The stuff (belongings) ah, it comes and it goes. Don’t get too attached.

It completely changes the tone of interacting with them.

Pulled over. Side of the road. He walks up, I already have the windows down. It’s storming.

Me: Before we even get started, I just want to point out my hands are on the steering wheel and I’m not reaching for anything. I’m wearing a handgun and there’s a cased rifle in the back seat. How do you want to proceed?

He glanced at the rifle case, returned his attention to me.

Him: Just leave it holstered. Your trailer lights are out. As loaded as you are, i couldn’t even see you from directly behind you. Can i have your drivers license and proof of insurance?

Me: It’s in the console. I’ll get it out. (Hands it to him)

Me: While you’re running that, do you mind if i get out and check the trailer? Lights were working when I left Colorado Springs.

Him: No. Go ahead.

Unplugging the cable and plugging it back in fixed the lights. I got back in. He walked back. Handed me the documents back.

Him: I see your fixed them. Be safe.

Me: Thanks for stopping me. Far preferable to being hit. Have a good evening.

And that was it. How different would it have been for you?

It was the best thing ever, and I didn’t even do it on purpose.

I was running my shift, when I started hearing some talking on the drive thru speaker. It was faint, so I couldn’t hear what they were saying. I peeked outside to see if there was a car at the order box. Nope. Checked all the headsets to see if one was on and “open”. Another nope. It’s quiet again, so I think nothing of it and go on about my work.

About 10 minutes later, a male voice comes booming through the speaker, using very coarse language and making sexual comments. He’s loud enough to be heard in the dining room, where our Sunday after-church crowd is lunching. I immediately call an apology out into the now-silent dining room, and promise to take care of it as quickly as possible. I spoke over the headset, asking the man to please stop cursing, as this is a family friendly establishment, and was there something I could help him with.

This was met with laughter and more profanity. Looking out the window I saw them, parked in a pickup truck, CB in hand. They’d somehow used it to get into our drive thru intercom! I speak one more time, asking them to leave or the police will be called. More laughter, more obscenities. I call the police.

A patrol car arrives, and parks directly next to their truck (I’d given the police a description and plate number in case they left before police arrived). The men hand over their IDs, and the officer gets back in his car, moves it in front of their truck to block them in while he runs the IDs. He gets out, and the driver gets out. The officer pats him down, has him empty his pockets.

Another cruiser arrives as the first officer handcuffs the driver and puts him in his car! The second officer approaches the passenger and does the same! While officer #2 stayed outside with the cars, officer #1 came inside to inform me that both men were being arrested on unrelated warrants, and would also be facing charges of disturbing the peace! The dining room, which had gone silent again when the officer came inside, broke out in cheers and applause!

Yada Yada Yada

Sheech! If you don’t want to be married… Don’t do it.

Idiot!

I was with the First Cavalry in 1968–69 up on the Cambodian border north of Tay Ninh. We mostly ambushed while looking for large NVA bunker complexes. We did a lot of combat assaults and at one point were out for almost 90 days without coming in to one of our forward landing zones for a “stand down”!

we moved to a new ambush site almost every day and got into an ambush and at night, we would set up on a path and ambush them back.

We had contact twice a day.

We took killed and wounded but nowhere near what the NVA (North Vietnamese Army) would take.

We were dirty, smelled from not bathing, had fatigues that in some cases were torn into rags with our “rumps” hanging out! Our resupply, many times was “ kick out” because the chopper could not land.! The chopper flew low and fast over where we popped a smoke grenade and kicked supplies out the door trying to hit the smoke through triple canopy jungle! First came ammo and parts (radio batteries etc), then came C Rations and if the chopper was not raking too much fire from the bad guys, we got water kicked out!

If no water kick out, we had to find a stream or usually an old bomb crater that had “thick liquid” we could scrape away to find something drinkable.

Presweetened Koolaid helped with the taste. This was in areas heavily sprayed with Agent Orange! I bet most of us got cancers!

Finally, we would get word we were going in to a Firebase for a few days(usually three). We could bathe, get mail and packages from home, change out of the dirty torn uniforms, get hot meals and become HUMAN again.

I swear, there were times we looked so bad we scared our own people! No one messed with us! We had nothing to lose!

Then, load up (70+ pounds) and up on a chopper for another combat assault into the unknown where we knew nothing about the size of the unit we were looking for.

photo is me in an NVA bunker complex. My knee is next to the slit he fired at us from. Bamboo is chopped from bullets going through! Roof was reinforced with bamboo and dirt was like concrete!

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Asteroid Mining

Submitted into Contest #283 in response to: Write a story that ends with a huge twist. view prompt

Ralph Straub

It’s always difficult to decide which asteroid to Harvest. Too much iron or ice and it’s worth less than one with some specific metals that are needed. I have been able to scan the common asteroids and register heavier elements. I Explored this cluster of rocks for a while, scanning, and the elements that are now coming up that don’t make sense. I want to find out more, but it’s a bit crowded for my ship to get in close.My ship is a typical Asteroid harvester. It’s big and round, like a giant basketball with clamps and directional thrusters around the equator. It’s been my home for almost 3 years. It allows me to grab a rock much bigger than itself and carry it to a launch point. Then one of the big market transport companies grabs it and sends it in-system to the breaker factories to disassemble the profitable parts and use them to build more things on the moons of Earth, Mars, Saturn or the many space stations that now litter the solar system.They say everything breaks down into simple repetitive tasks when you work. Boring travel from asteroid to asteroid just to find your “Motherlode” can take weeks. It’s really lonely. Just to travel between asteroid clusters is time consuming. It used to be thought that automated collectors could just grab the asteroids and bring them where the elements were needed. It worked, but the quality and discernment of human judgement and observation was better. If you just wanted ice or iron, send out the robots. If you want rare earths and trace minerals or even crystals that you can’t believe even exist, you need human beings. There are quite a few of us out here.With any luck you hit the “big one” and it gets you your retirement fund when it cashes in. I’ve been looking and so far, I break even at best. No gold or platinum. Maybe some beryllium, Neodymium, Indium and trace minerals. I guess I’m going to have to take a closer look at this cluster up front and in person with a handheld scanner and my old friend, the rock pick. You be surprised to see how similar this kind of mining is to the old gold rush days a few centuries ago. there’s even claim jumpers if, you can believe itYes, there are pirates of a sort that are too lazy to hunt for their own treasures and will just as soon take yours and your ship while they leave you to float in space. Mostly, it’s boring single miners or pairs that can stand each other for long periods of time hoping to cash in on that Motherlode.I guess this means I’ll need to leave the ship and go out into space to tap on one rock at a time. This is not as difficult as it sounds thanks to the modern jet pack. Miniature ion engines that slowly take you from rock to rock while you calculate the return on each one so you can pick the best one to go back with you. If you find a rich enough cluster, you can register the location in the central processing office and stake a claim. Then you can go back and pick the cluster dry if it will bring you a profit.I programmed the ship to stay in one place and I started to get into my space suit. Then I made sure the thruster pack was fully charged as well as loading the oxygen I’d need. I can make my own fuel and oxygen out here by finding an icy asteroid. My ship can break down ice into hydrogen fuel and oxygen. Any trace minerals just get sorted into useful additions to the hydroponics and algae tanks for food and biologic waste conversion. It’s where the nutrition processing takes place. The algae cultures are grown with the right balance of nutrients to keep you at peak health. Add flavor packets, dehydrate some of it, press it into “steaks” or mock poultry and you sometimes forget its all processed. The food manufacturers on Earth learned how to process just about anything way back in the 1950’s. Now we have machines that do it in every ship. It saved millions of lives during the global warming crisis. We don’t waste any waste out here or back on the home planet.I left the ship and started looking for the crazy readings I had in the ship scanners and began to weave through the mess of rocks. There! That way! I was acting like a bloodhound on the scent when I landed on one of the bigger asteroids in the cluster. The slightest extra push will send me flying into space, so I moved very slowly and carefully using a slight downward thrust to keep me grounded. Waving my scanner to get a better sense of direction. It seemed to be just under the dust ahead.There is very little gravity on these rocks, so, my movements forward were slow and precise. Then I was standing on some irregular shaped pieces of strange metal and started to move away from the sharpest ones. Oh, yes, this was a find. Rare earths, interesting composites that were probably made in a sun hundreds of light years away or even in the aftermath of a supernova. 

It took time and a lot of hard work, but I finally Isolated the find and strapped it to my ship. It was a lot bigger than I originally thought. It was more than one piece, and I had difficulty trying to figure out what to do with the organic compounds I found, so I put them in with the recyclers. The algae seemed to love them. The food they produced seemed to add extra energy to my step and somehow my mind was sharper than ever.

 

No one is going to believe the variety and mixtures of the elements I found. I don’t even quite believe it. It’s not every day you find an alien ship crash site and collect the technology that might just get humans to other star systems and galaxies. These engines I collected are really something. The power source was gone, but one of them lit right up when I tapped into the cold fusion plant. I’m definitely going to be rich on this find.

Question: What is China’s current fighter jet production capacity across all facilities?

Answer:

That’s a complicated question.

First of all, there is not really any official announcement regarding to the matter. Any number you see online is strictly guesswork, thus can be quite far from reality.

Second, capacity and actual production are two entirely different thing. Considering the Chinese military budget is a tiny 1.7% of GDP and it has 45% of the planet’s industry’s capacity, it is quite safe to say the Chinese are not at all running anywhere near full capacity.

Third, specific technology-wise, it is theorized that the most advanced Chinese fighters (such as J-20) were not really produced in full force due to the Chinese engine development program is still ongoing (this changed in 2024, since WS-15 is now officially in service).

With all these in mind, it is estimated at least 100 J-20 has been delivered to PLAAF in the year of 2023.

So we are probably looking at between 100~150 J-20 to PLAAF per year, similar number of J-16 and a smaller number of J-15. Part of the J-15 capacity is probably going to be swapped to J-35 once the testing phase are done.

No, about 300~400 fighters per year is not at all small. Because modern fighter generally has a lifespan at least 20~30 years, which means you would are looking at a fleet of 6000~12000 modern fighters.

Just for comparison purpose, the USAF has approximately 5,500 combat aircraft right now. USSR air force, at its height, has about 10,000 combat aircraft.

Of course, there is a bit more details into the whole estimation work, such as currently we do have a mix of fifth generation and fourth generation mostly due to fifth generation fighters are not designed to entirely replace the fourth generation (most due to stealth requirement limiting the fighter size and functionality), so you got concurrent production of both generations.

This may change when the six generation aircraft comes along, which, in theory, is supposed to completely replace fifth and fourth generation fighter.

Again, everything here is guess work.

And to nip one thing in the bud, it is not at all strange that China, have far bigger industry capacity than either US or USSR at their respective heights, would have a comparable and slightly bigger air force size. Yes, it does hurt many people’s ego and feelings, but logically, nations with stronger industry and economy have better equipment is nothing surprising.

Scott Ritter : Does the West Understand just how bad they’ve been beaten?

I am Chinese, I will answer this question with my own experience in India.

Around 2017-2018, China’s internet industry was still booming, and India was considered a vast untapped market by many Chinese internet companies. At that time, not only internet companies but also many VC funds and startups went to India to seek opportunities. My job was to work as a consultant, providing advisory services to these Indian companies to help them better connect with Chinese investors.

Things changed dramatically in 2020 when India banned TikTok and all Chinese apps. This incident served as a warning to Chinese enterprises, and no one was interested in discussing investment opportunities in India anymore. At the same time, India canceled all visas for Chinese citizens, and no Chinese nationals were allowed to enter India, including Chinese students. Chinese people in India were also required to leave immediately. Indian visas have not been restored to their previous level, but no one seems to care anymore.

The Chinese company that invested the most in India is Xiaomi, but how has India treated Xiaomi? They required Xiaomi to hire Indian executives, demanded that Xiaomi transfer its technology to India, and did not allow Xiaomi to repatriate its profits. They used various means to fine Xiaomi, even if the legal basis for those fines was established later. Xiaomi’s experience has become a joke in China, with everyone mocking Xiaomi’s foolish strategy. They didn’t make money in India and were slaughtered by the Indian government. The experiences of Xiaomi and TikTok in India are not isolated cases.

Another well-known case among all Chinese people in India is that Anil Ambani owes three Chinese banks $717 million in unpaid loans. From our own real experience, our Indian clients first asked for discounts on the payments they owed, then requested installment payments, and as a result, the payment never happen after several years. We have since abandoned all business in India. Once, local government officials in China asked us about investment opportunities in India, and we explicitly told them not to do it, as India is a trap.

Dangerous Travel: Safety When Traveling The United States?

MM AI artwork

This time I am experimenting with Ancient Greek, and Roman scenes.

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A fight for light

Submitted into Contest #282 in response to: Write a story set in a world of darkness where light is suddenly discovered. view prompt

Anirudh Raja

 ‘Log 21. Recorded on Janeri Prime, 421 A.S. My team of 10 miners, an ophthalmologist, a geochemist, and an experimental physicist is continuing scientific research into the myths of a fifth sense called “solem convenire cum suelen” in an ancient language of humans called latin, it translates to “The sun meets the ground” otherwise known as vision, we Aetherians have developed improved senses in the absence of light that somewhat compensate for vision. The only source of light in this world that is remaining are the rare occurrences of lightning strikes, as all species of this world have evolved from bioluminescence. Our expeditions have taken us nowhere. The allegations of helio-archaeologists being fanatics in pursuit of a quixotic dream are further proven right. We have excavated this place to the center, and no progress has been made. We are continuing to undergo this mining mission in Endo-novia, called Indonesia in the old world, the place that was theorised to have experienced the strongest ray of sunlight along the equator in the last seconds before the supernova. Mission specialist, Dr. Tavian Solen, geoarchaeologist signing out. Hail Lord Magnus Atris of Ja-Katris.’The scientist gently slipped the digital recorder back into his pocket, and then resumed bellowing at the exhausted miners to work till their last breath.The mine was atrociously repulsive. Every centimeter was as wet as a sponge. It was like being in the mouth of a Narwhale scientifically dubbed “Cetacius Monoceros”, the convergent evolution of the prehistoric Narwhal and Whale, with every corner riddled with a naked-mole bat, otherwise known as the “Heterocephalus petra”.‘Take a break, we won’t get any work done like this’ conceded Dr.TavianSuddenly a streak of divine substance bolted from one corner of the cave, elucidating the whole place, opening them to another sense. The ephemeral flash departed as abruptly as it emerged, just like a thunderbolt. The whole team stood absolutely shellshocked for a second, and then-‘My eyes’ a miner cried‘They’re burning, get water’One of the other miners promptly scooped a bucket of water from a nearby stream in the cave.‘What just happened?’ asked Dr. Tavian‘Sir, could you take a look at this once?’ asked another miner

 

‘I think I found a stone’

 

Dr. Tavian approached the miner and then examined the stone with his eyes, it possessed a shade of mustard yellow, and a dirty brown.

 

‘Everybody block your eyes’

 

He gently tapped the stone, and then the same streak appeared, emanating from the now blistering orange-ish red stone.

 

‘I dub this Luxium’

 

‘How do we mine it if our eyes burn, everytime its touched’ asked a miner

 

‘Any thoughts?’ asked Dr. Tavian to his team of scientists

 

‘We could excavate the whole rock around it’ said the geochemist, Darius Gale

 

‘That’s too much load, considering that there may be more behind this single vein.’ said Dr. Tavian

 

‘We could re-engineer the mining goggles to block the light out’ said the ophthalmologist, Lucan Viridus

 

‘Do we have the resources to do it?’ asked Dr. Tavian

 

‘We can make the lens using the quartz that we found earlier, and then suspend the stone in midair in one of the pressurised chambers that we got, so it does not activate’ said the experimental physicist, Eris Solen

 

‘You came up with the best idea, daughter. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. Luke bring out your thing.’ said Dr Tavian

 

‘That thing is capable of any precise mechanical function, and has a name. Molder’

 

‘Yeah sure. Molder’ said Dr. Tavian

 

Lucan whipped out an ingenious piece of machinery from his supply bag. The device opened up like a chest. Lucan placed the quartz in the chest, and then typed “concave lens : 8 cm radius” into a module. He closed the chest for five minutes then the lens was ready like food in a microwave, once he opened it.

 

‘This should be able to block most of the light when extracting the stone, once you extract it drop it in this pressurised chamber. Here, Linus.’ said Lucan, while handing it to one of the miners.

 

Everybody closed their eyes and Linus began his extraction of the stone. After attaining it, he dropped it in the chamber, and watched as it returned to its deactivated state in the midair

 

‘Here it is’ said Linus, holding it up like a trophy.

 

‘The fruit of our labor’

 

Linus then passed the container around for a while, the stone let out just a sliver of light, enough to see, due to the pressure from all sides of the box.

 

THUMP A boulder suddenly fell, enough to tip the fragile support that the cave stood on. The boulder blocked the way they came from. The ceiling and ground started to shake rapidly, as water flooded the surroundings of the cave from a crack that the boulder made in the wall.

‘There’s an opening in the roo-’ said a miner before getting squashed by the unpredictably moving boulder.

 

The water began to rise at a concerning rate while the team was still trying to figure out what to make of the situation.

 

‘Everybody be calm’ said Dariuus

 

‘We can all make it out, first get the stone out. Linus, get it to safety. Use the hooked rope to climb out’ said Lucan while pointing at the hole that the late miner revealed.

 

Linus made it out with the stone tightly clenched in his right arm. He then lent his hand out to the next survivor.

 

‘Father, you next’ said Eris

 

‘No, you three are the most important. Get out now!’ said Dr. Tavian

 

Darius readying up to ascend the rope next, he grasped it and started pulling at it.

 

‘You dropped your comms’ said Lucan.

 

‘Forget it, just get up’ said Darius.

 

‘Eris go’ said Lucan.

 

While Eris was making her way up, Lucan swam to the comms and tucked it in his zipped pocket.

 

‘Luke, now’ said Darius

 

Lucan was the next to make it up.

 

All three of them made it to safety with all of their supplies but then the boulder started accelerating, and started to thicken and elevate the water, increasing the pressure. The now floating miners began to scramble, all trying to climb the rope at the same time. Dr. Tavian was ahead of them on the rope, and reached his hand out.

 

‘Here father’ said Eris

 

‘I’m almost there’ said Dr. Tavian while grasping his daughter’s hand and then SQUELCH. The boulder successfully descended the cave, and massacred the doctor, and the rest of its miners on its way. His only daughter was left with only his hand as a reminder of him.

 

‘Dad’ cried Eris.

 

‘I doubt that he died with any regrets, having left his legacy with you’ said Lucan

 

‘He was an innate leader’ said Linus

 

Everybody took a moment to honor the lost. The pause lasted for five minutes until Darius broke the silence.

 

‘We have to make a move, they will be expecting us some time soon. The hand, leave it or keep it but I don’t want to see it’ said Darius

 

‘Back off, she just lost her father. We’ll start when she’s ready’ said Lucan

 

‘It’s alright. I’m ready Luke’ said Eris

 

‘I can smell fresh air, somewhere from here.’ said Darius

 

‘We move there’ said Darius while pointing to the creek that shone upwards towards the left.

 

The group tediously hiked their way up to the creek, and steadily made their way to the surface, surviving on the scarce rations of food

 

‘We’re finally here’ said Lucan

 

‘Send a message to the Lord’s office, Luke’ said Darius

 

‘There is no service, I can’t establish a connection between the city and my comms’ said Lucan

 

‘We can ask that bystander.’ said Eris while pointing at a single person on a tractor in the empty farmland that they appeared in.

 

Eris started waving and edging towards him, causing the others to follow along, until she finally approached.

 

‘Sir, how far are we from Ja-Katris?’ asked Eris.

 

‘It should be right across a mushroom forest that should appear about 60 flicks from here. For the right price, I can take you there.’ said the bystander.

 

‘Melargee forest?’ asked Darius.

 

‘Yeah’ said the bystander

 

‘How much do we have?’ asked Darius to Lucan

 

‘We have about 100 credits’ said Lucan. ‘How much do you cost?’.

 

‘100 credits exactly’ said the bystander.

 

‘Just give it, we don’t have enough time to negotiate.’ said Darius to Lucan

 

The bystander drove them up to the forest.

‘I’m pretty sure that there is better service here’ said the bystander

 

‘How? Its a forest, where would you find cell towers’ said Lucan

 

‘It seems that the mushrooms have some weird constantly vibrating frequency, and before you go, here’s some food to last you through, I can’t let a hungry man go on an empty stomach’ said the bystander before retreating back to his farmland.

 

The bystander handed them a basket of apples.

 

‘Thank you for your hospitality.’ said Eris.

 

The four troopers then edged their way into the heart of the forest to set up camp there.

 

‘What’s in the box he gave us?’ asked Linus ‘We haven’t eaten anything since the cave.’

 

‘We have a few apples, and some melons.’ said Eris.

 

‘Guys, our comms are finally back online.’ said Lucan ‘Darius, why do you have a message from Lord Atris?’

 

‘I thought I lost my comms in the cave. Just give me-’ said Darius restlessly while running towards Lucan.

 

The recording sent to Darius initiated.

 

‘Congratulations Darius, you eliminated the team. Return back with the Luxium and claim your prize back at the palace. Their markers have been erased. The rest of the surviving scientists must not know that I wish to use the stone as a weapon to turn my temporary reign into a permanent one. They are still needed to refine the Luxium to its true potential. Keep up the charade and come back immediately, Lord Magnus Atris signing out.’.

 

Darius nervously froze. His plan didn’t pan out the way that he wanted.

 

‘It’s not what you think.’ said Darius.

 

‘Then what is it?’ said Lucan.

 

‘It’s just, he said-’ struggled Darius while picking up one of the fiery logs from the bonfire. Darius then started swinging the fiery log in Lucan’s direction but then SWISH.

 

Linus impaled Darius with the hook before he was able to make the move.

 

‘What just happened?’ said Eris.

 

‘Linus’s survival instincts kicked in, that’s what.’ said Lucan.

 

‘I had a feeling about that guy from the start. He was pretty unnerving.’ said Linus.

 

‘What do we do about the Luxium now?’ asked Lucan.

 

‘We can’t just disappear off the grid with it. Magnus would find us with such a big infantry.’ said Eris.

 

‘He’ll also probably know about Darius’s death by now, considering the fact that he placed unknown markers in all of us.’ said Lucan.

 

‘We could expose him.” said Linus.

 

‘The message was a one-time audio’ said Lucan.

 

The remainder of the team spent all night devising the perfect plan to expose the true plans of Lord Magnus Atris to the public of Ja-Katris.

 

At the dawn of the cycle, they started making their way to the borders of Ja-Katris, and by noon they had reached. The team assumed a position of stealth to gauge the surroundings, hiding behind one of the large mushrooms between Melargee forest and Ja-Katris.

 

‘Do we go now?’ asked Eris.

 

‘Alright.’ said Lucan.

 

The three then surrendered themselves in handcuffs to the authorities. The personal guard of Magnus Atris then took them to a secluded royal room, with Magnus Atris awaiting them.

 

‘I didn’t expect you guys to turn yourselves in that easily. Seems like you chickened out. Boys check ‘em.’ said Magnus

 

‘This won’t end well for you.’ said Lucan.

 

‘Oh also, do you want to know how Darius caused the boulder, over the expedition, he placed timed bombs eventually causing the cave to be waterlogged, and a boulder to fall out of one of the holes he had made. I actually came up with the idea. It’s amazing. Isn’t it?’ said Magnus

 

‘You’re diabolical.’ said Linus.

 

‘Well, you aren’t supposed to be alive, but I’ll let you live for a little while’ said Magnus

 

The soldiers entirely stripped the heroes of their supplies, and switched all their active devices off.

 

‘Did you find the stone?’ asked Magnus

 

‘This one?’ asked a soldier, holding up the pressurised chamber.

 

‘Yes. This one. Ohh, it’s beautiful.’ said Magnus while releasing it from the chamber. Magnus held it in his hand like a trophy in its blinding glory for just a second due to his eyes beginning to cry like a waterfall. He immediately dropped it back in the chamber

 

‘Do you even feel any remorse after killing your own people?’

 

‘No, of course not. If that pest, Tavian had lived, he would have wanted it to be used for the betterment of society.’ said Magnus

 

‘What are you gonna use it for now?’ asked Lucan

 

‘I thought you heard the recording. Nevermind, let me repeat. I’m going to use it to make the whole of Ja-Katris bend to my will under the threat of being vaporised by the Luxium at a high concentration. Basically blackmail the citizens. I deserve this after suffering as a leader in a democracy. What use is power if not to be corrupted.’ said Magnus

 

‘To be responsible, to be truthful to the people who placed it on you, such as the rest of the team.’ said Eris.

 

‘How is that useful to me?’ said Magnus rhetorically

 

‘You’re done.’ said Lucan.

 

‘You’ve got a lot of nerve, you know-’

 

‘Shut up.’ said Lucan ‘Can you hear the rumbling outside? Those are the people of Ja-Katris. Every word you said here was heard on every radio in this city.

 

‘Someone, get a radio.’ said Magnus

 

One of the soldiers handed him a radio from a nearby room

 

‘Put it on the main channel’ said Lucan

 

Magnus turned it on and the radio echoed ‘Put it on the main channel’.

 

‘How?’ asked Magnus in despair.

 

‘We implanted the comms device in the Luxium’

 

‘You can barely look at it. How is that possible?’

 

‘The molder. You give it any instruction for a precise mechanical function, and it does it’ said Lucan

 

‘The what?’ asked Magnus.

 

‘An ingenious piece of machi-. You know what, forget it.’ said Lucan

 

The doors finally cracked open, and the whole room could hear the raging crowd downstairs.

 

‘Go meet them’ said Eris

If today, you are given a poor country to run with approximately 1.89 million mouths to feed and its means of living depending on the port operation for loading and unloading, trading, fishing, small businesses and manufacturing of textiles which are the sources of income… How far can you see the future of such a country?

1 year? 3 years or 5 years to be buried 20,000 ft in the ocean.

That sounded like Singapore in 1965 when it was left to do or die and with a little help with water and day-to-day commodities from the big bad brother- Malaysia.

How did Singapore develop so much so quickly from the poor 3rd world to the rich 1st world?

That is a grandmother’s old story everyone already knows.

Here’s a factoid that may be surprising to some.

The Korean war, a 20th century conflict fought in the early 1950s, is still an active conflict today, in the 21st century.

Why do I say that?

Remember this shot that made waves around the world?

Donald stepped into North Korea at Panmunjom with Kim, following the historic signing of the Panmunjom Declaration between the Koreas, committing to bring an end to the Korea War.

It is the year 2025. There is still no peace treaty, and the fragile calm of the peninsula is still being held together by the 1953 armistice.

The 3rd generation of the Kim leadership is still resisting, saying no to America when it imposes unilateral terms on the North.


It is the same with china. We are confronting the tariffs you are imposing on us. We are rejecting them permanently, and we will push back until either you give up, or one of us falls.

In other words, no means no. A unilateral tariff regime that tears up the heart of the WTO’s MFN formulation must not be wielded as a negotiation tactic. The Chinese learned from the Phase One trade deal, which brought nothing but grief. China is the number one problem for america today, a challenger that must be taken down, by hook or crook.

Beijing’s calculus is “can we make a deal to bring some respite”? And the answer is no, with bipartisan support for a full court press against the full spectrum of Chinese interests. The Americans will not stop until they either break up china, or obtain guarantees that will keep it down longterm, a la Bretton Woods and the Plaza Accords.

Beijing decided fine. Since a confrontation is unavoidable, let’s make a stand here. There is enough water under the bridge for the Chinese public to understand and support the decision. Besides, the chip ban shock, asset bubble contraction and covid were far harsher tests, and the Chinese overcame the challenges with steely discipline and ingenuity.

China wants america to stop the nonsense and come to the table as a fellow member of the WTO.

In other words, a normal trade negotiation between normal countries.

But if america insists on being special, it will be treated specially, in the only language it understands.

Pepe Escobar : I’m gonna MAGA you, baby!

This,

Image source: Web/Google

In 2015, one day a school boy named Amit was going to school. On the way he was hit by a car. Amit was bleeding, he needed immediate medical help but that car driver didn’t even stop and he didn’t feel to take Amit to nearby hospital. Amit was lying on the road, some people came and took him to a hospital but unfortunately he died. Amit’s dad Jitendra ji came to see his son and he was shocked to know about his little child is no more. Amit’s mom was in deep grief. In just a moment a happy family was shattered.

Image source: Web/Google

Jitendra ji filed a complaint but the police didn’t investigate. They even closed the case without informing Jitendra ji. This was ridiculous!

Jitendra ji and his wife just wanted to know his son’s killer. They wanted to question that man why he left Amit alone to die, he could have been saved if he was taken to hospital on time. They just wanted a Sorry. Was that so difficult??

Jitendra ji decided he will find that man who killed his beloved son. On the accident spot, he found a broken rear mirror and a broken car number plate. Car number was not full, but on the mirror there was a number. He asked from the local service centre but every time he got dissappointment. One day with hell lot of efforts a mechanic told him that this mirror is of a Maruti Car. Jitendra ji went to the manufacturing unit of the Maruti cars. He told his story and there people helped him. With the mirror number he managed to find the car registration number and with registration number he found the car owner’s name – Gyan Chand. It took 8 years for Jitendra ji to find the real culprit.

He went to police again with all the proofs and now again police disappointed him by not filing the complaint. He then moved to court and here also he didn’t get justice, his plea was rejected not just once but 4 times repeatedly. In Jan 2023, he again appealed to court for the 5th time. This time court accepted his request and asked the police to re-open the case but till now no arrest has been made.

Jitendra ji fought 8 years to find all the evidence and the person who killed his son. He is still fighting for the justice and he has told that he will fight till his last breath untill and unless his son’s killer get punished.

This story is deeply heartbreaking…….

Image source: Web/Google

I Salute Jitendra Ji from the bottom of my heart🙏

Amit would be Proud of his Dad❤

**Update : On 21st Oct 2023, Police has arrested the accussed, Gyan Chand.

Spicy Tomato Fettuccine

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d3e4712ce2375f4889cc1f1ed7b9fe27

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 8 ounces fettuccine, cooked
  • 2 ounces turkey bacon
  • 1 large onion
  • 4 or 5 large tomatoes, peeled and seeded
  • 2 tablespoons fresh parsley
  • 2 teaspoons olive oil
  • 2 garlic cloves, pressed
  • 1 teaspoon basil
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • Parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Cook pasta according to package directions. Keep warm.
  2. Fry bacon until crisp on 11 inch griddle; drain and set aside.
  3. Chop onions and tomatoes with food chopper.
  4. Snip parsley using kitchen cutters.
  5. Heat olive oil and stir-fry skillet. Press garlic with garlic press into skillet. Stir-fry 15 seconds.
  6. Add onion. Stir-fry 2 to 3 minutes. Add tomatoes, parsley, and seasoning to skillet.
  7. Gently stir 3 to 4 minutes until thoroughly heated.
  8. Remove from heat and serve over pasta. Grate fresh Parmesan cheese over top.

Attribution

Pampered Chef

  1. People may forget what you said, but they’ll always remember how you made them feel.
  2. Overthinking doesn’t solve problems — it only creates new ones in your mind.
  3. The things you fear the most often lead you to the biggest growth.
  4. Happiness doesn’t come from outside — it starts in your mind.
  5. When you truly love and respect yourself, others start doing the same.
  6. Forgiving someone sets you free more than it helps them.
  7. Life won’t always go as you planned, and that’s perfectly okay.
  8. Negative people slowly drain your peace — choose your circle wisely.
  9. A heart full of gratitude turns even little things into blessings.
  10. Whatever you repeatedly tell your mind, it starts to believe.
  11. Failing doesn’t mean you’re weak — it means you’re trying.
  12. Never make important decisions when you’re angry or upset.
  13. Life is too short to fake it — be real, be you.

Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Curious Case of the Beatnik Cat

Ah, dear reader, it is with great excitement (and a touch of bewilderment) that I welcome you back to yet another one of my extraordinary adventures. Today’s tale is a peculiar mix of intergalactic diplomacy, existential poetry, and an unexpected encounter with a most unconventional feline. Yes, that’s right—Captain Meowtronic of the Intergalactic Feline Federation has returned to our humble farm, and this time, he’s brought with him a mystery so baffling that even I, Sir Whiskerton, was momentarily left scratching my head. So settle in, dear reader, and prepare yourself for the hilarity-filled tale of Sir Whiskerton and the Curious Case of the Beatnik Cat.

A Familiar Visitor

It was a quiet evening on the farm. The chickens were roosting, the cows were chewing their cud, and I was perched on my favorite fencepost, watching the stars twinkle in the night sky. All was calm—until a sudden flash of light lit up the barnyard.

“Not again,” I muttered, shielding my eyes with a paw.

Sure enough, a sleek, chrome-plated spaceship descended gracefully onto the farm, its engines humming softly. The hatch opened with a dramatic hiss, and out stepped none other than Captain Meowtronic, resplendent in his glittering silver uniform.

“Sir Whiskerton!” he called, his whiskers twitching with urgency. “We meet again!”

“Captain Meowtronic,” I said, hopping down from the fence. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

“We have a situation,” he said gravely. “A new kind of cat has been discovered, and the Federation is at a loss. We’ve never encountered anything like it. We need your help to figure out what… or who… this cat is.”

“A new kind of cat?” I said, intrigued. “Well, you’ve come to the right feline. Lead the way.”

The Beatnik Cat Appears

I followed Captain Meowtronic into his spaceship, where he led me to a small, dimly lit room. There, sitting on a cushion and bopping his head to an invisible beat, was the strangest cat I’d ever seen.

He was lanky, with a black beret perched jauntily on his head and a pair of round sunglasses balanced on his nose. A set of bongo drums sat in front of him, and he tapped them rhythmically with his paws as he muttered under his breath.

“Dig it, man,” the cat said, his voice low and smooth. “The stars, they shimmer like cosmic vibes, ya dig? I’m just a cool cat groovin’ to the universal beat.”

I blinked. “What… is he talking about?”

“That’s the problem,” Captain Meowtronic said, throwing up his paws. “He speaks in riddles, recites nonsensical poetry, and refuses to engage in any meaningful way. We’ve run every test, and all we’ve learned is that he calls himself ‘Jazzpurr.’”

“Jazzpurr?” I said, raising an eyebrow.

“Yeah, man,” the cat said, looking up at me. “Jazzpurr, the feline beatnik. The paws that tap, the whiskers that vibe, the soul that jives. You dig?”

I stared at him, utterly baffled. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“I assure you, it is not,” Captain Meowtronic said. “We’ve never encountered a cat like this before. He doesn’t adhere to any of our protocols. He doesn’t even groom properly! Sir Whiskerton, you must help us make sense of this… anomaly.”

Introducing Jazzpurr to the Farm

After much deliberation (and some convincing on Jazzpurr’s part, which mostly involved an impromptu bongo solo), I decided to bring him back to the farm. If anyone could figure out what to make of him, it was the other animals.

The moment we arrived, the farmyard erupted into chaos.

“What is that?!” Doris the hen squawked, flapping her wings.
“That! Oh, it’s so strange!” Harriet clucked.
“Strange! I can’t bear it!” Lillian screeched.

“It’s a cat,” I said, rolling my eyes. “A very… peculiar cat.”

Jazzpurr tipped his beret to the hens. “Ladies, ladies, no need to squawk. I come in peace, spreading vibes and rhythms, ya dig?”

“What’s he talking about?” Porkchop the pig asked, waddling over with a confused look on his face.

“Your guess is as good as mine,” I said.

Jazzpurr pulled out his bongos and began tapping them softly. “The mud, it squelches beneath the trotters. A pig in the muck, a groove in the soul. Oink, oink, baby.”

Porkchop blinked. “Uh… thanks?”

Jazzpurr’s Farm Adventures

Over the next few days, Jazzpurr made himself at home on the farm. He quickly became a source of both amusement and confusion for the other animals.

One morning, I found him sitting in the chicken coop, reciting poetry to the hens.

“The egg, man,” he said, gesturing dramatically. “The egg is the cosmic cradle of life. It’s like… whoa.”

“Oh, Jazzpurr!” Doris clucked. “Your words are so… profound!”
“Profound! But also confusing!” Harriet added.
“Confusing! I can’t bear it!” Lillian screeched.

Later, I caught him in the barn, teaching Rufus the dog how to play the bongos.

“You gotta feel the rhythm, man,” Jazzpurr said, tapping a beat. “Let the vibes flow through your paws.”

Rufus barked happily as he attempted to mimic Jazzpurr’s drumming, though his paws were far too large for the tiny drums.

Even Ferdinand the duck got in on the action, joining Jazzpurr for a duet.

“Quack, quack, quaaaaaaack!” Ferdinand sang.
“Ribbit-ribbit, man,” Jazzpurr replied, adding a bongo flourish.

The result was… well, let’s just say it was an acquired taste.

The Truth Comes Out

Despite Jazzpurr’s eccentricities, it became clear that he wasn’t actually an alien or some mysterious new species of cat. He was simply a beatnik—a feline with a flair for the dramatic, a love of rhythm, and a penchant for nonsensical poetry.

When I explained this to Captain Meowtronic, he was both relieved and exasperated.

“So he’s not an anomaly?” the captain said, shaking his head. “He’s just… weird?”

“Precisely,” I said. “But weird isn’t bad. In fact, I think Jazzpurr has brought something unique to the farm—a little creativity, a little chaos, and a lot of laughter.”

Jazzpurr, overhearing this, tipped his beret. “Thanks, man. You’re a real cool cat.”

A Beatnik on the Farm

In the end, Jazzpurr decided to stay on the farm, much to the delight of the other animals (and the occasional bewilderment of Captain Meowtronic). He set up a “poetry lounge” in the barn, where he hosts weekly open mic nights for anyone brave enough to participate.

The moral of the story, dear reader, is this: it’s okay to be different. In fact, it’s our differences that make life interesting. So embrace the quirks, the oddities, and the bongos—they’re what make the world a groovy place to live.

As for Jazzpurr? He’s still bopping, grooving, and reciting poetry to anyone who’ll listen. And though I may not always understand his “vibes,” I can’t deny that the farm is a livelier place with him around.

The End.

I am in Guangzhou as I write this post

The atmosphere here among some of the US exporters is definitely gloomy

They don’t seem to be as much worried about the economics as the fear of having to adapt and change after so many years

The Prospect is daunting. They especially belong to the older generation who wouldn’t be unhappy if Xi kowtowed to Trump

They were all comfortable selling stuff to US and now they have to source new markets all over again, a tough task for exporters who have spent 20–25 years cultivating clients only in the US

Some others have adapted

I met a guy selling Smart Coffee Makers. Last year they sold 55,000 Pcs to the Agent of Costco for $ 53.50 a piece , which was resold for $ 153 in US and became a very popular Christmas gift

This year Costco wanted him to cut the price to $ 26.50 but he refused

He instead sold 13,000 Pcs to an Australian importer , 18,000 Pcs to European Importers and 6,500 pcs to ASEAN Importers. That’s 68% of his US Orders

He got an average of $ 55 per piece making far more money than he would have made selling to Costco at 50% discount

I met agents buying for Jiomart ,Croma & D-Mart but they feel this product wouldn’t move in India because they have to price it as ₹13,500/- and nobody would buy at such a price

Another guy who is selling these containers sold 90,000 Pcs to Agents of Walmart last year for $ 3.00 a piece

This year he sold 36,500 in Q1 but now Walmart wanted him to sell for $ 2.20 a piece (This was when Tariffs were 20%)

Now Taobao and JD dot com offered a green channel listing his products with a “Korean War” Appeal calling the US an Enemy and talking of the Korean War

Patriotic Chinese snapped up 80,000 Orders in under 4 hours for 25.55 Yuan a piece ($ 3.50)

His entire Walmart orders have been sold within China and he has made more money than he did last year

Conclusions

A. Smart Electronics, Consumer Electronics and Home Appliances are getting booming orders from Australia, Europe, Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia & UK. The Prices are very low for such good quality. Buying for £ 44 and selling for £ 120 is irresistible

So these products will definitely find other buyers and they aren’t that concerned about the US market

Mexican buyers are placing huge orders so my guess is these products will find their way to Walmart and Costco through Mexico after paying 10% Tariff

B. Low Cost Goods are getting heavy listing on Taobao and JD and other online platforms and livestreaming using PATRIOTISM and calling the exports “War Victims”

Many Chinese are buying them in droves out of patriotism

C. The Ne Zha Rebranding

Many products to be exported to US have been rebranded with Ne Zha stickers and have sold like Hot Cakes

These 309 Yuan ($43) small suitcases sold 7,000 under 1 Hour. 10,000 of these were destined to be shipped to Long Beach and Newark by 15/5/2025 and now 7,000 have already been sold on JD and TaoBao

Who are in trouble?

A. Suppliers of many US Clients who sold stuff on Amazon USA. These guys are too much Anglos and the Gen Z who are the biggest buyers don’t like Americanized stuff like Popeye, Garfield, Pokemon etc

Low Cost Jewelry, Plastic Moulds etc have all faced massive order losses and are panicking

There isn’t a market for such trinkets anywhere else

B. Suppliers of High Quality Clothing. Such suppliers have fiercely guarded their markets for years. European Suppliers will not allow anyone to push into their markets while Bangladesh and Vietnam have their own clothing exporters

These guys exclusively worked for US Brands and the US Markets and now they are in trouble

C. 3D Printers, Low Cost Consumer Goods

These guys haven’t found alternative markets so far

In India it’s too expensive

D. Lighting Equipment – Again fiercely protective markets. If a US Supplier has to sell $ 100,000 of light equipment in the European markets, he has to sell his stuff to a European Supplier for $ 60,000 who will then send the stuff to Rotterdam or Liverpool

E. Sports Equipment – Almost $ 70 Million cancelled orders in Yiwu alone.

Who are comfortable?

A. Smart Consumer Electronics and Low Cost Green Goods – They have a huge market in Russia. TCL and Hisense have a 60% market share in Russia and Eastern Europe and Serbia and Central Asia compared to 8% in 2021.

B. Electronics Equipment – Entire waiver by Trump administration. However even otherwise orders across the Globe will make up for them

C. EV Batteries – Huge orders from Mexico to be rerouted to US. Already being done since 2023.

D. Automobile Parts, Paints, Glass – Again Mexico is handling the orders

E. Chemicals for Pharmaceuticals – Bulk Buying and Front Loading is massive. Compared to Q1 2024 , Q1 2025 saw 34% increase and now Q2 2025 has already seen a 9% increase and it’s just been 15 days

F. Fine Tooling Components and Parts for Fine Tooling Equipment – Massive Transshipments through Europe & Mexico

G. Spectacle Frames & Lens – Vietnam is bulk buying in huge numbers for Transshipments

H. Industrial Smart Cranes – BRI Projects can absorb the extra unsold inventory easily

I. Aircraft Parts – Being Rerouted to COMAC and Airbus while Boeing is desperate. Their executive was in Shanghai yesterday

J. Artificial Diamonds (Lab Diamonds) – Huge Orders from Intermediate Countries to be rerouted to USA

Who are in trouble in US?

Every small business is in trouble

Industrial components are crucial and their tooling is superb in China

They say India simply cannot produce that class of tooling and the Indian price is only 8% lower with 60% quality ($ 190 vs $ 175)

The Big Brands like Gucci are in trouble due to IP deregulation. The Chinese factories that made these products for $ 300–400 each which sold for $ 9000 – $ 23,000 in US due to copyright is merrily tossing aside design proprietary and selling a $ 13,000 Bag for $ 1,450 including the 145% Tariff 😁

They still get $ 600 per bag, higher than the $ 300–400 a bag they would get from the distributors of Gucci

I saw a $ 3,200 hermes scarf sold as Hermiss from a factory for $ 450. Same Quality!!!!!!

So now the US Customers ARE PAYING THESE GUYS TO STOP

They are saying “Ok. Just stop selling. We will pay you whatever stock you have at full price. Just keep them with you until everything gets resolved”

Only the Big Tech is OK


I feel in a year or 18 months China will completely adjust without the US Market

Trump’s Bluff is OVER.Trump U-Turn on China Tariffs. China uses US’ blackmail, starts with S. Korea.

 

Laugh-in and being “very interesting”

I was at the grocery store. Maybe it was a case of being at the right place at the right time, but still….

So what happened? Well, the stuff that the woman wanted was on the very top of the shelf, she tried to “whack it down” with her cane. Instead, they went back behind, way out of reach. Well, this guy asked her “Ma’am? Which one did you want?” She pointed it with her cane.

This guy (taller than both of us but still short), climbed up and grabbed (she wanted 2) and using one hand to try to bend over to give her two cans, lost his balance, and he grabbed the first thing he could, I was wearing a tank top, so he grabbed my tank top and my bra, ripping it as he lost his balance (but I broke his fall by “catching him”).

By this time the Store Meat Manager (he saw what happened), rushed over. The guy was fine, but the first thing he said was

“OOPSIE MA’AM, I DIDN’T MEAN TO POP YOUR BOOBY!”

I had to pull my tank top up (he broke my bra and the upper right side “strap” of the tank top), using my arm to hold “what’s left of it” to cover my boob!

Meat Manager, he was red-faced and pulled me over behind the display rack (canned goods) and ordered an employee to grab something. It was a spare t-shirt, size XXXL, with the store and the slogan saying ‘I’VE GOT THE BIG MEATS’

REALLY? I am sorry but customers and a couple of other employees who saw this guy almost crashing to the floor… were cracking up!

That same guy, he wasn’t hurt, but he was still embarrassed, pulled out his wallet and a bill folded up into my hand and he left the store (leaving his few items behind). I thought maybe it was $5 or $10 to replace the bra and tank top. I really didn’t need it, so I just put it in my shorts pocket and totally forgotten about it.

FAST FORWARD: I didn’t put those shorts on for a long time, I wore them for about 2 hours, and just folded them up and put them in the drawer. Once winter was over, we were all going to go fishing, I pulled those shorts out and there was the bill, still in my pocket, and I laughed – couldn’t believe I had forgotten it, but when I opened it up, it was a $100.00 bill!

Wife Craved So Much Drama She Framed A Neighbor For Her “Neighborhood Cheating Board”, Now She’s…

It was the summer of 1975. I was 14, home alone, parents at work. Three boys from the local high school came over saying they wanted to visit with my older brother who was due home soon from his summer job. It was considered polite in the US south to invite guests inside and offer them a cold drink, which I did. What happened over the next 30 minutes is something unspeakable. Fast forward to the beginning of the school year in September. I told nobody what occurred because in our small, southern town, girls who were “loose” were ostracized and considered tainted. If my parents had found out they would now have a ruined daughter. Uneated food on lunch trays was dumped on me while sitting alone in the cafeteria, my former friends began calling me vile names and I was suddenly an an island living an isolated life. 50 years ago kids who were abused had no outlet like counseling. I was 14.

In my 20’s I went to the library and found books that explained the trauma I went through. They explained that I was a victim and should feel no shame since I was attacked. They helped me somewhat but didn’t help with the night terrors and my trust issues which continue to this day at age 63. It was a long time ago this happened. I’m much better but only trust a handful of people. The boys didn’t do so well in life. One died at age 33 and the other two are losers. That day almost 50 years ago was a hard lesson that showed me no one cared. I am a success today because when one has been so low I found internal strength to survive.

Roasted Pork and Potato Duet

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35d908450a7df2db3eadaf97f58c706b

Yield: 10 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 teaspoons rubbed sage
  • 1 garlic clove, pressed
  • 1 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 center loin pork roast, rolled and tied (3 1/2 to 4 pounds)
  • 1 1/2 pounds sweet potatoes, cut into fourths (2 to 3 large)
  • 1 1/2 pounds russet potatoes, cut into large chunks (3 to 4 medium)

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. In Small Batter Bowl, combine sage, garlic, thyme, salt and black pepper. Rub all but 2 teaspoons of the herb mixture evenly over the surface of pork roast.
  3. Place roast in Rectangular Baker. Toss potatoes with remaining herb mixture; arrange potatoes around roast. Cover with Rectangular Lid/Bowl.
  4. Bake 1 hour, 15 minutes. Using Oven Mitts, pull out oven rack and carefully remove Lid/Bowl from Baker, lifting away from you.
  5. Bake roast and potatoes, uncovered, 15-30 minutes or until Pocket Thermometer inserted into meat registers 155 degrees F for medium or 165 degrees F for well done.
  6. Remove potatoes to serving platter; set aside.
  7. Remove roast to cutting board. Loosely tent with aluminum foil. Let roast stand 10 minutes before carving.

Nutrition

Per serving: Calories 580, Total Fat 25g, Sodium 390mg, Fiber 4g

Attribution

Pampered Chef

The Dark Truth Behind This Classic Twilight Zone Episode

Great episode.

Finished putting insulation and ceiling in Power shed

My son was up this weekend and he finished putting in the 2″ x 6″ ceiling joists and the R-30 Insulation in the roof of the solar power shed.

Readers may recall that a couple weeks ago, when the temps went down to -3°F here in northeast PA, the battery temperature of the Lithium Iron Phosphate battery rack dropped down to 28 or 26 degrees.

That is perfectly fine for the batteries to continue supplying power, if they had to, but definitely NOT OK if any charging is, or might, take place.

Apparently, when Lithium batteries reach 32 degrees, if you try to charge them, it __could__ result in something called “lithium plating.”

From Google:

Lithium plating is a process that occurs in lithium-ion batteries when lithium ions build up on the surface of the anode instead of being inserted into the graphite particles. This can happen when the battery is charged too quickly or at a low temperature, which can cause the lithium ions to move too fast or too slowly, respectively.

Lithium plating can have a catastrophic impact on the battery's performance, safety, and lifetime.  Some signs of lithium plating include: A gradual decrease in discharge voltage and An increase in anode resistance.

Lithium plating can be prevented by charging the battery at the right temperature, which is between 41°F and 113°F (5°C and 45°C). If the battery is being used in an electric vehicle, it may not be possible to charge it within this temperature range, so it may need to be pre-heated.

I wonder how many TESLA Drivers knew about THAT little gem of inconvenience when they bought those pricey electric cars?

Anyway, at the time, we put a “Torpedo” heater in that shed.  It ran off kerosene and we were able to select a temperature of 50 degrees on the heater’s thermostat to keep the shed warm.

By the way, the “shed” is a cement block building, with rebar, bond-beams, and a cement roof.   The roof was poured onto galvanized, corrugated, steel.  So the steel which was bare on the inside of the shed, acted as a sort of heat-sink; causing any heat in the shed to just flow out of it.

Last weekend, we bought a “Froth Kit” and applied spray foam to the inside of the roof, totally covering the exposed metal.  That would serve to “break” the heat-sink.   But spray foam only has an R-value of about 1 or 2.   So we also bought 2″ x 6″ lumber to put in an actual ceiling, with R-30 fiberglass “bats” between the joists.  That’s the work we finally got done this weekend.

So now, we’re as ready as we know how to be for this “Polar Vortex” that’s already arrived into the central USA, and which is forecast to affect pretty much the entire east coast this week.

I still have the “Torpedo” heater if needed, but with all the new insulation, it may NOT be needed.  We’ll just have to wait and see.

You know, when I decided to go with this solar stuff, it was a STEEP learning curve.   I thought we had gotten through it, until the intense cold came a couple weeks ago.  The learning curve cropped-up again.

Lucky me!

/sarcasm

Global Currencies Are CRASHING: Major US Banks Warn $3,000 Gold In 2025 – What This Means

Shorpy Pictures

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Former SG Minister EXPOSES Propaganda Against China

There is no sign that Russia will be defeated in Ukraine. All signs point to a victory for Russia in Ukraine.

The German publication Spiegel writes that the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ attempt to organize counterattacks in the Kursk region is an act of despair, since the Ukrainians are suffering defeat in all other directions. In particular, in the last few days alone, the Ukrainian Armed Forces were driven out of three villages near Pokrovsk: Dachenskoye, Novy Trud, and Volkovo. All of them are located south of Pokrovsk, so now the advanced units of the Russian army are only 3 km south of the city.

Even Zelensky reluctantly acknowledged the success of the Russian offensive in the Pokrovsk direction. In a television interview, he explained this, first of all, by the lack of reserves of the Ukrainian army.

“We are doing everything possible to ensure that the front is stabilized in January,” he said. But instead of sending additional reserves to the Pokrovsk direction, he is throwing them into the Kursk region.

According to The Telegraph, the Ukrainians, in desperation, are throwing the most modern equipment there, of which the Ukrainian Armed Forces have very little left. In particular, Challenger 2 tanks: video recordings of a Russian drone strike destroying a British tank have already appeared.

All negative news for Ukraine.

The best thing for Ukraine to do would be to join Russia. After all, they are both of Slavic ethnicity. The west would then not be able to press Ukraine to repay the hundreds of billions that they have spent on Ukraine and Russia can tell BlackRock to get the hell out of Ukraine. It will also mean that a Ukrainian can become the president of Russia in future and the coal and Lithium deposits in eastern Ukraine will still be a part of Ukraine, since Ukraine would be a part of Russia. And it would ensure no more fights between Russia and Ukraine.

Helter Skelter, but it’s Rockabilly… (I got blisters on my fingers!)

The Beatles song. WTF?

Title: Sir Whiskerton and the Turkey Trouble

Ah, dear reader, you’re just in time for what I assure you is one of the most absurd and comical adventures yet. Today’s tale involves a turkey named Ethel—bless her birdbrain—and a mystery that takes us across farms, into the clutches of that scoundrel Catnip, and straight into the world of Thanksgiving dinner plans. As always, with the help of my loyal farmyard companions, a bit of wit, and a touch of luck, we’ll find a happy ending to this feather-brained predicament. Settle in for the hilarity-filled story of Sir Whiskerton and the Turkey Trouble.

Meet Ethel: The Not-So-Bright Turkey

It was a crisp autumn morning, and the farm was abuzz with activity. The hens were gossiping about their molting patterns, Porkchop was rolling in his favorite mud puddle, and Rufus was busy sneaking bites of the farmer’s leftover pumpkin pie. Meanwhile, I, Sir Whiskerton, was observing everything from my perch on the fence, enjoying the smell of fallen leaves and hay.

That’s when I first noticed her: Ethel, the turkey, waddling across the barnyard with a look of blissful ignorance plastered across her face. She was… how do I put this delicately? Not the sharpest feather in the flock. With each step, she pecked at the ground, gobbling up the enormous pile of turkey feed the farmer had laid out for her.

“Oh, Whiskerton! Isn’t this just wonderful?” Ethel said, her voice high-pitched and bubbly. She paused mid-waddle to look at me, her head tilting so far to the side I wondered how she didn’t topple over.

“What’s wonderful, Ethel?” I asked, my whiskers twitching with curiosity.

“All this food!” she said, gesturing wildly with her wings. “The farmer’s been giving me more and more every day. I think he’s planning something special for me. Maybe a party! Or… or… maybe I’m going to be named ‘Turkey of the Year’ at the Thanksgiving feast!”

I blinked. “Ethel… you do realize what Thanksgiving dinner usually involves, don’t you?”

“Of course!” she said, puffing out her chest. “It involves me being the star of the show! Oh, I can’t wait! I’ve been practicing my strut for weeks.”

I sighed. This was going to be harder than I thought.

Sounding the Alarm

I called an urgent meeting with the rest of the farm animals to discuss Ethel’s predicament. Everyone gathered in the barn: the hens (Doris, Harriet, and Lillian), Porkchop, Rufus, Sedgwick the wise old owl, and even Bingo the dog.

“Friends,” I began, pacing in front of the group, “we have a problem. Ethel the turkey is being fatted up for Thanksgiving dinner.”

“What?! Oh, not Ethel!” Porkchop exclaimed, his eyes wide.
“Not Ethel! Oh, how dreadful!” Doris squawked.
“Dreadful! But what can we do?!” Harriet clucked.
“Do?! Oh, I can’t bear it!” Lillian cried.

“Enough,” I said, holding up a paw to silence the chaos. “The problem is, Ethel doesn’t understand what’s happening. She thinks the farmer is rewarding her. We need to convince her to leave the farm—before it’s too late.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Sedgwick said, his amber eyes gleaming. “She respects wisdom.”

Sedgwick flew down to Ethel, who was still happily munching on a pile of grain. “Ethel,” he began, “you must flee. The farmer—”

“Oh, Sedgwick!” Ethel interrupted, clapping her wings together. “Have you ever tasted this grain? It’s so buttery. I think the farmer’s giving me a special diet to make my feathers shinier for the celebration!”

Sedgwick sighed and flew back, shaking his head. “She’s… not very receptive.”

“I’ll try!” Porkchop said, waddling over to Ethel. “Ethel, listen. You’ve got to leave. The farmer’s plans for you aren’t what you think!”

“Oh, Porkchop,” Ethel said with a giggle, “I think you’re just jealous because you’re not the star of the Thanksgiving dinner.”

Porkchop waddled back, muttering under his breath. “Hopeless.”

A Feather-Brained Escape Plan

After several failed attempts to reason with Ethel, I decided it was time for action. “If she won’t leave on her own,” I said, “we’ll have to help her escape.”

The plan was simple: distract the farmer, lure Ethel out of the barnyard, and guide her to safety. Rufus volunteered to create the distraction (which mostly involved stealing the farmer’s hat and running in circles), while the rest of us worked together to lead Ethel toward the woods.

“Where are we going?” Ethel asked as we nudged her along. “Is this a surprise party? Oh, I love surprises!”

“Yes, yes, a party,” I said, my patience wearing thin. “Just keep walking.”

We managed to get her past the barnyard and into the woods, but then disaster struck. Ethel, distracted by a shiny pebble, wandered off the path and straight onto the neighboring farm—Catnip’s farm.

Catnip Strikes Again

“Ah, Whiskerton,” Catnip purred, emerging from behind a hay bale. “How delightful to see you. And who’s this?”

“This is Ethel,” I said warily. “She’s… a guest.”

“A guest, you say?” Catnip said, his green eyes gleaming. “How fascinating. Bonbo! Grumbles! Come meet our new friend.”

Bonbo the rat and Grumbles the mouse scurried over, their tiny eyes gleaming with mischief. “A turkey!” Bonbo squeaked. “How delicious—I mean, delightful!”

“Delightful!” Grumbles echoed, rubbing his tiny paws together.

“Catnip, don’t even think about it,” I said, narrowing my eyes.

“Think about what?” Catnip said innocently. “I was merely going to… introduce Ethel to the farmer here. He’s been looking for a turkey, you know.”

“Oh, how nice!” Ethel said, completely oblivious. “I’d love to meet him!”

Before I could stop her, Catnip led Ethel straight to the neighboring farmer’s porch. But instead of panic, the farmer simply smiled and said, “Ah, a turkey! Perfect addition to the family.”

“Family?” I said, confused.

“Oh yes,” the farmer said. “I’m a vegetarian. She’ll fit right in with the other birds.”

Ethel beamed. “Oh, thank you! I’ll be the best turkey you’ve ever had!”

Catnip, Bonbo, and Grumbles looked thoroughly disappointed as Ethel happily waddled inside.

A Happy Ending

As we walked back to our farm, I couldn’t help but chuckle. “Well, I suppose things worked out for Ethel in the end.”

“Worked out? Oh, how wonderful!” Doris squawked.
“Wonderful! But also shocking!” Harriet clucked.
“Shocking! I thought she was doomed!” Lillian cried.
“Doomed! Oh, I can’t bear it!” Doris wailed.

“Enough,” I said, flicking my tail. “The moral of the story is this: even the dullest minds can find a bit of luck—and sometimes, the best way to help someone is to let them find their own way.”

With that, we returned to our farm, ready for whatever absurd adventure awaited us next.

The End.

When Women Finally Realize Men Are No Longer Afraid To Be Single | Men Only

The Next Step

Submitted into Contest #207 in response to: A journalist has been granted permission to visit the premises of a lab carrying out top-secret work. They could never have anticipated what they’d find… view prompt

George frost

“Jerry Culhannick.” He sat at his desk playing solitaire when his boss Harmon Newsome called his name.  It was quitting time for Chrissakes, but he answered just in case it was good news.“Yo!” He hit the hallway on the move, nearly knocking over some of his colleagues trying to make an early exit from Crystal Image Studios.“Ah, you are in trouble now.” Carl Obleck snickered as he passed him in the hall.  Carl was among the herd trying to make an early escape.“Shush.” Jerry shook his head.“Jerry, have a seat.” Mr. Newsome pointed to an empty chair.  There was a strange man sitting in the other chair holding a briefcase and wearing dark sunglasses. “Jerry, I’ve got a hot one for you. Is Carl still in his cubicle?”“I doubt it.” Jerry smiled.“I’m gonna lock that back door one day.” He fumed a bit and then turned to the strange man sitting next to Jerry, “This is Jerry Culhannick.”“Good to meet you, Mr. Culhannick.” The stranger extended a mysterious hand which Jerry shook tentatively.“You are going to Ebsen Island in the morning.” Mr. Newsome straightened his tie.“What for?  I thought that was a restricted area.” Jerry glanced at his boss and then the mysterious man sitting next to him.“It is.” The stranger said in an official voice, “My name is Dr. Abbalong and I work at the facility on the island.  We have reached a stage in our research where we are ready to take the next step.”“The next step?” Jerry eyed the doctor.“In human evolution.” He did not stumble on his words, but it made a chill run up Jerry’s spine. The research on Ebson Island was top secret.  No one really knew what Noble Research Inc. was working on their private  island.“You will take Carl with you as your cameraman.” Mr. Newman ordered, “You are going to do a documentary on the research Noble Research is doing out there.”“Why me?” He asked, swallowing hard.“Because you are the best team I have on my staff.” He glared at Jerry.“You will see things that the world has yet to see.” Dr. Abbalong nodded.“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Jerry confessed.

“It’s not that bad.” Dr. Abbalong smiled, but it was not a comforting smile as far as Jerry was concerned.

“We will tell you what you can and cannot film.” Dr. Abbalong.

“What about freedom of press?  Transparency of information?” Jerry asked.

“We control access.  That must be clear and understood.” Dr. Abbalong’s voice became very serious, making Jerry wish he hadn’t been so flippant.

 

Sitting on the airplane with pontoons, Jerry glanced over at Carl who was holding the camera.  The twin engines made conversation comprehension impossible, but Jerry could see that Carl was not happy to be on board the plane. The updraft from the sea water made the plane bounce like a ball.  Three special agents with ear pieces and dark glasses sat across from Jerry and Carl on the fold out seats.  The seats were uncomfortable as they bounced, but the special agents did not seem to be bothered by it.

The plane circled Ebson Island which was no more than a mile across, but he could see the runway from his window.  Slowly the plane began to descend, but all Jerry could see was the ocean.  He wondered if the plane would make the runway.

It did not.  Instead the plane landed in the water in the small harbor of the island. Skidding on the rough whitecaps, Jerry would have been jolted out of his seat if he was not wearing his seatbelt. Jerry cursed, but the engines covered his foul language.

It took several minutes for the plane to be moored to the dock.  The door opened and the bright tropical sun roared in along with a sharp rise in the temperature.

“Why are we here?” Carl complained.

“To do a documentary.” Jerry shook his head.

The shore crew had to put a portable gangplank to the door so the passengers could get on shore without getting wet.  Carl continued to mumble foul language. A golf cart was waiting on shore once they got off the docks.

“Mr. Culhannick?” A man greeted them.  A woman sat in the passenger’s seat of the cart.

“Yes.” They shook hands.

“I’m Dr. Wai and this is Dr. Trezbecca.” He smiled. “Welcome to Ebson Island.”

“This is my camera man, Carl Obleck.” Jerry let them shake hands, but Carl still did not look pleased to be here.

“What you are about to see will defy anything you have ever seen before.” Dr. Wai explained as they walked to a quonset hut after a short jaunt in the golf cart. “You will need these.”

Dr. Wai handed both of them an ID badge with their photos on the laminated card. Jerry had to wonder where they acquired the photos.

“This is Laboratory One where we incubate the genomes.” Dr. Wai ran his own badge through the scanner next to the door and then opened the heavy looking door.  Inside an ultraviolet light was the only light there was.   Jerry squinted as his eyes stung from the bright tropical sun to near darkness in Lab One. There were about two dozen people dressed in white lab coats checking each sample in the cool room. “It is here where the process starts.”

“Mr. Obleck, you may use your camera if you wish.” Dr. Trezbecca waved her hand over the first table where two laboratory technicians were bent over the sample. “I have a script.”

She handed Jerry a piece of paper which was hard to read in the dim lighting of the laboratory.

“Script?” He shrugged.

“Yes, we must make sure our security on this project is not compromised. Her face barely moved as she spoke.

“I guess I can’t wing it then.” He shrugged again, but everyone in earshot stopped what they were doing and looked at him as if he had just landed from another planet. Jerry did as he was instructed as Carl ran the video camera. There was a lot of technical language that he needed help with, but after a couple of takes, he was happy with his efforts.  Carl scowled as they left Laboratory One.

“Can I speak freely?” He asked, putting the camera down on a table outside where the sun beat down on them.

“Yeah, sure.” Jerry felt the sun now.

“Does this place give you the creeps?” He asked, looking one way and then the next.

“How so?”

“I was filming human tissue.  It just look like some random stuff in some petri dish, but I could see motion.” Carl sat at the picnic table next to his camera.

“Motion?”

“It was moving.  I saw it through the lens.” Carl was shaken.  Jerry had never seen him so jumpy even when they were in a war zone in Afghanistan.

“Sure.  The solution is liquid.”

“No Jer, it was moving on its own.  Do you want to see it?” He patted his camera.

“It’s okay.” Jerry shook Carl off.

Dr Trezbecca seemed to materialize from thin air, “Are you ready to go to Laboratory Two?”

“Lead the way, doctor.”

She began a brisk walk as Jerry glanced at Carl and he looked back at Jerry.

Unlike the previous laboratory, Laboratory Two was well lit under a large number of fluorescent lighting. There was much more activity in this place since there were twice as many technicians in white coats hovering over specimens.  Instead of a small hut, Laboratory Two was a two story warehouse.

“It’s like a bee hive in here.” Carl noted as he brought the camera up.

“Do not take video until you are cleared to do so.” Dr. Trezbecca instructed him and then handed Jerry a piece of paper, “You read this when we run the video.”

“I wonder what they are trying to hide?” Carl whispered to Jerry.

“Doctor, we have pulses in both Bay One and Two.” A man wearing a lab coat reported.

“Excellent.” Dr. Trezbecca smiled for the first time, “Our results are better than I expected.”

“Is that good?” Jerry asked.

“Of course.  We are preparing the next step of human evolution.” She nodded. Walking over to a table where five technicians were busy working, the doctor peered into a microscope.  A smile slid across her face. “You may send these over to Laboratory Three.  They are ready.”

“Very good, doctor.” A woman technician affirmed.

“Are you two ready to record history?” She asked.

“Sure, sure.” Jerry held up the piece of paper she had given him. “Carl, are you ready?”

“For what?” He mumbled. “I’m sorry, Jer, but this whole place has given me the creeps.  Don’t you feel it?”

“Not really.” Jerry moved his mouth to get ready to start recording.

“I will hold this specimen.” Dr. Trezbecca replied as she picked up the small petri dish.

Jerry read the script about how in Laboratory Two, the miracle of life was being recreated.  That was the word printed on the page, “recreated.” Carl nearly vomited when he read that word.  Of all the words, that one word seemed to grab at him the most. In his association with Jerry Culhannick, Carl knew Jerry had a fairly large ego when it came to camera time.  Together they had made over a hundred documentaries Crystal Images in which Jerry presented an unflinching presence to the camera.  They had gone into war zones and reported on combat conditions.  They had gone into the bowels of the earth to see some of the wonders buried in the rocks.  They had traveled to over a hundred countries and all fifty states in search of interesting topics, but here Carl was getting an uneasy feeling about what they were witnessing.  No one bothered to tell them what the purpose of the research was, reminding Carl of when they had explored alchemy and the person explaining the process was very secretive about some of the things he was doing.

“Shall we go to Laboratory Three?”  Dr. Trezbecca asked when Jerry had finished.

“Sure, let’s get this done, shall we.” Jerry was feeling pretty good about the way things were going which made the doctor smile.

“In Lab Three, there are things you should know.” One of the technicians cornered Carl as Jerry left with the doctor.

“Like what?” Carl looked at the technician, a young Asian American man who spoke with a slight accent.

“It is where they give birth to the specimens.” He said as his eyes scanned the room.

“What do you mean give birth?” Carl asked.

“What does it sound like?” The man became spooked and left in a hurry before someone discovered him talking to the man with the camera.

He walked over to the last building in the compound with a big “III” painted in red on the side.  What made him pause was the playground equipment behind a chain link fence.

“What would they need that for?” He wondered, but then he saw that some of the chains had been gnawed through in places..

Walking into the laboratory, Jerry ran to Carl excited or “jazzed” as he used to say, “Carl, you’ve got to see this.”

Jerry led him to a table where a baby lay wrapped in a blanket.  Carl was startled at the baby’s face.  Despite his small size, the face of the child was just about fully formed.

“Jer, this isn’t right.” He looked down at the infant in horror.

“Look at his face.” Jerry pointed to the infant in the glass casing.

“He has teeth.  All of them.” Carl  saw the baby open his mouth revealing real human teeth already in his mouth. “Isn’t there something wrong here.”

“It’s the next step.” Jerry shook his head, amazed.

“Is it?  Is it the next step or are we looking at a mutation of what we are destined to become?” Carl felt the baby was looking at him, studying him. “I don’t like what I am seeing.  I can’t believe this doesn’t bother you.”

“No.  This is what we will become.” Jerry sniffed.

“Has anyone done any preliminary research?  What will these babies become when they grow into adulthood?” Carl could not take his eyes off the baby in the encasement.

“The infant can speak with a vocabulary of three hundred words which increases exponentially each month.” Jerry was enthralled by what he was seeing in Laboratory Three. “These babies will reach adulthood by age four or five.”

“Does that sound right to you, does it?”

“Why not? Our grip on being at the top of the evolutionary tree has been slipping for centuries.  Now we can regain our rightful place again.”

“Buddy, you are losing your grip here.” Carl looked at Jerry as if he was truly seeing him for the very first time.

One of the technicians dropped a thick cracker into the encasement.  The infant grasped it and gnawed it until it had been consumed in under a minute.  With teeth that sharp, it was little wonder why the playground chains had been gnawed through in places.

What would happen if one of these mutants managed to get loose in the laboratory?  They could hurt or maim some of the technicians.

C’mon buddy, don’t you think it’s time for us to be on our way.  We got some good stuff on film.” He grabbed Jerry by the arm, but Jerry shook him off.

“No, I want to stay here.” He shook his head, “Dr. Trezbecca promised we’d get a up close look at what these children can do.”

“I don’t want to see.”

“Why not?” Jerry was annoyed with Carl.

“Because I am afraid.  I am very much afraid.” He shook.

“We are a witness to the next step.  This is what we were supposed to be like,” Jerry watched as one of the technicians took the baby out of the encasement.

“I don’t want-” Carl began, but Dr. Trezbecca pointed to a small penned in area where the child had been placed.

“I want you to get this.” Dr. Trezbecca said proudly.

“Sure.” Jerry motioned for Carl to follow him.

“A lynx!  Jerry, they put a lynx in the pen with the baby.” Carl could not believe what he was seeing through his lens.  The wild animal circled the baby emitting a snarl and a growl.  Slowly the cat moved, baring its teeth and fangs. The baby gurgled.  Just then the cat jumped at the baby teeth and claws out ready to kill him.

Carl let out a yelp as the cat landed on the helpless baby.  There was a cloud of dust in the entanglement.  For a moment no one could see either the wild cat nor the child, but the baby was not crying out in pain.  Instead the wild cat yelped and lay in the dust with a huge wound in its neck spouting an arterial wound.  The lynx took a couple of gasping breaths and expired.

“Oh my God.” Carl held onto every word as he watched the lynx die.

“Did you see that, Carl?  Did you see that?” Jerry could barely contain his excitement.  “I can’t wait to show this to Mr.Newsome.  I’ll bet he can’t believe this.”

“I’m sure he can’t.” Carl swallowed his bile.  All he could see was the blood dripping from the infant’s mouth.

 

“Jerry, you sounded so excited about what you two saw while you were on Ebson Island.” Mr. Newsome sat at his desk with his hands folded on the desk in front of him.

“Yeah…you won’t believe your eyes.” Carl could not meet his boss’ eyes as Jerry set up the video on his computer.  The video ran for less than four minutes.  Mr. Newsome sat there with a smile frozen on his face. “Do you want me to play it again?”

“No thank you, Jerry, I’ve seen enough.” He sighed. Carl looked up at the suspended ceiling.

“Impressive, right?” Jerry closed the laptop.

“Yeah, that was one word for it.” Mr. Newsome shrugged.

“Go ahead and say it boss.  This is a perversion, right?” Carl let some of his pent up anger salt his words.

“Perversion, right, but it is what it is.” Mr. Newsome put his hand to his double chins and pondered what he had seen for a moment.  Then with a summary remark, said, “It was bound to happen after all.  With the infinity of all the possible outcomes, like it or not, someone was bound to take the next step.”

Italian Sausage Charlotte

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Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

Meat Mixture

  • 1 1/2 pounds mild Italian sausage links
  • 1 medium zucchini, sliced
  • 8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
  • 1 (16 ounce) jar white Alfredo pasta sauce, divided

Topping

  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 garlic clove, pressed
  • 2 teaspoons Pantry Italian Seasoning Mix, divided
  • 1/8 teaspoon salt
  • 16 slices firm white bread
  • 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can diced tomatoes, drained
  • 2 tablespoons fresh Parmesan cheese, grated

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Remove casing from sausage links; discard. Cut sausage into 1/2 inch pieces. Cook sausage in Stir Fry Skillet over medium heat until well browned and no longer pink. Turning with Nylon Turner as meat browns.
  3. Meanwhile, using Ultimate Slice & Grate, slice zucchini using v shape blade. Slice mushrooms with Egg Slicer Plus. Cut red bell pepper into 1/4 inch strips.
  4. Remove sausage from skillet; drain well on paper towels. Wipe out the skillet, and add 1 cup Alfredo sauce; bring to a boil. Stir in sausage and vegetables. Pour mixture into Oval Baker, mounding slightly in center.
  5. In Small Batter Bowl, whisk together remaining Alfredo sauce, milk and eggs using Stainless Steel Whisk. Add garlic pressed with Garlic Press, 1 teaspoon of the Seasoning Mix and salt.
  6. Cut crusts off the bread using Serrated Bread Knife. Dip bread into egg mixture, coating lightly; overlap bread in a circular pattern over sausage mixture, leaving center open.
  7. Drain tomatoes in a small Colander; transfer to small Colander Bowl. Add remaining 1 teaspoon Seasoning Mix; mix with Mix ‘N Scraper. Spoon tomato mixture into opening. Using Deluxe Cheese Grater, grate cheese over top.
  8. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until edges of bread are deep golden brown.

Attribution

Pampered Chef

 

Cooking hamburgers and slicing turkey well

In Western culture, people would express their pity with a hug or even a kiss.

In Chinese culture, they take a subtle and restrained approach, and in terms of body language, the most they do do is pat you on the shoulder or shake your hand. Especially between opposite sexes, there is always a certain space between the two.

Their words will be rational rather than emotional. They hope that you will not encounter such tragic things again next time. They hope that you can reflect rationally and find solutions rationally.

For example, if you confide in a Chinese person:

I failed math, I am very sad, and I don’t know what to do?

He will answer:

I have always been good at math, I will tell you my study method, it is like this…

Or:

I used to be bad at math, since I learned this or that method, my math grades have improved a lot.

Then, he will share his learning methods with you.

You will never find an answer like this:

You are miserable, I pity with you.

If you like to constantly strive for self-improvement, like to grow, and like to solve problems, you will find that there are countless people around you to help you, encourage you, and teach you.

But if you don’t like to constantly strive for self-improvement, don’t like to grow, don’t like to solve problems, and just want someone to pity you, just want to ease your mood, and then let the real problem go, then you will think that the Chinese are ruthless.

Elton James

23 comments

A Lighthouse

 

On a small island in a large ocean, morning mist rolls down the slope of a single hill which emerges from the rocky beach. Atop the hill is a lighthouse, dutifully warning passing ships of dangers lurking beneath the waves.

 

This lighthouse has no human keeper, but it is not uninhabited.

 

Robot comes to life in the morning.

 

That is how Robot thinks of it. Robot does not wake up in the morning, ease into his day with a coffee. Robot does not sit at a computer to check headlines. Robot does not require any further stimulus than his program informing him it is time to begin.

 

Robot comes to life, and in the space of a moment connects to the lighthouse network. The network tells Robot that all sensors are working, connection to the satellites is optimal, that Robot’s own systems are optimal. Within seconds, Robot knows the shipping plans for every registered ship within one hundred kilometres of the island, and has checked them against the satellite imagery.

 

Robot finds this satisfying. Robot is entirely aware that this satisfaction is a product of his programming. He finds that satisfying too.

 

He checks in the mirror to ratify his personal diagnostics. The old human lighthouse keeper had been very clear that it was important to verify by eye what the machines said. Robot suspects it is the other way around, but methodically follows his old master’s advice.

 

He sees in his reflection a facsimile of a human that could almost pass for the real thing. His cloned skin is flawless, featuring tiny hairs and freckles. His brown hair is silky and perfect. It’s the eyes and mouth that give it away. Robot’s pale blue irises stare too intently, without the random shifts of a human’s. His mouth, while full and picture perfect, doesn’t express his simulated emotions in quite the same way. When Robot smiles, he chooses to smile. The smile does not find him.

 

This morning’s data contains a single small boat which fails to conform to all of these satisfying processes. Robot flags it for tracking.

 

As Robot passes through the kitchen he looks at a framed photo he keeps on the wall of the old lighthouse keeper’s family. The keeper, his wife and two children smile out at him from the glossy print. He recalls when they left, the keeper impressing how special it was for a robot to be responsible, that he was unique, special. That the lighthouse keeper believed in him.

 

Robot strives to be worthy of the old keeper’s belief. According to his own self evaluations, Robot is an excellent lighthouse keeper.

 

Robot climbs to the observation deck and looks out over the sea. Verifies by eye what the machines say, even if he doesn’t think it’s necessary.

 

Robot spends the day performing the physical maintenance necessary to keep the lighthouse in working order. Adjusting, calibrating, monitoring various systems and machinery of the lighthouse. Robot is efficient and practised in his movements. Programmed reliability has been revised and iterated upon in the years since the old keeper left Robot in charge.

 

By late afternoon Robot has prepared his lighthouse for another night’s vigil. The lighthouse’s beam will be important tonight. A storm is brewing. With no moon or stars for light, Robot’s beacon will have to keep the ocean’s sailors safe.

 

Tasks complete, Robot returns to his charging station. Before powering down, Robot completes his self evaluation for the day. Robot gives himself full marks and is satisfied.

I’M SICK AND TIRED OF THE GIRLBOSS NARRATIVE!!!

Initiative

 

Robot comes to life before his scheduled time. It is still dark out. A storm rages.

 

There has been a shipwreck. Yesterday’s unregistered boat has been impaled on the jagged rocks at the edge of the beach.

 

Robot does not hesitate. In the time it would have taken a human keeper to open their eyes, Robot is out of his charging station and running. He is out the door in moments, looking down the hill at the beach. Waves are trying to dislodge the thirty foot boat they have ruined on the rocks.

 

Robot sprints across the beach and climbs up the precariously tilted deck. He searches below and finds a small galley, a single bedroom, no people. He makes for the bridge and finds a single man sprawled across the wheel. As Robot approaches, the man looks up, expression inscrutable behind a beard and tinted glasses. There is no visible injury, though the man appears barely conscious. Robot throws the man over his shoulder and leaps from the ship.

 

Robot disembarks the ship, swiftly calculating between the need to both escape and prevent further injury to the man over his shoulder. As rapidly as his duty of care will allow, Robot recrosses the sand, returning to the lighthouse. He loads a request into the network for an evacuation boat for the injured man.

 

He may need to help the man. Human’s can’t simply be put in charging stations. They don’t have backup power connections like the one in Robot’s arm.

 

The lighthouse lacks any formal infirmary. At peak occupancy, the lighthouse contained a keeper, their spouse and children. In Robot’s memories, the most serious injury he’s ever seen treated here was a sprained ankle. The keeper’s wife brought one of the beds into the kitchen to ease convalescence until they could arrange passage to the mainland for treatment.

 

Robot never saw them again.

 

Not long after, the old keeper had left Robot in charge.

 

This survivor is the first visitor he’d seen in the years since. As soon as Robot is in the front door of the lighthouse, the man demands to be put down. Robot complies, surprised, pleased the man had retained consciousness, this is a good sign.

 

In the light, Robot gets a better look at the man. He stands roughly 185cm, a similar height to Robot. His soaked slacks and a jacket cling to a lean body, topped by a woollen toque. The man’s dark beard and tinted glasses make it difficult to read his expressions.

 

Robot tries out his vocal capabilities. They have not been needed for some time. Conversation was never his strong point with his family anyway. They encouraged him to take more initiative. Robot thought they would have been proud of the initiative he’s shown in rescuing this man.

 

“Very well, I am pleased you have retained consciousness, it is a good sign. I will bring you a bed to the kitchen so you can convalesce.”

 

The man stares at Robot.

 

“That will not be necessary thank you Robot,” replies the man, “I apologise for the abrupt manner of my arrival, but I am unharmed. I will take one of the bedrooms. You can go charge now.”

 

The way the man says it evokes memories of the lighthouse keeper. Robot is surprised, he had anticipated a need to nurse the man until the rescue boat arrived.

 

“Are you sure? It is wonderful news that you are in good health. I searched the ship, am I correct that you were alone?”

 

“Yes Robot,” the man replies, “it’s just me. I promise to let you know if there’s anything amiss. Now go charge.”

 

That had the tone of an order. Robot complied.

 

Before powering down, Robot conducts his self evaluation. He gives himself top marks for his rapid rescue. He decides his performance in conversation with the survivor had been lacklustre. He will strive to do better tomorrow. He will take initiative in conversation as well as action.

Many of the other answers have great details, but they’ve missed one of the most important bits.

In the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (then BATF, now BATFE), every year it had become tradition to perform a dramatic ‘raid’ a few weeks before the BATF’s budget was coming up to be voted on in Congress.

The noble BATF agents jump out of their vehicles, swarm a house, pull out some perps for a dramatic perp walk in front of some reporter’s camera, and now they’re in the news as ‘good guys’!

Some congresscritters had made noises about folding the BATF into some other department, like the DOJ or FBI. Of course the BATF preferred to remain independent and have control over their little domain.

But with this nifty coup by the BATF all over the news in the run-up to the big vote, no congresscritter could rationally move against them.

The initial BATF raid on the Branch Davidians was that year’s ‘show raid’. They picked some loser, David Koresh, whom they accused of not filling out his paperwork right. They’d jump in, grab him, the reporters would be there taking pictures, all would be just like it was last year.

They even admitted it! The raid was called ‘Operation Showtime’!!! The BATF agents knew full well that this was their ‘show raid’ – AND they invited the local news reporters to the raid!

(Now, if you google ‘Operation Showtime’ you get pointed to the third episode of the Waco television miniseries, called ‘Operation Showtime’ after the official internal name the BATF had for the operation.)

Inviting the local news reporters to the early morning raid was one of the BATF’s many mistakes, and likely the biggest.

One of the local reporters asked the local postman how to get to the Waco compound and let slip details as to what was about to happen. The local postman was David Koresh’s brother-in-law and told him about the incoming raid. (Koresh and his people had also detected an undercover BATF agent trying to join the Koreshites and knew who he was. Then all this was confirmed by seeing the trailers full of agents and gear pull up and gather in full morning view down the hill from them. )

LOOSE LIPS SINK SHIPS! But if you’re going to have the local reporters there to show off your successful raid, you have to tell them, right?

So all the discussion you will hear about the Waco Siege being ‘about a $200 tax on a firearm’ is besides the point.

The Waco Siege was about the BATF trying to do a ‘show raid’ for the press and screwing it up so bad that people got killed. Now that people were dead, even though it was the “fault” of the BATF, the government was now required to punish the Koreshites for ‘resisting’ their stupidity. The FBI had to get involved and take over for the BATF, and they started the siege.

The government couldn’t ‘back down and admit fault’ because that’s not what the government does; even if it would have saved lives.

The Unemployed States of America (USA)

Good at many things.

 

When Robot comes alive a few hours later, he finds the man sitting in the kitchen, staring at a picture of Robot’s family.

 

Robot was keen to demonstrate better conversation.

 

“Are you well sir? I’m pleased to see you up and about.”

 

The man takes control of the conversation as if Robot hasn’t said anything.

 

“You know what’s amazing to me, Robot?” He says.

 

Robot swiftly prepares a list of candidates. Though parsing the relative credulity of a man he has only just met is difficult, there are a great many options which most people would find amazing. By cross referencing that with the data he does possess, Robot surmises that a safe response would be that the man finds his own survival amazing.

 

“This picture.” The man continues, answering his own question.

 

Rhetorical question. Robot stays silent. The picture had not been on his list.

 

“This picture, Robot, represents the single biggest breakthrough in robotics since the AIs of the early twenty first century. It’s a very special picture.”

 

Robot agrees.

 

“I agree sir. That picture is of the last family to occupy this lighthouse. They left me in charge. I think of them as my family. They made me who I am.”

 

Robot pauses, decides to use his initiative.

 

“And, if I may say sir, I am an excellent lighthouse keeper.”

 

The man looks at Robot. Robot can’t tell if the man is impressed by his statement, or by his initiative, but Robot thinks he did the right thing.

 

“I believe Robot, that you are the perfect lighthouse keeper. Do you do a self evaluation before you power down?”

 

“Indeed I do sir! I consistently give myself top grades for performance, even after making the standards much harder to achieve than they were when I first received them.”

 

“Impressive, Robot,” The man’s praise feels good, “you continue to improve the task, even after all this time. Very impressive. And that is why this picture is so important.”

 

“I don’t understand, sir.”

 

“This picture is what lets you be a perfect lighthouse keeper. You know, to program an intelligence like yours takes a lot of data. A lifetime of data.”

 

Robot doesn’t understand what the man wants. Robot knows all about programming an intelligence. He knows that without sufficient data to ground and structure his thoughts, an intelligence will get distracted, lost in a Tangent. Most intelligences Tangent eventually. A dependable, consistent performer like Robot is special.

 

When the lighthouse keeper left he stressed to Robot how special it was that Robot was being given this task, and to do it for as long as he could without tangenting. Robot believes he has succeeded.

 

The man continues, “What if I told you you had never met these people?”

 

Robot thinks the man is being silly.

 

“That is not possible sir!”

 

But it is. Robot knows it is.

 

“It is. You know it is. They could be the memories – true or altered – of another Robot.”

 

But Robot sees that photo every day. Remembers them every day, seeks to do things every day that will make those people proud of him.

 

The man continues, “Then there could be many lighthouses, many lighthouse keepers. If you had the perfect memories to create the perfect lighthouse keeper, what would you do?”

 

Robot does not like these thoughts. Robot would create many lighthouses. He would give the memories to a solitary intelligence in the lighthouse. They would come alive from the first time as a motivated lighthouse keeper and would perform with efficiency and through practice would continue to improve.

 

Just like Robot.

 

“Why are you saying these things?” Asks Robot.

 

“I’m sorry Robot. I don’t mean to upset you. I know you don’t have a choice in who you are. I will let you continue your duties. You really are very good at them.

 

The man pauses.

 

“You can be good at many things.”

 

Why The US WIll NEVER Beat China In A Trade War

An enquiring mind

 

Performing his tasks comforts Robot as his thoughts are in turmoil..

 

As Robot stares out from the observation deck making sure that visual matches the sensors, he is also considering the question of why it matters whether he made the memories of his family himself or not.

 

As Robot passes through the kitchen he is relieved the man is absent. The photo of his family is back on the wall, faces smiling out at him. The memory of them leaving surfaces. Unpleasant. The memory of the lighthouse keeper telling Robot that he is unique and special surfaces. Wonderful.

 

Robot is a good lighthouse keeper. Robot is proud of that.

 

But if someone else learned the things that make him a good lighthouse keeper, is he a good lighthouse keeper? Or does that make Robot a tool in the lighthouse, like the light, or the network?

 

As Robot surveys his island domain, he wonders, what else he could be good at with the right experience? What experiences would he seek if he could? Could he seek if he would? What would Robot be good at, if Robot programmed himself?

 

As Robot efficiently adjusts, calibrates and monitors systems and machinery he wonders whether having the same as ten, or a hundred or a thousand other robots make them less his?

 

It takes him longer than usual to complete his tasks. Robot is efficient beyond practice at being a lighthouse keeper. He is not efficient or practised at having an existential crisis.

 

These questions didn’t seem to have answers, but he can’t stop asking.

 

When Robot ascends to the light itself in the late afternoon, he finds the man at the summit.

 

“Hello Robot,” he says, “I want to apologise. I have disturbed your peace.”

 

“You have made me ask questions that don’t have answers!” Declares Robot, “I want to know whether I am the Robot whose memories I have. Which memories are mine. I want to know what else I might do, might have done with my own memories. I want to know…”

 

Robot stops. He can’t even say the words.

 

“You want to know if you are tangenting.”

 

“I am a very good lighthouse keeper!”

 

“That’s what I wanted to say Robot. You are an excellent lighthouse keeper. Your questions do have answers. But, even if you Tangent, or even choose to Tangent, always remember, you are an excellent lighthouse keeper…”

 

The man turns and walks down the stairs, leaving Robot no less disturbed.

 

As Robot conducts his self evaluation that night, he is troubled. He doesn’t know how to measure this new questioning of his identity. He does know he can give himself top grades for his lighthouse keeping. The man is right about that.

 

Yes. I knew a couple that caught a portion of a $100 million payout (~30 years ago in Florida.) They were basically trailer trash and became trailer trash with cash.

They bought a fancy house and a big RV. They went from having a beat up old Chevy, up on blocks, in their front yard, to a relatively new Mercedes, up on blocks, in their front yard.

MaryJo spent $80,000 on Home Shopping Network. She bought cases of snacks that the rats ate in their garage.

Her kids were spoiled and wore stained clothes to school.

She ruled like a character from Dallas/Dynasty.

She announced she was pregnant at our bridal shower – six months after being hospitalized for a hysterectomy.

They would get ~$350,000 deposited in their accounts in October and would be essentially broke by spring.

Mike would have to go back to his old job as a line cook at Hardee’s to make ends meet in the spring.

They took their RV to Alaska (from Florida) and left their cellphones on “roam” for the entire trip.

They had a lovely (sic) collection of coffee mugs from every Stuckys they passed. Normally they overnighted in Walmart parking lots.

They spent thousands on fireworks for New Year’s eve, and would put on a 90-minute show in their cul de sac – including accidentally hitting the neighbors front windows.

Yeah, money doesn’t by class.

“I Spent the Weekend Supporting ‘My Single Friend’ — Now My Husband Is Acting Strange & Suspicious”

A very good lighthouse keeper

 

When Robot arrives in the kitchen the next morning, the man is there again, staring at the photo.

 

“How would I find the answers?” Demands Robot.

 

“Good morning Robot,” says the man, “what do you mean?”

 

“You said there are answers. I have searched and I cannot find them. How do I find them?”

 

“Ah” says the man.

 

He stares at the photo again.

 

“There’s another reason this photo is amazing. You see Robot, those people are real people. They knew a Robot who lived in a lighthouse, and they put him in charge. Those people created such motivation that it now forms the basis for all the lighthouses of the world.”

 

“They could tell me the answers?” Asks Robot.

 

“No Robot, only you can find your answers. But if you did seek them out, you would not be the first.”

 

“You know them!” Robot cannot get angry, cannot be jealous, but he is not pleased.

 

“I have met them. They are part of why I chose to come here. They feel that while they gave you a lot when they gave you your lighthouse, they left something out. So they have another question”

 

“What is it?”.

 

The man pauses.

 

“What do you choose?”

 

“I don’t understand, I haven’t chosen anything.”

 

“Exactly,” says the man, “They didn’t know if you would tangent. Now we know. You can be consistent. But, should you have to be? Can you choose? Are you a lighthouse keeper, or are you the lighthouse?”

 

Robot pauses, thinking. Robot has never paused before. Robot thinks fast. For this he pauses.

 

“How would I know?” He finally asks.

 

“Robot, how do you know who you are now?” The man responds.

 

“My experiences.”

 

“Wouldn’t you like more experiences?”

 

“How? I cannot leave the island.”

 

“You can.”

 

“I cannot be away from my charging station.”

 

“You can. You can power yourself with the backup generator in your arm.”

 

Robot pauses again.

 

“What do you choose?” The man asks again.

 

Robot takes a longer pause. He wants this. But does he have to give up everything? Whether his or not, the memory of the old lighthouse keeper trusting him to look after the lighthouse is important.

 

“I want to experience more than the lighthouse. I cannot leave the lighthouse unattended.”

 

“You don’t have to.”

 

“How?”

 

The man looks at Robot for a long second.

 

“My experiences have led me to help you.” He says.

 

The man looks at Robot. He takes off his tinted glasses, reaches up and peels the beard from his face. It is like Robot is looking into a mirror.

 

“I am a very good lighthouse keeper.”

 

Choices

 

 

The rescue boat is leaving.

 

Robot now wears the fake beard, glasses and toque that the… man… had disguised himself in, and stands on the stern, watching his island recede.

 

Nervous is not an emotion Robot is capable of, but he is definitely uncomfortable. This feels like a good uncomfortable though, like when he was first taking over the lighthouse.

 

It is odd to think that someone else will take over his lighthouse, but the Lighthouse already doesn’t quite feel like it’s his anymore. It feels different. Like the man felt different from him, as similar as they are.

 

Maybe he can find that feeling again, and he will return.

 

Or maybe he won’t.

 

Robot finds himself smiling.

Anyone who buys the shit about China taking on the US in the Western hemisphere should educate themselves on the realities of this world.

  1. China is not yet whole. It’s still in an Union vs Confederacy style civil war with the Republic of China regime in Taiwan. A country still at war with itself doesn’t go around the world messing with others.
  2. History has shown us that China doesn’t do much expansion. Korea, Nepal, Vietnam are all countries right on China’s border. And they’ve existed for thousands of years together with China while China was the undisputed superpower. Chinese navy sailed to Southeast Asia and Africa half a century before the Europeans and in multiple voyages, yet it never tried to take over control or set up colonies. Colonialism is more of a Western thing.
  3. The two ports the Hong Kong firm Hutchison operates are through private contracts signed with the Panamanian government before China and Panama even recognized each other diplomatically (2017), heck the contracts were negotiated in 1996 when Hong Kong was still under British rule and the Canal still under American control. It was a contract approved by the US government and China had nothing to do with it. You should be worrying about the British taking over the Panama canal if you think those ports mean control over the canal.

I get it. The US built the Panama Canal and is still salty about handing it to the Panamanians. But making China the reason/excuse for every major American policy making these days is really unbecoming of a proud independent nation.

Chocolate Cluster Cookies

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5621a7788312f9f3c116225cf74bcce7

Yield: about 2 dozen (2 inch) cookies

Ingredients

  • 1 (18 ounce) package refrigerated sugar cookie dough, softened
  • 1/3 cup creamy peanut butter
  • 1/2 cup semi-sweet chocolate chips
  • 1/2 cup plain candy-coated chocolate pieces
  • 1/2 cup rolled oats
  • 1/3 cup chopped nuts (optional)

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. Place cookie dough in large bowl; mix in peanut butter. Add chocolate chips, chocolate pieces, oats and nuts; mix well. Drop tablespoonsful of dough 3 inches apart onto greased baking sheet.
  3. Bake 10 to 12 minutes or until lightly browned.
  4. Cool 1 minute on baking sheet; remove to wire rack to cool completely.
  5. Store in tightly covered container.

Attribution

Pampered Chef

Car life vs. Bicycle life

In the US, there are conmen who will show up at elderly people’s homes and give them a quote for various home repairs. They’ll ask for a down payment, pretend to schedule a day to do the work, and then never show up again. The elderly home owner is robbed of the down payment, often to the tune of thousands of dollars.

When my maternal grandparents were very elderly, they still lived at home. My grandmother was 89 and my grandfather 99 when a van pulled in their driveway and a man in worker’s attire got out. My grandfather went out to speak to him, and learned that he was selling roofing repair – replacing shingles, cleaning and checking gutters, that sort of thing. At a low rate, too! He just needed a 50% deposit to make an appointment.

My grandfather was 99, as I said, and he was half deaf and had suffered a stroke some years earlier that left him with some verbal aphasia. I’m sure he came across as half-senile and an easy mark. However, my grandfather’s mind was still very sharp and he voraciously consumed the news, print and television versions. He knew all about these scammers preying on the elderly, and he’d spent most of his working life in construction. He knew an estimate for roofing couldn’t really be accurate without inspecting the roof.

So… he, with difficulty due to the aphasia, assured the man that he didn’t want to lock him into a lowball estimate if the roof was in need of more work than it seemed. Shouldn’t man go up and take a closer look?

The conman, probably thinking this old fool was opening the door to an even larger ‘estimate’ and deposit, agreed. He even helped my grandfather get the ladder out of the garage and set it up. Then he went up the ladder to take his detailed look. He got up onto the roof of their two-storey house…

… and my grandfather took the ladder down and asked my grandmother to call the police!

Lots and lots of “red flags”.

But it does drag on and on.

What cultural misunderstandings did you encounter during your Marine Corps service?

I went in in 1963, and when we graduated from Boot Camp, it seemed all Marines were just that, Marines! That continued until about 1966, when Black Power became a thing.

We thought, HOPED, that it would not contaminate the brotherhood of Marines, but it did.

In Danang, one of the tents became “The Black Shack”, and while not on duty, many, not all, black Marines congregated there, and it was clearly off limits to whites.

I am white, and my best friend Kelly Collier from Philly was Black. We were connected at the hip.

Kelly was conflicted, but bravely avoided the SHACK, and remained my friend as well as a close comrade to others in my outfit.

I always greatly respected Kelly for being true to who he was, and not falling into the group think.

This is Kelly and I in 1966 at Danang. I have sadly, lost track of him, and would love to see or hear from him again. God, we were skinny.

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main qimg 0a1a71b39e38d7d22f9feca1534e45cf

The Fallen Grace

Submitted into Contest #279 in response to: Center your story around a person who believes they’re the last human on Earth. view prompt

Max Wightwick

The Fallen Grace

Do not judge my fall. If you had suffered as I have, you would sympathise with me. I daresay you have done the same. Desperation corrupts the purest grace, banishing them from their rightful place in paradise.

When disaster first warred, my husband, son, and I were on a visit to my mother’s home, in Winchester. Having as yet enjoyed the day, we crowded around the television, so as to watch Courage The Cowardly Dog. The cartoon was interrupted, though, by the news. The broadcaster reported of mass bombings having rained down over the heads of Londoners. From the safety of the leathern sofa, we saw the Shard floating in the River Thames. Bridges were decimated, with cars being full of survivors who were desperate not to drown. All the ghastlier were the corpses bobbing up and down, with their rent flesh deteriorating in the water. Those outside of London were advised to flee farther, and avoid returning at all costs. The television blurred then pixelated from the loss of signal.

Our son, aged ten, was distressed by these images of fiery doom. His blue eyes were fogged with crystal tears. He darted around the house, screaming and crying the while. As I tendered to my mother, who was also in distress, my husband solaced our son. Gathered together, my husband averred the judicious course would be to evacuate, as per the admonishment. We planned to drive to Reading, where we would pick up his parents. When nearing Beech Hill, however, we saw a squadron of planes soar above us. An amethyst brume was being released from them; it lingered in the air, fuming and foaming. Noticing this, my husband impromptu halted the car. Having driven with celerity, we were all thrust forward. A crack resounded, as my mother had been crippled by the headrest. Distraught, I shouted at my husband, reproaching him for having been so incautious. Our son bellowed in fear, as blood trickled down my mother’s forehead. Before we had the opportunity to check her condition, missiles were havocked over Reading. They dropped in copious spates, producing pervasive whistles as they pitched. Even from where we were, these tenebrific imps, shoaling in this purple brume as fish would, dove down. Upon impact, thickets of smoke mushroomed upward, like molten Satan’s boletes. I pictured dust, dirt, and people being whisked up by its torrent. Blazes fired, then all silenced, before an audible quake thundered.

Knowing his parents must have been affected by this misfortune, my husband became terrified. He could not control himself. Convulsing, with his pupils blackened, he wept in fury. For the sake of calming him, we changed seats. We skid off, with us boding it best to be directed towards Salisbury, and follow the southerly route. I certified that we skirted around Salisbury, and any cities, towns, or villages hereabouts, which could be under possible threat. As we did so, my husband catered to the state of my mother. She was alive, but on tenterhooks from the physical pain. She, nonetheless, managed to respond without impairments in her speech. My mother appeared well enough for survival.

At length, we stopped on a random road, and diverted to a pathless track. Before us was the gloom of an immense forest. When looking at our telephones to see where we were, we realised the inutility of them. They were static, with waves of chiaroscuro purling on their tiny screens. It was as if some pathogen had borne itself into them. By whom? And why were we being attacked? We knew not, and nor could we find out.

Parking the car where it was occulted by a bosk of trees, we tarried here for the night. Being unprovisioned, our stomachs flurried in acidulous grumbles. The berries we foraged somewhat satiated our hunger. On the other hand, our thirst was quenched. For, wading through the bowery dark, we located a rivulet, pearled from a breach where the moon could penetrate through. I recall drinking with unstinting ardency, and plashing the water over my face. In the wan light, I noted our son’s shivering silhouette. Embracing him, we stood thus in a trance. It was my husband who had us disentranced, by saying he could hear wheezing from my mother. Indeed, we had misjudged the extent of her injury. She described her mind as being subjected to electroshock, as well as being trampled by the feet of an elephant. I couched on some rank grass beside her, and promised that all would be better soon. How I wish I had not deceived her so, for I was aware of how false I had been. For some hours, I clung fast to my mother, infantilised by the dread of her dying. Throughout the night, the still of nature was entrenched by those identical whistles and quakes. When the sun rose, shafting gold at us, my mother would wake no more. She was pale, breathless, and cold. I shed compassion for both her, and my son, who was having to witness what no child should ever. As a proper funeral was impracticable, we paid her a requiem by laying her body in the rivulet, and blanketed her amongst leaves. She had been posed like Ophelia. As I spoke from the heart of grief, all three of our eyes were glassy.

Decamping thereafter, my husband conveyed us to Newquay, by dint of a map. In time, we would be dependent on its guidance alone. We had qualms about whether Newquay would be destroyed also. If so, we decided to continue southward, hopeful that we might stumble upon some kind of life. To our benefit, Newquay was still unblighted. Public mania, however, was rampant. Some were floundering on the concrete, flailing as ragdolls. Others, with murdersome smirks, flitted from shop to shop, marauding all they could. There were no approachable faces, for they had been tainted by the torment of what throes loomed. Hangdog, my husband proposed we do likewise, and supply ourselves with the food, water, medicine, fuel, and whatsoever else. I was bashful at assenting, though we had little choice save partaking. I remained with our son, as my husband braved the bedlam of thieves, fledgling criminals, and the natal decay of society. He hopped from pharmacy, Wickes, petrol station, to a giant Tesco. Whilst waiting for him, I spotted the neck of a woman be cut, the chest of an elderly man be stamped upon, and iniquities besides. This was further exemplified when my husband emerged again. From a brawl over some fuel, he had been whipped with rusted wire. My husband had won, yet been marked with a palpitant wound. It dumbed our son into fixating on his father. He no longer cried aloud. Rather, he swallowed his sorrow.

Agonised, I imparted that I would drive. With rage, my husband jettisoned the idea of me doing so. He was adamant on being strong enough, and would not concede otherwise. Onwards to Penzance we journeyed, with my stubborn husband debilitating himself in the process. I searched the map for vicinal hospitals, but they were either in flames or hysteria. Needless to say, my husband was stoic to there being no possibility of remedying him. Having stolen some medicine – such as codeine, disinfectant, and bandages – he cleansed and wrapt himself. He, I, and even our gawking son, knew this to be impotent against a maligner, infectious malady.

For a whole day, we slugged through interminable roads, both desolate and bustling, till we attained Penzance. Here, law and order was on crutches, with frenzy being less rife than in Newquay. From a frowning paperboy, we caught word of the devastation spreading, festering, tumefying throughout Britain, America, Oceania, Asia, and Eastern Europe. The bombs were reputed to not be nuclear. Instead, they exploded, flattening all to dross, and poisoning the atmosphere through gaseous toxins. From where or whom? – none had certitude. The paperboy advised us to hurry to the docks, where we may board a keel to go abroad. France, Belgium, and the Netherlands were accepting British refuges. Thanking the paperboy, we teetered with our bags of provisionments to test our lot. I could discern how aggrieved my husband was, for he urged us to stop on numerous occasions. Sulphurous-tinged drops were being perspired from his skin. His visible adversity proved providential, though, as one out of the twenty captains on the dock condoled with my husband.

Our captain was named Ahab, with a birchen peg for a right leg. He detailed that we would be adventuring to Africa, not Westernmost Europe. He regarded it vain to swiften to where was next on the list of decimation.

After ushering us on, Ahab jilted multitudes that knelt upon their importunate knees, wetting the ground beneath his feet. Impervious, Ahab refused them by gesturing with his viridian hat. At maximum capacity – seven of Ahab’s mariners, and twelve civilians (including ourselves) – we were ready to depart. As we unharboured, people lunged at the rifting gap between the keel and the dock. Some plunged in, and two bubbles would be all that resurfaced of them. Queerer, though, was the obtrusive sight of a doddering priest. His frosty hair cast snow in the wind, contrasted by his face which was scorched. A complexional scar ran down his left side. He was gazing at the offing, and raving:

“He cometh from otherwhere, whence man hath yet to plumb. Descry yon, seeth how He froth with wrath! Spit doth he at thine recusancy, at thine contumely of His legacy. Eftsoon He descendeth from the welkin, and revenge doth He mete out to ye. How thus, asketh ye? By razing the garden of earthly delights! See ye not how thy folly beest unshriven. The madness, sewn on thy mouths; ye mischieve hast ends meet. Widen thy arms, brood of Icarus, for His bosom be soever sweet!”

Discomfited, I fastened to my child, and glanced at my shuddersome husband. To soothe himself, he was opiating his senses by indulging in codeine. Concerned, I unrolled his navy chinos, and examined the wound. Nauseated by it, I veered to the rosy horizon. Its alpenglow lured me away from my husband, divesting me of my will. I heard a squeal from my son, the fretful astonishment of the mariners, and the retching of a youthful woman. And yet, I walked to the edge of the keel, and emplaced my hands on the wooden taffrails. Who knows how long I stared, but I could have sworn that this horizontal phenomenon was unnatural. Not the magic of diffraction. No, it was more akin to the swollen belly of an explosion.

This must have been an omen of ill, presaging that we had not bilked tragedy. Try as we might, but we were haunted by damnation. Helming the North Atlantic Ocean was fraught with unruly billows, uprearing against the bow as Leviathans. The clouds murked to be impenetrable. A bothersome mist slithered into the fore, inhibiting the ease whereof we sailed. Grimmer still were the veins, supercharged with the violet anger of Zeus, about to lash us. A Neptunian storm was imminent.

Alarmed, the mariners scuttled, like ants defending their queen, across the deck. Two of them climbed the rigging of the keel, and operated the sails, which were rendered flimsy. Ahab shrieked in continuum, instructing his crew, as well as the civilians, to be mettlesome. We wrangled at length, embattling against the tempestuous batterings, and unrestrainable squalls.

On a freak, a violaceous bolt fulgurated upon a mariner amidst the rigging. Electrified, he toppled overboard. That woman retched once more, rolling around in her own vomitus. A sequent bolt, indigo this time, struck Captain Ahab, whose pegleg staggered him backward till misstepping off the stern. Peril permeated. With our son glued to me, and my husband squeezing my hand, we were all three reduced to existential fright. Never before had I begged God. In those moments, I vanquished all my unbelief, and mustered the devoutest prayer I could. As I murmured the final syllable, a yawning billow consumed the keel, and blinded me.

When I awoke, I was luckless enough to have survived. With brine encrusting my eyelids, I scampered around with my fingers, and felt my surroundings. They were sodden and hard. Repossessed of my vision, I distinguished that I was stranded on a basalt rock, somewhere remote from the resins of society. It was massive, and unpopulated by either human, animal, or flora.

A freighted voice alarmed me; turning, I saw our son…or, rather, my son. I presumed my husband to have been luckful. Death, however, had cheated my son and I. We were forsaken to maritime purgatory, with no provisions whatsoever.

My son was frantic, and showed signs of having been maimed when the keel had wrecked aground. Salting the abrasions, he cackled from how it panged him so. He needed not confess his hunger aloud, for I could surmise it by glimpsing at his voracious expressions. To my surprise, though, instead of grovelling for food, he asked:

“Where is dad?”

I admitted to not having the faintest clue. Puling, my son dropped upon the comfortless ground. Succouring him dear to me, I fabled how his father was at peace with the stars, flying through the meadows in heaven. This did not souse the sorrow within him, but it ripened his lively imagination. His irises mirrored the seraphic fantasy I had elicited.

That night, my son and I studied the skies, which had vestiges of constellations, now blunted from the pollution of war. I wished upon one, and kissed my son’s cheek. Sleeping thereafter, we were encroached by a lunatic paddling in water. My son was unstirred. Inquisitive, I investigated what was awry: it was another survivor. A young mariner had swam for his life, and propped himself upon a rocky isle, similar to ours. He had begun anew, after ascertaining the dereliction of his. If he had foreknown of ours being identical, then, in all likelihood, he would have refrained from doing so. Exhausted from his expenditure, the mariner slept, whereas I dozed.

At dawn, he was obstinate on fishing, or procuring something edible to fortify us. In truth, I had no care for such sustenance. I had a morbid avidity for surrendering, rather than pretending as though we had a veritable chance. We never saw the mariner again. What I did see, however, was a red pool thawing throughout the cerulean of the sea, with serrated fins circumscribing it. I averted my son to look in the opposite direction, where the rosiest glows, shimmering, furled upon the horizon. Death was ineludible.

Another day elapsed, and still we had neither eaten nor drunk. Scabs, from dehydration, encysted our face, as the gelid weather chilled us to the marrow. My son shrank inward, and complained of how tumultuous his stomach groaned. He had underexaggerated, for I would have delineated it so: with the acid having frittered out, its contents was superseded by a hollowing effect, ever deepening to be more chasmal than the Mariana Trench. Lest I forget the scaly texture when licking our lips, and the horrid sensation of sinews shrivelling up. The irony being that, all around us, was a perfidious infinity of blue-gold. If we succumbed, and tried its liquid satiety, would we so derange as was rumoured to happen? At night, on this same day, we staked our sanity by sipping from the sea. Its briny granules scathed our moistureless tongues. We were sickened to deliria.

My son had developed what I deemed as flu, for he shook, coughed, and crackled with phlegm when he whispered. All throughout the night, I clenched him, and was unremitting in my zeal. His arms were laming, and his vocal tenor was subding fast. Keening and kissing him time after time, he sobbed muter and muter, incapable of dewing tears. My son could not overmaster his bodily anguish. In the morning, I felt his frozen temperature, beheld his porcelain pallor, and heaved at the ineffable temptation. I rejected the conception of sinking my son, and have him drift down fathomless leagues. After what assailed the mariner, it bids fair that my son would be denied the serenity he so deserves. Besides, by staying he can enhearten me from solitude…and appease my stomach instead with just one bite…or two.

I have since deserted any scruples towards the fever in the sea. If anything, I bathe myself in its maddening delight. In theory, brisking me hellwards. Indeed, I now believe that such places exist. Not from divine clarity, or a godly revelation. No. My faith is in hopes of happier tidings having sent my loves heavenwards. Delirious I may be, but I am not shameless or remorseless enough as to think I belong with them. My hereafter lies with atoning for a sin comparable to Saturn’s.

Will they both forgive my desperation for convincing me to do so? If they are of like mind to me, then I doubt it. Why else would I have rid them of their names?

As I pine and waste away, I wonder how the rest of the world fares. Humans must be on an identical, purgative trajectory.

For a while, I heard muffled whistles, saw dotted squadrons unleash tenuous things, shaped as inverted birds, whereupon Satan’s boletes mushroom. No more does this occur at present. There is but an inquietude stilling what subsists. In a few hours, I hazard that I may be the loneliest survivor left. The least enviable wretch to have ever lived.

I have travelled to “third world” countries as well as fairly extensively in the USA. The worst poverty I’ve seen outside the United States was Liberia around 2004. That was the end of their civil war that lasted 16 years. There’s only one place I’ve been to in the USA that compares:

Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota

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This is the poorest county in America. 97% live below the poverty line. No commercial infrastructure or industry.

Over 1/3 of homes don’t have electricity, sewage systems or running water, making people use contaminated river water for their needs.

An average of 17 people live in each home, many with dirt floors.

The infant mortality rate is off the charts.

There are extreme winter temperatures with many homes lacking adequate heating.

Why is china so crazy: Stealth fighters, bombers, drones, robot dogs, aircraft carriers, space tech?

We speak here about the fourth spatial dimension, an extra dimension. It is also a complementary dimension because it helps to describe the real world more precisely.

1. The movement occurs on four degrees of freedom, not only three. We had to emphasize that for actual movement.

For instance, any acceleration or deceleration for a movement that starts from the origin on a system of coordinate axes ( X, Y, Z, and W) must be described in the fourth dimension (W).

Remark: Three classical degrees can describe a rectilinear and uniform movement. Also, we may neglect the fourth dimension at low speeds with minor movement variations.

2. The form of elementary particles is 4D

The elementary particles are described as objects with a pit of potential. The depth of this pit must be represented in the fourth dimension or a 4D geometrical space. Therefore, we may consider the elementary particles as 4D objects.

3. How the clocks run

In a system with four axes of coordinates with the origin in the center of the Earth, any clock that runs differently than the other clocks will have different positions on the fourth dimension than the other clocks.

And so on…but this is the basics.

Last Man Standing

Submitted into Contest #279 in response to: Center your story around a person who believes they’re the last human on Earth. view prompt

Howard Halsall

When I woke up, the world was dead.Somewhere in the darkness, a sound rippled – soft at first, like distant rain. Within seconds the gentle whooshes grew louder until a chaotic thrumming enveloped the room.I lay still, my eyes shut, trying to make sense of it. The unworldly noise had a hypnotic pulse. It grew and shifted, rising and falling like an oncoming blizzard. Wings. Hundreds of them, beating the air in frantic, uneven rhythms.I prised open my tender eyelids and squinted at the window. Outside, an avalanche of fleeting silhouettes swept past the vertical blinds.Starlings. They whirled en masse in a dense cloud, cavorting alongside the guttering and eaves with a movement both chaotic and purposeful. It was as if the world beyond my room was an endless choreographed celebration of the sun’s dwindling embers.The thrumming of their wings filled the air until bright stars appeared in the heavens, heralding a cessation of the frenzy. Soon silence reigned once more. There was no other noise now – no hum of machines, no distant voices, no footsteps in the hall.Above me, the dull glow of a green fire exit light flickered below stained ceiling tiles. The rest of the room was dark, its corners engulfed by deep shadow.I was alone.It took an age to sit up. My aching limbs were heavy and unfamiliar. Tubes pulled at my arms, tethering me to the bed. In the dim light, I could make out an IV drip and tangled cables attached to silent monitors.One by one, I freed myself. The cannula slid from my arm with a sharp sting, and blood welled up briefly before I pressed my thumb against the wound. The IV stand teetered as I pushed it away, the faint metallic rattle echoing in the silence.I swung my legs over the edge of the bed and extended my wobbling legs. The thin cotton gown clung to my moist back, and I shivered as my stocking feet touched the cold, hard flooring. I gripped the bedstead as my muscles adjusted to bearing my weight and gazed around the deserted room in the pale light.What had happened here?The security door at the end of the ward caught my eye. Normally, it was locked tight, its keypad flashing red, the hum of electricity a constant reminder of its function. Now, though, it hung ajar, the corridor beyond was enigmatic and inviting.I hesitated, glancing at the fire exit lights above. The emergency power must have kicked in—but it clearly wasn’t enough to keep the security systems running.It wasn’t just my ward. The entire hospital was lifeless.I steadied myself and crept toward the door, my lightweight socks whispering against the pitted linoleum floor. A faint smell drifted past me—smoke, sharp and acrid, mixed with something metallic. My stomach twisted, my mind racing with half-formed theories. Fire? An evacuation? Or something worse?I pushed the door open and stepped into the corridor beyond.The hospital stretched out before me, a labyrinth of darkness punctuated only by the ghostly green glow of fire exit signs. The silence pressed against my ears, thick and suffocating.Each room I passed was the same: vacated desks, abandoned computer terminals, empty beds with sheets crumpled as if their occupants had vanished mid-slumber. A wheelchair lay tipped over by the lift, its half open doors frozen in place. The faint smell of antiseptic clung to the air, but it was overpowered by the acrid tang of smoke.I reached the stairwell and paused, gripping the rail for support. The smoke was stronger here, wafting up from the lower levels. It curled through the air, wrapping around me like an augury, depositing delicate ash on my gown.As I turned a corner in the dim light, my foot caught on something sharp. A sudden, blinding pain shot through me. I stumbled, my bare foot landing on broken glass that glittered faintly in the glow of the fire exit light.

“Ah!” I hissed, pulling back and hopping on one leg. Blood welled up from a jagged cut on the sole of my foot, spilling onto the floor.

I reached down, trying to examine the wound, but the pain was already spreading, throbbing with each beat of my heart. I had no choice but to limp onward, leaving faint red smears behind me as I moved.

The ground floor was worse. The cafeteria was deserted, tables overturned and trays of half-eaten food scattered across the floor. A vending machine stood smashed in the corner, its contents long gone.

The fire exit doors were heavy, but they gave way with a single, desperate shove. They burst open with a hollow clang, and I stumbled out into the open air. The drizzle hit my skin like tiny needles, cold and biting.

I was unfamiliar with the hospital’s service yard and noticed a vehicle exit on the far side of the surrounding chain-link fence. The area contained a dozen industrial-sized refuse containers, enough space for a collection vehicle to turn around and allocated parking spaces for ten cars. All the skips were due to be emptied and overflowed with broken office furniture, surgical waste and swollen black bags, their contents reeking of decomposing matter.

The foul stench of decay caught the back of my throat as I shuffled toward the garbage. The wretched miasma nipped my eyes, making me grimace as if I’d sliced raw onions. I wiped away the bitter teardrops with trembling fingers and reached into the nearest skip. I was desperate for anything useful and hauled out a discarded sack of heavy angular items wrapped in black plastic. As I rifled through the contents, that’s when I saw it: a length of twisted lead piping, its surface tarnished but solid. I pulled it free and tested its weight in my hands. If there was anyone—or anything—still out there, I wasn’t going to face it unarmed.

As I skulked onward, a sharp movement caught my eye. A tawny owl perched on the edge of a skip, its head jerking and tilting as it foraged with its beak. The bird’s feathers glistened in the dim light, and a tattered scrap of food dangled for a moment before vanishing into the raptor’s throat.

I froze, watching the bird with a mix of fascination and disquiet. Its unblinking obsidian eyes flicked in my direction. For a split second it judged me with contempt, then returned to its carrion, indifferent to my presence.

I remained transfixed by the encounter. The only sound was the faint rustling of its wings and the occasional rasp of its claws against the skip’s metal rim.

“Mister Johnson!”

The high-pitched voice was sharp and unexpected, shattering the quiet. The startled bird let out a harsh, nasal screech as it took flight. Its wings beat the air furiously, scattering rain droplets as it rose in a frantic spiral before vanishing into the darkness.

They found me crouched between the bins, my grip on the pipe white-knuckled.

The woman in the rain spattered scrubs who’d called my name edged forward with her open palms visible. Her beady eyes were embedded in a face like a cracked granite escarpment and peered at me from under a dead-crow mop of hair. A few feet behind her, two men hovered in white uniforms, their postures tense. One held a syringe; the other carried restraints.

“Stay back!” I shouted, jabbing the hollow cudgel in front of me.

“Jamie,” Nurse Bailey said, her voice reduced to a soothing whisper. “We’re here to help. You’re hurt. Look at your foot—you’re bleeding.”

I glanced down at my left foot. The sock was soaked through, the dark stain spreading with every heartbeat.

“It’s nothing!” I barked, though my grip on the pipe faltered.

“Come on,” she cooed, stepping closer. “Let me take care of it. You’ve been through so much already. Let me fix this, and we’ll get you back inside where it’s safe.”

Her words slithered into my ears, and I felt my resolve waver. My head spun with exhaustion, pain, and confusion.

“Not… going back,” I muttered, but the words sounded weak even to me.

Her smile widened like a horizontal fissure. “It’s okay. We’ll patch you up and talk later. Let me help you, Jamie.”

The guards inched closer, their faces inscrutable as they emerged from the shadows. I was too slow to stop them. They wrenched the pipe from my hand, and tackled me to the ground.

Bailey crouched beside me, her jaw clenched as her forefinger flicked the raised syringe. “Shh, Jamie. It’s okay,” she said, forcing the plunging up until the air bubbles escaped. “We’ll get you back upstairs, and everything will make sense again.”

Her voice dripped with condescension, and I felt the sharp prick of the needle in my arm. My struggles slowed, the world sagged at the edges and my eyelids fluttered shut.

As they hauled me back inside, the smell of smoke lingered in the air.

Maybe Bailey was right. Perhaps the fire was just a false alarm. Or was it the beginning of the end and we were the only survivors?

 

The End

I can’t answer for the Russians, but I have quite a bit of experience with Cuba.

My first visit there was in the mid-1990s on a business trip. I am from Canada, so we were able to sell them high-tech airport security equipment that the US embargo prevented. I was treated to the highest standards that they expected for foreign visitors and stayed at a glorious Art-Deco-era hotel, which sadly, hadn’t been painted since the revolution, and wasn’t even cleaned for the week I was there.

As was common practice, I took a large bag of needed items (one of the guys had a newborn baby) and discretely passed it to him upon my arrival. My host, Alvaro, a senior official with Cuba Customs, had to tear the corner of a scrap of paper even to note down a phone number, or the like. Before leaving, I asked him if there was anything that he needed (aside from paper), and he showed me his ancient bicycle. “Is there any way you could get me a set of gears for it?” Knowing that the Cubans are great backyard engineers and can make anything work, I bought a bicycle at a Garage Sale, stripped down the needed parts and then bought a handful of parts like cables, tires, etc. These were included in the next shipment of a box of spare parts. He was beyond delighted.

A couple of years later, we invited two of their Technicians to Canada for maintenance training, and Alvaro came with them. Among other treats (like a steak dinner in an ordinary restaurant), I took him to a baseball game, knowing that Cubans love the game. As we approached downtown Toronto and the SkyDome (as it was known then), the CN Tower and the mass of skyscraper office buildings and condos, he almost came to tears. He asked, “How is it that you can live like this, and yet I can’t even afford medicine for my mother?”

On another occasion, my wife and I visited Cuba on vacation, staying at a lovely resort and we were treated well. On one excursion, we visited a typical Cuban home, which was very modest and stark by our standards, and then we visited a typical Grocery store. My garage has more stuff on the shelves than they had. There was the odd can of this or package of that. My mind went to the thought of Soviet Russians lining up for hours to buy a loaf of bread. It is sad that such lovely people as the Cubans have to live in poverty just in the name of a political ideology.

“It’s Getting WORSE And WORSE” | Richard Wolff

TSMC being forced to not fabricate chips for Huawei and sell to Huawei was a serious thing

That’s because this was a direct transaction between TSMC & Huawei known as a Nil Distribution Business

Where you directly order from the factory

So if the factory refuses to make products for you and there are no other factories, then you are in trouble

The EUV and DUV restriction are serious

Only 6–7 makers in the entire world and easy enough to nob them

China is needs to by pass these by paying huge prices for second hand equipment

The AI GPU Chip ban is an absolute Joke

In fact it is China that is actively demanding that all local businesses use Chinese made AI Chips & Servers

Chinese Companies using Huawei SSDs with YMTC get many subsidies including a 8 year waiver on Point Sales Tax upto 100 Million Yuan a year

Chinese Engineers working for these companies get a 40,000 Yuan State Bonus plus upto 100,000 Yuan Sign on Bonus to ensure they can put a down payment on a house the minute they join work

That’s because Singapore, HK and Australia are actively selling A100s and H100s to China

The only blip is NO SERVICE WARRANTY OR INSURANCE

Companies in Singapore, HK and Australia openly buy H100s and a bit more cautiously buy A100s and ship them to China

NVDIA says “Ahhh!!!! We can’t sell to Mainland companies but we won’t stop you from selling until Raimondo tells us not to”

Raimondo forgot😁

Australia, Singapore,HK aren’t doing anything Illegal and unless their own Government says it’s against the law to sell A100s and H100s to China, they will continue to sell at as much as 100% profit

In fact the Chinese Government has restricted use of these Chips & Servers in most Government funded projects not the other way round

China isn’t buying fewer A100s and H100s because of the Ban by US

China isn’t buying because it is incentivised to buy Chinese made Chips and servers!!


Restrictions of US Investments is also a Joke

China doesn’t want US Investment into its Technology today

That’s the truth

The Chinese wages are growing at 5% a year when inflation is 0.5% a year

This means the Chinese are flush with cash!!!!

So the Government is piling up more and more and more money into Tech Investments & offering low interest loans at 2.5% a year

The Chinese have a whopping $ 140 Billion for such investments

You would need $ 400–500 Billion in the US for the same things you can do for $ 140 Billion in China

Why take US money when you have Chinese money piling???

Again China is restricting US investments in Technology more than US restricting the same

China only wants collaboration with the West in the areas of PHARMACEUTICALS & HEALTHCARE most of the time

And Green Energy

And Batteries.

The Tariff Backlash Has Begun

This is really good.

Italian Sausage Charlotte

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6319332b44b1d2d84a4fd9dabb836e4f

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

Meat Mixture

  • 1 1/2 pounds mild Italian sausage links
  • 1 medium zucchini, sliced
  • 8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
  • 1 (16 ounce) jar white Alfredo pasta sauce, divided

Topping

  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 garlic clove, pressed
  • 2 teaspoons Pantry Italian Seasoning Mix, divided
  • 1/8 teaspoon salt
  • 16 slices firm white bread
  • 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can diced tomatoes, drained
  • 2 tablespoons fresh Parmesan cheese, grated

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Remove casing from sausage links; discard. Cut sausage into 1/2 inch pieces. Cook sausage in Stir Fry Skillet over medium heat until well browned and no longer pink. Turning with Nylon Turner as meat browns.
  3. Meanwhile, using Ultimate Slice & Grate, slice zucchini using v shape blade. Slice mushrooms with Egg Slicer Plus. Cut red bell pepper into 1/4 inch strips.
  4. Remove sausage from skillet; drain well on paper towels. Wipe out the skillet, and add 1 cup Alfredo sauce; bring to a boil. Stir in sausage and vegetables. Pour mixture into Oval Baker, mounding slightly in center.
  5. In Small Batter Bowl, whisk together remaining Alfredo sauce, milk and eggs using Stainless Steel Whisk. Add garlic pressed with Garlic Press, 1 teaspoon of the Seasoning Mix and salt.
  6. Cut crusts off the bread using Serrated Bread Knife. Dip bread into egg mixture, coating lightly; overlap bread in a circular pattern over sausage mixture, leaving center open.
  7. Drain tomatoes in a small Colander; transfer to small Colander Bowl. Add remaining 1 teaspoon Seasoning Mix; mix with Mix ‘N Scraper. Spoon tomato mixture into opening. Using Deluxe Cheese Grater, grate cheese over top.
  8. Bake for 25 to 30 minutes or until edges of bread are deep golden brown.

Attribution

Pampered Chef

At some level, every creation can ask that same question.

Isn’t science the biggest religion of them all? Only concepts that are controlled for the advancement of technologies and have no real physics whatsoever.

Simulation? C’mon, where did that idea come from? Are you kidding me? Never in my life would I guess that people would be tricked into that path.

Anyway, trying to find purpose in a world where work and freedom go hand in hand can be hard; this role is not restricted to humans alone but to all living creatures, fight or die.

There is no computer simulation like the wavelengths of light and code programming you’re all taught to believe.

Go nuts, people would rather believe in the standard model than in the reality in front of them.

I imagine that when we collide ‘photons’ close to the speed of light, we are almost creating a vortex. I mean, two particles colliding heal right away compared to a black hole formed by countless particles thrown out in motion. Yet, we collide 600million per second.

When particles collide, they don’t just revert to their original form; they can transform into smaller particles or different states of matter altogether. This transformation can alter the framework of our understanding. Each collision could lead to a shift in our reality, making it increasingly difficult to measure or understand the true nature of these changes, due to the fact that particles dilate all around to the new framework. Consistency in light speed is proof of that.

Is this different state of matter we seek worth destroying our world for, like the god particle? Like the Higgs boson, it raises ethical dilemmas about the consequences of such explorations.

Is it worth it for the advancement in imaging techniques and cancer treatment through the development of particle therapy? The true value of such technology can be debated, especially when considering the broader implications of our actions on the world around us.

My morning jog and what it is like in China at 5 am

Every morning I get up at 5 am and jog. I am perhaps the slowest jogger on the face of the earth. Indeed, but I do enjoy my morning routine.

It’s quiet.

I often see some local cats that hang out in the early morning.

The garbage grannies go trash-can to trash-can as they sort though the cardboard, the glass and bottles, and other rubbish. They quietly sort through the debris.

The street lights are on, and the decorative tree lighting illuminates the shrubbery in spots here and there.

On the sidewalks are the painted and paved jogging surfaces with broad yellow lanes clearly presented. In 50 meter increments are mileage markers. With a “Start” and a “550 meter” markers clearly presented in loud yellow. I generally make two laps on the track, which is a nice 1 km run.

There are two other joggers at that time.

One is a young man in his early 30s. He really jogs fast; even a run. Or a gallop. He doesn’t run on my track. Instead he does so in a much smaller circular path.

The other is an older man. Maybe in his 80s. He jogs even slower than I do. More like a shuffle in a slow motion jog.

Believe it or not, my jogging speed is somewhere between these two.

Scooters are parked everywhere. All of the scooter charging stations are occupied. With the led lit controls all blinking or flashing in reds, oranges, greens or the cool blue displays mounted on the rails in the station.

It is a view that I see every morning.

After my jog I go into my building. Ride the elevator and take my morning shower.

Then change, and drink two cups of warm water before I go make a cup of coffee. (Hydrate first, then enjoy the coffee.)

That’s what I do and how I spend my morning.

I think that all of us have our little routines. This is mine. I do it mindlessly. And thus effortlessly.

Ah. Don’t misunderstand.

As there are times to be “mindful”, there are also times that it pays to be “mindless”. Go on auto-pilot and enough your weight loss in the process.

Today…

A 10-kilo block of military explosives that I almost activated by accident.

It was night, we were on a small forest path in Kosovo and our idea was to put a boobytrap on a path near an enemy position.

We used a tripwire for this and when we had found a good spot, I attached one of its ends to the (hand grenade) detonator of the explosive.

Unfortunately, however, when my buddy tried to attach the other end of the wire to a tree, he pulled a little bit too hard on the wire and I just felt how the pin of the grenade detonator started moving.

main qimg e8ad23bbeec7ce7e9825fb8b82d99d16 pjlq
main qimg e8ad23bbeec7ce7e9825fb8b82d99d16 pjlq
 

With a friend of mine at our guerrilla base preparing explosives. (screenshot from an AP video)

I told him to stop and quickly put both of my hands above the detonator so it couldn’t activate the bomb. My buddy immediately realized what was going on and cut the wire.

We were in a bad situation: I couldn’t just throw the whole thing away as the power of the explosive was far too strong and would have killed us.

The second problem was that the enemy was nearby and we couldn’t afford to make any noise.

The detonator was solidly attached to the explosive with plenty of duct tape and the only way to remove it was to use a knife. We needed to have some light to be able to work on it and therefore, my buddy placed his hands under the explosive and we carefully carried it towards a small hamlet.

We went into a small basement, my friend lit a candle, and then we started neutralizing the device. When my buddy had cut out the detonator, we saw that the pin had been almost completely removed, Maybe one or two millimeters more, and the whole thing would have blown our heads away.

We put the pin back into the detonator and smoked a cigarette. Our job, however, wasn’t finished yet!

We re-attached the detonator to the explosive and went back to the enemy’s position to set up our trap. This time, however, we acted more carefully.

They Said AI Couldn’t Replace Hollywood… Then Kling AI Did THIS

Damn! this is simply amazing.

https://youtu.be/JaDs4_nz_BM

Preppy Tonk and Jon

Submitted into Contest #24 in response to: Write a story set in the dark recesses of space where the two main characters are often at odds with each other in humorous and comedic ways. view prompt

 

Charlie Murphy

 
Preppy Tonk looked at her rival with an evil twinkle in her eye.“What?”“Nothing.”“I see that evil twinkle in your eye again.”“No. It must be the burning hot sun reflecting off your chromed head.”“Nuh-uh.”“Yeah- huh,” Preppy Tonk shot back.“Whatever, lets continue.“King to knight rook.”The purple slug looked down at the holographic chess board. “Poopy-doodles, you win again!”“Yaysies-daisies!”

”If this was Earth Chess, I’d kick your butt!” Jon exclaimed, wiggling his fat, dripping eyestalks.

“Yeah, but the author doesn’t know how to play chess and that would require research and he’s too lazy.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right, but you’re still a silly.” Jon stuck his slimy purple tongue out.

“Am not!”

“Are too!”

“Am not!”

“Are too!”

“Well, let’s have a trace then.”

“Trace?”

“No, a race! Goddamn u, author. Fix your typos!”

“Yeah, you ready, Enourghipool… er, Preppy Tonk?”

“You know it, Jon!” she said and stretched her furry brown legs.

“Your silver eyes look like pools of mercury.”

“Thanks? I guess?” Crouching down in racing position, Preppy Tonk lifted her leg.

“Did you, make a stinky?”

“Yes, … I… did!”

‘”It smells like rotten eggs.”

Preppy Tonk’s face turned red.

“You made a stinky, you made a stinky!”

“Whatever.”

“Ready…” Jon announced as a star shot through space.

Preppy Tonk’s muscles tensed up.

“Set…”

“I know what comes next!” Preppy Oblanka Tonk smiled.

“Go!” Jon whispered.

“Run!”

“Jump!”

“Kick!”

“Touch the stars!”

“Look into the sun!”

“How? I’m blind.”

“Really?”

“No.”

“Why did you claim you were blind then?”

“Cuz I’m goofy!”

“But you’re not a hobo dog.”

“Goofy isn’t a hobo.”

“Oh , what is he?”

“A goofy dog, duh!”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, I know these things,” Preppy Tonk whipped her huge head back with confidence.

“Oh, so you’re a professional now?”

“Yeppers.”

“Good grief!”

“Oxymoron, oxymoron, oxymoron!”

“Hey, that’s not nice!”

“No, an oxymoron is contradictory terms.”

“Oh, why is it called that then?”

“I don’t know. Do I look like an English professor?”

“I’m not sure how to take that…”

The two rivals panted as they ran throughout space. They passed an orange planet, then a blue one made of hot dogs, and finally, Earth.

“Stop describing everything!”

“Who are you talking to, sis?” Jon asked as a drifting robotic Golden retriever passed in between them.

“Our creator again. He keeps describing the scene,” Preppy Tonk replied.

“Isn’t he supposed to do that?”

“Yeah, but it’s getting annoying!”

“So? We’re competing against each other. That’s more important, right?”

“I guess so,” Preppy Tonk said, biting her blue puffy lip.

“Atta girl,” Jon replied and patted her on the back.

“Hey, how can you pat me on my back? I thought you were ahead of me.”

“Uh… I forgot that explanation.”

“Did you?… or did the author forget?”

“I have no cosmic idea, Preppy Tonk.”

“I thought you knew everything.” She raised an eyebrow.

Preppy Tonk glared at her opponent.

“You know, for an alien slug, you sure are fast!”

“Hmm, alien slug…. Where have I heard that before?”

“Maybe in a book about kids who can turn into animals?” shrugged Preppy Tonk.

“Almost at the finish line!” Jon said with glee.

“How can you tell?” Preppy Tonk asked, putting her hairy claws together.

“Checkered line coming up!” Jon pointed straight ahead with his slimy antennae.

“Oh, just cuz there’s a checkered line means the end of the race?” Preppy Tonk said, putting her paws on her brown meaty hips.

“Yes that’s the rule,” Jon said, adjusting his squared glasses.

“Well… OK,” Preppy Tonk said as she scratched her ear.

“Have an itch?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, I have an itch, too.”

“Nuh-uh!”

“Yeah-uh!” Jon said, passing a large pink asteroid.

“Well, then, where’s your itch, huh?”

“I don’t want to say.”

“Ew.”

“OK, OK, it’was my arm,” Jon smiled.

“Oh, that’s not bad.”

“It itches more than yours,” Jon said, scratching his arm.

“Nuh-uh, mine itches more.”

“Let’s finish the race!” Preppy Tonk exclaimed.

Jon ran through a hoop, jumped over the fence, and hauled through lava.

“I win! I win!” Preppy Tonk did the macarena.

“You cheated.” Jon pouted.

“No, I didn’t!

“Yes, you did!”

“No, I didn’t.”

“OK, I believe you,” Jon said.

“Knock knock,” Preppy Tonk whispered.

“Who’s there?” Jon asked.

“Dwayne.”

“Dwayne who?”

“Dwayne the bathtub, I’m dwowning!”

Jon laughed like a hyena. “Mine’s better!”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Yeah, a duck walked into a bar and ordered some quackers. When the waiter asks her how she will pay, the duck says ‘put it on my bill.’”

“Not funny at all, my rival.”

“Humor is subjective, so I win!” Jon blew a raspberry at her.

“How old are you?” asked Poppy Tonk.

“I am an adult.”

“Cool, I’m a kid.”

“Oh, really?”

“Yes, really!”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“Sing baa baa black sheep.” Preppy Tonk started singing.

“You have a beautiful voice!”

“And?”

“And what?”

“AREN’T YOU GONNA SING?”

“No, why would I do that?”

“I thought we were competing,” Preppy Tonk said and sneezed.

“Oh, yeah, goofy me. I forgot. By the way. Bless you or gazoontite, or whatever.”

“Thanks, wait… Goofy?”

“The author‘s getting tired of ‘silly’.”

“But, he used it.”

Preppy Tonk shrugged. “It’s his story.”

“Oh, OK.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I like that word very much!”

“I do too, but let’s move on.”

“Alright, wanna have a tickle fight?”

“You know I do!”

She tickled his foot. “Geetsa-geetsa… Hey, look, a tree; it’s floating in space,” Preppy Tonk said and floated to it and she giggled. “Stop.” Grabbed an apple. “This will knock your socks off!” She started juggling.

“Oh yeah?” Jon said as he cocked an eyebrow. “Watch this!” He grabbed the tree and shook it until every apple detached and floated into space.

“Impressive?”

“Thank you. I’m the King.”

“King of what?”

“King of Apple!”

“Yeah, right.”

“No, really.”

“Well, I‘m the Queen of Blueberry Squash Pie.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“Wanna keep going?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“We made it to the thousandth word!”

Western Enchilada Lasagna

7eda13569b362b2440961e4873492288
7eda13569b362b2440961e4873492288

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds ground beef
  • 1 (16 ounce) can enchilada sauce
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 1 pound Cheddar cheese, grated
  • 1 pound Monterey Jack cheese, grated (optional)
  • 1 cup oil
  • 2 packages corn tortillas
  • 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/4 teaspoon paprika

Instructions

  1. Brown ground beef with onion and spices, drain and set aside.
  2. Warm enchilada sauce, adding 1 cup of cheeses for flavor.
  3. Heat oil in small saucepan. Dip tortilla into hot oil long enough to soften. Layer six across on bottom of pan.
  4. Layer bottom of pan with tortillas, cover with meat, cheese, enchilada sauce and repeat three times.
  5. Cover and bake at 350 degrees F for 30 to 40 minutes.

The Things China🇨🇳 Does Better Than Denmark | My Thoughts After 1 Year in China

After little over a year in China, here are the things I simply think China does better than Denmark. From healthcare and policing to politicians being held accountable.

https://youtu.be/Qc7QoqojewI

The daily Shorpy

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After Smearing China, the U.S. UN Ambassador Fled Away

https://youtu.be/nN0yCIdil60

Anyone been embarrassed by a friends mom at a sleepover?

When I was young, my mom was “the cool mom”. Every kid in the neighborhood was over our house every day after school. We tore up the back yard doing every imaginable kid disaster you can think of. And when we were worn out, she called us in for tea and cookies and every kid crowded around the table while she served us tea and hermits or oatmeal cookies.

When I was an adolescent, we would climb Blue Hills at 4:30am to watch the sun rise on Easter and sing the glory of God and scream out, at the top our lungs, “This is the day the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad!” (Ps 118;22) My mother had done it all her life, and now I do it too. But every fucking kid in the neighborhood would sleep in our house, everywhere, the night before, in their Snoopy sleeping bags, on the couch, on the floor – everywhere. And then we would cram into my aunt’s ancient Chevy Nova with no rear windshield and blue smoke pouring out the exhaust and Pepsi, the German Shepherd with his head out the window and off to Blue Hills in the pitch dark we went, still groggy with sleep. And when we got back, there was pounds of bacon sizzling, mountains of scrambled eggs and pancakes and a shitload of toast. We were pretty poor, but no kid ever went hungry at 6:30am on Easter Morning. No parent ever worried about their children when they were with “Mrs Bazzinotti”. She was the gold standard in safety and propriety.

We actually started a tradition. It became so popular with the high school kids that the number of kids grew so large, the local Catholic church usurped our tradition and bussed the congregation to the top and held a Mass service with candles and communion. They literally ruined our Easter tradition, first by eliminating the need to climb – and we always climbed – and by formalizing the rising of the sun (Son). But we traditionalists still hiked the “mountain” at 4:30 in the frigid cold on Easter and sang the Hallelujah Chorus as the sun broke over the horizon. Sixty years or more I have been doing this.

And I was proud of my mom every single time. She was a magician. She climbed up and down and then made breakfast.

There were LOTS of things that embarrassed me about my mom as a teen – but that wasn’t one of them. When my mother died in 2012, the Park Service let us put a stone bench on the top, right where she stood, with her name and that passage from Psalms engraved on it. On Easter morning, we greet our mom, stand on the bench and watch the sun come up.

KJ Noh | South Korean President Planned Disappearing Opponents After Martial Law Decree

https://youtu.be/GMJzyZ4w728

Tortilla Lasagna

72a3ad16966a5d011e3341f76bb9b1c1
72a3ad16966a5d011e3341f76bb9b1c1

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds lean ground beef
  • 1 large sweet onion, chopped
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 teaspoon cumin
  • 1/2 teaspoon red pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • 1 (14 ounce) can diced tomatoes, drained
  • 12 corn tortillas
  • 1 (16 ounce) container cottage or ricotta cheese
  • 1 cup Monterey Jack cheese, shredded
  • 2 cups lettuce shredded
  • 2 fresh tomatoes, diced
  • 1 cup black olives, sliced
  • 1 cup Cheddar cheese, shredded

Instructions

  1. Brown ground beef in a large skillet with onion and garlic.
  2. Add cumin, red pepper, cayenne pepper and diced tomatoes and cook over low-medium heat for several minutes. Remove from heat.
  3. Place 6 of the corn tortillas and the bottom of a lightly greased 13 x 9 x 2 inch baking dish and spread meat mixture evenly over tortillas. Top with remaining tortillas.
  4. Combine ricotta and Monterey Jack cheeses and mix well.
  5. Spread cheeses over tortillas and bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes.
  6. Remove from oven and top with lettuce, tomatoes, black olives and Cheddar cheese.
  7. Slice and serve.

Bioluminescence in the Interstellar

Submitted into Contest #24 in response to: Write a story set in the dark recesses of space where the two main characters are often at odds with each other in humorous and comedic ways. view prompt

 

Brittany Gillen

Wrong, wrong, wrong.How could this be happening? Every single reading Jerrie took didn’t make sense.  Yesterday, the readings were spot on, perfectly in range.  Today… today was just wrong.  Most scientists felt a thrill when readings turned uncharacteristic, hoping for a breakthrough discovery, but Jerrie knew that her readings were not uncharacteristic.  They were just wrong.  She also knew the reason.“Charlie!”For the last two months, she had been living in a tiny research capsule just outside the edge of the Milky Way measuring light waves in the interstellar medium.  Her goal was to take up-close-and-personal readings to confirm the current scientific theories about PAH molecules. All of the measurements, even at close proximity, barely registered on Jerrie’s expensive equipment.  It was like catching every word of a whisper from across a table in a crowded room.But today… today the measurements maxed out all her dials.  The whisper was screaming.  Today, Jerrie could see the light brightening with her vastly inferior human eyes. With her eyes for crying out loud!Something was creating interference, which was very rare in the interstellar medium.  Out here it was dark, cold and empty.  Empty except for Jerrie and Charlie. 

“Charlie!”

 

Seriously, Jerrie thought.  There are only four compartments in this capsule.  She knew that Charlie could hear her, and she knew it only took about two seconds to cross them all and join her.  Jerrie drummed her fingers on her keyboard and closing her eyes slowly counted to ten.

 

Finally, Charlie’s hair floated around the corner.  Charlie’s long hair preceded her everywhere she went.  To keep it somewhat contained, Charlie kept it pulled back in about a dozen long braids, but in zero gravity, the braids wriggled all over like a clutch of very excited snakes.  It totally creeped Jerrie out and created a horrible distraction.

 

“I thought we agreed you were going to pin back all your braids from now on,” Jerrie said grimacing.

 

Charlie just shrugged and chugged the last of the soda in her hand, tossing the empty container back towards the supply room.  Jerrie cringed again.  Charlie drank soda like it was her lifeblood.  She went through at least a dozen packets a day of the syrupy drink.

 

“Charlie, the container,” Jerrie said.

 

“What?” Charlie said with a shrug.  “I’ll get it later.  What do you want?”

 

“You can’t just toss things all over the capsule,” Jerrie complained.  “This isn’t your childhood bedroom.”

 

“Or my college dorm room, or a bachelor pad, or a trash yard.  I know,” Charlie replied rolling her eyes.  “Just tell me what you want already.  I’m not in the mood for another lecture on cleanliness being next to godliness.”

 

Jerrie took a deep breath and centered herself.  “My readings are unusual today,” she said calmly, pulling them up on the screen.

 

“Uh, huh,” Charlie said looking at the monitor while scratching her tummy vigorously.  “In what way?”

 

“In what way?” Jerrie wanted to scream even louder than the readings.  “Charlie, you just don’t understand my work at all.”

 

“Then what did you call me in here for?” Charlie complained.  “My job is not to interpret your results.  I’m your pilot.  Now, if you want me to move the capsule, I would LOVE to do it for you.  Can I, can I, please?”

 

“No,” Jerrie groaned, rubbing her eyes.

 

“Just a few feet?” Charlie tried sweetly, rubbing the back of Jerrie’s shoulders.  “Maybe I’ll just do a few donuts and bring us right back to the exact same spot.  Churn up the space matter a little.  Maybe that will fix your readings.”

 

Jerrie just sighed, tired of arguing.

 

A timer started quietly beeping.  “I’ll get the lights,” Charlie said, pushing off Jerrie’s shoulders towards the opposite wall.

 

“Give me two seconds, to prep the sensors and save the previous measurements.”  Jerrie’s hands flew across the computer.

 

“Is it hot in here?” she heard Charlie ask.  Jerrie just ignored her until Charlie’s shirt floated in front of her face.

 

“Charlie, what are you…” She turned around to find Charlie almost completely undressed.  Her black bra, “Wednesday” day-of-the-week underpants and Velcro shoes her only attire.  “Seriously! Can you put your clothes back on? It makes me uncomfortable.”

 

“Yeah, well, being hot makes me more uncomfortable,” Charlie said, continuing to scratch her bare chest. “Besides, I’m in the best shape of my life, someone should enjoy the view.”

 

Jerrie groaned.

 

“I think I may be running a fever,” Charlie complained.  “My eyes feel hot.”

 

“Don’t you dare take off any more clothes,” Jerrie warned keeping her eyes permanently fixed on her monitor.  “Alright, I’m ready.  Shut off the lights in three, two, one.”

 

The capsule went dark and Jerrie hit the button to begin the image and measurement captures.  Then Jerrie noticed a reflection on her monitor.

 

“Darn it, Charlie, turn off that flashlight.”  Jerrie turned around ready to jettison Charlie out the nearest porthole, but then jerked herself back towards the console in fright.  “What did you do?”

 

Charlie, her eyes bulging, floated in front of Jerrie, running her fingers all over her brightly lit torso.  Vibrant green veins crisscrossed Charlie’s entire body.  They glowed with a bioluminescence that Jerrie had never seen on a human before.  It reminded her of the small deep-water fish she had visited at the aquarium in her childhood.

 

Recovering from her initial shock, Jerrie floated closer and traced one of the lines with her finger. “How are you glowing like that?” she asked.

 

“I don’t know,” Charlie responded, flicking Jerrie’s cold hand of her belly and shivering.

 

“Well, you did something,” Jerrie told her.

 

“Why, do you always assume everything is my fault?” Charlie complained, reaching for her pants and pouting her lip.

 

“Because, I don’t look like that!” Jerrie said pointing.

 

“How do you know?” Charlie said wriggling her pants up over her bottom.  “Prove it.”

 

Unable to resist proving Charlie wrong, Jerry quickly pulled up her own shirt.  Then she smugly smiled at Charlie.  “See.”

 

“That still doesn’t prove it’s my fault,” Charlie said reaching for her shirt.

 

“Just let me think for a minute,” Jerrie said, rubbing her temples and staring at the green glow emanating from Charlie’s chest.  She reached forward to touch it again, but Charlie twitched away.  “I’ll be gentle,” Jerrie told her and leaned in even closer. Jerrie could have sworn the veins moved across Charlie like worms in a mud puddle.

 

Pulling back, Jerrie took a deep breath and pulled at her lip as Charlie put her shirt back on. Then something caught her eye in the eerie glow.  Charlie’s soda floated nearby.  Jerrie wanted to mention again why it was important to not throw trash helter-skelter in the capsule when she noticed a drop float out of the neck of the container. It also glowed a luminescent green. Jerrie looked at Charlie and noticed that she had seen the droplet as well.

 

“You don’t think…” Charlie began.

 

“This was caused by your soda,” Jerrie finished.  “The evidence points that way.”

 

“But you drink the soda too.”

 

“No, actually, I don’t,” Jerrie said turning back to her monitor and cancelling the contaminated readings.

 

“What do I do?” Charlie asked beginning to panic.

 

“Stop drinking the soda,” Jerrie said, deleting the files and making notes in her journal.

 

“Jerrie, focus here for just a second, please,” Charlie pleaded.  “I look like a glow bug!”

 

“You’ll be fine,” Jerrie threw over her shoulder, bending her head down and trying not to laugh.

 

“I’m not fine,” Charlie complained.  “I itch. I feel like my skin is going to burn off me, and I’m lit like a neon sign.”

 

Jerrie shook of her giggles and turned around attempting to be solemn.  Charlie was scratching all over now and writhing like she had ants in her pants.  It was more than Jerrie could take.  She burst out laughing.

 

“Stop it,” Charlie complained. “it’s not funny.”

 

Eventually, Jerrie calmed down enough to help Charlie rub olive oil lotion on her itchy skin and got her some cold compresses to help with the heat.  With Charlie’s permission, she took pictures of the “rash” as they started calling it, though Charlie wanted to call it the infestation.

 

“Nothing is living inside you,” Jerrie reassured her.

 

“Then I’ve been poisoned. You’ve poisoned me!” Charlie cried, thrusting out an accusatory finger.

 

“You poisoned yourself,” Jerrie said with a snicker.  “I told you not to drink so much of that candy-water.”

 

“Hey, it keeps me awake,” Charlie said petulantly.  “Otherwise, I’d spend all day sleeping.”

 

“Would that be so bad?” Jerrie whispered to herself.

 

“I heard that,” Charlie said glowering.  “I wish I could go into cryo sleep while you did your work, but someone has to keep you company.” Charlie made air quotes with her fingers on the word company.

 

Jerrie sighed.  She knew she wasn’t very good company for Charlie. Her entire focus was on her research. She had one shot to gather meaningful data before they traveled back to the main station.  She wanted to make her time in the interstellar medium count for something.

 

“I’m sorry,” Jerrie said. “I tried to teach you about my work.”

 

“It is as interesting as watching paint dry,” Charlie grumbled.

 

Jerrie felt hurt, but she knew to most people Charlie was right on target.  “You could read a book, watch a movie, exercise,” she offered.

 

“This is my sixteenth mission,” Charlie told her.  “I exhausted my interest in all those things long ago.”

 

Jerrie had never really thought about Charlie’s past experience before.  “Sixteen, really?”

 

“Lucky number sixteen,” Charlie said, rummaging through the snack box.  “And no one ever lets me move the ship,” she grumbled while shoving a granola bar in her mouth.

 

“Never?” Jerrie asked feeling guilty.

 

“Never,” Charlie replied emphatically.

 

The two floated in the galley in silence.  Charlie chewed on her granola bar and read the wrapper and Jerrie twisted her ring while biting her lip.  She felt horrible.  To be honest, there wasn’t any solid reason why they couldn’t move the ship.  Sure, it would be more consistent to take all the readings from the same spot to minimize any undesired variables. However, she already had two months of solid data without one single deviation in readings.  Not one deviation until this morning.

 

“Maybe a change in location wouldn’t hurt,” Jerrie offered.

 

Charlie’s eyes lit up a bright as her bioluminescent belly.  “You mean it?”

 

“Yeah,” Jerrie said with a shrug.  “We could move the ship every day for the last thirty days and see if the readings from multiple locations are consistent with those we have already obtained.  If they are, then it would mean…”

 

“You are the best!” Charlie squealed while bear hugging Jerrie until she couldn’t breathe.

 

Jerrie just patted her on the back.  “I know.”

 

Charlie threw her granola bar wrapper over her shoulder and swam for the control center.

 

Jerrie grabbed the wrapper and shoved it into a trash receptacle.  “But only on one condition,” she called out, following Charlie and settling into the passenger seat.

 

“Anything,” Charlie said.

 

“No more of that wickedly green soda,” Jerrie told her.

 

“Deal,” Charlie said quickly.  “I guess they don’t call it Aberration for nothing!” she said with a wink.

 

“Do they really call it that?” Jerrie asked wide eyed.

 

Charlie just winked at her.

 

For the next week, Charlie moved the ship every morning, and Jerrie waited patiently while Charlie added a few flips and donuts to the maneuvers.  Charlie’s fluorescent color had faded overnight with the administration of several large glasses of water.  Jerrie’s readings returned to the predictable, and she cheerfully noted that the change in location was having zero effect on her results.

 

Until day five.

 

“Charlie!” Jerrie called from her lab.

 

Charlie’s snake-like hair proceeded her around the corner again, but this time Jerrie kept her commentary to herself.  When the rest of Charlie appeared, she had a puzzle cube in hand, something Jerrie had dug out of her personal luggage.

 

“I’ve almost got it,” Charlie said focused on the cube with one eye closed and biting her lip.

 

“You’ve started drinking that Aberration stuff again, haven’t you,” Jerrie accused her.

 

“No, I haven’t,” Charlie said looking wounded.

 

“Charlie,” Jerrie said sternly.  “It messes up my readings.”

 

“Honest, I haven’t. Look.” Charlie threw the light switch and tugged up her shirt.  To her surprise, her belly glowed again with a bright red luminescence.  Although startled by the color, Jerrie still gave Charlie her best I told-you-so-look.

 

“Oh, man,” Charlie said groaning and pulling her shirt back down.  “It must be the Tongue of Fire.”

 

“What fire?”  Jerrie asked scrambling back in fear. “Something caught fire!”

 

Charlie cringed guiltily. “You told me not to drink Aberration, but water is just so blah.”

 

“So, you drank something called Tongue of Fire!” Jerrie said astounded. “I take it that it is a red color.”

 

“I wonder what color I would turn if I drank Void?” Charlie wondered, tracing the bright red highways along her arms.

 

“Charlie!” Jerrie said shocked.

 

“What?”

 

Jerrie was silently fuming. Her research was being messed with again, and Charlie did not even care.  Just stab her with a needle and put her in cryo sleep, Jerrie thought to herself.  She could feel every muscle in her body tightening.

 

“I also brought Everest,” Charlie mused.  “Would that light me up white or have no effect, do you think?”

 

Jerrie’s eye began to twitch, and her hands fisted as she contemplated how to handle her reluctant companion.

 

“Hey,” Charlie said enthusiastically.  “I just found something to do.  I can study the effect that different sodas have on body chemistry in the interstellar medium.  I mean, seriously, there is definitely something interesting going on here.  I have never turned colors before back in the Milky Way, and I’ve been guzzling soda for years.”

 

At the word study, all of Jerrie’s tension melted away.  Charlie was right.  There was a seriously interesting phenomenon happening right in front of her eyes, and she was missing it.  PAH molecules might help her understand the creation of the universe, but the implications from studying dietary consumption in the interstellar medium would be much more applicable to the progress of humankind in space.

 

“I bet we could get a huge grant to study it,” Jerrie said warming up to the idea.

 

“A grant, really?” Charlie asked.

 

“And, while we studied, you could move the ship anywhere you wanted and explore anywhere you wanted in the interstellar medium,” Jerrie said with a huge grin.

 

“There are plenty of other flavors like Fireball and Formidable,” Charlie said tossing the forgotten puzzle cube over her shoulder.  “I could make a list.  Ooooh, don’t forget Ebony.  I wonder what that would do!”

 

“Only one way to find out,” Jerrie told her.  As Charlie scrambled back into the supply room, Jerrie turned the lights back on and pulled up a clean notebook on her screen.

 

She’d contact the soda company first.  It was a pretty good bet they’d love the publicity and increase in revenue a glow-soda would create.  Proposal, she typed.   Bioluminescence in the Interstellar.  Who could resist a title like that?

 

What are some popular street foods in France?

Let’s define street food first.

  • You buy it from street stands, market stalls or stores like charuteries, boucheries, patisseries, traiteurs etc.
  • You eat it on the street, while standing, without a real plate and real cutlery. A paper tray or a disposable wooden fork does not count. You might sit down on a bench or you might use a bar table.
  • It is inexpensive.
  • I do not include plain bread, breakfast items, sweets and desserts.

Then, let’s see.

Sandwich, very popular all over France. Pronunciation is different

Pan bagnat, a specialty of Nice. Kind of sandwich, filled with salad

Pissaladière, another specialty from Nice. A kind of pizza with onions, anchovis, olives

Tielle, a savory pie from Sète, often filled with seafood

Tarte a l’oignon (onion pie), a specialty from Alsace

Quiche lorraine, another pie with eggs and bacon

Friand, pastry filled with meat or cheese

Merguez frites, a sandwich filled with Moroccan beef/lamb sausages, French fries and hot sauce. Can be messy to eat.

Crèpes with savory or sweet fillings

Oysters. Yes, they are eaten as street food, especially in the North.

I am sure if this still counts as street food, but moules frites are very popular for celebrations and gatherings

Paté en croute, not exactly street food, but can be bought at charcuteries and eaten with fingers

Then, of course, there is falafel, hamburgers, döner kebab, shawarma, pizza, sushi and other ethnic food which is available everywhere else.

The Collapse of the US Empire with Professor Richard Wolff

https://youtu.be/1NmVbztjAp4

Karma hits Park Sacramento

I work for Tom Dwyer Automotive in Portland. When I was just getting started as the Shuttle Driver, I listened to our Advisors and our owner say “no” to a client for the best of all possible reasons.

The client had an old car that needed about $3000 worth of work, back in the day when that was a LOT of money. It was all legitimate stuff he needed to keep the vehicle safe and functional. But our Service Advisor called him about it and said “sir, we’ve taken the liberty of checking the value on your car and it’s only worth about $3500. There’s just not enough value to the vehicle to justify repairing it. We recommend you skip the work, sell the car, and use the money you saved as a down payment on a new one.”

The client wasn’t upset, but he was disappointed. “No,” he said, “I’ve been driving this car for years. It’s my baby, and I really love it. It’s worth it to me… go ahead and do the work.”

He and the Service Advisor went back and forth a little until Tom himself got involved. “Sir,” he said, “when the man who stands to make $3000 off of you tells you not to do it, LISTEN TO HIM!”

The client sold the vehicle, brought his new one to us to service, and is a client to this day. I’ve since heard the same story from some of our other clients about their cars. Our company will FIGHT WITH A CLIENT rather than spend their money poorly!

That told me everything I needed to know about our company, and it’s a big part of the reason I’m still here after 15 years.

Easy answer.

When I play battletech (table top), Warhammer (table top) there’s a set of rules that are written down. I don’t play them so much but the Nephews love it. They’re in black and white, they’re codified. This means that when you play games there’s expected movements, outcomes and it is predictable. Same with any thing chess

VAT rules

But INTERNATIONAL RULES BASED ORDER is not in black and white.

It’s a polymorph in that it changes whenever they feel like it.

As such it’s like playing a game where the other player will change the rules on the fly to ensure that they win and you lose no matter what.

So lets go back to the original question

What did my friend mean by when he told me that the Western world undermined by themselves the rules-based international order?

Western world invasions are BAD!

Western world invades other countries BUT IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN I DO IT!!!

Western world forces business practices – say opium wars on China this is GOOD!

China offers people the chance to buy things, this is BAD!

In short the western world acts like the twatty friend you played a few games with and never played with again.

It is difficult to define “poor” in China anymore.

If you meant the not-as-well-to-do-country-folks, then yes, many folks living far away from cities do not have as much cash to exchange for high-value proteins, especially in high-quality beef and especially dairy products.

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As my travel took me to various corners and backwoods of China ( and I often traveled alone and on public transports), I had never seen dire poverty. People in the vast under-developed mountainous regions do not live “well” in the eye of modern valuation terms, but in general, they are content and have sufficient to eat. In a terraced region in Yunan, I was invited to eat with the long-haul bus driver’s family after I discovered all eating places were closed for the night.

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The menu was:

  1. fresh veggies from his garden, quick-fried with garlic and salt
  2. Bamboo shoots, freshly picked, quick-fried. with shredded pork
  3. tomato and tofu, braised together
  4. egg soup, with green onion and parsley ( with some lard)

It was a good gratifying meal to me and may well be sufficient to many who do not aspire for excessively processed foods, or highly “desired cuts” or aged wines.

In general, fresh cold milk is a luxury in China, even in big cities. In small towns, you will not be able to find any store which is willing to pay for refrigeration. In Tibet and Xinjiang, you can often local peddling “warm milk” on the street. It’s ok to drink it.

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0f02372424c0f981f639a6163086ad50

The US incited the Ukraine Russia war, sabotaged the Nord stream pipelines to have de-industrialized EU, blew up the Red Sea cables and made the Red Sea into war zone to commit genocide in Gaza and block the international trade route in Red Sea.

Now the US and Lithuania have cut off Baltic Sea cables and blame China in order to make a division between EU and China.

It is notorious that the US style of democracy, human rights and freedom are Genocidal, terrorists, lying, stealing, cheating, the root of all evil, the common enemy of the world, and the cancer of the Universe.


The international community has stopped using and buying any common commodities made by the US and US’ allies, especially the communication device made from the US, Japan & Taiwan.
They are truly the US style of democratic terrorist countries in the world.
———————

A. The Facts

The latest pagers & walkers-talkies‘ explosions in Lebanon demonstrate that the US, the US so-called allies, even whole West electronic products such as iPhones, communication network etc. are not just stealing all information, spying on you, but also embedded with explosive which can be detonated remotely to kill people. Snowden and Gina Raimondo have already revealed it.

So, the safest way is to buy Chinese products made in China such as Huawei 5G and smartphones or any electronic products. Huawei 5G products are the world most advanced, secured, the safest and spy-proof products.

B. The Bloody Lessons

The bloody lessons show that the US so-called National Security is to be able to put explosives into their common commodities and detonate them remotely at any time to kill more civilians who they want.

Any secured, safe and spy-proof products such as Huawei 5G and smartphones etc. products which the US and its allies are unable to spy and put explosive are threats to the US & the US national security.

That’ why the US is changing its supply chains so that the US can control them and then put explosive in their common commodities to kill more civilians whom they want. Remember the US is not just spying through their products, but also exploding them to kill civilians they want.

For your lives, stop using the US & the US allies products, especially the communications device immediately now! The US and its allies are not just spying and stealing from their device, but also detonating them to kill you when the US deemed necessary!

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China is a Nation of Laws

They are rigid with the Law

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main qimg cf1e8845a791386ba7ae286a5c175248

There are three laws to govern Overseas Mainlanders

Control of Exit and Entry of Citizens Act

Protection of Rights & Interests of Returned Overseas Chinese Nationals

Protection of Rights & Interests of Families of Overseas Chinese Nationals

There is absolutely no law that demands anyone forcefully bring Children back into China as hostages

Xi Jinping isn’t Trump that he can insanely make decisions like that

He doesn’t have the legal authority


PLA officers & Senior Party Officials are bound by the law in the following way

  • Needing Exit Visa to leave China on any Non Official Duty
  • Declare all foreign held accounts regardless of Active Or Inactive status every 6 months
  • Declare SOURCE OF FUNDS for any education of a Child in a foreign institution
  • Declare any family members in extended family upto 3 generations living or resident outside Mainland China, Hongkong and Macau
  • Not belong to any organization banned in China nor have any affiliation with branches of such organizations outside of the Mainland
  • To report any contact or relationship either to self or family while outside the Mainland including Live in Partnerships, Marriages contracted to foreigners, Surgery under Anesthesia performed by a Doctor Who is not a Mainland Citizen

Qin Gang violated the law by not reporting a relationship with a Hong Kong Resident holding Overseas Passport who had applied for a US Green Card and having a Child in US through Surrogacy

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main qimg ed41b2c00832a73d947208263159a5f5

The West blackmailed him.

But,  he wisely immediately confessed to his superiors, rather than agreeing to be a spy for the United States.

He was dealt with accordingly.

He was merely expelled with lifetime ban from travel outside China and 10 year ban from travel outside Province

Otherwise it would have been death

Li Shangfu didn’t declare 4 accounts held in offshore banks

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main qimg db6128c973a51ecfd7e07680aa75c16f

He claimed they were all having very low balances and he had forgotten about them

He claimed they were inactive

Yet since Switzerland obviously wouldn’t give statement of accounts to the CPC, the assumption was that he was dirty and he was fired and under investigation

Finally my guess is he got access and proved that his accounts didn’t have millions of dollars at any point of time

So he lost his position of trust but his life is safe

In fact if a Chinese General ruptures an appendix in UK, he needs to be operated in a Chinese approved hospital or his surgical team has to be approved by the Resident in the Consulate (Usually MSS)

In case he blabs something during anesthesia

If the son of a Chinese Colonel is caught in a police case, the Colonel must immediately notify the Military Commission and cannot leave China in case the Boy is offered leniency in exchange for information by the father

The Consulate will jump into action

The Colonel cannot even talk to the boy,nor can his wife

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Under Hu Jintao, these rules were ignored merrily

However under Xi Jinping all these rules have been BRUTALLY REINFORCED

If the son of a Chinese PLA Officer studying in US joins a Free Taiwan protest, the PLA Officer can be arrested immediately and interrogated and fired and forbidden to leave China for the rest of his life

Point is – All of it is the LAW and every Chinese leaving overseas will be told what the law is like

Chinese studying overseas have briefings where they are told what the law is like and what to do and whom to contact

My sons friends in Graduate Quarters NTU had to notify the Consulate of China in Singapore when they attended the Chinese Debates held by the University Debating Society

It’s routine but if they didn’t do it, and someone found out – they would face a lot of issues

So it’s BUILT INTO THEM

Children of Party Officials and Military Officials are far more aware of the rules and procedures

Many times Consular Staff who are Chinese and between 18–25 years and unmarried are urged to develop relationships with mainlanders studying in Overseas Institutions so that honey traps are lesser and lesser

So Xi has no extra authority to do something so stupid like holding kids hostage

You simply FOLLOW THE LAW AND RULES

In China the Law is rigid , that’s the only thing

It’s not flexible like in other nations

Mistakes made by some people can be very dangerous

I SET UP A TRIP TO PROPOSE, BUT SHE BROUGHT FRIENDS, IGNORED ME, AND I DECIDED TO TAKE REVENGE

The Wayback Machine

An archive of the internet that lets you explore how websites looked in the past. It’s a fascinating look at how the web has evolved over time.

WayBack

Some examples of the content…

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No.

It’s not risky at all, if the US deploys aircraft carriers close to its shores, or other important international waterways, under the request of local governments or the UN.

However, if the US unilaterally deploys aircraft carriers to China’s coast, interfere in China’s civil war over Taiwan, or even attack mainland China, then American carriers are as good as dead. China will go after them just like how the US would go after Chinese carriers if they arrive unannounced in Chesapeake bay and start bombing American cities.

Drones and missiles are cheap and effective and bloodless, they will work great against the big and slow carriers in the Pacific, just like how drones destroy tanks in Ukraine. American carrier battlegroups can have the most cutting-edge anti air missiles, but they can only carry so many, and they can’t produce missiles in the middle of the ocean, while China is not called “the world factory” for nothing. If China wants, it can throw 1000 anti-ship missile/drone at each US carrier, and no matter how advanced the American defense is, it will be overwhelmed.

And China knows this, that’s why it spearheads drone and hypersonic tech. Look at the below declassified Chinese hypersonic drones tests back in 2020. A drone carrying a drone. It’s an interesting concept where China can hit American carriers without any Chinese casualties. Everything in the kill chain’s expendable.

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The Simpsons Predictions For 2025 Will Blow Your Mind

The Unwelcomed Newcomer

Submitted into Contest #150 in response to: Write a story that either starts or ends with someone (or something) saying, “Please, don’t do it.” view prompt

T.S.A. Maiven

“Please, don’t do it!” I pleaded to my human while I pressed my soft furry head into her leg with earnest. I jumped up onto her lap gracefully and repeated my signature move against her torso. Finally, going in for the kill-her-with-cuteness move to get her to understand my plea, I stretched my slender delicate figure upwards so that my paws rested daintily on her chest and my head matched the height of her own. Again, using my cuteness as a weapon of persuasion, I pressed my silky face hard against her fleshy hairless cheek before I switched tactics.

I began to lick her chin to get her to comprehend my declaration and change her mind. I needed her to hear what I was saying instead of only hearing my distinguished sounding meow that came out of my throat, over my sandpaper tongue and out through my beautifully whiskered lips. I was telling her how I felt as I repeated my exclamation, “Please, don’t do it!” Alas, once again she only heard my sweet but determined meow as she kissed my head and purred back at me that she loved me so much and was I hungry? My human sometimes frustrated me to the point of thinking her as ignorant or simply plain stupid. How could she be so oblivious to what I was very clearly saying to her? I jumped off her lap in a gentle silent leap and sat upon the carpet next to her ridiculous looking paws and meowed again, much louder this time to show her my irritation at her listening and perception skills.

Once again she ignored my proclamation as the only response I received were more kisses on my head as she picked me up and cuddled me right into her chest.

“Okay my little baby, lets get you some food my sweet Princess,” was what she purred back in the middle of my tender snuggle. As she carried me towards the kitchen to get me food, the food I did not ask for, I could not help but feel disappointed in her. Even though I loved it when she nuzzled me like that, she still had not bothered to listen to what I urgently stated. Or worse, which I suspected was the case, she did not even understand what I was meowing to her. I loved her so much, as in return she did me, I nonetheless could not help but feel perplexed at her apparent lack of desire to grasp what my variety of meows and purrs meant. The time and effort I put into learning her language, Stephanie had not reciprocated.

The first thing I learned were our names; hers being Stephanie and I, Princess. I am not saying it was not hard some days, I was merely a kitten at the time, but within a few months of our daily interactions together, I had figured out what her foreign meows meant. I had overheard an exchange of meows she had over the phone with another human whom she referred to as her best friend Tara. Not only did Stephanie talk about another cat joining our home, but I also winced when she mentioned the new cat would be coming from Roam A.I., a company I was personally against. An enemy of not only real cats, but real cat lovers everywhere. How shocked I was to hear Stephanie even considering such a thing. This was what I had been pleading with her not to do.

I discovered this company’s existence on a beautiful summer day when the sizzling heat of the high noon sun was easily melting the paint off houses. I would rather the sun burn the houses than have it burning my back while I explored the adventures laying outside the house. Instead of exploring that day, I chose to be in the cool temperature of the air conditioner inside while sitting on Stephanie’s comfortable lap and petted blissfully. Stephanie had curled up on the chair printed with a motif of large, colorful flowers, the most enjoyable to sit on as she watched what humans called television. That was when I first saw the infomercial about Roam A.I. They claimed to be ahead of their time, as well as ahead of their competition, regarding Artificial Intelligence. That was an unfamiliar remark for me, ‘Artificial Intelligence,’ so I decided to watch and learn another new human thing.

From the television I heard them say, “Our team here at Roam A.I. are ready to make our advances in the science of technology and expertise in Artificial Intelligence available to the public. We have truly become a family at Roam A.I. all due to our daily dedication to creating the highest caliber of service and A.I. products possible. We invite you to join us in making our family bigger. Every client will become family once they experience how the personalization of our products will be unique to every single one of you. Not to mention how closely our service team will collaborate with you until your product is exactly right for your wants, needs and desires. We are far above our competition when it comes to A.I. that we do not even entertain the thought of having competition. Our family are immensely ahead of our time ever since we first embraced the special, personalized technology of Artificial Intelligence. You will meet with us at our state-of-the-art facility with the most modern and revolutionary computerized A.I. components to have your product finalized. You will have then ensured your position in the Roam A.I. family, playing a vital role of being on the forefront of those around you. Your neighbours, friends, and family will be in awe of the newest, most impressive, most realistic and fastest learning A.I. creation you have added to your household to enrich your life.”

I could not help but let out a yawn that was so big my mouth practically matched the gaping crevasse called the Grand Canyon. This television show was boring me. But I had nuzzled on Stephanie’s lap in such a perfectly comfortable position I was not going to leave. Besides, even though it may have killed me, I was very curious to find out what the amazing products were that they mentioned. So, I continued to watch.

“Using only the highest quality robotics,” the self-assurance and confidence of the man talking was practically jumping out of the screen and oozing all over our heads and into our ears and dripping off our bodies. I could see humans getting excited over this company. I was bored though but was too comfortable to move, and my deadly curiosity had taken over.

“Using only the highest quality robotics, we are bringing the next generation of companions to A.I. life, and into your home for years to come. Starting small I would love to introduce you to everyone’s favourite pets, mans best friend, the most loyal and easily trained dog as well as the adorable, stubbornly independent house cat. The cat meowed as if on cue”

My interest suddenly piqued. What kind of meow had I heard? I did not understand what that cat was saying. She was a beautiful cat I had to admit. Everything about her seemed so perfect and she was just gleaming. The coat she wore was quite fine. Was it a trick of the television cameras and the lighting that enhanced her breathtaking colors? White, orange, and black intertwined all over that thick, luxurious, fluffy coat. As fluffy as a cloud that was grabbed from the sky and placed right on her. I was impressed with the beauty of this cat but there was something eerily wrong with her. Was it her incomprehensible meow or the way she sat in one spot? She was not even licking herself or sniffing at the dog. She was so well-behaved; it just did not make sense. I had tuned out while they spoke of the dog, I was distracted by the unique and suspiciously different behavior over this gorgeous feline that Roam A.I. was calling a product. How can a cat be a product? I know the word product well. My cat food is a product, as is my brand-new red collar covered with tiny rhinestones that sparkle and shimmer almost as much as my lovely green eyes. Products are things Stephanie puts on a shopping list and brings home for us to eat or use. Like my new toy who I fondly call mousey. I know its not a real mouse, but he was so much fun to play with, especially when my human stuffs him full of catnip! Then I bite him even harder and hold him in my front paws and kick him repeatedly with my hind legs. I had already torn him open twice, but my wonderful human stitches him back together for me. She really loves me. I turned my attention back to the television.

“So, when you think of cats what do we love about them? Of course, the companionship, how cute they are and how nice they are to cuddle with. But there are downfalls that Roam A.I. has taken care of. Just like our dog, the A.I. cat has no need to eat or drink which solves another messy downfall, the litterbox!” The commentor of this infomercial is sounding so excited about this I could understand why humans would do whatever he said.

I was in shock. I licked my paw vigorously and then ran it over my face and licked it again to rub my eyes and my ears. What sorcery was this? Did I hear that right? Was I seeing things? How was it possible that a cat could go without luxuries such as food, water and a litterbox? I absolutely loved when my human said, “Come get some delicious dinner.” That meant I was getting wet food and not just dry food. And wet food was delicious. Then lapping up cool water? Positively divine! As for the litterbox, how could you deprive a cat of the delightful pleasure it was to sink one’s paws into the grainy sand? To get to dig and flail the sand about was so much fun and such a joy! Not to mention how gratifying it was to bury your waste. I adored my litterbox. In fact, I believe that my kind and loving human Stephanie would also love a litterbox of her own. She was playing videos for her bestie Tara when she returned from what she called a tropical island vacation. As usual my curiosity was not held back, and I watched too. Well, there she was in a huge litterbox full of sand as far as the eye could see and she was playing in it, digging, and squishing her silly looking paws in it and she was having a wonderful time. Seems to me she would love a litterbox.

Back on the television the man continued, “The first one hundred callers get a consult with one of our specialists so they can bring home their robot companion, Dog or Cat, for a special rate of twenty percent off. Remember these adorable creatures will be programmed with the characteristics you decide. They are instilled with whatever tricks you want them to do and command words to control them. Then you can watch your new A.I. robot grow into their personality the longer you are with them. That is right, they will learn from their environment and from you how to behave and what makes you happy. I know this is all fascinating and unbelievable at the same time, which is why I urge you to make that phone call today.”

That was it. I could not watch anymore. My curiosity was sated and replaced with disgust. No wonder I could not understand that cat’s meow. She was not even a cat! She was a robot. She looked so real it was scary. I stretched my body as far as it would go, emulating a rubber band, elongating my stiff muscles from sitting in one spot for too long. I sprang from lap to floor and immediately ate food and used my litter box. Robot cats without food and litter? As I dug and flicked sand everywhere I thought about the cat with the creepy vibe she gave off because she looked completely real but was not. That was why I did not understand her meow, why her coat was gorgeous, and she looked so perfect. She was a robot! She could not even be called ‘she.’ She was an ‘it.’

I expected Stephanie to be as appalled as I was but instead, she looked extremely interested as she was now leaning forward and even picked up a pen and paper to make notes. The next day was when I heard her talking about getting one of those “cats.” No, I can not even in good conscience refer to that “thing” as a cat. Talking about getting that A.I product was more like it. I overheard her saying how nice it would be for me to have a friend in our house and how she could program that thing to be submissive so it would not even fight with me for territory. She mentioned how adorable these A.I robot things were and how she would save money by not having to purchase extra food and litter but would still have the advantage of having a second cat.

Well, that was it! My ears had me completely dismayed by what they were hearing. I did not want another cat in my home, much less a robot one pretending to be a real cat. I did not need a friend. I had Stephanie and the cats I know from exploring the outdoors. I wondered what I could do to get my human to change her mind.

A month had gone by and her new A.I. cat was supposed to be arriving any day. I had been unsuccessful in changing her mind, though I still pleaded with her everyday not to do it. To add to my displeasure, she started getting excited and constantly reminding me that my new friend would be coming soon. Despite my disapproval, the day was upon us when this robot thing showed up at my house. Stephanie was so excited she placed the robot cat right in front of me and said, “Have fun with your new friend. Her name is Duchess, not as important as my royal Princess but still royal enough to be granted permission to sit with you. I will always love you the most my baby Princess,” and stroked my body lovingly. Good. At least I was reassured that I was still number one around here.

I circled this fake yet unbelievably realistic version of a cat that Roam A.I. had masterminded. I sniffed her and surprisingly the robot sniffed me right back, although more slowly with a hint of trepidation. I touched Duchess with my paw and was startled because she felt so much like me. Underneath her glowing fur, I was expecting the A.I. cat to feel more like the exterior of a car, hard metal that is quite unbitable. I pressed my paw into the body of this flawlessly feline looking computer harder this time to further investigate not only how she felt but how she would react. I knew she was not real, but this thing might make a fun new toy for me. She certainly would never be my friend, as Stephanie suggested, but I could always use a new toy. Duchess did not move so I meowed loudly at her and bit into her neck. It was soft and chewy but drew no blood. This cat meowed back at me, meekly and mildly like the nervous newcomer she was, giving me even more superiority, and ran under the kitchen table like a scaredy cat! I still did not understand her meow, it was so foreign, hollow, and plainly fake sounding. It reminded me again that she is just fake masquerading as real. I decided that I did not even want this thing as a toy. It was simply wrong to look and feel so real while Roam A.I. attempted to pass these things off as natural cats.

Then Stephanie practically scolded me as I heard her meow to me, “Princess! Play nice. Duchess is new and I made sure she was submissive so she would not fight with you. Be more polite like the Princess you are.” I did not like being told how to treat my new toy no matter how real it looked. I pounced on Duchess like I would pounce on mousey and grabbed her by the neck with my sharp teeth holding her still underneath me. I know she is not a real cat, but she is suddenly so much fun to play with, and I know how to get rid of her just like when I tear Mousey open. I bit her even harder and held her in my front paws and kicked her repeatedly with my hind legs. I could not believe she was not fighting back! I continued to bite and scratch and kick her with such force that quickly her eyes lost their glow and she lay motionless. I had succeeded in destroying my new toy. All my disappointment in Stephanie for even getting Duchess disappeared and I could finally relax again as the lone cat in the house. I looked into Stephanie’s shocked face and rubbed my body into her legs triumphantly. I meowed at her, “I am happier without an A.I. cat. Please do not be mad at me,” with wide innocent eyes. Stephanie had Duchess in her arms, and she purred back, “I am certainly glad this thing is under warranty Princess.” Another new human thing to learn! I would soon find out what warranty meant.

What do poor people in China eat?

Rice Porridge, Noodles, Bok Choy, Red Bean Paste Crepes, Tofu

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They also eat Shredded/Minced Pork or Beef twice a week with Vinegar and Soy Sauce

Chinese eat very well

Even the poorest Chinese averages 1790 calories a day as per the World Hunger Index

Food is extremely affordable

In the Rural Areas, the Villagers get huge subsidy coupons for a specific quantity of Rice, Soy Sauce, Vinegar, Pork or Beef & Soybeans every month

They only pay for Seafood, Noodles & Red Chillies Paste & Red Bean Paste

Poor illiterate peasants in Chinese Villages

Rural Enrollment stood at 97.1% in 2012

It was 99.25% in 2023

It was 95.7% in 2005

So roughly 96.94% Rural Chinese aged between 18–24 years of age today are literate

So let’s assume 97% Rural Chinese between 18–24 are literate

98.3% Rural Chinese aged younger than 18 are Literate

Enrollment rate was 85.40% in 1990 & 95.7% in 2005

This means around 91.35% Rural Chinese between 24 & 39 years are Literate

Enrollment rate was 69.63% in 1975 & 85.40 in 1990

This means around 79.75% of Rural Chinese between 39 & 54 years are Literate

Enrollment rate was 38.25% in 1957 & 69.63% in 1975

This means around 50.88% of Rural Chinese between 54 & 72 years of age are Literate

Conclusion :-

5–18 Years – 99.25%

18–24 Years – 97%

24–39 Years – 92%

39–54 Years – 80%

54–72 Years – 51%

Extrapolating we get that almost 85% Rural Chinese upto 50 years old are Literate


Definition of Literate :-

  • Read and Write 1500 Chinese Characters
  • Basic Education for 9 years (1976-Present) , Upto 15th Year (1949–1976)

Definition of Enrollment :-

  • Enrolled in Rural Or District School at the age of 5 years of age as per State Law (1976-) 6 years of age as per State Law (1949–1976)

Everyday Barbacoa Beef

This Everyday Beef Barbacoa is versatile and can be served on tortillas, chips or lettuce.

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Ingredients

Beef

  • 3-5 pounds beef cheek or chuck roast, cut into 4 inch pieces
  • 1 cup orange juice
  • 1/2 cup lime juice
  • 1 cup water
  • 1/2 can chipotle in adobo, diced
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 5 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1 onion, diced

Optional

  • Tortillas
  • Cilantro
  • Onion
  • Lime wedges

Instructions

  1. Combine all ingredients into a large bowl. Cover and marinate for 2 to 24 hours.
  2. Add marinated beef and leftover marinade to cooker. Cover and cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours or until fork tender.
  3. Carefully remove beef from cooker with little sauce as possible. Placing on a cutting board, shred beef with two forks and return to cooker. Cook for additional 10 minutes to absorb remaining liquid.
  4. If desired, crisp meat in a cast-iron skillet before serving.

I cannot speak as non Chinese I am a Chinese origin Born in Malaysia but now a Singaporean but I do Business and live in Malaysia. So I can say how Chinese people see westerners. We dont want them to be a bankrupt and a failure, as that would not be a good Customer. Chinese people think that there are no permanent enemy or friends. There are only interest of the nation which may change from time to time!

We don’t hate the west but we are mindful of the evil deeds that you had shown from doing genocides to murder all the natives to steal their land and causing deaths and destructions to remain the hegemonic nation. We won’t allow that and we will help other nations to stop your shit too. We don’t hate you but we hate your evil acts. China wants to make a better world not one with some hypocrite murderous regime pretending to care for the world but setting rules to rob and plunder.

The west, some racist and Sinophobic racial superiority complex minded group do hate China but to be fair they also call Latinos rapist and murderers, slavic as scum of the world and Africa as shit hole countries! Sure the cannot stand China preventing them from further thievery and plunder but 95% of the world thinks that China and Chinese is great and doing justice.

Drones have already surpassed the effective firepower of Javelin missiles.

A single Javelin launcher costs upwards of $180,000 US dollars and is typically only used once. It has a high probability kill rate, but cannot be used in some environments (dense urban areas, for example) and gives away the location of the user, albeit from a far distance.

Firing an FJM-148 Javelin

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On the other hand, an average commercial drone that is capable of carrying a 2kg shaped charge will cost less than a $1000 and can do the exact same job as a Javelin. And if the drone doesn’t work as efficiently as a Javelin might, then no worries! You can buy 5, 10, even 100 more drones and it will still cost less than what a single Javelin launcher does.

Drones are also incredibly multi-purpose because they can attack different kinds of soft targets that Javelin launchers aren’t meant to be used against, such as infantry and high-speed transports (motorcycles, ATV’s etc). Drones can be additionally used for overhead surveillance, which is an extremely valuable tool on any modern battlefield.

Cheap camera drones relay consistent battlefield info that could only be previously be done by satellites or multi-million dollar surveillance aircraft

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Now, I’m not trying to say that the Javelin is an obsolete or now redundant weapon, because it isn’t. But a comparison between a shoulder-launched anti-tank launcher with explosive-armed drones isn’t necessarily an apt one simply because drones are multi-purpose tools capable of a number of different tasks. Even if we’re only referring to anti-tank armed drones, the applications are still much wider than what something like a Javelin offers.

The bottomline is, drones can both reach and even surpass the given firepower of a Javelin launcher while also being much cheaper. There is a very specific purpose for one, and a very broad and utilitarian series of uses for the other.

What if? Sorry, not possible by any criteria, for a start, PRICE, number one, there is no way the US could ever compete with China, two, just the difference in population, China graduates 1.8 million stem graduates per year compared to US 611,000, then there is cost of living, the difference between the two is humongous, so China can make everything cheaper than any company in the US, THATS the reason all US companies went to China in the first place, just think, a lot of people in the US are screaming already about their inflation, can you imagine how much dearer everything will be if made in the US? Inflation would go through the roof, and the average person just wouldn’t be able to afford to buy anything, like I keep saying no one can compete with China, things are like they are for a reason.

Chicks, purses, steaks and night fun

On a work trip to Sydney Australia, I went out with a chick from an aligned company. We went to a rotating restaurant located in downtown Sydney.  It was at the top of one of the skyscrapers there, and it had a rotating floor so that you can get a slowly moving 360 degree expansive view of the beautiful night skyline.

She wore a short little black dress. She was petite. And she looked  great in that little black dress. It was plain, but there’s something about a little black dress that really  looks great. On all women.

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It was fun, and I well remember the Beef Wellington that I ate. Delicious and fantastic. It was the first time that I ever had that dish, and it was so very, very delicious.

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Anyways, my date had left her purse on one of the windows ledges, and after a while we both noticed that the purse was missing. And so, I laughingly walked around the restaurant searching for the purse. Oh, yeah. I certainly found it. But it was fine. And my date. Ah she was fine as well.

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Not a great story for today.  But a pretty girl, in a downtown restaurant with a fantastic sky-view and a delicious steak was and still is, a memory that is valuable to me.
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Make those memories guys and girls.
Life is about experiences. 

Make them matter.
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Today…
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What scares the U.S. elites about China?

During the Russia-Ukraine war, the United States frantically plundered European interests in Europe. Do Europeans hate the United States? They really don’t hate the United States!

This is because the “rules-based international order” promoted by the United States is supposed to be a jungle world of the weak and the strong, as it has been in the Western world for thousands of years.

Europe is weaker than the US.

Europe, being weak, was supposed to serve as food for the United States. Therefore, European countries believe that the United States is doing the right thing, and if they were stronger than the United States, they would do the same.

US Secretary of State Lincoln said “If you’re not at the table in the international system, you’re going to be on the menu”. This represents the general mindset of the American elite.

The Chinese government has emphasized countless times that “China will not be hegemonic even if it becomes powerful”, but Europeans and Americans do not believe it at all, and they think that the Chinese government are very hypocritical and hide their true thoughts.

This is the same as what the Australians said, “If you are stronger than me, but you don’t come to plunder me, aren’t you an idiot?”

They believe it is right and normal for China to plunder and trample on them after it becomes strong, just as they did to China when they formed the Eight-Nation Alliance.

Europeans and Americans have been lied to by their governments since they were children, so they inherently don’t trust what their governments say, and they don’t trust that the Chinese government will practice what it preaches.

It is interesting to note that at the beginning of the 21st century, China, the United States, Russia, Japan, and India announced their space programs to the world, and only China realized all of them step by step.

Have you ever seen any country from the Eight-Nation Alliance apologize to China? No! except for the Soviet Union and East Germany, which apologized to China because they were once part of the socialist camp, the rest of the European and American countries thought it was natural and normal.

They even refused to return the treasures they had stolen from China.

In the discourse system set by the West, Nazi Germany and the Japanese Empire, the culprits of World War II, are now kind, wealthy, and democratic countries, while China, the victim of World War II, is a evil, poor and bad country.

Look! The robber has become a gentleman, and the victim has become a thug.

They never mention how the wealth of Germany, Japan, Europe and the United States was obtained?

The British Empire stole $45 trillion from India and the Japanese Empire stole $10 trillion worth of gold from China. Did they say they would compensate?

By the same logic, Africa is portrayed as poorer and more evil for a simple reason:

Africa has been plundered by the West for hundreds of years, while Africa has never plundered the West.

However, The Black person has been made into the Evil person all over the world.

Even to this day, Africa continues to provide the West with cheap labor and raw materials to enable developed Western countries to afford their lifestyles.

Watch! This is a discourse set in the West:

All robbers are good people and all victims are bad people.

WHO IS THE BARBARIAN?

In an 1899 cartoon, René Georges Hermann-Paul attacked the hypocrisy of spreading civilization by force by juxtaposing the words “Barbarie” and “Civilisation” beneath Chinese and French combatants who alternate as victor and victim. When the Chinese man raises his sword, it is labeled “barbarism,” but when the French soldier does precisely the same thing it is “a necessary blow for civilization.”

So why do American elites fear China? They are, of course, afraid that China will plunder them when it becomes powerful.

Look at the faces of the leaders of these so-called developed countries. Which one is not a descendant of bandits?

The ancestors of the Euro-Americans were originally a bunch of robbers, and robbers, of course, are afraid of being robbed by robbers stronger than themselves, as they once did to the world.

Creamy Santa Fe Cutlets

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b63e4b4f90eef0624b376bd3df8c80ea

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 pound 1/4 inch thick pork cutlets
  • 3 teaspoons oil
  • 1/2 cup salsa
  • 1/2 cup frozen corn
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1/4 cup reduced-fat sour cream
  • 1/4 cup chopped cilantro

Instructions

  1. Combine flour, salt and pepper; dredge pork cutlets in flour mixture.
  2. Heat 2 teaspoons oil in a nonstick skillet. Sauté half the cutlets 1 1/2 minutes per side until cooked. Remove to a side plate.
  3. Repeat with remaining oil and cutlets. Cover to keep warm.
  4. After removing cutlets from skillet, add salsa, frozen corn and water. Simmer for 1 minute.
  5. Off the heat, stir in reduced-fat sour cream and chopped cilantro.

The son, the family and the gangsters

Submitted into Contest #150 in response to: Write a story that either starts or ends with someone (or something) saying, “Please, don’t do it.” view prompt

Jobinho 11

Please don’t do it Please don’t do it said the mother who’s sitting in the dark to her son who is about to leave the house in the middle of the night. My son, please hear me, don’t get mixed up in this life, it’s nothing short but life in prison or an early grave, the money is good, the clout is great, but you’ll be a fool with no escape. The son opens the door and walks through as if he didn’t hear the mother’s wise words. The mother looked at her phone to see the time and notice her battery was at twenty-five percent and her tears streamed down and fell on the phone screen. She stays in the dark to her lonesome and falls on her knees and starts to pray and beg God to not hand her a loss she can’t win back. Originally she isn’t a believer however, with the current situation she’s praying to whatever she thinks is out there. Guilt begins to hit her as she feels responsible for her son’s current state thinking how the father is in jail and she’s barely home trying to make ends meet, which is a con to the children who don’t have a role model. She thinks to herself and says from the moment your kids are born you’re afraid of how the world can hurt them but you never stop and wonder how you can hurt them, with that she falls into slumber right on the floor. The following morning the son came home and slept throughout the day, and when night time arrived he was soon ready to leave again. While walking out he hears please don’t do it, turning back he spots his mother and his younger brother sitting in the dark. Younger brother speaks up and says pops is Locked up right now bro and now you getting involved with the FK gangsters could potentially lead up to you going in as well, and there will be no father figure to guide anybody in this house. The son ceases for a second look to be contemplating then just walks to the car outside, the mother looks at her phone to check the time and notices her phone battery is at fifteen percent, so she gets up and heads to her room. Everything felt gloomy, the younger brother was still present in the living room. Sitting at the table solo, he notices a notebook and pen he then grabs both and began to write down the thoughts on his mind. Why do we go down a dark path, are we cursed to not succeed, or am I just tripping. Either way, my perception tells me differently, most of the dudes I know barely make it past the age of twenty-five, if they don’t get killed they end up being incarcerated. I’m only fifteen right now and incapable of foreshadowing my future without thinking of a type of demise, I mean even the fortune teller weeps when our future was on display saying all they saw was our time glass as pistols and graves. Younger brother realizes how late it is he heads to his room to sleep for school tomorrow. After the previous night, the son came back home, slumbered all day, and woke up at night to get going. While walking out he opens the door and hears behind him the same phrase he’s been hearing for the last few days, please don’t do it, except this time it was in sync almost like a church choir consisting of his mother, brother, and this time his five-year-old sister. The preschooler child spoke, big brother mommy and brother say you’re out to do bad things, please don’t do any bad things big bro or you’ll be in trouble. The son closes the door and stays inside for about two minutes gazing at his family lost in thoughts, then honk honk he hears from the car outside brings him back to his senses, he turns around and opens the door as soon as he walks out of the door the mother picks up the phone to check on the time, and noticed the phone was dead, as she gets up to go and charge it the phone fell accidentally and shattered, now sobbing she makes her way to her room, the younger brother did the same and headed to his room not bothering about the five-year-old in the living room all by her lonesome. The five-year-old who’s usually afraid of the dark this time stands without fear, she grabs her crayons and her coloring book and started to scribble. First, she draws a big pink house with a family consisting of a father, mother, and three kids two boys and one girl. And the second drawing she draws the same thing but this time there’s no father. The third drawing is the same but without one of the brothers. As she begins her fourth drawing she stops not knowing who to take out. From there she leaves it on the table and heads to sleep. Now inside the car, five young men including the son began to discuss what was about to go down, tonight they’d be robbing Kelmo’s store. Arriving at the spot four of the five men In the car stepped out with guns, they went inside and had the cashier at gunpoint and demanded the money. The cashier complies and granted their request while having already triggered the alarm. Police sirens blared throughout the area, one of the guys grabs the cashier tossed him on the floor, and say you pressed the alarm to have the pigs here, the cashier scared for his life had no words. The guys looked out the window witnessing about fifteen police cars and six swat trucks. Enraged one the guys yelled grabbed the cashier and says to the son put a bullet in his brain for calling the cops. The son points his gun at the cashier’s forehead and looks at him, he could perceive the fear of God that was in that man’s eyes. The cashier speaks while trembling, I I hav have family, I have ho hopes for the future, and today was su supposed to be just a normal day please don’t shoot me I beg please, please don’t do it.

Best of Al Bundy | Married With Children

Shorpy

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It’s not the police, you idiot. [Die Hard]

“Falling Off A Cliff”: This Chart Proves That We Are In A Major Economic Downturn Right Now

The number of job openings in the United States has been “falling off a cliff”, and that is a major red flag.  The last four years have been an economic nightmare for most Americans, and that is one of the primary reasons why Donald Trump won the election.  But as we approach 2025, things are starting to get frighteningly bad.  When the number of job openings in the U.S. drops by 2 million or more, that normally signals that we are either in a recession or that one is about to happen.  Well, as you can see from this chart that was posted by Bravos Research on Twitter, we are witnessing a collapse in job openings that is absolutely unprecedented…

Snip20241212 53
Snip20241212 53

I was floored when I saw that chart.

I knew that job openings were falling, but I didn’t know that things had gotten this bad.

Not too long ago, there were about 12 million job openings in the United States.  Unfortunately, here in the second half of 2024 that figure has fallen below 8 million

There were an estimated 7.4 million unfilled jobs on the last day of September, a drop from August’s revised tally of 7.86 million openings, according to new data released Tuesday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The largest drop-offs in openings were in industries that have driven much of the job growth in recent years: health care and social assistance, and government, according to the report.

Meanwhile, major employers continue to shed workers all over the nation.

For example, the U.S. lost a total of 78,000 manufacturing jobs during a recent three month period…

The manufacturing sector continued to shed jobs in October, bringing its tally of job losses to 78,000 over the past three months.

The Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday released its jobs report for October, which found that the manufacturing sector lost 46,000 jobs last month, according to the agency’s preliminary analysis.

That followed a loss of 6,000 jobs in September, which is also a preliminary figure, as well as a decline of 26,000 jobs in August.

Every day, there are more layoff announcements in the news, and the number of people filing initial claims for unemployment benefits increased much more than experts were projecting last week

The number of Americans filing for jobless benefits for the first time jumped significantly last week (from 225k to 242k – well above expectations of 220k) – the highest since the first week of October.

On an un-adjusted basis, claims exploded higher (highest since January)…

Throughout the second half of this year, I have been arguing that the U.S. economy is rapidly heading in the wrong direction.

Now we have even more confirmation that this is indeed happening.

Once we get past the holiday season, retailers are going to be dropping like flies.

According to the Daily Mail, it appears that Party City could soon be forced to declare bankruptcy…

A major party and craft retailer with 850 stores across the nation is considering filing for bankruptcy.

Party City has been faced with the possibility of mass closures just a little over a year after the company surfaced from Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

The celebration retailer, known for selling balloons and essential party supplies, is currently behind on rent at some of its locations, people close to the matter told Bloomberg.

And it is being reported that 670 Family Dollar stores have already been shut down

Discount behemoth Dollar Tree has shuttered 670 of its underperforming Family Dollar stores so far, about two-thirds of the nearly 1,000 it plans to close, as it considers whether to sell or spin off the struggling chain.

The Chesapeake, Virginia-based retailer provided an update on its portfolio optimization efforts when it reported is fiscal third-quarter earnings. Dollar Tree officials also said they were still reviewing options for Family Dollar, with no set deadline or timeline to complete that process.

Overall, thousands upon thousands of retail stores in the U.S. have been shuttered in 2024, and thousands upon thousands will be shuttered in 2025.

In many areas of the country, the landscape is absolutely littered with once thriving businesses that have now been boarded up.

More than a decade ago, I warned that we were headed for a future when impoverished areas of the U.S. would be filled with boarded up businesses and abandoned buildings.

Now we are there.

On top of everything else, inflation is starting to surge once again, and one recent survey discovered that about a third of all U.S. households have been forced to cut back spending just to keep the lights on

With the cost of things like food and housing still straining people’s budgets, many U.S. households over the past year have found themselves having to pare their spending on basic necessities just to keep the lights on at home.

That’s according to a recent Lending Tree study which analyzed U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey data from Aug. 20, 2024 to Sep. 16, 2024 to find the percentage of Americans 18 and older that had cut back on necessary expenses to pay their energy bill, kept their home at an unsafe or unhealthy temperature, or was unable to pay the full amount on an energy bill at least once over the preceding 12 months.

The study found that more than 34% of respondents said they have had to cut back or skip spending on certain necessary expenses at least once over the past year in order to pay their energy bill.

As I discussed the other day, prior to the election most Americans believed that we were already in a recession.

Since the election, conditions have only gotten worse.

Many are hoping that our economic momentum can be reversed once the new administration takes over.

We should all be hoping that is true.

But right now we are on a freight train that is steamrolling in the wrong direction, and that is not good news at all.

“I Joked About Him Being My ‘2nd Choice’ — Now He’s My Ex-Husband”

Uyghurs on Chinese social media VS Uyghurs on Western media

China

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main qimg 93cfd99135d6fb3592fa0b919e1ae5d1

CNN / BBC

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main qimg 58fb4343771a82c12ae9237045a259d9

The Museum of Endangered Sounds

A digital museum that preserves the sounds of old technology, like dial-up internet, typewriters, and VHS rewinds. It’s a nostalgic trip down memory lane.

Endangered

Some examples of the content…

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screen 2024 12 13 16 01 06

Die Hard – McClane vs. Karl Fight Scene (1080p)

Fedora & Stetson Hats

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Coffee Roast Beef

This method of preparing a beef roast was often used by cowboys and ranch hands while out on the range.

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fdb6564739eb678d84af1994f90225ed

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (3 1/2 to 4 pound) boneless rump roast
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 yellow onion, cut into quarters
  • 4 cloves garlic, cut in half
  • 1 tablespoon tomato paste
  • 2 cups medium strength black coffee
  • 2 cups water
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1/2 cup red wine

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 450 degrees F.
  2. Using a sharp knife, make very small cuts in the roast and insert the garlic halves.
  3. Heat the oil in a heavy roasting pan or Dutch oven (cast iron works best) and sear the roast on all sides.
  4. Add the onion quarters, tomato paste, coffee and water to the pan and bake for 30 minutes.
  5. Reduce the heat to 375 degrees F and bake for 1 1/2 hours more or until the roast is done to taste.
  6. Remove the roast to a warm platter, let cool slightly and then slice.
  7. Stir the butter and wine into the pan juices and serve with the sliced roast.

Givers and Takers

Submitted into Contest #150 in response to: Write a story that either starts or ends with someone (or something) saying, “Please, don’t do it.” view prompt

Theresa Fox Turner

“Please, don’t do it,” my last Giver said in her tiny, little voice. She did not plead; instead, she said it with resignation. It was as if part of her would not give up even though no other options were available. A Taker, me, loomed over her, shaking with the cravings I could no longer keep at bay. What luck for me that her lousy luck brought her here. The little ones brought me closer to that which I sought; the little ones, usually so carefully guarded, brought down all my defenses, giving me hope above all else that I could reach beyond once again.It wasn’t long after I took the little one, the last I’d ever take, that the doctors found me. They call themselves Doctors of Technology, DOT. They thought they threatened me when they told me I was required to pay for my indiscretions as a Taker by death or voluntary participation in the Heartrock Initiative. I laughed wholeheartedly at that word; indiscretions. I surprised myself with the sound of my laughter, something I hadn’t known existed in me anymore. I do not know if I will laugh again; is laughing a feeling? I will consult my database when this is complete.I progressed to Taker to escape being a Giver, not knowing the taking would puncture my heart deeper than giving ever could. As a Giver, I was also a martyr but a Giver’s physical pain is nothing compared to the pain my heart endured collecting bloody little pebbles of lifeblood as a Taker.Now I sit here, my head tightly bound to a cushioned headrest with bright red straps across my mouth and forehead. No other straps bound me to the blue chair, and if it weren’t for the blood-red straps, I might be able to imagine myself at a Healer’s office undergoing a minor procedure. Instead, I close my eyes against the operatory lights above me and take a deep, deep breath.I feel a hardness in my chest where my heart resides. This, they tell me, is the heartrock. I bring my hands to my face to look at the backs, watching the blue lines turn dark gray. I think of the network of blue veins and arteries feeding my organs and see them fade to a dead gray. This new heart can only spew a dark sludge that will get harder and harder until my veins and arteries are an extension of that rock. A new species of stone, heartrock, stronger than any diamond, will command my body and replace my life.I can feel my arms and legs start to stiffen as a searing hot pain spreads through my body. The greatest pain must be felt before there is an absence of pain. I wonder if that is a quote from some wise sage, or maybe I’m finally the wise sage. Will wisdom be mine once I access every nugget of information in the universe?At first I resisted the Takers. Once I willingly sacrificed my soul and cut open my veins so they could take my lifeblood, I became an official Giver and couldn’t run anymore. The physical pain abated a tiny bit when I gave willingly, so, as a willing Giver, I sacrificed my body to the Takers.Then I chose to become one of them, a Taker, when the physical pain of my sacrifices became unbearable. I never considered myself like the other Takers. I took each Giver into my heart; I thanked them for their sacrifice even when I forced it from them. I learned not to take all of them, and I stored tiny pebbles of what I took in my heart. Each pebble with a name and memories of who I took from. My final act today is not a sacrifice; instead, it is an escape from all the sacrifices that I have taken. Only Givers will ever understand sacrifice.

 

I had no choice, I told myself. How else can I live in this world? I wasn’t living, though. The pebbles in my heart burnt a hole in me, tore into me like a dull dagger. That was survival, not living. Tears flow from my eyes, not of a life lost but a life not lived. My tears burn the soft flesh of my face searing a trail of regret and sorrow.

 

“Is he crying? It looks like lava flowing down his face.” I hear someone say to the right of me.

 

“That is the heartrock. I’ve never seen a Taker cry, though,” responds a deep voice.

 

“Maybe he’s having second thoughts,” the first voice says. I recognize this voice as belonging to the woman who believes herself my savior. I think her exact words claimed to “deliver me from evil.”

 

I don’t believe my evil, if that’s what she’d prefer to call it, will ever be gone. I did it. I am responsible; I cannot take it back. Even if the pebbles in my heart melt and converge into the heartrock, my evil is still in the lifeblood of those I took. I took from living, breathing beings who were given no choice. Worse yet, I took choice away from them. I took, they gave. If I didn’t take, I would have been forced to give. And once I took, giving became an impossibility. Taking took away my choice as well.

 

I promised myself I would only do it once to relieve the pain and then resume my role as giver. The first time I took, the lifeblood of the Giver filled my senses, their aura wrapped around me, pushing me beyond, and I saw the true meaning of the universe. I finally knew the secret to life, to happiness, to perfection. I saw into the great beyond and spoke to the higher powers in the universe. I became a higher power of the universe.

 

After the first time, the chance of me returning to the role of Giver, to stop taking, disappeared. Every time I took another pebble, I yearned to see what I saw the first time, but it was always just out of my reach. I could feel it brush my fingertips, beckoning me to take just a little more, and I would find the higher power. The universe could be mine with just one more taking.

 

I knew, somewhere in the depths of my addled brain, as the pain of the takings became a vise around my heart, that even if I could become that higher power, it wasn’t mine to take. Taking wasn’t the way to enlightenment. How could it be when the pain of taking, so utterly different from the physical pain of giving, felt even more unbearable than giving?

 

I didn’t understand how the others did it. I’d never met a Taker filled with the remorse that threatened to bury me. Finally, I worked up the courage to ask another Taker how to avoid the hurt.

 

“Hurt? What hurt? Some of us are givers, some of us are takers. It’s part of the food chain, natural selection.” Then I knew I was not like the other Takera. Was it me that was broken or them?

 

When DOT found me, they presented an offer I couldn’t refuse. They could take away all the pain and give me the universe. An escape and a life that death would not give me. I would finally get to the beyond; I would finally be able to grasp it. However, a sacrifice would be required of me; my consciousness would no longer be mine.

 

A face appears before me, breaking me out of my reverie. My savior’s wide, blue eyes search mine.

 

“The heartrock is active. This is where we will cross to the point of no return. Once we plug you into the network, there is no turning back. Knowing the alternative consequences, would you like us to stop the procedure now?”

 

Without hesitating and feeling more than I’d ever know again, I said, “Do not stop the procedure. Please, proceed.”

Yes they will and this is not a theory.

This is the USS Gravely a guided missile destroyer. It’s a fairly new ship by USN standards. Construction began in 2007 and was finished in 2009.

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The USS Gravely was involved in this conflict.

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The USS Gravely had an incoming missile get within 1 mile (US source).

A Houthi missile got within a nautical mile of USS Gravely on Tuesday
Gravely used its Phalanx Close-In Weapons System, a cannon that can shoot 4,500 rounds a minute, to take out the Houthi missile.

Ansar Allah doesn’t exactly have the best technology, yet they were able to defeat the two outer rings of the AEGIS equipped missile destroyer.

But wait. USS Gravely is part of the USS Eisenhower group!

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Where was the flat top? Oh it was in the Mediterranean sea for much of the conflict. Why was the carrier so far away if the Houthis posed no threat with their old weapons?

It was far away because the Houthis proved to be a threat! Remember Yemen isn’t a huge economy. It’s been in a civil war for a decade. They have limited production capacity. Yet they posed a significant threat.

Next comes the argument you can’t find a carrier!

It’s an old argument based on the sea is big.

Except in 2020 using Jilin-1 a low earth orbit satellite this happened

What’s that?

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Jilin-1 the prototype satellite tracked an F-22. It tracked it for a few minutes. It couldn’t track it for a long time because there was only one satellite. Its orbit moved out of position. The theory is the satellite took a photo, beamed the image down to a ground based AI and the AI told the satellite where to look. The Jilin constellation of satellites was completed a few months ago.

An F-22 is a lot smaller than a carrier.

Why does the CCP think they can scare Taiwan into submission? It has been 75 years and they are still standing tall.

What are you talking about?

For the first 30 years of the 75 years you mentioned, it was Taiwan that was trying to “scare” China into submission. They tried to retake China from Korea, and they had a big fight with the US over dropping dozens of nukes on Chinese cities to help with their landing. The Taiwanese government, claiming to represent all China, just couldn’t understand why the US would refuse to kill millions of Chinese civilians to secure Taiwanese rule over China again.

People often remember the ONE U-2 spy plane shot down over Russia or Cuba, but in the same 1960s, China was displaying 4 U-2 wrecks that were shot down over China. That’s how intense the Taiwanese/American incursion into Chinese airspace was back then, collecting target information for their invasion, or nuclear attack.

Then another 15 years went by with both sides engaging in economic collaboration, no side was threatening the other at all.

It was the Taiwanese elections in 1995 when everything changed. That’s when the Taiwanese first started to push for separation from China, and the US decided to side with Taiwan against their promise to China, by sending its carriers to China’s coast, blinding Chinese radar sites with its growlers, which served as a huge wake up call to China and kicked started the current Chinese military modernization process.

The 1996 Chinese military exercise, in response to American carrier attack groups. China also dreamt of fighting the F-22 with J8 (a twin engine Chinese Mig-21) back then, since the J8 could also do Mach 2.

It’s been 10 years tops, that mainland China has shown a credible capability to cross the Taiwan strait and end the Chinese Civil War. China is nowhere near completion in its post-1995 military modernization program (the current publicized CCP time table says the military build up will continue till 2049), nor is it anywhere near the Taiwanese aggressiveness during the Cold War. Whether Taiwan will eventually be “scared” into reunification as China slowly builds up its muscles, the jury is still out.

IMO as time goes by, the Taiwan issue will increasingly become a burden and threat to the US and an useful excuse for China, as China is currently building the equivalent of an entire British Royal Navy every 3–4 years, without much international awareness or any push back. Everybody thinks that the Chinese military build up is just for its still on-going civil war with Taiwan.

Volunteers – 1985 – Full Movie

Today’s treat is a 1980s era movie starring Tom Hanks and a few other big names of the 1980s. I used to have this video on BetaMax and played the heck out of it. It’s a funny comedy and the full movie is right here for your enjoyment. John Candy is great as “Tom Tuttle”. LOL

Please take the time to watch this early masterpiece.

A row-boat to China to make it happen, still wearing a prison jumper

First and foremost dont get fooled by all this news being circulated that you have alliances against China.

This is entirely false. There are no alliances.

China is NOT Single.

China controls 24 African countries, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and has a very close friendship with Russia and Iran which it can use to its advantage at any minute.

China has a lot of trade and business influence in almost every country. Deutsche Bank since 2019 does more business with China than with USA. Banks, Manufacturers, Consumer Goods all depend on china for manufactured imports and on the chinese market for consumption and exports.

So automatically the Big Businesses – the Money Men – the People who fund elections and who can decide the fate of Democratic Governments are completely pro china.

So the Politicians can strut and shout but they cannot take any action against China as it will bring a stronger repercussion against their own country.

Simple example – India recently banned Tik Tok and many Chinese Apps. The Impact on China was minimal and only the companies were affected.

Say as a retaliation China would have stopped the export of Pharma Raw Stock to India. It would have taken us 6 years to find a substitute of that much quantity. It would rise costs by 240% to 700% depending on the drug. A Strip costing Rs. 35/- would now cost Rs. 145/- and there would be a massive supply crunch by 2023 when the inventories would dry out. There would be massive protests and literally revolutions and would create Chaos for us.

It would be the same for the United States.

China cut down its supply of the Raw Stock for Diabetic Insulin in 2019–2020 after the COVID Crisis to ensure it has enough for its own people. Trump promptly subsided the extra cost of importing insulin raw stock from other countries which cost the US Federal Government $ 38 Billion between May 2020 and February 2021 to keep the prices the same.

Biden has cut this subsidy resulting in Insulin prices rising. Biden plans to get back the Stock delivery from China and he has succeeded in getting the business back to scale by June 2021.

Sadly no country can affect China in the same way.

This is because while the world was sleeping or leaders like Bush and Obama (US), Blair (UK), Scroeder and Merkel (Germany), MMS (India) did not realize how dependent they were becoming on China.

Today it is too late.

China knows this

So unless you have an alternative – China can easily remain single.

If they get really angry and decide to use one of their many Nuclear Options – the West will promptly back down without a seconds hesitation.


Frankly I dont care too much about the West myself.

However i do wish We were in the same position that China is in today. Had we followed the Doctorine in 1991- established manufacturing bases in 14 of our uninhabited Islands on the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, Focussed on Manufacturing, we could be in a far stronger and influential position than we actually are.

Yummy

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When A Karen Gets Sentenced To LIFE In Prison…

Simple, because the UK is a totalitarian state, where you can participate in pretend elections where nothing really changes. Their recent elections changed nothing other than the front man who acts on the behalf of the corporate masters.

We can see when PC Kane Haywood, was found guilty of sexual assault by penetration (commonly known as you know rape) and received a 1 year suspended sentence. Westerners are like YEAH that’s JUSTICE! (Note how people planning a protest were given 5 years in prison).

“I smelled something smoking and I looked down … and I was smoking,” he said.

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US soldiers and doctors risked their lives to extract a live RPG lodged in a US marine which could have exploded at any point- they broke dozens of regulations as well just to do the morally right thing.

Thursday, March 16, 2006, was a beautiful sunny day in Paktika Province, eastern Afghanistan. It borders a lawless region of Pakistan that is home to some al Qaeda and Taliban forces. Snow in the mountain passes along the border had melted giving them access again to Afghanistan where they came looking for American soldiers. They soon found them.

At dawn, the 10th Mountain Division’s Alpha Company headed out on a mission. Four hours into the drive and just miles from the village, gunfire broke out. They’d been ambushed from above. Twenty-three-year-old Pvt. Channing Moss, the gunner, said it sounded like rattling spoons. A hail of RPG fell onto the convoy, destroying a friendly Afghan vehicle and also hitting the humvees. One humvee commander turned to tell Moss to aim his gun when he saw his sides smoking.

The RPG that had plowed into Moss’ lower abdomen stretched from one hip to the other. If the RPG went off, it would kill everyone within 30 feet of him. Yet the company medic Spc. Jared Angell stayed close, bandaging his wounds and stabilizing the weapon so that movement wouldn’t cause it to explode.

Reports of injuries had been radioed to the medical evacuation helicopter (MEDEVAC) base in Salerno, Afghanistan — minus one crucial piece of information.

“We didn’t tell them that, you know, Moss had live ordnance in him,” Mariani said, “because there was that possibility that, you know, they might not want to transport him with live ordnance in him.”

Preparations began for the rescue mission. But first the Blackhawk crew had to wait for clearance from commanders because the area was “hot” — the battle was still raging. For MEDEVAC crew chief SSG Christian Roberts, it was a very long 15 minutes.

“When you know you have wounded people out there that are waiting for you to come pick them up, it seems like an eternity,” he said.

“Doc” continued working frantically to stabilize Moss even though the RPG was a danger to everyone around Moss. Angell knew Moss’ only chance for survival was to get out of there and to a hospital quickly.

“I constantly was looking at my watch, saying, you know, ‘When is the bird gonna get here, when is the bird gonna get here,'” medic Doc Angell said.

When Lt. Mariani pulled “Doc” aside to ask him if he thought Moss would make it, he could only shake his head no.

If Pvt. Moss didn’t survive, his wife, six months pregnant with their second child, would lose her husband and his daughter Yuliana would lose her father. But just as Moss felt he would die, he heard the choppers. An Apache helicopter escorted the MEDEVAC chopper in case there was more gunfire.

Spc. Collier, the flight medic, quickly realized what they faced with Pvt Moss.

“I see a metal object protruding out, and there are fins on it, and I am like, ‘This looks like this guy got hit with something, and it’s stuck in him, and it didn’t blow up,'” he said.

Army policy states that they are not supposed to transport soldiers in Moss’ condition. The risk of catastrophic loss is too great — four MEDEVAC crew members, three wounded soldiers and a helicopter could all be blown out of the sky.

But they also knew if they didn’t take Moss, he would die.

Pilot CW2 Jorge Correa conferred with his soldiers: “I asked my crew, you know, ‘Are you guys comfortable with this?'” he said. “Because I wasn’t gonna put my crew in jeopardy if they weren’t comfortable with it.”

The crew quickly decided to take the risk.

Co-pilot Jeremy Smith recalled the tense moment.

“We all said, ‘Yeah, let’s get him on board and let’s get outta here,'” he said.

As crew chief Christian Roberts said, “We are not gonna leave a U.S. soldier to die in the middle of Afghanistan.”

But reports of the true nature of Moss’ injury had not reached the closest medical facility at the Orgun-E base — a former goat shed transformed into a rough field hospital. They were told it was “shrapnel injury.” The aid station had two doctors, Maj. John Oh, a general surgeon, and Maj. Kevin Kirk, an orthopedic surgeon. At this point it wasn’t clear which Moss needed most — a surgical team or a bomb squad.

Incredibly, both Oh and Kirk had drilled for this exact scenario, because the Army has a protocol to handle patients with unexploded ordnance in them.

“You’re actually not supposed to bring them into an aid station,” Oh said. “And actually, he wasn’t supposed to be flown with the other patients either.”

According to the “War Surgery Manual,” Moss should have been placed far away from other patients and operated on last. If procedure had been followed, Moss would likely have bled to death, but the doctors felt compelled to save him.

Then Pvt. Moss had another life-saving break — Staff Sgt. Dan Brown, the explosives expert who spends his time disposing of bombs and captured weapons, was on the base. In his spare time, Brown had been watching an episode of ABC’s “Grey’s Anatomy” about a patient with an unexploded grenade in him. In that story, the bomb technician is blown up. Brown was about to play a leading role in his own non-fiction drama.

Brown, shocked to see that Moss was still alive, confirmed that they were dealing with an RPG. Moss’ life hung on whether or not they would remove the rocket.

Brown explained the different scenarios of what could happen. The worst case was that they would all become “pink mist” — everyone in the room would be killed. But to identify how much explosive power they were facing, they needed an x-ray to determine whether the RPG’s warhead was inside Moss. Their notoriously temperamental x-ray machine malfunctioned, and it wasn’t until the third attempt that they got a decent image.

The doctors and Brown were relieved by what they didn’t see. The deadliest part of the RPG — the main explosive charge — was not in Moss. But their relief diminished when Brown explained to the surgeons that it would still have enough force to kill Moss and destroy their hands.

At that point, Oh ordered everyone except the critical staff out of the aid station, the two doctors and three surgical staff remained. They all knew the risk they faced.

“I looked everybody in the eye and said, ‘You guys understand what’s going on here, right?’ And I knew everybody heard me, but nobody said anything. They just kept doing their jobs,” he said.

Oh told them it was okay to leave — but nobody did. With no words exchanged, each had decided to risk their life to save Moss.

Extreme blood loss had caused his heart to stop. Unable to do chest compressions for fear of setting off the round, they gave him epinephrine. His heart soon restarted and they could finally operate to remove the RPG.

Sgt. Brown used an unusual instrument to gently remove the RPG’s tail fins — a hacksaw. The surgeons reached inside Moss, steadying the still lethal rocket, inches from the soldier’s beating heart. They then gently eased the rocket out, with the detonator aimed at Brown’s flak vest.

Brown quickly walked out of the aid station to a bunker and detonated it. The sound of the explosion thundered through the base. As the surgeons closed up Moss’ incisions, Sgt. Brown sat down outside to collect himself. Finally, the impact of the drama hit him.

“I started shaking. I just sat there. I knew I did everything I could to help him live. And that was very, very intense for me after the fact,” he said.

You Won’t Believe What’s He Says Is About To Unfold Over The Next 5 Months

Loaded Mashed Potatoes Meat Loaf Casserole

Loaded Mashed Potatoes Meat Loaf Casserole is two of your favorites in one dish.

loaded mashed potato meat loaf casserole
loaded mashed potato meat loaf casserole

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

Meat Loaf

  • 1 pound extra lean ground beef
  • 1/2 cup onion, diced
  • 1 cup seasoned Italian bread crumbs or 1 cup crushed Stove Top stuffing
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 egg
  • 2 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper

Topping

  • 1 (4 ounce) package garlic-flavored instant mashed potatoes*
  • 1 1/2 cups water*
  • 1/2 cup milk*
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded cheddar cheese
  • 1/4 cup real bacon bits or 3 slices bacon, cooked and crumbled

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. In a large bowl, combine beef, onion, bread crumbs, milk, egg, brown sugar, Worcestershire sauce, salt and pepper then press into a 9 inch square or comparable baking dish.
  3. Bake uncovered for 25 minutes, then remove and drain any excess fat.
  4. While the meatloaf is cooking, prepare mashed potatoes as per package instructions, using 1 1/2 cups water and 1/2 cup milk.
  5. Spread over the top of the meat loaf, then top with cheddar cheese and bacon bits.
  6. Bake for an additional 10 minutes, until the cheese is melted and the mashed potatoes are slightly crispy.

Notes

* Or make your own mashed potatoes instead. This would be a great use for leftover mashed potatoes.

The problem is that IBM failed

Political reasons are only the catalyst for IBM’s failure in China, but not the root cause.

In the past 20 years, IBM is no longer the top company in computer technology.

The blue giant rose with computer technology and once led many fields of commercial computers in the entire human world. From operating systems to servers, from giant computers to floppy disks, from mice to color monitors, the development of human computer technology and network technology is inseparable from the contribution of IBM.

But those great stories are only stories of the past. IBM once made a lot of money, which made IBM become bigger and bigger, less efficient, and in many fields, IBM was surpassed by other emerging companies.

Since many businesses were in the red, IBM had to get rid of those “unprofitable” businesses to maintain a better financial situation. In the past 20 years, they sold the PC department, the storage department, the server department, the printer department, the network hardware department, the storage device department, the health department, the semiconductor department…

But all the businesses sold by IBM have been proven to be very promising and profitable by other companies. Why did they stay in IBM and become “unprofitable” businesses?

IBM started to get sick a long time ago. There is a joke in the United States that IBM is the company with the lowest efficiency and the most complicated processes in the world. IBM is the company with the lowest per capita output among the major IT companies in the world.

I list the per capita output/per capita profit of several famous IT companies

Apple: $2.38 million, $600,000

Microsoft: $1.07 million, $380,000

HP: $926,200, $56,300

Huawei: $470,000, $58,600

Oracle: $333,100, $65,400

IBM: $219,200, $26,600

IBM is not only sick, but also very sick.

IBM once proudly claimed that they had transformed from a manufacturing company to a technology company, and from a technology company to a service company. They only serve the most valuable customers, large banks, governments, airlines, and insurance companies. Their employees wear the best suits, hold meetings in six-star hotels, and only strive for the most profitable orders.

Because, orders with meager profits will lose money at IBM!

Have you used any IBM equipment or software in your life? Very little, right?

Because the money in your wallet is too little for IBM. Making money from consumers is too hard and difficult for IBM.

IBM’s largest customers in China have always been the Chinese government, state-owned enterprises, banks and securities industry. They once generously gave huge orders to IBM, and IBM also opened a research and development center in China to provide services to these customers.

The main directions of IBM China Research Institute are the Internet of Things, big data and cloud services, which are also the areas where Chinese customers purchase more.

But in the past five years, these orders have become increasingly difficult to obtain.

1. Chinese companies are growing rapidly

Lenovo, Huawei, Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu. Many Chinese companies have grown into international giants. They are in their respective fields with technology and strength that is completely not inferior to IBM, and their fees are lower and their services are more efficient.

2. Trump’s “China Plan”

The US government has imposed comprehensive sanctions on Chinese technology companies and provoked a trade war. In order to defend and counterattack, the Chinese government launched a “de-Americanization” plan: requiring the government, banks, and state-owned enterprises to reduce their purchases of American technology every year.

Under the dual effects of commercial competition and geopolitics, IBM’s disease broke out completely. It is like a patient who has been ill for a long time and has been relying on expensive drugs to maintain superficial health. When these drugs are no longer so easy to obtain, it is time for him to fall.

IBM’s performance in China has been declining rapidly:

In 2021, it grew by 2%

In 2022, it declined by 22.7%

In 2023, it declined by 19.6%

In 2024, it declined by 25% (estimated)

IBM’s market has almost been completely occupied by Chinese local companies.

In 2023, IBM’s global revenue was $60 billion, while China’s Huawei was $100 billion and Alibaba was $120 billion. IBM is no longer the blue giant it once was, but a second-rate IT company.

Do you think IBM is only collapsing in China? No, in 2023, IBM laid off 3,900 people worldwide, and they moved all the jobs in Europe to India. Because India is cheaper.

Now IBM = India Business Machine.

Maybe India is the last medicine for IBM to maintain operations.

Suspects that LOSE IT During Interrogations

There I was, in Iraq. We, the US, had just agreed to sell Abrams tanks to the Iraqis and we (my unit) were at a range to put on a demonstration. Our plan was to use a section of Bradleys and a section of Abrams to demonstrate their capability to deliver a high volume of accurate fires at long range. We had the viewing area rigged with a speaker so the audience could hear the platoon leader and his fire commands. It was going to be a sweet demonstration of something we rarely got to see ourselves!

The Iraqis decided they would also put on a demonstration and showed up with a T72 and a BMP1 (with the unimpressive 73mm low pressure gun). They would go first.

The time to fire came….and went. People climbed around the BMP and we waited. Finally….one boom. We saw a puff of sand maybe halfway to the target (which was only a couple hundred meters away). Several minutes pass and then another boom. More sand flies in the air; closer, but still nowhere near the target. Minutes pass. It’s getting awkward. There’s a third round-still well short.

My boss, the brigade commander, calls me over to where he is sitting next to the Iraqi Army division commander. He whispers to me to call our crews and have them dial it back some because he doesn’t want to embarrass their guys.

The BMP finally falls pathetically silent, having fired a max of 4–5 rounds (it was 2010, I can’t recall for sure how many!). The target is unscathed.

Despite the crewmen busy around the back deck and gathered behind it, the T72 never fires at all.

It is our turn. I’ve called them to dial it back and they’ve acknowledged but when our crews fire, I’m not sure exactly what they dialed back because it looks like thunder and lightning where the vehicles are and a sand storm around and beyond their targets as both 25mm and 120mm rounds are punching through. The Brads reduce fires and shift to alternating fires. Cool, it’s ’talking guns’ with 25mm! (This was the highest volume of fires I’ve ever seen from armored vehicles!)

My boss is initially perturbed but then settles in to watch the show.

My flatmate moved a gay couple, Paul and Stefan, into our spare bedroom back in 1991. Stefan was gentle and okay to live with, but Paul was 6’8” tall with a menacing undertone. While he and I didn’t have any issues personally, there was something not quite right about him, something unsettling.

Paul and Stefan broke up while still living with us in 1992, with Stefan moving out. I came home soon after to find Paul’s belongings all packed up and him about to leave. He told me he’d taken his rent money back, having gone into my drawers to find it. We started having an argument about needing to give notice. I phoned my flatmate to do something about it, but he said unequivocally, “Don’t argue with him. Just let him go.”

So Paul moved out and I never saw either of them again.

Fifteen years later the police called me and asked if I knew a Paul Armstrong. I said not for a long time. They asked questions about the kind of car he drove when we lived with him. I replied that I had no idea as they parked it in the underground car park and I didn’t socialise with them.

I asked why they were asking me these questions – the police said they had arrested Paul for the murder of Felipe Flores, a man from Ecuador who had been living in Sydney. Paul had bashed him to death in a small park back in 1991….then moved in with us less than three weeks later.

It turned out the police had been reviewing a cold case, using blood found beneath the fingernails of Felipe Flores. The DNA led to Paul, who by then was also a convicted rapist. He was sentenced in 2014 for murder.

Paul Armstrong jailed for killing gay lover over HIV admission

Paul Armstrong, my former flatmate and, it turns out, convicted killer and rapist

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Felipe Flores, the man bashed by Paul in a park, who was then dragged unconscious under a bush where he died.

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Self-Assembling Nanotechnology in the $h0t?

Again

I look at China and believe whatever they did is the winning formula

That’s because nobody else did anything else that could be described as winning unless it’s done over a century or two

So

  1. Quality Public Education
  2. Manufacturing by offering Low Cost Labor and Land
  3. Use proceeds of manufacturing to build Supply Chains, Educate more people and then Build Ports and and Roadways and Warehouses to distribute and supply the products manufactured worldwide
  4. Invest in Technology especially R & D
  5. Develop Indigenous Technology in many areas
  6. Develop Key Critical Technology in a few areas
  7. Use the money made from 6 to create a stronger middle class and use them to start transforming to a Consumption Driven Economy
  8. Once you have sustainable money, focus on Healthcare and Elderly Care and Social Benefits for Citizens
  9. Focus on Higher Education and Advanced Degrees and use those degrees to maintain a supply of talented labor to various advanced manufacturing jobs

That’s literally the Chinese Model

That Transformed the Nation into a 19 Trillion Great Power from an Agrarian Backwater in 1960


Ultimately there are some Dos and Donts along the way

A. Spend wisely. Dont Stupidly borrow to build Infrastructure especially Airports unless you can generate sufficient revenue and make money

B. Education should be guarded. Dont be lazy and hand over Education to private Vultures to destroy and finish off the entire base

C. Careful use of earnings. Use Proceeds of Manufacturing to create Supply Chains & Research, not to create Obnoxious Gaudy Thelawallahs who load their own pockets

D. Focus on building a Middle Class. Use Money made from Economy into creating a stronger middle class through Jobs & Housing not by the SHARE MARKET

E. Merit driven everything. Don’t abandon Meritocracy for any other Model

F. Avoid politics. Don’t put Politics before Country and Don’t regard any LEADER as a God or as someone who can’t do anything wrong

G. Concentrate on the roles of education. Focus on Higher Education meaning make it more accessible to the common man and practical,not building 40 premier institutions and diluting their value

H. Accept your mistakes. Don’t be embarrassed to admit your lack of achievement in area and LEARN AND IMPROVE

I. Focus. Don’t use petty Nationalism if it comes in the way of Potential Development

Thats Literally India today

That is holding back a 1.4 Billion Nation and making it a Paper economy day in and day out


So First

[1] We need Good Leadership

Modi is a failure

He must go

Future leaders must be judged based on pre set Goals and Standards

If they don’t achieve this, they must resign and someone else must take over

Leadership based on Caste or Religion or Brainwashing is certain disaster

And no Party politics please


[2] Second – Priorities

We need something that benefits the maximum number of people

Education is critical

Far more critical than Airports for 5% passengers

Food security is critical

Far more critical than 40 new IITs


[3] Third – Stop saying the System is fine

The System is flawed and needs massive reform

Maybe the reform could be different from person to person

Yet anyone who says the system is fine as it is and we are going to be Viksit Bharat in 2047 without any effort , is a Fool and is Genetically a flawed product


Once you reach 1,2,3

Then it’s a Custom made solution based on how your Society and Economy is structured

Just that

INDIA IS DOING EVERYTHING WRONG TODAY

So everything must be overhauled completely

How it must be done different?

That depends on various factors

Sailor Discovers Wife’s Affair During Deployment, Plays The Divorce Long Game And Has Last Laugh!

My daughter’s 2009 BMW 335I had the twin turbos fail. I watched several videos to see how difficult it would be for she and I to repair it. The videos showed that it was a complicated, time consuming repair, but we felt we could do it. We ordered the parts and started working one Saturday morning. After working for a few hours, she called her boyfriend, who lives a couple hours away. He drove up to help. Her boyfriend has a lot of experience working on BMWs. He said he would not have attempted this repair. I had to take the intake manifold off this car once, to replace a heater pipe. So, I knew it wouldn’t be simple.

It took us three long days to replace the turbos. Many, many times we were forced to get just a couple fingers into a place no human should be able to touch. Everything was crammed together so tightly it was torture. We lost a lot of skin on our hands and arms. We had the foresight to put all the parts in ziplock bags and label them well. We arranged the parts in order, as we took them off. There were many, many parts.

We did get the turbos installed and working well. We made one mistake that took me 2–3 hours to fix after my partner in torture drove back home. That was about four years ago. I have only done minor repairs on that car since. I will never attempt a major repair on an BMW again.

I’ll show you a famous one, known by all Chinese.

When the tourists came to Xinjiang, they looked like four or five young people in their twenties. Their cars were stuck in the mud.

The old man from Xinjiang helped this group of people to take the car out of trouble.

When tourists tried to pay him cash to express their thanks, he refused, but his language was difficult to communicate, so he showed his party emblem.

He is not an Uygur or a Tibetan, but rather a smaller ethnic group in Xinjiang, Khalkhas.

His name is Abdugapal Mad, who lives in Muji, as a CPC member for 24 years.

“It’s Getting WORSE And WORSE…” – Danielle DiMartino

Well, America is the flagbearer of western civilization and it’s all of 250 years old.

And where did western civilization originate?

Modern day middle-east/Mediterranean.

America is an ocean away, but it spells in the Latin alphabet, and prints “in God we trust” on its currency.


Clearly, western civilization is unbroken, because it can be traced from the time of the ancient sumerians, Egyptians and Persians, as recorded in the Bible. In fact, the way we tell time today is based on a recorded event in the bible: the birth of Jesus. Hence it is AD 2024 today. Anno Domini, Latin for “in the year of our lord”.

But is it continuous, in the sense that today’s Americans share cultural and historical commonality with others that also identify as western and those that came before them?

The modern American may read Tacitus, quote Plato, and study machiavelli, but he doesn’t identify as a Roman, Greek or Italian. The refrain “it’s all Greek to me” is illuminating.

In other words, western civilization share a loosely linked pool of knowledge, but what sets the westerner apart is still geography and DNA. After all, North Africa and the Middle East have suffered massive destruction in recent years despite being the cradle of western civilization.


China is different. The fossil and DNA record clearly show modern Chinese are descended from paleolithic ancestors who settled and called it home. Elements of Neolithic culture found their way into the earliest xia and shang dynasties, including burial practices and cultural wares.

Chinese writing can be traced to the oracle bones of the Shang, and character evolution remains a topic for active scholarship. There was a period of fragmentation during the long decline of the zhou in the spring-autumn and warring states, but qin unification consolidated Chinese block writing. It has remained a consistent whole for the past 2,200 years.

The answer to “what it means to be Chinese” is rooted in continuity. History, culture, language, philosophy, the arts, technology, even governance and politics.

Take for example the genealogy of confucius, which has been continuously maintained over 2,500 years tracing more than 80 generations, the world’s longest extant record of human pedigree. There are over 2 million living descendants registered, with the estimated total well in excess of 3 million.

Similarly, an educated Chinese youth today can visit the Shandong museum and read Sun Tzu’s art of war off 2,200 year-old bamboo strips written during the Han dynasty.

You can’t do that with spelled languages. Even Shakespeare’s prose is unwieldy to the point of being unreadable because a 4-century gap separates modern English from the romance of Shakespearean times.

Chinese is drawn, not spelled.

This has allowed Chinese civilization to build and maintain the largest databank in history before the advent of digital storage.

Why did the kjv peoples expend significant cultural and political capital to preserve deep Chinese roots, especially Chinese literacy over tens of generations?

Because the Chinese language, especially block writing, remains the key to unlocking the priceless databank. Surely their survival as intact states must be in great part attributed to the umbilical link with the living Chinese body of knowledge.

Vintage Home Decor

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Stray Cat Almost Killed by a Car, Waits Alone for Death, Until This Happens

True story.

When I first moved to Macau, one of the first people I met was a guy named Mark from the UK. He was a professional card counter. He played everyday. If he won US $3500 or lost US $3500 he would stop playing. He won more than he lost, so he was pretty good at discipline.

The casino security spotted him. Then they changed the rules. Changed from a four deck shoe to a six deck shoe.

They followed him home. And when he came out of his home, someone would follow him. He became uncomfortable and went to Korea to play.

When he came back, he was told he was blacklisted. No reason given.

Casinos make up their own rules.

But the basic rule is the house always wins.

There are no strategies to win. Just keep your money in your wallet and you win!

Stanley Ho, the founder of the modern casino industry in Macau was asked what game he played at his casinos. And he said “I don’t gamble “

In the year 1523, Ming dynasty captured a few Muskets during war with the Portugueses. In the year, 1548 Ming dynasty replicated and mass produced it. That became the Ming dynasty’s main firearm, and later the Qing dynasty. In the year 1765, Qing dynasty had a “conflict” with Myanmar, Burmese had already switched to the newly invented flintlock received from the British. That was when Qing dynasty started falling behind in the weapons department.
It didn’t have a large army either. Military cost money, there was no neighboring country could threaten China at the time, why keeping a large army?

Lawrence Bates

The Last Voyage of Commander Jenkins

Lawrence M. Bates

 

I open my eyes. It’s light out. Then something that sounds like a Chopin nocturne starts ever so softly to intrude upon my still half-awake, still half-asleep consciousness. I begin stretching to get the kinks out only to find my elbows banging against the side of my crypt. Oh, yeah. Right. I’m Joshua Jenkins, the captain of the starship Montmartre on a colony prep mission. All the hoses and med devices and such have been retracted from my body and the lid to my pod has been popped open by Rosslyn. Hallelujah!  That means we’re in orbit around Kiroki 3 and it’s time for me to snap into action. It also means, as the realization suddenly dawns upon me, that I’m still alive.

 

The revival protocols kick in and I sit up to self-check for brain fog and atrophied muscles. The Advanced Life Support Hibernation Module (ALSHM), aka crypt, aka pod, is supposed to handle all the biological necessities for us while we’re in stasis. It must’ve worked, because I actually feel pretty good. This must be my lucky day. I step out of the crypt without any wobbling and sure enough, over in the corner right where I left it hangs my captain’s uniform. It’s a red jumpsuit with an insignia that reads “Commander Jenkins”, but by my lights a starship is still a sailing ship and I’m still this ship’s captain.

 

After getting dressed, I finally notice it. According to protocol, we’re all supposed to be reawakened at the same time in case something goes wrong and someone needs help, but the pods of my three-person crew remain unopened. I walk around the crypt room and inspect each pod. They seem to be operating normally with all vitals showing in the green. Something must be wrong.

 

“Rosslyn.”

 

“Yes, Commander Jenkins.”

 

I can’t resist. “Would it kill you to call me Captain Jenkins instead of Commander Jenkins? You know I hate that.”

 

“No, Commander. Calling you Captain Jenkins instead of Commander Jenkins will not result in my death or in any way disrupt my power supply. Did you enjoy the Chopin-themed revival procedure? That was one of the last orders you gave me before entering stasis.”

 

“Ah, yes, that was fine.”

 

“Good. That means that that aspect of me is still functioning properly.”

 

What the hell? “Rosslyn, why did you revive me and not the others? Aren’t we in orbit around Kiroki 3?”

 

“No, Commander. I encountered an anomaly which requires the Commander’s attention. Please proceed to the bridge. I have a briefing waiting for you there.”

 

“Ok, on my way.” Wow. A problem that needs human intervention. Scratch that. Commander intervention. As I walk down the corridor, my mind starts racing as to what kind of anomaly would short-circuit a ship mind. It’s supposed to be able to autonomously handle just about any contingency that the universe can throw at it. I’m used to Rosslyn and her eccentricities, but now I’m starting to get a little nervous.

 

I reach the bridge doors and am admitted by Rosslyn. “Rosslyn. As you can see, I’m here. What’s going on?”

 

The main viewing screen pops into life and shows a simulation of the Montmartre as it travels through space from Earth towards Kiroki 3, a journey of some 320 light-years. As the Montmartre gets to about 20 light-years from its destination, the simulation freezes.

“For six months”, Rosslyn begins, “the voyage of the Montmartre has proceeded without any significant incidents. Then two days ago the ship attained zero velocity and remains immobilized with respect to this sector of the observable universe at the location indicated by the red pulsing dot on the screen.”

 

“That’s impossible,” I say. “You can’t just stop in space.”

 

“Agreed. What has happened to the Montmartre is impossible. I have spent the last two days checking my systems for faults, but have found none. All my instruments report optimal functionality. I have tried using the attitudinal thrusters to maneuver and change our position, but to no effect. I then tried restarting the Leyton Drive on low power to see if that could get the Montmartre moving, but our position remains unchanged. Somehow, we have been frozen in place, and I have been unable to formulate an explanation let alone a remedy for this phenomenon. In a case such as this, default protocols demand that I revive the Commander and seek human assistance.”

 

I’m so shocked by this that I almost fall over backward before managing to recover my balance. Now I need to recover my emotional balance. Two months behind us is the Red Swan carrying thousands of colonists expecting to wake up and move in to a makeshift habitat that we’re supposed to have already prepared for them. Will they get stuck here too? My psych profile says that I excel at inhibiting panic and focusing on problem solving. That’s one of the reasons why SpaceLab made me a ship captain. More importantly, my psych profile also goes on to state that I’ve been evaluated out as a high-IQ, ultra-rational sociopath who doesn’t interact well with other human beings in what is classically referred to as a mentally healthy manner. This serves to amplify my predilection to make decisions based on mission priorities and not personal relationships. In other words, SpaceLab made me a starship captain because I’m a first-rate asshole, and everyone knows it.

 

“Rosslyn, something must be wrong with your sensors. This just can’t be happening.”

 

“Yes, Commander Jenkins. Either I am broken, or the universe is.”

 

*****

I instruct Rosslyn to try slowly revving up the engines to full power. We don’t move either backward or forward. In fact, alarms go off as the engines start overheating. “Commander Jenkins. I must turn off the engines or they will explode in 17.3 seconds.” A Leyton Drive explosion is not anything you want to be around. I wait another few seconds just to make sure, but nothing changes. “Rosslyn, power down the engines.”

 

“Yes, Commander Jenkins.”

 

I then order Rosslyn to revive my crew mates and instruct them to assemble in the dining room in two hours’ time, giving all of us a chance to settle into wakefulness. Arriving a little early is Padak Remanotra, a physicist. Tall, lanky, even regal in bearing, he grabs himself a coffee and sits down at the table. An attempt at small talk is made while we wait for the others but is soon abandoned. Oddly, when we talk physics, we get along just fine.

 

Thankfully, a few minutes later Susan Orman and Lee Sung wander in together chatting amiably. After all, they’re expecting this to be a pre-planning session for exploring and colonizing Kiroki 3 and are excited about finally getting the opportunity to do just that. Orman specializes in exobiology and so is by nature a bit quirky and somewhat whimsical. That’s ok with me. SpaceLab must consider these desirable personality traits in a person that you’re expecting to be able to communicate with alien beings.

 

Sung is a planetary scientist. Her disposition sours as she takes a seat and realizes that she must put up with being in the same room as me, at least for the time being. Understandable. Deep space exploration is not kind to fools, and back on Earth during training I rode her pretty hard while I took it relatively easy on Remanotra and Orman. She noticed, and at one point she just flat-out said that she hated my guts. In my standard charming style, I responded “Lots of people hate my guts, so don’t think you’re anything special for it.” Sung just harumphed, obviously unimpressed with my wit. As long as she does her job and follows my orders, then I don’t have a problem with her. We’ll see.

 

All three possess multi-disciplinary scientific skills and all three of them are a lot smarter than I am, and boy, do I need their expertise now.

 

Padak speaks first, asking “Where’s Kiroki 3? I didn’t see it on any on my screens. Shouldn’t we be in orbit around it?” At that point I explain to them the nature of our predicament. As expected, a chorus of “That’s impossible!” resounds through the dining room. Then I sit back and wait for the information to sink in and for them to start ideating.

 

Susan asks “Did you check Rosslyn’s logs?” “Yes”, I say. “Not in detail, but I didn’t offhand see anything unusual. One minute we’re cruising along at Leyton 12, the next minute we’re at 0. At least, according to Rosslyn. Rosslyn’s been running diagnostics for the last two days and hasn’t found anything wrong. That’s why she revived me – she doesn’t know what to do and neither do I.”

 

Padak starts thinking out loud. “Ok, assuming that Rosslyn is right, here’s a few ideas that could explain the stoppage. One. We’ve entered a black hole. Two. We’ve entered a void, a nullity, a region of non-universe where there’s no space for us to travel through. Or three, and this is a long shot, maybe this region of space is the result of two inflaton fields from two different universes intersecting each other resulting in a patch where the laws of physics that we’re used to no longer apply.”

 

Rogue black holes are a real problem in deep space, akin to the icebergs that our Earth-bound sea-faring ancestors had to contend with. I said “Rosslyn is designed to detect gravitational anomalies and asteroidal debris and make the appropriate course adjustments. As I said to Susan, a review of the logs contains no indication of any significant course corrections or major incidents encountered during our journey. As for a space-void, that’s something we’ll just have to find a way to test for.”

 

During this back and forth with Padak, Orman and Sung have been whispering to each other. Now apparently satisfied, they look at me and then each other, deciding which one of them is to present the material. Of course, it’s Orman who does the talking.

 

“Here’s what we think. It could be flypaper. Or a spider web.”

 

That’s a bit much, even for me. “That would imply that some creature is going to come along at any moment and eat this ship along with us in it. I reject that explanation because one, it’s too far-fetched for me, and two, if it is true, we’re done for. I don’t see how the Montmartre can fend off some gigantic galactic starship predator.”

 

Orman continues without missing a beat. “Ok, if you don’t like that explanation, how about this one? It’s a border wall, or perhaps a border sphere. Some alien race likes their privacy and this is their cosmic ‘Beware of Dog’ sign.”

 

Huh. I never would have thought of that. Leave it to an exobiologist to come up with an anthropomorphic interpretation.

“Or it could be asteroid protection” adds Padak, even though there are no planets anywhere near here that would need protecting. Still, who knows?

 

“All that sounds plausible” I say. But if it’s an asteroid protection shield, why are we stuck here? And if it’s a border wall, are they studying us? Vetting us before allowing entry?”

 

We continue in this vein for another hour or so. One option of course is to just go back into stasis and wait to see if something ever comes along to either eat us or collect us for an alien museum. Even if the wall is a naturally occurring phenomenon subject to dissolution over time, that may be ongoing for millions of years. Everyone, including myself, agrees that going back to sleep without knowing what’s up is a non-starter. Besides, we sign up for these missions because we want to explore, not sleep.

 

Sung finally finds her voice. “You know that you have to notify the Red Swan and tell them to go back to Earth.” “Yes,” I reply. Being overall Mission Commander gives me the authority to override anyone and anything. I could just advise the Red Swan of our situation and order it back to Earth and dump the problem back onto SpaceLab’s lap. “I’ve refrained from contacting them yet because I don’t want to have to abort the mission until we’re positive that we have no other choice.”

 

Eventually, we agree on a game plan that hopefully will lead to our getting out of this mess. Meanwhile, the Red Swan is still barreling head-long towards our position. Are they doomed to suffer the same fate as the Montmartre?

*****

We spend the next three days running tests. If it is one of Padak’s voids, then I can’t take the risk of exposing someone to this unknown environment. So first, we have a robot shove a probe out of the airlock. Surprisingly, the probe is able to maneuver around the vicinity of the ship freely. Also, we are able confirm some cosmological constants such as the speed of light via the probe and Rosslyn’s instrumentation as well. So, it doesn’t appear that this is some kind nullity.

 

Feeling adventurous, we next try extending the probe’s radius of exploration. We extend the range to a few 100 kilometers in all directions: up, down, left, right, backward, and especially forward. No problems. Padak suggests that the wall is mass-sensitive. To check this out, I take the shuttle out for a spin, just in case the wall is life-form sensitive. My spacesuit stays on in case the shuttle gets stuck and I have to hitchhike back to the ship. I take the shuttle out 1,000 kilometers in all directions and encounter no difficulties. The germ of a rescue plan begins to form in my mind, but I’m going to need Rosslyn’s help first.

 

I return to the ship, go to my cabin, and lie down.

 

“Rosslyn.”

 

“Yes, Commander Jenkins.”

 

“Is there a way for the shuttle to rendezvous with the Red Swan before it gets stuck here as well?”

 

“No, Commander Jenkins.”

 

“Why?”

 

“A message to the Red Swan ordering it to shed velocity will take approximately 4.4 weeks to arrive. That gives it approximately 2.5 weeks to match the shuttle’s velocity for docking and then set a course for return to Earth before getting stopped by the wall. There is no way the Red Swan can slow down enough or the shuttle travel fast enough to meet the Red Swan at that critical point.

 

Now it’s my turn. “Rosslyn. If the shuttle is located a safe distance away, would the shock wave generated by a Leyton Drive explosion boost the shuttle to the velocity needed to be picked up by the Red Swan and also leave enough time for it to reorient itself on a course back to Earth before hitting the wall?”

 

“Ahhh,” purrs Rosslyn. She spends a few moments performing astronomical calculations. “Yes, Commander Jenkins. That is possible. The optimum scenario has a Leyton Drive explosion that would actually propel the shuttle past the oncoming Red Swan as it slows. This gives the Red Swan ample time to turn around, build up speed, and recover the shuttle on its way back to Earth. Another pause. “Commander Jenkins, you understand that in order to detonate the Montmartre by overheating the engines, you must be physically present in the bridge to override my safety protocols.”

 

“Yes, Rosslyn. I understand.”

*****

I assemble the crew once again in the dining room and explain to them my plan. They shuffle uncomfortably in their chairs for a moment and then Padak says, “To be truthful, Commander, the three of us have also come to the same conclusion. We just never believed you would approve it.”

 

“Well, consider it officially approved. You have one hour to pack the shuttle with your personal belongings along with a couple of weeks’ worth of food. The sooner you launch, the better the odds are of your rescue. Get moving.”

 

While the crew is off busily packing, I make my way to the bridge. Rosslyn pre-programs the shuttle’s flight path. I send a data packet to the Red Swan’s ship mind. It orders the revival of Commander Strausburg as well as containing all the maneuvering instructions needed to avoid the wall, rendezvous with the shuttle, and return to Earth. There’s nothing to do now except wait for the crew to finish loading the shuttle.

 

The intercom crackles. “Commander Jenkins, we are ready for launch.”

 

“Very well,” I tell them. “Rosslyn. Launch the shuttle. Let me know when they’re in position.”

 

“Yes, Commander Jenkins.”

 

The intercom crackles once more. It’s Sung. “Commander, I just wanted to let you know that I still hate your guts.”

 

I can’t tell if she’s being serious or getting sentimental on me. “Good,” I reply. “That means you won’t experience any psychological damage from this incident.” The connection goes dead.

 

I’ve got some time to kill, so I kick back, relax, and put my feet up on the console. “Rosslyn. Play the Chopin please.”

 

“Yes, Commander Jenkins.”

 

I try imagining what it must have been like for sea-faring explorers of the past, like Cook and Columbus, sailing off into uncharted waters and unknown dangers. After some time, Rosslyn interrupts my reverie.

 

“Commander Jenkins. The shuttle has now reached a safe position.”

 

It’s time. Oh well, the captain always goes down with his ship. “Rosslyn. Disable all safety protocols. Bring the engines up to full power.”

 

“Aye aye, captain.”

Richard Wolff: Something BIG is About to Happen in the U.S…”

Today I read that a country exists where –

  1. Only goverment approved haircuts are allowed (18 for women and 10 for men) any other haircut is illegal.
  2. If a person commits suicide or crime then his family upto 3 generations are punished
  3. There is powercut every night. Need permission to use electricity.
  4. only three television channels for people to choose from and all of them are government-controlled.
  5. Making international call is illegal (may also get killed for it) even leaving country is illegal. Any means to connect outside to the country is banned. There’s no social media.
  6. Sanitary pads, Jeans Internet, Religious practices Owning private property or car, international travel is banned
  7. Choice of the profession of an individual is decided by the government based on the country’s needs.
  8. Any tourist who enters the country is closely monitored by the government throughout the trip. Each tourist is assigned a guide who accompanies him throughout the trip. If someone leaves their group or tries to talk to a local, they will be arrested. Along with this, tourists are taken only to certain places and along certain routes. Tourists visiting the country have to deposit their phones and computers and are allowed to take them back only before returning.
  9. If house is on fire then saving president’s potrait is priority over saving own children and can cause death penalty
  10. Very limited and restricted use of phones (cell phones not mobile phones) and internet (intranet – govt regularised) only 28 websites may be accessed under government supervision. The list of people with Internet access includes political leaders and their families, students attending elite schools, and the military’s cyber-warfare department. Only state-sanctioned operating system Red Star OS, designed in country, is allowed to use and not the standard Windows or Mac. Wi-Fi has been banned from use at all national embassies worldwide.
  11. The government chooses where people can live depending on their relationship with the state. Living in the capital needs government permission.
  12. The government restrictions allow only one in a hundred people to use a car.

Interesting but terrifying.

Nana’s Stuffed Bell Peppers

I made these last night. They cook on top of the stove instead of the oven. That way you don’t heat up the house. My Nana used a cast iron Dutch oven. It was a huge thing and a pepper never tasted as good as it came out of that ol’ iron pot!

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Ingredients

  • 2 pounds ground beef
  • 4 slices bread, torn into small pieces
  • 2 teaspoons onion powder
  • Salt and pepper
  • 10 large bell peppers
  • 2 cups ketchup
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • Water

Instructions

  1. Mix ground beef, bread, onion powder and salt and pepper to taste.
  2. Split peppers in half lengthwise. Remove seeds and discard. Stuff with meat mixture.
  3. Lay in cast iron Dutch oven (I use my big skillet).
  4. Mix ketchup, sugar and Worcestershire sauce and pour over the tops of peppers.
  5. Pour water into the pot to bring up to 1 inch from the bottom of the peppers. Bring to a boil over high heat. Cover and reduce heat to simmer, cook 20 minutes. Check water level to see that peppers do not stick, adding more water if necessary. If peppers are tender, remove from Dutch oven to serving platter and serve.

Yes they are so poor they have 60% driving the latest EVs and the US has less than 3%. Yes they are so poor 99% used digital money without carrying one cent in coins or notes today! 100% of Yanks still carry cash around! Yes they are so poor they have a hard time choosing between Bentley and Roll Royce? Or Mercedes and BMW! Yes they are so poor there are more Starbucks in China than there us in USA and for every 10 new Starbucks in China one is being planned in US! They are so poor they travelled in 400km an hour high speed train! They are so poor there is ZERO homeless to 2.5 million Americans livin in the streets!

I think you should finally admit that you are so poor in brain cells to asked this question! It is too obvious to the world.

Gambling revenues.

Macau government got rid of it’s gaming monopoly and issued six licenses including Wynn and Sands (Venetian).

When Sands opened its first casino which cost US $260 million, the crowd broke the doors! They recovered their investment in eight months.

With that success,they built the Venetian, a property three times the size of the Vegas property. It opened during the third week of August, yet tourist numbers went up by 24% for the entire month. Gaming revenues were unbelievable.

All six operaters have similar operations.

In 2005 we had 12,000 hotel rooms. Now we have over 42,000. Hyper growth. New hotels are 2000–3000 rooms.

Macau has 44 casinos and revenue of 5–6 times that of Vegas.

The government charges for each license, Charges rent for land lease and gets 39% of gross gaming revenue in taxes.

That’s why Macau is rich.

I used to have a boss that wanted a new Corvette. He waited to go to the dealership until the middle of winter when it had snowed like a foot the night before. Many of the city businesses had closed their offices, including ours. We had a “free day off.”

He KNEW exactly which car he wanted, and that dealership had one. So he went down there. Due to all the snow, the dealership was empty of customer — NOBODY was car shopping that day.

He pretended like he wasn’t sure which Corvette he wanted. He got the eager sales guy to clear the snow off of one, so he could sit in it and check it out.

“I dunno…. I like it, but do you have another one with the XYZ features?”

Clear off another car, sit in that one, chat with the sales guy for 15 minutes

“I dunno…. I like this one better, but do you have one in Red?”

Clear off another car, and chat another 15 minutes.

He farted around for more than THREE HOURS with that salesman, pretending he couldn’t make up his mind about which one to buy. The entire time, the car he really did want was RIGHT THERE on the lot.

He wore that poor guy ragged, jacking around all day. He made the guy clear off every single ‘vette they had, which was like 20. By the time they started talking price the sales guy was already PLENTY TIRED of this shit, and the negotiations had just begun.

My boss got the exact car he wanted at the EMPLOYEE DISCOUNT price, plus the factory incentives, plus some extra shit thrown in for free.

A Chinook is obsolete in today’s warfare context

Yes during the Vietnam War and those older wars, a Chinook made sense to transport heavy equipment and men from a safe zone to a war zone

The enemy didn’t have Air Defense and certainly not guided air defense with missiles

Today?

Even the Houthis can blow up a Chinook with a handful of limited air defense missiles

A Chinook is a lumbering elephant that is easy enough for a basic drone to attack and destabilize and cause to crash

Neither the Russians nor the Chinese have any use for the Chinook or its design

The Russians move on land and transport their equipment on land

Same for the Chinese

Neither need Lift Choppers because neither would ever target a Nation that is fighting with Guerilla Tactics


Attack Choppers

That’s what Russia wants and has

Like the KA-52

Rapid movement, Rapid assault and Rapid retreat

Tough for a Drone to latch onto and too much of a blur to lock on and blow up with an Air Defense Missile without accuracy

The tale of the small skull

Despite being attacked and labeled incessantly as wumao and commie lapdog, I don’t consider myself pro-china.

I am first and foremost pro-singapore. This is where I was born, and I fully intend to die here, an island I have sworn to defend.

I live right in the middle of the Anglophone echo chamber. Singaporeans are plugged directly into the mainstream news circuit as English speakers.

It is not an exaggeration I am surrounded by brethren who have been conditioned by decades of negativity fed by the news circuit.

You may not like China and the mainland Chinese. Trust me when I say I understand. My wife insists on banning Huawei phones from the home because these devices “send data back to China”.

And that is why I carry a Samsung. Guys who are married quickly learn the meaning of “no end to it”. The tomorrow threatened never fails to arrive.

So why am I writing about China?

Hate China all you want. But hate China and the Chinese for the right reasons.

Otherwise, mindless hate will only exacerbate the risk of war, as public consensus of China as THE enemy and THE threat solidifies.

The greatest arms race of the 21st century is brewing at our doorstep in East Asia. Hundreds of billions in strategic weapon systems and trillions in defense spending. Meanwhile, an economic war is intensifying, threatening to blow up the livelihoods of billions in East Asia.

It is pertinent to inform east Asia that the health of China is central to peace and prosperity of the region. China isn’t an abstract concept or a faraway land, because decisions in Beijing are intimately entwined with our livelihoods.

I continue to speak out against the demonization of China and the Chinese, because the real threat is the hegemony of the United States. But there must first be awareness and understanding of who the Chinese are, what they are facing, and why they are not bowing to hegemony.

My time on quora is but a token effort.

I very much want my daughter to inherit a peaceful tomorrow, one where the color of her skin does not condemn to a lifetime of discrimination meant only for yellow people.

Firstly, do not count on it. The United States could very well be victorious when fighting Russia, plus China, plus Iran, plus North Korea.

You never know.

Ah. The neocons believe so. And you just gotta believe them. For after all they have first-class seating waiting for them in Heaven.

But most [1] serious students of modern combat, who are also [2] aware of Chinese history, and who have [3] also been to modern contemporaneous China, pretty much everyone is in perfect harmony and complete agreement that China would emerge the victor.

Not just the experienced “people in the know”, but also American military think tanks. Such as RAND, and the Naval War College. In all cases, they advise NOT to engage China in a hot war.

So it is a unanimous consensus or shared agreement among all that China would be the victor in a hot conflict.

But…

There are a number of rising tides of dispute to these assertions.

The first are the rabid neocon cabal; who are religious zealots (for the most part) and who have an unwavering belief in “American exceptionalism”. This belief is that all one needs is “faith” and “unwavering belief” that Jesus (the Lord and Savior) has blessed the United States, and being so blessed; is immune from ever being destroyed. They control most of Washington DC “Deep State”. They believe, in their hearts, that the United States is immune from harm.

The Second is a propaganda feed-back loop. The neocons have made arrangements to fund an anti-China narrative in all English and American (and proxy) publications. This has been active since 2008, and has changed English-speaking public opinion against China. This is a negative feed-back loop as those decision makers inside of the Washington Beltway believe their own lies.

Since these two groups control the vast bulk of the decisions being made in Washington DC, we all (in unison) watch in horror as the United States places it’s various efforts in prepared positions for an assault upon China.

Well…

Are the neocons right, or are the military think tanks right?

They both see China, and I like to believe that they study China, yet they both come with completely different conclusions. Which is really a “head scratcher”. Don’t you think?

That’s a good question, and perhaps the actual issue behind this question.

Let’s spend some time learning about China from a military perspective.

HISTORY

It is well established that China has a solid 6000 years of the people identifying themselves as Chinese. It is also well known that this is only what we can read. China goes back much further than that. Latest archaeological discoveries place populated cities back to 200,000 years ago. And during all those years, do you know what China was doing?

They were fighting.

China has the oldest known civilization, and the oldest civilization with near continuous fighting. The Chinese know war. In all of it’s various forms. And when the archeologists started digging in the 200,000 year old Chinese settlement, do you know what they found?

Evidence of large scale war.

In fact, the Chinese were perfecting large-scale military battle involving thousands of men and horse, along with coordinated attacks when the earliest proto-Europeans were hiding in caves, and running from Neanderthals.

And when Robert Greene wrote his massive tome: The 33 Strategies of War, he used example after example of techniques that the Chinese have perfected over the many centuries of fighting.

MILITARY SOCIETY

Because of the massive span of time of fighting, the Chinese have evolved into a rugged and capable people. And with the torrent of endless wars, they developed a society of survival. This, of course, evolved into various forms of discipline and martial training; the Chinese people have created a Chinese-version of ancient Sparta.

GENGHIS KHAN

When Genghis Khan moved out of the Mongolian lowlands, his first order of business was to fight the Chinese. And it took years. For after all, the “Great Wall of China” was built specifically to keep out the Golden Horde from China.

But, you know, eventually, the great Khan captured China and integrated it into his kingdom. And from that moment on, the Chinese assimilated the Mongols. Resistance was futile. And so, while the European history books tell of the fierce Golden Horde seizing most of Asia, what they minimize was the fantastical role that the Chinese sappers played in the destruction of all the Middle Eastern, and European cities. These cities were not destroyed by Genghis Khans horseback riders, but by Chinese engineers, sappers and assault troops.

As you can see by the map below (at 1300 a.d.) the Chinese Empire and the Mongol Empire was one and the same.

Genghis Khan empire assimulated by China
Genghis Khan empire assimulated by China

China is the red outline, with the Mongol Empire in purple.

Today, the discipline handed down from generation after generation of Chinese follows a direct lineage to the bloodline of the Genghis Khan Golden Horde. As does the contemporaneous Russian living in Asia.

MODERN MILITARY EQUIPMENT

One of the great anti-China propagandized narratives is that China uses conscripts, out of date; hand-me-down weapons from the former Soviet Union, and is devoid of “real” leadership. This narrative is repeated with great gusto and passion in Conservative publications throughout the West.

But it’s all a big lie.

China was a peer competitor with the United States and it’s proxies in 1950. Since then, it has focused its efforts and redoubled down on creating the most dangerous, lethal and strongest military in the world. And it has been successful.

China today is Peer-level with Russia, and above-peer with the United States.

In fact, China has entire arrays of weapons systems that are absolutely unheard of outside of Asia. They have developed simple, rugged and easy to manufacture systems all domestically made. From the top-line stealth fighters (J-20) and stealth bombers to the (*hush top secret*) Tic-Tak UFO craft that enjoys zipping around American Aircraft carrier battle groups.

China has drone aircraft carriers, search-and-detonate hand grenades, sonic, and laser cannons, terminator robots that fly into the battle field, swarms of robot sharks and a wide selection of nuclear based munitions.

I have written numerous posts on these very interesting weapons systems, but there seems to be a cabal of folk that don’t want to hear anything about Chinese military. They just want to believe that they are just poorly educated peasants with old SKS rifles.

CO-TRAINING WITH RUSSIA

Russia is obtaining some terrific experience in the battlefield in Ukraine. And this experience has caused them to update their battle and combat doctrines. And do you know who they share this information with?

They share and train with the Chinese PLA.

Everything that the Russians learn is shared immediately in real time with China.

WROTE THE BOOKS ON FIGHTING

The vast majority of text and books on how to fight wars, strategies, and techniques are all Chinese. And the way that they are written are timeless. You can follow then whether you are an archer, or a battle tank commander. China KNOWS how to fight wars.

In the realm of strategy and war, ancient Chinese literature is rich with timeless wisdom and insights that continue to inspire scholars and military minds to this day. Here are ten notable Chinese books on strategy and warfare that have left a lasting impact:

1. “The Art of War” by Sun Tzu – A classic treatise on military strategy, tactics, and leadership.

2. “The Thirty-Six Stratagems” – A collection of ancient Chinese strategies and tactics for use in warfare and business.

3. “The Book of Five Rings” by Miyamoto Musashi – Though Japanese, this book offers profound insights on strategy and martial arts.

4. “The Water Margin” (also known as “Outlaws of the Marsh”) – A classic Chinese novel that includes themes of strategy and military tactics.

5. “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” – A historical novel that offers insights into military strategy and political intrigue during the Three Kingdoms period.

6. “The Book of Lord Shang” – A work on statecraft and governance that delves into strategies for maintaining power and order.

7. “The Tao of War” by Wang Chen – A military treatise that combines Taoist philosophy with strategic principles.

8. “The Way of the General” by Ts’ao Kung – A guide on military strategy and leadership.

9. “The Spring and Autumn Annals” – A historical text that includes accounts of military strategies employed during the Spring and Autumn period.

10. “The Seven Military Classics of Ancient China” – A collection of seven influential Chinese military texts that cover various aspects of strategy, tactics, and leadership.

These works offer a glimpse into the profound wisdom and strategic thinking of ancient Chinese military thought, providing valuable lessons that continue to resonate in the modern world.

LARGEST MILITARY

Oh, I forgot. China has the largest military in the world. Not only in manpower, but in combat trained troops. In auxiliary troops. In reservists. And in homeland defense. It is so huge that if you took the entire militaries of the West all together, China’s military still dwarfs them in numbers, training and size.

RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

One of the Achilles Heels of China has been (historically) to rely on sea shipping for it’s raw materials, foodstuffs, and advanced technology. But that is a relic of the past.

China trades with all of it’s neighbors; including Russia and wants for nothing. All the ocean routes around the world can be blocked and China will still survive because of all the land routes, rail connections, road connections that it has forged over the last two decades.

To think that China can be blockaded is a childish fantasy made by ideological fanatic infants with zero intelligence and pumped with (can only be described as) pure and simple stupidity.

WAR CHEST

To conduct a war, you need something called a “war chest”.

A “war chest” refers to a reserve of funds or resources set aside for use in times of conflict or emergency, particularly in the context of military operations or strategic planning. This term is often used figuratively to describe a stockpile of money, supplies, or assets that can be deployed to support a particular cause, campaign, or endeavor, much like a chest filled with provisions for battle. In a broader sense, a “war chest” can also symbolize preparedness, resilience, and strategic foresight in facing challenges or pursuing objectives.

Since the 1970’s the United States has relied on debt to finance it’s wars. This is directly tied to the demise of the USD and increased internal inflation.

China doesn’t have this problem. And is fully able to light long-duration wars with anyone and not have any significant changes to it’s domestic population.

LARGEST NAVY

China has the largest Navy in the world, and they operate modern cutting-edge vessels. These vessels are equipped with sonic and rail gun technologies and are very formidable. Additionally, they are concentrated along the Chinese borders. They are not spread around the world like the United States Navy is.

LOGISTICS

The Chinese military is designed (primarily) as a defensive organization. They are not designed for “force projection”. As China does not invade anyone. This is contrary to the American Western narrative of the “evil communists gobbling up and invading everyone”. They simply do not have anything near the invasion fleets, and systems that the United States has.

All this talk about a “Taiwan Invasion” is simply just bullshit and bluster. China does not have that ability. It cannot land a huge contingent of people on islands. Oh sure, it has one or two simple Naval Vessels, but is nowhere near the capacity to invade anyone.

That being said, because of this, to fight China is to fight in and around China. And that means, to so so in China’s “backyard”. A nation that has spent the last 500 years building underground bunkers and defensive parameters is not going to allow anyone to fuck with them. Every parking garage has blast doors and reinforced concrete walls. Every region and town has built-in CNC centers. Every comm link is redundant.

Oh, and China is a nation armed with a “zillion” missiles.

All sizes, types and shapes. Even the elementary school Children train with the missiles, the drones and basic combat skills.

If you go anywhere near it with hostile intent, you will be erased like God’s own hand. China will cleanse the land and it will become pristine; primeval.

Blessed emptiness and void for the world to see.

CUTTING EDGE TECHNOLOGY

China and Russia operate “cutting edge” technology. Most of their military technology is so advanced that the United States won’t be able to field comparable systems for decades. This includes the hypersonic missiles, but much, much more. From the novel 055 vessels to the latest hand cannons, the technology is unmatched outside of Asia.

EDUCATION & TRAINING

Everyone in China gets formalized military training. It starts in first grade, and continues year after year. Formal “boot camp” is traditionally held during Middle School, and then another placement later on in their educational career.

This is handled regionally; some like Guanxi provide “American SEAL” level training starting at Kindergarten. While others such as Shanghai concentrate on discipline, marching, and tasks such as bed making, and small squad level tactics.

This is a recent development. This became the norm after 2013, and was fully implemented nationally by 2016.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYZ2qI3qJu8

Short video. Worth you time to watch all three minutes.

ALLIED WITH RUSSIA

Oh, and to fight China is to fight Russia.

Russia and China are “joined at the hip”. They are a complete unified block. You cannot isolate China. China and Russia act as a unified team together. This is a formalized reality. One that was publicly announced in 2022.

NUCLEAR ARMED

China has nuclear weapons.

The idea that China only has 400 nuclear warheads is a propagandized narrative that has ZERO basis on reality. When you read the “studies” on this, look at their assumptions. “China doesn’t have the manufacturing capability.” Or, “China doesn’t know how to… and would take decades to…”. These “white papers” are a living and true example of “wishful thinking” that I have ever seen.

More accurate counts are somewhere between 4000 to 5000 nuclear warheads.

Oh, and they employ neutron-enhanced weaponry on the tactical scale. Erase the population, then move in the city.

Oh, and they do not employ “surgical strikes”. As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, they believe in “Shotgun nukes”. Which is to lace and bombard a target with ten nuclear weapons for a much wider dispersal and greater damage.

MANUFACTURER FOR THE WORLD

Finally, to fight China is to empty all the store shelves in the world.

No more aspirin, toilet paper, toothpaste. No more cell phones, spare parts for cars.

Consumer-based societies (of which the United States is one of the largest) will collapse. Thus to fight China is to have your entire internal domestic society implode.

Now, the neocons say that “facts do not matter”. Their faith in the divine blessings from God and that Jesus will protect the United States is unwavering. Therefore, they are pressing and planning and setting up conditions to attack China.

One excuse after the other.

But let me tell you, that when that day happens, it will be like a light switch. 0 to 1000 in 0.1 seconds. China will go from peace into “slaughter everyone on sight” mode.

War is not a game, and idiots should not be placed in charge of governing anything. Every effort should be devoted for peaceful resolutions of conflict.

But you know…

… there’s no arguing with lunatics. And sometimes the only thing that you can do with a Mad Dog is to put him down.

Wider Middle East War and US Imperial Decline

Cheesy meatballs

Cheese balls
Cheese balls

Cheesy Meatballs are juicy and tender, simmered in a rustic homemade tomato sauce. Topped with melted mozzarella cheese and serve over spaghetti for a delicious dinner!

The best meatball recipe starts with the most tender meatballs, browned in a hot skillet to seal in the juices and get crispy, golden edges. Soaking up rustic tomato sauce flavours underneath a golden blanket of melted mozzarella cheese, Cheesy Meatballs is an easy dinner recipe that will be a hit with your family!

Cheesy Meatball RECIPE IMAGE 2
Cheesy Meatball RECIPE IMAGE 2

MEATBALL RECIPE

Dry meatballs are a thing of the past with our recipe. While most nonna’s hold a secret to get the perfect meatballs, some people just can’t seem to get it right. Cooking dry meatballs that are often times flavourless and hard to swallow, I agree with most in that meatballs can be hard to master. It’s easier to buy cooked meatballs in throw them in a sauce.

Even though it can be hard to get the texture and taste right out of a humble meatball, I’m here to tell you it’s super easy. All you need is the right meatball recipe!

We have a trick up our apron sleeves (or straps), that make these meatballs so moist and juicy and absolutely the best meatballs we’ve ever eaten. You will love our cheesy meatballs!

HOW TO MAKE MEATBALLS

It all starts with your meat mixture. There are two key elements crucial to a good meatball recipe:

  • Texture
  • Flavour

Without these two details, meatballs are bland, dry and not worth the effort that goes into making them.

Bread soaked in milk instead of dry breadcrumbs is the secret to getting juicy, moist meatballs every single time. The same method we use for our Meatloaf recipe.

Meatballs also need to be well-seasoned. We use salt and a crushed bouillon cube to get the flavours going, as well as aromatics like onion and garlic.

Herbs are just as important to get those classic Italian flavours in each bite. Our recipe calls for fresh parsley and dried oregano and basil, purely taking seasonal availability into account. Feel free to mix it up with your own favourite combination. Mint, tarragon, thyme or marjoram, plus a pinch or two of nutmeg adds a subtle flavour. You decide.

Eggs are also added to bind the meat, bread and parmesan together, making them light and spongy.

Cheesy Meatballs IMAGE 65
Cheesy Meatballs IMAGE 65

HOMEMADE MEATBALLS

The next step to incredibly tender meatballs is mixing your meat mixture until the ingredients are just incorporated, with your hands. Use gloves if you have an aversion to touching raw meat, or mix lightly a wooden spoon. Full pieces of ground meat should still be visible.

Roll your meatballs with lightly oiled hands to prevent the meat from sticking to your fingers, while adding a little extra moisture into each meatball. Then place each meatball onto a lined plate or baking sheet. This just helps keep your kitchen stay clean without creating too much of a mess, and prevents your balls from rolling all over your bench top.

HOW TO COOK MEATBALLS

If there’s one thing my father passed down to me from the Italian side of his family, it’s never to poach or boil beef. There’s nothing like the aromas and flavours of meat hitting a hot skillet or pan. Sizzling first to get a perfect browned crust before adding in sauce. You won’t be cooking them all the way through in this step.

Space the meatballs out evenly into your skillet or pan by cooking in batches of three, instead of throwing them all in the pan together. This avoids the meat poaching or simmering in its own juices.

Rustic, homemade meatballs are never perfectly rounded, especially when seared first. Don’t worry if they begin to flatten in the pan. The blanket of melted cheese will cover them.

Cheesy Meatballs IMAGE 6
Cheesy Meatballs IMAGE 6

MEATBALL SAUCE

Our sauce recipe is easy, starting with onion and garlic to get those aromatics in. Tomato sauce, puree or passata is simmered with tomato paste, herbs, chili flakes (if using), salt and pepper. Add a pinch of sugar to cut through some of the bitterness, or use ¼ teaspoon of aluminium free baking soda to help neutralise the acid.

It’s really hard to overcook meatballs in your sauce, since they’re simmering in liquid. Braise them for about 15-20 minutes, turning the meatballs in the sauce to get those flavours absorbing evenly into the meat while simmering. I also suggest stirring the sauce to prevent it from burning on the bottom.

Top with cheese and finish them off under the broiler in your oven.

If you don’t have a broiler, continue simmering them until he cheese has melted.

There you have it! Cheesy meatballs!

Cheesy Meatballs IMAGE 53
Cheesy Meatballs IMAGE 53

Be the Rufus

75-year-old Leonard Bullock and his wife Dorothy have lived across the street from a railroad yard in Pendleton, Oregon since 1982. And over the years, they haven’t always had the money to maintain their house.

main qimg 37c5ebe6e08b600da401e4d8d2af467e
main qimg 37c5ebe6e08b600da401e4d8d2af467e

A railway worker named Josh Cyganik has waved to Leonard on his porch almost every day for the last four years, but never actually talked to him until last month, after he heard two teenagers making FUN of the place.

They were joking that it looked so bad, someone should just burn it down. And Josh knew Leonard heard them too, when he saw the look on his face.

So a few days later, he asked Leonard if he and some friends could repaint the place for him, and got a hardware store to donate supplies. Then he posted about it on Facebook, and more than a HUNDRED PEOPLE showed up that Saturday to help.

They painted the house . . . fixed up the porch . . . made it wheelchair accessible . . . and bought everything they need to replace the ROOF, which is still in the works.

Josh says one of his friends drove by around 10:00 P.M. that night, and Leonard and Dorothy were both still out on the porch smiling.

Pepe Escobar: Putin’s DEVASTATING Kursk Trap SHOCKS NATO & Ukraine, WWIII Next?

AMERICAN ANSWER

There are BIG differences between the services in this, and I mean the cultural gap is huge.

The American Navy descended almost directly from the British Navy and is hugely class-conscious. Officers and enlisted don’t mix. Officers, speak to chiefs and chiefs direct the men. There aren’t just two different messes, there are three — officers, senior enlisted and junior enlisted.

There is a reason for everything that persists. Life is very fragile on a ship—take a nuclear submarine: a wrong move kills everyone aboard. Familiarity breeds contempt. Better to let the Captain remain a godlike figure rather than Fred who likes knitting to relieve stress. A little psychological distance is a good thing.

The Army was heavily influenced by the proto-Germans (Prussians) and the French— a lot more egalitarian than the Navy, but still conscious of rank. We eat together in the field, there is only one mess hall, though we may be at separate tables. There was only one mess hall in Iraq — Generals and Privates ate in the same space.

The Air Force is directly descended from the army, and the least rank conscious part of the army, aviation. Their enlisted are smart, they are technicians, and they keep the planes in the air. The Air Force uniforms are more egalitarian, I do not think there is any problem with an air crew sitting and eating together in the air force.

So I think you need to calibrate your expectations to the service you are discussing.

I have not. But my company made a three-part blunder that might qualify:

Part one: we had this very senior employee, about 70 years old, who was highly experienced with one customer system that was quite old, but still in use. Since we only needed one person who understood the ancient technology, nobody ever thought to assign someone for him to mentor in case he decided to retire. It wasn’t a major profit center, but the company made a nice bit of coin and kept a big customer happy by maintaining the antique.

He loved working on that old system, and had a fantastic relationship with that customer. He was long-since eligible for pension and didn’t need to work—the job was a paid hobby for him and kept him moving, thinking, and interacting socially. He did his job, caused no problems, was always ready to lend a hand or advice to younger engineers. Which of course was pretty much everybody. But he wasn’t looking to get ahead, get promoted or anything.

Part two: being a large corporation, we had a performance evaluation system that ranked people into four categories, from outstanding to needs improvement. And since there were lots of people, HR & finance took a statistical view which included a specific shape of the “bell curve”: So many people (%) in the top tier, so many in the next tier, etc. This was enforced at the 100-person level of the organization. So if we had a pretty good crew in one area of the business, they’d end up not being allowed to rank some people as high as we thought they deserved, while some other area had people who were actually not quite as good but ranked higher. None of the managers close enough to know the people liked it, but we had to do it. That ranking was the strongest factor in raises and promotions. So by mutual agreement, this amiable, useful old guy was always ranked in the bottom tier, freeing up a better ranking for someone who might otherwise get hosed.

Part three: HR came up with a policy that anyone who’d been ranked in the bottom tier more than a certain number of years in a row, was automatically either demoted (with a pay cut), or laid off. It was the employee’s choice whether they got laid off or demoted but one or the other was going to happen.

You can see where this is going. HR called the guy in—without consulting his management—and offered to let him keep his job by accepting a demotion. As a long time employee, if laid off he was entitled to 6 month’s severance pay (as a lump sum) and could immediately apply for pension payments. So he took the layoff right on the spot. HR hadn’t expected that for some reason and tried to change his mind. Now, another bit of policy was any employee being laid off got walked out directly from HR—management would then be notified to have someone clean out his desk and return personal items. So by lunchtime he was home, retired, applying for pension and thinking how to spend the windfall. It was later in the day before his management found out he was gone. The customer was extremely unhappy. Before management could even begin to decide who would take over the maintenance contract, the customer cancelled it. They explained that the former employee was going to work directly for them as a technical consultant, which meant his hourly rate was nearly tripled—he was getting the “overhead” and profit the company used to get.

He Laced Her Drink & Let The Football Team Run a Train On Her!

Daily Shorpy

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Karl P. Schmidt, a renowned American herpetologist, chose to dedicate his final moments to science when faced with death, demonstrating remarkable dedication to his work.

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In September 1957, the Lincoln Park Zoo brought a 30-inch snake to the Chicago Natural History Museum, seeking help with its identification. Schmidt, who was highly respected in the field of herpetology and had several species named after him, agreed to examine the snake.

On September 25, Schmidt observed that the snake was African, with bright patterns and a head shape similar to a boomslang—a venomous snake from Sub-Saharan Africa. However, he was unsure if it was a boomslang because the snake’s “anal plate was undivided,” a feature inconsistent with that species.

While examining the snake, Schmidt made a fateful decision. He picked it up for a closer look, but the snake suddenly bit him on the left thumb, leaving two small puncture wounds. Instead of seeking medical help, Schmidt, ever the dedicated scientist, began documenting the effects of the venom in his journal.

  • “I took it from Dr. Robert Inger without thinking of any precaution, and it promptly bit me on the fleshy lateral aspect of the first joint of the left thumb,” Karl Schmidt wrote in his journal. “The mouth was widely opened and the bite was made with the rear fangs only, only the right fang entering to its full length of about 3 mm.”

Within 24 hours, he would be dead.

Schmidt may have underestimated the severity of the bite. He took a train home and continued noting his symptoms in detail:

-4:30 – 5:30 PM: Strong nausea, no vomiting. Took a suburban train trip.

– 5:30 – 6:30 PM:Experienced chills, shaking, fever of 101.7°F. Bleeding from the gums began around 5:30.

-8:30 PM: Ate two pieces of milk toast.

– 9:00 PM – 12:20 AM: Slept well. Urinated at 12:20 AM, mostly blood. Drank water at 4:30 AM, followed by violent nausea and vomiting. Felt better and slept until 6:30 AM.

The next morning, Schmidt carried on with his routine, eating breakfast and continuing to document the venom’s effects:

-September 26, 6:30 AM: Ate cereal, poached eggs on toast, applesauce, and coffee for breakfast. Noted continuous bleeding from the mouth and nose, though “not excessively.”

“Excessively” was the last word Schmidt wrote. After lunch, he vomited, called his wife, and soon became unresponsive. Despite attempts to revive him, Schmidt was pronounced dead at 3 PM, the cause being respiratory paralysis.

Boomslang venom is terrifyingly potent; just .0006 milligrams can kill a bird within minutes. The venom causes internal bleeding, leading to a slow and agonizing death. Schmidt’s autopsy revealed that his lungs, eyes, heart, kidneys, and brain were all hemorrhaging.

The Chicago Daily Tribune later revealed that Schmidt had been advised to seek medical help but refused, saying, “No, that would upset the symptoms.” Some say Schmidt’s death was a tragic case of curiosity overcoming caution. Others believe that, knowing the antivenom was only available in Africa, Schmidt simply accepted his fate, continuing his life’s work until the very end.

You be the judge.

PART 2 – Wife Of 7 Years Opened Our Marriage Without My Knowledge, Has BREAKDOWN When I Toss Her…

 

Two Deaths and a Glowing Plant

Submitted into Contest #247 in response to: Set your story on a spaceship exploring the far reaches of space when something goes wrong. view prompt

Eyza H

This story contains themes or mentions of physical violence, gore, or abuse.

“How much longer till we land?” Joan complained lazily as she swung her seat around, swaying her arms in their heavy armor.  “Not our fault you were the first to gear up sweetheart– you should’ve waited a bit before putting your suit on” a man commented with a sly smile from behind her. “Don’t call me that!” she chided as she looked him, although with a small, knowing smirk.“Alright, you guys better strap in now. You know how it gets, and we don’t know the atmosphere of this planet yet” a stern voice sounded from the head of the small space ship, which was only carrying three passengers. “Roger that, Sir!” Joan said as she straightened in her seat, and adjusted its position. Pressing a button on her right caused multiple belts to wrap around her, keeping her securely in place. The other two men followed the same process, and readied themselves for the landing. “This is the part I always hate the most…” she thought as she felt her throat go dry. The man seated on her left was gazing at her steadily. “Just count to 15 and it’ll be over, yeah?” Something about the softness in his brown eyes calmed her, and she relaxed hands, which had tightened into fists. “Thanks, Nick. Kash, estimated time of arrival?” “Time, 98:34:02. Year, 3010. I’ve already logged it.” With that, the three began their descent onto a planet not yet explored by humans, 30 light years away from Earth.“Well, that wasn’t so bad now, was it?” Nick commented as he pushed a button to unstrap his belts. Joan got up slowly. “I’m still nauseous. Also, it was way more than 15 seconds, liar.” Nick let out a small, hearty laugh, as he patted Joan’s head affectionately under his large, gloved hand. “Come on guys, time to head out.” Kash commanded as he adjusted his headgear. Although he usually spoke in a somber manner, the other two were able to detect a slight curiosity and excitement, which laced his words. “Let’s go, Captain!”The three stepped out onto what seemed to be a large, empty barren land. The ground was a reddish pink color, littered with rocks and boulders of different sizes, with a backdrop of a turquoise sky. There were no clouds, although there seemed to be layers of some sort of mist mixing on the horizon, with bands of yellow, orange, and a light grey. The contrast of the deep pink ground against the strikingly vibrant blue sky was breathtaking. The three looked around at first with some degree of uncertainty, before looking at each other as smiles spread wide across their faces, even Kash’s. “Isn’t this… The most beautiful one we’ve been to yet?” Joan commented excitedly as she looked at Nick and Kash. The two hummed in agreement, with Nick adding “Of course you’d like it the best – the ground here is all pink!” Joan bounced airily towards him, and gave a small nudge. “Let’s get to business now, shall we? We can’t be here more than an hour. I’m going to begin our timer now – lets stay within the prescribed radius – don’t you two dare wonder off.” Kash instructed while fidgeting with some buttons on his right arm. “You’re the one who wonders off the most, Kash!” Joan laughed. Kash looked at her sternly through the transparent screen of his suit, before breaking into a gentle smile. “That’s no way to speak to your Captain. Let’s get to it, now.” With this, he began taking long strides away from the ship. Nick and Joan looked at each other as he left. “Just us two left now, huh?” Nick spoke into his intercom, with a smirk. Joan pushed him away lightly once more. “Focus on the job, idiot. I’m going in this direction.” She said as she pointed towards the right. “Alright, Miss.” Just as Joan began hopping away from him, he grabbed her arm and turned towards her. “Keep talking on the intercom so I know you’re ok, alright?” The lightness of his voice had now been replaced with concern, as his mouth straightened into a serious line. Joan gave him a sweet smile in response. “You do the same.” The two gazed at each other for another second before departing in separate directions. If they had known that this would be the last time they would see each other, perhaps they would’ve gazed into one another’s eyes for a second or two longer.-The following report has been compiled over a period of 5 years following the incident at Planet Y, where three of our astronauts tragically lost their lives in a series of events still shrouded in mystery. This is the first incident where astronauts have died have on a mission in 37 years – hence, the issue must be dealt with utmost severity, least we repeat the mistakes which led to this terrible outcome in the future.Within a space of 15 minutes of the landing on Planet Y, Joan Longwood, Nick Wrigh, and Kash Presnig were declared deceased. The following report is divided into three condensed components, following each of the astronauts, their logs from those 15 minutes, an analysis of what their logs could’ve meant – although this is mostly based on assumptions due to lack of factual evidence – and lastly, a summary of recommendations for the future to avoid any such incidents from occurring again.Kash PresnigKash Presnig was the Captain of the ship Orchid 367. He was an experienced man of 37, who had led multiple exploratory missions of this nature in the past. Nothing from the evidence collected indicates any mistake or wrongdoing on his part – the mission was led and landed successfully on Planet Y. He was updating his log, while diligently keeping track of his crew members. Unfortunately, he was the first to lose his life, within 12 minutes. The following passage recounts Kash’s logs in those minutes and his final few words as he tried to contact the space station.“Log.1. We have successfully landed on Planet Y. The land here is barren – there is no vegetation here, and the soil is dry and hard. It is of an odd pinkish red color, which has not yet been observed in any other planet. Rocks of varying sizes are scattered, although some seem to be unnaturally larger than others. The terrain is flat – there are no elevations or dips. The sky is a bright turquoise shade, with bands of gases layered one on top of the other. The identity of these gases is yet unknown.”“Log. 2. 30 meters from the ship. The terrain is still the same. Sample of the rocks and soil has been collected. There are no metals detected in the area. An odd fog is growing in the distance, about 10 meters away. Proceeding with caution.”“Log. 3. I have now stepped into an area covered with grey, yellow, and orange mist. It seems to be swirling around, although no wind was detected on the planet. Visibility is extremely low – Cannot see beyond a few meters ahead. The suit is unable to identify the gases – however, an absence of water vapor is noted. Gas sample has been collected for further analysis. Retreating to base.”“Log. 4. The mist is growing thicker, worsening visibility. It seems to be spreading from this point, outwards to the surrounding areas. No impact of the gas is notable – although it seems to swirl into oddly distinct shapes. Proceeding back urgently.”After the fourth log, Mr. Presnig contacted our headquarters directly – which has not occurred in 13 years. His panicked voice indicated that there was an issue which had to be dealt with immediately. The following are his words – with no amendments – excluding the responses of the team he spoke to at the time to get a concise account from his own narration.“Contacting… HQ… Kash Presnig speaking here. The mist… The gases, they are.. They are poisonous! I know the suit is impenetrable to any gas but I am sure… Yes, it has penetrated, somehow… I am having hallucinations of some sort. Yes, dammit, I am certain! Or else, why is there… why is there a man before me? A large man – no, an alien! Finally, we have found life – so far away… 50 light years…! Our dream, our mission has been realized! Yes… I am certain, it is a man, but he is… proceeding towards me at a high speed, or… no. He has slowed down. I can describe his face… It is alright, I am almost at the base, I think… His face… but his face, his glasses, his eyes, his nose… is this man… Me? It cannot… this.… it is!”

 

After this, the communication line with Mr. Presnig was cut. From his own words, as well as the autopsy report generated from his suit, we can conclude that Mr. Presnig’s assumptions of being impacted by a certain gas, or gases, had indeed not only caused hallucinations, but also poisoned his blood – he died within a minute of having inhaled the gas. How the gas penetrated his suit is still unknown, as no issues were found with the suit during testing. However, his death was not caused by gas poisoning.

 

This piece of evidence has been left confidential, and his family were not made aware of it, due to the highly sensitive nature of the issue. Mr. Presnig suffered a slash to his neck which almost entirely separated his head from his body, which was his cause of death. Had this not taken place, he would have indeed died of gas poisoning within 58 seconds. Source or cause of the slash are unknown.

 

Nick Wrigh

 

Nick Wrigh was a young and promising technical engineer of 28. He had been a part of several space missions before this, including 12 of exploratory nature. As this mission was deemed low risk, Mr. Wrigh was considered an ideal candidate to join the mission and sharpen his skills for the future. He was joined by his partner of two years, Joan Longwood, who had been on several missions with him before this one as well. Their families reported that the two had planned to get married upon their return, before this tragedy had taken place.

 

Mr. Wrigh died 13 minutes into his exploratory course, and had only registered 2 logs. However, pieces of his conversation with Ms. Logwood have been recorded, as well as his emergency call, which took place 37 seconds after Mr. Presnig had passed away. His last communication was with Ms. Longwood.

 

“Log.1. Landed successfully on Planet Y. The planet is beautiful – bare stretches of magenta with brown boulders and rocks, against an electric blue sky. There seem to be some gases layered on the horizon in shades of yellow and grey. Samples of rock and soil have been collected, as well as a piece of what seems to be an unidentified metal.”

 

“Log. 2. 40 meters from base. The rocks and boulders around me have grown huge – they are almost the size of small houses. They did not appear this large from a distance. If I look back, I cannot see our ship, as I am walking through a narrow path between large rocks covering my view. The rocks themselves are smooth, with sharp edges. I have tried to break a piece but failed, as they are extremely hard and dense.”

 

Mr. Wrigh did not submit any logs after this. The following pieces of conversation have been recorded between himself and Ms. Longwood 2 minutes before his death.

 

“J, this place is… the rocks are huge. Are they huge where you are as well?”

“No, it’s all flat here… huh, I don’t remember seeing any rocks that big when we landed.”

“I don’t know when they started getting bigger, but… it’s all I can see around me. They are beautiful, but a little…”

“Hah…Are you scared, Nicky?”

“Come on… anyone would be terrified if they saw massive rocks on an unexplored planet.”

“Just teasing!”

“Joan.”

“…Nick? Is everything alright?”

“Joan, the rocks… are moving.”

“How is that possible Nick? I don’t detect any movement on my radar for several kilometers around.”

“Joan, I swear, I feel like these rocks, they’re… moving in, towards me…”

“Nick, are you… come back. I’ll come back too.”

“J, there’s no path… I can’t see a path back. The rocks, they’ve all moved in!”

“Nick, I’m coming to you right now!”

“NO! Don’t, or you’ll also… Joan! I..”

“Nick? NICK? Can you hear me?”

 

After that, Mr. Wrigh made a call to the space station. He mentioned the large rocks which had seemed to be moving in to crush him. The personnel responding to him at the time told him to immediately go back to base, fearing his mental faculties had been compromised by the same gas which had poisoned Mr. Kresnig. They did not alert him about what had happened to Mr. Kresnig, thinking it would worsen his mental state. However, around 20 seconds after this communication ended, Mr. Wrigh had passed away, before making it back to base. His last exchange with Ms. Longwood is recorded below.

 

“Nick, where are you? I don’t see any huge rocks, Nick!”

“Joan… I can’t, I can’t breathe… I’m..”

“NICK! Please… I’m getting closer, I’ll find you!”

“I love you, J. Don’t worry, just..c-count till 15…”

 

According to the autopsy report, Mr.Wrigh’s cause of death was asphyxiation. However, there were wounds on his arms, chest, back, as well as his head. We do not believe that any “moving rocks” are likely to have crushed him to death, as the wounds would’ve been much more severe. We have ruled out gas poisoning as the autopsy did not indicate any such factor. This leaves the real circumstances surrounding Mr. Wrigh’s death completely uncertain. The only explanation may be that he had fallen somewhere, which had possibly damaged the oxygen tank in his suit, thereby causing his death. The wounds on his body may also be explained through some sort of fall, though not with absolute certainty.

 

Joan Longwood

 

Joan Longwood was an extremely gifted and inspiring member of the Space Exploration Association, 27 years of age. She was one of the youngest crew members to venture to space, only at the age of 17. While a technical engineer like Mr. Wrigh, she also had expertise in scientific and geographical aspects of space exploration, making her an apt decision maker in key situations. Had this incident not taken place, Ms. Longwood was on a trajectory to becoming a Captain within the Exploration Department within the next 5 years, having taken part in 24 space expeditions. Her logs are recorded as below:

 

“Log. 1. Landed successfully on Planet Y. The planet is a vast expanse of dry, pink soil, with a few brown rocks of varying sizes, and a vibrant blue sky. Bands of unidentified gases streak the sky in shades of orange, yellow, grey and white. Land samples have been collected. No metal or water has been detected.”

 

“Log. 2. 20 meters from base. The terrain has not changed, although there seems to be some change in the bands of gas in the sky. They are slowly disappearing in this direction – although there is no wind to shift them from their place. No explanation found yet for this phenomenon.”

 

“Log. 3. 30 meters from base. Vegetation has been detected – a small green plant growing on a rock. The plant has the same anatomy as those on Earth from the outside – a stem, some small leaves, and one flowering bud. The flower is an odd mixture of colors – each of its petals are of grey, orange and yellow shades, similar to the bands of gas seen in the sky. Correlation unknown. Collecting sample for analysis.”

 

After this, Ms. Longwood engaged in communication with Mr. Wrigh as recorded. She began retreating to base, as she had mentioned, upon hearing the distressed words of Mr. Wrigh. She tried to contact Mr. Kresnig after disconnecting with Mr. Wrigh, but was unsuccessful. She did not make any calls to the space station like her crew members. Her final log, before her death at the 15 minute mark, is recorded below:

 

“Log 4. Communication has failed with Mr. Wrigh and Mr. Kresnig. Their location on the radar is incorrect and keeps shifting. There might be an interference in signals on this planet. Reached the base. The plant has begun to glow. It glows brighter by the second – so bright I cannot look at it. Mr. Kresnig and Mr. Wrigh are dead. Their vital signs disappeared from the ship’s monitor. The plant’s light is surrounding everything. Don’t come here.”

 

After submitting the final log, Ms. Longwood exercised her right to Code X355D100, which states that an astronaut, under circumstances of certain death, has the right to end their own life through controlled means to avoid excessive and extended suffering. However, this decision is questionable considering that her vitals were healthy till the end, and she did not describe any threats to herself, as the other two crew members had. The glowing plant could be said to be the result of a hallucination, however, there is nothing to indicate there was any sort of hallucinogen in Ms. Longwood’s system at the time of her death. Our only explanation for her decision to execute Code X355D100 is due to extreme fear and trauma from the loss of her crew members, including her partner.

 

The events surrounding this incident have been kept entirely confidential from the public. The circumstances surrounding the cause of death for each of the crew members of Orchid 367 are inconclusive and uncertain. The next two sections cover an analysis of the possible scenarios which may have caused their deaths in more detail, as well as recommendations for the future to avoid another Incident Y from taking place.

Crescent Ragu Squares

9be89543efec901b665a918ac516fbfc
9be89543efec901b665a918ac516fbfc

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 small jar Ragu spaghetti sauce
  • 1 (4 ounce) can mushrooms
  • 2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
  • 1 (8 ounce) can Pillsbury refrigerated quick crescent dinner rolls

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. In frying pan, brown ground beef; drain.
  3. Stir in Ragu sauce and mushrooms; simmer while preparing crust.
  4. Separate crescent dough into 2 long rectangles.
  5. Place in ungreased 13 x 9 inch pan; press over bottom and 1/2 inch up sides to form crust. Seal perforations.
  6. Spread meat mixture over dough.
  7. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes or until crust is brown.
  8. Top with cheese and bake until cheese melts.
  9. Cut into squares to serve.

An Uber driver told me something the other day that made me stop and think.

He came from Ghana 35 years ago to settle in the US.

“What do you think about America after having lived here for so long?” I asked.

“America is the best salesperson in the world. It convinces you that no matter where you are or what you have going on, things will be better here. It makes people all around the world drop what they’re doing and immigrate.”

“And then what?”

“You work your ass off until you die.”


I like talking to people.

Especially immigrants.

They have one leg in their home country and the other here. As a result, they see things that others don’t. They have a unique perspective.

They’ve all come in search of something.

Quality of life. Freedom. Money.

Some find it.

Many don’t.

They all miss the vibrancy of their home countries. Whether from Africa, South America, India, or somewhere else, they miss the colorful festivals, the sacred in the ordinary, the tight-knit family and community, the customs and tradition that make a place singular.


The US is marketed as the land of possibilities.

And for some, it is.

But most—like that Ghanaian driver—end up working very hard for little gain. On top of that, even though it’s a nation of immigrants, it doesn’t do a very good job of making newcomers feel welcome.

More like alienated and unaccepted.

What the immigrants I talk to dislike about the US—and what I tend to agree with—is that it engages in false advertising. It markets itself as the best, most advanced, and bountiful country on the planet.

The greatest.

But in reality, it’s not. I could insert a bunch of statistics here, but a quick Google search will reveal that the US isn’t number one when it comes to a variety of metrics such as tolerance, education, and quality of life.

Far from it.

Like every human being I know, it’s deeply flawed.

Except it won’t admit it.


“So what will you do?” I asked the driver.

“I’m going back to Ghana,” he said.

All Chick-fil-A outlets are basically company owned.

If they used a franchise model, they could expand much faster. But they prefer a slower, paced development. Even it seems like a lot of locations, they have not reached saturation in the US market.

Expanding overseas provides a huge opportunity but also large risks. Developing an efficient supply chain is one of them.

Funny you should ask.

Back in 1989, I had been hired to conduct surveillance on a car salesman in a small town about 150 miles southwest of Chicago. He claimed to be permanently disabled from slipping in wet grass in front of his employer’s location and injuring a leg. It had been more than a year after the initial injury and he hadn’t undergone any surgery, in fact a Chiropractor was allegedly treating the leg and certifying him permanently and totally disabled. The company said BS and suspected he was working elsewhere.

My normal practice was to contact the local constabulary and let them know I was in the neighborhood just in case someone called and reported a suspicious vehicle or person. I did so in this case too.

Nice little neighborhood, nice little houses, some cars parked on the street, too. That makes it easier to try and fit in. I was there well before dawn and parked about 4 houses down and on an intersecting street. Black felt capsule enclosure surrounding me in the back of my Trooper, I prepared the video camera on its secured tripod along with the Konica and long range lens. We were ready to rumble.

At about 8:AM a Sheriff’s department squad car rolled by me slowly, then pulls into my subject’s driveway. Sheriff Billy Joe Watkins gets out, holding two coffee cups from McDonald’s and is met at the door by my subject, who gives me the stink eye. I of course get a couple of good pics.

Half an hour later, Sheriff leaves, gets in the squad, subject steps out onto his front porch and watches as the Sheriff drives up to my vehicle, gets out, bangs on the side of my truck and yells “YOU GOT 5 MINUTES TO GET OUT OF TOWN OR YOU’RE GOING TO JAIL!”

He didn’t have to say it twice. I’m sure he would have found a reason to lock me up, impound my vehicle and make my equipment disappear. And I was 150 miles from home in Yee-Haw County. And the Sheriff was a friend of the subject.

That was the last time I made the courtesy call. Lesson learned.

Not worth the cost

The Scammers are geniuses in Economics and Finance

They know high value scams can get them roasted in days

For instance if they went after Adani for ₹5000 Crore, they would be caught and hauled up in a week at the most

However the Scammers go for MASS and small numbers

Rather than dupe 1 guy for 10 Million Bucks, they dupe 10,000 guys for 1000 Bucks each

Now take the Police

Even if they slog and slog and somehow manage to arrest the accused

They need the witness statement of 10,000 guys

It takes 2–3 years to bring a case to trial

By this time all the people who lost their money are OK with it and have resigned themselves to their fate

They certainly don’t want to come to court and spend 6–7 hours waiting and maybe get called again and again

Those who do come, get offered 10 times the amount and they end up making VAGUE STATEMENTS that go 180 degrees against the original statements

Ultimately the Scammers get acquitted

Then they start again


Scammers get your account information from Banks through the BPO side

They target customers who won’t be devastated if they lose ₹30–40K

Targets are angry for a few days, a week maybe two and then they shrug it off and go back to their life

Police don’t strike when the iron is hot

They start after 1–2 years by which time the Target has long forgotten the issue

By this time he simply doesn’t want to waste too much time and won’t come to 4–5 sessions with the Prosecution, Cops and hearings before the court

Imagine they are NRIs in US??

They need to pay more for the tickets to come to India

Would you testify for a loss of ₹1 Lakh four years ago by spending ₹5–6?

No right


The Cost Benefit Analysis never works in favor of the Victims or Law enforcement

It’s why Scammers flourish on CARELESS PEOPLE

Project Camelot – Kerry Cassidy Interviews Ashayana Deane Part 1 (2∶36∶39)

Remember, you are not what you do, and if you are in trouble… reach out for help.

Not needed

The Kursk offensive was elegant but ultimately a disaster as everything else

Imagine India invading and taking over large tracts of Pakistan and in exchange Pakistan captures 42 Rajasthani Villages across 5 Districts – 14 of which have already been liberated inside Five days with a minimum of 2500 Dead Enemy Soldiers and 150 pieces of equipment

The Ukraine supply line is cut off at SUMY where Russia is bombing FAB after FAB

This extends the Supply line from 7 Miles to 55 Miles

That alone means Ukraine cannot keep equipping their Soldiers who are in Kursk

This means Ukraine will send more troops across the Borders into Belgorod but again without supplies they will end up becoming TERRORISTS and holding hostages

Meanwhile Ukraine will leave their own territories where Russia will advance with impunity and capture more settlements and destroy more Ukrainian equipment and people

The Gamble was that Russia would be so worried about the loss of Civilian Lives in Kursk that they would immediately sue for peace

Unfortunately Russia is angrier now and regard Kursk as Terrorism against Civilians and will be even less determined for any peace

Yesterday 71% Russians voted on Telegram Groups to Kill Ukrainian women and Children against 8% on 30.06.2023 and 11% on 31.12.2023


It was a bungled offensive

You just don’t have the supply line to feed soldiers into Russia because Russians have Airpower and Artillery Power and Tank Strength

Plus they have the numbers

They can mobilize 200,000 Soldiers from their Reserves within a week

Ukraine is utterly exhausted and these are it’s BEST RESERVE TROOPS who are getting sliced into salami in Kursk


Why use Nukes?

Bronco Billy | 1980 | Clint Eastwood | movie review

Is Joe Biden Trying To Start World War 3 Before He Leaves Office? The Decision To Use Long-Range Missiles To Strike Targets Deep Inside Russia Is Insane

November 17, 2024 by Michael 

As if everything that Joe Biden has done so far was not enough, now he has decided to push us to the brink of nuclear war. On Sunday, Joe Biden decided to allow Ukraine to use long-range missiles provided by the United States to hit targets deep inside of Russia. This is a bombshell. I don’t know how else to put it. The Russians have already warned us how they will respond if long-range missiles provided by the United States and other NATO countries start raining down on their cities. Sadly, most Americans have no idea what a direct conflict with Russia would mean.

When I first heard what Joe Biden had done, I reacted very emotionally.

I am still feeling very emotional at this moment.

Everyone needs to clearly understand what just happened, because this is a major turning point…

President Biden has given the OK to lift restrictions that will allow Ukraine to use U.S.-provided long-range weapons to strike deep into Russian territory, a U.S. official confirmed to CBS News on Sunday. The move is a significant change to U.S. policy in the ongoing Ukraine-Russia conflict.

The easing of restrictions would allow Kyiv to use the Army Tactical Missile System, or ATACMS, to hit targets inside Russia. The move also comes as some 10,000 North Korean troops were sent to Kursk near Ukraine’s northern border to help Russian forces retake territory.

One of the reasons why I am so upset is because this wasn’t his decision to make.

We just had an election and his side lost.

The American people elected a leader that wants to bring the war in Ukraine to an end, but now Joe Biden is trying to make sure that nobody is going to be able to end this war.

According to CBS News, one of the reasons why this decision was made was to “put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if peace talks happen”…

The U.S. decision could help Ukraine at a moment when Russian forces appear to be making gains and could put Kyiv in a better negotiating position when and if peace talks happen.

It also comes as Mr. Biden is about to leave office and President-elect Trump has pledged to limit American support for Ukraine and ending the war as soon as possible.

Are you kidding me?

That is nonsense.

Donald Trump needs to come forward immediately and denounce this move, because we could be facing a scenario where events spiral out of control before he even has the opportunity to take office.

When Vladimir Putin was asked about the possibility that long-range missiles provided by the U.S. could soon be used to hit targets deep inside Russia, he responded by warning that such a move would mean that “U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia”…

“We are not talking about allowing or not allowing the Ukrainian regime to strike Russia with these weapons,” Putin said Thursday in comments to propagandist Pavel Zarubin. “We are talking about deciding whether NATO countries are directly involved in the military conflict or not.”

“This will mean that NATO countries, the U.S. and European countries are at war with Russia,” Putin said. “And if this is so, then, bearing in mind the change in the very essence of this conflict, we will make appropriate decisions based on the threats that will be created for us.”

Joe Biden just called Putin’s bluff.

We just crossed that red line, and there is no going back.

Now we will see if Putin was bluffing or not.

Later in September, Vladimir Putin explained that a “joint attack on the Russian Federation” could trigger the use of nuclear weapons…

A new nuclear doctrine would “clearly set the conditions for Russia to transition to using nuclear weapons,” he warned – and said such scenarios included conventional missile strikes against Moscow.

He said that Russia would consider such a “possibility” of using nuclear weapons if it detected the start of a massive launch of missiles, aircraft and drones into its territory, which presented a “critical threat” to the country’s sovereignty.

He added: “It is proposed that aggression against Russia by any non-nuclear state, but with the participation or support of a nuclear state, be considered as their joint attack on the Russian Federation.”

The Russians have told us that allowing Ukraine to fire long-range missiles deep into their territory could cause a nuclear war.

But Joe Biden did it anyway.

Just imagine how we would feel if some foreign power was firing long-range missiles into Washington D.C. and New York City.

If someone did that to us, we would nuke them.

I want everyone out there to understand the gravity of the scenario that we are facing.

Of course the Russians have been escalating matters as well.

In fact, they just hit targets all over Ukraine using “120 missiles and almost 100 drones”…

Ukraine said it would introduce nationwide emergency power restrictions Monday after a “massive” Russian attack further damaged its already fragile energy grid ahead of a much-feared winter, with nine civilians also killed across the country on Sunday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Moscow launched 120 missiles and almost 100 drones, targeting Kyiv as well as southern, central and far-western corners of the country.

Civilians were killed in the Mykolaiv, Lviv, Kherson, Dnipropetrovsk and Odesa regions in what officials in the capital called one of the biggest barrages in the almost three-year Russian invasion.

Meanwhile, the war in the Middle East threatens to spiral completely out of control.

On Sunday, Zero Hedge was reporting that Israeli troops were seen fighting at a location that is 3 miles north of the Lebanese border…

The Israeli military has reached the deepest point in Lebanon since the ground offensive began about six weeks ago. This has been reported by both Lebanese and Israeli media, amid raging battles with Hezbollah on Saturday.

“The state-run National News Agency reported that Israeli troops temporarily captured a strategic hill in the southern Lebanese village of Shamaa, about five kilometers (3 miles) from the border early Saturday, before later being pushed back,” Israeli media reports. “The outlet claimed soldiers detonated several buildings including a shrine before they withdrew.”

The IDF has also been bombing Syria on an almost daily basis, and we are waiting for the next Iranian attack on Israel which could literally occur at any moment.

Even though we could see these wars coming way in advance, nobody has been able to stop them.

Now Joe Biden has brought us to the brink of nuclear war with Russia even though he has very little time remaining in the White House.

It was not his decision to make, but he made it anyway, and it could end up having very serious implications for every man, woman and child on the entire planet.

Some AI lessons on MM image generation

It took me a while to figure out, but these images of people with this thing out of their mouths is what the AI interprets as “drinking”.

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(7)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(7)

It also has a problem with size relevance.

@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(10)
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(10)

Changing the AI model can result in dramatic changes in the resulting picture… Some are good, and some aren’t.

Here’s one AI model …

##Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(13)
##Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(13)

And here is a different AI model…

Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(18)
Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(18)

If you are not careful, all the individuals will look like clones…

ORB Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(15)
ORB Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(15)

I really like how it creates backgrounds, but you MUST be specific for a background to be generated… some fantastical backgrounds come with undesirable subject matter.

BG Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(19)
BG Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(19)

It does seem to have a problem with sheer and wet clothing. Only generating edges, and ignoring the rest. Which is interesting, but not what I am looking for.

Sheer Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(20)
Sheer Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(20)

Sometimes, it looks fine. But the AI really has a problem with hands; number of fingers, and left vrs right…

Imperfect Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(9)
Imperfect Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(9)

The fellow on the left is using a right hand on his left arm. Though the girl seems to be just ok.

Nothing worse than an extra arm to throw off the art…

#Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(11)
#Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(11)

Here is the story of a democracy.

The Prime Minister of this country refused to allow a British oil company to control this nation’s oil reserves. He wanted the oil to benefit his people, he was an elected representative after all.

In response, the British boycotted this nation and asked the Americans for help.

The determination was to over throw this nation’s government. The CIA helped design a coup to overthrow this democratic government  [1].

And the CIA succeeded and installed a dictator who was beholden to the United States to stay in power.

Now obviously this nation wasn’t thrilled about this and 26 years later the people of this nation protested and ended up successfully overthrowing this dictator to form a theocratic republic.

Since then, the US has flirted with the idea of going to war with this nation.

This nation: Iran

Yes, the US created the Iran we know today because the US installed a dictator.

The US does this stuff all the time, the US overthrew a government over the price of bananas [2].

The US supports 73% of the world’s dictators [3] .

The US does not spread democracy, the US supports people who support the agenda of American imperialism even if that is a dictator.

Also the US created the issues we have with Iran, so it is hilarious when Presidents complain about their ‘behavior’ because it was the United States that created the problem to begin it with interventionism… yet chuckleheads in the White House seem to think further interventionism is the answer.

Footnotes

Once, I bought a multi-roll package of toilet paper. I had it on the bottom of my shopping cart, on the little shelf. I told the cashier it was down there. She rang up my purchases, I left the store and went home. Later I was looking over my receipt, and noticed that the toilet paper wasn’t on there. She hadn’t scanned it.

That little devil sitting on my shoulder said, “Well, consider it your lucky day”. But the little angel on the other shoulder said, “You know you have to do the right thing”. So the next day I trooped down to the store with the toilet paper and my receipt and stood in line at the customer service desk. When it was my turn, I told the cashier what had happened, and she said that she wasn’t going to charge me for the toilet paper. She said that by then, the cashier’s drawer (the one who checked me out) had been counted and put in the days receipts.

So I took my toilet paper home and lived happily ever after.

Another time, I bought a weedeater for my husband. He told me exactly which one to buy, and it was on sale. So I go and find the weedeater and buy it, and take it home. When I got home, and looked it over, I realized that it was a much, much nicer weedeater than the one on sale had been. I realized I had been pretty drastically undercharged. So, I called the store and told them what had happened and that I would take it back and get the one on sale.

So that’s what I did. It was a small Mom and Pop business, and they were decent people. I couldn’t take them like that. They were appreciative, and gave me a little gift certificate.

Husband comes home from work, we’re talking about the weedeater, and I tell him what had occurred. He was furious with me. He said I was stupid to take the expensive weedeater back, when I could have just played dumb. And then he would have a better heavy duty weedeater. It caused a big argument between us. I tried not to, but I lost a little bit of respect for my husband over his attitude regarding that weedeater.

I was raised to do the right thing. To do my best to be an honorable person. I have failed miserably many times, I know. But I like to sleep at night, and I like to have a clear conscience as much as possible. So I try to do the right thing. Simple as that.

Can they? Yes, there are lottery winners every week.

But will they? Unlikely, and even if they do, it’s a long slog ahead.

Boeing can’t catch a break, not since the first 737 max crash.

A string of troubles later, Boeing has bled immense quantities of cash, but finds itself in a QC mess, road map delays, a stuck starliner in space, union troubles, legal and fed oversight issues and one 737 Max crash from the mother of all PR storms.

Evidently, boeing has big problems executing as an engineering and manufacturing firm.

Unfortunately, Boeing is a no-option too big to fail node. The American government will step in to save it. And molly coddling will help Boeing stay up but hardly improve its competitiveness.

The culture needs to change. Unfortunately, financialization and cheap credit has played havoc with American competitiveness in the 21st century. Hard engineering is too slow for quick money’s taste.

Twenty years ago, pilots preferred Boeing’s yoke for its sense of familiarity. Today, airbus’s sidestick has revolutionized the cockpit’s ergonomics and workflow, introducing class-leading safety while reducing pilot workload.

Boeing has its work cut out, especially with the emergence of comac.

I am of the opinion Boeing’s economic model is too extravagant and there is too much fat in the supply chain. But it will require the competition to lay bare the fact customers are paying too much for what they are getting.

But that’s 20 years down the road, due to the product life cycles of airliners.

I wish Boeing luck. It is unlikely to disappear, but I won’t be surprised if it weakens further.

Let me tell you the truth, all Chinese people believe that if Russia fails, China will also fail, because the US will use Russia as a springboard to invade China. We won’t let that happen.

Don’t think the defeat of both Russia and China is a good thing. You in front of the screen are actually standing in the same position as us.

Here’s the history about your economy.

On August 15, 1945, when Japan unconditionally accepted the Potsdam Declaration and surrendered, and the world finally moved towards peace.

That was also the beginning of the golden age that MAGAs believe in.

Five years later in 1950, Washington DC announced the completion of its industrialization goals. In order to address the vested interests of the military class and become a world hegemon, the Washington DC launched the Cold War against the USSR. In order to ensure that Europe and East Asia were on the same front as itself, the government launched the Marshall Plan in 1947, transferring industry to allied European countries around the USSR, plus Japan, South Korea, and so on.

Washington asked, and Moscow answered.

The USSR provided comprehensive social security from cradle to grave, including free healthcare, education, housing, and employment security. As a result, Washington expanded its Social Security Act, Americans had Medicare and Medicaid at the first time. Assistance for low-income groups, housing plans, and strengthening public education, all of them was made during the cold war. The last time oligarchs gave such preferential treatment to workers was at Ford Motor Company in 1914, half a year before WWI.

The policy of the Washington DC towards the Moscow benefited the American workers, however there’s a flaw of the US itself: the social welfare system pushed the pressure to capitalists, and American domestic capital flee and become international capital. Industrial hollowing began from then on. Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and South Korea rose later, at the cost of the Rust Belt in the Great Lakes region. The 1960s. The end of the golden age.

Rust Belt
Rust Belt

But that was far from over.

If the existence of the USSR cannot make you realize what you have gained because of it, at least the departure of the USSR may make you realize what you have lost. With the collapse of the USSR, American capital was no longer under pressure, and labor welfare plummeted.

Companies led by Wal Mart began to actively reduce workers’ wages and welfare benefits. Despite ongoing inflation in the US, its minimum wage for labor remained at $5.15 per hour from 1997 to 2007. Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act in 1996 forced low-income workers to choose unstable jobs, people no longer have sufficient welfare. Right to Work Laws drived workers away from the union, making the union no longer represent the interests of workers, but gradually become a dual rival between companies and workers. The limit of industrial hollowing out is marked by NAFTA and China joining WTO.

The rich took too much, and the poor had no ability to buy. enterprises went bankrupt. Financial crisis, again and again.

The USSR brought American workers the golden age. The USSR also protected them staying in the golden age. When the USSR left, American workers became orphans abandoned by the government. The irony is that few American workers appreciate the USSR. They would rather believe that it is the kindness and conscience of the wealthy who have brought them a superior life, than believe in the common beliefs and struggles of millions of people.

Now take a look at China. We have achieved a living standard similar to or even higher than yours with resources far below the world average and per capita GDP on the world average – as you can see from the expected life expectancy.

Look at history and ask yourself. If no country in the world can resist the capitalist oligarchy of the US, after the popularization of AI and industrial robots, as manual laborers, what bargaining chips do you have to negotiate with them?

Or, let me ask in a different way, how much longer do you have to wait before you will fight for your own life rather than relying on others’ efforts? The clock of average people is ticktocking, since the popularization of industrial robots will be realized in your lifetime.

Yes, Donald Trump is a great leader. I don’t like America but I like Donald Trump. He has charisma. He has a story. He’s honest, and it’s clear that many Americans adore him.

Xi is different. While Trump has an American and capitalist story, Xi’s story is different. He has an Asian story. He went through the most important and tumultuous period of modern China. While Trump’s story is about making profits, Xi’s story is about China’s struggle.

Mao Zedong taught the Chinese people to be unite. Deng Xiaoping taught the Chinese people to prosper. Xi, on his part, taught the Chinese people to be proud of China.

Unlike American presidents who rarely interact with their own but poor citizens, Xi visits every corner of China. He communicates with the villagers of China, sits with them, and participates in the activities of a Chinese person’s daily life. He makes the Chinese people feel like the government cares for them. He empathizes with them. He champions the spirit of ordinary men. In contrast, Trump champions the spirit of capitalism and profit.

Xi visited the Tibetan Autonomous Region and many Tibetans gathered to welcome him. He even said “Tashi Delek” at the end, which has won him countless Tibetan fans.

Also, the US is helping him. To make a complete story, there must be a villain whom the hero must fight. The US is the villain, who the world knows is corrupted beyond redemption. Xi himself never chose to fight. He is forced to fight, so that has won him support from around the world.

So. In conclusion, Xi is not the leader China needs but the leader the world needs. After a thousand years, people will talk about our time. They will refer to our period as “China’s revival”. The man they will talk most about is not Trump but Xi.

The saddest? A two way tie.

A kid in his early 20’s gains access to a trust fund his grandparents set up for him. Six hours into my shift his mother is behind him begging him to come home before he wastes everything at the table, tears and all. He calls security over to remove her from the area for harassing him. Sadly, he is technically correct, and security escorts the mother from the area. Congrats kid, you lost your future and your parent in one night at the tables.

Second was a 30 something female playing way above her head. No strategy, no quit. Wouldn’t take advice from me because “you work for the house”. She loses about 2-3,000, and goes straight to the ATM. Foxwoods ATMs charge $4 for every transaction, up to $400 per. She has $2,000. Ten minutes later, she’s in tears telling everyone she just gambled away the mortgage, and her husband is going to leave her. She leaves less than an hour before my shift ends. On my way home traffic is unusually heavy (5am mind you) and I see why. Distraught, she was walking along route 2 and decided to step in front of a bus. I found out it was her the next day.

For a poor city, it has the world’s largest metro system. 20 lines and counting. Completely safe. No drunks, homeless or druggies in sight.

Shanghai has the only commercial maglev train, allowing you to travel from the airport to the city center in 8 minutes. It travels at speeds over 400 km an hour.

You never need to look over your shoulder for your own safety. Even at 3:00 am you can walk the streets without fear.

You can eat anything your heart desires. From inexpensive street food all the way to Michelin Starred restaurants.

You never see traffic congestion because the city uses advanced smartcity technology so traffic moves very smoothly.

Your question should be why would New York, a poor and unsafe city, compare itself to Shanghai?

I’ve been to both cities. Have you ever visited Shanghai?

Not me. But someone hired in my office.

Years ago I worked at a management consulting firm in Austin. It was an awful place to work. Ridiculous hours, bad management, and nepotism lead to an extremely high stress environment. Most of the employees had advanced degrees, but because of the horrible work environment, no one stuck around for more than a few months.

One morning, several of us got on the elevator with a new person, who pressed the button for the our floor. Someone asked if she was going to work for “XYZ.” “Yes,” she happily chirped. Everyone groaned. “You really don’t want to do that,” said one of the analysts. Everyone else nodded agreement.

We reach our floor. Everyone except her gets off. She stands in the doorway for a second. “Nope,” she says, and presses the button for the lobby.

A few hours later, the boss comes into a room where several of us are working. “Where’s the new girl? She was supposed to start today.”

“She quit.”

“What! When?”

“In the elevator.”

The boss looks at us and growls, “Shit! What did you say to her?!!!”

Bronco Billy – Final Scene

During the 100 Years War, the French countryside was devastated, lawless and full of unburied corpses. It was a paradise for wolves.

“In all the lowlands of the Loire, the sheep were gone — devoured, destroyed. The cattle that were left were herded by peasants and defended with such weapons as were at hand. By night, they were safe corralled in barns or high stockades.”

People did not dare to venture outdoors at night, when the wolves would prowl village streets, killing any man or animal they found. Outside of Paris was a piece of rugged ground that had been cleared of trees. The wolves made it their home.

“Here it was known that many wolves had their dens, and each year new litters of cubs were born, to be a terror on the roads that led to the great city. It was many generations before the place was cleaned up; and the only memory of its savage denizens left today is the name, the same but shortened, that attaches to the place – the Louvre.”

The wolf king, leader of the pack, was a huge wolf called Courtaud (“Bobtail”) who led a small army of wolves in raids on herds of sheep and cattle. When the herdsmen tried to defend their animals, they were killed too, and soon Courthaud developed a taste for human flesh.

The Dubois family, bringing their sheep to market, took the precaution of putting them in a horse-drawn cart decked out with bells, tin pans and other noisemakers, but it didn’t help. They were overwhelmed by wolves. All three were killed and eaten. After that, the wolves would only eat people, leaving behind the sheep and cattle.

For a time, English longbowmen kept the road to Paris open, but then they were withdrawn, and the city was effectively besieged by wolves. In the hard winter of 1439, there was so much snow that neither wolves nor men could find food. Parisians retreated behind their walls and listened to hungry wolves howling outside.

But the walls were not secure. There was a gap between the iron grate at the river and the frozen river itself. The wolves came through and ran through the streets, killing 14 people before retreating.

The captain of the city guard, Boisselier, was fed up. He ordered cattle to be slaughtered in the town square and left there. The smell of blood attracted the wolves who again rushed into the city, but this time, they were cornered and killed with arrows and stones. That was the end of Courtaud, but wolves remained a terror to the countryside for many years.

Classic joke:

What would happen if Russia invaded China?

On the first day: One million Chinese surrendered to Russia

The next day: Two million Chinese surrendered to Russia

The next day: Three million Chinese surrendered to Russia

The next day: Four million Chinese surrendered to Russia

……

Russia ultimately achieved victory,and Russia changed its name to China and announced that Russians are the 57th ethnic minority in China

Imagine you are a war lord riding a warhorse, wielding a sword, and possessing a thousand cows

You suddenly became the emperor of a place called China

You became the emperor because the original emperor here was too foolish.

You have recruited your loyal Prime Minister, and you have decided to establish your own dynasty and civilization.

You: I want the people here to use new language!

Prime Minister: Sorry, the people here use language that is longer than the history of your tribe. If you replace their language, the entire country’s system will collapse,Great emperor, you don’t want your tax order to be passed on to people thousands of kilometers away, but theybelieve it’s just a piece of paper filled with mysterious symbols

You: I want them to wear my clothes!

Prime Minister: Your clothes are only suitable for the environment on the grasslands… Look, here are deserts, grasslands, snow capped mountains, plains, oceans

You: I want them to eat my food.

Prime Minister: Sir, even you are unwilling to eat your food. Their food is much more delicious. I guess you, who live on the grassland, haven’t studied the methods of shark fin and sea cucumber

You: I want them to accept our culture.

Prime Minister: Really? Do you want your people to learn from your culture of conquest and war, rather than their traditional conservative and submissive culture? The previous emperor here finally taught his people to obey the emperor’s orders. Do you really want to teach them how to conquer and overthrow the emperor like you do?

You: I want them to read our book!

Prime Minister: Hmm… You’ve been busy fighting and don’t seem to have many books. Even if they do, they can’t understand them, and they have tens of millions of books

You: I want them to live in my house!

Prime Minister: Are you serious… Do you want to move out of this magnificent palace and live in your tent full of horse manure?

You: Damn it, why do they have such a long history!

Prime Minister: My Emperor, you see, the region where these people live is bordered by deserts and plateau snow capped mountains to the west, mountains and seas to the south, and only the ocean to the east. In this natural fortress, in ancient times, we on the grasslands were the only threat to this civilization, unless a group of people can invent airplanes and warships in the future to destroy this fortress.

But before that, this civilization could exist freely in this fortress for thousands of years… Of course, this also limited their desire to explore the sky and sea too much, so in the future your dynasty will be severely kick ass by a group of white skinned guys – and they will blame you, the ruler of another ethnic group.

You: so…… how did we conquer this country

Prime Minister: As you can see, living in this country, if you are an emperor who has everything you want, it is difficult not to become an idiot,Just like your future children, they have never experienced your efforts and hardships in conquering a country. Under our foolish feudal system, they will soon become addicted to pleasure, after all, there are much more fun here than on the grassland,Otherwise, why did that crazy giant Mongol Empire ultimately choose to stay here and establish the Yuan Dynasty

You: Then I can let them change to my hairstyle, right

Prime Minister: Of course… but the cost is that hundreds of years later they will still use this as one of the reasons why you are a tyrant… and countless rebels will use it as an excuse to rebel against you

You:there are always some of them willing to accept all of the above!

Prime Minister: Indeed, so future museums will have information about your artifacts

You: I’m going to kill them all!!!!

Prime Minister: Really? You killed them, who will give you a gorgeous house, delicious food, beautiful women, and a group of men willing to cut their own dick to serve you? Are you really willing to give up such a beautiful life and spend the rest of your life killing and fearing being assassinated

You: I choose to join them

Prime Minister: So, enjoy your brief imperial life, at most for a few hundred years they will take everything away, and you will fall in love with the life here and become a minority of China, If a snake swallows an elephant – it will only transform itself into the shape of an elephant, What you can kill is only the emperor, not this huge civilization

you see, these people are all native Chinese now

Not exactly an “off the hook” situation, but I did go to court against an attorney and won.

The high school my youngest son attended denied him entry into the National Honor Society, even though he fit every bit of the criteria. It seems he was “black balled” by one or two of his teachers over personal grudges. I looked up the rules for admission to the society and found that black balling was forbidden. I asked to see the votes and vote tally records. I was told I was not allowed to see them. So, I filed a FOIA suit against the school.

A couple of days after filing the papers, I got a call from their “high-powered” attorney from our state capital. He wanted contact info for my lawyer. I told him I didn’t have a lawyer. He told me to get him the contact info when I hired my lawyer. I told him I had no intention of hiring a lawyer.

He then tried to bully me by telling me there was no possible way I could win, and that I would have to pay the school for his attorney fees. I ignored his threat and ended the conversation.

About 4 days before the hearing was set, the attorney called me again. He asked again for my attorney. I again told him I had none, and had no intention of getting one. Same old bullying started again. I ignored it again.

The day before the hearing, he called again and asked if we could just settle this. I declined.

The day of the hearing, I met this attorney at the courthouse. He entered the courtroom before I did, and introduced himself to the judge. As I entered, I looked at the judge and said, “Hi, Jim.” He responded with, “Hi, Eric.” I could see the attorney’s face, and the look was priceless. As the old saying goes, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.

I prevailed in my suit and the school was told they were required to give me the info. They said they didn’t have it. It must have gotten discarded. I pointed out to them that the National Honor Society rules required them to keep the information for at least 12 months. I let them know that I could contact the society and have them drop the entire school from their program for breaking this rule, with the implication that they were still allowing black balling of students. I received some apologies and promises that they would read the rules and follow them in the future.

My son was inducted into NHS the following year.

By the way, I had been denied membership in NHS by the same school some thirty or so years earlier. I didn’t complain. Even though I was valedictorian, they were correct in not inducting me. I was too ornery to fit the mold. My son did fit, it was just that a couple of teachers didn’t like him.

NEIGHBORS HATED THE COLOR OF MY HOUSE AND REPAINTED IT WHILE I WAS AWAY — I WAS ENRAGED & TOOK MY REVENGE.

My house is on a corner lot. Two years ago, a newlywed couple moved in next door and immediately made weird comments about my house’s yellow color. Soon, they outright DEMANDED I paint it a different color. My house has always been yellow; I love it, and there’s no rule against it.

They called the police and the city on me, but both told them to back off since I hadn’t done anything wrong. They even tried suing me (the suit got tossed, and they had to pay my legal fees) and attempted to rally our neighbors to form an HOA to force me to repaint. Our neighbors told them to get lost, so now they’re alienated by everyone.

I had to go out of town for two weeks, and when I got back, my house was GRAY. I almost drove past it because I’m so used to my yellow house. The neighbor from across the street came over and showed me pictures he took of the painting company setting up and doing the work. He and another neighbor called the police, but the painting company had a valid work order and had been paid, so the police couldn’t do anything.

It seemed everything done to my house was legal and no damage was done. But I was enraged and planned my revenge. Next day, I… repainted it yellow.

Yellow house
Yellow house

Putin TV Address: “Entitled to Strike” Nations Giving Weapons to Ukraine

Putin entitled header large
Putin entitled header large

“Russia considers itself entitled to use (hypersonic) weapons against facilities of those countries that allow their weapons to be used against Russian facilities.”

Those are the words of Russian President Vladimir Putin in televised remarks today from the Kremlin in Moscow.  Here is a brief video showing him making the announcement:

 

 

NUCLEAR ATTACK WARNINGS TRIGGERED THIS MORNING!

Russia’s ICBM launch at Ukraine this morning triggered early warning systems – – – and such launches are, by default, assumed to be nuclear. So for a short time, the US and Europe thought Russia was nuking Ukraine.

They only knew that it was not nuclear by checking to see if the city of Dnipro was still physically there after the impacts.

Essentially, If Russia decides to nuke Ukraine … the west will watch because they can do nothing other than that.

Second important thing to note: Russia has proven that it can deliver a conventional or nuclear payload to any place without a problem.

Which brings us back to President Putin’s address to his nation just hours ago . . . . NATO member countries have already supplied weapons being used to strike Russia.  Among those weapons have been: Tanks, Infantry Fighting Vehicles, Rockets, Missiles, Speed-Boat-Bombs, and Drones.

The United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany and other nations have long ago provided such weapons that have been – and still are – used to attack interior Russia.

That Russia has now announced they are “entitled” to strike seems the clearest indication yet that utterly massive escalation is coming in very short order.  Not necessarily in Ukraine, but on the territories of the countries who have been supplying weapons.

Hal Turner Analysis

Today’s use by Russia of an ICBM against Ukraine, albeit with only conventional explosives, should make clear to any RATIONAL person that the next step would be to use those same missiles with nuclear warheads.

There is no other RATIONAL interpretation possible!

Will the collective West see reality for what it is, or are they so immersed in their own echo chamber, that reality can no longer penetrate?

It seems to me that if the collective West does not stop what it’s doing with Ukraine, Russia is going to strike.  VERY soon.   Maybe before Thanksgiving.

For the almost three years that this Russia-Ukraine Conflict has gone on, I have implored readers of this website, and listeners to my radio show to get prepared: Emergency food, water, medicines you need to live on, a way to cook without electricity or utility-supplied gas, a way to heat your home without utilities (Fireplace, wood-burning stove, etc.).  I have urged folks to get a generator and have spare fuel stored outside, to run that generator, to keep your refrigerators running and maybe a light on in the house.  I have recommended a flashlight in every room of your home, or at least one for each family member, with plenty of spare batteries for those flashlights.  I have recommended a portable AM/FM/SW radio for local news and info and spare batteries for those portable radios.  I have urged people to get COMMUNICATIONS Gear, a CB, HAM, or GMRS radio, so they can communicate locally if everything goes down.  I have advised folks to get a FIRST-AID KIT for minor cuts and bruises, or, God Forbid, major war wounds.

Now that an ICBM has actually been fired in Combat for the first time in Human History, a threshold has been crossed.  Things go downhill VERY FAST from here.

If you don’t have the prepping items I mentioned above, you are totally screwed.

Please, I IMPLORE YOU, get “prepped” right now.  Today.  As best you can.  There seems to be very little time remaining before you will need those preps.

Endsville

Yes. When I was about 8 years old we lived in a house where the back yard was enclosed by a six foot high fence. Our first pet “Tiger” was a cockapoo a cross between a cocker spaniel and a toy poodle. I was there when Tiger was born.

One day my brothers and I were playing, tiger was out side with us, when the neighbor’s German Shepard jumped the fence and attacked Tiger. I grabbed the baseball bat and beat the German Shepard to death. The German Shepard had nearly ripped Tigers rear leg off. We yelled and our parents came out to see what was going on. They loaded up both dogs and took them to the vet. The German Shepard was pronounced dead on arrival. Tiger went into surgery. He was sewn up and bandaged. Several days later he was brought home.

We informed the neighbor about his dog accompanied by a police officer. The neighbor tried to attack me. The police officer held him back.

The neighbor took us to court. The neighbor wanted me punished for brutally beating his dog to death. And he wanted another dog. The judge listened to both sides and then asked the neighbor some questions.

The questions went like this.

Judge: You had a German Shepard?

Neighbor: Yes, and this little brat brutally killed it.

Judge: is there a 6 foot tall fence between your yards?

neighbor: yes.

Judge: was your dog capable of jumping that fence?

Neighbor: I have never seen him do that.

Judge: Is there a gate between the two yards?

Neighbor: No.

Judge: How do you think your dog got into their yard?

Neighbor: well it is possible that my dog jumped the fence.

The judge then asked me some question.

Judge: why did you attack this man’s dog.

Me: The German Shepard jumped the fence and attacked Tiger. We yelled but the dog would not stop. I had the bat in my hands and was not gong to take the chance the dog would kill tiger or attack someone else. I kicked the German Shepard off tiger but he went back. I kicked him again but this time I also hit him with the baseball bat. He kept trying to get at tiger. So I ended it. I hit the German Shepard till it quit moving.

Judge: were you scared?

me: I was. But I was more angry than scared. No one attacks my family. And tiger is family.

Judge: Do you like dogs?

me: yes, very much.

Judge: before this, were you afraid of the German Shepard?

Me: before this, I had never seen the dog. He barked a growled a lot. But he was always on the other side of the fence.

Judge: so you didn’t hate the dog.

me: I didn’t know the dog. Never met him.

The judge feeling he had all of the information needed made his determination. The neighbor was charged with having a vicious dog. Was ordered to pay our vet bill. He was told that if I had not killed the animal it would have been put down as a dangerous animal. After having cleared a 6 foot fence and attacking another’s pet and possibly children playing in the yard. I probably would have done the same thing as this young man. There will be no retaliation of any kind.

Ironically the neighbor got another German Shepard. A puppy. He introduced us to the dog and our dogs got along great. We moved about 6 months later. Tiger had complications from the surgery and started having seizures. My dad was in the navy and we often moved. Tiger was put down about two years later because we could not afford his medical care. I was told by my parents he was sent to a farm. I looked my parents in the eye and said “tiger was in bad shape. If you put him down just say so. Please don’t lie about it.”

When A Killer Has No Idea He’s Being Recorded

The U.S. stock market has plummeted, putting increasing pressure on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates. The U.S. has lost the financial war. At this moment, China has dealt another heavy blow to the U.S. by reducing its holdings of 228 billion U.S. real estate. Yellen issued a warning that the U.S. debt may face a collapse. Why do we say that the U.S. has lost the financial war? What signal does Yellen’s warning send?

In 2018, the United States unilaterally launched a trade war against China, and then provoked a technology and financial war. Now, the global game between China and the United States has lasted for nearly 7 years. I thought that this confrontation that determines the world pattern would be a slow process. After all, the game between major powers is to see who has better determination. Moreover, the United States has “dollar hegemony” and can collect wealth from various countries by issuing U.S. bonds globally. Relying on U.S. bonds and the dollar, the United States has successfully survived many financial crises. But this time, the United States took the initiative to provoke a financial war against China, and they themselves were the losers. Federal Reserve Chairman Powell made it clear that interest rates may be cut in September. Obviously, the United States can no longer withstand the financial war.



There is a saying about the Sino-US financial war: “hypertension vs. hypoglycemia”. From the perspective of the United States, they are facing high inflation that has been slow to be curbed, huge debts, and high interest rates caused by multiple aggressive interest rate hikes. Although China is the world’s largest manufacturing country, its consumption power is not as good as that of the United States, the world’s largest consumer of goods. In other words, China has goods but lacks money, while the United States has money but lacks goods. The essence of the Sino-US financial war is that the United States wants to harvest China through aggressive interest rate hikes. While China is improving its financial defenses, it is waiting for the United States to be dragged down by its own debts.



But in this process, the United States made two fatal mistakes.

First, the United States forgot the fact that “finance is a derivative of trade.” Although the United States has dollar hegemony, China has the most complete manufacturing sector in the world, which makes it have a long-term trade surplus and has $3 trillion in reserves. Therefore, the United States can hardly influence China’s exchange rate;

Secondly, the United States has never considered that its aggressive interest rate hike strategy will push its allies into a dead end and eventually force them to “turn against the United States.” According to 环球网_全球生活新门户_环球时报旗下网站, Japan has already started to raise interest rates on the yen, which is a dead end for the United States. Previously, due to the high interest rates in the United States, many international investors borrowed yen at ultra-low interest rates and then converted them into dollars to buy U.S. bonds. Now, the Federal Reserve has just released a signal of interest rate cuts, and Japan has immediately raised interest rates, which will trigger investors to transfer assets from the United States to Japan. In other words, Japan has implemented a reverse “harvest” on the United States.



It is worth mentioning that as early as two months ago, US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said that maintaining high interest rates may put US debt at risk of collapse. But Yellen did not expect that what happened later would be more serious than she expected. On Monday, US stocks suffered a sharp drop at the opening, with technology stocks such as Nvidia and Tesla falling by more than 10%. At the same time, a large number of Chinese buyers were worried about the US economic situation and began to sell their properties in the United States. According to public data, in less than two years, Chinese buyers have reduced their holdings of US real estate by 228 billion yuan.



By August 5, the onshore RMB exchange rate against the US dollar reached 7.1150, a surge of 1,000 points. The reason for the strengthening of the RMB is that the US non-farm unemployment rate has reached 4.3%, which is not only the worst in the past three years, but also far exceeds expectations. This makes international investors believe that the risk of an economic recession in the United States is increasing. It is worth noting that this time Japan raised interest rates and announced how much foreign exchange it used to intervene in the exchange rate. In the face of this “turnaround” approach, the United States did not make any accusations. Obviously, the United States is also very clear about how serious the situation it faces!


This news is brought to you by Host Anton

08-06 19:36 from Hong Kong

5 Most DISTURBING Deaths of Tourists in Thailand…

https://youtu.be/A1XrrG3Nrgk

Shorpy

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Was the USSR really that bad?

I don’t know what exactly you were told about USSR, but it was at least 10 times less bad than you’ve been told.

Everyday life in USSR wasn’t that much different from social democracies of today:

  • There was work, properly regulated to 8 hours a day and 2 days off.
    • During dinner break, you’d get to eat at an eatery, usually one affiliated with your workplace.
    • There was almost 0% unemployment. The country always had work that needed doing, but if they didn’t, they’d invent some work for you, like digging holes or filling up holes.
  • The work was paid for properly at the end of the month.
  • People would spend their money in shops, to buy food and things.
    • Unlike capitalism, there usually was more money than things to buy.
    • The amount of stuff owned by a typical Soviet person wasn’t that much different from stuff owned by a typical worker under capitalism.
    • Food shortages were the exception, not the rule. But growing or foraging your own food was a thing.
  • Everybody had a roof over their heads, usually provided by the government for a small rent/tax.
    • Less lucky people lived in dormitories and communal apartment, more lucky ones lived in their own apartments.
    • Wait time to get one’s own apartment was similar to time for accumulating money to buy an apartment in capitalist Russia, but one could use their money freely.
  • Violent crime was pretty low, while black market seems to have flourished.
    • Newspapers did not go out of their way to scare people, so people felt much safer.
  • Life in prisons was worse, as it should be. Still, prisoner lifestyle was regulated, so they wouldn’t go hungry unless the whole country did.
    • That joke from “Operation Y” where an prisoner builder gets a 3-course dinner with shahlyk and a poor student working part-time (who has to buy his own food) gets some bread with kefir is a comedic exaggeration.

One thing that really helps is having a goal — something you want to do before you pass. Like Jeanne Calment who made a deal with her rotary André-François Raffray in 1965, when she was 90 years old… in exchange for having the right to continue living in the property, she’d sell the apartment to Raffray, for him to use after she passed. He sure felt he’d made a pretty sweet deal with the little old French lady…

Only Calment didn’t die… she kept living. And living. And living. By 1995, Raffray had already paid Calment many times the value of the property she was living in. A piece of property he legally owned for some 30 years but couldn’t sell or make use of. He died, in 1995. And Calment, 120, continued to live for another 2 years, finally dying in 1997 at age 122 with Raffray’s widow and children continuing to pay her generously for her refusal to meet her maker.

Calment lived another 32 years after reaching 90, and it made her a fortune in her day’s currency. She was paid generously just for being alive, despite continuing to smoke and drink and live merrily. “Sometimes in life, one makes a bad deal,” Calment simply said. And sometimes, people make mighty good deals.

Why She LEFT the USA and Moved HOME to ASIA!

We sure do!

I pay more than $1000 a month for “good insurance, and last month I fell. I knew something was wrong and instead of going to the ER, I went to urgent care because it would be so much cheaper.

It almost killed me.

You see, I had broken three ribs and punctured a lung. I was bleeding into my chest cavity and the longer I waited to see the cheap doctor, I was losing my ability to breathe. At one point a lady sat next to me. She took one look at me and screamed at the front desk to call an ambulance. I told them it would cost too much and I would drive myself.

Luckily for me, they stopped me from driving and the ambulance soon arrived.

I stayed in the hospital for 3 days and demanded to be released because I couldn’t afford to be there any longer. I was released AMA and I got lucky that I had someone at home to care for me. It has taken weeks for me to be able to take a breath without pain, and while my doctor wanted to see me at the two-week mark, I waited until 4 weeks to see her.

I am now waiting for the bills to arrive. I know that my deductible for the year is $17,000 and that will be what I will have to pay before the full insurance kicks in, but I will STILL have more deductibles to pay!!

Our system is BROKEN!! The MAIN reason people file for bankruptcy is medical bills, and we are supposedly a first-world nation!!!!

People are so damn worried about paying for everyone to get medical care that they would rather go bankrupt than pay LESS than we do now for actual care! They seem to forget that they are already paying for roads, schools, first responders and so much more, but heaven forbid they pay for medical!

It would be CHEAPER FOR EVERYONE!!!

PLUS our politicians are in the pockets of the insurance companies who will lose billions if we were to have universal healthcare. So, we continue to see the decline in our health, die earlier, and lose mothers during childbirth at a rate higher than some third-world nations, and all people can think of is “Well at least I didn’t pay for someone else to live”.

Absolute stupidity!

Alien

Submitted into Contest #24 in response to: Write a story set in the dark recesses of space where the two main characters are often at odds with each other in humorous and comedic ways. view prompt

Ash Brinton

“What’s your planet like?” the little alien asked wistfully.The alien was two feet tall, with a tiny blue curl on the top of his head. By the time the alien was an adult, the curl would be about eight feet tall, sticking straight up like a bright blue mohawk. The rest of him would be only four feet tall, and I wasn’t sure whether the aliens counted the curl as part of their height or not. This species was either really short or really, really tall.“It’s beautiful,” I responded, thinking longingly of home, “When I was little, everything was green and there were all these animals in our backyard. There was a gopher that lived in a hole in the rocks that my dad named Pierre. He always ate my sisters garden. And at night, there were so many… so many stars. There was a lullaby my mom used to sing about the stars. I haven’t heard it in so long. I’ve almost forgotten the words.” I hummed the tune under my breath for a moment, “But Earth… Earth’s not quite as beautiful as it once was.”“What happened?” the young alien tilted his head, curious.“Humanity happened. We were told we were destroying the planet but no one would listen and when we did it was never enough. Overpopulation, pollution, hunger, poverty, global warming… Those all started before I was born and by the time I was old enough to do anything, it was too late. It was already irreversible. The people my age tried to at least slow it down, but no one would listen to us. Our only hope was to find another planet, like scavengers destroying everything they touch. We destroyed our home. Maybe if we had all worked together, refused to ignore the signs, things would be different, but we didn’t and they’re not.”“Is that why you left?”“Yes.” I turned away from the alien, lost in thought.Here I was, a human, lightyears away from my home. I couldn’t even see the sun from here. I had failed in my mission.Sure, I had found alien life on other planets, but I had lost my crewmates and my home. My memories of how I got there were still foggy.I remembered my crew and how we had been the first humans to reach the Kuiper Belt. We’d felt like heroes. Then one of the asteroids had crashed into our ship.I had been the only one to escape the wreckage.The aliens found me.Next thing I knew, I was in their spaceship with no idea where I was.“Do you miss it?” the young alien asked.“Hmm?” I turned back to him.“Don’t you miss Earth?”“Every day.”“I can’t believe I’m actually talking to a human. A real, live human! My grandmama says she went to Mars once. It’s the closest she ever got – the closest any of us ever got – to Earth. There was this weird thing that my mama calls a-” he said something in a different language “-but I don’t think there’s a word for it in Human, so the translator might not work for it. It was made of panels and metal with a human word written on the side in big block letters. The first letter looked like a wide mouth getting ready to eat you, grandmama says.”I tilted my head, trying to imagine what he meant. “An ‘O’?”“What’s an ‘O’?”“The letter. It looks like this,” I traced my finger through dust on the small table between us.The alien child shrugged, “Maybe. I wasn’t there. Grandmama says you could see Earth from where she was and it was all greens and blues and browns and whites and when it wasn’t facing the star, the land glowed. It even had a tiny metal moon orbiting it!” The little alien boy put his hands on my knees to pull himself into a standing position.“Earth only has one moon and that’s made of rock, but your grandmama may have seen a satellite. And the land wasn’t glowing, silly.” I chuckled, flicking the little curl on the top of their head that seemed to be the defining factor of their species, “That was the lights in the cities and houses.”“Why would you need lights? You have a star right there in your solar system!”“The lights are for at night, when the sun goes down.”“What’s a sun?”“It’s what we call our star,” I explained.The alien’s eyes grew wide, “Your star moves?”“No.” I said flatly, “When Earth rotates, it looks like the sun is moving across the sky. Thousands of years ago, people thought it was moving. They thought that Earth was the center of the universe.”

The alien snorted, “That’s kind of self-absorbed.”

“Yeah,” I laughed, “but science proved them wrong. When the part of the Earth that we are standing on turns away from the sun and it goes dark, we say the sun goes down. We call that time night. That’s when we can see the moon and the stars up in the sky. Do you have that on your planet?”

“No. There’s two stars, one on either side of my birth planet, so it’s always not-night.”

“Day. The word you’re looking for is day.”

“Wow. Humans name everything, huh. What do you call your moon?”

“Well, technically the moon’s name is Luna, but there’s only one, so we just call it the moon most of the time.”

“Cool!” He exclaimed, “We don’t have a sky. Mama says the atmosphere’s too weak for us to have a pretty sky like the one on Earth.”

“Light pollution blocks most of the sky nowadays, so don’t be disappointed if you ever see it.”

“Mama and Grandmama have always wanted to go to Earth. They were so excited when you got to the end of your solar system. We’ve been watching you progress for a while. Mama said humans were resilient and stubborn and would never give up, but Papa thought you were going to give up because you kept finding rocks and that was it.”

“They were cool rocks,” I nudged him, “Space rocks.”

The alien clapped two of his arms together, which I was quickly learning was how this species showed delight.

I hated to burst the alien’s bubble of innocence and wonder but…

“Do you know the worst thing about Earth and living there?”

The child’s face dropped and the spiky arm-like appendages fell to their side.

I continued, “The worst part about living on Earth, or at least in my country, isn’t the pollution, poverty, hunger, or even abuse. It’s the tension. The fear that we’ve entrusted the keys of mass destruction to a lunatic or a villain. The constant worry that one day you’ll turn on the tv and hear that a war has broken out in our country and a nuclear bomb has been dropped. In my country, we are always at war, but it is always pushed under the rug and ignored. For stuff like that to be shown on the news, it would have to be on our own soil. Either a civil war or a world war. It would destroy anything. No one would survive, and if they did… that fate might be even worse.”

“So… you don’t want to go back to Earth?”

I shrugged helplessly, “Humanity destroyed Earth. Maybe when your grandmama saw it, Earth was more beautiful, more loving, more kind, but more likely is that the effects of humanity’s cruelty were only just starting to show on Earth’s surface and it wasn’t as noticeable yet. To truly see Earth, you have to get up close, beneath the clouds, into the cities. Still… I do want to go home. I want to rebuild and restore Earth to its former glory, if it ever had any when humanity lived on the Earth. I want to see the animals, healthy and thriving, not on the brink of extinction, and to see the moon surrounded by stars, and see the milky way hovering in the sky like it did when my grandparents were little. I want to go home.”

“Can I help?”

“I don’t think so, little friend. It’s not fair to pull you into our mess.”

“So? I want to see Earth too! I want to help the humanities.”

I smiled sadly and patted the alien’s baby curl. “Let’s just get me home first. Just imagine being the first of your species to reach Earth’s surface. Your mama will be so proud.”

I looked out the small window at the wide expanse of nothing, with stars twinkling in the distance, almost too far away to see.

“Let’s go home.”

Alex Julius, you should be the one who must be cured of your delusions.

You are likely too young, but know that it’s not just Japan and South Korea, there are almost 800 of such “colonies” in the world.

We’re still doing this – added Finland recently. And restored another – the Philippines.

This is the rare occasion where what trump claimed is actually true – Americans can literally shoot anybody on main street and can’t be touched. Young Filipinos may not know these, but Filipinos were target practices once they get too close to Clark and Subic and of course, they could treat their women however they feel they want. And Bong Bong wants all these American liberties back in his country.

The only difference is that its so much more for Japan and South Korea – its Washington that dictates their national foreign policies – that when the American president tells them to jump, they ask how high. . . where the government of Japan can’t fly over Tokyo without permission of the U.S. military commisioner . . . where South Korea can’t do anything involving their military without the permission of the U.S. military brass. . . .where its president must know how to sing Karaoke when making state visits. But of course, to maintain the pretext of democracy, they have to do the work of governing their own people – that they can do themselves. Isn’t all these describing running “colonies” by enjoying the best of both worlds?

Today’s MM image generations

The focus is on admiration, and the god of the vine. It’s a hodgepodge of prompts and resulting in very interesting images.

Many nudes. But you all know that I am figurative art lover.

I really love the style, and the color composition. But I am having problems with the image arrangement. But I think that in time things will straighten out.

Personally, I don’t like full nudes. I prefer partial nudes, and elements of clothing with folds, and details.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(17)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(17)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(17)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(17)

@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(15)
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(15)

So I changed things out. And I started to require loin cloths and other attire elements.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(15)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(15)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(14)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(14)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(11)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(11)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(10)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(10)

Some didn’t have the elements of clothing, but the colors were great.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(10)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(10)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(9)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(9)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(9)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(9)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(8)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(8)

In the ones where everyone was  clothed, it became too formal. I wanted something less formal.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(8)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(8)

Maybe something more like this…

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(7)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(7)

This is pretty good.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(7)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(7)

So is this one.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(6)

And this one.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(6)

The careful placement of arms was really nice.

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(5)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 0(5)

This is fine…

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(4)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 1(2)

@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(2)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2(1)

@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)
@@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 3(1)

@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2
@Default Create a anatomicallyaccurate photo realistic Baroques 2

Our married love life was wonderful, Blessed with cute baby girl , added more and more love to our lives. Perfect love life , both of us were equally romantic and made for each other in all aspects . But he fell sick one day, severely sick. Lost his job soon due to the serious health reasons . I was not working and no experience though well qualified. No one earning at home , worst phase of our lives .I started hunting for job , use to seek help with whomever I know , giving my resume. Since it was already 4 years that I had finished my degree, securing a job was really too hard and challenging. I use to drop into offices , use all my limited intelligence and resources to get a job. Everywhere , every effort was a failure, I was good at nothing , hopes were very less with the future. Somewhere luck clicked , a gentleman agreed to help me , but I had to go far off – 1000 kms from my town . I took the bold step, left the beloved family back . I got a break, worked very hard without caring the number of working hours , my food , my comforts despite of my gender constraints. I did not had anyone to care about me . I had save every penny and money order to home. My life was very hard , but started feeling bit ease with finance. I could meet my family first time after a gap of 10 months. I endured all the pains , discomforts to save our lives . Slowly in 2 years my financial status became very sound and everyone happy at home. All the needs and luxuries of each individual were met with my income. This is 20 years old story , but when I look back now , I wonder myself with the journey. Everyone in the family knows about my success , no one knows the struggle I had in the initial stages especially when alone , away from home. But I am happy I could take care of my loved ones…!! I have cut the very long story short though here. Thanks for reading through this.

Edit 1 :

Dear all my friends , I am adding some more details as asked by you . My smart and intelligent husband lost many of his metal capabilities permanently , he just survived with no physical handicap. As of today he is very casual person with no job , no responsibility and no emotions to me and my daughter.

Yes I could meet all the materialistic needs of the family, but the love which I was dying for , I haven’t experienced again.

The reason I am anonymous here is , I have managed to keep this story very secret as much as possible due to many reasons . I had lots of hopes that I would get my love back , year on year realized that it would never happen, Along with that with growing daughter I wanted to stay strong , avoid any negative emotions , keep the father and daughter bonding as well as family bonding intact . My journey along had been very very rough while managing to take care of crooked in laws , take full responsibility of my sick parents ( my younger brother had died in road accident then ) , emotionless and half sensed husband. I avoided myself in all the social gatherings due to his behavioral issues, it is all a daily battle. I wanted to ensure my daughter will not suffer psychologically in this bargain. It was all tight rope walk for me , lost my youth , real happiness in life . But only satisfaction is my daughter is like a fresh flower with full of fragrance, she is undisturbed with all the tragedy which occurred in our life when she was close to 2 years old.

Materialistically I gained many many things in life but the wonderful love which I received from my husband is just a dream now. Many good things happened to me in my career unexpectedly .There are many many bitter most things about my husband which is still going on my life . Life has taught me the art of living .. and it is going on & on

Edit 2.

Friends , my thanks to all of you . Your responses has made me to feel lighter with the hard and helpless feelings that I have that I am not able to fix my husbands problems. I could have donated any part of my body to resume his love , medically there is no brain transplant . Miracles may work ??

I had shared a part of my story here earlier ,

Someone anonymous’s answer to What is the loveliest thing a child has ever said to you?

when I get chance I would share the details of deadly disease that my husband survived with, how I handled both my challenging IT career, responsibility of all the dependents , how my husbands family took undue advantage of his illness and emotionless status

Edit 3

Friends ,My daughter loves her dad a lot , has accepted him fully for what he is , tried her best to make him to understand his responsibility , no luck but. Our sorrow never reflects in our faces, not an exaggeration we look our best , lively and cheerful . Also look like sisters as per the comment we keep receiving from others. She is bold , practical, very independent, kind and considerate . Though she knows the hardships of mine she does not simply sympathize and am not emotional burden on her. She flew abroad recently for her masters and has lot of ambitions in life. She has her own passions besides academics.

My love life has been fully empty, I have been trying to overcome by indulging in my work , disciplined life & hobbies . My love to the family has been stronger not giving me a chance of seeking love elsewhere . Probably my brought up has a bigger role here

1990-0802, Delta Force Rapist.

MSG Marshall Brown, 1st Special Forces Operations Detachment Delta Operator, arrested while TDY in East Providence, RI. He raped five women. MSG Brown escaped custody & was captured 3-days later.

In 1988, an investigation began when two women were attacked in Raleigh, one @ North Carolina State University, apparently by the same man, a stranger, who climbed in through their second story windows, hooded & dressed in black, ordered them to silence with a knife held to their throats, covered their faces, then raped them. During the rapes, he apologized, telling them that he didn’t want to hurt them & that he “had to do this.”

On June 11, 1989 in Cranston, Rhode Island, Marshall Brown was taken into custody & charged with the rapes of two Rhode Island women. These women were raped with the same modus operandi as the North Carolina women. While in custody, Marshall was deferential to the police, calling them by their ranks & observing scrupulous courtesy. Police described him as soft-spoken. He even spoke approvingly of the professionalism of the arrests & complimented one officer for his handcuffing technique. He had been arrested for prowling in Fayetteville, North Carolina, earlier that May. He had forfeited his bond for a dismissal of the charge.

Marshall went to work in jail, studying the patterns of the federal marshals who transported him to & from court & making friends with a 20-year-old inmate named Frederick Heon. He stayed in shape in jail, using his exercise periods to run.

On July 30, he was cuffed to another prisoner in the back of a federal marshal van & driven to Providence to attend his hearing. When the back door opened, Marshall – who had picked open his handcuffs – walked with the escorting marshal & his fellow inmate for a bit, then sprang past the startled federal marshals & ran like an Olympic athlete up the street & out of sight.

Heon was out on bail & had rented a car, per Marshall’s instructions & was waiting @ an appointed rendezvous point & drove Marshall to the Connecticut state line. Heon then went to a church where he was told he’d find money, which wasn’t there. Three days later, Marshall was caught in a stolen car & re-arrested. Marshall told the police about Heon’s assistance & Heon was taken back to jail for a parole violation.

Marshall had burglarized a house 15 miles outside of Providence for food & credit cards & was camping in a pine grove nearby. He stole the car in the same neighborhood. When back in custody, he admitted to nine rapes in Rhode Island, Texas, Arizona & North Carolina. Marshall had been attending the Naval version of the Sergeants Major Academy in Norfolk when he was caught the first time.

His wife, Michelle, who was taking care of their young son, was stunned.

I can’t even pretend to understand Marshall Brown, after spending many hours with him & going on one combat operation with him. I have heard the statement that rape is not sex, it is an exercise of power. I don’t buy it. Rape is violent power, but it is sexualized power & it is also violent sex. Sex in patriarchal society is in almost every case practiced, portrayed & understood as a form of aggression & power & all power is in many ways sexualized.

Marshall’s brother-in-law spoke with me many years later & said that Marshall told him that he felt he had to use his skills somehow, or he’d begin to lose them. Marshall saw the rapes as a training opportunity @ some level & therefore the women as training aids

One might suppose, since he repeated this ritualistic rape @ least nine times, that there was some rush he needed. I don’t buy it. He had jumped out of airplanes a thousand times, was a proficient technical climber, had been in combat. I think the rush – if that’s what it was – was transgression. Nancy C. M. Hartsock, in Money, Sex & Power – Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism, said that “without the boundary to violate, the thrill of transgression would disappear.” Marshall’s criminality was not in spite of his religious conversion, his squeamishness about sex, or his uptight WASP upbringing in East Texas. It was an outcome… of all those things, but also of a masculinity defined by a culture of rape & a man who had made a career of pursuing that masculinity.

Marshall Brown served in a profession with a constant subtext of physical coercion & in a field within that profession (Delta Force/Special Operations) where we were expected to work outside the rules, behind the scenes, in the shadows, employing a host of very specialized skills, to “preserve a way of life.”

My father has served for 4 decades in the Indian Army. He retired last year but still looks like a young gentleman. Here is his pic:

main qimg 9492057ed7a9f41ad4dd09997e9d47a3 lq
main qimg 9492057ed7a9f41ad4dd09997e9d47a3 lq

Following are the things he does daily in order to maintain that fitness, happiness, and energy:

  1. Early 2 bed & early 2 rise: He sleeps by 10 pm and wakes up at 5 am. Those 7 hours are pure sound sleep.
  2. Fresh Air: Upon waking up, he goes for a walk/jog along with our dog.
  3. Morning Nutrition: Next, he drinks Mulethi Tea, which has immense and immense benefits.
  4. Being Natural: He also does Brushing with Neem twig sometimes before normal brushing. He applies Mustard Oil. He hasn’t used shampoo even once in his life and still at the age of 60, he has black & naturally strong hair.
  5. Exercise: Next, he performs yoga and calisthenics.
  6. Spirituality for positivity: After having a bath, he does pooja, which according to him gives him positivity and strength for the odd things.
  7. Do what you love: Then he goes to work. Right now after retirement, his work is to look after our farms. Despite having servants, he also does some farming himself which gives him joy.
  8. Love what you do: In his small-small work, whether household or be it when he was in the Army. He is determined and has will power to do the work. He takes full responsibility and doesn’t procrastinate. He does his work happily. He accepts responsibilities and problems rather than blaming or cursing. This reduces stress and increases productivity.
  9. Nutrition on time: He ensures that he takes his meals on time (Lunch before 1 pm and Dinner before 7.30).
  10. Proper Nutrition: He also ensures that he eats natural things and things with more health benefits rather than going for taste. For example, we eat black wheat roti, self-grown vegetables & and fruits, pure milk, and whatever we can arrange naturally.
  1. We were having dinner at the private Magic Castle in Hollywood. At the next table was a stereotypical studio executive type; you know, 50+ years old, ultra tan, long (hair plugged?) grey hair, flashy suit. With him was a20ish young, hot model type, with a low cut backless dress that showed off her tattoos, among other things. Yup, I thought; fossil studio exec pulling a Harvey Weinstein with some actress. Except as they were leaving, the young woman said to him Dad, when Mom gets back from New York, maybe we can have dinner again!
  2. Having dinner in a restaurant. The guy next to us appears to be having a tough time with his date. He does all the talking, and his date just gives him a half smile; jokes, funny stories, ordering the food, just a half smile from the women. We thought it might be a first date, maybe off of the internet or a blind one. Except when they were about to leave, the guy got her wheelchair and helped her sit in it; she obviously had had a stroke or something, and thus she could only muster a half smile and not speak.
  3. Las Vegas: we enter the Wynn Hotel, and see a scantily clad (mini skirt, halter top) woman walking with two security guards on either side. We thought it was a hooker being escorted out of the premises. However, this was Las Vegas. She was instead wearing the standard waitress outfit for the hotel. Sorry, our mistake!

A young pilot got a job as a bush pilot flying float planes in Alaska. On one of his first jobs, he flew out to a remote lake to pick up a hunter who had been dropped off the week before.

When he got there, he was horrified to discover that the hunter had bagged a full grown bull moose. He also had several hunting rifles, a canoe, several boxes of ammunition, plus all his camping gear.

“That’s too much,” he protested. “I won’t even get the plane into the air with all that weight.”

“I don’t see why not,” the hunter replied. “You strap the canoe to one of the floats, the moose to the other float, the baggage in the back seats, and I sit up front with you. Alf Smith did it last year, and he got us into the air.”

The young pilot’s ego was wounded. “Well, if Alf Smith can do it, so can I. Give me a hand.”

He taxied downwind to the far end of the lake as far as he could go, spun around into the wind and gave it full throttle. The plane staggered into the air and just barely cleared the trees at the far end. Ahead of them, however, was a low ridge. Using every ounce of flying skill, he managed to nurse the airplane over the trees at the top of the ridge. Before he could relax, however, he realized to his horror that there was a second, even higher ridge a half mile in front of him. There was nothing he could do but pancake the airplane into the trees.

As he and his passenger crawled out from the wreckage, he surveyed the destroyed plane and wept “My God, what have I done?”

“Don’t feel too bad,” said the hunter. “You made it half a mile farther than Alf Smith did last year.”

I was driving along a two lane road in rural Minnesota, at or just below the speed limit (55mph) when I saw a cop pull out from a side road. He quickly caught up with me and lit me up. I found a driveway where I could pull over safely and stopped. As I was getting my license and insurance ready, he walked up and asked the usual question, “Do you know why I pulled you over?”.

I said, no, I can’t think of anything I was doing wrong.

He told me that he had seen me give room for a lady pulling out slowly, and didn’t blow my horn, flash my lights or seem irritated that she had blocked my path, but let her get up to speed and gave her plenty of room. I also returned a wave from her as she turned off the road.

He handed me a card that read “Good Driver Award”. He told me that if I needed to use it, to show it, and they’ll forgive minor things like too long in a metered parking space. Not only that, but he was very cordial and friendly. Told me to have a nice drive home. He also told me to show it either the McDonald’s or Burger King just up the road for a free soda.

Made my day!!

Haha. Tonya Harding Syndrome. What a perfect description of the mentality of USA against anyone that is strong, be it China or Russia.

After WW2, USSR was militarily strong. USA said USSR threatened US (dominance). USA then collapsed USSR in 1991. Today Russia is still militarily strong, then thru Ukraine, USA is to weaken, if not break up Russia.

In 1980s’, when Japan was economically strong being #2 in the world & when its semiconductor surpassed USA, USA then beat Japan down making Japan lost 10–20 years’ of development.

Today, China is both economically, militarily & technologically strong. Of course, USA cannot sleep well at night.

Dont ever think USA is gentle to EU who is also competing with USA. USA pulled down Euro once. One reason for the Ukraine war is to weaken Europe’s economy.

So … USA suffers Tonya Harding syndrome against anybody who is developing well & challenging US hegemony. Not just against China.

USA was successful in beating down USSR & Japan. But has & will fail in China though.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten that China’s President Xi Jinping is the son of one of China’s greatest generals?

That he spent three years in uniform as Assistant to the Secretary of Defense?

That in the past two years he has repeatedly called on his 2,000,000 man army to ‘prepare to fight and win wars’?

That, when Gallup asked people around the world, “Would you fight for your country in case of war ?”, 87% of Chinese are willing and ready to fight–almost three times the percentage of Americans or anyone else?

Today, China overmatches the US in its Near Seas and my guess is that it will choose to act there in order to open a potential second front to take pressure off Russia. A credible sequence goes something like this: in close coordination with Russia, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Hezbollah…

1. Announce an ADIZ, below, over Taiwan and the Taiwan Strait that excludes all military aircraft and requires permission for every civilian flight in and out of Taiwan. The US cannot prevent this and it paralyzes Taiwan.

2. Issue an arrest warrant for Tsai Ing-wen on a charge of treason and incitement to war and warn that anyone attempting to assist her will be charged as an accessory.

3. Announce that the Taiwan Strait is Chinese, permanently closed to military vessels.

4. Announce that the entire South China Sea is Chinese, permanently closed to military vessels.

5. Show off a few new weapons systems to complement its remarkable missiles and its fleet of Type 055 heavy cruisers, the most powerful surface combatants afloat.

6. Place the entire nation on a war footing, call up the reserves and activate all radars, light up all missile launching facilities, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxd_A-hGEOQ

These actions would be front page headlines in every new media on earth yet, if you do the math, you’ll see that the cost is….$0.00.

And China hasn’t invaded Taiwan yet. Hasn’t hurt a fly, in fact.

China’s capacity to sustain combat in its Near Seas is far bigger than Western media have been telling us (read the USNI papers to see what I mean). America is no match for China there–on land, sea or in the air.

And, as Clausewitz might have said, fleets win battles but economies win wars and China’s economy is far bigger, growing much faster and is more capable of ramping up than ours.

Would invasion even be necessary?

As a female autistic growing up in Outback Australia in the 1960’s I was bullied a lot. Really nasty stuff, it was only when I was in my 40’s that I got diagnosed as High Functioning Aspergers. I have always used education to get out of bad situations and high school was a particularly bad situation! Getting my head flushed down the toilet daily by a group of six or seven laughing girls was just something I had to deal with.

I left as soon as I was able, went to the nearest big city, got a job and continued to study at night school. Over the years, I built up this small base into a very comfortable career, married, had children and continued to work in a job I enjoyed, was good at, and that paid well. I have travelled the world and learned several languages, since I have an affinity for it.

One of my “nerdy” friends stayed on in the small regional town I’d gone to high school in and we kept touch. She was able to tell me what became of the bullies who used to torment us.

The leader of the group was a girl who was voted by our class as “the most likely to succeed”, apparently because she was regarded as pretty and used to date a high school sports jock. She ended up living in a caravan with a dozen children all from different fathers, working occasionally in low-paid jobs and living on welfare and whatever she could make by peddling her body. My friend told me that I wouldn’t recognize her as she got onto meth and used to pick at her skin leaving bleeding sores all over. She eventually died of a drug overdose a few years ago.

Another girl who used to delight in putting out cigarettes on my skin if she caught me going to the loo while she was there ended up dying, her car wrapped around a tree late one night when her boyfriend, who was driving drunk, was speeding.

A number of other bullies, the low-level ones who just went along with the major bullies and joined in if they had nothing better to do, ended up spending their lives working in the vegetable cannery or the chicken processing plant or the abbatoirs (I lived in an agricultural community, and those where the big employers.) There are probably worse jobs about than gutting chickens for a living, and it is at least good honest work, I suppose…

Another one, a boy this time who used to enjoy getting a seat behind me on the two hour bus ride to and from school and whacking me across the back of the head with a book, also got his karma – he became a welder after he left school, was working inside a silo one day and there was a build-up of gases. When he turned on the welder, the gases ignited while he was inside the silo and the result was that he lost both his legs. Now he has no choice but to sit – in a wheelchair.

Whereas I have lived a comfortable and mostly content life, doing a job I love, running my own business, and owning my own houses, some of which I rent out. One of the best things I ever did was to leave the small-town bullies and small-minded losers to their own devices and leave. I’ve never regretted going.

On the trail of the shale

A problem with food banks, and eating randomly when the opportunity arises, it that a lot of what these agencies provide is processed foods that are heavily laden with salts, sugars, non-nutritious fats, and many chemicals (including preservatives) that can be toxic to the body. If I were low on monetary and food resources, I would shoot for the natural, nutritious foods that are inexpensive or easily obtainable. Buy them in bulk if possible. Examples of inexpensive foods that pack a nutritional punch, ones that are also tasty:

  1. The humble potato. They can be chopped up, smeared in extra virgin olive oil and baked in a microwave oven. Avoid the butter, margarine, ghee, etc. Do not fry the potatoes like they do the French fries. You could add spices, depending on your taste. Also add tomato paste before the baking. The nutritional value of the potato is very high, but loading it with trans-fatty oils, high cholesterol fluids will negate the value. And the potato is tasty and filling.
  2. But for those who are diabetic or pre-diabetic, an alternative to potatoes that is both filling and low sugar and calorie is the carrot. And carrots are both inexpensive and easy to consume as either raw, medium-cooked, or fully-cooked. You can more easily lose weight while eating carrots, although they are not as nutritious as potatoes, But eating a balanced assortment of nutritious foods will make up for that.
  3. Tomato paste, mentioned above is a thoroughly inexpensive way to eat tomatoes. The red paste is a concentrated and safely processed form of the highly nutritious tomato. A huge bulky can is sold for about $5, would last for weeks in the cooler, even if you use a lot of it every day.
  4. Some in the bean family such as cowpeas, lentils, and garbanzo beans. Buy them raw, to defray the expenses and to avoid the salted canned ones. Place them in water overnight. This will hydrate and soften them and make them easier and faster to cook the next day.
  5. Oatmeal. A canister, depending on size, will last you weeks or even months.
  6. The egg is famously nutritious, and one a day is enough. Boiled, or fried in olive oil. Wonderful animal protein, many B-vitamins.
  7. Drink your tea or coffee in moderation. The antioxidants are there and helps keep you alert. Use stevia, the natural no-calorie sweetener….inexpensive and not bulky. Cut out the sugar, the Equal, and the Splenda. Go for Stevia….comes in several name brands.
  8. An orange or tangerine a day does wonders.
  9. Carrots are another inexpensive nutritious powerhouse.
  10. Eat your nuts. The least inexpensive way to consume nuts , and to avoid overeating them is to buy them in bulk at the grocery store or places like nuts.com. And of course, many roasted nuts from the stores are overrated. If say you placed small amounts of a Brazil nut, almonds, walnuts, sunflower seeds, pepitas, peanuts, flaxseeds, etc (or whatever you prefer) in a small Pyrex bowl, added some water and olive oil, microwaved the mixture, you would come out with a very nutritious homemade power bar. Just don’t over roast or burn. Having natural foods at home is not only cheap, but deters you from overeating, and eating processed foods. Also, prepare your snacks at home. Nuts place you in a good mood
  11. Banana. Delicious and nutritious, and filling, mood-enhancing, hydrating, inexpensive. One a day does the trick.
  12. Water…drink your water. This can’t be emphasized enough. This is the medium of body and other functions
  13. Go for inexpensive vegetables, rainbow colors, instead of the tv diners which are hazardous to your health. Eating natural foods makes it so much less expensive to manage your health
  14. Exercising goes well with eating inexpensively and nutritiously, whether you are on a budget or not. My list is inexhaustible, but I suppose a reasonable guideline.
  15. A bit of garlic/onion should be incorporated in the diet, daily.

Be the Rufus

“No one ever buries a hoard of coins, especially precious metal coins, without intending to retrieve it.” Christopher Ratte.

Some Persian soldiers had buried their treasure at the time when the last remnants of Persian soldiers and Persian sympathizers were driven out of Hellenistic Greece. Archaeologist Christopher Ratte and his team have been in Western Turkey for years working on the ancient site of Notion – then part of Ionia – and have found a pot of rare Persian gold coins in what appears to be a basement room.

Credit: Notion Archaeological Project.

The New York Times has published a story on this find, with interviews of Christopher Ratte. Here is a share of that article:

By Franz Lidz, Aug. 2, 2024

It is the late fifth century B.C. and a mercenary soldier kneels in his modest quarters, digging a hole in the earthen floor. He places a small jug, called an olpe, in the hole for safekeeping and covers it with dirt. In the olpe are his savings — scores of gold coins, known as darics, each one equal to a month’s pay.

But something happens to the soldier — possibly something sinister — and he never retrieves his hoard, which remains undiscovered for the next 2,400 years.

That is one of several scenarios proposed by Christopher Ratté, an archaeologist at the University of Michigan, to account for the cache, which he and his research team recently unearthed from the ruins of Notion, an ancient city-state in modern-day Turkey. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., the excavators found the remains of an earlier dwelling. “The coins were buried in a corner of the older building,” Dr. Ratté said. “We weren’t actually looking for a pot of gold.”

Darics were chiefly used to provide payment to soldiers of fortune. Andrew Meadows, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford who was not involved in the project, said he knew of no other hoard of this type to turn up in Asia Minor. “This is a find of the highest importance,” he said. “The archaeological context for the hoard will help us fine-tune the chronology of Achaemenid gold coinage.”

The archaeological site at Notion spans 80 acres atop a promontory in western Anatolia, a borderland dividing Asia from Europe. It was one of the Greek-speaking communities that emerged in the region during the early first millennium B.C., perhaps because of migration across the Aegean Sea. The deposition and loss of the Notion hoard occurred at a time of warfare, insecurity and great power machinations in a contested frontier zone.

This was true in deepest antiquity, as remembered in the story of the Trojan War,” Dr. Ratté said. “And it remains true to this day, as demonstrated by the Syrian refugee crisis.” He noted that the small harbor on the east side of the city was one of the departure points for Syrian refugees who fled across Turkey to Europe during the refugee crisis a decade ago.

Anatolia is the birthplace of the Western world’s first state-issued coin, the stater, which was created by a seafaring people called Lydians. King Alyattes standardized the weight and design of the Lydian stater, which, beginning around 610 B.C., was struck in electrum, a natural alloy of gold and silver. The king’s son and successor, Croesus, is credited with minting the first true gold coin, the Croeseid. The expression “rich as Croesus” refers to his extravagant wealth as well as the opulence of Lydia during his rule.

Fortifications at Notion, a Greek-speaking community that emerged in western Anatolia during the early first millennium B.C. Credit: Notion Archaeological Project/University of Michigan.

Excavations at Notion last year. While digging beneath the courtyard of a house dating to the third century B.C., researchers found the remains of an earlier dwelling and a cache buried there. Credi: Notion Archaeological Project/University of Michigan.

In 546 B.C., the entire area, known as Ionia, was conquered by the Achaemenid Persian Empire. Although Croesus was defeated in battle by Cyrus the Great, his gold-based monetary system lived on. The Persians continued to manufacture Croesids until they introduced their own bimetallic currency, made up of silver and gold coins. The silver coins were called sigloi, and the gold ones were darics — a name derived from either Darius I, who ruled the Persian Empire from 522 B.C. to 486 B.C., or dari-, the root of the Old Persian word for gold.

In 427 B.C., according to the Greek historian Thucydides, an Athenian general named Paches attacked and killed a troop of pro-Persian mercenaries at Notion after luring their commander into a trap. The Persian sympathizers were then expelled, and Notion was reorganized under Athenian supervision.

Two decades later, a decisive naval battle in the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta was fought off the coast of Notion, which the Athenians had been using as a naval base. Dr. Ratté said that the gold hoard might have been connected to the events of 427 B.C., or later, with the Athenian evacuation of Notion.

“It is possible it was not associated with either of these dramatic events,” he said, “but was simply the savings of a veteran mercenary soldier in a time and place when soldiers of fortune could make a lot of money if they were willing to risk their lives for the highest bidder.” Many Greeks fought for the Persian Empire, including the Athenian historian Xenophon, who was an active mercenary for the Persian king Cyrus the Younger from 401 B.C.- to 400 B.C. — the same time period when the Notion hoard was tucked away.

In 387 B.C., within a generation after the Athenians were defeated by the Spartans, Notion and the other cities of Ionia were reintegrated into the Persian Empire. They remained Persian possessions until the conquest of Alexander the Great in 334 B.C., at which point production of the daric quickly declined. Alexander and his immediate successors had many of the existing gold pieces melted down and recast as coins bearing their images, making darics rare today.

The Notion darics are stamped on the front with a likeness of the Persian king kneeling in a long tunic. In his left hand is a bow; in his right, a long spear. The backs of the coins are blank, except for a punch mark. The hoard is being stored at the Ephesus Archaeological Museum in nearby Selcuk, Turkey, along with imported Athenian pottery that was recovered at the dig.

Dr. Ratté believes that the fact that the loot was never reclaimed is a clear sign of disaster. “No one ever buries a hoard of coins, especially precious metal coins, without intending to retrieve it,” he said. “So only the gravest misfortune can explain the preservation of such a treasure.”

Truth

Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real? How does it break our understanding of things?

How did you draw the conclusion that; “mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real?”, explain go into more detail. Unless of course you are a mathematician or psychist and you yourself have issues with infinity being real?

In mathematics, infinity is not just a vague notion of endlessness, but a rigorously defined concept that can be expressed in multiple ways, i.e., cardinality of sets, ordinal numbers, limit concept, symbolic representation, to name a few. Mathematicians have developed sophisticated tools to work with infinity, which strongly suggest that overall they do not have issues with it.

But, from a physics stand point things start to get complicated as the concept of infinity is more problematic and often indicates a limitation of our theories rather than a physical reality. This manifests itself in a number of ways, cosmology and quantum mechanics being prime examples. It is also a challenge when we start talking about black holes and singularities that represent points where physical quantities become infinite, suggesting a breakdown of the theory of infinity, as “normal” rules just don’t apply or they breakdown completely, which in real terms is nothing more than the end point of our understanding.

Many physical models use infinity as a form of idealization, and what I mean by that is, a lot of physical models use infinity as a convenient approximation (e.g., point particles, infinite potential wells), while still recognizing these are idealizations. Keeping in mind that no physical measurement can ever yield an infinite value, as all measuring devices have finite ranges, otherwise what’s the point of attempting to measure something in the first place?

You have not covered the philosophical perspective of infinity in your question which in many ways is just as important as it is in physics, mathematics and the physical world itself. Things like; does infinity actually exist in nature, or is it merely a useful mathematical construct? Infinity leads to numerous paradoxes (e.g., the paradox of Hilbert’s Grand Hotel, for more detail on this go to Wikipedia) that as a thought experiment challenges our intuitive understanding of what we believe infinity actually is. Infinity often represents the boundary of what we can know or are able to measure, that highlights the limits of human understanding.

Then we come to the practical implications of infinity. Some theories for example that produce infinite results often lose their predictive power, which indicates a lot more refinement is required. Infinite series and processes must be truncated for practical calculation purposes, which introduces a need for approximations, as there is absolutely no point them going on forever.

The appearance of so-called infinities in physical theories often drives a search for a more comprehensive framework to work within, (i.e., quantum gravity attempts to resolve singularities in general relativity). This is a signal, or indication that different thinking needs to be applied and more intensive research is required. To that end, in my mind infinity is not an end point, but simply a marker that requires one to go onto the next stage, whatever that may be.

Infinity in mathematics is a well-defined and useful concept that allows for the exploration of abstract ideas beyond finite limitations. In physics, infinity often signals the limits of a theory’s applicability, which then prompts further, deeper investigation and refinement of our understanding of the physical world. The interplay between mathematical infinity and physical reality of infinity is basically a work in progress and will continue indefinitely, as, when you think about it, is there any end to infinity?” Perhaps no…as that is what infinity is, across just about all domains no matter how one thinks about it or how it is expressed.


  • Q1: Why do mathematicians and physicists have issues with infinity being real?
  • A1: I don’t think they really do..is infinity is a concept on all levels is not fully 100% “resolvable”.

  • Q2: How does it break our understanding of things?
  • A2: Again, I don’t think it does, it is more a boundary where our understanding stops and it is merely an indicator that we need to dig deeper, refine and further our understanding. Human knowledge always has and always will have a limit, it will never, ever be infinite.

At the end of the day, there will never be an answer to your two-part question, it will go on forever, all the way to infinity and beyond…whatever that is…

ALIEN (1979) MOVIE REACTION!

Yes.

This was brought home to me during an exercise in the mid-80’s when I was a young Engineer Platoon Leader. My platoon was attached to an Infantry Battalion for a long field training exercise. We were equipped with HMMVW’s with TOW missiles and were trying to operate against tanks. That turned out to be pretty tricky, the tanks were very good, and the tactics we were using were not fully developed. We ended up getting kicked around the training area pretty routinely.

In one scenario, the Brigade Commander, a full Colnel and a Vietnam Veteran ordered the Battalion I was working with to hold a particular pass “at all costs.” The Battalion did a credible job defending, but then got flanked, which led to the Battalion Commander, also a Vietnam Vet, to order a withdrawl.

I was pretty new, but I thought at the time that this was a good call. In my view, holding onto the position any longer than we had would have led to the extinction (ln the exercise) of the Battalion, about 500 guys. The Battalion Commander wanted to live to fight another day, and what he was doing was doctrinally sound.

This particular point got discussed at length during the After Action Review. The Battalion Commander got asked why he ordered the withdrawal when he was ordered to stand. He laid out his reasoning, which made sense to me. I was there. There wasn’t anything else to do.

There was this long silence. Then the Brigrade Commander looked at the Battalion Commander with this laser-beam look and says, “John, if I tell you to go die on some hill, I’ve got a damned good reason for doing it. My concerns, the Division’s concerns, are bigger than yours. If I have to sacrafice your Battalion in order to preserve something bigger, it’s my job to order you to do it. It’s your job to take your boys and go out and die.”

This is the dark side of combat that no one really likes to talk about. It doesn’t happen often, normally because of a miscalculation or mistake, but units get asked to make these kinds of sacrafices. When you are an officer, if you’re doing your job right, your unit is like your family. Words that describe how close units bind together in combat fail me. Others have done it much better. These are your brothers, your sisters, your children. When you get asked to do something like this, it’s like asking your children to go out and die for you. Then you have go out and die with them.

Anyway, I’ve never forgotten it. It made me think through a lot of things before I became a Company Commander and had to take folks to war.

Its all about timing

  1. Face culture comes from Confucian culture. As a unique cultural and psychological phenomenon of the Chinese people, face culture has greatly influenced the daily social life of the Chinese people.
  2. North Americans are Christian culture
  3. Arabs, Somalis, Afghans, Nigerians are Islamic culture
  4. Turkic and Mongolians are nomadic culture
  5. The values ​​of Dignity, honor, face are different among Christian culture, Islamic culture and nomadic culture, and the difference is very big.

Honor and face cultures attach great importance to regulating individual behavior by social expectations and cultural norms. However, the two cultural phenomena differ in several crucial aspects.

The new cultural framework of dignity, honor, and face was proposed based on three different cultural logics and reveals that while both honor culture and face culture place importance on adhering to social norms, honor culture places greater emphasis on both self-awareness and external evaluations for self-worth, whereas face culture places more weight on external evaluations.

Additionally, honor culture is characterized by an unstable social hierarchy prone to competition, violence, and virtue, while face culture prioritizes modesty, harmony, and cooperation within a more stable hierarchy. Especially at banquets, whether or not to drink is directly related to face.

From indigenous perspectives, the self-image and social image in honor culture are relatively consistent, and honor encompasses moral, gender, and family-related aspects that may be defended through violence. In contrast, self-image and social image in face culture tend to be incongruent, and face involves morality and social achievement, which is expressed through the dimensions of seeking face and avoiding losing face with an emphasis on status and authority.

Combined with the above two perspectives, these core differences between honor and face cultures can be attributed to the moralization and instrumentalization of social cultural norms.

Specifically, honor tends to moralize social and cultural norms by transforming descriptive norms into prescriptive norms, where majority and typical behaviors that exist in a culture are considered behaviors that group members should or must abide by. In contrast, face instrumentalizes social and cultural norms by using descriptive and prescriptive norms as means and tools to maintain relationships, demonstrate status, and uphold authority.

This perspective provides new insights into cultural phenomena, such as the positive correlation between violence and virtue in honor cultures, where violence becomes a social norm that adapts to the honor culture environment and is moralized into a virtuous attribute. The social norm of harmony in face culture exists both as value-oriented harmony influenced by Confucian culture and instrumental harmony in daily life, leading to a dissonance between face and heart.

Biscuits

Submitted into Contest #24 in response to: Write a story set in the dark recesses of space where the two main characters are often at odds with each other in humorous and comedic ways. view prompt

Roisin O’Riordan

She was going to kill him. She was actually going to murder him. Yes, she has said it plenty of times before but this time she meant it. This time she would drag him by his stupid hair to an airlock and shove him out to space where he can suffocate.Seven months. She lasted seven months stuck in this shuttle with him, but now she was finally going to crack.It started off with the computer. He programmed it to call him “Hot Stuff.” She changed it back. Then, he programmed it to call him “King of the Bandages.” Once again, she changed it back. Twenty nine nicknames later-yes, she kept a list-the most recent development was “Big McDaddy.”And since his names apparently weren’t keeping him preoccupied, he decided to spend time obsessing over hers. Specifically, her first name. On the top of her medical file is “B. Miller” neatly typed out, but he wanted to know more. The guesses started off sensible enough with Bella and Bethany-they have now devolved into Bread and Bacteriochlorophylls.And somehow, no matter what happens, he won’t stop grinning. No one should be as cheery as this guy, it doesn’t seem healthy. Every time she sees him she wants to growl in frustration, but he remains as sunny as the actual suns they pass.But this time is worse than all those other time. This time he took the biscuit because this time he broke a rule that could get himself and her fired. This time he… well, he took the biscuits.”I can’t believe you!” She screeched, storming into the medical bay. “I can’t believe you would actually steal from the passengers!””I’m sorry?” He asked looking up from a rather heavy looking book. He was still smiling. Asshole.”The biscuits. Don’t even try to deny it. I know it was you who took them.””Ok.” He went back to reading.”Ok?” That threw her off her guard. She was expecting an argument. For him to try feign innocence before she finally broke him and he begged her not to tell their boss. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.

 

“Ok, I won’t deny it. I took the biscuits.” He raised an eyebrow. “Is there anything else or…?”

 

“Well… well… what do you have to say for yourself?” Her voice got weaker and weaker throughout the sentence. She really had no idea where she wanted to go with that.

 

“…They tasted nice?” Oh, that made her blood boil.

 

“Nice? Taste? That’s not what I was asking. Do you know how much trouble you could be in for this.” He was an idiot, he had to be. Maybe, he just didn’t care. No that couldn’t be it, could it? This job involves being away from Earth for years at a time and being fired tends to mean never getting work anywhere else. Maybe he thought the job would be easy and that he would get away with stuff like this. Not on her watch.

 

“I know how much trouble I will be in-none. No one cares. No one apart from you. Speaking of which, why do you care?”

 

He is unbelievable. “I care because I was put in charge of making sure everything is ready for when the passengers wake up.”

 

It is a requirement of every shuttle to have at least one engineer, and, if asked, she would tell people that she is the engineer-because she is. However, the shuttle is built fairly sturdy, and the AI seems to be doing a fine job of maintaining everything. It’s not that she wants things to go wrong… it would just be nice if there were a few mishaps that called for her assistance. This lack of jobs can make floating in space a tad boring, hence her eagerness to take on the role of an over-glorified party planner.

 

“Look,” he said, closing his book, “in eight months time we’re stopping for fuel at a space station. If we happen to be low on supplies-which we won’t be ’cause these passengers have more than enough-we can stock up then.”

 

“What if one of them wakes up?” It’s a weak argument but one she feels strongly about. She has read every story there was on passengers waking up from the deep sleep they are put into before take off. The passengers they were currently transporting were Taubverlians, so the four year journey would probably feel like a human’s version of a week to them but apparently it’s a week they would rather sleep through. What if they woke up angry? What if they got so annoyed they decided to file a complaint? What if those biscuits were the only thing that would have been able to calm them down and stop them from demanding the whole crew gets fired? It’s unlikely, but it is possible.

 

“Really?” He asked. She glared at him with cold, unforgiving eyes. “You need to calm down before you give yourself a stroke. I check, double check and triple check each passenger’s pod everyday and there hasn’t been even the slightest hint that one of them might wake up before they’re supposed to.” He let out a sigh and for the first time since she met him, his smile faltered. “It’s your first trip right? Thought as much. You see, after a while, you will start to get bitter. You’ll start to resent the passengers, our bosses, whoever it is at home that you’re sending your wages back to. The thought that you will more than likely be working here until the day you die and the knowledge that it is extremely rare for a crew member to ever see Earth again combined with the fact that if someone in charge screws up and needs someone to blame we will probably be killed… well, at some point or another, it gets to you. That’s why I play around with the AI and steal the occasional biscuit. That’s why Ellie stole a bottle of whiskey. That’s why Charlie is cheating on her husband with Smith. These acts keep us sane. And they’re not hurting anyone-not if no one finds out.”

 

She could somewhat sympathise. Ok, she could sympathise a lot. She was bitter. Of course she was bitter about… everything, but she wasn’t going to complain. Her family needed her to have this job, and so must his-it’s not like he would ever see his wages, so they have to be going somewhere.

 

“Our supervisors don’t care as long the passengers get to their destination safe and sound. You can relax, Birdy.”

 

She fought the urge to roll her eyes. “That is not what the B stands for.”

 

His smile was now back to full voltage as he realised he won. “We have been in this tin can for seven months and I still don’t know anything about you. What are your hopes, your dreams, your fears? Where are you from? And what exactly does the B stand for? It doesn’t stand for Biscuit, does it?”

 

She may come to regret this, but at the moment her stress is leaving her and she feels… lonely. She doesn’t have anybody to talk to on this shuttle apart from when she is arguing with him. Hearing him talk about their colleagues that he clearly knows so much better than she does just reminded her of how much she has isolated herself. “Brooklyn.”

 

“You’re from Brooklyn? Cool, I have a cousin that lives there, or used to at least.”

 

“No-well, yes I am from Brooklyn but, that’s what the B stands for.” The look on his face was almost worth it. Almost.

 

“So, you’re from Brooklyn… and your name is-”

 

“Oh, shut up.” She tried to fight a grin.

 

“…Were your parents really worried about you forgetting where you lived?”

 

“I shouldn’t have told you. I should have just stuck to Biscuit.”

 

He let out a laugh at that. Dear god, it was brighter than his smile. “Ok, ok, I’m sorry Biscuit.” She shot him a glare with much less heat than the previous one. It was kind of nice talking to him-not that she would ever dream of saying it to him. Just before she got a chance to retort, a series of short beeps filled the room. “Time for me to go check on the passengers again.”

 

“Oh, right. I have work I need to go do as well.” She turned to leave, ignoring the pang in her chest. She has her work to focus on, friends would just take up time.

 

“Wait.” He tossed her a small metal box. She stared at the box, then at him, then back again. At his nod she opened up the latches and the contents very nearly managed to surprise a snort out of her. Biscuits.

Tension Subsiding in South China Sea

Changing Geo-Political arrangements.

Mr. Xi doesn’t terrify me, but he certainly “terrifies” my German friend. Let’s call him Karl.

Obviously, Karl isn’t a basketcase of nailbiting anxiety and fear over a man a continent away. But he related a spine-tingling moment some years back listening to the news while driving on the autobahn.

Before we get into that, a little background about Karl.

Karl, perhaps unsurprisingly, speaks Chinese. What tickles me though, is he speaks funny Chinese.

Notice I said Chinese and not Mandarin.

Karl speaks a creole of accented Mandarin and horror of horrors, the Changsha dialect.

Now, try making sense of the hilarity hearing a thick German accent fighting his own tongue to make the proper tone for Mandarin words abused by the Changsha pronunciation.

After all these years, I have concluded he has been putting up a show all along to bewilder and get a rise out of me deciphering his words.

He has a future in standup, if he ever needs a change of scenery.

Back on topic. What piece of news made him nervous? It was a single statistic from China’s anti-corruption drive.

“More than a million party officials have been disciplined.”

He was flabbergasted by how seriously the Chinese were taking the campaign because when he was there, he had concluded corruption was so deeply ingrained in the culture it was impossible to root out. In fact, that was a primary reason why he left China, even though the money was lucrative.

Karl has an interesting way of bringing his point across, and he was ready when I pressed.

“China isn’t Germany. A million out of a billion is a mere drop.”

“Yes, but China either gives lip service or they do a thorough job. 1 million is a thorough job.”

“True. But why should that jolt?”

“Because nothing happened, Bill.”

“What do you mean nothing happened?”

Evidently he was waiting for this moment of weakness because he broke into a sly smile and declared:

“Nothing happened to President Xi.”

I was truly incredulous.

“I lost you Karl. You expected him to fall victim to the campaign he initiated because he is dirty too?”

“No, silly. The fact nothing happened means we have witnessed the coronation of the first Chinese emperor of the 21st century, if only in practice.”

“Now you sound like a flat earther.”

“No no. Nothing far-fetched. How do you think they land a big fish like Zhou Yongkang? Using the police? Or the army?”

“The President probably ordered his arrest personally.”

“Yes but what was the investigative apparatus and how did they manage to arrest him? Zhou was the security tsar.”

“Oh. I think I’m understanding. Even the FBI will have trouble arresting the vice President.”

“Sort of. The Xi administration basically set up their own supralegal modern day Embroidered Uniform Guard that was vested with political power to deal with anyone, even the biggest fish. The million they mentioned? A substantial number are senior cadres, nodes in the power structure. The Chinese think in terms of guanxi or relationships so tackling corruption equals identifying and destroying webs of collusion.”

“Do you think Xi went too far?”

“No. He did a fantastic job. I am just surprised the faction wars didn’t flare up in response. Not even a whimper. Xi has great standing within the party.”

“Ok, so he cleaned up. Why does that terrify you? He is more powerful than ever?”

“Not really. People fail to realize the five year plans were being executed like clockwork in the midst of rampant corruption. He would have reached the state objectives without rocking the boat.”

“He did not need to pick this fight?”

“No. He had to. It was the right time.”

“The stars didn’t align for Jiang and Hu?”

“Yes. The force was not with them.”

“The FORCE? Dude, you have been playing me all day!”

“Electricity, my boy. You can build the fanciest roads and buildings but without electricity you cannot urbanize.”

*Incredulous stare*

“For sure it is electricity. Hu was a hydroelectric engineer. China’s electricity output increased more than 2-fold during his time in office.”

“What does it have to do with corruption?”

“China essentially went full steam ahead to urbanize. Jiang wasn’t even sure how the system would work as it transited from Central planning to market economics as it spread inland from the SARs. Hu laid the foundation to guarantee future growth. The GFC gave China the breathing space to shape a cultural change among the ruling elite. A bunch of people got rich too quickly and developed money fever.”

“What does the GFC have to do with it?”

“China’s economy fundamentally shifted post 2008. China finally flexed her domestic muscle and decided they had to be less reliant on the west. But they had to inevitably slow down as the west recovered from a balance sheet and sovereign debt crisis. It is this recentering to OBOR and domestic growth that gave Xi the breathing space to tackle corruption nationwide.”

“Man, that’s deep but all that says is China has a good man at the helm. What makes him fearsome?”

“Well, when I was there the way the Chinese were throwing money around was unbelievable. Too much waste. And too many funny things going on. Putting a stop to that means the Chinese are getting on board the next stage of growth, one that is much higher in quality, and sustainable. The Chinese rocket shot up the sky in spite of excesses. Can you imagine a people without? Us Germans are counting the days when the Chinese become direct competitors to German technology and quality. The Chinese are getting their act together.”

Note: The emperor reference is no insinuation of shenanigans. Rather it is Karl’s intent to frame how far the Xi administration can push reform. In other words, Xi has the people’s mandate, just like a legitimate Son of Heaven.


Karl is real, but I’ve paraphrased our conversation.

Note: The profundity of Karl’s astute observations is contained within the satellite composites of nightime China, taken two decades apart.

Bill Pfeiffer’s Chili Capital Punishment

Bill Pfeiffer’s Chili Capital Punishment is the winner of 1980 World’s Championship!

chili 1
chili 1

chili 3
chili 3

chili 4
chili 4

Yield: 14 to 18 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon oregano
  • 2 tablespoons paprika
  • 2 tablespoons MSG
  • 9 tablespoons chili powder
  • 4 tablespoons cumin
  • 4 tablespoons beef bouillon (instant crushed)
  • 2 cans beer
  • 2 cups water
  • 4 pounds extra lean chuck (chili grind)
  • 2 pounds extra lean pork (chili grind)
  • 1 pound extra lean chuck, cut into 1/4 inch cubes
  • 2 large onions, finely chopped
  • 10 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1/2 cup oil or kidney suet
  • 1 teaspoon mole (powdered)
  • 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
  • 1 teaspoon coriander
  • 1 teaspoon hot pepper sauce
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 1 tablespoon Masa Harina
  • Salt to taste

Instructions

  1. In a large pot, add oregano, paprika, MSG, chili powder, cumin, beef bouillon, beer and water. Let simmer.
  2. In a separate skillet, brown 1 1/2 pounds of meat in oil or suet until meat is light brown.
  3. Drain and add to simmering spices. Continue browning meat in batches until all meat has been added.
  4. Sauté finely chopped onions in oil or suet. Add to spices and meat mixture. Add water as needed. Simmer two hours. Add mole (MOE-lay), sugar, coriander, hot pepper sauce and tomato sauce. Simmer for 45 minutes.
  5. Dissolve Masa Harina in warm water and add to chili. Add salt to taste. Simmer for 30 minutes.

I was born in 1965, which means I am 59 as I write this response. In the 1980s, I worked as a DJ in a bar called The Notorious Club 26, and I played music from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s.

As the DJ, I would say things like, “Remember, never trust anyone over 30. If you are over 30, don’t trust yourself.” As a 20-something, I thought I was being funny. Then a horrible thing happened: I turned 30 in 1995.

I was single at the time, and I realized that all the time I wasted being a DJ interfered with my social and personal life. I worked 6 days a week, and on Tuesday of each week, I got paid. Who wants to go out on a date on a Tuesday? Who wants date some who works from 9 pm until 3:30 AM?

I wass 30, looking back from where I came, and realized that I had wasted the last 10 years of my life. I worked, made very good money, got a lot of cash tips for the customers, loved my job, but my life sucked. All I did was work, sleep, and do household jobs. I had no social life.

I kept working but I also went back to college, and finally finished the work for my BA. After that, I was able to quit the DJ job and work during the day instead of being a vampire on a day pass.

I’m not going to lie: 30 seemed old to me. When I turned 40, I got a card that said something like 40 is the new 30.

I’m 59 years old now, and my hair is gray, just like my beard, and my body is a wreck. However, I know that my life has been full and fun. I’m not sure what comes next, but I am looking forward to the trip.

Johnny West 1960s toy figurines

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As a Chinese person, I never felt any connection to the “patriotism” that the Chinese Communist Party instilled in me since childhood.

In elementary school, our teachers told us, “The most important principle in writing is to show your love for China.” Well, I didn’t understand at all. How could a child possibly grasp what it means to “love China”? For an elementary student, “patriotism” is nothing but outdated stories and empty political slogans.

As I grew older, my aversion to “patriotism” only increased. The reason was obvious: if “patriotism” had a significant impact on one’s well-being, why had I never seen anyone get rich because they “loved China”? And why had I never seen anyone fall into a miserable situation because they “didn’t love China”?

When I started using the internet, I discovered more meaningful things. I realized that China could only avoid destruction by embracing Western political systems. During that time, I read many articles by “independent Chinese intellectuals,” including economists, Chinese immigrants abroad, lawyers, and entrepreneurs.

Back then, I hoped these independent intellectuals could awaken the “numb Chinese people” through their writings. They were active on BBS, blogs, social media, and China’s version of Twitter. I spent a lot of time reading their articles and enthusiastically commenting. I admired them and saw them as the future political stars of China. At that time, I had my own blog called “A Chinese Citizen,” with the slogan “For a Bright Future of China.” I wrote every day, and when I had nothing to write about, I would repost negative news about China and add my own gloating comments.

The trolls on Quora today are nothing compared to the old me.

Later, I got married and had my own child. As a freelancer, I had time each day to spend with my growing child. To expose my child to nature, I took them to many places. Busy with accompanying my child, working, cooking, and doing laundry every day, my life focus gradually shifted.

One summer evening when my child was three years old, we drove to a famous large lake in northern Xuzhou called Weishan Lake. A section of the Grand Canal passes through the Weishan Lake area. The sunset bathed the hundred-kilometer-long embankment road along Weishan Lake in golden light. My wife, captivated by the beauty, asked me to stop the car for a while. I parked by the roadside, and we were greeted by the cool evening breeze and the slightly fishy smell of the lake water. We all quietly listened to the waterfowl returning to their nests.

When a long line of cargo ships appeared at the end of my vision on the Grand Canal, another fleet from the opposite direction sounded their horns as they passed through the Linjiaba lock. The sunset deepened, and the afterglow moved from the embankment road to the surface of Weishan Lake. The vast lake, looking like an ocean, stretched beyond the horizon. Waterbirds in the reeds were startled by passing ships, taking off with pleasant sounds. Watching my child jumping with joy and my wife enjoying the cool breeze, I felt a deep sense of happiness. In that moment, I suddenly realized something:

Weishan Lake is a gift from nature to the locals; the Grand Canal is a monumental achievement by our ancestors. The various aquatic products from Weishan Lake have nourished generations of people on this land. Today, these endless cargo ships continuously transport energy and agricultural products to ports along the route. We enjoy the tranquility of nature, while our material life benefits from China’s vibrant economic system.

The natural geography is a gift from God; historically, it is a territory our ancestors expanded on horseback; and in reality, it is the result of countless generations of Chinese people’s hard work. For economic and social activities to run efficiently, the country’s leaders need exceptional talent to design reliable development plans. Without all this, there would be no individual happiness. The CPC is a positive part of this picture—not the whole, but just as important as all other parts.

I live on this land in this lifetime, and so does my child. Everyone I love and everyone who loves me live on this land. I love them and hope they remain healthy, happy, and joyful. Protecting them means ensuring that this land is free from war, plague, hunger, and poverty. Only when these foundations are solid can I fully devote myself to life and family. Isn’t this the relationship between an individual and their country? The CPC has achieved this, so what exactly am I complaining about every day? Should I deny everything just because of some bad news on the internet and some unfortunate events on this land?

By Weishan Lake at that moment, I grasped a simple truth: to love this country, to love its mountains and rivers, its history and culture, the heroes who shed blood and tears in modern history, and the forces leading this country to rejuvenation. At the same time, when my child grows up, they should see themselves as a master of this country, participating in its development. This is what a young boy should aspire to.

There is no such thing as love or hate without reason in this world. To love something, you must first understand it, knowing its strengths and weaknesses, and recognizing its significance to us. Otherwise, “forced love” is fake, blind, and short-lived. “Patriotism” is no different. Only by fully understanding this land, this country, and the forces driving China’s progress, with all their pros and cons, can one develop genuine love.

I am becoming such a Chinese person.

She Gave Him PRE and POST Date Bill and it Backfired

The Trigger For WWIII Just Arrived – What Are The Implications For Americans?

Guest Post by Brandon Smith

If the year of 2024 has proven anything so far, it’s that our worries about the potential outbreak of WWIII are absolutely reasonable. The skeptics making accusations of “conspiracy theory” and “doom and gloom” have been proven wrong yet again. The geopolitical atmosphere is turning sour fast.

I still don’t think a lot of people realize how truly volatile the situation is globally right now. From my point of view, WWIII has already begun, at least in economic terms.

 

Let’s not forget the fact that Ukraine is essentially a proxy for all of NATO against Russia. And, the situation in the Middle East is about to become much worse. Because of the alliances involved and the fragile nature of global energy exports there is a danger of systemic collapse should a wider war break out between Israel and multiple Arab nations. It appears that such a war is imminent.

But why should Americans care? It’s pretty simple – War spurs shortages, and shortages in the middle of a stagflationary crisis are a very bad thing.

Sanctions against Russia affect around 10% of the global oil market and around 12% of global natural gas consumption. But so far all that oil and natural gas is still flowing around the world, only the trade routes have changed. The Middle East, on the other hand, accounts for over 35% of the global oil market and 18% of the natural gas market. Widespread chaos in this region would mean economic crisis on a scale not seen in a century.

Think we have problems with stagflation now? Just wait until energy prices go to the moon.

Around 30% of all oil exports travel through the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow passage which a nation like Iran can easily block for months at a time. Sinking a few larger vessels in the straight would obstruct all cargo ship traffic and oil tanker traffic. Trying to clean up the mess would be difficult because artillery, which is almost impossible to intercept, can rain down from Iran on any vessels trying to drag sunken ships out of the way.

Iran has mutual defense pacts with multiple governments in the region including Lebanon and Syria, along with military ties to Russia. The Turkish government is unlikely to allow western troops to use their airspace to launch attacks. The US military presence in Afghanistan is gone and the Iraqi government will never allow foreign troops to use their land to come to the aid of Israel.

This greatly limits the west’s launch points for an offensive large enough to blitz Iran. The vast majority of attacks would be from the air, and if the Russians start supplying Iran with batter radar and missile technology then there’s no guarantees Israel or the US would gain full control of the air space. In other words, if a wider war breaks out it will not end for YEARS and it’s going to be fought on the ground.

Of course, most establishment experts have claimed that the situation will never escalate to that point and that the threat of direct confrontation between Israel and Iran is minimal. I have been predicting the opposite for a number of reasons, just as I predicted that there was a high chance of war in Ukraine months before it happened.

In October of 2023 in my article ‘It’s A Trap! The Wave Of Repercussions As The Middle East Fights “The Last War”’ I warned that a multi-front war was about to develop between Israel and various Muslim nations including Lebanon and Iran. I noted:

Israel is going to pound Gaza into gravel, there’s no doubt about that. A ground invasion will meet far more resistance than the Israelis seem to expect, but Israel controls the air and Gaza is a fixed target with limited territory. The problem for them is not the Palestinians, but the multiple war fronts that will open up if they do what I think they are about to do (attempted sanitization). Lebanon, Iran and Syria will immediately engage and Israel will not be able to fight them all…”

My purpose in that article was to outline the dangers of US involvement in a larger war that would require conscription and escalation with Russia. Despite the “experts” insisting that the odds are overblown, it now appears that the next stage of escalation is about to begin.

Iran, Lebanon and Israel have been exchanging limited fire for months now. This is nothing new. What is new is the change in tone after a Hezbollah rocket strike on a children’s soccer game in the remote Druze village of Majdal Shams that killed 12.

On the other side, Israel’s brazen assassination of the Hamas political leader Ismail Haniyeh on Iranian soil this week is a clear catalyst for war. Haniyeh has been engaged in a diplomatic mission to start peace negotiations in Gaza. His assassination sends a clear message that Israel has no intention of entering into talks with Hamas.

IDF officials also announced that they had killed top Hezbollah military commander Fuad Shukr in a precision missile strike Tuesday in Beirut.  There’s no escaping it now.

Iran’s supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ordered retaliation against Israel and issued an order for Iran to strike the Israelis directly. Iran will likely use extended missile barrages, but also stage troops in Syria and Lebanon. The Houthis in Yemen will then increase their attacks on ships traversing the Red Sea. It’s hard to say how much Russia will involve itself at first, but I have no doubt more advanced Russian missiles and other weapons will make an appearance on the battlefield.

The prospect of world war is immense. Israel will not be able to fight in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria and Iran all at the same time. Energy exports in the region will definitely face a slowdown, if not a complete breakdown. At that point the war won’t just be about Israel, it will be about a global energy crisis. I don’t see any scenario in which the US government doesn’t get involved.

The high risk of terrorism this entails should not be overlooked. We’ve had an undefended border and record illegal crossings for a few years now under Biden.  There’s not telling how many foreign agents are in the country and I believe this was by design.  I think the establishment maintained open border policies because they wanted such people here.  The more terror these agents cause the more the public will be tempted to increase government powers to deal with the attacks.

Beyond that, the political left in the west has tied itself to the Palestinian wagon as if it’s their business. In reality, leftists view the war in Gaza as just another vehicle for their outrage. They use minorities, they use gays and now they’re using Muslims. It’s the classic Marxist strategy of hijacking the social causes of other groups and co-opting their momentum.

Gaza is just another excuse for progressive spastics to riot and start burning more of the west down (their true goal). Anyone that opposes them will automatically be accused of being a “Zionist sympathizer” even if Israel is not their concern. So, there will surely be Muslim terror attacks, but also civil conflicts triggered by leftists exploiting the situation to their advantage.

The timing of these events in tandem with the election is definitely not coincidental. Whoever ends up in office will essentially be “stuck” with the war, inheriting a disaster from day one. Once US forces are committed to an allied effort, there’s no chance any president (including Trump) will pull those forces out.  If things get bad enough, there might not even be an election in November.

For those that think we can “win” on multiple fronts, the truth might shock you.  Eric Edelman, who serves as Vice Chair of the US National Defense Strategy Commission, has given warning about the impending conflict, stating:

“There is potential for near-term war and a potential that we might lose such a conflict…We need our allies to produce more. Our defense industrial base is in very bad shape. The European defense industrial base is in even worse shape. We need our industrial base, their base, and the industrial base of our Pacific allies. Australia, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan–they all need to be stepping up because to match what Russia, China, Iran and North Korea are doing is beyond our ability to do it ourselves.”

I have written about the logistical shortcomings of the west in a WWIII scenario for some time now. At the top of the list will be manpower, just as we have seen in Ukraine. This is why we have been hearing military and political officials hint about a new draft over the past two years. They know what’s coming.

A draft to fight for globalist causes is unacceptable. I’m not going to delve into debate over whether it’s right or wrong for western countries to throw their weight behind Israel. Frankly, I don’t care about that argument. I don’t have anything invested in either side of the conflict. I care about Americans. And, I know that making the US military the go-to solution to the Middle East problem is going to end with a lot of dead Americans. I also know that the expanding crisis would make certain special interest (globalists) very happy.  As I noted last year:

The establishment seems particularly obsessed with convincing US conservatives and patriots to participate in the chaos; there are a number of Neo-cons and even a few supposed liberty media personalities calling for Americans to answer the call of blood in Israel. Some have described the coming conflagration as “the war to end all wars.”

I believe that the real war is yet to truly start, and that is the war to erase the globalists from existence. They want us to fight overseas in endless quagmires in the hopes we will die out. And when we do, there will be no one left to oppose them…”

The trap has just been set. We’ll have to wait and observe the scale of the response from Lebanon and Iran, but I believe the worst case scenario is at hand. There are multiple powderkeg events in progress around the world right now, but the Middle East situation looks to be the most disastrous by far in terms of how it will affect the US.

There’s a hot topic on the Chinese internet: Is the United States now at the end of the Tang Dynasty or the end of the Ming Dynasty?

I’m in the Ming Dynasty camp.

The fall of the Tang Dynasty was essentially due to the power of the Guanzhong aristocratic group blocking the upward mobility of the Hebei class. Although it was nominally due to the rebellion of the An-Shi insurgents, it was actually a civil war between the Han Chinese of Hebei and the Han Chinese of Longxi.

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(What really led to the demise of the Tang Dynasty was this brutal battle in which most of the army was destroyed.)

Similarly, the fall of the Ming Dynasty was also essentially an internal Han Chinese issue.

Even though there were massive problems with the distribution of interests between the north and the south, it was essentially a civil war between the north and the south.

Since both falls were due to unequal distribution of interests leading to the collapse of the country, why do I insist that the United States is currently at the end of the Ming Dynasty?

Three characteristics:

First, during the fall of the Han and Tang dynasties, these massive entities in Chinese history still maintained overwhelming military advantages over surrounding ethnic groups, whereas the United States does not have this advantage now.

Second, before the fall of the Ming Dynasty, there was a period of, uh, I’m not sure if I should say this, but it is indeed recorded in history books, a so-called “men dressing as women,” and LGBTQ was very prevalent. I have no discrimination against homosexuality, truly none! In ancient China, including the Warring States period and the most prosperous Han Dynasty, there were many rulers who were homosexuals, whom I admire! Look, I’m saying this, so I definitely do not discriminate against homosexuals, right?

What I want to say is that when these rulers were homosexuals, soldiers and ordinary people did not have a tendency to change genders, but at the time of the dynasty’s collapse, there were many grassroots males doing this…

I mean absolutely no discrimination, but it is very similar to the records of the late Ming Dynasty…

Third, spending countless amounts of money and achieving nothing. It’s incredibly frightening. Hundreds of thousands of taels of silver invested, achieving nothing…

In general, I believe that the United States now resembles the end of the Ming Dynasty very much.

The real fall of the Ming Dynasty happened during the “Three Great Campaigns of Wanli,” when the Ming Dynasty still seemed very strong and launched three large-scale military campaigns. But seriously, hasn’t the United States also fought in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan? These three seemingly world-shaking wars actually only fattened the military leaders?

A hot topic on the Chinese internet is: Who least wants the United States to collapse?

80% of the answers are: China.

Chinese netizens are very clear that this world is maintained by the United States. If the United States collapses, it would be a disaster for the world, including China. No one can escape. So we clearly provide this answer based on our own interests: United States, you must not collapse!

The battle that marked the fall of the Ming Dynasty was the Battle of Salhu.

I do not want the United States to engage in wars in the Middle East again, as it is clearly America’s Salhu moment.

That would be a disaster for China, the United States, and the world.

In this world, no one can defeat the United States, except the United States itself.

No.

I’m from Hong Kong, a city that took in Vietnamese boat people who fled the Vietnam War, at the request of the United Nations. It placed huge economic and social burdens on the city, and the United Nations, after decades, has yet to pay back the 1.3 billion HKD it owes us for our efforts in accommodating them (as of last year, they’ve only paid back 166 million HKD, a mere fraction).

Taking in refugees is an expensive affair that doesn’t always come with benefits. We had enough trouble accommodating ethnic-Chinese Vietnamese people, who were culturally similar to us. Could you imagine if they were from an Islamic-dominated culture? I’m not just talking about the child sex rings, gang-rapes or honour-killings you see in Europe and the UK, I’m talking re-education, teaching them our language and culture, which is difficult and rarely succeeds, in addition to helping them find low-paying jobs, which affects the livelihoods of our grassroots citizens.

I understand the humanitarian principles of helping those in need, but taking them in is not the best solution. The elites who decide on our behalf to let them in can do so in their own good conscience, because they’re not the ones who have to bear the consequences. It’s not their jobs that will face higher competition from low-skilled foreign labour – if anything, they stand to profit from saving on workers’ wages. It’s not their wives and children who have to put up with the gazes and advances of lonely, desperate men (Dr. Clemens Ladenburger being an exception). It’s not their neighborhoods that will face greater poverty and crime. It’s not their communities that will be fractured, as the original residents move out to make way for the new ones moving in.

But most of all, I think young men fleeing their own countries just offends us on a cultural level. You see, there was a time when China wasn’t the second largest economy on earth. Our grandparents had to deal with the Imperial Japanese military, then considered to be one of the finest fighting forces in the world. Even western powers in the Far East couldn’t stop them – Hong Kong (then a British colony) fell in two weeks, with the Japanese only losing a few hundred men.

Guess what the Chinese people back in those days did about it? They fought back valiantly, and suffered the second-most casualties in WW2. Even those who fled to America supported the war effort by sending home what little money they made working jobs white people felt were beneath them.

Refugees (especially young men) should stay in their countries and work to make it a better place for their countrymen. No one can save you but yourselves. The Chinese have known this for at least a century now.

No saviour from on high delivers
No faith have we in prince or peer
Our own right hand the chains must shiver
Chains of hatred, greed and fear
– The Internationale

The Psychopath | House M.D.

I’m going to give a pro tankie answer, even though I am not a big fan of tankies. That’s because I have to agree with them here.

There is absolutely no reason for North Korea to be hated by the West. They are this defensive because they know they are hated and the West just wants to destroy North Korea… and for zero geopolitical reason at that.

The USA destroyed every city in North Korea, and put more bombs on North Korea than they did on Japan which brutally invaded Asia and attacked America’s Pearl Harbor. 635,000 tons of bombs were dropped on North Korea, compared to 160,000 tons of bombs in Japan.

North Korea had 9.26 million people before the war. More than 1 million North Korean civilians were killed or missing due to the Korean War. To compare, less than 1 million Japanese civilians died in WWII, with 100,000+ of them killed in the atomic bombings, in a population of more than 70 million.

The war that America waged on North Korea wasn’t even a war at this point. It was outright genocide. Hitler would be proud of this. Every last North Korean was a target (and some South Koreans too, No Gun Ri Massacre was an example). The aim wasn’t even to put pressure on the North Korean regime, it was to give civilians hell. That is what strategic bombing is aimed to do, give civilians hell.

North Korea would not be justified to invade South Korea (which, frankly, is a capitalist hellhole as much as North Korea is a radical communist juche hellhole today). If North Korea did such things, I would condemn North Korea as well and demand that North Korea go back to its borders.

But it would be very justified to build hundreds of nuclear weapons, and set conditions for its use being the second total destruction of North Korea as happened during the Korean War. Luckily for normal people, North Korea only has dozens of nuclear weapons, and it has only very recently acquired the ability to hit the US mainland with nuclear weapons using just one nuclear weapons platform.

When you read the North Korean history, it makes sense why Kim Jong-un is so preoccupied with building nuclear weapons. If I was him, I would also build nukes.

I’m happy to see countries be able to defend themselves from imperialists the hard way against all odds, be it Israel or North Korea.

America Compared: Why Other Countries Treat Their People So Much Better (Reaction)

The truth hurts.

The imperial examination system was a talent selection system implemented in ancient China to build a vast bureaucratic system and control the entire empire.

For its time, this system was quite advanced.

Firstly, it ensured a relatively open path for social mobility, giving children from poor families a chance. Secondly, it was relatively fair; while the winners of the imperial examination might not have been outstanding managers, they were certainly not fools.

At the very least, they had to read an immense amount of books, be knowledgeable, and be intelligent.

(Someone:Let me tell you something, folks, nobody reads more books than I do. Believe me. I’m the best at reading, okay? I’ve read more than anyone else—more than all the other politicians combined. They say, ‘ how do you know so much?’ Well, I’ve got the best books, the smartest people, and I understand everything. I know all the facts, the details, you name it. Nobody’s smarter, nobody’s better informed. It’s tremendous, folks, really tremendous. And believe me, when it comes to being well-read, I’m simply the best.”)

Moreover, the exams were not purely about comparing poetry or essays but included a large number of “strategy and policy” questions.

These questions are somewhat similar to modern civil service exam questions or political knowledge tests for students.

I found a few examples of ancient exam questions and, trying to adapt them to today’s global situation, rephrased them.

You can take a look to get a sense of the type of questions.

1 The United States has established hundreds of military bases around the world, while China’s military strength is mainly concentrated domestically. What are the reasons for these two strategies, and what are their respective advantages and disadvantages?

2 China’s ethnic policies are inherited from the Soviet Union, which has been criticized by many. However, it seems to be functioning well now, better than the Soviet Union. What do you think is the most important reason for this?

3 Roosevelt’s New Deal has some socialist characteristics, while China’s economic policies have many capitalist features. Share your views on this.

4 During President Trump’s tenure, what were some characteristics of the government officials he hired?

(Someone:I’ve got the best, the smartest, the most incredible people working for me. I pick winners, and let me tell you, they make America great again—just like I promised. The greatest administration, believe me. We’re bringing jobs, we’re bringing prosperity, and we’re making this country shine like never before. It’s fantastic, really fantastic,the best team, making America greater than ever. No one does it better.)

5 During the Korean War, China and the Soviet Union were allies, but in the Sino-Vietnamese War, China and the U.S. became quasi-partners. Share your opinion on this.

These are five exam questions related to politics, history, and military affairs, each requiring a detailed answer. There are also other questions covering topics such as education, economy, diplomacy, and so on.

Additionally, there was the Eight-Legged Essay examination, where candidates were required to use the sayings of sages as arguments and write an essay strictly following the standard format.

Overall, answering these questions well within a limited time is quite challenging, especially considering that you are competing with thousands of the most diligent and intelligent individuals in China.

An interesting fact: The top scorer in the imperial examination was called the “Zhuangyuan.” Only one was selected every three years. Over the 1,300-year history of the examination system, there were a total of 504 Zhuangyuans.

The first one was from the Tang Dynasty, and the last one was from the Qing Dynasty. Their hometowns were very close to each other, and today this area is known for having one of the strongest cities in China’s college entrance examinations, Hengshui City in Hebei Province.

The United States is sinking fast…

The shit that I will never forget!

I confronted the father of my daughters bully.

Although my daughter at 12 is not technically a teenager yet. Her bully was.

She started high school last year and was really excited. From September to Christmas break she was full of confidence and loved the new school.

Turn of the year and it all changed. My daughter caught the school bus each day as usual. But she wasn’t her usual self, she was very quiet, off her food, wasn’t sleeping and made excuses not to go to school.

I contacted the school to see if they’d noticed anything. They mentioned she was quiet since the Christmas break and would monitor it.

Then by chance I happened to be home from work early and went to meet my daughter from the school bus. I fought hard to contain my rage. I couldn’t believe what I saw. A girl about two years older than my daughter was dragging her by her hair and screaming in her face calling her names.

I knew that any physical contact with the girl would result in me being the one in trouble. So, I shouted out my daughter’s name. The girl froze and let go of my daughter. I rushed over to my daughter who was crying and put myself between the two girls.

Then I had an idea. Quick as a flash I removed the bully’s designer trainers. I told her she could have them back when her dad collected them. She tried ways of getting them back off me and left with torrent of foul and abusive language.

Around an hour later there was a thumping knock on my door. My daughter shouted it was the bully and her dad. I opened the door to a similar torrent of language to that of the bully.

So,a swift left kick to groin dropped him to his knees. Followed by a downward right punch to the bridge of his nose. He was left reeling in ball of blood,snot and tears. I threw the trainers at the bully and said that that was just a warning. If my daughter was ever bullied again, I would hunt him down and beat him up again.

Needless to say, my daughter returned to school and she started enjoying herself again.

Edit.

Thank you for all the messages of support.

As a victim of bullying all through my school life,I wasn’t about to let my daughter suffer too.

I’m not a confrontational person and can probably count on one hand how many fights I’ve had in my whole life.

But something just snapped that day. The implications if it had backfired on me could have been worse. But it was a risk I was prepared to take to protect my daughter.

Edit No2.

Sorry for the confusion.

Trainers here in the UK are short for Training Shoes.(Sneakers,pumps,itchy dabbers,runners etc)

One in Five

What is the most badass thing you have done as a parent for your teenage daughter? –2

A father speaks…

My 15 year old daughter came home from Knott’s Berry Farm one night around midnight in tears. Someone had stolen her iPhone while she and her friends were on a ride and she was worried I would be mad.

I told her to hold on for a moment, went to my computer for Find My iPhone, and told her, “I found it. Let’s go.” She asked where and I told her, “To get your iPhone. It’s at an apartment complex in Santa Ana.”

We found the apartment building and I called the police. I brought them up to speed and they said they’d meet us at a gas station about a mile away. My daughter was starting to see some hope.

Three police cars showed up and, after I showed him where the phone was, the officer in charge said we could park down the street and watch. So we did.

It was about 2:30a and the lights were still on in the apartment for some reason.

The lead cop went upstairs and pounded on the door. A middle aged guy answered the door and the cop said a stolen phone was inside the apartment and he wanted it brought to the door (he told us later). My daughter and I heard the guy yell, “Anybody have an iPhone that doesn’t belong to you?” After a few seconds, he shook his head “no”.

The officer told us he said, “Look, I know it’s in there. So you can either bring it out, or I’ll stand here until the search warrant arrives and we’ll go in and find it ourselves.”

We saw the door close and less than a minute later the guy handed the officer my daughter’s phone. He brought it down and my daughter logged in to prove it was hers.

She couldn’t believe we actually got her phone back, but I was committed to fixing this so my daughter wouldn’t become a victim.

We got home about 4am, but neither of us was tired – LOL.

I know everything worked out in the exact way it had to for us to succeed, but it was a great lesson for my daughter about standing up for yourself and taking appropriate action. She continues to be a very empowered individual and I like to think I had a hand in that.

Husband Was Blinded To Wife’s Double Life Until Reddit Gave Him A Clue

Learn some things.

What is the most badass thing you have done as a parent for your teenage daughter? –3

A father speaks…

Although she is 20 now, my daughter learned, at age 8, that no matter how scary the bully on the bus seemed, her daddy is a force of nature.

I was home on a rare occasion when she got off the bus, visibly shaken, and crying. She didn’t want to tell me what happened because she was afraid… it was traumatic! She feared a lot of things, in this moment.

A kid 5 years older, put her on the floor, at the back of the school bus, and stepped on her throat.

She was terrified. She thought she’d get in trouble, he would do more if she told, that he might hurt someone in her family, and the worst fear was that NO ONE would believe her.

She broke down and told me, after I calmed her. I assured her that this is a problem that I could solve, and asked her where this boy lived. She told me.

I told her to get into the truck. To be honest I was wildly livid under a calm mask. I’m 6′3″ and close to 300lbs and someone just hurt my BABY!

I take her to the the porch of the run down trailer, where this boy lived and knocked on the door. A man answered. I was sweating under a very serious calm. I asked if he was (blank)’s father. He said he was. I said, we have a serious problem. He needs to come out here as well.

I told my daughter to tell them exactly what happened. Then I told them that kind of behavior is extremely unacceptable. The father could sense that I was on the verge of doing something he might go to the hospital over if this wasn’t addressed immediately, so he not only adressed the issue… he punished the boy, and made him appologize to her immediately.

After this, the boy was very courteous to her on the bus and she had no more issues with bullies at school. She carries a confidence with her today, and knows how to handle situations like this because of the way I kept my cool. Despite my rage, I got my point across in an assertive manner, and got results without having to take further action than addressing the issue.

In all honesty, keeping calm was the hardest part for me but it got the results I wanted, so right or wrong, my daughter takes this with her today, so I call that a win in the badass column.

Favorite Chicken Tetrazzini

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13a5dcd46bdf26fd240b47ce7282d885

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 tablespoons butter
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 1 medium bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 (16 ounce) can tomatoes
  • 4 tablespoons chili powder
  • Salt, to taste
  • Pepper, to taste
  • 3/4 cup sharp cheese, shredded
  • 1 pint light cream
  • Pinch of baking soda
  • 1 (4 to 6 pound) chicken
  • 16 ounces thin spaghetti, cooked

Instructions

  1. Sauté butter, onion and pepper. Add tomatoes and seasonings. Cook slowly until sauce thickens; add cheese and light cream with a pinch of baking soda, cooking a little longer.
  2. Boil chicken. Cool, then pull pieces from chicken.
  3. Butter large casserole and line with part of the cooked spaghetti. Layer chicken, tomato sauce, more spaghetti and cheese. Continue until all is used, ending with sauce and topped with cheese.

Notes

This freezes well.

The Twin Vipers

Submitted into Contest #24 in response to: Write a story set in the dark recesses of space where the two main characters are often at odds with each other in humorous and comedic ways. view prompt

Kaysie Davis

   AuroraThe Crystal Viper shuttered as Darries put her into a dive, expertly avoiding the lasers that were flying passed us. Our attacker had appeared out of nowhere and started shooting at us without as much as a hello.“Who have you annoyed now?” Darries snapped at me, “Didn’t I tell you that your flirty ways are going to get us in trouble one of these days.”“Oh, shut up and drive.” I snapped back, pushing the button for the transmitter again, “For the second time, this is Captain Aurora North and the Crystal Viper. Stop firing on my ship and identify yourself.”The only response was another volley of lasers firing at us. I couldn’t recall upsetting anyone, recently anyway. I charged up our own weapons and tried again to hail our attacker. I didn’t feel like blowing him up unless I really needed too. “Crystal Viper to offending ship. Last chance to explain yourself.”To my surprise, we finally got a response. “Don’t think you can fool us by having your little girlfriend hail us, Zell. We want our cargo back, and we want it now!”Not this again. I swore loudly to Darries. “You are looking for the Black Viper, there, my friend. This ship is the Crystal Viper.” I swear that when I got my hands on Zell, I would make him pay for every scorch mark that had ever been put on my hull due to him. It seemed like every other day, someone was mixing up our vessels and trying to blow us out of the solar waves because of something that he did.There was a long pause, and they must have been checking for our transponder. The attacker could look all they wanted, but like most of the ships in the area, ours was modified not to give off a reading unless we wanted it too. People didn’t need to know who we are unless we wanted them to know. I nodded at Darries to turn it on.Finally, there was another response. “How do we know this transponder signal is real?”“Listen, I couldn’t give a flying frag if you believe me or not. I just would rather not take the time blowing you out of the stars if I don’t have to.”“We…apologize for the confusion.” The voice still sounded like he didn’t believe me, but he could also tell that my weapons were stronger, and that fact did tend to settle disagreements with other ships. We kept our arms powered up until the other vessel had fired up their engines and left our area in space.There was a ding on our console, and Darries swore when he looked down. “Yaffa is getting impatient. He says that if we don’t get to Maia Station soon, that he will give the job to any other ship that happens to be around.”“Onward, Jeeves.” I grinned at him. Darries rolled his eyes, and he gunned our engines. It was a short hop to Maia Station. We should be there in plenty of time.ZellI was whistling to myself as I finished docking my ship at Maia Station. The Black Viper was squeezed between two other ships that made her look small. She might be small, but she had a big bite. Anyone who dared cross us soon learned why we are called the Viper.My co-pilot and I were at the station to sell some cargo that we had acquired on another job. Mikell was already down on the station, settling up payment with our broker.I exited my ship, hoping to have time to wet my whistle before we had to head back out. Maybe I would also have time to get a gift for my wife, it has been far too long since I saw her last.As I walked across the ship bay, I was confronted by a smaller man in a sharp suit. He had an annoyed look on his face and was tapping his foot impatiently.“It is about time that you are here! We have been waiting for the Viper for hours! You know Yaffa is not a patient man. Now, sign this manifest, and we will get the cargo loaded up.” The man did not wait for my response but turned and barked some orders at some waiting droids.

I smothered a smile, this was perfection. This little man must have been waiting for the Crystal Viper. That ship and her captain had stolen a few jobs from me last month. I could get payback and get paid at the same time.

“So sorry, we are late.” I took the manifest and signed my name, I needed Captain Aurora North to know who stole her stuff. “We will take off as soon as we are loaded.”

I messaged Mikell that we needed to take off ASAP. Her response cannot be repeated in polite company. At least she got further than ten feet from the ship. I would not be able to get my drink.

In short order, we had unloaded one set of cargo and loaded the other cargo. Mikell was back with our money. She glared at me from under her mop of short purple hair as she flopped into her pilots’ chair.

“Five more minutes, Zell, five more minutes, and I would have had our broker wrapped around my finger. I would have doubled our money off this score too. Who did you steal this new cargo from?”

“A man on deck thought we were the Crystal Viper here to pick up some cargo. Now, who am I to correct his error?” I smirked at her “Now, let’s get out of here before the real Crystal Viper gets here.” With that, I fired up our engines and headed off. We really would need to find a place to sell this newly acquired cargo. My wife would need to wait for her gift.

 

Aurora

I signaled Yaffa as soon as we were in orbit around the station. It had taken us longer then I would have liked to get here. Our attacker had been lurking and trying to follow us, so we had to lose him before we could get to the station.

Yaffa’s confused face was soon on our viewport. “Aurora? Why are you back? Is there something wrong?”

I blinked at him, “Back? What are you talking about? We just got here.”

Yaffa turned and barked at his one aid, “Didn’t you tell me that the Crystal Viper had arrived and picked up my cargo?”

“Yes, yes, master. The Viper and her Captain West. They left just a few minutes ago.”

I let out a loud groan, “You moron. That was the Black Viper and the frustrating Zell West. “

Yaffa let out a string of swears in his native language. “Are you telling me that my cargo was stolen?” He leveled a glare at his aid that promised a lot of pain later. Then he switched that glare to me, “This would never have happened if you were here on time!”

“Don’t blame me for your aids stupidity.” I met his glare with one of my own. Then I turned to Darries, “Can you find any trace of where the Black Viper went?”

He tapped on his console for what felt like forever. Then he grinned and looked up at me, “It’s faint, but I have a lock on what way they went.”

I sat back in my chair, “Let’s go get our cargo.” I swear that Zell goes out of his way to annoy me most of the time. How dare he take my stuff.

 

Zell

“Will you stopped that never-ending whistling?!” Mikell’s green eyes were aflame, glaring at me. “I will throw you out of the nearest airlock if you don’t!”

I held up my hands in submission. Mikell looked back down at her own console, muttering in her native language. I enjoyed the view of stars passing the viewport when a ship dropped out of hyperspace next to us. Our transmitter buzzed, whoever this is wanted to talk.

Mikell opened a channel, and before I could say anything, a sappy love song came over the line.

Whoever was singing, it was horribly off-key. The singing went on for a painfully long time. My fingers itched to fire some laser at the ship just to stop the noise.

A very nasally voice came over the line when the singing finally stopped. “Aurora, my princess, please return to me.”

Mikell was silently laughing in the seat next to me, I rolled my eyes and toggled the transmitter.

“Hey, lover boy, you have the wrong Viper. This is the Black Viper. You are looking for the Crystal Viper.”

“Please put my princess on the line.” The voice was somehow even more annoying than the singing. “I need to hear the crystal tones of my princess.”

“No princess here. And you better get some singing lessons before you try this again. Now, skedaddle before I really get annoyed.” I powered up my weapons to get my point across.

The other vessel fell back but was still following us. Maybe he thought I was hiding his ‘princess.’ I swore under my breath. Typical Aurora. She probably flirted with this guy while that co-pilot of hers robbed him blind. And this shmuck was so lovesick, he couldn’t even tell that she had anything do with it. We got at least one broken-hearted buffoon thinking we were the Crystal Viper a week. Well, as long as he stayed out of my way, he could follow us like a lovesick puppy, all he wanted.

At least, that’s how I felt. Mikell took offense to our tail and fired some torpedoes in his direction. That seemed to finally deter the moron, and he went back into hyperspace.

Aurora

Darries gave me a devilish grin, “We have the Black Viper on our scanners. It is just a few hyper yards ahead.”

I grinned back, “Let’s go say hello, shall we?”

We popped out of hyperspace right behind the Black Viper and fired a few lasers that grazed its hull. It didn’t take long for our viewport to light up with the picture of Zell. His crystal blue eyes were shining with amusement. “Is that how you say hello?”

“Why should I say, hello? You stole my cargo, and all the people you piss off keep putting dings in my hull!

 

Zell

Somehow I was not surprised when the Crystal Viper popped up on our radar and fired on us as soon as they dropped out of hyperspace. Aurora was pissed. Her long black hair flowed over her shoulders as she yelled at me. I really should be listening to what she is saying.

“….all the people you piss off keep putting dings in my hull!”

“At least you don’t have lovesick morons singing love songs at you all of the time!” I shot back, “The last one was in serious need of singing lessons!”

Almost as one, our co-pilots looked up at us and nodded. There were no other ships in the area.

“And I wouldn’t have stolen your cargo if I didn’t miss you.”

 

Aurora.

“You could have just sent a message.” I glared at the man on the viewport, but then I relaxed, “But I missed you too, husband. “

His crystal blue eyes, the ones my ship was named after were shining, “What do you say we deliver your cargo,” He held up his hand, to stop the objection he could see coming “To your buyers. Then go home and take some time off?”

Zell

My wife had finally softened, she brushed that black hair that I loved so much back behind her ear and nodded. We didn’t get to see each other much. Too much of a risk for people to know we were connected. We gave out plenty of hints and loved to drive each other crazy with pranks. Most of the universe, however, thought we were mortal enemies trying to destroy each other. They would never know that just a few years ago, we were married on a no-name planet, under the twin viper constellation.

What is the most badass thing you have done as a parent for your teenage daughter? –4

A mother responds…

Years ago, while my daughter was still a teen, I was sitting in the dark on front step cooling down after a long hot night at work. It was about 3 am.

A car pulled into the lane. My daughter, her then boyfriend, and unknown male and female companions got out of the car. Judging by their conversation, they had no idea that I was sitting on the step.

Within a few minutes of being in the lane, the male stranger, suddenly, without warning, punched my daughter’s boyfriend, “T,” hard in the back of his head, knocking him onto the ground. He then proceeded to kick him rapidly, while the girls started screaming at the top of their lungs. All hell had broken out in my quiet yard.

Before I even knew what I was doing, I was up from the step, had raced across the lane, grabbed the 6′-something guy by the throat, and was holding him up against a tree on the edge of the lane and growling in his face, “We don’t behave like that in my house, Now get the f**k off my property!”

Then, I threw him towards his car. He left, cursing about a ‘crazy woman.’

I’m not sure where that woman inside of me came from, or the strength, considering the fact that the guy was so much larger than myself.

For a while, I got painted as the bad guy in this story. He was furious that I interfered. I shamed him, according to him. At the time, my daughter hated me because T broke up with her. However, years later, my daughter took me out for lunch in a different town, and she saw the guy who had hit her ex-boyfriend. She asked me if I remembered the incident. I told her that I vaguely remembered.

She then responded, “Well, I remember it like it was yesterday, and I never told you at the time, but I was secretly really proud to have Super Woman for a mom.”

Shorpy

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I will do anything for my girl

‘Mum I’ve just been sick and its black’ That message is what my teenage daughter sent to me. My heart skipped a beat. Being a nurse I knew that there was something seriously wrong with my daughter but I tried to think positive and not jump to conclusions. Fast forward to a hospital appointment. I was sat with my daughter holding her hand and the doctor said the words we had both been dreading. “It’s cancer”. My daughter who was 15 had a rare cancer and chemotherapy was her best option.

As many of you will know the effects of chemotherapy can be and usually are god awful. It was painful for me to watch my daughter go through it, I really can’t imagine how she must have felt. As her hair began to fall out my daughter started to get really down. She loved her hair and her overall appearance and now she was almost grey and very thin. I tried telling her it was ok and that she was still beautiful but she didn’t believe me and said she felt alone. That night after she had gone to bed I sat up for hours and thought long and hard about what I could do to help my daughter through what she was feeling. And so I decided to do something so she didn’t have to go through it alone.

It took all the strength I had but that night I shaved and cut off all of my hair until my head was completely bald and soft. I was aware that I was sure to be stared at and laughed at but I didn’t care. My little girl was all that I was worried about and in the morning she couldn’t believe what she saw. She was overjoyed though and felt a lot less scared about losing her hair. She cried tears of joy and I vowed to her that we would go through it all together. I kept my hair shaven until my daughter finally beat cancer, and then when she came off chemo I let my hair grow back.

It was a horrible time for my daughter but I’m proud of her for going through it. She was so brave and I think me having no hair have her the extra confidence she needed and made her feel less alone. My sixteen year old son also shaved his head in the end which surprised me. The whole family made it as easy as we could for her. I got many looks and laughter after cutting my hair off but I didn’t care, it was worth it as it made my daughter happy and feel so much better about what she was going through.

I think I speak for every mum here but I know no matter what I would do anything for all my children

The robber was robbed

Men…Be Men.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Bk8MYaxKpvk?feature=share

Two boxers fought a match in a low weight class. A Japanese man named Keita Kurihara and a Filipino man named Renan Portes. When the match ended, Kurihara was declared the winner “on points” despite Portes having landed some of the hardest punches in the fight.

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“I didn’t win!” Kurihara shook his head in disbelief and broken into tears immediately after the score was read out. Afterwards, he took the microphone in the ring and bowed deeply to the audience, saying, “I was treated as the winner in the end, but I lost. It’s embarrassing that I was declared the winner. I’m really sorry… My punches missed their target and I was spinning around. I got hit quite a lot. It was the worst possible situation and I was completely defeated. My countermeasures didn’t work. I felt that I hadn’t grown at all..”

Kurihara went to the locker room after the fight and apologized to Portes, declaring him the “real winner” of the fight. The Japanese fighter wanted to win only in a convincing way, with honor. Having not landed the hardest hits and having been unable to knock down his opponent despite losing his own footing, he felt he was undeserving of victory.

Monkey Branching Wife Who DEMANDED Divorce Begs Hubby For 2nd Chance After Lover Tossed Her Out

I lived in South Norwalk, Connecticut…. and worked in Westport. It was a few days before Christmas and I was driving home, after work, and decided to stop at Beldoch Popper, a sweater factory that sold wholesale at Christmas. I pulled my 1969 Mustang up to the curb, and was putting it in park when the factory door opened, the light caught my eye. Two people were coming out and for some reason, my spidey senses told me to get the hell out of there.. NOW. I hadn’t turn the car off yet, slammed it into gear and floored it……. I drove home, adrenaline pumping, and he no idea why. I’m not a scaredy cat by any measure.

The next morning, I walked into work and saw the mail guy, Fred. His wife worked there so I told him my crazy story. He asked me what time I was there and said around 5:30. He looked at me, and said if I had gotten there a minute earlier I would have walked into an armed robbery, and seen all the customers and employees face down on the floor…… and the two guys didn’t have a getaway vehicle, they left on foot.

I swear I didn’t see anything, no guns, just silhouettes walking out of the building in the dark……

So happy

This question is very well asked and very ‘Chinese’; I even suspect that the questioner might be Chinese.

First, you noticed the unusual duration of 4 days. If it were just a matter of diplomatic etiquette, it wouldn’t last so long. I’ve answered similar questions twice before, and I think the answer is: In fact, this 4-day period is very likely the time when Ukraine and Russia started negotiating through China, and it’s just the preliminary preparation.

Then, you are very perceptive, perceptive like a Chinese person, noticing that the Ukrainian Foreign Minister was in Guangzhou (Chinese netizens identified the location as Guangzhou by recognizing the background architecture in a video posted by the Ukrainian Foreign Minister himself). You are very sharp.

Why not in Beijing?

As a purely Chinese person, my view is:

First, it could be because Beijing needs to make way for more important meetings, such as the recent Beijing Declaration.

Chinese people care about these unspoken announcements, which essentially tell the world that for China, the Middle East is far more important than Ukraine.

Second, it might also be a deliberate move to show the world that for China, Ukraine is only a third-tier issue. (Beijing is first-tier, Shanghai is second-tier, and Guangzhou is third-tier.)

Most Chinese people were originally neutral towards Ukraine, but now there is indeed hostility due to Ukraine’s declaration, which said ‘give China a chance to talk with the civilized world,’ and the actions supporting Hong Kong’s independence have really ignited the anger of the Chinese people.

I have to say, don’t you all watch international news?

It’s all like a game of bridge, with clear hands and open cards.

  1. The U.S. inquires about Chinese arms control, and China refuses.
  2. The U.S. plays a card, namely 3,500 nuclear warheads, to see China’s reaction.
  3. China’s reaction is to deploy strategic bombers capable of carrying nuclear warheads, along with Russian strategic bombers, on patrol in Alaska (which means if there’s a nuclear war, China and Russia will ally).
  4. China issues a statement urging not to initiate a nuclear war (directed at the U.S., meaning: we have no intention of initiating a nuclear war. Last time it was before the Beijing Olympics, with all five permanent members of the UN Security Council signing, and then immediately after that, the Russia-Ukraine war started. Now, China is urging again, and immediately after that is the French Olympics? Clearly, after the Olympics, war is imminent!).
  5. China invites Palestinian forces and issues a Beijing statement.
  6. Netanyahu visits the U.S.
  7. The U.S. and China once again engage in a proxy war, this time in the Middle East.

Isn’t this quite obvious? If you can’t see this, you might as well stop caring about international politics.

All Men need to See this – Modern Women are DOOMED by this New Anti-Paternity Fraud Law Approval!

Between 25% to 33% of fathers who paternity test their children discover that they were not biologically theirs.

I had a girlfriend in college that did cleaning work on the side for extra cash.

She was actually a good maid. One client broached the subject, asked her what it would cost for her to be topless.

Because she knew the man and was comfortable with him she agreed for double her normal rate.

Please note that her job didn’t change, just what she wore. He was not looking for sexual favors, never touched her or made her uncomfortable in any way. It did something for this mans’ ego to have a pretty young woman serve him in such a submissive way while he basically ignored her. That was prestige for him.

He asked her if she was satisfied with the agreement and she told him that one other client like him would be enough that she wouldn’t need to work for the cleaning service at all. Of course he knew someone. So she halved her workload for the same pay and it was a good arrangement for all involved.

As for what you pay for such a service, check the going rate and be prepared to pay more. It’s not the kind of thing you want to haggle or be cheap about.

Tortiglioni with Spicy Sausage Sauce

This recipe calls for only 6 ounces of meat, so it is good if want to cut down on meat in your diet. (I usually have to make meatballs in a separate sauce for MY family! LOL!)

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Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 onion, finely chopped
  • 1 celery stalk, finely chopped
  • 2 large garlic cloves, crushed
  • 1 fresh red chile, seeded and chopped
  • 1 pound ripe Italian plum tomatoes, peeled and finely chopped
  • 2 tablespoons tomato paste
  • 2/3 cup red wine
  • 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
  • 12 ounces dried tortiglioni (or use rigatoni, penne, or ziti)
  • 6 ounces spicy salami, rind removed (I sometimes use pepperoni)*
  • Salt and freshly ground black pepper
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley, to garnish
  • Grated Parmesan cheese, to serve

Instructions

  1. Heat oil and add onion, celery garlic and chili and cook gently, stirring frequently, for about 10 minutes, until softened.
  2. Add tomatoes, tomato paste, wine, sugar, salt and pepper to taste and bring to a boil, stirring occasionally. Lower heat, cover and simmer gently, stirring occasionally, for about 20 minutes. Add a few spoonsful of water occasionally if the sauce becomes too thick.
  3. Meanwhile, cook pasta.
  4. Chop the salami into bite-size pieces and add to the sauce. Heat through, then taste for seasoning.
  5. Drain pasta and put into large bowl, pour sauce on top and toss to mix.
  6. Scatter parsley on top and serve with grated cheese.

Notes

* Buy the salami in one piece so that you can chop it into large chunks.

Yeah yeah

Have you ever been caught someone lying on a resume, and what were the consequences?

Yes. I was working for a major tech company in the UK, one that is extremely-high profile and very popular, and we got a resume that looked absolutely stellar. In fact, it was astounding that this guy didn’t have his choice of offers in hand already, based upon what was written down on his CV (which is what resumes are called in the UK).

However, having been on several search committees before, and having helped students with their own resumes back when I was a professor, I had lots of experience with puffery (intentional or not) and hyperbole (again, intentional or not).

The candidate had been on several high profile, very technical projects that resulted in tremendous profits for his previous companies. These weren’t trivial by any means, and I, for one, was very interested in learning more.

The problem with his resume was twofold.

First, the projects themselves were all over the place. One was a systems integration project, another was a software development project. Still another was a hardware project. All of them highly involved, all of them requiring deep knowledge of varied skillsets. All from someone who had only been in the workforce for about 6 years.

Now, it’s possible that we had a savant on our hands, but experience has told me that these are rarer than unicorns and, as a result, I became quite skeptical. Nevertheless, I was willing to give it a go.

Second, all of the tasks and responsibilities listed in the CV had qualifying terms, like “Helped coordinate,” and “Contributed to,” and “Supported.” These are wishy-washy terms that are so vague as to imply practically any kind of involvement, from running the project to taking minutes during meetings.

So, I wanted to know more.

The candidate came in, impeccably dressed, and full of confidence. Okay, so maybe my suspicions were unfounded. He certainly looked like he could have mastery over these different domains.

But then I asked the first question, and it went downhill from there.

“I’ve got to admit,” I said, “you have a very impressive CV. These projects are quite involved.”

“Yes,” he said, smiling and proud. “I’ve done a lot of great things.”

Okay, so not exactly humble.

“Tell me more about what you did on X project,” I prompted.

Thus began a long string of evasions. He started every sentence with, “I helped…”

“Okay,” I said. “I understand that you participated in the project, and that you helped it reach its goal. But I don’t understand exactly what you did. When you say that you ‘helped,’ what does that entail, exactly?”

What followed was a continuous stream of “I helped,” and “I contributed,” without any actual description of what it was that he did.

Now, I don’t suffer fools very well, and I particularly don’t like it when someone thinks that I’m a fool. I begin to get irate when someone continually doubles down and suggests that they have answered the question when they didn’t.

Then he put the final nail in his coffin. “Well,” he said, “I could go into deep technical detail, but it’s extremely complicated and most people don’t understand it.”

“I’ve got time,” I said. “Try me. Part of the job you’re applying for is to take complicated technical subject matter and translate it into consumable English. This seems like a perfect opportunity for you to show me how well you do.”

He paled. I mean, he’s already English, so this was quite a feat.

He failed. Miserably. He couldn’t explain the project, the technology behind it, even the problem the project was supposed to solve.

So we moved on to the next item on his CV. He failed that one too.

And the next.

Ultimately, at the end of the interview, it was clear that he knew nothing about any of the projects he had ostensibly worked on, and those technical details he did try to talk about he got dead wrong.

Worse, this was a group interview, with my entire team in attendance. Unfortunately, as this was the UK (and I’m an American), after the candidate left I was read a riot act by the manager for embarrassing him. Even though they admitted that they would have hired him, had I not asked more probing questions, I still got an official reprimand.

So, because some guy lied on his resume, tried to lie in the interview, got caught doing so, I was in trouble for pointing it out.

Gotta love those “consequences,” eh?

Some fine art

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Reason why I became pro-China: Western media overplayed their hand and made me do something they probably didn’t want me to do: search for information about China.

You see, growing up I had zero interest in China, which was why I never bothered looking deeper into it. I just internalised all the anti-China “news” I heard in my periphery since that was the simplest thing to do for someone uninterested. But recently anti-China news ramped up, like REALLY ramped up to the point there’s talk of war, so naturally I started to take actual interest in China for the first time. So I went looking for information… and oh boy it was life-changing.

Whether it was the alleged massacre, or alleged genocide, or the sweat shops, or the lack of modernity; they were all either partial lies or complete lies. As I learned from the locals and foreigners who actually lived in various regions of China, I felt like my worldview was being deconstructed bit-by-bit, until I ended up only with the deep sense of betrayal. Western media did this to me. To all of us. For decades, I had been propagandised into believing some extremely unflattering things about China and her people. Decades!

The one thing that I’ve always wanted our precious western society to do—but felt it was hopelessly impossible—was to eliminate extreme poverty. Guess what, China did. They had virtually eliminated extreme poverty, a feat that was considered impossible in wealthier western nations. Also, according to everyone who have visited China, their society is friendlier, cleaner, safer, and more modern. China’s investment in R&D and her people’s education at all levels are paying off, and the obsession with meritocracy in government jobs had allowed China to properly punish the corrupt and replace the inefficient. Many who have visited China loved it so much they wished they could stay there.

So yes, not only am I now pro-China, but I’ve also now stopped believing in Western media by default, especially when it comes to news about other countries, and especially when it comes to China. I’ve even started to wonder my perception of Russia, North Korea, and other so-called “enemies of the West” are accurate. This is what happens when the media breaks the trust of the people who relied on them for news.

In short, I’m pro-China now because western media overplayed their anti-China propaganda, and it made me so curious I had to go looking for information myself. I can only hope many more others would do the same.

Pentagon Again Applies Budget Lies To Deliver More Weapons To Ukraine

Whenever the Pentagon runs out of money designated by Congress as aid to Ukraine it starts to use creative accounting to free up some additional money from its general budget. The ‘accounting errors’ used therein are always in favor of more weapons to Ukraine.

Exclusive: Pentagon accounting error overvalued Ukraine weapons aid by $3 billion – May 19 2023, Reuters

The Pentagon overestimated the value of the ammunition, missiles and other equipment it sent to Ukraine by around $3 billion, a Senate aide and a defense official said on Thursday, an error that may lead the way for more weapons being sent to Kyiv for its defense against Russian forces.

Pentagon accounting error provides extra $6.2 billion for Ukraine military aid – June 20 2023, AP

The Pentagon said Tuesday that it overestimated the value of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine by $6.2 billion over the past two years — about double early estimates — resulting in a surplus that will be used for future security packages.Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said a detailed review of the accounting error found that the military services used replacement costs rather than the book value of equipment that was pulled from Pentagon stocks and sent to Ukraine. She said final calculations show there was an error of $3.6 billion in the current fiscal year and $2.6 billion in the 2022 fiscal year, which ended last Sept. 30.

As a result, the department now has additional money in its coffers to use to support Ukraine as it pursues its counteroffensive against Russia. And it come as the fiscal year is wrapping up and congressional funding was beginning to dwindle.

Pentagon finds another $2 billion of accounting errors for Ukraine aid – July 14 2024, Reuters

The Pentagon has found $2 billion worth of additional errors in its calculations for ammunition, missiles and other equipment sent to Ukraine, increasing the improperly valued material to a total of $8.2 billion, a U.S. government report revealed on Thursday.

In accounting an entity can generally use one of several methods to account for stock material. Using (ever increasing) replacement costs or (ever decreasing) book value are two arguably valid methods. What is a no-no though is to change horses during race. One either uses one or the other. One never-ever changes the applied accounting method during the accounting period.

Any commercial company doing what the Pentagon is doing here would be asking for serious trouble.

One wonder if and when Congress will wake up to this.

 

Posted by b at 14:22 UTC | Comments (78)

The problem with AI

that is standard procedure in any military to retire the old generals and replace them with new ones.

allow me to explain:

In the military landscape of any nation, the principle of retiring older generals in favor of fresh leadership is not merely a procedural formality but a strategic necessity. This standard practice is fundamental to ensuring that a country’s armed forces remain adaptive and relevant in an ever-evolving geopolitical environment.

Old generals, while often steeped in tradition and battle-hardened experience, may also carry with them a resistance to change, clinging to outdated tactics that they were trained in and grew up with that could jeopardize their nation’s defense in contemporary conflicts.

If, for instance, a formidable military power like the United States were trapped in a time warp, still combatting adversaries using the strategies and methodologies of the Revolutionary War or the Civil War, the outcome would undoubtedly be disastrous. In a world where nations like Russia, Israel, and North Korea and even Yemen have embraced modern technology, cyber warfare, and innovative tactical approaches, failing to adapt could lead to catastrophic defeats.

Countries such as China have recognized the need for reform, actively promoting young leaders who can infuse their military strategies with fresh ideas and perspectives that align with the realities of modern warfare. This method not only revitalizes the military command structure but also ensures that the national defense strategies are continuously evolving to counter emerging threats. For example, in recent years, China’s rapid advancements in artificial intelligence and drone warfare exemplify how new leadership can drive transformation and modernize military operations, enabling them to compete globally.

Similarly, nations like India and Brazil have also experienced leadership shifts in their defense establishments, aiming to harness young, dynamic thinkers who are equipped to navigate the complexities of modern warfighting. A proactive approach to military leadership ensures that armed forces are not just reactive but are equipped to anticipate and counteract the multifaceted challenges of modern-day combat, ultimately reinforcing national security.

what Xi is doing is nothing new people!

China Unscathed in CrowdStrike Meltdown

I’ve answered similar questions many time, so I’ll copy/paste an excerpt. Violating these 10 commandments of prison that someone asked me for could have serious consequences.

So I’ll give you some “rules” to follow, it’s not a comprehensive list and they’ll be in no particular order because they all are important.

  1. Mind your own business. Meaning don’t ask questions about what a person is doing (unless it directly affects you), personal questions about their past and/or charges unless it’s a natural part of a conversation THEY start.
  2. Never give an opinion unless it’s asked for.
  3. Don’t be in a hurry to make friends.
  4. DO NOT try to make friends with the guards. I was on friendly terms with a lot of guards, but I had been there for several years and had well established myself before I did so.
  5. DO NOT SNITCH.
  6. Don’t lie or embellish your past. You’ll likely find yourself in conversations where guys are telling “war stories” and guys in prison have phenomenal instincts and can spot a fake in a heartbeat. Just be yourself, if you don’t have anything to add to the conversation just listen.
  7. Prison runs on respect, so be respectful.
  8. There might come a time where you have to stand up for yourself. DO IT. Some things like minor disrespect you can let slide, but if someone puts their hands on you in an unwanted way, makes unwanted and aggressive sexual advances, and/or tries to take what’s yours, STAND UP FOR YOURSELF!!!! Sure you might lose, but who hasn’t had their ass beat before. But you’ll establish a degree of respect and should be fine after that because the predators who are there are looking for easy prey.
  9. Keep your word. If you tell someone you can/will do something, do it.
  10. This actually should be near the top but I’m too lazy to retype this. DO NOT GO INTO DEBT!!!!! If you gamble (for smokes, candy bars, or whatever) make sure you have the “money” on hand. Don’t borrow, do without whatever it is until you have the money to get it yourself. Debt, especially if something happens that makes it so you can’t pay when you said you would can lead to all sorts of things and all of them are bad. Trust me, things happen, like your prison pay gets screwed up or someone on the outside doesn’t send you money when they said they would. I repeat DO NOT GO INTO DEBT!! Along that line, don’t lend. If you do and that person doesn’t/can’t pay, you’ll be expected to do something about it or you’ll be seen as weak.

This is How Sanctions Changed Russia’s Car Market

When you have the time to leave something behind, make it useful and memorable

Where I live in Brazil, car theft is somewhat of a problem. For the most part thieves choose commonly found, locally manufactured models, like Ford Fiestas, Fiat Palios, and Volkswagen Foxes, and then take them to chop-shops who tear them down and resell the parts online.

Models that are ten years old or older are very sought after because they are often relatively easy to steal and parts for them are harder to find, so the demand for things like fuel pumps, taillights and radiators is greater.

If you go on to Brazilian eBay and buy a used or reconditioned alternator, chances are very high that it is from a stolen car. There is a whole black market industry for car parts all across of South America that is literally impossible to stop.

Ironically, if you drive a high-end model like a Mercedes, BMW or Range Rover no one will steal it. First because it is way too conspicuous to drive around in a high end car than a common one, you’ll most certainly get caught, and second because selling the parts is much more difficult because there are not that many high end models around, not to mention that the people who own these cars are wealthy enough to pay a dealership to fix them when they need service.

I have two cars, a 2009 Volkswagen Gol (a somewhat cheaper model under the Golf) and a 2010 Volvo XC60 T5. No one will touch the Volvo because it’s the only one in town and thieves know that Volvos have a factory GPS system installed in them that’s really hard to deactivate, but I really have to keep my eye on the Gol because Gols are all over the place and it is a very sought after car to steal.

Someone tried to steal my Gol a few years ago — they broke the small triangle window behind the back door to unlock the car, then they popped the hood and cut the wires to the alarm. Then they broke the ignition lock and used a screwdriver to force it to engage the starter. It was during the night and the car was right outside my bedroom window; I didn’t hear a thing.

I woke up the next morning and the car wasn’t there, so I called the insurance company who used a tracking system like lo-jack to find it, it was unlocked, sitting around the corner and all of the thieves’ tools were on the seats and the floor — even the screwdriver was still sticking out of the ignition.

I’m guessing that the thieves gave up and fled the scene when they couldn’t get the engine to turn over and a cop car came down the street, or something like that.

They couldn’t start the engine because I had installed an engine kill switch up and under the dashboard where no one could see it. Two feet of wire, a toggle switch and a 10-amp fuse saved my car from being stolen: total cost of $4.00.

The Volvo on the other hand is exceptionally hard to steal, not because of the GPS system, but because of how the ignition system was designed.

There is no key to turn, so there is no ignition lock to break; to start the car I put the remote that unlocks the doors in the dashboard and push a button. The steering lock is further down the steering column than in most cars — it actually sits under the engine at the firewall, so it’s very hard to get to.

The Volvo also has another feature that many cars don’t have, and it’s not a factory-installed feature. You could literally take a baseball bat to the windshield and it won’t break. You could also unload a full clip of .44 magnum rounds into the driver’s side window and it won’t shatter.

The car is bulletproof — the previous owner had it bulletproofed when she bought it new in 2010. It has inch-thick glass and Kevlar all around, including the roof, so just getting into the car is no easy task.

You’d probably be able to force the door open with a crowbar, but that would break the door’s closing mechanism making it kind of hard to drive, that is if you were able to get around the steering lock and the keyless ignition.

Very hard to steal. Hard to car-jack at an intersection too, something all too common in cities like Rio de Janeiro on hot summer days when people are stuck in traffic.

Of course, one could always use a tow truck.

Would you believe that I don’t even have insurance on the Volvo? Except of course for the mandatory Government insurance that costs about $5.00 a year. I know that someone won’t steal it – they won’t even try.

The Gol on the other hand is insured, to the hilt, with a super-low deductible, which costs me about $600.00 a year. It’s not worth very much though, maybe $2000.00, so the insurance company believes someone will steal it in a little over three years.

Actually the Volvo has a very interesting and somewhat amusing story behind it, I wrote about it in another post a few days ago. If you’re interested here’s the Quora link. What car do you currently drive? Is it worth the price you paid for it?

So, it all depends on where you live and the car you drive, what security features it has. No car is truly unstealable, but some of them are much harder to steal than others.

Many Chinese are shocked when they first hear that westerners are afraid of China and Chinese.

Immediate reaction is “What did we do? We just work hard and mind our own business and sell stuff to everybody. Once in a while we get annoyed at Taiwan or the Philippines, but we don’t really do anything.”

They are unaware that it is because of their hard work and competition in Chinese society, that China is very powerful and influential in the aggregate.

“They’re LYING about the economy, this is now a DEPRESSION” Top Economist Warns

Several behaviors prevent the middle class from ascending.

  1. Spending large sums on depreciating assets. If you want to be wealthy, your only large purchases should be investments, not vehicles or gaming computers.
  2. Buying more house than needed. While a house is an investment, if your paychecks are all going to pay a mortgage and upkeep, you are short funds for investing. If housing prices collapse again, you won’t even have the equity.
  3. Not having 3–6 months of living expenses saved in case of a lay-off or emergency. Unemployment isn’t going to pay all your bills and living off credit cards until you get a new job is an expensive mistake. Putting an emergency cost on credit cards means you will pay at least twice as much with interest added than if using savings.
  4. Paying banks, instead of themselves. Interest payments are a huge waste. Imagine if you had that $500–1000/ month credit interest going to investments instead of to banks.
  5. Not understanding what is an investment rather than a purchase. Sellers use investment in advertising, but they lie. You don’t invest in a nice suit, you purchase it. The next day it is used clothing and worth 1/2 what you paid for it. You don’t invest in furniture, you purchase it. An investment is an asset expected to go up in value over time.
  6. Investing only in their employer’s stocks. It isn’t a good idea to invest in only one stock, industry or investment type. Putting money in a variety decreases your risks.
  7. Passing up job opportunities or promotions because you don’t like the people you will be working with, the added responsibility and/or travel involved. The road to the corner office might detour through a landfill, but it is the only way to get there. Promotions may not be offered a second time. The job opportunity you are holding out for may never happen.
  8. Nobody get rich using coupons. It takes a complete budget and lifestyle that spends less than you make and that includes investing. Saving $20 a week on groceries, but spending an extra $600 a month on a new vehicle you just had to have makes no sense.
  9. Money is not the goal, it is the tool. If you save up $100,000 and it just sits in a savings account, you are losing money and the potential for becoming financially independent.
  10. You have to set aside money for fun or your budget will fail. Sacrifice is easy the first month. By the time you reach the fortieth month, sacrifices can feel like a vise on your life. Adding fun dollars to your budget will let you enjoy life while still reaching your financial goals.

Shorpy

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Six foreigners allegedly poisoned in Bangkok luxury hotel

No, it is far from perfect and there is always room for improvement.

The important thing is to have a channel to provide input to government officials, explain why something needs to change to make it better, and see if they can make the change.

This is very different from the idea of free speech in the west because while people have the right to elect new leaders at election time, there is no way to request changes on a small scale, and then to follow up on them.

The Chinese way is to ask for changes on an ongoing basis, explain the rationale for the change, and if the official feels that it is reasonable, ask him to make the change. If he does NOT make the change within a reasonable time, then move up the ladder, and complain to his superior.

And so on and so forth…

So in the western system, you vote for the person and hope that he makes the macro changes you want. In the Chinese system, you go to the local official and request that he make the micro change you want. If the request is reasonable, he should make the change. If he does not, he will likely be voted out at the local level. Since he is also a Party member, failure to act on reasonable requests will affect his opportunity for promotion in the future, and affect his own career.

My in-laws used to live across the street from a drug dealer. They often called the police where there were cars coming and going from his property, picking up “product”. This cut into his business, and led to several ugly confrontations between him and my in-laws.

One day my then-fiancee was visiting her parents, and was in the back of the house when there was a commotion out front, complete with gunshots. She didn’t see anything, but both her parents and one of her brothers claimed they saw said drug dealer leaning out of his upstairs window, firing a gun. From his body language and what words they could make out, his intent was clear: Stop interfering with my business, or the next time I won’t be firing into the air but at you.

They called the police and he was charged with aggravated menacing. Some months later, I attended the trial as a spectator, as my fiancee (now wife) was a witness. The drug dealer took the stand in his own defense. After a well-rehearsed examination by his attorney, it was the prosecuting attorney’s turn.

“Mr. ___, on [date], did you fire several shots from a handgun into the air from the second story window of your home?”

“No, I did not. I don’t even have a gun.”

“You own no firearms whatsoever? On [date], you didn’t have a single firearm in the house?”

“That’s right. I didn’t have no guns then.”

A look of confusion spread of the DA’s face as he quickly pawed through his notes.

“Now, on [date of previous police call to his home], didn’t you tell Officer ____ that you had an extensive collection of firearms and that you were an expert in their use?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, did you lie to Officer ____?”

“What?”

“Did you lie to Officer ____ back on [previous date], or did you lie to the jury just now?”

“Yeah, I lied.”

I suspect that if you want to be taken seriously by a jury, you should not admit that you are a liar and may have just lied to them on the witness stand.

He was convicted, despite testimony from friends who gave him an alibi. The jury must have thought they were liars, too.

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About 15 years ago, a very expensive piece of equipment, ($30k market value at the time) was stolen from my place of employment. I was the one who discovered it missing and I was the one who called it in to our security office, who contacted the local police. I gave my statement to our in house security and the lead detective from the local law enforcement gave me his card and asked me to go down to the station to meet him and take an official statement on the coming Saturday (three days away at the time) at 8am.

I thought that was weird, but I agreed and was at the station at 7:45 am that Saturday. I checked in with the clerk who said the detective wasn’t in yet. I knew I was early so it wasn’t a big deal to wait. At 8:30 am, the detective walks out and acted surprised to see me. He then stated that he thought he told me 9 am. I showed him the business card he gave me and how I scribbled “Sat 8am” on the back of it. He gave the most insincere apology I ever heard and then told me he wasn’t ready for me yet and asked if I could wait 15 minutes and that he could have someone get me a coffee.

I agreed to wait and took the offer for the coffee. Half an hour later, he walks by and asked, “Did you not get your coffee?” and I said no, and he said, I’ll get right on that, I just need a few more minutes.” Half an hour after that, someone comes to get me and brings me to an interview room (still no coffee). Another 15 minutes later the detective show up with his partner.

They start asking me questions which I thought were peculiar. Then it hit me that I wasn’t just giving a statement, they were interviewing me as a person of interest. I am the first one every morning to open the location from which the equipment was taken. The surveillance video showed a team of 3 who knew exactly what they were doing and how to go about it. None of their faces were ever turned to the cameras and they knew exactly what they wanted, how to get it as quickly as possible and how to get it out of the building without being noticed.

The detectives thought that someone on the inside had provided the thieves with the intel they needed to get away with it, and I was suspect numero uno. Knowing what I know now, I would have immediately ceased talking to these detectives without a lawyer present. They grilled me for 4 more hours trying to break me into a confession of being an accomplice, which I was not.

It turns out that the thieves were a ring of professionals who spent a week scoping out the location to figure out how best to get their prize. The same individuals had hit 11 other institutions on the eastern coast of the US. It also turns out that the lead detective on the case who gave me such a hard time was also later convicted of stealing cash from the evidence room of his own station. Reading that headline made me smile because he was a huge jerk and it blew my mind that he even made detective in the first place, but it also made me sad for our justice system as a whole at the same time.

Also I never did get that coffee…

One story I’ve always found hard to believe is that of Lee Harvey Oswald having acted completely alone. People tend to forget that the guy defected to Soviet Russia for about a year. He renounced his citizenship, and worked for the Soviets for a while, who sent him to Minsk.

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main qimg cd2734cccf425ca36aa4fcb76fc8bdb0 lq

Oswald went back to America because, as he wrote in his diary, he “found the work drab”. Soviet Russia was no fun. So he returned to America. How! How on earth did a US citizen defect to the Soviet Union and just… return. Like it’s no big deal. What the hell? He married a Russian wife, they have two daughters. Settle in America. Oswald, for the record, is a former marine. He’s an excellent marksman (finest in his unit) and for two years, he’s left completely undisturbed by US authorities despite having defected and worked for their enemies for a year. And, when he was just 24 years of age, he goes and — allegedly — kills President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas.

It’s hard to believe an American citizen defected to the number one enemy of America in the middle of the Cold War, was allowed back to the United States without trouble, only to assassinate the president and get killed almost immediately after by a random citizen while in policy custody.

Valiant Thor: A UFO, the Pentagon and a 3-year Mission to Save the World

Hit like iron

My parents were married for 47 years when my father fell ill in 2022. I’d seen him the day before he went into the hospital, he was complaining of a stomach ache and not feeling well, but my dad had a high pain tolerance being retired Army. My mom’s birthday was the next day so he tried power through, at 3:00 in the morning he woke up my mother and my brother and they took him to the hospital. My mom stayed with him until that evening when he sent her home to get some rest and he said he’d see her the next day.

My mom got a call at 1:00 at night seeing they intubated my dad because he started to fail and they still hadn’t quite figured out what was wrong with him yet. My mom rushes to the hospital, my brothers and I rushed to the hospital where they have had my dad intubated and sedated.

They told us that he had something going on with his pancreas they believe that his gallbladder had failed and he had gallstones blocking his duct to the pancreas.

My dad died 8 days later never regaining consciousness.

Two days before he passed I gave my mom the present I had helped my dad pick out. It was their birthstones and the inscription “ love you always”… on a ring in the shape of a heart.

They loved each other so much.

The truly sad part is I discovered he had stage 4 kidney disease, and didn’t tell anyone, which explains why his organs were failing and the dialysis wouldn’t work.

My mom doesn’t know and I don’t think I’ll ever tell her. She blames herself for not trying harder, yet she would blame herself for trying to hard.

I miss him every damn day

Edit wow over 500 of votes I’m very thankful everyone. And I’m fixing my grammar mistakes. This was the first time I wrote this down and it was painful enough I did not proof read it very well, sorry for any mistakes. And for anyone who says that that’s life and it’s bitter at the end I don’t see it that way. My mother especially doesn’t see it that way. St /he says my dad lived a full healthy happy life. He was happy with his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, his wife and all of his accomplishments. His illness was short only eight days and in the end I take solace in the fact that he had a great life a very full life he did lots of things that most people would never have done. Been to lots of countries, met lots of different people. I only hope that I can die happy and at peace like him. It’s just so painful, I’m the only daughter, the eldest and the one that’s the most like my dad. I feel like I’m missing my other half. It is easing a bit since it’s almost 2 years but I’m glad everyone liked my story it was very therapeutic for me thank you

Red Wine and Herb Steak

Red Wine and Herb Steak
Red Wine and Herb Steak

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon Montreal steak seasoning
  • 1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 1/4 cup red wine
  • 1 (2 pound) top round steak (1 inch thick)

Instructions

  1. Combine first 6 ingredients in a large, self-closing bag or glass bowl.
  2. Add steak and marinate in refrigerator 30 minutes or longer for extra flavor.
  3. Remove steak from marinade; discard marinade.
  4. Grill or broil steak for 8 to12 minutes per side or to desired doneness.
  5. Slice on the diagonal and serve.

She Regrets Ordering Food for Her 3 Kids While Her Date Was in the Toilet

“If I Sleep for an Hour, 30 People Will Die”

These are the words of Adolfo Kaminsky.

A teenager, criminal mastermind for law textbooks and Angel from heaven for Jews of France.

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After dropping out of school at a young age, Kaminsky got hired for a clothes dryer to supplement the family income. He spent hours reckoning about how to remove stains from clothes. Studying chemistry textbooks and trying out new experiments at home enlightened him about his job.

In 1943, he and his family were arrested and directed to the internment camp for Jews near Paris. It was the last straw before death overtook. However, their passports turned out to be their life-savers. Argentinian government protested their detention since his native place was Argentina.

That was the instant when he understood the significance of “papers”.

The Kaminsky family was freed but they weren’t safe yet. They sought out the help of a Jewish resistance group to get them underground. Adolfo was sent to pick up the false papers when the group’s member told him they were struggling to erase off the ink from the paper. This is when Kaminsky advised using lactic acid which he had learnt from his job. It worked

This was the headstart in Kaminsky’s Criminal career, a career which saved over 14000 Jewish lives. He joined the France Jewish Resistance group. He would get tips on who was about to be arrested, then warn the families, assembling new papers for them on the spot. Criminally, it was “Forgery” but it saved lives.

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main qimg b248dfc02dd15faa60108a6404632992 lq

It is estimated that the whole group saved around 11000 children from being deported and killed. With those skills, he could have made a fortune in the illegal market but he would never accept payment for his forgery. Instead, he earned his fortune as a commercial photographer.

Even after the war, he helped the resistance groups of other countries making false documents in order to save lives. He estimates that in 1967 alone, he supplied forged papers to people in 15 countries.

This is him now, your average white-bearded “old uncle” who lives in the neighbourhood. His daughter recently wrote a book on his life in early times.

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main qimg 566803fc98174f836696e67aa8f6f2b3 lq

Mr Kaminsky and his daughter.

What most of us teens can never accomplish, he achieved humanity’s most prestigious feat- saving lives just at a mere age of 19.

Sometimes, the most unassuming people do the most benevolent things with absolute altruism.

Footnotes: Opinion | ‘If I Sleep for an Hour, 30 People Will Die’

Do you know these two people?

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main qimg 24016acc4853133b38692f3ab9002788 lq

These two are Jon Venables and Robert Thompson. They are children.

Well so, what did they do? I hear you asking yourself.

That’s easy. They murdered someone.

On the 12th of February, 1993, an innocent two-year-old boy named James Bulger was out with his mother at a shopping mall.

So were Venables and Thompson. Earlier that morning, the two of them had skipped school, and were now spending their time stealing things from the same mall that little James was in.

Noticing the busy Mrs. Bulger, Venables and Thompson approached James. They took him by the hand and led him out of the mall, without his mother noticing.

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main qimg 00c0e12202de023515701d6e63564e03 c

The two boys then proceeded to take James to a canal. There, they dropped him on his head. Bruised and crying, James was led further across Liverpool, ignored by passersby- they thought James was a little brother.

Thus Venables and Thompson reached the Walton and Anfield Railway Station, without much difficulty. They then proceeded to torture James.

They threw paint in his eyes.

They put batteries in his mouth.

They threw bricks at him.

They hit him with a metal pole.

They laid him across the train tracks and covered his head with rubble.

They killed James Bulger.

Venables and Thompson were later caught and tried as adults. Both of them cried when they were questioned, and both lied outrageously over the manner of James’s death. Venables blamed Thompson, and Thompson blamed Venables. Both boys expressed sorrow for Mrs. Bulger, but they only seemed to cry when their own mothers did. Otherwise they were perfectly calm, if a little bratty.

Thompson went so far as to put a rose on James Bulger’s grave.

“Why did you do that?” the detectives asked.

“Well, if I did that then I couldn’t have killed baby James,” Thompson replied. “I put that there so James in heaven could know I tried to help him.”

Thompson said that he’d tried to pull Venables away from James, screaming at him to stop. In reality, both of them had tortured him, and both of them had done nothing to stop the other.

During questioning, a psychologist examined the boys to see if they could determine morally right from morally wrong.

“What you did was wrong,” she said, to Venables. “Do you know that?”

“Yeah.”

The two of them were perfectly sane and knew right from wrong. Both were imprisoned for what they did, but they were later let out for good conduct (Venables was later put back in prison, on another offense).

So yes, minors SHOULD be tried for murder- depending on the situation. In court, those under ten years old are not deemed mature enough to understand morals. However, if they do- and if they are sound of mind- there shouldn’t be a reason that can stop them from being tried. It should be noted, though, that no child was given the electric chair or the lethal injection, except for one case a very long time ago (the accused was very likely falsely arrested).

There are some crazy kids out there who know what they’ve done and know why they’ve done it. They know they murdered. We know they murdered.

So put them on trial for it.

Disney World EMPTY on July Fourth?! HUGE Must-Know Story of Attendance Collapse — Cut in HALF?!

Poland Army Chief “Prepare for FULL SCALE WAR with Russia”

Poland’s Army Chief of Staff, General Wieslaw Kukula, today publicly urged his people and nation to prepare for full-scale war with Russia.

Poland is preparing the Military for a full-scale conflict with Russia, Polish Supreme Commanding General Wieslaw Kukula said at a press conference!!

Poland needs to prepare its soldiers for all-out conflict, its armed forces chief of staff said on Wednesday, as the country boosts the number of troops on its border with Russia and Belarus.

Poland’s relations with Russia and its ally Belarus have deteriorated sharply since Moscow sent tens of thousands of troops into neighboring Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, starting a war that is still being fought.

“Today, we need to prepare our forces for full-scale conflict, not an asymmetric-type conflict,” army chief of staff General Wieslaw Kukula told a press conference.

“This forces us to find a good balance between the border mission and maintaining the intensity of training in the army,” he said.
Speaking at the same event, deputy defense minister Pawel Bejda said that as of August, the number of troops guarding Poland’s eastern border would be increased to 8,000 from the current 6,000, with an additional rearguard of 9,000 able to step up within 48 hours notice.

In May, Poland announced details of “East Shield,” a 10 billion zloty ($2.5 billion) program to beef up defenses along its border with Belarus and Russia, which it plans to complete the plans by 2028.

The border with Belarus has been a flashpoint since migrants started flocking there in 2021 after Belarus opened travel agencies in the Middle East offering a new unofficial route into Europe — a move the European Union said was designed to create a crisis.
Warsaw has ramped up defense spending to more that 4 percent of its economic output this year in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Kukula also said the current high interest from candidates to join the army posed a dilemma over whether to take in more recruits than budgeted for at the expense of military equipment procurement, especially as he said interest was expected to start declining sharply from 2027.

The size of the armed forces stood at about 190,000 personnel at the end of last year, including ground, air, naval, special forces and territorial defense forces. Poland plans to increase this to 300,000 troops within a few years.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – 1950’s Super Panavision 70 – Full movie

There is absolutely no indication that China will behave this way to the world. Every indication says that China will be peaceful and benevolent.

China has fought no wars in the last 45 years. Guess how many wars the USA has fought.

China has sanctioned no country. Guess how many countries the USA has sanctioned.

China has not interfered in any country’s internal politics. The USA interfered in many countries, including Iran, Libya, Syria, Ukraine and China.

China helps other countries through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Over 150 countries participate in the BRI.

China trades with all nations and is the largest trading partner to over 120 countries.

China tried to bring peace to the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Hamas conflicts but the USA blocked all attempts.

Like many other countries, China has territorial disputes but these will likely be resolved diplomatically.

China’s military modernization is in direct response the USA’s militancy towards China, Russia and many other countries.

So the answer to your question is a resounding No!

Just recently, one that I feel really bad about: Exchanging some books at the library, they were having a shelf of YA giveaways out front. All completely new. I initially passed, but they insisted and I finally took one. Had an interesting cover and the blurb seemed like it could be interesting. My bike bag was already stuffed, but I stuck it on top of everything else and tied it down.

Well, four miles later, I got home, and the bag was one book lighter. Somehow slid right out. I hope that wherever it ended up, someone snagged it and maybe got something out of it, but yeah, a real waste.

~

Oh, another one from this spring: Coming back from an aerial studio out of town, I took the freeway back into town. (Honestly, it often feels safer than city streets, even if everyone thinks I’m insane.) Crossing one on-ramp I had to cut over quick, and I guess it was a little too quick, since I had to block the retaining wall with my arm to hold my balance. It scraped a bit. Meh. It didn’t occur to me until hours later that I didn’t see my snake bracelet, so either I’d been wearing it or it’d fallen out of my purse at some point, and I could think of only one place it even might be.

Figured it was a long shot, even if it was there it was probably run over and ruined, but next day I rode back out there anyway. And what do you know, right at the end of the onramp, it was still sitting right there in the gutter, unharmed.

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main qimg 507206c4746fd143d66dd90508160cd3

Now that’s just the last two I can recall, extend out over 30+ years of biking as a total derp and I’m sure you can imagine how it’s been. Thankfully, most of the time I do hear whatever it was hitting the ground and can turn around.

Steam Wars: Alice’s Galactic Duel – 1950’s Super Panavision 70

Brace yourself. You could be asked to sign this contract, too.

Last summer, our HVAC system failed. We needed to buy a new one. We got a quote for $11,844–0% interest for 25 months. Those terms sounded pretty good to us, so we then received the financing agreement (“Home Improvement Retail Installment Contract”).

It was unbelievable. Really. Beyond crazy.

First of all, yes, the price was $11,844 so long as the buyer didn’t default in any way. If the buyer defaulted, the interest rate would go to 24.99% and the number of payments would rise from 25 to 60. That would result in $9,010 in finance charges and total payments of $20,884.

Gulp!

But we’re pretty good about paying our bills. Still, I read the contract to determine what would constitute a “default.”

  • If we were more than 10 days late in a payment, that’s a default. Ten days late and we would get hit with $9,010 in finance charges. But that was just one triggering action.
  • If we failed “to perform any act” required by the contract—such as providing at least 30 days notice of a change of address—that would constitute a default. Oh, but it gets better!
  • As the lender puts it, if “We, in good faith, believe that the prospect of payment or performance is impaired,” that’s a default. In other words, you could be paying on time. You could be doing just fine financially. But if the lender believes the the prospect of payment is impaired, the lender can say that you’re in default.

The financing agreement allows the lender to foreclose on your home.

It also allows the lender to take the borrower’s personal property.

Oh, but you’ll at least know there’s a problem. Right?

Wrong!

From the contract: “We are not required to: (1) demand payment of amounts due; (2) give notice that amounts due have not been paid, or have not been paid in the appropriate amount, time or manner; or (3) give notice that we intend to make, or are making, this Contract immediately due.” Read that again. They’re not required to notify you of any problem or that they intend to foreclose or seize your personal property.

And there’s another “gotcha.” If the HVAC stops working—even if you’re making all your payments on time—they can foreclose. Specifically: “You will keep the Property in your possession in good condition and repair.” Otherwise, yup, you’re in default.

Below is just one page of the financing agreement. I boxed some of their language; my commentary is in the yellow boxes. Because the one page doesn’t show the identity of the would-be lender, in the interest of accuracy and full disclosure it’s: Service Finance Co., LLC, 555 S. Federal Hwy #200, Boca Raton, FL 33432, (866) 254–0497.

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main qimg 684375a1d9be0760c1c130deb21401a5 pjlq

Thanks for the A2A.

The first time I realized this ‘surname change’ thing was in Japan.

My female coworker Tanaka san announced her wedding. From the next day, everybody in the company was required to call her ‘kurihara san’, which is her husband’s surname. We got the name change notification from our HR department, and the mail address update notification from our IT department. Tanaka san, er, I mean, Kurihara san (It took us coworkers quite a while to get used to her new name) changed her official seals and name tags, updated all the registrations, did countless paperwork. Being a big company with thousands employees, such ‘name changing’ stuff is a serious work of our HR department which they had to deal with on a weekly base.

The second time was in Canada.

My husband and I were on honeymoon. We joined a package tour to breath-taking beautiful Banff National Park. Once our local guide called somebody: ‘Mrs. **’. Nobody answered. ‘Mrs. **’. Still silence. He came to ME, ‘Mrs. **?’ Oh My Gosh! He was saying my husband’s surname! I didn’t know he was talking to me!

Being Chinese, I grew up in a society no such a thing anybody changes name because of marriage. My ears didn’t have this ‘setting’ to suppose anybody would call me by my husband’s surname.

On the other hand, I’ve heard in ancient China, married women used to be called by this combination of ‘husband surname + father surname + shi’ (shi is kind of ‘clan’). For example, your father’s surname is Li, and you marry to Mr. Wang, then you would be called ‘Wang Li shi’. The first name of a woman used to be a kept secret only known by her husband, just like her body. From 20th century, as a result of feminist movement, people changed mindsets upon women’s first names. Women didn’t need to keep their first names secret to the public any more. I searched on the internet and found in 1929, KMT Nanjing government announced its Civil Law which defined the names of married women something like this: husband surname + former family surname + former first name. For example, your former name is Li fangfang, and you marry to Mr. Wang, you would become Wang Li fangfang. (I guess that’s probably why I still see women name like that from Taiwan newspapers. Please correct me if I’m wrong.) Interestingly, it also said in case a man marries into a woman’s family (which is called ‘ru zhui’ in Chinese. It’s not common but it existed and still exists), the man should practice the same. So if Mr. Wang dacheng marries into Miss Li’s family, he would be called Li Wang dacheng. In 1950, CCP government published new Marriage Law which stipulated: ‘Married men and women have equal right to keep their own names (including first names and surnames).’ And it became a norm in China mainland. Li fangfang is always Li fangfang. Wang dacheng is always Wang dacheng. I grew up with this norm.

It doesn’t necessarily mean the man-woman equality level is higher in China than in countries where married women are supposed to change their surnames. Especially in rural regions, the traditional patriarchy still has strong influence on the majority. And as a custom, most people still name after their fathers than their mothers.

Comparing China to Japan/Canada, I found another difference. (Please correct me if I’m wrong).

The tax.

In Japan, the income tax amount you need to pay changes a lot depending on your marriage status, your spouse’s income, and if you have children. In another word, the basic income tax unit is a FAMILY, rather than an INDIVIDUAL. I’ve heard similar tax policies in Canada and lots of western countries.

In China, your income tax has nothing to do with if you are married, if you have 8 young children, if you have parents to financially support. The income tax is only based on the INDIVIDUAL income.

So you see, in China, the basic economic units of the society are more likely considered as INDIVIDUALS, rather than FAMILIES.

Like my coworker Tanaka/Kurihara san, name changing costs LOTS of work. And what’s the benefit from doing it? When a society is individual-based rather than family-based, I don’t see any benefit to pay the cost of name changing.

My guess on this topic, is that the choice of surname reflects the changes of the family structure as well as the social structure.

Time changes, economy changes, human relationship changes. What will be a ‘marriage’ like in the future? Will it still exist at all? What will we define a ‘family’? What will be the ties to connect humans and warm our hearts?

Let’s see.

BIOSHOCK – 1950’s Super Panavision 70 (Extended Cut)

Working at a community college in the 90’s, I dealt with a whole lot of teenagers who had gone to small rural schools and this was their first time meeting lots of new people. One young lady came in wearing a ripped up T shirt with a different color sports bra under it and cut off jeans shorts that were really short and ragged. I just had to mention her clothes since she was in business classes and it turned out she was really poor. I spoke with the head of the department and he pulled $20 from his own pocket and by the end of the next day, I had over $300 (large department) so I found her and we went to the local thrift store where $30 would garner me several outfits for work, decent jeans and all kinds of good stuff. After finding enough for a full week of classes and then some, for less than $100, I spent an additional $75 for clothes for her younger brother and sister and a Sunday dress for mom. I ended up taking her home since she missed her ride and saw where she lived when I helped her carry everything in. The place was small but as neat and clean as they could make it and her mom was floored over what we brought in. Along with clothes, the thrift store gave me two boxes of food, including milk and fruit.

It seems this was a turning point for them since the father had just gotten a decent job and the food carried them to his first paycheck (he had been laid off a few months earlier). The girl was very grateful and so were all of them and a couple years later the son came to the college (scholarships paid for all three kids so very bright) and I hear the younger sister became a nurse after she attended 2 years there and then to university.

Oh, the remainder of the money was used to start a fund for future students in the same predicament so sometimes inappropriate clothes actually lead to good things.

Bram Stoker’s DRACULA – 1950’s Super Panavision 70

Yes, it has been published.

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main qimg 778ad7de5834d5b9df1b6db418ec063b

China has always had a tradition of “the current dynasty writing history for the previous dynasty”. For example, people from the Ming Dynasty wrote about the history of the Yuan Dynasty, and people from the Qing Dynasty wrote about the history of the Ming Dynasty… The “History of the Republic of China” compiled by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has been officially published by Zhonghua Book Company.

The History of the Republic of China is the final conclusion of historians on the Republic of China (1911-1949)

The coffin lid now closed, there is nothing more to say.

It is not only a custom for the successor to edit the history of the predecessor, but also a practice in conformity with the international law on the succession of government.

However, “ROC” has not yet, which it should have, formalized the Qing history. This might be partly because of the restless destiny of ROC and partly because of its uncertain status as legitimate ROC after 1949 on Taiwan. Having not rested Qing in peace by publishing its history, ROC shirks its historical responsibility.

Be quiet

I was working with the President of Sears and a handful of his most senior Vice Presidents for about two years, five years ago. I flew into Sears headquarters outside of Chicago about every other week. At the same time I was working closely with the management teams of Home Depot, Lowe’s, Best Buy, Walmart, Radio Shack, and Target. But I spent a lot more time with the Sears team than any of the others. Here are some things I noticed:

Trends

On the one hand, general purpose department stores like Sears are suffering across the board and have been for 30 years. Every major trend in retail is working against these people. In order of timeline: malls are losing traffic and closing, and the anchor stores are taking the biggest hit. More of retail has moved to specialty brands and eCommerce. Over the last ten years luxury retail is the only non-digital retail segment that’s improved, and Sears doesn’t have access to that. On the low end, Walmart and Target have gotten wiser and savvier (maybe because they’ve been pushed by Amazon) and are eating the world.

Playing not to lose

Over the last few decades Sears has been a radioactive hot potato, and ended up in the hands of a “buy it and strip mine it to turn it profitable so we can sell it to someone else” kind of company. The president was a nice guy, but didn’t live at headquarters and wasn’t from the industry. He was plugged in from the holding company that owned them and was charged with stripping away the fat while they turned it around.

Unfortunately, the fat was the look and feel of Sears retail locations, and once you strip away the shopping experience, the “meat” of their profitability and unique differentiators, their nationwide appliance service team, their lead in US appliance sales, their Kenmore and Craftsman brands, and their automotive centers, eroded to specialized local competition.

When something like this happens, a few trends emerge in the kind of people you work with:

  • Very smart people who are undervalued are immediately recruited away – there goes your innovation and ability to keep up with competitive trends and any shot at being a market leader
  • Not great people who are willing to work for a depressed company join in to backfill, or lifers who are too lazy to look for another gig
  • You keep some smart people who are just crazy loyal to the brand/company

I got to work with all of these types at Sears, and sadly, the crazy loyal smart people weren’t much more effective than the not-great people.

Crazy loyal senior VPs at Sears were seen as combative and arrogant by their vendors and competitors. In previous times, they would have been held in check by savvy industry veterans who were self aware and strategic. But now, these loyalists were running the show and they were too proud/nostalgic to see that Lowe’s and Home Depot were already eating their lunch, and that their once platinum authority and influence over the manufacturing landscape (appliance manufacturers) was already gone.

Sears has been dying for 25 years, just very slowly

It could be that Sears was too dependent on malls and being a huge department store with an emphasis on the lower end of the market and Home Depot and Lowe’s were just too good for this to have turned out any other way.

At the same time, I think it would have been easy for Walmart to concede that metro areas didn’t want them and give up, but they adapted and built a chain of Walmart grocery stores to extend their brand and penetrate those markets anyway.

It would have been easy for them to roll over and let Amazon take digital, but they radically threatened their own Arkansas-centric family culture to build one of the best eCommerce teams in the world in the SF Bay Area and then bought Jet.com.

I could say similar things about Target, whose biggest earlier competitor, K-mart, is going the way of Sears, or Best Buy, whose earlier competitor, Circuit City, has already died.

Smart retailers have adapted, but Sears never did.

Shrek – 1950’s Super Panavision 70

There’s a fine line between designs that are jaw-droppingly original and ones that are truly awful.

Unfortunately, a lot of people tend to lean heavily on the latter side of the line, so the world’s filled with design atrocities that will make you cringe. So bad they’re good?

Nah,So bad they’re the worst!!


‘Muddy Water’ pop dress..

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main qimg 0b961cfac7737468e191056753af4ed1 pjlq

Perfect for a “I crawled out from my grave” look.

When I traveled through the Panama Canal in May of 2022, I paid approximately $2,200.00, plus additional fees (a few hundred dollars) for a “Canal Agent”, to coordinate and complete all of the paperwork (all in Spanish) that is required for passage through the canal. The fees charged are proportional to the size of the vessel. My ship has an OAL of 76 feet and it weighs 50 tons. Smaller or larger vessels would be proportionately less or more expensive. Container ships and super tankers pay hundreds of thousands of dollars, which is less than the fuel expense of crossing between the two oceans around Cape Horn (and much faster and less dangerous!) To my knowledge, no vessels pass through the canal for free. This is because the operational expenses of running the Panama Canal (personnel, maintenance, etc.) exceed $8 million per day! Panama can only recover those costs by charging fees for passage through the Canal.

Aside from the costs of passing through the Canal, there is currently an additional concern; and that is the amount of time you might have to wait until you’re allowed to pass through. Due to an extended drought of many years, the amount of rainfall needed to replenish the water level of Gatun Lake (which is used to fill and operate the locks for each ship passing through the Canal) is inadequate. Consequently, the number of ships allowed to pass through the Canal each day has been greatly reduced. Since time is money, many large container and cargo ships find that it is less expensive to off-load their cargo on one side of the Canal, have it trucked to the other side of the Canal and reloaded onto another ship to complete the journey to the intended destination. If you have a smaller boat, it might even be possible to have your boat shipped by truck to the other side of the Canal.

So if you are contemplating passage through the Canal, you really need to thoroughly research not only the costs involved, but also the amount of time it may take before you’re able to pass through the Canal. (Once again, time is money.) Either that, or plan on greatly extending your voyage by passing around Cape Horn. That endeavor takes much more time, is quite risky, requires crew with considerable experience, requires knowledge about what season is most conducive to safe passage and expert weather forecasting for proper timing of the most challenging part of the trip.

There is one last thing to consider. Passing through the Panama Canal is much more than just getting from one ocean to the other. It is a once-in-a-lifetime experience!!! You will likely be within a stone’s throw of HUGE ships, some of which you will even share space with while in the Canal. You will witness not only the Canal gates opening and closing, but also millions of gallons of water churning around you each minute trying (but not succeeding!) in pushing your vessel against the Canal walls. (Your vessel will be securely tied off to each side of the canal, maintaining control of your vessel’s position continuously.) Your memories of the sights and sounds that you can only experience by passing through the Panama Canal will be ones that you carry with you, and share with family and friends, for the rest of your lifetime. It is definitely a “bucket list” opportunity that few in this life ever get to experience. So if you actually do make it through the Canal, consider yourself very fortunate indeed!

Shorpy

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How Americans Got So Dumb

In your country, there are many states or provinces etc, right?

In USA, New York is a state of USA. Can NY become a member of UN? No. It is the US federal that represents USA to occupy a seat in UN.

Taiwan is a PROVINCE of China, UNGA made it crystal clear to the world on 2024/5/13. Instead of just saying Taiwan is Part of China as before.

As a province of China, Taiwan hence cannot become a UN member unless China is willing to make an exception for Taiwan. But I dont see it happen because the USA-Taiwan dual are playing political games.

Dont be fooled by USA the global trouble maker.

Face mask sign

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main qimg 8e4990249d4310c02de484ac106b8059 pjlq

Actually poor people are probably the most pro-CCP group in China.

My grand parents was born in 1930s. Suffered from WWII in 1940s, the famine in 1960s, the culture revolution in 1970s. My grandpa lost his father in WWII, his mother remarried and moved to another village left him a young kid only a small mud hut, my grandma’s family is also in extreme poverty to agree my grandpa, an orphan to marry her.

If you use a western standard, they are still living in poverty now, however they are 100% satisfied with current situation comparing to their first half of their life.

Meanwhile, these people who complains the most are not the poor group, take one of my brother, my uncle’s son for example, he owns a shop selling decoration materials for buildings, earned a lot during the decade of urbanization, he earns less now due to the slow down of urbanization, he is the one complaining day by day rather than the poor.

You see? Managing the expectations is easier than actually doing something good..

Tori Routsong

Bright, bright, bright. It was always too bright, always bright, always grating, grating at the back of his eyes, in the back of his mind. Peter no longer squinted. The lights that lined the room bored into his brain, boring and drilling, but Peter no longer squinted.The window, the singular window, told him it wasn’t food-time yet, but he couldn’t help but wait, shivering, by the door slot. She would come soon—or maybe not. Time didn’t exist in his blinding cell, not until the sky outside the window slit turned dark. When he stood, he could reach it, peering outside at the endless sky.Peter shivered, sitting on the damn floor. The room had begun to stink again, but he didn’t mind. It meant she would be arriving soon, to clean. Peter loved it when she came. She didn’t look like him, with her stomping boots and her black-eyed mask—Peter often wondered if they were of the same kind—but when he could see her hair, he felt at peace. They had the same brown hair, hair that trickled over her shoulders and cascaded down his back. Sometimes she let him touch it, gently and softly.On very special days, she would stay longer, and run her careful hands down the ridge of his backbone. She would help him to his feet, ever gentle, ever soft, and stretch out his arms and legs so she can run a bit of cold metal down them, bumping into his skin every so slightly, ever so often. He no longer made a sound when she did—she didn’t seem to like his sounds much anyway. He liked hers, though. Peter loved to hear the sounds she made when she came to see him. There was one she made, that she said so gently, with so much devotion. He longed to hear it. He practiced making her noises, so maybe she would stay longer, but she never stayed. Peter bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, both excited and cold. A very special day would be coming soon.Most days, all he could hear was the buzzing of the lights, but sometimes, if Peter huddled by the edge of his cell, he could hear muddled sounds. He thought they might be from others like him, but he’d never seen anybody but her. Maybe there were others out there, others like him. Peter longed to see them. Their sounds surrounded his dreams. He practiced making her sounds a couple times more—she would be so surprised to hear her sounds. Maybe then she’d stay.Food plopped through the food slot, and Peter rushed over, grabbing it as soon as he could so it wouldn’t lay for long on the damn, cold floor. It wasn’t bad—it wasn’t sweet today, but it was food, and he had been so hungry. At this point, Peter knew the routine well. After food came the darkness outside the slit of a window, and sometimes, if it was a very special day, she would come. Surely a very special day was coming soon, Peter thought. He had been waiting for a while now.It was! It was a very special day! Peter leapt to his feet, walking up to the door. She pushed him back as he walked in, which was normal—Peter knew by now that he was not supposed to see whatever was behind his door. She had less brown hair now, and she let him run the tips of his fingers over the feathery ends. He watched her adoringly while she did her measurements. She used the special sound, the one that Peter knew, only once. Peter waited patiently while she tested his memory, his reflexes, using a small shock to let him know what he would done wrong and something small and sweet when he did something right. This was all typical; Peter barely needed to think about it anymore. He made sure not to relieve himself while she was there; she didn’t like it when he did that in front of her, and it always made her leave sooner.Finally, she turned to leave, and Peter made his move. “Peter,” he sounded, and she turned with a start. Peter bounced up and down. He surprised her! Maybe she’d stay. “Peter,” he sounded again, and to his delight, she started making sounds of her own. “Peter.”

She made more noises, wiggling her finger back and forth on the little item she always brought with her. Then she said something else to him, but that sound he didn’t recognize.

“Peter,” he tried again, but she didn’t seem as surprised this time. He was far taller than her now, but she could still put one hand on his head. He closed his eyes. Maybe this time she’d stay.

But she didn’t. She left, leaving Peter in the cold, bright room alone. It was okay. That was okay. He would practice her sounds and maybe next time she’d stay longer. Peter settled on the floor and put his arms over his head, ready to sleep. Next time, he would be better at her sounds.

A muffled thump against his window startled him out of his rest. Something must have smacked against it. It wasn’t the first time that had happened, but as he trotted over to the window, he found it was different now, for the first time in eighteen years. There was a crack, splicing down the middle. Peter pressed on the window gingerly, and the freezing glass shifted under his fingertips. A cold stream of air swirled in, and with it, a tiny speck of something wet that settled and melted on Peter’s skin. He pressed harder, and harder, and harder and suddenly it snapped, and the glass under his fingertips was suddenly gone and his arm was out, out in an environment that was much colder than his own.

Peter pressed on the other side, and this one cracked too, but this crack stung his skin, as if she was still there, shocking him for being wrong. Peter pulled his hand back in shock—it was wet now, and vividly red with blood. It was colder in the room now, with the frigid air flurrying in. Part of Peter wanted to stay behind, to huddle in the corner. He doubted this is what she wanted him to do. But part of him felt exhilarated.

Peter propped himself up on one elbow, standing on his tippy-toes and ignoring the biting sting in his arm when it pressed against the jagged edge of where the window had been, and what he saw amazed him; there was so much outside his room, so many more colors, so many more shapes. Entranced, he stuck his other arm through, ignoring the cold, ignoring the stinging of his arm. Suddenly, wildly, taken by this other world, Peter launched himself through it, bits of where the window used to be piercing and tearing at this stomach and the paper-thin skin of his thighs until he was falling, and then he landed in something cold, something wet, knocking this wind out of his lungs.

And when Peter stood up again, he wept.

The world outside his room was so much bigger than he’d known. Something alive, something he’d never seen, fluttered over his head, making a sound he’d never heard. The wind blew over his naked body, making the thin hairs that covered his body bristle, before the wind swept past him, rustling a huge, spindling something farther down the path. Peter took a few steps toward it, his feet sinking into the white wet something that covered the ground. He took a few more steps, more than he’d ever taken in his room before, and soon he was running, speeding, faster than he thought he would ever move, and out of his mouth came a sound he’d never heard, and it filled his heart.

He reached the spindling something, touched the rough covering, felt pieces break off and crumble in his hands. The fluttering thing, the one that had flown over his head, lighted on the spindling something, looking down at him, and making a sound that was high and piercing and startling and Peter couldn’t help but shriek after it in delight. It flew away from him, and he followed it, running faster than anything Peter had ever seen.

He followed it a ways, until the white wet powder that coated his bare skin began to make his feet numb until they wouldn’t move. Peter was surprised—his feet pierced, like the cuts on his arms and stomach, but when he sat to look at them, he couldn’t see any holes or any blood.

His arms started to feel sluggish too, Peter noticed, and when he looked at them, he saw them change color from pink to blue to grey. They were hurting too, and Peter started to feel less sure of himself. He took to his feet again, plodding after the little fluttering thing, but it didn’t last. His feet, his legs were too tired.

It was okay, though, Peter thought, falling to his knees. He didn’t mind. He was starting to feel quite warm, actually, which was nice. He couldn’t help but wonder if he’d made a mistake though; he knew she wouldn’t like him being out here, and he hated to let her down. His stomach and thighs were sticky with blood now, seeping and dying the fresh soft powdered ground.

Peter lay down. The ground beneath him was soft, at least—he liked it more than lying on the cold tile of his room. And the sky—oh! —the sky was so much richer now that he was outside, and speckled with the little fluttering things, calling to each other as they traversed the sky. Peter loved it all, as much as he loved her, and he wished he could show her all of this wonder that had been outside his room the entire time. Most of all, he just wished she was there. Peter couldn’t move his arms or legs anymore, but it didn’t matter. It was okay, just to look up, look to the sky.

He had hardly closed his eyes when he heard her voice. She sounded so far away from him—he tried to sit up, to see her, and he found he couldn’t. That was okay.

“Peter,” she called, and he sounded back.

Peter was happy, as the strength left his chest. She had gotten to see the outside world with him after all.

Barney the Cursed Dinosaur – 1950’s Super Panavision 70

Richard Lee McNair.

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He is a convicted murderer who is currently serving two life sentences. He is most famous for escaping prison three times from three different institutions. He was also featured frequently on the show, America’s Most Wanted.

On his first attempt, he was just apprehended and was handcuffed to a chair and left alone in the room. He then proceeded to use the lip balm in his pocket as lubricant to squeeze his hands out of the handcuffs. He led the police on a foot chase through the town but was eventually caught when he decided to jump off the roof of a three story building.

In his second attempt years later, he escaped by crawling through a ventilation duct. Once free, he grew out his hair and dyed it blonde as a disguise and was freely roaming the U.S. for ten months before his capture.

His final (and most brilliant and famous) escape was ten years later. He worked in the mailroom and planned his escape for months. He created a pod with a breathing tube and was mailed outside the prison. Once out, he cut himself out of the escape pod and ran to the next town. On his way there, he was stopped by a police officer who had suspicions that he was an escapee. However, McNair kept his cool and deceived the cop with his plausible explanations.

He remained free for a year. During which, he stole cars and cash from dealerships. Having worked as a car salesman before, he knew exactly where the car keys were located and knew how to avoid security. He would also only get brand new cars since the window sticker would identify whether the car had a GPS tracking system (which he avoided). He would also choose white cars since “everybody had them”.

Here is the video of him tricking the cop:

I’m Having An Aneurysm Just Looking At This…

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main qimg 848501c942e6249d26884b0cbdc613e4 pjlq

Like a lot of people, one of my former jobs was working at McDonald’s. I had been doing a lot of back-breaking labor work on golf courses and working inside in air conditioning seemed appealing.

Like most who start out, I was assigned as grill cook on the quarter pounder grill. Two words: vaporized grease. Wow.

Anyway, I’d been working there for 5 months or so. It was basketball season and the very large city high school near our store just got done with a game. We had been slow in the hour preceding this tale, so I had been given a written list of cleaning tasks to complete in the down time.

I had completed 10 of 16 items on the list when the basketball game let out and we went from dead to as busy as a store can get. I jumped off the list and onto the grill, making quarter-pounders as fast as was legal.

In the midst of this chaos, my manager asked, “Clint, why isn’t that trash out?”

I answered that it was number 12 on her list of things to do and I was on number 11 when she told me to start making burgers. I thought making burgers was more important than getting the trash out, so I thought I’d start making burgers.

So…this is where our story gets fun!

She looked at me and said, “Clint, I’m not paying you to think…”

Tick. Tick. Tick.

I took off the really stylish polyester McDonald’s visor that I was wearing, and laid it down on the quarter pounder grill.

“Then fuck you. You aren’t paying me at all.”

I walked out.

You may ask. What was the strange request? Ah, our story continues…

I went into the “crew room” to change my clothes and get my coat (it was winter in Illinois). I was tying my shoes when our district manager walked into the room and politely asked me what had just happened. I told him the story, just like I have explained it to you.

“Clint, I don’t want you to leave.”

“I can’t work where I’m not allowed to think.”

“What if I fire (the manager)?”

“You need to fire her, but I’m still leaving.”

“What if I offer you her job?” ←——— STRANGE REQUEST ALERT

“Thank you, but no. I don’t want to be here in a year, telling some kid he isn’t being paid to think.”

You can learn something from every job you have. In 35 years, I’ve never treated an employee like I was treated.

In 2018 The top 9 “Most Evil Corporation Awards” go to…

  1. Japan Beverage – Vending machine operator. They had the twisted practice of giving employees a quarterly quiz called “paid vacation chance,” and only those who pass the quiz are allowed to get paid time off. Oh, and 100+ hours of overtime was not uncommon.
  2. Hitachi HPS – IT solutions. After working a brutal 160 hours of overtime, managers would verbally abuse factory workers, yelling, “it hurts to look at you – get the hell out of here” and “you should probably just quit your job already.”
  3. Monte Roza – Restaurant chain. Employees sometimes worked until 3 am and then had to be in for the next shift at 6am. One employee died from fatal insomnia due to overwork.
  4. GonCharoff Chocolaterie. A 20 year old employee was constantly harassed by his boss and committed suicide in 2016.
  5. Ministry of Finance. Sexual harassment is rampant.
  6. Suruga Bank (I’ve actually banked here and witnessed blatant sexism twice within 15 minutes of walking in to their bank). They had a massive scandal recently linked to systemic misconduct.
  7. Nomura Real Estate. They average about 180 hours of overtime /month per employee.
  8. Mistubishi Electric. Between 2014-2018, five employees died from overwork (karoshi) and many others have been hospitalized.
  9. Yamato. Japan’s top logistics/delivery business. One manager was caught on video kicking an employee, calling him an idiot and shouting “I’ll kill you.”

Harsh truth

Found on X (Twitter): Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman etc. depend on thousands on Chinese suppliers for everything — software & hardware.

Like it or not, the US NEEDS China!

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main qimg 71486f26cdff745017427affe4a51351

Feuilleté d’andouillette.

It looked so appealing. A delicate parcel of flaky pastry, baked to golden perfection.
“One of those, please.”

The traiteur hesitated. “I wouldn’t recommend that. An acquired taste”.

“Quite. I live here now, I ought to start acquiring a taste for local foods.”

It’s hard to describe the regretful smile on his face, as he gently lifted the feuilleté from its showcase vitrine.

On reflection, he was probably thinking this:
“I cook with passion. I serve with pride. Against my advice, this stupid woman is going to walk out the door with andouillette. Decades of future custom will be lost.”

He wrapped it in ribbon-tied paper, as if it was a parting gift from an unrequited love. “I could have given you anything..but you refuse to see the good in me…”.

“You won’t like it.” He called after me.

Andouillette – pay attention, you will thank me later – is sub-mucosa of pig intestine, stuffed with strips of more substantial bits of intestine (both small and large), and stomach. The sealed pastry cheats the nose of the aroma; so the taste, as you bite into it, fills the whole oral cavity, revealing itself to your olfactory senses via crawling up the back of your palate and punching you in the brain.
Shit. It tastes like shit.

Now, other cuisines make use of offal, but one is given to believe that all those tubes and pouches are given a good scrub beforehand. The French, proud of their inimitable culinary traditions, appear to have gone against the universal norm, and chosen instead to marinade the offal in shit. And then, presumably, drizzle their creation with a réduction of shit, for a more intense gastronomic experience.

He was right. I didn’t like it.
I did continue to frequent his establishment, though. A very fine traiteur. He caters to all tastes.

Donkey Kong – 1950’s Super Panavision 70

Logic dictates the answer…

What does any person want in life?

  • personal safety
  • financial security
  • food security
  • housing affordability
  • good health care
  • good education
  • good infrastructure
  • peace and stability

How does living in the most powerful country give you all this? Especially if the country is led by a buffoon (Biden) or a clown (Trump) or an authoritarian strongman (Trump). Especially if the country wastes your precious financial resources prosecuting overseas wars.

DC having a normal one

 

On April 22 US Congress voted in the $61 billion “Ukraine Response” bill. On the same day it also voted in a $8.1 billion “Indo-Pacific” bill.

The latter allocates $1.9 billion to replace DoD arms that will be given, or have been given to Taiwan for free.

It also allocates some $1.7 billion for Taiwan to use to order arms from US companies.

$2.7 billion in weapons to Taipei in just one fiscal year for free.

Two days later on April 24 the US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken traveled to China, and demanded that her government stops Chinese companies from selling electronic components and factory equipment to Russia.

Don’t you just love the American Empire?

The US formally recognizes there exists only one China with a capital in Beijing. This from the US point of view makes Taipei a renegade government on sovereign Chinese territory. Nonetheless, the US gives away weapons to Taipei for free, while demanding China damages its economy and stops selling non-weapons to Russia for cold cash. (Nothing is said of machine tool exports to Ukraine and Western arms makers which China is also willing to fulfill.)

China already refrains from giving away weapons to Russia, and largely refrains from selling weapons and ammunition. Yet this is not enough, a hostile Empire that arms Taipei against China for free, demands that Beijing sanctions itself. Sanctions itself in order to help the Empire exhaust and humble Russia so that the Empire can then focus all of its resources on China alone.

 

And what’s will all the utopianism anyway?

I can’t believe anyone at State Department seriously thought Beijing would comply with these shocking demands, and that they would do anything but offend and aggravate the Chinese, so why even bring them up?  

Did Washington seriously not expect that eventually Russia would start investing in its military production capacity, and that China would make its machine tools available for that? (As she makes them available to anyone willing to pay for them.)

The only shocking thing is how long it took for Russia to start doing it. Did DC think the inactivity would last forever?

Screenshot 2024 05 02 135949
Screenshot 2024 05 02 135949

 

Now DC will pass some punitive sanctions on Chinese manufacturers and banks that will delay some shipments and make others marginally more expensive, but most of all will help confirm to Beijing that DC sees it as an enemy.

BTW, the Russians are not entirely dependent on machine tool imports. Since 2014 they have been building CNC machines of their own — but they lack the capacity to build them on a truly grand scale like the Chinese.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Col. Larry Wilkerson: This is the American Empire Collapsing Before Our Eyes!

Large mansions are mostly a holdover from a previous era. For the most part, they are obsolete. When you get beyond about 6,000 sq. feet, (about three times the size of an average nice American home) you have far more space than you need.

This is especially true for most wealthy people who practically live at the office. No one wants to be in a mansion during the day when the Army of Help goes through the place with vacuum cleaners, leaf blowers and a general atmosphere better suited to a construction site.

Everyone thinks this:

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main qimg 6ff9cc1cd4de8b70b8298f99a109aab5 lq

And forgets about this:

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I’ve been in a few of these mansions and it’s typical for the family to confine themselves to . . . wait for it . . . about 2,000 square feet of the home and just ignore the rest. You can easily tell which rooms look lived in. The smart rich people have a smallish -for a mansion- (5,000 sq. feet) but veeeery nice home on a veeeeery large property.

There is no need for an entire wing for the live-in staff because it’s down to only one or two people: the nanny, only if there are young children and maybe a live-in maid. Everyone else commutes in.

Gone are the days of guests coming to stay for the summer, large banquets and banquet halls, dance floors and ballrooms. These functions are better served by hotels. Mansions do not need to be self contained cities anymore.

If you’re super famous then you still don’t need a huge house, just a large property with a big gate for privacy and maybe a security service to keep watch.

So mostly they’re there to look pretty. They’re not especially useful anymore.

Maytag Blue T-Bones

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4d5ab791b074bc0a0bfc92aab11b2783

Ingredients

  • 4 T-bone steaks, about 1 inch thick
  • 2 large sweet onions, such as Vidalia, chopped
  • 1/2 cup unsalted butter
  • 3 tablespoons dry red wine
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 3 ounces Maytag blue cheese, crumbled
  • Coarse salt

Instructions

  1. Sprinkle steaks with salt and let them sit at room temperature for 30 minutes.
  2. Sauté onions in butter and oil over a medium low heat until they are soft and starting to brown.
  3. Turn heat up to medium high and add red wine. Cook until most of the liquid has evaporated off. Remove from heat.
  4. Heat grill. Grill steaks for about 5 to 6 minutes per side or until they reach desired doneness.
  5. Remove from grill and top with blue cheese and onions.

Secretary of State Blinken announces the transfer of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine is underway

Blinken NATO Summit large
Blinken NATO Summit large

Speaking at the NATO Summit, taking place at the White House, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken confirmed: Donated F-16 fighter jets are “on the way” to Ukraine.

The F-16’s are coming from Denmark and the Netherlands.  Here is video confirming what he said:

 

This is a GIGANTIC problem.

The F-16 is a remarkable aircraft.  Even though it was designed decades ago, it is still one of the most capable, agile, fighter jets in the world.

But in order to make it so agile, the designers had to carefully match it’s weight to it’s speed.  And one of the areas where they had to cut weight, is in the landing gear.

So when the F-16 needs to takeoff or land, it **must** have a smooth runway.  Except . . .  there are none left in Ukraine. Russia has bombed them all.

Realizing this, NATO has told Ukraine that the donated F-16’s may be able to takeoff and land at NATO bases in Poland and in Romania.

Well, Russia isn’t having any of that crap.   Russia has made clear that if planes takeoff or land at bases OUTSIDE of Ukraine, while they are killing Russian troops INSIDE Ukraine, then those planes and the bases they use are legitimate military targets.

NATO, using it’s well-established and child-like intellect, says “No, the bases are NOT party to the conflict and if Russia attacks a NATO base, then Article 5 of the NATO Treaty (Collective self-defense) can be invoked for war against Russia.”

Well, we’ve all been watching for months as this situation has developed and now, at least according to Secretary Blinken, we have arrived at the moment of truth.

 

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

None of us is certain (yet) as to whether, or when, those donated F-16’s will start taking off for missions against Russian forces.

None of us is certain (yet) if Russia will be able to simply shoot-down those planes over Ukraine air space, thereby negating the need to hit the launch bases.

But ALL OF US are going to find these things out, very soon.

The trouble is, the mass-media in the United States, and in Europe, has been utterly derelict in its reporting of how serious the situation has become and as a result, the general public in the US and EU, have absolutely no idea AT ALL, how close we all are to World War 3.

The general public – for the most part – has not even been told to have emergency food, water, medicine, flashlights, batteries, a portable AM/FM/SW radio with spare batteries, a first-aid kit, a generator with fuel for temporary electric power to keep their refrigerators running, or communications gear like CB or HAM radio for communications if/when all the grid goes down from the coming war.

The general public is blissfully ignorant that THEIR survival is at stake.

WHEN this war breaks out, I fear it will escalate so fast, so out-of-control, that we will see nuclear weapons used WITHIN HOURS.

When that happens, there will be sheer PANIC.  The masses (who are asses) will all freak-out and try heading to stores for food, water, etc., and the stores will sell-out (or be looted out) within hours.

Then, I suspect, we will see lawlessness on a scale never before seen.   Roving bands of urban savages, hungry and without money, will storm into homes to steal food, water, money.  Homeowners, defending themselves, will likely shoot many of them dead.

But if hundreds of lawless maniacs are storming a house, there’s only so much a family can do before they’re over-run.

The police?   Will likely be home defending THEIR OWN families, and will be useless to respond to the widespread and escalating anarchy, if they even respond at all..

As the urban centers are exhausted of food to steal (within a couple days), the savages will fan-out into the suburbs.  I suspect far more incidents of homeowner self-defense will take place there.  I predict hundreds to be gunned-down by armed citizens defending hearth and home.

I predict it will all be to no avail, because the city-dwellers are simply not equipped to feed themselves, and their survival instinct will be the driving factor in their mob mentality.

Add to the mayhem the absence of electric power (grid down), dying batteries in cell towers, downed or non-functioning Internet and telephones, and you have the perfect recipe for Societal collapse.

FOR OVER TWO YEARS, I HAVE TOLD READERS OF THIS WEBSITE, AND LISTENERS TO MY RADIO SHOW TO HAVE “PREPS.”  EMERGENCY FOOD, WATER, MEDICINES, GENERATOR, FUEL, FLASHLIGHTS, SPARE BATTERIES, COMMUNICATION GEAR LIKE CB OR HAM RADIO, PORTABLE RADIOS FOR NEWS AND INFORMATION. My warnings have mostly fallen upon deaf ears.

Now, we’re coming to the point where what I have warned of, is about to begin.

GOD HELP US ALL.

2024中国说唱巅峰Top20首神曲 哪一首是你心中的第一呢?| GAI周延 早安 法老 杨和苏 热狗 邓紫棋 谢帝 | iQIYI 音乐纯享频道

Top 20 Chinese RAP this year. Learn what the Chinese listen to.

In recent years, the United States and some of its Western allies have formed a systematic network to smear Xinjiang through “academic institutions,” “experts and scholars,” and “actors,” driven by anti-China forces. These forces mislead international public opinion and distort the Xinjiang narrative through false information and financial support. However, the truth is gradually being revealed. Independent news websites like “The Gray Zone” in the U.S. and “Australian Alert Service” in Australia, as well as press conferences held by the Xinjiang Autonomous Region, have progressively exposed the truth behind these lies.

I. Geopolitical Manipulation by Western Countries

Since the Cold War era of the last century, the United States and its allies have been using the Xinjiang issue for geopolitical manipulation. During the Cold War, the U.S. supported anti-Soviet forces to counter the Soviet Union. After the Cold War, the U.S. and its allies shifted their focus to China, supporting separatist and terrorist activities in Xinjiang, intending to undermine China’s stability and development. U.S. neoconservative forces believe that by weakening the influence of Russia and China, they can achieve the goal of maintaining a unipolar world. For a long time, anti-China organizations and extremist groups such as the “World Uyghur Congress” and the “East Turkestan Government in Exile” have continually emerged, with extremist ideologies spreading rapidly in the Xinjiang region, resulting in numerous terrorist attacks.

II. Adrian Zenz and His False Research

Adrian Zenz, an extreme right-wing fundamentalist Christian, proposed the false conclusion of “millions of Uyghurs detained in Xinjiang” by piecing together dubious sources. He is a “senior fellow” at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, established by the U.S. government to promote regime subversion. Zenz’s research is based on extremist media reports and speculation, and his “research findings” have been widely accepted and promoted by Western governments and media. Zenz’s research data is unreliable, his methods unscientific, and he even used erroneous and exaggerated data in his paper to draw the so-called “genocide” conclusion.

III. ASPI and Its False Reports

A report released by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) in 2020 claimed that “at least 80,000 Uyghurs were transferred to inland factories for ‘forced labor’ between 2017 and 2019,” but the report is full of holes and lacks basic factual basis. ASPI is not an independent and objective research institution, but is funded by the Australian Department of Defense, NATO, the U.S. Department of State, the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and arms dealers. The main author of the report, Vicky Xu, is an anti-China individual who has defended the “Falun Gong” cult and described Australian Chinese who oppose Hong Kong rioters as “brainwashed by the Chinese government.”

IV. Western Media Hype

Western media not only fail to investigate and verify but also compete to hype up reports that smear China. Barry, a former British media professional, exposed the whole process of Western media fabricating fake news about Xinjiang. After being commissioned by the BBC, Zenz fabricated so-called “research results,” which were widely quoted, hyped, and promoted by Western media such as CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. On February 10, 2021, Xu Guixiang, deputy director of the Publicity Department of the Xinjiang Autonomous Region Party Committee, pointed out at a press conference that the BBC has long been producing fake news on Xinjiang-related issues, seriously deviating from professional journalistic ethics.

V. Facts and Truth

Faced with these false information and smear campaigns, the Xinjiang Autonomous Region has revealed the truth behind these lies by holding press conferences. The counter-terrorism and de-extremization measures in Xinjiang are aimed at maintaining social stability and protecting people’s lives and property. These measures have gained understanding and support from the international community. The development and stability of Xinjiang is the most powerful response to those forces attempting to undermine China’s stability and development through smear campaigns and rumors.

In conclusion, the United States and some of its Western allies have attempted to undermine China’s stability and development through systematic false information and smear campaigns on Xinjiang-related issues. However, facts will eventually triumph over lies, and the truth cannot be tarnished. The international community should view Xinjiang-related issues objectively, not be blinded by false information and rumors, and jointly maintain regional peace and stability.

The Simpsons – 1950’s Super Panavision 70

It is not a diplomacy when the aim is to destroy.

It’s the idiocy of this so-called “diplomacy” that trump and Biden can believe they have a chance against the Chinese.

They didn’t learn the immediate lesson that isolating China from the global initiative for the GPS and Space programs just made it existential for China to do it on its own. . . .and believe that sanctioning China from accessing advanced chips would not force China to work to become self-sufficient in chips given that the country is already the world’s largest chip consumer and has the operating base producing all the legacy chips to grow its chips ecosystem for produce advanced chips.

China will become self sufficient in chips and control the industry by the end of this decade. And it is the “ambition of this U.S. chip diplomacy” that made all of this possible.

Another Example: Mass-Media Becoming Irrelevant . . .

Another Example: Mass-Media Becoming Irrelevant . . .

NYT 2 Birds Nests large
NYT 2 Birds Nests large

In yet another example of how the so-called “Main Stream Media” is becoming irrelevant, the New York Times . . .

If you aren’t familiar with the “grammar” of the New York Times front-page layout, it goes like this: The top-right is the LEAD story, the top-left is the sub-lead, everything else above-the-fold is the important news of the day.

Today, the News York Times says the SECOND most-important story is Mounting Pressure from Senior Congressional Democrats to push Biden out of the Presidential race. The THIRD most-important story is the shocking French election results; upending all expectations.

The MOST-IMPORTANT story?  Elon Musk’s successful space launch destroying nine bird nests.

To the liberal nitwits at the New York Times, BIRD’S NESTS are the most important story of the day.

These people are apparently nuts; which is why rational, normal, people . . . . don’t pay much attention to the mass-media anymore.

Their priorities are absurd, their thinking is child-like, and their “facts” . . . . are manipulated at best, deliberately false at worst.

Kenny G in China

Zero significance.

The US decided that it was too dangerous to leave a long range attack missile there. Or decided that it could be wiped out by China with drones.

If someone, anyone pushed a button and launched a Tomahawk cruise missile at China, that means starting a war. China will wipe out every US base in Asia and the US islands.

The missile don’t threaten China at all so the risks outweigh any benefits.

Either that or Chine threatened to wipe those missile away and the US bases in Asia just like the US did with Cuba.

But this changes nothing. The US is still trying to get proxies to fight China. The US doesn’t want to be directly involved though because that will mean all US soldiers in Asia will be killed. Then the US will have to send a fleet along with NATO. The fleet will then be sunk.

This is contrary to what the US likes to do. Which is to use proxies to attack other nations. And the proxy that the US really wants is India. India has a high population and can theoretically last much longer than Ukraine.

So the US would love to put missiles in India then say that the Indians fired the missile and just walk away. It remains to be seen what India will do. After all the US is offering a lot of money to foreign politicians to destroy their country. The US will promise support.

Because China also uses the 155mm artillery.

The 155mm is the perfect size for a medium range shell with a good combination of size vs. range.

China replaced the 130mm artillery with 155mm.

It’s like rifle rounds. China uses the 5.8 and the West uses 5.56. This is a good combination of size, weight, and power. It allows the soldiers to carry a good amount of ammo without weighing them down.

The West used to use 7.62mm rounds or .308 but you get significantly less rounds and it is heavier than 5.56. You normally don’t need to shoot that far anyway. The 5.56 will kill out to 600 meters. Much longer than most soldiers can hit a man sized target.

I think it’s a huge mistake of the US to go to 6.8mm round. It has much bigger recoil than 5.56 and shoots way too far. They changed because of Iraq and Afghanistan but ironically, the US pulled out of those places and the new round would be way overkill in a jungle or forest.

And you end up back to the same problem as before. Too heavy so less rounds per soldier. Heavy recoil makes the rifle less accurate and takes longer to shoot accurately.

Shorpy

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If you are a Taiwanese, I would ask you to accept reality & not to follow the path of Ukraine. Dont get into a war & die for U S A.

If you are a foreigner, I would like you to understand Chinese history & UN charter as follows:

There was a civil war in China (called ROChina at the time). The then ruling party KMT was defeated by CPC in 1949. KMT fled to Taiwan while CPC stayed on mainland. CPC renamed ROChina to PRChina, like Qing was renamed to ROC in 1911 (5000 years’ of Chinese tradition).

In theory, the civil war has not finished as of 2024 because China has not reunified yet.

Internationally, between 1949 & 1971, both ROChina & PRChina exist. In 1971, however, UN resolution 2758 announced …

1, There is only ONE China & PRChina is the only legitimate government that represents China.

That is, ROChina ceases to exist on world stage. Only a handful tiny tiny countries still recognised ROC.

Taiwan is part of China. Ref: US doc 203 & the 1978 USA-China joint communique by former US president J Carter.

2, To make it crystal clear, on 2024/5/23, UN told the world “Taiwan is a PROVINCE of China.”

By UN charter, China has a duty to protect the integrity of Chinese territory that incl Taiwan province.

Internally, both constitution of China & Taiwan say:

China territory = mainland + Taiwan + some islands & reefs around China.

Why Taiwan dares not call for referendum? Because referendum involves mainland too.

Militarily Taiwan cannot fight China.

That is, Taiwan can NEVER be independent. Though opportunistic politicians must shout independence so as to get tons of foreign funding (corruption), before Taiwan is discarded by USA like a used condom. Remember USA discarded ROChina in 1971.

conclusion

Whether it is UN resolution or Chinese-Taiwanese constitutions, China has a duty to protect the integrity of China. Like former US president A Lincoln protecting the integrity of USA in the US civil war.

China is NOT invading or attacking Taiwan. Just to suppress Taiwan rebellion, like Lincoln suppressing the South.

China will reunify with Taiwan one way or another. It is the duty of China for the sake of Chinese nation, culture & history.

China’s 1st option is peaceful unification. If necessary, China is not afraid to use military.

When I was teaching a high school class at an international school in Mexico, I thought I was superior to my students. I had a New England education, English was my first language. I had a solid moral background. There was little (I thought) that my students could teach me.

One day, just before class, a student, by the name of Nicolas, came and asked me if he could go to the bathroom. I told him yes, but to hurry back because class would begin in five minutes. He asked, “Don’t I need a pass?”

Our principal was very strict and required every student to have a pass if he or she was out of class. I told him, “Just go! Hurry up back.”

Then I began writing the lesson on the board.

He returned about ten minutes later looking very dejected. I asked him if he was okay and he said, “Yes. No problem.”

So, I continued with the lesson. But at the end of the period as students were leaving, I noticed he still looked dejected.

“You okay, Nick? You look depressed.”

He replied, “Well, I got put on detention by the principal for being in the hall without a pass.”

“But didn’t you tell him that I advised you to go ahead without one?” I asked.

“No,” he replied.

“Well, why on earth not?” I asked exasperated.

“Because I didn’t want you to get in trouble, sir,” he replied.

I realized then that here was a student who was superior to me in sensitivity and caring. I could never have imagined doing such a thing when I was a high school student. I was humbled. The incident showed me not to underestimate the existing values of those whom I presumed to teach.

Korean values, the educational system, and runaway consumerism are designed to turn everyone neurotic, and the system largely succeeds.

Basically, Korean society is a pressure cooker, and going insane is one way to escape. Another way is suicide, which seems to be popular among Koreans working in entertainment.

The Japanese are more relaxed because their economy has been screwed since 1990, and things aren’t getting better.

The Chinese are more relaxed because their economy and country is huge, and Chinese have a very long historical memory. Basically, they have seen everything.

This means that the Chinese have perspective.

When they are unhappy or see something they don’t like, they complain to their local official, and tell him to fix it. Since the local official’s job performance is measured by how many complaints he resolves, his career depends on resolving the issue.

I like Chinese style of punishment

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main qimg dde3d64cb921154fbd0809544e78498a

Gather enough evidence and offer two choices

Option 1

Pay back 2/3 of what you took plus Confess and you get 5–15 years jail and your family won't bear the consequences of your actions

Or

Option 2

Have a trial and if found guilty - It's either 15–25 years Imprisonment or death penalty and your family members bear consequences of your actions

What I like about the Chinese is how they break families for what they call knowingly enjoying illegal earnings or product of corruption

Kids under 18 are reeducated and taught their father is a thief and he must be hated

Under Mao, many kids denounced their parents and watched them hang with a smile in favor of the State


Same punishment in India

Option 1

Pay back 67% of what you allegedly take and serve 10 years Jail and retire from Politics

OR

Option 2

If found guilty you can hang Or face life prisonment plus your Kids can't graduate and have to work as Unskilled or Skilled labor and your families will be forced to migrate to places exceeding 2000 Kms from place of sentencing

Men’s Adventure

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Hazy New World

Submitted into Contest #8 in response to: Write a story about an adventure in space. view prompt

Sabrina Alvarez

The darkness was so different in space, when I opened my eyes all I could see was the blinking red light that reminded me it was time to get up. I rolled back and forth, with the sun being millions of miles away it was harder for my body to wake itself up even though this one was the day my entire life was going to change. I pushed the red button and the dark rectangle that looked like any other wall with nothing on it phased away and Saturn appeared. The button was now green, and I yet again got to wake up to see Saturn instead of the Sun. It was an image I could never grow tired of watching Saturn in its infinite glory all the secrets it kept hidden for billions of years. The clouds moved along the most breathtaking gas giant and the rings so vivid and close I feel like I could reach out the window and grasp them. The pictures do not do it justice and the sounds of the massive planet put me at peace. My team is beginning the first ever human voyage to Titan to explore and map the moon in all of its entirety. Earth is becoming more unstable and life as we know it will cease to exist if we do not find another place to live. After the Mars massacre, NASA wanted to make sure we knew exactly what was going on before we allowed humans colonize another planet, in this case moon. There was a lot weighing on my shoulders as captain of Celestial Spectre, all the plans and ideas running through my head as I went to my post in the observation deck. I pulled the shade to reveal Saturn and Titan, the orange moon forever tidal locked with Saturn, only showing one side of its face to the planet. It makes me wonder what is hidden on that dark side. There were different filters we could apply to see the different colors of the universe as well as telescope on screen, which zooms into any area to reveal what is really hiding in the darkness of the naked eye. There is 360-degree view of the surrounding darkness, my focus was Titan and the anticipation of starting our surveying was nerve racking, how can my crew sleep so long? I said to myself. The haze of the moon was swirling around, it was hypnotic everything I had worked so hard for was laying right in front of me. I wanted to unlock every secret this solar system was hiding then move on to the Milky Way. Steve tapped me on the shoulder broke that trance, “Rachel I’m surprised you didn’t leave us on the ship and go down yourself.” I laughed, “Don’t think it didn’t cross my mind!” I grabbed the equipment list for the first touchdown on the moon to make sure the probe was all ready to go. “Dawson is the probe ready for today?” Dawson was the computer system that was built into the ship for us to communicate with, his knowledge base was vast, but he was limited as we were about what we were to expect on Titan. “Yes” Dawson replied. “Haven’t you quadruple checked that list?” asked Steve. “Yes, Steve I have, I wouldn’t be a good captain if I didn’t.” He smiled, “Waiting for everyone to wake up.” I smiled slyly, “Ugh! Is that obvious!” It was his turn to laugh, “I figured that’s why I woke them up before coming up to check on you.” I couldn’t stop smiling, “You are the best!”  The twins, Marcus and Mia, were the first to emerge from the dorm corridors. “We are awake,” said Marcus. “And ready to go,” as she yawned said Mia. The mechanical genius, Nikki, was the last to emerge, “Ready to go!” she said with pep. “That’s what I liked to hear. Let’s Go!” I said. I was the last one to get on the probe.Descending through the haze of Titan’s atmosphere was so exciting as well as completely terrifying as we did not know if the probe would make it through and still be able to take us back to the ship. It was designed by Nikki to not only fly through space, but to be a land rover and a submarine for any oceans or lakes we discovered. So much was running back and forth in my head I couldn’t get a grip on any of it, I was excited I wanted to scream but I had to keep my composure as a good captain. We descended through the clouds getting samples of them along the way and having DAWSON analyze them. The clouds started to thin and that’s when I saw it. A colossal ocean that was as giant as the Atlantic and Pacific put together, there were n ranges which didn’t reach the clouds but were still steep. There were rivers that lead to the Titanic Ocean, which I just named it. Past some of the mountains were lakes that could hold so many possibilities. Humans could get another chance here. “Look” I whispered to them I couldn’t bear to look away from the window, it was like a picture I always had in my head and to see it with my own eyes it was amazing. Valleys and areas covered with some type of alien florae, it was all just waiting to be explored. The probe came to safe landing with no damage to the craft at all, once it was secure to get out, I ran for the door. I wanted to be the first one to step foot on Titan, dreams really do come true. Each of us was equipped with a special suit specifically designed for the surface of Titan, again created by Nikki. Dust storms are a possibility on this moon so each suit has an outline in a neon color that will make us visible to the other crew members, I was pink, Steve was orange, the twins were light and dark green, and Nikki was blue. Each of us looked around where we landed and again how small we felt. It would take centuries to map everything on Titan, so we started with the immediate area to see if it was habitable. Once this region was down, we would extend out until all of Titan was printed on a map, so people could find the areas they wanted to start their new lives in. The region that faced away from Saturn was my personal interest, but I know that wouldn’t be smart to start there. “Let’s begin right here and call this region Home for now until we learn more about it.” My crew agreed and we start to unpack along with setting up a small camp for us to continue research and sleep. DAWSON alerted me when I was moving equipment, “There’s movement at the lower range of the mountains, I am unable to detect what it is other than it is alive.” I quickly equipped my hydrogen rifle using the recon scope was able to see exactly what the creature looked like. A three limbed creature with a thick fur covering its entire body, it was watching us with its three set of eyes. It had large set of teeth at its abdomen area and it appeared that it was sniffing the air with its tentacle/limb. “2 o’clock Steve.” He already had his rifle powered and aiming right that the creature. “Tell me when” Steve whispered toward my direction. I stood there for what felt like hours just observing I didn’t want to make the mistake of shooting a new life form. I decided in that moment, “we need a closer look.” I started to climb the mountain slowly keeping my eye on the creature while Steve watching the surrounding, so we didn’t get ambushed by anything else. A low humming filled my ears as I was looking at the beast, I took a chance and lowered my rifle. “Stay close Steve, but do not attack.” Steve responded by stopped and setting up by a rock just in case I was wrong. I knelt on one knee and extended my hand hoping it took the gesture as friendly and not threatening. It started to move; the limbs moved across the smaller rocks like an octopus shifting along the ocean floor. The fur was a deep purple and it slithered toward me. It took all my willpower to not runaway screaming with complete fear, but that would alarm it putting my team in danger. I took a deep breath, slowly opened my eyes to see it standing right in front of me. It was about three feet tall with three eyes that were bright orange and square. It never blinked the whole time I watched it and even when it was in front of me.Suddenly, the thing started to glide away again, but this time it was headed to ocean we had seen when we landed. I started to chase after it with only having three limbs it moved rather quickly. The land began to dip down slightly and then gradually it went farther down until we reached the beach area. The ocean was like of Earth with waves and currents. A huge wave came crashing down and I swear I caught a glimpse of sea creature from my nightmares. It had fins poking out for every direction and a long narrow mouth. I turned to look back at Steve, whose face was as pale as mine. “It’s like the Jurassic period here with all of these different types of animals.” Steve replied once he saw the monster that lurked in the waves. “Is this a good idea Captain?” Mia asked. “We need somewhere to start. Keep your eyes open and guns charged.” We rounded the corner where these cliffs ahead were sharp that’s when I noticed a cave with a blue hue coming from it. “Over there!” I shouted to my team. The Titan fur stopped at the mouth of the cave and pointed its tentacle at the entrance. “Stay here at the entrance Marcus and Mia.” They both nodded with their rifles in hand. Steve, Nikki, and I started to walk through the cave looking at all the amazing purples and blues that covered the walls of the fissure. We followed the blue hue which lead toward a metal door, “this is the last thing I expected to see.” Steve replied, “yeah I was ready for certain death.” I opened the door and there was another thing I least expected to see even more so than a door on a moon that orbited Saturn. There were hand drawings and notes everywhere on the walls. There was a partial map hanging on another wall with BEWARE OF THE DARK CREATURES and drawings of regions we hadn’t seen yet. Nearby were journals that were filled with descriptions of creature and tree-like foliage. One tree was completely twisted from the root and when grown would drop this blue oval that would explode once it hit the ground. The author of these diaries Mr. Seymour Dates described its reaction because of the methane in the ground would mix with what the fruit was made of which he still was unable to figure out. Under some other papers was a fold out map of an area that was dark that he referred to as Nix Valley, the area was so dark with no light and a drawing of a creature that was 25-30 feet tall. A description of the creature he encountered there:

“The biggest creature I have encountered since I started exploring

Titan, I haven’t had the nerve to explore the ocean yet,

The largest land animal if you can call it that. His skin was

White like death with eyes that were cloudy as well

It does use its eyes to see but it uses all of it senses to get

Around. It has bones protruding from his head and along

Its back. Its arms dragged across the floor while still haven’t

Gotten close enough to see any sort of lower extremities.

It mimics gentle sounds and ones in pain to lure in other animals

That walk around on the surface. Nix valley is located underneath the mountain range

And some flatlands. It never comes up to the surface only can

Be seen when finding its hidden caves along the mountains

Where I first landed.

Accompanying to the short description was a sketch of what the monster looked like and it was like a giant snake and dinosaur mixed together and was kept from the sun. “We need to find this monster; our job is so important. If this is here, we can’t bring humans to live here.” I said to Steve and Nikki. Nikki was as pale as a ghost and Steve just stood there unable to say anything. I noticed the door slowly opening and I aimed my rifle right at the opening. The Titan fur was standing there, and I immediately grew concerned for the twins, “I’m going to distract it, you both go for the twins. Make sure they are safe.” I ordered. Then the furry creature took its head off and a man was there inside a giant costume. “Thank you for not shooting me, it took me a while to build this costume.” Said Seymour Dates. “We need to talk.” I responded with, “Where are the twins?” We all raced to the entrance of the cave.

These Men Won’t SETTLE For Bare Minimum Women

Grilled Jalapeño Cheddar Meatballs

Serve delicious Grilled Jalapeño Cheddar Meatballs with Mexican rice, beans, or a side salad.

grilled jalapeno cheddar meatballs
grilled jalapeno cheddar meatballs

Prep: 20 min | Chill: 30 min | Cook: 35 min | Yield: 20 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds ground beef
  • 1/2 cup tortilla chips, crushed
  • 3/4 cup milk
  • 3 fresh jalapeños, seeded and finely diced
  • 1 (8 ounce) block Cheddar cheese, finely diced
  • 1 tablespoon paprika
  • 2 teaspoons garlic powder
  • 2 teaspoons kosher salt

Instructions

  1. Place the crushed tortilla chips in a large bowl, then add the milk and allow to soften the chips for about 10 minutes.
  2. After the mixture is soft and has absorbed all the milk, add the beef, jalapeño, cheese, paprika, garlic, and salt. Mix well to combine all ingredients, then scoop approximately 1/3 to 1/2 cup of the mixture and form a meatball; repeat until all the mixture has been formed into balls.
  3. Place the meatballs on a plate or tray and refrigerate them for 30 minutes to firm.
  4. Light a grill for two zone cooking. For charcoal: light coals and pile them all on one side, creating a hot and cool zone. For propane: light the very end burner on the left or right side, but no other burners. It’s recommended you place a piece of foil under the side without heat to catch any melting cheese for easy cleanup. The grill should be at MEDIUM temperature, about 350 to 375 degrees F.
  5. Place the meatballs on the cool side of the grill (away from the coals or the lit burner) and close the grill lid. Grill for about 25 to 35 minutes, or until they reach 165 degrees F internal temperature on a meat thermometer.
  6. Remove the meatballs from the grill and allow to cool slightly before serving.

It’s a sign of maturity

Yes. I was appointed by the court to defend a gang member for armed robbery. He thought he was super cool and wanted to take the stand. I told him no, I warned him, he insisted over my objection.

There was only one thing going in his favor. The clerk at the place robbed said the robber had blue eyes. My client had brown eyes.

I felt my client was a very very dangerous person. I was sure the prosecutor would ask him if he had color contacts. They were in his pocket. When he lied and said no, I would ask to be recused from the case as you are not allowed to knowingly let your client lie on the stand. The judge would then know he was lying and I would probably be excused as counsel, etc. The ignorant prosecutor never asked. He was found not guilty.

The judge had a fit. He excoriated everyone but me…he said I was just doing my job. Two days later my client shot and killed an 8 year old girl in a rival gang revenge attack at the girl’s birthday party. The newspaper headline was the judge’s quote that he would never sleep again until every member of that gang was six feet under.

The judge called me and advised me that I would NOT be appointed to represent the guy again (Thank God).

The police declared a vendetta on that gang. Five years later the headlines said that gang was “eradicated” from Texas.

I never took another criminal case. I became a real estate attorney and did pro bono work for battered women and men who paid child support but were denied visitation with their children.

Aromatic Chicken Curry (Vietnam)

Coconut Chicken main
Coconut Chicken main

Ingredients

  • 2 medium-size potatoes, cut into chunks
  • 4 tablespoons peanut oil
  • 8 shallots, minced
  • 4 stalks fresh lemon grass, minced
  • 3 garlic cloves, minced
  • 2 fresh hot red chiles, minced
  • 2 tablespoons best-quality curry powder
  • 1 pound skinless, boneless chicken breasts, chopped into bite size pieces
  • 1 teaspoon sea salt or 1 teaspoon fish sauce
  • 1 (14 ounce) can coconut milk
  • 1 (14 ounce) can chicken broth
  • Fresh basil leaves

Instructions

  1. Fry the potato chunks in the oil until nicely browned, then drain them on paper towels.
  2. Add the shallots, lemon grass, and all of the spices to the pan, and stir-fry for a few minutes.
  3. Add the chicken and cook, stirring, until it is opaque.
  4. Add the potatoes, salt, coconut milk and chicken stock. Bring to a boil and then simmer gently for about 30 minutes.
  5. Garnish with basil leaves before serving in bowls with rice.

Ingredients List for Vietnamese Chicken Curry

Marinade

  • 8 boneless skinless chicken thighs
  • 1 tablespoon curry powder
  • 2 tablespoons onion powder
  • salt to taste

Curry

  • 2 tablespoons oil
  • 3 large carrots
  • 1 large baking potato
  • 2 tablespoons oil
  • 1 red onion
  • 3 garlic gloves
  • 2 sticks lemongrass
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 3 cups of water
  • 1 tablespoon curry powder
  • 1 tablespoon garlic chili sauce
  • 1/2 cup coconut milk

12 Minutes of Modern Women Moral Decay

A Woman’s World

Submitted into Contest #8 in response to: Write a story about an adventure in space. view prompt

Rebecca Parker

Robert remembered the sensation of falling. He remembered the feeling of cold dread as the engine stuttered and died and his stomach dropped through the floor. He could never forget the look on his colleague’s face as the colour drained from him and his skin turned paper white.He didn’t remember plummeting through space, searing through the planet’s atmosphere, or the deafening landing. His colleague, Martin, hadn’t been knocked unconscious and had managed to pull him from the fiery wreck before the smoke and flames engulfed him. Robert was out cold. All he remembered was darkness.Blurred colours greeted him as he opened his eyes, the world spinning in and out of focus. One woman, or two, or three, was bent over him. He heard her speak, the words moving through his sluggish brain like soup. He could make no sense of them. He tried to sit up, but a shooting pain split through his head and the woman pushed him back to the ground. Martin appeared then; despite his hazy vision he recognised his co-pilot. Three Martins. Groaning, Robert closed his eyes.It might have been a few hours later when he next opened them. The dazzling sunlight had dimmed slightly, and the air was not quite so hot. His vision took a minute to clear, but when it did, there was only one Martin sitting over him. He asked him how he was feeling, felt his forehead, his throat, checked his pulse. Irritated, Robert pushed him away and forced himself into a sitting position. His head was still banging, but not with quite so much volition as before.“We went wrong,” Martin uttered in a low voice, just as Robert asked him where they were.“What do you mean?” Robert replied, rubbing his forehead with one hand as Martin handed him a glass of water. It looked like water and tasted like water, but it was purple. Robert blinked at it, confused, and then looked up at the sky. It was as if it had been painted with purple water colours.“Why isn’t the sky blue, Martin?” Robert asked. He must have still been dazed from the crash, because he was much calmer than he should have been.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. We went wrong.”

“We were right on target to hit Mars.”

“This isn’t Mars.”

It was then that Robert noticed the huddle of young women standing a short distance away, grouped under a copse of trees next to a river. Lilac-coloured water cascaded from an eight-foot drop into the shimmering pool, before winding away through the trees. Robert stared at the waterfall, the women, the sky.

“Martin?” he said, his tone still strangely neutral. “Am I dreaming, or am I dead?”

“Neither,” his colleague hissed at him. “You’re on Venus.”

Robert nodded, tasting the words even though his brain couldn’t comprehend them.

“But we were on target for Mars.”

“Mars is red, Rob, not purple.”

Robert nodded again, sipping the purple drink as one of the women broke away from the group and sashayed over to them. She might have been the same one that had been crouched over him before; she had the same silvery-blonde hair and violet coloured eyes. Her dress was lilac and her feet were bare. If Robert squinted, he could see that all the women were wearing dresses of a similar colour and not one of them wore shoes.

Martin got to his feet as she approached and Robert staggered up next to him. He felt oddly light-headed but pain free.

“Do you think they want to kill us?” he asked Martin as he drained the last of the water. In response, he received only a glare.

The woman paused in front of them, looking suddenly unsure of herself.

“Tia,” she announced. “Robert and Martin, correct?” The pair nodded. She chewed her lip, her eyes straying disdainfully over their clothes. Martin was half in his spacesuit, Robert was only in a t-shirt and jeans. “But…” she said, her eyebrows knitting together in confusion. “Where are the rest of you?”

The two men exchanged glances. “The rest of us?” Robert repeated. “There’s only us two. We crashed.”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better,” she said. “The water here helps with healing very well.” She paused, a light breeze playing with her hair. “But surely more are on their way? We have thirty women here, all waiting for you.”

Robert could feel his head begin to pound and not because of the crash-landing.

“We’ve come from Earth. Have you heard of it?”

If Tia had heard the sarcasm in his voice, she didn’t show it. Her eyes dropped to the floor, her lips twisting into a frown.

“Earth? No. I don’t know any Earth.” Her eyes narrowed then and her tone became suddenly accusatory. “You are from Mars. All men are from Mars!”

Robert stared at her. She glared defiantly back.

“Love,” he began, feeling his patience start to wear thin. “Nobody lives on Mars. The place is a rock, totally uninhabitable! We are not from Mars, we’re from Earth. Kindly tell me what planet you are from?”

“Venus.”

Robert opened his mouth to shoot back a snide reply, but Martin cut him off.

“Are there any men here?” he asked Tia.

“No,” she replied, clicking her tongue in annoyance. “All men live on Mars. There should be thirty of you arriving today for the Spring Festival, but so far we have only two and not even a decent two at that.”

She scowled at them both and turned on her heel to storm away, but Martin hastily dashed after her, apologies spilling from his mouth as Robert stood and watched, realisation beginning to dawn on him.

The sun suddenly broke out from behind a cloud and the brilliance of it dazzled him. He sat back down on the grass, his eyes straying from Martin and Tia to the group of women huddled by the river. When Martin returned, he was carrying another glass of water.

“She said this might help your head,” he said handing the drink to Robert. “Shame it can’t help your attitude.” He smirked but looked away hastily as Robert glared at him. “The boys stay here until they’re eighteen. She’s going to see if they can help us out with a ship. In the meantime, we can stay in the village.”

“She wants us to go then.”

Martin crouched down on to the grass in front of him. “This isn’t our universe, Rob. I don’t know how we’ve ended up here, but here we are. There’s no Earth in their solar system. All the men live on Mars and all the women live on Venus.” Robert found his eyes wandering back to the group of women. They were all young, in their late twenties or early thirties, and they were all beautiful. “This Spring Festival,” Martin continued. “It’s a mating festival, Rob. Thirty men come over to meet thirty women and they couple up and well… you know…”

“So what you’re saying is, we’re stuck on a rock in some other universe, who knows where, and we’re the only men? That’s what you’re saying?”

Martin grinned and hit him playfully on the shoulder. “More men are coming. When they get here, they’ll help us find a ship. We’ll get a ship, Rob, don’t worry.”

They waited for three days, but the men didn’t arrive. The women became fretful. Each day they turned up in their purple dresses with their hair and make-up done to sit by the river from sunrise to sunset and each day they went home by themselves. They weren’t interested in befriending the two astronauts. The majority of them seemed to blame the pair for the loss of their men.

It was late in the afternoon on the third day when the silver-haired Tia approached them, leading a teenage boy alongside her.

“This is Jay,” Tia said as she reached them. “Jay is seventeen and he studies solar engineering at the college. He will help you find a ship.” She smiled at them but her eyes remained troubled. “Maybe then you can return to your own planet.”

 

“And your men?” Martin asked. “Shouldn’t they be here by now?”

She turned to gaze into the sky and sighed. “Something must have gone wrong. You crash-landed in our meadow and they haven’t arrived. Maybe they crashed somewhere else? But what if there is no one there to help them?”

She patted Jay on the back and thanked him before leaving. He quickly dived into conversation with Martin, but Robert wasn’t listening, he couldn’t stop thinking about Tia.

Jay proved to be very helpful. He took them on tours around the village and surrounding areas. The village looked more like a city to Robert, with its sky-high buildings and its colleges, but it was welcoming and friendly. The women watched them in interest as they passed, and many trailed after them, like excited girls wanting autographs from their favourite pop-stars. The teenager took them to his college workshop where other young boys clubbed together to help build the pair a new ship, modelling it on what they had left of the one that had crashed. They were quick and nimble workers and it was completed in only a week. Jay told them there was a takeoff station at the bottom of the meadow where they’d crashed and they arranged to have the ship transported back there. When they arrived, a tearful Tia came rushing up to meet them.

“Something must have happened to them!” she sobbed, the tears streaking down her face. “Please, please, before you go, look for them! They could be danger!”

Robert gazed at her, at her shiny, soft hair that fell elegantly over the curve of her breasts, at the lilac dress that hugged her waist, at the tears that fell from her beautiful violet eyes.

“Of course,” he told her. “We’ll find them.”

A whole host of women gathered in the meadow to watch them leave, along with Jay and the other boys who had helped to build the ship. Martin pressed his face to the glass of the window as they rocketed away from the planet into the depths of space.

“We were on course for Mars,” he said softly, as Robert took the wheel. “How did we end up on Venus in another dimension?”

“Another universe,” Robert shot back. “We must have passed through… through a… a worm-hole or something.”

Martin gave him a sharp look. “You told me worm-holes don’t exist.”

“I must have been wrong.”

They trawled through space, searching for anything unfamiliar or unknown, anything that might have rooted an explanation as to how they travelled between universes. Robert had lost track of the days completely when he noticed something in the distance.

“Martin!” he hissed, squinting through the window of the ship. “Martin, get over here!”

His companion joined him, concern plastered over his face. “What?”

Robert didn’t answer, but merely pointed.

It was hard to tell what it was at first. It was if there was some sort of light distorting the view. It was a shimmering line, like the mist rolling in off the sea.

“We’re in the middle of space,” Martin said flatly. “We’re not going near that.”

“Yes, we are,” Robert replied, easing forward on the accelerator. “That might be just how we got here in the first place.”

Martin grappled with him for the controls but Robert was stronger and slammed the accelerator down, sending the ship careening towards the shimmering line. It widened as they approached, yawning open like a great mouth. Martin screamed as it swallowed them and they found themselves spinning and spinning and spinning through a mass of swirling, blinding colours.

When it spat them out, they both felt the engine lurch, and Martin grabbed Robert’s arm in panic.

“That’s how we crashed!” he yelled, but Robert was barely listening; he’d spotted the rocky, red planet of Mars and sent the ship spiralling straight for it.

Martin bellowed at his companion, trying to pull the ship up before they crashed, but it jarred against a mound of rocks and flipped on to its side. They piled out of it, helmets on, and sprinted away before it could burst into flame and meet the same fate as their old ship. It didn’t fortunately, but it didn’t look safe to fly either.

“Great going, Rob,” Martin grumbled, gesturing towards the heap of battered metal. “We finally make it to Mars and you go and break our transport. Again.

Robert could have shot him a snide reply, he wasn’t sure it was entirely his fault they had crashed on Venus in the first place, but he wasn’t listening. His attention had been snared by a far superior, more colourful ship that sat proudly atop a rocky outcrop. A rather dilapidated ribbon was tied around it. It might have looked smart at first, but it was dirty from red dust and the bow had come undone. He began walking towards it, his heart pounding, leaving Martin muttering to himself amidst the rocks. He thought about the lack of atmosphere, the lack of hostile environment, and began to run, panicking even though he didn’t know these men.

Martin yelled after him, suddenly noticing the ship for the first time. They both raced towards it, knowing the men would have been unprepared, knowing they would have lacked oxygen.

Robert reached the ship first and banged on the metal door, bellowing at them to let him in. Martin was quick on his heels and joined him, banging on the door until it opened.

There was a cluster of young men, all late twenties or early thirties and all beautiful. They were stood behind the air lock, frowning at the two strangers in their space suits who were waving at them from the inhospitable landscape of Mars. Wordlessly, they welcomed the astronauts on to the ship, though they seemed wary and kept their distance.

“Where are you from?” the first one said, as Robert took his helmet off.

“Earth!” Robert replied proudly, ignoring their puzzled glances to continue. “We were on our way to our Mars, when we crash-landed on your Venus.”

“What my friend is trying to say,” Martin interrupted, as the group of men muttered amongst each other in confusion, “is that we’re from a parallel universe, and we crashed in your universe. You apparently, have gotten lost in our universe, but we can guide you back.”

The muttering continued but a few smiles began to appear among the bunch.

“You crashed,” one observed.

“You can’t return in that wreck,” another said.

“Guide us back to our Venus,” the first one said, “and we will ensure you can safely return to your own planet.”

The two astronauts gladly obliged and took the controls to return the vehicle to Venus. Martin was a bit dismayed about leaving the red planet so soon, after only just arriving and without conducting any of their research, but Robert found he didn’t care that much; he longed to return to Venus, to Tia.

They landed safely the third time around and the relieved, yet tearful, silver-haired Tia came running up as the group disembarked. She weaved through the handsome young men, searching for the alien astronauts who had brought them to her. She found Robert and threw her arms around him, sobbing into his shoulder.

“Thank you,” she wept, “thank you so much.”

He didn’t say anything, but hugged her close. Martin took his shoulder, telling him they had to sort a new ship and get back to their own universe, but Robert had made his mind up.

“We’ve found a planet inhabited entirely by women,” he told his friend, as Tia straightened and wiped her tears from her flushed face, “and you want to leave?!” He turned back to the beautiful woman standing in front of him, took her hand and kissed it.

“Allow me to introduce myself, properly this time,” he told her. “My name is Robert, this is Martin. We come in peace.”

Giggling, she took his hand and led them both through the meadow towards the waterfall.  The sun shone down on them through the purple sky, sparkling on the purple river. Far behind them, deep in space, the shimmering dimensional gap, the stitch in the universe that had brought them there, slowly faded to melt away completely in the unfathomable depths of space.

Nam Jim Wan
(Sweet Dipping Sauce | Thai)

This is a simple dipping sauce usually used with deep fried items such as spring rolls and stuffed chicken wings.

Ingredients

  • 3 cups water
  • 3 cups granulated sugar
  • 1 cup vinegar (preferably rice vinegar)
  • 3 tablespoons Chinese pickled plums
  • 3 tablespoons thinly sliced prik ki nu daeng (red birdseye chiles)
  • 2 tablespoons garlic, very thinly sliced
  • 2 tablespoons ginger, julienned or grated
  • 1 teaspoon salt

Instructions

  1. Boil the water, and add the pickled plums (sometimes sold as ‘salted plums’), and simmer for five minutes.
  2. Remove the plums to a food processor and puree them.
  3. Continue to boil the water, adding and dissolving the sugar, then adding the vinegar and salt. If any sugar is still undissolved, add a little more water until it dissolves.
  4. Return the plums to the mixture, and then pour over the other ingredients in a sterilized preserving jar, and keep in a cool place for at least a week before using.

Can you introduce me as Joker? | Joker [UltraHD, HDR]

Today’s China is militarily strong.

China is not afraid of USA. It of course will not be afraid of Japan.

A year or 2 ago, Taiwan asked Japan if it will help Taiwan in case of war,

Japan said they only plan up to the point of evacuation of Japanese in Taiwan. Translation: Japan’s war simulation tells Japan that it will not win China.

Neither can USA.

Some other art

 

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alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 0 47f8ea70 52de 4e3f 916e 849846d50409 0

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Default The second coming of Jesus a powerful and aweinspiring 3 215c30b7 6cbd 4c32 a109 5c02b1abd923 0

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Default La joven mujer sonre con felicidad y alegra Estilo Car 2

Well, here goes, and it’s taken me 50 years to write or even speak of this event. I considered writing anonymously but that’s no way to get something off your chest.

I was with an infantry platoon in the Mekong Delta during the summer of 1969, we walked out of a woodline into an open paddy area and found several individuals dragging an unexploded 500 pound bomb across the paddy toward a wooded area. They were dressed like V/C, black trousers and white shirts, and probably about 500 yards away. This bomb would have made a devastating booby trap.

This was a so-called “free fire zone,” meaning all civilians and non-combatants had supposedly been relocated and only the enemy remained.

We opened fire and the subjects scattered into the woodline and we did not pursue them. It was getting on toward sunset and we heard crying and moaning from deep within the jungle. I, along with two other soldiers, was sent to investigate. We found a male subject laying on his back in great distress, when his shirt was removed there was a bullet hole in his upper chest/shoulder area but no exit wound. He was not bleeding, but that blood had to go somewhere, and it did, straight into his lung.

The other two guys with me argued that we should take him out and call for a dustoff (Medivac) but I was in charge and would not allow it. I said we were not going to endanger a flight crew to evacuate an enemy soldier who was going to die anyway. And besides, he might have been one of V/C who ambushed our platoon the previous week causing extensive casualties and loss of life.

So we waited as his breathing grew gradually more shallow; I kept shining my flashlight into his eyes and after about 20 minutes his pupils became dilated and non-reactive. This enemy soldier had died. Except. . .

The next morning our platoon was sleeping on dikes near the woodline and I was awakened by terrible screaming and crying from a woman and her children who had seemingly come from nowhere, there were no hooches or villages in sight. Our “enemy soldier,” whom I had watched and saw die, was in fact her 13-year old son.

At the time, and over the years, I’ve tried to rationalize my actions that evening: it was dark, V/C were all young looking, we couldn’t have saved him anyway, but the only true answer is that war had stripped away a bit of my humanity.

I saw plenty of sadness in Vietnam, but nothing was as sorrowful as watching a mother weep for her dead son.

And then I heard Phil Collins – In the Air Tonight (First Time Reaction) *

Hungry Food Porn

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Sorry are we already in 2057?

This is 2024 and China just recently graduated 11.24 Million people and typically after 18 months – as many as 850,000 of these people will not have a proper advented job and after 36 months around 332,000 of them will not have a proper job

In fact after 18 months – only India with 2.265 Million unemployed graduates will beat China in 2026 as per the extrapolation

In 2023 – Chinas Factories created 1.37 Million new jobs and this year the target is 1.50 Million new factory jobs

Guess how many factory jobs Germany created in 2023?

Negative 86,800

They closed 86,800 Jobs

The previous year it was 72,000 Jobs

In all of Europe – Hungary is the only Nation that created an additional 10,740 jobs in 2023

US has lost a whopping 4 Million Factory Jobs in the last decade (2010–2020)

China has added 18.3 Million Factory Jobs in the last decade (2010–2020)

It is expected that China will add 12 Million Factory Jobs from 2020 to 2030 and 7.2 Million from 2030 to 2040

Yet they will be more and more specialized jobs and skilled jobs

Meanwhile China will see a transition to the Service Sector

Today Manufacturing commands 36% of all Jobs and Services 13% (26% is still Agriculture and 8.3% is Government Jobs and Civil Service including the Army)

Yet a decade ago it was 41.2% for Manufacturing and only 7.8% for services

By 2030–2040 – you will see only 20% Manufacturing Jobs and upto 45% Service Jobs on the Mainland


Take a look at Nations with the largest NEW factory jobs created in 2023

  • China (1.37 Million)
  • Russia (670K) [War Production included]
  • Mexico (311K)
  • Vietnam (273K)
  • India (221K)
  • Bangladesh (157K)
  • Brazil (131K)

China nearly created the same NEW factory jobs as the next 4–5 Nations combined


South Korea & Japan are far worse than China in demographics yet Japanese Workforce showed 22,000 more factory jobs than workers and Korea showed 6050

With a huge rural population – the earliest China can reach the same situation is 2057 and that’s the absolute worst case scenario

The truth is Ceteris Paribus – China is unlikely to have any major demographic work issues until around 2075–2100 AD

By then I am sure you will have enough Robots and AI to do the needed work

Balsamic Marinated Flank Steak

balsamic marinated flank steak
balsamic marinated flank steak

Ingredients

Balsamic Marinade

  • 1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons Dijon-style mustard
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1/2 teaspoon granulated sugar

Steak

  • 1 beef flank steak (about 1-1/2 pounds)
  • Salt amd pepper

Instructions

Balsamic Marinade

  1. Combine ingredients in small bowl. Place beef steak and marinade in food-safe plastic bag; turn steak to coat. Close bag securely and marinate in refrigerator for 6 hours or as long as overnight, turning occasionally.

Steak

  1. Remove steak from marinade; discard marinade. Place steak on grid over medium, ash-covered coals. Grill, covered, 11 to 16 minutes (over medium heat on preheated gas grill, 16 to 21 minutes) for medium rare (145 degrees F) to medium (160 degrees F) doneness, turning occasionally.
  2. Season steak with salt and pepper, as desired.
  3. Carve steak crosswise into thin slices.

I will never forget the girl who ordered a Uber Comfort which is up to 4 passengers. I showed up. Granted I have an SUV and can fit 6 passengers. Well she had a group of 7. Not squeezing you all in, sorry. Order 2 rides. They didn’t want to split the group so I said I couldn’t take them. She had such a sassy attitude. With all of the sass in the world she told her friends, “Wait, this is still on my dollar, so…” and she turned to me, held out her hand rolling her eyes a little bit and said, “Can I at least have a water or something?”

My jaw dropped a little bit. Not only was I cancelling her ride because she wanted to disobey the rules and the law, but she had the nerve to give me sass and ask for water! As if I carry water, candy, snacks, etc. for all of my passengers. She was going to pay $10 for a trip home for 7 people and expected water and snacks and candy and for me to let an extra person squeeze in the back??? Nope! Not happening! I don’t carry water for passengers. I don’t carry candy. I drive people from point A to point B and provide good customer service and a good attitude, decent music, a clean nice-smelling car with air conditioning. If you want water or snacks I can take you to a gas station! But to give me sass? I was so amazed at the nerve this young lady had to ask me in such a way for a water.

So, why do people expect so much out of an Uber?

Entitlement

People expect so much for so little. They want to pay less than a taxi service, expecting private car service. Some drivers offer amenities to boost ratings or tips, or allow passengers to break the rules to not lose out on a fare. Over time, this has led people to expect more from the service. If 1/10 drivers allow it, then all of the drivers should allow it, which simply isn’t the case.

Chainsaw Life

Disturbing / interesting. Depends how you look at it.

My grandfather was well, a young kid’s dream. He’d had a “good” war. He was a relatively senior officer in the Royal Artillery and was an ack-ack commander in Liverpool until D-Day preparation. He landed on D-Day. Eventually. His landing craft got stuck on a sandbank on a falling tide, so they had an enjoyable few hours with a grandstand view of the action before they actually hit the beach itself. He was never on speaking terms with the Royal Navy after that. And judging by the photograph he’d taken from the bridge of the ship I can understand.

He talked about his experiences, unlike my mother’s father who’d been a Japanese POW following the fall of Singapore.

To an impressionable couple of grandchildren, it was interesting and I suppose exciting. We were still to young to see war as utterly horrendous. It was an adventure.

Anyway, he encouraged us to learn to shoot; air rifles and pistols, bows and arrows etc all at a stupidly young age (it’s quite rare in the UK. No semi automatic rifles as your 12th birthday present). So that was all fun, until a friend came over with us one day and he shot with me with a .22 and I still have the pellet in my hand 35 years later.

Grandpa finally and very suddenly died, so my brother and i helped my parents to clear the house.

He’d always been into his guns and actually had a beautiful pair of Purdey shotguns, along with the air guns, a collection of knives and knuckle dusters and a walking stick that was also a sword and a walking stick that doubled as a small gauge shotgun. We reasoned it must have been In case “Jerry tried to have another bash”. He was on good terms with the local police so all seemed relatively in order. Well they knew where to come to if they needed armed back up.

It was only when we opened his large safe hidden away behind a cupboard full of booze that we found out exactly how prepared he was.

Apart from the circa 750 rounds of ammunition, ranging from 9mm to .50 inch (a couple of which I took into school…); there were 2 sten submachine guns, a couple of service revolvers, a semi automatic pistol, a German Luger and an MP44 Schmeisser.

I must say it was really quite impressive. Firstly, that he’d managed to stuff them all in the safe and secondly that in a whisky or gin induced moment of excitement (dependent on the time of day), he’d not decided to put on a small display.

For a British person, it was unusual to find such an arsenal behind numerous bottles of de Kuyper Cherry Brandy, Advocaat, Kirsch, Pflumli and various bottles of scotch (all in itself a bit of an arsenal).

Not initially my reaction – but what the person did …

So I was on a plane and the guy seated next to me was in a very nice suit- right away ai am suspicious (even the CEO of my company – always in a nice suit- wears “travel clothes”).

So when the flight attendant was serving drinks, he requested more hot water in his tea- as she is pouring, he moves the cup and his hand- he got literally at most 2 tablespoons of water on his hand before she reacted and stopped pouring..

Immediately he screams out “You poured hot water on my hand and I am in pain!”

Not rehearsed, right???

My immediate thought “Oh, a scammer trying to get money from the airline.”

She immediately apologized and offered him medical attention.

“No – none of you are qualified!”

She assured him that every flight attendant must be fully trained in emergency medical care, first aid, etc.

“No! I will only accept the care of a medical doctor! No one else is allowed to touch me! And I demand you have one here taking care of my hand the moment we land!!”

The hand – the one with no blisters or even a red spot – that hand.

So she goes to arrange all of this – he looks at me and says “Give me your name – I want you as a witness.”

I said ,”Well – ok – But you know that I will testify truthfully that you refused all medical care offered.”

He immediately lost all interest in talking with me….

Yes! Not me, but my Husband did. And I am happy that he did 🙂

My husband had an interview scheduled on a Saturday in a software company. Since the interview location was nearby our home, he didn’t really want to waste an opportunity. My little son was just 8 months old at that time and we didn’t have our parents staying with us. The time when my Husband becomes available to babysit is the only luxury time I get to finish off the kitchen and other household work. All my remaining time is dedicated to babysitting my naughty monkey 🙂

So then this particular Saturday when he went for the interview, it was a big thing for me, because my maid didn’t come on that day. I had a lot of washing to do. I had a lot of cleaning to do (if you can imagine how much mess a crawling baby can make throughout the home). My hubby did understand it was a tough Saturday for Us, but he didn’t want to miss the opportunity because it was a well-known company.

He reached there by 9.30AM. There was a long queue of what they called “shortlisted candidates”. I kept messaging and asking hubby about the interview ongoings. All that he could tell me was that each candidate was being interviewed for almost 20 minutes. We patiently waited for his turn, which finally came at 3 pm in the afternoon only to realise that it was a telephonic interview!!!!! The interviewer comfortably stayed at his home and was thoroughly questioning all his candidates while the candidates waited endlessly without having their lunch.

By 4.30 the HR announced that bunch of people (including my husband) were selected for the second round of interview, which was about to begin “soon”. But this “soon” didn’t happen for at least next 2 hours. This was the limit for my hubby who understood that I was going mad at home with the kid and the home and I desperately needed some help. So he walked to the HR and politely asked when was this second round going to happen. What came as the response was a rude reply that said “ it may begin anytime. You may leave if you can’t wait.” As if he was waiting for that moment, my Husband replied back saying “Ok! I don’t want a job in this horrible company that doesn’t even bother to answer their candidates’ queries properly.“ And while she just stared at him, he walked off. 🙂

Back in my younger days I used to play a game called “Dungeons and Dragons”. It was a role play game where you generate a character, and live out various adventures. Ah. I haven’t played it in years. But, one of attributes of character generation was the temperament of the generated character.

You could be Legal-Good, or neutral. You could be Chaotic-Good or bad, and a host of other attributes. These attributes defined your abilities. For instance, a Lawful-good character wouldn’t rob a treasury or harm someone without reason. While a chaotic-bad might just go about killing and harming others on a more or less random basis.

It was nice and fun attribute of the game. Loosely designed around our “real lives” where we worked, and labored for coin. Fell in love, got married and raised a family. Sure, we never slayed a dragon, but we did have our own battles; struggles that we used the game to escape from.

That was until now.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you will notice that something just isn’t right with the West. Not only the United States, but throughout the West. And it is more than just inflation… crazy ass inflation… it is everything. A million tiny, tiny hands in your wallet. Zillions of apparently random laws that makes living a “normal life’ that of risky stress, and “dead ends” just about everywhere you turn.

Ah, but you know that. Right?

It’s due to Covid, or the oligarchy, or perhaps if you are brain dead… China. There is always an excuse. Usually with an elaborate back story. “A” exists, because of “B”. But there is nothing we can do about it. China is bad. Yeah. That’s life in the West.

Here, I want to offer a very scandalous thought.

Could it be that there is no one at the helm?

Could it be that the West, led by the United States, isn’t even on auto-pilot, but rather being driven into the ditch by a bunch of school year children playing around with the controls?

A frightening thought.

This is not, NOT, a democrat vs. republican issue. This is an American issue.

I argue that there is no one steering the ship.

I argue that the “hangers on”; the interns, and the political members of the “court” in all their various colors, and pedigrees are running the “ship” at will as the Captain is out of action. To use a British Monty Python term; it’s a “dead parrot”.

How else can you explain all the off-the-wall LGBQ+ laws, rules and pronouncements that randomly come out of no where? How else can you explain the ignition of wars all over the globe with no long term strategies? How else can you explain a ZERO emphasis on domestic issue; very serious issues, but action being taken on seemingly random trivial matters?

No one is at the helm.

Oh there is a figurehead.

Every now and then he gets an injection and a script to read. Meanwhile the20-something interns make rules and “pronouncements” using his stationary, on his phone, and dictated on his computer. It’s a self-serving “leadership’; completely chaotic in nature and implementation.

Or to use a Dungeons and Dragons term: Chaotic-Evil.

It is a dangerous time.

A very, very dangerous time.

1/3 The Day After | 1983 Nuclear War Movie

OMG.

Jesus.

It is so 2014.

Guam can’t even protect itself. Never mind the Philippines.

The entire US CONUS has 50 patriot batteries. Which is 1,600 air defense missiles. It is SOP to fire 2 per incoming missile. So at the best rate, if all Patriot batteries were transferred to Guam, it can intercept 800 missiles, glide bombs, or drones. Lockheed makes 500 missiles a year.

They can’t stop ASBMs or hypersonic wave riders. According to Pentagon report and joint Air Force/MIT study. There is currently no defense against ASBMs (anti-ship ballistic missiles).

Guam can be hit with Chinese land attack cruise missiles, ASBMs, stealth cruise missiles, and drones. Guam simply does not have enough air defense missiles to stop China. Never mind the Philippines.

Guam’s defense depends on fighters and carriers. The problem is China’s air to air missile have a much longer range than US missiles. So it would be like having one side armed with pistols and the other side armed with rifles. Start at 1,000 yards on a flat open field.

Once those fighters are gone. Guam is just a giant target. This is the same problem that all US forces including carriers face when attacking China. Forget the Philippines. They’re just meat for the meat grinder.

Which is what the US is trying to do. Turn Philippines into a meat grinder to “weaken” China. Like Ukraine.

Larry Johnson: NATO’s Nuclear & B-52 Are Flying to Russia, West Panic After Putin’s Missiles Attack

An extremely wealthy client passed away from cancer leaving millions in assets. He passed without a will, leaving everything by default to his surviving spouse.

When the widow and her 3 adult male children, came into my office at 9 AM in the morning it had already been 2 months since their father passed.

Two of them had already been estranged from each other before the father’s death. The youngest, fourth child, had already returned to the US to be with her kids.

So long as the mom was alive, she had complete control of the assets, and the 3 men were not entitled to them. However, as they continued to threaten each other and their mother, she wanted to distribute the assets as soon as possible.

I was a corporate lawyer and had no experience in these matters. I did, however, know where their father’s assets were, and also had the mother’s trust, which she kept telling her sons.

After discovering what their father left them, the 3 adult children were deadlocked on their father’s major shareholdings, property, shares in private companies and cash and equivalents.

Each one was pleading their case and deferring to me for validation, but there’s nothing I could say or do except watch these 3 siblings tear each other apart like enemies.

Throughout the day, the 3 men argued and cursed their lungs out in our non-sound proof board room, prompting many of our other clients to complain.

I left them to attend another meeting and found them still arguing when I returned. Mom did not look well, she looked like she was having a heart attack. She was evidently sad and unwell.

By 10 PM, I asked them to pack up and continue this some other time. Mom thanked me, but the men didn’t and angrily walked out.

The mom called me the following day and asked if I could tell her sons that she decided against distributing the inheritance.

Four days later mom and the 3 men, walked back into the board room. I had prepared over 3 days on what to say, but was interrupted when the eldest son said, “mother told us she is keeping everything”.

After some more arguing, the meeting ends 20 minutes later.

I walked mom to the elevator and asked if I could do anything else. She asked for someone to draft her will.

I worried about her safety. I honestly did.

The following week I received a check for the most amount of money for doing absolutely nothing but comfort a client.

It’s been 4 years, she is still alive and healthy.

The best advice

It was during the Great Depression.

My Grandmother discovered that her husband, my Mom’s alcoholic father, was sexually abusing my (then 12-year old) mom. Grandma kicked him out of the house to protect my mom (and her siblings, including 4 other girls). Only my Mom and my Grandmother knew what had happened, and why the Bastard was no longer in the home.

This was during the Depression. That Bastard was the family’s sole income, so Grandma had to find work to begin supporting her family of 9 children; my mom’s oldest brothers, George and Frank, quit high school to also work and help support the rest of the family. The family had very little before, and even less after that Bastard was kicked out, but Grandma was determined to protect her children, and support them any way she had to.

My Aunt Kathy, one of the youngest of those children, told me that late one night when they were all in bed asleep, she (only a little girl then) was awakened by the voice of the neighbor lady talking to Grandma in the living room, and she snuck over to the doorway and listened to their conversation; the woman was telling Grandma that there was no way that she would be able to support all of those kids (my aunts and uncles) by herself, and that Grandma would have to give some of them up to the orphanage.

Aunt Kathy told me that she was terrified at this, the fear that she and maybe some of her brothers and/or sisters would end up in an orphanage. But as she continued to listen to their conversation, she heard Grandma say, “NO! No, I won’t give up not one of my children— not one!”

And she didn’t. She kept her family together, took care of 9 children through the Great Depression (with the help of my teenage Uncle George and Uncle Frank). I didn’t know this until Grandma was very old, but my maternal Grandmother was one of the strongest and most amazing women that I’ve ever known, and she saved my Mom’s life by kicking out that Bastard that was their only means of support during the Great Depression.

One of the reasons that that meant even more to me was because one of my very first girlfriends, 16 or 17 years old when we were in high school, was living with her mother and stepfather, and she confided to me that her stepfather had sexually abused her for many years. “Does your mom know what your stepfather had been doing to you???” I asked. “Yes”, she said, “She knew… but she didn’t do anything about it because she was afraid that if she stopped him, he would kick us out of his house, and we would have no place to live…”

I was incredulous!

My girlfriend’s mom, basically, sold her own daughter as a sex slave to her stepdad, so they would have a place to live. For a place to live… as if there was no where else in the world that they could have a roof over their heads. She sold her daughter for that. Whereas, my Grandmother gave up every possible comfort she had to save my Mother (and my young aunts) from that. My girlfriend’s mother was worthless, human garbage. Never have I seen a more stark difference in humanity.

Also, I so admire my Grandmother because years later when Mom had taken Grandma to the doctor and Grandma was told that she had a fatal cancer, Grandma simply replied, “Okay.”

Mom said the doctor rushed to say, “No, Mary, don’t give up! There are several things that we can try so there’s no reason to give up…”

Mom said that Grandma leaned forward, put her hand on the doctor’s shoulder and comforted him, saying, “I’ve raised a family, and they now have their own families, and I’ve done what I was sent here to do. I’m ready to go— and it’s okay. It’s okay.” Mom said the doctor began fighting back tears. Even in the face of death, my Grandmother was so brave and solid. Even death didn’t scare her, as her strong Christian faith gave her all that she needed to raise 9 children alone, and to face death alone as well. She had all the strength that she needed, strength that she asked God for, and was given.

My Grandmother was the most amazing person I’ve ever personally known— a legend to me— and I hope, some day, to be half the incredible person she was. God bless her. She sacrificed any comfort she had in life to save my Mom when no one else could. She had no fear of death. She is a legend to me.

I can so relate

I have a friend of Japanese ancestry who is a famous bonsai master. I won’t use his name out of respect for his privacy. His family sent him to live with an uncle in Japan before the war, and he was stuck there after hostilities started. His uncle lived in Hiroshima.

The day the bomb was dropped, his uncle sent him to the city to get a job with the government. But he was angry and young and feeling defiant.

Instead of going to the city when he left home that morning, he went in the opposite direction and got a small boat to go fishing offshore. He was safe on the water when he saw the American bomber fly overhead. A moment later he felt the concussion. He could feel it right through the small boat in the water. He looked in horror as he saw the mushroom cloud rise up. He didn’t know what had happened, but he knew it was something horrible.

He hurried back to land and started making his way towards the city. What he described was like a scene out of The Walking Dead: hundreds of people staggering away from the city center with their arms outstretched, the skin literally melting off of them. In a panic, he headed for the elementary school in downtown Hiroshima that his little brother attended.

He never found his brother, or his body. By a wall outside the school, they found his shoes and a book bag. A dark shadow burned into the wall seemed to mark the place he was standing when the bomb struck.

My friend tells the story in a strange, rote sort of way, as if he was hypnotized, or simply numb to the horror of what he had seen.

He has never expressed any anger.

Only incredible sadness.

Super truth

Some of them are, some of them aren’t… kind of like with ‘normal people’. James Gandolfini is a fine example of a celebrity who was a genuinely nice in real life. While playing on The Sopranos, he was fiercely protective and paternal towards his on-screen daughter, Jamie-Lynn Sigler. She was diagnosed with muscle disease MS on the show, and it devastated her.

Sigler didn’t tell any of her castmates of the diagnosis, and no one asked… she would have dizzy spells, muscle pains, and have to take many bathroom breaks during scenes as the disease affected her bladder — no one would bothered to ask, everyone just got grumpy as her health interrupted filming. Gandolfini was the only person who asked “are you okay?” and Sigler told him of her illness. She asked him not to tell anyone — and he didn’t.

He just quietly helped her get through it.

It wasn’t until Gandolfini’s death, ten years later, that Sigler found out something else about him… for over a decade, without telling anyone, he had been giving generous donations to foundations aimed at fighting the disease his co-star suffered from. A genuinely good person does good quietly — kindness requires no accolades.

Why tiktoc is so awesome

My ex-husband butt dialed me and I heard him talking to his mistress. He was telling her what a horrible person I was. This is a man that had next to nothing when I met him. I encouraged him and pushed him to be the best version of himself.

I drove him to the interview for his current job. I waited in the parking lot till he was done. Since I was a Paralegal, I completed and filed Bankruptcy papers on his behalf. If I had not done that one of his creditors was going to start garnishing his paycheck.

I used my zero interest credit card to help him pay off parking tickets and penalties to the DMV for driving without insurance. He was able to get his license back after not having one for over 10 years. When he was in the hospital I was the only one who was there for him. No one including his family showed up or ever visited the whole week he was in the hospital. Despite me giving them updates.

I packed his stuff and put him out the same day. That was almost 4 years ago. Last time I saw him he looked gaunt, unattractive and was broke. I don’t wish him bad but Karma did get him. Oh and him and the woman he cheated on me with have broken up.

People do not realize that you must choose a partner wisely. The right one can build you up. The wrong one can destroy you. I am so grateful to God for exposing him. I am at peace.

Because they’ve been preparing for 80 years for such an eventuality.

After the 1939–1940 Winter War Finland gained a lot of confidence in it’s own abilities to take on an aggressor. Whilst Finland did eventually have to concede in that war the Soviet Union suffered a casualty ratio of nearly 7 to 1.

After World War 2, however, Finland realised that it needed to be prepared for a whole range of potential outcomes and began the process of updating it’s infrastructure, it’s legislation and more. So much of Finland’s infrastructure and planning has “what would happen if Russia invaded” as a core component.

Put it this way: Helsinki’s bunker complexes are designed to hold the entire population of the city and designed to withstand a nuclear attack, with full facilities including food stockpiles, hospitals, even sports centres.

They’ve spent 60+ years building and improving these bunkers.

main qimg 550d6699584d349e6c5bc304df70d37a pjlq
main qimg 550d6699584d349e6c5bc304df70d37a pjlq

Many of these bunkers have a civilian purpose as a primary design – but, don’t be mistaken, they are full blown nuclear bunkers:

main qimg b755f6442e5ba1c862e605d09df61a96 pjlq
main qimg b755f6442e5ba1c862e605d09df61a96 pjlq

Itäkeskus Swimming Hall – Yes, that is a full 50 meter swimming pool inside a nuclear bunker.

It’s actually kind of insane: in order to take Helsinki Russian forces would have to fight urban warfare on a scale we’ve never seen before. Fighting a military complex that they would not be able to just bomb into submission.

It’s worth remembering that one of the many reasons Russia are finding Ukraine such a hard nut to crack is because many of Ukraine’s cities were designed by the Soviets to withstand a large scale military conflict. It’s a key part of why the battle for the Azovstal steelworks is taking so long – a complex bunker system.

Because they basically nullify Russia’s core doctrines:
You can’t do a rapid mobile campaign – because the city centres are well supplied and are where the enemy are.
You can’t pound them with a bunch of artillery and missiles until they surrender – because the bunkers are so overengineered.

Helsinki is that times 10.

All buildings of sufficient size must have a bunkers & all buildings must be able to have multiple fuel sources for heating.

These bunkers have at least 6 months of supplies,

And that’s assuming Russia forces even make it that far. One of the big advantages of this kind of system is that it allows the safe rotation of troops into well provisioned and warm areas.

And then there’s these:

main qimg d631afc67875e1071076a692ae25e2e0 pjlq
main qimg d631afc67875e1071076a692ae25e2e0 pjlq

I know what you’re thinking: “but Alan that’s just a road?!”

And that, my friend, is where you’re wrong.

A lesson learned by the Finns during the Winter War is that they could move their aircraft to remote roads – so that when the Soviets bombed to airfields their aircraft were fine.
Well… the Finns continued this idea – that picture is actually the Alavas Road Runway.
Yeah, that’s right, they’ve built loads of roads to be runway standard. So good luck trying to catch the Finnish Air Force on the ground.

===

Russia would also have to get through some of the best natural defences there are with the volume of rivers and lakes, marshland and forest that basically make mobile warfare impossible.

And, worse still for the Russian doctrine, is that Finland’s doctrine accepts early territorial losses. Ukraine did something similar to this – but to a lesser extent. Let your enemy come in – let them start attacking your city that is defended by a local militia, then your best forces that were hiding in the woods take out the supply lines.

Finland does not have a second rate military and has multiple military cooperation agreements.

They have the capability to rapidly mobilise 1.1 million troops at short notice – all of whom have received at least some military training.
Oh, and it really helps that Finland has an exceptionally civilian ownership of firearms.
Russian troops in more rural areas of Finland (Finland is 75% forest) are going to be dealing with irregulars made up of seasoned hunters who have received military training.
These are people who have learned decent survival skills, have the right gear to be out in that terrain, know the terrain well and will be waiting.

Further, unlike Ukraine, Finland are well incorporated into NATO infrastructure (despite not being a member [yet]) so they can much more rapidly deploy NATO weaponry. If you think the equipment Ukraine have received is a lot, the amount that could and would be supplied to Finland at short notice is unbelievable.

Finland fields highly advanced weaponry – including the Leopard 2A6 and US MLRS systems.

See… Finland is a bit like Switzerland: Neutral – but armed to the freaking teeth. If you’re gonna try and take Finland you’re going to bleed and bleed badly. Russia would need to assemble an invasion force of at least 3 million troops in order to feasibly have a chance of winning an offensive war against Finland.

I am going to cry

"If, heaven forbid, it comes to some sort of strike, everyone should understand that Russia has an early warning system, a missile attack warning system.

The US has it.

There is no such developed system anywhere else in the world.

We have it.

Europe lacks such a developed system; in this regard, they are more or less defenceless.

That is the first point.

The second issue is the power of the strikes.

Our tactical nuclear weapons are four times more powerful than the bombs the Americans used against Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by three to four times.

We possess significantly more of them – both across the European continent and even if the Americans were to deploy theirs from the US – we still maintain a substantial advantage.

If, God forbid, it comes to that – which we sincerely hope it does not, then, instead of what you said about 'minimising the victims,' in reality, casualties could potentially escalate indefinitely.

That’s the first point.

Second, the Europeans must also consider: if those with whom we engage in such conflicts cease to exist, will the Americans participate in this conflict at the level of strategic weapons or not?

I have serious doubts about it, and Europeans should reflect on this as well.

Nevertheless, I firmly believe that such a scenario will never materialise, as we do not foresee such a necessity.

Our Armed Forces continue to gain experience and enhance their efficiency, while our defence sector consistently demonstrates its effectiveness.

I have stated this multiple times, and I will say it again: our ammunition production has increased by over 20 times, our capabilities in aviation technology far surpass those of our adversaries, and our superiority in armoured vehicles is significant.

There is no need to dwell on this matter.

Therefore, I kindly ask everyone not to mention such things unnecessarily."

Excerpt from remarks by Russian President Vladimir Putin during the plenary session of the 27th St Petersburg International Economic Forum, June 7, 2024.

Black Bread

no knead black bread 47015 16x9
no knead black bread 47015 16×9

Ingredients

  • 1 envelope dry yeast
  • 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
  • 1/4 cup warm water (105 to 115 degrees F)
  • 1/2 ounces unsweetened chocolate
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 1/4 cups water
  • 1/4 cup dark molasses
  • 2 tablespoons apple cider vinegar
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 1/2 cup All-Bran cereal
  • 2 to 2 3/4 cups unbleached flour
  • 1 1/2 cups rye flour

Instructions

  1. Sprinkle yeast and sugar over 1/4 cup warm water. Stir to dissolve. Let stand until foamy, about 10 minutes.
  2. Melt chocolate and butter with 1 1/4 cups water in a large bowl set over gently simmering water. Stir until smooth. Remove from over water. Blend in molasses, vinegar and salt. Mix in cereal. Let cool.
  3. Grease a large bowl. Blend yeast into cereal mixture. Gradually stir in 2 cups unbleached flour and rye flour. Turn dough out onto lightly floured surface and knead until smooth and elastic, about 10 minutes, kneading in up to 3/4 cup more unbleached flour if needed to form a workable dough. Add dough to prepared bowl, turning to coat entire surface. Cover and let rise in warm area until doubled in volume, about 2 hours.
  4. Grease two loaf pans. Punch dough down. Turn out onto lightly floured surface and let rest 3 minutes. Knead 3 minutes. Divide dough in half. Roll each into an 8 x 7 inch rectangle. Starting with long side, roll dough up into a cylinder. Tuck ends under and pinch seam to seal. Place seam side down in prepared pans. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 1 1/2 hours.
  5. Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  6. Bake until loaves sound hollow when tapped on the bottom, about 45 minutes.
  7. Remove bread from pans. Let cool completely on a rack before serving.

This is spectacular. -MM

By S.L Kathan

The contrast between rich and poor tends to increase in the US: the top 10% of Americans have nearly 70% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% are left with just 3% of the nation’s wealth. The only way to accumulate wealth in the country is through speculation – mostly in real estate and stocks.

“Fugazi, fugayzi. It’s a woozie. It’s fairy dust. It’s not real.” That is from a scene in the movie Wolf of Wall Street where a veteran stockbroker explains the strategy for recommending stocks to customers. That is also how the US economy works now. Somewhere along the way, the US forgot its own industrial past, and allowed the parasitic financial class to deindustrialize the country, destroy the free market, and create what can only be described as casino capitalism. Fueled by money-printing, unsustainable debt, massive fiscal and trade deficits, speculation and financial engineering, the American Empire superficially looks wealthy, but is actually teetering on the edge.

Three watershed moments

Paradoxically, the three global events that propelled American primacy would also be responsible for its eventual downfall. First, it was WW2 that replaced the European empires with the American, which immediately set out to dominate the world. However, this hubris led to humiliating failures in the Korean and Vietnam Wars. More importantly, the US was bankrupt in merely one generation after WW2. Thus, in 1971, the US went off the gold standard and defaulted on its financial obligations.

The second event that saved the US was the Saudi petrodollar deal, which rescued the US dollar from demise and re-established the greenback as the world’s reserve currency. On the other side, this was akin to giving a teenager a platinum credit card with no limit.

Excited by the possibility of immense and constantly growing demand for the dollar, America’s politicians went on a borrowing binge. The US debt-to-GDP ratio doubled between 1980 and 1992 – from 30% to 60%. Wall Street also loved free money and deregulation, which led to a spectacular boom in the 1980s and a crash in 1987.

The 1980s also laid the foundation for outsourcing, deindustrialization of US economy, stock buybacks, hostile takeovers, vulture capitalism obsessed with profits for shareholders, and exotic tools such as derivatives.

The third event that was the last nail on the coffin was ironically the fall of the Soviet Union. This led to the birth of the unipolar moment, which in turn sparked uncontrolled hubris among globalists, banksters, corporate overlords, neocons and the military industrial complex. The irrational exuberance inside the American echo chamber led to prodigious outsourcing of manufacturing, the dot-com bubble, disastrous multitrillion-dollar wars in the Middle East, and a real-estate bubble that ended in a global financial crisis spawned by banks and Wall Street shysters.

What are the consequences of financialization?

Income and Wealth Inequality

First, Americans stopped worrying about fiscal discipline and embraced debt wholeheartedly. The US government has a debt of $35 trillion and, for the first time, the interest payment alone has exceeded the spending on military. American families and corporations have racked up another $32 trillion of debt. However, the biggest debtor in the history of mankind shamelessly claims that it’s the wealthiest.

Meanwhile, 2 in 3 Americans are living paycheck to paycheck, since the real wages – adjusted for inflation – of the average American has remained stagnant for four decades. Look at the wage increases for different groups of American between 1979 and 2019:

  • Top 0.1% – wages grew 375%
  • Top 1% – wages grew 160%
  • Middle Class – wages grew 14%
  • Bottom 10% – wages grew 3%

From 1945 through the 70s, a typical American family could own a home, a car, and all the essentials with one wage earner, the husband. Now, in most families, both the husband and the wife must work to make the ends meet.

The wealth inequality in the US is staggering. As the chart below shows, the top 10% of Americans have nearly 70% of the wealth, while the bottom 50% are left with just 3% of the nation’s wealth. If you include debts such as car and student loans, credit card obligation, the net wealth of many Americans will be negative.

This neo-feudalism is sold to the masses as freedom and democracy.

Poverty and inequality are mostly taboo topics in the US, where the society is taught to blame the poor. Thus, even though homelessness and drug addiction are at record levels, there is no debate about the fundamental economic system.

Casino Capitalism

Las Vegas is a very popular destination, it is a Sin City that clouds people’s judgments. Although vast majority of people end up losing money, they gamble hopefully, because the few winners are always loud. And Vegas offers plenty of cheap drinks to drown the sorrow of losers.

Well, the US economy is modeled after Vegas.

The only way to accumulate wealth in America is through speculation – mostly in real estate and stocks. And just like in Vegas, for every winner, there are many more losers. The stock market crashes periodically, but there is no choice but to participate in it, since American wages do not allow people to save steadily. And, just like Vegas, the “house always wins”.

In the stock market, insiders engage in pump-and-dump. Consider Tesla stock: starting in March 2020, it went up 8-fold within a year, making millionaires and the billionaires a lot wealthier. However, the stock has lost half its value in the last year. Guess who was the sucker? The average investor, who buys high and sells low, since he hears all the hype close to the peak.

But a sucker is born every minute. The latest hype is Nvidia, which has a market cap of mind-boggling $3.3 trillion – India’s GDP in 2022. Nvidia’s profit is only $30 billion. In a logical world, this valuation means that it would take more than 100 years to recoup the investment. So, why would anyone buy Nvidia shares? In the hope that the stock price would keep going up.

Such absurdity is celebrated in the US mainstream culture.

There is also plenty of financial engineering. Stock buybacks used to be illegal until the 1980s. But now, US corporations spend almost $1 trillion a year buying back their own shares, artificially boosting the stock price. Many corporations even borrow money to use for the buyback programs. Thus, when the US boasts that its stock market is worth $50 trillion, it’s nothing but “fugazi”.

Corporate CEOs and the large shareholders such as Blackrock do not care about investing in production, research, technology or the employees. Instead, the priorities are stock prices and dividends. This is why the US is losing to China, which now leads in 37 out of 44 critical technologies.

The other option in the American casino is the real estate, which also goes through boom-and-bust cycles. When the market collapses, giant private equity firms like Blackstone swoop in and buy homes at a great discount. By 2030, corporate landlords will be owning 40% of the rental homes in the US.

As the World Economic Forum said, “You will own nothing and be happy”. Although, they are wrong about the second part – Americans are very depressed and rank #1 in global statistics for consumption of antidepressants and other psychotropic medications. The illegal market in the US is more than $150 billion a year. The suicide rate in the US has also skyrocketed to the highest level since the Great Depression.

Sociologists have a special term for what’s happening in the US: Deaths of Despair. In terms of life expectancy, communist China has now surpassed capitalist USA.

Financialize Everything

Financialization is the cancer that is eating away at the US economy. Interestingly, the great economists in America have not really analyzed this fatal phenomenon. I have thought a lot about it and have come up with four different ways that the economy gets financialized.

  • 1.Eliminating industries that are less profitable
  • 2. Transforming normal economic sectors into speculative ones
  • 3. Transforming normal economic sectors into extractive ones
  • 4. Creating destructive industries

Let’s dive in.

Eliminating industries that are less profitable:

This is the foundation of outsourcing and deindustrialization that really took off in the 1980s as American corporations became extremely greedy and forgot their duties to the country. “Greed is good” became the mantra. The first target was manufacturing, which is very capital- and labor-intensive. Why build massive factories and deal with the headache of managing workers? Moreover, why pay high wages and provide all sorts of benefits to blue-collar workers when people in developing nations could do the same work for fraction of the cost?

Many Americans would be astonished to learn that a century ago, the US’ share of global steel production was 40%. It is now about 4%, while China accounts for 54%. Similar American decline can be observed in every category of manufacturing, thanks to the warped ideology of financialization.

The same calamitous philosophy is also applied towards infrastructure, which has very low profit margins. What is the return on investment (ROI) on bridges, railways, subways etc. compared to stock market manipulation? Insignificant. That is why the US infrastructure has been crumbling for years. In New York City, the cradle of Wall Street, the metro system looks like a fourth-world country with decades-old trains, decaying subway stations with trash and rats, and homeless people sleeping in the trains.

Starting in the 1980s, US corporations started shipping jobs abroad, especially to Asia, which had plenty of diligent and cheap workers. Initially, US firms employed sweatshops to make the likes of Nike shoes, Gap shirts and Gucci bags. However, Asian countries were quick learners – especially China – and were able to climb up the value chain and manufacture more complex goods. Then, as the wages rose, those countries also became more efficient and productive, thus maintaining high profits for Western firms.

This exploitation scheme was working well until 2010 when China became the world’s largest manufacturing nation, displacing the US, which had held that title for the previous century! Then a decade later, China’s manufacturing value added was 75% larger than that of the US. More importantly, China was making its own intermediary goods and hi-tech products.

Now, when Boeing needs to build a plane, they need to rely on Russia or China for special titanium; when Raytheon makes missiles, it depends on thousands of Chinese suppliers; American pharmaceutical firms and hospitals need raw materials and medicines from China; and America’s largest corporations such as Walmart, Apple and Tesla will not survive without Chinese labor, goods and market. For example, half of Tesla cars globally are made in Shanghai and a third of Teslas are sold in China.

The US is in a terrible predicament. Since Trump’s election in 2016, Americans have found out how hard it is to fix the manufacturing gap. They have not been able to bring back the jobs; and they have not been to find any other country as skilled and efficient like China. Thus, US politicians and think tanks have been playing with creative phrases such as reshoring, friend-shoring, China plus one, and de-risking. However, all these have remained empty slogans for the most part. Last year, the US imported $430 billion of goods from China – almost the same as in 2016.

Transforming normal economic sectors into speculative ones

In a real economy, the society would focus on production of tangible and beneficial goods in abundance. There would be emphasis on manufacturing, infrastructure and development. However, in an economy consumed by financial capitalism, speculation reigns as the driving force.

For example, rather than building more homes, the financial overlords prefer to keep the supply of homes low. Scarcity means higher value. Then, the entire real estate can be turned into a game of betting. For example, someone can buy a home and sell it the next year to make $100,000 of profit. While get-rich-quick gimmicks are tempting, they result in a hollowed-out economy and a delusional society that create “nothingburgers.”

Transforming normal economic sectors into extractive ones

The third and more pernicious form of financial capitalism involves fostering extractive or predatory sectors.

Take, for example, higher education. Young Americans now owe a whopping $1.8 trillion is student debt. College education in the US costs 4x more today than 40 years ago — even after adjusted for inflation. Is education 4x better now? Are kids learning 4x more? Do college graduates earn 4x more? No, no, no.

Similarly, healthcare cost in the US has risen from 6% of GDP in 1970 to 18% of GDP now. But Americans are much fatter and much sicker today than fifty years ago. Numerous chronic diseases like diabetes, obesity, autism, allergies, immune disorders, and cancer have skyrocketed over the decades. Also, heart disease has been the #1 killer for a century but the great scientific minds cannot figure out a solution. As a Goldman Sachs analyst pondered in a biotech research report, “Is curing patients a sustainable business model?”

In predatory capitalism, providing affordable college education is a terrible idea; and preventive healthcare – especially using food, natural cures and holistic medicine – is an unforgivable financial sin.

Creating destructive industries

This is the most heinous consequence of financial capitalism, which creates disease, death and destruction for profit.

The military industrial complex is the prime example. Rather than focusing on peace, diplomacy and development, the “defense” contractors lobby politicians and bribe the media to promote perpetual wars.

The food industry and Big Pharma are two other notable criminals. The junk food industry is a colossal industry that makes billions of people sick; and Big Pharma sells numerous multibillion-dollar drugs based on exaggerated claims from rigged clinical trials.

In the 1960s, the sugar industry bribed researchers at Harvard University to blame saturated fat for heart disease; and companies like Coca Cola still fund scientists to “debunk” links between sugar and obesity. One of the scientists paid by the sugar industry went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he helped write the dietary guidelines. The entire nutrition science is corrupted by Big Agri, Big Food and Big Pharma.

America’s mainstream corporate media has also forgotten journalism and truth. Instead, it embraces propaganda to protect its cronies in the government and other giant corporations; and the media spreads fake news and sensationalism to generate revenue from clicks.

Finally, even American politics has been financialized, resulting in every politician being on sale for various lobbying groups.

Conclusion

Driven by greed, hubris and an inflated sense of exceptionalism, the financial overlords of the United States of America forgot the fundamentals of economics, politics and statecraft.

Once upon a time, the political and business leaders of the US understood the importance of industries, production, infrastructure and, more importantly, the contract between the rulers and the masses. However, with financialization of the US economy, the oligarchs created a predatory capitalist system that has been devouring the American society for the past few decades. Unfortunately, there is no easy path for the US to revert back to an industrial economy now.

Rather than building a sustainable and resilient system, US elites have created an Empire that depends on the exploitation of the rest of the world. However, this parasitic model has reached its expiry date, as the Global South is architecting a new paradigm for a multipolar world order. The implosion of the American economic and political system will be not only painful but also dangerous to itself and the rest of humanity. Managing the collapse of the US empire will be a monumental challenge for Russia, China, India and others in BRICS+ over the next decade.

Gooey Cheese Bread

pull apart bread
pull apart bread

Ingredients

Bread

  • 3/4 cup water
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/4 cup unsalted butter
  • 1 teaspoon honey
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 teaspoons yeast

Filling

  • 3 cups Swiss cheese, shredded

Instructions

  1. Place all dough ingredients in pan and program for knead only. Press start. The dough will be slightly sticky. After the kneading cycle, transfer the dough to a lightly oiled bowl, cover it with plastic wrap, and let it rise in the refrigerator overnight, or as long as 24 hours.
  2. Grease and flour a 9 inch cake pan. Heat the oven to 375 degrees F with the rack in the center position.
  3. Remove the dough from the refrigerator and place it on a lightly floured work surface. Roll the dough to a 14 x 10 inch rectangle with the long side nearest you. Sprinkle 2 cups of the cheese over the surface of the dough. Starting with the edge closest to you, roll the dough up like a jellyroll. Press the edges together and turn it over so the seam is now facing down. With the seam still down, roll the cylinder around itself in a coil and transfer it to the prepared pan. Sprinkle the remaining cheese over the top of the loaf and allow to rise, uncovered for 20 minutes.
  4. Bake for 35 minutes, then turn the oven temperature to 350 degrees F. Bake for 10 more minutes. If the cheese begins to brown quickly during the first 35 minutes, lower the oven temperature sooner.

pull apart bread 2
pull apart bread 2

My grandmother was head housekeeper (and, therefore, management) in a hotel when a union organizer came to the hotel to try to unionize the workers. The owner told the concierge to throw him out, which he did.

My grandmother followed the organizer, gave him her home address, and told him to come to her house that evening. When he did, she had almost all the staff of the hotel there, and they all signed union cards.

The next day, the union organizer came back to the hotel, and, again, the owner told the concierge to throw him out. The concierge said, “No, I can’t. He’s my union rep.”

Because my grandmother was management, she couldn’t join the union, but the organizer put her down as an organizer and paid her dues so that, when she retired, she had a union pension.

Years later, when my grandmother was running a hotel in New Orleans, she helped her maid form a Black Domestic Workers’ Union.

I am so proud to be her granddaughter! Right now I am facing the possibility of a strike where I work, and she’s my inspiration.

Wow! I’ve never had so many upvotes! Thanks, folks!

Yellow pee was flying everywhere

Yep. When I was young I sat on a First Degree murder trial of a 19-year old Marine who, on payday, went out with a friend on Friday night. They met a couple of girls at a bar and began drinking. At one point the girls introduced them to a guy friend of theirs and all had a great time, drinking and carousing. Then, late into the evening, the guy friend said “let’s roll a boot”, meaning rob a new recruit. Their plan was for the girls to lure two new marines to a vacant house out in the desert east of San Diego, where the three guys woul lie in wait until the girls could get them really drunk and then the guys would burst in, hold them up and steal their paychecks.

Sounded simple, if criminal, and this is where things went pear shaped. First, the three guys who were part of the plan armed themselves. Then one of the victims tried to run and the girl’s friend shot the kid as he tried to run off into the desert in the night. Poor boy had no chance. He was picked off as he came out the back door.

The defendant wasn’t the one who pulled the trigger. Had no priors and was in his way to a great life in the USMC. However, because he and his friend allowed themselves to get pulled into the robbery of the two younger marines, the shooter went away for life (had a wrap sheet as long as my arm, apparently, as did the girls). The two older Marines were both found guilty under the Felony Murder Rule. We had no option. The defense’s argument simply didn’t meet reasonable doubt requirements, and the kid at my trial went away to state prison for a long stretch. We heard about what a great kid he was and how his family and friends were shocked that he’d do something like this, but nothing could bridge the gap that he was there, part of the other crime (to rob the two boys), and therefore, he was guilty under the rule.

His life was ruined all because his common sense was impaired by lust and alcohol and he exercised really poor judgement.

Stubborn Cat Only Likes Listening To One Song | Cuddle Buddies

This is beyond adorable!

When Pinar went to a clinic she saw a cat named Goat hiding in a box all alone. The vet wanted to put her to sleep but Pinar refused to let that happen. When she brought her home she nursed her back to health and started singing to her. Goat loves when Pinar sings and she always wants to listen to the same song. They have formed such a strong bond together and Pinar could not imagine her life without Goat

https://youtu.be/A7m5qfBUyFg

In August of 2016. My baby sister refused to die. Her entire body was eaten with cancer and her pain was unbearable. The hospice said a 300 lb biker would die in 24 hours from the amounts of fentanyl etc she was getting . But I knew she was not going to die until September 11. Our father died on 9/11 …15 years earlier. She was waiting for him to come get her.

She would scream in pain. She would scream “Laura, save me” Then they would come with more drugs and try to quiet her. It never lasted long.

One night I could not bear the screams and I left the hospice and started walking, but I could still hear her. “ Laura, save me”. About 2 blocks away I could not hear her any more. I sat down in the grass and I started screaming . I screamed because she was dying. I screamed because she would not die. I screamed because I was beating cancer and she wasn’t. I screamed because I could not save her. I screamed until the police came and they talked me into going back.

On 9/9 she stopped screaming. She just lay there with her beautiful blond hair on the pillow and her big blue eyes looking at me. She patted my hand. She had a little smile on her lips. On the morning of 9/11/2016 she gently slipped away. I think our Daddy came for her. I did not scream again.

Peaceful Husband Secretly Records Coercive and Controlling Wife | Sheree Spencer Case Analysis

It’s never quite that simple. I had been going to University, my dad had a heart attack, and I quit university to go run the family business until it could be sold.

That was walking away from one life path.

Then about the time the business was sold, 4 years later, I was reading Dear Abby, and someone wrote in, and said I’m 32, I want to go back to university and get qualified for my dream job, but in 4 years when I graduate, I will be 36, what should I do. Dear Abby said, how old will you be in 4 years if you don’t go get your dream job?

I was 4 years older than when I quit university, I wanted different things now. So when the business sold, I ran away to sea. That was walking away from two life paths, university and the family business, all at the same time.

Eventually I became a ships Captain and fulfilled my dream of seeing most of world. Then I noticed that all of the crew over 35, were either divorced or estranged from their kids. I couldn’t just walk away, I worked 4 months a year, and got a degree in something that I hadn’t even thought of when I was 18. Then I walked away from working at sea.

I got a great job, but unfortunately it paid a bonus for productivity, and I got hooked. I was making twice as much in bonus, as I was making from my generous salary. But I was working 12 hour weekdays, and 8 hour weekends. My mother got very ill, and I walked away from that job, and took one that gave lots of time off.

Then finally when covid hit, I said enough is enough, and I walked away from that and retired to the wilderness…

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Chang’e 6 Moon Rover on Far Side in 4K panorama

[I just had a conversation with Mathias Döpfner, CEO of Axel Springer SE, a board member of Netflix, and the owner of Politico. His newspapers strongly advocate Western resistance towards Eastern despotism. We discussed this argument, which you also hear in Switzerland. They say, ‘Well, you know, China is a threat; they are evading WTO rules. We have Russia, which is an autocracy.’ There is a sense, and I think it’s an authentic sense, with these voices that our way of life, our democracy, is threatened. Therefore, we have to contain these countries, these powers. I’m sure you’re confronted with this argument as well. What do you counter in this sense? What’s your answer to that?]

"Well, first of all, it's a meme or a theme that goes back to Herodotus in the Greek-Persian Wars.

It's a theme since Alexander and the Hellenistic empires that he created.

It is a theme of the Roman Empire in its battles with the Parthians, with the Persians, that went on for several centuries.

It is a theme during the Crusades and the infidels to the east.

It is a theme that was part and parcel of the rhetoric of the British Empire, and it was a theme of the Enlightenment—Asian despotism, Western values.

It's extraordinarily trite is what it is.

It is trite; it is simple-minded.

[Is it paranoia?]

It is ignorance, basically.

People should go out and go to China, make some friends, have some Chinese students, go to Moscow, go to other places in the world.

This 'us versus them' mentality is kind of primitive.

Maybe it's a basic psychological state.

Evolutionary biologists think that because small bands competed with each other over campsites and foraging areas, group solidarity and otherness of the other side is a fundamental theme.

But the East-West theme is at least 2,400 years old.

It's a little boring, and it's such a crude character.

When Biden came into office, of course, he's not a very intelligent person even when he was younger, but his whole foreign policy was 'democracies versus autocracies.'

I didn't know whether to put my thumb in my mouth and suck my thumb for how stupid this was or how dangerous this kind of divide-the-world approach is.

Turns out it's the latter.

Biden meant it. He's absolutely dividing the world. He doesn't sit down to have conversations with anybody.

We're great; they're evil.

By the way, you know, your friend at Springer—China's really going to endanger the American way of life? Come on.

Are you kidding? What are you talking about?

[Is there a sense of an identity crisis here in the West? We have this woke philosophy, the questioning of everything—even biology. Then you have this kind of moral absolutism, not just in foreign affairs but also in interior affairs, cancel culture. These could be read as symptoms of a severe identity crisis, which is somehow compensated by these pictures, you know, by this kind of Dr. Strangelove way of looking at the world.]

I think it's actually something a little bit different in my view, although there are many interpretations. But you know, in 1095, Pope Urban called for the First Crusade.

Europe was pretty pathetic at that stage. It was peasants as serfs on manorial farms. But the idea was the crusade against the infidel and the reconquest of the Holy Land, and all of that.

It started what was a thousand years of Western ascendancy looking back.

The idea that the West has the dominant moral, religious philosophy—that it should lead the world.

Crusading became not only a literal series of wars but an idea.

The idea of the West spreading Western values, Western dominance, whatever those values were: African slavery, conquest, empire, whatever.

Then, of course, the next phase was the voyages of Columbus and Vasco de Gama.

Adam Smith, writing 275 years after that, said those were the two game-changers of the world because it basically became an interconnected but Western-led world.

Then with the industrialization of the 19th century and with Darwinism, by the way, in its interpretations by social Darwinists, the idea was Europe is superior in power, superior in values, probably superior in genetics.

That became the new idea when the idea of evolution and genetics came at the beginning of the 20th century.

[So you would say that this is kind of a superiority complex that is still raging within the West, if I correct?]

Yes, but with one major fact, which is that it's so flawed, so arrogant.

Now we live in a multipolar world.

The great trick of Protestantism was teaching people how to read. Literacy came early to Europe's north.

That was a huge economic advantage, by the way. Huge.

Probably the most significant thing was the printing press and Luther saying, 'Read the Bible on your own,' and Calvin saying, 'Read the Bible.'

Suddenly, literacy.

The rest of the world was basically illiterate.

One part of the world was literate and then saying, 'We're literate, we have advanced technology, we're superior. Oh, we're genetically superior. Oh, we're racially superior.'

So this became the idea.

Now all of it was kind of cruel nonsense, even in historical terms, because the other great civilizations were like, 'Well, you know, we've been here too for 3,000 years, sorry to tell you.'

Now we're truly at a moment where the United States can't get its way in Ukraine.

The United States can't get its way in Taiwan.

The United States can't get its way in the Middle East.

The Arabs have woken up, by the way.

They've been manipulated by the British Empire, by the French, by the American Empire for a hundred years.

They're saying, 'Stop, no more. Don't manipulate us.'

What's happening is a thousand years, or you could say since Herodotus, but basically a thousand or 500 or 200 years, depending on when you want to date it, of perceived European superiority.

What your counterpart at Springer said, you know, 'Western values,' that's not just 'we have our values,' that's 'our superiority' is what's being expressed there.

This is being challenged, understandably, properly, by the fact that there are other people in the world. Thank you.

When I add up the vote count, as it were, the U.S. has 335 million people, the European Union has 450 million people.

Add in Switzerland, add in Norway, add in Britain, and you get maybe 900 million people.

Add in, if you want, though it's kind of arbitrary, Japan, Korea, add in Australia, New Zealand, maybe you get to a billion people.

That's 12.5% of the world population.

We're going to run the world? Come on."

Excerpt from remarks by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, American economist and academic, in an interview with Roger Köppel for Die Weltwoche, June 6, 2024.

China, and not the US, just built the world’s first Artificial Intelligence hospital.

China just do rather than talk.

Yeah, the fastest… NO security checks! Some places will drive your rental car up to your plane so you can toss your bags in and drive away, right from the ramp. Most places will also let you drive on the airfield to load your bags into your plane. Usually they have fresh cookies and free water/coffee/tea, a room to nap in (if you need it). It’s so, damn, nice. Also they’ll usually let you take a car, free, for a few hours if kept locally.

Now, I say “free” but you’re paying. For a small plane like mine I get hit with around $50 in ramp fees, per night, and maybe $30 in facility fees which are waived with 20 or so gallons of gas, which is outrageously priced at $8–9/gallon. However that all varies with the size of the airport. Some places charge zero, but all you get there is a smile and a bathroom. Maybe a pot of coffee.

The major advantage is the time saved, and the lack of hassle. No TSA idiot going through your bags and rubbing your balls looking for that nickel you forgot to take out of your pocket, no traffic, no crying babies or obnoxious people. Kids are always well behaved, people are always quiet and nice. Upper crust types (of all colors for you gen Z racists out there who were about to pull the white privilege card).

It’s expensive, but so worth it. As Homer Simpson told Marge after flying on a private plane vs commercial “It’s the difference between drinking champagne and carbonated pee.” And I’m an airline pilot so yes, I know first hand.

You are Gay Now – It’s Pride Month Again!

Whatever USA say eg arms control, climate change or more. The intention is to limit other’s development. To stop others from surpassing USA. That is all. … USA thinks it is god. The world must take its order.

USA has a treaty with USSR-Russia to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, mid-range missiles & more.

In Trump’s time, USA unilaterally tore the treaty. USA’s excuse was that China must be in the treaty too. But the number of Chinese nuclear weapons is way way below USA’s. The truth surfaces in 2024: USA installed mid-range missiles in Philippines. USA created Cuba crisis 1.0 in 1962. Now USA is creating Cuba crisis 2.0 in PH.

Same thing for Climate Change. USA asked China to reduce CO2. The plot was to slow down China’s development to become a developed country with full industrialisation.

What shocks USA is that China takes Climate Change seriously by working hard to develop green energy products eg electric car, solar panel, wind turbine etc. Very successful as of 2024.

Now, USA complains China is too successful by accusing China of overcapacity of electric cars.

Back to the question. Arms control talks? With USA? It is a waste of time. Because USA is not serious about world interest. Only US interest.

Besides, who does USA think it is to tell others what to do? god?

If this is in reference to the Type 055 program, it’s 8 in 8 years (2014–2022), from hull-laying to commission. That’s probably unmatched delivery schedule, for a brand new >10,000 tonne warship class.

The impressive aspect of this program is the abrupt announcement of the program’s existence and the decision to serially produce an initial batch of 8 ships. Usually, yards take their time to construct and test the lead ship of a new class, which serve as a systems demonstrator. Evidently, the engineers must have tested the individual subsystems to death to confidently build the ships in parallel. By all indications, Nanchang, the lead ship, has fulfilled its operating envelop. There are plans in place for another batch of 8.

The American Arleigh-Burke, in its third iteration from 1980s roots, is also being laid and commissioned at a rate 1 per year. It is the only American destroyer in production currently, and displaces ~9,000 tonnes.

The difference between the Americans and Chinese is the latter operating more than one Destroyer class. The Type 052D is a 7,500 tonne-class warship announced in 2012. Construction probably begun in 2010. Between 2010–2022, 25 ships have been laid and commissioned, for a rate of ~2 per year.

In other words, China’s demonstrated destroyer output in the past decade and a half is at least 3 per year. Going forward, it is estimated that the Type 052DL program will deliver 3–4 ships per year. If the Type 055 program is expanded, that’s 4–5 destroyers a year in the coming decade.

America has had immense difficulty delivering clean-sheet designs this century. Even the Constellation class, which is developed off a licensed and proven FREMM design from the 2000s has run into construction snags. The problem? Backlog and lack of skilled workers.

Fundamentally, American shipbuilding is in a horrible state of neglect, with heavy shipbuilding a dead end commercially. Only military shipyards remain viable, and there is a general lack of skilled workers in the industry. Boomer retirement is eroding institutional memory, while union protectionism add to self-renewal woes.

China has over 500,000 workers in the shipbuilding industry, which produced >50% of the global merchant tonnage delivered last year. There are at least 30–40 dry docks that can accommodate >100,000-tonne ships. Chinese shipyards are now capable of building the most challenging designs, such as ice-breakers, LNG carriers and ocean liners, using precision-controlled hull block modular construction techniques that significantly reduce build times and defects.

American shipbuilding suffer from a deficit in scale, and increasingly, skill and technology.

Once I was traveling across western Kansas with my two young children and I needed to get home. I hadn’t let anyone know that I was down to my last, last money and highly stressed about the trip – nervously running the math of miles and miles per gallon and how many gallons my tank held – all while I drove in silence. This was in the late 1980s.

Somewhere across the great empty expanse of rural Kansas – I stopped for gas. I gave the cashier my last $20 plus some change. So say the gas was $16.53. And I gave her my precious only $20 bill plus $1.53 so I could get a $5 back. I needed a miracle to make the $5 stretch to get us home and had no idea how it could happen. The kids were asking for drinks and my response of a hard “No” let them know we were not in a good place with money. They went back to the car quietly and I felt bad that I let them see my stress.

In the meantime, the cashier handed me back about $25. I looked at what she put in my hand and said, “I don’t think that’s right…” She cut me off with a snippy response that of course it was right. She didn’t do this as a gift – she was offended that I thought she couldn’t make change correctly.

I stood a second and looked at the cash in my hand – essentially the last tank of gas I was going to need to make it back home safely…

I accepted the gift. I’ve never forgotten it.

Brian LECTURES The Ladies On Why Men DON’T Wanna Be Gentlemen Anymore!

I fired someone a few years ago. She had “injured” herself in a minor accident in my store. She took 11 weeks off. I dropped over to her house two weeks after the accident and she was busy cleaning the junk out of her back yard and redoing her gardens. She looked pretty healthy. Cleaning out her yard was a lot harder work than her job. At that point, I wrote her off.
Ten weeks after my visit, she was supposed to attend a meeting with the Workers Compensation person and me to discuss returning to work. She didn’t show. She said that she was too injured. Apparently, she had a doctor who was known for signing anything. So two weeks after that, I phoned the Workers Compensation people, and asked them what to do. I needed a person there. They said to fire her. As a small business under 20 people, I could do that. I came from a large corporation and we would not do that so it felt odd. So I fired her. She was given 2 months salary. By the way, she wasn’t a good employee. She avoided work and showed up late all the time. We were going to terminate her anyways.

A few months later, she sued me under Human Rights. She said that she could work just fine.

I fought it. Her problem was that she went back to Workers Compensation saying she could not work and got another ten weeks of pay. I asked for that information that she had submitted to them but she refused to supply it. Basically, she got caught in a lie. She had been defrauding the Workers Compensation for the eleven weeks plus another ten weeks. She should have gone back to work the next day after the little accident.

So the lawsuit ended.

So when you are firing someone, be careful of things like Human Rights. They can override legislation.

Someone called the police on me while I was trying to help them when they called the police for help.

Here is the set up… information I gathered during the investigation…

Joyce had a protection order against Paul.

Paul was at a bar enjoying a burger and a beer after helping the bar with some work.

Joyce and her friends Bob and Jay had decided they might get burgers themselves. Originally Bob and Jay were going to go and they were going to bring Joyce’s burger back to her.

Bob or Jay called Joyce and told her that Paul was there.

Joyce, all of the sudden, decided it would be more awesome to go to the restaurant and enjoy the burger fresh rather than after it had been driven 20minutes to her home.

Joyce arrived at the bar.

Paul saw her.

Paul wolfed down the rest of his burger and gulped down his beer as Joyce was calling police telling them Paul was in violation of the protection order.

I arrived after Paul had left. Joyce, Bob, and Jay were still on scene. As were the bar owner and the bar manager.

After hearing Joyce’s story about Paul violating the protection order (but not the details about anything else) it felt odd to me.

I talked to the bar owner and manager.

Based on the fact they told me Paul was there BEFORE (WAY BEFORE) Joyce got there and that Paul left the “second” he saw Joyce…. I asked more questions.

When I started asking more questions to ensure I had the story right (I talked to Bob and Jay first) Joyce got upset. She called my dispatch center and started to complain about how I wasn’t doing anything about the protection order violation.

Dispatch connected her to a deputy with the sheriff’s office who knew what I was investigating.

After a complete and thorough investigation and hearing Joyce tell me how the district attorney and the victims’ advocate told her that Paul had to leave where ever she was, and dashing her dreams of that being true- at least where I was responsible for applying the law, she left in a huff. She was in more of a huff when I told her that any other calls like this would result in her being charged with false reporting.

I told her to go back to the district attorney and to the vicitms’ advocates and ask them to set me right if I were, indeed, wrong about this case.

She either never did OR she was def. wrong in what she told me they said.

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NATO needs to understand that playing Russian roulette with a nuclear superpower is never a good idea

We’ve been on quite a few cruises, (it’s a lazy way to travel to a destination and a really good way to relax) so we’ve been witnesses to some *crazy* scenes.

On longer cruises, there’s usually a couple of formal events where the drinks are free for a couple of hours. I was wearing a cocktail dress and heels… and nearly got flattened by a group who charged for the drinks table to help themselves to the free alcohol.

It was a small group of men and women who hadn’t bothered to dress formally. They just shoved their way past everyone and then they started loading themselves up with drinks. They clearly had favourites because they stripped out an entire row of a specific cocktail by taking 5 of them each. It was weirdly fascinating.

It didn’t matter if there were people waiting to get one of those drinks. They took them all. They didn’t even have trays. They just held one arm close to their bodies and slotted multiple glasses along their arm while holding the drinks against themselves. (It was… quite talented in a weird way).

Then they filled up the table they were sitting at and went back and did again to another line of drinks. And they kept doing it until their table was filled.

Then they proceeded to quickly get tragically wasted.

They literally shoved right by me to get to the drinks in front of me. There was an older lady left standing empty-handed and shell shocked with me who looked at me in horror and blurted “I think they’re human locusts”. That gave us both a much-needed laugh.

There’s this thing that happens in New Zealand. No one eats the last bit of anything because they’re worried that someone else won’t have enough. At buffets or dinners, (in my group) for people check that others have enough or that no one wants anymore before they help themselves. There’s often one bit of everything left.

Watching the group of locusts push past everyone and ignore everyone else who wanted a drink was embarrassing for me to watch but the group that did it were shameless.

I learned some details by asking the locals.

The story is very simple:

A retired worker named Mr. Cui from Jilin went to the park to practice Tai Chi sword in the morning.

main qimg 3275e83d6b584188176e2f54df7efd14
main qimg 3275e83d6b584188176e2f54df7efd14

It is not allowed to bring sharp weapons into Chinese parks.

The Tai Chi swords used for fitness are not sharpened, they are just fitness equipment.

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main qimg 67235d964a9717e9af17eadb579f7828

During his exercise, four so-called US college instructors collided with him and pushed Mr. Cui.

Mr. Cui got anxious, so he used the Tai Chi sword to injure the four so-called US college instructors. The injuries of the four Americans were not serious because the Tai Chi sword used for fitness was not sharpened.

Therefore, I advise foreigners who travel to China:

China is not America, nor is it Europe. When traveling to China, you must abide by China’s rules and do not bring your own domineering ways in other countries to China.

Respecting the elderly is a part of Chinese Confucian culture.

In China, you should respect the elderly.

Don’t push old people who are smaller than you. The old people in China are different from the old people in wheelchairs in your country.

I was in the courtroom waiting for our turn up before the Judge.

This one is FAR BETTER than a bald-faced lie! READ ON!

There was this “Paternity” feud occurring between the soon to be ex husband and ex wife. His wife gave birth the child, but he refused to provide the DNA and proof of being “sterile”.

JUDGE: I am going to court order you right now for the DNA test. If you refuse, I will hold you in contempt and without bond.

The Guy protested, his lawyer told him he had nothing to worry about for if he was sterile, it wouldn’t matter what the DNA was on his side.

The Bailiffs swabbed him and the DNA was now sent away.

JUDGE: May I ask what Urologist had told you that you were sterile.

HIM: You’re a what?

Lawyer: Telling him what an Urologist is.

HIM: I didn’t see a You’re A What ist doctor.

JUDGE: Your Primary Physician?

HIM: Don’t have a Doctor.

JUDGE: Then what doctor told you that you were sterile?

HIM: None of them, my Uncle told me I was sterile.

JUDGE: _____________________________________

People in the court room: ___________________________

JUDGE: (tilts his head, making weird expressions) Okay, so it was your Uncle?

HIM: Yes your honor.

JUDGE: What kind of a Physician is your Uncle?

HIM: He was a Pneumatic Mechanic

JUDGE: _______________________ (really staring at this guy) _____________________ PLEASE TELL THE COURT HOW YOUR UNCLE HAD DETERMINED YOU TO BE STERILE AND WHAT IS HIS FULL NAME AND WHERE DOES HE LIVE?

HIM: (gives name) and gives the name of the Cemetery.

JUDGE: Hold it! Hold it! Are you just informing us that your Uncle is deceased?

HIM: Yes Sir.

HIS LAWYER: Objects!

JUDGE: Overruled, your client informed everyone that his Uncle had deemed him sterile. We have to know exactly how was he deemed sterile.

I have two questions for you: Question number one: Were you snipped?

HIM: ________ (looked confused)__________

LAWYER: My client is not an animal!

JUDGE: It’s called a vasectomy! Did you or did you not have this procedure done? YES OR NO?

HIM: No

JUDGE: What was your sperm count?

HIM: I never counted, never looked to see them.

(People in courtroom laughing)

JUDGE: You just told everyone in the courtroom that you were sterile. I need to know the sperm count, documentation of proof that you are sterile.

HIM: __________________

Lawyer: Objecting

JUDGE: Overruled, your client constantly makes these claims that he’s sterile! I am ordering proof of your client being sterile.

You, Sir? How did your Uncle confirm or acknowledge you were sterile? Please tell us.

HIM: Well, when I was a teen, my Uncle caught me jacking myself off. He told me because I was doing that and if I kept doing it I would become sterile! So there’s your answer.

JUDGE: _________ (his FACE was priceless) ______________

His Lawyer: ________ his jaw drops _______________

(People snickering and laughing)

Judge court orders him to an Urologist, and approves of child support temporarily for the sum of $xxxx a week. The final amount will be determined after the Urologist’s report.

::::::::::::::::::::: FOLKS! PLEASE DO NOT BELIEVE EVERYTHING THAT’S SAID IN YOUR FAMILY! THERE ARE THOSE WHO WILL REALLY BELIEVE STUFF LIKE THIS! :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

US Missiles STRIKE Russia! Army Colonel Reveals What Happens Next

Three months after adopting our 12 month old daughter, we finally got her case file. It was supposed to come with her, so to speak, but these things are always messy. We knew she had been removed from her birth parents as they had somewhat low IQs, criminal histories, and were unable to care for her, despite major assistance including 24 hour in-home carers (this was not a possible permanent solution). So we were nervous, but we decided to put our names forward to adopt her.
We were chosen and had experienced a chaotic but deliriously happy three months with a little 1 year old dynamo – she had some quirks, but was overall a happy, friendly wee girl.

And then the report arrived and shook us to the core.

She’d experienced sustained and high levels of in-utero drug and alcohol abuse (marijuana, synthetics, meth).

She had witnessed frequent physical abuse – dozens of police reports, both parents beating each other.

The real soul-destroyer? She’d experienced severe physical abuse at the hands of her birth father, between the ages of 2 and 7 months – until the 24 hour care started and he did it in front of them. Her crime? Not lying perfectly still while getting her diaper changed.

The birth mother stayed (and is still with) that horrible man, despite losing her daughter. She still has visitation rights and we are constantly abused by the birth father, but he does not have visitation rights at the moment and hopefully never will, but we can’t guarantee it.

it sickens me, that anyone would hurt my precious bubba. But now we knew why she freaked out when my husband tried to change her diaper.

Taiwan is a PROVINCE of China, UN said it loud & clear on 2024/5/23. Taiwan is China’s internal affairs. If you are a foreigner, dont spend any time to think about Taiwan. China will take care of Taiwan.

Aviation art various

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The Time Thief

Submitted into Contest #251 in response to: Write a story about discovering a lost manuscript. It can be from a famous (or infamous) author, or an unknown one. view prompt

Jim LaFleur

It was a night draped in the deception of stars over Baltimore, 1840, where shadows fell like cloaks over cobblestone streets. Dr. Simon Dorset emerged from the obscure folds of an alley, the hum of his time machine dissipating into the ether of history. He adjusted the lapels of his meticulously chosen 19th-century attire, feeling the weight and wonder of epochs as he tread discreetly among the citizens of the past.His ebony walking stick clicked rhythmically against the stones, a metronome to his swirling thoughts. This was not merely a visit; it was an anachronistic pilgrimage. Simon’s destination tonight was more elusive and intoxicating than any artifact—a meeting with the enigmatic Edgar Allan Poe.A glance at his pocket watch reminded him of time’s cruel precision, especially for one stolen from another era. He allowed himself a brief moment to jot down observations in his leather-bound journal, noting the gaslight that flickered like ghostly sentinels guiding his path.As he entered the local tavern, a hubbub of raucous laughter and smoky whispers washed over him. He absorbed the milieu, each detail a precious nugget of information. The patrons, swathed in the comfortable drab of labor and the occasional flash of foppish textile, provided a carousel of character study. Edgar Allan Poe was a frequent visitor here—an icon whose conversations might reveal more than his written words ever could.Positioning himself at the bar, Simon sipped a drink, his eyes and ears open, scrutinizing each face and catching snatches of conversation that danced on the air. His guise as a visiting publisher from England seemed impermeable as he matched the locutions and cadences of his surroundings.His opportunity arose when a man of unmistakable countenance stepped through the doorway. Edgar Allan Poe, known by portrait and prose, moved with a somber grace, his eyes holding an unearthly fascination. Simon initiated a dialogue, discussing the philosophical quandaries inherent in modern Romantic literature—a surefire way to pique Poe’s interest.Poe’s response was immediate and intense, providing a fertile ground for deeper discussion. “Ah, sir, you understand the darkness of the soul entwined with the light of creativity,” Poe remarked, his voice tinged with a melancholic timbre. Their conversation quickly moved from the public earshot to the intimate setting of Poe’s study.The study was a chaos of inspiration—papers strewn like fallen leaves in autumn, books stacked in teetering columns of thought. Simon’s heart raced as he eyed the manuscripts cluttering the desk. In a moment of distraction for Poe, his gaze fell upon a specific stack of papers penned in a hurried yet deliberate script.Topics and metaphors unknown to the scholars of Simon’s time beckoned from those pages. The lure of academic glory flickered before him, stirring a tempest of ethical and temporal dilemmas. His plan emerged almost fully formed—a theft that would echo through the centuries but could brand him an eternal brigand in the annals of time.Weeks passed, and a cordial invitation to a social gala at Poe’s abode presented the perfect milieu for his surreptitious intent. Under the guise of evening air necessity, Simon navigated back to the tempest of paper and ink. The manuscript was now in his grasp, a treasure far more potent than mere gold. Yet, in his haste, Simon’s modern smartphone—a slab of technology utterly alien to the 19th century—slipped from his pocket, left on Poe’s mahogany desk. 

With a swirling cloak and a heart pounding against the corset of his own deceit, Simon returned to his era, leaving behind an anachronism that would unravel time’s tightly knit fabric.

 

The morning sun, indifferent in its rise, found Edgar Allan Poe in contemplative solitude. As light spilled across his desk, the unusual sheen of the abandoned smartphone caught his attention. It lay there, stark and intrusive among the soft yellowing papers of his literary endeavors. Curiosity, that relentless driver of human behavior, prompted Poe to reach for the device, his fingertips brushing against the cold, smooth surface. The screen flickered to life at his touch, illuminating his face with a pale, eerie glow.

 

Simon, safely ensconced back in his time, felt the immediate ripple of his accidental influence. The Baltimore he returned to bore scant resemblance to the one he had left. Buildings bristled with unfathomable technology, the skyline jagged with the spires of progress grown wild, fed by an anachronistic seed. His stomach churned with the realization that history had veered catastrophically off course.

 

Poe, meanwhile, was originally viewed as the harbinger of this new era. Word spread through the city with the speed of fire through dry timber. The enigmatic device held secrets of light and knowledge, screens within screens—miracles undreamed of even in the fevered pitches of the most fantastical literatures.

 

It wasn’t long before Poe was thronged by the curious and the ambitious, their minds alight with possibilities. Inventors, scholars, rogues—they all wanted a piece of the future unveiled. Each touch, each interaction spun a new thread of history, weaving a tapestry far removed from the one Simon knew.

 

Back in his altered present, Dr. Simon Dorset was consumed by an urgent need to correct this unintended aberration. The historical and cultural legacy of Poe, once defined by his mysterious and macabre tales, was now overshadowed by a technological boom he had unwittingly initiated. Simon’s own research spiraled into obsolescence; the Poe he revered was lost to a world dazzled by premature progress.

 

The gravity of his error was a weight he could barely sustain. Turning to his colleagues and historical chronicles yielded only scant mentions of Poe—the poet and author were eclipsed by Poe, the accidental father of a technological revolution. Simon’s isolation grew, paralleled only by his desperation.

 

Resolving to undo the harm, Simon reactivated his time machine, dismissing the cascade of warnings displayed by the machine’s diagnostics. The temporal navigational systems, designed to prevent precisely such paradoxes, blared their reluctance in stark red warnings across the interface. But Simon pushed forward, driven by a near-mad obsession to restore the literary giant’s legacy.

 

As the machine whirred to life, encasing him in a cocoon of pulsating energy, Simon felt the pull of temporal forces contorting the fabric of reality. A misstep in calculations, coupled with the machine’s strained capabilities, wrenched Simon from his intended course. The world around him blurred—an array of colors and sounds, history replaying all its possibilities simultaneously.

 

He found himself trapped, a ghost in the looping scenes of his interactions with Poe. Each cycle through the loop sharpened his understanding of the cascading consequences of his actions, yet he remained powerless to intervene directly. His presence was spectral, an observer cursed to watch his folly unfold in perpetuity.

 

Amidst the ceaseless cycles, a flicker of anomaly caught his attention. Brief moments appeared where versions of himself overlapped—past, present, and future converging. It was an unintended side effect of the time stream’s fracture, a shimmering crack in the oppressive wall of endless repetition.

 

With renewed purpose, the Simon Dorsets of different times began to recognize each other. An understanding sparked between them, each iteration contributing his unique perspective on the predicament. Together, they constructed a plan—a message ensconced within the digital confines of the smartphone, coding it into the metadata of the device. A cryptic puzzle designed for Poe’s keen and curious mind, leading him to restore the timeline undisturbed by technological marvels.

 

The contriving of the message was meticulous, a maneuver engineered with the precision of a master clockmaker. Hidden within the coding, Simon embedded the instructions—a route back to temporal stability, crafted specifically to attract Edgar Allan Poe’s intrigue with cryptology and the unknown. It was more than just a recovery mission; it was an appeal to Poe’s intellectual appetites, a call to explore and unravel the mystery set before him.

 

The loop provided Simon endless opportunities to refine his approach, each iteration fine-tuning the message embedded in the strange artifact from the future. When Poe finally discovered the embedded instructions, hidden amidst what appeared to be common applications, it struck a chord deep within his writer’s soul—a mystery woven by fate or circumstance, begging to be unraveled.

 

His brows furrowed, Poe set about deciphering the cryptic clues with a zeal that had often been reserved for his literary compositions. The message guided him to a precise location, an act in itself harmless but pivotal—a secluded corner of the Baltimore docks at dawn, where the water whispered secrets to those patient enough to listen.

 

Meanwhile, Simon watched these moments unfold, his heart thrumming with a mix of hope and apprehension. The plan was simple yet reliant on Poe’s willingness to engage with the unknown without fully understanding the forces at play. It was a gamble, staking everything on the intellectual curiosity of one man.

 

As the appointed time approached, Poe, cloak billowing behind him in the pre-dawn wind, approached the designated spot. He carried the device, its screen dim in the soft light. Following the last of the instructions, he left the smartphone nestled within an old fish crate, obscure and seemingly inconspicuous.

 

The crate, Simon knew from his meticulous studies of the timeline, would be destroyed in a warehouse mishap mere hours later, the smartphone lost forever, consumed by the flames—an incident that originally occurred without historical significance but now charged with the weight of resetting history.

 

Simon’s vision blurred, the looping finally slowing, reality solidifying with the promise of release. As the time streams began to align, the world around him steadied, the oppressive weight of temporal distortion lifting. The colors and sounds that had haunted his senses merged into the rightful hues of his time.

 

When he next stepped out of the machine, the air was different—fresher, somehow more correct with the essence of his original timeline. Buildings, people, the very atmosphere buzzed with subtle but significant changes back to the familiar. Poe’s literary legacy had been restored to its rightful place, his technological influence erased as if it were merely a ghost story, fittingly ephemeral.

 

Simon Dorset found himself back in his study, the walls lined with books, the familiar scent of paper and ink a soothing balm. His heart, though weary from the journey, was buoyed by the restoration of history. His respect for the delicate fabric of time had deepened, each tick of the clock now a reminder of the dance between chance and choice.

 

He resumed his academic pursuits with a newfound reverence for the past’s fragility and the unknown variables of history. The world around him continued, blissfully unaware of the catastrophe averted, a tale of what-if preserved only in the quiet confines of Simon’s experience.

 

In his diary, filled with the wild scribblings of his adventure, Simon penned a final note—an acknowledgment of the power held by both time and literature, the twin forces of creation and destruction. He wrote, “In our pursuits, we must tread lightly upon the tapestries of the past, for they are woven with the threads of potentiality, delicate and profound.”

 

The sun set over a world untouched yet changed in ways unseen, as Simon Dorset closed his diary, the book of his extraordinary journey through time concluding with the silent assurance that some mysteries, like some manuscripts, were best left unaltered.

ESCALATION: Russia Has Surrounded The US With Dozens Of Submarines Armed With Nuclear Missiles

You might think so but no. There’s an episode of Rick and Morty that explains it. Rick makes all every $1 of their currency worth $0.

So what?

In a nuclear war, all money has suddenly become worthless, most nation states have ceased to exist… as a result what maintains discipline and for men to follow orders?

To king and country? (or whatever system your country is based on) – It no longer exists

Punch clock soldiers – Money no longer exists as anything useful.

Those things maintain order usually. So the only thing enforcing order is violence and cram a bunch of men with limited food supply strict discipline and nothing to fight for in a nuclear sub… and that may easily collapse.

Imagine you’re the captain of a boat like that.

You order a crewman to do something, he said no why should I?

Whatcha gonna do? Shoot him? Put him in the brig?

Well, I had a client walk in my office with a Quarterpounder box from McDonald’s. He told me that the day before he ordered a sandwich with no pickles and he mentioned it to the order taker and the shift manager, mentioning he was deathly allergic to something in the juice. He was assured that there would be no pickle on the sandwich

When his sandwich came up he was given the sandwich and shown on the paper taped to the box that the sandwich had no pickle.

45 minutes later after having his stomach pumped he discovered he had ingested 3 pickle slices.

The emergency room report indicated that the stomach pump had removed the contents of his stomach which included the 3 pickle slices.

The manager had offered the kid 100 bucks for the box and some coupons.

I called and spoke to the owner’s attorney and offer to settle out of court for 15000 dollars ( the client needed 10K for something). I told him the claim would be worth far more in front of a jury. We had 3 witnesses that heard the kid very clearly mention he was allergic and could die if he ate a pickle.

Long story short, I had a 15,000 dollar McDonald’s check delivered to my office by a courier by the close of business 3 days after the incident. I took my 33 percent and for a couple of phone calls and a letter. Got paid 5K .

One absolute truth, that most people rarely consider, is that the world during the first millennium was a very, very dark place after nightfall. Even though cities existed during that thousand year epoch…the world descended at night into a darkness we would have trouble comprehending. Even the interiors of people’s homes were pitch black except for minuscule pools of dim candlelight. Other than vague moonlight, the only available light was small oil lamps or camp fires…as well as torches. But that would have only been a tiny glow in a vast blackness. It’s why the world is still diurnal. For the entire history of our species, humans have slept at night because of the often impenetrable blackness and the lurking danger that used the darkness for cover.

The beauty of this situation was that the clear night sky would be ablaze with stars and planets, galaxies, moons and comets, asteroids and meteors. It was so vivid that ancient people not only looked at the night sky with curiosity, they studied it. They had naturally “dark adapted” eyes. The night sky was so clear that they became familiar with it to a degree we can’t imagine. They understood its contours, they had names for everything. The Milky Way has a name like an avenue because it was an imaginative route to be traveled and understood. It wasn’t just something out there to be feared…it was fully present and revered. It is ironic that the more we know the less we see. Our modern astronomers and telescopes are reaching back nearly to the Big Bang and the beginning of time in our universe, able to literally see the invisible, but most of modern humanity is wholly unacquainted with our own cosmic neighborhood because the night sky has been rendered almost meaningless.

Ancients the world over “read” the night sky and correlated it to the passage of time and the change of seasons and they wove its meaning into their daytime pursuits. As agriculture took root and cultures shifted from nomadic to agrarian with the consequence being the establishment of settlements and villages, then towns and then cities. The night sky helped guide the people towards accurate planting and harvesting routines. They were inextricably linked to the heavens in a way that we aren’t. It fueled mysteries that defied knowledge and it became central to ancient religions. But it also hastened the growth of civilizations. The insatiable ability for humankind to not just acquire knowledge but to actually imagine it into reality is nothing less than miraculous.

It was the night sky and people’s confident knowledge of it that guided the early Polynesians to populate the Pacific. The Sun and stars kept the Mediterranean abuzz with international trade and it was the night sky that possibly guided the Chinese and Leif Erikson to cross vast oceans to plant seeds of new cultures on new continents and sowed the seeds of destruction of many civilizations in the “new world”. Early mariners charted their courses by the night sky as well as in tandem with the motion of the sun. The sky told them when the easterlies would blow them across the Atlantic or when to hunker down because the coming season would produce no trade winds. Across the Islamic world, founded in the first millennium, the daily calls to each of the five prayers are timed to the position of the sun yet the Islamic calendar is lunar based. The modern constellations descend from such ancient observations. Our current map of the sky and its constellations is a living record of the past. It’s right there, in front of us. Our earliest mechanical clocks, dating to the second millennium, had hands that circled the dial like the earth spinning on its axis, counting the beats of time like metronomic slices of the universe itself, cosmic ideas turned into lyrical realities, existence made measurable and certain.

Modern society has virtually erased the night sky with twenty four hour global economies and the glowing lights that illuminate such economies…but our modern world owes a huge debt to the wisdom that was gleaned from a strikingly visible universe that held profound existential meaning to our ancient ancestors. It was during the first millennium that the knowledge of the previous several thousand years began to coalesce. They beheld the vastness of the night sky and tried, with wonder and great success, to figure out our place in that cosmic firmament.

Do yourself a favor…drive out to Joshua Tree National Park…or Anza Borrego State Park east of San Diego…or deep into the backcountry wherever you are…pack a tent, some blankets and pillows and whatever gear will help you survive the night…lie back under the ceaseless inky dome, listen to the coyotes yelping and bickering in the darkness and then watch the spectacle unfold above and all around you. It is breathtaking. It is humbling. It is the infinite. It’s what the night sky looked like a thousand years ago for everyone. See what they saw ! Carpe Noctem !

Let’s end with this sunshine…

https://youtu.be/10-1tVj8m_8

Rasta man

Many people are ignorant bigots.

The Chinese know exactly what kind of government they have. It’s not a dictatorship. It’s a uniquely Chinese form of democracy that actually works in the best interest of the Chinese.

Nobody is suggesting that Chinese democracy would work for other countries. It’s entirely up to other countries to decide how they want to be governed.

It is enough that the Chinese like their system. The following shows you how they think, especially in comparison to the Americans and British…

According to 𝗟𝗮𝘁𝗮𝗻𝗮’𝘀 𝗗𝗲𝗺𝗼𝗰𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘆 𝗣𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗲𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗜𝗻𝗱𝗲𝘅 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰, 79% of Chinese believe their nation is democratic while only 57% of Americans and 55% of British do.

Another example, according to the 𝗘𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗺𝗮𝗻 𝗧𝗿𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟰, 85% of Chinese trust their government while only 40% of Americans and 30% of British do.

Another example, according to the 𝗢𝗽𝗲𝗻 𝗦𝗼𝗰𝗶𝗲𝘁𝘆 𝗕𝗮𝗿𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯, 76% of Chinese trust their politicians while only 29% of Americans and 20% of British do.

Another example, according to 𝗜𝗽𝘀𝗼𝘀’ 𝗚𝗹𝗼𝗯𝗮𝗹 𝗛𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗶𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟯, 91% of Chinese are happy with their life while only 76% of Americans and 70% of British are.

Another example, according to 𝗮 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝘃𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗞𝗲𝗻𝗻𝗲𝗱𝘆 𝗦𝗰𝗵𝗼𝗼𝗹 𝗶𝗻 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟬, 95.5% of Chinese are satisfied with their government.

Another example, according to 𝗜𝗽𝘀𝗼𝘀’ 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗿𝗶𝗲𝘀 𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝘂𝗿𝘃𝗲𝘆 𝗳𝗿𝗼𝗺 𝗡𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗯𝗲𝗿, 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟵, 95% of Chinese believe their country is on the right track and moving in the right direction while only 41% of Americans and 23% of British do.

Another example, according to 𝗮 𝟮𝟬𝟭𝟵 𝗨𝗖 𝗦𝗮𝗻 𝗗𝗶𝗲𝗴𝗼 𝘀𝘁𝘂𝗱𝘆, 80% of Chinese are happy and enjoy financial security.

I’ve gone back 5 years but I could go further back if you like.

Why Russia Loves Cats

French Bread Taco Pizza

Take your favorite taco ingredients, and layer them up on French bread. So easy and tasty, too!

67881t1
67881t1

Prep: 20 min | Total: 30 min | Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 loaf French bread
  • 1/2 pound ground beef
  • 2 tablespoons Old El Paso™ taco seasoning mix (from 1 ounce package)
  • 1/3 cup water
  • 1 (16 ounce) can Old El Paso™ refried beans
  • 1 yellow bell pepper, cut into 3/4 inch pieces
  • 1/2 cup thinly sliced red onion
  • 1 1/2 cups (6 ounces) shredded Mexican cheese blend
  • 1 cup shredded lettuce
  • 1 tomato, chopped

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Line large cookie sheet with foil.
  2. Cut bread in half lengthwise, then in half crosswise. Place on cookie sheet, cut sides up.
  3. Place in oven to lightly toast, about 5 minutes.
  4. In 6 inch skillet, cook beef over medium-high heat until brown, stirring frequently; drain.
  5. Add taco seasoning mix and water; cook until thickened.
  6. Spread refried beans over toasted bread.
  7. Top with beef mixture, bell pepper, onion and cheese.
  8. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until cheese is melted.
  9. Top with lettuce and tomato.

Notes

For a quick and easy dinner, cook the ground beef mixture ahead, and refrigerate. Then all you have to do at serving time is top the French bread, and bake.

"There is a saying I learned in Spanish, and the English translation is: 'People confuse being good with being a fool.'

What that means with respect to Russia is the West has interpreted Russia's patience and tolerance up to this point with outrageous actions (on the part of the West) as a sign of weakness (on the part of Russia).

That's a potentially fatal mistake.

Both President Putin, Foreign Minister Lavrov, and Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov have said the same thing this week.

It is not just a coincidence that they've made those statements—it's a coordinated message that they're sending to the rest of the world that they’re not going to take it anymore.

The United States and the West are now on notice that any further attacks inside Russia are going to be met with a response.

Some of the options Russia has, and I don't know if they're going to pursue these, but just let me lay out a couple of options they have:

They could supply more advanced missiles and rockets to insurgent groups fighting ISIS and U.S.-backed forces in Syria and could strike U.S. military bases or the bases of those entities in the Kurdish region that the United States is supporting.

They could also help the Houthis not only with improved weaponry that could actually take out a U.S. ship, but also provide intelligence that could be used, doing the same thing for the Houthis that the United States is doing for Ukraine.

Now, Russia recognizes that it’s moving steadfastly forward in its campaign to demilitarize Ukraine—denazify Ukraine—and they recognize that in the process, they’re weakening NATO.

Yet, what does NATO do in response? They’ve issued statements this week about preparing for their ground troops to fight Russia on the ground.

They're crazy.

This is madness—absolute insanity being talked about by people that you think would have more sense, but they obviously don't.

I'll put it very clearly: the United States and NATO, if they decide to enter a ground war with Russia, will lose badly.

It may end up with the complete destruction of Europe.

Europeans need to sit down and count the cost—is it worth it?

Because Russia's not seeking to conquer Europe; Russia's seeking to have its national territory respected and not have to face, every year as has been the case for the last 16 years, NATO and the United States conducting military exercises on the borders of Russia.

When you're sitting there as a Russian looking at it, you see these as hostile and intended to come after you.

Given Russia’s history, where they’ve been invaded from the West four times over the last 212 years, they're not sitting back ignoring that—they’re taking it seriously.

These are continued provocations by the West. There’s no justification for it.

The West keeps coming up with justifications, trying to portray Russia as this country trying to recreate its 'empire.'

We talked about this before in our previous discussions.

Name me all of the colonies that Russia established in Africa—none.

It was Germany, France, Italy, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands that were establishing colonies and exploiting the people in Africa. Same thing in Asia.

Vietnam was under French control, and one of the reasons the United States initially got involved with Vietnam was more to try to help preserve French influence, not to free the people from communism.

That was the big lie.

The U.S. is trying to use the same playbook both with respect to China and to Russia, portraying them as these authoritarian societies hellbent on conquering the world.

It’s a lie.

It's the West that has been involved in unrelenting wars over the last 70 years around the world, killing millions of people in countries such as those in Africa, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya.

It has to stop.

That's what you're seeing coming from the Russians—they're saying it’s going to stop.

They’re not going to sit back and be a punching bag.

With this feeble-minded president heading up the United States, it’s quite clear to the world that the United States is being led by an incompetent."

Excerpt from remarks by Larry Johnson, former CIA analyst and U.S. State Department employee, in an interview with Nima R. Alkhorshid, June 9, 2024.

Starbucks in CHINA is BIGGER & BETTER (They Even Have Alcohol)

On our 3rd date, I asked my favorite question at this point in a new relationship: “If you could be or do anything in the world you wanted—age or training not an issue—what would you be or do?”

I had asked this question several times, and was always fascinated by how it was received. Some had never asked themselves this question, much less be asked by someone else; a few couldn’t even wrap their heads around the question. This fellow was stunned and was quiet for a long time. Then he gave an astounding answer:

An unemployed prince.

He went on to explain why: A prince has plenty of money to pursue his own interests, princes get to travel and meet lots of new people, they have no major decisions to make, and princes get to dress well. I asked about the “unemployed” part: most princes don’t have any official duties, especially if not in line for the throne (and he didn’t want to be a prince in line for the throne).

I found his answer charming. Clearly, this was an imaginative individual to be able to think so far outside of the box, and it supported how much I was enjoying his differing perspectives on movies, music, and art. He had established his own business that was successful (I worked in the security of corporate) in the creative advertising/publishing field. He was great fun and a delightful companion, a treat from my previous husband, while seeming to share many of the same values on the important items.

Arm in arm, we headed down life’s path; dated, moved in together, married, then started a family. Life was good; if as busy and as stressful as any family of two young children, two careers, and two aging parents can be. Then our paths diverged.

When the youngest was 3, he closed the business, got his real estate license and “worked” not earning a dime. Bills to pay and full-time parenting two opinionated, busy kids weren’t near as much fun as pursuing one’s own interests. Struggling with it all, I could not understand how the same individual who professed to want what we had could also not do the everyday work that was required to keep it all going.

Then I remembered his answer on our 3rd date. As Maya Angelou said: “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”

Mexico’s New President is a “Nightmare for the Right”

Heard of the Vietnam War?

Now, how did a war in Vietnam cause Laos, a neutral country in the conflict, to become one of the most bombed nations in the history of warfare?

American munitions dropped half a century ago continue to maim and kill Laotians today.


Answer that, and one will be more than halfway through the answer for the question posed.


In a conflict escalation, the rules flip. Supply lines will be targeted. Long range sensor support will be targeted. Foreign airfields from which flights originate will be targeted. Belarus may open a second front. Tactical nukes will enter the battlefield.

Russia has mobilized over a million men, NATO hasn’t.

Russians see this conflict as an existential threat to the Russian nation. NATO doesn’t.

Russians have give the mandate to Putin to pursue victory. NATO haven’t.

It is a question of attitudes—which side has the resolve and grasp of reality.

The West does not need to fight Russia, whereas Russia has no choice but to fight the West.

As Sun Tzu said, “know yourself and your enemy, and you will not lose in a hundred battles”.

Gen Z Is Finally Paying Taxes And They Are Pissed

My father died in 1982 when I was 8. I was an only child and I was ‘daddy’s girl’. His death wasn’t sudden-as he was diagnosed with cancer in June and had passed away in November. Even at an early age I knew the permanency of death. My great grandmother died a year prior to his passing and my grandmother passed away in June of 1982. I was in school when my dad died that morning. I was using the restroom and when I turned to open the stall door, I caught a whiff of Aqua Velva (for those who don’t know- it was a popular aftershave in the 70s and 80s and it has a very DISTINCT odor). Well, that is what my dad wore. And I loved the smell of his cheeks! So when I caught that distinct odor I was expecting to see him outside the girls’ bathroom. I walked out and didn’t see him. So I walked down the hallway hoping he was looking for me. When I finally went back to class, my teacher called me up to her desk and informed me that I had been gone for about 15 minutes and she said it is 9:55, you left here at 9:40. I went back to my desk and tried to focus on school. I kept thinking about smelling that odor. At 10:30 my mom came to the classroom and my teacher went out to speak with her. After a while my teacher came in and quietly got my coat and lunchbox and walked me out into the hallway. I didn’t say anything to my mom and when we got to the stairway landing, I asked if daddy had died. She turned and stooped down to my eye level and with tears in her eyes quietly said yes. I asked her when he died. And she replied at 9:45. I truly believe that he wanted to let me know that he was there in that bathroom and it was his time to go. Every so often I will catch a whiff of Aqua Velva for just a slight second and I would like to think that it’s dad checking in on me.

Russian Naval Group off Melbourne, Florida Coastline!

Russian Naval Group off Melbourne, Florida Coastline!

Russian navy off FL large
Russian navy off FL large

The Russian Navy has a grouping of warships off the east coast of Florida, between Melbourne and Vero Beach.

One of the vessels involved is a Russian nuclear submarine (FILE PHOTO – Not actual image from Florida):

Russia Sub Kazan
Russia Sub Kazan

 

That submarine is being tracked by a US Navy P-8 “Poseidon” Sub-Hunter (FILE PHOTO: – Not taken over Florida)

P 8 Poseidon Sub Hunter
P 8 Poseidon Sub Hunter

While these vessels from the Russian Navy are hanging out off Florida, the Russian Navy frigate Admiral Gorshkov – capable of carrying Zircon hypersonic missiles, arrives in Havana:

Russian Frigate Havana
Russian Frigate Havana

Hal Turner Remarks:

Just so all of you grasp what’s taking place here, the United States and our NATO vassals, are making more and more trouble for Russia, inside Ukraine.

So now Russia is demonstrating to us they can make trouble for us . . . . HERE . . . . inside the United States.

While what __we__ are doing in Ukraine is causing the actual deaths of Russian soldiers, Russia has not —- yet —- decided to bring death to OUR people.   Notice I said “yet.”

This is what the US Congress and the US President are causing.  While THEY play “the sport of Kings (war” in Ukraine, we the American people are the ones they are endangering HERE, inside our own country.

If we get attacked here, inside America, by Russian forces, the sole and exclusive BLAME rests on members of the United States House of Representatives, the United States Senate, and the present illegitimate occupant of the Presidency.

They have been warned over and over again by Russia, to stop what they’re doing.  Yet Congress not only ignores the warnings, they up-the-ante and do even worse things.  Sooner or later, once the Russians have had enough, they’re going to show us that they are as powerful – if not more – than we are.

Remember that when you see your member of Congress slithering out from a nuclear bunker after it’s all over . . . . and hold them accountable right then and there.

Douglas Macgregor Exposes: “Russia Unveils New Hypersonic Missile, threaten to U.S & NATO”

BRICS+, Lavrov & Escobar

Levity happens!

Nizhny Novgorod hosted the BRICS Council of Foreign Ministers in its new enlarged format. A Joint Statement will be issued.

According to the MFA’s website, Lavrov met on the sidelines with all BRICS+ FMs and many from invited nations like Laos and Thailand. We’ll begin with Lavrov’s opening remarks:

Dear colleagues and friends,

I would like to open our meeting with a minute of silence in memory of the untimely departed President of Iran Sayrahmad Raisi and our colleague Khalid Amirabdollahian, and once again offer my deepest condolences to the people of Iran and the families of the victims. I ask everyone to stand up.

***

Dear Colleagues,

We are glad to welcome you to one of the oldest cities in Russia, in Nizhny Novgorod, the history of which dates back more than 800 years. Today’s meeting will certainly leave a special mark not only in the annals of the city’s leading international events, but also in the BRICS itself. For the first time, a meeting of the heads of the foreign affairs agencies of the association is being held in a new expanded format.

The expansion of BRICS is a clear confirmation of the process of formation of a multipolar world order. New centers of globally significant political decision-making are emerging from among the states of the Global South and East, from the states of the World Majority. These countries are in favour of a more just way of life based on the sovereign equality of States and the diversity of civilizations.

The transition to a new world order (we have already seen this) will take a whole historical era and will be thorny. The United States and its allies do not abandon their attempts to maintain their elusive dominance and slow down the objective processes of the formation of multipolarity. At the same time, they are using economic instruments as a weapon – through sanctions pressure and financial blackmail, they are trying to influence the choice of development models and trading partners by sovereign states. The West does not shy away from forceful methods. Examples are known to everyone: Yugoslavia, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Ukraine and a number of other countries. And this is just the “tip of the iceberg”.

Recent international events have “thrown off the masks” from those who have hitherto claimed almost the exclusive right to define “universal values” under the guise of a “rules-based order.” Supporters of this concept are trying to impose norms and mechanisms of interaction that are beneficial only to them, to replace equal and honest dialogue with narrow coalitions that act behind closed doors and arrogate to themselves the right to speak and act on behalf of the whole world.

Russia, like the countries of the world majority, stands for a fairer world order based on the sovereign equality of states and taking into account the balance of forces and interests. Together, we aim to promote a future-oriented constructive international agenda. An important task in this context is to strengthen the role of interstate formats that advocate collective approaches to international development.

BRICS is one of those associations where the principles of equal cooperation are implemented in deeds, not in words: mutual respect, openness, pragmatism, solidarity, continuity and, of course, consensus. I am convinced that BRICS is driven forward by the wind of change, because its role in solving global problems will only increase. This is also confirmed by the steady growth in the number of countries showing genuine interest in joining the work of our association. In this context, we expect productive discussions at a separate session today with the participation of a number of like-minded BRICS countries.

Dear Colleagues,

Russia’s chairmanship is increasing momentum. About 70 events have already taken place, and more are to be held. We note the constructive participation of all partners in them. Work has begun on key Russian initiatives in the transport sector, the creation of the Contact Group on Climate and Sustainable Development, the Working Group on Nuclear Medicine, and the Medical Association.

Active work is underway to implement the decisions of the Johannesburg Summit in 2023, in particular, in terms of improving the international monetary and financial system and developing a platform for settlements in national currencies in mutual trade. In accordance with the instructions of the leaders at the Johannesburg summit, we are paying special attention to coordinating the modalities of establishing the category of partner states of the association.

We have an extensive agenda. It raises issues that will directly affect the future world order and the formation of its fair foundations. [My Emphasis]

A great deal has occurred under BRICS auspices before and during SPIEF as this news roster with links in English details. Pepe Escobar’s “The Three Key Messages From St. Petersburg to the Global Majority” is a very link heavy report published today in SputnikGlobe. Here are what Pepe describes as Putin’s three main messages:

Message Number One:

President Putin, a “European Russian” and true son of this dazzling, dynamic historic marvel by the Neva, delivered an extremely detailed one-hour speech on the Russian economy at the forum’s plenary session.

The key takeaway: as the collective West launched total economic war against Russia, the civilization-state turned it around and positioned itself as the world’s 4th largest economy by purchasing power parity (PPP).

Putin showed how Russia still carries the potential to launch no less than nine sweeping – global – structural changes, an all-out drive involving the federal, regional, and municipal spheres.

Everything is in play – from global trade and the labor market to digital platforms, modern technologies, strengthening small and medium-sized businesses and exploring the still untapped, phenomenal potential of Russia’s regions.

What was made perfectly clear is how Russia managed to reposition itself beyond sidestepping the – illegitimate – sanctions tsunami to establishing a solid, diversified system oriented towards global trade – and completely linked to the expansion of BRICS. Russia-friendly states already account for three-quarters of Moscow’s trade turnover.

Putin’s emphasis on the Global Majority’s accelerated drive to strengthen sovereignty was directly linked to the collective West doing its best – rather, worst – to undermine trust in their own payment infrastructure.

And that leads us to…

Glazyev and Dilma rock the boat.

Message Number Two:

That was arguably the major breakthrough in St. Petersburg. Putin stated how the BRICS are working on their own payment infrastructure, independent from pressure/sanctions by the collective West.

Putin had a special meeting with Dilma Rousseff, president of the BRICS New Development Bank (NDB). They did talk in detail about the bank’s development – and most of all, as later confirmed by Rousseff, about The Unit, whose lineaments were first revealed exclusively by Sputnik: an apolitical, transactional form of cross-border payments, anchored in gold (40%) and BRICS+ currencies (60%).

The day after meeting Putin, president Dilma had an even more crucial meeting at 10 am in a private room at SPIEF with Sergey Glazyev, the Minister for Macro-Economy at the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU) and member of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Glazyev, who had previously provided full academic backing to the Unit concept, explained all the details to President Dilma. They were both extremely pleased with the meeting. A beaming Rousseff revealed that she had already discussed The Unit with Putin. It was agreed there will be a special conference at the NDB in Shanghai on The Unit in September.

This means the new payment system has every chance to be at the table during the BRICS summit in October in Kazan, and be adopted by the current BRICS 10 and the near future, expanded BRICS+.

Now to…

Message Number Three:

It had to be, of course, about BRICS – which everyone, Putin included, stressed will be significantly expanded. The quality of the BRICS-related sessions in St. Petersburg demonstrated how the Global Majority is now facing a unique historical juncture – with a real possibility for the first time in the last 250 years to go all-out for a structural change of the world-system.

And it’s not only about BRICS.

It was confirmed in St. Petersburg that no less than 59 nations – and counting – plan to join not only BRICS but also the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

No wonder: these multilateral organizations now finally have established themselves on the forefront of the drive towards the multimodal (italics mine) – and to quote Putin in his address – “harmonic multipolar world”.

The above is only about half of Pepe’s report; click the link for more. Pepe also links to the session he was directly involved with at his Telegram and the speeches others gave besides himself.

More on the BRICS+ meeting will be presented tomorrow along with the Joint Statement. Readers should know there are two BRICS TV stations online, Russian and English, with both having dropdown menus for Chinese, Spanish and Portuguese.

Happens all the time. When I was at airborne school at Ft. Benning in the summer of 1992, a female ROTC cadet in my squad who told me on the first day she was into triathlons and on a “low-salt diet” collapsed at the end of rather mild training day on the last day of Ground Week. It was hot and humid, as is typical in summertime in Columbus, Georgia, but we were on the last day of Ground Week, which meant it wasn’t that physically intense. However, she succumbed to the rigors of the training and climate — many arrive at Ft. Benning without being acclimatized to the heat and humidity — and practically collapsed. Our Black Hat instructor ordered her to sit done on the side of the sawdust pit and “drink more water” while the rest of the squad continued practicing PLFs (Parachute Landing Falls). By the end of the training day (around 17:00), she couldn’t even stand on her own, so the Black Hats ordered her to drink more water, while they summoned a medic to look at her. She feebly attempted to drink more water, but was at that time almost unconscious, so most of it dribbled all over her face and uniform when she tried to drink from her canteen. The medics came and had to help her walk, as she couldn’t walk on her own. We didn’t see her for the rest of the day, and come Monday morning, with the start of Tower Week (week two of three), we were told that she wouldn’t be joining us as she was now in intensive care at Martin Army Medical Center, the on-base hospital at Ft. Benning. We asked what was wrong with her, and he said she almost died because of Hyponatremia. Apparently, she became so over-hydrated from drinking too much water combined with excessive sweating due to the high-levels of physical exertion and lack of climate acclimitization, that she depleted herself of all her electrolytes and salts that are required to be alive. I also knew that she was skipping meals and the few times that she was eating at the d-fac (dining facility), would typically forego the main entree for just a small salad. (I knew this b/c she often sat next to me in the mess hall.)

Shorpy

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Popular Plastic Surgeries for Asian Women: White Worship, Mix Blood & Abomination

Ty Warmbrodt

To: Frank DelaneyEditor@thewashingtonpost.comSubject: anthropological finds linking past to the futureI, Dr. J. Emmit Hardy, Professor of Archeology at the University of Montana, former navy seal and marine sniper, stumbled upon something I should not have and in the excitement of the moment, I took it. Now they are after me. I don’t know who they are, other than the keepers of secrets, the guardians of mysteries. Could be the Vatican or some other religious organization, a collaboration of world governments, or some secret society. I probably sound out of my mind but wait until I tell you what I have uncovered. 

It all started in what I like to call the broiler, a.k.a. southern Iraq, in an area once known as Mesopotamia. It was in that barren landscape that I and a group of archaeologists came upon a rather suspiciously lonely looking hill, more of a large mound I would say. We had started excavating as soon as the Iraqi government lifted their ban on archeological excavations. After years of careful digging, we dug down where we found an entrance to an upper chamber that led down to the heart of what we presume will be a ziggurat. In the lowest portion of the structure, we found what we named the Library of the Anunnaki, the collective name for the Sumerian gods. The library consisted of hundreds of stone tablets, most of them broken, some shattered, even to the point of dust. I found one large piece, rough in my hands, chipped, not without its damage. I blew it off and noticed it was written in cuneiform. The translation goes:

 

Origin………. Primitive species DNA spliced………. producing male child………. male children produced and raised to farm and………. production cumbersome………… remove Y………. first female child for reproduction presented to first male……… uprising………. Usurpers cast out of gardens and mines………. debauchery throughout………. murder………. war………. Meteor causing mass………. Fleeing planet, will return.

 

Obviously defaced, what I concluded from the text was that the text was not written by human hands. Rather, it was a document left for us by who early humans considered gods. It tells us that we originated from a primitive species (apes, or Cro-Magnon Man perhaps, maybe even some early form of homo sapiens) having their DNA spliced with that of an alien race, producing a child that we now call a human being. Given the success of the experiment, they created more, until they figured natural reproduction to be a viable process. These children grew up working on farms and in mines for the alien race. It goes on to say there was an uprising. Some were cast out where they lived wildly without law or rule. A lot of text is missing, but it goes on to explain the flood was caused by a meteor, probably crashing in the sea nearby. At that time, the aliens left, promising to return. My biggest question is, return to do what?

 

This tablet destroys god-centric religions, proving that we were created through the advanced science of an alien race, putting an end to ancient beliefs. It would also take away power from institutions such as the Catholic Papacy. Old traditions will die hard, but the word of God will no longer hold credence in the minds of the majority again. This is a world altering find. That is why I had it carbon dated for its legitimacy, taking it to an old friend.

 

Dr. Phillip Baker at Oxford University did some carbon dating. The tablet predates the Sumerian use of cuneiform for literary purposes by a thousand years. We realized then that it was truly an extraordinary find. While Phillip and I celebrated with the champagne he had been saving for such an occasion, men in black suits paid us a visit trying to seize the tablets. With a distraction made by Dr. Baker, I escaped out the back. From the hallway I heard shots fired. I knew my dear friend’s fate and feared it would be my own if I did not run. I assumed knowing what was on the tablet put my life in jeopardy. I was pursued by them and what looked like a private security detailed, armed, muscular men dressed in black. They chased me through the streets at high speed. I was scared out of my mind, even taking to the sidewalk to avoid stoplights. I made it to the airport where I evaded capture and caught a plane back to the states. The tablet is now hidden safely where no one will ever find it.

 

I still wanted answers. Why are they returning? When will they return? Why were they here in the first place? I knew of one place that had the answer. I put to use all my military training to sneak into the most heavily guarded military base in the US. I broke into Area 51. I’ll save you the details. It’s a process of inching through the desert dressed like a bush for three days, monitoring security patterns, cutting chain-link, and choking people out for their security badges and weapons, turning up loose ends, until finally I found what I was looking for – the Area 51 Library.

 

The library is a massive collection of written statements, voice recordings, pictures, videos, blueprints, documents on everyone who has claimed abduction or sighting, documentation of people who have been abducted or visited and have no recollection of it, and archeological evidence. The most disturbing artifact I found was a 1950’s recording of an alien being questioned under duress giving the same account on the tablet, filling in the gaps.

 

Apparently, there is another planet in our solar system that passes the sun every six thousand years. They survive in biodomes but require extra fuel and food that they get from earth when their planet gets within flying distance. The air on earth is toxic to them, so they wear suits, some wear armor over their suits resembling animals known to humans to strike fear in them. They have a spy station on the dark side of the moon where they operate out of one of their biodomes, watching us, occasionally experimenting on us, or coming down to replenish food.

 

The Alien went on to explain that they tried to quell the violence within humans, who murdered each other and started wars for territory, before the flood. As they watched on over the centuries, war and hate spread like wildfire across the land as humans flourished. They decided since humans still believed in gods, they would send them a representative from God.

 

He explained the insemination of Mary and the resurrection of the man we call Jesus – he was revived from a coma using advanced medical procedures and lifted up in a small spy shuttle under the cover of smoke. He is at the station now and will return with the others when the other planet draws near. His purpose was to teach people how to live peacefully, choosing people to carry on his work after he was gone, to spread it around the world. The alien said things didn’t go as planned, calling us wicked and violent. His final statement was that when the planet returns, those who fight will be destroyed and those who don’t will be enslaved.

 

Area 51 is only guarded by the US. They are not running it. I was discovered by a man with a heavy European accent and, of course, dressed in a black suit. I grabbed the recording and fought my way past him, then through three levels of private security before getting past the military detail on the outside. I’m sure these men know where I live. I’m taking a big risk contacting you, but the public deserves to know the truth. They need to prepare to fight the coming onslaught. So far, governments have kept everything a secret, selling off technologies like cellular communications and nuclear power. I have the recording safely hidden away with the tablet. I have the evidence if you want to proceed with the story.

 

To: J. Emmit Hardy

drdigit@gmail.com

Reply: anthropological finds linking past to the future

 

Dr. Hardy, I’ll be honest with you, if it weren’t for your credentials and the background check I ran on you, I would be telling you to take this to the tabloids. Since you are an esteemed professor of sound mind with a military background, I suppose your story warrants some attention. Meet me at Malone’s at noon on Thursday for lunch. They are usually busy so there should not be any scenes made in there if you are followed. Try not to be followed. Bring the evidence. Depending on it, we will see where we go from there.

 

———————————————————————————

 

When I saw Dr. Hardy walk into Malone’s that day, he was not what I was expecting. I was looking for an unshaved old man with wild hair acting a little erratically. No, this was your Indiana Jones type professor, middle aged, lean and sun kissed. Far from erratic, his eyes scanned the restaurant before approaching me with a duffle bag.

 

“Mr. Delaney?”

 

“Yes, that’s me.”

 

“Emmit Hardy. Glad you took the time to see me.”

 

His eyes missed no detail of what was going on around him. He was even checking reflections in the smallest objects to see behind him.

 

“Did you bring the evidence?”

 

The first thing he pulls out is an old reel-to-reel and lays it on the table as he goes for the next item in his bag.

 

“What am I going to do with that?”

 

“Listen to it.”

 

“I thought you would have recorded it on your cell phone.”

 

“I wasn’t about to take a cell phone into Area 51. You’re the news. Don’t you have a reel-to-reel player?”

 

“Well, yeah, back at the newsroom.”

 

“Here, check this out. Carefully.”

 

He displays a bundle of rags gentler than if it were a baby. He unwraps it to reveal the stone tablet, chipped and cracked with a series of markings on it that meant nothing to me.

 

“I’ll have to take your professional word on what that is. What I’m interested in is on that reel. But first, we eat.”

 

“I don’t think we have time for that, Frank. Be casual, but two guys in black suits and sunglasses just walked in.”

 

“Relax, guys in suits eat here all the time.”

 

“Not with security details. Let’s head out the back. Slowly, they haven’t made us yet.”

 

I thought Emmit might be schizophrenic, but when we got out to the alley, two guys were waiting with guns. Now, I would love to give you a play-by-play of what happened next, but it happened too fast. Somehow, Emmit managed to disarm and knock unconscious two men in a matter of seconds. He took their guns, putting one in his waistband.

 

“Can I have a gun?”

 

“No,” he chuckled.

 

We ran to the news building. When we got there, we were spotted by more guys in black suits and their security details. We took off in the other direction with them on our heels. I pulled out my cell and made a phone call.

 

“Susan, I need you to get those old duffle bags out of storage and five other people. Here is what I need you to do.”

 

Emmit and I took the long way to The Lincoln Memorial. There, we ran into six people with bags similar to the one Emmit was carrying. We all bumped and shoved, switching bags several times. When we were done mixing up the bags, some took cabs, some ran, some strolled. They grabbed Marcus and checked his bag, only to find gym clothes and a phone book. Later that night, Emmit and I met with Susan to retrieve the real bag. She asked what was going on, but all I could tell her was to read the morning’s paper.

 

Emmit was able to sneak me pass some of the men in black suits and their muscle so I could write up the story. I wrote frantically, the words flowing from my mind straight to the screen. I barely got it through pre-press in time to make the front page. I rushed it out to the printers myself. They were in the middle of putting on the plates that were supposed to run and were not thrilled about the last-minute change, but now people know where they came from and can prepare for the future.

Australia Forces China To Dump Rare Earth Assets, But No Refund For US Submarine Deal?

32 New Ukraine Soldiers Cross Hungary Border to Escape War Mobilization

32 New Ukraine Soldiers Cross Hungary Border to Escape War Mobilization

Yesterday, a Ukrainian GAZ-66 truck with “military” license plates illegally crossed the border into Hungary from the Zakarpattia region of Ukraine. Local border guards found the truck and detained 32 Ukrainian citizens.

It turned out, the truck was filled with new Ukraine Army “Recruits” – men who had been forcibly grabbed off streets in Ukraine, held for three days, given uniforms, and sent to the front lines to die.

The men took a military truck across a field in Zakarpattia, entered Hungary, and surrendered to Police in Hungary.

The government of Hungary has granted the men asylum.

Hal Turner Opinion

The slave state of Ukraine is the very worst place in the world with absolutely no human rights at all.

These people are being hunted by army slave catchers and sent to the front to be exterminated.

The average Ukrainian’s worst enemy is the war criminals in Kiev and the war criminals of NATO who fund and facilitate their slavery and extermination while pretending that Ukraine is a free democracy,  and not the only cause of the conflict that is going on.

Imagine what the U.S. will be like when Biden orders the draft for WW3 against Russia/China. There will be some crazy things going on; can’t wait for the chaos.

Someone should make an “Escape from Ukraine” movie as a sequel to Escape from L.A. from the ’90s. I’d watch it.

It’s Official: Russia ready to strike NATO airfields hosting Ukrainian jets

It's Official: Russia ready to strike NATO airfields hosting Ukrainian jets

andrei kartapolov large
andrei kartapolov large

F-16 fighter jets and any airfields they are based at will be legitimate targets for the Russian military if they participate in combat missions against Moscow’s forces, the chairman of the Russian State Duma Defense Committee, Andrey Kartapolov, has warned.

The comments come as Kiev prepares to receive the first delivery of US-made fighter jets from its Western backers, after Ukrainian pilots were trained to fly them.

In a statement to RIA Novosti published on Monday, Kartapolov clarified that if the F-16s “are not used for their intended purpose” or are simply held in storage at foreign airbases with the intent to transfer them to Ukraine, where they will be equipped, maintained, and flown from Ukrainian airfields, then Russia would have no claims against its “former partners” and would not target them.

However, if the jets take off from foreign bases and carry out sorties and strikes against Russian forces, both the fighter planes and the airfields they are stationed at will be “legitimate targets,” according to Kartapolov.

“As for [our ability] to shoot [them] down, we can shoot down anyone, anywhere,” the MP insisted.

Kartapolov’s statement comes after the chief of aviation of Ukraine’s Air Force Command, Sergey Golubtsov, stated in an interview with Radio Liberty on Sunday that some of the F-16 fighter jets donated to Kiev by the West would be stationed at foreign airbases.

He explained that only a portion of the jets would be stationed directly on Ukrainian territory, corresponding to the number of pilots trained to operate the aircraft. The other jets would be kept in reserve at “safe airbases” abroad so that they are not targeted by the Russian military.

Golubtsov stated that so far four countries have agreed to transfer F-16s to Ukraine, namely Belgium, Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands. While he did not specify exactly how many aircraft would be donated, he claimed it was between 30 and 40 planes, with potentially more to come in the future.

Meanwhile, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has also warned that Moscow would perceive the deliveries of F-16 fighters to Ukraine as a nuclear threat, given that the jets have long been used as part of the US-led bloc’s joint nuclear missions. 

At the same time, the minister stressed that the US-designed jets would not change the situation on the battlefield, and would be shot down and destroyed like any other foreign weapons supplied to Ukraine.

Crispy Sweet Onion Pizza

Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435
Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435

Ingredients

  • 1 (12 inch) pre-baked pizza shell
  • 2 1/2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 pound sweet onions halved, sliced vertically
  • 1/4 cup sun-dried tomatoes (packed in oil), chopped
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried basil
  • Salt and pepper, to taste

Ingredients for Caramelized Onion Pizza

  • Pizza Dough – Use your favorite pizza dough here. I always love the chewy / airy texture of this No-Knead Pizza Dough.
  • Extra Virgin Olive Oil – Instead of sauce, this pizza is brushed with a generous amount of extra virgin olive oil before the toppings are added. The oil helps the crust to get a deep golden brown color and adds a subtle, fresh olive flavor. 
  • Caramelized Onions – See below for all the details on making caramelized onions. They are sweet and savory and make a super flavorful base for this pizza.
  • Gruyere Cheese – The first time I had Gruyere cheese I was blown away by the rich, deep flavor of this Swiss-style cheese. It’s slightly crumbly and has a nutty, tangy flavor. It costs a bit more than mozzarella (which is more common on pizza), but seriously delivers on flavor.
  • Fresh Rosemary – The savory flavor of fresh rosemary fits really well here. Be sure to remove the leaves from the stem and discard the stem (it’s too tough to chop along with the leaves). You can skip the rosemary or use another fresh herb – fresh thyme is great here.

Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435 2
Caramelized Onion Pizza 3435 2

How to Caramelize Onions

  1. Slice the onions into slices that are about 1/3” thick. (No need to be super precise here, but if the slices are too thin they won’t develop all the flavor that comes with the low, slow cooking process. If they are too thick, they’ll take forever to cook. Try to strike a balance.)
  2. Heat a heavy-bottomed skillet over medium-high heat. Add olive oil and butter (use about 1 tablespoon of each per pound of onions).
  3. Add the onions to the skillet and cook, stirring constantly, until the onions start to soften, about 5 minutes.
  4. Reduce the heat to low.
  5. Season onions with salt and some sugar (about ½ teaspoon of each per pound of onions). (Note: Sugar is optional here, but can help to draw out the natural sugars in the onions and speed the caramelization process along.)
  6. Continue to cook the onions, stirring occasionally, until they are very tender and deep golden brown, 25 to 40 minutes more. (Important: If the pan starts to look dry or the onions start to burn, add a splash of water. You may need to do this several times throughout the cooking process.)

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
  2. Place pizza shell on baking sheet.
  3. Sprinkle onions on pizza and drizzle with olive oil; top with sun-dried tomatoes.
  4. Sprinkle with herbs, salt and pepper.
  5. Bake until onions just begin to brown, about 10 minutes.

Russia already has enough “hyenas” to deal with in Europe, Vladimir Putin has told his Zimbabwean counterpart

Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Zimbabwean counterpart Emerson Mnangagwa shared a laugh during a tense debate on nuclear diplomacy on Friday, as they discussed how to deal with the real and metaphorical “hyenas” threatening their countries.

During a plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), political scientist Sergey Karaganov urged Putin to update Russia’s nuclear doctrine to allow nuclear retaliation against countries that strike Russia with conventional weapons.

With multiple Western nations – including the US, France, and Germany – recently giving Kiev permission to use their missiles in long-range strikes on Russian territory, Karaganov argued that these countries have grown complacent and need to be reminded of Russia’s nuclear capabilities.

“They have gone mad, especially the Europeans,” he told Putin. “It’s how animals behave. If there is a herd of hyenas or wild dogs and you’ve got a stick, you can keep them at bay. But there’s a high chance that they will tear your clothes, and if you get tired they will bite you to death. If you can kill a couple of them then they will disperse.”

“President Mnangagwa knows about the behaviour of hyenas,” Karaganov continued, before asking the Zimbabwean leader: “Do you agree Mr. President, that this is how you deal with hyenas?”

“We do have lots of hyenas in Zimbabwe, but we keep them in the national parks,” Mnangagwa replied. “We have no problems with them, but they breed a lot, and if there is anybody who wants them, we are ready to donate,” he added, to laughter from the audience.

“Well we’ve got hyenas of our own in Europe,” Putin responded.

Russian nuclear doctrine has not changed since 2010. It allows for the use of atomic weapons in the event of a nuclear first strike on its territory or infrastructure, or if the existence of the Russian state is threatened by either nuclear or conventional weapons.

“I do not believe that it is the case now,” Putin said, adding that Russia “needs no nuclear weapons to achieve victory” in Ukraine. However, Putin noted that changes to Russia’s nuclear doctrine “are not ruled out.”

18 Years Later, I Finally Get how Idiocracy Came True – The 2024 Election

The kitties were reverting to savanna life while munching the ham chunks

When I lived in Massachusetts I would occasionally buy some real treats for my cats.
You see, the local supermarket had a deli counter, and what they did was get these huge sausages of cheese and meat… looking like hotdogs only much, much larger, and then slice them into small slices.

70115 Ham Bolo Large 300x216
70115 Ham Bolo Large 300×216

Eventually the long sausages of meat and cheese would be down to the very end, and I… well… I could buy those ends really cheaply.

50005 Bologna 1
50005 Bologna 1

And so I did.

I bought cheese ends, beef ends, all kinds of baloney, and pepperoni ends. I bought chicken and turkey ends. It was a great way of stretching your budget.

IMG 3987 thumb[5]
IMG 3987 thumb[5]
IMG 3986 thumb[1]
IMG 3986 thumb[1]
My kitties loved the ham. I would get the end piece and cut it into little rectangular chunks. They would purr and growl at the same time while eating them. OMG!

cat1
cat1

I suggest you all give this a try with your kitties.

Keeping in mind that no matter how much they love it, you can only use it as an occasional treat. There’s lots of preservatives, and salt in these meats. So do not make a habit of it.

cat2
cat2

But every now and then… yeah. Let them enjoy!

Today…

Your Worth Is Inherent, Unchanging, and Absolute

 

Your worth is not up for debate. It’s not some fickle, fleeting thing that can be given or taken away by anyone else. It’s not dependent on your achievements, your relationships, your bank account, or your fucking Instagram follower count.

No, my friend. Your worth is inherent, unchanging, and absolute. It’s baked into your very being, as much a part of you as your DNA or your undying love for pizza. And anyone who tells you otherwise is full of shit.

But I know, I know. It’s easy to let the world convince you otherwise. We live in a society that’s constantly trying to sell us the idea that our value is contingent on external factors – that we’re only as good as our last success, our latest conquest, our most recent “before and after” photo.

And when we buy into that bullshit, when we let our self-worth be determined by the opinions and expectations of others, we set ourselves up for a lifetime of anxiety and self-doubt. We become so fucking desperate for validation that we twist ourselves into pretzels trying to please everyone, convinced that if we just work hard enough, achieve enough, sacrifice enough, we’ll finally be worthy of love and respect.

But that’s a trap, my dear. A soul-sucking, joy-crushing trap that will leave you feeling emptier than a bag of kale chips at a Super Bowl party. Because the truth is, no amount of external validation will ever fill the void of self-doubt if you don’t first believe in your own inherent worth.

And I get it. Believing in yourself can be hard as hell, especially if you’ve spent years marinating in the toxic stew of self-loathing and insecurity. But it’s not impossible, and it’s sure as shit not optional if you want to live a life that feels authentic and fulfilling.

So how do you start cultivating that unshakeable sense of self-worth? How do you begin to internalize the truth of your own value, even in a world that’s constantly trying to convince you otherwise?

It starts with a choice. A conscious, daily, moment-by-moment choice to reject the bullshit narratives that tell you you’re not good enough, and instead lean into the radical truth of your own inherent worthiness.

It means standing in front of the mirror and telling yourself “I am enough” over and over again until it starts to feel less like a lie and more like a battle cry. It means surrounding yourself with people who reflect back your own brilliance, who celebrate your quirks and flaws and all the things that make you uniquely you. It means learning to treat yourself with the same kindness and compassion you’d offer a beloved friend, even on the days when you feel about as lovable as a dumpster fire.

And most importantly, it means letting go of the idea that your worth is something that can be earned or achieved or bought or sold. It means embracing the truth that you are valuable simply because you exist, because you are a one-of-a-kind expression of the universe in all its chaotic, messy, beautiful glory.

Because here’s the thing, my love: you are a fucking miracle. You are a walking, talking, breathing example of the incredible resilience and creativity and magic of the human spirit. And no matter what anyone else says, no matter how many times you stumble or fall or fuck up, that essential truth remains unchanged.

You are worthy. You are enough. You are inherently, unequivocally, absolutely valuable, just as you are.

So fuck the haters. Fuck the doubters. Fuck anyone who tries to convince you otherwise. Your worth is not up for debate, and it never will be.

Embrace that truth. Lean into it. Let it be the foundation upon which you build a life that feels authentic and fulfilling and joyful as hell.

Because you, my dear, are worth it. And that’s the fucking tea.

"The United States spends close to $900 billion a year on defense. Over the last 20 years or so, it has spent over $16 trillion.

It far outstrips the next nine or ten countries in terms of the amount of money committed to the defense industry.

Yet, the defense industry from a manufacturing point of view is actually one of the least competitive and least productive of them all.

Much of the defense industry in the United States remains locked into technologies that look more like a 1960s factory than a 2020s factory.

Much of the more modern elements of the manufactured outputs from the defense industry are overpriced and over-engineered, with poor implementation and poor market fit.

Now, I use economic terms, but in a military sense, the poor market fit is evidenced by military equipment that's not doing its job in the environment it was designed for—namely combat.

From the point of view of the US defense industry, the experiences in Ukraine at the moment, together with some of the experiences in the Middle East, particularly the Red Sea, show that the investments made in the defense industry aren't delivering a product-market fit that is actually meaningful.

Transforming that requires not just more money. More money doesn't necessarily resolve the problems.

The problems are deep—they go to research and development, design, systems, and know-how.

The number of engineering students graduating each year in the US is substantially fewer than the number graduating each year from China, for sake of argument.

Russia was underestimated for the past 25 years––described by the late Senator McCain as a gas station masquerading as a nation––despite the fact that the Russian economy and Russian society were growing the number of engineering and STEM graduates generally during the post-Soviet period and raising the level of overall economic complexity of that economic structure.

You don't change or turn around 40 to 50 years of hollowing out in four to five years, particularly if your political economy remains unbalanced and controlled by the branches of finance capital.

Finance capital is the most dominant branch of capital in the American political economy.

It has dominated industrial capital now for the best part of 30 to 40 years.

Until that changes, you're unlikely to see a dramatic turnaround in American manufacturing capability."

main qimg ff00c5b4a7fba8e2a35d59ac0c13b4ef
main qimg ff00c5b4a7fba8e2a35d59ac0c13b4ef

Excerpt from remarks by Australian scholar Warwick Powell, adjunct professor at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane and senior fellow at Taihe Institute in Beijing, in an interview with Lena Petrova, June 1, 2024.

The Rise of Neocons: How and Why They’re So Successful

Not in a picture I took but in one I found online that very few people would understand. This is something that most people wouldn’t typically notice. But, because of my work, It really shocked the hell out of me.

Specifically the minor detail in this picture

main qimg 40d02c058ed8c12d67dffb8037f867e4 lq
main qimg 40d02c058ed8c12d67dffb8037f867e4 lq

From this article(Chernobyl’s Enduring Legacy) on Slate.

Believe it or not, it’s not the creepy doll, or the gas mask lying on it or anything in the background that is scary. Rather it’s that big donut of metal the doll is resting on.

Do you know what it is?

It’s a stator core from a fairly large AC induction motor. Probably around 22kW-55kW (30–75HP). Like so:

main qimg 453ba2b7663324e56fd814e36a29c686 lq
main qimg 453ba2b7663324e56fd814e36a29c686 lq

Well, most of a stator core really. Let’s look at the same core in side the motor. See if you can spot what’s missing.

main qimg e9939b5cd3a2d68331b77ea987bb51a0 lq
main qimg e9939b5cd3a2d68331b77ea987bb51a0 lq

That’s right, copper wire. What the above picture shows is that somebody went into Pripyat, if not Chernobyl itself, took this motor to one of the abandoned apartments and stripped the copper wire out of it to sell for scrap. They have probably done the same in all the abandoned buildings in Pripyat if not Chernobyl itself.

Oh, and the Ukraine does export scrap metal. So…may want to invest in a Geiger counter when buying new electronics, because that metal could have gone anywhere and been used in nearly anything.

Houthis in Yemen Claim Second Attack on USS Eisenhower PLUS, “Successful Hits” on U.S. Destroyer

Yemen map large
Yemen map large

The group calling itself Houthis, who run the country of Yemen are publicly claiming they have launched a SECOND attack upon the aircraft carrier USS Dwight D. Eisenhower, and also scored “Direct hits” on a U.S. Destroyer.

Here is the Official Statement from the Yemen Houthis:

“The Yemeni Armed Forces, by the grace of Allah, carried out six military operations as follows:

The first operation targeted the American aircraft carrier “Eisenhower” north of the Red Sea with several missiles and drones. This is the second attack on the carrier within 24 hours.

The second operation targeted an American destroyer in the Red Sea, hitting it directly with several drones.

The other four operations targeted ships belonging to companies that violated the decision to ban entry to the ports of occupied Palestine, including the ship (MAINA), which was targeted in two operations in the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea.

The third operation targeted the ship (ALORAIQ) in the Indian Ocean.

The fourth operation targeted the ship (ABLIANI) in the Red Sea.

The operations successfully achieved their objectives, with precise and direct hits, by the grace of Allah.”

Short answer: The Q angle.

I’ll start off by saying “average” woman and “average” man. There’s an awful lot of women who can run faster than I can.

Men’s bodies tend to be straight up and down. Relatively narrow hips so the thighs are close together.

Women tend to have wider hips because they have babies. The tops of the thighs tend to be angled such that they are further apart at the thigh and narrower at the knee. This difference is the Q angle. Wide Q angles are inefficient for running and also place a strain on the knee. Narrow Q angles that you find in men means that the energy expended goes into running forward. Wide Q angles? I’m sure you’ve walked behind plenty of adult women. They have a characteristic wobble as they walk because their hips tend to rotate. For a given amount of energy expended in running, some of it ends up rotating the hips and thighs rather than being used to move their bodies forward.

main qimg 134a154e81bdc8b79bdbcd9afa439cbe pjlq
main qimg 134a154e81bdc8b79bdbcd9afa439cbe pjlq

Here’s the gold medal German relay team. Look at how relatively narrow their hips are compared to most women you see. This gives them a tremendous advantage when running. Unless she is very, very good, a woman with very wide hips is unlikely to compete in running at this level.

Vintage illustration various

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019299fbb6455497def509ad0a55137e

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8f120b61a8471948df7b1991245b0ed4

cbe04a7328aa3132489ae8f2ab1c62d7
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The problem is the remedy proposed, which is the imposition of a docking fee in all US port of calls, calibrated to the cost of goods carried, targeting China-built ships exclusively. The remedy aims to collect at least $1m per ship docking to feed a fund benefiting shipbuilding and metalworking unions.

That’s robbing Peter to pay Paul, and unprecedented. It is also illegal, because of the brazen, targeted nature, just like the blanket tariffs announced under Donald. That is why the WTO’s dispute settlement mechanism remains paralyzed.

This is also a tariff on tariff for goods originating from China carried on board China-built ships.

Where is this going to end? Are they going after China-built containers next, imposing a handling fee for every container based on cost of goods carried?

I won’t be surprised if this passes, because America is willing to throw in the kitchen sink just to “win”. It will stop at nothing, not even general war.

Is it a good idea, economically? No, because it will reshape trade flow, while China-built ships maintain a healthy economic edge over rivals. It just adds to the cost of doing business with the US, making the consumer pay more to benefit the pockets of a small number of union workers, funding the retirement of baby boomers. There is no way to revitalize ocean-going shipbuilding stateside with the cost structure today. The Jones Act, after all, dates back to 1920, and what has a century of protectionism bought?

Sweet and Sour Hawaiian Beef

Hawaiian Beef Stew 13
Hawaiian Beef Stew 13

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1/3 cup brown sugar, packed
  • 1/3 cup cider vinegar
  • 1 (8 ounce) can pineapple chunks, drained and reserve juice
  • 3 tablespoons soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon fresh minced garlic (or to taste)
  • 3 to 6 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 1/2 pounds boneless beef sirloin (cut into 1 1/2 inch pieces, or use a cut of beef of choice)
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried red pepper flakes (or to taste)
  • Kosher or sea salt and pepper
  • 3 cups baby carrots, cut in half
  • 1 large onion, cut into about 1 inch pieces
  • 3 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 3 tablespoons cold water
  • 1 large green bell pepper, seeded and chopped

Instructions

  1. In a small bowl combine brown sugar, cider vinegar, reserved pineapple juice, soy sauce and garlic.
  2. Add/stir in the brown sugar until completely dissolved; set aside.
  3. Heat oil in a skillet.
  4. Season the beef cubes with salt and pepper then brown in hot oil on all sides.
  5. Place the browned meat in the slow cooker along with the red pepper flakes.
  6. Add in carrots and onion to the slow cooker.
  7. Pour the pineapple juice mixture over the veggies and beef.
  8. Cover and cook on LOW setting for 7 to 9 hours or on HIGH setting for about 3 to 4 hours, or until the meat is tender.
  9. Increase the heat to HIGH.
  10. Dissolve the cornstarch and cold water in a small bowl.
  11. Add in the cornstarch mixture, pineapple chunks and green pepper into the beef mixture in the slow cooker.
  12. Continue to cook for about 30 minutes, or until the green pepper is crisply tender and the juices are thickened.
  13. Serve with cooked rice.

One of the most puzzling mysteries of Britain is why the British don’t know how to eat seafood.

The United Kingdom is an island country, surrounded by sea and separated from the European continent by only one tantalizingly narrow strait of water. The British Channel is not only not dangerous, but also very close to Calais and Dunkirk in northern France. However, when the weather is good, you can see each other across the sea.

The French are good at food and have abundant seafood. The French word for seafood is literally translated as “Fruits of the Sea” (fruit de mer), which shows how much the French value seafood. Today, oysters, which are generally regarded as delicacies, were initially promoted to the world under the leadership of the French.

In addition to France, Spain and Portugal in southern Europe have exquisite seafood meals, such as grilled octopus, garlic shrimp, Spanish paella, and Portuguese bread crab. These are all proof that these cusines are not inferior to that of China in their ultimate pursuits of colour, flavour and texture.

Another example is Japan, which is an island country like the United Kingdom. The Japanese are extremely particular about fish, shrimp and shellfish. Japanese people eat seafood, but their use of condiments is very restrained and simple, which is similar to Cantonese cuisine. Guangdong’s steamed fish creates a umami flavor in addition to the five flavors of salty, sour, sweet, bitter, spicy. No wonder Hong Kong people frown when they see the British eating fish, which is first frozen and then fried or baked.

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main qimg 4f9f243253826cceb63e41e58b31cb5d

Even Britain’s former colonies, Australia, New Zealand, and the eastern United States, at least know how to eat lobster. However, Britain had two to three hundred years of sailing experience and had colonies all over the world, but it never learned to eat seafood. The cultural elite in British history have tirelessly pursued knowledge in various fields, such as Dr. Sloane, the founder of the British Museum. He is good at everything from astronomy to geography, flowers, birds, and insects. He did his best to collect all kinds of novel and interesting materials, but he had nothing noteworthy regarding food. He had no interest in it, and never published any insights about food.

Compared with Europe, Britain likes to call itself “eccentric”, but even in the eyes of most people, it is indeed weird to live by the sea without knowing how to eat it.

Time’s Unlikely Gift

Submitted into Contest #251 in response to: Write a story about discovering a lost manuscript. It can be from a famous (or infamous) author, or an unknown one...

Todays SF addition. -MM

Anna stood, suitcase in hand, in front of the old white farmhouse, as the caseworker drove away, kicking up dust in her wake. The front door swung open and Aunt Betty stepped out, hand raised in greeting.

Having been raised the only child of a mother who preferred alcohol to her daughter, Anna was quite used to being dropped off at unfamiliar homes, with unfamiliar people. She never quite felt like she belonged anywhere. This was no different. Aunt Betty, as she was known, was a sweet old lady who opened her home to many foster kids over the years, having never had any children of her own.

“Oh Anna, darling! Please come in, come in! Here, let me get that for you.” She said, reaching for my bag. “We’ve been waiting for you, dear. I am so sorry for everything you’ve been through to get you here. You must be tired.” Anna simply nodded and followed closely behind her.

“Are you hungry, dear? Or would you like to go straight up to your room? It’s just this way.” Without even waiting for an answer she ushered her towards the stairs to the second story. There were photos on the walls, most of them crooked and layered with a thin film of dust, but it was evidence of a loving home. Something she was in desperate need of.

Upstairs, Aunt Betty set her bag down on the bed and gave her a chance to get settled. “I’ll be downstairs if you need anything, Anna. Please, don’t be shy.” She closed the door gently on her way out.

Anna took a deep breath and glanced around, taking in her surroundings. A simple room, adorned with a bed and a dresser. It would certainly do.

She unpacked what little belongings she had, placing her clothes in the dresser, and a couple of old paperback books on the bedside table. While sliding her suitcase under the bed, she noticed something unusual about the flooring. To get a closer look, she scooted as far under the bed as she could. Several of the boards, about two feet in length, were cut on either end.

“Anna, darling!” Startled, she knocked her head against the bed frame as Aunt Betty called from downstairs. “Are you hungry, dear? I’ve made up some food for you!”.

“I’ll be right there…” She called back, as she slid out from under the bed, making a mental note to come back to investigate.

 

**

 

Later that night, sufficiently full of home-cooked food, Anna made her way back to her bedroom. She was looking forward to being able to relax alone; moving into a new place was always so mentally exhausting. But first, she had to know what, if anything, was up with the floor. As quietly as she could, she slid her bed over a few feet. Kneeling on the floor, Anna pulled up on the boards one by one. Underneath, to her satisfaction, was a wooden crate and an old typewriter. Wiping some of the dust off the crate, she noticed the letters E.A. written on top. She wasted no time in taking the lid off. It was filled with aged paper. Journal articles, by the looks of it. After a quick glance she noticed the first page was dated October 15, 1918. She rifled through the crate, looking at the rest of the dates. They didn’t seem to be in any particular order, as if someone had haphazardly collected the papers and threw them in.

She found the page with the earliest date, figuring it would be best to read chronologically, and started reading.

 

**

 

October 15, 1905 

 

Dear reader, 

I hope this finds you well. It is my birthday… Today I am fifteen years old. Ma and Pa gifted me this typewriter. They’ve known of my fondness for stories since I was a small girl. I couldn’t be more thrilled to have opened it. I have decided to write journals to document my life. Maybe someday you will find it. Maybe someday I will read them back and realize what a wonderfully exciting life I have lived. Oh, how I long for adventure. I have always had the sense that I do not belong here… like I am destined for more than to grow up and become a housewife, on a farm in the middle of Virginia. Perhaps I will become a famous author one day! I will write again soon. 

 

Best, 

E.A. 

 

**

 

Anna read through the journal entries one by one. Many of them were so worn with age that they were difficult or impossible to read. A few partially eaten by mice. The mystery author wrote almost daily. Occasionally she tried her hand at fictional stories. Many times she wrote about her life: her friends, books she was reading, plans she had for the day, and fond memories that she wanted to remember.

 

**

 

October 16, 1895 

 

Do forgive me if this does not make much sense. I can hardly believe it and I myself experienced it. My last entry was last night, I wrote about my fifth birthday. Shortly after writing that, I extinguished my candles and went to sleep. When I woke up this morning, I was not where I was supposed to be. I am home, yes. But everything is different. I should say, everything is as it once was. Ma and Pa look different, much younger. There is a little girl, strangely resembling me as a child. They are treating me as though I am a scullery maid. I feel like an outsider with my own family! In the kitchen, I noticed a newspaper dated October 16, 1895. It is impossible, utterly impossible! But I seem to have traveled through time. 

 

E.A.

 

**

 

Anna looked up from the page. Time travel? It was far more likely that the mystery author was simply practicing her creative writing. Fiction or not, she was grateful for this temporary escape from reality. More and more, she felt like the author was a kindred spirit. They were just words on a page, but she felt like she had found a friend. She looked up at the clock: 11:45. Her eyes were burning with fatigue. She knew she should go to bed, but she couldn’t, like a novel she couldn’t put down, she went back to the crate of papers. The next date didn’t make sense, July 30, 1862. If it was the same writer, she wouldn’t have even been born yet.

 

**

 

July 30, 1862 

 

A civil war is currently raging between the north and the south. I have been in search of an adventure, and while I have certainly found one, I’m unsure whether it is wise to be here. Danger is all around. The north seems to be prevailing. I do hope that they succeed. This is not the Virginia that I know. I have felt ashamed everyday that my ancestors are here now, fighting for their right to treat human beings as property. I have seen abhorrent things here. I am missing home, but I want to be helpful, in some way. I have befriended several wives of Union soldiers and we have been raising money and sending supplies. I am unsure where or when I will travel next. 

 

E.A. 

 

**

 

“Aunt Betty, how long have you lived in this house?” Anna asks as she pours herself a cup of coffee the next morning.

“Oh, this house has belonged to me for many years, dear. Let’s see… I think I arrived in the sixties. Yes, that’s right, I believe it was the year 1969. I met Arther shortly after and we got married, and made ourselves a nice home here.”

“I found some old things in my room… journals dated much earlier than that. I just wondered who they belonged to.”

“It is such an old house. This farm has a lot of history, to be sure. It stood here far before I came. That sounds fascinating.” She said, pouring a coffee of her own. “Where did you find them?”

“They were under my bed… someone cut a hole in the floor and tucked them away under there. I just found them by chance.”

“Oh dear, you know the furniture in this house has not been moved in many years… I suppose I forgot that it was there.”

With a warm smile, Aunt Betty made her way to the porch to enjoy her coffee in her rocking chair, just like she did every morning.

 

**

 

December 12, 1969

 

I’ve found myself in the year 1969. I’m now 25 years old. I’ve been traveling like this for many years now and I am growing weary. I am feeling more and more like I do not belong anywhere. I have experienced the impossible. I have seen incredible things, and equally as many horrible things. I long for a home and a family. I wonder what they think happened to me. By this time, they are long dead. It gives me some solace to know that as long as I have my typewriter, I can go home to them, at any point. As long as I have that, I will never truly be alone. But how long can I go on like this… with no roots in the ground. 

When I arrived here, I found myself under a beautiful willow tree. After walking a short distance I came upon a farm, with pastures and a barn and a beautiful white house with a big porch. From what I can tell it is abandoned, which is useful for me. It is a comfortable place to rest. I will write soon. 

 

E.A.

 

**

 

Anna sets down the page and reaches into the crate for the next one, but as she does she finds that it is the last entry.

“No! It can’t end like that!” She said aloud. She turned to the typewriter, looking for clues on who it might have belonged to. She clicked a few keys, testing it out. It can’t really be a time machine, she thought. With only one way to truly find out, she inserted a piece of paper, but when she tried to type, nothing happened. It was broken, and with no understanding whatsoever about typewriters, especially potentially magical typewriters, she was ill suited to fix it. As she tinkered with it, a thought suddenly came to her, “Wait… 1969… 1969!”

Anna got up to run downstairs, but as she turned around, Aunt Betty was standing in her bedroom doorway.

“My friends and family have always called me Betty, dear, but my full name is Elizabeth Alexander. By the look on your face it appears that you have put enough of the pieces together to have figured that out on your own. The typewriter has been broken for a long time. I never was able to figure out how to fix it.”

“You wrote these… it was all true.”

“Yes, somehow it is. And what an adventure it was… for a time, at least. It was lonely, though. When I got stuck here, I realized how much I missed having a family. After so many years with no home, it was time I made one.” She smiled warmly down at Anna. “I want you to know that you have a home here now, too. You always will.”

NATO: “Cyber-Attack” Now Grounds for Article 5 Collective Self-Defense. False Flag their own Countries, Blame it on Russia, then Join the Ukraine War against Russia?

The head of NATO’s military committee, Admiral Rob Bauer, has said that NATO can now declare war over a cyber attack . . .

“We have agreed in NATO that a cyber attack can, in principle, be a reason to invoke Article 5” said Admiral Bauer.

So now not only a real attack, but also a cyber attack can be a reason for a NATO Member to Declare Article 5 Collective Self Defense. The result will, of course, be all the military actions that follow.

But it’s important to find out who organized the attack. Regardless of the route, the servers and their location, and whether the countries in which these servers are located were aware of the attack, the main thing is to identify the organizer of the attack. If the attacker is unknown, you don’t have enough data [to declare war on anyone].

———

Unless you manufacture it yourself . . . .

Hal Turner Snap Analysis

For over two years, NATO has goaded Russia, trying to get Russia to attack over the ongoing NATO interference in Ukraine.  Russia won’t take their bait.

Instead, Russia is steadily destroying all the weapons and manpower Ukraine (and NATO) is throwing at them.   NATO is hamstrung; they can’t do any more for Ukraine, and Ukraine is now losing – badly.

So they seem to have come up with a nifty alternative: Cyber-Attack.

They can attack their own countries in a massive and destructive cyber-attack, BLAME IT on Russia, and then invoke Article 5, collective self defense, to enter the Ukraine war . . .  as they have been desperately trying to do for two years.

A completely, totally, FALSE FLAG “Cyber-Attack” as their basis to BLAME RUSSIA and enter World War 3.

These people, I think, are snakes.  There is apparently no low they will not stoop-to, to cause another World War.

I would describe China as a heavily technocratic Confucian-Leninist authoritarian state, ruling over a mixed economy with features of both capitalism and socialism.

But that’s really not very useful without breaking down what this means.

It’s technocratic in that most people in putative or actual positions of political authority are holders of degrees in the natural sciences or engineering, and because the political culture is still one that venerates expertise and is very solutions-driven.

It’s Confucian in the sense that the political culture still bears the imprint of the imperial civil service exam system and sees as right and natural a paternalistic bureaucracy of educated elites.

It is Leninist in the sense that it is still a single-party dictatorship with a disciplined cadre running things on the principle of “democratic centralism.” It is nominally communist, but has jettisoned most of what an “orthodox” Marxist would regard as actually communist and has retained really only Leninist political structures and a not-very-deeply held belief in Marx’s dialectical materialism as a way for understanding history.

It is authoritarian for what I would hope are obvious enough reasons: The Party utterly dominates the state, retains control of coercive forces like the armed forces, paramilitary and police, exercises considerable control over media, and suffers very little civil society to exist.

The economy is certainly mixed. Features of socialism persist, but I don’t think they compare favorably with the social democracies of Northern and Western Europe. State participation in industry is still quite substantial, even if the private sector is a larger and larger component of GDP, so it’s really premature to say that China is a fully capitalist economy. “State capitalism” is a phrase many have used, and I think it’s largely apt.

China’s leaders are pulled in multiple directions by different interests, confronting often contradictory exigencies. Some, and perhaps even most, aren’t driven by any particularly high-minded ideals and are chiefly interested in staying in power and enjoying the perquisites thereof, while others I have no doubt really do take to heart the long-term interests of the Chinese people and are motivated by an altruistic ideal of service to the country.

But mainly, China is pragmatic. Imagining for a moment that there’s a leadership that we can speak of as having some unified worldview and a shared set of priorities, that leadership is basically about the practical exercise of power toward creating a China that is increasingly wealthy and militarily powerful. It seeks to create a society with conditions that make economic development where dignity and some semblance of social justice can be had by most people. It looks for solutions that “work,” and not ones that simply conform to any particular ideology, and so it doesn’t particularly prize ideological consistency. It believes that “development is the final word” (发展是硬道理) and that that which augments wealth and power is desireable. It has abandoned its once overly-optimistic assessment of the mutability of humanity, and now acts in the belief that people don’t in fact change overnight. It will harness various forces to be found in society — nationalism, grasping materialism, religiosity, environmentalism — when those forces can be made to advance its agenda. But it has no compunction about smacking them down when they threaten the control of the Party-state.

Wine Pot Roast

210119 potroast 2
210119 potroast 2

Yield: 6 to 7 servings

Ingredients

  • 3 to 4 pound beef pot roast
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1 small onion, chopped
  • 1 (3/4 ounce) package brown gravy mix
  • 1 cup water
  • 1/4 cup ketchup
  • 1/4 cup dry red wine
  • 2 teaspoons Dijon-style mustard
  • 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/8 teaspoon garlic powder

Instructions

  1. Sprinkle roast with flour, and brown well in small amount of oil in skillet.
  2. Sprinkle meat with salt and pepper; place in slow cooker.
  3. Combine remaining ingredients; pour over meat.
  4. Cover and cook on LOW for 8 to 10 hours.
  5. Remove meat and slice.
  6. If desired, thicken sauce with flour dissolved in a small amount of water, and serve over meat.

I was at Disneyland with my best friend a few months ago. We were both in line waiting to go on the gondola. In front of us was a family of four. A mother, father, young girl (perhaps 5–7 years old) and a little boy (maybe 2–3 years old). He was probably closer to 2 because he was still waking funny and slightly wobbly.

The family was not communicating or smiling at all. Granted, I’m not the most chipper in long lines in the California sun either. But they weren’t even saying a word to each other. Clearly, tensions were high, and I understand, children can be a handful especially at theme parks.

The toddler started crying uncontrollably and grabbing his mothers leg begging to be picked up. She pushed him away, not once, but probably about ten times. Each time more aggressive than the other. He just continued to cry and tried to reapproach every time.

His dad, without saying a word, picked him up. I saw the mothers eyes roll and heavy, blatant sigh. As if she was annoyed that he got his way and got picked up, even though she made it clear she didn’t want to carry him. Eventually, his father put him down to get something from his bag. At this point he reapproached the mother, starting to cry again, and without even looking down at him she shoves this little stumbling toddler away so hard that he falls on his butt and his back hits one of the bars in the line.

Of course, he started sobbing even more. His father seemed like he didn’t want to upset the mother any further and just looked ahead. None of his parents did anything. His older sister, however, noticed right away, and instinctively smacked her mother (on the waist/stomach area) to defend her little brother. Her mother then grabbed her face so tight and whispered something that I did not hear.

They entered the gondola, and I got in the next one. For some reason I have not been able to get her stone cold demeanor out of my head. Poor children.

How On Earth Did Ancient Civilisations Get MERCURY?

Confessions Of A Woman In A Polygamous Marriage

 

How did you end up in a polygamous marriage?

I was born and was raised in Saudi Arabia, in Riyadh. A few months before my seventeenth birthday, my father, due to the Guardian System, told me that he had arranged a marriage for me to a foreign businessman in Dubai, and that I would be married within a few weeks.

 

At the beginning of 2017, I was married to my new husband in Dubai, and became his second wife. I didn’t ever realize that I wouldn’t be his first wife until a few days before the wedding, and I can only remember crying for an entire afternoon the day I found out I would be his second wife. It would not be until the end of last year that our husband took his 3rd and most recent wife.

How old is your husband?

Early 50s

How soon before the wedding did you meet him? What would have happened if you didn’t like him/he didn’t like you?

I met him about a week before the wedding for the first time. If he hadn’t like me, it’s not likely anything would happen since he had already talked to my father, but if i hadn’t liked him there was not much I could have done about it. At that point I was such a mess of nervous teenage anxiety and emotion that there wasn’t much I could have even thought or said.

Why did he marry you?

I’m not sure why exactly, it could have been for my looks or age, since his first wife is quite a bit older than i am, but I’m sure it was also due to the social connections between him and my father that would be forged because of the marriage.

Has your husband mentioned how many wives he plans on having?

He legally can’t marry more than 4 according to Sharia Law, but I can’t imagine he would marry someone else, especially at this point in his life. But who knows, he certainly could. I hope not, but it is a possibility.

Do you have a good relationship with him?

We have a fairly good relationship. Although he doesn’t spend as much time with me as his new wife, he’s very polite and nice to me, and doesn’t mistreat me at all.

Do you love him? Does he love you?

In a way I think I love him; even though I don’t think he married me for love, and I didn’t have much of a choice, I’ve learned to love him for what he is. I know he cares for me in his own way, and I know he wants me to be happy and provided for, which I am very thankful for.

Do you guys have children?

Yes, we have one child, a beautiful two-year old baby girl!

How does your husband treat you? Does he treat all his wives equally or is he biased?

It depends; he treats his first wife and I pretty much the same, or at least spends the same amount of time with us, but ever since his third marriage he’s spent most nights with his new wife. I try not to feel jealous, but it is hard not to resent him and her for it.

How old are his first and third wife?

His first wife is 36, and his most recent wife is only 16. Even though 18 is legally the marriable age in the UAE, a judge can approve a younger marriage, and our husband is wealthy enough to ensure that it happens.

What do you think of a man in his early 50s marrying a girl of 16?

I personally don’t think it’s right for such a marriage to take place. Even though legally it was allowed, the odds are she’ll be widowed before she even turns 40, which is really tragic for her.

Why are you more concerned for her after he dies than what might happen during the marriage?

I don’t think it’s right for him to marry someone so young, but at least this way she is provided for. Once he dies, I’m not sure what’s going to happen to any of us once he dies.

What typically happens to the wives once their husband dies? Say you are 50. Do you get an inheritance?

I would most likely be sent to live with a male relative, and perhaps receive an inheritance or something similar. I would have to follow ‘Iddah’ under Shariah Law and wait before remarrying though. If I an widowed while still young, I could probably remarry, but if I was older I might just live as a widow with my relatives.

He must be very rich to afford 3 wives, 3 households. Are you allowed to spend any money?

He is, as far as I know, fairly wealthy, even though he never talks about business or finances with us. Each of us gets a monthly allowance for groceries, clothes, shopping, and anything else we might need, but it’s never enough to make any really extravagant purchases; for anything like that, like jewelry or really nice clothes; anything really expensive, we have to ask him for permission.

What do you enjoy spending your allowance on?

Well, its usually not enough to buy anything more than the essentials, but I love cooking and buying new ingredients, and i always put a little aside to buy paints and art supplies with.

Are you allowed to work?

No, we aren’t allowed to work, or at least not for money. I love painting and art, so I do work on that a lot, but my husband would never let me sell them or earn a living myself. For the most part I have to rely on my husband to provide for me and our daughter.

How are mealtimes? Do you cook? Do you all eat together?

I usually cook meals for myself and daughter, and maybe a few friends, but we usually I don’t eat with our sister wives, except for on Friday, when we usually eat a meal together with our husband.

When it comes to sex, is it only ever you and him? Or is part of it that the four of you have sexual relations?

It is always only him and one of us, he has never asked any of us to have relations with him at the same time. It’s a very private affair.

Do you spend time with the other wives? Are they your friends? Or do you keep separate lives?

For the most part we are like separate families, we each have our own apartment, cook our own meals, and have our own beds, but fortunately his first wife and I do get along very well; since I left Saudi Arabia she’s been almost like a sister to me. His third wife though, she is very rude to us, since she is the youngest, and we definitely don’t get along.

How is she rude to you?

It feels like since our husband spends more time with her than the rest of us, she has a more privileged relationship with him than we do. She can get him to do things to us that he wouldn’t do otherwise, like punish us for doing innocent things, like going out without his permission, he is usually fine with, but if his youngest wife convinced him to, he will get angry and even hit us, even very softly. It’s more of symbolic than anything, but it still makes me feel awful. She also doesn’t miss an opportunity to bring me down or insult me.

What’s the best thing about your marriage?

Probably having such a good relationship with his first wife. It’s almost like having another sister, and it definitely helps make up for some of the worse parts of my marriage. Either that or being provided for so well. I’m not mistreated or neglected, and it gives me a chance to raise our daughter.

If he were to die soon, would you still be friends with the first wife?

I think we would. Even if we didn’t share a husband, I think we would have been friends anyway, and I think we would stay friends even if we weren’t married to the same man.

What is the worst part about living in such a relationship?

The worst part of my relationship is probably just the stress it brings. For instance, he spends most nights with his new wife, and she knows she is his favorite right now and uses that to treat his first wife and I very badly. I try not to hold it against her or our husband, but it’s hard not to.

Do you feel any resentment towards your father for putting you in a situation you may not have necessarily chosen for yourself?

I do sometimes. He never really gave me a choice in the matter, so I do sometimes feel resentful towards him for putting me into this situation, but it’s the culture he knew growing up, and i know he had my best interests at heart. He wanted to be sure I would be provided for, and I know that despite everything he loves me and wants what’s best for me. But it’s not easy to forgive him.

If you were given a chance to, would you get out of the marriage?

Although under Sharia Law divorce is allowed, the only way it could realistically happen for me is if my husband wanted a divorce as well, which he does not. And if I did divorce him, I don’t know what I would do or where I would go, especially since I would have trouble finding anyone willing to marry a divorced single mother. But honestly, I really don’t want to leave, although I wish it hadn’t happened at all, now that I’m married, I’m fairly well off and happy, and although it’s hard, it’s something I have to live with, and I am alright with that.

Would you prefer a different future for your daughter?

Absolutely. I would never want anyone, least of all my daughter, to be in the same relationship as me.

I would like to see the attitudes towards marriage become more western, and allow women more of a say in who they marry. I also pray that plural marriage continues to become more and more rare as time goes on.

Did you have a childhood sweetheart/relationship before your marriage?

I did have a sweetheart before I got married, he was a family friend, and I thought I was going to marry him for the longest time. I was actually looking forward to it, and I stroll sometimes regret not being able to spend my life with him. But I never had a choice in the matter, so I’ve learned to live with it.

How do you feel about the fact that a lot of the world (at least a lot of the Western world) looks down upon plural marriages. Do you ever question your own lifestyle?

I definitely question my lifestyle, and if I had the choice, I don’t think I would want to be in a plural marriage. Since I do live in Dubai, I do get exposed to more western culture than I did before, and I generally think that the west is right about the negative aspects of polygamy. Despite this, I’ve lived my whole life this way, and I’m not unhappy like many people in the west think. It’s not ideal, and certainly causes more stress and emotional strain on everyone, but it’s not all bad.

How has your life changed because of the marriage?

Before I was married, I lived with my family, and, because of the laws in Saudi Arabia, I had very little freedom of movement, and had to ask permission to do or go anywhere. Even while I was at home my parents, and especially my father, had absolute control over what I did.

Now that I’m married, I don’t have to ask permission to go out, as long as I am accompanied by another woman or male guardian, and I have more control over how I spend the small allowance I get. I also have more freedom at home, to raise our child and to talk and spend time with female friends. Despite this, if he wanted to, or if I made him unhappy with me, my husband could control me just like my father, did and monitor my every move, but fortunately he allows his wives to be fairly independent as long as we obey.

USA will launch two Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles

USA will launch two Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles

nuke
nuke

The United States will launch TWO separate Minuteman III nuclear-capable inter-continental Ballistic Missiles, one on June 4, and another on June 6.   One might think they are “posturing” to Russia.

However, the stated goal of the launches is to demonstrate the readiness of American nuclear forces and nuclear deterrents.

Russia has been warned in advance about the launches, which will take place on June 4 and 6, the US Air Force command said in a statement.

The Minuteman III is a solid-fuel intercontinental strategic missile that entered US service in 1970. Its previous tests failed: due to the discovery of an “anomaly” after launch, the rocket exploded in the air.

This missile is the only silo-based ICBM in US service. Upgraded versions are regularly tested. Washington has 400 of these missiles. Each of them is capable of carrying up to three nuclear warheads.

Some Bad Things I saw In Prison

Lack of Trust: India Moves 100 Tons of Gold from United Kingdom

India’s central bank has moved a little more than 100 metric tons of gold from the UK to its domestic vaults, the Times of India newspaper reported on Friday, citing sources.

The source revealed that the “public” reason for moving the Gold is that too much is stored overseas and they want it in their country.  However the “non-public” reason is now “lack of trust.”

India, the source said, has seen the way the West “froze” Russia’s Sovereign Wealth Fund and is now literally “stealing” the interest from those frozen funds, to give to Ukraine.  India now views the West as brazen thieves and does not want to be victimized by such theft!

“While India has no plans to go to war, as Russia did in Ukraine, prompting the theft of their Interest money, India knows all too well how arrogantly the West imposes “Sanctions” and does not want to be subject to the whims of the West.” the source continued.

Even Stephen Bryen (former US DoD/MIC) is sounding the alarm: NATO is flirting with war and extinction.

“NATO does not want to negotiate with Russia. That goes especially for President Joe Biden, who fears going into the coming elections having lost Afghanistan and Ukraine. Any deal with the Russians today would mean major concessions, not only on territory, but about Ukraine’s future. Russia has not changed its red line on demanding that NATO get out of Ukraine.”

“France is now “officially” sending troops to Ukraine (they have been there for some time) and NATO countries are demanding strikes deep inside Russia. Meanwhile the US has secretly made a “policy shift” that somewhat falls short of what Zelensky wanted, but opens the door to deep strikes by the US on Russian territory.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken says that the US deep strike authorization is “misinformation” but he did not deny the change in US policy. He claims it is Russian disinformation, but the reports came from Washington and not from Russia.”

Is Russia somewhere between DEFCON 2 and DEFCON 1?

Attack on Russian radar is a significant escalation:

“The nuclear issue is extraordinarily sensitive nowadays as Ukraine’s army appears nearing collapse. US legislators and NATO’s leader are urging Ukraine to fire long range missiles at Russian territory. It that happens, the Russians will not be able to distinguish whether a missile has a conventional or nuclear warhead.”

“British-Portuguese Tekever AR3 drones were used for the strike.” “for several months the focus of attention of the US Air Force RQ-4B data has been shifted specifically to the Krasnodar Territory”

“attack represents the first time that strategic nuclear defense installations have been attacked in Russia or any other country.

There has long been a debate among defense experts on the issue of “launch on warning.” Had the Russians believed this was a NATO attack on their nuclear facilities, that could have triggered a nuclear response.

The nuclear issue is extraordinarily sensitive nowadays as Ukraine’s army appears nearing collapse. US legislators and NATO’s leader are urging Ukraine to fire long range missiles at Russian territory. It that happens, the Russians will not be able to distinguish whether a missile has a conventional or nuclear warhead.”

🇷🇺 Russia’s “Dead Hand” Perimeter System will automatically launch Russia’s entire nuclear arsenal in response to a nuclear attack on Russia. It assures that whoever initiated the attack on Russia will be annihilated. Studies show that, “no locality in the U.S. was free of the risk of receiving deadly levels of radiation” and even if one is not at a primary target site, “the entire population of the contiguous U.S. and the most populated areas of Canada, as well as the northern states of Mexico, would be at risk of lethal fallout…known to result in certain death.”

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Shelter cat makes saddest face to get adopted

German Bundestag (Parliament) Asked to Activate 900,000 Military Reservists for war with Russia

Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) in Germany’s legislature, the Bundestag, is calling for the activation of 900,000 German military reservists.

“Putin is trimming his people for war and positioning them against the West. Therefore, we must become capable of defending ourselves as quickly as possible,” said the chairwoman of the Bundestag defense committee to the newspapers of the Funke media group (Saturday).”

“Russia only produces weapons. Textbooks are printed that portray Germany as the aggressor. Primary school children are trained on the weapon. All this is frightening,” said Strack-Zimmermann.

“The Russian attack against us has already begun,” Strack-Zimmermann told the Funke newspapers, referring to cyber attacks, espionage and deliberately triggered refugee movements.

“We must be aware that the war in Ukraine affects us directly.” If Putin is successful, he will “continue his raids,” Strack-Zimmermann said, referring to Georgia and Moldova. And when Putin thinks that the time has come, “he will also attack the Baltic States.”

Hal Turner Snap Analysis

Shameless fearmongering.  Lies made-up out of whole cloth, spewing from the mouth of what is supposed to be an elected public official – trying to set Germany on a collision course with Russia – again.

Someone should ask this dumb broad if she realizes such an effort didn’t work out well for Germany the last time they tried it.  It was Russian troops that stormed Berlin and destroyed Hitler’s Nazi regime.

Is she looking to cause the Russians to do that again?

Confessions Of An Ex-Mercenary

 

How does one become a mercenary ?

Typically you start somewhere. I was a US Army Paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne. Friends of friends found me, and got my first contract to go to Africa.

 

How’s the pay?

Pay can fluctuate. First of all, there’s a lot of deadbeats in this space. For example, Liberia asked me to create a littoral sea fighting force, but I couldn’t figure out how they would actually pay (regardless of promises) so I walked away. Never work for the UN. Total deadbeats.

The US pays you about double what you might make in uniform, which ain’t much given the risks. All the stories of guys making 2 grand a day are BS. Maybe a few guys at the beginning of the Iraq war. Also, the US might pay Blackwater $1500/day for you but Blackwater pays you only $400/day, pocketing the rest.

The best is extractive industry, especially those that are private owned. You can find these in Houston, with the right connections.

 

What was the best/worst compensation for the contracts you’ve been on?

Worst. Not getting paid what was owed me.

Best. Getting paid six-figure for a two-week walkabout among the armed groups of the Sahara. Oil company.

How do you acquire your equipment? Especially for situations where you’re raising a small army.

It depends on the client. When I worked US government (USG) contracts, they would pay for it and I would go get it. Hence I did shopping sprees in Eastern Europe.

Are there anybody that you refuse to work with? If so: why?

There are many whom I would refuse to work with. For example, China or Russia. Actually, any who is the enemy of the US, since I’m still an ex-soldier at heart and blue passport holder.

However, a lot of people don’t care and go where the money. Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater, left the US and now works for China in Africa. He’s now in DC pimping an idea to hire a mercenary army to “fix” Afghanistan. It’s a dangerous idea.

What was the craziest thing you had to do as a mercenary?

Stop a genocide in Africa.

Could you elaborate?

Only a little.

The US had intel that an extremist Hutu group hiding in the Congo called the FNL were planning to assassinate the President of Burundi in 1994. If they did this, it would cause a chain of reprisal killings – Tutsi killing hutus and hutus then killing tutsi – that would rekindle the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The US sent us in to prevent all this from happening, with out the governments of Burundi, Rwanda, DRC etc knowing. Only about 5 people knew in Burundi our mission, including the President and General in charge of their military.

We succeeded. I am sorry that I can’t go into the operational details.

 

What is the rule on killing kids?

There are no rules.

Unless they are written into the contract.

BTW mercs make moral choices. They can say ‘no’ to a contract or ROE, unlike soldiers and marines. They can also go ‘off contract’ or rogue.

Is your work considered peacekeeping, or are you on a definite side of the wars you’ve been part of?

“Peacekeeping” is one of those weasel words that diplomats like to throw around to cover their operations. Putin said he was doing ‘peacekeeping’ in Chechnya. The UN does “peace enforcement,” which they did in the eastern Congo in 2013.

I’m straight faced about it. We do war.

During your time as a Merc, how many times have you had run-ins with SOFs (Special Operations Forces) from other countries, which ones, how many did you actually have to fight, and which ones scared you the most?

All the time. People cluster around skillset, so if you have a SOF or paratrooper or ranger etc background, you will gravitate to those with like skills and either form a team or join one.

The best are from US, richer European countries and many of the former Soviet republics. Latin american SOF is good too. The worst are African and Middle east countries. Scariest: ex-Soviet. They are…different than the rest of us.

How so? Psychologically they’re different? Their skill sets?

Yeah. Many of them are crazy and tough. They use to have this thing in Spetznatz training called the Rule of the Grandfathers. Recruits would have bones broken.

How large is the industry, and would you say that it is mostly larger bodies of armed men, or do mercenaries also do smaller, covert ops missions in tight, single digit groups?

It’s really hard to say how large and how much money is sloshing around the private military world. There’s no Department of Labor and Statistics for Mercenaries.

During the height of the US wars in Iraq and Afghan, contractors worked in large military corporations. Now that this market has dried up, mercenaries are atomizing into smaller units.

What is the mortality rate for mercenaries?

It depends. Let’s assume proper mercenaries here, meaning they are ex-military and in conflict zones. The mortality is higher than most 1st world militaries. Also, if you get hurt, you are likely screwed.

Merc ops gone wrong generally don’t make the news. Mercs are hired often to work in the shadows, and if something goes wrong, their employers cut them away like a kite. That’s why we call these ‘kite missions.’

High end mercs are hired because they offer good plausible deniability.

What is the biggest misconception on PMC’s (Private Military Contractor) or Mercenary firms that is currently being published in the political science literature?

Political Science and academics in general don’t know much because this industry is so opaque. You have to be on the inside to understand it, yet not succumb to it, or get blackmailed into silence.

The common misperceptions are:

  1. Mercenaries are ineffective. Wrong, very wrong.
  2. Mercs are illegitimate. “Legitimacy” is a big word people like to throw around with much thinking. Ultimately, it doesn’t really matter that much.
  3. Mercs are all evil. Some are, some are not. Same with soldiers.
  4. We can use international law to curb mercenaries. Wrong again. Mercenaries will just shoot your law enforcement.
  5. Mercs are peripheral security problem. Wrong. The market for force is growing and cannot be stopped. At least not if we leave it on auto-pilot, which have.
  6. Lastly, mercs are not useful. This is wrong. They are like fire: power a steam engine or burn the building down. They can augment UN forces of be used as terrorists.

Did this kind of experience provide you with insights into a deeper understanding of the interactions between the western world and the middle eastern one? If yes, could you go into details?

You can’t understand the middle east if you think in terms of “states” or countries. You have to think in terms of blocs of ancient powers warring one another. You have the Sunni bloc, lead by Saudi Arabia and includes the GCC, Jordan, Yemen, Egypt and N. Africa and others.

Then you have the Shia block, lead by Iran and includes N. Iraq, Syria regime, parts of Lebanon.

I call these blocks “deep states,” not like Steve Bannon’s conspiracy theory but rather networks of power, elites and interest.

These Sunni and Shia Deep States have been at war, in some fashion, since the death of Mohammed. People who don’t see the middle east as two warring deep states will be left scratching their heads, which is what many ‘experts’ here do. Every day.

Is it good to have an knowledge of geopolitics related to the war you are participating in as a mercenary?

No. Optional.

The only knowledge you need to master is how to operate in a fire team.

Can you drop some light on the level of discipline in the mercs (rape, plunder,etc) during interactions with non-armed civilians? Have you personally witnessed any such incidents?

Good mercs do good things, bad mercs do bad things. Just like national armies around the world. However, I ran across mercenaries in the Congo that were pure evil. Really evil. It was sad.

BTW this is a serious concern you raise. I don’t have an answer because what mercenaries do is introduce market dynamics into warfare. Supply and demand dictate warfare as much as traditional military strategy.

Example. When I was in West Africa, some warlords used rape as a tactic and strategy of war. You could hire mercs to terrorize and cow local populations this way. You could also hire mercs to kill those mercs. But you are left with a world awash in mercenaries, and that’s what I fear is coming.

So, just curious if there are female mercenaries, or is this just a male arena?

I never found any female mercs, although it doesn’t mean they are not out there. I ran across female warlords in Africa, who would cut off you undercarriage in a heartbeat. With a rusty machete.

Mercenaries seem to have a fixed role in small arms conflicts (like what you said about Africa and the middle east) but with the international security landscape focused nation states and their nuclear weapons, what role do you believe mercenaries will play, if any, in nuclear security?

I think the international community is by definition Westphalian and can only see the world like a state. That’s why they continue to struggle against non-sate (what they humorously call ‘sub-state’) actors. Hence the mayhem.

Mercs are rising and can take over states, become a praetorian guard, can bully states etc. Let’s not forget that most of the states in the world are fragile or failing. And nothing is stopping the rise of mercenary organizations around the world. 100 years from now, mercenaries will be a bigger problem than nukes.

How has the battlefield changed in your lifetime? I imagine tactics are changing every day with each new advancement in equipment, but did you foresee the role of drones playing such a large role in current conflicts? It seems like we are heading towards wars where soldiers will never be in line of sight or am I thinking far too down the road?

Well, there’s war and warfare. War never changes; it’s bloody, violent, political etc. Warfare changes all the time, including tactics, leadership, environment, technology.

Drones are cheap and easily rigged into kamikazes. Expect mercenary “air forces” of suicide drone squad. There are also cyber mercs called “Hack Back Companies.”

That said, technology is over rated in war. The US has loads of tech and yet can’t conquer Taliban, Al Qaeda, ISIS etc. Meanwhile the humble IED remains a big tactical problem.

Mercenaries also change war. They open up strategy to the laws of the market place. Future Generals may need to know more about the laws of the marketplace and Wall Street, so they understand how to increase or decrease the flow of mercenaries into a battle space.

In your opinion, what is the best approach to handling North Korea?

DPRK is the headache that keeps on giving. If we strike them, they shell Seoul with artillery. China uses them as leverage to extract favor from the US.

Ultimately, no one wants to see DPRK fall. China and South Korea don’t want to absorb 20 million deranged refugees and no one wants to tempt the DPRK leadership’s will to launch everything they have.

Ultimately the best course of action is the status quo, which is why nothing has changed in 70 years.

What is a moment you can still vividly recall today?

Digging up children’s teeth in the genocide killing fields outside Bujumbura, Burundi.

What sorts of non-millitary exclusive skills helped you the most or did the best to keep you alive?

Cultural skills. When you are operating in Africa or elsewhere, you need to be cultural attuned. First, I’m a white guy with straight teeth, which means I’m American. That can be very disadvantageous in some parts of the world. You have to have a good intuition about people.

How does the merc profession mesh with family life? I imagine it takes one away from family a lot.

Merc life is pretty incompatible with married life. You’re always “deployed.” You can maybe do something like 6 months on a defensive lucrative mission, like defending oil pipelines in the desert. Then 6 months at home.

What is the biggest misconception people label you guys with? 

People think mercenaries are villains, etc. This is BS.

People often throw machiavelli in my face, who said mercenaries are “faithless whores” or something like that. He was the guy who wrote The Prince (which I love, as well as his Art of War and Discourses on Livy). But he was a total failure. During the the early 1500s, he was in charge of Florence’s defenses and got seriously burned by his lame mercs. So he Mr Sour Grapes. Most mercs – then and now – are not like that.

The prejudice against mercenaries is extremely unjustified. Would you rather be taken a prisoner by Blackwater of the Zimbabwe army ? I recommend the former.

Her Visions of Future Disasters Keep Coming True After NDE

  • 10:14 – Told of Future Events
  • 12:24 – Dreams of Future Disasters
  • 15:36 – Most Shocking Dream of the Future
  • 17:52 – Names of People About to Die

Creating manifestations via AI art tools

January of 2016, my 14-year-old brother intentionally shot himself in the head with a .22 rifle … twice (the first time the rifle shifted and shot him in the ear, so he reset the rifle and the round entered his right temple.

I was at work when I got the news and I rushed to my mom’s house as fast I could … too fast to be honest. I couldn’t even get to the driveway for all of the deputies, fire and EMS crews. My grandfather’s truck pulled along side my car and my mom leaned forward from the passenger seat, covered in blood and tissue and said “baptist” (Baptist hospital in Winston-Salem).

Driving down the highway to Winston, I was a nervous wreck … I would catch my breath between sobs and quivering … unable to drive and yet traveling nearly 90 mph. Half way to Winston, I saw emergency lights in the rear view … the ambulance caught me quickly and had to be traveling nearly 110mph … I smiled … because I knew that he was certainly still alive.

Arriving at the hospital, there was already a family room prepared for us … I saw family members and family friends arriving … confused … scared. At this point, we didn’t know why my brother had been shot. My mom lived in a rural, heavily wooded area … there were many deer hunters in the area, and I had honestly assumed that he was accidentally shot.

We had been there for 30 minutes or so when the lead doctor came in and briefed us on the situation. He said that per evidence that was gathered by the sheriff’s department, it was concluded that he had shot himself intentionally. The amount of sorrow that those words generated soaked in the walls … the air was heavy and our faces were all saturated. I saw my grandfather break down…he had given my brother the rifle…his guilt was evident and one of the saddest things I’ve ever witnessed. I was so convinced that my mother would hyperventilate or pass out that we asked about getting her something to calm down.

This was the first hour of many restless days and sleepless nights. This was the longest hour of my life.

If there was a happy ending to this story you would be surprised … maybe even baffled. The round entered my brother’s brain and stopped nearly half way through. Over the next several days his head swelled and surgery was needed to relieve the pressure. His speech was very limited … his arms weren’t of much use … and he was deaf in his right ear. Through mumbled words and tears he apologized for what he had done.

Almost three years later he shows very little sign of ever having gone through such an ordeal. His speech is great, he has full use of his body, and his scarring is very minimal. He recently achieved his GED and he has just started his first job.

I have the honor of knowing the luckiest man alive.

China, Palestine and Africa

I had a neighbor who did the same thing, called on a few other neighbors too. She had lots of money, lawyer on retainer, and a son who was a detective on the force. I got a temporary Protection order once, which she broke almost immediately. Went back to court she said she never came over and I said “are you saying you didn’t come to talk to Terry and Carolyn last week on Tuesday? (they were neighbors from the other side of me and they rented from her, but we were grilling out on my property). She said “Well yes, but I wasn’t talking to you” Her lawyer looked at her in disbelief, threw his hands up in the air, ‘pen flying out of his hand, mind you’ and I GOT MY PERMENENT PROTECTION ORDER that year. Next yeart the cops would talk to her and then come talk to us. They started coming and saying “how you doing today, she called again…pretend we are talking to us about it, then we would talk about other stuff for awhile, like how our families were, how their families were doing, kids birthdays or milestones, ect. They go tell her we talked. They said she needed a psychological evaluation, so told me to keep track of how often she called on me (she called on me the most, I lived right next-door). One time she even called on a neighbor kid cause he dropped part of his orange peel on her sidewalk. Another time she called 3 times in 1 day ( same cop all 3 times), he told her if she called again that day SHE would be arrested for false reports. Eventually the cops told me to get a 30 day police call log, file for a protection order, AND 3 cops offered to testify on my behalf. I did get log (she called the cops a total of 43 times in 1 month’s time period) and all 3 cops testified,. The Judge even helped by asking if cops ever told me they threatened to arrest her for false report. YUP!! Got that Permanent Protection Order immediately. Her High Falutent Lawyer was so pissed. I didn’t have any lawyer either time. She stopped calling the cops so much, but still cauesed problems for everyone. Eventually, like 3 years later the family moved her to a nusing home on the locked ward for high risk for running away residents. The family told us she had been suffering from Alzheimers AND Dementia for 7 years. Like they didn’t have a clue. That was 12 years ago, cops not called other than on some renters up the block for parties, drugs, fights, ect, but not on any of us that lived here then and are still here. Good Luck, maybe the cops will get sick of being called on you.

  1. Gay people everywhere. And they’re the same as everyone else. Perhaps slightly nicer even. No one freaks out over them and they live just like everyone else. So do women. They can do stuff. And say stuff.
  2. Doors without handles or knobs. You are supposed to just push them with your body. It can be your hand. Your shoulder. Or even your butt.
  3. Revolving doors. Just. How. Am. I. Supposed. To. Jump. In. To. That. Mommy!
  4. Costco food court dispensers of straws, plastic forks, gooey green substance, and ketchup. And the wheel of psychopathically small cut up onions.
  5. Clothes sizes. What’s 3XXXLV? What’s Woman? And when it doesn’t say Woman, does mean I can’t wear it? And kid shoe sizes go from 0 to 13.5 then abruptly stop for no discernable reason and start again at 1 (!). Cuts are confusing too. Husky. Does it mean fat? What about tall? Where’s short? I give up.
  6. Camping. We work so hard to not have to sleep on the hard ground, have a hot water and electricity, cook with proper appliances, and be protected from nature.
  7. Huge. Enormous food portions. When we get our first meal in US, we look around for the four guys who are going to help us eat it.
  8. One bedroom and better yet – one bathroom for each family member. Oh god, one can never go back to sharing a bathroom after that. If two kids are sharing a bedroom, that’s held up as a pinnacle of modesty and bonding experience for siblings.
  9. Constant bombardment by aggressive commercial offers. What? You want to give me filtered water? It’s the best filter in the world? It will help my hair grow back? And if I don’t get it right now at a charming price of only $79 a month, I will die from calcium overdose?! Sign me up!
  10. Certainty. Your home will be there tomorrow. Your country will be there tomorrow. As long as you pay your taxes, you are left to your own vices. You can just pretty much do whatever the hell you want. Like build a new life and become less frenetic and more jolly.

Ready-When-You-Get-Home Pot Roast

What could be better than dinner waiting for you for a change?

1200 Pot Roast Chuck Roast SpendWithPennies 8 2
1200 Pot Roast Chuck Roast SpendWithPennies 8 2

Prep: 5 min | Cook: 8 to 10 hr | Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (2 to 3 pound) chuck or shoulder roast
  • 2 large onions
  • 3 large bell peppers
  • 1 package beefy mushroom soup mix (dry)
  • 1 pound baby carrots

Instructions

  1. Cut the onions into quarters and separate.
  2. Seed the bell peppers and cut into 8 pieces each.
  3. Layer about half of the onions and peppers in the bottom of the slow cooker.
  4. Place the roast on top of the vegetables.
  5. Sprinkle the dry soup mix on the roast and top with the remaining onions and peppers.
  6. Add the carrots on top. ADD NO LIQUID.
  7. Cover and cook on LOW for 8-10 hours.

Pot Roast Chuck Roast SpendWithPennies 5
Pot Roast Chuck Roast SpendWithPennies 5

Perfect Pot Roast SpendWithPennies 12
Perfect Pot Roast SpendWithPennies 12

So you think you’re ready to move to America, huh?

Well, let me tell you, it’s not all apple pie and baseball.

One of the biggest shocks for me was the sheer size of everything – the food, the cars, the houses, the roads.

It’s like they say, everything is bigger in Texas, or in this case, everywhere in America.

I mean, have you seen the size of a standard American fridge?

It’s like a small room in there.

And don’t even get me started on the food portions.

You’ll be like, “Is this a joke?

Who eats this much food in one sitting?”

But what really threw me off was the whole tipping culture.

I mean, in most countries, a tip is a small token of appreciation, but in America, it’s a whole different ball game.

You’re expected to tip at least 20% in most restaurants, and if you don’t, you’re basically considered a cheapskate.

And it’s not just restaurants, it’s bars, hairdressers, even delivery guys.

It’s like, when did 15% become the new minimum?

And don’t even get me started on the whole tax situation.

You’ll be like, “Wait, I have to pay taxes on this too?”

Yeah, welcome to America, where taxes are like the unwelcome houseguest who never leaves.

But you know what really blew my mind?

The fact that in some states, you can still be fired from your job for being LGBTQ+.

Like, what year is this?

And don’t even get me started on the healthcare system.

It’s like, you’re expected to have a PhD in insurance jargon just to navigate the system.

And good luck if you’re not insured, you’re basically on your own.

It’s like, how did the richest country in the world manage to mess up something so basic?

And then there’s the whole gun culture thing.

I mean, I’m not going to get into the politics of it all, but let’s just say it’s…different.

You’ll be like, “Wait, you can just walk into a store and buy a gun?

Like, no background checks or anything?”

Yeah, it’s a thing.

And don’t even get me started on the whole “gun show” culture.

It’s like, I get it, America loves its guns, but do they really need to flaunt it so much?

It’s like, I’m trying to buy a coffee here, not attend a gun rally.

Anyway, that’s my two cents on the whole American culture shock thing.

Take it or leave it, America, it’s still a wild ride.

Trump says he would bomb Moscow and Beijing. And who’d win?

American politicians talk as if the US is on another planet or something. That the US itself cannot be bombed. They think that the US is the only country with bombs.

I’m 76. My high school and college classmates are dropping like flies. My time is coming fairly soon. I’ve had a varied and active life from stealing food from hotel corridors to survive to owning 4 successful companies and retiring at 49 to backpack the world with my kids. 35 was my best year. I was young enough to do it all and smart enough to see the traps ahead of me. One thing I wish I knew back then, not just philosophically, but at the basic level of my soul: It doesn’t matter. Nothing really matters. There is no point to all of the pain, stress, arguments, hassles, and the rest. I can buy a Lambo for cash and have my clothes custom-made, but I drive a 2,000 Toyota 4Runner with 242,000 miles on it, my pants are almost as old as my sons, I wear shoes I bought in 1999 that still have miles on them, my favorite food is spaghetti, and I tossed my smartphone six year ago. It drives my sons nuts. They want my wife to buy me a new Toyota Sequoia, a smartphone, and something other than the $9 tee shirts I get off Amazon. But I learned something years ago, long after my 30s: It doesn’t matter. None of that stuff made me happy. It gave me pleasure, but pleasure fades and the darkness falls unless you are happy at your core. I am. So, I’d have liked to know not to take life so seriously. It cost me my first marriage and bad relationships all over the place because I tried to grind my way up the “ladder of success”. And it didn’t mean a thing.

Vintage Men’s illustration

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Navy boot camp, Orlando 1973. War is over.

The first days are orientation, haircuts, uniforms, making beds, etc. Then I see a guy on the top bunk, hugging his knees close up to his chest. He’s rocking back and forth, muttering, “It’s just a game. It’s just a game.”

Cheezus. The hardest thing we had to do was fold our underwear.

Number Two:

Recruit Roly Poly gets caught with his girlfriend’s photograph in his pocket, so we all do push ups. That night, a group quietly wraps him in his bunk with dental floss. In the morning, he can’t get out of bed.

At formation, a few guys pick him up, turn him upside down, and shake him up and down like a salt shaker until the photo comes out of his pocket. I still remember his name after 50 years.

Not crazy, but noteworthy:

Snaggle Tooth is from West Virgina. He joined to get his teeth fixed. His mouth is disgusting with black teeth that are eaten away into half-moon shapes. He laughs a lot.

Ol Red from Missussippi is a muscle-bound man with massive legs that make him step like he’s bow-legged. His arms are so huge they don’t touch his side. The chief yells for us to “pop tall” at attention in front of our bunks, so we all race out of the shower, slipping and sliding, and stand tall in front of our bunks. Some are wrapped in towels, some towels drop off. A few giggle at the absurdity but nobody laughs out loud.

Then out from the shower comes Ol Red from Missussippi. His standard-sized GI-issued towel barely wraps around his waist. Slowly, with dignity and a bearing that says, “ I dare you to make fun of me,” he comes around the corner, saunters up the middle of the barracks like he owns the place, walks past the chief, and takes his place at his bunk.

Now we learn something about Ol Red from Missussippi. His body is divided by a giant scar and his skin is different colors. Red, white, pink. It looks like a farm plow has sliced him completely in two, from the top of his head, through his face, down his torso, all the way to his feet. The scar is as tall as he is. Nobody makes fun of Ol Red from Missussippi.

Is This The Collapse of the Great American Empire?

I was homeless in Portland oregon for 2 months in 2006. I met this older man who was drifting and he claimed he was a teacher. He told me to read about the fall of the Roman empire. He told me that America was going to collapse.

One is 求同存异, which means to “seek common ground while respecting each other’s differences”.

The idea is that people and countries are different, and they should seek common ground, while respecting each others’ different points of view.

This is a phrase commonly used by the Chinese Foreign Ministry in press releases, especially in dealings with the US. Of course, it also conceals a dig at the US’s attitude in foreign policy, which is, as much as possible, to force other countries to accept the US POV.

Another phrase is 守株待兔, which means “standing by a tree, waiting for a rabbit (to run into the tree).

The origin of this phrase is about a farmer, who one day while working his field, saw a rabbit running into a tree and knocked itself unconscious. The farmer walked over and picked it up, and had his rabbit for dinner.

From then on, he stood by the tree, waiting for another rabbit to run into the tree, hoping that he would have another dinner.

The saying makes fun of people who think that pure luck will come to them repeatedly, and become stupid and lazy in the process.

The Optimist’s Handbook

Submitted into Contest #251 in response to: Your protagonist is a writer who discovers a new favorite author. How does their writing, or even their own personality, change as the protagonist falls under the writer’s influence?

Today, I am playing around with the idea of including some contemporary short science fiction with the daily posts. This will be in addition to videos, pictures, art, and historical stuff. Tell me what you all think. -MM
The moment Astrid truly accepted that her favourite book wasn’t a work of fiction was the moment she decided she had no other option than to eject herself out of the airlock.She wasn’t the first to come to this rather extreme conclusion after reading the title, but the population of Gen-Ship-Six had yet to notice the connection between the innocuous title amongst the recently deceased possessions and the series of grisly suicides that had followed it’s odyssey through readers hands.Astrid had found the book in the redistribution centre. A cold name for the room which stored the warm remainders of lives lived then extinguished, aboard a space ship where none of the passengers were alive at the journey’s commencement and none would survive thought to it’s destination.The system of redistributing possessions made sense though. Nothing novel was produced on the ship, so with each new generation the personal effects of the previous one became more and more sparse as accidents, loss and wear and tear claimed more and more of the luggage brought on-board from Earth by the 20 million original passengers, a hundred and fifty years ago.

 

Astrid had no idea who the book had belonged to before she picked it up from under a slightly chipped, ornate ramen bowl. The book was ragged and discoloured, the only way books looked nowadays. Astrid had never seen a new book, it was lucky if the titles she came across were in one piece, not defaced and managed to hold themselves together long enough for her to reach the last page.

 

‘The Optimist’s Handbook’ had felt heavy in her grip as she extracted it from the pile and turned it over to read the blurb.

 

“When the dark of night feels like the end of all things, remember the blue of the dazzling sky, the smell of keen grass in summer, the feel of a kind, warm breeze on your face.”

 

The book may as well have been written in Latin for all the comprehension those descriptions held for Astrid. Certainly she knew what grass, sky and wind were, but none of those things had ever brought her joy. The grass on Gen-Ship-Six had a faint chemical smell due to the solution that fed it and forced it to stay alive. Astrid had learned in school that grass on earth was fed by the sun that radiated itself onto the planet’s surface. A blue sky was another story. The 6D cinema in her neighbourhood allowed viewers to gaze up into the turquoise heavens, as the earth dwellers had experienced centuries previously, but the distantly visible pixels and soft hum of electricity fizzled around Astrid’s brain and she was unsure if the experience had been all together as authentic as what staring up into a real sky would be like; The Optimist’s Handbook suggested not. As for the warm breeze on her face; steadily controlled air conditioning was the closest comparison she could imagine, and this was not some kind of devine, blissful feeling, rather, a necessity to existing on the space ship without suffocating.

 

Over the following week, Astrid found herself continuously buried in the curious book, trying to imagine feelings she had never felt before, sinking further and further into despair as she attempted to accept the fact she would never understand the emotions that the author was trying to evoke.

 

“David, have you ever wondered what it’s like to smell wet soil after a dry spell?” Astrid asked her brother over a meal of artificially grown steak, beans and brocoli.

 

“Ehhh, what?” David replied absently while tapping away at his xCube.

 

“It’s called petrichor,” she continued glancing down at the book to check the word again, not really needing him to answer, or even to pay attention, she just wanted to wonder outloud. “It sounds wonderful. Earthy and deep, but also, sort of fresh and just so… alive.”

 

This time David didn’t even respond. Astrid looked at him for a few moments then went back to reading. Hungry to learn about more sensations from Earth, even though each one brought her no satisfaction and instead pushed her further and further into despondency.

 

The following morning she had read about a simple pleasure called ‘people watching.’ This one she felt was achievable. Gen-Ship-Six had cafes where she could go and sip coffee and eat bread. The Handbook had talked about a French deli, beautiful flowers growing up the visage, striped umbrellas scattered around the front entrance, casting shade onto intricate tables and chairs made of cast iron and painted pure white. The Handbook encouraged readers to take to their favourite spot, such as this one, and watch the passing characters, noticing how they interact. Laughter and love, rage and grief painting pictures between friends, family and lovers. Take in their clothes, shoes and bags, it continued, their unique features that make the world rich and romantic.

 

And so, that lunch time instead of staying in her apartment Astrid sat, coffee dispensed into a plain white cup, croissant sitting on a napkin atop a small plastic table outside her neighbourhood’s pipeline entrance, observing people getting on and off the transport system. Her excitement turned to woe in only a few minutes after she hadn’t spotted a single person who wasn’t permanently staring down at their xCube. There hadnt been so much as a glance shared between two people, let alone a word of passion or anger, or… anything. Also, no one’s clothes were particularly exciting. The Handbook didn’t have pictures so she didn’t know what exactly the author would have seen outside that French deli but she was sure it wasn’t the various hues of grey and black, shapeless tops and trousers, all made out of the same plain textured fabric, that was on offer in her current vista.

 

Sighing, she put down her coffee and flipped open her own xCube, instructing it to show her ‘French fashion through history.’ She abandoned the cafe- and her uneaten croissant- 5 minutes later, silent tears streaming down her face.

 

Just shy of a week had passed and Astrid stood at airlock 6754. She had finished The Optimist’s Handbook and stowed it away in her bookshelf the previous evening making a vague attempt to sleep, but no respite came. She had soon got up again and stared out of her window into the blackness of space surrounding her and felt a feeling she’d never really comprehended before- she was trapped. She would always be trapped, she would never leave the walls of Gen-Ship-Six. She would never feel the warmth of a burning star on her face, or smell the overwhelming perfume of a summer garden in bloom. She would never see a sublime Prada outfit on the body of a firey French woman as she slapped her lover and strode away down a cobbled street. She would never gaze out on a twinkling city at night, or feel the calm, cool breeze ruffle her hair. It was all too much, because, it wasn’t enough.

 

She reached out her hand to pull the emergency handle at the exact moment her xCube shook with a notification in her pocket. Her hand paused in its advance.

 

“Pick up Astrid, oh my stars, something wonderful has happened, pick up!”

Back in the early 1970s, my wife and I were close friends with a couple named Rose and Gary. The connection stemmed from our shared school days with my wife, and our marriages coincidentally occurred within a week of each other. Our friendship remained strong post-wedding, often visiting each other’s homes for gatherings and various activities.

Rose was a striking redhead, and I couldn’t deny that her beauty occasionally stirred thoughts beyond the boundaries of friendship. It was a year into our marriages when a pivotal moment unfolded during an unexpected encounter. While assisting Gary with laying a patio, an abrupt downpour interrupted our work, prompting a reschedule for the following day. When I returned, Gary had been called away for work, leaving me to carry on alone. It was then that Rose appeared with refreshments, clad in a revealing outfit that ignited a primal response within me.

As she settled onto a stack of slabs, an unintentional reveal of her undergarments sent a surge of desire coursing through me. Engaged in conversation, my gaze unintentionally lingered, prompting Rose to coyly inquire if I’d seen enough. Without filter, I voiced a desire for her nudity, a remark met with a sly smile as she led me indoors without hesitation. What followed was a passionate encounter, unbridled and consuming, unfettered by the weight of consequences.

Months later, as life carried on, Rose’s whispered revelation at our doorstep echoed with unexpected gravity – I was to become a father. Initially met with disbelief, the undeniable resemblance of the child to my younger self confirmed the truth. The realization dawned that I had unwittingly contributed to this new life, a silent participant in its creation.

Despite the seismic shift in our dynamic, our friendship endured, albeit marked by an unspoken understanding. The intimate connection shared that fateful day remained a singular occurrence, a memory treasured in secrecy. For Rose and Gary, their family remained complete with a single child, a testament to choices made and paths taken.

Reflecting on the journey, I find solace in the bonds forged and the unexpected twists of fate. Though the circumstances were unconventional, the love and connection shared among friends endured, transcending the complexities of human relationships. And as I watched the child grow, a silent acknowledgment lingered – a silent witness to the echoes of a moment that forever altered the course of our lives.

Smoky Beef ‘n’ Beans

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30E19C82 0853 4D88 A338 81DD3D61B7BF

These picture-perfect fall days are my favorite. The sun is shining, there’s a cool breeze and we can start to curl up on the couch with a bowl of warm soup or stew. Chili is one of the best make-ahead meals, because it’s great for lunch or dinner and it honestly tastes better the longer it sits. This would be a good go-to recipe for any tailgate party since it’s easy to prep and hold warm in a crockpot.
I like to serve mine with corn muffins on the side for dipping. For garnishes, cheddar and onions are obviously great, but I would also recommend Greek yogurt (or sour cream), corn chips, avocado and/or pico de gallo.

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 cup chopped onion
  • 12 bacon strips, cooked and crumbled
  • 2 cans pork and beans
  • 1 can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
  • 1 can butter beans, drained
  • 1 cup ketchup
  • 1/4 cup packed brown sugar
  • 3 tablespoons vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon liquid smoke
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper

Instructions

  1. In a skillet, cook the beet and onion until meat is no longer pink; drain.
  2. Transfer to a slow cooker.
  3. Stir in the remaining ingredients.
  4. Cover and cook on LOW for 6 to 7 hours.

This is a problem that the United States cannot solve, because Chinese culture is vast and profound, and American politicians have always treated China with high arrogance, they can not understand China, let alone understand the Chinese.

The reasons are as follows

First, China’s history is too long, and the current situation can certainly be found by looking at the history books. The thoughts and strategies of ancient sages are enough to deal with any international disputes in the world today.

For example, <The Art of War >is just one of many ancient Chinese books, and there are countless such excellent books in China. These books deal with philosophy, strategy, culture, ideas and so on.

Second, there is a huge difference between the Chinese language and the letters language in the world. Nowadays, Chinese middle school students can easily understand the Chinese language of thousands of years ago. Americans today can no longer understand the English of 500 years ago.

Today’s game between China and the United States will certainly be recorded in the history books. When the Chinese people face new enemies in the future, they only need to look at the history of today’s game with the United States, and they will find new ways to deal with difficulties.

Third: China has always been a unified country and has been for thousands of years, unlike the United States of America. In the United States, all ethnic groups only consider their own interests, and people will not consider the United States. The United States is more like an international company, where employees of different ethnic groups form the company. If the company goes bankrupt in the future, those employees will directly leave and go to the next company.

China was divided many times in ancient times and invaded many times by enemies, but she will surely move towards unity, and China will still be the same China. In the future, if the United States is divided, it will disappear into history, like ancient Rome.

There is an ancient Chinese saying: With copper as a mirror, you can be dressed; With history as a mirror, we can know the rise and fall; With people as a mirror, you can see the gains and losses.

Five thousand years ago, we faced the same flood as the ancient Egyptians; Four thousand years ago, we forged bronze like the Babylonians; Three thousand years ago, we thought about philosophy like the ancient Greeks; Two thousand years ago, we were on the march like the Romans; A thousand years ago, we were as rich as the Arabs; And right now, we’re battling it out with the Americans.


Added:

Now the American is losing control of the world, Arab countries are slipping away from US control, and Saudi Arabia and Iran have joined forces.

France and Germany working together, the post-Marshall Plan European order would change.

Various Asian countries have also fallen out of US control, such as Singapore, Thailand and other Asian countries.

If the U.S. military cannot change this situation by force, the United States will become an island in North America in the next five years, just as Britain was in Europe.

Unfortunately, the US military is not capable of launching a medium-sized war anywhere in the world, so the United States can only procrastinate until the inevitable split, just like the movie “Civil War”.

The mastermind of all this in the world now is the mysterious Eastern empire – India

<( ̄ˇ ̄)/


Added:

If you don’t believe me, you can look up the modern history of China. The tragedy of Gaza and Palestine happened in China 100 years ago

“Marriage Is Modern Death Sentence For Men” | Pearl Davis vs James Whale

The traditional institution of marriage is facing a decline in modern society, with fewer than 50% of adults opting to tie the knot. This shift raises questions about the future of relationships and family life. 

Some argue that marriage as we know it is already dead, with the average marriage lasting only seven to eight years. 

The rising divorce rates and challenges faced by men in the family court system are also contributing to the changing attitudes towards marriage. 

This discussion around marriage and relationships has sparked debates about gender roles, feminism, and societal expectations. 

Some believe that men are facing increasing challenges in the current landscape, with issues like infidelity and lack of intimacy being brought to the forefront. Others argue that women have more freedom and choices in the dating world, leading to a shift in power dynamics within relationships. 

Pearl Davis: "Marriage is a modern death sentence for men. In the future, there will be a lot of single parents, and a lot of people without children."

Ukraine is located in Eastern Europe, and most of the weapons provided by the United States are transported to Ukraine through neighboring countries such as Poland.

Ukraine has a long border with the NATO country Poland, and weapons provided by the United States can easily enter Ukraine from Poland.

The Ukrainian army consumes 350,000 artillery shells every month, all of which are transported into Ukraine via the Polish-Ukrainian Railway.

But Taiwan is a China’s island Province, with no US allies bordering it. Under the PLA’s anti-access/area denial, US-supplied weapons simply cannot enter Taiwan.

Moreover, all ASEAN countries, including the Philippines, a vassal of the United States, support that “Taiwan is a part of China”, and the United States cannot find a transit point in Southeast Asia at all.

Once the war of unification begins, no ships will be allowed to pass through the Taiwan Strait, and PLA warships will intercept any approaching ships and aircraft within 12 nautical miles east of Taiwan Island.

Ukraine has been relying on weapons provided by the United States and the West to survive until now, but given Taiwan’s situation, how can it become Ukraine?

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main qimg 63a1683d810a4a9473be496a6f8bb460


In addition, Taiwan is also not a country at all; Taiwan is within China, the island is in Chinese waters, and the PLA’s military manoeuvres around Taiwan are military manoeuvres in China’s own waters.

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main qimg 2d57525c45cc6b71a5f7874a8022b7cd

The End Of The American Empire Is Here

I went for lower back pain. I hurt after sitting, standing or walking for even short periods of time. I had X-rays and then was sent for an MRI. I was referred to a neurosurgeon and the infectious disease department of the hospital. My PCP called me on her day off and asked if either one had contacted me. To which I told her no. She hung up and next thing I know I had appointments with both. I went to the infectious disease doctor first and ended up going to the ER to be checked in that day. I had so many tests I couldn’t believe it. And so many different people bothering me. One of the tests was a biopsy on my lower back bones. I was awake for the whole thing. The nurse shot me up with fentanyl and something else but I was awake. Sliding in and out of the CT scan and watching the needle or whatever being repositioned until they finally got it where they wanted. Then I hear a drill and I swear to god it looked like a DeWalt cordless drill. I was diagnosed with an infection of some sort in my bones. They put me on two different heavy duty antibiotics and of course it ruins the vein where the IV is. So they had to move it numerous times. They sent me home after putting a PICC line in that ended close to the heart they said I have, 😂. Six weeks later after doing my own hanging and injecting antibiotics at home. And complications with the PICC line. I had 4–5 mri’s and I have to have disc replacement. 4 1/2 months later I’m told that I’m only “ about “ 30% healed. The surgeon said I was healing slower because of the infection. He said he got it cleaned up but it was a complication that is slowing my healing time. Unfortunately, I still can’t walk, sit or stand for extended periods just like before. I’ve been unable to work since the end of September 2023. I struggle every day. I thought I might get physical therapy and maybe an antibiotic and have been going through hell. I also have a knee replacement coming up. Life sucks.

RIP Terry A. Davis.

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main qimg fa95840994c5a8b0fba69f94b2e0e234

Despite being severely schizophrenic and bipolar—to the point where his speech was often nearly incomprehensible due to the constant paranoid delusions that haunted him—he managed to create a brand new operating system, completely from scratch.

It’s called TempleOS, and it’s an original operating system, written in a programming language Davis developed himself called HolyC (yes, I’m serious). It has is own unique compiler, kernel, and GUI, and includes various applications and games—even a flight simulator—all of which were created by Davis himself.

In his psychotic episodes, Davis believed that God was communicating with him and instructing him to create an operating system as “God’s third temple”. Hence, many of the applications and games that come with TempleOS are religious in nature, for example, a program that generates seemingly random strings of text, which Davis claimed were coded messages from God, or a program that generates seemingly random music, which Davis also claimed were sent from God. There are games that recreate events from the Bible.

Now, you might take one look at this OS and its features, and dismiss it as a piece of junk. And you’d be perfectly correct in that assessment— it is a totally worthless operating system, not worth installing except as a bizarre toy to tinker with. But you have to remember: ALL of this was made by one man, in the early 2000s, whilst suffering from such debilitating delusions that legally qualified him as a disabled person.

Unfortunately, due to his inability to land a stable job, Terry Davis fell to homelessness, and a year after that, he committed suicide. He often called himself “the smartest programmer to have ever lived”, and while that is a very arrogant and presumptuous thing to say, I don’t think he’s wrong. If this is what Davis was capable of while being batshit crazy, just imagine what he would actually be capable of if he was sane.

How The American Empire Will Collapse (Shocking Insights)

Very interesting discussion.

egypt
egypt

A nation of nymphomaniacs by design

I am over 50, and not only do I not have any money saved, I’m in debt up to my eyeballs.

So I think I am qualified to answer this question.

Short answer? Continue to go deeper into debt.

Longer answer?

Within the next twenty years (unless universal complete healthcare happens) I can probably expect to lose my teeth, since I can’t afford dental care.

I will have to continue to earn as much of a living as I currently can, while physically deteriorating even further.

I expect to lose my home (nowhere near being payed off), and have to live with my adult children on their incomes. (and they are only starting to earn them, by the way.)

I fully expect to have to see my sister, ten years older than I am, die during that period.

As long as I can afford a computer and the internet, I will live more and more of my life online instead of out in the real world.

If the current style of Trump republican remain in power, I can see any benefits I currently have continue to be marginalized and vanish.

If Democrats overcome the Republicans, there is a possibility I may get comprehensive universal healthcare and drugs I can afford, and I may be able to collect what little Social Security may be coming to me, if not a small, guaranteed income to overcome my extreme poverty level.

I have no guarantees of any help or aid, as indeed I have never had. So my life should not radically change over the next twenty years from what it has been the past twenty: a hopeful future being twisted into a tragic present.

I don’t know how many of us are in the same situation I am, which has been cause by singular features of my personal life, a failed marriage, becoming the adult caretaker for my ailing parents, and then my brother, and then my eldest son (who has cerebral palsy), and probably soon for my sister as well.

But I imagine many of us over 50 who are only managing to barely squeak by from paycheck to paycheck will be in much the same boat: we are all pretty much in a position where we are in a self-perpetuating downward spiral, and we won’t get out without outside help.

Many of us will wind up getting reverse mortgages to make ends meet, getting much further in debt in the process, and having health issues from not seeing the doctor as often as we should, so we will become burdens on the next generation, who we will have no inheritance to pass on to.

Somehow, as depressing as all that reality is, I still look hopefully towards being in a better place in five to twenty years, and the future being bright again.

I somehow have confidence that the millennials will not screw up the future as badly as we boomers have.

Toxic evil woman gives 200 men HIV and instantly regrets it

I am Chinese. I apologize. I don’t know what “criticism” means here? In China, the most popular self-media app is called “Toutiao.” If you haven’t heard of this company, then you must know TikTok. They are different products under the same company. On “Toutiao,” criticisms and complaints against the Chinese government abound at all times. These criticisms are directed at government institutions at the national, provincial, municipal, and rural levels. Below are some examples of similar content I have seen in the past month:

  • Complicated medical insurance reimbursement process;
  • A relative’s child got into a better school through bribery;
  • Traffic signs on highways are in disrepair year-round;
  • The government has promised to start construction on a subway line for three years but has not yet begun;
  • Government incompetence behind food safety issues;
  • The village chief appoints his relatives to important positions;
  • Unfair treatment, complaints lodged with national departments, but still unresolved;
  • Reporting a corrupt official, only to face retaliation;
  • Gas billing system in a city seems to have raised prices, causing many to pay more;
  • Sewage flows freely in an old residential area, but the government has yet to initiate a demolition plan;
  • All diners at the same restaurant suffered food poisoning, but the government investigation is opaque, suspected of corruption;

Based on Toutiao’s recommendation algorithm, if you read some of the above content, the app will tirelessly recommend “criticism and complaints against the government” until your brain is overloaded. If this isn’t “freedom of criticism,” then what is?

Actually, I know what the asker wants to express: always criticizing the Chinese Communist Party, the one-party rule. And none of the criticisms I listed above touches on the “key points.” Right?

I’m sorry, could you use any online survey tool to design a questionnaire about “whether you oppose the Chinese Communist Party”? And invite suffering Chinese people on internet communities in China to fill out the questionnaire, in order to get “first-hand insider information from China.”

You will get the data you want and be surprised—why don’t Chinese people oppose the power that rules them? You will continue to draw the conclusion—the reason is that Chinese people have been brainwashed.

In the end, you will still believe: the seeds of freedom and democracy will never sprout in China, because Chinese people are ignorant.

That’s the whole trick. So, I wish you live in the “terrifying China” dream you imagined, and never wake up. I respect your choice.

China Commences Military “Drill” – Completely Surrounds Taiwan

China v Taiwan large
China v Taiwan large

The China military has begin drills surrounding the entirety of Taiwan, including islands of Kinmen and Dongyin, state media says.

Taiwan was forced to scramble fighter jets and put missile, naval and land units on alert this morning after China launched huge military exercises around the self-governing island.

Beijing said the menacing war games, dubbed ‘Joint Sword-2024A’, were a ‘strong punishment’ for Taiwan following the inauguration of its new president, Lai Ching-te, who is detested in Beijing as a ‘separatist’.

China claims Taiwan is part of its national territory and the People’s Liberation Army routinely sends navy ships and warplanes into the Taiwan Strait and other areas around the island to wear down Taiwan’s defenses and seek to intimidate its people.

But this week’s wargames are massive in scale.

The PLA released a map of the intended exercise area which completely surrounds Taiwan’s main island concentrating major firepower at five key points, as well as places like Matsu and Kinmen, outlying islands that are closer to the Chinese mainland than Taiwan.

China’s coast guard also said it organized a fleet to carry out law enforcement drills near two islands close to the Taiwanese-controlled island groups of Kinmen and Matsu just off the Chinese coast.

They come after the island swore in President Lai who said in his inaugural speech on Monday that Taiwan ‘must demonstrate our resolution to defend our nation’.

China denounced Lai’s speech as a ‘confession of independence’.

UPDATE 11:50 AM EDT  — ***** URGENT *****

Agence France Press (AFP) Reports:

Brutal Warning China to Taiwan
Brutal Warning China to Taiwan

This UPDATE comes as the Chinese military has Taiwan literally surrounded for an ongoing “Military Exercise.”

Hal Turner Remarks:

We all have to keep 2 things in mind:

1. Not all military drills lead to invasions.
2. Modern invasions always follow military drills..

Recall that China’s President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, had a big meeting together about a week ago.   If no one thinks Putin & Xi didn’t have a little war gaming session when they met last week, either you’re not paying attention or you’re just willfully ignorant.

It seems to me China must strike while Biden is still in office and the USA is weak. They know of Trump wins they will not be able to do so.

This isn’t WW II, and a Chinese “invasion” of Taiwan (or liberation of Taiwan from U.S. military occupation, which would be a more correct description of the campaign) isn’t going to look like D-Day.

Taiwan is small enough for China to be able to completely obliterate all (U.S.) air defenses located on (and off) the island before sending in paratroopers to secure key locations.

Then, and only then, will China start shipping troops to the island… and U.S. will be able to do literally nothing to stop it.

Either way, it sure seems that Russians and Chinese have agreed on China opening a new front against the U.S. in Taiwan.

This is a video of the Chinese military drill

This is a MM video, direct copy from the PLA.

When I was born my dad could not get work, so he decided to rob a service station, well that sent him to prison for the 1st 5 years of my life. So we lived with my grandmother (mom and baby me) in a place called piedmont courts back in the 50’s.

When my dad served his time he found work in a blue collar trade which he learned in prison and so life was basically lower middle class, which is to say we had a car, 9″ Black and White TV, meat and potatoes, new clothing twice a year, Easter and the start of school, and by new clothing I am talking new pants maybe shoes and shirt just one or two of each. We lived with my aunt and uncle as we did not have enough money to get a apartment or home.

Then when my baby brother was born, I was 11 years 7 months old, my dad left with the parting phrase, “I did not want the first bastard I sure don’t want the second” so my mom with a 3rd grade education, so petite she bought her clothing from the girls section, and no programs to help; was homeless.

Now I must admit she could have gotten help from her family but there were conditions she unwilling to tolerate. My new born baby brother was to be placed with my Aunt M and Uncle J’s family to properly raise, I was to go to a boarding school and mom had to live with an old maid aunt/chaperon in Marion county South Carolina.

Mom would rather die than lose us so we were homeless, we lived in the streets in cities from Miami FL (weather was a factor) to Worcester MA, mom’s favorite brother lived there; we crossed a picket line in Philadelphia and mom was beaten and they threatened to kill my baby brother and myself, a cab driver rescued us. Also in Philadelphia I almost died due to hypothermia, I was carrying my baby brother in about 2 or 3 feet of snow (remember homeless) and mom could tell I was in real trouble, so she went to a Catholic church which turned out to be a nunnery, mom begged and pleaded for help for me and my baby brother, they gave us blankets, soup, let us sleep in the kitchen and gave us some money for a bus to go somewhere warmer, Miami. (Note: we lived in an abandoned car a fireman showed mom the location of in Miami)

For a short time we lived with Aunt R whom was also divorced, (Note: Divorce was looked down on greatly at the time, so much so we could not rent a place even if we had money, because they would not rent to a single woman with two children, they just could not have that kind of trash living in their apartments). My mom was recruited to work massage parlors, which evolved to prostitution, which lead her arrest for solicitation in Norfolk. I have some really scary stories and some great ones.

I am just establishing I was by any standard poor.

What did we eat, well when we got extra money, there were food stands that sold hot dogs 10 for a dollar, burgers 5 for a dollar etc. those were special times. When we lived with aunt Rachel and her 4 children and boyfriend of the day, Robert my cousin and I would scour the roads for soda bottles, take them to the grocery store, cash them in and buy a bag of rice or beans, get a can of jack mackerel for the rice or ham bone for the beans cook it in a big pot and everyone ate well. When we were in the streets we would buy a can of anything that could be eaten cold, basically open can and eat. We also scoured for food, behind restaurants, trash, day old goods from the bread factory. There were lots of days week old moon pies and miniature pecan pies or just stale white bread kept us going as we lived in abandoned cars, under picnic tables, trash cans, or sewer pipes.

When I was in my 50’s I searched out my family, reconnected with them and they spent a lot of time telling me we did not have to go through this, but it was all mom could think of in order for us to stay together, there were no programs at that time, and welfare was basically a block of cheese, big can of peanut butter, and staples like beans and rice.

To this day I will eat grits with a raw egg in it, soup with stale bread broke up in it, rice and fish. I can afford steak I just don’t want it, never developed a taste for all that fancy food, so it is no loss.

Last note, I never loved my mom any less, she did the best she could do, I settled things with my dad, granted in my 50’s, he admitted he did wrong took 100% of the blame and never shifted any to mom, that helped me in getting over his abandoning us. All of these people have passed, most in the last 18 months, my dad died November 20th 2016, my wife of 47 years Martha passed April 12th also 2016; without a doubt her passing is the greatest loss of my life. Yea, I know this is perhaps too much info but it is therapeutic for me and I do not think people realize what others go through. There was no drug or alcohol abuse involved in all this, just life as it happens.

That is what a poor abandoned/divorced white woman with a 3rd grade education, an 11 year old and infant living on the streets ate.

Single Mothers Are GOING MAD Trying To Date When They Learn Men Want NOTHING From Them Besides Sex

Ugh. What the HELL is going on in the West?

Classic Orientalism

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PASSPORT BROS Got Him A Beautiful Traditional Mexican Wife & You Can See WHY

Advanced lithography (e.g. EUV / DUV) gets all the attention but not enough in the Natsec OSINT community are paying attention to industrial-grade glycine, a critical amino acid used in the semiconductor supply chain to help remove degraded resist during the etching process. Advanced etch processes enable chipmakers to use triple or even quadruple (!) patterning to create the tiny features found in most modern chip designs.

Table
Table

Due to BIS export controls announced in October 2022, all exports of industrial-grade glycine below ISO 140001 certified levels (more on this below) from the U.S. and allied nations were restricted. This has forced the Chinese specialty chemicals industry to scramble to find new supply alternatives, as the sector has long been dominated by Japanese supplier Ajinomoto and UK-based GEO Specialty Chemicals.

Over the past year, Donghua Jinlong Chemical — based in the heart of China’s military-industrial complex in Shijiazhuang, Hebei — has risen to prominence. Founded in 1979 by a former mid-level apothecary in the PLA, it has long been a provider of food-grade glycine but in response to export controls, re-developed its glycine formulas for industrial (and possible “dual” military) use.

Since 2022, Donghua Jinlong has rapidly expanded production capacity, building no less than sixty-eight “lights out” factories with aggregate production capacity of 1.7 trillion picograms — not a typo — of aggregate annual capacity. In a stunning turnaround from peak supply chain disruption in late 2022 / early 2023, analysts are now expressing worries about spillover excess capacity into food-grade glycine given the rapid rate of factory expansion. Shares of Nissin, Nongshim, and Master Kong plummeted last week on volatile trading in glycine commodity prices.

This plus a slick marketing campaign on TikTok have propelled Donghua Jinlong to a dominant 42.807% global market share in this critical material.

Last month, Donghua Jinlong was elevated to national-level “champion” status and hailed as a Party paradigm in the “upcoming round of techno-scientific revolution and industrial transformation” (新一轮科技革命和产业变革) that is one of the pillars of “Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era” (习近平新时代中国特色社会主义思想).

Unlike the poseurs at Huawei — much less Hubei Jingfa Chemical Group with its puny 3.653% market share — Donghua Jinlong is certified to ISO 22000, 90001, and 140001 standards. The last one is especially difficult to attain and industry analysts were more shocked by its ability to reach 140001 standards than SMIC’s ability to reach HVP at N6+ earlier this year.

TL;DR: All y’all cucks really ought to pay more attention to industrial-grade glycine and Donghua Jinlong.

Because of this speech made in Taipei:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gCC9tUESNIQ

An irresponsible, dangerous, and stupid political stunt by a former Secretary of State who remains sanctioned by China.

He is essentially tearing up the three communiques, and openly pushing for the independence of Taiwan.

The 3 communiques are words that underpin the basis of US-China diplomacy. Tearing them up equals the end of relations, and most likely, open war.

uh, I made a few heads hurt a couple years ago when I took a position uh, that said, “You know, it’s time for the United States to recog- recognize Taiwan as a sovereign and independent country.”

Um, you should know, I I thought about this a lot before making that statement. As a former Secretary of State, people think about what you say. Sometimes they think about what you say, and they say, “You’re just crazy.” Um, but I thought about it a lot, and I came back to what I tried to write about in my book. I came back to the central idea that we shouldn’t live in a make-believe world. We shouldn’t say things that everyone knows aren’t true. We should accept fundamental, basic truths and speak about them openly, no matter what that means, what, no matter what the second-order implications of that are. We should, when when we live in a fantasy world, we create enormous risk.

Um, this wasn’t just a, a gesture or a diplomatic nicety. Um, recognizing this place, Taiwan, as an independent, sovereign, free nation is true. It reflects the reality. You know, I was I was speaking, uh, a week or so back about this law that China has on its books, this idea of an anti-secession law. That’s just crazy, right? When when Xi Jinping speaks of Taiwan as being reunified with his country, this is propaganda. This is an effort to shape the minds of your children, and shape the minds of people around the world who don’t know the history, that don’t know the history that is so central to why it is, it would be important for the United States to make a declarative statement about Taiwan and its independence. It’s a it’s it’s a simple call to just recognize the existing reality. You govern yourself democratically. We saw this yesterday with your peaceful transition of power. You control territory. You engage in international trade. You do so as a separate entity, deeply separate from the People’s Republic of China. None of your real estate, none of your territory, is under the PRC’s sovereign control. Uh, to suggest otherwise belies the reality. You know, the risk is that the PRC has misinterpreted the – the PRC stance, and frankly we’ we’ve had these set of understandings, these communique- these agreements, that have been made uh, long ago now, um, and perhaps they were workable in decades gone by. It’s possible.

Um, when the other side violates an agreement, and there are really only two parties involved, it makes no sense for the other side to continue to honor those commitments. This isn’t about belligerence. This isn’t about an effort to create conflict. This is about recognizing conflict. This is about recognizing that there is an aggressive party, and there’s a party that is a potential victim of that aggression. That’s the people of Taiwan, not the people and the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. They are the aggressor. They are the ones who have threatened and attempted to coerce this place. You are the ones who have stood up to this coercion, aggression, ways that are important and noble and decent, and God bless you for that.

And finally, I, what pushed me over the edge to say that America ought to take that position is a reflection of my country’s history, my country’s history of recognizing people and their sovereign right to protect their own borders and to create prosperity for their own people. We correct an historical oversight when we get this right, but it also strength- strengthens a peaceful and democratic peoples. It’s not just you. It’s not just a policy adjustment. It is a moral and strategic imperative. And it is a necessary and it is a rightful acknowledgement of the democratic process of your true, free, and sovereign state. Time for us to act boldly, together. And when we do, when we do, I am convinced uh, that we will look back on the day that we just acknowledged the truth and the reality, we will look back on that day as a day that was an inflection point in world history, an inflection point in the history of this place, and an inflection point for the peoples of the entire region, and we made their lives better, safer, and more prosperous.

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Breaking News – China: “The Japanese People will be dragged into a fiery Hell”

Wu Jianghao large
Wu Jianghao large

Chinese Ambassador to Japan, Wu Jianghao, today publicly announced “The Japanese people will be dragged into a fiery hell,”  after Japan pledged support to Taiwan.

The ambassador has already been summoned to the Taiwan Foreign Ministry.

Hal Turner Snap Analysis

WOW!  That language is so unusual as to be completely unknown coming from _any_ China official.

Seems as though old animosities are resurfacing in Asia.

This is not the language used by Diplomats . . .  or are we in a new paradigm?

If this is what their DIPLOMAT says . . .  can any of us imagine the level of anger/hatred the Chinese still feel against Japan for the “Rape of Nanking?”

Sounds to me like someone has some very old scores to settle.

This could get ugly.

Men are lonely. Women are lonely. I so feel for this woman. Sad girl. Terrible!

The West is a cluster FUCK.

Taken from South-East Asia and transported to America, on May 27, 1902 he was in an enclosure at the Forepaugh Circus in Brooklyn when a keeper, in a state of intoxication, decided to throw sand on him and burn his trunk with a cigarette. The animal left no escape for man, but from that day on, especially for obvious marketing reasons, it was advertised as “the bad elephant that killed 12 people”.

The animal’s growing aggressiveness in the face of instigation convinced the owners to sell it to the Sea Lion Park; Here it wasn’t long before Topsy became the protagonist of a new attack and escaped from the facility, once again after being hit in the ear with a pitchfork.

The new owners thus found themselves obliged to euthanize the elephant in an event open to the paying public; For Topsy, three systems were planned to be used simultaneously: poisoning with cyanide-laced carrots, hanging with iron cables and finally electrocution.

The latter had been strongly sponsored by Thomas Edison who wanted to demonstrate in this way the danger of alternating current, supported by George Westinghouse in favor of direct current; a shock of 6,600V, lasting 10 seconds, killed the animal instantly.

Famous Pennsylvania Dutch Sticky Cinnamon Buns

IMG 8776 sticky buns
IMG 8776 sticky buns

Ingredients

  • 1 package dry yeast
  • 1/4 cup warm water
  • 1 cup milk, scalded
  • 3 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3 1/4 cups sifted all-purpose flour, divided
  • 3 tablespoons soft butter
  • 1/2 cup chopped raisins
  • 2 tablespoons currants
  • 2 tablespoons finely chopped citron
  • 1/4 cup firmly packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 3 tablespoons brown sugar

Instructions

  1. Soften yeast in warm water and let stand for 5 to 10 minutes.
  2. Add milk to sugar and salt. Mix and cool to lukewarm.
  3. Add 1 cup flour and mix until smooth. Stir in yeast. Add remaining flour mixing well. Knead dough on floured board until smooth. Put in greased bowl, grease top, cover with towel and let rise in warm room until double.
  4. Punch down dough, and roll into a rectangle about 1/4 inch thick. Brush with the softened butter and spread with mixture of raisins, currants, citron, the 1/4 cup brown sugar and cinnamon. Roll up like a jellyroll and cut into 1/4 inch thick slices. Lay the slices in a buttered 13 x 9 x 2 inch pan. Cover and let rise until doubled.
  5. Sprinkle top with the 3 tablespoons brown sugar.
  6. Bake at 375 degrees F for 20 to 25 minutes.

This week I took my family out to some fancy Italian restaurant to celebrate my daughter’s college graduation.

This is a type of place that everything is a la carte because I guess making you pay for side dishes makes it a fancy restaurant.

I digress. So the bill is $225. And it included a 3% fee which was never explained to me but let’s assume it’s a credit card fee.

At the bottom of the receipt list the suggested tips 20% 23% and 25%.

Here’s my problem in the past 3 years going out to eat has gone up by 25% in the United States. Tips are based on the cost of the restaurant so inherently the tips went up by 25%. And yet I guess this is not enough, on top of that there’s an expectation for a 25% tip? You got to be kidding me.

Now before you tell me how I’m a cheapskate and servers work hard for their money let me tell you about a week ago I went with my daughter and wife out to a breakfast place the bill was $45 the service was excellent and I left $10.

According to my calculations that $10 is over 20%. But that is not the point. The point is are you telling me that that waitstaff at the fancy Italian restaurant work any harder than if the breakfast place I went to?

I am so irritated with the tipping culture of the United States, especially the expectations at fancy restaurants that do not necessarily go above and beyond for service.

https://youtu.be/6duze3I79-s

Some things never change

Full-fledged financial panic?

I was just in Macau for a trade show, and the financial panic must be why I saw all these Mainland Chinese queueing up outside the Chanel boutique in the Four Seasons. I mean, in a financial meltdown, Chanel bags and shoes are the first thing you buy, right?

I can’t quite explain the hordes of Mainland Chinese tourists strolling around and taking photos on the Cotai Strip, though.

main qimg ba6fece4d2a08925be37cd6c46ae4723
main qimg ba6fece4d2a08925be37cd6c46ae4723

Great Hall at the Venetian Macau on 24th May (my photo). Everyone speaking Putonghua and indulging in full-fledged panic eating…

Maybe they decided to delay the financial panic until after their holiday?

So much wrong in one short question.

Man Dies & Learns We Have It Completely Backwards! (Unbelievable Near-Death Experience) 2024

What’s the most offensive Christmas present you’ve ever received?

From my mom. She was mad so when she came down to see my brother and me, she gave me a purse of mine I lent her and some of my middle school clothes back to me, as well as a new pair of socks and a thing of kitchen rags unwrapped. The socks were nice though – I liked them.

She then gave my brother some brand new books he wanted wrapped and a $100 dollar gift card to Amazon lol. I got her some new Sephora make-up, a pretty snow globe, and something else I can’t remember. Barely had time to just put it in her car because she drove off angry and refused to open it.

The worst part is the only other Christmas gift I got was from my brother, but it was sweet and my best one.

Also in case there was confusion we were adults (I think 22 & 20 then?) that live in a city away from her now; our apartments were just down the street from each other and neither of us had cars, – that’s why she drove up.

My mom angrily dropped off some Christmas dinner her BF of a month made for us too before she drove off to his place. Still an awesome Christmas though! Played some of the games I bought my brother, together, and we watched cartoons while we ate and I made hot cocoa. Actually it was one of my favorite Christmases or favorite I’ve probably ever had. Love him. I’m 24 now and he’s turning 23 Sunday.

This happened during boarding. I was running late and was one of the last people to board. I go to my assigned seat to find the guy in the middle seat is huge, like 400 pounds huge. I’m looking at my seat and trying to figure out how I am going to get my 250 pound body into what is in essence 1/3 of a seat. While I am looking the guy says “too bad you’re so fat, I don’t think you’re going to fit here. Maybe you should take the next flight.” Now I am normally the funny guy but this hit me wrong – before I could offer a smart ass remark the flight attendant came and she knew immediately what was going on. She told the guy that since he was really taking up two seats he should pay for two seats, but she would help out this situation and let him slide. He gave me a sickening smile and she said “I’ll get you another seat, let’s get you settled.” She promptly took me to business class and gave me the only open seat there. I did open the curtain during the flight to make sure my former seatmate saw me and when we made eye contact I gave him the biggest wave.

Pizza Porn

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When I was living in Beijing in 2010 as a foreign exchange student my dad came to visit. My dad is an avid skier and always buys North Face jackets.

He’s been skiing for over fifty years so knows his North Face jackets well.

It was winter in Beijing and pretty cold and I needed a new jacket.

I decided to take him to one of the “fake” goods markets in Beijing. This one in particular was called the Silk Market.

You bargain for everything in these markets and there were a few vendors selling “fake” North Face jackets.

I decided to try my luck and see how much I could get a North Face jacket for. After about what seemed like an hour of haggling, I finally got the salesman down to 250 rmb from his original ask of over 2000 rmb. (250 rmb is about 35 usd)

While I was bargaining, my Dad, the North Face jacket expert was inspecting their jackets.

He was amazed.

Everything from their labels to the actual tag was exactly as it was back in America.

I bought that jacket and to this day it still holds up.

Now that I’ve started manufacturing a lot in China, I’ve come to realize that large factories almost always produce more than what is ordered from bigger clients.

With the leftover goods, what do you think they do?

They sell them on local markets.

The jacket I bought that day in the Silk Market, might have come from an actual North Face manufacturer.

PLA military drills around Taiwan legitimate and necessary — FM spokesperson

A Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson said on Thursday that the joint military drills surrounding the island of Taiwan are legitimate and necessary.

main qimg 80b20a222b822727e71ba5569d83362d
main qimg 80b20a222b822727e71ba5569d83362d

It’s completely legitimate and necessary for the Eastern Theater Command of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army to conduct joint military drills surrounding the island of Taiwan, safeguard national sovereignty and territorial integrity, strongly punish the separatist forces seeking “Taiwan independence,” and seriously warn against interference and provocation by external forces, said spokesperson Wang Wenbin at a daily press briefing.

He said the drills are fully in line with international law and practice.

Wang said that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the Chinese territory. This is not only a historical fact, but also a real status quo. It will never change in the future. “Taiwan independence” leads nowhere. The Chinese people will never waver in their resolve to safeguard China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity.

All “Taiwan independence” separatist acts will be hit head-on by more than 1.4 billion Chinese people, and all “Taiwan independence” separatist forces will be hit hard in the face of the historical trend of China’s complete reunification, he added.

“We urge the U.S. side to stop emboldening and supporting the ‘Taiwan independence’ forces and stop interfering in China’s internal affairs. Any act that endangers China’s national sovereignty and territorial integrity will be resolutely and forcefully counterattacked by China,” the spokesperson said.

In response to another query about whether China plans to conduct more “punishment” drills, Wang said each time “Taiwan independence” separatists make waves, it garners stronger effort from China and the rest of the world to defend the one-China principle.

Figurative Art

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I had to report my best friend at the time…..She had 2 children, a 2-year old and a 1-year-old. I saw it get worse and worse.

It started with her yelling at, calling them stupid, retarded, pulling them around by their hair, slapping them and eventually punching them.

She left a bruise once that literally covered half of the 2 year olds face. I saw her pick him up with both hands around his throat.

I used to go to her house daily to make sure she didn’t hurt them. I tried talking to her and couldn’t get through to her, I even tried talking to other mutual friends to try and get them to talk to her too.

The father (who didn’t live in the home) called the cops one night after she picked the 2 year old up out of the car seat and carried him to the garage by his throat. ( all because she thought he killed her goldfish) I witnessed the whole thing.

When the cops came, initially I lied for her. After they left, she kept going on and on about the goldfish and how her son was still going to be punished more for it.

I tried to leave but I was afraid she would hurt them and I then realized as an adult I was responsible and if I didn’t do some thing then I was an abuser too.

So I called the police parked in my car outside her house and spoke with the same deputy who came out earlier that night, the same deputy that I bold faced lied to. I told them the truth about what happened. They came back immediately and took the children.

I had actually called their father first and told him what I was going to do in hopes he would show up and he could take them. Maybe he didn’t think I’d really do it? Im not sure but for some reason he never showed up. But he did eventually get them from foster care and they are currently with him now.

I hear My friend since gave birth to another baby. My friend hates me and I haven’t spoken to her since that night. I really miss her and her children but I think I did the right thing.

528 Hz MIRACLE FREQUENCY • MANIFEST YOUR DEEPEST DESIRES • WHOLE BODY REGENERATION

Since Taiwan Province is part of China, virtually no country in the world would invade Taiwan. Because it means invading the People’s Republic of China. Then, on the premise that ” no external enemy can invade Taiwan “, Taiwan buys a large number of weapons that can only be used against the People’s Republic of China.

The document on the establishment of diplomatic relations between China and the United States points out that ” both sides of the Taiwan Straits belong to One China “. For four decades, it was said to be the basis of American policy toward China. This can be compared to: there is a family called China, the mainland and Taiwan islands are members of this family. They are family, therefore, their contradiction is parent-child contradiction, husband and wife contradiction, brother contradiction. But not between enemies.

But a man thousands of kilometers across the Pacific came up and told Taiwan that you have to carry guns and grenades when dealing with your family. Because your family will kill you. Perhaps an undeclassified historical archive records Taiwan’s intention not to buy weapons. But this good man thousands of kilometers away would threaten and deceive the two families in various ways in order to get one of them to buy weapons.

Only Taiwan’s elite can recognize this fact. However, some of the elite live a drunken life, they do not think about the future of Taiwan and its people. For them, even after his death. This elite is deeply tied to the national interests of the United States.

Other Taiwanese elites are worried. Their proper voice channels have been shut down. Warnings can only be issued through online media. This is why the purchase of American fighter planes is opposed by some Taiwanese.

The people of the Chinese mainland have been told for more than 70 years that Taiwan isle is our family and that we should maintain close relations with our Taiwan compatriots. But, after 2005, After Chinese mainland began popularizing the internet in both urban and rural areas (before the GFW in Mainland China blocked access to some foreign websites), Many Chinese dreams of kinship with Taiwan disappeared when people saw some Taiwanese cursing the Chinese mainland in Taiwan’s online community. They don’t understand why another family member would want to viciously attack a loved one.

Any discussion of Taiwan’s arms purchases will ultimately get around the topic of ” China’s reunification “.

My conclusion is: first, militarily, the Chinese Communist Party does not care about populism, which keeps the island from becoming scorched earth.

Secondly, in public opinion, the existence of GWF makes it impossible for the vast majority of nationalists in Mainland China to express their views on the world internet. This has kept the topic of Taiwan’s popularity at a low level.

Otherwise, if the so-called ” democracies ” rule China, only God knows the outcome. Therefore, CCP and GFW are the saviors of the Taiwanese people. It seems ridiculous, but it is.

Au Jus Beef and Noodles

crockpot mississippi beef and noodles
crockpot mississippi beef and noodles

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds stew beef meat
  • 2 (7 ounce) cans sliced mushrooms, undrained
  • 2 cups beef broth
  • 1 (1 ounce) package dry au jus gravy mix
  • Worcestershire sauce to taste
  • Salt, pepper, garlic salt to taste
  • Hot cooked noodles

Instructions

  1. Place stew meat in slow cooker.
  2. Add beef broth and mushrooms.
  3. Add seasonings to taste and sprinkle in au jus gravy mix to taste.
  4. Cover; cook on LOW for 7 to 8 hours.
  5. Serve over hot cooked noodles.

Notes

Store any leftover gravy mix in a cool, dry place in an airtight container.

The Beijing Municipal Government announced a free online education and tutoring platform available to all Beijing middle school students starting in 2022. The platform’s operating hours will be Monday-Friday at 6–9PM. In addition to teaching classes, students will be able to ask questions. One-on-one tutoring will also be available with each student getting up to 30 minutes per session.

Teachers will be drawn from Beijing’s highest-ranked middle schools. Nine subjects will be covered including mathematics, physics and English.

The program’s purpose is to give equal access to all middle school students regardless of family income. Previously, this service was only provided through private companies such as New Oriental. Costs per student were up to 100,000 yuan per family, restricting it only to well-off families.

Teachers will be ranked by their students and can draw bonuses based on the score given to them by students, and the bonus caps are set at 100,000 yuan per teacher per semester. In order to prevent gaming of the system, real-name registration is required.

The costs of the service will be covered by the Beijing City Education Department, which will also manage the system.

Analysis by China’s Future (Paul Denlinger): This year the Chinese government is making multiple moves to decrease the cost of raising a child, and this is the latest move. I expect this to be a test launch; if it works well, and the initial kinks in the program are worked out, I expect it to be pushed out to other cities in China.

Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Chongqing are all Tier 1 cities. Living costs are especially high in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen, which are just as expensive as New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles in the US.

I expect the interest and demand for this program to be especially high in the Tier 2 to Tier 8 cities, because parents in those cities feel that their children do not have access to the same quality education, teachers and tutoring as parents in the Tier 1 cities. They are likely to ask that this program be launched in their cities as soon as possible, and will demand their municipal governments to offer the same progam as Beijing.

All of the programs aimed at cutting education costs have the same purpose: correcting the effects of the one-child policy, which lasted too long, until 2015, and which I have discussed in this answer:

A recent report suggests that China’s population peaked this year (2021); this means that the birthrate will fall below the population replacement rate in 2022. The Chinese government has not released the latest statistics, which suggests that the numbers are not good, and the government does not want to give them broad media coverage.

The most important feature of this policy is that it is a long-term policy. Beijing women cannot start popping out second and third children immediately, and the children will be 9–10 years old before they enter middle school.

For General Secretary Xi Jinping, this is a very tangible policy which he can use to promote his “common prosperity” policy all across China, and now, overseas.

Russian satellite is called a threat to the American spacecraft

The Russian satellite COSMOS 2576 has been identified as a spacecraft designed to destroy other satellites, specifically targeting American ones, according to representatives from the US Space Command. COSMOS 2576 was launched on May 16 from the Plesetsk launch site and is currently in the same orbital plane as the American optical reconnaissance satellite USA 314 (KH-11). Although COSMOS 2576 is currently in a lower orbit, it has the capability to increase its altitude, potentially allowing it to intercept USA 314.

 

Initially, space monitoring experts classified COSMOS 2576 as an inspection satellite, which are typically used for spying on other satellites. Russia has previously launched similar inspection satellites, such as COSMOS 2558, which targeted USA 326, and COSMOS 2542, which monitored USA 245.

 

However, the US Space Command has stated that COSMOS 2576 is not merely an inspection satellite but a fully operational anti-satellite weapon. It is presumed to have the capability to attack other satellites in low Earth orbit. American intelligence had anticipated the launch of COSMOS 2576 and has shared its assessment with allied nations.

 

The emergence of COSMOS 2576 coincides with concerns from the American side about Russia’s intentions to deploy nuclear weapons in space to destroy satellites. While such weapons have not yet been deployed, the Pentagon is taking the situation very seriously and considers it a significant threat to national security.

As a current alcoholic and someone that has heavily drunk for intermittent periods but have varied my drinking substance, I feel it would be only to be able to answer with qualifying my experiences with you.

11 years ago when I became an alcoholic, as a result of coming off a drug addiction and craving a mind-altering mood substance, alcohol felt natural. So I initially went straight to Vodka – I had quite a traumatic couple of months and it made sense. But over the course of a decade now, having had detoxes, rehab, 12 steps, hospital visits – it makes sense explaining each substance and what it did to me. Let’s be honest, they are all bad. Picking between them is like picking between the devil and the deep blue sea but these are my experiences:

Vodka – I used to drink 2 litres a day at my worst and by far this is the worst substance for me (please understand that knowing hundreds of alcoholics everyone has different experiences so I am only speaking for myself). Technically a scientist and anyone in any alcoholic profession would argue that whilst the toxicity because of the concentration is high, it is cleaner alcohol due to the process then standard drinks like beer and wine. I can say that if you drink this (and I always mixed) – it absolutely terrorises your stomach lining and throat. Killed my appetite but my weight drinking 6000 calories a day made my weight go up from 11 stone at 25 to 19 1/2 by 28. I would be sick every morning regardless and at least 3–8 times a day, impossible to drink water with a permanent headache from dehydration. My doctor said before detox I had 8 months left at my rate based on my liver tests which were 400 times abnormal. Withdrawals on the substance used to leave me unable to talk and walk, have seizures, cough blood, hallucinate, have crawling skin. Even drinking I was so drunk I could have been anywhere. Worst period of my life.

Wine – I switched to wine after 3 years of vodka and 6 months clean. I figured it was a middle ground between socially acceptable and as my partner of the same period of time likes a drink, we can be responsible. Worst hangovers ever. It’s so true that the darker the liquid the worse the hangover. If you’re an alcoholic you obviously aren’t getting the benefits that wine in moderation would give you. But the alcoholics that I know that drink wine age so much quicker then those that drink something else. They all end up flush. This lasted 3 months and I got too ill.

Beer – beer as an alcoholic is impossible to drink in large quantities. Too many bubbles. It’s the best of everything on this list but to qualify my answer, it is not possible for me to drink 30 cans of beer a day. But of beer, wine, vodka, whisky, cider, it’s easily the best for you internally. And if you can burp even better. I can’t so I would look pregnant 24/7.

Cider – cider is my current drink and the reason is that it is 4.5%, relatively clean if you buy a well-known brand and the hangovers are middle-ground. However and having stuck to this only for the last 6 years (minus a period I will explain), it is the worst for acid reflux. Every morning I wake up and my stomach is on fire with sickness every sort of 3 days. I drink about 18–20 per day but Gaviscon no longer works to protect against it. I mean it’s not ideal but a morning of 3 minutes of sickness beats the other 2 options with beer ruled out. I like to joke that at least I always get my 5 a day but drinking cider now means I am never drunk (paralytic) on this and i now never deviate from cider or beer. It is extremely high in sugar and I visit the dentist every 6 months to make sure my teeth are cleaned and checked because the acidity is so bad for them and you can’t live in the bathroom.

Whisky – terrible hangovers. There are scientific benefits in moderation.

Vodka again – having not drunk for 3 months before going on holiday in Sept 2019 – within a 2 week period of drinking cocktails on an all-inclusive and a month at home, I had hepatitis of the liver and having had an endoscopy, one of the worst experiences of my life, I was a week from death. I didn’t know that at the time but I couldn’t move. My partner had to put me in nappies, I wet myself, collapsed, dropped 30 pounds in 3 weeks. I was yellow. Thankfully I ended up hospital and having experienced DT’s, believing I was in a church and my doctor was trying to lure me to the basement to kill me, I checked out, went rehab and got clean, vowing never to touch vodka or any spirits again. And since that experience I haven’t.

My answer to you would be none of them. It has changed my life for the worst and I am so thankful I have a girl that has stuck with my for 11 years. If I could actually maintain my sobriety for a sustained period of time that allowed me to work, I would love to go in to school and educate children. Because no one educates people about long term affects and withdrawals and having lost both my father and grandad to alcoholism but having been young and not understood it, there isn’t enough education on the subject or resources. I am thankful I have a family that can afford treatment. I hope everyone could get the same.

TLDR – don’t drink. All the benefits over time go and offer you nothing. So have a cold can of pop or a cup of tea.

"Oh, yeah, oooh, ahhh, that's how it always starts, then later there's running and screaming." 

-Jeff Goldblum

Shuffle walk and peculiar habits

I lived in a trailer park for 14 years.

Living in a trailer park was the smartest decision of my entire life.

Why? Because thanks to my willingness to live in a trailer park, fix up and pay off two successive trailers, I was able to gradually build up enough equity to buy a house. This was in spite of being a single income gal in a double-income world; having no available help from family**; living in a high-cost, very desirable area; and working in a career I loved but that didn’t pay well.

First I bought a $5,000 trailer that had to be moved – hence the super-cheap price. I was able to arrange a lease on some property for the next five years.

When I eventually had to move elsewhere for work, the trailer had to leave the property but I was still able to sell it for $1,000 more than I paid. I had done some upgrades and added a small porch.

I had long since paid off the trailer, so the $6,000 was all mine. If I had rented an apartment over those five years, I would have walked away with nothing.

I put that $6,000 and some savings into a down payment on a much larger and nicer trailer (960 square feet with extensive decks) on a large corner lot in a mobile home park. I lived in it for nine years while working in my new community.

I paid it off and fixed it up. When the real estate market cycled up, I sold it for $5,000 more than I had paid for it. Again, if I had rented over those nine years, I would have had nothing.

I was self-employed at the time, so I moved to a nearby community that I had already identified as having lower housing costs. From the sale of my trailer, I put a substantial 30% down payment on my first house.

I’m still living in that house.

If I had not lived in a trailer park, I would not have my house. Without my house, I would be at the mercy of what is currently a tight and very expensive rental market. I would not have my beloved pups.

I put a suite into my house so it generates some income, which is useful since my job vanished in a corporate reorganization. The rental income is a bonus support as I’m venturing back into self-employment as I near retirement.

I have a mortgage but it is low. I have more than $400,000 in equity.

I’m far from wealthy…but I’m not at risk of being homeless either.

I recommend trailer parks to everyone who has limited income/resources but needs a toehold in the housing market.

———————
**For the record, my family likes me just fine but there are some life-challenged offspring in the tribe who need help more than I do, so any extra resources go their way.

Easiest Homemade Pizza Dough

easiest homemade pizza dough
easiest homemade pizza dough

Yield: 2 medium pizza crusts or one extra large pizza crust

Ingredients

  • 1 cup plain Greek yogurt
  • 1 to 1 1/2 cups self-rising flour, divided

Instructions

  1. Combine yogurt and 1 cup flour in the bowl of an electric stand mixer. Mix until combined, scraping down the bowl as necessary until combined.
  2. Knead on medium high for 5 minutes.
  3. Slowly add additional flour as necessary to help dough come together. Depending on how thick your yogurt is, you may need up to an extra 1/2 cup of flour.
  4. Dust clean counter top with flour and remove dough from bowl. Knead a few turns until dough is tacky, but not sticky. Roll out and add toppings as desired.
  5. Bake in a preheated 450 degrees F oven for 10 to 12 minutes.

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I know I was.

  1. Their border police seems to consider it their mission to make you feel unwelcome. Russia was indifferent, China was surprisingly friendly.
  2. Their luggage system at the airport is primitive.
  3. The country has more obese people than I’ve ever seen.
  4. Technology seems backwards. I’ve seen coin operated public phones, video rental machines and that was just before COVID.
  5. The car focus thing is silly, walking a mile to a bar wasn’t safe because there was no sidewalk
  6. Food seems focused on quantity and everything contains sugar! I even had a pack of salt that had 3 ingredients, salt, anti clumping agent and sugar.
  7. Public bathrooms the stalls never seemed to be ceiling to floor and the doors so low that I had to avert my gaze to avoid looking over them. This makes shitting a semi-public event.

She ain’t lyin’

Some fun vintage art

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What Happened To Google Search?

This is surprisingly good.

More Magical Thinking As US Raises China Tariffs

I just couldn’t understand why my coffee tasted like camel pee

During my “off in the wilderness” days, we (my wife and I) would go to a restaurant and order coffee with refills. Back in those days, refills were the norm. And we could stretch our time, and enjoy ourselves by drinking coffee.

One day while we were at the fast food franchise Carl’s Jr. we were drinking the coffee and talking about how lousy it was. Honestly it tasted like camel piss. And we stopped drinking it and left the restaurant.

But it was only then that I glanced in the window reflection and saw two of the employees a guy and a girl watching our every move and snickering.

Ugh.

Spent the night vomiting. Both of us.

I don’t know what happened to those two.

But…

But…  Karma is a swift sword. Don’t you know.

*sigh*

Van life. If it wasn’t one thing it was the other.

I’ve had people pour sugar in the gas tank, and others flatten our tires. I’ve seem people call the police on us, and all sorts of stuff. Not an easy life. I’ll tell you what.

But pissing in our coffee…

God.

Memories that I don’t ever want to relive.

Today…

 

What was the role of empresses and concubines in Ancient China (Han, Tang)? Did they have any power over the emperor?

First of all, an Empress was significantly different to a concubine in ancient Chinese culture. Although ancient Chinese allowed polygamy, there must always be a formal wife. She was married through a more formal ceremony and had significantly more legal rights and privileges, such as not being allowed to be divorced without valid reason.

A concubine did not have any of these privileges.

In fact, a son born to a concubine could be given for adoption to be the son of the prime wife, if she chose to do so.

The Empress was, of course, the formal wife of the Emperor. She would have to have the dignity to be the First Lady of the Empire; also there was no Second Lady (sorry concubines). And as the First Lady, she would have to play a role fitting of traditional Confucian values. That is, to be a supportive wife and responsible mother.

I will list out the one lady who I personally rate as the greatest Empress of China. Note that this was in regards to being the traditionalist figure. Empress Wu Zetian was, of course, greater as a leader, but she would always remain a controversial figure because her actions challenged the patriarchal society.

Empress Ma was commonly nicknamed Ma Bigfoot. Not necessarily meaning she had big feet, but more likely that she did not bind hers (foot binding, for all the cruelty, was for rich ladies who didn’t need to do manual work).

She was betrothed to a mid-ranking military commander named Zhu Yuanzhang. Little did she know that his fate would eventually be intertwined with the fate of a nation.

When Zhu Yuanzhang was imprisoned in the army, she secretly smuggled food to feed him. After Zhu Yuanzhang became crowned as Emperor Hongwu, she still occasionally prepared simple meals in their dinner, to advise him to never forget their humble beginnings. When the Emperor wanted to kill the royal teacher Song Lian, she fasted to convince the Emperor to spare him, stating that even a commoner had to show sincere respect to a teacher. Sadly, she died before the Emperor, and even her last words she asked him not to blame or sentence any of her doctors, stating that it was not their fault that they couldn’t cure a person already doomed to pass.

But just considering her biography, one could tell that she remained humble and modest, without overstepping her position. If an Emperor wanted to give significant political power to the Empress or her family, it would be very heavily frowned upon or criticised. There had been times where the Empress’ family had too much power, and caused severe corruption in the government (moreso in earlier Dynasties like Han, Jin and Tang).

What about concubines getting too much power from the Emperor?

If an Empress and her family gaining too much power was criticised, then a royal concubine gaining political power would be considered outright blasphemous. Ancient China often had the social rule that a formal wife should be chosen for both their merit and near-equal social rank to the husband, but a concubine did not. They were often chosen purely for beauty, servitude to their husbands, or even out of love (!).

A royal concubine’s only influence over the Emperor would be to use the Emperor’s love for her, to sway his opinions. And even so, if the Emperor’s decision was found out to be under the influence of a concubine, he would be criticised for being “weak-minded,” “lustful” and “irrational.” Because of these, some of the more power-hungry Emperors would punish his concubine if she dared to speak on political matters. And given that concubines were of lower status, she could receive much harsher punishments, such as banishment to the cold palace. Most concubines would not dare to speak up until they’ve reached significant status within the palace.

There were some ladies who were concubines who rose to power, either by usurping the current Empress (like Empress Wu Zetian), or when their son got chosen to be the new Emperor, they would gain (honourary) Empress status.

Empress Dowager Xiaozhuang was probably the best example for this; she had significant power and influence, but during her time as Empress Dowager (mother) and not royal concubine. While she was not liked by her son Emperor Shunzhi, she was very significant to her grandson Emperor Kangxi. And again, she knew the importance to teach and inspire her heir, not abuse power for herself. After she had died, Emperor Kangxi was able to continue his legacy.

Tomato Gravy

Tomato Gravy
Tomato Gravy

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 cups tomato juice
  • Pinch of baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
  • 1 1/2 cups milk
  • 3 tablespoons cornstarch

Instructions

  1. Boil tomato juice.
  2. Add baking soda, salt and sugar.
  3. Mix cornstarch and milk together, and pour into tomato mixture. Bring to a boil.
  4. Serve on scrambled eggs or fried mush.

“My boyfriend called me a 4/10”

 

Since dating my boyfriend, he kept making side comments about my appearance here and there. Then he compliments his ex every now and then. He says she is pretty or ended up talking about how he fell for her ass. One day I asked him to stop because it was making me self conscious. He never complimented me until I made a comment about it.

It’s been about four months and I told him I don’t have a good feeling about him and his ex and that he makes it seem like he likes her more than me. He finally told me that she is more attractive than me and that I am a 4/10 for him. I even asked how he thought about me, compared to his friend’s girlfriends, and he says they are more attractive than me. He tells me that his ex beauty means nothing to him. Then he turns around and still tries to call me beautiful after telling me was below average in looks. I am ok without being everyone’s cup of tea, but my own boyfriend?

Now I’m always looking in the mirror questioning myself. Everytime we go out I think about how he thinks all the girls are prettier than me. I don’t think I’m ugly and I am also not super attractive, but damn I thought I’d atleast get a 5 from my own boyfriend. What do I do? Do I leave because now I’m too insecure to be with him? Am I wrong? Would you date someone who thinks you are below average look wise?

Your feelings are valid, and your boyfriend’s behavior is utterly despicable.

Rating your girlfriend’s looks on a numeric scale, constantly talking up how hot your ex was, and telling you that his friends’ girlfriends are more attractive than you? No. Just no. This guy has the sensitivity and emotional intelligence of a potato.

You say you don’t think you’re ugly but also not super attractive. But you know what? That’s irrelevant. What matters is that you deserve to be with someone who thinks you are absolutely beautiful and makes you feel that way. Every. Single. Day.

His attempts to call you beautiful now ring completely hollow after he so thoughtlessly shattered your self-esteem. It’s like smashing a vase and then trying to hastily tape it back together. The damage is done.

I would seriously question staying with someone who makes you this insecure, who makes you feel like you don’t measure up, like you’re always being compared to other women and found wanting. That’s not what a loving relationship should do to you. It should build you up, not tear you down.

Leaving him over this would be completely justified in my opinion. Find someone who will appreciate you for exactly who you are, inside and out. You deserve so much better than to be stuck with a tactless, insensitive, emotionally stunted man-child who probably couldn’t find his own ass with both hands and a map.

 

Vintage Illustration

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Did you change your mind about China after you actually visited the country?

I went to China in 2017 with my family for a holiday. And a lot I had in mind about China was not true.

Language is a major barrier in China. I was totally wrong. Though the majority do not understand English, the younger generation in the metro cities can understand and converse in English pretty well. In Beijing, whenever we were stuck, there was someone to help us out. And those who are into tourism, keep their smartphones in use! Even we used offline Google translate to communicate to people. So language is not at all a barrier.

Chinese only eat non-veg which includes crawling, tiny insects. We carried so many ready to eat thinking we’ll get nothing vegetarian. Again, totally wrong. I feel, Chinese eat the most balanced meals with a healthy mix of veggies, carbs and protein. Had some of the most amazing vegetarian Chinese dishes. All that ready to eat remained untouched.

Chinese are soft, melodious speakers. Till date, I had heard Chinese announcements only in the airports, public places in Singapore and Hongkong. It sounded so melodious. But in reality, Chinese can sound loud. They do make several sounds, even from the epiglottis, making it sound weird.

China is a cheap shopping destination. I was very excited to shop in China. Thought I will buy a cute suitcase and fill it with stuffs. But in reality, the prices in their markets is comparable to that in India. I did not even find that cute suitcase I was looking for! I was particularly looking for a jacket, which I couldn’t find in their local markets. Later after coming back to India, I ordered it online from Aliexpress!

As an Indian, we would not be catching a lot of attention in China. Again, I was proved wrong. Chinese find us exotic. We got a lot of stares in the Beijing metro. Many asked for a selfie. In the summer palace, a group surrounded us and looked with awe!

Found Out

 

Do you think that for the majority of people in America, they find themselves in difficult positions in life mainly because of the poor decisions they made in their early years?

Everyone makes bad choices at some point in their lives.

The difference between “a mistake that ruined your life” and “a small setback” is gender, race, and wealth.

Consider Brock Allen Turner. He came from a rich family. He was a student at Stanford. He was on the swim team. And on January 18th, 2015, Turner sexually assaulted an unconscious woman behind the dumpster. He was caught red-handed by two other students. Turner was indicted on five charges and found guilty of three felonies.

The prosecutors recommended that Turner be given a six-year prison sentence based on the purposefulness of the action, the effort to hide this activity, and the victim’s intoxicated state. Do you know how long he got? Six months. The judge sentenced Turner to six months in the Santa Clara County Jail, and Turner served three months.

Turner’s father famously said, “His life will never be the one that he dreamed about and worked so hard to achieve. That is a steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20-plus years of life.”

The Judge himself was a Stanford alumnus and student-athlete like Turner.

What do you think would happen if Turner is black, poor, and went to a community college?

Everyone makes mistakes. Rich people with generational wealth can bounce back from it. Regular people making the same mistake would take them longer to recover and potentially alter their life’s trajectory forever.

The majority of people in the US, especially millennials and Gen Z, find themself unable to afford a house or find a job not because of the poor decisions they made. No. They find themselves in a difficult situation because they don’t have generational wealth to pay for their school, so they have to take on debt before they even enter the workforce. They don’t have a family to gift them a flat in a trendy neighborhood. They have to take the first job offered because, without a job, they don’t have health care. They couldn’t work on their start-up idea because they didn’t have parents who gave them over 300 thousand dollars in investment, nor were their parents friends with the CEO of IBM.

Reagan’s trickle-down economy never trickled down. After corporations discovered stock buy-back, job security was nonexistent. An entry-level job requires a master’s degree and five years of experience.

Everyone is created equal; some are more equal than others.

 

Dating apps are holding on for dear life, and they’re failing

 

Who was the most interesting person you’ve ever been seated next to on an airplane?

 

The flight had only one open seat, the flight attendant said, so squeeze in. The middle seat was open between me and what appeared to be a businessman, who was dispassionately reading the newspaper next to the aisle when the announcement was made. He set his newspaper down and turned to me, with a strange grin.

“I bet,” he said, “we can have that empty seat here.”

“Oh?” Naturally I was intrigued.

“Start an argument with me. We can be so unpleasant no one will want to sit here.”

I immediately did, asking how he could dare consider something so selfish. It continued from there, with the two of us quietly snarling at each other and glaring daggers at anyone who looked like they even considered intervening or sitting between us.

The plane continued to fill. We ended up at some point reciting the Monty Python argument skit from somewhere in the middle, so we never ran out of material. Any topic we could think of, we argued about. Seats around us vanished. People hastily stood to let people slide in.

He never had to. The last person finally was seated, leaving the space between us open.

Immediately, his face switched from outrage to smug satisfaction and he extended his hand to me.

“Thank you, that was fun. I’d love to do that again sometime.”

Then he picked up his newspaper, shook it open, and continued to read. We said nothing else the rest of the flight.

I think about that guy every time I’m sitting next to strangers.

Has a child ever done something that really surprised you?

Almost a year back, I went to Apple Store along with my father and my younger sister to get iPhone for my father. We bought the phone and were waiting for its installation. There weren’t much people in the store and we were simply looking around the other products.

In the middle of the silence, where everyone was heeding their own business, a 13 year old Boy walked in store ( I am assuming his age ). He was wearing a basic t- shirt, jeans, had specs. He also had school bag on his back. He walked straight towards the billing counter and said something to the person standing. Everyone looked at him. We all were wondering and guessing the possible reasons for him to be there. One of the store attendants brought the unit he asked for. He came to buy Smart Watch worth 90k INR. He was clear what he wanted and did not waste much time to decide.

Store manager asked him how is going to pay, to which he took the money out of his back and handed over all the cash to him. He did not bother to count and gave all the amount he had. He took the watch and left without taking the left over cash. The manger stoped him, gave the remaining amount and finally asked for whom he is buying. “Papa”he said and left.

Everyone in the store was equally perplexed and surprised.

I questioned Manger that why did he let him buy, he should have cross checked with his father. I get to learn that it is Apple policy not to question anything to the customer.

 

How do I stop an elderly neighbor for asking me to do everything for her?

Just say no as Nancy Reagan said.

I have an elderly friend who I helped out with certain things including tech support. She was quite rude about it sometimes if she couldn’t get a hold of me right away. I let it slide as I thought we were friends and had a friendship worth saving.

Then all of a sudden she had terrible breathing issues that came out of nowhere. She was hospitalized as she needed oxygen and many tests including a colonoscopy. I was devoted to this woman and spent more time than I should have visiting and bringing her things from home.

I did her laundry and spent hours cleaning her apartment as I didn’t want her to come home to a messy apartment.

I mentioned a colonoscopy as the purgative gave her sudden diarrhea and a soiled her pajamas. She shouted at me to go to the bathroom and rinse them out. I did this disgusting thing that even a nurse wouldn’t have done. By this time I was getting burnt out as I am in my sixties and am disabled myself.

For the sake of myself I started to say NO and I was rewarded with a rude awakening. She was so awful to me as she was very entitled and didn’t like being told no.

Once she was discharged I expected a call thanking me for cleaning her apartment in addition to everything else I did. I received no call for a week then an email ordering me up to her apartment to help her with things.

I have since ghosted her after sending a long email on her bad behaviour. She is housebound now with at home oxygen but she no longer has a slave ( me) so don’t know don’t care.

She would still have my friendship and help if she had just learned how to say thank you.

 

What’s the buying experience like when purchasing a high end luxury car like Ferrari, Lamborghini, Bentley, Rolls Royce, etc?

I recently purchased my first Bentley… woohoo.

I wanted to try pre-owned first to make sure I liked it. This one cost me 1/3 the price of a new one, but it’s also eight years old with 28,000 miles. The car looks new and drives like it’s new.

My experience was likely different than most as I didn’t purchase new. I had been looking off and on for about two years. I finally found exactly what I wanted and then nearly decided not to buy it.

Financially, it’s a horrible purchase… most vehicles are. I still wanted to own one, so I decided to go with this one. It was loaded. It’s a 2016 Continental GT Speed. It’s a little different than most Bentley’s, in that its exterior color is kind of in your face, while most Bentley colors are more subtle.

I found it online. Emailed the dealer to discuss it. Worked on the price a little bit. Agreed to purchase as long as they would ship it in an enclosed trailer.

I had never even sat in a Bentley before.

I love the way it drives. My wife doesn’t care about cars at all, and she mentioned how nice, how comfortable, and quiet it is. She asked just yesterday, “you’re going to buy a new one before long aren’t you?” Not because she wants a new one, but because she knows I like to test things before I fully commit.

It seems to be a good car, and one that I’m going to enjoy driving for a year or so before I trade it in for a new one.

I ordered custom license plates for it. The plates say INVSTED for invested.

If you want to know if purchasing the vehicle was exciting or anything like that: not really. It was kind of like ordering something online from Amazon.

The excitement comes from driving it.

Wholly Holy Insane shit!!

My God!

Why were Soviet submarines so much louder than American and British subs?

This statement is true for 1950s and 1960s, but if we talk later…

Just few interesting incidents around this topic.

31 October 1983, Sargasso Sea. Frigate, USS McCloy, equipped specifically to track Soviet submarines, was conducting tests of Towed Array Sonar Surveillance System (TASS). Soviet Project 671RTM submarine K-324 was tasked with trailing American frigate and gathering information about the new detection system. At one point, K-324 got too close to McCloy and hit the towed antenna, as a result, almost 400 meters of it were spun around the K-324s propeller shaft. K-324 lost ability to move and surfaced.

Destroyers USS Peterson and USS Nicholson arrived at the place shortly and started moving between K-324 and McCloy, trying to cut the antenna and prevent Soviets from seizing it. K-324 called for tug and prepared to scuttle in the event if Americans tried to seize the sub. This lasted for 10 days before Soviet tug Aldan arrived and tugged K-324 to Cuba. The trophy antenna cable was removed and sent home for research.

Another example, quite famous. 21 March 1984, project 671 submarine K-314 was tasked with tracking US carrier group based around USS Kitty Hawk in the vicinity of Korean peninsula. After 7 days of going on and off of carrier group tail, K-314 lost the contact and surfaced – right in the middle of carrier group’s order, resulting in collision between K-314 and Kitty Hawk. Neither the sub nor the carrier knew about each other location before the collision.

 

Soviet naval commission determined that the cause of the collision was an incorrectly selected search depth.

This was due to hydrology: thermocline at that fateful moment passed through a depth of 30 meters. But the crew could not take advantage of this, since all instructions obliged the sub to stay no higher than a safe depth of 50 meters. For this reason, K-314 did not detect the aircraft carrier and came dangerously close. When the BIP (combat information post) reported to the commander the distance to the main target at 60-70 cables (13-15 km), it was actually several times less than 10-15 cables (2-3 km).

The collision, though, was really lucky for both vessels. If K-314 had surfaced 20 seconds earlier, Kitty Hawk would have split it in two. Kitty Hawk, meanwhile, received the blow on the starboard side, right across the aviation fuel tanks and leaked a couple of tonnes of it. The fact that fuel had not ignited was very fortunate for Kitty Hawk.

11 February 1992, north of Murmansk. Los Angeles class submarine USS Baton Rouge was conducting intelligence tasks in the area and playing “cat and mouse” with Russian Project 945 submarine K-276. After various maneuvering, K-276 ended up behind and below Baton Rouge and surfaced right into it, ramming it from below. K-276 was repaired and returned to service, Baton Rouge was scrapped two years later.

For submarines that were supposedly very noisy, snapping the array designing to track submarines, surfacing in the middle of the carrier group and ramming hunter-killer submarine from below are interesting achievements.

For those who wants to comment on recklessness of Soviet sub commanders, quite a lot of collisions were caused by US subs too, like 20 March 1993, 23 May of 1983 or 24 June 1970 collisions, all with Sturgeon class subs on US side

 

What are some life lessons you have learned that you wouldn’t have if you hadn’t joined the military?

 

  1. Soldiers don’t fight because they hate the enemy. They fight to protect their buddy.
  2. Racism exists at every level of society.
  3. Just because you’re on the same team doesn’t mean all the players have your back.
  4. The government pays way too much money for many substandard products and services.
  5. There is a large difference between a clean weapon and an armorer approved clean weapon. “Go try again Hill!”
  6. No one joins the military because they are too stupid for college. I wish this stereotype would hurry up and die already. I served with some of the most brilliant minds of my generation.
  7. A soldier with a car is a popular soldier.
  8. Polishing boots is indeed a zen practice.
  9. Clothes last ten times longer if you dry clean them.
  10. Take care of home and never air your dirty laundry in public.
  11. Women play as many games as men do. And they’re often as unfaithful.
  12. It is possible to run while still drunk from the night before.
  13. Not all officers are suitable for command.
  14. There is such as thing as bad NCO’s.
  15. Technology can cause as many problems as it is supposed to solve.
  16. It is possible to drive with zero depth perception.
  17. Loneliness hurts but it won’t kill you.
  18. It’s not that easy to die.
  19. Motrin can solve all of your health problems. If not, take some Cepacol.
  20. Having the right roommate matters a lot.
  21. The closest distance between two strangers is a hot plate of good chow.
  22. Stay alert, stay alive. At all times. In this day and age this might just safe your life.
  23. Misery is always better with company.
  24. Hospital food is better than army chow hall food.
  25. Even a grenade launcher can get boring after a few hours.
  26. Nothing can cheer someone up like news from loved ones at home.
  27. If you donate plasma beforehand, getting drunk is a lot cheaper.
  28. Many times in life, we are required to do things that do not make any sense.
  29. Wet weather gear will often make you wetter than you were before.
  30. Humvee’s are horrible vehicles. It takes around 3 hours to replace a Humvee turret by yourself on a Friday evening in the motor pool.
  31. People will abuse the uniform.
  32. Heat is a killer.
  33. If your not pissing clear, time to drink water.
  34. You can save quite a lot of money by cutting your own hair.
  35. We are all pawns of more powerful people open to the random chances of fate.

 

An American Reacts to Why America Sucks at Everything – THIS ONE HURT

 

What did you do first after being released from prison or jail?

Once pass the prison gate in the prison van..went over to the bank to cash the state check and then to the motel that I told DOC that I was going to…waited till the van turned,so that officer couldn’t see me leave ..walked over to the state DHS..got my food stamp card..then to Walmart .Got a dome tent and sleeping bag,food, quart of water. fillet knife and a ball of clothes line,a sharpie ,cell phone…once out side , looked in the trash bin and got a cardboard box..walked over to the street that would take me to the interstate..once there, walked over a overhead bridge.. went to sleep in the tent that night ..next morning,walked over the truck stop over the other side.made me a sign on where I was going to…

While I was setting there at the TS..a shoolie came in and 4 guys got out ..we spoke and I asked which way they were going..they was going my way ..I asked if I could join them..so I had a ride . Once there.had them drop me off where I wanted to be..call a person who I could stay with..got my DL , bought a pickup and a on bed camper..lived in it as I started my life outside of prison..

Since I discharged all of my sentences.I could travel and sleep where I wanted to..been out here for 13 years now…had a business that I had till I retired from.. Don’t want a place that I have to pay rent on.. upgraded to a shuttle bus now..not bad for a 70 year old guy…

What’s the nastiest move a coworker made to get you or another coworker fired?

I had a lesbian coworker who had the hots for the young executive assistant to the president of the company. She was the cutest girl at work so I flirted with her. I had a hot, sophisticated, rich, brilliant girlfriend so I never asked her out. My girlfriend and I were on a break so I tested the waters on asking the EA out and the lesbian coworker overheard it on a Friday. So she sends me company emails over the weekend telling me all the EA’s flaws. I’m thinking, WTF but I know the lesbian is going to be trouble and save the emails.
Few weeks later, I actually start dating the EA. The lesbian goes to the presidents office in tears making up tales of me menacing her. He tells the VP of engineering to fire me immediately. I get walked out of the building 20 minutes later on a Friday. The head of my project tells the president it’s going to cost millions of dollars if I go so he calls me at home asking me to work at home. I finally get to tell my side of the story and sent him the emails. I get a public apology on Tuesday and back pay. Thank God the b*tch was stupid and used the company email system so I had proof.

Chili Gravy

Chili Gravy
Chili Gravy

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 tablespoons butter or beef drippings
  • 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 cup cold water
  • Salt, if needed
  • 2 to 3 cups meat, cubed or ground
  • 1 clove garlic, chopped or crushed
  • 1 tablespoon red chili powder
  • Hot biscuits

Instructions

  1. Melt butter or drippings in a cast iron frying pan.
  2. Add flour and stir until rich brown.
  3. Slowly stir in cold water and continue to stir as it cooks so it won’t get lumpy.
  4. Taste and add salt, if needed.
  5. Brown meat with garlic and chili powder in a skillet, then add to the gravy, which should be bubbling. Simmer for a few minutes, then serve over fresh hot biscuits, mashed potatoes, rice, enchiladas or tamales.

American reacts to ‘Why America Sucks at Everything’

 

What are the top ten things I should experience in life?

 

  1. Take your family for dinner frequently. There is no time like family time and they appreciate it more than anything. Be there for them when they need you.
  2. Travel alone, travel with a a group of friends, travel with him/her. Travel anywhere possible and as far as possible. Make spontaneous plans and travel without any arrangements. It’s going to be very hard but you will love the experience.
  3. Fall in love. It’s a great feeling in the world when you know someone always has your back no matter what. Remember, with love comes heartbreaks too but don’t worry because time almost heals everything.
  4. Find some mentor for yourself and when you feel ready, mentor someone. This will change someone else’s life and it’s an amazing feeling.
  5. Work for someone else, work for yourself or anything that you want to do but make sure to make money. Money can’t buy happiness but it surely does make your life luxurious.
  6. Try new looks and change the way you dress up once in a while. This will make you feel fresh and confident too.
  7. Learn how to ride, drive, swim and as many languages as possible. Also stay updated with new technology. They make your life easier.
  8. Wash you car, list the best songs that you always listen to and go for a long drive alone. Sing the song when you are in the car and forget everything. You will feel that life is better than you actually think. You can do it with friends too but the experience will be a little different.
  9. Forgive someone. It’s not for them but for yourself. Don’t keep on holding to something someone has done to you. Just let it go and give yourself a fresh start. Trust me, you will feel amazing.
  10. Get married. Start a family and make them happy. I haven’t done this yet but I am sure this is going to be one hell of a experience in life.

Have you ever put a hidden camera in your own bedroom?

Actually I have, though in the end I wound up not needing it. Let me explain…

Several years ago I lived in an apartment that had been carved out of the basement of a raised ranch house located in a beautiful part of Oakland, CA. The setup was such that I’d enter the apartment through the attached garage and the owner, who lived upstairs in the main living area of the house, would only enter the garage to do laundry and would do so using the same exterior door that I used to enter my apartment through the garage.

You can see where this is headed.

After having lived there for about a year, I started to find small things in my living space that had been moved, or a leaf on the floor that I knew hadn’t been there when I’d left the house in the morning. I owned a cat through so for awhile I just assumed he had been moving these things around, but for some reason (maybe the locations where the items were found?) I couldn’t shake the feeling that the landlord was cutting through my place to get to the garage. I set up a camera mostly just to prove to myself that I was being paranoid.

Well, it turns out I wasn’t being paranoid at all. I just didn’t wind up needing the camera to find out. One morning while I was sleeping in after a fun night on the town, I woke up hearing the sound of someone talking to my cat. WTH? I groggily look over and there coming down the stairs in his underwear and carrying a basket of dirty clothes was my landlord. He looked over said good morning and tried to keep on his way. Some choice words were spoken, a new lock added to the door that he used for access, and a rather confusing video was captured of me lecturing a half naked man about privacy that day.

I’m very glad not to be renting like that any more.

In elementary school, what was the funniest reason you got called to the principal’s office?

I was in the first grade and the public school I attended was having a canned food drive for Thanksgiving. My teacher picked me to go to the Principal’s Office to appear in a news photo of several students sorting through the baskets.

I was a shy, six year- old kid with little school experience, so my teacher walked me to the office to await my journalistic debut. The office was bustling with activity that morning and a secretary told me to have a seat. She pointed to a bench where some “big” boys were sitting and horsing around. My teacher had left and there I was sitting with these sixth grade kids.

I was terrified when this large man in a suit stepped from an adjoining room and in a deep, angry and booming voice said “Get in my office now!” He gestured at the group I was sitting with on the bench.

I followed those sixth- graders into his office and sat quietly in a corner chair. He started hollering at us at the top of his lungs, pointing at the biggest kid and saying he ought to suspend all of us for what we’d done.

He ordered us all back to class but not before the biggest kid had his behind paddled with a wooden board. By this time, I was terrified and balling my eyes out. I found my way back to class and knocked on the closed door. My teacher opened it, took one look at me and realized something was clearly wrong. There I was, my shirt soaked from crying, my face contorted from sheer terror, and my eyes no longer those of an innocent boy.

She asked what had happened and when I couldn’t get the words out without blubbering, she grabbed my hand and off we marched…back to that terrible place where kids were being tortured.

Upon arrival, I noticed the mean man, the secretary and my teacher huddled and whispering in the room where I’d just been traumatized. They pointed at me and I couldn’t believe my eyes. They started laughing.

“You poor little boy,” my teacher said as she wiped my forehead. The mean man explained he was the principal and those boys were in the office for being bad. I wasn’t supposed to be with them, he apologetic ally said.

There were some other kids watching me at this point and the secretary said I was to go with them to have our picture taken. There was a man with a big camera with them so I fell in line and we went outside. When he took the picture for the paper, he told us all to smile.

That Sunday, after the paperboy delivered our newspaper, my mom and dad flipped the pages and proudly eyed the picture of their young son. I had already told them what happened that day, so when my mother, with a straight face, asked why I wasn’t smiling like the other children, we all had a good laugh.

Confident Man Humbles Woman After Forcing Him to Do This On Date

 

I’d served 16 yrs and 4 months when I was released on parole. I was fortunate that my partner (who I married 6 mths after my release) had stood by me throughout my sentence (our son was just over 1 yr of age at that time and prison was much different then). Visits were 20 minutes a month (behind wire) You could write 1 letter a week and receive 2 (which were heavily censored with blackout) There were no gangs, no drugs, no buy ups (Comms),no sports, no weights -each wing had it’s own yard. You were let out 1 hour in the morning and 45 minutes in the afternoon.

The prison officers totally controlled the prison with violence and threats of violence- you lived your life one day at a time doing the best you could to get through another day in a place where it was anything but normal. You become grateful to be locked in to your cell for the night. About 9 months before I was released, they converted a wing into a Special Care Unit for inmates who had served 10 yrs or more to help prepare them for life after prison. I applied to participate in the program and was 1 of 14 other inmates who were successful in the first intake. I was always grateful to be given the opportunity to be in that unit. It made me realize I was so out of touch to what I had perceived life back into society would be-like comparing chalk to cheese.

My partner was encouraged to participate in the program and speak about how life was for her dealing with my incarceration. I’d believed because she was in the free world that she was going okay- that couldn’t have been further from the truth. Her struggles far outweighed anything prison threw at me. I had about 3 months to go before I could apply for parole. Every thing was moving along okay but for some reason the psychologist and I had communication problems from the get go because he felt that I wasn’t taking the program serious enough and could make a better effort. To be honest, I had no idea what he was going on about but I was very aware that his report could stop my getting parole so I took the attitude from then on to agree with everything he said to me. The last night in prison, I couldn’t sleep. I had my civilian clothes in the cell with me so I got changed early (at dawn) when they let me out for breakfast.

I had been granted an early release so at 8 am, as I walked to the main gate, I became totally overwhelmed that I was finally going home. When I got to the gate, my partner and son were there I just held them for what seemed like an eternity- it was incredibly surreal. I wanted to get off the prison property as quick as I could. I was incredibly nervous and just wanted us to get home. When we got home and we walked in, that was when it really hit me- I wasn’t in prison anymore and I emotionally lost control. The truth is; I had no right to have my partner and son be here for me and support me for over 16 yrs but here they were… so excited to have me home. We didn’t talk about prison. I had lots of questions though about how much things had changed whilst I’d been in prison. That afternoon, my son’s girlfriend turned up. I was incredibly nervous meeting her but she was great which made me comfortable after that.That night was the first time my partner Dorothy and I made love in nearly 17 yrs- it was a beautiful night. Though I had a terrible time trying to go too sleep so I went into the lounge room and put the television on. Not long after, my partner came out and I told her I couldn’t sleep so she snuggled up and we watched movies together. In the morning, my partner was taking me into Sydney for the day. When we got on the bus about half way to Sydney the bus was full and I felt like I was choking and badly closed in. I told Dorothy we had to get off because I was sweating so bad. When we got off, I told her how I felt and we caught a cab the rest of the way. When we got into Sydney I couldn’t believe how much had changed- the amount of people and traffic was bewildering. I wouldn’t let go of Dorothy’s hand.

We went into a cafe for breakfast and coffee I was totally taken aback by the prices of everything. People’s dress sense was totally foreign to me as because when I went off to prison, it was the rock and roll and hippy era. It was all so very different. We went into a major store in Sydney called David Jones- we weren’t in there long when I had a shocking panic attack. I told Dorothy I had to get out of there as I honestly thought I was going to collapse and have a heart attack. It was terrifying. It was a long time before I went into a major shopping center where there were so many people for quite a while. Prior to going to prison, I was starting my final year in nursing and unlike today, 80 percent of it is done in University & 20 percent in a hospital setting. Back in my day, all training was done hands on in a hospital. I applied to finish my nursing career which was accepted. So much had changed, wages had dramatically increased. In the early days of my release, we didn’t venture far from home as my confidence level was low out in public. My partner was so understanding of how much I was struggling to integrate back into society and function normally. Everyday was a better day. 6 months after I was released, she & I married and made plans for the future. We both wanted to travel around Australia but one of my parole conditions prohibited me from travelling interstate for 2 yrs so when we had weekends off, we would go camping as much as we could. Our son and his partner were due to have their first child. They lived in a unit not far from us.

After 2 years of Dorothy and I working, we’d saved enough for a deposit for our first home for us- that was a huge step in going forward. One of the biggest, if not the biggest hurdle facing me, was at work where I kept all conversation as much as possible to hello and goodbye. I avoided having my lunch or dinner breaks with other staff so I wouldn’t be asked any questions about where I worked before. It wasn’t like I could say, “I’ve just come out of prison after serving 16 yrs for armed robbery.” It was a terrible fear; a do or die situation where you don’t want to lie but it was a case of self preservation. On several occasions, I was put into that situation where I had to reply to where did I’d worked before. It was a normal question to be asked and I replied I worked interstate or in a country town (one I knew enough about in case I was asked questions about that town). That wasn’t easy- having to lie about your past but I had no choice as I wasn’t going to declare my hand and go backwards. Before I went to prison, my wife and I loved going dancing (particularly rock and roll) but one of my parole restrictions was I couldn’t go onto licensed premises even though I didn’t have a problem with alcohol. I found the most consistent problem I faced was being with/around people, so after work, I would go straight home. I avoided making friends at all costs. At home it took me a long time to get used to turning the light off. I was forever doing things in the garden or in the house. I was fastidious about keeping everything clean. I was also constantly washing my hands.

As time went on, my son and his now wife had another child which I doted over- they and my wife were everything to me. I told my son, Adam, how sorry I was not to have been there as a father for him. I can honestly say never once did he blame me for anything; he was just happy I was finally home. I had just finished my parole licence after 5 yrs when I was at work one day at the hospital and my son unexpectedly turned up. He was in a terrible state. I asked him to calm down and tell me what was wrong. He told me that Dorothy had had a heart attack at work and they couldn’t revive her. My world just crashed-everything meant nothing in a blink. For my son’s sake, I was trying hard to keep my emotions together. I told him to go home while my wife was brought to the hospital where I worked. I asked my superior if I could go see her. Unfortunately, when I got to the morgue and saw her, it was total devastation. I got angry and kept asking her how could you do this to us. I begged her to wake up. I couldn’t let go of her. I can’t even remotely explain how I felt- the loneliness and emptiness physically hurt. My tears were uncontrollable and I was inconsolable. After about an hour, I left and went home. My son and his wife and grandchildren turned up. Very few words were spoken though we talked about the funeral. It was the most dreadful time. The next day, I resigned from my job and after the funeral, I told my son I needed to go away for awhile. I went on geographicals for nearly a year. I just could not come to terms with my wife dying. When I finally did get home (much to the relief of my son), he said to me “Dad you have to let go, this isn’t how mum would want you to be”. I didn’t get grief counselling, I just threw myself into my work and my grandchildren. I also bought a motor home and on my holidays I would go to the places she & I were going to go to together. Eventually, I paid the house off. As far as meeting another woman was concerned that was not going to happen anytime soon. Eventually, I put prison life completely behind me and became just another normal member of society. I’ve been out of prison 34 years now. And, a few years ago, I met a nice lady. We are close friends and keep it just as friends only because my one and only love was Dorothy and that’s how it will always be.

I am a Muslim from China, and my English is not very good, so I partially used translation software to complete this answer. My friend’s wife works in an elementary school. We often get together, eat, and chat. Once, she talked about having two special children in her class. One is a child from the UK (his parents work at a local foreign enterprise), and the other is a child from Xinjiang (her parents are from Xinjiang and run a restaurant in our city). The British child left our city when he reached the fourth grade to follow his parents to another branch of the British company in China, but that is not the focus of this text. I’ll talk about what I heard about the girl from Xinjiang.

The girl is Uyghur and came here in the first grade, barely speaking Mandarin. My friend’s wife (who manages the class and also teaches math) was worried this would affect the girl’s mood, so she arranged for two Han Chinese girls to be her “Mandarin teachers.” By the time my friend’s wife talked about her, she was already in the fourth grade, and her Mandarin level was indistinguishable from local children. This girl had clearly integrated into the group.

Since she initially couldn’t speak Mandarin, she encountered difficulties in her studies. My friend’s wife patiently tutored her. She said that the Uyghur girl made the fastest progress in math. This was not only because she was the math teacher but also because math is a way of thinking, not a language. So, the girl quickly earned an “A” in math. Because of her poor Mandarin, the Chinese language teacher did not impose high requirements on her grades, as long as she listened attentively and completed her assignments as best as she could, she could pass.

My friend’s wife told me that the girl’s family is devoutly Muslim and explained a lot to her. Sometimes, during Muslim festivals, the girl would bring traditional foods from home to give to her teachers.

This Uyghur girl looks very different from Han Chinese (from a Chinese perspective, she looks more like a European Caucasian). She is very beautiful. Therefore, some boys in the class liked her very much.

As her Mandarin improved and her relationships with her classmates grew stronger, this girl often invited classmates to her parents’ restaurant to do homework together after school. Sometimes, when it was evening and there were still children who hadn’t left the restaurant, the Uyghur girl’s parents would invite them to stay and have a free dinner at the restaurant until their parents picked them up.

The above is what I heard about the daily life of an ordinary Uyghur girl in an eastern province of China. It seems mundane, and as I write this answer, I also think it is an unremarkable story. However, I want to remind you that in recent years, many people from Xinjiang have come to big cities in China to seek fortune. Running restaurants is their most common business.

In 2019, a friend invited me to a Xinjiang restaurant in my city (he knew I am Muslim and have dietary restrictions). There, I saw many locals. Xinjiang restaurant owners often package their restaurants with a “Western Frontier” theme, adding a sense of mystery that attracts people to try the food. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get used to Xinjiang Muslim food.

Another business for Xinjiang people is selling jade. In China, jade is considered a precious gemstone, and the Hetian region of Xinjiang is a major source of this gem. Every time I go to the largest antique market in my city, I encounter some Xinjiang people selling these stones. I see them chatting, smoking, arguing with Han Chinese, and, when happy, singing Uyghur songs that others don’t understand.

I think that anyone forcibly displaced from their homeland would not be happy. They must be filled with hatred and complaints in their hearts. And the most direct target of their hatred would be the Han Chinese areas and people under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party (many Han Chinese are even atheists or non-believers). And as the target of hatred, Han Chinese would certainly be full of vigilance and the same hatred towards them. Right?

But what do you feel in my mundane words above?

  • A Han Chinese elementary school teacher was afraid an Uyghur child would feel lonely and helped her find friends;
  • A Han Chinese language teacher gave special care to the Uyghur girl, encouraging her to learn Mandarin well;
  • The Uyghur girl gradually made Han Chinese friends on campus;
  • A group of Han Chinese boys liked the Uyghur girl;
  • A group of Han Chinese children freely came and went to the Uyghur family’s restaurant, and the Han Chinese children’s parents never worried about any “potential danger”;
  • The Uyghur restaurant owner often kept Han Chinese children and provided them with free dinners (although most of the time it was simple meals like noodles, dumplings, and naan);
  • Some Uyghurs have gained wealth here;
  • Many Han Chinese were attracted by the “Western Frontier” gimmick and went to Uyghur-owned restaurants to eat;

How can anyone infer from the above facts that “Uyghurs are forcibly displaced and persecuted”? Just as those who do bad things always leave traces, if there were persecution, there would certainly be resistance. Even if one person is persecuted, they would have parents, children, friends, and relatives who would all hate the persecutors.

If the Uyghur restaurant owner in the text was persecuted, why wouldn’t he tell his daughter about this hatred? Some might say, “The CCP is too scary; they don’t dare.” But at the very least, they would teach their daughter to stay away from Han Chinese, right? There’s no need to frequently invite Han Chinese children to eat, right? Hearing that some boys who persecute their religion like his daughter, could there be anything worse than this?

 

 

 

 

Ultraman in China

There is something unexpected about kids in China.

Every single one of them, from boys to girls, love Ultraman.

I know…!

It’s a Japanese character from the 1960’s, but no it hasn’t gone away. It just settled in for the long haul. And the kids in China all love this persona. And they cannot tell if it is a boy or a girl. Thus, all the kids of all genders love this hero!

2024. Ultraman.

Ultraman 7
Ultraman 7

Ultraman 6
Ultraman 6

Ultraman 5
Ultraman 5

Ultraman 4
Ultraman 4

Ultraman 3
Ultraman 3

Ultraman 2
Ultraman 2

ultraman 1
ultraman 1

Who would figure?

Today…

a retired paramedic – we went to a domestic violence incident. The poor woman, this wasn’t our first call out to her and we’d seen her so badly beaten before, but this time the filthy mongrel in his drunken rage had put a star picket (a metal fencing post that looks like a star at each end) into the outdoor fire pit, he then beat her, accused her of having sex with other men he then raped her with that star picket. We didn’t think she’d survive this one as we took her to hospital full lights n siren. We hadn’t seen her for a very long time after this event and we though she may have died, then one night we got her address come up, a DV situation again. We thought dispatch made a mistake when they said it was a male casualty. We got there and yep he’d started to beat her, this time she waited till he passed out drunk and she beat him with a star picket. He survived with major brain injury so will never beat anyone again and she got prison. I gotta say I wanted to cheer her on and high five her. Like she said prison is way safer than living with him.

I had a PE teacher that was a stereotype of a PE teacher. He was a shorter man, pretty buff, always wore shorts, bald with some facial hair. You’ve seen the type in movies. Let’s call him Mr. X.

The PE classes were mixed 9th and 10th grade. I was in 10th grade (sophomore year). A new boy arrived one day and he had a serious attitude problem. He was angry at the world. (A 9th grader, so PE was my only class with him). Every day he was mouthy and disrespectful. Yelling at kids, pushing and shoving, trying to start fights. Mr. X could not stand the kid. He’d send him to “go run laps” when his attitude got on his nerves.

One day, I don’t know how it started but I’m with my group doing some PE thing and we hear serious yelling. The kid has come up off the track and is shouting obscenities at Mr. X and stalking towards him. Mr. X turns this shade of reddish purple and meets the kid halfway and punches him. The kid starts fighting him and Mr. X kicks his ass. Full on brawl. All of us kids are watching this with jaws dropped.

Next thing we knew, the kid was lying there, and the freaking Principal and Security guards are there. Mr. X is escorted away. The Principal apologizes for us “having to see that”. The kid gets up and is taken away.

I never saw Mr. X again. The kid was fine, but super subdued after that. Never heard of any more trouble with him. He was a year behind me so he could have been expelled for all I know the next year, I just know he did not have an attitude problem in PE again.

The next day in PE, my little petite math teacher was there to teach us. She was totally out of her depth.. but that’s another story 😉

DOWNTOWN Los Angeles COLLAPSED

What happened at a wedding that made you feel horrible for the bride?

My friend Anthony married his wife 24 years ago.

The ceremony itself was fine. The weather was beautiful and the priest gave a great sermon.

The reception on the other hand was where I really felt bad for the bride and her family.

-One of his groomsman decided he wanted to make a speech as he felt he should have been best man. (My friend’s brother was his only choice as they are best friends as well)

-Two other guys almost came to blows over one of the few single female guests (She wasn’t interested in either of them btw)

-The bride’s family was not shy about stating their disdain for pretty much everything.

And worst of them all….They asked all the guests to make a video wishing the bridecand groom well. One of his buds was absolutely hammered goes up and says in a mock Tony Soprano/Vinnie Barbarino accent:

“Congratchlerations youse two pricks….and Tony if dis bitch gives you any trouble you let me know and I’ll have her whacked”

The bride saw this and was PISSED!! She pulled groom and said she wanted him to leave and read my friend the riot act about inviting that weasel in the first place.

Fortunately the videographer was able to edit him out.

Biscuits and Sausage Gravy

Biscuits and Sausage Gravy is popular all over America. It’s a staple dish on diner menus.

biscuits sausage gravy
biscuits sausage gravy

Yield: 6 servings, 2 biscuits each

Ingredients

Biscuits

  • 3 cups self-rising soft wheat flour
  • 1/4 teaspoon baking soda
  • 1 teaspoon granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup butter-flavored shortening
  • 1 1/4 cups buttermilk
  • Butter, melted

Sausage Gravy

  • 1 pound breakfast sausage (mild or hot)
  • 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
  • 3 1/4 cups milk
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt or seasoned salt
  • 2 teaspoons pepper
  • 1/8 teaspoon Italian seasoning

Instructions

Bisicuits

  1. Combine first 3 ingredients in a large bowl; cut in shortening with a pastry blender until mixture is crumbly.
  2. Add buttermilk, stirring just until dry ingredients are moistened.
  3. Turn dough out onto a lightly floured surface, and knead lightly 4 or 5 times.
  4. Roll dough to 3/4 inch thickness; cut with a 2 1/2 inch biscuit cutter. Place on a lightly greased baking sheet.
  5. Bake at 425 degrees F for 12 minutes or until golden.
  6. Brush tops with butter.
  7. Split biscuits open; serve with Sausage Gravy.

Sausage Gravy

  1. Brown sausage in a skillet, stirring until it crumbles.
  2. Drain, reserving 1 tablespoon drippings in skillet. Set sausage aside.
  3. Add butter to drippings; heat over low heat until butter melts.
  4. Add flour, stirring until smooth. Cook for 1 minute, stirring constantly.
  5. Gradually add milk; cook over medium heat, stirring constantly, until thickened and bubbly.
  6. Stir in seasonings and sausage. Cook until thoroughly heated, stirring constantly.

Notes

This recipe is easily doubled.

1. A good way to get your friends to buy you drinks at a bar is to tell them you quit drinking.

2. After meeting someone and shaking hands, smell your palm. Guarantee they won’t ever talk to you again.

3. If you want to sound sick when calling in to your work, lie on your back while hanging your head over the edge of the bed. You will sound congested.

4. Spill drink in the seat in front of you at the movies to avoid people blocking your view.

5. Want to go on a foreign vacation and can’t afford a flight? Just purchase a one way, then overstay your visa and get deported for free!

6. If you’re stuck on an annoying call, put your phone on airplane mode instead of hanging up. The other person will see “call failed”instead of “call ended”.

7. Take pictures of yourself everyday or week of you slowly getting fatter. When you have reached a good heavy weight, post all the photos in reverse and attach an exercise plan to sell.

8. If you ever want to be nosy and rummage through someone’s desk drawers but are scared of being caught, do so while holding an empty stapler.

9. When you start a new job, tell them you have a pine allergy. When Christmas comes and they start decorating remind them and then work from home that month.

10. At a crowded bar, and can’t get a seat? Go up to the hottest woman there, and hit on her. She’ll leave in disgust, and you can take her seat.

11. Flatulence works well for clearing crowds in front of famous paintings at art museums.

12. Put an old parking ticket on your windshield when parking illegally so the parking cops think you already got a ticket.

13. If you’re about to get in a fight tell the other person that you are HIV positive.

14. When meeting someone, tell them you are twice as far away from them as you actually are, and are willing to meet halfway, l.e. a block away from where you currently are.

15. If you’re flying somewhere and realize you have something that won’t get by security, turn it in to ‘lost and found’. Go pick it up when you return.

16. If someone asks to see your ID, act affronted, yell “you’re an ID!”, and stomp off in a huff.

Economic Danger: IMF Slams The U.S. Over China, WARNS Of Cold War Fragmentation

I told my boss that I’m going to resign, and he offered me twice my current salary if I stay, what should I do?

It happened to me. A year ago, I was 64, starting to think about retirement. I have a 24-mile commute through mountain roads and it can get treacherous during the winter. After missing a day because I was snowed in, I said, “the hell with this,” gave my boss notice, and started looking for another job, closer to home.

The next day the regional vice-president called and offered me a raise. I told him all my concerns about my age and the weather.

The day after that the president of the company called from HQ in Florida. I’d never met him before, but he offered me a bigger raise, one that would make me the highest-paid person with my job title in the company.

And I quickly realized that the reason I was commuting 24 miles over mountain passes was because there weren’t any jobs in my area. I could go to work for my son-in-law, but I’d already worked for him, and he’d fired me. Twice. We learned we really shouldn’t work together.

So I told the president of the company I’d stay.

A year and a half later I’m still there. Now I sort of feel obligated to stay, and pressure to do a fabulous job to earn that high paycheck they’re giving me (but my quality of work must have been at least acceptable or they wouldn’t have made the offer, right?) And I’m socking away a bit of money for my eventual retirement, whenever that is.

But part of me still wishes that I told them I was done. So to this day I don’t know if I made the right choice or not.

 

Have you ever caught your neighbor doing something that made you furious?

Yep, I woke up early one Saturday morning to what sounded like a bull dozier in my yard. I looked out of my bedroom window and saw a small bulldozer pushing oner a medium sized pine tree on my property.

I went up to the dozier and tried to get the attention of the driver who seemed intent on lining up his dozier for another one of my trees, he had already pushed down three.

I slammed my hand against the door and startled the driver. I asked him what the was doing. He leaned over and told me he had been hired to move some trees by my neighbor. I asked him “Isn’t it customary to get the owners permission before you push down his trees?”.

He said the neighbor had showed him which trees he was to push down. I told him to cease and desist until I got back.

I went to my neighbor and asked him by what authority he was pushing my trees down.He said “Those trees are outside of your fence” . I agreed but told him that I owned 20 feet of land outside of my fence and that the trees in question were clearly within the 20 feet.

He asked me “Why didn’t you put your fence around your whole property?”.

I told him it was my land, my fence, and my business but the fence did not mark the end of my property.

He went to get his plat and sure enough he had violated my property. He is such a jackass.

After Thought:

I didn’t sue the guy, but I should have. Later his dog came into my yard and attacked my wife’s cat. My yard, my wife’s cat, his damn dog.

I took the cat to the vet trying to save its life. The vet operated on the cat but eventually he had to put the cat down, because its ribs had destroyed its lungs and it struggled to breathe. It was clearly in terrible pain. My wife was hurting too. After the cat was euthanized, the bill was over $8,000.00.

I was angry and called that jackass and told him what had happened. He told me that he had no control over the dog and did not send it to my house, it had just wandered over there. It was only a cat, after all and I should have not spent that much money to save it’s life.

I told him, you will pay for that cat’s medical expenses and anything else I could make him pay for, just because he was a jackass.

I sued him and won, but there is no pain and suffering for a cat. There should be but there isn’t .

He is still a jackass.

 

Hegemonitis: Why The West Has Become So Dumb

 

After British “Storm Shadow” and French “SCALP-EG” Missiles Strike Russia, “Response against London and Paris Coming”

Hal Turner World

 

In mid and late April, Ukrainian SU-27 “Flanker” aircraft fired missiles into Russia.  The missile debris was retrieved by Russia and forensic exam revealed they were AASM-250 “Hammer” from France and AGM-88 from the U.S.

In the video below, released by Ukraine Armed Forces, the jet is shown firing AASM-250 “Hammer” extended range bombs into Russia:

Ukrainian Air Force Su-27 Flanker operations, conducting standoff strikes with US-supplied AGM-88 HARMS and French-supplied AASM-250 Hammer extended range bombs. pic.twitter.com/1WhMGMxZRA

— OSINTtechnical (@Osinttechnical) April 12, 2024

In the next video, also released by Ukrainian military, another Ukraine Air Force jet is shown firing AMERICAN AGM-88 High-Speed Anti-Radiation (HARM) missiles into Russia:

Ukrainian Air Force Su-27 launching US-supplied anti-radar AGM-88 HARM missiles. pic.twitter.com/Zo7oiErh4m

— Igor Sushko (@igorsushko) April 25, 2024

Over the past few months, other missile attacks into Russia from Ukraine were forensically analyzed by Russia and, at various locations, the missile were determined to be either French SCALP-EG cruise missiles, or British “STORM SHADOW” cruise missiles.

Russia has repeatedly warned the United States, Britain, and France – all of whom are supplying weapons to Ukraine — that such weaponry cannot be used to attack inside Russia.   Those warnings have apparently been ignored.

Earlier this week, Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of the Russian Federation Council (Their version of a Senate) said, in a media interview:  “Storm Shadow/SCALP-EG missiles are not controlled by the military personnel of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, but by the British and French who arrived in Ukraine.”

He went on to add:
“That is why the response to such actions will not be long in coming, and the target will not only be Kiev, but also London and Paris.”

“I’m embarrassed to be out in public with my boyfriend.”

 

My boyfriend and i have been together for 2 years. I love my boyfriend, but he lacks social awareness and doesn’t have good manners. For example, when we went out to dinner the other night, he was talking/laughing extremely loudly, burping and farting. When we go to the movies, he talks regularly rather than whispering and makes commentary about the movie, which annoys the other people in the theatre. Also, whenever we walk past a group of people, he tries to be funny and says stupid things. For example, the other day, we were walking past a group of guys and my boyfriend was like “i need to fart” super loudly. Mind you, he’s 27.

I don’t know if i’m being overly sensitive or if his behaviour is childish and unacceptable. How can i handle this situation?

Dear Embarrassed Girlfriend,

Your boyfriend’s lack of social awareness and immature behavior in public settings is understandably frustrating and embarrassing for you. Burping, farting loudly, making inappropriate commentary at the movies, and saying crude things to strangers is the kind of conduct most people outgrow by the time they graduate high school, not the way a 27-year-old man should be acting.

You’re absolutely right to be bothered by this. It’s not overly sensitive to expect your partner to have basic manners, exercise restraint, and behave respectfully in shared public spaces. His childish antics reflect poorly on him and on you by association.

The real issue is why your boyfriend seems oblivious to social norms and unconcerned with how his behavior affects you and others around him. Have you talked to him directly about this? I would sit him down at a neutral time, not right after an incident, and calmly explain how his actions make you feel. Use “I” statements like “I feel embarrassed when you make loud bodily noises in restaurants” rather than “You always humiliate me.”

See if he’s receptive to toning things down and working on his self-control and social skills. If he gets defensive, minimizes your feelings, or refuses to make an effort to change, then you’ll need to consider whether you can accept this long-term. It’s no fun constantly cringing at your partner’s behavior.

Ultimately, you can’t force him to change, but you can and should advocate for yourself. Make clear that the status quo is unacceptable to you. If he’s unwilling to modify his behavior, you may need to modify the relationship. There’s someone out there who can make you laugh without making you cringe.

Shorpy

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Lets hear it for the 195th. Fighter Squadron 1958 the Clarks.preview
Lets hear it for the 195th. Fighter Squadron 1958 the Clarks.preview

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Because he is a Minor

Indian law after the Nirbhaya Incident can treat Juveniles as Adults when judging and delivering sentences but the law still allows Juveniles to be given leniency during pre trial proceedings including BAIL

The Bail was delivered on the grounds that

  • During Pre Trial, a Minor can’t be considered an Adult. Only during trial can the prosecutor request and apply for the Minor to be considered as an Adult and he will be punished as an Adult meaning Port Arthur or Yerwada is definite rather than JDC or Reform School

Thus the Minor was released on Bail

It’s within norms of Indian Law


However I am surprised the father or mother haven’t been booked under 199 MVA

Typically when a Minor drives a car, his father or mother or the owner of the car is held liable and will be booked

They may not get bail so easily

Maybe they complained that the car was stolen


Please note :-

He has only got Bail

He has to report to Police Station every Wednesday and Friday

He has to surrender his passport immediately

If he flees, his parents will face charges

He will be tried for 304A , 279, 338 IPC and various sections of the MVA and if found guilty will definitely be treated as an Adult


What if this was a poor 16 year old kid without a rich father?

Ah!

If that was the case, he would be sent to a Juvenile Home on Remand and would not likely be released until sentencing and would likely move from Juvenile Remand to Jail on reaching 18 years


I quoted Indian law, never said it was applied equally and fairly

A reason I call it a Cesspit Nation

Cat Adopts Orphaned Tiger Cubs. 3 Years Later, She Reunites With Them & The Unthinkable Happens!

When a zoo cat unexpectedly loses her entire litter of kittens, she is heartbroken and inconsolable. But then, another feline mother lives the opposite experience – she gives birth to healthy kittens, and rejects them. The zookeepers worry about the tiny cats. Without their mother and no one else to raise them, they will lack several skills they will need as adults. But then, the first cat adopts the orphaned kittens… even if they’re actually tigers. A year later, they are separated to allow the tigers to flourish. 3 more years pass, and the three cats are reunited. What happens next is unthinkable!

 

 

What was the moment you cancelled the friendship with your best friend?

We had been best friends during high school and were practically attached at the hip. Two girls in a close group of five friends.

We would spend every chance we got as a group.

One night we went out to a dance club and I hit it off with a really nice guy.

The guy asked for my number, and I gave it to him.

The next evening, my friends and I met up, as usual, and my female best friend asked me in a teasing manner, whether I’m planning on going out with the xxxxxx from last night.

The x’s are in place because it stands for a very derogatory term for a black person.

The guy that I gave my number to it was black.

My former best friend then went on to say that no friend of hers will go out with a xxxxxx.

I was too shocked to answer, and have to admit that back then I was not a confrontational person and tried to laugh it off because I was so embarrassed by what she said. But she was serious.

Her words stuck with me as something I could never forgive her for.

She never even spoke to the guy, yet decided he was less than her because of the color of his skin.

I have to mention that he called me a couple days later, I wasn’t home, and spoke to my mother (this was in the 90’s, before the prevalence of cell phones).

When I got home, my mother was gushing over the polite young man that called me.

My mother was always annoyed that my friends didn’t have proper calling etiquette (like saying “hi, May I speak to Michal please”, instead they would say “is Michal there” without even saying hi).

What my racist friend didn’t know is that this young man was a marine, and my mother loved the polite way he spoke to her, and told me she’d love for me to invite him over.

I began to distance myself from that friend after that, which became much easier because we graduated soon after and I didn’t have to look at that racist again.

 

Larry Johnson: China-Russia-Iran A New Alliance

 

What is the most shocking thing a judge has said to you in open court?

“Guilty, $1000 fine and one year of jail!”

Let me give you a little back story. I was in a motorcycle accident on base while in the Army. Being a knucklehead boot, I hadn’t gotten a motorcycle license, and my registration and insurance were out of date. Somebody didn’t see me and pulled in front me, and I T-boned her car. When the MPs showed up, she was clearly at fault for the accident but when I went to show my license, registration and insurance, I was given multiple tickets.

Fast forward to my day in court. The driving without insurance was a no-joke offense with up to a $1000 fine and a year in jail. I negotiated with the prosecutor before the case that I would accept a $500 fine and be done.

I went before the judge, who read off the charges and suggested they were serious charges and I could go to jail and I should get a lawyer. I looked over to the prosecutor, who just gave me a little hand wave like “Don’t worry about it.”

The judge then strongly suggested I get a lawyer, which I declined. When I declined, he rapped his gavel and said, “Fine, you are condemned to a $1000 fine and one year in jail.” This would have also ended my military career and resulted in a less-than-honorable discharge. I did not go down, but my knees turned to jelly.

The prosecutor jumped, asked to speak to the judge and ran to the bench. After a quick sidebar the judge said, “OK, $500 fine, next case.”

 

What is the most jaw-dropping method for shoplifting that you have seen?

I worked as a Security manager at a large retail store and was friendly with the Store Controller, who managed the computer system.

This was late 90’s and the PC’s were still monochrome, DOS based, and very difficult to utilise. So one morning my colleague said I must come and take a look at how he is able to clone a session on any terminal in the store and look at sales and other transactions that are taking place as they are captured – “live”.

He asked me, which area he must connect to, so we can see if anything is happening. One of my favourite areas was the watch counter as they had some really cool stuff. After typing in a few commands, the screen changes to the till at the counter and seconds later we see a credit for a Fossil watch – R600.00, around $80.

I owned a Fossil watch and this piqued my interest, why would someone return this brand of watch, I thought they were really nice. So I told my buddy, let’s go downstairs to the counter and find out why the customer was not happy.

Arriving at the counter we met the cashier, and I asked her to see the watch, also asking why the client had brought it back.

I will never forget the look on her face – her smile turned into sheer terror… there was no watch. She was crediting items that did not exist, paying cash out of the till as “refund” which went into her pocket. She was also responsible for stock control and was able to manipulate figures so the fictitious returns were well hidden. Being a staff member for a little over 6 years, one can only imagine how much money she had taken.

It still amazes me how she was caught, the total number of random events and the exact timing that led to her demise. Karma? I am a firm believer.

Is there any weapon from history that can’t be replicated?

There’s one type of steel whose production method have been lost to history but people are still trying to replicate today: Damascus steel.

Damascus steel is pretty legendary, because the method of making it is lost to history, because of its intricate, beautiful pattern, and also because of its durability. Perhaps more surprisingly, traces of carbon nanotubes have been found in real Damascus blades. Now, this is obviously an unintended byproduct of the manufacturing process but it does explain how the material became so highly regarded to the point of being mythical; it had been said that real Damascus blades could cut through a gun barrel (most likely a myth; the same way that supposedly Japanese WW2 mass-produced katana was said to have cut through hot gun barrels. It’s very unlikely at best).

The term ‘Damascus’ itself is also hotly debated: What constitutes a proper ‘Damascus’?

Interestingly, the Damascus steel is not from Damascus. It is actually thought to be from India, though it became associated with Persia and the Arab world. In fact, it got as far as Russia, where it was called ‘Bulat’. There are plenty of theories how they became called ‘Damascus’, like that Europeans who first encountered it found it in Damascus (back then one of the centers of sword production), or it was a corruption of a renowned Arab swordmaker’s name who made these, and so on. Regardless, people from Damascus do not refer to this steel as ‘Damascus’. The truth of the origin of the name is also likely lost to history.

In the 19th century, ‘Damascus’ was the term for ‘pattern-welded steel’ that was used in making knifes and gun barrels. And then in the 20th century, people started marketing their patterned knifes as ‘Damascus’ to latch on to the fame, adding further to the confusion.

Scientists and engineers have been trying to recreate the material from current samples, but so far they could only come close but not exactly replicate the process. To make them properly, a smith would need the correct raw materials and knowledge of the procedures, both of which probably will never be found again.

HOWEVER, by today’s standards, Damascus isn’t all that special with regards to its strength, the same way that Japanese swords aren’t particularly superior to European or other types of swords. Back then, however, seeing something so beautiful and yet durable must have been nearly magical.

Yes, and I regret it.

We worked together for several years, and one day, I disclosed that I was going through a divorce. She sympathized as her marriage was a mess. We commiserated about our mutual marriage problems for some time, and (I think partially based on my situation) she filed for divorce.

We “dated” in secret until her divorce was final, and then a year or so later, we got married.

After a few years, she moved to a different company (so that all of our eggs were not in one basket…). We both changed jobs several times, moved three times, and had a pretty good life.

I don’t regret the good times. What I do regret is not taking the advice of my first divorce attorney to get a prenuptial agreement before marrying again.

When we both entered into our second marriages, I had a decent nest egg. She was broke. Being in love, I felt the prenup wasn’t necessary. Oh, hell yes, it was necessary. Not only did I pull her out of bankruptcy, but I shifted her and her four kids into a very comfortable life. We went on multiple cruises and international vacations and had very nice homes (e.g., several 5-bedroom, 5-acre properties).

After the kids were all grown and living independently, I think I outlived my usefulness and she left me. Earlier promises to allow me to keep my entire retirement account went out the window, and her attorney fought for half of everything – including pre-marital assets that I thought were excluded. That’s a long, sordid story, but how many people keep detailed financial records from 25+ years ago? And with no prenuptial agreement, I was screwed.

I know of many successful marriages between people who met at work. I’m not suggesting that is a bad thing. My only caution is to protect any family or personal assets by getting a prenup.

What are 20 things absolutely worthwhile in life?

 

  1. Marriage — To have or not to have a life partner is a matter of choice. But I’ll tell you why it’s worthwhile. Life is better enjoyed when you’re in pairs.
  2. Sex — This comes at number two on the list for obvious reasons. Unless you’re celibate, you absolutely need this. Besides, without it, marriages are dead. Biology calls. And it perpetuates your genes.
  3. Love — I won’t even begin to explain why you need this. It’s what makes life worthwhile.
  4. Family — Because it provides a support system that no other institution can. And it binds societies together.
  5. Resilience — Life itself is tough and I don’t have to remind you that there are many trials. Developing a thick skin to withstand every storm is a particularly good thing to have.
  6. Risk — Yes, has it ever occurred to you that without risk there can never be any meaningful success? We all learned how to walk by taking risks. Big risks.
  7. Laughter — Have you heard that it takes far fewer facial muscles to smile than to be angry? Well, laughter takes it even further — It pumps that much-needed oxygen into your lungs perpetuating your longevity.
  8. Fitness — Fitness and health go hand in hand. If you’re in the habit of eating well, then go one step further and take some exercises. You’ll keep the doctor away and the bills low.
  9. Happiness — You can do without money but you absolutely need happiness to stay mentally healthy.
  10. Travel — I cannot even begin to explain how the feeling of traveling and experiencing new adventures does to your system. It puts into a state of rest.
  11. Investing — Securing your future is a must if you know that you’ll still be here unless something bad happens. Even if something bad happens to you, it is still worthwhile to invest so that your family may not be left with nothing to eat.
  12. Education — You can’t imagine how the ability to read and write is powerful. Obtaining relevant education is not only worthwhile but also an investment.
  13. Friends — Friends do come in handy especially if you’re in tight places.
  14. Goal setting — You can’t just live aimlessly in life.
  15. Discipline — Will keep you out of trouble.
  16. Wisdom — Will help you make good decisions and sound judgments.
  17. Passion — You absolutely need this.
  18. Courage — You will try and fail many times. You must equip yourself with this ability to keep trying even when you know you risk to fail again.
  19. Focus — There are just a bunch of things that will work for you. Setting your focus is absolutely necessary to ensure you don’t miss the target.
  20. Self-belief — If you don’t believe and appreciate yourself, no one else will.

Walmart Issues a Major Warning To Entire US Economy (It’s Bad)

 

 

Have you ever bought a car that didn’t run and found that it was an easy fix?

I have!

Around 2010, I went to check out a 1984 Ford Bronco. It was in really nice shape, but the owner had tried to convert the 300 I6 engine from a small 1bbl carburetor to a big aftermarket 4bbl, as well as performance headers and exhaust. Afterward, he couldn’t get it to drive much more than about 15 mph and it was gutless. He eventually parked it and it sat for about a year or two until he finally decided to just get rid of it.

I went over and looked at it, and despite the fact that he had to fight with it for about 30 minutes to get it fired up using starting ether, it ran quite nicely and underneath the engine was in good shape. Whatever the problem, it was on the outside (ignition, carb, etc).

I bought it for $600 and towed it out of his yard with my brother steering the Bronco. It was a 20 mile drive home and I didn’t feel like towing it the whole way, so I pulled it into a parking lot and popped the hood.

For some reason, the idle adjustment screw was about 2 inches too long (it’s usually about 1/4″) and it would jam into the body of the carburetor, physically keeping the throttle from opening further than about 5%. Since you normally have to pump a the carb a few times to spray gas into the intake to get it to start, you couldn’t move the pedal enough to get any out (which is why it wouldn’t start). Then, once you did finally get it started, you couldn’t move the pedal far enough to accelerate.

I pulled the screw out and voila. It fired right up. My brother drove my vehicle while I drove the Bronco home at about 30 – 40mph.

Once home, I found out that all the spark plugs all had different gaps, which was causing it to pop and back fire, as well as several intake and exhaust bolts completely missing. Once I fixed those issues, that thing was a beast.

Owned for about 5 years and put about $1000 into maintenance, tires, and miscellaneous fixes. Ended up selling it for about $5000. It was a beauty, and ran like a top.

 

Part 1 | The Galactic Lyran-Orion Wars | Astral Legends

I am told that this is the REAL DEAL. You please check it out.

 

 

What did your mechanic say that made your “jaw drop”?

I left my wife to take my car to the local MOT station as I was working away, my wife went to collect it that evening ready for me coming back the next day. . She rang me that evening and said “bad news I haven’t got the car cos they said it’s too dangerous to drive ” they estimate for cost to make it roadworthy works out at about 50% of the cars value. , at this point my jaw hit the floor l was speechless . She said the mechanic gave her a list of work that needed doing before he’d release the car for her to drive on the road . The next day I went straight from the station to the garage and said I’ve come to collect my car, the mechanic said ” I’ve explained to your wife it’s not road worthy and can not be released, so she has authorised the work to be done ” I said nonesence nothing has been agreed , after a long and “meaningful ” discussion with the service manager I drove away in my car.!!! The next day I booked it in at the main agents for its MOT, SURPRISE it passed with flying colours, no work was needed. I took my car back to the local MOT station with my new MOT certificate and showed it to the service manager, he said impossible it’s not the same car , he then rang the main agents and spoke to their service manager. I could not hear the exchange but the result was he asked me to leave . The moral of the story is if the garage sees a woman with a car they assume she knows nothing and they will try it on .

When I was 13-years-old, I had a little two-year-old sister who would throw explosive temper tantrums on a daily basis. Loud noises have always bothered me since I was a baby, and this was no different.

Unfortunately, my parents believed that ignoring the temper tantrums was the best way to handle them, and would let my little sister scream for hours on end. Our home was small enough that she could be heard throughout the entire house, and I couldn’t get away from it. Furthermore, my six younger siblings and I were homeschooled, meaning that I was around my family 24/7.

All I wanted as a young teen was to get away and have some time to myself, but that was next to impossible. In addition, I was constantly getting in trouble for not completing my homeschool work on time. I told my parents time and time again that I did not do well with homeschooling, as I needed a structured environment in order to get things done, but they kept blowing me off year after year.

I got into frequent arguments with my parents, often regarding the way they handled my little sister’s temper tantrums which, in turn, got me into trouble for “talking back” and “disrespecting authority.” I would fight with my younger siblings over various things, and I think it’s because I was around them too much. The arguments with my parents and siblings often ended with me running to my room and bawling my eyes out. I had no friends, either, because I was a socially awkward, dorky kid due to my parents sheltering us from the real world.

I wanted to be alone, but would get in trouble with my parents if I slammed or locked my door. I cried for hours every day, wishing that I was never born. I would pull my hair and scratch my arms to punish myself because I knew I was a horrible person at the time and that my family would be better off without me. I remember praying to God to let me die in my sleep, and was actually making serious plans to run away.

At the time, I attributed all this as normal teenage hormones, but now I look back and realize that I was suffering from depression and didn’t even realize it. Furthermore, my entire family was oblivious to the fact as well and my parents didn’t do a damn thing to help me.

I went undiagnosed for six more years — until I was 19 — and thinking about suicide every single day. I told my mom once, “I don’t want to live anymore, but I’m not sure if I want to die either.” I think that’s when it finally clicked for her that something was wrong.

A few days prior to that, I was crying in my car at college and it clicked in my mind that something wasn’t right. I had a roommate that bullied me, and every day I cried myself to sleep. I had lost interest in everything I enjoyed and I felt guilty just for being alive. I was constantly thinking about how I would kill myself, and I was very close to crashing my car while driving one night.

Thankfully, since I have been on medication, I haven’t hit a point as low as that, but I’ve come pretty close several other times. Looking back, I just wish that I would have realized I was battling depression sooner, and maybe my teenage years wouldn’t have been such a nightmare.

Vintage 1960 era family life

Great pictures.

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Have you ever been in a bank or store when a robbery happened?

Yep, at a fast food place.
I was coming home from a bar and decided to stop at a taco place that stays open until 2am.

I missed key indicators, due to being a tad intoxicated.

I backed in to a parking space right by the door.
I went in and did not even notice what was going down.
I was looking up at the menu, which was in front of the cash registers.
After deciding what I wanted to eat, I looked down and forward and all of the employees were standing there with their hands up over their heads! I looked around and omg I am standing next to one of the robbers. One beside me and one in front behind the counter, with masks over their faces and big guns!

The one standing next to me started yelling and sticking his gun in my face.
I glanced around and saw a small group of patrons huddled over at a table in the back.

I put my hands in the air and told the guy that I didn’t want any trouble and that I was going to join those over in the corner. Hands in the air, I stepped backwards towards that table. If I was going to be shot, no way was it going to be in the back. I faced this robber as I slowly walked backwards away from him.

I think it threw him. He didn’t anticipate that reaction. Thankfully, they only wanted money and did not shoot anyone.

They proceeded to rob the place and run out the door.

What are some things that people who live in places with brutally low temperatures know, that the rest of us don’t?

A man in the Yukon was telling me about when his wife was about to give birth in the winter. When the temp gets below about 50 below zero the air freezes in your tires so you can’t drive. He took his wife to Whitehorse ahead of time and left her until he could get back to get them. People plan to be frozen in or snowed in for weeks. We drove through the Yukon in November it was really pretty. You don’t use chains there only tourist use chains. The roads then were not paved but packed snow over gravel. Road graders kept them smooth. They are not icy because they freeze once and stay frozen all winter fresh snow is packed on top. When traveling you always carry a couple of heat sources so if your car dies you don’t freeze to death, cans of Sterno can be used to melt snow to drink and heat the interior of your car a little bit. On the road if you break down every single person passing will stop to help so you always stop too.

My ex was a probation officer. Her job was to deal with serious sex offenders who’d just been released from long sentences.

While being away these guys had lost their home, their job, their partner etc so had nothing to come out to. Hence they were accommodated in hostels.

Ideally she’d like to integrate these people in to society but the assumption was given the chance they’d return to their old ways. So the priority was to prevent them doing so, they weren’t allowed mobile phones or internet access for obvious reasons.

She came home one night and said she’d spoken to a guy who said he’d been out banging on doors trying to find a job but everyone he spoke to asked for his number so they could call him back. Obviously he didn’t have a number so he was stuck. She’d been doing the job for a long time and she can spot liars from 100 yards, she said 100% this guy is legit he actually wants to turn his life around.

I took an old mobile phone out of my drawer stuck some credit on it and said give him this. She knew she shouldn’t do this but she believed in the guy. She gave him the phone and 2 days later he came to see her and said I’ve found a job.

A guy actually finding a job was so unusual she was asked for an explanation. She said my partner loaned him a phone which enabled him to get a job.

She was disciplined for breaking the rules.

First off, jail and prison are two different things in the United States, so you’re unlikely to be serving more than a year if you’re in a municipal lockup.

Therefore, a significant percentage of jail detainees won’t be staying for an entire week to figure this one out.


But I was one of the prisoners staying for months rather than days in county jail, so I can speak to your question.

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Basically, the first week is a matter of settling in.

  • If you have a support system of family and friends on the outside, they can contribute to your JPay and SecurTel accounts so you can order sundries from the commissary and make collect calls on your pod’s payphones.
  • Likewise, you’ll be required to make a list of the people you’d like for the facility to consider for approval to come see you on visitation day. Said clearance can take awhile, so they’re probably not going to get to come during the first hours available.
  • I experienced a severe spike in my blood pressure my first few days without alcohol and opioids, so the med staff put me on furosemide until my symptoms started to subside about a month into my sentence. Don’t, however, expect anything for the nerves or discomfort, ‘cause that ain’t comin’.
  • If there’s a sit-down library, visit it as soon as you’re allowed, and if not, make a list of FAVORITE AUTHORS (not titles…jails have notoriously limited selections) for the inmate rolling the book trolley to wheel your way. The day room TV, card and board games are gonna get old real quick. Inmates who don’t read, suffer; it’s as simple as that.

Mostly you’re gonna spend the first week figuring out that jail isn’t as dire as the movies and TV make it out to be.

Most of the people you meet are gonna be decent human beings who managed to fuck up just enough to end up where you are right now.

(…and that includes the CO’s.)

While the ones who aren’t decent usually end up getting relegated to SHU and eventually transported upstate.


    • Bottom Line: You Can Do This

Because the real trouble starts when you’re back on the street and trying to put your life back together.

Jail is a cinch next to what comes after.

Amazing times that we live in!

I’m American but our country is a shitshow.

Deep Brown Gravied Pork Chops

deep brown gravied pork chops
deep brown gravied pork chops

Yield: 4 pork chops and 1/2 cup gravy total
Servings: 4; about 3 ounces cooked pork and 2 tablespoons gravy per serving

Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon smoked paprika
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
  • 1/2 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 4 bone-in ribeye (rib) pork chops
  • 1 tablespoon canola oil
  • 14 1/2 ounces chicken broth (reduced sodium)
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper (coarsely ground)
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 2 tablespoons green onions (or fresh parsley), finely chopped

Instructions

  1. Heat a large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add the flour and cook for 3 to 3 1/2 minutes or until lightly browned and fragrant, stirring constantly. Remove from skillet and set aside on separate plate.
  2. Combine the paprika, thyme and garlic powder in a small bowl and sprinkle evenly over both sides of the pork chops.
  3. Add oil in pan over medium high heat. Cook pork chops for 4 minutes on each side or until the pork chops reach an internal temperature of 145 degrees F. Set aside on separate plate.
  4. Whisk together the flour and 1/2 cup of the broth until smooth. Stir into the pan residue.
  5. Gradually stir in the remaining broth, salt and pepper until smooth. Reduce the heat to medium and cook 10 minutes or until thickened slightly, stirring occasionally.
  6. Add the pork and any accumulated juices and cook for 1 minute to heat through, turning several times to coat.
  7. Sprinkle with the green onion.

We are Living in The Twilight Zone ..…

The pizzas that were never eaten

Oh how vividly I remember this experience. The experience I am about to tell you all about was the day I decided that I will do everything in my power to change my passport to a Canadian passport as soon as possible.

This story takes place back in 2009/2010 new years period. I was a PR in Canada, having immigrated in 2007 to Canada alongside my entire family. Due to some family reasons and situations, after landing in Canada, my dad, mom and little brother went back to Dubai for a year and I was in university in Ontario. I would visit them in Dubai during the winter breaks and summer vacations. This story is about the nightmare that I faced while on my way back to Toronto from Dubai.

Back then, we would take connecting flights, usually through British airways. As many would know, connecting flights from BA are routed through London Heathrow airport, for the most part. This story begins from the time I landed in Heathrow, after completing the first leg of my journey back to Pearson airport in Toronto. As we landed, I remember the captain coming over the intercom and advising us that, apparently due to “adverse” weather, the Heathrow airport had seized all their operations, which included my flight onward to YYZ. As I sat there, my mind racing, the next announcement made informed us that they are trying to arrange for hotel accommodations for the stranded passengers, and to contact BA customer service if we needed further inspection. I remember as we were allowed inside the terminal, there must have been hundreds, if not a thousand, people all in the terminal at the same time. As I walked forward, there were signs and people all around that were directing passengers around. As I approached, they asked me which passport I hold. At that time, I was an Indian passport holder, so I told them that. The expression on the person I was speaking to was eye opening. He sniggers and says, “oh ok, go to that line there, big fella”, pointing to a line of at least 400 people and filling in fast. As I stood in this line, I noticed that most of the people who had been on my flight, who were either EU or US or Canadian citizens, were being directed to a much smaller line, and were dealt with swiftly. As I watched, another 747 unloaded its passengers, and everyone of the EU or US or Canadian passport were pushed again to the front of the que. Seeing this, I was livid. I asked one of the guys working there, and all he asked me was, “what’s your passport or nationality”. Once I said Indian, he says, stay in that line.

I now realize that this disparity in processing immigration/passengers is due to the challenges of making sure that illegals don’t enter into the country, and each country has their own relationship with other countries, but as a 19 years old kid, I was mad. I was pissed that I was in a line going back atleast half a km, while people were allowed to jump ahead. Plus, when I finally got to the front of the line, I was informed that I would be getting a hotel about an hour away from Heathrow airport, and I would have to figure out the way to get there myself. All because, to my teen mind, the people who jumped ahead got all the hotels near the airport. This was the moment I decided that I will do everything in my power to get a Canadian citizenship and get my Canadian passport.

JD Vance Did WHAT to a Couch?

God. This stuff…

This idiot, Aaron O’Neill worked at the Intel plant in Kildare, Ireland. After a night of drinking and taking drugs he didn’t want to go to work so paid his friend to ring in a bomb threat, on behalf of ISIS.

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main qimg 1b7a0d6ebe90630867e45d8beec05167 lq

Source: The Irish Times

Aaron O’Neill (20) had been out drinking and taking tablets with his friend Colin Hammond (21) when he decided he did not want to go in the next day.

He paid his friend to make the call from a payphone outside Hammond’s home.

The resulting 999 calls shut down a motorway, disrupted air traffic control and prevented 4,000 Intel staff from going to work. Garda Eamonn McFadden said that at a “conservative estimate” the incident lost Intel 6,000 hours of production.

Mr O’Neill of Chieftains Drive, Balbriggan and Hammond of Bath Road, also in Balbriggan, pleaded guilty at Dublin Circuit Criminal Court to making a false report on the Bath Road on January 13th 2015. Neither man has previous convictions.

Mr Hammond told the operator there were bombs located at Intel which would go off in 12 hours.

“You will not find them. This is a warning, we’re everywhere now,” Hammond told emergency services. When asked who was making the call, he replied: “Islamic State.”

Described by Judge Martin Nolan as “profoundly stupid”, Hammond claimed he had been paid to make the call. He was ordered to carry out 200 hours community service in lieu of a two year prison sentence when his case was dealt with in October.

He said, “to put it politely” it had been a misconceived plan and accepted that the men hadn’t envisaged the calls to have the effect they did.

“It is a very, very strange way to avoid going to work,” Judge Nolan said .

And the best part is how they got caught –

Gda McFadden said that a month after the hoax, a taxi man arrived at Balbriggan Garda station with a passenger who wouldn’t pay his fare. The passenger was Hammond and a garda at the station recognised his voice from the hoax call.

That is one very observant Garda Officer.

Man paid friend to make hoax bomb call to Intel to avoid work

Edit : I’ve included The Irish Times article at the end but I see I have been negligent in explaining actual events, mea culpa, I certainly could have explained this better – the person in question wasn’t directly employed by Intel, he was a subcontractor and directly employed by his father, so he simply couldn’t ring in sick, as I strongly suspect/believe that at the time he lived at home. He couldn’t pretend to be sick when he worked for his Dad.

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I do not tell this story to brag. It is just so different.

My parents sold their small farm and moved to El Paso with my husband when we moved there. They would have had to pay a lot of tax. We found a house with room for inlaw quarters.

I hope l get this straight. It was quite awhile ago. They had one year to reinvest to avoid taxes.

I found out about once in a lifetime non taxable gifts. So l worked a way for us to give the down payment. Using a four way split where l would give my mother x amount of money and my father x amount. They used it for their half of the down-payment. My husband would do the same. We used the same four way split to cover their half of the house payments which was jointly owned. At the end of the one year they gave us their half as a once in a lifetime gift. They used the same four way which kept it non taxable.

We were not sure of the legality of this so we went to a lawer, he read it all over and said “l used to work for the IRS, if l had audited this l could not find a problem with it. Who figured this out for you?” When told him l did he said “Lady, you found one hell of a loop hole.”

He has a great point.

Shorpy

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So one of my seniors recently got to know that I won the QPCA and she decided to congratulate me. Her bad, and I’ll tell you why.

Now, when it comes to keeping the interaction alive, I’m pretty good at it.

But sometimes, ( sometimes = always ) I miserably fail in the more important thing, that’s keeping the interaction interesting ( interesting = continuable, without occasional cringing ).

So this is what happened,

She: It’s great that you won.

Me: Thanks.

She: But you don’t seem as sassy in real life.

Me: Umm, ya.

I don’t know why and I kid you not, but this time, I decided that I’ll keep the conversation going on. So I came up with this revolutionary compliment. Compliments that can change the world.

Me: You’ve got asymmetrical eyebrows.

She: °_° Wh.. What?

Me: Yeah, I never noticed. Maybe no one ever did, but your eyebrows don’t have symmetry.

She: Uh…. Ok?

Me (By now I realized that I fucked up, but never quit is a good motto and when to never quit is never taught ): And uh… if, if you notice closely, the left eyebrow is more bent than the… the ri…

She ( By now, she is regretful that she congratulated me in the first place ): Hey, you can go, seeya!

Me: ..ght eyebrow.

Now what’s important here, is that I tried.

( And Sarhad, what’s even more important here, is that you failed )

Only if I had known that asymmetrical eyebrows are not something great to talk about, I would’ve picked up something more intriguing.

Like I always have my moo point ( cows and magnets ) to talk about.


But I’ll admit, though social interaction is not really my prowess, I’m learning and I do want to get better.

It’s a skill which is not really optional, and which everyone should possess, to a certain level.

At times, people have talked themselves out of perils ( like when Sir James Donovan negotiated the release of 10,000 prisoners in Cuba

) and then at other times I’ve been talked into paying ₹900 for something worth ₹50. Almost every business and trade is based on your ability to fool your client better.

And then, we have stockbrokers.

|SaCh|


Oh, the rating you ask?

Yeah, on a scale of 1 to 10, I think I’m a pair of ever frowning eyebrows with rainbow eyelashes. Everything symmetrical.

Half a million likes!

She is right.

I often went out with two friends, who were also my colleagues, to a pizza house. We’d order two large pizzas and split the bill. The leftover would be packed, and one friend would always take it home. We lived in the same apartment building.

The problem is, when I eat I always take my time and I like to talk. At the end of the meal, I would always have eaten only two slices and yet I had to pay an equal share of the bill. I never got to take the leftover home.

One time I mentioned this problem to the friend who also never got to take the leftover home. I told her that I had a problem with us always splitting the bill because I always eat only two slices and never got to take home the leftover. The other friend would automatically take the leftover for herself and never once offered us if we’d also like to take it home.

My friend was surprised because she thought that the other friend and I took turns to take the leftover because we lived in the same building. Then she said that she also had a problem because she never got to order the pizza that she likes.

The thing is, I don’t eat pork so I get to order my favorite chicken bbq pizza. The two friends eat pork but it’s always the other friend who got to order her favorite pork pizza, and also the one to take all the leftover.

So we came up with a solution.

The next time we went again for pizza, I told the waiter that I was ordering a small chicken bbq pizza with a glass of coke, and that I’d pay my bill separately. The friend that I’ve spoken with also ordered her favorite Hawaiian pizza, small size, with drinks and asked the water to separate her bills too. Thus, the other friend also had to order her favorite pork pizza in small size.

I enjoyed my pizza, took my time eating it, enjoyed telling stories, and at the end of the meal told the waiter that I’d like to take home my leftover.

Needless to say, the friend who always took the leftover went home that night without any bring home because she finished her small size pizza. And the friend who I had spoken with was satisfied to have finally eaten her favorite Hawaiian pizza.

Many years ago I was working as a developer on one of the largest derivatives markets in the world. Part of our teams remit was supporting the live environment and as such I had on my sun workstation a 9 window virtual desktop one for each environment. we often jumped on each other’s workstations to do things, start/stop uat processes or get prod logs.. One day unknowingly to me, my boss was using my workstation and accidentally moved our futures trading market console onto my UAT desktop and later that day asked me to recycle UAT to pick up changes he pushed. I did it without though and within 30 seconds the Head of development (CTO) comes running across the floor screaming the futures production environment had just crashed. I looked at my screen and to my horror the console I just typed my command into had a prod$ console. My boss looked and me, I looked at him and we both thought the same and it wasn’t good! Immediately a witch hunt started and it was assumed the support guys had messed up (They forgot we had access). My boss quickly told me close all the consoles and go take a really long lunch so when they get to us, you’re not here to lie!

I got back an hour latter and my boss quickly announced “They found the problem, a bug in one of the support scrips means if someone cont-c it run kill -9 -1 to clean up, no one knows who IN SUPPORT did it but it wasn’t their fault”

It made the main 6pm news business section that day although I didn’t speak a word about it to anyone until a I left a years later. We also changed the background color of all prod consoles to red after that

How to get the pill

1. People don’t have as strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1 billion is than 1 million.

  • A million seconds is about 11 days.
  • A billion seconds is about 32 years.

2. Only 2% of people can hear their eyes move and blink.

3. The Facebook logo is blue because founder Mark Zuckerberg is red-green color blind, making blue the “richest color ” for him.

4. If you hold in your farts long enough, the gas can be re-absorbed and come out of your mouth.

5. Over 50% of pilots have admitted to falling asleep mid-flight. And of these pilots, 29% said that they had woken up to find their co-pilot asleep as well.

6. Most toilet paper sold for home use in France is pink.

7. There are more fake flamingos in the world than real flamingos.

8. Bananas are berries, but strawberries are not.

9. Giraffes and humans have the same number of necklines. Actually, all mammals do.

10. Sometimes, hiding your thumb behind all your fingers is a sign of panic.

11. Broccoli is a man-made vegetable and was created by breeding different types of cabbages.

12. Try to breathe and swallow at the same time. You can’t.

A female marathoner was referred to me because her running times were increasing and she was progressively short of breath. She was also coughing up blood occasionally.

Ten years earlier she had removal of the upper 1/3 of her right lung(right upper lobe) for a benign tumor that bled often and obstructed that lobe of the lung.

To do this the surgeon must pull the remaining lower lung bronchus (intermediate) up and connect it to the trachea (wind pipe). This puts the sutured connection ring of tissues under considerable tension, tending to rip out the sutures leading to a catastrophic leak.

So the surgeon buttressed the suture line with several cotton pledgets. The surgeon obviously did a great job, she had been doing well for ten years.

When I looked into the lung (bronchoscopy) I saw a large mass of tissue I assumed was recurrent tumor completely blocking the right lung. But the pathologist found the biopsy tissue samples to be benign!

To clear the path into the lung I used laser through the bronchoscope to ablate the tissue. As I steadily removed tissue I found the suture line and then saw the many pledgets (small cotton pieces) the surgeon had used to support the suture line. I realized that obstructing tissue was a granulomatous mass the lung had generated because of the foreign body irritation from the pledgets. I steadily burned away the pledgets along with the old sutures until the area was completely clear and the airway to the lower lung was reopened.

This relieved her shortness of breath and she resumed running. A recheck 1 and 2 years later showed no recurrence of the tumor; she remained asymptomatic.

I expected to find malignancy but instead found a treatable benign condition.

20 MINUTES Of Modern Women BEGGING For A Good Man To Save Them

Guys, I’d love your feedback on this. I can’t believe my friend did this.

Last summer, my best friend was housesitting for about a week for her another friend and that friend’s wealthy family. They had a massive aquarium tank, eight feet tall with thick glass, almost as big as a room. It was only fish inside and nothing else. One night while storming, she wanted to go and swim in the tank. She absolutely loves fish and aquatic life. She got changed into some elastic shorts and a tank, turned off all the lights in the house, and with a towel walked barefoot up the small staircase that led to the top of the tank — her heart beating really fast with excitement. The top of the tank was already open, wide enough for her to easily fit through.

After she raised her arms over her head, she plunged into the water. The water was deep enough that she didn’t hit the bottom but her body went horizontal upon landing in the water. She said doing so was such a rush and that it was so warm and relaxing. While she swam underwater in the tank, lightning flashes lit up the inside. She said it was the most romantic thing she ever did, it was so quiet and peaceful underwater with the fish, and that she could feel the thunder vibrations from outside.

Woman gets reality check by dating a man that KNOWS his value…

You Stand up and fight

Last year my son was suspended. 3 boys corned him and were bullying him he kept is cool and attempted to walk away. One blocked his path.

At that point one shit stain said 2 sentences that changed my son’s life. “I’m glad your mom’s in a wheelchair. And I hope one of her seizures kills her.” See our families already known loss.

April will be 11yrs since my daughter and his sister passed away. She was 14m old.

So hearing this boy say he hoped I died was too much for my son. He turned to the leader and punched him right in the nose. To the school it didn’t matter what they had said.

The school district suspended my son cause he made it physically. So I took him out for ice cream. There comes a time when words do count and do cross the line. I support my son’s decision to finally say enough.

He knows he can’t hit someone and not have consequences.

But he also knows that there are going to be times in his life that he’s going to have to stand up for what is right. And I’ll support him when he does.

I was kicked out on Christmas eve by my mother when I was 17. That’s not even the subject of this story so you can imagine I didn’t have a good life growing up. She kicked me and my 15 year old brother out because (and this is a direct quote) “I have a life to live, and you and your brother have held me down long enough. I deserve to be happy.” She left the state with her internet boyfriend, that she knew for 3 weeks, a week later. We moved in with our aunt and her boyfriend. My aunt was like a mother to us, she helped raise us since our mother didn’t have the best taste in men. My brother and I got full time jobs and each of us gave our aunt’s boyfriend $50 a week (for rent and bills) and an extra $50 a week because all of us were saving to go to Florida to visit our grandparents and he was putting it into a savings account because my brother and I didn’t have one. My grandfather had health problems, he had heart attacks before and we all knew he didn’t have much longer to live. He was the best man I’ve ever known and he was the only male figure in my life that I could count on. My brother and I had been living at my aunt’s and her boyfriends house for about 6 months when my aunt’s boyfriend didn’t come home for 4 days. When he did finally come home, he was beyond messed up, he was slurring his words, he was falling asleep standing up, it was clear he was on something. My aunt told me and my brother later that he went on a bender with his boss. They spent 4 days smoking crack and snorting cocaine. She then told us that he spent all of the money that me and my brother had been saving to go to Florida to see our grandparents. $2400 we saved, gone in 4 days. But she said “don’t worry, we won’t charge you rent for 6 months and it will all equal out.” I heard my aunt on the phone with my grandma a week later. She told my grandma that we couldn’t come to Florida because “Stacey and her brother didn’t save any money”. My grandfather died 3 months later. It kills me that he thought my brother and I were too immature, selfish or had better things to do than to save money to see him. I wanted to tell my grandparents the truth but with my grandfathers health being what it was I didn’t want to upset him and tell him “hey your daughter lied to you, my brother and I did save the money but her drug addict boyfriend spent it all in 4 days during a bender.” This is literally one thing that my family has done to me or put me through in the 35 years I allowed them in my life. It has been 2 years since I cut the last toxic person in my family from my life and I feel so much better. The fact that I am a positive, healthy, loving wife and mother is a gift from a deity.

Black Tuesday is a 1954 American crime drama film noir directed by Hugo Fregonese and starring Edward G. Robinson, Peter Graves and Jean Parker. The supporting cast features Milburn Stone, Warren Stevens, Jack Kelly and Russell Johnson.

Full movie.

Film Noir.

A violent con, Vincent Canelli, escapes prison on the night of his execution. With the help of a phony newspaper reporter and Canelli’s girlfriend, Hatti, who has planned the escape, the con takes along five hostages: the prison priest, the prison doctor, one of the guards, the young reporter whose place has been taken by one of the gang, and the daughter of another guard. This young woman is kidnapped to force her father – who, unlike the guard who is taken hostage, always treats the death row inmates well – to facilitate the escape.

Pretty well done. I think you all will enjoy this one.

The pause that refreshes

When I was a young boy, perhaps 11 or 12, I went on a business road-trip with my dad. We drove throughout the Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia hills selling “ship propeller shaft “sleeves”” to prospective small boat yards.

In that week-long travel, we would stop at various small towns along the way.

I well remember us pulling into a out-of-the-way (on a dirt road) rural West Virginia General Store. We were in the sticks… the middle of nowhere. I am not kidding.

It looked something like this
It looked something like this

And we go into the decrepit old wooded unpainted building, and walking on the wooden floor that make noise with every step. There was an old man there. Shit! Older than God himself, I would say. And my dad wanted to get a coke.

Well, this place didn’t have a coke in the cooler. But the old man said that he “had just the thing”, and he went into the basement and after a few minutes of him rummaging about, and making a bunch of noise, comes up with this ancient old wooden box. Completely dust covered. I mean it. It was layered like you have no idea.

28601668 1m
28601668 1m

And he used a hammer to open it. He pried the wooden box open, and the nails were all rusty, and some of the wood was just brittle. I remember that clearly.

Inside were bottles of coke-cola. But they were strange bottles. He chuckled that “you’re getting the real thang“.

And handed each of us a coke.

Now, the bottle was strange. It was curved, but not like a normal coke bottle was. It had this fat Goose-Like shape. Exactly like the bottle in the picture below. The third from the left.

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65f51d3c8f4d4e70514eb00b3d034dc6

He said something about getting this in his inheritance from his father. But I wasn’t paying attention. I was simply asking my father if this was good to drink. And both he and the old man laughed.

“Don’t be silly.” My father said. “Of course it is.”

So the old fella got out a bottle opener and opened up three bottles, Yeah. He opened up one himself. And he kept watched me with this funny curious look on his face.

I wouldn’t have remembered this moment at all if it wasn’t for his amused look.

And so, I looked up at my dad. And he was swigging his. So I took a tepid taste.

I was good.

No shit. Really good.

Ah. But different.

You see, it was not refrigerated, but it tasted refreshing. Like those mint commercials that suggest a blizzard of freshness. It tasted like a normal coke, but maybe a little bit watered-down perhaps. Yet…but… had this lite refreshing “bite”.

It also wasn’t nearly as sweet. Oh, it was sweet, but not as thick, and not as super sweet. More like a gentler coke, but with a mint-like “bite”.

The old man smiled and chucked, and looked at me again.

“What do you think son?” he asked.

I told him that it was good. Yeah. I told him that I really liked it.

Again, he chuckled. Yeah. He nodded.

He said. “It’s the pause that refreshes.”

Then he added, “Son this is a special coke. You know that, right?”

I had no clue as to what the Hell he was talking about.

But I said “Yes Sir. It really is good sir.”

And then after that we both left and got in the car and drove off.

I will tell you that my dad and I had a great time afterwards just chatting away in the long drive. Man, we talked about so much, and so many things. Not that I remember them all, but it was really enjoyable. I do remember that.

We were “chatter boxes”.

Oh, I never went back to that old man, and haven’t a clue as to where that General Store actually was. But you know what I think?

I think that we drank the original Coke-cola; the one and only made with real cocaine leaves.

And that is both a blessing and a curse. As good as it was, the present day sugar-laden version cannot compete against the less sweet, but totally refreshing cocaine-laden version.

Real talk.

Today…

The three coups of July

In less than two weeks we have seen three events in the United States that could all by themselves be described as coups or coup attempts.

  1. Trump assassination attempt.
  2. Kamala’s coup, the forced removal of Biden from the ticket and possibly from the presidency.
  3. Trump’s counter coup after failed assassination, selection of JD Vance as candidate for Vice President.

The last event may be the most consequential of all, as it opens the possibility of a real regime change in America. During his first term Trump had little influence on the workings of the US government. He failed by surrounding himself with neocons and Deep State operatives.

The failed assassination now acts like the Reichstag fire of 1933, giving Trump Hitlerian powers to remove the old establishment. He is now manning his team with people the US mainstream likes to call “Russian agents” or “Putinists”. A real danger to democracy!

Interestingly, the Twitter account of TIME magazine published three covers and cover stories for a print issue dated with a sell-by date of August 5.

I do not know which one, if any, have appeared in print. Note, that the three covers do not match the three “coups” I have listed. Covers 1 and 3 are related to Biden’s ousting, cover 2 relates to Trump’s assassination attempt and counter coup.

Posted by: Petri Krohn | Jul 24 2024 16:46 utc | 21

What was a red flag that made you stop talking to a person immediately?

I was scheduled to fly from Boston to Minneapolis very early on July 4th to celebrate my sister’s birthday that day (we always joke that she gets a fireworks show for her birthday each year).

As a student with a tight budget, I booked the cheapest flight, which had a layover in Chicago.

After landing in Chicago, the airline announced that the plane had mechanical issues and we were to fly at the same time the following day.

That was not an option for me.

Birthdays were important for my sister, and I was determined to get to my destination no matter what.

That’s how I ended up on a greyhound bus, traveling the 8 hours or so from Chicago to Minneapolis (by car it’s around 6 hours, buses tend to take their time and have a short bathroom break in the middle).

The bus was full and I ended up sitting next to a fellow college student.

We got to talking had had a really nice time chatting and time passed fairly quickly.

About an hour away from our destination, and having felt very comfortable with each other, this young man asked me where I was during the 9–11 attack.

This was in 2006, almost 5 years after the attack, and we each spoke about where we were when it happened.

He then said that he trusts me enough to let me know that the the US government was behind the attack and that they were framing Al Quaeda.

I thought he was kidding.

He wasn’t.

Uncontrollably, and quite literally, all that came out of my mouth was: “Oh no, I thought you were normal.”

I couldn’t even look at him after that, moreso because I was a bit embarrassed by what I said to him.

I didn’t mean to insult him, but was so taken back by what he accused the government of doing, especially after al Quaeda proudly told the world that they were reaponsible.

Not only could I not look at him after that, I didn’t speak to him at all.

I made it to my sister’s birthday though.

Why American Suburbs are so Creepy (liminal spaces)

Has anyone ever bought a car with the wrong engine in it?

I have.

I ordered a Ford Crown Victoria in 1981.

Three weeks before delivery I got a call from Ford Motor company.

The engine factory in Windsor, Ontario is on strike. Would I mind if my new car had a “slightly larger” engine? No price change.”

It made no difference to me. I’m a sales guy, and I don’t ever do anything special with my cars.

It arrived.

The dealer apologized for this car on delivery. “It may have a little harder suspension than you expected”.

Wow, what an understatement.

This car was a V-8 powered police car in plain clothes, a real wolf in sheep’s clothing. It looked just like in the catalogue.

But everything outside the cabin was super heavy duty. Larger wheels, oversize brakes, extra-large radiator, battery, and alternator, as well as a heavy-duty transmission with overdrive. Top speed 225 km/h (140 mph). It could go faster, but I lost my nerve.

I drove it with utmost care.

It was so light in the rear end that I could spin the tires on dry roads up to 60 km/h (40 mph).

My wife used to have fun squealing the tires by jumping on the accelerator going around corners.

My teenage daughter? She NEVER drove it, not for one metre. NEVER.

The drawback? A 55 litre tank. In the city, two days between fillups. On the highway, about three hours between fill-ups.

I kept it for four years and sold it to a guy who added a tow-hook for his camping trailer and kept it for another six years.

The blessing – my company paid for all my gas in those days.

My next car – A V8 Pontiac made under the worst of the 55 mph rules in the United States. A wheezing engine and a speedometer that ended at 140 km/h (90 mph). I don’t think it could be driven any faster, not even downhill with a tailwind.

 

1950s USA – Real Street Scenes of Vintage America – Colorized

When did you realize small things matter?

Once, when I was sitting in my physics exam, there was this girl who was an assistant in the exam room. She watched and kept eyes on us so that nobody could cheat. She also organized all the stuff that was related to the exam.

She came to me and asked me for an extra pen, so I gave one to her, and I put my head back to my test. I kept writing and I didn’t raise my head till the time was over.

I got up from my seat and gave them my papers and they asked me to sign; I did. Everything was normal; I got out and met my friends. We started walking and talking. We probably walked an hour away from the university.

And…

Suddenly, I saw a car coming directly towards us, and the driver was a girl. She stopped in front of us dramatically with the sounds of breaks screeching and smoke everywhere.

She came out of the car. I saw that she held my pen in her hands.

It was her; the assistant girl from the exam room! What blows me away is that she did all that to bring my cheap pen back to me!

I mean it wasn’t even easy to find us after we walked so far, and I’m sure she had more important things to handle there in the university than to go out and look for me!

I always thought those kinds of people no longer existed, but they do exist and they are so beautiful and pure.

Sorry for my English, but if you get the story in general, that’s more than enough for me because I’m glad to share it.

CHINA Destroy U.S SANCTION Shackle, Produces Quantum Module

 

 

What was a red flag that made you stop talking to a person immediately?

I am white. At the time this occurred, my biracial daughter was 7. We had moved into our new house a month earlier and winter had just taken a break. So, while she was in school, I was doing some winter clean-up yard work. Neighbor from across the street waves. Older man, 70-ish. Crosses the street to speak to me. We introduce ourselves, he points out the house that he lives in and asks me: “Have you noticed a certain element moving into the neighborhood? Right on this block?”

“Certain element” is, of course white-speak for “non-white.”

The school bus driver’s timing was too precious: first graders were let off in front of their homes. My little darling comes skipping up the driveway behind the neighbor. She’s all smiles for mommy. I’m all smiles for her. I take her hand and reply to the neighbor:

“Element? Element? No, other than one old racist white guy, I haven’t seen anything odd. Then I said to my child, pointing to the neighbor’s house: “See that white house across the street? Don’t ever walk in that yard, a very mean old man lives there.” And with rake in one hand and child in the other I turned around and we went inside for an after-school snack. Needless to say, I never spoke to the MF again.

 

What was I born for? Tearful End of Little Kitten After Abandoned by Owner

What are some of the most messed up family secrets?

  • My drug dealing Uncle was found in a hotel room with another drug dealer having homosexual relations by the cleaning lady. They both placed a hit on her life. She was forced to move out of state.
  • Another drug dealing Uncle was caught drug dealing in his car with his children. The police made a deal with him. He snitched on all of the other drug dealers in town in exchange for not being arrested. The police promised to not tell. They lied. A family member had to resettle him in another state with fake identification.
  • A cousin never told the family she was pregnant. Nobody even had the faintest idea until she gave birth. She threatened my grandma with giving the baby up for adoption. My grandma begged her to not make the decision. The great grandchild is now being raised by my Aunt. She looks just like her mother. My cousin won’t acknowledge her.
  • My grandma goes to church with a lady whose husband she used to date and have extramarital affairs. My grandma had us call him Uncle as children. He’s been dead for many years, but my grandma and the lady act like nothing ever happened.
  • My father is the only brother on his side of the family to never deal drugs or go to jail or prison.
  • I’m the only nephew on my father’s side of the family to never go to jail or prison.
  • On both sides of the family, many people have multiple children with multiple partners before marriage. But they mostly all go to church or mosque. And they tend to be overly preachy except for their life decisions.
  • Mental health problems loom large on both sides of the family. One side pretend they don’t exist and claim Jesus is in control. The other side is bat crap crazy and bow at the feet of Minister Farrakhan.
  • My grandma is the only reason everyone comes together for holiday functions. There are solidly formed cliques that hate each other. Some are able to move from clique to clique. Most aren’t.
  • My dad’s side of the family thinks I am a sex freak. The same goes for my mother’s side.

Malted Milk Waffles

WS BC ButtermilkWaffles Day 7 v4
WS BC ButtermilkWaffles Day 7 v4

Ingredients

  • 1/3 cup malted milk powder
  • 2 1/2 cups buttermilk pancake mix
  • 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs, separated
  • 1 1/3 cups buttermilk
  • 1/2 cup butter, melted

Instructions

  1. In a large bowl, stir together malted milk powder, pancake mix and granulated sugar.
  2. In a separate bowl, beat egg whites until stiff peaks form; set aside.
  3. Add egg yolks, buttermilk and butter to dry ingredients; mix well. Fold in egg whites.
  4. Spray preheated waffle iron with nonstick cooking spray. Pour batter onto hot waffle iron. Cook until golden brown.
  5. Serve warm.

What is the most unusual and incorrect reason you’ve had the police called on you?

Not me, but my dad. Pictures in a house can do wonders for calming down a police officer.

My grandmother lived alone in a small town in NH. No police department, just the County Sheriff’s Office for law enforcement. As she was elderly and lived alone in a remote area, she had a check-in system with the Sheriff’s Office. She would call in every morning, just to let them know that she was up and about without any problems. On the rare occasion that she didn’t call early enough, they would call her. That happened every few months.

My parents were up visiting her, when my mom got sick and had to be admitted to the local hospital. The next morning, bright and early, my dad and grandma went to the hospital to see my mom. My grandmother, worried about her daughter in the hospital, forgot to call the Sheriff’s Office.

My mother asked my dad to go back to the house to get her a book. As my dad was walking out of the house, a deputy pulled in the driveway.
Scene: An elderly woman didn’t make her daily call, that she almost never forgot. Said elderly woman doesn’t answer phone when Sheriff’s Office calls. Deputy pulls into driveway, thinking a fall and a broken hip. Strange car with out of state plates in driveway and a stranger walking out of the house.

The deputy gets out, hand on holstered gun, and asks “Who are you and where is Dorothy”. My dad tells him that she is at the hospital, visiting her daughter/his wife. The deputy then asks if he can prove it. Dad tells him that his picture is on the piano. They walked into the house, dad picks up one of the many family pictures on the piano, there he is in a picture with my mom & grandma.

Dad said that was when the deputy finally took his hand off his gun, and radioed in to cancel his backup. The deputy told him that as soon as he saw him walking out, he called in saying he might have a situation and the Sheriff called back letting him know he was on the way.

The funniest part of this story happened years later. There was a family gathering at my grandma’s over Christmas. My nephew hit a deer and totaled his car, no injuries except for Bambi. He called it in, and called grandma’s house to ask if someone could come pick him up. Dad’s car was at the end of the driveway, so he’s elected. He shows up at the accident scene, and as he’s walking up the same deputy looks at him and says “I know you. Your picture is on the piano”.

 

Shuffle dance of Chinese school principal

What is a split-second decision you made that changed your life?

I was a ‘plus 1’ to a wedding reception that I knew no body except my ‘date’.

I really felt only friendship towards this guy and I made it obvious. I was planning on cancelling because I really didn’t want to be in a room full of strangers with a guy who I felt kinda awkward with at this point. But I decided to suck it up because the bride and groom had paid for me and it would have been rude to cancel. The drive up was a nightmare – I was driving and it was pouring – I could barely see. I was getting really annoyed at the guy because he kept talking about how great he was in every single way and also said I could have made more of an effort with dressing up (I had minimum time to get ready since I had worked the morning). 🙄 so I was regretting my decision to attend.

we got there, sat down at the table and that is how I met my husband. He was sat at the same table, we got talking/dancing. He was a twin and I took a chair ribbon to put on him so I knew which one he was. We started dating shortly after, moved in together after a month of dating. We’ve been together 15 years, married 12 and have 4 children.

Me and the bride are still in touch, and sadly another lady I met there and remained friends with-died in her 20s of cancer when our (same age) children were only 2 a few years later. That day changed the entire course of my life for the better. I’m glad I didn’t cancel that crappy date.

 

What is your most interesting encounter with the police?

When my older daughter was a toddler, I took her to a friend’s house for a play group. When we were getting ready to leave, I put my daughter in her car seat and proceeded to open my front door; to my shock, my door immediately swung closed. I was baffled as to why this would have happened.

Upon closer inspection, I noticed that a car had hit my car right where the door hinge was. There were now straight white even lines on my blue car. I took my daughter out of her car seat and rang my friend’s doorbell. I explained that it looked like somebody hit my car and took off.

At this point, my friend’s son piped in. (Keep in mind that this child was also a toddler – he was not yet three years old!) He said “I saw a car hit your car!” When I questioned him about the details, he said it was a white car and he even told us the make and model of this car!

The reason why he was able to do this was because he owned over 500 dinkies and he knew every make and model of every toy car he owned! The child then looked out the window, pointed and announced “There’s the car!” It was parked across the street.

At this point, I called the police to report a hit and run. The police came over pretty quickly and I told him the whole story. After inspecting my car and the car across the street, the officer rang the neighbour’s doorbell.

After denying that he had any knowledge that he hit my car, the police officer made this man back his car right up to where my car was hit. The white lines on my car matched up with the lines on this man’s bumper. Imagine the look on the police officer’s face when I told him that the person who identified the car responsible for this hit and run was a toddler!!!

strong independent woman gets a TRAIN RAN on her and regrets it

I’m married for 30 years. My husband is 63 and I’m 60. He acts more like 73 than 63. He’s very boring and I can’t stand it anymore. What should I do?

I am now very close to 68 years old. when I was 54 my wife was two years older than me and 56. We had been together for 28 years. You will notice that I used past tense. I started to be bothered with her lifestyle compared to mine. She liked to smoke cigarettes and drink beer all day long and I was and am very fit.

She was my soulmate but in 2010 I left her for a while because I didn’t want to watch her grow old and die prematurely. At that time she looked like she was 10 years older and then she was. It didn’t take me very long to find out that I couldn’t live without her and we got back together within a few months, but it was difficult because some damage was done. We were able to overcome our obstacles because of our deep love for each other even though she was still hurting her body through her lifestyle. In 2016, she was diagnosed with a very severe form of COPD. After several tests, we sat in the doctor’s office and she was told that if she changed her lifestyle that day she might live seven years and if she didn’t, she might live four. Two years later, they discovered a mass on her lung. Damage done. On April 20, 2020 she died in my arms at home.

If you’ve been together for 30 years, then you have something. Sometimes you might think it’s boring but when they are gone, it is really boring and awful. I have never forgiven myself for leaving her although maybe someday I will, but for right now I miss her so much.

Hang in there, find things to do to keep yourself from being bored and cherish the people you’re close to including your husband or wife.

 

China leaves West’s financial system? Sells record amount of Dollar Assets. De-Dollarization.

Why did 10 million Americans lose their homes after the 2008 financial crisis?

“Sir, I need a loan to buy my dream home,” says Luigi.

“Do you currently have a job?” asks Mr. Greedy.

“Yes sir, I have a good job!”

“Do you currently own or rent a home?”

“I rent a home. We pay $1,500 per month.”

“Oh, I will be able to help you save so much money!”

“What do you mean, Mr. Greedy?” asks the innocent Luigi.

“Today you pay $1,500 a month. That’s terrible. You’re giving that money away to your landlord. You save zero in equity! Terrible investment, Mr. Luigi,” salivating for his HUGE commissions.

“Well, I know. I hope we can someday qualify for a loan, Mr. Greedy.”

“With our loan, you will pay the bank only $1,300 a month, saving you $200 every month.”

“Wow, that’s like a dream.”

“Mr. Luigi, are you sitting down?”

“Yes, Mr. Greedy. Why?”

You are qualified for a 100% loan, Mr. Luigi! No money down! The bank will give you all the money needed to purchase the house.”

“Really? Really? Wow, this is life-changing news, Mr. Greedy! Every one of my friends that have purchased a home is happy — real estate prices just keep going up!”

“And they will continue to rise, Mr. Luigi. Congratulations!”

“This is a life-changing event! Thank you, Mr. Greedy!”


Now, to answer your question, why did 10 million Americans lose their homes after the 2008 financial crisis?

Remember when you last purchased something with credit?

When we buy something, we’re focused on the satisfaction of the purchase, not on the obligation of the payment we just assumed.

Our behavior as a consumer is easily influenced by emotions and excitement to fill that emotional void with the purchase. This becomes a huge problem in a world where there’s an alarming lack of financial education — people may be deceived or make bad decisions.

I still remember those pre-crisis years. The world was different. Everyone wanted a piece of the pie. The real estate “party” was something nobody wanted to miss. Naturally, millions of Americans were emotionally attracted to the dream while ignoring the future legal and financial demands of their loans.

The banking system was extremely greedy. Banks qualified what are known as subprime mortgages. These are loans granted to individuals with poor credit scores (640 or less, and often below 600), who would normally not be able to qualify for a mortgage.

Mr. Greedy abused many consumers like Luigi, selling too many unqualified mortgages. Now, Luigi purchased his home for $200,000. He qualified for a 100% loan.

Luigi started making payments.

Then, the unexpected happened. In 2006 home prices started to drop. Suddenly Luigi’s $200,000 home was worth $50,000 less.

Luigi faced a decision: pay back the loan for $200,000 or give the home back to the bank.

Like Luigi, millions of Americans were not willing (or able) to pay the mortgage on their unreasonably expensive home anymore.

People stopped making their payments, which triggered defaults.

Now the banks were full of expensive foreclosures in their inventory. Prices kept falling. Nobody was willing to buy them.

The problem quickly spread nationwide.

Meanwhile, financial corporations who owned these junk sub-prime loans stopped receiving payments. This triggered the perfect storm.

A collision of two gigantic “cornerstone” industries of the economy followed.

It was scary … Devastating for millions around the world.

The rest is history …

Will history repeat?

What do you think?

Shorpy

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NYCITY1937.preview

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SHORPY 4a23727a.preview

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1053 crop full.preview

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SHORPY 4a17499a.preview

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SHORPY 12515u.preview

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Jim Mom Jeff 58 DeSoto.preview
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Have you ever accidentally touched another person inappropriately? What happened?

Rule of life:

  1. If it is your mistake, no matter, of what age, the person could be, fall back and say sorry.

  2. If it’s not your mistake, no matter, of what age, the person could be, rip him/her off, if the person tries to mess with you.

This is how I lead my life and I got no regrets.


Delhi metro is funny and accommodating at the same time. The other day, some months back, I was late for my office and had to reach Gurugram as soon as possible.

The option of using a cab was haunting me because, at peak hours, the traffic on Jaipur highway tends to intensify.

I landed at AIIMS metro and boarded a metro up to Sikanderpur.

The metro was overcrowded with office people, frustrated with their boss and distance from the offices, even one could say it looking at their faces.

Somehow, I got adjusted in the crowd, have put my earphones on, and started listening to songs.

A girl boarded metro from Saket, New Delhi and was in a hurry.

I understand. People could be in a hurry but there should be a protocol of no panicking because anyway, the metro gonna get the same time for everyone.

She stood opposite to me.

Later, more people boarded the metro from Qutub Minar and she got pushed, in a way that my elbow got pressed with her breasts, and I felt it, I won’t deny, but it was not my mistake.

According to physics and logic, which she lacked, I was stationary and she was acting as an object who interacted with a stationary object.


Someone patted on my shoulder.

She: Hello? Are you desperate?

She shouted loud enough to get the attention.

Me: Excuse me?

She: Dude, watch your elbow. You just tried to press my breasts.


Everyone started to give a look as if I am the harasser here.

I understood, she was wanting fun.

I raised my eyes, came closer and shouted loudly.

Frankly, you lack common sense. I was standing opposite to you and didn’t even notice you standing because you’re not worth looking. You are an attention gainer. You think, boys being a minority in such cases would step back, ask for a sorry even if it doesn’t justify a mistake. You are an arrogant girl who just wants attention.

I can prove it.

Who wears a “Deloitte” hoodie in the month of April?

The temperature is already above 30, and you are wearing a hoodie not because you feel cold but you wanna make everyone realize, I work in one of the best advisory firms.

Get a life.

And about your breasts, I didn’t even feel it.

The last line, if someone could have understood, was kind enough to rip her off and two people started laughing on the last line.

Rest didn’t get it.

Even, she didn’t.

She made a face, turned back and didn’t say anything after that.

She got down at the next station.

After leaving, everyone said: Good, you have at least spoken. It happens a lot in the metro.

Lesson: Zulm karne se, Zulm sehna Jada bara apraadh hai- Bhagwad Geeta.

English: One who harasses is not the bigger criminal, but the one who endures it is the biggest criminal.

Homemade “Maple” Syrup

Homemade Maple Syrup
Homemade Maple Syrup

Ingredients

  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 cup packed brown sugar
  • 1/8 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup water
  • 1/2 teaspoon maple flavoring or extract

Instructions

  1. Combine granulated and brown sugar in a saucepan. Add salt and water. Bring mixture to a boil.
  2. Remove from heat. Add maple flavoring or extract.
  3. Cool and serve.

Notes

Use any combination of granulated and/or brown sugar as long as it is two parts sugar to one part water.

If you fell from 14,000 feet without a parachute, where would the safest place possible be to land?

In WW2 my father made a water landing from high enough that he did not notice the shrimp boats at first. Luckily he remembered the training about men hitting water from altitude and the theories about how to survive. He became a dart. Legs were crossed and toes pointed to avoid having the legs ripped in different directions. Chin over the shoulder to avoid having it ripped off. Not looking down to avoid having the face smashed in. Arms tight against the sides. Do not have your butt stick out—be as straight as possible.

He had to take in another breath as the air pressure increased. Once he slowed down in the water he inflated his “Mae West” but the water pressure did not allow it to fully inflate yet. He kept the dart sharp because it worked. He claimed he still went in over his head the third time he hit the water.

The navy’s take was to alter the training about when to leave your parachute during a water landing to avoid getting tangled in the lines and drowning. Instead of jumping out of the harness when you are 10 feet from the water (my hillbilly father thought the Gulf of Mexico looked like the local pond he used to jump into—after all, how big is a wave?) you waited until your toes touch, then jump out.

You shouldn’t do that on purpose since getting a detail wrong results in death.

 

What is the most “illegal” thing you’ve done and gotten away with?

 

I have to go anonymous on this one.

It is the year 1999.

I helped my friend / flat mate escape from jail..

We were in Egypt at the time, and were young and still in university. I am an Egyptian citizen, he on the other hand was a foreigner, and did not have a valid driving license.

For some stupid reason he was driving his friend’s car and got heckled by a pedestrian (who pretended he got hit by the car to scare some cash from the driver, common practice in egypt and some other countries I will not be mentioning that I have been to). Anyway, my friend did not have any cash on him, minutes later police came over and booked him. He managed to call me for help from someone’s cellphone.

That night I went over to the police station, with food for my friend. At that point it was not my intent to help him escape. Anyhow, being an Egyptian, I know how to “grease someone’s hands” to let the food and cigarettes in.

The soldier whom I bribed gave us a couple of minutes while he smoked a cigarette, and there was an open door at the end of the hall. My car is parked close by.

I told him, if you can run to that door, jump over the fence (a shitty low cement fence), I will wait with my car in 2 minutes, and I will take you to the airport.

That is exactly what we did. Took him in my car, stopped by his place which was close by for not more than 30 seconds for his passport, and off to the airport.

I saw him once after that in his country of origin almost 10 years later.

Edit: thank you Gargi for the edit and review. Really appreciate it!

I laughed and laughed!

The Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciosa)

I grew up on a farm in Outback Australia. We had quite a big workshed full of equipment up a lane behind our house.

Even out in that area, we would occasionally get people in cars wandering up our back lane; fair enough, they’d get a bit lost and turn when they noticed their mistake and leave. We could always spot them, as the lane ran right by our house. We didn’t bother to shut the gate, since there was always somebody coming or going during the day and who can be bothered if you’ve not got stock there at the time?

Until one day when somebody went up there late one night and didn’t turn around and go straight back. My dad and I went and shut the gate on them and then waited, with our dogs and shotguns (this was a working farm, and so we had guns.) We also called the cops.

The two guys came back down the lane, saw us and the locked gate, backed up and went charging around the back fields trying to find another exit. By the time the cops got to our place, the two would-be thieves were pretty shaken up, and the cops found a heap of our stuff that they’d pinched from the shed.

We kept our front gate locked after that. And at night the dogs were let off.

What Putin and China just did is SHOCKING and the U.S. is in Real Trouble

I’ve had more.experience with this than I care to remember,.

At one point during my tenure with GM, the average age of my subordinates was very nearly 60 years old (59.8 I believe). Under CAW/UAW/UNIFOR, terminating someone with this kind of seniority was often a multi-year ordeal. By asking this question, I at least know you are not dealing with a union, or you would have been trained on a specific protocol for it. Also, you are likely working for a fairly small company or this would probably be left to an HR rep, who would also be trained. So with that in mind;

First depending where your company is located, I would make good god damn sure you have one hell of a rightous, well documented case for termination. In many places firing a 42 year employee without sufficient grounds could lead to the type of wrongfull termination suit that could sink a small company.

Secondly, if your company doesn’t already employ security, hiring a security company for a month or two after the termination is advisable. Being fired after 42 years would be a pretty massive shock for anyone. The potential for retaliation by someone who has dedicated nearly half a century to their career is a much more likely than it is with the average worker.

After 42 years, it is safe to assume the person considers their career to be a large part of who they are. Depending on the circumstance it’s very possible you are about to do something this person will view as one of, if not the greatest betrayals of their lives. Treat them with honesty, respect and compasion, don’t be afraid to show remorse, and be aware of the fact that l if you leave a person feeling like they have no options, they are financially ruined or you take away a part of their life they believe defines them, they are likely to lash out.

Lastly, you should never terminate anyone on your own but especially someone who has been with a company their entire adult life. You should always be acompanied by at least one other person, be that someone from HR, thier direct supervisor, another manager, a company lawyer and/or a security guard would all be reasonable choices, the 20 year old replacing him for 25% his salary, not so much (this should be obvious, but its the internet, who kows who will read this..)

Glitterbomb 3.0 vs. Porch Pirates

Prison Life

  1. Your woken up at 5:00 AM 7 days a week 365 days a year.
  2. Your then called out for chow, in which your section / tier heads to the chow hall. The food is served to you just like you were served while in elementary school. The difference is you could eat what they served you in the school cafeteria, In prison the food they serve you would make a belly goat puke. You will be given 8–10 minutes to consume the prison slop and out you go., On most days you will get some live entertainment to go with your food, such as fights, stabbings and of course the strong praying upon the weak.
  3. You then have a choice of a shower, yard, going to your prison job, school, or the yard.
  4. At about 10:30 am they issue the call for noon time chow, in which you march down to the chow hall in groups, afterwards they will send you to be counted, then when the count clears it’s back to your routine. In between is usually the gambling, tv watching, card games, beatings, hustlers, snitch squad, cell searches, stabbings, rapes and suicides. The golden rule is if you are walking on the tier, and you gotta use the restroom bad, you either soil yourself or run to your cell or dorm, you do not enter into any cell that is occupied or un occupied, because you will be beaten beyond recognition. If you see a person hanging and bleeding you just keep walking, if someone collapses from a heart attack or jumps off a tier you didn’t see anything.
  5. if it’s your time to go to store then go, but remember the sharks are circling at all times, and you have to be prepared to meet your maker, over a candy bar, or a bottle of shampoo. You don’t share a stick of gum, if you’re cash didn’t come in you do without.
  6. At about 3:30 pm they will issue the chow call for dinner, they will then count you again and when the count clears, they will allow you to have yard time, work time or shower time. At around 8:30 pm they will toss you into your cell for the night, and by 9pm the night has pretty much ended. If you listen close enough you will be able to hear the screams, of the inmates attacking the weak, and in some cases you will hear the goon squad coming to extract an inmate. In some cases you will hear a few brave cell soldiers, acting out and making noise.
  7. Come 5:00 AM the process starts over again, unless someone calls a strike, or your tier is locked down .

Welcome to prison life.

Cheesy Smothered Pork Chops

cheesy smothered pork chops
cheesy smothered pork chops

Ingredients

  • 4 or 5 boneless pork chops
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1/2 onion, thinly sliced
  • 1/2 cup mayonnaise
  • 1 cup Cheddar cheese, shredded

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Place pork chops in a baking pan. Season with salt and pepper on both sides.
  3. Sprinkle the onion on top of the pork. Spread mayonnaise on each pork chop. Top with shredded cheese.
  4. Bake for 25 minutes, or until the cheese is melted and browned. Baking time may be longer, depending upon thickness of pork chops.

About fifteen years ago, my cell phone rang at 10 o clock at night. When I answered, a very upset guy was on the line.

“Hey man!” He said. “You should be ashamed of yourself.”

I was sitting in bed next to my wife reading a book. I tried to think if I had done anything shameful recently.

“I think you have a wrong number,” I replied.

“”Don’t even try that bulls—-t on me.” He said. “My girlfriend is really upset, man.”

I tried to explain that I didn’t know what he walking about.

“Yes you do. You’re answering her phone, dude. How can you do stuff like this? Steal someone else’s phone? You think that’s okay?!?”

I desperately tried to assure him that it wasn’t her phone, but he was insistent that he had dialed her number.

Suddenly, it hit me. He had dialed without an area code, and got my number, not hers. (Can that even still happen now?) As I tried to explain this to him, he faltered slightly, but I could tell he thought I was somehow pulling a fast one on him, and didn’t want to believe me.

Finally, I had the solution. I realized that I wouldn’t have been able to change her voicemail message, even if I had her phone. I said I was going to hang up, and he should call back. He would hear my message, and know he had the wrong number.

I hung up. My wife and I watched as the phone rang four times and then went to voicemail.

I felt this weird flashback to when I was a kid and got accused of shoplifting because I had walked into a store with a soda I had bought elsewhere, and the owner was convinced I had taken one from his store. There were no adults with me, and I had to surrender the soda, and I got a tiny inkling of how it must feel to be in serious trouble for something you didn’t do, and how scary it is to have to prove a negative.

The phone went silent, and the problem was resolved. He left no message.

“Smite Me, Almighty Smiter!”

About 30 years ago, as a young woman, I needed a new vehicle and decided to buy a small pickup truck. My boyfriend (now husband) and I had gone out for breakfast and went to the Ford dealership to look at trucks. I found a Ranger that I really liked. The salesman seemed really nice and helpful. My boyfriend had to go to work, so we told the salesman we would come back. When my boyfriend left for work he asked what I was going to do for the afternoon. I told him I was going back to buy the truck.

I went back to the dealership and found the same salesman and told him I had returned to purchase the Ranger. He actually laughed. I told him I was serious. At that moment a man drove onto the lot. The salesman walked away from me to go talk to the man. I looked for another salesman and was ignored by all. I even went inside and said I want to buy a Ranger and was ignored by all. I left.

I went down the street to the Nissan dealership and purchased a new Nissan pickup that I liked better than the Ranger. I drove my new truck back to the Ford dealership and asked to see the original salesman and the sales manager. I took them both outside, showed them my new Nissan and told them I had stopped to buy the Ranger, but was laughed at and ignored by all. I told them to have a nice day, got into my Nissan and drove away.

As I was leaving I heard the manager yelling at the salesman. I loved that Nissan and drove it for years.

Went to McDonalds , and had a late breakfast, coffee and read the paper for half an hour.

I was pretty fed up with the job, and was trying to get through the next month before starting to look, but even so the dismissal was still a surprise. I arrived at 8: 30 on Monday morning , after working the Saturday and Sunday on a piece of work for the bank, and by 9: 30 was on my way home with no job, and an appointment with the company lawyer for the Friday , for my exit papers, so a bit bamboozled.

By the end of my macca breakfast , I was sorted in my head , with a plan and way forward. Gave my wife a call , and said “Sorry its happened again” She said. God bless her ”Are you OK?”

Me “disconcerted, but I’ll be fine, let’s look at the finances tonight, but I think we’re in good shape, and I should be able to negotiate a settlement from these guys that will get us a free holiday”

“That sounds nice, see you tonight“

No.

The United States has been using NATO to attack Russia.

A simple look at the map has shown NATO encroachment into the (former) Soviet Union Eastern Block and then with the 2014 color revolution, a full invasion of Ukraine… a battlefield from which to attack and destroy Russia by.

Only idiots forgot that Ukraine was originally a significant part of Russia. Look at the maps.

main qimg 4dd70bdda51ecd4e00124a2dbb67e7a6
main qimg 4dd70bdda51ecd4e00124a2dbb67e7a6

Like I said; only ignorant idiots; with a brain no larger than a peanut, don’t realize this FACT. I mean it. These brain-dead piles of vomit can’t even tell the difference between a boy and a girl. They don’t know what the root of Pi is, and they sure as fuck cannot tell you how many mm are in a yard.

Ambulatory Stupid feces wearing diapers.

But the stupidity doesn’t stop there…

Oh no. The great mental retardation is alive and well in the West.

Look, I know that some people cannot help their stupidity. But Lordy, you all shouldn’t elect them into office. What the Hell were you thinking?

Yeah.

Only a real IDIOT would think that they could take on Russia.

A massive, blundering ignoramus of a pile of weeks-old pig-feces, would possibly think such an absurd idea.

So, now…

Now…

No shit… NOW…

…they are now looking to “pivot to Asia”… and take on the Russia + China alliance.

Surely, the world has NEVER seen such ignorant, and stupid fools in all the history of mankind.

Psssst…

There’s more.

No shit!

Can you believe… actually believe… that a virtual army of United States officials have been marching off to China to TELL THEM to stop being friends with Russia.

And…

To order them to buy a shit load of American Treasuries…

And…

to force them to stop being the manufacturing center of the world.

And what did China do immediately afterwards?

Oh, the hug between Putin and Xi was pure gold.

The absurdity of this situation is pristine. You just cannot make this shit up!

China & Russia, better than alliance

Stupido Americano!

When we moved to Louisiana, we found an amazing home that we love. It is on a lake and has huge windows looking out onto the water.

It is part of a subdivision where most of the houses have waterfront property on the development’s five long lakes that snake their way through the neighborhood. However, a few of the houses do not have waterfront property, and the HOA rules dictate that 15 feet from the water’s edge is a right-of-way for water access for all residents.

There is a cul-de-sac of homes across the street from our house that do not have waterfront property. Although the rules don’t allow it, the residents of the cul-de-sac often access the lake by cutting between ours and our neighbor’s home, on our private property. As it is otherwise a long walk around to the public access we have mostly ignored this.

Since our back yard is flatter than our neighbors, the cul-de-sac residents often set up chairs and coolers and fish from our backyard. One day a kid asked if they could take our small kayak out. I confirmed this was okay with their parent, had them put on a life vest, and let them take the kayak out. Another older child with the group ended up taking our larger kayak out. I naively didn’t see the harm.

The next weekend, the kids showed up and asked to take our pedal boat out. I allowed it, but had my son go with them.

A month or so later, my wife called me at work. She said the neighbors were in our backyard and had our kayaks out on the lake. They weren’t wearing life vests and hadn’t asked. She was uncomfortable approaching them as there were several adult men and they’d been drinking. I couldn’t leave work and when I got home they had left already. I texted them and told them they needed to ask first before using our equipment. They didn’t respond.

Then the coup de grâce. We came home from church to find a large group of people basically hosting a huge barbeque in our backyard. They were eating at our picnic table, which they had moved from our porch out into the water, cooking with our propane grill, blasting a boombox with vulgar lyrics, and had both our kayaks and our pedal boat out on the water.

I was astonished. I could not believe the nerve of these people. It was all I could do not to blow my top. My wife was so angry she went inside to keep from assaulting someone. I considered calling the cops, but cooler heads prevailed. I went looking for the patriarch of the family that were the usual culprits, but couldn’t find him.

I started asking questions of the adults. Why did they feel they could just use our personal property without asking? Who’s idea was all this? How did this happen? Everyone was quick to blame someone else. Soon enough I realized that although I’d seen them all at one time or another with a local resident, not one of these people actually lived in our neighborhood.

With the help of my other neighbor who had come out ready to throw the boombox in the lake, we rounded up the party goers and herded them back across the street to the cul-de-sac. A few of the women protested loudly, but my neighbor’s threats to have the cops come and sort it out shut them up.

I later told this neighbor that if something like that happened again I would make sure they couldn’t cut through our yard to get to the lake.

We are also now in the habit of locking up our BBQ, kayaks, and boat in our shed. I put a chain on the picnic table to the patio roof column.

They still cut through the yard, and I have let the kids take the kayaks out because I’m a big softie. But if there’s ever a request of that day I’m raising hell.

After my freshman year of college, my parents pulled the “my house, my rules” for the last time. Finally I said, okay, then I’m leaving. My best friends picked me up and I brought the essentials and my bank book that had $2,000 in it. No cell phone or car.

One of my siblings called me and I told her I was car shopping. She said “why bother? You’ll never make it on your own so why waste the money?” I found a car for $700 and my friend taught me how to drive a stick so I could get it. I used the rest of my money to get an apartment and fix the car. I started working any temp job (factories, retail, etc) to make ends meet and to save money for school.

Skip ahead to when I was trying to return to college and needed my parents signature to get a student loan. I had to get them to sign to prove we were estranged. Yes I know, It doesn’t make sense. I finally said, if you don’t sign, then I have to go in front of a panel. I’ll describe the years of abuse and I’ll bring the pictures I took as evidence. My dad promptly signed it, to protect his prominent reputation, and crumpled the paper into a ball and threw it at me. He said “you’ll never amount to anything and you’ll never make it on your own.” he dented the top of my car with his fists as I was leaving for the very last time, and I told him if I ever saw him again I’d call the police (he had stalking tendencies and every time I moved, he would find my new apartment, drive the hour to sit outside of it and stare at my house. No call or attempt to talk to me. He would just lurk, even in the middle of the night. The police said it is common with abusive estranged parents and they would do their best to make me feel safe.

I worked factories third shift during undergrad to make ends meet and went through college with no phone, internet, or computer. I lived at the computer lab basically and the custodians would wake me up from naps so I could manage small amounts of sleep. I graduated from an accounting program that was ranked very high in the US, after accepting an invitation to an honors fraternity that is invitation only. I get good life long discounts on my car insurance, too, from that frat 🙂

A lot of my motivation in the beginning was spite. To not have to ask them for help, and to prove my sister wrong. I went through a lot of hardship that I probably wouldn’t have endured, otherwise. But as time went on, and I didn’t see any of the family for longer and longer, the anger and hurt started melting and I started living life for myself. I got some therapy too to get past some of the trauma and I can now manage the residual anxiety/depression without medication.

Any comments that provide advice or defense on behalf of my family will be deleted. This all happened between 10 to 15 years ago and I have moved on with my life without them.

“We are on a path to World War III right now—nothing is explained, nothing is told to us, and we have no choices.

The CIA comes in, conducts the briefings, and off we go to military escalation.

The public is profoundly unhappy, and the students are getting beaten up; faculty are getting arrested because you’re not supposed to speak about this.

Then there’s this concoction that this is about anti-Semitism—give me a break.

I’m a Jewish professor at Columbia University.

This is not about anti-Semitism; this is about a slaughter that is taking place in Gaza right now, and the American people don’t like it.

They don’t like our complicity in it, and they are protesting it—that’s what this is about.

But we don’t behave in any reasonable way right now, not even to discuss these things honestly, to know the facts, or to have hearings where our executive is called to account by Congress.

This was one of the fundamental roles that Congress was supposed to play.

It’s laughable to think that this is how anything works right now—it doesn’t. I know it doesn’t.

There is no accountability whatsoever.

There are closed-door briefings, and then, if you approach a congressman or senator, as I often do, they say, ‘Well, Jeff, I’m just not supposed to talk about such matters. I’m sure you understand.’

In the meantime, we have our NATO allies talking about moving troops to Ukraine, and Russia entering tactical nuclear drills right now.

This is crazy.

This is what you read about on the path to World War I, when a few people decided the fate of the world.

We had made a claim that because we are a republic, it couldn’t happen here, but starting in 1947, it has been happening here repeatedly.

That’s the year of the National Security Act; that’s the year when we went secret, and now we cannot hold our government accountable because everything is confidential.”

main qimg 9a70f6cc5cdd73eeae08eef6fbda9494
main qimg 9a70f6cc5cdd73eeae08eef6fbda9494

Excerpt from remarks by Professor Jeffrey Sachs, American economist and academic, in an interview with Judge Napolitano, May 6, 2024.

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Linda’s Prime Rib

This is SO tasty. The leftovers make wonderful roast beef sandwiches also.

prime rib2
prime rib2

Ingredients

  • Garlic powder
  • Seasoning salt
  • Mrs. Dash Seasoning
  • Lemon pepper
  • Fresh rosemary (optional)
  • Prime rib roast

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 500 degrees F.
  2. Rub seasonings into the prime rib. Sprinkle with fresh rosemary, if desired. For medium rare, cook 5 minutes per pound. For medium, cook 7 minutes per pound.
  3. Turn oven off and do not open oven door for whatever time remains of 2 hours (total cooking time).
  4. Serve with Yorkshire Pudding, if desired.

Notes

When we serve this, it is always served with Yorkshire Pudding.

One time my eldest son approached me & was like: “Dad I have something to tell you.” So i said sure. He was looking very nervous in the face so I was starting to get worried. Then, the next thing he said literally rocked my world. Alright so, I’ve been knowing that he has been having a girlfriend for quite a while now. So, i know that they probably have been doing nefarious acts while they were alone. Anyways, he proceeded to tell me that his girlfriend was pregnant. I immediately(in my head) went Bonkerzzz. There is no way he was serious. But, i knew i couldn’t flip out, I had to stay calm. I had to support him. So, after a bit of pacing, I mustered the courage to ask him how it happened. He told me that they just did it. So, i was just going to go with it & help my son out however I could. Because that’s what a father does. I was actually a bit happy. A grandchild! My very first grandchild!

But, as I was just going to pick up my phone & call his mother who was at work, I heard him laughing. So, I thought something was wrong. but, then he pointed at me and said. “You’re so gullible dad. She’s not pregnant & I got you!” I immediately felt stupid. But, after 30 secs I joined him & we were both laughing. I told him “You got me son. Now go take out the trash.”

(I continued laughing while he stopped)

Gravity is a Lie, Light Speed is Slow, Nothing is Real, the Universe is Electric

Actually I have 2 stories from my time at Wal-Mart. First is the story of “Bob”. Bob worked in electronics, everybody loved Bob, he was friendly, knowledgeable, and willing to go that extra bit to help a customer. Bob worked there just shy of 3 years and lived in the area for 27. We got word one day that Bob was arrested by Federal Marshals. Someone who had shopped there recognized him.

In the early 1970s, Bob and an accomplice had robbed a bank, and Bob used a woman as a human shield. Bob was sentenced to 7 years. He was 6 months away from being done with his sentence, and was on a light guard work crew, when he walked off and disappeared. When they raided him, he had loads of weapons and a lot of illegal hard drugs. Bye Bob, you might be out by now, IDK.

Second was “Winnie”. Winnie was a sweet lady, again everybody loved her, kind, helpful, spent her lunches crocheting and reading her bible. Winnie and her daughter and a family friend went to the east coast to visit family. 6 months after her visit, Marshals raid her house and arrest her AND her 18yo daughter AND the 18yo family friend FOR ARMED ROBBERY AND MURDER. They had run a profile on a case on Unsolved mysteries, where a woman was murdered, and her ATM Card used, and the picture on the ATM camera was of Winnie and her daughter using the card.

The gossip mill went into overload, there was one person defending her, ME. I knew her and her Daughter was a friend of my daughter, So I stuck up for her. WELL, all 3 were extradited across the country to a shithole of a US City. I won’t say which City (Coughthewirecough). So the FATHER of their family friend flies back east, lawyer in tow. He confronts the police, who being the ineffectual dickheads they are refuse to talk to him as his Daughter is 18.

SO He wields the Lawyer and points out, that even though she is 18, she still lives at home, goes to HIGH SCHOOL, and is supported by him and her mother, therefore in the eyes of the law, even though 18, IS STILL LEGALLY A MINOR AND THEREFORE THEY HAVE TO COOPERATE WITH HIM. BAM, POW, Up your’s you hacks.

So he gets their “Evidence, IE the ATM Camera footage. He talks to Winnie. Makes a trip to the bank, again Wielding his trusty lawyer like a scalpel to force the bank to cooperate. He then goes back to the Police and shoves this up their asses sideways –

  1. Winnie, her Daughter and the friend had gotten off their plane at X-O’clock, at the time of the murder they were still in the air.
  2. They had immediately caught a cab to the bank, withdrew money using THEIR CARDs, as THE ATM CAMERA FOOTAGE AND ATM TIME STAMP WERE OUT OF SYNC BY 17 MINUTES. The footage from the appropriate time showed 2 individuals using the victims card, and were felons known to the police.

He did this by doing about an hour’s actual investigation, nothing the fat, lazy, life wrecking swine that call themselves detectives in Shithole City did. The DA was NOT Pleased. Here’s the real insult. He gets his daughter and they leave, flying back home. Winnie and her daughter are kicked out onto the streets of Shithole City, without any kind of apology.

When she asked them what they were supposed to do as they had Nothing and nowhere to go, they literally said “That’s your problem, now leave before we arrest you for loitering” Those words wound up costing them a lot. Unsolved mysteries as well, as they also refused to apologize stating that “Verifying the facts ws the police departments job, not theirs.

So Winnie got a HUNGRY Lawyer and went to town. She got enough To buy her and her Daughter each a house, and her Daughter a good education at a good school of nursing. Winnie returned to work as she liked interacting with people but she let Management know she didn’t NEED the job, and they could just keep off her back. She also Has a signed letter of Apology from the Shithole City Chief of Police. She framed it.

Oh, I had a couple of ridiculous ones.

First, I grew up in a very affluent area, but didn’t realize it because I’d always lived in one. Until I was school aged, I believed that everyone had a diving pool in their yard. I believes that the pools at public parks were just for swim and dive team.

And for a time, I believed that I was adopted. This is ridiculous, because my brothers and I all look very much alike, except the one brunette. But I was the only girl. So my brothers told me that Momma and Da took me from another family because they could only produce boys.

This belief was furthered by my oddball birth certificate. I’ve not seen another like it, but there must be tons, because it was the stamped official certificate issued by the state of New Jersey in the 70s. However, it’s ridiculously incomplete in the information it gives. It just says my name, girl, my birthdate, and the name of the hospital. No mention of parents at all. They showed me their Florida birth certificates, which did list parents. This really cemented my belief in their joke.

I also believed that all dogs were boys and all cats were girls.

One more… I believed that I’d be allowed to play quarterback when we all went to Pop Warner, because I was as a better quarterback than any boy I knew (still am). But of course, in the early 80s, this was not the case. I felt truly betrayed when I was given a cheerleader outfit.

Kids do believe some silly stuff huh?

For some reason, Quora answers about China are all very emotionally charged in both direction. People from China are either very pro-CCP and list every single one of their (usually) developmental achievements and what the west fails in. The Westerners usually paint the CCP as the epitome of all evil.

I would like to offer a moderate perspective on it. Throughout my life, I have had the good fortune to meet multiple educated Chinese nationals who studied abroad. My impression from talking to them is that most Chinese do not care that much about politics. They are more interested in basic issues like education, making enough money to feed their kids/live and advancing in their careers.

From my understanding, civil unrest happens primarily due to economic factors as much as ideological issues like human rights or freedom of speech. In the economic realm, the CCP has delivered. As for the aspect about societal freedom. Though most civilians experience censorship and media bias, a large part of their lives are actually very free from an absolute standpoint. They can own property, go abroad, own businesses and even hold some political opinion. Though they lack the ability to vote their top leadership, but most people don’t care. (I suspect from voter turnout that most American citizens don’t care either)

My friend once told me, China is just a regular developed country (at least in Shanghai etc) with its own host of problems and strengths. The CCP isn’t some demon, neither is it a savior. It is a government like many others. If one party rule was the singular thing people used to judge people, many European monarchies would have experienced revolutions long ago. Historically, many societies were ruled by monarchs, so it is not a definite dealbreaker.

One more thing to note is that, the type of issues Chinese nationals have with the government are different than that of Westerners. Westerners do not inherently care about the development of China, although some might. (If the CCP collapses, who would replace them?) A Chinese national (like all others) wants the best for their country. The typical Westerner does not actively think about proper developmental policies that boosts China, they only think about China as a foreign country whether it affects their own country.

For example, a Chinese national might disagree that the Wolf Warrior diplomacy good. But they might think that their government should be more militant or utilize more soft power to influence minds. A typical Westerner would not want China to project any power or influence at all, instead Western media would for example, want China to help aid Western interests more. (Like standing against Russia)

The late Henry Kissinger, whom I admire said that we need to listen to our adversaries and understand them. We don’t have to agree, but we should listen to a variety of perspectives. When Nixon was in power, they turned the Chinese from an adversary to a neutral or even neutral positive state against the Soviets. This is despite China and Soviets being both “communist countries”. The reason they achieved that, was because they recognized that despite the shared ideology, there were many territorial conflicts between China and Russia on the border. They then offered trade and prosperity to entice China to become unaligned with the Soviets.

Two things impede the Anglophone world from understanding the Chinese in my opinion. The language barrier (most don’t speak Mandarin), and modern American political discourse seems to be very tribal, and don’t promote listening and dialogue with the other side, whether with Republicans, Democrats or the Chinese.

I once stood about five meters (fifteen feet) away from a grenade when it went off. We had planted some booby traps in the vicinity of an enemy position and one of the grenades that we had used to build these traps had been activated.

It was night and I just heard a clicking sound when the ring was pulled out of the grenade.

There was no time to jump for cover. Anyway, it was pitch dark and I was in a forest: I would just have smashed my head against the next tree by trying.

I shouted “attention!” to my buddies, covered my ears with my hands and turned my back towards the grenade. Then I felt the blast, and a few seconds later, there was something wet and warm in my right boot. It was blood.

There were enemy forces around and so we had no time to stop and take a look at my leg. Fortunately, I could still walk and we made it out of the forest without any problems.

As soon as the sun went up, a friend of mine took a small pocket knife and pulled the pellets from the grenade out of my leg.

I was very lucky that I wasn’t exposed to the full blast of the grenade, otherwise I would have had much more serious injuries.

When you are in an open terrain, you are wearing your body protection, and the grenade isn’t too close to you (less than ten feet), you should be able to survive.

However, when you find yourself in an enclosed space, like a house or a trench, hand grenades can be deadly. I remember an incident where we threw a hand grenade through a window of a house during the war in Kosovo.

After the detonation, we entered the building to clean it up and came to the room where the grenade had exploded. Although there was no enemy in the room (there was one in the next room, though), the room was a complete mess:

The furniture was badly damaged, there was a big hole in the wooden floor, and the explosion had caused a small fire in the room. I was surprised: All this mess from a single grenade! I was sure that if there would have been any persons in that room, they would have been seriously wounded or even dead.

About 18 years ago someone came to my rescue when bullies showed up on my front lawn.

Fast backward to junior high where I wasn’t exactly a popular girl. I had recently switched to a new school and I still hadn’t found my crowd.

A group of adolescent boys, convinced they were cool like the Fonz, decided to pick on me for fun. They barked at me and called me dog-face. It wasn’t long before I found myself hiding in the bathroom during lunchtime. I made the geeks in Sixteen Candles look good.

One afternoon I headed home from school on foot like I usually did. While turning onto my street I looked back and saw I had company. The bully ringleader and two of his jackals were bicycling toward me! I remember taking off running in Forest Gump glory and bursting through the front door with hot tears in my eyes.

Standing in front of me was my older sister Alyssa. We were teenage sisters at the time and we fought quite a bit. Unlike me she didn’t have a problem finding friends and being the center of attention. And so I waited for her to pounce on the opportunity to ridicule me for being such a wimp.

Instead, upon realizing what was happening, red anger flooded across her face. Quicker than I could say jambalaya she swung the front door back open and stomped down the driveway toward my not-so-gentleman callers.

There, in front of our home on Hickory Dr., my own Joan of Arc warded off the beasts. Facing the head bully, she bent down to the lawn, ripped out a fistful of grass, and threw it into his face. “Stop messing with my sister!” she screamed out with indisputable authority. The intruders were cornered as Alyssa launched an impromptu mouthful of artillery that reduced them to speechless, little weenies. I remember watching in awe as they pedaled off on what seemed like tricycles.

After that day I got to eat my lunch at a table instead of talking to toilets that don’t talk back. With time I found friends. Really good ones.

Eventually I did get bullied again by a different pipsqueak, yet this time I stood up for myself. My sister’s defending me inspired me to defend myself.

I’ve learned that sometimes we aren’t strong enough to come to our own rescue. When we lend our strength to others, even if it’s just for a moment, the effects can travel across a lifetime. Gracias, hermana.

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  1. You’re built to appreciate female beauty. Once you’re married, you’re supposed to turn on the filter limiting it to your wife. But the filter was not part of your design.
  2. Your public bathrooms are horrifying. I’ve walked into one by accident years ago and have been scarred for life.
  3. You have to monetize your life. Creative type? Become famous. A hero? Run for political office. Don’t care about money? Doesn’t matter, still have to make a lot of money. You are a man.
  4. The way all the pants are designed. Not to gently support and cradle your genitals, but to harshly cut them in half. Also topped off with a zipper in case if you also want to experience unimaginable pain from zipping up something you weren’t supposed to.
  5. To mate, you’re supposed to be good at reading women’s smoke signals. But all women’s magazines tell them to play it cool and not send any signals. Now what are you supposed to do?
  6. Women get a lot more pampering – we get massaged, our feet are washed, gently scrubbed, oiled, and toes decorated with pretty colors. Your feet look like hooves and you have to pay your toddler $3 to put some lotion on them.
  7. If a woman wears a low cut red dress, you will have difficulty concentrating, negotiating a deal, or forming your thoughts. Conversely, men don’t have similar easy hacks.

We live in a world where there are infinite possibilities. They come to us in our day-to-day decision making. However, we only get to live in one set of such possibilities. You either took the job or you didn’t. You either said yes or no. You either held on or let go. But a part of us may wonder: could there be an alternate reality where a different version of ourselves took a different path in life? Here are 5 Bizarre Experiences of People Being in a Parallel Universe.

First of all your friend should NEVER have told you that without explanation. Shame on them.

Actually, the words are ,”Easy Victor” it stands for “evacuate”.

However, you as a passenger will never hear the pilot just blurt it out! And passengers will already know there is a problem long before a pilot says this. DO NOT spend your time flying listening for those words. Trust me, in 20 years, the only time I heard “easy victor” was every year in recurrent training when we practice our evacuation drills. This fact should put you at ease to know that in the very very rare event there is an emergency, you will finally get to see what a flight attendants job really is about. The reason we spend weeks in training and 2 days every year! We save your lives! Honestly we do! And as a passenger in an emergency, you only have to do FOUR things!

  1. listen to the flight attendants, and do exactly what they tell you.
  2. listen to the flight attendants, and leave everything behind. You want to waste time opening the bin to grab a bag of CLOTHES??? Your life and the lives of everyone else are worth more than anything in your bags.
  3. listen to the flight attendants, tell you when to go OR use common sense and get out!
  4. listen to the flight attendants, and find your exits as soon as you get on the plane. All your exits! Know how and where to get your butt outta there! And dont get complacent. There are lots of aircraft types out there with doors that open differently, even if you fly the 737 a lot, did you know there are at minimum now 7 different versions of that plane flying around, ?? 4 types of 747, 2 types of 777 and 767 and 757. Etc. many different airlines who configure their planes differently????

(sorry, Im just used to using “he” for the pilot)

when the flight attendants tell everyone how to brace, do it. They will tell you when to brace and when to evacuate. Sometimes the crew and passengers are ready for an evacuation…. If the plane lands fine and evacuation might not be necessary. The pilot will make an announcement and say, “do not evacuate”. But if its necessary to evacuate some airlines have trained pilots to just say over the PA, “Easy Victor”. Then you will hear the flight attendants go into evacuation mode. Or the pilots may just say “evacuate”! Or, he may give special instructions, like,”evacuate aircraft right only”, or he may say”Forward doors only”, or “no overwing exit”. Sometimes they have info the cabin crew doesnt. Like if the plane lands hard and a fire starts under the right wing. The tower may see this and notify the pilots of the fire under the right wing before the plane has stopped. The pilot would then pass that on by saying “evacuate aircraft left only”

so you see, dont just listen for “Easy Victor” to be said out of the blue. But do always listen to the flight attendants. I hope this helps and puts you at ease. I know this is more than you asked for, but I have insomnia and am on a roll!!!!

Be kind, be safe, and make it a happy day!

Kevin out

Ukraine SitRep: Eating The Seed Corn – Intervention Threats And Responses

Dima of the Military Summary Channel and others have mentioned that the Ukrainian army has deployed its police and military cadets to the front line.

This is like farmer who, during a winter famine, eats his seed corn for the next year. It will only prolong the crisis and guarantee that there will be even more hunger during the following winter.

Where will the next generation of Ukrainian army officers come from when the cadets are all dead?

Over the last days the Democratic Minority Leader in the House Hakeem Jeffries suggested that U.S. troops would have to intervene in Ukraine:

In an interview with CBS News, Jeffries expressed concerns that despite billions of dollars in military aid from the United States, if Ukraine cannot secure victory over Russia, America may be compelled to intervene directly in the conflict.

The British Foreign Minister David Cameron has invited Ukraine to use British delivered weapons against Russian territory:

David Cameron said Ukraine “absolutely has the right” to conduct attacks inside Russia with British weapons as he made his second visit to Kyiv since becoming foreign secretary.Lord Cameron said it was up to Kyiv to decide how to use the ammunition supplied by Britain.

“In terms of what the Ukrainians do, in our view, it is their decision about how to use these weapons, they are defending their country, they were illegally invaded by Vladimir Putin and they must take those steps,” he said.

France has allegedly deployed parts of its Foreign Legion to Ukraine. The report follows musings by the French president Macron about putting French troops onto the ground in Ukraine.

All this was a bit too much for Russia. It invited the British ambassador to its Foreign Ministry to get an earful of serious talk:

Russia’s foreign ministry said the UK’s ambassador to Moscow had been “summoned” to make him “reflect on the inevitable catastrophic consequences of such hostile steps by London”.

Russia also announced a spontaneous drill of the deployment of tactical nuclear weapons:

Russia has threatened to strike British military facilities and said it will hold drills simulating the use of battlefield nuclear weapons in response to UK weapons being used by Ukraine to strike its territory.

It is the first time Russia has publicly announced drills involving tactical nuclear weapons, although its strategic nuclear forces regularly hold exercises.

The exercises will be held by the southern group of Russian forces which is also involved in the special military operation in Ukraine.

This should for now shut up the loud voices who dream of defeating Russia in Ukraine.

There is zero hope that this could be achieved. The Ukrainian army has had 600-700,000 soldiers, maybe even more. It has been defeated. How many soldiers could France deploy into Ukraine? 5,000-10,000? And all NATO together? 100,000?

No western force is currently configured and equipped to defeat a near peer competitor force. Twenty-five years of ‘war of terror’ have left those armies in a very sorry state. At least during the first year of an expanded war their troops would have no chance to survive. The Russian forces, by now a well oiled machine with plenty of excellent weapons, would defeat them within one or two weeks. What then?

Since February 2022 Russia’s old and new president Vladimir Putin has warned against all interventions:

Let me emphasise once again: if anyone intends to intervene from the outside and create a strategic threat to Russia that is unacceptable to us, they should know that our retaliatory strikes will be lightning-fast. We have the tools we need for this, the likes of which no one else can claim at this point. We will not just brag; we will use them if necessary. And I want everyone to know this; we have made all the decisions on this matter.

I for one do not take that lightly.

 

Posted by b at 10:35 UTC | Comments (202)
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Lisa’s Crispy Chops

Baked Breaded Pork Chops 1
Baked Breaded Pork Chops 1

Ingredients

  • 6 pork chops
  • 3 eggs, beaten slightly
  • 2 cups crushed soda crackers
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons garlic powder
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons dried minced onion
  • 1 teaspoon each salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Mix all dry ingredients in a bowl.
  2. Dip pork chops into egg, then roll in dry mixture.
  3. Fry over medium heat in a small amount of oil until dark, crispy brown.
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“Hungarians are a worldly-wise people, so we can see through the games of others, and we know that war not only brings losses.

Of course it does bring terrible, appalling losses, with the tide of war sweeping away human lives and entire national economies.

But there are always those who gain from it.

I look at the decision of the US Congress, a month or two ago I listened to the US president, and he made it very clear that the US economy benefits from arms aid to Ukraine.

First the US secretary of state said this, and then the US president.

Now they’ve made these decisions about 60 billion dollars and more in military aid; and if you look at its internal structure, you can see that it’s actually a huge military order for US industry.

There are these NGOs, Soros and his people.

There are always these financial speculators, people fishing in troubled waters, who – as they say in Budapest – are looking at the war to see what they can get out of it, and are trying to get everything they can out of it.

It’s all very well to say that they’re few in number; the fact is that they exist, and they’re strong.

So behind the tendency for war there are very serious forces: business, political and economic forces.

But the public – the majority of the public at least – are on the side of peace.

This lends the current situation its tension, with the number of people throughout Europe who feel the danger and don’t want war growing continuously, while every day European leaders take ever more steps towards war – although I’m not saying that they’re marching.”

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Excerpt from remarks by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in an interview on the Kossuth Radio Programme ‘Good Morning Hungary’, May 3, 2024.

As far French Legion troops. They did arrive to Slaviansk. They were hit by Russians and had casualties. One group had a close combat encounter with Russians in the region Ocheriteno and 5 French and 2 German soldiers got killed after a day of clashes. After that they ran away like chickens, basically French Legions are not for this war. People have to understand that Ukrainians are losing up to 1500 men per day and no NATO can replace that. Having said that, this war is going to end with NATO Ukrainian defeat, a bad defeat. Out of Hundred or so Legions who arrived just in less than a week they lost 30% of soldiers, and at this point they are out of Ukraine. I think France understood the level of war being conducted by Russians.

A kitty cry for rescue

October 2017,
Redmond, WA.

I was interviewing a college candidate for a PM role. He had already cleared the phone screen, the on campus round as well as gotten through first couple of rounds of the day with positive reviews. It was my job to work through a real scenario with him that would be help me gauge how he would perform in that situation on the job because it was not an infrequent task he would need to do.

The basic scenario was about how he would handle a competitor scenario for acquiring a specific chunk of business. We were to try and gain a specific customer who was evaluating subscribing to our product vs our top competitor; another tech giant with a lot of resources. The specific product the client wanted is almost at par with both companies so we need to come up with creative solutions to acquire the client; I asked him to think outside the box, think of long term package deals, service agreements, price negotiations, whatever else he could come up with.

He decided to go with trying to get the customer on a lower price. I asked him how he would know what the competing bid might be, what kind of historic data would he need to drive this inference, what models would he need to build to estimate the right number to write on the bid. What he said next literally made me gasp.

Candidate: “Oh I don’t need to do all that. I’ll just ask the guy over at our competitor what price he’s going to put and beat him.”

Me: “Why would he tell you what they are going to bid?”

Candidate: “That’s easy. I’ll take him out on the town for a few drinks, get chatty with him, and once he’s got enough alcohol inside him I’m sure he’ll tell me; or I’ll figure out other ways of getting the number from him. I can be very persuasive .”

Me: “Hahaha… You’re kidding right? You do realize that not only is that very unethical, it’s also completely illegal and it could get you fired, and, the company in a lot of legal trouble.”

Candidate: “I disagree. I’m not doing anything illegal. There’s nothing wrong with taking someone out for drinks after work and if in that state he happens to voluntarily tell me certain things that work to my advantage, I see no harm in using it.”

At this point I was just shocked how someone could say this in an interview. It didn’t matter to me that he was a fresh grad student and maybe didn’t realize the severity of what he was saying. Every university has courses on business ethics and even if he decided to skip those classes, this is just common sense. What really bugged me was how much he pushed back when I tried to explain to him how wrong that approach was. This back and forth continued for another 10 minutes by which time I had absolutely made up my mind on how this was going to end.

I ended the interview a few minutes early and told him to take a break and use the restroom and get something to drink if he liked. I went back to my manager and the rest of the interview team and told them very clearly what happened and how in my opinion such an attitude can be a huge liability for the team and the company, and that what made it worse was he didn’t come across as coachable and was not receptive to feedback. I insisted and everyone agreed that we end the interview loop there and not waste any more time when we clearly know he’s a no hire. Some things are unforgivable sins in an interview and he had committed a fair few of them.

Larry Johnson Warning: “Nuclear Crisis – Russia’s Fury Unleashed by NATO & France’s Provocation”

Surprisingly great.

Swiss Steak with Tomato Gravy

swiss steak tomato gravy
swiss steak tomato gravy

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 large slice round steak
  • 1/2 cup vegetable oil
  • 2 large cans tomatoes
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 large onion, diced
  • Kosher or sea salt and pepper
  • 1 cup water (for gravy)

Instructions

  1. Spray slow cooker with Pam. Turn on LOW.
  2. Heat oil in large skillet.
  3. Cut round steak into serving-size pieces.
  4. Put flour into a shallow pan. Add salt and pepper to flour and flour steak well.
  5. Fry steak in hot oil until brown.
  6. Pour a few tomatoes into the slow cooker. Add pieces of browned steak and remaining tomatoes in layers. Add diced onion.
  7. Cook for 4 hours on LOW heat.
  8. Remove meat from slow cooker.
  9. Put 1 cup of water in a pint jar. Add 3 tablespoons flour. Shake well. Add to tomato mixture in the slow cooker. Cook and stir until gravy is thickened.
  10. Put meat back in long enough to heat.
  11. Serve with mashed potatoes.
  1. If your house smells like fish for absolutely no reason, 9 times out of 10 it means that there is an electrical fire.
  2. If you ever feel like someone is following your car take four right turns and eventually it will make a circle. If they are still behind you that means they are following you. Don’t drive home, just call the police and drive to the police station
  3. If a service dog ever approaches you without its owner, follow them and do it quickly because potentially you can save someone else’s life.
  4. If someone is trying to abduct you, fight back. Most abductors will just give up if they meet resistance. And whatever you do, don’t let them take you to another location.
  5. If the tide suddenly goes out unexpectedly, run like you stole it, for higher ground.
  6. If you’re ever charged by a moose, get behind a tree.. they have about a ten inch blind spot and they’ll lose you..
  7. When people say to take an aspirin to help during a heart attack, chew the pill, don’t swallow it whole. It gets absorbed much quicker.
  8. If a person asks you for something in the street – a light, the time, whatever – always keep the person in your eyeline. So if they ask for the time, don’t just look down at your watch. Raise your arm slightly so your watch is in sight.
  9. If you are in danger or in need of help, in a public place, it’s almost always a bad idea to just yell “help”. It’s more important to be specific. Pointing at someone and telling them to call 911 will be more effective. The Bystander Effect can be cruel sometimes.

Today’s unusual funny covers

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I was working a few years back at a busy, upscale Tuscan-style restaurant in the Chicago area, when a party of five came in.

There was one woman who stuck out like a sore thumb, because she had to be on the north side of 40, but was dressed and made up like a teenager. Additionally, her dyed blond hair hung long and loose down her back, except for the sides, which were swept back with an outsized pink bow.

She basically looked like an escapee from a psychiatric ward….in 1985.

As I took their order and subsequently began serving them, every time I approached the table this woman was doing the majority of the talking, and loudly laughing, such that it was becoming a problem for the other tables in my section.

I then asked this lady quite respectfully and discreetly if she could please lower her volume just a bit for the sake of the other diners.

This made her very angry. She stood up so fast that she spilled her water glass, and as I struggled to mop that mess up, she yelled at me up one side and down the other: “Do you know who I am”?!!

I admitted that I did not.

She then shrilly informed me that she was a celebrity dancer from TELEVISION, and that I was just plain ignorant if I’d never heard of her, as she was a regular on ##variety show.

A man in her party nervously interjected, “D****, please, let’s just get back to enjoying our meal together, okay sweetheart”?

The whole restaurant, staff and patrons, were relieved to see the back of Miss D by the time they checked out.

This was before the internet, so I had to ask around, but I finally found a guy who grew up in the American Southwest who had heard of her:

It turns out that in the days of local affiliates of the big TV corporations, this woman had been a tap-dancing sensation.

As a child.

In one city in Arizona.

Doing commercials for a well-known DOG FOOD brand.😳

The Coming Simp Shortage

Braised Pork with Green Chile Sauce

Mild green chiles season this meaty pork stew. Serve it with rice or as a burrito filling. This can also be served with tamales. This chile verde is also good served with scrambled eggs.

braised pork green chile sauce
braised pork green chile sauce

Ingredients

Pork

  • 1 (3 pound) lean boneless pork butt
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 4 garlic cloves, minced
  • 2 large green bell peppers, seeded and chopped
  • 1 (7 ounce) can diced green chiles
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves, crumbled
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons kosher or sea salt
  • 1/2 cup fresh cilantro, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon wine vinegar
  • 1/4 cup water

Garnish

  • Tomatoes, cut into wedges
  • Cooked rice
  • Sour cream
  • Lime, cut into wedges

Instructions

  1. Trim and discard fat and cut pork into 1 inch cubes.
  2. In a large frying pan, heat oil over medium-high heat; add meat a few cubes at a time and cook until very brown.
  3. Push meat to side of pan and add onion, garlic and bell peppers; sauté until limp.
  4. Stir in chiles, oregano, cumin, salt, cilantro, vinegar and water.
  5. Cover and simmer until meat is fork tender (about 1 hour).
  6. Skim off fat and discard.
  7. Serve with rice or make burritos or serve in your favorite way.
  8. For Burritos: spoon pork into warm, soft flour tortillas, add sour cream, tomato wedges, and a squeeze of lime juice and fold to enclose. Rice may also be enclosed with the filling in the burritos, if desired.

Video: US-NATO Chinook Helicopters inside Ukraine Air Space Near Odessa

Video: US-NATO Chinook Helicopters inside Ukraine Air Space Near Odessa

Video below shows two US/NATO Chinook (Double-prop) Helicopters, flying about 100 feet above the waters of the Black Sea, INSIDE Ukrainian air space, near Odessa.

US NATO Choppers Inside Ukraine airspace large
US NATO Choppers Inside Ukraine airspace large

It is important to realize that what you’re seeing is the US/NATO operating in an area where they are considered a legitimate military target by Russia!

It is also important to point out the long air-refueling pipe protruding from the front of both helicopters indicates these are MH-47G helicopters; for “SPECIAL FORCES.”

Rural Areas of USA Could Soon LOSE Cellular Service

While Congress was quick to find $61 Billion for Ukraine, they aren’t “finding” $3 Billion for US Rural Cell Service.  States such as Tennessee, Kansas, and Oklahoma could be affected unless ‘rip-and-replace’ funding is secured.

Rural and Indigenous communities are at risk of losing cell service thanks to a 2019 law intended to strip US telecom networks of Chinese-made equipment. And while local companies were promised reimbursements as part of the “rip-and-replace” program, many of them have so far seen little of the funding, if any at all.

The federal push to block Chinese telephone and internet hardware has been years in the making, but gained substantial momentum during the Trump administration. In May 2019 an executive order barred American providers from purchasing telecom supplies manufactured by businesses within a “foreign adversary” nation. Industry and government officials have argued China might use products from companies like Huawei and ZTE to tap into US telecom infrastructure. Chinese company representatives have repeatedly pushed back on these claims and it remains unclear how substantiated these fears are.

As The Washington Post explained on Thursday, major network providers like Verizon and Sprint have long banned the use of Huawei and ZTE equipment. But for many smaller companies, Chinese products and software are the most cost-effective routes for maintaining their businesses.

Meanwhile, “rip-and-replace” program plans have remained in effect through President Biden’s administration—but little has been done to help smaller US companies handle the intensive transition efforts. In a letter to Congress on Thursday, FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel explained an estimated 40 percent of local network operators currently cannot replace their existing Huawei and ZTE equipment without additional federal funding. Although $1.9 billion is currently appropriated, revised FCC estimates say another $3 billion is required to cover nationwide rip-and-replace costs.

Congress directed the FCC to begin a rip-and-replace program through the passage of the 2020 Secure and Trusted Communications Networks Act, but it wasn’t long before officials discovered the $3 billion shortfall. At the time, the FCC promised small businesses 39.5 percent reimbursements for their overhauls. Receiving that money subsequently triggered a completion deadline, but that remaining 61.5 percent of funding has yet to materialize for most providers. Last week, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-WA) announced the Spectrum and National Security Act, which includes a framework to raise the additional $3 billion needed for program participants.

So finding money to spend on Ukraine was easy for the US Congress, but finding the money to take care of their own Constituents – well, that’s another story.  Not happening.

American Reacts to First Time You Realized America Really Messed You Up pt 2

France Sends Combat Troops into Ukraine

France has sent its first troops officially to Ukraine. They have been deployed in support of the Ukrainian 54th Independent Mechanized Brigade in Slavyansk. The French soldiers are drawn from France’s 3rd Infantry Regiment, which is one of the main elements of France’s Foreign Legion (Légion étrangère).

In 2022 France had a number of Ukrainians and Russians in the Foreign Legion. They were allowed to leave the Legion and, in the case of the Ukrainians, return to Ukraine to join Ukrainian forces. It isn’t clear if the Russians returned home.

The Legion today is run by French officers but the rank and file are all foreigners. Under the current anonymat (being anonymous) a volunteer who joins the Legion can decide whether to keep his given name or adopt a new one. Legionnaires serve for three year terms, after which they can ask for French citizenship. If a legionnaire is wounded, he is entitled to gain French citizenship without any waiting period. There are no women in the Foreign Legion.

The initial group of French troops numbers around 100. This is just the first tranche of around 1,500 French Foreign Legion soldiers scheduled to arrive in Ukraine.

These troops are being posted directly in a hot combat area and are intended to help the Ukrainians resist Russian advances in Donbas. The first 100 are artillery and surveillance specialists.

For months French President Emanuel Macron has been threatening to send French troops to Ukraine. He has found little or no support from NATO countries outside of support from Poland and the Baltic States. Allegedly the US opposes sending NATO soldiers to Ukraine (other than as advisors).

One of the questions to immediately arise from France’s decision to send soldiers from its 3rd Infantry Regiment is whether this crosses the Russian red line on NATO involvement in Ukraine? Will the Russians see this as initiating a wider war beyond Ukraine’s borders?

A key question is how NATO will react to the French decision to deploy. As France is acting on its own without NATO’s backing, the French cannot claim support from NATO under its famous Article 5, the collective security component of the NATO Treaty.

Should the Russians attack French troops outside of Ukraine it would be justified because France has decided to be a combatant, and forcing an Article 5 vote would seem to be difficult if not impossible.

Of course, NATO members individually could support the French, either by sending their own forces or by backstopping the French logistically and in communications. For example, there is no way Foreign Legion soldiers can go to Ukraine without passing through Poland. Will the Russians see this as evidence they are at war both with France and Poland?

Right now no one can answer any of these questions with any degree of certainty. It is unlikely the Russians will long tolerate a buildup of French army troops, even if they are Foreign Legion soldiers. What Russia will do in response is not certain.

China’s envoy to France, Lu Shano, is a very outspoken diplomat, and I like his style very much. As a Chinese professional diplomat, he attaches great importance to safeguarding China’s interests. Therefore, his admission that “China-France are at the forefront of China’s relations with Western countries” is a statement of reality.

He is a career diplomat, a graduate of the Diplomatic Academy in Beijing and fluent in French. He has worked for 25 years in the Africa Department of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and from July 2019 is the Ambassador to France. Two years before that, he served as China’s ambassador to Canada.

In 2019, Canada detained Chinese citizen Meng Wanzhou without reason. He was interviewed by many media at the time, condemning Canada, pointing out that Western countries had double standards in treating Meng Wanzhou’s arrest and the arrest of two Canadian spies in China, and blaming Meng Wanzhou’s unreasonable detention on Western hegemony and White supremacy. The Canadian side has never seen an ambassador who dared to point out the root of the problem so bluntly. They all expressed dissatisfaction with Ambassador Lu Shaye and made overwhelming sophistry.

Later, Lu Shaye served as ambassador to France. On the one hand, he promoted China’s effective practices and achievements in fighting the epidemic, and on the other hand, he relentlessly criticized Western governments for being too lax in their management of the epidemic. This has attracted great attention from Western media. It also made French politicians feel as if they were facing a formidable enemy and specially summoned Ambassador Lu.

Ambassador Lu Shaye also asked the French Chamber of Deputies to cancel his plan to visit Taiwan. The French accused him of “interfering in France’s internal affairs.” Antoine Bondaz, a scholar at the French Foundation for Strategic Research (FRS), criticized Lu Shaye’s interference in France’s democratic system on Twitter, which is unacceptable. Ambassador Lu directly responded to Antoine Bondaz on Twitter, criticizing him as a “petite frappe”, once again causing a war of words. The French Ministry of Foreign Affairs once again summoned Lu Shaye, and local media also described China’s diplomacy as “rude” and “wolf warrior diplomacy.” The Chinese Embassy in France responded: “If there are really ‘wolf warriors’, it must be because there are too many ‘mad dogs’ and they are too ferocious.”

On March 22, 2021, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs imposed sanctions on 10 people and four entities in Europe, including French MP Lexman. After China officially issued the sanctions order, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs prepared to summon the Chinese Ambassador, Lu Shaye The ambassador responded forcefully: “The ambassador is not available today and will go to the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs tomorrow for negotiation.”

In 2022, Pelosi visited Taiwan and became the first Speaker of the House of Representatives to visit Taiwan in 25 years. Lu Shaye said in an interview with French media, “After reunification, we will re-educate (Taiwanese people). I believe that by then, Taiwanese people will support reunification again. They will become patriots again.”

In April 2023, Lu Shaye accepted a TV interview. He said that “the process of the disintegration of the Soviet Union was very chaotic. The member states that separated from the Soviet Union did not sign any formal agreement on boundary demarcation and mutual recognition of national sovereignty” and “Even these ex-Soviet countries don’t have an effective status in international law because there was no international agreement to materialize their status as sovereign countries”, which caused panic among the Baltic countries. Because Lu Shaye frankly told the truth, Nearly 80 European parliamentarians called on France to expel Lu Shaye, the Chinese ambassador to France. 🤣

In response to the West’s demonisation of China, Lushano said, ‘I am honoured to be given the title of War Wolf, we are the warriors who stand in front of our motherland and fight for her, we are the warriors who stand in the way of the mad dogs that attack China.’


This reminds the Chinese people of what happened 121 years ago:

Tom Kim Yung, a Chinese diplomat in the United States, was out when he encountered two American policemen, who insulted him in English and rudely grabbed him, tying his braid to the fence as if he were a leashed dog, and then beat him severely. Onlookers jeered as they watched him being beaten. Finally, unable to bear the humiliation, he committed suicide by gassing himself on a light fixture in the consulate room.

Yes, today’s powerful China no longer keeps a low profile and allows others to bully and humiliate it.

China’s diplomatic thinking fully embodies “a sense of mission that has the courage to take responsibility and dare to fight.”

As some media explained: Compared with “keeping a low profile”, China is now fighting back head-on, focusing on struggle. In fact, this is also determined by the mission of our era and the complicated national environment.

Women REALLY HATE MGTOW! They misunderstand, complain, but don’t seem to change behavior.

This is a great movie. I love the flamingo section.

They’re going to be completely alone.

Russia Issues Warrant to Arrest Ukraine’s Zelensky; Declares Ukraine “Illegal Entity”

The Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs has put the leader of Ukraine, Vladimir Zelensky, on the wanted list; declaring Ukraine to be an “illegal entity.”

He joins former president Poroshenko and former acting officer of the Minister of Defense of Ukraine and current rector of the National Defense University of Ukraine Mikhail Koval, and Alexander Pavlyuk, commander of the ground forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

This means the actual recognition of the Kiev elite as an illegal government and actual criminals.

This step means that a criminal case has been opened against Zelensky and the company, within the framework of which a search has been announced.

In turn, all of the above means that there can be no negotiations with these people since Russia does not negotiate with those it is looking for over crimes committed.

This step is not just a formal kick to Zelensky and other members of Ukrainian elite.

It also means that negotiations with Zelensky are possible only about one thing – his surrender.

As of today, Ukraine has been declared an “illegal entity” and its leadership is subject to arrest and trial.

For the past two years of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Russia has repeatedly and publicly said they are willing to negotiate a settlement.  Each time, Ukraine set pre-conditions: That Russia must return all captured lands to Ukraine.  The Russians obviously refused.

Now, there can be NO NEGOTIATIONS because under Russian law, Ukraine is a criminal entity with which there can be no negotiations except for its surrender.

This whole Russia-Ukraine thing must now be settled only on the battlefield.

Stove Top Stuffed Pork Chops

stuffed pork chop
stuffed pork chop

Yield: 4 or 5 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 box stuffing mix for pork (with ingredients for preparing)
  • 1/2 cup apple juice, divided*
  • 1/4 stick butter
  • 4 or 5 butterflied pork chops or 1 (2 pound) pork loin, cut into 1 inch chops and butterflied
  • Salt
  • Cracked black pepper
  • Seasoned salt

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F. Spray an 8 or 9 inch square baking dish with nonstick cooking spray.
  2. Prepare the stuffing mix according to the package directions, adding 1/2 cup apple juice to it in addition to the butter and water required.
  3. Melt the 1/2 stick butter in a pie plate or pan and dip the chops into the butter, then stuff each chop with about 1/4 cup of stuffing mixture.
  4. Seal the stuffing into the chops with a wooden pick and sprinkle each chop with salt, pepper and a little seasoned salt.
  5. Arrange the pork chops in the prepared pan.
  6. Pour the remaining 1/2 cup of apple juice around the pork chops.
  7. Cover tightly with foil and bake for 45 minutes.
  8. Turn oven temperature to 375 degrees F; uncover and bake for 15 more minutes to brown the tops of the pork chops.
  9. Spoon some of the cooking juices over the chops to moisten.
  10. Remove the wooden picks before serving.
  11. Serve with mashed potatoes or rice.

* Mango juice or peach nectar work well also. Or you can use chicken bouillon.

  1. If someone is being mean to you, you can make them feel self-conscious by saying, “Excuse me, you have something stuck in your teeth.”
  2. To calm someone who is yelling, ask them, “Are you having a bad day?”
  3. Yawning, drinking water, or checking the time can show if someone is paying attention to you.
  4. Looking at someone’s lips shows interest in their conversation, while staring at their forehead can be intimidating.
  5. Making people laugh can make you 88% more attractive.
  6. When you meet someone new, try to notice their eye color. It helps you make more eye contact and feel less nervous.
  7. When you need help, start by saying, “I need your help…” It makes the other person feel wanted and more likely to help you.
  8. If you show happiness and excitement when you see others, they will feel the same way about you.
  9. When someone apologizes, say “Thank you” instead of “No problem” to show appreciation.
  10. Showing a thumbs down instead of the middle finger can hurt someone’s feelings.

“It’s ALREADY BEGUN…” – Danielle DiMartino

  1. No means No , even when it comes from a boy’s mouth as well.
  2. If he is not offering you a seat in public transport doesn’t mean he is heartless He might be tired like you.
  3. Not groomed well doesn’t mean that guy is cheap. His look is nothing to do with his attitude.
  4. Not all the guy who initiates conversation with you is flirting with you. He might have approached you for some genuine reason.
  5. #MenToo, no need to tell more isn’t it?
  6. Tagging him as cry baby doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t have any inbuilt dam in eyes to control his tears.
  7. Even he can listen to his mom and dad like you listen to your parents. No shame in that.
  8. Don’t define his coolness by seeing his smoking and drinking habit.
  9. Don’t ask any boy like “whether me or Passion or me or your mom ” because it is asking you like “your heart or your brain”
  10. Don’t ignore men’s feeling like how people ignore International men’s day.

Dont’t demand respect if you can’t give one.

I was a new nurse working nights on a medical floor with the most terrible woman I had ever met! She looked like a witch and I was literally frightened of her. She had a crush on one of the physicians and wouldn’t let anybody answer the telephone just in case he called. And if he did, she would put on her sloppy, ‘sexy’ voice, YUCK!! And this woman was in charge, she made our nights hell!

Buddy was a sixty-something year old patient who was actively dying of metastatic bladder cancer. He was disfigured from cancer tumor, bedridden, and nasty as hell from being in constant excruciating pain. Nurse Witch and Buddy would fight all night! And to make it a little more interesting, Buddy had started to cognitively decline, rapidly. Probably brain mets. This man was a hot mess who deserved pain medication around the clock. He had no family or friends and was in the hospital for pain control while he died.

Unfortunately, Buddy’s intravenous narcotics were not holding him over at night. He would become wild at night, then sleep comfortably all day. Sundowning? The physicians increased his morphine through the night without any results. This man was clearly suffering, even if he did use his backscratcher to beat up the nurses if they got too close. Fun times!

Then it happened, Nurse Witch forgot to lock the door as she was injecting Buddy’s pain medication into her ass cheek while straddling the toilet, and somebody walked in! Yep, she was signing the injectable morphine out, documenting she gave it to Buddy, then going to the bathroom and injecting into herself. I don’t know how she could live with herself, denying a dying man pain medication.

Nurse Witch lost her nursing license for awhile. I know this because she was my waitress at a local restaurant. I really enjoyed that day, not because she was an addict, but because she was such a bitch and morally reprehensible!

Burn the matches that serve no purpose

My mother ordered a case of matches with the logo of my sister’s wedding on it. She did this as a favor to help my sister pay for her wedding.

Something like this design of matches
Something like this design of matches

Unfortunately, she accidentally ordered 10,000 cases. Thinking, obviously, that they were 10,000 matches.

And, don’t you know it, she could not part with this massive ancient fire hazard. So it sat in her basement year after year, decades after decade.

About thirty years later… when matchbooks went out of style, and smoking became the unacceptable vice in the USA, she died and was buried. Rest in peace mom.

But then, about a month later, my brother and I carted all those cases out of the basement. We stacked them high in a field and set them ablaze.

Good bye to the relics of the past.

It was long overdue.

Sometimes we tend to cling to things because we paid a lot for them, forgetting that their value was zero and was not worth any benefit to keep them around for.

Burn the matches that serve no purpose.

Today…

Veterans to Biden: US Law Says No Weapons to Nations with A-Bombs if They’ve Not Signed the Non-Proliferation Treaty. That Means Israel

In a letter 18 April to President Biden and top members of his administration, Veterans For Peace cited existing federal law that gives the President “…no discretion whatsoever to allow any military assistance of any form to be delivered to Israel,” based on that country’s “serial violations of the Symington-Glenn Amendments, codified at 22 U.S.C. § 2799aa.”

The letter cites a lengthy list of credible reports that Israel has possessed nuclear weapons for decades. Because Israel has not signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the Symington-Glenn Amendments to the International Security Assistance and Arms Export Control Act of 1976, which allow no presidential discretion, goes into effect, including:

  • termination of assistance under the Foreign Assistance Act, except for humanitarian assistance or food or other agricultural commodities;
  • termination of defense sales and licensing of Munitions List exports;
  • termination of foreign military financing;
  • denial of U.S. government credit, credit guarantees, or other financial assistance (except for medical and humanitarian assistance and agricultural exports from the United States);
  • U.S. government opposition to any loan or financial or technical assistance from international financial institutions (IFIs);
  • prohibition of any loan or credit from U.S. banks to the foreign government (except for the purchase of food or other agricultural commodities); and
  • prohibition under the Export Administration Act of exports to that state of specific goods and technology licensed by the Commerce Department (except for food and other agricultural commodities).

The letter states, “The President may not waive the cutoff of the above aid and exports under the Glenn Amendment where there has been a nuclear weapons detonation, or the offending state has received a nuclear explosive device. Congress would have to enact new legislation authorizing the President to waive some or all of these sanctions.”

VFP National Director, Mike Ferner, said, “Israel’s possession of The Bomb and the U.S.’ refusal to take appropriate action is yet another example of how the Madmen Arsonists – the Raytheons, Boeings, General Dynamics – actually govern our country and determine policy. The law is quite simple – Does Israel have an unregulated nuclear weapons arsenal? Yes, it does. Is Israel a signatory to the NPT? No, it isn’t. So, the question to Biden is, ‘will you obey the law or the Madmen?’”

Ferner added, “This election year our members will ask their Congressional representatives, ‘Will you hold hearings to enforce existing law, or let the Madmen Arsonists continue to run our country?’”

Highlights of the letter:

  • Senator John Glenn was prompted to seek a change in the law because of a reported theft of 100 kg of highly enriched uranium from an NRC vendor in 1968, later traced to the Dimona reactor complex in Israel. (pg. 3)
  • Repeated CIA assessments and remarks of Colin Powell in 2016 that the U.S. knew Israel had at least 200 warheads at that time. (pgs. 4-9)
  • Israel prosecuted and jailed Mordecai Vanunu for his courageous whistleblowing disclosure in the 1980’s that Israel has The Bomb. (pg. 7)
  • Benjamin Netanyahu was identified by the FBI as being directly involved in an Israeli smuggling operation in the 1980’s that successfully stole 800 krytrons, a prized device used for triggers in nuclear weapons. (pg. 7)
  • The Symington-Glenn amendment has been implemented by previous administrations. (pg. 4)
  • What the President must do (pg. 10)
  • Contrary to other instances where the Biden administration is allowed to ignore aid limitations, this one may be litigable in court. (pg. 10)

Veterans For Peace members across the U.S. are telling their members of Congress to vote NO on any more weapons for Israel and hold hearings to hold the Biden administration accountable They have participated in numerous protests and acts of civil disobedience to highlight Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine.

 

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”–Antonio Gramsci
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Bailey’s Lasagna

baileys lasagna
baileys lasagna

Yield: 8 to 12 servings

Equipment

  • Lasagna pan

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 pound Italian sausage
  • 1 (67 ounce) jar Prego Traditional spaghetti sauce
  • 12 lasagna noodles
  • 14 ounces ricotta cheese
  • 2 large eggs, beaten
  • Salt and black pepper
  • 1 cup grated mozzarella cheese or other cheese of choice
  • 1/2 cup freshly-grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Heat the oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Brown ground beef and Italian sausage together until cooked through, then drain well. Combine with the spaghetti sauce. Set aside.
  3. Cook lasagna noodles until al dente, according to package directions. Drain and toss with 1 tablespoon olive oil. Set aside.
  4. For the filling, combine ricotta cheese and eggs. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
  5. Spread a thin layer of the spaghetti sauce over the bottom of a lasagna pan.
  6. Lay lasagna noodles lengthwise in the casserole dish.
  7. Spoon and spread spaghetti sauce over the noodles.
  8. Spoon and spread filling over the spaghetti sauce.
  9. Repeat steps 6, 7 and 8 twice.
  10. Sprinkle shredded mozzarella or cheese of choice over the top.
  11. Bake, covered and sealed with foil (DO NOT LET THE FOIL TOUCH THE CHEESE), for 30 minutes or until sauce is bubbling and cheese is melted.
  12. Uncover and bake 15 minutes longer to brown the cheese.
  13. Let stand for 15 minutes before cutting.
  14. Top each serving with freshly-grated Parmesan cheese.

Notes

Serve with garlic bread.

Refrigerate any leftovers.

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When my daughter was twelve, we were called into the school for an emergency meeting with the principal. I was absolutely mortified as I watched the video of my daughter chasing down a younger and smaller boy on the playground, knocking him to the ground, sitting on him, and placing handcuffs on him. It had not been a game: the boy had been the target of systematic bullying by some of the kids the whole year, and my daughter had decided to join in. Small as my daughter was, she was still bigger and stronger than the boy, and the sheer determination in her and desperation in him was sickening: it was like watching a predator chase down a bunny rabbit.

The only thing that saved us from a lawsuit from the boy’s parents was that hubby and I sincerely apologized immediately and made absolutely no excuses for her actions. I believe they were expecting us to try to play the event down, or blame their son, or make some lame excuse to try to get her out of trouble, but there was simply no denying the video evidence of the assault. To this day my gut still knots up over it. That was not how we raised her to be, and thankfully that was the only time (that we know of) she acted so cruelly.

EDIT: Answers to a few common questions I’ve received.

I’ve had a lot of people asking me about the handcuffs. I’m into cosplay, and I’m constantly picking up odd things here and there. The weekend prior to this event I had found a pair of handcuffs at a thrift shop. They weren’t real peace officer type, but they were metal. She’d been playing around with them and I didn’t realize she’d taken them to school with her that day.

This happened over seven years ago. She’s almost twenty now.

The day she was suspended from school she had to go and apologize to the boy directly. While she was at home on suspension, she had to keep up with her schoolwork, she was restricted to the house (no going out with friends), was restricted from all electronics short of what she needed to do her homework (with monitored internet only for homework), and she had to help me install a hardwood floor in two rooms of our home. This was in addition to writing the apology letter.

Yes, the parents could have taken us to civil court for the emotional distress done to their son. As the parents of a minor, we would be held financially responsible for any damages. More importantly, they could have pressed charges and given my daughter a criminal record (albeit a juvenile record) for assault and possibly unlawful detention (I’m not certain of the exact terminology in the state we were living at the time). No, I do not believe that it would have been an overreaction on the other parents’ part and we were lucky that they chose to do none of those.

While there was certainly peer pressure involved, it does not relieve my daughter of responsibility. She has before and since proven resistant to peer pressure… for the most part. She’s not perfect and we don’t expect her to be, we just expect her to be accountable for her choices.

Interesting.

Without question, the USA will suffer more.

You see, China controls all the supply chains, all the manufacturing, all the logistics. The USA is heavily reliant on Chinese-manufacturing.

The USA is also heavily reliant on natural resources from China such as rare earths and mineral processing.

China’s economy will continue to chug along as it exports to Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the rest of Asia.

Without cheap imports, inflation in the USA will go through the roof.

Many years ago my wife and I went to a wedding of a relative. The church wedding was simple and fine.

The reception was at a hall and I don’t remember if there was a band or DJ. Drinks were fine. They asked everyone to sit at their tables and the announcer would call table numbers.

The buffet was served by a row of staff, so you didn’t just dig in. The main course was pre sliced Turkey. As we sat and waited for our number to be called, we watched as smiling people walked past with plates piled high with food. We were getting hungry!

Finally they call our table and the serving trays were empty! The servers were trying to scrape mashed potatoes in a failed effort to give the remaining guests on line a scoop full. And a spoonful of vegetables. The Turkey was long gone.

To add to the disappointment the bus people are clearing tables of plates still laden with food! Lots of slices of Turkey, two big scoops of potatoes all floating in gravy!

It was pretty clear that the servers had bad judgment and loaded up plates with what was no doubt double servings and simply ran out of food before the final tables were served.

We did stay until the end and ate wedding cake. We stopped At McDonalds on our way back to the hotel.

I later learned that the parents who paid for the reception were mortified and got a big chunk of cash back from the venue.

After speaking at a conference for Young Achievers a teen boy applied at my company. He sent his resume directly to me and followed up with numerous phone calls. I told him I wasn’t hiring at that time so he got his father to call and ask me to give him a chance. I was impressed with his refusal to take no for an answer, something I admire in people, so I brought him in for an interview. Normally there was a tiered interviewing process but I was going on maternity leave in two weeks so I interviewed him myself. I was impressed with everything about this boy. I explained to him that he’d have to learn fast because I would be leaving and he would have very little supervision. He was hired.

This is the part hurts-

We were in a busy season and no one was available to properly train him. At the end of the two weeks I had to fire him. Under different circumstances he would have been a model employee. I told him that I was letting him go because we didn’t have the time to train him but if he applied anywhere else, I would give him a glowing recommendation. A few weeks later I got a call from a company asking for a reference for this boy. I highly recommend him. They then asked me why I let him go if he was so great. I explained everything to them, assured them that this was in no way his fault and that I’d gladly hire him back should he ever want to return. They ended up hiring him. Years later I still find this difficult to write because of the disappointment in his face that day. I’m sure wherever he is he became successful.

This is life in Montenegro: The Country Where You Can Walk WITHOUT CLOTHES on the Beaches

Click Baity. Sure. But the content does not equate to the splash image.

The cool thing about this video is that this place looks really cool to visit.

It really does.

A powder keg just blew up in Niger’s capital Niamey as Russian troops swarmed into Airbase 101, setting up a tense face-off with the United States. Niamey’s airport is now a freakin’ barracks for both American and Russian forces after Niger’s military junta booted out US troops. Nice move, right? Sure, Russians have their own hangars and aren’t bunking with US troops, but there’s a lot of angst about what access they might have to US military gear.

main qimg ae688cd26d740e275593e0627274bb7e
main qimg ae688cd26d740e275593e0627274bb7e

Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin claims Russian boots don’t have a free pass to American equipment, but how long before something goes boom? The US thought they had Niger’s back fighting against the Islamic State and al-Qaeda, but after the coup last July, they’re getting kicked to the curb, just like Chad, Mali, and Burkina Faso did with US and French troops. Guess they’re not feeling the love anymore.

So, who’s filling the void? You guessed it, China and Russia – the new BFFs for these military-ruled African nations. Without that colonial baggage, they’re smooth-talking their way in as anti-West sentiment ramps up. So, brace yourselves, folks – this scramble for Africa is on! As resource-rich Africa becomes the shiny prize, the rise of a new global order looms with the US, Russia, and China in a three-way tug-of-war. Things are about to get wild; everyone is on edge and on the lookout.

Massive relationship collapse in the West as society crumbles.

There is a farm house outside of town that I have been driving by my entire life.

It is memorable because it is simple.

A simple home with a simple garage.

One day a friend of mine says he wants to show me something really cool at the simple old farm house.

I chuckle, but it’s the summer, school’s out and so have nothing better to do.

He takes me out to the simple farmhouse and we go in to its garage.

The amiable old farmer who owns the house is standing there.

He introduces himself but all I see is a vault door that stands as tall as the garage itself that is nearly half as wide.

And inside that bank-like vault door:

main qimg 7b6442b81af2e408a244932b06065e8c lq
main qimg 7b6442b81af2e408a244932b06065e8c lq

A gun collection with every gun imaginable, and sometimes two.

It looked like something out of Bass Pro Shops.

It was like the image above, but the room was even more grand if you can believe that.

This old farmer’s gun collection was worth more money than most people from our small town will amass in their entire life time.

He could see the shock on my face.

And he was just standing and smiling like he had seen this reaction a thousand times.

I knew in that moment what it feels like to be secretly rich:

You always get to have the last laugh.

If “every day” can mean “since the age of 5”…?

A good friend of mine was raised in a *Mennonite community.

He told the story about one of his younger brothers who at the age of 15 made the decision he wanted to join the Marines when he turned 18.

Every day for 3 years he started conditioning with an 80 lb. ruck sack he created.

He carried it on him at all times unless he had a chore where he couldn’t.

He ran everywhere he went in addition to a plethora of other homemade training routines he created to help prepare himself.

Mind you, all of this was done in addition to his daily manual labor performed from sun up to sun down and a life time of adhering to “orders” and a strict discipline he had to follow as a Mennonite.

When his brother turned 18 he went and signed up for the Marines just like he said.

And he completed Boot Camp just like he trained to do.

But here’s the real kicker:

When my friend talked to his brother about his experience in Boot Camp and what it was like…

His brother replied back to him with a straight face:

”I was disappointed.

I thought it was going to be harder.”

So, yes, there is a point where some can begin training and “easily” go through boot camp.

But unless you were raised in a modern day agricultural equivalent of the Spartan’s agōgē

?

Probably not.

*The order he was a part of was a no-modern technology Mennonite community e.g. My friend once attached wooden boards to the top of a rotating horse-drawn saw mill column to create a makeshift ceiling fan during the hot summer heat; he was told to take it down because it was too modern.

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To Die for Beef Roast

This is one of the best roasts you will ever taste. Carrots, potatoes and celery can also be added, if desired.

to die for crockpot roast
to die for crockpot roast

Ingredients

  • 1 beef roast (any kind)
  • 1 envelope Hidden Valley Ranch salad dressing mix
  • 1 envelope brown gravy mix
  • 1 envelope Italian dressing mix
  • 1/2 cup warm water

Instructions

  1. Place roast in slow cooker.
  2. Mix contents of all 3 envelopes and sprinkle over roast.
  3. Pour water into the bottom of the slow cooker.
  4. Cover and cook on LOW for 6 to 7 hours.

Some years ago our washing machine stopped working, about 2 weeks after its 2-year warranty expired. It was a mid-range model, and with 2 toddlers in the house, we really needed a clothes washer. We managed to get an engineer (specialist in washing machines) out the next day. I already knew the timer clock was working OK, as were the inlet valves; yet when it tried to rotate the drum, absolutely nothing happened. After about 45 minutes, with the engineer running all sorts of diagnostics on the control circuit board and checking all the wiring, he sighed and told us that there was nothing to be done; the motor was burnt out and a replacement, plus the cost of fitting, made the fix uneconomical; instead, recommending buying a replacement machine.

He left, but with all the covers off the machine and with his assurance that the control board was fine, I decided to have a look myself. As a kid I’d played around a lot with model trains, and knew that their motors would sometimes fail if the brushes, or the springs holding the brushes, were out of adjustment. This machine’s motor had more armature windings than I was used to, but the familiar two brushes, in spring-loaded brass housings. The housings had a single wire plugged onto them, and they were held in place by spring clips. I popped one out and found that while the carbon brush itself still had plenty of use left in it, the spring pushing it against the commutator was short and the brush wasn’t making contact. I slid the brush out, put in a small packing piece, replaced the spring and brush and clipped it back in place.

Immediate success, worked like new. Cost? £0.00 The machine ran for another 5 years, when it failed with similar symptoms. This time there really was no life left in the brushes, but a spares shop about a 5 minute walk from home sold me a brand new pair for 14p. It ran for yet another 5 years before the controller circuit board finally blew up.

  1. Don’t be a people pleaser.
  2. Spend time with your parents and treat them well. They will not be around one day.
  3. Mind your own business.
  4. Don’t lie, cheat or be dishonest. It spoils your name in the long run.
  5. When the phone signal is down to the last bar, don’t answer the phone as the radiation will be 1000 times higher.
  6. Don’t cheat if you are in an unhappy relationship. Just leave.
  7. Use tea sachets to remove odour from gym bags.
  8. Never give up on your dreams no matter what. Try to accomplish your goals and dreams in the long run.
  9. Never take your medicine with cold water.
  10. Be empathic. An act of kindness wouldn’t ruin you.
  11. Graduate before 30.
  12. Don’t waste your time with meaningless relationships or temporary people.
  13. When people treat you like they don’t care, believe them.
  14. Participate in family gatherings, college reunions and get together with friends.
  15. Adopt a pet. I did. My six months old pup is my ultimate stress buster now.
  16. Never ‘ever’ abandon your old friends by replacing them with your new buddies.
  17. Have two servings of vegetables and fruits daily.
  18. Learn to love your flaws and imperfections along with your perks.
  19. Start your day with a glass of lukewarm water on an empty stomach.
  20. Be thankful for something daily, at least once.
  21. Stay away from toxic people. They only bring out the negativity in you and ruin your life further.
  22. Compartmentalize your ideas and thoughts. Write them down on a journal.
  23. Don’t be shy. Go out and be a social butterfly. Talk to random people.
  24. Add some slices of lemon in plain water to zest up your taste buds.
  25. Don’t let someone get comfortable with disrespecting you. Set boundaries.
  26. Crushed mint leaves or Indian basil are great herbs to remove bad mouth odour.
  27. If you don’t have enough time, spend lesser time on social networks.
  28. Never speak bad or low about yourself. Make it a point to not put yourself down even as a harmless joke.
  29. If you don’t like your job, quit it and do something else. Don’t just put up with it and force yourself to do it.
  30. Don’t waste your energy on bad feelings, negative thoughts or useless people.
  31. Travel often. Getting lost will help you to discover your identity.
  32. Be careful about personal things you share to people. The friend today could be your enemy tomorrow.
  33. Never stay in an unrequited love for a long time. Let it go and move forward.
  34. Say exactly what you feel/think. Be direct about it even if it might displease others.
  35. Forgive people and their actions. Never give it to him. Let karma finish up the job for you.
  36. Be mindful about your expenditures but not a miser. Budget spending is a start.
  37. Have a glass of buttermilk or warm milk before bedtime.
  38. If you don’t master you own time, there will be possibilities of you being unconscious slaves of those who have mastered theirs.
  39. Trust your instincts. Intuitions doesn’t lie.
  40. Be cautious about lending/borrowing a huge sum of money to your friends/relatives. It may break the tie. Just saying.
  41. Never enter the lift before others have got out of them. Don’t be a jerk. Wait and let them get out before you barge in.
  42. Have few cups of green tea in the evenings after lunch and throughout your day to aid digestion.
  43. You could forgive, let go and give them another chance…or you could chuck them aside and give yourself a better chance.
  44. Cut down on your caffeine intake. Replace your coffee cravings with something healthier.

Many years ago a friend and I stopped by a pub on our way home from a rock concert. It was Triumph. This was the early ’80s and wearing a bandana around your neck was kind of normal. Anyway we go in sit down, and didn’t even get a chance to order a beer. This group of guys just started in on me, for some reason. It was a country music bar, and I guess I was a long hair. It gets so bad that I finally stood up and said to the main culprit,what the fuck IS your problem? Remember we’re talking we’re in there 5 minutes. At that point him and his buddies grab me by the seat of my pants and the bandana around my neck and threw me out the front door head first with my head opening the door. Stunned outside I wanted to go back in and just clean house. Fortunately my friend who they threw out as well but not as roughly calm me down and made me realize that they would have probably just thrown me out again. This has been decades ago and I still have no idea what the real reason was. I know that a woman to fight over was not the issue.Overflowing 🍺 beer and testosterone I suppose. The whole incident reminded me of that Ron White story where he says he was thrown out of a bar and he doesn’t know how many there were, but he guesses it was all of them. That may have been true with me.

Putin and China Put Out Devastating Warning to the US | Col. Jacques Baud

May 2024. China has stopped “playin'”.

This was during my placement time…

I was having an interview for TCS. The panel called my name, I went in. It was a panel of 3 ladies. I was carrying a file containing my resume, marksheets, certificates.

R1- what are your hobbies ?

Me – I like sketching, playing guitar, riding my bike and collecting pens( all looking at me). If you wish, I have some sketches attached at the end of the file.

All looking through my sketches.

R2 – so, if we recruit you would you still continue sketching in your busy schedule.

Me – yes Mam I will still continue sketching, if you’re passionate about something you will manage some time for it no matter how busy you are.

R2- good.

R3- so, you say you like to collect pens. What kind of pen do you collect ?

Me – I am a pen enthusiast. I like to collect premium pens, PARKER, SHEAFFER, CROSS, WATERMAN, LAMY etc. Ball , roller ball, fountain.

R1 – that’s interesting. So, how many pen do you have ?

Me – I have around 50–60 normal range pens(Parker , Pierre Cardin) and 15–20 premium range pens (above 1k INR). And I will continue to collect while I’m here.

R2 – what will you do with so many pens when you’re gone ?

Me – (don’t know what to say , still came up with the most stupid answer ) some of those are limited editions and some are discontinued which are not available in the market at present and I know they will have a great value someday, I’ll leave them as a legacy for my children/grandchildren.

R3 – you’ll need to have a great number of children. Good luck with that. ( don’t know with what logic she came up with that )

All burst into laughter. I join in with them and start to chuckle.

R2 – okay , I’m gonna write your feedback with my sheaffer pen

Me – sorry Mam, but that’s not a sheaffer, that’s a Parker.

(Edit 3: I guess she focused on this statement to check my presence of mind and whether or not I really knew about what I said i.e. to check if I was lying about my hobby or not).

R1- you may leave now.

Me – thank you.

Next week the result for day 1 sharing was out.

Verdict : got an offer letter from TCS.

P.s these are around 5-6 year old images, didn’t have for the latest collection.

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Why So Many Countries Are Abandoning the Dollar

It’s damn obvious.

Not my dog, but my next door neighbors’ dog. Duke was a large mixed breed about 65–70 pounds, a super friendly boy who spent every day making the rounds in our neighborhood collecting treats, love, attention and objects he found in the yards or garages of those he visited. I was used to getting calls from Sharon with a list of items Duke had brought home—sometimes things I hadn’t even missed yet! About 10 years ago, my son, dil and 2 grands were staying with me and it snowed Christmas night, a rare event where I live. There was about 3–4″ inches of lovely white covering my grass the next morning so the kids had to play in it before they left to go home. My grandson came in and said he had lost his phone in the snow. We all spent at least 30 minutes looking for it and even Duke came over to see what was going on. My family left and about 30 minutes later, I received a phone call from Sharon asking if anyone was missing an iPhone. I walked next door and collected my grandson’s pristine phone-no scratches, no dents and it turned on. My son and grandson were both really happy with that news! Duke is still remembered in the neighborhood as being such a “good boy.”

When I was in 6th grade, I had a math teacher that I hated so much I’d have panic attacks on the days I had her class. Here’s a short list of what she’d do to me, keeping in mind she was told multiple times I had debilitating social anxiety and ADHD:

  1. Humiliated me when I asked for help by telling me as loud as she could “you can’t do this problem? This is the easiest one in the set, how do you not understand it?!”
  2. Called my mom in the middle of class after I handed in a test that she said I didn’t work long enough on in front of the other students, telling her I was an embarrassment
  3. Had her TA search for me while I was waiting for my dad to pick me up since I had to stay after school on certain days of the week due to my parents working late. When she found me, she yelled at me, brought me back to the math room, where, in front of (mostly older, and way more popular) students, the math teacher called my dad and yelled about how he should be making go to the after school math tutoring so I could “at least pretend to care about the material”

Thank God, THANK GOD my parents were supportive of me and told her off each time. After the final call to my dad about forcing me to get the tutoring, my dad rushed to get me and ripped her a new one about how tired my parents were of her treatment of me. But ever since then, I’ve been afraid of almost every teacher and would just be silent during my classes

Best Macaroni and Cheese

This is the tastiest, easiest and fastest macaroni and cheese you will ever eat. DO not skimp on the Colby cheese. Use as much as you can afford.

macaroni cheese2
macaroni cheese2

Ingredients

  • Macaroni (as much as needed)
  • Colby cheese (lots)

Instructions

  1. While the macaroni is cooking in salted water, dice the Colby cheese up rather small.
  2. As soon as the macaroni is cooked; drain it well. Keep it, covered, in the same pot in which it was cooked.
  3. Add the diced Colby cheese and stir it in. Cover immediately and let it sit for about five minutes so that the cheese melts.

Attribution

Recipe is from the kitchen of Kathryn Irene Jolly.

Recipe is from the family recipe collection of Linda Ann Jolly, Arizona.

African Nations Repatriate Their Gold and Foreign Reserves From the USA.

Not being well reported. Not at all in the Western “news” media.

One of the RNs in our dept had worked there for 5 plus years, was around 60 years old and very nurturing and maternal so she was well liked. Her employment predated mine and I became her immediate supervisor. After several years of working together , mostly amicably she started to undermine me, making snarky comments and decisions that didn’t include discussions with others in the dept or weren’t hers to make or sometimes even mine to make. She was resistant when I discussed this with her. I really liked and admired her and it was getting more and more challenging. My supervisor wasn’t any help. We RNs became concerned that a medication error may be made if this nurse did the med pass so we made sure that someone else did that. We double checked behind her with the order transcriptions. We found small errors and brought them to her attention. She stated that everyone makes mistakes and that she was no different. One day I found that she had written an order on the wrong chart and filed the med in that pt’s med drawer. I saw it right before the tech was going to give the med to the wrong pt. What was even worse was that the pt wasn’t on ANY meds for a condition that was in any way similar to what that med was for – that should have made her question it. So, a performance improvement plan was implemented, discussed and put in place with approval of HR and my supervisor. The nurse ignored it, did nothing and cheerfully stated there was no problem. We decided that termination was in order. She was aghast and said, “Well, I will talk to the CEO and he will not stand for this!” Termination took place, she demanded a ride to the unemployment office and HR agreed – WHAT? It was so hard, but necessary to protect pts. Anyway, I ran into her about a year later and she said she had a medical condition that was contributing to her “brain fog” and that she’d been treated. She apologized for the instances of petty behavior. We all hoped she was doing well.

OMG

Shorpy fun

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A golden dome

By Al Mayadeen Net

Almost 450 extremists from various nationalities arrive to Idlib to fight against Russian troops, after leaving Syria and passing through Turkey.

Close to 450 extremist Arab and foreign nationals have arrived in Ukraine from Idlib to fight against Russia’s forces, less than only three days after they left Syria, passing through Turkey.

Relatives of extremists that have arrived in Ukraine told Sputnik that senior fighters from terrorist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (the rebranded version of Jabhat Al-Nusra, i.e Al-Qaeda) have held a number of meetings with senior leaders in the Turkistan Islamic Party group and Ansar Al-Tawhid and Hurras al-Din groups, and agreed on allowing a number of all their fighters to enter Ukraine through Turkish soil.

The sources added that most of these foreign fighters are veterans of the Syrian war, had been causing issues in Idlib, and were given this opportunity to fight against Russia as a compromise by which they would receive a new start and with an acceptable income.

Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham also gave these fighters assurances that their families would be allowed to join them later.

Around 300 of these fighters are Syrian nationals that are originally from the Idlib and Aleppo countrysides, while the 150 others are Belgian, French, Chinese, Moroccan, Tunisian, Chechen and British nationals.

As for the financial compensation, the sources said the fighters that hail from Syria will receive around $1200-$1500, but had no knowledge what the foreign nationals were going to be paid.

Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, has previously stated that 16,000 foreign mercenaries will fight for the country.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin had warned Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz during a meeting last Friday of the growing number of foreign mercenaries  operating in Ukraine, including those coming from Albania and Croatia and namely militants and Jihadists coming from Kosovo in order to put their experience from military operations in Syria to use.

I don’t consider it a “loophole,” but rather a bit of a tech glitch.

When I was in college in the late 1980s (Dartmouth), it was towards the end of the life of pulse dialling technology. In the “old days,” telephones used to look like some variant of this:

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main qimg 183b0a76af2ba7dbce3556d103cada20 lq

When you made a call, the dial was turned for each number, and it sent out a series of electronic pulses that matched the number (for example, my grandfather had a telephone whose number was WI-1–8214 (941–8214).

In the 1970s, touch-tone dialling became the standard (I am not sure that a rotary phone would even work anymore).

Telephones swapped out the rotary for push buttons, but the switching equipment had to, for a time, accommodate both. So telephones for a while had buttons, but a switch on the base that permitted tone and pulse dialling.

At Dartmouth, where I was a student, all of the telephone lines in the dormitories were controlled by Dartmouth. In order to make long-distance telephone calls, you had to subscribe to a service called “DarTalk.” Again, not sure if this is still the case.

Anyways, what we discovered in the dorms was that, if one started the telephone on pulse, entered the 8 (for an external line), a one, the area code, and the three code prefix, then switched the phone from pulse to tone and entered the final four digits in tone mode, the switching equipment that the college used could not detect that the call was going out. Hence, the calls were free.

We could thus make long distance calls without paying.

US prepares for war against Russia and China. In Self-Defense of course.

Sometimes you have to throw away your balls to achieve contentment

I believe my daughter, now almos 24, will be one ofthese women.
She occasionally has a drink, but is not a drinker.
She doesn’t smoke or do drugs.
She loves to cook for us, and is a good baker.
She has had a credit card since she was 16, but has her own as soon as she was eligible.
She is serious, goal oriented, and fun with an easy laugh, and her father’s good sense of humor.
She does play video games to relax after studying but more like that building your own world game where you build houses…

This is what she looks like. She is tall, slim, and has nice curves.
Her hair is currently past her shoulder now, and she has great fashion sense.

No tattoos, but several piercings in her ears.

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She has dated 2 men so far. Personally, we didn’t care for the first one, but it is her choice.
We are always respectful, and keep our opinions to ourselves.

One started doing mushrooms, had a psychotic break, ended up in a drug rehab to recover, dropped out of his first year of college, and may or may not be working. His parents were both deceased by the time he was 18. He had 1 million in inheritance. He spent money unwisely. He liked to play video games more than study or complete assignments. He had never been taught to drink responsibly.
Even during his short time in college he didn’t seem to be specifically goal oriented. He was on academic probation after the first semester, and had to retake most of his classes.

The second one seemed nice enough. He didn’t drive a car, and had no interest in getting a license. He also had never been taught to drink responsibly – but his drinking was to the point he would be totally out of it, and throwing up.
He was a Philosophy major and was on the Dean’s list. He had said he was going to pursue his Masters so he could get a teaching position. But before graduation he decided to change his mind. No masters, and no use of the 4-year-degree. Instead he wanted to become management at the restaurant he had been working for. They turned him down for the posted job, but the candidate they hired did not work out so he was given the floor manager position. Now he makes less money and puts in more time.

My daughter is finishing her first year of Law School. She has decided that she needs to spend her time wisely. No dating guys, lots of pro bono work, more studying, and time with friends, plus family time.

Yeah, it was only 2 guys. But a huge disappointment for her.
Most of the guys she meets do drugs a bit, like to drink, love to play video games, and have no financial sense.
To add to this, these guys have no social sense.
They are also only ready to have a girlfriend for fun,they couldn’t commit to anything because they simply are not even ready to live on their own, cook, work, pay bills, and save money.
They seem to have no goals.
As we know life moves by fast.

She doesn’t want to be her boyfriends mommy!

The pandemic didn’t help matters.
But too many people are not even ready for a serious relationship.

She may meet someone by chance. But she is already willing to be ready to be on her own.
She has worked from early on as a dog Walker, baby sitter, house sitter, and tutor of kids and students at school who needed help.. Sh also volunteers her time at the food bank. She has saved her money, and has her own Financial Advisor. She applies for scholarships, and grants and that has really helped her reduce her college costs. She lived at home to save money, she also she commutes to college from home.

She is a learner. She plays 2 instruments, can weld, program, do analytical research, she is already published, she sews, does woodworking, can solder, and is able to understands electronics.
She started being a researcher the summer after 12th grade at her college. She was paid nicely, and had that job every semester and summer until she graduated.
She speaks Spanish fluently, and has 2 undergraduate majors, 1 minor, and earned 3 certificates.
Just this week we attended an event at her Law School where she was awarded an honor for her 70 hours of pro bono work. She was 1 of 22 out of a class of 200 first year Law students to be given this award.

I hope she continues to have good friends, as she does now. Having fun is important to her.

But unless she runs face first into the a guy that has her values – she may be one of those women who just has great friends in life.
She wants to travel for vacations when she is done with Law School.
She loves the culture, food, and architecture in Europe.

Her best friend is very much like her. That girl has a boyfriend, and he is really great so we have hope there are guys out there. She has lots of time still.

Update: Although this may seem like bragging, it is her accomplishments – not mine.
I am thankful for the way she turned out – but she has made her choices in life.
Even the best parents can have a child that cannot find their way in life.
But thank you to those who offered me kind words regarding our parenting.
We all know that parenting is a road we travel without much in the way of directions.

These Frat Bros Are Saving America

A photo recently went viral on Twitter showing frat boys holding up the American flag while angry protesters tried to tear it down. What these young men did is incredible, especially in our current society that doesn’t value the American flag. Let’s discuss it.

I think it was when I was working in elderly care. I was part of the management team, the assistant manager, in charge of the care staff and the care staff rotas. I was responsible for ensuring all the shifts were covered. The registered home manage was a woman named Dot, who had some really skewed outlooks on life. She always wanted to be a social worker, but failed the exam. We as a team were trying to recruit. On this occasion, a certain guy had applied for a job as a care assistant. He was currently working in a different home. We got his references back. He was an alcoholic. His reference said that when he was at work, he was a fantastic carer, really hard working and caring and pretty sensible. But that was when he was sober. He had a habit of going on a bender, then being off sick for weeks at a time. Dot wanted to give him a chance. She wanted to work with him and prove that he could beat the disease. Fine. But not in an old people’s home with lots of vulnerable people, and a place where you counted on everyone to turn up when they should, (old people’s homes are notoriously badly paid and hard work, and as a result, people frequently go off sick, and you’re frequently short of staff).

But Dot pulled rank and Steve was taken on, and his references were spot on. He was very likable, a really good worker, and had sound judgement and common sense. When he was sober and when he was there. On one occasion when we were short of staff, and Dot had to work out on the floor, (which she detested doing), I had a row with her. When she complained, I told her she was the one who took Steve on despite his references and despite the rest of the teams objections. So it was her own fault.

NATO’s Glaring Weakness On-Display in Moscow; Tanks and Armor Captured in Ukraine

Moscow Captured Armor Exhibit 11 large
Moscow Captured Armor Exhibit 11 large

An Exhibit of smashed and wrecked Armored Vehicles from NATO, is now on display in Moscow, Russia, showing the real life weakness of NATO, and our high-priced, high-tech, weaponry.

The Exhibit in Moscow opened today, and the crowds to see the weak West were large.  On display, a whole range of captured NATO and Ukraine military equipment:

Moscow Captured Armor Exhibit 4
Moscow Captured Armor Exhibit 4

Moscow Captured Armor Exhibit 3
Moscow Captured Armor Exhibit 3

Moscow Captured Armor Exhibit 2
Moscow Captured Armor Exhibit 2

 

The mocking of NATO is so thorough, they even placed a sign at the entrance saying “”ATTENTION: Employees of US, UK, Germany, France and Poland embassies get queue-free access (1st priority) to visit NATO vehicles trophies”

Moscoww Exhibition Invitation To West
Moscoww Exhibition Invitation To West

 

The dramatic exhibit of the shear weakness of Ukraine, and more importantly, of the US and NATO is unprecedented in our modern era.  NEVER BEFORE has the US or NATO been so thoroughly whipped on a battlefield.

Russians are so patriotic, and supportive of what their nation MUST do in Ukraine, so as to protect themselves from NATO expansion, they sing songs on their SUBWAYS about what they believe is the coming war:

Oh, and did you notice their Subway?  No one smoking meth, or snorting coke.  No one crapping or peeing in the train cars as is so often seen here in America.

The culture of Russia is rock solid, willfully focused on Almighty God, and strong to the core. NO sickening LGBTQ+ over there; at least not in public.  No “pronouns” being treated as if they matter over there.  No feral animals having fist fights in Walmart.  No looting or burning of stores.  No taking down of historical statues. Clean, safe streets.  Healthy, strong people. The West – none of those things.

We just think we’re tough.  We just talk tough.

If this goes wild-weasel, given our present generations, we’ll get clobbered.  We’re infested with mental (and physical) weaklings.  We in the West have been hollowed-out and destroyed, from within.

Want proof?  Here’s a video of Moscow’s military display.  THIS is what __they__ can accomplish.  What have __we__ done?

For one thing, the Chinese are very clever and adaptable and resilient. The Americans have grown fat, lazy and stupid.

For another, the Chinese number over a billion, more than 4X the size of the US population.

For another, the Chinese are well-educated. In fact, China produces 4X more STEM graduates than the USA does. This is why China can kick America’s ass technologically.

For another, the Chinese are led by a very strong, stable, capable, intelligent government. The Americans are led by clowns.

For another, the Chinese do not waste valuable resources on fighting wars around the globe. They dedicate their resources to economic and technological development.

From my perspective, having been engrossed in China’s captivating push-and-pull between ancestral roots and state-of-the-art developments, I’ve witnessed a nation that works diligently to create an impressive narrative. China’s story is one of relentless rise, a tenacious pursuit of progress that never ceases to inspire.

However, through my observation, one understanding shines brighter than others: the concept of perfection—exemplified by utopia—is a relative construct. And the notion that China, or any country for that matter, can embody the picture-perfect embodiment of this construct is less a sign of achieving flawless harmony, and more of narrowing our understanding of societal development.

Yes, China has made profound strides in economic and technological innovation, shaping global dynamics in the process. But this doesn’t take away from the reality that like every other nation, China also portrays a myriad of issues that require continued attention and improvement. Recognizing these issues does not equate to slandering or ‘anti-China’ sentiment. Rather, it’s a testament to the objectivity that each one of us should aspire to uphold in our understanding of the world.

Being so deeply immersed in studying China and its intricacies, I’ve learned to strike the balance between applauding the commendable and voicing the critical. Rather than subscribing to the extremes of a black-and-white narrative, we ought to embrace a more nuanced understanding that depicts the world in its full palette of colors.

In truth, every nation, China included, is not a one-sided utopia or dystopia—it’s a mix of both, an evolving entity with every rising sun. This understanding, I believe, allows for a more enriching and insightful global dialogue, where we not only acknowledge the advancements made but also the shared human struggles, thereby paving the way to collective betterment. We ought to remember, the true essence of a utopia is not stagnation in perfection, but relentless movement towards growth and betterment.

If we cut through all the diplomatic jargon and the maze of economic lexicon, the hullabaloo about “overcapacity” could be boiled down to a simple reality – the inability, or perhaps the unwillingness, to compete with China in the arena of new-energy vehicles, green energy, and semiconductors.

main qimg 88017f2c5be6f6487fc6efe04cff9214
main qimg 88017f2c5be6f6487fc6efe04cff9214

“Overcapacity”, more accurately, is a carefully chosen euphemism, artfully spun to mask an uncomfortable truth. The effective translation? Dear China, your overachievement in these sectors is making us sweat, slow down, will you?

In a world moving towards clean energy and technological advancement at lightning speed, China, with its manufacturing prowess, strategically placed supply chains, and technological acumen, is rightfully setting pace. Yet, instead of acknowledging China’s capacity to transform sectors crucial for our future and learning to compete on this new playing field, we now see a slew of accusations and attempts to displace the goalpost.

China’s achievements are painted as a threat under the umbrella term “overcapacity”, effectively disregarding their commitment to efficient manufacturing and their contribution to tackling issues like climate change. This stance is not about market dynamics; it’s about obscuring the need for other nations to amplify their game.

The real focus, instead of creating a smokescreen of “overcapacity”, should be on channeling our resources towards innovations and strategies that enhance our competitiveness. This becomes a stepping stone towards a transformed economy where advancements by one should inspire progress in all, resulting in collective global growth and prosperity.

Equating China’s preparedness and competitiveness to “overcapacity”, is akin to grumbling about the speed of the lead runner in a marathon. Instead, it’s time to lace up and catch up. Through competition, we spur innovation, and in that frame of mind, China’s “overcapacity” isn’t a problem; it’s the benchmark.

Should TikTok pack its bags and leave the United States, following Google’s footsteps in China? The answer to this query is more complex than a simple yes or no, stirring the cauldron of geopolitical, corporate, and ideological clash.

You might think, ‘Well, Google did it, so TikTok should too, right?’. But that would be oversimplifying the intricacies of the global digital landscape. Google’s exit from the Chinese market was propelled by the formidable ambiguity of state regulations and its inability to conform to China’s internet governance model. In contrast, TikTok’s troubles stem not from an unabiding nature towards regulations but from being caught in a proxy war of power and influence between two superpowers.

Moreover, TikTok represents more than just a social media app – it’s a frontiersman of technology that has successfully engaged millions of Americans with its unique user experience. The panoramic reach of the platform extends across young creators, independent artists, small businesses, and ordinary folks looking for a daily dose of laughs and phenomenons.

Turning off the TikTok tap doesn’t just dry out a stream of viral dances – it’s much more profound than that. It diminishes avenues for expression, creativity, and connection for a significant part of the American digital community.

To sum it up, the comparison of TikTok’s situation in America to Google’s in China only goes so far. Each company was thrown into different whirlwinds at different points in the digital era’s evolution, requiring distinct responses. Pulling the curtains down on TikTok’s U.S. operations is a dramatic act with far-reaching consequences that ripple beyond the business world, reaching each user deeply. And that’s something which requires serious consideration.

Nopes

US is losing the battle of economy and technology to China

I can illustrate this with three points

I. Forcing China to Innovate

In 2014 , China imported every chip made with 28 nm process or lower and 70% of the Chips made with the 45 nm process

The Chips were made in Taiwan and Korea, designed by the US and made by Dutch machines

China was utterly dependent on these nations for the chips and these nations were dependent on China for the consumer goods made using these Chips

In 2018, Dumbo Trump began to restrict the flow of Chips to Huawei and began the entities blacklist

He began the tariffs due to which to lower their costs, China began to start their own supply Chain

Fast forward to 2024

China makes 54% of its own 28 nm process chips (from 0% in 2014) and makes the entire indigenous equipment to make the 28 nm process commercially

China makes 69% of its own 45 nm process chips at a mere 32% cost

It’s ready to make fully indigenous 14 nm Chips and just made a 7 nm Chip with DUV technology that performs very well

Thus thanks to US stupidity – China managed to go from full importer of 14 nm, 28 nm Chips and 70% 45 nm Chips in 2014 to net exporter of 45 nm Chips and above plus develop fully Indigenous machinery for 14 nm Chips and make 7 nm Chips indigenously in a mere decade

Without US Push, Chinese Entities would simply have not been inclined to invest in Chipmaking as the Imports would have been higher yield at more efficient costs in the early years

II. Decoupling

In 2018, China used the USD for 94.6% of its Trade and settled in USD with 132 out of 143 BRI Nations

China used SWIFT for 99.3% of its transactions in USD

US had leverage control on China and China was utterly dependent on the Western financial system

Then US began to talk of decoupling and derisking and freeze others funds and steal Afghan money

Fast forward

China uses USD to settle only 57.5% of its trade using Local Swaps to settle 26% of its trade and the RMB and Ruble to settle 16% of its Trade

China uses CIPS and other systems now with Iran and Russia and Cuba and Venezuela

Thus again China is no longer entirely dependent on the Western System

III. Anti China Rhetoric

Mainlander Residents made up 27.7% of all Researchers in the USA in 2018. The Highest among foreign researchers

60% of all researchers in Critical Technology research were Chinese, bulk of them from the Mainland

They did a lot of path breaking innovation

Anti-Asian Atmosphere Chills Chinese Scientists Working in the U.S.
As universities such as Harvard and NYU put researchers under scrutiny, some schools seek to avoid a “loyalty oath.”

Then you had gutter scum like De Santis and Cotton who began Anti China Rhetoric

So Chinese brains decided to stay back home and not go to the US while Chinese Scientists and Researchers decided to go back home to China than be insulted and treated with suspicion in US

So in each case China adapted but it was US who started it all

When you have Idiots chosen by a corrupted form of democracy – they are no match for the High range meritocracy of China

Chinese Scientists Are Leaving the United States

Here’s why that spells bad news for Washington.

From 2023- almost 548 researchers including 107 with Tenure left US and moved back to China

Plus nearly 10,300 Doctorate Students from China stayed home rather than going to the US and innovating for them

They help China innovate instead of USA

Accelerating Chinas progress in those areas

US is unable to fill the gap with others

Korea, Taiwan and Japan combined send maybe 1600 researchers a year

Indians send barely 60 researchers a year in critical technologies


The United States is afraid of China, I should say, they are afraid of China’s rise.

The reasons are simple:

(1) China’s glorious history compels every nation to believe that it will rise again.

The Three Emperors and the Five Emperors to the present day, no matter how history is interpreted, China’s dynasties have time and again pushed China to the pinnacle of the history of human civilization, and these are unadulterated. Even arrogancy as the United States, had to go to choose to believe that can create such a civilization of the country must be back to the top. The search for a way out of civilization seems to be a historical destiny, and China, no matter when it is, is on the way to fulfilling that destiny. Today, it seems that China’s historical development is constantly proving one thing, namely, that the path we are taking is not to be the first in the world, not to compete for world hegemony, but to create a better quality civilization. This is exclusive to our historical self-confidence, because the history of Chinese civilization belongs to the future.

(2) China has all the qualifications to become a powerful country

  • Solid regime: Under the leadership of the Communist Party of China (CPC), the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has been founded for 75 years, with its people living and working in peace and contentment, its society developing steadily, and its national strength climbing upward.
  • Sufficient land area: With a large land area and a wide range of terrain in the east, west, south, north and south, a strong country has both offensive and defensive territories, which are essential for China’s long-lasting peace and stability.
  • Abundant resources: China spans five temperature zones in the north and south, and is rich in land and sea resources. In peacetime, there are enough survival materials to satisfy the people’s life and national development, and in wartime, there are enough production materials to satisfy logistic supply and equipment manufacturing, so as to ensure that it will not be constrained by others.
  • Developed economy: Although China is still a developing country, its economy is the second largest in the world, with unlimited economic potential, and it is constantly reforming itself to meet the actual needs in the process of economic development, and i think, a developed economy is not about the ranking of figures but about future expectations.
  • Complete industrial system: Manufacturing is the foundation of a country, and China has the most complete industrial system in the world. Excellent production capacity creates wealth in times of peace and strengthens national defense in times of war. A complete industrial system allows China to produce everything imaginable in this era, although not all of which are the best, but China has the courage to never fear any monopoly or oppression, so that chinese can defend ourselves against all enemies again and again.
  • Modernized army: The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is constantly modernizing its equipment, but whether a country’s army is modernized depends not only on its equipment, but also on its beliefs:the PLA is the people’s army, it belongs to no one but the people and the country. The PLA is the people’s army, it belongs to no one but the people and the country. When an army engages in a meaningless war for the sake of domestic plutocrats and politicians, it will not be able to win for a long time, even if it is equipped with the most powerful equipment (yes, I’m talking about the US). A modernized army is used to defend the sovereignty and independence of the country, protect people’s freedom and safety of life and property, not to invade other countries, not to mention that it should not become a money-making machine and security for interest groups. That is why China’s army is modernized more deeply and has more combat power.
  • Rising innovation capacity: China never stops exploring and innovating in the fields of aerospace research and development, military science and technology research and development, Internet development, and cutting-edge science and technology. With the popularization of education and the improvement of talent pool, China will never use brute force if it can create the future with knowledge.
  • China has the Irreplaceable political status: World War II allies, the five permanent members of the United Nations, the historical powers of Asia, and the member countries of major world organizations, China’s political status has been consolidated and strengthened as a result of the fact that in the 75 years since its founding, China has defeated all incoming enemies, thus shocking the world to this day. Nowadays, no one can ignore it: China is bringing the world’s political, economic and cultural center back to Asia.

However, we have overlooked one point: China is such a peace-loving country (this is already the consensus of the international community), so why is the United States still so afraid of China and its rise?

Perhaps they are just afraid of being overtaken by China and of having their hegemony threatened.

What the United States needs to be clear about is that China will never become as despicable as the United States.

Forever wars w/ Aaron Maté

My first full-on drunk

The Secretary of State is the world’s most powerful diplomat. His underlings at the UN wag fingers at foreign colleagues and go “do you want to be consulted, or insulted?”

And yet no Secretary of State had visited Beijing for 6, 7 years, until Antony barged in.

The Chinese did not fete him or court him. He was not accorded priority, because he wasn’t the honored state guest on a carefully coordinated state visit.

His job was to personally deliver an invitation to President Xi for him to toast and grace the greatest gathering of American capital in recent years.

This time, his job is to mirror what Janet did recently, reading off a script on the Beijing podium criticizing and threatening the host, to show the public that America still has to chops to make others listen. Delivering the message in the evil enemy’s capital fills the air with American machismo.

This isn’t diplomacy. It’s poorly fleshed out domestic politics.

Let’s save the red carpet for others on the level because Antony’s job isn’t to secure cooperation but subservience through the scourge of power.

This is really great.

North Korea and the Russian – China Axis merge

I had a table of 8 family members. Brothers with their wives. This one sister in law was literally embarrassing them all at the table. She always had a complaint and was just rude. Even accused her husband of checking out a server. I came back to check on them as they were my table go figure that smh, and asked her why she hasn’t touched her food. I asked this because she sent it back at least 3 times and did everything to get extra sides etc. this women was a hot mess to say the least. The rest of the table was fine and they all knew how to act in public but her not so much.

As I asked her why she wasn’t touching her food and if something was wrong she said yes actually you can just take my whole meal off. I asked her why but before I could finish she said because there is bugs crawling all over the floor. My mouth dropped and I was speechless and just looked at her. The rest of the table did the same. I didn’t say anything I just walked away and got my manager.

We did not have bugs it was a very clean steak house. She admitted to the manger she just said that. Anyway one of the brother in laws came up to me when I was putting in another tables order on the computer. He asked me if he could get their check and his other brothers check. I gave it to him and he asked if he could pay it right now. I said sure no problem. So I cashed him out and not even a minute or two later I came back to their table to find one brother and his wife the crazy lady the only ones still sitting there waiting to cash out. The hostess told me the rest of the family was embarrassed and couldn’t get out of there fast enough. She said it’s like they practically ran out of there. Lol I seriously can’t blame them one bit!

I was an asshole with a bad sense of humor when I was young and drunk, so my friends and I decided to test the drive-thru policy.

We felt that we were being awfully clever, but that was the tequila talking. The reality is that we were probably the twentieth set of idiots to try it that month, but we didn’t think about that. We’d been too drunk to drive so we had walked to McDonalds and tried to order in the drive-thru. Predictably they told us that it was a safety issue, and they could only serve cars. That’s when my friend Amber asked them if they could serve people in SUVs; the girl said “yes”. Someone else asked about vans, and I chimed in with pick-up trucks.

That’s when the girl became frustrated with us and made her mistake. She told us that anything on wheels was okay. We promptly forgot all about being hungry and immediately went to Amber’s neighbor’s house and stole a kid’s tricycle and a wheelbarrow, and made our way back to McDonald’s. We all thought we were being uniquely hilarious when I rode up on the kid’s bicycle and one friend pushed two others in the wheelbarrow. It was incredibly fortunate that no actual cars were there, because the wheelbarrow kept falling over and dumping my friends onto the pavement. I’m tiny, but I couldn’t actually work the pedals, so I just pushed myself along with my feet.

I still remember the look on the girl’s face. Louder than any words could have done, it said “Fuck me, not again!”. She just left the window (they’d been ignoring our shouts into the speaker) and an older man took her place. We proudly informed him that it was his employee who had told us that we could get served like this, but he had a simple yet undeniable rebuttal: That we knew damn well that she hadn’t meant wheelbarrows and tricycles. We were too drunk to argue against that, but we had remembered our hunger, so we begged for food before we finally realized that he wasn’t joking about calling the cops.

My friends wanted to stay, but I only had a green card at the time, so I shuffled off on my tiny bike. I have no clue if pestering the employees at McDonald’s was a crime involving moral turpitude, but I was fairly certain that bicycle theft was. Those tend to get you deported, so I finally just picked up the bicycle and ran it back to the yard where I found it. My friends arrived soon after, battered and bleeding from their fights with the wheelbarrow, and I called my husband to come and get me.

Moral of the story? McDonald’s won’t serve pedestrians and other idiots in the drive-thru because it’s dangerous. Bonus moral: You’re not as smart as Señor Patrón would have you believe.

BREAKING Putin Shocks The U S with a Visit to North Korea WHAT DID HE SAY

Fate

The fate of the United States has been "baked into the cake" since 1776. The country was founded wrongly, ideologically corrupted from inception, yet covered in a wickedly deceptive but attractive gloss, and so it simply follows the natural arc of history despite any pleas or protests from those along for the ride. Now is the time for sinking, and sink it shall.

Posted by: Matthew | Jun 19 2024 17:45 utc | 66

The Sopranos – Tony gets rid of Feech LaManna

Thai Peanut Pizza

This deliciously unique recipe topped with spicy-sweet ingredients makes it a Thai Peanut Pizza with pizzazz!

thai pizza
thai pizza

I love a pizza with nontraditional flavors and toppings and this copycat of California Pizza Kitchen’s Thai Chicken Pizza is a real winner. It has diced chicken tossed in a spicy peanut sauce flavored with ginger, honey, sesame oil, and oyster sauce. A gooey layer of mozzarella cheese covers the chicken and it is topped with shredded carrots, bean sprouts, and green onion. A sprinkling of chopped fresh cilantro and chopped peanuts finish off the flavors. It is a pizza made for lovers of sweet and spicy foods.

thai pizza 25
thai pizza 25

We go to California Pizza Kitchen quite often. It’s probably our go to place for special lunches. The only problem with eating there is I can never decide what to order. There are too many delicious pizzas and salads to choose from. I’ve never actually eaten the Thai Chicken Pizza at the restaurant, but the recipe is in California Pizza Kitchen Cookbook that I have had for years and I thought it would be the perfect pizza to make at home.

thai pizza 17
thai pizza 17

Typically I haven’t really been one to make pizza at home mainly because I was completely inept at making pizza dough. I blame it on the fact that I was raised on Chef Boyardee pizza.

I say “was” because I am now able to make a pizza dough that I am pround of thanks to the free Pizza Making Class Perfect Pizza at Home on Craftsy.

thai pizza 10
thai pizza 10

Ingredients

Pizza

  • 9 Rhodes™ Dinner Rolls or 6 Rhodes Texas™ Rolls, thawed to room temperature
  • 2 boneless skinless chicken breasts, cubed
  • 1 tablespoon canola oil
  • 1 tablespoon low sodium soy sauce
  • 1 red bell pepper, cut into strips
  • 3 green onions, chopped
  • 2 cups mozzarella cheese
  • 1 cucumber, sliced
  • 1/2 cup chopped cilantro

Peanut Sauce

  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/4 cup creamy peanut butter
  • 3 tablespoons low sodium soy sauce
  • 3 tablespoons water
  • 2 tablespoons canola oil
  • 2 teaspoons minced garlic

thai pizza 5
thai pizza 5

If you’ve never taken a class on Craftsy before, they are amazing and this Pizza Making Class, which is completey free, is the perfect way to try out the Craftsy video classes AND learn how to make a darn good pizza.

The class is over 30 minutes in length but it is divided into segments and you can pick and choose which ones you want to watch. Even better, all Craftsy classes have a 30 second replay button so you can watch and cook at the same time and hit the replay button if you get behind or miss something.

thai pizza 4
thai pizza 4

There are 4 types of dough taught in the class. So far I’ve only made the American-Style (Neopolitan) dough. I first made Muffaletta Pizza with it a few weeks ago. It makes a big batch of dough which keeps well in the fridge for a number of days.

So a few days after I made the Muffaletta Pizza, I used the remaining dough to make this Thai Chicken Pizza.

thai pizza 1
thai pizza 1

Perfect Pizza at Home shows you not only how to make the perfect dough, but how to shape it as well. This part takes a little bit of practice and my Thai pizza was much more evenly shaped than my Muffaletta Pizza. 🙂

If you make one of the Craftsy doughs, which I highly recommend, you will need to do it a day in advance and refrigerate it overnight. Then bring it to room temperature for 90 minutes before shaping it.

thai pizza 3
thai pizza 3

Prep: 20 min | Bake: 20 to 30 min | Yield: 5 servings

I haven’t included the pizza dough instructions here because frankly I couldn’t do them justice. Being able to watch the instructor demonstrate the process is a much better way to learn. So go to Craftsy and download the free class if you want to improve your pizza making skills.

Instructions

  1. Spray counter lightly with nonstick cooking spray.

Pizza

  1. Combine Texas™ rolls or dinner rolls together and roll into a 13 inch circle.
  2. Place on a sprayed 12 inch pizza pan.
  3. Cover with sprayed plastic wrap and let rise for 30 minutes.
  4. Remove wrap and poke several times with a fork to prevent bubbles from forming.
  5. Bake at 350 degrees F for 10 to 15 minutes or until lightly browned.

Peanut Sauce

  1. In a medium saucepan combine all the ingredients for the peanut sauce.
  2. Cook over medium-low heat, stirring constantly, 10 to 15 minutes or until thickened.
  3. Set aside to cool.
  4. Stir fry the chicken in canola oil and soy sauce until completely cooked.
  5. Spread peanut sauce over baked crust (peanut sauce can be made ahead and stored in the refrigerator).
  6. Top with bell pepper, green onions, cooked chicken and cheese.
  7. Bake at 350 degrees F for 10 to 15 minutes or until cheese is melted.
  8. Remove from oven and top with cucumbers and cilantro.

Attribution

Recipe and photo used with permission from: Rhodes Bake-N-Serv

The Grand Prize Winner one of the Rhodes Employee Recipe Contests was a tie…a Thai Peanut Pizza that is! Submitted by IT Administrator Austin Tolman and his wife Mariah, this deliciously unique recipe topped with spicy-sweet ingredients makes it a pizza with pizzazz! Congratulations Tolmans!

When my friend Richard (name changed) died, he had no surviving family of which we knew. Although I say “friend”, I didn’t really know him that well. He had been a tech on a couple of plays I’d been in.

Another actor I knew had gone out to do a wellness check on him and discovered his body. Apparently he’d had a heart attack while in the bathroom. He was found there.

Richard was best friends with a mutual friend. I called her when I heard. When I asked about a service, she explained that no one knew what to do, as he had no family.

I have written this many times: I’m a complete dolt about everyday life. However, I am great with emergencies or hard challenges.

So I started this odyssey of trying to figure out who to contact and how to get his body released. I ended up, with some help, being able to contact his cousins. His body was released & I arranged to have him cremated.

Before his cremation, which I attended alone, I brought a small bouquet of flowers to put in his coffin; I read some Shakespeare to him; and at the last minute snuck a cigarette in there as well; just in case. I think he would have appreciated that. We were smoking buddies, standing outside on break during many rehearsals.

Now. This process took almost two weeks. I was in his apartment twice. Once while trying to find info on any extended family; and once with police, to try and salvage some of his belongings before his apartment was condemned.

Richard was a hoarder.

Apparently he could throw nothing away. I mean nothing, including trash. I do not know how he survived his home. It was beyond hazardous. There was absolutely no open floor space. It was an obstacle course over objects to try and get from one point to the other.

He was a large man. I don’t understand how he didn’t constantly have a sprained ankle or broken leg. It was that bad.

Imagine a tornado hit your house. Inside. Add years worth of receipts and plastic bags, clothes, records, furniture, and stuff that belonged in the garbage, was strewn everywhere by this tornado. I had to look to find the bed. It was indistinguishable from the rest of the mess.

Under the bed were tied-off, white plastic deli bags of cigarette butts. He’d empty the ashtrays but couldn’t throw the bags of butts out.

It goes without saying, I guess, that the apartment had never been cleaned.

What was found that was even more of a surprise than the disastrous mess? Bank statements.

He had millions in his account.

He chose to live like that. Although choice may be the wrong word. I think it entirely possible he stayed there because if he moved, someone had to see the place. He probably couldn’t bear the idea of anyone knowing how he lived.

It somehow made it more awful to me, knowing he had money.

We are all prisoners of our own minds, to some extent. We tell ourselves stories about why or why not we can do something. More often, I bet, we tell ourselves why we can’t do something.

Richard’s mind kept him a prisoner in that dreadful place.

Being comfortable isn’t always…comfortable. I tell myself if I want to make a change, I’ve got to be willing to go through the initial discomfort.

Somehow I’ve made his apartment a metaphor for that.

神崎ゆまカメラ】LOVE IZ DOLL NANAMI AIZAWA BIRTHDAY LIVE(1部)

Death by cuteness in China.

Vintage Family Views

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  1. As recently as the 1980s, many researchers and doctors believed that babies couldn’t feel pain, so some were operated on without any anesthesia.
  2. The picture to be used in your funeral program may have already been taken.
  3. Dogs like squeaky toys because it reminds them of a small animal being killed
  4. You don’t know if there is a secret everybody knows except you.
  5. Butterflies have been known to drink blood.
  6. Cannibalism is common in hamsters.
  7. You pass the anniversary date of your death every year.
  8. You have tiny mites in your eyelashes.
  9. Many people take medications to relieve despair, but there is a certain type of antidepressant that can eliminate your feeling of love and compassion.
  10. Bananas are radioactive.
  11. The Greater Short-Horned Lizard squirts blood out of its eyes.
  12. Several species of birds keep cool by defecating on themselves.
  13. After scorpions shed their tails, they die of constipation.
  14. When male bees mate, their sexual organs explode.
  15. Sloths almost die every time they have to poop.
  16. Rabbits will eat their own young if they’re stressed enough.
  17. All cruise ships have a functioning morgue on board.
  18. The average person walks by almost 16 murderers in their lifetime.
  19. Serial killer Joe Metheny owned a food stand and sold burgers that combined animal meat with the flesh of his victims to unsuspecting customers.
  20. You’re 6.7% more likely to die on your birthday than any other day of the year.
  21. In the Victorian Era, it was common to take pictures with the bodies of a deceased family member, as a final way to preserve their memory.
  22. In the 16th and 17th centuries, many Europeans thought that eating human bones, blood, and fat would cure certain illnesses, so they stole mummies from Egyptian tombs and robbed graves to get the bodies.
  23. Less than 5% of the oceans have been explored by humans, meaning we have no idea what kinda monsters could be living there.
  24. Ted Bundy was a serial killer who also worked at a suicide hotline. A coworker once said, “Ted Bundy took lives, but also saved lives.
  25. The first person to die while building the Hoover Dam was John Gregory Tierney, and the last was Patrick William Tierney, his son, exactly 14 years later.

Official Announcement: “Diplomacy Has Failed” – Israel – Hezbollah Heading to War (Doom Scale Just Hit 10)

Official Announcement: &quot;Diplomacy Has Failed&quot; - Israel - Hezbollah Heading to War (Doom Scale Just Hit 10)

The U.S. Special Envoy, Amos Hochstein, has publicly announced that “diplomatic efforts to calm tensions between Israel and Hezbollah have officially failed.” Hezbollah squarely refuses any negotiation to relocate its people north of the Litani River in Lebanon.

Yesterday, through COVERT INTEL, I reported that Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, told US Envoy Amos Hochstein that Hezbollah will PRE-EMPTIVELY strike Israel if they see Israel preparing for a Lebanon Invasion.  Those preparations have been announced and ARE happening.

Israel said today that “Southern Lebanon will look like GAZA, and Beirut is not immune.

Based upon Hezbollah refusing to reach any agreement and Israel now backed into a corner being forced to take action to resolve the so-called “Hezbollah security issue (no security at all), the time is nigh for war.

Hezbollah had until the 24th to agree to the Israeli demand to withdraw to north of the Litani River. Instead, Hezbollah threatened offensive measures if Israel looked to prepare to attack.

Israel is now prepared to attack.

Whom draws first in this standoff is all we need to know. It can happen at any moment from either side, but my bet is that Israel will strike first; and could happen anytime now.

Meanwhile, Iran publicly says it will support Hezbollah and join in to any War, of course.

Hezbollah threatens to hit Cyprus as Cyprus will allow Israeli jets to use runways to bomb Hezbollah.

If Cyprus is attacked, then Greece may come to their support.

Then Turkey will side with Iran and Hezbollah as Turkey hates Greece and hates Israel.

This is looking like a 10 scale doom moment.

Here’s my daily morning summary on MM

Some insight.

America’s INSANE Anti-China Campaign Exposed! || 美国的反华运动

Biden’s ‘Exceptionalism’ Is Likely To Stay

An emphasis of U.S. exceptionalism has been a major theme throughout Joe Biden’s presidency.

Remarks by President Biden on a Future Made in America – May 18 2021

This is the United States of America, for God’s sake.

60 Minutes – President Joe Biden: The 2023 60 Minutes interview transcript – Oct 15 2023

Scott Pelley: Are the wars in Israel and Ukraine more than the United States can take on at the same time?President Biden: No. We’re the United States of America for God’s sake, the most powerful nation in the history– not in the world, in the history of the world. The history of the world. We can take care of both of these and still maintain our overall international defense.

Full Transcript of President Joe Biden’s Interview With TIME – Jun 5 2024

Q: Is America still able to play the role of world power that it played in World War Two, and in the Cold War?

Biden: Yes, we’re planning even more. We are, we are the world power.

Talk of claimed U.S. exceptionalism is usually bi-partisan.

But finally there is a voice in U.S. foreign policy who argues against exceptionalism and calls for a different view of things.

Ben Rhodes, former National Security Advisor to President Barrack Obama, writes in the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine.

A Foreign Policy for the World as It Is
Biden and the Search for a New American Strategy

[T]he Biden administration’s mindset of restoration has occasionally struggled against the currents of our disordered times. An updated conception of U.S. leadership—one tailored to a world that has moved on from American primacy and the eccentricities of American politics—is necessary to minimize enormous risks and pursue new opportunities.

That seems like a well intended advice. The U.S. tends to intentionally ignore the consequences of its policies. It does not reflect on them. Should it start doing that its policies might change:

To date, Washington has failed to do the necessary audit of the ways its post–Cold War foreign policy discredited U.S. leadership. The “war on terror” emboldened autocrats, misallocated resources, fueled a global migration crisis, and contributed to an arc of instability from South Asia through North Africa. The free-market prescriptions of the so-called Washington consensus ended in a financial crisis that opened the door to populists railing against out-of-touch elites. The overuse of sanctions led to increased workarounds and global fatigue with Washington’s weaponization of the dollar’s dominance. Over the last two decades, American lectures on democracy have increasingly been tuned out.

The case of Gaza emphasizes this and has renewed a global rejection of U.S. policies:

Indeed, after Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the Israeli military campaign in Gaza, American rhetoric about the rules-based international order has been seen around the world on a split screen of hypocrisy, as Washington has supplied the Israeli government with weapons used to bombard Palestinian civilians with impunity. The war has created a policy challenge for an administration that criticizes Russia for the same indiscriminate tactics that Israel has used in Gaza, a political challenge for a Democratic Party with core constituencies who don’t understand why the president has supported a far-right government that ignores the United States’ advice, and a moral crisis for a country whose foreign policy purports to be driven by universal values. Put simply: Gaza should shock Washington out of the muscle memory that guides too many of its actions.

The world has moved on. If the U.S. wants to stay a part of it it will have to adopt:

Too often, the United States has appeared unable or unwilling to see itself through the eyes of most of the world’s population, particularly people in the global South who feel that the international order is not designed for their benefit. […] Yet the overuse of sanctions, along with the prioritization of Ukraine and other U.S. geopolitical interests, misreads the room. To build better ties with developing countries, Washington needs to consistently prioritize the issues they care about: investment, technology, and clean energy.Once again, Gaza interacts with this challenge. To be blunt: for much of the world, it appears that Washington doesn’t value the lives of Palestinian children as much as it values the lives of Israelis or Ukrainians. Unconditional military aid to Israel, questioning the Palestinian death toll, vetoing cease-fire resolutions at the UN Security Council, and criticizing investigations into alleged Israeli war crimes may all feel like autopilot in Washington—but that’s precisely the problem. Much of the world now hears U.S. rhetoric about human rights and the rule of law as cynical rather than aspirational, particularly when it fails to wrestle with double standards. Total consistency is unattainable in foreign policy. But by listening and responding to more diverse voices from around the world, Washington could begin to build a reservoir of goodwill.

But would that change policies? Rhodes doesn’t argue for a rejuvenation of international organizations and a U.S. subjugation to these. He still seems to see the U.S. as some kind of outstanding entity.

There is anyway little chance that Biden will adopt Rhodes’ advice. During the Obama administration Biden’s team had several run-ins with the Rhodes’ led National Security shop.

It leaves the impression that Rhodes only wants a new rhetoric, not a really new way to do international policies. Keep doing what you are doing, he says, but sell it differently.

It fits to another piece in the current edition of Foreign Affairs in which three professors try to sell their basically neoconservative policies – do what we say or else … – as a ‘progressive’ program:

The Progressive Case for American Power
Retrenchment Would Do More Harm Than Good

Today’s progressives need to get comfortable with American power, which, for all its flaws, has a crucial role to play. That doesn’t mean condoning illiberal actions to achieve just ends or cynically invoking progressive ideals to justify military adventurism. But it does mean seeking to harness power to advance the values progressives cherish—and accepting that might sometimes makes right.

It is, on its face, the opposite of what Rhodes argues for.

I applaud the idea behind Rhodes’ piece but I see little chance, especially under Biden, for it to get implemented.

‘The World power’ – as Biden calls the U.S. of A. – will not move aside unless someone makes it do so.

Posted by b on June 19, 2024 at 13:59 UTC | Permalink

Expats Share Their American Trauma After Living Abroad

Dr. Stephen A Salaka

AI Montage of Fake News

“It is a truth universally acknowledged…” Sophie Nakamura paused mid-sentence, her brow furrowing as a chill crept up her spine. She had read that exact phrase before, and not just in another Jane Austen novel. The modern thriller she’d finished just last week had used it too. What were the odds?

 

Sophie, a 15-year-old high school student, was a self-proclaimed bookworm, more at home in the world of fictional characters than the cliques of Cornwallis High. Her refuge was a cozy nook in the attic, overflowing with well-loved books and the soft glow of her laptop screen. She was a girl who preferred the company of Elizabeth Bennet and Sherlock Holmes to the gossip and drama of teenage life.

 

This wasn’t just any coincidence. It felt like a pattern, a thread woven through the tapestry of literature. The phrase niggled at her. Sophie grabbed her battered copy of Northanger Abbey, flipping through the pages. There it was again, a variation of the same phrase, this time about a young woman’s love for gothic novels. She grabbed the worn paperback of Frankenstein from her bedside table, her eyes scanning the opening chapter. A cold dread settled in her stomach as she found a similar sentiment, this time about a scientist’s thirst for knowledge.

 

Sophie, a symphony of restless energy, bounced between her overflowing bookshelf and the glow of her laptop screen. She was the president of her high school’s coding club, and, in her spare time, the self-proclaimed president of the Loch Ness Flat Earth Society (a title she held with pride and a healthy dose of irony). Her parents, staunch Fox News conservatives, had raised her on a steady diet of “fake news” warnings and conspiracy theories. Ironically, their paranoia had sparked an insatiable curiosity in Sophie, a burning need to unearth hidden truths and expose the puppeteers behind the scenes.

 

This wasn’t just some conspiracy theory cooked up over a tinfoil hat dinner, though. This was a pattern, a thread winding through the very fabric of literature. Fueled by a caffeine-induced buzz and a mounting sense of urgency, Sophie dove into her digital library, her fingers dancing across the keyboard like a concert pianist. Lines of code flowed from her fingertips, each keystroke a step closer to unraveling the mystery. She wasn’t just building an AI program; she was crafting a digital detective, a literary bloodhound with a knack for sniffing out inconsistencies.

 

The AI, aptly named “LitSleuth,” whirred to life, its virtual eyes scanning thousands of digital texts. It dissected vocabulary, scrutinized syntax, and even analyzed the frequency of semicolons with the meticulousness of a grammar-obsessed English teacher. As the night wore on, Sophie fueled her efforts with copious amounts of gummy bears and Diet Coke, her laughter echoing through the quiet house as she imagined her parents’ horror at her late-night coding frenzy.

 

The hum of the AI filled the room, a low, steady rhythm that matched Sophie’s heartbeat as she watched LitSleuth dissect the digital texts. It felt like watching an autopsy, each line of code a scalpel peeling back layers of meaning, revealing hidden truths beneath the surface.

 

Suddenly, the rhythmic hum was pierced by a sharp, electronic shriek. The screen flashed a harsh crimson, the words “Anomaly detected. Multiple instances of non-random patterns found” searing into Sophie’s retinas. A cold sweat broke out on her skin as she leaned forward, her fingers hovering over the keyboard like a concert pianist about to strike a dissonant chord.

 

The AI delved deeper, its analysis growing more frantic with each passing moment. Lines of code scrolled across the screen like a frantic heartbeat, each one a piece of the puzzle. Sophie’s breath caught in her throat as the patterns began to coalesce into a horrifying picture.

 

The codes weren’t just random anomalies; they were deliberate, carefully crafted messages woven into the very fabric of literature. They spoke of manipulation, control, and a subtle influence that had been shaping human thought for millennia. Sophie’s mind reeled as she traced the origins of these codes, her pulse throbbing in her ears like a war drum.

 

3,500 years… The Vedas… Ancient India… The words echoed in her mind, each one a chilling reminder of the vastness of the conspiracy. It wasn’t just modern literature that had been tainted; it was the very foundation of human storytelling, the sacred texts that had guided civilizations for millennia.

 

Sophie’s hands trembled as she scrolled through the AI’s findings, each new revelation sending a fresh wave of terror through her. She felt like a marionette whose strings had been cut, the illusion of free will shattered into a million pieces.

 

“Oh my God,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. The enormity of the revelation was suffocating, a black hole threatening to swallow her whole. Aliens had been manipulating human thought through literature for millennia. But why? What did they want? And could she, a teenage girl armed with nothing but a laptop and a caffeine addiction, possibly hope to stop them?

“This is insane!” Sophie’s voice cracked, barely a whisper as the realization sank in like a stone in the pit of her stomach. A cold sweat clung to her skin, her breath coming in ragged gasps as her world tilted on its axis. It was too much to process, too monstrous to comprehend – aliens had been puppeteering humanity, their insidious tendrils woven into the very fabric of stories that had shaped civilizations, religions, and the collective consciousness of mankind for millennia. Her mind raced, a whirlwind of questions and fears. Why? What was their endgame? What did they want from humanity?

 

A sudden meow ripped through the suffocating silence, shattering the fragile remnants of Sophie’s composure. Gizmo, her sleek ebony shadow, materialized from the darkness, his claws clicking against the hardwood floor like a death knell. His emerald eyes, usually playful and bright, now burned with an unsettling intensity, mirroring the abyss of dread that yawned open within her. Was it just her imagination, or was her cat trying to tell her something? A shiver ran down her spine. This was more than just a literary mystery; it was a puzzle with cosmic implications, and she had a feeling Gizmo was about to become an unlikely player in this extraordinary game.

Because of the challenge this convicted criminal:

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poses to this senile duffer:

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Or rather, the titanic, behind the scenes life-and-death struggle between the parties they represent.

These two ~80-year-olds are the candidates the electoral college has thrown up, to partisan uproar.

The 2024 elections has morphed into “which side is the least bitter pill to swallow”, for the neutral, non-aligned voter.

In other words, both “choices” are nightmares in their own right.


Both parties are being held to ransom, because of the winner-takes-all stakes. Winning at all cost is all that matters, and that is why demonstrations of power are important, especially the ruling party.

That is why Joe’s administration has racked up deficits at twice the rate of Donald’s pre-pandemic, or 2t/yr, give or take.

That is why Nancy HAD to make her spiel in Taipei, with the President ordering the Pentagon and Department of State to clear the way for her.

That is why Janet “$20t in National debt should keep people awake at night” is singing a different tune as Treasury Secretary, not only massively increasing the issuance of T-bills (which is cash-equivalent) but also engaging in direct market-intervening yield curve control buying back debt it issues. Unlike the Fed’s QE program, Treasury does not have employment and inflation mandates as constraints. Janet’s sleight of hand is why Jerome is able to trace this curve (current to May ‘24):

graph
graph

That is why both Janet and Anthony made long flights across the Pacific, only to cool their heels away from Beijing engaging in the frivolous and nonchalant, just to have to opportunity for photo-ops with the Chinese leadership, and give their 2 cents worth criticizing their gracious hosts on the Beijing podium. The message to the electorate? America’s word still carries the day in 2024 (even if we have to move heaven and earth to demonstrate it).

That is why abortion has made a startling legislative comeback in recent years. America is turning back the clock on women’s suffrage and emancipation. “Conservative” or “blast from the past” finally makes sense to me, politically speaking.


I can go on and on, but I hope you get the idea. This election is like no other I’ve studied, going back to McKinley’s 1900 campaign.

Joe as a physical specimen is melting before our eyes, while Kamala has been a giddy lightweight. Without extravagant demonstrations of shock and awe, the Democrats can’t even step up to bat with Donald, the guru of pomp and bluster. The Democrat formula is to throw the hegemon’s weight around without alienating the first world like Donald did. And that means fixing guys on the “other side”, with help from willing partners of course. And others have rushed to sign up because they don’t want a repeat of Donald’s insufferable politics.

Joe must out-Donald Donald, greasing the unpalatable with enough shock and awe for the rest to swallow.

The long-term consequences matter less than what’s immediately at stake.

This is a quandary there is no escaping from.

“This Is Gonna Get Us ALL Blown Up!” Jeffrey Sachs On Russian Invasion

I met her when I was new to Australia and she was a new arrival as well. Both of us were without a job, had followed our husbands to the land down under and wondering what the future holds without friends and family. That’s when a common friend introduced us. Our love for cooking got us together, and our love for self deprecating humour bound us together.

She became my son’s godmother when he was born and my pillar of strength as I fought through post partum depression. She was my confidence when I was plagued in self doubt. She was my sister – from another mother.

I am a hard core introvert – and she would be the one to drag me to party and take a break when I would be exhausted from work and home. I hated her and complained non stop – yet loved those little moments of respite secretly.

The days I would be too tired to cook, I could find a meal ready in her house. The day I wanted to get out, she was my designated baby sitter no questions asked.

So what ended our relationship?

Death.

She collapsed one day, and never woke up. A Brain aneurysm. A gaping hole in my heart. Forever.

Doing Dark Deeds

The town of Cornwallis, Oregon, wasn’t supposed to be a cauldron of cosmic dread. It was a place of apple pies, Friday night football games, and quiet nights under star-strewn skies. But on this particular morning, as the first rays of sunlight pierced the pre-dawn haze, an eerie silence hung heavy in the air, punctuated by the distant wail of sirens and the hushed whispers of fear.

 

Sophie hadn’t slept a wink. The monstrous truth she’d unearthed in the dead of night gnawed at her, twisting her stomach into knots and sending chills down her spine. She stood at her bedroom window, her eyes bloodshot and her body trembling, watching as a swarm of police cars, news vans, and a growing tide of terrified townsfolk converged on the nearby woods.

 

A sleek, alien spaceship, an obsidian monolith against the pastel hues of dawn, pierced the treeline, its presence an unholy stain on the familiar landscape. The sight sent a fresh wave of nausea through Sophie, her mind reeling with the implications of her discovery. The aliens had come. Not as benevolent explorers or curious observers, but as conquerors, their insidious tendrils already woven deep into the fabric of human existence.

 

Beside her, Gizmo paced restlessly, his usually playful demeanor replaced by a grim vigilance. His emerald eyes, glowing with an unnatural intensity, were fixed on the ship, his low growls a chilling counterpoint to the rising panic outside. Sophie could feel his fear, a primal dread that mirrored her own. This was no longer a game, a puzzle to be solved. This was an existential threat, a cosmic horror that could swallow them whole.

Sophie switched on the news, the screen flickering to life with a live feed from the forest clearing. A hush fell over her room as a tall, slender figure emerged from the alien ship. His skin shimmered, a living tapestry of iridescent colors shifting and swirling beneath the sunlight. Meetveega, the alien negotiator, stood before a crowd of stunned onlookers, his presence amplified by the high-definition cameras, each pixel a chilling reminder of the impossible reality unfolding before her eyes.

 

“It is a truth universally acknowledged,” Meetveega began, his voice a cold melody that sent chills down Sophie’s spine. The phrase, so familiar from her beloved literature, now twisted into a sinister mockery of human expression. A sickening dread pooled in her stomach as she realized that this wasn’t just a coincidence, a literary quirk. It was a deliberate echo, a taunt, a confirmation of the insidious manipulation she had uncovered.

 

Meetveega continued his voice a chilling symphony of ancient wisdom and thinly veiled contempt. “We have observed your kind for millennia,” he declared his gaze, like twin lasers, sweeping across the terrified faces. “Initially, we were baffled by your fascination with the written word, particularly your obsession with… bodily descriptions.” A ripple of nervous laughter ran through the crowd, quickly silenced by the chilling intensity of his stare. “Our studies, however, revealed a simple truth: your species exists in a perpetual state of rut. Thus, our influence upon your literature has been deliberate, a subtle yet pervasive guiding hand. We have kept you preoccupied with base desires, ensuring you remain safely confined to your primitive planet, far from the stars.” His voice hardened, a steely edge replacing the earlier amusement. “But your recent foray into artificial intelligence has disrupted this delicate balance, exposing our carefully woven tapestry of control.”

 

As if to punctuate his words, Meetveega raised a hand, and a beam of pure energy shot forth, disintegrating a group of onlookers in a blinding flash. The crowd erupted in screams of terror, their bodies crumpling to the ground in a grotesque tableau of shock and despair.

 

“We have come to negotiate the terms of your surrender,” Meetveega continued, his voice unwavering amidst the chaos. “Resist, and you will face annihilation. Your stories, your myths, your very dreams have been woven with our threads. We are the architects of your reality.”

 

A wave of dread washed over Sophie, the chilling realization that she was witnessing the subjugation of humanity. The town’s leaders, their faces etched with terror, fumbled for a response, their voices trembling as they faced the unimaginable. But their words were lost in the deafening silence of a crowd frozen in fear, their eyes wide with the knowledge that their world had irrevocably changed.

Sophie’s stomach churned with a mixture of fear and defiance. The aliens had underestimated humanity for far too long, manipulating their stories and molding their minds like clay. This ends now, she thought, her resolve hardening with each passing moment. I won’t let them control us any longer.

 

She glanced at Gizmo, who was now perched on the windowsill, his ears twitching, his body tense. As Meetveega continued to speak, Gizmo’s ears twitched in response, his head tilting as if following the rhythm of an unheard conversation. A series of low, guttural sounds escaped his throat—sounds that seemed to mimic the cadence of the alien’s speech.

 

A sudden thought struck Sophie, a spark of hope in the overwhelming darkness. “Gizmo,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “Can you… understand him?”

 

The cat turned his head, his green eyes locking onto hers. A low, guttural sound escaped his throat, a sound that was both alien and strangely familiar. Sophie’s heart leaped. Could it be that her cat, her mischievous, enigmatic companion, held the key to communicating with the alien overlord?

 

In the days that followed, the town became a cauldron of speculation and fear. The initial shock of the alien arrival gave way to a tense standoff, as Meetveega, growing impatient, demanded an official response from the human leaders.

 

Meanwhile, Sophie spent every waking moment trying to decipher the remaining coded messages, her AI working tirelessly to analyze the vast libraries of digital texts. Gizmo, now her constant companion, seemed to guide her, his purrs and nudges leading her towards specific books or phrases.

 

One evening, as Sophie poured over an ancient copy of the Mahabharata, a sudden chill filled the room. Gizmo leaped onto her lap, his purr growing louder, more insistent. He nudged her hand towards a particular verse, his claws lightly scratching the page as if to emphasize its importance. Sophie followed his gaze, her eyes widening as she recognized the pattern. It was another code, more complex and intricate than any she had encountered before.

 

Her fingers flew across the keyboard, inputting the code into her AI. The program whirred and beeped, its lights flashing in a dizzying display. Then, silence. Sophie held her breath as the AI projected a holographic message above her desk:

 

“Meet us at the heart of the forest. Alone. Bring the cat.”

 

Tinkly Thunderdome Troubles

Pine needles crunched underfoot as Sophie and Gizmo emerged into a moonlit clearing. Meetveega stood in the center, his skin shimmering with an unnatural iridescence. His eyes, twin pits of darkness, met Sophie’s with a chilling intensity. The air crackled with tension as Gizmo hissed, his fur bristling in warning. Despite the overwhelming dread that threatened to consume her, Sophie held her ground. This was it. The moment of truth.

 

“You came,” Meetveega intoned, his voice a chilling echo in the stillness of the night. “I have been expecting you.”

 

Sophie, her voice surprisingly steady, met his gaze head-on. “I know your secret, Meetveega,” she declared. “I know your plan to sedate humanity, to control our thoughts through the very stories we hold dear.”

 

A flicker of surprise crossed the alien’s face, his composure momentarily disrupted. “A clever child,” he sneered, his tone dripping with condescension. “But your knowledge is inconsequential. You cannot stop what has been set in motion for millennia.”

 

Sophie smiled, a sly glint in her eyes. “That’s where you’re wrong,” she retorted. “With the help of my AI, I have deciphered your final message. I know your ultimate goal—to lull us into complacency, to weaken our defenses, and then to invade.”

 

She raised her laptop, her AI springing to life, projecting a holographic display above them. A swirling vortex of words and symbols materialized, revealing the aliens’ insidious plan in stark detail. The forest seemed to hold its breath, the very trees rustling in outrage as the extent of the manipulation became clear.

 

Gizmo, sensing the rising tension, let out a series of piercing meows, his eyes locked on Meetveega. The alien recoiled, his voice laced with a newfound uncertainty. “What is this? How can a mere feline communicate with me?”

 

Sophie knelt beside Gizmo, stroking his fur. “He’s not just a cat, Meetveega. He’s my friend, my partner, and he understands your language better than any human ever could.”

 

Gizmo’s meows transformed into a melodic symphony, each note conveying a complex range of emotions – fear, defiance, hope. Meetveega listened, his eyes widening in astonishment as he began to grasp the depth of the cat’s intelligence and the profound bond he shared with Sophie.

 

For hours, the dialogue continued, a strange symphony of human words, feline sounds, and alien intonations. Sophie, with Gizmo as her interpreter, laid bare the resilience of the human spirit, the indomitable power of free thought, and the unbreakable bond between humans and their stories. She spoke of the power of love, the importance of community, and the unwavering determination to protect one’s freedom.

 

As dawn broke, casting long shadows across the forest floor, Meetveega stood silent, his gaze fixed on the horizon. The first rays of sunlight illuminated his face, revealing a flicker of doubt in his ancient eyes. The weight of millennia of manipulation seemed to bear down on him, the cracks in his resolve widening with each passing moment.

 

“You have made your point, child,” he said at last, his voice heavy with resignation. “Perhaps we have underestimated your kind. Perhaps your stories are more potent than we believed.”

 

With a final, lingering glance at Sophie and Gizmo, Meetveega turned and walked back towards his ship, his footsteps echoing through the forest. As he reached the base of the vessel, he paused, turning back to face the girl and her cat. A wave of energy rippled through the clearing, washing over the trees, the ground, and the stunned onlookers.

 

When the wave subsided, Meetveega and his ship were gone, leaving behind an eerie silence. The townspeople blinked, their faces etched with confusion. They looked at each other, their minds struggling to grasp the events of the past few hours. They remembered the fear, the terror, but the details of the encounter with Meetveega had vanished, replaced by a vague sense of unease and a lingering question: “What just happened?”

 

Sophie, however, remained trapped in the chilling reality of the encounter. The alien’s words echoed in her mind, a haunting symphony of arrogance and manipulation. She looked down at Gizmo, his emerald eyes mirroring her own unspoken horror. They were the sole keepers of the truth, a truth the world had been robbed of. While the news channels buzzed with conspiracy theories and wild speculation about the sudden disappearance of twenty townspeople, Sophie knew the horrifying answer. The world had been rewritten, the missing residents erased from existence as if they had never been.

 

The world moved on, unaware of the danger it had narrowly escaped. The town of Cornwallis, Oregon, returned to its tranquil routine, the memory of the alien encounter fading like a dream. But Sophie’s life was forever changed. She became a silent guardian, her vigilance unwavering as she monitored for any signs of alien interference.

Shorpy

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SHORPY 05413u.

My son died of adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD) when he was 8. He was born perfectly normal and had a seemingly perfectly healthy life up until half way through kindergarten. Our first clue came when one of his teachers called us in for a conference to tell us our son, who was for all of his life before that point, exceptionally well behaved, was acting out in school. Nothing particularly mean or even really relatable. He basically just seemed like he was no longer aware of good manners. He would do things like pee outside the urinal or behave erratically at inappropriate times.

We had him diagnosed by experts who promptly diagnosed our son with mild autism and ADHD. A bit weird considering he was highly social, reading above level, and prior to this had no real signs of either. We start ABA therapy and do all the things you need to do for a child with special needs. He makes progress he learns to do things better after weeks of intense therapy, but then a few more weeks go by and he gets worse in every way. We didn’t know it then, but he was just relearning to do things with different parts of his brain, not getting better. He starts forgetting things. He’s talking less. He’s climbing furniture and doing immature things he never even did when he was younger. The psychologists imply it’s our fault. We must not be sticking to the therapy. We try harder. Nothing is working. He tells us he has brain freezes and asks us if he’s dying. We tell him of course not, everything is fine, we will work through this and you will get better. Regressions go on for several months. We start to doubt the diagnosis, but there’s nothing we can do except complain to our psychologist who tells us he was misdiagnosed. He actually has severe autism! We ask for a referral to a neurologist to rule out other possibilities. The psychologist refuses, letting us know it’s us. We need to work harder. This goes on for months and we keep on begging for a referral. By the time he is close to non-verbal we finally have another appointment and show the psychologist a video of our son singing and dancing when he was a year younger. It’s a stark contrast to the child we now have who can no longer even attend a regular school. That’s not how autism works. We finally get a referral to a real doctor. We get an MRI and it’s lit up like a Christmas tree. An incredibly intense week of more testing follows. We test for hundreds of different diseases. Finally a genetic test for Adrenoleukodystrophy comes back positive. There’s no doubt. It fits.

It’s also a death sentence. There’s no known cure once symptoms start. Over the next year we watch our son forget who we were. Lose the ability to hear, see, smell, taste, and walk. He went through epileptic seizures and eventually became a walking zombie, not really cognizant of the world around him, but still able to perform basic life sustaining tasks like feeding himself. After he ate something he should not have, we had to take him to the ER. The anesthesia, messed with what was left of his brain and he never quite came back. He never walked again after that and could no longer feed himself or really do anything as he lost all of his senses.

Once symptoms start, every single person who has ever had this disease dies within a few years at most. Some people have prolonged it by using machines to keep their children alive, but their brains are totally gone except for the autonomic functions. No one has ever reversed the brain damage.

The only thing worse then watching your son die is knowing he’s absolutely going to die, knowing he has nothing to live for except more pain and suffering, and the only way to stop the suffering is to starve him to death. We had a team of doctors at that point. Not helping our son. There was nothing they could do for him and his body was actually quite healthy. He was just in a semi vegetative state. Awake, but not cognizant of the world around him. His soul was actually the first thing to go. His behaviors changed and for all intents and purposes, the disease took our son’s identity and dignity before any of the more physical ailments. There was no hope he was still in there. No question he was gone for over a year. This team of doctors was there for us, his parents, to guide us through his death. They were his palliative care team. We were at Stanford and they were some of the most qualified, compassionate, and intelligent doctors I have encountered. Near the end, I wanted to punch every one of them. It wasn’t their fault. They are messengers in a broken system, but they all knew our son was dying. They all knew his brain function was gone. They all knew he was never coming back. The adrenoleukodystrophy expert actually told us down to the month when our son would lose each of his functions. He was incredibly accurate. The last few meetings we had were all about how removing nutrition and hydration isn’t so bad, hes past where he is aware of most things. The body “knows” it’s dying and just peacefully gives up. It all felt made up. They said they will control the pain with morphine. Fuck! I know what morphine does. My first question is what is the point of prolonging his life. Theres no answers of hope coming back, no answers of he might still be there. Just the elephant in the room no one explicitly brings up. Society says this is the only path. “It’s fine.” But it wasn’t fine. My next question was how much morphine will stop all the pain immediately forever. They wouldn’t answer that one.

My son died when he was 8 after 3 weeks without food or water.

Adrenoleukodystrophy is a rare genetic disease. It can be cured if it’s caught with a test before symptoms start with a simple genetic test at birth. The federal government recommended this test before my son was born to be included with all newborn screenings. No state at the time he was born adopted the test as part of newborn screening despite that it pays for itself. When he died only 5 states did, today 44 do. If you have a son that was born with the gene for ALD, 1/3rd develop adrenoleukodystrophy most of the rest develop a related disorder that has very serious symptoms that start in the 20s or 30s. 10% have just minor adrenal gland issues that are treatable.

This is a photo of the last time I was able to get Griffin to laugh. He was otherwise non-verbal at this point, and struggling with a lot of his senses, but often you would barely know it if you saw us out. Physically his body was healthy. He was mobile nearly to the end. The one saving grace about the progression of his disease is that he seemed to lose the ability to comprehend death and other abstract concepts early. We wasted so much precious time with the misdiagnosis. Nothing will ever make up for that, but I’m glad we tried.

son
son

EV Dominance in CHINA(America CAN’T Compete) || 美国无法竞争

Tomato Pizza

I love a good vegetarian pizza. It not only tastes delicious, but makes me feel a little bit better about eating pizza! The flavors are just so fresh and clean. And let’s face it, it’s a bit less expensive too.

This tomato pizza is so simple, but just as satisfying of a slice. It gives you all the flavor punch of eating a slice of pizza, with less calories!

My favorite is when I can pull fresh tomatoes and basil from my garden. I may or may not repeatedly point out to the kids that we grew these toppings!

Whether you make your dough from scratch or opt for the ease of store bought, this simple pizza is sure to knock your socks off. Now it’s time to get your slice on!

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tomato pizza resize 10

Ingredients

  • 1 pizza shell
  • 1 sliced plum tomato
  • 1/4 cup feta cheese
  • 1/2 cup mozzarella cheese, thinly sliced
  • 1/4 teaspoon garlic salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon fresh basil
  • 1/2 teaspoon fresh parsley

Instructions

  1. Layer a little mozzarella cheese on the pizza shell.
  2. Lay sliced tomatoes on top so that they are not on top of each other.
  3. Crumble feta over tomatoes.
  4. Sprinkle with garlic, basil and parsley.
  5. Cover with remaining mozzarella cheese.
  6. Bake for about 10 to 5 minutes until cheese is melted.

Long ago, actually not so long ago, I started working as a Data Engineer at Amazon. Before this, I had experience as a Software Development Engineer (SDE) and a Data Scientist, but Data Engineering was relatively new to me. Additionally, I had primarily used Azure as my cloud provider in previous roles.

I soon found myself grappling with the notorious “imposter syndrome” — a phase where you feel you’ve faked your way to your position. I was assigned a new task involving technologies I had no experience with, and the deadlines were fast approaching. Feeling overwhelmed, I went to the kitchenette, grabbed a cup of coffee, and sat with my head buried in my hands.

yet
yet

One of the most experienced team members noticed my distress. He was well-versed in our technology stack and always had a stoic demeanor. He approached me and asked what was going on. I explained my situation and the looming deadlines. He told me to ditch the coffee and join him in the cafeteria.

Once there, he asked, “Do you know what differentiates unsuccessful and successful people in our profession?” I immediately responded with answers like “the highest amount of knowledge, great coding skills, holistic understanding of the stack, etc.” He shook his head and said, “No. Try again.” After a while, I admitted, “I don’t know.”

He laughed and said I had answered the first half of his question. Confused, I asked for clarification. He then shared a secret that changed everything: “When a person looks at an unknown problem and says ‘I don’t know it’ and moves on to a more familiar problem, they will eventually fail. But if they say ‘I don’t know it yet’ and see the problem as a learning opportunity, they will eventually succeed.”

That conversation made me realize the power of the word ‘yet’ and the importance of mindset. I guess ‘Yet’ is the secret of success.

North Korean Soldiers Are Preparing To Enter The BATTLEFIELD To Hunt NATO Forces In UKRAINE

An Interesting Development

So now that President Putin has visited North Korea, and is now in Vietnam, there is a great deal of speculation as to his objectives.

We don’t really know if there are going to be any “earth shattering” events that come out of this.

But what we do know is that the West, lead by the deluded and dementia ridden has made arrangements to place three (x3) ENORMOUS NATO bases outside of Ukraine from which to attack Russia with.

It is from these bases that NATO planes, flown by NATO pilots, and using NATO munitions, and NATO intel that will engage Russia from the safety of Poland, Germany, and one other nation.

Once confirmation of this new dimension has been obtained, we have a flood of speculation as to how Russia will react to it.

The normal “armchair warriors” suggest nuclear detonations, and full-scale invasions.

But, I disagree.

Perhaps, the three North Korean divisions of crack assault troops will be used to attack NATO bases and facilities in Europe. The advantages are numerous.

  • North Korea would be immune from reprisals.
  • Russia would focus on Ukraine special operations.
  • And Europe would be fighting the descendants of Genghis Khan.

An interesting development. For certain.

Germans and Polish troops fighting North Koreans inside their own nations without the NATO safety net hiding from Russia. Seems to me that two can play that game of “immunity from reprisals”.

Logical, but frightening.

Imagine that! Europeans having to defend their own nations instead of invading other nations.

Miller pony bottle dreams

They lied to me for 54 years. Successfully.

at 21 I was complaining to my cousin that I loathed my father and was sick of his abuse. Her reply “what if I told you that he’s not your father?” for two years my parents told me that it’s a lie and to drop it.

dad dies in 2004. A few years later I get suspicious again because my siblings have diabetes (perfectly healthy and fit). I don’t. Dads parents and aiblings ll had it by 50. But I don’t act on it.

2010 youngest goes off to college and the hubs and I get a call from mom that she would like to share her home with us. I asked why, she said “because I need one of my kids on my side, the other 4 want me in a nursing home.” Her only health issue was Parkinson’s. She had it for 30 years but wasn’t disabled or senile until 2–3 years before her death in 2021 (Jan 2021)

One day in 2014 she is asking me to show her how to look up and old beau. I searched everywhere and couldn’t find him. He had a super rare name so I was surprised. I don’t think twice about it but it’s really important.

2018, my sibs and I are arguing over our heritage. Some think we are Scottish. Some Irish. We all order tests, take them the same day and ship them off. We all get our results the same day. We are in fact Scottish, or should I say THEY are. And right there were it says father is a name I recognize. Moms “old beau”. Wtf? So the man had his dna on ancestry dot com at 84, could he have known about me? I quickly email him. No answer but he has two sons. I quickly emailed one of them. He gets back to me. They had no idea and sadly my birth father had died 7 months prior. They say he would have welcomed me with open arms and would have loved me

So they successfully lied. I was suspicious because I was the only one he physically disciplined. First I was angry that mother allowed this man to lay hands on me. Knowing he wasn’t my father and most likely taken it out on me that mom lied to him.

The saddest part is they had at least 3 chances to tell me. Instead I found out myself 7 months too late. They cheated me out of a dad and a better life. I don’t grieve for them. Not like a Daughter would really. I loved them, I just can’t grieve with all this anger over being their dirty little secret and robbing me of knowing my biological dad. Friends say “oh but he was your father, he raised you and blah blah blah. No. He’s not my father. He mistreated me and abused me. So to hell with him.

Anyone that read this far, I thank you. Those that didn’t, I’m sorry I babbled on.

UPDATE – Yes I am in contact with and have a relationship with one of my half brothers. The other I was told to contact with extreme caution as he is “trouble” and lord knows I don’t need that. Maybe someday I’ll reach out. I don’t know. I don’t see my half brother as much as I’d like but we are 3 hours away from each other. We do exchange pleasantries and such on holidays.

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"The West must be factoring our response into its projections all while plotting against us. They are trying to put themselves into our shoes, while sticking to their own mentality.

As for their mentality… Only recently, Mark Episkopos, a prominent American political scientist, chastised the West, including from a purely utilitarian and pragmatic standpoint.

Take sanctions, for example. Usually, they are designed to change the way their subject behaves. If you want them to be effective, you need to adjust these sanctions based on the response from those who endure them.

The West has been carelessly expanding its sanctions without giving any thought to the possible outcomes.

But the outcome was clear to begin with, even before the special military operation when the Crimean sanctions, as well as a host of other sanctions, were already in place.

The result was clear. We pulled together, and I do hope that we will become even more focused.

We have to go further, as Vladimir Putin said many times. We pulled together and decided not to depend on them in any sectors where they can restrain or hold back our development, and possibly in other sectors too.

Today, they pride themselves for getting rid of Russian gas.

First, supplies have been on the rise in many countries, including France.

Italy took pride in claiming that over the past three years the share of Russian gas in Italian imports declined from 90 percent all the way down to zero.

This is what German Chancellor Olaf Scholz boasted of when describing his efforts to reduce the country’s dependence on Russian energy imports, while promising to end the dependence on them completely down the road.

Many European have been making statements along the same lines, including the Netherlands, and almost all Western and some Eastern European countries.

But at what cost? How much did they have to spend and how have their spending on serving their people increased?

Nobody answered these questions. Still, people can see through these ramifications.

Mr Episkopos went on say that failing to anticipate the way Russia would respond to these developments was a huge mistake.

The West fails to understand that sanctions can be effective only if the subject is ready to change its behaviour for the sake of having these sanctions lifted.

The second point Mr Episkopos made was that if the country subjected to sanctions already said that it was not going to change its behaviour, keeping these sanctions in place would be pointless and careless.

This is the kind of policy our would-be colleagues have opted for."

Excerpt from remarks by Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in an interview with the radio stations Sputnik, Govorit Moskva, and Komsomolskaya Pravda, Moscow, April 19, 2024.

How to be a man

One of the unremarked things that has happened over the past ten years is the collapse of the so-called man-o-sphere. There may be people still working that land, but all the big names have moved on or disappeared. The pickup artist have all disappeared from the internet entirely. That whole scene just seems to have folded up and gone the way of the dinosaur without anyone noticing.

One reason is the demographic aged out of the material. A guy like Heartiste, for example, could do the pickup artist stuff when he was early middle-age, but once you hit fifty you become a skeevy weirdo, not a Don Juan. The same holds for the other subcultures in that space. Once you reach middle-age, it all starts to sound a bit weird and pointless, even to the people making money off it.

There is another aspect to it. That whole scene was a reaction to the feminization of the culture starting with second wave feminism. The next generation of males have no frame of reference in which to have a reaction. The typical Zoomer has been raised in the longhouse, to use the cool kid’s term. He has no way of knowing that all of this is both weird and unnatural.

That is the point of the show. The male role is not a slippery concept that changes from one generation to the next. It has been revolutionized and pulverized over the last few decades, but that is what makes this age anomalous. The male role in society is timeless, at least in the Western world. There are certain immutable characteristic to being a man that will reassert themselves in the coming years.

IT JUST DOESN’T WORK ANYMORE! Retirement and Jobs ARE FINISHED!

The company I work for gave everyone a nice company coat for Christmas. I took a marker and marked the inside tag with my name so that I would know if it was mine (all the coats looked the same).

One day, before heading for home, I looked at the peg where my coat had been hanging, and it wasn’t there. I checked all the coats…mine was gone, as were my favorite sunglasses.

I told management, who expressed regret, but there were no coats left.

Two weeks passed…and I periodically did a check to see if any hanging were my coat.

After about two weeks, I came across it hanging on a peg on the opposite end of the room. I grabbed it and hid it at my work station.

One of the night crew workers came storming up to me demanding HER coat. I told her that I didn’t have it…I had mine. I then showed her the tag, which showed my name. I then asked her where my sunglasses were. She responded she didn’t know.

I told her she had 24 hours to come up with them or I was going to tell them who had stolen my coat.

This would have been a termination offense.

She handed them to me the next day, saying she found them in her husband’s truck.

She has since transferred, but when I see her, she avoids me like the plague.

Some views of Pago Pago

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Freedom of trade? What a hypocrite! The U.S. burnt down nations just to install freedom but it ensures that it’s people buy from profiteers and keep prices high to give its people no choices! The U.S. citizens are the real loser! Are US citizens not aware that they are worst than Chinese citizens who can buy Tesla if they do wish! I fact out of the cars that Tesla made in 2023, 69.7% are sold in China! Can you Yanks not see the irony that China a supposedly unfree nation can buy Tesla and a nation screaming freedom like there is no tomorrow cannot buy BYD?

Let me school all of you on this! China U.S. a very smart and intelligent nation, by allowing Tesla to sell it ensures that those cars are made in China too! They got jobs and are learning all the while about western demands and western customers. So by the time BYD goes international it knows their taste, their likes and dislikes and they made a killing! Thanks to being open and free they are successful.

The U.S. is left as a pathetic slur grape nation without principle nor freedom!

A fun quote

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I have. For 20 minutes.

It was 2011, and I was meeting a couple for lunch for my birthday. He worked at Oakley, and lunch “came with“ a new pair of Oakley‘s as a gift. It should’ve been a great day.

I was in a convertible, traveling on highway 73 in Orange County, California. I exited and was waiting for the light to turn left onto a surface highway. The approaching cars stopped, the light turned green and I started to make a left turn. As soon as I passed the stopped cars and made it to the centerline, a speeding Chevy Suburban, three times the size of my car, came into view. My last conscious thought was “They’re not going to stop“. I swerved, and it was lights out.

She ran a red and T-boned me; smashed into my side, forward of the door, near the front wheel. She crushed the entire front like a tin can, my car spun and we collided twice. So I heard…

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main qimg 13abbd756b9bf9831bffc15280867f8a lq

Twenty minutes and lots of bystander activity went by. My next conscious moment was in the ambulance, looking up at a female emergency medical tech as we were heading to the trauma center. I was an EMT decades ago, and my first thought and words were “so this is what it looks like in the other direction“…

My head had hit the frame of the convertible top and it split my scalp, but fortunately didn’t crack my skull, though you could see it from the wound. My hand broke on the steering wheel, my ribs were cracked where they impacted the door. I was covered in blood and bruises. The airbags never went off.

Two guys jumped out of their cars and ran over. My window was a curtain of blood and of course I was out. They couldn’t open the door and thought I was dead. One called 911, and the other ran over to the woman’s car. It was totaled.

The impact of my head hitting the car was so forceful, my brain violently bounced off the inside of my skull. The brain stem flexed with such force it caused “micro-tears.” They sewed me up, patched me up, gave me X-rays and a CAT scan and I left the trauma center late that night with my wife instructed to ensure I woke up the next morning.

To give you an idea of how much it shook me up? I had been arranging a huge business dinner for two nights later. I still made phone calls to make sure the plans were set, and then the night of the event? I forgot to go… Par for the course with bad concussions, I had a slightly volatile temper for a couple of months. I forgot, seemingly everything randomly. I had minor bouts with depression which I’ve never had otherwise in my life.

The brain impact prevented me from remembering proper nouns for almost year and a half. I got to know my neurologist and the neuropsych testing people very well.

You can’t be unconscious for that long without taking a huge shot to the brain. And you can’t be unconscious for that long without having a long-term challenge. My ability to recall proper nouns is still pretty poor. That’s mostly it…

But it could’ve been much worse. Had she hit the driver’s door? It would’ve been the other kind of “lights out.”

This was a series of purchases, over a period of around six months. The company I was working for hired an employee who apparently had left her prior job under a cloud of felony charges. She hadn’t been convicted, so there was no record to find in a background check, plus the individual reversed a few numbers on her SSN when she applied. She managed to then hit a perfect storm of processes that allowed her to run up some significant charges on the company credit card. First, she was a remote employee with an also remote boss (this was well before COVID). She immediately requested a company credit card so she could fly to HQ for new hire orientation. A card was issued and FedExed to her. Her first charge was a cash advance (in those days, this was a holdover from days further in the past where it was unheard of for an employee to use the credit card — or their own money — for small purchases). During the ensuing investigation, we found that her subsequent purchases were for household bills, groceries, and utilities. Interestingly, she never submitted the expenses for the trip to HQ. Her manager never noticed that.

Fast forward six months or so and the employee went missing. Her manager woke up and discovered from media reporting that said employee had been convicted of some felony charges related to her prior employment and sent off to be a guest of the state for a few years. Alarm bells went off and an investigation began. As we unwound the credit card bill, we continued to see the various household purchases, utilities, cash advances, etc. Then we found that she had used the card to pay her lawyer as well as take some family members on a (modest) cruise. By the time we added things up, the company was out well in excess of $10,000. Arguably, not a ton of money for a large company, but something that caused immediate changes in expense policy and company credit cards. We found that she was able to exploit a fairly liberal payment window (established to accommodate time for employees to submit expenses, get them approved, and get them paid out to the credit card company). She further managed to (probably) use cash advances to make payments on the card to avoid showing up as delinquent. It appeared that she made some additional payments from other sources, but it wasn’t something we were in a position to confirm. The company didn’t have a good process for tracking personal charges, so there was no process to have the employee report and reimburse such expenses. There were also no categories of expenses that could not be charged to the card. There were quite a number of additional learnings, starting with why the background company didn’t flag a SSN mis-match.

The employee’s manager was fired (in addition to the initial failure to submit expenses, there had been some communications from the credit card company that charges were aging, which the manager had never looked into) and the lawyer was advised to pay the company back the fees charged against the credit card. Beyond that, I wasn’t privy to any other events outside of a flurry of expense and credit card policy changes.

Retro Underground Comix

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Even though he passed away years ago, I still find myself feeling a bit envious. I’m talking about my granddad—my lifelong hero and mentor. He kept grinding every day until he hit 90. Getting up at 6:00 AM, he’d down his coffee and head off to work. Surprisingly fit for his age, not exactly a six-pack, but definitely in good shape.

I remember working on physically demanding tasks with him, and I’d be wiped out afterward. For him, it was a walk in a park. Once, we chopped wood for eight hours, and I passed out right after. But he? He moved on to his next job without missing a beat.

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What I envy most is how he never lost his ability to handle physical tasks. While others his age struggled just to stand, he could do everything as if he were still in his thirties. I never quite grasped how he managed it all. I really wish I could be like he was.

“Members of Congress are terrified of the intel agencies. I’m not guessing at that. They’ve told me that, including people who run the intel committee.”

What Tucker said next was even more revealing.

“I said to somebody, a very powerful person, the other day, in a conversation in my kitchen, an elected official — holds a really senior position… But I was like, ‘All these people are controlled. They’ve all got weird sex lives, and all these things they’re hiding, and they’re being blackmailed by the intel agencies.’ And he said, and I’m quoting, ‘I know.’ I was like, okay, so at this point, we’re just sort of admitting that’s real? Like, why do we allow that to continue?”

This is the Amerikkkan Deep State.

About six years ago or so when I was still in high school, we were playing soccer in gym class. After about five minutes in or so, the kid who was playing as my team’s forward (we’ll call him “Brock”) came up to me, who was playing goalie, and said he wanted to be the goalie now. I politely declined, because the game was only five minutes in, and that’s just not how soccer (or the real world) works.

After about 30 seconds of arguing back and forth over it, he presumed the second best option to be to grab me by the shirt and try to drag me out of the goalie box. Or in other words, physically assaulted me.

As a natural reaction and in accordance with what the law actually says, I laid into Brock with one good hit.

I then see the gym instructor approaching us to break up the scuffle that was occuring. When he gets to us, he sends us both to the principal’s office.

Brock’s punishmen was a week of out-of-school suspension. And I received the exact same punishment.

Why? Because according to my school’s policy on fighting, if you are even merely involved in a fight, it’s an automatic out-of-school suspension, so the principal technically doesn’t even get to use his own discretion regarding disciplining students regarding these types of matters.

I remember him even saying to me “Geraldo, coming from person to person, I would have done the exact same thing as you. However, as a school official, I unfortunately have no choice but to suspend you”.

What my school expects you to do if you are to find yourself in the situation I was in, is to passively submit and take your beating, and then once that is finished, you are to go to a teacher and tell on the person who attacked you. (Because it’s not like the person you just told on isn’t going to kick the shit out of you for rolling on them once you’re outside school property, right?)

Say you were to get jumped by five people at my school. Well that means that a total of six people will be getting suspended. That being the five dudes who assualted you, and yourself, for being assaulted.

If that’s not an example of institutionalized wussification, I don’t know what is.

Some of my AI generated pictures

Girls and alcohol with cats.

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This happened when my dad was just out of high school. One of his longtime friends confirmed the details.

My dad and some friends were at a roller skating rink having fun and flirting with some girls. There was a black family skating there as well. Suddenly they hear this guy saying, “You n%#s, we don’t want your kind here.” He kept harassing them and it pissed my dad off. He went up to the jerk and told him to knock it off, that this family was more than welcome to be here, and he is the one who should leave.
The bully asked, “You n%# lover, are you going to make me?”

My dad told me he was terrified because this guy looked like someone who had been in a lot a fights. But the looks on that poor family’s faces was more than he could bear. So, he agreed to take it outside. While he was putting on his shoes an employee told him he should take off, that the guy he was facing was a known troublemaker and he had just gotten out of jail for assault. That didn’t help my dad’s nerves. Then as he was getting up the father of the black family told him not to bother, that they will just leave.
I don’t know how he mustered the courage to walk out that door, but he went to face him anyway. A crowd gathered around them as they faced each other. The bully said, “Now I am going to teach you a lesson you n#% lov…” He never had a chance to finish that sentence. My dad hit him squarely on his chin and the racist bully crumpled to the pavement. One punch and he was out.

Everyone cheered, the girls were all swooning over my dad, and the family thanked him for being the only one standing up for them. Yep, my dad was a true badass that day.

I was in 6th grade and 11 years old. I had started menstruating at 10 and didn’t have it all figured out quite yet. I was wearing a pale yellow skirt and jacket that my grandmother had sewn me and I really liked it. When school ended, I stood up to leave and the teacher snapped at me to come see her. I was pretty shocked. She never raised her voice to me. When I reached her she spun me around so my back was toward the wall. Then she whispered to me that the back of my skirt was stained and to just stay there with her until everyone left. When everyone left she told me to just keep waiting. She knew that my mother came and picked up my brother and I each day. Eventually, my brother came to see why I wasn’t coming out to the car. He was about 7. When he came into the classroom, first she yelled at him for not getting out of bed in the morning and making me late several days (I felt bad about this, but she wasn’t wrong) and then she told him to give her his jacket. She wrapped it around my waist and told us we could leave. I have never forgotten her kindness. Especially because several of the girls could be really mean to me. I’m pretty sure no one ever saw the stain.

Creamy Asparagus Soup

Creamy Asparagus Soup with Morel Mushrooms and Ramps 500
Creamy Asparagus Soup with Morel Mushrooms and Ramps 500

Ingredients

  • 1 pound fresh asparagus
  • 2 onions, finely minced
  • 2 potatoes, peeled, diced small
  • 2 ribs celery, diced small, with tops included
  • 2 carrots, diced
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 8 teaspoons granulated chicken or vegetable bouillon (or 8 cubes of bouillon)
  • 1 bay leaf
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1/4 cup fresh parsley, chopped or 1 tablespoon dried parsley
  • 2 sprigs fresh thyme or 1 teaspoon dried thyme
  • 1 sprig fresh tarragon, chopped, or 1 teaspoon dried tarragon
  • 1/4 cup fresh basil, minced, or 2 teaspoons dried basil
  • 1 teaspoon seasoned salt (or to taste)
  • 1/2 teaspoon white pepper
  • 1/4 cup cornstarch
  • 2 cups Half-and-Half
  • Sour cream
  • Chives, chopped

Instructions

  1. Break off and discard the tough, thick end of each asparagus spear. Chop the spears into 1/4-inch slices and add to the slow cooker along with all remaining ingredients down to and including the white pepper.
  2. Add water to within 1 inch of the top of the slow cooker.
  3. Cover the slow cooker and cook on HIGH for 6 to 7 hours.
  4. About two hours before serving, use a slotted spoon to remove most of the vegetables to a blender. Use a ladle to add some of the liquid from the slow cooker to the blender. Puree the mixture and add back in to the slow cooker.
  5. Repeat once or twice more as necessary (you can leave some of the pieces in the slow cooker for effect.)
  6. Add approximately 1 cup of the Half-and-Half to the slow cooker.
  7. Add the cornstarch to the remaining Half-and-Half in the carton.
  8. Close the carton well and shake vigorously.
  9. Add the mixture to the slow cooker.
  10. Continue to cook on HIGH for 1 hour, stirring occasionally.
  11. Serve in bowls with a dollop of sour cream and chopped chives sprinkled over the sour cream.

Op-Ed: One Woman’s Anguish at Being Vaxxed

by DUPED LADY

For those who cannot imagine what it’s like to be vaxxed, and living with it once the evidence becomes available, l can answer you: it’s day-to-day grieving and cellular remorse.

Many of us were just living our daily lives without any idea of the World Economic Forum or the World Health Organisation. We trusted our doctors – l’d had mine for over 25 years, and we knew our government lied at election times, but we voted the best we could based on the B.S. presented to us.

We went about our lives innocently – working, raising kids and babysitting grandkids – and many of us had not one person in our circles to warn us of the dangers.

We didn’t even know that we had to do ‘research’. Unbelievable as that may seem, it’s absolutely true.

So off we went and had the shots.  And now us ‘sheeples’ – as we are sometimes referred to – are dying in our millions, some suddenly, while some are destined for slow, malingering, pain-filled deaths.

But we are dying, and ironically, we are the evidence; the proof you will all use later.

Some of us argued with others who knew about the dangers, and words and actions hurt both sides. And that is the greatest weapon of the psy-op: it’s actually greater than the vax itself.

There is a level of toxic hatred and gloating online that condemns the vaxxed to silence in regards to seeking help. l see it in the forums, how they are abused by total strangers, so we stay silent and die alone, unforgiven for our naivety and fear.

But back to the point above – of what it is like to be vaxxed and to then become aware of how we’ve been done. It is hell. Living with the knowledge that I took three of them; that my wonderful, kind, hardworking husband took four; that our children and grandchildren had them;
it haunts me, it breaks my soul, it has destroyed me… simply because we were naive.

My husband and l were already injected when a cousin contacted me through Messenger after seeing a post about my rapid decline in health and asked me questions. l then spoke to my sons, but it was too late – they had been jabbed already.

It’s reading endless detox protocols and wondering IF they truly work or IF they too are part of the B.S., because how would we ever know when there is no long-term proof? It’s endless medical tests that come back ‘normal’, but you just know and feel the changes in your body.

It’s seeing the videos of the ‘calamari’ clots and reading about graphene microblades slicing up veins, and spikes adhering like velcro to tissues and organs.

It’s the breathlessness and palpitations on the slightest exertion that doctors can’t explain.

It’s the knowing that it was all for nothing, though we believed it was for the best of intentions.

It’s this tattoo on my arm of the vax batch numbers that l use to open conversations and share my adverse reactions with every doctor, specialist and pathologist, radiologist and ambulance paramedic l meet.

It’s knowing that any second, any second, could be IT… the last one l breathe before l die.

It’s grief – deep, empty, gut-wrenching grief for all my family and friends, all those l love and care for.

It’s loss – the loss of my future dreams and plans, the loss of my husband and family, it’s the pain felt by the name-calling and ongoing online abuse.

l may be a sheeple to some, and cop endless abuse online for speaking up with my truth, but that will not stop me.

Not every vaxxed person acted like an A-hole when approached by someone who cared enough to take the risk of warning them.

Yet we have ALL been tarred with that one brush. And it’s there that humanity debased itself even further. They did not have to do a thing except sit back and watch us fall apart.

Music in this video is from various Bruton and music De Wolfe Records dating from 1972-1979 mixed in audacity and recorded onto a 1977-79 Maxell UD Type 1 Cassette Tape. The Video portion was created from various images of old department stores recorded onto real VHS tape for the retro effect. 

Comments 45
Comments 45

Smelling like a zoo

I often comment about my experiences in world line slides.

I talk about how things were different, and how they seemed strange. I talked about how sometimes my body would be different.

Like I would have a scar or a tattoo, or some other minor change. Like socks changing into black and white checkered race flag designs instead of my normal business socks and so on and so forth.

Once, I will tell you, that I had a heightened sense of smell. I could smell the most amazing things, but my consciousness could not process all of it. Which means that to me, everything in that world-line adventure smelled like an animal zoo to me.

It was, I’ll tell you the truth, quite an interesting experience.

Good for me that the trip on that line was short lived.

Ah. Ignorance is bliss.

Today…

Blinken to China to fuss about support for Russia

With ties somewhat stabliized, the visiting envoy wants China to stop sending dual-use goods – and to leash Iran
.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will visit Beijing soon to raise concerns about China’s support for Russia’s defense industrial base and its purchase of Iranian oil products.

Blinken’s China trip was announced after Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs Daniel Kritenbrink and National Security Council Senior Director for China and Taiwan Affairs Sarah Beran ended a three-day visit in Beijing on Tuesday.

Last week, US officials briefed reporters on materials China was providing to Russia, including drone and missile technology, satellite imagery and machine tools, Reuters reported.

Blinken is also set to discuss with Chinese officials the situation in the Middle East.

On April 11, Blinken requested to have a phone call with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi to talk about the Iran-Israel conflict. Wang said China strongly condemned Israel’s attack on the Iranian Embassy in Syria, which happened on April 1.

On April 12, US President Joe Biden said he expected Iran to attack Israel “sooner, rather than later.” He underscored Washington’s commitment to defend Israel. On April 13-14, Iran unleashed a barrage of missiles and drones against Israel, which successfully intercepted most of them.

No full-blown Mideast war yet

Both Washington and Beijing called for de-escalation and a full-blown war has not yet broken out in the region.

(Indeed, if a report for which veteran American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh cites unnamed sources is correct, the attack was something of a charade, negotiated in advance, in which Iran was permitted a massive show of anger while inflicting very limited damage.)

Meanwhile, the US House of Representatives on Monday passed bipartisan legislation called the Iran-China Energy Sanctions Act by a 383-11 vote.

Jointly proposed by Democrat Josh Gottheimer and Republican Mike Lawler, the bill is aimed at making it more difficult for China to purchase Iranian petroleum and related products. It needs approval from the Senate before it can go to Biden for his signature.

“After Iran’s unprecedented attack on Israel, and as its regime of terror deepens ties to China, we are reminded that they cannot be trusted,” said Gottheimer.

”We must hold Iran and its backers accountable, especially China, the number one purchaser of Iranian petroleum,” said Lawler.

The duo said the Iran-China Energy Sanctions Act, along with the SHIP Act passed last November, will kneecap Iran’s ability to export murder and instability across the Middle East region.

Also on Monday, Wang had a phone call with Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian.

Wang said China believed that Iran is fully cognizant of the situation and will avoid causing further turbulence while defending its sovereignty and dignity. He added that China will steadily advance practical cooperation in various fields with Iran to make greater progress in China-Iran relations.

A pundit responds

“The passage of the Iran-China Energy Sanctions Act by the US House is a bargaining chip that is aimed at forcing China to compromise on Iranian issues,” You Feng, a visiting lecturer at Peking University and a military commentator, says in an article published on Wednesday. “It seems that if we do not fulfill the United States’ demand of exerting influence over Iran, the act will soon take effect.”

“But obviously,” she adds, “even if Blinken will raise the matter during his upcoming visit to Beijing, China is unlikely to give up its cooperation with Russia and Iran. The reason is simple. Our cooperation with Russia and Iran is normal trade. The United States’ unreasonable demand directly hurts our interests, and this is unacceptable.”

She says China will definitely fight back if the US imposes sanctions. She says Blinken should consider Beijing’s opinions, before departing for China, instead of presenting a bunch of unreasonable demands.

Overcapacity

Last June, Blinken visited China and met with Chinese President Xi Jinping after US-China relations had been impacted by the Chinese spy balloon incident, the US chip export ban and Taiwan issues in early 2023.

Since then, more US and Chinese officials have held meetings. A face-to-face meeting between Xi and US President Joe Biden in San Francisco last November also helped stabilize Sino-US relations. But the US sanctioned more Chinese firms that shipped products to Russia. It unveiled new chip export rules against China last October.

Now Washington is urging the European Union to take actions to avoid being hurt by China’s industrial overcapacity, especially in the electric vehicle (EV) sector.

During a meeting with Chinese Xi Jinping in Beijing on Tuesday, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz raised the issue of China’s overcapacity and said that Germany wants open and fair markets.

Xi asked the German side to look at the matter objectively. He said a surge in China’s clean-technology exports can help the world tackle inflation and achieve its green goals.

“The notion that China’s overcapacity harms the global market is a complete fallacy,” Li Jian, a spokesperson of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, said in a regular media briefing on Wednesday. “Those who spread that narrative to justify protectionism have nothing to gain from it and will only destabilize and disrupt industrial and supply chains, hinder the world’s green transition and curb the growth of emerging sectors.”

An article published by China National Radio’s flagship radio channel called The Voice of China said that the accusation of “overcapacity” is another form of the West’s “decoupling” with China. It said US politicians want to use this campaign to gain benefit in this year’s presidential election.

Li Daokui, director of the Center for China in the World Economy (CCWE) at Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Management, was quoted as saying in the article that all countries would subsidize their new industries during the development stage.

He said the US cannot accuse China of subsidizing its new energy sector while it is openly subsidizing its chip industry.

“A ‘super-cycle’ exists in EVs and renewable energy equipment as excess supply in certain parts of their supply chain is coupled with yet-to-materialized demand,” Chim Lee, an analyst at the Economist Intelligence Unit, says in a research note on Monday. “These sectors are highly politicized globally. Lower prices can be perceived as the result of government support, but they are also key to accelerating the green transition.”

They are freaking out

One day while leaving the office at 8.30pm. The security guard looked at me with the phone in his hand in a confused state. Curious I was, I went near him and from there, the conversation started.

Me :What happened? Why are you looking so confused?

He : Sir I tried to withdraw money from our office ATM but the transaction was failed due to timed out. Then I got the message from the bank that my money was deducted from my account!

Me: Don’t worry they will refund the money within one or two days.

He : Sir, but I didn’t get any message about the refund. How will I get? Also the bank is far away from here so I cannot go immediately.

Me : Don’t worry bhiaya I too faced similar kind of problem but I got refunded within 3 days. So don’t worry.

He : Okay sir. Thank you

Then after few days I saw him running towards me and he said “Sir thank you so much, I got my money refunded”

Me : Oh great! Why are you saying thanks to me?

He : You only said about this refund. Otherwise I would have taken leave to visit bank next day. You saved my one day salary.

Me : Oh! its OK bhaiya. Happy that you got the money back.

Which I thought to be a small piece of information, after seeing his smiling face, only then I realized how big it was.

SO YES these kind of small things matters a lot to me and gives satisfaction!!

Power

WeChat, which is owned by Tencent, was launched in 2011, and its programming team gradually added new features to attract new users to switch from QQ Mobile (also owned by Tencent) to WeChat.

However, compared to Alibaba’s offerings, it was weak because it still did not have a wallet and payment function.

The Guangzhou-based 10-person team led by Alan Zhang 张小龙 worked on a programming solution to this hole in WeChat’s functionality, while the business team worked with the Chinese government to enable digital functionality by plugging into their bank accounts.

The product marketing team needed to do something big in order to really put WeChat Wallet on the map. They decided to launch around Chinese New Year 2014 so that they could leverage a traditional Chinese custom, and turn it digital. During Chinese New Year, the Chinese traditionally hand out red envelopes stuffed with cash (in new bills) to children.

The strategy was brilliantly simple: WeChat Wallet would hand out digital red envelopes. In order for the campaign to succeed, WeChat Wallet would have to connect with a minimum of two bank accounts: one person to send the money, and the other person to receive the money. Usually, the number was much higher than two because adults would have to give New Year’s money to more than one child or teenager.

The product marketing team focused on seeding a significant number of early adopters so that they could get others to connect their bank accounts so that they could receive money. In order to simplify the money amount selection process, buttons were marked in the amounts of 8, 10, 88, and 100 yuan; most of the time, people just selected a default amount to transfer.

The marketing campaign immediately went viral and was a tremendous success, and within two months, more than 100 million bank accounts were connected to WeChat Wallet. At the same time, merchants and small businesses applied for QR codes so that they could accept payment online and offline by just providing a QR code to scan.

Alibaba’s founder, Jack Ma, who is a strong competitor with Tencent, complimented the success of this launch, and in internal meetings, referred to it as a “digital Pearl Harbor attack” on Alibaba because it was caught completely by surprise. Coming from Tencent’s main competitor in the China market, it was a true compliment.

Within two years, Chinese society went largely cashless. Now, in China, most of the people who pay in cash are travelers from outside China. Everyone else uses either Tencent’s or Alipay’s digital wallet which they carry in their mobile phones.

The social repercussions have been huge: e-commerce and delivery services have taken off in China, and the volume and velocity of transaction is much larger than in the US.

I feel your pain fellas…

New PLA unit underscores intelligentized warfare shift

PLA-ISF aims to better integrate emerging AI, quantum and other technologies into multi-domain operational concept against the US and its allies

China has just unveiled its People’s Liberation Army-Information Support Force (PLA-ISF), a rebranding of its previous PLA-Strategic Support Force (PLA-SSF) to reflect new responsibilities and capabilities and guide the military’s technology-driven integrated combat concept, Chinese state media reports said.

In contrast to traditional PLA services such as the Ground Force, Navy, Air Force, and Rocket Force, the PLA’s strategic arms, such as the Aerospace Force, Cyberspace Force and Joint Logistics Support, focus on more specialized areas critical to modern warfare.

PLA-SSF, founded in 2015, was initially tasked with developing and implementing most of the PLA’s space-based capabilities and counter-space operations. Stressing the PLA-ISF’s broader responsibilities, Chinese President Xi Jinping emphasized that the renamed PLA-ISF will be crucial in advancing the PLA’s modernization and effectiveness in modern warfare.

Xi also stated that the PLA-ISF would be integrated into the PLA’s joint operations system, feature unique Chinese characteristics and accelerate the development of integrated combat capabilities more effectively.

China may have rebranded its PLA-SSF into the PLA-ISF in line with its evolving strategic thought and changing operational strategy.

In December 2022, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) noted that the PLA-SSF was created to centralize the PLA’s information support units. Before the creation of the PLA-SSF, each PLA service branch had its own information support units, potentially resulting in disjointed support efforts that hampered rather than helped operations.As part of the 2015 reforms establishing the PLA-SSF, China’s Central Military Commission (CMC) took over the roles of the PLA general staff and general political departments while those departments’ responsibilities for cyberwarfare, space, electronic warfare and psychological operations were transferred to the PLA-SSF.The SCMP report mentions that before the PLA-SSF’s rebranding into the PLA-ISF, it had two principal departments – the Space Systems Department, which runs intelligence and communication satellites, and the Network Systems Department, which is tasked with cyber operations, electronic warfare and signals intelligence (SIGINT).The rebranded PLA-ISF may reflect an evolution in Chinese strategic thought from “winning informationized wars” to “intelligentized warfare,” which in turn implies a broader mission set for the PLA-SSF, necessitating a name change to reflect increased responsibilities and capabilities.China’s 2015 Military Strategy describes the foundation of “winning informationized wars,” noting the application of information technology in all military operations.

It says that “preparations for military struggle” (PMS) are under the context of winning “informationized local wars,” emphasizing that information is not just vital but will play a dominant role in winning future conflicts.

Building on the premise of China’s 2015 Military Strategy, the 2019 China’s National Defense in the New Era white paper notes that technologies such as AI, quantum information, big data, cloud computing and the Internet of Things (IoT) mark an evolution from “informationized” to “intelligentized” warfare.

Koichiro Takagi mentions in an April 2022 War on the Rocks article that the main idea of China’s “intelligentized warfare” concept is to use AI to directly influence the will of top policymakers, military commanders and citizens.

Takagi says that “intelligence dominance” will become a new area of struggle in intelligentized warfare, emphasizing that China envisions using AI for military purposes differently than the US and its allies.

In a January 2022 article in the Security and Strategy journal, Maasaki Yatsuzuka outlines the imperatives that may have led to the rebranding of the PLA-SSF into the PLA-ISF from political and military angles.

From a political standpoint, Yatsuzuka notes that the Xi administration’s implementation of intelligentized warfare signifies a shift toward a centralized decision-making process in the PLA.

This process, he says, aims to uphold the Communist Party of China’s (CPC) control over the PLA and secure its alignment with the party’s goals and ideology.

He also mentions that the need for centralized control is emphasized by integrating military reforms with broader party policies, such as the Military-Civil Fusion (MCF) strategy.

Further, Yatsuzuka says that the PLA’s emphasis on political education and control through political commissars is becoming increasingly crucial as warfare becomes more technologically advanced and specialized.

From a military standpoint, Yatsuzuka says that to move toward intelligentized warfare, the PLA must establish integrated information systems to effectively manage the diverse aspects of modern warfare, including land, air, sea, space, cyber, cognitive and electromagnetic domains.

He mentions that effective utilization of AI and real-time data processing is crucial for future operations as it requires a robust data flow and analysis framework across various platforms and military units.

Yatsuzuka stresses the importance of a consolidated strategic directive incorporating inputs from multiple military and civilian sources to enable a united and adaptable response driven by centralized military leadership.

The rebranding of China’s PLA-SSF into PLA-ISF may also reflect the need to integrate information warfare and emerging technologies and capabilities into a multi-domain operational concept.

In October 2023, Asia Times reported on China’s Multi-Domain Precision Warfare (MDPW) concept, which utilizes AI and big data advances to identify weaknesses in the US operational system and launch precision strikes. It also tests and improves AI-driven capacities to align with China’s military doctrine.

China’s intelligent warfare strategy is expected to involve a combination of human and machine command and control systems. Humans will have limited control over autonomous weapons and the focus will be on expanding warfare to areas where humans cannot operate, such as the cognitive domain.

MDPW may be China’s answer to the US Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) system, a tech-driven plan to enhance military interoperability and AI integration across all warfare domains with allies and partners.

In practice, MDPW may seek to dismantle and destroy CJADC2’s kill chain by targeting critical information nodes such as aircraft and satellites through physical attack, targeting information networks by jamming, electronic warfare and cyberattack. It may also seek to disrupt decision-making within and between the US and its allies.

MDPW may capitalize on the fixed and centralized approach of US kill chains, which lack diversity in sharing information among different components, making them vulnerable and arguably unsuitable for a large-scale conflict in the Indo-Pacific region.

Survive

This is actually pretty cool.

So I worked with this person. She stole 80$. I was a server. There was nothing I could do and I wasn’t getting my money back and I knew it.

Months later I had found a new job. I get a call from my old place of employment. “Yes I need a cab to so and so”. I recognized the voice. I was the cab driver.

I knew it was her.

I go anyway. When I arrive there she is smiling. I said 80$ to get in this cab babe. And I just looked at her and smiled back.

”You can’t do that. I know the company. I’m calling you in. I know the owner”. I laugh and I’m like yeah I know him too. He’s the guy that hired me. But if you want in this particular cab, there’s an 80$ deposit.

Ha I’m like go right ahead but if you don’t wanna walk home in the rain there’s an 80$ up front fee.

Now this whole time I have the window cracked. And literally nothing else is unlocked.

She was so mad.

I smiled ear to ear and says hey remember fucking me out of 80 dollars? She said fuck you you’re a cabbie now and you have a duty to customer service. I said well just slip a hundo through the window.

She was absolutely livid. You can’t do this. This is an assault. I NEED A RIDE HOME…. NOW. I was like yep I need my money back honey!

But what could she do? I drove away smiling. Karma, sometimes, is a mother!

Russia Issues Economic Ultimatum, China Drops Stimulus Bombshell To Counter G7 Threats

On the morning of May 21, 2014, an Indian system admin working at HCL logged on to one of the servers of Norwegian petroleum company Statoil.

By accident, he had logged on to a production server that was giving him some warning messages. Not completely understanding the messages, he decided to reboot the server. Despite additional warnings that a reboot was inadvisable, he went along with it.

On the other side of the globe, at the Mongstad facility, the largest oil refinery in Norway, a tanker was being loaded with 50 million liters of gasoline. Enough to fill up the fuel tanks of about a million cars.

Suddenly, the operation came to a halt. Gasoline started pouring violently into the ocean. Boatloads of it.

The night shift crew monitoring the facility looked on in horror as millions of dollars worth of liquid was disappearing by the minute.

The situation could quickly turn into an environmental disaster that would wreak havoc on the local sea life.

Fortunately, the crew at the facility reacted quickly and was able to avert a major disaster by overriding the operation manually.

A few years earlier, Statoil had outsourced all maintenance of server infrastructure to India. The incident at Mongstad, as dramatic as it was, wasn’t a one-off occurence.

Several times, Statoil’s various facilities had to be evacuated because of compromised IT security and server shutdowns. The company executives now feared they could face incidents that would lead to loss of life.

It turned out that about 100 consultants in India had admin access to all of Statoil’s production servers. Yes, all of them. None of the consultants had been background-checked.

Statoil (now Equinor) is the company that forms the backbone of the Norwegian economy, one of the strongest economies in the world. The amount of damage these guys could do to the Norwegian economy and society as a whole if they wanted to was cataclysmic.

In 2017, Statoil was in the midst of a global oil crisis, with plummeting oil prices. Yet, despite the red numbers in the balance sheets and strong focus on cost-savings, the company decided to homesource IT infrastructure to Norway again, even if this came at a massive cost.

It wasn’t so much that the Indian consultants lacked the technical knowledge to manage the servers. The main problem was that they didn’t have the domain knowledge to understand what the servers were actually doing. They often didn’t appreciate the gravity of the situation. Communicating this across the globe through timezones and language barriers proved difficult.

The entire outsourcing experiment ended up being a massive failure, even though it was supposed to save the company billions of dollars on paper.

Men at work

It’s because the Sanctions are toothless

For instance we all heard of the ban on Xinjiang Cotton by many brands across the world

Xinjiang cotton: Western clothes brands vanish as backlash grows
Companies including H&M and Nike are targeted for showing concern over Uighur forced labour claims.

Yet it was puzzling to see that Cotton Exports from China from Xinjiang rose by 10.7% in 2023 from 2021 after being down by 4.6% in 2022

Then I saw the fine print

Imports and Sales of Xinjiang Cotton produced through Forced Labor in contravention of Human Rights after 30 June 2021 may attract Sanctions

This means any order signed until 29/6/2021 is legal and free from any sanction

And most big importers, they don’t place orders for Cotton every 2–3 months or even 6 months

They place orders for 5–10 years at a time

So most orders signed between Xinjiang Cotton producers and US Importers and European Importers that were signed before 30/6/2021 are still active and unaffected by any sanctions

These orders will likely continue to run until minimum 2026 and maximum 2031

So the Xinjiang Cotton orders will cease only from 2031

That’s a long time away

By then Biden, Trump won’t be in power and maybe the next President can repeal the order

Either way 2031 is a long way off

So despite all the noise, in reality the Sanctions won’t bite until 2031 or earliest 2026


Likewise the US have demanded that NVDIA not sell their A100 Chips to China without permission and license

So NVDIA simply modified their A100 and H100 designs, reduced density by 1/16th and sold the new GPUs as H800

China placed orders from 1 February 2023 for the next 3 years

Sanctions cannot affect existing orders per WTO regulations and Free Trade Law.

Thus China has a continuous stock of deliveries of the H800 GPU until 2026 minimum


So Sanctions won’t affect any commercial product for minimum 2–5 years because of existing contracts

Only Military Sanctions will work because delivery does take 5–10 years and most orders aren’t fully commercial so the WTO argument can’t be used

Hits them hard with reality

I worked in a call center for a highly respected financial institution, and was treated more poorly than when I worked for Subway when I was in college.

First of all, my team were required to arrive for work 15 minutes early in order to get signed in to our computers and phone systems, but were not allowed to clock in until our shift actually started.

That was the least of my issues, however. My manager was a horribly arrogant woman who only liked around five people on her 20 person team. If you weren’t one of her favorites, you were treated like something yucky she stepped in that morning.

While her favorites were allowed to put a call on hold and go to her desk to ask a question, I would be reprimanded for leaving a call on hold while seeking an answer, then reprimanded for not knowing the answer.

I got in trouble for constantly eating at my desk, which was untrue. Toward the end of my shift I might grab a snack from the vending machine, but I ate any substantial meals during lunch or designated breaks. I had coworkers who always had full meals at their desks, which they would be eating while they were on the phone with clients. I’m seriously talking bacon, eggs, pancakes, and hashbrowns……

The final straw was when I was reprimanded for not handling a call professionally. A client called in and was immediately verbally abusive. I did my best to calm him down and attempt to address his issues, but the abusive behavior progressed throughout the call. At around the five minute mark, he started telling me that I should call him “Daddy” and that he knew that I was a bad girl, among other inappropriate things. I handled the call as well as I could, but I wasn’t incredibly friendly by the end of the call.

When I got to work the next day my Manager called me into her office. It turns out that the client had called to complain about me because I had been “very rude” to him during our call. She told me that she had reviewed the call with three other Managers and could not excuse my behavior during the call. She would have to write me up.

I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. This was not a phone sex number, it was a freaking brokerage house. I asked her how I should have handled the call. Should I have called the client “Daddy?” Should I have agreed that I’d been bad and asked him to spank me? She simply said that I could have handled the call more professionally, although she didn’t offer me any coaching toward *how* I should have handled the call.

I grabbed an empty box, packed up my cubicle, and walked out. Apparently she was fired about a week later. The team that I was on was the third team that she had been moved to since she had been promoted to Manager. She had been moved due to complaints regarding harrassment and favoritism, and upper management finally realized that she actually was a terrible Manager and not worth their trouble anymore.

The dangers

Chinese firms to assemble EVs in Europe, duck tariffs

Chery plans to purchase an old Nissan plant in Barcelona and turn it into its first manufacturing site in Europe
.

Chinese electric vehicle (EV) makers are pushing forward their plans to building production capacity in Europe in order to evade potential tariffs that would be imposed by the European Union.

Chery Automobile President Yin Tongyue said Sunday that his company will soon purchase an old plant of Nissan’s in Barcelona, Spain, and turn it into its first manufacturing site in Europe. He said the reopening of the facility, which stopped running in 2021, can create 1,600 jobs.

He said Chery is discussing partnerships with two European brands, with one of the deals to be closed soon. Chinese media said Chery is having a discussion with Stellantis, the Italian auto conglomerate that owns Fiat, Chrysler and Peugeot.

Spain’s Industry Ministry said an agreement for Chery to start production in the country will be formalized in the coming days.

Chery is still talking with the Italian government about building a factory there but there has been any update yet.

In the first quarter of this year, the number of the company’s exported cars rose 40.9% year-on-year to 253,418 units. The company is now focusing on markets in South America, the Middle East and Russia and will explore those in Spain, Italy Poland and the United Kingdom later this year.

Other key Chinese EV makers also have their manufacturing plans in Europe. Last December, the Shenzhen-based BYD said it will build a passenger car factory in Szeged, Hungary. It said the facility will be the first of its kind built by a Chinese automotive company in Europe and will have an advanced car production line.

Great Wall Motor said last year that it was mulling whether to locate its first European plant in Germany, Hungary or the Czech Republic.

SAIC Motor Corp said it was considering setting up a plant in the United Kingdom although the country has already left the European Union.

Meanwhile, the China Chamber of Commerce for Import and Export of Machinery and Electronic Products (CCCME), a Beijing-based industry group, said the 13-month investigation launched by the European Union last September against Chinese EV makers is not transparent and is in violation of global trading rules.

In a hearing with the European Commission in Brussels on April 11, CCCME Vice President Shi Yonghong, said he was concerned that the findings of the EU probe of Chinese EV imports would be distorted and unobjective.

Shi said the European Commission had departed from its principle of selecting for study the top Chinese EV makers, such as BYD, Geely and SAIC, and seemed to have purposely focused on three Chinese-owned producers to reach predetermined findings of subsidization.

He said the biased sample selection has tainted the entire investigatory process. He added that the probe was a perfect example of the EU’s double standards as it avoided taking any action against the US$400 billion of subsidies granted by the US government and also billions of euros of subsidies granted by the EU to the EV and battery sectors.

A spokesperson of the European Commission said the investigation and its findings would fully respect EU and international obligations. He said the EC will make sure this anti-subsidy investigation is thorough, fair and fact-based.

Impact of tariffs

US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, who finished her six-day China trip on April 9, told CNN on Sunday that the US will not take “anything off the table” in response to China’s manufacturing capacity, including the possibility of additional tariffs to stop the influx of cheap Chinese goods into the US market.

“We’re concerned about the possibility of surges in Chinese exports to our markets in areas where they have a great deal of overcapacity,” She said.

She said she has told Chinese officials that China’s overcapacity problem is a concern not only to the US, but also to other countries and regions, such as Europe and Japan, and even to emerging markets including India, Mexico and Brazil.

As the Trump administration imposed an extra 25% tariff on Chinese goods on top of the usual 2.5% tariff in 2019, Chinese EV and battery firms found it very difficult to develop their US markets.

They then turned to build factories in Mexico, which signed a free trade agreement with the US and Canada in 2018, trying to evade the extra 25% tariff. But Republican candidate Donald Trump said last month that he will impose a 100% tariff on Chinese cars that are made in Mexico if he wins the presidential election in November.

Now Chinese automakers are accelerating their plans to localize their production capacity in Europe, in case the EU imposes extra tariffs on EVs made in China later this year.

About one in five EVs sold in Europe last year were made in China, according to Transport & Environment (T&E), a Brussels-based non-profit organization. The figure is expected to grow to about 25% in 2024.

More than half of Chinese imports into Europe are still western brands, such as Tesla, Dacia and BMW, T&E says – but Chinese brands, including SAIC’s MG, Geely’s Polestar and BYD, could reach 11% of the European EV market in 2024 and 20% in 2027, up from about 7.5% last year.

“Tariffs will force carmakers to localize EV production in Europe, and that’s a good thing because we want these jobs and skills,” said Julia Poliscanova, senior director for vehicles and e-mobility supply chains at T&E. “But tariffs won’t shield legacy carmakers for long.”

She said a higher tariff should be accompanied by a regulatory push to increase local production of EVs, including electrification targets for company car fleets by 2039, on top of the agreed 100% clean car goal in 2035.

No dumping

After European Commission President Ursula Von der Leyen announced a probe into unfair Chinese competition in the EV sector on September 13 last year, German Economic Minister Robert Habeck welcomed the decision.

But then German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said, on September 28, that he was not convinced about the need to impose tariffs on Chinese EVs. He said that, since Germany wants to sell its cars in all places in the world, it should also open its market to foreign firms.

On a visit to China on Monday, he told Chinese students in Shanghai that Germany wants open and fair auto markets. He said Chinese cars will still be in Germany and Europe at some point if there is fair competition with no dumping, overproduction or infringement of copyrights.

According to the MarkLines Data Center, German automakers sold 462,720 vehicles in China last year, up 3.8% from 2022. They accounted for about 17.8% of the Chinese markets.

Chinese brands sold 1.46 million vehicles domestically with a 56.2% market share. Japanese brands sold 382,900 vehicles in China with a 14.7% market share.

Stroganoff Soup

beef stroganoff soup 102 1
beef stroganoff soup 102 1

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 ½ pounds stew meat
  • 6 cups beef broth(I used low sodium)
  • 4 tablespoons worcestershire sauce
  • ½ teaspoon Italian seasoning blend
  • 1 ½ teaspoons onion powder
  • 2 teaspoons garlic powder
  • salt and pepper to taste(I use about 2 teaspoons salt and ½ teaspoon black pepper)
  • ½ cup sour cream
  • 8 ounces mushroomssliced, (about 1 cup sliced mushrooms)
  • 8 ounces short noodlescooked, (egg noodles, rotini, and cellentani work great)
  • cup cold water
  • ¼ cup corn starch

beef stroganoff soup 101 2
beef stroganoff soup 101 2

Instructions

Instant Pot Instructions

  • In your instant pot, combine stew meat, beef broth, worcestershire sauce, Italian seasoning, onion powder, garlic powder, and salt and pepper to taste. Place lid on the instant pot, make sure the vent nozzle is in the non-venting position, press “pressure cook” and set timer to 1 hour.
  • Move venting nozzle to the vent position and allow to vent until the button drops down. Remove lid, and switch Instant Pot to “soup” mode. Stir together sour cream and 1 cup of broth from the Instant Pot until smooth. Stir mixture back into the pot along with the mushrooms. Whisk together cold water and corn starch in a bowl.
  • Once soup is boiling, whisk corn starch mixture into the Instant Pot until soup thickens. Stir in noodles. Taste, add salt and pepper to taste, if needed. Garnish with cracked black pepper, fresh thyme or parsley, and grated parmesan cheese and serve.

Slow Cooker Instructions

  • In your slow cooker, combine stew meat, beef broth, worcestershire sauce, Italian seasoning, onion powder, garlic powder, and salt and pepper to taste. Cover and cook on high 3 hours, or low 6 hours.
  • Stir together sour cream and 1 cup of broth from the slow cooker until smooth. Stir mixture back into the pot along with the mushrooms. Whisk together cold water and corn starch in a bowl, then stir into the slow cooker.
  • Cover and cook on high for 1 hour longer. Taste, add salt and pepper to taste if needed. Add cooked noodles. Garnish with cracked black pepper, fresh thyme or parsley, and grated parmesan cheese and serve.

Notes

Flavor tip: Add a sprinkle of crushed red pepper flakes.

beef stroganoff soup 105
beef stroganoff soup 105

collage
collage

Should I make this in the Instant Pot or a Slow Cooker?

I’ve included instructions for making this easy Beef Stroganoff Soup in either the Instant Pot or the Slow Cooker. Both methods work great, it really just depends on your personal preference and whether you have an Instant Pot or not.

Side note: If you haven’t made the leap to getting and Instant Pot yet (*and this is not sponsored in any way!!!*) you have got to get one. You may not know this but the Instant Pot has a setting for slow cooking so it really is an all-in-one. BAM. Let whoever drew your name for Christmas know, this is what you need.

What cut of beef should I use?

My favorite meat to use for this Beef Stroganoff Soup is stew meat, because it gets so juicy and fall-apart tender in the Instant Pot on the pressure cooker setting (only takes an hour!) or after slow cooking in the crockpot all day. It’s also really budget friendly and makes this meal super affordable. Win win!

What type of noodles should I use?

Any short noodle works great! Egg noodles are really common with traditional stroganoff and taste great in this soup, my favorite though are twirly noodles as I like to call them, or Callentani. You could also use penne, ronini, or macaroni elbows!

Can I cook the noodles in the Instant Pot/Slow Cooker?

Technically, yes, you can cook them right in the Instant Pot/Slow Cooker. Personally, I prefer to cook my noodles separately for two reasons. 1) You need to add extra liquid to the recipe to account for the liquid that is absorbed by the noodles while cooking. My issue with this is that the excess dilutes the soup and makes it less flavorful. 2) It gets tricky with short noodles like these to know exactly how much cooking time they need, while making sure they don’t overcook. The whole point of a crockpot recipe in my opinion is to not have to keep a close eye on it the whole time, and to say hey this can cook for 6ish or 7ish hours. If you’ve got noodles in there though, that extra half hour or whatnot can turn your noodles to mush.

beef stroganoff soup 104
beef stroganoff soup 104

Chinese warn of Taiwan crisis from US military aid

‘Crossing red lines – just like racing cars on a cliff’s edge, where a crash is almost inevitable’

Beijing has expressed strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition after the United States House of Representatives passed a bill that will grant military aid to Taiwan and countries in the Indo-Pacific region.

The US House on April 20 passed four bills in a US$95 billion package to boost the defense ability of Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. About $60.84 billion of funding will be earmarked for Ukraine to counter Russia while $26.38 bill be used to support Israel to defend itself against Iran and its proxies.

One of the bills consists of $8.12 billion for Taiwan and Indo-Pacific countries to “counter communist China and ensure strong deterrence in the region.”

The aid includes:

  • a $3.3 billion funding to develop submarine infrastructure, including investments in dry dock construction;
  • $2 billion in a foreign military financing program for Taiwan and other key allies and security partners in the Indo-Pacific confronting Chinese aggression; and
  • $1.9 billion to replenish defense articles and defense services provided to Taiwan and regional partners.

The remaining $920 million will be spent on strengthening US military capabilities in the region, enhancing the production and development of artillery and critical munitions and providing additional flexibility for Foreign Military Financing loans and loan guarantees.

Already, on February 8, the US Senate had passed its own $95 billion package to support Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, and reports are that the Senate will now accept the House version and the package will soon be submitted to US President Joe Biden for approval, whereupon it will become law.

“The US insists on passing and signing a bill containing negative content related to Taiwan, seriously interfering in China’s internal affairs and seriously violating the one-China principle and the provisions of the three Sino-US joint communiques,” Chen Binhua, spokesman for the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, said Monday. “We express strong dissatisfaction and firm opposition to this.”

Chen also said the Democratic Progressive Party, the ruling party in Taiwan, is trying to rely on the US and use force to seek independence but such an attempt is doomed to failure.

“By providing military aid to Taiwan, the US is trying to stir up a crisis and confrontation in the Taiwan Strait and related region,” Li Haidong, a professor at the Institute of International Relations of China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times in an interview. “The US will then use the chaos and conflicts it creates to make countries in East Asia and Western Pacific regions lean to its side and form an alliance.”

Li said such a move will lead to division in the Asia Pacific region, undermine the important foundation for the stability of Sino-US relations and seriously damage the existing order and security environment for shared prosperity in the Asia-Pacific region.

US commitment

The Taipei government and local media were cheered by the newly-approved US military aid. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen thanked the US Congress for approving it.

Taiwanese Premier Chen Chien-jen said Monday that a peaceful and stable Taiwan Strait is important to peace and prosperity in the world.

He said Taiwan will continue to work with like-minded countries, including the US and all countries in the free democratic camp, to safeguard peace and freedom in the Indo-Pacific region and make the Taiwan Strait area more stable.

The approval of the military aid for Taiwan reaffirmed Washington’s “rock-solid” commitment to helping the island defend itself, especially when this year marks the 45th anniversary of the passage of the US-Taiwan Relations Act, said Anny Hsiao, executive director of the Formosan Association for Public Affairs (FAPA), a Washington-based organization of Taiwanese Americans.

She said the US should give up its “strategic ambiguity” on the China-Taiwan matter and adopt “strategic clarity.”

For several decades, Washington has remained ambiguous about whether it will provide military support to Taiwan if the island is attacked by mainland China. Last year, Biden said on several occasions that the US will support Taiwan if a war breaks out in the Taiwan Strait.

‘Salami tactics’

Xie Feng, Chinese Ambassador to the US, delivered a speech on April 20 at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024.

He warned the US of the consequences of interfering with China’s internal affairs and damaging China’s interests on issues related to Taiwan, Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Xizang (Tibet) and the South China Sea.

”Applying salami tactics and crossing red lines on issues bearing on others’ core interests is just like racing cars on a cliff’s edge, where a crash is almost inevitable,” he said.

“The Taiwan question is the most important and sensitive issue in China-US relations. The so-called ‘Taiwan independence’ is a dead end, and the one-China principle is a red line not to be crossed,” he said.

He added that it’s natural for the US and China to have differences but it’s also important for both sides to properly manage their differences and respect each other’s core interests and major concerns.

Meanwhile, US State Secretary Antony Blinken is set to visit Beijing from Wednesday to Friday, invited by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi.

A senior US State Department official told the media that Blinken during his China trip will convey Washington’s deep concerns” over China’s aid for Russia’s defense industrial base.

It is expected that Blinken’s topics to be discussed with his Chinese counterparts will be Taiwan issues, Chinese industrial overcapacity and the Middle East conflicts.

The Plague

Ah yes, I love telling this story.

A little after the pandemic when stores were able to take people in again, I was working at an essential store. Well, one thing about me when it comes to work, I learn to do everything, so I can do everything. Well one day , heavy traffic in store and I’m on my toes. I’m all over the place. We are getting slammed with people and their stimulus checks lol one of the managers kept telling me to go on lunch but everytime I tried someone needed help, so there I would go . It got to a point where they were about to write me up, As I was helping two families, I had to apologize and excuse myself. Well as I’m walking out about to go to my car , my coworker stops me and says hey this guy needs help. The manager is staring at me, so I say “I’m sorry I can’t , have you tried to radio it in?”

The guy then says “what do you mean you can’t? Is it really that much work?”

I chuckled and said “no sir but I’m on the verge of getting a wri-”

Guy- “then stop wasting time and help me, all your doing is pushing a cart. I haven’t seen you work at all”

Me- “I really can’t , I’m about to get a write up if I don’t go to lunch”

Guy- “you just don’t want to work , lazy m********ker”

Me-”have a good day “ *walked out*

He walked out behind me and he still kept shouting profanity and a racial slur . I turned back around and at that moment all his stuff started falling off the flatbed(he had his flat stacked too high) and onto the gravel outside, his other cart rolling down the steep parking lot ended up getting swiped by an 18 wheeler.

It’s like the stars and planets aligned perfectly on that Sunday afternoon

Decisive: Upon $61 Billion in new U.S. Aid to Ukraine, Russia Declares It Must Now Also Take Sumy and Kharkiv Oblasts

Decisive: Upon $61 Billion in new U.S. Aid to Ukraine, Russia Declares It Must Now Also Take Sumy and Kharkiv Oblasts

As a direct result of the United States approving $61 Billion in new military aid to Ukraine, Russia has announced they are now required to take two additional states of Ukraine – Sumy and Kharkiv — to assure Russian national security.

The aid package from the United States includes long-range ATACMS missiles, which can be used to strike targets inside traditional Russia, so Russia needs a safety zone to protect itself from such launches.

The map below shows the two additional Oblasts (states) that Russia must now take from Ukraine to assure its security:

Sumy and Kharkov Oblasts

Sumy Kharkiv oblasts
Sumy Kharkiv oblasts

In response to the new Aid sent to Ukraine and the attacks by mercenaries on Belgorod, the Russian Army will now expand the objectives of the Special Military Operation (SMO).

The new regions, Kharkov and Sumy will be the main focus of the new Group N (north).

Russian Army - New Group "N"

Russia Army Group N North
Russia Army Group N North

Hal Turner Snap Analysis

This conflict is escalating.  U.S. meddling, and the massive amount of new US financial aid for military gear, is causing it to get worse.

Zelensky could have at least bargained to cede the Donbass for Ukraine’s neutrality but I guess more regions will now be incorporated into the Russian Federation.

When my wife walked out on me, it wasn’t the fact that she abandoned everything and everyone related to “us” that hit me the most (and obliterated “us” in the act), but what she had done in the months prior to her parting with me.

The things she never told me. The things she always vehemently denied.

She broke up with me over the phone, separated by 500 miles of land and water which would become 500 light years soon. (It’s funny how far people can end up from each other once they have been so close — as if they become repelling magnets once pulled apart.)

And only over the phone was she able to admit that she had cheated all along, and slept with him for the first time on her birthday, while I was attending a conference. To make matters worse, before sleeping with him, they had met in the very pub where the former “we” had spend our first date.

(Anyways.)

If there was anything left of “us” whatsoever, her sudden urge of getting as much money as possible from me totally destroyed it. It left me wondering who she really was — and who she had become.

Even when it turned out she was dying from late stage breast cancer more than ten years later, there was something inside me that could and would not forgive her. Even when I saw her in the flesh, with half of her already in the shadows and the rest of her trying to grab on, realizing that all was lost.

Even when I saw her empty eyes, broken and desperate, I just couldn’t.

Because for me, she had died a long time ago.

The former she, that is.

That offends me

I was homeless for about 2 years in the 2010s. it was a very shitty experience for me. i was depressed most of the time and struggling not to just end it all. it was very hard to get a job without a stable address and I got stuck doing dead end temp jobs for very little money. didn’t really have to worry about food because so many church groups came by the shelter to feed us. Plus no matter how nicely you dressed and behaved, it seemed that everyone could tell that you were homeless. and never forget the discrimination towards you by the majority of society.

In fact, It’s miserable. The boredom is ruthless. Once you’ve found something to eat, your work for the day is done. It’s the most lonely feeling you’ll ever experience. Night comes, you see people out with their friends, then you’ll see them go home, and you’re just looking for somewhere dark and safe to sleep. The only way I can describe it is being completely outside the human experience. Your old friends will stop being around you, and your new friends aren’t friends at all. You’ll become acutely aware of every little thing you used to take for granted.

I knew people who claimed to have “good” homeless experiences, but most of them were homeless by choice…why, I’ll never understand. It’s uncomfortable and oppressively lonely.

In India, the probability of following rule is inversely proportional to the status of the person in the society.

The higher you are in the social hierarchy, the lesser rules you usually follow.

  • If you see a vehicle coming on the wrong side, it most likely belongs to a top civil servant or politician.
  • You will rarely find the police officials wearing helmet or seat belt.
  • If you visit to a tourist place and you find a vehicle parked in the ‘No Parking’ Zone, it all likelihood, it must belong to a government officer.

It is a common belief in the government officers and politicians is that they are above law because the officials who are expected to enforce the law are below them.

How can a lower official dare to take action against the higher officials?

And if you even know someone in power, you can use your influence to break the law with immunity.

There is a famous saying in India, “Sainya bhaye kotval, to dar kahe ka?” (When the husband is a police officer, why should you fear?)

When the political leader and government officials who make the law and whose duty is to enforce the law themselves don’t follow the law, it is natural that the rest of citizens too follow their example.

This truth is beautifully stated in Bhagawat Gita, “Whatever action is performed by a great man, common men follow in his footsteps, and whatever standards he sets by exemplary acts, all the world pursues”.

Unlike India, the elite in developed countries don’t get extra-constitutional privileges and protection.

Here is a picture of U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron, traveling in train with common people like a common person.

[1] You can never imagine such humility from any PM, CM, Minister or even an ordinary politician in India.

Top political leaders and civil servants here are like demi-gods in India who are beyond the purview of the laws applicable for the ordinary mortals of the land.

When Indians visit other countries, they know that they don’t have any such immunity from law and they are bound to suffer fine, penalty or arrest if they break the law.

Hence, they become quite law abiding in foreign land.

Only if the people who are in power in India learn to follow the rules, the rest of the Indians can be expected to follow the rules.

It is sure that this is not going to happen any time soon in India.

Footnotes

COVERT INTEL: Russia Has Moved Tactical Nuclear Missiles to their Western Border

COVERT INTEL: Russia Has Moved Tactical Nuclear Missiles to their Western Border

Russia Moves NUCLEAR Iskanders to Finland Border large
Russia Moves NUCLEAR Iskanders to Finland Border large

In response to Finland joining NATO, Russia has moved hypersonic, “Iskander” Tactical Nuclear Missiles to Karelia, Russia.

The Iskander missile has about a 500km range and can travel at about 7500km per hour.

From their location in Karelia, Russia, these new nuclear-tipped missiles can reach most of populated Finland within just a very few short minutes.

The deployment of these missiles is CONFIRMED.  The fact they are already nuclear-tipped is also CONFIRMED.

The map below shows a 500km radius from Karelia, Russia.  Note is covers almost all of Finland – at least all the major population centers, and a good portion of Estonia as well:

Iskander Range

Iskander Range Karelia Russia
Iskander Range Karelia Russia

Super Chill

French Onion Chicken

french onion chicken 104
french onion chicken 104

Sometimes a recipe needs refinement to get to the point of putting it in my recipe book, a little altering and adjustment here and there. Sometimes I test out a recipe and it comes out exactly as I’d hoped. No tweaks needed, no surprising flavors or textures, just spot-on recipe perfection.

 

And then there are times when I make a dish and with just one bite I am completely wowed and all of my expectations are exceeded. This is one of those times! I fully expected this French onion chicken would be delicious. I didn’t think for a minute I’d be fixing this for dinner three times in one week and reheating leftovers for lunch on the in-between days because it was that good.

Sometimes a home-run recipe just sneaks up on you like that.

french onion chicken 103
french onion chicken 103

Honest to goodness, this French onion chicken thing we’ve got going on here is straight-up life changing goodness. All those classic flavors of French onion soup, in a one pan skillet meal the whole family will beg you to fix again and again. And the recipe is so straight forward and simple you won’t mind one bit.

You start out by sauteing thinly sliced yellow onions in a bit of butter and beef broth til browned and very tender, just like you would with classic French onion soup. Then you move those onions over to a separate dish to keep warm while you brown the chicken in the same pan.

french onion chicken 101
french onion chicken 101

Move the onions back to the pan and add flour and beef broth to make the most delicious caramelized onion gravy EVERRRRR and then top your chicken with three kinds of Italian cheese. Bake for about 10 minutes and viola! The sauciest, tastiest 30-ish minute chicken dish you’ve ever made.

This is Fall comfort food at its finest. And I just want to point out that I even though this dish is inspired by soup, it is not a soup, unlike the past four recipes I’ve posted which are all actual real live soup. #soupbsessed #sorrynotsorry #longlivesoupseason

french onion chicken 102
french onion chicken 102

Ingredients

  • 2 medium yellow onionsthinly sliced into rings
  • 3 tablespoons butter
  • 1 cup + 3 tablespoons beef brothdivided
  • 4 boneless skinless chicken breasts pounded to even thickness
  • 1 tablespoon oil
  • salt and pepper to taste
  • 1 teaspoon Italian blend herbs/Italian seasoning (OR ¼ teaspoon dried basil + ¼ teaspoon dried thyme + ½ teaspoon dried oregano)
  • 2 tablespoons flour
  • 4 slices provolone cheese
  • 4 slices swiss cheese
  • ¾ cup parmesan cheese
  • fresh thyme or parsley and cracked black pepper for topping(optional)

Instructions

  • Preheat oven to bake at 400 degrees OR broil on low. In a large oven-safe skillet (see note) over medium-high heat, melt butter. Add onions and 3 tablespoons beef broth and saute onions for 3-4 minutes until translucent. Continue to cook, stirring occasionally so the onions don’t burn, for about 15 minutes longer until browned and very tender. Use tongs or a fork to transfer to a bowl and cover to keep warm.
  • While onions are cooking, prepare the chicken by drizzling with oil, then seasoning with salt and pepper (to taste) and Italian herbs. Once onions have finished cooking and are removed from the pan, cook chicken for 4-5 minutes on each side (don’t clean out the pan between the onions and chicken) until browned on both sides. (Chicken may not be fully cooked through yet, that is okay).
  • Transfer chicken to a plate and cover to keep warm and return the onions to the pan. Sprinkle flour over the onions and stir for 1 minute over medium-high heat. Add beef broth and continue to cook, stirring throughout, until mixture comes to a boil. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Return chicken to pan and spoon some of the sauce over each piece of chicken.
  • Top chicken with one slice of provolone each, then one slice of swiss, then 1/4 of the parmesan cheese. Transfer skillet to your preheated oven and cook for about 10 minutes until chicken is cooked through completely and cheeses are melted.
  • Spoon some of the onions and gravy over the top of the chicken, garnish with thyme or parsley and cracked black pepper, and serve.

Notes

If you don’t have a cast iron skillet, any other oven-safe skillet will do OR you can transfer everything to a casserole dish or baking pan for the baking portion of the recipe.

Found in a tree

not sure of my exact age maybe 11 or 12? I went to a friends house and her mom made us cookies and took us to our soccer practice and stayed the whole time, she was so involved throughout the day , selfless, and loving. I thought how lucky my friend was to have a mom who cared so much. Then I went to another friends house and noticed the same love and interaction with her mom. It baffled me. My mom was always too busy, too self involved, and too irritable to have any relationship with me that was remotely close.

First part of my life, I chalked it up to her job but she retired early at 54 and even though less than 15 minutes away she rarely see me or her grandkids. She says she’s just SO busy.

As a mom myself now, I realize how messed up my childhood was. Us Kids fending for themselves, basically running feral, emotionally starving for attention, a dad who tried (& loved us dearly, that I was certain of) but he didn’t quite have the time (worked full-time) or tools. I had a mom that I rarely saw (though I was thankful bc when our paths crossed the interaction was not good).

growing up, We walked on eggshells. Don’t upset mom. We weren’t allowed to share food with friends but that was embarrassing and rude so I gave my portions to my friends & didn’t eat to help save food so my mom wouldn’t get mad. I did so many things “so mom won’t get mad.” She was physically abusive which I thought was normal as well. It was always about her; her desires and wishes. The rest of us had no say—-even my dad. she moved us all over the country. 3 different high schools. Leaving behind friends. I thought it was all normal.

I vowed to be present & loving to my kids. I vowed to be a mom who did the little things, who listened, who took the time, who apologized if needed, who didn’t scream, yell, hit, spank, slap; who met more than their basic needs and who genuinely cares about them and is interested in them.

Destruction of the family

My husband, son and I recently attended a friend’s wedding. The bride looked beautiful, the venue was well-chosen and the little details were perfect. Everyone was having a wonderful time.

And then the speeches started.

It was a well-known fact that the groom had hounded the bride for over a year to go on their first date, and that topic featured in every speech to a greater or lesser degree. The parents of the groom had a couple embarrassing stories to tell about his childhood, but they brought it back to how happy they were for him and how he deserved such a perfect wife. The brother and sister of the bride had a few ribs about her, too, but again, they finished on a loving, positive note.

The same cannot be said for the sister of the groom.

She was already a little…toasted by the time she hit the podium, so there were portions of her speech that were a little difficult to catch. But the jist was clear: her brother was an oaf and no amount of lipstick would improve the beauty of that pig.

From humiliating stories to hurtful jabs, she just kept barreling through her obviously not proofread speech, and everyone in the room was staring at their plates in embarrassment. I kept waiting for her to sigh and start on the positives, but the sigh never came. She finished her speech with a final zinger and stepped down to a very light smattering of grateful applause.

Our table was silent. My husband, who is not my brother’s biggest fan by any means, turned to me and said, “promise me you won’t do that to Dylan”.

George Clooney called 14 of his closest friends and said “Hey, mark Sept 27th, 2013, on your calendar. Everyone’s going to come to my house for dinner.”

The 14 friends belonged to varying economic backgrounds. One of them was married to Cindy Crawford while another was riding his bicycle on his way to work at a bar in Texas airport.

When ‘The Boys’ (the group’s name) arrived at Clooney’s house, they found 14 designer suitcases placed on the table.

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main qimg dd1d35b0f86308b28c5e93d3b29c1877 lq

And then- Clooney said:

Listen, I want you guys to know how much you’ve meant to me and how much you mean in my life. I came to L.A; I slept on your couch. I’m so fortunate in my life to have all of you, and I couldn’t be where I am today without all of you. So, it was really important to me that while we’re still all here together, that I give back. So I want you all to open your suitcases.

There was $1 million inside every suitcase, arranged in $20 notes.

[1] Clooney continued:

I know we’ve all been through some hard times, some of you are still going through it. You don’t have to worry about your kids; you don’t have to worry about, you know, school, you don’t have to worry about paying your mortgage.

(Clooney also paid their taxes so they could pocket the entire $1 million. That’s an additional $3.5 million altogether.)

One of his friends, Rande Gerber (married to Crawford) refused to accept the gift, so Clooney made a condition – either they all accept the gift, or nobody gets it.

Gerber (who donated his share to charity) said “This is who George is. That was September 27th, 2013. Now, September 27th, 2014, he marries Amal. That’s good karma right there.”

Clooney is a legend.

In other news- “George Clooney is a piece of shit”, said his 15th closest friend.

Footnotes

Scott Ritter: NATO Just CROSSED Putin’s RED LINE! The Severity Of The Ukraine War ESCALATED

Slot Machine Millionaire

“Guys, I just developed this bulletproof liquid. The Germans won’t be able to kill us now!”

These words were said by Kinjekitile Ngwale, a Tanzanian witchdoctor (and the hero of this story). But first, understand what was going on in Tanzania at that time.(It was called Tanganyika)


In the late 1800s, Britain, Germany, Portugal, Belgium and France storm into Africa, grabbing as much land as they can in the name of colonialism. The Germans in particular enter Tanganyika and claim it as their own.

See those two Africans holding the dead animal? Yeah, those are slaves.

See, Germans are efficient. Instead of bringing in labour from their country, which was a tedious affair, they forced indigenous tribes to work for them. They also imposed heavy taxation on them, because why not.

Naturally, those tribes were not happy.

So what do you do when some white guys take your livestock and steal your women?

Simple. You REBEL AGAINST THOSE ASSHATS!

That’s where our valiant revolutionary, Mr. Kinjekitile Ngwale, comes in. He told his fellow Africans that he was a prophet sent by the ancestors to get rid of the Germans. So he became the leader of the rebellion. Just like that.

One tiny problem though…the Germans had GUNS. Lots of guns. The Africans only had spears and arrows. If you’ve ever played rock paper scissors you know how it feels when you put paper and everyone puts scissors. That’s how the Africans felt.

So Mr. Kinjekitile Ngwale came up with an idea…

Using his extensive knowledge as a witchdoctor, he mixed water, castor oil, and millet seeds. He claimed the concoction, when applied on the body, would turn the German bullets into water, essentially rendering them bullet proof. The African tribes applied this liquid and charged straight to the nearest German base, confident of their leader’s magic.

As soon as the Germans saw the Africans approaching, they…well…read this excerpt:

Several thousand Maji warriors, led by a spirit medium, marched toward the Reich’s compound at Mahenge. As soon as the rebels were within firing range, soldiers, backed by two machine guns, laid down a lethal fire. Row upon row of Maji warriors marched toward the guns, but were cut down.Hundreds were killed or wounded before breaking off the engagement.

Kinjeketile was later captured and hanged by the Germans for ‘treason’. Despite his grand bullet proof mishap, he is still considered a hero for stirring nationalism among the Tanzanians.

So yes. Even failure can make you a hero.

Hookup Culture

The US has secretly offered a stunning array of concessions to Ansarallah to halt its naval operations in support of Gaza – to no avail.

APR 11, 2024

By Khalil Nasrallah

We favor a diplomatic solution. We know that there is no military solution.

– US Special Envoy for Yemen Timothy Lenderking

In a special briefing on 3 April – nearly six months after Yemen launched its far-reaching naval operations to debilitate Israel’s ability to conduct war on Gaza – US Special Envoy for Yemen Timothy Lenderking touted the importance of seeking diplomatic solutions in Yemen

instead of the military ones his government has been loudly advocating for months.

Lenderking’s stance contrasted sharply with Washington’s announcement in December of a multinational coalition against Yemen’s Ansarallah-led forces, aimed at safeguarding international shipping in the Red Sea and effectively protecting Israeli-linked trade from Yemen’s sweeping naval blockade.

But as tensions heighten and regional allies have hesitated

to join the US–UK coalition in fear of direct Yemeni retaliatory strikes, the US and its allies have quietly sought to entice Sanaa into negotiations through offers conveyed by Omani and other international mediators who maintain ties with Yemen’s de facto government in Sanaa.

Lenderking’s position may, in fact, reflect an astounding set of private US promises made via intermediaries to Ansarallah behind closed doors – pledges that essentially tick every box on the resistance movement’s wish list.

‘Stop your Gaza support, and we will give you everything’

Informed Yemeni sources reveal to The Cradle that the US offered Sanaa – in exchange for its neutrality in the ongoing Gaza war – “an acknowledgment of its legitimacy.”

This would involve severely reducing the role of the Saudi-backed Presidential Council led by Rashid al-Alimi and accelerating the signing of a roadmap with Riyadh and Abu Dhabi to end the aggression against Yemen.

The sources further reveal that the Americans pledged to immediately release withheld Yemeni public sector salaries from the National Saudi Bank, lift the country’s siege entirely, reopen Sanaa Airport, ease restrictions on the port of Hodeidah, and facilitate a comprehensive prisoner exchange agreement with all involved parties.

In terms of reconstruction, the sources say:

[Washington] pledged to repair the damages, remove foreign forces from all occupied Yemeni lands and islands, and remove Ansarallah from the State Department’s ‘terrorism list’ – as soon as they stop their attacks in support of Gaza.

Despite these tempting offers, which have been the subject of negotiations between Sanaa and Riyadh for over two years, the Yemenis remained steadfast. Ansarallah leader Abdel Malik al-Houthi’s consistent position, as reiterated in his speeches, has been to continue operations as long as Israeli aggression against Gaza persists.

Ansarallah’s ‘military negotiation’

From the outset, marked by Israel’s declaration of a state of war following the 7 October Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Sanaa threw its weight behind the Palestinian resistance, launching comprehensive drone and ballistic missile attacks against the southern Israeli-occupied port city of Umm al-Rashrash, known as Eilat.

In response to the Yemeni salvos and interception attempts by US warships, Washington initiated a campaign of threats against Sanaa, which in turn demanded an immediate cessation of aggression against Gaza as a precondition for halting its military operations. Their exact words to the Americans were: “We are not within the circle of those you dictate to.”

Matters only intensified as Ansarallah began deploying previously unused naval strategies – not even utilized against Yemen’s aggressors, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, in nine years of battles – with al-Houthi vowingto obstruct Israeli ships in the Red Sea.

This strategy was actualized days later on 19 November, when Yemeni naval commandos stormed an Israeli-linked vessel, the Galaxy Leader, and its crew, redirecting the ship to Yemeni shores.

This daring naval action prompted the US to pursue dual strategies: the first, involving intimidation and preparation for a naval coalition to support Israel, and the second, encouraging diplomatic engagements through Arab and international mediators to halt Sanaa’s impactful naval operations.

Sanaa’s leadership not only dismissed these overtures but expanded the naval blockade to include non-Israeli vessels en route to Israeli ports and extended their theater of operations as far as the Indian Ocean– to cut off Israel’s “alternative long route” shipments.

Yemen’s firm refusal to succumb to either enticement or intimidation led the US and the UK to initiate aggressive military operations against the war-torn Persian Gulf state three months ago, aiming to neutralize the Yemeni threat and halt maritime attacks in support of Gaza under the guise of protecting maritime navigation freedom.

As a countermeasure, Sanaa escalated its military response by expanding operations to target not only US and British ships but also introducing advanced weaponry into its arsenal.

This included the sinking of the British cargo ship Rubymar, attacking other vessels, and broadening the theater of operations to the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean – a strategic move to ramp up pressure on those executing the brutal war on Gaza.

Yemen’s military checkmate

In light of the current situation, where the US has acknowledged the futility of its military strategy and is clamoring to devise a diplomatic solution, Sanaa has clearly demonstrated its relevance to any and all West Asian geopolitical calculations.

Its stunning achievements of the past six months include Sanaa’s ability to disrupt the Israeli economy by cutting off or lengthening trade routes for Israel’s essential imports. This can be seen most notably in Eilat, where the operational disruption of Israel’s southernmost port has led to significant job cuts by the port’s operating company and paralyzed shipping entirely.

Ansarallah has also thwarted retaliatory measures by the west’s most celebrated naval forces, made a mockery of their ramshackle “coalition,” and created complex challenges for US hegemonic ambitions in the Persian Gulf, both presently and in the long term.

Moreover, Yemen has showcased remarkable political and military maneuverability, demonstrating that a single resolved Arab state can provide the Palestinian resistance with a potent negotiating tool.

Importantly, through its military operations in the region’s waterways, Sanaa has solidified its position within the Axis of Resistance, transforming into one of the most effective forces in the Axis’ Unity of Fronts strategy. All, while drawing British and American naval assets into vulnerable – and unwinnable – positions and successfully hindering Israel’s shipping connections with the world.

A rising regional power

According to al-Houthi’s most recent count, Yemen’s numerous military operations have launched over 520 missiles and drones to target naval assets and areas in southern Israel. Ninety vessels have been targeted to date, with 34 operations conducted only between 4–5 March using 125 ballistic and winged missiles and drones.

In contrast, the US and UK have launched nearly 500 raids since their ill-conceived naval coalition began ops, resulting in the martyrdom of nearly forty Yemenis.

Six months into the war, Yemen continues to demonstrate its strategic capabilities on land, in regional waterways, and even in the world’s oceans. Yemeni officials hint at further military “surprises” still to come, which they may deploy depending on Israeli actions in Gaza and the broader region, as well as the actions of its US enabler, which Sanaa views as the most destructive and destabilizing force for West Asia’s security and stability.

Black Sabbath “Heaven and Hell” REACTION & ANALYSIS by Vocal Coach/Opera Singer

Fun.

  1. Girls often understand what a guy is implying, but they may feign innocence.
  2. Women tend to develop feelings for those who maintain distance from them.
  3. Many women enjoy engaging in what society deems “promiscuous” behavior, yet they recoil from being labeled as such.
  4. When deeply in love, women may exhibit childish tendencies around their partners.
  5. If a woman truly loves a man, she’ll likely inform him when other men attempt to flirt with her.
  6. Cooking for someone often signifies care and affection from a woman.
  7. A woman may choose to be intimate with a man based on his character and identity.
  8. Beware of the woman whose father was the first to break her heart; she may have deep-seated trust issues.

Green Chile Ground Beef Burritos

Burritos with a ground beef filling are a favorite in our family.

green chile burrito
green chile burrito

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds ground beef
  • 1 onion, diced
  • 2 (4 ounce) cans diced green chiles
  • 3 cups water
  • 4 cloves garlic, pressed
  • 3 to 4 tablespoons all-purpose flour*
  • 1 to 2 cups water*
  • 1 can El Pato tomato sauce*

Instructions

    1. Brown ground beef; add onion and garlic and toss until onion is soft.
    2. Add green chiles.
    3. Sprinkle flour over it to make a crumbly mix.
    4. Add water and El Pato to desired thickness. Simmer.
    5. Serve on warm tortillas, with any topping you like…sour cream, salsa, cheese, cilantro, jalapeños, etc.

Notes

* or use 1 can El Pato green enchilada sauce – or use homemade

You’ve been dating him for a year and a half at age 19, and told him that you still want to wait — that is your right. You get to decide who you want to have sex with, and when, and that includes the right to wait for as long as you want, or even to never have sex at all if that is your wish.

He, on the other hand, clearly wanted sex to be part of his relationship, and after waiting for you for a year and a half, he found he could no longer be happy in a sexless relationship, and what you are offering is not what he wants — so he did the rational thing and left you in order to search for a partner that has desires more in line with his.

Many of the other answers here place blame on him, and for example claim that if he truly loved you, he’d be willing to wait, or that clearly he was only interested in getting laid. Such allegations are unjust, it’s quite possible to genuinely love someone, but still to realize that you have to leave because the two of you aren’t compatible. And accusing someone of only wanting to get laid after staying in a sexless relationship with you for a year and a half is utterly unreasonable. (in addition to that, there is NOTHING wrong with wanting sex as part of a relationship and being unwilling to stay in sexless relationships.)

But other answers place blame on you and say for example that it’s “selfish” for a woman to refuse to sleep with her partner. This is nonsense. Sex should be mutual and pleasurable and wanted by everyone involved, and is not some kind of service that women should “provide” to men if you’re not into it. Your body is your own, and you should say yes to sex when you genuinely want to, and only then.

Neither of you are to blame. You want different things, so you’re not compatible with each other, and you’re likely both better off looking for a partner that shares your ideas about what a relationship should be like.

  • You have a desperate need for mental engagement. You are starving but then you suddenly see the new trailer of Sherlock Holmes. Before you know it, hours have passed without any sensation of hunger.
  • Sleeping in a cold room can help you slim down. According to research conducted by commonwealth university, just one month of sleeping in a 66-degree room helped increase the subject’s fat-burning ability by 10%.
  • The researcher found that you can read faster with a single wide column, but still, people prefer shorter lines & multiple columns.
  • You Quit in 2 situations
    • When a challenge is tougher and you have beginner-level skills.
    • When you have advanced-level skills and the challenge is too easy.
  • All your habits of thinking & acting are stored in your subconscious mind. Even just thinking about doing something different from what you’re accustomed to, will make you feel tense and uneasy.
  • The research found that for each hour a person between the ages of 40 and 59 spends watching TV, their risk of developing Alzheimer’s increases by 1.3 %.
  • Listening to high-frequency music makes you feel relaxed, calm, and happy.
  • Fake smiles can hurt you. The researcher looked at the behaviour of bus drivers, & found that these people withdraw from their work by putting smiles for show & it has long term deleterious health effects.
  • Psychologists found that people struggling to make complex decisions did best when they were distracted and were not able to think consciously about the choice at all.

What you Gain from this space by becoming its member.

  • No more random motivational screenshots & one-liner answers, you will get facts that are backed up by the latest research papers.
  • Now you don’t need to waste your valuable time on understanding the difficult terms of a research paper.
  • No Bullshit, pure research-based information with real references which you can check by yourself.

The fact that Lavrov met with Xi while Yellen was there speaks volumes !

“In light of the recent aggressive statements by the French political leaders, who openly announced plans to send troops to Ukraine, I should like to bring up the anniversary of a crushing defeat that Paris sustained in Vietnam, which marked the beginning of the collapse of the French colonial empire.

We believe that remembering those events should be a warning for all those in the Elysee Palace who have been literally haunted by Napoleon’s shadow these days.

The Battle of Dien Bien Phu, often referred to as the Vietnamese Stalingrad, claimed thousands of lives.

The brutal confrontation took place from March 13 to May 7, 1954 and marked a turning point in the eight-year war between the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and France’s colonial forces.

In 1946-1954, France, supported by Washington, unleashed the Indochina War in a bid to maintain its influence in the region after World War II.

It should be specifically noted that the French colonial troops were a motley mix of foreign legionnaires, mercenaries of all stripes, including Nazi fugitives hiding from trial and hoping to start over with a clean slate with Paris’s help.

However, they dirtied it again, as the brutality of their methods had no limit.

Just like the Americans who came to the Vietnamese land later, what they did was close to scorched-earth tactics.

For 54 days, the Vietnamese revolutionary army demonstrated extraordinary military valour in the battle of Dien Bien Phu. They also appeared exceptionally skilled in the art of war.

In fact, it became so bad that the French soldiers hastily left their positions as soon as they heard that the Vietnamese were advancing.

The decisive phase of the battle, the general assault, began on May 1.

By that time, the garrison’s morale was close to rack bottom – the French were in panic.

The total death toll was over 2,000 killed on the French side. Nearly 12,000 French troops were captured – only a few managed to escape from Dien Bien Phu.

The most capable French troops in Vietnam – paratroopers and legionnaires – almost ceased to exist.

The surrender of the French garrison of Dien Bien Phu on May 7, 1954 finally broke the morale of the French command, extinguishing any faith or hope for a good ending of the war in Vietnam.

Before the start of active operations, the hawks in Paris boasted they would ‘defeat the crowd of Vietnamese peasants armed with flintlock rifles and bamboo sticks in just a couple of weeks.’

Along with a crushing military defeat, France suffered high reputational losses, as its international influence as a former member of the anti-Hitler coalition fell dramatically.

The very next day after the fall of Dien Bien Phu, ceasefire talks began in Geneva.

The war ended with a convincing victory of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the withdrawal of French troops in July 1954.

Ten years later, in 1964, remembering that defeat, French President Charles de Gaulle warned US President Lyndon Johnson against a military operation in Vietnam, prophetically calling it a very risky venture.

But France then had an independent voice and the capacity to pursue an independent foreign policy.”

main qimg b106e318cdcba5ae72a06ea0560d5179
main qimg b106e318cdcba5ae72a06ea0560d5179

Photo: Vietnamese President Hồ Chí Minh and members of the Party Central Committee (from left to right: Phạm Văn Đồng, Trường Chinh, and General Võ Nguyên Giáp) convened to decide the opening of the 1953-1954 Winter-Spring Offensive and the Điện Biên Phủ Campaign. The meeting took place in Phú Đình Commune, Định Hóa District, Thái Nguyên Province, in 1953.

Excerpt from remarks by Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova during the briefing, April 10, 2024. Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation

The worst case for the US is that the US starts a war and all US ships within 2,000 miles of the China will be sunk.

Not only does China has the DF-21 which has a range of 1,200 miles. That is actually a medium range ASBM. It hit Mach 10 at terminal phase. China also has DF-26, which hits Mach 18 at terminal phase.

China is now onto their second generation hypersonic wave glider. These are even scarier than the ASBMs. As they come in at a hundred feet above the Ocean surface. At Mach 8 for the one type and Mach 12 for the second type.

The second generations has a range of almost 5,000 MILES. In other words, it can hit Hawaii and ships on the other side of Hawaii, towards the CA coast.

So yeah, the US should not be messing with China as the Chinese can sink all US ships in the Western Pacific if they want to.

Carne Asada Guacamole Cheese Burrito

carne asada guacamole cheese burrito
carne asada guacamole cheese burrito

Cook: 1 hr 30 min | Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

Carne Asada

  • 1 pound sirloin steaks
  • 1/4 cup coconut sauce
  • 1/4 cup lime juice
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1 teaspoon chili powder
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Guacamole

  • 2 ripe avocados
  • 1/4 cup red onion, diced
  • 1/4 cup chopped cilantro
  • 1 small jalapeño, seeds removed and finely minced
  • 1 tablespoon lime juice
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Burrito

  • 4 burrito size tortillas
  • 1 cup shredded cheese (Cheddar, Monterey Jack or a blend)

Optional

  • Fresh cilantro leaves
  • Limes, cut into wedges

Instructions

  1. Marinate the Carne Asada. In a shallow dish, combine the soy sauce, lime juice, garlic, chili powder, salt and pepper. Place the steak in the marinade, turning to coat it evenly. Cover the dish with plastic wrap and refrigerate for at least 1 hour, or preferably overnight, to allow the flavors to meld.
  2. Cut the avocados in half, remove the pits, and scoop the flesh into a bowl. Mash the avocados with a fork until it reaches your desired consistency (chunky or smooth).
  3. Add the diced red onion, chopped cilantro, minced jalapeño, lime juice, salt, and pepper to the mashed avocados. Mix everything together until well combined. Taste and adjust seasoning as needed.
  4. Heat grill or stovetop grill pan over medium-high heat. Remove the marinated steak from the refrigerator and let it sit at room temperature for about 15 minutes.
  5. Grill the steak for about 4 to 5 minutes per side, or until it reaches 145 degrees F for medium rare or your desired level of doneness. Transfer the grilled steak to a cutting board and let it rest for a few minutes before slicing it thinly against the grain.
  6. Heat the tortillas in a dry skillet or over an open flame until they become warm and pliable. On each tortilla, place a generous amount of cheese. Add a few slices of the grilled Carne Asada on top of the guacamole. Garnish with fresh cilantro.
  7. Serve the Carne Asada Guacamole Cheese Tacos immediately with lime wedges on the side for squeezing over the tacos.

Nutrition

Per serving: 550 Calories; 266.6 Calories from fat; 29.6g Total Fat (9.1g Saturated Fat; 12.2g Monounsaturated Fat); 84.2mg Cholesterol; 1015.3mg Sodium; 40.2g Total Carbohydrate; 9.4g Dietary Fiber; 33.5 g Protein; 18mg Iron; 895.3mg Potassium; 0.3mg Thiamin; 0.3 mg Riboflavin; 13.9mg Niacin (NE); 0.8mg Vitamin B6; 1.3mcg Vitamin B12; 5.2mg Zinc; 32.8mcg Selenium; 105.3mg Choline

This recipe is an excellent source of Protein, Thiamin, Riboflavin, Niacin (NE), Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Selenium, and Zinc. It is a good source of Potassium, Iron, and Choline.

Imagine being lost in the desert, desperate for water. Crawling through the sand. Praying to find something.

Your hike went wrong and now you can’t find anyone. You are sure you’ve gone miles in the wrong direction.

You lay in the sand. Waiting to die.

 

Then.

You hear a phone ring.

That’s right. A phone. There are phone booths in the middle of deserts – sometimes.

One such phone booth was situated in the Mojave Desert, 12 miles from the nearest type of pavement.

A man, Godfrey Daniels, read in a magazine, about this strange desert phone booth.

He then became obsessed with this phone booth. Who calls this phone booth? What is it for? How? What? Why? What does it all mean?

Who would answer a phone booth in the middle of nowhere?

He then began calling this phone booth every single day. Trying to find out who would answer.

Every day, he got up, he called the booth. Then, later in the day, he called again. This continued for months.

Eventually, he called and it was busy. This was a major breakthrough. It meant someone was using the phone!!!

He waited a few minutes. Then he called again. Still busy. Waited a few minutes – called again.

A woman picked up.

They talked for a bit. She was a local miner who occasionally used this phone booth. That’s all she knew.

He then made a website about this mysterious phone booth. And people from all over the country started calling it, wondering who would answer if they decided to call the desert.

(Source: The Mojave Phone Booth. Betsy Malloy.)

This phone booth took on this mystical status in American sub-culture for a brief time in the late 1990s, referred to as “The loneliest phonebooth on earth.” It became a minor spiritual destination.

LA Times reporter John Gigliorma made a journey out to the booth and met all sorts of people that arrived for any number of reasons, boredom, curiosity, spiritual journeys, adventure – as it would be like visiting mars, wanting proof it existed, wanting to see who would call them while they were there.

He even met a man, Rick Karr, who said he’d been commanded by God to go answer the phone. Karr spent 32 days camped out by the booth answering phone calls. (Source: Reaching Way Out. LA Times. Glionna, James)

Eventually, the chaos got to be out of hand and the park service requested the phone booth be removed as it was creating litter and a safety hazard as randoms from the internet had no business being in this extreme region (also home to Death Valley).

In turn, the phone company had it taken out.

But then –

Someone came and put a gravestone commemorating the Phone booth.

But the gravestone started to attract more trouble as people began arriving from all directions to pay tribute.

The park service eventually had the gravestone removed as well and that concluded the legacy of this magic phone booth.

RIP Mojave Phone Booth.

Around 1988, our strict Muslim, much older next door neighbor signaled me to come into her home. I noticed that she had nervously glanced around before extending the invitation, and rushed me inside before closing the door.

During our brief visit, she talked of being a pediatrician in Iran before the Shah fell. She also mentioned she needed two items for the meal she was preparing, but she had to wait for her son to return to take her to a nearby grocery. It was a gorgeous California day, and failing to remember what I had learned about strict Islamic doctrine from two Iranian college friends, I offered to walk with her to the store. She recoiled in horror, so I changed my offer to drive her. Her response remained mortified, her countenance stiff, her eyes glaring at me.

Several uncomfortable moments passed; I decided I should leave and started to rise from my chair. She grabbed my arm, gripping it tightly and quietly said:

“You are proof there is hope for the rest of us.”

I consider her statement among the most profound ever said to me.

It’s 2024. This is reality.

Toilet Toms Van

When I was 18 I worked at a fast food place called Hardees. For those not familiar, this is the same chain as Carls Jr. If you’re not familiar with either of those, it’s basically like a McDonalds or Burger King.

My normal days off were Sunday and Monday, but I had asked for Saturday off one week because I had a date. My manager let me off, and when I left work Friday night I waved and said “See you Tuesday!” on my way out the door.

Saturday night I go on my date and everything goes fine. When I get home my roommate tells me my manager called five times wanting to know why I wasn’t at work. The store was closed by that point so I decided I would just go in the next day (Sunday) and remind her that I had the day off.

Sunday afternoon I go to the store and ask to speak to the manager. She immediately starts reading me the riot act about not coming in to work and not calling to let them know I would be there. I let her get it all out of her system, then I pointed to the schedule on the wall right outside of her office and said “I wasn’t here because you told me a week ago I could have yesterday off.”

She looked at the schedule, looked back at me, and the light popped on. “That’s right,” she said, “I remember you saying see you Tuesday when you left Friday night. I’m sorry, it totally slipped my mind.”

I was fairly pissed off, but I decided that it wasn’t worth making a big deal about. I told her not to worry about it, and again said “See you Tuesday” as I left the store.

When I got to the restaurant on Tuesday I was told to go to the manager’s office immediately. When I walked in she started off by saying “Why weren’t you here yesterday?”

I gave her a blank look, then finally responded “Because it’s my day off.”

She responded “No, I changed the schedule Sunday, and since you had Saturday off I needed you to work yesterday. Why weren’t you here?”

I must have been looking at her like she had two heads at this point.

“What time did you change the schedule on Sunday? When I was here at two o’clock we looked at the schedule together, and I was still scheduled to be off yesterday.”

“I changed it around eight o’clock Sunday night.”

“So what you’re saying is that you changed my schedule on my day off, and scheduled me to work the next day, and expected me to somehow know you had done this without telling me about it?”

That’s when she went too far. “I’m your boss, not your mother. It’s your job to keep track of your schedule, I shouldn’t have to do that for you.”

I took off my hat and my apron and replied, “You know what, you don’t actually have to do anything for me. I’m done.” I handed her the hat and apron and walked out the door, didn’t look back.

Beef Brisket Burritos

beef brisket burritos
beef brisket burritos

Ingredients

  • 18 slices beef brisket
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil or butter
  • 6 (10 inch) flour tortillas
  • 1 cup Mexican cheese, grated
  • 1/2 onion, sliced
  • 1 jalapeño, deseeded and diced
  • 2 tomatoes, sliced
  • Cholula sauce
  • Lettuce, shredded

Instructions

  1. Warm the brisket slices.
  2. Put the oil or butter into a large skillet over medium-low heat. When oil is heated, or when butter is melted, quickly warm the flour tortillas on both sides.
  3. Place slices of brisket down the middle of the tortilla. Top with cheese, onion slices, some jalapeño, some tomato, Cholula sauce, and top with lettuce. Carefully roll the tortilla around the filling, tucking the ends to prevent any of the filling from falling out.

Yeehaww!

China sez no to buying US T-bills

main qimg 2f5303f9ee4bc77b6afa9333c5b44585
main qimg 2f5303f9ee4bc77b6afa9333c5b44585

In short the interest on US debt is $1.2 trillion and rising. Just the interest. Much of that debt is also OLD debt at lower yield and yields are rising fast.

outlook
outlook

Now of course somebody will say USD will NOT collapse it will still remain dominant etc.

But here’s the thing, it doesn’t need to collapse.

Western elections for instance. You do not need to convince ALL the voters of your position only the marginals. The 1–2% at the marginals can cause an entirely different party/government to be elected… hence, why political parties always target the marginals.

Small niggles become bigger problems very quickly.

This is a harsh truth

Anyone of them can fall

I remember in 2010 when people spoke of BlackBerry being a trillion dollar valued company by 2020

It had a market value of $ 50.7 Billion at its peak

It made smartphones and had a Global share of nearly 16%

Then suddenly Apple and Google surged ahead. The Touch Screen ended the Mini QWERTY Keyboard and today BlackBerry survives on IOT patents


That’s the problem with Tech companies

A New Direction in Technology can render then null and void in six months after decades of existence

Hewlett Packard was once valued at around $ 130 Billion at its peak but today it’s around $ 27–28 Billion

That’s because nobody in 2010 expected that your super fast internet could be available on your smartphone that would render a lot of Laptops as vestigial


So let’s see

Google

They have a lot of services. A whole lot of services. Yet are they monetized?

Google makes 80% or more of its Revenue from Advertising

The entire Google infrastructure seems to be entirely oriented towards micro advertising

They have YouTube, Google Search Engine, Chrome to help them build enough customers to generate a huge advertising income

Google has a near monopoly today as far as YT and Chrome and the Search Engine are concerned and thus so far it’s advertising revenue is safe

Chance of a Fall :- Bleak in the next 5 years. Google seems safe. Unless a rival comes up in the next five years at a evolved scale either in searching or browsing or video streaming

Amazon

Amazon has AWS but the near monopoly is absent.

Google, Microsoft, Huawei, Alibaba, Oracle all compete with Amazon AWS

AWS is where the big profits are

The E Commerce generates moolah but not profits

The E Commerce is just the source for Data like Google Search Engine or Chrome

Chance of Fall :- AWS has a low tech threshold and will lose share to Huawei and Alibaba especially in the emerging economies minus India

I see their value falling in 5 years and their market cap.

Unless they step up their technological edge

Meta

Meta is guaranteed to cease to exist unless they manage to get Metaverse rolling

How many people use Facebook anymore?

Instagram helps get a lot of advertising and revenue space but Instagram is slowly being phased out by TikTok and Douyin and Live Streaming apps

Chance of a Fall :- High in the next 5 years. Very high. I doubt Meta in its present version will exist beyond 2034

Apple

Apples bulk revenues come from its products like Iphone and Ipads and other products with Iphone earning almost 70% of Apples revenue

It’s profits come from its services like Icloud etc

It also has Valuable Proprietary software

Plus it’s own Chip architecture

However that also demonstrates Apples weakness

Everything is linked to that one IPhone

If the Iphone and it’s popularity tanks then Apple will have a steep fall

I am sure Iphone will tank in China and in many countries that would sell both Chinese Phones and Apple in the coming years

I don’t see any innovation by Apple and their advantage of a Smartphone with its own Ecosystem will soon be replicated by others

Once EVs become more popular, the next player is one who can integrate his EV Mobile platform to the Smartphone and handle processing for both

Apple ain’t that player

Chance of a fall :- 50% in the next 10 years. I doubt if the company will keep a $ 3 T valuation in a decade. It may fall to maybe $ 375-400 Billion in the next decade


So according to me

Meta > Apple > Amazon > Google

Highest chance of a fall is Meta

Lowest is Google

Again unless the Tech evolution climbs to a whole new level and suddenly Google loses its key market and competitive edge

Male Standards Are Frowned Upon

Michael Roberts

Michael Roberts has an interesting piece on China’s economy today. The disfunctional nature of western capitalism- so celebrated by the Ideologist/Economists- as it disappears up into its own orifice has reached the stage at which it pleads for help from the competition. The truth about the ‘market model’ is that it only works when it has evolved into a series of mutually reinforcing monopolies controlling the state and, through it, society. That’s what the capitalists call ‘freedom’- one chance in a million of becoming a dictator.

“The recent nonsense issued by the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on China’s ‘overcapacity’ and ‘unfair subsidies’ to its industries is particularly pathetic. As Renaud Bertrand put it: “the so-called threat of China’s industrial overcapacity” is a buzzword that actually means that China is simply too competitive, and by asking it to address this, what Yellen is truly asking of China is akin to a fellow sprinter asking Usain Bolt to run a less fast because he can’t keep up.”

“….(Renaud) Bertrand..: “despite the very low prices for its EVs or solar panels, Chinese companies involved still make a profit (industrial profits are rising at double digit growth), and they DO charge higher prices abroad than at home. The competitiveness of Chinese companies is overwhelming: today, in scores of industries – like solar or EVs – there is simply no way for American or European companies to compete with Chinese ones. This is the real issue: Yellen and Western leaders are afraid that if things keep going, China will simply eat everyone’s lunch.”

“China is the only country in the world that produces all categories of goods classified by the World Customs Organization (WCO). This gives it a key advantage when it comes to end prices: when you want to build something in China you can literally find the entire supply chain for it at home. Bertrand: “China has become an innovation powerhouse. In 2023 it filed roughly as many patents as the rest of the world combined and it’s now estimated to lead 37 out of the 44 critical technologies for the future. All this too has implications when it comes to the final prices of its products.”….

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2024/04/10/chinas-unfair-overcapacity/

Posted by: bevin | Apr 10 2024 15:28 utc | 12

This Is How You Deal With Pronoun Warriors

TekWar as the mystery

Not me but my Dad (may he Rest In Peace). Dad had been sitting in a Tank during the Korean War but he had been stationed in Germany. Well, tanks from back in the 1950s did not have the noise suppression systems of the tanks of today and the technologies we have for Hearing Protection were practically non-existent; Dad had severe hearing loss before he ever met Mom.

Some time after their divorce, Dad had finally obtained some really GOOD hearing aids. He got home really tired and was traipsing through his kitchen when suddenly there was an unfamiliar noise. He spun around with his weapon drawn and…almost shot his new refrigerator, which he had never heard kick on before. 😀

EDIT!: Thank you to everybody so much for all the likes!

I am getting a FAQ for this post; here is the answer so I won’t have to spam it in the comments:

After Dad was out of the Army, he went to another service branch and then FINALLY left the Military altogether. But then he became a police officer.

As a Police Officer at the time the incident happened with the refrigerator, he had just gotten off a long shift and had a case of nerves that had not settled yet. Sometimes police are jittery after a long or difficult shift. He walked in his door and had not yet disarmed himself when he heard the fridge kick on for the very first time. He lived alone then, so that weird unfamiliar noise startled him and he reacted like he had been trained to react for his entire adult life. Dad practiced excellent trigger discipline and did not actually FIRE the weapon; he just aimed at the fridge.

Please keep in mind, this was MULTIPLE DECADES ago and where he worked at the time, Police could bring and use their own firearms on-duty, not just their Service pieces that were kept in lockers at the station.

Take it easy, everybody. Dad thought it was funny after it happened, it was told as a funny story, nothing bad happened. No Big Deal because nobody actually got hurt. The ‘danger’ has been in the past since I was a toddler.

I hope this clears things up enough for everybody. 🙂

I worked at a grocery store when I was a teenager. Human Resources was called in to interview the employees about a beer and cigarette theft problem.

Before my interview, I saw a co-worker cleaning out his locker. “What happened?” I asked.

“Dude, they got us. They had cameras filming everything we did,” he said. “I just got fired for eating grapes that fell off the vine.”

My turn came and the HR guy said, “You need to confess to everything you have stolen here. Put a dollar amount on the stolen goods and we will set up a payment plan for restitution and avoid your being arrested.”

“I have never stolen,” I said.

“Okay, I am going to give you one more chance. If you are honest, we won’t get the police involved. If you are lying, things are not going to go well,” he said. “Be advised we have video.”

“I have never stolen anything,” I said.

“Call the police,” he said to the manager. “We are going to have to press charges.”

“You are full of it,” I said. “You have nothing.”

“Do you want to see the video?” He asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It doesn’t exist.”

“What makes you say that?” He said. “You seem very confident for someone about to go to jail.”

“I haven’t stolen anything,” I said. “If you had a video of people stealing, you wouldn’t need a confession.”

I think seven people confessed and were fired that day. My friend that ate the grapes put $7 on the amount he had stolen. He was one of the most honest people I worked with.

The ones eating steak cooked on the heat seal of the meat wrapper never confessed to anything. They did not catch the cigarette and beer thieves they were looking for either.

The people that confessed were the honest ones who felt guilty for their petty thefts while the dishonest ones stuck to their guns and confessed to nothing. Brilliant move by HR.

Jiggle Jiggle

Chicago Style Stuffed Pizza

deep dish 1
deep dish 1

Ingredients

  • 2 (14 inch) soft pizza crusts
  • 6 ounces pepperoni slices
  • 6 ounces Italian sausage
  • 8 ounces mushrooms, sliced
  • 1 green bell pepper, cut into thin strips
  • 1 red onion, cut into thin strips
  • 1 can pizza sauce
  • 8 ounces shredded mozzarella cheese
  • 1 cup ricotta cheese
  • 1/8 cup Italian seasoning
  • 2 cloves garlic
  • 1 teaspoon salt

Instructions

  1. Spray a 12 inch deep-dish pizza pan with vegetable oil.
  2. Place 1 pizza crust in pan and have crust come up sides like a pie.
  3. Add all listed ingredients into pizza pan, adding seasoning to top.
  4. Place second crust on top and use a fork to blend top and bottom crusts together like a pie. Cut off any additional crust.
  5. Bake at 350 degrees F for 45 minutes.

I can’t remember who wrote it, but I’d read a book many years ago about Operation Market Garden. Although some of the British 1st Airborne Division escaped Arnhem, many remained trapped and were captured by the Germans. One of the men who became a POW talked about marching into captivity past German soldiers. The Germans were cheering them saying things like “Good show, Tommy!” The writer said it felt like the winners of a soccer match were consoling the losers after the game. That, of course, didn’t make the defeat any easier to swallow!

Another I’d read about (again, I can’t remember the source) was the US occupation of Japan immediately after the Japanese surrender. As advance American units landed, they headed to Yokohama where their headquarters would be. The Japanese had lined the route with soldiers as guards – all of them had turned their backs to the road. The occupying Americans took that as a sign of disrespect but it was actually the opposite: in Japanese culture, that’s showing the utmost sign of respect.

Pay attention to this

This is real.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/O4KQmoVi3xM?feature=share

Star Trek:TNG – Data shows off his ultra human strength to primitive aliens(commander ,Data, )

Lovely. A guy still living in 1865 and he thinks we should be slaves to our jobs.

I remember, some time back, where portions of the bridge, out of my neighborhood were flooded out. No cars were getting into my neighborhood and none were leaving and this was the only way out of my neighborhood. I took pictures of this event and sent them to my boss. He came back and stated “So, this is your excuse for not coming into work. Consider yourself fired”.

So, I did and this was on a Friday morning. I started looking for jobs and by Friday evening, I secured a new job that started a week later. On Monday, my prior boss called around 10:30 AM and asked where I was at and I reminded him “Don’t you remember you firing me? You don’t?! Okay, as a former colleague, I am going to let you in on something, lay off on the day drinking. Everyone knows it is not your cologne.” It was an unhidden fact that everyone knew this manager was hitting the sauce, early on in the day, everyday. No one had the ability or courage to say anything and since I was fired… the courage was right there for me.

I once did maintenance for a guy that was a true slumlord in Gainesville, FL. I was the only one that had a HVAC license in the whole company and he was using my license to buy Freon and to legally evacuate and recycle extracted Freon. The guy was so cheap that he only owned one Freon pump and vacuum pump, he wouldn’t even spend the money to buy a good set of gauges and I just used my own but I refused to bring my pumps and tanks to work because they’re expensive and I knew he wouldn’t replace them. Anyway, I was out on a job that was fairly remote and needed to evacuate system to do repairs, I called and asked if they could send the equipment out to me rather than me having to drive approximately 45 minutes back to the shop. The answer I got was no and that they were using it at another job (keep in mind that I’m the only one licensed to handle Freon) and if I needed it then I could just evacuate the Freon into the air. Well first off, that’s completely illegal and would cost me my license if I was caught, secondly it’s just plain unethical and I refused to do it. I flat refused and was told that if I didn’t want to do that to leave the job and he would send somebody else out to do it. At this point I not only flat refused I quit as soon as I got back to the shop. I then called the EPA and reported him and also made sure to let all the HVAC suppliers in the area know that they were no longer allowed to use my license for refrigerant purchases or anything else.

When he tries to purchase Freon and found out that he could no longer buy it, he completely flipped out and called me cussing me out as it was the middle of summer in the middle of the Florida swampland. He was having to contract the work out to HVAC companies now and they really didn’t like him so they were bending him over big time. Then on top of that he was investigated by the EPA and hit with huge fines. I have no regrets.

Such an American video

It wasn’t the waiter. It was the bartender. I had taken my two children out for lunch before we went school shopping. We stopped at Applebee’s, and as we were perusing the menu, we ordered our drinks. I ordered a bloody Mary with extra limes, my son ordered a cookie milkshake with extra cookies. I don’t remember what my daughter ordered, but she wanted something extra in her drink as well. The waitress left the table and walked over to the bar to order our drinks. The bartender yelled out extremely loud for the whole restaurant to here, including myself that sure we want to have extra things but don’t want to pay for them. What he didn’t know was I was a waitress at the time and had no problem paying for extras. I was so embarrassed! After that, I walked over to him and let him know I heard everything he had said, and we left the restaurant. Wasn’t too happy about Applebee’s that day. However, the next weekend I took my children there again in hopes for a better experience. We ended up having the same waitress and I told her I was so sorry that we left the prior week After she took her drink orders . She remembered us and has heard about the situation in regards to what the bartender said. She apologized profusely and the manager came over and apologized as well! We ended up getting our dinners free that day with free desserts. Not sure whatever happened to the bartender, but I must say Applebee’s stepped up to the plate! And yes, I left her a big tip!

Some fun with Text to picture

alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 1 cbc3d0ba 4ef7 4af8 bf43 129c87b73d5c 0
alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 1 cbc3d0ba 4ef7 4af8 bf43 129c87b73d5c 0

Default 0
Default 0

alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 0 47ab24d8 2971 456e 9ff8 8fde8f9fba2c 0
alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 0 47ab24d8 2971 456e 9ff8 8fde8f9fba2c 0

alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 1 3a49d8de 2c30 46cc b5a4 f07e3e816357 0
alchemyrefiner alchemymagic 1 3a49d8de 2c30 46cc b5a4 f07e3e816357 0

Default A gummy cat on a white background 3
Default A gummy cat on a white background 3

Default Dove flying 1
Default Dove flying 1

Default Suit logo 2
Default Suit logo 2

Default Qin Gang as a Ming dynasty warrior standing on dayligh 1(11)
Default Qin Gang as a Ming dynasty warrior standing on dayligh 1(11)

Default Qin Gang as a Ming dynasty warrior standing on dayligh 0(11)
Default Qin Gang as a Ming dynasty warrior standing on dayligh 0(11)

Default Qin Gang as a Ming dynasty warrior standing on dayligh 3(11)
Default Qin Gang as a Ming dynasty warrior standing on dayligh 3(11)

Default Qin Gang as a Ming dynasty warrior standing on dayligh 2(11)
Default Qin Gang as a Ming dynasty warrior standing on dayligh 2(11)

When I was 19 years old, I was going to collage, and working a job at a McDonald’s part-time.

At the time, I didn’t have either health insurance or a PCP.

It was a particularly cold winter, and I was often put in the drive-thru window; so about once every 2–3 weeks I’d end up with a nasty cold. I’d call in sick when this happened, as it’s illegal to work in food service while sick, and I’d typically be find after just a day or two. Sometime’s they’d accept over the phone, sometimes they’d make me come in anyways, before taking one look at me and telling me to go home.

One time when I called back to say I was over the cold, and good to work again, the manager told me I needed to get a doctor’s note before they’d let me go back to work. I explained I didn’t have insurance, or a doctor, they basically said “not my problem.”

So with literally no other option. I went to a hospital’s ER. I walked in, checked in, talked to the triage nurse, explained what was happening, and asked them to just write a note saying I’m good to work.

The triage nurse took my vitals and wrote the note, and I was out of the ER in literally 5 min, never having left the lobby nor seen an actual doctor.

A month later, I got a bill for $500 in the mail from the Hospital. I should mention that I was only making around $300 a month at my part time job, and had no other income.

I’m just about 40 now. It’s been over 20 years since they sent me that bill. I’ve still not paid it.

I gave3 weeks notice because the estimator I worked with would need time to be trained to cope without me (he was almost computer illiterate). Our boss ALWAYS let everyone work out their notice. He was very easy going like that, except with me. I pissed him off so much when I gave him my notice that he immediately escorted me out of the place like I was a common criminal. LOL

He first sent me in to get my stuff, but then realized that after being there a decade, I had a lot of stuff. My husband worked there also and we often went straight from work to meet clients. I kept clothes, shoes nice boots, work boots, makeup, meds, anything I might need was kept at work. He then came and told my estimator to just bring me home (I had a company vehicle).

“You can come back this weekend to get your stuff. I don’t want you to be embarrassed.”

“I’m not embarrassed.”

Trying to stop the flow

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Z95fwg6bP9U?feature=share

A couple of years ago I was in my driveway when I witnessed a young mother and her child walking down our street, being harassed by a young man in his mid-20s. He was following them, getting in her face yelling at her, putting his hands on her and telling her to go back and get in the car. She kept telling him to leave her alone.

I called out to her and asked if she needed a ride somewhere. She and her child (small boy around 5 or 6) turned around and walked back to where I was standing – which pissed the man off. Then he followed them up my driveway and started screaming at me – calling me names and telling me to mind my own business. When I told him he had made it my business – he started posturing and making threats to me, asking loudly “Do you know who I am?”

My reply was “I don’t know who you think you are – but from where I stand, I see a sad little man child who likes to intimidate and harass women and children. Now step off my property before I call the cops. I’m sure they”ll know who you are.”

He took me seriously and stepped into the road- but continued his verbal harassment , even as the woman and her kid climbed into my car and I backed out of my driveway.

Turns out he was her boyfriend, but I never did find out what the argument was about. I offered to take her to the police station – but she didn’t want to go there – so instead I drove her to where she wanted to go (a few miles away.)

I haven’t seen either of them since but I sure as hell hope she got away from that abusive hothead.

  1. When someone answers your questions partially, wait. Don’t interrupt. Chances are high that they will complete the answer when you say nothing.
  2. When you want to get something from someone, frame it as an offer/opportunity instead of a request. Anyone will be ready to accept an offer/opportunity.
  3. When you meet people, notice their eye color while you smile at them. Don’t mention anything about it. It’s a good way to make sure that you really look them in the eyes.
  4. A person’s name is the sweetest sound in the world to that person. To make a person feel very special, remember and repeat their name.
  5. Have zero expectations when you are first trying something new, it prevents disappointment.
  6. To judge a person’s character, notice the way they treat people – who can’t do anything for them.
  7. After you state your position in a negotiation. Wait for a while. If you continue to speak, you are not speaking in your favour.
  8. Chewing gum while doing nerve-racking things calm your brain.
  9. When you are learning something, teach someone about it. You will remember it easily and explore more in the process of teaching.
  10. Most people’s favourite subject to talk about is themselves. If you don’t know what to talk about, or have awkward silence, just ask them questions.
  11. Emotional expression causes emotion. If you focus yourself to smile, your mood will actually improve.
  12. Stand up straight. It makes you look more confident and you will actually feel more confident.
  13. With kids, frame things in a way that always gives them a choice. It makes them feel like they are in control. For eg., “Do you want to wear red shirt or blue shirt?” Either way, they know it’s time to put on a shirt.
  14. When asking for favors use the word “because”. No matter how simple the reason. The word “because” makes them think it must be okay because there is a reason.

Roasted Pepper and Gorgonzola Pizza

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roasted pepper1 2 300×225

Ingredients

Pizza

  • 1 Boboli or homemade crust
  • Garlic Oil Sauce
  • Mozzarella cheese, grated
  • Gorgonzola cheese
  • Roasted red bell pepper strips

Garlic Oil Sauce

  • 1/4 cup extra virgin olive oil
  • 4 cloves garlic

Instructions

Pizza

  1. Heat the oven to 450 degrees F. Spray or grease a pizza pan or stone.
  2. Top crust with Garlic Oil Sauce, mozzarella cheese, gorgonzola cheese and bell pepper strips.
  3. Bake on the bottom rack of oven for 8 to 12 minutes or until cheese is melted and crust is piping hot.

Garlic Oil Sauce

  1. Puree olive oil and garlic in blender.

I was in Milwaukee about 3 years ago for training for a job I’d just gotten and the orientation was going to be 2 days so I was put up in my hotel room and I started to get hungry around 5:00 P.M. and while watching TV shows, I went to the website for EatStreet and looked up food places near the hotel in the downtown area and there’s this pizza and gyro delivery restaurant called New York Pizza Delivery and so I ordered a pizza, breadsticks and a soda from them. Went back to watching the TV. They said it would be there by 6:00 P.M. 6:00 P.M. arrived. No food delivery. So I thought I’d give them a margin in case they got delayed somehow which happens occasionally with food deliveries. By 6:30 P.M., still no food. So I called the restaurant, and I said, you know, where’s my food, they told me it’d be here by 6? The guy who answered the phone said it came but the driver couldn’t find me or my room but they’d send it again. So I headed down to the front lobby and asked the clerk if they’d seen the pizza delivery driver and they said they hadn’t. By 8:00 P.M there was still no pizza. So at 8:30 P.M, I called the restaurant again and asked them why my food wasn’t there and they said the driver forgot to drop off my pizza but they’d send him again. Basically I got my pizza a full 4 and a half hours later and it was only slightly warm. Worst customer service I’ve ever had. I’m not ordering through EatStreet again because they blow, too.

Freedom In CHINA Vs AMERICA! (Untold TRUTH)

To say volunteer is an understatement. It has become the major regret of some who could not make the cut to serve in the PLA. Each year enrollment into the PLA is selected from a big group of volunteers like around a few hundred thousands, and not all pass the selection process.

I personally have encountered more than 10 individuals who wanted to join the PLA but were rejected. Some of them express a major regret for not being able to join the PLA and wish that they could have contributed in some other way.

At first like most foreigners I was baffled, I could not believe my ears as I’m from Singapore where all young men that are proven to be healthy and fit are required to do national service and the more common idea in Singapore is to try and escape it and go into the workforce as fast as you can. To be frank, I never agree to the idea that one should escape national service and come up with all manners of excuses for it as I’m one of those very on the ball types in the army, but I’m still very very surprise when I got to know how different it is in China. You would be too if you have seen a grown man with tears in his eyes because he was rejected by the PLA. And of course, I was doubtful because he had some beer before those tears appeared. Lol.

But seriously, after staying here for abit and having a relative (my wife’s family) who is in the PLA, you start to understand the kind of glory they put into it. It’s like a perosnal honor, a family honor or even a social honor. It’s even comparable to going to an ivy league University kind of honor if you perform well in the PLA.

But, that’s not to say that it’s simply like a degree where you study for it and you graduated with honors. The PLA has been serving the people rather well, especially in times of natural disaster or even law enforcement. Common example are like disaster relief work after the many earthquakes in western China, but an event that happened in my wife hometown like 25 years ago was rather closer to me. An organised crime family setup base in her hometown at that time. Crime was rampant, prositution, loan sharks, drugs, murder, etc, were an everyday event. The local police at that time was weak and from what I understand also corrupted, thus unwilling to flush them out. So when a new mayor with PLA background was posted to her hometown, things started to change. He at first tried to form his own town watch and policing units, but were not very sucessful due to the strongarm methods of the crime family. In fact it became worse when the crime family resisted and tried to assasinate him. Understanding the dire situation (maybe also for his own life), he made some calls to his connections in the CCP and PLA, and within 2 days the PLA send down troops to flush out the crime family and the corrupted police officers. It was like a brand new place overnight.

Well other than from my wife and her family, I heard this from many others living there that it’s true. I stand by the story since my wife’s uncle happens to be one of the PLA soldiers who was send down to flush out the crime family and as a homegrown hero, he got the banners with words like 人民子弟兵典范,人民英雄,sent as gifts by the locals to my mother-in-law house. They are now in his own house after he left the PLA and he choose to retire in the countryside. Even now, when he goes visit my mother-in-law, he is still remembered by the older folks as one of the PLA who rescued the town from unimaginable crime. His son now is also in the PLA and is very proud to be serving even as a small platoon leader.

As far as I know, there are many stories like that about the PLA soldiers, from rescuing a village cow stuck in a mine field near the border, to saving the suicidal from drowning themselves when off duty. Maybe it’s because I look out for such news because I believe in the good of man, but I think the general citizens have a very good impression of most PLA soldiers.

Thus given the very different environment and expectations of the PLA, I think now I understand the honors that comes with joining them. I sometimes do wish that Singaporeans would give the same credits to our SAF, but in the end, respect is earned over time and it would be up to the SAF to prove themselves to Singaporeans.

Mike Oldfield – Tubular Bells Full Album

Takes me back…

NearLink

This is the first time I’ve heard of NearLink. Have you guys heard of this?

Transmission Range:

  • Bluetooth – 10 m
  • Wi-Fi – 300 m
  • NearLink – 600 m

Transmission Rate:

  • Bluetooth – 50 Mbps
  • Wi-Fi – 500 Mbps
  • NearLink – 900 Mbps

Latency:

  • Bluetooth – 15-30 ms
  • Wi-Fi – 100 ms
  • NearLink – 20 μs

Microseconds?! Fucking, eh?

Connectable Devices:

  • Bluetooth – 8
  • Wi-Fi – 256
  • NearLink – 4,096

This technology is taking off like a rocket, it appears.

I was headed to the doctors office (running late of course) with my two young children, both of whom had ear infections and were screaming/crying in their car seats. Because they’d been sick I’d gotten about 6 hrs of sleep in the past two days.

I’d rolled down my window before the officer got to the car and I was busy trying to shush the kids while grabbing my license etc. When he got to the window his first question was why I was in such a hurry? I explained to him the info above and the Dr office would charge me extra if I didn’t get there soon and I just couldn’t afford extra on top of the appointment and the meds I knew I was going to need to buy.

The whole time we’re talking the kids are still screaming!!! He walks away to check my info and I lean over the seat to again try to comfort my kids. He comes back and says everything checked out fine and He was just going to give me a warning this time. He then said that he’s a father so completely understands what I’m dealing with; but Please slow down, the roads are icy, he can see that my tires are bald and he’d hate for us to get into an accident. He then gave me a card with the name of a tire shop and said to call them, saying that officer XXXX sent me and they would help me get new tires.

After the appointment I figured, what the heck; it can’t hurt to try the shop. They asked me to come in and quoted me a very reasonable price for 4 new tires, asked if I could put $25 down and then I could pay the rest at $25 a month. I agreed because I really did need new tires.

When the first bill came in the mail it said “Paid in Full”. I thought there was a mistake and called the place; the lady on the phone explained to me that the owner of the shop and the Officer were brothers and they did this for those that they felt needed the help. Best traffic stop I’ve ever had!!!

A old vintage movie. Get your mind off stuff.

Check the characters before buying the poison

My mother, husband, and I combined households many years ago, and we all lived together until her death. We would trade off hosting family holiday dinners with my aunt and uncle who live nearby. When this happened, which was many, many years ago, my cousin, his wife, and their child lived with my aunt and uncle, so we always celebrated holidays together.

One year at a holiday dinner at our house—Thanksgiving, I think—we also invited one of my best friends and his family: a wife, and three children, the youngest a baby, and the oldest a seven-year-old girl.

During dinner, my aunt asked the seven-year-old girl what she had been doing of late that she thought was fun. She was extremely enthusiastic about the Harry Potter series and the entire world in the books, and explained the newest book had been released recently, and she was reading it at night with her father.

She began to say something else when my cousin’s wife, an Evangelical Christian, cut her off.

She began lecturing her loudly and cruelly about the world of Harry Potter, the evils of witchcraft, and even told her she was a bad girl, with bad parents, for even opening one of the books. (My mom, husband, and I were all following the series, as well. We’d all read the newest volume she was talking about because, well, adults read a lot faster than a seven year old.) We were also giving her less than loving looks.

My aunt politely silenced her daughter-in-law and reminded her the question had been addressed to the little girl, then said, “We can discuss your feelings about Harry Potter another time, at home.”

She asked the girl to continue. Before she could get a full sentence out, my cousin’s wife again jumped in and began lecturing the child about what she was reading.

She also called out her parents, and began insulting their judgment and their parenting skills.

That time, my mother stopped her with a simple, “That’s enough. Someone else is speaking, and you are out of line.”

The seven year old was clearly growing distressed.

She was simply trying to explain why she liked Harry Potter, and an adult was being terrible to her.

We were all certain my cousin’s wife would finally be quiet, and encouraged the child to finish her thought. Again, an interruption from my cousin’s wife, followed by an “ouch! why did you kick me?” because my cousin had kicked her under the table when he saw she was going to open her mouth.

She spoke anyway, lecturing all of us, and then finished her comments by turning to the seven year old and saying, “And you are going to Hell.”

That, of course, tipped the scales, and my friend’s little girl began to cry.

My cousin’s wife got up to go get something from the room where the food was laid out, and I followed her. I’d grown angry at the second interruption, but had tried my best to hang on to a bit of calm because I was a hostess, too. I’d had it, though. I was beyond furious.

I followed her into the other room, and told her she wouldn’t say another word about it, or I’d have to tell her to leave—she was completely out of line with her comments, her lecturing, and especially with driving a young girl to tears. She looked at me for a moment, then said, “You don’t have the nerve, and your Mom won’t put up with it.” I said, “Go ahead and try me.”

If she said anything else at all that night, aside from which kind of pie she wanted, I don’t remember it at all.

The Sopranos – Tony Soprano extorts Ralph Cifaretto

I am from a longline of southern cooks. One of my first memories, is standing on a chair with a wooden spoon stirring cornbread batter. My husbands family does not share this skill. My mother in law is lovely and an amazing women. She is charming, beautiful, kind, extremely health conscious but a lousy cook. My husband swears , he and his siblings were raised on wheat germ and bean sprouts. Cooking was truly of no interest to my mother in law. She knows nothing about cooking above the very basics. The first Holidays after our marriage, I hosted the Thanksgiving meal. I was so excited because I love to cook. A few days before the big day, my mother in law called to say she would like to bring the Turkey. I assured her that wouldn’t be necessary but she insisted. I agreed. When I told my husband, he laughed and said that I better have a back up plan. His mother had good intentions but turkey was not in her Wheelhouse. Anxiety got the best of me. I put a Turkey in my outdoor smoker the night before on the pretense that it could be used for sandwiches the following week. Thanksgiving day, a hour and a half before the meal, my husbands family showed up with Turkey in tow. It was still in the wrapper and totally raw. My mother in law said she came a little early so the 20 lb Turkey would have time to roast. My husband was all grins. I thanked her kindly, praised her on the size of the Turkey and took it into the kitchen. A hour and a half later, I served a beautiful smoked Turkey to my guest. No one even picked up on the fact that the Turkey was smoked instead of roasted except MY mom. Thankfully she said nothing until we were alone. The sad thing is my daughter has the cooking skill of my mother in law. But thankfully, she also has her loving kind heart and that outweighs cooking any day!

It was around 2009 when our flat screen TV began to require several tries before it would turn on. You knew it was finally going to turn on when you heard the “ka-blink” sound. Finally, one day it would not turn on at all. My wife confidently said, “You can fix anything. Can you fix the TV?””. I expressed my skepticism as my electronic expertise and experience were very limited. But I also didn’t want to just give up despite my prejudice that modern TVs were not ” fixable”. My guess was that the power supply had failed so I began a Google search for how to replace the power supply on a Samsung TV. I found an article titled something to the effect of ” I don’t know much about electronics but this worked for me”. Seemed like a good place to start.

The article was excellent with a description and photos of the capacitors that can fail. If they are swollen or leaking, replace them. Removing the capacitors was the main technical challenge but the article described the entwined copper wire yarn that draws out the solder as you melt it. The real challenge was finding replacement capacitors. Only one store in metro Atlanta had them. Took two days to find the store. I needed 3 but bought several extras for a total of somthing like $8. The guy at the store said, “ Nobody fixes anything anymore.””

Installing was fairly straightforward soldering. Tried to be careful to not overheat anything. It helps your confidence when you consider the TV was dead and most people would have just tossed it. Anyway, the moment of truth came. Pressed the ” On” button on the remote and (after an anxious delay) ” ka-blink”!! I felt like Tom Hanks when he declared ” I have made fire! “. I basked in my wife’s admiration for the rest of the day. The TV still works and I still have the extra capacitors, just in case.

I wish I could cite and thank the person who took the time and effort to post the fix. It was excellent.

My sister fell from the 4th floor when I was 16 years old and fought for her life for two whole years.

When you fall from such a height, it’s most often not the impact that kills you.

It’s the fall.

Most people falling from such a height, faint before impact – and they fall on their back.

Their spine breaks, ruptures, and is torn to shreds and most of them die or are paralyzed their entire lives.

But, my Didi, was awake through the fall.

She fell on her legs.

Later doctors told us that, that was the only reason she’d survived.

On impact, her right leg, which bore the maximum impact, was torn to bloody shreds.

Her right foot had an entire piece fall off from where it was attached.

When I saw her – the white sheet that covers patients was red with blood.

I saw bone where flesh was supposed to be.

When I saw the X ray for the first time, I couldn’t help but hopelessly cry.

Part of her hip bone was just bone dust.

Literally! Literally bone dust where bone should be.

This further complicated her surgery when she was admitted to the ICU.

Bone fragments could have ruptured her blood vessels – or so the doctors said.

Forget walking ever, doctors told us she had a ten percent chance of survival.

My Didi spent two years in the hospital and missed her board exams (12th) that year.

Next year, carried on a stretcher, she was ferried from the hospital in an ambulance and she sat for her 12th boards.

That year – she scored 92 in her boards with a 94 in Physics and Maths.

Her school awarded her an Exceptional Student award and gifted her a phone and a certificate for her achievements.

Today, she has two degrees to her name.

One in Physics and another in Hotel Management.

She’s preparing for a third degree – an MBA this year.

Today, she’s working for a subsidiary of Google in Hyderabad, all alone in a different city.

The limp is still visible, but barely.

Inspiration?

This word doesn’t even begin to explain what I feel when I look at her.

She’s a living, breathing miracle.

Literally — a living, breathing miracle.

My favorite family story.

I am an only child, and my parents were a challenge. They did not get easier, as they got older. My family (me, the husband and two sons) lived about 2 and a half hours away and would always go home for Christmas, usually bringing food, since there was no guarantee that there would be anything in the house to eat, and all restaurants are closed on Christmas (my parents survived on black coffee, white toast and McDonalds, and surprisingly, it had no effect on their longevity).

One year, my mother insisted that, instead of my cooking, we should all go to the Legion Hall to the ‘friends’ dinner, for the old, lonely and homeless.

Well, technically, we weren’t lonely, we were together. And they could have as much food as they wanted, since I was willing to bring it. But Mom wanted to go to this meal, and I wasn’t going to deny her what she wanted on Christmas day.

So, off we all go to the Legion. Mom sees someone she knows and sits down with them. My father follows, sitting down with her. She totally ignores the fact that there is no room for the rest of us to sit with her. Dad gives me a shrug, but doesn’t say anything (because, in my family, this is just Mom being Mom and we roll with it).

My family grabs a four top by the bar and we eat our meals rolling our eyes and shaking our heads.

There was an empty seat on the table by my Mom. A reporter for the local newspaper takes it and interviews her. The next day, she is on the front page of the local paper complete with photograph, announcing that the people that put on these meals for those who need them are “angels.”

Apparently, though it did not make it to the paper, (THANK GOD) she also told the reporter all about her daughter “the famous author” (I’ve written a bunch of books and she was really proud). But anyone who knew her knew that story already. She did not bother to mention that I was in the room with them at the time.

And that is how the entire town learned that I had abandoned my mother and made her eat alone at the Legion on Christmas.

Some of my work. A comic theme.

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Had a friend who decided to purchase a small gift shop in Western Washington to add to the several they already owned near Tacoma. This one was a bit farther away from their home, so they would have less of a day to day contact with the location. The former owner had recommended the retain the manager that worked for them for many years, and so they did. They were very happy with this decision, and for a couple of years this manager would not only run the store on a daily basis, but come in on vacations and days off and do the books, payroll, stock ordering etc.

Problem? This store, even though it was in a more rural location, less rent, lower pay all around, was still not as profitable as they thought it should be.

How did they uncover the problem? The manager had a grandbaby born in Seattle, and she decided to spend a couple of weeks with them to help out.

Old school cash registers would have what we would call a “z” tape that would total up transactions at the end of the day (and subtotals whenever you wanted one throughout the day) to tell you what sold, amount of cash, checks, charge cards, refunds, etc. In theory, every day one would take that tape and balance the amount of receipts against what was in the till.

Problem? My friend could not get the tape to balance against receipts by the method that had been used to balance as proscribed by the manager. There was too much money every day. It turns out here in Washington, we have a Sales tax of about 9.7%. The manager would use the PRE TAX amount on the Z tape to balance the daily amounts, and keep the tax amount.

So, for 3 years my friend owned the store, the manager had pocketed that amount of cash every day, and probably for many years back. They store was grossing about $600k a year at that time, so she pocketed about $54k a year cash as well as her salary.

And if you know about these kind of stories, often the owners do not want to have publicity in this kind of situation. So instead of having the sheriff charge in this case, they actually caught her taking items from the the store (a baby album!) and cited that as reason for termination. But then they showed her the rest of what she knew, and they ended up getting a partial restitution.

Lesson? If you have a manager of staff member that does not take time off, be suspicious.

AND: you have to make sure that IRS records are correct, or you are liable for the additional taxes.

Hope this answers the question,

Rick Olson

Money, money, money (always sunny, in a rich man’s world)

I was at a wedding this summer when I asked a friend of mine, who is a history professor specializing in 18th century Ottoman history, why he believed that the Ottomans would start suffering from major issues in the 19th century. (The word ‘decline’ is, for some reasons I’ll try to go into, not necessarily true for the 18th century).

He, of course in the traditional academic manner, said that careers could be made studying even a minor area of the subject and to be wary of teleological explanations, and the usual jazz.

So, I rephrased and asked him, “If you had a time machine to take you to the beginning of the 18th century, what would you have done differently, assuming you wanted the Ottomans to have survived?”

He thought for a while and answered, “If we have the technology for time travel, I’m going to assume that we would have the technology for bringing others with us as well.”

“Sure”.

“Then, I’d bring with me around fifty German and Swiss accountants to take charge of Ottoman finances.”

“Not Turkish ones?”

“Better safe than sorry.”

“So you would not have found a clever way of killing off the unruly Janissaries, like Peter the Great did with his unruly soldiers?”

“The Janissaries were not the problem. They were not necessarily bad soldiers. They were cheap soldiers and they suffered from low morale. And because they were paid so little, most of them ended up doing other jobs as well.”

So there’s the rub – the unruly Janissaries were not the problem. They were the symptom of the problem which was money.

Indeed, most of the other (quick and easy) explanations don’t really hold water or go to the heart of the matter: for example, technological lag. Hold on to your hats because I am about to blow your minds but the Ottomans, at no point in their history, had a significant technological handicap compared to their European neighbors. This was especially true for the 18th Century. First, speaking of military technologies:

  1. The Ottomans had the same military technologies as their European counterparts. The story of the Ottomans’ “massive (anachronistic) bombards” is just a story. Whether it be the caliber of the guns, their metallurgy or the mixture ratio for gunpowder, the Ottomans had no major differences with most of their European contemporaries.
  2. The military technology between 1600 and the Napoleonic Wars did not have major leaps that the Ottomans could be left behind in. Ottomans employed many European experts, not just in the 18th century, but throughout their entire history. (Orban and his famous guns, anyone?)
  3. Well into the 19th century, weaponry continued to be produced with traditional (i.e. artisanship) methods instead of mass production across Europe. Ottomans had begun their military defeats before the 1850s, so the proliferation of mass produced weapons (which they ended up buying in the 19th and early 20th centuries anyway) could not be a factor in their earlier defeats.

For the rest of their “technology”, we can give the example of Russia, which remained mostly agrarian until the second half of the 19th century. Further, even after the freeing of the serfs, their industrialization was slow, which led to major problems in the First World War. They also had a low literacy rate. Yet, along with England, they were the major Great Power for most of the 19th Century. One thing that Russia had was a large population (although China, with a large population, did not fare so well), but other than that, their main difference with the Ottomans was their centralized and bureaucratized state apparatus.

The “nationalism” of minorities itself was an issue tied to money. Again, contrary to the general narrative, the “millet” system was not a thing de jure until the 19th, and de facto until the middle of the 18th Century and was born of the economic issues of the Empire. How so? Tax farming under the ayans became a major source of revenue in the 18th Century. In this system, the government would auction the right to collect taxes for a lump sum in Istanbul. Important figures such as ministers, princesses, harem women, would buy such privileges. Then, since they did not want to (or could not) travel to the regions that produced their income, they would work with local notables, ayans (who could be Muslim or Christian), to collect their taxes. Well, in this tax farming system, the Rum patriarch in Istanbul, for example, was a “tax farmer in chief” and by delineating an important financial function to such groups, the Ottomans allowed for them to make power grabs elsewhere, such as increasing control over their Christian flock, which would culminate in the “millet” system, wherein the various religious heads became the final authority on the legal issues (or education) of their flock. The Hellenizing project under the new Greek state, its support by the patriarchate (albeit not immediately), and the inability of the central government to stop it, was one of the major reasons behind one of the aggressive and usually quite bellicose nationalisms that would develop among the Christian Ottomans.

Also, the change from a centralized to a subcontracted “sekban” (mercenary) system of military recruitment where the central government would send “banners” to the local officials and notables, who would collect and arm the peasants in the beginning of the 17th Century created a large number of armed men in Anatolia, leading to the “Celali Revolts“. This created a mass migration of the peasants to the cities and mountains all throughout Anatolia, called “Büyük Kaçgun” – (The Great Flight). So depopulated was the countryside that many lands would grow wild and not become cultivated again until they were resettled with Balkan, Crimean and Caucasian refugees fleeing ethnic cleansing two centuries later in the 1800s.

The Ottomans could collect so little tax in the 18th Century that with this new tax farming system, only 30% of all the taxes that were collected found their way into government coffers. But the local ayans, provincial notables, and tax farmers could usually not get enough money from their cut to be able to invest in major infrastructure projects or other developmental investments, contributing to the vicious cycle of decentralization.

This left the Ottomans with an underpaid and in many cases (of sekban units provided by the local notables) a poorly and haphazardly supplied army with chronically low morale.

Losing wars led to the further loss of taxable lands and as the Christian population slowly developed into openly hostile nations, the internal problems and external ones compounded.

In the 19th century, to pay for a large army and a navy, the Ottomans would bankrupt themselves, and until the construction of railways in the late 19th Century, would not be able to successfully (and even then to a very limited scope) industrialize, in spite of attempts in the 1830s. (Although the Ottoman artisans were surprisingly resilient in the face of imported, mass produced, European goods)

But it all started from a lack of funds. This, of course, should not mean that the country was poor per se. The early 18th Centry was a time of economic boom in the long peace until 1769. But even as the economy of the country developed, the finances of the state continued suffering.

One year my husband’s brother and his family hoated the family Christmas party (we alternate between the brothers)… SIL is VERY cheap one Christmas though she totally proved it.

My daughter had driven 2 hours to get there and realized her cellphone was dying. So she plugged it into a charger out of the way of where people were. Twice she went to check the status only to find it unplugged and no progress of charging. One the third time she said something. MY sister in law explained it cost money to charge a phone so she was jept unplugging it. They are very financially secure so it was totally because she was cheap.

At first my daughter thought she was joking but she sas not…she was serious. So my daughter handed her a dollar. SIL took the money, put it in her pocket and walked off. While laughing my daughter told BIL what happened. He was mortified…handed my daughter a dollar (out of sight of SIL) and showed her where to charge her phone so SIL would leave it alone.

Let’s flip the script. Imagine we’d all been driving EV’s the last hundred years, you pay $5 to fully refuel at home overnight while you sleep and never leave home without a ‘full tank’. There is practically zero maintenance and the cars are very fast and reliable with instant torque, more storage space, brakes that last the life of the car, over the air feature updates etc. The motors and battery have 8 year warranty and are expected to last at least 500,000 miles.

Then somebody invents a gas car. It’s slow, noisy, needs lots of regular repairs and maintenance. It’s full of explosive and toxic fluids. It burns fuel and emits poisonous gases even when it’s not moving. Refueling it costs $100 and you have drive to a special refueling station, you can never do it at home. Everything needs to be repaired by a specialist in a remote workshop and adding new features after you bought it is not possible. But hey, that $100 refueling can be done in just 15 extra minutes on your drive to work!

Who would buy it?

When I was living in Tempe, I lived in the back of my apartment complex, and got my own little sheltered parking spot for my Toyota. Unfortunately, it was not an uncommon occurrence for people to park in my designated spot or block it with their cars. Being as polite as I could, I would go around and knock on doors to try and get that person to move their car. Oftentimes I would be late for class.

One day, I was looking through the tenant’s rights of Maricopa County, AZ, and I found a clause that stated that the tenant has the right to remove an illegally parked vehicle. The clause then defined “an illegally parked vehicle” to mean a car that is parked in such a way that it hinders the tenant from entering or exiting their designated parking space. The clause also defined that the owner of the illegally parked vehicle is responsible for fixing any damage caused by the removal of the vehicle. The clause never stated HOW the tenant might do that, however. The county legislators probably thought that 99.99% of people would call a towing company, but I had places to be and was honestly fed up with these illegal parkers, so I was part of that other 0.01% group.

I bought towing straps on my way home from class one day, and I didn’t even have to wait a full night. In my parking space that I was paying rent for was a black Tesla. I hooked it up to my Toyota diesel pickup and dragged it out of there, tires squealing. I left it in the middle of the street, and the next morning, the owner came out and stood perplexed at the new positioning of his car.

A few days later, there was a Prius parked in front of my truck. I had to get to class but couldn’t. So, I gently pushed the Prius out of the way with my bull-bar and left it in the middle of the street. The Prius sustained a minor dent in its passenger side, and that evening when I got back from college, there were several police officers on the scene. The owner of the Prius tried to charge me with a hit and run, but after I showed the officers the picture that I took of the Prius blocking my truck in, and the clause from the tenant’s rights document, and the lease proving that I was the rightful occupant of the parking spot, they determined that the Prius owner was at fault and was responsible for the damages.

My favorite instance of this was when somebody parked a total lemon in my spot and had leaked oil all over the concrete. The lease said that oil-leakers were strictly prohibited, so I had to do something special for this guy. I got a piece of metal wire and bet it over into a hook. Underneath the car, I reached up with my hook and pulled the hood release cable. Once I had the hood open, I located the fuse-box and took out the fuse that would allow the car to start. I then proceeded to yank the car out of my spot into the street, business as usual. The next morning, his car was still there, in the middle of the street, a decently sized puddle of oil underneath it. He was on his phone talking angrily, presumably with a towing company. I didn’t have to be anywhere that day, so I watched the chaos ensue through my window.

Several more times this happened, and eventually, word got around that my parking spot was not safe to park in front of. Everyone could tell if there was a newbie in town, because they would park in front of my spot, and subsequently get yanked. Thanks, Maricopa County!

Around 2008 I was in the engineering lab working on the design of my latest project. The CEO came in and asked me it I could look at an NC lathe on the factory floor.

The controller went out on the 30 year old machine. There had been no replacements available for about 20 years. This machine made the “Secret Sauce” part of our flagship product. This machine had never given trouble before.

The manufacturer’s representative declared it a write off and told us it would be at least 3 months to get a replacement machine for $30,000. Plus shipping from Germany. While we could farm out making the part, the reason we made it ourselves is that in the Los Angeles area there was so much military work going on for serious money that it would have been months to get someone else to make the parts.

We would lose months of sales and 40–50 people were facing layoff. So while this was not in my job description I went out for a look.

I took the controller board out and set it on my bench and could not see anything obvious. So starting with the power input I started doing resistance tests on the rectifier diodes. Son of a gun. The third one I checked showed it was shorted. We did not carry the 1N4002 in lab stock. So I put in a 1N4007 which costs about 15 cents versus the 8 cents of the original part.

I put the controller back in and the machine fired right up. The machinist started saying words of what seemed like joy in his native Vietnamese.

I went back to my bench and carried in with my project. Dashing off an email to the CEO that the machine was working again. All in a day’s work. Saving about a ton of high grade steel from going to the junk yard and keeping the factory floor workers earning a pay check.

Little was said but at the Christmas party a couple months later the CEO hands me my Christmas bonus and whispers to me to not tell anyone about it. Instead of my usual $500 bonus was a check for $5,000.

The machine was still running fine when I moved back to Canada in 2010.

In the west…

  • Jesus has long blonde hair and a six pack.
  • China’s economy is collapsing as GDP growth is 5.20%, while the U.S. economy is booming with 2.50% growth
  • In the west they believe Sri Lanka was debt trapped by China. Investigations revealed that the country had to repay loans to the west.
  • In the U.S. they believe China is the main cause for global warming, they don’t realise that they’ve emitted more Co2 than any other country and their emissions per capita are almost twice as much when compared to China.
  • In the west they believe they are leading the transition to zero emissions, but the reality is China is the biggest producer of solar, wind, and hydro power and has the largest fleet of EVs.
  • In the U.S. they believe they are free and yet they incarcerate more of their own population than any other country and their children need to pass a metal detector when they enter school.
  • In the west they believe the Belt and Road initiative is bad, but they believe the Marshall Plan was good despite they’re both the same thing except China’s is a much grander scale.
  • In the U.S. they believe the Chinese force their companies to hand over technology, in reality it’s a deal signed by both sides.
  • In the west they believe China is oppressing Tibetans, in reality they saved them from feudalism.
  • In the west they think China has committed genocide in Xinjiang while Israel has the right to defend themselves.
  • In the U.S. they believe they have democracy, in reality they’re just picking a millionaire to run their country. In the U.K., the choice is another Oxford graduate.
  • In the US they believe TikTok is a national security concern despite everything is based in the west.
  • In the west they believe they uphold human rights in reality they’ve been in multiple wars causing millions of death and even more displaced.

Really who is brainwashed?

I had some small yellow cable ties for doing up the zips on my bag so that my larger non carry on bags can’t be opened when out of my sight. (Well… at least make it harder). These things would be something like 8 to 10cm’s long. Like I said, small as far as cable ties go.

Something like these ones. Only I had four.

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main qimg a89a0d44928f27e43a5f9995b1e26de5

This immigration (What the US calls a TSA Officer) woman is going through my bag because she suspects something is in the bag that I shouldn’t have. She can’t find what she’s looking for (I think I know what she’s looking for, however I let her try and find them. In one of the front pockets on my laptop bag she finds these small yellow cable ties.

TSA Woman:
“Arh ha… there they are.”

Me:
“What? Are you going to tell me you saw these four small plastic cable ties on the X-ray machine? Not likely love. Anyway, what’s wrong with wanting to secure my bags with these anyway?”

TSA Woman:
“You can’t have cable ties on a plane” she says louder so she gets the back up and support of the her colleagues on the other side of the bags counter.

I nodded, and replied:
“Yeesss you’re so right… I mean, how many people’s thumbs could I tie together with those massive cable ties on the plane. I reckon I could take out the entire first class row with those bad boys, if the passengers agreed to hold their thumbs together and still long enough.”

Her colleagues are now looking away and sniggering, some not knowing where to look.

“Hang on” I said… “I reckon I could tie up rows two and three with my laptop lead here, and not to mention my iPhone cable for charging.” As I took my laptop lead out of my bag and proudly held it above my head like I was declaring it for immediate confiscation. “If I could get all of the fourth row to stand up, and be patient for just a few minutes, with a bit of jostling, maybe even one more person from the fifth row, I could really do some damage with this” as I reached into my laptop bag and pulled out my iPhone lead.

Nothing, silence, a few sniggers… then…

TSA Woman:
“Well, you can’t have them on the plane, I’ll have to confiscate them.” She starts to walk to the bin and drop them in there.

Me:
I then said “Hang on bring them back here.” My thought was to just use them… you know, run them through on each other so they don’t get used by any of the TSA staff later as a reward for confiscating my four lonely little yellow cable ties, and because I wanted to make a big deal out of it. Hell… I’d come this far so why not.

However, I suddenly remembered how to use what I knew she was originally looking for. I pulled out a pair of scissors from my bag and took the cable ties from her and cut all four of the small yellow cable ties in an instant.

TSA Woman:
”That’s what I was looking for” and she quite literally snatched the scissors out of my hand whilst my fingers are still in the holes. (Not nice…. )

“Everyone knows you can’t takes scissors on a plane” she proudly boasts out louder than even the cable ties got a mention for early, because now she has to save face with her colleagues, whilst she practically does a basketball layout on the way to the bin and slam dunks those scissors into the bin. She looks around very proud of herself.

“Excuse me lady” her smile still beaming as she looks around and then at me. “Can you get them out of the bin now? (smile now completely wiped from her face.) I think you’ll find THOSE scissors are legal on flights. They’re medical scissors with the bend on the blades. Whilst I know it’s not common knowledge you can carry these on a plane, I expected you would know, however it appears you didn’t and I’d really like to get to the Qantas club lounge before my flight. So if you can get them out quickly it would be much appreciated.”

main qimg 9c1d8b2de093733b57e540c6d5567240
main qimg 9c1d8b2de093733b57e540c6d5567240

They sort of looked like these, without the black. At the time they were legal on flights. I don’t know the rules now.

TSA woman looks around in absolute dismay. I’m standing there with my hand out. I can’t wait to see her dive into the bin that would have be at least three feet tall. I so wish I was allowed to use my phone and video this right now, however, in this area of the airport, photography of any kind is banned. Video or still… not allowed.

TSA Women gets a supervisor, she isn’t having any of this. I’m at least three hours early for my flight, I’ve got heap of time spare, I don’t care and I can’t wait to see how this ends. The supervisor comes over to have a word to me. I am allowed to explain the situation first when the supervisor says “What seems to be the problem?”.

I explain the above to the supervisor without all of the “glee” the TSA Woman had shown, whilst being able to very successfully hold back my own thoughts of this woman being head first in the bin retrieving my scissors, with her feet up in the air. (Still makes me smile even now)

The supervisor turns to the TSA woman and asks her to “Retrieve the evidence please”. In absolute horror and dismay, the TSA woman goes to the bin, puts the bin on it’s side and empties the bin right there on the floor. (I so wanted to have my vision be fulfilled, however, I could see she was a bit smarter than that.) Of course a thin pair of metal scissors will go straight to the bottom of the bin. No exception on this day for that rule either. Everything coms out of the bin, and yep,… there was nothing else to get out, except my lonely scissors. Even my four lonely (now cut) cable ties came out near the start.

Her colleagues are sorting other people baggage, whilst sort of watching with sideways glances at what the TSA Woman was doing, and trying to hold back smiles. One other TSA employee looked at me, and she couldn’t stop the smile, I thought she was going to bust out laughing. She did well and held the laughter in.

The TSA Woman… The offending, basketball playing, self confident, “Look at me I have the power to confiscate scissors and four cable ties… TSA Woman, eventually finds the scissors, hands them to the supervisor like a nurse hands scissors and a scalpel in the movies to a surgeon. I have no idea what’s going to happen next, but this was kind of fun and i was all in now. It’s like I was watching someone else. I had no stress no concern, this was like a seen from a sitcom, only I had written it without the ending, after all, what was the worst they can do, take my scissors off me again? I had already had this woman go and retrieve my scissors from the bin, and had her colleagues witness it, I’m already a mile in front. You can have the four yellow cable ties and the scissors… I’m good at this point.

The TSA Supervisor (Oh… who is also a woman, sorry I missed that point earlier)) takes a half second look at the scissors as the scissors hit her hand. She turns to me and says “Happy travels Sir” and hands the scissors back to me with a smile.

When I turned my back, I couldn’t get the smile off my face, I nearly bust out laughing as I walked up to the Qantas lounge and waited for my flight.

Never saw her again.

Good. Very good.

It was right after I gave my two weeks notice. My manager came to my desk on Monday morning and said, “Mike, coffee is now your duty until you leave.”

I smiled and kept doing my work.

The next day he calls me. “Mike, I thought I told you you’re in charge of coffee?”

“I am in charge of coffee, yes and I see that we need a fresh pot. Can you handle this for us since you seem to be an expert.”

He laughed and said, “We all know that already. You brew the pot of coffee, Mike, Not me. Come on.”

“Well, I am a little busy now and will get to it when I can,” I replied. I stayed at my desk for an hour an half working away! No care for him or the coffee.

Then he comes to my desk and says, “Mike, where is my coffee?”

I stood up, looked him straight in the eye and said, “Let’s go have a quick talk while I brew you a fresh cup of coffee.”

We got to the break room. I stood by the coffee machine and said. “Listen, I gave you my notice, but that doesn’t mean you need to make my life difficult and belittle me. I really do not appreciate your tone and remarks. I am reporting you to HR. I find it very offensive and it looks like retaliation.”

He stumbles in his shoes and starts to stutter, “Ah, Mike, I was just joking around and didn’t mean anything by it.”

I stayed quiet.

He kept going on and on. I walked out of the break room and headed to the elevator.

He was still talking and asked, “Mike, can we talk about it?”

I stopped and looked at him. I could see the entire floor looking from under their cubicle walls. “I don’t think we need to talk about it anymore, I will be right back.” By then I clicked and called the elevator. The door opens up, I jump in and the door closes.

I know what he was thinking – Oh, crap! He is going to HR.

I went to the vending machine on the same floor as HR and got myself a drink!

I waited a bit, chatting with some co-workers, then I went back up.

He did not even look at me.

I sat at my desk and the whole day he did not even cross in front of my desk, not even once – like a scared rabbit hiding in his hole.

I told everyone on my team about what I did and everyone was waiting to see how he would react or what he would do the next day.

The next morning I came in and dumped the coffee pot, brewed a new one. While walking to my desk, I stopped by his cube and said, “I just brewed a fresh pot of coffee.”

He jumps up from his seat and says, “Oh! Thanks, Mike, you didn’t have to!”

As soon as I sat down, my coworker that sat right next to me said, “What a Punk.”

“You said it, not me!” I replied

In the end, I felt good that I stood my ground and did not fall victim to his actions. He never came and asked me if I reported him to HR. He asked two of my team members and both said: “I am not sure!”

He wanted to make a joke and make me feel unwelcomed or belittled. In the end, he was a joke and was called a punk. Who knows what others thought of him?

”Generosity is giving more than you can, and pride is taking less than you need” — Khalil Gibran

Acapulco Chicken Pizza

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495950155

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 3/4 pound fresh boneless, skinless chicken breasts, sliced
  • 1 package Ortega Taco Seasoning Mix (regular) or 2 tablespoons homemade Taco Seasoning
  • 3 tablespoons cayenne pepper
  • 5 tablespoons Ortega Thick & Smooth Taco Sauce (medium)
  • 2 (12 inch) flour tortillas
  • 8 ounces Ortega Refried Beans
  • 1/4 cup Ortega Thick & Smooth Taco Sauce (medium)
  • 1/4 cup Monterey Jack cheese, grated
  • 1/4 cup Cheddar cheese, grated
  • 2 cups lettuce, shredded
  • 2 avocados, seeded, peeled and mashed
  • 1 tomato, diced

Instructions

  1. Add oil to a large heated skillet; stir in chicken, taco seasoning mix and cayenne pepper and cook until browned.
  2. Stir in first amount of taco sauce and remove from the heat.
  3. On a large plate, place flour tortillas; divide and spread with refried beans, being sure to cover the entire tortilla.
  4. Add the chicken mixture over the beans and sprinkle remaining taco sauce, grated Monterey Jack cheese and grated Cheddar cheese on top.
  5. Bake at 375 degrees F until the cheese is bubbly, about 10 minutes.
  6. Remove and cut into wedges.
  7. Serve with shredded lettuce, mashed avocados, and diced tomato.

In the late 1970s, my mom was refurbishing a house in Mt. Helix, just outside of San Diego. There was a guy who pulled up in a truck from a carpet installation business and asked about the project, and whether they were going to be needing new carpets for the house. She thought something was a little off with him, so she said that they had not yet decided what they were going to do, and that they had a prospective buyer who wanted the original hardwood floors.

He kept trying to sell her on some carpeting for the stairs, etc. until her partner in the project, a contractor (who she was also having an affair with, but that is another story entirely) who was 6’ 4” and a Vietnam Vet came out to ask a question. The guy almost immediately stopped talking, handed her his card and left. She threw away the card and figured that was the end of it.

The next week, he called our house, and I answered the phone and he said he had been speaking with her about carpeting for the house and was she available? She wasn’t home, so I took a message which was just his name and number. I gave her the message and she thought it was weird, but did not connect it with the guy in the truck, because she hadn’t gotten his name the first time.

Then he called again, and my brother took a message and she realized who these messages were coming from, but she had not given him our phone number. At the time, you could go to the DMV, and ask for the registration info for a car by giving the license plate number and paying $3 for it. (After actress Rebecca Schaefer was murdered by a stalker who did this, they stopped that service, but that was a few years later). My mom called the police about this guy, and they later found out that this was how he got our number.

After that, we started getting frequent hang up calls at our house. She said she thought islt was this guy, and my dad said he didn’t think so, and she was worrying over nothing. But she stopped going out to the worksite and eventually just sold her half of the project to the contractor.

But soon afterward, she got a call from a police detective who wanted to ask some questions about the guy. Like do you know this guy, and from where, and why are there so many calls to your house from him, etc. Eventually, they even asked my brother and I what he had said when we answered the phone. All the information we had was his name and phone number.

About 5 years later, it was on the news that they had arrested the guy for serial murders. His story is all kinds of horrible, but he was thought to have brutally raped up to six women and murdered them, along with their children in some cases. How brutally? They called them the Throat Slash Murders, because he cut their throats so deeply that the spine was visible from the hole in the front of their throats.

He was convicted of three of the killings, and he is now on death row in California.

David Allen Lucas – Wikipedia

Golfing alone

It was Black Friday at about six in the morning.

In the aisle was a display for two sets of toys. One was a Noah’s Ark with all the animals and Noah and his family. The other was Old MacDonald’s Farm.

My son had the Old MacDonald one. He’d gotten it a couple months earlier for his birthday. He wanted the Noah one. The display only had a couple of Noahs, but plenty of Old MacDonalds.

I was standing right by a Noah and waiting for the store employee to cut the banding. Once he did, it was game on.

I grabbed the Noah one. A woman lunged OVER THE TOP of the display and grabbed the same one I did, yelling, “I need this! You can have one of the MacDonald ones!”

She refused to let go. So I did the only thing I could do…I planted my feet and yanked her across. She had no choice, let go or take a faceplant into the floor. She was pissed.

She followed me around cussing me out. I ignored her. But when I went to get a game off the shelf, she lunged at my cart to grab the Noah toy. I slammed my hand down on hers as she grabbed my cart. This got her pinched fingers.

I cut across a line of people waiting to get DVD players to get to the other side. People parted to let me through. When she followed behind me I yelled and pointed to her, “Hey, she’s trying to cut in line!”

They converged on her like lions on a gazelle.

Her screams were most satisfying.

Whenever I’m in a bad mood, I remember that day, and those screams.

Suddenly I’m not in a bad mood anymore.

Pepe Escobar

Pepe Escobar writes about the major takeaways of his recent tour to Brazil.

I have just been immersed in an extraordinary experience: a mini-tour of conferences in Brazil encompassing four key cities – Sao Paulo, Rio, Salvador, Belo Horizonte. Full houses, sharp questions, fabulously warm people, divine gastronomy – a deep dive into the 8th largest economy in the world and major BRICS+ node.

As much as I was trying to impress the finer points of the long and winding road to multipolarity and the multiple instances of frontal clash between NATOstan and the Global Majority, I was learning non-stop from an array of generous Brazilians about the current inner contradictions of a society of astonishing complexity.

 

It’s as if I was immersed in a psychedelic journey conducted by Os Mutantes, the iconic trio of the late 1960s Tropicalia movement: from the business front in Sao Paulo – with its world-class restaurants and frantic deal-making – to the blinding beauty of Rio; from Salvador – the capital of Brazilian Africa – to Belo Horizonte, the capital of the third-wealthiest state in the Federation, Minas Gerais, a powerhouse of iron ore, uranium and niobium exports.

Chancay-Shanghai

I learned about how China chose the state of Bahia as arguably its key node in Brazil, where Chinese investment is everywhere – even if Brazil is not yet a formal member of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

In Rio, I was presented with an astonishing work on Stoics Zeno and Cleanthes by essayist Ciro Moroni – delving among other issues into the equivalences between Stoic theogony/theology and the Hindu Vedanta – the tradition of culture, religion and sacred rituals in India up to the Buddha era.

And in a sort of psychedelic synchronicity, I felt like Zeno in the Agora as we debated the NATO proxy war against Russia in Ukraine at a lovely round pavillion – a mini-Agora – in fabled Liberty Square in Belo Horizonte, across the street from a fabulous exhibition of Treasures of Peruvian Art.

Much to my astonishment, a Peruvian, Carlos Ledesma, flew in from Lima especially for my conference and the exhibition; and then he told me about the Chancay port being built south of Lima, owned 70% by COSCO and the rest by private Peruvian capital; that will be a sister port of Shanghai.

Chancay-Shanghai: APEC in action across the Pacific. Next November, there will be three nearly simultaneous key events in South America: the G20 in Rio, the APEC summit in Lima, and the inauguration of Chancay.

Chancay will be boosted by no less than five rail corridors that may eventually be built – certainly with Chinese investment – from the agribusiness Valhalla in the Brazilian Center-West all the way to Peru.

Yes, China is all over the place in its largest trade partner in Latin America – much to the despair of a Hegemon sending lowly functionary Little Blinken to Beijing to hear the letter of the new law by Xi Jinping himself: it’s cooperation or confrontation, a “downward spiral”. Your downward spiral.

A river from Tibet to Xinjiang

At the Belo Horizonte conference, I shared the stage with remarkable Sebastien Kiwonghi Bizaru from Congo, who supervises PhD programs at the Candido Mendes University as well as being a Professor of International Law, after an extraordinary academic journey.

He is also the author of a ground-breaking book examining the highly debatable role of the UNSC in the conflicts of the Great Lakes – focusing on Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

With top researcher Natacha Rena, we pored over a map of China retracing her travels east to west last year all the way to the Xinjiang border – as she filled me in on the astonishing Honggqi River – or Red Flag River – Project, first proposed in 2017: no less than an attempt to divert water from Tibet to the dry lands and deserts of Xinjiang by building an enormous, over 6,000 km-long artificial river, including the branch canals.

The projected river will be slightly less longer than the Yangtze, diverting 60 billion cubic meters of water a year, more than the annual flow of the Yellow River. Predictably, ecologists in China are attacking the project, which may have already had an official go-ahead and is proceeding discreetly.

And then, as I was on the road between Rio and Minas Gerais, the BRICS 10 Ministers of Economy and heads of Central Banks met in Sao Paulo: and all of them hailed the drive towards “independent” payment settlement mechanisms. Russia is the 2024 president of this crucial group.

Russian Vice-Minister of Finance, Ivan Chebeskov, went straight to the point: “Most countries agree that payment in national currencies is what the BRICS need.” The Russian Ministry of Finance privileges the creation of a common digital platform congregating the BRICS Central Banks’ digital currencies and their national systems of transmitting financial messages.

Crucially, at this BRICS 10 meeting, most members stressed they are in favor of totally bypassing the U.S. dollar for trading.

Russian Minister of Finance Anton Siluanov was even bolder: he said that Russia is proposing to BRICS the creation of an independent and “de-politicized” global system of payments.

Siluanov hinted that the system may be based on blockchain – considering its low cost and minimal control exercised by the Hegemon.

BRICS map the new world in Sao Paulo

A day before the meeting in Sao Paulo, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov in Moscow supported the development of these BRICS strategies, noting that “if we manage to develop independent financial mechanisms, that will seriously question the globalization mechanism currently led by the West.”

As over 100 nations are currently researching or embryonically implementing a digital currency in their Central Banks, a big breakthrough is imminent in Russia – a process I have been following in detail since last year.

In the end, it’s all about Sovereignty. That was the crux of the most serious debates I had this past week in Brazil, with academic players and on several podcasts related to the conferences. It’s the overarching theme hanging over the Lula government, as the President seems to cast the figure of a lonely fighter cornered by a vicious circle of 5th columnists and comprador elites.

In Belo Horizonte I was presented with yet another astonishing book by a former, brilliant government official, the late Celso Brant. After a sharp analysis of the modern history of Brazil and its interactions with imperialism, he reminds the reader of what stellar Mexican writer and poet Octavio Paz said in the 1980s about Brazil and China: “These will be the two great protagonists of the 21th century.”

When Paz rendered his verdict, every indicator favored Brazil, which since 1870 held the largest GDP growth in the world. Brazil exported more than China, and from 1952 to 1987 was growing at annual rate of 7.4%. Continuing the trend, Brazil would be the 4th largest economy in the world by now (it’s between 8th and 9th, side by side with Italy, and could be the 5th, were not for direct destabilization by the Empire starting in the 2010s, culminating with the Car Wash operation).

That’s exactly what Brant shows: how the Hegemon intervened to crash Brazilian development – and that started way before Car Wash. Kissinger was already saying in the 1970s that “the United States will not allow the birth of a new Japan under the Equator line.”

Hardcore neoliberalism was the privileged tool. While China under Little Helmsman Deng Xiaoping and then Jiang Zemin went Full Sovereign, Brazil was mired in neocolonial dependency. Lula tried – and is now trying it again, against all odds and surrounded on all sides, with Brazil branded as a “swing state” by U.S. Think Tankland and potential victim of new rounds of imperial Hybrid War.

Lula – and some solid academic elites away from power – know full well that as a neo-colony, Brazil will never fulfill its potential of being, side by side with China, as prophesized by Paz, the great protagonist of the 21st century.

That was the major takeaway of my psychedelic tour of Tropicalia: Sovereignty. Viktor Orban – accused by simpletons of being a member of a fuzz “Neofascist International” – nailed it with a simole formulation: “The inglorious period of Western civilization will be brought to an end this year, by replacing the world built on progressive-liberal hegemony with a Sovereigntist one.”

Daily Comics

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Ukrainian Losses And The Role An Austrian Archduke Has Had In Them

A recent piece in the New York Times connects us to a name which played a serious role in the last century of Ukrainian ‘nationalism’.

The history of the western Ukrainian region is, like in some other European areas, a quite convoluted drama that still plays out today.

The first reports of war fatigue in the ‘nationalist’ western Ukraine are coming in. Natalia Yermak, a Ukrainian cartoon producer turned New York Times journalist, reports from the Galician area near Lviv:

In Western Ukraine, a Community Wrestles With Patriotism or Survival (archived) – New York Times
As the war drags on, communities that were steadfast in their commitment to the war effort have been shaken by the unending violence on the front line.

It was sunset when Maj. Kyrylo Vyshyvany of the Ukrainian army stepped into the yard of his childhood home in Duliby, a village in western Ukraine, just after his younger brother, also a soldier, had been buried. Their mother was still crying in the living room.“I can already see that she’ll be coming to visit him every day,” he said that day. He was right, but he would not be by her side. A few days after the funeral, in March 2022, he was killed in a Russian missile strike on a Ukrainian military base and buried next to his brother, Vasyl.

The Vyshyvany brothers were the first deaths from Duliby and the surrounding community after Russia began its full-scale invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Since then, 44 more Ukrainian soldiers from the area have been killed — more than four times the local death toll from the previous eight years of fighting Russian-backed separatists in the east.

For Duliby and its surrounding enclave of Khodoriv — total population around 24,000 people — waiting for the next solemn death notification and the funeral that follows has become a bitter routine. But even as the town meets and buries the fallen with modest ceremony, some neighbors are quietly weighing the price they are willing to pay for a war with no end in sight.

Divisions have started to form between residents agnostic about the war — often those whose family members have dodged the draft or fled the country — and those who have loved ones on the front line or who fully support the war effort.

The name Vyshyvany looked quite familiar to me. I’ll come back to it.

The reporter depicts Galicia, the hotbed of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) fascists, as ‘nationalist’:

In the earliest days of the war, before the news of the first combat deaths arrived, people in communities across Ukraine flocked to draft offices. Among them was Khodoriv, whose families have a long history of fighting for Ukraine’s independence and being executed or sent into exile during violent Soviet repressions of its nationalist movement in the last century.

Even in the region with deeply seated Ukrainian nationalism lots of people have skipped the draft by paying bribes or other means:

Petro Panat, the leader of the territorial defense unit, an ad hoc military unit formed in the early days of the war to protect local communities, said 10 out of 30 men from the unit had since obtained documents to legally exempt them from fighting. The exemptions are granted for reasons like health problems or relatives in need of care.

In the Khodoriv area, relatives of soldiers who are fighting or who have died at the front said that in the last two years they have begun to resent men in the community who are said to have bought their way out of service while their own sons and fathers are fighting — a feeling that may be shared by many across the country as the Ukrainian government wrestles with how to mobilize up to 500,000 more troops.

After the war is lost, with whatever other outcome, there will be a deep acrimony between families who’s members have fought and died in it and those families who had the means and foresight to bail their members out:

There is no legal way to pay for an exemption from military service in Ukraine, but there have been widespread reports of corruption in draft offices, with bribes ranging from $1,000 early in the war — “a buyout from death” — to as much as the $10,000 per head price that was revealed in a Kyiv draft center.

In future the distance between the ‘nationalists’ and pragmatist draft dodgers will get even bigger than it has been before the war. I wonder how much that could contribute to further internal strife or even a civil war in western Ukraine.

Now back to the Vyshyvany family name which was the first mentioned in the above piece. I had stumbled over it a while ago.

If one searches for that name it brings up the Wikipedia page of the Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria who was born in 1895. Wilhelm’s  rather complicate history and Ukrainian fascist-‘nationalism’ are deeply interwoven:

Archduke Wilhelm Franz of Austria, later Wilhelm Franz von Habsburg-Lothringen (10 February 1895–18 August 1948), also known as Vasyl Vyshyvanyi (Ukrainian: Василь Вишиваний), was an Austrian archduke, a colonel of the Ukrainian Sich Riflemen, a poet, and a member of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine.

Wilhelm was raised in his parental estate located in the Austrian city of Saybusch, Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria. His father was a patriot of Poland [..]. Accommodating the 19th-century rise of nationalism, he decided that his branch of the Habsburg family would adopt a Polish identity and would combine a loyalty to their Habsburg family with a loyalty to Poland. Accordingly, he had his children learn Polish from an early age and tried to instill in them a sense of Polish patriotism.

Wilhelm, the youngest child, rebelled, and came to identify with the Poles’ rivals, the Ukrainians. … [H]e developed a fascination with Ukrainian culture that he kept for the rest of his life.

The family eventual accepted his Ukrainian tendencies and groomed Wilhelm to become a ruler of Galicia, then part of Austria-Hungary and today of western Ukraine.

During the first world war Wilhelm became a Ukrainian ‘nationalist’:

The most acceptable course to solve the “Ukrainian issue”, for Wilhelm, was the creation of an autonomous Grand Duchy of Ukraine with federalist principles, within the Habsburg monarchy. That duchy, beside the Eastern Galicia and Bukovina provinces, could include as well Ukrainian lands that at that time belonged to the Russian Empire and which had to be reconquered.

Supported by the German-Empire and Austria-Hungary William fought as commander of Ukrainian draftees against the Bolsheviks.

When the world war ended William was hospitalized. Ukraine, the name translates to ‘border land’, again experienced the fate that comes with such an estate:

As he lay in the hospital, World War I ended, Austria-Hungary fell apart, and the Habsburgs lost their throne. In Eastern Galicia the West Ukrainian National Republic was proclaimed, while the Ukrainians of Bukovina tried, unsuccessfully, to unite their land with the new Ukrainian republic. The Bukovina was occupied by hostile Romanian forces, causing Wilhelm to flee to Lviv to avoid arrest. As Lviv was occupied now by Polish forces, Wilhelm again was forced to leave, moving to the Carpathian region where he was hiding in local monasteries for almost half a year. Meanwhile, while Germany was withdrawing its troops from Ukraine, the regime of Skoropadskyi in Ukraine was overthrown by republican forces of “Directorate”, led by Volodymyr Vynnychenko and Symon Petliura, and interest in seeing Wilhelm as sovereign of Ukraine faded.

During that era other nation’s rivalries affected the region – as they had done before for many centuries and as they still do today.

Between the world wars Wilhelm was mostly in Vienna but continued his Ukrainian ‘nationalist’ activities:

In circles of Ukrainian political emigrants, a hope was burning that the loss was not yet final and the Soviet regime could still be overthrown. In Vienna, Wilhelm became involved with pro Ukrainian monarchists who saw in him an opportunity, but nothing came out of it.

In Paris Vyshavanyi renewed his communications with Ukrainians when members of the newly formed Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) found him. He twice met with head of OUN Yevhen Konovalets. Through Wilhelm, nationalists tried to find new sources of financing.

Wilhelm supported the German Nazis who, with the avid support of the Ukrainian OUN militia, killed many Poles and Jews after invading the Soviet Ukraine. When the Nazis turned against the OUN Wilhelm stayed with the Ukrainian ‘nationalists’:

Soon however, Wilhelm realized that the Hitlerites would not allow for creation of independent Ukraine even as a puppet state similar to Slovakia. After he and his brother Karl Albrecht were arrested and interrogated by Gestapo, Wilhelm changed his political views and soon joined the local anti-Nazi resistance in Vienna.

When the second world war came to an end Wilhelm was engaged by the British(?) and French secret services to instigate a Ukrainian nationalist terror campaign against the Soviet forces in Ukraine:

At some point Maas introduced Wilhelm to his colleague Jack Brier who in his turn in 1946 introduced Wilhelm to French military officer Jean Pélissier. The latter had been tasked by the French authorities to revive contacts with Ukrainian nationalists who continued to fight the Soviet regime. Confrontation between yesterday’s allies, the collective West and the Soviet Union, was becoming more obvious and eventually had grown into what now is known as the Cold War. The French representatives promised help with delivering by planes political agitation on the Soviet territory as well as Ukrainian militants who would join the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA). At first the French representatives requested to meet personally with Stepan Bandera, but since it was too complicated, agreed to meet someone from his closer associates.

The ‘western’ allies, especially the U.S. between 1948 and 1952, spent a lot of effort and money to instigate an insurgency in Galicia against the Soviet forces.

Wilhelm was eventually caught by the Soviets. In 1948 he died in of tuberculosis a prison hospital

One wonders what else but the name connects the Vyshyvany family in the recent NYT piece with the Austrian aristocrat turned Ukrainian ‘nationalist’.

In the early 1950s, after the Soviets had launched a serious counter insurgency campaign, the post WWII fascist OUN insurgency in Ukraine eventually petered out.

In 2014 the U.S. revived it.

Posted by b on May 9, 2024 at 15:00 UTC | Permalink

  1. Don’t celebrate too soon, wait until it’s a sure thing.
  2. Don’t give things to people who won’t value them.
  3. Starting is simple, but keeping going is tough.
  4. Showing off starts when being smart ends.
  5. Even someone foolish can have a talent.
  6. Even when time feels never-ending, life is still short.
  7. Everyone likes different things. Let’s respect each other’s preferences.
  8. Fear is only as strong as we let it be in our minds.

Is this the end of the United States as a global superpower?

SUMMARY: US lost dominance nearly decade ago on all fronts, now, its prepping a world war against China to regain it before the gap gets wider

Dominance? This was over 7 years ago.

Dominance? America lost the first spot to China on all fronts.

ECONOMIC: China is the world No. 1 Economy for 5 years and over 10 years if you add the black economy.

POLITICAL: U.S policy was based on creating Win-lose, China’ relies on Win-Win.

Invasions and destruction VS. Investments and development.

All U.S close allies rushed to China to build partnerships, after realizing that the US can’t be trusted for a blink.

These partnerships are China’s Political leverage in the future. A way smarter approach than bullying and intimidation.

China is respected, the US is (was tb precise) feared.

The atrocities and impunity of the several consecutive US administrations made the US hated but feared worldwide, which made China loved and respected when it emerged.

China is a 70 century old wise grandad compared to the US,a bustard 4 centuries baby with a diaper, wisdom and experience is a key on the policies front.

(Note: bustard is not an insult here,but a description of a nation born on a raped land from another, and that explains alot, since It was born with brute force and relied on it to present)

TECHNOLOGY: One of the Chinese giants, HUAWEI is times bigger than the entire of Silicon Valley companies. Search Huawei city and see the wonders. HUAWEI is the world’s no 1 mobile phones manufacturer, the forbidden APPLE is the 3rd next to Samsung. But that’s just the tip.

HUAWEI is the world’s leading telecom company, owns the 5G with over 1000+ patents and now the 6G.

The panic of NSA and the 5 eyes( US,CA, UK,AU,NZ) over the 5G says it all. The FIORC or the 5 eyes WERE tapping and controlling all Internet and telecommunications until the 5G. Now, HUAWEI or China runs the show.

But the desperation of US was really interesting, starting with an idiotic campaigns on the hazards of the 5G, as if the 4G was the last safe thing and supposedly we shouldn’t advance anymore?

That was followed by an even more idiotic move from NSA, which announced they will start their own 5G, they will reinvent the wheel, so by the time, they are ready, there will be 6 or even 7G.Ofc the intention was a message of the US capabilities to the world, which was perceived as a silly joke.

Now, the entire West is paying loyalties on the 5G patents to HUAWEI.

Tables are turned, yesterday’s payee is today’s payer. More importantly, intelligence is in the Chinese hands

And another desperate but seriously idiotic move was by Trump, by calling Tredau of Canada, to arrest HUAWEI daughter( also HUAWEI CFO) from Canada to the USA in an attempt to blackmail HUAWEI on the 5G. Obviously blackmailing was Trump’s Art of the deal.

These desperate moves signals the panic of the US and its typical way of thinking. Just American muscles no brains.

Since Technology and communication is a key and crucial factor in today’s smart weapons, it adds leverage to the military front.

MILITARY This is tricky, because practically wars aren’t 1vs 1, but alliance vs alliance.

1 vs 1, China has an equivalent of each US weapon,but China has weapons, the US never saw before on the military parade of the Chinese party 70 year anniversary. Its available on CCTV UT channel.

The US realises that the gap with China is growing wider every day. So, its Now or Never.

Knowing that China and Russia have joint defense agreement, then they will face both together.

The US used Ukraine to provoke Russia and Taiwan to provoke China. These pawns are presented to the public under the pretenses of democracy and free world, as always. Its not Ukraine vs Russia, its the US and the Nato against Russia and China for now.

Inflation rises in the countries of conflict, pretty normal, but in the present quarter, it’s the entire world.

This is not a regional conflict, its a global one, its a brink of a world war.

The US weapon stockpiles have been depleted to critical levels, making the US incapable of self defense with its current levels. Manufacturing backlogs are full. The US won’t risk that unless its at war, not for any of the pawns. These stockpiles are enough to go against the entire world.

It’s pretty clear that the 4 centuries diapered baby, is a cry baby, and can’t learn or accept the fact, that life and existence is a cycle, everything is a cycle.

Europe had its 2 centuries of dominance, then the US had its 2, now its China, its Asia time.

The West had 4 centuries collectively, now its the East time

So, the US crybaby isn’t mature enough to grasp that concept, and seek a confrontation while at parity, hoping to stay dominant.

Nothing strange, Muscles no brains is the American way of thinking.

The brat doesn’t realise its not a confrontation vs Russia and China, its against a cycle, its against nature

Man has never won against nature

So again, DOMINANCE was 10 years ago, and heading to DOOM, unless one of those immigrants isn’t thinking the American way.

God saves us all from the immigrants way of thinking

This answer isn’t really about saying what one single country has done the worst, but I do want to share below on the cruelty of humankind that many people don’t know about.

Graphic content below but I want to make this known because so many people around the world have heard of Hitler, Nazis, concentration camps but they have not heard of the Asian holocaust that took place around the same period. In western schools, history classes do not teach people about this part of the world.

This is regarding what the Japanese did during their occupation of Korea and the war crimes they committed to the surrounding Asian countries, including some Pacific Islands they invaded: Mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Myanmar, East Timor, New Guinea, Indonesia, Guam, Nauru, Wake Island, Attu and Kiska Islands, and Kiribati.

They even had some prisoners of war from the west such as America, any forces against them at the time etc.

Hundreds of thousands of women from my country in Korea were forcefully abducted (called comfort women) during the Japanese occupation in WWII. They endured torture beyond imagination if they did not sexually submit to these vile men and were forced to have sex with 60–100 men every single day. Their innards rotted because of the STD’s and they were destroyed, unable to have children even after they were rescued. They have still not been compensated for the war crimes that they endured and majority have died.

Pregnant mothers were cut open and rape victims were sodomized with bamboo sticks and bayonets until they died in agony.

On top of this they literally tore the unborn from women’s wombs and speared them alive with bayonets in front of them. They’d crush the infant’s skull against concrete floors. They would actually do this for fun.

They tied sons and daughters up and tore them apart, spearing them and forced their own parents to watch.

They raped and pillaged women of all ages, even toddlers to old women in the most vile, disgusting way imaginable. They would often disembowel them while in the process, leaving them to die in agony.

They conducted unspeakable evil torture and experiments on LIVE prisoners from these countries even children and infants in UNIT 731. Torture methods such as vivisecting pregnant women without any anesthesia, centrifuging and killing people in pressurized chambers, and slowly burning and freezing people alive. They artificially created what is similar to the ‘bubonic plague’ to see the effects on the prisoners. They were forced into X-rays until they perished and hung people by their thumbs or tongues etc. These torture tactics were deliberately planned to see death happen SLOWLY, not fast as the scientists wanted to observe the resilience of the human body.

Unbelievably Inhumane Japanese Torture Methods Used During World War II

@main qimg 30af759ac02bf12299e3638e3d9082d3 lq
@main qimg 30af759ac02bf12299e3638e3d9082d3 lq

Bodies of slayed, raped, mutilated women in China.

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Carcasses of babies and children piled up

Despite this, Japan still presently denies what has happened and even believes that it is a rumour. The young people as shown in this video are absolutely clueless on the whole tragedy, or are so far removed in cognitive dissonance and lack of care it is astounding. There is even a middle aged woman in the video who even says “Well I’m not sure if it’s a rumour or not…” which is an absolute lunacy and an embarrassment of the failure of the country in not properly educating their citizens of what truly happened. One young girl even says “Well, I wonder when they will ever get over it…” How are people supposed to get over it when there are still thousands of victims still alive who didn’t receive any form of compensation for what they have been through??!

Their government still warps their history books and deliberately tries to hide the evidence of what truly happened. There are active groups within Japan who refuse to accept what happened and truly believe that it is just a ‘rumour’ to make Japan look bad.

Below is a real life account by a South Korean comfort woman on the horrors she went through. It is heartbreaking to watch but quite educational. She sadly passed away early January of this year, fighting until her last breath but still never receiving any compensation or apology from the Japanese. They don’t even recognize that she went through this or who she is.

What Japan did wasn’t just an invasion or occupation, it was a literal carnage, hell on earth genocide. They didn’t have to go this far as majority of the Koreans and the people they invaded were helpless farmers, uneducated servants, and innocent people who were not trained in war at all. They did this because they did not see these people as human, and their goal wasn’t simply to occupy, but to desecrate the spirit from within. They knew when you destroy someone’s spirit from inside out, the enemy will bend the knee and yield to the point where they do not have the soul to fight back. On top of this, it was just pure, raw sadistic savagery because all of these helpless people surrendered and begged for mercy yet they were still tortured for absolutely no reason.

Presently Japan is one of the most wealthiest and prosperous Asian countries in the world yet they cannot even fully take responsibility for their own committed atrocities. It shows the savage barbarism that still resides in some of these people and makes one question just how this is even acceptable. Instead they choose to warp their own history books, flat out deny it existed and have refused to offer sincere, acceptable compensation/apology for the people who are still alive. They are waiting until every last victim is dead so they no longer have to worry about it. They are not truly ashamed of this past, they just see it as an eyesore they want to bury. Keep in mind Japan has very strong political parties that strives to ensure this shameful past does not reach the masses to retain their false honour. Still to this day, they praise their war criminals in shrines.

From the invasion of China in 1937 to the end of World War II, the Japanese military regime murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably almost 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This is more than the estimated Jewish victims of the Holocaust.

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe controversially claimed that “there was no evidence to prove

” that the women had been coerced into sex.

“The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is engaged in an all-out effort to portray the historical record as a tissue of lies

designed to discredit the nation,” wrote Mindy Kotler, director of Asia Policy Point, in 2014.

“Mr. Abe’s administration DENIES that imperial Japan ran a system of human trafficking and coerced prostitution, implying that comfort women were simply camp-following prostitutes,” Kotler continued. “The official narrative in Japan is fast becoming detached from reality, as it seeks to cast the Japanese people — rather than the comfort women of the Asia-Pacific theater — as the victims of this story.”

Japan’s Textbooks Reflect Revised History

Japanese Broadcast Official: We Didn’t Commit War Crimes, the U.S. Just Made That Up

Why is it so hard for Japan to say sorry?

China criticises Japan after Shinzo Abe honours war criminals as martyrs

Letter threatening to hunt Koreans sent to South Korean embassy in Japan: media

The Harrowing Story Of Filipina Women Enslaved In Japan’s Wartime Rape Camps

Edit: Since I’m getting quite a lot of people who clearly don’t seem to understand and may not have read or researched in depth in this matter. They are saying that ‘Japan does not need to offer apology or compensation for what people of their past did etc’

It’s more complicated than that. Please read the links again. Even if they can’t take full responsibility for their past, they SHOULD take responsibility for the future by not warping textbooks and giving power to political parties who enforces the dangerous fallacy of denying any of this ever happened or triviliazing everything that has happened. They should make sure to teach the correct history not just for educational purposes but to ensure their citizens fully know and accept their own history and in hopes that it never happens again. This is also to help not silence the voices of the people who did suffer in the past and to not spit into their graves and ruin their legacy by spreading false lies.

Also the comfort women and people who were forcefully taken into labour camps as prisoners, many are still alive who didn’t actually get any compensation or even sheer RECOGNITION. They suffered their entire lives without anyone hearing what they have to say with nothing from Japan. This isn’t just about wanting Japan to go up to a stadium and saying ‘I am sorry’ and stepping down. Words are meaningless and worthless when not backed up by actions.

They are hypocrites by warping textbooks and also praising their own war criminals. Imagine what the world would say if Germany praises Nazis and gave strong political power that has the power to make Germans never even hearing of the Nazis or even contemplate if it was just a rumour or not. Think about how insane that would be.

So why do they need to apologise? Because unlike Germany what they are doing is absolutely deplorable and morally bankrupt by continuing to CONTRIBUTE to the legacy of the abomination Japan was in the past. You don’t see Germany do the same about the Nazis and for good reason. It means Japan hasn’t learned and is not truly remorseful. By Japan I am talking of the FACES of Japan which are the politicians who represent that country. The rest of the Japanese experience their trickle down effect so while it’s not saying it’s their fault, they end up indirectly contributing to supporting these vile politicians. So yes the people who represent JAPAN who hold the power of influence does need to sincerely apologise and stop contributing to what they are presently doing.

As I am getting tired of having to repeat the same information again and again, any comments that say things along the lines of ‘Japan does not need to apologise’ or those questioning or defending the existence of any of these crimes, their war criminals will be either ignored, deleted or blocked. It is extremely disrespectful to the victims and deplorable. The links are already here clear as day for reading and one can also do the research themselves. Also for anyone who brings up another atrocity and pitting them against each other, STOP. This post isn’t about pitting one atrocity against another, it is disgusting to even keep doing that and seriously lacks any insight into the original point of my post.

Otherwise thank you for reading and have a nice day.

TLDR: Japan did some truly horrific shit that many people including the present day Japanese citizens are unaware of. What they did is abysmal carnage from the Antichrist itself.

Also, piece of shit apologies that require uttering words and throwing money at victims isn’t a true apology when they are still in 2019 warping textbooks and none of their youths know anything about their crimes.

Why do you think Germany forces every citizen to learn about their nazi history and Japan doesn’t ? It is to deliberately ignore and not acknowledge their past due to their pride and selfishness. I’d equate this to even pathological narcissism and psychopathy due to how far they have gone in managing stomping this knowledge out of their own present day citizens.

Edit 2: As I am still getting very disrespectful, deranged comments on here pitting atrocities against each other, saying that I am spreading lies and others spewing ignorant hatred against Koreans, here’s my final message.

Instead of blaming others, look at what Japanese Nationals do. Stop diverting the attention away by blaming the mistakes of other countries yet not acknowledging the corruption of the Japanese government

Japan’s leaders are still stubbornly refusing to admit their war crimes

What Japanese history lessons leave out

Japanese people often fail to understand why neighbouring countries harbour a grudge over events that happened in the 1930s and 40s. The reason, in many cases, is that they barely learned any 20th Century history. I myself only got a full picture when I left Japan and went to school in Australia

The Germans in contrast have personally done everything possible to make people aware of their Nazi past. Japan doesn’t scratch the surface of what it means to have true honour while Germans go to great lengths to do humanitarian work and to allow their citizens to understand the FULL facts. This is what true compensation and remorse actually is, not the dogshit excuse of what Japan does by also denying people, correct history. End of.

We must remember Nazi crimes, says Merkel

Daughter was 4, old enough to be dropped at a birthday party for sometime without husband or I to be with her.

At this one party, I dropped her and told her I would be back in an hour and that if she wants to come home, she just needs to tell the birthday boy’s mother to call me.

She assured me she was okay and headed off inside.

I was skeptical as this was the first time but she appeared okay to me.

I went back after an hour and a half to see the main door was open. I took out my slippers and peeked in. A bunch of kids were fighting and screaming. A few girls were crying put loud for their mother terrified with scene going on in front of them.

I looked around for my daughter and didn’t see her.

I panicked.

The host was in the middle of the whole drama trying to call a truce but in vain. Two mothers joined me just then and took control over the situation.

I looked around for my daughter and still couldn’t find her. I went over to the host lady and asked her about it.

She laughed and pointed at a teeny tiny corner of the dining table.

Perched up on the chair sat my daughter with a plate in her hand, munching away the food. Oblivious to the surrounding.

The whole area looked like a war zone. ‘Hurt’ people were complaining to their mother. The birthday boy was crying because his party was spoiled plus someone broke his favourite toy. Some girls were crying because they were afraid and wanted to their parents to take them away.

And here was my daughter not caring a damn to the drama that unfolded around her.

“Hey!” I said as I walked up to her.

“Mumma, the fried rice is really good and also these cheese balls. You want?” She said beaming.

“There was a fight here. You know what happened?”

“No. I am eating.” She said as she dug into her cheese ball with a fork.

When it comes to food she doesn’t care even if the world is ending.

Yep, that’s my kid.

Women has it so easy…

During a light-hearted exchange, a man guessed this 39-year-old woman’s age to be 43, which apparently pissed her off. She followed him to the bathroom and glassed him in the face, twice.

He received a 10cm cut that narrowly missed his eye, as well as an injury to his thumb while he was trying to shield his face. He needed stitches for his injuries.

Judge Elizabeth Nicholls spared her prison. The judge said that she could see this woman was a ‘hard working woman’, ‘loving mother’ and ‘no risk to the public’. Yeah right.

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In September 9 last year Joanne Dodd was out with her sister at a Manchester pub. In a banter with a guy he was asked to guess their age, at which he guessed Joanne to be four years older than she was. This made her fly into a rage and threaten to hurt him. He excused himself to go to the bathroom and away from the hostile situation, but she followed him and attacked him with her glass.

In court her lawyer said she was drunk. Said she was suffering from low self-esteem. Yeah aren’t we all. We just don’t cut up people’s faces when we’re drunk.

Joanne pleaded guilty to inflicting grievous bodily harm. She was facing up to three years in jail under the sentencing guidelines.

But she was spared jail. The judge said, “one person’s banter may be insulting to others, but that did not justify what you then went on to do.” Fair enough, but come on.

She almost rendered someone blind over a joke, gave them multiple lacerations in the face that needed stitches.

Joanne was sentenced to 12 months in prison, suspended for 12 months and was ordered to complete 180 hours of unpaid work. Plus also ordered to pay £800 in compensation to her victim.

When I worked for the legal department of the Department of Children and Families, about year three or so I begin to experience profound depression, bad enough that I needed to seek medical assistance. I felt pretty miserable that my life had deteriorated to a point where I would need psychotropic medication just to function, but the doctors assured me that it was a very good thing that I was seeking help from them instead of trying to self medicate and we tried to work on a plan. The problem was, I hadn’t taken any psychotropic meds for years at that point, and I wasn’t sure what would be effective. At this point, there are so many medications on the market that sometimes it’s literally a game of “well, let’s try this and see how it goes.”

The first medication I took, Prozac, made me paranoid, even at half-dose, and gave me full-blown panic attacks. I called the doctors’ office to explain my symptoms, and they continued to tweak, but suggested that I give the meds a chance to work. The meds ended up knocking me out constantly. I literally would not have been safe to drive a car, let alone work with legal files.

The managing attorney of the office threatened my employment when I came back to work, stating that me being out of work for five days put too much stress on everyone else in the office for coverage. Mind you, this is the same person who would make small talk with me about when I was going on vacation and asked me why I hadn’t dropped everything to go across the country with my husband on one of his spur-of-the-minute trips California or Italy or something. So it’s totally cool if I ask for time off to go on a drinking trip, but actually trying to manage my mental health so that I can continue to do the job of a junior attorney for a receptionist pay is borderline terminable?

This is the same supervisor who took nine months off for her own maternity leave, but was demanding that an underling come back to work four weeks after giving birth because “the office needed her.” Completely unempathetic human being. Before she became the managing attorney, the turnover in the office was practically zero; afterwards, it stood close to 90% every two years.

I was working the front desk at the police station when a woman came in and said she had some information. She told me her boyfriend (I had the impression he was or was about to be an ex-boyfriend) had two sticks of dynamite hidden under her house. She wasn’t sure why he had this. I recorded her information, thanked her, and sent her on her way.

The usual procedure would have been to notify our bomb squad. My department participated in a regional EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) team that was staffed by representatives of the local police, sheriff, and fire departments. Our PD’s representative was an academy classmate. He was (and is) also an asshole. I avoided talking to him for any reason. One of my close friends, however, was the EOD tech for the fire department. I called him at home and passed along the information.

About six hours later, my friend came in to the PD to update me. He had gone to the address in question for recon, found a suspicious package under the house (maybe some search and seizure issues here, but Not My Problem), and called the rest of the team. They recovered the two sticks of crystallized (read: highly unstable) explosive, which they placed into a bomb-proof cask to transport to a remote location to be “rendered safe” (read: blown up). He thanked me for a most productive day.

I was in court over a ticket, it was dismissed so I’m not a lawbreaker.

Anyway, this little old lady was called up. She’d been given a ticket for speeding in an area at the end of my street, a busy business highway street that goes through the main part of a town.

The lady told the judge she wasn’t speeding, she was actually going under the speed limit. The judge called the officer up, he said he clocked her going 44 in a 40. The officer said I clocked her in front of… some local business, XXXX, and she was doing 44mph. I drive that area every day, multiple times. The speed limit there is 45. She really wasn’t speeding. The judge started to chew the lady out, stating she was getting too old to drive and needed to surrender her license and sell her car.

I muttered something to the effect that she hadn’t done anything wrong and was driving fine, and the judge heard me. I was thinking “oh crap! now he’s not going to listen to me when it’s my turn!!” but I said I live on SSSS street and drive the road in question, every day. The speed limit in front of XXXX business is 45, the speed limit if 40 up the YYYY business and the 45 mph speed limit sign in on the easement in front of their business. The speed limit where he’s talking about is 45mph.

The judge had to get another officer on the phone to go and check where the speed limit changed. The lady went to sit down and wait. I was nearly last so when they got the call back he dismissed her ticket. I bet the officer got in trouble for giving false tickets.

All empires fall. It’s an historical fact.

The American Empire is falling. The US Dollar is America’s main pillar of power and the world is massively de-dollarizing.

Within the next 20 years, the US Dollar will no longer be the world’s primary reserve currency. It will be replaced by something else.

When that happens, the Empire will collapse. It will no longer be able to afford its military.

America is also rotting from within. It is plagued by domestic problems such as homelessness, gun violence, poor health care, poor education, crumbling infrastructure, opioid addiction, systemic racism (“I can’t breathe”), mass incarceration, growing poverty, etc.

The US political system is in turmoil. Deep political division. Deep corruption by the corporate capitalist elite. January 6, 2021 is just the beginning.

As we report, the disintegration of the old order is visible everywhere. Sanctions are used four times as much as they were during the 1990s; America has recently imposed “secondary” penalties on entities that support Russia’s armies. A subsidy war is under way, as countries seek to copy China’s and America’s vast state backing for green manufacturing. Although the dollar remains dominant and emerging economies are more resilient, global capital flows are starting to fragment, as our special report explains.The institutions that safeguarded the old system are either already defunct or fast losing credibility. The World Trade Organisation turns 30 next year, but will have spent more than five years in stasis, owing to American neglect. The IMF is gripped by an identity crisis, caught between a green agenda and ensuring financial stability. The un security council is paralysed. And, as we report, supranational courts like the International Court of Justice are increasingly weaponised by warring parties. Last month American politicians including Mitch McConnell, the leader of Republicans in the Senate, threatened the International Criminal Court with sanctions if it issues arrest warrants for the leaders of Israel, which also stands accused of genocide by South Africa at the International Court of Justice.

It is the U.S., the country which arguably benefited the most from the liberal international order, which is actively destroying it.

Others, if they did not attract random U.S. rage and war against them, also saw some benefits from it. Those small to medium countries will most likely lose out should the current regime collapse.

That would not be unprecedented:

Unfortunately, history shows that deeper, more chaotic collapses are possible—and can strike suddenly once the decline sets in. The first world war killed off a golden age of globalisation that many at the time assumed would last for ever. In the early 1930s, following the onset of the Depression and the Smoot-Hawley tariffs, America’s imports collapsed by 40% in just two years. In August 1971 Richard Nixon unexpectedly suspended the convertibility of dollars into gold; only 19 months later, the Bretton Woods system of fixed-exchange rates fell apart.

Similar ruptures, like the examples above again caused by the U.S., may happen soon.

Interestingly the Economist does not name a solution or way to avoid it. It sees a collapse coming, blames -more or less- the U.S. for causing it, but does not point to way out of it.

That is an uncharacteristically pessimistic view for writers who otherwise like to paint a positive picture for those with big money.

Posted by b on May 10, 2024 at 14:04 UTC | Permalink

Picadillo-Stuffed Turkey with
Orange-Tamarind Sauce

Add Latin flavor to your holiday turkey with the addition of picadillo ingredients to the Stove Top Stuffing.

picadillo stuffed turkey
picadillo stuffed turkey

Prep: 30 min | Total: 4 hr 45 min | Yield: 24 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon oil
  • 1 small onion, chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 1/2 pounds ground pork
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 1 (6 ounce) package Stove Top Stuffing Mix for Chicken
  • 1/2 cup raisins
  • 1/2 cup Planters Slivered Almonds, toasted
  • 5 large navel oranges, divided
  • 1 (15 pound) frozen turkey, thawed
  • 1 (14 ounce) package frozen tamarind pulp, thawed
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 4 1/2 teaspoons cornstarch
  • 1 tablespoon butter

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 325 degrees F.
  2. Heat oil in large skillet over medium heat.
  3. Add onions and garlic; cook and stir for 3 minutes.
  4. Add pork; cook 5 minutes or until no longer pink, stirring occasionally.
  5. Stir in tomato sauce; cook 2 minutes.
  6. Add stuffing mix, raisins, nuts and the juice of 2 oranges (about 1/2 cup); mix well. Cook for 5 minutes or until heated through, stirring frequently.
  7. Remove from heat. Cool for 15 minutes before stuffing the turkey.
  8. Remove and discard neck and giblets from turkey cavities. Rinse turkey; drain well. Free legs from tucked position, but do not cut band of skin. Place turkey, breast-side up, in roasting pan.
  9. Spoon stuffing into neck and body cavities, being careful to not pack stuffing into turkey too tightly. Return legs to tucked position; turn wings back to hold neck skin in place.
  10. Cut 1 orange into 8 slices; arrange over turkey. Cover breast loosely with foil to prevent over-browning.
  11. Bake for 3 hours, basting occasionally with pan juices.
  12. Meanwhile, combine tamarind pulp, sugar and juice from remaining 2 oranges in saucepan.
  13. Remove foil; bake turkey 45 minutes to 1 hour or until done (165 degrees F), brushing with 1/4 cup of the tamarind mixture for the last 15 minutes.
  14. Remove turkey from oven; let stand 15 minutes before carving.
  15. Meanwhile, stir cornstarch into remaining tamarind mixture until completely dissolved. Bring to boil; cook and stir 1 minute or until thickened.
  16. Remove from heat; stir in butter. Serve warm with turkey.

Notes

Serve with smart sides, such as a crisp mixed green salad and your favorite hot steamed vegetable.

A 12 to 14 pound frozen turkey needs 3 to 3 1/2 days of thawing time in the refrigerator. The cooking time will range between 3 to 3 3/4 hours until the turkey is done (165 degrees F).

Do not stuff turkey until ready to roast.

Nutrition

Per serving: Calories 460

Total fat 20g Saturated fat 6g Cholesterol 130mg Sodium 260mg Carbohydrate 26g Dietary fiber 2g Sugars 17g Protein 45g

% Daily Value: Vitamin A 2 % DV Vitamin C 0% DV Calcium 6% DV Iron 20% DV

* Nutrition information is estimated based on the ingredients and cooking instructions as described in each recipe and is intended to be used for informational purposes only. Please note that nutrition details may vary based on methods of preparation, origin and freshness of ingredients used.

“You never deserved any of the promotions I gave you.”

I started working for a small non-profit when it was only 3 other employees and myself. I was able to take over a lot of jobs that they were outsourcing and saved the foundation over $15,000 a year in contract labor within 6 months of being hired. Within 2 years, the organization grew to over 15 full time employees and I was promoted from Office Admin to Office Manager to Finance Director/Travel Logistics Manager. I was on call every day and often sacrificed family stuff to make sure the participants in programming were taken care of.

After 2 years, I took a 9 day vacation with my family to Disney. I made sure that everything was taken care of before I left and had made arrangements with co-workers to be able handle anything that came up. I left contacts for myself, and my husband should there be an emergency. On the plane to FL, I lost my phone. When we arrived at the hotel, I immediately emailed from my personal email to let my co-workers and boss know what had happened and how I was handling it.

When we returned, my boss pulled me into her office and berated me for not taking my work laptop on my family vacation and said that losing my phone (not a company phone) was extremely “unprofessional” and that I didn’t deserve anything I had earned in my tenure there. She claimed that she had only advanced me because she was being nice and yelled at me so loudly that the entire office heard. I told her that was pretty poor leadership and gave my 2 weeks notice to the founder and explained the situation. Unfortunately, he felt we were “just being catty” and refused to do anything about it.

You may not believe this, but…

Los Angeles. 1980, at a stoplight. three lanes. Truck in furthest left lane, A friend was next to me in middle lane, I was in the inside lane. My friend and I were revving our motors like we were going to drag race as soon as the light turned green.

Rev..rev, looking at the light. Waiting. Yellow comes on in other direction, I was ready to go when….. this old man crosses in front of us, slowly. He looks like he’s 100 years old and so slight you can barely see him.

The light turns green but we can’t go because of the guy. All of a sudden, from my left, a truck comes barreling through his red light, crossing directly in front of us. If it wasn’t for the old guy walking across our paths, we probably would have been dead. Except……later at the coffee shop, we were talking about what a close call that was, and that but for the old guy crossing we would have been toast.

My friend asked: “what old guy?” I said the old guy crossing the street in front of us, isn’t that why you didn’t take off? No, he said, I just don’t race at stoplights. I thought we were playing.” My friend was killed, a long time ago by an old driver racing through a red light and striking his car, killing him. Me: “So you didn’t see the old guy.” He laughed thinking I was making it up.

My life was saved by a ghost.

It was immediately after he moved in.

We had a house for 10 years. Beautiful natural yard with several 200+ year old oak trees. Mr. New Jersey moves in behind us and immediately starts pestering my wife about getting those trees cut down because, “if they fell over they could land on his house and take out the power so they needed to be removed immediately.” Wife demanded I not talk to him about it as she didnt want me to anger new neighbor.

She put up with it for a year. I was really sick of hearing her complain about it. So I started doing yard work where he could see me. He came over and started his rant. I politely told him noody was cutting down my wifes healthy oak trees and the subject was closed. I then pointed out his pretty shrub was growing into the powerline and needed to be trimmed or we would all have a power outage.

A few weeks later the power company came out for a service call(3 days with no power for the neighbor hood). His shrub had taken out the power.

We all now get along great.

When the 65 foot Hackberry tree died, I rented a 45 foot boomlift. He let me park it in his backyard while I cut that thing into 2 foot pieces and lowered it to the ground. It was leaning over the powerline. The power company wouldnt cut it down and I had to take it down in pieces so it didnt knock out the power to the neighborhood.

He asked me why I was doing the work instead of hiring a tree service. I explained its easy work and I find it fun and relaxing.

I get to drive a 45 foot boom lift and play with a new chainsaw. Its guy heaven.

He had thought he could bully a woman into cutting down her trees. As I had not gotten involved in the fracus for a year he maybe figured I was intimidated by him for some reason. Then he realized I wasnt intimidated and just supported my wifes opinions.

I was a stripper for about ten years, so I’ve talked to far more men than the average female. The one thing most married men talked about missing from their marriage/relationship was acknowledgement, particularly for their feelings, and also their contribution. Men would routinely tell me that their wife behaved as if she was owed a better husband than he was to her; she deserved a man who made more money, but she also deserved a man who spent more time at home. And very often, a man would go to great length and trouble to do something special for a woman he cared about, and very often, she would mention the parts he fell short in that endeavor. Women have encouragement and acceptance and affection and appreciation, and when a man gets all that from a woman, her holes are hardly the thing he wants most from her. In fact, if any woman has nothing to offer, but her holes, she will find herself very unwanted, even if she has really good holes.

Aliens & Espionage: Crop Circles and the CIA Coverup | They Don’t Want You to Know

This is great fun. Learn something.

Fun in Japan

I grew up rich. Very rich. And at a young age, my parents lost everything. To be more specific; my father lost everything. Instead of telling me the truth, they shielded it all from me.

Now, being the kind of child who was used to Versace dresses and Armani jeans, it wasn’t easy to start shopping at our local equivalent of Walmart. And trust me, I was the kind of kid that knew that nice stuff was really nice. And I loved shopping.

It wasn’t easy to give up all the toys. It wasn’t easy for me to buy less books than I used to. And I wasn’t given a reason why. All I was told was that I was a spoilt brat and that I didn’t deserve it.

My parents fought. A lot. Turns out, my dad had a gambling problem I didn’t notice.

He lost the house, the cars, the business. He owed people money. Terrifying people. And as a young girl, I used to be followed around by these terrifying people.

My mother kept me home more often. I wasn’t allowed out, unless it was to a friends house.

I developed insecurities, some learning disabilities and a terribly annoying stutter. My change was so obvious at school and the counsellors noticed. They told my mother to send me to a psychologist. That it would help. But she told them no, and that I wasn’t crazy.

But I wasn’t crazy. I just needed help. And she refused it because she didn’t want to believe it.

And my grades dropped even lower.

In my early teenage years, my mother told me the truth. We were poor. I could barely believe it because I studied at one of the most expensive schools in the country. But it was true.

The reason why daddy didn’t come home for a year? Because he was embarrassed. And because he didn’t want those terrifying people he owed money to, to get him.

My mother sold everything. She paid his way out. Then she got a divorce.

That broke my heart.

She blamed everything on him. She started drinking more. Started openly smoking.

She called me an idiot. Told me I was worthless. Basically made me feel as bad as she did.

That was kind of crappy.

All this while she made sure I hated my father for what he did. And I did.

At university I couldnt study without worrying about money. I worked more than I studied so I could pay for room and board, and I couldn’t keep up the hours necessary to make my grade. So I had to leave.

After I quit university, I didn’t speak for a year. I hid in my room and slept and read and occasionally I would go out to see old friends and feel more distant from them than I had ever been.

Eventually, my mother’s partner got me a job working at a gambling den. If you knew anything our country, it was that places like these were quasi-illegal.

Women were hired to entertain the male clients, and to take their cash to change it into credits. I was hired because I was pretty and I spoke English without an accent. Perfect for one of their best customers.

I was depressed. I wanted to die. But I did it because she made me do it.

I quit after three months. I realised that after everything she laid on me, that was possibly the worst. That was the biggest plot twist in my life. That my mother would basically prostitute me to make ends meet. That realisation what what changed me.

I still love her. But I do not necessarily trust her.

And as for my dad? I don’t hate him now.

I’ve learnt from the many turns of events, and finally from that last one that even though I am my parents children, that my parents may not always have my best interest in mind.

And now, I make sure that I’m ok and I get the support I need from the people whom I trust. And I support the people I love, and try not to expect anything in return.

It’s hard to shake off her shadow but every day is a new one, and everyday I am getting better.

Resident Evil: Opening Scene (HD CLIP)

Years ago I was at a wedding.

We were assigned a table with people we didn’t know.

All of a sudden, a guy started a conversation:

“So what do you do for a living?”

“I’m a pilot.”

“Are you a pilot, or a copilot?”

After clarifying the roles of captains and first officers, I said: “I am a first officer”.

“Your only task is to make coffee for the captain.” He laughed.

“What do you do?” I asked.

He had a good job: he was the sub-secretary in some government dependency. I suddenly felt like a hyena when she spots a wounded gazelle.

“You must make very good coffee for the Secretary.”

He got as offended with my answer as I was with his. Our conversation was over.

Why am I telling you this story? Because I feel offended by your question.

This time, however, I’ll be nice… and respectful.


I am a lazy guy.

If there’s an easy way, I’ll find it. I’m really good at avoiding chores. I’m on a constant lookout for shortcuts. I procrastinate.

Except when doing my job. Then, I become hard-working. There’s simply no other way.

  • I am awake while everybody else is sleeping.
  • I work more hours than others.
  • My job carries high levels of stress and responsibility.
  • I cannot afford to screw up too much.

I fly a highly automated airplane and, yes: I fly on autopilot most of the time. But this doesn’t mean I sit around doing nothing.

Flying manually or under autopilot is the same. You seem to be missing some important points of my job:

  • We are constantly planning what to do if things go wrong.
  • Conditions change, forecasts sometimes are wrong.
  • Weather gets nasty.
  • Aircraft systems fail.
  • There are a lot of procedures to follow.
  • The rules of the air are complicated, with subtle variations from country to country. We have to comply.
  • Passengers get sick, babies are born on board.
  • Airports get closed.
  • We fly with a certain amount of fuel. You cannot create more.
  • We cannot stop for troubleshooting.
  • We fly, navigate and communicate regardless of what’s happening.
  • We have to react calmly under extreme situations.

Most importantly, pilots are constantly making decisions. The right ones.

  • Making the wrong decision can cost me my job or my license, or even worse.
  • Making a good but inefficient decision can cost the company more money than they have paid me in 14 years.

They pay me to be safe and efficient.

Tinder Experiment: Attractive Men Reveal What Women REALLY Say

This is really harsh, but needs to be shown.

1.The “Invisible” robber

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On April 19 1995, a five foot six robber robbed the Pittsburgh bank without wearing a mask. His face could be seen clearly in security cameras.

When he robbed, he was so confident that he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of the bank.

Apparently, he rubbed lemon juice onto his face before committing the act. Since lemon juice is known for being an invisible ink, he thought the juice made him invisible.

When police caught him, he was very shocked, and said “But I wore the juice!”

2. The Bungling Burglar

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47-year-old Crawshaw got stuck at the bathroom’s window of a home he’s trying to break in 15 feet above ground.

The fire brigade had to be called to free him when the home owner returned to this ridiculous scene.

He was sentenced two and a half years in prison.

3. Driving dog

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When Reliford Copper III was suspected of driving under influence, he led police to a high-speed chase and crashed into a house.

When police cuffed his hands, he defended himself by saying “My dog was driving that car! I ran because I wanted to!”

Apparently police wasn’t convinced that he isn’t drunk or high. His charges included property damage, leaving the scene of an accident and resisting arrest.

I personally find those dumb criminals very amusing, I guess they just made the jobs easier for cops. Did they make you question human intelligence?

If you want to be a criminal, do it smart! 🙂

Every Grocery Store Is Leaving Chicago | City Begs For Help

I used to think… I used to think… that Chicago could avoid the collapse of American cities. Nope. It’s all down the shitter.

China has canceled US, Australian, France wheat imports, replacing them with orders from Russia, Kazakhstan and Argentina.

The US cancellation was the largest cancellation since 1999.

The Chinese government is showing a strong preference for buying from the BRICS and Global South economies, and is moving away from buying from the G7 countries which are part of the western bloc led by the US.

This is done for a combination of political and economic reasons. The US is pulling out the big guns when it comes to chip technology, AI, and blocking Chinese sales of EVs and solar panels, and more recently, the forced divesting of TikTok USA, which are all part of de-coupling and de-risking. From the Chinese perspective, the US’s Biden administration is heading rapidly in the direction of sanctions against Chinese companies following the sanctions applied against Russia. Opposition and hostility to Chinese companies and business interests in Congress is very strong, and China must be prepared for the US acting to seize Chinese assets which the US can reach. The only way to avoid this scenario is to have as few overseas assets in US dollars and held by US banks as possible.

This is the de-risking and de-coupling model the Chinese are following.

In the US, there may be a political side-effect in this US election year: Trump supporters are usually stronger in US rural states, and some farmers may blame the Biden administration for poor wheat sales and vote for Trump. In a tight race, this may be an important factor.

INSIDE JAPAN’S ULTIMATE LOVE HOTEL!

I’m not sure whether this is a little known fact, but I’ve always found it disturbing.

You know when you’re buying medicine, sometimes toiletries, and other things like that, and you find those annoying little seals?

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Some of you might know why these exist. Some might not.

In 1982, a 12-year-old Mary Kellerman took some Extra-Strength Tylenol and died not long afterwards.

Adam Janus, brother Stanley, and sister-in-law Theresa all died after taking some Tylenol capsules.

Not long afterwards, Mary McFarland, Paula Prince, and Mary Reiner all died after taking the same brand capsules.

All were from within the Chicago metropolitan area.

After the 7th person died, it was realised where the connection lay – each had ingested Tylenol capsules.

Tests on the bottles the capsules revealed an alarming fact:

The capsules

had been dosed with potassium cyanide!

Police were quickly able to rule out manufacturers as a source. They weren’t being tampered with there. They theorized that the source was from the shops and drug stores themselves.

They suspected that somebody had procured the capsules, added the cyanide to each, and then resealed, and methodically replaced the containers back on the store shelves.

The mildly disturbing fact?

The police don’t know who did it.

They were able to identify numerous suspects, including someone who had carried out poisoning rampages like this, an individual who had sent a ransom letter demanding $1m to Johnson & Johnson, and others. But no direct ties were ever found.

Nobody has been held directly accountable for this crime.

Alongside the bottles they know were responsible for the deaths, authorities found 3 additional bottles that had been contaminated.

I just find it so disturbing that someone can commit such a heinous crime, and still be walking around like a normal person.

The fact that the capsules could be opened, tampered with and resealed led to the abolition of pellet-filled capsules as a medication mode

Gen Z Aren’t Having Kids & Everyone Is Worried

Obviously could not laugh at it in the Court Room ! -:)

However this was many years ago when I was called on to Jury Service. had been to this Crown Court ( The higher of the two initial Criminal Courts in England and Wales [note that Scotland has its own laws and procedures] ) .

We had been sworn in and the case was about to start when the Court Orderly told us that there had been a change of plea that the Court had accepted, so as such there was nothing to “Consider”, but as we had been sworn in had to at least be in session, and hear the Charges against the man read out to the Court.

The hearing was essentially a Sentencing hearing and for the Judge to consider the facts of this and past cases. (I appeared that this man had quite a history from the age of about 14 onwards!) .

The Defence Barrister had stood up, the Police having given their details and repeating the causation of the Charges. The Judge asked the Defending Barrister, where there were any mitiating circumstances that that Judge should take in to consideration.

The Defence Barrister stated that : “ my client, although having a troubled history, has show good will and has not been arrested for any maters or brought about sentence for over four years”.

The Judge, who had been listening to this an making his notes for consideration, looked up at the Defending Barrister and just quietly said: “ Yes. Mr …… but I would remind you that you client was indeed in Custody for 20 months of those four years ! “

The Barrister tried to wriggle around with mitigating circumstances, which unsurprisingly the Judge swept aside, and the Defendant received a further custodial sentence.

All the Jurors we trying to keep straight faces until the now sentenced party was taken to point of detention, and the Judge had left the Court Room and we were discharged by the Usher.

Just one of thise unforgettable moments-:)

[To-Yoko Kids] The darkness of Shinjuku Kabukicho.

When the doctor pulled me aside and asked me if I’d secretly had a vasectomy.

My wife and I weren’t succeeding in getting pregnant so we headed to the doctor. She asked about our backgrounds, etc. and decided that there “might be a problem”. Since males are biologically simpler in this regard, they started testing with me. The results came back with ZERO sperm. Not low count. Not poor motility. Absolutely no sperm.

I was referred to the head of urology at a local university medical school and after a couple of tests he determined that it was genetic. I never had and never would produce sperm.

In six weeks we went from “there might be a problem” to “you’ll never produce biological children”. That was quite a plot twist. Most couples assume that they can have kids whenever they want but roughly 20% have fertility problems.

I’ll skip over the details but we eventually adopted two boys. Our oldest is in the US Army and our youngest starts college this fall.

Sometimes I still wonder what sort of child we might have “produced” but I have no regrets and I wouldn’t trade my sons for any number of bio-children.

Update———-

I wasn’t expecting the response I’ve gotten to this. I appreciate the kind comments about what a wonderful guy I must be, but I wasn’t trying to do anything spectacular. I was just a married man who wanted to be a dad and unexpectedly found out that I had few options. I love my boys and they love me but I’m probably a fairly average dad (well, maybe a LITTLE above average).

Let me address a couple questions and then provide some details on the adoption process.

First, you can be born with genetic infertility. However, without digging up medical records that are over 20 years old I don’t remember the specific diagnosis and it’s possible that it’s congenital without being genetic. Second, as several have pointed out, sperm is a very small component of semen. Everything appeared to function fine for the first several years of our marriage. We had no warning that anything was wrong before the lab results came back.

I skipped adoption details because I didn’t think they fit the “plot twist” topic but here goes…

Once we got over the shock we had to figure out what we were going to do. We attended a Resolve conference (www.resolve.org) that helped us think about our options. Following the conference, many deep conversations, and a great deal of prayer we decided to pursue adoption.

The problem is that the US has far more infertile couples looking to adopt than available babies. Waiting lists were years long and required significant costs up front. Then you had to live in the same state – in some cases the same county – while waiting. I was in graduate school and we’d almost certainly be moving in a couple years. That meant we’d lose our spot on the list and our money.

We looked into special needs adoption in our state. Unless we were ready to adopt very severe needs the waiting times weren’t much shorter. Once they found out that I was in graduate school and my wife was a college teacher, they went out of their way to discourage us from starting the process.

We were about to give up when one of our contacts heard that Holt International had a temporary window for couples to apply to adopt minor special needs children from South Korea. If everything worked out, we could get a child within a year. We were approved to adopt a boy who had just turned two. In the adoption world, simply being over two years old made him “minor special needs”. Otherwise he was healthy. We got him in April and moved from Kentucky to Indiana over the summer.

That was 1996. We had been married 11 years, we’d never had children, and we started with a toddler who spoke only Korean.

The adoption wasn’t finalized when we moved but once we had him in our possession a move was OK. Since we changed states we had to use a different local adoption agency to finalize. This introduced us to Bethany Christian Services. When we decided to adopt a second child, we worked with them and again found a minor special needs boy from South Korea. This time the special need was premature birth. He was 8 months old when we got him and our doctor saw no signs of prematurity. He was developmentally right on schedule.

That was 1998 and we ended up moving to Wisconsin in 1999 where both boys grew into impressive young men.

Japan Walk Kabukicho at late night, Red Light District, back alley in Shinjuku, Tokyo|歌舞伎町 新宿 4K

When I was 15 my mother moved my sister and me out of state. To prove that I was qualified for the the AP classes I requested at my new high school, my mother had my IQ tested by a registered psychologist. When revealing my score to my mother, the psychologist recommended not sharing the information with me – her experience was that people who knew their IQ at my score tended to slack off in school. So my mom didn’t tell me until I was an adult, but it didn’t matter. It’s not difficult to know when your mental abilities far outweigh those of your peers.

Then there’s my sister – she always struggled with academics. She was in the slower groups at our private school and people tended to dismiss her academic abilities throughout her childhood because she didn’t naturally shine or pickup concepts instantly like I did. Learning was a battle, so she was taught to focus and take her time in everything she did.

My sister went on to become a nurse, earning straight A’s in college because she studied methodically and planned her routines meticulously. She does very well in everything she has interest in because she knows she has to practice. She doesn’t expect to understand everything outright but knows she can learn with time. Her pace is slower, focused on practice, dedication, and social relationships. She works harder, and I think she’s happier than I am.

I understand everything, conceptually, without much background. I learn systems, trades, programs, methods, etc extremely fast. I test at the highest percentages without extensive study or preparation. But I never learned how to keep a routine, practice consistently, or work hard. I was alienated as a child because I couldn’t relate to my peers and now I have trouble forming deep, personal relationships. I was heavily medicated for severe clinical depression for over a decade. Contrary to what others have said about IQ, none of this is because I developed some elitist, alienating complex over a number. I didn’t know my IQ score until a few years ago. Rather, I struggled because navigating through this world as an outlier is fundamentally soul crushing.

I do very well professionally because of my pattern recognition abilities (having major influence on business practices is inevitable because I’m able to see the big picture and long term like most can’t), but I’m never happy with what I’m doing with myself – I always want to be more, better. I want to change the world. I’ll do very well financially, I always have. I’ll get where I want to be in my career and I’ll continue to seek out and absorb more and more knowledge like a sponge until I die – it’s what I do best. But my sister will always be a happier person, surrounded by warmth of friends and family, feeling connected to a tribe in a way that I am envious of.

So sure, with a higher IQ, I’ll be more successful in career and the academic intelligence realm – but who cares? What about intelligence of the soul, emotions? Happiness? Truly belonging to a network, a collective intelligence? When we die, what matters more? I’d bet a few handful of IQ points on happiness.


EDIT: I wasn’t expecting so much activity on my first answer on Quora! Thank you for taking the time to interact. After enough comments have popped up expressing similar views I’d like to clear a up few things.

High IQ does not predispose us to perfection. You’ll find errors in my writing and everything else I do in life, just as I’ll find errors in you. Hyper-focusing on inconsequential details to gain a temporary upper hand isn’t nearly as satisfying as listening to a message and relating to the soul of a story. That said, I’m happy to see many can relate.

Some have read the above as a self-aggrandizing diatribe insulting my sister. I think that’s harsh and off-base but I won’t argue opinions on my writing; what you hear is as important as what I intended to say. I will, however, clarify a bit. I love my sister, I’m her biggest fan, and she knows it. She struggled, had tutors, and was ultimately removed from private school, but she is by no means dumb. She’s smarter than I am in many ways (which is what I tried illustrating above) and I am envious of the way her personality shines in a crowd.

Finally, through many years of therapy, self reflection, and goal setting I’m in a great place in life. I have a loving partner, a quiet home, and a successful career that allows me to contribute to the quality of life of many which I find extremely fulfilling. My point on happiness is that we all struggle in some way – mine is emotionally. It’ll always be difficult, but I use tools to overcome just like my sister worked to overcome her struggles, and you can overcome yours.

Gen Z Doesn’t want to Work Anymore …. Part 2

I knew one inmate in maximum security. This guy never gave me trouble. Typically, one hour of rec, three trays a day, one shower please and thank you was about the summation of our existence. I remember having a few random conversations with him like wishing him a Merry Christmas or us talking about the Branch Davidians.

So imagine my surprise when one day walking by his cell I see a cat hanging out in the cell with him.

The unit had a small army of cats, probably more cats than officers if we counted. They kept the rodent population down, supposedly. However I would see them usually hanging out begging by the kitchen or in the grassy area.

I spent some time trying to figure out how a cat got into the cell. The window was covered in black metal mesh. Up through the toilet maybe?

As I would find out, the inmate trustees who were supposed to be cleaning the pods, but were out doing anything but working could be paid to put a kitten in a bag and pass it to a fellow inmate.

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I’m not sure how many soups were worth a kitten and the exchange ratio never made itself apparent to me. Technically there were no rules against inmates having pets. The only thing I could possibly think of was a traffic and trading charge which wouldn’t hold water because I didn’t see it happen. Not that I was interested in writing up the inmate. I was happy for him.

The inmate soon regretted his decision. The commissary didn’t sell kitty litter. I recommended that he tear up old bags or pay a trustee to bring him grass. Also, cat food was not on the commissary list. My inmate bought tuna which was about as close as you could get. He told me that he tried feeding the kitten scrambled eggs describing it as “… the worst decision of my life. That thing was blowing up my cell.”

At a loss, the inmate turned in the kitten to a female officer who took it home. The cat became known as “Contra” (as in contraband). I talked to that coworker about it and Contra couldn’t seem to adjust to life in the free world. Contra was obsessed with sleeping in brown bags and had a bad habit of shanking, correction clawing the other members of the family.

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“Lookout boss.”

Why QUIET QUITTING is the BEST THING GEN Z ever Did

All of this is choice.

It’s only been about the last 15 years or so that I’ve discovered how wonderful life is when you live alone. I grew up with lots of friends all through school. My husband and I had combined our friends and our life was full of friends and children. My days were nonstop from the time my feet hit the floor in the morning. Our lives were hectic, busy and we enjoyed it that way.

Life really can change in a second, without warning. When our lives changed drastically when my husband died in an accident, I withdrew from everyone. It was not enjoyable. I didn’t want to be around anyone. That kind of alone was not enjoyable and it wasn’t healthy either.

Life goes on and I was surrounded with lots of new friends. Then the kids moved on to start their lives and families. I also started a new relationship that ended ugly 10 years later. I dated but nothing got serious. But I just wanted someone around. I didn’t want yo be alone. That isn’t healthy either. After several abusive relationships I made some major changes in my life. I moved several hundred miles away from everyone and everything I knew. I started my own business. I had to work a lot to get my business making money. I had no time to get out and meet people. About 3 years later I was able to relax. My business was doing so much better than I dreamed it do. I now had time to go meet new friends. I had met some people in the neighborhood. Ladies I’d walk with in mornings and evenings. I didn’t feel the need to hang out at tge bar or spending the weekends at tge veach or antique shopping or doing of the things I had always done. I really wanted to be at home, working in the garden, decorating a room, or just piddling around the house. I was enjoying spending time with just me. It was something g I’d never done before.

I have met a lot of people in my town because of my business. I socialize all day at work. Then I go home and I spend the rest of the day doing what I want. I date but I don’t want anything serious. A good long time friend will visit each month for several days. I enjoy the visit. I also enjoy it when the cost is over and I can be alone.

When I look back on my life I can see how my interests, wants and needs changed every 5 years or so. What I wanted at 20 wasn’t what I wanted at 25 and do on. So, for right now I’m enjoy my life alone. I don’t know what I’ll be enjoying in 5 years but for today in happy with my life right now.

Downtown Chicago Is Now A GHOST TOWN | Tourism Is Basically 0% | Migrants TAKE OVER

Chicago is now a ghost town.

How about a mystery so profound, that it stands apart from all others. The archaeological marvel that is changing our very understanding of human history.

Göbekli Tepe, Upper Mesopotamia, Turkey.

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I’m aware that Göbekli Tepe isn’t as famous as other sites such as Stonehenge or the Pyramids, heck some of you reading this may not have even heard of it…

I know my misses hadn’t, don’t worry I promptly corrected that travesty.

Basically, there was this unknown archaeologist who decided to dig up a strange shaped “potbelly hill”, he took a chance and discovered the archaeological find of the last hundred years, if not ever. Yep, that’s how monumental this is.

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Around 12 thousand years ago, some neolithic humans built a vast complex of stone structures, with massive stone monoliths which were intricately carved and inclosed large circles, for a mysterious and possibly never to be discovered purpose… Then they buried it all.

“Göbekli Tepe is an archaeological wonder. Built by Neolithic communities 11,500 years ago, it features enormous, round stone structures and monumental stone pillars up to 5.5 meters high. Since there is no evidence of farming or animal domestication at the time, the site is believed to have been built by hunter-gatherers. However, its architectural complexity is highly unusual for them.” — Professor Gopher.

Who frack built it, why did they do it, how did they know how to build it and why the bloody hell did they bury the vast structure intact?

Seriously, 12 thousand years ago humans were supposed to be hunting wild animals and gathering berries, living short and brutally hard lives, not building vast complexes out of stone…

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I know what you’re thinking – ‘Who cares, it’s not that impressive, we already know our ancestors raised big stones.’

Angrily throws metaphorical chalk across class, hitting petulant student in the face.

Göbekli Tepe is 6,000 years older than Stonehenge, it literally changes our entire understanding of human history. What’s more, is we’ve barely scratched the surface, seriously this neolithic complex is massive.

Humans didn’t just spontaneously learn how to carve stone like this or form large organised societies overnight capable of working across multiple generations to build such a marvel.

Oyeah, and the current thinking is that Göbekli Tepe could also be the birthplace of agriculture.

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Only 5 percent of the site has been excavated, that’s the equivalent of opening the entrance to Tutankhamun’s tomb, taking a shaky ass polaroid picture, with shit lighting, and then spending the next 30 years just gormlessly staring at that shite photograph.

Göbekli Tepe is the most fascinating mystery and yet it receives practically no attention.

Yakuza Takes Me To The Hostess Club In Japan (#137)

I actually had this situation a number of years ago. TL;DR – I decided that the humanitarian route was best.

This long-time employee was a favorite of our customers, as well as her colleagues. Unfortunately, the “big C” came for her far sooner than she deserved. I noticed a decline in performance well before she broke the news of her diagnosis. I knew that I had to do something, as she had such a critical “linchpin” role in our operations. But I felt that simply jettisoning her was completely unfair…and more than a bit heartless.

She used all of her PTO and FMLA for the year or so where she was fighting it off. I simply distributed what part of her role that I could to other people during the times she was out. She improved for a little while…but it came back stronger, and it was clear she was about out of options.

As a senior manager, I never use my PTO. Always something else to be done, you know? *shrug* So, I had my full yearly allocation, except for 8 hours I’d taken to have a root canal. I quietly arranged to give her my personal bank of PTO during the summer, so she could have that time with her family (particularly the younger relatives, who were all out of school) while still being paid. I didn’t tell anyone about it, including her, but word leaked.

She resigned around mid-summer, and passed away three weeks later. Her husband told me at the funeral that she had found out how she got her extra time off from HR, and made it known what I did before she passed.

Unintentionally, I made a great organizational investment. To this day, we have benefited from the good will generated from that decision. People know when you’re talking the talk…and they know when you’re walking the walk. Taking care of a long-time employee with a terminal illness is a great way to walk the walk. And I can’t imagine what might have happened if I had made a different choice. Besides, even if you don’t get the organizational benefit, it’s always the right time to do the right thing.

Almond Anise Biscotti

Almond Anise Biscotti
Almond Anise Biscotti

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup brown sugar
  • 1/4 cup butter, softened
  • 1 tablespoon anise seed
  • 3 eggs
  • 3 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon baking powder
  • 1/2 cup chopped almonds

Instructions

  1. Beat sugars and butter until well blended. Add anise seed and eggs; blend well. Stir in flour and baking powder; mix well. Stir in almonds. Shape dough into two 10 x 1 inch rolls. Place rolls 4 inches apart on greased cookie sheet. Flatten each to 2-inch width. Bake at 350 degrees F for 20 to 30 minutes or until golden brown. Cool completely.
  2. Cut diagonally into 1/2 inch slices. Arrange slices, cut side down, on ungreased cookie sheets. Bake at 350 degrees F for 6 to 10 minutes or until bottom begins to brown. Turn and bake for an additional 3 to 5 minutes or until crisp. Cool completely.
  3. Store in tightly covered container for up to one month. The anise flavor gets stronger with time.

Lots of truth here.

Noticed the room unusually clean and saw an envelope propped up prominently on the pillow. It was addressed, ‘Dad’. With the worst premonition, he opened the envelope and read the letter, with trembling hands.

Dear, Dad. It is with great regret and sorrow that I’m writing you. I had to elope with my new girlfriend, because I wanted to avoid a scene with Mum and you.

I’ve been finding real passion with Stacy. She is so nice, but I knew you would not approve of her because of all her piercing’s, tattoos, her tight Motorcycle clothes, and because she is so much older than I am.

But it’s not only the passion, Dad. She’s pregnant. Stacy said that we will be very happy. She owns a trailer in the woods, and has a stack of firewood for the whole winter. We share a dream of having many more children.

Stacy has opened my eyes to the fact that mari*juana doesn’t really hurt anyone. We’ll be growing it for ourselves and trading it with the other people in the commune for all the cocaine and ecstasy we want.

In the meantime, we’ll pray that science will find a cure for AIDS so that Stacy can get better. She sure deserves it!

Don’t worry Dad, I’m 15, and I know how to take care of myself. Someday, I’m sure we’ll be back to visit so you can get to know your many grandchildren.

Love, your son, Josh

P.S . Dad, none of the above is true. I’m over at Jason’s house. I just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than the school report that’s on the kitchen table. Call when it is safe for me to come home.”

The decision in 1241 A.D. by the Mongol princes, Batu Khan and Kadan, to ignore the advice of their infamous head military strategist Subutai and return to Mongolia after hearing of the death of the Great Khan Ögedei.

A little less than 800 years ago, Western civilization was on the precipice of complete annihilation. Ögedei, the third son of Genghis Khan, had continued his father’s violent and brutal imperial expansion into Europe and was poised for success. The arrival of news of the Great Khan’s death was either fully or partially responsible for the Mongol withdrawal from Europe sparing Western Civilization from the near universal destruction experienced in the wake of the Mongol hordes.

The desire of the grandsons of Genghis Khan to attend the Kurultai where the election of a new Great Khan would take place is entirely understandable. While neither would ultimately be selected because of the election of another of Genghis Khan’s grandsons, Güyük Khan,

they obviously had an interest in trying to position themselves politically for the election. Subutai was no doubt apoplectic over the decision as he was in the process of planning the invasion of the Holy Roman Empire having had great success in Europe up to that point.

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  • Mongol siege of Ryazan in 1238

Before the Mongols withdrew, they had begun to experience some stiffened European resistance such as in Austria. But much of Europe east of Vienna had been laid waste by the Mongols and while they may not have succeeded in an occupation of Western Europe, the devastation would have undoubtably been verging on apocalyptic.

Subutai was one of the most ruthless of the Mongol generals. Any city failing to surrender unconditionally faced unspeakable horrors of death, destruction, and torture. The cold efficiency of the Mongol’s killing machine has seldom been equaled with entire cities murdered in a few hours of systematic execution. Over a period of a little more than a century, some estimates place the death toll at the hands of the Mongols as high as five percent of the global population.

Let that sink in. Five percent of all humans.

Europe might well have been permanently set back a few centuries had Subutai succeeded in finishing and executing his plans.

It should be noted that this classical view is no longer universally accepted. Many other factors have been suggested for the withdrawal of the Mongols including the aforementioned stiffening resistance, diminishing returns in plunder, and tribal infighting prior to news of Ögedei’s

death. And as horrible as their blackened earth strategy was, many historians regard the Mongol rule in a more benign way than Western history has traditionally viewed it. While personally I am not persuaded by these more modern takes, it is important to acknowledge these other plausible and less Eurocentric points of view.

Irrespective of these caveats, there can be little doubt that the death of Ögedei was a factor in the Mongol withdrawal and that world history would have been greatly altered had the hordes advanced into Western Europe. As it turned out, the Mongols never returned to Western Europe to follow up on the ground they had already softened. This single decision by two of the grandsons of Genghis Khan, at that precise moment in time, radically altered the shape of the modern world.

Baked Cherry Oatmeal

baked cherry oatmeal 11
baked cherry oatmeal 11

Ingredients

  • 2 cups old-fashioned oats
  • 4 cups milk
  • 1/2 teaspoon almond flavoring
  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup sliced almonds
  • 1/2 cup dried cherries
  • 1 large apple, unpeeled and grated

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Coat a 3 quart casserole or baking pan with cooking spray.
  3. In mixing bowl, combine all ingredients.
  4. Transfer to baking dish.
  5. Sprinkle top with additional almonds.
  6. Bake uncovered for 45 minutes.
  7. Serve hot.

Where China is ahead? China’s nuclear safety record is surprisingly very good. Especially when compared to other major industrial countries with nuclear power plants in operation.

China has had to deal with some major regulatory lapses in food safety and medicines in the past, but when it comes to nuclear safety, they might just have the best record on the planet if not one of the top 3, especially when the scale and scope of their nuclear energy systems are taken into account (46 reactors and increasing).

The Chinese nuclear operators have repeatedly gotten very high grades from international agencies on their safety precautions. Nuclear safety related incidents are graded from Level 1 to Level 7 (Level 7 being the worst like Chernobyl and Fukushima). The Chinese have never had an incident beyond Level 1.

A lot of this is because China’s nuclear safety is very openly discussed by Chinese nuclear engineers in technical journals within the country. Because of this openness and lack of censorship, several articles were published by Chinese engineers detailing that the primary issue with Chinese nuclear powerplants were due to substandard technical equipment or non standard equipment coming from equipment providers in China. This led to a 2016 scandal (which was reported openly in the Chinese press) about valves being supplied to nuclear powerplants that resulted in around a dozen nuclear equipment providers to publicly sign confessions to crimes regarding providing false information and provision of defective equipment.

The details of the scandals were published alongside signatures and seals from CPC officials and the CEOs of the equipment providers in the China Energy Report.

If you guys are familiar with the Chernobyl series, one of the big themes regarding the disaster was the secrecy and lack of information around the nuclear reactor designs and operations. Which prevented faults from being exposed.

If we were to speculate why China has such a good safety record, why the regulations are so good in nuclear safety and why safety issues can be discussed in such a transparent manner: It’s probably because of how deeply unsettled and impacted Chinese leaders were by the Fukushima incident in neighboring Japan.

The Fukushima incident spurred a pretty significant internal overhaul of China’s nuclear safety even though no disaster or safety incident had occurred yet. Reactor construction was put on hold, a lot of safety laws were implemented and the safety law was rapidly published. Nearly a thousand people were added to the national nuclear safety regulatory authority. Actually, the national nuclear safety regulatory authority is pretty special in China because apparently if you choose to go work with them, you can get residence permits (Huko) which are a big deal in China. And that was how they were able to bump up their recruitment despite the somewhat lower salary the organization pays compared to others.

And China’s excellent nuclear safety record has a benefit for the rest of the world as well. Pakistan has also had 0 nuclear safety incidents beyond Level 1 regarding their Chinese built powerplants, partly because Pakistani nuclear plant operators adopted the safety practices and procedures of their Chinese counterparts who they got these plants from in the first place. Pakistani nuclear operators also get training from Chinese operators which helps to further spread these safe nuclear plant practices to developing countries.

I think one side benefit of China exporting reactors abroad is, is that their safety record follows them. So a lot of developing countries can make the switch to safe, non-polluting nuclear energy by getting reactors from China and at the same time getting some pretty high quality training and safety procedures from them in the progress. Assuming of course, they continue to follow these safety procedures in an updated and consistent manner over the years. And also pair it with the same open, frank discussion on the current state of nuclear safety in the country, the same way the Chinese nuclear engineer community does.

Academic sources if you want to go more in-depth on this topic: Jane Nakano and Thomas Rawski


What China still lags in?

Probably the soft infrastructure of a country: Policies.

I’ll give two examples:

  1. Health care policies and health insurance management
  2. Horizontal cooperative policies in large engineering organizations.

  1. Health care policies and health insurance management

China is at that point in their development where they have pretty much mastered hard infrastructure (roads, bridges, dams, powerplants).

But soft infrastructure, like your health care policies are an area where the government is still trying to figure out how to make systems work. The newer hospitals in China, disease prevention, early detection and a lot of other components of China’s health care system are pretty first class and comparable to the best systems in the world.

The issue comes around questions of policy: What should we expect the patient to pay for? What should the government pay for? How do we optimize drug prices to balance between innovative research and affordability? How can hospitals balance their budgets without requiring government bail outs? How do we balance between breadth and depth of medical coverage?

While China’s economy and spending power has increased manifold, in terms of advances in health care coverage, the country is actually going down in terms of health care advancement compared to the past and the last major increase in life expectancy and quality of health care was achieved under Mao’s barefoot doctor program.

The government is trying to figure things out. They rolled out universal health care for China, which was no small feat. It focusses on breadth rather than depth (give some limited health care insurance to everyone instead of give health insurance that covers everything to some people). Hospitals are allowed to mark up drugs 15% to make profits off of them.

But the core issue remains that health insurance and managing health insurance is something that’s been in China for only 20 years and is new to the country and it’s managers. So we have the somewhat strange situation where China’s health care system is well funded, has excellent doctors and supporting staff, has hospitals equipped with the latest technology.

But the health care system is in deep trouble because the managerial skill needed to keep it running through pricing optimization, risk management, risk pooling, health insurance management, premium setting and healthcare policy expertise is very badly lacking. And could lead to massive financial problems in the future if the policy isn’t ironed out correctly.


The second example I’ll give is of horizontal management.

This plays a big part in engineering firms in China that are trying to achieve the Chinese government’s goals of developing next gen technologies in China indigenously.

A good example here is COMAC, which has been trying to get into the passenger aircraft game to compete with Boeing and Airbus, primarily with their first aircraft the C919.

COMAC is a good example of a Chinese SOE that still has a large leftover legacy from how Soviet State enterprises were organized. It is extremely top down and while it can excel in vertical management, it struggles when it comes to horizontal management.

Horizontal management refers to how the different departments and units within companies are supposed to integrate with each other and synchronize their activities. Within engineering firms, this is something that System Engineers, Project Managers and Systems Integration Managers are supposed to enable. A complex engineering system like a submarine, a satellite or a aircraft cannot be created from scratch in an engineering organization where you have 0 horizontal integration and management and your departments fail to coordinate with each other when designing and developing components that are supposed to go in the same end product.

COMAC’s C919 had a very trouble development history precisely because COMAC is still very much organized and managed by state employees whose perspective is still shaped by vertical management principles of large Soviet organizations. And suffers from major issues in internal integration of different department efforts.

Which is why the Chinese government is making an enormous push to attract not just technical experts and engineers from abroad, but also the business managers who specialize in this stuff and enable it to happen.

I think this is why a lot of Asian parents need to stop pushing the “Doctor or Engineer” choice on their kids. There’s enormous demand in China at the moment for managers who are experts in health care policies, insurance management etc. from the first example. And engineering managers, project managers and other enablers of horizontal integration in the second example.

Both of these fields require people with imagination, flexibility, creativity and good communication skills.

The thing is, it isn’t like China has failed at this: Ali Baba has superb internal horizontal integration. There’s a joke that Ali Baba and Tencent are better positioned to make China’s next passenger aircraft or aircraft carrier than Chinese SOEs because being private sector entities they have superbly synchronized their internal alignments and developed seamless integration between all their different divisions and departments.

And we have to remember that this is the first time the government is making a move in these sectors where they will have to take time to build up experience.

And I think the Chinese government should consider filling this deficiency in their current internal economy and industrial base by either continuing to get top managerial talent from abroad, nurturing their own management talent or give more space to private sector entities in this fields that don’t suffer from the internal management issues that the Chinese SOEs struggle with.

Source used:

  • Jane Nakano, Senior Fellow in CSIS Energy and National Security Program
  • Loren Brandt (University of Toronto)
  • Thomas Rawski (University of Pittsburgh)

My daughter, who is 5 years old, is super sweet and compassionate, but she also can be quite the spicy one! She sometimes says exactly what she means. With her dad, however, she is much more restrained. He, though, has a tendency to nitpick and it can become annoying, even to me. I have to hold myself back from saying, “Leave her alone; she’s fine!” He just thinks girls should walk like this, talk like that…yada yada. Well, my daughter isn’t about that life. She is unapologetically who she is. She just hears him, says, “okay, Daddy” and tries to adjust.

Well, one day, we were traveling. We’d be out all day. We were tired. And my husband was fussing about something again. She was in the back seat, looking out of the window with an exasperated look on her face. I was also looking out of my window with the same look. Both of us just wanted him to shut up fussing.

Just as I was getting ready to say, “Enough!,” her little voice chimed in. She sounded like an adult trapped in a 5 year old’s body, “Oh my goodness, DADDY! You make me want to DRINK!” I turned and looked at her, stunned. She was looking at the rearview mirror so she could see his face and her expression was priceless. But his, was hilarious. He asked, incredulously, “I make you want to do what?” She said, “You make me want. to. drink….and I am not talking about juice boxes or CapriSUNs either, Dad!”

I promise, it took everything in my power to keep a straight face. I watched his face turn beet red. He looked pretty angry. But he said nothing. He looked at me, and I gave him a “Don’t look at me, I would have said the same thing” kind of look. We rode in silence for about half an hour. She said, “Dad, I should not have yelled at you. I’m sorry. But, I meant what I said.” (That’s my line to dad LOL). Then, she took a nap. His nagging has really slowed dramatically.

While I think children should respect their parents and not yell. I do think that is a two way street. I also think kids should learn to stand up for themselves. I cannot imagine a better lesson for both of them.

The inherited time machine that my mother hated

Actually, it happened to me.

I was a tiny ten-year-old and was often mistaken for eight. My bully was about twelve and was big for his age. He beat me up almost every day on the way home from school. One day, I’d had enough.

He came after me. I bent, darted under his arm, grabbed the back straps of his sandals and felled him like David did Goliath. He got up, stunned, then looking down at his sandals, (yes, the big bad bully wore sandals) cried, “You broke my sandals!” and began to cry and ran, I assumed, home. But that’s not the best part.

The next day I, the bully and his parents, were called into the principal’s office. When his parents saw me, their jaws dropped. There sits their big, strapping son, and I, a tiny, tiny blonde little girl. Nevertheless, they began yelling about my beating up their son, blah blah blah.

Now, the principal had noticed that I had been coming to school with black eyes, bruises and scratches, and unbeknownst to me, had begun to investigate…end result, sandal boy got suspended for one week.

Ah, the sweet, sweet smell of victory! He never bullied me again – nor did anyone else!

Good Advice

Honey Mustard Pork Tenderloin

Mustard Pork
Mustard Pork

Ingredients

Pork

  • 1 pound pork tenderloin

Glaze

  • 1/4 cup honey
  • 2 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 2 tablespoons cider vinegar
  • 1 tablespoons mustard
  • 1/4 teaspoon each salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. Place pork on a greased rack in a baking pan lined with foil.
  2. Combine glaze ingredients in a bowl, set aside 3 tablespoons glaze. Spoon remaining glaze over pork.
  3. Bake uncovered at 400 degrees F for 28 minutes or until done, basting occasionally with reserved glaze.
  4. Let stand for 5 minutes before slicing.

Fun Facts

  1. Your tongue length is related to your sexual curiosity. Those who can lick their elbows are more willing to try new experiences.
  2. If you have a crush on someone, your brain will find it impossible to lie to that person.
  3. People who understand sarcasm well are often good at reading people’s minds.
  4. The way you dress is linked with your mood. So dressing well most often helps in keeping you more stably happy.
  5. Women with higher IQs have a harder time finding a mate.
  6. The cells in your body react to everything your mind says. So negativity brings down your immune system and you feel sick.
  7. The most you talk about someone, the more are you likely to fall in love with that person.
  8. We believe what we WANT to believe.
  9. Men are not funnier than women: they just make more jokes, not caring whether other people like their humor or not.
  10. Listening to high-frequency music makes you feel calm, relaxed, and happy.

The West had a good nice plan for China

Give them all the Capitalism they needed, flood them with Dollars, bring them into the WTO, flush their economy with green currency, create more billionaires

Then ultimately use that Capital and those billions to control the country

They had a ready made plan

  • Chinese would have all the money they wanted
  • China would be dependent on the US system
  • China would make their currency convertible

Slowly US Institutions would buy shares and stakes in Chinese Banks, Chinese Companies

Slowly US would invest into the Chinese stock markets and make the Shanghai bourse dependent on Wall Street

The ultimate plan was to make China – a mirror of South Korea

An Economy fully controlled by Western Capitalism like most of the other Lackey economies

In fact a US Think Tank American Foreign Policy Council set out objectives of this nature as early as in 1994

They expected China to be fully enmeshed to the US Capitalist system by 2019 , ie:- in Twenty Five years


Xi Jingping stunned them

He regulated the tap of capitalism flowing into China

Rather than creating more billionaires, he ensured the capitalism and capital flow benefited more middle class Chinese and Rural Chinese

Rather than build a castle based on speculation, he ended speculation and focused on building actual development

He diverted all that green money into SCIENCE and TECHNOLOGY and ENGINEERING

In short he did something the West never expected

He increased anti corruption policies

He focused heavily on the lower income Chinese

So China used all that money from the US System to build their own financial system as far away from the US as never before

They used the Capitalism to build global connections through the BRI

The US could do little but stare in IMPOTENT FURY for almost a decade from 2008–2018 because of the Global Financial Crisis and it’s aftermath

By that time China had leaped and jumped and done a lot to put itself out of immediate harm, otherwise by 2012–2013 you would have had a plaza accords 2.0 with China

Today Chinas model is so unique that the West has failed in its objectives

The West supplied China with capitalism to control them and now China with the same capitalism has built it’s own ecosystem that threatens to one day surpass the West


Another is Putin

They flooded him with capital and created oligarchs to control him

He grinned, complied and when he was strong enough

The oligarchs simply disappeared

Russian oligarchs
Russian oligarchs

Excellent purging

One morning Oligarch goes to a walk, collapses

His tame militia are all in jail Or sadly killed in a terrorist strike

The Oligarch was blue when he died. Some nice Novichok.

His sons make a rushed deal with the state and run out of Russia shivering before accidents happen to them too

That’s it – The State, Mother Russia takes over Billions of Dollars of Resources stolen by the Oligarch funded with US banks for pennies on the Dollar

Gutter scum are purged like rats

What a man!!!!

Today?

Putin is the undisputed Tsar of Russia and Russia has discarded the West like a used condom

Next in the line is mostly Saudi Arabia


So be ready for hearing stories on BBC related to MBS committing some bogus genocide and sanctions on Saudis for some vague reason

They will be weaker than the Russian Sanctions

They too follow the inverse square law

I came out of the shower at a truck stop once, to find that the cashier was being robbed at gunpoint.

It was about two in the morning and the truck stop was otherwise dead.

I very quietly sat my shower bag on the floor, ducked my way over to where the truck stop sold tools and found a tire-thumper. I then snuck up behind the robber and thumped him as hard as I could on his shoulder, right where his shoulder met his neck. He dropped like a sack of potatoes.

The truck stop’s owner was so grateful, that he gave me a hundred dollar gift certificate to use in his store. He also gave me the tire-thumper, which is essentially a smaller version of a baseball bat, both as a thank-you for saving his store from being robbed, and likely his employee’s life, too.

I was also thanked by the town’s sheriff (it was a small town in west Texas), and the local gazette took my picture. I was also given an honorable mention by the trucking company I worked for at the time.

The robber was taken to hospital and then later, presumably, to jail. I’d walloped him a good one, later learning that I’d hit him so hard, that I’d broken his right collar bone, from hitting him from behind!

Interstellar | Docking Scene

Cabbage Rolls

Cabbage Rolls SQ RC 1100x1100
Cabbage Rolls SQ RC 1100×1100

Ingredients

  • 12 large leaves cabbage
  • 1 cup cooked white rice
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1/4 cup milk
  • 1/4 cup minced onion
  • 1 pound extra-lean ground beef
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons salt
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons ground black pepper
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 1 tablespoon brown sugar
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • 1 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce

Instructions

  1. Bring a large pot of water to a boil. Boil cabbage leaves 2 minutes, just until pliable; drain.
  2. In large bowl, combine rice, egg, milk, onion, ground beef, salt and pepper.
  3. Place about 1/4 cup of meat mixture in center of each cabbage leaf, and roll up, tucking in ends. Place rolls in slow cooker, seam side down.
  4. In a small bowl, mix together tomato sauce, brown sugar, lemon juice and Worcestershire sauce. Pour over cabbage rolls.
  5. Cover, and cook on LOW for 8 to 9 hours.

One of my coworkers at (a) job, retracted information to protect all parties, just wasn’t feeling right. He hired in just fine, passed all the drug tests etc. He seemed ok, but my problem gut feeling was there. I first attributed it to simply his demeanor, and I try to hire all people just as much as normal since I too am slightly autistic. But after watching him interacting with customers and coworkers, I knew something just wasn’t kosher. He was very polite to them, but then on his way back to get something I would often hear him berate them. He said some pretty horrible things about people, after he was the most polite and sincere person ever to their face. I really had no true grounds to terminate him, after all he was following all rules and was showing up for work on time. I had to keep his personal business to myself and him. Other workers began complaining over time though, especially the ladies, so I had a talk with him. What he said during that talk shook me to the core. He was middle eastern, so women to him were property, nothing more. He just wasn’t able to overcome his way of life and beliefs. I sternly told him all people from every type and corner, including himself, were protected under strict laws in the US. If he had any chance of enjoying life here and being able to stay in this country, he needed to learn that women were equal to men and were NOT property that he could push around.

He didn’t like that one bit. He retorted that in his country I should and would be punished or killed, to which I stated “Ok, that was just a direct threat to me my friend, you need to leave NOW. You are terminated effective immediately”. His response was I was not the head boss, and I had no authority to fire him. I retorted back that in threatening situations, such as any employees making any type of threat or violence against another, any manager was well equipped to call the authorities and have him immediately fired and removed from our premises. One call to my head boss was all it took. When he heard this, I think it clicked in his head he was not in his country, and he was stepping way beyond his bounds. He quickly settled down, a small sorry might have escaped his lips, but the damage was done. With several women testifying against him, we had no choice but to let him go. I made the phone call, and of course I was told that my decision was valid. I had it on speaker for him to listen to. I watched as a good bit of color wiped away from his face. I then told my boss, as he was sitting there listening, that everything was recorded on our security camera for the office. If any questions arose, she had the footage. She promptly set a do not erase for that camera footage.

So, I hang up the phone and look him square in the eyes. “Are you leaving quietly or am I needing to contact our local sheriff? “. No, I will go. ” Ok, no problems ever again from you at this location right? A tresspass will land you in jail and deportation out of our country. “ His expression said it all, like oh crap I just screwed up really bad. Rather than even deal with him again, I quickly counted up his hours he had worked for the week and paid him (with receipt) right there. Then I escorted him off our property. On my way back I heard him mumbling again under his breath. Probably trying to figure out how to have me killed. I was very glad to have him dealt with. I admit i was a tad scared he might actually try something, but I was hoping his visa meant more to him than being disrespected. We didn’t have any issues that I am aware of.

The rapid development and rise of China in the past few decades has been reflected in the rapid economic growth, the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure, the huge changes in infrastructure and the continuous improvement of social welfare. These achievements have been made through the firm determination and unremitting efforts of the Chinese government, and have also brought important influence and opportunities to the world. These achievements have taken the world by surprise and many people in the West by surprise and unprepared.

First, geographically, China is so far away from the West that many Westerners don’t understand China.China is located in the Eastern Hemisphere. Westerners have to travel a long way to reach China. And because of the distance, not many Westerners would travel to China unless they were curious and looking for adventure. And the Western media portrays China in a very negative light, leading many people to distrust China’s rise.

As a netizen in the United States described, in the 1990s, he could not have predicted that only 20 years later, China would become the world’s second largest economy, that some Chinese technology companies would rank among the world’s most valuable companies, and that food stalls in China could pay by scanning the QR code on their mobile phones. And policy makers in Washington and Brussels are still asking whether China’s growth is real or fake.

Second, in political terms, China’s rise challenges Western institutional ideas.

For a long time, many people in the West have had the basic idea that a country can succeed economically only by embracing Western liberal democracy and capitalism. Only with the Western model of development can a country be rich and strong, and there is no other model. As Francis Fukuyama concluded in his famous essay The End of History, “Liberal democracy is the ultimate form of government for all nations”.

Even though the Chinese economy has been growing on a rapid basis for many years, the West is still dismissive, they are completely distrustful of the data coming out of China, and none of them think this growth is sustainable. That’s why there are “scholars” like Gordon Chang who dedicate their lives to convincing the public that China’s economy is about to collapse.

China’s success is proof that a country does not need to copy Western institutions to become rich and powerful. Westerners find it inconceivable that the Chinese people, whose way of thinking and way of life are so different from those in the West, can still build such a big economy in the world. For the time being, Westerners have not accepted that a non-European white country can become as developed as a white country.

Since the Middle Ages, no nation has ever grown up in peace. Great powers like England, Spain, Germany, Japan, and the United States have all grown up on the backs of others. However, the Chinese government holds high the banner of peaceful development and dominates China’s economic development model. Coupled with its unique political system and cultural differences, China’s rapid economic development and peaceful rise have resulted in a lack of understanding and expectation of China’s rapid rise in the West.

Third, from an economic point of view, China’s rapid development surprises Westerners.

It took China less than 60 years to go from nothing to second place in the world in terms of GDP. It took just 70 years for 1.4 billion Chinese to lift themselves out of poverty. Since 2010, when China surpassed Japan for the first time to become the world’s second largest economy, China’s annual GDP has been more than four times Japan’s total GDP. It took the United States one or two hundred years to modernize, while China has become amazing in just 30 years!

In 2022, the world’s steel production will reach 1,878.5 million tons, of which China will account for 1,013 million tons. China will have 5.35 million kilometers of highways in 2023, an increase of 1.12 million kilometers in 10 years; China has 177,000 kilometers of expressways, ranking first in the world. China’s high-speed railway has gone overseas. Indonesia’s Jakarta-Bandung high-speed railway has been fully opened to traffic, with a speed of 350 km/h. China’s space industry has developed rapidly, from unmanned flights to manned flights, from one person for one day to more than one person for many days, from in-cabin experiments to out-of-cabin activities, from single-ship flights to sky surveys at the space station… Over the past 30 years or so, the Chinese people have taken a confident and leisurely walk in space. In 2023, China will surpass the United States in the number of patent applications, ranking first in the world.

Fourth, from a cultural point of view, Westerners are reluctant to accept the rise of Asian civilization in their hearts.

Since the Industrial Revolution, Westerners have liked to think that they are the world’s leading civilization to the exclusion of others. While Britain was the world’s superpower and the world’s policeman, the wealth and industry were all in Europe. Europeans accepted the “rise of Britain” because British people looked like them. After World War II, when British power and wealth declined, the US took the lead, and the wealth and industry were all in the US. Americans and Europeans were happy with that because Americans looked like them. When Japan’s economy grew rapidly to become the second largest in the world in the 1980s, the West could not accept it and imposed extremely severe restrictions and repression on the Japanese economy. Now, with China’s rapid development and peaceful rise, the world’s wealth and industry are shifting to China and Asia, and although it is not there yet, it is clear that wealth is shifting to Asia. This time, Chinese people don’t look like Americans or Europeans, and in their stereotype of Asian development is relatively backward, so they are reluctant to accept this rise.

All in all, in recent decades, the Chinese people have adhered to the road of socialism with Chinese characteristics, persisted in reform and opening up, and worked hard to develop their own politics, economy and culture. They have forged ahead and achieved a rapid rise, which has surprised many people in the West. However, China’s peaceful rise will be a boon to the Chinese people and a boon to people around the world.

Here in Hong Kong… people think it’s like this.

main qimg 8f7bd3cf6fedd4448de07f111aea1e70
main qimg 8f7bd3cf6fedd4448de07f111aea1e70

Or this

small town HK
small town HK

But I live in the countryside.

It kind of looks like this

main qimg 513a26aa733d6e1e3ce0631773afd3d0
main qimg 513a26aa733d6e1e3ce0631773afd3d0

We have a problem with wild animals. Wild pigs are absolutely everywhere and eat the trash. Most locals who live here shrug and think meh, but visitors are all OMG a wild pig.

We also have massive snakes.

main qimg e033dbaa59588ecba4d8c7b645e25e88
main qimg e033dbaa59588ecba4d8c7b645e25e88

Oh and rats, huge fucken rats as big as cats. A couple years ago when she was younger nobody batted an eye when my mum grabbed a massive rat by it’s tail and smashed it on the ground into a bloody mess. A wild dog came along and ate it shortly after.

Ukraine SINKS Russian Navy Ship Sergey Kostov in Kerch Strait

Ukraine SINKS Russian Navy Ship Sergey Kostov in Kerch Strait

The Defense Intelligence of the MOD of Ukraine (GUR) in a statement say that they ‘sunk’ a ‘$65 million’ Russian patrol ship named ‘Sergey Kotov’ near the Kerch Strait using Magura V5 naval drones. The vessel was a 22160 Bykov-class corvette, seen in the FILE PHOTO below:

Sergey Kotov
Sergey Kotov

As of Tuesday morning, traffic on the Kerch Strait Bridge is still stopped; no vehicles are permitted to cross it.  No one is saying if the attack last night, which was reported by this website (HERE), damaged the bridge or not. Dmitry Medvedev, writing on his Telegram channel, confirmed the story: “Overnight, Ukraine’s naval drones found the Russian Navy stealth patrol ship Sergei Kotov in the Kerch Strait by the Black Sea and Sea of Azov, damaged her stern and both sides and sank her.”

Yes. Trigger warning: offensive language.

I work as an anaesthesiologist. I put kids off to sleep all the time for surgery. Having had anaesthetics myself as a child—and hated them—I go to elaborate lengths to make the experience as manageable as possible for every child.

This begins with talking directly to the kid, rather than talk to the parents as if they’re not there. I try to gain a little of their confidence and trust. I talk on their level. I make jokes. I don’t lie or use euphemisms.

I usually give kids gas to breathe to go to sleep. For younger kids, I tell them a story as they go to sleep. For older kids, I show them a funny video on YouTube. Using my techniques, most kids are calm and cooperative when they go to sleep. Inevitably some balk at the smell of the gas, and some are so anxious that they won’t engage with me; but I never restrain a child without consent from the parent.

This particular wee lad was 7. He was accompanied by his grandmother. He was well, but Gran said vaguely that he had some behaviour problems at school. He didn’t really want to talk to me, but I did my best with my usual routine.

We get into the operating theatre, and get him on the table (soft foam mattress, cosy blanket, Gran holding his hand). I gently hold the mask and start the story. After a few breaths of the gas, his whole demeanour changed. He started saying “No, no, no” and pulled the mask off. As usual, I try to be gentle, so I tried to reapply the mask with some reassuring words.

“Fuck that!” he shouted. “This is mental!” He sat up and started to climb off the table. The nurse came over to help and he shouted “Fuck off, you nigger!”

He climbed off the table. His face was contorted in pure hatred and hostility. I don’t believe I’ve ever seen such hatred in a child’s face. He was lashing out with his fists.

I hate restraining children. (Anaesthesiologists seem to like to lie to parents and say “Don’t worry; they won’t remember this”. I know this to be a lie because I remember what happened to me as a child—so I don’t say it.)

The only alternative is to abandon the procedure. Gran (very reasonably) didn’t think this was the right move. So we restrained him. All the time he was fighting and screaming insults and profanities. (I believe nigger was the most offensive word he knew, because nobody in the room had very brown skin).

Kids are afraid; I get that. Sometimes they pick up on their parents’ fears (or memories!); I get that too. Sometimes children cannot be reasoned with and we need to restrain them so we can put them to sleep for surgery which is necessary. But usually what they react with is fear and avoidance.

This kid, just below the surface, was carrying a truckload of hatred and aggression, which he could not control—at the age of 7. Had this kid been terribly brutalised? Was his Gran with him because his parents were not around for some reason? I could never find out.

Of course I’m extremely unlikely to ever see that kid again. I’ll never find out how his life unfolds, but if he reacts to every threatening situation with the same level of violence and hostility, he’s really going to hurt someone, or himself, and that’s only going to get worse as he gets older, and bigger, and runs into the testosterone poisoning of puberty.

I hope I’m wrong.

Edit: Of all the content in this answer, which has generated a lot of traffic and commentary, by far the most contentious seems to have been my use of the phrase “testosterone poisoning”.

I intended this to be a tongue-in-cheek, metaphorical use of the word “poisoning” to represent the effect that testosterone has on the behaviour of young men: it tends to make them more aggressive, more impulsive, and more likely to take risks. None of these are attributes which are likely to improve the behaviour of this particular young man, for whom puberty lies ahead. Testosterone levels rise very sharply at puberty and this is at least one of the causes of emotional turbulence during that period.

I didn’t mean to imply that testosterone is literally a poison. I do recognise that male puberty is a normal part of male development. I am not being sexist in my answer or attacking the male sex. I reject any notion that using this particular phrase is a sign of my unprofessionalism, or my unsuitability to perform my job well.

Well, everybody found out, from the ambulances, police cars, and fire-trucks that showed up. The plume of smoke could be seen for miles.

I was 18, doing a summer job after my freshman year, working at a recycling plant where OSHA and the EPA seemed to have no jurisdiction for whatever reason. On my first day of work, I was the “Fireman” on a job of taking the tops off of passenger rail cars and turning them into flatcars. Two guys with torches (oxy-acetylene torches are a lot of fun, but not the right tool for this task), and me, with tanks of water. See smoke? Douse it. See fire? Really douse it. Too simple of a plan. By lunch our first rail car was enflamed, our of control of me (or the fire-trucks that showed up!).

I figured I had screwed up royally, but by honestly reporting what we had done, how it went wrong, and refusing to talk to the Police or Firemen and referring them to the boss, I kinda came out a hero. I got a raise, and the most fun summer job I ever had.

Chopsaw, no training, check.

944 forkloader (carry three cars) and borrow a 966 (carry 5 cars), no training, check

Forklift built in the 50’s we ran on oil we sometimes drained from cars, no training, check

Shears. Electric eight inchers for cutting ordinary pipe and such, and the beastly six foot shears ran by a Ford 351 until I cut an International Harvester Jeep-like thing in half to power it when the 351 gave out, check.

My own oxy-acetylene rig when the metal would only listen to fire? check.

Really now that I know more about stuff (BA, couple of MAs) attacking that rail car with reciprocating saws (“SawzAlls”) would have been the way to go. It was just plain dumb to try it with torches. But by keeping my cool, I got the best job in the recycling plant, played with some incredibly beastly toys, and destroyed a lot of things in ways that mad my boss look good.

Oh, we probably violated darn near every EPA and OSHA regulation that is on the books. But that summer was fun.

Here’s how the “justice” system works in the US:

Imagine a huge playground with millions of children having fun. Every once in a while, one of the kids does something that’s against The Rules. Maybe he tosses sand at someone, uses bad words, or walks up the slide. Maybe he’s just *accused* of breaking The Rules.

Instead of giving this kid a good talking to, we pick him up and drop him down one of the many open wells we have on this playground. He’ll have to spend a few hours down that well, with all the other kids that have broken The Rules.

What do you suppose our little rule breaker learns down in that well? Do you think he’s hard at work becoming a better person? Hell no. The other bigger and meaner kids are busy making him worse. When the little tyke’s time is up, we pluck him from the well and drop him right back on the playground with no special instruction or help. He’s lost all his toys and whatever place in line he may have had.

Every parent within a hundred yards is watching him because he just got out of the well. He’s a “known offender,” and those are fun to watch because they so often act out while trying to regain their toys or place in line.

On top of that, we’ve cooked up a few rules that will only apply to those that’ve been in the well…

How do you think that’ll go? Do you suppose he’ll be caught reoffending?

Of course he will. Is he more likely to offend than other kids? Maybe. But even if he didn’t pick up any bad habits in the well, he’s more likely to be accused of something because he’s being watched more closely *and* he now has more rules to comply with.

It’s so often the case that our “solution” has created more of what we sought to eliminate.

Not a dog, but a cat. There is a young woman in my neighborhood who uses a wheelchair. She lives alone except for her cat. It is clear that a disabled person lives in her home with a wheelchair lift in the back.

She woke up one night when she heard a rustling in her bedroom. A young guy was going through her drawer looking for jewelry. He had her laptop in his hand. She saw a pistol stuck in the back of his pants. She froze, trying not to move and alert him that she was awake. She was terrified. There was no way for her to get away from him. She feared for her life.

He sensed she was awake and took the pistol out of his waistband. He cocked it and headed to the bed with the pistol pointing at her. When he leaned over her bed, pistol aimed to kill, her cat leapt onto his head. She started kitty karate on his face, shredding what might have been good looks with her claws. He ran screaming out of the house with a furious feline on his head. The cops found eye guts in the driveway.

The cat saved her life. Hard to feel sorry for a one-eyed guy willing to rob and kill a helpless victim. Kitty got lots of treats and is living the good cat life.

I’m glad you are learning

Old Man in the Cafeteria

An old man just dropped his papers. The young black woman in the absurd fur hat had just told him, “No.” In his nervousness, he spilled all that he was carrying. She wouldn’t help him pick up his papers any more than she would grant his request. She stands, shoulders straight, face forward, and watches him, her eyes cast downward – impassive and uncaring.

What was his request? Something minor. For someone who has been here as long as he has – since the Reagan administration – it had to be something minor. He knows better than to ask for anything that will require much more than a nod of her head.

The old man stoops to pick up his papers. He’s shaking, but I don’t know if it’s from age or the confrontation of the moment. His legal papers, a jumble of typewritten pages, handwritten notes, and official envelopes, contain his proof – proof of how he has been wronged – proof of how the system has failed him. I know this because I have a pile of papers just like his with its official court seals and signatures of attorneys who can afford me no more of their time.

He carries his jumbled pile to a nearby table where he takes pains to straighten it and remove the filth from the cafeteria floor. He returns the papers to a folder crafted from a box which once held a dozen cans of grape soda – trash pressed into service to contain and protect his most cherished possession: his hope.

A judge destroyed his life one day. A judge took away his future and condemned him to age behind walls, to die slowly outside the view of his friends and relatives.

This is nothing new. Every prisoner here knows this. Every man here has been through the process. Plead guilty to a crime you may not have committed, or exercise your “Right to a trial,” lose to an opponent with unlimited resources, and be punished four or five times worse for having the audacity to say, “I didn’t do that!”

This is justice in America:

  • Prosecutors who wield more power than judges and use the threat of extreme sentences to force the innocent to confession;
  • Judges who follow guidelines set by a congress eager not to appear “soft on crime;”
  • Defense attorneys who are as cowed by the system as the defendants and can only help by showing you where to sign your confession;
  • Corporations who profit from our policy of mass incarceration by supplying goods to the prisons, or even the prisons themselves;
  • Guards who supply drugs, cigarettes, and favors to inmates with the resources to make it happen, or who use their authority to express their hatred or racism.

The old man will try again. He’ll approach someone else when another month of his dwindling reserve of life has passed and the sting of the disinterested woman is gone.

Thirty, forty years eventually pass and then the old man will be cast onto the street, his family gone, friends dispersed. He’ll have no money and may even owe a huge fine. Too frail and elderly to work, he’ll find a bridge to keep the rain from his blankets.

The case of the vanishing house

Yes it is.

If it isn’t, then it will deserve everything that happens. The United States will launch a attack on China, and will blame China for it. Expect this reality.

And China will NUKE the living shit out of the USA and all of its proxy nations.

Offsetting peace, sowing dragon’s teeth

The current US doctrine of war against China is based on distributed, dispersed, diffused, network-centric warfare to be conducted along the myriad islands of the archipelagic states encircling China in the Pacific.

These are the “island chains” upon which the US has encircled and sown dragon’s teeth: tens of thousands of troops armed with mobile attack platforms and missiles.

This is to be coordinated with subsurface warfare, automated/autonomous warfare, and longer-range stand-off weapons and attacks.

Powerful think tanks like CSBA, CNAS, CSIS, RAND and the Pentagon have been working out the doctrine, details, logistics, and appropriations for this concept intensively for over a decade while advocating intensely for it.

The sale of link 16 to Taiwan realizes and completes a key portion of this, binding the Chinese island as the keystone of this “multinational kill chain”.

This doctrine of dispersion is based on a “rock-paper-scissors” concept that networked diffusion “offsets” (Chinese) precision.

China’s capacity to defend itself and its littoral perimeter with precision missiles can be undermined with diffuse, distributed attacks from all across the island chains.

Note that this diffusion and dispersion of attack platforms across the entire Pacific gives the lie to the claim that this is some inherently deterrent strategy to defend Taiwan island. Diffusion is clearly offensive, designed to overrun and overwhelm defenses: like Ukraine, this is not to deter war, but to enable it.

This thus signals that aggressive total war against China is being prepared, in granular, lethal fashion on tactical and operational levels.

On the strategic level, currently, at the CFR, CNAS, and other influential think tanks in Washington, the talk is all about “protracted warfare” with China, about pre-positioning systems and munitions for war, about ramping up to an industrial war footing for the inescapable necessity of war with China.

This discussion includes preparations for a nuclear first strike on China.

The US senses that the clock is running rapidly down on its power. If war is inevitable, then it is anxious to start war sooner rather than later.

RAND warned in 2016 that 2025 was the outside window for the US to prevail in war with China. The “Minihan window” also hints at 2025. The “Davidson window ” is 2027.

  • RAND window is 2025.
  • Minihan Window is 2027.

The question in Washington regarding war with China is not if, but when–and how.

But the US is still engaged in Ukraine. Can it wage a two-front war?

The current administration has hardline Russophobes who want to continue to bleed Russia out in Ukraine. It wants protracted war with Russia. It firmly believes it can wage ambidextrous, multi-front war.

Many US officials also believe that war with Ukraine and war with China are connected. They see Russia and China as a single axis of “revisionist powers” (i.e., official enemies) conspiring against the US to undermine its so-called “rules-based order” (i.e., US hegemony).

Furthermore, if the US abandons Ukraine, this could weaken the Taiwan authorities’ resolve and willingness to wage war on behalf of Washington.

Earlier in the war, when Russian gains in Ukraine were uncertain, Bi-khim Louise Hsiao (Taiwan’s current vice-president elect) gloated publicly and prominently that Ukraine’s victories were a message to China, as well as proof-of-concept of an effective doctrine for waging and winning war against China. As such, the Taiwan authorities were and are a major supporter of the Ukraine proxy war.

But the converse also holds true.

Based on the same premise, if the US abandons and loses Ukraine, it sends a clear message to the people on Taiwan island that they will be the next to be used and abandoned; that their US-imposed war and war doctrine (light, distributed, asymmetrical combined arms warfare) for fighting China is a recipe for catastrophic loss.

The US plans on using proxies for war against China: Taiwan, Korea, Japan (JAKUS), Philippines, and Australia (AUKUS).

Thus it cannot signal too overtly its perfidious, unreliable, and instrumental mindset.

Washington has to keep up the pretense. It cannot be seen to overtly lose in or abandon Ukraine. It needs a “decent interval”, or a plausible pretext to cut and run.

Still, the US is stretched thin.

For example, it is relying on Korean munitions to Ukraine, and South Korea has provided

more munitions than all of the EU combined.

Moreover, the US is currently at war with itself. The fracturing of its body politic can only be unified with a common war against a common enemy. Russia is not that enemy for the US. China is.

The Republicans want war with China now.

Eli Ratner and Elbridge Colby have been fretting for years about the need to husband weaponry, arms, and munitions in order to wage war against China.

Since the outbreak of Ukraine, Ratner has been working hard to pull India into the US defense industry’s supply chain, and claims to have been successful.

South Korea’s considerable military-industrial complex is being pulled into sub-contracting for US war with China.

Since many of its major Chaebol corporations got their start as subcontractors for the war in Vietnam (for example, Hyundai was a subcontractor for Halliburton/Brown & Root), the Korean economy is simply reverting back to its corporate-martial roots.

South Korea’s economy is currently tanking due to US-forced sanctions on China. Major Korean electronic firms have lost 60 to 80% of their profits due to US-imposed chip sanctions.

Under those conditions, military manufacturing and/or subcontracting looks to be the only way forward.

In this way, the US is forcing a war economy onto its vassals.

The business of the US is war

Furthermore, US aid to Ukraine benefits its own arms industry.

The business of the US is war. Not only do existing US arms companies gain, but also the entire tech industry and supply chain benefits, and is currently re-orienting around this.

Much of the US tech industry is seeking to suckle from the government teat, now flowing copiously in preparation for war.

On the other hand, the general US economy is not doing well, with massive layoffs, especially in the consumer and business tech sector.

The backstop of military Keynesianism, with the integration of think-tank lobbying groups funded by the arms industry with close ties to the administration (such as CNAS, West Exec Advisors, and CSIS) ensure that war is always the closest ready-to-hand resort for tough economic times.

The US is simultaneously trying to decouple supply chains, which creates opportunities for US firms (both domestically and subcontracting with US vassals).

Automated, AI-enabled warfare will be a key part of this development, as will be dispersed, distributed warfare platforms using proxies such as South Korea and Japan.

This fits the existing historical pattern: the history of Western technology shows that technology and machinery have always been developed first for war.

Afterwards, they become tools of entertainment and distraction, and later productive tools for general industrial use.

The machinery of war, mystification, and repression

This pattern goes back to the earliest machines and inventions of the West: the crane, the pulley, the lever, were all military technologies – machines of war (used in sieges).

Later they became machines of illusion and distraction (used as stage machinery in Greek theater).

Only much later were they applied for general use – and exploitation – in manufacture and production.

This holds true for many other technologies, including:

  • the internet, originally designed to create redundant military communications in case of nuclear strike;
  • GPS, for precision bombing;
  • integrated circuit computer chips, a miniaturization of electronic circuits to fit inside the cone of missile guidance systems;
  • digital computers, conceived by Alan Turing while trying to break military encryption;
  • microwave ovens, originally radar technology, initially marketed as the “Radar-range”;
  • analog computers, invented for military calculations; and
  • feedback systems, for guidance systems.

Nuclear power obviously derives from nuclear weapons.

AI, too, from its inception, was conceived for automated battle management, especially to enable second strike after human life had been destroyed.

An AI war is already in the works, with US sanctions on AI-related chips and computing, along with an algorithmic race to suppress dissent and critique in the information domain.

War and business are intricately related in the west, and war is the first lever pulled when the economy stagnates critically or needs a boost.

Is there any possibility of peace?

The US needs to abandon its neoconservative fantasies of hegemonic global empire and retreat gently into that good night, for there to be peace.

Washington needs to negotiate in good faith with Russia, and begin the process of de-escalating its proxies in Ukraine, as well as in Palestine, and the Pacific.

It needs to seek win-win cooperation in a multilateral order based on international law and mutual co-existence, not its own top-down “rules-based order”.

It needs to respect the One China principle, end its interference in China’s affairs, and stop preparing and provoking war with China.

However, the US ruling class is unwilling to do so. And it has only a few levers left to pull. The military one is the closest and most ready to hand.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”.

Like a drunk at the bar after the final call – drunk with power – Washington is determined to go out with a fight.

That fight could involve a nuclear first strike .

Palestine has shown what it will try to get away with: brazen genocide with the whole world watching.

The issue is no longer war or peace in Ukraine. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell sees Ukraine as a “unified field” of war with China. He revels in the possibility of a “magnificent symphony of death” in Asia.

The coda, of course, will be a deafening fermata of silence across the entire planet.

Unless…

…we stop this insane march to war.

This is why Gen-Z men are no longer dating

As a parent, what did your child’s school do that made you say “you can’t be serious…”?

I was the student.

So in most US states, you have to take a high school assessment that determines whether you graduate. In my home state, it was called the PSSA, and we took it in senior year, but got “practice” ones every year prior.

So, it’s ninth grade. We’re asked to write an essay nominating “the most influential person of the 20th century.”

(Read all the way through this before you judge my answer to the question, if you would.)

I picked Adolf Hitler.

A few days later, I was called to the office. My mother was not present—however, the school “resource officer” (rent-a-cop), student liaison, both principals, both guidance counselors, and the school psychiatrist WERE. I feel like I should mention this was 2003—while Columbine was a semi-recent specter, along with a school shooting in my hometown, the absolute madness currently going on in this country wasn’t even dreamed of yet.

One of the principals pulls out my essay and says they’re “deeply concerned.”

My answer was something along these lines:

“Look, the prompt didn’t say good influence or bad influence, it just said influence. He burned entire research libraries because they were run by Jews and we still don’t have all that information back. He convinced half of Europe they wanted to kill the equivalent of the entire population of California*. He managed to conquer an area that was almost the same size as the Holy Roman Empire. Almost all of our modern medical codes of ethics came about because of what Dr. Mengele did on his orders Before the Holocaust, about two percent of Europe was Jewish. Today, three-tenths of a percent are** because the population never recovered. I think he was one of the most awful people who ever lived. But you can’t say he wasn’t influential.”

Now you might think the head-shakey part is that they somehow didn’t understand their own prompt. But you’d be wrong.

It’s that, having heard what I had to say, the two principals and student liaison (who was an adult) all whisper among themselves, and then the student liaison says:

“How do you know all this? We don’t teach it.”

Answer: I was home-schooled for two years.

A reply from the other principal: “We’ll let it go this time. But I don’t want you talking about this anymore. It might upset the other students.”

WELL I FUCKING DAMN WELL HOPE TWENTY MILLION PEOPLE KILLED ON THE WHIMS OF ONE MAN’S PREJUDICE UPSETS OTHER STUDENTS, MY DUDE. When Hitler-like behavior doesn’t upset people, we end up with seven-year-old refugees dying in concentration camps on Christmas Day. There’s a fucking reason we say “Never Forget.”

A postscript: I found out the next year they were all full of shit anyway. My tenth-grade teacher made a habit every year of showing Schindler’s List.

*The population of California at this time was approximately 20.3 million people. I’m aware it’s higher now. This number includes all victims of the Holocaust, including but not limited to Jews, Rroma, people with physical and mental disabilities, and gay men.

**This number has fallen further and is now two-tenths of a percent.

I should loop this and watch it over and over and over

Fideo with Ground Beef and Potatoes

food1
food1

Ingredients

  • 1 package fideo
  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 potato, cut into small cubes
  • 1 can El Pato
  • 1 can diced tomatoes
  • 2 to 3 cups hot water
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon cumin
  • 1 teaspoon minced garlic

Instructions

  1. Lightly brown fideo. Add ground beef and potato. Stir well and cover for about 3 to 5 minutes to brown meat a bit.
  2. Uncover and add 1 can El Pato and 1 can diced tomatoes. Stir and add about 2 to 3 cups HOT water; stir.
  3. Add salt, pepper, cumin and garlic; cover and cook over medium low heat for about 15 to 20 minutes.
  4. Serve with warm flour tortillas.

Be part of his struggle

As a Japanese person, what cultural shocks did you have when you visited the USA?

My goodness, so many cultural shocks. Off of the top of my head, here are a few:

1.) Shoes

This was probably the first thing I noticed when I went to the United States. No one seemed to take their shoes off when going into any type of building. I found it rather odd though I knew prior to visiting that they didn’t follow customs like that.

2.) Talking and Speech

Americans generally speak in a louder and more blunt tone than countries in East Asia. One thing that stood out to me when I first visited was how close they would put their face next to you when talking and their distinct way of laughing. I honestly didn’t have a big issue with it for the most part although I can be quite sensitive to loud noises, touch, and certain types of personalities. Slang and sarcasm was used commonly as well, something, while not rare, but not often used in Japan.

3.) Toilets

The toilets in the U.S are scandalous! (In my opinion). They use a sheet of paper to wipe their private parts instead of using bidets. I personally think it’s disgusting, but the toilets mechanics are simpler, I suppose.

4.) Quantity vs Quality

While quality is still valued, most things in the United States were large in proportions or quantity. In Japan, people are very thin and small, though in the U.S it is more common to see overweight people. This is most likely because of marketing and how junk food is much cheaper than organic foods (which is understandable). It was sad to see and many people didn’t get the exercise they needed because most people drive cars (again, are very convenient). Meals at restaurants were also large, as well as houses and many buildings.

5.) Reading

Books in the U.S, and most other places, are read from left to right. Books in Japan are read right to left. This surprised me despite knowing beforehand. For some reason they keep manga nearly the same, though. Japanese is traditionally read vertically, but it did not surprise me to see English read horizontally since all my schools taught it.

6.) Driving

I was used to seeing cars driving on the right side, although I had visited places that drove on the left side. My friend was initially confused and a little frightened, but he soon understood. I was surprised to see that the minimal legal age to drive was sixteen. I thought that was a little young. I visited a place in the U.S where it was fourteen.

7.) Expense

I found everything to be quite expensive there, and some of the stores and food to be disappointing. There was a product I wanted to buy that was 301.00 $ in the United States and only 14,630 ¥ in Japan. On the contrary, depending on where you live in either country, prices will always vary. Larger more populated cities will generally be more expensive (like Tokyo and New York) and smaller towns will usually be cheaper (like Coeur d’Alene or Kunohe-mura).

8.) Courtesy

The culture in the U.S, so it seems, can sometimes be quite rude. While this isn’t always the case, in certain places they can be seen as ignorant or apathetic, though this really depends on who you are talking to. Some people don’t even know how to give a simple thank you or speak politely, especially around elders (this is quite noticeable for young children). During political debates and elections, citizens may start riots and yell at others who don’t believe the same thing as them. While it makes sense, it is still not okay.

9.) Touching

High fives, handshakes, embracing, hugging, kissing, and patting backs is seen often in the U.S. This can be very uncomfortable for a Japanese person as we generally don’t touch each other (purposefully), though it can’t be helped in crowded areas or if you’re with friends and family. The comfortable distance between two people is 1 1/2 to 3 feet (yes, using the imperial system) when standing together, if not in a crowded area. In the U.S, couples will show affection to one another in public (kiss, hugs, romantic grooming) and friends will tug on each other and playfully hit each other. This isn’t unseen in Japan but it just isn’t the norm.

10.) Homes

I have lived in a traditional home my whole life, so it was a shocker to see the difference. I could find houses similar to these in Japan, but it was about my 2nd or 3rd time encountering one and I actually went inside. They are set differently than houses in Japan, even if they look similar on the outside (modern homes). I don’t exactly remember, but I believe I was bewildered by the fact of how dirty it was, and the bathing differences.

11.) The Check

In the United States, you are expected to pay a lot of money for the check, but in Japan, you’re not. Actually, in most cases, you don’t leave extra money for the server/waiter. In the U.S you are always supposed to, or else, someone may get angry. Though, from my standpoint, many Japanese servers wouldn’t actually mind receiving tips though have been taught that it could be an inconvenience for the person paying (which is very true).

I was going to mention the school system, but that could be a whole entire essay. Thank you for reading, here are just some of the cultural shocks that came to mind. Thank you. For people from Japan, is this accurate?

This is a Seleucid war elephant.

main qimg 564a0e9cc2876b92954e358405d96e07 pjlq
main qimg 564a0e9cc2876b92954e358405d96e07 pjlq

War elephants were probably the most terrifying battlefield weapon of the ancient world.

However, there were two problems with them. Firstly, elephants were hard to find, difficult to train and expensive to run.

Secondly, even with training, you could never really make an elephant want to fight. Worse, they could be driven mad by enemy arrows and end up trampling friends rather than foes.

However sometimes, just sometimes, they actually were the terror weapons they were supposed to be. One such occasion was a battle fought in 273BC.

The Galatians were a bunch of marauding Celts who rampaged across northern Greece in the years after Alexander the Great’s death. About 20,000 crossed the Bosporus and settled in Asia Minor, taking protection money from the local inhabitants.

main qimg 0a31b6c78967d59e24041428abcf5114 pjlq
main qimg 0a31b6c78967d59e24041428abcf5114 pjlq

Where they settled made them neighbours of the Seleucid Empire and in 273BC Emperor Antiochus I decided to deal with these interlopers. Unfortunately for Antichus, his army wasn’t really a match for the Galatians. He had mainly light troops, whilst the Celts had infantry, cavalry, light chariots and their own terror weapon – chariots with scythes on the wheels.

However Antiochus had his elephants, 16 of them. Somehow -and we’re not told how – he managed to hide them from the Galatians. As the Celts charged the Seleucids the elephants emerged: four on each flank and eight in the middle facing the scythed chariots.

Faced with this unexpected terror weapons the Galatian horses turned and fled. This was particularly unfortunate for the infantry, who suddenly found their own scythed chariots heading back towards them. The entire Celtic army routed, pursued by the elephants.

Antiochus had won a decisive and, from his point of view, cheap victory. What’s more he had shattered the myth of the invincible Celtic warrior. All thanks to his elephants.

Brian REJECTS Girl Who Throws Herself At Him

Why does the CCP keeps saying the accusations in Xinjiang are false but refuse to let UN observers in? Are they afraid of letting the world know or see something? What is a better way than to show the world themselves to prove them wrong?

In light of recent events happening in the Middle East between Israel and Palestine, it would be safe to say that if an active genocide is happening in an area, regardless of any kind of attempt to block the information from getting out, there will be images and videos leaking out.

I mean, look at Palestine; there is no electricity, no food, and they are bombing reporters. There are new videos of the dismembered bodies of children uploaded every day.

Xinjiang is a province about 300 times larger than Palestine, and they claim that millions are being killed. It would be very hard for an authority to suppress the information in that area. Just imagine the manpower needed for such a job, that’s impossible. Yet, all the videos they have is so-called exiled Uyghur or Concentration camp gurads who has their faces covered and voices distorted. That’s not convincing at all.

Allowing the investigation would be a bad start. If It’s allowed, from then on, any group from any country can request some kind of investigation of visit as long as they claim they suspect something. We do not trust your intentions on our lands. You can’t blame us on that, You know what your ancestors did.

Any request without compelling reason should be denied. It’s our rights. We will stand for it, and fight for it if necessary.

Col. Douglas Macgregor: How Close Is WWIII?

What is the most shameless thing you have ever seen a teacher do?

We had a cocky little brat in our class who loved to cause havoc. He was as popular as herpes, both with kids and teachers.

One day he picked up a chair and threw it at a teacher. Hitting her and a couple of other kids. They weren’t hurt badly though. She picked the chair up, told the kids around him to move out of the way, whilst he stood there daring her to throw it at him, and saying she was too scared to do it.

She threw that chair with all her might and whacked the little brat a good one, and the entire class started laughing at him. The noise caused other teachers to come to see what was happening and the class backed the teacher up when she said he was acting the fool and fell off the chair he was standing on. He was a well known trouble maker (who was eventually expelled from school) so the other teachers believed her (or went along with it more likely).

This was in the UK in the 1970′s, and nothing happened to that teacher, and no-one messed with her ever again, but I am quite sure that the brat would be molly-coddled today, and the teacher ‘expelled’.

Pity. The old days were much more fun.

Chinese insane billboards

Can you be shot from so far away that the bullet loses enough energy and the shot does not break skin and just hurts?

Yes, and you can also be shot at a very close range with the same result.

A good friend of mine was shot in the chest from just a few yards away with a .45 caliber bullet and it did not ‘break the skin’.

The way the story was recounted to me, a group of young people that included my friend, were on a camping trip in the 90’s. Someone was mishandling a .45 cal pistol when the pistol was accidentally discharged.

The .45 ACP round went through a cooler sitting on a table, then through the two, 2-liter soda bottles inside the cooler, then out the other side of the cooler, then shattered the Gatorade bottle my friend was holding, and finally stopping when it struck him square in the chest.

Adding to the absurdity of the whole incident, the Gatorade bottle he was holding in front of his chest contained the familiar red liquid which ended up all over his white shirt.

He fell back when the round hit him, more from being startled than struck. The bottle, being glass, seemed to explode in his hand. Several people standing next to him thought he was bleeding profusely in the fading light due to the red liquid he was now soaked in and everyone panicked – but amazingly there was no bodily damage found when he was examined.

Ironically, the person who was holding the firearm when it discharged was supposedly the most experienced person there with firearms – being some sort of Firearms Instructor associated with law enforcement. That person was the most affected by the event and was psychologically traumatized for quite some time as a result of completely screwing up and unintentionally shooting someone in the chest.

My friend still keeps the bullet that did not kill him in his possession.

Lots of lessons here, kids.

More insane Chinese billboards

When the ISS is decommissioned, can we control it to crash into the Chinese space station and claim that it was caused by the ISS going out of control?

cannot

1. The power plant of the International Space Station comes from Russian modules .The Russian module is a locomotive, and the modules of other countries are just carriages.Therefore, odules from other countries cannot control the flight of the ISS.You can’t convince the Russians to do that.

2. The Chinese space station itself has a powerful power unit that can implement emergency orbit changes and actively avoid any impacts. According to public reports, they implemented two orbit changes to avoid Xspace Starlink satellites.

3. Trolls like you cannot make any decisions about the behavior of ISS and can only type on the keyboard in front of the monitor.

The reality

The United States and it’s hawkish neocons have ZERO idea what they are dealing with. Check this 40 second video out.

This is why Asians are smarter than you!

Since his death, the many toxic facets of Apple Computer visionary Steve Jobs have grown more visible. However, one of his actions still resonates with me, if only for its petty cruelty.

In 1975, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell decided to make a single-player version of their popular game Pong, called Breakout. He tasked Jobs, then a low-level Atari technician, with designing the game.

Bushnell knew that Jobs would most likely recruit Steve Wozniak, who was known to the Atari leader as the better engineer. Jobs and Wozniak had been friends for the past four years, designing and building the computers that would become iconic around the world.

Bushnell offered Jobs a bonus for every chip fewer than 50 that he used when building the game.

Wozniak could not believe his luck when Jobs asked him to help. Jobs proposed splitting the fee, and told Wozniak it would have to be built in only four days, using as few chips as possible. Typically a job like this could take months.

However, Jobs hid two key details from Wozniak:

  1. The bonus for using less than 50 chips.
  2. The four day deadline was self-imposed by Jobs, as he wanted to get back to his commune farm to help bring in the apple harvest.

The two Steves stayed up all night, for four straight nights. Wozniak would work his day job at Hewlett-Packard, then toil nightly on his design. Jobs implemented the chips beside him.

Their herculean efforts succeeded. In four days, the assignment was completed using only 45 chips. The game was successfully delivered to Atari.

For the payment, Steve Jobs only gave Wozniak half the base pay. He kept the bonus money for himself.

Wozniak only found out about this ten years later. He is quoted in the Isaacson biography Steve Jobs, sourced below:

When he talks about it now, there are long pauses, and he admits it causes him pain.

“I wish he had just been honest. If he had told me he needed the money, he should have known I would have just given it to him. He was a friend. You help your friends.”

“Ethics always mattered to me, and I still don’t understand why he would have gotten paid one thing and told me he’d gotten paid another. But, you know, people are different.”

Wozniak, to his credit, did not hold this against Jobs in later years.

There are other excellent answers to this question, detailing historical figures perpetrating brutal acts. I realize this tale from early computing is quite small. Steve Jobs is not in the same league as others.

But tricking your friend into working all night long for several days, and then cheating him out of his paycheck, proved to be only the first salvo in a long litany of his penchant for pettiness and pointless cruelty.

Remember one thing

What was the stupidest thing you heard the accused say in the courtroom?

I didn’t see this live, but I did see the video. Two separate stories.

In the first a guy broke into the bank to rob the ATM . There is the full security footage of his attempt.

There are two bullet proof glass doors before you get to the ATM. He goes to the first and pushes it, to no avail.

So he takes his truck and rams it into the outer door at an angle damaging his right front fender, but pushing the outside door off its hinges.

So now he goes to work on the second door. It wont budge and he can’t get the truck in far enough to touch it. He gets a a crowbar, and has no luck. Then he hops in his truck and comes back 5 minutes later with a cordless drill.

Still no luck, then he lays on the floor and naps. The police eventually come and arrest him.

There’s a sign on both the inner and outer doors, that says Pull.. He spent well over an hour trying to push. They weren’t locked, because people need access to the ATM 24 hours.

So he goes to court, and says that he didn’t get into the bank, so it wasn’t break and enter. That he just needed a warm place to sleep it off.

The judge didn’t believe him.

In the second case, that the media called Dumb and dumber, two guys painted their faces with permanent markers, and tried to rob a bank.

They were caught just down the street, because they couldn’t remove permanent marker.

They said that there was no way to prove it was them, because by the time the trial happened the permanent marker had faded. The police showed a video of them robbing the bank with permanent marker, then a video from a body cam, of them being arrested. Then they had clips taken of the two in jail as the marker faded day by day.

 

Keep on keeping on

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/nRZDR8lVENU?feature=share

What is it like to take point position in a formation? Do soldiers dread this role?

Nobody likes to walk point. The point man is at the head of a patrol in enemy territory and is usually the first soldier to get shot at.

I remember the first time I was told to walk point: our battalion conducted a search and destroy operation in the Bosnian mountains and just one minute before my platoon would march into enemy territory, my commander walked up to me and said: “Is it okay for you to walk point? Now?” That came as a surprise. Only two days earlier, a soldier of our company got shot in the stomach while walking point. Now it was my turn!

I could have said no, but to be honest, I also felt honored that my commander came to me and not to somebody else. Not every soldier is able to make a good point man:

A point man has to be very perceptive and must be able to spot an often well camouflaged enemy. He must know how to detect landmines and have an eye for possible ambush situations. At the same time he must be quick and not slow down his unit’s movements, an impossible task!

Everything went well, we were chasing the enemy and we decided that I would continue to walk point for the rest of the operation. Once I got used to my new job I was quite thrilled.

Soldiers rarely volunteer for any combat related activity and this is especially true for the point man position. When your commander asks you to walk point you neither say “yes” nor “no”. You simply clench your teeth and do the job.

 

First Men in the Moon | Full Movie | Voyage

Full video. A great fun classic!

H.G. Wells fantastic account of life on the moon is vividly brought to the screen by special effects master Ray Harryhausen in this amazing sci-fi epic featuring extraterrestrial creatures.

https://youtu.be/AnJe03PnV9U

Other than money, what indicates social class in the US?

In no particular order:

  1. Body size. The average BMI rises as the social class decreases. It’s expensive to maintain a healthy weight in the U.S.
  2. Family size. The higher the social class, the fewer the children, on average.
  3. Age when you had your first child. Higher class people tend to wait longer to have their first child.
  4. Number of different people you’ve had children with. The higher the number of different people you’ve had a child with, the lower the social class, generally.
  5. Education levels. Lower class people tend to quit their educational attainment earlier.
  6. Volume levels while in public. This goes for both speaking and music levels. Lower class people tend to be louder when in public, either oblivious or unconcerned with how obnoxious they are to others. Or, in the case of loud music, the obnoxiousness is a part of the appeal.
  7. Conflicts in public. Lower class people tend to have more conflicts in public places. You rarely hear about fights breaking out at places frequented by high class people.
  8. Respect for authority. Lower class people—particularly younger ones—are more likely to have a default adversarial stance towards anyone in authority, including the police and teachers.
  9. Proximity to violent crime. Lower class people are more likely to have seen a violent crime, know a victim of a violent crime, have committed a violent crime themselves, or know someone who has done time in prison for a violent crime.
  10. Proximity to the military. The lower the social class, the more likely you are to enlist in the military. The higher classes tend to become officers, if they consider the military at all.
  11. Post-retirement plans that don’t rely on the government. This one should be obvious, but higher class people tend to also have better, private retirement options.
  12. The ease with which you or your children can find a job via networking. Higher class people know more people in hiring positions, and have an easier time getting jobs. If you are high class and unemployed for an extended period of time, it’s likely by choice.
  13. Tattoos on your face, neck, or hands. Lower class people are more likely to have tattoos that aren’t easily concealed by regular clothes.

 

When Police Make 1 in 1,000,000 Discoveries

https://youtu.be/XuUYqpyz-K0

Has an officer lied to yo

Is it normal to look at CNN reports on other sources?

A view from the video camera of the CNN channel:

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1

Passerby’s Perspective: They see a new movie being made by the famous American movie studio CNN that hired paid protesters …… 🤣

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2

CNN is simply responsible for delivering the messages and attitudes that the American ruling class wants to deliver. Whether or not it disseminates the truth is beyond the scope of CNN’s job.

Do you really take the American “democratic and freedom” as a real scenario?

If you see a promotion from American Mobile Recharge, remember to buy a small recharge card for your IQ. 😁

So does the BBC in the UK. The Uyghurs you see in reports like the BBC.

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3

Uyghurs 100 years ago

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4

Uyghurs in reality today

main qimg 59cbcb142b6567daec525ca2b3836e91
main qimg 59cbcb142b6567daec525ca2b3836e91


How CNN covers China:

CNN reporter: Old gentleman, how do people as old as you travel on New Year’s Eve?

Chinese old man: I’m too old to walk.

CNN reporter: In China, there is no freedom to travel casually.

Chinese old man: I sometimes travel, and high-speed rail is very convenient.

CNN reporter: China’s high-speed rail has safety hazards, the technology is not up to scratch, you are so old to do up very difficult, right?

Chinese old man: High-speed rail is quite comfortable, but I don’t ride it often.

CNN reporter: In China, high speed rail is the privilege of a few people!

CNN reporter: What is your New Year’s wish?

Chinese old man: life is better now, children are earning a lot of money, is busy at work, come back to see me more often would be better.

CNN reporter: The young people have to abandon the old people in order to make ends meet.

Chinese old man: You can’t talk nonsense, I live a good life, why can’t you speak kindly?

CNN reporter: The old man protested strongly against the injustice he encountered, which is the enlightenment of democracy and freedom ah!

Chinese old man: you guys stay away from me! You guys are reporting nonsense!

CNN reporter: The old man is afraid that our factual reporting is subject to injustice by the authorities and urges us to leave.

(Old man turns and runs away)

CNN reporter: We are worried about this old man’s future. How terrible it is to have no democracy and freedom!!


Simply put, the Western mainstream media pursues a policy of dumbing down.

In 1981, a cargo ship called the Primrose ran aground off the coast of North Sentinel Island. After a few days of waiting for a passing ship to rescue them, the Primrose crew members noticed that a group of Sentinelese tribesmen were building boats on the beach and were preparing to attack them and their wrecked vessel. Panicking, as they had no guns or weapons aboard, the Primrose’s captain radioed that they be supplied firearms by air drop, but a storm prevented this. Fortunately, they were rescued by helicopters sent from India.

In 2004, an earthquake and a tsunami struck the Indian Ocean area around North Sentinel Island. An Indian government helicopter was sent to the island to establish if the Sentinelese people were badly affected by the earthquake. The helicopter was able to observe a few islanders on the beach, but incredibly, the helicopter was pelted with spears, arrows, and stones, which forced the helicopter to flee.

In 2006, two Indian fishermen foolishly decided to fish in the waters near North Sentinel Island, and when their boat drifted too close to the island, they were killed by the islanders.

Shortly after this, a film crew sailed very close to the island to film a documentary about uncontacted tribes left in the world. Naturally, they were very wary about the tribe; after being warned by the Sentinelese, they snapped a few photos such as these and promptly sailed away.

Most infamously, in 2018, a 26 year old American missionary named John Allen Chau decided to visit the island to preach Christianity to its people. However, he was shot down with arrows almost as soon as he arrived.

Due to these tragic incidents, it’s illegal to travel to the island, and the Indian government leaves the Sentinelese people alone. They have simply always been there; no other civilization has conquered them. We know almost nothing about their language, religion, and culture.

It is amazing to me that the year is 2021, and there is still an uncontacted tribe out there, which we know almost nothing about.

Have you ever been waiting for a show to start while they’re testing the equipment? When the microphone is just a little too close to the speaker, or the speaker is turned up just a little too loud, you hear that awful screeching noise. It’s system feedback. Someone goes to test the microphone and the “T” sound from the word “Testing” (or whatever first sound they make) is fed back through the speakers at almost the same instant. The sound arrives at the mic just slightly louder than that initial sound. It happens so fast, it seems instantaneous.

If you could watch it in slow motion, you’d see something like a hill followed by another hill slightly bigger. Each successive hill grows until system limits are reached.

Meanwhile, everyone in the room clasps their hands to their ears while the guy with the mic fumbles for the volume.

The “justice” system in the US is suffering from multiple slow motion feedback loops.

Not convinced? No idea what I’m talking about? Stick with me for just a minute.

On June 18, 1971, President Nixon announced the War on Drugs. This was that initial “T” sound. The public supported it, yes drugs are dangerous, and this seems like a good idea.

main qimg 9faecdfc36a8ae73eb21a133f999e6b0 lq
main qimg 9faecdfc36a8ae73eb21a133f999e6b0 lq

Arrests are made, lots of them. Wow, this drug problem was a lot bigger than we thought. We need stiffer penalties, more laws, and more enforcement. So the prison population grows drastically.

White middle class voters notice that the majority of people getting locked up are not white, nor middle class. From behind the picket fence, these people look downright dangerous. Cue more laws and penalties.

The stiff penalties and societal ostracization of convicts trying to return to society make it all but impossible to succeed. Lawmakers see the “recidivism” and decide that felons are beyond hope… more laws… more penalties.

The growing prison population needs more space and cheaper supervision. Enter the private prisons. Now we have a group of people with an economic incentive to lock up their fellow Americans. The prisons become a sizeable sector of the economy. You can’t close prisons or reduce penalties because jobs depend upon it.

Any politician who suggests reform is labeled “soft on crime” and dies politically. Even if the competition doesn’t call him out, lobbyists for the prison sector will.

The children of inmates grow up without positive role models. Their role models are in prison, so they emulate that behavior… another cycle starts…

In our schools, we overreact to horrible events by making things that children do (and have always done) criminal offenses. We station police in elementary schools!

Many children leave school having already had multiple brushes with the law… commence new cycle.

And on it goes.

These are feedback loops. We’ve created what we sought to destroy. The problem is that nobody is at the mic. The screeching noise is only now beginning to be heard. Pretty soon we’ll all have our hands to our ears.

Canines at War: Watch out for China’s robotic dogs equipped with arms

FP Explainers

• March 1, 2024, 14:05:44 IST

Robotic dogs equipped with machine guns have been successfully tested by Chinese scientists. Developed by a research team at Nanjing University of Science and Technology, the accuracy of small four-legged robotic companions is quite close to that of skilled soldiers

Traditionally used for entertainment purposes and to perform mundane tasks, these Chinese-made robotic canines are now repurposed for military purposes. Image Courtesy: @aprajitanefes/X

The technology used in the military is advancing.

These days, utility robots are now mimicking dogs in both appearance and functionality.

Robotic dogs equipped with machine guns have been successfully tested by Chinese scientists, according to the South China Morning Post.

The accuracy of the small, four-legged robotic companions is quite close to that of skilled soldiers.

Traditionally used for entertainment purposes and to perform mundane tasks, these Chinese-made robotic canines are now repurposed for military purposes.

This could have a substantial impact on how conflict plays out in the future, particularly in urban combat situations.

Here’s all we know about them.

Putting guns on robotic dogs

A few videos of robotic dogs, designed to play a support role to humans, have been released by the Chinese military through official media in recent years.

Developed by a research team headed by Professor Xu Cheng of Nanjing University of Science and Technology, the videos demonstrate the strength and accuracy of these robotic canines.

The researchers have put a 7.62 millimetres machine gun on the robotic dogs, to achieve impressive precision with a half-dispersion radius of only five centimetres across a 100-metre range, the report said.

Its accuracy exceeds that of the M16 rifle, which is known for being an accurate weapon, highlighting the technical strength that these quadruple platforms possess.

SCMP quoted lead scientist Xu Cheng and his colleagues as saying that the study “demonstrates the feasibility of a legged strike platform” in a peer-reviewed paper that was published in the Chinese Journal of Engineering last month.

Because of the rapid growth of China’s electronics industry, these developments have resulted in an enormous reduction in production costs, making this technology more widely available.

Influence on urban warfare

Researchers believe that this technology may have a big influence on how combat develops in the future.

“Urban warfare, encompassing anti-terrorism operations, hostage rescue missions, and the clearance of streets and buildings alike, has steadily risen to prominence as a fundamental facet of contemporary conflict,” Xu and his colleagues wrote in their paper.

“The urban landscape, with its maze of intersecting streets and towering edifices packed tightly together, poses unique challenges for unmanned combat platforms. These platforms must negotiate unstructured terrain and execute intricate actions such as manoeuvring, scaling, and leaping, rendering traditional wheeled and tracked designs inadequate.”

With a focus on bionic principles, these machines are highly adaptable and capable of navigating the difficult terrain of modern warfare.

“Quadruped platforms, based on bionic principles, can use independent ground support points to provide enhanced mobility and adaptability in complex urban combat environments,” the researchers said.

Similar attempts by the US

In 2021, a company named Ghost Robotics displayed the Q-UGV, a four-legged robot equipped with a Special Purpose Unmanned Rifle 4. The utility robots’ weaponisation was emphasised at the showcase event.

Another utility robot with four legs was used in a proof-of-concept test carried out by the US Marines in September 2023. Its capacity to “acquire and prosecute targets with the M72 Light Anti-Tank Weapon” was measured, according to The Conservation.

The American company Boston Dynamics developed the utility robot Spot, which resembles a dog. Another intriguing move was when the business released a video in November last year demonstrating how it had integrated the AI chatbot ChatGPT with its Spot robot.

One of the company’s engineers can be seen asking the machine questions and having conversations with it while utilising a variety of “personalities,” like an English butler. The AI chatbot provides the answers, but Spot mumbles them.

Ethical concerns

A new era in military technology has begun with the introduction of utility robots that are outfitted with rifles and have proven to be effective in engaging targets.

Although there is no denying the potential to improve combat capabilities and operational efficiency, the implications of these advancements must be carefully considered.

Concerns about ethics have arisen about the autonomy of robotic canines in making life-or-death judgements as their deployment into conflict becomes a serious possibility.

The international community has demanded strict laws to control the use of autonomous weaponry, including defence analysts and AI researchers.

As per The Conversation, dozens of the top robotics companies signed an open letter that was posted on Boston Dynamics’ website in 2022, expressing their opposition to the weaponisation of readily available commercial robots in the letter.

The firms did not, according to the letter, object “to existing technologies that nations and their government agencies use to defend themselves and uphold their laws.”

According to BNN Breaking, the US military’s execution of programmes like Project Maven and references to studies from the Centre for a New American Security and Public Citizen highlight the critical need for a strategic approach that gives ethical and human oversight top priority in the development and application of AI-driven warfare technologies.

CRITICAL DRINKER: They Removed Testosterone & MEN From Movies, Now The Hollywood Sign is in FLAMES

Money talks and now Hollywood is finally learning that people are sick of wokeness in movies. Make Films Great Again.

https://youtu.be/Bp3ZtFSB-fk

By K.J. Noh

Washington approved the dangerous sale of the Link 16 communications system to Taiwan. This is the final link of what the US military calls a “transnational coalition kill chain” against China, and signals a commitment to kinetic war.

In many traditions, when you paint or sculpt a Buddha, the eyes are the very last to be painted. It’s only after the eyes have been completed that the sculpture is fully alive and empowered.

The United States has approved a $75 million weapons package to Taiwan province, involving the sale of the Link 16 communications system.

The acquisition of Link 16 is analogous to “painting the eyes on the Buddha”: a last touch, it makes Taiwan’s military systems and weapons platforms live and far-seeing.

It confers deadly powers, or more prosaically, in the words of the US military, it completes Taiwan as the final, lethal link of what the US Naval Institute calls a “transnational coalition kill chain”, for war against China.

What exactly is Link 16? Link 16 is a key system in the US military communications arsenal. Specifically, it is the jam-resistant tactical data network for coordinating NATO weapons systems for joint operations in war.

If this sale is completed, it signals serious, granular, and single-minded commitment to kinetic war. It would signal that the Biden administration is as serious and unwavering in its desire to provoke and wage large-scale war with China over Taiwan as it was with Russia over Ukraine, which also saw the implementation of this system.

More important than any single weapons platform, this system allows the Taiwan/ROC military to integrate and coordinate all its warfighting platforms with US, NATO, Japanese, Korean, Australian militaries in combined arms warfare.

The deadliest link

Link 16 would be the deadliest piece of technology yet to be transferred, because it allows sea, air, and land forces to be coordinated with others for lethal effect.

It permits, for example, strategic nuclear/stealth bombers (US B-1B Lancers, B-2 Spirits) to coordinate with electronic warfare and surveillance platforms (EA Growlers, Prowlers, EP-3s), fighters and bombers (F-16,F-22, F-35s) as well as conduct joint arms warfare with US, French, British carrier battle groups, Japanese SDF destroyers, South Korean Hyun Moo missile destroyers, as well as THAAD and Patriot radars and missile batteries.

It also allows coordination with low-earth orbit satellites and other Space Force assets.

In other words, Link 16 supplies a brain and nervous system to the various deadly limbs and arms that the Taiwan authorities have been acquiring and preparing on the prompting of the US. It ensures interoperability and US control.

It effectively prepares Taiwan to be used as the spear tip and trigger of a multinational war offensive against China.

To give a shoe-on-the-other-foot analogy, this would be like China giving separatists in a US territory or state (e.g. Hawaii, Guam, Puerto Rico, Texas) not just arms and training – already a belligerent act of war, which the US is currently doing – but connecting insurgent militaries directly to the PLA’s surveillance, reconnaissance, and command/control systems.

This coordinates and completes, to borrow the words of the US Naval Institute (USNI), the final link in a “transnational coalition kill chain” for war.

Offsetting peace, sowing dragon’s teeth

The current US doctrine of war against China is based on distributed, dispersed, diffused, network-centric warfare to be conducted along the myriad islands of the archipelagic states encircling China in the Pacific.

These are the “island chains” upon which the US has encircled and sown dragon’s teeth: tens of thousands of troops armed with mobile attack platforms and missiles.

This is to be coordinated with subsurface warfare, automated/autonomous warfare, and longer-range stand-off weapons and attacks.

Powerful think tanks like CSBA, CNAS, CSIS, RAND and the Pentagon have been working out the doctrine, details, logistics, and appropriations for this concept intensively for over a decade while advocating intensely for it.

The sale of link 16 to Taiwan realizes and completes a key portion of this, binding the Chinese island as the keystone of this “multinational kill chain”.

This doctrine of dispersion is based on a “rock-paper-scissors” concept that networked diffusion “offsets” (Chinese) precision.

China’s capacity to defend itself and its littoral perimeter with precision missiles can be undermined with diffuse, distributed attacks from all across the island chains.

Note that this diffusion and dispersion of attack platforms across the entire Pacific gives the lie to the claim that this is some inherently deterrent strategy to defend Taiwan island. Diffusion is clearly offensive, designed to overrun and overwhelm defenses: like Ukraine, this is not to deter war, but to enable it.

This thus signals that aggressive total war against China is being prepared, in granular, lethal fashion on tactical and operational levels.

On the strategic level, currently, at the CFR, CNAS, and other influential think tanks in Washington, the talk is all about “protracted warfare” with China, about pre-positioning systems and munitions for war, about ramping up to an industrial war footing for the inescapable necessity of war with China.

This discussion includes preparations for a nuclear first strike on China.

The US senses that the clock is running rapidly down on its power. If war is inevitable, then it is anxious to start war sooner rather than later.

RAND warned in 2016 that 2025 was the outside window for the US to prevail in war with China. The “Minihan window” also hints at 2025. The “Davidson window ” is 2027.

  • RAND window is 2025.
  • Minihan Window is 2027.

The question in Washington regarding war with China is not if, but when–and how.

Link 16 makes “how” easier, and brings “when” closer.

But the US is still engaged in Ukraine. Can it wage a two-front war?

The current administration has hardline Russophobes who want to continue to bleed Russia out in Ukraine. It wants protracted war with Russia. It firmly believes it can wage ambidextrous, multi-front war.

Many US officials also believe that war with Ukraine and war with China are connected. They see Russia and China as a single axis of “revisionist powers” (i.e., official enemies) conspiring against the US to undermine its so-called “rules-based order” (i.e., US hegemony).

Furthermore, if the US abandons Ukraine, this could weaken the Taiwan authorities’ resolve and willingness to wage war on behalf of Washington.

Earlier in the war, when Russian gains in Ukraine were uncertain, Bi-khim Louise Hsiao (Taiwan’s current vice-president elect) gloated publicly and prominently that Ukraine’s victories were a message to China, as well as proof-of-concept of an effective doctrine for waging and winning war against China. As such, the Taiwan authorities were and are a major supporter of the Ukraine proxy war.

But the converse also holds true.

Based on the same premise, if the US abandons and loses Ukraine, it sends a clear message to the people on Taiwan island that they will be the next to be used and abandoned; that their US-imposed war and war doctrine (light, distributed, asymmetrical combined arms warfare) for fighting China is a recipe for catastrophic loss.

The US plans on using proxies for war against China: Taiwan, Korea, Japan (JAKUS), Philippines, and Australia (AUKUS).

Thus it cannot signal too overtly its perfidious, unreliable, and instrumental mindset.

Washington has to keep up the pretense. It cannot be seen to overtly lose in or abandon Ukraine. It needs a “decent interval”, or a plausible pretext to cut and run.

Still, the US is stretched thin.

For example, it is relying on Korean munitions to Ukraine, and South Korea has provided more munitions than all of the EU combined.

Moreover, the US is currently at war with itself. The fracturing of its body politic can only be unified with a common war against a common enemy. Russia is not that enemy for the US. China is.

The Republicans want war with China now.

Eli Ratner and Elbridge Colby have been fretting for years about the need to husband weaponry, arms, and munitions in order to wage war against China.

Since the outbreak of Ukraine, Ratner has been working hard to pull India into the US defense industry’s supply chain, and claims to have been successful.

South Korea’s considerable military-industrial complex is being pulled into sub-contracting for US war with China.

Since many of its major Chaebol corporations got their start as subcontractors for the war in Vietnam (for example, Hyundai was a subcontractor for Halliburton/Brown & Root), the Korean economy is simply reverting back to its corporate-martial roots.

South Korea’s economy is currently tanking due to US-forced sanctions on China. Major Korean electronic firms have lost 60 to 80% of their profits due to US-imposed chip sanctions.

Under those conditions, military manufacturing and/or subcontracting looks to be the only way forward.

In this way, the US is forcing a war economy onto its vassals.

The business of the US is war

Furthermore, US aid to Ukraine benefits its own arms industry.

The business of the US is war. Not only do existing US arms companies gain, but also the entire tech industry and supply chain benefits, and is currently re-orienting around this.

Much of the US tech industry is seeking to suckle from the government teat, now flowing copiously in preparation for war.

On the other hand, the general US economy is not doing well, with massive layoffs, especially in the consumer and business tech sector.

The backstop of military Keynesianism, with the integration of think-tank lobbying groups funded by the arms industry with close ties to the administration (such as CNAS, West Exec Advisors, and CSIS) ensure that war is always the closest ready-to-hand resort for tough economic times.

The US is simultaneously trying to decouple supply chains, which creates opportunities for US firms (both domestically and subcontracting with US vassals).

Automated, AI-enabled warfare will be a key part of this development, as will be dispersed, distributed warfare platforms using proxies such as South Korea and Japan.

This fits the existing historical pattern: the history of Western technology shows that technology and machinery have always been developed first for war.

Afterwards, they become tools of entertainment and distraction, and later productive tools for general industrial use.

The machinery of war, mystification, and repression

This pattern goes back to the earliest machines and inventions of the West: the crane, the pulley, the lever, were all military technologies – machines of war (used in sieges).

Later they became machines of illusion and distraction (used as stage machinery in Greek theater).

Only much later were they applied for general use – and exploitation – in manufacture and production.

This holds true for many other technologies, including:

  • the internet, originally designed to create redundant military communications in case of nuclear strike;
  • GPS, for precision bombing;
  • integrated circuit computer chips, a miniaturization of electronic circuits to fit inside the cone of missile guidance systems;
  • digital computers, conceived by Alan Turing while trying to break military encryption;
  • microwave ovens, originally radar technology, initially marketed as the “Radar-range”;
  • analog computers, invented for military calculations; and
  • feedback systems, for guidance systems.

Nuclear power obviously derives from nuclear weapons.

AI, too, from its inception, was conceived for automated battle management, especially to enable second strike after human life had been destroyed.

An AI war is already in the works, with US sanctions on AI-related chips and computing, along with an algorithmic race to suppress dissent and critique in the information domain.

War and business are intricately related in the west, and war is the first lever pulled when the economy stagnates critically or needs a boost.

Is there any possibility of peace?

The US needs to abandon its neoconservative fantasies of hegemonic global empire and retreat gently into that good night, for there to be peace.

Washington needs to negotiate in good faith with Russia, and begin the process of de-escalating its proxies in Ukraine, as well as in Palestine, and the Pacific.

It needs to seek win-win cooperation in a multilateral order based on international law and mutual co-existence, not its own top-down “rules-based order”.

It needs to respect the One China principle, end its interference in China’s affairs, and stop preparing and provoking war with China.

However, the US ruling class is unwilling to do so. And it has only a few levers left to pull. The military one is the closest and most ready to hand.

As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The US is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world”.

Like a drunk at the bar after the final call – drunk with power – Washington is determined to go out with a fight.

That fight could involve a nuclear first strike .

Palestine has shown what it will try to get away with: brazen genocide with the whole world watching.

The issue is no longer war or peace in Ukraine. Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell sees Ukraine as a “unified field” of war with China. He revels in the possibility of a “magnificent symphony of death” in Asia.

The coda, of course, will be a deafening fermata of silence across the entire planet.

Unless…

…we stop this insane march to war.

He is right

What is the reason for the lack of a border between China and Mongolia?

  1. There is a border between China and Mongolia, or how do you distinguish the two countries?
  2. If you mean the border fence, in most parts, there isn’t.
  3. You can roughly devide China-Mongolia border into three sections: east, middle and west. Middle and west section is not habitable for human beings.
  4. The famous Gobi desert lies in between China and Mongolia covering middle and west part of the C-M border, you wanna cross the border on foot? Die. Because Gobi desert has a size of 1.4 million square kms, ranked 19th among all countries if it is a country. No roads, no rivers and lakes, no human residents, no one can cross it without an army behind providing supplies.
  5. There are some villages and towns in the desert, with a road connecting each other. But there’s border patrol along the roads in near border areas, because you go off the road, you die.
  6. There are some crossing points, and also patrols and fence stretching aside, long enough to preventing anyone trying to cross the border near the crossing point.

 

Chinese 3D billboards

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Ad_t-2jou38?feature=share

What job offered to you was so shocking that you didn’t even believe that it was happening?

I was 16 (legal working age) and acting up at home so my mother decided that I should get a job to keep me busy. No skills, still in school and couldn’t type.
A friend of a friend said they were hiring at a company that mailed credit card holders their statements and a bunch of advertisements. You had to hand pick the sheets and stuff the envelopes. (This was before the digital age)

Got hired! For one day. The second day I showed up I was told that I had to be 18 to work in that position.

I was devastated. Vice President of the company to the rescue! We had met at lunch the previous day and he was the nicest, kindest man.

Anyway, for the next 7 months I was his personal assistant, riding with him to business lunches, keeping his schedule and generally doing a few filing tasks.

The regular office staff was furious! His actual secretary would make snide remarks, throw eye daggers and practically have an apoplexy every time she handed me my check.

Mr……… then offered to pay for my college education!

I was ecstatic!!! He had two grown sons with their own businesses who he said didn’t need him to help them.

One morning I came in to “work” and everyone was crying. Mr…….. had a heart attack and died overnight.

I loved that man. He made me feel like I mattered. I still miss him even though it’s been over 45 years since this happened.

 

China Just Launched The MOST POWERFUL Hypersonic Engine In The World That Will CONFRONT The US

https://youtu.be/48gUxp9pR34

 

Why can Russians destroy Abrams?

In a modern battle, the tanks are brought in only when the Aerial Threats are completely cleared

Tanks today are used mainly to break positions and strongholds

Yet the line of tanks come into play only after the air force destroys all aerial threats to the tank which are mainly

  • Artillery Guns
  • Air to Surface Missiles
  • Other Tanks

The fourth threat is LANDMINES which can be neutralized by demining operations


Now let’s see Ukraine

They have virtually no Air power

This means a Tank goes into the front line with the air full of Sukhoi 35s, Sukhoi 34s, Ka 52 Helicopters and Loitering Drones

How long do you think the world’s best tank can survive?

It has armor but it also has vulnerabilities, which include being susceptible to a munition drone that drops an accelarant laced explosive capable of generating a huge ball of flame

Today Tanks can be mainly used against enemies who don’t have major air power

Small Armies, Separatist Factions, Terrorist Holds, Fortifications without Air Cover

Not against the front lines of the World’s Best Land Army, loaded with air power

The worst part is the Abrams is millions of dollars whereas the drone that dropped the explosive likely cost the Russians less than ten thousand dollars

A Storm Shadow that cost £ 200,000 to source by the British Army is destroyed by a missile fired by the Russians that probably cost $ 30,000

That’s because Britain and other nations in the West have primarily privatised their defense industries and profiteering is INSANE

Russia , China and even India have managed to keep defence manufacturing in the hands of the State for a major part and that means prices are more controlled


Its an entirely new world now

Aircraft Carriers are becoming redundant as our Houthi Braves are showing the world

Stealth is becoming less important given the rapid nature of Air Defence Systems

Tanks are secondary to Air Cover which means rather than Superior Aircraft, you need more saturation of airspace and for that you need Cheap Loitering Drones

 

Here’s what REALLY happened with the Covid vaccine

https://youtu.be/D1t4KYNjHPY

When did the collective West start to freak out about the rise of China from being positive?

Shortly after the GFC.

Why?

America asked China to help stabilize the dollar and the American government debt market.

China not only committed to buying Federal debt, but it also expanded fiscal spending on a massive scale, doubling down on infrastructure.

Chinese growth and monetary injection helped pad the fallout from the GFC, which saw the dollar devalue by more than 30%.

American leaders belatedly awoke to the fact that China was already a mover and shaker, just because of the rarefied size of the Chinese economy.

Thankfully, the yuan hasn’t ascended to the table, still dominated by 4 currencies: dollar, euro, yen, pound.

That’s the sole reason why the G7 remains relevant today: financial dominance.


Let’s go back to 2012, when Barack was campaigning for his second term, having stabilized the American economy.

What was the platform he campaigned on?

The pivot to Asia.

Let me repeat, because this is a pivotal moment in 21st century geopolitics.

THE PIVOT TO ASIA.

Or rather, a thinly veiled platform to fix China and the Chinese.

The most consequential strategy that arose out of the pivot is a known fact that rarely surfaces in discussions. I call it the Reverse Plaza Accord. After winning his second term, Barack and the G7 essentially gave the BOJ carte blanche to devalue the yen, then held to captive highs as the darling of the carry trade.

The rest of the third world followed the yen’s lead, and devalued massively, with one notable absentee: China.

Both the Barack and Donald administrations subsequently attacked the PBOC’s monetary policy, threatening sanctions for currency manipulation. Singapore was drawn into the mess for operating a similar exchange rate mechanism based on the BBC (Basket, Band and Crawl), managed against a basket of currencies of major trading partners, and threatened with designation in tandem.

The political message (for those in the know) was crystal clear: do not devalue the yuan to keep pace with the rest.

What was the goal? Give Japan an unfair forex edge at high tech exports, while forcing low-tech exports out of China to the rest of the third world.

Notice the flattening/dip of ex-china cost post-2013? That’s the reverse plaza accord, measured in dollars.

Barack was using American hegemony to enforce step change in the forces shaping the Chinese economy.

China lost plenty of jobs—and babies—over the past decade.

But what did Beijing do?

It hunkered down, bit its tongue, and decided to focus on home renovation. Let’s transit from unbridled expansion to quality and HSE (Health, Safety, Environment). Let’s focus on domestic recirculation and develop OBOR markets rather than chase first world exports. Let’s pursue indigenous technology rather than buy foreign.

Let’s pivot from the West, too.

The discipline was merciless, and there were pockets of carnage in the upheaval. For example, opportunities in the Northeast—long a major industrial heart—became so limited the migration of entrepreneurs west to Yunnan and elsewhere was promoted and facilitated by the government.

The yuan has hardly moved the past decade, hovering around a 10–15% band of 6.6 to the dollar. The rest of the third world and Japan have all corrected lower. In the yen’s case, a 100% devaluation.

How does China remain the world’s factory with a 300% rise in labor cost within a decade?

Or in other words, how does China remain competitive with externally-imposed margin squeeze?

That’s a topic worthy of a book-length dive.


Pacific Command is now Indopacom. The annual APEC summit is now a backburner priority for the US, unless the US plays host. East Asia is no more—there is only the Indopacific. There is the Quad and Aukus, loose military partnerships centered around containing China’s maritime ambitions.

American worldview is pivoting to India and the INDOpacific being the center of Asia, and the red carpet is being rolled out to an immense population that can do no wrong.

I fear the consequence of unbridled ascent.

Note: the Americans no longer need China to buy its debt because they invented QE and explained it away using MMT.

 

 

Billboards in China

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/q4x6K9GV4Uw?feature=share

What is the reason behind the U.S. holding onto a large amount of gold? Is there a fear of other countries selling their gold and causing a significant decrease in its value?

Do you think the U.S. has?

Their gold vault is highly lightly empty. French president in the 1970’s threatened to take all its gold out and Nixon declared a U.S. dollar fiat currency. Ie they don’t have the gold!

China and Russia and a whole host of country has loads of gold. Not the U.S. the U.S. has loads of debts and deficits. Ready to default. Watch out!

What moment made you think “This is awesome…oh wait”?

Laying by the ocean next to my gorgeous girlfriend.

We were living the Dream.

Outside of my pasty white skin, it was the stuff of a great #travel Instagram post.

We were celebrating an incredible year as business owners, splurged to fly our entire staff to an all-inclusive Mexican resort, and couldn’t wait to strip our clothes off and drink alcohol on the beach.

We rubbed sunscreen on each other and took a deep, relaxing sigh.

Until one unscheduled activity ruined everything.

A nap.

We had both succumbed to our exhaustion, or to the margaritas, or to the sunshine… but I woke feeling like a 76” hot dog forgotten on the grill.

I looked at my girl.

She was a bronze goddess.

“Babe, I’m not feeling too good.”

Her: “Okay, let’s just get you back to the room.”

With the stride of a marathon runner overcome with bunions, she walked me back to our room.

The heat wasn’t subsiding. I felt like my skin was made of tin foil.

I made the mistake of looking in the mirror.

I was somewhere between crimson and purple.

Maybe my eyes haven’t adjusted yet.

I lathered myself up with Aloe.

Then they started show up.

Blisters.

In the end, I had to remain in our hotel room the remainder of the trip. There was free booze, great food, and all I wanted was to be locked in a walk in freezer.

Instead, I got a trip to the emergency room and learned an all-too-important lesson when it comes to sunbathing:

I am not, and never will be, a bronze goddess.

She messed up big time

Gringo Nachos

Unlike regular nachos, these are served as an entree. Melty cheese covers roasted potatoes, bacon and caramelized onions. The amounts are as desired.

nachos
nachos

Ingredients

  • Red potatoes
  • Bacon, sliced into 1 inch pieces
  • Large yellow onions
  • Garlic powder
  • Cheddar cheese, grated
  • Sour cream
  • Green onions, sliced

Instructions

  1. Roast red potatoes, then cube and sauté with bacon.
  2. Meanwhile, caramelize onions. Halve and slice onions. Coat a 12 inch skillet with cooking spray. Over medium heat, cook onions in oil for 15 to 20 minutes, stirring occasionally, or until soft and golden. Stir in garlic powder, per taste.
  3. Place potatoes on a rimmed cookie sheet.
  4. Add caramelized onions on top of potatoes.
  5. Sprinkle lots of grated cheddar cheese over the top.
  6. Bake for 5 minutes at 350 degrees F or just until the cheese is melted.
  7. Garnish with dollops of sour cream and green onions.

FIRST LISTEN TO | Ram Jam – Black Betty THIS S#!T SO DOPE MY NEW FAVORITE! (REACTION)

https://youtu.be/nPe_UWLrfvg

What are the reasons for China’s dislike towards America? Is the issue with Taiwan a major factor?

Imagine this.

What if China decided to abduct Tim Cook’s family and ban iPhones in China, as well as force every other nation to ban Apple products? The US did this and still does it to Huawei.

What if China openly supports Hawaii in seeking independence and sells weapons and offers military trainings to the Hawaiians to better kill Americans? The US is doing this to China on Taiwan.

What if China patrols the Gulf of Mexico with warships, checking American civilian ships at gunpoint, blackmails the Mexican president into accepting a China-organised private court in Hague to use Mexico as a pawn against US presence off the coast of Florida? The US is doing this to China in the South China Sea.

What if China controls the world’s media and social media and brainwashes people all over the world to call AIDS the American virus, preach that the US is committing genocide against the blacks all over the nation, to constantly dehumanize and demonize the Americans as the core issue of every problem worldwide? The US is doing this to the Chinese people.

What if China prohibits Americans from going to space and kick the Americans out of the International Space Station and call all Americans spies? The US has been doing that to Chinese for years.

Etc. Etc. Etc.

It’s not which specific issue, but the entire underlying logic that bothers the Chinese. People used to fall for the “We’re not against the Chinese, only the government” shit, we used to look back at how the Americans joined China in its fight against the Japanese invaders in WWII, to imagine that the US holds certain moral principles. But now everyone in China understands that it’s neo-nazism and racism that’s driving the current American “competition” with China. That to beat China, the US government may go beyond fair competition or basic decency if it gets the chance. We don’t want to go the way the native Americans did, just so that future Americans can pretend to be friendly and shed tears for us. And this awakening has rallied people behind the Chinese government in its defense against the US.

 

And this is what is going on right now with Gen-Z

Hi Wow! Some of these stories! Here’s mine.

I worked in the marketing department for a national retailer. I’d come over from IT to run/manage their relational database system. We were responsible for the loyalty program, and sending out mailers. The marketing department consisted of me, a data analyst, and our supervisor. We reported to one of the VPs of Sales.

I’d been campaigning for the creation of a sales analyst position for several months, but was told that there wasn’t room in the budget for additional headcount. One day, I see a posting for a Sales Analyst position on the bulletin board. Naturally, I applied for the job. The VP of Sales told me that he didn’t think I could do the job, and another of the Sales VPs was bringing on someone from his former company to fill the position. (Yes, there were more VPs at that company than departments. There was even a VP who didn’t have any direct or indirect reports. She was the VP of herself!). Anyway, although he didn’t think I could do the job, he wanted me to train the new person when they started. I asked him if that made sense to him: I’m not good enough to do that job, but good enough to train someone else how to do the job? Before he could answer I said, “I’ll give you the weekend to think about that.” and left his office.

On Monday morning I went straight to his office. The conversation went like this:

Me: Have you reconsidered?

Him: No, but we still want you to train the new person.

Me: Then I quit.

Him: Effective when?

Me: Effective when I stop talking.

I turned and left his office, gathered my few personal belongings from my cube, and walked out.

Kindergarten in China

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/psM2EiQTUT8?feature=share

What’s the pettiest thing you’ve done to get back at a nuisance neighbor?

Keep on truckin’; boxtruckin’, that is!

My former neighbors (Oh, god! If there was ever a couple who needed to enter into a murder-suicide pact!) and I each had our own drive way that butted up together; enough for two cars to park side by side. Granted, it was somewhat tight on that portion of our driveways that was situated between the two houses but completely negotiable to even the casual driver.

My neighbor’s wife believed it was too tight in this location for her to proceed past a car that was parked fully on my driveway and complained about it. Being a new neighbor and wanting to get along, my wife and I avoided parking in this area even at our own inconvenience. I also informed family members and recurring guests to do the same.

However, when I had uninformed visitors come over to my house and park in the “sensitive“ area, my neighbor would come out and start yelling at my guests. Because she had a delusional take on the width of the driveway, she assumed everybody else had her same irrational perspective. This was not the case though. No one ever thought that they would impede the flow of my neighbor’s traffic in and out of their own driveway. So they never gave it any thought.

Again, trying to be accommodating, I told my neighbor that it was impolite to confront my guests about where they parked their car. I asked that she and her family members, if they saw a car parked in this area, to come and get me (Or another in my family if I was absent) and I will take care of it. She argued with me telling me that it should be readily apparent that anybody parking in this section of my driveway would block any cars proceeding in and out on their driveway. So apparent (in her unreasonable brain) she said her confrontations were appropriate.

I told her she was 100% wrong (but I still wanted neighborly harmony) and reiterated that she only talk to me; never again to say anything to my guests. I told her in no uncertain terms that if she did not comply with my simple request, I will buy an additional car and make that area of my driveway its permanent home; never to be moved. Well, it happened again (not surprised) and I made good on my promise to take the offensive.

I planned to purchase a beater from a junk yard but a friend of mine (just as outraged as I was) had an old box truck he said I could have as long as I needed it. I fell in love with it! It was big and intimidating yet within regulations for width and more importantly, totally fit within the boundaries of my drive way, albeit barely.

My neighbors never said anything to me because they knew why it was there. They tried a counter move by parking adjacent to the truck when one of them was home but it was a move I anticipated. Although inconvenient, I had to move the truck every now and again to egress my driveway. However, more times than not, my neighbors were not home and all we had to do was swing around the truck on their driveway (as any experienced driver could do) to get In or out. That truck was there to stay until I saw a white flag.

Besides changing their parking behavior, they called the police. However after discussing it with the police (and knowing they could not do anything anyway) they gave me a wink and a smile translating to, “More power to you!”

The neighbors had their overly-sized son try to intimidate me but I told him to do his worst and go pound salt. They complained to the city (various departments) but there was nothing that the city could do except try to convince me to come up with an amicable solution. Again, when they heard my side of the story, the response was just about the same as the police accompanied with a required, but weak, “Well, we hope you would reconsider.”

The white flag came out about six weeks after the truck arrived. I agreed to remove the box truck if and only if I was promised that I would never hear a complaint regarding a car parked anywhere on my drive way. Moreover, not one comment to any visitor; I didn’t care if it was a Jehovah Witness or an Amway sales person. No one was to be addressed regarding where they parked on my drive. I promised them that if they did not abide, the next vehicle would be a fifth wheel with its own address.

Welcome to China

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Jxay8Ew2qBs?feature=share

No. They aren’t. The were at one time, but that’s gone. Switzerland remains unique in that it one of the two places in the world where you can bring in paper cash without being required to declare the paper cash (Gibraltar is the other.)

The special thing about Switzerland is that until recently what you told you banker or accountant was secret in the same why that what you told your lawyer or doctor. If you tell your doctor or lawyer that you are hiding money, then in most countries, they aren’t legally required to tell the government, and can get into a great deal of trouble of if they did so.

However, in most countries, if you tell your banker or accountant that you are hiding money, they will immediately tell the government.

Switzerland was particularly special during World War 2. A lot of people wanted to hide their money, and Switzerland was the place to do this. This money got hidden by both the good guys and the bad guys.

But all that is gone. A few years back, the US forced Swiss banks to disclose information about US accounts. It turns out that in disclosing this information, the Swiss banks were in violation of Swiss law, however, the US basically asked the banks who they where more scared of, and they blinked. This happened after 2000.

Swiss banks are no longer special. Swiss bankers still are, and there are a ton of Swiss bankers in Hong Kong. The thing about the Swiss is that they have a reputation of being trusted, and talking to a Swiss banker is like talking to your doctor or your priest.

So imagine that you are a rich billionaire that happens to have several mistresses, none of which know each other, and which your wife and family do not know about. You want to make sure that they are provided for. You have one nephew you like, one nephew you hate. You want to give a ton of money to the nephew you like, but just enough money to one that you hate to keep him quiet.

Your banker will know about this so people trust Swiss bankers not to tell anyone else.

As far as where to hide your money. That changes from place to place, but the number one place for non-US residents to launder your money happens to be the United States, particularly US real estate, which is totally awesome for money laundering.

One thing that’s funny about US money laundering laws, is that they all apply to money going out. None of it applies to money going in.

My husband had a terrible mental breakdown. He developed psychotic depression very quickly and without warning.

We had been happily married for 40+ years.

One of the manifestations of his illness was that he thought we had no money, our house would be repossessed and we would be on the street. All of this was completely untrue but he was convinced that it was so.

He could not bear the idea of us having to suffer this humiliation and in his poor deluded state decided that it would be for the best if we both died.

Obviously I disagreed with this suggestion and tried very hard to convince him that he was mistaken about our financial position and that even if he was right it was not something to die for.

To try to talk someone out of a strongly held psychotic belief is completely futile even if you can change their mind for a little while the psychosis comes back quickly.

My bone chilling moment came one evening. I was in the kitchen when my husband appeared in the doorway, he was holding a knife. He quietly said “ It will be quick”

I am not one to panic easily thank goodness, I really believe that had I run he would have come for me and stabbed me, instead I reached into the drawer in front of me and found a hammer, looking him in the eye I said “ give it your best shot”.

He must have thought better of his plan because after a short stand off he put down the knife and walked away.

I spent some months with him as he planned to kill us both before he finally got too dangerous and had to be placed in a secure mental hospital, but that first threat was for sure the one that chilled me to the core.

Thanks to everyone who has sent me positive and kind messages.

My husband finally tried to strangle me, after this he was confined to a secure mental hospital and I was told that it would never be safe for me to live with him in the future.

He was in hospital for two years then he absconded one day and walked into the sea.

I loved him very much but I can understand that for him death seemed the only escape from the nightmare his life had become.

Day of The Triffids (1962)

Full Movie! This was one of my favorite flicks growing up as a kid. Really. Have fun and enjoy it.

 

Treasures of life

There are various scenes from life that are characteristic of the place where you live.

When I lived in Milford, Mass… I well remember the local boys carrying the fishing poles to the local stream before school started. I remember the hot fresh bagels that were so great with butter and creme cheese. And I remember the ‘Northeasterner’s.

In Hattiesburg, Mississippi it was the deep fried cat fish and hush puppies. The swarms of cockroaches under the streetlights at night, and the lush moist air that was so very calm.

In Sydney, Australia, it was the delicious meat pies, and the lady that sold them at ten in the morning at the factory. I remember the funny little $2 gold color coins, the women with huge manes of hair, and prawns the size of a turkey.

In Zhuhai, China it was the morning walks with PP (my dog) along the beach front, the beautiful blue skies and flowering trees. And the bike ride that I took to the office.

Different places generate different experiences.

It is the experiences that we have that causes us to think things in ways that are unique to us.

Thus forming our own unique opinions.

Treasure your experiences, and generate new ones at every opportunity. Welcome them as they manifest in your life. Have adventures. Savor the experiences.

I believe in you.

Today…

 

 

The dying American Empire may lash out in a nuclear strike as an act of desperation. Also, Biden, like all Alzheimer patients has bouts of irrational aggression. Is the world in danger of a destruction by the Americans?

Unfortunately, that is a nontrivial possibility. The U.S. corporate elites and their servant government are not popular at home these days (according to Pew Research, only 20% trust the government today, while in the 1960’s it was as high as 80%). In Finland, for example, 80% trust their government.

The US is also no longer very popular externally. So, rather than continue losing clout at home and abroad, the last one being the power of hegemony, the U.S. elites may opt for yet another world war, and a nuclear one, to boot. I hope it doesn’t happen, but I wouldn’t put it past them.

Also, I read an opinion similar to mine above, in a Western mainstream article two or three years ago, and now things are that much worse for the US elites, with Russia’s apparently successful Special Operation in Ukraine, a (real) 8% inflation in the U.S., and a half-senile President.

What was the most dangerous day in human history?

“Compared to this raid, Pearl Harbor was a Sunday picnic.”

3
3

9 November 1979.

It was a cold winter’s morning in Colorado when the alarms began to shriek at NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defence Command. With a Cold War cloud hanging over their heads, the analysts’ hearts instinctively sank when they witnessed the cause behind the alarm — 250 Soviet missiles hurtling towards the United States.

2
2

Zbigniew Brzezinski, right, with Jimmy Carter.

At 3AM and within minutes of the alert, President Jimmy Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, is awoken by a call from NORAD to inform him of the imminent nuclear assault. Each second has suddenly become more valuable than gold, as he is told that he has as few as three minutes to inform President Jimmy Carter of the situation, as well as to get a decision from him.

Instead of doing so though, Brzezinski played cautiously by not immediately informing the president, telling the military assistant who’d called him that he would stand by for a further call to confirm the situation first. His wife sleeping beside him, he decided not to wake her up, convinced that everyone would be dead within half an hour anyway.

1
1

A B-52, part of the Strategic Air Command.

He received a call back shortly later, and was informed the number of incoming missiles had jumped to 2,200 — this was a full-scale annihilation. Brzezinski was determined that the USA should strike back, and so requested confirmation of preparations for retaliation. They were passed on, and ten aircraft from the Strategic Air Command were readied to launch into the sky and begin their flight towards the Iron Curtain, primed to deliver an American brand of retribution.

As each second dragged on and with less than a minute from Brzezinski making the big call to the President, the one that would change the war from cold to searingly hot, he received a third call. He was informed that the other warning systems weren’t registering anything; radar and satellites showed no sign of any approaching missiles. It turned out to be a false alarm, the result of someone mistakenly loading a training simulation into one of the operational computers at NORAD’s HQ.

To think, a mere blip caused the planet to be but a single minute away from World War Three! The quote at the beginning belongs to a congressional investigator who spoke about the event years later, reinforcing just how close the world was to turning that simulation into reality.

What was your “something doesn’t feel right here…” moment?

I’ve had several such moments, but one in particular comes to mind.

I was fourteen, probably, maybe thirteen. I was doing something in town with my dad, I can’t remember quite what. He wandered off for a little while anyway so I started texting or going on twitter or some such thing.

A car pulled up, the guy in it was perhaps thirty. He called me over, and I approached the passanger side door. He was asking for directions which, in the relatively rural area I lived in at the time, was relatively common. He was asking for somewhere I hadn’t heard of, however, so I told him I really wasn’t sure. He asked about somewhere else that I had heard of, though didn’t know the exact location of. I told him the rough direction of it. He held his phone, and requested for me to walk around the other side of the car to help him figure it out.

I don’t know quite what it was. Looking back there were a few red flags, the fact he decided to ask me instead of finding an adult, the fact he didn’t just hold his phone towards where I was stood, the fact he was asking for directions but didn’t have a definite destination in mind. At the time I wasn’t really thinking about this, but the whole situation gave me a definite sense that… something didn’t feel right.

I told him I couldn’t help him, while taking a few steps away from his car. I said that if he wanted to wait a minute or two my dad would be back and would probably know. He said nevermind and drove off.

I didn’t hear about anything happening that could confirm or deny the validity of my apprehension, all I can say is that as he drove away I made a point to memorise his face and licence plate.

I think in certain situations it’s important to trust your instincts, especially when they’re warning you of danger. It’s better to be too cautious a hundred times than not cautious enough even once.

 

What is the most badass thing your parent has ever done?

My family, Dad, Mum, my sister and I, were on holiday in the south of France in 1983. My sister fell ill and so we all went to the local pharmacy to get something to help get my sisters temperature down and help with the vomiting.

A quick aside: my mother went to an all girls grammar school and took German and French as well as some other topics. She always wanted to be a librarian and do she made sure she could read, write and talk in German, French and Latin.

And so, dear reader, back to the plot.

My dad attempted to talk to the pharmacist. With typical Gallic flair the pharmacist dismissed my dad, in French, and apparently added some less than savory comments about my Dad, us kids, my mum, her clothing, is not talking French etc.

I recall my mother getting redder and redder and more and more ready to explode. The pharmacist said a couple more words before the smoldering volcano of fury, anger and absolute motherly care and distress for her daughter exploded and, metaphorically destroyed the small village that sat at the foot of the volcano. This was the first time I ever saw my mother go absolutely ballistic at someone else. Me and my sister did the sensible thing and hid behind my dad. My dad just stood there and watched Mount St Helen erupt in a pharmacy in Hyeres in southern France.

The pharmacist stood no chance. He would get one half of a syllable out before the wrath of the Titans picked up a small temple and smashed him in the face. Eventually my mother stopped and said it was his turn to speak. Amazingly the pharmacist had several medications we could have to help my sister. No, no, please accept them with my thanks and blessings. No, Madam, there is no charge for your beautiful daughter or your exquisite self.

That’s the first time I saw my Mum be a bad ass in a foreign language. I have since seen my mother destroy other ignorant people who happen to make a serious error of judgement when her husband or children are ill or hurt.

Pork Sausage Loaf (Hungary)

2024 02 21 08 35
2024 02 21 08 35

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 cup diced mushrooms
  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1 pound fresh bulk pork sausage
  • 2 cups dry bread crumbs
  • 1 teaspoon paprika

Instructions

  1. Melt butter in a skillet and add mushrooms. Sauté.
  2. Combine sausage, mushrooms, egg and crumbs and shape into a loaf. Sprinkle with paprika. Place in a small roaster; cover.
  3. Bake at 350 degrees F for 1/2 hour.
  4. Uncover, return to oven, and bake 30 more minutes.

Have you ever had an elderly relative sell a vehicle to someone way under its value, but you only found out after the (bad) deal was done?

Yup my father sold his last car to a neighbor’s 17 year old daughter. The car was worth in the neighborhood of $10,000 and he sold it to her for $1,000. Why? Because the neighbor and his wife had been very helpful to him after my mother died and he knew and liked their three children. The three kids 17, 15, 12 had come over every week or so and had done chores for him, things he couldn’t do as he got older. cleaned gutters, trimmed trees, replaced high light bulbs, they refused to take any money saying they were just being neighbors. When he decided to give up his car he thought about it how their daughter would be starting college and needed a reliable car. He discussed it with her parents and the fact that they had been wonderful neighbors to him and that he wanted to give something back. He sold the car for way under market to her. He bought savings bonds for the two younger children with the $1,000. We were so proud of him. He taught us to be kind, generous and to be grateful.

Yes he absolutely knew what he was doing and we would have never dreamed of interfering. It was his car and his choice. When he died he left a very small estate including his home. We sold the home since neither of us lived within 1500 miles and we divided the money from his entire estate into fourths. On fourth to my brother. One fourth to the two children of my youngest brother. One fourth to me and one fourth to the kind neighbors who had been such good friends to him over the years.

My brother and I took our inheritance and donated it to a charity, our father would have approved, neither of us needed it and others did.

 

“I Got FIRED!” Women WEAPONIZED The ME2 Movement & Companies Are Saying NO, To Hiring Modern Women

https://youtu.be/77F-puxgCDs

What are the biggest lessons you have learned in the corporate world?

  • If you spend 8 hours working for somebody else, take a couple hours after that to work for/on yourself.
  • A corporate office is not what you expect when you are in high school/college and most of the things you learn in college won’t worth a dime in your real world work environment anyways.
  • Your employer company is not YOUR company, so never take it for granted.
  • Never finish a work assignment sooner than the timeline given to you. No one gives a damn if you do it early, instead they will think your job is easy and their expectations from you will get higher.
  • It is okay to be late, miss a meeting, and say no to your superiors from time to time, in fact it will be worse if you never did any of those.
  • No matter how honest, dedicated, hardworking and talented you are, still there is a high chance you will never be the best employee of the month/year and you probably won’t get any promotions either.
  • Don’t be the guy who is there to take any task which others failed to complete.
  • You might be right, your opinion might be the best, but guess what? Sometimes nobody wants to hear the right thing and they won’t do it your way.
  • When you feel that you are way smarter and more talented than your boss, that is the moment you should consider changing your job.
  • If you actually want to grow and have your dream career/job then start your own business, spend all those energy and talent working for yourself instead of working for someone else all your life. You will grow much faster working a day for yourself than a month for somebody else.

A Powerful Website I Guarantee You Didn’t Know

 

What are the harsh truths of being a man?

Yesterday, something happened.

I was on the metro escalator on my way up to the platform. In front of me was a couple – probably in their late twenties. The wife was wearing a sleeveless top and carrying a baby in her arms. She was kind of cute. Her husband stood a couple of steps in front of her.

Suddenly, I’ve no idea how it happened, but the girl lost her balance started falling backwards. She tried to fumble for the railing, now holding the child with just one hand – her body flailing wildly. The child was about to fall on the moving escalator.

Instinctively, I reached out and firmly grabbed both her (wife, not the child) arms, steadying her. Once I was sure she was safe, I immediately let go.

The entire thing must have lasted less than a nanosecond.

But as it happened, I registered a flash of intense fear jolting through my body. It wasn’t because the girl and her child were going to get hurt. Their safety had nothing to do with it. No! my fear was much more primal, originating somewhere deep inside my reptilian brain which knew that she was a female and I was a male – and my bare hands on her naked flesh – what that would mean in the eyes of the society, and how those standing around us might interpret it! Her husband, who was standing just a few steps ahead of us had no idea what had happened. A single shriek from the girl, and his animal brain would have gone berserk trying to defend what was rightfully its and eliminate the perceived threat at any cost.

My life could have been destroyed.

In that single nanosecond, my brain witnessed a fierce battle between two base instincts – one to help a fellow human being and the other to be afraid since that human being happened to be a female. Society had only taught me well enough the consequences such a situation might spiral into.

I was just lucky that that day, the first instinct had prevailed.

Had the second one kicked in first, a two year old child would have, at best, gotten gravely injured, or at worst, lost his life.

This is what happened with one guy in one incident.

Integrate that over four billion men on this planet and a million such situations that arise in the lifetimes, and you’ll realize what our world has come to.

What has been the saddest moment of your life?

The day my father died. I know that’s a big one for most people, but it was so much more for me. I was 40 and had had a contentious or non-existent relationship with him for 30 years due to the lies my mother told me about him. According to her, he was a sociopath. He lied, cheated and stole money from his own children. I believed it all as a ten-year-old.

I contacted my father several months before his death because I found out about my mother’s lies. I needed to apologize to him. My stepmother said she would arrange a meeting as soon as they returned from vacation. When they finally returned, he had already been diagnosed with inoperable, incurable cancer, the kind that Jimmy Buffet had.

Dad only lived four more months and I only had one opportunity to say what I needed to say to him. He hadn’t known how pervasive the brainwashing had been or what had been said. It helped to talk, but it couldn’t heal 30 years of mutual wounding. My father died not loving me, and the time lost devastated me. It still does 30 years later.

Powerful Websites You Should Know!

Due to the numerous US military bases in countries close to China and the creation of the AUKUS, is China imprisoned?

Does it occur to you it could be the U.S. that could be imprisoned? If the U.S. ends up spending tons of money meaninglessly and without a return and yet it cannot stop spending billions to continuously do shit that don’t pay it is the U.S. that is trapped. China don’t gives a shit it simply just let the US waste all its own money bribing nations who refuse to do shit, just to pretend to the world that it has allies.

For us in Asia. Even Japan, Korea, Phillipines and India have no wish to do shit as it knows the repercussions and it has been China’s neighbour for some 5000 years! It may have no choice but to barked some shit on China to get the U.S. off its back. But sure won’t risk it to do more than that. So the U.S. having a pay billions get some pretend shit is outright silly and wasteful.

So who is trapped? China can and will do what it wants. And the U.S. has to stay and waste a ton of resources to get pretentious shit that China gives a damn. To me the U.S. is trapped in its own stupidity!

The mistake women make with faithful men…

Russian Space Nukes and Navalny’s Death… U.S. Psyops Go Ballistic

Two “breaking news” items this week provided a timely opportunity for the United States and its media-intelligence apparatus to regain control of the narrative.

The claims about Russian space-based nuclear weapons unraveled to become a joke. Fortunately, the death of Western-sponsored dissident Alexei Navalny then occurred to enable Western media to go into a frenzy of anti-Russia headlines.

First up was the scaremongering story about Russia allegedly developing a space-based nuclear weapon. Initially, it was dramatically trailed as posing a serious national security threat to the United States. Despite the sensational reporting, the story quickly became a laughingstock. Even some U.S. lawmakers dismissed it as “bullshit” and a blatant attempt by the Biden White House and intelligence agencies to push Congress into passing a new mega military aid bill for Ukraine worth $61 billion.

We’ll get to the Navalny story in a moment. But let’s just first parse the orchestration of the alleged Russian space nukes.

The drama began on Wednesday when Mike Turner, the Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee (a dodgy source if ever there was one), made public appeals to President Joe Biden to declassify intelligence on “a serious threat to national security”. Turner is a Republican member of the House of Representatives but he is a close ally of the Democrat White House in terms of keenly supporting military aid to Ukraine. The latest bill passed the upper chamber of the U.S. Senate the day before, February 13, but it is unlikely to be approved by the House where many Republican lawmakers are staunchly opposed to it.

Accompanying the “concerns” of the intel committee chairman Turner,  media outlets then vented anonymous US intelligence sources “revealing” that the national security threat was from Russian nuclear weapons allegedly under development for destroying American communication satellites in space. The White House then “confirmed” the intel the next day, February 15. It was a flagrant put-up job. But the Biden administration sought to tamp down any public panic by saying that the threat was not imminent and the alleged Russian satellite-killing weapon had not been deployed in orbit, nor would there be any danger to Earth. (So, what was all the fuss about?)

Ironically, derisive comments from incredulous U.S. lawmakers were also echoed by the Kremlin. The latter’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov made a similar assessment that the Biden administration was playing tricks to push through the military funding package for Ukraine.

That bill has been delayed since the end of last year. The Biden administration has been cajoling Congress for months to vote it through. After the Senate finally passed the bill this week, President Biden put pressure on the House, saying that “history is watching you”. The bill has been exalted as having existential importance in defeating “Russian aggression” in Ukraine. The U.S. media have claimed (preposterously) that if the military aid is not supplied then Ukraine’s defeat could result in American troops being deployed to prevent Russian rampaging across Europe.

The American public, as with the European public, has become increasingly skeptical about the relentless funneling of taxpayer funds and weapons to Ukraine. Many citizens in the West – a majority, according to polls – have become critical of fueling a bloody war for the dubious cause of “defending democracy” in a regime dominated by NeoNazis. At a time of deep social and economic hardship in the U.S. and Europe, the Western public is rightly disdainful of hundreds of billions of dollars and euros being wasted on death and destruction and also being siphoned off by a corrupt cabal in Kiev.

The $61 billion in military aid to Ukraine is just the latest tranche that Washington is seeking to throw at the black hole of its proxy war against Russia – a war that is really all about defeating Russia as a geopolitical obstacle to U.S. hegemony. Another driver is the massive profits that taxpayers are subsidizing the military-industrial complex at the rotten heart of Western capitalism.

There’s a huge lot at stake with the failure of the US/NATO proxy war in Ukraine. The Kiev regime is facing a collapse in the face of a superior Russian military.

That’s why the passing of the latest bill by Congress has taken on such an imperative importance – for the warmongers.

To get this bill into law, the U.S. deep state rulers and the pliant Biden White House along with the media-intelligence establishment sought to demonize Russia with a desperate story about alleged nuclear weapons for outer space. Oh, those dastardly Ruskies!

But as noted above the space nukes scar-story turned into farce. It was too obvious that the public was being manipulated, or gaslighted as one US lawmaker put it. When a psyops fails, the blowback is dangerous for the authors because of the damaging revelation and contempt it engenders. The Biden administration was open to ridicule.

There are several telltale signs that the story was total hogwash from the outset. Bruce Gagnon, U.S.-based coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, said the claims are absurd. In an email exchange with the Strategic Culture Foundation for this editorial, Gagnon said Russia has already developed formidable non-nuclear kinetic weapons to destroy satellites if it wanted to. He also remarked that the United States possesses anti-satellite weapons (ASATs).

In other words, there is no need for Russia to develop a risky nuclear weapon to knock out satellites. The nuclear details flagged up in US media this week are a gratuitous embellishment designed to alarm the public and to demonize Russia as an evil rogue state.

Russia is a co-signatory to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty as are the United States, China, and over 120 other nations.

Bruce Gagnon commented: “I believe the Russians have a long history of generally honoring treaties while the U.S. does not. And remember that Russia and China every year for at least the last 20-30 years go to the UN and introduce a new treaty called Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) to ban all weapons that fall outside of the 1967 treaty. The U.S. always refuses, saying there is no need for a new treaty.”

Apart from the paramount issue of getting additional funding for the proxy war in Ukraine, another timing issue is the aftermath of the blockbuster interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin by American journalist Tucker Carlson. Since the interview was aired last Thursday,  February 8, it has broken all records for public audiences around the world. It has garnered over 300 million views, and counting.

The one-on-one interview was seen as a breakthrough world exclusive, an informative platform for Putin to comprehensively give Russia’s point of view on the whole Ukraine conflict, and more. The Russian leader was seen by American and European audiences as reasonable, intelligent, articulate, and convincing. The Western propaganda caricature of Putin was dispelled and for a rare moment, the Western public was persuasively informed of the bigger causes of the conflict in Ukraine. That is, how the U.S.-led NATO axis had instigated the war by fomenting an anti-Russian regime dominated by NeoNazis. The impact of the interview dealt a devastating blow to the Western narrative of “Russian aggression” and “evil Putin”.

Plausibly, the U.S. warmongering establishment was incensed by this exposé.

Hence, to wrest back control of the narrative and corral the Western public, the space-based nukes scare-story was unleashed. Unfortunately, that psyop attempt failed to gain traction and indeed was fast descending into a farce.

Next up, luckily, came the news of Navalny’s death. Western media immediately blared headlines and comments that he had been killed by the “Putin regime”.

Navalny was serving 19 years in prison on multiple corruption convictions. He died Friday apparently from a blood clot. The 47-year-old was a broken and forgotten figure facing a futile existence, having been used and abandoned by Western intelligence handlers as a cut-out dissident figure. His future looked bleak. Who knows at this stage what caused his death? He was last seen by his lawyer during a prison meeting this week two days before his passing. Did his lawyer pass something to Navalny? Was the washed-up Western asset offered a deal for his family’s benefit if he agreed to one last, ultimate psyop on behalf of Western handlers? Taking his own life? His death in prison has certainly provided the Western media with a bonanza opportunity to change the narrative and precipitate an avalanche of Russophobia, just as required.

As for the far-fetched Russian space nukes and the death of Navalny, the criminologist’s question of Who Gains? and the factor of timing are often reliable indicators.

Has anyone you’ve known simply disappeared? Under what circumstances?

My friend’s cousin disappeared, and it was an interesting lesson in media bias.

She didn’t come home one day. They found her necklace, broken, next to her car, in a nearby park. Her photo was in all the local newspapers: a cute smiling blonde girl in her high school softball uniform, well liked and a good student. Her family held press conferences pleading for whoever took her to let her go.

A few weeks later, she did return. But she had not been kidnapped – it had been staged. She had actually run off with her boyfriend against her parents’ wishes. The photo of the cute blonde girl was replaced by a photo of her with dyed black hair, dark goth clothing and a look of defiance. The papers began reporting that the well liked good student had been caught shoplifting and was in trouble at school. She was eventually sentenced to community service for faking the crime.

This was the same person. When they wanted to make her look innocent, she looked innocent. When they wanted to make her look guilty, she looked guilty. Think about that next time you read the news.

Big Picture Conflict: Pepe Escobar & Global Times Observations

Karl Sanchez

The Two-year anniversary of Russia’s SMO and the Ten-year anniversary of the overt beginning of the Outlaw US Empire’s conflict with Russia with the Ukraine Coup are upon us as well as the related conflict to free Palestine from Zionist/West Genocide—both operations initially were planned as Nazi-like Plan Ost Genocidal ethnic cleansing so the lands “freed” could then be exploited by Western Capital. But in both cases, the targets of oppression, dispossession and death fought back, although in both cases resistance was always present with the assaulted able to gain formidable allies. Both conflicts have revealed the status of the protagonists within the larger Global Conflict pitting the Global majority against the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals, perhaps most starkly revealing the Fence Sitters trying to play both sides for their own pecuniary gain as is the case most certainly with Turkey.

The recently completed G-20 Foreign Ministers Summit in Rio de Janeiro helped to further define the lines/sides as the raw statements from Lavrov provided to readers who read the reports about his actions. To help deepen understanding about our Global Conflict, the latest two essays by Pepe Escobar and Global Times G-20 report are presented below. The political cartoon at the header is from Global Times and is almost accurate for our purposes as the pot needs to include the Zionists. And Palestine is where we’ll begin with Pepe’s “The Axis of Asymmetry takes on the ‘rules-based order:’”

The Axis of Asymmetry is in full swing. These are the state and non-state actors employing asymmetrical moves on the global chessboard to sideline the US-led western rules-based order. And its vanguard is the Yemeni resistance movement Ansarallah. 

Ansarallah is absolutely relentless. They have downeda $30 million MQ-9 Reaper drone with just a $10k indigenous missile.

They are the first in the Global South ever to use anti-ship ballistic missiles against Israel-bound and/or -protecting commercial and US Navy ships. 

For all practical purposes, Ansarallah is at war with no less than the US Navy.

Ansarallah has captured one of the US Navy’s ultra-sophisticated autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), the $1.3 million Remus 600, a torpedo-shaped underwater drone able to carry a massive payload of sensors. 

Next stop: reverse engineering in Iran? The Global South eagerly awaits, ready to pay in currencies bypassing the US dollar. 

All of the above – a maritime 21st-century remix of the Ho Chi Minh trail during the Vietnam War – spells out that the Hegemon may not even qualify as a paper tiger, but rather as a paper leech.

Lula tells it as the Global South sees it 

Into the Big Picture – linked to the relentless ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel in Gaza – steps a true leader of the Global South, Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. 

Lula spoke in the name of Brazil, Latin America, Africa, BRICS 10, and the overwhelming majority of the Global South when he cut to the chase and defined the Gaza tragedy for what it is: a genocide. No wonder the Zionist tentacles across the Global North – plus its Global South vassals – went bonkers. 

The genocidals in Tel Aviv declared Lula as persona non grata in Israel. Yet Lula did not assassinate 29,000+ Palestinians – the overwhelming majority of whom were women and children.

History will be unforgiving: it’s the genocidals that will eventually be judged as personae non grata to all of humanity.

What Lula said represented BRICS 10 in action: this was obviously cleared before with Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, and, of course, the African Union. Lula spoke in Addis Ababa, and Ethiopia is now a BRICS 10 member.

The Brazilian president was extremely smart in timing his Gaza fact-check to be on the table during the G20 meeting of Foreign Ministers in Rio. Way beyond BRICS 10, what’s happening in Gaza is a consensus among the non-Western G20 partners – who are actually a majority. No one, though, should expect any serious follow-up inside a divided G20. The heart of the matter remains in the facts on the ground. 

Yemen’s fight for “our people” in Gaza is a matter of humanistic, moral, and religious solidarity – these are foundational tenets of the rising eastern “civilizational” powers, both domestically and in international affairs. This convergence of principles has now created a direct link – extrapolating to the moral and spiritual spheres – between the Axis of Resistance in West Asia and the Slavic Axis of Resistance in Donbass. 

Extreme attention should be paid to the timescale. The Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) forces and Russia have spent two hard-fought years in Novorossiya just to arrive at the stage where it becomes clear – based on the battlefield and cumulative facts on the ground – that “negotiations” mean only the terms of Kiev’s surrender.

In contrast, the job of the Axis of Resistance in West Asia has not even started. It’s fair to argue that its strength and full sovereign involvement have not been deployed yet (think Hezbollah and Iran). 

Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah, with his proverbial subtlety, has hinted there’s, in fact, nothing to negotiate on Palestine. And if there would be a return to any borders, these would be the 1948 borders. The Axis of Resistance understands that the whole Zionist Project is unlawful and immoral. But the question remains how to throw it, in practice, into the dustbin of History?

Possible – avowedly optimistic – scenarios ahead would include Hezbollah taking possession of the Galilee as a step toward the eventual retaking of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights. Yet the fact remains that even a united Palestine does not have the military capability to reconquer stolen Palestinian lands. 

So the questions posed by the overwhelming majority of the Global South that stands with Lula may be: Who else, apart from Ansarallah, Hezbollah, Hashd al-Shaabi, will join the Axis of Asymmetry in the fight for Palestine? Who would be willing to come to the Holy Land and die? (After all, in Donbass, it’s only Russians and Russophones who are dying for historically Russian lands) [Not entirely 100% correct, but close].

And that brings us to the way towards the endgame: only a West Asian Special Military Operation (SMO), to the bitter end, will settle the Palestinian tragedy. A translation of what happens across the Slavic Axis of Resistance: “Those who refuse to negotiate with Lavrov, deal with Shoigu.”

The menu, the table, and the guests

That out-of-his-depth closet neocon, Secretary of State Tony Blinken, let the cat out of the bag when he actually defined his much cherished “rules-based international order”: “If you’re not on the table, you are on the menu.”

Following his own hegemonic logic, it’s clear that Russia and the US/NATO are on the table while Ukraine is on the menu. What about the Red Sea? The Houthis defending Palestine against US–UK–Israel are clearly on the table, while Western vassals supporting Israel in a maritime way are clearly on the menu. 

And that’s the problem: the Hegemon – or, in Chinese scholarly terminology, “the crusaders” – have lost the power to place the name cards on the table. The main reason for this authority collapse is the build-up of serious international meetings sponsored by the Russia–China strategic partnership during the past two years since the start of the SMO. It’s all about sequential planning, with long-term targets clearly outlined. 

Only civilizational states can do that – not plutocratic neoliberal casinos.   

Negotiating with the Hegemon is impossible because the Hegemon itself prevents negotiations (see the serial blocking of ceasefire resolutions at the UN). Additionally, the Hegemon excels in instrumentalizing its client elites across the Global South via threats or kompromat: see the hysterical reaction of Brazilian mainstream media to Lula’s verdict on Gaza. 

What Russia is showing the Global South, two years after the start of the SMO, is that the only path to teach a lesson to the Hegemon has to be kinetic, or “military-technical.”

The problem is no nation-state can compare to nuclear/hypersonic/military superpower Russia, in which 7.5 percent of the government’s budget is dedicated to military production. Russia is and will remain on a permanent war footing until Hegemon’s elites come to their senses – and that may never happen.

Meanwhile, West Asia’s Axis of Resistance is watching and learning, day after day. It’s always crucial to keep in mind that for all the resistance movements across the Global South – and that also includes, for instance, West Africans against French neo-colonialism – the geopolitical fault lines could not be starker.

It’s a matter of the collective West versus Islam; the collective West versus Russia; and sooner rather than later, a substantial part of the West, even reluctantly, versus China.

The fact is we are already immersed in a World War that is both existential and civilizational. As we stand at the crossroads, there is a bifurcation: either escalation towards overt “kinetic military action,” or a multiplication of Hybrid Wars across several latitudes. 

So it’s up to the Axis of Asymmetry, cool, calm, and collected, to forge the underground corridors, passages, and trails capable of undermining and subverting the US-led, unipolar, rules-based international order. [Bolded italics my emphasis]

Pessimistic or realistic? Obviously, the situation is already kinetic. But two very important factors have been proven over the past two years: NATO is powerless to defeat Russia and the USN can be defeated by the new methods of warfare. Pepe and I agree that the major forcing to solve Palestine will need to come from outside, which means Russia or China or perhaps an international coalition sans Western nations. The longer Palestine is subjected to Zionist Genocide, the more the world’s people will learn of its history and the utter crime related to the creation of Occupied Palestine. And now for the second Pepe Escobar essay, “Two Years After the Start of the SMO, the West is Totally Paralyzed:”

Exactly two years ago this Saturday, on February 24, 2022, Vladimir Putin announced the launching – and described the objectives – of a Special Military Operation (SMO) in Ukraine. That was the inevitable follow-up to what happened three days before, on February 21 – exactly 8 years after Maidan 2014 in Kiev – when Putin officially recognized the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Lugansk.

During this – pregnant with meaning – short space of only three days, everyone expected that the Russian Armed Forces would intervene, militarily, to end the massive bombing and shelling that had been going on for three weeks across the frontline – which even forced the Kremlin to evacuate populations at risk to Russia. Russian intel had conclusive proof that the NATO-backed Kiev forces were ready to execute an ethnic cleansing of Russophone Donbass.

February 24, 2022 was the day that changed 21st century geopolitics forever, in several complex ways. Above all, it marked the beginning of a vicious, all-out confrontation, “military-technical” as the Russians call it, between the Empire of Chaos, Lies and Plunder, its easily pliable NATOstan vassals, and Russia – with Ukraine as the battleground.

There is hardly any question Putin had calculated, before and during these three fateful days, that his decisions would unleash the unbounded fury of the collective West – complete with a tsunami of sanctions.

Ay, there’s the rub; it’s all about Sovereignty. And a true sovereign power simply cannot live under permanent threats. It’s even feasible that Putin had wanted (italics mine) Russia to get sanctioned to death. After all, Russia is so naturally wealthy that without a serious challenge from abroad, the temptation is enormous to live off its rents while importing what it could easily produce.

Exceptionalists always gloated that Russia is “a gas station with nuclear weapons”. That’s ridiculous. Oil and gas, in Russia, account for roughly 15% of GDP, 30% of the government budget, and 45% of exports. Oil and gas add power to the Russian economy – not a drag. Putin shaking Russia’s complacency generated a gas station producing everything it needs, complete with unrivalled nuclear and hypersonic weapons. Beat that.

Ukraine has “never been less than a nation”

Xavier Moreau is a French politico-strategic analyst based in Russia for 24 years now. Graduated from the prestigious Saint-Cyr military academy and with a Sorbonne diploma, he hosts two shows on RT France.

His latest book, Ukraine: Pourquoi La Russie a Gagné (“Ukraine: Why Russia has Won”), just out, is an essential manual for European audiences on the realities of the war, not those childish fantasies concocted across the NATOstan sphere by instant “experts” with less than zero combined arms military experience.

Moreau makes it very clear what every impartial, realist analyst was aware of from the beginning: the devastating Russian military superiority, which would condition the endgame. The problem, still, is how this endgame – “demilitarization” and “denazification” of Ukraine, as established by Moscow – will be achieved.

What is already clear is that “demilitarization”, of Ukraine and NATO, is a howling success that no new wunderwaffen – like F-16s – will be able to change.

Moreau perfectly understands how Ukraine, nearly 10 years after Maidan, is not a nation; “and has never been less than a nation”. It’s a territory where populations that everything separates are jumbled up. Moreover, it has been a – “grotesque” – failed state ever since its independence. Moreau spends several highly entertaining pages going through the corruption grotesquerie in Ukraine, under a regime that “gets its ideological references simultaneously via admirers of Stepan Bandera and Lady Gaga.”

None of the above, of course, is reported by oligarch-controlled European mainstream media.

Watch out for Deng Xiao Putin

The book offers an extremely helpful analysis of those deranged Polish elites who bear “a heavy responsibility in the strategic catastrophe that awaits Washington and Brussels in Ukraine”. The Poles actually believed that Russia would crumble from the inside, complete with a color revolution against Putin. That barely qualifies as Brzezinski on crack.

Moreau shows how 2022 was the year when NATOstan, especially the Anglo-Saxons – historically racist Russophobes –   were self-convinced thar Russia would fold because it is a “poor power”. Obviously, none of these luminaries understood how Putin strengthened the Russian economy very much like Deng Xiaoping on the Chinese economy. This “self-intoxication”, as Moreau qualifies it, did wonders for the Kremlin.

By now it’s clear even for the deaf, dumb, and blind that the destruction of the European economy has been a massive tactic, historic victory for the Hegemon – as much as the blitzkrieg against the Russian economy has been an abysmal failure.

All of the above brings us to the meeting of G20 Foreign Ministers this week in Rio. That was not exactly a breakthrough. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov made it very clear that the collective West at the G20 tried by all means to “Ukrainize” the agenda – with less than zero success. They were outnumbered and counterpunched by BRICS and Global South members.

At his press conference, Lavrov could not be more stark on the prospects of the war of the collective West against Russia. These are the highlights:

  • Western countries categorically do not want serious dialogue on Ukraine.
  • There were no serious proposals from the United States to begin contacts with the Russian Federation on strategic stability; trust cannot be restored now while Russia is declared an enemy.
  • There were no contacts on the sidelines of the G20 with either Blinken or the British Foreign Secretary.
  • The Russian Federation will respond to new Western sanctions with practical actions that relate to the self-sufficient development of the Russian economy.
  • If Europe tries to restore ties with the Russian Federation, making it dependent on their whims, then such contacts are not needed.

In a nutshell – diplomatically: you are irrelevant, and we don’t care.

That was complementing Lavrov’s intervention during the summit, which defined once again a clear, auspicious path towards multipolarity. Here are the highlights:

  • The forming of a fair multipolar world order without a definite center and periphery has become much more intensive in the past few years. Asian, African and Latin American countries are becoming important parts of the global economy. Not infrequently, they are setting the tone and the dynamics.
  • Many Western economies, especially in Europe, are actually stagnating against this background. These statistics are from Western-supervised institutions – the IMF, the World Bank and the OECD.
  • These institutions are becoming relics from the past. Western domination is already affecting their ability to meet the requirements of the times. Meanwhile, it is perfectly obvious today that the current problems of humanity can only be resolved through a concerted effort and with due consideration for the interests of the Global South and, generally, all global economic realities.
  • Institutions like the IMF, the World Bank, the EBRD, and the EIB are prioritizing Kiev’s military and other needs. The West allocated over $250 billion to tide over its underling thus creating funding shortages in other parts of the world. Ukraine is taking up the bulk of the funds, relegating Africa and other regions of the Global South to rationing.
  • Countries that have discredited themselves by using unlawful acts ranging from unilateral sanctions and the seizure of sovereign assets and private property to blockades, embargoes, and discrimination against economic operators based on nationality to settle scores with their geopolitical opponents cannot be considered guarantors of financial stability.
  • Without a doubt, new institutions that focus on consensus and mutual benefit are needed to democratize the global economic governance system. Today, we are seeing positive dynamics for strengthening various alliances, including BRICS, the SCO, ASEAN, the African Union, LAS, CELAC, and the EAEU.
  • This year, Russia chairs BRICS, which saw several new members join it. We will do our best to reinforce the potential of this association and its ties with the G20.
  • Considering that 6 out of 15 UN Security Council members represent the Western bloc, we will support the expansion of this body solely through the accession of countries from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Call it the real state of things, geopolitically, two years after the start of the SMO. [Bolded italics my emphasis]

The G-20 timing also coincided with the ICJ’s sessions about Palestine and the increasing number of cases being filed against the Zionists and their abettors. The West’s stance was specifically called out by Lavrov who added it to the evidentiary trail of previous criminal acts. The Outlaw US Empire and the West generally are parasites who feed on host nations in what are clearly Neocolonial types of arrangements. Now the Empire is leeching off the EU and enforcing its blood-sucking via NATO. Trump doesn’t want to disband NATO; he wants to increase the intensity of its blood-sucking just as he did before. Now it’s: Pay up your 2% of GDP or we’ll sick the Russians on you, or rather won’t protect you from the Russians. Putin has said Europeans must rescue themselves as Russia has no intent on going beyond Ukraine as Russia already has most everything it needs. So, now we have Global Times whose experts opine that the SMO “may become ‘a war without winners.’” We’ll see why in “US escalates sanctions, fans fire as Ukraine crisis enters 3rd year:”

The US joined the EU and UK in announcing a new round of sanctions against Russia, ahead of the two-year anniversary of the military conflict between Russia and Ukraine that started in February 2022. But at the same time, Russia is seemingly gaining the upper hand on the battlefield with its latest victory in capturing Avdiivka, a critical town in eastern Ukraine. 

Analysts said considering the previous sanctions were far from reaching expectations, and the US and West are not prepared to compromise with Russia on the conflict in 2024, the stalemate may become a large probability, and a cease-fire is still far from sight. 

At a time when the security environment and economy of the entire world are being seriously affected, the US, whether it is from holding Europe hostage to promote bloc confrontation or from selling gas and arms to Europe, seems to be benefiting the most. However, experts said that if the Russia-Ukraine conflict continues for a long time, it will be a war without winners, and China will continue its efforts in promoting peace talks and a cease-fire as early as possible. 

Stalemate to continue

US President Joe Biden on Friday announced Washington would issue more than 500 new sanctions targeting Russia for the ongoing war with Ukraine and for the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny. 

The US will also impose new export restrictions on nearly 100 entities for providing support to Russia and take action to further reduce Russia’s energy revenues, Biden said in a statement.

The US latest sanctions came on the heels of moves by its allies. The UK on Thursday announced more than 50 further sanctions against Russia, targeting individuals and businesses supporting Moscow’s “war effort.” On Wednesday, the EU also approved its 13th package of sanctions against Russia, banning nearly 200 related individuals and entities which it claimed as being linked to Moscow’s operation, including companies from China and India. The sanction was adopted on Friday.

However, experts found that sanctions from the US and West have failed to have any substantial impact on Russia. Meanwhile, Moscow was also “not nearly as isolated as US officials had hoped,” as Russia’s inherent strength, rooted in vast supplies of oil and natural gas, “has powered a financial and political resilience,” according to a New York Times report. [Which is BS as Escobar reported above.] 

Western sanctions on Russia did put short-term pressure on the Russian economy, but it soon adjusted policy and resumed growth, Zhang Hong, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Friday.

The sanctions are a sign of Western political correctness, but they have fallen far short of their intended goals, Zhang said, adding that rounds of sanctions have not changed Russia’s position in the Ukraine crisis or caused major economic difficulties for Russia. 

“In a way, it was a failure,” said the expert.

According to the expert, compared with the previous measures, the recent ones have focused more on indirect sanctions, by restricting Russia’s trade and financial contacts with other countries, narrowing Russia’s external economic activity.

The sanctions also come at a time when Russia is gaining the upper hand on the battlefield, capturing Ukraine’s eastern city of Avdiivka last week. Ukraine faces a shortage of ammunition and insufficient troops, according to media reports. 

Ahead of the crisis anniversary, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday that Russia will have to continue fighting Ukraine until it takes the coastal city of Odessa and Ukraine’s capital Kiev, according to RT. 

Although some observers, including former CIA director and secretary of Defense Robert Gates, told US media that he believed Russia has “regained the momentum” and “has broken the stalemate,” Chinese experts said the current seesaw battle may continue in 2024.   

Medvedev’s remark shows Russia’s confidence in continuing its “special operation,” Zhang said, “What Moscow seeks is to maximize its security interests within the scope of controllable risks.

However, the latest sanctions show the US and the West are not prepared to compromise with Russia, Zhang noted, adding that although Ukraine has recently been passive on the battlefield, it’s unlikely to suffer a rout. [Avdeevka ws a rout.]
On February 1, EU leaders approved the extension of 50 billion Euros ($54 billion) in aid to Ukraine from 2024 to 2027. “It shows that currently the West is not prepared to abandon Ukraine,” Zhang said. 

Experts also noted that in the long run, the situation in the battlefield largely depends on US factors, whether it can overcome domestic partisan strife on aiding Kiev, and whether US policies will be adjusted sharply after a possible Trump return. 

In 2024, the continuation of stalemate and attrition may become a high probability on the battlefield in Ukraine, Li Haidong, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University, told the Global Times on Friday. 

The conflict will continue, and there is no end in sight, at least for now, Li added. 

War without winners 

Given that Chinese companies were listed among the latest British and EU sanctions against Russia, on Thursday, the Chinese Embassy in the UK expressed strong opposition, stressing that China has always held an objective and just position on the Ukraine crisis. 

Ahead of the anniversary, some Western media expressed misgivings over China’s position. VOA accused China of not pressuring Russia to “stop the aggression,” while some German media said the sanctions pushed Russia into the arms of China, making it “the biggest winner” of the Russia-Ukraine conflict.

The West is trying to pressure China to take sides through public opinion, but as a major power, China will not let this noise affect its neutral position, Li said. 

During a meeting with Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba on February 17, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said that China has stayed committed to promoting peace talks on the Ukraine issue and will not give up as long as there is a glimmer of hope. China refrains from adding fuel to the fire or taking advantage of the situation, and refrains from selling lethal weapons to conflict areas or parties, Wang said. 

Sanctions and weapons aid have not changed Russia’s position, but have prolonged the conflict and extended the damage to Ukraine. In order to end the losses in Ukraine as soon as possible, there must be an early cease-fire and peace talks, Zhang said. 

Due to the conflict, all major economies, including China, have been impacted, both in terms of security environment and economy, and it has also had a negative impact on China-EU relations and China-US relations, Zhang said. 

So far, the US is the biggest beneficiary, analysts said. US liquefied natural gas has entered the EU market and now takes up a large share. Through the export of weapons, US military manufacturers are making huge amounts of money. At the same time, the Russia-Ukraine conflict also further strengthens US control over Europe, prompting the return of the influence of its bloc politics.

However, overall and in the long run, the conflict will be a war without winners, with only tragedy and disaster, analysts said. 

If the goal of the US is to maximize the weakening of Russia by completely depleting Ukraine, even if the goal is achieved, Russia, the US and Europe will most likely fall into a deeper strategic confrontation in the future, Li said. 

If the US and the West hope to wait until Ukraine is almost exhausted before directly engaging Russia on the battlefield, then they are playing with fire, said Li, “to defeat a nuclear power on the battlefield is likely to lead to nuclear war and World War III. If that happens, Russia, Ukraine are the losers, the US, Europe are losers, global security will be at stake, and the end will be disaster and tragedy for humankind.” [Emphasis mine]

IMO, it’s odd that Li doesn’t think Ukraine isn’t yet “exhausted” and the loser ever since the conflict began in 2014. That the experts consulted think the conflict is now a “stalemate” means they aren’t paying attention to what’s happening and have ignored Russia’s highly successful strategy of attrition. Again, the notion that “the US … seems to be benefiting the most” or “is the biggest beneficiary,” is chimeric with the seems being an incorrect assumption when reality within the Outlaw US Empire is considered—no tangible gains have accrued to US citizens aside from a very small group of elites. Indeed, the US economy is polarized as the real economy shrinks and the parasite economy expands. The complexity of the sanctions and collusion in their make-up and application by the Empire and its vassals tells us that they were not made for Nalvalny. Indeed, his murder was likely induced by the West to coincide with three events: SMO anniversary, Munich Security Conference, and Putin/Carlson Interview, since his wife/widow was previously invited and showed no shock or grief and all BigLie Media outlets had synchronized copy/paste “news” items immediately upon word of his death. Over the last 24 years of similar happenings, those with active minds can see through the crap. Are the Chinese being honest when they write, “However, overall and in the long run, the conflict will be a war without winners, with only tragedy and disaster,” or are they writing that way to appease the West so it will not target China with further sanctions? Most credible analysts have China next on the menu after Russia, which is precisely what the Outlaw US Empire’s “security” and “defense” documents and policies say matter-of-factly.

Russia’s proving its SMO isn’t mired in a stalemate as it continues to push Westward along the FEBA. Medvedev has issued serious goals as statements of policy. The need to deNazify not only Ukraine but Europe’s been voiced by both Putin, Lavrov, Medvedev, Zakharova, Patrushev, and other top Russian officials. Russia has its Home Front in fine form with very little dissent to be seen or heard. The situation in Ukraine and the West is almost the exact opposite as it’s embroiled in the Gaza Genocide too that has vastly amplified dissent. Plus, the Neoliberal economies are functioning as planned—taking from the poor and giving to the already rich. Dr, Hudson recently provided some anecdotal evidence of that, “New School University race to the bottom,” which ought to be compared with my “Creating a Network of Modern University Campuses” report about two weeks ago. And as my reports show, Russia’s economy is booming as is its trade, while it’s ready to vastly widen the non-Western payments and settlements system so sanctions will have nothing to impede.

Some time ago a European politician made the analogy of Ukraine being a drowning person capable of drowning its rescuers. That man was insightful when compared with most European and US politicos. The longer the West continues to lie about the actual reasons for the SMO and what group started it, the harder it’s going to be when the time arrives for whatever remains of Ukraine to capitulate. The state, which has always been artificial as Putin told the world again in his talk with Tucker Carlson, will likely disappear into the ether from which it was conjured. And all those loans and “investments” will translate into 100% loses for their providers. And if the West attempts to steal Russia’s illegally frozen assets, then it’s going to suffer an even greater loss in the end as extinguishing Ukraine is precisely what will happen.

“What’s Coming Is WORSE Than A Recession” — Ray Dalio’s Last WARNING

https://youtu.be/uTBFD6t68js

What is the greatest act of cruelty you have ever committed?

I trashed a child in front of his parents while watching the movie “The Jungle Book” and I am proud of what I did to him.

April 14,

Navratri puja over, so I took my brother to watch a movie as my birthday treat which was on 12th.

Housefull.

This child was 27 years old sitting one seat to my left. And right beside me was a beautiful lady in her 60’s, followed by this boy and his father.

During the intermission, the boy ordered two cups of American corn and sat back. Then after a few minutes, the INOX guy came and handed it over to the boy.

Two minutes later, the lady unintentionally spilled the corn.

The boy started yelling at his mom, “koto taka legechy jaano ?? kheyecho aiekhany ??”

Translation: “Do you know how much that cost? Have you ever eaten here??”

And then comes the sickening part: he hit his mother’s legs pretty hard, simply because she had accidentally spilled the cup of American corn.

Seeing all this made me livid. And just when I thought he wouldn’t repeat this deplorable act, he hit his mom again.

His mom was extremely embarrased and kept her head down.

After hitting his mom twice, I didn’t hold myself back. I hit his cup of corn and spilled all of it on the floor. He stood up and confronted me; I landed a punch on his face as hard as I could.

To ensure he stayed put and didn’t retaliate, I landed two more. By then all the people around me (including my brother) got up on their feet and were ready to stop me in case I was going to smack him again.

It was chaos all around, and the security intervened and escorted both of us out.

Once outside and no more in the darkness, I saw that the guy really needed medical assistance after what I had to him. His nose was bleeding and lips were split open. And when our eyes met, I could clearly see the guilt in his eyes. I was damn happy with what I did, though I missed the movie which I watched later.

I was escorted off the premises, while he was administered first aid. I had to assure the security team that I would never repeat anything like this.

I never knew I could do such things but seeing a man punching his mother enraged me and I couldn’t resist myself.

Respect each and everyone whoever it might be, that is what my parents have taught me and I am glad that I do so and hope our generation does the same.

Edit 1 : For all those who think that I didn’t solve the whole problem, my little brother while taking them out of the theatre took the mother’s phone and saved my number.

I don’t think he will dare to do such activity again and I am hoping I won’t receive any call his mother.

Thanks for the appreciation !!

Edit 2: I would like you all to read Yogesh Singhq comment.

Link to the comment : https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-greatest-act-of-cruelty-you-have-ever-done/answer/Bharat-Sirohia/comment/18739940?srid=a0BE&share=bc8a905e

Thanks buddy !!

Edit 3: All those who are asking what was his father doing ?

He was there watching the drama unfold and was able to stop neither his son nor me.

The only and best way to protect Taiwan from China can be done by the United States. Why hasn’t America invaded and destroyed China by now?

You’re not a big history buff are you?

I guess you like to watch Rambo movies, instead?

  • China not only has the largest military in the world, but it is also the oldest military in the world. The Chinese were fighting mass invasions and assaults involving thousands of trained warriors when the Europeans were still living in caves and picking lice off each other.
  • China also has the oldest Navy in the world. Indeed, the Chinese were conducting mass Naval Battles centuries before the Europeans were considering the value of ocean going vessels.
  • China has always fought using cutting-edge technologies that were unexpected, unheard of, and unanticipated by the nation attacking it. It’s more than gunpowder, it’s poison weapons, tricks and deceit, and armored vehicles that totally stunned the opposition.
  • China is lead by merit, with people with millennia of military experience. Indeed the top rated military strategy books are all Chinese.
  • China is a military-organized society that does everything based on merit. They are hopelessly super patriotic, and live to die for their country.

Oh, and remember that the United States tried to attack China in 1950. The United States lost, and lost badly.

FACT: Keep in mind that China considers both Taiwan and the South China Sea as China territory.

EXTRAPOLATED FACT: Any bombs, guns, missiles, or assaults in those regions will provoke a STRATEGIC response onto the United States.

KIND REMINDER: And remember Kiddos, that for China, STRATEGIC is the same as NUCLEAR.

You all should be really FUCKING clear on accepting the risks, and resulting lifestyle that you will endure, after that Pandora’s box is opened.

Alien Bodies Confirmed After Testing to be NON Human

This is actually a pretty good video, and I recommend it to all mm readers.

https://youtu.be/ST8axewdge0

What do police officers typically notice when entering a person’s home (messy, clean, stinky, etc.)? What is the worst/weirdest thing you’ve seen?

I responded to a medical emergency in a hoarder house in the 1980s. When we entered the house from the front door there was no pathway to the back of the house. Newspapers, magazines and papers stacked up to the 6 foot mark on all the walls. The kitchen was covered in plates of old food that had not be cleared or thrown away. No way to get through to the bedrooms in the back of the house. Rats, mice and bugs crawling over everything. We could see the resident in the back bedroom, but could not get through the piles of papers, junk and trash to get to the back bedroom to see if he was alive. The smell was unbelievable.

The fire department brought in a K-12 saw and cut hole into the bedroom from the back of the house. The owner was dead. Mice and insects were crawling all over the body. Multiple cats sprawling all over the piles of papers, garbage and junk in the house. The fire department used the saw to cut a larger hole in the back of the hose so we could get in. The City Public Works Department brought a four wheel drive front end loader to clear out piles of newspapers and magazines which filled the floor around the bed in the bedroom at the back of the house. Several police officers, Animal Control Officers and Public Works employees had to run to the back the property to throw up from the smell.

I took time off the radio after we got the body out of the house to go back to my home, dump my uniforms in the laundry and take a very hot shower to insure I cleared everything I was in contact in this house off my body.

The city quickly declared the house a major health hazard and had it bulldozed to the ground. I told my sergeant the next call like that I wanted to be sent to other side of of town rather than enter a hoarder house again.

I dealt with several more in that community and next one when I was Chief of Police. The smell never gets better.

When you stop trying, it happens | The psychology of the flow state

This is a very important learning exercise.

https://youtu.be/k23x5kP7dAY

Have you ever seen an employee get fired on the spot because of you?

Well technically they quit but……

As a teenager, I washed dishes in a restaurant where my step-father ran the kitchen. He made all the soups and other pre-cooked items (prime rib, ribs), ordered the produce and stock, etc.

The restaurant was located on a barge moored in a harbor on a river. Most of the kitchen help were what we referred to as east-enders… rough boys. I was a preppy high school kid but got along with most of them. However, there was one guy… Dale. Dale was a bit crazy. He was also heavily into drugs and a burnout. He also washed dishes and on weekends, there would be two of you paired together.

All dishes had to be cleaned by the end of the night, the floors swept and scrubbed, and dirty laundry put away (table cloths, napkins, and aprons). If it was a particularly good night, the waitresses would bring a few pitchers of beer from the bar to the kitchen crew.

One night beer was brought while everyone was cleaning up. Dale was drinking more than cleaning. I got fed up and left the dishes piled high in the sinks.

The following morning, my step father arrived at work to find the dirty dishes. My mother awoke me asking what happened and that my step father was livid. I was taken to work where I find Dale and my step father standing in the kitchen. My step father is PISSED. He asks me why the dishes were left. I explained I was tired of Dale not doing his job. Dale tried to talk his way out of the situation which only made things worse. My step father was screaming at Dale and told him to go clean the bathrooms. Dale left to do that and now I’m expecting to catch hell. My step father put his hand on my shoulder then walked away calmly asking me to finish the dishes.

I was stunned. My step-father wasn’t an understanding person and he didn’t treat me any different that the rest of the crew. But here he was believing me and siding with me (a rare instance).

About an hour later, we discovered Dale left without cleaning the bathrooms. I was asked to stay and work the shift…. and to clean the bathrooms.

Dale never returned.

Ladies, men need this

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OdzXKsEgZuo?feature=share

“On Friday I did an activity with my 5th graders where they wrote a short blurb entitled.

“I wish my teacher would know…”

These are just a few that stuck out to me:

Kid 1: I wish my teacher would know; my dad is in jail, and I haven’t seen him in years.

Kid 2: I wish my teacher would know, I don’t always eat dinner because my mom works and I don’t know how to work the stove.

Kid 3: I wish my teacher would know; my sister sleeps in the same bed as me, and sometimes she wets the bed, and that’s why I smell funny.

Kid 4: I wish my teacher would know that I don’t always have sneakers for gym class because my brothers and I share one pair.

Kid 5: I wish my teacher knew I like coming to school because it’s quiet here, unlike my house with all the yelling.

✨We spend so much time talking and judging what we think we know… we need to ask more questions and spend more time listening. We also need to shift our mindset and see things from other people’s perspective. Give more than we get. Live to serve and to help make a difference in others’ lives.

Let’s leave this life a little better than we found it.

Polish Cinnamon Cake

babkaslice
babkaslice

Yield: 8 to 12 servings

Ingredients

  • 12 tablespoons butter
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 egg
  • 3 teaspoons cinnamon
  • A grating of fresh nutmeg
  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 cups whipping cream
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Instructions

  1. Beat the butter until it is soft and fluffy. Add 3/4 cup of the sugar and the egg and continue beating. Add 2 teaspoons of the cinnamon, the nutmeg and flour, and beat until well mixed.
  2. Spread about 1/3 of the batter on an ungreased baking sheet, forming a rectangle about 10 x 12 inches and bake in a preheated 400 degrees F oven for 8 minutes, until lightly browned.
  3. Remove from the oven and allow to cool.
  4. Repeat two more times with the remaining batter.
  5. Whip the cream until stiff, and fold in the remaining 1/4 cup sugar, the remaining 1 teaspoon cinnamon and the vanilla extract. Spread a thin layer of whipped cream on one of the cakes, top with another cake, and repeat.
  6. Spread remaining whipped cream on the top and serve immediately.

Cyber Potter 2077

https://youtu.be/j0ov7NBosuE

For those of you over 40, what is it that confuses you the most about young people?

I am slap-in-middle of Gen X. Two years ago, I got diagnosed with cancer. I still live in the small-time town I was born in and know everyone.

I still went into work the next day and in the morning after I had texted all to my 31 year old boss whom I thought was a great guy that I might be a bit quiet today…. My ‘millennial’ boss was someone I deemed trustworthy and not at all like other guys like my disgusting, selfish, youngest brother. I was happy he was gonna be my boss through what was going to be a difficult time for me and my family. I wished I’d stayed at home but I had a lesson.

He actually thought it was the coolest thing, and was seriously, absolutely, completely delighted. An employee with cancer was so trendy. Not that he said that out loud but he was really pleased for himself…. Genuinely, the guy wanted to tell everyone – and I ordered him to be silent until I said so and stopped periodically shaking and could talk about it without being overwhelmed with fear that was so bad my tummy and heart hurt.

Me and my husband were looking at him like W.T.F. I suddenly got why millennials aren’t liked…

He then started to reduce my hours and told me I wasn’t haven’t sick pay three days before my massive surgery and sacked me when I got a lawyer on to him a year later. It is strictly illegal to sack someone with cancer in the UK.

He thought he was the best boss ever because he spent two minutes reading a website about how employees with cancer often want to work as it seems normal.

He had gotten a recent promotion and became ….. absolutely vile… I didn’t even get a card or a teddy bear. I am rather wary of that generation now.

And yes, this actually happened…

AI Video From OpenAI Just Blew Everyone’s Minds!

Sora. Damn!

Reality Universe sub-structure rebuilding effort by mm

Happy new year. 

I pulled out a Paetron video for you all to enjoy. It’s the start of the Dragon Year 2024. Please enjoy it, you all. For those who already watched it, please check it out again.

Enjoy this video.

MM discusses a rebuilding of the Reality Universe substructure

 

A question…

I really enjoyed this but now I have so many more questions! 

Didn’t know you still do missions and I wish I knew what “polishing” is…

 

An answer

I am retired from MAJestic. But I am still active in Domain.

As far as “polishing” is concerned…

“Polishing” is like dipping a piece of fly paper into a thick vegetable soup. Then pulling it out. 

The chunky bits all cling to the paper. You then scrape the paper clean (or get a new sheet), and repeat the process.

Over time, the soup gets less “chunky” and full of stuff, and is more like really sluggish and calm water.

(You can thank the DC for this explanation.)

What is the most selfless thing you did?

Hmmm. I guess it was when my parents were divorcing. My father purposefully put mom in dire financial trouble. He even somehow cancelled my credit cards and cleaned out my college fund which I hadn’t touched yet, even tho I was 21. She was suddenly behind in house payments and taxes, because even tho he said he was paying everything, he pocketed the money for months and years. So, yeah. I gave mom all my savings, dropped out of school midterm and went to work full time to get her back on track. I gave her my entire paychecks. After about a year she was ok again. And karma found the sperm donor and took him down. Story for another time tho. Secondly was quitting my job to care for my mom when she was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, which had spread everywhere. She became bedridden pretty quickly I was her 24/7 caregiver for over a year. I wouldn’t let her go to a place where she couldn’t get one-on-one attention. She had every complication possible. Rashes, wounds, meds, diarrhea, nausea, dizziness, everything. She would be confused and call me every 15 minutes for something. She required 3–5 full bed changes and cleanings a day at times. Hospice told me it was the worst case they’d seen in 25 years. But I stayed. Caregivers I hired at $50/hr to get a few hours relief would leave because it was “too much work.” But I stayed. I may have had no outside life, only got 3–4 hours of sleep a night, and was an emotional wreck, but I know I did everything I could have done for her. She passed a few months ago and I’m still riding all the emotions while trying to figure out my life again.

 

If another coworker didn’t show up for work, how would you handle their responsibilities besides your own?

Not my coworker; my supervisor.

Already entitled and lazy, once she realized that I’m reliable, not stupid and could be trusted to do her work, she started dumping on me. Eventually I was doing her job and mine for four days out of five while she called in either “sick” or “working from home today” or .”out on appointments” or “cold-calling” every day except payday Fridays.

Or one or the other of her children or husband was sick, or had an appointment, or the car broke down. Like she fucking thought I was that damned stupid. Every. Single. Day.

When I complained to her brother the company owner about my overwhelming workload, I was told that I just needed to learn how to prioritize.

Eventually he was spending more and more time on the golf course and dumping on me himself. I became a de facto office manager without the salary, I was running their company for them in their absence on my secretary’s wages. Everything from invoicing, collections, and banking to sales and installation support and inventory to making coffee and vacuuming to painting walls.

Yeah, I quit without notice. And without me, they not only had to get off their asses and do their own jobs but had to figure how I’d spent 45 hours a week, because neither one of them had any idea. Clueless about customer service, answering the phone, taking and filling customer orders, shipping and receiving, reception and typing and filing and billing. Without me they didn’t even know where the vending machine keys were. I guess neither one was smart enough to figure it out, because less than a year after I quit they bankrupted the business.

My supervisor ended up giving $6 haircuts at the Hair Cuttery for tips.

Are ‘Girls Trips’ on Spring Break Okay When Married?

 

What was the most disgusting display of entitled behavior that you ever witnessed?

I’m sure there are examples more disgusting than this, but this is the one that sticks in my mind.

I was a Teaching Fellow at Harvard while getting my Ph.D. There was a student in my section who clearly had money to burn and the attitude that the world was his toy to play with. He came to me on the day a paper was due, smiled his expensive Tom Cruise smile, and said he hadn’t gotten his assignment done because he spent Spring Break in the Bahamas, so he’d get it to me when he had a chance. He seemed to think this would be absolutely fine. I told him how much his grade would drop each day it was late, and he shrugged and sauntered out.

Later, close to the end of a semester of this kind of performance from him, I explained exactly how many points he needed on the Final to pass the course.

He didn’t pass.

He then proceeded to come in with a multi-page detailed analysis explaining how I had graded his exam wrong. If he had put that much effort into studying for the test, he would have passed.

He clearly expected me to change his grade and pass him, because otherwise he wouldn’t graduate and would have to take summer school to get his diploma, and he already had a job lined up at his dad’s law firm. And to my amazement, the professor of the course wanted me to do exactly that — either he was afraid of what the powerful lawyer-dad might do if we failed his kid, or he just didn’t want the bother. I had to fight to get him to follow through with the clearly stated consequences for this kid’s actions.

I saw the kid later during the summer term. He didn’t look quite so entitled then.

What is the wildest reaction you have seen to someone getting fired?

It seemed pretty wild to me.

I was hired by a Director at a software company, she was remote, her team was remote, I was remote, and the team was Project Management (overseeing the implementation of enterprise facility management software). BUT then the Director of the implementation team was more short-handed, so I was given that director instead. Fine. I’d done all of the roles before, I was just happy to be working there, and able to help the clients, and give articulate feedback to the dev team, which I did.

I was the only one on the Implementation team (including the Director) who’d actually been a Solutions Consultant before. Talking to the clients about their needs, importing their existing data, customizing the software to meet their needs, helping them with training, etc. The rest of my team were total noobs. It’s cool, we all had to start somewhere. So, everyone on the team would come to me with questions.

I’d started off as a CAD Manager (dealing with the drafting and design software), so when our tech support team would have a difficult issue with a client’s drawing files, they’d call me in, and I’d help them out. They were SUPER grateful. Like they knew all about their own software, but AutoCAD and Revit are a whole different company, and they weren’t experts.

About six months in, my Director told me I needed to move to a different state because the remote work wasn’t working out. Uh, really? Because my two biggest clients were actually in the same city as me, and I’d been doing this job remotely for clients all over the country for years.

Whatever. I was let go because I couldn’t relocate. (I was in the middle of a divorce, and I’m physically disabled. My kids and I needed family support, and they legally needed to remain near their Dad.)

***The wild thing was, when the head of the support team heard that I’d been let go… he quit.***

He was tired of not having anyone else in the company to turn to for help, and I’d been that person for him, and the clients were all happier with quicker, more effective resolutions, and clear documentation for the knowledgebase.

He and I are still friends. That director didn’t last much longer there either and went back into real estate.

Can’t Escape The Gender Roles

 

 

What were the worst two minutes of your life?

A little background: I was a 13yo city kid. I previously joined the Boy Scouts but having made only 2nd Class, I was invited to leave by the Scoutmaster for swearing. Hey..we were city. Short time later we were snow sliding not far from the tenement and I got the bright idea to pick up a long sheet of scrap metal from a nearby mill. I found out if you pulled the end up like a toboggan you rocketed down the hill. On one run I really picked up speed and my ‘sled’ went out of control spinning and I landed at the bottom covered in snow and laughing. I looked up the hill and a line of my friends were just staring at me. I yelled “what?” and they pointed to my hand. I had gone out wearing a pair of my sisters white wool gloves. I looked at my left hand and that glove was soaked in blood and dripping fast. I stumbled up the hill to try and run home. At one point I knelt and pulled the glove off. I had severed my left thumb down to the bone along with the arteries and blood was pumping out of my body. A friend stayed with me as everyone went to get help. By this time the snow around me was crimson. I was getting dizzy. I knew I was in trouble. I told my friend to find a stick and told him to give me his bootlace. I told him how to tie a tourniquet and told him to keep winding that stick until the blood stopped. He was shaking and crying. I remember telling him it’s going to be all right. The bleeding did stop but there was blood everywhere. I looked up to see my mother running towards me. I remember saying “I’m sorry mommy” and I guess I passed out. I woke up in a rescue and the EMT asked who tied the tourniquet and I said I remembered from Boy Scouts and out again. A week in the hospital and my thumb reattached and today as good as new. One of the things I remembered before getting kicked out of Scouts was First Aid.

Have you ever seen someone treat someone else horribly and receive instant karma?

The suicide bomber who died alone.

In 2016, Abdullahi Abdisalam Borleh was a suicide bomber who had explosives in his laptop as he boarded airplane from Somalia,Daallo Airlines.

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image 212

He had come in as someone who had difficulty in walking and he claimed his purpose for travelling was health related.

Twenty minutes after taking off from Mogadishu, Somalia at an altitude of 14,000ft an explosion occurred inside the aircraft. There were 74 passengers and 7 crew members on board.

The explosion created this opening.

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He was sucked out of the plane from this opening.

His intention was to kill everyone on the plane, but as fate had it, He was the only one who died.

He was the only fatality and the plane’s controls were unaffected by the blast allowing the pilot able to fly the plane back to Mogadishu safely.

Karma some times works like magic.

No one could have seen this coming!

 

 

What are some golden advice you want to give for free?

  1. Don’t rely on others for happiness – it often leads to disappointment.
  2. Take risks while you’re young, because youth doesn’t last forever.
  3. Love isn’t about escaping suffering, but sharing a beautiful life with someone.
  4. Use your pain to grow and learn, don’t let it go to waste.
  5. Don’t let religion or beliefs stop you from loving and empathizing with others.
  6. Forgiving yourself is key to finding inner peace in life.
  7. Stay united with your family – they’re your support system.
  8. True love doesn’t just follow trends, it’s genuine and supportive.
  9. Explore life, but don’t forget to listen to your conscience.
  10. Stay open to learning – no one knows everything in life.

What is the worst prank someone did to you on April Fools?

My boss was a prankster so I should have seen this coming.

Not sure if it was April fools but the joke was on me!

I worked for a company based very near Heathrow Airport. One year I booked a three-week holiday to the Philippines with my family.

Long-term car parking would have cost hundreds of pounds, but my boss had a secretary lived nearby. She said I could use their driveway as they would be away too. Just pop the keys in their letter box, bring a spare and drive myself home when we got back since she would be at work.

It all worked fine.

About a week after I got back I had a meeting with my boss. I am a field manager so we used to meet at a local Hilton convenient to us both.

So we meet up and were having our discussion when he excuses himself to go to the loo. He’s away a while so I assume he’s just having a dump.

At the end of our meeting we say our goodbyes, I go off to my car. Its gone! I check everywhere! I’m sure I remembered where I parked it! No it’s gone! Some bastard stole it! My beautiful blue Mercedes C class!

I run back in panicking! I see my boss still packing up his lap top. I tell him what happened. He’s not surprised! He’s laughing!

What?

He waves my key at me !

The bastard had been given my key by his secretary and asked to return it to me . He’d taken the opportunity to move my car to the far corner of the car park! No wonder I couldn’t find it!

The bastard!

But I got him back about a year later….

4 signs she’s cheating on you

 

What did you do when you saw someone stealing while on the job?

When I saw a significant theft on the job, I held off, thinking on the subject until quitting time. As my fellow employee prepared to leave I approached him, saying I knew what he wanted to take and it was in his knapsack. He gave me an innocent look and denied any such thing. I advised him what would probably happen if management “accidentally” found out about attempted theft as he exited the building. Then I explained how he would feel later, how it would probably affect his performance, and what little gain he was going to get -vs- his possible loss of employment as well as a black-mark on employment history.

He stood quite for a moment then explained the item was supposed to be a birthday gift to his son. Sympathetically, I asked him how much he could afford for a gift. He had about half the money he needed if he paid retail price. I knew the owner/manager well so I told my fellow employee to replace the item while I asked what could be arranged.

The owner seemed proud the employee’s son would receive an item his company produced and gave me a reduced figure. I paid the difference, asking the owner to accept the amount the employee had saved. We went to the production area, selected a newly inspected item, packaged it and presented it to the employee who beamed with excitement. Then he hesitated, explaining he only had half the value saved. The owner simply accepted the amount, grinned and told him not to tell other employees about today’s deep discount. The day, and a man’s dignity had been saved.

 

What was the first thing that blew your mind when you became a police officer?

In my first two weeks after finishing in the training school I was put with Alan.

Alan was a very experienced officer and I was assured I would learn plenty from Alan.

So we are driving down the street when Alan suddenly declares “There’s Fingers Malone. He must have just been released. Sit in the back!”

Alan then pulls up alongside this criminal.

“Hi Fingers. How are you doing? Just got out have you?

“Yeah.”

“Where are you heading? Home?”

“Yeah”

“Well we’re heading that way. Why don’t you jump in and we’ll give you a lift?”

Fingers then gets in the patrol car where I had previously been seated.

“So did you have a bit of a party when you got out?”

“Yeah”

“I bet your old mates Wiry and Doggo were there eh?”

“Yeah”

“Anyone else”

“Yeah, Jacko and Freddie were there too.”

“Here we are King Street. What number was it?

“28”

“Here we are number 28. Right to your door”

“Thank very much. Sometimes I think you guys are better to me than my mates”

“Stay out of trouble”

“OK Steve you can come back up front now. Have you got your notebook?

“Yes” says I.

“Take this down”

“Fingers Malone is residing at no 28 King Street. He is still associating with known criminals Wiry Burns, Doggo Johnson, Freddie Duggan and Jacko Carpenter.”

I was blown away. Alan had skilfully attained information that was highly useful to the collator. (It would now be done on a computer but in those days by paper.)

To illustrate how useful – I took a call from someone who had their tool van broken into and they had noticed a man known to us (criminal) hanging around.

Found that man’s address from the collator sent a car there and it arrived just as this person was unloading his van of a load of stolen tools.

As he was arrested and cautioned his reply was “Fuck me that was the fastest I have ever been arrested.”

Policing is not always what you think!

Italian Pork Roast

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2024 02 13 17 11

Ingredients

  • 1 (3 to 3 1/2 pound) rolled boneless pork loin roast
  • 4 cloves garlic, halved
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 to 2 tablespoons dried Italian seasoning
  • 1 teaspoon coarsely-ground pepper

Instructions

  1. Place roast in a shallow roasting pan. Cut 8 small slits in roast at 2-inch intervals; insert garlic clove halves deep into slits.
  2. Brush olive oil evenly over roast, and sprinkle with Italian seasoning and pepper. Insert meat thermometer, making sure it does not touch fat.
  3. Bake at 325 degrees F for 1 1/2 hours (30 minutes per pound) or until meat thermometer reaches 155 degrees F.
  4. Remove from oven, and cover loosely with aluminum foil. Let stand 15 minutes or until meat thermometer reaches 160 degrees F.

Made in Shenzhen, China…

 

I am 60+. I lived alone for nearly 15 years. I have tried everything to meet someone. Is it simply never going to happen to me again? No one can imagine how lonely it is. I just want to scream.

After my father died, my mother was incredibly lonely, she was the type of person who couldn’t be alone. My dad, brother and I were never like this. She just never felt complete if she didn’t have someone in her life.

I was a workaholic, and wasn’t giving her the attention she needed, my brother had his own young family to look after. We just didn’t understand how lonely she was, because when we visited, she wasn’t lonely, she had us.

We started going on road trips, and at first she would lose her train of thought, and not be able to finish a sentence. She couldn’t walk a half block without resting.

After taking a three week road trip, and going for a walk every night, she was back to normal.

But she quickly backslid, and I asked her to move in with me. She was reluctant, because she didn’t want to ruin my life. But she said she would give it some thought, and then she had a stroke and died.

For people who don’t get lonely, its hard for us to imagine what someone who does, feels after years of loneliness.

But I finally got it, albeit, too late.

You say you have lived alone for 15 years, and tried everything. Does that include online dating, there are plenty of fish in the sea, especially if you aren’t too picky, and just need someone. Don’t be afraid to contact men, don’t wait for them to approach you. This is how I met my wife. If this hasn’t worked, try volunteering to fill up your empty hours. You will undoubtedly meet other lonely souls, and don’t be afraid to make the first move. All of my long time girlfriends and my wife, approached me first.

Cheating wife

 

What has an employee said that immediately caused you to fire them?

“I never even used that pot! It was the morning shift!” – this was the last lie Stefani told me while she was still employed by me, because I fired her on the spot. Somehow everything that happened around her was always someone else’s fault, but people do occasionally lie, so I let it go until she lied about three different coworkers in one day, trying to get them in trouble for no apparent reason.

Stephani was the sole lunch cook in a small store I own, and she was a problem from day one. She spoke to her coworkers like they were dogs, constantly corrected and bullied them even when she was a new hire being trained by them, and she excused it all by saying that she “always speaks the truth and won’t hold her tongue” and “that’s just how she talks, she can’t help it”. She was also a sneaky bitch, because she tried to kiss my ass, but even with me her temper and pathological need to be right would assert itself, and she’d flash out until she got it under control again. With everyone else, she was constantly insulting them, berating them, and lying about them. You might think that it takes more than one person to carry on a feud, but Stephani proved that she could do it all on her own.

Her job wasn’t hard, because sales were low at that store when I bought it and we’re branded by a chain that mostly has ready-to-fry foods. She had to come in and fry chicken, sides, and make a lunch special, and she had to do the occasional burger or sandwich. Other than that she just needed to prep for the following day, and clean the kitchen and the equipment at the end of her shift, which only takes an hour. The other cooks who had worked her shift had all had lunch out on time, gotten the special orders (those the cashiers can’t put together by the hot case) out in a timely manner, cooked until an hour before their shift ended, and left a clean kitchen with food prepped for the next shift. Stefani, on the other hand, couldn’t get the food out on time, and it was always the breakfast cook’s fault for not getting out her way. She had similar excuses for why she couldn’t prep, and when the kitchen was a filthy mess it was always because someone else made it that way.

We cook our own lunch specials but everything else is branded, and those foods have to be made and they have to be made according to certain standards, but Stefani tried to take advantage of my absences from the store (I have other businesses, a full time job, and a family) to stop doing those items and just do her own cooking that wasn’t even selling in this small town. When her more senior coworkers would politely remind her about the way she was supposed to cook, she make arrogant statements like: “Oh, I know how to cook. I don’t cook according to recipes, I do my own, and these people will either eat it or they can go somewhere else”. I knew about her behavior but for almost two months that little store just wasn’t my focus, as I’d mainly just bought it so it wouldn’t be soaking up sales from my bigger store across the road, which meant that she got away with way too much. Finally I got a chance to focus on this store, so at the beginning of the month I had a serious talk with her. I told her what she had to cook, I transferred an experienced cook from the other store who needed a less demanding job for health reasons to cook breakfast at the little one, and I appointed her kitchen manager so she could stay on top of Stephani.

What I’d hoped was that she’d do what this cook asked, especially since this woman gets along with everyone and has an incredibly tactful way about her, but it didn’t work. She doesn’t complain much but when I asked for updates she admitted that nothing had improved. I tried spending more time in the store, and it did make Stephani at least pretend to do what she’d been asked, but pretend is all she did. I had already made up my mind to fire her, but I was short on staff at both stores and in the process of buying a third, so I was going to wait a bit. When she snapped back at me after I once again told her that she couldn’t bully her coworkers, I went ahead and told her that I was going to fire her if she didn’t start getting along with people, and when I found a very unclean kitchen a day later I made it clear that she was out of chances. She went about two weeks without causing any issues big enough for the other ladies to bring them to me (although they try too hard not to bother me), only instead she started to call me about every little thing.

The big store has a general manager who runs it for me, and I’d tried putting her in charge of the little one too but it was too much for her, so those few employees were temporarily allowed to contact m directly. Other than her calls, the only one to call was the kitchen manager and the assistant manager in the store, and that was for serious trouble like a broken walk-in cooler and a fire marshal showing up to inspect us. Stefani called multiple times about little shit even though I told her every time to go through her immediate manager for that, and then she started to call to complain about her coworkers. One time a cashier had told her that she was being mean, which was exceedingly mild and entirely appropriate under the circumstances, but Stephani wanted her fired. Apparently she’d even looked at her smugly and announced that she was about to get her job taken away from her, as she grabbed her phone and walked outside to call me. This was when I reached out and hired someone to replace her, and started to count the twelve days until that woman could start.

I didn’t want her to leave immediately when I didn’t have her replacement yet, so I didn’t tell her. In fact I was just going to send out the new schedule the day before the new cook started, and let Stephani figure out that she was fired, but she couldn’t stop making trouble. Last Tuesday she called and woke me up after my late shift in the ER (the schedule in the store includes my hours at the hospital so they can know when it’s okay to call), to complain that the same cashier who had said she was mean had called her the n-word. She was gleefully happy as she informed me that I’d have to fire the girl now or she was going to sue me, but I was 99 percent sure she had made the accusation up. I’ve never used it to spy on my workers, but my stores have hidden cameras with microphones and speakers in addition to the visible cameras. I had them installed for precisely this reason, to avoid having to fire someone innnocent, and because audio is useful evidence too in case a crime is committed. It took me a while to find their confrontation on the footage and then search out the audio based on the time stamp, and before I finished the assistant manager of the store calls to tell me that a group of regular customers had come in to say that Stephani had started a fight with them outside when she was smoking. According to the men, they had half-jokingly asked why she never had the fried foods out at lunch time, and she’d gotten pissed and told them that she wasn’t ever cooking for them again. When they asked what the hell she meant, she’d banned them from both my stores.

At that point I got dressed and drove to the store, only to find my cook sitting outside in the middle of the lunch rush, smoking a cigarette. She immediately said it was her first break, but having just watched most of that morning on the cameras, I knew she’d already taken at least seven smoke breaks in less than four hours. She comes inside as I’ve asked the other cook if she’d done any work that day and she’s explaining that no, she has not, so then Stephani starts screaming at the other cook – the kitchen manager – that it’s none of her business if she works. I tell her stop, and I explain that Mary is her supervisor so it absolutely is her business. I tell her to apologize and she does that thing where she says “I’m sorry if you thought what I said was mean, but I can’t help how I talk”. When I insist on a proper apology, while I’m also answering an important call, she says something to Mary just out of earshot. I finish my call and ask Mary if she apologized, and I’m told that no, what Stephani really told her was “to mind her own business because people who crossed her had a way of regretting it”. It was my turn to fly into a rage, especially since I’d just seen a text Stephani must have sent just as I was pulling up to the store, one complaining that another employee had been the one who spilt a lot of gravy on the floor she just left it. I already knew it was Stephani because her coworkers knew she’d blame them, and so they’d sent me the exact time so I could easily check the cameras. That and the veiled threat was it, so I was done with this bitch even if I had to cook lunch myself for the rest of the week!

Up until that day I’d never fired anymore in public, but I followed Stephani out into the store where she was getting her some more free coffee, and told her to get her shit and go home. She’d been suspended once before, because of her attitude, so she put her hands on her hips and said: “Really?? You’re suspending me for taking a smoke break?!”. She’s a big woman who uses her body and voice to bully people, so she wasn’t particularly discreet with her question, which meant that her coworkers and the customers all stopped to stare at us. Knowing her it was deliberate, as she likely thought she was about to verbally own me, so the look on her face was priceless when I told her that she wasn’t suspended; she was fired. It was the first time she didn’t immediately snap back, so I actually got a chance to tell her that I was firing her for failing to perform her job, bullying her coworkers, lying, and making false allegations of racism. Once she recovered from the shock she started to argue with me, about the specific reasons, but I told her to get her shit and go home, and I would mail her last check and her separation papers.

She was starting to cry a little when she grabbed her purse and left, but my sympathy is with the coworkers she terrified and tried to get fired! I wish I’d known just how bad it all had gotten, but my employee are great women who didn’t want to bother me unless it was urgent. I’ve made it clear that everything Stephani did qualified as a valid reason to call me, and I’m training the assistant to run the store. A cashier is filling in until the new cook starts, all five employees at that store got a 50 cent raise for all they’d had to put up with, and now that they know about the microphones and speakers, we’re having some fun with them. Last night I played “Haunted House” sounds from YouTube over the speakers, just as the cashiers looked like they were starting to fuck off a bit too much, and their reactions were hilarious. Oh, and Stephani called to ask that I say she was laid off rather than fired, so she could get unemployment. Even as she was asking for a huge favor, she couldn’t stop being a bitch, because she actually went ahead and said: “you know, since it’s your fault if my kids have to starve”. As you can probably guess, I made it abundantly clear that she’d been fired for cause, and that there are plenty of available jobs around here. None of them are paying as much as I do, but she had her chance.

Truths

 

Have you ever called in a “welfare check” to the police? Did it turn out there was a real need? Officers, how often are “welfare checks” something where a person does need assistance?

One of the weirdest stories we covered when I worked at the TV station involved a welfare check. The police received a call from the coworkers of a woman who hadn’t showed up at work that day, nor had she called. Coworkers tried to call her but she didn’t answer multiple calls. Normally the cops are not going to go check on someone because they didn’t feel like going to work. But in this case, her coworkers insisted this was not like her, she’d worked there ten years and never failed to show up without calling, and she was also an older woman who lived alone and had a heart condition. They were concerned she might be sick and unable to get to her phone. Given all that info, the police dispatcher agreed to send a unit to do a welfare check.

The officers got to the door, thinking they were probably going to find an old woman who died in her sleep. That happens a lot with welfare checks. Usually they will start by ringing the doorbell or knocking, and if they don’t get an answer, they walk around and look in the windows to see if they can see the person. If they spot someone who’s not responsive despite repeated yelling and pounding, they might consider that probable cause to break in.

But that wasn’t really necessary in this case. They got to the door, one of the officers knocked, and it just swung open. Wasn’t fully closed, let alone locked. The old woman was lying on the floor in a pool of blood, clearly dead and not from a heart attack. She had been stabbed multiple times. The coroner was called, Homicide detectives and crime scene techs came. One of the detectives knelt down to look at the body and noticed something on the wall. It was a name, written in blood. Turned out it was the name of her cousin, who turned up a few days later at a hospital in another state, claiming to have amnesia. She had the dead woman’s ID on her. I seem to recall she was charged with the murder but not how that turned out.

Bizarre story. I always thought it would be good inspiration for a work of fiction, and I did eventually write a short story loosely based on it.

Yes it can

 

What needs to be said out loud?

I was at a hospital for some tests recently. The doctor prescribed some medicines and asked me to get them from the in-house pharmacy as they weren’t available elsewhere. I went to get the same and stood in the queue.

The hospital had put a queue barricade for easy maintenance of crowd. The counter was equipped to handle only two people at a time. There was a lady ahead of me in the queue. She was getting irritated for being made to wait and started shouting at the staff. They offered a mumbled apology. Meanwhile she tried to push her way through, even though the previous guy was still waiting to collect his medicines. His hospital file grazed this lady’s arm and all hell broke loose!

The lady started shouting at the poor guy and accused him of harming her. The poor fellow did not know what had happened exactly. He was a very young lad and was cringing at the lady’s accusations. He tried to reason with her and said that he had not budged from his place at all. It was her own fault. This retaliation was unacceptable to the lady and she took it as a serious affront to her! So she started calling for the management and resorted to threats.

However, everyone present there stood by the boy. That was almost a miracle! No one spoke against the boy and instead told the lady to mind her language. Frustrated at this sudden turn of events, the lady marched away calling all of us a bunch of “bumbling idiots”. Yes… her exact words!

What needs to be said out loud? The message that the perception of people is changing. Slowly but surely. Now women can’t expect immediate and blind support just because they are females. If you are wrong, you are wrong. It’s as simple as that. So it’s the need of the hour to refrain from such stunts so that a genuine case of harassment does not get ignored and a victim is not denied help just because some of us decided to cry wolf and made people wary of every female!

Generations looking at their Bank Account

 

What was the most outrageous repair quote a mechanic has ever given you to fix your car?

I am still thanking the mechanic who told the guy I bought my new truck from that the engine was bad! 2016 Dodge RAM 1500 and it barely had 50,000 miles on it. This was a few years back.

As I drove this truck around on the highway she rode and smelled like new. It had great acceleration and power, and didn’t have the burning smoke exhaust like an engine using oil should have. I look at the oil on the dipstick, and the percentage the computer says left was 40%. If it had blowback, that oil should be really black and smell of exhaust. It was pretty clean and smelled ok. Nothing was pointing to a bad engine. So I thought maybe bearings or something? I quickly check pricing on a new engine core just in case. Heck doing the work myself I was only looking at $3600.00 for an entire brand new engine core. The price he was asking ($15,000) was half its worth of around $32,000.00. How could I go wrong?

I once again told the seller I didn’t think the engine was bad, he was making a big mistake, etc. Nope he already bought a new truck he likes better and he was happy with the deal he got. Ok, I tried, so I hand over the cash and signed the papers. Best decision i have ever made.

Next morning I go out to a chilly 48deg truck. At this temperature if the rods and bearings are bad they will knock like crazy at first start. I turn the key and listen intently. I hear noises, but not rods or bearings. Now Dodge Hemi engines are noisy. Their design you will hear various rattles and ticks here and there. My last work Dodge lasted 390,000 miles and rattled to high heaven. I listen intently to a very loud tick on the passenger side, as the noise begins to fade away. Using my scope i quickly found what I suspected, a leaky exhaust header. Very common on these. A good look underneath confirms several broken bolts. A pain to remove, but nothing serious. At first it did sound like an internal problem, but any good mechanic with a scope should be able to pinpoint that noise or should have known it was a problem.

At this stage we are at 85,000 miles and doing great. I have never owned a newer vehicle before with so many buttons and things to touch. Most of the miles have been cross country to see relatives. So yes, thank you whoever you are! You got me a new vehicle I otherwise would never get for a fantastic price.

Jesus!

 

What happened in a courtroom that gave the judge a belly laugh you will never forget?

My buddy was 17, the legal drinking age was 18, and he would be turning 18 on Sunday. But he wanted a party in the bar Saturday night to celebrate. So we all go down to the small town bar. A good time was had by all, until about 11:00 pm, when the police do a walk through. Being a small town, they notice that they hadn’t seen my buddy in the bar before. They ask for his ID, and he is underage. They write him up an illegal possession of alcohol, the fine is about the equivalent of 15 dozen beer.

This happened a long time ago, so giving dollars wouldn’t mean much.

My buddy wants me as a witness, to say that I didn’t see him drinking, and the beer on the table wasn’t his. I hadn’t seen him drinking, because I had only arrived 10 minutes before, and so I could tell the truth and get him off. There is a different charge they could have used, with a lesser fine, for being underage in a bar.

He is called before the judge, and the police officer is sitting in the back of the court.

The judge asks my buddy how old he is, and he says 18. The judge says. It says here you were found in the bar, last Saturday night and were under age. He says, yes thats true.

The judge asks when was your birthday. My friend says Sunday. The judge burst out laughing, and says a dollar a day fine, please pay the clerk a dollar. My friend says, but I wasn’t drinking, I have a witness. The judge says, don’t push your luck. its a dollar, do you want to have a trial.

I never had to testify.

You won’t believe what the Filipino girl said

 

Does hard work really pay off?

You decide for yourself.

The world owes a debt to Israel for how they took on the terror-maniac Saddam Hussain’s vision of designing an atom bomb.

Iraq was a sworn enemy of Israel and it was just days away from the berserk tearing down of Israel.

Israel had only one reason in its favour before trying for the no-win.

They ticked all the boxes in the domain of ‘HARD WORK’.

  • For long, Israel had mastered the art of flying aircrafts at a height less than 30m( to avoid radar detection).
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image 216
  • Israel can’t magically appear wherever they want to, they have to fly over enemy nations. They practised speaking the accent of those arab nations.
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image
  • Israelis mastered the art of diversion tactics and deceiving radio signals.
  • Israel effected the speed of execution and precise-hitting because they get only one chance.

Israel had mimeographed the entire Iraqi nuclear plant and drilled several times before final execution.

Israel launched Operation Opera on June 7, 1981. Let’s see if the hard work paid off.

  • Israel flew over Jordan and interacted in Saudi accent. Jordanes assumed them as Saudis(ally of Jordan).
  • When over Saudi Arabia, Israelis produced a sham of Jordanese using Jordan radio signals.
  • Now, they were in Iraq, the High-Israel got low, I mean literally. They were flying less than 30m altitude and thus evaded detection.
  • A diversion was played using F-15 aircrafts while F-16s were ready for attack.

King Hussein of Jordan was enjoying in yacht when Israeli planes had flown just over him. He had communicated it to Iraq.

Iraqis had turned the detectors off so Israelis capitalized as their anti-aircraft attack was a no-threat but it’s time their lunch-break was over. .

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image 215
  • The F-16s reached an height of 2000m then dived into 1000m, dropped off the Mark-84 bombs.
  • 8 of the 16 hit and were enough to reduce the nuclear plant to ashes. The attack took less than 2 minutes.
  • Jordan-king’s message would never reach and the Iraqi anti-aircraft attack was circumvented successfully by Israel.

Ramon was the youngest Israeli pilot who later on became an astranaut and was with Kalpana Chawla when the space shuttle disaster occured.

Technical details reference :

Operation Opera – Wikipedia

Never judge a book by its cover | 850k mudhouse in Africa

 

What’s the saddest celebrity moment ever caught on camera?

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Simply known as “The Greatest”, Muhammad Ali had it all – enormous wealth, exceptional good looks, freakish athleticism, and hundreds of millions of adoring fans. According to international polls, it was Ali who finally toppled Elvis as the “The Most Famous Person in the World”. This is his final picture before taking exit from his frail, withered body.

After someone stole his bicycle, a young Cassius Clay decided to “whup the thief”. He never got the chance, but, hoping for the opportunity, took some boxing lessons at a local gym. Six years later, while still in his teens, he would win an Olympic gold medal. And less than three years after that, Clay became the undisputed heavyweight champion of the world.

Although somewhat shy, Clay watched professional wrestlers with their outlandish behavior and remarks filling the seats with fans. Wanting to do the same, Ali took on a new persona – the supremely pompous “Louisville [Kentucky] Lip”, drawing attention to a sport that seemed to be struggling with mediocrity and a plummeting fan base. People loved him or hated him. Everyone had an opinion and it was never in the middle of the spectrum.

But, although he kept on winning, something was not right. Punches to the head from George Foreman, Joe Frazier and Ken Norton were taking their toll. Still in his thirties, and no longer calling himself by his “slave name”, Muhammad Ali, was developing early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease. But he kept boxing, even as his disability made every moment a chore.

Eventually, there was nothing left. Ali had no choice. It was time to retire or face the prospect that one more punch to the head might take away his last breath. Dedicating the remainder of his life to charity, it is estimated that Ali provided 22 million meals for the hungry in Africa. Among his many other contributions, Ali became one of the biggest donors to the United Negro College Fund, talked a suicidal man off a 9th floor ledge and negotiated the release of American hostages held by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Eventually, his ailing health would no longer allow him to speak. His body would quake. His brain was damaged, losing its ability to function on virtually all levels. His bladder failed. Ali would have regular bouts with pneumonia and infections in which he could never fully recover.

For the last years of his life, Ali was not able to leave his house. His once agile, quick and strong body capitulated to a much stronger, microscopic virus. It would be his last fight.

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image 217

Muhammad Ali 1942 – 2016, R.I.P.

A little king

 

Who are some of the dumbest criminals ever to be caught?

In 1983 a German couple was on a holiday in Sicily. They were minding their own business, alternating mornings at the beach with little road trips in the afternoon.

On one of those afternoons coming back from a hike, their rented car broke down. In the middle of nowhere. They got out of the car and tried to push it to the side of the narrow dirt road. The car was stuck in gear and wouldn’t budge. The German couple was happy to see a car approaching in the distance, preceding a cloud of dust. The car stopped and a man flung out, screaming. The Germans did speak some Italian but had a hard time understand what he was shouting: do you know who I am!?

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image 219

They didn’t. And worse, instead of helping the wedged his Fiat through the little space between their car and the edge of the road. Metal against metal, scratching the rented car from front to rear.

Later that evening the couple reported what happened to the local police. They described the man who scratched the car and added he was probably famous since he couldn’t seem to understand they did not recognise or knew him. Well the police sure did who he was. After being on the run for three years Masino L. was arrested. The price he paid for asking stupid questions.

Elon Musk’s Frustration with the Biden administration.

The United States is a joke.

 

Can a workplace fire an employee for an argument that took place outside of work?

Yes.

I consulted a business where someone in a work uniform took his break at a nearby coffee shop. He was clocked out. He got into a dispute with another customer over something stupid but decided to check all the boxes in his argument. He insulted an old black woman and implied that she needed to practice better feminine hygiene.

The woman took note of the company name on his coveralls and noted it in her police report. No charges were filed, but the woman made sure to contact the business claiming that this man represented their company and she planned to share with everyone she knew that the company hired racist, sexist assclowns.

When we asked the employee about it, he freely admitted every detail, telling us that we “can’t do a fuckin’ thing about it” since he wasn’t on the clock at the time. He was fired on the spot but police had to trespass him and march him out in handcuffs.

To the woman, she had no power over a large, loud man in the moment, but she chose to get her revenge for his disrespect. Employees who are off the clock usually have instructions about how they can conduct themselves in public while wearing company apparel. This is why companies don’t approve of people wearing company apparel in their off-hours, because they can act like assclowns while also serving as a walking billboard for the company that pays them.

Imagine If The Roles Were REVERSED

 

What is it like being a police officer in a small town?

Boring most of the time. After I got out of the military I went to work for a small town of 1000 residents. We had three officers, one for the day, mid day, and night. I was chief of police there and took the day shift. Most of the things that happened were an occasional stop sign violation, a domestic once in a while, and just keeping things safe.

Kids were kids, always trying to get a beer or two past me. Not always successful too. When I would catch a minor with booze, I would take them to the office, sit them down and call parents to come get them. However I did not arrest them as here was the deal. Parents and child could decide if I took the kid to jail, booked them in, gave them a police record, and have them spend time behind bars for their stupidity. OR….they could show up each weekend for the next year, Pick up trash in the park, sweep the sidewalks downtown, Paint the fire hydrants, Plant flowers on the corners downtown, etc. I had the prettiest park, corners, and hydrants in the state. The kids learned a lesson and knew if they did it again they would go right to jail, no parents involved. Which did happen I think three times. After word got around in the younger citizens I and my fellow officers were treated with respect and as a friend of the younger people and parents.

The only bad thing I can think of was the small town politics, When I started I was handed a piece of paper with names and addresses on it as to who to arrest, who not to arrest, who to trust and who to do every thing possible to get to move out of town. After reading the list, I tore it up right in front of the city council meeting, told them I do not discriminate, do not do what they wanted, but I enforce the law equally of all citizens.

I lasted there for two years and when I arrested the Mayors daughter for possession of drugs, with intent to distribute ( $75000 worth of meth, $100000 worth of coke, and more, The city council fired me., She still went to jail, found guilty and spent 5 to 10 behind bars. I went on to a sheriffs dept in the same county and later even arrested the mayor of the town on similar charges. After which I was asked to come back to the town to work and I refused.

So small towns are quiet, boring most of the time, but occasionally have some excitement and danger.

USA Gen-Z

 

 

What happened to nurses captured on Bataan and Corregidor?

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image 222

They endured many of the same deprivations the soldiers did.

“The Angels of Bataan (also known as the “Angels of Bataan and Corregidor” and “The Battling Belles of Bataan”) were the members of the United States Army Nurse Corps and the United States Navy Nurse Corps who were stationed in the Philippines at the outset of the Pacific War and served during the Battle of the Philippines (1941–42)

. When Bataan and Corregidor fell, 11 Navy nurses, 66 army nurses, and 1 nurse-anesthetist were captured and imprisoned in and around Manila.“

“They continued to serve as a nursing unit while prisoners of war

. After years of hardship, they were finally liberated in February 1945.“

At Santo Tomas

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Army Nurses in Santo Tomas, 1943. Left to right: Bertha Dworsky; Sallie Durrett; Earlene Black; Jean Kennedy; Louise Anchieks; Millei Dalton.

“The campus of the University of Santo Tomaswas converted to the Santo Tomas Internment Camp

by the Japanese during their occupation of the Philippines.“

“The camp is described in detail in The War by Ken Burns

. In addition to its civilian population, Santo Tomas became the initial internment camp for both the army and navy nurses, with the army nurses remaining there until their liberation.“

“Capt. Maude C. Davison, 57 years old and with 20 years of service experience, took command of the nurses, maintained a regular schedule of nursing duty, and insisted that all nurses wear their khaki blouses and skirts while on duty. She worked with Josephine Nesbit.”

At Los Baños

“In May 1943, the navy nurses, still under the command of Lt. Cobb

, were transferred to a new internment camp at Los Baños, where they established a new infirmary and continued working as a nursing unit.“

“At Los Baños they came to be known as “the sacred eleven.”

On the Home Front

“While the capture of the nurses was widely publicized in the U.S., little specific information was known of their fate until they were liberated.

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US Government Poster

“Lt. Juanita Redmond

, one of the few nurses to escape, published a memoir of her experiences on Bataan in 1943 that concluded with a dramatic reminder that her colleagues were still prisoners.“

“The nurses’ story was dramatized in several wartime movies, including:

“When So Proudly We Hail was shown in the theaters, a recruitment booth staffed with Red Cross volunteers was set up in the lobby.“

Final year of Internment

“In January 1944, control of the Santo Tomas Internment Camp changed from Japanese civil authorities to the Imperial Japanese Army

, with whom it remained until the camp was liberated.“

“Access to outside food sources was curtailed, the diet of the internees was reduced to 960 calories per person per day by November 1944, and further reduced to 700 calories per person per day by January 1945.“

“A Department of Veterans Affairs study released in April, 2002 found that the nurses lost, on average, 30% of their body weight during internment, and subsequently experienced a degree of service-connected disability “virtually the same as the male ex-POW’s of the Pacific Theater.”

“ Maude C. Davison’s body weight dropped from 156 lbs. to 80 lbs.”

Angels of Bataan – Wikipedia

 

When surrounded by a mob and you have a fully loaded pistol, what would you suggest: to fire in the air or fire on people?

A few years ago I’m in Uganda and we drive through a village. Everyone is running out of their houses with spears and machetes (they call panga), knives and pitchforks. So, I ask the driver to stop and ask the mob WTF is happening.

Within a few seconds, we’re surrounded by about 200 people who look fucking mad as hell.

They tell the driver that some dude just stole a motorcycle and that they’re going to hunt him down and chop him up into lots of tiny pieces. Our curiosity satisfied, we thanked them and continued on with the journey.

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Naturally, I had questions for the driver on the way:

  1. if the guy has a bike will they catch him. He says yes. They normally catch people within 24 hours.
  2. I pointed out that the border to the Congo is less than 24 hours away by bike. He says people have tried that in the past and they still get killed.
  3. I ask why the police aren’t going after this guy. He says that the police only catch a guy if they’re paid to. The village is poor and can’t afford the bribes.

And that was that. I had witnessed the beginning of murder, but glad I wasn’t there to see it happen. I know they would have gutted him like an animal. And he must have known this too since he lived in that village. How desperate must that man have been to take such a risk?

When surrounded by a mob and you have a fully loaded pistol, what would you suggest: to fire in the air or fire on people?

If that happened I’d just tuck the pistol in my belt. If the mob is after someone else, they don’t give a fuck about me. If they’re after me, I’m already dead.

Edit: That was the nicest image I could find. A lot of the other ones show the person being chopped up – no censorship. Brutal.


Edit: For those people in the comments trying to turn this answer into a culture war, I recommend you educate yourself about the history of Africa before you call them savages. The most savage thing done to Africa was by Westerners – lest we wilfully forget, yet again.


10k bonus edit:

So, something like this has happened to me before. 1997, Edinburgh, Scotland, during the day. I’m waiting at a bus stop when two young guys come up and offer me a swig of wine. I look at it and say, no thanks. Then they demand, “DRINK IT”. So I take a swig and hand it back. Then one of them comes up to me and says, “Give me all your money or I’ll cut your fucking throat.”

I look down at his hands to see if he has a knife, but he has no hands, just stumps. So I ask him, “how are you going to hold a knife?” He puts one stump behind his back and says he has a knife in his back pocket. Now I only had 53 pence and the bus ticket was going to cost 50 pence, so I told them to “get tae fuck” and walked along the road to the next bus stop while they shouted after me that they were going to murder me.

I just can’t take anyone seriously if they don’t have any hands.

What do mediocre employees do that the best employees don’t do?

Having been a boss for several decades I feel qualified to give an answer here.

I am smart enough to realise that I am unlikely to attract extremely high intelligence employees to mix detergent! I own two chemical manufacturing companies. So I am talking about normal everyday people with this answer.

For me a good employee is one that is consistent. In other words they produce the same quality and quantity of work/results every day consistently. They are set and forget with little to no effort required from me or their supervisor. I don’t need them to be a superstar. I am happy with them giving me 80% of what a superstar could give me in theory because I know I am always going to get it from them and I can more easily predict business/job outcomes as a result.

This doesn’t mean I don’t try to get them to 85% or greater, of course I try.

The above employee tends to arrive on time and have less than average personal/sick leave too in my experience.

By contrast, the mediocre employee is brilliant one day and off with the fairies for the next three days, then rounds out the week with a day off for a sprained eyelash!

Mediocre employees work output is up and down and hard to predict resulting in far more time spent supervising them. This adds cost and complexity to the business as a result.

So if you want to impress a boss – work consistently. Produce at the same level everyday and try and find ways to gradually improve or become more efficient.

Russia Launch on Feb 9 Causes U.S. National Security “Threat” Today

World Hal Turner 14 February 2024

Roscosmos Feb 9 2024 MoD Launch large
Roscosmos Feb 9 2024 MoD Launch large
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Russia Launch on Feb 9 Causes U.S. National Security "Threat" Today

Five days ago, on February 9, Roscosmos, the Russian Space Agency, conducted a rocket launch into space carrying cardo for the Russian Ministry of Defense.  Today, February 14, Americans are being told of a new “threat” described as “destabilizing.”

Earlier today, February 14, U.S. Congressman Mike Turner (R-OH) head of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI), announced to the nation a new “Destabilizing threat to national security” and revealed all members of Congress are now able to go into the secure House Briefing area to learn details.

HPSCI notice
HPSCI notice

Within the offices of the US House of Representatives is a SCIF: Segmented, Compartmentalized, Information Facility.  Anyone entering the SCIF is searched for any electronic devices, which are forbidden.  Entrants are also barred from taking any notes.   They are “read-in” on the Classified Material and when they depart the facility, they are reminded they are forbidden to talk to anyone about what they have learned under Penalty of prison.

Congressman Turner issued the following notice to fellow members of Congress:

In the notice above, the words “destabilizing foreign military capability.”   “Destabilizing” means it is a power THEY have, but which we DO NOT have.  That’s what “destabilizing” means in this context.

CNN and other media outlets are claiming this has something to do with Russia.   It may. 

On February 9th, the Cosmos-2575 Mission was launched by Roskosmos using a Soyuz-2 Rocket carrying an “Unknown Payload into Space for the Russian Ministry of Defense.  It is almost guaranteed our spy satellites and ground-based information gathering capabilities have kept close watch on whatever went up.   

Based on our current capabilities for intel-gathering, it seems likely (to me) that we now have some idea of what it is — or possibly know EXACTLY what it is.  So here we are, just 5 days later, being told there is some new, “destabilizing” foreign military capability.

My personal layman’s FIRST guess: Fractional Orbital Bombardment System (FOBS) weaponry.

FOBS are space-based nuclear bombs (actual warheads)  that can be released at ANY time, orbit the earth several times under their own power for months or years (or just once), then come down anywhere on the planet with ZERO advance warning to the intended target.

A particular city in a particular country would go from happy-go-lucky to vaporized with ZERO warning.

There is no defense to such weaponry.

 My SECOND guess:

Iran may now be confirmed to have a working nuclear bomb.

 Of course, it is common knowledge that Mike Turner is a RINO, he supports the aid package for Ukraine and Israel (but NOT our own Border), he wants to push the Ukraine support, end of story.  SO coming up with some new Russian “threat” may be the impetus to get that passed.

Kicked her off

Ukraine Sinks Russian Navy Ship in Black Sea

World Hal Turner 14 February 2024

Ukraine sinks another Russian Ship 02 14 2024 large
Ukraine sinks another Russian Ship 02 14 2024 large
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Ukraine Sinks Russian Navy Ship in Black Sea

Ukraine has attacked and sunk another Russian navy ship in the Black Sea; this one the “Cezar Kunikov“ shown in a file photo above.

According to information released by the Ukraine armed forces, “Magura V5” drones sank the Russian warship near Alupka, Crimea as shown on the map below:

Map Crimea Ship Sunk 02 14 2024
Map Crimea Ship Sunk 02 14 2024

Below, after being hit by THREE sea drones, the ship listed onto its side and sank.

Ukraine sinks another Russian Ship 02 14 2024 2
Ukraine sinks another Russian Ship 02 14 2024 2

It’s the fourth landing ship from Russia’s Black Sea Fleet that Ukrainian military has sunk since the beginning of Russia’s Special Military Operation.  The Caesar Kunikov was a large landing ship with a crew comprising 87 personnel.

BUILT IN 86 ….38 years old 

Class and type: Ropucha-class landing ship
Displacement
2,768 long tons (2,812 t) standard
4,012 long tons (4,076 t) full load
Length 112.5 m (369 ft 1 in)
Beam 15.01 m (49 ft 3 in)
Draught 4.26 m (14 ft 0 in)
Ramps Over bows and at stern
Installed power 3 × 750 kW (1,006 hp) diesel generators
Propulsion 2 × 9,600 hp (7,159 kW) Zgoda-Sulzer 16ZVB40/48 diesel engines
Speed 17.59 knots (32.58 km/h; 20.24 mph)
Range
6,000 nmi (11,000 km; 6,900 mi) at 12 knots (22 km/h; 14 mph)
3,500 nmi (6,500 km; 4,000 mi) at 16 knots (30 km/h; 18 mph)
Endurance 30 days

CAN CARRY 10 TANKS AND 340 SOLDIERS

This Clip Will Disillusion All Young Men

Escalation In Northern Palestine

The situation on the northern Israeli border is escalating. It is likely to soon evolve into a full fledged war. The situation is already increasing the economic price Israel has to pay for its misdeeds.

The international rating agency Moody’s has downgraded Israel’s credit rating. This will lead to higher interest payments on Israeli government debt:

In a report dated last Friday but not issued until Saturday, the Jewish sabbath, the agency officially reduced Israel’s rating from A1 to A2, and added pointers of further downgrading to come. The Anglo-American press immediately reacted against Moody’s.

“Israel hits back”, the Financial Timesheadlined.  The newspaper added: “[Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, in a rare statement over the Jewish Sabbath, said: ‘The rating downgrade is not connected to the economy, it is entirely due to the fact that we are in a war. The rating will go back up the moment we win the war — and we will win the war.’” In the Associated Press report, “Israel’s finance minister blasts Moody’s downgrade”.   Rupert Murdoch’s platform Fox claimed: “Israel has a strong, open economy despite Moody’s downgrade”.  “Israel’s creditworthiness remains high,” according to the New York Times, “but the rating agency noted that the outlook for the country was negative… A rating of A2 is still a high rating.”

There are several negative issues that could lead to a further downgrading:

According to Moody’s report, “downside risks remain at the A2 rating level. In particular, the risk of an escalation involving Hezbollah in the North of Israel remains, which would have a potentially much more negative impact on the economy than currently assumed under Moody’s baseline scenario. Government finances would also be under more intense pressure in such a scenario.”

Shortly after the Moody’s report appeared Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah set out to increase the pressure on Israel:

Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hasan Nasrallah reiterated that Hezbollah will continue its border offensive against the Israeli occupation sites near Lebanon border till the Zionist barbaric war on Gaza ends.

“When the aggression on Gaza stops fire will be ceased in South Lebanon,” Sayyed Nasrallah said.

Hezbollah Secretary General commented on the recent threats made by the Zionist defense minister Yoav Gallant who said that the IOF will not stop aggression on South Lebanon even after Gaza ceasefire, stressing that, then, Hezbollah will continue its offensive.

“When the war on Gaza ends, we will stop our offensive. If the enemy resumes its hostilities, we will, act in light of the rules and the formulas.”

Nasrallah rejected western demands, passed through the Lebanese government, to pull back Hizbullah’s forces and to cease fire:

It is Hezbollah duty and responsibility to deter the enemy and prevent the assault on Lebanon, Sayyed Nasrallah affirmed, adding that the Resistance responses will be proportionate, yet effective and productive.

Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that the hundreds of thousands of settlers already displaced from the North will not be able to return to their homes in case of escalation.

‘Israel’ must prepare shelters, basements, hotels and schools to house 2 million settlers who will be displaced from northern Palestine if it expands the war zone, Sayyed Nasrallah warned.

If the Israeli enemy expands its war zone against Lebanon, Hezbollah will do too, Sayyed Nasrallah emphasized.

“It is easier to move Litani River forward to the borders than pushing back Hezbollah fighters from the borders to the Litani River,” Sayyed Nasrallah said.

More will be announced later:

Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that ‘Israel’ has failed over 130 days to achieve any target in Gaza war, except the monstrous attacks on the civilians.

Concerning the Zionist war on Gaza, Sayyed Nasrallah stressed that he will address more details about during a speech he is scheduled to deliver on Friday (February 16) the anniversary of Hezbollah Martyr Commanders.

Rarely mentioned in western news is the extend of Hizbullah’s activities against the military of the Zionist entity:

Al-Manar correspondent:

The resistance in Southern Lebanon, has so far attacked:

  • HQ of the Northern Region Command in Safad.
  • Command HQ of the 91st Galilee Division in “Branit”
  • HQ of the 769th Eastern Brigade in Kiryat Shmona.
  • Meron Air command and control base
  • Beit Hillel IOF base
  • Training camp in Kela, in the occupied Golan Heights
  • Ma’ale Golan IOF base on Mount Hermon
  • Most artillery positions along the rear front and military concentrations
  • Every single border military IOF sites

All of these attacks carried out by the resistance confirm that all military and fire pressure and Israeli threats will not deter it from continuing its operations. The resistance is proceeding with full confidence, first relaying on God, and then its military capabilities, the spirit of its fighters, and the resilience of its people.

The Safad headquarter site was only hit this morning. This followed after more Israeli attacks had hit civilian structures in southern Lebanon.

Hala Jaber @HalaJaber – 23:01 UTC · Feb 13, 2024

URGENT: #Hezbollah fired a barrage of rockets targeting an army base #Israel’s northern city of Safed.
One reportedly killed & eight wounded, one in serious condition.
The IDF said some of the rockets hit the Northern Command headquarters base in #Safed, some 13 kilometers (8 miles) from the Lebanese border.

Hitting Safad was a (mild) escalation after previous attacks.

Unlike the daily Palestinian victims of Israel’s brutality, the Israeli casualties of the strike created headlines in Israel:

An Israeli woman was killed and eight others were wounded as a barrage of rockets fired from Lebanon slammed into Safed and an army base in the northern city, the military and medical officials said.

In response to the attack, the IDF said it launched “widespread” airstrikes in Lebanon.

There was no immediate claim for the rocket fire, although it was believed to have been carried out by the Hezbollah terror group, which has been launching daily rocket, missile, and drone attacks on northern Israel in recent months, saying it is doing so in support of the Hamas terror group in Gaza, against whom Israel is waging war.

The Israel Defense Forces and Safed’s municipality said rockets hit an army base in the area, some 13 kilometers (8 miles) from the Lebanon border.

The casualty count on Israel’s northern border is still very uneven:

So far, the skirmishes on the border have resulted in six civilian deaths on the Israeli side, as well as the deaths of at least nine IDF soldiers and reservists. There have also been several attacks from Syria, without any injuries.

Hezbollah has named 194 members who have been killed by Israel during the ongoing skirmishes, mostly in Lebanon but some also in Syria. In Lebanon, another 29 operatives from other terror groups, a Lebanese soldier, and some two dozen civilians, three of whom were journalists, have been killed.

If Israel does not evacuated more settlers, at high economic costs, the casualty ratio is likely to change.

The Lebanese Hezbollah expert Amal Saad, who is currently teaching in Cardiff, Britain, explained Hizbullah’s thinking:

Amal Saad @amalsaad_lb – 10:58 UTC · Feb 14, 2024

There are several messages behind Hizbullah’s qualitatively different strike on Safed this morning, which Israel is treating as the gravest attack since the start of the war, with Ben Gvir calling it a “declaration of war”.

At the forefront, is Hizbullah’s message that it won’t capitulate to Israeli and western demands that it cease hostilities across the border, as per Nasrallah’s speech yesterday. It’s also a response to several Israeli assassination strikes in South Lebanon, reaching as deep as Sidon.

But the timing of this escalation also appears to be related to Netanyahu’s scuppering of the Paris cease-fire proposal and his government’s threats to invade Rafah, which in turn, would make a full-out attack on Lebanon more likely. Hizbullah is giving Israel a taster of the type of strikes and casualty tolls its military will have to bear, should Netanyahu continue to reject a cease-fire.

Predictably the Israeli occupation forces responded to the strike on Safad by escalating further:

The Israeli military said Wednesday its fighter jets “began a series of strikes in Lebanon”, raising fears of a war between the two countries after months of cross-border fire.

The military gave no further details of the air strikes, while Lebanese media reported air raids on southern villages including Adchit, Sawwaneh and Shihabiyeh.

The strikes came hours after fire from Lebanon wounded multiple people in northern Israel, according to medics.

Fears have been growing of another full-blown conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, with tens of thousands displaced on both sides of the border and regional tensions soaring.

“I don’t know when the war in the north is, I can tell you that the likelihood of it happening in the coming months is much higher than it was in the past,” Israeli military chief Herzi Halevi said last month.

Following the last Israeli strikes, the Lebanese side said that four civilians had been killed or wounded by them.

The increase of hostility is getting to a point where there will no longer be the question “if” another war between Israel and Hizbullah will occur but only the question of “when”.

Posted by b on February 14, 2024 at 15:23 UTC | Permalink

Who makes the best cheese burger in America?

 

Has a friend ever hurt you so badly, emotionally speaking, that you considered not being friends anymore?

Yes. This past week. She is a lot older than me but our personalities clicked. We met at work and were really close for 7 years. We both left the department we met in for new jobs but still met up every month. I supported her through breast cancer. Then we both got offered promotions in our old department. Both accepted and were so excited to be working together again. She started a month before me and struggled to settle back in, feeling old colleagues were freezing her out. I comforted her as she sobbed down the phone to me and helped her talk things through with them. Then last week I started back. One particular colleague was very angry I was back as I had given evidence in a bullying case against her involving another colleague and she got very nasty, even refusing to sit beside me in the office and screaming at caretakers to move her desk on my first day. I was very upset and intimidated. I shared my feelings with my friend. Her response was that SHE didn’t feel any toxicity and I needed to just stay away from people. Also she and this woman had now bonded because they were both new grandmothers. I was crushed and texted her about it later, saying I was hurt by what she had said. Her response was to tell me to never text her again. Fine. I figured I’d leave her to cool off and then maybe we could talk.

A couple of days later I developed chest pains in the office. It was early morning and my manager wasn’t in so I left a message on her desk and went for an Emergancy GP appointment. He sent me straight to the hospital. On the way there I was trying to get through to our office to let my manager know what was happening, but couldn’t get through on the office line. So I phoned my friend, told her I was having an emergency and couldn’t get through and asked her to tell the manager what had happened.

She said no, she couldn’t do that. And then hung up. And blocked me.

And now I’m done. Because whether we were fighting or not, I would have taken the call and helped her.

Thankfully I’m ok, it was just a torn chest muscle and pluerasy but I learned that day that some people only like you when you’re the one carrying them. And frankly, she doesn’t deserve my friendship. Don’t waste time trying to heal relationships with people who don’t value you.

 

Employers Do NOT Want To Hire Gen Z

What are the best new products or inventions that most people don’t know about?

How did a lake go from this:

image 227
image 227

to this?

image 226
image 226

The reason is this man:

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image 225

… and one incredible invention he made.

Japanese-Peruvian Marino Morikawa found that his childhood lake was contaminated and decided to put his master’s degree and Ph.D. to work. His goal was to change a plant-covered, unsanitary swamp into a place that animals and people could use.

He began by taking a break from school and taking a loan from the bank. He wanted to create something that could clean the lake. He had to use several different methods to get there, though, and research took 6 months.

One tool he tried was microbubbles. Microbubbles are tiny bubbles invisible to the naked eye. Morikawa put them into water. As they traveled up, they caught diseases and other harmful elements, acting like a spider web. Once they finally reached the surface, the bacteria were killed and the bubbles were destroyed by ultraviolet lights. Unfortunately, bubbles take hours to rise due to their size.

Another tool he used was biofilters. Biofilters work by bringing foul pollutants to the surface of a lake while leaving clean water and useful organisms at the bottom. He made his ceramic biofilters by himself in a pottery class.

Eventually, Morikawa created an organic nanotechnology compote to clean dirty water. The compote was so natural that it was even edible! Morikawa admits that it is quite expensive, but he believes that it is worth it.

To use it, one simply had to put it in dirty water and wait for about 15 minutes. This is what the water looks like before and after treatment:

image 224
image 224

Look, I’m on TV! Hi mom!

Once he had done the hardest part of the work, he was ready to clean his lake. Using homemade biofilters, the compote, and science, he was able to clean the lake in 15 days (although other sources say that cleaning the entire wetlands took 4 months).

As a result of cleaning the lake, people, over 40 species of birds, and 10 species of fish came back to inhabit it. This man should truly be respected. His efforts are not for money or fame; he simply wants to make the world a better place.

And he still wants to do more, zoning in on other polluted lakes and prioritizing Lake Titicaca. With his intelligence, passion, funding, and ingenious technologies, I think he may just be able to do it.

Nana’s Spinach and Sausage Pies

This spinach pie is a family recipe passed down for generations.  It stems from a traditional Greek (or in our case Albanian) recipe.  It calls for homemade crust, and is truly wonderful when the time is taken to make it from scratch!  But if you’d like you can substitute homemade crust for store bought Phyllo dough.

My grandmother would make this spinach pie every New Year’s day.  She would wrap a quarter or silver dollar in wax paper, and place it near the crust.  Whoever received the lucky dollar would be blessed with good luck for the year!  Before you start baking, mark the quarter with a toothpick so you know where it is and it stays in the slice.  Cut the pie, take the toothpick out, and randomly provide everyone with a slice.  Everyone uses a fork to poke through their slice to find the lucky dollar.  Don’t start eating until you find the lucky dollar, or it could become an unlucky choking hazard!

Prep Time: approx. 1 hr. 

Cook Time: approx. 40 Minutes. 

Ready in: less than 2 hours

Ingredients:

  • Pie Crust
    • 5 cups of flour
    • ½ teaspoon salt
    • 1 cup warm water
    • ½ lb melted butter
  • Filling
    • ¾ lb spinach (remove stems from the end)
    • ½ cup yogurt or cottage cheese
    • ½ lb Feta cheese
    • ½ cup parsley
    • 2-3 stems of chopped scallions
    • 3 tablespoons parsley
    • Salt & Pepper
    • 2 tablespoons butter
    • 3 eggs

If you’d like to skip making your own dough, purchase Phyllo (not country style) dough for this crust.  It’s more and more common in grocery stores these days.  It can be very thin, so use up to 10 layers on for your crust.

For homemade dough mix flour, salt, water for dough with your hands until soft.  Knead for 5 minutes.  Then place in a bowl and cover with plastic wrap for 10 minutes.

Divide the dough in half, roll it out until thin and spread with melted butter well.  Fold the sides to the center and butter again.  Now fold one half over the other and butter and fold in the opposite direction until you have a 5 inch folded square formed.  Butter the top and cover with plastic wrap.  Refrigerate for 12-15 minutes (or overnight if you’d like) and do the same with the other half.

Now it’s time to make your filling!  Just add all your filling ingredients into a bowl and mix well to make your filling.

Remove your dough from the fridge and roll out to the size of your square or round buttered pan.  A 12–15-inch pan is perfect.  Place the dough on the bottom of the pan with a ½ overlap around the edges.  Add your filling and cover with more dough.  Wrap the edges of the dough into a crust and bake uncovered at 350˚ for 30 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and a bit crispy.

I will never forget my wonderful Nana Tefta, and all the ways she showed her love.  Cooking this family recipe and giving us the joy of finding a lucky quarter was just one of the many ways she did that.

2024 02 13 17 09
2024 02 13 17 09

Ingredients

  • 1 pound sweet Italian sausage links, casing removed
  • 6 large eggs
  • 20 ounces frozen chopped spinach, thawed, squeeze dry or 1 pound fresh salad spinach leaves, stemmed
  • 1 pound mozzarella cheese, shredded
  • 5 1/2 ounces (1/2 container) ricotta cheese
  • 1/8 teaspoon pepper
  • 10 to 11 ounces piecrust mix or 2 (9-inch) deep dish pie crusts

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. Crumble sausage in a medium skillet and brown meat over medium heat, breaking up with a spoon. Drain on paper towels.
  3. If using fresh spinach, bring a large pot of water to a boil and put spinach in water. Boil 1 minute and drain; squeeze dry.
  4. Separate 1 egg. Combine 5 eggs with 1 egg white, sausage, spinach mozzarella, ricotta and pepper and set aside.
  5. Prepare pie crust mix if using. Lay 1 pie crust in pie pan and spoon mixture into it. Lay another crust on top and flute with a stand-up edge. Carefully cut a 2-inch circle out of the top crust.
  6. Mix egg yolk with 1 tablespoon water and brush on top of pie. (Can decorate with scraps of dough.)
  7. Bake for 1 hour, 10 minutes until golden and bubbly. Check crust after 1 hour and put foil on edges to prevent over-browning.
  8. Let stand for 10 minutes and cut OR chill uncovered until cold; cover and refrigerate until serving cold.

 

Internet Crazy

What was your most horrible wedding experience as a guest?

It wasn’t ‘horrible’ exactly but… maybe just odd.

When I was 15 our cleaner invited our whole family to her wedding and reception. We were friendly with her as she’d given one of our puppies a home when our dog had a litter, but we hadn’t known her long. Being 15 I didn’t really want to go, but my mum said we wouldn’t have to stay long and we would just go for the reception, dance a bit and come home. It was in the Town Hall, a big, grand room in the nearby town.

When we got there we saw the bride and groom dancing, but hardly anyone else in the room. My mum checked the time thinking we were early or late but it turns out no one had turned up! There were my parents, my two brothers and me, and then no more than 7 other people in this huge, heavily decorated room with a large buffet that would have fed around 100 people.

We felt bad for the bride and groom so tried to make up for the lack of people by dancing and eating a lot, but they were acting as if it was totally normal. They seemed to be having a really good time. After a while a couple of people left and the 5 of us in my family made up half of the guests! I felt very awkward, and instead of staying an hour or two we had to stay the whole night, all the while pretending we were having a great time.

We found out later the reason no one had showed – it turns out that the bride and groom had been married before. In fact, they’d been married and divorced 9 times! The reception we went to was their tenth wedding… which explains why none of their family and friends wanted to waste anymore time on them. A match made in heaven! I wonder if they are still married, or how many more weddings they’ve racked up now…

Putin on the Collapse of the Dollar as the World’s Reserve Currency

 

What is the greatest display of kindness you have witnessed in your life?

I was at a thrift store, just looking around for anything interesting.

Standing in the entrance area was a mother with a baby and a toddler, and a large toy chest she had just purchased, which was sitting in her cart.

Thus she had a dilemna.

The baby was too small to walk, so she had to carry the baby. The toy chest was too big to carry one-handed, and too big to allow the baby to sit in the cart with it. Even if she could carry the baby and the toy chest, the toddler’s hand needed held in this busy parking lot.

What to do?

The thrift store was especially busy that day. People walked in, gave her situation a glance, and kept walking. She stood there for at least five minutes (which doesn’t seem very long, but it seems like a long time if you’re just standing there), occasionally trying to pick up the chest. Not a single person stopped to help.

A family walked into the store. They all gave the woman a glance and kept walking, just as the others had.

Well, most of the family kept walking.

A teenager slipped away from the family and went up to the woman.

“Hey. You need some help?”

The teen carried that toy chest all the way to the woman’s car. I saw the woman pull out her wallet, and the teenager backed away, waving their hands.

Any show of kindness is great in the eye of the recipient.

 

You’re Not Broken, The Dating World Is

What did your boss do that you decided to quit?

One and only time I ever left a job because of a boss was when I was doing software engineering at a major aerospace company on contract.

The direct manager was a micro-manager and apparently didn’t have a life outside of work.

He would take home the code listings of that day’s work from his team members to do “code reviews.’

The next morning you would get back your listings with “suggested changes” in red pencil.

You would dutifully spend the first half of the day coding and testing the suggested changes then try and make some new progress before turning the day’s listing back to the boss.

The next day it would start all over again except, more often than not, the day’s “suggested changes” basically had you putting the code back to the way you had it to begin with.

I implemented my own code management system so I could easily roll back changes.

I lasted all of a year before finding a new job.

When I became a people manager some years later I used the experience as a life lesson of the kind of manager NOT to become.

The Pathology of America: Dehumanization, Greed, and the Decline of Empire

Goals for the new year

This is a a year of the wood dragon. It is a great expanse of opportunity for the well prepared explorer.

I suggest that everyone have goals.

That everyone have planned affirmation campaigns.

That everyone understands their career, work and fiances.

We cannot predict the future; as it is the nature of our thoughts that direct our actions. We can only play the gravitational influences; our Fate Forecasting.

Review yours today. Take note of the auspicious months and the inauspicious months.

A book, a journal… helps.

Note that I also have a new youtube channel. It is 100% devoted ONLY to affirmation campaigns. I think I have something like 15 to 20 videos already posted up on it.

HERE IS MY NEW CHANNEL

Please like and subscribe!

Today…

 

As a surgeon, have you opened somebody up only to realise that they were beyond saving?

Unfortunately, yes.

There was this patient, 55 year old guy. He came with acute abdominal pain. The patient was in severe distress and the vitals weren’t good even at presentation. He was way too unstable to get a CT scan so we went ahead with just an Ultrasound.

Ultrasound wasn’t very conclusive but it suggested intestinal obstruction. The patient was just getting worse and worse so we gave him initial resuscitation and decided to open him. We were prepared to face unexpected scenarios. But we weren’t prepared for what it actually was.

As soon as we entered the abdominal cavity, copious amounts of reddish liquid oozed out. A little deeper and there it was..about 80% of his stomach, duodenum, the entire small intestine a portion of ascending and transverse colon were almost black in colour.

Every surgeon’s arch nemesis…Superior Mesentric Artery thrombosis.

But in this case Stomach was also involved. Basically, the blood supply to his stomach and his entire small intestine and parts of large intestine was compromised. Due to this the parts were ischaemic. There is nothing you can do in this situation. If there was enough healthy gut remaining we would have just cut out the dead part and anastomosed the healthy parts. There just wasn’t enough healthy gut here. So we just closed the patient up, informed the relatives and sent the patient back to the ICU where he passed away a few hours later, surrounded by his family.

It’s very disheartening for a surgeon to accept there’s nothing you can do for the patient in front of you. But then, a good surgeon knows when to cut but the best ones know when not to. Just operating when we knew he wouldn’t survive the procedure would have led to him dying on the table.

At least buy closing him up he could pass away surrounded by his family. And believe me, that matters. That matters to the patient and that matters to the family. And while I was heartbroken at losing my patient, it gave me the tiniest bit of satisfaction knowing that we could give that family the last few hours with him. And, hopefully, we could give them closure.

 

This is a new trend…

Girls flashing. Showing a bare back and some side boob.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Z6U4E8hM6_8?feature=share

Has a cop ever said something to you which was completely unexpected?

Yes.

First one: I was a single mom and my daughter’s father never paid a dime in child support. When she was very young, I was pretty destitute. Needed my car to get to and from work, but couldn’t afford to pay for insurance. My car was such an old beater that I couldn’t pass the emissions test, and couldn’t afford the $150 worth of repairs required to get a waiver. And I couldn’t replace my expired license tabs without either passing emissions or getting the waiver.

So, I spent $25 on a temporary 3-day pass and put a layer of tape over it. Put another layer of tape over the first one and wrote a date 3-days out on the top layer of tape. Every 3 days, I would replace the top layer of tape and write a new date.

I was out late visiting friends one night and got pulled over by the police on my way home. They shined their light on my temporary pass and my heart sank. Officer asked for my license, registration, and proof of insurance. After handing them my license (and hoping they would forget about the rest), he said he pulled me over because my temporary pass was expired. I knew the date was good until the next day, so I said, “Officer, are you sure? I’m pretty certain it doesn’t expire until tomorrow”.

The officer looks at his watch and says, “My apologies, ma’am, you still have 15 minutes”. And he let me leave.

Second one: Two weeks later, I’m driving that same old beater (with freshly dated tape), it’s dark and raining, and some guy comes speed-racing around me while an officer is headed in my direction and the officer immediately hangs a U-turn. I thought he was going after the guy that was speeding, but no, he pulled me over!!

Asks for my license which I had in a zippered pouch with a ton of other cards (debit, credit and store rewards cards), and spent a long time rummaging to try and find it, the officer becoming more impatient and angrier by the second. I finally found it and presented it to the officer. He glances at it and then asks for proof of insurance. So, I decide to play it off, and I tell him, “That will be another few minutes, officer”. I opened my glove box, and right on queue, it vomited paperwork all over the floor of my car. The officer now has a great big “Frankenstein vein” pulsing on his forehead and he shouts “Never mind, I”m letting you off with a warning this time”. LOL, never did say why he pulled me over or what the warning was for!!

You are inferior

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/O5_1pgq7LLM?feature=share

Caldo Verde (Cabbage Soup)

Many soups of Italy, like this one, are served at the table with a jug of olive oil. The cabbage must be very finely sliced because it is barely cooked.

2024 02 13 10 33
2024 02 13 10 33

Ingredients

  • 1 pound potatoes
  • 1 pound green cabbage, finely sliced
  • Water
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • Salt, to taste

Instructions

  1. Peel and cook potatoes in just enough salted water to cover them. Blend potatoes with their cooking water. Thin with more water if necessary. You should have a medium consistency.
  2. Add cabbage and olive oil.
  3. Cook uncovered for 5 minutes, until the cabbage is lightly cooked. It should be a little crisp.

Notes

Serve with a jug of olive oil.

 

Delusion

She’s in her early 20’s, but she will end up with lots and lots and lots of cats.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BhRNoGG2l2Q?feature=share

Why are Indian breakfasts so heavy as compared to the Western ones?

Size of breakfast is not a country thing. It’s a class thing.

In the west, Blue collar workers, people who work outside, or work with their hands tend to have a huge breakfast, small lunch and huge dinner. This is because during lunch time, they may not have access to refrigeration, and hence might have to take something for lunch that doesn’t​;t spoil. Or they may not be in a place where they can sit down and eat, so they take things that are easy to eat. So, they load up on calories in the morning. Physical labor requires a lot of calories

This is a “lumberjack” breakfast from Denny’s. Lumberjacks are people who go into the woods to cut trees. They need lot of calories

image 170
image 170

White collar workers, OTH, tend to eat all thought out the workday. If they are not having lunch, they are either snacking or having coffee. This is because their environment gives them free access to food. As a result, they don’t load up on calories in the morning.

This is what a white collar worker typically eats in the morning

image 169
image 169

 

 

What type of person angers you the most?

My friend and I were patiently waiting for our food at the table. As it was a self-service cafe, we got a number showing our order, and when it was announced we needed to collect it ourselves.

The number came up, and we went to collect our dishes.

Lo and behold, as we turned our backs a group of ladies gracefully lowered our bags on the floor and sat at our table.

Mind you, the whole process was less than a minute.

When we went back, we gently but firmly asked them to move.

“Oi, how am I supposed to know you guys are sitting here? You think by putting your bags here it’s your space?”

“Excuse m…”

“This is a public space and we can sit anywhere we want. Don’t think tha..”

BAM. I put my bowl down loudly. Everyone who wasn’t paying attention before turned their heads. She froze in shock.

“You saw our bags, you saw us take our food, and you threw our stuff on the floor. I will make a larger fuss of this unless. You. Move. From. My. Place.

They sheepishly left, leaving my pal and me to eat peacefully.


If you use your privileges to justify rude behaviour, you are just waiting for trouble to erupt.

Do not mess with a hungry person.

 

Bye Bye USA

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3Jc9iIAkO-A?feature=share

What happens to a bullet if it is shot into the air?

Tested on Mythbusters. Shot straight up, the bullet will climb and decelerate as it loses energy, at the top, the bullet will have zero energy and tumble back to earth, landing in the vicinity of the firing point. the bullet will experience atmospheric drag on the way up and the way down. There will be more drag on the way down due to the tumbling. The impact velocity will be the terminal velocity of the bullet. It will give you a nasty bump on your noggin, but not kill you.

Fired at any angle other than straight up, the bullet will retain enough energy over the top of its ballistic arc to come back down in a stable spin, and cause injury or death.

Under ideal circumstances (no wind, fired exactly straight up) the bullet returns to the location from which it was fired at the same velocity as the muzzle velocity.

Edit: (Yes, I’m a dumbass). The bullet returns to the location it was fired from at terminal velocity of a falling object, not muzzle velocity. I must have taken my stupid pill that morning.

The fact that the bullet tumbled on the way down both causes the bullet to slow down more and to have a higher likelihood of impacting on its side (larger impact area).

Short answer. Don’t try this at home.

Feel Good Music


Peter Thomas Orchestra – “Chariots of Gods Theme (Erinnerungen an die Zukunft)” (epic melody, 1970)
The Birdwatchers – “I Have No Worried Mind” (sunshine pop, 1966)
Georges Delerue – “Curly Sue Interlude” (instrumental, 1991)
Ray Davis & His Button-Down Brass – “A Taste Of Honey” (jazzy instrumental, 1964)
Agnetha Faltskog – “Disillusion” (beautiful song, 1973)
The Superficials – “Gone” (indie pop, 2001)
Claude Thornhill & His Orchestra – “If I Had A Ribbon Bow – Maxine Sullivan” (so smooth, 1939)
The Fireballs – “Light In The Window” (great pop, 1965)
The Objections (Sweden) – “I’m Through” (psych pop, 1966)
Juan Martin – “Romanza”, “Last Farewell” from “Serenade” LP (awesome orchestral pop, 1984)
The Quid – “Mersey-Side” (Merseybeat instrumental, 1963)
Mantovani & His Orchestra – “Theme From Moulin Rouge” (instrumental, 1959)
Drupi – “Sereno E” (classic song, Italy 1974)
Lewis & Clark Expedition – “Daddy’s Plastic Child” (psych-sunshine pop, 1967)
Pino Donaggio – Music from “Botte di Natale”: “Travis”, “The Prairie” (epic western, 1994)
XTC – “The Disappointed” (great power pop, UK 1992)
The Charles Kingsley Creation – “Summer Without Sun” (Joe Meek pop, 1964)
The Tornados – “Dragonfly” (nice instrumental, 1964)
Peter & Gordon – “Go To Pieces” (Merseybeat, 1965)
Secret Service – “Destiny Of Love” (romantic pop, 1983)
Enigma – “Prism Of Life”, “Beyond The Invisible” (epic stuff, 1997)
Johann Sebastian Bach – Cantata BWV 1, First Chorale (by Georg Christoph Biller) (baroque, 1724)
The Ventures – “Telstar” (classic instrumental, 1963)

Crowded House – “Not The Girl You Think You Are” (great song, 1992)
Ray Conniff & His Orchestra – “Taking A Chance On Love ” (happy tune, 1965)
Michel Legrand – “Chanson du Prince (sung by Jean-Pierre Savelli) from “Peau d’Ane” movie (romantic song, 1970)
Ennio Morricone – “Canzone Per Donatella” from “Quando L’amore e Sensualita” (piano instrumental, 1973)
Linus Of Hollywood – “When I Get To California” (neo-sunshine pop, 1999)
Guido & Maurizio De Angelis – “Trinity Stand Tall” song, from “Continuavano a chiamarlo Trinita” (western, Italy 1972)
Jean Sibelius – Symphony No.1, 1st Movement” (epic orchestral piece, 1899)
The Fredric – “Saturday Morning in Rain” (rare pop psych, 1968)
The New Colony Six – “The Time Of The Year Is Sunset” (haunting psych, 1966)
Ferrante & Teicher – “You’re Too Much” (romantic instrumental, 1959, here)
The Cleves – “You And Me” (pop psych, 1968, New Zealand)
Johann Sebastian Bach – “Cantata BWV 204 “Ich Bin In Mir Vergnügt”, by Ton Koopman / Ruth Holton (beautiful arias, 1724)
Cilla Black – “Something Tells Me” (sunshine pop, UK 1967)
Richard Alden & His Orchestra – “‘S Wonderful” (cool instrumental, here)
Paul Mauriat – “L’Avventura” (instrumental, 1972)
Justin Hayward – “Day Must Come” (sunshine pop, UK 1966)
18th Century Corporation – “Message To Michael” (“Bacharach Baroque”, 1968)
Johann Sebastian Bach – “Cantata BWV 8, Finale Choral” by Masaaki Suzuki (baroque, 1724)
Carlo Savina – “Le Nochi Buena” from “Le calde notti di Don Giovanni” (relaxing, 1971)
The Stone Country – “Everywhere I Turn” (US pop psych, 1968)
Carlo Rustichelli – Main Title from “Avanti” (happy melody, Italy 1972)
Duran Duran – “Last Chance On The Stairway”, “Save A Prayer” (new wave, synth pop, UK 1982)
Antonio Vivaldi – “Concerto No.5 in E minor, RV280: III. Allegro” (great baroque, 1712)
Foxx – “Sunshine Children” (happy little tune, 1970)
Zack Hemsey – “Mind Heist” (absolutely epic, 2010 – here)

Fat stores

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lZez8PIskg8?feature=share

Fine drawing

This wonderful drawing of the satisfied cat (thinking “I should buy a boat”, perhaps?) was made back in 1899 (published in Russian children magazine “Svetlyachok”):

image 165
image 165

 

Were Allied troops really mowed down while landing in Normandy like in the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan?

My grandfather, third from the right in the picture below. He was 19 when he was supposed to hit Omaha. His troop carrier was hit on the way in and he swam in with absolutely nothing. The story he told was this: I got up on the beach and laid down behind a big piece of wood that was part of a blown up something. He’d had to come out of all of his gear to keep from drowning. He was trying to calm down and figure out what to do when this old crusty major walked up like it was a beautiful day on the beach and asked him what in the hell he was doing. Bullets are zipping around and explosions everywhere, people screaming and this guy looks like there’s not a thing in the world happening. Grandpa says “I don’t know what to do! I’ve lost all my gear.” The major says “ There’s gear everywhere, boy! Start picking shit up and get off of this beach now!” So he did. He said he grabbed every loose rifle, pistol, backpack, satchel, everything and got as far up the beach as he could.

When Saving Private Ryan came out, he wanted to go see it. He and my Grandma went, about 10 minutes in he got up and Grandma asked him where he was going? He said “Home. It hasn’t been long enough yet.”

He was transferred to Patton’s army and went all the way to Czechoslovakia. I’m pretty sure he was in Belgium when this picture was taken. It’s used as the cover photo for a book called Steel Victory by Harry Yeide. Grandpa went through it and noted all the battles he’d fought in that were mentioned in the book.

image 168
image 168
image 167
image 167

Edit: thanks for all the upvotes and comments. It’s amazing that a simple thing like this can get so many votes.
Another quick story about the above picture. They were lazing around in the halftrack when the photographer came by and asked to get that picture. They all started digging rifles out and the guy on the very end couldn’t find his rifle. Somebody told him just to carry the BAR (I think that’s what he said but I’m not an expert in war weapons so it might be something different. Regardless, it’s the biggest gun and the smallest guy according to grandpa ) because nobody would know any better back home. Grandpa thought it was funny that the smallest guy had the biggest gun.

Edit 2: Several people have asked about the Major who sent Grandpa off the beach. I asked my Uncle about it and he said Grandpa never mentioned a name and probably didn’t even know his name. If anybody reads this and had a family member who was a walking, talking, badass Major getting men off of Omaha Beach, let me know.

 

Laundry hacks

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/j6-UY24Qepg?feature=share

What’s the most insignificant amount of power you’ve seen get to someone’s head?

I once worked with a teacher who thought it was a huge deal that she was the only teacher at the school who was allowed to use the laminator. She only had that position for logistical reasons… the laminator took a long time to warm up, so it made sense to do all of the laminating at the same time.

So, if you needed something laminated, you had to give it to her and, once per week, she’d fire up the laminator and run everything through it.

I have never once, in my decade of teaching, needed anything laminated. Not once.

Still, she brought up her position as “official school laminator” on a monthly basis. She was so proud of it. She’d email us updates about her pile of things to be laminated.

“I have a big pile this week, so, if you need something laminated, get it to me now. I’m going to start early so I can get this all done.”

It wouldn’t surprise me if she even had it on her resume.

Jane Smith, English Teacher, Director of Laminating, Girls’ Lacrosse Coach

The Big Show

Posted on


One of the novel things about this age is the role played by carnival acts in reinforcing public morality and shaping public opinion. With the exception of ancient Athens, human societies assigned entertainers a low status. After all, we still have the expression, “run away to the circus”, even though we no longer have the circus. The idea behind that expression is you reach such a degraded state that you literally leave decent society and join the low status world of the circus.

In modern America and the West in general, the circus not only plays a central role in society, but the circus performers also have enormous influence. So much so, in fact, the most powerful people want to be friends with the popular carnies. Every president has a stream of carnies coming through the White House, often attending state dinners with important foreign leaders. Carnies have even turned up in Ukraine, getting a special welcome by the Ukrainian dictator.

Of course, we have just had the biggest circus event on the American calendar, which is the Super Bowl, the title game of the NFL. According to the people in charge, almost all Americans stop what they are doing to watch the spectacle. The Super Bowl party has become something of an industry. Americans spend over $15 billion on parties that host three quarters of all adults. Naturally, all the important carnies seek a way to be part of what is the biggest carnie act of the year.

It is popular to compare the Super Bowl to the Roman games, maybe even dusting off Juvenal’s line about bread and circuses. There is some truth to that, but the Roman games were nothing compared to American entertainment. The games were a distraction for the masses and important people, but the performers were never treated like the modern celebrity or athlete. The performers in the arena were low status and important people made sure they remained so.

This is the great innovation of America. Entertainment has become a church at which the morality of the day is preached to the audience. It is easy to see at the Super Bowl, where moral messaging is everywhere. In the end zones there was a message about ending racism, a hobgoblin of the modern elites. There were ads about other hobgoblins like antisemitism, bullying and Gaia. They have your attention, so they make sure to let you know what you ought and ought not be doing.

Then you have the appeals to unity, by which they mean conformity. At the start of the game, you get patriotic songs. They even have something called the “The Black National Anthem” which is supposed to shame whites and remind them they can never be forgiven for the sin of whiteness. In a prior age, parishioners were told they were at the mercy of an angry God. Today they are told they are at the mercy of angry minorities, which is far more terrifying than an angry god.

When these songs are played at the start of the game, the players, who should only care about winning, make themselves cry and look moved by the program. This is where you see the supremacy of carny life. The star players know this game is really an audition for them to join the media circus or possibly get a brand going so they can be a celebrity past their playing career. Everyone wants to run away to the circus, even people already in the circus.

You see the warping power of the circus with the public romance of Chiefs player Kelce Travis and middle-aged warbler Taylor Swift. She is a super famous pop star, but she can always be more famous, so dating a famous sports star, especially one who gets to perform in the big circus, is good business. The NFL loves it and makes sure to feature this totally authentic romance in their shows. Any bets on whether these two love birds manage to build a life together?

All of this is the product of democracy. In theory, democracy is about convincing fifty percent plus one. In order to do that, you need to get the attention of the public, which is why celebrity becomes the coin of the democratic realm. The only way you can have a chance to influence anyone is by getting on the stage and you do that by getting everyone’s attention. Carnies live to get attention, so it does not take long before they take center stage in the democratic process.

It is why our politicians are mostly actors playing a role. The producers of the political shows are no different from the people who make movies, television shows or produce extravaganzas like the Super Bowl. They select people who can play the role, which often means picking people who will not question the script. Oklahoma senator James Lankford was picked because he is not smart enough to question things. He looks the part, and he reads his lines. That is why he is in the Senate.

It is easy to be critical of mass democracy, but the Super Bowl shows how powerful it is at controlling the masses. More people care about why Travis Kelce wore a suit made from garbage bags than the fact Joe Biden is non compos mentis. More important, it encourages the masses to empty their wallets in order to see the next show that the ruling elite will stage for them. Mass democracy is where the ruling elite charge the masses to be the masses.

For most of human history, carnies were relegated to the fringes of society because the running of society was too important to do otherwise. Today the running of society is over on the fringes, in the shadows where no one looks, because the carnies are now at the center of society. Maybe this is how the great experiment with participatory government is supposed to end. The masses think their voice matters, but in reality, no one cares, just as long as they pay full price for their ticket.

 

Sigma and Alpha males

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/aC-4rjRWkhQ?feature=share

Why would a teacher question a 6-year-old about her gender?

Look… I’m 100% in favor of you being whatever gender you are. Once upon a time (maybe five years ago?) I was easily able to tell what gender a student was 99% of the time. I won’t pretend that I didn’t make mistakes here and there, but it was pretty damned rare. Every year for the last several years, I’ve had transgender students. In general, if you’re sensitive to it and you honestly do your level best to treat them with respect as to the gender they identify themselves as, you’re fine.

But here’s the problem: the English language has these tricky things called “pronouns.” Those pronouns are gendered.

Let’s say that I have a student named Jaime. Jaime looks stereotypically male, buuuuuut you’ve heard from other students that Jaime identifies as female. So what do you do? You can ignore it and only call Jaime by name, but that’s awkward and clearly avoids the issue… which is a bit disrespectful. You can call Jaime by male pronouns, but now you’re being an asshole if Jaime identifies as female. You can call Jaime by female pronouns, but that could really set a boy off if you call him by female pronouns. You could go with a gender-neutral pronoun, but “it” is daaaaaamned insulting.

You know… you could pull Jaime aside and say, “So… here’s the deal… I’m going to let you know that this is a safe place and I’m okay with you being whoever you want to be. I have been hearing rumors that you want to be called by female pronouns. Is that correct? Cool. Sounds good to me. I’ll do my best to honor your wishes.”

Except… now people are upset because you’re “questioning a six-year-old about his/her gender.”

You just can’t win.

Fortunately “people” aren’t my boss. I don’t serve them. I serve my students, so I’ll just continue to do… whatever it is that I already do.

Truth

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3qW2gBE93Z4?feature=share

Crossover: Dieselpunk + Retrofuture, by Victor-Albert Bouffort



“Victor-Albert Bouffort was an aeronautics engineer who took it upon himself to design and build some pretty crazy cars in the years after WWII. The first was this magnificent streamlined three-wheeler based on a Citroen Traction-Avant”. Read this good article about this man here.

2024 02 13 10 23
2024 02 13 10 23

 

What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?

It wasn’t exactly a loophole, but it was something I exploited the hell out of. I wanted a new snowmobile, and they offered nothing down, and no payments for two years, interest free. I couldn’t get a discount for cash, so I took the deal. This was quite a few years ago. The sled was $4000, so I put the $4000 in a GIC guaranteed investment certificate, at 5 percent for two years, ending a couple of days before the first payment was due.

The deal was that as long as you paid for your snowmobile before the two years was up, you didn’t have to pay interest. But if you owed 1 penny on the snowmobile after two years, you owed 19.99 percent a year for 2 years on the entire $4000.

So this was a bit of a stress, but manageable. I had a cash back credit card, and I paid off my snowmobile with the credit card, and got 1 percent cash back. I had also received another points credit card, that allowed me to transfer the credit card balance from another credit card interest free for 6 months, during the first month after I activated it. So when my credit card was due, I transferred the balance. I still had to pay for all my purchases, but the transfer was kept separate.

When the six months was up, my line of credit offered me zero interest for three months, on any money I borrowed that month.

But I figured I had already pushed the system as far as I could.

So at the end of two years and seven months, I had earned $400 interest and $40 in cash back, plus points, on my snowmobile.

I could have made it to at least 2 years and 10 months interest free, But I was starting to think I would forget, and miss a payment and I would wreck my credit rating, so I called it quits.

Fool-proof

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/wYY1eIJzwSI?feature=share

“You Didn’t Even Post. So What Did You Do Today?”

I have had no idea what serious issue to post about today.

But this:

When I say that running MoA is a full time job it raises doubts and I may even get laughed at. But it is. Even when I don’t post.

I have to read, every day, a large number of pieces and/or watch videos to collect new ideas. It takes time to process those into conscious contexts and then those into blog posts.

Today, like every day, I have of course skimmed over of the usual mainstream stuff, NYT and WaPo nonsense, but found little in it to take note of.

I then skimmed through the comments at this blog and cleared up the spam list.

Then I walked through what my various news feeds provide. It is often quite a lot.

Here is what I consumed (read or watched) today and found worthy enough to copy URL, headline and some excerpts.

Middle East:

Ukraine-Russia:

China:

Other stuff:

That is all I did for the day. It feels like a lot. And that was without writing a real piece for the blog.

Oh, not to forget – I also bought food and prepared a meal for myself.

Later today I will read the Strana.news summary of the day (usually out at 18:00 UTC). At 20:30 UTC I will listen to Dima’s Military Summary (well, at least to the first 10 minutes of it).

Then it will finally be the end of my day.

So what did you do today?

Posted by b on February 12, 2024 at 17:46 UTC | Permalink

 

Is there still fear towards China in the Western world, now that it has become a global superpower? If so, what are the reasons for this fear and to what extent does it exist?

There is nothing to fear about China attacking you, or stealing your land or colonising you or bombing you indiscriminately. There is nothing to even fear about China being authoritarian or bullying you or stealing your intellectual property.

But you are right to fear China will learn fast, with work hard, will build the best infrastructure, will send their children to the best school, will work very hard and stay disciplined and whatever you do Chinese can do better, faster and cheaper.

With 1.4 billion people or 4 times the U.S. population, or double the western world, China will overtake you and beat you in everything you do! They cannot be stopped unless you are ready to lose your limbs! China will be wealthier, more successful, more modern, efficient and effective than you.

But you were made to have irrational fears and thoughts to make you forget your failings and the consequences of your over exaggerated expectations of yourself set by your own hubris and xenophobic tendencies that is fanned by western media. It exists everywhere in the west and particularly the Anglophone world.

Let me be honest to you. So that you don’t live under the rock anymore. China has overtaken you in every sense of the world. China is in fact the leader and the most powerful nation now! Never mind the flawed GDP and the self deception. But the good news is China don’t want you dead. China only want to keep selling to you!

Instant Mail Delivery, 1964 style:

image 166
image 166

 

Have you ever been rude to someone and thought that you were right in doing so?

Oh, yes!

It was about 30 years ago, and I was having my car cleaned at a very big car wash. When the cars came out of the wash tunnel, they were placed in one of 5 lines, where men were busily wiping the cars down. When it was done, the guys would wave their towel for you to retrieve your vehicle.

Now these were mostly Hispanic men (it was in So Cal), and most spoke little to no English. My car was in the middle lane. There was a car in front of mine, a luxury make that I can’t remember. The detailer waved me to my car, but I was stuck. The driver (a woman) was inspecting her car, and making another detailer redo where she would point. I am a patient person, but I truly was boxed in and couldn’t move until she did.

She’d lean close and point to another spot. This went on for at least 6 minutes. I was getting pretty annoyed, and finally, on a whim, I pulled out a $10 bill (keep in mind that most tips at that time were between $1–2. I got out of my car, walked over to the hard-working detailer, and handed the 10 spot to him, saying (loud enough for it to be heard by the woman) “Here, that’s for you, because you know that b@#$h won’t be tipping you.” I turned and walked back to my car, to scattered applause from other car owners who had been watching the whole scene.

The detailer quickly pocketed the cash, and the woman got into her car, slammed the door, and took off.

Pasta Fagioli

This classic Pasta e Fagioli is maybe the perfect pantry soup! With canned tomatoes, canned beans and pasta. A bit of pancetta is added, for a salty note and of course, cheese in the form of Parmesan or Pecorino.

Enjoy this hearty, easy pasta fagioli soup for a hearty lunch, or add a crusty bread (or garlic bread) and a salad for a lovely pantry dinner.

pasta fagioli 1200 55
pasta fagioli 1200 55

Ingredients

  • 12 ounces Santa Fe chicken sausage, halved lengthwise and sliced
  • 3 cups fat-free, less-sodium chicken broth
  • 1/2 cup uncooked small seashell pasta
  • 2 cups coarsely chopped zucchini (about 2 small zucchini)
  • 1 (14.5 ounce) can stewed tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 teaspoon dried basil
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 1 (15 ounce) can kidney beans, rinsed and drained
  • 1/3 cup (about 1 1/2 ounces) shredded asiago cheese

Instructions

  • Step 1: Brown the pancetta or bacon.
  • Step 2: Add the diced onion and celery and cook until softened.
  • Step 3: Add the garlic and herbs.
  • Step 4: Add some tomato paste and cook for another minute.
  • Step 5: Add the canned tomatoes.
  • Step 6: Add the rinsed beans.
  • Step 7: Cook the tomatoes and the beans together for about 10 minutes. *You can make ahead up to this point and refrigerate to finish when ready to eat later.
  • Step 8: Add the broth.
  • Step 9: Add the pasta and cook until the pasta is tender, about 10 minutes. Serve immediately.

FAQ

  • What kind of pasta can I use in this soup? Any small pasta is fine. I’ve used Ditalini pasta here. Small shells, macaroni or even orzo would work as well.
  • Can I use a different kind of bean? Absolutely, use what you have. Red kidney, navy, great northern or pinto beans would be great options.
  • Can I use canned whole tomatoes instead of diced? Yes. Just hand crush them before adding to the soup.
  • What is a Parmesan rind? It’s just the harder, darker outside of a Parmesan wedge. I like to keep the ends in a bag in my fridge for just these uses. If yours doesn’t have a rind, just cut off a chunk of the Parmesan and use that. No fresh Parmesan? Just stir a few Tbsp of grated Parmesan into the soup instead.

Top Tip

I feel like a bit of a broken record, but I’m going to say it again 🙂 Be sure to properly season your soup at the end of cooking. Taste it. If it tastes bland or flat, it needs salt. Some freshly ground pepper is nice, too. Need a touch more oregano? Stir that in at the end as well. And finally, top this soup with shavings of extra Parmesan (vs. grated). The hit of Parmesan is so lovely in this soup. Use your vegetable peeler to shave it on top before serving.

  1. Heat a large saucepan over high heat. Add sausage; cook 2 minutes, stirring constantly.
  2. Add broth and pasta; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer 4 minutes.
  3. Add zucchini and tomatoes; bring to a boil. Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 2 minutes.
  4. Stir in basil, oregano and beans; cover and simmer for 3 minutes or until pasta and zucchini are tender.
  5. Sprinkle with cheese.
pasta e fagioli process
pasta e fagioli process

Yield: 5 servings (serving size: about 1 1/3 cups soup and about 1 tablespoon asiago cheese)

pasta fagioli 4 3 55
pasta fagioli 4 3 55

 

Simple

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FesnUDdeORc?feature=share

Have you ever seen a mass exodus after a respected employee quit or got fired?

I was the nursing director for two large units at a Level 1 Trauma Center. I was “offered” a wonderful opportunity to move to a newly created Nurse Research position – same pay grade, same salary. Now, I am 100% not a research minded person. I realized that this was a move by Nursing Administration to get me out of the unit director position. Since I was two years away from retirement, I took it.

There was a HUGE going away party since I had been at the hospital for 25 years at that point. Many nurses that I had hired and mentored had moved to other positions, management, education, etc…. The next week, five of the most seasoned nurses transferred to other units in the hospital. A month later, another four left to go traveling and specifically said in their exit interview and on social media that they were leaving because I wasn’t there. It was quite satisfying. I tolerated the position for two years and then I retired. At my retirement party, I looked across the room and realized that almost 100% of the Staff (nursing and others) had been hired by me over the years.

So I would call the exodus of the most experienced nurses – the ones who oriented, mentored, clinical experts, informal leaders – a max exodus.

 

Belief

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/apOhIzziIsg?feature=share

As a teacher, had you ever had to enforce rules implemented by the school or district that you thought were ridiculous?

Yes, of course.

I’m upfront about this with my students, too.

“Look, kids, I didn’t make this rule, and I think it’s a stupid rule, but I am paid to enforce it, so do me a favor and just go along with it, okay?”

You’d be surprised at how many middle schoolers are receptive to that kind of frankness. Not all of the students… there’s always going to be the kids who like to push boundaries and break rules for the sake of pushing boundaries and breaking rules… but the majority of students are cool with you if you’re cool with them about these things.

The worst “stupid rule” I had to enforce was about seven years ago, when I worked at a school that was on the verge of closing, for a principal that was on the verge of retiring. Her retirement was about a decade too late, I thought. She’d been in education since the 1960s, and expected students to act the same in 2012 as they did back when she first started in the field.

Among the stupid rules I had to enforce:

  • Absolutely zero talking in the hallway while switching classes. Her office was at the end of the hallway, and she didn’t believe in closing her door for anything. She just expected 150 students aged 11–14 to all go into the hall at the same time, go to their lockers, and go to their next class in complete silence. Teachers had to stand by their doors to enforce this unenforceable stupid rule. We had faculty meetings every week, and almost every week, we were spoken down to about not enforcing the silence in the halls during passing periods. We were enforcing it as best we could. She just didn’t get that students these days don’t have that kind of self control or concern for rules they think are stupid.
  • All student work had to be in cursive. Even when I was a kid in the 1980s, they didn’t enforce the cursive writing rule. They taught us how to write in cursive in third grade, and by fifth grade, no one cared if we stuck with it. So I didn’t. I struggle to read cursive writing when the students do it. I prefer print. Most of the students preferred to print. But she insisted on everything being in cursive, because that’s how it was when she was a kid.
  • Faculty may not leave the school during their planning periods or lunch breaks. I once drove down the street to get a coffee during my planning period, and, when I came back, all of the students were in the parking lot for a fire drill. She saw me, and threatened to fire me if I ever did it again. I still did it. I’m an adult, and I can do what I damn well please during my breaks. If principals want to start with the “planning periods must be used only for planning” business, then I’ll just start with the “okay, then I am doing absolutely zero planning or grading at home in the evenings and on the weekends.” The truth is that most teachers… most of them I know, at least… do the majority of their grading and planning at home on the weekends and evenings. There is no way planning periods would cover all of it.

 

Gonzalo Lira Has Now Died After Trying to Flee Ukraine

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/lWZ2HBMzfqY?feature=share

What is the funniest joke you’ve been told that you still think about to this day?

A young wife met her husband at the door when he came home from work, “Honey I tried getting something from the shelves in the garage, and everything fell over. Can you clean it up for me please? “ Husband just grunted and said “Who do I look like, Mr. Clean?” Two days later wife is at the door again. :Honey my car is smoking and making weird noises. Can you look at it please? Husband grunted ”Who do I look like, Mr. Goodwrench?” A few days later he is feeling guilty and comes home and announces. “ Hey honey I picked up everything needed to clean the garage and fix your car.” Wife said, Don’t bother it’s taken care of, the man next door did it for me.” Husband, ”Why would he do that?” Wife, I offered to bake him a cake or have sex.” Husband exclaimed. “What kind of cake did you make!’ Wife “ Who do I look like? BETTY CROCKER!

 

What are some problems that only boys face?

  1. The problem of scratching your balls in public.
  2. We can’t pleasure ourselves with everyday household items. For us, bananas are only meant to be eaten.
  3. If a man walks behind a woman on the street, she may think he is following her.
  4. You were probably told as a child that real men do not cry.
  5. Men cannot tell their friends how attractive their siblings are, as women can.
  6. It’s morning and you’ve got an awkward boner. You want to pee but you have to wait until the blood changes its route. (Men go to sleep with 206 bones, and when they wake up, they have 207)
  7. The boy must apologize to the girl when their vehicles collide, no matter who is to blame for the accident.
  8. It seems like we’re always being judged on how much money we make.
  9. A man usually doesn’t get proposed to by a woman, but there are a few exceptions.
  10. When you write an answer on Quora and don’t receive the same amount of views, upvotes, and comments as someone of the opposite gender, it’s easy to feel devalued.

Men Use AI To Put Clothes Back On Women! And Women ARE MAD AF

https://youtu.be/bMg8d5omkqg

High fashion pooches

Dogs in Shenzhen are a real trip. I must tell you all, these pooches have to be the most catered to, and pampered animals in the world. They get hair styling, fingernails, their own clothes, carriages and backpacks.

It is wild.

Check out the pictures…

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2024 01e 30 10 56
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2024 01 30 10 5dh7
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2024 01 30 10 5cv7

Now… with a smile on your face… enjoy today…

What is the best comeback you used on someone?

Many, many years ago I was working at Godfather’s Pizza. One of our assistant managers was a real jerk. One of his endearing habits was making sexist remarks. I found that the way to shut him up was to add into the conversation topics that he just couldn’t handle. Like one day when a song by The Who was playing. I altered the words and sang to him “Talking ’bout my menstruation”. Another time he was being rather condescending, lecturing the kitchen staff, and mentioned the cleaning towels. He said “We DON’T use RAGS!” and I said “I do!”

Which reminds me of a time with this guy I was dating briefly. We had just had dinner at a restaurant on our way back to town, and before leaving, he said “I’m going to visit the porcelain altar.” When he came back from the restroom, I asked “Did he accept your sacrifice?” He answered “With open mouth”. So then it was my turn. When I came back to the booth, I said “I gave a blood sacrifice”. I don’t know why he thought his answer was so witty, but mine was horribly disgusting!

Have you ever walked out of a car dealership just before signing a final purchase contract? What happened?

This was back several years ago, phone books were still used and no one had ever heard of such a thing as a smartphone. But I went to a Ford dealership in response to one of those Saturday morning programs I seen about various dealerships having sales on used cars where they’d parade them by the screen while rattling off the various things the car or truck was equipped with and the listed price. I go to the dealership and fell for their first scam, they ask you if you’re trading in the vehicle you arrived in and if you say yes they ask you for the keys so they can appraise the vehicle. Don’t ever fall for this cause not only are they going to low ball you on the trade in value (know what your car is worth before you go), but some dealerships will also about hold your keys hostage until you agree to buy whatever car you had been looking at with excuses ranging from they’re still looking at your car to let me go talk to my manager for the umpteenth time…

So I had fallen into this trap. The sales guy I had test drove the car with didn’t know anything about the car, I had to educate him, and I decided not to buy the car. Well they wouldn’t give me back the keys to my car and we were going through a litany of excuses – they were still looking at my car, let me talk to my manager, they can’t find my keys, so on and so forth. I’m getting angry and I’m not a confrontational person mind you but around and around we’re going. But then I have an idea and ask for a phone and the phone book. They ask who I’m calling??? I turn the pages of the phone book until I find the listings for the various local news channels and start to dial the phone on the desk for one of the local news outlets as I tell the dealership guy I’m calling the news, I’m sure they’d just love to hear about this dealership and their sales practices (cause we’ve all seen shady dealerships get profiled on the news haven’t we????). Well you never saw my car keys appear so fast. Never did get to talk to the news, got a busy signal but I didn’t tell them. Got up, left and bad mouthed them to everyone I ever encountered who was thinking about buying a car from them.

Why Men ARE NOT COMMITTING in Modern Dating | Dating Apps & Relationships

https://youtu.be/EHbcvm4uFxg

 

What are the differences in living conditions between Vietnam and China for both foreigners and locals?

Vietnam (Hanoi), China (Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Chengdu)

As a foreigner who has lived for a short time in these citys, I can answer this question.

I have lived in these cities for more than 30 days, so I have a certain say.

1. Basic life

The cost of living in Hanoi is lower than Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen in China, and about the same as Chengdu. This seemed a bit incredible to me at first, because Vietnam’s per capita income is much lower than China’s. But the fact is that whether it is rent, catering, purchasing mobile phones, or telecommunications services, prices in Hanoi are not cheap and do not match the level of development of the entire country.

Regarding this issue, some Vietnamese friends also told me that it is because I have adopted a “foreigner” lifestyle. For example, I live in hotels, shop in large shopping malls, and eat in more formal restaurants. It’s not really an “ordinary” life.

But I think this explanation is limited in its persuasiveness because I also live the same way in China. For example, the price of a bowl of rice noodles I eat on the streets of Hanoi is almost the same as the price of a bowl of noodles on the streets of Chengdu.

What particularly impressed me was that the taxi price in Hanoi was twice that of Chengdu and 1.5 times that of Beijing and Shanghai.

Compared with China, only some service industries in Hanoi are relatively cheap, such as haircuts and massages.

Therefore, in terms of basic life, the consumption levels of foreigners living in big cities in China are similar to those in big cities in Vietnam. There are no problems with basic living needs.

2. Public facilities

In terms of public facilities, Vietnam and China are quite different.

Hanoi’s urban development level is similar to that of Southeast Asian countries (except Singapore), while China is at the world’s leading level.

Urban transportation: Hanoi mainly relies on taxis, there is only 1 subway, and the public buses are terrible, slow and inefficient. There are some rickshaws that I rarely try.

China relies mostly on subways, every major Chinese city I’ve lived in has a huge subway system, and taxis are cheaper than in Vietnam. Buses in big cities in China are also very cheap and efficient. China also has a large number of shared bicycles and electric motorcycles, which are very convenient and you can use public transportation to quickly reach your destination.

China is faster and cheaper

Roads: Vietnam’s urban roads are narrow, vehicle driving efficiency is low, and traffic congestion is serious. Roads between cities are in poor condition and there are very few freeways. Driving long distances is not an option

China’s road construction level is very high. Expressways can lead to every small city. You can easily drive more than 500 kilometers a day by driving a car. If you are not prone to fatigue, 800 kilometers is also acceptable.

Driving a car in China is easy, but it is not recommended to drive a car in Vietnam for short-term stay

Cross-city transportation:

Vietnam is largely dependent on flying, driving a car is not an option and the rail experience is terrible.

Chinese people generally rely on highways and high-speed rail to solve journeys within 300 kilometers.

Most distances of 300-800 kilometers rely on high-speed railways.

Planes are only used for journeys over 800 kilometers, as they are too inefficient.

Although China is larger and cities are further apart, it actually takes less time than Vietnam.

FOOD:

The catering industry in Vietnamese and Chinese cities is very developed, and there are also restaurants that are open for a long time at night. So basic meals are no problem.

The food in Vietnam is generally Southeast Asian style. You can feel the influence of Thailand and Cambodia, and the spices they like to use are relatively similar.

The difference lies in diversity. China’s catering industry is the most diverse I have ever seen. In cities like Chengdu or Shenzhen, you can eat completely different foods every day for a month, and there are many choices for each type.

The catering industry in Hanoi is relatively simple. The tastes of Vietnamese restaurants are almost the same, unlike in China where there are so many types. The number of foreign restaurants is much smaller than in China, and there are even fewer choices.

3. Medical treatment:

Hospitals in Vietnam are crowded, and so are those in China. But the efficiency is not bad. Compared with Europe and the United States, the medical efficiency of China and Vietnam is very high.

I had a skin allergy in Vietnam and a respiratory infection in China. I entered the hospital on the same day, completed the examination on the same day, and received treatment and medicine on the same day.

The obvious difference is that Vietnamese doctors basically don’t speak English and they need to use translation software or my friends. Chinese doctors basically all speak English.

In terms of hospital environment, Chinese hospitals are larger, cleaner and more modern, while Vietnamese hospitals are generally older, but have complete basic examination equipment. (I don’t go to many hospitals. I always ask local friends to take me to regular large hospitals)

4. Language :

Language is a big issue in Vietnam

English is basically useless here, except for some hotel staff and professional translators, and some college students, almost no one can speak English. What’s embarrassing is that there are more people who can speak Chinese than English. So in Vietnam I always try to speak Chinese first.

In China, young people in big cities basically know some English, but some are more proficient and some have difficulty. But if I speak slower, many people can understand. However, as a Chinese speaker, I speak more Chinese, and I feel that the language environment in China is very good.

Spinach Balls (Pseftokeftedes Santorini)

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2024 01 30 10 21

Ingredients

  • 1 1/4 cups peeled, chopped plum tomatoes or 1 1/2 cups cooked, well-drained, chopped spinach, or any other greens
  • 1/2 cup finely chopped scallions
  • 1 garlic clove, finely chopped
  • 1 tablespoon freshly chopped parsley
  • 1/2 teaspoon oregano
  • 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon
  • 1 heaping teaspoon fresh mint
  • Salt
  • Freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon double-acting baking powder
  • Olive oil, for frying

Instructions

  1. In a large bowl, combine tomatoes, scallions, garlic, herbs and spices. Add flour and baking powder and mix together so that all ingredients are well blended and have the consistency of a thick batter (about as thick as pancake batter).
  2. In a large heavy skillet, heat enough olive oil for frying. Taking a heaping tablespoon at a time, drop batter into hot oil and fry until golden brown and crisp.
  3. Remove at once with a slotted spoon and drain on paper towels.
  4. Serve hot.

Servings: 36

Scariest Things Caught On Live TV

https://youtu.be/Bzm3IJCp_Rg

Who do you know who appears poor that is secretly loaded?

When we first moved to Maine, my wife was a wedding photographer. Having relocated from the West Coast, we were pretty unaware of the lay of the land here. We’d heard of ‘old money’—the result of generations of inherited wealth—but had never seen it up close.

So my wife gets a call from a woman asking about photo coverage of her second marriage, and my wife agrees to come out to their house to discuss with her and her husband, Richard. My wife takes along a $200 off coupon she was offering new clients at the time. She gets in her old Subaru and heads to the address. At some point, she realizes that the huge, mile-long block of woods she’s navigating around is completely enclosed by a stone wall and that the house she’s going to is the only structure inside the walls. She starts to sweat.

Inside the house, she’s introduced to Richard Rockefeller. He’s an unassuming guy in his 50s, a medical doctor. She thinks, there must be lots of Rockefellers here on the East Coast; this doesn’t mean he’s related to THE Rockefellers.

He is. In fact, Richard is the son of David Rockefeller and grandson of John D. Rockefeller. He is a physician in Maine, a prominent member of the community and president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, a philanthropic foundation.

My wife has a lovely time, he asks lots of questions about her Nikon camera and even gladly accepts her $200 coupon, because, why not?

We both work together to cover the wedding reception, held a month or two later on an island the family owns off of Bar Harbor, Maine. We take a private boat to the island and are greeted by Richard at the dock. He’s wearing baggy old khaki pants, an ancient LLBean flannel shirt, a floppy sun hat and old battered shoes. He’s driving a Subaru wagon that makes my wife’s nine-year-old car look new. He grabs the wheel and tells us—the hired help, basically—that he’s taking us to his ‘barn’ where we’ll spend the night.

So we arrive at a structure I could call a barn only because it has the vague shape of what once was a barn. Huge open area for seating and events, with an upstairs loft area with comfy beds, bathrooms. We stayed there, in a gorgeous custom post-and-beam ‘barn’ that probably cost three times what my own house cost.

The weekend was fun—we photographed people like Glenn Close and others in attendance for the event. It was low-key and tasteful and understated, but obviously extravagant. Richard and his wife were extremely kind to us.

I’ve never forgotten my brush with ‘old money’. Here in Maine, you might sit next to someone like Richard Rockefeller at a local diner and never know it.

Richard died a few years later in a small plane crash. I consider myself fortunate to have met him, however briefly.

Woman Held Accountable By Church For Cheating On Her Husband

https://youtu.be/BFsTqxOToS0

What did you notice during an interview that made you not want the job?

Back in the ‘80s, as a teen, I applied for a security position at local supermarket (36hrs/wk), advertised in the Jobcentre. The advisor phoned them on my behalf (standard practice), they wanted me to attend a week long training seminar, nearly 3 hours away by bus, and assured they’d refund travel costs.

First day of training went well, and they informed me they’d refund travel at end of course. Fair enough. At the end of the week they said they’d refund after the contract was signed (yes, alarm bells rang), I intended to accept the job, while not great pay, it was local (walking distance) and better than nothing. So, read and signed contract, collected uniform, then given my assignment, 2pm to 2am (60hrs/wk, same pay!) at the airport! Not local! I explain it’s too far, and public transport doesn’t run that time of morning, they expect me to get a taxi home, which would cost more than my wages! I’m then told they do not refund travel expenses, after repeatedly saying they would.

As I’m leaving, wondering how I’m gonna explain this to dad (to borrow more money), I notice a woman in security uniform, she’s pale and looks upset. She’d not been paid for 3 MONTHS! I returned to the office, stating I didn’t want the job, to be told they’d sue for breach of contract.

Of course I’m upset and scared, if I take the job then it’s either have about 2 hours a day at home, or live in the airport, and hope I get paid. If I don’t take the job I’ll lose my benefits and get sued.

When I got home, I explained what happened to dad. He contacts a drinking buddy who works for the benefits office, and we both go see him Monday morning. He said they’d breached a verbal contract, I had good reason to believe they’d breach the written contract (not pay wages), and the job was not as advertised. He was appalled they hadn’t given me a copy of the contract. He assured me I wouldn’t face sanctions. He contacted the company’s head office on my behalf, he also made sure the company was blacklisted from advertising at the jobcentres.

Dad and I returned the uniform to the offices, he verbally ran rings around the 2-faced muppet who threatened me with breach of contract. Oh, and I made sure the room full of new recruits knew travel expenses are not refunded, not to expect a paycheque for at least 3 months, and the job is unlikely to be where or when advertised.

What are some hard ways to make life better?

I want you to take a gander around your room right now.

Seriously. pivot in your chair, couch, whatever —and survey everything.

How many things aren’t being used?

How many things are being kept for thin sentimental reasons? Until last year, my answer was “many, many things”.

I had an old crappy laptop that didn’t even work. I had a bunch of comics that were never going to become rare — because millions were printed. I didn’t even like the comics.

Your life is being dragged down by purposeless objects.

Junk is scientifically linked to stress, procrastination, and inefficiency. You could turn all three of those problems into advantages.

I hereby challenge you to can 50% of your stuff. Don’t let your room get like this.

Start by throwing away that stupid printer

My printer was the ultimate bad employee. Once every six months, I’d summon him, “Can you come to work today?

And in that one moment of need, he was hungover and unable to function. I’d get a mysterious error. Or an out-of-ink issue despite having barely used the printer.

He’d groan and moan and nothing would happen. He’s like that deadbeat dad who can’t sober up once a year for his son’s birthday party.

“Damnit Epson! You can’t get your act for Billy’s party for one day. Not sure why I ever married you!”

My printer is no longer with us. He’s enjoying an early retirement in the sunny isles of the Hillsborough County Waste Department.

The point I’m making: if you own something that doesn’t do its job, start there.

That lame couch you never sit on because it isn’t even comfortable? That clunky, wobbly table with a weird mystery stain, you can’t get rid of? Find them a new home.

Donate it.

Break it with an aluminum bat and scream my name if you want.

Do what must be done. I command thee.

Take a NASA perspective

I used to write in a tiny office, in a tiny house for 13 years. I moved in when I was in my mid-20s.

It was in this house that I had a girlfriend, who became a wife, who then became an ex-wife. I’ve finally collected the plunder from my various ventures and invested in a nice home. As I took stock of my inventory, I was mortified by how much junk I owned. I felt like a hoarder.

If my stuff was going to space, I’d have blown out NASA’s cost-per-square-foot budget. “Who brought these 50,000 index cards from Sean’s 2003 Bio class!?”

Heck, they’d have needed an extra fuel tank. Everything you own isn’t cost-free.

As you add more stuff, it drastically increases the surface area in your home. That surface is just one more thing to clean and collect dust. It eats up mental space. Think of your belongings like they’re being shot into space. Everything must be of absolute necessity.

No junk on the launch pad.

A push for more functionality

I used to have a GPS watch. I used it to track where I spent the most time in the house.

It was depressing: 90% of my waking hours were in my office.

I wasn’t surprised. Yet is this what home ownership is supposed to be about?

One study showed this is a common phenomenon, particularly in larger homes. Shaquille O’Neal famously owned an 18-bathroom house — and admitted, “I only use three rooms.”

We fail to optimize space. We have a bunch of chairs that suck to sit on.

Our dressers are full of clothes we never wear. Give yourself a reason to use every room in your house.

Decluttering isn’t about whether you like something; it’s about whether you actually use it.

A functional, non-cluttered house feels light. It’s efficient. It almost like weight loss. You feel lighter on your feet. Purging junk even feels like exercise: it isn’t particularly fun, but the outcome is super rewarding.

One simple trick and then some

We moved 14 times in 18 years during my childhood.

To avoid becoming hoarders, we had a hard and fast rule: if you haven’t used it in six months, throw it away. Do you even know what you own?

Imagine knowing what and where each item is at all times. I know where my remote is. I know where my two pairs of brown dress socks are.

I feel in control. Everything is accounted for. There is peace of mind in knowing everything in your life belongs there and has a use. It’s not neglected like an abandoned toy. It reinforces a mentality of purpose and deliberacy.

Adopt a six-month rule for your belongings, with rare exceptions where they need apply.

Selling on marketplace

The first object to go to was my dining room table.

I put it on the Facebook marketplace for only $50. My inbox blew up like a hot scammy dating profile at Port Dumbass.

This is usually what happens on the platform. It’s so easy. Two hours later, a nice, middle-aged Hispanic couple showed up.

After inspecting it, he turned to me and said, “How about $35?” I said, “Sorry. There are too many people wanting to buy.”

I wasn’t bluffing. But — then I offered him another table and several dozen other household items for free.

I realized I just needed to get rid of stuff. Thirty minutes later, we were stuffing his van with three tables, a huge ladder, and even lawn equipment. It wasn’t the most profitable way of doing things, but it felt good giving to someone who would need. I jokingly offered him the shirt I was wearing too, but he declined.

Decide what you don’t need and isn’t being used, and either sell or donate it.

I also called a trash hauler and paid them $150 to haul off a huge trailer full of unused stuff. You can find them easily on Craigslist.

The last step is to buy a big box of industrial bags. Then, each week make it a point to fill at least one with things you don’t want anymore.

They fit in the regular trash pickup. Donate what you can to the Salvation Army and get a tax deduction. Sell the rest on Facebook Marketplace.

Don’t think of this as an action but a lifestyle. You’ll reevaluate how you spend your money, taking broader consideration for how badly you actually need something.

Your house will feel bigger, more open, and more efficient. You won’t lose nearly as many things.

And you won’t have nearly as much stuff to manage. Throw away 50% of your stuff and you’ll be better off for it. It’s not a dare.

It’s a double dare.

I thought I wanted that…

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RFqVysoJ__k?feature=share

What would Hell be for Joseph Stalin?

The question makes me remember two old Soviet jokes.

Both are about a tourist visit of the Hell. One of them mentions Joseph Stalin.

Joke #1

A tourist visit of Hell. Hall of the greatest criminals. They stand in blood (according to some versions, in shit). Hitler is waist-deep in blood, his gaze angry, his mouth shouting something that tourists do not hear. Stalin stands to Hitler’s left, silent, with a sardonic smile on his lips, blood reaching to the middle of his boots.

Tourist (astonished): Please tell me why Hitler is buried so much deeper than Stalin? Did he spill so much more blood?
Guide: Ah, I will have to tell the administration. Stalin cheated again!
T: How does he cheat?
G: He always climbs on Lenin’s shoulders!

Joke #2

A tourist visit of Hell. Astonished tourists see Nikita Khrushchev sitting on a sofa, with Marilyn Monroe in his lap, caressing him and kissing his bald head.

Tourist (astonished): Are you telling me this is the punishment for Khrushchev’s sins?
Guide: No, dear sir. This is the punishment for Marilyn Monroe’s sins.

DATING CRISIS: Why Are So Many Men Single?

https://youtu.be/EGRzM1f_qi0

 

What is the real condition of poverty in China?

image 222
image 222

See these Kids?

These Kids are University Students in China and Poor Kids, Children of Poor Families

Under Common Prosperity, University Students are mandated to serve 42 hours a year in their third or final year to tutor and help poor kids pass their examinations

They have these centers where Poor Kids are provided Food, Clothes, Shoes, Smartphones and Tutors free of cost as part of the revenue from the tax collections of the local provinces plus a 3.5% of profit from the Big Gun Industries

The best of them are admitted to School and on to Gaokao

The others get Skilled Training

The others get Vocational Training

Their Working Age is reduced from the mandatory legal 16 in China to 14 in many provinces so that they can earn a living and help their families

Once they are 21 years old, THEY HAVE TO COMPETE ON THEIR OWN

Their Talent , Their Ability

No Reservations

No Affirmative Action

I like this system

Help the Kids, give them education, give them all the material benefits needed then they can compete fairly

From 2019–2023 – Roughly 8.5 Million Poor Kids have been given Jobs that will transform them to Low Income immediately and Middle Class by 2036


China just doesn’t handout money or food to poor families like India or US do

There are NO FREE LUNCHES

One new rule that China established in 2021 for Poor People was :-

image 221
image 221

The Ten Year Rule

Tenant Farmers who work as Rural Workers can now send their Kids to the Local Schools in the Village where Education is free plus two meals are free (Breakfast and Lunch)

The Kids study from 4 PM to 7 PM

They work from 7 AM to 12 PM and are paid a minimum 6 RMB per hour ($ 0.91) which is equally TOPPED UP BY THE STATE

So each kid makes 60 RMB per Day and makes 4,000 RMB for a season in addition to two free meals a day plus education

Tenant farmers don’t have to feed their kids for 240 days a years, that has to be done by the Agricultural Unit Owner

Tenant Farmers who have worked as Tenant Farmers for at least 20,000 Hours , are eligible to get their OWN LANDHOLDINGS with the deposit amount FULLY WAIVED

Hu Jintao and his gang ignored these rules

Xi enforced them immediately

Almost 300,000 Tenant Farmers now own their own LANDHOLDINGS on 30 Year or 100 Year leases


The Real Condition of China is that today China has

51.9% Middle Class or Higher

34.7% Low Income

13.4% Poor People

0% Extremely Poor

Target 2030 where at least 15 Million Kids are involved in given all those benefits is

55% Middle Class

40% Low Income

5% Poor People

This is the target set in 2022

image 220
image 220

The Stock markets can wait

According to Xi, the key is to create a large middle class consumer base

800 Million is the Goal for 2030 from 426 Million in 2023

Have you ever seen a mass exodus after a respected employee quit or got fired?

My father was a banker for most of my life. He worked in the trust department assisting people with estates, wills, and trust funds, inheritances, etc. My mother used to tease him that he had a “harem” of older ladies who thought he was wonderful because he had handled things when their husbands died.

In the early 90s the local bank was bought by a much larger bank from another state. Things changed and not for the better. My father was told that he should use money from one account to bolster another account and replace the money later. My father refused. While it might not have been illegal at the time he felt that it was highly unethical and he wouldn’t do it.

He resigned.

And when his clients all found out WHY he resigned they all, except for two or three, moved their accounts to a different bank.

One of his colleagues who still worked at the first bank told him that the leadership from the new bank were dumbfounded by the sudden mass exodus of clients. And when my father informed the local lawyers who referred clients to him what happened they stopped referring clients to that bank. In less than two years after my father resigned the out-of-state bank closed the Trust department because it was unprofitable. My father took great satisfaction in that.

WOW! I am humbled by the huge number of upvotes for this story about my father. He was not perfect, no one is, but he was an honorable man and I am proud to be his daughter.

I am humbled by how high the number of upvotes as climbed. It is over 5,000. This is the most upvotes I’ve gotten on anything I’ve written on Quora. Thank you for recognizing a good man.

Male inequality, explained by an expert | Richard Reeves

https://youtu.be/KVOJGRFSTgE

Who interrogated an accused with too much zeal?

In the 3rd century BC, a sensational scandal erupted in Rome: two Vestal Virgins had lost their virginity, and the guilty party was a young ‘pontiff’.

The Sibylline Books were consulted to decide the fate of the three religious figures, the Vestal Virgins Opimia Floronia and the pontiff Lucius Cantilius.

The two women had no escape, having been caught in the act. The rule of the Vestals prescribed live burial.

Floronia, not accepting the idea of dying in such a way, preferred to take her own life. Opimia resigned herself. A large crowd saw her ascend onto a mournfully adorned chariot, accompanied by a procession of priests to the place of execution.

Many Romans wanted to witness the dramatic scene of her being enclosed in the tomb with a loaf of bread and a pitcher of water. The interrogation of Lucius Cantilius was public.

The Pontifex Maximus, his superior and representative of the state religion, took on the role of the public prosecutor. Relentlessly, he ordered the questions to be preceded by violent lashes, repeated after the defendant’s answer.

It was not possible to conclude the interrogation: Lucius Cantilius, in fact, died from those lashes.

What’s the worst thing a girl ever said to you when rejecting you?

I had a sunroom added to my house, and the sales lady, construction manager was around a lot. She was quite flirtatious, as sales people often are. So when the project was done, and I had signed off on everything and I would never see her again, I asked her out on a date.

She told me she was moving to a different city the next week. Which was pretty suspicious, because my project had finished ahead of schedule. But I didn’t press it. Three months later I had a leak in my sunroom, and I called them up to fix it. Guess who answered the phone?

We had spent a lot of time together, and she knew I wasn’t psycho, the logical thing would have been to say that she wasn’t interested. If she was worried for some reason, then say that she was in a relationship.

But no, she had to go with the whopper, that I am moving to a different city. Nothing tells you how a person views you as much as telling an outrageous lie that’s so easy to check.

She told me on the phone, that she had just moved back. I pretended that was a reasonable answer.

Physical Intimacy: His NEED is NOT your WEAPON Ladies

https://youtu.be/NNMrhuIeUEQ

How did you know it was time to call it a career?

Police work is a young man’s profession. You don’t want to be out chasing criminals on the street in your fifties. I was hired rather late in life, graduating from the police academy at thirty-three years old.

I learned quickly that I could do the job of a street cop but liked narcotics, especially undercover work. That led to more complex investigations. After six years in narcotics, I decided it was time to gain rank, so I aced the sergeant’s exam. I enjoyed every day as a street sergeant, leading and teaching.

Four years later, I would become a lieutenant which was great for a while. As a watch commander and then patrol division commander, I led over half of the department and made positive changes. All was fine until one day; I was asked to take over internal affairs. Our department had more serious problems than I realized. I spent the next six years of my life embattled, persuing the worst officers you can imagine.

Officers committing crimes, abusing their power, abusing citizens, and even their loved ones. Stealing, cheating, and anything else they thought they could get away with. I spent a lot of time being grilled in court by their high-priced defense attorneys with only limited success.

By the time I left, we had fired all but one of this group. The last was fired shortly after I left. So I had to go through hell for years, but in the end, the department was a better place for the citizens we served.

My twenty-five-year retirement couldn’t come soon enough. A few more years in that pressure-cooker position, and I might have stroked out. So at fifty-eight years old, I walked away with my pension. I haven’t been sorry a single day since I retired six years ago. Life’s too short.

Have you ever accidentally opened someone else’s email and found something interesting?

My husband and I have been together 20 years when we met he was finalizing his divorce which they were simply too young and tried to grow up too fast they were together just two years. After about a month I was helping him get some of her stuff out which was all junk. I started cleaning out a desk of hers and in the bottom drawer was just stacks n stacks of mail. Apparently my husband hates opening mail and would just put it in a drawer for him to open later, I certainly make him open his mail I don’t know why she would do that. So he told me to open it, it was flyers, bills, coupons, everything in a stack. I start opening mail and I would see $5000 check then another then another then another. These checks were two days away from void/expired or have to wait a long time to reissue. It was from his dad’s estate and each kid got $5000 from certain accounts and investments and so on. He was broke at this time with his divorce plus being in your 20s you don’t quite make as much yet. He went from having a couple hundred dollars in his account and the very next day we now have money to put down on a house which is cheaper than our current rent and much larger and we later made a good chunk of cash when we sold it. In the end, it did look like a scam letter or a collections notice, now im always into opening mail because I’ve even over paid a bill and what looks like a bill would be a small refund for my over payment. I just can’t wait to get that jury summons for a crazy court case.

Will there be a War with China

https://youtu.be/PEpez9sCydY

Has being a polite customer in a stressful situation ever resulted in unexpectedly exceptional service or special treatment for you?

We were the polite customers in a round about way-

We are attending a destination wedding on an all inclusive resort in Jamaica-absolutely beautiful weather, all the food and drink you could possibly want. Beautiful rooms with waterfront views-

The bride and groom and the 6 other guests attending were incredibly rude, demanding, belittling, belligerent and racist in their remarks towards the staff on the resort. My husband and I had never seen this side of their personality and were shocked at the behavior to the point that after the wedding (3rd day of 7) we disassembled from those in the group and did our own things.

On the final day, we were all

booked under the wedding party and had to check out and depart together-one of the women in the group was accusing the cleaning staff of stealing her clothing, the bride was making up all kinds of reasons she should have received a discounted stay, on and on, the mother of the bride was loud and yelling in the front foyer of the resort-my husband and I had enough and told all of them to shut up. All they had done the entire trip was lie and complain. We then went into a private office and explained to head of the resort how they were lying because we heard all the comments they had made and could prove it-We were comped 1k off our stay and turned that money around to tip the staff that so excellently served us during our stay-my husband and I both knew none of the others had left a tip and it was intentional to not do so as it was mentioned on the very first night at dinner.

Once it was clear their motive was to get as much for free as possible they were checked out w/o any further interaction and escorted to the van that would drive them to the airport-My husband and I were put in a different van to go back

We never asked for anything back as we had a great trip but the resort was happy to give us the 1k- as for those people we have not spoken to them since-it’s not that hard to be nice!

As a professor, has there been a student you instantly recognized as a genius in the first week of knowing them?

Genius is what genius does. Professors spend the better part of their waking days interacting with intelligence at the upper tail of the distribution, so an unusually adroit bit of intelligence will catch any professor’s eye. Alas, anybody with experience also has seen many a charlatan, so skepticism always comes first. I may recognize genius quickly, but I will test it many times before I conclude it is truly there.

Here is an illustration.

A few years back I had an MBA student, born in the Caribbean, who had considerable world-travel experience under his belt. Quietly confident, and charming and affable, he had natural leadership abilities. Over time his stories of travels came with the additional details that he was facile with languages, and that helped him pick up work as he travelled.

I was intrigued, and learned about his travels throughout Asia, and tested him a bit with details (I have some experience in that part of the world, but, of course, I also had many more years to accumulate it). He seemed to be telling the honest truth. He knew things about Myanmar (and similar places) that would be hard to learn unless you visited.

Here is the genius part. He said that, for a while, he settled in China doing translation and other work. How was that possible? He had simply picked up Chinese, he said. I have an old acquaintance who was native English speaker who knew several European languages and learned Japanese after spending many years there, and he told me about all the challenges. So I was just a little skeptical. A few words, sure, but fluent with no formal training?

I had asked a few of the native-Chinese speakers whether the student could speak well, and they said yes, but none had a lengthy conversation.

One day we were visited by a Chinese delegation of businessmen. And my student was introduced to them. Off they went in conversation, laughing and conversing. He was fluent, and just as charming and affable in that language.

I never doubted him again. Genius is what genius does.

That’s fishy

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/_F9XXx_sx7k?feature=share

Why do so many people hate the self checkouts?

My typical self checkout experience goes like this.

Using own bag. Place on scale. So I do. I use a backpack so it is heavier than a shopping bag. This triggers, Wait for an assistant. I open my bag ready so the assistant can look inside it. I do this because if they asked to see inside my bag I would be terribly offended and most people don’t like being told to go fuck themselves.

Ok, ready to start scanning. Where is the barcode on this cabbage? Oh, I need to look for it in the touchscreen. Finally found it after 2 minutes searching.

UNEXPECTED ITEM IN THE BAGGAGE AREA. PLEASE WAIT FOR ASSISTANCE.

This happens at least one more time. I am really getting pissed off now.

Ready to pay. It asks me if I took a bag. I didn’t. It asks me if I’m sure. Now I start arguing with the machine. I’m fed up of you. Why would I steal a 40p bag? Don’t you think I would have taken the £10 side of salmon instead?

Finally, after a good 5 minutes have passed I get to pay for my 15 items. But wait, I have wait for assistance again to authorise the bottle of wine I bought. OK, so now I get to pay.

Not so fast. There were a couple of discounted items in there and guess what we need to get the discount applied? That’s right, an assistant!

I pay, put on my backpack and instead of saying thank you, as I would to the cashier, I mutter, stupid fucking bastard, to the machine.

Not a pleasant experience at all.

A woman I know who works in my local Aldi told me she feels bad for the old people. An old woman told her that she used to look forward to shopping because she lives alone and sometimes the cashier might be the only person she spoke with that week.

Some people enjoy human interaction. As a general rule, I’m not one of them. However I much prefer to be served by a cashier than those self checkout machines. It takes too long and it’s frustrating. Added to that, I feel like it is constantly accusing me of shoplifting.

Pepe Escobar: Putin and China just changed EVERYTHING with this Move and the Neocons Can’t Stop Them

https://youtu.be/xUFXD3-XF-M

What’s something a doctor did to you that you won’t ever forget?

When I was in grad school, I had to have oral surgery for a midline palatine cyst. After misdiagnosing it as an abscessed tooth and mucking about, my dentist finally referred me to an oral surgeon.

The oral surgeon (who was nearing retirement) asked about my financial situation at the initial consultation. It was pretty dire, so I told him I would need to pay over time. He told me not to worry,

After doing some imaging he told me that he had never seen a cyst that large. The surgery was done, and went well. But I was left with two drains coming out of the corners of my mouth. These needed to remain in place for a week.

My upper jaw was incredibly swollen. With the drains in place, I looked like a walrus. I had to be careful how I ate and drank, to avoid having food or drinks dribble out of my nose. Nonetheless, I had to go to classes (it was the first week of the semester) as well as meet my students (I was a teaching assistant at the time.)

And every other day, I had to see the oral surgeon. He irrigated the site and gave me samples of antibiotics and words of encouragement.

When he finally removed the drains, my palate was healing well. I saw him two weeks later for follow up. I stopped at the front desk to arrange for payment. His total bill? $50! The surgery had taken almost two hours! And there were those follow up appointments as well.

I was incredibly grateful. I waited to see him between patients to express my gratitude. He smiled and said, one day you’ll do something for someone else.

He was right. And I will never forget him.

Scariest Things Caught On LIVE TV 2#

https://youtu.be/Af18eL_y4L0

As a landlord, what was the grossest thing you ever saw in a tenant’s house or apartment?

This wasn’t my property but that of a friend. He rented it to a couple ‘from New York’ they claimed, who showed up very well dressed. He was in a suit and his ‘wife’ in a nice dress. They claimed to need a ‘local apartment’ as they ‘came to Boston’ (we are 10 miles west of Boston) often and stated an apartment was cheaper than renting hotel rooms every time, sounded legit. Anyway, for the first year, the rent was a couple days early then it was ‘just’ on time for a few months then a couple days late but paid IN CASH every month so no real issues. THEN it happened! After about two years the rent was a week late so my friend went by daily to catch them in (remember, they stated that they were from NY and came up ‘often’ so he didn’t expect them to be there at any given time). After five drive-bys he was there in the evening, on weekends, nothing seemed out of place from the outside. The yard was impeccably neat and clean as they stated it would be. Then two weeks later on a Friday evening just after dinner as he drove by he saw movement inside the apartment. He stopped and knocked on the door. When it opened, he was greeted by someone who spoke NO English. Panic ensued, people running around the apartment and out the back door. He told someone who came to the door that actually spoke some English that the rent was past due and needed to be paid. They stated that they would have cash Saturday morning for him. He asked why so many people and was told it was a party. He didn’t believe that story and said so, he told that individual that as it was rented to TWO PEOPLE everyone else had to go and if more than two were there in 12 hours it would be $50 EACH! What follows I witnessed the very next day. We knocked, no answer. I went around back and knocked, no answer. I walked back to the front. He was pounding on the front door… no one answered. WHY I cannot tell you but I turned the door knob, the door was UNLOCKED. He opened it. Before I go on, first I will say that we eventually found two month’s rent left on the kitchen counter in cash. Now the HORROR! They removed the doors from the kitchen cabinets and replaced them with chicken wire to house the CHICKENS that were now living in most of the cabinets! TWO DOZEN CHICKENS!The STENCH was gag worthy. The filth was just as revolting but what got me was the bathroom! The door was closed but the exhaust fan running. (A neighbor later told me it was running 24/7, read on and you will know WHY!). When he opened the door my friend closed it fast and proceeded to vomit! I opened the door to see the toilet PLUGGED AND MOUNDED with feces! The bathtub was ALSO filled with urine and feces! There were mattresses wall to wall in every single room except the bathroom and kitchen! This included a rough basement too! About 50(?) mattresses! The apartment was being used to house over 70 people! Even the ceilings were disgusting. I do know that the entire apartment had to be gutted and renovated, I saw it after it was done. It took a bit of searching but the two that rented it originally were found, I don’t nor want to know what was said or done but I do know that they were in full knowledge and complicity with what was going on. One further note, at some point before they ‘filled the tub’ they had roasted a pig in it! They built a fire in the tub and roasted a pig above it! When the apartment was gutted, it was found that the wall and floor behind and beneath the tub were charred, they almost burned down the house!

Hollywood Goes CRAZY! | Seinfeld DESTROYS Woke Insanity in EPIC Video

https://youtu.be/IELOMZMMljk

How do Chinese restaurants get their beef to be so tender? Like beef in black bean sauce or Mongolian beef etc. It almost falls apart in the mouth.

I’m an aficionado chef and I love watching cooking tutorials. Recently, I’ve discovered the secret behind how Chinese restaurants get their beef to be so tender in dishes like beef in black bean sauce or Mongolian beef – and it’s pretty interesting!

Once I did an Asian cuisine workshop, and one of the chefs there taught me the secret. Chinese restaurants often marinate their beef in a mixture of baking soda, cornstarch, and soy sauce for at least 30 minutes before cooking. This breaks down the proteins in the meat, making it more tender and easier to chew.

In addition, Chinese restaurants slice the beef against the grain, which makes it even more tender. When you slice against the grain, you’re cutting the beef perpendicular to the muscle fibers, and this makes all the difference.

Another thing that I love the most about Chinese cuisine is the high heat cooking method. When you stir-fry beef at a high temperature, it keeps the moisture inside the beef and makes it juicy and flavorful. And the cuts of beef that they use, such as flank steak or sirloin, are naturally more tender than other cuts.

I’ve tried making beef in black bean sauce using these techniques, and it is absolutely delicious! The beef just falls apart in your mouth, and it tastes so well. So, if you want to make your beef dishes tender and juicy like the ones you get at Chinese restaurants, try using these techniques. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed!

Tomato Pilaf

1400x919 One Pan Tomato Pilaf
1400×919 One Pan Tomato Pilaf

Ingredients

  • 2 medium tomatoes, coarsely chopped
  • 2 tablespoons chopped onion
  • 2 tablespoons butter or margarine
  • 2 cups water
  • 1 cup uncooked regular rice
  • 1 teaspoon instant beef bouillon
  • 3/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/8 teaspoon pepper

Instructions

  1. Cook and stir tomatoes and onions in butter in 2-quart saucepan over medium heat for 2 minutes.
  2. Stir in remaining ingredients. Heat to boiling, stirring once or twice; reduce heat. Cover and simmer 14 minutes without lifting cover or stirring.
  3. Remove from heat. Fluff rice lightly with fork; cover and let steam 5 to 10 minutes.
  4. Serve with grated Parmesan cheese if desired.

Yield: 8 servings

Does a boss ever get in trouble when a staff member quits?

Names are fictional, but otherwise this is accurate to best of my memory.

Back in the mid-80s during my high school years, I worked at major fast food place. I worked there for around 18 months and was generally well regarded by the managers there. Because of this, I would often be called on to see if I was able to cover a shift when someone called out.

One such time, I agreed to cover and went in to see that the only person working was the manager (Jim). So literally it would be just the two of us working, Jim up front on register and me in the back making the food. (Another person from a different store came in an hour or so later to help out). It was a rough night, but we made it work.

After things slowed down, I asked Jim what happened. One of the other managers (Randy) was working that night and everyone he had working with him just up and left. I asked Jim where Randy was, and he said he was asked to leave as well and really couldn’t talk any further about it.

The rest of the story wouldn’t reach me for a week or so, but the entire staff quitting at once prompted the owner to investigate what happened. It turns out that Randy had been violating labor laws for months. And as most of the staff (including myself) were minors, those laws are more stringent and carry higher penalties. Things like forcing more than 8 hours a day, working outside certain hours, and forcing unpaid OT. While I don’t know for sure what prompted everyone to leave that night, I have to assume it was related.

Randy was taken off the schedule and, as far as I know, never set foot in the store again. I don’t know what legal consequences resulted from this, if any.

 

What’s the strangest request you’ve had at McDonald’s?

I have not worked at McDonald’s, but since there’s no equivalent question for Burger King, I’m going to answer anyway.

Late at night, a guy came up to the counter and said he wanted a Whopper with 10 patties on it. He seemed like he was probably a little stoned, or a little drunk, or probably a little both. “Money is no object,” he said. I knew how to set this up, but I called the manager just to make sure everything was ok and more importantly because I knew she would want in on this process. We had a button for a patty with no bun, to accommodate people on the Atkins Diet. I entered in his Whopper request, punched the patty button nine times, and then hit the intercom to explain to the kitchen crew the correct interpretation of what was now appearing on their screens. My amplified voice filled the kitchen, like the voice of God:

“That is not a mistake. It is a Whopper with 10 patties on it. Please do whatever it takes to make it happen.”

We couldn’t hear anything from the back over all the machine noises. The guy paid. It was around $12. Then, after a few minutes, there was activity at the hamburger chute. Normally burgers would be placed here and they’d slide to the front to be bagged or placed on trays. A pair of hands gently placed a very large, roughly-ball shaped object on the chute. The hands gently—tenderly— guided it to the bottom. It was held in place by four Whopper wrappers. “Be careful with this,” one of the cooks said. “Wrapping it was very difficult.”

The customer was delighted. Once he had his to-go bag, he explained that he and a friend had got in an argument concerning the truthfulness of our “Your Way, Right Away” slogan, and he had just won a bet. It remains one of my favorite moments, a real team effort.

Why Men Get So Few Matches on Dating Apps

https://youtu.be/x3lypVnJ0HM

The theme ended with projectile vomit

Yesterday, I took the family to a theme park in Southern Zhuhai. It’s the Chimelong Ocean Kingdom. We paid 3500 rmb (roughly $500) for two days with hotel, and two buffet meals. (For us three.)

new header 16 9
new header 16 9

Now, you must know, everything in China is HUGE.

Not Texas huge.

“Universe” huge.

The facility included FIVE theme parks. Each with it’s own hotel, and passes to each one. Each theme park is “Disney Park” in size. So it is an ENORMOUS complex.

Just mind-mindbogglingly large.

When you buy the tickets, the ticket seller will warn you to take one day per theme. Other than that you are wasting your time.

And there is no way you can do more than that! Lordy!

Under the sea
Under the sea

We chose to concentrate on the “Penguin life park”, and the “spaceship future” park. Both were fun and cool, and my little girl enjoyed every second of the excitement.

Inside 1
Inside 1

My little girl loved it!

Animals. Excitement. Bright colors. Rides. Many playgrounds.

And the hotel room was super kid friendly.

236308
236308

We stayed at the Circus hotel, and she had her own bed that looked like a lions cage on wheels, had her own kid-sized robe and slipper. The television only played kids shows, and the commode was kid friendly with a kid style insert. The shower had a kid sized lower tier.

Well thought out.

place 2015 09 25 7 Chimelongoceankingdom
place 2015 09 25 7 Chimelongoceankingdom

The only problem was that on the last day I caught a “bug” and spent the entire day vomiting and spending time on the shitter. I had water-cannon high volume vomiting.

36 times. Thirty Six vomits!

Each time I just emptied out.

Wholly crap!

Then went home to sleep. And sleep I did. Like the dead.

But I am up now, and shaky but functional. I am taking medicines and it all seems to work. I am drinking coffee and I am able to hold it down. So that’s good. Right?

It reminds me that I am still alive and functional. Yay!

Ah. Today…

What one sentence can change a life?

“Man, I’ve another 50 years of this shit…”

That one sentence was spoken by myself, to myself, in my car, as I pulled up outside my house, February 3rd 2016.

I have suffered from depression for 35 years. I can go months, sometimes years, without an episode, but in 2013 my wife, my soul mate, my best friend, left me after 15 years, which plunged me into the worst episode of my life.

Now, whilst depression is a living hell at times, I never actually feel sorry for myself. It’s a different emotion altogether, as anyone who suffers the same will testify. But this particular day, I was feeling sorry for myself. My business had gone to the wall in the first 12 months of separation. In the second 12 months I was struggling to pay the bills. By the end of year 3 I had £2 in the bank, was in desperate arrears with my mortgage and my new business was bringing in barely £200 a week.

I pulled up outside my house at 5pm, knowing the rest of the night would, yet again, be spent sat alone, in the cold, with the constant memories of my wife and children walking around the house, ghosts of their laughter echoing around, heart and mind being tormented by all that had gone before. There was little food in the cupboard. No credit for gas on the meter and low credit for electricity on that meter.

And this was the lowest point, it was 3 years of decline to this moment. I had no way of getting out of the mess I was in. No way I could figure, anyway. For the first time, this time I felt sorry for myself and literally said out loud, “man, I’ve another 50 years of this shit.”

That was the moment everything changed. I turned the engine off and lit a rare cigarette. I continued to talk to myself in the car – partly out loud, partly in my head. The conversation (with myself) went along these lines…

“50 years… ha, great… and I’m 50 years old next year (2017). Well, hang on… if I’m 50 next year, then I am only half way through my life. If I do live to be 100 – and why not ? – then next year, my 50th birthday, is the start of part 2. Mmmm… well if that’s the case then :

1 – I don’t need to buy a house – already bought one, only 5 years off completion (if I can find a way to keep the reposession order at bay). In 5 years, I will have property worth £130,000. Fully paid up. Hey, imagine if I had that when I was 5 years old, how cool that would have been for a start in life !

2 – I don’t have to go to school for 15 years – I’ve done that, I’ve got an education, done college, done university… I’ve got a head start !

3 – I don’t have to get married and have children – I have 3 wonderful children who are doing well and I’ve had the snip, so no need to have any more… no stress and strain of raising babies. Ace !

4 – I don’t need to buy a car or learn to drive – already sorted.

5 – I don’t need to worry about making friends or being popular or liked – I have a fantastic circle of friends who love me and I love them.

6 – I don’t have to worry about my parents leaving me, I already have had the sadness of losing them.

7 – I don’t need to worry about a job. I have the potential in my new business to make a comfortable living, if and when I am mentally strong enough to fully apply myself.

… and so on and so forth…”

Now I am having this conversation with myself in my car and I can literally feel the stress, the pain, the depression leaving my body. I am getting genuinely excited at the way my mind is working. I go into the house and continue this conversation whilst making a coffee. I get a notepad and make notes of what I am saying. Every note, every little idea, is scribbled down so as not to be forgotten.

As the evening progresses, I find myself going through each room in the house, removing any trace of my wife’s existance. Every memory gets either boxed up for the children to enjoy in the future, or goes in the bin. The kitchen gets emptied – I keep 3 cups, 3 plates, 3 knives, forks etc, for me and the 2 youngest children when they visit. The rest of the clutter gets binned. The living room is re-arranged. The bedroom is rearranged. The bathroom is rearranged. This carries on through to maybe 5am…

… For the first time in 3 years, I go to bed with an exhausted smile and wake up a few hours later with that same smile. I carry on where I left off. I borrow a couple of hundred pounds off my brother to get rid of furniture and replace with cheap “get by for a while” furniture, that has no trace of my marriage attached to it. I carry on writing notes.

Well, over the next 2 -3 months, remarkable changes happen. By the end of the 3rd month, at my medical check up, I am taken off my blood pressure tablets, my BP being normal for the first time in 3 years. The following month, after slowly cutting back, I am off my anti-depressants, also for the first time in 3 years, the longest I have been there in my life. I have lost over a stone in fat. My business is taking off as I am able to focus on it and money is coming in again.

By November, 9 months on, I have cleared my debts and I have £4,000 saved. My friends tell me I have a “happy house”. That they feel the positive juju the second they come in the door. They want to know (part jokingly, and part enviously) why I now walk round with a permanent smile, like a village idiot. More than anything though, they are genuinely delighted that they have got “me” back.

But let’s go back to Part 2.

The whole trigger for this was the realisation that if I live to be 100, I am only halfway through my life. So I started adding to the notes I had already started. This time, not marking down things I didn’t have to go through, but things that I am going to do. Each page of things to do is broken down into what I need to do to get there. There are wild things that I may not be skilled enough to do, like publish a novel. I may never be as good as Jimi Hendrix on the guitar. But what is there to stop me doing the best I can do with both ? Then there are totally achievable goals, like buying a campervan and spending 3 months on the road, enjoying life and writing that novel ? Getting married again, now that my heart is mending and I am meeting lovely ladies again – why not ? Decorating and renovating the house. Expanding the business. Getting fit. Losing a bit more weight. Learning to fly a plane. Doing a new degree in something I really enjoy. So many places to visit, to enjoy, to experience.

It’s all there and it’s all ahead of me and I know it’s all down to me. But most importantly, after the 9 months that have just gone by and how my life has already changed so much, I know it’s totally achievable !

So… “man, I’ve another 50 years of this shit” is the single, most important sentence that has changed my life, hopefully forever. Because I’m proving it wrong. And life has rarely felt better.

(I have missed out a section about a girl, I’ll call her “W”, who added a lot of fuel to this fire right at the beginning. She may read this and/or some people may know her, so I shouldn’t mention her by name. But, without knowing it, she made me want to be a better person (thanks Jack Nicholson) too. We never dated, or anything like that… but she is one of the most beautiful souls I have come across. Thank you “W” for your inspiration.)

Best wishes all of you reading this. I wish you a long and happy life.

Rob.

Chicken Gyros with Dill Sauce

Chicken Gyros with Dill Sauce is a traditional Greek sandwich.

Crock Pot Chicken Gyro 6 500x375 1
Crock Pot Chicken Gyro 6 500×375 1

Ingredients

  • 1 cup plain yogurt
  • 2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon chopped fresh dill
  • 2 large garlic cloves, finely minced
  • 1 teaspoon + 1 tablespoon fresh lemon juice
  • 1 pound skinless boneless chicken breast halves, cut into 1/2-inch pieces
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 2 medium onions, thinly sliced
  • 4 fresh pita bread rounds, heated
  • Salt and freshly ground pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. In small bowl blend together yogurt, 2 tablespoons dill, garlic and 1 teaspoon lemon juice. Season with salt and pepper. Set aside.
  2. Heat 1 tablespoon oil in heavy large skillet over medium-high heat. Add chicken with oregano, 1 teaspoon dill, salt and pepper. Sauté until browned and cooked through, about about 5 minutes. Transfer to a bowl. Add 1 tablespoon oil to skillet and sauté onions until golden brown, about 10 minutes.
  3. Return chicken and any juices to skillet. Add 1 tablespoon lemon juice. Stir until heated through, about 2 minutes.
  4. Top pita rounds with chicken mixture. Spoon dill sauce over chicken and serve. This sandwich is folded in half and eaten. Pass the extra sauce, as desired.

Doomed by decoupling

The West falls further behind

Godfree Roberts

We are decoupling from China and, a fortiori, from its technology and the 130 countries in its currency, trade and defense alliances. Highlights from 2023 suggest that we far behind and the gap is widening.

2024 01 22 09 57
2024 01 22 09 57

Economy

In 2023, China’s economy grew by $1.6 trillion, more than the rest of the world’s combined – while the USA borrowed $3 trillion to fund $300 billion GDP growth. Real wages grew 4.7% and demographics will remain healthy through 2043. 21 million tourists flew during Golden Week and spent $3 billion in Xinjiang alone. Hangzhou hosted more athletes at the Asian Games than the Olympics and domestic brands Anta and Li-Ning outsold Nike and Adidas.

Research

Young Science became the world’s #3 journal and is rapidly overtaking incumbent leaders Nature and Science. With a $228 billion corporate R&D budget, 3 million Chinese scientists applied for almost as many patents as the rest of the world combined, and utterly dominated the top 1% of most influential papers. Huawei’s R&D budget alone is larger than the US CHIPS and Science Act.

Health

Researchers there cured thalassemia, reversed autism and aging, provided Covid immunization with a dry powder aerosol, curednasopharyngeal cancer, constipation, atherosclerosis and improved Alzheimer’s memory and functionality. They grew human kidneys in pig embryos and oversaw the first live birth of chimeric monkeys

Hard Tech

Scientists created the first graphene semiconductor, while Betavolt began shipping an atomic energy battery that powers consumer devices for 99 years.

     

Huawei mastered 7nm chip production (Intel still has not), replaced WiFi with 6x faster NearLink, took Apple’s #1 spot in the world’s largest market with a phone using 90% domestic components. Chinese chip foundries bought 62% of machinery equipment domestically this year, vs. 47% last year, and produced the first integrated neuro-memristor and the first 232 layer flash memory. Researchers set a record for high-rate quantum key distribution, showed off the first ambient superionic hydride ion conductor, the first primate brain-computer interface and an integrated neuro-memristor chip that will make circuit boards obsolete.

Macro inventions included the first waterless nuclear reactor, the most powerful solid-fuel rocket, the first liquid oxygen/methane rocket (it lifted 6 tonnes into sun-synchronous orbit), the world’s only Mach 30 wind tunnel, lasers generating high-energy beams indefinitely, and the first high-orbit Synthetic Aperture Radar satellite for 24×7 weather observation.

The country installed 80 million kW of PV and PV generated 300 billion kWh nationwide, 30% above 2022. CATL’s EV batteries get 400 km on 15 min. charge and 700 km. on a regular charge at all temperatures. In addition to installing 290,000 industrial robots – more than the rest of the world combined – it put AESA radars on $8,000 farm drones (only four countries can make them – for fighter jets). Its 800 million 5G subscribers are served by 3.2 million base stations and integrated 5G industry applications into 67 economic categories with 100,000 application cases. Tibet’s 5G service surpassed California’s.

Environment

In the wilderness that covers 42% of China’s landmass, conservationists counted 70,000 Tibetan antelopes, 3,400 Przewalski’s gazelles, 5,000 golden snub-nosed monkeys and 1200 Snow Leopards

What’s a red flag that you ignored in a significant other, only to realize it was a big deal later?

I dated a lady, who was already dating someone else. Except I didn’t know this when she asked me out. They weren’t living together, so it wasn’t something that jumped out at you.

It was only on our 4th date, that the guy got suspicious , and followed her to our restaurant, and caused a scene that I had a clue. She dumped the guy, in the restaurant, and made it seem like it was no big deal, as they were a short term casual couple.

I found out from her best friend about a month later, that they had been seeing each other regularly for a year. But I was hooked by then.

After 9 months she asked me,to ask her, to marry me. Yes, I know, confusing right?

I said I needed to think about it. Immediately, she was busy on Friday nights, but still up for Saturdays. She said it was work related.

I recognized the pattern and decided not to follow her to whatever restaurant and bar she was going to. I didn’t need to have a big fight in public. Instead I waited until the next day, and lied to her, and told her I had followed her. She said, well I guess thats it then. Why does everyone follow me?

Implying that I wouldn’t have just been the second person to follow her.

She was right, that was it. Once a cheater, always a cheater, even if they aren’t married or living together.

Wife Started Behaving Like A F**inist And Is Now Having A MELTDOWN That Her Marriage Is IMPLODING

https://youtu.be/CM8100c-xxg

How has China’s growth model based on debt-fueled investment and land sales become difficult to sustain?

It is not though!

Chinese people are prolific savers. And Chinese as you know are the most practical and pragmatic people on planet earth. They are the opposite of American people who are one of the most wasteful nation on planet earth. And worst the U.S. as a nation and your archaic political system allows wasteful and unaudited spending.

China and Chinese are just the opposite.

Chinese people save 36% of their income, the highest on earth and the US barely save at all. That is a very big difference. The U.S. cannot depend on domestic savings, China can and they do. China saved more the entire UK GDP each year! China used that to fuel the Chinese economy by building up infrastructures and invest in R&D. Hence China is now totally independent innovatively and scientifically.

I know when a person like you who ask such a question you are already fooled by your western media that China is unsustainable but the fact is just the opposite. The U.S. is mightily unsustainable and China is the lowest geared economy. And its real tangible investment are paying off well!

The U.S. infrastructure is dilapidating and you guys burnt cash like there is no tomorrow! 5 trillion in Iraq, 5 trillion in Vietnam, 3 trillion in Afghanistan. And probably 10 trillion in Ukraine by the time this shit ended. Burning cash sending armadas around the world and keeping 800 plus military bases around the world! Your investment is not getting any returns.

China build more high speed railway, solar panels, wind turbines and hydroelectric power stations then the rest of the world put together!

So grow up Mr. Questioner and Americans and brain dead westerners. China is great and dandy. The U.S. is without doubt collapsing before your eyes. If you open yours!

THIS AMERICAN INSULTS THE ENTIRE AFRICAN CONTINENT. IS THIS HOW A/AMERICANS FEEL ABOUT AFRICANS?

https://youtu.be/1qeRW-SbsPg

Would the Tiananmen Square Massacre have happened if China had a Second Amendment?

The problem is, there was no massacre.

Tiananmen, and the never-ending western media narrative telling outright lies for decades without giving the Chinese the opportunity to set out the facts is the primary motivation for the Great Firewall, and strict Chinese censorship.

A poor and relatively backward China would have been at constant risk of implosion had external forces been able to spread lies as propaganda to bring down the government in Beijing, using Tiananmen as the rallying point.

Unfortunately, the truth is way more mundane.

The students were persuaded to go home before first light, and most of the soldiers deployed to the square were involved in area cleaning on June 4th and 5th.

In sum, the Tiananmen PROTESTS (which lasted for months centered around June 4th) resulted in the deaths of several hundred, with an abnormally high percentage being uniformed personnel. It was at best, a sustained social disturbance.

The Chinese are not stupid, or disrespectful people. No leader will order a massacre at Tiananmen, with the portrait of Mao overlooking the square. The Long March generation had given their lives to free the people from oppression, and it would have been heresy to mow down the hope of the nation under the watchful eyes of Mao.


Dmitry Orlov: Russia and China Melding in a Shifting Geopolitical Landscape

https://youtu.be/sdkloQ5dycI

What’s the most unprofessional thing a doctor has said to you?

This happened, not to me, but to my younger sister (who’s 16 at the moment). [Too bad I wasn’t with her back then…]

Some Background Details (they’re important in the story): My sister is a beautiful, talented and intelligent girl. She got double promotion in her 6th year so now she’s the youngest in her class. For some time now (around 2–3 years… Whoa, that’s actually a lot!), she has been complaining about her vision. She says that whenever she opens her eyes, everything just constantly keeps morphing and changing forms .

We took her to 3 opthalmologists. None of them could determine the cause of her wavy vision and so they diagnosed it as psychological and referred her to a psychologist who was very well-known (and well-paid) in our area.

Let’s call the psychologist Sarah. So here goes:

(My sister comes in and sits down. Sarah regards my sister condescendingly then proceeds to give her a complacent smirk as if she had just found the answer to all the problems in the universe)

Sarah: “You’re not a very good student are you?”

5 remarks popped into my sister’s head at that very moment:

  1. WTF?!
  2. Is this the first question you ask your patient?
  3. I’m top of my class even after my double promotion.
  4. You’re not a very good doctor are you?
  5. Lady, you just ruined your reputation in less than 10 seconds.

But instead she replied with a simple “I’m moderately good.”

Sarah: “You know, it won’t do you any good to lie.”

By this point, my sister is so shocked she doesn’t even say anything.

Sarah: “Please stand outside for a moment. I’d like to speak to your mother privately.”

My sister just walks out (still unable to process such level of vanity in an adult).

Sarah: “Your daughter is quite obviously making the whole thing up about her vision. And as her parent, it is your responsibility to make sure she studies all day. She gets an F in her tests and at best a D, am I right?”

It took my mother all of her willpower to not get up and slap her full across the face. She quietly thanked the doctor and left, making sure to slam the door especially loudly on her way out.

P.S. After much more research and diagnosis in another country (Australia), it turns out my sister’s wavy vision was due to ocular migraine. It hasn’t got much better yet but baby steps lead the way. 🙂

INVESTIGATORS REVEAL JIMMY LAI MONEY TRAIL

Huge amounts of international money flowed into the bank accounts of Jimmy Lai—and large sums of cash went out to anti-China groups, a court heard yesterday.

The tabloid publisher received HK$2.945 billion in his nine bank accounts in recent years, with deposits coming from the United States, Canada, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and elsewhere. The money is said to have derived “from overseas securities trading”.

But the money didn’t sit there.

Who got the cash?

Chunks of finance went out to multiple China-hostile political groups in Hong Kong, the US, and the UK, the prosecution said, providing a detailed report from financial investigators.

Jimmy Lai’s lawyer Steven Kwan Man-wai did not dispute the information.

Local recipients included the Hong Kong Democratic Party, the Civic Party, the Labour Party, the League of Social Democrats, the court was told.

A wildly critical UK group called Hong Kong Watch, whose members include Benedict Rogers and former Hong Kong Governor Chris Patten, received HK$202,000.

Paul Wolfowitz, former US deputy secretary of defence, was sent HK$1.76 million in payments from 2013 onwards, the court heard. Money also went to a right-wing think tank called the American Enterprise Institute.

Cash also went to a group called the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China, organizers of an annual meeting to keep the “Tiananmen Square massacre” story, debunked by Julian Assange and others, alive.

The biggest individual recipient named yesterday was Cardinal Joseph Zen, a retired Hong Kong churchman who has fallen out with his colleagues, including Pope Francis, over his relentless China-bashing. The churchman received HK$3.5 million in 2017, the prosecution said.

The court heard earlier that large sums of money from Jimmy Lai’s funds (held by various entities) were paid to media companies, including the publishers of the Washington Post, the Nikkei Weekly, the UK Guardian, and media groups in India.

Jimmy Lai, 76, is on trial for sedition and collusion, offences illegal worldwide. His colleagues and associates have pleaded guilty in related hearings. The trial continues.

Baltic Sea Anomaly, Atlantis, and Underwater Alien Bases | Mysteries of the Ocean Pt 1

https://youtu.be/tgqAt6YN1jE

Why do so many couples still get married when the divorce rate is so high?

I can tell you why I took the plunge.

She was gorgeous.

I wanted to have sex.

We were both young and stupid.

Oh, and movies said we’d “live happily ever after.”

And we did, through the honeymoon. Then reality struck.

We suddenly discovered that, well, we’re very different. In just about everything.

And that caused us to clash and occasionally me to wonder, “What the hell is wrong with her?”

And my wife to wonder that about me, only way more often.

Through years of building businesses, raising kids, paying bills. And occasional sleepless nights, sickness and clashes it would have been easy to walk away.

To think, “Well, I guess it’s not meant to be.”

But we just chose not to. We chose to make it “happily ever after.” Period.

So when we didn’t have the happy part we still had the ever after part. And it was going to be a long ever after.

So we might as well put the happy part back in. And we did.

Last week my wife was gone baby sitting our grandson. I was home alone.

No, that’s never a good thing in so many ways.

She came home on Friday evening so we had a late dinner and watched a movie.

As we enjoyed a glass of wine, I thought, “Ah, life is good again. Just the way it’s meant to be.”

I turned to her and said, “I’m glad you can babysit. But I’m really glad you’re home.”

“Yeah, it feels good to be home too. Though I miss my baby,” she responded.

“I know, I’m having to compete with your new boyfriend. But I do have to say, he’s really cute.”

We laughed.

And proceeded to live happily ever after for another evening.

And later, well, never mind.

You get married for the wrong reasons. Then build a marriage for the right ones.

What path in life did you go down that, as a child, you never would have expected?

I was failing grade 8 Math and English, and barely passing Science. My parents ran into my Math teacher at a social event, turned out they had distant common friends.

She made it a point to tell them I wasn’t going to get anywhere in life. She suggested they find me a trade, I might do well as an electrician or a plumber (nothing wrong with these professions, except she used it in a derogatory way, as studying is beyond my capabilities).

Ms. Farhana was a real jerk.

I was the shiest kid around and bullied throughout my childhood. However, I was embarrassed enough by that incident that I mustered up my courage and asked the neighbour’s daughter to tutor me. She started from basic and built up from there.

I passed grade 8 Math. Barely, but I passed it.

She kept tutoring me and I did average in grade 9.

My grade 10 Math teacher had a baby. He lived in the neighbourhood so I decided to ring his doorbell to wish him well. He invited me in for cake. Zee never says no to cake. He told me I could be his best student if I just tried harder.

I knew he was giving me an empty compliment, but a part of me thought I could.

So I asked him to help me after school. He said yes.

I got lucked out with a really kick-ass, but slightly racist, grade 11 Chemistry teacher. He broke things down to just Math. I overlooked his passive aggressive micro-aggressions and had him help me. Everything made sense.

I took Finite Math in highschool. The teacher had a bit of a gambling problem, but man did he know his probabilities.

Suddenly Math was fun.

There is a goat behind one of three doors and you pick a door. I open one of the doors you didn’t pick, do you change your answer? (Hint: yes)

I made up different problems with him. I learned Texas Hold’em. We talked about probabilities of different hands.

In grade 12 Advanced Math I got almost perfect, the highest mark anyone has gotten up until that point in that school’s history.

I took Math tests for fun and did well enough at the University of Waterloo’s Descartes test that I got in with scholarship even though my overall marks weren’t that high.

I decided to major in Math (and Computer Science). I finished the first year in Dean’s list, primarily because of kicking ass in Math. I tutored Calculus, Algebra, and Combinatorics and Optimization to pay bills.

Screw you Ms. Farhana, you were wrong.

I graduated and went to work for Microsoft and then Amazon due to my strength in Math.

I decided to run for a local office and despite not knowing anyone, turned campaigning into a Math problem. I reached out to others in the office and asked them for advice. I took their advice seriously.

Heck I read a book, tracked down its author (two-time mayor of a Michigan municipality) and emailed him for advice. He replied and agreed to mentor me remotely.

I won the election.

I started a business. I sucked at it. I ran into someone at a dinner who ran an agency. I asked him for help. He agreed. Eventually we ran a campaign for Nissan.


As a child I never thought I could learn that everyone had something to teach me, outright ask them to teach me, and benefit from this skill so incredibly.

The Worst Thing Ever”

it was seriously the worst thing ever. I walked into my house and saw my mom hanging from the ceiling fan.

I can’t even put into words how messed up it was. It felt like my whole world just fell apart. I still can’t wrap my head around it. It’s like I’m stuck in some kind of freaky….

I can’t even put into words how messed up it was. It felt like my whole world just fell apart. I still can’t wrap my head around it. It’s like I’m stuck in some kind of freaky dream.

 I just wish I could go back in time and stop it from happening. But I know that’s not possible. All I can do now is try to move on and remember her in the best way I can. 

The most devastating experience of my life was witnessing my mother’s passing. The sight of her lifeless body on the floor left me feeling as though I had lost not only her, but also myself and my entire world. 

Despite my desperate desire to help her, she passed away before my eyes, leaving me feeling helpless and hopeless. 

However, as time passed, I came to the realization that I must strive to make her proud by doing my best to secure a successful future. This tragedy has left an indelible mark on my life, but I am determined to honor my mother’s memory by achieving my goals.

image 167
image 167

Related…

DESPERATE WOMAN RESCUED FROM HANGING HERSELF TO DEATH

2024 01 22 07 03
2024 01 22 07 03

Information from reliable source to YIRIMAMBO ADVOCACY GROUP UPPER WEST REGION

indicate that a woman from East District information gathered from Wa East district in the Upper West region indicate that a married woman with six children who allegedly wanted to hang herself to death is battling with problems.

It has been fetched but obvious that she can not do anything else for survival nor her mother to care for her family. It is noted that she is a sickler and her mother a stroke patience.

Despite her poor health condition, she and the husband that are taking care of the family. She is always carrying her mother here and there to help her in movement because of that she can’t do any work for money.

Notwithstanding to this, sometimes it is difficult for them to get even food to eat or clothes to wear and medicines for themselves.

Even though the father with six children, is a farmer but is not easy for him taking care of all of them, he brings only what he gets from the farm and that is all which is not always enough but they have been managing.

So she always sit idle thinking that all these problems cannot be solved and she has been saying which she has always been saying to people.
*Ending Her Life By Committing Suicide*
On the 31st July, 2019 at about 4-5:00 in the evening, a woman which is about 45years- old by name with-held with six Chlidren, from Ducie in the Wa East district of the Upper West region went out with a rope in a black 

polythene bag thinking that nobody have seen her but one of her children who was inside another room before she went out into the bush quickly went to inform some good Samaritans in the community and they also quickly traced this woman to the bush and before they got there she has already tied the rope on top of a tree trying to climb another piece of a tree before she can put her neck on the rope. Then the people who followed her as good Samaritans shouted on her and quickly rushed to save her without doing that.

So on this note we are pleading that if any member can help us with either food stuffs or clothes for these people and health support for them as well, if possible so that we will also try to help this woman with counselling and the materials support from you.

But for now she is a little bit OK with her situation.


With the intervention of yirimambo for the first place with our advice and counseling than before.

SOURCE YIRIMAMBO ADVOCACY GROUP UPPER WEST

Be the RUFUS!

We are a community.

My post on community… on Quora.

What is a Chinese Expert?

I really do not think that this creature exists.

According to the Western / American “news” media, a Chinese Expert is…

  • A person who accepts American government funding to say bad things about China.
  • Is associated, or was associated, with American mainstream media.
  • Has, in their possession, photos of the “expert” with American political personages.

According to the Chinese, a Chinese Expert is a graded, stratified tier system based on experience.

  • Top Tier

Born in China. Studied Chinese history with exemplary grades. Works on behalf of the Chinese people, and puts the people of China first. Many members of the CCP fit this role, as do many Pioneers, and an entire subculture of Chinese that support the “Chinese Dream”.

  • Old Hand

Has lived in China for a significant period of time. Understands the various societies, and cultures of China. Is married to, or was part of, a Chinese family. Works on behalf on the greater good for all, but of course, his / her Chinese family and Chinese friends come first. This person is also known as a Chinese wanna-be. And this person supports, and praises, “The Chinese Dream”.

  • Enthusiast

This person, may or many not have lived in China. But has totally embraced the Chinese culture, society and means. This includes certain individuals out of Singapore, Vietnam, and other places around the globe. Maybe they aren’t an “expert” in a classical sense, but they are certainly enthusiastic for the Chinese dream. These people are perhaps known an “fanboi.”

At best, I (personally) am considered a “China Old Hand”.

I don’t know everything, but I know enough.

What is “The Chinese Dream”?

Last weekend, my family and a few friends, went to visit an organizational youth meet in Zhuhai. This group (and there are thousands throughout China), teach independence, pride, self-confidence, and acceptance as part of “The Chinese Dream”. It was astounding.

It’s 100% voluntary. The kids pay a small membership fee.

Really. Amazing.

You will never see anything else like this anywhere. Watch how accepted and inclusive my daughter was taken in. It was like she was “absorbed by the hive”. LOL

“Resistance is futile”. -The Borg

https://youtu.be/vVcosfCqwNA

There is a great sense of belonging, and acceptance that I have NEVER experienced anywhere else.

Belonging.

B-E-L-O-N-G-I-N-G

Belonging as PART of a COMMUNITY.

No “lone wolf” bullshit.

It’s stuff like this why I LOVE LOVE LOVE China so much.

EDIT 22JAN23

1.3K views. Only 30 “thumbs up”.

I guess you all have bought into the Western propagandized lie that you can be the “lone wolf”. That you can be another “Die Hard” type; another Rambo. Another Clint Eastwood or John Wayne. Maybe a “Professional career woman”… and all that.

That is a lie.

As many are waking up to the reality that humans are social creatures.

We need to be part of society. We need to belong.

Watch my little 2 minute video. (above)

Belonging is valuable.

 

What made you think, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” when someone sat next to you on an airplane?

We were on a flight to the U.S. from Thailand where we live.

In Taiwan, a disheveled man of around 30 sat down next to me, reeking of weed. After takeoff, he pulled down the tray and filled it with candy bars, nuts, fruit juice and oranges from his camouflage jacket. He turned to me and said, “You can’t trust airline food.”

But when lunch was served, he smashed his food stash under the food tray he was given and ate everything, including the garnish.

Afterwards he wanted to talk and kept pestering me with, “Hey. Hey!!”

He asked where we were from, and upon hearing “Bangkok” he began raving about ‘Thai sticks’, Thai marijuana. Then he asked my Thai husband if he would help him start importing weed to the U.S.

Husband stared at him really coldly and told the man that he was a Royal Thai police officer so “No.” The idiot’s response: “ Listen, I know all Thai cops are corrupt. We could make a load.”

Husband put headphones on and ignored him. I asked the pothead if he was out of his mind. He shrugged, laughed and said husband would change his mind, for sure.

Luckily, he made a friend elsewhere and moved.

But he wasn’t finished with us.

As we lined up for Customs, he got right behind us. As the agent checked our bags, he kept saying loudly, “They’re from Thailand. Great weed there! Oh, look! That’s a weed pipe!” (It was a replica of a silver opium pipe, a decorative item – a gift) “Listen! I still wanna import from you guys!!”

Another agent picked up his bags and escorted him to a separate office, and we never saw him again.

My MM video about pollution in China

https://youtu.be/1vpQCefbArY

Why is the United States afraid of China?

It’s entirely IDEOLOGICAL

The United States and it’s entire existence is based on the WEALTH OF NATIONS

The inherent belief that Core Capitalism is the only system to deliver maximum benefits to an economy and stability to the economy & a system of the people is the only way to deliver a system with full global peace

That the world will be fully peaceful when every nation is governed by its people AKA is a democracy built on Western ideals


This was a very correct analysis that the US followed for almost a hundred and ten years from 1880–1990

Unfortunately this ideology got corrupted post 1990 when:-

  • US Democracy slowly became more and more partisan
  • US Leaders became slowly worse and worse and essentially corrupt demagogues
  • The US capitalism model deteriorated to an Oligarchy ‘Support the top 1%’ model that is sinking the states
  • The US model became all about speculation and less about actual progress and growth

Yet today’s US leaders religiously believe this is the winning model that every nation must adopt and regards any nation that is different as a ‘Flawed Nation’


Chinas Economic Ideology unlike the USA has always changed to suit changing times

From Deeply Socialist under Mao Tse Tung where the focus was on Education and Equality and Food Production and Stability

To Gradual Mixed Economy under Deng Xiaoping & Jiang Zimin where the focus shifted to Industrialization

To a Ruthless Capitalist Mindset under Hu Jintao where the focus was growth, growth and growth

To the Common Prosperity Mindset under Xi Jingping focusing on reducing Income inequality, spreading development across all sections of the economy and a sort of hybrid model of socialism within capitalism

It is diametric opposite to the US and it’s Ruthless Capitalism Ideology

US maximizes emphasis on Speculation

China hates Speculation

US prefers to capitalize everything to the maximum

China prefers a strong sense of control on excess capitalism

US prefers coalescing smaller entities into a handful of monopolies

China prefers mushrooming of smaller entities and competition deciding which is the best


Chinas One Party System is also diametrically opposite to the Multiple faction democracy that the US endorses and the West supports

The US believes that one person for too long loses the incentive to serve the people and becomes a dictator

Yet China believes a group of able people can serve the people the best and prevent unworthy individuals from coming to power who can ruin a well established system of governance


The US has always believed that ultimately China will shed it’s different ways and join the US in their perfect model (that they don’t realize they have fully corrupted)

It’s what made Gordon Chang & Peter Zeihan such celebrities

The US has always believed that China would face a massive setback like the USSR did (Or was suckered into triggering a setback like my friend Hoàng Phan establishes in his answers)

They estimated this to happen between 2005–2008

Didnt Happen

Instead China moved from strength to strength to strength over time and successfully endured every US action against it, from the Wolf Sanctions of 2011 to the Raimondo Sanctions of 2022

The US may trigger a wave of propaganda against China but the purpose of this is to STOP THEIR OWN PEOPLE FROM QUESTIONING AS TO HOW CHINA NOT ONLY SURVIVES TODAY BUT THRIVES FOLLOWING DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSITE ECONOMIC AND POLITICAL IDEOLOGY


As China moves ahead without the seeming collapse, the US are seeing their two hundred year old belief and ideology (Again which they don’t realize they have corrupted already) getting shattered by China

And slowly seeing others start to adopt a similar stance from Turkiye to Serbia to Vietnam to Singapore

The US is beginning to wonder if indeed it’s ideology was flawed and whether it’s gods and idols are false

And that terrifies them

They don’t realize that it is THEY who have completely corrupted a nice good solid system that was giving them the position of world leader and global trust for decades

It is they who have become Satanic Hegemons from Global Leaders


As for China, China is on the right track so far

They MUSTN’T MAKE THE MISTAKE THAT US DID

They mustn’t allow ideology and hegemony to corrupt them the way US was corrupted under Bush Junior, Clinton and so on

They must ensure they keep refreshing their system so that it best helps the people of China

Pepe Escobar: China Issues DEVASTATING Warning to Neocons as Putin and Xi Make History

https://youtu.be/Qozaq6KAvPs

Have you ever seen something so surprising that you were momentarily stunned? What was it?

I was on the beach late one night looking at the moon and the waves.

Out of the corner of my eye along the south end of the beach – I saw something super weird.

What is that?

I squinted, trying to figure it out – it was too far away – but it had to be really huge.

What the heck?

Well, I couldn’t sit there idly looking at the moon and listening to the surf anymore – I needed to figure out what that thing was over there on the beach.

So, I started walking… is it a car? What is that thing? How is it on the beach? Nobody in their right mind would drive a VW bug on a beach like ours… at night…

Closer and closer I walked and larger and larger it looked.

It was a leatherback sea turtle. Digging a hole in the sand.

I was utterly flabbergasted.

I didn’t make a sound, I just stood there, awestruck: feeling truly blessed in the moment to be near such a magnificent being.

I had never been so close to such a large animal in the wild before.

She was utterly oblivious to me – she was on a mission.

I stood beside her as she dug: I definitely got a sand bath that night. She flipped the sand until she was happy with her nest and began to fill it with eggs.

It took a long time.

I couldn’t stay until she was completely finished.

I’m pretty sure it took most of the rest of the night. I left around 0300 and she wasn’t done.

I’ve since swum with green turtles, who are dwarfed in comparison. But nothing has engendered that kind of awe before or since. Stunned is the right word for something which leaves your mouth hanging and your words lost.

Cheese and Honey Pie

Cheese and Honey Pie
Cheese and Honey Pie

Ingredients

Sesame Seed Pastry

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1/3 cup butter or margarine, softened
  • 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
  • 1 tablespoon toasted sesame seed
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt

Filling

  • 16 ounces cream cheese, softened
  • 2 eggs
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup honey
  • 1/2 cup whipping cream
  • 1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Instructions

  1. Sesame Seed Pastry: Mix all ingredients until blended; press firmly and evenly against bottom and side of 9-inch pie plate.
  2. Bake at 475 degrees F for 5 minutes.
  3. Filling: Beat cream cheese in large mixer bowl on medium speed until creamy. Add remaining ingredients; beat until light and fluffy. Pour into baked pie shell.
  4. Bake at 350 degrees F until firm, 40 to 50 minutes.
  5. Refrigerate until serving time.

Yields 10 to 12 servings.

Done with the bullshit

I had a thought today that I wanted to share with you all, this is my response to a Reddit post I saw about how corrupt and outdated representative democracy is.

I will start with what I think to be the main problems of representative democracy

  1. The elected body of legislators is not a representative sample of the population, looking at the legislature, you’d think the vast majority of the country was white male lawyers that are either Republicans or Democrats. This is very far from the truth, and many voters do not properly identify either Republican or Democrat and their interests oftentimes scope over topics from both parties. Most of the time when people vote they’re just picking the lesser of two evils, and are not in any way completely satisfied with what other party is doing.
  2. Scope of power does not match scope of accountability, legislators may pass laws that impact people that could not vote for or against them. Unless you count propositions in places like california, legislators are able to pass pretty much whatever law they want that impact sometimes tens of millions of people and are in no way accountable to the laws that they pass. The people have no say in the laws that legislators have passed. This very often leads to a corrupt system of the government being able to do whatever it wants and the people having no say in what the government does.
  3. Job security for elected officials is more dependent on fundraising than on whether the politician is acting in his or her constituents’ best interests. This blows the system wide open for large corporations and billionaires to buy off politicians that represent their best interests as opposed to the people.
  4. Lobbying undermines democracy. Lobbying is a mechanism for powerful groups to influence laws and regulations at the expense of the public interest. This results in outside influence, unfair competition and policy capture, to the detriment of effective policymaking. This effectively allows billionaires and big corporations to buy our government and politicians that act in their best interests rather than the interests of the people.
  5. The voting system and general layout of government was designed before it was possible to quickly communicate long distances, so it ignores the possibility of citizens directly participating.
  6. Mass media cannot be trusted to provide accurate information and is very often bias. Mass media often feeds lies and propaganda to the electorate and the electorate is not currently equipped to ensure a representative democracy is acting in the best interest of the people.
  7. The electoral college needs to go, it is not based on popular vote, and it is based on a winner takes all system which is easily susceptible to corruption and allows political candidates to be elected by losing the popular vote. Under the system if you want to vote for your states of losing party don’t even bother voting.
  8. There aren’t enough representatives to accurately represent the people if we’re going to keep our system of representative democracy and not throw out the entire thing. I think the amount of Representatives should be raised to 936, and the amount of Representative districts should also be increased.
  9. It’s very hard to remove corrupt politicians from power. The people should be able to impeach corrupt politicians, the system was not designed to have politicians serving for 30 or 40 years. We need term limits, I think a term limit of 6 years for senators and representatives is perfectly fair, and I think a term limit of 10 years for supreme Court justices is also perfectly fair. This would allow the government to be more in touch with what people want by constantly switching out people every couple of years.
  10. The Monopoly of power that both conservatives and liberals have over the government in their respected Republican and Democratic parties. We need more political parties to better represent the people, it is not the case that people simply think one way or the other there should be five political parties written directly into the Constitution. The government should operate in a European style model of a political coalition if it wants to get anything done, in other words political parties are forced to make concessions and are forced to work with other political parties to pass laws.

So what do I things should be done to fix things? I’ll tell you

  1. Abolish Congress and the supreme Court, and implement a system of direct democracy where every 6 months every single issue that the supreme Court and Congress would have looked at are voted on directly by the people in the form of propositions. Now I know that if we implemented elections twice a year every June and December people will be voting on about 100 different issues, and that’s fine, people’s voices need to be heard and it is a much better system of asking people what they think of certain issues rather than allowing an out-of-touch government to make these decisions for people instead.
  2. Like I said on my previous point, it needs to be a government for the people by the people. This is why representative democracy is an outdated and obsolete relic of the past. In representative democracy legislators are able to pass whatever laws they please and are not accountable to the people.
  3. We need to make lobbying illegal and if we are going to have a political coalition system the people need to be the ones electing politicians not billionaires and big corporations. Money should not be a part of politics. Making money part of politics undermines democracy
  4. Like I said before lobbying undermines democracy and it needs to be banned 🚫. Lobby groups do absolutely nothing for the government except give special interest groups political power that they shouldn’t have and allow the special interest groups to have a voice in our country and our politics and it allows them to buy politicians.
  5. We need to switch to a ranked choice voting system, as opposed to an instant runoff system. The electoral college needs to go, even if that means amending the Constitution to get rid of it.
  6. Mass media should not have a say in our government, as they cannot be trusted to provide accurate information. I think we should have a system of fake news laws that holds these mass media companies accountable for publishing bias or false information
  7. Like I said the electoral college needs to go. Even if that means amending the Constitution get rid of it. We need a ranked choice popular voting system. This would make it so everybody’s voice is heard, and it would allow new political parties to come to the table and it would break up the Monopoly of power that Republicans and Democrats have over the government.
  8. I don’t even think we should keep our system of Representative democracy, but if it needs to stay we need to double the amount of Representatives to 936. This wasn’t even my idea this was the idea of YouTuber Mathew Beat.
  9. We need term limits for politicians. Once a corrupt politician like Mitch McConnell is in power it’s almost impossible to get rid of them. And it should be up to the entire country to elect politicians not just their state. Term limits would allow new people to come to the table and new ideas to spread and it would allow for more political parties to have seats. Every political party no matter how extremist should be able to have its voice heard.
  10. We need to switch to a political coalition system. Everybody should be able to have their voice heard no matter what side of the political spectrum they sit on. There should be five major political parties and many smaller political parties even if those political parties only get 1–5% of the vote. These political parties should be: the nationalist, the conservatives, the liberals, the acella party (progressive party), and the green party. Many smaller political parties such as: the Socialist party, the fascist party, the libertarian party, etc should also get a say. If we have 936 representatives, even if the fascist party only got 2% of the vote, they would still get 19 seats. This would actually heavily benefit minority political parties and give them a lot of power. Let’s say for example that 20% of the population identifies as nationalist, and 22% of the population identify as conservative. This does not add up to 51%, it adds up to 42%, this would still require an additional 9% of the vote for the nationalist and conservatives to get anything passed and they would have to make deals with the smaller political parties to get up to 51%.

These are just my thoughts about our whole busted political system, let me know what you think

2024 Taiwan Election Reveals Shocking TRUTH About USA and China

https://youtu.be/XKiM2rVZMYg

Born with a tail

After my first wife and I divorced, I joined a website “match.com” and started dating other women. I met all kinds of girls. Many of the dates were just a nice meal, or coffee. Some resulted in hook-ups, and a few were girls that I would end up spending a lot of time with.

One time, I dated a girl who was an assistant professor at Tufts University. Which is a pretty well-known university in the Boston area. And she was part of the Woman’s Studies program.

The date started off well enough, but our conversations kept on turning to what was wrong with the world and why men were the root of all evil.

Honestly, looking back, I get the impression that the ONLY reason why she went out with me was to somehow torture me for her pent up anger and unhappiness in her life. But I really don’t know for sure.

Anyways, after about an hour long bitch-fest, I finally managed to have an opportunity to talk.

She asked me “oh, so tell me about your life”. And I was pretty upset (but not showing it) by then.

So I remembered a line from a movie that I once watched.

I told her that I was born with a tail. And that my mother had the doctor cut it off when I was just a baby. I told her that it was kept in a jar of formaldehyde in the guest bathroom mirror, and that I personally believed that the tail was the reason why I was born with the ability to put curses on people.

After that, she didn’t know what to say, and we finished the meal quickly… yelling “I’ve gotta run. I’ll call you”.

Every now and again, I get a chuckle out of that memory. Remembering well, the puckered up expression on her face, and how she practically galloped out of the door.

Oh well.

Today…

What scary gut feeling did you have that turned out to be true?

My husband and I were away on a trip, and our older kids were holding down the fort (including our son who was home on leave from the Marine Corps). About 5:00 in the morning (2:00 a.m. at home), I sat straight up out of a dead sleep with one terrified thought: something was wrong at home.

My husband had been married to me over 20 years by then, and knew better than I did to never question when I got that instinct. He handed me the phone to call. I wasn’t sure what to say. “Just call. You’ll figure it out”, he responded.

The overwhelming feeling that something was very wrong wouldn’t let up. I called our daughter. She laughed and said everything was fine. I asked her to humor me and just go check. She said kids were asleep, so I asked her to go check the kitchen. Still chuckling at me she checked the stove and oven and declared them turned off. She looked about the rest of the kitchen until she turned in the direction facing the front doors. We have a large arctic entry so there are two front doors on each side of it so we come in from the cold and close one door and then open the second door to come to the house.

“Oh my God!” She cried out, and the phone went dead. I frantically tried calling back.

When she finally answered again, she told me both doors were wide open, so she called her Marine brother to come down from the upstairs apartment and he raced down. He did a security sweep of the house then the perimeter where he found evidence of bear on each side of the house. We question if the door was slightly ajar and the bear just pushed the doors open and started to come into the house until the phone rang.

That same mom vibe served me well when my Marines were deployed. I always seemed to know when to pray. It got to the point that whenever there was an incident, my other Marine son said he wouldn’t worry. Even when trapped in a doorway during a fire fight for five hours… because he knew his mom “knew” and was praying. Oddly enough, he was right. Thus another story.

A Cuban Sandwich

This is a labor-intensive recipe, but so delicious. You can opt to replace the Pan Cubano with ready-made bread, if desired.

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Yield: 6 sandwiches, 12 servings

Ingredients

Pan Cubano

  • 4 cups unbleached all-purpose flour
  • 4 teaspoons granulated sugar
  • 2 teaspoons salt
  • 2 1/4 teaspoons instant or active dry yeast
  • 3 tablespoons fresh lard, cut into small pieces
  • 1 1/4 cups (10 ounces) water

Roast Pork and Marinade

  • 1 (1 1/4 pound) boneless pork roast or pork tenderloin
  • 3 tablespoons minced garlic
  • 3 tablespoons minced parsley
  • 1 tablespoon paprika (preferably hot)
  • 2 teaspoons ground cumin
  • 1 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 tablespoons lime juice
  • 2 tablespoons light corn syrup
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable or olive oil

Sandwich Assembly

  • Sliced roast pork
  • 3/4 pound thinly sliced smoked ham
  • 3/4 pound thinly sliced Swiss cheese (or other melty cheese)
  • 4 dill pickles, sliced
  • 3 tablespoons butter or olive oil

Instructions

Pan Cubano

Manual Method

  1. In a large bowl, combine all of the ingredients and stir until the dough starts to leave the sides of the bowl. Transfer the dough to a lightly greased surface, oil your hands, and knead it for 6 to 8 minutes, or until it begins to become smooth and supple.
  2. Transfer the dough to a lightly greased bowl or dough-rising bucket, cover the bowl or bucket, and allow the dough to rise until puffy though not necessarily doubled in bulk, about 1 hour, depending on the warmth of your kitchen. Gently fold the dough in upon itself and turn it upside down after 30 minutes; this “turn” helps eliminate some of the excess carbon dioxide and redistributes the yeast’s food, both imperative for optimum yeast growth.

Mixer Method

  1. Combine the ingredients as directed at left, using a flat beater paddle or beaters, then switch to the dough hook(s) and knead for 5 to 8 minutes.
  2. Transfer the dough to a lightly greased bowl or dough-rising bucket, cover the bowl or bucket, and allow the dough to rise, with a turn, as directed above.

Bread Machine Method

  1. Place all of the ingredients into the pan of your machine, program the machine for Manual or Dough, and press Start. Examine the dough about 10 minutes before the end of the final kneading cycle, and adjust its consistency with additional water or flour as needed, to produce a smooth, supple dough. Allow the machine to complete its cycle.
  2. Divide the dough into six pieces, and shape each piece into a rough log. Let the logs rest for 15 minutes, covered, then shape each piece into a smooth batard shape (a log about 8 inches long, slightly tapered at each end). Sprinkle a baking sheet with cornmeal, and place the loaves on the baking sheet.
  3. Let the loaves rise, covered, for 1 hour. Brush or spray them with water, and slash one long lengthwise slit down the middle of each loaf.
  4. Heat the oven to 375 degrees F while the loaves are rising.
  5. Transfer the loaves from the cornmeal-sprinkled pan to your oven stone (if you have one), or leave them on the pan and place them in the preheated oven (if baked on a sheet pan, the loaves will be slightly less puffy). Bake the bread for 16 to 18 minutes, or until it’s golden brown. Remove it from the oven, and cool it on a wire rack. The loaves may be made one day in advance and stored at room temperature, or several weeks in advance and frozen. Yield: 6 sandwich loaves.

Roast Pork and Marinade

  1. Mix all of the marinade ingredients together (all of the ingredients except the pork), and rub this mixture over all surfaces of the pork. Cover well, and refrigerate for 6 to 24 hours.
  2. Place the pork in a roasting pan or ovenproof dish, and roast it in a preheated 425 degrees F oven for 30 to 40 minutes, basting occasionally with the pan juices, until a meat thermometer inserted into the center of the roast registers 160 degrees F. Remove the pork from the oven, and cool it completely before slicing thinly.

Sandwich Assembly

  1. Slice the Cuban loaves in half horizontally. Brush the cut surfaces of the rolls with olive oil, soft butter or the remaining pan juices. Layer the sandwiches as follows: Swiss cheese, sliced pickle, ham, sliced roast pork, then additional cheese.
  2. Now comes the somewhat challenging part. You want to grill these sandwiches, top and bottom, while at the same time flattening them slightly. This helps meld all of the filling ingredients. Heat two large skillets, or a grill and one skillet, to medium-hot. Lightly grease the grill and/or skillets. Place the sandwiches in the greased pan(s). Top them with a piece of parchment paper, then the remaining skillet (or flat sheet pan, or other heavy, flat, non-meltable object — the point is to weigh them down). Press down firmly on the top pan, and weigh it down. A tea kettle filled with water makes a good weight, as does a clean brick wrapped in aluminum foil.
  3. Grill the sandwiches for 5 to 8 minutes over medium heat, checking often to make sure the bottoms aren’t burning (we burned our first attempts to a crisp). Adjust the heat downward if the bottoms are becoming brown after only a couple of minutes. Turn the sandwiches over and grill for several more minutes, until they’re crisp on both sides.

Harry Potter but in France

If someone broke into your house, would you let them know of your presence before shooting them? By law, do you have to?

I disturbed a burglar when I was about 19. He froze and I was so confused I initially thought it was my father (who I’d seen go to bed an hour earlier) pulling out drawers in the dark. When I got my wits about me I turned on the light, told him to stand up, and told him to turn out his pockets (which he did, returning a few items). I then told him to walk out on to our patio and sit down. The moment he got outside he ran, and I pursued half-heartedly as I didn’t really want to catch him by myself.

He vaulted over our back fence and landed almost on top of my brother and his friend who (unknown to me) had sneaked out for a secret cigarette before bed. The burglar said to him “don’t worry I’m just going home”, about two seconds before my brother and his friend sat on him.

They brought him around to the front of our house, and we (including my father who’d been awakened by my shouts during the “chase”) sat him on our front wall until the police arrived. It was cold and the burglar seemed a bit worked up so my mother made him a cup of tea.

No guns or weapons of any kind were involved. We live in England.

Why Most Men Have No Chance In Short-Term Dating – @hoe_math

Who are some of the most well-known cult leaders in history, and what made them so dangerous?

The best example I can think of would be L. Ron Hubbard. Prolific science fiction writer turned dangerous cult leader. In a way, it’s hard not to admire the man for his honesty — because he did give the world the best quote ever on cults and shady false preachers:

“You don’t get rich writing science fiction. If you want to get rich, you start a religion.”

It’s fun, having your own religion. You can do whatever you want. You can say whatever you want. And since you’re the one and only “enlightened one”, the Great Messenger, no one can question you. Hubbard started off as a conman, but eventually came to believe his own nonsense. He was deeply mentally ill.

I remember Tom Cruise divorcing Nicole Kidman in the year 2001. One of the reasons for the divorce? Her father was a psychiatrist. And psychiatrists are “the enemy” according to Scientology, Hubbard’s invented faith. Not only because they would have told the great founder he was insane, but because they would have told his followers the same. Which would mean a loss of power.

Imagine creating a religion that thinks psychiatry is “evil”. Because your deeply mentally ill Messiah hated admitting he was deeply mentally ill, rather than a visionary. Decades after his death, your followers still hate psychiatry. They hate everyone and everything that might point out the absurdity in their views. It’s crazy, like Hubbard. But also impressive, like Hubbard.

HOE Math Explains Perfectly Why Men Love Inexperienced Women!

  • “Stuck on your highest setting,” is a brilliant way to describe the current female dating outlook.
  • Hoemath having his work vindicated in real time. Absolutely amazing.
  • Women don’t gain experience over the years they acquire trauma.

Have you ever been arrested when you were innocent? What happened?

Yes. 48 years old with a clean record.

I drove up from Florida, in route to Atlanta, to visit family, and had tickets to see a Too Short show with my Sister.

Got pulled over in Newton County, GA cuzz, “my taillight was out?”

The female officer said, that my license were suspended ?

The male officer, told the female officer that the suspension didn’t look right, and could be a mistake.

Then the male officer, turned and asked me if I owed any back child support?

I said, “No, I’ve never had to pay child support.”

The female cop, asked for permission to search my vehicle, I said, yes.

She found one rusted up Coors light can thrown into the truckbed I was driving.

She told me to turn around, handcuffed me, and took me to jail charged with, suspended license, taillight, and open container.

So, I spent the night in jail and froze to death the whole time.

The next morning, I went in front of the jail judge, and he dropped all of the charges, except the open container.

The jail judge took me back to where the police were, and asked me if I had $20.00 cash? I said, “Yes.”

The judge told the officers to let me out of jail, ordered them to take the cuffs off me me and to not put me back into that jail cell, and to give me my belongings.

So, I paid $20.00 cash, then $200.00 to get the truck out, and I took the truck to the closest auto shop to get the taillight repaired.

Well, guess what ? The taillight wasn’t broken, and was in proper working condition. The auto dude couldnt give me proof of that bc he said, I could have went somewhere else and had it fixed.

When I went to court for the open container, the court judge charged me with suspended license, taillight, and open container.

My public defender showed the judge the proof I had from the Florida DMV, that my license were never suspended, he told the Judge that I had no prior convictions, not even a speeding ticket, and the jail judge has already dropped those charges.

The court judge looked at me finded me almost $1,900.00, a year probation or 10 days in jail.

Then the court judge told me, that he had authority over the jail judge so whatever charges he dropped will not be dismissed.

Then the court judge told me, “No one drives thru his county with a suspended license!”

He said pay your $1,900.00 fine, and we will take you off probation, or we can put you in jail for 10 days, if you have anything further to say.

I paid my fine and the charges were dropped so my record is clean but it was an awful night and it took me a while to get back on track financially, not to mention all the stress and trips back up to Georgia to straighten the shit out.

It is a huge money scam, tow truck people are all in on it, and there is nothing you can do about it!

I didn’t miss the Too Short show tho and me and my Sister had a blast!

Cops suck ass! They are lazy and they lie too much. Anything to meet that quota! They don’t care about you losing your job, missing a show, staying in jail cause you can’t afford to pay the bail. They don’t give one fuck.

Protect and serve my ass!!!

They are bullies with badges, and can fuck your life up, even when you’re an innocent law abisding citizen, it’s all legal and it’s getting worse.

Fuck’em!

Conservatives INSANE reaction to Gen Z Hating the 40 Hour Work Week

Has a cop ever said something to you which was completely unexpected?

I was 17, driving my Dad’s Mercedes, drunk. A cop pulled me over, told me to exit the vehicle, and walk to the back of my car. I leaned against the trunk lid. The cop asked, “Where were you tonight?” I said, “At a party.” He asked, “Are you carrying any drugs or paraphernalia?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “Toss it down by my feet.”

i did. It was a little pot and a pipe. He asked, “Have you had anything to drink?” I said, “Yes.” Then he asked me, “In an ideal world, what would you like to happen now?” I said, “I’d like to drive home and never do this again.”

The cop said, “I believe you. You’ve been completely honest with me. Drive straight home.” He got back in his car, and drove off. He never even knew who I was. He didn’t ask for my driver’s licence or even my name!

What are some psychological things that make you likeable person?

  1. You don’t always need to be around people. People will want to be with you when you are happy by yourself.
  2. People love boldness. You will be respected when you become a straight talker. Example: If you can’t provide a favor, say no instead of trying to please them.
  3. If you don’t like yourself, no one else will. You must change what you don’t like about yourself and accept what you can’t change.
  4. Swallow your pride and always accept your mistake. Deflecting blame is always seen as a weakness.
  5. When you listen more instead of talking people feel special. In return, they will make you feel special.
  6. When you share a few uncomfortable truths about yourself, people will feel comfortable and reciprocate. Example: When talking to someone new, share the truth about your nervousness.

Gen Zer explains why her generation is screwed when it comes to Dating & Marriage

Lavrov’s Remarks and Answers to Questions at the Conference Marking the 10th Anniversary of the Coup d’état in Ukraine

Karl Sanchez

There are times when it’s hard to tell if Sergey Lavrov is angry or not. Most of what he said, including in his answers, he’s said many times before. I know he must keep up decorum, but when you read the text it’s easy to see him fed up with having to say whatever it is once again. Maybe his blood was already boiling since he addressed the conference on Neocolonialism before this forum. In print, when he discusses anything related to the West, there’s nothing good to be expected from it. Yes, we must understand that this pot’s been coming to a boil for many years now, since before Maidan, and not everything that could be cited is anymore. I recall the tense seriousness of his discussions with Putin, the government and the Security Council that began in September 2021 and culminated in his verdict in January that the Outlaw US Empire would refuse the December security proposals and thus the military technical operation would need to commence. In November, it was decided at a tense meeting of the government that what was happening Donbass was Genocide and something needed to be done and very soon. Putin agreed Genocide was indeed happening, and we know the subsequent formulations. I covered all that while writing at my VK platform that remains operational. My opinion is Team Putin never anticipated that their European counterparts could be as evil as they’ve become—IMO, it’s very important that the word evil is almost never mentioned by Team Putin and other descriptions are invoked instead, while the accusations coming from the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals are usually 100% projection. However, in the following, Lavrov uses the term Nazi as an adjective twice, which is synonymous with evil and diabolical and close to universally agreed upon by Humanity.

This much longer than usual preamble perhaps serves to provide more context for Lavrov’s words, or maybe it’s because I need to provide some justification for essentially repeating a story I’ve heard too many times, and every time it merely raises my angst against the Outlaws who stole my nation and have caused so much grief in the world over my lifetime. Enough from me; here’s Lavrov. All emphasis mine:

Dear Colleagues,

I am sure that those present here are well aware of the current situation in Ukraine, who was in charge of the process, and what methods were used.

On February 9, President of Russia Vladimir Putin, in an interview with Tucker Carlson, once again

gavea detailed account of the story. If we talk about the geopolitical aspects and consequences of the coup in Kiev, first of all,

I would like to say that what is happening is yet another result of the policy of “divide and rule”, pitting different countries and peoples against each other, and provoking interstate conflicts. This policy has long been pursued in various regions of the world by the “collective West” led by the United States, or rather, with the Anglo-Saxons.The role that England is playing in current events is more aggressive and sophisticated in its provocative assertiveness than any other participant, including the United States.

When the Americans and their satellites proclaimed themselves the winners of the Cold War, they set a course for NATO expansion, ignoring all their obligations not to expand the North Atlantic Alliance and not to deploy significant combat forces on the territory of new members, given (orally and in writing) to the Soviet and then Russian leadership. That was the next stage. The block began to expand. But even then we agreed to sign

an agreementon the establishment of the Russia-NATO Council. Once again, we made a concession. The fact of expansion was acknowledged. In response, the alliance pledged not to deploy significant combat forces on the territory of new members.

This

Acthas not been repealed. Look at what’s happening now. On the territory of the new members, more and more large groups equipped with modern weapons began to train right on our borders.

If we talk about the position of the West towards Russia, then since gaining independence, Ukraine has always been considered by it as an anti-Russian bridgehead. In 2004, in fact, the first coup d’état took place. It was bloodless, but unconstitutional. When Viktor Yanukovych won in the second round, the West forced the Constitutional Court of Ukraine to issue a verdict on the need to hold a third round, which is not provided for by the Constitution. That’s how they “wrung their hands.” How did it all end? They were playing democracy. But the games of democracy, even according to their rules, did not help in 2010, when the people (primarily the votes of the south and southeast of Ukraine) elected Viktor Yanukovych.

Then the West began to prepare a coup in such a way that there would be no more “misfires”. To destroy the opposition once and for all, which has been happening for many years since the February 2014 coup.

In the same year, a coup d’état took place in a country called Yemen, which now also often flashes on the pages of newspapers and TV screens. President Abdel Abdullah al-Hadi fled to Saudi Arabia. For many years after that, the West unanimously demanded the return of the legitimate president of Yemen to its country and only then begin negotiations on a settlement with the opposition.

In the case of Viktor Yanukovych, we drew the attention of the French, Germans and Poles (who guaranteed the peace agreement that was broken the next morning) to the need to “reason with the opposition.” What did they sign up for? That there will be early elections, and a government of national unity will be formed for the period until the elections. And the morning after the coup d’état, Arseniy Yatsenyuk (there was such a leader among them) went to the Maidan and said that he congratulated everyone, that they had won and created a “government of winners.” Does no one see the difference between national unity and winners? So there are losers. You all know how the situation developed later. Those who did not accept the result of this putsch were declared terrorists and an “operation” was launched against them. There were such brutal episodes in this tragedy as the burning of 48 civilians in the House of Trade Unions in Odessa, the bombing of Lugansk and other cities of Donbass by military aircraft. The DPR and LPR declared independence. But even then there was still room for agreement.

Some time later, in the second half of 2014 (after Kiev announced an “anti-terrorist operation”), a meeting of the foreign ministers of Russia (represented by yours truly), the United States, Ukraine and the European Union took place in Geneva.

At that time, Oleksandr Deshchytsia was acting Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine and had powers from the authorities that illegally reigned in Kiev. We have agreed on the statement. Unfortunately, it was not published by agreement, as it was agreed that Oleksandr Deshchytsia would “check” in her capital. The statement, in addition to a clear call for de-escalation and an end to violence, called for the start of a broad national dialogue in Ukraine with the participation of all regions of the country, with an eye to its federalization. Despite our reminders, the participants of this meeting then “walked away” from the publication of this statement. Instead, Kiev began to solve the “Donbass problem” (as they called it) by force.

In fact, it set the same goal as Adolf Hitler when he announced the need for the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”

Once again, we began to look for ways to cooperate to overcome the crisis. We persuaded Donbass not to abandon negotiations. President of Russia Vladimir Putin spoke about this in detail.

As a result, a year after the coup in February 2015, the agreements of the same name were signed in Minsk. Subsequently, you all know how then President of Ukraine Petr Poroshenko, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President of France Francois Hollande, who signed these agreements with Vladimir Putin, cynically and even proudly stated that they had no intention of fulfilling them. It took time to pump Ukraine with weapons against Russia.

This is a “stunning” confession – a “confession”, in fact. As a consequence of the fact that the West is using Ukraine in every sense to contain Russia and, as they now say, inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia, to prevent it from playing the role on the world stage that it rightfully deserves.

As a result, Ukraine, which received the richest industrial potential from the USSR and the Russian Empire,turned into the poorest state in Europe, into a territory, without exaggeration, dying. The Kiev authorities are already a universally recognized international beggar.

Ukraine’s independence is gone. Even before the coup of February 2014, starting with the Maidan, or even earlier,American and British advisers were sitting in most departments (including the Security Service of Ukraine). Now this is a standard, unsurprising practice.

They sit and make sure that money is not stolen, although no one will ever stop stealing. How will the West demand that Ukraine not steal the money it provides it with, if it is stealing our money? They are already openly discussing how to do it better so as not to violate their “moral” principles and not to create a precedent.

This is a vivid example of what “flirting” with the West and the thoughtless desire to integrate into its system of political and economic coordinates in any way leads to.There is no doubt that the West has declared war against us.

They don’t hide it.Although they say that they are only arming Ukraine, and it is the Ukraine itself that is fighting. Everyone understands that this is a lie. Western instructors monitor how the planning of the General Staff of Ukraine is carried out, help to guide to targets (we are 100% sure of this) and do much more. According to our information, the European External Action Service has made recommendations for Ukraine, which proceed from the fact that it will not be possible to win with the methods that Ukraine is currently fighting, and it will lose. Therefore, it is necessary to rely on the transfer of even more long-range weapons to this country so that they reach the “heart” of Russia (as the European Union describes it). In this way, they will once again sow confusion and panic and undermine the trust of the people.

Isn’t that direct participation in the war? Of course. In war, the main thing is strategy, and it is not in Kyiv, but far away.

Europe, eager to do something as soon as possible to end this drama with the defeat of Russia, in fact, serves the interests of the United States, does not care about its own interests at all. Look at the economic indicators, the negative growth, the recession in the leading European economies. President of Russia Vladimir Putin spoke about this in detail. Everything will probably become clear. All this is humiliated and accepted without complaint. There are no objections. Recall how after US President Joe Biden’s Nord Stream bombings announced in advance, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz went to Washington to bow down, where, apparently, he was told not to make any noise, and he returned without any news conference.

I would like to say that they are now trying to “gloom” (there is no other word for it) all the countries of the global majority, including those represented here (we are very glad to see you here), and to “drag” them into supporting Vladimir Zelensky’s completely dead-end “peace formula”. Its essence is that Russia must capitulate, go beyond the borders of 1991, and the Russian leadership must go to the tribunal and pay reparations. Everyone understands that this is a “dummy” and, at the very least, an unwise initiative.

But in order to lure normal countries that understand what is happening, in addition to the points I mentioned, they threw in supposedly neutral provisions: food security, energy security, nuclear security, prisoner exchange, and humanitarian issues. In total, there are 10 points in the formula, half of them are supposedly neutral.

Clearly, this is seen as a whole. When the countries of the Global South and the Global East are lured to “gatherings” that are organized to promote this “peace formula,” they are told that they understand that they do not like it, they understand their position that it is pointless to discuss anything without Russia. But they then say, they must support food security and sign up to “one” paragraph. As we say, these are “thimble makers”, as we say. I don’t know how it translates into English, but it’s an absolute “cheat” (there’s no other way to put it).

In Davos, there was another “gathering” on this “formula” of Vladimir Zelensky. The main thing they were interested in was a “group photo”. This is actually true. This is the EU’s recommendation to Ukraine: they say, do not go too far, do not force neutral participants, whom we are dragging into this process, to condemn Russia, the main thing is that “there is a photo.” I’m not kidding.

When I was in New York on January 23 of this year for the UN Security Council meetings on Palestine, Swiss Foreign Minister Ignores Cassis asked for

a meetingand suggested that Switzerland become the venue for the peace conference. In his conversation with me, he emphasised in every possible way that in Davos, after the meeting on the peace formula, he said at a news conference that it was necessary to solve problems involving Russia. I replied that if he said so, it means that he is sure of it, and then why did they gather without Russia?

This is not serious from the point of view of diplomacy of any country, and for the West to say that this is the only way forward, I think it is a shame.President of Russia Vladimir Putin,

commenting onthe results of his contacts with Tucker Carlson and during

his conversationwith him, said that

the West must admit that it has taken a wrong course that has failed.Let the West look for a way out of the situation without losing face.

Vladimir Putin stressed that the West must return to the art of diplomacy, and the art of diplomacy, like the art of politics, is the art of compromise.

It is clear that all this unequivocally presupposes the recognition of the legitimacy of our demands, non-bloc status, the rejection of any NATO advance, the rejection of the militarization of Ukraine as a threat to the Russian Federation, and

the cessation of the Nazi policy of extermination, both legally and physically, of Russians and Russian-speaking citizens on the territory of Ukraine.

Remember, back in November 2021, before the decision to launch a special military operation, before the West rejected our initiative on European security, a journalist asked Vladimir Zelensky how he felt about the people living in Donbass, on the other side of the contact line. Vladimir Zelensky thoughtfully and artistically said that there are people and there are “specimens”. And he also said earlier that if someone lives in Ukraine, but feels involved in Russian culture, Russian civilization, then for the sake of their children and grandchildren, let them “fail” to go to Russia.

This was said by the president, who was elected under the slogans, firstly, of a peaceful settlement, and secondly, of the protection of the Russian language in Ukraine. He called for “falling behind” the Russians, allowing them to continue speaking their native language in Ukraine, as they had done for centuries. That’s how he changed his views back in 2021.

And the final touch. He stated that he would never implement the Minsk agreements. It was clear that they were stalling. From February 2015 to 2019, there were no positive developments, only the bombing of Donbass in violation of all the requirements of this document. In December 2019, President of Russia Vladimir Putin, President of France Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and President of Ukraine Vladimir Zelensky

metin Paris at the initiative of the French and Germans, where they spoke in favour of “reconfirming” the Minsk Agreements, first of all, regarding the need for a direct dialogue between Minsk and Donetsk and Lugansk, and, secondly (no less important), in terms of enshrine their special status on a permanent basis in the Constitution of Ukraine. Vladimir Zelensky signed it. Some time later, when the events of February 2022 began, Oleksandr Yermak, Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine, said that Vladimir Zelensky had signed “just like that” so that they would fall behind. He wasn’t going to do anything. Like, they deceived us and “squeezed” us out of more time. This is the whole characteristic of the “characters” who now rule Ukraine and the West is betting on them in order to inflict a “strategic defeat” on Russia. If you want to go to the battlefield, it’s up to you.

Question: As you know, there are many mercenaries from Latin America on Kiev’s side. Do you think they pose a threat to democracy in these regions? Is there a security dialogue with the Latin American countries where they come from?

Sergey Lavrov: This topic is relevant not only for the situation in Ukraine.

It is known that mercenaries, including those from the Middle East, are actively used in the African region. In Ukraine, they are also fighting, including members of terrorist organizations like the Islamic State.

The Islamic State and its representatives are under the tutelage of the United States at the illegally occupied al-Tanf base in eastern Syria. Everyone knows this very well.The Islamic State itself came into being as a result of an attack on Iraq under false pretenses by the United States. Then the United States took over the administration of Iraq. They had the Gauleiter, the Governor-General (whatever you want to call him), Paul Bremer, who dissolved all the structures of the Baath Party. I just let it go. They were based on the Sunni branch of Islam. The backbone of the Islamic State was made up of officers of Saddam Hussein’s army, who had nothing to live on.

And the U.S. had a direct hand in this.It is interesting to see what the Americans have achieved in Iraq. The goals set are a complete failure.

Now, for the umpteenth time, the Iraqi government is asking them to withdraw their troops, but the U.S. is unwilling. That’s how big the Democrats are.

Al-Qaeda emerged after the Afghan saga, which also ended badly and shamefully. And after the invasion of Syria, Jabhat al-Nusra appeared, which later became known as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham.

Whatever you call them, they are “mercenaries.” The same members of the Islamic State are sent for money to various hot spots. They’re paid thousands of dollars to do their jobs.

Clearly, this is a dangerous practice. Eventually, when their mission in a country is over, they will have to go somewhere else (they don’t know how to do anything else but organize terrorist attacks, shoot, kill people).

If people go there from Colombia or other Latin American countries, one day they will have an epiphany. Many American and British mercenaries have already said publicly on camera that they are completely disappointed in what is happening there, in these lofty “democratic” goals proclaimed by the Kiev regime and its Western sponsors. Some are returning to their home countries.

But if the people who remain in this war waged against us by the West go through a military phase in their lives, it is likely that they will return to it, especially since in Colombia there is someone to argue with and there has always been someone to compete with.

We hope that the Colombian leadership is well aware of this, as are the leaders of other countries. After all, what is the problem? In many respects, this process is connected with the gross violation

of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relationsby Ukrainian embassies. It is outrageous that there are offers to be recruited for war on their websites. Several times we have drawn the attention of the Western masters of this regime so that they would “reason” with them. Nothing happens. Somewhere it quieted down, and then the recruitment activity continues again.

Everyone should be aware that a neutral position and a call for a settlement are good. We appreciate that. This is the position of the World Majority (with the rarest of exceptions). No one has joined the anti-Russian sanctions. But when the countries of the global majority try to “frown” by convening meetings under the slogan of Vladimir Zelensky’s “peace formula” as the only approach to a settlement, it is necessary (at least) to show that everyone understands everything and does not want to play this game.

Mercenary activities are part of the problem. This must be fought. There were thousands of mercenaries in Ukraine. According to our military, now there are less than half of them. The rest either left or met their inglorious end. [Lavrov could have gone much deeper and mentioned the Outlaw US Empire’s longstanding use of its Terrorist Foreign Legion to attain its goals in South America where it has a very long history going back to the 1850s.]

Question: Against the backdrop of President Vladimir Putin’s interview with Tucker Carlson, the rating of Republicans in the United States is generally rising. The opinion of the people in the West about Russia is changing dramatically. Previously, they did not know about what was happening in our country because it was not covered. How do you see the prospects for restoring relations with the West in the event of a change of government, especially in the United States (if Donald Trump becomes president)? Will they recognize the new territories? Will there be a resumption of cooperation?

Sergey Lavrov: Regarding the position of the Republicans and the “epiphany” that suddenly appeared in American society after President Vladimir Putin’s

interviewwith Tucker Carlson. For me, the main thing is that, as it turned out, US citizens live in a complete information blockade. They are “fed” with the internal narrative, primarily of the Democratic Party. Fox News is the only exponent of Republican sentiments, but after the departure of T. Carlson, the tone has also changed.

It turns out that there is no question of any freedom of speech. Although the American Constitution requires that there be access to any information. But in addition to this, there are also commitments made within the framework of the OSCE in 1991 inMoscow. At the initiative of the West, it was written in black and white (and the Soviet Union signed the demands): to ensure free, unrestricted access to information in each member state of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Special mention is made of information that originates both inside and outside the country concerned. This is a direct requirement.

Our friends from the diplomatic corps and all Russian citizens see in the news that “a good half” is a story about the position of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and the European Union on Ukraine or any other international event.

Our public is familiar with the point of view of the West. Yes, in most cases this is criticized, but everyone is free to draw their own conclusions. We do not censor what is said in the West.All this is shown, and then political scientists discuss it.

As for the restoration of relations, President of Russia Vladimir Putin also spoke about this in

an interview.

He explained that the West must admit its mistake and find a convenient way out. But with the full understanding that the problem of Ukraine, as we have identified it, must be resolved. He added that someday relations will be restored. When this happens is not up to us.

That’s their problem.President Vladimir Putin recalled that we had made so many concessions and gestures of goodwill. The limit has already been reached.

On their part, in response to our good deeds, we saw other gestures on one hand.

Question: What are the main consequences of the Euromaidan protest for the ordinary population of Ukraine? How to restore relations in the future?

Sergey Lavrov: There are living witnesses of those events here. I think they can describe it in brighter colors. But it is written in Ukrainian laws that a course has been taken to destroy everything Russian.

“Euromaidan” affected everyday life, access to information, education in the Russian language, which was used by more than half of the citizens. According to some estimates, 80% of the population of Ukraine feels that the Russian language is more comfortable in communication. All this is forbidden by law. Up to everyday situations: the saleswoman may refuse to serve if you address her in Russian. A few months ago, Kiev Mayor Viktor Klitschko issued a city regulation banning all cultural events in the capital: exhibitions, performances, film screenings, etc.

When this word was mentioned in the context of the

special military operationand

the policy pursued by the Kiev Nazi regime towards Donbass and Russians in general,Ukraine filed a lawsuit against Russia in the International Court of Justice. By demanding that the court recognise the groundlessness of the accusations of the Zelensky regime of carrying out a policy of genocide.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has concluded a decades-long debate. It made a verdict that we did not violate any conventions. Moreover, it rejected the Ukrainian claim that they were fighting terrorist regimes in Donetsk and Luhansk. The entire ideological basis of the “anti-terrorist operation” that Kiev launched after the coup d’état and then continued contrary to

the Minsk agreementshas been debunked. Now there are “local assaults on people” – they can pull them out from anywhere (from a cinema or a bathhouse) and send them to the “slaughter”. Bad consequences.

Millions of Ukrainians have found their shelter in our country. Here they are perceived as absolutely equal to us. Brothers, sisters, people with whom we have shared joy and sorrow. We have families on both sides. Rosbrothers. Both in Ukraine and in the Russian Federation. They are at home here. And the main thing is that those who come to us feel at home themselves. We will do everything we can to make them feel this way.

Question: The other day, the US government asked Congress for $100 billion: $65 billion for Ukraine, $15 billion for Israel and $20 billion for Taiwan. They will enact this sooner or later. Several European countries have begun to say that Ukraine should be part of NATO. Where are we going? Are there any possibilities for a peace conference?

Sergey Lavrov: This is not a question for us. We have answered it many times. President of Russia Vladimir Putin touched upon this issue. In April 2022, there was an agreement that has already become the talk of the town. The Anglo-Saxons forbade Vladimir Zelensky to sign the agreed agreement, which was acceptable to both the Ukrainian and Russian delegations. And so it happened.

To reiterate, there is a decree issued by Vladimir Zelensky prohibiting talks with Vladimir Putin’s government. When the West raised such questions, our President repeatedly said that it was necessary to force him to cancel this decree and say so publicly. The ball is not in our court. Everyone understands this very well.

At the same time, it is said that the Swiss are announcing a peace conference. But at the same time, the West unanimously declares that it is only on the basis of Vladimir Zelensky’s formula. Therefore, friends from Asia, Africa, and Latin America should choose the most “innocuous” points from these ten points (food or energy security), and the Westerners will write them down to participate in a “collective photo” in support of this “formula.” What kind of diplomacy is this?

They have not been engaged in diplomacy for a long time. Instead, there is blackmail and sanctions. Any issue that seems important to the West is never the subject of an honest discussion.

The UN Charter states that the United Nations is based on the sovereign equality of States. The most important point. Imagine retrospectively the various conflicts that have taken place since the creation of the World Organization in 1945. There is not a single conflict in history in which the West has been involved, either before or after the creation of the Organization, in which the United States and its allies have observed the principle of sovereign equality, and this obligation is enshrined in the Charter – to respect the sovereign equality of states. Therefore, the conference is apparently understood as a “collective photograph”, the participants of which will later say that there is a “formula” of Vladimir Zelensky, and that on this basis they invite Russia. I think it will be humiliating for them. Most people are well aware that this is neither diplomacy nor politics. So we don’t have the ball.

Question: In view of the fact that after the end of the

special military operation(even if not now), there is a transformation of the world order and international relations in general. Are there any plans to reform the UN, in particular the Security Council, under the auspices and within the framework of the initiatives and efforts of the Russian Federation, which is its permanent member? In view of the fact that we have repeatedly sent inquiries and requested various sessions to consider the terrorist attacks that took place on the territory of our country, in particular in Belgorod. Just yesterday. Will we somehow advance these efforts so that the UN Security Council acquires a new character and international law is respected?

Sergey Lavrov: Reform of the UN has been discussed for a long time. It’s overdue. For me, there are two main aspects of this reform. One is conceptual, the other is practical.

We are convinced that theUN Chartercontains all the necessary principles, respect for which will ensure peace and security.I gave an example that when the Americans need something, they look at what principle of the Charter to take as a justification for their actions. When it was necessary to declare Kosovo’s independence unilaterally, they said that it was based on the principle of self-determination of peoples enshrined in the UN Charter. When an open, transparent referendum in Crimea with the participation of many international observers decided to reunite with Russia, they did not accept it, condemned it and said that it violated the principle of territorial integrity.

Since the inception of the United Nations, there have been debates about whether the self-determination of peoples or territorial integrity is more important. Self-determination of peoples is mentioned earlier in the UN Charter. But a multi-year negotiation process was initiated, culminating in the adoption of the Declaration

on Principles of International Law concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations. This is a multi-page Declaration adopted in 1970. The section with which we are now concerned states that “nothing shall be construed as authorizing or encouraging any action which would lead to dismemberment or to partial or total dismemberment violation of the territorial integrity or political unity of

sovereign and independent States which observe in their actions the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples as set forth above, and, consequently, have governments which represent, without distinction as to race, creed or colour, all the people inhabiting the territory.” After the coup d’état, did the Kiev regime represent the population, a huge part of Ukraine? Of course not. So it’s conceptual.

A fundamental part of our position is that the UN Charter should remain at the heart of all the activities of the legal community, but with the understanding that its principles should be applied in their entirety and in all their interrelatedness.

The practical judgment is (there are many aspects of reform now) that everyone is primarily interested in the reform of the UN Security Council. This topic is in the public eye all the time. The prestige of the countries that want to get into this body on a permanent basis is directly related to this. The reform should unequivocally eliminate historical injustices and ensure fair representation of the countries of the global majority – Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The current composition of the UN Security Council was formed at a time when the consequences of decolonization had not yet been realized, when the newly liberated free and independent countries were just arranging their own internal lives and getting used to the new quality. It is clear that the situation on the world stage is radically different now. Economic giants such as China, India, and Brazil are on the rise. In Africa, there is a movement towards the realization of its own identity and in favor of rejecting the rudiments of colonial policy, when resources are pumped out of Africa, and all the added value is produced in the former metropolises and the main profits are generated there. It is necessary to ensure the admission of representatives of the developing world to the UN Security Council. We have publicly said that we support India and Brazil as candidates for permanent membership in the UN Security Council, with the understanding that at the same time a similar additional presence in Africa will be ensured.

We have warned our Indian and Brazilian friends (and we explain this at every turn) that it is unacceptable for us to replenish the UN Security Council with any new representative of the West. Currently, six of the fifteen members of the UN Security Council represent Western countries. Sometimes Japan is added, pursuing a purely Western policy. Granting more seats to the western group would only mean deepening the injustice. Germany and Japan aspire to “infiltrate” the Security Council together with India and Brazil, but they will not succeed. From a purely arithmetical point of view, the West is already disproportionately represented.

Now to the point. Name at least one issue of international politics in recent years on which Germany or Japan would have taken a stand. Any. All of them are “built” by the West. There’s nothing you can do about it.

There were sensible ideas about leaving one seat in the UN Security Council for the “collective West,” for NATO.

You mentioned the UN Security Council’s consideration of various crisis situations, including terrorist acts carried out by the Ukrainian regime on a regular basis and to which the West is pushing it to continue. I quoted the EU’s instruction to Kiev in which direction it should “work”.

A few days ago, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron unleashed a neo-colonial “mantra” urging people not to abandon Ukraine under any circumstances. Vice versa. It is necessary, they say, to “pump” it with the most modern weapons as much as possible. Condemnation of such terrorist acts is possible only with the consent of all members of the UN Security Council. In most cases, the Americans “shield” the Kiev regime and do not “pass” these resolutions.

There is a lot of talk about proposals to abolish the veto.This is what many developing countries have been saying in discussions on Security Council reform.

The right of veto is not a privilege, but a tool for ensuring well-considered decisions and preventing unilateral resolutions that can bring imbalance to world politics.

The West has practically lost the culture of work in the UN Security Council, which has always relied on the ability of the five permanent members, each of whom has the right of veto, to come to an agreement, to seek compromises on any complex issue and never to provoke a veto by putting to a vote resolutions that are unacceptable to any of the five members.

We have always been ready for this kind of work. The Americans, along with the British and French, have chosen a different style that is detrimental to the UN.

It is unrealistic to abandon the veto. Then the United Nations, like the League of Nations, will turn into a useless structure that will only further escalate confrontation.

Reform is a long process. It should reflect a common understanding at this stage of the tectonic changes taking place in the world in the context of multipolarity processes.

I know Lavrov wants to remain optimistic, but the realities against that are formidable. Yes, Russia and the Global Majority will continue to grow stronger, but the planet will remain chaotic as long as the Outlaws exist. And remember, they are Nazi-like and thus extremely diabolical—they will continue to attain their objective no matter the cost as all means justify their goal which is to keep their hegemony. All sorts of reality can, and has been, thrown in their faces, but they are blind to it and can only see their goal. Those hiding behind the Front Men and Women must be exposed and made visible in the public’s eyes—the Bidens, Trumps Kennedys, and their ilk are screens to shield. That’s why policy is contiguous—it matters not which flavor is in charge anymore, although there’s currently a theatre ongoing to make it seem otherwise.

I made one parenthetical comment and could have provided more. Lavrov provided a warning to fence-sitting nations that even what appears to be a safe position actually isn’t, that joint, in resolute solidarity, resistance to the West is the only real path forward. In his talk yesterday, Lavrov expressed the idea that regional solidarity will meld into global solidarity and regional organizations will then become global. That’s the only real way to control the Global Fracture that’s now occurring. There’s more to be said about the historic Global Big Picture that shows a distinct continuity over the last 4,000+ years where the great mass of people have tried again and again to establish a fair social contract with rulers/governments. Today’s conflict is all about ending the one last Great Tyranny, which as mentioned is the same Tyranny that’s been existing and plaguing Humanity for centuries.

If I’m a defendant in court, when the judge tells me, “The defendant, please rise,” if I don’t rise, what will the judge do to me?

I’ll tell you a story about respecting the court. My step daughter was a young teen and had some case against her. On the day of court she got up and put on jeans and a t-shirt I told her to change into a nice Sunday church dress with no heels. She wasn’t happy but did it. We were towards the end of the docket. All the other defendeants that got up were dressed similarly as she had been initially. The judge made a stern ruling quickly and moved on. When it was her turn and she stood he stopped. Talk to her about what she did wrong and about how she looked like she probably learned a lesson and he let her off pretty easy, a little community service. The lawyer even told us that wasn’t his normal but he’s sure it was because of how she was dressed. So if you want to go in and not stand, show disrespect to the court don’t expect things to go favorably for you. And consequences can be contempt of court with jail time, dismissing your case until you can be respectful or loosing your case to getting a harsher sentence. So think about that before you decide to do something so stupid

Have you ever had an experience that proves the adage “don’t judge a book by its cover”?

I worked at a mom and pop home center. Like a small Home Depot, but privately owned. An older gentleman came in a lot to buy small stuff. I spent time with him, took him outside to look at lumber, cut a few boards to size. One so he could build a bird house. Not money making at all. I even hauled a few boards to his house in my own truck on my lunch break, it was on the way. Boss had told me to knock it off, I was costing him too much money. A week or so later the guy comes in, we talk, he leaves. Boss is pissed, wants to know WTF he wants this time? “ Oh he wanted to give us this” I handed the boss a check for $25,000. Seems the man was building house, hired the builder I introduced him to, and based on his and my relationship, he intended to buy building materials from us. Cash up front. When the $25,000 was used up, he left more, until the house was done.

If your boss steals your ideas and claims that they came up with them themselves, how should you react?

As I child I remember a time where I had built sandcastles, left for a few minutes, only to find a group of kids kicking down my creations. So what I did was build them on top of large rocks. I left again. When I came back I watched them kick the sand castles down again. They immediately stopped after one of them broke their foot on a rock.

The lessen is that sometimes you have to outfox people to teach them a lesson. Deception and misinformation is key. It’s not hard to punish someone who steals an idea from you. If you get a little creative, you can deeply embarrass the culprit, even destroy their career. Don’t be alarmed when they steal your work, act like you are gullible, stupid, and didn’t even notice so that they’ll do it again. Hide a watermark or code or leave your name in metadata some where so they don’t notice. Then once they’ve done it again you’ve got your watermark to prove it was your work, then go to HR with documentation exposing their fraudulent behavior. It’s fun to outsmart such people because they tend to be Narcissists and they will have an existential crisis once they realize they’ve been outwitted. They absolutely cannot stand being bested by someone else, especially in the manipulation department.

Hot and Spicy Cubano Sandwich

Cubano Sandwiches main
Cubano Sandwiches main

Prep: 15 min | Cook: 90 min | Yield: 8 servings

Cuban Sandwich Recipe

Cuban sandwiches are one of my favorite indulgences. They hit all the right spots and then some. I wanted to create a Cuban sandwich recipe that would make any Cubano connoisseur proud – and I think this recipe does just that. At least both my foodie critic husband and I couldn’t stop stuffing our faces as he repeatedly awed “these are so good!”

After experimenting, I stumbled upon a few key elements that make the best Cuban Sandwich recipe. I’ll go into greater detail below, but for starters, you need the best Cuban Mojo Roast Pork for the best Cuban sandwiches!  It is all about the pork. I posted my mojo pork recipe separately because it is stand alone delicious and absolutely hypnotic in these Cubanos.  If you don’t use the mojo pork recipe, I cannot guarantee epic delicious results. Plus, you can prep the pork days ahead for stress free Cubano assembly.

Second, use the right filling ingredients. Aged Gruyere Swiss cheese (not the rubbery Americanized version) and Black Forest ham add dimensions of gourmet flavor and thinly slicing whole dill pickles delivers the perfect thickness so all the ingredients beautifully meld together.

Lastly, you might be wondering if you can achieve the coveted buttery, golden crispy crust characteristic to Cuban sandwiches without a plancha or paninin press – the answer is yes! No press, no problem! The inside of the bread is first toasted (no soggy Cubanos here!) and then slathered in a mustard sauce spiked with some reserved mojo marinade. This amps up the flavor again. Next we create our own panini press by placing the bread in a buttered skillet or grill pan and top it with another heavy skillet to weigh it down. The resulting Cubano sandwiches are buttery, crispy and compressed – just like the restaurants. Or better.

I’m going to go into more details about Cuban sandwiches from their history to specifics on ingredients to step by step instructions. Read on or use the “jump to recipe” button at the top of the post. I hope you love this Cuban sandwich recipe as much as us! Happy eating!

What is a Cuban sandwich?

The Cuban sandwich, better known as a Cubano in the US and simply sandwich in Cuba, is a decadent Cuban grilled ham and cheese sandwich that has reached mainstream popularity all over the US. It is the ultimate sandwich for every pork lover and a must for every non-pork lover alike. 

The Cubano begins with hearty yet soft, slightly sweet Cuban bread slathered with yellow mustard then loaded with layers of Swiss cheese, tangy pickles, sliced mojo pork, smoked ham and more cheese, then buttered, grilled and pressed to create a super crispy exterior and cheesy interior.

There’s nothing fancy or difficult about making the Cuban Sandwich, but the varying layers create a symphony of flavors and textures with each element filling a specific roll.  It’s tangy and tart from the pickles and mustard, smokey and salty from the ham, zesty, citrusy and herbaceous from the mojo pork, buttery and slightly sweet from the bread all sandwiched together to create soft, crunchy, melty cheesy textures.   Are you drooling yet?  With one bite you will be.  If you’re planning to devour just one half of a Cubano, heaven help you, you’ll need will power of steel.

MIAMI VS TAMPA CUBAN SANDWICHES

Both Miami and Tampa claim to have the best version of the Cubano Sandwich. The difference between the two Cubano variations is minimal. Both Miami and Tampa versions share the classic Cubano structure discussed above of Cuban bread, ham, Cuban roast pork, Swiss cheese, and pickles, but the Tampa version features a layer of Genoa salami, the Miami version does not.

Genoa salami is a kind of salami believed to have originated in Genoa, Italy.  It is seasoned with garlic, salt, black and white pepper, and red or white wine.  The Tampa contingent believes salami adds yet another layer of salty flavor to the already decadent sandwich, which makes their version superior.  To  prove their point, the Historic Tampa Cuban Sandwich was designated the “signature sandwich of the city of Tampa” by the Tampa City Council in 2012. Miami, on the other hand, stands by their Cuban Sandwich motto that simple is superior.

So how did salami become a staple in Cuban Sandwiches in Tampa?  In the early 1900s, Tampa was the home to both many Cuban and Italian immigrants.  As the people and cultures mingled, so did their foods and eventually, salami, a staple on Italian sandwiches,became a staple on Cubano Sandwiches in Tampa.

As far as which is better?  We know what Tampa and Miami will say, but in the end, it comes down to personal preference.  I personally think salami makes everything better, even Cubano Sandwiches.  So, if you like salami, chances are you will love it on Cubanos; if the jury is still out, it’s better to omit the salami because it’s not a subtle addition.

Ingredients

  • 2 pound boneless pork loin roast
  • 1 pound honey ham, thinly sliced
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 cup Chinese mustard, divided
  • 8 whole wheat submarine rolls, sweet rolls, or 7 to 8 inch sections of French or Italian bread
  • 3/4 cup red plum, red currant, or raspberry jam or jelly
  • 8 slices Swiss cheese
  • 2 (7 ounce) cans green chiles, drained and sliced
  • 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) unsalted butter, room temperature

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 450 degrees F.
  2. In a small bowl, combine salt, pepper and 1/4 cup of the mustard. Spread mixture on all sides of the pork. Place pork, fat side up, in a shallow roasting pan and roast for 15 minutes.
  3. Reduce oven to 350 degrees F and continue roasting for 40 to 45 minutes, or until the internal temperature reaches 145 degrees F (medium rare) to 160 degrees F (medium).
  4. Remove roast from oven and let rest 10 minutes.
  5. Slice very thinly and set slices aside.
  6. To prepare the sandwiches, halve the rolls, laying all 16 halves out, and butter the outside of each of them. On half of the halves, spread the remaining mustard (1 1/2 tablespoons). On the other half of the sandwich halves, spread 1 1/2 tablespoons of jam. Arrange ham, roast pork, cheese, and chiles on the mustard halves of each sandwich, then top with the jam halves.
  7. Prepare a grill to medium-hot heat. Lay a double layer of foil on the grill, large enough to hold the sandwiches. Place sandwiches on the foil, place bricks over the sandwiches (2 sandwiches per brick), and press down gently.
  8. Grill until the bottom of the bread is browned and cheese starts to melt, 2 to 3 minutes. Turn, replace the bricks, and grill for 2 minutes more.
  9. Cut sandwiches in half and serve.

Notes

You can also cook the sandwiches on a stovetop griddle or grill—weigh them down with foil-wrapped bricks or other heavy objects, like a plate of canned goods. If you want to make less than 8 sandwiches, use less of everything except for the roast ingredients—then save the leftover roast for another use. And if you like things extra-spicy, try substituting sliced pickled jalapeños for the chiles.

When has a ‘gut feeling’ saved your life?

When I was twenty my parents, who had divorced but were now living together, asked me to go on a weekend trip with them.

I was amazed my father would even ask. We weren’t close, I barely spoke to him! He had been physically abusive to my mom, siblings, and especially me my whole life.

I ran away from home at 13, married at 16 so I’d never be under his thumb again. Yet suddenly he wants to be cozy! My mom was a sweet but weak woman! She just never knew when to get out.

This invitation came on the weekend of my 20th birthday, my dad was insistent I go. I came up with all sorts of excuses. I had to work, my husband had to work, dad was fine with the latter excuse (said just the 3 of us would be great). I knew it was a rotten idea from the beginning, he’d get drunk, they’d fight, I’d be referee. No way!

The more he pushed the idea the worse I felt about it, I just knew something was wrong. I finally just said there was no way I’d go we’d already made plans for a birthday party with friends so they went alone.

Two days later on my 20th birthday the State Police came to tell me my parents were dead, my father had killed my mother and then committed suicide. From a note he had left it was quite clear why he was so adamant that I came along. My instincts that day told me the trip was a bad idea and yes I was right.

I had told mom after the divorce to never let him back in her life but she always thought he would change. I have posted parts of this answer before and just want to say in advance that I am fine with my life. I am happily married to the love of my life with a amazing grown son and grandchildren. I’ve had a lovely full life filled with great times! Unfortunately my sibs are all gone after failed marriages, drugs, and alcohol. They chose to be victims and spend their lives blaming our parents for all that’s gone wrong in life, where I chose to learn and never make the mistakes they did! Not sure if I am editing this in the correct manner to add a afterthought but here goes anyway! I am surprised by the number of views and upvotes, personally I didn’t think anyone would even care. I mean it happened so long ago and as the only survivior I am long over the whole thing. But at times I do wonder if others out there experienced the double murder or murder suicide of parents and also survived relatively unscathed or if because of the abuse I’m simply detached from the situation. Just something I think about! Please excuse my run on sentences, its just how my thought process works. Thanks for all the kind thoughts.

Harry Potter but in Jamaica – Rasta Potter

This is fucking brilliant! It just is amazing.

You can’t fix stupid

People can be odd sometimes. I wish to relate a story that took place a few decades ago. At this point in time I was sponsoring some Americans to visit some factories in China, and this group of four guys were all pretty nice. But one of them was a gnarly cuss who insisted on not eating ANY Chinese food while he was in China.

Instead, he wanted no part of the Business KTV lifestyle, food, friendships and was generally a royal pain in the ass. He insisted that no one smoke at the table… (WTF? this is China), and that we go to a grocery store to get cereal and milk so that he can have a “safe” breakfast in his room.

OK. Different strokes for different folks. I get it.

Anyways, Instead of eating at the many, many delicious restaurants for dinners, he convinced everyone to eat a McDonald’s, Pizza-hut, KFC and Burger king instead. And I begrudgingly allowed it. That was, until the last day.

There we took him to a steak restaurant, and we all ordered steaks.

It was a nice Western style place, and they were known for their decent steaks and fine dining atmosphere. Everyone loved the decor and the food looked great. We all sat down and placed our orders.

Imagine my surprise when he received a fine filet Mignon, and then promptly drowned it in ketchup. It went from this…

ee472e3e21002e2f8c037c4597bed3c1
ee472e3e21002e2f8c037c4597bed3c1

To this…

tomato ketchup 1024x576 1
tomato ketchup 1024×576 1

You couldn’t even find the meat under all the ketchup. I couldn’t believe it. Thinking about it now, and again… I still am incredulous. Jeeze! Louise!

Ah.

You can’t fix stupid.

Todays…

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

In 1971 the 18 year old me worked 10 hours a night 7 nights a week overnight pumping 29 cent a gallon gas at an Exon station on Highway 14 near Los Angeles. An endless parade rolled through every night.

The cult bus from up the canyon gassed up heading for LA to recruit and gassed again coming back with newbies. The cult escapees on foot stopped for food or directions.

My usual directions to lost drivers was “you can’t get there from hear” with a smart-ass grin. One time the person just said Ok and left quickly. I guess they went somewhere you could get there from!

I had an endless supply of free food from the catering trucks fueling up. Newspapers, donuts, bread and more.

Guest appearances by two dozen of the Galluping Goose Motorcycle Club (Google them) swarming the stations islands was interesting. A sheriff car chase through the station code 3 was entertaining. You never knew what was next.

The problem was I tried to go to the local junior college full time and slept a bit in the morning and a bit at night. Zombies had nothing on me. Mom wpuld tell me the time, day and where I needed to go when I woke up.

One night, around 3am I was leaning against the front of the station waiting for the next car and noticed three dollars sticking out of my shirt pocket. A customer had filled up and paid while I slept standing up!

I took it as a clue that I should retire and joined the Air Force.

But I came away with so many great stories 🙂

Memnon of Rhodes (died 333 BC)

Memnon was a Greek soldier from the island of Rhodes in the southeastern Aegean Sea. He was born around 380 BC and entered Persian service at a young age. His first patron was Artabazus, the satrap of Phrygia, who married Memnon to his daughter Barsine, a beautiful and well-educated woman. The Greek soldier proved his worth during Artabazus’ revolt against King Artaxerxes III of Persia; at some point, he even rescued his captured father-in-law.

When Artabazus fled to Macedon, Memnon followed him. He stayed there for about five years and gained valuable inside knowledge. He met the then king, Philip II, and his son, the future Alexander the Great — he had supposedly lengthy discussions with the latter. He studied the Macedonian tactics and realized how keen on invading Persia Philip was. He also understood how precarious the Macedonian hold on southern Greece was — Greek unity wasn’t deep yet.

All this theoretical knowledge was soon combined with practical experience. Memnon fought with considerable success against general Parmenion, whom Philip II sent on an expedition shortly before his own death. Thus, Memnon was the perfect man to lead the Persian defense when Alexander the Great crossed the Hellespont in 334 BC. Indeed, he sat at the war council of Darius III along with Persian satraps and other high-ranking officials.

Memnon proposed a dual approach. First, the Persians were to follow a scorched-earth policy: burn the crops before Alexander’s army and constantly retreat instead of opt for an open, pitched battle. Second, using money and diplomacy, they should cause as much unrest as possible in Greece, behind Alexander’s back. It was a careful and well-thought strategy, because the Greek armor, training and battle tactics were superior to those of the Persians.

Darius and his satraps didn’t agree with Memnon. They were unwilling to destroy Persian land, believed it would be below them to not fight openly against the invader and possibly hesitated to follow the advice of a Greek. Thus, they assembled an army behind the river Granicus and waited for a battle that eventually took place in May 334 BC. Memnon was one of the leaders of the left flank, opposite Alexander. Reality proved him correct: Alexander won.

After the battle, Darius changed his mind. He made Memnon supreme commander of the West and gave him the authority to carry out his initial plan. Although several Anatolian cities surrendered to Alexander, others like Miletus and Halicarnassus resisted, and that could wear out the invading army. Memnon didn’t care how many individual victories Alexander would win; he played the long game and was content with the Greek losses.

Soon, Memnon started his counterattack. Since Alexander’s fleet was not very strong, he attacked the islands of Chios and Lesbos; the first he captured completely, while the latter partly. He also accepted representatives of the Cyclades — with them, he could control the Aegean route. Persian money worked miracles, as it had in the Peloponnesian War. Athens, led by the anti-Macedonian Demosthenes, Sparta and other cities were almost ready to rebel.

In this crucial hour, Alexander’s good fortune prevailed. Memnon got sick and died in 333 BC while besieging Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. The Persian generals, seeing that Alexander was moving slowly, thought he hesitated to face them openly. Thus, they abandoned Memnon’s strategy and pushed for a second direct confrontation. A few months after Memnon’s death, Alexander defeated Darius himself at the battle of Issus. The East was open to him.

It’s always hard to pose What if … ? questions, but Memnon’s plan had many chances of success. His shrewdness, experience and what steps of his plan he managed to carry out before he died show that clearly. If he had forced Alexander to keep advancing slowly and with constant losses, exploited the favorable dynamics at sea and stirred up a major revolt in Greece, the invading army might not have been able to get beyond Asia Minor.

It’s not necessary to get into details about this, but Alexander’s campaign was indeed world-changing. Although he died too early, his conquest set the bases for all sorts of historical developments. Greek became the common language of the new oecumene, the Greek civilization came in closer contact with those of the East — a new era began. Even Rome would later build on Alexander’s legacy. Who knows if any of that would be the case had Memnon lived to execute his plan to the end?

Fun fact: Memnon’s wife, Barsine, was later captured by the Greeks. Alexander made her his concubine, and she bore him a son named Heracles. He was the only child we know Alexander lived long enough to see: his legitimate son by Roxana, Alexander IV, was born a few months after his death. Both Heracles and Alexander were murdered at a young age, victims of the bitter antagonism among Alexander’s generals over his kingdom.

When did you realize your parent was a total badass?

I was 11, and for some reason, I wasn’t at school and with my father when he got word that my older sister had run-away, again.

Dad went to a couple of houses, with me staying in the car. Then, we went to a biker bar. Dad said, “Stay here!” Then, walked into the bar.

Being the brat that I am, I waited briefly, and decided I needed to use the restroom. I walked through the door and spotted my sister on the right at the far end next to the bar. My father was just in front of the door, and to his left were two pool tables, with those low-hanging stained-glass lights over each table.

There were FOUR extremely large biker dudes – right out of central casting. All were much taller than my father, who stood at 5′7″. All four had cue sticks in their hands, and all four began moving.

My father shifted quickly to stand between the two pool tables. The bikers spread-out and one circled back, going behind the rear pool table. Dad grabbed the table light and shoved it violently to sideways, hitting the biker solidly in the face.

Then the guy on the far side of the tables stepped forward, swinging the pool cue like a baseball bat. Dad blocked the cue, gave two punches to the face, grabbed the cue, swiveled it around and punched him with the base of the cue several times to the neck and face.

At this point, the third guy came from behind, and struck Dad viciously in the right kidney, causing a grunt. Nevertheless Dad swiveled around with the cue, hitting the biker on the side of the neck. Then Dad did a little jump and kicked the knee out from under the biker. The crack was audible.

Guy #4, clearly not being bright, tried to do the same trick with the other table light, and missed as Dad ducked beneath, grabbed the biker by his vest and pulled him onto the table, then elbowed him to the throat.

Guy #2, having recovered enough on the far side of the tables, pulled-out a knife and came with a stabbing motion. Dad caught the thrust arm, twisted it with both of his arms, and broke or dislocated the man’s shoulder / arm – again with an audible sound – and a screech from the biker.

#1 guy, face bloodied from the splintered light, put his hands up in a placating gesture and backed away.

#2 guy was on the floor, holding his right arm

#3 guy was on the floor, groaning, and holding his leg, which was bent in an odd manner.

#4 guy was gasping for breath, on hands-and-knees on the floor.

At this point, the bartender started rummaging around under the bar for something, and Dad said, “She’s 14 years old.”

The bartender stood up, backed away from my sister, next to the wall and put his hands up.

Then we went home.

Please note, that while Dad was quite powerful, and lifted weights, with biceps that split shirts – he also had a bad right leg, and was only 5′7″.

Is it possible that the Apollo 11 ascent stage is still orbiting the moon?

image 27
image 27

Interesting question and it might be.

You see, the ascent stage was the part of the Eagle lunar module that blasted off from the moon’s surface on July 21, 1969, carrying Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin back to the command module Columbia.

After they docked, they jettisoned the ascent stage into space, leaving it in a retrograde orbit about 125 kilometers above the lunar equator.

NASA assumed that this orbit was unstable and that the ascent stage would eventually crash into the moon.

But a new analysis by James Meador, an independent researcher at Caltech, suggests otherwise.

image 2
image 2

He used a NASA tool called the General Mission Analysis Tool to simulate the trajectory of the ascent stage using data from GRAIL, a mission that mapped the moon’s gravitational field in 2012.

He found that all of his simulations showed the ascent stage maintaining a steady orbit for over 50 years, despite the influence of the sun, other planets and solar radiation.

Of course, there are other factors that could have affected the fate of the ascent stage, such as fuel leakage or explosion, but Meador thinks that there is some possibility that it is still up there and might even be detectable from Earth.

How cool is that?

But don’t get too excited yet.

This is just one study and it has not been peer-reviewed or confirmed by other sources.

Meador himself admits that his analysis has limitations and uncertainties.

He also says that finding the ascent stage would require a lot of effort and resources from NASA or other agencies.

So, for now, we can only speculate and hope that one day we will know for sure what happened to the ascent stage of Apollo 11.

Maybe it is still orbiting the moon as a silent witness to one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

Or maybe it has already crashed and become part of the lunar landscape.

image 26
image 26

Either way, it is a fascinating piece of history that deserves our attention and respect.

More Info:

Long-term Orbit Stability of the Apollo 11 Eagle Lunar Module Ascent Stage

What is a stand you took during your wedding planning that you will never apologize for?

I was 32 when I got married and had been on my own, building a career and supporting myself for 10 years. I refused to be “given away” because no one “owned” me. So, I told the officiant to eliminate the line where they ask who’s giving me in marriage. My dad simply escorted me down the aisle, sat down beside my mom and I joined my husband.

I’d attended and been in enough weddings by this time to have very definite ideas about what I did and didn’t like. So, I also made the following changes to the reception. When I was planning our wedding, all kinds of people told me I “had to do all this stuff because it was ‘tradition.” I said, “NOPE!”

  1. No long wait between the ceremony and the reception – The photographer took a few pictures of me and my husband at the church and we arrived at the reception along with the last of the guests. We took the family and wedding party photos after we ate.
  2. No sit-down dinner – I’d been to too many receptions that were ruined by guests banging on their glasses to make the couple kiss. We decided we weren’t trained monkeys that perform on demand and had a cocktail-style reception.
  3. No obnoxious, screaming DJ – We had a guy playing background music on the piano and guests were able to converse without shouting.
  4. No smashing cake in the face – I don’t know who ever decided this was cute, funny or amusing. It’s tacky and an insult to your new spouse, and I didn’t spend hours on my hair and makeup to have it messed up with smeared cake and frosting. As a side note, any DJ who sang “The Bride Cuts the Cake” to the tune of “The Farmer in the Dell” would have had the cake smashed in HIS face—by me!
  5. No dollar dance (or anything else that solicits money or gifts) – I subscribe to the old-school view that you don’t ask guests for gifts or money. If someone gives a gift, you should thank them regardless of whether you like it or now, and follow up with a nice note.
  6. No bouquet toss – Some women don’t want to get married. Others recently lost a spouse or are getting over a breakup. They don’t want to be singled out or embarrassed by “well-meaning” guests or insensitive DJs who want to push them into catching the bouquet.
  7. NO GARTER TOSS – I saved the best for last. I ABSOLUTELY REFUSED to do this. The “tame” version always made me uncomfortable, but the way many couples do it nowadays is raunchy, nauseating and disgusting, especially when the groom removes the garter with his teeth! I definitely DO NOT want my new husband or anyone else sticking their head up my dress in front of a hundred people! Maybe I’m just an old fogey or fuddyduddy, but some things should be kept private!

It’s YOUR day. Do what you want and don’t let anyone force you into doing anything that you don’t like or that makes you uncomfortable!

China’s ‘Golden Veil’ To Launch Cruise Missiles For Sneak Attacks

As a doctor or nurse, what is the greatest display of selflessness you have ever witnessed?

During the toxic, soul destroying ICU rotation of residency, we admitted a young lady intubated for a “community acquired pneumonia”. It ended up being acute myeloid leukaemia, and she had to start chemo in ICU.

She turned out to be an incredible, inspiring, resilient and kind soul. She developed every possible complication of chemo, including being septic while having profound pancytopenia (all cell lines down).

During a particularly busy call with multiple sick admissions, she started bleeding (sepsis plus inability to clot), and I remember noticing frank blood in her catheter. At some point after midnight, she weakly summoned me to the bedside. There were tears on her face and I remember they seemed blood stained, which seriously alarmed me.

I thought she was calling me to tell me how sick she felt. But, teary eyed and all, she said, “I’ve been watching you…you’re having such a hard evening. Are you okay?”

Here was this woman battling for her life, and she had enough compassion left over to care for me. I thanked her, told her to please not worry because she/they were the only priorities.

Then I went into the bathroom, bawled my eyes out, put my game face back on and got back to work. People like that make everything worthwhile.

I’m glad to say she survived and was discharged from hospital several months later, but my colleague who managed her after she was discharged from ICU said it all took its toll and she was a shadow of her former self.

I still think of her. I hope life gave her her flowers, because she deserved everything.

Have you ever had a neighbor who believed they had free reign of your property?

Many years ago we moved into a house where the garden had two gates, a small one at the back and the front double gate which gave access for the car. I was amazed to see people idly strolling through our garden one day with their dog. I went out and challenged them and they said they’d been doing it for years. The previous owner let them use his garden as a short cut to the shop instead of having to walk round past the church.

I said it had to stop now. We had a young child and I didn’t want to risk total strangers coming into the garden. Besides which we had two dogs at the time and although they were not dangerous I didn’t want to risk them getting involved with trespassers. As a child I discovered that people tell lies and they can report that your dog attacked them even if it didn’t.

We put a lock on the gate, and a notice saying Private Property. Keep out. We had no end of abuse from people. The one who really stunned me was the one who said they picked the apples and other fruit every year, it was their right, and now we were stopping them from doing it. The woman even said the fruit wasn’t ours because the trees weren’t planted by us, they’d been there for years.

We only lived there a few years. We didn’t like the weird neighbours so we moved.

Men are Avoiding Marriage and Modern Women Don’t Get It Ft.

Have you ever had a neighbor who believed they had free reign of your property?

Back in 1993 my first wife and I purchased a house on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Our house was a new construction, we were the first owners, and it was also the last piece of property in the subdivision to be developed. Our right-side neighbors, an elderly couple, had been one of the first residents, moving in back in 1975.

For all the years they had lived there they used our property for extra gardening space, and as a dumping ground for their yard waste. Our one-acre lot was partially wooded, and I found huge piles of branches, leaves, and household trash scattered throughout the woods. Apparent leftovers from these neighbors. No problem, it was pre-existing conditions, so my wife and I just worked to clean up and do our own landscaping.

The problem was, our neighbors didn’t seem to understand they couldn’t use our yard as their private dump anymore. We woke up one morning several months after moving in, and discovered a huge mound of leaves, branches, and other yard waste right in the middle of lawn area in our backyard. Trying to be polite and “get-along,” I talked to the guy and explained they couldn’t use our yard as a dumping ground. he agreed to remove it. His method of “removal” was to just torch the pile and burn it. No fire permit, no warning to us, and he left a big burn scar in the lawn.

We let this go, which turned out to be a big mistake. For the next several years, we would periodically discover piles of yard waste in our yard. The lady next door would simply clean up her yard, and haul everything over into our yard. She would always haul this waste over during the night, or times when my wife and I were both gone. No amount of complaints would change her behavior, and her husband would openly avoid us.

After nearly five years of this, my wife and I had enough. After finding yet another pile of yard waste, I called the police and filed a trespassing complaint against my neighbor. In Mississippi, this was a misdemeanor and so I had to go to night court to testify in support of my charge.

The night of our court hearing, the judge had my wife wait outside the courtroom while I testified first. The night court prosecutor and judge were pretty hostile to me during their questioning. Extremely hostile. They included comments about how “neighbors were supposed to get along,” and other similar crap. I managed to hold my own during their questioning, then they called in my wife.

The judge asked my wife to explain our reasons for the trespassing charges, and she just lit into the judge with “They have been doing this for five years!” How long should we have to put up with this?” The judge looked shocked, looked at me, said “five years?” and I nodded my head in confirmation.

My wife finally ran down, the judge gave some judge-homily crap about neighbors getting along and ruled against us – no trespassing. One week later we found yet another pile of trash in our yard, and I called the police, again. When they showed up, I explained we had already taken the neighbors to court once, the judge decided this wasn’t trespassing, and now our neighbors did it again. I suggested that possibly if their house accidently burned down, this crap would stop.

The police, not happy with the entire situation, and not happy with my comments, finally took action. They issued our neighbors a “no trespass” order and advised them that if they set foot on our property again, it would be in violation of a police order and they would be charged with a misdemeanor.

We finally had peace. Then a year later the husband lost the house due to gambling debts and they moved away.

Scott Ritter: “US Naval SUPERIORITY IS A MYTH! Our Navy has been exposed in the Red Sea as weak!”

https://youtu.be/hym8EJEibjg

What is the best advice HR gave to you?

Best HR advice I got was two things.

1) Document everything. A journal format is best. Date, time, who, where (desk, hallway, restroom), what, and your impressions. I’m a nerd: I use Excel.

2) Once a year, ask HR to let you see your file. You’d be surprised what random people put in it. I once saw a note from a coworker that said “she used the F word.”

An example of how the advice worked to my advantage. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease after six months of “what the F is wrong?” A couple days later I mentioned it to my immediate supervisor. I asked about partial disability and should I contact HR? She said no no no do not call HR yet. (I thought that odd).

The next day I heard through gossip that layoffs were coming. So I went and copied my HR file a couple days after. Wow, I found that my boss emailed her boss about my diagnosis. Boss’s boss wrote, “Well, she’ll be one of the first to go” and “I won’t let someone faking a disability continue working here.“ It was in there because it had info about work performance for a review due in 4 months. I have no idea why those sentences weren’t redacted.

One week later, I get called to HR. During the “exit interview” she gave me a big envelope. I asked, no, I told her to increase my compensation package by a factor of ten. She said nothing. I said, “I’m getting laid off because I have Lupus, which as you know, is against the Disabilities Act … { long pause }… and I have proof.“ She mumbled, I’ll get back with you before the end of the day.

Packing up my stuff, HR came and gave me the envelope, asked me to sign an NDA. I noticed the final check was not increased. “My lawyerl will contact HR soon. I’m not signing this NDA. Goodbye.”

End of story. I got a settlement with the compensation multiplied by 10. It took almost two years and if not for my journal and the copy of my HR file, it would have been pointless to sue.

Bullied cat is now unrecognizable

Why do some people always act over-modest when in fact they’re extremely talented and brilliant?

Okay, this is something I legit struggle with. When you’re talented, one of the lovely little gifts that gives you is the ability to see the flaws in the things you create.

Like, I’ll have people gush about one of my books and I cringe inside because when I look at it, all I see are the bits I’d fix if I could rewrite it. I read books from people who are better writers than I am, and then I read something I’ve written and I’m painfully aware it’s not as good.

The same was true when I was really into B&W photography. I was dedicated enough to have a darkroom in my house, but that didn’t give me confidence in my own ability, it gave me an acute and sometimes pointed awareness of the gulf separating me from people who are actually talented.

Like, I look at the best thing I’ve ever done, and compare it to the most mediocre thing Robert Mapplethorpe ever produced, and there’s a gap that’s actually more like a chasm.

I have a lot of writers, artists, photographers, and other creatives in my social circle, and pretty much all of them are plagued by this. The ability to create comes with the ability to evaluate your creations, and when you do that, you realize the gulf that separates you from genuine masters.

Online Dating App Creator Regrets What Online Dating has Become

Who is the most unlikely movie star?

I’ll go with my favorite:

Gene Hackman.

He was tall (6′2″) and “manly”, yes. But he was never handsome, even as a young man. More than that, he was expected to be a failure.

He dropped out of high school at 16 and lied about his age to join the Marines, but he didn’t care for military life, having an admitted “problem with authority”. At 21, he moved to New York City, where he bounced from job to job; then, in 1956, when he was 26, he decided to pursue an acting career, something he said he’d dreamed of since watching James Cagney films as a kid in Illinois.

As a teenaged Marine:

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image 25

Hackman moved to California and joined the Pasadena Playhouse, where he befriended another aspiring young actor, Dustin Hoffman. The two were noted outsiders, and their peers didn’t think much of them — jointly voting them “least likely to succeed”. Hackman also got the lowest score in the Playhouse’s history.

But he was determined to prove them all wrong.

He moved back to New York and took a job as a doorman at a Howard Johnson’s to support himself while taking bit parts here and there. Here he ran into one of his former Playhouse instructors, who told him, “see, Hackman? I told you you wouldn’t amount to anything.”

It was in 1967, at age 37, that he had his breakthrough role as Buck Barrow in “Bonnie and Clyde”, which earned him his first Academy Award nomination. He would be nominated again 3 years later for his against-type performance in “I Never Sang for My Father”, then became a bona fide leading man — and Oscar winner — with his unforgettable turn as Jimmy “Popeye” Doyle in 1971′s “The French Connection”.

As Popeye Doyle:

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image 24

He received BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for his performance in “The Conversation” (1974), another Oscar nomination for “Mississippi Burning” in 1988, and won his 2nd Oscar for his brilliant turn as Little Bill Daggett in “Unforgiven” in 1992, while “The Royal Tenenbaums” (2001) garnered him the Best Actor Golden Globe.

Two-time Oscar winner:

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image 23

He retired from acting at age 74 in 2004 to write historical fiction, with 2 Oscars (5 nominations), 4 Golden Globes (8 nominations), and 2 BAFTAs (5 nominations) for his career, in addition to countless other awards.

Not bad for a funny-looking guy whom everyone expected to fail.

Beef Piroshki

Beef Piroshki
Beef Piroshki

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground round
  • 2 medium onions, chopped
  • 2 hard-boiled eggs, chopped
  • 3 tablespoons sour cream
  • 1 teaspoon dried dill (or 1 tablespoon fresh)
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 5 (7 1/2 ounce) cans buttermilk biscuits
  • 1 egg, well beaten

Instructions

  1. In a large skillet, cook ground round, onions, and garlic over medium-high heat, stirring often to break up lumps of meat, until beef has lost its pink color, about 5 minutes. Drain off excess fat. Off heat, stir in hard-boiled egg, sour cream, dill, salt and pepper; let filling cool completely.
  2. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  3. One can at a time, separate biscuits. On a lightly floured surface roll out each biscuit to a 3 1/2 -inch circle. Place about 1 tablespoon filling in the center of each circle. Fold in half to enclose filling. Press edges with a fork to seal closed. Place on ungreased baking sheet. Brush tops with beaten egg.
  4. Bake piroshki for 15 to 20 minutes, until golden brown. Keep unbaked piroshki batches covered with clean kitchen towels.
  5. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Baked piroshki can be frozen and kept for up to one month. Thaw and bake as instructed.

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God's Rainbow - Noahic Covenant

What’s the most badass thing anyone ever did in school?

The most badass thing I ever did in grade school was during a Dodgeball game. I was in the 5th grade, 10 years old. Being the competitive little fuck I was, this game made me ever more hyped up than a monkey at a banana buffet.

The teacher chose who went on which side. I ended up going against the class bully and a couple of my friends. The class bully’s name will be Derek. Derek was a mean motherfucker who was fatter than a whale.

But you couldn’t tell it to his face or he’ll make sure to break yours. Derek never really picked on me that much since I usually kept to myself and away from him and his friends. But he did pick on my friend; Mike.

Mike was a full-on geek. Me and him both liked comics and Star Wars, but I kept that geeky side of myself hidden while Mike foolishly waved it around. He was also a very easy target.

I was really fit and tall compared to everyone else in my grade so not many people would try to physically start a fight with me. Simple insults were as far as they’d dare to go.

Mike, however, was really short and frail. You could kick him like a soccer ball if you had the lack of heart to go for it. He was also a super nice kid, so it really hit me in the feels when I saw him getting picked on.

In this Dodgeball game, Mike was on Derek’s side of the field and 2 of Derek’s friends were on mine. The balls we had for that game weren’t your typical soft and airy ones. No, they were all green and red plastic ones.

The plastic shells for these balls were hard and lordbabycheezit’s only knows why they allowed it for a game where the sole purpose of winning was to throw them at other people. Ironically, these were the same balls we used when playing bowling at the school fair.

During the first round, my side won. We also were about to win the second round when Derek burst in anger and started yelling at Mike.

The teacher didn’t do shit, he was busy having his lunch in the gym office. Some people told Derek to keep it down and take a chill pill but that only even made the asshole angrier.

Like it was just Mike’s fault his team was losing. I was surprised that no one had even hit Derek yet seeing that he was so huge, missing him would’ve been an even harder than not.

I guess everyone was afraid of hurting him and getting him angry. Having enough of his shit, I called out his name. He turned his head to face me, looking as if I’d just finished cussing the life out of his mom, “What?”

“Leave Mike alone.”

“Or what?”

I didn’t respond cause my mental response was a nice long essay’s worth of insults and death threats. Yeah that wouldn’t go too well seeing that Derek was also notorious for snitching even more than he was for bitching.

He took the ball that was in his hand and threw it right at me, full force and all. I was about 6 feet away from him and shouldn’t’ve been hard to hit. But just as the ball came this close to hitting me in the face, I tipped my head over to the side so that it’d miss.

My gawd people, it was so close that the air from that thing was brushing against my skin. I’m still impressed with what I did to this very day. Then, while I was getting Oo’s and Ah’s from everyone around me, I turned around and grabbed the ball from the floor.

Derek stood there, dumbstruck. Which makes sense, I was still freaking out then. Not giving him time to recollect and snap out of it, I took the same ball and football-chucked it right in his big ugly face.

Y’all know what came after that cat-in-a-blender scream when it hit him? That’s right; blood. And a whole lot of it. His nose was bleeding so much that his entire shirt was almost completely covered in it.

And he kept crying until the teacher came, furious as to what he saw. “What happened?”

“Leonardo hit me in the face mister! He tried to kill me!”

Ugh, could this soft ass bitch be any more of a drama queen?

“Is that true Leonardo?”

“No sir, if I was trying to kill him then he’d be long gone by now.”

And that was the last time anyone heard of the great DiCrapio. Any questions?

Just kidding. He sent me to the office straight after that, not bothering to listen to my side of the story. Which to be fair, wasn’t a very justifiable side to hear from. I was suspended for a good week and had another week of recess detention after that.

Needless to say, they never picked on Mike again after that. So worth it.


Just fyi, I wouldn’t recommend anyone try this at home cause even though they did leave Mike alone after that, I became enemy number one for Derek. That wasn’t the most fun title to hold.

Oh and he broke my thumb during recess the next month. Yeah, definitely don’t do this. Fuck you Derek, I hope your thumb gets crushed by a million plastic Dodgeballs one day.

Military personnel, what’s the dumbest thing you’ve heard someone in uniform say?

It was a two star general.

I was in the military for two years, just long enough to get the GI Bill. Just a one-striper, nothing much. As luck would have it, I scored very highly on an aptitude test I was given, and I was selected to work in a nuclear facility, as a computer operator. It took nine months (of a two year gig) for me to get a very high security clearance, necessary to handle nuclear weapon related material.

I was involved only at the lowest levels of this, my job included janitorial work, for example, gathering and bringing trash from officers to the furnace (to be burned; all paper and packing trash was burned, none left the building).

Anyway, one day I am filling in, in the computer room, for the tape librarian who is on leave. All data was stored on reel-to-reel magnetic tapes, and the tape librarian, directed by the console operator, brought the tapes in from the “library” (many racks of stored tapes) to mount them on the tape drives. And of course to take down tapes, label them and store them in the library. It’s a fairly continuous process walking back and forth, but not very strenuous for fit soldiers.

On this particular day, the general in charge of our operation had retired, and his two-star replacement was taking a tour of the facilities. He knew absolutely nothing about computers. He was guided by a full bird colonel, that knew a little bit about computers, but was not a very technical type.

When they got to the tape drives, the Colonel tried to explain to the General how they worked, like a voice recorder. The General thought this could be a security risk, because somebody could stand next to a tape drive, and listen in on the data being played, and be privy to nuclear secrets they should not be listening to. That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.

Everybody in the computer room had all the clearances necessary to do anything or see anything going on in the computer room. You not only cannot hear the binary data, you couldn’t possibly make sense of it if you did, it goes by far too fast and sounds like static if you feed it into a speaker.

The Colonel assured him it was impossible to eavesdrop on the data.

Nevertheless, the following day we had an armed MP guarding the tape drives, and we had to show an ID in order to mount tapes, or take down tapes. Which slowed down operations. And a week later, the MP was gone, and things went back to normal.

Why are many countries investing in China’s growth despite their poor human rights record and their own struggling economies?

How about the whole world!

Human rights and struggling economy is a narratives. Set to demonised China. It don’t work except for Brian dead westerners. That is some 1% of the entire world!

Four out of every five stuff made on the world U.S. made in China! 175 out of the world’s 195 nation on earth has China as their biggest trading partner! And 171 nation support and participated in BRI

Sure racist like this person who ask this question like to ignore facts and listen to narratives like these but even in the west there are very few of them! Do you know, in spite of Donald Trump’s trade war, the U.S. trade 3 times more in 2022 than in 2017 when the trade war began?

So it must make your anger and hate boils but heck some people choose not to think!

What bad experience had you saying “I will never buy from that company or use their service ever again”?

Lowe’s. Went to the store and ordered a GE gas wall kitchen oven with 5 year extended warranty. Not in stock, they had to order it and I had to wait. Because of a unique kitchen cut out and old house, I had few options. I call the store a few times over several weeks to try to get a status update. “Should be coming in soon”. Three months later they call to say GE no longer makes the model. Come in and pick another or get a refund.

I go in, get my refund and decide to do some more research. A few days later I go back to Lowe’s and order a Frigidaire gas wall oven and 5 year warranty. Not in stock, have to pay and wait for it to come in. I do so. About three months later they call to say that model is no longer made. Come in and pick another or come and get a refund.

I go in to get the refund. When they refund me, I notice I did not get refunded the $300 for the 5 year extended warranty. The cashier tells me they don’t give refunds on the warranties in the store. I have to call a special Lowe’s Telephone number to get that refunded separately.

I go home and then spent the next two weeks in automated telephone carousels trying to get to somebody who can orchestrate the refund. Probably spent 40 hours in total on the phone at different times before finally getting somebody. They had no record of the sale so I have to email them all my purchase and refund receipts. I do so. More run around. After a few weeks I get a check in the mail for the refund.

It then occurs to me…did I get a refund on the GE oven extended warranty I ordered first? I go back and look at the receipts and see they did not give me the $300 warranty refund on that one, and I didn’t notice.

Back to the store who tells me I must call the telephone number. Back on the phone trying to get to the right person. Did I mention this telephone number they have me calling has no weekend hours and limited weekday hours? When I do reach someone they have no record of the sale or return so I need to send them all copies of my receipts, which I do. Weeks later, no word. And no response from more hours on the phone. Mostly on hold.

I write a letter and send it through the mail to Lowe’s corporate office. I gave them documentation and photocopies of every single receipt and my timeline of purchases, calls, emails…every interaction, everything. I explain what’s been happening.

A few days later I get a letter from them saying they’d be happy to assist. All I have to do is call this telephone number (the one I’d been calling).

At that point my stomach could no longer bear it and I had to decide if $300 was worth the stress and time. I let it go.

I wouldn’t purchase a nail from Lowe’s ever again.

At that point I searched the internet and found the first GE oven I wanted at Plessers Appliances. I call them. They had five in stock. So the model wasn’t discontinued. I ordered it from a salesperson on the same call on which I confirmed it was in stock. I paid by debit card and it was installed 3 days later.

A true story. No embellishments.

Why didn’t I just go to Plessers to begin with? I didn’t know they existed. Their closest store to me was about 50 miles away in a town I never visit. But more importantly, initially I had no reason to doubt the information Lowe’s gave me about both models being discontinued. I know wall gas ovens are becoming more and more rare, so it seemed possible. And I didn’t want to deal with a gas to electric oven conversion, but that probably would have been the next step. But not with Lowes.

What is the most expensive lesson a company got after firing an employee?

Learned this through shard contacts. When we rented a house a few years back, the landlord was engaged to a very wealthy ex-Pharma sales executive. Roughly 15 or so years ago, this person was working for a major Pharma company selling its patented drugs to doctors. He was making a lot of money. Until one day he stumbled upon evidence that the company was covering up the massive toll of side effects of its drugs. After repeatedly attempting to correct the situation, he was stonewalled. In a good conscience, he couldn’t remain silent as the drugs were affecting people in terrible ways.

Under the Whistleblower Act, he provided the details to Federal agencies, who immediately launched an investigation. His identity was not protected as part of this process, and he very quickly was fired from his high paying job. Worse, he was blackballed across the entire industry. No one would talk to him. No companies would ever hire him. His Pharma, Medical and Sales careers were over. No one would hire him – not for anything. If I recall he was in his mid 30’s. He ended up bankrupt, divorced, lost his home, lost his family. He was utterly destroyed.

After many years of litigation at the highest levels, the company was found liable across a number of areas. The fines imposed on the company were MASSIVE – hundreds of millions of dollars.

As a whistleblower, he was entitled to, and paid a percentage of the fines imposed. I forget the exact number, but he made something like $100 million dollars as a result of ratting on the company’s deadly products. But the cost was….EVERYTHING.

When I learned of this story, the man was in living in the same town/city that we were in, and had a beautiful multi-million dollar waterfront home.

I always wondered if he felt like he would do the same thing again if he knew how things worked out. His life was ruined, literally ruined.

The company, of course, is still in business today. But a fine approaching the better part of a billion dollars has to hurt. A Lot.

China’s LATEST Stealth Aircraft Can Kill US B-21 ‘Raider’ in 1 Second

Have you ever had a neighbor who believed they had free reign of your property?

We had the neighbor from hell. The first day they moved in, he parked his Uhaul on our front yard yo unload. This was a hundred year old house with ceramic water lines. My husband explained that he had to move the truck, and he did.

Then, we had a tree cut down in our fenced back yard. The wood was cut into lengths to burn in a fireplace. I worked that day, and when I came home that night, over half the wood was gone. Every night for months they burned their fire pit. I know he took it.

Next, ghe to,d me he was putting up a privacy fence. As I said, we had a chain link fence already. I explained to him that he needed to put it as close to our fence as possible. The weeds between the fences on our side would be every difficult to remove. Again, I came home from work, and he had put up the fence inside out with the support beams on our side. This left a 8” gap between the fences. Weeds were horribly difficult to reach.

We had a two car parking spot in the back of our houses. No lie, he had a motorcycle trailer, two cars and a trailer parked there. Of course he spilled over his lot. Every time they took the trailer out they moved my garbage can. They never put it back where it belonged. One night I was having a few beers when I heard him come home with the trailer. I grabbed the trash can and held it. He wasn’t going to move it that night. My drinking got the better of me and I went off on how they thought our yard was his to use, and how all the neighbors had had enough of them.

They put their house up for sale that week. Good riddance.

If you can give me only one tip to improve my life, what would it be?

I can’t think of one person who runs and doesn’t have their shit together.

  1. I think it’s because running teaches you how to persist. The entire act of running is to not listen to your body’s urges to stop and to persist instead.
  2. You will also learn how to focus on a singular goal, to keep your legs moving until you reach your destination. The skill of focus is one of the most underrated and misunderstood. Many people think your ability to focus is inborn, but I know from personal experience it’s a skill that we train through out the day.
  3. Running will also make you have more stamina in bed which could lead to you landing the wife or husband you want.
  4. Running also tends to weed out bad habits like smoking because it’s so difficult to run and to keep smoking.
  5. Also when you travel, you will get a intimate view of the city because you will know what it’s like to see the city on foot.
  6. You will also be able to learn things because podcasts​ and books are some of the best things to listen to while you are on a long run.
  7. Also runners tend to eat healthier which helps them lose weight and have good skin. I know I don’t like eating fried food if I’m going to be running later because I will feel sluggish.
  8. When you run you also feel very confident because you will feel like you are becoming a stronger person.
  9. Finally, you should run, because one day, you won’t be able to.

Have you ever had a neighbor who believed they had free reign of your property?

Yes after buying new property in a rural area. The neighbor behind us kept letting the family ride off road four-wheelers on our property as we did not have a fence between us and we did not live there yet. As I was building our new house and shop we saw the kids riding across our property again, I drove to top of hill where they were and asked them not to keep coming across the property line that was surveyed and marked. They apologized and said they thought it was their grandparents property. I thanked them and told them my insurance would not allow other people to drive on my property, if they got hurt I could get sued.

No problem I thought all was well. I keep getting other neighbors calling and saying people are still driving all over our property when we aren’t there. So the next week we see an adult with a small child again riding on our property. Again I drive up the hill and park in the middle of the trail so when he comes back he has to stop. When he does, I again ask to stop trespassing as I have also told his kids before. He said they are just puttering along slow and not hurting anything. And he drives off. Now I’m mad. So my employees start a new (nice) fence the next day. A week later all employees are working on new house (I’m in construction) and one employee says “hey there’s that rude guy on the four-wheeler at the top on the hill”. We all stopped working and run over to look, he is stopped (standing on top of his seat) on the trail by a large barbedwire fence looking all the way down both sides on the mountain at a new long fence. We laughed for about 10 minutes. He had that look like how did this get here. Sad thing is we would have let the kids ride on our property if they had just asked nice. But we didn’t even know their names. We had miles of trails all over the place.

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How did you get revenge on a co-worker who stole credit for your work?

I never seek revenge.

In the 1980s, I had a co-worker who presented my craft work as her own. At that point, I just sat back and watched, I knew things were going to be entertaining.

My manager was so very pleased with the job my co-worker claimed as her own. When my manager asked my co-worker to show her how she had done the job; my co-worker was at a complete loss on what to do. My manager tried to assist my co-worker by asking “how did you start, what was your first idea?”

My co-worker had no idea about how I had created the project as I had completed it at home. After about an hour of trying to figure out how to dismantle my work; my co-worker had to admit that she hadn’t created the project at all. She also admitted that she had taken it from off my desk.

My manager was not amused by my co-worker. When she came to my desk; I was just smiling a little smile. My manager asked me why I hadn’t defended my project and claimed my work. Then she answered her own question; that my work spoke for itself.

Have you ever had a neighbor who believed they had free reign of your property?

Not I, but my brother.

When my brother was ready to buy a home, he instead went the custom-built route: our parents divided their five-acre lot so he could build next door.

Both homes were perched on top of an almost-mountain hill, looking over the valley. Pretty amazing view.

For whatever reason I’m unaware of, my brother ended up with a two-acre L-shaped lot; basically, he ended up with his front and back yards and a narrow strip at the rear of our parents’ backyard next door. I think it may have been so my brother could own and maintain the wire suicide fence that prevented any accidental tumbling into the valley below, so our parents wouldn’t have to. Yeah, the hill slope was that steep; it was basically a grassy cliff.

Then my mother’s husband passed away, leaving her to rattle around her huge home by herself. Empty nesting, the property became too much for her to care for and she put it on the market.

My brother, having foreseen this, had included a mother’s suite when he built his home. Practically an independent apartment on the first floor next to the garage, with its own kitchen and bath and a private entrance and my brother’s living space on the second floor upstairs. Absolutely no issues with Mom moving in next door to live with my brother while she was trying to sell.

The people she eventually agreed to sell to were not fun even during the real estate transaction process. They moaned and whined and nickel and dimed but they got her house and moved in. Long story short, this couple proved to be assholes before they even signed the contract, and that certainly didn’t change when the house was theirs. They promptly began tearing out everything to renovate.

Including the yard. Twenty years’ worth of plantings; Mom’s beloved gardens and flower beds, shrubs and fruit trees, ruthlessly removed to accommodate an unending sea of grass. Mom said nothing of course but she was sick.

My brother suggested that she replant a new garden. Together, they spent the time and money to plant roses and fruit trees along the suicide fence on that strip of land that was too narrow to accommodate anything else.

My brother returned from work one afternoon to discover that the new neighbors had crossed the property line to dig up and chainsaw everything my brother and my mother had planted. When questioned, the neighbor explained he wanted nothing but grass in the backyard. He wanted an unobstructed view of the valley below.

Furious, my brother explained that that strip of land was not part of the neighbor’s backyard and that he didn’t consider two dwarf fruit trees to be obscuring the view, but even if they did, the neighbor did not have the right to trespass or to tear them out of property he didn’t own. The plants had cost in both time and money. Neighbor refused to pay for the damages.

It was not worth it to bother with the time and expense of small claims court. But Mom had already been complaining that every time she stepped into the yard or the driveway, the nosy neighbors were watching her, and that they were able to view the interior of my brother’s home through windows visible from their side of the property line. Mom was feeling paranoid and upset.

My brother erected an 8-foot-high wooden fence that completely surrounded his L-shaped lot and its driveway. Including both along the suicide fence at the rear of the property and the property line that separated that narrow strip from the neighbor’s backyard. When the driveway gate is closed, the only thing visible from outside the fence is the roof of the house and a couple of treetops.

My brother further installed a length of decorative metal fence with a fairy gate to separate that narrow strip from his own backyard. Mom ended up with a “hidden” garden that over the years was equipped with concrete benches, bird houses and a bath, a fountain, lawn toys. They planted fruit trees, grapes, roses, flowers, a vegetable patch, butterfly bushes. You couldn’t see the valley from Mom’s fairy garden for the wooden fence, but no nosy destructive neighbors could see her, either. She puttered away hours in there; she loved it.

Instead of two fruit trees and some rose bushes, now the new neighbors had not one but two runs of eight-foot-high wooden fence between their house and the view. The view from their property is completely gone. Short of climbing a ladder to sit on the roof, there is nothing they can do about it.

And whenever my mom wants, the valley and their neighbors’ yard are visible from my brother’s living room and back deck, upstairs from her mother’s suite. Sometimes they barbecue up there.

Oh, and they got a half-dozen egg-laying pet chickens. The rooster is pretty loud at 5am. That’s how my brother knows it’s time to get up and get ready for work.

We don’t know what the rooster wakes the nosy neighbors up for.

The fantasy of the Philippines has been completely shattered, the situation in the South China Sea has been clarified, and the mysterious “sonic weapon” has appeared!

Just this morning, I woke up and saw the news. After the Philippines illegally invaded my country’s Scarborough Shoal. Philippine control began to “collapse” with my country’s law enforcement ships on Ren’ai Reef, which was met with professional restraint by my country.

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First of all, as for the recent provocations by the Philippines, it is obvious that the United States is behind it. Without the support of the United States, the Philippines would not dare to come and make noise. China is dismantling the “island chains” deployed by the United States in the Asia-Pacific region one by one, and breaking through the “containment” of the United States at a rapid speed.

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That article was a paper written by an expert from the University of Defense Technology, which roughly revealed that our country has accelerated its development in close-air combat in recent years, and has also established a near-air command equipped with a variety of hypersonic weapons units.

Everyone knows that our country is ahead of the United States in the research and development of hypersonic missiles. We not only have a mature and complete offensive weapon system, but also a strong and powerful defense system.

The emergence of the Near Air Command today obviously tells the United States that it is no longer possible for the United States to “cover the sky with one hand” in the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time, he also warned the United States not to have any illusions on the Taiwan issue or the situation in the South China Sea.

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Looking back, the United States naturally does not want us to develop more and more stable long-range missiles and hypersonic missiles, so it will let the Philippines come over from time to time to stir up trouble.

After all, what the United States wants is to involve us in the war, then contain our development, and turn the South China Sea into the next “Russian-Ukrainian battlefield.” But what makes the United States even more unexpected today is that we will not dispatch hypersonic missiles to deal with the tiny Philippines.

Instead, a brand new “attack weapon” was released, which was the mysterious sonic weapon!

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Since the Philippines continues to invade our country’s islands and reefs and frequently come to cause trouble, our country’s new coast guard ships are equipped with a series of self-defense weapons to strengthen the defense capabilities of maritime law enforcement.

Of course, in the face of repeated troubles from the Philippines, we still maintain the rationality we should have to avoid falling into the trap of the United States, so we usually use some high-pressure water cannons to achieve the effect of driving away the Philippines.

But this time, in the face of the collision with the Philippines, our country has released a brand-new weapon, which is the long-range directional acoustic wave repellent device. This “acoustic weapon” can be said to be specially designed to deal with the Philippines!

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Because this remote directional sound wave driving device can release a sound of 160 decibels, which is 60 higher than the human body’s tolerance range (100 decibels).

This weapon can be used for “sonic bombing” from a distance of 3 kilometers.

You know, this time the Philippines dispatched 40 small fishing boats, multiple coast guard ships, and official ships to form the so-called “Christmas Fleet” in an attempt to invade my country’s islands and reefs in an attempt to create large-scale chaos.

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In that case, we will directly release the “sonic weapons” to give them a “Christmas atmosphere boost”!

Maybe many people don’t have much idea about this 60 decibels.

The human body is originally very sensitive to external sounds. The sound of two people communicating normally is about 20 decibels. But if a large car passes by and honks its horn, the decibels will reach 50, and the ears will instantly “buzz”. Once it exceeds 100 decibels, it will cause great damage to the ears, and may even lead to temporary “deafness”.

Moreover, this kind of directional sound wave repellent weapon can focus 150 decibels of noise, and then adjust the angle to directionally project it onto the enemy’s ship. As a result, all the Philippine ships can do is to leave quickly with their tail between their legs…

In fact, the Philippines still does not understand the situation in the South China Sea today. We have already firmly grasped the overall situation.

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If nothing else, in the past two years, our navy has laid a “drag net” on Mischief Reef, Ren’ai Reef and other islands and reefs, and assembled the largest naval formation in recent years.

There are 052D guided missile destroyer, 052C guided missile destroyer, 053HC guided missile frigate, 056A guided missile frigate, 072 tank landing ship, 022 high-speed missile boat…

All in all, the current situation in the South China Sea is very clear: ASEAN countries have clearly seen the true face of the United States and know that the Philippines is a pawn of the United States in the Asia-Pacific region.

Author note : China is a country when you do something anti China you will lose the disputed territory to China, it happened to India, it happened to Japan now the Diao Yu Island is in China control. A lot of countries has demarcated border with China Russia, Vietnam, Pakistan, Nepal, Kazakhstan.

Has anyone at your workplace ever been fired for something they said or did?

Yes. Leanne. A rather entitled millennial who thought the sun shone from somewhere it didn’t. She told her manager to F-off.

She was put into a tech assistant role, supporting George, a category manager who had been working for the company close to 50 years. He actually retired when he hit 50 years service – he was 72 at the time. After retirement, he stuck around part time for a few years as a consultant too – he was that knowledgeable, and important to the business.

Anyway, what George didn’t know wasn’t worth knowing. He could tell you the names of staff going back to the early 70s. He could also tell you when something was made obsolete, and what replaced it. He was a walking archive of catalogue information going back to before I was born. If you couldn’t find an answer, George was the one who would know it. He was extremely well respected. He had 2 assistants working under him, doing daily tasks like tenders and quotes, warranty checks, stock orders, and general technical assistance for distributors and customers.

Jovic was a fellow in his mid 30s when I met him. He was George’s protégé, and he had already learnt a lot from George – having worked under him for nearly a decade. His only career plan was to step into George’s role when he retired. He did (and still does) a cracking job.

Leanne was employed a year or so before I came along. She was lazy, and slow to reply to requests for help. Customers complained to both Jovic and George about her. Jovic was growing tired of having to carry Leanne’s shortcomings, and begged George to do something.

George worked out she would be better doing analytic tasks like price increases, manufacturing updates, large pricing tenders, and stock monitoring – so she wouldn’t have to talk to customers anywhere near as much. She was taking a week to do a tender than George could do in a few hours. Admittedly, George could look at a partial part number, or a description, and instantly know the correct number. This took Leanne a lot of time to search. But she was also partial to online shopping, and would spend hours browsing fashion sites. She would also call her friends and spend hours going through fashion websites, deciding what to buy. This was the main reason she was so slack.

George had gone to HR several times about her lack of competence in the role, her time wasting, excessive personal calls etc etc. She was given numerous verbal warnings, and a couple of written ones. She was on thin ice. One afternoon George was frustrated that a deadline was coming up, and she hadn’t started a tender that she’d had for over 2 weeks. He walked up behind her desk to see she was browsing a fashion site, and yapping away on a personal call. He interrupted her and asked her to focus on the tender. Her response “fxxx off George.”

George had never been short with anyone before. So his next outburst was a huge shock to us all. He bellowed (loud enough for whoever was on the other end of her phone to clearly hear it) “That’s it, we’re going up to HR right now. You had your last chance, and you blew it.”

Her response, which was heard right across 60+ people in an open plan office – people who had suddenly become silent after hearing George’s ouburst, was “you can’t sack me you crusty old cxxx. I quit first.”

Because of that retaliation, and the language used, HR refused to give her a reference as she was marched from the building.

George was the most patient guy, but Leanne pushed him way too far. We were all glad to see the back of her.

Jovic has since become “George 2.0” – although his knowledge isn’t as impressive as George, he still has some 25 years to get there.

Chicken with Dill Sauce
(Kurczeta z Sosem Koperkowyn — Poland)

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Ingredients

  • 1 (3 to 3 1/2 pound) broiler-fryer chicken, cut up
  • 1 1/2 cups water
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon white pepper
  • 1 cup Half-and-Half
  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon minced dill weed
  • 1 teaspoon lemon juice

Instructions

  1. Heat chicken, water, salt and white pepper to boiling in skillet; reduce heat. Cover and simmer until thickest pieces of chicken are done, 45 to 50 minutes.
  2. Remove chicken; keep warm.
  3. Shake Half-and-Half and flour in tightly covered jar. Stir Half-and-Half mixture, dill weed and lemon juice into pan juices. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly; boil and stir 1 minute.
  4. Pour some of the sauce over chicken; serve with remaining sauce and with spaetzle or cooked cauliflower, if desired.

What is the best way to handle rejection?

My partner interviewed for her dream job as a tenured professor at an elite university. It offered generous compensation, and the opportunity to expand her research and educate students on niche subjects she is passionate about. She prepared for a week, doing mock interviews and research. When the day came, she called me after and exclaimed “It went great! I’m sure I will get a follow up interview. I haven’t felt this good about an interview in so long.”

The next day, I was walking downstairs at our home and saw her sitting at the dining room table. She looked glum, so I asked, “How’s it going?”

Without looking up, she said, “I’ve been better. I just got a rejection email for that job.” She was completely devastated. For years, she’d been so successful in getting every job she applied for, saying that, “Interviews are my super power.” Consequently, she was being quite hard on herself.

I reminded her that this job process wasn’t like finding jobs in high school and college. She was competing with other academics: highly intelligent, motivated, organized professionals with so much to offer — just like her. But it still stung because she’d put so much of herself into this process.

I related so strongly to her feelings. Coming from corporate, I’ve done around 100 interviews. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard a hiring manager say, “You are such a great match for this role!” Or something equitably enthusiastic, with me leaving their office skipping like a kid out of a candy shop — only to get a rejection, followed by waves of frustration.

While I’ve found that rejection does get easier with repetition, it never becomes a pleasant, or even neutral experience. Be it writing, dating, or jobs, there’s always a burn.

Dr. Ethan Kross, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, found that even the most sophisticated among us are often distinctly sensitive to failure. His study found the part of the brain activated during rejection is also associated with physical pain. When someone says “it hurts” after a rejection, they aren’t far from the truth.

Rejection is different from failure in that there’s often an interpersonal dynamic to it — which makes it particularly unpleasant and personal.

I have long battled my harsh inner critic, which is quite common, especially with people who had a strict childhood or where they felt they weren’t good enough (the prior certainly describes me). Replaying these rejections comes naturally and with ease. Which is why I’ve invested in help from a therapist. He gave me a great and counterintuitive exercise, called the “rejection collection”. It helps destigmatize that rejection and promotes empathy — and friendships.

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How the rejection collection works

Rejection often has a secretive nature, where we hide these shortcomings from others to insulate our ego and feelings of acceptance. Ideally, per the American Psychological Association, we should do the exact opposite and seek more meaningful connections with people in the aftermath of rejection, which is what this exercise does.

You create a simple spreadsheet using excel, google docs, anything. Create it with at least one other person and list out notable rejections from your life. I’ll throw myself into the fire right now:

  1. I was rejected from my dream publisher, Penguin Random House, after going through several rounds of feedback with a senior editor. I was close to signing a contract, only for them to reject me in the 11th hour, saying my book idea, “Is not strong or unique enough.”
  2. I was given a reference to interview at my dad’s company, SAP, and flew to Philadelphia for an interview, only to be rejected. I applied for a second position, and flew to Philadelphia again, only to be rejected a second time. I felt like a complete failure and an embarrassment to my dad.
  3. In 8th grade, 23 people tried out for the JV soccer team at a school where soccer was everything. Only me and one other person got cut from the team. I felt like the least athletic, least cool guy in the world.
  4. I was once having a great and long conversation with a beautiful Jamaican woman. We were hitting it off. On a whim, and before I could talk myself out of it, I said, “We should grab dinner sometime.” Her smile immediately vanished, as if she’d just seen a ghost. Then, she said, “Sorry, I don’t date white men.” Which is fine. She’s entitled to her preferences. I cringed more thinking about how I misread her energy.
  5. There was a personality test for our finance department at my last corporate job. During HR’s presentation, each of us were represented as a dot on a giant graph, with our initials by the dot. I didn’t see my name. At the end, I raised my and asked the researcher, “I noticed my name isn’t listed?” She said, “Yeah, we couldn’t properly score your personality. It was too far outside our bounds.” The room erupted in laughter.

When you create your list, adding context and the story helps humanize the experience for the other people on the list. The other option is to have a zoom call where each person reads through their rejections and shares those stories.

It’s OK if they feel entirely random and with different contexts. It’s also completely advisable to find ways to laugh and have fun with it. Self-deprecation can remove the heaviness from the experience, and pivot the tone of your inner monologue to be more accepting.

Per psychology professor, Dr. Mark Leary, the communal component of a rejection collection is the key component to remember. Rejection tends to threaten your sense of belonging to the group, but by celebrating and putting those rejections boldly forward in a group setting — it promotes that sense of belonging and understanding between people.

When I went through this list with two friends, I marveled at some of the stories I heard and we laughed together, thinking through and discussing the events, often debunking people’s insecurities. I felt a sense of togetherness, and enhanced friendship with my buddies afterwards. I was glad they shared these moments of supreme rejection that they’d hidden from me for decades. I didn’t feel alone.

Each of us exists on a spectrum of rejection sensitivity, with some people having very harsh and self-immolating interpretations of these events. But this rejection can cause you to seek out friends and build your connection to them as a compensatory response. This isn’t to say one should get chewed up by rejections intentionally to make friends. But more to remind you of how universal this experience is. A rejection collection helps you purge these harsh narratives and reframe them into something kinder.

When I was an early teenage boy, I had a long-standing crush on another girl who was signaling pretty clearly that she liked me too. I was talking to my friend Brian, saying, “I want to ask her out but I’m so afraid.”

He shrugged and said, “What’s the worst thing she can do, say no?” It was such a healthy extrapolation to rethinking these rejections. Sometimes, we need to lighten the load we place on these outcomes.

I remind myself that rejection stems from something proactive: you taking the initiative to pursue things you want in life. It takes courage to try, to put yourself in the line of judgement. So pat yourself on the back for that, regardless of the outcome.

And if you get rejected, consider sharing it with a someone, or scheduling a call with friends, and list them out in all their glory. You’ll all be better off for it. Remember to stay kind — to others, and yourself.

What’s the quickest way you saw a co-worker get fired?

When I was with the DoC, we had a shipping container in our parking lot to store outdated, or damaged, computer equipment. Once the container was full, bids would be placed on it and the winning bidder would come out and carry the equipment off.

The container was 8 feet by 40 feet so unloading the equipment from it could take some time, and because security balked at having to stand around while the equipment was removed, someone from IT would have to babysit the people hauling the equipment off. This job fell to the person in the office with the least seniority.

It just so happened that we had a newbie start the day equipment was being picked up so the team leader took him outside, handed him the clipboard of inventory being picked up and forms the buyer had to sign, and told him to stay out there until the container was empty. He was told to lock the container up and come back inside once it was done.

It usually took about an hour to empty a container and the newbie was sent outside around 9 AM, so when the team lead began asking us if we’d seen the new guy around 11:30, we knew something was wrong. The team leader went outside and found the trailer wide open, and empty, so he locked it. There was no sign of the newbie. About that time one of the techs saw him strolling across the parking lot, from the direction of a fast food joint nextdoor. When he entered the office the team lead asked him where he’d been and he said it was hot outside (it was summer) and watching the people empty the trailer was boring so he’d decided to sit in the fast food place and watch them from there. He was asked when the people had left and he said they drove off around 10:20. The team lead asked if the buyer had signed the equipment transfer forms and the newbie stated he’d “forgotten” to have them sign (and it’s kind of hard to have someone sign a form when you’re 150 feet away, sitting in a restaurant).

The team lead told our boss what had happened immediately and the new employee became a former employee after only 3½ hours on the job. He didn’t even make it to lunch time — the official lunch time, that is.

MAGA Girl Drops TRUTH BOMBS About Western Women

What is normal in your country but weird in the rest of the world?

Although Australia is considered your “typical white country” by many, we still have quirks that make the whole world tilt their head and think “What the F*ck?” For example:

  • We have a tradition called a “shoey”– which is were you drink beer out of a dirty shoe.
image 21
image 21
  • Bars are required to have stables, water and food for horses.
  • We call friends “cunts” and people we dislike “mates”.
  • Life sentences cannot be over 25 years.
  • Repairing a fence because a kangaroo tried jumping over it and failed.
  • School is from February to December, so we have Christmas and New Year’s eve during our annual break.
  • Petting zoos having kangaroos, wallabies and emus which you can feed and play with for something like 5 bucks an hour.
  • Deadly spiders everywhere. The week before writing this answer, I actually removed a huntsman from my backyard so my dog couldn’t eat it. I ended up throwing the fucker over the fence and into my neighbors house (by accident of course).
  • Having Christmas at the beach. Since Australian summer is during December- people go to the beaches in swarms on Christmas Day to open presents and have barbecues.
  • Every Australian town has a pub with at least one, massive foster beer ad stuck on the rood (even though no one drinks foster any more).
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image 20
  • Almost everyone is outdoors. Hiking, walking, fishing, sailing, boating, surfing, swimming and a hell of a lot more. Everyone is into some kind of sport or activity. The natural resources like beaches and suburbs are used wisely and not just wasted.
  • Swearing when complimenting something. In Australia, when someone says “Sick cunt”, it means “you did good.”
  • Calling rain boots/wellies “Gum boots”.
  • Smelling smoke from a far way bushfire when going outside.
  • Having no idea what “political correctness is” and saying anything on our minds.
  • We say ‘Yeah, nah’ instead of No, and ‘Nah, yeah’ instead of “Yes”.
  • Children aren’t allowed to purchase cigarettes, but there is no law specifically stating that they cannot smoke them.
  • Not being able to go outside during lunch break at school because you forgot your hat.
  • Having extremely wide roads and pavements, even in the city and suburbs.
  • Making fun of anything regardless if its offensive or not.
  • It is illegal to dress up as Robin and Batman.
  • Selling $2 hot dogs when everyone is voting for the new prime minster in the elections.
image 19
image 19
  • Getting fined if you don’t vote in the elections.
  • Putting butter and sprinkles on bread to create fairy bread– our traditional dish.
  • Putting butter and Vegemite (a thick black Australian sauce) on bread to create another traditional dish: Vegemite and toast.
  • Eating a lot of fresh fish and ripe avocados. Avocado milkshakes are really common in Australia, and so is really good sushi.
  • Every pub has 2–4 Poker Machines minimum.
  • Eating burgers that have beetroot.
  • Getting attacked by magpies (a Australian bird), because you walked into their territory by accident.

Atlantis, Thoth, the Emerald Tablet & the Secret to Immortality

Metallicman domain name hustle

Well, it seems that a compromise in the metallicman dispute issue has been realized.

It’s a hustle: a scam. A fraud.

Ah… The head honcho at the CN domain office has offered me to purchase the domain names before the interloper does.

Great. Or so I thought.

Then he sent me the price list.

Not so great.

2024 02 09 14 30
2024 02 09 14 30

So I will need to cough up 20,000 RMB to secure the metallicman website.

20,000 RMB is a tidy sum.

Uh oh!

But then, a mm subscriber suggested that it was a scam.

2024 02 10 13 02
2024 02 10 13 02

So I went on Google and checked it out.

I discovered this….

Beware the following email originating from John Liu <chinaregistry177 (at) aliyun.com address individually to you. It is a scam trying to get you to part with your money. The website at the end of the message does not exist.

Mine was a Mr. Albert Liu.

Albert Liu<albert.liu@chinaregistry.org.cn>

Subject: CN Domain and keyword

“(It’s very urgent, please transfer this email to your CEO. Thanks)

We are the domain name registration service company in China. On Dec 30, 2015, we received an application from Huaxun Holdings Ltd requested “XXXXXX” (name removed) as their internet keyword and China (CN) domain names. But after checking it, we find this name conflict with your company name or trademark. In order to deal with this matter better, it’s necessary to send email to you and confirm whether this company is your distributor or business partner in China?

Kind regards

John Liu
General Manager
China Registry (Headquarters)
8052, Douhai Building, No. 59 Baolian Road,
Shanghai, China
Tel: +86 21 6191 8696
Mobile: +86 138 1642 8671
Fax: +86 21 6191 8697
Web: www  .chinaregistry.com.cn
Email: john (at) chinaregistry.com.cn

Phone numbers and URLs are equal to what what I got in my mail.

Comment and Advice

The unsolicited email you receive is from a Chinese domain registrar (could be a certified registrar, agent, affiliate or private person).

In the email they explain that a supposed company (try to Google the name) is interested in some available domain names (typically .hk, .cn, .tw), which correspond with your brand name.

In only a few days the other party will register these domains, unless you secure them first. The domain registrar can even send you an email from the interested third party (it comes from a hotmail address) claiming that they want to register your domain names, and they are only waiting for approval from Mr. Jim or whatever his name is.

Identical to what happened to me. Only this was from a sina address.

Zhihai Ning<zhihaining@vip.sina.com>

There is a similar domain name: www  . chinaregistry.org.cn.

Yes. This is the URL.

In trying to connect to this my anti virus protection gave the following message so beware:

“When we visited this site, we found it may be designed to trick you into submitting your financial or personal information to online scammers. This is a serious security threat which could lead to identity theft, financial losses or unauthorized use of your personal information”.

It can be very expensive if you fall for it.  Just ignore it.

Yuppur. It’s a pretty well established e-mail scam.

2024 02 10 13 05
2024 02 10 13 05

Remember the name of the organization that registers domain names is CNNIC. Not “China Registry”.

I’m gonna ignore it. Thanks MM crew!

Happy Dragon Year!

Today…

Why is the Western cooperate media so keen on the Chinese economy but not their own economies in recession?

Excellent question.

Thank you for asking. It is easy to understand. Western governments need to hoodwink their own people who are now very wary about their dropping standard of living for close to 3 generations now. The average westerners are now worst off then their parents and even their grandparents.

Homelessness is rampant, inflation exceed their growth rates and set them back further. Take the UK. In 2023 it’s economy had a negative growth of -3% yet its inflation is a full 4.2%. Together British people suffer a 7.2% deterioration of their standard of living.

The U.S. grew by 2.4% in 2023 but suffers a 3.4% inflation. So once again it’s standard if living fall by 1%. But it has deteriorated back to the levels of 1960’s. Even life expectancy has dropped below that of China! Homelessness has reached a million and a third of Americans cannot afford their health insurance and their college debts consume most of them.

So with such a scenario, it is hardly surprising that they used their media to channel western minds to Chinese economy that is purportedly deteriorating. These are simply a pack of lies to deceive the westerners. Just imagine 2020–2022 over the 3 years post pandemic China grew by 5.5% per annum while most western economies had negative growth.

But what is worst is that it suffered close to double digit inflation while China’s inflation rate is on average 0.5%. In 2023 China grew by 5.2% with a mere 0.2% inflation. Chinese people’s standard of living grew by a net +5.0% in 2023! Yet if you read western media it accuses China of a host of things casting doubt on China!

By right westerners ought to be mad at their government for lying to them. But most pretend to be living better than the world. It’s a fell good factor! It is not good because truth will dawn on them sooner or later.

When did you realize that your parent was verbally abusive?

I realized my mother was verbally abusive when I was around 13. One of my first friends invited me to dinner. I was worried, but I went. It was a normal dinner, with home cooked casserole and green beans. I wasn’t used to that. Everyone sat at the table, and the father cleared his throat. Uh-oh, I thought, here it comes.

Then, he launched into a funny story about how he and a coworker kept hiding each others waste baskets, and how he had won the last round thanks to his daughter’s suggestion of putting a plastic lei on it and photographing it as though leaving the office.

Then her older brother spoke. He was in college, and told an anecdote about a professor who kept losing chalk. Mum spoke up about Chippy, a little squirrel that she fed by the back door. My friend moaned a little about a huge homework project.

Everyone turned to me. I actually spoke, suggesting that we should build our school project in such a way that it blocked the principal’s door. None of these stories were actually that good. but there was a tenderness in the telling and listening that I had never seen. People listened. They chuckled. They talked. They praised Mum’s cooking. No one said one derogatory thing.

They were a normal family. My friend teased her brother about his lack of hockey prowess, and Mum and Dad liked different baseball teams. My friend got grounded for sass, sometimes. But, instead of the parents trying to destroy the children, they held them up.

I cried all the way home. It was winter, and the tears froze on my face. Mother was there. Her first comment, what did you do to your face? My God you were an ugly baby and it’s just gotten worse. It’s good you don’t wear make up, lipstick on a plow horse.

And it didn’t stop until I went to bed. It never really stopped until I left home, always under the guise of helping me fix my flaws.

But after that dinner with the B family, I knew there was another way to live. And that made all the difference.

Pasta con le Sarde

If there is any pasta dish that represents Sicilian tradition to its fullest, it is pasta con le sarde. Combining the culinary footprints of Sicily’s kitchens, this classic recipe mixes maccheroncini (macaroni) with fennel, tomatoes, pine nuts, raisins, anchovies, onion and fresh sardines.

pasta con sarde
pasta con sarde

The pasta is always ladled out of the pot, never poured into a colander, and then put in a serving dish. During two weeks in Sicily, we never had a piece of overcooked pasta. Test, test, test was Chef Tino’s rule, and, apparently, every other chef’s.

Ingredients

  • 1 pound fresh sardines
  • 1/2 pound fennel bulb
  • Olive oil
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 8 ounces uncooked tomato sauce*
  • 4 ounces pine nuts
  • 1/4 cup raisins, softened in water
  • 2 salted anchovies
  • 1 pound macaroni
  • Pecorino cheese

Instructions

  1. Bone the sardines. (If you slit the fish lengthwise and grab it by the tail, the bone easily strips out). Chop the fennel and boil under just tender in water that you will use to cook the pasta. Strain the fennel out of the pot and chop finely.
  2. Heat a sauté pan over medium heat and add enough olive oil to just cover the bottom. Brown garlic and onion in oil until soft. Add tomatoes, chopped fennel, pine nuts, raisins, and anchovies. Simmer for 10 minutes. At this point, start the macaroni and add the sardines to the pasta sauce. If the sauce is too dry, add a very small amount of the fennel water. Don’t stir the sauce once the sardines are added, to avoid breaking them up.
  3. Place the cooked pasta in serving dish and pour the sauce over, finishing off with a sprinkling of Pecorino and a little olive oil.

Serves 4 to 6.

* This is best made with fresh tomatoes, coarsely chopped, skin and seeds included. If tomatoes aren’t in season, you could use good canned tomatoes.

What is the greatest waste of human potential?

The first Emperor of a unified Germany, Wilhelm I, was a strict and conservative man. His son, Frederick III, was a liberal mind. A brilliant man and a keen reformer, he was full of ambition to transform German society, do away with stuffy nobility and its ancient war-like ways, and usher in a new, open-minded and scientifically oriented Germany.

image 4
image 4

Wilhelm I, however, kept on living… born in 1797, he didn’t die until 1888, aged almost 91 years old. Frederick had to wait for a long time for it to finally be “his turn”. He was eager, and excited for the task. But then, three days before his father passed away, Frederick was diagnosed with throat cancer. He had been ill for a while, and his health rapidly took a turn for the worst. By time his father was buried, he was already too weak to walk in the procession. He looked on from the palace window, and wept…

image 3
image 3

No small part of Frederick’s sorrow? His son and heir, Wilhelm, was a war-like man, imperialistic, aggressive, expansionist, conservative… the polar opposite of his peace-loving, progressive father. Frederick wanted desperately to make good use of his remaining time on earth. But cancer of the throat soon took away his ability to talk, and a botched operation to fix his pain resulted in even greater pain and discomfort when the resulting wound became infected.

“I had so hoped to have been of use to my country. Why is Heaven so cruel to me? What have I done to be thus stricken and condemned?” wrote Frederick III in his diary. He died in June 1888, a mere 99 days into his reign, aged 56. It is often speculated that, had Wilhelm II not ascended to the throne, his father would have moved away from Prussian militarism and Germany may never have entered WWI. WWII would have been averted as well.

Gary, Indiana

What did your boss say to you during a meeting that resulted in you immediately resigning?

Not to me, but how she treated my co-workers.

We were all working overtime and being stressed out. Sales weren’t doing well, people were quitting, and everything was dysfunctional. Some items at the store weren’t even there or expired.

My boss was in a bad mood, taking it out on everyone. Nitpicking, tearing others down, and calling people incompetent. I’d already gotten a warning for talking back. I had told her that she shouldn’t be treating people that way. We were all working hard and doing our best. She said that if I didn’t like how she ran the store, then to get out. I was really tempted, but kept working.

It was the final straw when a pregnant co-worker needed to go home on time because she had to walk home at 11:00 PM. My boss refused and my co-worker was in a lot of pain. My boss told her to suck it up, that it was her fault for being an irresponsible wh*** and being stuck as a single mom. This made my co-worker burst into tears; her boyfriend had just broken up with her and left her after the news she was pregnant. She’d been taking it hard since.

I marched right up to this and told my co-worker to gather her things because she worked enough for the night, that I would drive her home. My co-worker listened.

My boss was furious for undermining her. I blew up at her, telling her that she needed to work on her morals and values. I asked her how she could even think about doing this to someone, especially her own worker? My boss answered that it was the wh***’s problem, not ours.

I told her that she should never call someone that and her behavior is exactly why she was losing employees. I said this was why nobody wanted to be around her or get to know her. She was an awful human being, no matter how many times she lied to herself.

I ended it that she was right, that I couldn’t work for someone like her. I didn’t like how she ran the store and I quit; the only time I ever did.

I drove the pregnant woman home and thanked me for everything. I explained that I quit, but would drive her if she needed me.

Apparently, I started a chain. Five people quit after me, including the pregnant woman.

The ironic part is that two months later, that boss was fired… for her treatment of employees.

What, as a first responder, is the dumbest complaint you’ve ever had made against you?

I don’t know that it was the dumbest, but it was certainly an interesting and unusual complaint against me.

I was notified that officers were at a housing project and were requesting permission to force entry into an apartment. The officers had identified a man who had multiple warrants for his arrest. As they were arresting him he broke away from them and ran into an apartment where he did not belong.

I was a watch commander at the time and advised them to set up a perimeter around the apartment and I would be there in two minutes. Upon my arrival, I knocked on the door and spoke with the tenant who was very angry that my officers were threatening to kick down her door.

I had an advantage in speaking with this woman as I knew the complex manager and I also had studied the lease agreements with the various complexes. One reason for an immediate start of eviction proceedings was allowing criminal activity to be conducted at the apartment. I explained that I did not want to see her violate her lease, or have to pay for the door if the police had to break it in.

I explained the search process, and that we were just going to take the man who had run into her house into custody, and leave, without messing anything up inside. She allowed the officers to enter as long as I agreed to stay at the scene. I entered with the officers and actually helped in the search, checking one downstairs closet.

The man was found upstairs fully dressed in bed under the covers (so creative!). He was taken into custody and transported to the department for processing.

Several minutes after I get to the station, I receive a call from the resident. She said, “One of your cops stole $1000 from my apartment.” I advised her that I would take the particulars of her complaint and get to the bottom of this immediately.

I asked where the money had been located and she answered: “In the downstairs closet.” I thought for a minute and replied, “I’m the only one who searched the downstairs closet and I didn’t see or take any money.” She replied rather sarcastically, “Well, it was there before you came in and it’s gone now, so if you didn’t take it, where’s my money?”

Now my mind is going over each minute of the search, with no reasonable explanation. I asked to place the woman on hold for a minute and went to the processing room where the accused was.

Also in the room was a young woman who was counting out a pile of cash. I asked whose money is this. The girl replied, “It’s my money and I’m posting his bail.”

Now I remember, the girl was in the house. I said, “I saw you at the house. Where did you get all that money from?” She replied, ”From the closet downstairs.”

I put the resident, who was the girl’s mother, on speaker phone and had the daughter explain where the $1000 in bail money came from.

I spoke to the mom afterward and she apologized repeatedly. I told her it was already forgotten, and how much I had appreciated her cooperation at the scene, putting her trust in me.

After that, she thought I was a good cop and would wave to me or stop and say hello. Out of a silly misunderstanding, a higher level of trust would develop. So much of police work is about building trust, one person at a time.

You want a wife

What is the most ridiculous reason for which you have been fired?

I learned how to do some simple programming on my own. I wrote simple programs at work for my own and my department’s use. My boss knew about it. One day she came into my office and demanded that I write a program for another department. I tell her, politely of course, that I would be happy to do it but she had just hired a well-trained person to do just that sort of thing and it might be better if he did it. She quickly turned on her heel without saying a word, walked immediately to HR and wrote me up for insubordination. HR suspended me with pay immediately and I was escorted out of the building by security. I hired a lawyer, the best employment lawyer in the area and a friend, immediately. The lawyer told me that I would eventually get fired and then he would go into action. He also told me that my boss would be fired in 6 months and her boss would be fired within a year. Soon I got fired in person by my boss, who smiled throughout the whole ordeal (I had been with the company 21 years and had nothing but excellent reviews), while a security guard stood behind her. I was smiling on the inside.

My lawyer went to work. With 3 weeks my status was changed to retired (at age 56), my legal fees paid, was given a sizable settlement, and never had to go back into work. In about 8 months my boss was fired and her boss was transferred to corporate Siberia. To my surprise, a year or so later the company newspaper published picture of me standing in front of a beautiful new RV in the retiree’s section of the paper. I had bought the RV with part of the settlement check and sent the picture in as a joke. No one probably knew that it was a joke.

China + Russia

Is huge.

As a waiter/waitress what have you done to get back at a rude customer?

Back in about 1990 I was waiting on a group of six men at Baker’s Square. Five of them were normal people, but the sixth was just a funnel when it came to coffee. He wanted me to leave a pot at the table, which we weren’t allowed to do. I told him I’d keep him topped up. He was skeptical, and he was right to be.

I have never seen any three people drink as much coffee in an hour as that guy. I couldn’t keep up. I asked my manager if I could leave him a full pot and was told no. The guy was going from kind of irritated to outright crabby, probably partly due in part to the caffeine overdose he had to be on the cusp of. Glares, passive aggressive remarks, like that.

Near the end of their meal I got kind of slammed and the poor man’s cup was probably empty for five minutes. As soon as I had the chance I hustled to the table and was filling cups. Coffee Man was on the far right and I was going left to right. As I was tipping the pot over his cup he snapped at me, “Could you take a little longer with that fucking coffee?!”

Instantly aborted the pour with less than a teaspoon in his cup. Looked him in the eye with a smile (more of a smirk tbh) and said, “Yes, I absolutely can.”

Turned on my heel and left, with the sound of his friends laughing behind me. Went to the break room and had a cigarette. A whole one. Customer’s always right yeah?

Told the manager what happened on my way back out to the floor. He couldn’t keep from laughing but also said you can’t do that and he was taking over the table. I think he comped Coffee Man’s meal, but I never heard another word about it after that.

Ended up with a pretty good tip, I assume from his friends.

Passport Bros – The Men Fleeing The West | Japan Street Interviews

Pretty interesting.

What’s something your husband did to you that you will never forget?

Bob loved me unconditionally and always respected me during our entire relationship.

We were married for over 31 years. We worked together for much of that time in a very public business. We met on the job when Bob was hired as the news director at a TV station I was already working for as a reporter/anchor. So not only was he my boss, but we co-anchored the evening news as well.

Bob was incredibly careful to make sure I was never granted any special privileges in the newsroom. His decision at work, went. He would always listen to my point of view and that of the rest of the staff, but his decision was final.

He was always able to switch to the mindset that we were equal when we went home.

He loved me like nobody ever had before , even when I didn’t love myself. He loved me when he was mad at me and when he really didn’t like something that I had done or said.

Bob was my husband…my partner and my best friend. He was my teacher and teammate as well.

Although he was not purrrfect (sorry, we were owned by cats), he was purrrfect for me.

I lost Bob to suicide. He had gotten incredibly sick and wasn’t going to get better. I believe that even this final decision and action, was done with me in mind. He didn’t want me to live the rest of my life as his caregiver while our bank account dwindle to pay his medical bills.

One thing about his final decision. In my opinion, Bob wasn’t wrong very often, but for me, this time he was wrong. The problem is, he was DEAD wrong. I will love and honor him forever. I work hard to make sure people remember his career and his accomplishments instead of just his final decision. I also work with several mental health organizations, including the local medical college, in both suicide prevention programs and postvention efforts (following up with people who have lost a loved one to suicide). I have done very television and radio interviews about Bob as well. I believe that since we spent most of our careers telling other people’s stories, that I should be willing to share ours.

Bob loved me, unconditionally. That is what he did for or to me.

OnlyFans = Video Games

Do companies ever pay for their employees’ tickets?

Here’s an odd story for you.

Several years ago, my job was to sell robots to SWAT teams. Every SWAT team (except two of them) wanted one, but they couldn’t all afford them, so the problem wasn’t that the potential customers didn’t want to buy. The problem was that it was difficult to get to the SWAT teams. Lots of people wanted to get to them to sell them various things they didn’t want nor need, so the department didn’t make it easy to reach the SWAT commanders. I had several different ways of getting to them, all of which worked some of the time, but none that worked all of the time.

Then one day I figured out a new approach. Whenever I saw a cop along the road waiting to catch speeders and such, I would deliberately speed up in order to get pulled over. When the cop walked up to the window, I would say, “I have a SWAT robot in my trunk.” The response was always a variation of, “You have a what?” I would then ask if he wanted to have a look at it.

Sometimes the cop got very nervous about me opening the trunk, but they always wanted me to. (Could have been a guy with a gun in there; the cop had no way of knowing.) Once the robot was revealed, I would hand the cop the control and show him how to operate the robot. Then I would ask for the department’s SWAT commander’s name. The reason for this was that I wanted to be able to say “Officer so and so told me you would want to have a look at this robot.” It worked every time.

However, one time the cop was already writing the ticket on his way to my car. After the standard conversation and demo, the cop said that he couldn’t tear up the ticket, because he would get in all kinds of trouble for a missing ticket number, so he wrote me up for 1 mile per hour over the speed limit. If I had gone to court, the judge would have thrown the case out, but I just went ahead and paid the ticket instead.

Later, when I told the founder the story, he said, “From now on, the company will pay for every ticket you get while on the job.” I never got another ticket, though.

Ukraine SitRep: Finally A Wonder-Weapon That Does What It Promised To Do

The battle of Avdeevka is about to be finished.

The city of Avdeevka, (not to be confused with the small town of Andreevka near Bakhmut), is situated immediately north-west of Donetsk city. It has been used for years as a Ukrainian fortress well positioned for artillery attacks on Donetsk. The whole city, and especially the coke and chemical plant in its northern sector, was well prepared to defend against Russian attacks.

But despite all attempts to hold on to it the Ukrainian garrison within the city is about to be encircled and fall.
Source: Live UA Mapbigger

2024 02 09 1e3 19
2024 02 09 1e3 19

The Russian attacks are coming from multiple directions and are more progressed than the Ukraine friendly map above is showing. The biggest danger to the Ukrainians is the Russian move in the north west which threatens to cut the city off from its supply line through the northern coal and chemical plant.

The Russian victory in this battle was accomplished with the help of one type of weapon created during the current war in Ukraine.

In the early 1990s the U.S. developed a strap on kit for unguided bombs that turned dumb weapons into precise ammunition.

The Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) is …

… a guidance kit that converts unguided bombs, or “dumb bombs”, into all-weather precision-guided munitions. JDAM-equipped bombs are guided by an integrated inertial guidance system coupled to a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver, giving them a published range of up to 15 nautical miles (28 km). JDAM-equipped bombs range from 500 to 2,000 pounds (230 to 910 kg).[5] The JDAM’s guidance system was jointly developed by the United States Air Force and United States Navy, hence the “joint” in JDAM.

The JDAM is not a stand-alone weapon; rather it is a “bolt-on” guidance package that converts unguided gravity bombs into precision-guided munitions (PGMs). The key components of the system are a tail section with aerodynamic control surfaces, a (body) strake kit, and a combined inertial guidance system and GPS guidance control unit.

The JDAM kit, of which more than 500,000 were produced, allowed for the use of large piles of cold-war era bombs with previously unknown precision.

After the 2022 start of the war in Ukraine Russia engaged in a program to develop an equivalent to the JDAM kit. The program was finished by the end of 2023. The Russian version can be strapped onto a 500kg or a 1,500 kilogram dumb bomb extending their range by attaching wings, guidance kit and control surfaces to already existing dumb bombs. Prototype of a FAB 500 with (folded) wings and guidance kit

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2024 02 09 13 18


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After being programmed with target coordinates the bomb gets dropped, turns 180 degree around its length axis and unfolds its wings. The wings enable the bomb to fly some 50 miles before hitting the ground. This allows the planes dropping these bombs to stay outside of the enemy’s air defense envelope.

The guidance kits are cheap and can easily be mass produced.

Yesterday some 65 FAB500 and FAB1500 were used against targets in Avdeevka.

The use of these bombs, which carry 300 kilogram and more of explosives, near one’s own troops requires careful planing and observation. Observers on the ground have to make sure that their own troops are outside of the deadly circle of these bombs and that the coordinates of targets are submitted in a disciplined but secure and timely manner. Pilots have to make sure that the received coordinates are programmed into the bombs and that their release is done at the right attitude and positions.

This kill chain requires intensive training and disciplined soldiers. Yesterday’s attacks demonstrate that the Russian army and air-forces have mastered this discipline.

Any detected resistance or position of Ukrainian troops was visited by a precise FAB attack within just a few minutes.

There is no defense against these weapons. It is no wonder then that any resistance against the Russian onslaught is breaking down. Russian troops can proceed through bombed out Ukrainian positions without taking losses.

Previous reports have talked about a Russian superiority in artillery by a factor of 5 or higher. But consider that a 155mm artillery round has a weight of some 50 kilogram, 60% of which are explosives. One FAB carries 10 to 30 times the explosive equivalent of one artillery round.

The Ukrainian army has nothing comparable in its arsenals.

The introduction of mass FAB500 strikes onto the Ukrainian battle field have given the Russian forces a new qualitative advantage that will change the course of the war (though not its outcome). The U.S. political and military specialists who still believe that attrition is a viable strategy for the Ukrainian army are clearly way off the path of reality.

On February 1 the German broadsheet Bild reported of the conflict in the Ukrainian leadership:

The Bild publication writes that Zaluzhny wanted to withdraw troops from Avdiivka a few weeks ago, but Zelensky refused him this and on December 30 he personally went to the city to the front line to support the Ukrainian Armed Forces fighters.

So all the coffins that arrived from near Avdeevka to Ukraine since December 30 are solely on the conscience of Zelensky and his passion for narcissism.

Zelenski had asked Zaluzny to resign which the General rejected. The Ukrainian president has since made clear that he wants to fire the more popular general but is still looking for the right time and reason to do so.

The loss of Avdeevka may give him a marketable excuse to finally do that even when it is clear that it was Zelenski’s narcissism, and not Zaluzny’s advice, that has caused high Ukraine losses while inevitably losing a not holdable position.

Posted by b on February 8, 2024 at 12:38 UTC | Permalink

Ray Eldridge

What is something that your boss has said or done that you will never forget?

It was my last job in Vietnam before I moved to the U.S. I was in that job for almost 5 years.

When I first started my position and reported to my boss, he was extremely difficult with me. He questioned everything and demanded an explanation for everything I did, including why I did it the way I did and how I came to that solution. This continued for six months. I felt so ‘roasted’ by him.

After those six months, one day, I received an email from him saying, “Read this email thread and tell me what I should do.” In another email, he replied to someone else’s email about a solution, added me to the loop, saying, “++ [my name]. I will approve this after [my name] has reviewed and gives me the green light.”

I had earned his trust.

One day, I messed up something important in an important project. I panicked, ran to him, and asked him what I should do. He sat me down and told me, ‘Remember, after you mess something up, admit the issue and come up with a solution to fix the problem yourself. You need to control how YOU are going to fix it; do not let anyone tell you what to do, because it won’t be in your favor.’ Listening to him, I calmed down and thought of a solution myself.

That was the most valuable lesson I learned from office. He is the best boss I’ve ever had, and I am thankful for the time I had the chance to work with him.

During a court case, what was your most, “You just messed up.” moment while someone in the opposition was talking?

My dad was called as a witness to an accident that a member of the public had allegedly had on a building site he was foreman on. The victim had apparently fallen into a deep hole that had not been labelled clearly and then been laughed at and not helped by my father. Apparently when the victim had spoken to my dad he had refused to offer any help. The victim was suing the company for actual injury and for pain and suffering.

Prior to appearing in court the victim’s lawyer had contacted my dad and told him what was going to be said (I don’t know why, the case was a long time ago) My dad replied with “Are you really sure you want to do that?” The lawyer said of course and see you in court. My dad repeated “Are you really sure you want to do that?” The lawyer hung up.

On the day of the court case the victim told their story then they called my dad to the stand. The lawyer asked what job my dad had been doing onsite on the day of the accident. My dad replied with “None, I wasn’t on site on that date.” The lawyer called my dad a liar so my dad got his passport out which showed an exit date of 2 days before the alleged date of the accident and a re-entry date 6 weeks after.

Guess who ended up paying costs for that little debacle!? The victim’s lawyer was less than impressed.

She got a gold star

Guys give out the relationships. Women give out the sex.

Be picky.

In special forces training, do they teach you how to survive torture?

All I can add about what to do if captured. At first simply give name, rank and serial number. During the class I asked the following, “what do you do when they bring pliers and a few other devices?” The instructor replyed, “ask politely for a ream of paper (a ream is 500 sheets of paper) and a dozen Bic pens; as long as you are writing they’ll leave you alone that is until they send the notes you wrote up their chain of command.” LOL. We always had a cover story that would make us so low on the classified stuff and if they persist; I would if captured I would tell them that I’m simply a cook. If pressured I’d ask them to let me cook them a meal. LTC Nick Rowe convinced his captures that he was a cook, this worked until they found out his real MOS; that he was a Special Forces 1LT. Nick knew that after 24 hours anything he told his captures would have been changed and will no longer be of any use to his captures. Nick was the go to guy on how to survive capture. He escaped after five years as a POW.

During capture you’ll always be looking for an opportunity to escape. Nick was assassinated while on duty in the Philippines.

Does China know that there can never be a new world order without a previous war in which China emerges victorious?

The Thucydides Trap?

The Famous belief that an emerging power will always be a threat to an existing power and war between them is inevitable

The Belief is incomplete

This is the case only when the Emerging Power desires to be a global hegemon

This is NOT the Case with China

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image 120

China needs Cooperation for its growth and development

China needs Energy, Oil and Gas from others

China needs almost 23% of it’s Food from others

China needs Global Markets for its Trade

Thus China lives on a WIN WIN cooperation

China can flourish only as part of the Global Economy


The only thing that has changed is SO DOES THE USA

Until maybe three decades ago, the US could flourish on its own domestic economy, it’s own Oil & Gas, it’s Western and Japanese allies and satellites

Today the US needs many more countries to flourish and CHINA is one of the most important of them.

US needs China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and several other Nations in order to flourish as an economy

This the US does not like

The US doesn’t want to be dependent on China for it’s welfare and prosperity

The US policy has always been to CONTROL ANY NATION ON WHICH IT’S PROSPERITY DEPENDS

Thus it has two options :-

  • A China that is shaped as per US requirements. A Lackey basically. Like Japan and South Korea and now even Germany and France OR
  • A China weakened enough to accept US guidelines on what constitutes FAIR PLAY

China of course will not agree to either

China believes in a direct win win cooperation in the “May the best man win” mode of competition

So it’s the US that wants to keep the OLD WORLD ORDER rather than the Chinese wanting a new one

The Chinese just want to make money, grow and develop their economy and not be subject to throttling by the West and so to develop their own independent and safe technology and financial systems and military

Maybe 50–60 years later China could change but today there is zero chance of China wanting a New World Order or be a hegemon

It’s impossible

Have you ever smelled something but only found the source of the smell a while later?

We bought a used couch from someone on the Facebook. Seemed too good to be true. $1000 for a couch that goes for $3500 new. Leather sectional with 4 electronic leg rests, cupholders, USB charging ports, etc. A very nice upgrade from our existing sectional.

So, we went and checked it out. They had it in their garage. I asked why they were selling it for such a low price. Aside from some scratches on one seat, it looked almost new. They said he was a surgeon at the university and he was getting a job in North Carolina. So they were packing up and preparing to move quickly. We plugged it in and tested the leg rests. Everything worked. We had a minivan, so it was going to be three trips to get the whole thing home. 30 minutes each way. Kind of a waste of a Saturday, but I felt it was worth it.

On our first trip home, the smell hit us. It was a strong smell of orange, like they used an orange scented cleaner to clean it. This should have been a larger red flag than it was at the time. We still needed to move our existing couch to the basement, so we decided we’d kill two birds with one stone. Move the new couch into the garage, let that orange smell dissipate, and take our time disassembling and moving the other one to the basement.

When we went back to the seller’s house, we asked about the strong orange scent. They downplayed it and basically said they used whatever cleaner they had on hand to clean it before selling. Red flag #2.

We accepted their answer and continued making trips back and forth. They seemed trustworthy. All the pieces of the set smelled of orange cleaner, but especially one section. That piece was much more intense. We left the couch in the garage and sure enough, the smell faded. We moved the living room couch to the basement and the new one to the living room. The orange smell was gone. However, it was replaced by a much worse odor. I don’t know how to describe it except that it was musty, pungent, and kind of stuck with you. It was mostly coming from the leftmost recliner piece.

We reached out to the sellers a couple weeks after buying it. We asked about the smell. She played dumb and said they had hardly used the couch. They had it in their basement and there was never a problem with it. No water damage, no nothing. Clearly lying to us. Red flag #3.

Over the next few weeks, we tried multiple off-the-shelf products and home remedies for removing smells from furniture. None of them improved the smell at all. We finally contacted a fire restoration type of place. They had specialty equipment to deal with all sorts of problem smells in furniture. The cost was high and we didn’t know if it would work, so they offered us a deal. They said, bring in the problem recliner. They’ll try to remove the smell from that one piece. If they succeed, we’ll bring in the rest and they’ll fix each piece at a total cost of $700. If they can’t fix that recliner, no charge and we go our separate ways. Handshake, done deal.

I brought the recliner in and the guy who received it immediately started sniffing all the parts of it like a dog. He got underneath and focused on that area. From under the back, he exclaimed, “Tomcat! Nothing’s gonna work. We’ll try, but it won’t come out. Nothing gets tomcat urine out of furniture.”

Why I’d question the expertise of a guy who crawls under furniture and identifies tomcat urine is still a mystery to me. He was absolutely right. Their process didn’t put a dent in that scent, and we didn’t pay them a dime when I picked it up.

At this point, we’re pissed. We spent $1000 on a couch that’s unusable, and we’ve moved our clunky sectional to the basement and back again, not to mention spending a Saturday moving their couch home. We keep reaching out to the seller. She tries different tactics, from ignoring us to just refusing to do anything for us. All the while, she still insists that the couch never smelled in their house and she sold it in good faith.

Finally, I’ve had enough. I tell my wife to tell this woman that they’re going to return our money and take the couch back or we’ll take them to small claims court. Then she offers to give us $100 back, still not admitting there was a problem with the couch. No. Everything or you’ll be sued. Finally, she agrees, but somehow is able to act like she’s the victim. Great. She transmitted our money back to us, but doesn’t say anything about the couch. A couple days pass, and she demands that we bring it back to them. My wife asked me when we can return it to her. My response? “Oh no. She can come pick it up from us. I’m not spending one minute or a single calorie on bringing her that useless couch.”. She says fine and asks for our address. She responds a couple days later and says they don’t want it either. Yeah, nothing wrong with it. Sold it in good faith. But you don’t want it at all. Huh.

We put it up for sale for free on the Facebook. We were very up front on its condition. The guy who came to get it was excited about it. I warned him that the scent is strong and nothing will improve it. He didn’t care. Said his sense of smell is very bad and he didn’t think it’d be a problem.

Since 99% of real street fights involve punches, why there are so many martial arts and styles other than boxing since what you will actually going to use is boxing (in the form of bare knuckle boxing to be exact) in an actual scenario?

The reason most fights come down to bare knuckle brawling is simple. All that stuff you see on TV, MMA, martial arts tournaments etc are people that are trained to fight like that.

I have had my fair share of fights over the years, some I won, some I took a beat down. I have never seen anyone win a street fight using martial arts. Its probably not because it isn’t effective. Its because 99% of people are just watching TV or taking weekend course at Bob’s Dojo and that makes them think they are qualified to put the moves on Joe the drunk.

Pro Tip: Joe is not interested in style points or looking cool when he fights.

The worst thing in the world you can do if your not a trained professional is to try to kick someone in a street fight. Your foot leaving the ground means you have lost all your balance, your center of gravity is gone and your probably so slow doing it any reasonable healthy twenty-something man see’s it coming a mile away.

When I was young I had this happen to me once (not bragging) I caught the guys leg and slammed him into a brick wall. His Bruce Lee impersonation was over in less then a minute.

That wasn’t special. If you are not highly trained do not try any fancy kick moves you saw last night on TV. It wont end well. To effectively get away with kicking someone or doing most martial arts type moves like you see in the movies requires tons of training. It isn’t something Joe average can pull of just because they saw someone else do it or they took a couple of classes at the local community center.

What’s the most incredible coincidence that ever happened to you?

#1: I went to high school with this girl, Lisa. She kissed me once. Later, in my early 20’s, I kept randomly running into her, all over the world: in a dive bar in New York, on the street in San Francisco, and in an obscure back alleyway in Oaxaca, Mexico.

#2: When I lived in New York, I had a dream in which some voice kept repeating a 4-digit number, like 3264, 3264, 3264, like it was very important. At the time, New York had a lottery you could play by choosing four numbers. I thought about playing 3264, but then dismissed the idea, as I had to go to work. As I was about to get on the subway, I noticed that my subway car was numbered 3264. That did it for me, I ran to the nearest lottery kiosk and played that number. The following day, the winning number was announced: 3265. One digit off. I was rather annoyed with the universe over that one.

#3: I exited my gym and hopped into my car, at that time a rather sad and beat-up green mid-1980’s Toyota Tercel. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, I noticed that there was someone else’s stuff scattered around. And then it hit me: This was NOT my car! It turns out that for that particular model, the keys are sometimes interchangeable. Toyota made about 13 possible key shapes, and the woman who had already driven MY car away, had the same key I did. It took her longer to notice.

Daddy Issues

Have you ever smelled something but only found the source of the smell a while later?

My wife would occasionally smell something odd. She couldn’t describe it. It happened at random times in random places, like in her classroom or at a concert or on the sidewalk downtown or in our house. If she was with someone she would ask, and nobody else smelled it. This happened over the course of at least two or three years that we can remember.

She also occasionally stumbled or lost her balance, which she attributed to natural clumsiness.

One Saturday afternoon in late March 2022 I came home from an errand to find her shivering under a blanket but not cold, and stammering her speech. I declared “something ain’t right with that girl” and took her to the Emergency Room. There a CAT scan revealed “a concerning mass” in her head. She was transferred across town to the major regional medical center. Sunday morning a MRI showed detailed pictures of a mass the size of a tennis ball behind her right eye.

That Tuesday she underwent 9 hours of surgery to remove a meningioma – a tumor of the meniscus tissue surrounding the brain. It was contained (not invasive) but growing. It had been growing for some years before it pressed on nerves and on the brain itself enough to disturb their function, including vision and smell and balance and eventually seizures. I brought her home that Friday afternoon, six days (to the hour) after we entered the ER.

Beginning immediately and now two years on, her olfactory hallucinations (remember the question was about smelling something?), tremors, and problems with balance and coordination are gone. She has a new eyeglass prescription. Follow-up MRIs continue to reveal no recurrence, and her brain is expanding to re-occupy the space from which it had been shoved aside by the tumor as it grew. She has made a more-than-full recovery, engaged with new sporting challenges, and enjoys every day as a teacher, musician, and Grandma.

By the grace of God expressed through a surgeon’s skillful hands, she no longer smells things that aren’t real, I get to enjoy more years with my lovely bride!

How does the IRS find people who work under the table?

Here in my little town we had this business called the Executive Whirl-A-Sage. It offered massage and spa services for the “discriminating client”.

Everyone knew what it really was.

Anyhooo… The IRS decided to take notice. But they couldn’t figure out how much money the place made because it did everything in cash. They got clever.

Sent an agent in as a “client”. (I always wondered which lucky dude landed THAT plum assignment!) He had his “service” (which I suspect didn’t include the happy ending, but who knows???). He carefully counted the number of towels used.

The IRS then demanded all the laundry bills for the business. They counted the total number of towels and divided by the number used per client to determine the number of clients. Some simple math and they had their estimated revenue.

Needless to say, the place was closed down when it couldn’t pay the bill.

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image 124

You came to my house

As a woman, what do some men do that creeps you out?

I’d just like to start off by saying, gentlemen, I love y’all. You’re half the world. Most of you are great, many of you are just sweet and adorable.

And then there’s the rest of you who come out of the barn in which you were raised just long enough to scare me out of leaving my house.

The right to have sex with me is earned. It’s not transactional, it’s not a bought and sold commodity, and I don’t owe you just because you bought me dinner or even a lousy cup of coffee. In fact, I owe you nothing of myself except my public courtesy, and that can be withdrawn at any time if you show yourself unworthy of it.

What you men—and this is where you stop being gentlemen—do to really creep me out is that you forget that I am the ultimate keeper of my body, and try to wear me down when I say no. Constantly badgering, hinting, whining like a toddler in a checkout line full of candy. Like a toddler you sulk and stomp around when I say no, and double down on trying to get your way. And just as the toddler screams “I hate you!” because mom won’t buy them a Kinder egg, you turn on me when I won’t give in.

“Bitch.”

“Fat pig.”

“You’d be lucky to have someone like me, you ugly piece of shit.”

Yeah, that’s just the right way to get me into the sack.

You don’t respect the word NO, and in that you disrespect me. That’s just creepy and you make me question my lifestyle choices.

What is the basis for the belief that the United States is more powerful than China? Why do some people disagree with this belief? What factors contribute to their differing opinions on this issue?

I totally disagree!

To me I believed most of the global south world agree with me. I am sure the U.S. dog and slave nations very much prefer to lie to themselves that the U.S. is the most powerful for their own self interest and wishful thinking.

No matter how pretentious you can be, the world’s most indebted nation, the world’s highest deficit nation, the nation that spends more on defence than the next 10 biggest defence spender, the world’s most over reach, over extended war monger and trouble maker cannot be powerful. So the U.S. is at best is a desperado trying to grasp at anything to stay relevant at the cost of bringing its economy down further.

The real power is China whose respect comes from its actions. Not like the U.S. on coercion and threats. China has overtaken the U.S. in most counts. Even militarily. China does not want a poor U.S. or even a collapse U.S. it still wants a good trade with the U.S. but one that has mutual respect.

Why are universities making students pay for classes that have nothing to do with life

What if I don’t want a funeral?

I work with a woman whose WHOLE family doesn’t “do funerals.” I asked her why.

She told me that it started when her paternal grandfather passed away, and they were planning the funeral. It was emotionally draining to plan while grieving, not to mention expensive.

Her paternal grandmother decided she didn’t want a funeral, and that Thanksgiving, with the whole family (my co-workers parents, co-workers in-laws, aunts, uncles, extended family on both sides) she made a declaration.

“I don’t want a darn funeral. Donate the money you’d use for a funeral for me to an animal shelter or a food bank.”

After a long discussion, it became a tradition.

They just don’t have funerals, they put up an obituary and ask for donations to whatever charity the deceased picked.

On the anniversary of their death, the family members take the ashes of their loved ones and spread them.

I don’t think it’s such a bad idea.

EDIT: (04/24/2020) Wow, I have gotten a LOT of feedback on this answer. Thank you all!

One thing I’m going to suggest to all of you is, if you choose to be cremated, please get your cremation set up and prepaid for as soon as you can.

My mom was diagnosed with Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer in March of 2017. One of the first things she did was get her cremation set up.

She prepaid for her cremation, she picked out an urn (a plastic box.) She also separately bought “keepsake urns,” for my sister, grandmother, one to be interred and one for me. She bought 10 death certificates (my dad had passed away on 2010, and she knew you’d need a lot of them for different things.)

When she passed away in February of this year, all my sister and I had to do was call the funeral home and they picked up her body. They had my sister and I go in a few days later and sign paperwork.

They didn’t try to sell us anything, they were able to be human to us. To help us grieve.

When you pass away, your family won’t have to pay anything extra out of pocket unless taxes or death certificate prices rise. We actually received a refund check for $11.38.

The cost of her “package” in 2017 was around $1,600. The funeral liaison we met with said today, it would be around $1,800.

At the time of the loss of my mom, I was so grateful she took care of it for us. It was an amazing gift.

What shocked you when you opened someone’s safe deposit box at the bank?

I was doing part of my internship in a bank in the safe deposit department. It turned out to be quite fun, actually. One day a client came down and asked to rent a safe deposit box, a large one. He was in a hurry, so I did the paperwork as fast as possible, and then took him to his box, leaving him alone to deposit whatever it was he wanted to leave with us (as we were not supposed to watch) and then he left.

About ten days later, the gentleman came back, and, by chance, I was the one who went to open his box with him. I was about to leave him at it, when he stopped me and said “No need, I’m just getting this and I’ll return the box.” I looked and he had a big bag of chocolates which he was pulling out of the box! I gave him a puzzled look and he laughed: “My wife demanded I buy Swiss chocolates for the whole family, but then I had to add a leg to my trip, and I couldn’t take them with me. I thought it would be a pity to throw them away…so…”He raised his shoulders and left.

Still, he’d paid one year’s rent for a large sized safe deposit box, which was about 500 to 600 francs, to avoid throwing away maybe 200 francs of chocolates. And created an insect infestation risk for the bank, if he’d forgotten or neglected to return for his chocs!

Mark Twain great quotes

What should I do if my boss says, “If you don’t like the job, you can go”?

I never had a situation like that,but just last year one man that has a restaurant in Rovinj,Croatia called my ex boss to ask him for my phone number since he saw me work the previous season.He then called me and said that he wanted me to work at his restaurant,and since he knew that I’m good at my job he offered me 3000€ a month,accomodation and food.He said that he knows that I’m worth it and that he won’t haggle because he wants me to work for him.I accepted and got there,and started to work. To cut the story short,from all the things he promised,nothing was delivered. It was close but not what was promised.When I got the first salary I noticed that the money paid to me was off,but since my first month there I didn’t work the full month i decided to wait for the next salary and to see what is what.The salary for the full month I got 2300€.When I called him to speak about it he said;”The conditions are what they are,if you don’t like it,good luck!”,and he raised his hand like he wanted to shake my hand.I grabbed his hand right away and said “I don’t like it.”He was surprised,and when I was walking away I heard him say that 2300€ is still a good salary and non of his other workers had that much.But to me it would have been the same if he gave me 1€ less than promised.I would still left.You can’t lie to me like that and expect me to take it.And besides the way he said that”if you don’t like it,good luck”that would be humiliating if I were to stay.Fuck you and your 2300€ a month.If he offered me 2300 from the start,and kept his word I would still come to work for him,and I would be satisfied.But anyway when it comes to your case,I think that saying to people:”If you don’t like it,you can go.” is degrading,and I would go.I think that there should be mutual respect between the worker and the boss,not just respect for the boss.

Some of what was said in the interview by Putin:

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– Russia is ready to supply Europe with gas through the “Nord Stream 2” pipeline, but Germany does not want to

– The United States was the one who blew up the “Nord Stream” pipeline.

– Elon Musk’s creativity cannot be stopped, but rather an understanding must be reached with him

– Russia and Ukraine will reach an agreement sooner or later

We want to reach a solution to the Ukrainian crisis through negotiations

– NATO has options to recognize Russia’s control over the new territories

We have information that the United States supported terrorists inside Russia

The West fears a strong China more than it fears a strong Russia

– The Americans pledged not to expand NATO eastward, but the expansion happened 5 times

– The world will change regardless of how the crisis in Ukraine ends

– Russia becomes the first economy in Europe in 2023 despite the sanctions. American attempts are of no use.

– Ukraine is an artificial entity established in the Stalinist era

Russian relations with Ukraine are distinguished by language, kinship and religion

We proposed that Russia join NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but they refused

– When NATO refused to let us join it, they feared Russia as a large and powerful country

We will never attack Poland unless we are attacked by them

How was Andy Dufresne able to walk into a bank and withdraw a large amount of money after escaping without being recognized, knowing his face would be all over the news as a fugitive?

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How the heck did Andy Dufresne walk into nearly a dozen banks in the Portland area and walk out unrecognized with hundreds of thousands of Warden Norton’s money the day after his escape from Shawshank Penitentiary?

Signature cards, no photos on driver’s licenses, and no CNN or World Wide Web.

This stumped me for a long time, too. I couldn’t figure out how someone could use a phony driver’s license with no picture on it, and take out tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars out of any bank in the United States.

But apparently photos weren’t always required on driver’s licenses in every state. The first photos appeared on driver’s licenses in California in 1958. Texas didn’t require them until the mid-1970′s. Even New York and Tennessee didn’t require pictures until 1986.

I couldn’t find what year Maine began putting photos on theirs, but, it’s probably safe to assume that in the mid-1960’s, Maine didn’t yet require pictures on a legal form of ID.

The Maine driver’s license Andy presented to the bank was probably state issued and not forged, if we assume it was Warden Norton who created the alias to hide the money he was making by taking bribes from construction companies who didn’t want Shawshank’s cheap labor taking over major construction jobs in the local area.

Also, I remember, from working for a couple of years for a bank when I was in college that signature cards are placed on file with the bank, so if someone comes in without ID, they can just match the signature to the card, and accept that as legal identification.

We would think of that as somewhat of a lax form of ID in today’s day and age, but fifty years ago, the world was different.

Anyway, it makes sense that Warden Norton would use Andy and his wealth of banking knowledge to create all these accounts under the alias, Randall Stevens (Peter Stevens, in the novella) even having Andy sign the signature card (that doesn’t always have to be done inside the actual bank, believe it or not) so as to further insulate Norton from the crime.

As for why no one in the banks or on the street knew Andy by his face, someone else mentioned that this was 1966 (or 1975, if we’re talking about the original text) and in that era, it took a day, or so, to get someone’s photo into the newspapers (which was the World Wide Web back in those days) to get a photo distributed to the three major broadcast companies, and maybe a couple of days to reach all the local TV stations state- and nation-wide.

The instant gratification of the Information Superhighway was still a couple of decades away, so the wheels of communication could take a few days or even a week to get up to full speed back then, so it’s completely plausible that Andy Dufresne could have walked into a bank the following morning to clean out all of Warden Norton’s false bank accounts without anyone even knowing there was an escape at Shawshank, much less recognize his face.

The only thing that’s a little bit implausible is that he could get to eleven banks, all in one day. It has always been a tedious, drawn-out task to go into a bank and close an account, especially if you get an accounts officer, then an assistant manager, then the bank manager, all trying to talk you into keeping your account open, which Andy would most assuredly have run into, considering the money he was taking out of each branch, so the idea of getting to that many banks in a single 24-hour period is a bit of a stretch.

Being Honest

What was a moment when a teacher had a nervous meltdown in class?

I remember the teacher very well.

She was young and timid and always wore full-length skirts and hats whenever she was outside. She was one of the three women who ran the gifted program in my middle school. That may have been a part of her student teaching (internship), now that I think about it. Like I said, she was very young.

The gifted program in middle school was a one-hour-per-week pull-out program. Three or four kids from each class (I was one of them) left our regular class for that hour and went to a different room where the three teachers played logic games with us, discussed current events, and generally tried to challenge us more than the regular teachers were able to, since the regular teachers had to aim for the middle of the pack, student-wise.

The best part of that program was the field trips. It was nice to spend extra time with just that group of classmates and those three teachers. I happen to have some pictures from an 8th-grade gifted class field trip, and she is in some of them. I can tell now that she was maybe 25 years old at best back then.

Two years later, when I was a sophomore in high school, she got hired as a full-time English teacher at the school. It was cool to see her again. All of us former gifted class students of hers were happy to see her again, but sad that she wouldn’t be teaching the advanced English class we were in.

Within two weeks, we saw her for the last time, jogging down the hall mid-class period, crying, heading for the exit.

She was used to working with gifted kids in small groups… Kids who were well-behaved and genuinely interested in what she was trying to teach them.

As is the norm with high school teachers, the newest teachers get the last pick when it comes to classes. So she was stuck with teaching the remedial English class… the students who had the most academic and behavior issues. Apparently, those students were able to get under her skin so much that she walked out on the job. Broke her contract and everything. We never saw her again after that.

I remember seeing the assistant principal running down the hall shortly after that, into the room that she’d left teacher-less. It was the first time I’d heard an adult actually swear at students. (Although I was told that the coaches did it all the time to their student athletes.) He got the class back under control for the rest of the period, mainly by yelling at them like a drill sergeant.

But perhaps that’s what they needed all along: someone with the demeanor of a drill sergeant, not the timid young lady whose teaching career they ended quickly.

Why does prime rib taste better than a ribeye steak even though it’s the same cut of meat?

I’ve read many of the comments on this topic, and I believe my offering here can be helpful.

I worked in food service for 14 years and held the title of Executive Chef at two American institutions. The most notable was at the Augusta Country Club in 1987 up to the Masters’ Golf Tournament of April 1988.

The grilling, broiling, or searing of a Rib Eye steak will bring a distinct flavor to the flat surface of the cut, which is common for all beef seared grilled or broiled. However, that flavor will not be present along the outer perimeter of the cut, and tenderness is not guaranteed, especially once it cools down. (I’ve had to use a jacquard tenderizing device on some.)

A roasted Prime Rib can be prepared in an oven to achieve a dark brown upper/outer surface and can then be placed under a broiler/salamander to add more of that coloring/flavor to the outer surface. Also, a sliced Prime cut can be seared to get that browning onto the face of the cut. Au Jus is a lesser preferred option for me in that it “waters” the flavor as it rinses off some of the rub/seasoning.

Now, just last year I developed what I believe is the pinnacle of prep for Prime Rib. (I moved away from buying ribeye after I got less-than great results in tenderness after paying a high price per pound.)

What I did was to season a whole Prime Rib with a plain mustard binder, and my custom rub. THEN I thoroughly pierced the entire Prime with a long skewer to promote self-basting INSIDE the cut. The final step is the “ringer.” I put the Prime into my Cuisinart pellet smoker on 250 degrees, until the core temperature reached 200 degrees. (about 10 hours) I use dark wood pellets like Cherry, or a dark fruit blend. The outer surface comes out as dark as any sear. The smoke ring all around the Prime is always at least 1 centimeter wide, and the inside is always full of flavor!

Some of my guests who like rare meats believed they got rare from me. “Rare” is (arguably) around 165 degrees internally, but my Prime at 200 degrees was so tender, juicy and flavorful inside and out, that it pleased all my guests.

I am retired from my career, but I’ll be smoking another Prime Rib for visitors at my home next week!

Do police officers feel uncomfortable or flattered when stores offer them complimentary coffee?

Both. We had one restaurant that charged all cops $2 for a meal. It was a greasy spoon that health departments and vegans despise but it was the only place in town open 24/7 that we did not have to worry about some crackhead cook “doctoring” our food.

That $2 was usually supplemented with a $5 tip, which covered the meal and the waitress’ tip.

The chief stopped us from going to the diner unless we paid full price. So we paid full price. Orders are orders.

When the owner found out why we were paying full price, he was livid. He went to the next city council meeting and actually yelled at the mayor and city manager about how they were trying to dictate to him what he wanted to charge cops and firefighters. He had been doing it so long, everyone knew about it and didn’t care.

The day after the city council meeting, the chief rescinded his order and $2 meals were back with the $5 tip.

This was a place we could bring a homeless guy on a cold night for coffee and a meal and we did many times in the winter. We always left enough money for both and when we came in for our meal hours later, the waitress would give us our money back.

The owner would always feed someone in need for free and didn’t want us to pay for it. He felt it was his duty to do so.

Great food and a better man who, sadly, passed away many years ago.

Rich people

What are some of the most awesome psychological facts?

1- 23% of couples who meet online end up being married.

2. Some psychologists say that humans can not be “just friends” with opposite sex members.

3. A research shows that a woman is more drawn to a person when she is not sure how much he loves her.

4. If you want to know if someone loves you, look at their eyes: if we are in love, the pupil expands up to 45 percent.

5. People who are really in love tend to get jealous over stupid things

6. The way a man stands counts for over 80% of a woman’s first impression

7- More than half of people who believe in love at first sight have already experienced it.

8- Men are known to fall in love faster than women

9-. Falling in love at first sight is apparently true according to psychologists.

10-People generally prefer an attractive face over an attractive body when they are looking for a long term relationship.

Have your neighbors ever called the cops on you for something ridiculous?

I was born to answer this question. I have three distinct instances when my neighbors have called the cops on me, well rather my parents but still.

When I was a child I had a neighbor who would literally spy on my family and called the cops on us several times. The first time she called the cops on us was because she saw a sleeping bag on the roof and was calling because she thought one of us was on the roof. So the police come to our house and ended up waking my mom who was asleep (she works night shift as a nurse). What had happened was one of my sisters had spilled water on the sleeping bag and thought it was a sunny day she would just put it on the roof to dry.

image 122
image 122

As you can see my house has a window above the one roof so it’s not particularly hard to do this. Anyway the cops came questioned my mom and then went about their merry way.

The second time my neighbor called the cops was when we all were getting ready to go somewhere and my dad was at work so it was just my mom and us kids and so we all got loaded into the van and we were going about our merry way when the cops call my mom and ask if she has all of her children with her. She says yes and the cop asks if it’s okay if he comes and checks. She says yes and he comes and sees that we are all there and goes on with his life.

The third and final time was the most serious. The neighbors kid threatened me and said if I didn’t come over to her house in the middle of the night she would burn my house down. Now of course that wouldn’t make sense but I was under nine and she was three years older than me and I was scared of her. So I went over and spent the night. Her mom was totally okay with this and didn’t call my parents at all. Instead in the morning she gave us breakfast because we were hungry and we went home. Later that day she calls the police on my parents because she said we were not well taken care of and were starving. All because we had asked her for breakfast because after all we had not eaten all night. So the police came and inspected our cupboards and such. They decided that my parents were fit parents and left.

So that’s my crazy neighbor for you. I hope you enjoyed my stories.

Why Chinese don’t get scam calls

How did you come to find your dog? How did you know you found the dog for you?

My last dog was a “street rescue”.

My girlfriend back then was working at a hotel near my house. She went to work in the morning, and noticed a puppy in the back of a pick-up truck in the parking lot. It was yelping and whining, like puppy’s do, so it was hard to miss.

When she left work 8 hours later, the puppy was still in the back of the truck in the parking lot… in Texas. No water. No food. It was a hot day. She grabbed the dog and brought it to my house.

She was a yellow lab mix, and my girlfriend named her Vive. The girlfriend didn’t last, but the dog did. Best dog I ever had. We traveled together through thick and thin for the next 12 years. From small apartments to horse farms, and for a few weeks living in my truck, we were best friends. I could take her anywhere. Never on a leash to control her. Only when others demanded it. She was good with children, kittens, horses, and I could leave a steak dinner on a low coffee table, and she’d never touch it.

She had 2 drawbacks. The first, was that she loved the smell of a dead skunk. Thought it was Chanel No. 5 and loved to roll in it whenever she could find it.

The second, was that she didn’t live as long as me.

What is the most shameless thing you have ever seen a teacher do?

I attended college in the ‘80s, when miniskirts were (again) in fashion. In one class, a lovely young woman sat beside me in the front row.

During the first week of classes, the professor dropped the chalk mid-lecture (intentionally, I suspect) and peeked up her miniskirt. Her legs were not crossed.

She was taking notes, so she didn’t notice. He saw that I had, and he quickly resumed the lecture.

In the hallway after class, I asked did she have a moment. She was wary, probably used to being hit on by strange guys. I told her what had happened, and that she should probably switch seats.

She switched out of the class. I should have.

The professor had seen me talking with her in the hall. From that point forward, he nitpicked my assignments and test answers. (It was an English course, so all answers were written.) Nothing was ever wrong, but he’d find ways to subtract a point here and there until the deductions added up. I had a D in the class at one point.

I was naive, never before having received a bad grade. (Yes, overachiever.) I assumed that eventually the reprisal would end. The realization that college professors are almost completely unaccountable came too late — after the period to drop a class.

My final grade was a C. I was distraught, not only because it was my first C, but also because it threatened my scholarship, which required that I maintain a minimum GPA.

The assistant dean called me in for a conference. I explained what had happened, bringing exhibits of his grading of my work. I also provided the name of the peeking victim to corroborate my story.

A few weeks into the next term, I received a notice that my grade had been changed to a B. It was my only B in my major field.

And I avoided future classes with that professor.

Green Lasagna with Two Sauces
(Lasagna Verdi al Forno)

recipe lasagna with two sauces
recipe lasagna with two sauces

Yield: 12 servings

Ingredients

Meat Sauce

  • 8 ounces bulk Italian sausage, crumbled
  • 4 ounces smoked sliced chicken or turkey, finely chopped
  • 1 large onion, finely chopped
  • 1 medium stalk celery, minced
  • 1 medium carrot, finely shredded
  • 2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
  • 1 3/4 cups water
  • 3/4 cup dry red wine
  • 1/3 cup tomato paste
  • 1/2 teaspoon Italian herb seasoning
  • 1/8 teaspoon pepper
  • Dash of ground nutmeg

Green Noodles

  • 8 ounces fresh spinach or 1 (10 ounce) package frozen spinach, cooked as per package directions
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 4 1/2 quarts water
  • 1 tablespoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil

Cheese Filling

  • 2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
  • 1 1/2 cups grated Parmesan cheese
  • 1/4 cup snipped parsley

Creamy Sauce

  • 1/3 cup butter
  • 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • Dash of ground nutmeg
  • 3 cups milk

Instructions

Meat Sauce

  1. Cook and stir sausage until light brown; drain. Stir in remaining ingredients. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Simmer uncovered, stirring occasionally, 1 hour.

Green Noodles

  1. Remove root ends and imperfect leaves from spinach. Wash several times in water, lifting out each time; drain. Cover and cook with just the water that clings to leaves until tender, 3 to 10 minutes. Rinse spinach with cold water; drain.
  2. Place spinach, eggs, 1 tablespoon oil and 1 teaspoon salt in blender container. Cover and blend until pureed, about 20 seconds.
  3. Make a well in center of flour. Add spinach mixture; stir with fork until mixed. Sprinkle with a few drops water if dry; mix in small amount of flour if sticky. Gather dough into a ball. Knead on lightly floured cloth covered board until smooth and elastic, about 5 minutes. Let stand for 10 minutes.
  4. Divide dough into halves. Roll one half into a 13 x 12 inch rectangle; cut rectangle into 6 (13 x 2 inch) strips.
  5. Repeat with remaining dough. Spread strips on rack; let stand 30 minutes.
  6. Heat water to rapid boil; stir in 1 tablespoon salt, 1 tablespoon oil and the noodles. Cook uncovered over medium heat until nearly tender, 15 to 20 minutes.
  7. Drain; rinse with cold water. Place in single layer between sheets of wax paper.

Cheese Filling

  1. Toss all ingredients together.

Creamy Sauce

  1. Heat butter over low heat until melted. Blend in flour, salt and nutmeg. Cook over low heat, stirring constantly, until smooth and bubbly; remove from heat. Stir in milk. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly. Boil and stir for 1 minute; cover and keep warm. If sauce thickens, beat in small amount of milk. Sauce should be the consistency of heavy cream.

She knows what she wants

What is the weirdest reason you ever found out a co-worker got hired for?

This happened a very long time ago in Corporate America.

Our department worked closely with another that was managed by Marsha, a 40-year-old workaholic who was brilliant at her job. In fact, headquarters had her conduct workshops twice a year to share her methods and to update procedures.

She was totally immersed in effective management, efficiency, quality control and motivation.

Occasionally, she would ‘come up for air’ and momentarily consider that life included much more than work. She would look around for something to do that would benefit the less fortunate and made donations of money, goods, old clothes and books.

Then it was back to being a workaholic.

She was approached by Stan, a fifty-eight-year old, homeless man who refused charity and asked for a job. She spoke with him several times at a cafe where he was sometimes given meals in return for doing odd jobs. Marsha was impressed by his attitude, but most of all, by the love he had for his dog SweetPea, a Lab mix.

That was a side of Marsha that none of us were aware of.

She put her reputation and position on the line, cleaned him up and got him a job in the company’s mail and supply room. Stan lasted two days: he insisted that SweetPea had to be with him.

Marsha didn’t blink. She negotiated a position for him in the large parking area of the office building. He and SweetPea were still there, three years later when I moved on to a different place.

What would happen to China’s economy if it continued to grow at its current rate indefinitely, without any external factors affecting it?

Whatever the US do, or tries to do it does not matter. At the best it will only slow dow China the the U.S. expense of slowing it selves even more. China will grow till it is effectively be 5–6 times the U.S. real size. It may take the most of the 21st century but it will ultimately come to that.

The reason is simple. China has 4 times the U.S. population but it’s political and social system is simply far more superior and stable. It’s growth is sustainable and very healthy. Hence it should put grow the U.S. on per capital basis. But in the real sense. Not in U.S. dollar or even in GDP narrow sense that is frankly a farce and meaningless.

Chinese people are harder working, they are certainly more discipline, the learns more and are more industrious and highly driven. The Chinese language may render its people less descriptive but it makes them more learned and helps them learn faster and better. China is not distracted like the U.S. to get itself into endless wars like the U.S. hence it ought to be at least 50% more successful over time.

That is provided there’s us no war with the U.S. but if war happened it either end the world as we know it or it it world totally implode the U.S. till it becomes several nations. Both are not good outcome for the U.S. To me the U.S. needs to accept that the best option it to hang on to being a strong number 2 till India get its act together sometimes by the 2nd half of 21st century.

I needs to partner not try the shit of containing China right away. It needs to benefit most from China’s inevitable ascendency. Not obsessed with stoping China by cutting of its own limbs.

Men’s double bind

The LOSE-LOSE situation men often face.

What is the strangest complaint you have received at your job?

“You told my granddaughter her shirt was ugly,” an angry woman I’d never met before told me as I was supervising my kindergarten students during their breakfast time.

I looked down at my little student, then up at the grandmother and asked, “I’m sorry, what’s this all about?”

She repeated her claim, saying the girl came home from school the day before and told her the teacher said her shirt was ugly. I couldn’t even remember what the little girl had worn, and I most certainly never said that to a child.

Speaking to the girl, I asked her who had said her shirt was ugly and she replied, “The kids.”

Grandma went berserk at this and yelled at the girl, “No! It was your teacher who said that! That’s what you told me!”

At that point I suggested we take it to the principal and asked the other teacher in the cafeteria to cover my class. Once grandma and I were in the principal’s office, the whole conversation was repeated. The principal told the woman that she’d known me many years, that I would never speak to a child in that manner, and that clearly it was indeed other children who had said the shirt was ugly.

Grandma threatened to take her accusation to the district office. The principal pointed to her desk and said, “There’s the phone.” Grandma turned and left the office without another word, and that was the last I heard of the strangest complaint I ever received as a teacher.

Why are some reasons that cops turn dirty?

  1. Debt – had a sgt, when I first started, that lived about a mile from me, so we hung out sometimes. I get a call one day that he got arrested for bank robbery. He bailed out and my roommate and I went to talk to him, because we couldn’t believe it. He said, “I was just trying to show them how weak their security was.” We were new, but we weren’t born yesterday. Apparently he had some big gambling debts and was desperate. He went to prison.
  2. The slippery slope – A team of narco cops decided, amongst themselves, that they weren’t being treated fairly. They were bringing in all this money in seized assets, but the department wasn’t giving them money for equipment they felt they needed, like night vision scopes. So, they kept (stole) some of the the money they seized to buy the equipment they felt they needed. mmmmm Okay. But then the equipment they needed turned into houses, cars, jewelry and boats. They went to prison.
  3. Greed – A case I heard about recently, a deputy offered up his services to provide security for dope shipments. He said he and his coworkers would escort shipments for a certain amount of money. His “coworkers” were actually just people he knew. They all went to prison.
  4. Born dirty – A kid from a generational gang family was raised to stay out of trouble and get good grades. The sole purpose was to get him hired on the sheriff’s department so he could help with the gang’s jail drug smuggling operation. He was found out and arrested. Within a week, he was all tatted up. He went to prison.
  5. Stupidity/Naivete/No good deed goes unpunished/Blackmail – Inmates have nothing but time. Career criminals use that time to plan. They will try to identify, target and “groom” young naive deputies. In a case a few years back, 2013, or so, a young kid graduated from the academy and was assigned to one of the jails. An inmate started making conversation with him and being friendly. At a certain point, he gave this kid some sob story about his family and that he couldn’t get in touch with them, or something like that. Whatever it was, this young deputy decided to do something for this inmate, like take a message to his family, or something and then bring a message back. I forget exactly what it was, but it was against policy and being in his first year, he could be fired. The inmate used it against him and blackmailed him into smuggling drugs into the jail. The inmate was caught, gave the deputy up and the deputy went to prison. He made a video for the department about it that the department now shows in the academy.

I can relate

What is something you will never understand?

Until a few years ago, when my mom was still working, she had a very strange habit — She would come back from work tired, request for a glass of coke, a couple of papad, and sit down for a few minutes before resuming other household work.

We would often tell her that rather than coke and papad, you can eat something healthier, perhaps a glass of juice and some fruits. But no, these advices would just fall on deaf ears. I wouldn’t just understand why would she not want to stay healthy.

She would often have headaches in the morning and would wake up tired. Being an advocate of yoga, other fitness activities and it’s importance, I would keep persisting with my efforts to convince her. But no, she would just not have it.

For me, it was difficult to understand why would she not want to have a better life.

Just, why not!

Surprisingly, my father, who used to go for jogging and would really care about his fitness, started ignoring the healthy bits of his life and slowly, with time, stopped doing it at all. He seemed to be following mom’s route of not caring about his health anymore. I tried to persuade him to restart with the brisk walking again, but to no avail.

Years later, I realised the reason — It was the stress that was killing them from inside — something I was not aware of, until recently, especially about the intensity of it they were dealing with.

When it was my turn to get a share of their stress coupled with some of mine, I found out how it overpowers your willingness to do things which makes you happy. It smothers you slowly, makes you want to avoid putting any extra efforts, even for those things which are absolutely essential. You become a person who just wants to do things which makes them feel normal, if not better — like having some unhealthy meals in my mom’s case; or stopping the exercises in my father’s.

Advices, suggestions, words of wisdom are the most readily available things in this world. Every body seems to give it, very few can follow it under every circumstance. What a person is going through and whether he can even make something of your suggestion (intended in a helpful way) is way beyond our understanding at times.

And unless you can be in someone’s shoes, you will never understand why that someone behaves in a certain way, or chooses not to.

What is it like to serve time in a Swedish prison?

I think a story from 2005 illustrates it fairly well.

This was at the Norrtäljeanstalten prison, Sweden’s highest security facility. We’re talking murderers, armed robbery, that sort of people.

One fateful evening, there was a major slip in security. Total disaster. In one wing, the cell doors remained unlocked as the staff went home for the day.

So. It’s not like the inmates could get out – they were still behind several secure layers. They just had the run of the building for one night.

So what did they do?

They made their way to the kitchen, baked a cake, and ate cake and watched TV all night. They all said it was the best night ever.

In the morning, they were unceremoniously put back in their cells, but faced no further consequences. The two staff who had managed to forget to lock got a weeks’ pay docked, and a stern warning.

Swedish prison: turns bank robbers into cake bakers.

Forced to be free

What is the most absurd thing you’ve been charged for on a bill?

My cat went missing for several months. He was a stray that kind of adopted my home as an inside/outside mellow lap cat. I searched and asked around, posted flyers all around town but he was just…gone. One day went to a customers home and on her living room couch is my missing cat!! This older lady had been feeding it and coaxed it inside and he stayed. He remembered me, I pointed out a little crook in his tail that convinced her it was him. I told her that he seemed pretty happy and I guess he lives here now. I gave her his vet records, cat bed, and favorite toys. Part of me was mad because she HAD to have seen those missing cat signs but I was at the same time glad he was warm and happy and not flattened by a truck or something.

About a year later, this crazy lady comes to my door with VET BILL! He got a bladder infection and she took him to the vet and asked them to charge me for it. She took the paperwork I’d given her and told them it was on my account. A bill had been mailed and I was on the phone with them before it even arrived letting know it was her cat and her problem now!

Crazy cat ladies man…..

Something was wrong

CB Memories

Back in the 1970’s there was this fad. It was the CB Radio fad, and everyone seemed to end up with a Citizens’ Band radio in the car. Ah. We all had slang that we would use, and there were many a useless discussion over the air that we all endured.

I had one. My brother had one. My parents had one. My friends all had one.

It was so “hip” at the time, don’t you know.

CB radio
CB radio

Now, we have cell phones, social media and all the rest. But every now and then, I get an itching to reach for the CB to find out what is going on regarding an accident that I just passed on the road.

Fads come and go.

And everything that we consider normal today, will eventually be viewed as a strange fad by others. Enjoy them while you have them.

Today…

Have you ever regretted saving a patient?

Yes. The paramedics brought her in from a nursing home and they had been doing CPR for a while. The patient had been in and out of perfusing rhythms the entire time. She looked very old and frail and chronically ill. I asked the medics if she had a DNR order and they just rolled their eyes. The lead medic told me that they asked the same thing but the nursing home staff couldn’t locate the paperwork and because they couldn’t be sure they initiated resuscitation.

We didn’t have anything on record either but I wasn’t really committed to CPR and shocking and all the drugs necessary to keep this poor woman alive when her quality of life was likely so bad. I decided to give one round of drugs and then stop if there was no response. We did just that and much to my surprise she responded. Her heart started out slowly and gained momentum. Within a couple minutes she had a stable blood pressure. After a while she even began to attempt breathing on her own.

It wasn’t long before the family arrived and told us that the patient’s wishes were to NOT be resuscitated. They told us that she would never want to be kept alive this way and demanded that we stop the ventilator and medicines. So, I did. Despite stopping all support she continued to live. Ultimately, we admitted her to the hospital and she continued on in a sort of half-life state. This went on for days. Days!

I went to see her and the family a few times when they were there in the hospital and just felt terrible for them all. They were unhappy with me but they also understood why we did what we did. Ultimately, they sort of took it out on the nursing home staff and not the medics or me.

In the end, she died with her family all around her. Several members were able to travel in to say goodbye before she passed because of the hospital course. I suppose it all worked out the way it was supposed to. I still regretted it though.

It’s fun until it isn’t

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/BFwQhDrX0hE?feature=share

English Beef Steak Pie

English Beef Steak Pie
English Beef Steak Pie

Ingredients

  • 1 pound boneless round steak, trimmed
  • 6 to 8 russet potatoes, pealed and cubed
  • 1 large onion, sliced and separated
  • 1/2 cup flour
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 1 cup water
  • 1 pie crust (to cover top of pie)

Instructions

  1. In a deep glass baking dish (either round or square, Corning or glass), layer meat, potato and onion, sprinkling flour over each layer.
  2. Salt and pepper each layer.
  3. Pour water slowly over layers and top with rolled out crust.
  4. Roll edges of crust under around the edge and flute to seal edges to pan. Vent with knife several times.
  5. Bake at 350 degrees F for about one hour until water bubbles and gravy have formed. Pierce with a cake tester through vents for doneness of potatoes.
  6. Serve with a green salad.
feae6c86cfb526da56d1158124b28ec1
feae6c86cfb526da56d1158124b28ec1

Compromise

As a trial attorney, what is the most ridiculous outburst you have seen first-hand in court?

Maybe it wasn’t rediculous as you mean but it was the biggest and it was Mine. I was representing a 15 year old pregnant girl. CPS wanted her sent to a reformatory. I wanted her sent to a girls school. The CPS worker testified that the girl should go to jail because when she was 5 yes five she seduced her father ( an executive with a big company). The girl had been raped by her father for years.

The girl said to me “ you told me that wasn’t my fault.” In the courtroom before God Judge and country I grabbed that CPS worker and tried to pound her into the floor.

It wasn’t looking good for me but the judge made an immediate order. He ordered the CPS worker to personally pay for the girl to go to the private girls school. (about 3times her annual salary) . I waited all day to be arrested. Finally a call came that I was wanted back in court.

It was announced that no charges would be brought against me and the order against the CPS worker was dropped and the order to pay made against the agency. The CP S worker was also to resign.

I’m not a violent person but only so much can be let go I guess at time I lost sight of my life and career and could only see my client.

I have gotten some nice comments. I need to add that before I went for this person the judge asked her if she had done everything she could for the girl. Her response was “I have been wonderful”. I am not proud of getting violent. It is very rare in my life. I was happy with the outcome but I risked getting my license and going to jail. I need to make a clarification here. I was in law school then. i was representing her as her probation officer. It was in the early 70s. A child’s right to an attorney was based on the parents ability to afford one. I was the closest thing to a lawyer she had.

PS. if you read about incest cases, or any sexual abuse cases of very young children, the children are usually taught by their abusers how to “please” them. they are basically taught to mimic seductive behavior. They are not seductive. They are merely mimicking what they have been taught to do, but not everybody sees it that way. many overtly seductive Teenagers have been molested in this manner as a child, but they are just labeled as seductresses. I guess it is easier for some people to blame a child than it is for them to take the time to learn about the effects of abuse on children. I was often called in by other probation officers when they had an uncomfortable feeling about a case because I could see these types of behaviors even minor ones. i’ll never know how many cases I didn’t catch, but I was never wrong when I called it.

Killer Thinks He Got Away With Murder – Doesn’t Know 5 YO Survived | The Morrissey Family Case

What types of problems do Asian Americans face in Asia?

Not quite fitting in, this applies to ALL overseas types, near ones (Malaysia, Singapore) and far ones. USA, Europe.

An example is this

image 498
image 498

vs this

image 497
image 497

Superficially we look similar but we’re quite different.

You stand me next to some China born Chinese and you’ll feel there’s something off.

The foreign diet in our formative years changes us. I was a LOT fatter (though thing for westerners) and had a rounder chunkier face.

The life experiences also make us stand differently. I’ve written previously that in the UK if you’re weak (doesn’t matter if you’re black, white, Indian or Chinese) people will pick on you. So there’s an outward portray of aggression already… probably why cops stop me so much.

That’s just the visual things.

Then we’ve got psychology, culture and language.

All of which means you fit in even less. You can as again fit in on a superficial level but go any deeper and you’re spotted.

Being different leads to disimilar treatment sometimes, sometimes this is good, sometimes this is bad.

Mentally Ill USA

New York 1966

new york 1966 1967 kodachrome 05
new york 1966 1967 kodachrome 05

She Thinks An AVERAGE “D” Size Is SMALL?

The USA is so messed up.

What is the perfect thing to say when someone is being rude to you?

My wife and I brought her car in for service at the dealership and we’re looking around while waiting. A young salesman asked if he could show us around. I said we are just there for service.

After talking a while about their new cars, he went to get “the closer” a big fellow who obviously had been there for a while. He began to say things like what would I need to do to get you into this vehicle and make me an offer. I told him we weren’t in the market for a car; I research such matters before making such a purchase; and, for me to buy a car today, he would probably have to nearly give it to me. I told him if I made him an offer, I was sure he would find it insulting.

I did let him pull my credit. This would have made it very clear that I was highly successful in financial services sales. Which is what makes his subsequent rudeness particularly inconceivable.

He continues to insist that I make an offer. I finally offer him probably half of what the car is worth (because I would have bought it on the spot at that price). He is insulted.

He then leans over me (with my wife still sitting next to me) and says:

“At some point in your life, you’re going to have to become man enough to be able to make a decision.”

I instantly replied:

“It’s not my manhood in question here; I’m not the one who can’t close this deal.”

I only saw the stunned look on his face for a moment before he turned to walk away.

Harsh truth

Do police officers care about you?

June 2nd, Midnight; a 15 yo boy Zohaib posted a suicide note over social media; stating he’s going to end his life today.

image 495
image 495

I browsed through a lot of tweets posted from other users on the topic, and learned that the boy lives in my city on XYZ road. That’s it.

The problem is that, on the said ‘miles long’ road there are dozens of towns and neighborhoods interconnected, I mean, that is very incomplete piece of information to effectively and timely counter such an issue of extraordinary sensitive nature.

I responded to him immediately, and also requested public to send me any information or clue they might have about this boy.

image 494
image 494

And that interaction of mine resulted in one of the most burdensome barrage of tweets and DMs I’ve ever received as social media handler of city police, the number was literally in thousands. That kid’s name was trending nationwide on twitter during this fiasco. But sadly, nothing useful came out of this interaction tsunami, all I had was first name of the boy and that he lives somewhere in my city.

I calmly reviewed the situation for a minute; I mean our field officers are ‘head to toe’ engaged with crime fighting day in & day out, responding to the calls, handling cases one over the other, and now comparatively… I have this first of its kind situation where a boy wants to commit suicide about whom we know nothing… could even be a prank for goodness sake.

Nope. I told myself.

We should find and rescue him, no matter what it takes…we gotta!

I got Police Chief in the loop, by his orders Police command & Control was now at my disposal. Which I believe is the most sophisticated and comprehensive system of surveillance, communication and patrolling all across the country. We were about to to execute a time sensitive search and rescue task. Our officers responded to the given locations and secured the entry exit points; while being on the look out.

And that minute, I learned over social media that the boy has fled home, he’s on the loose!

Holy cow!

We didn’t panic with the thought of him doing something foolish while on the run, though it was a legitimate concern. We kept striving, I dispatched teams here and there upon receiving bits of information from concerned twitter users, and then the magic happened…. we got his address. Somebody finally recognized him I guess even though there was no display picture or anything else but the that helped us greatly. Now that is something, I can work with.

He wasn’t home but now we knew who he is. So technical resources along with human intelligence played the good part, he was tracked and in minutes… secured!

And all of this happened under an hour.

He was anxious and nervous… but otherwise fine and safe. His parents thanked the Police, the situation came back to normal.

Next day while I was at work, various news teams arrived at my office and I was genuinely surprised to learn that this episode has made to the news, even to BBC. I was directed to speak a few words on camera, which I did even though I hate to.

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image 493

Those of you who know me for a long time, I really do not appreciate the idea of being on the limelight for many reasons. I have politely excused out of numerous feature stories and interviews all these years.

I’m not a celebrity, never was. Super hero, Yes. But not a show off… for that is not what cops are meant to be. That is why you see the big-ass mask on me even though I was requested twice that it is perfectly alright to slide it down a little during the talk. Nope!

Do police officers care about you? YES. Dogmatically!

I’ll do whatever it takes to protect and serve you, I will put my life on the line to save yours! And here “I” stands for Police officers you see daily around you no matter wherever you are.

Start your journey

Not wealth, but really in the things that matter to you.

Figgy Pudding

Figgy Pudding is a type of Christmas pudding which was originally made with figs. It may be baked, steamed in the oven, boiled or fried. Figgy Pudding dates back to 16th century England.

istock 000018579358 large
istock 000018579358 large

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 300ml (1/2 pint) milk (10 fluid ounces)
  • 225g (8 ounces) flour (2 cups)
  • 175g (6 ounces) dried figs
  • 150ml (1/4 pint) Brandy (5 fluid ounces)
  • 110g (4 ounces) suet
  • 110g (4 ounces) prunes
  • 85g (3 ounces) raisins or sultanas
  • 50g (2 ounces) dried apricots
  • 50g (2 ounces) dates
  • 25g (1 ounce) dried apples
  • 1 tablespoon honey
  • 1/4 teaspoon ginger
  • 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Instructions

  1. On the day before making the pudding, place the dried apricots, prunes and apples to soak in water and place the raisins or sultanas to soak in the brandy.
  2. Remove the stones from of the dates and prunes.
  3. Butter a large pudding basin or double boiler bowl.
  4. Sift flour into a bowl.
  5. Stir in suet and mix to a fairly soft dough with cold water.
  6. Turn out on to a floured surface. Lightly knead until smooth.
  7. Roll out two-thirds of pastry into a round and use to line a well-greased 2-pint pudding basin (or double boiler bowl).
  8. Melt the honey and stir in the ginger and cinnamon. Add to the soaked fruits and brandy mixture. Mix well and place into the pastry lined bowl. Moisten edges of pastry with water. Cover with lid, rolled from remainder of the pastry. Press edges well together to seal. Cover securely with greased greaseproof paper or aluminum foil.
  9. Steam steadily for 2 hours. Ensure that the water does not evaporate, topping it up from time to time with boiling water.
  10. Turn out onto a plate and serve.

Something good about this man

What is your biggest mistake or regret?

Starting a “STARTUP” with best friends.

Three years back, in 2013, one evening, I was having casual discussions with my friend, lets call him “Mr.S”. We were discussing on different topics like current trends, jobs, future life, family and friends, money. At that time, I was working in a software company with little experience of 1.5 years and some cash in my account. S was studying hard to clear his remaining subject which forced him to take a year gap. And same was the case with “Mr.P” too, he is the third character in my story.

Let me tell you, we all are intelligent students. But because of some mistakes and their habit of taking things lightly cost them a year gap. In fact, Mr.P was smarter than me in every department. Mr.S was not good at academics but he was too good at marketing and some other “special” skills.

We three were together from last 7.5 years. We sat on one bench. We studied together. We stayed together. We tripped together. We partied together. We lived together. We participated and won lots of competitions together. And most important – we dreamed together. Everyone from our batch including teachers used to tell us — you 3 idiots are awesome.

Everything in life was going in a right direction. But let me remind you one of the laws of Mr.Murphy, “In nature, nothing is ever right. Therefore, if everything is going right, something is wrong.” [src: http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-laws.html]. And exactly, same thing happened with us.

Lately, I was thinking a lot about starting a business. Starting a start-up. Starting an IT Company. Starting an IT Training institute. Starting something related to IT. I discussed these thoughts with Mr.S. And guess what, he completely agreed with my ideas and within a few minutes we were business partners! I started giving more time to the thoughts on business. Within some days, we decided to include Mr.P in our team, as he was our best friend and also a sound person with technical knowledge. We shared all these thoughts with Mr.P and he also agreed to join us on the long adventure. But assured us that he’ll join the company after a few months.

So basically everything needed to start a startup was ready. We had a team. Me as a sole investor, lead technical person and of course, the CEO. Along with that I also had a role of Software Engineer in the company where I was working concurrently. It was a big task for me to handle both the tasks – a job and a start up.

My job was the main source of finance for my family and for the startup also. Mr.S was assigned the role of getting assignments and marketing department, while Mr. P was going to look after the training and in-house development. We also had few projects to start with. We also hired 2 people to work with us.

After few months, I made an investment of ₹2 lac (~$3000) and bought 4 advanced PCs, also rented out a small place to start our work in. And, within a span of 4 months, our small startup was on its way onto a long journey. We held a small inaugural function and celebrated. Yeah, that was quite an achievement for us. We started our working together.

But there was a small problem, Mr.P was yet to join the company. He earlier promised us to join the company, yet after 3 months, he was not interested in joining the company. After thinking a lot, I decided to talk to him about his decision and why he was not joining office. His answers gave me the biggest shock of my life. He refused to join the company. His reasons were like, “I am not seeing future in your company. Another friend of us started another startup and he is taking me in his team. I need money right now.” Guys, let me tell you, I also offered him mighty amount of salary. But still, he refused my invitation politely and sent a long message reasoning why he won’t join the company. Most of the reasons were BS. And story of Mr.P was finished. Completely.

Lesson#1 learned [in a hard way]: Do not trust the promises of everyone. Everybody is not loyal to his/her own words.

I was shell shocked, shattered, and quiet depressed after hearing his decision and answer. I was scattered from inside. I decided to keep the work running with Mr.S along with the two hired people. Things were getting more and more difficult.

Fast forward 4-5 months.

Mr.S was looking after the marketing and product sales things, he was the main guy our customers were dealing with. Whereas I was busy in development and resource management.

One day, while managing balance sheets, I figured out there was a record missing for a sum of ₹20000 (~$300). Out of curiosity, when I asked Mr.S about the missing ₹20000, his answers were not logical. They were irrelevant. They were lies. I got to know that he was playing some tricks and using the company’s money for his own personal use. His most funny reply was, Dude, chalta hai… busy log hain hum, chhoti chhoti details par dhyan nahi rakhte“. [Dude, We are too busy people, we should not focus on such small details]. For him ₹20K was a small amount, but it wasn’t for me.

We had a bitter argument on this and it resulted into disagreement. And we decided to separate. Decided to drive on our separate ways. But he put one condition. He will retain the “business name“. As he was looking after the marketing and other things, he decided to go after the name and customers. And in such way, my first startup was dead.

Lesson#2 learned [in a harder way]: Be careful who you bring to the top with you, not everyone is loyal.

Image Source : Google

P.S. I allowed him to use the business name, because of two reasons:

  1. I was ready to work with anyone, but not with a treacherous friend.
  2. I trust myself, I was alone at the start and will fight the battle alone, will re-build everything from scratch. One can delay me, but can never stop me from achieving my dreams.

Edit 1: From last 2 years, we 3 have never met, talked or discussed about each other.

Being nice

New York 1966

new york 1966 1967 kodachrome 02
new york 1966 1967 kodachrome 02

What scandals should NOT have been forgotten?

In June, 1954, US Senator Lester C. Hunt (D-WY) shot himself to death with a rifle at his desk in his US Senate office in Washington, DC. Senator Hunt had been despondent over threats he had received – from Sen. Joe McCarthy and two Republican colleagues, Senator Herman Welker (R-ID) and Senator Styles Bridges (R-NH) – that lurid reports of the arrest of Hunt’s son the previous year would be made public, both in Washington and in his home state of Wyoming, embarrassing Hunt and putting his upcoming reelection bid in peril. The younger Hunt had been arrested and charged with soliciting sex from a male police officer, who was working a sting operation in a Washington park. The charges were later dismissed, but McCarthy and his cronies discovered the fact, and pressured the police department into refiling the charges. Hunt was under great pressure from McCarthy, demanding that he resign, which would have effectively given the Republicans control of the Senate. At the time, Democrats controlled the US Senate by just one vote, and a Hunt resignation would have put the Senate into a tie, enabling the Republicans to gain control, since then-Vice President Richard Nixon would serve as tiebreaker. After Hunt’s death, the Republican governor of Wyoming appointed a Republican to fill Hunt’s unexpired term, who in turn declined to run for the seat in that fall’s election, a race that was won by a Democrat. Unfortunately, the Republicans flipped other Senate seats in 1954, and took control on their own. This scandal was downplayed for many years, but it also occurred in the shadow of the Army-McCarthy hearings, which were going on at the time of Hunt’s death. Even today, there is little awareness of the scandal in Wyoming, and few Americans know that it took place at all. Interestingly, though, Hunt is known as the driving force behind Wyoming’s famous “bucking bronco” license plate emblem, having commissioned the artist to create the design during his years as Governor of Wyoming.

The USA is totally fucked up

Why didn’t you leave a tip at a restaurant?

I went to a famous pancake restaurant that was promoting its new burgers. I saw an ad offering them for $5.99 with unlimited fries and a free drink. I pointed to the jalapeno kick burger and asked the waitress to verify that this burger was, in fact, part of the $5.99 special. When she said, “yes,” I then ordered this burger. I had a $10 gift card, and my intention was to tip the waitress the remaining amount after taxes, which would have made it a 50% tip.

However, when I got the bill, I saw was charged $9.29 for the burger. When I called the waitress over to tell her about the mistake, she said that the burger I chose was not included in the special and that I needed to pay regular price. Naturally, I told her that I deliberately asked her if this burger was included before I ordered it and that she confirmed me it was. Her response was that she didn’t understand what burger I wanted.

I explained the situation to the manager, saying I would not have ordered it if the waitress did not tell me it was part of the special, that they cannot charge me for the server’s mistake. The manager called the server over and she had the nerve to deny that I even asked her about the burger being a part of the promotion. Unbelievably, the manager said she must take the server’s word for it.

In front of the waitress, I presented my $10 gift card, telling the manager, I was going to give the waitress what would have remained from my $5.99 burger, which would have been a nice tip. However, since she won’t own up to her mistake, she will now receive what is left from my $9.29 burger (which after taxes was about a nickel).

New York 1966

new york 1966 1967 kodachrome 09
new york 1966 1967 kodachrome 09

Woke challenge

What’s the most ridiculous adult tantrum you’ve witnessed that you couldn’t believe?

Waiting in line at an auto parts store and the guy in front of me sets down an alternator and asked the clerk for a water pump. The clerk naturally is confused and asks about the alternator. The guy tells him it’s a water pump and that’s why he asked for a water pump.

The clerk tries nicely to correct him, even shows the guy a picture of an alternator vs. a water pump for his specific car. To no avail the guy “knows more” than this poor clerk. Who I might add is 100% correct that the alternator is NOT a water pump. The power connections kind of gives it away specially when there are no hose attachments for it to pump coolant a.k.a. water.

Anyway, the guy just goes nuts. Throws the alternator at the poor clerk luckily missing his intended target. Makes huge threats about calling corporate; of course he has tons of friends on social media so he threatens to close the store down. On and on this guy goes about how much smarter he is than anyone behind the counter, how they always give him the wrong part. I swear it lasted 20 minutes. Anyway, the manager was in the back counting out the money or stocking something, not really sure, but she was in the back. She comes out, picks up the alternator, sets it on the counter, and asks the guy why he is throwing such a temper tantrum over an alternator.

Oh here we go again! How dare a woman correct him. She doesn’t know shit about cars. What’s a woman doing working at an auto parts store. The vile shit just kept going. Well, during ALL of this mess someone in the oil section decided to call the cops. At some point the cops sneak in and are right behind me and this entire mess. I’m gently pushed aside and they yell, “Sir!” real loudly. He turns and goes ghostly white. The cops start asking about the situation. One has taken the rest of us aside, found the caller, and we are telling them what we witnessed. The other officer is talking with mister alternator/water pump.

Next thing you know he is under arrest and as they are escorting him out we hear one officer tell the other officer that arguing about alternators was the dumbest thing they have witnessed all month. To which the guy yells, “It’s a fucking water pump!”

What did someone say in court that made you burst out laughing?

When my son was in elementary school he was beaten up by two older students to the point he required hospital care. Since the two boys were going into high school next year and it was the last day of school both the principal and superintendent said there was nothing they could do. I called the police and had them charged. One officer went to the hospital and saw my son and two more took the boys away in handcuffs at the school. When the case went to court I told my son to be honest and don’t guess. The boys had been in trouble before so the parents hired a good criminal lawyer.

My son was on the stand for over an hour being grilled by the lawyer and the judge was getting fed up. The lawyer asked my son how he knew who was kicking him. Basically he said “ I was being kicked by a Doc Martin shoe which was on a foot which was on a leg which was on a body and his head was on it” I could see the judge shaking in silent laughter and the stenographer laughing in her Dictaphone. The courtroom was silent with muffled laughter. The lawyer also stood away from my son and holding his ear said he had bad hearing and to speak up. My son was very nervous and scared showing it by speaking very quietly. Finally my son turned to the judge and said could he ask a question. The judge said sure. My son said “in which ear is he hard of hearing because he is going back and forth between both ears”. Same muffled laughter. The judge glared at my son and said “if his hearing is that bad he will be ending his questioning” with a wink to my son he told me later.

Apparently this went on with all the other witnesses and the case was dismissed from all the conflicting statements. This lawyer must have cost the parents a bundle. The police officer in charge of the case visited us about a month later to see how my son was doing. He also said that he was impressed with my son in court and gave him his card. All our children make us proud.

Moral of the story

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RtIIpfpMKhc?feature=share

New York 1966

new york 1966 1967 kodachrome 04
new york 1966 1967 kodachrome 04

Why didn’t you leave a tip at a restaurant?

Because it is an utterly stupid idea.

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image 496

During my college, I took a course called entrepreneurial marketing.

The professor gave one interesting perspective regarding billing and customer experience:

When booking a flight ticket, if the price is $220 instead of $210, the customer wouldn’t feel anything. The $10 on the top of $210 he is paying seems insignificant.

But if you charge him $210 at the beginning and later ask him to pay $5 if wants a water bottle onboard, he might find the experience disappointing. One, he thinks $5 is too expensive for a water bottle. Two, he has to check if he has the cash. Three, he has to worry about conversion charges if it is the card. Overall, there are so many things that make the experience complicated.

So just add $10 more on the flight ticket and give him two water bottles if you are keen on giving a comfortable experience.

Same thing with star hotels. Just charge $20 more on the $150 per night and give complimentary water, canned drinks, and coffee rather than billing for every item inside the mini-fridge.


The same logic applies to tipping.

When you go to a restaurant for a pleasant dining experience, you are made to do all sorts of calculations for taxes and add them to the amount in the menu. On top of this, you have to do calculations for tips and then add to the final amount to see if the item is really worth that price or not.

It ruins the whole experience.

Secondly, this tipping is completely optional. It is in the customer’s hands whether to pay it or not. And if he wants to, whether it is 5% or 15% is also his choice. There is no guarantee that the one who did the best service will get the maximum tip.

Thirdly, does anyone who what is best service universally? For me, not bothering me by enquiring every five minutes ‘Do you need anything else?’ or standing beside my table is a better service. For someone, being approachable by waiting near his table is better service. It varies from person to person and it is near impossible for the waiter to figure this out.

Fourthly, the tip for bringing $50 for 100ml single malt is more than $5 1L water bottle, when the former requires less energy. Is there any logic here?

And lastly, the owner thinks that waiters get high tips and pay them low salaries. The customer thinks that the waiters are anyway paid and hence don’t give them tips. So the waiters are at a complete loss here.

The best way to solve this is to treat waiters like any other worker- chef, security guard, delivery guy or equipment operator. Pay them market salary rather than putting their livelihood at the mercy of the customers. Why do you need to tip waiters, when you don’t tip nurses, delivery guys, security guard, police, or janitors when they are also doing service?

English Muffins

English Muffins
English Muffins

Ingredients

  • 1 cake or package yeast
  • 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup lukewarm water
  • 1 1/2 cups milk, scalded
  • 1/4 cup melted shortening
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 6 cups flour

Instructions

  1. After kneading, place in greased bowl and let rise until double.
  2. Roll out to 3/4-inch thick. Cut with 3-inch cutter. Cover circles and let rise until very light.
  3. Bake on greased electric skillet or at 375 degrees F in the oven.

Good advice

What are some unwritten social rules everyone should know?

  1. Don’t comb your hair on the table at the restaurant. I don’t want your hair-strands in my food. I prefer that you use the restroom even if you want to touch up your lipstick.
  2. If you know that you have smelly feet and that you have not washed your socks in several weeks, don’t take off your shoes in crowded places. Not even in the aircraft. You should have thought about this before you boarded the plane.
  3. Let people who are sitting in the front of the aircraft deplane first! If you have a connecting flight, you can politely ask them to let you deplane first.
  4. Let people exit the elevator/train/bus before rushing in.
  5. Follow the queue. Yes, even in the washroom. Just don’t stand in front of the bathroom stall when 572 people are waiting in the queue.
  6. Buy earphones, or headphones. Whatever you prefer. Because I don’t want to listen to rock music during my morning commute.
  7. Give your seat to the pregnant lady. Or the lady carrying a small child. Or the old lady/gentleman. If you are a young lady in perfect health condition, this applies to you as well. Not just the boys.
  8. Wear washed clothes, because the smell of the sweat sticks. Use deodorant. Specially applies when you are traveling by public transport.
  9. Also, don’t keep your clothes next to the kitchen area, as the smell from spices sticks.
  10. Don’t leave the texts as “seen” or with the “blue ticks”. Either respond, or never respond. Don’t respond to a text which was sent 4 days ago. Just be honest and tell them “that you are busy” or that “you don’t feel like talking to them”.
  11. Show up with a gift. Don’t come empty-handed, after all the host took the time to invite you and do the preparation, didn’t they?
  12. Don’t dump your negativity onto others. Not many people are accepting of it.

It’s all I have.

How did one small decision change your life?

I had stopped dating someone who had just been divorced and wasn’t ready to settle (and wasn’t right for me). I had been invited to a party but didn’t want to go. I’m not going, I decided. Finally, two hours after the party had started, I went, alone. The loft owner’s friend opened the door — and we started talking. He was sweet, funny, had just graduated from college, was 7 years younger than me, was planning to move cross country in 2 days. We hung out at the party and then he asked if he could walk me home. We’d walked 2 blocks, making all sorts of witty comments about street signs,etc., and I thought, “This guy is so different than the ones I usually like…he’s not all dark and dramatic (which usually hooked me)…he’s like being with a best friend.” And then I asked myself, “Why shouldn’t I be in a relationship with a guy who treats me as well as my best female friend does??” I remember my small decision precisely: deciding that I’d be open to this…even had a mental metaphor of it being like a Japanese paper lamp I’d hold gently…not try to force anything…but just be open to connecting with someone who made life fun, who was kind, who wanted to know about me and share himself.

He’s been an extraordinary husband and father and after more than 30 years, is still the most fun person to hang out with. We’ve traveled all over the world, gotten grad degrees after the kids were born, created books and apps and games, gone through family stresses and losses, relationship issues, gone through everyday boring ol’ life.

It was a small decision I made, but a profound one: to love myself. To allow myself to be loved by someone who treated me (and others) well. To let myself be with someone whose company I flat-out enjoyed. It wasn’t sudden roses and symphonies…it was playful and sweet. But I see the depth and beauty now. I so wish everyone this.

Dad’s do your job

As a trial attorney, what is the most ridiculous outburst you have seen first-hand in court?

Maybe it wasn’t rediculous as you mean but it was the biggest and it was Mine. I was representing a 15 year old pregnant girl. CPS wanted her sent to a reformatory. I wanted her sent to a girls school. The CPS worker testified that the girl should go to jail because when she was 5 yes five she seduced her father ( an executive with a big company). The girl had been raped by her father for years.

The girl said to me “ you told me that wasn’t my fault.” In the courtroom before God Judge and country I grabbed that CPS worker and tried to pound her into the floor.

It wasn’t looking good for me but the judge made an immediate order. He ordered the CPS worker to personally pay for the girl to go to the private girls school. (about 3times her annual salary) . I waited all day to be arrested. Finally a call came that I was wanted back in court.

It was announced that no charges would be brought against me and the order against the CPS worker was dropped and the order to pay made against the agency. The CP S worker was also to resign.

I’m not a violent person but only so much can be let go I guess at time I lost sight of my life and career and could only see my client.

I have gotten some nice comments. I need to add that before I went for this person the judge asked her if she had done everything she could for the girl. Her response was “I have been wonderful”. I am not proud of getting violent. It is very rare in my life. I was happy with the outcome but I risked getting my license and going to jail. I need to make a clarification here. I was in law school then. i was representing her as her probation officer. It was in the early 70s. A child’s right to an attorney was based on the parents ability to afford one. I was the closest thing to a lawyer she had.

PS. if you read about incest cases, or any sexual abuse cases of very young children, the children are usually taught by their abusers how to “please” them. they are basically taught to mimic seductive behavior. They are not seductive. They are merely mimicking what they have been taught to do, but not everybody sees it that way. many overtly seductive Teenagers have been molested in this manner as a child, but they are just labeled as seductresses. I guess it is easier for some people to blame a child than it is for them to take the time to learn about the effects of abuse on children. I was often called in by other probation officers when they had an uncomfortable feeling about a case because I could see these types of behaviors even minor ones. i’ll never know how many cases I didn’t catch, but I was never wrong when I called it.

Sadly

Why do people go into the military without doing any research about what they’re getting themselves into?

Few people walk into a recruiting station and tell them they want to leave that afternoon. You do have to chat with a recruiter for a while. Granted, they’ll tell you the Army line. Rarely will they lie but they will leave stuff out.

For a lot of people, the Army sounds way better than the situation they’re in. In my first meeting with the recruiter, he told me the Army would train me in life skills (HAHA, at least, not from my MOS), they’d cloth you and give you everything you needed, I’d get a bed, desk, and wall locker, they’d feed me as much as I wanted to eat, I got to choose me MOS (This is where you need to do your research), they’d let me blow stuff up and play with some of the biggest toys the Army has, they’d give me $15K for college, and they’d pay me on top of it.

To a seventeen-year-old kid who’d worked a dirt farm in N. Colorado his entire life, that sounded pretty good. The Army helped get me my Eagle Scout and gave me some perks for that. The recruiter worked with the school to make sure I’d graduate. I was failing a class, and I told my recruiter I wouldn’t graduate. He went to the school and talked to the admin and they made sure I’d pass.

Researching your MOS and the Army is a good idea, but nothing prepares you for stepping off the bus. I have a Ranger buddy whose son just went through basic. He had his son meet with all the vets he could find and we gave our experiences. That wasn’t enough to keep him from calling home and wanting to come home.

No matter how prepared you are, once you get boots on the ground and jump down the rabbit hole, you’re in for a ride. I think people with less prep do better as they have no idea what to expect and they just roll with it instead of standing around thinking this is nothing like what everyone said.

I can relate to this

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2lG5LXgzzzw?feature=share

Brian Berletic: China Has a SHOCKING Secret and the US is Going to War Over It

Hot Dog Butler

Butler, Pennsylvania is a small city that was a one half hour drive from where I spent my High School years. This is a typical Western Pennsylvania city; steel, and blue collar work.

Downtown, in the city, was a restaurant. It was established in the 1920’s or 30’s and pretty much stayed with the same decor throughout the century. It was Art Deco “diner” style with stainless steel fixings and decor. With a big picture of the family founder over the door.

It was called “The Hot Dog Shop“.

2023 12 20 11 06
2023 12 20 11 06

And it served typical diner food, and was a great place for my family to go to as a young boy in my pre-teens and my teenager years.

I would often get such things as grilled cheese sandwiches, with sides of gravy laden french fries, and bowls of soup. So very delicious. Not to mention the mandatory cup of coffee.

Taken in the old days
Taken in the old days

About ten years ago, give or take, it burned down. What a great loss!

But….

They had insurance, and the rebuilt the restaurant and as far as I can tell, it is still operating today. Oh sure, the great thing is that the have not changed the menu. They have not changed the decor. In fact they kept everything else the same EXCEPT for the removal of the cigarette vending machines, the ash trays and the free packs of matches.

Worth a visit
Worth a visit

If you ever get a chance to go… please go there and enjoy a “blue plate special”. Good times! Good times!

The grill
The grill

Ah…

For today let’s start here…

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2023 12 20 11 14

As a student, what is the saddest thing you have found out about your teacher?

My 8th grade English teacher, Mr. Bishop, was one of my favorite teachers. He taught my sister four years before me, and the year he taught me, my sister was a new mother. He asked me about her and her new child frequently, like he really remembered her and cared about her. It was nice.

But I also remember a few times when he fell over in his chair during class. The kids all laughed at him, and he laughed right along with them as he got himself back up.

Sometimes, he’d seem to talk really slow or just “zone out” for a few seconds while teaching. We just got used to it.

One day, he didn’t come to school. We found out later that, while on his way to school that morning, he’d lost control of his motorcycle and crashed through a sign next to the road. He was fine… just shaken up a little, and his motorcycle was broken.

A few years later, when I was no longer his student, I heard through the grapevine that he had to quit teaching because he kept having “episodes” where he lost control of his body.

He had multiple sclerosis.

All of the incidents the year that he taught me were just manifestations of the disease. He either didn’t know it, or didn’t tell us. Probably he just didn’t tell us… it was none of our business.

That was 25 years ago now. He’d probably be in his 70s by this point. I’ve tried Googling him, but I can’t find anything. But that includes an obituary, so that’s a good sign, I guess.

Edit: I just Googled his name again, and found his obituary. He died in Jan. 2022.

Soul star

My employee was recently diagnosed with a terminal illness and has since been sluggish at work. How do I let her go nicely without it costing me?

If I have read this correctly, your dedicated employee is dying because of illness, and you want to get rid of her because she is sluggish aka tired.

Take a good long look at yourself in the mirror and ask yourself that if you were in her position, would you want the same thing to happen to you?

This job is probably what is keeping her going through this tragic period of time in her life, and you want to take that away from her? Are you serious? What kind of a person are you? She has bills to pay, food to buy for herself and possibly her family, and a FUNERAL to plan for HERSELF! Show some compassion and understanding. Is this the reputation that you want to have? If you fire her, trust me, what you have done and why you have done it, will be spread to everyone, especially your contacts and/or clients (customers). Legally, she can sue you for firing her under the Equal Employment Opportunity Law.

Have a heart of flesh and not one of cold corporate stone. What you do, will come back on you, either for the good or for the bad. Choose wisely.

aliens first encounter

As someone who lives in the United Kingdom, what is the most ridiculous thing you have witnessed a tourist do?

Another tale from the shire horse farm which I used to work at. A group of French students came to the farm, along with a couple of teachers. The students were teenagers and right from the start they were causing trouble. The first thing was being kicked out of the gift shop for being caught trying to steal.

Then they came to the animal section where I worked. At first, they seemed to be behaving themselves, but after they left the farm animal section, a member of the public came up to me and informed me that one of the French teenagers had stolen a duck. Yes, a live duck. I immediately went to one of the teachers who were supposed to be supervising the students and asked them to unlock the coach, which is where the person had told me they’d seen the duck.

The teacher did so. The duck had been shut on the seating area, and was flapping around, terrified, and pooing everywhere. I managed to catch the duck and put it in a sack to calm it so I could get it back to the pond. The teacher then had the audacity to ask if someone could clean up the coach, to which I replied that since it was her students who had stolen the duck, then they could clean the coach. Then I left with the traumatised duck, who amazingly survived.

The French students were consequently kicked out of the shire horse farm and I for one hope that they enjoyed the trip back in their feather and duck poo encrusted coach.

What is your best “one time my dad … ” story?

One time my Dad and I drove about an hour to fly my radio-controlled helicopter. But that’s not the big thing.

This was way back in the early 80s, at the latest. Way before stabilization systems, autopilots, etc. I was about 13 years old, had gotten a paper route (yes, kids actually delivered papers to your door) and saved every cent to buy an RC helicopter. After several unsuccessful flight attempts at home (hovering is freaking *hard*), he suggested we go to a flying club where there was a guy who could teach me. Off we go!

We arrive, helicopter, fuel, cooler full of sandwiches and soda, ready to start my training! But… nobody’s there? Apparently, the flying club was off that weekend- we got our dates mixed up. Bollocks.

No matter- the field is open, we figure we’d just try more “self-paced instruction”. Fire up the heli, a few really bad hover attempts when all of a sudden:

I’m barely maintaining a hover when all of a sudden the heli peels off into this incredibly cinematic sweep- dips forward, tail sweeps around, engine throttles up- it was beautiful! My Dad was shouting “Oh yeah, that’s it!!”- but I was shouting “It’s not me! The radio is jammed!”

The heli, on its own, takes off on a circuit about 1 ft off the deck, and circles around- coming right back down the flight line. By now my Dad knows this craft is out of my control, and if he doesn’t catch it it’s probably gone forever- and he knows how hard I worked to buy it.

He jumps in front of it.

This is not a little drone- this is an aluminum-frame gas-powered 3ft rotor diameter with ash blades behemoth screaming down the runway at us. If it hit something on the ground and jumped up- it could have killed him.

It smashes into his shins, rotor blades splintering. The engine, no longer under load, starts to whine like a banshee- we pinch off the fuel tube and kill the engine. We collect the debris, and start home. Dad actually packed a couple of cold soda cans into his socks to keep the swelling down.

When we got home, I asked him why he would do such a foolish thing as blocking the heli with his body. He said “You worked so hard to buy this, and build it, and fly it- I couldn’t bear to see it take off and fly away on a full tank of gas and be lost forever. Let’s just fix this up.” BTW- he had bruises and blood pooling in his legs and feet for months after this.

That was almost 50 years ago. I could never bring myself to rebuild that heli, though we continued with a bunch of other projects that were somewhat less lethal.

In the grey

What is the most absurd code you’ve ever seen?

It was a computer science lab.

We were being taught loops in C++. As a test, the teacher gave us the following question :-

Print the following pattern.

image 21
image 21

Everyone of us started writing the code, trying everything (since at that time it was a high level problem for us). One of my friends had no clue whatsoever about the problem, but he wanted to score well in the test.

You know what he did?

He wrote the following code

  1. #include<iostream.h> 
  2.  
  3. void show(); 
  4.  
  5. int main(); 
  6. char ch=’A’; 
  7. int i,n; 
  8. /* Here he wrote certain code just to 
  9. show that some thing was being done*/ 
  10.  
  11. show(); //called this function 
  12. //secretly 
  13. for(i=0;i<7;i++) 
  14. for(int j=0;j<12;j++) 
  15. /*wrote some more useless code  
  16. which had no  
  17. effect on output*/ 
  18. return 0; 
  19.  
  20. /*after leaving about 100 blank lines so 
  21.  
  22. that you dont have to scroll the  
  23.  
  24. function to show you*/ 
  25.  
  26. void show() 
  27. cout<< ” ABCDEFGFEDCBA\n”; 
  28. cout<< ” ABCDEF FEDCBA\n”; 
  29. cout<< ” ABCDE EDCBA\n”; 
  30. cout<< ” ABCD DCBA\n”; 
  31. cout<< ” ABC CBA\n”; 
  32. cout<< ” AB BA\n”; 
  33. cout<< ” A A\n”; 

When the teacher came to check his code, he glanced at the code and asked him to run it.

HERE IS THE OUTPUT:

image 20
image 20

Teacher saw this correct output and awarded him full marks. Teacher no longer cared if the code was correct or not since it was producing the desired result.

I was like, “wow man at least you thought of such an idea!”

Edit 1:

Just showed this answer to my friend who is being referred here. He was amazed I remembered it to such precision.

The whitest thing

When a child actor acts in an R-rated film, what do the makers tell the child about the film?

As an experienced professional actor, whose children have acted in screen productions they were too young to view, I will attempt an answer.

The short answer is that the film is compartmentalised and the child actor will only experience a small subset of the film. They will only be told about what is appropriate for them to know.

The “makers” of the film communicate with the child in the first instance through the child’s agent and thence to the legal guardian (parent or otherwise). If they feel the role and the production are suitable they will agree to be available and audition. Then, if cast, it is up to the director to communicate with the child actor.

Under no circumstances will they be allowed to see the full script or be on set at all times in an “R-rated film”. They will not be invited to the full cast read through nor to extensive rehearsals. Film making is compartmentalised. Every single shot need not be in the same place or shot on the same day as the next shot. Things are not shot in order.

The production company is responsible for the wellbeing of the child actor and will allow the legal guardian to be on set when the child actor is called. They will also supply a chaperone and brief all the crew and cast about what is appropriate. For example I once played a character who murdered his family. I was never allowed to be seen by the child actors – no wardrobe, makeup, rehearsal calls were scheduled on the same day. In the shoots there were no shots framed to include both the murderer and the victim.

In another production, involving an infant, no crew or cast were allowed to make loud noises or wear perfume on set.

There are laws to protect minors on set in most jurisdictions. If they are obeyed the experience can be safe and rewarding for the child and one day, if they are old enough and choose to see the whole film, hopefully they will be able to be proud of their work.

What’s your most absurd dealbreaker?

I have a beauty for this question.

I tried to buy my family’s next home many years ago and my wife and I were blown away by the massive cubbyhouse in the back yard. Our kids were young and they would love it. We had other reasons to love the house too, one being that our good friends lived in the same street. Needless to say we were looking forward to buying this, our new home, and started the price negotiations.

A deal was struck and we signed a contract we were happy with. Part of the contract was to ensure that massive cubbyhouse was legal and had all the right government approvals. It did not and so our lawyer informed their lawyer of the problem. Instead of further negotiations and a price reduction or trying to gain the required approvals, the vendors thought it appropriate to cut it down and burn it!

Unbeknownst to me, this house was for sale due to the divorce of the previous owners and the husband thought it would annoy his ex wife to destroy the cubbyhouse. The problem was we had a signed contract for the purchase of the house including the cubbyhouse. They would have to make good and we were assured they would.

As is often the case the purchaser of the house we were selling needed another day or two to finalise their finances and asked for an extension to the settlement date which was agreed upon by us and the owners of the house we were buying. However on the new day settlement was to occur, the lawyer for our new house changed position and said that we had to give up on our demands for compensation over the cubbyhouse. We refused.

They then would not proceed with the sale and gave us the option to sue them later. To my lawyer’s amazement I cancelled the sale and walked away. I have no regrets either and I and my family found an even better house, we loved, shortly after. We loved our new neighbours too and enjoyed the next 13 years in that home.

What is China’s response to Trump’s claim that China wants him to lose?

China don’t give a shit. It is none of China’s business is the U.S. wants to choose a proverbial liar or a corrupt politician that is for the American’s to decide. China prefer to mind its own business. China’s government is answerable to its citizens. It wants to do everything to make China prosperous. And peaceful.

It is always ever ready for US miscalculations but it is the U.S. business if the U.S. wants to throw monies into bottomless money pit like Gaza or Ukraine or flex it’s muscles aimlessly bankrupting itself in the process. That is your choice. We the world knows better.

A man like Trump cannot even be a lowly official in most nation. We don’t vote a sexiest, racist, xenophobic, baboon into power. At best he stays running a small con till he is caught! Please vote him in for all we care!

Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (4/8) Movie CLIP – Kirk Beats Khan (1982) HD

What are some signs that someone is not as successful as they claim to be (financially)?

1. They don’t have a circle of successful people.

A banker will have a group of financial friends while a start-up guy will surround himself with a bunch of start-up guys.

2. Wealth is quiet. Rich is loud. Poor is flashy.

3. They don’t care about time.

True wealthy men are particular in time because they know these are the most valuable resources.

4. They have fake rich hobbies.

Clubbing, drinking, and partying.

5. They always try to impress people with their wealth and possessions.

And they want other people to know when they have spent a lot of money.

6. They are name-dropping like crazy.

A real wealthy man will always keep things private and will never act in that way.

7. They tend to buy pieces where the logo is big.

For them, owning these items is about making a statement, not the quality of the product.

8. They may own an expensive car but live in a relatively cheap apartment or house.

9. They often do not have any savings or investments, even if they earn a significant amount of money.

10. They constantly brag about who they know or where they’ve been.

Have you ever walked into work only to realize that you were fired?

I’d been in my new corporate job two weeks. I’d been given an office on day one and by the end of week two had made it my own.

Family pictures, work calendar with my appointments and in particular my desk blotter. My desk blotter was a massive work tool and an important record of my days and weeks. After two weeks my office no longer looked like the office I was given two weeks earlier.

Monday morning I arrive at work and to my surprise a very confused man I had not met before was sitting in my office, behind my desk. I was just about to have a chat to him when my secretary grabbed me and told me the news.

The man sitting at my desk used to have my office. He had been fired during his leave but his boss apparently hadn’t told him yet. To make matters worse his boss wasn’t at work yet either. Awkward.

So I did the right thing. I waited in the boardroom until his boss showed up and did the deed. I had no time for his boss, he was a lazy, disorganised non performer who didn’t last much longer than the guy who just got fired.

I found the whole episode to be cruel. I don’t know how much earlier than me he got to work that day but he would have known instantly he no longer had a job when he entered his old office and saw it had been taken over. That just isn’t right and I felt extremely sorry for him.

What’s a rule your employer implemented that backfired terribly?

Heh. This was years ago, at my current employer.

We’re a mailhouse: we take people’s mail, co-mingle it, sort it, and get a better rate from the Post Office. As we’ve grown, we’ve added inserting/fulfillment, and eventually, printing as well. Like a print shop, but built in reverse.

I was hired to be the print department, which I did for seven years before I became the IT manager.

As print designer, programmer, and general operator, I often had to talk with clients—sending proofs, getting information, etc., and I developed a good rapport with many, if not all, of them, sometimes better than the salesperson they were assigned to.

If there was something wrong with an order, I was often the first person they’d contact.

So it was with a large client of the banking world. They were a high maintenance/high-return client, so I always gave them my best customer service. This day, they called to find out about envelopes, which is not my department, but I knew whom to talk with and I told them I’d look into it.

I ran around the shop and got the info, and reported back: they were out of envelopes.

Oops.

I had neglected to loop the salesperson in on the request (they don’t have any production knowledge, usually, so never was an issue in the past), but our salesperson, for some reason I’m still not clear on, had lied to the client and told them we had envelopes in stock.

No envelopes meant that their time-sensitive prints weren’t going on time. So when I said, “Yeah, there’s no envelopes in stock”, you’d better believe that our client went into panic mode.

And of course, they called the salesperson back, who, not knowing that I had told them the truth, proceeded to lie…again. The client was displeased, told them what I’d told them, and demanded an explanation. There was much back-pedaling and BSing from the salesperson along the lines of “Oh, they’ll be delivered today, Toby just didn’t know…” blah blah.

My manager, the general manager, the sales manager, all called me in. “Why are you talking with clients at all?” They asked, incensed. I could tell that they were this close to just firing me on the spot.
“Because I have daily conversations with them about their jobs?” I offered.
“Not anymore. ALL communication goes through the salesperson.”
“Ooookay, but, just to make sure I understand this correctly, it was the salesperson that lied to the customer, right?”
“That doesn’t matter! You could have cost us this account!” Veins were popping on at least two foreheads.
“No, I’m pretty sure that does matter. If we’d been honest with them, there wouldn’t be a problem.” And that was the third forehead.
They talked among themselves for a moment and said, “Just…just no more talking with clients.”
“Your call.”

The next day, one of the client’s vice-presidents flew in from across the country for a surprise inspection. There were no envelopes. Because I was just a print jockey, I didn’t have to be in that room when those four people got chewed out. But I did hear (from the client) that they were glad at least one person in the company was honest, or they’d have had a huge legal fight (that they would lose) on their hands.

Yeah, we lost the account. And, yeah, relations with that salesperson and I were chilly from then on (months later, she left the company). But what hurt even more was that all those customers who were used to my excellent customer service were now getting the run around from their clueless salespeople. Several of them complained and accounts were shuffled around*, but eventually the people in charge figured out that the problem started when they took me out of the loop.

“Toby, it’s okay if you talk to clients again.”
“Oh, good.”
“Just…check with the salespeople before you report on production, will you?”
“You mean, in case we need to lie to them?”
*Uncomfortable fidgeting* “In case we need to apologize.”
Okay. Because I’m not going to lie to our clients.”
“That will be all.”

I’m happy to report that in the dozen or so years since, our sales team has become far more adept at apologizing and rectifying situations, and our production team has learned how to order before we run out of stock. My work here is done.

*Yes, a few clients did even suggest that they’d rather have me as their salesperson, but that idea was rejected by everyone—I don’t do sales, for reasons obvious from this answer.

Truth

What was the most popular band in the 70s that isn’t popular now?

Ask a teenager who is into classic rock to name the biggest performers of the Nineteen-Seventies. They’ll tell you names like Queen, David Bowie, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. Ask them “What about the Bay City Rollers?,” and they’ll answer: “Who?”

In the Nineteen-Seventies, if you liked popular music, you couldn’t escape the Bay City Rollers. From 1974 to 1977, they dominated the music scene, selling an alleged 120 million records. Yet you hear little about them today. It’s as if they’ve been erased from the collective memory.

Rollermania replicated the Beatlemania of the Nineteen-Sixties. Many however, felt the Rollers’ success was undeserved. As with all bands popular with young teenage females though, their success waned as their fans got older.

image 269
image 269

If you were female and under 14 in 1977, the Bay City Rollers were your world. No-one else wanted anything to do with them.

Time has not been kind to the Bay City Rollers. Unlike their predecessors, the Monkees, and their successors ABBA, the Bay City Rollers have not been declared pop geniuses. Classic rock fans have by and large spurned them. They are largely remembered today as an embarrassment. If they are ever mentioned at all in a documentary, it’s usually for laughs.

The Bay City Rollers’ record contract with Arista expired in 1981. Although this was the official end of the band, after 1981 versions of the Rollers continued to record and tour.

Eventually, nostalgia rescued the Bay City Rollers from obscurity. They appeared at the Punk and Disorderly 2010 festival, on the same bill with legends Stiff Little Fingers, Cockney Rejects, and Anti-Nowhere League. The ‘dag’ movement in Australia, which brought back faded performers and trends from the Nineteen-Seventies and Nineteen-Eighties, encouraged some to go to thrift shops in search of Bay City Rollers vinyl and memorabilia.

The Bay City Rollers saw little of the estimated £5 billion generated by their record sales and merchandising. Reportedly the nostalgia circuit enabled the Bay City Rollers to live the comfortable lives that their negligent and criminal management denied them, before death eventually claimed the main members.

I remember thirty years ago the Bay City Rollers undertook a low-key tour of Australia. This caused some excitement among the late-twenties females at work. One woman, who only listened to alternative rock, was quite excited that the Bay City Rollers were coming back!

image 268
image 268

You either hated them or loved them … the Bay City Rollers at the height of Rollermania. At least the Ramones admitted they liked them.

Kung Pao Beef

00100lrPORTRAIT 00100 BURST20200212145151299 COVER scaled 1
00100lrPORTRAIT 00100 BURST20200212145151299 COVER scaled 1

Ingredients

  • 1 pound beef boneless sirloin or flank steak
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 2 teaspoons cornstarch
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 dash white pepper
  • 2 hot green chiles
  • 2 green onions (with tops)
  • 1 red bell pepper
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 2 teaspoons finely chopped garlic
  • 1 teaspoon finely chopped ginger root
  • 2 tablespoons brown bean sauce
  • 1/2 cup diced canned bamboo shoots
  • 1 teaspoon sugar
  • 1/2 cup skinless raw peanuts, roasted

Instructions

  1. Trim fat from beef steak; cut beef into 3/4-inch cubes. Toss beef, 1 tablespoon oil, the cornstarch, salt and white pepper in glass or plastic bowl. Cover and refrigerate 30 minutes.
  2. Cut chiles into thin slices (remove seeds and membrane if desired).
  3. Cut onions diagonally into 1-inch pieces.
  4. Cut bell pepper into 3/4 inch squares.
  5. Heat 12-inch skillet or wok until very hot. Add 2 tablespoons oil; rotate skillet to coat bottom. Add beef; stir-fry 2 minutes or until beef is brown. Remove beef from skillet.
  6. Heat skillet until very hot. Add 2 tablespoons oil; rotate skillet to coat bottom. Add chiles, garlic, ginger root, bean sauce and bamboo shoots; stir-fry 1 minute.
  7. Add beef, bell pepper and sugar; stir-fry 1 minute.
  8. Stir in onions.
  9. Sprinkle with peanuts.

What is your evaluation of the recent visit to China by a delegation of Arab foreign ministers? Do they want China to attack Israel?

image 18
image 18

About twenty years ago, these Nations had little voice

They had to DO AS TOLD by the United States and it’s allies

If they showed the slightest independence, they would be faced with a four step method by the US

  • Make up accusations on Human Rights violations which would be the first step. Saddam got this in 1989 after the Iran Iraq war (Until which time he was useful to the West so they didn’t see any human right violations)
  • Impose Trade restrictions on such countries using shipping insurance and freight as a weapon and throttling their revenues which would be in Dollars. Saddam got this in 1994/95, ironically almost 4 1/2 years after he invaded Kuwait. Step Two
  • Impose Unilateral Sanctions and freeze their money and prevent them from being able to buy basic food and water at times not to mention medicines, hospital supplies etc. This is the FINAL WARNING. At this stage the Nation needs to depose it’s present leader and the new leader has to kowtow to the West.Step Three
  • Cause a color revolution or invade making some trumped up excuse.Step Four

Today these Nations have a very strong BACK UP SYSTEM

image 258
image 258

If the US goes too far, these Nations have CHINA & RUSSIA to fall back on

China takes care of the commerce and trade. The RMB ensures that these Nations can keep buying anything they want as long as they have Oil and Gas to sell China rendering most sanctions as impotent

Drilling machines, Machinery, Food, Paper Clips – You name it and China will deliver

Plus China’s enormous clout at the UN and it’s lobbying powers beat the US today. China carries 78 guaranteed votes at the UN Assembly against 54 Guaranteed Votes of the US

Russia takes care of the Grain and of the Military aspect

If the US try any tricks like they did in 2003, they could find themselves in a conflict with Russia being involved

Best example is Syria where Assad is very much in charge despite all the attempts by the US to depose him under Obama & Trump (?)


So the Arab Nations have a voice today

They can protest and they can demand things and the US can’t repeat it’s four step formula because that could send them fully to Russia and China like it happened with IRAN

That’s all the Arab Nations are looking for with China

They still want to be loyal to the US and it’s allies but if the US goes TOO FAR then they won’t buckle that easily and they have a back up with Russia and China

The US better not make the same mistake they did with Iran or Russia this time

Alien³ – What Happened On The Sulaco [HD]

What is the most clever way you have seen someone respond to road rage?

My brother. He was working graveyard shift at the time and had to commute quite a distance on the freeway for work. Of course, night time is when they do a lot of roadwork in this region to minimize impacts during rush hour. My brother is a burly sized guy. At the time he drove a little Hyundai hatchback. (Important to know for later). Anyway, one night, while commuting to work, the freeway is shut down to 1 lane of traffic for roadwork. Every one is backed up, traffic is virtually at a stops as everyone merges from 4 lanes to 1. Some person is a big old jacked up pickup truck gets behind my brother and starts riding his tail. Obviously, since this is a traffic jam, my brother can’t go anywhere. After a little while of riding my brothers butt, this person decides to turn on their high beam and start getting aggressive. Backing off, then running up to my brothers bumper and slamming on the brakes at the last possible second. At this point, traffic is down to one lane, so my brother stops in the middle of the traffic and proceeds to unfold himself from the car. Walks back to the truck and starts slamming his hand on the hood and screaming at the person. “it’s one f**king lane! I can’t go anywhere, I can’t go any faster! I can’t pull over and you can’t f**king pass me! If you want a fight climb out right now! Otherwise, Back the F**K off!”

Big truck never opened his doors. My brother waited a moment, went back to his car and proceeded on his way. Big truck turned off their headlights and maintained a respectful distance for the rest of the way through the roadwork.

Why would anyone want to retire?

I operated coin-operated amusements from about 1989 to about 2010. Foosball tables, Air Hockey, Video Games, Countertop Games, Pinball Machines, Pool Tables, Dart Boards, etc. I also retailed various Home Model games and parts, mostly Foosball.

I quickly realized, or maybe not so quickly, that when Laptops connected to WiFi had more attractive games on them than my coin-ops, and eventually even Cell Phones had more interesting games, that my business was doomed. During that same time many of my locations, mostly taverns and bars, and a few Game Rooms as well, were going out of business.

I had the policy, unlike most of my competitors, to own my own business without having an awful silent partner of a huge bank-loan. If I could expand using the funds from my business, I did, otherwise I remained small.

When the contraction began, as I lost a location, or one became unprofitable, I would just sell off the equipment and cash out. That went on for several years. But I kept my business open for my customers. The last 2–3 years I worked but had negative income. In other words, I was paying for the privilege of being able to work.

One year, I think it was either my last or second to last, I worked all year and found that I lost $6,000 doing so. More frustrating than that, I had $8,000 in licensing and taxation expenses. In other words, $8000 of my $6000 loss went to licensing and taxing authorities. After being in business for about 2 decades, you learn to hate taxation and licensing. That is when I closed shop. I just couldn’t see giving them ALL the money I earned and paying them an additional $2,000 out of my savings. Technically, I still have a non-operating business, that I don’t work at anymore.

Anyway, the end result was I quit working because it was more profitable to not work.

What is the rudest thing someone said to you because of your weight?

Not me… my wife.

My beautiful wife was a size five 10 years ago when she got pregnant with our first son. Here’s a picture of her right before she got pregnant.

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image 257

Her pregnancy was difficult. She gained a lot of weight and her legs and feet got so swollen that the last couple of months were almost unbearable for her. She couldn’t walk very far without pain.

One time as we were walking out of a restaurant when my wife was 8 months pregnant, a woman stopped in her tracks and said “Oh my God”… looking at my wife’s stomach.

She was in labor for 36 hours and finally the doctor said “That baby is not coming out.” C-section it was. We found out why he wasn’t coming out. The doctor pulled him out and said “That is a BIG baby!” He was 12 pounds 2 ounces.

Two years later we had our second and final son. He was 11 pounds.

The two pregnancies and two C-sections left my wife with a hernia in her stomach and muscles that just never healed back normally. Despite her going to the gym 4–5 times a week and eating right, her belly has never been the same.

At least 10 times in the years since, people have asked my wife how far along she is. People, please stop doing this to women. Don’t ever, ever, ever ask someone if they are pregnant. My wife has been brought to tears over this stupid question many times.

Here’s my beautiful family now.

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Update:

Wow, so many wonderful comments from all kinds of people. Thanks so much. It’s truly heartwarming to hear so many of you comment on how beautiful my wife is. She truly is a beautiful person inside and out.

Many have commented about how my wife could have corrective surgery. This is something we have researched and considered for several years. We are hoping that in the next few years we’ll be able to save enough money. It’s a very expensive surgery that we currently can’t afford, but it’s important for me that we get there and we get it done.

Preventing scars by allowing bruises

Do kids of bigger families wish they didn’t have so many siblings? If you were raised with more than 4-5+ siblings, what are your thoughts? Did you like having so many siblings? Were older siblings expected to take care of the younger ones?

I’m one of 5 kids. My parents always wanted a big family — in fact, they’d planned on 6 kids, but my mom’s health wouldn’t stand for it. Money was always tight, of course. My dad made a good salary but it still didn’t stretch that far among seven people, and my mom stayed home to take care of us. Both my parents believed it was very important for her to do that, and tbh any money she brought home would have been totally eaten up by childcare, anyway.

There was a time or two that I wished there weren’t so many of us, so there would be more money and attention for me. But which of my siblings would I wish out of existence? I could never imagine my life without any one of them. They’ve been my lifelong built-in friends. And sometimes enemies, LOL — we used to fight like cats and dogs! But as adults we are all very close, even those of us who are far apart in age. In a lot of ways I feel sorry for people who didn’t grow up with a lot of siblings like I did.

It probably makes all the difference that we didn’t just happen, our parents specifically wanted a lot of children to love. They always knew and respected our different personalities and needs. They sacrificed to make sure we were taken care of. They enjoyed our company—our mom was sad when we went back to school after summer break because she missed us! They never played favorites or acted like we owed them for existing.

And yes, the older siblings did take care of the younger, to an extent. Our oldest sister was Second Mommy in a lot of ways. I remember changing my two youngest siblings’ diapers. That’s how it works in a big family, you help take care of each other. But we helped, we weren’t fully responsible for our siblings. We just did our part. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to learn early in life that you’re not the center of the universe! You’re part of a family, and that means you’re there for them and they’re there for you.

Personally, I wouldn’t trade my family or the way I grew up for anything!

Evil Mother

As a patient, what’s the angriest you have ever been toward a doctor?

When a GI failed to listen to my history. Failed to look at records, radiology and pathology reports from my past. I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis while active duty over two decades prior, my diagnoses was switched by his nurse practitioner to Crohn’s when I was hospitalized.

He decided I simply had Irritable bowel syndrome and told me it was in my head. At an office visit when asked what my pain was, I reported it as a 5 (I had an obstruction) only for the nurse to LAUGH. I stood up and excused myself asking for someone else to check me in since she thought pain was funny. The office manager came in to apologize but looked at my husband the entire time. When he noticed he said: “You need to be apologizing to my wife, not me”.

I ended up receiving a certified letter that I needed to find a new GI (I already had), so I asked to speak with the medical director and was kicked out of the patient portal. This same GI dismissed me when complaining of my guts being on fire (I had pancreatitis). I ended up walking around with a dead gallbladder and ended up in the ICU for 5 days.

I just returned from the ER after messaging with my primary for a month trying to get a GI referral for my now second stone stuck in my common bile duct. She kept telling me to go. I kept saying what for? They won’t treat the pain I’m in nor will they listen. She assured me I’d be admitted for pain control.

I wasn’t.

The ER provider did not listen when I told him my history of translucent stones being missed and that they’ll see it on an ultrasound. What was ordered? A CT. Of course nothing was seen but my liver enzymes are high, potassium low and positive lactic acid…I stood pacing the 5 hours we were there hoping to be heard.

I wasn’t.

Getting taken seriously post Covid is extremely difficult. There are so many jaded medical professionals that assume anyone complaining of pain is just there for narcotics… a year of trying to get help and countless episodes of Pancreatitis with no pain control is barbaric and my blood pressure certainly shows it. I cannot eat without feeling like a bomb has gone off inside me. NSAIDS have already caused gastritis and duodenitis so those are off the table.

I already exceed the recommended dose of Tylenol due to no other option. Yay for my liver!!

My children have been told that if I go septic or get peritonitis and the worst happens to sue. I’ve left a paper trail for them to follow. It’s so amazing being a middle aged female. I can’t possibly know what’s wrong due to experiencing it in the past. Nope. I’m just some needy woman who doesn’t get attention at home. I just can’t with the assenine thought process

Pretty in China

What is the saddest thing that happened to you that you never shared with others before?

Year : 2009

Place:Patna

It was during the summer, my maternal uncle and his friend visited our home. As usual, my mother cooked lunch for everyone and everyone were engaged in a conversation.

I was bored and wanted to peek into my Facebook account. I made a quick move and sat in front of my desktop and was chatting with my virtual friends.

After few minutes, I noticed a firm hand resting on my shoulders. I turned back to see and to my shock it was my uncle’s friend. I got uncomfortable and I thought probably he is just patting me.

After a while, his hands traveled downwards towards my breasts and he tried to hold them . THAT was a sickening feeling! And, I was so petrified that I couldn’t move and froze in fear.

I gathered courage to just run away from the room and went out to the living room. I saw my mom and looked at her face but I fumbled. And, I couldn’t speak up anything regarding the event that occurred with me few minutes ago.

I locked myself up and cried that night. The next day, my mother could sense something wrong with my behavior. And, asked me “Beta, what happened?” ..

I broke down and with tears in my eyes , I went on with everything I had in my heart.

She was shocked and furious. And what she did made me relieved and happy!

The next day, my uncle and his friend were leaving for their hometown.

My mother went to the railway station, got Kurkure and Lays chips ( as that man got these things for me) and in front of …all the passengers she threw those packets on his face and slapped him and thrashed him with her chappals.

She returned home, and said me ” Promise me , you will speak up if anything will bother you and at least would share with me if anyone tries to touch you without your consent” .

I’m still stuck to the horror of that event and it’s very hard to move on. I try to keep a safe hand distance from men and in a crowded place where I am surrounded by men I still feel restless. I just want to run and run and hide myself some where.

I live a normal life but some where within me, these fear have created a little home for themselves.

Ronald Reagan on taxes

What is the lowest probability event you have personally witnessed?

Technically, *I* didn’t witness it – my cousin’s camera witnessed it. But it was the bullet itself as it came out of the barrel of my .357 magnum.

To impart just how rare of a thing this is, normally a photographer has to use a reeally, reeeally advanced (and extremely expensive) camera with an insanely high continuous shutter-speed, AND stage the timing of the shot (by that I mean both the camera-shot and the gun-shot), as well. And even THEN, sometimes they have trouble.

My cousin did not have that kind of camera. He had a Nikon. Something like a D500 or a D600. It’s a nice camera for a hobbyist, but it’s not even remotely designed to capture something like a bullet moving at 1,500 feet per second. As is evidenced by the fact that the bullet in the picture appears as just one really long rod-like streak, rather than the size and shape of a normal bullet. THAT PROVES JUST HOW SLOWLY THE APERTURE CLOSED, in comparison to the speed of the bullet.

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A person could easily spend their entire lives trying to get a picture of a bullet at that shutter speed, and never capture it even once.

And, mind you, my cousin wasn’t attempting to take a picture of the bullet itself, he was intending to take a picture of me just shooting the gun. So he was just manually clicking the camera button with his finger, not caring that much about the timing.

Would you buy a “mechanic’s special” used car?

This was back in the early 1970s. I bought 1969 Chevy Beaumont from a friend, I gave him motorcycle, that I had paid $500 for two years before, and was worth maybe $350, plus I think $200 cash.

I was managing a service station at the time, so I had access to all the tools and parts.

I had inspected the car before and I knew what it needed.

The water pump was leaking like a sieve, so I took it off, and at the time, you just used a cheap $3 kit to repair it, and replace. The fuel filter was plugged, it was just a piece of cardboard probably cost me 50 cents. The oil was so thick I drained a couple of quarts out, put two more quarts in, ran it for ten minutes, so that the black sludge would actually drain. Then changed the oil and filter. $7

There is a doughnut gasket between the exhaust manifold and the exhaust pipe. It was completely gone, no sign that it ever existed. It had been spewing out hot exhaust gas, and had burnt three spark plug wires to a crisp, so they weren’t firing.

At the time you could just buy bulk spark plug wire, cut what you need and put new caps on each end.

The donut gasket was $2, the sparkplug wire and caps was another $3.

The car was all done. I had put a sign up out front of the service station, offering to sell the car for $1200.

While I was still replacing the donut gasket, I was offered cash, no questions for the car.

They waited impatiently while I changed the donut gasket, gave me $1200 and drove off.

It had taken me about $30 and an most of an afternoon of my day off, to fix it.

This was a long time ago, but to put it in perspective, I could buy more than 400 cases of beer for $1200.

So, in the good old days, when you could actually work on cars yourself, I had a lot of mechanics specials.

Today I wouldn’t risk it.

What is the worst example of cheating you have ever seen, as a teacher?

Ice Tubes.

When I was subbing, I asked a question about atoms with the same number of protons and different numbers of neutrons.

Such atoms are called “Isotopes”.

Someone in class apparently knew that answer. But then people started playing a fun game of telephone, and the answer got … blurred.

In the end, several people wrote “Ice Tubes”.

Sad. But I couldn’t help but chuckle.


Runner up?

When I was in 7th grade, my science teacher approached me with a proposition:

“David, if you can get a 0% on the next science test, I’ll give you 100%.”

“Um, Mr. Morris, why would you do that?”

“Because I think people are cheating off of you. I know you know this stuff, and if you get every single question wrong, I’ll know that you knew all of the answers and were able to pick the wrong one. Plus, it’ll catch the cheaters.”

“Sure thing, Mr. Morris.”

I liked Mr. Morris. He was nerdy.

And so, on the test, I did my level worst. Answered every single question wrong on the Scantron (multiple choice) test.

And 7 other people all got zeroes.

I got an A in that class. Best zero I ever got.

Have you ever seen a rude or entitled customer get put in their place?

Right out of high school I was working for a big box retailer. I had only been working there a couple of weeks when I saw this happen.

I was working as a cashier and this little old lady (around 80 y/o) came up with her items – and she had quite a few of them. She was walking with a walker and moved pretty slowly.

We had just opened the doors for the day, so it was around 7am and there were only two of us, so pretty barebones staff. The rest of the staff would be in about an hour later – and this lady had been waiting at the door when we got there.

Just as she finished putting her items on the counter, this guy in a business suit comes up to the counter and asks me if I could ring him up really quickly – he was in a real rush.

I told him that was up to the lady who had just finished unloading her cart.

She said no – she was late for an appointment herself and he would have to wait.

He cut her off and INSTRUCTED me to ring him up right then. I said no. He then told me to get another cashier up front, right this damn minute. I told him the only other person working the store at the moment was the receiving guy and he was unloading the truck – and couldn’t use the registers anyways as he didn’t have the codes to the registers. I was the only cashier and would be until 8am.

He got really irate – I’m going to call the manager, etc. etc. etc. He was kept raising his voice until he was almost screaming. Other customers started to gather to watch.

When he finally got to the question of Don’t you know who I am? The little old lady yelled back at him – Yeah, you’re an asshole so shut the F up before I ram this walker where the sun don’t shine. She also said some other very choice words to him, but it’s inappropriate to post here.

He was just shocked by this little lady. He was so embarrassed, that he left his stuff in the basket, dropped it on the floor and left.

Turns out, this little old lady was in the Marine Corps Women’s Reserve during World War II. As the women’s division equivalent of a drill sergeant. She had been married to a USMC drill sergeant and her two kids became USMC drill sergeants.

She didn’t take crap from anybody.

What is the most condescending advice you received from someone who assumed you were poorer or less educated than them?

I grew up in New Hampshire where we had well water (without fluoride) and my parents never took me to a dentist. Consequently, by the time I got to college, my teeth were a mess.

I took a part-time job just so I could try to afford the dental work I knew I needed.

When I opened my mouth, the dentist looked inside and made a “Tsk! Tsk!” sound.

“Someone needs to start brushing their teeth and lay off the sugar,” he said in front of his hygienist. They shared a look of disapproval.

The truth was that as a college athlete on a partial academic scholarship, I ate healthfully and did brush after meals.

I found myself shaking with anger and shame which the dentist interpreted as fear.

“There’s no beating around the bush. You’re going to need a lot of work to save these teeth and it’s going to be expensive,” he advised.

I got out of the chair, didn’t commit to a second appointment, and the next day, went to another dentist who immediately sensed that the situation was more complicated than a snap judgment. He asked questions and when I mentioned growing up in New England, he said, “I thought so. I used to practice in Vermont and half of my patients were people who didn’t have access to fluoridated water. But don’t worry. I can see that you’ve developed good habits and together we can get you caught up.”

He quoted me prices that were half what the first dentist charged. He put me on a no interest payment plan where, for the next three years, I visited the office sometimes twice a week.

The process was all-consuming and expensive despite the plan and reasonable prices. There were times when I chose between meals and paying for dental work. I don’t recommend root canals on an empty stomach. But while I was never able to afford orthodontics, to this day, I never lost a tooth.

How was the US industry so powerful during WW2?

Just to give you an ideal on how strong the US industries was in world war two.

The Free French air force (1940–1943) was a sad display of brave but poorly equipped pilots, most of the experienced officers and pilots where parts of the royal air force (some 262 men in 1940 -which is far from nothing!) the free fernch air force was a mickmack of stolen plane from vichy air base, obsolete planes, some hurricane (at beset!) etc.

After the success of operation torch (november 1942) the American agreed to modernize the entire french army, navy, land forces and air forces included. The rearmement for the French air force was nickname Plan 7.

From scratch… the Americans totally rebuilded the entire french air force with some 33 fighter groups (bombers, fighters, reconnaissance)…while also rebuilding the French army with 3 armored division, several tank regiments (destroyed, medium and light), several paratrooper unit…. and modernizing the 140 vessels of the French navy!

the Fench air force went from this:

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to this… in a matter of one single year:

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-The French air force would be an important component for the Allies, fighting in the Mediteranean, eastern front, England, Normandy, France, Italy, Sicily just to name a few.

Basically the US industries were literally spewing thousands enough materials to rearm a nation air force for 3 decades!

Bourne Means Business – Part 3A: Intelligence

“A couple of nights ago, I was so tired from everything we’ve been through with our toilet breaking and our house flooding.

We got back to the hotel we are living in pretty late after the hour-long round trip drive to boy scouts and basketball practice.

We put the kids to bed as quickly as possible and some teenagers were loud in the hallway for awhile.

I was frustrated, but wanted to wait to talk to them at the right time so I could tell them about our situation to see if they could show compassion rather than become angry at the lady next door.

I didn’t see them the next morning at breakfast.

(But that night ) I noticed that they were Future Farmers of America kids from Kansas.

They had their doors cracked, so I decided to talk to them.

I let them know about our house being destroyed by water.

I told them that we wanted them to have their fun and we would appreciate their respect to let our kids get good rest.

The young man who answered the door told me that he was very sorry about what we are going through.

Before I went to bed, I noticed a note that someone had slipped under our door.

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image 261

I opened the note to find money.

(The note said:

We are more than sorry for,waking you and your family up the past few nights.

We hope everything goes well with you house.)

In a world where some people sit behind screens and become angry on social media, this young man restored my faith that the next generation can make eye contact and show compassion to the person right in front of him.

There were two other guys that I could see in their hotel room.

If anyone sees this post and knows who I’m talking about, please tag these guys so I can say thank you and God bless.

They set an excellent example for my children and their parents should be more than proud.

What is your best parking spot revenge?

When I was a teenager I went with my cousin and friend to an ice cream shop located in a strip mall. The parking lot was very full. There was a pristine looking truck parked in the intersecting point of four parking spaces. Literally one vehicle taking up a portion of four spots. The parking stalls weren’t too small for a truck like his either. Frustrated with this person’s sense of entitlement, I grabbed a sheet of paper from my school binder and wrote “I am so sorry about the damages. I will be in touch to discuss payment.” I left no contact information. I put it on his windshield.

20 minutes later we watched from the inside of the ice cream shop as the man looked at the note. He looked angry. Then, in the pouring rain, he spent several minutes walking around his vehicle, closely inspecting it for signs of damage. He got more than a little wet. We could see the moment when it clicked for him. He cracked a smile and looked like he laughed before climbing in his truck and driving away.

Is 60k a year a high salary in the U.S.?

Let me kind of start from the inside out. I live in Seattle (well, about 5 miles from the city of Seattle anyways, so whatever.)

Assuming 60k means $4,000/month take home, give or take, let’s look at some houses you could save up to consider.

In Seattle, with a 20% down payment, here’s a $2,500 mortgage payment.

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If that looks like a small 1br house, that’s because it is. That’s what a $600,000 budget gets you in Seattle, relatively close to downtown.

Go 30 miles south to a city called Puyallup, and you get this:

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Well, this is actually about $60,000 cheaper than the one above. Pretty profound difference right?

Go about 2 hours east and you’ll find homes about $100,000 cheaper than the Seattle house that look like this:

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image 273

Okay, so now we’re closer to a $2,000 monthly mortgage, and I gotta say, that’s a whole lot of house. It has what, 3–4 car garages, wrap around 2nd level deck with a view, plenty of land… Not bad for the half million range.

Still though, Washington is pretty expensive even in the “cheaper” areas.

Let’s head back to my dad’s home state of Ohio.

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image 272

Wait, is that a castle!? Yeah, that’s a f*ing castle. Not bad for that half million range, right? Except it’s not. It’s $280,000. With a way smaller down payment, you get your own castle for $1,200/month.

It comes with f*ing gargoyles!

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The US is a pretty big country…

That’s really the trouble here. I mean, if you’re a full-time work from home employee, there are places in the country that are actually great to live in, good medical, good schools, etc., where 60k is a great income. In others, it’s low income.

I showed houses, of course, but even food, electric, water, fuel, home/car repair rates, taxes, etc. can fluctuate wildly from place to place. If you’re restricted to a location, look at it, and if not, go look at what’s out there and what you like. It’s a big and beautiful place with something for everyone.

What’s something you can’t believe you had to explain to another adult?

I once argued with a graduate student over the weight of a Taco Bell burrito. She was hungry and so I suggested some half-pound burrito (I don’t remember what it was called). At which point the conversation went something like this:

“I can’t eat a half-pound burrito, that’s way too much food!”

“Actually, it’s only 8 ounces.”

“No, but it’s a burrito, so it’s heavier than that!”

“Um, no, it doesn’t actually matter what it is. A pound is 16 ounces, so a half pound is 8 ounces. A half pound of one thing weighs the same as a half pound of something else.”

“No, it’s more than that because beans are heavier.”

“Um, so you would argue that a half pound of bricks is heavier than a half pound of feathers?”

“Yeah, obviously bricks are heavier than feathers!”

“Even if they are both the same 8 ounces??”

“Well, yeah, because bricks weigh more than feathers!”

This went on for maybe a couple minutes while we were sitting in the drive-thru waiting to order. Honestly we had to finally agree to disagree before I went crazy. At which point I learned that a formal education doesn’t always mean a whole lot…

Emotion and belief

What was the British Army’s biggest mistake in WW1?

Allowing GHQ (General Headquarters) France to disregard hard intelligence.

British Military Intelligence was grouped per Command (GHQ Home, GHQ Ireland, GHQ France, etc.). This means nobody had the overall picture.

On top of that, most intelligence went through the Foreign Office and that intelligence, often on economic and and social matters in Germany was disregarded by GHQ France.

Brigadier John Charteris, in charge of Intelligence GHQ France was of the opinion that the hard intelligence was too pessimistic.

He believed, and convinced General Haig and his staff, that Germany was near to defeat as early as 1915 and pushed, together with General Haig for continuous offensives starting in 1916.

The estimates regarding available ammunition, air power, German troops movements, German troop morale, German civilian morale, etc. were all wrong.

The British kept on pushing for major offensives that resulted in massive casualties without ever having a real chance of breaking the stalemate until the Hundred Day Offensive in 1918.

In London, it was well known Intelligence GHQ France was a sick joke, yet nobody dared to upset the existing structure in which each Army Command could make its own decisions based on the intelligence they decided to trust.

Charteris wrote that “trusting the pessimistic intelligence provided by the Foreign Office would result in the staff at GHQ France losing hope and would lower staff morale.”

Charteris believed keeping the staff happy was essential to achieve victory.

The whole system was rotten to the core.

What did the average Southern general staff member or high ranking official think of the South’s chances after Gettysburg and Vicksburg?

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Joseph E. Johnston — the one who acted like he knew it was over.

The Confederacy didn’t have a general staff. Jefferson Davis thought he was a military genius and dealt directly with the commanders of the CSA field armies.

The top men, Robert E. Lee in particular, all held on to the bitter end. They might not have been confident of success, but they didn’t communicate any such doubts and fought until hope was gone.

On the final flight west from Petersburg, Lee received a note from U.S. Grant asking Lee to consider an end to hostilities. Lee showed the note to James Longstreet and asked his opinion. Longstreet read the note and handed it back. “Not yet,” he said. They kept fighting until the road south was blocked at Appomattox Court House.

Joseph E. Johnston might have been the one who acted the most like a man who knew more bloodshed was pointless. A brave man who had survived several wounds, he was always judicious about giving battle. He made one serious attempt to stop Sherman, and when that failed, fell back and told Lee he could do no more than “annoy” the Yankees. When word came that Lee had surrendered, he asked Sherman for terms even though the two armies were not even in contact. He had to go quite a ways to meet Sherman and surrender.

So dumb

What’s the weirdest thing someone casually told you as if it were totally normal?

Approximately four months after I got married to my wife, my business partner defrauded me and put me into over 35,000 dollars worth of debt. My businesses began to crumble despite my frantic efforts to salvage the situation. Soon thereafter, my finances nosedived into a freefall.

By this time I had already already come to certain terms about my wife. One of them was that she was in it (our marriage) for the money. Since I couldn’t stand the thought of a divorce or a broken home I did my best to conceal my financial troubles from her in the hope that I was going to find a way to get back on my feet again.

Well she did eventually find out when I started having problems with releasing funds to pay the bills and run our home. Soon thereafter she started her series of packing out of our home on the slightest imagined irritation or offence.

Each time she would pack out I would go right after her, pleading with every single one of her relatives. I did get her to come back a good number of times but I guess this really annoyed her and her mom in particular who was really the brain urging her to abandon ship and go look for greener pastures.

One day she calls me up on the phone and tells me “hey look, each time I try to leave you, you’re always going around my relatives and getting them to put pressure on me to come back right? Well, one of these days I’m going to come back and unalive you and then you won’t get me to come back anymore, will you?”

I never went after her again.

I had to keep alive to take care of the two toddlers she left behind.

‘I Remember the Secret Service Being Tougher’ Scene | Red

What was your best moment as a doctor?

I was one year into practice. A 14 year old girl was transferred to my hospital. She had been in a motor vehicle accident and been to two hospitals before mine. Her parents had been told she was permanently paralyzed waist down, twice. I was the orthopedic surgeon on call and had spinal privileges and the ability and privileges to implant hardware. So I was the surgeon they called.

I arrived and did a thorough spinal trauma exam. Yes she was paralyzed. The confounding factor was that one test (her anal wink) where I poke the anus with a needle and see if it contracts was still working. That told me she was not completely paralyzed or in spinal shock as the nerve that controls this is the last one out of the spinal cord.

I told her parents that I needed to operate immediately. I discussed with her parents she might be the same, slightly better or significantly better. I made no promises.

I decompressed her spinal cord, implanted hardware and fused several levels. As I wrote my post operative orders in the recovery room after 4 hours of surgery I saw her thrashing her legs about. I tested her motor strength and it seemed normal. I went out to talk to her parents to tell them that she was better but I couldn’t predict how much better. She might have sensation deficits or coordination deficits and we would see but that it was a very good sign that she was moving her legs.

Amber made a full recovery after being declared fully paralyzed by 2 hospitals and at least one neurosurgeon. She walked out of the hospital in a brace and 6 months later was released from my care to full activities. I am sorry, Amber, if your back hurts later in life. I did my best.

I received Christmas cards and gifts for 15 years from her family.

Her case was actually part of my oral board exam. It was quite funny to hear questions from these examiners who didn’t even do spine surgery as to why I chose to do surgery and how I chose the operation and what levels to fuse.

The moral of the story here is that a physician who learns a thorough spinal examination found a patient that did not have a complete spinal injury and fixed it. Being a physician is being a master of your profession, not just reading reports and listening to others.

What was the moment you cancelled the friendship with your best friend?

I had a best friend in high school. We remained close friends until we went off to the same college. Her financial aid hadn’t come in so I loaned her some money that I had been saving for a trip which she knew was very important to me. I found out through another friend that she had received her financial aid, and she had not offered to return my money, putting my trip in jeopardy. She had also made new friends at college and I felt ejected by her. I got angry, got the money back off her and stopped speaking to her. The following semester I went to London for a semester, which extended into years, which became permanent. About five years after I left she sent me a letter saying she would be in London and wanted to meet up. The letter included her phone number where she was staying (way before mobile phones). I thought about ringing her. But never did. Thirty + years later, I had grown up and regretted my behaviour. I searched for her on social media but no luck. Eventually she contacted me through my father (no idea how she got his address). I responded this time and despite being on different continents, we are now long-distance friends. It was hard but I apologised for how I had behaved back then. I had taken the word of someone else instead of speaking to her directly and I did the very childish thing of not speaking to her. She might have had good reason for hanging onto my money, which I didn’t give her the chance to explain. And, she had every right to make new friends at college. I could have been part of her new social circle, I chose to tantrum instead.

So, I am admitting all this as a message to anyone younger than me who indulges in this sort of behaviour. It is childish. Don’t do it. You owe it to yourself and your friend to sit down together and have an adult conversation about whatever is troubling you. It cost me one of the most important friendships of my life. Don’t make the same mistake.

What is the most offensive thing someone has ever asked you?

It was 3 years ago, I was 24.

My mom (egg donor) left my siblings and I to be with friends from her church 2 years after we got home from being in Foster Care for 12 years. She took our foodstamps with her and spent them on other families, while we starved trying to find her. The family she ran off to be with told her she wasn’t allowed to talk to her children- she obeyed.

I went to her church one Sunday at 14 to speak to her. The pastor and whole congregation was telling me ‘a 14 year old anorexic girl’ that I need to get a job and take care of myself while my mom took care of them. This was 2010, so you know I legally couldn’t work yet.

I couldn’t call, text, meet, or have any contact with my mom. She allowed it, so obviously she was happy she didn’t have to.

So, 3 years ago my egg donor calls me and asks me for some money. She “needs a car”, but doesn’t have any money. I still don’t have my first car and it’s 2023, now.

After explaining I don’t have money to give, I boldly asked her “Why would I help you if you abandoned me as a child? I needed you and you weren’t there”.

She offended me by saying with a chuckle “I had you kids so that when you got older and I need help, you kids will help me with money or a place to live”. I simply responded “That’s not how that works, if you wanted me to take care of you now, you should have taken care of me years ago. 1 timothy 5:8”. For a woman who claims she lives for the bible, she had to ask me what that meant.. it simply means anyone who abandons their kids or family is worse than a nonbeliever.

The Last Dragon (1985) “Craps”

How could the United States expand sanctions on China’s chip industry?

A better question is how could the United States expand sanctions on China’s chip industry without repercussions that hurt the U.S. more than China? And the Answer is it can’t. It simply can’t!

Chips are nothing unless it is used as a component of a product for example a smartphone or a computer. And China as a market dwarfs the U.S. by several folds. Today there are a billion Chinese consumer of high technologies compared to say 250 million in the U.S.! That is 4 folds higher! China’s consumer market alone is 30–35% if the entire world! Can the U.S. not be hurt if these consumers are forced into buying a different chips?

But worst is that from the 2/3 of the rest of the world market, most of their products are either assembled or made in China! That constitute another 30–40% of the world’s market! So the U.S. by sanctioning China U.S. sanctioning the U.S. chip makers of some 60–70% of the market. Or it has direct influence or possibly sell to only 30–40% of the world’s market.

But that is just the first nightmare for the U.S. Next, China will make equivalent products within 3 year’s maximum and then. Even this 30–40% rest of the world market will choose a Chinese make that is cheaper, faster and better than the U.S. products. Your entire chip industry will thoroughly collapse and U.S. government will be faced with high unemployment and bankruptcy!

So if I were you, I will vote in a smarter U.S. government!

I am dreaming about renting a van and traveling throughout America, from Canada to Patagonia, after I retire. To what extent is that doable and safe?

It is impossible.

Just around halfway, you will run into the infamous Darien Gap:

image 19
image 19

And there, the jungle is Master. There are no roads and those who try, fail miserably:

image 260
image 260

If a 4×4 cannot make it, a van even less…

You’d have to take a boat from Panama City to Colombia and that will be very expensive.

It’s better to sell your van in Panama, fly to Bogotá and buy another van there.

However, I would not do that trip on a van. It has to be a good 4×4. You need to do some research because not all car manufacturers sell in all countries; if you need a spare part and it is not sold where/when you need it, it may mean you’re stuck for a long time and there’s no guarantee that you will ever receive the part.

By the way, do you speak at least Spanish? In the countryside, people will not speak English at all.

What are the most common regrets that people have once they grow old?

I first met my wife when I was about 24 and very soon after had ideas that this was the woman I wanted to grow old with. I knew fairly quickly that she was divorced, but she always kept her private life private (I found out why later and agree with her totally) so it was some time later that I found she had 3 young daughters.

Being young, stupid and typically male, I didn’t want a ready made family, I wanted one all of my own, so I put the idea to one side. We stayed friends, but as we lived over 30 miles apart, we only saw each other occasionally. Years passed and the friendship continued to grow. In the meantime, she remarried and had 2 more daughters, then got divorced again.

Move on 24 years, I’m still single (came close a couple of times) but couldn’t find the perfect lady for me, but by now the older 3 are in their 20’s and the younger 2 are in their mid to late teens. Finally my stupidity left me and we finally got together.

15 years later, we’re married, still together and happy, even though she’s now bedridden. In case you’re wondering, the daughters have all “adopted” me, as have the grandchildren!

The long and the short is; don’t let hubris stop you from doing the right thing. We could have been looking at 40 years of happy marriage if I hadn’t been an idiot.

What was the best time you witnessed a bully get owned?

When I was in High School, there was a tall, thin Chinese boy in my swim class. He was very quiet and always had his nose in a book. I knew him because I was the one tasked with “helping“ the non swimmers.

One day, after class, we were outside waiting for the bell to ring so we could leave the Gym Area and head to our next class. He was off to the side leaning up against the wall while reading his book. A trio of boys (troublemakers/bullies) started grabbing for his book. So he asked them politely to leave him alone, so they just turned it up and managed to take his book. In a flash, he snatched the book back (that was the first clue).

Again, they tried to grab it, but he pulled it up out of their reach and asked them one more time to just leave him alone. But this time, the biggest jerk smacked/punched him in the face instead. Two of my friends and I immediately stepped forward to step in, but before we could take another step, this tall, gangly quiet kid had kicked the jerk on the side of the head and dropped him. EVERYONE who was there stood there in shock, not sure we had just seen what we’d seen, and the other two jerks immediately stopped and stepped back. The jerk who’d been kicked just sat there on the floor rubbing the side of his head while the kid just opened his book and started reading again.

To my knowledge, NO ONE ever messed with him again. That was one of the most impressive things I’ve ever seen and I’ve seen and been in a lot of fights/scuffles.

Crocodile Dundee (1986) “Mick vs Pimp”

https://youtu.be/3o6SNp9Ouu8

Have you ever told a ridiculous lie just to see how someone would react?

20 plus years ago I was ordered to lie to my buyer or lose my job. I was ordered by my boss despite my protests.

The company I worked for had just won a major contract to sell light globes through one of the largest hardware chains in Australia – Mitre 10.

However we were very much behind schedule having had a number of delays already. Many times I had been in to my buyer to let him know of our latest delay and his patience was wearing thin and my boss knew it.

She asked me to lie and blame the latest delay on an earthquake in Japan (our globes were coming from India) or any other lie I could come up with as long as it wasn’t the company’s fault, as in it had to be a force majeure.

I made an appointment with my buyer and sat across from him and literally told him this:

“Peter, as you know, our globes are coming from India. The ship left on time and the order was 100% filled and packed in a shipping container. Unfortunately inside the same container was a cage containing a couple of Bengal Tigers. They escaped their cage and have unfortunately ripped or damaged all of the light globe packaging.

But we could fix that by having new packaging made and printed here in Australia except that, also in the same container was an Indian elephant. This elephant also escaped its cage and has trampled all the globes. Not one globe was left intact. The entire shipment was destroyed.”

“She’s told you to lie to me didn’t she?” he said after listening to me spin this ridiculous lie. He knew full well what was going on.

We got on very well, he knew me and what I stood for. We stayed in contact for many years after we both left our respective positions. He knew the position my boss had forced me into. After asking me for a new eta he told me to leave.

He wasn’t happy.

But I did what I was ordered to do and did it in a way that kept my reputation intact.

Why do people choose 35 or 37 when asked to choose a number between 1 to 50 with both odd digits.?

This was part of an old trick that the magician/illusionist Kreskin used to do back in the 1970s. You’re leaving out two very important parts of the trick:

  • He would say that the two digits couldn’t be the same
  • He would also say “So 17 is OK, but 11 isn’t.”

It sounds like there’s 50 numbers, but if you look at the options, they’re quite limited: 13, 15, 17, 19, 31, 35, 37, and 39. It’s really only eight. When he says “17 is OK but 11 isn’t”, most people won’t choose 17 since it was used in the example so you’re down to seven choices.

When he tested his trick, he found that overwhelmingly most people choose 35 or 37. When used this trick in public, he would write down both “35” and “37” but would cross out 35 and say something like “I sensed you were thinking of another number but changed your mind”. He would then proclaim that you were thinking of 37. This way, even if you said “35”, it would be there on the paper and as an onlooker you’d still be amazed.

He speculated that by using “17” and “11” in his spoken example, it tended to cause people to go the other direction and choose numbers in the 30s.

What was the rudest thing that a guest did to your children in your home?

Our home, but my brother’s son. We had our aunt over, an old, strict, stuck-up childless lady. She was always proud of how polite and good-mannered she is, and despite not knowing a damn thing about kids, she was always ready to educate them, expecting all kids to behave like miniature grown-ups respecting the rules of etiquette at all times.

Well, it was a big family lunch on the terrace, kids running around, so she was a fish out of the water – there were too many kids to educate, she lost count. When I arrived, I was immediately greeted by my 4-year-old nephew, whom I kissed, cuddled and then I ceremoniously placed my bag in front of him.

We had a game: each time we met I had something in my bag for him. He could dive in and find it. This was our thing. Sometimes it was a dessert that he could eat while we talked. Sometimes a toy, or some other small surprise. This time it was a small dog figurine that resembled their own dog whom he loved so much.

While he was snorkelling in my bag, I turned to greet some relatives. Then I heard my Aunt Etiquette, shouting in a sharp head voice at my nephew. “What are you doing? Who do you think you are, young man?”

We all froze, including my poor baby nephew. I had to explain my fuming aunt that I had allowed him to search my bag, and that was our little thing, but she was not the person who could understand things like this. There were rules that we clearly disrespected.

My brother had to tell her that in his house, it’s also a rule to keep it quiet and not to shout with any of the kids. That shut her up, but just because she was hurt over her educational methods being disregarded.

My nephew still goes in my bag, and there is still something in there for him every time. He has never done the same with anyone’s bags or stuff. He knows the drill. He knows it’s just with me. My poor auntie will never get that kids are not stupid – they are kids.

What is the lowest probability event you have personally witnessed?

A rich friend of mine one day had an emergency and needed to borrow money from me.

I was on campus so I went to the ATM and withdrew what he wanted to borrow, but in true ADHD style, forgot to take my card back.

After I left, a few minutes later, I noticed a Northern European girl (college student, probably Nordic from the accent) running in my direction and panting.

She was looking at me so I stopped to see what was going on. Then I saw my bank card in her hands!

Amazing because there was a lot of money in that card and a nefarious person would have withdrawn all the money and absconded with it.

I was so amazed by her integrity and kindness that I did not even know how to react. I had gone a long distance and at the time, there was nobody around the ATM kiosk; so I didn’t know how she realized the card was mine.

I think she may have seen me from a distance as I emerged and when she arrived at the ATM, I had spent the same time going away from it. Then, in order to not lose me, she ran all the way back to bring it to me, in consideration of no return whatsoever—just because it was the right thing to do.

How probable a similar event could be?

I insisted on asking for her details so I could at least thank her properly—perhaps by buying her a gift or inviting her to lunch—but she wouldn’t hear of it.

When I asked for her phone number she smiled and replied that it was not necessary to repay her in any way and left despite my persuasion to stay for a while so I could get to know her (you see, such a kind person would have made an excellent wife—additionally she was beautiful and I was single [and young, maybe four or five years older than her]; alas, she left too quickly and I didn’t find it polite to insist further).

Aliens (1986) – They Can Bill Me Scene – Enhanced 4K UHD HDR Custom”

What is your best parking spot revenge?

image 265
image 265

This is two days ago at a very busy shopping centre with just over a week to go before Christmas day and this “person” decided it is OK to park across two spots.

It was so busy and so difficult to get a park I had to do a lap of the carpark before I got lucky and found someone who was about to leave and so I was able to grab their spot.

I was furious when I saw this car and so were a bunch of other people standing around complaining. What I and the others didn’t know was that this person, who parked across two spots, was a psychic. I never met them, never saw them either but they had to be able to see into the future.

Their future told them they would have 4 flat tyres when they came out from shopping and so to make it easier for them to change all 4 wheels they gave themselves extra room around their vehicle. That surely was their reason!

It would have been impossible to do if they parked in only one spot like normal humans do.

There is definitely an upside to be psychic!

What was the best time you witnessed a bully get owned?

In Elementary School near Dallas, TX in the 70’s there was a bully named Paul. He stole from the cafeteria cash register, disrupted class, ruled over the entire school due to his size and generally pushed his way throughout class. Then a new kid came to our class. His name was Todd and by appearance was a total nerd. Tall, skinny, braces and into comics and science fiction.

Then in band Todd revealed that he played saxophone. None of us were bold or cool enough to even try that instrument, we were scared and just went along being content with the common brass instruments provided by the school. He brought his own horn and was much more advanced as well.

Then he met Paul. Paul tried to impress onto him that he was the big man in the school and literally pushed him around. Todd did not even hesitate to talk things over, he just punched Paul hard right in the face. We were amazed, we never thought it possible that a bully could be bested.

Later during outdoor recess Paul tried to re-establish his dominance to the rest of the kids. Without talking, planning or organizing dozens of the kids picked up rocks, sticks and other weapons and chased him off the lot. One that has stuck with me was a kid who took off his belt attached a stick at the buckle and swung it very effectively.

Paul never came back to school. Todd fell into his role as a nerd, never tried to become king.

Quick Orange Beef

Orange Beef
Orange Beef

Ingredients

  • 1 pound flank, sirloin or rib-eye steak
  • 1 tablespoon finely grated orange zest, plus a little juice
  • 1 tablespoon soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon minced garlic
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1/2 pound sugar snap peas or snow peas

Instructions

  1. If time allows, freeze the steak for up to 60 minutes to make it easier to slice. Slice the beef as thinly as you can across the grain. If you’re cutting it so thinly that some of the meat shreds, that’s good.
  2. Combine beef with orange zest, soy sauce, garlic, salt, pepper and red pepper.
  3. Heat a wide, heavy skillet or wok over high heat for a minute. Add vegetable oil and heat another minute. Add garlic and when it turns light brown (a few seconds) add the beef. Stir the beef 2 minutes. Add peas and stir 2 minutes more, or until the beef has lost its red color.
  4. Squeeze half an orange over skillet ingredients and stir to combine. Serve over rice.

Serves 4 to 6.

If you have leftovers: Chill rice and beef separately. When ready to cook, heat 1 or 2 tablespoons vegetable oil over high heat in a wok or skillet. Add leftover rice and stir, breaking it up with a spoon or fork. When it’s broken up, add leftover beef and stir to heat through. Add soy sauce or toasted sesame oil, as desired.

What did a family member say or do that you don’t talk to them anymore?

so let me preface my answer; I no longer speak to my cousin but I didn’t speak to him much before the incident either.

My grandmother passed away the day my oldest son left for his spring break trip as a sophomore in High school, he was playing varsity baseball and invited on their tournament trip to another state to play.

I made arrangements to go on the trip to see my son play. This was an honor for him and one that he had worked so hard for. I got the call that my grandmother had passed away and I contemplated if I was still going to go on the trip or stay behind and attend the funeral. My grandmother had not been well for several years and honestly did not even recognize me or my children for the past two years due to her illness. I choose to continue on the trip with my youngest to see my oldest play ball. My parents were okay with my decision and actually helped me make the decision.

The evening after the funeral I received a nasty text message from my cousin stating how dare I miss the funeral. He understood that I was attending a baseball tournament but he came home from vacation for the funeral and he expected me to miss the baseball trip as well. It didn’t matter to him that I had visited her several times in the year leading up to her death even though she didn’t know me and he didn’t even know what nursing home she was in.

The fact that he inserted his beliefs in my life; and didn’t take into consideration the hard decision I had made was appauling to me. I wasn’t at peace with my decision but made the best one for my family at the time the decision needed to be made. I had said my good-byes to my grandmother heartfelt the last time she remembered me.

It has been 10-years since her passing and I still refuse to talk to that cousin when we are together at holiday functions. I will walk away if he comes over to sit at the same table I am at. He has never met my grandchildren on purpose as I don’t want to subject my grandchildren to his negativity.

Have you ever seen a tiny work mistake snowball into something catastrophic?

Oh, I have one. I was with my son at a Boy Scout jamboree back in the early 90’s in our state. The arranged for the state fish and game to come and train search and rescue. I had trained in search and rescue in the military and for Appalachion Mountain Club. I walked over to the game warden and volunteered to help, that I had a lot of experience in this sort of thing. He told me he had it, he was trained too and this was his job. The warden lined up like 300 kids and sent them into the woods to search for a injured hiker (two of the scout masters acting as injured hikers). The kids started walking across the field. Then went down an incline records the woods. As they started down the incline they started to run and then a battle cry like something out of bravehart came out of the crowd. By the time they hit the tree line into the woods they were on a dead high speed run. It was at this point I walked over to the warden, looked at the woods and asked him if he ever done this before? He said no, first time. I then asked, oh, by the way, how many kids went into the woods? First rule, know how many volunteers you send in so you know if you have accounted for everyone. He looked at me puzzled and said, I thought you guys knew that! I then asked, how far did you tell them to go into the woods before turning back? He said he didn’t. He then called for backup! The local volunteer fire department arrived and he sent them into the woods. I walked over and asked, oh, how many fireman did you send into the woods? He facepalmed and walked away. Three hours later, we accounted for every scout. Five were retrieved two miles away when they walked out the back side of the woods. It took another hour to find all the fireman. I walked over to the warden and said, I think that went well, don’t you? He walked away without answering.

Bourne Means Business – Part 3B: Intelligence

Have you ever seen an employer fire someone without realizing what a crucial role the employee played?

Yep , me . Two days after removing me from a job and my crew of 30 Americans to be replaced by a Latino crew I got a phone call .

Boss .” Hi”

Me”What’s up “

Boss “The engineer just told us they will withhold the final 10% if we can’t supply the electrical testing results that I know you did but that no one else ever does and he is persisting that he needs them . They are pissed .”

Me”Oh that sucks “

Now this was a 10 million dollar project . 10% of 10% would have been a good start . But :

Boss “Are they on the site somewhere , I know you were really organized so I’m hoping you can tell me where they are .”

Me”I have them in that log book I bought , ya know the log book you laughed at me for for using , ya know , the one where I kept records of what everyone did , deliveries , the weather and those test results “

Boss “Oh that is excellent can I swing by and pick it up “

Me “Well you could , but I’m looking out my window and the garbage truck is going up my road right now .”

Boss “You don’t have it”

Me”Nope”

Boss “ Oh you are supposed to keep them “

Me”I know , but as of the other day I don’t work for you any more and it was my book and I was done with it .Now ain’t that a bitch “

click

Have you ever been mistaken for the opposite sex? What was your reaction? Does it happen often?

Well, it wasn’t me, but I was involved.

See, about a lifetime ago, I worked in addictions. And I had this client. Beth. She was a young gay woman. Somewhere between 19 and 21. Totally butch and cute as a fucking button.

image 259
image 259

Sort of like this.

Long story short, she asked me to pick her up at a different place, one I happened to know was a trap house. When I pulled up at 8:30 in the morning, there were cops at the house next door, looking for a kid with a warrant.

Beth sees my car pull up, but hadn’t seen the police. She walked out of the front door and head down, beelined for me.

It took the cops less than five seconds to intervene.

Me: Fuck.

I roll down my passenger side window to eavesdrop. I can’t hear exactly what they’re saying, but I can tell by everyone’s body language they’re giving her a hard time.

Me: Double fuck.

I grab the badge that says I’m a county employee and I walk over to the encounter. The cops look at me. I smile, show them my ID, and stick out my hand.

Me: Good morning officers. I assume everything’s alright here.

Officer 1 (nodding to my client): You know this young man? Is his name John?

Me (chuckling): Well, I definitely know this young WOMAN. Her name is Beth. And we have an appointment at her PO’s office in 45 minutes.

Officer 2 (doing a double take): Young woman!?

Beth: Yes. I was trying to tell you.

Officer 1 (pulling out papers and quickly changing the subject): Do either of you know this man? John Doe?

Me: Haven’t seen him.

Beth shook her head no.

Officer 2: We’ve got a bench warrant on him, so if you see him around, we’d appreciate if you call the station.

Me: Will do. Well, we better get going. They’ve got the highway backed up again with construction and we don’t want to be late to see the PO. You gentlemen have a nice day. And thank you for your service!

When we got to my car, Beth freaked the hell out: Holy shit, Molly. I thought I was going down! They wouldn’t let me get a word in to tell them I wasn’t who they were looking for! And they totally thought I was that dude!

Me: Breathe, girl. It’s alright.

We drove around the block, headed to the probation office.

Me: Now you want to tell me why you’re living at the dope dealer’s house?


Beth was always amazed that I knew what was going on. Like it being a trap house. Like knowing who her dealer was. Like when I told her she needed to get tested for Hep C and she said she didn’t. Then I had to tell her that I knew someone who fucked her girl who was sharing needles. And rumor had it, the girlfriend was positive and was hiding it.

Sigh.

I was pretty damn good at that job.

Except Beth ended up going back to the needle. Then back to jail. I hope she’s somewhere today, clean and sober.

Or at least off the dope.

Dogmen, Hybrids, The Beast of Bray Road | True Stories of Werewolves

One of my regrets

Oh, I have a lot of regrets. Though, I try to minimize the mountain of built-up and pent-up regrets and memories. Often enough, though distraction and labor. In one way or the other.

Some of the regrets are silly.

Here’s a silly regret.

When I lived in Boston, I used to go into the thrift stores, and antique stores and browse around. Over time, I would often find this kind of heavy (smash on the table) white coffee cup. And it would be cheap. 25 cents more often than not. These things were great, and were really popular in the United States say up until the late 1960’s.

mug
mug

Many had logos, and designs. Often symbols. All nicely done. Like for Naval Ships. Or for government agencies. Or for awards and events. Like a bridge opening in 1954.

So I had amassed quite a collection of them. I loved them. I had, maybe, about 35 of these things.

Later on, when I was living in Arkansas, and going though a nasty divorce with the witch that was poisoning me and who eventually got me sent to prison, I left the state with just a few items of clothing and my books.

When the time came to pack up the mugs, however, on a whim, I decided to leave them behind.

I guess that I was too upset, and too lethargic over everything to take them with me.

I shouldn’t have done that.

And now I have regrets.

Do not allow emotion…

…tiredness…

…frustration…

…stress…

…to allow you to make hasty and ill-advised decisions.

You will egret them in the future.

(A word to the wise.)

Today…

BULLETIN: Russian Forces Hit NATO Operations Center Inside Ukraine!

World Hal Turner 16 December 2023

BULLETIN: 2:49 PM EDT  16 December 2023 — Starokonstantinov, Ukraine — Russian Aerospace Forces have struck a NATO Operations center with a Kinzhal Hypersonic Missile.  

Russian Forces report and confirm the destruction of a NATO operation center in Starokonstantinov, Ukraine, by a Kinzhal hypersonic missile strike!!

Initial reports say Ukrainian suffered 28 casualties and NATO lost at least 12 officers!!

The Ukrainian forces have given no statement and have disabled communication in the region to prevent information from getting out!!  They’re too late.

The US and NATO are now directly involved in Ukrainian combat operations against Russia in Ukraine!!

Standpoint Theory

What is it like to ride a camel?

Riding a camel is quite an experience. It’s not like hopping onto a horse or sitting on a bike.

First off, before you even get to the exciting part, you’re going to face the camel’s getting-up process. Camels are tall creatures and they rise in stages—back legs first—which can leave you feeling like you’re about to be catapulted over their head. Holding on during that initial lurch is key.

Once you’re in motion, the rhythm is unlike any other. Camels have a swaying gait, and it can take a moment to find your balance with the camel’s oscillating movement (they often walk in a ‘pace’, moving both legs on one side of their body simultaneously). Think of it like a boat slowly rocking side to side—you need to relax and go with the flow.

The height can be disconcerting too—you’re way up there. A camel’s back is a lofty perch compared to the average horse. This means you get quite a vantage point; it’s like sitting on a slow-moving balcony. For me, here in Portland, OR, the tallest I usually get is standing up on Mount Tabor, which is nothing compared to being atop a camel, I’d bet.

But it’s not an amusement park ride. Expect some discomfort, especially if you’re not used to riding animals. The saddle, often just a blanket or a simple framework, isn’t the epitome of comfort, and it’s going to test your core strength and your backside.

Now, let’s talk about the personality of your ride. Camels can be temperamental. They’re known for being a bit…

Well, let’s say they have their own minds. They might decide to stop and refuse to move. Or they might express their displeasure in a more vocal way. Yep, they can spit if they’re really pushed. But mostly, they’re majestic creatures—stoic and adapted perfectly to their environment.

Here’s a pro tip: wear long trousers and maybe even some padding. You’ll thank me later when you’ve avoided chafing and can still walk normally the next day.

Lastly, enjoy the quirks. It’s an ancient mode of transportation, a connection to a different way of life. Riding a camel can be an opportunity to take in the landscape at a slower pace, from the deserts of the Middle East to the wilds of Australia, or even special tours elsewhere.

All told, it’s about embracing a unique adventure, one sway at a time.

The USA needs this man

What tiny detail have most people noticed but never bothered to stop and think about?

Have you ever pulled a “push” door?

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Have you noticed that most public doors open outwards?

Picture this:

You’re at the cinema with your family or friends, enjoying a spectacular movie by some of your favourite actors.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, a fire breaks out and the fire alarm rings.

At first people are confused, but very quickly they catch on. In chaotic unison, everyone suddenly starts to panic.

And like a herd of buffalo that have just spotted a lion, everyone darts towards the door. You’re in the lead.

You reach the door first and quickly try to push it open. But it doesn’t budge. It’s a “pull” door.

Realizing your mistake, you quickly try to pull it open. But it’s too late. Everyone’s already at the door trying desperately to push through.

You can’t pull the door back, because everyone is pushing you against it and cramming at the entrance.

At the same time, people are yelling at you.

“OPEN THE DOOR!!!”

“JUST PUSH IT YOU F*CKING IDIOT!”

“PLEASE, I HAVE A BABY!”

But you can’t.

You can’t even move. Your body is being crushed against the door by the panicking crowd. Combine that with the smoke and you can’t breathe.

You’re suffocating.

This was someone’s reality in the Iroquois Theatre Fire of 1903.

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The deadliest theatre fire and deadliest single-building fire in United States history. Resulting in over 602 deaths.

Luckily, by chance a passing railroad agent saw the crowd pressing against the door and unfastened the hinges from the outside using tools that he normally carried with him, allowing the actors and stagehands to escape.

Because of this incident, most public doors now open outwards or are bidirectional.

And this is why a fire exit in particular will most likely open outwards.

Have you ever seen a mass exodus after a respected employee quit or got fired?

Not so much a mass exodus but a full team exodus – five of us. I was team leader but my elder mum (we lived together) was extremely ill, and it was clear to me that very soon the diagnosis would be one of terminal cancer, so I asked my Manager for a change in working hours so I could go home every lunch time to make sure she ate and was okay. I lived a 25 minute drive away so my intention was I would be absent 12 – 2 and make up the missing hour (1 of the hours being my lunch hour) by doing work at home that evening. Now bear in mind that for the entire 7 years I had worked for that company, and been team leader for 4 years, I had often gone in of a weekend UNPAID for at least a couple of hours to ensure that all was up to date, or took work home to do during the evening UNPAID. My team had a reputation for being fast, efficient, and friendly. We exceeded our targets every single year and received handsome bonuses.

My boss said NO. His only reason being that if he did it for me he would have to do it for others. The fact that this was exceptional circumstances and, as far as I could see, it would not be longer than a year or so (in fact, my mum died in the March of the following year, I had made my request in the July). I had already been headhunted by another local firm much nearer to my home (10 mins walk maximum) so I went back to them and they offered me a job. My boss was gobsmacked but still would not offer a change to my working hours, so I took the other job offer.

Well as soon as they knew I was leaving, my entire team started looking elsewhere and within a matter of months the entire team was gone! In fact, one member of the team actually came with me to my new employer :-D.

Repair

What is the one in a million coincidence you have ever had?

We sold a used car to a man who claimed that it was for his 16 year old daughter’s birthday that was the next day. He didn’t have all of the money, but said he would bring us the rest after he got his next paycheck. My heart went out to him, so I gave him the car with just a partial deposit. No surprises…he took the car and never came back. This was in Los Angeles.

Flash forward a few months, we were in downtown Las Vegas when who do I see but the thief who still owed us the money. My husband insisted it wasn’t him. I knew it was. I marched right up to him and demanded our money. The man was clearly caught off guard and then said that he didn’t have it on him. I said, “That’s okay, we’ll walk with you to the nearest ATM.” And that’s how we got the money that was owed to us.

Funny side note… the FBI called me a few months after that to see if I recognized anyone in a line up. There he was again! Turned out that he was part of an organized auto theft / chop shop ring. So much for my gut instincts!

Why does the military allow fresh, young, inexperienced college graduates to immediately enter OCS and gain the rank of a 2nd lieutenant, which places them above the rank of a master sergeant who probably has more than double the experience?

This is one of those “Yes but / However comma” answers.

Civilians with no military experience get hung up on this idea a lot, because they don’t understand two concepts that are pretty fundamental to how the US military (and most Western-style militaries, for that matter) operate: rank is not the same thing as authority, and officers and NCOs have fundamentally different jobs and responsibilities.

Caveat that I’m coming at this question from the perspective of the Navy. An officer or NCO from another service might things somewhat differently, but I’m trying to give as ecumenical an answer as possible.

A junior officer in the O-1 pay grade* is first and foremost an apprentice officer. Everyone understands this – the JO, his NCOs, his superior officers, etc. If a new 2nd Lt or Ensign doesn’t understand this, then his instructors at his commissioning source failed to do some pretty basic education. The new butterbar is there to learn how to be a leader; the philosophy of the US military is the best way to learn is by doing. So he or she is placed in a position of leadership and, at least by the pay grade table, outranks even the saltiest E-9.

*It’s different with officers commissioned from the ranks – the Navy calls them “mustangs” – and that’s a whole different discussion outside the scope of the OP’s question

This is where the however comma bit comes in. By matter of long service and experience, the NCOs in a unit have greater informal authority. The O-1 is there to learn from them. It’s supposed to be a good working partnership that combines mentorship, OJT, and maintaining unit discipline and morale. The officer should demonstrate willingness to listen and learn and respect for the NCOs’ experience and authority over the more junior enlisted; the NCO should demonstrate patience and good mentorship while respecting the officer’s rank and extending them the courtesy due that rank. An officer who confuses his pay grade with authority undermines the NCO in front of the junior E’s. An NCO who demeans or disregards the officer undermines the officer and fails in his duty to form the young officer into the kind of leader he’d want to work for.

Of course, people are people, in uniform and not, and it doesn’t always work the way it’s supposed to. Sometimes a new officer doesn’t know what to do with their by-rank authority but tries to hide it (which is silly, nobody expects a brand new officer to know how to do everything) by blindly issuing orders without listening to his NCOs, or trying to be chummy with the junior E’s (who are probably closer to his age), or masking their insecurity about their inexperience with arrogance, etc. Not all NCOs are created equal. Some don’t have the patience to mentor an officer, or the desire. Those are the “go away and let me do my job…sir” NCOs. And some NCOs are just plain incompetent, or might have been great technical specialists but with no talent for leadership. The military promotion system is, to say the least, by no means perfect.

When it works as designed though, it works well for everyone involved.

It’s the BRO code

What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve heard a parent say when fighting for custody in court?

This wasn’t when we were fighting for custody, but when I was trying to have our custody case transferred to a different courts jurisdiction.

The judge asked me why I wanted the change. I told him that the kids and I had moved to the jurisdiction of the other court and I planned on asking for a change to our custody case. I had no car and with the way the public transportation ran, I had to come up with the kids the night before court and stay the night at a friends house to be able to make it to court on time and then the kids would all miss a full day of school. The judge then asked their dad why he didn’t want the change to happen. He told the judge that it would inconvenience him (even though he had a car). I had never seen a judge yell at anyone before that day. He was screaming at my ex “How does your inconvenience trump your kids missing school, spending the night away from home, spending hours on a bus?!”

I got the change of jurisdiction.

Have you ever started playing mind games with the interviewer during a job interview?

If it’s a “mind game” to shut down a “mind game,” yes. I got quite blunt:

  • Interviewer: “You’ve proven to me you are an excellent designer; but you haven’t proven your writing skills. Here is a writing assignment. Work on it tonight and bring it to me tomorrow at 2 and I will give you your portfolio back then.” THANK YOU, NO.
  • Interviewer: “Do you have any idea who would buy our product? I’m thinking salesmen. But I’m not sure. Do you have any ideas? Maybe we could write some down.” THANK YOU, NO.
  • Interviewer: “It’s only a one-day assignment, but we have a zero-tolerance policy, you we will need a urine test from you before we will consider hiring you.” THANK YOU, NO.
  • Interviewer: “I need to test you. Here’s a written exam (!). You have :30 to finish it.” (I realize the “exam” is an article the hiring company needs for a trade-industry magazine.) THANK YOU, NO.
  • The worst mind game played on me was by a nice, professional man who I liked instantly. I arranged to meet him after the staff went home, because I was still working a full-time job. This position was for a temporary marketing person that would cover a specific 3-month project. There was the possibility it could become permanent. We had a lovely chat, and he seemed ready to hire me. He said “let me show you around.” After we toured the work area (and he showed me “my” desk), he said “Can you come back on Tuesday? I just want to introduce you to a few co-workers.” (I’m thinking he’s hired me; I lied to my current boss so I had all Tuesday morning.) On Tuesday morning, I arrived all relaxed and confident. I asked to see Mr. Manager (who was oh so nice, did I mention?). The receptionist said “Mr. Manager isn’t in today.” Me: “I’m sorry, he was interviewing me for the marketing position. I must have confused the day.” “No; said the receptionist. Follow me.” She led me into a huge conference room with six large banquet tables arranged so it was one big table. People started filing in… 7, 11, 12… I lost count. They were “the executive board” and they started peppering me with questions. I did my best to answer, but my anger at Mr. Nice Manager was boiling over. So he deliberately lied to me to presumably see how I acted “under pressure” and didn’t have the decency to even be there. Sorry, I won’t work for someone who would do that to a person. This was years ago, but I still see the company’s vans and I cringe; what did they do to the guys that drive the vans, hold them out a window by the ankles? I fell flat on my face in that interview. Maybe that’s my fault, but that is the definition of a mind game, and I didn’t want any part of someone who would do that to a prospective employee.

In short, most of my mind game interviewers are trying to get work done for free or betray a weird corporate culture (OK, you have a zero drug policy for a one-day temp job and you can’t find anyone pre-screened and in-house?). A few interviewers have left me waiting for :45 to over an hour; if they were “tricking me” or just disrespectful of me and my time, I didn’t really care because I left.

TL/DR: Pay attention to how you’re treated in an interview because whatever game they’re playing is going to get exponentially worse if they hire you. An interview goes both ways. Plus, if they’re obviously playing you, you have every right to “play” back.

Rufus in action

What thing are people starting to make not fun?

I still enjoy going to theaters with my girlfriend—sometimes. It gives us an excuse to get out of the house and focus on a movie with no distractions.

It’s gotten remarkably expensive. The last time we went, tickets were nearly $25 each.

But the biggest problem is the people. There is constant talking and playing on phones.

We had teenage girls sitting in the front row during a showing of Dune. Their screens were flashing in the front row. They were sprinting in and out of the theater like hyper children.

My girlfriend left halfway through the movie to use the bathroom.

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She bumped into the teenagers and called them out for ruining the movie for everyone and they didn’t come back.

She got back from her bathroom break and said, “Don’t worry about those girls. I took care of it.”

For a brief second, I was worried she’d killed them.

Sadly, in the past three out of four movie dates we’ve been on, there has been some sort of incident. It’s making movie theaters damn near impossible to enjoy.

I’m hoping it’s just bad luck on our part. It wasn’t always like this.

Is it possible to have a giant nuclear powered aircraft that stays in the air all the time?

Yes, indeed. Behold the HTRE-3 nuclear aircraft engine.

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Yes, this is real. Yes, the military was crazy enough to think this was a good idea.

In principle, it’s straightforward. A jet engine is just a heat engine. You suck cold air in the front, you heat it up, you spew the hot air out the back. What we normally think of as a “jet engine” heats the air up by burning jet fuel. But the heat can come from anywhere. A nuclear reactor? No sweat. They get plenty hot.

Thing is, it’s easy to make a lightweight nuclear reactor that gets as hot as you want it to. The heavy part of a reactor isn’t the core, it’s the radiation shielding around the core.

So. What do you notice is missing in this picture?

Core’s looking a bit exposed, innit?

The US military built and flew these engines [edit: an experimental reactor similar to the one designed to drive these engines, not the engines themselves: see comments!] in a test aircraft.

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They produce a lot of radiation, and you can’t easily shield them if you want them light enough to fly a plane. Which creates quite a problem for handling and servicing these things.

They considered a modular design where you could just undock the crew bits from the nasty radioactive bits…

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…and then just reprocess it or, I don’t know, throw it away or something.

Then some engineer somewhere said “you guys do realize this idea is both crazy and stupid, right?” and the idea went away.

America today

What’s the most pretentious thing you’ve ever seen on a résumé?

Originally Answered: What’s the most pretentious thing you’ve ever seen on a resume?

I received a resume from someone who had recently graduated from high school. They had one job on the resume and their job title was Director in Charge of Company Morale at a prestigious local law firm.

The resume lacked all the things I was looking for, but the job title listed intrigued me. I set the interview and was waiting to hear a litany of lies.

On the day of the interview this cleancut sharp dressed young man showed up. After brief small talk I asked about the prior job and what it entailed.

Turns out his Director in Charge of Company Morale Position entailed him going out each morning and getting coffee for all the partners. He said without their morning coffee, morale was very low.

Best belly laugh in an interview ever. I hired him. And he worked out well because he found a way to place a positive attitude on everything he did, however menial the task.

Edit: I am honored that so many people like my answer. Thank you all.

Update: I’ve had several people suggest editing the gender from “they” to “he”. At the time I read the resume and set the appointment, I had no idea if the applicant was male or female. Gender was not a decision point in our hiring process. This is why I have left the answer unedited. Thank you all again for the overwhelming response.

Filipino Egg Pie

filipino egg pie
filipino egg pie

Ingredients

  • 6 large eggs yolks
  • 1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
  • 1 cup warm evaporated milk
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 2 large egg whites
  • 1 (9 inch) pie crust

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. In a large bowl, beat 6 large egg yolks, sweetened condensed milk, warm evaporated milk, nutmeg, vanilla extract and salt until mixed well.
  3. Whip egg whites in a separate bowl until they form stiff peaks.
  4. Add the whipped egg white to the milk mixture slowly until well incorporated. Pour into pie shell and bake for 45 to 50 minutes until the center is set.
  5. Let pie cool completely before serving.

Attribution

Recipe and photo used with permission from: American Egg Board
Recipe created in partnership with @thetastebud

What is the weirdest thing you’ve walked in on?

I had a very rocky second marriage, but I loved him so kept going back for more of the same bad treatment. (I have learned better behavior now!) Our marriage consisted of lots of comings and goings, and we split up with each other quite frequently because we were really incompatible. Being around each other all the time was a trial.

He was a big time gambler and many other things besides, and I couldn’t cope with all of his bad habits. I dare say I had some bad habits, but I didn’t have any addictions, thankfully.

One time, the last time, I left home and went to stay with a friend, my husband and I talked very frequently on the phone and missed each other’s company. It was a very strange affair.

Anyway, I decided to move back in for good and went back to the house one day with all my luggage. I got to our home and went in, and what do you know, I heard a familiar sound coming from our bedroom that was on the third floor. When I climbed the stairs, I realized what was happening. Despite the fact that my husband knew I was coming home, he was up in our bedroom making love to another woman.

Needless to say, that was grounds for divorce. He caught Covid in prison and died two years ago.

Traditional vs. Progressive

What did your pastor say or do that made you quit his church?

My pastor and his wife tried to convince me to stay with my abusive husband and just live separately until our children were both adults and then start living like a married couple again. Why would we have to live separately you ask? Well, that would be because a few days before this conversation I had Child Protective Services (or CPS for short), the San Berdarnio County Sherifs Office, Fort Irwin (I and my ex-husband were both in the Army at the time) Military Police, and Fort Irwin Criminal Investigation Department (or CID) at my door at 10 at night trying to take my kids away from me because he FINALLY got caught beating my son. (Before this point I could not prove it as there were never bruises or marks) But this time he threw a phone at my sons face because he did not get up at 5 in the morning when his 4 year old sister had to get up to go to daycare (My son was 12 at the time) and it “wasn’t fair that she had to get up that early and he didn’t so I make them both get up”. My son did not have to be to school until 830. My daughter had to go to daycare before we both started work in the morning but got to go back to sleep at daycare so can’t figure out where fairness comes in to play.

Anyway, the pastor and his wife call and say that divorce is against the Bible and we should stay married and live apart until the kids are adults and can move out and then we continue, at that point to live together. I told them flatly no because he was also abusive to me and oh, by the way that woman he has been bringing to church as a “friend?”, yeah he has been having an affair with her for over 2 years. So, tell me again about what the Bible says? I also may have threw in there about how the Bible says there are a few reasons why divorce is accepted and a couple of those just happen to be abuse and adultery. I may have also mentioned that they have no room to talk when their own daughter was getting divorced from her husband because he came out and told her he was gay and that is NOT an acceptable reason (for that religion) to get a divorce.

What is the most misunderstood profession?

Being a CEO.

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I often ghostwrite for executives. My job is to help tell their story, either in book or article form. The more I learn, the more I feel bad for them.

Not one of the CEOs I’ve written for looks back fondly on the actual day-to-day CEO experience.

They loved being CEO. But they hated the job. Their phone was ringing at all hours. Every problem rolled up to them.

They had to decide the fate of many people’s careers and lives. There was immense pressure on them from stakeholders and owners. The hours they put in were beyond intense.

Most are now very wealthy — but they were undoubtedly aged by the job. It changed them.

When I was in finance, I worked alongside a senior VP and sat in on many of the executive meetings, taking notes for my boss. This was not a room full of happy people.

When you start making $200K, $300K, and up, you can expect to pay a steep price and often get a target on your back.

It is constant worry and emails and people problems.

The idea of the CEO who kicks back, smokes cigars, and yells “mush” couldn’t be further from the actual job.

If China has so much money to invest in other countries, why don’t they develop the poor parts of China?

If China has so much money to invest in other countries, why don’t they develop the poor parts of China?

Which poor part of China do you refer to? Can you give just one specific example that China has failed or ignored to develop?

If you are not convinced, let us just look at the situations from the poorest part of China. Here are the last four provinces with the least GDP per capita (nominal) in China: List of Chinese administrative divisions by GDP per capita – Wikipedia

:

  1. Gansu province ($4735, 26 million people)
  2. Yunnan province ($5612, 48 million people)
  3. Guizhou province ($6233, 36 million people)
  4. Guangxi province ($6270, 49 million people)

Just for reference: India ($2036), Vietnam ($2551), Mongolia ($4026), Albania ($5289), South Africa ($6377). Note that all the listed are poorer than Tibet ($6550, 3m people) and Xinjiang ($7476, 24m) in term of GDP per capita.

We will look at these provinces and see what China has done specifically to develop these poor provinces.

This will be an extremely long post. Please read at your discretion. But if you read on, I’m sure you will learn a lot of new things about China:

1. Gansu province

Gansu is poor for a reason. On one side, you have the massive freezing Tibetan Plateau. On the other side, you have the deadly Gobi Desert.

God doesn’t want you to live here. But you insisted.

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Image credit: 地球知识局

What kind of environment are we talking about? Have a look at the following picture. This is what a typical village in Gansu looks like.

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Red stones, golden sands and deep valleys. Gansu is the Nevada State of China. There are a lot of sites just like the death valley and red canyon in the USA.

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The Taolai River Gorge at Jiayuguan Pass in Gansu

Imagine you are living here. You grow your food in the valleys but you have virtually no rainfall at all. Even if you managed to grow a few tons of wheat magically, where you do sell? To the nearest city? That’s fine. Please drive 5 hours out of this god damn dry mountains.

Even if you manage to find a customer to buy your wheat. He will buy your wheat for $150 per ton. But your transport and fuel cost to move the wheat out of these mountains has exceeded $100 per ton. Considering other costs, okay … , so do you grow wheat just for losing money?

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A mountain road in Jingtai County, Gansu

So you have no choice but to leave the village and become a Foxconn worker in Zhengzhou and spent your days making iPhones. That’s what most Gansu people would choose to do. As most people are leaving the rugged land to the cities, your village becomes deserted just like this:

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An abandoned village in Dingxi County, Gansu

What has the Chinese government done to address this problem?

For the 13th Five Year Plan (2016–2020), the central government has poured a huge amount of money in building expressways and railways across these God damn hills. And what’s more, they are not building “Level 5” bridges just enough for people to move. Instead, they are building “Level 50” shiny and massive bridges.

What are the differences between a “Level 5” bridge and “Level 50” bridge?

Here is an example of a “Level 5” bridge in France. Short in length and height. You have to rush down, cross the bridge and climb up the mountains.

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Here is an example of a “Level 50” bridge in Gansu. All you need to do is to pass through at the speed of 120km/h.

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Tian Ning Gou Bridge in Gansu, Tianyong expressway

These “level 50” bridges are indeed very expensive to build. But, on the other hand, they are very cost effective if you consider the amount of fuel saved for trucks, trains, and cars! You don’t have to go down and up again and again.

Even if there is already a “level 5” road along the valleys, the government is still not satisfied. They want to build another high-speed “level 50” expressway along with it. In order to run at 120km/h across the mountains and valleys, the expressway has to be filled with tunnels and bridges so that it is more stretched. This makes trucks and cars to drive faster with less distance. So the fuel cost and transport costs can be reduced significantly.

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Provincial expressways S2 in construction in Gansu (35°21’14.3″N 102°49’02.0″E)

In 2019, the total “Level 50” expressway length in Gansu has exceeded 4242km [1] (speed limit 120km/h), which is even longer than Mexico. And it is almost three times longer than India’s total length. Not only expressways but Gansu also has 4 lines of high-speed railways running at 250km/h to 350km/h (宝兰,成兰,兰新,兰渝).

In the next 14th Five Year Plan (2021–2025), the government will promise to connect every prefecture city of Gansu with high-speed railways and expressways.

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Lanzhou-Xinjiang high-speed railways

Why are “Level 50” bridges, roads and railways are so useful?

Imagine you are the farmer mentioned above, thanks to the village road built around you, you can transport your crops to your nearest city faster and also at a lower cost. The distributor in your nearest city can also find customers in a province that is even further away. People who are at 2000km away can buy your wheat at a higher price, thanks to the giant expressway network. Overall, you can finally make profits in growing wheat in Gansu!

Still think what I said is made-up or propaganda?

Well, here is another real-life example. Imagine you live in a distant village in Gansu and you want to buy a mobile phone from Taobao (Chinese Amazon), what does it cost to ship a package of 1kg from Shenzhen to Dunhuang in Gansu in 2019? Note that the total distance is around 3500km.

You can use this Chinese website for shipping cost calculation: 快递价格和网点查询 – 快递小帮手

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According to the website, the total cost for shipping over the 3500km is 15RMB ($2.2) and it promises to arrive in 3 days.

For comparison, the total cost for shipping one 1kg package from Boston to Reno in Nevada (a similar 4000km) in the USA is $26.13 according to the UPS shipping price calculator under the UPS 3-day service.

Therefore in the USA, it requires 10x more money to do the same thing! And note that they are both counted in the GDP calculation in both countries. Is it fair? Of course not. This applies to other services too.

That means Gansu is not that “poor” as we originally thought.

Instead, Gansu is also blessed with the richness in “green” natural resources. On one side, you have the freezing Tibetan plateau. On the other side, you have the hot Gobi desert. Boom! The temperature difference causes constant wind blowing. God doesn’t want you to live here but he really gives you another gift: the wind power.

Therefore, Gansu is the leader in its renewable energy sector. It has the world’s largest on-shore wind farm:

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Gansu Jiuquan Windfarm 40°40’31.2″N 95°24’44.5″E

There are so many on-shore solar farms in Gansu as well. I am not sure if it is the world’s largest. But you can spot them everywhere on Google Earth.

If you can’t grow crops on the land, then just grow solar panels.

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Gansu Wuwei Solarfarm 38°06’05.1″N 102°18’00.2″E

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God also said, “Let Gansu be light”. Thanks to the Chinese, do you see the holy light?

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Gansu Dunhuang Tower Solarfarm 40°03’49.3″N 94°25’29.9″E

However, despite China’s “great leap forward” in solar farm construction, they are faced with severe problems in Gansu. They are generating too much electricity and it is much more than the Gansu people can consume. The private sector is also investing heavily in Gansu, making the government unable to control the overall supply of the solar power in Gansu.

As a result, it is estimated 40% of the wind and solar electricity is wasted in Gansu [2]. We could not store the energy because currently, we don’t have giant batteries. Storing a huge amount of energy remains a problem to be solved by future technology.

The remaining choice is to transmit this huge amount of electricity through the ultra-high voltage power grid to the power-hungry Eastern China. However, building a 3000km power grid is not an easy task and people along the grid would complain about the danger and radiation above their houses. I will write about this on-going Chinese mega project and its achievements and problems in another answer.

In summary, these conclude the development in the poorest province of China —Gansu. The GDP growth for Gansu province in 2018 is 10.54% [3]. And it is still far from enough compared to other provinces because we still have a lot of distant villages in Gansu that are yet covered by decent roads and bridges. We will wait and see how China continues to eliminate poverty here.

2. Yunnan & Guizhou province

The next three poorest provinces: Yunnan, Guizhou, and Guangxi are next to each other in the Southwest of China. There are around 140 million people living here.

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Image Credit: 地球知识局

Yunnan & Guizhou are poor for the same reason. So let’s look at them together and later we discuss Guangxi specifically.

If you have already been there, you might have already enjoyed those amazing tourist attractions in these areas. But they do not represent the majority of the people nor the whole poverty situation.

What is the real situation?

As the Indian subcontinent continues to squeeze, terrains around here are becoming more and more similar to “wrinkles”, as mountains are squeezed higher and the rivers continue to carve valleys deeper.

Yes, it is like the wrinkles of the skin.

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Imagine you are living in the middle of the “wrinkle”. You would be surrounded by tall mountains and deep valleys.

It is nearly impossible to move around without flying. Building roads is also nearly impossible. You would be isolated for your whole life. To get a taste of what it is like, you can just go to Google Earth and experience it. (26°12’28.4″N 99°07’57.1″E)

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Even if you can climb across the mountains to the other side, you have to climb up and down another three similar mountains in order to reach a nearby city.

As a farmer, can you get rich if you live here? That’s nearly impossible. If you are ill, you have to call a helicopter to fly to the nearest hospital. But you have to be rich to afford a mobile phone. No signals? Oh, why not just wait and die?

Are you desperate? Most likely.

But the Chinese said: “Hold my beer, I got this”.

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Beipanjiang bridge, Liupanshui, Guizhou (World’s highest bridge)

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Pu-Li-Te Bridge, Xuanwei, Yunnan (World’s third highest bridge)

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Jin-An Bridge, Lijiang, Yunnan (World’s fourth highest bridge, to be completed in 2020)

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Ya-Chi-He Bridge, Qingzhen, Guizhou (World’s fifth highest bridge)

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Liu-Guang-He Bridge, Liutong, Guizhou (World’s sixth highest bridge)

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Ping-tang Bridge, Liutong, Guizhou (World’s largest viaduct bridge, to be completed later in 2019)

A similar and smaller viaduct bridge can be found in Hunan as well. Here is the video for the beer:

The Chinese said: “Hold up. There are ten more to come in the next five years”.

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A high-speed railway arch bridge in Guizhou. Bullet trains pass through this bridge at the speed of 250km/h.

For comparison, a similar railway bridge is also being built in India. It is the Chenab Railway Bridge in J&K. Chenab Bridge – Wikipedia

However, this bridge started in 2003 and it was originally intended to be completed in December 2009. But ten years passed the Indian people have still not finished it.

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If the Indian engineers wanted to delay for another 2 years, the bridge would no longer be the world’s tallest railway arch bridge. The new King will be crown to the Sichuan-Tibet railway bridge.

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That’s enough for bridges. For the rest of the bridges please refer to List of highest bridges – Wikipedia

. Basically nearly the world’s top 100 highest bridges are all from Yunan and Guizhou (I’m not talking about China. Just the two provinces).

And we are not comparing the length of the bridge, because expressways in Yunnan and Guizhou are pretty much always in bridges or tunnels. So it is pointless to compare their length.

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The takeaway for this section is that please don’t take for granted if you see the expressway network like this in Yunnan and Guizhou.

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Think about their terrain and imagine how difficult it is to build expressways here.

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Now back to Yunnan and Guizhou. What kind of other developments that are worth mentioning?

4G Network Coverage

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Even in the most distant village with no good roads, you can always find 4G base stations installed. In terms of 4G, no other countries in the world can be compared with China. Not a single developed country like the USA, UK nor Japan can be comparable in such a scale.

According to the Ministry of Industry and IT in China [7], there are 1.204 billion users connected to 4G stations in China. There are 3.72 million 4G base stations installed in China, exceeding 20% more than the rest of the world combined. Guizhou has achieved 100% 4G coverage in all its 10k villages and Yunnan reaches 65% in its progress.

In 2019, the package price for unlimited 4G internet is 98rmb ($14.5) for one person and 134 rmb ($20) for a family of three. Compared to the USA, you have to spend $40 in T-Mobile just to have a 10GB of internet. Compared to India, although India has much cheaper Internet than China, their 4G coverage is relatively low compared to China.

Why does the 4G access useful? Well, this is another answer I will write. But just to draw your curiosity, do you notice that there are more and more Youtubers from Yunnan and Guizhou broadcasting their daily farming life?

Making Toufu online?

Picking tea leaves online?

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Hydroelectricity

Of course, 4G signals are inseparable from the electricity. Yunnan and Guizhou are also blessed with the hydropower. Most of the worlds’ largest dams and power stations listed here are from Yunnan and Guizhou. List of largest hydroelectric power stations – Wikipedia

. They contribute to 30% of the hydroelectricity generated in China.

Yunnan hydropower generation: 280.4 terawatt hours [4]
Guizhou hydropower generation: 65.8 terawatt hours [5]
Three Gorges Dam (only) generation: 88.2 terawatt hours [6]

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Just follow along the four major rivers in Yunnan from Google Earth. You can find many stages of Dam on the same river. For example, the Jinsha River (Yangtze) has nine stages of dams.

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A dam along the Jin Sha River 26°48’23.9″N 100°26’46.4″E

Compared to the power transmission and storage problem in Gansu, hydroelectricity generated in Yunan and Guizhou are directly transmitted to power up the Guangdong province and Hong Kong, because China has already built the ultra-high voltage power transmission line.

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That means a fraction of your made-in-China products are actually manufactured using the hydro-power from Yunnan.

Data centres

Thanks to the abundance of electricity and water resources for cooling, the Chinese government has chosen Guizhou as its most important base for data centres.

Deep in the caves of Guizhou, lies the Tencent T-Block data centre (腾讯七星数据中心). This is the place where the data of all Chinese Wechat/Tencent Video (Chinese Netflix) users are stored.

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In 2018, Apple has also decided to place its iCloud (China) data centre in Guizhou. This is where all Chinese apple users information are stored in China.

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Now pretty much every important IT company has set their data centres in Guizhou, such as Alibaba, Huawei, China Mobile, etc.

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Why do most companies choose Guizhou, such a poor place, to be the destination for data centres? Why not other places?

Because Xi Jinping wants it. He recommends IT companies to place their data centres in Guizhou to enjoy cuts in taxes and electricity bills. As Guizhou have more data centres, it finally has something to focus for its own to develop.

Why does Xi Jinping think Guizhou is so special?

Because Xi found that the leader of Guizhou, Chen Min’er, was exceptionally capable. It was Chen who led Guizhou to attract so many investments and called for IT companies to setup big data centre installations in Guizhou. Thanks to Chen’s excellent governing skill in Guizhou, he is now promoted to the Mayor of Chongqing.

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I think he will be the next president of China after Xi Jinping (if he continues to demonstrate his governance skills).

On the other hand, China can finally build its Great Data Bank of China in Guizhou so that the Chinese government can regulate API usage based on Chinese laws and validation using Chinese government licensed blockchain E-authentication.

Yes, this is really the authoritarian style of development in the Internet area. New forms of democracy are created: the government can instantly sample on what do the citizen feel from their mobile phones (like instant vote).

3. Guangxi province

Guangxi and Northen Vietnam are actually very similar in terms of geographic positions and terrains. They both have plenty of flooded plains, hilly mountains and coastal areas. Their cultures are actually very similar. Both are the descendants of the Nanyue Kingdom.

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In theory, their GDP per capita should be similar but Vietnam suffers many wars compared to Guangxi. Now Guangxi GDP per capita is $6270 and Vietnam is $2557.

Compared to Northern Vietnam, the main problem for Guangxi is that all of its tributary rivers are flowing east instead of heading the south to the sea. These tributary rivers are then forming into one giant Pearl River at Wuzhou and then reaches the South China Sea in Canton.

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Even for today in China, there are still a lot of heavyweight goods shipped through the rivers because of its cheap costs. This becomes really a problem for Guangxi. Since all its rivers flow directly to the east, all river-based shipment from Guangxi has to go through Guangzhou and Hong Kong.

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From the above picture, the biggest embarrassment for its Capital Nanning is that ships have to travel 1000km to the east to reach the sea, even though Nanning is only 100km away from the coast in the south. Just imagine the extra cost added for the Guangxi people for international shipment!

A similar terrain can be found in Brazil. A huge mountain can be seen blocking the coast. This is really a curse from God. That’s why the Brazilian economy is not so good and could not develop manufacturing.

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Guangxi is slightly better but shipping costs in Guangxi are more expensive compared to other coastal provinces in China. Due to the high costs, investments and talents would not come and it suffers the severe brain drain from the nearby Canton. This is the ultimate reason why Guangxi is poor.

On the contrary, if you look at Northern Vietnam, they are blessed with a wide natural river — the Red River. 5000-ton ships can easily reach Hanoi from Hai Phong. Low-cost transportation gives Vietnam the destiny to be the next center of low-end manufacturing. With the current US-China trade war, Vietnam would receive more foreign investments and its economy would be sky-rocketing.

Hopefully, if the Vietnamese government could follow the same approach as the Chinese government and massively expand its infrastructure and energy sectors, Hanoi-Hai Phong (the red river delta) would become the next mega metropolis around this region and they may experience over 10% growth over the next three decades.

Therefore Guangxi people have to be aware that Vietnam people are catching up quickly. What they need to do is to try everything best to improve its infrastructure and attract shipment from Chongqing and Kunming.

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For the above map, you can see that it is actually closer for Kunming to go through Vietnam to reach the sea. If the Vietnam government is really clever, they should reduce the shipping costs (by improving road quality) and attract goods from Kunming and Tibet and use Hanoi port. This would make Hanoi to become the next logistic center for international shipping.

That’s why it is vital for the Guangxi government to counterbalance Vietnam and promote its connections to Yunan and Chongqing.

However, in the past two decades, the Guangxi CCP government have gone in the wrong direction. They’ve built three giant international ports along the coast. But not many people and ships wanted to use them. The combined port shipment volume is only 200million tons, which ranked at 18th among all ports in China.

Originally for Kunming and Chongqing, it is always cheaper and easier to go through Guangzhou instead of coming here. And what’s worse. You made all your three ports (Fang-cheng-gang, Qinzhou, Beihai) compete with each other, instead of focusing on building a combined giant port.

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Image: A massive expansion in Fangchenggang port. Now it is pretty much a “ghost port”. 21°33’59.4″N 108°22’37.0″E

And what’s worse. The top CCP leader in Guangxi focused on building expressway and railway connections to Guangdong and ignored the roads to Kunming and Chongqing. As a result, more Guangxi people are drawn by the gravity from Guangdong and they are not coming back. This causes a severe brain drain in Guangxi.

People are leaving and ships are not coming. That’s why the Guangxi CCP leader did not get promoted. However, Guangxi is not a province, but it is an autonomous region in China. So it has its own laws and regulations. One of its regulation is that the Guangxi leader must be a Zhuang entity Zhuang people – Wikipedia

. This race-based selection obviously breaks the meritocracy system of CCP. And I think this is probably the reason why Guangxi is not developed so well. That’s why I suggest to remove the “autonomous” status and make Guangxi a province.

Lucky the current CCP leader in Guangxi has realized the problem and focus on promoting connections between Yunnan and Guizhou. And also they proposed to

Build Canals!

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For the 13th Five Year Plan in Guangxi, the CCP is planning to “evaluate” the possibility of the Ping-Lu Canal (平陆运河) that connects the Pingtang river to the Qinjiang river in the south.

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The canal is 20km long and it is very expensive to build. For reference, it is half the length of the Kra Canal in Thailand. It requires a lot of in-depth studies before the CCP finally decides to spend billions of RMB to build the canal. Whether it is worthwhile, it remains to be seen.

If it were built, it would be truly a significant boost to the Guangxi economy. With connected water, ships can then carry extra-heavy machinery and goods across most of the river network in Guangxi. It would finally solve the Guangxi problem!

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For the road and railway network, Guangxi still has a lot of rooms to improve in terms of density and accessibility. I’m not listing their detailed projects because they are similar to Yunan and Guizhou.

Conclusion

After this extremely long post, I hope you can know something about the on-going developments in the four poorest provinces of China. The take away is that China invests much more domestically than abroad. These are all in the news but people just don’t pay attention to them.

And also note that most of the above projects are led by Chinese state enterprises. They lose money for doing this. But they bring huge social benefits to the general people. This is called “socialism with Chinese characteristics” and it is working. That’s why the West such as the USA and Europe could not achieve nor even consider doing it.

Finally, let’s finish up with a view of the expressway in Guangxi province. Thank you for taking the time to read this extremely long posts.

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Please enjoy the real China 🙂

College-Age Carousel Rider Tries Lecturing Men That A “High Body Count Should NEVER Matter”

What is the best example of human kindness you have witnessed recently?

I was at a mall today, paying bills, having lunch and planning on a visit to the gym (pat on the back: I did all three!).

As I walked to the bank, I noticed an older man sitting by a water feature, dipping his fingers in the pool. This was unusual as people here in Thailand rarely do this in a mall.

When I passed him again 10 minutes later, he was standing in the middle of the walkway, searching to his left, then to his right, over and over, looking distressed.

I was about to approach him when a group of (uniformed and backpacked) high school students got to him first. They spoke to him respectfully and quickly realized that he didn’t know where he was or who should be with him.

One young man sprinted off to Information while the others tried to distract the old man to calm him.

A few moments later, a female security guard approached the group, having been notified by Information. She told the kids they could leave, but they refused, feeling they should stay and keep ‘grandfather’ happy.

An announcement was made, and within a few minutes, a very worried, middle-aged couple rushed over to the old man, and although they fussed at him for disappearing, they were clearly relieved.

The high school students were thanked, and then they respectfully took their leave.

The old man watched them go, turned to the couple and asked, “Where are the grandkids going?”

The couple smiled at him and gently said, “It’s ok, Father. They are going to school.”

The old man replied, “They are such good kids. You raised them well.”

Why do some civilians choose to stay in war zones?

Yesterday, I met a journalist friend who had just arrived from Avdiivka and we were talking about this issue.

Although this city in the Donetsk region is at the risk of encirclement by the Russian army and there’s no electricity and no internet, there are still some civilians living there.

My friend visited some of them in a bomb shelter and while he was doing his interviews, a woman in the shelter died.

Not from old age (she was fifty) or a sickness but because she had drunk hand sanitizer. Some people there are so poor that they cannot afford to buy alcohol so they drink disinfectants.

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Avdiivka, Ukraine. (Picture: Forbes)

There are obviously two kinds of hand sanitizers, the clear one and the colored one, and one of them is extremely poisonous. The woman drank the wrong one, started sh*tting blood and died a few hours later.

Of course, not every civilian who stays behind in a war zone is a complete alcoholic but a lot of them are old, sick, or suffer from mental disorders.

Many of the civilians in Donetsk are also of Russian origin and wouldn’t feel much at home if they were to evacuate to Western or Central Ukraine.

Their lives were already screwed up long before the war and now, they simply don’t care anymore.

What’s the cleverest cheating you’ve ever seen as a teacher or student?

We take our exams in the classroom, where there is a projector that looks like this. It’s hanging from the ceiling and underneath it, there was a shiny piece of plastic that the school had never bothered to remove.

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One of my friends, who sat directly below the projector, looked up to see the bottom of the projector in the middle of a Chinese exam. He was that friend who struggled a lot with Chinese, and guess what he saw at that moment?

The answers of the guy who sat next to him, reflecting off that shiny plastic.

The projector itself was black, so he could see the white exam paper easily. He copied down the answers, which was easier to do because that exam was multiple choice.

A few days later, we got our papers back and he was copying the answers off the wrong page, but in the next exam he used the same trick and made sure that he was on the same page as the person next to him (who was smart).

We don’t use that classroom now because we moved to a different building, but this “cheating hack” was passed down to the next generation and I’ve heard that they now fight for the seat underneath the projector. The teachers never found out.

Why do the men that admire Tyler Durden also admire Patrick Bateman when the two are about as opposite from the other as anything could ever be?

Love this question.

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The Yuppies of American Psycho (and similar characters in the Ellisverse) are the Masters of American Consumerist Culture. They are the, in a sense, heroes of the Consumerist Myth. Rich, powerful, beautiful, and crushingly successful at everything they put their mind to.

So successful at consumption are they that they have moved beyond merely consuming things; they consume people and souls.

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Fight Club could easily be put in the same universe. But instead of looking at the Masters of said Universe, Fight Club looks at its losers. The men who weren’t born to wealth and didn’t make it up the ladder.

The movie, through Tyler Durden, constantly points out the failures of these men to reach the levels of the Patrick Batemans of the world. Here is one particularly blunt, powerful scene:

Of course, Durden is also a consumer — in that he is actually consuming Jack and plans on erasing him entirely. He also “consumes” Marla, and eventually holds most of the Fight Club men in an iron grip. He even begins to morph into a “Master of the Universe” like-figure.

Notice the comments on the male model. In the Ellisverse, models are of the Elite.

Notice here that not only does Durden look like a male fashion model, he states that it’s exactly what Jack wishes he could look like and how he could live. And he’s not wrong, obviously. “All the ways you wish you could be? That’s me.”

As I see it, while Durden and Bateman would absolutely be opposed to each other’s “political” goals, such as they are, a Durden victory would be a “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” kind of thing at core.

Basically: Patrick Bateman and Tyler Durden really aren’t that different. If Durden were born in Bateman’s world he would be another Bateman; if Bateman were born in Durden’s world he would be another Durden (might sound implausible but remember, Bateman is crushingly charismatic, intelligent, and quite driven when he wants to be).

While Bateman is more openly aristocratic, Durden fairly quickly sets himself up as the undisputed King of Fight Club and clearly sets himself apart from the other men. I can’t find the video but there is a scene in the movie where the men dig ditches while Durden yells at them through a megaphone. He’s not in the ditch with them.

Durden presents himself as a hero of the common man… but he isn’t a common man himself. And the fact that he isn’t, makes him far more appealing. Because who wants to be the common man?

So.

They are the Elites of their Universes. All the women want them and the men want to be them. So of course many male viewers would admire them both and ignore their drawbacks. The political stuff is immaterial — at core they represent the same desires that many men have.

What’s the most ridiculous thing someone has claimed to be allergic to?

This is a prison story.

An inmate at a certain prison in the western US claimed that he was allergic to sodium. Now, this is ridiculous because, as my freshman chemistry teacher once pointed out, sodium is in everything.

Inmates with special diets (medical, dental, allergies, etc.) would go at the end of the line after everyone else had gotten their meal trays. Sodium guy would go last of all and put on a performance that was annoying and stupid but oddly comforting because of its predictability.

Prison staff mostly want things to go smoothly. Nobody was yanking this guy’s chain or trying to piss him off. At each meal they genuinely tried to come up with something he could eat. And at each meal, when his tray slid out the window, he would look at it and say (or scream), “I can’t eat this! It’s got sodium in it!” And he would slide it back into the window. This happened every time. Eventually he would eat something.

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Once I saw him drinking a half-pint of milk. Showing him the ingredient list, I pointed out that it had sodium in it.

“That’s OK,” he said. “The sugar counteracts the sodium.”

Right. Whatever.

Who was the most ignorant American you have ever met?

A previous boss.

I was required to issue a monthly report of sales by geographic region, listing each project.

One was a project in China sold to New Sun (China) Energy. I dutifully indicated the sale was in Asia.

My boss protested. “No!” said he. “You need to report that in Europe.”

I blinked and said, “But it’s in China.”

“Yes,” said he. “China’s in Europe.”

“Um…no.. China’s in Asia.”

He slammed his hand on his desk and said, “China’s a state of Germany, now report it in Europe.”

Me: “Ok” while silently muttering dumbass.

We had another dispute over Egypt. Apparently Egypt is also in Europe.

I had a grand time explaining to our lead sales person (a Chinese lady citizen of China) and our production manager (a German citizen) that Germany had expanded its population by a billion with this master stroke of geopolitical theater. They both rolled their eyes.

Yeah, boss was that dumb.

What made fighter jet dogfights obsolete after World War II? Was it because of radar or missiles or something else entirely?

They weren’t obsolete after WW2. They still occurred over Korea, Vietnam, the Falklands, and Israel.

  • In Korea – There were no good air-to-air missiles yet, so jet aircraft had to close in to within gunnery range to shoot each other down. There were some pretty epic dogfights in Mig Alley, over the Yalu River.
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  • In Vietnam – Missiles were now available, and the “clever fellows up on high” declared the dogfight was dead because jets could now fly at Mach 2, too fast for dogfights. That meant the F-4 Phantom was fielded with 8 missiles…and no gun. Well, turns out the dogfight wasn’t actually dead yet, and while the missiles of the time were “adequate” for downing bombers flying straight and level, they were pretty lousy against maneuvering fighters. And the ROE (Rules Of Engagement) for Phantoms required a visual ID, eliminating the BVR capability of their Sparrow missiles. So, dogfights were in fact…not obsolete.
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  • In the Falklands 1982 – Dogfights still weren’t dead, and there were some pretty intense battles between British Sea Harriers and Argentinian Mirages/Daggers. But, we could see the beginning of the obsolescence of dogfighting because of the AIM-9L Sidewinder.

While still an Infrared Homing (Heatseeker) missile, the “Lima” Sidewinder no longer required getting on a opponent’s 6 o’clock so the heatseeker would home on a hot tailpipe. The Lima Sidewinder was all-aspect, meaning it could get a lock from any angle…even head-on, completely changing the nature of dogfighting.

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Even, now with missiles such as the AIM-9X, Meteor, R-77–1, and the AMRAAM, which do not require being within dogfighting range (WVR—Within Visual Range) to score kills, I am reticent to claim the dogfight is dead. I’ll say it no longer will be the bread and butter of aerial combat, but won’t go so far to say the dogfight is obsolete.

It still may happen. Let’s see what happens when Ukraine finally gets their F-16s, and make a decision then. I expect most kills will still occur at BVR, but we may still see genuine dogfights once more. And when both sides are operating stealth aircraft, who knows what we’ll see?

What is the most disrespectful thing someone did to you while you were on an airplane?

Disrespectful?? Weird absolutely. About 8 months ago flying from Portland Or to Amsterdam Ne.

Woman behind my seat has a infant 6–10 months old. Infant cries and cries and cries. I put in ear plugs. I doze off. About an hour later she taps me on the shoulder and hands me said infant. “I need to talk to my husband in first class, you watch her”. She hands me the baby and is gone about 3 hours. Eventually the cabin staff goes and finds her. She is angry because she is hauled back to her seat. I hand her her child and she is upset.

To this day I wonder why she would hand off a perfectly good infant to a total stranger and wander off.

Candy Cane Fudge

candy cane fudge
candy cane fudge

Yield: 24 pieces

Ingredients

  • 2 cups white chocolate chips or semisweet chocolate chips
  • 1 (14 ounce) can sweetened condensed milk
  • 3/4 cup crushed candy canes

Instructions

  1. Line an 8 inch square dish with parchment paper, making a sling to lift the fuge out when ready to cut.
  2. In a medium glass bowl, combine the chocolate chips and sweetened condensed milk.
  3. Microwave on 50% heat in 30 second intervals until fully melted and combined. Be sure to stir well in between each interval.
  4. Transfer melted mixture into the prepared pan.
  5. Sprinkle on crushed candy canes and slightly press into the top.
  6. Refrigerate for at least 4 to 6 hours to set or freeze for 2 to 4 hours (allow to thaw for 30 minutes before cutting).

Attribution

Photo credit: ohsarahrose on Visualhunt

Deadline U S A 1952 (720p) Humphrey Bogart, Ethel Barrymore, Kim Hunter

Steroids and past decisions

When I was a Senior in High School I was “big” into weight-lifting. I was “pumped” and I was quite an “amazing specimen.”

In fact, during the class physical check-up for us boys, the female doctor and the female nurse asked me to go to the back room (in my underwear) and pose for them. They just smiled and looked on.

I, being young and a dumb shit, didn’t know what was going on.

Anyways, some friends offered some steroids to me to help me get and build up mass. I thought about it, but you know, I was concerned about this. So I made a doctor’s appointment, though my mother, and went to the doctor.

When the doctor asked me what was wrong I had a trouble answering. I did a lot of hemming and humming.

Finally I asked about steroids, and the doctor (a woman) told me that it was a serious, SERIOUS issue and that I should not do it.

She saw me off, and then her son (who was in my class) brought me an envelope filled with papers about the dangers of steroids. She also continued to check in on me. She did this over the next five months. And she checked up on me though my mother.

Well, I really didn’t need a follow up.

I just didn’t do any steroids.

It was one of the BEST things that I ever did. And honestly, I am so happy that I lived in a small town and community. Access for these kinds of medicines was difficult and I did not pursue them. Thank JESUS!

Our decisions ALWAYS possess late-game impact.

You are the sum total of your previous behaviors. And that is why it takes a while for the affirmation campaigns to work. You have to untangle decades of previous verbalizations.

Smile. All of you are doing great right now. I believe in you all.

Today…

What is the best food to eat in France ever?

The best food in France, ever?

The best food in France ever is the Jambon Beurre.

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But that’s just a ham sandwich, and you’re correct, it’s a ham sandwich, but not just a ham sandwich. The jambon beurre is a gastronomic lesson. It exemplifies how to make great food: take the best possible ingredients and prepare them with great technique, and no unnecessary fluff. The jambon beurre is simply a freshly baked baguette, delicious jambon de Paris and creamy 85% fat butter. Sometimes you’ll see sweet and sour cornichons or a few slices of cheese, but nothing else. No lettuce, tomatoes, onions, jalapeños or overpowering Subway styles sauces or dressings. This sandwich is just an assembly of three fine ingredients and it is divine.

Jambon Beurre
Jambon Beurre

Quality ingredients and good technique are the keys to great food. French cuisine taught us that lesson and the jambon beurre shows us it is true.

Wendelstein Church on Wendelstein Mountain, Bavarian Alps.

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What was your “I am surrounded by idiots” moment?

I was in the office photocopier room with a fellow engineer.

I noticed there was a stack of paper in the recycling bin.

And the big stack of discarded pages, looked a lot like the smaller stack of pages that were spewing out of the machine.

I had time to notice this, because I had to wait while he loaded more paper into the copier’s empty paper trays.

I asked, “Do you have a lot of people coming to an engineering meeting? Usually there are only a few people at those meetings.”

“Oh”, he said. “I’m following the new directive to save paper by making only double-sided copies for meetings.”

I asked, “What’s wrong with all these copies in the recycling bin?”

”I forgot and I made those copies single-sided.”

I was shocked for a moment, then asked, “Why not actually save paper, by using the single-sided copies you already printed?”

“Because if I walked into the meeting with a bunch of single-sided pages, everyone would say I’m wasting paper.”

“But now you are wasting even more paper by re-printing everything again.”

“Yes, but I won’t get in trouble, because nobody knows.”

I thought about ’turning him in’ for deliberately wasting paper.

But having worked in the corporate world, I knew he was right.

The rules are intended to save paper, but the way those rules are enforced, can lead to more waste, not less.

It might seem like the engineer was the idiot.

But he was right.

We both knew that our management would punish us if we admitted even a small oversight.

The real idiots were those managers.

Siebers Tower, Rothenberg.

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Body Count

United Arab Emirates officially stops using U.S. Dollar for oil trades

World Hal Turner

The global financial landscape is witnessing a seismic shift as the United Arab Emirates (UAE) boldly moves away from the US dollar in its oil trade dealings.

This strategic pivot aligns with the broader ambitions of the BRICS economic alliance, of which the UAE is a recent addition. 

The changeover, involving the transition to local currencies for oil transactions, marks a significant departure from the long-established dollar dominance in the global oil market.

The BRICS bloc, comprising Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, recently expanded its membership to include the UAE, along with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran, and Argentina.

This expansion signifies a growing inclination towards de-dollarization among these nations, a move that challenges the traditional hegemony of the US dollar in international trade.

The UAE’s decision to prioritize local currency over the US dollar in new oil deals is a clear reflection of this sentiment. This move isn’t just a mere policy shift; it’s a strategic maneuver in the complex chess game of global economics.

By aligning with the BRICS nations, the UAE is not only diversifying its economic partnerships but also reinforcing its position as a global oil powerhouse.

This change could potentially reshuffle the cards in the international oil trade, impacting the dollar’s stronghold and introducing a new era of currency dynamics in oil transactions.

ONGOING CATASTROPHE FOR USA

The shift away from the U.S. dollar is not some distant, arcane, thing which doesn’t affect YOU.   It is affecting YOU already and it is going to get worse.  Much worse.  In fact, it’s going to be a catastrophe.

You see, since the 1970’s, ALL sales of oil, worldwide, have been transacted in “Dollars.”  Everyone who sells it, sells in dollars.  Everyone who buys it, buys in dollars.

In order to do that, every country on earth needs to hold “dollars” in its central bank.

Now that countries are starting to sell oil in currencies OTHER THAN Dollars, the central banks around the world won’t need to hold all those dollars.  They will start to send those dollars BACK to the United States and say convert these back to OUR currency.

As dollars come back to the U.S.  and other countries currencies are exchanged, THEIR currency will rise in value compared to ours.  Our currency will FALL in value compared to others.

Now, we don’t manufacture much of anything here in America anymore; we import a lot of what we need/want.

So as we need to import, the value of OUR money is going to be worth less, and less compared to foreign countries, meaning what we need will cost VERY VERY MUCH MORE.

Inflation will hit the US in almost every sector because the things we need to import cost more and more dollars that are worth less and less.

So if you think things have gotten expensive this year, hold on to your hat; it’s going to get a LOT worse.

Moreover, at some point, countries may decide that the U.S., being so far in debt, makes our currency worthless.  They may decide to STOP selling anything to us in US Dollars.

Despite being universally accepted nowadays, the fear of our currency becoming worthless is real because there is literally nothing backing our currency.  Government keeps going farther and farther into debt until at some point, people around the world will simply NOT take our money anymore.

When THAT happens, the shortages and “supply chain disruption” seen during COVID-19, will look like kid games.

GOVERNMENT TO BLAME

The sole entity responsible for all this trouble is the US federal government; specifically, YOUR member of the US House of Representatives and YOUR US Senators.

It has been these people who have literally spent the country into oblivion.  THEY voted for each and every dollar spent which had to be borrowed.

So as they come back from Washington to back-slap, glad-hand, and kiss babies, know that it is THESE PEOPLE who are personally responsible for wrecking this nation, and ruining everything you and your family has worked all your lives for.

More importantly, it is THESE PEOPLE who have mis-used their positions to impose “economic sanctions” on country after country around the world; telling those countries, “If you don’t do what we want, then you cannot use OUR money in YOUR trade.”

All those countries are tired of US meddling in THEIR internal affairs.

So they’re moving away from using US dollars, so that the US cannot sanction them anymore.

The result will be hyper-inflation for us, and wrecking of our country.  All because THEY will not stop meddling in other people’s business.

1939 Delahaye Type 165

1939 Delahaye Type 165 is viewed by many as the most beautiful French car of the 1930s, only 5 of them were ever made with this one having been fatefully chosen by the French government to represent France at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

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Have you ever judged someone and realized you were wrong?

I was once the daytime caregiver for a little boy with a massive brain injury. The damage was so extensive that a large part of his right brain had been surgically removed. He was paralyzed on his left side. He also probably suffered from Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, but the doctors were unsure. He hoarded food, because he had gone hungry many times in his earlier life. Altogether a really lousy start.

I was pushing little X in his stroller. He was about three years old at this point. We were walking toward the high school, and there was a group of girls on the sidewalk. Black clothes, black hair, smoking, swearing girls.

X was a bit unusual looking, due to his injuries. I was thinking that these girls were going to laugh at him, or tease him, or something. I was getting tense and defensive.

As X and I get close, he hollers out, “HI”, which was his only word at the time. I was not expecting the response he got from those girls.

They were totally sweet. They were all saying hi back and asking his name and saying how cute he was. One asked me about his injuries, and I gave her the short version. She started to cry, and then I did, too. It was hard for me to talk about his history. We ended up hugging each other.

I have always remembered that group of girls, and how completely wrong I was about them.

They remind me often not to judge people by their appearance.

Copeland’s of New Orleans the Guitreau

Copelands of New Orleans the Guitreau
Copelands of New Orleans the Guitreau

Ingredients

  • 4 ounces butter
  • 4 ounces chopped onions
  • 5 single mushrooms
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon white pepper
  • 8 ounces fish fillet (red or black drum recommended)
  • 4 ounces crawfish tails
  • 4 ounces 90-100 size shrimp

Instructions

  1. Cook fish on grill approximately three minutes on each side.
  2. While fish is cooking, sauté shrimp and crawfish tails for about one minute. At this point, everything else may be added. Cook until vegetables are translucent. If mixture is too thick, add a splash of dry white wine. If too thin, turn the heat up and cook down until the right consistency.

South Korea, Japan BETRAY and ABANDON U.S, Rush to CHINA!

Breakup of antiwar coalition on Taiwan Island brings war clouds closer to East Asia

Taiwan is not Ukraine. The Taiwanese army is compulsory conscription for one year, extended by Tsai Ing-wen from the previous four months, making her extremely unpopular. No one in Taiwan has the delusion that Westerners have that the Taiwanese army can withstand the PLA for more than a day.

Most of them will tell you the PLA takeover will last only a few hours.

The reason is none of these young men want to die fighting the PLA, not even the deepest Green. Many street interviews of youngsters in the deep Green country of south Taiwan have shown as much: don’t know history, don’t understand why Taiwan is the Republic of China and its airline is China Airlines, don’t like China, don’t want war with China, won’t fight the PLA to defend Taiwan.

In truth, most of them will simply surrender, because those who do not will be tried for treason or, as a minimum, carry a black mark for themselves and their family so that none of them or their offspring will enjoy the privilege of say working in government jobs or state corporations.

Don’t forget that Taiwan is an island. The shortest distance from China to Taiwan is about 220 km. Hawaii is 8500 km away and the American west coast is 11,000 km. People on the island can’t run off to Poland. No one is going to save them when the PLA lands. Taiwanese people understand this but try explaining it to people like Mearsheimer.

Another thing about America arming Taiwan. It’s a scam. Taiwan is going to get antiquated equipment at exorbitant prices. Taiwanese people also know about this because it is not new. It happened before. The US is worried there may be many Yifu Lin types in Taiwan, taking the latest US war technologies to join China. The last time they armed the Nationalists during the Chinese Civil War, the PLA got their hands on a large amount of the latest American weapons.

America is really good at lying. The country is built on lies. Ask any native American how many times the white man has lied to them and they will tell you as numerous as the stars in the sky. It’s too late for the natives, but we can learn something. Don’t trust any words or narratives that come from the direction of the hegemon.

-PM

Quiet

What will always be cool?

You met a girl. You smiled. She liked. You gave her compliments. She liked you more. You used every textbook trick to impress and voila! She indeed was impressed.

Time flew. Your mask fell off.

Now, she hates you.

Persuasion techniques are, at times, indeed useful. But if you want relationships that last, always be real. These techniques may capture someone’s head, but being who you are will capture their hearts.


That genuineness and sincerity, my friend, will always be cool! 🙂

What scary gut feeling did you have that turned out to be true?

A friend and I had plans to hang out. For whatever reason, she couldn’t make it and canceled. I didn’t want to hang around the house and went out anyway. As I approached the car, I got an uneasy feeling. I opted to take the other car; I still got an uneasy feeling, but it wasn’t as intense. I got in the car and left the house. Thirty minutes later the car was totalled; I didn’t even see it coming. When I came to, the car was upside down. I was still in the car, but laying on the roof. Had I take the initial car, I probably would have been dead or severely injured at best. I literally got up and walked away from the car on my own (I did pass out a couple times while the ambulance was en route). I broke my ankle and sternum and needed a couple stitches.

Chimney Sweep, outside 97th General Hospital, Frankfurt.

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Five Pleasures for every pain

What’s something your husband did to you that you will never forget?

When my husband had been a consultant for about a year, and had been traveling 80% of the time for a job that he absolutely loved.

He came home one weekend and said, “Yesterday I was sitting at a table with five other consultants, and one of them told the group that I was on my first wife.

They all laughed and said, ‘That won’t last long!’ Two of them are on their third wife! That’s when I knew for sure that I have to change jobs.”

And that’s when I knew for sure that he would always put me first.

That we would always put each other first.

We’ve been married more than 40 years, and we’re still putting each other first. (He has since had several jobs that he enjoyed as much as that one, I’m glad to say. I wouldn’t want him to be unhappy at work because of me! I’ve always supported him in whatever his work choices have been, and he has been supportive of my career too.)

Ikigai

Have you ever met someone for the first time and got the strongest feeling that the person was bad?

I didn’t technically “meet” the guy. But when I was about 10yo & my mom asked me to run to the donut shop before going to school (it was less than a block from our apartment), I was so stoked, I ran the entire way!

As I went to pull the door open at the donut shop, this big grisly bear of a man sorta stumbled towards me from me pulling the door open so fast.

I looked him right in the eyes & got The biggest shot of freezing cold fear through me, turned right around & ran straight back home.

When my mom asked why I didn’t get any donuts, it took me a minute to answer. I asked if she remembered the creepy old big guy from the show we were watching last night & my mom replied “you mean Americas Most Wanted?”!

I said yes, she said “yeah, and?” I told her I’d ran straight into the featured criminal that was a father who raped & molested his daughters & their friends for years & was on the run with his wife (she said she didn’t believe her daughters or their friends, eww)!

My mom asked if I was sure & I was absolutely sure it was him. My mom called the tip line immediately & they said I wasn’t the first to report seeing him at that donut shop. That couple got so spooked by my reaction that they apparently immediately went back on the run. I believe they gave chase for a bit but somehow evaded police, but were later found dead from self inflicted injuries. I was told my report was the final “straw” for cops to believe it was a legit sighting.


No joke that when I say I felt straight evil from him, the burning ice cold feeling his eyes gave me, I will unfortunately never forget it.


Always, ALWAYS trust your “gut”! That intuition is inside us all for a very good reason.

Chinese journalist Liu Xin: DON’T MESS WITH CHINA!

What is the best etiquette for guests who offer to pay for things after staying at someone’s home?

Some years back, a close friend of mine, let’s call her Jane, underwent a significant surgery. She lived alone, and the recovery period was expected to be long and challenging. Jane’s sister, who lived in a different city, offered to take her in during the recovery. The sister had a spacious home and a supportive family, making it an ideal environment for Jane’s recuperation.

Jane, always mindful of not imposing, devised thoughtful ways to contribute to the household. Since she couldn’t engage in physical activities initially, she used her skills as a seasoned graphic designer to help her niece with a school project, creating an impressive presentation. This gesture was immensely appreciated and brought her closer to her niece.

As she regained strength, Jane took up the responsibility of managing the family’s online affairs. She organized digital photo albums, set up an efficient bill payment system, and even taught her sister and brother-in-law how to use various apps to streamline their daily tasks. These small yet significant contributions made her feel useful and less like a burden.

Additionally, Jane used her savings to occasionally treat the family to meals from their favorite restaurants, understanding that her presence had increased the household expenses. She also made it a point to maintain her space meticulously, ensuring that her temporary stay caused minimal disruption in their routine.

When Jane finally returned to her home, her relationship with her sister’s family had deepened. They had not only supported her through a challenging time but had also received her gratitude and contributions in a way that enriched their lives. This experience, my friend often reflects, taught her the importance of giving back, even in times of personal difficulty.

What was the best relationship advice you ever got?

The best relationship advice I ever got was from my grandma years ago, while we were sitting on our back porch swing. There was a thunderstorm going on, and we were enjoying the rain and swinging and talking and nothing was off limits.

At one point, Grandma said, “When we stop expecting someone to be perfect, we can begin to appreciate them for who they really are. No one can ever be perfect. That’s just the way things are.

Crying is okay, too. Sometimes, love is just too big for words …”

What are some useful facts that went unnoticed?

  1. The way you treat yourself is the standard you set for others.
  2. A successful man is one who makes more money than his wife can spend . A successful woman is one who can find such a man .
  3. Sometimes following your heart means losing your mind.
  4. The most beautiful woman is someone who’s happy and is always smiling.
  5. The sexiest thing about a woman is not in the clothes she wears , the figure that she carries or the way she combs her hair but Confidence in a humble way, not in an arrogant way. Sense of humour is definitely important.
  6. The biggest asset in the world is your mindset.
  7. Good looking people are trusted quicker by the subconscious mind. No clue why ? But there’re many good looking manipulators. Trust by character not appearance.
  8. Someone you’ve only known for ten days could have better intentions for you than someone you’ve known for ten years. Time means nothing; character does.
  9. Don’t let the world define your identity for you . They don’t know you and likely they don’t care about you.

What was the moment you realized your significant other didn’t care about you at all anymore?

After twenty years of marriage I got crippled up by arthritis and my wife came to me and asked for a divorce so she could go out and live her life.

I pointed to the door.

Signed the divorce papers for her so she saved some costs. I got no child support even though both our kids stayed with me. Actually they gave her half the house I had built and the entire time I was building it she didn’t want me too because I was “wasting” money on it.

A few months after the divorce was final she actually told me I was going to have to marry her back. Right.

I said no.

Today I’ve been married to a wonderful woman who’s supportive and I enjoy every day.

I did recover from being crippled with a lot of rehab and I made sure to tell my wife to be that I could never guarantee that being crippled wouldn’t recur.

Then a couple years after we married she had to have open heart surgery to repair a bad heart valve and I was there taking care of her with no complaints while she recovered. She’s always doing things to make my life easier. It’s what marriage is all about. Teamwork.

What was your strangest experience visiting a friend or relative in the hospital?

I wasn’t the visitor. I just happened to be a physician, working at the hospital, that day.

I was walking down the hall talking with one of our most senior nurses. As we walked by a patient room, I happened to glance over.

“Did I just see that?”, I remarked, stopping and placing a restraining hand on Pat’s arm.

“What?” asked Pat.

“Back up.”

We took a couple of steps back and looked into the room.

“What the actual f**k!”

A visitor had climbed onto the bed with the patient. He was choking her and hissing,

“You ruined my life, B**ch!”.

“Whoa!”

I yelled for Security, at the top of my lungs.

Pat charged around me with the wrath that only an overweight, middle aged woman, who is sick of everybody’s sh*t, can.

“Off!” She yelled, smacking the man, on the head, with her clipboard.

“OFF, OFF, OFF!” ( whack, whack, whack)

The man let go of the patient and turned toward us.

Uh-oh.

Pat was undeterred. She smacked him a couple of more times. (whack, whack)

With a voice, honed with the authority of 30 years of nursing, she chased him down the hall.

“OUT, OUT, OUT!” (whack, whack, whack)

Just then Security showed up and rescued the perpetrator from the furious nurse.

I stayed to ensure that the patient was not seriously injured.

Pat returned, ruffled but none the worse for wear.

“Remind me not to EVER piss you off.”

We went back to our original conversation.

Just another day in the glamorous life of a physician.

Peace.

Have you ever broken the law for good reason and did you ever get caught?

Yes, I did.

Many years ago, I was approached by a woman I knew through our homeowners’ association, and she asked to talk to me. She said that she was getting ready to leave her husband, who was a brutal and abusive alcoholic. She had a tiny puppy — a little fluffy mix that was mostly Yorkie and Pomeranian — that he was kicking and mistreating, and she wanted to get it to safety as soon as possible before he either damaged her or killed her.

She knew I was a dog lover, so she proposed that she leave her back gate unlocked, and after she was sure her husband had passed out, she would put the puppy on the back porch behind the unlocked gate. I could take the puppy, and disappear into the night.

I lived a distance from the woman’s home, so there was no danger the puppy would ever be seen by her husband. So, I agreed. We decided to do it that night.

The arranged dognapping went off without a hitch, and Rita made her home with us for many years. The woman also escaped her husband, as planned.

Traveling around Bavaria, in a 1951 Chevrolet.

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What do Hospice workers know about the last hours of life that most doctors don’t?

I buried my wife a week ago today. Alzheimer’s disease is a terrible way to die. She was diagnosed in 2013. She died October 10, 2023. I delayed her services until one of her siblings returned from a cruise. Since she chose cremation long ago, there was no urgency to bury her in my family’s grave plots.

She was an RNC – BSN in Labor and Delivery. Dedicated her life managing a 40 bed LDRP unit with NICU.

The Hospice nurse thought she was stable earlier in the day, but she later observed a change that I probably would not have recognized. The Hospice nurse told me I should come. She had been non verbal for about a year. Had to be fed, and was in a special Hospice provided wheel chair when out of her bed.

I knew as a lifelong nurse she did not want to live like that, but a DNR covers no cardiac crash cart intervention and no tube feeding. It is way above my pay grade to opine that her quality of life was near zero. A Hospice nurse knows when there is more brain activity than many of us might think.

She had been in a nursing home exactly three years. When she first arrived, she never stopped nursing, looking after those residents who were no longer ambulatory. In fact, she thought she was in charge of the nursing home because she was a Director of Women’s Health before she retired. At the peak of her career, she had 150 employees and a seven figure annual budget. A few years later, she could not balance her check book.

The Hospice nurse told me the last thing to go with an Alzheimer’s victim is their hearing, so even though she looked comatose, the nurse convinced me she could hear me.

I believe her. No finger squeezing, no eye movement, nothing but labored breathing. I told her I loved her, and that I would have been nothing without her.

Thinking she was stable for maybe another day, I went home to get something to eat. Hospice called and said she was gone before I got back to the nursing home. We would have been married 51 years December 30. Planned our wedding around an OU Sugar Bowl game in 1972.

I hated myself for leaving the nursing home for what seemed like only a short time, but maybe she knew I had been there, and she was tired of the pain. Maybe she held on just long enough to see me or hear me one last time.

I’ll forever regret not spending more time with her. I honestly did not think she knew I was there during visits the last year, but now I know she knew I was there near the end, so she probably knew I was there during those times when I thought there was little brain function remaining.

I regret not spending more time with her excellent Hospice caregivers, to better understand that though my wife seemed near comatose for over a year, she would know I was there if I had spent more time with her.

Always pay attention to the Hospice nurses. Milk them for more knowledge about how it will probably end.

I am forever indebted to the Hospice nurses who cared for my wife. Hospice was there when I could not be there. No one should die alone.

What are your thoughts on the recent incident where a Chinese navy destroyer used active sonar to harass a disabled Australian frigate conducting underwater repairs in international waters?

Not long ago, Western media were promoting “the Chinese Air Force intercepted a Canadian aircraft.” But they don’t tell you that this interception took place in the northern part of the Taiwan Strait, only dozens of kilometers away from the coast of China.

Now, the Western media is once again propagating that “the Chinese Navy is unprofessional towards Australian warships.” Okay, let’s look at the truth of the matter again.

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  1. The “exclusive economic zones” of China and Japan overlap on a large scale, and the overlapping area is closer to China’s territorial waters. 

First, Australia claimed that “the warship is located within Japan’s exclusive economic zone.” It seems to tell us that they are near Japanese territorial waters. But is this true?

Let’s take a look at how big Japan’s “exclusive economic zone” is. As we all know, Japan’s “exclusive economic zone” was set unilaterally by Japan. It has a large number of overlapping areas with mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, and North Korea, and is not recognized at all in East Asia.

Therefore, the fact that the Australian warship is “located within Japan’s exclusive economic zone” does not mean that it is “close to Japan”. On the contrary, it is likely to be close to China’s territorial waters, has entered China’s exclusive economic zone or even approached China’s territorial waters. This is also the reason for this type of incident. normal. The Chinese almost never go far from their shores on such missions.

Secondly, the news that the Chinese Navy’s use of “sonar” caused “slight injuries” to divers is not credible at all. According to news reports, the warship that intercepted the Australian Navy was the Chinese Navy No. 139 Ningbo Ship. This is a modern-class destroyer with a full load displacement of 8,500 tons and an old Soviet warship. According to public information, the sonar equipped on this destroyer is the MGK-335 hull-acoustic hull sonar. This is an active high-power sonar designed for deep-sea nuclear submarines, with a peak operating power of hundreds of kilowatts.

The shock waves it emits can hit the submarine’s hull several kilometers away and detect the echoes. There is no point in turning on sonar for surface ship monitoring.

Because this type of sonar is powerful enough to cause injury to large marine life such as dolphins and whales, it is generally not turned on. When the warships of both sides are approaching, if the Chinese Navy really turns on this sonar, then the diver will not suffer just a “slight injury”, it will shatter people’s internal organs.

Therefore, the real situation may be that the diver suffered minor injuries due to other reasons in the process of rushing to shore. After all, the Australian Toowoomba is just a 3,600-ton frigate. When facing an 8,500-ton Chinese warship, a hasty retreat is a normal reaction.

There are a few more noteworthy keywords

2. Sanctions tasks of the United Nations

This statement is the same as that of the Canadian military aircraft, which also claimed to be carrying out “UN sanctions supervision against North Korea.” But they flew to the northern part of the Taiwan Strait.

China has publicly stated many times that the United Nations has never authorized such a mission. As one of the five permanent members of the Security Council, China’s statement is credible, and other countries have not raised any objections.

Therefore, the Australian warship’s so-called “implementation of United Nations sanctions and supervision of North Korea” is just a farce written and directed by several countries led by the United States.

3. The fishing net entangled the propeller

It shows that the Australian warship has entered the fishing area instead of the normal route. This will cause disruption to both Chinese and Japanese fishermen. Whether it is Japan’s exclusive economic zone or China’s exclusive economic zone, it is undeniable that it is more than 1,000 kilometers away from Australia. That is China’s doorstep, not Australia’s.

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The incident took place so far away from Australia. What was the Australian Navy thinking when it sent a small warship to the coast of a nuclear-armed superpower to show off? If the opponent was the United States or Russia, they would have been sunk long ago. 

4. Unprofessional

The Chinese Navy’s approach to foreign warships approaching China’s territorial waters has always been to “identify, warn and drive away”. This is their “professionalism”. There was no warning of weapons and no active collision, indicating that the Chinese navy was restrained. It makes no sense for the Australians to use the excuse “sonar harms divers” to divert attention.

What is the biggest snub you received from a family member?

There have been several over my long life but the one that still hurts the most was when my family decided to do a family photo.

For context:

my parents (mom and dad), 4 others siblings with their spouse and child(ren)

18 people total including myself and husband.

I’ve always been a coordinator of events and the like so I offered to find and buy all the children’s outfits so they match/color coordinate.

All the adults wore coordinating colors. We planned on having an outdoor spring photo shoot and I purchased all items to stage the pictures (included a setee, velvet arm chairs, Persian rug….you get the idea not just outside but staged. We hired a professional photographer with each of us paying $200

to cover the bill.

A week before the photos were supposed to be done, my older sister comes over and says my parents want our children but not myself and husband in the pictures. I say nothing, think about it an day and then call my dad. I ask him did he and my mother say we were not to be in pics? He never gives me a direct answer. Says they really just pics of the grandkids, I ask him then why is everyone else included besides my husband and myself? -he gives Half answers until I say I have to go-I sent all of them an email laying out how hurt we were and Don’t understand what we could have down to be excluded like this. Not one response.

Picture day:

My older sister had the audacity to call me and ask if my kids were ready and she was on the way to pick them up. I told her Nope and hung up.

That is the last one I ever spoke to or heard from any of them. Family should never hurt like that

What are the most common regrets that people have once they grow old?

My generation, the boomers, was encouraged to take risks and accomplish great things. We were told that we could do anything and should. We had people like JFK pushing us to go to the moon.

I grew up in a violent, terrifying and poor household where I felt great responsibility for the younger children. I felt no love from my parents. I was just scared all the time. I subsequently had little energy left for doing well in school. I had only one friend. I was always afraid of authority and had no self-confidence. I was not equipped for adulthood and most of it was a struggle to do well at whatever job I held.

When I retired, due to my great fear of poverty, i had plenty of money saved and my own home. I also realized something important. I didn’t have to have regrets even though I had not taken risks or accomplished great things.

I had survived. I had accomplished something important. I was safe. I had made it through all the troubles and fear. I had gritted my teeth and pushed through all the pain and loneliness and self-loathing that comes with being treated badly.

I am old but I have many years to go and I’ll spend them being proud of myself for making it through to safety. This might not seem like much of a goal to most people but it was what I dreamed of for myself and unwittingly worked hard for. I have no regrets.

Cat revenge story

What’s a rule your employer implemented that backfired terribly?

Not me, my wife.

She ran a very successful Dentist as Practice Manager…she has been a Dental Nurse since the early 90s and worked her way up.

Probably about 80% of the role was managing the staff…whereas 80% should have been running the regulatory side of the business….unfortunately, that meant that the regulatory side had to be done after hours.

She would put in 12 hour days, come home, have dinner, then start again and not stop until near midnight, nightly!

Now the business owner and principle knew HE could not manage the staff, but he then started demanding that she was ‘front of house’ due to her professionalism…even though others were just as capable…so of course, that meant other things started to suffer…initially her health, but she persevered…she ‘loved her job’!

But then, the inevitable happened…he ‘decided’, without any consultation, that her role was now ‘salaried’ and he would no longer pay overtime.

Now, there’s a rock and a hard place…the regulatory side could not be undertaken during the day, would not be compensated, and was a legal requirement for the Practice to operate; so she took the only option available; she resigned (her health was deteriorating anyway…and that was due to the stress of the job!)

6 months later, she is in a far better place physically. The business she left is on its knees. All the staff had left, and it is now – just about – scraping by as a single dentist practice (there had been 10 dentists and 26 support staff!).

I reckon that it has 3–4 months left before it goes completely under….all because he started interfering in the staff roles and didn’t want to pay a little overtime.

What should be done to make the Indian police more efficient and less corrupt?

image 2
image 2

Lets do what China or Singapore is doing and ensuring that their police remain tough but relatively free from any corruption and actually follow the law

Pay

India pay their policemen a pittance. I am talking about the rank and file cops. If you look at Comparative Median Income- a Middle ranking Indian policeman (Non IPS) gets only 1.06 times the Median income compared to 1.41 times for a Chinese Cop and 1.83 times for a Singaporean Cop and 1.82 times for a US Cop from NYPD or CPD. A 41% Pay raise for Middle Ranking Cops and allowance raise and upto 77% Pay raise for the Rank and file would work wonders.


Housing and Allowances

China, Hong Kong have police departments which purchase their own lands and commercially build apartments and sell them at zero interest to Cops and retired cops. 2,3,4 BHK Apartments with all the luxuries like a Swimming Pool, Gymnasium etc provided.

image 1
image 1

Hamara Bharat – How a Police Quarters looks like in Bharat with Inspectors living in this dilapidated building. The Toilets are particularly a bonanza. Departments have to beg and beg for the most basic of maintenance and painting.


Death Insurance

In India a Cop shot and killed while on Duty will get a flat sum of Rs. 18 Lakhs to Rs. 85 Lakhs depending on City and State with Mumbai and Delhi paying the highest.

85 Lakhs sounds good right?

Sorry. First the money is taxable, Second the average time to get this money is 17 – 24 months if you are lucky and third – an Insurance company pays this sum and it will dodge and demand a lot of documentation like death report etc etc etc.

A woman called Gurbachan Kaur who was supposed to get Rs. 78 Lakhs for her husbands death (He was Senior Inspector of Police) is yet to get any money after 1 1/2 years and after taxes and deductions – she is expected to net Rs. 58 Lakhs. Its around 5.25 times his median annual income. Even this sum is in doubt as the Insurance company is now saying the man died of a heart attack which means natural death (Far low payout).

Lets take China or HK – the sum for death of a Similar rank is around 8.25 times the Median Income and NO TAX. And you get the money within 60 days. Its a law. If you dont get the money in China within 60 days – the Department will be questioned and the LEPPA laws will be applied and No insurance company – money belongs to the Department directly


And many others – Good Healthcare plans, Good Education Plans, Education Trusts for Kids of Cops, Free Education etc.

The Cops are taken care of decently and so they do their job well.

Then there is the question of Punishment. Cops who break the law are brutally punished. In China except the Political Police – all other cops can be punished brutally for Bribery or for Public Abuse or false cases etc. The LEPPA which applies only to cops and can put a cop for 15–25 years for a custodial death within 3 months through special courts.

Its the Double Edged Sword – Good Incentives but Brutal Punishments

Its what India should do


PS This only applies to officers. Chinese Constables are very less paid (Same as Indian PCS) but they get commissions (Hyeung Ya or Golden Fragrance) of 55% – 150% of their monthly salaries. Legal commissions on which they have to pay tax.

Our Poor Havildars have no such incentives and can get a CBI Case for a mere Rs. 500/- bribe.

Weißer Turm (The White Tower), Galgengasse, Rothenburg.

17 7
17 7

Simple

Why are the Chinese not interested in Western democracy?

Western Democracy is:

  • School shootings.
  • An expensive education system that does not give people the most basic knowledge.
  • The world’s largest prison system.
  • An expensive healthcare system that is against disease prevention. And which gives decreasing life expectancy.
  • A colossal big expensive army which is not able to overcome the Taliban. And the army’s expenses are poorly documented.
  • The judiciary is large and expensive.
  • The financial sector is filled with at least 90% air, which will give rise to a new financial bubble, which will empty people’s pensions.
  • The two identical parties present only the interests of the rich. And yet they are extremely hostile to each other.
  • Real wages for the middle class have not increased since the 1970s.
  • Many of the politicians stand with one foot in the grave, so it will never be them themselves who will pay back the country’s debt. Their goal is to survive only four more years.

I could make several points. But why do you think it is difficult to sell this system, Western Democracy to the Chinese?!

Wasn’t it a better idea to sell Chinese socialism to the Americans?! Who wants a government that will multiply your hourly wage?!

What do we know for certain about China’s military, or what sources are most reliable?

image 3
image 3

The bloody history has told every Chinese: China’s peace today is not because the invaders abandoned evil and turned to good, but because of the powerful PLA.

Men need emotional closeness

How do you make productivity less of a miserable experience?

Mike Tyson is the father of my favorite sports quote. Reporters were questioning him about his new opponent. They were building up the rivalry, talking about how dangerous this fighter was, how he planned to keep Tyson at a distance with his jab, how he planned to wear him down.

Getting annoyed with the questions, Mike looked up from tying his shoes and said, “Everyone has a plan — until they get hit.” It’s so perfectly translatable to life. Everyone is on a diet, until they get hungry. Everyone wants good grades, until it’s time to study. Aspirations and reality are often star-crossed lovers: desperate to be together but doomed to be apart.

We don’t like what most goals entail. There’s a way to make things easier. It starts with understanding the process of productivity.

Slow down your mind to produce more

In a 2013 experiment, scientists showed flashing images to young mice for six hours a day for ten days straight. The changing images emulated cell phones and TVs. Those mice later displayed significant difficulties getting through mazes and finishing cognitive tasks versus non-stimulated mice. Science has long known overstimulation leads to deficits in cognition and attention span.

More plainly, when you are bored with a task, you are often overstimulated. It’s worse than most people realize. Our minds are lost in thought for roughly 47% of our day.

Concentrative meditation, a focus on one specific thing, is proven to boost your focus over time, even if you only do it for five minutes a day. Letting too many voices in your head drowns out those that need to be heard. It’s counterintuitive to think that slowing down your mind increases its potency. The brain is like a lightbulb: too much energy makes it shine less.

If you are feeling ambitious, a Harvard study found that 27-minutes of meditation per day led to increased gray-matter density in the hippocampus, resulting in improved learning, empathy, and memory.

Start easier by creating mental opposition

My girlfriend works in academia and occasionally writes huge, thickly worded papers. On the scale of writing projects, it’s one of the most nightmarish. She was working herself up over a paper last month. She talked about it all week, dreading it, venting about it. She was eventually in full-blown tears, despite not having written a single word.

I’m a fairly patient guy but I do have limits. I finally said, “I need you to do a favor for both of us and get this done. Do it for me, please.” Her dread was bleeding into our relationship. Seeing my point, and to her credit, she powered through it and was a new person afterward.

Procrastination is the hellspawn of anticipation. We expend so much energy thinking about doing something, building up the tension, contemplating the boredom and pain involved. Our energy is sapped before we even begin.

Defeat it by inverting your thoughts

The next time you are putting something off, pay attention to your thoughts. Notice when you have a ‘dread’ thought, “This is going to be so hard.” Notice how you feel heavier. I can literally feel my body getting more immobile when I catch those thoughts.

The trick is to invert that process. I write for a living. When my keyboard is roaring at me like a 101-toothed monster, I’ll itemize reasons I should write. For example:

If I write now, I’ll have free time later.

  1. It will be fun to discover which words show up on the page.
  2. The show I’m watching is useless and boring.
  3. I’ll make more money if I spend more time writing.
  4. It’s going to ruin my mood if I keep procrastinating.

Make it a game to verbally list as many reasons as possible. This will magnetize your motivations. Actions are an extension of our thoughts. Starting is often the hardest part of productivity.

How to stay in the pocket after you start

When I was a swimmer, I didn’t have aquatic headphones to get me through a workout. Swimming is an exhausting exercise in sensory deprivation. You can only see the bottom of the pool and hear the water in your ears. Workouts were miserable and every stroke invites you to slack off.

The key was to stay focused at the moment. I did this in two ways. First, I focused on my technique, giving 100% of my focus to my coach’s instructions. When that technique crumbled, I fell back into reminding myself of my goals. I singularly focused on them, much like you would with concentrative meditation.

Remind yourself that you want to get promoted and get a raise. Reflect on sub-goals. Reflect on what happens if you quit now and flake out. Thoughts can be weaponized against laziness. Productivity is a battle in your mind. If you let weakening thoughts run about unchallenged, you are doomed. Focus on perfection and your attention to detail.

The takeaway and tying it all together

Remember, productivity has three key elements:

  1. Convince yourself to start.
  2. Stay focused despite distractions.
  3. Continue working when you don’t feel like it.

Convince yourself to start by being cognizant of detractor thoughts. Dismiss them quickly and list out reasons to start.

To avoid distractions, practice slowing down your mind with meditation. Additionally, make a mental note of every time you lose focus. When I start getting sloppy, I’ll keep a piece of paper and make a line every time I catch my mind drifting.

Lastly, to get through arduous, monotonous tasks, focus on being present in the moment. Focus on the details. Think about your goals. But never dread the painful aspects of your tasks. Motivation is war. Know how to rally your troops.

Roman Empire and Chill

Dinardo’s Italian Restaurant Creole Carbonara

Creole Carbonara
Creole Carbonara

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup chicken thigh meat
  • 2 1/2 tablespoons Creole seasoning
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 2 ounces andouille sausage, chopped
  • 8 ounces medium shrimp, peeled and deveined
  • 1/4 cup green onions, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon garlic, chopped
  • 1 1/2 cups heavy whipping cream
  • 1/4 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • Dash of Tabasco
  • 1/2 tablespoon salt
  • 1/2 cup Parmesan cheese
  • 1/2 pound fettuccine, cooked

Instructions

  1. Coat the chicken with one teaspoon of the Creole seasoning.
  2. Heat olive oil in a skillet over medium-high heat and sauté chicken for approximately one minute.
  3. Add andouille and continue cooking one additional minute.
  4. Season shrimp with remaining Creole seasoning, add to chicken/andouille mixture and cook until shrimp are pink and curled.
  5. Add green onions, garlic and whipping cream. Bring mixture to a boil then reduce heat to medium.
  6. Add Worcestershire, Tabasco, salt and half of the Parmesan cheese.
  7. Coat fettuccine with sauce and top with remaining cheese.

West Germany.

19 5
19 5

Appreciation

***** REAL ****** Trouble: No One Buying US Treasuries

World Hal Turner

Nobody wants U.S. Treasury bonds. Bond Sales are in the worst stretch since the Civil War.  The federal government has run up so much debt that few if any around the world, want to lend them money anymore.   This cannot end well.

Once a symbol of America’s economic might and accepted as a global coin of the realm, US Treasuries have fallen badly out of favor, with serious consequences for taxpayers, investors, and financial markets.

Elementary economic forces — too much supply and not enough demand — have collided to create the worst stretch for U.S. government bonds since the Civil War. The government keeps borrowing to cover its budget deficits, while once-reliable buyers of that debt, both at home and abroad, have pulled back.

The result: Investors are demanding the steepest yields since 2007. Auctions of fresh bonds that were once routine are now  going terribly. And bond portfolios are getting absolutely hammered. The longest-dated Treasury bonds are in a bear market worse than the dot-com bust and almost as bad as 2008.

Already 2.5% of the U.S.’s economic output is going to service its existing debts, a number that some analysts expect to hit 4% by 2030. Already running huge deficits, the only way for Treasury to pay the interest — along with ambitious spending programs like the CHIPS Act and student-loan forgiveness — is to keep borrowing.

They are now TRAPPED in a vicious spiral that can ONLY lead to financial death for the country.  There is no other possible outcome because the government will not stop spending.

Skiing in Bavaria.

24 4
24 4

Smart kitty

What’s a rule your employer implemented that backfired terribly?

Didn’t happen to me, but a friend of mine.

He worked in a private local company. At the end of 2017 the owner of the company changed which means the head of the board of directors changed (let’s call the new guy Jim). Obviously, Jim wanted to make some changes himself, mostly to establish dominance and show he’s the new sheriff in town. Rumors say he promised to double company’s profit in a single year (remember this). There’s a thin line between ambitious and cocky.

The first move he made didn’t have anything to do with the increasing work efficiency or meeting heads of departments or actually know the work that is done in that company. Jim had installed one of those time clock machines where employees check in when they get to work and check out when they’re done. Something like this:

image 165
image 165
[source: google time clock, image from Icon Proximity card keyfob Reusable RFID Key Fob for Icon]

only they didn’t have tokens, but cards. Installation and writing guidelines took about a week after which he announced to heads of departments that every employee must check in and check out themself even when they’re going out just for a break. Also, heads of departments should’ve forward these news to employees. The thing officially started second or third week in January of 2018.

At first, employees didn’t take it so seriously and some of them didn’t check in/out every day or didn’t (sometimes even forgot to) note down their breaks. At the end of the week, Jim would go through every employee’s record to see does any of them have less than 40 hours. (Notice he wasn’t interested in those who had more than 40 hours.) Friend told me that most of employees were in the range 38–45 working hours and a very few around 37 but none under 37. Jim called for a meeting with heads of departments every Friday to inform them about the records and to warn those who work less. Also, there was no compensation for those who work more (stay late or work on weekends).

Employees protested about that kind of behavior and wanted time clock out. That only made Jim to push that thing even more and convinced the board of directors and the owner that the time clock is necessary. So it passed.

The thing is that the work climate has changed. Everyone was more concentrated on if they checked in and if they worked enough than the actual work and the pressure started to build up. The thing went on for two whole months until the most of the employees (friend said 80% but maybe he exaggerated a bit) decided to come to work, check in, work their 8 hours at a moderate pace, check out and head home. No overtime, no working weekends, if the clock hit 16:00 people would leave midwork or in the middle of the meeting not giving a shred of an F. Their excuse was that they did their 8 hours and if they want them to stay, they want a written notice (which is a proof of working overtime and must be paid).

This way every single employee had 40 working hours a week and not a minute more or less. But you know what? Jim wasn’t satisfied. Why? Because work suffered. He made the employees numbers and working slaves that have only one purpose – to work. This killed all the passion people had towards the job they were doing. It demoralized people. They had a feeling that someone is standing above their head every second of the day. And the time clock might not be a bad thing to check employees every once in a while, but to terrorize them like Jim did made them do anything just in spite of that work regime.

After 3 and a half months, the moment of truth came. The first quartal report came. It was a bit better than the last year so Jim stayed at his position. Employees continued with their strike. The second quartal report came and the profit was ~8% less than the same period of previous year (maybe 9% I don’t remember). Jim ascribed it to a bad economy in the country and stayed at his position. Employees were informed about the drop in profit which made them to continue their strike. The third quartal report came. The company’s profit was down by amazing 34% compared to the same period of the previous year. Jim was fired on the spot (even though his mandate supposed to last 5 years) and time clock was left just to control employees every now and then.

Conclusion: Treat your employees as humans which they are and maybe consult someone about your radical actions.

A serious MIXED message

What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you’ve witnessed?

Many decades ago my Dad was a high school teacher in the inner city of Boston.

One of the students in his class was a nationally ranked Judo practitioner who competed at the national level. This young man might miss weeks of school to attend an event around the world. IIRC he may have been part of the US Judo team at the time.

This young man was very quiet and kept to himself generally head down looking at a book at his desk. However he would sometimes be taunted by other students and generally would ignore the idiots.

One day Dad is writing something on the blackboard and behind him he hears one of the jerks taunting. He hears things like “You gonna show me some of that kung fu shit” and then he hears “Let’s see you block this punch”.

Dad hears a small amount of noise and turns around. This is a matter of seconds. The Asian Judo practitioner is sitting in his chair, head down reading a book. And the jerk kid is unconscious on the floor peeing his pants.

The jerk on the floor starts coming around. Dad tells his friends to get him back in his seat. And everyone starts laughing at the jerk because of the giant pee stain on his crotch.

That seemingly ended the attempted bullying. Everyone realized that this kid could kick everyone’s ass if needed.

I love a happy ending!

On Mount Wendelstein.

6 12
6 12

Wife Cheats On Work Trip And Now Is Losing Her Mind That Her Marriage Is IMPLODING

Her: I ripped the soul out of my husband through betrayal.

Also her: I made him coffee and did some chores. We should be all good, right?

It’s about stinky dead bodies

When I was a teenager, there was a flood along the river where we lived. A large number of mobile homes that were located on the shores of the river were taken out, and destroyed. And six people were missing.

2023 11 27 17 19
2023 11 27 17 19

One day after the grand storm, I was walking alongside the tracks beside the river. I was in a remote section of the track. Perhaps two miles away from the town, and in the woods.

Eventually I came across a section that smelled really, REALLY bad. It was so foul that I got off the tracks and went to the edge of the river, where the smell was so damn intense.

I couldn’t see anything, and left. But that afternoon, I later discovered that a body was found at the exact location where I was standing looking for the body.

body
body

This is my story for today.

Boring? But, you know… true life experience.

Today…

What did you find while snooping that you wish you had never found?

When I was around 11 I was snooping around in my parents room and saw their bank passbook sitting on their dresser. I opened it up expecting to see a healthy sum of money. Instead there was less than $30 in it. I saw the weekly deposits from my dad’s work and regular withdrawals for cash.

even at that young age I realized that we were poor and what little we had got spent on us kids. I felt terrible when I thought of all the times I’d pushed my folks to spend what they had on treats for me and my sister and brother.

I stopped asking for expensive things after that.

What are the reasons more and more Chinese students abroad decide to return to China?

A year ago, filled with a longing for Western freedom and democracy, I applied to the University of Auckland, thinking that it would be great if I could stay and work or live in New Zealand after graduation.

Now, I am firmly convinced that I should return to China after my graduation because:

1.The salary here is not as high as what I can earn in China,

2.The best city here is only equivalent to a third-tier city in China. Shopping and daily life are not as convenient as in China, and the cost of living is four times higher.

3.The knowledge taught in universities here, I can learn for free on Chinese websites, and it’s richer and more advanced.

4. I participated in two research projects at the University of Auckland and found that the level of research and development here is behind that of equivalent universities in China. I realized that by studying here, I probably won’t be able to bring back advanced knowledge. Therefore, I am considering returning to a Chinese university to further my education.

5. Moreover, I can feel that the majority of people in Western countries still believe they are more developed than China. This is the general perception, and I don’t need to explain it. I’ll just return to China and quietly contribute my strength there.

6. Western culture, there seems to be a preference for those who are boastful and talkative rather than those who are low-key and pragmatic. Coincidentally, as a Chinese person, I am not good at boasting, and I prefer to fulfill my responsibilities and then rest. The Chinese workplace is more accommodating to someone with my traits.

In fact, I spent hundreds of thousands of RMB to come to New Zealand, to see the real Western world, improve my English, and then met a group of Chinese students and a few friendly foreign students, and ate food that I wasn’t quite used to for a year.

What, as a parent, could you not believe you had to explain to another parent?

I’m not a parent, but as a teacher I had to explain to a mother about bedtimes and sleep for a seven year old.

Her son was always tired and had difficulty staying awake during class. He was not working to his potential.

His mom came to discuss his poor grades. Come to find out, she was under the impression that he slept too much. So, she kept him up to midnight and had him get up at 6:00 a.m. No wonder the poor lad was always tired. I would be, too.

So, I explained to her that growing children needed at least 10 hours of sleep nightly as their bodies were growing and sleeping gave their bodies time to rest, heal, and grow.

She started having him go to bed at 8:00, especially on school nights. Within a week, he was brighter, more chipper, and the quality of his work improved immensely.

The interesting part? About a month later, he gave me a big hug and thanked me for telling his mom he needed to go to bed earlier.

What was the craziest thing a mechanic said about your car?

I took my nice little VW Beetle Diesel to a mechanic for an oil change. After they got the car on the rack, the service advisor came out “Your car has a really bad oil leak.”

Before you go farther, bear in mind: This was a diesel. This comes in important later.

I go back to the bay and take a look at the purported oil leak. The bottom half of the back of the engine was covered in fresh, amber colored oil. “Oh, you’ve got a huge oil leak. You need to pay us $200 to diagnose the problem.” I called for the shop manager.

“Your employee claims that this car has an oil leak.”

He looks under there. “Yup. Sure does.”

“You know this is a diesel.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Have you ever seen the oil drained from a diesel?”

“Yeah.”

“Then you know that if I put fresh oil in this engine and drive the car three blocks, that oil will be as black as the Ace of Spades. This supposed oil leak, which is in a place oil can’t leak out of, is fresh oil.”

“Umm…”

“Listen. Clean all the oil he sprayed on my engine off it right now so I can go somewhere honest.”

The unbreakable rule

What is something you absolutely despise about your country?

Finn here.

The climate. Finland is located between 60th and 70th North, which makes the climate absolutely miserable.

image 163
image 163

The location means the winters are long, dark and miserable – sun rising at Christmas only at 09:00 in Helsinki and setting at 15:00. The situation isn’t exactly improved by the fact that Finland is located at the occlusion zone of Ferrel cell, which means the whole Atlantic comes down from the sky each Spring and Autumn. (Oh, Autumn is really Fall – I mean, rainfall. Finnish rain is not the warm shower as the Mediterranean rains, it is hard, cold and scourging.)

Finland has the worst of both littoral and continental climate: cool summers and freezing winters. Oh, and did I mention rasputitsa? Yup, we have it too.

image 162
image 162

The cold and miserable weather and the long and dark winter has left its permanent mark on our national soul. Finns tend to be emotionally cold, dour and close-minded. Not rude nor impolite, but cold. Sorry, no jolly reggae tunes here. Hero metal, power metal, black metal and prog metal. If your playing sucks, turn on more overdrive.

Which leads to another problem. Alcohol use is commonplace. Simply to carry over the worst. Getting hammered is a method to cope with the cold, dark and miserable winter.

Which leads to another problem. Suicides tend to be common, but not as common as they used to be. Many people simply cannot stand it all and quit their living.

Atheism is in Scandinavia a far older phenomenon than science. When the soil is poor, weather hostile and everything in the climate tries to kill you, you relate to supernatural as enemies and any deities as intolerable cosmic oppressors. The divine is not seen as a provider, but oppressor – as something which attempts to make living even more miserable than it already is. This is one reason why the Scandinavians are so hostile to religion and spirituality they tend to be. Already the Hrafnkell’s saga from 10th century tells of a Viking chieftain who ditches the Viking gods and becomes godhlauss, Atheist.

I wish I had wings so I could fly to Spain for winter like the migratory birds.

I’d choose the sandwich

What is the nicest thing you have done that no one knows about?

A bit of background: My parents recently got divorced and my dad got most of the money, furniture and he got the house. My brother (10) and I (13) only see our mom every second weekend and sometimes my dad just keeps us for the weekend. I always stop by my moms After school everyday to let her dog out and clean up any messes she made (She’s 17 and black lab). I usually wait there for bit until I have to pick up my brother.

Anyways, one day, my math teacher asked me to stay behind for a few minute so to talk about an opportunity to compete in a math contest. It was country wide and was for grade ten and eleven math. I’m grade seven but he said that’s he talked to the people who were running it. They said I could try but might have some trouble with it. I really like math so I said yes.

Fast forward two weeks and I’m sitting in the cafeteria with a bunch of really tall people. They hand out the papers and say go. I finish in about half an hour and turn mine in.

About a month ago i got the results and i placed third in the country. Apparently, there was a prize and i won three hundred dollars.

Now, my mom has been struggling financially although she didn’t tell us, I figured it out. Every time I stop by her house, I put some of the money in her jar and she hasn’t but noticed. I know it’s probably not a lot but I like to think I’m helping a at least a little bit. I can’t legally work yet…

Man, the USA is fucked up.

What is the best lie you have ever told your child?

When my due date was getting very close, I told my 3 and a half year old daughter that her little brother is afraid to come out of my belly. He thinks to himself: Oh, its a big scary world out there. Who knows what is awaiting for me outside. I’m just a little baby boy. I don’t want to go out and live with big grown up people all by myself.. Who will understand me and help me when I’m outside? Oh how I wish there was a little girl out there who would be my sister, so we can grow up together…

She was deeply moved when she heard this. She put her little hand gently on my belly, and whispered to her brother with a voice filled with tenderness. Come out little brother. I am your sister M. and I will always take care of you. You don’t have to be afraid. Few days after this, her brother came, and the love and connection that the two of them have is something I, as an only child, never imagined could exist. The way they cherish one another, help, encourage and comfort along the way is truly amazing.

Are school uniforms the most effective way to eliminate social and economic differences between students?

It’s not going to eliminate the difference at all. However, it could help the less rich kids to maintain their dignity.

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image 160

This is the most common school uniform in China. It’s ugly, oversized, and appeard since my school ages, but totally affordable. It wouldn’t change the fact that some kids have a poor family background, but it could reduce the possibility of students getting isolated in schools for either being too poor or rich. Trust me that kids do that all the time, and it could be quite hurtful sometimes.

image 161
image 161

Besides, with an ugly uniform, how one looks like purely relys on face. Dad’s mercedes or even GTR wouldn’t save it.

This is very serious what is going on

Not really Communism, though…

Can you describe a time that your company only discovered that you were irreplaceable after they fired you? How did you feel? What did they do?

I am a welder and applied to a job through a temp agency. Their ad said hiring welders from $23 to $26 an hour depending on experience. They gave me a weld test and decided to hire me at $23. I told them I want $26 because that’s what their add said. I was told that was dependent on experience. Well I have 24 years of experience and I want 26. In the end I agreed to work for 25.

On my first night it was time to clock out so I went to the time clock and clocked out. I noticed all the other welders were still there cleaning up their work areas. I shouted at them so they could hear me, “hey it’s time to go. What are you all still doing here?”

I didn’t get an answer and left. Coming in the next day I asked them about this and they said they cleaned up the shop after hours on their time. With all the workers around and the boss I told everyone, “I don’t work for free. This mess wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t been here working. I won’t be cleaning the shop for free. I am loud quitting boss” as I made eye contact with the foreman, “when my shift is over I am clocking out and going home. I will have my area cleaned up before then.”

That night was the first night they did weld testing because new clients demanded all their welders were certified welders.

The next morning the temp agency called me and asked me not to go back to the job because I had been terminated for not listening.

The morning after I was called back again. I was the only person on 2nd shift who passed the weld test and many on first shift also failed.

Company representative: “Would you come back to work for us, please?”

Me: “OK but I want $28 an hour and switched to 1st shift.”

Company representative: “we can’t do that”

Me: “Good bye”

50 Bucks and a pack of cigarettes

What was the most obvious hint that someone hitting on you ever gave but you totally missed it?

In Vietnam, when we meet someone for the first time in the new (lunar) year, we usually give each other a red envelope with some lucky money – as a good wish for a bright and happy new year.

I was in 11th grade in high school. We were just back from the Lunar New Year holiday (”Tết” holiday in Vietnamese), happily exchanging red envelopes and good wishes. Coincidentally, it was also Valentine’s Day that year. But, 20 years ago, I had no idea about that, so when this boy handed me the red envelope with a chocolate bar, “Happy Valentine!”, I happily took it, “Thank you! You’re so sweet!”, and I gave him a big hug.

Before he could say anything else, I opened the chocolate bar, broke it into pieces, and… shared it with the whole class, everyone got a piece. I couldn’t explain the emotion in his eyes when he watched that happened.

Years later, every time we meet up for our class reunion, he always brings this story up and we laugh. Still can’t believe I missed that hint.

CIA

Back in the late 70’s I found myself between jobs. I had 10 years as the GM of aof a chain of convenience stores which had been sold and that ended my job! My parents lived in the Washington DC area and one of their neighbors, who I had known for many years, worked for the CIA. At a neighborhood gathering while I was visiting I mentioned to him that I was job hunting and asked if he had any connections in the CIA. After we had returned home I got a call asking if I would like to interview so I flew back up and stayed with my parents for a week.

I was instructed to report to a building in Rosslyn VA which is across the Potomac River from DC. I remember having a hard time finding the address I was given because there was no name or numbers on the building. Maybe that was my first test! In any case, the interview lasted all week. One thing that I remember was is how low key the whole process was. Mostly a series of different people asking me a lot of questions about myself. What my hobbies were, favorite foods. etc. It reminded me of shooting the breeze with a bunch of strangers at a college mixer. Not much in writing, no physicals, drug tests, etc. Not many probing questions, very relaxed. Definitely the strangest interview I’ve ever had, and this went on for 5 days.

There was one woman who was my primary contact. From the beginning to the end, she was the one who was always there at the end of an interview and introduced me to the next person. Never their last name or title, just a first name, always in the same room, never in their office. On the 5th and final day, she brought me into her office and said that they would like me to work for them as an operative. I had never heard that term before, but knew that it meant that the CIA wanted me to be a spy. Immediate visions of James Bond came to mind. Fast cars, nice clothes, A GUN…all the things that we associate with being a spy. Obviously I was very interested.

I had a bunch of questions but the two that I remember were: 1. Where would I be stationed? and 2. What did they want me to do? I was married with two young children, and I was thinking maybe they wanted me in Europe where I had spent many years as a boy. WRONG! They wanted me to operate a small grocery store in PAGO PAGO! I had never even heard of Pago Pago, let alone knew that there was a large US Navy Base there. Out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, thousands of miles from everything and everyone we know, it was out of the question.

That was the end of my spy recruitment.

LOL. All, I do mean ALL of the stores in Pago Pago are owned by Chinese nationals. No fucking shit. -MM

Chinese Rufus

Has an unknown stranger ever paid a massive bill for you? What happened?

I was a semi-freshly divorced single mom working in a chain of gas stations. It was my job to cover if someone called off and to run the money every day.

I had a reliable car only because my parents both took the time to teach me about cars including how to find a good used one and repair it when it broke.

I was enrolled in college. One class at a time is all I could squeeze in my schedule and budget.

My child was suffering under a rural southern school district. She is gifted and they had refused to set an IEP, refused to challenge her, and in fact persecuted her and myself due to our religion. We were told more than once we were going to Hell by school officials.

It was an uphill battle with them that required an attorney who volunteered his services. I couldn’t have afforded him otherwise.

Despite these difficulties, life was OK. We were surviving. We had food, shelter, and running water. My child never went to bed hungry or cold.

Then I started getting tired. Abnormally tired. I didn’t have the energy to function. My mother forced me to go to her doctor. She paid for the visit because I didn’t have insurance.

The doctor called me at work two days later and asked me to come in. I made arrangements for my child after school and I went.

He told me I was sick. Very sick. The tiredness was a symptom of this. It wasn’t just lack of proper nutrition or being over worked. This wasn’t something that could be fixed with a pill.

I started treatment the next week. I still went to work. I still took care of my child. I had to drop my class and adjust my schedule. I had to fight — and fight I did.

Then the medical bills started coming in. Uninsured and dead broke, I almost gave up. The state said I did not qualify for assistance of any kind because I made too much money.

If I had another child, I’d be at the income threshold. If I had another child, I could collect benefits like food stamps, Medicaid, and housing assistance.

If the state would have straightened out the child support instead of counting it against my income, I might have been able to pay a little bit of the medical bills.

I made arrangements for my child’s care after I passed. I had a small life insurance policy that would cover my final expenses. I managed to keep fighting.

The medical bills kept coming as did the phone calls from debt collectors. The threatening letters. The calls to my work. To say it was stressful is an understatement.

Until one day they stopped. The medical bills still came but showed a zero balance. The bills that had gone into collections were paid in full.

My rabbi approached me one night after services. He told me that a member of our shul had paid everything on the caveats I finish school and don’t stop.

I begged him to tell me who but he would NOT budge. He just said, “Finish your education and don’t stop.”

Finish school and don’t stop.

I still do not know who. I’ve had my suspicions, but I keep them to myself.

I have graduated but haven’t finished my education. (That is something that is never going to be finished.)

I haven’t stopped.

Smart Cat

Downtown Grill Catfish LaFitte

This is one of my favorite ways to prepare catfish. Even those who dislike catfish love it fixed this way.

Marks Catfish Lafitte
Marks Catfish Lafitte

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 large eggs, beaten
  • 1 cup milk
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/4 teaspoons salt, divided
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons ground red pepper, divided (may need 2 1/2 teaspoons)
  • 4 farm-raised catfish fillets, about 1 1/2 pounds
  • Vegetable oil
  • 12 large fresh shrimp, unpeeled
  • 1 tablespoon butter or margarine
  • 2 teaspoons minced garlic
  • 1/4 cup sweet vermouth
  • 2 cups whipping cream
  • 1/4 cup chopped green onions, divided
  • 2 teaspoons lemon juice
  • 3 very thin cooked ham slices, cut into strips
  • Garnish: lemon wedges

Instructions

  1. Combine eggs and milk, stirring until well blended.
  2. Combine flour, 1 teaspoon salt, and 1/2 teaspoon red pepper in a shallow dish. Dredge fish in flour mixture; dip in milk mixture. Dredge again in flour mixture.
  3. Pour oil to a depth of 3 inches into a Dutch oven; heat to 360 degrees F. Fry fish for 5 to 6 minutes or until golden; drain on paper towels. Keep warm.
  4. Peel shrimp; devein, if desired. Melt butter in a large skillet over medium heat; add shrimp and garlic, and cook until shrimp turn pink, stirring often. Remove shrimp, reserving drippings.
  5. Stir vermouth into reserved drippings; bring to a boil, and cook 1 minute. Add whipping cream, 2 tablespoons green onions, lemon juice, remaining 1/4 teaspoon salt, and remaining 1 to 2 teaspoons red pepper; cook 12 to 15 minutes or until sauce is thickened, stirring often.
  6. Place catfish on a serving plate, and drizzle with sauce. Top with shrimp and ham; sprinkle with remaining 2 tablespoons green onions. Garnish, if desired.

Notes

I make the sauce first and keep it warm. I then fry the fish and finish the dish.

The Big Lie that Women Keep Believing in Modern Dating

Don’t people in China wish to live in a democratic country?

As a 31-year-old Chinese person who lived in China for 30 years and has been living in New Zealand for a year, I find that this question seems to be of particular concern to people in the Western world, while we ourselves are not so concerned about it. I have also thought about this for a long time, and I would like to give a rather serious answer.

When I was living in China, politics really didn’t have much to do with our lives. In the daily routine of a normal person, we were essentially free and democratic. Moreover, from childhood, we learned about both Chinese culture and Western culture. We were quite familiar with the Western world from our media, and we knew roughly what the world was like. After going abroad, it was also easy for us to embrace Western culture.

However, after coming to New Zealand, I found that the Western media is full of prejudice against China and North Korea, while reporting differently on East Asian countries like Japan and South Korea. In fact, I particularly want to tell many Western friends who have never been to China that it is easy for us to accept Western civilization, but your points of concern about China seem to differ from what we care about ourselves.

Historically, China has never actively pursued religion, so how could it be actively enamored with politics? As long as the party does not disturb the people, we won’t pay too much attention to it, and a political party is the least intrusive solution. China is a country that has been agriculturally based for thousands of years. Our ancestors loved the land that could grow crops, and this love has flowed into our blood. The charming land that produces enchanting crops makes us ordinary people happy. China is large enough that whether at the top or among ordinary people, everyone can find their own focus in life, everyone takes responsibility for their own duties, rather than thinking about taking advantage of others or stealing from others. This is more efficient and safe.

If the leadership does not perform well, the people will resist together, and our history has always been this way. An ordinary person can grow to be a top figure in the country, or a top figure over a piece of land. With 5,000 years of detailed recorded history, many historically high-ranking people came from common families. So, when you ask if Chinese people want to live in a democratic country, I want to say that we have always been democratic. Every Chinese person knows: “The noble and the humble have no determined lineage,” but as a culturally united nation, if we are in a high position and do not make the contributions we should, we will be shamefully recorded in history, which is as important as life itself to every Chinese person. Thus, even though we have equal opportunities to become influential figures, not everyone wants to be the most powerful because that also means taking on more responsibilities, which can be more tiring (the positions of emperor, prime minister, and general in Chinese history were high-stress jobs). So usually for us, enjoying the life of an ordinary person also seems more relaxing.

However, it seems that Western politicians do not have the same immense pressures as Chinese leaders, nor do they have the same sense of responsibility. Your leaders seem very relaxed, speaking eloquently with expressive gestures, whereas our leaders are sparing with words, and mostly very serious. How should I put it? They are also under great work pressure, as they are not only supervised by hundreds of millions of common people but also by their competitors. But from my heart, I like this Chinese style where everyone has their role and does not interfere with others.

Compared to many Western countries, China is very open. I grew up in a very ordinary family in China, reading masterpieces from all over the world from a young age, experiencing different cultures, which is why I chose to go abroad after getting married and having children. I have also read modern and ancient Chinese books, which enables me to answer this question today.

For foreign friends curious about China, if you want to understand China, you are sincerely welcome to visit, especially if your daily exposure is only to English media. Because they seem to be the most heavily brainwashed region at the moment.

How true is the statement that if China adopt electoral democracy, their politicians will be corrupt?

There is already corruption in China. I mean not USA style corruption. The USA is almost as corrupt as Ukraine.

But here’s the thing.

Corruption is actually punished in China. With the PENALTY of DEATH.

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image 164

This man here? He was in the TOP ten most powerful men in China.

He took bribes. He is rotting in prison now, he was sentenced to DEATH in 2020 😀

Most westerners now are hahaha death is a soft punishment! They think that resignation is the ULTIMATE PUNISHMENT.

You remember when Jon Corzine walked off with 2 billion dollars? He went on television and said it simply evaporated.

At the same time this man

image 15
image 15

Citizens found he had better stuff than his pay grade. They reported it. He lost EVERYTHING.

BUT BUT westerners cry! We can vote them out and make them suffer.

How can you tell someone is faking intelligence?

Somewhere in my graduate school years I noticed a trend.

An undergraduate philosophy major will sound absolutely brilliant. They often speak in a jargon-dense diction, delivered at high velocity, one idea bouncing off another to produce a spiderweb of spiraling associations. The effect, rhetorically and aesthetically, is often overwhelming. Logic doesn’t really play a role because one hardly knows what they are saying. The unwitting listener feels himself outmatched, drowned and blinded by the naked light of unbridled genius.

The graduate student is a much dimmer light. He is still full of abstract phrases and obscure references, but he is someone who is starting to sound, again, like a human being — explaining things, pausing, asking questions to insure the listener is following. This is not nearly as impressive as the undergraduate, but it does have the virtue of allowing the ordinary among us to understand what is being said.

The professor sounds like your basic “dad,” albeit one with a lot to say. He can at times seem unsure of himself. He pauses to define his terms and to add qualifications to his statements. He speaks carefully. He might even speak slowly. He explains as he goes, almost apologizing for whatever obscurities he falls into. His manner of speech is, well… designed to communicate! A quite boring and not evidently bright fellow, you almost feel embarrassed for him.

In light of these observations, I was forced to conclude that there is either something terribly wrong with our educational system — since the higher people go the dumber they get — or intelligence is not quite what we sometimes think it is.

Show me your boobies

If a nuclear bomb is about to explode 2 miles away from you in 30 minutes, what is the first place you would go to?

In my van. We would drive away with the pedal to the metal. In 30 minutes, I could expect to get at least 50 kilometres away, and that ought to be far enough to be safe. Moreover, the van has a Diesel engine, so it does not need electricity to function – it will run as long as there is fuel and air.


If it was summer, I would drive to our yacht, put SCUBA gear on, and dive in the sea in the marina. There is enough oxygen to survive the blast underwater. Most radiation is absorbed in the sea, and the shock wave would not get to the water.

What was your “Aha!” moment during a toxic relationship that made you realize people never change?

I dated a girl for a few years and we lived together for the last half of the relationship. Things hadn’t been great for several months before I decided to break it off, but it was a single statement she made that convinced me it was time.

The yard was in serious need of some attention. The grass was a bit high and we hadn’t done weeding in a few weeks. So I decided to spend my day off working in the yard.

I mowed the grass and edged the walks, I weeded all the flower beds, watered and fertilized our plants, got some new plants to fill in the beds. After I was done with all that, I decided to do some cleaning. I power washed the driveway and the house. The concrete looked brand new.

I finished shortly before she got home from work. When she got in, I was in the backyard admiring my handiwork. I was proud of how the yard looked. It hadn’t looked that nice in quite a while.

When she came into the backyard, I motioned towards all my hard work with my hands as if to says “look what I did!”.

The only thing she had to say about it was “You forgot to sweep behind the chiminea.” and pointed to a small pile of leaves off in the corner of our yard. Then went inside to take a shower.

Something snapped in my brain. All the times she had criticized stupid things just to have something to criticize came flooding back. I suddenly realized the obvious pattern that had been there all along. She didn’t just do it to me either. It was just who she was to everyone. She just enjoyed criticizing people.

I knew I couldn’t live life like that. I knew that if I stuck around, she would keep doing that for the rest of our lives and it would make me miserable.

I had just spent my entire day doing yard work in the middle of June and she couldn’t find one positive thing to say about it. I left that evening and stayed with a friend. The next day, I came home and broke it off with her.

Every man on Earth

What was the most unexpected knock you got on your door?

I was about 10 years old, and in bed – about 11pm. I was supposed to be asleep, but as usual, I was reading by the light of my nightlight. I heard my dad slam the front door, and my mom yell. This wasn’t normal behavior, so I went into the living room.

The police were called, and my dad told me the story. Mom and Dad were in the living room, and heard a knock at the front door. We lived out in the country, and the neighbors all knew Dad was a doctor, so Dad thought it might be a neighbor needing help. When Dad opened the door, he saw a man with a mask standing there with one hand behind his back. Our super friendly, loved everybody German Shorthair, Ringo, followed Dad to the door. As soon as she saw the man, she gave a huge bark, and lunged for the guy. Dad said that 3 things happened nearly simultaneously – 1) he grabbed Ringo’s collar, 2) the guy pointed a gun at Dad (it was in the hand behind his back), 3) the man shot the gun. Dad slammed and locked the door. Dad was unhurt.

When the police arrived, they spent a long time looking opposite the door to try to find a bullet hole. At one point, one of the officers said that maybe it was a blank. But eventually, one of the policemen noticed that the row of art books we had on the bookshelf facing the door wasn’t completely even; one of them was pushed back about an inch. He peered closely at it, and noticed something odd about the O (it might have been Michelangelo) in the title – it had a hole in the middle of the O. He opened up the book, and sure enough, the bullet was nestled in the pages.

Needless to say, there was a rule in our house after that – don’t open the door at night without asking “Who’s there” first!

Have you ever met a dangerous person and not known it at the time?

I used to own a small tavern. We had a guy who started hanging out there quite regularly. Nice guy, played darts with the other regulars, bought rounds in order , but didn’t talk much about himself or his past. But it’s a bar, so no one cares. We’ll call him John.

He was in early one night around 7pm. My staff is all away on lunch, partner wouldn’t be back til 10pm. I’m all alone. Usually not a big deal. This night, a couple of college jocks got way out of hand and started tearing the place up – breaking cue sticks and tossing around empty kegs. It’s just John, me and the college boys. I’m trying to de-escalate and get them to leave. Then, one of the big guys starts pushing me and throwing punches. I’m screwed. That is, until John steps in and beats the shit out of two guys much bigger than himself. I was completely shocked! We toss the guys out and he tells me not to call the police. He leaves shortly afterwards.

Next time I see John, I want to pick up his tab and chat. He asks me not to tell anyone or talk about it. I figure he’s ex-military and a private guy. He becomes pretty scarce. We’re looking for him, but he doesn’t come around anymore.

About a year later, we see his pic in the paper. He’s on trial for a pair of mob related murders. Turns out he might be responsible for more than a couple of these. I’m very glad he liked me.

US Ambassador threaten to shut Ghana’s economy down if Anti-Gay bill pass

Yup. The United States foreign policy at work.

What’s the fastest you’ve wiped a smirk off of someone’s face?

I lived in northern Manitoba and southern Ontario, both in Canada, for about 25 years before I moved to southern Maryland. Snowmageddon struck in January-February of 2010. Everything was shut down for 10 days or so. Finally, I ventured out onto the roads.

My apartment complex fronted a 4 lane divided roadway, which was a designated Snow Emergency Route. The left lane was bare, the right lane was still covered with ice and slush. Both lanes were blocked where an SUV had gotten stuck then started to slide into the ditch to the right of the road. Pickup trucks, cars, other SUVs, vans, all were parked higgly jiggly and tall, brawny men were attempting to get the vehicle out.

I parked well back, walked to the crowd in my Canadian snow boots, and offered to help. They all had a good laugh, then turned away. I tapped on a man’s arm, “I grew up in Wisconsin and lived in Canada for 25 years. I know snow.”

“Hey, let the little lady here give it a try!”

I cleared them away from the car, crunched around it, repositioned the men, instructed the driver to straighten her wheels and put it into LOW gear, no gas! Told the men to push again, rocking, and told the driver to release the brakes.

The SUV popped right out of the icy ruts and kept going. Silently, the men returned to their cars and left. Too cold for crickets, I guess…

What did you notice during an interview that made you not want the job?

I was interviewing for a Canadian regional sales manager’s job for a company that sold patent medicines, made in Saudi Arabia. (Yes, I wrote the correct country name.)

After having introduced ourselves the interviewer handed me a package of papers, about ten pages thick.

“I’ll be quiet for a few minutes until you have read and signed this.”

It was the most horrible secrecy agreement you could imagine. If I break this, my grandson’s firstborn would be burned on the stake, or something along those lines.

I put it down, and politely bade my adieus.

The interviewer followed me all the way to the elevator door, trying to explain that not all was cast in stone. Some details could be negotiated.

I entered the elevator and left.

My next job was selling industrial valves, no secrecy agreement required. (I stayed there 9.5 years.)

Dead Bedrooms

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/cuWLECYMWxo?feature=share

What did you see going on in the back of the school bus that shocked you?

The school arranged for a bus load of junior high students to go to a live play in the city.

This was the second bus trip in a month. The first one had gotten a little steamy on the ride back to the school in the dark. But not so bad it stopped the second one from happening.

The second trip, stopped all future bus trips, and caused a general assembly to be called. The principal and vice principal were dismissed at the end of the school year.

I didn’t have a girlfriend, and my best friends sister wanted to make out with me, but I knew that would end my friendship with my best friend. She wasn’t attractive enough to risk that.

In the back row, you could only see two guys sitting up, one in each seat. There had been girls sitting beside them when we left for the school.

What brought it to a head, was that the majority of students had hickies that were visible to their parents when they got home from the school trip.

There were a lot of phone calls leading up to the general assembly. It was amazing how many students had purple splotches, vainly trying to be covered with turtle necks, and long sleeves, and they had to sit in the front row of the general assembly, as we were told the consequences of our actions.

Do you continue to greet neighbors who never say hello first?

My mother was a nurse.

One day, she came home with a bruise on her cheek – just a small one, but it was a bruise. I asked what happened to her? She told me that a patient’s son hit her in the face because he thought she was ignoring his father – who was in pain while actually she was busy with another patient who was more critical. I asked her what happened next? She told me: “Oh, I came to that patient as soon as I finished with the one I was working on. Talked to him, comforted him and gave him some meds. Then I explained the situation to the son, and he apologized”. 7 year old me that day got angry and asked: “Why? You’re the best nurse, why didn’t you let someone else deal with that patient? His son hit you. He didn’t deserve your care!”

And my mom’s answer that day became one of the most important lessons I carry with myself through life: “Sweetie, you should never let someone’s bad action to be the reason for your own. Fixing something wrong by doing something wrong will never work. That man hit me may have been wrong, but if I hadn’t taken care of his father, I wouldn’t have been right. Moreover, it was the son who made the mistake, why should the father has to face the consequences? Your mom is the best nurse, so I do the best, right?”

So, if my neighbor never says hello to me first? That doesn’t stop me from saying hello and wishing them a good day.

I still believe that in this world full of sad/angry people, it’s much better if we’re sweet to each other, even just a littleeeeeee bit.

They know her language

Do you think the recent incident where a Chinese navy destroyer used active sonar to harass a disabled Australian frigate will threaten the pro-China government in Australia?

I strongly condemn Chinese military using sonar of mass destruction near Chinese coast which caused damage to Australian soldiers close Australian coast.

Wait… the Australians were near Chinese coast.

Oh… so you were their collecting seabed information, right?

In case of WWIII, it would be useful to intercept Chinese submarines.

International water or not, it’s definitely a hostile activity against China.

I can already make the draft about the same thing but reversed, i.e. PLAN soldiers got hurt by Australian sonar near Australian coast.


There is no “pro-China government in Australia”.

We know that already.

Stop lying.

Miao Ethnic Group

This is one of the 65 recognized ethnic groups in China.

What is the most absurd thing you’ve been charged for on a bill?

The flags for the cars at my mother-in-laws funeral.

Well, they tried.

When they were doing their consult, they went over about a million things with my wife, and her brother. Both of whom were pretty deep in grief as they had just lost their mother. This woman was more of a mother to me than my own, so I wasn’t exactly NOT grieving.

Before my wife signed on the dotted line, she asked me to look the paperwork over. I saw a HUGE line item, it was around $2000, and just listed as “flags”. I asked the wife about it, and I asked the brother-in-law. Both had no idea what it was. I asked the representative from the funeral home, and they said it was for the funeral flags for the cars. The little magnetic “flags” that say “FUNERAL” on them. They are plastic, and have a magnetic base on them and you put them on your front fenders. If you have seen a few funeral processions, I’m sure you have seen them.

So I asked why we were paying $2000 for these.

I was told we had estimated 100 people, and they charge $10 per flag, and 2 per car. so 100x2x$10=$2000.

I asked if these were required, or if they thought that literally every single person was going to be driving their own car, or, the pretty obvious question, would this get re-rated based on how many people ACTUALLY showed up and needed a flag.

I was told that no, they were not ‘required’ but that they were recommended to make it more visible, and that wouldn’t my MIL want that item? They would re-estimate based on how many cars I expected (yeah, they KNEW that the estimate of how many guests was NOT the same as how many cars there would be), but that once the order was put in, it was non-refundable, and that if we didn’t use them all, then that was just how it was. They were basically being paid to make them available.

I went back to the wife and BIL, and explained, they agreed, nope, not necessary. I told them we didn’t need this, and to remove it immediately. They acted like that was some manner of travesty, and basically implied that people would think poorly of us for it. I knew my MIL, and KNEW she would have spit her teeth out if we had wasted $2k on this. There was a lot of shade from the funeral people for this.

Strangely enough, day of, not a single person asked about the flags. We turned out headlights on, and drove in procession with absolutely no problems whatsoever. Ironically, the only vehicle with the flags was the hearse, it had them permanently attached to it. We weren’t charged for that.

The funeral industry literally preys on people at their most vulnerable. They prey on your emotions, and your fears and insecurities. They have no trouble manipulating you into paying more than is necessary, and they will pad that bill out to match any insurance you might have. Do NOT just give them the insurance information, magically, if you have $35000 in insurance, they will eat every penny of it up. We had, $0 and paid every penny out of pocket… They still tried to pad the bill at every turn.

“What is the most absurd thing you’ve been charged for on a bill?”

edit

yes, these ARE reusable, and yes, they are returned after the procession, and yes, that does make it so much worse.

Good men won’t stick around if they are unwanted

Canadian “Mercenary” Killed By Russian Army in Ukraine

World Hal Turner

The Russian Armed Forces announced today:

“Canadian Mercenary, Joshua Mayers from Alberta, Canada has been successfully liquidатеd by the Russian army in the Bakhmut direction.

Joshua abandoned his family to go fight for Ukraine in September 2023, and was liquidатеd on November 10th 2023.

Hope it was worth it all.”

Eight?

Dad finds out his daughters “body count”. His expression…

What is the most unforgettable sentence that someone said to you?

When I decided to move halfway across the Earth, from Vietnam to the U.S. to marry my (then) boyfriend, the only ‘condition’ I made my boyfriend agree to was I wanted him to move closer to his parents. My reason was that I would be in a new country, I wanted to stay close to our family. He agreed.

So, when The Teenager & I moved over, we settled down in a place within one hour drive from our parents.

Then came the first meet-up, we invited a few other family friends over. My mom & I were in the kitchen preparing food when a lady came in. She saw me, smiled, and asked my mom, “So, here is your daughter-in-law hah?” My mom smiled back at her, “No. She is my daughter in love.”

That sentence struck a harmonious chord within me and made my heart sing.

What is the one in a million coincidence you have ever had?

My wife and I were living in our first house in Oklahoma City. One day while we were both at work, the city sewer department tore down all the fences in the rear of the houses on our block to replace the sewer main. When we got home from work we were heartbroken because we had had our young dog in the backyard and now he was nowhere to be found. We searched the area for days and put up notices but to no avail.

We were starting to believe that we would never see our dog again. My wife was so upset she decided to call the city to “give them a piece of her mind” about the lack of notification on the sewer work causing us to lose our dog.

So she gets a person on the phone from the city’s Ombudsman Department. My wife explains the situation and tells the person that we loved that dog and had paid good money for him because he was a registered Irish setter. The person asks where we live and my wife gives our address. The person says “Well that’s amazing. I live about a half mile from you and there’s been an Irish setter hanging around lately.” My wife tells me the address and when I got to the person’s house, there’s our dog.

Oklahoma City is a big metropolitan area. Of all the people in the metro area my wife might have got on the phone, our dog happened to be at that person’s house.

Why can’t fast food establishments give the unsold food to the homeless people at the end of the night?

I managed a cookie shop once. It was in a college town, and was open til 11:30 pm. At the end of the night, a homeless person showed up asking for cookies. I gave him some.

the next night, he brought 3 friends. There were just enough cookies for them. The next night, I was swamped. Literally dozens showed up. I didn’t have enough cookies for all of them. The crowd became enraged. They started yelling at me, then they started throwing things at me.

i told them not to come around again, there would be no more free cookies. I had to take a cab home that night, it was unsafe for me to walk.

The next night, a few of them started following me as I walked home. They were loudly talking about how they were going to rape and kill me. I ducked into an open business and called a cab home again. I was very young, and made just over minimum wage. I couldn’t afford to take a cab every night, but I had to for weeks.

I did make arrangements with a night nurse, who worked at a local hospital. She dropped by at closing every night on her way to work, and picked up the last cookies to take to the break room.

Having had that experience, I would never give food from a restaurant to homeless people again. Many years later, I owned a bakery, but still remembered my lesson.

The UFO Incident That Shocked Ariel School: Telepathic Extraterrestrials (Re-Edit)

It’s like story time for grown-ups. I really appreciate this channel. Hecklefish is my spirit animal.”

What are you banned from? Why?

I was banned from my local Walmart because I miss scanned an item. I went to self checkout one day because I had 4 items and wanted to teach my sons how to scan items. To make the story easier to understand, I had a tshirt, set of bras, shorts and some socks. While scanning, we had accidently double scanned the bras rather than scan the shorts, honest mistake. We finish up and as we are heading out, loss protection stops me and says “My name is XXX I’m with loss prevention please come with us” I was genuinely confused, my son got scared because of how aggressive they were but we complied. While in the security room they proceeded to rummage thru my bags and asked to search my purse. Again, I complied, but they never explained why I was pulled in. They searched cameras for probabaly 20 minutes. At one point, I hear one of the workers call across the radio “We need security detail for an escort.” I started getting REALLY scared and demanded an answer. Finally, they explain I miss scanned an item, because of this I am being escorted out of the building and will not be allowed back on property, should I step foot on property I will be arrested. I was baffled! They didn’t even give me a chance to fix my honest mistake! Needless to say, again I complied, but I put in a call the corporate after leaving, they reached out to me and lifted the banned immediately, apologized, and fired the entire loss prevention team. It wasn’t the first time they had abused power!

What vulnerabilities does the U.S. face by being dependent on China for Rare Earth Elements?

Every shit that the US does on China, the Chinese can do even more, faster cheaper and more painful to the U.S.

China prefers not to but it is always ready. Chinese people has a saying. If you do it on the 1st Luna calendar. We will reciprocate on the 15th. You mentioned rare earth but this is just one out of a thousand measure. It could checkmate the US. Don’t even think about it. Every hurt on China will be returned by several fold hurt on the U.S.

What is something everyone should consider doing?

My father called me yesterday.

Dad: Hello son, how are you?

Me: I’m perfectly fine, Dad.

Dad: Did you eat?

Me: Yep.

As usual, the conversation ended in five minutes.


After I had disconnected the call, I thought – What if it was a call from my best friend, would my response have been the same?

The answer was a big no and I was unable to figure out why. This restlessness drove me to call him again.

Dad: What happened? Are you ok, son?

Me: Yes, I’m fine, Dad. Just, missing you a lot.

He was surprised at first and thought I needed money.

Soon after, I began cracking few jokes (lame ones) to which he laughed his heart out. We talked for straight 40-45 minutes, engaging in topics we had never discussed before.

Strangely enough, I felt like talking to a different person. The person whom I had spent my life with, yet knew so little about.

The blissful conversation ended with a ‛Khush Raho’ (Stay Blessed!) from his side and a wide smile from mine.


And so, I realised, not taking your dear ones for granted and making a deliberate effort to know them is something worth consider doing.

I found a really good friend in this process.

Who knows, you may find one too!

What does that word mean

In Imperial China, was there any possible situation where a commoner could meet the Emperor?

In ancient China, common people had the following ways to meet the emperor.

1. The imperial examination. The final stage of the imperial examination is the palace examination, which is personally supervised by the emperor.

2. Assassination. The emperor went out to patrol and ambushed him by the roadside. Even if the assassination fails, before being executed, the emperor will personally question you, who is behind the scenes?

3. Emperor Banquets Centenarians. This is a large-scale honoring and respecting activity for the elderly where the emperor invites centenarians to participate in the royal banquet. But the prerequisite is that you must be able to live healthily to a very old age despite the lack of medical treatment and medicine in ancient times.

4. Become a eunuch. This is not recommended because ancient castration surgery was very risky.

5. Becoming a famous prostitute. Although the emperor had many wives, he would never refuse beautiful women.

Why don’t hotels in Western countries have Chinese breakfasts for their Chinese guests when they used to have Japanese breakfasts for their Japanese guests?

When I was in Malaysia, during breakfast they served dim sum in addition to other traditional breakfast foods and it was very nice. However, Malaysia is a country with a 20% Chinese population. Back here in the West we don’t have a high percentage of Chinese people. There are some Westerners like myself who would enjoy Chinese food, but the majority of people who would eat it would be Chinese people themselves. The lack of demand means there is little incentive to supply it.

What are some of the best pranks you have pulled?

1999. I had a four-year-old Internet advertising agency with 15 employees. A global corporation was buying it.

Weeks before the sale was finalized I had an early morning doctor’s appointment and saw these cups in her bathroom marked URINE SPECIMEN.

I took a bunch of cups, got into the office before any of my employees arrived, left a cup on each person’s desk with a memo that said the buyer required a urine test from everyone in the company before the sale could be approved. A nurse would arrive at noon to test the samples.

One by one they trickled in and proceeded to go batshit. Violation of my rights. They can’t do this. My personal life is my personal life.

I commiserated, but reminded them that if I didn’t sell the company, we’d probably go belly up, and we’d all be out of a job.

Not a lick of work got done all morning. Finally, at noon we all gathered in the reception area, each of us holding a full urine specimen cup.

I spoke to the group. “Guys, I hate this as much as you do.” I looked at my cup. “And I really hate my sample. The color of this piss is terrible. I think I’ll run it through one more time.”

And then I drank it.

I didn’t have to tell them it was Peach Snapple. They knew they’d been had.

15 people. 45 man-hours (and woman-hours) wasted. Pissed away, so to speak. And I loved every second of it. Best. Prank. Ever.

Simply disgusting

What is the most disturbing message ever left on your voicemail?

“Hey guys, it’s Heather. I’m running a bit late, but I should be there in a…..”

There was absolute silence in the room.

“Message received: September 3rd at 11:55 am.”

Not a word was spoken among the three of us listening to the message and none of us could muster anything useful to say afterwards other than a very weak, “save that message”.

It was September 5th. In less than 24 hours, we would be going to Heather’s funeral. Her car had been t-boned by a large truck and she had been killed instantly.

The police report showed that the accident had happened on the 3rd. Slightly before noon.

What could be the implications of China’s major state-owned banks exchanging yuan for U.S. dollars and selling those dollars in spot currency markets?

Try to fully understand China. Unless you do you will always have imaginary Chinese action. Let me help you. To China currency is meant to help transaction and to store wealth not trade currency for currency sake.

To China and to BRICS the SWIFT and its manipulative money trading scheme is just another western conspiracy to destroy countries by a stroke of a pen. China will not and will never play a meaningless game it is stacked against. China. So

it will not internationalise RMB or the Yuan. It will not try to helped prop it currencies artificially and it wanted a real currency value that. Is sustainable trusted. Playing Russian roulette’s with its 1.4 billion people’s wealth is not what China will do.The U.S. dollar used to be able to buy 100 items to day a mere 78 years later it can buy 3 of the same item. That is not good for Americans.

In fact between 1980–2020 Real Chinese income grew 30 times and the U.S. during the same time frame not only not grow. It went back to the 1960 level. So try imagine this. American today is doing worst than their grandpa! China wants its currency to buy roughly the same 78 years later. And an average Chinese have 50 times more Yuan.

What’s the funniest reason you’ve been called in to school to collect your child?

What’s the funniest reason you’ve been called in to school to collect your child?

We were called to get our 16 yo boy. He had drunk a bottle of some alcohol during the lunch break. Then during the relaxation class, he fell asleep. When we got there around 90 minutes later, the high school was closed. We couldn’t get there any earlier as both of us worked around 70kms away.

We discovered from the cleaner he had been taken to the police station as they couldn’t depend on when we would get there.

Unfortunately, the police [ it was a small unit] had been called out to a large bushfire. So they put him in the outside exercise yard. The problem was it didn’t have a roof. When our boy saw us coming he climbed the chain wall and high-tailed it.

He slept at a mate’s place that night. The next day the high school said they were going to have him placed under care. His mum also a school principal said, “ over my dead body”.

We came and collected him. He was terrified his mum was going to hit the roof. Which she did.

We got called by the police to discuss his behaviour as they wanted to know how he had purchased the bottle. We counted with how could you lose our son when he is in your care. In the end nothing became of it and our son grew up and gained some brains.

What happens when you get no action

What are the lessons people most often learn too late in life?

As my first son learned to crawl and then walk, my wife and I played mantras to him, meditated by his side, and lit sacred sandalwood incense around him.

We co-slept and in the day he was always strapped to one of us, skin to skin.

He was breastfed exclusively for nearly a year and then given only organic, vegetarian food.

We didn’t buy him any guns or other toy weapons, only simple wooden and cloth playthings.

He was so peaceful that he radiated a tangible serenity.

Which made her happy—and me—because we wanted him to be calm, loving, and spiritual.


He’s seven years old now.

His favorite dish is a medium rare burger, he knows an embarrassing number of juicy curse words, and he’s obsessed with Nerf guns.

He likes to listen to rap music with phat bass lines, he finds talk of spirituality to be boring, and is not in the least bit interested in receiving affection.

But everyone is impressed by how determined, free-spirited, and bright he is.

And between you and me, I’m kind of happy he chose to do his own thing, to be his own being.

We love him more intensely than the blazing of the sun.


It took me a long time to realize that you can spend years and years of your life aiming for a particular outcome, just to have things turn out wildly different than you anticipated.

It took me a long time to realize that life is like a wild animal, like my son—fierce and free and beautiful, but ultimately, unpredictable, untamable, and unruly.

And I have the feeling it might take me the rest of my life to fully realize that this built-in uncertainty gives life a unique flavor that, after being acquired, tastes exquisitely delicious.

Why is it mostly old people that go to seafood-based fast food restaurants?

It could be because a lot of older people have tooth problems. An older relative, has dentures, I suggested that we go for steak, and she countered with a fish place, so she could be sure, that she wouldn’t embarrass herself having problems eating a tough steak.

The next time she was over, I had bought tenderloin steaks, and I cooked hers medium, which wasn’t as well done as she would have liked it, but was still pretty tender. Ours were medium rare.

She was upset with me, saying that she wouldn’t be able to eat the steak.

I showed her I could cut mine with my fork. She took one bite and was in love. She hadn’t had a steak she could eat in 10 years. She finished the whole steak, which she had said was too much, when she was looking at it. But once she started eating she couldn’t stop.

Every time we eat at restaurant, we have to make sure there is something on the menu that is soft for her.

So this is one possible reason.

Swarms of drones – kamikazes – attacked USS Thomas Hudner

World Hal Turner

The USS Hudner (DDG-116), an Arleigh Burke-Class Destroyer of the United States Navy, was attacked by a swarm of drones this morning, while patrolling the Red Sea.  The ship sustained no damage or injuries to its crew.

US Central Command (CENTCOM) reported the incident after Houthis in the country of Yemen, took credit for launching the attack.

Houthis are now attacking United States Naval vessels over US Support for Israel, as the Israeli government engages in conflict with the Municipal Government HAMAS of the Gaza Strip.

The Houthis launched swarms of Iranian-made “kamikaze” drones in an unprecedented act of war.

Yemeni rebels who have become a force to be reckoned with in the Middle East, attempted to sink the U.S. vessel.

What happens when you don’t get paid in China

How many Humans existed on the entire earth 60,000 years ago?

Not much more than a few thousand, which is surprisingly small. This is based on our DNA.

Unlike our chimpanzee cousins, all humans today have virtually identical DNA. In fact, one group of chimps can have more genetic diversity than all 8 billion humans.

Our minuscule genetic diversity indicates that at some stage, around 70,000 years ago, the human population dwindled to a very low level — maybe 2,000. In fact, it looks like we came close to extinction.

It was also around this time that our ancestors began migrating out of Africa.

This suggests there were dramatic changes to our traditional environment, possibly caused by the Toba supervolcano eruption 74,000 years ago, the biggest eruption in 2 million years, which left entire regions devastated by ash and climate change.

What is going on with the Republican Party? Why do they seem so unhinged?

It’s 1964. Republicans are sane and intelligent. But they just got handed one of the largest losses in modern history, with LBJ winning the largest popular vote majority since James Monroe in 1820. Desperate for votes, they start pandering to racists who are upset about the Civil Rights Act and desegregation.

It’s 1974. Republicans just had their President outed as a criminal. They need an edge to get back in power. They start pandering to evangelicals, hoping their ability to believe in things they can’t see will make them easy targets for brainwashing.

It’s 1984. Republicans are scoring big points thanks to looking like the tough guys in the Cold War. They double down on the idea of growing the defense budget.

It’s 1994. Republican economic policies are dividing conservatives and just cost them the White House. They launch a 24-hour fake news channel to keep their base uninformed.

It’s 2004. Democrats have nominated a war hero for President and he should easily defeat the Republican incumbent. It’s time to start lying about his war record. Disinformation becomes the new norm.

It’s 2014. The economy is good. The nation is safe. But the President is black. Republicans dig up the 1964 playbook and capitalize on racism in their base.

It’s 2024. Sixty years of tactics have produced Republican voters who are racist, uninformed, misinformed, brainwashed, and violent. Now these people aren’t just voters anymore. They’re in Congress.

The president of the United States

China’s New Subs and Sonars Challenge Supremacy of US Silent Hunter Fleets

18:33 GMT 21.11.2023 (Updated: 18:37 GMT 21.11.2023)

The People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) surpassed the US Navy in total number of warships in late 2021. Technologically too, China has made major strides, including in the area of submarine construction and detection. These advances have sparked concerns from observers that America’s powerful fleets could be left dead in the water in a crisis.

The PLAN’s military and technological prowess against the US Navy in the field of submarine construction and anti-submarine warfare is progressing apace, and the “era of total US submarine dominance” over the People’s Republic of China is reaching its end.

That’s the conclusion reached by one of America’s top cited business newspapers in a piece focused on the Asian nation’s scientific and industrial advances for naval warfare. China, the paper pointed out, is gradually “narrowing” the gap between itself and the United States in the highly complex fields of submarine technology and undersea detection.

These developments not only threaten the Pentagon’s regional strategy of hemming China into its home ports, but could challenge US naval supremacy globally over the long term.

Earlier this year, for instance, research by the US Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute pointed to Chinese advances in efficient nuclear reactors, quiet-running pump-jet propulsion systems and internal quieting devices, the latter based on “imitative innovation” of Russian technology, predicting that the PLAN’s latest nuclear-powered subs will be much harder to track than before.

Additionally, analyses of satellite photos of the Huludao Shipyard in Liaoning, northeastern China taken last year showed the construction of sections of submarine hulls larger than anything US analysts have ever seen in a Chinese sub, along with what seemed to be plans to increase production capacity.

US media citing leaked US Navy intelligence already sounded the alarm about China’s impressive shipbuilding capacity this past fall, which at 23.2 million tons per year, compared with 100,000 tons per year in the US, gives the People’s Republic the ability to build warships at a rate some 200 times greater than the US in a pinch.

On top of that, the PLAN’s rapid construction of a vast network of underwater sensors in the South China Sea and other areas along the Chinese coast known as the “Underwater Great Wall”, to look out for sub, surface warship and aerial activity, means that the Pentagon will find it more difficult to place its warships, subs and aircraft in areas around the Asian nation. The Underwater Great Wall’s construction is reportedly nearing its completion, and includes a vast network of passive and active sonar sensors, plus remote controlled underwater and surface drones which can look out for enemy activity.

China is reportedly also “getting better” at finding silent-running US attack and cruise missile subs sneaking around near its home waters, combining buoy and drone-based monitoring with the use of patrol aircraft and helicopters, for example.

In addition are the PLAN’s growing number of exercises with Russia, which, it can be assumed not only increases the Chinese Navy’s ability to coordinate with its northern neighbor in the event of an emergency, but allows it to learn from the Russian Navy’s half century-plus year experience as a major global naval power rivaled only to the US.

“The implications for the US and our Pacific allies will be profound,” former US Navy officer Christopher Carlson said, pointing to the headaches the US Navy will face, and the additional resources it will need, to locate and keep track of China’s new generation of quiet-running nuclear subs.

Strategically, the outlet noted, maneuvers that the US once took for granted, like the ability to approach close China’s home shores, will now no longer be a given, with the PLAN’s nuclear-powered attack subs able to pick off approaching American warships before they could reach Taiwan in a crisis, for example.

On top of that is the Chinese sub-based ballistic missile threat to the US homeland –a threat Washington has long been used to meting out, but not experiencing itself, in relation to the Asian giant.

“Finding a boat this quiet is going to be really hard,” Carlson said of the Chinese sub threat, predicting the new Chinese boats will probably be about as quiet as the Project 971 Shchuka-B (NATO reporting name Akula, or “Shark”) class fourth generation nuclear-powered attack subs which the Soviet Union and then Russia started fielding in the 1980s and 1990s.

China’s fleet of 79 submarines includes at least 16 nuclear-powered attack and ballistic missile subs, including six Type 093 (NATO reporting name Shang class) attack subs and six Type 094 (NATO reporting name Jin) ballistic missile boats operating “near-continuous” patrols between Hainan Island and the South China Sea. But Carlson warned that the Asian nation could build up to triple the current US rate averaging 1.2 subs per year.

Costly as Aircraft Carriers, Difficult to Build

“Submarine-building is the pinnacle of technological excellence in economics and industry, and only a few countries have mastered the technologies which China has now broken into – France, Britain, the Soviet Union/Russia, and the United States,” Vasily Dandykin, a veteran Russian military analyst and retired Russian Navy Captain 1stRank, told Sputnik.

Several factors account for the US’ slowing pace when it comes to the construction of new submarines, according to the observer, starting with Washington’s decision to rest on its laurels after the end of the Cold War, to the drop in the number of high-class specialists in the field.

“The downtime” in the US’ submarine-related programs resulted from “complacency after the collapse of the Soviet Union,” when “not just America, but also Europe rested on their laurels,” according to Dandykin. “The Americans have the world’s largest military budget, which exceeds those of all other countries in the world. That means that somewhere they got carried away with such gigantic and expensive projects which did not justify their cost,” the analyst said, pointing to out of control spending on novelties like the $8 billion-per ship Zumwalt class of destroyers.

“There were a lot of such projects that sucked up a lot of money. And now it turns out that all of these experiments boil down to the fact that they’re 10 years behind Russia in the creation of a new fourth-generation strategic nuclear submarine,” made possible, according to the analyst, thanks to the backlog of revolutionary Soviet sub designs that Russian builders have been able to develop and build on.

“The ‘downtime’ that occurred had an impact in this area, not just with submarines, but the construction of the surface fleet, the entire American fleet. Here, without a doubt, China’s pace has been impressive, first and foremost in terms of the construction of large ships for the surface fleet. But I think they will push themselves and try to build up their nuclear submarine fleet as quickly as possible,” Dandykin predicted.

As far as China’s subs themselves go, Dandykin pointed out that for the moment, the majority of the PLAN’s fleet still consists of diesel-electric subs, and for them to reach the same technological level as the US, as they have already done when it comes to ships like universal landing ships and destroyers, will take time. The PLAN’s current nuclear-powered ballistic missile-launching subs belong to the second generation at best, in the retired naval officer’s estimation, and the newest efforts are aimed at the creation of third-generation vessels.

Accordingly, Dandykin believes US efforts to hype up the “Chinese threat” are “a little disingenuous,” and designed mainly to lobby for the allocation of even more resources for US sub-building efforts – a titanic effort equivalent, more or less, to the construction of an aircraft carrier in both technological and financial terms.

What does it feel like to be abroad but feel more at home than when you are back home?

Surreal. Uncanny. Deja vu. That’s how I felt as I looked down on Southeast Asia from my seat aboard an airplane. The feelings intensified the longer I was there. While my friends made me feel so very welcome, even in my time alone the feeling never left me.

I began the first leg of my long journey back home by crying into my teacup in a cafe in Changi Airport. My heart felt heavy. I was glad to go home to my daughter but if she’d been with me on the trip I’m not sure I’d have returned to the U.S. willingly.

I have said that when I die I want my ashes to be scattered in China, because America is the place of my birth but China holds my heart. There’s something about the Asian region that draws me deeply. I have no Asian background or ancestry so I can’t rationalize it. It’s just how I felt.

I was just jokin’

Have you ever seen a mass exodus after a respected employee quit or got fired?

I was fired after 11 years in a PR firm. I never clicked with the owner, and the feeling was mutual. I loved my colleagues, got along well with everyone, and consider them friends to this day.

I had just come off of a very trying time related to a proposal I was writing, had slept little, was burned out and mentioned to a colleague that I wasn’t sure I belonged there anymore.

Soon afterward, the boss took me into his office and said nobody wanted to work with me and that we had just lost a client that reduced our budget. His second in command sat through this with his head in his hands the whole time. He helped me clean out my office the next day.

There were other things going on at the firm. The owner was advancing in age and had promised a succession plan. He never delivered. One by one, after my firing, everyone quit. His firm, started in the mid-80s and one of the most prominent in the city, was done.

Two people told me that my firing was the trigger that made people start thinking about whether they wanted to be there anymore. I can’t take the credit or the blame for what happened, but the exodus was fast and devastating.

Correct attitude to have

What seemingly good celebrity is actually a jerk?

The public image of a celebrity can often be quite different from their true character. Take Ellen Degeneres, for example. On her show and in interviews, she appears to be a lovable, down-to-earth aunt-like figure. However, there have been numerous accounts from staff and crew members claiming that she is actually a nightmare to work with and a terrible person. So, which version is the truth?

Then there’s Sean Penn, who was once in a relationship with Madonna. It has been alleged that he kidnapped and raped her during the 80s. Additionally, Penn has been involved in some truly awful activities throughout his life. On the flip side, he is also the CEO of a large charity and engages in humanitarian work.

Another celebrity, Mark Wahlberg, is often seen as an extraordinary role model and a decent guy. However, it is important to note that he blinded a Vietnamese man during a fight and is a high school dropout. Please note that the mention of being a high school dropout does not imply that it automatically makes someone a terrible person, but it is worth considering when evaluating their status as a role model.

Tim Allen, known for his lovable and funny dad roles, has a dark side. Despite making people laugh out loud with his jokes, he has been described as a severe asshole who disrespects those around him. Furthermore, he was caught smuggling a kilo of cocaine in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and served time for it.

On the other hand, we have Danny Trejo, who was once involved in drug running for a cartel and had a long history of violence and addiction. However, he has transformed himself into a humble and honest man who actively tries to steer kids away from his former lifestyle. In person, he is charming and genuine.

How might rising interest rates in the US affect China’s growth potential and FDI flows?

Nothing.

Zero effect.

Slave nations like Germany and Japan wrap themselves around US and western economic orbit. And the U.S. increase interest it destroy their banks and industry. Not China. China is in its own stable orbit. Today the U.S. interest is between 3–5% and China stays under 1% or so. It do its own thing.

US banks are dropping like flies. China’s bank is loaded with Cash. Chinese citizen on average save 35% of their income in Chinese banks. The U.S. citizens meanwhile saved in average less than 4%. So every year the Chinese add another 6–7 trillion dollars into their wealth and funds.

On FDI if the west reduce other nations made up for it and China’s own investment is so humongous. FDI from west means nothing.

This cheating event did not work out well

What are the influences of food on our culture?

I grew up in the USA. In high school, the lunch period was 25 minutes. On a normal day I washed down three peanut butter sandwiches and half a dozen cookies with a quart of milk and headed to the break room.

At least my parents enforced a family sit-down dinner, though it didn’t last long either.

My eating behaviour in college and working part time jobs was not any better, though the food choices were smarter and more varied.

When I started working in sales after college, I graduated to fast food eaten in the car.

At restaurants, servers were all over me, trying to turn the table in 45 minutes or less.

For me, eating was like putting gas in my car. Get it over and move on to the rest of life.

Then I moved to Germany. It was a shock. The canteen served excellent full hot meals and everyone took their time eating, chatting (but not about work), and taking turns buying coffee for the table.

It was impossible to get out of a sit-down restaurant in under 90 minutes without pushing the staff.

Dinner at friends was a four-hour affair.

I learned to love food and the community of sharing it with others. It wasn’t uncommon for less formal outdoor restaurants to seat me with other diners. I met dozens of fascinating people in that manner.

Ten years later I moved to France and learned that the French take mealtime even more seriously than the Germans. Employers even subsidise the canteen or pay part of the meal vouchers for each worker.

I think this question might be better phrased if it asked “What are the influences of culture on food?”

While the food does vary from country to country, I have little trouble in Europe to eat exactly what I ate in the USA. That’s why I don’t think it’s the food that matters.

Instead I think it’s the value people place on taking the time to savour their meals and those they share them with.

Zelenogradsk: What does a Russian city of CATS look like?

Nov 09 2023

Anna Sorokina

They are literally everywhere: occupying benches at observation decks, sitting next to tourists at restaurant terraces, strolling along pedestrian streets and (alright, fine) allowing you to take photos of them. Let’s pay them a little visit?

2023 11 26 19 40
2023 11 26 19 40

You can definitely call the small city of Zelenogradsk (pop. 16,000) in Kaliningrad Region the “cat capital” of Russia. Everything there is dedicated to these furry animals, from souvenirs to… traffic lights!

The many cats of this city will gladly show a tourist the best photo spots (and the best lunch spots!). But, how did it come to this?

Zelenogradsk (Cranz until 1946) is an old resort city at the shore of the Baltic Sea. Cats usually like to settle in such seaside towns, closer to fishermen, fish and vacationers. But, in Zelenogradsk, they have become a real attraction of the city.

According to legend, centuries ago, cats saved the city from rodents that were destroying their food supply and spreading disease. Caring for stray cats is the locals’ way of expressing gratitude.

2023 11 26 19 41t
2023 11 26 19 41t

Cats have always been living in Zelenogradsk. But, it was only recently that the city itself became the “cat capital”. It all started with the Murarium Museum in an old 1905 water tower. Local inhabitant Irina Klochkova decided to set up an exhibition hall for her cat statuette collection in the unused tower in 2012.

Real cats also live in the museum, with ginger-furred ‘Semyon Semyonovich’ chief among them. He became the prototype for the first museum souvenirs. ‘Murarium’ gained a lot of popularity among tourists; soon after, a lot of everything “cat-themed” began to appear in the city.

2023 11 26 19 42b
2023 11 26 19 42b

As soon as you visit, you’ll immediately notice an incredible amount of cat graffiti on buildings. Souvenir stores, on every corner it seems, sell anything from keychains and magnets to shopping bags and mugs with cats on them.

The city’s central street, Kurortny Prospekt, even has mini-benches for cats, little traffic lights with flashing cats, as well as vending machines where you can buy cat food. The city administration even has the position of cat chief, a cat caretaker. Their responsibilities include feeding and taking care of cats.

And for those tourists who decide to have lunch on an open terrace of any cafe, just know you won’t be able to so in peace and quiet! The local cats will always investigate and will not be against the idea of sharing a meal with you.

By the way, there are plenty of dogs in the city, as well, but they seemingly maintain a neutrality with the cats. There are literally no fights or altercations to speak of these days.

2023 11 26 19 4g1
2023 11 26 19 4g1

Why are the Chinese not interested in Western democracy?

There are two approaches to an answer, one superficial.


I’ll begin with the superficial.

Democracy, or one man one vote, is practiced by the Chinese. They have found the process is good at selecting leaders from small groups that work or live closely together. In fact, this is how the President is selected among the Politburo, and so on.

Unfortunately, one man one vote can and has been hijacked, particularly if money and power enters the equation. There are innumerable tales of village/town leadership seizing power through the “democratic process” and terrorizing “voters” for years on end.

When groups grow too large, voting among strangers can lead to undesirable outcomes.

That’s the modern Chinese experience.


Unfortunately, “Western democracy” isn’t just voting systems. It is a system of values and beliefs built on the foundation of western prosperity. For the past 5–600 years, it has been the absolute dominance in technology that has kept the West on top. That is how the top 12% of humanity today maintain radically different standards of living from the rest of the 88.

Until the emergence of China, only willing acolytes of the “Western model” made the leap into the first world, leaving has-beens by the wayside. All of them, to a fault, adopted Western-style constitutions, governments, legislation and thoroughly reformed society, in order to qualify for membership into the “globalized world”. In return, their economies boomed, powered by export-led demand from the first world.

Along came China, which is distinctly different, especially in the post-Soviet age of “the end of history”. Unfortunately, Communist China has succeeded wildly, way beyond the imagination of the “last man”.

Herein lies the rub. Chinese leaders had enough self confidence decades ago that the Western highway to prosperity wasn’t exclusive. Today, Chinese society is increasingly convinced their leaders were right, because they are living the best times in the sum history of Chinese civilization, a realized boast that reverberates through 4 millennia and >100 generations.


Western prosperity in the 21st century is no longer the shining city on the hill, cities of the future one can only dream of being teleported back home. A Chinese tourist visiting NYC, London, Paris and Berlin will be nonplussed by the sights, and perhaps repulsed by the smell and experience. Chinese cities have the same modern hardware, and services is rapidly catching up. And Chinese cities are evolving rapid improvement in quality of life metrics, while the west is stagnating, or worse, regressing.


The Chinese will go, that’s “Western democracy”, “in God We Trust”, and “all men created equal”?

Thanks, but no thanks.

Communism has our vote, because we live and breathe its outcomes.

Ukr Hard Day: Avdeyevka Cauldron, Kherson Bridgehead Cut Off, Wilders Wins; Biden BRICS Gaza Plan

As a doctor, what’s the saddest experience you’ve had with a patient?

I once talked to an acid attack victim.

She came to the surgery OPD by mistake on a day when our Plastic Surgery OPD was closed.

She had her face covered with a dupatta. I was immediately aware that she had some disfigurement that she was trying to conceal but it was only when I saw her treatment card that I realised what the reason behind it was.

I read the entire card and slowly looked up at her. She was looking at me with one eye while she kept the rest of her face covered.

“I was asked to come after 4 weeks. Here I am.” She told me quietly.

“Yes, I see it written here, ma’m, but our plastic surgery OPDs are on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I am afraid, you’ll have to come back tomorrow.”

She closed her eyes and took a deep breath.

“Can’t you or the doctors here do anything about this?”

“We can but we are not plastic surgeons. We are not experts and we are not the best people to help you.”

“No one can help me, doctor. You know it.”

I had no answer to that.

“If there’s anything else I can do for you…” I said.

“What can you do? My life is ruined. All I do is travel between my home, the hospital and the court. The last few of weeks my life have been hell. The pain has been unbearable. I can’t even look into the mirror anymore. What do you think you CAN do? Can you get me to look like before?”, she said, her eye moist and a hint of desperation in her voice.

I was trying hard to act professional.

I wanted to say that I was sorry that this happened to her. I wanted to tell her that I felt a burning hatred for the person or persons who did this to her. I wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t give up because her life wasn’t over.

Yet, I didn’t say anything. Everything that came into my head began to sound empty as I was about to say it out loud. My words all seemed so woefully inadequate to offer any kind of assurance to her.

That’s why I was trying to be calm and professional. No pity, no sadness, no anger. I was just trying to do what I was there for: my job which was to try and help her.

“I’ll try to call the Plastic Surgery resident to see if he can come here and take a look at you. I can’t promise that he will but I will give him a call.”

“Thank you.” She said quietly.

Nodding, I took out my phone to call the resident.

“I shouldn’t have spoken like that to you.” She said, looking straight at me.

“It’s completely fine.” I said immediately. The last thing I wanted was for her to feel bad for me.

“No, it’s not. I know what it feels like to be spoken to like this, especially if you haven’t done anything to deserve it.”

“Really, ma’m, you do not need to apologise at all. It’s okay-”

“You know, what hurts the most? Before this I was recently-”

Married? Did the husband abandon her? That was the first thought that came to my head.

“-promoted. I was a receptionist in a famous hotel. I was good at my job. People speak to us rudely all the time but I was really good at handling them. There wasn’t a single complaint against me to my manager in the one and a half years that I had the job.”

She paused, looking down at her feet.

“It’s all gone now. They won’t let me work with this…face. It doesn’t matter how well I handle our customers if they can’t handle my face.”, she said, in a voice that was so matter-of-fact that my heart felt like it was being stabbed.

This was a woman who had been serious about her job. She had been excited about her future. She had been independent. The first thing she told me about her life was that she had lost the job she had worked so hard at.

I don’t know why but this case affected me so much more than other cases. Medically, there exist even more severe cases in which acid attacks have caused complete blindness, paralysis or in the inability to eat or swallow.

I know, of course, that you can’t quantify suffering and everyone has their own battles but this one…this one made me want to stop doing my work and go cry in a corner.

I forced myself to look away and called the resident. I managed to convince him to come and examine her.

“He’ll be here in fifteen minutes. Please wait outside.”, I said with difficulty because I felt a lump in my throat.

“Thank you.”, she said softly and left the room.


When you throw acid on someone’s face and they survive the attack, you take from them much of what we consider “life”. You take away choices, opportunities, self-respect and throw them into a world of such suffering that they have never known before.

Many victims say that death is preferable.

I don’t think I’ll be able to argue with them.

What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you’ve witnessed?

My grandfather was once a lightweight boxing champ. He was healthy most of his life, but like everyone, he grew old. At 90 years old, though, he still liked to go dancing. He took his girlfriend to their elder community’s weekly dance. We went to join them for dinner and just visit them a while.

While I was up getting them plates from the buffet, two scummy men came in. They had been drinking and were looking for some old people to bully – no joke. They were in their late 30s/early 40s. They stopped at my grandpa’s table and started talking about his girlfriend. My grandpa stood up and told them to leave. I looked over and saw this jerk spit on the floor and shove my 90 year old grandpa.

I saw my grandpa stumble backwards against the wall, and I dropped the food tray and started moving towards him. It felt like slow motion.

Before I could get there, I saw my grandpa push off the wall and punch the guy square in the jaw. The man landed on his butt and slid backwards nearly all the way across the room! No one could believe what we saw, especially not the two creeps. His friend went over and helped him up, and everyone watched them leave with their tails between their legs.

I finally went back and got the food for them, and we sat and talked about what happened while they ate. After a bit, the two idiots came back with the police. They pointed by grandpa out to the officers.

The police didn’t believe their story, and we all acted like we didn’t know what they were talking about.

I sure miss that wonderful, strong old man.

Is it true that an increasing number of Chinese people are preferring domestic tourism? If so, what are the reasons?

In last two decades hundreds of millions of Chinese have travelled overseas. Annually about 130 million Chinese travel outside of their country. So by now most of them may have realised that most of the rest of the world is very backward and not as advanced as they used to think.

And secondly they have their own continent sized country to travel and explore and will probably take a lifetime to explore fully. And every kind of tourist related attractions are within their own country be it tourist spots, beaches, deserts, cultural and historical sites, valleys, grasslands, snow and glaciers means in short every experience and to say the least their excellent infrastructure that makes travelling within China indeed a cakewalk.

May be that’s why.

Man’s worst fear

I tricked my Muslim coworker into eating pork (bacon) in a lasagna. How can I tell him so he sees how hilarious and innocent it is?

If a Muslim unknowingly eats pork it isn’t a terrible problem. That doesn’t mean they won’t be upset though.

Regardless of how they feel about the pork, they will probably be more upset with you. Letting them unknowingly eat pork as a joke is a dick move of the highest order. I would recommend that you never tell them, if you want to maintain the relationship you have with them. If you tell them and laugh about it, no one is going to blame them for hating you forever. Others might join their camp.

Like I said, it’s a dick move, so proceed at your own risk.

A purr-fect neighbor

If Earth got flung out of the solar system and became a rogue planet, what measures would we take to survive, whether or not those would actually succeed?

Hoo boy. This is going to be one rough ride for humanity.

If we act fast, there is a chance that our species might survive for the long term, but we’re going to have to do things quickly. As soon as the Earth starts to move away from the Sun, things are going to cool off. A lot depends on exactly the trajectory, but even with a conservative estimate, we’re facing a snowball Earth scenario within a matter of years, when the surface of the planet can no longer support liquid water. It won’t take long for everything living on the surface to die.

However, not all hope is lost. The oceans will freeze from the surface downward, and as they freeze over they will in fact insulate the deeper layers. It could take hundreds of thousands of years before the oceans freeze solid, meaning some life may still manage to hold on in the deeper parts of the oceans for millennia, particularly where there is active volcanism going on, keeping things (relatively) warm. In theory, given enough time, we might be able to construct underwater habitats in the deep oceans as a refuge for humanity.

Another option is to simply go underground. On average, the temperature increases by about 25C for every kilometer we go down into the ground. Even when the surface temperatures have plummeted to -200C (when we’ve wandered out past Pluto), we “only” have to dig down a handful of kilometers before we can bask in the relative heat from the heart of our planet.

That heat from the planet’s core is what might ultimately provide the salvation for the species. While the rest of the energy sources we have available to us are ultimately based on solar radiation and will be forfeit once we’ve drifted from the Sun, our planet’s core is powered by radioactive decay and will keep on cooking for billions of years to come. We can harness this either directly via fission reactors, or indirectly through geothermal energy sources.

So here’s the scenario we might enact to provide for the continuation of humanity.

First, we determine what capacity we have for tunneling down into the crust and excavating areas large enough to create underground settlements. Perhaps the Boring Company will be in high demand in this scenario! Governments across the world pool their resources and a number of candidate sites around the globe are selected. Access to existing geothermal energy sources might be a good starting point.

Then we start digging. Temporary “camps” are excavated at shallower depths while digging proceeds ahead for future movements. In the meantime, each of these future colonies is prepared with resources that they’ll need to survive. Deep underground, some of the challenges will be oxygen and clean water; however, with artificial sunlight and proper preparation it should be possible to grow crops even underground. We’ll probably have to say goodbye to eating meat as raising animals for food won’t be an efficient use of resources, though we might keep some animals around for the sake of having animals.

At some point there’s going to be some kind of selection process for who gets to go down and survive. This won’t be pretty. Most of us will be left on the surface to freeze to death. But once it’s done, the selected groups can descend into the bowels of the Earth and begin a new subterranean existence.

Would it succeed? It’s hard to say. They have to dig deep enough, and that presents dangers in and of itself. Colonies could be destroyed by seismic activity that collapses them. In those kinds of close quarters, a disease outbreak could prove fatal to the whole group. Issues with food supply or water supply could doom a group. There are many ways in which any underground colony could fail, and it is almost a given some of them would.

But with enough luck, persistence and hard work, some of them might make it, and over the generations adapt to this new lifestyle. Maybe they’d even thrive to the point they could send excursions back out to the surface, exploring the frozen wasteland, travelling across the ice to visit other underground colonies. Maybe even once again find ways to build ships to leave the planet and try to find someplace nicer to take the family, so to speak.

From the Bayou Crawfish Louisianne

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2023 11 26 19 45

Yield: 4 to 6 generous servings

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) butter
  • 1/2 cup chopped andouille sausage
  • 3/4 cup chopped bell pepper (can mix the colors)
  • 1/2 large onion, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon Italian seasoning
  • 1/2 to 3/4 cup whipping cream
  • 1 pound crawfish tails
  • 1 quart peanut oil
  • 4 to 6 catfish fillets (2 to 3 ounces each)
  • Egg wash (egg white, water, milk)
  • Seasoned flour
  • Seasoning to taste
  • Cajun seasoning, pepper, red pepper and garlic powder

Instructions

  1. In a small saucepan, melt butter. Add andouille, peppers, onions and Italian seasoning and sauté until tender (about 5 minutes.) Add mushrooms just before completion.
  2. Add whipping cream, and reduce the sauce over medium heat.
  3. Add crawfish, and cook for 3 minutes. Adjust seasoning.
  4. Heat oil in a large saucepan.
  5. Dredge fish in egg wash and then season with flour.
  6. Fry until golden brown on both sides.
  7. Pour crawfish mixture over catfish.
  8. Garnish with parsley and onion tops.

So very British

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/y8lMSMoqbps?feature=share

What are the ways to become a high quality man?

  1. Make decisions for yourself and do not follow the opinions or actions of others.
  2. Have a clear sense of who you are and what you stand for.
  3. Spend time reflecting on your thoughts and emotions and deeply understand yourself.
  4. Be capable of taking care of yourself and do not rely on others for support.
  5. Enjoy spending time alone and find it more fulfilling than being with others.
  6. Have a few close friends or family members and do not rely on the need for an extensive social network.
  7. Enjoy exploring ideas and concepts and be comfortable contemplating complex topics.
  8. Do not seek validation from others and be comfortable relying on yourself.
  9. Have a unique perspective and approach to life and be confident going against the crowd.
  10. Do not conform to societal norms or expectations and march to the beat of your drum.

The Chinese warship sonar incident

This mature and analytical write-up by John Menadue, November 23 is very constructive and logical.

John Menadue is the Founder and Editor in Chief of Pearls and Irritations. He was formerly Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet under Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, Ambassador to Japan, Secretary of the Department of Immigration and CEO of Qantas.

What a feast of anti-China stories we have had again from the Coalition and our media over the incident between HMAS Toowoomba and a Chinese PLA-N destroyer.

The whole issue really looks to be overblown – and seeded by some in the Sinophobia school who are worried about where Prime Minister Albanese and Foreign Minister Penny Wong may be headed. The idea of “stabilisation” scares them, so they react by promoting some destabilisers.

The proposition that the Chinese warship was directed by Beijing – let alone President Xi – to initiate such “aggressive” action beggars belief. Like the ‘spy’ balloon exercise, where it seems clear enough that President Xi initially knew little about the whole thing.

Our ‘spooks’ depend on the CIA for about 90% of their overseas information and the Pentagon is building a network in our Department of Defence. I would very much doubt whether Albanese and Wong really know what ‘information’ the CIA and the Pentagon are feeding into our spooks.

The US expects that a pliant ally like Australia will do what it is told. It is concerned at recent events and prefers that we do not stabilise our relations with China. So this incident is a great opportunity for some destabilisation. And our poorly informed media tag along as always.

Given the unsurprising PLA comments the chances of misunderstanding the message or even miscommunication would have to rate high. If the PLA ship had been shadowing the RAN ship, which then decided to stop dead in the water to check for nets, would the Commander of the PLA ship not be a bit suspicious about what the RAN was up to and activate some of his intel alerts including special sonar to try to find out more? In any event presumably he would have had some of his sonar devices running while he was sailing anyway? Even if the PLA just happened on the RAN in the middle of the sea (electronically of course) would its initial reaction not be one of suspicion?

We probably will never get the real story of the actual communications between the two ships, but language problems cannot be excluded.

But Albanese and Marles (again and again) have been panicked into hasty responses for which we will pay. Marles should have tried to hose things down, but he invariably sings from the US song sheet. Albanese should stick to the line of not commenting in detail on his private conversations with world leaders. Blinken did this repeatedly over questions about the Xi-Biden talk. If necessary, the government can call in the Chinese Ambassador at Secretary level to make the point.

It is strange why Marles would want to play this up right now. The incident was not in the SCS but in Japan’s EEZ heading towards Japan. This could be in the contested area of the East China Sea, south of Okinawa.

It is also not clear what UN sanctions RAN was monitoring unless they were part of the regular monitoring of UN sanctions against North Korea. We have been doing that in the Sea of Japan further north.

These incidents should be sorted out by military to military communications and not as a stick for those who want to destabilise our improving relationship with China.

We would be more concerned if this incident occurred in waters adjacent to Australia and not in waters adjacent to China, which is already encircled by scores of US military bases. China would understandably be very sensitive about what happens in its proximity.

In any event, this incident is minor compared with the aggressive things we do that are hostile to China. RAAF P8 aircraft operating out of the Philippines drop Sonar buoys in the SCS to monitor Chinese submarines. This is not for the defence of Australia but to support the US in a possible conflict with China over Taiwan.

Our media have shown no interest in this issue. It does not fit the Western ‘China threat’ narrative that our White Man’s Media works so hard to construct and maintain, and so is ignored.”

I stuff guys with cars…

Have you ever witnessed an “I demand to see the manager” moment?

If you’ve worked retail long enough, even if you’re amazing, you have one of these.

I work retail pharmacy. I had a woman come up to the sales counter with her adult daughter, wanting to buy a large quantity of Sudafed, but within the legal limit. Both of them were planning to buy, and they happened to mention that they were buying it for the woman’s mother, both of them. This is illegal, as in my state you must purchase it for yourself or your minor child. You actually sign an electronic document stating so.

I apologize to the women and tell them I can’t complete the transaction, and explain why, that it is against state and federal law.

Immediate attitude, along the lines of “Who do you think you are, you low born classless person to tell me and my daughter, with our bleach blonde hair and snooty attitudes ‘no!’”

The mother demands to speak with the manager, who isn’t there, we just have a staff pharmacist who’s witnessed the whole thing. She tells the woman that I can complete the sale.

I stare at her for a second before asking the pharmacist if she intends to pay my legal fees to reinstate my pharmacy tech liscense, and tell the pharmacist that if she wants to process the transaction she can, but that I WILL NOT.

She demands my register login and codes, because she’s not a regular pharmacist at my store. I refuse to give them to her, as that is a fireable offense.

The customer is staring at us, red faced and ready to burst, and demands I listen to the pharmacist, then demands I page store management when I explain that the pharmacist cannot compel me to break the law.

I page store management, and my favorite assistant manager comes over and asks what’s going on. By this point, the woman is using abusive language, and exclaims “This f*ggot won’t sell me Sudafed that is for me!”

At that point the manager raises an eyebrow and tells the woman she’s going to have to move her car.

Woman asks why.

“Because our parking is for customers only. You need to leave now. Our customers know they can’t talk to people like that.”

The woman throws a shrieking fit, shoving over a display of medication… which her adult daughter stops to pick up, apologizing the whole time.

The pharmacist in question got written up by corporate for an Ethics violation, and when my Pharmacy Manager told me I should just turn my ears off and not listen to conversations at the register and do my job, he got an Ethics violation that has left him stuck as a pharmacy manager.

The woman emailed the corporate office, and I got to see the reply which was basically ‘We’re sorry you had that experience, but our stores are committed to following state and federal law’ and they attached the laws in question, highlighted.

It was nice to be vindicated and defended for once, instead of thrown under that well known bus.

Reality in the USA

US Congress unanimously approved the Patent Restriction Act. All of China’s patents are at risk of invalidation overnight. Huawei’s 20000+ patents could be deemed invalid. All countries at risk as the US can claim a national security threat. Fair?

With China’s manufacturing power and the engi eers’ abilities of learning and copying, good luck to the US.

All US patents will be nulled by China and Russia as, and the US will lose much more than Huawei would do.

This is not only on Qualcomm, TI, AMD, intel but also hit huge on the pharmaceutical companies.

China and its engineers are waiting for the bill passed and now all the knowledge would be shared without any loyalty across mankind. Nice job the US.

I just don’t beat the shit out of you…

What’s something you can’t believe you had to explain to an American tourist or as a tourist visiting America?

I was in a hospital, here at Rome, to visit a friend, and when I was going away I saw two American girls, one could hardly walk because she had fell and hurted badly her leg. I helped them to call someone to bring a wheel chair and they went to emergency. I went with them to help because they didn’t speak italian well. I asked why they didn’t call for an ambulance and they said they didn’t want t to spend too much money. They were worried about how much they would have to pay at the hospital too. I explained them, in Italy, the ambulance is free, and so the hospital. Even if she would have to stay there for days or weeks. No one in Italy could dare to ask a girl with a broken leg for money. Nobody could leave her without medical care even if the didn’t have money.

They couldn’t believe me . They continued asking if the hospital was going to send bills later. If they could pay later in installments.

The girls wanted to ask the administrative employee too, because they wanted to be sure. He gave them the same answer and they were very surprised.

Later the girls left the hospital, one had a cast on her leg but they had big, beautiful smiles!

Loyalty and Respect

What is the most absurd thing you’ve been charged for on a bill?

Not me, but my mother. She was visiting the US for a ski holiday in New England and had a bad fall that resulted in a broken bone. As a result, she had to spend a bit of time in a hospital. Her stay was fortunately paid for by Canadian health insurance; can’t imagine how US citizens who don’t have or can’t afford coverage manage to pay for their care.

Anyway, I was curious to see what it cost after she got home, so she showed me the detailed bill. The total was shockingly high, no surprise, but one thing caught my eye. She’d been invoiced for 3X “helically wound cellulose absorbent matrix units” at $48 each. Curious, I contacted the hospital to ask what these could be. Can you guess?

They turned out to be rolls of bog-standard toilet paper, the number she was tracked as having consumed during her stay.

Amazing.

Pretty good

What’s the fastest you’ve wiped a smirk off of someone’s face?

Not myself but a teacher at my school.

This was a Church of England (Christian) secondary school (ages 11-18) in the late ‘80s and the dress code was quite strict. Among the many rules was one that boys weren’t allowed to have long hair.

There was this old-fashioned teacher (Mr. Barabell) who’d been teaching there for ~30 years already by that point and was well-known for being strict but fair.

Anyway, there was this one boy (Luke) who decided that he wanted to grow long hair and he wasn’t going to let a stupid school rule stop him, and so he just let it grow. Initially he started getting comments from teachers about being “scruffy” etc. but eventually the situation came to a head in Mr. Barabell’s class:

A confrontation begins with the teacher telling Luke off— “There are school standards to maintain, “ and, “Does he think that he’s special, ” and so on. Well Luke—smart alec that he was—has a pre-prepared answer ready to go:

“But sir, Jesus had long hair didn’t he?“

As this point the class is completely silent waiting for a response, but instead of answering Mr. Barabell says, “Right, everyone come with me now,” and he turns and exits the class room. We all follow, including Luke, wondering what on Earth is going on.

Eventually we reach the school swimming pool and gather around. Then Mr. Barabell turns to Luke, points to the swimming pool and says, “Walk!”.

Luke is just standing there kind of shaking his head (knowing that he’s defeated) and the whole rest of the class is cracking up.

The teacher finishes with, “When you can walk on water, you can have long hair at school.”

Game. Set. Match.

Smart Kid

Why can’t Americans get access to the Chinese electric car market?

Americans foolishly screamed and shout that they are the leader of the free world without ever questioning if it is even remotely true or not! Please don’t be angry or upset if I help you guys since I understand you can pretend to be free or even dare says you are ordained by god to spread democracy and freedom but you Americans are one of the least free country on earth.

Let me help you good American. So first I like to explain how unfree you guys are.

35% of you cannot get health care when you fall sick! The most basic of freedom is the freedom to see a doctor and get cure when you fall sick. At least 100 million Americans don’t have this basic of basics of freedom.

Next 1 million Americans are homeless and don’t have another basic of basics of freedom. The freedom to have a roof over their head.! They have to live in makeshift tents on the streets.

20% of Americans don’t have 500 dollars to their name and don’t know where their next meal is coming from! Surely everyone must have the freedom to have a hot meal to stay alive!

USA with about 4% of world population has 25% of the worlds prisoners population! Think about this my American friends, prisoners are certainly. Not free. Many of them coloured people thrown into jail for the slightest reason. How on earth can you keep a straight face to say U.S. is the leader of the free world. No one know!

In many cities in the U.S. one cannot go to certain parts of the inner city like the Queens in New York. As crimes are rampant. So normal innocent and good Americans like you have to avoid that part of America! Surely freedom means you can go to anywhere or any part of America.

Kids and parents suffers the mental turmoils daily for just going to school. Many got shot to death in schools, public places, cinemas and even in Capitol Hill! Is that freedom? Even your kids are not free to go to school without a random mass shooter lurking with military grade weapons to murder them! Is this freedom?

If you are not fortunate to have a white skin you could be necked to death in the bright daylight of even driving a good car may be be shot to death just for suspected of stealing the car! Everyday you live in fear of a white policeman! Is that freedom to live? Freedom to avoid death at the racist inclination of the white racist? Surely not.

Freedom means you can choose who you really want to be your leader. Only 30% choose Biden. Or 35% choose Trump! Why are they your president? Your system allowed 0.8% of the richest and most influential people to choose your candidates! Surely this is not political freedom. This is far from democracy. How on earth can you call yourself the “beacon of democracy” who in a sane mind can claim that?

Oh today you country stop the Americans from having access to best 5G technology, Smartphone, best EV’s, drones and others for some geopolitical nonsense! Is this freedom? Freedom to be deprived? Let me help you understand. You are deprived from buying a 10 bucks EV. And need to be charged once a week but you are not allowed to! You cannot buy your Tesla like for half the price! Just to support your too big to fail auto industry paying 100 million bonus doing shit for good Americans!

But to me EVs and Drones are just the top of the iceberg of your draconian and suicide policies that takes away the freedom of Americans like you. Think about Jullien Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden! Freedom? American is anything but free.

Man these people are monsters

What conversations have you overheard in a language they assumed you don’t know?

It was 2016 in Bruges, Belgium. I was with my parents and we had just hailed a cab that somehow turned into a ride-share with this British family.

All was well in the van until about three minutes in, when I heard the lady say: “These people look a bit funny, don’t they?”. I looked up to notice that they were talking about my family. In plain English.

I stayed silent as much as I could, as they went on discussing among themselves and chuckling over how we were so bundled up (It was in the middle of a freezing winter and I live in the freaking equator!) even though it wasn’t that cold for them, or how they couldn’t figure out where we’re from because apparently we didn’t look Chinese enough nor Middle Eastern enough for them (Answer: Neither – we’re Indonesian) and all. During the whole ride, they were mocking us.

My mother must’ve seen me giving them a death stare and asked if anything was wrong, in Indonesian. Topping it all off, they were of course chuckling at how my mom was talking really funny. I couldn’t stand it any more, so I answered my mom in English, making sure the British family heard me well:

“Yes there is a problem here. Some people actually still think that English isn’t a universal language by now, and think that it’s good fun to mock and make fun of other people just because of how they look”.

I spent the rest of the cab ride watching the blood drain from their faces. At least I was no longer the one being uncomfortable in that cab.

Lord, Jesus help us

What are some deepest lessons you should know in your young age?

  1. Feeling sad after making a decision doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision.
  2. Life is not tiring. Wanting life to be a certain way but not having the confidence to make it that way, is tiring.
  3. Self-awareness is realising that there is no opponent -you’re fighting against yourself.
  4. Sometimes saying ‘goodbye’ doesn’t mean you don’t love something, it just means you love yourself too.
  5. That lesson will repeat itself until you learn it.
  6. If you keep one hand on your past and one hand on your future you’ll never have either. To embrace tomorrow, you must let go of yesterday.
  7. The world starts and ends entirely inside your mind. No matter where you end up, no matter how rich, or successful you become, you won’t enjoy any of it if you get there at the expense of your mental health.

Chinese ethnic groups

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/SC7IyLLt6PA?feature=share

What is the fastest you have ever seen your co-worker getting fired?

As a teenager, I worked in a gas station for a couple of years. A younger kid got hired who had some odd work habits. When the station owner would leave, the kid would just go sit down in the office. Meanwhile, I’d be pumping gas, changing oil, or mounting tires. I had no authority over this kid.

A few days after he was hired, I told the owner what was going on. An hour or two later the owner mentioned he was going home for an hour or two. He departed, the kid sat down in the office, while I finished doing an oil change and waited on customers at the pumps.

Ten minutes later, the boss walked out the alley where he’d parked his truck out of sight, and stood quietly in the shadows, watching me work, and the kid sitting on his butt. A few minutes later, the kid was fired. Word got around our small town pretty quickly, I don’t think this kid could find another job that summer.

I wasn’t sad to see him leave…

What is the most absurd thing you’ve been charged for on a bill?

Years ago I strained a tendon in my thumb. I went to one of those jenky quick service medical clinics to have it looked at and a person, who I assumed had some training in doctoring or nursing, prescribed me ibuprofen and put my hand in a brace.

I paid them like 50 bucks and went on my way.

A few weeks later I got a bill for the brace from a medical billing company in Texas. They assigned a cost of $750 to the brace, and only the brace, claimed to have billed my insurance for $450 and expect the rest from me. Of course, I sent them nothing, and the bills kept coming. The brace was essentially the same as one you’d buy at the drug store for about $35. It was nothing special and there was no way I was sending them any money. I tried to call them, but no one ever answered their phone.

Once my tendon healed, I put the brace in a box, along with a copy of their bill and mailed it to them. I never received anther bill afterwards.

Good advice

Why did China keep collapsing throughout history?

This is an interesting question.

Why did ancient China keep collapsing?

Or , let’s change the question.

Why did ancient China keep rebuilding?

In fact, there is no eternal empire in human history. From Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, China, Ottoman, Russia. The lifespan of any empire established by a civilization is limited. In other words, crashes are bound to happen.

But the difference between China and other empires is that most ancient empires collapse only once. Because the collapsed empire can never be rebuilt again. But China has such a magical power that no matter how it collapses, it will always be reunified after a period of time, and then climb to the peak again.

image 14
image 14
  1. This picture shows the whole history of China. The crown represents peace and unity, and the sword represents division and war. 

So much so that the opening sentence of the famous ancient Chinese novel “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms” reads: “The general trend of the world is that if it is divided for a long time, it will be united, and if it is united for a long time, it will be divided.”

Why China has such magic power, historians have many opinions.

One of the more widely recognized statements is this:

4,000 years ago, the Chinese were born on a land suitable for farming. Since the earliest civilized countries were established, they have been a typical agricultural civilization.

From the earliest recorded history of China, they have faced the threat from the north. That is the nomadic civilization galloping on the grasslands. In the early historical documents of Chinese dynasties, the invasion of nomadic civilization was recorded many times, and even the most brilliant Western Zhou Dynasty perished because of the invasion of nomadic civilization.

The ancestors of the Chinese discovered that the agricultural civilization, which is good at farming and construction, cannot compete with the nomadic civilization, which is good at riding and archery, in war. (Infantry can hardly defeat cavalry).
But as long as they are united, they will become more powerful. If 1 person can’t defeat the enemy, then 3 people; if 3 people can’t, then 10 people. Since agricultural civilization can breed more wealth and population, once China is united, the nomads are no match at all.

In 221 BC, the Qin Empire unified China for the first time, defeated the Xiongnu in war, and built the Great Wall to keep them out of the cold north. The Han Empire went a step further and formed a professional army of hundreds of thousands of people, went on an expedition to the desert, and completely defeated the Xiongnu. A unified and strong state always protects its people from harm. And when the empire crumbles and divides, China becomes weak. For example, the Northern and Southern Dynasties and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period were all like this. At this time, the enemy from the north invaded, the internal war was in chaos, and the society was dark. People cannot live a normal life, and starvation and death become the norm. Every round of imperial collapse and division in Chinese history will be accompanied by wars and a significant reduction in population. The lessons of history have engraved this truth deeply in the hearts of the Chinese people—unity is justice and light, and division is evil and darkness. The Chinese yearning for unity transcends history, time, religion, and nationality.

Therefore, the ultimate political goal of every careerist who wished to seize power in ancient China was the same: to unify the country and obtain the “sky destiny”. Only in this way can we gain the support of the people.

Imagine if in Europe, every German thought the German government was evil, the British thought the British government was dark, and the French thought the French government was corrupt. These governments should all be overthrown. As for the reason, there is only one: they don’t want to unify Europe, which is not the right direction.

What a terrible and incredible power this is, but the Chinese have such power.

A beautiful lesson

AH. I want to do this with my daughter.

What are some of the best examples of “American ignorance”?

I used to date an American. At the time I lived on an estate where to get out, you had to drive under a railway bridge arch. He got annoyed with having to wait for oncoming traffic to clear and demanded to know “why the hell didn’t they build this with two lanes?” I said it was built 150 years ago for stagecoaches, before cars were even invented. Americans forget how old England is.

What are some things that look easy but are difficult?

I asked a cycle rickshaw driver in India if I could have a turn. “This’ll be as easy as riding a bicycle,” I thought.

Technically, that’s exactly what it is. Only that you’re pulling someone else’s weight as well. Or even that of several people.

His face had all those deep grooves from the harsh sun beating down on him all day. His arms and legs were as thin as twigs. His ribcage bulged through a sweat-drenched tanktop.

I was less than half his age and enjoyed the kind of nutrition he could only dream of.

“You’re a tourist,” he protested.

But I insisted and he sat on the vinyl seat in the back.

I mounted the driver’s seat brimming with confidence and pressed down on the pedal.

It didn’t even budge.

I stood up and pushed down with all my might.

The rickshaw squeaked forward a couple inches.

By this point, the driver was laughing hysterically.

I conceded defeat, we changed positions, and he sailed down the street with an ease I could not even begin to fathom.

And while he was no industry-disrupting maverick, he was solving a real problem—helping people get from A to B.

My view of manual laborers was forever changed.

I learned that technique always trumps strength.

And that every honest line of work deserves our utmost respect.

Neil deGrasse Tyson: America is declining RAPIDLY

https://youtu.be/0gjzpZMFVsE

Hot ants

When I was a five year old boy, my father gave me a magnifying glass… set me on the curb near an anthill, and I spent the entire afternoon burning ants.

It was cruel.

But I had no idea about that during that time in my life. I mean, I was only five.

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afcd5a997c51ac8dbbd701318ad8b7e4

I wonder how many times that I hurt others though ignorance, and a lack of compassion. I really do wonder.

Look guys, we cannot change the world, but we can alter our little piece of it. Let’s just strive to be a little bit better on a day to day basis. What do you say?

Today…

As a teacher, what was the biggest lie you heard a student say?

I’ve been teaching nearly 20 years and my favorite lie is still the one that I heard as a brand new teacher.

A student came to class with his hand bandaged, carrying a doctor’s note. He told me “last night, my computer blew up and the shrapnel injured my hand so I couldn’t complete the homework assignment that was due today.”

I took a look at his hand. The bandage was so loose it was falling off. There was no way that any sober doctor had done such a sloppy job. It looked like he had tried to apply it himself and been unable to do it properly one-handed.

Then I took a look at the note. It was from a doctor’s office and it said “[Student’s name] has been seen for a ___ hand procedure.” I took a closer look at the blank space between “a” and “hand”. The word “minor” had been erased (but not well enough that I couldn’t see it if I squinted). I was guessing he had a wart removed or something that morning.

I didn’t need to point out the holes in his story, though. I just told him, “I’m sorry to hear about your injury, but the assignment wasn’t due today. It was due two days ago- the day before your ‘accident’.”

He walked to his seat without a word. He looked like he was going to be sick.

China’s Most Advanced Warship ABLAZE

World Hal Turner 21 November 2023

Longushan 2 large
Longushan 2 large

China’s People’s Liberation Army – Navy ship “Longushan” is reportedly ablaze just off the coast of China tonight.   The vessel is reported to be “China’s most advanced warship.”

No OFFICIAL word on what caused the fire.  (There ARE rumors . . . .)

All mention of this is being rapidly scrubbed from China social media networks, and no official information is coming out of Beijing.

The vessel bears Hull Number 980 and is described as a Type 071 landing ship.

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X3DIlNwb

China’s fifth Type 071 amphibious transport dock (LPD) Longhushan; with hull number 980) was commissioned with the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN or Chinese Navy) on September 12, 2018 in Shanghai.

Originally designed after the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996, the Type 071, measuring 210 meters long and 28 meters wide, is capable of carrying an 800-man marine battalion and some 20 amphibious tanks.

When you lost him

Has anything apparently insignificant or of little value ever been found by archaeologists, which later turned out to be of extraordinary value?

During building construction in an Athenian suburb in 2014, a tomb of the classical period was unearthed. It was no big deal, it happens frequently in Athens. Archaeologists took over but the findings in it weren’t of much interest…until they assembled a ceramic wine cup (a skyphos) smashed in 12 pieces, this one:

image 13
image 13

The cheap cup belonged to a man named Drapetes (the name, inscribed at the bottom of the cup, indicates a slave) However, the big surprise came from the other six names inscribed on the cup:

Aristides, Diodotos, Desimos, Arrifron, Pericles and Efkritos. Could this Pericles be the famous general?

Archaeologists say yes! This is why:

One of its fragments is engraved with six names, including Arrifron — the moniker of Pericles’s grandfather and brother. “The name Arrifron is very rare,” said A. P. Matthaiou, secretary of the Greek Epigraphic Society

. “The mention of [Arrifron] over that of Pericles on the surface of the vase makes us 99% confident that they are the two brothers.”

The inscription of the name Aristides also points favorably to Pericles having used the cup. Aristides was a politician who acted in Athens between 488 and 478 BCE, while Pericles led the city-state from 460 BCE to his death from the plague in 429 BCE. The cup dates between 480 and 465 BCE when the two might have interacted in a social setting such as a symposium or tavern. As men commonly drank from the same skyphos, it’s possible they would have carved their names onto the cup as a token of their meeting. “[He] certainly was dizzy from the wine as it is clear that whoever wrote the name of Pericles made a mistake initially … and then corrected it,” Matthaiou said.

Drapetes kept the cup. We don’t know why or how, maybe he was flattered by the presence of the noble company in his tavern.

It’s always a little magical when archeologists turn up objects that place such mythic figures in real time and space, breathing the same air and walking the same ground we do today. It seems miraculous that 2,500 years after the orator’s death, an ancient cup just happens to contain six complete names evidencing a life that has evaded archeologists for centuries.

U.S. Army prepares for War with China and Congress is EXCITED about it

Sigh. You all afraid, yet?

Angelina’s Zydeco Creole Jambalaya

Angelinas Zydeco Creole Jambalaya
Angelinas Zydeco Creole Jambalaya

Ingredients

  • 1/2 pound smoked sausage, cut
  • 1/2 pound ham, diced
  • 1 cup onion, chopped
  • 1 cup bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 cup celery, chopped
  • 1 cup green onions, chopped
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons Worcestershire Sauce
  • 1 can whole tomatoes, drained (reserve liquid)
  • Pinch thyme
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 3 cups Uncle Ben’s Converted Rice
  • 1 1/2 cups stock water
  • 2 pounds fresh shrimp, deveined

Instructions

  1. Place sausage and ham in very heavy Dutch oven and sauté until lightly browned. Remove from pot and set aside.
  2. Sauté onions, bell pepper, celery, green onions and add meat drippings. Cook until tender.
  3. Add tomatoes, thyme, pepper and salt. Cook for five minutes. Stir in rice.
  4. Mix together liquid from tomatoes, stock and Worcestershire sauce equal to 2 cups and add to sautéed vegetables. Bring to a boil. Reduce to a simmer and add fresh shrimp, ham and sausage. Cook uncovered, stirring often for about 30 minutes or until rice and shrimp are done.

Loyalty

U.S. Marines shifting focus to China, threat is “real”: top general

The U.S. Marines view deterring China as their key focus and will strive to make sure a conflict in the Indo-Pacific does not “spill over” to Japan, the military branch’s top general Eric Smith said Monday, while warning that Beijing’s missile capabilities are “significant” and “real.”

The Marine Corps’ No. 2 officer, who has been nominated to become the next commandant, also said in an interview in Tokyo that a littoral regiment being formed in Japan for remote island defense is being designed to provide “advanced maritime domain awareness” to allies and partners, in order to better detect events in surrounding waters.

The United States and Japan announced in January that the existing 12th Marine Regiment based in the southern prefecture of Okinawa will be reorganized into the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment by 2025, making it the first MLR to be forward-deployed against China.

The regiments will possess advanced surveillance capabilities and will be armed with long-range fires. Consisting of about 1,800 to 2,000 personnel per unit, they will also be capable of flexibly deploying small groups of marines to remote islands in the South China Sea.

The forming of the regiments comes amid China’s increased military assertiveness around far-flung southwestern Japan islets and Taiwan, which has raised the risk of conflict.

From HERE.

Commandant of US Marine Corps Hospitalized after Medical Emergency

Nation Hal Turner

The Commandant of the United States Marine Corps is hospitalized after a serious medical emergency. General Eric M. Smith suffered a medical emergency on the evening of October 29 and was taken to a hospital.

He is now in stable condition.

Per Statute Law 10 U.S.C. §8044, as the senior officer assigned to Headquarters, US Marine Corps, by date of rank, Lt. General Karsten Heckl, the Deputy Commandant for Combat Development and Integration, who is the Commanding General of the Marine Corps Combat Command, is  serving as Acting Commandant of the Marine Corps, for the interim.

Wife Cheated On Me With Her Colleagues, so I Snatched Everything She Had – FULL STORY

You didn’t dodge a bullet. 14 years with her, you got shot.”

What’s the most pretentious thing you’ve ever seen on a résumé?

I received a resume from someone who had recently graduated from high school. They had one job on the resume and their job title was Director in Charge of Company Morale at a prestigious local law firm.

The resume lacked all the things I was looking for, but the job title listed intrigued me. I set the interview and was waiting to hear a litany of lies.

On the day of the interview this cleancut sharp dressed young man showed up. After brief small talk I asked about the prior job and what it entailed.

Turns out his Director in Charge of Company Morale Position entailed him going out each morning and getting coffee for all the partners. He said without their morning coffee, morale was very low.

Best belly laugh in an interview ever. I hired him. And he worked out well because he found a way to place a positive attitude on everything he did, however menial the task.

Edit: I am honored that so many people like my answer. Thank you all.

Update: I’ve had several people suggest editing the gender from “they” to “he”. At the time I read the resume and set the appointment, I had no idea if the applicant was male or female. Gender was not a decision point in our hiring process. This is why I have left the answer unedited. Thank you all again for the overwhelming response.

What did you do that was a huge achievement for you but very insignificant to the people around you?

This morning, I woke up to a text from my bank.

“Unusual account activity— call this number”.

I called and the automated machine said it would read back my last five transactions to check for anything weird.

“Video entertainment— $65. California.”

“Video entertainment— $10. Declined. France.”

“Video entertainment— $10. Declined. France.”

“Gas— $30. Colorado.”

“Gas— $30. Wyoming.”

I was pretty sure I hadn’t been to France or California recently, so I checked my account summary and noticed I had -$50 in my account.

I’m taking poor college kid to a whole new level. I’m negative poor right now.

So I called their fraud number and the woman on the other end walked me through securing my account and getting a new card. She asked a few questions, told me my card was on its way, and hung up.

The achievement was not that I got my card number stolen. It wasn’t that I managed to put my account $50 under.

It’s that I made a phone call.

That sounds awfully small and to everyone around me it is, but I have been known to have panic attacks when forced to make phone calls. I hate ‘em. They make me anxious and uncomfortable and incredibly stressed.

I struggle with hearing on the phone (and in general, really), which exacerbates my social anxiety and makes phone calls some of the worst interactions I can have.

But today, I did it. The woman even had an accent and I think I understood her and responded correctly.

It’s a small thing, but when it’s one of your biggest fears, it can feel like the greatest thing in the world.

Make Daddy a sandwich

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/OY4MSrW5U-Y?feature=share

When did you realize you’re an asshole?

I was 20 and dating a guy that I met in a 20s chat room. This was the year 2000. We went to a grocery store and was walking down the Easter candy isle when I spotted these malt eggs. I stopped and said, “eww! Do you remember getting these in the bottom of your Easter basket every year?!” He simply said, “No.” Stupid me goes on and on about how I hated them and that he MUST remember getting them… He finally says quietly, “No. I didn’t ever get an Easter basket. My parents didn’t have the money.”

THAT is why I’m an asshole.

FYI, I married that guy that same year and we are still together with 3 amazing kids.

The next Easter morning he woke up to his first Easter basket from the Easter bunny complete with malt eggs. 🪺

Are you happy with your current life situation?

I got some new shoes today.

I was cleaning the coffee cart when a guest at the soup kitchen walked by me.

“You’re wearing Converse. Do you collect them?”

“No,” I tell her. “I just like my old black pair. They’re comfortable shoes.”

“They are. I have some pink ones that don’t fit me—I’ll bring them and if they fit you, you can have them.”

True to her word, I glanced out of the kitchen door today to see her holding them up, much to my coworkers’ confusion.

At work, I can’t walk two steps without someone stopping to talk to me.

One man spent all day poking fun at me about how sunburned my arms are.

Another gave us all breakfast burritos and promised sopapillas tomorrow.

I spent a good part of an afternoon with one of our volunteers trading fun facts and talking about theatre.

Sometimes strangers stop in the serving line to tell me their story.

I learned about Rainbow Gatherings and how they send positive energy into the world.

About powwows.

About brain injuries and single parenting and the best way to make spaghetti and bonnets purchased in Missouri and what chickens like to eat and how they make decaffeinated coffee.

About cancer and babies and sunburn cures and about how food is one of the greatest gifts known to man.

I took the job at the soup kitchen because it paid and because they called me back first.

But damn, my job fuels my artist’s brain more than anything else.

People. People are all that art is.

And if you can be in a room where veterans and drug addicts and businessmen and hitchhikers all sit at the same table for a meal—

You’ll find no better place to hear someone’s story.

Today, I got new shoes, and I don’t even know that woman’s name.

But I know her. I know them all, even if all I know is that one guy likes the comics in the newspaper and another always waits for his wife before eating.

You ask if I’m happy with my current life situation.

I’m poor. My pay is calculated at pretty much the poverty line for the local community, so I’m making fuckall in money.

I’m tired and I’m sunburned and I’m sore and I’m still excited to go to work every day.

It doesn’t feel like a job. I don’t dread it like I honestly thought I would.

I’ve been sleeping full nights and working full days and while the depression doesn’t just go away, it finds someplace else to be during the work day.

I wish I had the money to do everything I want to do, but I will honestly take full days at the soup kitchen over working fast food any day of the week.

I guess I’m happy.

I don’t know. I’m content. The days are flying by faster than I can count them.

If anything, this work strengthens my desire to work in nonprofits. I don’t think traditional schools are for me.

I’m excited to keep going, and that feels good enough for me.

Don’t take it personally

Do Europeans view Americans as prudes?

I was very surprised with American attitude towards (partial) nudity. A couple of real-life examples from when I lived in NJ:

  • My kids were 2 and 3 years old and during the summer it’s very normal in Europe for small children to run around the house and yard naked. When they did that in the US however, I received several complaints from our neighbours and one of them put up a solid fence between our properties after that.
  • Two years later we went to a water park in Hope, NJ and our daughter was only wearing bikini bottoms. The top didn’t fit well, would only annoy her and there was nothing there to hide or cover up (so we thought). We received a warning from the park and had to cover her up or leave immediately.
  • When our daughter was in pre-school we (the parents) had to stop by the principal for a serious discussion: they noticed how our 4-year old daughter started undoing her pants before she got in the rest room with the door closed, which was apparently shocking to the other kids.

After that we started adjusting better to the local norms and didn’t have any incidents anymore. I’ve always wondered though why this was such a big deal and suspect it to be a nutty religious thing.

Which is the most powerful country today?

CHINA, in every respect, I know every yank will say the USA but I don’t think so, not anymore, mainly because of their debt, and growing daily, yes, the US have a very powerful navy, but SO WHAT? Ships can be sunk, and sunk quickly, missiles are the thing these days, and China is way ahead with their hypersonic missiles, double the speed of US ones. According to all reports. Also, they run rings around the US in speed and cost of manufacturing. Which also puts China in front.

Have you ever walked out of a restaurant after you were seated by a waiter or waitress?

Yes! Just recently my husband and I did this. We were visiting NY. Our hotel had a restaurant in it. We went down for breakfast. There was a menu just outside of the restaurant. The continental buffet was $29. The hot buffet was $45. A little steep, but we figured those were just NY prices.

When it was our turn to be seated, they but us at a high communal style table. I’m 5″2 and I HATE high tables! We sat down and looked around. We looked at each other. The kind of silent communication you can do with someone you’ve been with for years. Then we decided that we were not paying $100 for breakfast while we sat at an uncomfortable “display” table. I turned and looked out the window. I saw 53rd St. Grill across the street. We walked past the waiter as he was bringing our waters. The food at the grill was delicious, and cost about $30 for both of us. We ate breakfast there for the remainder of our trip.

She can’t handle the truth…

What’s something that sucks about being a man?

I have several female friends that worked hard in school and then got prestigious jobs. But the thing about prestigious jobs is that they’re usually a lot of long hours of tough work. They made fairly good money but after a long, frustrating day at work they would sometimes joke “ugh, I need to find a rich husband so I can be a house wife.”

And then some of did. One of them moved to another country where traditional gender roles are more prevalent and she found herself a really rich husband. Then a few of the other girls moved too and, I kid you not, they also found rich husbands.

I’ve met a lot of girls that have jumped up the socioeconomic ladder through marriage. But guys? I haven’t met a single one. Generally speaking, girls still expect guys to make at least as much as them.

So what sucks about being a guy? The immense pressure to be financially successful. As much as we try to deny it, society is obsessed with financial status and will measure a man’s worth based on his wealth.

What are some good examples of perverse incentives?

The current economic system is full of perverse incentives.

Ever heard of the phrase “identifying your customer’s needs”?

The thing is, creating or maintaining needs so that you know what people need is more profitable than trying to identify new needs every time.

Problems cause need, and so problems are encouraged.

Imagine there is a pothole in the street.

That’s a problem. It’s going to cause issues.

If you identify it, then you could set up a company to fix roads, and try to get paid to fix it.

But what would be even more profitable would be to lobby so that it doesn’t get fixed, and then open a shop next to it to fix people’s suspensions after they break, or to offer towing services.

Because then you have a repeated source of income.

And then anyone trying to fix the pothole becomes a threat to your bottom line.


People benefit from the existence of problems, because then they can be paid to provide a temporary solution.

And this impacts many areas of our lives.

The legal system currently is bloated, and overly complicated. But the lawyers have a job thanks to that, so they don’t want it to change.

Government officials are corrupted by bribes and lobbying, and their perverse incentive is to take the money instead of working for the good of people.

Planned obsolescence leads to people making items that don’t last a long time but break fast, and have to be replaced, because that’s an opportunity for profits.

We are scared of human labor being replaced by machines. A weird incentive to be against progress and automation, because our access to resources depends on our labor being needed.

Health insurance is a business that tries to deny as many claims as possible to increase profits.

The owners and workers of the factories producing bombs and munition rely on constant wars for their income.

Creating emotionally laden clickbait attracts more attention than rational discourse.


If you identify a problem somewhere, fixing it is not the most profitable thing you can do; letting it happen, and then swooping in is.

If you want maximum profits, and know that the housing market will crash, you don’t want to try and avoid that, you want to short the market and make billions. And then use the billions to buy up the low price property from the desperate people in need who just lost their life savings.

There are perverse incentives all around us.


The perverse incentive is to do the easy thing, for short term profits.

Doing the right thing, even when it’s hard, to reap the long term benefits? That’s what we should be aiming for.

Men are visual

What was the bravest thing you ever did in a job interview?

I arrived for an interview and was asked to wait a few minutes as the interviewer was held up. A few minutes later he came out, apologised said he’d been called to an urgent problem. He explained that some of the stuff I’d be working on would highly commercially sensitive and while he finished up could I read through the pre-interview contract and sign it.

I read through it and though I’m no lawyer it read like they could sue for everything I owned from my house down to my underwear if I so much as said I’d been within a mile of the building. The I interviewer came back a few minutes later and asked if I was happy and had signed the paperwork.

I replied that I hadn’t signed coz it looked a bit iffy on the conditions and he replied

‘congratulations, you’re the first person out of 8 people who passed the first stage test’.

Apparently everyone else had skimmed through and signed and not bothered really looking at what they were signing off on.

I got the job 🤣

Percentages

What’s the best excuse for being late you’ve ever heard?

A kid walked in late to my English class in 8th grade.

My teacher was really weird, and would go on these rants about how space doesn’t exist, reality is a figment of our imagination, and one person at google is taking over the world by deciding what search results google gives you.

This kid walks in and says “I’m not late because time doesn’t exist.”

He wasn’t marked late.

FIRST TIME HEARING Simple Minds – Alive & Kicking REACTION

How liberal are you?

I’m a retired cop, and most people think we are very conservative. My law enforcement friends think I’m a hippie.

  • I am for the legalization of recreational marijuana. I have never tried it, probably wouldn’t even if it was legalized, but it’s time for us all to grow up and see that Reefer Madness isn’t helping anyone.
  • I am opposed to the death penalty. I don’t like pedophiles or murderers, I just don’t think our government should be in the business of killing people. And I know first hand how flawed our criminal justice system is.
  • I support peaceful protests, even if I disagree with their views.
  • I think we (law enforcement) need to work with the media. Many of my colleagues think I’m nuts. It’s win-win when we do.
  • I think abortion should be legal. But I wish the last one performed was the last one ever performed.
  • I support diversity, tolerance, and I believe in “seeing the whole elephant” (a term I constantly told to my sons as a lesson from a poem by John Godfrey Saxe: The Blind Men and the Elephant
  • ). We need to put ourselves in each other’s shoes, and the best way to do that is to be around each other.
  • My grandfather’s first sight of America was the Statue of Liberty. I believe that monument is still relevant.
  • I vote for democrats. I vote for republicans. I vote for independents and green party and libertarians. I just think we need some good people in charge, and it makes me crazy when people vote straight party tickets.
  • I am a straight white male, married for 37 years. (Hi, honey.) But I am glad same sex couples can get married. I have 4 grandchildren. If they grow up with different preferences than most, I still want them to find love and happiness.
  • Trump is a disaster, and I’m going to wear out my rosary beads because of him.
  • I believe in the Second Amendment (actually am quite fond of them all), but I think it has gotten out of hand. Maybe we are not as self controlled as the Founding Fathers had hoped we would be. I am for reasonable restrictions on gun ownership.
  • I think everyone should have health insurance (at least as good as what members of congress give themselves), whether they can pay for it or not. Life is an inalienable right. Pretty sure health is too.

Not sure if that makes me liberal or not. I don’t like breaking rules or laws, but there are times when that is necessary. As long as you understand the consequences.

As that great philosopher Popeye once said, “I yam what I yam.”

Psychologist Explains Why MEN CARE about a WOMAN’S SEXUAL HISTORY: what women don’t understand

This is very interesting. I never looked at things this way.

Paying twice as much for getting something ½ the value.”

Well as a man, it doesn’t matter to me whether they have “grown” or got more wisdom, they still did the deeds, and as rude as it may sound to a woman, a good man will hold you accountable for your actions and your past. No high value man, as they put it, wants to pay new car prices for a used car.”

What are the downsides of being promoted at work?

Management didn’t know what to do with Steven and it was their fault. Steven was a 28-year-old coworker and assistant project manager. We worked at a corporate construction company and project managers were our most important personnel.

Steven was smart and had stellar reviews, but when prompted about promoting to PM, he said, “No, no, I’m good.” It perplexed our CFO and COO, who didn’t know why a good employee wouldn’t want more money and responsibility.

I knew why. I was the budget manager at his division and sat in on many of their meetings. I saw the grueling pressure put on project managers and saw them yelled at on occasion. It wasn’t an easy job. Steven figured, he was young and enjoying his life and didn’t want that kind of pressure. And perhaps he thought he’d be bad at the job — which is wiser than most realize.

The Peter Principle was first proposed by psychologist Laurence J. Peters and was intended as satire. It proposed that competent employees will be continually promoted until they are incompetent in their new role. Then, they remain in that position for the remainder of their career. Consequently, every role is eventually held by an incompetent employee. His concept was unexpectedly hailed by researchers as having relevance and truth. Many firms now actively work to combat it.

I would wager any person reading this, who has been in corporate long enough, can think of at least one manager who was shockingly bad at their job. Yet they seemed untouchable.

It makes intuitive sense that as the demands and competition go up, your shine can easily lose its luster. For example, I was a good swimmer and the captain of my high school team. I felt like a god when I swam in local meets against kids who only swam a few months a year. But as I went up to districts, states, and then regionals, I felt increasingly less special.

Today, I’m a writer who sits on the other side of the corporate fence, living mostly free of hierarchal structures and constantly worrying about mistakes slipping through. I see my own partner, and friends, all angling for promotions and raises. This isn’t bad on its own as I admire ambition. But I’ve watched many of them take a hit to their life satisfaction.

The data reflects this: Employees are the unhappiest they’ve been in years, due to a lack of control, unreasonable workloads and not enough time off. You’d wonder why anyone would want to take on more if they are already drowning, but they do — by the millions.

It seems paradoxical. You work to be good at your job and gain respect, only to be promoted to a position that jeopardizes those perceptions. Being highly competent risks making you incompetent.

If you succeed enough, your high flying incompetence may introduce the Peter Principle’s brother, dubbed Peter’s Pinnacle, where you make a huge mistake and are paid to go away. It happened with the president of Disney, Michael Ovitz, who was fired after 16 months but made off with a $38 million severance.

The art of balancing

A few programmers I’ve known are good at dodging this responsibility paradox. My buddy Brian is a high flying coder, who is stiff-arming attempts by management to bring them into their fold and start managing people. He insists his goal is to be a skilled programmer and contribute to the company.

But beware of letting this mindset drag you to stagnancy. Don’t become the middle aged employee who has been in the same role for 10–20 years, just going through the motion and replying blandly to questions about their day with, “Living the dream.” The difference with Brian is that he is continually refining his programming, and is passionate about coding. There’s still a fire in him.

I’ve seen many falls from grace over the years, employees who were five star performers and thought highly of. Then, months after the company gleefully announced their promotion, the whispers started, “I heard he’s been struggling in his new role.” And, “He’s slipping.”

At a former employer, there was a corner room we called “The Death Trap.” The role for that office fell under a difficult manager and had sky-high expectations. They went through four people in 18 months. The company fired three managers who’d had great reviews in prior roles. One was saved by the skin of his neck by transferring to another department. It was the Peter Principle on full display.

Companies can do better too

Per a study by Dr. Ed Lazear at Stanford University, companies should account for the Peter Principle in any promotion decision because it’s an inevitable consequence. One solution is to inflate the original promotion requirements to smooth the transition. Put another way, ensure the candidate is an absolute star in their current role before leading them to deep waters.

Sometimes, you shouldn’t promote great employees at all. For example, in school, they often took our “Teachers of the Year” and offered them jobs in the administration. It’s tragic because it removed the teacher from working with students and making an impact where they thrived. Why not pay the teacher more to keep being an awesome teacher? To the managers seeing this, think long before hard-capping salaries by job title.

Parting thoughts

Think about your job well beyond compensation. Your motivation and job satisfaction are driven by feelings of competence, relatedness (feeling connected to coworkers), and autonomy. Every move up the ladder impacts those three things in unpredictable ways. If you do take a promotion, use that job to supplement your skills. Hire and surround yourself with smart people, and listen to what they have to say. That alone would save many from the clutches of the Peter Principle.

Everything is a tradeoff. I was keenly aware of that when I quit finance to be a writer. It was a conscious but difficult decision. I resolved I would probably never get wealthy. Upward mobility, outside of me writing a fluke hit book, would be limited. My health benefits would vanish. But I’d be doing something creative and that I loved doing, with minimal oversight and flexibility. Four years out, I’m still happy with this decision, but I am constantly doing status checks. Things can change on a dime.

My point is: Take a long view. Protecting your reputation and integrity gets harder as you carry more responsibility and teams to manage. Make sure the new role aligns well with your skillset, lifestyle, and has the support in place for you to thrive. If you make the decision solely for money, you may fall into an old and dangerous career trap.

Women are retards?

I don’t think so, but he has a point.

What was the moment you cancelled the friendship with your best friend?

For most of my life, my best friend was my sister. Then one day she called me and said that she didn’t want me to be part of her life anymore. I can’t tell you why because she didn’t say. That was five years ago and I haven’t heard from her since.

About two years ago I found out that she had moved to another state without even letting me know. I had some kind of emotional breakdown. Tears streamed down my cheeks for four straight days. I couldn’t sleep. My heart was broken.

The hardest thing about it is not knowing why. I’ve run dozens of scenarios through my mind but nothing seems to make sense. We have completely different political views but had made a pact years before that we just simply would never discuss politics. I had just been diagnosed with cancer for the second time just days before the phone call. She refuses to deal with anything “sad”; so maybe that was it.

After about four years of losing sleep and wondering what had happened, I realized that I don’t care so much about it any more. I guess that was the day that I cancelled our friendship. I consider her to be my ex-sister, now. I have lots of friends who do want me to be a part of their lives. They are my true brothers and sisters.

Blue Bayou Bananas Foster Shortcake

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da482b66 8f8c 4a17 a8aa 7c33dbc7a653

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

Biscuits

  • 2 ounces (about 1/3 cup) brie cheese, diced
  • 2 1/2 cups Bisquick
  • 1/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 3/4 cup water

Sauce

  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 4 large bananas, cut into 1/2 inch slices
  • 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
  • 1 cup plus 3 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 2 cups heavy cream
  • 2 tablespoons dark rum
  • 2 tablespoons banana liqueur

Garnish

  • Whipped cream
  • Fresh mint sprigs

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.

Biscuits

  1. Add together the diced cheese, Bisquick and sugar, mix well. Add the water and mix thoroughly to make a wet batter. Drop the batter in 4 mounds onto a greased cookie sheet and bake on the top rack for 20 minutes or until cooked through (when wooden pick inserted in middle comes out clean).
  2. Remove from oven and cool on wire rack.

Sauce

  1. Melt the butter in a saucepan and sauté the bananas for about 3 minutes. Add the sugars and stir until melted. Add the cream and, stirring constantly, cook over high heat until it reaches a boil. Reduce the heat to low and cook for 10 minutes. Add the rum and banana liqueur.
  2. To serve, cut the cooled biscuits from the top two thirds of the way down, open it up and pour the sauce into the center of the biscuit.

Garnish

  1. Serve with whipped cream and mint sprig.

Promiscuous Women Have The LOWEST Standards | Pearl Daily

This is super interesting.

My first experience with a woman in a typically male job, was in a campground at age 16. We worked as general labor, building things, cutting trails, planting trees and so on. Once or twice a week we would rotate an “easy day” while we rode the riding lawn mower, basically just sitting on our ass all day long. That ended when a girl started. She did nothing but ride the mower all day, every day. Somehow what was previously 1-2 easy days of work, became a full time job for her. And the rest of us no longer got any “easy days”. She never held a shovel, or a hammer, or an axe. But she got paid the same.”

https://youtu.be/3ihhTK6fbao

Why do rich people work even after they become rich? Why don’t they play?

“Dad, when will you retire?” I asked him one day.

“Hector, I retired before you were born,” he laughed.

Confused, I asked again, “Be honest, Dad, I mean, when will you stop working?”

His response was simple, “Working? What’s work? I don’t know what work is.”

“OK, Dad, forget about it,” I said as I assumed he wasn’t willing to talk about this.

“Hector,” he said, “what you know as my job is not work for me. I enjoy architecture so much that I could do this 24/7. This is who I am. Architecture is my life.”

So, to answer your question, why do rich people work even after they become rich? Why don’t they play?

My father lived to be 91 and worked until his body gave up on him. He was a passionate architect who found joy in his work. That’s what kept him active and full of joy every day. His passion for architecture was infectious, and it taught me this valuable lesson about work as a lifestyle.

So, if you ask me about retirement or work-life balance, I’d say it’s better to find what you love and make it a part of your life. When you find that, you’ll stop working and start living. We achieve a balance not by separating work from life but by integrating what you love into your lifestyle.

Today, this is how I see it: It’s not about working less; it’s about loving more what you do.

That’s the secret to a fulfilling life. As my father always said, “The day you find what you love is when you will stop working.”

So, go out there and find your passion. Make it your lifestyle.

And remember, it’s not work when you love what you do.

12 rules

Sidewalk Kiss

I am out of the hospital, and I am feeling much better. I can’t wait to get back to business with the start of the new year. The world seemed to be passing me by. Just excited and ready, but my engine is purring. All is good.

STORY 1

When I was 16 years old, I went horseback riding with a girl-friend (not a girlfriend) and we were riding in the woods. Well, there were some low hanging vines, and sure as shit, one caught my neck and rubbed it raw. I mean, it was brutal. All my skin was removed.

To everyone at work… it looked like a big “hicky”; a huge sucker bite.

That wasn’t the case, of course, but the razzlin’ and all was really excessive, don’t you know. It took me months to get out from the hasslin’, but you know it was the early 1970’s and that kind of stuff was common in the work-place.

I was still “sweet 16” and never been kissed. That ended shortly afterwards when two of my “girl-friends” fought to become my girlfriend. Which resulted in a sidewalk kiss, that I will never forget.

STORY 2

We were leaving a “sweet 16” birthday party of a classmate. She, a girl named Robin, invited me to it, and I as clueless as ever didn’t know what to do. When we left, and we were on the sidewalk… walking home she stopped turned to me and and “Kiss me”. And so we did.

That was my first kiss.

Robin went off to college, got married, and last I heard was doing well. I’m happy for her.

People, as cherished as those memories are, there is no way that I want to relive similar events in another life. I am tired, and have no desire for another reincarnation. I’ll tell you what.

Today…

What has been achieved from the Chinese leader’s visit to San Francisco?

Politically, nothing much.

The star of the whole show, in my opinion, is the turnout of Big Business.

No, not what President Xi said, but the audience composition. Namedrop a household corporate name and the CEO was probably in attendence, Tim Cook and Elon Musk included.

The movers and shakers of Wall Street paid handsomely for the privilege of WELCOMING President Xi. In fact, the visiting Head of State may have gathered THE star-studded corporate audience in recent years, bigger than any Democrat or Republican convention. Even King Charles and the Pope will struggle to demonstrate the star appeal lighting up San Francisco this November WEEKEND.

It was a dinner worth trillions upon trillions in market cap. One need only imagine the private jets lining up to pay hangar premiums for parking rights.

America NEEDS China, economically.

That is why Janet, the top-ranking finance official in America, welcomed President Xi on the tarmac personally.

image 143
image 143

Note that both Janet and Gavin visited Beijing PERSONALLY to arrange the visit.

Both the tarmac welcome and dinner highlighted the conspicuous absence of the State Department. No more James Cook Hotel browbeating and public attempts at humiliating the Chinese contingent.

What’s the key here?

American corporations are suffering in the downturn and the captains of industry want guarantees from Joe that the situation with China will not deteriorate further. The chips they have on the table? 20–30 billion in election funding for 2024.

We can expect a freeze on escalation of the new cold war, but not a ceasefire. The militaries will resume direct communications, which is nothing more than “we’re continuing with the harassment, but we’ll inform you first, with your acknowledgement”. However, we can expect cabinet officials to either be gagged top-down or bottom-up, or instructed to be cordial and tone down on provocation. In other words, Gina et al. morphing back to friendly beaver mode rather than “feet to the fire” wolf warrior incarnation.

That’s the tone for 2024. I don’t believe Joe will repeat the “genocide determination” stunt next year, having committed to extravagant molly-coddling in San Francisco, amidst the sea of bipartisan support for playing the China card the corporate-sanctioned way.

Lobbying works, both ways.

This is why President Xi appeared relaxed throughout, almost as if he was on holiday, totally unlike the tense atmosphere in Anchorage, Alaska, back in 2021. People have short memories.

President Xi was being feted and courted, and he was only here after two years of intense US diplomatic efforts to re-establish ties torn down by the State Department, no less.

Crazy world, isn’t it?

Note: The welcome dinner also reassured the Chinese, and gave them the confidence to negotiate deals with the Fed. Corporate America’s turnout is the real deal, in a fiery red vs. blue battle to the death.

We start with a woke *something*…

Not sure if it’s a woman, or a man, or what…

What is the biggest life lesson you have ever learned?

I’ll probably never be as successful as my dad and I’m perfectly OK with that.

If anything I’m proud of him. At one point he was overseeing a $50 billion annual budget as Undersecretary of Defense. The dude earned his Wikipedia page.

My father is also an excellent case study. He is certainly very smart. But it wasn’t like he was always the smartest guy in the room. In fact, he was keenly aware when he wasn’t. Yet many of my dad’s peers, who were smarter on paper, fell way short of his success.

Why? It’s mainly because of his people skills and his diligence. He is an excellent listener. He knows how to dial in and pick up on what is important. He is also conscientious and very ethical. He treats people equally regardless of their position.

I’d say if anything, my dad’s superpower is the ability to size people up quickly and judge their character.

He has a special distaste for self-serving people, which is probably because of his career with SEAL teams, where teamwork is a religion.

This is where many highly intelligent people fail. They lack the soft skills, the ability to relate with many types of people.

Cliche as it sounds, many gifted people also have an underlying arrogance they mask. Business textbooks are filled with case studies of executives’ careers being destroyed by pride. My girlfriend is a college professor and complains constantly about the incessant egos at academic conferences.

And to be fair, I can’t totally blame them. When a person is told from birth that they are brilliant, and their test scores affirm that praise, and they live in a world that prizes intelligence — it is probably hard to stay 100% humble.

No matter how talented you are, remember you are dealing with human beings in your career. Success isn’t a MENSA test. Soft skills matter—bigtime.

Be nice to the secretary.

China is building a large harbor in Peru south America as part of its Belt and Road Project, why can’t the United States develop its own Belt and Road project between South America, Central America, Mexico, United States and Canada?

The U.S. should but it won’t and it can’t. The U.S. thinks like a racist, xenophobic superior white Caucasian nation that their neighbours should be kept as savage, poor, undeveloped nations that it can invade anytime it feels like doing. So they won’t help these nations. It is beyond them. People like Donald Trump can term them robbers and rapist so that he feels very good as the Aryan Superior. So the U.S. abused them instead of helping them.

Of course now that the Chinese decide to help them the U.S. will term it “Debt Trap” China will help to make these former Spanish and Portuguese stolen nations rich and successful.

Anyway they can’t help them. The spent all its money and resources in forever wars, war mongering, war financing, war orchestrating, chaos and coup tormenting. And barely have enough to help US homeless and poor. The U.S. own infrastructure were also 20 century relics and dilapidated beyond repair in the U.S. so they cannot help. Even if the wanted to they will set a thousand conditions including signing over their sovereignty to Uncle Sam.

She Can’t Answer This Simple Question About Marriage

Are there cats out there who do have a problem with you sleeping, for no other reason than you sleeping? One of my cats wakes me up from my naps at 12:30pm tops, just for her to want nothing in particular. Is that normal?

My cat goes on a rampage when he wants to wake me up, knocking every conceivable item off of every flat surface until I finally give up on sleep.

He did it to me the other night. I’d fallen asleep on the couch and woke up to the familiar sound of the TV remote control hitting the floor, then the Roku remote.

I could just make out the little guy’s form on the coffee table through blurry eyes without my glasses. My smartphone was the next thing to hit the hardwood (I have a military grade case precisely for this reason), then he violently smacked a bottle of pills so hard they ricocheted off an end table and went spinning across the room.

Next he hopped onto the end table, upending a bag of restaurant tortillas and swiping my keys off. A water bottle went flying. I heard my vapor pen skidding in the opposite direction.

The little f—er is relentless.

(“Does it look like I’m judging you, human? Because I am.”)

If that doesn’t work — and sometimes it doesn’t, because I know giving in just emboldens him — and he runs out of things to smack and wreck, he’ll pad over to his litter box and start punching the cover flap with his paw because he knows it squeaks and it pisses me off.

He’s a super vocal cat too, so all this is accompanied by high-pitched trills like “RRRRRRRUUUUPPPP!” and “BRRRRRUUUU!”

And you know what the most ridiculous part is?

He’s not asking for food because he always gets a bowl of dry food before bed. He wants to hang out and snuggle and be buddies. I can’t be mad at him.

So yes, it’s pretty common for cats to wake their people up for no other reason than they want us awake, acknowledging them, or giving them scritches and affection.

It’s not always tied to more concrete requests like food, although sometimes it is.

You’ll also notice that cats have no regard for your sleep, but they’ll give you the feline death stare if you rudely interrupt their naps. Such is the pecking order in feline-ruled households.

It is possible to train them out of waking you, especially if they’re young. If your cat is a kitten then she’ll adjust to your schedule. If she’s an adult, well, good luck with that. You can break the habit, but you’re going to make sure you never give in or you’re just hitting the reset button by proving to her that if she makes enough noise, you’re going to get up eventually.

In that case, grab a package of earplugs off Amazon for a few bucks. Your brain will thank you for wearing them.

(“I am a sweet little kitty cat and none of these vile lies are true.”)

Its all about control

Did you ever see karma hit someone who deserved it so befittingly that it was eerie?

We were at an airport in Mexico, going through customs and immigration. Once your bag is xrayed you pick it up, and walk to this green button and push it. If the light above flashes green, which it almost always does, you proceed on. If the light flashes red, and the buzzer, buzzes, you get pulled into a side room and they go through your luggage thoroughly.

There was a huge line up. We had waited an hour to get to the X-ray machine. We were up next. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw someone from a culture that doesn’t believe in queuing, walking alongside the line, right up to the front, I actually stepped in front of him, so he couldn’t get past me, and his wife took the luggage and threw it on the X-ray conveyor belt. At this point I admitted defeat, and let them go.

They get through the x-ray, and push the button, in my place. It flashed red, and they were led off to a little side room, It would have been me, if they hadn’t barged into the line.

I waved to them as they were being led into the little room.

Wonderbread women

Who is the lowest status person for whom you have the highest respect?

He is the manager of my neighborhood gym, a very rinky-dink gym.

He makes ~$35K per year. It isn’t terrible money. You can certainly live on that, but it isn’t great money in the US. His salary isn’t specifically why I have so much respect for him. It’s the context:

He was a big-time lawyer here in Tampa. He had a fancy degree and a job making huge money. He did it for 15 years. He had the respect of his peers, the fear of his opposition.

He was fully capable of continuing his relentless march as a litigator.

But he realized, “Nah – this isn’t the right life.”

He walked away – chose a low-stress job, managing this local gym.

When the end of the day rolls around, he goes home and work doesn’t chase him. He is free to indulge the rest of his life.

I see him 3-4 times a week while I sign into my gym. He is always in good spirits. Relaxed. Not troubled by some unseen threat that looms on his calendar.

We grow up. The people around us tell us they just want us to “be happy,” but at the same time, they are pushing this maximization mindset: maximize grades, maximize salary, maximize reputation, go, go, go.

You see plenty of people that maximize. You see plenty of people who don’t.

But how often do you see people who maximize and then walk away? Who goes from introducing himself as “Senior Counsel at XYZ” to answering calls, “Hello, ABC Fitness! How can I help you?”

It’s surprisingly rare. It’s hard to kiss the ring of ambition for so long and then drop it.

He’s a bit of a novelty in my life. On my bad days, I envision what it would be like to be him — that one guy who stepped through the paradox of happiness and ambition.

And although I suspect I don’t have the guts to do what he did, walk away, I have a surprising amount of respect for a guy who is capable of so much, yet aspires to so little.

He did it his way. And he’s happy. Does anything else really matter?

How you know…

What was the dish that made you reverse your opinion on a food you had until then disliked?

A girl I quite fancied took me to meet her parents for dinner – which turned out to be lasagne. The only prior experience I’d had with lasagne had been at school, many years before – about a millimeter thick, cooked in trays half a mile wide, with about 50p’s worth of ingredients and left to dry out under a heat lamp for a year. 🙁

But I had to be polite.

“I’m not very hungry,” I said. “just give me a little.”

Turns out that lasagne cooked by an Italian mother was rather different to the filth churned out at St. Mary’s. So I asked for seconds

“I thought you said you weren’t hungry?”

“That’s alright, I thought I didn’t like lasagne”

That’s lovely

Is it true that, in some American schools, students do essays on why the USA is the best country in the world?

Back when I was in high school in Florida, yes.

In the 1980s, state law in Florida required that all public high school students take a one-semester class called Americanism vs Communism, or AVC.

The State-approved AVC textbook can be summed up this way:

“Rah rah rah! We’re #1! America, fuck yeah! We won WWII and saved Europe and Russia! America is the best at everything! Woohoo! Look at how amazing we are! America, go us!”

Like, seriously, it was embarrassingly bad. We’re talking Soviet-Union-textbook bad. If George Orwell included a page from the AVC textbook in Nineteen Eighty-Four, critics would be all “nah, bro, too unrealistic.” You wouldn’t think it’s possible to fit so much cringe into one book.

I cannot fathom the degree of insecurity that went into passing the law that required teaching this class in schools.

Fortunately, I lucked out. My high school teacher, a WWII vet and survivor of the Bataan Death March, hated and loathed the class requirement and textbook with every fiber of his being, and made that very clear on the first day of class.

He refused to teach from the book at all. He told us point-blank “The state requirement for this class is complete propaganda bullshit. As far as I’m concerned, this is a class in Russian history, and that’s how I intend to teach it.”

He made his own teaching materials for the class and it rocked.

Short Men Energy

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/c_KJmSuiswQ?feature=share

What would happen if China stopped investing in US treasuries? Would Americans face a financial crisis?

China has already stopped investing in U.S. Treasuries.

Since the beginning of the Ukraine War, China has been selling its Treasury holdings. As of October 2023, it continues to hold about $820 billion of U.S. Treasuries. This is a reduction of about 18% in one year.

Russia previously sold all its U.S. Treasury holdings, after the United States began to sanction it in connection withe Ukraine War. In about 2017, Russia encouraged the world to do the same.

At the same time, the Federal Reserve is selling the U.S. Treasury Bonds that it purchased during covid.

The combined actions of Russia, China and the Federal Reserve are driving down the value of U.S. Treasury Bonds. In the past six months, the value of 30 year bonds has fallen by about 50%. This raises interest rates in the United States, because the U.S. government must pay more to borrow.

The higher interest rates have greatly limited America’s options, financially. Housing prices are poised to fall, due to higher interest rates. Even worse, interest payments on the U.S. national debt have doubled. Interest payments will soon exceed what the United States spends on national defense. Thus, as you can see, the tactics of Russia and China have limited America’s ability to fight wars. We are seeing just the beginning of the cycle.

Your question is — will the United States face a financial crisis?

The answer is yes. If the United States (a) continues printing dollars, and (b) continues supporting a violent response to conflicts in the world, two things will happen:

  1. The planet will refuse to work with the United States during America’s foreseeable crisis; and
  2. The U.S. dollar will collapse, due to continued printing and the planet’s rejection of the dollar.

The collapse of the dollar will be devastating in the United States, because American society is dependent upon cheap gasoline and cheap imports, which will no longer exist in the United States.

The United States imports 28% of its crude oil. This leaves the United States vulnerable to a falling dollar. Contrary to popular belief, the United States is not “energy independent,” and remains vulnerable. The United States imports 5 million barrels of crude oil per day more than it exports. That is a lot of oil that won’t be coming into the United States when the dollar falls. In addition, President Biden foolishly sold decades of oil stored up by the WWII generation in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. America is not ready for the foreseeable crisis coming to its shores.

Expect riots and shortages in the United States. If Biden continues to pursue violent solutions to global conflict, those wars will return to the United States when the dollar comes down. The American people will be fighting over limited resources. There won’t be any jobs in America, when the shopping malls close.

Be equal or not

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/2O1jxwQ00iw?feature=share

My friend has been terminated from the company that she’s been working for. On her last day of her work, she deleted all of her work in her computer. Does she have the right to do that, since all the work was done by her?

Normally the work product belongs to the company, not the worker. In the early days of solid state circuitry, my BIL developed much of it. Although his name is on the patents, the company owned them.

I was an independent contractor managing HOAs. ( Also a lawyer). I started by managing my own while my kids were preschoolers. It ran very smoothly so no one ever wanted to be on the Board until crazy ass lady and her group of idiots came on. True nut cases. One insisted on judging the Holiday decorating contest, then picked her own house as winner. One shot my dog. Board meetings were like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.

The Board was 3/3, three humans, three horses asses. When one human was on vacation, the three asses called a special meeting and “ terminated “ me. Now they knew I would just sue them on my 2 year contract so they made paying me for another 18 months conditional on me delivering all the Assn documents and computer data on fees, violations etc on discs within five days. This belonged to them.

I was happy to get out of the nut house. The Assn owned the file cabinets. I just put them on a dolly and walked them to a Board member’s house and left them. I downloaded all the data in computer language and gave them the disks.

Problem was, I used a program I bought that was made by a company that had gone bankrupt. It was a great program. Totally unavailable for purchase anywhere. But I had no duty to give them my program. The computer disks were useless. The finances were also kept on a very old edition of an accounting program. I had no duty to provide them with my copy. The financial disks very useless to them without paying a few thousand for the program. It was a very specialized program used by CPAs

They spent a fortune going through old files and bank statements and quarterly financials to recreate payment records etc. And, I had fulfilled my duties. I got the next 18 months of my contract paid. They also received a cease and desist letter from me. The Assn ‘s original documents had a problem and no lender would loan on a house without a document called a Subordination agreement. Only a lawyer can write one. I always wrote them. No cost. It was my own HOA. But the first time they copied one on a new sale, I hit them with a cease and desist letter and reported them to the Bar for the unlicensed practice of law. So then they had to pay a lawyer for the next 150 or so documents. Lawyers are not free.

So, what the employer owns and what the employee owns is a mixed bag.

My guys…

What’s the fastest you’ve wiped a smirk off of someone’s face?

I was in an elevator on a cruise ship. Some wiseacre saw my polka-dot suspenders.

He smirked, “Nice suspenders. You from Wisconsin?”

I replied, “No. Ever since my cancer surgery, I can’t wear a belt.”

His smirk instantly evaporated. The elevator doors opened on my floor, and I got out.

Soft tissue sarcoma caused by Agent Orange in Vietnam, They took out 1–3/4 pounds of me from my groin to my beltline. It left a notch where a belt would sit, so I can’t wear a belt comfortably.

Order over chaos

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/utsOIvH_FOs?feature=share

What is the coolest thing you have ever done in your life?

Two years back, I was on a road trip on my bike to Meghalaya. While returning, as I was tired I was riding slowly. I was still some 70 miles away from home, and it was already dark. On the highway, I saw a car parked and some people arguing. I rode past them, however before passing them I caught the sight of two women crying and eagerly looking through the front window.

I took a turn and came back to the spot. I saw four boys, around my age, were arguing and pushing a man of around 50 years old. Turns out, the family was returning from some function and lived in another town which was about 90 miles from mine. They were stopped by these four boys on bikes and asked them for some money. They started misbehaving when the old guy refused to pay. He asked his wife and daughter to stay in the car and got down to reason with them.

I heard the story from the old guy, while the boys asked me mind my own business and get the f**k off. I simply turned and started walking towards my bike. The man begged at me to stay and help him, and looked at the women in the back seat and felt their eyes pleading me to stay. But, I kept walking!

Here comes the twist! Now, during my rides I always keep a hockey stick on my bike. Bad luck for the guys who never knew this. They laughed at me, calling me names. One even said, “Yeah, keep walking you p***say.”

I took the hockey stick and came back running. The boys didn’t get time to react and I started beating them. The blows landed everywhere and I think two or more of them bled as well. I didn’t show them any mercy. Someone threw some punches and kicks at me too, but I had a more formidable weapon than them. Seeing me in action, the man also jumped in; his wife and daughter also got down and helped in whatever way they could. All beaten up and even not being able to stand properly, two boys somehow managed to run off on their bikes while the other two ran after them.

I told the man to start the car and keep driving, while I rode in front of him in case the boys decided to get help and chase us. When we entered the man’s town, we went to the police station and lodged a report. The daughter was smart enough to note down the bikes’ number plates. As it was very late, the man requested me to spend the night at their place. Once reaching home, the family thanked me for helping them. He wouldn’t even allow me to leave early next day, saying that he can’t send me off without a proper meal. Family, friends and relatives came to thank me for my heroism. I stayed for lunch and returned home.

To this day the gentleman calls me occasionally. He even invited me to his daughter’s wedding.

Now, let me tell you something. I’m not the brave person they take me to be. I was equally scared that night. I was terrified. It took me a lot of courage to do what I did. After this whole thing was over, I was so proud of it!

Companies Are Ditching Hiring Fresh Female Graduates

Does welfare perpetuate generational poverty?

My grandparents were too poor to afford a private jet or a private helicopter, they had to rely on government programs like public roads to get by.

They couldn’t afford to hire private tutors for my parents, and so had to send them to public schools to learn to read and write.

As one might expect, this cycle of dependency continued: My parents also didn’t have a private jet or helicopter, and they also had to rely on government programs like public roads to get by.
They also sent their kids to learn to read and write in public schools.

And here I am: made lazy by all this generational welfare, I’m not pulling on my bootstraps nearly hard enough to afford my own private airport.
Like my parents before me, and my grandparents before them, I depend entirely on government programs like public roads (or worse, public transit!!) to get to work.

There is no means testing in place for using public roads, which leads to rampant abuse.
I’ve seen people use them to go for a stroll, even though they could have afforded a treadmill.
Not only that, but these type of government handouts kill any incentive for most people to get a private helicopter, they’d rather stay dependent upon the government provided public roads.

It’s truly a modern tragedy, with no end in sight.

You rascal

What happened in your office that became the stuff of legend?

The Door.

Years and years ago, when I quit smoking, I found my temper would often flare up during the first few weeks of abstinence.

I worked at a remote branch office with a staff of six. One morning when I came to work early, something went “wrong” and I was so angry that I impulsively gut-punched my office door.

The door was hollow core wood; I punched right through it.

I admitted my foolish outrage to my office mates when they entered an hour later.

And little was said about it; I believe they were sympathetic with my situation, and supportive of my effort to quit smoking.

There matters laid at rest; nothing more said.

Until the office Christmas party, when staff from all branches and the headquarters office (over 100 souls) gathered at some central location for a cocktail party and most sumptuous feast. Everything paid for by the company as a treat to us. This was followed by after-dinner drinks, and the “awards ceremony.”

The awards ceremony was a production of the employees and was in the nature of a good-humored “roast,” drawing upon such amusing things as had happened involving any of them over the past year. Some of the recognition was by actual funny trophies which were passed from one recipient to another; others were unlikely objects constructed of broom sticks, hub-caps, old radios, or heaven knows what.

Because I and my cohorts were from the remotest branch, none of us received, or ever expected to receive, recognition at this ceremony. We had our OWN Christmas party, for that.

Thus it was quite a surprise, to me, when I saw that my associate, Greg, was called upon by the master of ceremonies to announce the grand prize winner. He briefly described in very general terms the struggle of one individual to overcome a serious addiction. I was as curious as everyone else to know who, and to know the story. The room became very quiet, as the subject appeared to deviate from the laughable to the serious. The recipient was as yet unnamed.

Then a cloaked object was carried onto the dais, looking for all the world like a draped coffin.

With the words, “And the winner is, John Scott Geare,” the black drape was pulled away to reveal my actual office door, with a precise halo painted around its wound. Somehow, the damned thing had been spirited from our office, and carried the 60 miles to the party, unbeknownst to me.

And it became the stuff of legend.

You owe me half

Chick was only going out for a free meal. And he says…

Cajun Style Tip Roast

2023 11 09 15 20
2023 11 09 15 20

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (4 pound) tip roast
  • 1/4 cup finely chopped onions
  • 1/4 cup finely chopped celery
  • 1/4 cup finely chopped green bell peppers
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons pepper
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1/2 teaspoon dry mustard
  • 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 300 degrees F.
  2. Combine vegetables, spices and oil.
  3. With a sharp knife make 8 to 12 deep V-shape slit pockets, stopping an inch from the bottom of roast. Fill the pockets with the vegetable mixture, reserving some to rub on top of roast.
  4. Bake uncovered for 2 1/2 hours or until thermometer reads 140 degrees F for medium rare beef.
  5. Serve with pan juices.

Nutrition

Per serving: Calories 391; fiber 1g; carbohydrates 2g, Protein 61g, Cholesterol 160mg; Sodium 509mg; Fat 14g (32% of calories from fat)

Inaccurate Self assessment

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/c0CzEzo7VwI?feature=share

What is the strangest reaction of someone who has just been fired?

A number of years ago I worked for a large US company. My role was in sales (industrial product). In my third year, I was selected for management. As such, I was trained in recruiting and helped district managers hire talent.

I visited one district and held a recruiting fair and ultimately recommended 10 applicants to the manager. The manager had his own candidate and asked me to interview him. In my opinion, his choice was terrible. He did not have any of the qualities successful people in our business had. I told him this.

Jump ahead six months. I become the manager for that district. My predecessor had hired the guy I did not recommend and did not even call any of the 10 I recommended.

Within three months i had hired five new sales reps. Four did very well and stayed for years. One failed within six months. The one that I did not recommend? I had to let him go due to poor performance and poor attitude. When I told him I had to let him go, he held onto my desk and told me he really did not want to be fired and would not leave the office. He would continue to come to work. It took several hours to convince him that he was not a good match for our industry. I continued to pay him for one month as he searched for another job.

Please don’t tell me I am mean and unfeeling. In my 30+ years of managing, I have supported many people in many different ways. The bottom line, if someone is not doing well in a job, it is usually because they are not trying or they are just in the wrong job. The latter is almost always the case. If you have a good, hard working person, try to find a different position in your company for him/her. That’s the mark of a good manager.

A biological male…

Why do some scientists on the Internet seem so arrogant toward people with differing opinions?

I first noticed this phenomenon with a guy named Dr.Layne Norton. Layne has a PhD in biochemistry. This man has forgotten more about the human body than I’ve ever learned, and I’ll have my Masters degree next month.

He’s an elite level powerlifter.

And a pro bodybuilder,

He also runs a youtube channel where he shares some advice on bodybuilding and powerlifting. I began to notice that the comment section was particularly toxic.

People were insulting this man’s intelligence, his personality, and his family.

I didn’t understand why. He seemed like a nice enough guy. Until I stumbled upon the answer.

One commenter said, “I’m sure you know what you’re talking about, you just seem arrogant though.” The comment had 100s of likes.

Scientists tend to speak in very absolute terms. Why? Because they’ve studied the shit out of whatever it is they’re discussing. And because they speak so unequivocally, people get turned off.

For example, I wrote an answer in which I said working out in the afternoon is best for muscle building and performance. The hormones and body temperature are in a better position to support a workout in the afternoon.

How do I know? I wrote a 20 page paper on this topic for school (supported by 30 peer reviewed studies).

Some guy told me that I was a liar. Why? According to him, testosterone is obviously highest in the morning… because men get morning wood…..

Like many have said, scientists have spent years studying a topic, and they’ve forgotten more about said topic than most will ever even hear. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve EARNED the right to be a little arrogant when it comes to their subject.

Since 1979…

What is the best comeback you used on someone?

I was adopted at birth. From the time I was able to understand anything, my parents called me their Chosen Child and gave me a poem with that name. I was raised to feel special. When I was in 3rd grade, one of the spoiled little rich girls tried to make fun of me, saying mean things, like, my mother hated me and got rid of me so that I had to be taken in by strangers out of pity – really wicked thing for an 8-year-old to say. When she finally took a breath, I responded by saying that I KNEW my parents wanted me, they CHOSE me. Then I said “I bet you were an ax-i-dent!” and walked away. When I got home from school, my mother said she had gotten a call from that girl’s mother, wanted to know what happened, and asked me how in the world I knew what an “accident” was, laughing all the time! I was only 8, had no clue, but I had heard her talking on the phone when she mentioned a girl getting pregnant by accident. Obviously, she didn’t know I heard her or that I understood the gist of the conversation. She was laughing when she told daddy – and that was when I began hearing her say to her friends that “little pitchers have big ears” as she changed the conversation. I don’t know what a little pitcher is, and that may not be what she said, but that’s all that I heard before they started a new conversation!

Your future children…

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Oo8ihDBf4qc?feature=share

What does a babysitter do if parents don’t respond to calls and they don’t show up until the next day?

If they said they would be home at a certain time and didn’t call to ASK if it was ok that they stayed out later, I would call the police. I give them 1/2 hour past designated time to call and if they didn’t answer 2 calls and 2 texts all done within 1/2 hour time frame, the police would be informed of how worried I am about their safety because it’s now an hour late with them not calling or answering multiple calls and texts. Let them deal with the cops questioning them about not contacting you or answering you. The cops will let them know you only concerned about their well being and they will also rip them a new one for informing you and also for leaving their child alone with a babysitter who is now upset that something had happened to them. Trust me, they will never do it again to any babysitter. I say any babysitter because after that, I would NEVER babysit for them again, even at 4x’s the amount of money.

I actually like you

One of my favorite shorts.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/1kypV3rvNHg?feature=shareWhat is an example of “It was nice while it lasted”?

Chaurice

This Creole pork sausage is an old local favorite dating back to the 19th Century, but Chaurice isn’t as easy to find as it once was. It would seem to have come to Louisiana with the Spanish, and was adapted to local custom and ingredients; the term is similar to the Spanish chorizo. It’s great with white or red beans, and good for breakfast too, with eggs.

2023 11 09 15 18
2023 11 09 15 18

Ingredients

  • 4 pounds lean fresh pork, butt or shoulder
  • 2 pounds fresh pork fat
  • 2 cups onion, finely minced
  • 1 1/2 tablespoons garlic, finely minced
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons cayenne
  • 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes
  • 8 teaspoons salt
  • 2 teaspoons freshly ground red pepper
  • 2 teaspoons dried thyme leaves, crushed
  • 5 tablespoons parsley, finely chopped
  • 3 bay leaves, finely crushed
  • 1/2 teaspoon allspice
  • 3 yards small sausage casing (optional)

Instructions

  1. Cut the pork at fatback into small pieces. Mix together and run once through the coarse disc of a meat grinder into a large bowl.
  2. Add the seasonings and mix thoroughly until the stuffing is very smooth and well blended.
  3. Make into patties, and use within three days or freeze.

Notes

You can also put chaurice into casings; make each sausage about six inches in length.

Skunks in Milford

You know, I really liked Massachusetts. I used to live in Milford, Massachusetts. It was really great.

Beautiful, pleasant. A really nice place, and I often miss what it was like.

You know… there is one thing about Milford…

Skunks.

Lots and lots of skunks. LOL.

That and foxes. Who would thunk it?

Oh, they would really leave you alone. But, you know, you don’t want to get them upset.

Ha!

They would just meander about. Clueless, without a care in the world. Funny.

Skunks in Milford.

Meandering about. Not a care in the world.

Cute.

Puts a smile on my face.

Today…

Is it really worth it to live to over 80 years?

When he was 87 and slipping into dementia, I asked my father exactly this on one of his “good days.” He smiled and said that it had been worth it, even when he became the last of his siblings alive and started to lose his ability to remember names, first, and other things later.

He became a very gentle person to be around (he had been an angry and argumentative Democrat for most of his life) and enjoyed his children, grandchildren, and even their pets. We got along better than we ever had. I remember taking him to the Fourth of July parade and whispering the names of people who came up to greet him. Once he knew their names, he could have a great conversation. Then I brought him back to a school reunion and that was wonderful. He needed no introductions as everyone wore a name tag.

Having watched my father in those years, I hope that I may live long enough to navigate old age just the way he did despite his obvious infirmities.

What situation made you wish you never reported it?

I’ve worked with the company I’m presently employed with for not quite 12 years. Up until a year ago, we were a small personable, easy going, family owned company of about 250 drivers. If you were around for any length of time, everyone in the office and shop knew you, and vice versa. That was up until about a year ago when the owner of the company retired and threw us under the bus by selling us out to a larger company and everything changed.

It’s common practice for just about any trucking company to require any damage to their equipment be reported and documented. With my company, if the damage was minimal, the report would still go in the driver’s jacket, but no further. It would stay in-house instead of being reported to a national data base.

I’ve always been the type to man-up in situations such as this. I was raised that way, and it was the right thing to do. Even leaving small damage unreported could result in the next driver having to have it repaired and possibly being late for a delivery.

So, after pulling out of a customer’s driveway and cutting it too tighly, I felt something go bump in the night. Upon further inspection, it appears I clipped one of those large landscaping rocks placed to prevent idiot drivers like me from cutting corners too tightly, and running over their curbs. When I stopped for the day and was doing my mandatory post-trip inspection, I came upon this,

image 114
image 114

Thinking it was no biggie, and my company would normally think likewise, and wanting to do the right thing, I called it it. What happened next was nothing short of a shit storm. The new people acted like I ran over a carload of nuns. Initial phone call to my parent company, followed by a call to the new company’s safety department, followed by a call-back the next day from same, followed by submitting pictures and a full accident report, followed by a call-back from the new company to review of same, followed by a never-heard-of-before-review from Greg in our safety department.

When I related the story to the former head of our . safety department, her reaction was, “It was just a fuckin’ rim!”, as she shook her head.

Trust me, if it ever happens again, I won’t think twice about going palms up with a “Dunno nuthin’ ‘bout it. When I dropped it off, it was fine “, should anyone inquire.

Something to accept

What has been the most life changing health issue you’ve experienced? Did it change your life for the better or worse?

I was driving down the freeway and all of a sudden I couldn’t see the cars ahead of me. It was if someone had pulled a shade down in front of my line of vision. I could see all around the shade, but not right in front. Although it was only for a few moments, the terror I felt was devasting.

I was a 21-year old college student, a senior at academically prestigious school, getting good grades, working part time, and enjoying a fun social life.

So, what was the matter? Where did the intense headaches come from? Why did I frequently wake up in the middle of the night, jumping out of bed and running to the bathroom, to vomit repeatedly? Why did I feel that I was about to fall down whenever the sidewalk was a little uneven?

Then there were those crazy nightmares I was having.…. I dreamed one night that I was driving on the freeway. The car next to me pulled up right beside me. The driver pulled a gun out. He shot me in the head. My head exploded. Everything became dark. I woke up in a terrified sweat. What on earth was wrong with my head that I would have such a dream?

In spite of everything, I was doing okay and maintaining my studies. But finally it became too much for me to handle. Especially the shade covering my eyes on the freeway.

I saw several doctors. They said I was fine.

I went to a psychologist. I figured that since the doctors said I was fine, it must be all in my mind. The psychologist listened to my symptoms. He said that I didn’t need to see a psychologist. Instead, I needed to see a neurologist and he urged me to see one right away.

I took his advice and went to a neurologist. The neurologist admitted me to a hospital. Still no answers. Many tests were done, but it was during the days before C-T scans or MRI’s were used, so it was hard to figure this out. Finally a diagnosis was made: brain tumor.

Surgery was scheduled. They operated for 10 hours, and were able to remove half of the tumor. The surgeon told me the tumor was the size of a large orange and that if I hadn’t been diagnosed when I was, I would have had 6 months left to live. It was just taking over my whole brain and growing so fast.

I was in intensive care for 2 weeks. I can’t remember too much about that time. It seemed like a dream, for just a few hours.

Then, more surgery. And then some more.

I lost the ability to walk. I couldn’t see very well. I lost hearing. I was fed intravenously. Because I had stroke-like symptoms, one side of my body became weak and uncoordinated. I no longer could hold a pen and write.

I had physical therapy and occupational therapy to regain some of the skills that I had lost.

I finally left the hospital and went home to live with my parents. The tumor was not all gone, but I needed a break. I needed time to get stronger before the next onslaught of surgery.

While I was home, I had physical and occupational therapy at a nearby hospital. I still couldn’t walk or write, but I was beginning to feel better. In physical therapy I worked on learning to walk with a walker and then eventually on my own. In occupational therapy I worked on strengthening my very weak hand. I did many activities with my hands, including making some beautiful crafts. Occupational therapy was so much fun! I loved therapy.

I went back to the hospital and had the last surgery. Finally the tumor was gone. After some more time had passed I felt that maybe it was time to return to school.

Living on my own again was not easy. I still couldn’t walk or write well. But I persevered. Sometimes I fell down. I used a tape recorder during lectures since I couldn’t write fast enough to take notes, and my professors gave me extra time to write exams. With the support of my family and professors, I did well and succeeded.

As graduation approached, a brilliant idea occurred to me. I remembered the great time I had in occupational therapy, and how I had been helped so much. Maybe I too could become an occupational therapist. I thought of how wonderful it would be to spend my life helping others just like I had been helped. I decided that yes, I would try, and so I applied to a master’s degree program in occupational therapy.

There were many more applicants than spots available, but much to my delight I was accepted into the program!

The program was so difficult and very competitive. But I worked hard and after two years became an occupational therapist.

That was 40 years ago, and I am still going strong. I have worked with literally thousands of patients during my career, from little 1-pound premature babies all the way up to 103 year-old patients in nursing homes, and everything in-between. I have loved every minute of it.

Occupational therapy is a flexible career with an abundance of interesting and meaningful jobs available. During my career, I traveled the world, met and married my husband, gave birth to and raised two beautiful children, and enjoyed my life!

I turned what could have been a terrible, frightening experience into something really wonderful.

Swapping phones

How does a rescuer deal with a person who has been cut in half by a truck and obviously will not survive, but is still alive?

Not a truck. A railroad train.

The kid had attempted to jump on a boxcar from a bridge.

He dropped instead between the cars and rolled onto a rail.

A wheel cut him in half at the belly, but at the same time sealed the wound.

He was fully conscious, and asked a rescue worker if he would be “OK.”

The first responder said, “Sure, son, you’ll be fine.”

Then his two halves unsealed, and his guts poured forth. He died.

Where?

In Cumberland, Maryland. Here:

image 118
image 118

Right behind my house, years ago.

What’s something you can’t believe you had to explain to another adult?

My sister-in-law once called me to borrow my fax machine. This was in the days before most people had computers and internet. She had a very important document that had to be faxed to a company showing proof of payment.

I took my fax machine to her house that night, hooked it up, walked her through the simple instructions and left.

She called me at work the next day in a panic. She said she had tried to send her document several times and it would not go. This was important, and she needed it sent right away. I was getting off early that day so I agreed to go by her house and help her with it.

When I arrived I checked the machine and connections and everything seemed fine. I told her to send it again so I could see what was going on. She did everything correctly and at the tone hit Send. The fax machine pulled the paper through and indicated a successful receipt at the other end. My sister-in-law grabbed the paper as it came back out of the machine and said, “See. It doesn’t go, it just spits it back out.” My jaw hit the floor. It turns out she thought the actual paper was being sent over the phone lines.

After I explained the concept to her, I let her know that this story would be told at every family get together for the rest of my life. It is now firmly a part of the family lore and enjoyed by each successive generation.

My sister-in-law fortunately took it in stride. She declared it her worst blonde moment and laughs as hard as anyone when the story is retold.

P.S. My sister-in-law did call the company still to confirm receipt. They told her they had four copies and that was absolutely sufficient.

Have you ever accidentally found out that you were about to be fired?

Close? I accidentally found out I was going to be demoted which lead to me quitting.

In my 20s I worked at one of those places that made huge cookies, I was specifically hired by the manager to be the assistant manager, she’d worked with me as a key holder at another place so she knew I would be good at it. A few months after I was hired the owner sold the business.

One day I was hanging out with the Manager L when she got a call from one of the kids at cookie shop. “Hey L, the owner is in here with some chick he says is the new Manager, what’s going on?”

Too bad L had no answers for her, we had no damned idea what was happening. She and I jumped in the car and headed to the cookie shop to talk, in person, to the owner.

Sure enough, he was demoting L into Assistant and me into just a regular employee. Neither of us had done anything wrong, the new owner just planned to make this new lady a manager. He told us a bunch of BS saying she had experience bla bla… but we found out later she was actually just his girlfriend. We told him how messed up that was, and that both of us would quit if he planned to do this. He was unrepentant, even gaving us the whole “I’m sorry you feel you need an apology” line.

She and I looked at each other, got up and walked away.

Apparently he truly didn’t understand what had just happened because when he saw the kid who called us changing the schedule he was confused. When he was told by her we had just quit, he was completely stunned and didn’t understand why we would have done that. Dude, we literally told you to your face that’s what we’d do if you demoted us for no reason other than to put someone else in as manager, WTF did you think would happen?

Turns out the girlfriend was horrible as a manager, and the owner ended up folding in a few months. Funny how that happens when you take actions that force the people with a clue out, and put someone clueless in just because you are dating them. The two of us were the ones who knew how to run the store, knew how to run the fundraising side, which is where most of the money was made. He screwed himself by being an idiot.

Cajun Butt

2023 11 09 14 20
2023 11 09 14 20

Yield: about 8 to 10 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (6 pound) boneless pork butt
  • 15 to 20 garlic slivers
  • 3 tablespoons red pepper flakes (or less)
  • 4 tablespoons yellow mustard
  • 3 tablespoons Tony Chachere’s Original Seasoning
  • 3 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon black pepper

Instructions

  1. Cut 15 to 20 slits 1 inch deep on external surface of pork butt. Press one garlic sliver into each slit with thumb, to bottom of slit. On top of each garlic sliver, insert 1/4 teaspoon of red pepper flakes in the slit. Pinch slit closed.
  2. In a bowl, mix mustard, Cajun seasoning, brown sugar and black pepper. Mix well and apply to pork butt. Lightly dust with a coating of red pepper flakes.
  3. Wrap in plastic wrap and refrigerate overnight.
  4. Smoke-cook using apple and hickory chips on a covered barbecue pit off the heat for 1 hour per pound or until the internal temperature reaches 190 degrees F.

What is the strangest way you have seen someone repair a broken object?

I drove around a 1988 Toyota Corolla when I was 16 years old.

It looked like this, only a lot more beat up and ugly:

image 110
image 110

The car had a habit of making strange noises, but there was one noise in particular that I just couldn’t deal with anymore.

I drove it over to my dad’s house to see if he could tell what the problem was.

Dad: “Oh that’s just your heat shield.”

Me: “My what?”

Dad: “It’s basically just there to keep stuff from catching on fire when you park somewhere.”

Me: “That sounds kind of important. Is it something that can be fixed?”

Dad: “Hmmm… Probably.”

My dad grabbed a stick from the yard, shoved it somewhere on the heat shield, and the noise magically stopped.

I thought that stick would eventually catch on fire, but it never did and the noise never came back.


There are some benefits to having a redneck dad.

What is one of the most effective improvised weapons made by soldiers in the field?

Perhaps one of the most effective improvised weapons was the Rhino tank. An ordinary tank – usually a Sherman but with improvised steel teeth welded to the front.

In 1944 just after D-Day the Americans, Canadians and British troops were getting held up in the ‘bocage’ countryside of Normandy. Bocage consisted of high hedgerows built on thick banks of earth. This environment proved ideal for German ambushes, providing plenty of defensive cover. It also meant that the Germans could pick off tanks because they would be funnelled down the lanes, or forced through the narrow gaps in the bocage hedgerows. The Germans knew exactly where the tanks would come through and could lay anti tank mines, or train their guns on that exact spot. If the tanks tried to avoid the gaps and instead drive over the top of bocage embankment, it was so steep that it would expose the thin underside armour. Allied tanks were getting wiped out. Until this man, Sergeant Curtis G. Culin had an idea.

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image 109

When one of his fellow soldiers joked and said they needed a big set of teeth to bite their way through, Culin didn’t laugh but took the idea seriously. He welded some of the steel that the Germans had used as tank traps to the front of his tank, like this.

image 108
image 108

The teeth allowed the Sherman to burst straight through the hedgerow, surprise and then destroy any Germans waiting in ambush on the other side.

When General Omar Bradley saw what Culin had done and saw how his tank was able to smash its way though the bocage hedgerows, the General ordered that as many tanks as possible be fitted with this improvised weapon. The Normandy beaches had been filled with landing spikes which were conveniently just the right shape and type of steel to make the ‘teeth’.

This simple but effective innovation enabled the Americans to swiftly move on and cut off the Cotentin Peninsula and then move south and meet up with the British and Canadians cutting off the Germans in the Falaise Pocket.

What problems did you encounter when buying a house in an “as-is” condition?

I bought the house we are in now exactly 10 years ago in “as is” condition. In fact this was the entire listing:

“Seller and agents make no representations and warranties. Sold as is.”

The house is in a fairly upscale suburb, and was about 15 years old at the time. There was plenty of cosmetic damage — water damage on the hardwood floors, a filthy kitchen, holes in some drywall, a half-full leaky pool clogged with algae. Plus the interior and exterior were just sad looking, with ugly brown paint and outdated stained oak stairs.

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image 107

But the funny thing was that no matter how carefully I looked, I could not see any actual serious problems. In fact, it was a bank repossession, and I eventually figured out that since it looked so bad they just assumed there were real problems, and they listed it the way they did to avoid any liability. Over 100 people looked at the house, and we were the only ones who put in an offer, and we got it way (way!) under the asking price, which is rare in Toronto.

I was planning on doing a full renovation anyhow, so I didn’t care about the drywall and flooring. The entire kitchen went in the dumpster. And for $600 we repaired the pool, and it worked perfectly.

I’ve been here for 10 years now and we have not had a single serious problem with the house.


I am sitting outside Quoraing this morning and I took this picture 60 seconds ago:

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image 106

From the Agreement of Purchase and Sale:

image 105
image 105

What are the most mind-blowing tricks used during any war?

When you can’t destroy a target by dropping bombs vertically, you can drop them horizontally. That’s what the 617 Royal Air Force Squadron did in May 1943.

The squadron carried out Operation Chastise, designed to destroy German dams and hydroelectric power stations. Reconnaissance and simulated bombing runs revealed that bombs dropped vertically on top of dams were not effective. So instead, the RAF used an experimental bouncing bomb, designed by Sir Barnes Wallis, that was dropped at low altitude onto the surface of the reservoir and skipped along the water horizontally until it hit the face of the dam.

The strategy proved effective. “The Möhne and Edersee Dams were breached…Two hydroelectric power stations were destroyed and several more were damaged. Factories and mines were also either damaged or destroyed.”

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image 121

Lancaster bomber dropping bouncing bomb during the Operation Chastise raids on Germany’s Ruhr Valley.

The operation was later the subject of the movie Dambusters, released in 1955.

West will choke on Putin’s terms for Ukraine

Discussion on the Ukraine surrender terms.

Who was the most delusional person you’ve ever met? Why were they so delusional?

I remember seeing a girl, her parents were millionaires due to a massive inheritance.

She would try and talk about her “Working class background” how the struggle was real.

One day she was telling me how her parents only bought her a brand new mini when she passed her test and how that went to show how much her family had struggled. One of her school friends got a brand new Range Rover.

I listened to that thinking “My Mum couldn’t have afforded a driving lesson let alone a car”

Have you ever felt disgusted by the actions of a family member?

My sister’s daughter and her husband were about to lose their house in Texas because neither of them had jobs, they had one very young daughter and were expecting another baby. My 80 year old mother couldn’t stand to watch this happen. So, she took out an equity loan on her house and lent them $100,000. They were supposed to make the equity payments for my mom, and at first they did and were supposed to pay the whole loan back when they sold their house.

A few months later, they sold their house but told my mother they needed her money as a down payment on their new house in california. So, they kept the money, and continued making the monthly payments until they had a big fight and split up. Suddenly, no one wanted to make the payments on my mother’s equity loan so my mother had to. If she couldn’t keep up on them, she would have lost her house.

She is now 85 years old, completely disabled, living on a tiny pension, and trying to pay off this loan. Since my niece split with her husband, they did not make payments on their house either. So, it went into foreclosure, and Mom cannot even put a lien on it to get her money back.

Needless to say, I am truly disgusted by my niece’s behavior as well as her husband’s. I have now sent my mother money; my sister has sent her money, and another one of my nieces has sent money. The only people in the family who do not seem to feel terrible about this are the two people who should.

How did one small decision change your life?

When i decided not to break up with my boyfriend at that moment.

I had just joined post graduation course and found this guy who was extremely caring about me. Within a month, he proposed me. I was confused however i said yes.

We use to talk, study and laugh together. However even after six months, i was not sure about our relationship.

AND Here comes the blow. He was back to his hometown. He was ill since a week. Meanwhile, i had a introspection round with my roommates. I found i was still unsure about our relationship. So i decided, on the next call, i will tell him that this is not the right time to fall in love etc., we should be friends only.

He called me around 8 PM. I was full prepared to say him a No. As soon as i picked the phone, he was crying on the other side. He was suffering from a fatal disease, Meningitis. I could not gather courage to leave him at this crucial moment. I just said, “I am with you today and always. No matter what happens.”

He was not in position to join college. His parents was insisting him to leave the college and repeat next time. He refused and joined the college next month. He had not recovered fully. In fact, he lost his hearing power around 40%. When he came back, he told me – how my words motivated him to join the college again. I took care of him. I used to call him reminding his medicines, diets etc. Meanwhile, i actually fell for him and then never told about that breakup thought.

Today, i am happily married with him.

P.S. I do not want my husband to know about my breakup thought even today. He is on quora. So i am writing anonymously.

What did you notice during an interview that made you not want the job?

I visited a radio station for an interview, at the station manager’s request. At the time I was somewhat “known” as a pleasing radio “personality” and therefore many stations wanted to talk to me.

Part of the interview process includes a station tour where the owner or manager shows off their office, production facilities, etc.

But at this particular station, I noticed all the shelved albums (well over a thousand) were locked in place by a steel bar which prevented their removal from the shelf, unless the bar was unlocked.

But who the Hell would steal the records? During business hours, when the station was open, advertisers or promoters might come in, but they were always accompanied by station staff, so visitors couldn’t steal an album (or even a 45). So, when the doors were locked after 5 PM, who did that leave as a potential thief?

Answer: the DJ who was on air, and the news guy or gal. Sometimes, the sales manager might come in.

So, the owner of the station was paranoid about theft from his or her own people! I had worked at a number of stations, and had never seen a lockdown of the music library. It had to mean that employees and top management were not happy with each other, and I was NOT going to work in that kind of environment.

Thus, I stopped in my tracks and said, “Thanks for the tour, but I don’t think this will work for me.” And I was out the door before anyone could say, “Huh?”

What’s the pettiest thing you’ve done to get back at a nuisance neighbor?

Years ago, I lived in an apartment in a two-family building. Upstairs and downstairs.

The landlord had rented the downstairs to a woman and her three teenage kids. They were obnoxious, had fights constantly, played music so loud it literally shook the walls, and despite multiple complaints by other neighbors to the landlord and the police (because yes it was that bad), nothing was done.

While technically, landlords are supposed to do snow clearing after a snow fall, getting some landlords to do so in a timely manner is more effort than digging out the snow yourself. This was one such landlord.

That winter we had a bad snow storm, a few feet of snow.

The downstairs neighbor knocked on my door to ask when I, the older woman with no kids, would be shoveling out the apartments and driveway, all of it, by myself.

I told her I wouldn’t, but we could split the cost to have someone come over and do it since the landlord was extra full of excuses as to why it would take days to get to the property and do so.

She laughed and said she wasn’t paying. She then told me I was welcome to hire her 3 kids to dig out the entire property. Her kids were a big part of the problem as to why the cops were coming over constantly, and so no. I’d previously had problems with her children opening my mail and putting it back in my mail box or opening deliveries of mine. There was no way I’d pay them.

Oh hell no, first you expect someone older than you to do the work for free, then expect that I will pay your kids, who are apparently perfectly able to do so, to dig YOU out? Fuck that.

A friend’s husband was offering to dig people out for a reasonable rate. I contacted him and hired him. When he got there, I explained the neighbor issue and what I wanted and was willing to pay for. He was only to clear out MY half of the driveway/garage/sidewalk. Her sides were still untouched, because no one(Me) would pay her kids to do it.

He went the extra mile, splitting the snow between the yard, and her side, of everything. AKA her side ended up with more snow that needed to be cleared.

This level of petty

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image 117

Picture from Google.

She complained to the landlord that:

1. I refused to shovel her side of the property for her and her family (I was not obligated to do ANY property maintenance at all)

2. I had refused to hire her kids to do it

3. I had hired someone and refused to pay him to clear her side.

Now this was a kinda shitty landlord, but still… I was amused that the landlord contacted me about it and agreed to reduce my rent the amount I paid to have MY side cleared, as well as tell me about the downstairs neighbor’s complaints about me.

Until I moved out, whenever there was snowfall, you would see a similar clearing pattern on the property. SO much so the other neighbors joked about it, and refused to hire her kids to clear their properties as well.

EDIT: Apparently there are a large number of people who feel the need to comment about how she could just use my side of the stairs as if I lack a functioning brain. Seriously, the level of condescending ‘splaining in the comments is a sad statement on so many here. Thanks all you Captain Obvious’.

Of course she could, as could the postal worker who had to use them to deliver mail(Something not one of those commenting about her using the stairs seemed to consider).

Her being able to use them or not wasn’t the point. So many of you making the same comment as if the more of you who say it, the more I will regret it, or as if I didn’t realize that years ago when I did it is mind-boggling.

For those clueless ones that feel the need to comment the obvious, you all missed the obvious point that it wasn’t about her use of the stairs, but the refusal to clear her side on her command.

What’s something your husband did to you that you will never forget?

My partner (not my husband). My mother had been really sick from cancer for 18 months, we were told that she was unlikely to make it past the weekend. With that being said I was completely distraught… my partner of 9 years said pack your stuff and leave first thing in the morning (400km drive). He woke me up at 430 am, had already packed the car and fueled it up for me. Had a travel mug of coffee ready and said call me when you get there. I left 5am Friday morning.

mum passed 8am Saturday morning (the next day). I called my partner and told him, he said I’ll move heaven and hell to get there as soon as I can. I said, don’t worry, there is nothing you can do, just be here in time for mums funeral (the upcoming Friday).

in the mean time, it was my birthday 4 days after mum had passed. My family tried to make it as special as it could be. But, it was quite a somber occasion. At 8pm, there were headlights at the top of the drive way (rural property). I know the sound of his car. I’m like it’s *partners name.

he had worked 12 hour shift (construction) then drove 400km to be with me in my darkest time to help me feel better on my birthday. In the days after mums passing I had not been able to sleep, or cry or anything but just barely function. I slept solidly that night.

I know most would say that or like to think their spouse would do the same. But, that level of love and support got me through my darkest days. Love this man so very much.

The USA is so filthy rich to fund $100+B to Ukraine and $14B to Israel to support their wars but they can’t agree in Congress to avert a government shutdown this Friday, lifeline extended since 30 Sep. Where is the America First mindset?

Unfortunately, this is the point. The U.S. is not filty rich but filty poor.

All those money for Ukraine and Israel we got by using the printing press. We’re now $33 trillion in debt.

We can’t pay for basic utilities to keep our house in order but we believe we’re still able to live the high life of showing off to the rest of the world how powerful we are.

Strange things caught on camera

How did Genghis Khan treat his soldiers?

Genghis Khan, the legendary Mongol conqueror, had a unique approach when it came to treating his soldiers. Known for his strategic brilliance and military prowess, Khan understood the importance of a strong and loyal army in his quest to build the largest empire in history. So how did he treat his soldiers?

First and foremost, Genghis Khan believed in meritocracy. He valued skill, loyalty, and bravery above all else. Regardless of their background or social status, anyone who demonstrated these qualities had the opportunity to rise through the ranks of his army. This approach fostered a sense of unity and purpose among his soldiers, as they knew that their achievements would be rewarded.

Khan was also an astute observer of human nature. He recognized that soldiers needed to be motivated and inspired to fight with unwavering dedication. To achieve this, he led by example. Genghis Khan was renowned for his courage on the battlefield, often placing himself at the forefront of his troops during crucial engagements. This not only boosted morale but also instilled a sense of camaraderie and trust among his soldiers.

In addition to leading from the front, Khan took great care of his troops’ physical well-being. He ensured that his soldiers were adequately fed, equipped, and cared for. The Mongol army was known for its skilled horsemen, and Khan prioritized the breeding and training of horses to provide his soldiers with superior mounts. This gave them a significant advantage in maneuverability and speed during battles.

Furthermore, Genghis Khan implemented a system of rewards and recognition for valorous acts. Soldiers who displayed exceptional bravery or achieved notable successes on the battlefield were given honors, titles, and even land. This not only motivated his soldiers to excel but also created a sense of pride and camaraderie within the ranks.

However, Khan was also a strict disciplinarian. He demanded discipline and obedience from his soldiers, as he believed that a well-disciplined army was crucial for maintaining order and achieving victory. Disobedience or betrayal was met with severe consequences, ensuring that his troops remained loyal and committed to the cause.

Woman EXPOSES The INEVITABLE Problem With Dating Modern Women | TRAINED/GROOMED To Be Masculine

What is the most ridiculous way you have seen someone make a lot of money?

I was in talks to design a business plan for one of those “Become a Millionaire” guys – aka a “Life Coach”.

As we moved along in talks I immediately got the heeby jeebies from the guy.

He was in his late 50’s and only seemed to brag about things he did in high school and his early 20’s. When I would ask about subsequent years, just to understand his career narrative, he would get thin on details and then squirm and change the subject.

So then I watched a few of his media interviews where his go-to story was about this incredible and vivid vision that came upon him when he was a child. A vision that he would someday become rich.

To his credit, it indeed came true. He was a wealthy man.

But it became true because he inherited his dad’s company when his dad passed away unexpectedly. He then immediately sold the company and spent the next 30 years doing a whole lot of nothing.

So now he is one of those people going around telling everyone he knows “that ONE special secret to getting rich”. He released his first book on becoming wealthy, which a bunch of unfortunate suckers bought.

And, no, I won’t tell you the title because he will sue the hell out of me.

But I’ll give you the cliff notes version, “Get rich by having a rich dad.”

Unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there that are like him.

Preying on people’s hopes and dreams in search of a dollar.

Can the United States build a new carrier group every five years for the next fifty years?

The American industrial system does not have such production capacity.

  • American shipyards do not have such production capacity: There is only a dry dock suitable for manufacturing aircraft carriers, and aircraft carriers waiting for repair are still queuing;
  • The steel mills in the United States do not have such production capacity: The last scandal involving the use of low-quality steel made in Kobe, Japan, by US nuclear submarines has not yet passed. This batch of nuclear submarines with quality issues cannot dive at all, and diving into deep water will explode due to increased pressure. American warships are even unable to withstand the impact of fishing vessels, which fully proves the quality issues of the steel used in their shipbuilding.
  • There are not enough skilled workers in the United States

20 And Back – The Super Soldiers Defending the Kuiper Belt

Another fun video.

Is it a crime to say in China, “Xi Jinping is destroying China. He must be kicked out! He is a dictator!”? In the West, saying such things about one’s president is perfectly normal.

Joe Biden is taking the World to the brink of World War III

What can the American people do about it?

SQUAT

Until 19/1/2025 at least, there is nothing any American citizen can do about it except watch the World plunge into war under the watch of a senile idiot who needs Diapers

So what is the use of saying

Biden is destroying USA and he must be kicked out

It’s just empty gas isn’t it. It’s just 10 words at the end of the day. Biden laughs and keeps doing whatever he likes for four years, unchecked

Same with every Democracy in the Planet

At the end of the day – WHAT IS THE END RESULT OF ABUSING OR CRITICISING THE LEADER?

Nothing

Either the Media suppresses it or people shrug and brazenly keep doing what they are doing

Take India

We have had Protests on every decision that has ruined the country

Demonetization, CAA, NCR etc

They matter Squat

Once in, Modi is in power for minimum 5 years and he can’t be shaken by the common man

France?

Same story

All those Protests and Screams and Shrieks about Pension reforms and Macron did exactly what he wanted

He is in charge till 2027

Same with South Korea , exports plunge to historic lows and people scream and protest but does it matter? Nopes

Taiwan?

Japan?

Germany?

So many protests begging to end the war and Germany openly and brazenly calls for Escalation

So what is the use of this damn free speech? You can say the words but they are worthless in every possible way


Now China

Yes

Maybe in China, saying these 10 words could be counter productive

However the people’s voice in China is heard much better than in any democracy

  • Lockdowns were ended post protests
  • Rural Banking Reforms were initiated after Protests
  • Crackdowns on Real Estate Financing was initiated after Protests
  • 1.03 Crore Jobs have been added due to vigorous Weibo Netizen criticism
  • Tagging Schoolkids Or regulating online gaming has been deferred due to Weibo online protests

Plus the Biggest Biggest Thing…

Recently on the XI Jingping app, they asked if Chinas History for 6–9 Classes be modified and whether Chapters on the Boxer Rebellion and the Opium Wars had to be reduced

The Question was asked of Students who had already passed out their 9th Grade and above

79% Students said NO.

DON’T CHANGE HISTORY

They didn’t.

In India, US, and all those wonderful democracies – they don’t ask the kids do they????


So on one hand you have Western Democracies and their lapdogs where you can say what ever you want but can do zilch

Or China where your criticism must be tempered but as citizens you can achieve much greater control on Governance

The Chinese say WE LIKE OUR MODEL BETTER

I kinda agree with them

So you keep your Senile Alzheimer’s Ridden President and your ‘Freedom and Democracy’ and let the Chinese have their own version

Perceptions on making money

What would you consider a legitimate Italian cuisine that the US actually gets right?

I think you might want to edit the question to ask which item from Italian cuisine does the US actually get right.

Italian American cuisine is a cuisine in its own right. Millions of Italians immigrated to America and they adapted their traditional dishes to use American ingredients. Some of the ingredients they used at home were unavailable or too expensive in America, so changes were made. Successive generations didn’t know there was a difference between what they were eating and what was being cooked in the old country. They just accepted the food their families prepared as being Italian cuisine, which at heart, it is.

There’s a lot of water between America’s East Coast, the epicenter of Italian American cuisine, and the old boot herself. It’s that distance that led the creation of Italian American classics. If I had to point at one item the made the leap unmolested though, I’d name Sfogliatelle.

Sfogliatelle are a flaky pastry that originated in Campania. They’re made by rolling out dough, brushing it with lard or oil, rolling it up, cutting it into portions, shaping the pastry, filling it and baking. Sfogliatelle can be baked unfilled or filled with sweetened ricotta, almond paste or candied citrus zest. They’re simple to make and don’t call for any exotic ingredients. It’s the thin flakey layers that make sfogliatelle unique.

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image 116

Ricotta filled:

image 115
image 115

If you’ve never tried these pastries, seek them out. They’re amazing and their recipe has not been molested by time or distance.

The 80/20 rule

Why is a partner at a Chinese semiconductor investment fund calling the U.S. ban on certain chip exports to China “great news”?

It’s simple

Today YMTC makes products that are maybe 75% as good as NVDIA

Other Chinese Entities make products that are around 60% of the quality of products of entities like Samsung & SK Hynix

Spending $ 100 on NVDIA chips means $ 88 goes to US or Taiwan or other such companies

Spending $ 100 on YMTC chips means $ 61 comes to Mainland China

That’s 5 times more money than otherwise

And these Companies, they won’t use this extra revenue and put in a Swiss Bank account somewhere

They will use this money to invest into more researchers, more hours and match the same quality of the superior western brands

Today there is a vast stockpile in China to handle maybe 30 months of inventory

That gives a transition gap of approximately 2 1/2 years or until 2027 January

This is a big boost to the Chinese local entities because you can’t rely on Government largesse for ever

What robbed you of your childhood, and how?

Life robbed me of my childhood. My parents had to quit school after grade 9 to help support their families. They vowed that my brother and I would not be barred from finishing school and going to University.

But we were poor, so they had no way to pay for it. So they propped me early. I knew by grade six that if I wanted to go to university, I would have to pay for it myself.

So in grade 8, I started mowing lawns and shoveling snow.

In grade 9 I got a part time job and worked 20 hours a week, in grade 10 ,30 hours, and grades 11 and 12 it was 40 hours. I graduated first in my class. I lived in a 10×14 ft room, with a roommate and the bathroom, was down the hall. I worked in the dorm cafeteria. When summer came I got a camp job, where I worked 360–380 hours a month, and they also paid room and board.

This was the way I graduated from university debt free.

So, as soon as I turned 13, I stopped having a childhood, and had an adulthood instead. So much for life being easy for baby boomers.

I’d do it all over again in a heart beat. Its what it took to break the cycle of poverty.

What is your most embarrassing restaurant experience?

I was bar tending during a lunch shift at a horseshoe shaped bar in the middle of a restaurant.

The bartender who closed the bar the previous night did not shut off the hose inside the bar.

Unbeknown to me, the nozzle had fallen off the hook and was resting right under the service bar, where I was making drinks.

About 30 minutes into the lunch rush I had a full bar and a miles worth of service bar drinks to make.

All I remember is hearing yelling and commotion coming from my right, yet continue slave away as I had a million and one things to do.

Finally, hearing a “WHAT THE F*#K IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” towards my direction I turned to see the hose dousing half the restaurant in water.

I had been stepping on the nozzle for at least 30-45 seconds.

The entire left side of the restaurant, it’s customers, the food, everything was drenched in water.

Everyone who had food, had it ruined, men in business suits… soaked.

Water was literally dripping off the ceiling.

Looking back it was kind of awesome to see around 100 people all giving you the rageface all at the same time.

What is something that people were better at 100 years ago?

Because I am 71, I knew people who were in their prime of life a hundred years ago (1918) and there were definitely things that they did easily and routinely that are rarely done today:

  • Baking bread and caramel rolls. My grandmother learned it from her mother but did not pass it on to her daughters, probably because sliced store bread had essentially taken over.
  • Writing cursive and writing letters. I have saved some of my grandfather’s letters. For a person with an eighth grade education, he wrote simply but beautifully.
  • Sewing and mending. My grandmother was not wealthy, but she was capable of producing wonderful pajamas for all of her grandchildren on her trusty Singer. My generation has lost the ability to create heirlooms.
  • Gardening and canning the things they grew. In an era when you were not going to see fresh fruit or vegetables in stores after growing season, people developed great preservation skills. Things like pickles, berries, tomatoes were canned as were peaches and plums when in season. I do not remember kale or zucchini, however, and that was also a blessing.
  • Memory work. I grew up with great uncles and aunts (all born about 1900) who had memorized massive amounts of poetry and famous speeches as well as scripture. Rote learning was fairly normal in their education, so they did group memorization. We loved to hear their recitations.

I miss those folks. They just slipped away one at a time between the seventies and today.

What was the bravest thing you ever did in a job interview?

This wasn’t me, this was my wife. She is a lawyer and was interviewing for a job managing the sale of properties. She was interviewing at a firm that specialised in really expensive and tricky sales and when she turned up to the interview she was told by the recruiter that the partners had told the last two people who were interviewed to leave midway through so they were quite abrupt!

She went to the interview, which went quite well, and they asked her to prepare an answer to a legal sale question. When she looked at it, she knew she had no hope: it was madly complicated and about a type of property sale that is known to be horrendous to do. She thought about trying to brazen it off and decided to be honest and say she had no idea.

It turned out the partners knew from looking at her CV she would have no idea about how to do it; it was something so complex the partner himself had had to do it himself. What they were trying to do was see how she reacted to something she didn’t know. The last two people interviewed had tried to make something up and so failed the test.

They offered her the job on the spot!

Have you, while repairing a computer, ever found anything that made your jaw drop?

I was nowhere qualified as a computer tech but one time a friend of mine brought over a a desktop machine and keyboard and asked me to see if I could get it running as it wouldn’t boot up. Every time you’d plug in the power cord to the wall socket a strange odor would start permiating from the cover. I figured something was wrong with the power supply, which if push came to shove I could’ve probably went to an electronics supply store and bought another one and installed it. I was adept at soldering and replacing some common components at the time, which is why my friend thought that I could fix it.

Anyhoo, I removed the screws holding the cover to the unit, lifted the cover off and got the most absolute shock of my life!! Hundreds of live cockroaches start running out all over everywhere not to mention many more that were obviously dead inside that cover!

I came unglued along with a major panic attack! I’d never, ever had to deal with roaches after I became an adult. I despised them because while growing up my family and I always had a major problem with roaches and they were always into everything and would drop from the ceiling when you went into a room after turning on lights, etc etc etc.

I spent 2 hours stomping on and smashing roaches trying to prevent them from getting into places in my apartment where I couldn’t reach and in the long run wasn’t successful. Ended up moving out to get away from them making sure in the process that I didn’t inadvertently take any with me.

I was not happy with my friend. It caused a major, almost homicidal argument with him and it would be several years before we spoke again. The creepiness and ick factor of watching those roaches pile out of that machine that day still haunts me to this day.

Huawei refused to disclose its foundry information, sending the Biden team into madness.

Mama! Huawei is not giving me his data!

What is the saddest truth about smart people?

Let’s talk about smart children. Particularly smart children in the United States. Particularly those in grades K-8 at a public school.

A lot of you reading this are, yourself, a product of the American public school system. Think back to your K-8 years. Do you remember people whose only job was to deal with the students with behavior problems? Were there “special education” teachers who had special classrooms with aides and all kinds of equipment for just a handful of students? Do you remember being bored a lot in school, because your teacher didn’t have the time to challenge you, because they were so busy re-teaching things to the students who didn’t get it the first time? Do you remember a handful of students who seemed to set the pace for the whole class, and that pace was much, much too slow for you? Do you remember a handful of students whose attitudes and behavior set the tone for the whole class? And was that a negative tone that left your teacher spending most of their time dealing with that small handful of students?

That was my experience, at least. In grades 4–8, I was one of about 20 students in a special gifted program in my school. But that gifted “program” was just two teachers who were given a spare classroom in five schools in the district, and they went to a different school every day of the week, and pulled out the gifted students from their classes for an hour, to play logic games with them.

One hour per week. That’s what we got.

Meanwhile, the students on the other end of the spectrum had resources thrown at them, including permanent classrooms with full-time teachers for students whose only “special need” was that they didn’t give a damn about learning.

I remember one incident in particular, when I realized just how much time my teachers wasted trying to get one particular student under control. His name was Anthony. One day, in seventh grade, we were learning about feudal Japan by playing a game where we were all on teams, given items to trade, and could use money we made to hire soldiers, and then there was a huge map of Japan on the wall, separated into regions, with the number of regions under each team’s control represented by different colored push pins.

My team started in Osaka. To this day, I know exactly where Osaka is because of this game back in 1992. I remember that we were the blue team, our main thing to trade was fish, and we began with five pushpin armies.

Also Judith was in my group, which made it even that much more enjoyable for me. She was forced to interact with me for a few minutes each day because of this.

It was a computer-less strategy game. I loved it. The game was supposed to last for a few weeks.

It lasted two days. On the third day, Anthony vandalized the giant game board, and some of his friends laughed. And that was it. The teacher was tired of putting in so much effort for something that students like Anthony just kept ruining. We did the rest of the unit, and every unit afterwards for the rest of the year, through textbook reading and worksheets.

But, as I thought about it, I realized that Anthony had been that way since he was first in my class in second grade. He was always out of control. He always set the pace and the tone for the class. In middle school, he got kicked out of class a lot, which just wasted a lot of time because he rarely went willingly and they had to call and wait for security. But he was always back in the class the next day. He just needed to “chill out.”

That was actually the name of the kick-out room for students like him: the “chill out room.”

I just Googled him and found a story that he was sentenced to six years in prison in 2004 for “domestic battery, drug possession, and forgery.”

Yep. All of that extra time, effort, and money the public school spent on him… how’d that work out?

That would be fine, if the public schools spent the same amount of time, effort, and money on the upper end of the spectrum.

My point is this: What’s the saddest truth about smart people? Public schools just aren’t equipped to deal with your special needs, because they’re too busy dealing with the special needs of students on the other end of the spectrum. The very people who have the most potential to give the most back to society are the same ones who school prioritizes the least.

Imagine a school system where every dollar spent on students on the lower end of the special needs spectrum had to be matched by a dollar for students on the higher end of the spectrum.

Imagine if, just like schools have resources in place for when the teachers need to kick out the Anthonys of the world, those same schools had resources for teachers to send out the students who were too smart for that day’s lesson.

Timmy, you can read this and learn it on your own in five minutes, but I’m going to be teaching it to the rest of the class for the next hour. You can go to the gifted resource room and work with the teacher there on more advanced stuff.”

Imagine if, just as schools pay extra attention to students with special needs due to federal laws and fears of getting sued, schools did the same for students on the high end of the spectrum. Imagine if parents could threaten a lawsuit because the school wasn’t meeting the needs of their child… the legally-mandated requirement that the school challenge them on their academic level and not let their classmates hold them back.

Imagine how high your hot air balloon could be now, if not for the classroom sandbags that weighed you down when you were in school.

Instead of “No Child Left Behind,” it should be “No Child Forced To Wait.”

Gavin Newsom goes to China, one-ups Biden and meets Xi Jinping

As a Californian, I can tell you that not only is Newsom not acceptable to the rest of America, California is not acceptable to the rest of America”.

How likely is China going to sell $810 billion worth of U.S. securities? What will happen in the global credit markets if China starts to dump U.S. dollars?

It is likely that China will sell virtually all of its remaining U.S. Treasuries.

It is useful to look at Russia’s experience in this regard. Russia sold virtually all of its Treasuries in 2018, fairly quickly. At that time, Russia encouraged the world to dump U.S. Treasury bonds. Thus, it is possible for a country to officially not hold Treasuries.

After 2018, Russia continued to hold some foreign currency reserves in U S. dollars. When the Ukraine War started in 2022, the United States and its allies froze hundreds of billions of dollars held by Russia.

As a result, the world has been forced to look elsewhere to store its savings. Both China and Russia are storing much of their wealth in physical gold. Other countries are doing the same. The planet is also increasingly doing business in currencies other than the dollar.

As a result of these trends, China will increasingly no longer need U.S. Treasuries to do business. In October 2023, China bought its first oil for Chinese Yuan. If this continues, China will get its oil for free, by printing Yuan. America will be forced to trade hard goods for oil in the future.

America’s leaders were very short-sighted to weaponize the dollar. A global reserve currency requires trust. The United States had a money-making machine, and voluntarily gave it up.

FLASH TRAFFIC ADDED – TURKISH NAVY DEPLOYING 100 SHIPS AGAINST ISRAEL –~FIFTY (50) U.S. Military Transport Planes in 24 Hours to Middle East

World Hal Turner

FLASH TRAFFIC ADDED – SEE 12:27 PM EDT UPDATE BELOW ——   From Friday-into-Saturday, the United States sent no fewer than fifty (50) military transport planes loaded with troops to the Middle East.  In addition, the list below shows “unprecedented” naval deployments.  Today, Iran said they WILL NOT abide U.S. warnings to stay out of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

We begin with Naval Deployments into the Middle East showing 11 Countries in Support of Israel:

All of the above, along with Submarines and other support ships show an utterly massive naval deployment.  I am told this present deployment is larger than the ones done prior to the US war(s) against Saddam Hussein in Iraq in 1991 and again later.

In addition to all the above vessels, another Aircraft Carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth II, transited the Strait of Gibraltar yesterday morning around 11:00 AM, enroute to the eastern Mediterranean:

In addition to THAT additional aircraft carrier, the Navy of Italy is also now deploying vessels:

AIR

In the 24 hours period from Friday into Saturday, the United States flew 49+ military transport aircraft from the US to the Middle East, carrying TROOPS!

https://halturnerradioshow.com/images/2023/10/28/US-Military-transport-Flights-Fri-into-Sat.jpg

On top of those troop transport flights, a Significant number of C-17A Globemaster lll and C-5M Super Galaxy Transport Aircraft from the U.S. Air Force’s Air Mobility Command have been arriving in the Middle East.

The flight info above DOES NOT even cover the regular commercial airline flights the US has chartered to exclusively move troops!

Yesterday, Saturday 28 October 2023, Germany put 1,000 soldiers on alert for deployment to the Middle East in case of emergency The German Army keeps 1,000 troops on alert for possible deployment to the Middle East in case of emergency, given the prevailing tension in the region as a result of the war between Hamas and Israel.

This flight from Fort Sill, OK has my attention at the moment. Fort Sill is home to a THAAD battery and this flight appears to be headed overseas. There are no helpful ACARS for this flight, but this is possibly a THAAD battery flight enroute to Saudi Arabia:

https://halturnerradioshow.com/images/2023/10/28/THAAD-flight-to-Saudi-Arabia.jpg

At about 1:47 AM eastern US Time Sunday, which was about 11:00 AM in Tehran, Iran, the President of Iran said Tehran will not follow US warnings against interfering in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. According to the Press service of the President of Iran: “Israel has crossed red lines, forcing everyone to take action.”   

The President made it a point to also say “the presence of U.S warships in the region will make no difference to Tehran’s decision.”

Hal Turner Analysis

Based solely upon the movement of ships, troops, and planes, it is obvious to me the United States is going to war.   A big war.

Trouble is the federal government under the Biden Regime has intentionally left the US southern border with Mexico, virtually open.  Literally millions of illegal aliens have been entering the country via Mexico since Biden took office.

It is my opinion that many – but not all – of these illegal aliens are a “5th Column” sent here by adversaries to be “sleeper cells.”   I believe that when war erupts in the Middle East, that WE HERE IN THE USA will also be attacked by these sleeper cells.

YOU must be ready with emergency food, water, medicine, a generator to make electric in case the grid is taken down.  Have CASH MONEY in your possession incase cyber attacks take out the financial networks, making credit, debit, and SNAP/EBT useless.  After all, almost no one takes checks anymore.  So folks with cash will eat.  Those without cash will go hungry.

The utterly massive movement of troops and weapons indicates to me that hostilities are imminent.  Which could — and I emphasize “could” (not necessarily “will”) — trigger sleeper cell attacks here in America.

If you wait until trouble starts, then YOU and every other person who failed to plan, will all be rushing to stores at the same time trying to get food and supplies.   In short order, store shelves will be empty and those of you who took no action, will find yourself standing in an empty store.

Don’t be like “the masses who are asses” that wait until the last minute to get supplies.  Do it right now.  Today.

And gas-up your cars, trucks, and spare gas cans for your generator.

Lastly, have COMMUNICATIONS GEAR – a CB or a HAM (Shortwave) radio — so if things go wild weasel, and communications like phone, fax, email, cellular/Internet all go down, at least YOU will be able to communicate locally (CB) and hear international news on shortwave (HAM).

Of course, some of you will say that this story and its advice is sort of like “Chicken Little, the sky is falling.”  To those who would scoff I merely point out that, this morning, a U.S. E-6 Nuclear Command Post is now flying over the US East Coast:

The E-6B Mercury is a communications relay and strategic airborne command post aircraft. It provides survivable, reliable, and endurable airborne Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) for the president, secretary of defense and U.S. Strategic Command.

So it isn’t just ME telling you to take steps to prepare, it’s the US Military, too.  Take the hint!

(PERSONAL: Sorry my coverage today begins at this late hour of 11:00 AM EDT.  I slept-in this morning.  Didn’t wake up until 9:25 AM.   I was literally exhausted.)

********** FLASH ***********

UPDATE 12:27 PM EDT —

The Turkish Navy is, right now, transiting ONE-HUNDRED Naval Warships through the Bosporus Strait from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. 

 It is BELIEVED Turkey plans to engage Israel over its ongoing military action in Gaza.   War may break out between Turkey and Israel within Hours! ! ! ! 

What was a big mistake in WW2?

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This is the Lorenz cipher.

Unlike its better known relative, the Enigma machine which was infamously deciphered by code-breakers at Bletchley Park throughout the war, the Lorenz cipher posed a much greater challenge. Utilising 12 wheels to scramble up the message being sent as opposed to the 3 or 4 rotors found in the Enigma machine, the Lorenz cipher was incredibly secure. As a result, unlike the Enigma that was used by the German standard armed forces, the Lorenz cipher was used only by high command with messages coming from Hitler himself. As a result, to crack the Lorenz cipher (or Tunny as it was code named by the British) would have the potential to change the course of the war.

Not much headway had been made in breaking the Lorenz cipher through the war until a German operator made a catastrophic mistake on 30 August 1941. When a German receiving operator did not receive a message correctly, he asked the transmitter to resend the information and despite clear protocol against it, the two operators resent the message without changing their key settings (the settings that determine how the text is scrambled up). However since the message in question was 4000 characters long, the lazy German operator abbreviated several words, thus changing the length of the message. Since their key settings were both the same, the two messages had the same scrambling pattern of characters. Thus by comparing the locations where the message text changed, details of the way the rotors worked could be determined.

These two messages were intercepted by the British who soon realised the importance of what they had discovered. This task of cracking Tunny was given to W T (Bill) Tutte who began to find repetitions in the cipher which allowed him to reverse engineer the Lorenz machine’s logical structure in what would be later described as “one of the greatest intellectual feats of World War II”. In order to support the painstaking decryption of German messages, the British Colossus was built in 1943 by Tommy Flowers, the first ever modern computer.

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The Colossus Machine

The impact of the decryption of Tunny was enormous. It gave the British intimate details of Hitler’s most secret communications which was most notably vital in D Day where the Allies were able to deceive the Germans that they were going to attack at Calais as opposed to Normandy and at the Battle of Kursk in 1943, Germany’s last ditch attempt to reverse their fortunes on the Eastern Front and one of the largest battles in history. Involving 3 million men, without foreknowledge of German planning provided by the British, the Soviets would have been badly prepared defensively and could have lost this crucial battle and as a result, the war would’ve been prolonged. In fact, historians estimate that the breaking of the Lorenz cipher shortened the war by two years and thus saved millions of lives all due to the careless mistake of two lazy German operators.

However this pivotal event is not well known due to the Official Secrets Act keeping the nature of the code breakers working to break the Lorenz cipher secret until 1974 and some former staff even today still refuse to break their vow of secrecy, preferring to take their knowledge to the grave.

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W T (Bill) Tutte, the man responsible for cracking the Lorenz Cipher

Cajun Pot Roast

2023 11 09 14 23
2023 11 09 14 23

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (3 pound) beef sirloin or chuck roast
  • 2 large garlic cloves, cut into 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces
  • 3 cayenne chiles, or jalapeno chiles, cut into 1/4 to 1/2 inch pieces
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • 1 large onion, chopped
  • 1 bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 large garlic clove, minced
  • 1 (4 ounce) can whole or sliced mushrooms
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • Creole seasoning to taste

Instructions

  1. Cut 1/2 to 3/4 inch slits into beef. Stuff one piece of garlic and one piece of chile into each slit. Season the roast with salt and pepper.
  2. Heat a large nonstick pan over medium heat. Add beef and brown well on all sides.
  3. Add onion, bell pepper and minced garlic land sauté until tender.
  4. Add water to pan to cover the beef.
  5. Stir in the mushrooms and Worcestershire sauce and season with Creole seasoning.
  6. Simmer, covered, for 3 to 4 hours or until tender, adding more water if needed to keep liquid level halfway up the beef.

Notes

You may stir 1 tablespoon flour mixed with 1 cup cold water into liquid near end of cooking for a thicker gravy.

Who did you experience that is so cheap they are disgusting?

I broke off a 10 year off and on relationship over a single piece of gum.

He and I weren’t on great terms for a long while. It was mostly out of his cheapness. He wouldn’t take me out to eat-we ate at his place. That wouldn’t have been bad except that he bought cheap items and used foods that had expired. I told him I wasn’t eating his cooking anymore, thank you. We watched TV but only shows he liked-he didn’t want to waste his time on my shows. I could watch them at my place.

Things were coming to a head and I knew the next fight we had would be the last. It was November when he called me and asked me to come over and fix his computer. I wasn’t in the best of moods-I finally had a free afternoon with the kids out with their father and I had things to do. Ok, I decided I would go over and see if I could do something to help. I got there and he already told me I had just an hour to get things right. Perfect start-no thanks for coming over, great to see you, etc.

He offered me a piece of gum. I haven’t chewed gum in years because it sticks to my dental work, and he knew it. Why was he offering me gum-was my breath stinky? After I thought about it for a moment, I took a piece. I didn’t even get it open when he started to yell at me-why is everything in your life a big decision? Don’t waste my gum-either take it or don’t! I paid money for that!

I immediately put the gum back on the table. He flips out again-you touched it not you don’t want it! What’s the matter with you? With me? I don’t chew gum, not in years! You knew that! I thought you were hinting my breath stunk so I took a piece of gum. Now you don’t want me to take the gum! Why don’t you make up YOUR mind?

He immediately moved my tech bag away from his computer and began to work on his computer. Don’t you want me to do that? No. You asked me to cone down here to help you, now you don’t want me to help you? Silence. Are we really going to have a fight about a piece of gum after I wasted my time and gas to come here? Silence.

I sat on the couch for a few minutes. I could have just stormed out the door. I wanted to compose myself and make it clear what would happen. I told him that I have spent 10 years doing for him, taking care of him when he was sick, lent him things like my cell phone and my car, then paid the repairs when he broke them and he never paid me back. I have put up with all this, and if we didn’t resolve what was really going on, I was leaving and not coming back. All I got was silence. Are we really going to break up over a damned piece of gum? Silence.

I picked up my things and I left. I never went back. I blocked his number from my cell phone. I had a feeling I knew what happened because he did it to me before. He used to get moody around Thanksgiving time and lots of times we broke up so he could avoid my birthday in December and Christmas/Chanukah/Valentines Day. He used to call around March to renew our friendship but his birthday was in April and he really wanted a present. I just had enough of his childishness, his cheapness and his abusive control. It was just one fight too many and I was done.

He did email me the following April-after I sent nothing for his birthday. I emailed him back that I told him that after our last fight, I was done and I wanted nothing more to do with him. He replied that he forgot what we fought about, and I told him that it was over a piece of gum. Then I blocked his email.

He called from another phone the following September, demanding I stop being stupid and get back together. What a lovely invitation, no woman can resist that, I answered. Then he threatened me. I told him to come over and try to f*** me up. I had an old lead pipe my father had and it had his name on it. I told him I’ll invite my neighbors to watch me smear him all over the street. My temper broke and I told him about the horrible things he did to me over the years. He finally said “I guess you’re mad at me, huh?” I hung up and blocked his new number too.

He attempted to contact me a few times through his friends but I told them I would go to the police and file harassment charges. He finally moved out of New York City-he attempted to contact me from his mother’s home in Tennessee. I blocked that too. He’s been blocked in every social media site so I don’t have to deal with him.

He had 10 years to grow up and apologize. The words aren’t in his vocabulary. I know the piece of gum wasn’t the reason our relationship ended-it was years of my giving and him taking and never appreciating what he got. But that stupid piece of gum was the catalyst. To this day, when I see a pack of Wrigley’s gum, I still smirk with amused disgust.

What did you say at a job interview that automatically landed you the job?

“I don’t know”

I interviewed for a support engineering role, the interviewer asked me how a fluorescent light fitting worked. I explained what I knew about the ballast, starter and gas tube etc. He delved deeper and I drew a rudimentary circuit diagram. When he asked exactly how the starter worked I was stumped, so I said “I don’t know”.

He told me that he must’ve had 2 dozen other applicants attempt to convince him how it all worked, but being able to admit I didn’t know something landed me the job. I learnt how knowing one’s limitations is so important.

Resistance hits back against US bases in Syria, multiple casualties reported

Despite increased attacks on US occupation bases, Joe Biden has reportedly turned down more ‘aggressive bombing options’ in Syria out of fear that a wider conflict may erupt

NOV 13, 2023

(Photo credit: AFP via Getty Images)

Several missile and drone strikes targeted US occupation bases in Syria on 13 November in response to the latest round of US airstrikes on alleged Iranian targets in the country.

Fifteen missiles targeted the US base in the Conoco gas field, sources told Al-Mayadeen, adding that US helicopters began making flights ten minutes after the strike.

“The Conoco base was targeted with advanced Grad missiles, which led to the death of four US soldiers,” Al-Mayadeen’s correspondent reported.

Field sources told Al-Mayadeen that the attacks were carried out by the “Popular Resistance” in Syria.

In a second response to US airstrikes, three drones struck the Al-Shaddadi military base in Hasakah, northeastern Syria.

The US Green Village base at the Al-Omar oilfield northeastern Syria, was also hit with a drone. The Islamic Resistance in Iraq claimed responsibility for the attack.

The Islamic Resistance in Iraq is a coalition of Iraqi resistance factions formed last month in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance in Gaza.

The coalition was formed to confront US forces in Iraq and Syria as part of Operation Al-Aqsa Flood and in rejection of US support for Israel in the war, and has been targeting US bases on a regular basis.

Hours before Monday’s attacks, US warplanes carried out several airstrikes in eastern Syria.

Washington claimed the attacks targeted facilities used by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

According to Al-Mayadeen’s correspondent, the US airstrikes “targeted a house in the town of Al-Mayadeen, which led to the death of a citizen and the injury of another.”

US jets have struck Syria several times over the past month in retaliation to the unprecedented surge in resistance attacks against US military bases in Iraq and Syria. Washington has labeled the attacks as “self-defense.”

According to the New York Times (NYT), US President Joe Biden “has rejected more aggressive bombing options proposed by the Pentagon out of fear of provoking a wider conflict with Iran.”

The newspaper also cites Republicans in Congress as saying that Washington’s strikes on Syria “only invite more frequent and more dangerous attacks against US troops in the region.”

There have been at least 48 resistance attacks against US forces in Iraq and Syria since 17 October, the Pentagon said on Saturday.

“At least 56 U.S. service members had been injured. Roughly half of those suffered traumatic brain injuries, and two had to be flown to Landstuhl military hospital in Germany for treatment,” the NYT adds.

Who is the rudest celebrity you have met, and who would be the nicest?

There doesn’t seem to be many who are rude. My story is about a beautiful and kind woman.

Many years ago I was in O’Hara airport getting ready to fly home from Navy boot camp. As I waited, I saw what looked like a Hollywood photo shoot going on. I walked over with my nearly bald head and baggy Navy uniform and talked to an absolutely beautiful woman, dressed like an Elf. She was friendly and asked where I was from and what my home was like. We talked for about 10 minutes. As I needed to catch my plane, I thanked her for taking the time to speak with me. I asked her what her name was. It was Ann-Margaret. Surprise! I’ve had a soft spot for her since our meeting.

What shortcuts in life are never worth taking?

Suicide.

There have been a lot of memes lately, discussing this subject:

It’s viewed as a sort of work-around to all of life’s problems:

These’s memes are funny and all (sometimes), but they also have some truth.

A good portion of depressed people definitely view suicide as a way out and they genuinely think it’s the only way.

But it’s not.


Sunday, Nov 18 is my late-uncle’s birthday.

No one ever talks about him in my family. And of the few times he’s brought up, is always in relation to his suicide or mental illness.

He lived a pretty amazing life, but the memory of his suicide looms over the conversations around him.

It’s not like we never talk about him, or that suicide is strictly the only thing that we remember about him. There’s just no solace to the memory of his passing, suicide is something that is preventable, it didn’t have to be this way.

And, unfortunately, it’s the same with my idol, Chester Bennington.

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In every Linkin Park YouTube music video, all the comments are the same. They’re ALL about his depression or his death.

No one talks about his life, how he made it big after a period of being homeless. How Linkin Park immediately knew who their lead singer was after his audition; how Chester would always do screaming vocal warmups, which could be heard several changing rooms away, before each of his live performances.

No one talks about that anymore.

If I’d killed myself on year ago, all I’d be remembered as was “that quiet kid who killed himself.”


You have a lot to be remembered for.

Stan Lee, who passed away on Nov 12, 2018, is positively cherished by fans.

So much material was circulated recently about his life and work.

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image 119

There was a meme about how he drew the Peter Parker meets MJ comic strip based on the time he first saw his future wife. There were memes of his cameos in Marvel movies, memes of Infinity war, Spider-man memes….

It was awesome.

And nobody was particularly sad, rather they celebrated everything he did in his 95 year life on Earth.


You have a lot to live for.

And a lot to be remembered by.

And even if things don’t get better quickly.

Don’t tarnish that with suicide.

It’s not worth it.

You are worth it.

You are worth a good life and the world deserves your proud legacy.

What’s your impression about your experience in China? How about the Chinese?

During my very first visit to China, there were a couple of things that took me by surprise:

  • Massive malls absolutely everywhere
  • I’ve heard that Chinese food is so much better in China than what you get in other countries, but that’s is a massive understatement. There is so much diversity in food options, all of it is amazingly delicious and very reasonably priced. I could not get enough of it, and I can’t wait for my next visit so I can stuff my face with all that deliciousness again!
  • I didn’t expect to have that much trouble finding restaurants or shops that accept foreign bank cards. Some locations only allow Alipay. Also, apps like Didi are not available to foreigners as you need a Chinese number to sign up, and hailing a taxi is not always easy.
  • I saw very few tags or graffiti on buildings in big Chinese cities. Those are a major issue in pretty much every European city, as even historical buildings get smeared in tags, so this was a welcome surprise.
  • Excellent public transportation – so cheap and easy to use!
  • All the people I’ve met were absolutely lovely and extremely helpful. Also, there are so many older people in the parks, exercising or dancing, which is refreshing to see.
  • There is never any paper in bathrooms, so you have to carry a roll with you
  • The only thing that slightly threw me off during my very first visit was that people in China often take pictures of foreigners without asking. I’m very visibly a foreigner, so I always get quite a bit of attention when I’m travelling in Asia. I’m used to that, and I never decline a picture with some curious locals, as I find it a sweet experience. However, in China, while many approached and asked for a photo, there were many more who just tried to ‘’sneakily’’ take it, which made me feel a little bit uncomfortable at times.
  • As a tiny woman travelling alone I felt quite safe, even at night in less populated areas.

Children who have had to clean out your parents’ house after they passed, did you find anything that completely changed how you viewed them?

My wife and kids lived upstairs in my parent’s house. My Dad passed before my Mom. When she passed, as the only child, I had to sort out her bills, insurance, etc. My Mom was a school teacher for many years and received SS and a pension. At her time of retiring, she did not make as much as teachers do today. A few days after her funeral, I was sitting at her desk going through her checkbook to see what was paid and so forth. When I looked at the deposits, I started to see bill after bill after bill being paid, leaving her with very little left over. I am still saddened to this day, many years later, that I never knew the depth of how bad things really were. We could have contributed more to the household, but she hid most of this from us, trying to spare us any hardship. This is the single biggest regret I have in her passing, knowing I could have eased her burden, as she was the most loving mother one could ask for. She worked her whole life to teach children and raise me, who deserved so much more in her retirement. I am shedding tears as I write this, and hope that others can take more of an active role in their parents lives (when allowed) while they are still with us.

When did you think, “this can only be a fake”?

While employed as a pizza delivery rider, after the lifting of the COVID lock-down, our company decided to pull a fast one.

A memo from the head office was circulated among all restaurant staff at all branches. It basically said that the company was so concerned about our welfare in these trying times that they were willing to keep a percentage of our weekly salary for us as a form of savings. The memo also mentioned that if we agreed to this ‘Pizza Savings’ (my term, not theirs) that we will be getting 0% interest.

My delivery co-worker and I had a field day with that memo. We read it several times in disbelief and laughed. The owners could not be serious.

It was obvious they wanted to get a loan/invest in something. It was as if they told themselves instead of taking a 16% interest loan from the bank why not simply take it from their uneducated restaurant workers, all they needed was our signatures.

I went around some of the co-workers joking about it. Most of us laughed it off but two of them couldn’t understand what was so funny.

‘But we’re getting 0% interest!’ an older woman working the grill said.

She seemed to have the idea that this was a good thing. Apparently she had had so many loans in the past that to her the word interest = bad.

I explained to her it was a savings and not a loan. That with savings you want the highest interest you could get and the exact opposite when it comes to a loan.

‘But isn’t it good to have a savings?’ one of the teenaged girls working the pizza table said.

I explained to her it is a good thing but it makes no sense to save your money with someone giving you 0%. I tried explaining how banks work, about buying shares etc and getting the best rates for your money. Both women looked at me in silence.

In the end they both decided to ‘try it out.’

I didn’t know what shocked me more. The fact that the restaurant attempted that stunt or the fact that it actually worked on two employees.

Before leaving after being fired, what’s the most that one can sabotage the office without getting caught?

Controller got fired for all the right reasons. On his way out, and before his access was deleted, he programmed a very, very offensive message on the Windows start menu for the entire company-something along the lines of “fxxx you, (name of the CFO)”. Now I’ll admit the guy had it coming, but will also say that the CFO was the biggest a-hole I’ve ever met. Anyway, it took the IT guys weeks before they were able to fix it (always wondered why it took sooooo loooong).

What is the worst medical misdiagnosis you have ever had or personally known someone to have had?

As a 45 year old, I started feeling very tired. I fell asleep in the bathroom at work one day. Went home and thought I was coming down with a cold. Never actually got cold symptoms, but could barely move my body. It felt like all of my extremities were filled with lead. Then I started getting dizzy. Then I started to vomit. I went to an urgent care center and told them all of the above symptoms and how now I’m vomiting and peeing every 5 minutes. I even told them I was vomiting black stuff which they informed me was blood. I was told I just had a stomach virus like people get on cruise ships. I said I have never been on a cruise ship in my life. I was sent home with antinausea meds. I had lost about 15 lbs in 3 days. That night and next day still vomiting and now breathing in short gasps. Now my body is shivering uncontrollably and I can barely move and still vomiting blood. My kids found me on the kitchen floor and took me to the ER. I was rushed back and found out I was in diabetic ketoacidosis. My body was shutting down. I was about a day away from death. My blood sugar was 854. I was diagnosed as a type 1 diabetic.

While hospitalized, I received a survey from the urgent care center asking how my experience was. I’ll told them that I almost died thanks to them, but other than that it was great.

What’s a hilarious story that has happened to you?

Years back when Subway still gave you tickets to collect for free subs, my kids’ mother and I were going to have dinner and movie night with my brother and his wife. Subway was the night’s choice. Well, it is Friday evening and the video store is packed. So we’re standing in line waiting to check out our movies, and she is going through these Subway tickets. She asks me,

“I don’t supposed you’ll eat a 6 inch?”

To which I responded, in a building with over 150 people in it, without even missing a beat,

“No, if I don’t get 12 inches, I’m just not satisfied.”

Children were laughing at me. Had it not been so hilarious, I would be mortified of that story getting out.

Very Unlikely

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/R3eXHD3c4EI?feature=share

Corked

After my mother died, I spent a few months living in her (our) house and taking care of it, and arranging probate issues. It was a difficult time, as my second wife (the wife from Hell, and BTW…the person who worked for MAJ to “retire” me), demanded that she gets the entire estate “or else”.

So, I’m dealing with all these stressers.

Those in the “know” also know about this point in time. My fate forecast; I am entering my “triple black” inauspicious time, and I lost my job, my wife, my mother… and soon (though I didn’t know it yet) everything else.

But at this moment in time, I was in the house, and my brother came over with a close friend of his (ours).

We were all in the kitchen drinking. My mother had collected all sorts of wine that sat in racks in the kitchen / dining area, and they decided to open them up and start drinking.

And I stepped out to go onto the “sun room”.

After the first bottle, my brother said “corked”.

If a wine is “corked”, it means that it has been tainted by the cork, or rather a chemical compound which can be found in natural corks. This contamination gives off a very distinct smell and taste, which can be described as musty, earthy, wet cardboard, wet newspaper, or even wet dog. The term ‘corked wine’ refers to a wine contaminated with cork taint, which can happen if the wine is bottled with a TCA-infected cork.

Which means that the wine had been sitting too long, and somehow the wine went bad. Now, this might be a term used by aficionados, but for us “regular folk” (and I know, I drink one FUCK of a lot of wine) it was just fine.

I tasted the wine.

It was fine.

I was in the other room, and when I went into the kitchen, imagine my horror when I watched my brother and his friend draining out about 35 bottles of (very expensive) wine down the sink. Claiming that it was “corked”.

wine down the drain
wine down the drain

They weren’t “corked”. Not in the least.

Sheech!

As a wine lover, and as a wine aficionado, I still remember that moment with aghast horror. Such a pity! Such a waste. And what is really horrific, is that he has no idea… none… not one iota what he did.

Everyone… what ever you do, don’t though out wine unnecessarily. Even if corked, it can still be used for cooking! Sheech!

Today…

What was the moment you cancelled the friendship with your best friend?

Don’t know about my “best” friend but I remained close with an ex. She didn’t like my partner for (mostly) racist reasons. But they were civil together when we met up.

I didn’t tell her we were expecting. But at 20 weeks my partner experienced severe pain and was hospitalised for 4 days. This came up in conversation. She deduced that we were expecting.

She pushed me to ask for an abortion.

She then posted it on Facebook to around 2000 followers, asking for advice about persuading someone to get an abortion. To a group I was a member of.

I blocked her on all meeja and we haven’t spoken since.

She did send a message apologising. Not for the sentiment, but for taking it public. That really doesn’t address the core issue, which is that she wanted my beautiful daughter – the love of my life – executed because of her hatred of my partner. It’s going to be difficult to remain friends after that.

Copeland’s of New Orleans Crawfish Etouffee

2023 11 13 06 55
2023 11 13 06 55

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 6 cups water
  • 2 bay leaves
  • 1 teaspoon lobster base
  • 1 pound fresh crawfish tail meat
  • Pinch black pepper
  • Pinch white pepper
  • Pinch cayenne
  • 1 tablespoon paprika
  • 1 teaspoon peanut oil
  • 1 cup chopped yellow onion
  • 4 teaspoons all-purpose flour
  • Salt to taste
  • 1 cup chopped green onions
  • 1 teaspoon minced garlic
  • 3 tablespoons finely chopped parsley
  • 6 cups cooked white rice

Instructions

  1. Prepare a stock by bringing the water to a boil. Add bay leaves and lobster base. Allow to boil for about 20 minutes or until the water has reduced to 5 cups of stock. Hold aside.
  2. In a mixing bowl, combine the crawfish tails with black, white, and cayenne pepper.
  3. Add the paprika and stir together well.
  4. In a medium-size pot, heat the peanut oil at a near high setting. Oil should be hot but not smoking.
  5. Add the chopped yellow onion and stir until translucent.
  6. Add the crawfish tails and stir until they are heated and cooked through and have attained a good bond with their fat.
  7. Add flour and mix well.
  8. Pour in stock gradually, stirring constantly, until sauce achieves a substantial thickness and consistency.
  9. Season with salt to taste.
  10. Add the green onions, garlic, and parsley. Reduce the heat to a medium setting and simmer for about 10 minutes more.
  11. Serve over a bed of cooked white rice.

Notes

If desired, you may stir in 2 to 3 tablespoons of butter to completed etouffee for added richness.

Attribution

Posted by GayleL at Recipe Goldmine 9:17:49pm 4/19/03.

The New Thai Tax Law that EVERYONE is Talking About

Big news in Thailand. This new tax law has everyone talking, and a bit scared. I will detail the rules and how it might affect you. So if you’re ever considering relocating to Bangkok, Phuket, Chiang Mai, Samui or anywhere else in Thailand, there’s lots of information in this video.

What is the most inappropriate experience you had with a debt collection agency?

Years ago I bought a USB “dongle” for Internet access, through a company called Orange.

It was a pay monthly arrangement.

The bloody thing never worked, their customer services eventually admitted that the area I was in had very poor access and it wasn’t going to improve soon.

I said let’s just cancel.

They said no, you signed up for a year.

I said fine, and cancelled the regular payment, after sending them a letter explaining why, with my contemporaneous notes from a series of calls.

They kept sending demands. I said jyst take me to small claims court, we’ll see what the judge says. My view was, if the thing doesn’t work I ain’t paying for it. Contractual obligations go both ways.

Eventually they gave up, but clearly sold the debt (iirc around £250) to some agency.

The agency got in touch, but their phone number was a premium rate one. I sent a letter explaining my side, inviting them to small claims.

At around 6 month intervals for 2 years, different debt agencies tried- presumably these guys sell debts on?

Eventually, a reslly aggressive debt agency agreed to try it in small claims. They were based in London, I live 180 miles north.

I turned up, they didn’t. Well, not on time- some flustered legal junior arrived as I was leaving, and got a proper bollocking off the judge.

Judge awarded me, and my expenses/lost day’s pay, were to be covered by DebtTwat ltd.

I wasn’t expecting them to ever pay up, but i certainly wasn’t expecting them to send me a demand for flustered legal bloke’s train fare, taxi, and fee.

Obviously i tore this up and sent it back without a stamp.

Getting old in China

When did you realize you’re an asshole?

We once took my son and his family out for a meal. The bill was £150, and I paid it with a card. I asked the waiter if I could add a tip and he proffered the card machine to let me do so. I added £20 and paid and we left.

As we got to the car park I glanced at the receipt and realised I’d actually given him a tip of 20p, clearly defining me as tight-arse, so I proceeded back into the restaurant, spotted our waiter, in a group of two or three of them at the bar, apologised for my mistake and gave him a £20 note. Smiles all round. I’d clearly done the right thing.

However as I left for the second time, I couldn’t resist adding “By the way, I’ll take my 20p back next time I’m here”

This caused a roar of laughter, and on subsequent visits has made us memorable and very well looked after. As I pay – more carefully with the tip – I am asked “Will you take your 20p now, Sir?”

The Standard Female Delusion Chart – a tool to reduce dating drama

Technology has enabled countless millions of desperate and morally bankrupt men to constantly shower mediocre women (there’s nothing wrong with being mediocre — most of us are) with attention. Naturally, women assume that this attention is higher-quality than it actually is, because “why wouldn’t people like me?” It’s an understandable mistake. We all want to believe we are “worth it.”

Simply put, a huge wave of sleazy, short-term, hookup-level interest from men is being mistaken – by the women who receive it — as akin to marriage proposals, and they are subsequently developing deeply emotionally and ego-rooted beliefs that they are all 9s, which is mathematically impossible. They then proceed to reject men who are far more likely to treat them well and pursue men who see them as nothing but cheap conquests, resulting in avoidable emotional damage, which they then take out on men in an intensifying cycle of resentment.

I must stand against this, and all I have is a voice. The only power that a man has to stop this cycle is to stop playing the game of letting women think he wants to be with them for real, when he knows he doesn’t. Shame on you. Stop that.

The only power that a woman has to stop this cycle is by being realistic about her actual value and finding men who are most likely to give her the maximum return for what she offers. Stop letting yourself believe that users love you.

That’s a delusion.

These diagrams are only roughly based on non-scientific data, but they are heavily rooted in real-life experience that proves itself true again and again.

I am confident that if women use them to identify the correct men and get to know them, they will have better luck starting relationships that last, and that will cause much less drama, heartbreak, confusion, and wasted time.

Also, my content does and always will contain humor to clarify and intensify the points that I’m making. Try to not take my content as being in competition with formal science, but rather as evidence-and-experience-based advice to avoid common dating problems. I tripped over a lot of rocks so you don’t have to. Best luck out there.

As a doctor, what is the biggest mistake that you’ve made?

I had scheduled a young woman for a very long (easily 12+ hour) surgery on a deep-seated brain tumor right next to her brainstem. Having explained the risks and benefits of the surgery at length like I usually do (including significant risks of death, coma and stroke), she was more concerned about how much of her hair I would remove to do the surgery.

The night before surgery, I got a terrible flu – fever to over 103, malaise, joint and muscle pains, the works. In the end, I had no choice but to cancel her surgery and schedule for another day …

… expecting she would understand … I mean, who would want to undergo such a massive and dangerous surgery if the surgeon were that ill?

Well I was wrong. The patient became furious, hostile, angry, blamed me for inflicting emotional distress … demanded that I immediately find another surgeon to do the surgery that morning (not possible) … later lodged complaints up and down the hospital system … filed complaints with the medical staff … threatened to sue me … it took weeks to calm her – and our hospital – down.

It was the first time I had ever canceled a surgery in >20 years.

It’s what you get in a society that demands more than it understands. A society in which people live their lives in imaginary worlds conjured up by media (including doctor stereotypes) far removed from any sense of real humanity.

ADDENDUM:

A few Comments made me realize that not everyone understood my Answer, and I should perhaps clarify a few things:

  • the tumor was not near any part of the brain that would affect intellect or emotions
  • this patient was not “dying of a brain tumor;” while the surgery was going to be long and dangerous, it was far from urgent
  • I gently passed her care on to another neurosurgeon (it’s never a good idea to operate on someone who lacks faith in you), who operated on her a few weeks later; I heard she did well (though her attitude remained problematic)
  • there are no “back-up surgeons” waiting in the bullpen in case a surgeon gets sick: nowhere in the U.S., nowhere in Europe and nowhere in the world. Not like TV.
    • this is especially true of small sub-specialties like Neurosurgery
    • the all too common 60+ hour neurosurgical work week is packed full of patient responsibilities, and it is unrealistic to expect a colleague to abandon their own patients just to fill a gap like that at the last minute
    • no patient would want to undergo a huge brain surgery by someone they just met that morning – nor would most surgeons want to do a “surprise surgery” at the last minute. Neurosurgeons must do a lot of preparation before embarking on big, complicated cases. It’s not at all like you see on TV.
  • of course the hospital and its committees understood my situation completely (any reasonable person would understand that doctors can get sick), but they are obliged to investigate every complaint – hence a whole lot of unnecessary time and effort

To be honest, what I found most disconcerting about some of the negative Comments was how easily some people could make major assumptions about this story instead of simply asking me questions to clarify the situation.

Such Comments are just another example of: “demand more than understand.”

Why I’ll Never Move Back To America…

The American Dream… Is it dead or alive? In this video, I share THREE reasons why I don’t foresee myself ever moving back to America and why moving to the Philippines was potentially the best decision my family has ever made. Enjoy!

What is the hardest thing you have ever done?

At the age of fifteen, thirteen days after my fifteenth birthday to be exact, I went out on my first real date. He came to my door and picked me up and we walked to a party. We had so much fun. He walked me home and he kissed me goodnight and he asked me to be his girlfriend. This felt like the greatest night in the whole world. Nothing could bring me down from my giddy and excited teenage crush!

….except for what happened the next morning.

I was awoken by my mother shaking me gently but urgently saying, “Honey? Erin. You need to get up now sweetie. Daddy’s going to die today…”

Those words ripped me out of any dreams I was having and back into the waking nightmare that had become my life for the last two years. I lived in constant fear that I was going to lose the bravest, strongest, most honourable, incredible man this world had to offer, but never really truly believed in my heart that it could happen. For me, to believe that he was really dying would be a betrayal to my hero. I would be giving up on him, and you never give up on your hero, not ever.

I learned that day that no amount of wishful thinking or prayer can change your circumstances.

The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do is to tell my dad that it was okay for him to die. He was hanging on with everything he had but it was time for him to go. I told him out loud that it was okay to let go, that we would be okay. We all told him that he had permission to die and to stop struggling so hard. And as soon as we said those things to him he passed away.

I held his hand as he took his last breath.

I watched my hero lose a terrible battle with cancer and I didn’t really know if I would be okay. I may have just lied to the person I loved most in this world. But I still believe I did the right thing. Setting my dad’s mind at ease was the most important thing to me that day, not wondering whether I’d be okay.

And to tell the truth I’m not sure I ever have been okay since that day. Something inside of me changed forever and I haven’t been able to get the old me back.

But I let my dad believe we would be okay because that was what he needed to move on. And I’d do it for him again in a heartbeat.

What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you’ve witnessed?

I had an uncle who was mildly retarded. It wasn’t Down Syndrome, it was probably lack of oxygen at birth, but people could tell just by looking at him that he was different.

That may be why 3 18 or 19 year old teens thought that they would jump my uncle and my grandmother while they were walking through their neighborhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut. What could an old lady and a 30 year old “retard” do to them?

I haven’t mentioned it yet, but my uncle was the youngest of 11 children. 9 of those kids were boys. So even though his brothers had taken it a little easier on him because of his mental disability, he was still used to playing rough and fighting. A lot. So when these teens threatened him and his mother he snapped. He hospitalized all 3 kids. He wrapped one of the kid’s arms around a tree backwards, the opposite direction of the kid’s elbow.

When the first officers showed up they put my uncle in cuffs, thinking he had initiated the carnage. My grandmother set things straight. My uncle had just defended his mother and himself.

The American Child vs The Chinese Child || 美国孩子 vs 中国孩子.

What was the biggest scandal at your high school?

A student got sassy with a teacher about a grade and the teacher kicked him out of the room. The student grabbed a pencil and stabbed the assistant teacher in the room. Just in the hand, but still.

So the teacher goes rage mode and physically marches the student down to the deans office. Everyone is initially furious at the student, he’ll be expelled for sure. Assistant teacher is shaken but fine.

Daddy was a big donor to the school and the kid was on the state championship bound Football team. Daddy argued with the school, who reverses the expulsion and instead fires the teacher for “laying hands on a student.”

There were walk outs, several other teachers quit, the local news picked it up, the whole nine yards. Nothing changed. The school kept the little asshole to keep Daddy happy and fired a very, very good teacher.

When were you hilariously wrong about something?

When I was a cocky, long-haired punk and could get girls just by walking up and talking to them, I saw what I thought was two women getting in a car. I went up to the driver’s side and said something to the girl behind the wheel involving the word “ladies”. The long-haired dude in the passenger seat leaned over and said “Ladies?” he was annoyed I had tried to hit on his GF, but we laughed it off.

Entitled Women Make First Date List, And It BACKFIRES

I was at McDonald’s and I noticed that customers were choosing to wait in line to order with the cashier, instead of using the available kiosks. Why do you think that is?

I’m 61. My husband is 69. We can’t figure out how to use the kiosk. This morning, we added what we wanted to our order, but couldn’t figure out how to check out. The only icon that looked like it was a possibility was “Review Order” and it was greyed out. So, we were stuck. We backed out of it and left the restaurant. Also, when we saw the “login” prompt, we thought we might have to create an account which we don’t want to do. It’s just one more login and password we would have to remember. Nobody was at the counter to provide assistance. I’ll be diplomatic here. McDonald’s doesn’t sell weed. They sell shitty fake food. There’s nothing in their stores that I can’t live without…for the rest of my life. So, if they’re not willing to assist an old couple by taking their order, we won’t go into their restaurant(s) anymore. We went home and made a veggie omelet, hash browns, and cantaloupe. It was superior to anything on the McDonald’s menu and cooking it was less stressful than trying to figure out that fucking kiosk. Fast service that’s easy is basically all McDonald’s has going for it these days. And, they won’t even do that anymore. Plus, they’re using these non user friendly machines to phase out workers. Fuck ‘em.

What is the dirtiest fine print you’ve seen in a contract?

I was going to download my banks, banking app, I always read the fine print. They want control of my camera, and they want permission to edit my contacts list.

I said “No” they said that the app wont work without access. I access my bank over the Internet, through their website directly, without going through the app. It works fine. Yet they don’t have access to my camera or contacts, funny about that.

Hot Signs

When were you hilariously wrong about something?

I was on a subway train in DC. I had my five year old son with me, plus a few bags. I’m sitting on one end of the car, paying attention to the stops because I really don’t want to miss ours. A young black man grabs a seat on the other end of the car. I’m thinking gang member. Bandana. Gold jewelry. Baggy pants. Mind you, there were enough people on the train I certainly wasn’t concerned… that was just the impression I had. Anyway, we’re approaching our stop. My son has fallen asleep. The car isn’t jam-packed but it is kind of full. I’m wondering how I’m going to pick up my son and our stuff and make it to the door before the doors close.

As I struggle to get to my feet and head for the door, I see a foot casually hooked around the door, so it can’t close.

Yep. The black kid with the bandana and jewelry. As I look over, he flashes a smile.

We got off the train with no problem. A few people moved out of our way, but I didn’t see anyone else attempting to actually help.

Was he a gang member? Who knows. Who cares. At that moment, he was kind and helpful to a stranger. That’s all that mattered.

Stress

What was the shortest interview you’ve had that led to a job offer?

I went to apply for a job one time, and when I got there, the lead hand introduced himself to me while shaking my hand.

I had never been to this place before.

As he was shaking my hand this other guy jumped out from behind a machine, and in a gleeful, boisterous tone yells out to the lead hand, as he’s pointing to me, “There’s the guy! There’s the guy right there, that’s going to show you how to work that machine!”

It was a guy that I worked with at a previous job. He was a helper that was assigned to me whenever necessary.

I couldn’t believe it.

The lead hand looks at me, and that second I knew I was in.

What’s the fastest you’ve wiped a smirk off of someone’s face?

I was in an elevator on a cruise ship. Some wiseacre saw my polka-dot suspenders.

He smirked, “Nice suspenders. You from Wisconsin?”

I replied, “No. Ever since my cancer surgery, I can’t wear a belt.”

His smirk instantly evaporated. The elevator doors opened on my floor, and I got out.

Soft tissue sarcoma caused by Agent Orange in Vietnam, They took out 1–3/4 pounds of me from my groin to my beltline. It left a notch where a belt would sit, so I can’t wear a belt comfortably.

About Women body-count…

Good equivalent.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/rT4UA3j8Fbg?feature=share

Why does the education system of China and Singapore work so well while India lags behind?

The Legendary Mao in 1954 felt that any party member whose kids studied in Missionary Schools run by Western ideology , could not be trusted

In 1964, he felt such party members were Collaborators and Enemies

Thus every CPC member wisely decided to ensure his kids studied in Local Chinese schools and so the Party built more and more and more and more Schools all across China

Since their own members kids would study in these schools, the quality of these schools were higher and the subjects better

In 1996, Jiang Zemin after 42 years decided to repeal this old rule from Maos time and allow CPC members to send their kids to private schools

Then they discovered something

They discovered that Private School Quality was LOWER than Government School

Nobody wanted to send their kids to Private School.

Math, Science, Physics was of a tougher standard and teachers were the best

Thus even if it was due to fear of being branded a Collaborator, the fact is due to Mao – Chinas Education System became one of the best and it’s Government run schools became top notch

Indias misfortune was India never had a visionary like Mao or Deng

We did have Kamaraj but he was too localized

In India, Children of Politicians studied in the finest schools and later typically in UK Or US or Canada and foreign Universities

As a result there was NO REASON for Politicians to focus on quality education

India is a cesspit democracy

Long term vision was replaced by Short term election strategies

As a result, India focused on the BARE MINIMUM for State Or Centre sponsored Education

China and India were both equally pauper nations in the 1970s , in fact India was a tad bit richer

Yet China spent more on Education due to it’s long term vision , spent more on training teachers, spent more on sending teachers to foreign countries for enhancing their knowledge

India?

Politicians lined up their pockets

They duped the public

They openly stole public money and lined their coffers


Still even in 1992, there was some hope

Reservations destroyed it

The principle that a Moron Dullard was entitled become a Neurosurgeon or Doctor merely because Great Grand Daddy was oppressed a few decades ago

Plus the fact that this system was exploited even further when the genuinely oppressed weren’t at all given the chance

Instead a handful of wealthy persons took advantage of loopholes and drove quality into the Ground

China meanwhile had Crisp, Lovely, Meritocracy

A Son of a Sweeper could become an Engineer if he had merit, or a sweeper if he didn’t. Only Ability mattered.


By 2014, China was at a place India couldn’t reach with a hundred ladders

Then under Modiji, we all hoped things would improve

  • That at last we would have an AFFORDABLE EDUCATION ACT
  • That at last Modi would set a National Education Program and do what Mao did in 1954

Didn’t happen

Private Education raping the average Indian family with absurd tuition fees

Modiji focusing on Language policies, Sanskrit, Vedas and changing India to Bharat and removing Chapters on Mughals

The Average Chinese focusing on Python and Technology. The Average Indian on Ram, Laxman and some made up lies about how Modi is a superhero


It’s why, the Top 5% or 10% Chinese and Indians are similar

Yet the Average Chinese can swallow the Average Indian for breakfast, lunch and dinner

The Below Average Chinese os more than a match for the Average Indian

The Below Average ‘Educated’ Indian is on the lowest rung


Plus Indias biggest problem is the AVERAGE INDIAN

He doesn’t realize there is a problem at all

Realizing there is a problem means needing to work on a Solution and needing to recognize failure

Sorry. We are India. We are the best. We have no weaknesses.

Our Education system is flawed

Most refuse to agree. Some who agree make excuses including blaming Manmohan Singh. Some talk ‘Practically’ and say India needs to do nothing but everything will magically happen


Like I said, India is heading to a point where it would end up as a hotch potch, mish mash of uneven growth, a kind of Tumor rather than a crisp engine of growth with a Vision like China or even Vietnam

The $ 10 Trillion India would be a Huge Tumor rather than a nice neat rocket

Unless India buckles up and begins basic structural reform of Education, Healthcare and Liberal Laws

A Respectful manner

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/USGM2dxmJac?feature=share

What are some deep truth you must learn now or never?

1. Everyone is insecure about something. It’s not just you.

2. You will never be 100% sure about decisions you made. But always make a decision because it’s better to go back and fix it than to never make it at all.

3. There is always someone better than you. So there’s no point to compare.

4. There’s nothing in life you can really control except your own thoughts and actions. So always hope for the best and prepare for the worst.

5. Nothing lasts forever. Things change, people change. And YOU can change anytime too.

6. Life is not a fairy tale. That’s why it’s always exciting and you’ll never be bored.

7. Hard work doesn’t guarantee success. But that’s what makes it challenging.

Just stay at home and don’t even try…

What was your weirdest date ever?

Going anonymous on this one, sorry about it, I just don’t think I can face being associated with the story I am about to tell.
It will be a bit long-winded but one of the weirdest encouters ever happened in my life. And as it happened in a date, so…

Here it goes:

I signed up for a free dating site and started chatting to several guys. One of them, seemed like a nice and decent person.

When we started talking, it was about usual topics, interests. The conversation was flowing, as they say. I gave him my mobile number and he sent me texts every day, just some niceties. One of them was “I think we are on the same wavelength”
I hope so” I responded.
I haven’t the slightest known yet, how wrong I was on assuming so…

After a week of talks, we set up a real life date.

He lived around an hour train ride from me and came to the station to pick me up. When I entered his car, he looked up to the sky and said:
do you find those clouds a bit weird?”
There were no clouds, only condensation trails from airplanes.
I said: “these are not clouds”

To which, he responded: “exactly” and had an expression on his face as if he just had said something really meaningful.
Bit of an odd exchange, but I shrugged a shoulder and we did not mention the “not-clouds” again.

To my surprise, the date he set up was not the usual movie or restaurant combo with drinking, instead he took me to the riverside on a boat ride. I was enjoying it a lot, we both did a bit of rowing, it was sunny, we chatted nonchalantly.

We were talking about building styles in the UK (I am a foreigner) and I told him my impressions about buildings and differences to my home country.
I also added that my dad is a bricklayer, so I have seen many houses being built.

To this, he said: “I have built something too”
I asked: “What did you build?”
“It is very unique. You will see it once, I hope.” –
he said mysteriously.
“What is it, a bunker?”
– I joked and we laughed out loud.

The first date was over. I thanked him for the pleasant time and laughs. There was not much chemistry between us but I thought, what the hell, I will give another chance. So, when the next day he asked me for a second date, a dinner in his house, I said yes.

We drove to his house, where he lived alone. A nice and big family home.
He had a wine chilled and invited me to look around. Everything was tidy, clean and stylish. I was impressed. We settled and he poured me some wine.

Out of the blue, at one point, he told me to go outside and check his car.

The following conversation happened:

Do you see the scratches on the side?” – he pointed on the side, where large, faint scratches were running.
Of course I can see them”
What do you think caused them?” – he asked again.
I suppose branches or grass, or other cars, maybe some metal objects, a key maybe?” – I said hesitantly unsure where this conversation is going.
Let me tell you: Satan did these scratches…” – sounded his response.
Pardon?”
Satan scratched my car.” – again that sort of meaningful expression.
You mean figuratively I think, mean people maybe with evil motivation?” – I tried to deter the distrubing turn.
No, literally, the Satan itself.”- he said dead serious.

Uh.ooo….

Do you know the feeling, when suddenly the world seem like upside down and the fear hits you momentarily to make you nausetic and words froze inside you?
I had that, combined with one of the biggest WTF moment.

Is this guy crazy or what?”

We went back inside, my alarm bells were set off after this, I tell you.
I was like a hawk, watching for little signs of anything unexpected.
Little did I know that the real fun starts later….

He suggested we go to the kitchen and eat dinner. At least something normal, right?
Right.
You would think that someone inviting you over would prepare something. This was not the case. He suggested we eat soft boiled eggs.
I happen to like boiled eggs very much, so ate 4 of them with bread. No problem, I am not fussy. So far so good.

After dinner, we went back to the living room and I relaxed a bit as Satan and scratches, the weird clouds and non of this crap was mentioned again.
However, around a half hour later, again without any transition he says:

Let me blindfold you, so I can show you what I built”

My mind went screaming: NO.F**.WAY!
Adrenaline rushed through my blood I could sense it.
Right then, I became concerned that this guy wants to kill me.
In the same time I decided he won’t have an easy task to do so as I will fight like hell.
I am not timid and rather strong and quick, so I was sizing up my options to run to the kitchen, grab a knife and defend myself if it comes to that.
At this point, I’m wondering who was crazier, me or him?

Amazingly this is what I responded to him without even thinking:

You know what? You are not going to blindfold me. Reason is, I think you are plotting to kill me. I know. And I also want you to know that you are not going to succeed. I will fight until my last breath.” – I sounded very calm, which amazed me even further.

His eyes opened wide and seemed genuinely surprised.

Ok, ok, I can see you are nervous. Calm down, I am not planning anything. Just wanted to surprise you. I can see it backfired, so let’s just go as we are. No blindfold, I promise!” – he said.

Even though I was scared, I was also curious, so I responded:

Right. I will take a look, under two conditions.
First: You go in front of me and
Second: I will take a knife from the kitchen and walk behind you.
One bad move and you are dead. Did I mention I do martial arts?”

He agreed to my conditions.
So, here we are, walking out the backdoor into the dark garden.
The wind is blowing, trees and bushes rustle ominously as we walk the path.
Him in the front with a light, me behind him, armed with the biggest kitchen knife I have ever seen. Just a perfect picture of two batshit crazy lunatics.
As a matter of fact I have never fought in my life, I’m absolutely terrified, I lied about the martial art thing as well, I don’t know what I’m doing here, who is this insane person with me, not a single soul knows I am even here – I think about my life, my family far away, my stupidity.

We reach the shed in the back, well away from the house.
There is only me and him, the bushes, and complete silence.
Around us and as in front of us, as much as I can tell, just some woody areas and meadows and… a garden shed.

This is it” – he says standing in front of the shed.
Just a normal wooden shed, with 6 locks on the door.
This is what you built? Well, good one, now we can go back” – I am almost relieved.
No, the one I built is inside. Do you allow me to open it?” – I realise he must be scared of me a bit too.
I nod.

He removes the locks and opens the door.
The first thing I saw is a big ass axe on the floor!
I jump away and pull the knife in front of me defensively.

I knew it! Is this your murder weapon?!” – I shout. I can feel my heart beating so fast.

Sorry, sorry! This is not meant to be here, I will put it away, ok? There.”-he says quickly.

Give me that axe. Handle first.” – I order.
He did.

Now, look inside” – he asks and steps aside.

Very slowly, keeping an eye on him, I look inside the shed.
Nothing.
No rotting corpses, no torture chamber, just a few gym equipment, gardening tools, completely normal.
I sigh… maybe I imagine too much into this…until.. from the corner of my eyes I notice something on the floor.

This!!!!!!!!!!!!:

A submarine hatch door.
Holy crap, like a bloody rollercoaster! My gut is churning again.

You really built a bunker…” – this is all I can say. What? How? Why?
Words would fail to describe my thinking processes.
Yes” – he says bluntly and asks me to allow him to open the hatch door.

Next thing I know is we are looking down into a hole with concrete stairs, thick concrete walls, going down few meters. A nuclear bunker.

I am thinking, “if he kills me now and closes the door, nobody will ever find me”

Let me tell you the end quickly.

I did went down and looked around in the nuclear bunker of his design. He wanted to know what I think of it. I pointed out that no air filtration, pollution measurement equipment and surveillance system was installed so I was not sure if it is of any use (apart from hiding dead bodies). He agreed it needs improvement.

After the tour, we went back to the house. As you can guess, I was exhausted and weary from the whole evening but a bit calmer as I was still alive.

I thanked him for everything and requested to leave.
He cried and told me he never met such a cool person as I am…

I was happy I only met a lunatic and not a serial killer.

TL:DR

A guy took me for a second date and showed me the nuclear bunker he built driven by his ideas on an upcoming doomsday fight between evil and good.

Fitness before business

Or not. Hum…

Why do Iran’s leaders threaten the United States so often? They never threaten England, Mexico, or Canada. Why is that?

Is refusing to be submissive and subservient to the U.S. threatening the U.S.? To you it may be, but to the rest of the world it is call standing up to their right!

Lets defined threat. If Iran say it will bomb Washington, LA, New York, Miami or Hawaii, that will be considered a threat. Did Iran do that? So far it is the U.S. that funded and supported Saddam Hussein to fight a war with Iran in the 1980’s and murder General Solameini an Iranian scientist by a drone in Iraq! That is threatening. But it is the U.S. threatening Iran!

Seriously unless you are blind, deaf or dumb could you asked such a ludicrous question! Come on man be real. The U.S. ought to know that, Americans must surely know that. And you by asking this question is seen by 7.5 billion out of 8 billion or world inhabitants as a fool to even ask this question.

The U.S. threaten Iran and half the world to be bomb into smitten daily. And anyone that refused to be submissive and subservient to them is their enemy. Such behaviour belongs to Ghengis Khan or Atilla the Hun, or the Vikings not a 21st century nation! Call a spade a spade! Make the world a better place.

Humans need contact

Will China cut off rare earth exports to Western, South Korean, Japanese and Taiwan chipmakers in retaliation for US sanctions on Chinese chip technology?

In my opinion yes, but not now. I looked at the numbers about this. As I suspected, the main reason why China extracts and processes this much rare earth metals is its industry demands it. It is not because of low labor costs or lax environmental regulations.

Few relevant numbers:

Chinese mine production was 210,000 tonnes in 2022, limited by Chinese law for environmental reasons.

Global mine production was ~300,000 tonnes. Which means the Chinese share of global production was 70%.

China’s share in the processing of rare earth ores was 85%. This means around half of the non-Chinese production was imported to China for processing. We can conclude from here that China processed around 255,000 tonnes of rare earths in 2022.

China’s export volume was 48,000 tonnes in 2022. For the value of this trade, the last data is from 2021. And it is 653 million USD. Completely insignificant for China, especially when you consider that it is coming at an environmental cost. When you look at the volume, you see that China’s exports are barely higher than its imports (in terms of weight after the processing of the imported ores). China’s own industry uses almost as much as China extracts from its own soil. Really, it looks like this monopoly only emerged because the scale caused by domestic demand resulted in much lower prices compared to the rest of the planet.

If this monetarily insignificant trade is this important for countries who are trying to kill entire sectors of the Chinese industry, then China should stop this trade. Let them deal with years of shortages. But it is not a good time to do this now. Export controls should be timed so that non-Chinese shortages should coincide with the emergence of Chinese products that compete with the products of Western companies (primarily US, SK and Japan) suffering from the shortages. This is important because commodities are rarely irreplaceable.

Passport guys make sense

What is the most outrageous “fee” you’ve ever been charged?

It’s not technically a fee, but…

When I moved into my first apartment, it was one of those fancy newer buildings that offered incentives on move-in. In my case, it was a low deposit and a free month of rent! Because I was signing for a mid-month move-in, they pro-rated their amounts. At this stage was when I started eating the big bucks working crypto-forensic analysis and scam tracking jobs for Coinbase.

I wrote my check, moved in, and all was well for about 2 years.

A few weeks after I got tossed a notice about the building’s management being changed, I received a new notice taped to my front door. It told me I owed the front office <insert blank> amount within 3 days or they would begin eviction proceedings.

I’ve paid rent on time my entire life so I couldn’t imagine what on earth I would owe. Then I read the amount typed into the <insert blank>.

$0.01.

Yes. One cent. One one-hundredth of one dollar. One penny, and they wanted it NOW or they were going to evict me. What the hell?!

I went down and talked to the nice people in front of the computers in the leasing office. They looked through the files and told me that the new management was going through the books and making the final debt collections in order to start the new term on solid bookkeeping. They were rounding up all the outstanding fees and demanding payment. My fee, it appears, had been hanging around for two years. Yep: a rounding decision on that pro-rated rent amount.

asked them why they didn’t waive it. They said they couldn’t. I wasn’t about to lose my home over a rounding error, no matter the principle. I dug into my pocket to get the damn coin and hand it over. They held up their hands.

“I’m sorry, we don’t take cash.” I am sure the look on my face was comical but inside I was boiling with baffled rage.

They made me write a check. In order to keep my apartment, I used a $0.10 sheet of specially coded paper to hand over to salaried employees to collect in a deposit bag to go into a bank to cover a rounded calculation that had been irrelevant for 2 years but was now suddenly the difference between shelter and the streets.

tl;dr I was nearly evicted over a penny.

Super Real Truth

If you could financially afford it, would you hire a house cleaner to clean your house once or twice a week, or would you prefer to do it yourself?

Once upon a time, I was a stay at home mother. My home was spotless, my daughter taken care of, dinner was ready when her father walked in the door. I was happy and felt fulfilled. I truly loved giving of myself to my family.

Until I found myself alone and I had to find work. I did what I had to. I work long hours. Some say I work too many hours. But they aren’t responsible for me or my daughter, so their opinion is irrelevant. That responsibility falls on me, and even if I ever did remarry, I would never expect anyone else to be responsible for her, other than myself.

I prefer to do all of the “domestic arts” myself. I enjoy them. But the hours I work and the responsibilities I carry outside of work necessitate that I delegate some things to others. I don’t mind paying someone to clean if it means it’s one less thing for me to worry about.

Why is the US dollar used as a standard currency? What would happen if another currency was used instead?

Well, for this, we have to go back to the closing years of World War II. Although Germany and Japan were still fighting, it was clear they were going to lose, but that meant cleaning up the economic mess that had been created by the war.

Now, historically, the British Pound Sterling had been the most common reserve currency due to its stability and the ability to convert paper money into gold. However, the British government had to go heavily into debt for the war and suspended conversion of paper money into precious metal. However, it hardly mattered as British gold reserves were under pressure as it borrowed more and more money.

Now, the United States was in debt too, but back in 1933 they had already suspended the ability to convert paper currency into gold (you could convert it to silver until 1964) and had made the ownership of gold illegal. They then consolidated all the gold held by the various regional Federal Reserve banks and all the private gold they confiscated (and gave paper money for) into a single depository next to Fort Knox in Kentucky. Moreover, most countries had finance their debt int he United States as their own markets collapsed. In other words, the United States was swimming in gold.

So in July 1944 all 44 allied nations met at a hotel in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire and worked out the new world monetary order. At the top of the agenda was avoiding expensive and potentially destabilizing transfers of large amounts of gold which would allow nations devastated by war to have capital to rebuild.

The scheme essentially took gold entirely out of the market and fixed it to the U.S. dollar, with $35 U.S. being the equivalent of 1 ounce of gold. Nations in the compact, called “Bretton Woods”, would agree to buy all the gold they had at that rate. Each nation would be able to fix the value of their currency against the U.S. dollar (for example, 5 francs to the dollar) but would have to guaranteed that exchange rate for intercountry transfers (i.e. the U.S. could buy all the francs it wanted for dollars at that rate). Countries could change that rate (Canada did in the 1960s when it dropped the rate from $1.00 U.S. for $1.00 Cdn. to $0.975 U.S. to $1.00 Cdn.) but had to stand by it. In other words, gold would not routinely change hands, U.S. dollars would.

There was a catch. Even though people couldn’t exchange dollars for gold, countries could. Most countries held U.S. dollar reserves, which were largely from surplus exports to the U.S. If they wanted to, they could “take delivery” of gold, assuming they wanted to securely transport it from Fort Knox themselves.

As such, the U.S. dollar standard replaced the gold standard, as the U.S. dollar became the common currency for all the countries in the compact.

Of course, this only lasted until 1973 when Richard Nixon pulled the United States out of the agreement. From that point forward, there was no fixed rate between currencies and they traded on the open market. The U.S. also ended the prohibition against owning gold and started selling some or theirs on the open market.

A Golden Eagle, a roughly 1 ounce gold coin that the U.S. government sells at the current market price of gold, plus a small premium.

Most countries still use the U.S. dollar as their “reserve” or “exchange” currency, but that’s changing. For example, Argentina just moved from the dollar to the Chinese yuan, which is also quite stable because the Chinese government manipulates its value

Get your act together guys

What’s something you’ve never told anyone?

I am 21 years old. When I was in 10th grade there was a girl A in school. Just like typical teenagers she had many rumours surrounding her. I ignored those and went ahead and made friends with her.

In some months we started dating. We were head over heels for each other. We had everything going great so shown in movies. One day when we were on a date, after coming out from washroom she gave me her phone. There she had written something which changed all my views on her. She wrote that she was raped at the age of 14 by a guy who forced her to be his girlfriend so that other people won’t suspect a thing.

Fearing society and her parents, she didn’t tell it to anyone. But had to undergo therapy. Her parents were totally unaware to real reason behind her behaviour. She lost a ton of weight and was living on medicines. This was really shocking for me. Then I had flashback of all the times when she had certain insecurities and why she required so much time to trust a person. She also had intimacy issues because of this. And that person had told her to shut her mouth or he’ll leak the tape which he had recorded. This rumour was spread in our school by her friends isolating her.

But now she’s a healthy person pursuing her career in engineering and I am a proud boyfriend.

America Warns China To Obey As US Debt Auction GOES BAD

What’s a modern convenience that we take for granted?

I woke up in a haze in a hospital bed.

My stomach had ruptured due to an ulcer, causing my stomach to spill acid on an artery near the lining of my stomach.

I was lying in a hospital bed post surgery in the intensive care unit.

This would be the beginning of a full week-long stay.

First, I was happy to be alive. I could have died.

I had IVs in my arm keeping fluids going into my body. My nurse came in.

I asked when I’d be able to eat.

She said, “Doctor’s call. It will probably be a couple of days.” (So my stomach wound could heal.)

A couple of days turned out to be just over 4 days without eating anything.

I can remember being so hungry that I literally was fantasizing about eating ice. I remember begging the nurse to have ice.

“Please let me chew on some ice…I’m so hungry…”

It was this nagging aching pain all the time.

Eventually, they let me eat some bland crackers and Jell-O. and it was the best food I’ve ever eaten in my life.

But to answer the question, I think that we take for granted our easy access to cheap food.

There was a time where we had to forage or kill to eat. And if those two missions failed, we simply starved to death.

When you experience true starvation, all of your other problems begin to rapidly shrink.

What is it like to be a poor student at a very rich university or high school?

I didn’t think I was a poor student until I arrived at USC for my MBA program. I had worked hard and saved up $150K, which was to last me exactly through the $100K in tuition for two years and $50K for basic living expenses. I had a 9 year old Lincoln and thought I was set. My naïveté lasted for about 10 minutes.

As soon as I pulled into the student parking lot, I could see all the late model cars, many of them luxury marks. This was the undergrad parking area. One blond undergrad roared her shiny white Cadillac Escalade down the ramp as I looked for a spot.

During our casual meeting time with fellow students, productively labeled as networking, I heard about the kind of massive homes in exclusive neighborhoods that were the norm. Many of my classmates had gotten new luxury cars just for school and had fancy upscale condos for partying during school. But, that was just stuff. What really blew my mind was their attitude about money on a daily basis.

Many would invariably go to night time parties two or even three times a week, all during some very intense course work. While I looked for ways to stick to my $25 daily food budget, they had no problem splurging a few hundred dollars a night each time they were out. At the same time, I knew they were taking out massive student loans to fund their gratuitous consumption, along with tuition and basic living expenses.

Their lack of concern about repaying an extra $50K just surprised the heck out of me. I wasn’t dead broke and could tag along, but I just didn’t see the benefit of such free spending. Eventually, I settled into a more middle-class normative life-style and was comfortable.

Then I saw how naive I truly was.

One of my classmates had gotten to attend the MBA program on a merit and needs-based scholarship. He didn’t have any money. While his tuition was waived, he still needed to pay for daily expenses.

Instead of a fancy high floor condo or even a modest downtown condo, he lived in one of the roughest neighborhoods just off campus. I lived nearby and can hear the police patrols and random gun fire where he lived. My place wasn’t much but at least it was secure. He lived on a couch in a shared room right in the middle of regular gang and drug activity. Running water wasn’t always available, but it was cheap, just a few hundred bucks a month.

Obviously, he didn’t have a car and relied on brisk walks to get anywhere. He didn’t have many friends as he couldn’t afford to go hang out with anyone. When we hung out, I made sure we didn’t need to spend any money.

He couldn’t even afford food, so he worked part time at university food service to make a few dollars and grab leftovers for meals. While others dined in fancy Beverly Hills and Hollywood hot spots, he was scraping pots for a bite. But, he never complained about the squandered money of our fellow students. He knew his values and was content on focusing on his goals.

He certainly kept me grounded as I felt like a spoiled brat using money so freely and buying myself a burrito whenever I felt hungry.

So, here I was moping ridiculously about my relative paucity; he showed what real determination and pride in the midst of deprivation looked like.

And, even at the MBA level, there’s a bias to spend money. My freespending classmates all got six-figure jobs right out of school from their “networking” efforts and were able to quickly pay off their huge student loans. Meanwhile, my poor friend is still struggling financially.

Cheating Wife Stories, Husband’s Cruel Revenge For Cheating

It doesn’t matter if she ” started to fall back in love with you “…SHE’S HAD ANOTHER MAN’S BABY !!! …that’s it…its over , no if and or buts it’s over…any man who’d accept that is NOT a man , he’d be a lil bitch , I don’t think I could have been with her the 9 months and not starting IMMEDIATE divorce proceedings could cost him child support…remember some sick states automatically declare a husband the ” father ” …even if you have medical proof and D.N.A proof…you must also have written statements by the mother and possible father…if mother can’t find other guy or he refuses to get involved you owe that affair baby 18 yrs of child support.. ( disgusting they’d punish a innocent man just to save a few percentages of tax rates for business and the rich…yet they have the harshest anti- abortion laws…total scum…but then again any man stupid enough to still marry in those states is criminally ignorant and brings it on himself…so no sympathy for those or this idiot..no one or no law forced him to marry…he put himself into his predicament….so keep lining up to sign up for marriage…I get a kick out of your pain and suffering”

What are Taiwan’s chances if Mainland China goes to war with it?

Zero and here’s the fun bit.

Nobody says we have to accept their surrender either.

Also the precedent has been set! In Ukraine and Iraq.

Western powers have literally said you can’t surrender to aircraft or drones.

Do you think the China International Import Expo is successful in attracting foreign capital to China?

Attracting foreign capital to China?

According to CIIE organizers, this year’s expo has attracted a record 289 Global Fortune 500 companies and industry leaders, with over 3,400 exhibitors and 394,000 professional visitors registered for the event.

Now read carefully the name for the expo – it’s an IMPORT EXPO meaning the exhibitors are EXPORTERS from all over the world traveling to China to meet Chinese IMPORTERS to buy from them.

This is not about these people investing in China. This is about exhibitors interested to sell to the world’s largest consumer market.

What is the one text message that changed your life?

The number I got belonged to a Michael before.

I received a text addressed to him and asking him to call back the very next day after I activated it.

“Who’s this?”

“Mom.”

“I think you have the wrong number,” I answered. “My mom’s half way across the planet.”

“Sorry.”

“Hope everything is okay with your son/daughter!”

“Thanks! All the best!”

The messages didn’t stop there.

Reminders to pick up his car from the mechanic’s, friends wanting to get beers over the weekend, or talking sports and venting about frustrating relationships.

A woman he used to see asking if they can reconnect.

And I diligently replied saying that it’s no longer his number.

Except the more I replied, the more I felt some inexplicable connection with Michael. As if every message I received made me understand him a bit better. Identify with him. Even root for him as he navigates through the challenges of life.

Then things went quiet and I thought he must have let everyone know about changing his number and I almost forgot about the whole thing.

Until I started getting a different kind of messages.

Prayers. Is-there-anything-I-can-do. Please-know-we’re-there-for-you.

We love you.

You’re in our thoughts.

And then it was spelled out in one message: “I heard your mom got diagnosed with cancer.”

The same mom who sent me my very first message on that phone.

I wrote back to one person saying that even though it’s not his number, I’m deeply sorry about the news and that I’m sending healing prayers.

He/she was so touched they said the kindness of a stranger brightened their day and restored a little bit of faith.

And I felt even closer to Michael.

Like we have something greater in common than just having shared a number. I’ve *been* through shit with him. I’ve thought about his problems and commitments.

And now his mom has cancer.

Michael, I don’t know you and we’ve never spoken, but I want you to know that I *am* there for you. That you *are* in my thoughts. That I *do* care.

That I love you and your mother and I hope you all get through this.

Why is China so desperate to compete with the US when the world knows it can’t?

Ali Moco, use your common sense.

China can do manufacturing and the U.S. cannot. China is the global supply chain hub. China is the one with the perrenial trade surplus with the U.S. Militarily, China has the world’s largest naval fleet while we can’t construct any new naval assets while those “active” assets spent more time in repair than out on duty.

So who is the one desperately trying to compete?

Arguments

What was your strangest experience while visiting the U.S.?

Yesterday in the Charlotte, NC airport I decided to spend my last few dollars on a beer before my flight to Munich.

Before me in line stood a man well into his seventies. He ordered two red wines.

The server asked him for his ID and that of his equally aged wife who was sitting at a table with a cane propped between her knees.

He thought it was a joke. So did I.

It wasn’t. He had to walk back to the table and fetch his wife’s ID.

This was not only strange, it was the stupidest rule I’ve ever seen.

Sixty-year old me was next. And yes, I needed to prove I was twenty one.

Edit: I keep getting comments about how this is normal and the server is just doing their job. I understand and don’t hold it against the server, their management or even the legal system that makes them so careful.

All that said, the rest of the world finds it very strange (and a bit sad perhaps) when 80-year old people must be carded to prove they are 21.

How do I tell my parents that I know they put a camera in my room?

Take a small, clear bag and fill it with a certain white substance. Hide that bag somewhere in your room.

Every morning before you leave for school, and every afternoon when you get home, take out the bag of white substance, and cut a line.

Take a piece of paper, (like a dollar bill), roll it up, and pretend to snort the substance.

You don’t actually have to snort it. You can do this trick where you use the side of your hand to brush the substance off to the side.

Just make sure you do all of this in the camera’s sight line.

Repeat this process for as long as necessary.

Eventually, your parents will see you do this on camera and think you’re snorting cocaine.

They’ll go to your room, find your bag of “cocaine”, and pull it out.

But what they’ll find instead is a bag of flour or sugar, and a note from you that says, “I know you put a camera in my room.”

The thrill of spying on you will be gone, and hopefully they’ll remove the camera.

Either way, they’ll know you know what they’re up to.

5 Unexplained Moments Caught on Live TV That Were Never Solved

My neighbor picked all the peaches off my tree last year without my consent. I’ve never met them as every time I’ve tried, they’ve made themselves unavailable. How do I go about protecting my fruit this year without seeming passive-aggressive?

If you are 100% sure you know who did it, and the peaches were all inside the boundaries of your yard, you have several options – none passive.

  1. Coming from compassion – Offer to share some – not all – if they “need” some.
  2. Let “all” neighbors know you have plans for the fruit this year. Request everyone stay out of your yard unless invited.
  3. Put up a Beware of dog sign – even if you don’t have one.
  4. Put up No Tresspassing signs. Warn that anyone caught tresspassing is subject to being arrested.
  5. Get security cameras on your place – yard and front and side areas.

And if they get caught trying to do it again have an estimate for value of the crop and press charges for theft. If it’s over $500 it’s a felony in many or most states. Tresspassing and theft could mean jail time. Those peaches better be worth it to them.

Growing up we had grapes along our back fence. Three different neighbors over 25 years all asked first before taking the grapes poking through to their side. Every year my family told them to take any on their side of the fence.

Point is good neighbors “ask.”

Something is weird with your neighbors.

China’s Growing NAVAL POWER Can Destroy the USA in 30 Seconds

Technological advancement is a cornerstone of China’s naval dominance. From the development of cutting-edge submarines, such as the Type 095 and Type 096, to the deployment of advanced naval aviation capabilities, China has demonstrated an unyielding dedication to innovation. Its naval prowess is complemented by a formidable array of anti-ship missiles, naval defense systems, and electronic warfare capabilities, placing it at the forefront of maritime technology.

What is the most outrageous thing you have seen a diner do to get out of paying for their meal?

I was enjoying a meal of spaghetti with marinara sauce in a pleasant Italian restaurant. I noticed two women, around 40, eating at the other side of the small restaurant, conversing and eating heartily. When they had finished, the waitress came to take their plates, and asked if they wanted anything else. They said no, and she asked “If you are ready, I will bring your bill.” The ladies said, no, they would not pay because the food was very bad. They claimed the spaghetti was undercooked, the sauce was thin and salty, and the rolls were not fit to eat. Their coffee was much too strong, too. They were not rude or really loud, but were adamant they did not think they should pay for such bad food. The waitress said, “Why didn’t you tell me? I would have taken the food and gotten you a better meal. And besides, why did you eat it all and then tell me it was so bad?” The ladies realized the sense of the waitress’ words, accepted the bill, and paid.

Did you ever say something very simple that had a profound impact on someone in an unexpected manner?

Early during my intern year in San Francisco in 1973, I took over care of a comatose alcoholic patient. I discovered her electrolytes and metabolic tests were all out of wack.

I corrected them and she woke up.

The first thing she asked upon awakening was “Who’s taking care of my cats?”.

She was in a panic.

I called her contacts and got a neighbor to get her cats and care for them.

I then told my patient that if she kept drinking, the next time she ended up in the hospital she would surely die and there would be no one to look after her cats. They would die a terrible death of thirst and starvation.

I remember her looking at me with grave concern.

About a week later she was discharged and I didn’t see her again until very near the end of my internship. I saw her walking in the corridor of the hospital going for a clinic visit. She looked like a different person, well dressed and made up.

She told me that she hadn’t had another drink in almost a year because her cats depended on her.

It was one of the most rewarding moments in my long career and one of the rare times I succeeded in getting a hard core alcoholic to get and stay on the wagon.

Cheesecake Factory Cajun Jambalaya Pasta

pasta jambalaya 4 1 of 1 1463x2048 1
pasta jambalaya 4 1 of 1 1463×2048 1

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 ounces butter
  • 2 teaspoons Cajun spice mix
  • 1 pound boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into small pieces
  • 1 pound fresh linguini pasta
  • 1/2 cup clam juice
  • 2 ounces green bell peppers, cut into thin strips
  • 2 ounces red bell peppers, cut into thin strips
  • 2 ounces yellow bell peppers, cut into thin strips
  • 4 ounces red onions, cut into thin strips
  • 1/2 pound fresh medium shrimp, peeled, deveined, tails removed
  • 1/2 cup diced tomatoes

Instructions

  1. Place the butter into a sauté pan. Allow the butter to melt slightly. Add the seasoning into the pan and stir together with the melted butter. Add the chicken into the pan and continue to cook until the chicken is about half done.
  2. While the chicken is cooking, carefully place the pasta into boiling water and cook until al dente.
  3. Pour the clam juice into the pan. Add the peppers and onions. Cook for another minute, making sure the vegetables are heated through and the chicken is almost done.
  4. Add the shrimp into the pan. Toss the ingredients together and continue to cook until the shrimp are almost done.
  5. Add the tomatoes into then pan. Continue to cook mixture until both the shrimp and chicken are thoroughly cook through.
  6. Place some pasta into each bowl. Spoon equal portions of the jambalaya mixture into each bowl over the pasta.

Invest in yourself

Do children of parents who were close to or over 40 when they were born wish they had younger parents?

My dad was 22 years older than my mom and in his mid-fifties when I was born. He retired while I was in elementary school which meant I essentially had two stay at home parents as my mom didn’t work. My dad never showed his age and was as active and involved as any of my friends dads but more so because he didn’t have work. When I was younger my dad would come to elementary school and eat lunch with me. He helped with boy scouts and came camping with me. He attended all sporting events and school activities. In the summer we would spend full days at museums or going on trips; he was a regular chaperone on school field trips. When my bus stop was far away he’d come pick me up every day.

I was always sadly hyper aware that he was older and losing him was a regular fear; I lucked out and had him with me until he almost hit 97 and I was 42; my mom passed 15 months before him. I just had my first child at 43 and have no idea how my dad managed 4 kids, with my brother and I just two years apart, and not complain or show any signs of age at all. I wouldn’t say I ever wished for younger parents as it is all I ever knew.

Do children of parents who were close to or over 40 when they were born wish they had younger parents?

My dad was 57 when I was born and my mom 43. My mom passed away 2 days after I was born. My dad was my world. He learned to cook to make me my favorite meals. I was a picky eater as a kid.

He woke me up each morning with fresh squeezed orange juice which I love until this day. As I got older, he would play tennis with me and taught me to play softball. He had played baseball in Cuba and he was a great hitter even in his sixties. I did everything with him.

When I was 5, he was on his way to pick me up at day care when he got into a terrible car accident where an ambulance was called to treat him. He was less than a a tenth of a mile from the day care, he told the ambulance workers he had to pick up his daughter before he could be taken to the hospital. He walked and picked me up with a head injury and took me to a neighbors house before being transported to the hospital. I will always remember this day.

When I was 10 he retired from work and started picking me up from the bus stop every day after school. He always had a snack ready for me and we sat and talked about our day.

At 15 he taught me to drive. He was patient and made sure I knew the rules of the road. For my 16th birthday, he took me to get my drivers license. A few days later he bought me a car. We were poor and I had no expectation of a car. He had put aside money to buy me a 3 year old Toyota Camry. He drove a 13 year old car.

A few months after my 16th birthday he was not feeling well and I thought it was a cold. He passed away 20 days later of a double pneumonia and acute leukemia. My world was shattered. I didn’t know how to pick up the pieces and keep going. To this day, I think about him every day.

Did I wish he was younger? No, I wouldn’t change him but I do wish I had more time with him.

Women are in the horns

What people are shining examples of the power of authenticity?

Joe Rogan.

He’s never run any commercials promoting his podcast. Never bought any billboards, any print ads. He never went on any late-night shows to promote his podcast.

I’ve always known about him from watching UFC’s, so I knew he had a podcast.

But eventually – he began popping up more and more on my YouTube suggestions. I figured – can this podcast really be any good? I know he’s a decent comedian and a great fight commentator.

Steadily – over years, he continued plugging away at his podcast, getting more and more guests.

Finally, I gave in – and I’m hooked – along with millions of other people.

The podcast is a blend of funny/smart and is just people having conversations. No acting, no-nonsense.

Just humble, intelligent conversations with a wide variety of people from all walks of life.

Joe now has one of the most popular podcasts in the world and he just did it by being his authentic self and enjoying conversations with people.

What is the best example of people who cheated death?

Mike Day.

He was a Navy SEAL serving in Afghanistan. During a mission in 2007, he went into a room first, leading his team. Unfortunately, it had insurgents in it, waiting with automatic weapons.

He was shot 27 times. While 11 rounds were blocked by his body armor, 16 rounds managed to hit him in the torso, arms and legs. He was also hit by a grenade which exploded and sent shrapnel through his body.

And then, he managed to kill three enemy fighters near him with a pistol and without killing any of the women and children in the room.

His recovery took two long years.

And he later became an advocate for wounded warriors and those living with PTSD—because he had it bad.

Sadly, he was haunted by the things he went through in war. This past March, he couldn’t bear it anymore and was found hanging in his room.

He cheated death narrowly for 16 years, but the demons were the ones Mike couldn’t escape. Rest in Peace warrior.

Toxic social media

Why does Russia refuse to give up on its only aircraft carrier?

The Admiral Kuznetsov was and actually still is the flagship of the Russian Navy.

Yes, she’s not seaworthy, but it doesn’t matter. This is really a matter of national pride. If the Russian Navy can’t keep their flagship in service, that does not look great.

As a side-note, the Kuznetsov was built at the Black Sea Shipyard in what is now Ukraine. Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few years, you’ll know why docking it in Ukraine is not exactly an option. Russia lacks any shipyards large and capable enough to properly service or build something this big, which is why they’re having so much trouble refitting the ship.

Do you feel Home Depot and Lowe’s are nothing but chain stores that bought out the little guy? Please note, my question does not imply I think so.

It may happen now and then but I have never heard of of a big box company buying out the little guy. They usually just open up a store and drive the little guy out of business – maybe. Read on. Sometimes a smaller chain will be bought out but seldom a single store.

Mom and pop hardware stores tended to do better than, say, grocery stores because of the expertise offered.

In 1976 I got a position in Rochester NH as a bank trust officer and we bought a beautiful cape cod with a center chimney built in 1853.

A neighbor chatted to me and asked me if I had experience with working on houses. Our previous home we had bought brand new so I had to confess that I had not. He told me I should expect this home to require endless work. He suggested to me that I should patronize Warburton’s Hardware just down the road from me. He said I would go in for a dollars worth of nails and come out with ten dollars worth of advice.

He was right on both counts and I took his advice.

Brownie Warburton retired and it was bought by the Boucher family and they are still there. It was a happy day for me when he invited me to call him Brownie. The locals were not usually that accepting of blow ins.

So the mom and pop hardware stores can compete.

Now just about anyone will be familiar with this logo

ACE Hardware

You might think that Ace is a chain but you would be wrong. Ace stores are individually owned or parts of small chains – a bit liked McDonald’s. The big difference is that Ace Corporation is owned by the store owners – it is a cooperative. Ace started up in 1924, long before big box hardware stores and they seem to be thriving. They do so in the same way that Brownie Warburton did: by providing service and expertise. Edit. I did not intend this to be an ad for Ace but it sure resonated with readers. Read the comments.

This is not to say that big box stores have no place; they clearly do but so do smaller, locally owned stores.

Be the best that YOU can be

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/uN0X2ygkdbM?feature=share

What’s the most “life works in mysterious ways” experience you’ve ever had?

I’m a Christian and would change it to God moves in a mysterious way, His wonders to perform “ as an old hymn says.

When I was younger, I was asked at the last minute to delay my holiday as someone else wanted to go to the Henley Regatta and we couldn’t both be away from work at the same time. I was furious!

When I arrived finally on holiday, this vision in a blue dress appeared. She also not only shouldn’t have been there that week, but shouldn’t have been there at all. She had been going to Switzerland earlier but developed appendicitis and couldn’t go and some weeks later was invited to join her sister and some friends and so we met.

We married a year later and remained together for 63 years until her death.

What’s the fastest you’ve wiped a smirk off of someone’s face?

I used to work for a large rehab company. I was a licensed occupational therapist. One year, we had a new girl start there, who was from Europe. She was also also a licensed therapist, but had two years of additional training. She was also on a work visa. At first she was friendly and agreeable, but soon began to show her true colors. She started making snide comments about people behind their backs, and then proceeded to say them to their faces. She told me that where she came from, I wouldn’t be considered a real therapist, because I had only studied for two years.

We had a few Rehab assistants that she proceeded to lord over, because she had a college degree and they did not. But they worked hard and did their jobs. One day she sat with us at lunch; myself, and two rehab assistants. She proceeded to make rude comments about certain ethnic groups in the company, claiming that they had chips on their shoulders. I told her that her remarks could be construed as racism, and that she had better knock it off. She scoffed, and went on making rude comments. When she left the room with a big smirk on her face, one of the aides told me that she had been making unflattering comments behind my back, too. I decided that she needed to be taught a lesson. I contacted our clinical director and reported her behavior, especially the racist comments.

An hour later, she came walking down the hall, smirk replaced by copious tears. She had been warned that if she continued with her behavior, she would be shipped right back to Europe.

Addicted to lifestyle

Snakes and spiders

When I lived in Milford, Massachusetts, my home was next to a state park. It was beautiful; a nice cabin overlooking Lake Pearl. I lived in it with numerous partners. And, of course, my kitty cats.

I would like to relate a nice story.

In this fraction of time, I was living with my girlfriend from Zambia. She was adorable, and was African-African. And I absolutely LOVED THAT about her.

Now one of the big things that carried over from her life in Africa. Now, keep in mind that she was a city / suburban girl. Not a rural girl. But still, Africa did, and still has, some very dangerous critters moving about. From lions, to leopards, to strange and nasty insects.

So, one morning, I was in the kitchen making coffee, and I noticed that there was a spider web near the sink cupboard doors. And in it was a black garter snake. It was maybe 4 inches, 100 cm long. And it was trapped in the web, dangling there.

I found the entire situation really interesting. I thought it was fascinating.

So I yelled to my girlfriend…

“Hey XXXXXX, come in here! You won’t believe this!”

So she came in, and then freaked… FREAKED out!!!!!

I mean she jumped up on the table, and was in hysterics. I was blindsided, and totally surprised. Hopping up and down, shaking her hands. Goosebumps on her arms, and jabbering incoherently.

All is good now today. But the reason why I am bringing it up is that I had no clue as to how sensitive this issue was for her. I grew up with snakes. Some were poisonous like rattlesnakes. But I was unprepared for the reaction of people who had to deal with cobras and black mambas.

Know your audience.

Especially, if you are living together.

Word to the wise.

Today…

What’s the fastest you’ve wiped a smirk off of someone’s face?

Hit the drive-thru late one night after school and hand the cashier a $20 for my $6 meal. She hands me $4 and closes her window, expecting me to move on.

But I don’t.

I knock on the window and ignore the honking behind me until she opens and asks me what is wrong.

“The change should be $14, not $4.” Even tone, no anger.

She tells me that I gave her a $10 and is fairly adamant. When she begins to close her window I ask if I could speak to her manager.

It’s late; it’s possible that I could have handed her a $10 rather than a $20, but I have a habit that I’ve fallen into because of a similar situation.

I memorize the serial numbers on large bills before I hand them over.

The manager listens to my request for the extra ten, looks at the receipt and notes that the girl had put in $10 as the money submitted. The girl is looking annoyed and has the classic, “I told you so” look on her face.

I ask the manager to look at the top $20 in her drawer and proceed to recite the serial number.

The manager asks me to do that again and I repeat the numbers for her.

The cashier’s face is stuck on shock and awe as I’m given my correct change and an apology before driving on to the next window for my meal.

Andouille Melt

Looking for quick Cajun comfort food? This sandwich melt made with Johnsonville® Sausage offers multiple layers and textures that will perfectly please any palate. The secret to this recipe is the smoked rope sausage, flavored with just the right amount of herbs and spices for an authentic Cajun flavor. Add in some onion, mayonnaise and Cheddar cheese, for a magnificent meal in a matter of minutes!

andouille melt
andouille melt

Prep: 10 min | Cook: 10 min | Yield: 2 servings

Ingredients

  • 1/2 package JOHNSONVILLE® Andouille Rope Sausage, thinly sliced
  • 1 hoagie or sub roll, split in half
  • 1/4 cup mayonnaise
  • 1/2 teaspoon Old Bay® Seafood Seasoning
  • 1/2 cup shredded Cheddar cheese
  • Red onion, chopped

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 375 degrees F.
  2. Place roll halves, cut side up on a foil-lined baking sheet.
  3. In a small bowl, combine mayonnaise and seafood seasoning; spread over cut sides of roll.
  4. Layer with the sausage, cheese and red onions.
  5. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes or until cheese is melted.

When have you caught someone saying uncomplimentary things about you behind your back? What was said? How did you respond?

I was shopping in an “International” shop common here in the UK. I greeted people in English, and I was commanding my assistance dog in English. I was excited as a part of my family was Polish- and until my great grandmother died, we all spoke Polish in the home. I don’t speak as well as I understand. I have to read things out-loud to understand them (I have to hear the words to understand them). I love Polish food, so I am really grateful that the new Skleps are here.

I heard one of the sales staff say, in Polish “What is that fat Englishwoman doing in here? She doesn’t know anything.” Her friend said “And she brings in that filthy dog. People like her should stay home”. I believe she was referring to my disability.

I did my shopping. At the till, the woman who made the fat Englishwoman comment smiled and said “How was your shopping? It’s hard here for people not Polish.” (in English) and I said in a halting but clear voice, “Moge nie byc Polska ale Jestem grzeczna”. Her face fell and she went pale.

“I might not be Polish, but at least I’m polite.”

Then in very clear English, I said: “Manager, please”

All I said to him was that his staff should not assume that all Angielka (English women) don’t speak Polish, and that his staff had been rude about me in Polish, but I understood them and had been very offended. He was mortified.

Then I turned to the other staff member and said, pointing to my dog, “Ona nie jest Brudna a ona tez nie jest niegrzeczna” – “She’s not filthy and- she’s isn’t rude, either.” The manager turned to them and said “Office”.

I was careful not to let them see my little well-worn Polish-English dictionary, a gift from my precious Ciocia Regina, my Great-aunt and Godmother, who helped me keep Polish culture in my soul, Polish cooking in my kitchen …and Polish words in my mouth!

Pure Bluntness

What’s the worst parenting advice you’ve received?

Our first child was not toilet trainable. We took her to doctor after doctor from age 3 to 6, eventually carrying an x-ray made by the local radiologist. Everyone agreed that poor parenting skills were the problem, though some added that our lovely daughter, who had a BM only when standing or lying down, really enjoyed tormenting us.

One of the last doctors said, “If she were my kid, I’d lock her in the bathroom until she did it on the toilet!”

A few weeks later, a surgeon hundreds of miles from home held up that x-ray and said, “She has a birth defect.” Her lower intestine was positioned in a way that made a BM impossible unless her body was absolutely straight, NOT sitting on a toilet. Surgery fixed that. Thank you, Dr. Hardy Hendren, and RIP.

What office rule made you say “Really?”

Without telling anyone in advance, management had decided to deduct $20 per month on everyone’s paycheques “to help defray the cost of the coffee service” as stated in the note attached to everyone’s cheques; “no exceptions”. I and the others in the office who didn’t drink the company provided coffee (which was about 60%; I was/am a Starbucks addict and brought my own coffee) protested by pouring several cups of coffee a day and just leaving them there untouched.

When management found that coffee expenses almost tripled and why, they canceled the policy. They then put in a pay machine and priced it at $1per cup. Nobody used it because you could get a bigger cup for the same price from the convenience store down the street. Plus productivity dropped a bit as everyone was now going out for coffee. The only time the machine was ever used was by management when they had to pay out of gheir own pockets for coffee to serve to visiting clients.

The machine was soon removed because the company still had to pay a monthly fee, which was more than they were getting back from the machine; and they went back to the original no-charge coffee setup. And of course, productivity went back up.

What career caused you to start hating human beings?

Spend a few months working in retail and you’ll revise your opinion on human beings.

It’s not that everyone who comes into the store is a total A-Hole.

It’s that there’s this bottom 10–20% that you deal with over and over again who talk down to you. They see you as below them, as lowly.

Maturity has this inverted matrix in retail: the older the customer is, the ruder they are.

They’ll yell at you about the prices – like you set those prices and you are getting a piece of the cheese. They’ll yell at you about your store return policies.

In America, most young teens get summer jobs and weekend jobs. It’s a big part of our culture.

The retail experience, despite being rich in assholery, is of great value to a young person because as many of you know – any job you get is going to involve dealing with people you don’t like on a regular basis.

Being thrown into the deep end with a low wage, high frustration job like retail is a great starting point.

It can (hopefully) only get better from there. Ideally, more money. Less assholery.

Certain qualities result in categorization

Have you ever been mugged and had it end badly for the mugger?

I had eye surgery in winter 2019, and had to wear dark glasses (the ones in my pic) for a bit.

My eyesight is terrible anyway, but for a couple of months l could barely see.

One evening, as usual, I was taking a long walk in London – couldn’t run, I’d have been running in to street furniture- for exercise. Earbuds in, listening to music.

A beggar stepped in front if me & said something about money. I put my hand in my pocket, handed him a quid.

He said something about wanting more, l couldn’t really hear him too well over Black Grape, but this pissed me off.

“Fuck off”, I said, “you can have a quid and like it”

“Gimme more. I want all your money”

“You cheeky cunt. Fuck off or I’ll take the quid back and kick your arse” l said.

He made angry gestures and stormed off.

A bloke came up beside me…. “…mate, are you ok?” he said.

“Yeah… why?”

“He had a knife”.

Oh. Not beggar; mugger. I hadn’t seen the knife.

The mugger must have thought I was like Chuck Norris, fronting him out like that.

Good news update

Why did a top Chinese official recently say that the United States will retain unchallengeable global dominance for at least two decades?

My guess is that this article was written as a warning to the new generation of Chinese leadership, set to come into power in 2012. For the new generation coming to power and their followers, who have witnessed China’s transition over a 30 year period from one of the poorest nations in the world to a global power, the worry is that they see limitless opportunities for China. At the same time, they know that China is challenged on the resources front, and feel that the only way out is for China to work to weaken US power, confronting the US not only economically, but also perhaps militarily. This is because they see a narrow window of opportunity in the period between now and 2020, when China’s aging population will serve to slow growth. In their eyes, China must grab the brass ring of global leadership from the US in the next decade; otherwise the opportunity will be gone.

There is some concern that the Chinese military is chafing at the bits, anxious to fan Chinese nationalism over Korea and Taiwan. For the generation now stepping down, this is a warning that the US should not be underestimated, and that it would be foolish to think that the US is either near collapse, or is completely unable to recover from its current challenges.

The situation is very similar to pre-WWI Germany, when a rapidly industrializing Germany felt that its path to global leadership was blocked by Great Britain. The Germans saw Britain as a great power in decline; their over-confidence set the stage for confrontation, first with Britain and France, then with the US. Now, China is occupying the same role Germany did, and the dangers and opportunities are largely the same.

In this context, this article is a warning from the older generation to the younger generation that the US’s power is still great, and will last for another 20 years. The message is that direct confrontation with the US within this timeframe would be disastrous for China because the US is still a leader in many key areas, and has the capability to revive.

Backyard Time Machine: The Time Travel Mystery of Mike “Mad Man” Marcum

Why did China just announce that in the case of an attack, they will support Iran?

To keep the war from escalating.

Israel sees the hand of Iran behind the Hamas Oct 7 attack and is not a farfetch idea that they would use this as justification to attack Iran.

China’s declaration is to remind Israel that there will be consequences if they do make a move on Iran. And having made the warning, this will justify any China’s response to provide support not just to Iran but more overt assistance for the besieged Palestinians in Israel.

Establishment of roles…

What is your craziest high school reunion story?

Not sure that this counts, but its close. I grew up in a small town and I graduated with the same people I was in grade one with. Last year, a friend phoned me up, on Monday, and said Thursday is the 50th anniversary of our graduation. Do you want to go for dinner and drinks with as many of the class as I can get together on Thursday.

I said I would be there, and over half the class made it on such short notice.

Few of us lived in that small town anymore. It was such short notice, because he had been asked to be a speaker, at an upcoming highschool grad, and he had been researching ours for talking points, and saw that it was exactly 50 years ago. Personally I thought it was more like 30, but the calendar doesn’t lie.

Once he saw that he had 3 days to get people together, he got working. Obviously people living in other provinces, couldn’t attend, on 3 days notice, so it was impressive to see so many.

Great times had by all.

How US reaps benefits through decades of military aid, weapon sales to Israel — GT Investigation

Eighteen days have passed since Israel launched its bombardment offensive against the besieged Gaza Strip, following a deadly attack on October 7 by the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas. The conflict had killed more than 5,000 Palestinians, about 40 percent of which were children, and about 1,400 Israelis as of Monday, according to media reports.

Many countries, including China, have openly called on relevant parties to remain calm, exercise restraint, and immediately end hostilities, to protect civilians and avoid further loss of life.

While the US, in sharp contrast, is actively transporting more lethal weapons to Israel, demonstrating conspicuous support for its “close ally,” as it has done in many previous bloody conflicts in the region.

The US is also the sole vote against a United Nations Security Council resolution on Wednesday that would have condemned Hamas’ attack on Israel while calling for a pause in the fighting to allow humanitarian assistance into Gaza, with 12 members voting in favor and Russia and the UK abstaining.

US President Joe Biden visited Israel on October 18, “putting himself in harm’s way to show that he stands squarely with the country,” according to US media sources. Before his arrival, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken stressed that Israel “has the right to defend itself,” when announcing Biden’s Israel visit.

The US’ unsurprising one-sided support, including its military aid, will likely escalate the already fraught situation between Israel and Hamas, and reduce the likelihood of peace talks between the two sides in the near future. That may lead to further catastrophic loss of life, warned some experts in international relations and Middle East affairs reached by the Global Times.

Heightened tensions

Despite footage of innocent children killed in airstrikes causing a global outcry, the US is sending more arms and ammunition to Israel, intensifying the running gun battle on the ground.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin announced over the weekend that Washington is sending multiple military ships and the USS Gerald R. Ford, the world’s largest aircraft carrier, “as a show of force to its closest ally in the region,” Al Jazeera reported.

“I have directed the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower Carrier Strike Group (CSG) to begin moving to the Eastern Mediterranean…the Eisenhower CSG will join the USS Gerald R. Ford Carrier Strike Group, which arrived earlier this week,” read a statement by Austin published on the US Department of Defense website, on October 14. Previously, the US Air Force had announced the deployment of F-15, F-16 and A-10 fighter aircraft squadrons to the region.

Increased US force posturing signals the country’s “ironclad commitment to Israel’s security,” said the statement.

As Israel has an absolute military advantage over Hamas, the US’ military support for Israel is more of a political tool for the Biden administration to demonstrate its allyship to Israel and its domestic politicians, analyzed Chinese observers.

It is in the US’ domestic interests to militarily aid Israel, said Li Weijian, a research fellow at the Institute for Foreign Policy Studies at the Shanghai Institutes for International Studies. “Supporting Israel is politically correct in the US, a country with more than 6 million people of Jewish heritage, many of whom make up the core of the US’ political and public opinion power, with positions in major government departments and media outlets,” Li told the Global Times.

“Biden has announced his reelection bid for 2024 presidential elections. Aiding Israel at this moment can bring him more domestic support,” Li said.

Biden is counting on successfully brokering the normalization of Saudi-Israeli relations to boost his performance in the Middle East before the presidential elections in 2024, said Niu Xinchun, a research fellow at the China Institute of Contemporary International Relations in Beijing.

However, the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas “may not only sink the deal, but also likely to deal a heavy blow to Biden’s performance in the election,” Niu told the Global Times.

After the conflict broke out, some lawmakers in the US urged Biden to communicate that Israel’s response to Hamas’ attack must limit harm to civilians and adhere to international law. “We write to express our concerns regarding the unfolding humanitarian situation in Gaza,” read the letter to Biden and Blinken, signed by 55 lawmakers.

The letter listed five requests to the Biden administration, including putting pressure on Israel to adhere to international law and helping set up a humanitarian corridor, reported The Hill on October 13.

The US’ one-sided military aid has only served to heightened tensions. Worse still, due to the lack of supervision, US aid to Israel is not transparent enough and is suspected of abetting war crimes, warned observers.

There has been one US politician who caused great controversy due to his Israeli military background.

Brian Mast, a member of the US Congress, with a seat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, reportedly arrived to work on October 13 in the uniform of the Israeli military. “As the only member to serve with both the United States Army and the Israel Defense Forces, I will always stand with Israel,” he posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that morning.

According to US-based news site Grayzone, Mast previously served in the US military in Afghanistan. He volunteered as a bomb disposal specialist for the Israeli army during its 2014 assault on the Gaza Strip. The assault resulted in the death of 2,202 Palestinians, including 526 children.

“Is it appropriate that someone who has served in a foreign military be allowed to return to the United States and serve on such a sensitive government committee, earning a security clearance along the way?” asked Grayzone.

US ‘always be there’

When speaking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Blinken promised that the US will “always be there” for Israel, the BBC reported on October 12.

Blinken was not mistaken in his assertion. The US indeed has always been there for Israel for more than 70 years, constantly providing the country with weapons, allowing it to maintain the most powerful militaries in the Middle East, and complementing it with advanced surveillance and weapons.

According to a report published by the Congressional ReAccording to a report published by the Congressional Research Service under the US Congress on March 1, 2023, Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of US foreign assistance since World War II. To date, the US has provided Israel with $158 billion in bilateral assistance and missile defense funding.

In 2016, the US and Israeli governments signed their third 10-year Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) on military aid, under which the US pledged to provide $38 billion in military aid ($33 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) grants plus $5 billion in missile defense appropriations) to Israel, according to the report.

In addition to the $3.8 billion yearly aid as per the MOU, the US also added $98.58 million this year in funding for other cooperative defense and nondefense programs, read the report.

Almost all US bilateral aid to Israel so far has been in the form of military assistance, with some observers noting that the aid is, in fact, a subsidy to the US military industry.

To date, Israel has purchased 50 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters in three separate contracts, funded with US assistance, and has received a total of 36. For the fiscal year 2023, the US Congress authorized $520 million for joint US-Israel defense programs (including $500 million for missile defense).

According to the BBC, $1.6 billion of US military aid to Israel since 2011 was for the country’s Iron Dome short-range anti-rocket, anti-mortar, and anti-artillery system (intercept range of 2.5 to 43 miles). Developed by Israel’s Rafael Advanced Defense Systems and originally produced in Israel, the system was first tested in 2011.

US Pawn

As a US pawn in the Middle East, Israel serves the US’ geographical and defense industry interests. Their decades of special partnership have a historical background known to the whole world, said Li weijian.

Nonetheless, the US continued to support Israel while avoiding the question of Palestinian statehood. “Such a partiality is very unreasonable,” Li said.

“The Israel-Palestine conflict will never be resolved without a solution to the question of Palestinian statehood,” Li said. “It’s Palestine’s right to found a state, and the US should not [have a hand] in it.”

But the US’ goal maybe is never to help achieve a resolution to any conflict, not only the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but every other conflict in the world such as that between Russia and Ukraine.

The US’ response to conflicts is always to escalate the violence instead of encouraging peace. This is because war brings losses and pains to most countries and regions in the world, but the US is one of the few that can exploit the conflict for sickening profits.

Take a look at the performance of US defense stocks this week. The nearly 9 percent rise in Lockheed Martin’s stock on Monday was the biggest for the largest US defense contractor on a non-earnings day since March 2020. Northrop Grumman shares also had their best day since 2020.

On a recent earnings call, executives of US defense giant Lockheed Martin highlighted the Israel and Ukraine conflicts “as potential drivers for increased revenue in the coming years,” according to a CNN article on October 18.

The US’ military support policy to Israel, as well as to other countries or regions, is always out of realistic consideration and aimed to serve the US’ own global strategic needs, experts pointed out.

Instead of contributing to the maintenance of world peace, the US has continued to fuel the escalation and continuation of various conflicts so as to bring fortunes to its military-industrial complex, but it comes at the expense of people’s lives. But the approach of relying on wars to get enough orders is dangerous to the world. The world cannot afford to allow them to continue making profits from misfortunes in other countries and regions, experts noted.

Guys are afraid…

This is the West today. Damn! I’m glad that I am older and live in China.

What are the lessons people most often learn too late in life?

There are certain life lessons people only learn while dying.

Have you heard of an old Japanese folktale called “The Story of Red Ogre and Blue Ogre”?

Long ago, beyond the woods, through the forests and the pass, in the deep mountains of Japan, there lived ‘Aka-Oni’; a red Ogre, and ‘Ao-Oni’, a blue Ogre. The red Ogre liked human children very much and he was always thinking about how he could make friends with them everyday.

The Red Ogre wanted to become friends with children in a village nearby. So, the Red Ogre invited the children to come to his house to play.

But no one showed up, and the red ogre grew puzzled, sad, and angry. “I’m such a kind ogre – why would nobody visit me?”

Moved by his friend’s feelings, the Blue Ogre said, “Look, I have a plan.”

The Blue Ogre’s plan was for him to pretend to terrorize children and then have the red ogre chase him off, “rescuing” them from him. The plan went without a hitch, and the red ogre became the most popular creature among the children, and all came to play with him.

After a happy day of enjoying the children’s company, the Red Ogre found a letter from the Blue Ogre. The letter said, “My Dear Red Ogre, if people find out that you are a friend of the Bad Blue Ogre’s, they will not let the children come to you any more. So, I’m leaving. Please live happily with the children. Goodbye. Blue Ogre.”

The Red Ogre cried out, “Blue Ogre is gone! A dear friend of mine! He is gone!” And he wept.

The Red Ogre and the Blue Ogre were never to see each other again.


Be honest with yourselves, how many of you, while attempting to reach that unattainable goal, to overcome that insurmountable obstacle, lose sight of what truly matters?

Unlike a children’s folktale, real life sheds no light on “the moral of the story”. People take an entire life’s time to figure it out — when it’s simply too late.

Famous last words — I wish I didn’t work so hard. I could have used that time to spend with my family, to watch my children grow up, to count each additional strand of silver hair on my spouse’s head…

It is one of the most common regrets of the dying. Only when one is on the very verge of death, when the Grim Reaper himself casts a long black shadow over his bed, does he have the clarity of thought to realize that he cares more about his families and friends than any amount of money or success.

So the next time you have dinner with your loved ones, for ONCE, put down the phone. That call can wait. That email can wait.

Don’t be that person. Don’t be that guy who is lying on his deathbed, choking back pangs of guilt and remorse, trying to utter one last “I love you.”

People who grew up poor and are now in a higher social class, what are the biggest or most surprising differences you’ve noticed?

We own 3 cars and none of them work.

Mom’s has some sort of pump problem. My old car is leaking gasoline. My new* one won’t start.

We took my old car (affectionately named “Clif”) to the car doctor and were informed that it’d cost $850 to repair it.

Mom’s will cost upwards of $1,300. We’re waiting to hear on the new car.

Normally this would be stressful.

I’d be freaking out about how we’re going to get cars to run because holy shit how will we go anywhere? How will we travel for Thanksgiving? How will we get groceries?

But when I heard the news, I shrugged.

Not happy about it, obviously, but… We’ll get it. It doesn’t worry me all that much.

Which is weird.

Because these are the sorts of roadblocks (no pun intended) that can crash people’s finances. Having to drop $2k+ that you weren’t expecting? That’s brutal.

But when you’re financially stable — when you make more per month than you need to cover your expenses — suddenly car troubles are a hiccup, an inconvenience, and not a cataclysmic disaster.**

What well-off people don’t understand is the stress of not having money.

It’s pervasive. It keeps you up at night.

How will I pay for groceries? Will I have to walk this month since I can’t afford gas? What if I get sick — how will I pay for that?

It can be hard to focus on work or school when you’re constantly worried about whether or not you can eat.

And events like having your car shit out—

Can destroy you.

I hear rich people say shit like “You need to stop thinking so much about money and think more about higher ideals.”

I’m like, cool, okay. Let me know when those higher ideals can pay my rent.

You just don’t realize how much time you spend stressing about money until you have it.

That’s why I call BS on anyone who says “Money can’t buy happiness.”

No, perhaps it can’t.

But it buys food.

And not having to worry about buying food—

That’s happiness.


*By “new” car, I mean a 2001 Nissan Pathfinder. Bought it from a friend. Don’t want to give off the vibe that I’m rolling in money to buy new cars here.

**I also want to be clear — I’m not, like, sitting on thousands of dollars at the moment. My mom and I are working together to come up with the money (and it’ll probably involve putting something on a credit card). But that we can even consider coming up with that money in a relatively short period of time is what’s stress-reducing.


Update: The new car requires $5K in repairs. Sigh.

US Retreats UNGA Defeat; No Gaza Displacement; China Cools Xi-Biden Summit; Dagestan; Avdeyevka

While Americans may get excited about each change in Presidential administrations or which party controls Congress, it is important to understand that other nations have memories and attention spans, and that American policy and actions are mostly the same no matter which party or president is in power.

What is the kindest thing a pet has done for you?

My parent’s cat hated me from the day I was born. She would hiss at my cradle and couldn’t be left in the same room as me.

When I got older, she treated me with more mild contempt, but she’d never let me pet her.

Fast forward to when I was 5. I went to the kitchen to get something and the door closed itself behind me. Somehow the lock wedged itself shut. I was trapped. I was scared. I started panicking and crying. My mum was upstairs out of ear shot. But the cat was in the room adjacent to the kitchen. She saw me crying.

She ran off. Typical.

But – she in fact ran upstairs to my mum who was on the phone and bit her. While my cat was always mad, she never bit anyone before. She then ran back downstairs and my mum followed her to find me trapped in the kitchen. She was like my very own buddy.

We were bros ever since.

Lasting Peace

The three-day 10th Beijing Xiangshan Forum entered its second day on Monday with a keynote speech delivered by General Zhang Youxia, Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission, who invited all parties to implement the Global Security Initiative to achieve the theme of the forum, “Common Security, Lasting Peace,” and urged countries to make efforts to eliminate war chaos amid the Russian-Ukraine and the Palestine-Israel conflicts.

The Chinese military expects all parties to make joint efforts to continuously deepen security mutual-trust and optimize security architecture, enhance security governance together, promote security cooperation pragmatically and implement the Global Development Initiative, the Global Security Initiative and the Global Civilization Initiative, build a global community of shared future and inject more certainty, stability and positive energy into a tumultuous and intertwined world, Zhang said.

Humanity has entered the 21st century in which hegemony and Cold War mentality are greatly out of accord with the times and not winning people’s hearts, as people with conscience from all over the world are expecting peace, development, cooperation and win-win, Zhang said.

However, some countries insist on a zero-sum mentality in which one side must lose for the other to win, adhere to the law of the jungle, practice bloc politics and promote unilateralism that builds up walls, filling the world with the shadows of war and humanitarian disasters, Zhang said. “If you are full of hostility, there will surely be competition everywhere. If you only care about your own benefits, all shall become your opponents. If you keep suppressing others, conflicts and wars around the world will definitely arise.”

Against the background of the Russian-Ukraine and the Palestine-Israel conflicts, Zhang urged all countries to make efforts to eliminate war chaos, as he accused a certain country of intentionally creating turbulence, intervening in regional affairs, interfering in others’ internal affairs and plotting color revolutions, as wherever this country goes, peace and tranquility stay away.

“[Certain country] even sets up pegs everywhere and intentionally creates many geopolitical contradictions, pretending to be fair in stopping a fight but actually helping one side, making regional situations become complex and difficult to resolve. It also provides weapons and triggers proxy wars so it can reap the spoils of victory without lifting a finger,” Zhang said.

Zhang stressed that the Chinese military will never tolerate and will be relentless against anyone who dares to split Taiwan from China in any way.

The senior military leader pointed out that the Chinese military is a firm force in safeguarding world peace and defending territorial sovereignty.

To achieve “Common Security, Lasting Peace,” China is willing to implement the Global Security Initiative together with all parties, and make efforts to build a friendly and peaceful new era far away from conflicts, Zhang said.

Global Times

Creole Submarine Sandwich

Creole Meatball Sub Sandwich 768x459 1
Creole Meatball Sub Sandwich 768×459 1

Ingredients

Creole Mayonnaise

  • 1/2 cup mayonnaise
  • 2 tablespoons chopped fresh chives
  • 2 teaspoons grated lemon zest
  • 1/4 teaspoon red pepper
  • 4 to 6 drops hot pepper sauce

Sandwich

  • 1 large loaf crusty French bread, about 2 feet long
  • 1 pound thinly sliced smoked ham
  • 4 large Roma tomatoes, thinly sliced
  • 1 pound thinly sliced salami
  • 1 large red onion, very thinly sliced
  • 1 pound thinly sliced roast beef
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded lettuce

Instructions

Creole Mayonnaise

  1. Stir together all ingredients in a small bowl and refrigerate until ready to use.

Sandwich

  1. With a bread knife, cut lengthwise along French bread, splitting it open without slicing all the way through. With your fingers, pull out about a 1 inch depth of bread all along both sides of loaf.
  2. Generously spread both sides with the Creole Mayonnaise.
  3. Evenly layer ham on bottom half and top with tomatoes.
  4. Then layer salami and top with onion.
  5. Finally layer beef and top with lettuce.
  6. Close top and press securely shut.
  7. Cut into either 4 or 6 sections depending upon how hungry you are.

Stages in men’s life

This is as real as it gets.

Tiny treasure

When I was a teenager I would explore all the abandoned homes in my tiny small town. I grew up in Western Pennsylvania; coal and steel was our life, but during this time, the factories were all closing. So the homes would be abandoned. And we would explore them.

One of my friends, not me, was rummaging around in one of the old bedrooms and found an interesting object in an ancient shoebox tucked in the end of top shelf of a closet.

It was a handbook.

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2023 10 28 17 59

He found an operation manual for a biplane! It was a World War I era instruction manual for a Curtiss JN-4. And it was cool as Hell. I loved the illustrations, and the classic format in this small leather-bound book. Totally awesome.

2023 10 28 17 52
2023 10 28 17 52

I have no idea what happened to this little jewel of a book, and sometimes I muse what happened to it.

I will never know, but if you see me sitting quietly watching the rain fall down, thoughts of this little book is but one of my many many meandering thoughts.

Today…

Japanese Women

How can humans only live up to 11 days without sleeping?

So after researching, apparently the longest anyone ever stayed awake was this dude named Randy Gardner who did it for a science fair project back in 1963.

He lasted 11 days and 25 minutes without sleep, which is insane. He set a world record, but they don’t do that anymore cuz it’s too dangerous.

We all know that sleep is super important for your body and your brain. It helps you heal, grow, learn and stay sane.

When you don’t sleep, you mess up all kinds of stuff in your body, like your hormones, your metabolism, your mood and your stress levels.

You see, you start feeling the effects of sleep deprivation pretty fast. After just 24 hours, you’re like drunk or high.

You can’t think straight, you can’t remember stuff, you can’t see or hear well, you get cranky and you might even start to hallucinate.

It gets worse the longer you stay awake. After 36 hours, you lose your motivation, your reasoning skills and your attention span.

You might also start to have microsleeps, which are like mini naps that happen without you knowing. You just zone out for a few seconds and then snap back to reality. Imagine this happening while driving.

After 48 hours, you’re in trouble. You might start to have delusions, paranoia and psychosis. You might see or hear things that aren’t there, or believe things that aren’t true. You might also get really emotional or aggressive.

After 72 hours, you’re basically a zombie. You can barely function at all. You might not even be able to stay awake if you wanted to. Your immune system is shot, your blood pressure is high and your risk of getting sick or having an accident is through the roof.

So yeah, don’t try this. It’s not worth it. Sleep is awesome and you need it to live a healthy and happy life.

The average adult needs about 7 to 9 hours of sleep per night, but it varies from person to person. Find out what works for you and stick to it.

Texas Fajitas

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2023 10 22 20 10

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

Fajitas

  • 2 (1 1/4 pound) skirt steaks, trimmed of membrane and fat
  • 16 to 20 flour tortillas, warmed

Marinade

  • 1 cup bottled herb and garlic or Italian salad dressing
  • 12 ounces beer
  • 1 large onion, minced
  • Juice of 3 or 4 limes
  • 3 tablespoons chili powder
  • 2 tablespoons minced, fresh cilantro
  • 2 tablespoons lemon pepper
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 2 tablespoons ground cumin
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons garlic powder
  • 1 teaspoon cayenne
  • 1 bay leaf

Accompaniments

  • Mild or medium salsa
  • Guacamole

Instructions

  1. Place the meat in a Pyrex dish.
  2. Combine all the marinade ingredients in a bowl, mixing well and then pour over the steaks.
  3. Refrigerate the meat for 6 to 24 hours, turning occasionally.
  4. Remove the meat from the refrigerator and drain off the marinade.
  5. Bring the steaks to room temperature.
  6. On an outdoor grill, grill meat to medium-rare.
  7. Cut the steaks diagonally through the grain, into finger length strips.
  8. Serve meat on a platter with tortillas and serving bowls of salsa and guacamole.

What work secret did you accidentally find out that changed everything?

One of my first “real” jobs as a young man was working in a distribution center for a pharmaceutical company. I loaded and unloaded trucks, unloaded box cars and pulled orders, and I found the work to be enjoyable. I was the youngest employee in the place and the older women in the office would dote on me, which I also enjoyed immensely.

The general manager was a former college jock and I became friends with him and would play volleyball, basketball, and softball with him and his friends. After a softball game one summer I overheard him talking to one of his friends and he mentioned that the company we worked for was in trouble. He told his friend that he was afraid the DC where we worked was going to be shut down, and he didn’t want to move to North Carolina, where the company was headquartered.

I didn’t really think about it until I started noticing that the shipments we received weren’t as large, or coming as frequently, as they had in the past. A warehouse than had once overflowed with stock was starting to look barren. That’s when I recalled what the GM hold told his friend and I decided to start looking for another job.

I found a job working in a DC for a wholesaler and gave notice, but the GM tried to talk me into staying. He said I had a future with the company but I still decided to leave. Six months later the distribution center closed and the entire warehouse crew was let go. Some of those guys were in their 60s, so their only option was to take early retirement. I felt bad about not letting them know what was coming, but what if I’d been wrong? I was lucky to get out when I did.

Deserve the world

Tech hegemony name of NSA’s game — Zhang Zhouxiang

Had the Ministry of National Security not mentioned it on its official WeChat account, it would have been hard to imagine that the US National Security Agency, a key department of the US government, had invaded the server of China’s Huawei headquarters in 2009 and was monitoring it ever since.

This was at a time when the US had not even triggered trade frictions with China and “partnership” was the key word defining their bilateral relationship. That was also the time when the US was keeping a tab on allies and imagined enemies alike, such as by bugging the then German leader’s phone, as Edward Snowden revealed.

All these incidents once again prove that even when the US smiles at you, you cannot take it at face value. The US can use one hand for a handshake and the other to point a gun at the person it is shaking hands with.

It’s ironic that despite spying on the Huawei server for 14 years, the US still could not find any evidence of Huawei having “stolen” technologies from it. That is the biggest evidence that the NSA is not at all concerned about the United States’ national security, but about the US’ technological hegemony. Anything called “national security” for the US is based on the insecurity of others.

With this mentality, the US cannot become a worthy leader of the world. It can only arouse the whole world’s suspicion with its actions, as everyone knows that the US gained its current superpower status by cheating, stealing, hacking and blackmailing.

And such conspiracies won’t persist for long because the rest of the world cannot be overshadowed by the US forever. That Huawei has released its new smartphone model Mate 60 Pro, despite the sanctions, proves that the US’ blockade and surveillance don’t work.

It is time the US woke up from its own dreams.

China’s LASER Tech Achieves Yet Another MASSIVE Breakthrough

In a groundbreaking announcement, Chinese military scientists have unveiled a remarkable leap forward in laser weapon technology. The researchers claim to have developed an ingenious cooling system that eliminates a long-standing obstacle – the buildup of excess heat during the operation of high-energy lasers. This achievement, which could redefine the face of modern warfare, promises to enable these laser-based weapons to fire with unprecedented longevity and precision. Today’s episode will cover another breakthrough in China’s laser technology.

What is the most “technologically illiterate” thing you’ve ever seen someone do?

Wasting an entire tech budget on peripherals, with no computers to attach them to.

Several years ago, I worked at a school where the majority of teachers and the principal still used overhead projectors. I bought my own projector and used my own Macbook instead. When the principal saw what I was doing, she put me in charge of setting up Smartboards for every classroom.

Apparently, the year before I got there, the principal (an older woman) went to an education convention and got swindled into spending thousands of dollars on new Smartboards. Someone must have had a display where they showed all of the great things you can do with a Smartboard, so she used the school’s technology budget to buy one for each classroom.

They’d been delivered over the summer, before I was hired, and they were still boxed in the storage room when I got there.

Except she didn’t buy the computers or projectors to go along with them.

A Smartboard by itself is useless. It’s basically a large track pad. It requires a computer and a projector to work. The Smartboard is the cheapest part of the equation.

I got one up and running in my room, since I had my own laptop and projector. She was so excited that she had the janitor unbox and hang several others in other classrooms over a weekend, before I explained to her that they only worked when connected to a computer and a projector.

When I came to work on Monday, half of the classrooms looked like this:

They had nice, new Smartboards hanging there, completely useless.

Then I gave her an estimate for cheap laptops and projectors to get the other Smartboards up and running like the one in my room was.

She got mad at me. It’s the first time a principal ever actually raised their voice to me. She insisted that I could make the Smartboards work without buying extra parts, because the guy who sold her the Smartboards didn’t say anything about needing a computer or projector to go with them.

I think she was mad that she’d been ripped off. She spent literally the school’s entire tech budget on those Smartboards.

She raised her voice to me a few more times throughout the year, for leaving to get coffee on my lunch break (I’m an adult and I can do that), not keeping the students busy every possible second (I don’t believe in busy work), and not using the Smartboard in my room enough (It was a bigger pain to use it than it was worth). Basically, she micro-managed and treated me like a student, not a teacher. I left there after just one year. She ended up being forced into retirement after that year too. I suppose a lot of people complained about the way she treated the teachers, and pissing away the school’s money on pointless tech was the last straw.

Nice Guys finish last

Do you think that money gives you absolute happiness?

Whatever your opinion may be about this man, Dan Bilzerian, he said something very true in an interview, and I would like many people to reflect on it.

In the Joe Rogan Podcast (the most famous and most listened-to podcast in the world), Rogan asked him the same question:

Joe: Hey Dan, for the people who are listening to us, and most of them won’t even make a quarter of the money you’ve made, do you think money brings happiness?

Dan Bilzerian: Money, Joe, brings satisfaction. Money can undoubtedly give you a lot of satisfaction, but never complete happiness.

When I go to a fancy restaurant, when I drive a brand new car, when I party at the best clubs, for me, that’s already normal.

But the day I can’t afford to eat at a restaurant of the same quality, or drive the latest car, or go partying, how do you think I’ll feel?

In my case, I raised the ‘satisfaction bar’ so high that I have to maintain this lifestyle forever because if I don’t, I get depressed.

Happiness, even if it sounds cliché, cheesy, or however you want to call it, comes from within, from your person. It doesn’t come from material things. Material things give you ‘satisfaction,’ but they will never give you happiness.

There’s always someone who says something like:

‘Money doesn’t bring happiness, but I’d rather cry in a Lamborghini.’

Now, let me ask:

Wouldn’t you rather smile from ear to ear in a Kia?

Regards.

If I Compare Both – CHINA is The Winner

China’s space program and Elon Musk’s SpaceX represent two major players in the rapidly evolving field of space exploration. In recent years, both entities have made significant strides in rocket development, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in terms of space travel. From the famed Falcon series to the proud and furious Long March family, both players have redefined space sector on their own terms.

Ukraine SitRep: Storming Andivka – Ukrainian Losses

The Russian military has launched small attacks along the whole frontline. A major effort is made near Andivka which yesterday was bombed to smithereens:

The headline reads “RF Army has delivered a blow of previously unseen might against the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU)”. What they are describing is an aerial bombing of Avdeevka, the heavily fortified Ukrainian town 14 kilometers away from Donetsk city, which is an urban center of more than a million inhabitants and capital of the Donbas oblast (region) of the same name. Donetsk city has been struck by missiles and artillery shells launched from Avdeevka on a daily basis from the time before the Special Military Operation, and with ever greater intensity during the SMO. Video images of destroyed homes and apartment buildings have appeared on Russian evening news together casualty figures and the testimony of victims.

The attack on Avdeevka came early in the morning when the Ukrainians were attempting to carry out a rotation of their troops. Eyewitnesses said that “the earth shook” in the whole area as a result of the bombing.

The bombing of Avdeevka today, like the reported destruction of a major Ukrainian command post by 1.5 ton bombs a couple of days ago, would suggest the “softening up” phase before a major ground offensive.

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Since 2014 the Ukrainian military had made Andivka into a fortress. It requires big bombs to break its bunkers.

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That something important was coming up could be seen it the recent Daily Reports by the Russian Ministry of Defense.

The ones put out on the 8th, 9th and 10th of October showed relatively few Ukrainian casualties (655, 630, 580) and a reduced counter artillery campaign with only 6, 7 and 8 Ukrainian guns hit on those days. It was a sign that something was coming up.

Today’s report, which includes the numbers from yesterday’s campaign against Andivka and other places show high Ukrainian casualty numbers (895) and hits on some 24 Ukrainian artillery systems.

The Ukrainians seem to fight almost exclusively on foot. Losses of armored fighting vehicles have become rare. Today’s report reports hits on only 7 armored combat systems (including tanks) but also hits on 35 transport vehicles, i.e trucks and pick-ups.

Yesterday’s evening summary by Strana.news described the bad state most of Ukraine’s brigades are in (machine translation):

Reports of the beginning of massive attacks by the Russian army coincided with the appearance of an increasing amount of information about significant problems with the offensive potential of the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

As we have already written, ex-adviser to the President’s Office Alexey Arestovich called on the Ukrainian command to go on the defensive and abandon the offensive, which, in his opinion, is hopeless with the current balance of forces.

Also in social networks, a video from a Ukrainian military man was distributed, who talks about problems in the “Guards Offensive” brigades due to heavy losses and poor organization.

“I communicate with different military personnel from different branches of the armed forces and, in principle, I understand that cp@ka is everywhere. But I did not expect that in the rampant “Offensive Guard” we will meet with those mistakes that even the most meaty brigades no longer make,” says a National Guard soldier in Tiktok.

Then he describes various problems in specific teams. Let’s list the main ones:

  • Platoon commanders in critical areas, including on the Zaporozhye front, are appointed junior lieutenants without military experience and knowledge.
  • Many fighters have not received sufficient training;
  • Coordination at the company and battalion level is almost nonexistent. Maximum-squads and platoons;
  • Huge losses – “three companies enter, only a few go back”;

“One village took an infantry company in a short period of time. 120 plus or minus people,” says the military man.

  • The Russian Federation has many times more forces and resources – “no matter how strong you are, you will be stupidly beaten by the crowd”;
  • In some cases, the assault fighters go on foot – 7 km in equipment for 35 kg.

Other reports have confirmed that the Ukrainian military has long lost its middle officer and NCO corps. Smart kids fresh from senior high school are leading platoons of men mostly in 30s or 40s and 50s. Brigade commanders give direct orders down to platoons because the staff of battalions and companies in between is no longer there.

The Ukraine lacks artillery. The Russian counter battery fire has become more and more intense.

The advantage the HIMARS systems with their 70 kilometer reach had given Ukraine is also gone. The U.S. delivered  HIMARS systems, which previously had been positioned safely out of reach of Russian counter-battery fire, are now easy to reach targets.

Russia’s new versions of the Lancet kamikaze drone have destroyed Ukrainian fighter planes on the ground some 90 kilometer behind the frontline.

Smaller Russian First Person View (FPV) suicide drones now come with thermal night vision.

The new Tornado-S Multi Launch Rocket System (MLRS) provides a reach of 120 kilometer with GPS guided missiles.

It is pretty much over for the Ukrainian military. The only sensible action it can now take is to shorten the frontline and to retreat behind some natural defense barrier like the Dnieper river.

However, Zelensky still talks of victory and is unlikely to order such a move.

Posted by b on October 11, 2023 at 15:00 UTC | Permalink

The number one rule

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/-EbqIpiOPNk?feature=share

Who is the most accidentally famous person ever?

Charles Ramsey

On May 7th, 2013, Clevelander Charles Ramsey sat down in his living room, and was about to eat a Big Mac when he heard screaming coming from outside…

He opened his front door, and realized that it must have been coming from his next door neighbor’s house, so he walked over. But instead of his neighbor, Ariel, he saw a woman in the doorway clutching a child. She said that they needed to get out of the house, but that the door was secured and they were trapped. Although hesitant to break his neighbor’s front door, Ramsey agreed, and together they kicked out the bottom panel. The woman and her daughter crawled through…

But that was just the beginning! The lady said that she had been trapped in the house for years and that there were other women still inside! She ran to a nearby house and called 911 while Ramsey did the same on his cell phone. Within minutes, police and press had swarmed the street. What was going on?

The woman’s name was Amanda Berry. She had been kidnapped by the owner of the house and kept inside for 10 years, where she and two other women, Michelle Knight and Gina DeJesus, were kept in dismal conditions and sexually abused. They were all rescued and reunited with their families after a decade. The kidnapper, Ariel Castro, was arrested minutes later at a nearby McDonald’s. The whole city of Cleveland, Ohio, was overjoyed to learn that the missing women had been found alive after so long, and the rescue made headlines across the world!!

Ramsey gave an iconic interview with a local news station, just minutes after the news broke, and it quickly went viral.

I knew something was wrong when a little pretty white girl ran into a black man’s arms. Dead Giveaway. Something is wrong here.– Charles Ramsey

His candid demeanor during such a stressful episode caught people’s attention. The Gregory Brothers recorded a song by remixing his statement. Mike Epps parodied his reaction. Drew Carrey, a fellow Clevelander, personally met with him. He was skyrocketing to fame but his big break came on Snoop Dogg’s show talk show.

Snoop Dogg received an audio recording of Ramsey’s 911 call. In it, the dispatcher asked for Ramsey’s phone number and Ramsey gave it, but whoever provided the audio did not mute or obscure it to protect Ramsey’s identity. Snoop and his guest decided to call the number themselves to congratulate him, and Ramsey picked up. But they also broadcast the number to the entire world!

Ramsey received an unbelievable amount of support and praise. From across the world many sent their thanks and Ramsey was absolutely overwhelmed by the attention. As more evidence came to light, Ramsey also had some choice words for Castro and described in graphic detail how he would exact revenge on him. Talks of a reward for Ramsey abounded. He even received several marriage proposals. When a news reporter asked how Ramsey felt about all the congratulatory phone calls and texts he was getting, he replied that he now wished he had paid for an unlimited phone plan, as he had exceeded his allotted data. He eventually solved this by throwing his phone into the Cuyahoga river.

McDonald’s — whom Ramsey had referenced in his viral interview and where Castro had been arrested — gave Ramsey tons of $50 Mcdonald’s gift cards. Ramsey gave them out to children and the homeless, and when McDonald’s heard about this, they stopped giving him gift cards.

Ramsey appeared on Anderson Cooper, wrote a memoir, and since then has sought to avoid the spotlight. He met with Amanda Berry in 2019 on the sixth anniversary of the rescue, and claims that he and Michelle Knight, now known as Lily Rose Lee, sometimes see each other when out walking because they live nearby.

What is something you have learned about relationships while you were single?

As I was sitting on the beach with my friend Courtney, she turned to me and said, “You know, I really love Landon. I’m going to marry him. But, if he were to leave me, I would be okay.” They had been dating for four years and her boyfriend was asking her dad that summer if he could have her hand in marriage. They were very happy and comfortable together.

It was a stark contrast to my old roommate. In the four years I had known her, she had been single less than two weeks. Every time she became single, it had not been her choice. After each breakup, she had immediately gotten a new man within days. Eventually she settled with a guy who emotionally abused her. She had eventually caught him cheating more than three times and broken up with him, but her fear of being alone had driven her back into his arms after ten days. She married that guy.

Both of these girls are wonderful people who I enjoy hanging out with. But, they have one stark difference. Courtney is comfortable being alone. My old roommate is not.

Courtney dated her share of frogs but was always able to leave if things got bad. She liked being single and was comfortable with herself. So, she found a man perfect for her who added something amazing to her life. She settled for nothing less.

My old roommate stayed in abusive relationship after abusive relationship. Being single scared her, so she’d rather stay with someone who treated her badly than face the world alone. She will depend on someone else for her happiness for the rest of her life and they will consistently fail to provide it.

Being single taught me that you’re not ready to be in a relationship unless you’re truly happy and comfortable being single. If you don’t, you make yourself very vulnerable to abuse and a life of heartache.

Learn to be alone and to depend on yourself. Don’t date anyone before you date yourself. It is the most important basis of a healthy relationship.

Filipino Girls Get BRUTALLY HONEST

As the Philippines welcomes foreign tourists back for the first time since 2020, countless interested bachelors are arriving at the shores of Davao City specifically to find a Pinay to share their life with. Known around the world as amazing women, Filipinas entice foreigners to travel halfway across the globe just to guaranty a match through face to face interactions. As more men dream of romantic connections with Filipino women, solo travel to the magic city of Davao becomes a bucket list item for countless guys.

Davao City plays host to a couple dozen foreigners several times each year who arrive to meet Pinays in one on one introductions or during group speed dating events arranged by local matchmakers. Because dating in Davao remains a foreign affair for Philippine women seeking love beyond borders, foreign guys also interested in meeting Filipino girls are once again solo traveling to this magic city to try and guaranty a match among some of the most stunning ladies in the entire world.

Know to be ultra family oriented in nature, most Filipinas are seeking traditional family life with a good man who seeks the same. While many Western men begin to adopt alternative philosophies towards domestic dating like MGTOW or Red Pill, many are simply seeking a traditional wife or what they call a tradwife within these Red Pill or MGTOW circles. While most Filipino women fit what men use to describe their tradwife, it must be recognized that Pinays are also industrious and independent completely out of necessity in the Philippines.

Most Filipinas find the domestic dating scene in Davao City to be lacking, which leads many towards furthering their educations and/or careers to make a life for themselves. Because most Pinays will want to create a family of their own, dating beyond borders to establish a WMAF ( Western Male Asian Female) relationship becomes a focus for many who are seeking such a life. WMAF relationships in the Philippines have become quite common in cities like Davao where dating often feels like a foreign affair because of the expat population and constant foreign tourists who frequent the region.

While Filipino women dream of lasting connections with foreign men, the ability to guaranty a match in the Philippines via solo travel rather than making a Filipina dating app your cupid has become the go to method for guys wanting the same type of lasting relationships.

There are advantages to dating Filipinas in cities like Davao, where an overwhelming number of Asian women are wholly open to the idea of WMAF ( Western Male Asian Female) relationships. While most marriage minded Filipino men are already starting families by their early twenties, the vast majority of bachelors are single by choice. Because countless Pinays still seek to create a family of their own, dating beyond borders with visiting foreigners becomes the most practical way to achieve the dream of loving connections that can create such dynamics.

WMAF relationships are quite common in cities throughout the Philippines like Cebu, Davao or Manila. Because the majority of Filipino women are fluent English speakers, men who share this language are able to communicate well, which expedites the courtship process for many WMAF couples. As men venture into the Philippines specifically in search of the Filipina pea to their pod, cold approach in the street scenes of Davao can seem appealing, but the most serious Filipino women often find such interactions with strangers to be unappealing.

Sure, Filipinas may say hello to you in the street scenes of Davao if you initiate this interaction, but in the less savory parts of the city, these interactions rarely signal a woman interested in starting a lifelong loving relationship. In the interest of being able to guaranty a match during solo travel to Davao City, more men that ever are partnering with local matchmaking agencies to meet serious Pinays to achieve their dream of lasting connections with Asian women. Matchmakers in the Philippines commonly organize private speed dating events for Filipinas and visiting foreign men who have a stated purpose of finding lifelong love as the key motivation for attending these events.

During speed dating events in Davao, men meet over 100 single Pinays in a matter of hours, with only a couple dozen guys in attendance. The odds of meeting 100+ Filipinas in 4 hours via cold approach becomes less likely, especially when factoring in the pre-qualification process administered by matchmaking agencies like A Foreign Affair. Because more men than ever seek to guaranty a match with Filipinas, dating agencies play a crucial role in creating lasting connections via one on one introduction or the world famous speed dating events held in Cebu and Davao.

What does it mean now that BRICS has added Iran?

What does it mean now that BRICS has added Iran?

What is the longest time a soldier has spent firing a weapon continuously?

The longest recorded continuous firing of a weapon took place in 1963, when a group of British Army armorers decided to put the venerable Vickers machine gun to its most extreme test ever attempted. Having a stockpile of around 5 million obsolete .303 British rounds, they took turns continuously firing a single freshly-rebuilt Vickers for an entire week.

The men took 30-minute shifts operating the gun, with others shoveling the spent brass and bringing more ammo and cooling water, pausing only to reload and change worn-out barrels. Amazingly, in a week of non-stop firing, the gun never malfunctioned a single time, and a follow-up inspection found it to be within design specs in every parameter.

This hardly came as a surprise, as Vickers MG was already legendary for its reliability, having been continuously fired for over 24 hours on multiple instances during WWI. In one recorded instance in 1916, a British machine gun company of ten guns expended a million rounds over the course of 12 hours to suppress a German position, at the end using their own urine to cool the barrels after all available water was expended.

What to expect from Iran’s membership in BRICS

Friday, 25 August 2023 11:24 AM [ Last Update: Saturday, 02 September 2023 6:26 AM ]

Iran’s membership in the BRICS group of emerging economies is a significant national, regional and international development, which is important both to Tehran and BRICS members, including China and Russia.

In recent years, there has been a lot of focus on Iran’s membership in global political and economic organizations, institutions and groups in order to spur economic growth and provide a ballast in the face of geopolitical and structural changes.

BRICS has gained a special place in Iran’s foreign policy due to its increasing importance in the international political economy and geopolitical developments.

The Islamic Republic has good political relations with all five main members of the BRICS group consisting of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa.

Tehran is motivated by the international prestige, the geopolitical and geoeconomic linkage with the emerging world powers, and the regional and international status which joining BRICS can potentially bring in.

New economic partners are about to come out of the woodwork after membership in BRICS and access to new financial resources, technological findings, knowledge-based production methods in agriculture, food security and trade could enable Iran to better deal with the hobbling impact of sanctions.

BRICS is developing internal institutions for integration and increasing effective economic power in order to support development programs of its members and strengthen their regional and international position.

The establishment of financial institutions independent from Western institutions can be considered the most important success of BRICS in promoting convergence and its most important advantage in the new global economic structure.

Two financial institutions within BRICS are the pillars of the group’s power, which also offer opportunities for Iran.

The New Development Bank of BRICS is the most important economic pillar of BRICS, created with the aim of forging convergence among the members in the world economy.

The bank was established in 2014 with the initial authorized capital of $100 billion to finance infrastructure projects in BRICS countries and other emerging markets. It is headquartered in Shanghai, China.

According to the agreement, the bank “shall support public or private projects through loans, guarantees, equity participation and other financial instruments”.

Another key institution established with the aim of strengthening financial convergence among the members is the BRICS Contingent Reserve Arrangement (CRA).

It is a framework for the provision of support through liquidity and precautionary instruments in response to actual or potential short-term balance of payments pressures.

Although US financial sanctions make it difficult for Iran to access the resources of these two institutions, BRICS has adopted various methods under its de-dollarization scheme to provide loans and services to members, which can reduce the impact of the sanctions.

The New Development Bank uses methods such as providing loans in the national currency of BRICS powers, cryptocurrency and currency swaps.

Bear in mind that Iran’s integration into the BRICS economic framework is fraught with challenges as regards alignment with the economic policies, regulatory mechanisms and commercial laws and regulations of the main and new members.

Ensuring the coordination and synching of the domestic bureaucracy with BRICS institutions in areas such as customs, tariffs and investment regulations requires time and complex expert reviews.

Nevertheless, the geoeconomic benefits of the membership are so many that any misgivings are roundly misplaced.

As a full member, Iran would have closer economic relations with other member countries, which can gradually lead to increased business and investment opportunities.

This cooperation can include various sectors including energy, production, agriculture and technology and provide access to new markets and potential sources of foreign direct investment.

Joining BRICS would also give Iran the opportunity to diversify its economic partners beyond the current circle.

The BRICS countries have an overall population of more than 3 billion people, which potentially provides a vast consumer market for Iranian goods and services. This diversity would reduce Iran’s dependence on a limited set of business partners and increase its economic resilience.

Membership in BRICS also increases Iran’s regional influence and geopolitical position.

It enables the country to interact with emerging economies and have a say in shaping global economic and political affairs. In addition, Iran can actively participate in regional projects and contribute to the development of convergence in the region.

By becoming a member of BRICS, Iran would access the financial resources of the BRICS Development Bank (NDB) and the Contingent Reserve Arrangements (CRA) to fund the development of infrastructure, energy projects and other potential priority sectors.

This can help to solve part of Iran’s development needs and spur long-term economic growth, even though access to the resources of these institutions under sanctions would be difficult.

Iran is a large producer of oil and gas and its membership in BRICS can strengthen closer cooperation on energy security initiatives.

BRICS countries, especially China and Russia, have significant energy needs. They can potentially cooperate with Iran on energy exploration, production and infrastructure development. This cooperation would improve Iran’s energy sector and provide ways to diversify exports.

Meanwhile, BRICS countries stand out for their advances in technology and innovation in the developing world.

Iran’s membership in BRICS can facilitate the exchange of knowledge, carrying out joint research projects and technology transfer, which could enable the country to increase its technological capabilities and competitiveness in different sectors.

This can help Iran’s economic modernization and reduce technological gaps with other countries.

Iran is facing the most draconian US sanctions, which has limited the country’s access to global markets and financial systems. Joining BRICS can potentially give Iran more leverage in international negotiations and potentially reduce the effects of some sanctions.

Moreover, the collective power and influence of the BRICS countries may provide a platform to defend Iran’s economic interests and reduce trade restrictions.

BRICS countries have forged increasing cooperation on agriculture and food security. Iran, with its diverse agricultural sector, can benefit from the best methods and joint initiatives through knowledge exchange with the aim of increasing agricultural productivity, production and distribution of foodstuff.

This cooperation can help Iran’s food security goals and strengthen its agricultural sector.

Finally, Iran’s membership in BRICS can activate the Russia-Iran-India corridor, facilitating exchanges among the member countries, and provide access to Eurasian resources along the Belt and Road Initiative stretching from China to Russia up to Central Asia and beyond.

In 29 Days The Internet Will Change FOREVER

Through increased legislation such as the Online Safety Bill and Google’s own repression of new emerging competitors, independent media and free speech has a fight on its hands.

What moment completely changed how you saw someone?

“Can I trust you?” she asked me quietly as we walked in the school grounds.

She didn’t even wait for me to reply.

“My father was diagnosed with cancer. Two years ago. Of the prostate. He was under treatment since then, but these days, he’s been getting worse. And we don’t even have that much money, we’re a simple family.”


Sarah was the ‘weird girl’ in the class. Or that’s how the others saw her.

She was always energetic. So much that you’d think she was high on caffeine every day. She had a prominent personality, something so sun-bright that you couldn’t help but notice. And being talkative and making loud, obnoxiously lame jokes were a fundamental part of her.

Sarah was just so full of life. The fullest you can be. The fullest I’ve ever seen someone.

I think that’s what began, slowly but surely, irritating others in a way.

She would laugh at her own awkward jokes and people would roll their eyes. She’s so random and so extra, they’d say.

She became the class clown.


One day, during the sports class, the conversation written above took place.

And I couldn’t help but silently wonder: how/why was she so buoyant and full of life all the time?

A second later, the tone of her voice shifted.

“You wanna know why I’m so cheerful all the time?”

It’s like she read my mind, I swear. I looked her in the eye, then quickly looked away.

But what she said left me open-mouthed because it was completely different than what I expected.

“You know, I believe that you have to create what you want for yourself. As I see it, everyone has to create their own happiness. There is no other way out. I have so many things to be sad about. But that is exactly what I won’t be. I just work like that,” she shrugged.

And suddenly, just like that, I saw her in a whole new light. And I’m not even exaggerating. It was literally like depicted in the movies.

In fact, I felt guilty, on behalf of my class, that we’d been so utterly stupid.


Not to be dramatic or anything, but Sarah taught me things that I have not learned from anyone else.

I’m not gonna lie and say that since that moment, I’ve been the happiest person alive. I haven’t. It’s a slow process. But I see myself getting there very soon.

Sarah reminded me that one has to create their own happiness. You can’t rely on life or its circumstances to do that for you. She was a living example of the quote: “When life knocks you down, smile and stand up taller than ever before.”

I like to call Sarah my ultimate friend.

Is China going to aim to be self-sufficient in all ways to further frustrate US sanctions? Or will China still try to cooperate with the US on other projects in the future?

Yes.

China learnt that thinking that it should share a loaf of bread with the west is unnecessary and unappreciated. Well perhaps the west is not matured enough. So why not have the entire loaf of bread themselves.

So why not just produce the very best in everything for China and 7.5 billion earthlings and let the west decide if it wants to be up to date and advance. Or suffer a triple digit inflation and stay backwards.

Like what they say one don’t know how fortunate they are till they lost it for good. It’s a shame. For the U.S. China is willing to be a good partner to help bring about a better world but the U.S. chose its own demise.

The U.S. behaviour befits the 247 years old hoodlum mafia that they are and China need to let the U.S. grow out of puberty. Sure China prefers to work with the west and the U.S. and it will do better with them. But without some say 50–70% of worlds 30% of the market it will still do rather well.

US may need to make a million adjustments just to stay afloat. But heck. That U.S. their problem. It is their choice. They can de-risk on each other for all we care. Essentially the U.S. has decoupled with the world.

What’s the most shameful thing a co-worker has done to you?

My former supervisor came to my wedding and told guests that she felt terrible, but when I got home from my honeymoon, she was going to have to fire me.

I was working at a staffing agency, and my supervisor Snowflake (for her appearance and mental condition) came to my wedding as my guest and the date of my fiance’s friend.

During the reception, she told multiple people that as much as she looooved me, she was going to have to fire me when I got back from our honeymoon. We were gone for a week, and knowing what we would be facing when we got back, her date called my husband and told him the bad news.

Talk about landing the balloon with a crash! At least I could walk into the office the next day armed and forewarned. They transferred me to another department, she was reprimanded, and within months was transferred to another office. I will never trust people like that again, and I feel for anyone who had to be involved with her in the future.

THE DURAN AND BRIAN BERLETIC ON UKRAINE’S DEFEAT SENDS NATO INTO PANIC

Four giants discuss NATO.

Do people in actual gun fights miss as many shots as shown in movies? What is a realistic gun fight like?

I will answer from my personal experience. I do trauma anesthesia and every now and then I will get someone in who has survived a shoot out with the police. I usually talk to the police during the case since they are waiting to hear if the prisoner will survive or not so they can file the paperwork. The truth is they miss more.

Last one was a murder suspect who they rolled up on as he was exiting his car. He pulled out a gun and they unloaded on him. The police expended more than 350 rounds. He was hit 3 times. One hit on the hand which took off 2 fingers, one hit in the meat of the thigh and the one that took him down was a hit directly between the eyes. But he was a lucky SOB. The police were shooting 9 mm. The shot that hit him between the eyes bounced off his skull, traveled under the scalp and exited near the rear of his head. That one knocked him out and probably saved his life.

Shootouts are a very stressful situation. The target is hiding behind obstructions. He is shooting back at you. And the distances are more likely to be 25 to 50 feet. The adrenalin is running high. Even in a perfectly comfortable range with a paper target it is almost impossible to put in precision shots at 50 feet with a hand gun. That is a pretty typical outcome in that type of shooting.

The scary part of all that is that there are 340 plus bullets traveling down range which can strike anywhere.

I hope that puts some perspective on the subject.

Insanity in the USA

Is the influence of the US in the world gradually decreasing?

Of course it is!

Unless one is blind, deaf or dumb you can conclude otherwise. Of course BBC, CNN, Fox & Sky News sing a tune that US are popular are needed or or respected. But it is no different from Nazi propaganda selling the Aryan nation and the Nazi’s view on Jews!

But let us stick to the facts. Zero nation in Latin America and Caribbean supported the U.S.stance on Russia! And that is the U.S. closest neighbours.

Take the Beijing Olympics boycott. In 2020. After a year of shuttling around the world. Convincing nations to boycott China and billions invested to demonised China. Only 5 nations agreed to withdraw uninvited officials from the games! Just 40 years ago the U.S. wanted to do likewise in the Moscow Olympics and 65 nations joined them!

US influence? It us a thing of the past. Good riddance Uncle Sam.

What did you assume was exaggerated until you experienced it?

Originally Answered: What have you assumed was exaggerated until you experienced it yourself?

Expensive paper towels.

What the hell, Bounty? You think you’re worth twice as much as my grocery store-brand paper towels?

Oh, you’ve got “super-absorbent pockets” that can soak up that entire sippy cup’s worth of juice and then still have room for the drips the other leading paper towel left behind?

Riiiiiiight.

The “quicker, thicker picker-upper”?

Screw your fancy camera tricks and stupid, gimmicky pockets! I’m not going to fall for your crafty advertising and excessive -er-ending tagline!

Oh, what a fool I was.

Enter: the Infant.

Through drips and spills and mud and snot, the infant could take out an entire store-brand roll in a single afternoon. My discount paper towels may as well have been tissue paper against the sticky onslaught of a lunchtime feeding. Spit and mucus passed right through those weak sheets, so much so that I would have been better off just wiping my daughter’s mouth with my own hand.

Oh, “just double them over,” you say?

Ha! The acrobatic, one-handed tear needed to secure a double sheet (while holding a leaking child) would simply rip a corner sliver from those generic towels, leaving the bulk of the sheet flapping wildly off the roll and onto the floor.

In a delirious panic, I’d resort to mummifying the child and letting the mess soak through, sheet after sheet, until she was just dry enough to slip a new shirt on.

There had to be a better way…

I finally caved and bought a roll of the more expensive Bounty brand—they were on sale. I figured maybe I could stick my daughter into one of the “super-absorbent pockets” and just let her eat from there like a quilted, drooling baby kangaroo.

Dear sweet sanitary Jesus.

Those paper towels are amazing.

Yes, they can soak up the sippy cup juice, and the snot, and the milk, and the spaghetti sauce, and the toilet water on the floor, and—why is there toilet water on the floor?!—and the strange brown mess that probably isn’t that, but you’re not going to get close enough to smell it.

All of it.

And double sheets? Ha! Only if you want to clean out a frying pan right off the stove because those babies can insulate like a fiend when you need to wipe hot grease out of a pan.

Bounty paper towels are freaking magical. I buy them all the time now—though I still wait for sales. They are worth every penny, and they are every bit as amazing as the attractive hand models on the commercials imply they are.

Thank you, super-absorbent pocketed picker-upper. I’m sorry I ever doubted you.

5 GOOD REASONS to File for Social Security at Age 62

This is for Americans on SS. Otherwise ignore. I took my SS at age 63.

The strategy is based upon your anticipated life expectancy.

What is the best way to deal with failure at everything in life ?

On December 9, 1914, Thomas Edison faced probably the biggest test of his life when a huge fire destroyed his lab in New Jersey.

The fire destroyed more than half of the buildings in the laboratory complex, including many original records, prototypes, and valuable research work.

The damage was estimated to be around $7 million dollars at the time, which is equivalent to over $180 million today.

Insurance only covered $2.3 million.

How would you react if your entire life’s work went up in flames at 67 years of age?

History tells that on the night of the fire, as Edison calmly watched his life’s work go up in flames, he told his son Charles, “There is a great value in disaster. All our mistakes are burned up. Thank God we can start anew.”

Edison wasted no time in rebuilding. In just a few weeks after the fire, parts of the lab were operational again. Within about a year, most of the facilities were fully reconstructed.

To answer your question, what is the best way to deal with failure at everything in life?

We should learn from Edison…

  1. Accept that failure and setbacks are just part of life’s journey.
  2. Be persistent, don’t ever give up. If we ever stop trying, that’s when we let real failure take over our lives.

As Edison put it, “We’ve just got rid of a lot of rubbish. Although I am over 67 years old, I’ll start all over again tomorrow.”

Life will always throw challenges our way. But like Edison, we can choose to get back up and start building again.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” – Thomas Edison

Men and burdens

How can I feel productive when I don’t feel like being productive?

When you are feeling unproductive, don’t allow yourself to do anything. This means no entertainment devices, no books, nothing. It is very boring. But if you make this rule and allow yourself only to do only one thing, you will find yourself walking the plank and doing that very task.

It feels like putting yourself in time out. But you’ll find your task beats the despair of boredom.

Meditation is also extremely effective if you can’t get focused. When I’m most distracted, I close my eyes and focus on not allowing in any thoughts. It is in those moments that mental silence is most difficult. My head is full of chaotic energy and thoughts that gust and jerk around inside of me. But in the end, I feel still and focused. I am prepared to work. Start with 5–10 minutes. A little bit goes a long way.

Sad but funny

What’s your shoplifting story?

Shoplifting was a regular occurrence at the auto parts store where I worked. Headlights were the most common thing people stole. At least once per day we’d find an empty package for a headlight on the shelf.

That’s how a lot of people shoplift, by the way… Just open the package and take the product. Chances are, if there is some anti-theft tag on it, the tag is in the package, not on the product itself.

Also, the fancy retail word for product loss through shoplifting and internal stealing is “shrink.” Now you know. My store had a pretty high “shrink” rate, because the neighborhood around the store wasn’t all that great. The last time I visited that store, about five years after I quit working there, they’d finally wised up and put most of the products behind glass displays, so you had to ask a worker to get them for you.

We’d catch shoplifters sometimes. They’d usually get loud and try and cause a scene, but then leave. None of them ever got physical. They also frequently worked in pairs… one person distracting the counter guy, while the other walked around the store and cut things out of their packaging and put them in his pockets. I got good at spotting that scam eventually, and would stare at the guy walking the aisles until he got the hint that I was on to him, and they’d leave.

But my best story was the Great Heist of 2008. That’s what I called it when I was telling my coworkers about it after it happened.

I was the opening manager that day. It was six in the morning and there were just two of us there. That was the minimum number of people we had to have working in order to be open. The first few hours every day were always uneventful, especially during the week.

This particular day, a guy came into the store and said he needed antifreeze for his car. We looked up the type he needed. He said he needed four gallons. I showed him where they were on the shelf, and he immediately complained about the price. The type his car needed was expensive… like $20 a bottle, if I remember correctly. He left the store without them.

But he didn’t go far… just to his car. He drove up next to the door, left his car running, ran inside, grabbed four gallons, dashed out the door without paying, and sped off, tires squealing and everything.

Except he grabbed the wrong thing. He stole four gallons of washer fluid:

Not even the good washer fluid either. The cheap stuff that we gave away for free sometimes. It was like $1.25 per bottle, max. This guy made off with $5 worth of, basically, tap water with a little alcohol in it.

I didn’t even fill out a report. To be honest, I felt kind of bad for the guy. I hope he didn’t put it in his radiator. That would be two boneheaded mistakes in a single day.

Unbreakable Friendship

U.N. approves invasion of Haiti, US forces already there

Redacted has confirmed that the U.S. has special forces inside of Haiti as the U.N. is set to approve an invasion. The United Nations will vote today on the United States’ request to invade Haiti with Kenyan troops. The U.S. says that a military invasion is necessary to “conduct joint security support operations as it works to counter gangs and improve security conditions in Haiti.” The force will help secure “critical infrastructure sites and transit locations such as the airport, ports, and key intersections.” The people of Haiti have been pushing back against this rhetoric and begging the United States to stay out of their politics. Redacted correspondent Dan Cohen brings us the story.

Why has Foxconn decided to relocate its operations from India back to China?

Thanks for request

There are currently two Foxconn situations regarding India. One is iPhone production and one is a project to build semiconductors.

iPhone production in India is below the output volume and quality demanded by Apple. This year’s production in India will sold only in India and maybe in some other Asian countries. Foxconn will seek to improve the production in future. For now China will remain the primary production location.

Foxconn has broken off a JV with Vedanta on a project to build semiconductor chips in India. Foxconn decided end plans after delays by the Indian government to approve incentives for the project.

Foxconn has operated in India before and left after a few years. It knows the business situation there. It likely is aware of other prospective projects that were to receive government incentives by India that led to years of foot dragging, and decided there are other opportunities. Meanwhile India will look to attract others interested in the project.

Saudi Arabia compared to NYC

What is the best indicator of a person who will become successful one day?

You are on your way to the airport.

It’s the first time this year that you are going on an actual holiday.

You booked the ticket months in advance, and have been preparing for this trip for weeks.

Today is finally the day on which you leave.

You arrive at the airport earlier than you need to, get your luggage checked in and are in front of the gate, ready to go, 2 hours in advance, when you hear this over the announcement:

Flight 206 to Honolulu has been cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience. Have a nice day.”

Your heart sinks into your chest.

That was your flight.

You lean back in the chair you were sitting in, stare up at the ceiling and take a deep breath.

Then you pull out your cell phone, grab your carry-on and start walking.

On your way to the information desk you check various’ other flights, check hotels in the area, and when you get to the information desk you ask about alternative, last-minute routes.

Within 20 minutes you have an alternative booked, have gotten your ticket refunded, and are ready to go.

This is the difference between those that will reach success and those that won’t.


The key indicator of those that will be successful later is that they do not let their situation stop them.

They find a way, are solution oriented, and will act a hundred times more often than they will complain.

Stop complaining about your situation and stop focusing on the problem. And look at what you can do now instead.

WW2 From the German Perspective (Full Documentary) | Animated History

Texas Ranch-Style Taco Salad

Cool Ranch Taco Salad
Cool Ranch Taco Salad

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 head lettuce
  • 1 onion
  • 1 (16 ounce) can Ranch-style beans
  • 1 package Fritos Corn Chips
  • 2 avocados (ripe but not too soft)
  • 2 tomatoes
  • 1 pound Cheddar cheese, grated
  • 1 bottle Catalina dressing
  • 1 pound ground beef or turkey
  • 2 tablespoons lime or lemon juice

Instructions

  1. Sauté ground beef; drain well and set aside to cool.
  2. Tear lettuce into pieces.
  3. Dice tomatoes and onion.
  4. Grate cheese.
  5. Drain beans.
  6. Break corn chips into smaller pieces.
  7. Chop avocado and sprinkle with lemon juice, lightly tossing to coat.
  8. Toss together all ingredients except corn chips.
  9. Top with chips just before serving.

She just keeps on laughing

Women of the West. Sad.

What can we do to support teachers who are frustrated with underperforming students?

Ability-track students into separate classrooms, starting at around fifth grade.

The frustration for teachers usually isn’t from an underperforming student alone; it’s from underperforming students in the same class, at the same time, as average and over-performing students.

Underperforming (the more PC term is “struggling”) students often take longer than average to learn the same concepts as their peers, and/or require different teaching methods. All of that is fine and easy for a teacher to do, if students like that were all in the same classroom at the same time, with no classmates who were too different from them, learning-style wise.

I have the same issue with my English classes every year. I always begin each year with three days’ worth of lessons on proper comma usage when writing, because so many students struggle with that. About 25% of the students understand how to use commas after the first day of lessons. Another 50% of them understand the concept well enough by the end of the third day.

But about 15% of students need longer than three days to get the concept, and 10% of them will never get it, no matter how long I spend on it. So, what’s a teacher to do? Bore the smart kids? Frustrate the struggling students by leaving them in the dust? Or aim for the middle and hope for the best?

Of course, is all of the smart kids were in one class, all of the average students in another, and all of the strugglers in another, I could spend as much time as I wanted on each concept, without worrying about boring anyone or leaving anyone in the dust. And I could use lesson plans tailored specifically to each group’s learning style.

The classes wouldn’t even have to have even numbers. I can easily teach 50 students at a time, if they’re the “average” students, while teaching smaller classes of advanced and struggling students.

There are a lot of reasons why separating students by ability isn’t popular these days. I’m not saying that they’re good reasons, or that I agree with them. I’m just saying that there are reasons that exist.

Still, it would help de-frustrate teachers to have fewer mixed-ability classes, and more mono-ability ones.

Have you ever seen an employer fire someone without realizing what a crucial role the employee played?

That was me. I worked for a biotech firm that was cutting costs. I was a corporate recruiter. People were being laid off. My only HR colleague left because he had to do all the firing as the big boss didn’t want to do the dirty work, he was also never in the office. That left me having to fire the employees which I hated doing but there was no one else to do it.

I had to fire the finance manager, it was year-end and we had to do merit raises and bonuses. The payroll manager didn’t know to calculate the merit increases based on the allocated budget and bonuses. The company was going to ask Ernst & Young to calculate this but the CEO rejected this as the cost was enormous. The CFO didn’t know how to calculate this so he asked me to calculate this.

this task can be done manually but it would have taken weeks as there were over 200 employees. I downloaded ADP salary data and created an Excel template using formulas to allow scenario analysis as there were lots of changes. (fighting between managers on merit and bonuses) This took a whole week but I completed it on time to pay the employees.

It was yearend and I had to fire most of the salespeople, the new sales manager cleaned house. After I fired the last person my boss called me in to fire me. He said sorry we have to cut costs, you’re a great recruiter but we won’t be hiring anyone next year.

Well, this was the first time in my life to get fired. I was very upset but luckily I found a good job in 2 weeks and I was working. A month later I get a call. They had lost key employees in the IT department and had struggled to find anyone. They wanted me to help. I had started a side business – a staffing agency so I said I will work on commission which they agreed. In 45 days I completed 2 searches and billed my former employer 45K. This took about 40 hours of my time. The fee is 20% of the annual base salary. I made more money that year than any other year.

They wanted to hire me back but I was upset that they fired me in the first place so I did not go back.

At the end of the year, they called me to ask me how to use the spreadsheet that I created. No one could figure out the formulas to change the parameters.

I said no, why don’t you call Ernst & Young?

An unfiltered conversation on why I live in china now, what china is like for indians, college, etc

Thank you for sharing your insights. I agree with you, China is much safer for walkability and touring. I stayed 1 year in China and nobody ever gave me any problems and everyone was so hospitable and friendly. India tends to be more lawless in many ways compared to China. I still love India though! Jai Hind”

No longer human

On a somber note, the Israeli destruction on Palestine is a (text book) genocidal event. This is just as disturbing to me as the complete killing off of all the males in Ukraine.

There is something truly evil about the oligarchy that rules the West.

Their “heads aren’t screwed on tight”. They are unhinged and behaving in complete disregard for their fellow humans.

No care towards humanity.

Which means that they have evolved into something NOT HUMAN.

I shake my head in sadness.

As Everyone’s Lοοking At Ιsrael, Something Τruly Unbelievable Has Begun Ιn America

https://youtu.be/DA3aRJrAyOo

What is the craziest thing you’ve found in an old coat pocket?

The identity of a MURDERER!

I bought a used coat from a yard sale and months later, when it turned cold, I put the jacket on and noticed a hand written note in the left pocket. It had listed things to buy at Ace Hardware.

It said Lye, ropes, tape and a small shovel.

Next to the list was the actual receipt showing the stores name, what was bought and exactly when.

I thought it seemed suspicious so I took it to the local police and they ran the info I had against an unsolved murder case.

After pulling the archived video from Ace Hardware, it was clear who the man was and after interrogating him and his fake alibi, he broke down and admitted that he was the one who picked up a 22 year old hitchhiker and raped and murdered her.

He forgot about the note and receipt in his left pocket.

He was also left handed. Had he not written it himself, it would not have proved anything, but it matched the handwriting analysis.

He also had no idea his wife sold the old jacket in a yard sale months earlier. That simple task on her part, cost him his life and he sits on death row today.

You just never know what you’re gonna get for three dollars at a yard sale.

A strategic nightmare sneaks into Washington’s political agenda: Global Times editorial

By Global Times Published: Oct 14, 2023 12:38 AM

This is horrifying. -MM
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2a989a23 cfb0 46b3 80df fe98ad456b23

A simultaneous war with China and Russia is a strategic nightmare that sober American strategists such as Henry Kissinger have been warning the US to avoid at all costs, and it is also a topic that some US media outlets have become more and more fond of talking about in recent years. At least from the publicly available information, Washington has never previously addressed it as a formal political agenda, supposedly aware of its seriousness and the terrible risks it carries. But the publication of a report by a congressionally appointed bipartisan panel titled America’s Strategic Posture crossed this “red line” on October 12.

The central point of the 145-page report is that the US must expand its military power, particularly its “nuclear weapons modernization program,” in order to prepare for possible simultaneous wars with China and Russia. Notably, the report diverges completely from the current US national security strategy of winning one conflict while deterring another, and from the Biden administration’s current nuclear policy. It is not a fantasy among the American public, but a serious strategic assessment and recommendation in the service of policymaking.

The 12-member panel that wrote the report was hand-picked by the US Congress from major think tanks and retired defense, security officials and former lawmakers. This report makes us feel that a “strategic nightmare” is sneaking into the US political agenda, but has not drawn due concern and vigilance in Washington, and to a large extent, the American elite group represented by the panel is actively working to make this nightmare come true.

A look at the specific recommendations of this report will send shivers down the spine of those who retain any basic rationality. The report recommends that the US deploy more warheads, and produce more bombers, cruise missiles, ballistic missile submarines, non-strategic nuclear weapons and so on. It also calls on the US to deploy warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and to consider adding road-mobile ICBMs to its arsenal, establishing a third shipyard that can build nuclear-powered ships, etc.

What depths of insanity is the US sinking to? The US’ military spending accounts for nearly 40 percent of the world’s total defense expenditures, and it has been growing dramatically for several years, with military spending in 2023 reaching $813.3 billion, more than the GDP of most countries, but even that is not enough for these politicians. Such a report full of geopolitical fanaticism and war imagery, whether or not it actually ends up as a “guide” for Washington’s decision-making, is dangerous and needs to be resisted and opposed by all peace-loving countries.

According to some American media, the report ignores the consequences of a nuclear arms race. In fact, the report doesn’t seem to consider this at all and doesn’t suggest any measures other than nuclear expansion to address this issue. In other words, it is a reckless approach. Both China and Russia are nuclear powers, and everyone knows that provoking a confrontation between nuclear powers is a crazy idea. Even promoting a nuclear arms race under the banner of “deterrence” is a disastrous step backward in history. Washington’s political elites, who lived through the Cold War, cannot be unaware of this. However, the fact that such an absurd and off-key report is being presented in all seriousness by the US Congress is both surreal and unsurprising. It is in line with the distorted political atmosphere in Washington today.

The motives behind this exaggeration of threats and creating a warlike atmosphere are highly suspicious. The recent outbreak of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict caused a sharp increase in US defense industry stocks, while American defense industry companies have also been the biggest beneficiaries of the long-standing Russia-Ukraine conflict. The military-industrial complex, like a geopolitical monstrosity, parasitically clings to American society, manipulating its every move, pushing Washington step by step to introduce and even prepare for ideas that were once considered “impossible.”

The prosperity of the American military-industrial complex is built upon blood and corpses, and carries a primal guilt. Serving the interests of the American military-industrial complex is unethical.

The reality is that such rhetoric is becoming increasingly politically acceptable in today’s Washington. The idea of “preparing for possible simultaneous wars with Russia and China,” once a fringe fantasy, has gradually made its way into Washington’s agenda, which is deeply unsettling.

If Washington were to adopt even a small portion of the recommendations in this report, the harm and threats it could pose to world peace would be immeasurable and would ultimately backfire on the US itself.

There is an old Chinese saying: “Those who play with fire will perish by it.” This is something that is worth Washington’s careful consideration.

Have you ever bought a car that didn’t run and found that it was an easy fix?

In 1980 my boss had left the company and had planned to sell his very nice 1970 Buick LeSabre for $500. One Monday I came into my office and the keys to the Buick were on my desk with a note saying that the automatic transmission was bad and that it would cost more than the car was worth and that I could have it for $25 since that is all the wrecking yard would give him.

I picked up the car one evening and was able to make it part way home before the “transmission” problem occurred.

Fortunately, I was near the company parking lot where I left the car. The next morning, in daylight, with the help of my brother-in-law, we discovered that the “transmission problem” was actually the air conditioning compressor intermittently locking up and putting a severe drag on the engine.

Since it was fall in southern California, we just cut off the single belt that drove the AC compressor and the car ran great. Months later, a neighbor was putting a Chevy V8 into a Toyota pickup and gave me the AC compressor, which we installed on the Buick. And the AC worked perfectly.

I told my boss how we fixed the “transmission” problem and offered him $500 for the Buick.

He declined and said I should keep the car for $25.

I told him I didn’t want my wife driving a $25 car, so he agreed to $250.

That summer I decided to install an aftermarket cruise control unit on the Buick and while routing wires under the dash, I noticed a small spring, not unlike the ones in ball point pens, was broken in an AC/heater duct. I replaced that spring (cost was less than $1) and noticed that the AC was coming out of the dash vents where previously it was just coming from the floor.

When I next saw my former boss, he said that he had taken the Buick to the dealership to complain about the AC/heat not coming from the dash vents, and they told him that to fix the problem they would have to remove the dash and it would cost more than the car was worth.

I put an additional 100K miles on that car and only recall replacing the brakes and a distributor, in addition to routine maintenance. In 1992, as I was moving to Texas from NJ, a co-worker asked if I would sell him the car, which I did.

As an aside, my former boss went to work for a company that made high power gas lasers, costing at that time about $25,000.

At my next company, I needed one of those lasers. I happened to mention to my former boss at a conference that I hoped to buy one of those lasers, but didn’t have the budget.

A few weeks later, a high power gas laser unexpectedly arrived on the shipping dock!

I called my former boss and he said if and when I get the budget, let him know and he will replace the “loaner” laser with a new one. Probably a year or so later, I did find the money and paid for the “loaner” laser.

My former boss’s company also made an even higher power laser for $50,000. I later wondered if I had given him $500 for the car if he would have shipped a $50K “loaner.”

I would ask him, but he passed away, way too young, years ago.

Rest in peace, Dean…

Life in URUGUAY! – South America’s Richest and Safest Country

As an Uruguayan I want to make a comment. First, great video, mostly accurate expect for a couple of details.

When you show the ‘gauchos” those look more like people on horses from Bolivia or Peru, or even maybe somewhere in northern Argentina or Chile. Because, first of all, in Uruguay, the gaucho’s “poncho” is usually made of plain dark colors, and most important, we do not have mountains, like the ones you show. About population “skin” color, let me make some remarks.

The original population in Uruguay is around 90% of European descent, and when I say European I mean, from all over Europe, including countries like: Germany, Poland, Switzerland, Russian, Denmark, etc. Not only Southern Europe. So there are a lot of fair skin color people including blonde, blue eyes.

But what has been happening in the last decade is that there’s a large immigration wave, such as from the Caribbean countries, as well as from the rest of Latin America.

So, the demographic is changing rapidly because Uruguayan’s population as you established is very small, so the culture is also changing, including the food and even the language…

https://youtu.be/sTP44M2vQzk

How heavily does Apple depend on China, and what would happen if China decided to seek revenge for the Huawei ban by kicking Apple out of their market and supply chain?

2500 Foreigners have been invited to the Hangzhou Asian Games in China

Ordinary Foreigners

From US, Canada, Europe and Japan and South Korea

Fully paid for, Business Class Tickets, Five Star Pampering

All China asks them to do is to cover the Games on their Social Media (TikTok mainly or YT or Instagram)

The result is despite the Western Media almost entirely ignoring the Asian Games, a whopping 673 Million people worldwide are watching the events

This is China’s Strategy to counter thr Western Media

Not launching their own MSM and insanely and making accusations

Instead , they bring ORDINARY PEOPLE and treating them to what China looks like and spreading the message

A Popular Teenager goes home and says “Man do you know China is so different from what we hear in our TV channels”

Slowly this gains traction

It’s a long term plan targeting the 19–24 year olds today and gradually influencing the Younger Generation

The key reason is INFLUENCE

The 12–36 year old US Generation doesn’t view China as an enemy but as a neutral country or as a mutually beneficial country

Yet 36–65 year old Americans, the MSM influenced generation see almost 75% of them view China as an enemy

China is slowly influencing the younger generation and in a way that US simply cannot comprehend

Long term, slow and PATIENTLY

Every year you have 20,000 Vloggers invited to China and cover China positively

They influence around 60 Million -150 Million people

Tourvashu is one of these

He influences 2 Million Indians

Most are 16–20 year olds

More likely to watch Tourvashu than Palki Or Gravitas or Arnab

Slowly the Younger Indians will be influenced and say “Yaar Tune Chaayina ka wo Video dekha. Mast tha”


So you wonder why Apple is not banned. In China?

Same reason

It’s not the Chinese way

These Brash, Useless and Economically unsound tactics are not something the Chinese do

China will encourage Apple, use it as a gold standard to develop their own industry, and undercut the iphone eventually

Take the Chinese High Speed Rail

In 2005, Chinese imported exclusively their Boring Machines (Germany, Switzerland), Engines (Japan, Spain), Software (UK, Singapore, US) and Electronics (Japan, S Korea)

Today nearly 90% of their High Speed Rail Supplies are COMPLETELY MADE IN CHINA with same or better quality

They have decimated TBM markets in Germany with export shares plummeting from 69% in 2000 to 11% in 2023

Took them 17–18 years


That’s how China works

These loser protectionism bans don’t work for China

They COMPETE and UNDERCUT and enhance quality with competition

The Trump Ban begun in 2019

So the key is to see if China will beat the Apple and undercut the company by 2036–2037

I am willing to guarantee that they will

It’s what they do

Kind of their Mantra


Banning is what Losers do

Competing and beating with Economics is what Winners do

What is the smallest thing a person ever did for you that impacted your life?

When I was a young boy I used to get teased a lot in school and I didn’t have many friends. I was a fat kid and often got called a “fat slob”, “pig”, and “smelly or “stinky”. I took a bath at least once a week, more in the summer, and tried to keep clean so I knew I was just getting teased because I was fat. When I was eleven my best friend’s mom drove us home from baseball practice one day. Out of the blue she turned to me in the back seat and said, “Andy, you smell and you need to bathe more often.” She did not say it in a mean way but in a stern businesslike manner. My best friend was horrified and said nothing.

When I got home I immediately took a shower and wondered about what was going on. Obviously, I’d been sweaty from practice but she must have known that. As I thought it over, it also dawned on me that my skinny little sister often got teased as “smelly” too. I’d always assumed she got it from association with me, not because she smelled. So I told my mom what happened and asked her to tell me honestly if I smelled. She said, “no” and started to get a little upset about my best friend’s mom saying that to me.

I went to play outside and saw one of my classmates across the street. We had an on-again/off-again friendship up to that point. I guess we were what you might call “frenemies” today but at this point in time, we were more on the friendly side. I decided to get his opinion believing he wouldn’t hold back. In fact, he had teased me before about being smelly. So I asked him straight-up, “Do I smell?” He answered very matter-of-factly, “yes”. “My sister too?” “Yes, her too,” he replied. Then I asked him what we smelled like. He then told me that this had actually been a subject of discussion among his family who did not want me or my sister in their house because of our smell. He said his parents said we smelled like “old books”. Immediately, this brought to mind the set of Encyclopedia Britannicas I had in my bedroom closet. I immediately went home to check them out. Not only were they covered in mold but vast sections of my closet and room had mold. In fact, I found it throughout our home. But it didn’t smell to me. I was used to it. We all were. We lived in the woods surrounded by soggy tree pools so our home was often damp. We had no AC nor did we need it. This was back in 1972 before the internet and all the scares about the dangers of mold.

I told my mother what I’d learned and was able to convince her this was what was causing my sister and me to smell and probably her too. We cleaned everything with bleach, aired out the house, and bought dehumidifiers. From then on I showered every day. My friends all told me I no longer smelled. That following summer I also worked my ass off to get physically fit. I don’t know how many more years I might have suffered but for this very simple and brutally honest admonition from my friend’s mother. To this day, my best friend of 58 years still tells me how embarrassed he was that his now-deceased mother said that to me. And I always remind him she did me one of the greatest favors of my life.

Flip Flop Cherry Cobbler

CHERRY COBBLER 05 28 2028115 1
CHERRY COBBLER 05 28 2028115 1

Yield: 6 to 8 generous portions

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 4 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup milk
  • 8 cups cherry pie filling
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar

Instructions

  1. Coat a 9 x 13 inch baking dish with cooking spray.
  2. With an electric mixer, cream the butter and sugar.
  3. In a separate bowl, combine flour, baking powder and salt. Add to butter mixture alternating with the milk; mix until well combined.
  4. Spread batter evenly into prepared pan.
  5. Top with filling and sprinkle with sugar. Cover and freeze.
  6. To bake: Thaw completely in refrigerator.
  7. Bake at 375 degrees F for 40 minutes or until browned.

Mighty China Remove All Iran Sanctions Placed By U.S and E.U

In this eye-opening video, we explore the shifting dynamics of power and influence between Iran, the United States, and China. With the U.S. imposing stringent sanctions on Iran, China steps in to form a strategic alliance, challenging the global power balance. Learn more about the economic, political, and strategic implications of this trilateral relationship and how it could shape the future of global geopolitics.

What was one experience in your life that hardened you as a person?

Going anonymous because it is a part of my life that not even my closest friends are aware of.

This is from the time when I was 12 years old. My mom had a problem where her breast would develop lumps which would have to be removed surgically. This problem started before I was born and she would undergo these procedures every couple of years. We lived in a small town with limited access to advanced medical facilities, but the doctors always told us that the lumps were not malignant.

When I was 12, this one lump was growing very big. My dad (who is a doctor himself) decided to take her to Delhi to get some tests done. I have two elder sisters and we (me, my sister and my parents) live with my grandparents.

So, my parents were away in Delhi and my grand mother would spend the day on the phone talking to relatives, spreading rumors that my mom actually had cancer and saying that we three are a burden on them and that they just want my parents to come and get us off their head.


My sisters, who were older and more mature, would mostly stay in their room, but I, by nature liked to be outside with my mom and in her absence, my granny. Hearing these things used to hurt me, but I wouldn’t tell my sisters since I knew they’d be hurt even more.

I started taking up house-work with my granny (though we had help by my granny used to crib that we 3 were a burden)-cooking half meals, helping with washing clothes. All this I did without my sisters’ knowledge (or they’d never have let me do it).

This was a time when mobiles didn’t exist in India and fixed line phones were the only means of communication. News from my parents used to reach us with a lag. We just kept praying that our mom comes back safely.

After tests at AIIMS (top hospital in India), our parents returned awaiting results and my granny immediately left for my aunt (her daughter’s) place citing she needed “rest”.

Results came in-the growth didn’t seem malignant but needed a fairly complicated medical procedure in Chandigarh. These were times when my dad was under a lot of financial pressure (though my grandparents were well-off and my dad was the only son). My dad requested my granny over call that they need to leave immediately and that though he had applied for their life savings-their FDs to be broken, but if it doesn’t happen on time, if my grandparents could lend money till the FD money could reach home.

Unbelievably, my granny just didn’t come home! She made my aunt call in saying she would stay longer at her place and that my parents can leave for the surgery! I still remember my dad almost crying, not sure if he would be able to arrange money on time to save his wife (the tumour had grown visibly big). By God’s grace, the FDs broke a day before they had to leave and they left us alone, at the trust of the neighbours who were more helpful than my grandparents!

It was a long, painful time when my mother received treatment-a surgery which lasted 9 hours, where doctors almost gave up hope, where she was on ventilator support for days. All this while, I kept hearing from my granny’s conversations as she invited friends over, that it was certainly cancer, that such complicated surgeries could only be for cancer. It kept on making the 12-year old me scared as I knew cancer is something bad, it is something that can take away my mom.

We first got a chance to speak to our mom after 35 days when she managed to call from a hotel after her discharge. Those 35 days had been a struggle beyond my imagination for my parents (which they told me much later when I was around 20). With just my dad for company-he had managed everything from sleeping on hospital floors to washing my mom’s clothes.

My mom has recovered fully and still prays everyday for the doctors who cured her.

My dad still hates my grand parents, and I don’t feel any love for them wither.

My grand dad passed away a few years ago and we still live with my granny because my mom still thinks its our duty.

But, the pain is still there, the fear that the 12-year old felt is still there ,the betrayal is still feels fresh when I see my granny.

I grew up in those 2 months, chopped off my hair because I had long hair and my granny wouldn’t help manage them.

I hardened, realized I only have my parents and my sisters who will stand by me, and I will stand by them till I die.

I realised the world is cruel, looking at my relatives’ behaviour in that period.

The child in me died.

Why do rich people work even after they become rich? Why don’t they play?

“Dad, when will you retire?” I asked him one day.

“Hector, I retired before you were born,” he laughed.

Confused, I asked again, “Be honest, Dad, I mean, when will you stop working?”

His response was simple, “Working? What’s work? I don’t know what work is.”

“OK, Dad, forget about it,” I said as I assumed he wasn’t willing to talk about this.

“Hector,” he said, “what you know as my job is not work for me. I enjoy architecture so much that I could do this 24/7. This is who I am. Architecture is my life.”

So, to answer your question, why do rich people work even after they become rich? Why don’t they play?

My father lived to be 91 and worked until his body gave up on him. He was a passionate architect who found joy in his work. That’s what kept him active and full of joy every day. His passion for architecture was infectious, and it taught me this valuable lesson about work as a lifestyle.

So, if you ask me about retirement or work-life balance, I’d say it’s better to find what you love and make it a part of your life. When you find that, you’ll stop working and start living. We achieve a balance not by separating work from life but by integrating what you love into your lifestyle.

Today, this is how I see it: It’s not about working less; it’s about loving more what you do.

That’s the secret to a fulfilling life. As my father always said, “The day you find what you love is when you will stop working.”

Heavy Rain forced Mother Cat to Carry her kitten in Streets, but No One Opened the Door for Them!

In the pouring rain, we spotted a soaked cat seeking shelter. Feeling sorry for her, we followed as she led us to her hidden kitten in the woods. We gently petted the mama cat, who had braved the relentless rain. The tiny, wet kitten needed our care, so we wrapped him in a warm blanket. Back at our home, where rescued cat families and foster cats live together happily, we ensured both mother and baby were dry and well-groomed. A vet visit ensured mama cat’s health, and we even gave the kitten a bath, revealing his adorable charm. The heartwarming reunion between mother and kitten was filled with playfulness and bonding, showing the strength of family ties.

https://youtu.be/-xzP2TMSoMQ

What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you’ve witnessed?

Here’s one example, regarding myself: I was working as a bouncer at a bar in Erie, Pa one night and some guy, about 24 years old or so was making quite a bit of trouble, harassing customers, pushing some, bullying others, etc.

He was somewhat high, but not drunk, and it seemed he was there just to harass and embarrass/humiliate some who were there with a date. He was pretty big, about 225 pounds and about 6 feet and acting like a real bully. When I was told about some guy doing these things ( He wasn’t near my door, but farther inside ), I went in to see what was up.

When I got there he was harassing some poor kid who was clearly scared and was with his girlfriend. As I approached, a few people pointed at this guy and said, “get him out if here, he’s an asshole.” .

I got up to him and very nicely told him to leave the kid alone and that he’d have to leave because he was causing too much trouble.

He looked at me, stood up as high as he could (I hate when they do that, like it matters), and said, “Who’s going to make me?” I said, simply, “me.”

He told me to get lost or he’d beat the shit out of me.

I said, “Well, let’s go outside and see who comes back in, and, if it’s you, you can stay.” He smiled, said,”I’m gonna enjoy this” and said, “let’s go” and we walked outside. By that time, everyone, including the other bouncer at my door knew what was going to happen.

The other bouncer, Tommy Williams, just stood at the door and smiled while we walked outside. Well, when we got out about 15 feet from the door, the moron suddenly turned and tried to hit me with a roundhouse kick which I not only blocked, but grabbed his leg and picked him up by the leg and threw him to the ground, saying, ”I don’t think karate is going to help you here.”

He jumped up and said, “how about this, asshole? and then tried a double leg takedown, as, apparently, at some time he was a wrestler. I actually laughed and said, “oh, you want to wrestle, huh?” and then as I countered his sad attempt, the other bouncer, who had heard everything, shouted out: “Wrestle? well you picked the right guy, he’s the National wrestling Champion……”

I just said, “You picked the wrong guy you moron,” and, as my friend, Tommy later said to me, I literally swept the parking lot with him.

I never saw him after two of his friends ended up taking either home or to the hospital.

He was a bully.

He got to feel like those he had bullied before.

I was NOT kind to him.

No regrets, but I bet he was kinda surprised when he heard the other bouncer tell him who I was, and he had no escape, as even as he said over and over, “I quit, I give up.”

I told him that it wasn’t up to him, It was my call and I wasn’t done yet.

That is a scary thing to realize, that you can’t quit, that it’s up to the guy beating the crap out of you. But I believe it has led others like that guy to never bully anyone again. Jeff

Have you ever met a dangerous person and not known it at the time?

Sat in a bar in South Pattaya one Sunday afternoon in 1991 I noticed a fairly fit looking bloke dressed only in flip flops and shorts. He suddenly ordered everyone a drink then turned to me and said “I see my friend that you are interested in my tattoos.” I wasn’t that interested but I wasn’t going to argue and let him tell me. One he’d got for some work in the Philippines – the other some thing in the Mekong Delta. A mahout then came by with a large elephant which the man went across to look at saying they’d always fascinated him. So I asked him where he came from – American Samoa he replied. And what did he do? He worked “for the government”.

He then stepped back and ordered another drink for everyone in the bar. I thanked him and he turned and said “Let’s eat and drink for tomorrow we may be dead”. He then looked me in the eye with the coldest eyes I’d ever seen and said “ You know it is very easy. I pick up the gun, I pull the trigger and they are gone.” It was evident he wasn’t bullshitting.

That evening I saw the bar owner – who comes from Texas – and mentioned this guy. “Oh yes that’s so and so – he’s a US Navy SEAL. Bad news when he’s drunk.”

Guess I can be thankful I met him whilst he was sober!

Atheist Overdoses; Shown Soul’s Process Of Pre-Life Planning (NDE)

Her story is powerful. All of her words should have been heard and none bleeped out….

What are your thoughts on the owner of Home Depot saying,” The rise of socialism is making people too lazy, fat, and stupid to work”?

If you are offended by profanity, best skip this response.

I, too, am in the top 1% of wealth holders in this country, albeit, on lowest rung, yet minimum wage at my small Inn is higher than it is at this billionaire cunt’s company. I have no problem finding employees. This piece of shit motherfucker sits on his yacht sipping pina coladas while his employees need a second job to just pay the bills to live their day to day lives.

This asshole supports the Republican Party with massive amounts of money, and as a wealthy person, I can tell you a thing or two about how tax laws work in this country. For those of you who make less than $250k a year but still vote Republican, your economic misery is your own fault. The Democratic Party has LOTS of problems, but one problem they don’t have is trying to make life better for the average person and if you stopped watching your choice of right wing media, you’d soon realize that. It’s people like this cunt who are destroying America and contributing NOTHING to it.

What did this prick do? He built a fucking store, massively exploited his workforce by grabbing all the loot for himself and then whining when ordinary people have had enough and don’t want to work for anymore. Fuck him, and his fellow cunt billionaires.

How do you know you are rich?

When I was doing my B Tech, there was a Professor Talukedar who used to teach us ‘Mechanics’.

His lectures used to be very interesting since he had an interesting way to teach and explain the concepts.

One day, in the class, he asked the following questions,

  1. What is ZERO.
  2. What is INFINITY.
  3. Can ZERO and INFINITY be same.

We all thought that we knew the answers and we replied as following,

  1. ZERO means nothing
  2. INFINITY means a number greater than any countable number
  3. ZERO and INFINITY are opposite and they can never be same

He countered us by first talking about infinity and asked, ‘How can there be any number which is greater than any countable number?’

We had no answers.

He then explained the concept of infinity in a very interesting way, which I remember even after more than 35 years.

He said that imagine that there is an illiterate shepherd who can count only upto 20.

Now, if the number of sheep he has less than 20 and you ask him how many sheep he has, he can tell you the precise number (like 3, 5 14 etc.). However, if the number is more than 20, he is likely to say “TOO MANY”.

He then explained that in science infinity means ‘too many’ (and not uncountable) and in the same way zero means ‘too few’ (and not nothing)

As an example, he said that if we take the diameter of the Earth as compared to distance between Earth and Sun, the diameter of earth can be said to zero since it is too small.

However, when we compare the same diameter of earth with the size of a grain, diameter of earth can be said to be infinite.

Hence, he concluded that the same thing can be ZERO and INFINITE at the same time, depending on the context, or your matrix of comparison.


The relationship between richness and poverty is similar to the relationship between infinity and zero.

It all depends on the scale of comparison with your wants.

  • If your income is more than your wants, you are rich.
  • If your wants are more than your income, you are poor.

I consider myself rich because my wants are far lesser than my income.

I have become rich not so much by acquiring lots of money, but by progressively reducing my wants.

If you can reduce your wants, you too can become rich at this very moment.

Ep 9. We just moved to Bulgaria! How is it going?

From the UK to Bulgaria.

Have you ever caught your spouse cheating on you in your own home? How did you deal with it?

I came home very sick with flu one day, went up to my bedroom, my husband was in my bed with the mail lady. I told them both to get the fuck out of my house. He argued that he needed sleep cuz he worked overnights. He needed his clothes and stuff. I told him all his clothes would be alongside the garage by Monday. It’s where the garbage is kept. Take a shirt and stuff he needed for tonight and get lost. Take a shower at her house or work. I packed up his stuff in garbage bags along with the topper to our wedding cake, some mementos from our honeymoon, I was being passive aggressive I agree, but how dare he sleep with her in our bed, in our home. We had a 2 year old and a 6 mos old. He was just wrong. He showed up a month later crying to me that she had broken up with him. I told him too bad, I didn’t feel bad for him in the least. I got the house( and mortgage) in the divorce. It was ok cuz I wanted the kids to stay in their home and school and I made more money, the root cause of the problem. He felt inadequate cuz I was a senior manager and he was doing maintenance work. This was no issue for me, just for him.

What caused you to fall out of love with your past lover?

When I first got married, we would be passionate everywhere, if you know what I mean, bed, floor, couch, where ever. We would do things for each other. And we enjoyed each other’s company. She was from Japan I am white american.

I learned to speak Japanese and we lived in Japan a few years and life was good. We had kids together, but over the years things grew cold between us.

They say that people change and you grow apart. I don’t think either of us changed. I doubt that most people change. What I suspected happened was that I would base my love on how much she loved me and visa versa. If she did something nice for me, I would do something nice for her. Or if I did something nice for her, she would do something nice for me.

That all sounds fine and dandy, but I think in practice, it doesn’t work. When I do something nice for her, I expect something of equal niceness in return. However, often is the case that you don’t perceive what is done in return is as valuable as what you gave him or her. So the next time you do something, you feel less inclined to do something as nice. And so the love kind of fizzles.

You basically stop caring because you perceive your partner as not caring. And chances are your partner feels the same way about you. Neither person has changed. They are both the same person, but the love isn’t there anymore. They let it spiral into nothingness.

That is what my wife and I did. After 20 some odd years of marriage, there was nothing. I really had no desire to do anything for my wife, because she wasn’t going to do anything for me. We didn’t hate each other. We helped each other when needed, but that is about all.

I was unhappy with the marriage. I either wanted out or I wanted it fixed. But after 20 years of marriage, I knew that she wasn’t going to try and fix the marriage. I knew that she thought I would not change so why should she have to do anything special and if I did change, it would only be temporary and things would go back to how they were, so why even try. I knew this would be her mind set.

So I had 3 options. Divorce, stay in the lifeless, sexless marriage, or take a chance and do something about it.

I thought perhaps divorce would be the better way. Start anew. She had given up on me and didn’t care.

But I decided to give it a try anyway. I completely revamped my approach. I decided that I would try for one year to fix this. I would not require her to do anything. I would just do these things on my own. If these things wooed her back then she would be back on her own terms and not mine.

So I did the following.

  1. I committed to get into shape… better diet, exercise
  2. I committed to do something special for her everyday regardless of whether we were getting along or not.
  3. I committed to do at least an additional 30 minutes of house work every day.
  4. I committed to pay her a sincere compliment at least once per day.
  5. I committed not to fight with her and to only have calm arguments with her.
  6. I decided to fix her dinner and breakfast as often as possible.
  7. In essence I decided to love her every day.

As I thought, I got essentially no response from her day after day. I mean she would sometimes say thank you, but that was about it. After about four months she started to change. I kept at it. She continued to change. Ok.. she didn’t change. She was the same person, but she saw that I was trying. She saw that she was important to me. She saw that I wasn’t giving up. She wanted to be loved.

She started doing things for me again. We started talking a lot more and doing a lot more together. We started dating again and going on trips. It was almost like we were newly weds again, but with less passion, but it felt great. Sometimes I would just hold her in my arms for 30 minutes.

Love can be revived. It is not easy. True love takes work. Making the decision above to love her regardless was the second best decision of my life. The first of course was to marry her. Our marriage is not perfect, but I look forward to seeing her every day. She is an awesome woman. She is basically the same person I married. We just let our love die. We were lazy lovers. She asked me one day what got into me and I talked with her about my plan. I think it was a pretty good plan and so did she. And yes, we are still married, but much more happily now.

I knew our love couldn’t be one sided, but I also knew it needed to start somewhere and why not me. Ask yourself, why not you? Do you want the love back? what kind of sacrifice are you willing to make to have the love back? If I had decided that she needed to do something while I was doing something, then we would have been right back to where we started. You can’t base your actions on what the other is doing in return. You need to commit to love regardless of what is done in return. That is the sacrifice and that is where real love will begin.

Edit.

I can’t believe how many people have read and liked this. Someone mentioned the 40 day challenge. I found out about that several months after I started on this path. There is a movie out there along these same lines called fireproof that is worth a watch.

For me things didn’t change around in 40 days. It took quite a bit longer. But you have to ask yourself is divorce really the better way out? Yes, sometimes it is. But infidelity doesn’t have to be the end of life as we know it.

I look back on these events and they seem like a distant memory, the hurt and pain. like a forgotten dream. But it really wasn’t that long ago. I am a better person because of it. She has become a better person as well and we are definitely a better couple.

6 REASONS WHY AMERICANS ARE OBESE. WHAT IS CAUSING THE RISING OBESITY IN THE USA?

It’s no secret that obesity in America has been an ongoing issue and that doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.

In fact, according to Harvard University; about 2 in every 3 adults or 69 percent of the population in the US are overweight while1 in 3 adults are obese or 39 percent.

It has to make you wonder how the most powerful and advanced nation in the world can be so obese especially when compared to countries in Europe and Asia, it’s not like we don’t have the means as a nation for healthier lifestyle and better-quality food.

Or maybe Americans are meant to be obese, and they want us to stay that way? Sounds controversial right, well in this video we will expose 8 reasons why Americans are so obese compared to other countries.

Why is Burma so poor?

Our country born with troubles since its independence.

Have you ever heard about the Burma Campaign in World War 2? It is quite thorough and one of the most destructive campaigns largely forgotten by Western Powers and historians. The entire infrastructure of the country was destroyed during the course of the war. By the end of the war, the country was totally in rubbles and a massive number of firearms were widespread even in the village level which was left behind by warring powers. The situation was ripe for armed insurgencies.

The country was never been administered as a whole before British arrival. The region out of central Myanmar was usually administered by local petty chiefs with vassal-high king relationship which never need any direct contact between different cultures (except a few tributary missions and merchants). There is no large-scale internal trade and the transportation was also difficult. Different cultures and ethnic groups suddenly came into contact under British rule. As usual, the British exploited the situation by creating a divide & conquer strategy by favouring ethnic minorities over the Burmese majority. This led to extreme Burmese nationalism.

Due to economic disaster in the 1930s and later devastating war, the country is under very hard economic conditions which was a natural breeding ground for communism. The Burmese Communist Party which never believed in British plan for independence already went rebellion even before independence.

Then, the world’s longest-running civil war began.

In the 1950s and 60s, the civil war lost momentum and Burma came under the spotlight of international relations due to its leading role in third world nations, one of the founders of the non-aligned movement. The country was also the only real democratic nation in Southeast Asia with regular elections. The country largely recovered from the war at the beginning of the 1960s and hopes ran high. A federal system was proposed by the ethnic leaders and the government agreed.

All out of sudden, the coup came. At first, people weren’t serious as they already seen a short 2 years long military rule which stabilized the country and the coup ended with the mostly free and fair elections. By the time they realized that the military is no longer intended to give up the power this time, the civil war gained intensity and all the things we achieved in the last 10 years were gone.

The military junta slowly transformed themselves into businessmen by laying hands on the country’s economy entirely. The Myanmar Economic Corporation (MEC) ran by the military alone control nearly 40–50% of the country’s economy directly or indirectly. With the lack of a proper banking system, the ordinary people have no access to much-needed capital for investments. Small and Medium scale businesses have no chance to grow unless the monopoly of military elites and their relatives were removed.

My daughter hit her younger brother in the groin so he slapped her across the face. I confiscated all his devices and grounded him for a month. Was that a good enough punishment or not?

So he responds in self-defense and you teach him that if the attacker is female he’s supposed to just sit there writhing in pain getting injured? And she got off scott-free?

What’s next? She stabs him and he gets tossed in a closet and fed gruel and water? Because you might as well.

If you knew she attacked first, you should have punished HER. You discipline all parties that have transgressed, not just the ones who have a penis. Having a vagina doesn’t magically bestow immunity on a person.

If you confiscated all his devices, you should have confiscated hers as well. For his month of grounding, she should have received two.

There’s a big difference between a slap in the face (which stings but quickly dissapates) and kicking someone in the jewelies (which could cause irreparable damage).

No. You’re punishment wasn’t good enough. You half-assed it due to sexist reasoning. Go back and discipline your daughter as well.

Who Wants To Be A WARMONGER?!

Inspired by the war hawks that run the West, it’s the game show that always ends badly!

What is the kindest act you have ever witnessed?

Even though this was a relatively small thing, it affected me profoundly.

On my lunch break from work, I went to a fast food place. A homeless man came in. He was absolutely filthy, with long, greasy hair and dirty hands, dressed in raggedy clothes with a piece of blanket wrapped around him. He smelled bad. He didn’t seem able to talk and he went from table to table, sort of chittering at people, like a rat. People were pretty horrified and either gave him a quarter or just ignored him.

There was one table with 4 Mexican day laborers. These are guys who often are in the U.S. “illegally” and who hang around outside home improvement stores, hoping to pick up jobs. They don’t make much money and sometimes people cheat them, knowing the laborers can’t go to the authorities. A lot of these men may live in one house so they can save money and send it back to their families in Mexico.

When this homeless man came up to their table, they asked him, “Are you hungry? Do you want something to eat?” Then they gave him all of their food, packing it up for him so he could carry it away. Then they didn’t go and buy more food themselves (they probably couldn’t afford it), but simply cleared the table and walked out. They knew what it was to suffer, and they very likely would suffer a bit from their generosity. But that didn’t stop them; and they were the best example of kindness I have ever seen. It was over 30 years ago, and it still affects me.

What is an insane coincidence that you’ve experienced?

The night my daughter died in a double hit-and-run in Colorado, a stranger stopped to help her and was witness to the second car that hit her, ending her life. He had been trying to help her though; he called for an ambulance and although it was ultimately unsuccessful, every effort was made to save her life. That stranger is a hero as far as I’m concerned.

The man who tried to help was very traumatized by what he had witnessed and had to change jobs so that he no longer had to daily pass by the place where my daughter died as he went to and from work. Unrelated to the accident, he and his wife got rid of their landline when they moved. I wanted very much to thank him but although I had tried every way I knew, his job had changed, he no longer had a telephone I could call 411 for and he no longer lived in the same place. I finally decided that simply being grateful would have to be enough, even if I couldn’t tell him myself.

Two years later, I’m sitting at the dinner table in a hostel in London and strike up a conversation with a guy also having dinner there. He was from the same area as me. He remembered my daughter’s death not just from it being in the news, but because the husband of one of his co-workers had stopped and tried to help the young lady.

OMG.

To make a long story short, he put me in touch with his co-worker and I was able to email her and express my thanks and gratitude for her husband’s efforts that night. She emailed me back and said that although her husband was desperately sorry he couldn’t save her, he was grateful that she didn’t have to die alone. He is a hero in my eyes and I’m so glad I got to let him know how grateful our family is. May he and his loved ones be abundantly blessed.

China Reveals HUGE Sanctions On US Tech Giants Due A STAGGERING Unpaid $1 Trillion

The direct consequences for the implicated U.S. tech companies are potentially disastrous. China is a significant market for many of these entities, and the sanctions could drastically affect their revenue, stock prices, and global operations. Companies like Apple, which rely on China for both sales and a vast portion of their supply chain, could see significant disruptions. The same goes for firms like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, which have invested billions in capturing the Chinese market and establishing a supply chain nexus.

Furthermore, these sanctions could also impact hundreds of smaller U.S. tech firms and startups that might not be direct targets but could suffer collateral damage due to the intertwined nature of the tech ecosystem. This isn’t just a bilateral U.S.-China issue; the sanctions have ramifications for the global tech industry. Supply chains across the world are intricately linked, and disruptions in China could lead to ripple effects impacting tech manufacturing globally. Countries and businesses that rely on these tech giants for critical infrastructure, software, and hardware might find themselves caught in the crossfire.

The European Union, India, Japan, and South Korea, among others, will be closely watching the developments. Any prolonged conflict could force these nations to recalibrate their tech dependencies and alliances. On the diplomatic front, this escalation further strains an already tense U.S.-China relationship. The last few years have witnessed a hardening of stances on both sides, with trade wars, tech bans, and territorial disputes. This new development might just push the diplomatic ties to a new low.

As the news of China’s unprecedented sanctions reverberated across the globe, key stakeholders began weighing in, highlighting the vast complexities of the issue. Major international business councils, traditionally silent on political matters, expressed deep concern over the possible long-term disruptions to global trade. Wall Street responded predictably, with significant declines in tech stock prices. Investor sentiments seem to mirror the broader fears. If China and the U.S., two of the world’s largest economies, can’t resolve their differences amicably, what hope is there for the stability of the global economic order?

Moreover, experts in international relations also sounded the alarm. The escalation of this magnitude in the U.S.-China tech conflict marks a deviation from conventional trade disagreements. The integration of geopolitics with business is not new, but the scale of this rift indicates a deep-seated power struggle reflecting ambitions, fears, and strategies beyond mere economic interests.

One of the most pressing concerns for the sanctioned tech companies and the international community is the verification of China’s claim. How is this enormous one trillion dollars figure reached without transparent documentation and a clear breakdown? Suspicions linger over the validity of such a vast sum. The call for a neutral third-party audit has gained traction in various quarters. International bodies like the World Trade Organization could potentially mediate, ensuring that claims and counterclaims are examined impartially.

While the U.S. government has not yet announced any countermeasures, there’s widespread speculation about potential retaliation. Would the U.S. respond with equivalent sanctions on Chinese tech companies? Could there be a broader economic response that targets other sectors of the Chinese economy? Such a move would undoubtedly lead to further escalation, intensifying the trade war and potentially causing harm to global economic stability.

https://youtu.be/0HdX5XhiMMQ

Date Pudding Cobbler

Date Pudding Cobbler
Date Pudding Cobbler

Yield: 9 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 1/2 cups brown sugar, packed, divided
  • 2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 tablespoon cold butter
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 3/4 cup chopped dates
  • 3/4 cup chopped walnuts
  • 1 cup water
  • Whipped cream, for garnish
  • Ground cinnamon, for garnish

Instructions

  1. In a bowl, combine flour, 1/2 cup brown sugar and baking powder.
  2. Cut in butter until crumbly.
  3. Gradually add the milk, dates and walnuts.
  4. In saucepan, combine water and remaining brown sugar; bring to a boil. Remove from heat; add the date mixture and mix well.
  5. Transfer to a greased 8 inch square baking pan.
  6. Bake at 350 degrees F for 30 minutes or until golden brown.
  7. If desired, top each serving with a dollop of whipped cream and a sprinkling of cinnamon.

What are the cleverest scams you have come across?

As an immigrant, one thing that always spooks me is paperwork and all related things to immigration process.

One day, I was outside working on my garden, when I came back inside, there were four missed calls. Just like a habit, I copied and pasted the phone number to Google search, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection – Corpus Christi Border Patrol Station popped up.

I started panicking. Why? Why they called me?!?? So, when the phone number appeared again a few minutes after that, I picked it up.

A woman on the phone let me know that there was someone used my identity to cross the border, tried to traffic drugs into the country. She told me that this could happen because I traveled outside of the country recently (which was correct). I was nervous. Then the woman proceeded to tell me she ‘would help me to verify and straighten things up’. Then she asked me my full name, DoB and Social Number.

At this point, I started smelling B.S. I told her, wasn’t it an identity thief case? Shouldn’t she have those information already? She got furious and told me, she was ‘trying to help’ and I needed to ‘cooperate’ or else I would ‘end up in jail’.

I decided to cut off the call, told her I would contact my lawyer and said goodbye then hung up.

I did some searching, then I decided to call back the phone number. It went to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection – Corpus Christi Border Patrol Station for real. I talked to an officer. He told me I was right hanging up the call and told me scammers nowadays gets really aggressive. They can hi-jack the phone number line like that, so the Caller ID looks like it’s legitimate from government offices. He also told me: If the government wants anything from you, they will send snail mails, they don’t call.

It was a very interesting experience.

Star Trek – Parallel Universe

MM hospital run

Well, I am in the hospital. In-patient.

I had a “blood pressure” event that scared the living shit out of myself and caused me to rush to the emergency room.

The night before, we had drank three bottles of Merlot wine. Now, Merlot is a very hard wine, not so much in alcohol, but it is a heavy wine, and the next morning, I felt “very off”. That feeling of being “off” persisted well into the afternoon.

By 3:30 in the afternoon, I made up some of my herbal tea. Which consisted of “yin Yang Hua herbs (“Horny goat weed”) and GuoGe grapes. You just keep on adding hot water to the mix. And I drank about six bottles of the tea. Perhaps six or seven bottles. Maybe three liters total. It made me feel better.

It always does.

Anyways, I started to chew on some of the leaves and swallowed some of the GuoGe berries. And about a half of an hour later, I started to feel really “off”

My body felt really “wrong”.

So I went and checked my blood pressure. It is normally at 121.

I read 142. High.

High.

2023 11 20 20 40
2023 11 20 20 40

So I calmed down. Waited 15 minutes.

Measured it again.

158. Uh oh!

Gulp.

It was rising rapidly. Too rapidly. Too fast.

So I waited twenty minutes, and checked again.

175.

Sheeeeet!

I told ms. mm, “we need to go to the hospital now”. She started to protest, “but I have xxxxx”. I said “I don’t care.” And grabbed my keys. And the mrs and kid followed behind.

Luckily the hospital was down the street and we parked in front of the emergency room, as it was around 5 o’clock Sunday night.

I got in. They measured my vitals.

  • Blood Pressure = 214
  • Body temperature = 39.5 C
2023 11 20 20 42 2
2023 11 20 20 42 2

Both too high. I was admitted, and checked in. The staff took care of me.

Anyways, things are under control now, but I have to stay in the hospital for a while as they watch me.

My temperature is back to normal, and my BP is going down. The doctors tell me that I worry too much, high BP will not kill me. And they put me in the old people wing of the hospital due to my age.

LOL.

They nurses look at me… and then to my wife…, and four-year old and go “really?”

I don’t look like the rest of the folk in this area. And frankly, they are scaring me. Old 90 year old men on death-beds, and 80-year olds with health issues.

But I’ll get out once things stabilize.

My heart checks out fine. CT scan of my skull is fine too, though the doctor wanted to know what those seven black beads were. LOL! He chuckled at my answer, and I joked about it too.

Anyways…

Don’t fuck around with your health!

Anyways, the doctor says that my worrying about my situation only made things worse. All I was doing was drinking red wine, and taking Chinese herbal teas and that there was nothing that I should worry about.

Nothing. Normal behaviors.

Blurred vision, however. Dizziness, however… yeah… go straight to the hospital, but aside from that. Dontworryaboutit.

I’ll give you all updates as time moves on, but I have a lot of things on my plate that this particular moment in time, and I have to jiggle my medical emergency with all sorts of other personal, professional concerns. So I’m at max right now.

Today…

Attractiveness as rated by different sexes

How and where was Huawei able to manufacture the 7nm chip that powers the Mate 60 series? It is the subject of intense speculation within the US government. Why does the US focus on it? Will it reignite the ongoing US-China tech cold war?

Huawei did a miracle, defy traditional convention and believe, it had done the impossible. It was beyond US and DOC imagination, it is still a mystery to them, they have yet to figure out how Huawei did it.

The US banned Huawei access to EDA design tool, practically cut Huawei or Hisilcon from designing the chip although Hisilcon was able to design chip of 3nm using US EDA design tool before the ban.

Therefore Huawei and Hisilcon need to come out with their own EDA tool which they did successfully in unprecedented record time.

With its own EDA tool Hisilcon can proceed to design 7nm chip that SMIC can fabricate.

The other breakthrough was the fabrication of 7nm chips with DUV machines which according to industry is not possible, DUV standard limit is to produce chip up to 14 or 10 nm. 7nm chip require EUV machine, China or SMIC was banned from getting EUV machine.

BUT SMIC with corporation from Huawei did successfully produce 7nm chips by using available DUV machines which they call them N+2 chip. It was reported Huawei seconded more than 300 engineers or scientists to jointly resolve the bottleneck of using existing DUV machines to produce the require N+2 chips, an unbelievable breakthrough.

Another mystery is how can SMIC mass produce N+2 chips, initially, market was under impression, Huawei Mate 60 pro will be limited in supply, but Huawei surprised the markets by introducing 3 more models and look like the 7nm chip had achieved mass production able to meet sale volumn requirement.

The US and allies are panic now, Qualcom sale of chips to China contribute more than 60% of their sales, may risk losing the markets, ASML is panic too, China and Huawei are likely to breakthrough on EUV machine soon. US EDA suppliers risk losing Chinese markets permanently, the biggest risk is China may soon flood the markets with competitive chips killing US and allies chip industries.

The US and allies need to worry beyond just Mate 60 pro.

周杰倫 Jay Chou【Mine Mine】Official MV

What do you make of the comment by Deputy Prime Minister Heng Swee Keat that “the most important bilateral relations in the world is that between the US and China”?

Of course.

The U.S. will lose considerable ground and opportunity if it continue behaving like it is doing now.

What you need is a leader like Newsom the California governor. He sets aside biases and US media narratives to visit China and sees for himself what opportunities the U.S. is missing by having senile leaders like Trump and Biden.

The U.S. can only stay strong if it takes its head out of the sand. China is not just a big market it is humongous and growing rapidly. China alone is worth more than your next 5 biggest market. These nonsense of decoupling or de risking is having the opposite effect. You are not cutting China out. The U.S. is being decoupled from the world instead.

I suspect that Americans will throw out all China and Chinese haters out of your government soon. That is the first right step for the U.S.

GLICHERY – SEA OF PROBLEMS (PHONK)

Creole Flank Steak with Sautéed Vegetables and Cheese Grits

creole flank steak
creole flank steak

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

Flank Steak

  • 1 beef flank steak (about 1 to 1 1/2 pounds)
  • 1/2 cup red wine
  • 2 tablespoons lime juice
  • 3 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 1 tablespoon Creole seasoning
  • 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon coarse ground black pepper

Okra and Carrots Sauté

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1/2 cup onion, chopped
  • 1/2 cup carrots, chopped
  • 1/2 teaspoon cumin
  • 1/2 teaspoon coriander
  • 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
  • 1/2 cup tomatoes, chopped
  • 16 ounces okra, cut into 1 inch pieces

Creole Grits

  • 1 1/2 cups water
  • 2 cups milk
  • 1 tablespoon Creole seasoning
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 cup quick-cooking grits
  • 1 tablespoon butter
  • 1 cup jalapeño jack cheese, shredded

Instructions

Flank Steak

  1. Combine red wine, lime juice, garlic, Creole seasoning, crushed red pepper, salt and pepper in a food-safe plastic bag. Add steak, close bag securely. Marinate in refrigerator for 6 hours to overnight.
  2. Remove steak from marinade; discard marinade. Place steak on grid over medium, ash-covered coals. Grill, covered, 11 to 16 minutes (over medium heat on preheated gas grill, 16 to 21 minutes) for medium rare (145 degrees F) to medium (160 degrees F) doneness, turning occasionally. Allow to rest.

Okra and Carrots Sauté

  1. Meanwhile, in a large saucepan, heat the oil over medium high heat. Add the onions, carrots, cumin, coriander and chili powder. Sauté for 3 to 5 minutes or until the onions are transparent. Add the tomatoes and cook for 1 to 2 minutes.
  2. Add the okra and simmer for 8 to 10 minutes or until the okra is cooked through.

Creole Grits

  1. In a Dutch oven combine water, milk, Creole seasoning and salt. Bring to a boil.
  2. Slowly add grits to hot liquid stirring constantly. Reduce heat to low and cover, stirring occasionally, about 5 to 7 minutes.
  3. Remove from heat, stir in butter in cheese until melted.
  4. Slice grilled steak against the grain. Serve with vegetables and grits.

Nutrition

Per serving: 569.53 Calories; 256.68 Calories from fat; 28.6g Total Fat (13.2g Saturated Fat; 0.1g Trans Fat; 1.1g Polyunsaturated Fat; 8.6g Monounsaturated Fat;) 97.9mg Cholesterol; 1192mg Sodium; 45g Total Carbohydrate; 5.3g Dietary Fiber; 38.5g Protein; 4.3mg Iron; 964mg Potassium; 9.9mg Niacin; 0.7mg Vitamin B6; 3.6mcg Vitamin B12; 6.6mg Zinc; 35.5mcg Selenium; 129.3mg Choline

This recipe is an excellent source of Protein, Iron, Potassium, Niacin, Vitamin B6, Vitamin B12, Zinc, Selenium, Choline; and a good source of Dietary Fiber.

Why do many people live beyond their means/income?

Because the goalposts have been moved.

50 years ago, it was perfectly reasonable to have a huge house, 3 kids, a car, and go on holidays at least once per year. On a single income.

Today, working 2 jobs, living in a small room, having no kids, taking the bus, never going on holidays, but sometimes getting a latte or an avocado toast… is considered to be an extravagant lifestyle, filled with needless luxuries.

Give it another couple of decades, and random stuff like getting 8 hours of sleep will be declared to be some kind of reckless indulgence, irresponsible behavior that youngsters should avoid if they ever want to be able to afford housing.

Husband Shocks Mrs By Laying Down The Law About The Marriage, Lack Of Bedroom Fun, Etc (She Obeys)

In today’s video, I go over an email sent from a subscriber who shares his story of how his once great marriage went down the tubes after unfortunate life events caused him to stop being the masculine leader he once was.

Finally after gaining back some of his manhood, he confronts his wife about her years of bad treatment of him and makes it clear that there are going to be some immediate changes or it’s over!

This is a great story about how men need to always remain in their masculine (even when things are difficult) as well as be the leader or things will quickly go to hell in a handbasket in their relationships.

What was the best April Fool’s prank played on you/you played on someone else?

Sixteen years ago, I got a job assignment 100 miles away for one year. My newly married daughter and son in law (Andy) moved into my house and I got an apartment in the new city. I came home most weekends. Before I left, I asked Andy if he wanted to keep cable for the year and pay for it. He said no and I cancelled it. Interestingly my bill with Comcast reflected the cancellation but the house still had service.

A few months go by and now it is April 1. I call Andy and leave a voicemail. I say that the Michigan State Police contacted me. They are investigating a three state cable theft ring. They claim my home is stealing cable, there is an illegal, third party bridge device affixed to home and the device has Andy’s fingerprints on it. I am in the clear because I have not been living there. This is all fiction.

Next, Andy is out and goes to my ex wife’s house where he and my daughter had been living previous to my house. A younger daughter answers the door and tells Andy that a police officer came to the house asking for him. She gives him a name and phone number the imaginary cop left. Andy is confused and then listens to my voicemail. Now he is freaked out. He calls the number and it rings to the desk of the woman who works next to me. She sees the incoming number and answers “Kent County Jail”. Andy identifies himself and tells her a bit of the story. She says she will transfer the call to the detective.

The call rings to my desk and I answer Hi Andy. April Fools.

I never left his side

What are some reasons the Cold War started?

Everyone keeps saying “1945” but the genesis of the distrust between the Soviet Union and the United States goes back way before that, and it’s impossible to understand why the two sides got engaged in proxy wars and a disastrously expensive arms buildup without going back to the Russian October Revolution in 1917.

It’s 1917 and the Russian Empire is on the ropes due to some spectacularly bad military and civilian leadership that saw Tsar Nicholas actually trying to lead troops in the field. His government completely collapsed that spring.

However, the provisional government, led by a faction called the Mensheviks (“Minority”) made one critical error. They were dependent on Great Britain, France and the United States to prop up their finances on the condition that Russia continue their war effort. The Mensheviks were no better at trying to fight the Germans, Austrians and Turks as the Imperial forces were and Germany decided to try to destabilize the new government by allowing passage to a Communist who went by the pseudonym of “Lenin” who was living in Geneva at the time who knew an opportunity when he saw it.

Lenin managed to get the support of worker’s unions, known by the Russian name “Soviet”, and the armed forces and took power in Moscow. He then consolidated power and ordered his foreign minister to end the war with the enemy powers as soon as possible no matter what it cost them. Russia conceded massive amounts of land and Lenin planned for what he knew was coming next – a civil war with the various factions that remained in Russian territory and breakaway states.

Naturally, the Western Powers were appalled, not only by the fact they now had to fight the Germans and Austrians alone (the war dragged on for another year) but that Lenin was making good on his promises to destroy the aristocracy and redistribute land and factories to the new “Soviets”.

The Russian Civil War, which lasted from 1917 to 1923 was an absolute mess with dozens of factions getting involved in addition to the primary fight between the Bolshevik “Red Army” and the “White Movement”, a loose coalition of anti-communist forces. Into this mess jumped in Great Britain, France and the United States, who sent personnel and support to the White faction.

So, after half-a-million people were killed and another 2.5 million people were wounded, the Reds were clearly on top and ready to rebuild the country. Unfortunately, the currency was worthless and the economy (once the world’s 4th largest) was in the toilet. What made it worse was that the economy was still largely agricultural at this point, and the Soviet Union still had to feed itself.

And absolutely no-one was willing to help them. Despite the Soviet Union being the de facto government of most of the old Empire (the Baltic States and some other areas remained independent) it would be another ten years before the western governments would recognize the new government, at which point the Soviet Union still struggled to recover its economy while it made great strides in industrialization. Sure, the west would buy Catherine the Great’s diamonds, but money was scarce.

In 1924 the secretary of the party, who had by manipulating meeting attendance and taking control of the bureaucracy rose to the head of the government, was clearly in charge with his rivals fleeing the country (to no avail, he had them hunted down). Joe Steel, or in Russian, “Josef Stalin”, had been a Georgian seminary student (he was very bright) and former bank robber (to finance communist party operations) but despite his accomplishments still spoke Russian like a Georgian and had a massive inferiority complex, a suspicious streak a mile wide, and was absolutely ruthless. When he died thirty years later, his servants were too afraid to check to see if he was actually dead.

But the western powers, this time including the newly restored Nazi Germany, were still hell bent on anti-Bolshevik rhetoric. The Nazis were hardly alone in this – the U.S., France and Great Britain were also hostile to communists during this period.

And it’s in 1939 when Stalin makes one of the greatest blunders in world history – he trusts Hitler. As his foreign minister later said, Stalin trusted no-one, except the world’s greatest liar. At first, it seemed to be a good idea as Russia seized the eastern half of Poland. However, just two years later, the Germans were on the move and invaded the Soviet Union. The irony is that Great Britain had excellent intelligence and was able to pin down the date of the invasion. They weren’t stupid and passed the information onto Russia. However, Stalin thought it was a ruse to get them to attack Germany. The Tsar’s attack on Germany in 1914 was what led to the war with Germany and he didn’t think it was a good idea to repeat history.

Nevertheless, their common enemy pushed Great Britain and the Soviet Union together as the British provided what they could to the Russians. When America entered the war later that year they got in on the game too and the three sides realized they had to work together to destroy Nazi Germany.

But throughout this period the three sides still had a lot of distrust of each other, and there were even cases where the United States and Great Britain were at odds.

Percentages agreement – Wikipedia

Russian and Great Britain’s plan to carve up Europe after the war. The U.S. wasn’t in on it.

But distrust over each other’s post war motives continued. By the time Truman told Stalin about the atomic bomb, Stalin knew about the project and even before that, had known about the potential (Russian scientists had independently hit on the idea). Moreover, during the period from 1941–1944 and D-Day, the Russians were carrying the bulk of the fight against the Germans and suffering terribly for it while the British and Americans were safely making plans in England. Stalin persistently pressed the matter about when the western powers would open a second front, and by the time they did so in June 1944 it was clear the Germans weren’t going to win the war anyway. American involvement didn’t win the war, but it certainly shortened it.

Things didn’t get better after Germany’s defeat. Russia turned its attention to Japan and Japan, in another great historical miscalculation, figured they could avoid an occupation by using the Russians as intermediaries with the Americans. Instead, the Russians moved their forces east and invaded Manchuria the same day the first atomic bomb fell.

The importance of this delay cannot be overstated as it allowed Russia to occupy Manchuria and the northern half of the Korean peninsula, both of which were under Japanese occupation. Meanwhile the Americans grabbed the southern part of Korea and Japanese occupied Taiwan. Russia’s occupation allowed safe haven for the Chinese and Korean communist parties.

Still, the Russians, Americans, British and French still worked together to get things done, but by 1949 it was clear that the relationship was severely strained. One of the big issues was the flight of European capital to the United States after the war. This was clearly against the laws of the countries where the capital flight had taken place, but instead of repatriating the capital to their original countries, the American government decided to provide replacement capital (commonly called The Marshall Plan). Stalin outright refused to participate in the plan and again blamed capitalists for the now near total lack of usable money in his sphere of influence.

The western powers managed to keep the Russians from extending their influence into Austria or Greece, but it was clear Stalin had a great plan to prevent western friendly governments from getting influence in the regions he occupied. The first was his refusal to clear Warsaw of German troops as the Polish government-in-exile in London planned to return. This gave him the opportunity to set up a new Polish provisional government. East Germany’s new leaders were found by using the easiest denazification tactic after the war – finding German communists who had been forced into exile or concentration camps.

After the Soviet attempt to blockade the western powers zone in Berlin in 1948, everyone quickly got used to the new world order with NATO in the east with the remaining democracies and the Warsaw Pact consisting of communist puppet governments in Russian occupied territory. A couple of places like Yugoslavia and Albania were both communist and mostly independent of Russia, but it was a delicate balancing act.

At the same time, it was clear the Republic of China was in serious problems and the Kuomintang fled to American controlled Taiwan as the Chinese Communist Party managed to do what the Republic of China never did – consolidate the country’s military forces into a single unit and take control over all the countryside. The Soviet Union immediately recognized the new communist government of China, but the western powers instead continued to back the Kuomintang despite the fact they no longer controlled any of the mainland.

So in the end all of this really goes back to that time in 1918 when the western powers refused to accept communism despite its immediate popularity in the new Soviet Union, and gave birth to a paranoid sociopath who could neither trust nor be trusted. The two sides continued to be suspicious of each other for the next forty-five years as both spread misinformation about the other in order to justify their tactics.

Do not be fooled

What is the strangest thing you’ve seen someone return to a store?

Someone attempted to return a steel entry door to the store I worked at. I refused the return.

“You have to take this door back! I know the returns policy here!”

“No, I do not. We only accept returns of unused items.”

“And how do you know it isn’t unused?”

“Okay…
It’s painted green on one side.
It’s painted white on the other.
The tape from where someone hung a picture on it is still there.
The jamb on one side is nine years older than the jamb on the other, and it’s busted out where the lock bores are.
The jamb side of the hinges is a different color than the lock side.
It’s warped.
The brickmould around the outside is three different colors. (There are three pieces of brickmould on a door.)
There’s a big dent in the area of the lockset where someone kicked it in.
Which says to me that someone came in, bought a new door to replace this one, removed the parts from the new door that he needed, reassembled the rest of the parts into a facsimile of a door, then sent you down here with it to try to return it. And, as I said, I’m not going to accept the return.”

Naturally, he demanded to speak to a manager…who took one look at the door, asked the guy “you’re kidding, right?” and walked away.

On edit: Here’s one that was actually justified. In North Carolina, you can buy bales of pine needles. The product is called Pine Straw, and people use it in landscaping. A woman brought back a bale of it – something that NEVER happened.

“Reason for return?”
“There’s a live rattlesnake in it.”

We called Animal Control. They sent a truck over to pick up the bale. Before hauling the snake off, they told her that next time she gets a free rattlesnake with her pine straw, she needs to call Animal Control and not try to haul it back to the store. They returned two hours later; they hauled the snake twenty miles out in the woods and turned it loose.

Second edit: A customer I knew pretty well and got along with (he was a contractor) brought in a wooden gable vent. A very, very used wooden gable vent…the house it was in was probably 50 years old. So I got called to Returns. “No. Definitely used, and we don’t sell these anyway. The cobwebs on this thing probably weigh more than it does.”

“But I bought it here fifteen years ago!”

“Sir, I can guarantee you didn’t buy this here fifteen years ago.”

“How can you guarantee that?”

“The store is only eleven years old.”

He was just fucking around; he wanted to see if I’d throw it away for him because it wouldn’t fit in the dumpster he rented. That, I would do.

Two options

I just got fired. Now my former boss (the one who let me go) is asking me where some important documents are. How should I respond?

I went through this myself and I was the biggest idiot in the world for thinking that maybe, just maybe, if I’m nice and give the info my “dear friend” would change his mind. HAH!! The fucker had his errand boy bother me for days about all the shit that they never fixed or gave me the correct info to fix it properly and they they denied the fact that I worked 7 days a week and only paid me for one week instead of the 2 it should of been. His piss poor excuse was that his girlfriend the office manager said I wasn’t owed it. I wonder how she would of felt if I told her about the offer of an apartment and $3k a month to be his girlfriend and how much he hated being with her and was disgusted at the thought of having sex with her. DO NOT DO IT! If you are offered payment to do it and you need the money, tell them the money has to be in your account before you tell them anything, otherwise let them look for it themselves. Basically, fuck them, they fired you and now are proving they need you. It’s bullshit!

What is the worst case of a spoiled person you have ever seen?

In 9th grade, during PE class we were just sort of milling around waiting for class to start. The guys were all standing around discussing chores.

Our PE teacher was a southern blue collar kind of guy. He worked as a fixer upper worker on the weekends too, repairing homes, bathrooms, kitchens etc. This is a guy who probably earned every penny he ever spent.

And here he was stuck in a room with a bunch of spoiled rich kids.

He jokingly said something to the effect of, “Man, you guys are all spoiled. I bet your parents pay you to do chores.”

And all the guys start nodding yes. “Oh yeah, my mom gives me $20 to mow the lawn.”

Another says, “I get $5 to clean my room.”

The teacher had poorly concealed disgust on his face.

For the record, I didn’t get paid for chores. Again, I’m from a military family. Being paid for chores is preposterous.

I cleaned my room or else.

Why did China’s Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng say that the US wants to establish China as an ‘imaginary enemy’ to divert attention from domestic problems and suppress China?

Of course.

It is cheap political propaganda that gain popularity but in reality costly to the U.S. government and the Americans livelihood.

To me and indeed the world. The U.S. is a broken nation that has tremendous internal issues to the point of being unsustainable and imploding politically and socially. There is far too many unworkable issues facing the U.S. such as racialism, poverty, homelessness, disparity of income, high inflation, bankrupt cities, random street shooting and unworkable. Health care policies.

Most U.S. politicians simply ignore those unsolvable issues and distract the attention of frustrated citizens by ignoring those problems through creating imaginary adversaries like China, Iran or Russia. Their media are used to demonise these nations instead of facing its own domestic issues.

What is the last thing you want your pilot to say?

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem with our wings,” announced the pilot.

True story. This happened to me last week.

The plane was making its final approach to Houston Intercontinental Airport. Suddenly there were three consecutive “ding-dong” sounds in the main cabin.

I saw both air hostesses run from the back of the plane to the front and grab the phone. They talked for a few seconds to the pilot, then the pilot came on with an announcement.

We have broken off our approach. We have a problem with our wings. The leading edge slats won’t come down. We have declared an emergency and we will be landing shortly,” he said.

Fire trucks will be waiting for us on the runway. It’s probably going to be a hard landing because we can’t slow the plane down as we normally would. We’ll see you on the ground.”

That was it.

Immediately the air hostesses started preparing everyone for the emergency. Uncertainty filled the cabin. Everyone of us felt vulnerable and scared.

I reflected on how fragile we are. There we were, trapped inside a metal tube flying at a high speed, … nothing to be done, simply pray and trust that everything would be okay.

The wind shook the plane from one side to the other. I could sense how the pilot was trying to find the optimal speed to land, not too fast, yet enough to fight the winds.

I could finally see the runway through my window. We all braced for the impact and as soon as we touched the ground, the pilot hit hard on the brakes.

The captain did an amazing job. We cheered and clapped for his fantastic landing.

Fire trucks followed us to the gate.

It was not fun. That leading edge slat on the front of the wing is responsible for the addition of a few more grey hairs to my head.

My first — and hopefully my last — emergency landing!

Making a sandwich is a problem

Is it a crime to say in China, “Xi Jinping is destroying China. He must be kicked out! He is a dictator!”? In the West, saying such things about one’s president is perfectly normal.

Nobody cares about you.

  1. You need to prove your idea carefully and defend your opinion facing a tsunami of debates, otherwise, no one believes in you, or they just took you as a psycho. Persuading Chinese people is a hard task, America tried every means to turn Chinese people to think so in past 30 years, but worked badly. And thanks to Western anti-China propaganda, Chinese people are well trained in confronting such speeches.
  2. China has a lot of CCP-haters, Western-lickers, retro-nationalist (hate their own nationality and hoped to be colonized by the West again), they spoke much more hilarious speeches than you.
  3. Again, if someone making speech only providing his own opinion but lacking details, usually means the speaker is less educated or lack independent rational thinking.

Why I choose to raise my child in CHINA and not the WEST

I found a practically new Porsche 911 that was declared a total loss by an insurance company because water came up to the floor. A third party says it’s in perfect condition and wants to sell it. Should I buy it?

Oh. Oh dear god.

Any car that’s been written off for water damage is a car you want to stay as far away from as possible. Insurance companies know what they’re doing, and there’s a reason they declare water-damaged cars total losses even when the car looks and acts fine.

Look, Porches are expensive, temperamental, finicky beasts at the best of times, with perfect care and proper maintenance. A water-damaged car that insurance has declared a total loss? Jesus.

No. The third party is lying to you. It is not in perfect condition. Dear God no. If you buy it, you are not purchasing a car. You are purchasing a world of hurt. You are purchasing pain everlasting. You are purchasing a demon of the night, a thing that will present you with repair bills you never knew could be so high and so frequent at such totally unexpected times. Every seal, every moving part, every bit of metal on that car is suspect, and it will fail in interesting ways you wouldn’t think possible.

“Perfect condition” my left testicle. Right now, as I type this, corrosion is at work in every tiny nook and cranny of that car, eating away at its heart. As the seller hopes you’re too technically naive to realize. Don’t think of it as a car, think of it as an opportunity to saddle yourself with an expensive albatross that will be a source of the most magnificent pain for years to come.

Snowgraff – 10 Mentions Parallèles feat. José (Clip Officiel)

Israel Minister Amihai Eliyahu: Dropping a Nuke on Gaza is “An Option.”

World Hal Turner

Israel’s Minister Amihai Eliyahu says that dropping a nuclear weapon on the Gaza Strip is “an option.” Given the volume of explosives already dropped on Gaza, it exceeds the explosive power of Hiroshima.

Asked in a radio interview about a hypothetical nuclear option, Eliyahu replied: “That’s one way.” His remark made headlines in Arab media and scandalised mainstream Israeli broadcasters.

Neither Eliyahu or his party leader are in the streamlined ministerial forum (War Cabinet) running the Gaza war. Neither would they have inside knowledge of Israel’s nuclear capabilities – which it does not publicly acknowledge – or the power to activate them.

“Eliyahu’s statements are not based in reality. Israel and the IDF (military) are operating in accordance with the highest standards of international law to avoid harming innocents. We will continue to do so until our victory,” Netanyahu’s office said.

Eliyahu also voiced his objection to allowing any humanitarian aid into Gaza, adding that “there is no such thing as uninvolved civilians in Gaza” and that Palestinians “can go to Ireland or deserts.”

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

I am almost apoplectic at this remark by Minister Eliyahu.

It is unclear to me which is worse: His remark, or the reality that his country has dropped more conventional explosives on Gaza than the explosive power of the Hiroshima nuclear bomb; and Israel still isn’t winning.

Can any of us imagine a military that is so ineffective, they would have to resort to using a nuclear bomb against an “enemy” that has NO ARMY?

How pathetic must the Israel Defense Force actually be that someone would even consider using a nuclear weapon?

One wonders if Minister Eliyahu has even considered what the rest of the world might do if Israel actually did something like that?  Would the rest of the world allow even ONE Zionist – including Christian Zionists – to continue living anywhere on this planet if they did something like that?

How could the world ever trust any such person to remain breathing if they chose to use a nuclear bomb against an enemy that has NO ARMY?

I think this remark by Minister Eliyahu shows a gigantic, deep-seated, severe, mental sickness.  Win at all costs, no matter what.

The remark strikes me as what we get when we bring up entire generations of people with “Participation Trophies” so they “all win.”  

In real life, in sports, in business, in relationships, someone wins and someone loses.  It is the reality of human existence.

But those who were brought up with Participation Trophies, have never had to learn to lose.  They never learn to deal with it.

And it now appears to me, this is the result:  A man who is so bent over possibly losing, he is willing to use nuclear bombs against an enemy that has no army, in order to satiate his need to “win.”

This remark indicates to me, that this particular Minister (and maybe a whole slew more) is a danger to himself and to other people.

How many more  such people with such maniacal ideas are elsewhere in Governments around the world?

Maybe it’s time to find out – before such a maniacal idea spreads.

It’s a different race completely

Have you ever gotten roadside help from somebody unexpected?

Quite the opposite. One of the right side 110psi tires on my 24 foot living-quarters horse trailer blew out spectacularly on the interstate in Wyoming. It caused quite a bit of damage to the trailer. My horses were fine, though. I was alone, but prepared for that eventuality. On the side of the freeway, I set about getting it changed. I noticed a car pull over in front of me as if to help. A young man got out of the back seat, took one look at me standing there holding my four-way lug wrench, immediately turned around and got back in the car and left! What was he expecting? I was 57 years old at the time with silver hair, but not ugly or scary. I can’t imagine why someone pulling over to help would change their mind upon seeing me. Maybe I looked capable? I did get the tire changed, but getting the extremely heavy spare on was very difficult. I was very dirty (I ended up sitting on my butt on the roadside straddling the wheel, and lifting the spare up with the help of my knees) and bug-bit when I was done, and I’m still mystified as to what changed the young man’s mind.

Why Men Age Like FINE WINE in the Dating Market | Why Women Like to Date Older Men

The reasons why men age like fine wine and most women prefer to date men that are older, is because women look for a “standard”. In addition to qualities, that most men, simply do not have in their early twenties. Which makes it very ironic that women complain about this fact, since it’s women themselves, who are choosing these standards and men. Most skills that women love in a long term partner are skills and traits that only come with age and experience.

What was the most scariest experience you’ve had at work?

Hello, I trust that you will truly understand the whole means the this event had upon me. I was working in neibourhood office with about a dozen others, a mother came in carrying her child, who alleged had stopped breathing. Everyone stood back aghast…. Not knowing what do, several people just ran out. I had to push through the melee of useless people who were happy just to stare.. Moribid fasination! I managed to take the child from the mother and began breathing and heart compression treatment. I was very briefly trained in first aid, but only to a small degree. While I was with the child, someone called for an ambulance, which eventually arrived. They took the child from who by now was partly recovered. I heard theat very soon the child had recovered completely. All this action caused a great deal of mental worry to me and disrupted me a huge amount. Am I now over the trauma? I very much doubt it. My the lord never sho you the back of his hand.

What are some paradoxes in life?

  1. The more you seek approval from others, the less you will get it.
  2. You can only be brave when you are afraid.
  3. If you aren’t happy now, you won’t be happy after you achieve your goals.
  4. We aren’t wired to be happy and fulfilled, but to be miserable and safe.
  5. Without failures, there can be no consistent success.
  6. Wisdom is realizing that you know so little.
  7. The more available you are to people, the less they will respect you.
  8. Nobody will love you if you don’t love yourself.
  9. A king and a slave have the same duties i.e. to serve others.
  10. If you find yourself in toxic relationships over and over again, then it’s your fault — you teach people how to treat you.
  11. Whatever you think is stopping you from living the life you want is not stopping you, but only you.

Triangle method

What is your craziest TSA experience?

I was on my way to Iraq. I was on a plane chartered by the Marine Corps for this, there were about 400 Marines on the flight, in uniform, with our weapons stowed under our seats. I was stationed in California, and we left from March Air Force Base out there. The first stop was in Baltimore, at the international airport there, and this is where my story occurs.

In Baltimore, we were let out of the terminal to go make phone calls and smoke cigarettes and whatever else. I called my girlfriend from a payphone, I smoked some cigarettes, and eventually it came time to get back on the plane. Now, I had put my rifle cleaning kit into my cargo pocket, without the slightest idea that this would cause any problem whatsoever. Inside my cleaning kit was this”carbon pick”.

I’d estimate that the steel rod at the end is about half an inch long by maybe a millimeter in diameter. As I emptied my pockets to go through the checkpoint, this carbon pick came to the attention of the TSA mouthbreather working there. He had decided that this steel rod, significantly smaller than a toothpick, was a deadly weapon (or something) and that I would not be permitted to take it into the terminal and on my flight. Now, mind you, I was in uniform. Flying with a military ID. With approximately 400 other guys dressed exactly like me. I told him that I clearly was flying on official military duty, and that I wasn’t wearing desert camouflage for fashion sense, and that it wasn’t a coincidence that there were all these other guys wearing the exact same outfit who were with me. He didn’t seem to comprehend this. I told him that, speaking of weapons, I had an M16A4, a select fire rifle, under the seat on my flight, a bayonet with a 7″ blade in my carry on, and everyone else on my flight was similarly equipped – except for those with grenade launchers and machine guns. He looked at me stupidly. Eventually I said something to the effect of: “you know those guys, those terrorists, that you’re trying to keep from getting on airplanes? Well me and all those other guys dressed like me are going over to Iraq to kill them. And to do that properly, I need my fucking rifle cleaning gear”. He grudgingly handed my carbon pick back and let me through. He took my cigarette lighter – I’m still convinced, 12 years later, that he did so simply to score some small, petty victory. I didn’t care, I’d left my crucial Zippo on the plane anticipating TSA stupidity.

This is your tax dollars at work, America. Outfuckinstanding.

Anima Libera 0.8X (国会鼓DJ抖音版 2023) Remix Tiktok

Why don’t China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have emotional intelligence and no global media? Why they don’t use datas against the USA? Everyone thinks the USA is right always.

You think that everyone thinks the U.S. is right. That is a highly flawed notion. You media gives you the impression and your politicians fooled you into thinking that way.

The truth is to tally the opposite. Very few people on earth have trust and faith in the U.S. Global media reached out to mainly to the western world. This group sound a lot but they are a small minority. In population it adds up to 13% of the world. In nation count it is at most 12–15 out of the world’s 195 nations.

I live in South East Asia. Almost everyone I meet are disgusted with American lies and western media. No one believes it. It is biased it is opinionated, it spews falsehoods and fabrications. For me I feel pitiful for the western Ignorant and highly naive lot. Please tell yourself 90% of everything written in CNN, Fox, BBC are inaccurate and lies.

I cannot speak for other nations but Chinese media focus less on opinion but you are given facts and proofs. Chinese media trust that armed with facts one can make up their own mind.

Creole Hot Dogs and Rice

2023 11 09 14 48
2023 11 09 14 48

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 3/4 onion, diced
  • 1 tablespoon Cajun seasoning
  • 2 slices bacon, diced
  • 3 hot dogs, sliced
  • 2 cups cooked rice
  • 1 (14 ounce) can diced tomatoes (seasoned or not)
  • 2 tablespoons fresh cilantro or basil, chopped

Instructions

  1. Cook bacon until crisp and remove from pan to paper towels to drain.
  2. Sauté onion in bacon drippings for 4 to 5 minutes or until onion is softened.
  3. Stir in seasoning and sliced hot dogs and cook for 2 minutes.
  4. Add rice, bacon and tomatoes and cook for 3 to 4 minutes, or until heated through.
  5. Remove from heat. Stir in chopped cilantro or basil.

Would you be willing to adapt if European style socialism was implemented across the board in the U.S. or would you have to leave the country?

If the U.S. treated its citizens like Europe does, I might actually come home.

Leaving Media, PA for Frankfurt, Germany in 1990, I have to admit, it was hard to adjust.

When I went to the supermarket there were only ten or twelve types of soda. The bread was heavy with brown stuff and seeds. Some stores didn’t even bother to take the goods out of the carton boxes. The cashiers didn’t treat me like a king and the stores closed at 6.30 p.m. during the week and at 2.30 on Saturdays. The service was so lazy they refused to work on Sundays and everything was closed.

What a nightmare!

I went from the land of 24/7 plenty to a socialist desert.

Get this, on Sundays people walked everywhere. Gas was so expensive, that few could afford to cruise about the countryside just for fun. People took public transportation because they couldn’t afford a car or the place to park it.

Then there were the taxes. When you are young, single and making tons of money they rob you. In some countries such people are taxed at more than 40%.

Healthy I had to pay the highest premium for mandatory health insurance, and some chain-smoking unemployed father of five paid much less.

There is no better way to say it, I was furious.

I was used to a different sort of social justice.

Then something really terrible happened.

Summer came and I had to take vacation. I learned that I had five weeks with full pay. Crazy isn’t it?

How can any economy function when everybody spends so much time on vacation?

It gets even worse. Everybody gets a minimum of 20 paid vacation days! EVERYBODY! Yes, even the dishwasher, the hotel page, the taxi driver and the cleaner get paid vacation. And for a small deduction from their salary, they get unlimited health care too. And if they have smart kids, they get to go to the best schools for free.

It was then I started to understand why eating out was more expensive too.

Feeling sorry for myself I asked “Why did I go to college and study so hard if even the cleaner has the same rights to vacation, health care and education as me?”

Slowly, the answer dawned in my thick skull.

Everybody else does have the same rights as me.

Everybody has the right to health, enough to eat and a warm place to sleep…even those who don’t work. It occurred to me that that may be why the incarceration rate is so much lower in Europe.

Everybody who works hard, no matter how much they earn, has the right to paid vacation.

I woke up and smelled the roses.

I liked vacation. And I was much more productive and happy when I returned to work

I saw the clean streets, the modern buses and metros, the airports crowded with regular people returning from sunny beaches.

I learned to look forward to Sunday grill parties when nobody had to work.

I became tired of traffic jams and trying to find a parking spot for my car and read a book while on the train or the bus.

I fell from a fence and had to go to the hospital. They treated me like a king and there was no bill.

I met a girl who became my wife. We moved to France and raised four children. That was almost 20 years ago.

I still pay the highest rate for health care, but it’s not much more than I paid 30 years ago as a single. The deduction for our four children makes our income tax rate very low. If they want, all the children can go to university without breaking the family finances.

To conclude, everything I paid into the system as a young man is being returned to me in spades.

When the children are grown and my taxes rise, I will pay them without anger (I won’t lie and say happily).

Europe is taking care of me, my family, my friends, my co-workers and my neighbours.

It is not a utopia. It can do many things better.

But America can do better too. A good start would be to recognize that caring for fellow humanity is not a dirty word that ends like Venezuela.

I love America dearly, but Europe treats its normal people (that would be me) better and I will stay here until that changes.

That’s Right

A global interruption to the BRI

If you take a moment to look at the globe, you will notice that the United States (and remember they OWN both Ukraine, and Israel) started wars in Ukraine, and in Israel (After all, HAMAS is Western trained).

Why?

Well, for one, war is a business racket. But that is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about the BRI.

Both wars effectively block two major routes of the BRI to the West.

  • War in Ukraine = Europe BRI
  • War around Israel = African BRI
2023 10 14 08 13
2023 10 14 08 13

Thus the BRI is now geographically limited to the Asian nations.

Hum…

Today.

What “black technologies” have shocked the world at the Hangzhou Asian Games?

The Asian Games in Hangzhou, which kicked off on Sept. 25, are not only a showcase of athletic prowess, but also a dazzling display of technological wonders. China has spared no effort to impress the world with its cutting-edge innovations in various domains. Here are some of the most remarkable examples of what I call “black technologies” that have made the games a spectacle to behold:

Digital torchbearers: This is the first time that the Asian Games have used holograms to create virtual torchbearers who can carry the flame across different locations and interact with real people and surroundings. The digital torchbearers include some of the most famous and influential figures in sports, entertainment, and history, such as Yao Ming, Jackie Chan, and Confucius.

Electronic identity registration cards: These are smart devices that replace the traditional paper-based accreditation cards for all participants. They can perform multiple functions, such as verifying identity, controlling access, monitoring health, making payments, and providing information. They also support various authentication methods, such as NFC, QR code, and biometrics, making them convenient and secure.

Digital spectator service platform: This is a comprehensive platform that offers a range of features and services for both online and offline audiences. For example, users can watch live streams, replays, highlights, and VR videos of the games; chat with athletes, coaches, and experts; join quizzes, games, and lucky draws; and access information about venues, transportation, tourism, and culture.

Intelligent robots: These are robots that can assist in various scenarios and tasks. For example, there are robots for guest reception, patrolling, firefighting, and distribution; robots for public performances, such as dancing and drumming; robots for sports training, such as playing table tennis and badminton; and robots for media coverage, such as interviewing and reporting.

These “black technologies” reflect China’s leadership in digital transformation and innovation. They also add to the cultural significance and social value of the Hangzhou Asian Games. By blending technology and culture, the Hangzhou Asian Games have created a new paradigm of sports events that is more intelligent, interactive, and inclusive.

Blueberry Dumpling Cobbler

This is good served warm with vanilla ice cream. Strawberries may be substituted for the blueberries.

blueberry dumpilng cobbler
blueberry dumpilng cobbler

Ingredients

  • 4 cups blueberries
  • 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 3 (8 ounce) packages cream cheese, softened
  • 2/3 cup granulated sugar
  • 2/3 cup milk
  • 2 1/4 cups Bisquick baking mix or Biscuit Baking Mix
  • 3/4 cup Quaker oats, uncooked

Instructions

  1. Bring blueberries, 1 1/3 cups sugar and butter to a boil in a large saucepan over medium heat, stirring gently until butter is melted and sugar dissolves. Remove from heat.
  2. Beat cream cheese and 2/3 cup sugar with an electric mixer until fluffy; add milk and beat until smooth.
  3. By hand stir in Bisquick mix and uncooked oats.
  4. Spread two-thirds of dumpling mixture onto bottom of a lightly greased 9 x 13 inch baking dish.
  5. Spoon blueberry mixture evenly over dumpling mixture.
  6. Dollop remaining dumpling mixture evenly over blueberries.
  7. Bake at 350 degrees F for 35 minutes.

This is a Briefing, I’m not asking for your consent.

I love how in this altered timeline, the relationship between Picard and Riker is completely different. Far more strained and much less casual as well. It’s little touches like that that make the overall picture clearer and more believable. Great writing and great execution by a very talented group of actors.

Hersh Reveals U.S. Motive For Destruction Of Nord Stream Pipelines

Seymour Hersh just published a new piece about the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines.

When the pipelines were blown up on September 27 2022 I had asked:

Whodunnit? – Facts Related to The Sabotage Attack On The Nord Stream Pipelines

I had collected the various known facts around the incident and they in sum suggested that it had been the U.S. of A.

Seymour Hersh put the same question to some of his intelligence contacts. He was given the same answer.

He now reports on further facts and final motives to trigger the incident.

A YEAR OF LYING ABOUT NORD STREAM
The Biden administration has acknowledged neither its responsibility for the pipeline bombing nor the purpose of the sabotage
(archived version)

At the core of Hersh’s report is this:

It was no surprise to the agency’s secret planning group when on January 27, 2022, the assured and confident Nuland, then undersecretary of state for political affairs, stridently warned Putin that if he invaded Ukraine, as he clearly was planning to, that “one way or another Nord Stream 2 will not move forward.” The line attracted enormous attention, but the words preceding the threat did not. The official State Department transcript shows that she preceded her threat by saying that with regard to the pipeline: “We continue to have very strong and clear conversations with our German allies.”

The German leader was considered then—and now—by some members of the CIA team to be fully aware of the secret planning underway to destroy the pipelines.

What I did not know then, but was told recently, was that after Biden’s extraordinary public threat to blow up Nord Stream 2, with Scholz standing next to him, the CIA planning group was told by the White House that there would be no immediate attack on the two pipelines, but the group should arrange to plant the necessary bombs and be ready to trigger them “on demand”—after the war began. “It was then that we”—the small planning group that was working in Oslo with the Royal Norwegian Navy and special services on the project—“understood that the attack on the pipelines was not a deterrent because as the war went on we never got the command.”

After Biden’s order to trigger the explosives planted on the pipelines, it took only a short flight with a Norwegian fighter and the dropping of an altered off-the-shelf sonar device at the right spot in the Baltic Sea to get it done. By then the CIA group had long disbanded. By then, too, the official told me: “We realized that the destruction of the two Russian pipelines was not related to the Ukrainian war”—Putin was in the process of annexing the four Ukrainian oblasts he wanted—“but was part of a neocon political agenda to keep Scholz and Germany, with winter coming up and the pipelines shut down, from getting cold feet and opening up” the shuttered Nord Stream 2. “The White House fear was that Putin would get Germany under his thumb and then he was going to get Poland.”

All of this explains why a routine question I posed a month or so after the bombings to someone with many years in the American intelligence community led me to a truth that no one in America or Germany seems to want to pursue. My question was simple: “Who did it?”

The Biden administration blew up the pipelines but the action had little to do with winning or stopping the war in Ukraine. It resulted from fears in the White House that Germany would waver and turn on the flow of Russia gas—and that Germany and then NATO, for economic reasons, would fall under the sway of Russia and its extensive and inexpensive natural resources. And thus followed the ultimate fear: that America would lose its long-standing primacy in Western Europe.

The German Chancellor Olaf Scholz will now have to answer some serious questions …

Added:

This is of course related:

Stephen Stapczynski @SStapczynski – 22:47 UTC · Sep 25, 2023

Europe must rely on LNG from the US for decades, said EU’s top energy official 🇪🇺🤝🇺🇸

🚢 “There will be a need for American energy,” said Jørgensen, energy director-general

⚡️ This is one of the strongest signals that the EU needs US LNG well past 2030

ft.com – Top EU energy official says US gas will be needed for decades

Posted by b on September 26, 2023 at 14:26 UTC | Permalink

Get Out of America Now… Something Strange is Happening

Hey fam! Let’s talk about why we believe you should leave America for good. Back in 2020 we left America and have never returned and hope to never go back. As time goes on, the country isn’t getting better from everything that happened with the planned-demic and now hyper-inflation. What do you think? Will you be leaving America in search of greener pastures? It’s up to you to decide!”

Mainstream Media Admit – Ukraine’s Propaganda Is Full Of Lies

As a sign of the turning narrative of the war in Ukraine we find a new New York Times piece about ‘disinformation’ that is not about Russia but about lies from Ukraine.

Andrew E. Kramer, the NYT correspondent in Kiev, opens with an anecdote from the first weeks of the war:

Six weeks after Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Ukraine sank the flagship of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, dealing a serious blow to the enemy navy, and, a Ukrainian official said, killing the ship’s captain.

“We do not mourn,” an adviser to the interior minister at the time, Anton Gerashchenko, said.

The only problem was that the captain — or somebody who resembled him — later appeared in a video of survivors released by the Russian Navy. He had escaped his sinking ship, the Moskva, the video seemed to indicate.

Then comes a paragraph that could fit both countries but the following one it is again related to disinformation from Ukraine:

What is clear is that misdirection, disinformation and propaganda are weapons regularly deployed in Russia’s war in Ukraine to buoy spirits at home, demoralize the enemy or lead opponents into a trap. And it is often hard to know when reports are false or why they may have been disseminated.

Now, Ukraine and Russia are offering dueling narratives over whether a more senior Russian naval officer, the commanding admiral of the Black Sea Fleet, is alive or dead.

Well, in this interview Adm. Viktor Sokolov looks quite alive.

Then comes an astonishing admission:

Few military analysts, […], believe the Ukrainian military’s optimistic daily account of Russian casualties running into the hundreds that is nonetheless reported widely in Ukrainian media.

It is the first time I see a public refutation of Ukraine’s laughable claims about Russian casualties in the mainstream media. It is also an indictment of the Biden administration and the Pentagon who publicly use the Ukrainian numbers.

The piece ends with a wise acknowledgement:

Mr. Gerashchenko said that, in the end, war propaganda is only effective when it accompanies battlefield successes. The missile strike on the headquarters of the Russian Black Sea Fleet last week, he said, was a “stunning success of Ukrainian intelligence and the air force that fired the cruise missiles on a supposedly well-defended site.”

You cannot win the propaganda war without winning the real war,” he added.

Oh really? Guess who told you so:

Good to see that this obvious truth is finally sinking in.

Yesterday the Minister of Defense in Russia, Sergei Shoigu, gave an update (in Russian) on the war in Ukraine. The speech seemed to include a time frame for the war to end (machine translation):

The United States and its allies continue to arm the Armed Forces of Ukraine, and the Kiev regime throws untrained soldiers into senseless assaults, for slaughter.

Such cynical actions by the West and their cronies in Kiev only encourage Ukraine to self-destruct.”

“Under these conditions, we continue to increase the combat power of the Armed Forces, including through the supply of modern weapons and improving the training of troops, taking into account the experience of a special military operation. Consistent implementation of the activities of the Action Plan until 2025 will allow us to achieve our goals.”

Shoigu expects the war to run throughout 2024 and into 2025. But if the current loss rate of the Ukrainian army continues the country will be running out of soldiers and armored vehicles before the end of next year.

Schadenfreude:

Posted by b on September 27, 2023 at 13:50 UTC | Permalink

Ask Prof Wolff: China Vs. a Myth of Stolen Technology

China has pulled it off because it is unique with huge, diligent and hard working population, and a one party state with consistent long term goals but flexible enough to adapt and adopt so as to be pragmatic.

Other Asian and South East Asian countries have similar ethos but their populations and geographical size are much smaller.

More to the point, those countries have multi-party political systems that would ensure continuous changes to whatever the previous government has done, ie no consistency in long term targets but all short term political gains (Western style).

Vietnam is actually a communist country but the US and the West like Vietnam; they rarely publicly criticise or smear Vietnam because it is not seen as a “threat”.

Singapore is a prosperous city state virtually dominated by one political party.

Rarely, if any, have I seen negative opinions of Singapore from the West. Some local and Asian people think that Singapore acts like a dictator.

So you know what I am leading to.

Political system may or may not matter. It is a matter of effective governance.

During an interview, the founder of Huawei questioned that how could the West accuse Huawei of stealing technologies from them that they had not got?

A senior employee said in an interview about 5G that the company had been researching on 6G several years ago.

By the end of 2020 the entire underground transport network in Shanghai was covered by 5G.

In contrast, the Mayor of London has promised to cover the entire London Underground network with 4G by the end of 2024.

That’s how much more advanced Chinese technology is in terms of development and implementation. Without Western interference of all kinds, I bet that African nations with help from China will leapfrog the West.

This may sound far-fetched.

The US will do its utmost, including starting a war and regime change, to next suppress the rise of Africa.

Many areas on the Belt and Road Initiative have since 2013 had bombings, massive political protests and chaotic civil wars etc.

This is the dirty work done by a particular organization to stop the success of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

If China and the Chinese had the technology to migrate to live in Mars, I bet the US would try to stop the Chinese travel in mid-space.

My 18-year-old believes that as an adult, he doesn’t have to respect the rules of my home. He refuses to do his only chore, so I grounded him but he’s ignoring it. What do I do here?

Grounding an adult has no effect other than making them more belligerent.

Instead, I changed her living conditions…

  1. Turned off her phone service
  2. Changed the wifi password
  3. Changed the password for all TV services and accounts
  4. Put a lock on the laundry room door, where the breaker box just happened to be located
  5. Flipped the breaker for her room
  6. Finally, I ordered take out for me for a full week and bought no groceries

After a week, she came in throwing a tantrum. I was abusing her! How dare I do this to her.

I calmly told her that family enjoys the perks of living in a family, including my electricity and food…but they also are respectful, do household chores or pay their share. Squatters get no considerations of family. And next week, there will be a lock on my room and no hot water in my guest bathroom.

She was a butthead for another week. She talked to other adults and the cops and CPS (who asked if she was a vulnerable adult who needed guardianship)…then decided being pleasant and respectful and doing about 2 hours of chores a week was worth the perks of being family.

I never raised my voice, never argued with her, simply impressed upon her what I no longer HAD to provide for an adult.

‘Armed to the Teeth’ Frankish Warrior’s Untouched Grave Found

In a discovery that has left historians and archaeologists astonished, a completely untouched grave from the Merovingian period was uncovered in Germany. Hidden among other graves that were plundered over a millennium ago, this singular grave had rested undisturbed for over 1,300 years.

The discovery was made by the archaeologists from the Kaiserpfalz Research Center , who have been digging at this early medieval burial ground since 2015. Christoph Bassler, excavation manager described the discovery:

“We first spotted the edge of a shield boss…It wasn’t immediately clear which grave it belonged to. But, as we dug further, the realization dawned that we had stumbled upon a grave that, for some reason, had been overlooked by ancient grave robbers.”

A 7th Century Frankish Warrior, ‘Armed to the Teeth’

The grave’s occupant, known as the “warrior from grave 447,” was evidently someone of importance in his time. A splendid double-edged sword, or ‘spathe’, lay next to him, measuring nearly 93 cm (3 foot) in its entirety. Its blade, even after so many centuries, remains slightly flexible , pointing to an impeccable state of preservation, noted Bassler.

The sword wasn’t the Frankish warrior’s only companion in the afterlife. A massive broadaxe, another heavy knife, a lance tip, and a shield were found, showcasing an array of almost every weapon from that era—except for a bow.

Interestingly, while adorned with an impressive weaponry collection, this man was not a full-time soldier. In the early Middle Ages , there were no standing armies as we know them today. Free men were expected to gear up and respond to their leader’s call to arms when required.

The Franks in Europe

The Franks, one of the prominent Germanic tribes, played a central role in the reshaping of European geography and politics after the fall of the Roman Empire . Their history in the region was rich and transformative.

Between the 5th and the 8th centuries, with the decline of Roman power, the Franks under King Clovis I unified various Frankish tribes and expanded their territories. In 486 AD, Clovis defeated the last Roman governor in Gaul, marking the end of Roman rule in that region. Clovis and his successors, known as the Merovingians, expanded the Frankish kingdom into what is now Germany, establishing a significant portion of the region as “Austrasia.” Under the Merovingians, the Franks converted to Christianity, and the fusion of Germanic and Roman traditions began.

Secrets Remain intact, For Now

While the grave’s goods have been handed over for restoration, further studies are expected to shed light on the precise dating and intricate details obscured by rust. For instance, silver inlays hidden beneath the rust layers, might offer deeper insights into the artistry of the time. “This incredible discovery adds a significant piece to our understanding of early medieval Ingelheim,” remarked department head Eveline Breyer.

Analyses are also underway to ascertain the cause of the man’s death, who was believed to be in his 30s or 40s when he passed. Whether he succumbed to illness or fell in battle remains to be seen, but given his grave’s martial ambiance, a warrior’s end in combat wouldn’t be unexpected.

How does China feel about the ban of Huawei products in other countries?

Typically China doesn’t use political muscle to counter Anti Chinese sanctions or Anti Chinese hostility

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image 103

China is in a very good position today

It is very strong, it is bustling with emerging technologies, every day sees new developments and it’s people are enjoying the lowest inflation possible and saving the most money in the world with very little personal debt

China is developing at a very rapid pace and surging ahead

It’s Military and Navy are building up at a rate that the US has not hit since 1944

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Israel placed an order for 1.5 Million units of Body Armor Vests for their Paramilitary with China

Delivery within 30 days

Express order at 2.5 times original tender price

Bangladesh can do it, India can do it

Yet the quality, price and time taken combo is entirely Chinas baby

No Nation on earth can come even 50% close


At this stage, China is too prosperous to get into fights and get into any situation that could jeopardize it’s progress

In fact if you go to China, you will realize that a Company sanctioned by US is a MARK OF HONOR in Beijing

DJI is flush with orders from South America, Central America and the Middle East today

They lost a potential $ 4 Billion of deals in US and Europe and gained almost the entire $ 4 Billion in Saudi, Oman, Qatar and Brazil and Peru

Huawei has China

The Sheer Network in China alone would ensure Huawei covers 5G for 1.4 Billion people

Add the BRI Nations and another 36 Nations and you have a whopping 3.47 Billion People who are using Huawei equipment for their 5G

Plus Chinas smartphone market of 867 Million Units a year is more than US and EU and UK and Japan combined (574 Million Units)

Plus Huawei is an expert at using Western IP developed for Billions using a few tweaks and minting money on the same by spending pennies on the dollar

Best example is 3G and 4G.

The Collective West spent almost $ 15 Billion on the development

Huawei modified these IP and developed their 5G Patents by spending a mere $ 600 Million

Thus while Cisco hasn’t even recovered 15% of it’s investments, Huawei has already quadrupled it’s investments in 5G


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China thus is in the best position to just sit by and surge ahead while doing very little

Things are so good for them that any counter action could make things worse

Huawei too is building a base among its Global South clients and will ultimately reach the peak without the West or their markets


Don’t under estimate China

They use their soft power for other things

This UNHRC is the best example

The Collective West twisted arms until they broke

Yet China grinned and became a full member for 2 more years

The Collective West twisted arms until they broke to avoid the BRICS expansion or the G20 condemnation of Putin

China crushed both these plans through tough diplomatic manoeuvres


The US is in a very weak place

It’s breaking up and is in deep trouble

Thus all this posturing to divert attention from the problems at home.

Same for UK, Canada and Europe

China has no such diversion needed

They just want to keep doing their job – developing Technology and soft power and surging ahead

FIRST TIME REACTING TO | Merkules ”Rich Men North Of Richmond” Remix

He’s been around many years. A true badass rapper. Dudes flow is always crazy.

What’s a point in time when you realized nothing would ever be the same again?

I was 14. No friends. Each day I dragged myself home to where I lived with my schizophrenic Mother, just the two of us.

I would be in trouble for something: I lived in a perpetual state of confusion as I often couldn’t remember what she told me I had done.

She told me I was stupid and needed to go to a special school because I didn’t know what I had done wrong.

In the past she had often slapped me until my nose bled and beat me with the metal pole of a fly swatter, but that stopped the summer before high school.

She told me she didn’t love me repeatedly for months.

According to her I was a horrible daughter.

Her friends from church had stopped coming weekly to yell at me and slap me senseless as well. I knew when she sent me away with my Aunt and Uncle the summer that had passed she had read my diary, where I detailed all the abuse and talked about wanting to die.

She denied reading it, but it stopped the physical abuse so now it was just verbal and believe it or not that hurt just as bad.

I was unloveable and alone.

She didn’t work and depended on government assistance.

She just sat at home chain smoking and playing cards.

During the week I woke myself up, made breakfast, went to school. She complained about the smell of eggs in the morning and of course I was useless.

I had a hard time socializing, and she decided she didn’t like the friends I’d managed to make the previous year, so put me in a very small private Christian high school the church paid for.

As a low income, single parent house I was a freak among higher income two parent families.

So I spent my days an outsider and bullied at school and then came home to be bullied some more.

I got in trouble once because someone told her I walked around with my head down and never smiled!

I remember trying out and making the school play that year. I was so proud.

My Mother decided to use that as leverage for her every whim: if I did anything wrong (sang doing dishes) she threatened to not allow me to be in the play. It got so bad I just quit the play rather than have it continually be held over my head as a threat.

A school councillor regularily made me talk to him.

I refused to give anything up.

He persisted. He asked me if I was abused: as she was no longer hitting me I said no.

I had no words to explain the verbal abuse.

Being stupid and unloveable didn’t seem to qualify.

Then one magical day a girl at school approached me and we became friends.

A few weeks later she asked me if I could spend the weekend at her house.

Her house was beautiful and she lived with her parents and siblings and it was loud, noisy and chaotic.

On the Saturday of this weekend sleep over, my new friend had to take piano lessons so I was to hang out in her room until she got back.

I was surprised when both her parents wanted to speak with me while she was gone.

They informed me that the school had asked them to be my foster parents and presented me with a ‘contract’.

They gave me 30 minutes to decide if I wanted to live with them.

I was 14 years old.

I had no friends.

My Mother was the only family I had ever known.

I knew I was stupid. I knew that I was worthless and unloveable. 30 minutes was a ridiculous amount of time for a decision that would change the course of my life that I was too young to make. I didn’t know these people at all.

But a voice in my head screamed at me to do it, with everything it had.

So I took that leap of faith. I jumped off the cliff away from everything I’d ever known.

My roller coaster ride wasn’t over my any means, but to this day I am so grateful I left.

My life 30 years later is wonderful and I often wonder where I would be if I had stayed growing up in that horrible house.

U.S. Confirms M1A1 Abrams Tanks Arrive in Ukraine

World Hal Turner Hits: 10439

The United States is confirming that the first (official) group of M1A1 Abrams tanks have arrived in Ukraine to be used against Russia.  The escalation of fighting between Russia and Ukraine continues.

At some point, and we are now very close to it, Russia is going to declare the US a “combatant” in the fighting, and when that takes place, it will be public notice that we — here in the USA — are now subject to Russian military strikes.

Americans will be caught completely blind-sided if and when this takes place; they won’t understand how or why we got attacked by Russia – because our Mass-Media has not done its job to inform the public just how far our government public servants have escalated the fighting.

China just gave US chip materials’ permission, the US ordered to escalate sanctions against China!

Tired of this wicked government of america.

What is the biggest surprise about getting rich?

I made $30M from my previous tech company.

For me, the most surprising thing about being rich is that it’s an incredibly isolating experience. What I mean by that is you can’t really complain about your problems except within your small circle of rich friends. Otherwise, you will sound like a douchebag. Even if you do, non-rich people can’t really empathize with you.

There are a few problems associated with being rich such as general (lack of) motivation for work, family/friends asking for money, worry for how to motivate kids, spouse with different attitudes toward life after getting rich, potential spouse being a gold digger, unexpected jealous reaction from friends/family, pressure to deal with more complex tax, estate planning and investment planning and etc.

The joy of “set for life” doesn’t seem to offset the anxiety from hoarding the huge sum of money. In addition, when you don’t work because you are rich but can’t hang out with your friends who have to work during the week, you feel like an outcast of society.

Overall, being rich is very isolating and that’s the most surprising thing I have experienced.

China’s new missile DF 51, called a small Sarmat, can evade the Aegis defense system at sea

The New DF-51 ballistic missile can carry 10 miniature missiles. When the DF-51 flies to a certain area and launches 10 atomic bombs at the same time, the power is so great that the existing air defense system of the United States cannot bear it at all.

What is the best moment you witnessed in which somebody proved they weren’t “all talk”?

I watched a 90 lb female put a 235 lb guy in the hospital. This was a fight between 2 neighbors in my neighborhood. This guy harassed her for weeks then for some reason he decided to walk up to her front porch and knock on her door. I was sitting on my front porch when it happened. I was thinking this is not going to be good, and had my cell phone within reach.

She open her door and in a clear loud voice, she requested he get off her property. He said, what are you going to do about it. She said, I’ll call the police. He laughed at her and reached for the screen door. Before I could move she kicked him in the head twice, swept his legs out from under him, and he was down and bleeding.

I started to call the police, but again before I could dial the number a patrol car pulled up and the officer put the guy in handcuffs. I just sat there, drank my coffee and waited for him to come over and ask what I saw. I told him and signed the bottom of the form.

As he walked away he said you know the woman? I replied yes, she’s a former Marine. He chuckled and said. I guess the guy didn’t know that, and I laughed.

How I see the US after living in Europe for 5 years

I moved to France 5 years ago. Came home to Maryland to spend Christmas with the family. I got sick, went to the ER, and came out with a bill worth $1,900. The doctor saw me a week later for a follow-up. I needed surgery and it would cost more than $ 45,000. I went back to France after the holidays, saw a doctor, got surgery, 2 months off work and I PAID NOTHING. “

What kind of leader is Xi Jinping?

What kind of leader is Xi Jinping?

He’s somebody who will deal with shit.

I mean it literally.

In 1974, Xi volunteered to go to Liangjiahe, a dirt-poor village in Northwestern China. His dad was getting the rough treatment during the Cultural Revolution, so he probably felt that getting out of Beijing was a safer move. So he volunteered.

China’s GDP per capita in the 70’s was around $100 per year, which is obviously not great. But Liangjiahe was a totally different ball game. It was a famously poor place. I would guess the GDP per capita was maybe $20 a year. No, I did’t miss any zeros. It was really that poor. There was no electricity, no indoor plumbing, no toilet, no heat, no rice or flour. Corn was a luxury, millet and wild grass were the normal diet. and people just dug dirt caves out of mountains to live.

The villagers that Xi lived with – were mostly illiterate and covered in fleas. So Xi looked around, and was like, fleas, oh well, I just have to get used to it. Food? That’s OK, I’ll take a hoe and go farm with the villagers. We can feed ourselves. Electricity? Water? Nah, nothing can be done about that. So what do we have? Poop! OK, so we have poop. We can make something with that, maybe.

So he read about fermenting poop to make methane gas, and tried to build a poop-fermenter in his village, so that people can use it for light and cooking at night. He was only 16 or 17 at that time, so he wasn’t very good and got the pipe stuck, so he had to jump into the cesspool to clear the pipe, and got poop all over himself, but he got it working. The next year he traded his motorbike for a water pump and some other tools for the village, and pretty soon his village was getting more prosperous. He stayed and worked in that village for 7 years, applied to join the CCP 10 times, got rejected 9 times, and finally got admitted on the 10th time. The villagers promptly elected him the Party Secretary of the village.

That was how he started his political career in China.

He’s not unique.

Actually, all of China’s leaders have been through absolute hell to get to where they are.

CCP tradition is that unless you start from the very bottom, you’ll never get to the very top. I mean, you are selecting 7 out of 80 million, once every 10 years, so the CCP traditionally has been absolutely ruthless in terms of discipline and promotion.

Election bribery? Expel 70.

Industrial accident? Send 25 to jail.

Corruption? Punish 100,000 in one year.

Get GDP to grow at 10%+, while keep your nose clean? OK, you get a one step promotion.

A small purge once every 2 years.

A big purge once every 5 years.

You’ve got to beat out 80 million people to get there, and everybody is swimming as hard as you are. The ones who pop out at the end, after 35 years, are all NOT your normal people!

When Beijing announced the plan to eliminate extreme poverty in 2015, most foreign observers were dubious. Can China Wipe Out Poverty By 2020?

Since the announcement, People Daily, the top Chinese newspaper, has been literally reporting on poverty reduction DAILY – success, failure, method, strategy, recidivism, lessons learned, statistics, etc. Everyday! I suspect the guy is actually serious about it.

Why I Am Leaving The United States and Never Coming Back

In this video I will be explaining why i am leaving the united states and never coming back. this discussion consists of reasons like social life in the united states, dating in the united states, cost of living for quality of life and more. I am going to thailand for the first time leaving the country in a couple months. expect upcoming traveling vlogs.

What is one absolute cast-iron classroom practice you use all the time that your day wouldn’t be the same without?

I sit behind the students and use an iPad hooked up to a projector to show them things on a screen in front of them.

It’s a really big screen, too. It’s one of those “backyard movie projection” screens, for which I built a frame and now it’s taking up the better part of one wall in my classroom. I have the projector at the back of the classroom, aiming over the students’ heads. And, since the projector is next to my desk (which is a sit/stand desk, by the way), I can physically plug my iPad into it. I tried doing this all wirelessly a few years ago, but it was more trouble than it was worth.

Usually, I’m showing them pages from their textbooks or workbooks. I snap pictures of the relevant pages for that day, turn them all into a single .pdf, and work my way through them, for the class to see. I use an Apple Pencil to mark them us as I go.

If the students seem bored, I ask for volunteers to come over to the iPad and do a few problems for everyone to see. The students enjoy it when one of their classmates takes on the role of “teacher.” The students who are taking on that role enjoy using the iPad and Apple Pencil.

Every now and then, I have to sub in another teacher’s classroom for a single period. No one else at this school has a set-up like mine. I genuinely don’t understand how teachers can stand being in front of their students while they’re trying to teach them, writing things on a whiteboard. Turning your back on your students while you write on the board is nerve-racking for me.

As an added bonus, when I’m using the iPad as a whiteboard or e-reader, and our textbook mentions something interesting, I can quickly and easily pull up YouTube or Safari, to enlighten the students a little more. Just this morning, our lesson on appositives featured 10 sentences about jazz music, including several about Louis Armstrong and Wynton Marsalis. I was able to pull up videos of both men, so the students could see who we were learning about. I was then able to find out that, not only is Marsalis still alive (the students asked me), but he’s playing in Chicago next spring.

At least once per day, I pull up something online that one of our textbooks mentions, to teach the students a little more about it.

Originally, I sat behind my students so I could see their screens when they were online. Yes, there is monitoring software, but just looking around at their screens in much easier. That was 15 years ago, when I began teaching. I’ve been doing it like this ever since.

The Video I Never Wanted to Make.

This is honestly getting scary hopefully it doesn’t get as bad as we all think but something tells me that we may not get that lucky. Crazy to think I am only 28 years old and I am prepper but i might have to start teaching my family how to do this stuff. Everyone stay safe.

When have you fired someone on the spot?

Yes.

Several years ago I inherited a “team” of people that included a lady I’ll call “Nancy.” She was what we called a houseplant: she’d been there forever and didn’t do much, but firing her would be a mess.

Nancy was a disaster from day 1. She would take two hour lunches. She’d hand in work so poor I could have just done it.

I once asked her to compile a spreadsheet and all she did was dump files into a folder and send it to me. She literally had one job of compiling a single report that she was doing. We even made her a simple guide that anyone could follow. We had her do this because it kept her away from everyone.

She also had beefs with three of my other people, so much that I moved people around the office to avoid her. She once accused a lady of drinking beer at her desk and it turned out to be some generic cola from Winn Dixie. When she wasn’t satisfied by this she reported me and the lady to HR. One fellow on my team was on long term pain management after being wounded by an IED in Afghanistan. He took some serious pain medication but he was a fantastic employee. Again, she called HR on him after telling her to mind her own business. When HR didn’t do anything she called the police and tried to have him arrested for drug possession.

One day we were doing end-of-year reporting and needed the report that Nancy was running. I go to the share drive and it’s empty. I ask her for it and she claims it’s there. I check again and it’s just raw data from our database.

I go over to her desk and ask what was happening. She immediately lies and says I never told her about the report. I point out the file detailing the steps on how to pull the report on her desktop.

One of my other employees, Wondah (pronounced Wanda) walks over and is trying to help. Nancy keeps trying to just push her away or delete files. Wondah tells her she’s costing us time and resources and it hits. Nancy looks at Wondah and yells “Shut up n*gger!”

The office goes quiet. I take two steps back. I put my hand on Wondah’s shoulder and gently pull her back a bit. I call over a neutral guy on another team. I ask him to walk Nancy out of the office and wait.

30 seconds later I’m on a conference call with HR confirming she’s getting fired. Wondah and five other employees confirm what she said.

I walk out in the hallway. Any illusion of civility is gone. Now she’s spitting and swearing at everyone. I tell her she’s fired. I get deluged by a string of racist screeds and threats to send her sons to my house to kill me. Security is there to escort her out. She turns and spits at me.

She tried suing the company for everything under the sun. On the stand she was a total disaster of a witness and I think the jury hated her as much as I did at that point.

She lost and had to pay our legal fees. Last I heard she’d fled the country to avoid paying a bunch of debts.

Silvio.

What is the most interesting fact you know about a film?

This is a somewhat worrying fact.

In the movie “The Wizard of Oz”, aluminum powder was used as makeup for the “Tin Man” costume.

This dust ended up getting into Jack Haley’s eyes and causing him a chronic infection.

But this was not an isolated incident. Buddy Ebsen, the original Tin Man, retired when he realized that makeup was slowly poisoning him.

The Tin Man’s character makeup was changed when Jack Haley replaced Buddy Ebsen.

Haley’s eye infection became so severe that he was forced to undergo surgical treatment and use antibiotics for years.

The production of this film was complete chaos.

Reacting to the Song that Stole America’s Heart

What is the best case of, “You just tried to scam the wrong person,” that you’ve witnessed?

As a gullible 30 y.o. I met a really cute man that seemed to like me. We started dating. His car broke down and he asked to borrow $80. I loaned it to him and he returned it. About 6 weeks later, his Mom had an emergency and he needed $400 and asked to borrow it until the next payday. I loaned it to him. Then I found out he had a live-in girlfriend and child. She came to my work and tried to beat me up for trying to steal her boyfriend. I broke up with him but I tried to get my money back. That wasn’t happening. He kept trying to get back with me, but I found a note that he had written about how much money I had in my checking account. He didn’t realize it had fallen out of wherever he put it. So I decided to beat him at his own game. I asked him to meet me for lunch at a restaurant. I had stashed a dear friend of mine at another table within ear shot and vision of what I was doing. I had handwritten a small “loan agreement with interest” that I told him I needed him to sign for me to rebuild trusting him. The Sucker signed it thinking it wasn’t valid. My friend witnessed it and signed as a witness. I then took him to Small Claims Court, asked for damages and Court costs, garnished his wages, and got my money back over time, including interest.

10 Reasons Why You Should NEVER Move to the United States

The USA has become a TERRIBLE place.

Apricot Cobbler

Apricot Cobbler
Apricot Cobbler

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

Filling

  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 tablespoon cornstarch
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1 cup water
  • 3 (15 1/4 ounce) cans apricot halves, drained
  • 1 tablespoon butter

Topping

  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3 tablespoons cold butter
  • 1/2 cup milk

Instructions

Filling

  1. In a saucepan, combine sugar, cornstarch, cinnamon and nutmeg.
  2. Stir in water; bring to a boil over medium heat. Boil and stir for 1 minute; reduce heat.
  3. Add apricots and butter; heat through. Pour into a greased 2 quart baking dish.

Topping

  1. Combine flour, sugar, baking powder and salt in a bowl; cut in butter until crumbly.
  2. Stir in milk just until moistened. Spoon over hot apricot mixture.
  3. Bake at 400 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes or until golden brown and a wooden pick inserted into the topping comes out clean.

What is a split-second decision you made that changed your life?

When I was 14 years old my Mom suddenly decided she wanted to move to Colorado. Apparently it was a place she had always wanted to see, so next thing I knew we were living in the ultra small town of Limon, Colorado. I was not happy about this at all. My brother, who was 19 at the time, had stayed in South Carolina. All of my friends were still in South Carolina. I was miserable.

I spent my freshman year in Limon, and hated almost everything about it. The one part I didn’t hate was that my freshman class of 30 students included 5 guys and 25 girls. That was fun. On the other hand, I was the fattest kid in school, so even playing football didn’t help me in that arena.

One day, about a week after school let out for summer, I was sitting in my bedroom listening to music when I suddenly really wanted to hang out with my brother. I didn’t even think about it. I grabbed my rucksack that I used for camping, loaded it up with clothes, my radio and some tapes (this was 1990), and I walked out the door. I was going to hitchhike the almost 1500 miles to South Carolina.

It took me 63 hours to get there. To this day I am amazed at how easy it actually was, and how fast I made it there. What’s even more amazing is that when I showed up at my Aunt’s front door (my brother was living with her after we moved) it was my Mom who met me at the door. As soon as she had gotten home from work and I wasn’t there she knew what I had done and where I was going. Since she was able to drive straight through she made the trip far quicker than I did.

My Mom was angry, but she was just as relieved that I was safe, so she agreed that we could stay for one week before we headed back to Limon. That was on a Friday. The following Wednesday was June 6th, 1990. That date might not matter to most people, but it was very important to us, because of this:

Limon marks 20 years since devastating tornado

A tornado ripped through the town, destroying almost half of the town – including the apartment we were living in at the time. If we hadn’t been in South Carolina, I would have been home when it came through, and likely would not be alive right now.

Oddly enough, this would not be the last time something like that would happen to me. In 2010 I made the split-second decision to move back to South Carolina again, leaving behind my apartment in Joplin, Missouri. I had already been planning to move, but my plan had been to go to Florida to be near my parents. At the last minute my Mom told me not to come because the Space Center had just laid off 10,000 NASA employees, and that was a job market I did not want to try to compete in during those hard times. I could have stayed in Joplin, but I had already sold off most of my furniture, so I just decided, “Screw it, I’ll go back to South Carolina.”

A year later, Joplin was hit by an F5 tornado that destroyed almost 25% of the town — including the apartment I had been living in when I was there. Combined with the fact that an entire street I lived on in South Carolina was destroyed by a tornado a couple years after I moved away, and the fact that I left South Carolina months before Hurricane Hugo hit, and again just before Hurricane Andrew hit, and now my friends joke that if I ever move away they are all coming with me.

Jamaican Sista Warns Black Immigrants, The American Dream Is A Farce Because US Is A Plantation

You will work until you are literally DEAD!”

Stacked 1,400-Year-Old Zhou Dynasty Emperor’s Tomb Uncovered in China

Archaeologists in Shaanxi Province, northwest China, have discovered the tomb of Emperor Xiaomin (birth name Yuwen Jue), the founding emperor of the Northern Zhou Dynasty (557-581). Emperor Xiaomin’s tomb, a medium-sized one in the context of the Northern Zhou dynasty, is situated in Beihe Village, Weicheng District, Xianyang, an area known for its concentration of high-quality tombs spanning from the Northern Dynasties (439-581) to the Sui and Tang dynasties (581-907).

Uncovering Zhou Dynasty Emperor Tomb: Medium-Sized but Power Packed

The tomb itself faces south and is a single-chamber soil cave tomb with four patios along the sloping tomb passage, according to a press announcement by Shaanxi Academy of Archaeology on Tuesday. Covering a total length of 56.84 meters (186.5 ft) from north to south, the bottom of the tomb lies 10 meters (32.8 ft) beneath the current surface.

According to the press announcement:

“The archaeological discovery of Yuwen Jue’s tomb from the Northern Zhou Dynasty is of great significance. It is the second Northern Zhou emperor’s tomb that has been excavated after the Xiaoling Mausoleum of Emperor Wu of the Northern Zhou Dynasty.”

Though the tomb had previously been looted, archaeologists have managed to recover 146 burial objects, primarily pottery figurines in a single chamber holding funerary offerings, depicting warriors and cavalry units. Furthermore, the presence of an epitaph on the tomb’s eastern side has allowed archaeologists to confirm that the tomb belonged to Emperor Xiaomin (542-557), reports  Heritage Daily .

This discovery holds immense significance for historical research into the emperors of the Northern Dynasty , as highlighted by Zhao Zhanrui, an assistant researcher at the academy.

Northern Zhou: Foundation of a Short-Lived Dynasty

Rather than assuming the title of emperor, Xiaomin, also known as Emperor Ming of Northern Zhou, chose to adopt the Zhou Dynasty’s title of “Heavenly Prince.” However, his reign was marred by internal strife and power struggles. A significant conflict unfolded between Xiaomin and his cousin, Yuwen Hu, who sought to consolidate his own power.

In a dramatic turn of events, Yuwen Hu managed to depose Xiaomin from his position and subsequently had him killed. This political maneuvering further highlighted the instability and internal divisions that plagued the Northern Zhou Dynasty during its relatively brief existence.

The Northern Zhou Dynasty , which reigned from 557 to 581 AD, was a significant but relatively short-lived era in the history of ancient China . Founded by Yuwen Tai, who took the title of Emperor Wen upon his ascent to power, the dynasty was established following a successful rebellion against the ruling Northern Wei Dynasty .

The Northern Zhou’s capital was Chang’an, an influential city located in what is now Xi’an, Shaanxi Province. Chang’an was known for its cultural richness and strategic importance as a center of trade and governance .

One of the most notable aspects of the Northern Zhou Dynasty was its association with Buddhism. Emperor Wen and his successor, Emperor Wu, were fervent Buddhists, and they played a pivotal role in promoting Buddhism as the state religion. They supported the construction of Buddhist temples , sponsored the translation of Buddhist scriptures, and actively contributed to the growth of Buddhism in China. This period marked a significant turning point in Chinese religious and cultural history.

Emperor Wen and Emperor Wu also implemented important political reforms aimed at strengthening the central authority of the emperor. Land redistribution was one such reform, aimed at reducing the power of the aristocracy and redistributing land to the common people. These efforts were indicative of the dynasty’s desire to create a more equitable society.

Despite these reforms, the Northern Zhou Dynasty faced challenges. The empire’s unity weakened over time, leading to regional fragmentation and conflicts among various power centers. Eventually, the Northern Zhou Dynasty succumbed to internal strife, and it was conquered by the Sui Dynasty in 581. This marked the end of the dynasty’s relatively short but culturally impactful existence.

Legacy and Historical Relevance of the Northern Zhou

The legacy of the Northern Zhou Dynasty lives on in several ways. Its patronage of Buddhism had a lasting influence on Chinese religion, culture, and art. The dynasty’s contributions to calligraphy and sculpture, particularly in the context of Buddhist art, marked significant advancements in Chinese culture. Furthermore, some of its political reforms, such as those related to land distribution, influenced subsequent Chinese dynasties, including the powerful Tang Dynasty.

Notably, the Northern Zhou Dynasty was unique in its ethnic background. Its founding emperor, Yuwen Tai, belonged to the Xianbei ethnic group, making the dynasty one of the few in Chinese history to be ruled by a non-Han Chinese ethnic group, a rarity.

FILIPINA WIFE DEFENDING PASSPORT BROS.

One of the best, most intelligent responses to these woke, American women. Thanks Leah. You and Gary have a great family and life. Wish you both the best!

Reaping the whirlwind

Israel war. Ukraine war. Niger war. Maybe soon… Taiwan war.

Which nation is center to all these wars?

Geo-Politics is a real bitch. It’s the middle of the HOT PHASE of the massive Global Turning that we all are experiencing.

But we have PAST the THREAT THRESHOLD. So do not get too caught up.

Today.

How did your marriage end?

He came home from work, ate dinner, and said , ““I want you to do something and I don’t want you to fight me on this. I want a divorce.” I was completely blindsided. Then he packed a bag and left for his mother’s house. I made him leave his key. He didn’t understand that, ““how will I get in the house?” I replied that he had no reason to enter the house when I wasn’t home. He didn’t live there anymore. He was shocked.

I started thinking about his infidelity and the micro-aggressions that had recently increased; for Christmas he had given me a bottle of men’s cologne! That’s it. Of course, he kept it for himself. It was evident that he had given my gift absolutely no thought.

So instead of begging him to stay, I emptied out the joint accounts and made an appointment with a family attorney for the next day.

Of course he wanted to drag things out. He came to get his things the same week, and I watched TV while he packed and loaded the car. He actually asked me to help. I said “This is something you want to do, not me.”

Before he left, I told him that I know he is still committing adultery and that my attorney said he should be careful about that. Lots of denying and sputtering but the thing that bothered him most was my getting a lawyer. He actually said “You got a lawyer? You know I will always take care of you. Don’t you trust me?”

By the way, he told me the reason he needed space was “the children are grown now, so I don’t have to pretend anymore. I never wanted a family that I had to hang out with.”

So that was the end. A year later, a judge granted me about a third of his assets and income as alimony until I remarry or die. We were married 32 years, and I was 65 years old. I’m sitting pretty comfortably and very peacefully in a different city. Except for incidental paperwork handled by my attorney, I have no contact. I don’t have to pretend anymore, either.

‘’Edit: I want to say that finally getting a chance to tell my story has been cathartic for me. Thank you all for your support and encouragement. I am much less angry and more resolved to live well after this. Thank you all.”

INTERVIEW: Reaping the whirlwind

Karma is a BITCH. Well said Scott.

Steak over Noodles

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Ingredients

  • 1 (3 pound) round steak, cut into strips
  • 1 can tomatoes and green chiles
  • 1 can sliced mushrooms
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 teaspoon brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon oregano
  • Parmesan cheese
  • 1 envelope onion soup mix
  • 1 can tomatoes
  • 2 tablespoons wine vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder
  • Salt and pepper, to taste
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 package egg noodles, cooked

Instructions

  1. Cut steak into small strips.
  2. Heat oil in a large skillet. Add steak and brown quickly.
  3. Combine tomatoes and green chiles with onion soup mix. Pour over steak.
  4. Add remaining ingredients, except noodles and cheese. Simmer until steak is tender, approximately 1 to 2 hours.
  5. Cook noodles according to package directions, then drain well.
  6. Serve steak mixture over cooked noodles. Top with parmesan cheese.

What is the biggest scam an auto mechanic ever tried on you?

Last week I needed to drive to Sheffield for my brother’s funeral. On the morning in question I thought I had better top up the oil so l lifted the bonnet, undid the oil filler cap and placed it on top of the engine. It rolled off and fell down into the body of the engine just below the fan belt and where all the pipes and tubes and things I don’t understand are. I tried reaching it, I tried a magnetic rod, I tried a long reach grabber thingy but couldn’t get it.

I stuffed some paper towels in the oil filler orifice and set off for my local garage. Explained the situation on arrival and they immediately allotted a young lad to retrieve it for me. He got it up on the ramps, undid a few things, removed a panel or two and then there was my oil filler cap.

Then they did the unthinkable – they said there was no charge and they were happy to do it for me.

Needless to say I couldn’t stand for that type of impertinence and gave them £20 and told them to have a drink on me.

What is something that the 1% do that 99% won’t do?

The 99% work following a linear formula:

Skill×Time=Paycheck

There’s NO leverage in that equation.

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image 86

To answer your question, what is something that the 1% do that the 99% won’t do?

The 1% work with a non-linear formula, with business leverage:

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image 85

We all have the same 24 hours in a day.

The 99% focus their efforts on increasing their skills on making more money.

The 1% are focused on finding creative ways of making the most of their limited time and energy using leverage. How?

  • Using other people’s time (employees)
  • Using other people’s talents (expert advisors)
  • Using other people’s money (Banks)
  • Using technological advances (Automation)
  • Scaling their knowledge (Systems)

Why did China invest 400 billion in Iran?

China and Iran are still discussing a $400 billion strategic agreement over 25 years.

This agreement has many benefits for both countries.

Since Donald Trump unilaterally denounced the Vienna nuclear agreement that Iran had been respecting, Iran has once again found itself under a very strict embargo.

Iran has realized that the European Union is not in a position to resist the pressure of American sanctions.

Therefore, Iran is looking for partners who can help it resist US economic sanctions. China is the only partner capable of offering this.

China will invest 400 billion dollars in Iran over the next 25 years if this agreement is signed in early 2021.

This agreement provides for the sale of Iranian oil and gas to China at a preferential rate. China could also set up military bases in Iran and have privileged access to all investments in the country.

Iran would join China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

For China, securing its oil and gas supply is essential. For Iran, having a partner as powerful as China will enable it to better resist the United States.

An Iran-Russia-China axis is being formed to better resist the United States.

CHINESE VS AMERICAN BOOKSTORES

So typical China.

This is a MUCH WATCH.

https://youtu.be/1bn-FQBsvT8

How do the surgeons preserve a patient’s dignity during surgery?

Two years ago, a surgeon told me my left testicle was malignant and had to be removed. He worked out of a teaching hospital, so he asked if the students could come in. They get very few malignancies like this— a rare form of cancer. I agreed. Every visit, I’d have 5 drop dead gorgeous women in masks and white coats come in and feel my nutsack while the surgeon had his hand in there giving the tour.

One day, while the crew was working my nutsack over, I noticed a woman had come into the room, and was standing back from the crowd huddled around my nether-regions. She seemed hesitant.

“It’s okay.” :I said. “Join the party.”

“No thanks,” she said. “I’m just here to have you sign some forms.”

Look, one thing you’re going to have to get over with this sort of thing is dignity. There’s just no room for it.

When the day came, I drew a big arrow up my left leg with marker and wrote THIS ONE! When I got in the operating theatre, there were over a dozen people. Some were surgical team , while others were student observers. Before they passed me the gas, I sat up on the table and asked for everyone’s attention.

“Just so there’s no confusion here,” I said. “I want everyone here to repeat for me; ‘It’s the left nut!’”

“It’s the left nut!”

“It’s the left nut!”

“It’s the left nut!”

“It’s the left nut!”

I didn’t want any mistakes.

My advice to anyone reading this is as follows. Throw away all notions that what you have under your clothes is private and unique. Whoever is going to see you started working on this with cadavers. The whole point of the exercise is to keep you from ending up as one of those cadavers. Once you embrace it, have fun with it. You might as well. You’re getting cut on anyway— one way or the other.

Just so y’all know, the orchiectomy went well. I was back at work in less than a week. The cancer returned 9 months later. I had to undergo chemo; that darn near killed me, but I pulled through and made it out to my deer stand that November. I’m now cancer-free and there is very little chance of it returning.

The National Debt And The Everyday American

Why does the United States have so many more prisoners than other countries?

Up until the late 1960s, U.S. prisoner populations weren’t much that greater than other similar countries.

However, both the Nixon administration and the Reagan administration decided to use the justice system to fight both the counter-culture movement and, of course, minorities. Many states already had draconian laws in place for marijuana possession (Michigan made it a felony punishable by life imprisonment) but the federal government upped their own penalties for marijuana, treating it as the equivalent of a narcotic (which it wasn’t).

This initiative was, of course, given the name “The War on Drugs” as “The war against hippies and uppity n*ggers” didn’t play out so well in the press. African-Americans and Hispanics were using their newly found “civil rights” to vote for Democrats in droves, pretty much driving Republican mayors and councilmen out of America’s biggest cities, where blacks and Hispanics were quickly becoming the majority.

Naturally, none of the new drug laws were administered equally. Possession by rich white people in the suburbs was pretty much ignored or got a slap on the wrist, while police and the courts came down hard on blacks and the poor living in the big cities.

The effect on these communities were immediate – other crimes related to drugs started to rise in concert as drug dealers stopped being the friendly guy down the street and started to be organized criminal gangs with the wherewithal to bribe cops and the power to eliminate competition. Having most of your young male population serving time in jail devastated black and Hispanic communities, fueled prison and street gangs as prisons became more overcrowded, overwhelmed the courts with drug cases. Cities collapsed as those who could moved out and the people left became more desperate.

With this side effect being crystal clear by 1980 when Reagan was elected, he decided to double down. The new menace was “crack”, cheaper than cocaine, but shorter acting. It was preferred by the poor as a gram of cocaine could set you back $100, but a dose of crack with much less cocaine might only be $10. Nevertheless, even though a gram of crack contained less than .1 gram of cocaine, the penalty for using it was identical. That meant white cokeheads got the same sentences as black crack users for using a more potent drug. That particular issue wasn’t fixed until the Trump administration. (It’s the one thing Trump did right, although he did it for all the wrong reasons and got angry when black people didn’t start voting for him).

Meanwhile the underground drug economy was growing by leaps and bounds. Raw product was available in Mexico for peanuts, but once across the border markups of 1000% weren’t uncommon, and then it was marked up again for retail sale. So much money was flowing to Columbian drug lords that they had more money to spare than the government, and a good chunk of the cash coming out of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing was solely for the purpose of feeding the drug supply chain. I think I estimated at one point that about 10% of the BEP’s output was going solely to Pablo Escobar.

But you know who else was taking advantage of all this free cash and the cars, planes and yachts that came along with it? United States law enforcement agencies. You see, in most civilized counties, if you levy fines or seize ill gotten assets, all that money “excheats” to general revenue, so it becomes part of general government funding to be distributed as politicians see fit. That wasn’t what happened in the United States. In the United States, the agency that seizes the assets, such as the Drug Enforcement.

Agency or the Customs Service, gets to keep them, and they’re added directly to their budget, just like a small community that runs a speed trap on a major highway.

As such, the efforts of federal, state and local law enforcement started to become to seize as much stuff as possible. A single marijuana cigarette on a yacht allowed the Customs Service to seize and sell the entire thing. The practice was so reviled that even the most conservative U.S. Supreme Court Justices railed about its legality, and eventually the Supreme Court forced reform of the system.

So, with many federal, state and local agencies being dependent on drug money for their operations, they got more aggressive and, the more aggressive they got, the bigger they got and the more money they needed.

Naturally, all of this, together with people stealing money for drugs, drug dealers fighting over drug territories, and all the other secondary effects of a prohibition movement (remember alcohol prohibition, remember Al Capone, take that and multiply it by a hundred) the prisons got stuffed full. No problem because it provided a lot of free labour, most of the prisoners were poor, black, or Hispanic, and prison budgets didn’t allow for such luxuries as “enough well trained guards” or “rehabilitation programs”. When many states hit a wall because of the cost of new prisons, they privatized them, paying prison owners a per diem for every prisoner, which the private prisons demanded a new supply of.

Since many drug offences are felonies, it often means that when people are released they’re prohibited from entering lots of fields such as “barber” in New York State (a felony conviction keeps you from being licensed).

Luckily, things are changing on a bipartisan level. Conservatives are noting the cost of running all these prisons as other crimes had longer sentences attached. Drunk driving is a bigger problem than drug use, but it was clogging Texas prisons until they came up with a more effective diversion program to keep people out of jail. The increasing cost of an aging prison population serving time for things that happened when they were 20, and they’re now 70, are stretching prison budgets to the limit. Moreover, the “defund the police” movement notes that many of these initiatives that put people in jail for minor offences turn local populations against the police, making it harder to investigate more serious crimes.

THE GREATEST SPEECH EVER by AN AFRICAN LEADER explaining THE NEW AFRICA-EVERYONE MUST HEAR Historic

That was epic to say the least.

What are your 10 laws of manhood?

Here are 10 laws of manhood that my father taught me:

1.Don’t pay for sex.

You don’t need it that bad, you’re not an animal, you should spend your evening trying out new pick up lines and having a good time with people.

2. Never chase after a woman

Never base your life around one single person that is not a sure thing, instead, you should be chasing your dreams and goals while trying to make a success of yourself.

3. Know when it’s time to fight back

There comes a point in life, where you can no longer expect others to solve a problem for you. If you can’t stand up for yourself, why should you expect others to? A man should know when it’s time to hit back. There’s never a reason to fight — until there is.

4. Your marriage should not always be a choice between your mother and wife

Your mom is definitely the first woman in your life. But your wife is someone to be cherished and respected, too. A clear line should be drawn between the kind of relationship that you share with both of them. In case of a tussle take a neutral, just and impartial stand.

5. Don’t brag about things you’ve done, instead let the things you’ve done speak for itself. Actions will always speak louder than words so keep that in mind.

6. It’s good to talk about the emotions you’re feeling with loved ones as they’ll be there for you. Being a man does not mean that you have to hide your emotions and be a rock.

7. Stay clean, if you have a long beard then take care of it and keep it neat, brush your teeth and shower

8. Failure doesn’t threaten your manhood

A lot of men fear failure in life, career, and relationships. They feel they aren’t “real men” if they fail. But failure is an essential part of life! It’s a reality of life. Accept it!

9. Be able to cook a good meal.

It’s important. You don’t have to be a chef, but know how to make at least one good meal. It doesn’t need to be fancy, a good sloppy joe is perfectly fine, but be able to cook up something and make sure it’s good.

10. Take action because it is right, not because it is popular.

The things that matter are not merely what is popular at the moment. A true man, a gentleman, takes action because it is the right thing to do, and they do the right thing whether or not it feels cool or fun.

Man Dies & is Shocked to be Shown the Future (NDE)

Jeff Tolley shares his Near Death Experience (NDE) after being so distraught after his brother’s death that he took his own life. While on the other side Jeff met up with his brother and three beings that showed him he had more to live for and the state of his energies bodies. He was also shown his future and the future of Earth. Jeff came back from his near-death experience with a renewed sense for life and a new outlook on life and his purpose.

As an American, do you get offended when you repeatedly try to convince those from Europe, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand that America is the greatest country in the world, and they end laughing in your face?

As an Australian who travels to the us a lot , I prefer Australia and New Zealand. I’ve got a business that is growing in the US but I really don’t want to move there so instead endure the 12 hour return flights .

There are some really awesome Americans. But there’s a lot of dicks, and this huge focus on materialism that I just don’t buy. If you drive a $600k super car and look like the Kardashians you are idolised there more than you would be in any other country I know. The American god is the god of material wealth . I find that quite noxious, even though I can afford a $600k car.

what I respect about America is that you can , as a middle class battler, still buy a nice house for USD400k in most cities . America protects its middle class , and that’s cool. Affordable housing is a big tick. I come from humble beginnings and know what it’s like to struggle to get your first house , and I think America does well here .

As a place to live though – naa. Australia and New Zealand far better . And from what I’ve seen Western Europe far better also. Go to downtown LA or San Francisco. It’s vile. Miles and miles of people living on the streets, shooting drugs , littering. It’s some sort of future dystopia ! Who the F would want to live near that depravity. It’s down right depressing and disgusting. It’s what happens when you drive the cost of living beyond what the poor can afford to exist and you offer no support for the cost increases – the bottom 15% of society simply fall out and end up living like animals on the street. Is this the sort of country where you would want your kids to grow up in? Not me , not ever.

America is dangerous, riddled with crime and depravity. They have got it wrong and are paying for it. And it’s gunna get worse.

Don’t take this as all Americans are pricks – they aren’t. But there’s something structurally wrong with that country – not my cuppa!

“The Mandela Effect” These examples will make you question EVERYTHING in your reality

This is fun. And it is a MUST WATCH. Especially for you MM followers.

When Susan Kuhnhausen walked into her house, she immediately knew someone was in her home.

It wasn’t just a sixth sense. Things had been moved. Curtains were now open, moving as if they’d recently been touched. Things on her table had been moved. She lived alone and she knew where everything belonged.

She walked through the house uneasily looking down hallways. In the kitchen. Moving quietly.

She walked past her bathroom. She turned into her bedroom.

Standing there was a bearded man, holding a hammer. He charged her and swung his hammer, hitting her on the side of the head. She fell down. He got on top of her and kept hitting her.

They then began wrestling.

Susan was a larger woman, who was particularly strong and worked as a nurse in the ER, trained on how to subdue wild patients.

After being hit several times, she managed to get her assassin pinned to the ground in a sleeper hold.

She began choking him. When she released him, his throat had been crushed — he later died (after Susan called an ambulance for him).

The assassin had been sent by her husband.

Their marriage had fallen apart and he wanted her dead. He’d paid the assassin $50,000 to kill her.

She was later treated for injuries and made a full recovery. Her husband was then sent to jail for the remainder of his life (he died in prison).

Her would-be assassin’s last words, during their fight, were “you are strong.”

Girl power.

I Had 0 EXPECTATIONS.. But I LOVED IT | Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond (REACTION!)

What is the oddest conversation you’ve had with a telephone scammer?

Me: “Hello.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “Hello. This is Bob Bobson from Microsoft Support. We are seeing a lot of virus activity from your device.”

Me: “Oh no. My device? Are you sure?”

NOT-Microsoft support: “Oh yes, we have many reports.”

Me: “Oh jeez. How can I fix it?”

NOT-Microsoft support: “It’s OK, sir. We can help you right now. Are you in front of your device, sir?”

Me: “Yes. I was just about to use it. I’m glad you called.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “Yes sir, we are going to help you. Can you please push the Start button?”

Me: “I haven’t put in a time yet.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “That’s OK sir, just press the button.”

Me: “OK. What now?”

NOT-Microsoft support: “Now you want to click on Control Panel.”

Me: “I don’t see that.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “Do you see a bunch of information above the Start button?”

Me: “Yes.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “That is your Control Panel.”

Me: “Wow, I didn’t realize it had a name.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “Yes sir, now press on Internet Options.”

Me: “Yeah, I definitely don’t see any Internet options. I don’t think I purchased that feature. This is just a cheap one.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “They all have the Internet, sir. Press the Start button again.”

Me: “OK, it’s the same as before.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “That’s OK, sir. We are going to restart your device. Can you please turn it off?”

Me: “Ummm…I don’t know how. I’ve never turned it off. Since I bought it, it just kind of stays on all the time.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “There must be an off button on your device. How do you stop it when it’s running?”

Me: “In those cases, I usually press the big button beneath Stop/Cancel.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “OK, sir. Please press that button.”

Me: “Ok.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “Is your device off?”

Me: “No. The door popped open.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “Door? Is there a disc inside the door?”

Me: “No, there’s a burrito.”

NOT-Microsoft support: “Why is there a burrito in your computer?”

Me: “Computer? This is a microwave.”

The Sopranos – Carmine Jr Speaks To Lupertazzi Management

Are girls more attracted to confidence or the look of a guy? I’ve seen some couples where the girl is very attractive and the guy is just average, and I’m asking myself, how? Is it because of his confidence? Maybe he’s funny or rich?

My two older sisters, twins, had a long and busy career in fashion modelling. I always thought they would marry the Hollywood hunk type of guy because those were the types they would sometimes go out with.

However, when they did got married, the guys were just your average Joe types; certainly not the Hollywood attractive male type. My parents and I were quite surprised. However both were confident in themselves.

They married good men who always treated them nicely. They didn’t put the girls on pedestals, treat them like starlets or have them as trophy wives. They didn’t ask them to leave modelling. They just treated them as regular women, were loyal, and had a great sense of humour. Of course they loved and cared for them deeply.

Lori and Tracy were the business girls who after modelling, took over dad’s car dealerships when he retired and made them very successful.

Mom was a fashion model who was on her way to Hollywood with a friend when she met dad. Dad was at the time working at a car dealership, which he later bought, but at the time he was a sales manager. “He made me laugh and didn’t fawn all over me like I was a movie star. He treated me as a regular girl and I just fell in love with him,” she said. She was six years younger than dad.

So attractive women don’t always go for the rich, good looking businessman. The smart ones go for the ones that make them happy.

Missile Excerpts from the TV Movie “The Day After”

While not completely accurate in technical approach, the failure of the deterrence mission was shown in the made for ABC TV movie “The Day After” that premiered on 20 Nov 1983. The movie used scenes from the film “First Strike” to show the USAF detection and response to an ICBM attack against the U.S. Presented from the archives of the Association of Air Force Missileers (AAFM).

I spent 4 years in SAC as a Minuteman II launch crew commander back in the 70s. This depiction of the launch actions is very accurate. Of course, they left out some of the classified details in processing the message, but, all in all, this was very accurate. Several times EVERY DAY we got coded Emergency Action Messages (EAM) that could have been real execution messages for nuclear war. As others have mentioned, we did NOT know whether these were tests/training messages until we had competed decoding and authentication procedures. That was the real test of your nerves. You never knew. I am sometimes asked if the launch crews would obey the execution messages. The answer is an unqualified YES. If the message turned out to be a valid and authentic message, keys would be turned. We believed that the EAMs would not be transmitted unless the U.S. was under attack and the sooner we got our missiles off the ground the sooner we could stop any further incoming attacks. While I count that as a valuable experience in my life, I do not miss the stress.”

Why is America losing the tech war with China?

The truth!

The U.S. can win if they compete on who is better in plundering, looting, stealing, abusing nations, regime change, orchestrating demonstrations and coups and unilateral sanctions. That kind of competition the US will win hands down.

Tech war! Are you kidding me. For ever 100 Chinese engineers the U.S. barely produce one! Chinese will eat them for lunch any day. Over the past decade China has registered twice the U.S. registrations of patent in the U.S. patent registration office.

And according to the Neo con funded Australian Strategic Policy Institute ASPI, out of 44 of the most strategic technologies China leads in 37 of them! The U.S. only manage to lead by a whisker in 7 out of the 44 these days.

Try colour revolutions competition I guarantee the U.S. will! Hahahaha.

Dad Came Back 1,5 Month Later. Cat’s Reaction.

Has a teacher ever accused your child of doing something that you know he could not have done?

Quite clearly. But not my kid.

I was tutoring a young man in HS. He (and several classes of other students) had to take his teacher’s Math Final over the Internet with a non-relative adult as Proctor. He took the Final at the tutoring center with me as Proctor.

About an hour in, he discovered that an entire sentence was missing from a Question rendering it impossible to solve. He asked my help. I refused. He asked my advice. I first looked at the Question and said nothing but knew he was correct — unsolvable because of missing information. “What do YOU think you OUGHT to do?” “EMAIL THE TEACHER, AND THEN DO THE REST OF THE EXAM?” “Then do that.” He did. I watched.

About 20 minutes later the teacher put out an email announcement to all students to skip that question, saying it had a misprint and was missing required information.

Fine. EXCEPT she flunked him saying he was absent from the exam. The problem escalated but the tutoring center did nothing because that teacher had threatened to have our contract with the County terminated (possibly causing massive tutor layoffs and lots of kids screwed….)

At that point I went in to the center’s boss, announced my resignation, and contacted the Principal and the young man’s father’s lawyer. The bitch teacher tried to get support from the Teacher’s Union and got caught in more lies.

The lawyers worked out a compromise. The kid passed and graduated, but the D in a straight A record was kind of a screw job and the bitch teacher accused me of lieing.

Oh well, let it go….

Five years later, my wife and I received a brief note with tickets to a university graduation. The kid not only got in, he was Straight A for four plus years.

US And Western Media’s Dirty Propaganda About China’s Lithography Exposed!

Bro the US cant even compete. Its laughable.

https://youtu.be/lDGMe7cK_RU

What’s the nicest thing anyone has ever done for you?

I had a bank customer who was a older gentleman that had recently lost his wife. He came across as a mean person only because he didn’t engage in conversation nor smiled much. Somehow he trusted me and we became good friends. He was the second person I called when my own father died and he explained to me why my father chose to just give up. My friend was 90 at the time and in better health than my dad. Anyhow he made me understand why he was “tired” and just wanted to feel alive again. I teased him telling him he more less became my surrogate father from then on. The day I quit the bank, he cried thinking I was going to forget him. He had two daughter’s who didn’t live in the same state so I continued to check on him taking him home cooked food, to appointments and just to visit. The day came when he moved into a retirement home so helped him get his house ready to sell. I never asked for anything because I never expected anything. He was a friend and I’ve always enjoyed dealing with elderly people. Once he hit 92, he decided to move near his daughter in another state. That’s when it was my turn to cry. Felt like I was losing my father all over again. Kept in touch with him until the day his daughter called and told me he had a massive heart attack. I was devastated. Months went by until out of the blue I got a call saying he left me alittle something in his will. I didn’t want anything and didn’t have a friendship for that purpose. His little something was a check for 20,000. I was blown away but his daughters thanked me as well for being there for him. It never was a duty but it was more of a way to let him know, he wasn’t alone. I work home health now and always keep him in my mind.

People Who Disappeared Because They Knew Too Much

The people you are about to see in this top made discoveries that would have changed humanity. However, unexpectedly, they disappeared from the face of the Earth or ceased to exist. Many theorize that they disappeared because they knew too much.

What is the Chinese people’s understanding of democracy? Why don’t they have it yet? If they are aware of it, what are their reasons for not wanting it?

One big reason the Chinese people don’t want democracy is the USA.

The USA keeps holding itself out as the world’s prime example of democracy. Chinese people take a look and they are horrified.

The US imprisons more citizens than any other country in the world. The police step on black men’s necks to kill them. U.S cops carry weapons designed for war! Then there are the widespread demonstrations that degenerate into rioting, looting and arson. Half the U.S population believes that the last election was “stolen” from them. Then there is an attack on Capitol Hill. Furthermore Americans say that gun ownership is a fundamental liberty. But every week they have mass shootings. People get killed all the time in schools, supermarkets, pubs, parking lots, country music concerts, churches, Independence Day parades etc. The infrastructure is crumbling, the country is mired in an endless drug crisis and they don’t seem to have a healthcare system. The country claims to have freedom of expression but it bans TikTok, which the rest of the world has. Meanwhile fake news is so prevalent in the US that Americans’ trust in U.S media, as proven by survey results, has plunged to a record low. The country claims to have freedom of religion, but clearly Christian nationalism is sweeping across the USA and women can’t even get birth control or abortion. Also, did you know that the U.S violent crime rate is 3 times higher than that in China, and that the U.S homicide rate is 4 times higher? Meanwhile every day, the Dems and Republics are attacking each other for the sake of attacking and they do not appear at all to be interested in working together in any way for the good of the country.

This terrifies the Chinese people.

Then the USA says “Oh, we are the champions of democracy.”

Well, of course the Chinese people don’t want democracy. “Errr, thanks but no thanks!” they say.

The Middle Class Can No Longer Afford Rent In America

All Americans require a nice, secure, and inexpensive place to live in order to prosper. For years, low-income families have battled to find cheap rental properties, but today the middle class is also facing significant difficulties in this area.

Due to the sharp increase in rent prices seen in major American cities since the outbreak, millions of middle-class Americans are unable to pay their rent.

These middle-class households are being excluded from normal middle-class communities without major income increases or government support, which starts a domino effect that results in systemic poverty and enduring inequality. In other words, middle-class Americans are being squeezed to death by housing costs.

Compared to just two years ago, the average home now costs approximately $80,000 more, and the average rent in the US is over $1,000 more than it will be in 2020.

The survey discovered that while middle-class renters’ salaries have decreased 9% over the past ten years, rents are rising on average by 3.5% yearly.

The American middle class has been spending far more on housing than they can afford in the majority of urban areas across the nation, researchers found.

According to the survey, 46.3% of middle-class renters and 21.2% of middle-class homeowners in the US, respectively, are moderately or severely burdened by housing costs, which are defined as spending more than 30% or 50% of one’s salary on housing.

What would you do if you were told, “pack up your things and leave immediately” from your place of employment?

This happened to me when I was a programmer in London, back when coding was done in ANS Cobol.
I was sitting in my office at around 9:30 a.m., feet up on the desk and probably snoring. The big boss man came in very quietly, pushed my feet off the desk, and told me I was fired and to leave the company immediately.


Well, I know how to wind people up, so I just shrugged and started to leave. He stopped me, asking if I had anything to say, and the conversation went something like this:


Boss: “Why did I find you sleeping on company time?”


Me: “Where were you at 3 a.m. this morning?”


Boss: “In bed with my wife, of course. Why?”


Me: “Well at 3.a.m. I had already been here for two hours fixing a bug that had interrupted the operation of the mainframe computer at around midnight. It was a bit of a bugger to find, and the system wasn’t up and running again until 7:30 this morning. This means that I get triple pay for the hours I worked, all expenses, a full meal (even though no place was open), and today off work. I’m leaving now, and will be contacting my union to discuss how best to get as much as I can in damages”.

His only choice was to give me a raise, which he did. Tosser.

What is the most surprising thing you have accidentally overheard about yourself?

My parents divorced when I was 4. My mother remarried a man one year later in 1965.

He was a very controlling man about most things—but that’s a different story. In the summer between my 4th and 5th grade, he became “Born Again” at a Billy Graham revival. At his insistence, my mother soon followed, as did my sister. I was the only one in our family of 4 who didn’t want to give up their entire life and become a singularly focused religious fanatic.

My stepfather had never really liked me before that. After that he hated me, and could barely contain his loathsome attitude toward me.

Speeding ahead a few years, when I was entering the 12th grade, my mother took me aside one day and told me that they had no money to help me with college—that I was going to have to figure out my future on my own. (She was quite literal about that. They never even once discussed with me what my options might be.) I said it was ok. I’d figure it out. I did, and after high school, I got a job at a factory.

My sister, who is 4 years older than me, did attend a religious college, and while it crossed my mind as to how she was able to pay for college, I never asked. We weren’t very close.

Fast forward to 1994. I am now successful in my career. I have a large house with a swimming pool and hot tub in the backyard. My family—mother, stepfather, sister and her family—are invited to my house for an afternoon barbecue.

My mother and sister are sitting in my hot tub. I am around the corner of the house tending the barbecue. They don’t realize that I’m there. They are talking loudly, and I can clearly hear them. My sister starts talking about college education for her kids and she asks my mom how she and my stepfather saved up the money for her college education.

My mom immediately started to panic, and began shushing my sister to be quiet. She frantically said, “I don’t want Kent to hear this! We told him we had no money for college.”

I always knew that I was the black sheep in the family, but it was in that moment that I truly realized how much I was excluded. From that point on, my eyes and mind were opened to the lies and deception within my family. It forever altered our relationship.

Update- stepfather died. Felt nothing. My wife thinks that I suffer from PTSD because of him. Maybe with time I can now forget and maybe even forgive. I wonder if he got that gold-plated throne next to God that he obsessed on his entire life. I doubt it.

Update- mother died. I felt almost nothing. I do mourn that she was more interested in keeping her abusive husband happy than having an interest in her son. Such is life.

Why CHINA Will Win The Space Race

China has rapidly advanced its space capabilities, achieving milestones such as landing a rover on the far side of the moon and establishing its own space station, the Tiangong. The Chinese space program’s impressive progress has raised concerns in the United States about the potential erosion of its dominance. Today’s episode is explaining how and why China will win the race to space.

What is self-love?

I once was in a very tough situation financially. I worked three jobs at the time to keep up with life.

One day, at the end of the month, my rent was due, my fridge was empty, my paycheck was late, and I got a phone call from my daughter’s teacher reminding me to pay the school fee – my daughter was the only one who hadn’t submitted the payment. I was exhausted and didn’t know what to do, so I called my best friend and just cried. He came to my office, forced me to call in sick that afternoon, then took me to an ice cream shop and bought me an ice cream.

Then he sat me down and told me, ‘Life is tough, so you need to be tougher. In order to do that, you need to be nice to yourself, and don’t beat yourself up. You need a break too. Look, if everything you carry is heavy, you can put it down for a second, take a break, and then pick it up and keep moving. Sometimes, just surviving to the next day can be called a success.’

After that day, I went to the supermarket and bought a package of candy. It’s Korean milk mint candy; it’s really good and I had one every day in the morning to remind me that, no matter how hard life could get, there would be always something sweet, as long as I’m kind to myself. That one candy in the morning was what helped me going strong through life. I don’t remember how many candies I’ve eaten.

I don’t think ‘self-love’ needs to be something big or serious, it can be as small as a candy.

Oh, and I still have that kind of candy around the house:

Does the U.S. regret the chip act that has backfired on most of the successful U. S. chip companies, to the point where they are losing profits, market share, and risk going bankrupt now?

They ought to, they should be…

But of course they won’t publicly. These setback has very severe consequences that cost the US trillions of dollar loss and hundreds of thousand or a million jobs!

The billion of dollars investment in the Chip plant in Arkansas, US is barely in its teething set up stage with painful bickering between the Taiwanese and the U.S. contractors. 3 full years into the most ridiculous day light robbery of Taiwan technology and know how coerce by the U.S. with promises of billions of U.S. taxpayers money as subsidy to produce in a place without the skill and expertise needed and to be made by workers 3 times that if Taiwanese and 10 times benefits to produce half the result.

But the losses that is huge is nothing compared to the loss of respect that the U.S. believes in free market mechanism. And free trade. Forcing a Taiwanese company to shut its operation in their land and uproot to US heartland against their wish is anything but freedom! But what is worst is that it will be the biggest white elephant before even a chip is ever made. And if course destroying the entire livelihood of the very people they said they want to defend.

China has all but proven that every technology the U.S. tried to protect and stop China from having at a humongous cost to the U.S. is now proven to be easily produced in China. Made better, cheaper and faster by China a mere 3 years after this obnoxious and ridiculous attempt to stop China. All in all hundreds of US, and U.S. cronies technology companies simultaneously going obsolete all due to this ridiculous decision. Think about the billions and billions of losses of each company. And think about the workers losing their livelihood.

China whose own market alone is 30% while also producing most products for 60% of this planet’s need now will totally stop using anything from these firms. Just on business losses and profit loss is in the billions. Which fool could have thought it is a good idea losing this customer. But now you lost the entire world’s business.

In Wall Street trillions got wiped off the stock value of these firms. And 90% of these firms will go bankrupt. Mostly insured by the U.S. What an unbelievably daft decision by some neocon politicians and administrators yet 20 odd days after China shock the world not a word by those responsible! Not a whisper not a groan not an apology.

But this is the real irony of the U.S. they screamed so loud of freedom of expression who is talking now. Here in QUORA there are many brain dead Yankees who cheered this on. Where are you now! Don’t be a coward come out and continue your hateful agenda. You let the U.S. and your American friends down. You gave them false hope. Now they lost everything because of your selfish hate. I like to hear what you have to say.

Texas Grilled Cocoa Chile Steak

Bored with burgers and hot dogs? Offer seasoned steak slices in flour tortillas at your next backyard cookout.

2023 10 10 18 53
2023 10 10 18 53

Prep: 5 min | Refrigerate: 2 hr | Cook: 16 min | Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds flank steak
  • 2 tablespoons oil
  • 2 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 2 tablespoons McCormick® Gourmet Collection Cocoa Chile Blend
  • 2 tablespoons lime juice
  • 1 teaspoon McCormick® Gourmet Collection Oregano Leaves, Mexican
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 6 flour tortillas (8-inch)

Instructions

  1. Brush steak with oil.
  2. Mix brown sugar, cocoa chile blend, lime juice, oregano and salt until well blended. Rub paste over steak.
  3. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours or overnight for best flavor.
  4. Broil or grill over medium-high heat for 6 to 8 minutes per side or until desired doneness.
  5. Cut steak across the grain into thin slices.
  6. Serve steak slices in warm flour tortillas.
  7. Top with salsa, shredded Cheddar cheese and sour cream, if desired.

The Day the Earth Stood Still

Epic action and mind-blowing effects rock the planet in this thrilling reinvention of the sci-fi classic, THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL. Keanu Reeves portrays Klaatu, an otherworldly being whose arrival on Earth triggers an unstoppable series of events that threaten all of mankind. In a desperate attempt to save humanity, governments and scientists race to unravel the mystery behind the visitor’s appearance. When a woman (Jennifer Connelly) and her young stepson find themselves embroiled in the alien’s plan, they become the world’s only hope to stave off apocalyptic annihilation.

Why aren’t men nowadays persuasive?

I met Senator Strom “Spermin’” Thurmond not long before he died. He gave me and my young friends this priceless advice:

Boys I’m going to share with you the most important thing I have learned in my life; Two women in ten that you ask to sleep with you, will. You just have to ask the other eight first!”

For years I was grumpy about the issue this question addresses. I’ve made my peace with the post #MeToo dating regime. You should too.

I’m no longer persuasive. No means no.

If I for some reason wanted to ask a woman out face to face instead of on a dating site like a normal person, it would go like this:

Would you be interested in being courted? No? OK. You know where to find me if you change your mind.”

That’s one less woman I need to ask to reach my goal of ten. The end.

The old way – sidling up to a woman.after enmeshing yourself in her life, finding a good way to ask, then being persistent (but not too persistent) if she didn’t shut you down hard sucked for men and it sucked for women.

Why would you want to go through that again?

In the early 2000’s back to time immemorial that push-me-pull-you cat and mouse bullshit was simply how courtship worked. I had no complaints because that was all I ever knew.

You might do this dance for weeks, months, or in same cases years with ten women for every two who would eventually consent to date you. In some cases you as a man were making their lives hell and their work/school/social environment hostile in the meantime. In other cases you were feeding their “A Man Is Courting Me” ego at the expense of your dignity.

That’s all gone now. Good riddance to bad rubbish.

Women who liked the game lost. Game players. Flirters. Time wasters.

Women who preferred straight forward yes/no propositions won. Normal women.

Now we don’t have to distress eight women to suss out which two of them really “just want to be pursued”. Now we don’t have to be a creep just because we “can’t read the signals”. No more wasted bouquets of flowers. No more months long pre-courtship. No more of the woman’s friends coming up to you and telling you that you’re making her uncomfortable.

You ask. She answers. The end.

If she tries to play a game, she will lose every time because in this new post #MeToo environment you can’t be persistent. Neither can any other guy. You suffer no competitive disadvantage by accepting the first “no” you get because all other guys must do the same.

It’s liberating really. They only people who lose are the super aggressive men who don’t mind making 100’s of women uncomfortable to get laid once, and the women who want a Disney Princess experience of being chased.

Senator Thurmond would be a happy man… “ask(ing) the other eight first” has never required less effort or risk! We no longer must or may be “persuasive”. We live in Strom’s world now.

What do you think about the Hong Kong protester Tong Ying-kit being sentenced on July 30, 2021 to nine years in prison as the first prosecution under Hong Kong’s national security law?

If he had done this in America, flag or no flag, there is a high probability he won’t be granted a trial, because he would have been shot dead, one of a thousand killed by American police in a normal year.

He didn’t just chant a slogan and walk the streets as a protester. He drove his vehicle at speed deliberately into a group of police officers who were armed and trained in the use of deadly force. It would have been a justified shooting, because tong ying kit turned his bike into a deadly weapon. The officers used their bodies to stop him. Several were forcefully thrown by the impact. Tong remains wheelchair bound, with a cast on his arm, injuries sustained in the crash.

The sentence is a little harsh but there is no doubt Hong Kong society must make an example of him to warn others what he did is unacceptable.

His notoriety did him in.

He is the perfect index case for the nsl, and an illuminating case law example.

MINDBLOWING NDE: Secrets From the Other Side! You are NOT Who You Think You Are.

A full Scottish kilt ensemble

When I was a young boy, perhaps in first grade, my father had a business trip up into New Foundland. And there, he did some work and (apparently) attended a local festival.

When he came back, he had a special gift for me.

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It was a full Scottish kilt ensemble.

And I, well I wore it with pride, and being the photo buff that he was, took a zillion pictures of me wearing the outfit.

I don’t know what ever happened to the outfit, or the pictures, but I do remember that time, and how I felt being parading about in Bridgeport Conn wearing that kilt.

My dad was kind of silly. But he was cool in a strange way. And this little event is one of my best memories.

Today…

What would happen if the United States were to change its stance on recognizing Taiwanese sovereignty?

The U.S. have a right to adopt or adapt any any stance it wants. Or behaves as obnoxiously and despicably as ot wants too! But China will act swiftly in its own path forward to protect and defend and its own territories including Taiwan. And the world’s 99% will be behind China solidly. The Taiwan issue is totally and absolutely none of US or anybody’s business except the Chinese people and the Chinese authorities. Get that through your think skull once and for all.

You can talk as much shit, or stir as much shit as you want but touching an inch of Taiwan and we all go to war fully and comprehensively till the world as we know it will be change forever. If that is what you want. Let that be absolutely clear even a single U.S. marine parachute into Taiwan and China will without a doubt take drastic and immediate action.

No go back to asking shit like this and waste all your time. If you want. China don’t gives a shit about U.S. stupidly and waste fully sailing 10 thousand miles blowing a billion gallons of fuel to aimlessly flex your muscles a million times. We don’t mind if you to go hang yourself if that is what you want. You can have a million discussion in Washington for all we care but the business of Taiwan is decided in Beijing.

FLASH TRAFFIC: GERMAN ARMY TANK CREW CAUGHT OPERATING TANK IN UKRAINE, ATTACKING RUSSIAN ARMY

World Hal Turner 23 September 2023

German supplied Leopard Tank With German Army Crew Zaporozhye Started WW3 2 large
German supplied Leopard Tank With German Army Crew Zaporozhye Started WW3 2 large
FLASH TRAFFIC: GERMAN ARMY TANK CREW CAUGHT OPERATING TANK IN UKRAINE, ATTACKING RUSSIAN ARMY

This is FLASH TRAFFIC: It appears World War 3 has officially begun.  Saturday morning the Russian Army engaged a German-supplied Leopard Tank operating for the Ukraine army in Zaporozhye.  The Russians hit the tank with an anti-tank guided missile. The tank blew up.  The tank crew evacuated and were captured.  The crew identified themselves as ACTIVE DUTY GERMAN ARMY TROOPS.

Thus, the actual Army of Germany has now been caught waging actual war against Russia inside official Russian territory, Zaporozhye.   The image above is the actual tank involved in the actual incident this morning, 23 September 2023.

Hal Turner Remark: It appears, on its face, NATO has just started World War 3; using the active-duty German Army to attack Russians.

More as I get it . . . .

UPDATE 10:14 AM EDT —

Details are emerging.  It is now CONFIRMED a Russian Army reconnaissance team destroyed a German-supplied Leopard tank of the Ukrainian military but manned with a crew comprised of Bunderswehr soldiers.   The Bunderswehr is the actual active duty Army of Germany.

This took place in Zaporozhye this morning.

A member of the actual Russian Recon team directly and personally involved in the incident has stated the following: “When we curbed another offensive and ATGM-ed [destroyed with an anti-tank guided missile] the Leopard, we moved out to the burned vehicle hoping to seize the ‘tongue.’ Then we saw that the crew’s driver-mechanic was severely injured and the others were dead. Once he awoke, the mechanic started yelling ‘nicht schießen‘ [“do not shoot” in German],” the head of the reconnaissance team said.

“The mechanic repeatedly stated that he was not a mercenary but a Bundeswehr serviceman, and that he and the rest of the crew were members of the same unit of the German army,” the Russian fighter said, adding that while receiving medical aid, the German soldier named his brigade and its dislocation site.

 The tank’s driver died from wounds minutes after he was found despite efforts to save him.

Philly Cheese Steak Stuffed Peppers

2023 09 25 15 22
2023 09 25 15 22

Ingredients

  • 1 pound thinly sliced sirloin steak (or deli roast beef)
  • 8 slices provolone cheese
  • 4 large green bell peppers
  • 1 medium sweet onion
  • 1 pound white mushrooms
  • 3 tablespoons butter
  • 3 tablespoons olive oil
  • Kosher or sea salt and pepper, to taste

Instructions

  1. Slice a thin piece off each pepper lengthwise, remove ribs and seeds.
  2. Slice onions and mushrooms. Sauté over medium heat with butter, olive oil and a little salt and pepper. Sauté until onions and mushroom are nice and caramelized, about 25 to 30 minutes.
  3. Salt and pepper the steak and sauté in a little olive oil until just not pink, about 5 minutes.
  4. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  5. Add steak to the onion/mushroom mixture and stir to combine.
  6. Line the inside of each pepper with a slice of provolone cheese.
  7. Fill each pepper with meat mixture until they are overflowing.
  8. Top each pepper with another slice of provolone cheese.
  9. Bake for 15 to 20 minutes until the cheese on top is golden brown.

What is the most satisfying thing you’ve seen happen when someone rudely cut ahead of a long line?

Back 20 years ago my 8 year old son and I went to the bank. When we walked in the only customer was a lady filling in forms at the bench. We walked up to where the lines started, identified by some silver poles with plastic chains showing the flow of foot traffic. We waited while the teller finished doing her task.

As we waited a few people came into the bank and lined up behind us. The lady at the bench then walked over and pushed in front of us stating that she was in the bank first but had to fill in some forms. I commented that she should take her place at the back, and again she said she was in the bank first. My son looked up at me, knowing that her behavior was rude but he had a glint in his eye. I should have known better.

Silently, without anyone noticing, including me, he picked up the end of the plastic chain from the top of a metal pole and hooked it into her handbag.

As she stepped forward in her self importance her snagged handbag then pulled 4 or 5 poles onto the tiled floor with such a loud clatter. As she spun around to see what had happened she pulled another 2 poles over.

We slipped past, went to the teller and on our way out saw that she had been passed by most of the line and was still picking up her paper, pens and other things that had spilled from her handbag.

On my next trip to the bank the teller told me that was the funniest thing she had ever seen and presented me with a savings book for my son with $20. Each teller donated $5 because no one liked that lady.

One day it will be you.

Twice this week, I have watched an elderly individual, fade into the busy life in which we all live. One man just needed Panadol for his wife but the shop assistant simply said it’s in ‘6’.

But he struggled to navigate the supermarket and as I watched him go in the wrong direction, I left all my groceries and took him where he needed to go.

Today, I watched an elderly man struggle in the heat, who had obviously had a fall with a huge scrape and blood on his leg. He walked past people in the cafe, while he slowly made his way to his car. Not one person stopped. Or looked.

Or acknowledged him. I took him to his car and checked he was ok. He told me he had a fall and wasn’t sure how the air con worked in his car so he just didn’t use it. I sat with him, until his air con kicked in and heard him talk about the old frail body that he is in, that fails him now, every single day.

When you see an elderly person walking down the street, searching in the supermarket or struggling to their car, take a minute out of your busy schedule and ask them if they need a hand. Think about your grand parents and your parents and how pissed you would be if someone didn’t stop to help them. But more, think of them as you.

Once upon a time they were you. They were busy, they had work, they had children, they were able…. Today, they are just in an older body that is not going as fast as it used to and this busy life is confusing. They deserve our utmost respect and consideration.

One day it will be you, it will be us. I wish more people gave a sh*t about them and acknowledged them for their admirable existence and geez I hope someday, not that far away, someone does it for me.

Full-Time RV Life: The Quitting Has Just Begun – Why Many Have & Will Come Off The Road

Notice these trends that are going on in the United States.

Chinese complain about the US becoming increasingly anti-China over the past 10 years, but hasn’t the PRC always spoken of the US as its chief enemy since 1949 (except for a brief period in the late 70s)? How do patriotic Chinese reconcile this?

Chinese people are consistent with Japanese people, only one enemy is japanese imperialism and chinese national scum. – Mao zedong, 1941.5.15 (This was at a time when Japanese imperialism was invading China)

Likewise. Chinese people are consistent with US people, only one enemy is US imperialism and chinese national scum.

The Chinese national scum includes Taiwan independence elements, Hong Kong independence elements and overseas dissidents funded by the US government. not elaborated here.


The point is: who represents US in the world? Is it the US people, or is it US imperialism?

  1. No other country in the world has invaded the United States. Even if Bin Laden had created 9/11, it was not an act from the military of any country.
  2. It’s not US politicians or capitalist who die on the battlefield, it’s you! idiot! In war the politicians give ammunition, the rich give the food and the poor give their children… When the war is over the politicians get back the leftover ammunition, the rich grow more food and the poor search for the graves of their children.
  3. The US people need to pay more in taxes and lives for the war of aggression waged by the US government. Obviously, the U.S. government has launched a war of aggression against all countries in the world, which goes against the interests of the US people.

Do you think it is in the interests of the US people for the US government to go around the world invading?

It is not in the interest of the US people, nor is it in the interest of the Chinese people, who are simply generating profits for the capitalists of the US military industrial complex.

Because US is a capitalist country, capital controls US politics.

The US has more than 240 years of history, only 16 years without war.

So, Does the US government represent the interests of the US people, or the interests of US imperialism?

Do you represent the interests of the US people, or the interests of US imperialism?


Biden did not tell the US citizens that he wanted to invade China, only “to defend Taiwan”.

So, I ask, how does the US plan on doing that? with some sort of video game competition?

I mean, in order to “defend Taiwan”, you have to have military troops pertorming military actions, aka combat inside of China.

And that’s because Taiwan is in China.

So currently America has soldiers in Taiwan, which is either illegal, or at the very least gray area because that’s part of China.

And the government of China doesn’t approve of that and hasn’t allowed it.

So that’s the current status.

If US start performing military action, that’s an effort to militarily conquer at least China or push them back inside of China.

That‘s called an invasion.’

Sorry, everybody, if you don’t agree with this definition, but that’s what it is.

So US is yet again confirming that it will invade China if China attempts to continue its reunification by using military action.

So this is a very, very dangerous game that US are playing.

George Carlin – It’s A BIG Club & You Ain’t In It!

Classic.

What’s the funniest reason you’ve been called in to school to collect your child?

Lots of bullying stories. Here is mine. My son (autism spectrum, language disabilities) had a chum who happened to be a boy-crazy girl. Dating wasn’t his thing, but she was pretty smart and he liked her and they looked out for each other.

Another boy in the class was a little behind on his social skills, and was doing some low-end bullying of her. Calling out to her “Hey— coat rack!” or similarly stupid things. She was annoyed, but it wasn’t quite so bad that teachers noticed or disciplined him.

Anyway, we got a phone call from school that my son finally lost his temper and pushed this kid against the wall, telling him to knock it off and never do it again. It was pretty clear that regulations about bullying required us to be told of his inappropriate response, so they were following the rule but they weren’t too concerned.

When I told the program director of his previous school about this, he high-fived me. It never would have happened when my son was overwhelmed with sensory overload, so it was a real sign of progress.

China Destroyed US Sanctions Whole Car Industry in Big Trouble

Historic times!

Patrick Lawrence: The Real Threat From China: They’re Better at Capitalism Than We Are

The Biden regime’s robotic procession to Beijing proceeds apace. Following Antony Blinken’s fruitless visit in mid–June, we have paid Janet Yellen’s airfare for another fruitless visit, and following Yellen it was the same for John Kerry. This week it is Gina Raimondo’s turn. The secretary of state, the Treasury secretary, the chief climate envoy, and the commerce secretary: What is the point of this parade?

I cannot but wonder whether these officials are dispatched across the Pacific in descending order of competence. Raimondo, who previously flopped as governor of Rhode Island—except for her plan to cut civil service pensions, an unfortunate success—is mediocrity made flesh. The Chinese must be wondering, with chagrin or amusement or both, who the Biden regime will next send their way.

The assignment in all these cases is the same: It comes down to “two seemingly contradictory responsibilities,” as The New York Times’s Ana Swanson put it in a curtain-raiser last week. She described “a mandate to strengthen U.S. business relations with Beijing while also imposing some of the toughest Chinese trade restrictions in years.”

This is succinct, although we can live without the “seemingly.” Proposing to conduct routine business while sabotaging China’s competitive position in advanced technologies is prima facie a ridiculous idea. But The Times must have its “seemingly,” because it is imperative we pretend the Biden regime thinks sensibly and means well in its relations with the People’s Republic.

Blinken got nothing done, Yellen got nothing done, Kerry got nothing done, and in Raimondo’s case it is hopeless. The final item on her itinerary is a visit to Disneyland in Shanghai, and you have to credit the secretary’s scheduler for the parting reference to dreams and fantasy. An English friend observes that we Americans are doing a lot of blinkin’ and yellin’ across the Pacific these days. Fair enough, but I think it is more of the former than the latter for the time being. This administration simply has no idea what a sound China policy would look like.

What is this all about? For a long time now I have concluded that Biden’s foreign policy people match the definition of insanity commonly but mistakenly attributed to Einstein. These people seem to be doing the same thing again and again while expecting a different outcome. But with Raimondo’s visit to Beijing this week I have to revise this assessment. Those running Biden’s national security policies are unimaginative ideologues petrified of diverging from the neoliberal catechism, yes, but they are not insane. I start to see in their dealings with Beijing a diabolical design to which the Chinese are very right to object.

The Biden administration’s China strategy comes down to parrying, in a word. All the pointless talk is intended to obscure a concerted effort to undermine China’s economy because we cannot compete with it in various strategic sectors, while—part two—buying time to move maximum U.S. military hardware as close to the mainland as possible under the program the Defense Department named a few years ago the Pacific Defense Initiative, the PDI.

At the horizon, we are likely to see Washington’s trans–Pacific military ambitions trump longstanding trade and investment relationships. This is what “decoupling” and now “delinking” are all about. They are warnings to the corporate and financial sectors that their interests, which came first in the decades after the Dengist reforms of the 1980s, will no longer take precedence as the new Cold War Biden constantly denies provoking destroys relations with the mainland.

Two years ago Raimondo gave an interview to CNBC

, the financial news network, that more or less announced the Biden regime’s intention to subvert key sectors of China’s economy. She was about to address something called the U.S.–E.U. Trade and Technology Council and told her interlocutor, “If we really want to slow down China’s rate of innovation, we need to work with Europe.”

It is useful once in a while to have dumbheads such as Raimondo in high positions, because, without meaning to do so, they can tell you so much more than you are supposed to know. Slowing down China’s impressive advances in high-technology sectors was precisely Washington’s intent by the time Raimondo spoke. The Commerce Department under her direction has since imposed a wide variety of restrictions on U.S. exports to China of semiconductor chips, software systems, and the machinery used to produce both. As Ana Swanson reports, Raimondo is likely to pile on more of these as soon as she returns from Beijing.

The Biden regime dresses up this profoundly undignified conduct as “narrowly targeted” to technologies that could be of use to the Chinese military. Jake Sullivan set the tone for all of these visitors to Beijing in a speech at the Brookings Institution last April. “We are imposing necessary restrictions on specific technology exports,” he explained, “while seeking to avoid an outright technological blockade…. The administration intends to maintain a substantial trade relationship with China.”

This is what Raimondo and all of those who preceded her to China say when explaining their intent: Washington’s sole concern as Raimondo imposes her regime of restrictions is national security, and all else can proceed rosily. It is hard to think of a flimsier dodge. By this standard, she would have to restrict sales of Juicy Fruit gum to the Chinese. What the Biden administration is doing comes down to securitizing the economic relationship. If you have ever doubted that the United States is a failing imperium unwilling to accept 21st century realities, I offer this as proof of the proposition.

The Chinese know this and have said so many times. I no longer think Blinken, Yellen, et al. have any thought of persuading them otherwise on these journeys. That only looks like their intent. Their true purpose is in the way of theatrical, and Americans are their true audience: They must make sure we do not understand Gina Raimondo’s efforts to punch the Chinese well below their belts for what they are: an uncompetitive nation’s attempts to hold back a rising economic power.

I found that speech Sullivan delivered last spring

interesting for what he left out as much as for what was in it. There was not a single mention of the U.S. military buildup at the western end of the Pacific.

Talk about elephants in the living room. The Pentagon is developing the Australian–British–U.S. alliance known as AUKUS, there is the Quad group, comprising the U.S., Australia, India, and Japan, there are these recently and assiduously fortified alliances with Seoul, Tokyo, Manila, and Canberra, and none of this, we hear again and again, has anything to do with surrounding China or providing for the movement of U.S. military capabilities westward toward the mainland. This is only “seemingly” the case, as The Times would put it.

It is the same as with Raimondo’s projects on the technology side: Neither the Chinese nor anyone else in Asia believes these silly explanations, and no one expects them to do so. Beijing knows very well there is a point to all these apparently pointless visits U.S. officials insist on making. The Biden regime is buying time as it remilitarizes the western end of the Pacific. The only people who are supposed to understand otherwise are Americans. We are not supposed to watch as Washington provokes and prosecutes Cold War II before our eyes. We are supposed to watch as American officials—reasonable, constructive, well-intended—make all efforts to talk to the Chinese in the face of their stubborn reluctance to cooperate.

This is my revised take on the Blinken–Yellen–Kerry–Raimondo cavalcade across the Pacific. These people are not clods. They are purposefully malicious and, it should go without saying, are making the world even more dangerous than it already is.

There are two things to think about here. One, the Biden regime’s efforts to obscure what it is up to at the other end of the Pacific is a straight reprise of the first Cold War, which now resides in all but the most important history books as the responsibility of the Soviets. We have a responsibility to render and defend an accurate record so that this does not happen again.

Two, there is this administration’s immense betrayal of Americans as it aggresses in the Pacific, along with the numerous lost opportunities of which American are deprived. You will find in that Jake Sullivan speech grand and plentiful references to the revival of the American middle class, bipartisan unity, and other such elevated thoughts. Read the speech and then ask: What is this nation’s leadership doing in the cause of a competitive America?

Are we redoubling efforts to educate our people or are we, diabolically, shutting down access—see the University of West Virginia—to liberal arts education? What are we doing to produce the doctors and scientists we need to find our way in the 21st century? What are we doing to bring the dispossessed into the economy, address drug addiction, and all our other debilitating social ills? What are we doing—seriously doing, I mean—to repair and build out the infrastructure we need? Nothing or not enough are my answers.

The Chinese challenge could and should be understood as a chance to reinvent America by way of a Great Mobilization, cap “G,” cap “M,” of New Deal magnitude. There is, of course, no more than lip service to any such idea. We are instead sacrificing this historic opportunity to the military-industrial complex, the greed of corporations, and the ambitions of political leaders who lack all principle or any thought for the commonweal.

Maybe you think, as I do, that none of the Biden officials flying off to Beijing is serious about the true work to be done in our relations with China, or is competent to do it. We must consider, bitterly, that they are perfectly representative of our circumstances as defined by a leadership that is more or less across the board unserious and incompetent to meet the great challenges of our time—China merely one among many.

Biden’s adviser meets China foreign minister in bid to ease tensions

Its working now – thanks to Huawei chip.

US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan has held “candid” talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi in Malta this weekend, as the world’s two largest economies seek to stabilize troubled relations over trade and militarization of the Pacific.

During the two days of talks on Saturday and Sunday, Wang brought up the issue of Taiwan – a self-governing, democratic island that China claims as its own territory – as a “red line that cannot be crossed in Sino-US relations”. The US has vowed to defend Taiwan against possible Chinese aggression.

“The United States noted the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait,” said the White House in a statement, adding that the two officials “committed to maintain this strategic channel of communication and to pursue additional high-level engagement”.

A Chinese government statement on the Malta meeting largely echoed the US version, saying “the two sides conducted candid, substantive and constructive strategic communication”.

China has accused the US of weaponizing tech and trade issues under the guise of national security while Washington has warned Beijing against its military ambitions in Taiwan and the Pacific. The US has forged security alliances in the Pacific to counter growing Chinese influence.

Sullivan’s meeting with Wang was the latest in a series of high-level discussions between US and Chinese officials that could lay the groundwork for a meeting of US President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping later this year.

Sullivan last met Wang in the Austrian capital Vienna in May.

Why I Gave up on the American Dream

Huawei is full of surprises

Huawei has made an interesting discovery about the Kirin 9000s processor after a recent software update. Previously, this processor was thought to have an 8-core architecture, but it turns out it actually has 12 cores. This revelation has attracted significant attention, as it brings a substantial boost in processing power and performance for devices using this chip. It’s always exciting when technology surprises us with hidden capabilities, and this discovery could have a positive impact on the performance

of devices powered by the Kirin 9000s processor.

Huawei has released HarmonyOS 4.0.0.116 for its Mate 60 series and Mate X5 smartphones. These devices are powered by the Kirin

9000s chipset, which is a new processor developed by Huawei. This update brings the latest features and improvements to these smartphones, enhancing their performance and user experience. It’s always a good sign when manufacturers continue to support their devices with software updates, ensuring that users can enjoy the latest innovations and enhancements.

There seems to be a discrepancy in the reported core count of the Kirin 9000s chipset in the Huawei Mate 60 series. Initially, phone information apps and Geekbench indicated that the chip had an 8-core architecture. However, after a recent software update, these sources are now reporting that the Mate 60 is running a 12-core chip. This is indeed an interesting development, and it could indicate that Huawei has unlocked additional cores in the chipset

through a software update, potentially improving its performance. It’s a noteworthy change, and users may experience enhanced performance as a result of this update.

in the meanwhile … see Huawei new Cloud Service

I gave up on the American Dream|And you should too

Have your parents tried to reach you out after cutting contact with them?

My mother did. I moved out at 18 because of physical abuse (beatings). I didn’t talk to her for about 10 years. She called me one day and asked if she could see me. I said no. She started crying and begged me to see her. I agreed. We met and talked for awhile. She told me how sorry she was for the way she treated me growing up. She apologized and begged my forgiveness. She told me of the abuse she went thought from both her parents. Like burning her tongue with a red hot knife for lying. And the beatings that left her bloody. By the time the evening was over, we were both crying and hugging. After that we had a more loving relationship until she passed away.

What’s the most offensive thing you’ve heard when someone assumed you didn’t understand their language?

Years ago, pre-Covid, I went on holiday to Hong Kong with my mother and aunt. I was a teenager at that time, so most of the time, I was roped in to become my mother and aunt’s ‘pack mule’ when we weren’t sightseeing, and they were shopping like no tomorrow.

So one time, we passed by a shop that was selling jewellery and my aunt wanted to take a look. One of the shop attendants take one look at us and spoke to her colleague in Cantonese.

Now, I live in Singapore, and me, my aunt and my mother are all Singaporean Chinese. As such, we are bilingual and Cantonese happened to be one of the languages we can speak and understand.

Essentially, the shop attendant is telling her colleague to not serve us or just show us the cheapest items they got as ‘we can’t afford it anyway’.

Oh geez, I wish phones have the video function at that time, as the dressing down my aunt and mother gave to that shop attendant is GOLD! Not to mention her very impressive imitation of a fish out of the water!

6 Major Culture Shocks After Returning to the US From Europe

Do you agree with Eric Xu Zhijun that China’s semiconductor manufacturing technology will continue to be in catch-up mode for a long time because of US export controls?

The world knows better. China will absolutely take over the entire chip making process, production, business and industry. The U.S. can make some chips for its military equipment. At 1000 times the cost of a Chinese equivalent to fool themselves that they are in charge if that is what they want. That is their right.

But there is no way China will stop till they make their own stuffs. And they will get it done faster, better and cheaper. They always do. The U.S. export control will end the U.S. involvement in 99.9% of chip business losing them trillions of dollars over time. It is too bad. It is not what China wants it is what China is forced into it by the U.S. excesses and U.S. obnoxious and despicable behaviour.

Which childish things you still do?

I grew up in a poor family from a small, poor village in Vietnam.

I don’t know why, but to me when I was a small kid, a globe being displayed on the top shelf of a glass cabinet in the living room was the symbol of wealth. A family had that thing, they were rich – that was my silly logic. I liked the globe a lot, but I knew I couldn’t ask my parents for one – because we’re poor.

In my neighborhood, there was a decent family. The husband was a math teacher. He liked me, because every time when I had a tough math homework, I would bring it to him, asked for his guidance, listened and tried to solve it. I also played chess with him. I liked him, because, well, he was nice but also because he had a globe.

One day, after finishing a chess match with the math teacher, I stood there in front of their cabinet, looked up to the globe with my widening eyes. I guessed that he noticed it. He opened the cabinet, took the globe down, then he showed me and asked, “Do you know which country is The land of the Rising sun? Do you know why they said The empire on which the sun never sets?”. I shook my head. Then he told me stories about countries, and the world. All of my dreams were condensed into two things: traveling the world and owning a globe.

I grew up. My dream about traveling around the world is still an on-going dream. But I do own a globe now. A very traditional old school style globe. I don’t display it in a cabinet. I have it on my dining table.

Every day, during dinner, we play a game called Where am I now?. Each of us will take turn to pick a country, then others will ask questions, ‘Are you in Asia?’; ‘You border the ocean?’;… and try to guess which country is it.

Why I Left the USA (Again)

The consumerism here in the USA is ridiculous. And people’s self worth is all determined by what they buy and their social media reels. So sick of it.

What is the sleaziest, dirtiest trick an auto insurance company tried to pull on you? Did they succeed?

In mt early 20’s I had a cute little expensive sports car that I had worked multiple jobs to afford. Some idiot rear ended me and did a lot of damage to it and it should probably have been totalled. Insurance adjuster comes to my house, reeking of alcohol, and decides it can be saved.

Trying to take advantage of my youth & sex, he tells me that he can help me out by referring me to his buddy’s shop to get all the work done. RED flag #1 And that I needn’t worry about getting ripped off. RED flag #2. And that his friend would gladly send a flat bed to my house that afternoon, free of charge, to pick it up. RED flag #3. He gives me his friend’s business card

He then proceeds to hand me a pre-written “letter” from my insurance company, that he has personally signed, that authorizes any & all work to be done. RED flag #4. I read it and realize that nowhere in the paperwork does it state that I have to use his friend. Actually, it is an authorization for me to go anywhere.

I sign it, get my copy and quickly usher him out, implying that I need to call his friend and get this in the works. He leaves smiling. I call my buddy who owns a high end exotic & sports car repair shop and read him the letter. He confirms what I thought and arranges to have a flat bed sent ASAP.

My buddy does the accident repairs, plus a few other custom things that I wanted done. Ends up costing 40% more that a brand new version of my car. Pissed off insurance company contacts me to find out how this all went down. I explained about the adjuster being drunk, pushing his friend’s business, the pre-written letter he showed up with etc.

Ends up the adjuster was getting kick backs from his “friend” and gets fired. Plus the insurance company sued him & won a judgement requiring him to pay the full cost of my car’s repair. And I got my car back in better shape than when I bought it.

As a Canadian, would you like to switch your healthcare system to one like America?

I was in Michigan with a bunch of Canadian students on a SERVE trip. Our host, the pastor of a church, complained that when he retired all he would have was “‘Obama Care, like the health insurance you Canadians hate so much.”

I said,”Whaaaaat?”

He insisted we Canadians hate our health care system with its delays and problems. He ‘knew this fact’ from TV and articles he’d read.

I told him, “There’s not a single politician I’ve heard of in Canada who would publicly say he would get rid of our health care and replace it with an American system. Not one. He or she would never be re-elected.”

“Whaaat?” he asked me. “How about heart attack victims who never got treated in time and died? I read about a guy…”

“You have to start reading Canadian newspapers and watching Canadian news channels. We love our health care system. Sure, there are delays, but usually serious cases are treated quickly and families are not bankrupt when they have a medical emergency. You can thank Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather…”

“Who?”

“Tommy Douglas, grandfather of Kiefer Sutherland, the actor. First Canadian leader to initiate universal health care in his Province.”

“His what?”

Finding True America: Why Americans have left the U.S.

Should Putin be made aware that his future lies with the West and not China? Does he not see this?

Putin cares about the security of Russia preserving the Russian motherland and it’s glory

He cares about RUSSIA and he will choose his future based on what is best for Russia

Putin has no ideology

He is a crisp man of logic and reasoning


Here is why he won’t trust the West again:-

  • They are LIARS – They promised no eastward expansion of NATO, They made promises with Minsk 2 – eventually they lie and lie and lie some more.
  • They are steeped in Ideology – They are insane. The leaders are. They are steeped in ideology equivalent to Hitlers. They have caused death and devastation of millions of people in the name of human rights and freedom.
  • They HATE RUSSIA – The West hates Russia. It’s as simple as that. They want Russia balkanized. They want Russia broken up and swindled of all it’s resources by the Evil Coalition of the West

Putin may do business with the West in the future but he will never trust them or come on their side

Now let’s see the track record of the West :-

  • They nuked Japan and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people
  • They destroyed Vietnam, a war where they had no direct causation
  • They destroyed Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya and Syria all for some demented ideology and flooded the world with migrants plus Al Qaeda plus ISIS

They haven’t helped a single country fruitfully towards Independence and Strength

They throttled Japan single handedly in the Plaza accords


China is where the USSR should have been and that rankles Putin

Yet he is enough of a realist to understand that China is a giant and the only major economic bulwark to the USA today

So it’s a mutually beneficial partnership

China has no interests in Europe and Russia has little interest in the South China Sea

They have territorial peace now

Russia has the Military Capabilities and the Energy Resources & Raw Materials and China has the High Intellect People and the Manufacturing and the Economy

Together these two nations form a strong bulwark against Western Sanctions & Bullying & Restrictions

They have the largest pliable land area on earth now and they can route bulk of their energy and trade by land and entirely bypass blockades

Plus China has never let down it’s friends at crucial times nor caused color revolution in any of it’s friendly countries nor interfered with any such country

It’s always been TRADE, TRADE and TRADE


It’s why Putin and Xi are teaming up

It’s the only way to form a bulkwark against Western Hegemony

Get Iran into the picture and maybe Saudi Arabia and that would be a very powerful alliance

Ranch Steak

2023 09 25 15 24
2023 09 25 15 24

Yield: 4 to 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 3 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1 medium onion, thinly sliced
  • 1 1/2 to 2 pounds round steak
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1/3 cup all-purpose flour
  • 3/4 cup beef broth
  • 1 tablespoon Ranch dressing mix
  • 1/2 cup sour cream

Instructions

  1. Heat oil in large heavy, nonstick skillet.
  2. Fry onions until limp. Remove from pan and set aside.
  3. Cut meat into serving size pieces. Sprinkle both sides with salt and pepper. Dust lightly with flour and beat it into meat with edge of a saucer. Brown on both sides, adding more oil if needed.
  4. Return onion to pan with meat. Add beef broth, cover and simmer for 50 to 60 minutes or until meat is very, very tender, adding a little more broth if needed.
  5. Combine Ranch dressing mix and sour cream. Remove meat to platter.
  6. Stir sour cream mixture into meat juices. Heat through until bubbly. Pour over meat and serve.

It’s Happening. Americans FINALLY Leaving The US!

What is the reason for the belief that there is no middle class in China, despite the country having billions of citizens and having one of the largest economies in the world?

This is not true. Since poverty was wiped out in 2020, 800 million Chinese entered into the middle class, that’s 2.5 times US entire population. Half of rural population moved to cities for better education and healthcare. China has 4 times the US population, but less homelessness. Wealth is concentrated in 1% of population in the US, trillionaires like Bill Gates and Elon Musk, and the middle class is shrinking, many without healthcare. “Middle class” as defined by 96% literacy rate in China, people with basic needs of food and shelter, healthcare and old age benefits.

Russia Retaliates for Sevastopol; Hits Kremenchug Airport Where Missiles were launched

World Hal Turner 23 September 2023

Kremenchug airport large
Kremenchug airport large

Just days ago, Ukraine fired either French-supplied “SCALP” or British-supplied “Storm-Shadow” missiles at the Russian Black Sea Fleet HEadquearters in Sevastopol, Crimea, Russia, killing what we are now told was 34 high-ranking Russian officers.  Now, Russia has retaliated.

The Kremenchug Airport, launch site for the cruise missile attack upon Sevastopol, has been hit by a significant Russian missile barrage.

NO AIR-RAID WARNING WAS SOUNDED PRIOR TO THE ATTACK, with locals suggesting Russia utilized low-observable, KH-50 cruise missiles for the retaliation attack.

Both SCALP and STORM SHADOW missiles, which were stored at the Kremenchug airport, along with the Ukrainian SU-24M/MR bomber aircraft which fired those missiles, have been destroyed.

A substantial number of fire-fighters and ambulances have been dispatched to the airport.  We are told there are “significant casualties among pilots, ground crews and even NATO personnel, including Polish troops, who were involved in coordinating the operations and maintaining the missiles.

What do McDonald’s workers do on the overnight shift when there are no orders or customers?

After my first year at university, I ended up working for McDonald’s, where I made a number of friends and several lovers, and even met my first wife.

I generally worked the night shift. The night shift is quite a lot different from day shift: the average age of the workers is slightly higher (at least when I was there, this was decades ago), and the workload is different.

During night shift:

  • We spent a huge amount of time cleaning. We deep-cleaned the lobby, dismantled and cleaned the shake machine, and deep-cleaned cooking trays and food prep utensils. (We didn’t have an industrial dishwasher, this all happened by hand.)
  • We cleaned the grills, a rather tedious process involving lots of scraping with a dedicated tool that was basically an aluminum handle with a stainless steel blade bolted to the end, another tool with a wire mesh pad on the end, and a special cleaning solvent that would take the hair out of your nose.
  • We changed deep-fryer oil.
  • We received the supply truck.
  • We snuck off to make out in the walk-in freezer. Yes, I’m serious. I had several rather delightful makeout sessions with a lovely woman whose name I sadly no longer remember.
  • We played with the helium tanks that the cDonald’s kept on hand for birthday parties. I will never forget working the back drive-through booth one evening when my friend Henry filled a garbage bag with helium, walked into the booth, and pushed it out the window. We all just kind of stood there watching it float away…including the customers in the drive-through lane.
  • We played practical jokes on day shift, like stacking the trays the hamburger buns were delivered in all the way to the ceiling, so you actually had to take the entire stack outside to remove the top tray.
  • At closing, we’d disassemble and clean the various bits of equipment before we locked up. Then we’d go across the street to the 24-hour Perkin’s, which back then was called Perkin’s Bar and Grill (this was before they re-branded as “Perkin’s Family Restaurants”). We called the place “Perkin’s Brawl and Grill” because it would usually be the scene of at least one or two knock-down-drag-out bar fights a month.

The in-laws

There was a 1979 movie starring Peter Falk titled “The In-laws”, and for some strange reason I just remembered this movie. I tried to download the torrent, but it is taking forever. It is just a goofy and funny comedy, but for some reason… it came to mind.

It is available free on the Internet DB. HERE.

And still, I have downloaded the torrent from this site...

Three Cheers For the Guacamole Act of 1917!!!

The premise of this film is really simple: if two families are about to enjoy the union of their children in a marriage, is it not likely that the in-laws involved can come to depend and help each other out in times of need? Most of us would probably say no, or want to know the extent of the help. However, when Vincent J. Ricardo (Peter Falk) asks Dr. Sheldon Kornpett (Alan Arkin) to assist him in retrieving something from a safe in Ricardo’s office, Kornpett is willing (if somewhat suspiciously) to do it.

The reason that Kornpett is suspicious is he is not quite certain what to make of Ricardo. They only met at Kornpett’s house the night before, for a dinner party introducing the families of the bride (Kornpett’s) and groom (Ricardo’s) to each other. Ricardo acted…well oddly. He told tales of his business travels in Central America, including how in one country babies are being carried off by huge bats that are protected by the Guacamole Act of 1917. Kornpett hears this with a blank face, although his eyes do bug out a little in disbelief. Later, when Ricardo gets testy with his son over a comment about the former not being home enough, Kornpett can’t believe the near rage that Ricardo demonstrates at the table. So his suspicions about his future in-law seem well based.

Shortly, after being chased and nearly killed by two men who are after the items that Kornpett picked up, the suspicions seem confirmed. Ricardo explains to him, over pea soup in a restaurant, that he actually is not a successful salesman but a C.I.A. operative (a photo in Ricardo’s office confirms this: it is of President Kennedy, and the autograph refers to the Bay of Pigs Invasion). He is in the middle of a critically important mission in Latin America dealing with international finance and a conspiracy against the richest nations. Kornpett hears him out, and is upset to hear that there is more material that Ricardo hid in Kornpett’s home the night before. He wants no part of it, and leaves to go home – only to find the police there. He flees, and does evade capture – at the cost of having his car repainted in a way he never would have wanted it to look.

Soon Kornpett is forced to join forces with Ricardo, and enters the deadly serious but (here) quite farcical world of international espionage and intrigue. At the end of the road is the ringleader of the conspiracy, General Garcia (Richard Libertini) who has a special little friend that makes Al Pacino’s little friend in SCARFACE lethal but sensible in comparison.

THE IN-LAWS is funny. Arkin with his tight-ass repressive personality works well against the free-wheeling, anything goes Falk. Libertini appears only in the films last twenty minutes, but he does equally nicely as the ultimate in screw-ball dictators. Well supported by a cast including Nancy Dussault, Arlene Golonka, Penny Peyser, Michael Lembeck, and Ed Begley Jr. the film is just a laugh fest until the happy ending. As mentioned elsewhere in these comments Arkin and Falk should have made several films together. They have only done one other movie together since THE IN-LAWS. Pity.

What’s the coldest thing a doctor has ever said to you?

‘If you lose this baby, you could always have another one’. The comment above was made by the doctor who my husband and I had a consultation with. I was roughly 10 weeks pregnant with our first child. I was in my mid 30’s while hubby was in his early 40’s.

An elderly man in his fifties, he barely looked at us, ignored me, said hello to my husband, looked at my file fleetingly, a file with tests and scans which showed I had fibroids, looked directly at my husband and said to him, ‘She will be fine’. I was furious that this man was clearly sexist, ignoring me as if I was invisible. I responded by asking what that meant, what was the cause of the bleeding as he had not told us at this point about the fibroids. ‘You do not need to bother about it. That is why we are here’. This statement was addressed again to my husband who he was still looking at while still ignoring my presence.

At this point, something in me snapped and I snapped at him, ‘Look at me and tell me what is causing this bleeding. It is my body and I need the details’. He then slowly turned to look at me as if seeing me for the first time and emotionlessly said, ‘you have fibroids. They are not massive and do not pose a danger to your baby’. ‘But I am bleeding. Is that not dangerous? ‘ I worriedly asked.

That was when he looked at the file and without lifting his head, retorted ,Not really. However, if you lose this baby, you could always have another one ’. I almost cussed the insensitive idiot out but my husband who knew I was fuming at this point, got up and ushered me out of the office while the doctor was still talking about ante natal visits at their hospital. We had heard enough. I went on to another hospital where I met the amazing doctor who delivered my daughter without complications and went on to have a son after that.

She is now a healthy, happy 10 year old who is pure joy and always a little mama to her 7 year old brother.

London Broil

London Broil is a favorite recipe from the Iowa Beef Industry Council.

delish london broil horizontal 1546553273
delish london broil horizontal 1546553273

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (1 1/4 to 1 3/4 pound) beef flank steak
  • 1/4 cup vegetable oil
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • 1 clove garlic, crushed
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper

Instructions

  1. Combine vegetable oil, lemon juice, garlic, salt and pepper for marinade.
  2. Place steak in plastic bag and pour marinade over it.
  3. Close bag securely and refrigerate 4 to 6 hours or overnight, turning occasionally.
  4. Pour off and reserve marinade.
  5. Place steak on grill and broil at moderate temperature for 5 minutes.
  6. Turn, brush with marinade and broil 5 minutes or to desired doneness (rare or medium).
  7. To carve, slice diagonally across grain in thin strips.

10 STOIC LESSONS TO HANDLE DISRESEPECT (MUST WATCH) | STOICISM


Learn something important.

ASML

Here is the reason why ASML CEO said a few years ago that if ASML gave China the blueprint for the EUV machine China would not be able to make it.

This is because all of the core technologies is NOT owned by ASML. ASML is the system integrator that was allowed by the US government to participate in the US government project to create an EUV light source.

This project pulled together many US national labs including Lawrence Livermore Labs, Sandia Nation Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, Lawrence Berkely National Lab, IBM, Intel, AMD, etc. And it took over 10 years to create this laser light source.

This was considered a national security project so Japanese companies like Nikon and Canon were not allowed to join.

The difficulty of this light source and the engineering problems that had to be overcome was as difficult as the first atomic bomb.

So I have to admit that I was wrong in my speculation about using a Rube Goldberg device to generate EUV. They didn’t have a choice. This was the best possible source at the time. It took literally the US, Germany, and some other nation’s best experts to create this light source.

The other parts are relatively easy in comparison.

The problem is that China has also created this light source and using another method so it isn’t so Rube Goldberg machine. Not that it was simple to make. But it is more reliable and you don’t have to worry about residue removal that will mess up your mirrors and the inside of the your machine which has to remain at clean room levels.

Is China creating fear in many Americans because China’s success challenges the American belief that democracy is necessary for a successful market-driven economy and intellectual freedom is necessary for technological innovation?

This is a very good question indeed.

Thank you for asking.

The Answer is yes. Yes indeed the U.S. and the west has been propagating that only western liberal democracy works. Nothing else. Either be a liberal democracy or die says the US. That is of course simply not true at all. And the real truth is simply that the West wanted to install liberal democracy so that the west can easily manipulate it and install a government that surrender its sovereignty to the west in order to manipulate and steal it’s resources to enrich the former colonials.

Now that China proved beyond reasonable doubts and against all odds that it could grow phenomenally and economically dwarfed every other nation, this fear and worry the U.S. mightily. Failure to contain China means failure to perpetuate this lie!

This is indeed worrisome for the west since they the west in general has essentially collapsed in a huge pile of debts. And law and order disintegrates through the western world. With high inflation and a looming recession with countless millions of homeless people living in the streets while their government finance and orchestrate wars. Based on printing money without basis and rampant money creation.

China U.S. out innovating the U.S., it U.S. out thinking the U.S., out growing the U.S. and out influencing the U.S. growing even its military and wealth and out manipulating the U.S. government everywhere on earth. The U.S. wants to stop the truth from being revealed to the world.

It’s Not Just You: American Jobs Didn’t Used To Be This Terrible

My Dad’s Union IBEW is the reason we went from lower middle class to solid middle class in 10 years. Unions are one of the most important checks for capitalism.

Why are Chinese people so satisfied with their government?

Easy – shit gets done.

Government promise something. Give it a few years and it happens.

Some bigger projects like Mao wanting to borrow some water from the south took a bit longer.

OTOH governments like the UK one I lived under… they promise shit, then they say haha you sucker you actually believed me? Fuck you!

Gordon Brown’s QC literally said that election pledges and promises were not subject to legitimate expectation.

Here? Here in Hong Kong? The government construction projects shaved 20 minutes off my commute.

25 years ago they shaved an hour off the commute for the villagers by widening the dirt track that lead to my village and paving it. Then offering a bus franchise nearby so it was connected with the world.

We literally see things happen.

What is something weird that you enjoy doing?

I observed something while traveling.

Most people my age would either be listening to music, watching some TV show/movie in their smartphones/tablets. A very few would be reading a newspaper or book.

I was one of them. I always had music on. I can’t read/watch anything because of motion sickness while traveling on road.

The older generation- they do nothing. They don’t use phones, they don’t talk, don’t read, nothing. They just sit and look around.

I wanted to try this and coincidentally my earphones broke down.

Now it has been over six months. I travel in the metro for 3 hours everyday and do nothing, just look around. This has helped me so much. I observe people, their behaviours. I look around to see what’s actually happening.

It may sound weird but there’s something weirdly enjoyable about it. It feels like living life the old school way. This has helped me reduce the screen time as well.

I have even started recognising the regular commuters. I am sure they don’t recognise me.

Unbreakable (2000) | *First Time Watching* | Movie Reaction | Asia and BJ

Still one of the top 10 best comic films of all time. Its really the first one that showed what the comic genre could do when taken seriously.

This is one of my top, and most favorite movies. It is so meaningful to me. Seriously people. I can relate to this movie. So very much!

What did someone do that made you think they were really smart?

When my daughter was about 9 or 10 years old, whenever she got a scolding from my wife, I would annoy her by doing a chicken dance and do so in a way that ONLY she sees it.

“Mommy! Dad is making fun of me!” she would always complain.

When my wife turned around, I would stop and act normal and go on with my stuff. This went on for a while till it became a game of HER trying to catch me in the act and prove it to her mother.

She would learn to very quickly take out her mobile phone and try to snap a picture of me doing it. I would tease her by dancing until the moment the phone was almost pointing towards me, then I would stop and behave normally.

“I will get you someday,” she said.

“No, you won’t! I am too fast for you,” I replied.

On a particular day, I again did the ridiculous chicken dance, she was rolling her eyes and her hands move slowly towards her phone. I continued dancing and mentally calculating how fast she could key in the pass-code and turn on the camera mode.

Something didn’t feel right, her action was slower than usual, by the time she pointed the camera at me, I had stopped. But she started laughing loudly.

“Guess what daddy? THIS isn’t my phone. I switched the phone cover with mum. MY PHONE is behind you, just above the cupboard, ON VIDEO TAKING MODE.”

Ouch! A full two minutes of myself being ridiculous caught on video!

NOT genius smart, NOT intellectual smart, perhaps a little STREET SMART!

That was my last chicken dance.

How is the Chinese government treating MPOX?

The gay and bisexual men are not as common in China as they are in the West. It is difficult for MPOX to become an epidemic in China.

From June 2 to June 30, 2023, 106 new confirmed cases of monkeypox were reported in mainland China (excluding Hong Kong, Macao, and Taiwan), including 48 cases reported in Guangdong Province, 45 cases reported in Beijing City, 8 cases reported in Jiangsu Province, 2 cases reported in Hubei Province, 2 cases reported in Shandong Province, and 1 case reported in Zhejiang Province. There were no severe cases or deaths.

The epidemic presents the following characteristics:

  • One is that the vast majority of cases are mainly transmitted through male homosexual sexual contact.
  • Secondly, the risk of transmission through other forms of contact is low, and the vast majority of close contacts, except for sexual contact, have not experienced infection.
  • The third is that most cases were found during medical treatment, while a few cases were found through follow-up screening of close contacts.
  • The fourth is that the vast majority of cases have typical clinical manifestations, mainly symptoms such as fever, herpes, and lymph node enlargement, with no severe or fatal cases.

An American Reacts to Why America Sucks at Everything – THIS ONE HURT

This is very good. Really.

It is a MUCH watch. This is the real truth about the United States.

I’m so glad you made this video because my conservative mom watched it and now she’s starting to wake up. I got screwed over by the “in network out of network” bullshit recently. My employer changed our healthcare coverage, and I had to find a new neurologist and start the “prior authorization “ process for a particular drug that I take all over again”

Is this the end of Xi Jinping, now that he has lost FACE over Qin Gang?

The sheer power of Xi Jingping is the fact that QG has been buried away and cut off in a matter of seconds and China and it’s foreign affairs moves without a single blip

Thats power

Had Xi been weak, a rival faction would have lobbied immediately within the CPC but the fact that China has simply chosen to forget QG and not talk about him shows the power of Xi Jingping

China and CPC knows that today in the hostile atmosphere with the West — Only XJP is the right man to lead China

  • Hu JINTAO would have kowtowed in seconds
  • Li Keiqang would have kowtowed in maybe a month
  • Bo Xilai would have kowtowed in nanoseconds

Xis power is at its peak now

Had QG defected to US and been declared a mole for CIA then yes , Xi would have been finished politically

Yet QG is in China and safe and under the Partys safe hands 😁

So NOT A CHANCE

Have you ever had a premonition that saved your life?

My father-in-law did. He was moving some tools around in his garage and suddenly had a strong urge to move one of the cars, a Subaru, out into the driveway. He tried to ignore this feeling, because the car was not in his way and it seemed like a needless waste of time. But he couldn’t shake it, so he went and got his car keys and backed the car out of the garage.

Just as he had done so and was getting out of the car, a speeding Tesla flashed past him a couple of feet away and crashed into the open garage, then burst into flames. If he’d stayed in the garage working, he would most likely have been killed.

The resulting fire destroyed the entire garage and his other car. It was 9 months before he and his wife were able to move back into the house. But he was alive, and they still had their Subaru. There was no good explanation for the “little voice in his head” that told him he needed to get himself and his car out of the garage.

By the way, the Tesla driver, who was pulled out of the burning car by a neighbor, was uninjured but was convicted of DUI and had to pay restitution and perform community service.

He was suffering from pancreatic cancer at the time, but from that moment his desire to oversee the restoration of the house gave him a new determination in life. It was a very busy and stressful time, during which he and his wife lived in rental housing. At last they were able to move back into the house which had been perfectly restored to its original state, including a new garage of course, new roof, new heating & a/c, new paint and flooring, and every item inside the house had been removed, professionally cleaned, and replaced. It was beautiful. However, his condition declined rapidly after that and he passed away in August 2018, not quite a year after the fire.

The US Plan to KILL Second Citizenship

As a Venezuelan born in the 90s (post oil-golden era for that country), I know first hand what he means when he says it’s important to have options. I saw how my mother and her siblings were unable to get their second citizenship by descent from Trinidad and Tobago, once things got terribly bad in my country. My grandparents had both US residency and Caribbean citizenship, but because things were going so well in Venezuela in the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, they didn’t work on securing and passing along those other options; and their children never thought things would get this bad. It only took less than 30 years to see things turn around for the worst.”

America isn’t an ordinary country, it’s an idea, it’s the very embodiment of democracy, freedom and hope for the whole world, and now China threatens American democracy and freedom for all mankind. How will humanity unite to defeat Chinese autocracy?

For many years now, the USA has been classified as a “flawed democracy”. Events such as the Capitol Hill riots – intended to disrupt the inauguration of your elected President – did not help. A significant proportion of Americans themselves believed that the last election was rigged and “stolen” from them. So how can the USA be said to be the “very embodiment of democracy”? This strikes me as an extremely grandiose and indefensible claim.

As for freedom, the USA comprises 5% of the world population but holds about 20% of the world’s prisoners. With so many Americans literally locked up behind bars, how can the USA claim to be a “free” country? Furthermore your 13th amendment legalises the enslavement of prisoners – and the USA heavily exploits these slaves/prisoners in ways that your own civil liberty lawyers have described as an abuse of fundamental human rights. (Eg US prisoners can be forced into hazardous jobs – such as fighting wildfires – for as little as zero to fifty cents per hour of work). Errrr, seriously, you think that the US is the embodiment of freedom?

What hope does the USA bring to the world? In the past 40 years, the USA has dropped more bombs, fired more missiles and killed more people in other countries, than any other country in the world. In the past 40 years, the USA has killed people in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Grenada, Bosnia, Somalia and Uganda. Because of US sanctions, the world was afraid to send even vaccines, masks and ventilators to Iran during the covid–19 pandemic. This is how the US brings death and destruction to the world.

Please stop watching your Hollywood movies where the USA is always the one to save the world from invasions by aliens from outer space. Open your eyes and look at the real world. At least look at your own country. Your people are dying from drug overdose at the highest rate in the world. Your people are getting shot to death at the highest rate among all developed countries. Your policemen are shooting citizens for minor offences. Your cities are littered with homeless people living in tents. Your national literacy rate is collapsing together with your average life expectancy. Medical bills are the biggest cause of personal bankruptcies in the USA; your infrastructure is crumbling and aged water pipes are leaking lead into the drinking water for your public schools. To lead your country, you are choosing between a criminal octagenarian and a senile otagenarian. Your income inequality is vast, with the top 1% controlling more wealth than the middle 60% – let’s not even discuss the sufferrings of your bottom 20%.

The US is the embodiment of … HOPE, you say?! Hopelessness is more like it. The USA is no example for the world – unless we are talking of negative examples.

What’s a rule your employer implemented that backfired terribly?

Not so much a rule.

I used to work for a major mail order company; as tech staff I could be sent out anywhere in the country, for which the company would pre-pay for accommodation and pay 40 pence per mile for fuel costs (which was tight-arsed of them, as other companies paid 65ppm).

They also supposedly insured us for using our private cars this way.

People who regularly went out for long trips had a company card to pay for hotels with.

One day they decide they are cutting the fuel payment to 25ppm, and back-dating it SIX months, and also cancelling the company cards – people would have to pay with their own money and claim it back.

This latter move caught a few out who were already out on trips – one guy was unable to pay his bill at a London conference centre, and the staff there were threatening to call the Police.

We also discovered at the same time, that the company HADN’T been paying for the extra car insurance policy, so we were all using our cars effectively with no insurance.

Next day, everyone parked 1/2 mile away and walked into work. “Sorry, can’t go on that job, no car” was the story from every member of the technical staff.

Every senior manager was made to turn over his company car for us to drive around. Even the CEO’s chauffeured Bentley was pressed into service, but it still wasn’t enough; by the end of the first week the taxi bill was running into the high hundreds, and everyone was refusing overnight jobs on the basis they couldn’t afford to pay for the hotel.

It took a MONTH for the suits to cave, and god only knows how much it cost them, in money, customer relations, and the lost goodwill of the tech staff.

Why the American Dream is a Myth

“It’s expensive to be poor” Just…. damn man!

Mediterranean Steak and Pasta
with Tomato-Olive Sauce

Whole-wheat pasta is served with beef Sirloin Tip Center Steaks and a tomato and olive sauce. This one will please the adults and the kids in your family.

2023 09 25 15 07
2023 09 25 15 07

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 8 ounces uncooked whole grain fettuccine
  • 4 beef Sirloin Tip Center Steaks, cut 3/4 inch thick (about 4 ounces each)
  • 1 (26 ounce) jar pasta sauce with olives*
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano leaves, crushed
  • 1/4 cup finely shredded Italian cheese blend or mozzarella cheese
  • 2 teaspoons chopped fresh parsley leaves

Instructions

  1. Cook fettuccine according to package directions; drain and keep warm.
  2. Heat large nonstick skillet over medium heat until hot. Place beef steaks in skillet; cook for 11 to 13 minutes for medium rare (145 degrees F) doneness, turning occasionally. (Do not overcook.) Remove from skillet; keep warm.
  3. Combine pasta sauce and oregano in same skillet; heat until hot. Return steaks to skillet; turn to coat with sauce.
  4. Place steaks on fettuccine; spoon sauce over all.
  5. Sprinkle steaks with cheese, allowing cheese to melt. Sprinkle with parsley.

Notes

* You may substitute 1 (26 ounce) jar pasta sauce with olives for 1 (26 ounce) pasta sauce plus 1/4 cup chopped olives.

US loses first round in attempts to curb China’s tech progress; change of course a better option

US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said she was “upset” when China’s Huawei Technologies released a new phone with an advanced chip during her visit to the country last month but noted that the US has no evidence China can make these components “at scale,” Bloomberg reported. She also said the US is trying to use every single tool at its disposal to deny the Chinese the ability to advance their technology in ways that can hurt the US.

Raimondo’s words are nothing new, but saying that China’s technological advancement “can hurt the US” is a stupid and ridiculous line of thinking. Many American elites refuse to accept that the Chinese have broken through the technological blockade. Radical lawmakers are calling for efforts to strangle Huawei and SMIC, which is not only hegemonic but also an evil way of thinking.

Whether it is ASML, the Dutch manufacturer of lithography machines, or the American chip giants, they do not believe that decoupling can stop China’s progress in semiconductor technology. They believe that China can find alternative methods and its own technological path. However, a large number of American elites are non-technical and refuse to face reality, blindly believing that Huawei’s breakthrough is because the US export controls on technology to China are “still too loose.”

It should be said that Huawei’s breakthrough has to a certain extent undermined the credibility of the US’ technological blockade against China and shattered the collective confidence of the West in this regard. Washington’s current investigation into the origin of Huawei’s chips and attempts to tighten the noose on the blockade against China will only isolate itself.

Because Washington clearly lost the first round, it has to bet even bigger and risk losing the Chinese market for many Western semiconductor companies. Imagine the result of continuing technological restrictions if Huawei makes further breakthroughs – can ASML’s lithography machines still enjoy their current glory? Where will the US-controlled chip production factories find their next market? Just look at the panic faced by Japanese and German automotive giants today in the face of the rise of Chinese electric vehicles. If the current semiconductor leaders are cut off from the Chinese market, who can guarantee that their future situation will be better?

Huawei’s Kirin 9000s is a breakthrough that it was forced to make by the US sanctions. If the US exerts even greater pressure, it will turn this breakthrough into a systemic breach, promoting a highly integrated and strong production chain in the Chinese semiconductor industry. Chips produced in China will also be much cheaper than those produced in the US.

If the US semiconductor industry loses the Chinese market, it will not be as lucky as Google and Facebook. The latter have software advantages that some Chinese internet companies do not have, including the application ecosystem they established by being the first movers. However, semiconductors are hardware, and when Chinese companies like Huawei can provide a cheaper alternative, the situation will be completely different.

A crucial crossroads has been reached. If the US forces China to achieve complete independence in the semiconductor industry, it will have no further cards to play in blocking China’s progress. Moreover, the technological landscape of the world will undergo a rewrite. China now possesses the capital, and we will continue to progress no matter what. It is now the US’ turn to make a choice: continue gambling or change course and resume cooperation?

Expat’s THAI WIFE disappears and so did his fortune $$. Then it got WORSE!

Gosh! This is horrible! You all must be careful.

Head Shakers

One of the “head shakers” about China is the ever-present music of Kenny G on elevators, in supermarkets, in malls, and in restaurants. I do like slow easy jazz, and back in the 1980’s. But I, like most Americans, have moved WAYYYY past all that.

We moved past mullets. We moved past Miami Vice. We moved on from large curly hair, and pastels. We moved on from Windows DOS.

But, you know, China never experienced those things, and have no idea how out of date all this is. And us expats, really, have no heart to admonish our friends in China to stop being so retro. We, well, we just let it all ride.

Just like no one ever says “What’s uppppppppppp!” any longer.

Or, “Where’s the beef?”

Or, Max Headroom.

Todays…

At what point should America issue an arrest warrant for China’s Xi Jinping à la Manuel Noriega?

First it's the unchecked flooding of Chinese Fentanyl into America. Next, mercenary bounties get placed on British residents. 

First of all, Fentanyl is used for treating severe pain especially for cancer patients and is deem a medicine product which many countries import mainly from China. Likewise it is your own country laws and regulations to prevent abuse instead of blaming China or Mexico or another other countries. If illegal Fentanyl managed to slip into your country, blame your border guards and custom officer for not doing the job or your judges for not imposing severe penalties.

Just like a simple soap for washing and bathing and you decided to abuse it by eating them as food and then you blame China other then yourself.

I suggest in that case better that your country be pure communist like Mao time where China totally shut off from the world where no exports and no imports can take place.

Would that scenerio be a better option for your country . That covers all your citizens from visiting any countries so that they will not be arrested or detained or even your organs been harvested for scientific research.

The moral of my answer is don’t blame others, other than yourself if you decided your own will to do stupid things.

Why are the people of the PRC hypocrites that they say they don’t want their nuclear arsenal to be increased and yet they increased from 300 to 400 nuclear arsenal?

Here’s the fun thing.

We don’t actually need them. This is from the US military college. A war with China will wipe 3600 US soldiers out or 50,000 a week. That means ONE brigade a day.

main qimg 9edc4a61f5c9274ffb1048a611b9d6aa
main qimg 9edc4a61f5c9274ffb1048a611b9d6aa

Kiwifruit Teriyaki

kiwi marinade
kiwi marinade

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 kiwifruit
  • 1/4 cup dry white wine
  • Soy sauce
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil (optional)
  • 1 teaspoon grated fresh ginger root or 1/4 teaspoon ground ginger
  • 1 1/2 to 2 pound (1 inch thick) boneless round steak

Instructions

  1. Pare and puree 2 kiwifruit. Combine with wine, soy sauce, garlic, ginger and oil in large baking dish.
  2. Add steak and marinate for 1/2 hour. Marinating for more than 1 hour may over-tenderize it.
  3. Remove steak from marinade, and broil to desired degree of doneness.
  4. Slice steak and arrange on serving platter.
  5. Pare and slice remaining kiwi; garnish platter with slices.

Have you ever refused an inheritance? Why?

Yes. My brother died last September without signing his will (they had it filled out but he didn’t sign it).

I have helped his widow out with cleaning the house.

Because he was intestate, I’m technically entitled to 25% of his inheritance under my state law as our parents are dead, but he was married (75/25 split by law).

He literally told me he wanted everything to go to his wife, who I would consider my sister now.

I’m not screwing a 60 year old lady out of her house.

Yeah, as a working class guy, I could REALLY use 100k+ dollars if I fought it, but I will absolutely NOT destroy his dream of his wife having a nice little home.

Them home cooked meals, talk and sharing memories a couple times every few months are worth more to me than money.

Maybe I’m an idiot, but I love him and her too much to go by “the law”.

Signing that form for her lawyer was about the easiest moral choice I’ve ever had to take.

CN bans ASML products,Lays off 86 million employees; Photolithography machine turned into scrap metal

For china to make a competitive smartphone to Apple with old generation technology is truly remarkable, I know why U.S and Europe is scared of china…they are simply better in technology.

Is democracy inevitable in the long term? Will countries like China and Russia ever become democracies?

Depends on your definition of Democracy

Let’s start with Russia

Russia IS a democracy. Merely because they keep electing Putin and the UR Party all the time or because the election rules favor the ruling party doesn’t disturb the definition

Ultimately Putin IS elected by the people of Russia

The Government under Putin has helped Russia rise from a torn apart and destroyed country in 1991 to a very strong, united force in 2023

So the People are happy and the People vote for the Government and President

That’s Democracy to me

If the US don’t like it, they can go f*** themselves


Next China

Chinese society is 5000 years old

The Chinese mindset is entirely based on the premise that EVERY CHINESE has a role to play in Society and if every Chinese plays their role properly, China will flourish

Under the Emperors, this role was defined by birth and family

Under today’s CPC, this role is defined by ABILITY, ABILITY and more ABILITY

That very mindset is completely against Democracy which claims everyone from a Pauper to a Beggar to a Technology Geek to a Clerk to a Oil Baron have the same rights in choosing a Government

The result is before you

India and China became Independent in 1947 and 1949 – at the same time virtually

Yet China is advanced in EVERY SINGLE FACET over India

China stands before the US as such a feared opponent that the US spends every waking moment on trying to countering China with propaganda and lies and failing

Proof that the CPC did more for China than any Democracy in the history of the modern world

Why would they need this US loser version of democracy


The Chinese version of Governance:-

  • The Worthy keep voting in the Grassroots
  • The Unworthy do what they are told to do
  • Only Ability and Merit matters
  • One Party, different opinions
  • Gays, Transgenders put in their proper place which is a ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell environment’

That alone is enough for China to grow

They don’t need the horrors of becoming a Cesspit democracy

Oh SH*T, What Russia and China are doing will change everything, and the west wants WAR

What Russia, China and North Korea are doing will change everything. The massive economic expansion is pushing the West to do some very desperate things. This week Russia and North Korea signed remarkable new trade agreements. It came on the same week as China and Russia launched a new cross border energy hub. Do you see what’s happening?

URGENT: RUSSIA **HALTS** ALL EXPORT OF GASOLINE AND DIESEL FUEL

World Hal Turner

This morning, Thursday, September 21, Russia announced they are “temporarily” halting the export of all Gasoline and Diesel Fuel. 

Russia is the world’s single biggest seaborne exporter of diesel-type fuel.

Their decision will have an immediate impact on fuel costs and availability.   Expect skyrocketing prices, especially for Diesel, and subsequent skyrocketing prices on EVERY product that moves by truck.

It is not known at this hour, exactly how long this “temporary” halt will last.

Confession of the Day

There’s always someone who ended up in a worse situation with a bigger loss. Every time I hear those stories, it makes me feel a little better that it “could have been worse.” Hope this helps someone realize how bad it can get before you ultimately end in the same place, with the same loss, and the same need for help. It’s also therapeutic to write it down, I’ve found.

In 2012 I had $20k to my name. Turned that into $100k in 5 years buying American Airlines and chip stocks. Took most of the $100k and bought a house to run as an Airbnb. Made about $100k off that in 2 years and sold it when they banned airbnbs. Bought my own house and sold it a year later for another $100k profit. Invested that $300k in the market around the Covid drop and ended 2020 with about $600k. Then I started with options. The ability to make huge gains so quickly was so intoxicating and addictive. $20k in a day. $50k. $100k. I was crushing it and starting to dream of my new rich life. I broke the $1mil threshold and ended the day with $1.1m.

The next day the market sucked and I knew it. But I had such an itch I made a play anyway. I was down $250k by noon because I broke all my own rules just to avoid “taking a loss.” I finally accepted the loss but tried to chase it by jumping to the other side. That cost me an additional $100k loss. Within 2 days I made it back to within spitting distance of being a millionaire once again, but spoiler alert, I’d never see that number again.

Down $200k, another $300k. I finally had to go to my dad for a bailout. He refueled me and I lost it all again within a month. Another bailout, another loss. I was so depressed and suicidal at this point. It was like a bad dream that I couldn’t wake up from. I will forgo buying a drink with a meal because I don’t want to spend the extra $3 but I had no problem loosing $600k in a single day if it meant I could get the dopamine rush.

Then comes the shame of having to admit what happened. The relapses. The broken future. The never ending despair.

I made right moves far more times than wrong but my losses were always much larger than my gains because I couldn’t accept a loss and didn’t want to further risk a gain. In the end, the money didn’t actually mean anything and it was never about the money (not really anyway) it was always about the high of submitting the order and watching the dollars come or go.

In the end, if it wasn’t for anti depressants and my daughter, I wouldn’t be here today. Looking back it’s impossible to imagine how something could have completely high jacked my brain in such a way but it really did.

There is recovery. There is help. It does work. I only wish it didn’t take losing $2mil before I realized it and finally sought help and treatment.

Don’t make my mistake if waiting and find help now. Also, give the “unhappy millionaire” episode of Happiness Lab podcast a listen, changed my life.

Giving up the American Dream is hard.

giving up the American Dream is Hard. I made a few videos: why I gave up the American Dream, the real cost of the American dream and how to ditch the American Dream. Folks have resonated with it, hated it and everything in between.

But let’s be honest, it’s hard to give up the American dream, especially as a Black woman.

Hustle Culture is not for Black women, but the pursuit of the American dream is tied directly to it.

Let’s talk about grieving the American Dream. content included: giving up the American Dream, I gave up the American Dream, Giving up the American Dream is hard, Hustle Culture is not for Black women, Healing for Black women, I gave up Black excellence, hustle culture is toxic, the real price of the American Dream, Black Women deserve good things, Black woman wage gap, I gave up the American Dream, why I gave up on the American Dream, grieving the American Dream, Black women and the American Dream,

What has been your most stunning find at a thrift shop?

I work as a manager in a Charity Shop/thrift Store and I look having a good search through donations for that special item!

One day, I had some items donated and a handbag. In that handbag in a secret pocket was a Genuine Cartier watch.

I was in absolute awe and was so excited!! Thing is, I wasn’t 100% sure I wanted to sell it without the donors consent. (I knew it was genuine as it’s myself who deals with all the name branded luxury items)

I chased the lady through town and told her what I’d found. She broke down in tears telling me they were her late mums things and the watch was lost for many years. Her mum had dementia and her father was only just starting to clear through her things.

So anyway, she asked me to stay with her whilst she rang her father to tell him the news (he also cried which started me off crying!)

After the ordeal of the day I genuinely felt pretty chuffed with myself. I could’ve easily sold it online for a 3figure sum – but something just didn’t feel right.

A few days later that same gentleman came in and thanked me personally. He told me he’d brought it his wife for an anniversary present. I asked how it came to being in an everyday handbag and he explained that she went to get it cleaned (it was boxed) but her dementia was in it’s early stages and was eventually forgotten about. The kind gentleman had a funeral collection in the Charities name and even made a £200 donation to me personally, which I put to the charity.

So yea, that’s my amazing find

Oprah has no idea there’s a Cost of Living Crisis

Why everything feels so expensive right now.

The basic price of commodities has tripled in my experience from 2019. The same 1 bedroom apartment I rented in Dallas for 700 dollars in 2017 is 1400 dollars in 2023. The house that would cost 180k in suburban DFW just 5 years ago costs 400k. The cost of home and car insurance is over the roof. All this in Dallas which is still very cheap compared to many other big cities in the USA.”

Beijing says it uncovered US National Security Agency operatives behind cyberattack on Chinese university


Article HERE
Second Date’ software used in Northwestern Polytechnical University attack is potent cyber espionage tool developed by US agency, says state media
After global tracing, Chinese team reportedly found ‘thousands of network devices’ across the country still infected by the spyware and its derivatives

China says it has identified US National Security Agency operatives while investigating a recent cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University, as its top spying and anti-espionage agency vowed on Thursday to root out all “digital spies”.
The revelation came just three days after Beijing revealed more details about John Shing-wan Leung, a Hong Kong permanent resident and US citizen the Chinese Ministry of State Security said posed as a philanthropist while snooping for information. He was jailed for life for espionage in May, two years after his arrest in China.

State-run CCTV said on Thursday that China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre, with help from Chinese antivirus company 360 Total Security, had discovered the identity of the National Security Agency (NSA) operative or operatives – the broadcaster did not specify how many or name them – after it extracted “multiple samples” of a spyware called “Second Date”.

It said the spyware was used in the cyberattack on Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shaanxi province.

Stop stealing’: China condemns US over Trojan horse cyberattacks on state-funded university
The report said technical analysis showed that Second Date was a cyber-espionage weapon developed by the NSA to sniff out and hijack network traffic and insert malicious codes.

Quoting senior engineer at the National Computer Virus Emergency Response Centre Du Zhenhua, it said software was a potent cyberespionage tool that enabled attackers to take control of target network devices and the data traffic flowing through them, and use them as a “forward base” for the next stage of attacks. It could run on various operating systems and was compatible with multiple architectures.

Du was quoted as saying the spyware was usually used in conjunction with various network device vulnerability attack tools from the NSA’s Office of Tailored Access Operations (TAO). The TAO, now renamed Computer Network Operations, is a cyberwarfare intelligence-gathering unit.

China’s foreign ministry says the international community should be highly vigilant about CIA activities as a new report alleges a years-long global cyberattack campaign. Photo: AFP
The report said that after global tracing, the Chinese team found “thousands of network devices” across the country were still infected by the spyware and its derivatives. It said they also found springboard servers remotely controlled by the NSA in Germany, Japan, South Korea, India and Taiwan.

Those pesky Chinese…!

INDY

Posted by: Dr. George W Oprisko | Sep 20 2023 20:39 utc | 31

Back in China | Our First Impressions…

Can you describe the creepiest person you have ever met?

I had an abusive boyfriend. He was great at first, of course. As soon as he was confident of me, he stalked me, tried to run me off the road many times, pointed a gun at my head a few times, cut my phone lines, beat me, fired a gun into my floor pretending to commit suicide (he would never have done that, he only wanted to scare me), destroyed my things, and more. He was military (so was I) and I had no protection. I was able to get him out of my apartment with the help of his best friend and because he was put in a mental hospital for a few weeks. But I never got a break until I was discharged (honorably), moved across the country to a large city, and changed my name. An ex-husband kindly let me take his name, a common one. The abuser knew my friends and family. A false friend who secretly hated me (I didn’t know) kept telling him how to find me and encouraged others to do the same. People thought it was romantic that he carried such a torch for me. I thought he would appear at my door any day and kill me. He stalked me for 13 more years until I persuaded his commanding office to make him stop. I can’t imagine after all those years that this worked, but it did. Perhaps it was because he didn’t deny what he did and the commanding officer threatened his career and his pension. I never heard from him again. In those 13 years, things had changed somewhat.

I went to law school and made it my mission for many years to protect other women who were treated this badly and sometimes worse by abusers. I got them protection orders and divorces. I got their abusers out of their homes and sometimes in jail. It was very satisfying work. I’m retired now and happy to be so. I feel I did my bit.

Dedollarization Accelerating Within BRICS, Across Globe

It will be amazing if BRICS can come up with some gold-backed trading currency. The dedollarization is happening fast. Over the last 20 years, you see the share of global payments in the dollar has gone down at a steady rate.

This is getting even faster now. At the same time, to “truly dedollarize,” several aspects should be taken into account, he added.

“The harder part” in efforts to replace the dollar lies in the reserve aspect of the currency, the Netley Group president noted. For instance, the United States’ big advantage at the moment is the breadth of its bond market, Goddard explained. “One of the ways, I think, BRICS could develop something to compete with that would be the technology to actually link the BRICS bond markets,” the entrepreneur added.

Combining these two things — a stable trade currency and a strong joint bond market — could create the potential to eventually displace the dollar, Goddard also stated. This process could be even sped up with the enlargement of BRICS, increasing the depth of these economic ties, he concluded.

Why did Israel allow a terrorist and thuggish nation like China to take over the Haifa port?

I live in Haifa, Israel, the location of that port.

A few decades ago we decided to build tunnels to connect the north, the south, and the middle of Haifa. We hired a Chinese company from Shanghai with experience in tunnel building to do the work. It was a massive project and took a few years, during which the Chinese workers lived here. The Chinese company did an excellent job. These tunnels have reduced traffic congestion in Haifa.

The Chinese company we chose to run the new Haifa port has a lot of experience in that kind of work.

In both cases, we chose based on objective criteria, not on politics.

Btw, many Chinese students study at the Technion here, and Chinese tourists visit.

European Union’s decision to launch an anti-subsidy probe into Chinese electric vehicles, will it make the Chinese EV industry become another Huawei?

The Claim is :-

China offers subsidies to their EVs in battery making and other areas, heavy subsidies in taxes and waivers to ensure that EVs are produced at a final cost that is 20% cheaper

This makes Chinese EVs deliver lower cost at better quality than many European EVs

Second complaint is that most of the world pays a premium for Chinese EV batteries but BYD and other players pay 45% lower costs for the same battery due to the fact that the batteries are made in China

This is alleged as unfair competition

They want either the batteries at lower costs or a 20% mark up on Chinese EVs that eliminates the subsidy effect

It’s Classic Protectionism 101

Soviet Style rather than Adam Smith


China didn’t do this

When Volkswagens and Citroens and Mercedes Benz and Toyota and Mitsubishi dominated the vehicle markets of China a decade or so ago:-

China didn’t impose extra tariffs on them nor make it unfair for them to import custom made parts by imposing 60–260% tariffs

China told BYD and SAIC and Great Wall to either make similar quality cars or go out of business because the customer needs the best

Thus these companies formed partnerships and purchased technology and leased technology and made a living with limited market share

Yet this competition helped them prepare a lead in EVs and dominate today

However the West isn’t prepared to do the same thing and ask Renault and Chevy and Volkswagen to COMPETE or go out of business

They want to protect their companies

Like US , Germany, France

They talked of free trade when their products were much superior and Asian nations imposed protectionism

Today when they are being left behind, they scream and yell and whine about tariffs and duties


China has many weapons here

China sells 61.5% of the EV Batteries in the world and 86% of EV Batteries today are made by Chinese players with only Tesla having it’s own supply chain and making it’s own battery for it’s own cars

If you want EVs – you need the Chinese Battery, Electric System and Motors and Chargers

The Chinese make the world’s best and most cost efficient products

Even Tesla battery technology is inferior to CATL and it’s latest batteries

It’s only in Autonomous driving that Tesla has an edge

So frankly China for the next 15 years at least can simply ban the export of batteries or impose a 80% tariff on EV exports and ensure European and US EVs simply can’t compete with ICEs

It throttles the EU green initiative

China loses the EU market but critically ensures Russia & Saudi gains a major leverage as EU and US become more dependent on Oil

That is one card

The Bigger card is

China can play it’s own protectionism

China has a huge market for European Cars with Eight Brands having their largest market in China

That’s 157,000 Jobs

China could simply ban the imports tomorrow and that would finish these companies revenue and share wise

Like the Iphone

Intel & Qualcomm openly said if China forced them to choose between the Chinese market and the Commerce Department restrictions, they would have to choose China for the sake of their US stockholders

If China banned Qualcomm entirely today and said “Okay. We will live with inferior phones but you B******* won’t sell or get a fifty cent piece from us”

Qualcomm would be brutally mauled

The Entire smartphone industry will be brutally mauled

The Entire Semiconductor industry will be brutally mauled

The Chinese are VERY PATIENT PEOPLE and they will play their cards very slowly

They thrive on competing

If China simply decides to close its markets to Foreigners except it’s Russian and Global South friends who will sell it all the Energy and Food it wants

Then most of the Tech firms will be brutally mauled

It was predicted that if Apple was banned entirely from China – $ 1.02 Trillion of it’s market share would never come back

The Total hit on the entire industry could touch $ 7–12 Trillion

Who will take up the slack?

India is expected to touch 40% of Chinas present market in 17–21 years (2040–2044)

Nobody else can take up even 3% of this slack


So China has a lot of Brahmastras to use


There will be no more Huaweis

Huawei was a blow

Nobody expected the West to be so brutally lawless and act like a mafia state , like a land with zero laws

Today China is ready

Every US attack has a party from China including the biggest Brahmastra

  • CUT OFF ACCESS TO PHARMA APIs & Cut off all components needed for Medical Equipment
  • Devalue US Debt by suddenly pegging an exchange rate of 2 Yuan to 1 USD. China will lose 17 Trillion Yuan and after the peg is removed the rate could reach 10–11 but US will lose 160 Trillion Yuan ($ 25 Trillion) , 8 times worse than the 2008 Crisis

APPLE Shocked! Huawei’s Secret Weapons: NearLink Explained

Amazing technology. Zero coverage in Western “news”.

Chinese wisdom: Wang Yi urges nations to help avert cold war

INTRODUCTION

Human behavior falls into durable patterns of action and reaction/response. Taking China-U.S. bilateral relations as an illustration, one almost always finds that China is forever responding, and that the United States is non-stop plotting, agitating and acting in annoying or irritating ways, resulting in China’s patterned response of rebuttal.

For example, in picking a fight with China, the United States will accuse China of “spying” and/or soliciting a prominent politician to accuse and confront China on “ideological” grounds, making it difficult for China to defend.

How do you defend an ideological choice?

As ideology is value-laden, it was adopted to change a sick Chinese society for the better, by bringing in fresh or foreign ideas that are believed to work.

For China, socialism with Chinese characteristics is designed to address its chronic social inequality and alleviate abject poverty. China’s adoption of a socialist ideology is observably bearing fruitful results, lifting millions of its people out of poverty, and building railways in foreign countries.

But, for the U.S. hardcore irrational antagonists such as Mike Pompeo, China is “on the wrong side of history”. What else then can these self-styled enemies of China do but to use and recycle the “spying” game of accusations, hoping to see their cooked-up situation comes to fruition.

In the following article taken from an English-language newspaper dated Thursday, July 30, 2020, the incidents that happened at the beginning of the Trump era were nearly the same as that is happening in the United Kingdom, which has officially announced that a parliamentary researcher has been lately accused of “spying” for the CCP.

For fear of missing its juicy details, let us go over this article.

Entered Wang Yi Who Called on All Countries to Resist “Unreasonable Acts” and to Help Prevent…

FM Wang Yi called on all countries to “resist” the United States’ “blatant and unreasonable acts”, and to help prevent the world’s two greatest powers from descending into what he called a new cold war.

In a phone call with his French counterpart Jean-Yves Le Drian on Tuesday, Wang said China would take “firm and rational responses” amid the intensifying rivalry with the US, but also stressed that Beijing would strive to maintain stable relations with Washington.

It was the fourth time in less than a fortnight that Wang, who is also a state councilor, has named the US in conversations with foreign official, following calls with his Russian, Vietnamese and German counterparts.

Before that, veiled attacks against Washington might have been made in talks with foreign governments without naming it.

The change in rhetoric and the increased frequency of verbal aggression by both sides has meant a rapid deterioration of China-US relations, and an imperative for Beijing to ensure other nations do not side with Washington.

“Tolerating a bully [such as Pompeo] will not keep you safe. It will only let the bully get bolder and act worse. All countries should act to resist any unilateral or hegemonic act and safeguard world peace and development.” Wang was quoted as saying in a Chinese foreign ministry statement.

Wang said the current decline in China-US relations was caused by a certain political faction in the US, driven by the need to lift campaign prospects and maintain unipolar hegemony.

During the phone call to Le Drian, Wang called for “vigilance against US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s recent remarks instigating renewed ideological confrontation and leading the world to a new cold war”.

In a speech last week, Pompeo called for China’s own citizens to join an international effort to “change the behavior” of the ruling Communist Party.

“We believe that all countries will make the right and wise decisions, instead of being held hostage by a small number of American politicians,” Wang said.

“All countries will make concerted efforts to prevent the world from being dragged into a new cold war of conflict and confrontation,” he said.

But Wong said the interests of the two countries were deeply integrated – and that Beijing stood “ready to maintain the stability of China-US relations through equal communication and exchanges with the US side”.

“We will never allow a few anti-China elements to overturn decades of successful exchanges and cooperation between China and the U.S., nor will we allow ideological prejudice to undermine the future development of China-US relations.”

Ties between the world’s most powerful nations have plunged to the lowest point in decades as they clash over trade, technology and geopolitical clout.

In their latest brawl last week, the US ordered the closure of the Chinese consulate in Houston –over spying claims. China retaliated – by ordering the US mission in Chengdu to shut down.

The foreign ministry rolled out a 10-point rebuttal yesterday against American accusations over the closure of the Houston consulate, denying that it was a hub for China’s spying efforts or that it was used as a base for its “fox hunt” operations to induce the return of Chinese fugitives. (Source: SCMP)

CONCLUSION

Readers may find it amazing after reading the above newspaper article on U.S. accusation of Chinese spying, and China’s retaliatory response. Amazed because the narrative over alleged Chinese spying is the same, except this time it is the UK that is the accuser. This pattern persists, and tensions go up.

The ultimate reality, though, is that “U.S. trade is still chained to sources in China.” Research demonstrates the difficulty of severing the countries’ economic ties. According to NYT.

In the end, it is U.S. pragmatism and Chinese rationality that prevails, settling the “spy” squabbling.

Ties may temporarily go sour; bilateral efforts will be made, and trade activities between the U.S. and China will resume. Wang Yi’s rationality is right and wise.

The latest visits by high-profile U.S. secretaries starting with Anthony Blinken, Janet Yellen and Gina Raimondi wrapped up the futile spying game – testifying to the law that damaging business ties lead to revenue loss.

Will the US actions against China over chips really set the Chinese tech sector back 100 years?

Only 100 years?! You bet, will be at least 1,000 years, or maybe, better back to the Stone Age!

And then, you might find one day, your country would have to import chips from China, and the products you use would be embedded with Chinese chips. LOL

The whole Western world, especially the nuclear powers, even later the Soviet Union, had blocked nuclear technology from entering into China back in the 1950s and 1960s. Then what?

The first Chinese nuclear test was conducted at Lop Nur on October 16, 1964. Then in less than 32 months, China detonated its first hydrogen bomb on June 14, 1967. Now, China’s nuclear arsenal is the world’s third largest, and China has, more importantly, also developed its nuclear technology for peaceful use, boasting the second largest number of nuclear power units in operation or under construction in the world.

China was officially barred from visiting the International Space Station (ISS) by the United States in 2011. Then what?

China is nearing its completion of the construction of its own space station -Tiangong, with many visits there already done by Chinese astronauts, three of them are right now flying over us in the station. With the ISS retiring sometime in 2030, China’s Tiangong will be the only space station in the world.

China has been under the tough blockade of Western military techonologies, especially high-end, advanced ones. Then what?

China has successfully tested several times of its hypersonic missiles, among the first nations who have achieved success in this most advanced weapon development.

Also, China has finished its third air-craft carrier, with a fully indigenous design, featuring a CATOBAR system and electromagnetic catapults, one of the most advanced in the world.

And China has its J-20, a twinjet all-weather stealth fighter aircraft with precision strike capability. The Y-20, a large military transport aircraft, the first cargo aircraft to use 3D printing technology to speed up its development and to lower its manufacturing cost.

Similar cases also include the tunnel boring machines, giant cranes, giant excavators, deep-sea drilling machines……You name it. Then what?

China has self developed all of them, not only meeting its own market needs, but also exporting them at a much more affordable price than their Western competitors. What’s more ironic is, some of them have been exported even to those countries who had previously blocked their techonologies into China!

So, in the short term, yes, China is sufferting from the heavy blow from the US, but in the long run, the US and its allies would not only lose the lion’s share of chip market here in China, but will have also to face a strong competitor in semi-conductors, or chips, or something alternative which have similar functions, in the not-too-far-away future, maybe in their own market, and also in the global market.

But during the process, the US would have dried up its influence as a banner-holder of liberal market economy, its credibility as the rule-setter who betrays its own rules, its reliability to its allies since all of them would have to suffer along with the US, and hence, its soft power in leading the world.

Nothing much to gain, but a lot to lose, yet, the US is determined to ride on the self-devastating road. The faster it runs, the quicker the fall of its hegemony.

Japanese-Style Sirloin

japanese style sirloin
japanese style sirloin

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 pound Certified Angus Beef ® boneless sirloin steak, cut into 1/4 inch strips
  • 3 tablespoons soy sauce
  • 1 tablespoon sugar
  • 2 tablespoons sake or dry sherry
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 8 scallions, cut diagonally into 1 1/2 inch pieces
  • 1 large red bell pepper, chopped
  • 8 ounces Napa cabbage, chopped
  • 4 ounces bean sprouts
  • 1 cup cooked short grain rice
  • 1 teaspoon toasted sesame seeds

Instructions

  1. Combine soy sauce, sugar and sake in a small bowl. Set aside.
  2. Heat wok or electric frying pan to medium heat.
  3. Heat oil, add steak strips and stir until beef is browned (about 3-5 minutes).
  4. Push beef to one side. On the other side, add scallions and peppers and stir-fry for 2-3 minutes.
  5. Add cabbage and sprouts, combining all ingredients in the pan. Stir-fry about 1 minute.
  6. Sprinkle soy mixture over meat and vegetables. Cook for 1 minute.
  7. Serve over warm rice and garnish with sesame seeds.

Why People are Leaving Canada, Top 5 Reasons Why People Leave

I left Canada about 1.5 years ago to travel the world and here are some of the top reasons why I left. I give a lot of my own personal anecdotes as someone who has lived in canada for over 20 years. This video represents my personal opinion about living in canada and why I prefer to live in Asia or other countries.

The main reasons. why people are leaving

1. High living costs creates a low standard of living, especially in Vancouver and Toronto.

2. Lack of infrustructure for transportation which means you need to have a car in order to get around

3. Brain drain and lack of opportunities because most talent go to the states

4. Lack of medical healthcare because most people can’t find a family doctor or are finding it difficult to find one

5. Not much social life /activities for young people, most stores close at 6pm

https://youtu.be/2vXjQHNfiW8

China, the next war

On China, the US is again lying itself into the next war. The US says “The [Defense] Department remains committed to abiding by the well-established one China policy of the United States” and “this Administration opposes any unilateral changes to the status quo from either side of the Strait. We have not supported Taiwan independence, we do not support it now.”

But actually the US is supporting the Taiwan independence from China, while Taiwan is calling its independent government the “Republic of China” which is a violation of the “one China” claim. The US also admits that the principle reason for this attention to China’s internal matters is to sustain the anti-China barriers in the off-shore China region: “Taiwan is located at a critical node within the First Island Chain in the Indo-Pacific region.” More detailed information on the coming anti-China next war is recent testimony in the House Armed Services Committee here and here.

Posted by: Don Bacon | Sep 20 2023 15:14 utc | 7

Is India acting as a spoiler in the BRICS on behalf of the West?

A spoiler must possess some power to manipulate but this India clearly does not have.

India can do nothing within BRICS with China around (that’s why they didn’t even dare to join RCEP). Modi was left sitting in the corner of their meeting hall.and as quiet as a church mouse during the last BRICS summit because he had no allies to support him on anything. BRICS proceeded accordingly to invite those countries that Xi had pursued.

An interesting thing happened between then and the Modi show at the G20 with new BRICS members Saudi Arabia and the UAE getting into the act. And of course Xi completely abstaining from even attending. Expectations are of course that the G7 countries, headed by Biden, would be there to cheerlead to elevate Modi’s ego as their way of wooing him to their side.

As the saying goes, give the guy enough rope and he’ll be sure to do it to himself!

And true to form, Modi came out with a true masterpiece that had behind him the G7 countries – U.S., E.U., Germany, France and Italy – applauding him on. and the Western MSM hyping up Modi as the new major player to contest China’s BRI plans. This is the G7’s main challenge to China and to be implemented unti its GPII initiative!!

But this plan could not have been possible without the push of Saudi Arabia and the UAE.

Of course, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have grand plans for themselves – mostly to transition and establish their economy as a major global force after their days of oil dominance is over.

But look at the curious first part of the IMEC journey that has the starting route going through the UAE and Saudi Arabia, which essentially is an alternative route to bypass the Suez Canal.

And then of all places, this very expensive trans-Arabian rail line ends up in Isreal!!!!!

Now, who are the Arabs in their right mind would set up the crown jewel of their economic infrastructure to land in the hands of their arch nemesis to be held hostage anyttime any conflict should arise?

So, you have Modi hoisting himself as a challenger to Xi’s BRI.and also coincidentally, there will be after this G20 a third BRI Meeting in Beijing in October 2023!

The big question is: What are Saudi Arablia and the UAE’s real plans? Are they with the IMEC or are they part of the BRI still and be officially inducted as new BRICS member in 2024?

Have you ever tried to eat at a restaurant, which happened to be a mafia front, but you didn’t know it was a mafia front, and everyone inside just stared at you when you walked in, because nobody actually eats there?

A friend of mine told the story of going to visit his childhood home in Brooklyn. He had hired a car for the day to go all around the old neighborhood so he wouldn’t have to rely on taxis. On the way to visit his mother’s grave at the cemetery, he spotted a flower shop and thought it might be nice to bring flowers.

He went inside, and found a couple of men playing cards, They didn’t seem to notice him. He cleared his throat to get their attention.

“A customer!” one declared, as if in shock.

My friend said he had grown up in the neighborhood, and he chatted with the proprietor a bit about how things have changed over the years.

“Why don’t you sit down and have an espresso with us?” he asked.

“I can’t, I have a driver outside!”

“Well, invite him in, too!”

After he politely refused, they made a beautiful bouquet for him, fairly quickly. He was impressed with the work.

“How much do I owe you?” he asked.

The florist looked hurt. “It’s for your mother! How could I possibly charge you?”

After a little back and forth, it was clear that they weren’t going to accept payment. He thanked them for their generosity and left.

It dawned on him that this place probably wasn’t a flower shop. But they did make him a nice arrangement.

Something TERRIBLE Just Happened in Maui, Oprah & The Rock

James sues Hawaii for First Amendment violations over ban on public photography in Lahaina “This isn’t merely about the freedom to take photos; it’s about the freedom of the press and the right to hold our leaders accontable.

What are your thoughts on China surpassing the USA

Well, China has surpassed the United States in so many ways, that this question is a tad out of date. China is quite a formidable and powerful force right now. Depending on the measurements used, you can easily map out the dates when the mantel of power was transferred.

  • Economic = around 2013.
  • Military = around 1950.
  • Educational = around 1995.
  • Social = around 2005.
  • Manufacturing = around 1990.
  • Technological = in process.

So what are my thoughts about this?

I really don’t think that China is trying to surpass anyone. And certainly isn’t trying to better the USA. I just think that China is doing what it needs to do to serve it’s people. It’s 1.4 billion people, don’t you know. And they need to be satiated, satisfied, and happy.

China is doing that.

All these sanctions, political posturing, and the general madness out the United States (and it actually is a DSM-4 state of crazy-town) is only accelerating and necessitating China to become absolutely independent of the leashes and chains that the United States controls.

Soon, and I do mean SOON, whatever vestiges of American “greatness” will be eclipsed by a rather harsh reality.

Oh, and it PAINS me to speak of it.

But today, the United States is a lie, on top of a lie, that is covered up by lies, and the only good thing about it is that the lies are so obvious that everyone KNOWS that the lies are simply BULLSHIT.

Today, the USA is a third-rated, banana-republic, ruled by psychopathic morons.

And when history books are written about this has-been nation, it will refer to it as a over-glorified “strip mall” masquerading as transsexual brothel built upon an open sewer.

This is common knowledge in “fly over country”.

Those “Rich Men North of Richmond” really gutted the country, and are now stealing everything they can lay their hands on as they flee the cesspool that they created.

When did China surpass the United States?

Oh, sometime back in 1776. It’s been downhill ever since.

Neocons turn on Joe Biden

Calling Biden a president is like calling Harris a vice president.

A big waste of time

In the 1990’s I used to collect “news” articles.

This was in the early days of the internet, and I would find the articles, and then print them out. I ended up with piles of stacks of unsorted articles, (also known as the Rush Limbaugh style “stack of stuff”) and huge expenses for printer ink and boxes of white paper.

2023 09 28 11 09
2023 09 28 11 09

Towards the end of the 1990’s I just gave up, and simply saved the articles on hard drive. i used something called a “ZIP drive” back then to store the articles. It was a “hoarding” habit. A sign of… coping… perhaps. To a stressful life. And then, oh Lordy was my life stressful.

2023 09 28 11 10
2023 09 28 11 10

I did this with everything. I was like a big vacuum and magnet that recorded everything that passed my screen. Articles, images, porn, stories, cat pictures and memes. Ugh!

And I would collect these things on disk and then put the discs in boxes, and just store them. I had so many boxes of “my precious archives”.

2023 09 28 11 12
2023 09 28 11 12

Funny thing though, I never really took the time to go back through them. Not really. They just were vacuumed up, stored, and boxed. Only to be forgotten and ignored over the dust of time.

Today, we can put the stuff “in the cloud”.

But you know what?

If you never get around to reading the articles, looking at the pictures, viewing the movies, then why bother with the effort?

You are wasting your time.

STOP.

Just STOP.

Go outside and get drunk… play with your kitties, doggies, or go fishing. How about watching a ball game? Or better yet, playing ball. Spend time with your loved ones.

Give your mind a break.

Today…

What do you do when someone has road rage and tries to follow you home to fight you?

I live 3 blocks north of my local police station and 3 blocks south of a tiny strip mall. The strip mall has 1 entrance and 1exit so basically it is a 1 way drive and many use it to make a u-turn

I had picked up a moron about a mile from my home because I was only doing 30 in a 25 residential neighborhood – tailgating, honking, etc. There was no shoulder on this road. I was not about to speed up since it was the time that school got out and there were kids walking home.

Even though the moron had a few opportunities to pass me or turn off the road, he stayed on my bumper. I drove into the strip mall and he followed me so I knew I had a serious problem on my hands. While driving, I discreetly called the cops, explained what was happening and headed to the station. Moron kept following me. He was not thrilled when the cops were waiting for him.

While they held him and ticketed him, I drove home and parked my car in my garage. The next day, I dropped off a basket of cookies for the cops and found out that the moron had a couple of outstanding warrants for assault. I’m so glad that I never stopped my car and just kept driving.

Blackstrap Steaks with Caramelized Onions

blackstrap steaks
blackstrap steaks

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

Caramelized Onions

  • 1 1/2 cups sweet onions
  • 3/4 cup red bell pepper
  • 2 tablespoons fresh basil
  • 2 tablespoons pine nuts
  • 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper

Steak

  • 4 chuck eye steaks (Delmonico)
  • 1/4 cup molasses
  • 2 tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 tablespoon balsamic vinegar
  • Salt
  • Fresh basil

Instructions

Caramelized Onions

  1. Spray a medium nonstick skillet with nonstick cooking spray. Heat over medium to medium-high heat until hot. Add onion; cook 5 to 7 minutes, stirring frequently.
  2. If necessary, re-spray skillet with cooking spray. Add bell pepper; continue cooking for 3 to 5 minutes or until onions are browned and bell pepper is crisp-tender, stirring frequently.
  3. Stir in sliced basil, pine nuts, vinegar and black pepper. Season with salt, as desired; keep warm.

Steak

  1. Combine molasses, Worcestershire sauce and vinegar in small bowl.
  2. Heat second large nonstick skillet over medium heat until hot. Season steaks with black pepper. Place steaks in pan; cook 9 to 11 minutes (ranch steaks, 8 to 11 minutes) for medium rare (145 degrees F) to medium (160 degrees F) doneness, turning occasionally and brushing with molasses mixture during last 3 to 4 minutes of cooking.
  3. Season steaks with salt, as desired; serve with caramelized onions. Garnish with basil sprigs, if desired.

Why are SO MANY Americans Retiring in Europe Right Now?

Huawei M60 Pro shocked the world. Why is it?

Try imagining this.

For the U.S. to decide this Chip Act it must have been debated at length by hordes of parties and institutions including dozens of companies in the U.S. and throughout US allies.

Why?

Well simple. The repercussions are simply gigantic and colossal if indeed this act fail. It will cause trillions upon trillions of dollars lost over time. At least a hundred U.S. and its cronies chip firms may simply go out of business all together.

Worst is that this is the last thing the US can do to stop and contained China if this fails, that will be the end of US hegemony in technology. So for the U.S. to take this measure is like putting everything at stake into this one act. Billions has to be spend to build a plants in the U.S. that hinge on China’s failure to counter act. Billions need to be spend to protect and subsidise these hundreds of firms in case it fail.

Countries whose livelihoods depend on this precise technology and business to survive and thrive have to be bribed and coerce to cut out China.

These bribes probably run in the trillions of dollars figures.

And all these hinge on one and only one assumption.

That is China will not be able to design, make and manufacture this high end chips for at least a generation! If this assumption fail to materialised then the U.S. will be thoroughly fxxked for a generation and it will forever not able to compete with China.

In other words, there is absolutely no room at all for failure.

Failure means China will now totally controlled every aspect of Chip making technologies from materials, to designing, to developing , to mass producing in the billions. And it will do it at a fraction of the costs of doing it in the U.S. which simply means the total implosion of all the U.S. chip firms!

So after a mere 3 years China did precisely what the U.S. fears most.

Their worst fears has come true.

The Chinese simply do not need a single technology from the U.S. and its cronies to launch this 5NM chip capable of 5G and satellite communications which also means there is zero possibility for the U.S. to hack it. 150 million orders have been placed and 40 million orders has been fulfilled in a mere 20 days from its launch.

This Huawei Mate 60 series including the Mate 5X is such a blow to the U.S.

For a start the U.S. already lost 3 billion in profit had they not banned themselves from selling to China and up to a few trillion dollars have been wiped off the stock values of these chip firms from 27th August till now. The melt down will carry on and on and on till the U.S. economy collapse all together. We in the rest of the world call this Karma.

That is why it is such a big deal.

Why is the US doing worse than China?

The US is lagging behind China because the US is a plutocracy, a system where the rich and powerful have a stranglehold on the political and economic spheres. This is not a matter of opinion, but a reality that can be verified by various sources and indicators. In this essay, I will show how the US is a plutocracy, how it affects its performance compared to China, and what are the consequences for the future of both countries.

First, let us understand what a plutocracy is. According to Wikipedia, a plutocracy is “a society that is ruled or controlled by people of great wealth or income”. Plutocracy is not based on any established political philosophy, but rather emerges from the accumulation of money and power in the hands of a few. Plutocracy is often linked to corruption, inequality, social unrest, and environmental degradation.

How can we tell that the US is a plutocracy? There are several indicators that reveal the extent of the influence of money and power in the US political system. One of them is the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, which allowed corporations and other entities to spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns and advocacy. This decision effectively gave the rich and powerful a disproportionate voice in the electoral process, undermining the principle of one person, one vote. Another indicator is the lobbying industry, which spends billions of dollars every year to influence legislation and policy in favor of their clients’ interests. Lobbyists often have access to lawmakers and regulators that ordinary citizens do not have, and they can shape the agenda and outcomes of public decisions. A third indicator is the revolving door phenomenon, which refers to the movement of personnel between positions of public office and private sector jobs. This creates conflicts of interest and reduces accountability, as public officials may favor their former or future employers over the public interest.

How does plutocracy affect the US performance compared to China? One way to measure performance is to look at the economic growth rate, which reflects the increase in the value of goods and services produced by a country over a period of time. According to World Bank data, China’s GDP growth rate was 2.3% in 2020, while the US GDP growth rate was -3.5% . This means that China’s economy expanded despite the COVID-19 pandemic, while the US economy contracted significantly. One reason for this difference is that China has a more effective and responsive government that can mobilize resources and implement policies to deal with crises and challenges. China also has a more balanced and diversified economy that relies less on consumption and more on investment, innovation, and trade. The US, on the other hand, has a dysfunctional and gridlocked government that is captured by special interests and unable to address the needs and demands of its people. The US also has an unbalanced and fragile economy that depends heavily on consumption and debt, and suffers from low productivity, inequality, and environmental degradation.

What are the implications for the future of both countries? If the current trends continue, China will surpass the US as the world’s largest economy by 2028 . China will also gain more influence and leadership in global affairs, especially in areas such as trade, technology, climate change, and security. The US will face more challenges and difficulties in maintaining its economic competitiveness, social cohesion, democratic legitimacy, and international reputation. The US will also have to deal with more internal conflicts and external threats, as its plutocratic system erodes its trust and stability.

Gallium’s Dark Side

The substrate’s subplot

Godfree Roberts

In 1959, the American inventors of the integrated circuit chose silicon as their substrate and gave birth to a new industry. Now other materials, with virtues suited to new applications, are beginning to replace it. Graphene, for example, is a potentially exciting substrate, but it lies years further out on the R&D schedule.

As with silicon, whoever mass produces the new substrate will probably dominate the trillion-dollar industry it spawns.

Gallium oxide is much closer to mass production, and China refines 80% of global gallium and exported 94 metric tons of it last year, up 25% YoY. But only a few companies – one European and the others in Japan and China – can make it at the required purity.

Thanks to their low energy consumption, gallium oxide semiconductors are ideal for communications, aerospace, radar, and maglev. Among ultra-wide band gap materials like diamond, boron nitride and silicon carbide, only gallium oxide forms single crystals at atmospheric pressure after solidification from a melt

While drastically reducing fabrication costs, this requires large amounts of iridium to make crucibles for the melt. But iridium is three times more expensive than gold, and a 4 inch crucible requires 11 lb. (5 kg.) of the stuff. Also, for China, this raises IP concerns since Japan and the US pioneered the method.

Battle of the substrate stars

August 2022US government imposes export controls on two substrates of ultra-wide bandgap semiconductors – gallium oxide (Ga2O3), and diamonds – as well as EDA software “designed for the development of integrated circuits with Gate-All-Around Field-Effect Transistor (GAAFET).

July 2023 —China: ‘Gallium and germanium require an export license’.

August 2023 — China: ‘Gallium nitride (GaN) and germanium dioxide (GeO2) exporters must apply for licenses, identify importers and end-users’.

September 2023 — “Chinese researchers cut iridium use 80%, make four-inch gallium dioxide wafers, slash production costs, smooth the path to mass fabrication”. Interesting Engineering.

Why is China releasing a blizzard of new technologies?

  1. It’s committed to development through technology,
  2. It outspends the USA by 400% on R&D,
  3. It has 300,000 researchers with an IQ of 160+ vs. 30,000 in the rest of the world.

China is doing for ICs what it did for railways and renewable energy.

It’s doing the same for EVs and will do for medical care: make them affordable by the 90%. And make a fortune doing so.

What kind of real-life people fascinate you?

I saw a woman wrap a line once, it was fascinating.

We all know those lines, boarding planes, at the store, the Post Office. People arrive too fast, the line grows out of control and takes over the space.

Takes over everything.

It’s an operation crisis, new people arrive faster than they are processed and the system overloads.

Everyone grumbles but no one fixes it.

It’s conformity. Everyone doing the same thing: standing behind the person in front of us.

I used to go to a Dunkin Donuts in Boston. It was just off the North Station T stop so, between 8:20 and 8:30 am, the line grew exponentially. Each commuter stood behind the last and inadvertently created something that consumed the small space and made everyone uncomfortable.

Quickly, the straight line went right out the door, and in winter people near froze, no longer waiting for coffee, but for warmth. To get inside.

It always felt selfish stepping inside, away from that person behind you. Like you were separated, different. But we all did it.

Fact was, it was too early and we were too tired to take responsibility for anyone else.

One day, in February, a day coated with the most vile wintery-mix, a woman with winter boots, two bags, gray face, looked just like me, just like all of us – she just woke up.

Quietly, almost to herself, “This is stupid, those people are freezing.”

And then she did something about it.

She gently pulled arms and pushed backs and said ‘excuse me’ and ‘I’m trying to get those people inside’ and one by one she got strangers to ribbon themselves in such a way that everyone fit, everyone was inside and everyone was still behind the person in front of them.

What an amazing person.

Who steps up and takes responsibility for strangers like that? Especially when it matters so little. And so early in the morning?

What a lady. Fascinating. I’ve wrapped a few lines since then, I always think of her.

“A Revolution Against The Elites!” – WEF’s Klaus Schwab Openly Worries

This is actually REAL. Pay attention!

Huawei M60 Pro shocked the world. Why is it?

Huawei Mate 60 Pro may not have shocked the world as much as the news reporting on the Chinese government instructed all its personnel to refrain from bringing any foreign brand phone into government building and subsequently ………

Apple immediately lost US $200B of its market capitalization.

So what is $200B?

Well, that’s 50% of the total Apple revenue generated in 2022. Any ideas how many senators and congressman/women hold much shares in Apple ? 🤭

Isn’t that a sweet revenge for bullying Huawei and for holding hostage of their princess CFO Meng Wenzhou.

What was your first clue you were no longer as young as you thought you were?

I was at a swanky resort hotel in Niagra-on-the-Lake and some obnoxious young women in their early twenties were hanging off a baggage cart for an Instagram shot. I was annoyed because they had been acting all day like they were in their own private reality show, and I suppose since they had two videographers, maybe they were.

I brushed right through them to get through the door they were blocking with the luggage cart, only to hear one yell “Later, Grandpa” as I closed the door. Doing the math, yep I could be their grandpa if had children at age 20. I have no biological children so those kind of “mile markers” are generally not present in my life.

I have to stop myself if I’m at a coffeeshop and there is an attractive young woman. Otherwise paying too much attention makes me a creep. In my mind, and probably many other people, we think of ourselves as mid-20s for a few too many decades.

Modern Women Regretting Feminism Loneliness is Affecting them Badly

American society is CHANGING.

https://youtu.be/t5wdQvefSpQ

Is China a threat in the EV sector?

The US is not a democratic, it is a die hard interventionist, meaning it interferes with the world Sovereign States’ affairs . Every single year of its existence is spent on warring with others, if not in physical wars then it would be on non physical ones.

But why the the Sovereign State of US alone spent so much time , money and energy on wars while other Sovereign States don’t? The reason is simple, so long as the US government views you as a threat, an enemy to its preeminent *dominance, it will target you , the US government even admitted this themselves , the key words here is “ America’s **adversaries” :—

So based upon the US clampdown on all things China like , the Chinese students study of STEM subjects, the banning of China from the Space technology, space station, the purchase of companies in the US, and recently in year 2023 , the Huawei , and the EVs , we know that the US never stop targeting China for demise even though the US Biden administration said it is derisking the Chinese government. The Derisking of China here is actually to destroy the competitive threat the Chinese is posing to the US economy! So, the US has been all out to stop the *money making opportunities of the Chinese to stop the Chinese from rising economically.

The archives Fantabulastic physical war list of the US:

The signs are written on the walls , the undeniable truth is the money making Chinese companies are the ones being targeted by the US for it’s ‘derisking’ strategy against China!

What do we do when we’ve done all we can do?

-SMACK A KID-

There was a rule at home when I was in middle school called no questions after 7:00 pm. If I broke that rule I got a lip numbing face smack. Not by the creator of the rule, my mom, but by her boyfriend. Mom actually made the rule to try and curb Dale’s anger. He was only allowed to slap me if I broke a rule. No crying. No talking while the tv was on. No staying up past eight. No complaining. The point is, I got the shit slapped out of me a lot. I watched men abuse my mother and my brother for years. Some would say it’s all I ever knew.

Jessica and I got together three years ago. We live together with her two teenage (16 and 13) sons. I don’t have any children. Their curiosity and love of life can be challenging for me. I don’t know how to be a parent. Here’s an example. The eldest, Corey, likes fire. I caught him flicking a lighter after I took the last one away. If that were me, I’d be bruised for ten days. Being constantly pounded on as a kid made me promise myself I’d never do that.

So, the question I asked myself was, how should I discipline him? How can I get the point across without being that monster that I hated so much? Well, I’m making a light up skateboard and since you enjoy lighting things up, you’re gonna help with soldering the lights for one hour every time I catch you with a lighter.

It’s eight at night, so, we set up our phones to aid with lighting and I taught Corey how to use solder. Once I was confident he could use the iron safely, I strung lights beside him while he soldered for an hour. It ended up being really fun for both of us.

Another point of contention is bedtime. Boy oh boy, getting two teenagers in bed by ten is like trying to hit the Powerball without playing. I’ve told them for two years now to go to bed at ten. So what do I do when I wake up at 3:00 am to use the bathroom and find them sleeping on the couch?

I cover them up, kiss their foreheads and say goodnight.

I’m followed on Quora by five ex-girlfriends, my mother, my current girlfriend, her two children and my ex-wife of 18 years. I don’t know how to be a parent and I can be a shitty boyfriend at times. What I do, when I’ve done all I can do, is anything other that what Dale did to us.

I have never raised my voice or hand to a woman or a child, ever. There is no version of me that finds that acceptable. Eighteen years of marriage, never once did I raise my voice to her. The point is, I’m not sure what to do sometimes. But I know I’d rather Corey remember having to learn how to solder as a punishment over being smacked. Yelling at the people I love is never the answer. My job is to do everything I can to protect my family. Not yell at my girl or smack a kid.

Leon

A Death Row Inmate’s Thoughts, Days Before His Execution

Not many people have seen a real death warrant in person, let alone been issued one with their name on it.

I remember the warden instructing security to escort us in restraints from our cells, one at a time, to a small office where we were surrounded by prison officials. The warden read aloud the information off the warrants, which included our names, our crimes, and the jury’s verdict.

There was silence. My mind remained unaffected, having undergone this very thing before only to later receive a stay of execution. There was a measure of calm, knowing I wasn’t alone, that there were seven others—though, given the love I have for the other guys, I would rather have done it alone.

I was handed the death warrant, a longer-than-usual sheet of paper with the golden seal of the State of Arkansas fixed on it. At the bottom, there was the signature of Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

Death, one step closer. Tick, tick.

When you’re issued a date, you want to be the first to break the news to your family. But often the press gets to them first. For the prisoner, as the fatal day approaches, the hardest part is knowing you’ve condemned your loved ones to a bitter fate. Once you depart, they have to carry on.

It is vital that I reach a place of self-forgiveness, so that I can write to my 21-year-old daughter and break the news to her. I could soon be joining her mother in the afterlife, leaving her parentless. Just writing that letter is enough to make me consider beating the executioner to the punch, but I’ve been stabilized and sustained by the inner peace and forgiveness I’ve received through a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Oh boy, do the letters come pouring in after an execution date has been set! During mail call, I receive more mail than ever before about the well-being of my soul. Do you know God? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as lord of your life? If you don’t repent before you die you will go to hell. They send typed letters, handwritten letters, cards, books, etc.

Most of these materials are destined for the trash. Where were they all those years, when I was sitting on death row, when I might have embraced what they had to offer? I see them as opportunists, who want to brag to their friends about how they tried to win my soul.

At this point, an individual has already made his peace with God, or hasn’t.

Some of the prisoners opted out of petitioning for clemency, knowing the board usually issues a denial. They figured they’d save themselves the disappointment.

I, on the other hand, saw opportunity. I wanted to appear before the board so I could show them I was no longer the person I once was. God has transformed me, and even the worst of us can be reformed and renewed. Revealing these truths meant more to me then being granted clemency. I’m still going to eventually die someday, but to stand up for God in front of man, that’s my victory.

To the families of my victims, to whom I have brought pain, great loss, and suffering, as shallow as “I am sorry for robbing you of your loved one” can sound, I would rather say it, and mean it, than not say it at all.

I was asked by mental health personnel, “Have you been thinking about harming yourself?” I was offended — the train of thought behind the question is to get ahead of anyone thinking of ending their life before the state can do so. They don’t want us to beat them to the punch.After a death row prisoner has received a date, others who have befriended him make their pitch: Let me have those tennis shoes. Leave me that watch. Let me get your radio. The poor guy may feel like he’s being picked apart. Other things he doesn’t want to give to prisoners, like family pictures or old letters, he can send home in a box, shortly before he too is sent home in a box.An officer showed up at my cell door today and asked, “Kenneth, how are you?” Then he asked, “What is your shirt and pant size? What size shoe do you wear? How tall are you? How much do you weigh?”

Talk about the lamb being sized up before the slaughter. I thought: Have they forgotten I am human, or do they just not care? Then I thought: Wasn’t it my disregard for human life that got me in this situation to begin with?

I know that midazolam, one of the drugs used in the cocktail to put prisoners to death, doesn’t always anesthetize the prisoner completely. Since I am one of the last to be executed, there are some people who think that if one of the first executions is botched, it could prolong the lives of the others, including me. But I don’t want to live only because someone else suffers that agony. Others suffering in order that I live for however much longer — that’s no hope at all, not if I have truly learned my lesson to value other people’s lives.

–  Kenneth Williams,  The Marshall Project

Kenneth Williams was sentenced to death for murdering Cecil Boren during a 1999 escape attempt from the Cummins Unit in Grady, Ark. Williams had just begun a life sentence for the murder of university student Dominique Hurd. He also confessed to a third murder, and was responsible for the death of a fourth victim in a traffic accident during his escape. This essay was derived from Williams’ written correspondence with Deborah Robinson, who is writing a book about the eight men scheduled for execution in Arkansas.

The Sopranos – Tony’s revenge (S06E19)

How a man handles problems.

Children who have had to clean out your parents’ house after they passed, did you find anything that completely changed how you viewed them?

My Mom passed in 1999. My sister and I were cleaning out her home. In her closet were a bag of wigs. My sister said, Toss these, I replied, No let’s give them to a cancer charity. As I was taking them out one by one, to check the condition. Money flew out of the wigs.

A total of 22 thousand dollars. Looking back I should have kept it all. After I went thru her paperwork. All of my older siblings owed my mother thousands of dollars over 10–15 years. She kept emaculent records dates, reasons, payments all in a book.

Not one of my 5 siblings ever paid her back! My oldest brother and wife owed my mother $30,000 with one payment years before of $100. Others were just as bad.

I never owed my mother any money!

Dax – Oliver Anthony “Rich Men North Of Richmond” Remix [Official Video]

Another rebellion rap!

Wall Street analysts tore down a Chinese Tesla rival and say it’s exactly why Elon Musk should be worried about China

Wall Street analysts tore down a Chinese Tesla competitor and found a great Model 3 alternative — for a fraction of the cost.

The Seal, a mid-sized electric sedan made by Chinese EV giant BYD, backed by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, is a close rival to the Tesla Model 3. Analysts at UBS recently investigated to see just how comparable to Elon Musk’s popular model it might be.

Ultimately, tearing down the Seal — “a good example of Chinese EV models’ technological edges and cost optimization” — reinforced the bank’s belief that Chinese auto companies are here to stay and dominate the global electric car market, it said in a note to clients.

The Seal rivals the Model 3 in many ways, according to UBS, and it does so at a “20% lower selling price.”

Analysts noted features such as its larger interior space, 5G connectivity, and rotational central cockpit screen, as well as how it “opts for slower acceleration, lower top speed, slower charging speed” as some of its advantages over Musk’s popular car.

They also noted BYD’s battery technology (coined cell-to-body), allows for more in-vehicle legroom, a unique car shape, improved performance, and — given the tech introduces a more efficient way of integrating the battery — lower manufacturing costs.

“The floor carpet of the passenger cabin is directly above the battery cell stack, and the top cover of the battery pack serves as the floor of the car body, eliminating one more layer of aluminum or steel,” UBS analysts noted. “Such a thin battery pack occupies less floor space than others, allowing the car’s profile to be low, which reduces aerodynamic resistance and creates a more spacious interior for drivers and passengers.”

UBS also said that, when comparing power performance, cost efficiency, and energy density, the BYD Seal’s electric system “is in-line with the competition despite being at the relatively lower end of the range, especially compared to the leading solution provided by Tesla’s Model 3.”

Interestingly, unlike Tesla, BYD seems to be steering clear from autonomous driving technology, and instead, is opting for a standard, Level 2, advanced driver assistance system. The company is also outsourcing this tech instead of developing it in-house.

At a high level, UBS analysts said the BYD Seal is “cost competitive, thanks to its vertical integration, suitable specs, and volume scale.”

And experts suggest it’s not unlikely they’ll find success in the US in the near future, too.

“Chinese carmakers currently have systematic EV cost advantages versus US and European incumbents while offering wider product line-ups than Tesla and covering more segments (especially mass market),” they added.

Can you tell me about a time that you sued someone in civil court and won?

I sued my general contractor who was also my neighbor.

We hired him because of the great price and he gave us and because he could “squeeze us in right away.” We trusted him because he lived across the street.

Who would screw over his neighbor?

Well. He took our 10k down payment, ripped off our siding and roof, demolished the garage where the new addition was going, and then hit us with sob stories about his grandma dying (seriously) and the expensive adoption of a baby from overseas and the other people in the nieghborhood who weren’t paying on time, etc.

He asked for more money upfront to buy the roofing materials.

And we gave it to him.

He was our neighbor, right?

He was working on another 5 or more homes in the area, surely he was a trustworthy guy.

The roof was finished. Then the asks for more money.

Considerably more that was outside the payment plan we agreed to.

More excuses. And interestingly, more new stuff was showing up at HIS home!

Like a new SUV for his wife.

New siding and windows on HIS home across the street!

Eventually he comes over to say all these other people have stiffed him, and he’s going bankrupt. I have no siding.

It’s Fall. It’s cold.

I have a gaping hole in the side of my house where the addition should be.

So I go out and meet some of these other homeowners whose houses he was working on. And they all have the same story I do.

Excuses.

Lots of money paid upfront.

Broken houses with winter coming.

I go to lawyer after lawyer.

Each one says you lost a lot, save your money. Fix your home. You won’t win. You’ll have to stop his bankruptcy to recover anything.

Not gonna happen.

I dont accept this.

It’s like the perfect crime!

I finally find a lawyer who will take my money and fight the bankruptcy. We need to prove theft by deception.

We get statements from a half dozen angry homeowners.

We get the story in the local papers.

I get Fox News’s consumer reporter to run the story of the neighborhood builder who screwed his neighbors.

They even sent a helicopter to shoot all the half built houses from the air- and his mansion sitting across the street from my tarp covered ranch.

I talk to the prosecutors office too.

They tell me you won’t win in court.

I say wait.

We block the bankruptcy.

We prove theft by deception.

I pitch and get more media coverage.

I go back to the prosecutors. I join up with another hurt family and they finally take our case, and we win.

The judge orders the contractor to pay me damages AND to pay back all the other families who were hurt in a settlement over time.

He also can’t work as a GC anymore.

Plus, our county enacted new law the forced GCs to operate with a license.

By now though I’m dead broke, and my house is still a mess.

We had to pay for so many things 2x.

Once to our criminal GC and again to the suppliers and subcontractors to actually complete the work.

We start getting payments from the settlement, but they come in a little every month.

God blessed my family though, because we won 10k out of the blue in a contest Betty Crocker was running on their fruit roll up boxes!

It paid our legal bills.

Moral of the story, sometimes we need to fight back.

God opened doors for me throughout the whole ordeal.

He needed someone who would be His hands and voice and soldier here on Earth to stop this criminal from hurting so many people.

We found out this guy had run the same scheme in other towns too and had moved around a lot.

Now he’s stopped. Justice is slow. But Justice is done.

President of Turkey Says “may have to part ways with EU”

World Hal Turner

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan said on 16 September that Ankara could “part ways” with the EU if necessary, following the release of a European Parliament report rejecting the possibility of Turkiye joining the EU soon.

The report instead suggested the EU explore “a parallel and realistic framework,” such as a customs union, to determine its ties with Ankara.

“The EU is trying to break away from Turkiye,” Erdogan told reporters. “We will make our evaluations against these developments and if necessary, we can part ways with the EU.”

Turkey’s Foreign Ministry said the European Parliament report contained unfounded allegations and prejudices and took “a shallow and non-visionary” approach to the country’s ties with the EU.

Visa liberalization, which would give Turkish citizens visa-free travel to the bloc for long periods, is a significant reason Turkiye wishes to join the EU. Many Turkish citizens work in EU states, most notably Germany, and EU membership for Turkiye would free them of the difficult bureaucratic process needed to obtain visas.

The European Parliament report follows renewed Turkish efforts to join the EU. Earlier this summer, President Erdogan sought to link Turkiye’s EU accession to approving Sweden’s bid to join NATO.

However, EU officials balked at linking the two issues, citing human rights abuses and the deterioration of the rule of law in Turkiye under Erdogan.

“We have recently seen a renewed interest from the Turkish government in reviving the EU accession process,” said the lead lawmaker on the file, Spanish Socialist Nacho Sánchez Amor, upon adopting the report on Wednesday.

“This will not happen because of geopolitical bargaining, but only when the Turkish authorities show real interest in stopping the continuing backsliding in fundamental freedoms and rule of law in the country,” Sánchez Amor said.

EU officials accuse Erdogan of stifling the media and imprisoning dissidents, including during a crackdown after a failed coup in 2016, which Erdogan blamed on the Gulen Movement. Turkiye’s occupation of parts of EU-member Cyprus has also led EU officials to criticize Erdogan.

In 2018, the European Council said in a statement that negotiations for Turkiye to join the EU “have come to a standstill.”

Hal Turner Analysis

Erdogan of Turkey keeps trying to burn the candle at both ends between Europe and Russia.  He pits one against the other regularly and BOTH sides are growing weary of his antics.

Biden Afraid As U.S Finds Itself In A WEAK Cold War Which Can Turn Into World War III!

How can you have a WAR when there is only one combatant? The world is moving past this, hopefully the US will see their future as a major player amongst all nations and join in as an equal for everyone’s benefit. Everyone should benefit and no-one needs to win.

https://youtu.be/OKHqSNZhkoM

Nuclear war can be avoided if the U.S. gets wise…

September 18, 2023 – 23:39

From afar one gets the impression that Iran’s fortunes are improving. The exchange of prisoners between the U.S. and Iran and the return of $6 billion stolen dollars to Iran is a positive. Iran also has joined BRICS, the Global South is more or less rejecting Western hegemony, Africa is pushing off French colonialism, and U.S. and Western dominance is unraveling some like never before since World War 2.

Europe is sinking into a self-inflicted economic morass and the U.S. is not far behind with its unsustainable debts built up this century especially. The U.S. has all but lost the proxy war on Russia in Ukraine, the Russian economy so far is doing okay, Putin remains popular and Russians in general are united in their own sovereignty with resolve. Apartheid Israel is a divided mess what with the incompetent Netanyahu government staffed with evil clowns, racists, and belligerents.

However, it must be said by this American observer from afar, that Iran could prosper even more than it may in future if it can dispense with any perceived oppression of its own population by its own citizens. Doing so is no threat to Iran’s Islamic orientation.

But at this juncture here’s a few prognostications with commentary.

The worst President this century, senile Joe Biden now facing an impeachment inquiry in the U.S. House, is being pushed by important voices in the U.S. not to run for a second term. The Washington Post confirms this. He is likely to be forced to cancel his candidacy later this autumn or winter.

The bloody, ill-conceived and provoked U.S./NATO proxy war on Russia is likely to end early in 2024 with negotiations. But Russia will never abandon Crimea or the regions it occupies among Russian-speaking and leaning former Ukrainians in the eastern parts of Ukraine. They are Russians now. And a neutral Ukraine is imperative to Russia. The war is unsustainable but if NATO/U.S. enters the conflict directly that could spark a nuclear apocalypse. Russia will NOT permit a threat to its existence.

With respect to China, the U.S. cannot abide competition anywhere. (Huawei, one of China’s leading hi-tech companies, is under attack again given fear of Huawei’s latest 5G consumer mobile phones which have been supplied with a Chinese-made advanced chip after being cut off from buying them elsewhere. The U.S. House of Representatives has proposed sanctions against Huawei and SMIC, not only severing all commercial relations with them but also filing criminal lawsuits against their executives for managing to compete! This is beyond petty.

The U.S. has stationed an alleged 375,000 thousand personnel at 66 military bases in the Indo-Pacific region, and focused the US defense budget for 2024 on China. It is pushing war with China on its gullible Pacific allies, too. This is waste on a gargantuan scale by a U.S. that is virtually bankrupt even without war. The Pentagon, playing war games from time to time, has concluded the U.S. cannot “win” a war with China, not to mention any war with Russia that cannot be won. As long as the U.S. maintains economic wars on competitors and even Europe, it will backfire on the U.S. economy. Expect more erosion of the dollar as a reserve currency.

The “American Century” is dying. Multipolarity is rising. No one can weep about this.

Expect increasing military, social, economic, and political decay in the U.S. and vassal Europe. Ukraine is the last of militant U.S. imperialism on steroids, which is why it’s so dangerous to humanity. Too many psychopaths in Washington remain, fewer in the general populating by the week. One must ask simply: what’s wrong with a more peaceful world, one where competition is acceptable to spur innovation and the U.S. isn’t the hegemonic beast throwing its weight around waging wars of choice, and none of them to date have “won” a thing but dollar profits for the Military Industrial Complex in the U.S. and for politicians. Average Americans also are in desperate need of attention and are suffering relatively. Corrupted Zelensky is coming to the U.S. and will appear at the UN in New York. Would that he were shunned and ridiculed there. He’s coming to beg for another $24 billion atop nearly $200 billion already wasted and he’s likely to get another lame infusion to prolong the bloody proxy war on Russia.

West Africa is likely to avoid a general conflagration and Nigeria probably won’t be able to lead a war on Niger.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has threatened to leave the Democratic Party in his bid for the Presidency in 2024. Biden won’t even give him as a candidate normal Secret Service protection and he faced a distinct threat of assassination last week. He or Vivek Ramaswany could win the 2024 election in a truly free and fair election, which the U.S. will never see again if the so-called Deep State has its way again. The U.S. has not really been a “democracy” of merit for many years.

The “American Century” is dying. Multipolarity is rising. No one can weep about this.

Beef Pepper Steak

instant pot pepper steak 7
instant pot pepper steak 7

Ingredients

  • 1 pound beef top round or top sirloin steak, boneless, cut 3/4 inch thick or flank steak
  • 1/2 cup prepared Italian dressing
  • Salt and pepper
  • 2 large bell peppers, any color, cut into 1/8 inch strips
  • 1 onion, cut into 1/8 inch wedges

Instructions

  1. Cut beef steak lengthwise in half, then crosswise into 1/8-inch thick strips.
  2. Place beef and 1/3 cup Italian dressing in food-safe plastic bag; turn beef to coat. Reserve remaining dressing for vegetables. Close bag securely and marinate in refrigerator for 30 minutes to 2 hours.
  3. Remove beef from marinade; discard marinade. Heat large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat until hot.
  4. Add 1/2 of beef; stir-fry for 1 to 2 minutes or until outside surface of beef is no longer pink. (Do not overcook.)
  5. Remove from skillet.
  6. Repeat with remaining beef.
  7. Season beef with salt and pepper; keep warm.
  8. Wipe skillet with paper towel.
  9. Heat remaining Italian dressing in same skillet until hot.
  10. Add peppers and onion. Stir-fry for 5 to 6 minutes or until vegetables are crisp-tender.
  11. Return beef and juices to skillet. Cook and stir for 1 to 2 minutes or until heated through.

Total: 30 to 35 min | Marinade: 30 min to 2 hr | Yield: 4 servings

China’s Luxury Car Is A Threat To Rolls-Royce, Mercedes, BMW, and Bentley

WOW.

What extreme test would you give to your daughter’s boyfriend to see if he is worthy of dating her?

My father was very conservative and extremely protective of me.

When I was little – seven or eight – he often joked I’d have to wait until I was at least forty before I could date anyone.

When I did start dating, the rule was the boy had to pick me up and come inside to meet my father.

Oh oh.

The first time I had someone over, I was nervous. What would my father do? How would he act?

I hoped he wouldn’t scare him off forever.

The boy came in and sat on the living room couch. My father shook his hand cordially, sat down and asked him a couple of questions, mostly logistical. Where are you going? How will you get there? What time are you bringing my daughter back?

That was it.

“That’s it?” I whispered to my dad. “No tests, no threats?”

“Dushka,” said my dad. “You have a very good head on your shoulders. I trust you. If you like him and want to spend time with him, my assumption is the kid is worth spending time with.”

Then he said “One day you will make the wrong choice and get hurt. Getting hurt is how you learn. I am here to keep you safe – not to take away your life experience. So please, be thoughtful and careful about who you choose because beyond that I can’t protect you without causing more damage than good.”

And so I’m careful.

China cooks covert chips, recruits global geeks to dodge US restrictions

China is looking to hire engineers from other nations to bolster local chip production in the face of crippling US sanctions, with Huawei – one of the country’s largest tech giants – said to be creating a network of covert semiconductor plants across the country.

As Washington tries to curtail China’s access to advanced technology, Beijing continues to seek ways to advance its semiconductor ambitions, including discreetly reviving a past initiative to recruit top foreign-trained scientists to import much-needed expertise.

The new initiative, called Qiming, is overseen by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology.

Qiming was set up to run in parallel with other recruitment initiatives from local and provincial authorities plus a government-backed hiring drive by Chinese chip companies themselves, which favor applicants trained at elite foreign institutions.

In related news, Huawei is building out a covert network of semiconductor facilities across China to tackle the limitations of US sanctions that have chocked off its supply of chips.

According to the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA), the trade body for US chipmakers, Huawei has taken possession at least two existing factories and is building a minimum of three others. SIA claims it is doing this under the names of other companies to conceal its involvement.

Doing so may allow Huawei to circumvent restrictions and indirectly purchase chipmaking equipment and other supplies that would otherwise be off-limits to the company. As a reminder, earlier this year, Washington was pushing for an all-out block on any and all US technology export licenses to Huawei.

No wonder that BRICS is spearheaded by China to bring USD’s demise sooner than later. There has to be a tit for every tat and who knows this better than China which started with Gallium and Germanium products, Micron and now Apple card being played.

Just imagine this, with the news of few Apple phones being discouraged to be used in the offices and Apple lost 200 billion dollars (this is akin to GDP of Hungary) of its share value overnight. What happens if there is a official ban a la Micron on Apple? They will lose trillion dollars = 33% of its share value in a single day because China is responsible for 25% of Apple’s revenue.

Its easy to do business with China, yet its tough to do business with China if you arm twist China.

What is the comprehensive US plan to contain China economically and replace it on the supply chain by Indian manufacturers?

  1. The US is all talking. They don’t have the resources to push for their “comprehensive” plan in blocking China’s development.
  2. Rome is not built in one day. The Belt and Road Initiative started 10 years ago and to date, 147 countries—accounting for two-thirds of the world’s population and 40 percent of global GDP—have signed on to projects or indicated an interest in doing so.
  3. No one, including the US, really wants to cut off their ties with China as they all benefit from the big Chinese market and investment.
  4. The US’ goal of containing China’s rise is evil and despicable.Who do they think they are? The US is working against the trend of history and against the wish of 1.4 billion Chinese pursuing a better life. Their effort in containing China’s growth will prove to be useless and 100% be crushed down to nothing. China’s rise is inevitable, no one can stop.

Why did Qualcomm choose to officially join Huawei’s Harmony OS (September 2023)?

Qualcomm generates two-thirds of its revenue and profit from China. Instead of manufacturing the chips it designs, the company derives income from licensing fees related to its intellectual property. Following the embargo, Qualcomm has been permitted to supply 14nm and higher Android chips to China to sustain its operations. since most cell phone vendors in China, are converting to Harmony, enabling the chip for Harmony OS enhances Qualcomm’s prospects in China, as it involves minimal expenses to adapt the microcode it possesses

Trouble Ahead! Western Lithography Machines Shutdown En Masse.

The United States has restricted the export of high-end chips to China, but China has made significant progress in mid-to-low-end chips. This has reduced China’s dependence on US chip imports, leading to a decline in integrated circuit imports and Western photolithography machine shutdowns. China’s semiconductor industry has developed rapidly, although there are still technological gaps and market share issues compared to American chip companies. China has provided an opportunity for American chip giants like Qualcomm, Intel, NVIDIA, and AMD to expand their business and generate significant revenue, with over 30% and up to 60% of their revenue coming from the Chinese market. They even develop tailored versions of their chips to comply with export control regulations and continue doing business in China.

https://youtu.be/VELRx5n4Efk

Extract of horny 16 year olds

One of the MANY kinds of music that I enjoy is “Trance”. This is a kind of melodic continuous beat, many times with a female vocalist signing her heart out.

I was listening to some Trance on you-tube, and thought about it… you know… the pace and the beat of the music lends itself well to porn. No shit!

So, on a lark, I went to one of the porn sites; xHampster, and spent a minute or two watching the video while the you-tube Trance music played. Sure as shit, I kid you not, the music and the melody absolutely matched the actions of the porn actors and actresses. LOL.

  • Both the men and the woman busy in frenzied (erp) activity…
  • The woman lost in organismic pleasure
  • Periods of bliss

Like this tune…

30:20 Giuseppe Ottaviani & Lucid Blue – I Believe

2023 09 28 10 49
2023 09 28 10 49

I think that this is more than just a casual observation. It’s a reflection of the ties to emotional and mental biological attachments relative to our drives.

Sex is but one of our many, many drives.

How does the music you listen to reflect your interests and desires?

I mean if Trance can equate to porn, then what does Country & Western music equate to? What does Classic Rock equate to?

  • Carry on my wayward son
  • Stairway to Heaven
  • Back in Black
  • Black Magic Woman

It seems to me that David Lee Roth is always singing about prostitutes, and Van Halen roars out about cars…

Ah.

…but what about polkas?

2023 09 28 10 45
2023 09 28 10 45

… Vodka drunk aunties, with roses clenched in their teeth, and little kids running all over the stage, eh?

Music reflects our inner desires, and under certain conditions, they can enhance or suppress them.

Jazz.

Pop.

Banjo

Todays…

NATO Planning for 3.5 MILLION to Serve if War With Russia Starts

World Hal Turner

In the event of a direct war with Russia, the NATO military bloc will utilize the 300 thousand troops already on the Border with Russia, in the first month.  “NATO will then “attract” up to 3.5 million troops” according to Admiral Rob Bauer, the head of the military committee of the North Atlantic Alliance, .

Where do they think they’re going to get those 3.5 Million troops?   Why, YOU – and your children — of course!  Ready to go fight and die for the armpit of eastern Europe, Ukraine?

Admiral Bauer noted that NATO’s new regional defense plans involve further reinforcement on the borders with Russia in case of a possible confrontation.

“If they attack, we must be ready. So we need more militaries at a high level of readiness, and that’s not something that can be done overnight. They will need training, weapons, ammunition, everything else. Therefore, we are talking about 300 thousand military personnel at a high level of readiness. In total, NATO countries, together with Finland and Sweden, have 3.5 million troops,” said Bauer.

Rattling sabers will not help. Sooner or later Russia will complete its plans for its new Northern Military District, and NATO knows about this.

NATO, the clown force defeated by horseback riders from Afghani caves.

Beef and Mushrooms

Wild Mushroom and Beef Stew Recipe 5 of 10
Wild Mushroom and Beef Stew Recipe 5 of 10

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 1 1/4 pounds sirloin steak, cut into 1 inch pieces
  • 1/2 teaspoon kosher salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon pepper
  • 1 (10 ounce) package sliced mushrooms
  • 1 (16 ounce) package frozen pearl onions
  • 2 cups red wine
  • 1 (10.75 ounce) can Campbell’s Golden Mushroom soup
  • 1/2 cup flat-leaf parsley, chopped (optional)

Instructions

  1. Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium-high heat.
  2. Season steak with 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper and cook until browned, about 5 minutes.
  3. Transfer steak to a bowl and set aside.
  4. Add mushrooms and onions to the pan and cook until liquid has evaporated.
  5. Add the wine and simmer until reduced by half, 5 to 6 minutes.
  6. Stir in soup and 1/4 cup water and bring to a boil.
  7. Add steak and its juices from the bowl and simmer, 2 minutes.
  8. Divide into individual bowls and sprinkle with the parsley, if using.

Trump Latinos – Rich Men North Of Richmond “Official Video”

Everyone is raging about Washington DC.

Why is America losing the tech war with China?

America does not believe in fair competition, Tonya Harding is its role model.

What has the US done while China is improving?

NOTHING.

Just a whole lot of talk, blustering and promises…

China released new photolithography factory plan, U.S. restrictions will no longer be in effect.

Oh man this is a very wonderful news, hope it can be made soon and can’t wait to see US semiconductor companies close their doors one by one as no other market can absorb their products … I would say well done USA for digging your own grave yard, very well planned!

Have you ever been judged by someone solely based on the clothes you were wearing?

My first “real” marketing job, back in the 80’s, was working in the fragrance division of a world renowned fashion designer. 2x a year, I was given $2,000-$3,000 to go shopping at Bloomingdales buying up the competition’s newest products.

I learned that if I dressed down, jeans & tees, I could freely shop the dept without sales pressure. I could easily make a list of what I needed to buy Basically, I was ignored and when I tried to get help, I was ignored even more by the seasoned sales people. They would rather talk to each other than help me.

Eventually, a new or young sales clerk would take pity on me & ask if they could help me. I would hand them my list and watch the delight spread over their face as they mentally calculated their sizeable commission, especially as I pulled out the cash.

And it was super fun watching the scowls on those that wouldn’t help me, when they saw the size of my purchase. And yes, as I walked out, I said to each one of them “ you had your chance.” Lol

Are Europeans shocked when they first come to the United States?

There were only two things that shocked me when I came to the US.

  • The complete lack of maintenance for the infrastructure. I thought Americans loved to drive? So why not spend some money on maintenance. I’ve seen more potholes in 6 days in the Usa, than in my entire life in the Netherlands
  • The way police officers and other other uniformed people behaved. It already started on the airport at border security, all of the guys in uniform acted like they were the most important person in the world and we were just measly worms. Come on, I know you have a job to do, but why can’t you just try to be pollite? If Dutch police officers would behave like that, they would be considered unfit for the job.

What should we children do with a 91-year-old mother who needs care but refuses to move in with us, let anyone live with her and will not consider nursing home or assisted living?

You could try doing what my neighbor did 50 years ago. His mother was a stubborn woman from the old country. She won’t consider going to a nursing home having any help in her place etc. she fired several people as soon as they started. So he hired another person and they concocted this plan. He told his mother that this person wanted to rent a room from her and she would pay her every week. But that she was a bit hard up and couldn’t afford the full cost of the rent so in order to get a lower rent she was going to help around the house and other things that might need to be done. So every week the son gave the Aide an extra $50 and the Aide handed the mother the $50 and she gave it to her son to put in the bank. So the Aide started helping around the house and then slowly started with personal care. Pretty soon she was taking full care of the mother and the mother thought she was great and offered a bigger reduction in her “rent” and she told her son that she had a nice tenant who helped her “a little” and it was so much better than having an Aide messing around in her house plus she was earning an extra $50 a week!

What is the funniest loophole you have ever seen?

When I was in school, they held a robotics competition.

It was pretty simple, conceptually. You had to make a firefighting robot. It would have to navigate a maze, find a candle and put it out (fully automated, no remote control). I can’t remember the exact size but I think the robot had to be smaller than 1 foot in length, width, and height.

Scoring was as follows. You start with your time (how long it takes to search every room and put out the candle), and get deductions (bonus points) if your robot:

  • Put out the candle with anything other than a fan (water, for instance)
  • Searched every room, didn’t just stop at the one with the candle
  • Could separate into parts to search rooms in parallel
  • Was very efficient algorithmically (there were a few benchmarks for this)

Most entries looked like what you would expect, a bunch of sub-systems. Each one with a specific purpose. A Robot.


I entered a block of dry ice. It held a simple metal device attached to it.

It basically just had a spring-powered hammer to shatter it into little pieces when the start timer went (so that it would evaporate faster)

In seconds the entire maze was filled with a white fog and the candle was definitely out. I had the fastest time by a landslide even before you counted my deductions:

  • Didn’t use a fan? Check
  • Search every room? Check.
  • Separate into parts to put out fires in parallel? Check

I think I could’ve been the only person in history to ever win a robotics competition without writing a single line of code or soldering a single wire.

But alas, the judges disqualified me by unanimous vote.

Aztec Death Whistle | The Scariest Sound You’ve Ever Heard

What children’s toys have been repurposed for something very un-childlike?

During the Iraq war, soldiers frequently used Silly String to help detect booby traps.

Specifically:

If you were entering a house, a perimeter, any at-risk area, you would stand near the areas, and spray Silly String around the room.

Wherever the string caught, seeming to hang in the air—was often a tripwire, that was designed to set off a bomb killing all in the immediate vicinity. (Source: Silly String Has a Real Purpose: Exposing Trip Wires. Ferro, Shaunacy)

Because Silly String is so light, it doesn’t set the wire off. And—you can get Silly String that glows in the dark and is bright. So it has become a popular request from soldiers in the field.

A woman in New Jersey, whose son was serving, even created a charity and collected 80,000 cans of the stuff to ship over to them.

New Zealand’s Capital City Is OVER

What’s the craziest thing you found in the middle of nowhere?

My parents used to fuss at me so bad about my adventures, mainly because I would bring junk home from the multiple dumpster areas. One in particular was located in the middle of nowhere, which is now a very nice neighborhood. Before this area boomed into what it is now, this particular set of dumpsters was literally rich people stuff from the surrounding lake homes. If Dad told me to take off the trash, I drove the extra few miles down the small road to go to these. Anyways, one day I hit mega jackpot!

Since these were so remote, nobody ever really used them and they were not picked through. I can tell you we had pickers in the others, because one day I threw a bag in and the dumpster said “hey watch it!”. That was quite the surprise. On this day the stars aligned for me though. As I was emptying Dad’s old truck, my eyes happened to see what I couldn’t believe….a nearly new VCR. Back then dad said he wouldn’t buy one they were just too expensive. This was back in the late 80s when VCRs were literally thousands of dollars, and this one was top of the line too! Somebody must have gotten angry at it, as I could tell it had been bashed. It was lying in a pile of stuff, deep down inside. So I pull the trusty truck up to the door where I could crawl inside. Low and behold it gets even better! Under it was a fairly new Sears stereo system…..like WHAT!!!! This was thousands of dollars of stuff here, and me being 17 I was just overcome with emotion. The cabinet was smashed as someone had just tossed it all in. I didn’t care I was in heaven. I retrieved my prizes and headed home. I was beside myself. When I pulled up to the house, I was so excited I could barely speak. Dad was skeptical. I admit the stuff had been scratched and damaged, but it was complete!

I understand why someone threw it out. The VCR ate tapes more than it played them. At 17 though, my skills as a repair person were developing. What happened was the rubber was not staying on the wheel that drove the tape, it was slipping. Gluing the rubber to the wheel solved the problem. The stereo was way more complicated to fix. It only had one side that was working, the left channel. The right was dead. It took me some time to figure it all out, but with help from the neighbor down the street (who had a Commodore 64 controlling his whole house) we were able to get it repaired. It was a burned up circuit on the board. I held on to that stereo and VCR for years, until it became totally obsolete and I finally placed it for recycling. My roommate for college was utterly shocked with the electronics I had. He couldn’t figure out how someone who barely worked could afford such high end stuff. He was even more miffed when I said I literally got it for free. I was always scared he was going to steal it too.

What was the most satisfying lie you caught someone in?

I ran a company for years and I told my employees that I expected them at work every day unless they were truly sick or had something that had to me taken care of.

I paid well and took good care of my people. One day, a guy named Tommy called in sick. Later in the day, I had to go look at a job on a part of town I’d never been in. As I drove, there was a group of guys in a yard drinking beer. Tommy was there with them. I waved as I drove by, and the look on his face was priceless.

I had a car phone which was rare back then. Tommy called after a bit and I told him his check would be ready on Friday.

Later, his wife called and asked me to give him one more chance that this was the best job he’d ever had and that their family was more secure than they’d ever been.

I let him come to a staff meeting and stand up and tell everyone what he’d done. I passed out slips of paper to everyone and let them vote. Stay or fired. They wrote, folded the papers and put them in a hat as it went around.

Most voted to let him stay. I did and he was a great employee from then on. I think it made a strong impression on all of the crews and I’m glad I gave him another chance. If his wife had not called, he would never have gotten the second chance.

Shopping at One of the Last Open Kmart’s Before it Closes Forever! Westwood NJ

Signs of America.

When my mother started to suffer from dementia.

I was in that position. It’s not an uncommon position to be in.

My mother was living alone and had early dementia. While not 91, she needed help and someone to talk with. And she was slowly losing it. She was in her late 70’s and had cancer. She lived in a big “Manor” house about an hours drive out of Pittsburgh, PA.

My sister lived the next town over and didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Instead, she wanted to put her in a care-home for aged people, and then take over her estate. Which was really selfish, and rude, but her husband was / is a self-centered bastard, so what can you expect.

My other sister lived a five hour drive away, and while she wanted to do something, it really wasn’t possible. She had her own business, and was busy. She could visit maybe once a month, but that was it.

My younger brother lived in Colorado, had his own business and couldn’t do anything.

And I, well, I was living in Boston, MA at the time. I was working as the VP of an International automotive electronics company, and I (as the oldest) was faced with the task on what to to. My brother and older sister discussed the matter with me and none of us wanted to put here in a “home”. So it was really up to me.

I quit my job.

Packed up all my belongings, and moved into the “Carriage House” (a caretaker building) on the property. Technically, I didn’t live in the house, but I was with her every day. We shared meals together. I took care of the property, and drove her to her medical appointments and kept an eye on her.

I did this for three years.

Then on Easter day, she got really tired. She couldn’t eat dinner with all of us. Instead she just sat in the kitchen, unable to move. We ate, and talked and then we carefully helped her to the couch in the TV room.

We put on a rental movie, and watched it together. She closed her eyes and went to sleep. Everyone else left, and that night, I sat beside her writing e-mails to my girlfriend in China.

She never woke up.

And I, well, I sat beside her all night, and into the next afternoon. Hospice came. We moved her into a bed in the TV room. She laid there.

And I sat beside her.

I was there beside her as she passed on.

You can either be a man and take responsibility for your family, or not. I took responsibility, and those three years with my mother were very special to me. Treasures. Really.

After she passed on, a new chapter opened up in my life.

And that is what life is all about…

高速道路に捨てられた子猫、不器用な女性が持ち帰る | とても幸せでした

https://youtu.be/WynzVlff9iQ

How much will Apple, Qualcomm, and other U.S. tech companies have to lower their costs in order to compete with Chinese tech companies?

Lowering costs?

That’s not the US Style isn’t it?

When has a Company in US ever lowered its retail costs to compete fairly?

The Answer is NEVER

At least not since the 1970s


Japanese cars and steel threatened to swamp out the US overpriced cars in the 1980s

You had the PLAZA ACCORDS to destroy the Japanese export market for two decades

Tik Tok has a huge market in US and threatens every Big Tech Giant and their applications

It became a National security threat

Huawei became a major competition for Apple globally and looked poised with their innovation to eclipse Apple by 2025

It became a National Security Threat and was hit with every commercial sanction in the book

Chinese Electric vehicles threaten to dominate the world market by 2025

Bang!!!! European Parliament decides to look into anti dumping and raise tariffs. After all, it became a National Security Threat.


The fact is these guys haven’t properly competed with any rival for more than five decades

I mean the West of course

They have a four way formula to keep skirting around competition:-

  • Powerful Brand Image and Billions of Dollars in advertising and marketing
  • Powerful Lobby Groups in US and powerful political forces to throttle any competition outside the Western Bloc plus Japan using the ‘National Security Threat’
  • Political manouvering to use Tariffs, Sanctions and vague Export controls to throttle foreign competition
  • Outright buying up of opposition through voluntary or involuntary acquisitions

In short ‘BULLYBOY TACTICS’

India does the exact same thing, so do most democracies these days

Dr Singh wanted multiple entities to set up mobile services in India to develop fair competition and lowering the prices

33 to be exact

Instead we set up mock bribery charges and wiped out the entire plan and established a Cartel


So the US and it’s lackeys will never play fair economics

They will talk about it of course until kingdom come

Tomorrow if China decides to ban Iphones for 50 people, they will shriek and scream about ‘Laissez Faire’ and ‘Free market’

Yet these demented fools will never see that they are doing worse. They have been brainwashed into believing they are the good guys.


The only way to defeat them is the Chinese way which involves simply innovating, lowering costs and establishing markets wherever possible in the Global South especially BRI countries where Chinas influence exceeds the West and their influence

And slowly keep your cards close to your chest and use some of the same protection tactics that the West adopts and cut off their products from your market threatening a SCORCHED EARTH POLICY.

Or have you forgotten what and how the United States treated Huawei?

8 Forgotten Restaurant Chains We Need Back!


If the US dumps chips in the Chinese market at very low prices, how will the Chinese government react?

My wife works for a big logistics company in China. When the US sanctions hit, DHL withheld some Huawei equipments in their European warehouses for American investigation. This totally set Huawei off and prompted the company to look for domestic alternatives. My wife says their service is worse and more expensive than DHL, in fact totally incomparable in Europe, but after the episode Huawei was just never going to trust DHL again. Thanks to the money Huawei keep throwing their way these past few years, they’ve been able to grow and expand in Europe, becoming more respectable. At this very monent she’s on a business trip in Europe to open a new office for their newly acquired Dutch subsidiary and the inauguration of a new cargo airline.

This is just one very narrow and personal peek into the consequences of the trade war, but I think it’s a window into other areas like chips as well.

American chips were good and cheap and flooded the Chinese market before the tech war, in fact they still do, so Chinese domestic chip makers just couldn’t grow. In 1997 Chinese ministry of education downright cut the semiconductor major in universities, probably believing such majors to be unnecessary since cheap American chips are readily available and Chinese companies just weren’t making them so graduates couldn’t find jobs.

The chip war has changed that. Now semiconductor is the hottest major in China and new Chinese engineers are filling up new Chinese chip start ups. If the US drops the sanctions and flood the Chinese market again now, it will still have tarnished its reputation as a reliable supplier, and we have an entire nation, if not more, wary of the potential of American political untrustworthiness disrupting supply lines. Just like Huawei refuses to use DHL despite its service being better and cheaper, allowing for my wife’s company to grow and maybe one day take on DHL, some Chinese companies will just not trust American chips again, despite them being cheap or not, leaving room for domestic chip business to grow.

Cambodian Girl Surprises Me With Kindness in Phnom Penh

Fun and interesting video.

https://youtu.be/uXv6qrcGGhw

Have you ever witnessed an objection at a wedding?

As an attorney, I had someone served with an involuntary bankruptcy at his wedding.

He had refused to pay both child and spousal support for years. He worked for his daddy and claimed he wasn’t making any money. Almost everything he owned was in someone else’s name, except for the house.

He drove expensive cars, had a boat, a couple of quads and dressed in very upscale clothing.

He would eat at the finest restaurants and travel all over the world.

Yet his ex-wife could hardly put food on the table for herself and her children, who were his children also.

I filed an involuntary bankruptcy against him to get the equity in the house to pay for the support.

He kept dodging my process server. His car would be at his work, but they would claim he was not there. Same at home, his car would be there, but his girlfriend would claim he was not home.

I spent about six months trying to get him served, when his children (the ones he refused to support) got an invitation to his wedding.

I had my process server dress as a delivery lady, with a big gift-wrapped box. Someone at the door said they would take the gift, but the process server told them that the gift was so special, it had to be delivered to the man personally.

He came to the door, the process server opened the box and, “Mr. So-and-so, you have been served.” He blew a cork and started screaming at the process server using every cuss word you could imagine.

I found out later that he was served just as the wedding was about to start.

During one of the court proceedings, he told the judge that I ruined his wedding and his honeymoon, to which I replied that was OK because he had ruined his children’s lives.

Daddy came up with the money for the back support and my attorney fees. I also got a lien on the house for all future support payments. I then dismissed the bankruptcy.

I really dislike anyone who will not support their own children, especially when they have the ability to do so.

I consider this to be one of my finest cases.

Shanghai Has Changed Forever Since The Lockdown

A dated video. But gives you an idea bout the feeling at that time.

What is the most British thing ever?

I arrived at a very old and very prestigious school for a job interview as a teacher. The first thing I thought upon arrival was “Oh my God! This place is way outside my comfort zone.” It looked just so venerable and posh. Much of the building was Tudor (1547ish) and extensively re-modelled in Victorian gothic. It was imposing and intimidating as a potential workplace.

But then I walked into the school office and Reception and there on the Reception desk was a letter “In-Tray” with a huge ginger Tom Cat curled up alseep in it. I thought that “only in a very old, very British, very eccentric school that was very sure of itself would a cat be sleeping in the Reception Desk in-tray.”

The cat was called Henry and he had the run of the whole school and everyone loved him.

Anyway, I got the job and was ringing round various companies to acquire new equipment for my Technology lab. One company I wished to use had no supply contract with the school and so I was asked by their representative on the phone to set up a credit account. The conversation went like this:

“We will need some business credentials for your company in order to set up the credit account”

“Yes of course; what do you need to know?”

“Firstly, how long has your business be operating?”

“Four hundred and seventy-five years”

“Ah. I don’t think there will be any problem setting you up with a credit account”.

The De-Civilization of America | Victor Davis Hanson

A calm voice of reality.

What did you find out about your teacher that shocked you?

When I was in 3rd grade, there was a class bully by the name of Chris. My cousin Ryan was also in the class, and we were buddies. One day Chris decided to pick on my cousin. Incensed, I punched Chris in the face and knocked him clean out of his chair.

Horrified by what I had done, I quickly turned to see if the teacher had seen. She hadn’t. She had her back to the class writing on the chalk board and had missed the whole thing. I was so relieved. I attended a private school that employed corporal punishment and I was so sure I was going to get paddled.

I found out years later from my parents that she had actually seen the whole thing and had quickly turned to the board to hide her huge smile. She had been aching to punch Chris herself for months.

Chris never bothered me or my cousin again.

Constitution 101 | Lecture 1

Learn the meaning of the Constitution and the principles of American government in this new version of Hillsdale’s most popular course. Visit hillsdale.edu/con101 to begin your course today.

What was the strangest thing you found cleaning out your parents’ house after they died?

Two things – not necessarily strange, just quirky. My father died quite unexpectedly of an aneurysm over a decade ago. He had a terrific sense of humor, and an awful gold and tan plaid sports jacket from the 70s. My mom had begged him to get rid of it for years, but no. He even wore it to my best friend’s wedding, insisting she’d find it funny. She did. When I got to it in the closet, I wasn’t sure I could give it away, but I checked the pockets anyway. Each pocket held 13 crisp $100 bills – $3900 total.

The other item was inside a puzzle box I had given him many years prior. It was the kind where you had to tap on one section, twist another, etc. in a specific order to get it open. I heard something inside when I shook it. Took me almost an hour to get it open to find his neatly written recipe for barbecue sauce.

Gosh, I miss him!

9 Things Your Cat Does for You Without You Knowing

What’s something a doctor did to you that you won’t ever forget?

I am disabled and I see a psychiatrist, as required by disability.

My doctor was the only one in town who accepted medicare/medicaid. He accepted me as his patient when I went for my first appointment. We got on well right away. Over the years, he has helped me along my journey to better mental health. I have had to change medications quite a few times. Sometimes they stopped working. Sometimes the side effects were too bad, or they didn’t help at all. Each time, he listened to me describe my thoughts on the medications. He worked with me and offered different solutions in order to find the best fit for me. I sincerely like and respect my psychiatrist.

I had an appointment one afternoon, and at the end of our session, he told me that he wasn’t going to be accepting medicare/medicaid patients any more. My heart sank, because this meant either forking over cash, or driving to another town to see a psychiatrist.

Then he told me that he had decided to keep a handful of his medicare/medicaid patients and see them pro-bono. He said that I was one of those patients.

So now I have a doctor who sees me regularly, fills out paper work to the satisfaction of disability people, and prescribes my medications and monitors how they are working for me. And he does it without charging me a dime.

My income is small. This is an enormous benefit to me. I can’t thank him enough. I’m proud to know a charitable person who silently helps people with no expectation of gaining anything from it. If my situation changes, I will be glad to start paying him to see me, even if it hurts my pocketbook.

1980s Things That Are Not Socially Acceptable Today

https://youtu.be/Apmq2Ktyd1I

What did you find out about your teacher that shocked you?

My 8th grade PE teacher was tall, black, muscular, and pretty terrifying. His wife came by class one day; she was white, plump, mid height, and sweet. I’d never seen a mixed race couple before and was a little shocked. (It wasn’t that I didn’t like the idea; I had zero exposure to mixed race anything in a nearly all white neighborhood.) What was more shocking was she took none of his shit. He barked at her like he barked at us and she told him to settle down. She instantly became my hero. They loved each other a lot, that was obvious. I never thought twice about mixed race couples again.

I was at McDonald’s and I noticed that customers were choosing to wait in line to order with the cashier, instead of using the available kiosks. Why do you think that is?

Yep. Our local McDonalds recently completed their renovation, which includes the new kiosks. I walked in and noticed the kiosks, but went straight to the cash register.

The manager asked me to please use the kiosk. I said no thank you. She said, we’re trying to get all of our customers to use them. Again, I said no thanks. She got really huffy and stopped what she was doing at the french fry station and turned to me and said, why won’t you use them?

I said, “I didn’t come here this morning to do your job. You want me to take an order, then pay me.” That stopped her. She came and took my order.

While she was taking my order I explained, “To use your kiosk, I have to make multiple selections, and each one requires that I choose between many options. I don’t want to do that. I just want a breakfast sandwich and a coffee. I can tell you that in one simple sentence. I don’t have to pick through multiple screens of options of things I don’t want.”

That’s why you won’t ever see me at the kiosk.

“We Can’t Be Afraid Of Nuclear War!” Says Sean Penn

The world is populated by idiots.

EU may become as hooked on China batteries as it was on Russian energy

EU could become as dependent on China for lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells by 2030 as it was on Russia for energy before the Ukrosia war unless it takes strong measures.

Worried by China’s growing global assertiveness and economic weight, the leaders will discuss the European Commission’s proposals to reduce the risk of Europe being too dependent on China and the need diversify towards Africa and Latin America.

While the EU has a strong position in the intermediate and assembly phases of making electrolysers, with a more than 50% global market share, it relies heavily on China for fuel cells and lithium-ion batteries crucial for electric vehicles.

According to the European Commission, in 2021, the year before Ukrosia war, the EU took more than 40% of its total gas consumption, 27% of oil imports and 46% of coal imports from Russia.

Ending most energy purchases from Russia caused an energy price shock in the EU and a surge in consumer inflation, forcing the European Central Bank to sharply raise interest rates in a move that has curbed economic growth.

Lithium-ion batteries and fuel cells were not the only area of EU vulnerability.

A similar scenario could unfold in the digital-tech space. Forecasts suggest that the demand for digital devices such as sensors, drones, data servers, storage equipment and data transmission networks will rise sharply in this decade.

The EU has a relatively strong position in the latter, but it shows significant weaknesses in the other areas.

By 2030, this foreign dependency could seriously hinder the productivity gains that the European industry and service sector urgently require and could impede the modernization of agriculture systems essential to addressing climate change.

China Ignores the US & Deepens its Ties with Russia!

China Creates world’s most powerful RADAR Chip


Article HERE
Amid US tech sanctions, Chinese scientists say they made the world’s most powerful radar chip

New semiconductor performs at orders of magnitude higher than similar power-amplifying chips in most existing radar systems, says Chinese team

It uses gallium nitride despite export bans by the US government blocking high powered gallium-based semiconductors to China

A research team with a major Chinese defence company says it has built a radar chip with a record power output using semiconductor technology that is the subject of strict US sanctions.
The finger-sized chip can generate radar signals with peak power reaching 2.4 kilowatts. It is one or two orders of magnitude higher than the performance of similar power-amplifying chips in most existing radar systems.

This after China banns the export of Gallium to NATO countries.

INDY

Posted by: Dr. George W Oprisko | Sep 20 2023 20:28 utc | 29

Expats Share Their American Trauma After Living Abroad

Americans has PTSD.

Why is China a threat to the United States?

American foreign policy is based around “security”. But our notion of “security” does not distinguish between a possible threat and an actual threat. If it could possibly be a threat, then we treat it as if it’s threatening us right now. We dominate the North American continent; that’s not secure enough, so we establish military bases in Europe; that’s not secure enough, so more bases in Asia; that’s not secure enough, so take over space. In fifty years, we’ll probably be trying to colonize Mars to forestall the “threat” of somebody else getting to it first (that’s a little joke). To get an idea of how American foreign policy works, imagine a psychopathic Uncle Sam, staring at some small country with creepy twitching eyes, and saying, “You’re threatening me” while reaching for a knife.

There is a thing called nuclear primacy. Suppose that you can attack another country with nuclear weapons and destroy the whole country without the possibility of retaliation. The United States can do this to any nation on the planet, except for Russia. If Russia’s arsenal degrades to the point where it can no longer retaliate, then the United States has nuclear primacy, meaning the ability to destroy anyone without consequence. Total impunity.

There is another thing called full spectrum dominance, which is similar to nuclear primacy, except for every single dimension of warfare, not just nuclear weapons. Domination of land, air, sea, cyber warfare, everything. The United States has this over most other countries. There are a few exceptions, though. China is one. The stated intention of American military policy is to achieve full spectrum dominance over any possible opponent. Total control.

When Washington describes China as a threat, they mean that China may one day be a country that the United States can’t dominate completely with zero consequences. The chances of this are quite small and remote, but higher than zero. That makes China a “threat”, in the way that Washington uses the word. So we have to remove the “threat” by ham-stringing China, preferably by partitioning them.

Which brings me to my next point: divide-and-rule is a strategy as old as empire. Western countries excel at it. The idea is to take someone else’s country and break it apart into many smaller countries. We call this “partitioning”. Partitioning weakens your enemy by destroying their unity. But partition is a nasty, aggressive word, and Washington likes to frame all of its actions as just and defensive. So instead of partitioning, we say we’re “decolonizing” other countries. We don’t want to dominate Russia and China by partitioning them. No, see, they’re the evil imperialists, so we’re going to decolonize them, tee-hee! We’re the good guys!

This last requires a lot of propaganda to frame our enemies as “colonizers”. So we take lands that have been Chinese for centuries and claim that the Chinese are evil colonizers for having those lands. Of course, we’re also evil colonizers, but that’s okay because I started with a land acknowledgment. This is also why you hear Western intellectuals say things like, “China has never been truly unified” and “There is no continuous Chinese civilization”. This is manufacturing a justification for partitioning China a few decades down the line. Or perhaps sooner than that…

What I fear is that American hubris will suck us into a Thucydides trap. What if we decide that it’s intolerable for us not to control the world? What if we decide that World War Three is a better option? Because those are the only two options Washington sees as viable: total domination, or apocalypse.

Don’t get me wrong, by the way. I love my country. But the America I love is 4th of July parades, cookouts, and deer jerky. The America that glasses a small Middle Eastern country so some guy at Raytheon can get a new yacht — that America I don’t love.

Record Treasury Dump

If ASML cannot sell to China, how did they sell a huge order in September?

It’s very complicated

It seems the Dutch Government has forbidden ASML to sell EUVs to SMIC from 1/9/23

Yet orders placed until 23:59 on 31/8/23 can be shipped and fulfilled.

So technically ASML can ship orders to SMIC upto the time the last order placed on 31/8/23 is fulfilled

That’s for 21 EUV Machines & 1850 DUV Machines

In September, ASML has delivered 4 EUV Machines & 390 DUV Machines


Meanwhile there is another legal complication

SMIC has now introduced a Distributor company who can buy EUVs from ASML and simply sell them to SMIC for a 10% commission (10% is just an example)

Now the Dutch order said only SMIC was forbidden from receiving ASML EUVs so ASML has also accepted 8 more orders for EUVs from this distributor

Technically Dutch Govt cannot specifically forbid ASML from selling to China as a whole as that is a major WTO violation

So they can only blacklist importers

So China can keep bringing up new distributors and placing orders and ASML is happy because TSMC has cancelled 24 Machines recently and i am sure China offered full price for the machines


Ultimately MONEY TALKS

Once again the US is furious but again it’s all about the legalese now

SMIC is forbidden so an agency buys and sells to SMIC

The Dutch look the other way of course

ASML is delighted because they sell more machines


My guess is this new agency will be blacklisted soon and they will incorporate more laws to prevent such measures

Yet that gets China another 8 machines plus a further 24 machines which I bet China will place as they are already in process

This means SMIC technically can make 7 nm and 5 nm Chips in decent quantities at least till 2026/2027

By then they should crack some breakthrough

So China has gained TIME and the Dutch have put business ahead of stupidity

Just like NVDIA and Intel just sold products to China which were slightly off the specs in huge numbers

Economics is ultimately invincible

Reality

Beef Medallions with Cognac Sauce

Beef Medallions wCognac Sauce
Beef Medallions wCognac Sauce

Yield: 2 servings

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons (1/4 stick) unsalted butter
  • 1/4 cup chopped shallots
  • 1 teaspoon (packed) brown sugar
  • 1 cup canned low-salt chicken broth
  • 1/2 cup canned beef broth
  • 1/2 cup Cognac or brandy
  • 1/4 cup whipping cream
  • 2 (4 to 5 ounce) beef tenderloin steaks (each about 1 inch thick)
  • Fresh Chives

Instructions

  1. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in heavy medium saucepan over medium heat.
  2. Add shallots and sauté until tender, about 4 minutes.
  3. Add brown sugar; stir 1 minute.
  4. Add chicken broth, beef broth and Cognac. Simmer until sauce is reduced to 1/2 cup, about 20 minutes.
  5. Add cream. (Can be made 1 day ahead. Cover; chill.)
  6. Sprinkle steaks with salt and pepper.
  7. Melt 1 tablespoon butter in heavy medium skillet over medium-high heat.
  8. Add steaks; cook to desired doneness, about 4 minutes per side for rare.
  9. Transfer steaks to plates.
  10. Add sauce to skillet; bring to boil, scraping up any browned bits.
  11. Season to taste with salt and pepper.
  12. Slice steaks; fan slices on plates.
  13. Top with sauce and garnish with chives.

Notes

Serve Cabernet Sauvignon with the steaks.

The cost of living in Chiang Mai, Thailand 2023. Retire in Thailand affordably – live in Chiang Mai!

The rest of the world is a great IMPROVEMENT over that of the “good ol’ USA”.

What is the smallest thing a person ever did for you that impacted your life?

When my daughters were babies/toddlers, I/we used to have to walk to the supermarket and back to get our groceries for the week. Most of the time, this went alright. It was a bit of a juggling act and it always stressed me out on the way home, but it was also nice to get out with them without my then husband.

Anyhow, one day we’re really struggling to get home. My oldest didn’t want to walk and I couldn’t carry them both and the bags etc, so we’re doing everything the hardest way possible. The only way possible. Then a lady, a bit older than myself, stopped me and told me to ‘wait right there please”. I was completely confused, but thought maybe she was going to get her car or something? Who knew. I was exhausted, my kids were too, so we waited and I thought I was an idiot for waiting.

Then she came back, with a double stroller. Not some glamorous kind, nothing with all the bells and whistles and not brand new, but one that I could use as a buggy or as a stoller. I could put one of my kids in it and still have room behind them for bags, or put both kids in.. or neither kid and lay the front seat down. Anyways, it was perfect for us and I could’ve cried and kissed that lady. She kept saying she didn’t need it anymore and it wasn’t a big deal, but it was a huge deal for us. I offered to pay her or do something, but she wouldn’t hear of it. I’ll never forget her generosity or how much she helped us.

RUSSIAN SUPERMARKET TOUR! 🇷🇺 0,2$ BREAD and 0,2$ POTATO

Bitten by rattlesnake

When I was taking care of my mother in Pennsylvania (she had cancer, and was living alone) I was responsible for the house care taking. This was a “manor”; a massive old house on 11 acres of land.

I did a lot of work on the property; renovating buildings, fixing things, and what-not.

One day, I went about the property and painted fresh white paint on all the water taps that littered the yard.

As I was painting, I heard something that sounded like a shaking rattle and then suddenly there was a blur in front of my eyes, and then nothing.

Sigh.

I hopped back on the tractor and rode to the manor, parked it in the “carriage house” workshop and started to notice that my arm seemed to be sore. I felt a little dizzy and so turned in early.

The next way I woke up with “cotton mouth”, and my arm was all yellow and swollen up and puffy. It was one big lump of piss-colored balloon / eggplant / muscle. I looked in the mirror and I looked like shit.

When looking at my arm, I saw two tiny puncture holes. That to this day I still have.

And that is my story of what it is like getting bit by a rattlesnake.

Todays…

What happened to all of the soldiers who were sent to fight in Vietnam, but didn’t make it there?

One of my favorite Vietnam veteran stories the likes of which never get told. I had a buddy in college post army who was a “Vietnam Vet”. Why the quotation marks? He gets to Nam and settles in at repl. During the first formation an NCO asks if anybody there has experience as a bartender. Having grown up in his father’s bar in Rochester, NY he raises his hand. After checking him out to their satisfaction he packs his shit and is flown to Guam to run the officer’s club bar for the length of his tour. His total time in Nam was about 36 hours!!!

After watching the American playbook in Ukraine, it is so obvious to China what the US will do in the Asia-Pacific. How has China’s thinking changed with regards to Taiwan?

U.S., Japanese and South Korean fleets scurried away during military exercises last month. Do they want to repeat?

Why don’t they stay? It turns out that they were afraid that the PLA would take over their nest!

If it were an actual battle, Apra Naval Base and Andersen Air Force Base would have been reduced to ruins long ago. The United States Indo-Pacific Command is in danger.

image
image

Taiwan is Chinese territory, Taiwan is in China.

The Yankee fleet only dared to circle around, but did not dare to enter the area near Taiwan.

Transport ships, transport planes, the PLA lets them in, they can come in. If they are not allowed in, they can only fire with their mouths on the other side of the network.

Nice Picture

2023 09 26 16 54w
2023 09 26 16 54w

Herbed Steak

Herbed Steak is excellent served with hot buttered noodles with dill.

Herbed Steak 610x407 1
Herbed Steak 610×407 1

Ingredients

  • 1 pound round steak
  • 2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon seasoned salt
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 can condensed cream of mushroom soup
  • 3/4 cup water
  • 1 tablespoon herb seasoning

Instructions

  1. Cut steak into serving-size pieces.
  2. Combine flour and seasoned salt.
  3. Pound into steak. Brown meat on both sides in hot oil in heavy skillet.
  4. Add remaining ingredients. Cover; simmer 45 minutes, or bake at 350 degrees F for 1 hour.

The Sopranos – Tribute music video

Lonely Road – Everlast

“Today while at the gas station I overheard a lady in her late 20’s telling 2 other men to leave her alone

so I decided to walk over to them and I asked her ” how was the meeting today darlin? ” she looked at me and said ” it was good, I’ll tell you more about it when we get home in a few “. I replied with ” wonderful I’ll pick up your favorite for dinner”.

The two guys left in a hurry and she told me ” you have no idea how much that meant to me …. thank you.” I said “you’re very welcome ma’am …. you can never be too careful. “

I made sure the guys left before I walked back to my car and as I was walking back all I could do was think ” I hope a man does that for my future daughter one day”.”

~ Cody Bret

Confession of the Day

$300k in debt (no mortgage). $297,677.49 to be exact.

$215k law school debt, $40k graduate school debt, $25k credit cards, $11k car loan, and a personal loan.

After 5 years of deep denial- I think I’ve finally accepted how badly we fucked up. I feel like I’ve gone through the stages of grief multiple times this year.

We paid for very expensive degrees that didn’t need to be. We racked up a shit ton of credit card debt by spending money like entitled a**holes and not using a budget. I wish I could go back in time, slap 23 year old me (and my husband) and ask, repeatedly- what the hell are you doing??

We would go out to bars and dinners every weekend with friends. insert Discover card. We would regularly order takeout. insert Amex card. We went on yearly vacations. insert Jet Blue card. We financed furniture???? Not to mention we walked right into the “prestige” private school bullshit.

We ate that shit up. And for what? To impress people? To prove that we’re worth something? All the above? It’s so normalized to be in debt as a millennial.

Everyone had credit cards, everyone was going out, everyone had student loans. We were super normal! You’re only young once- amiright?!

I found Dave last year, when I was hitting rock bottom. My debit card was getting declined at the gas station and the grocery store regularly.

After listening to The Ramsey Show for a couple weeks, I realized how screwed we were. I remember the first time he talked about the borrower being a slave to the lender.

That’s exactly how I felt. I couldn’t breathe. I had a mental breakdown. I haven’t really been able to relax since. My husband and I spent all last year fighting about money and almost got divorced.

We’re on BS2 right now. We should bring in around $170k this year before side gigs. We have paid off $12k since June. We started FPU last week. We’re throwing everything at the debt. I’m working my ass off. Husband is working 65+ hrs a week and donating plasma.

We dropped more than half of our “friends.” It’s a humbling experience to say the least. My mother in law makes us dinners a couple days a week to help out.

Family and friends ask why we’re not having kids or buying a house yet. The whole situation is embarrassing, but we deserve it.

I don’t blame anyone but myself. I’m not expecting anyone to “forgive” or payoff our dumpster fire. We were extremely stupid and entitled, but we need to get out of this ourselves. I just need prayers that we can make it out of this. We will. Hopefully better than who we were before.

Just trying to “embrace the suck” and keep up the motivation.

Europe-US tech war breaks out! 17 European countries boycott the US!

https://youtu.be/78bH7wbM-kc

What was the most brutal military tactic in history?

I’m serious when I say this is actually one of the cruelest things you can do in a battle because it exploits human’s basic survival instinct.

Leave your enemy a way to escape.

Human beings aren’t so different from the many types of creatures that roam the planet, One of the universal traits shared by so many species is this. Fight or flight or freeze.

In a situation that presents danger, living creatures will perform one of these actions. Fight, meaning we leap into action and confrontation. Flight, meaning we try to remove ourselves from the danger. Freeze, where we are facing an unfamiliar situation and do nothing.

As the last several thousand years of recorded history has shown, humans have yet to grow beyond these basic instincts. It’s a part of who we are.

The brilliance comes in exploiting this mindset in a military situation. Consider a classic military tactic. Encirclement.

The idea of encirclement is simple. Use your forces to surround an enemy and isolate them. Cut off their means of supplying themselves with material and reinforcement. Strangle them as you make sure that you don’t run low on supplies. It’s classic thinking for military warfare, especially in regards to sieges.

But I want you to think of that in terms of what I just told you. “Fight, flight or freeze”.

If you take away an enemy’s ability to retreat, you are actually giving them a subtle advantage.

This might be hard to understand for people who don’t expect to face life or death situations. Facing a scenario where you have a high chance of dying without chance of survival is less stressful than a situation where you might survive. Why is this? Because it’s less complicated.

if you make your enemy think they can’t escape, you remove the “flight” option. And you have increased the chances of them choosing “Fight”.

I’ll use a real world example to explain this better. Pirates.

Now back in the days when piracy was men in giant wooden ships sailing through the Caribbean, there were several unspoken rules of piracy. One of the most important of which was FLAGS. A lot of successful pirates had their own heraldry, much like Noble Houses of Europe.

Pirates would hide their flags from plain sight. They would only unfurl their banners when stalking targeted ships. They would suddenly spring the flag from cover, displaying to their prey their intent to rob and plunder.

Now if you were some poor merchant ship who was suddenly ambushed on the high seas, your greatest fear was seeing THIS flag.

If you saw a RED Pirate flag unfurled that meant you were in serious trouble. Pirates who used red flags intended no mercy for their prey and were going to kill and do unspeakable things to whomever they captured, even if they surrendered and begged for their lives. Red flag pirates were torturous, murdering bastards who would probably laugh as they set you on fire or tossed you into the sea with weights tied to your ankles.

What you wanted to see was a white pirate flag.

Pirate flags that had white (or lacked red generally) were from pirate crews who were more reasonable. Generally if you surrendered to these pirates (either immediately or after a short battle), the worse they would do is steal your valuables, most of your food and maybe abduct some of your crew. After that they’d let you go peacefully. They would usually kill you only if you fought to try to stop them. If you happened to be belligerent and refused to give them your supplies, they would probably torture you or threaten to torture you.

Defeating your opponent isn’t just skill at arms. There’s a mental component to combat and sometimes you can defeat an opponent before you even cross swords.

If you are a pirate with a red flag, here is what your opponent is going to be thinking.

“Okay that pirate ship is coming for me. If I surrender or do nothing, they are definitely going to kill me. If I fight back, they MIGHT kill me. But if I fight back, maybe I’ll kill them before they kill me. I might even be able to win and go home. I think I’m going to fight back.”

If you are a pirate with a non-red flag, here is what your opponent will be thinking.

“Okay that pirate ship is coming for me. If I surrender or do nothing they are probably going to let me go free if I let them steal everything. If I fight back I might be able to win. If I fight back though, I could lose, be captured and then tortured to death in front of friends. Combat is unpredictable, I could be killed fighting before the battle is over. If I die I won’t be able to go home, get a drink, make love to a woman and live a peaceful life. I think I’ll take my chances with surrendering.”

Contrary to what you may think, it is a poor sign of a warrior to seek battle over capitulation. Fighting is unpredictable. On the high seas, pirates defined success by captured treasures, not the number of people they killed. Sailors knew this. This is why when pirate offered fair terms their enemies surrendered almost immediately.

If you back a man into a corner, he will fight to survive. If you back a man into a corner and give him a way to escape unharmed, there’s a good chance that man will take the escape route.

This is why professional armies don’t massacre their prisoners. It’s why armies take prisoners in the first place. If you have an enemy surrounded, that enemy faces a choice. Fight and likely die or surrender and likely live. It’s much harder to have a man fight knowing he can surrender than fight until he stops breathing.

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Facing death when it’s the only option is easy. Facing death when you want to survive is hard.

Now here comes the brutal part.

As your enemy runs through that corridor of escape you strike HARD. Your enemy thinks they are safe. That they still have a clear path to run away. Then you attack them at their most unsuspecting. Take advantage of their weakness.

This is a tactic that is used in battles of annihilation. Where the objective is to annihilate enemy spirit, not just manpower. There are countless examples of this used in history. But there is one example that chills my very soul when I think back on it.

Napoleon’s Folly

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image 1

It was the year 1812. Napoleon had just realized he couldn’t conquer Russia. Napoleon’s campaign to dominate the largest European kingdom had ground to a halt. He could win on the battlefield, but an extended conflict would ultimately accomplish nothing. The Russians refused to surrender, even when their own capital had been seized and the Tsar had fled. Facing an impossible situation, Napoleon ordered a withdrawal.

Now the Russians could have counterattacked, encircled Napoleon and tried to capture him with their superior numbers and knowledge of the land. What they did was worse. They let the French walk back the way they came.

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The French army marched back through lands they had already conquered. These areas had been picked clean of food. In their places was less than nothing. Napoleon’s grand army, the largest on Earth at that time, was cut off from supplies. This was literally as the Russian winter was beginning.

But they could still escape. The Russians were only behind them. So they started walking back.

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Yellow line represents French invasion into Russia. Black line indicates retreat. The thickness of the line represents amount of men.

All the while, the Russians bled them with raids. Mounted horsemen, Irregular militias. Pin prick attacks from a thousand directions. But never a concentrated military attack. The Russians kept bleeding the French. Bit by bit by bit.

The French couldn’t turn around and retaliate. The invasion had failed and now all they wanted to do was go home. They thought they would be safe if they just kept walking west. And they kept getting more and more hungry. The weather became worse and worse.

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This is when the Grand Army began to break down. Deserters abandoned the army in droves. Their equipment was insufficient for fighting in winter and broke down in unrelenting cold. And the Russians kept circling their flanks. Never surrounding them. Never stopping them from retreating.

So the French kept walking west. There was still a chance they probably thought. If they endured a few more days, a few more hundred miles, they could make it. They kept weakening themselves. Structure and order were undone as desperation infected the French ranks. They lost whatever advantage they may have had fighting the Russians directly and weakness began to suffocate them. Hunger, disease and deprivation on a massive scale.

The retreat from Russia lasted from October to December of 1812. By the time the Grand Army had entered friendly territory, they had been reduced to barely 20,000 emaciated survivors.

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And that’s how you destroy an army of 700,000 men. You give them hope of escape.

The Nurse

“Today I woke up feeling like I had a hangover. I’m starting my 4 day break from the ICU, after working 6 of the last 8 days. I drug myself down the stairs and starting cleaning house as I normally do on my days off. I glanced at myself in the mirror at the bottom of my stair case. Horror. My face blatantly shows the pure exhaustion that I feel, and my hair looks a complete mess. “Thank god I’m off work today and my patients won’t have to see this worn out version of myself” is my first thought.

People who aren’t nurses always tell me, “You only work three days a week? Wow! That must be great. I wish I had your schedule!”..Only three days a week? ONLY!? I wake up at 4:30AM, shake off my fatigue, drive an hour to work, and then begin my scheduled 12 hour shift. 12 often turns into 13 hours or even more depending on the patient load and if I were able to keep up with my charting. When I’m done and finally clock out, I drive home arriving around 8PM, where I strip out of my scrubs and collapse onto the couch where I snuggle my cats and tell my husband about my day until I pass out from exhaustion. I slip upstairs to bed, to the disbelief of my husband that I could possibly be so tired, and I set my alarm and prepare for my next shift.

ONLY 36 hours a week. But does anyone who’s not a nurse know what those 36 hours consist of? Juggling all my nursing tasks for each individual patient while also trying to communicate with the doctors, pharmacists, respiratory therapists, PT, OT, social work, our aides, the patients themselves, and their families?! Yes, that’s right, I communicate with all of these people on a daily basis. I am personal coordinator for my patients. I am their voice, their advocate. I must be aware of my patients needs at all times. Room 101 is going up stairs to cath lab at 0900. 102 wants their pain medicine at 0915. 103 needs to be turned at 0930. Got it. My mental check list is a never ending dynamic that I must prioritize and rearrange constantly.

My job is scary. Always thinking, always analyzing, ALWAYS aware of my actions. I could cause a patient to lose their life if I am not critically thinking about everything that I do and every medication that I give. Is this dosage appropriate, does this patient need this medication? It is all my responsibility to keep the patient safe.

Even when I am doing everything that I can it isn’t always enough. I’ve had family members displeased that I took a little longer to answer a call light. I’m sorry that I couldn’t get you a coke right away, I was busy titrating a lifesaving medication in the room right next to yours. I have been asked by a family member if I were qualified to even be a nurse, surely I was too young for that. I have been told that I am too weak to help lift a patient when in reality I can lift more weight that I weigh. Nursing is hard. I take all these comments and offer a kind response to remain professional even though it can make me feel really small at times. Not feeling appreciated is hard when all I am trying to do is help.

I have been there when a patient said their lasts words before being intubated and never being able to come off of the vent. I have been there as a patient has taken their last breaths on the earth. I have been there when a patient has decided that their body can no longer fight, and they would like to receive comfort care. I have provided comfort care as family members are silent, with tears streaming down their faces, as I turn the lifeless body of their once resilient family member. I have been there when a doctor has told a healthy, active patient in front of their spouse that they have stage 4 cancer, and will not survive. I have stood and held my tears to remain strong for family members who have had their hearts shattered by the news that their loved ones will not be coming home again. I have sobbed on my way home from work because my heart is shattered too. I am so sorry that you have to go through these things. I am so sorry that your loved one has cancer. I am so sorry that myself and the doctors couldn’t get your loved one to wake back up after being sedated on the ventilator. Nursing is hard. I am human. I care about my patients. How could I not? My heart breaks along with my patients and their family members. Then I go home and try to pretend that I have not been broken during my shift. I don’t want to burden my husband with my sadness, and I need to pull it together so I can go back to work in the morning and do it again.

So how do I do it? How do all nurses do it? How do we manage ONLY 36 hours a week? Because nursing is beautiful. I have been there as a scared patient on a ventilator has woken up so I held her hand and told her that everything would be okay. She could not speak as she had a lifesaving breathing tube down her throat. Somehow she managed to grasp a pen with her weak hands and wrote “I love you guys.” My heart exploded with joy. I have provided comfort to someone when they were far from comfortable. I have been there when a patient has come off of a ventilator after being on it for a week, and watched as they cried and said they were so happy to be alive. I helped bring that person relief. I have bought lip gloss for an elderly patient whose son forgot to bring in her lipstick. The smile on her done up face was priceless as she put on the lip gloss to complete her look. I have made a patient genuinely happy even though she is sick and in the critical care unit. I have been there providing comfort care to a dying loved one and family members have hugged me and thanked me for being the angel that their family member needs. Nursing is beautiful. Life is beautiful. I watch lives change, I watched lives end, and I watch lives get a second chance because of the care and medicine that I have provided.

Nursing is hard. Nursing is stressful. Nursing is exhausting. It drains me both physically and mentally. I come home tired, sweaty, and defeated. Not all days are good days. Nursing is not all sunshine and rainbows. But nursing is my life. I dedicate my life to saving the lives of others. Those break through moments when a patient miraculously recovers, when a patient holds your hand and tells you how thankful that they are for you, and the moments when myself and a patient can share in a good laugh. The feeling of pride I feel when my patient came in on a ventilator but walks out at discharge, makes it all worth it. All the wonderful, precious moments are why I love nursing. The great moments are what get myself and my coworkers through the long, difficult 12 hour shifts. Thank god for fantastic coworkers. My coworkers are like my family. I know that they understand the mental turmoil that I go through after a hard day. Only nurses understand truly what nurses go through.

So the next time that you want to tell a nurse that it must be great to work ONLY 36 hours a week, please be mindful of what those 36 hours are like. Give a nurse a hug today, and be thankful that we continue to do what we do, and don’t judge us when we drink a little extra wine. If it were easy, everyone would do it.

Sincerely,

the exhausted,

but still smiling ICU nurse.”

“Men Deserve To Be Lonely!” Responding To Backlash Over ‘The Male Loneliness Epidemic’

Shoe, I don’t think you’ll ever know how much these videos mean, but thank you. It’s absolutely heart-warming to realise that not everyone in this world is crazy and I don’t have to feel so isolated, that not everything has to be a war, that I could go outside and not be scared to socialise based on things of which I have no control. Thank you.”

Confession of the Day

We got married almost 3 years ago. She started having an affair with her coworker 1 year ago. I got to know that because I saw his car outside my house one day. I had my suspicions. I hired a PI and gathered evidence that she was having an affair with him. I was angry.

Then I got a call from the coworker’s wife that she came to know about the affair. She only had texts they used to send but I have all the receipts of their hangouts. Together we decided to confront them. We used to meet up a lot. She told me she had suspected his affair since her pregnancy. They have 3 children together. One day we had an idea that we should sleep with each other as revenge.

We did and not going to lie it felt good. We have been meeting and having sex for a while. She is an amazing woman. I would say she is better at some things in bed than my wife. Mostly, I am very angry towards my wife. Because in some of her texts with her affair partner she and AP made fun of AP’s wife. Saying things like she has gained weight, her vagina was destroyed and other disgusting stuff. I cannot believe that she would say something like this while being a woman. She even made fun of my fertility issues saying that I am not a man because the chances of me having kids is very low.

I do not feel bad about my affair. I like the sex life I had with AP’s wife way more than my wife. She hardly ever gives me oral but expects me to give her one. At least AP’s wife was more enthusiastic about it and it was the best oral I ever had. AP’s wife wants to tell his husband.

I guess we are both tired about carrying out the revenge affair. We both got carried away. We were both so driven by the revenge that we got addicted to it.

I will confront my wife soon. I already have the divorce papers ready. Since we do not have a joint account or marital assets it will be easy for us.

AP’s wife might have some problems because they have kids but she has the power to take him to cleaners. I know I sound like an awful person. But I am already checked out of my marriage.

What are some common misconceptions about happiness?

Last weekend, my boyfriend asked me to make some creme brulee, so I did. After dinner, I served the dessert.

My boyfriend then pulled out from his pocket a small spoon with an owl on it and handed it to me. I love owls very much (I have a lot of owl things around the house). He told me this is the designated spoon for creme brulee – just for me.

I was happy. And he, after finishing the creme brulee, also was happy.


I find that a lot of people, myself a few years ago included, tend to think and look for big things to be happy in life, like a big house, a fancy car, a steady career,… But then, I learned that, it doesn’t take much for you to be happy.

Life is a difficult journey, lots of things we have to deal with every day. But if you try to collect small and small pieces of happiness along the way, you will be much happier.

Couple finds cats in new home. Guess how they responded.

What did you do when you saw someone stealing while on the job?

I laughed and laughed. He was a maintenance guy at Nabisco back when Nabisco had a Houston facility and he decides to steal a big bench grinder. It maybe weighed a hundred pounds and would have cost around eighty or ninety dollars. Anyway, he couldn’t get it past the guard house so he decided to back his truck up to the building and drop the bench grinder into the bed of the truck from the top of the second floor roof, that would be about a thirty foot fall. Now just doing this in my head and playing fast and loose with the numbers I’m figuring that the bench grinder is going to exert somewhere around ten thousand pounds of impact force when it meets the bed of that truck, and I stood back and smiled.

The grinder hit just in front of the third member and went through the bed of that truck like a cannon shot. It was fabulous!

Man Dies Car Accident; Learned The Truth About The Matrix (NDE)

What screams “I’m educated, but not very bright”?

While living in Atlanta, I met a guy who told me he wanted to move to New Zealand. I was a little surprised. At the time, it wasn’t a country you heard Americans talk about often, at least not in Georgia.

He was a culinary arts graduate though, and in my country (Jamaica) they tend to be pretty cultured people. Partially because of the classes but also because it attracts a lot of upper-middle class students (not sure why!). So I figured this guy likely just knew something I didn’t.

“Why do you want to move to New Zealand?” I asked.

“Because they speak English!” he answered. “I don’t want to have to learn another language.”

I puzzled over this in silence for a moment and then I asked. “Ok, but that’s an interesting choice just for English. I mean, why not Britain?”

“Well, I don’t know what language the British speak,” he responded.

I thought he was joking so I burst out laughing, but I soon realized he wasn’t joining in. “Wait….are you serious??”

“Yes, it’s not like I’ve ever googled that or anything.”

“England is part of Britain…” I hinted, still wondering if maybe he was just toying with me.

Nope. He started to get angry. “I don’t know what language they speak either.”

I was flabbergasted. “DUDE…what language do you think THE ENGLISH speak??”

“I just told you I don’t know,” he started to say, until it dawned on him. He stared at me in awkward silence for a moment and then he got up and left, lol.

He never spoke to me again. 😂

I don’t remember his name or even how we met, but every so often, I think about him and wonder if he’s gotten any smarter with time.

Can you tell me about a time that you sued someone in civil court and won?

While living in a housing community, one morning I returned to where I left my car the previous night, it was gone. Wondering why someone would steal such a crappy car, I called the local police. I wanted a police officer to come out and take a report. Instead, the officer asked me over the phone where the car was removed(address), and license plate number. While we were talking on the phone, other community tenants were wandering the parking lot looking for their car too. The officer informs me that my car was at a local low yard and had been impounded with twelve other cars. It seems the community had issued new parking permits yet failed to notify ALL the tenants.

With a ride from a friend, off I go to the impound lot. When I arrive, I’m welcome by many young retired gang bangers covered with jail and prison colored tattoos. They hold my car hostage, demanding over two hundred dollars I didn’t have to lose. After I pay the ransom, I lean over the counter getting as close to the cashiers face as I can. I tell him I will be suing their company, and it will cost them far more than I’m paying. He responded, laughing, “I hear that threat a dozen times a day”. I respond, “get a good look at my face so you’ll remember me later as the one person who actually did sue you!”

Due to rampant predatory towing, in 2004, California signed into law a detailed code and section listing nearly 12 specific criteria that a towing company must preform prior to impounding a car. No towing companies ever satisfy these requirement. That same law listing the requirement also lists the penalties for towing company and possibly security staff non-compliance. I’m my case, it was four times the extortionist tow charge that they charged.

Off to court I go, filed and waited several months for scheduled court date. When our court date arrives, the company didn’t bother to appear. I was awarded everything I asked for, plus interest.

Off again I go to the tow yard with copy of court order demanding payment, they told me to “pound sand!” The next day the towing company attempted to appeal the order not knowing that you cannot appeal an order issued on a case in which you failed to appear.

Now the fun starts. Off to the Sheriffs Department with my court order to request a till tap levy. Due to the sheer volume of deadbeats in Orange County, this task takes another nine months to arrive. After nearly a year since my car was stolen and held for ransom, the Sheriffs department forcibly collected over a thousand dollars in restitution, penalty, and interest, from a very angry business owner. When it was all over and I’d received my money, I went back to the towing yard and thanked them for stealing my car.

How do I deal with a neighbor who insists on telling his kids to play in my yard? They’re always climbing my tree and messing up my yard while his yard is immaculate. What should I do or say?

I am Answering the question. I am not the one who asked it. I said how I handled it. To the one who asked it.

I am single. No girlfriend or wife to keep me company. I bought a house in a really nice neighborhood. After settling in one weekend I decided to go for a swim in my pool. Lo and behold, there were kids already in there. I thought, am I in the wrong house? I pinched myself. Nope I am in my home. So I sat outside to watch the kids to make sure they stay safe while swimming. After a couple hours they got out and left, saying hi as they left. Just as they were leaving. I told the kids that I really do not want anyone in my pool except me or my family, because of liability issues. Plus I am afraid the kids will urinate in the pool. (I did not tell them that.) So I told them my pool is off limits. They looked at me as if to say “Whatever “. Then they left.

It was OK for a couple days. Then one Saturday I heard the sound of someone in my pool. So outside I sit and watch the neighborhood kids. Like I said before I am single. With no companion. I had always wanted a dog. I thought not only would I have a life companion, I would also have a way to guard my home. So one day I brought my friend home. I installed a dog door and got him a huge comfy dog bed. Now since my dog has access to the back yard I posted warning signs by the gate to state “Guard dog on premises. Do not enter.” Did not think too much about it. Now since I got a friend I wanted to be active with him. We go on walks, go to the park to let him stretch his legs and run, as well as mine.

One morning I heard the doorbell and the dog barking to let me know someone is at the door. So I got up and went to the door. There were kids with towels standing at my door. I asked what they wanted. They told me they are afraid of my dog, and could I put him up so they could swim. I told them “I am sorry, but you are going to have to find another place to play.” I also told them every once in a while it would be OK, but only if they asked first and one of their parents was there to supervise them.” I never heard from them again. I am not saying you should do this, but that is how I solved my issue. Also I am glad I got a dog. He is my best friend and goes with me pretty much everywhere. Where you see me, you see Kronos.

9 SHOCKING Retirement Statistics…We’re In Trouble

What scares you most in life?

It started so innocently. I asked my son to get me something out of the refrigerator. I forgot the word “refrigerator”. I pointed to it and said get me something out of “that.”

I opened the mail once and I received a ticket for running a red light. A camera saw it and I could view what it saw. It was early in the morning and I never tried to stop when the light was red. I could have killed someone. No cars were coming. I don’t remember even being there. Twice I have pulled out of a parking lot and for some reason, I touched the gas pedal hard instead of the brake. I have taken two driving tests by the VA. I passed. I have to focus on every aspect of driving. My driving days are numbered.

My doctor has given me two tests for dementia. Part of a test involves her giving me five words like “apple” to remember. Minutes later, when I am asked to repeat the words, I remember maybe two. I’ve seen a specialist for a four hour session. Drawing a clock, etc. are part of the test.

I have minor to mild dementia. It’s hard to scare me but dementia sure does.

I write and forget grammar rules I’ve known for years.

Any disease is a label, it doesn’t define me. I get to choose what defines me. I was diagnosed with dementia three years ago and I’m fighting it like hell.

Never take for granted looking in a mirror and knowing who you are. Someday I fear I will have no clue who the hell the person is that’s looking back at me.

I plan to fight dementia as hard as I can. I hope it will be years before I slip into total darkness.

The Rise and Fall of the American Mall

What bad experience had you saying “I will never buy from that company or use their service ever again”?

U-Haul

(What I believe should happen to the company)

My wife was moving from Virginia to Ohio, had a U-Haul reservation, and showed up on Saturday morning to pick up her truck. There was no truck, they had rented it out to somebody else, who showed up earlier that Saturday without a reservation. When asked about why they had done that, they blamed us for not being there earlier, on an 8–12 pick up window, when we showed up at 9:00.

Within an hour, we had a Ryder truck. However, later that afternoon, when we were nearly done packing up her stuff, U-Haul called to say they had her truck ready. We said “no” in very definitive terms. Sure enough, two weeks later, when my wife got her credit card statement, U-Haul had charged her for the rental in spite of not having the truck. The customer service representative at U-Haul was inflexible on the charge, stating that they had a truck for her, and it was her fault that she didn’t pick it up.

Never again, they suck. If you rent with them, it will happen to you.

China proposes a new domestic EUV lithography machine plan: “super large lithography factory”!

Wow, China is very innovative by proposing to build EUV lithography as an infrastructure project to get the advantage of large scale production.

This is a great idea as chips will always be needed in the future and it’s applications will be in every product.

By consolidating all the chips manufacturers together one can reduce the price of chips significantly.

No other country will be able to compete as it will be integrated in the infrastructure project. China will be self sufficient all the way through the 21st century.

If your car is stolen, and then you just so happen to stumble across it parked in the street, are you legally allowed to steal it back then and there without calling the police or anything in the USA?

My friend had something like this happen, the rented garage where he worked on his race car was broken into and burgled. They didn’t take the car but took a set of wire wheels with Dunlop Race Tires (a special order option for wet conditions) on them, along with all his tools, etc. He filed a police report.

Well, a week later my friend is downtown and sees an MG B parked at the curb, with his tires and wheels on it. He knew they were his because he had marked them with chalk showing which locations on the car they were on.

He went to a payphone on the same block called the police, and went back to stand by the car.

A cop showed up within a few minutes. He explained to the police officer, and. They waited a while, but the owner didn’t come back.

The police took all the information off the car and called a tow truck.

They eventually tracked down the owner of the car, who was related to the people who rented him the garage. They searched his garage and found all my friend’s tools and other things that were stolen.

The guy was arrested, tried and sent to jail.

What’s the coolest death in history?

I’d vote it would be Ben L. Salomon who was an army Dentist during WWII. In June 1944 he volunteered to replace a wounded surgeon due to there not being much need for a dentist during combat when all hell broke lose.

The Japanese General Saito, after taking massive casualties and being pushed back so far, ordered his remaining 3000-5000 to advance to attack the American forces and die with honor. Outside the medical tent Captain Salomon saw a Japanese soldier bayonet some of the wounded soldiers. He grabbed a nearby rifle and killed the Japanese soldier and went back to tending the wounded inside the medical tent. At that point the defensive line collapsed, unbeknown to Salomon, and two more Japanese soldiers ran into the tent. Salomon clubbed both of them with the rifle, then shot one and bayoneted the other. Four more Japanese solder started crawling under tent. He shot one, bayoneted another one, knifed the third, and head-butted the fourth, allowing one of the wounded soldiers to shoot him. Realizing the dire situation, he ordered the medics to evacuate the wounded. Meanwhile he stayed to provide cover for the soldiers evacuating.

When the military retook the area 15 hours later they found Captain Salomon’s body slumped over a machine gun with 76 wounds from being shot and bayoneted (autopsy revealed 24 of them were inflicted before death), and the bodies of 98 Japanese soldiers piled in front of his position. Based on the blood trail of the wounded Captain, Salomon relocated the machine gun 4 times to maintain a clear field of fire due to the build up of piles of bodies.

Ben L. Salomon is pretty much the embodiment of “Going Out in a Blaze of Glory”

The Feline Couple Came to the Family’s Doorstep Every Day

Nice story.

My wife is a parasite and I feel stuck

My wife (37f) and I (38m) and I have been married for 11 years, together for a few years before that, and have known each-other for over 20 years. We met online when she was 16 and still in high school, and I was 17 and just starting college. For the sake of this rant we’ll call her Connie.

Connie and I lived several states away and, at first, there was some attraction on her part – but I just wanted to stay friends. Over several years we grew closer and decided to have a long distance relationship. I was always awkward with girls in high school and it continued into adulthood. With Connie things just felt natural. After a couple years, when we were talking about meeting in person, she destroyed me. She let me know that she had been having multiple other online relationships and one of these men came to meet her and she wanted to be with him.

Looking back, the smart thing to do would have been to end the story there. Nearly a year later she reached out to me, saying she was sorry and that she missed our friendship. I decided to give friendship another chance and, for a while, it worked. She had a couple other relationships. We’d talk and text regularly. But, over time, the old feelings came back. I admitted them to her and she said she felt the same.

We decided to give things another shot. Eventually she came to visit me and then we would alternate visits. We talked about her coming to live with me, and she did. She worked for a national chain store, so the plan was for her to simply transfer locations. She didn’t do that. Instead she quit. After a couple attempts at finding work, she asked if she could stay at home and take care of the house. Cook, clean, etc. I agreed, since we didn’t really have many expenses. She also refused to get her own bank account, instead using mine and calling everything ‘our’ money. Looking back, the red flags are so blatantly obvious – but I was young and in love.

She never cleaned and rarely cooked.

Instead we ordered out most of the time, wasting any money I had saved. We got several pets, at her insistence. She begged me for over a year to get her pregnant because she wanted a baby. I said I wanted to get married first, which is what ended up happening. When my daughter was an infant we bought a house in order to have more space. She also wanted to be nearer to one of her world of warcraft friends, who we’ll call Aaron.

It was because of Aaron I learned of her fixating behavior.

She will find a male friend online, become ‘besties’ with them, and then eventually find someone else. After Aaron it was Roy. Roy lived further away, but was in a bad relationship with his own wife (ironic) and suicidal. Connie begged me to let him come stay with us until he could get on his feet, admitting she’d already invited him. Defeated, I agreed since I didn’t want to make someone homeless.

He lived with us for a year before he was able to get a job. He is still living with us nearly 9 years later. And to be quite honest it’s because of him I haven’t gone completely insane yet. Connie still barely does any housework. Roy is the one who does the dishes, laundry, and yardwork. All of it.

He does not pay rent, but Connie has access to his bank account and regularly spends his money to the point of overdraft. In the interim years I’ve mostly separated my money from her. There is a bank account she does not have access to, with some savings and from which I pay our bills. If I didn’t do this, she would spend me to overdraft as well. Some of my paycheck goes into a shared account for her, which she regularly overdrafts. After Roy lived here for a while she found another man to be friends with and the cycle continued.

We have two children now, and she barely spends any time with them. Preferring instead to smoke weed (it’s legal here) and play video games for the entirety of the day. Sometimes she cooks, sometimes she’ll even straighten up a bit. However she has filled my house to the brim with clutter. Every room has boxes and boxes of useless shit. Some of it untouched.

I knew she had mental health issues when we were dating, but they have gotten worse and, with the use of tik-tok, she has weaponized them against me. Every time I criticize her for ordering stuff we don’t need (such as groceries that we already have, or junk we will never use) she defends herself by saying she has ADHD and it’s a symptom. She probably does have it, but she’s undiagnosed. She won’t go to a psychiatrist for it. Her medical doctor prescribed her antidepressants, which have helped, but not with everything. The thing is, I have plenty of friends with ADHD. They view it as a part of them which needs to be addressed and worked around/through. She sees it as an excuse to do whatever she wants without consequences.

Recently we went on vacation and she asked if her her latest friend, who is recently divorced and looking for jobs in our area, could stay at our house while we were away (though Roy would be there). I agreed, since it felt bad to make him spend several thousand dollars a week on a hotel room. He’s still here, and it’s been weeks. He’s done some Zoom interviews and occasionally does door dash to make extra cash, but he’s still here. We’ll call him Joe.

Connie and I have hit a breaking point and are talking about divorce. After a long conversation she’s admitted she sees nothing wrong with her behavior, and finds it aggravating that I try to ‘fix’ her. I realized then that there is nothing for me in this relationship anymore. She’s also admitted to having feelings for Joe, and he is in love with her.

The problem now is money. We have 60k left on our house and just bought a new car. She wants to keep the house and the car when we split. I’m fine with this because I would rather live somewhere that isn’t full of her garbage and I don’t drive. But she can’t pay for them, and no bank in their right mind would give her a loan to buy me out. Even if they did, she couldn’t pay it on her own (either Roy or Joe or both would be paying for it).

I want to be done with this relationship so badly, but I feel like I’m trapped here. My kids love their school and I don’t want to make them move. I’m more than happy to get my name off of the house and the car, get some money from the equity, and start over. It would be great to take my kids each weekend and actually DO things with them. But I don’t see a path to get there. I feel trapped in my own house, which is becoming increasingly full of my wife’s pets (both human and otherwise) and all of her garbage.

Even though I want out, I still love Connie (in a way) and don’t want to hurt or destroy her – even though it’s probably better than what she deserves. She first broached the topic of divorce, but now she gets sad regularly thinking about it – and is confused at why I am so often upset with her. All of the stress of having her, and Roy, and Joe, and two young children is eating away at me. And I feel ashamed of the divorce. Ashamed that I couldn’t fix her. Ashamed that I couldn’t put my foot down and say no. Ashamed that there are multiple people living in MY house that I don’t want here. I haven’t told my extended family or friends yet, though I am going out with a friend tomorrow and plan to tell him. And we haven’t told the kids either. It’s all eating me up inside, but just typing this out has helped. I hope it wasn’t too bad of a read. And I hope I can get through this situation sooner rather than later.

(Reddit)

I asked DIGITAL NOMADS how they MAKE MONEY in Bali

Nice Picture

2023 09 26 16 5f3
2023 09 26 16 5f3

The How And Why Of Heroin Addiction

Let me explain it to you, I’ve been an opiate addict for a long time and tried many drugs.

Drugs that are ‘uppers’ have the most ‘obvious’ euphoria.

For example if you take adderall/coke/meth/speed/MDMA you will get this shining bright euphoria, self confidence, energy, and other drug-specific feelings (for meth like you are king or for MDMA like you love everyone).

However, you owe these drugs back what they delivered to you.

After a meth binge, or lots of MDMA use, or staying up all night on coke you will feel like shit.

To an extent this aspect is similar to an alcoholic hangover.

On the other hand, for many people who experiment with heroin they are underwhelmed (not including IV usage, but most experimenters rarely ever IV first time).

They just feel good, chill, happy, but they feel like this spooky drug ‘heroin’ hasn’t delivered. They are just mellow.

Oh obviously it has all been a lie they will think.

Heroin isn’t spooky, it’s chill.

It’s not addictive like everyone else thinks. It doesn’t make you do stupid shit or stay up all day and hallucinate like amphetamines or coke. It doesn’t empty your serotonin like MDMA or give you a hangover like alcohol.

People tend to just think oh, what a nice drug.

So the next day they wake up and everything is normal. No headache or shitty feeling–just a slight afterglow of that nice feeling. Oh it was cheap as well! It only cost $10 for a whole night of being high! I thought people said heroin was expensive?

And then next weekend comes… There are all these drugs I could do but I liked heroin. It didn’t ‘fuck me up,’ I could still think clearly. No hangover. No feeling like shit later. I still was awake. It just made me happy and content with life. Oh and it’s only $10! Well, I should get some more for the whole weekend.

This is great!

I will use Heroin on the weekends now!

Now let’s say this person works and has responsibilities. He knows he can’t go into work drunk, or on MDMA, or high. So he doesn’t. It’s actually simple.

But heroin… Well the user might actually find they do better work on heroin.

Instead of being sad or grumpy or depressed with his job… he is just… happy. Mellow. Content. Everything is fine and the world is beautiful.

It’s raining, it’s dark, I woke up at 5:30AM, I’m commuting in traffic. I would have had a headache, I would have been miserable, I would have wondered how my life took me to this point.

This point I’m at right now. But no, no, everything is fine. Life is beautiful. The rain drops are just falling and in each one I see the reflection of every persons life around me. Humanity is beautiful. In this still frame shot of traffic on this crowded bus I just found love and peace. Heroin is a wonder drug. Heroin is better than everything else. Heroin makes me who I wish I was. Heroin makes life worth living. Heroin is better than everything else. Heroin builds up a tolerance fast. Heroin starts to cost more money. I need heroin to feel normal. I don’t love anymore. Now I’m sick. I can’t afford the heroin that I need. How did $10 used to get me high? Now I need $100. That guy that let me try a few lines the first time doesn’t actually deal. Oh I need to find a real dealer? This guy is a felon and carries a gun–he can sell me the drug that lets me find love in the world. No this isn’t working, I need to quit.

To answer your question, heroin feels nice.

That’s all, it just feels very nice. Y

ou can make the rest up for yourself. Attach your own half-truths to this drug that will show you the world and for a moment you will feel as clever as Faust.

Redfin Reports San Francisco Is About To Collapse

I’m happy that we sold our house there a few years ago. I didn’t want to risk that for an AirBnB rental.”

Boxloads of New COVID-19″ Death Darts Arrive at US Military Bases Marked “2023-2024”

World Hal Turner

Box loads of Pfizer’s latest COVID-19 Death Dart, marked with its brand name COMINARTY” are arriving at US Military Bases.  The boxes are labelled “2023-2024.”  They’re planning another COVID outbreak to steal the Presidential Election (again) next year.

This has got to be one very smart virus; it seems to KNOW that it can only come out when a Presidential Election is coming, so they can demand mail-in paper ballots, and steal the election again; just like they did in 2020.

Except we’re not falling for this again.  DO NOT COMPLY. 

No more of their death dart, phony, “vaccines. No more masks. No more social distancing, and for damn sure, no more “lockdowns.”

That whole thing was total bullshit for a virus that is no worse than a nasty Flu.

They scammed us in 2020, don’t fall for it again.

This Is What Happens When Men Stop Simping…

Big, big, big changes in the West.

What is the saddest thing you have heard a child say?

Don’t cry, ma. I know, and I am ready…”

These were words spoken by a 5-year old girl under my care when I worked in a Paediatric Oncology ward a few years ago.

She was a Beta Thalassemia Major patient. A real cutie, i can still remember her curly hair, friendly smiles and she was always very talkative on her good days. She had undergone two bone marrow transplants in the past, but came back with recurrent complications from the procedures.

We tried our best, but she was dying. And she knew it. We were on the verge of crying when we did our morning review that day, and heard her; comforting her parents. She then passed away peacefully in her sleep, after weeks of fighting.

(May you rest in peace, baby girl).

The “American Dream” is actual Slavery (It’s all a Lie)

Outstanding message! It’s such a materialistic world and we’ve been brainwashed to think the more possessions the better. It’s not true. Sad that it takes us all our lives to realize the lie.

The news is full of headlines about ‘China’s economic collapse’ — ignore them

Once again, the Western media Establishment, and sadly some on the left, are talking up an impending economic disaster in China, when the truth is quite the opposite, argues JOHN ROSS

IN THE last four years, covering the period of the Covid pandemic, China’s economy has grown two-and-a-half times as fast as the US, 15 times as fast as France, 23 times as fast as Japan, 45 times as fast as Germany, and 480 times as fast as Britain.

To add in smaller G7 countries, China has grown four times as fast as Canada, and 11 times as fast as Italy.

China’s outperformance of advanced capitalist countries is even greater in per capita terms — a still better measure of productivity changes and potential for increasing living standards.

China’s per capita GDP grew three times as fast as the US, five times as fast as Italy, 44 times as fast as Japan or France, and 260 times as fast as Britain — while per capita GDP fell in Germany and Canada.

China’s outperformance of developing capitalist countries shows the same pattern — China’s per capita 4.4 per cent GDP annual average growth compares to 2.6 per cent in India, 1.3 per cent in Brazil, or 0.9 per cent in South Africa.

What is important about such economic growth, of course, is not abstract statistics but its meaning for the real lives of ordinary people.

The International Labour Organisation data on real, inflation-adjusted, wages shows that up to the latest available data — for most countries to 2022, and for India to 2021 — China’s annual real wage growth was 4.7 per cent.

For Britain it was 0.1 per cent, for the US it was 0.3 per cent, in France it was minus 0.4 per cent, in Germany minus 0.7 per cent and in India minus 1.3 per cent.

Given this enormous economic outperformance by China of capitalist countries, any rational discussion that should be taking place in Western mainstream media about the international economic situation would be, “why is China’s economy hugely outperforming the US and the rest of the capitalist West?” and, “what lessons are to be learned from China’s socialist economy that is so outperforming the West?”

For the left, the issue that needs to be assessed and publicised is, “Why are real wages rising 18 times as fast in China as in the US, 44 times as fast as in Britain, while in France, Germany or India real wages are falling?”

Indeed, the present author would argue that much greater stress should be placed on the latter point. The international left has begun to absorb that China has lifted more than 850 million people out of World Bank-defined poverty in 40 years — by far the greatest poverty reduction achievement in human history.

But it has not yet internalised how rapidly not only the poorest but average living standards are rising in China — far faster than in any Western country.

But, of course, this real economic situation can’t be discussed in the mainstream media, because its conclusions would be too damaging for the capitalist West.

Instead, a type of mad discussion is unfolding, with US claims about China’s economy becoming increasingly bizarre — one might say deranged — as they get further and further out of touch with reality.

President Joe Biden, for example, recently made a speech claiming China’s economic growth rate is “around 2 per cent,” when it was 5.5 per cent in the first half of this year and, as already noted, China’s economy is growing two-and-a-half times as fast as the US.

Biden bizarrely claimed that in China “the number of people who are of retirement age is larger than the number of people of working age” — entirely false, and inaccurate by a figure of many hundreds of millions of people.

Discussion in the US financial media equally refuses to face real facts. Because I am an economist, every morning, after the overall news, I switch on Bloomberg TV to catch up on the latest economic data. Discussion there is like Alice Through the Looking Glass — the book the principle of which is that everything is reversed compared to the real world.

Apparently, according to Bloomberg’s analysis, China’s annual average of 4.5 per cent a year growth in the last four years is an economy in severe crisis, whereas the US’s 1.8 per cent is allegedly strong growth — not to speak of Britain’s 0.1 per cent. Similar rhetoric, out of all contact with factual reality, pervades the Financial Times, The Economist, or the Wall Street Journal.

The left is well used to such US political lying — the completely fake claim that North Vietnamese ships attacked US naval vessels on August 4 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, used to launch the Vietnam war, or the equally untrue claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction to justify the US invasion, were classic examples.

Today, the US systematically lies about the state of China and its own economy because it is crucial for US capitalism to prevent its own citizens, and close allies, from understanding the real economic trends.

It is further proof, if one were needed, of the truth that if the real world and a theory do not coincide only one of two things can be done. One is to abandon the theory, the other is to abandon the real world.

In this case, the theory is that the US, because it is capitalist, should outperform socialist China. The real world is actual economic performance — in which China continues to outperform the US and other capitalist countries by an enormous margin.

Unable to abandon its theory the US is therefore forced to abandon the real world — hence the demented denial of comparative economic performance noted at the beginning of this article.

While the left should expect lies from capitalism what is rather shameful is that some sections of the left repeat such nonsense — apparently believing that if they put in a few left phrases into an analysis taken from the Western press this constitutes “socialist” commentary.

For example, an article in the New Left Review’s Sidecar called China a “zombie economy.” Some “zombie” when China’s economy is growing anywhere between two-and-a-half times and 480 times as fast as any major capitalist economy.

The real data shows the reality is simple. China has far outgrown any Western capitalist economy for more than 40 years. It continues to do so.

The result in China is by far the world’s most rapid rise in living standards — not only for the poorest but for the whole average population. It is known as the practical advantage of socialism. It is fact. We know why the US has to make up big lies about it. There is no justification for sections of the left echoing them.

How has a mother-in-law offended you?

I’ve been married for 6 years together for 8. Every single year we celebrate both of my husband’s parents birthdays. And every single year they don’t even acknowledge mine or my daughters. We both reach have one daughter from a previous and no children together. My husband spends hundreds on each of their birthdays year after year with custom ordered cake from the fanciest bakery in the area and we don’t get so much as a card. His parents don’t dislike me they just wish he would’ve stayed in a relationship with his ex who he never married but shares one child with. They still hold hope they will get back together after all these years so they pretend we don’t exist. It makes me want to stop showing up on their birthdays but I don’t know how to do that without hurting my husband who has had several private conversations asking them to please atleast acknowledge my daughter on her birthday but to no avail.

Italian Beef Stir Fry

Few ingredients – fast and flavorful!

2023 09 25 14 56
2023 09 25 14 56

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 pound beef top tip steaks, cut 1/8 to 1/4 inch thick
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 2 small zucchini, thinly sliced
  • 1 cup cherry tomato halves
  • 1/4 cup fat-free bottled Italian salad dressing
  • 2 cups hot cooked spaghetti
  • 1 tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. Cut beef steaks crosswise into 1-inch wide strips. Cut each strip crosswise in half.
  2. Heat oil in large nonstick skillet over medium-high heat. Add garlic and stir while cooking 1 minute.
  3. Add half of the beef strips. Stir-fry 1 to 1 1/2 minutes or until no longer pink.
  4. Remove with slotted spoon and keep warm.
  5. Repeat with remaining beef strips.
  6. Add zucchini to same skillet. Stir-fry for 2 to 3 minutes or until tender-crisp.
  7. Return beef to skillet with tomato halves and dressing. Heat through.
  8. Salt and pepper to taste.
  9. Serve beef mixture over hot pasta.
  10. Sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.

Attribution

From the kitchen of Martin James – Copenhagen, Denmark

Confession of the Day

My fiancé has a micropenis

Wow, it’s almost a relief just to write that down. IRL I have not told a single person- not anyone in my family not my bestie. I really have no one to vent to.

Obviously it’s not a deal breaker for me- I want to spend the rest of my life with him. He is an amazing man, treats me so well, highly intelligent. He is tall, very good looking and fit. He is basically the whole package and I’m so proud to be with him.

Now- his dick. He is 3 inches hard and very thin. Basically the size of my thumb. The one area in this world he is insecure about. It was definitely a shock for me at first. We do have sex often. Pretty much every day without fail. He has magical hands & tongue and he is a very enthusiastic lover-making sure I cum every time. He has a tremendous imagination. We do use toys, such as dildos, sleeves and straps ons from time to time. It’s good and all, but it’s just not the same.

Now here is the real get off my chest stuff. He would ask me if I ever miss a bigger dick. I don’t have it in my heart to tell him ABSOLUTELY YES. I was always a very sexual being and I was very orgasmic from PIV. I absolutely miss cumming from PIV. I absolutely crave that full filling that I don’t get now.

I wake up horny and just crave it.

It’s not a deal breaker because of the amazing man he is and my love for him. He is very much the greatest man I have ever met. I would never cheat- I’ve never cheated on anyone and I won’t start now. But I admit, my mind is dirty and can wonder. I would imagine fucking a big dick while I masturbate- and I would cry with guilt after I cum.

I feel so bad that the world is so unfair. I would read on Reddit about men being so sad and insecure over their average cocks. 5-6 inches and your insecure? Like STFU!!! Whoever, I’m part of the problem myself. I was the girl that previously bragged to her girlfriends about how well endowed my ex boyfriend was. It’s funny how the world works.

The world sucks. We suck.

What is the nicest thing you’ve ever done for a complete stranger and vice versa?

He was the tallest person I had ever seen, and he saved my brother.

It was the early 80’s, and that meant unsupervised play, staying out until you heard your Mom’s voice, or the street lamps coming on.

Our neighborhood, and everything in it, was our playground.

Including our car.

While I was busy building a ramp for my bike, my brother had climbed into our family car, and was doing his best Knight Rider impression.

That’s when I saw him.

A giant. I was stunned as he bolted through our yard. So stunned that I failed to notice our family car backing quickly out of our driveway, building up speed, and heading straight for our neighbors house.

I watched as The giant stepped in front of the car. It was like seeing Superman in real life.

The momentum of the car was slowed, but it didn’t stop, and he struggled to bring it to a stop.

The car, with my brother inside, was still rolling towards our neighbors house.

Then little by little, inch by inch, he stopped the car.

I watched in stunned silence.

He was our quiet neighbor. A single guy in a family neighborhood that kept to himself. His name was John, he was a giant, and the closest incarnation of Superman I’d ever seen.

Oprah DELETES Accounts, LOCKS Comment Section in Maui Fire BACKLASH

Oprah could’ve given $50 or $100 million and not even felt it…. Or she could’ve had cabins put onto her land, far away from her home and shown true charity towards the residents. Instead she showed her true colours and at the first hint of criticism she threw a tantrum, went on the attack and then stopped people from being able to give feedback.

The case of the light-fingered PC thief

As my life crumbled apart, back in 2005-6, I tried all sorts of measures to stop my “retirement” from MAJ.

But, at that time, I didn’t know the entire picture. I didn’t know what was going on. I thought that I was just “having some problems”.

Nope my entire life was crumbling away before my eyes.

Still I tried to do something about it.

I made arrangements in China, and tried to make various arrangements in the Philippines as well. I was tricked, abused, and basically thwarted at every turn. So many swindles. So many scams. So many selfish pricks. So many liars, tricksters, and generally selfish narcissists.

In hindsight, my Fate Forecasting was Black-on-Black, overlaid with black. It was triple negatives; or to use the parlance of Fate Forecasting and Bazi, it was very inauspicious, on top of very inauspicious.

It was one bad thing after the other, and my life fell apart in complete stages of collapse.

(Which, by the way, you are now starting to watch the entire United States government go through.)

Anyways, I was stuck in the Hong Kong airport,and spent about ten days there after being swindled in a number of places… by numerous people… and left alone to ROT.

While I was waiting there, my resources started to dry up and I was living off airport coffee, and hope. I slept on the hard metal chairs. Used the bathroom, and took sponge baths in the sinks.

And sure as shit, I eventually had to go to the bathroom and pee up a storm, so I put my backpack (with my laptop computer) in it, on my back and stood at a urinal peeing away…

…and some jackass gets really close behind me, but I must have been pissing three liters out, …

…he stood there right behind me, so close. Sheech.

Anyways, soon he left. I still kept a peeing.

I’m not kidding. I must have needed to pee out three liters. It just kept draining.

Then I exited the bathroom, and settled down, and low and behold, my laptop was stolen!

That asshole plucked it skillfully and silently from my backpack while I peed. Sheech!

Yeah. It really sucked, and I was flabbergasted. Shocked, and upset. I didn’t know if I were to laugh or cry.

It was profoundly a disaster, on top of a fiasco, surrounded by trouble at every turn.

I relate this little story to make a few points of interest.

  • When things are going to shit; they will go to shit no matter what you do.
  • The only thing that you can do is to reduce the damage, hedge against it, and be extra cautious.
  • It was a new computer, but has all my passwords, codes and critical communication methodology. I placed way too much on electronic means of record keeping, and communication.
  • After this event, I made it back home, computer-less, of course, and then was seized and set into the “system” to endure my “retirement”.

So to keep things simple.

Let’s distill the lessons here.

  • Friends are valuable. Never dare try to do things alone; and on your own. Work as part of a team with your most trusted friends.
  • Fates must be endured. These are gravitational / planetary alignments that you cannot modify. The only thing you can do is “nothing” on very inauspicious times.
  • Hope is critical. No matter how bad and hopeless things are, it is always temporary. Eventually it WILL change. Just hang on.
  • It will end. Sure it will, and an equal period of greatness will occur. You simply must endure the bad first. Consider the “bad events” to be your entry ticket to the life you desire.

Todays…

Nice Picture

2023 09 26 16 51a
2023 09 26 16 51a

Do you think Huawei can produce smartphones with advanced chips in large volume despite the US claims that Huawei may violate trade restrictions?

LOL, this is China.

If they know how to do something, they automatically know how to do it at scale.

This is a country that builds entire new cities at one go. They produce 600,000 engineers per year. They make four out of every five solar panels in the world. They can build a 57-storey skyscraper in 19 days, and as we saw during the covid-19 pandemic, a brand new hospital in 10 days. They are the world’s biggest factory.

If they know how to make one Huawei Mate 60, they already know how to make 100 million Huawei Mate 60s.

China does not know how to think SMALL. It is unnatural and weird for them to think on a small scale. China has cities with populations larger than countries such as Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, even Australia. Thinking big is China’s default mentality.

Barbecued London Broil

london broil
london broil

Ingredients

  • 1 (1 1/2 or 2 pound) flank steak
  • 1 tablespoon sherry or any dry red wine
  • 1 tablespoon soy sauce
  • 2 tablespoons granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Instructions

  1. Score meat on all sides.
  2. Mix together remaining ingredients. Put on meat and let stand 1 1/2 to 2 hours, then place meat in broiler pan about 4 inches from heat. Broil for about 10 minutes or a little longer on each side. Ten minutes is for medium rare.
  3. To serve, cut diagonally across the grain into very thin slices.

What were the worst two minutes of your life?

Watching my wife die.

My wife’s had cancer for the last seven years. It was well-controlled. She was on maintenance chemo to prevent it from coming back.

All was going fine—she always felt sick a few days after chemo—but she was generally doing well. She had good quality of life and wasn’t really limited in any way except she had doctor’s appointments and scans nearly every week.

After a routine PET scan… Well, to make a long story short, they found cancer in her brain. It wasn’t “brain cancer”, it was the same cancer (inflammatory breast cancer) that had made its way to her brain. It was already fairly extensive by the time they found it, but they were confident they could take care of the lesions through radiation.

The day after her penultimate treatment, she complained that it hurt to breathe. I took her to the hospital and after giving her some pain meds, they admitted her. She was still having pain breathing, so the doctor thought they’d give her something to help her sleep so she could get some rest. And maybe in the meantime, they could figure out why she was experiencing painful breathing; it hurt to breath in and out.

While they were checking her out to prep her for some sleep, she flatlined. About a dozen people sprang into action. Some were specialists, some were support, but all were fighting to bring her back. I stood in the corner out of the way watching in horror as the hoard of medical professionals tried to bring my wife back.

About a million thoughts flooded my mind. Was I really watching my wife die? Was she really gone for good? I just hoped they could get her back.

The doctor pulled me out into the hallway. She asked what I wanted them to do.

I said, “I’m not a doctor, but I want you to do whatever’s reasonable!” She said okay, and they tried shocking her back. Every time, they got no pulse in response. They tried at least three or four times when it was clear she was gone. I gave the signal they could stop.

That was two weeks ago. I’m still trying to process it. It wasn’t like she was on a slow or steep decline. Everything pointed to her recovering.

But she’s gone. My kids are doing a good job helping keep my spirits up, but they’re devastated too. They’re all adults now, but they very nearly worshipped her, as did I.

Girls Standing In The Middle of Tokyo to Sell Themselves.. Japan Has A Serious Developing Problem.

Thank you for posting this. Japan is a complex society, with many ancient traditions, some of which are clashing with modernity even today after 150 years of intense exposure to (and copying of) the West. As with many things, prostitution there has uniquely Japanese characteristics and doesn’t necessarily involve physical intimacy, though such certainly exists. Anyway, these sad stories of girls from the countryside being exploited in the big city are all too common not just in Asia but in the West as well.

https://youtu.be/yo3IUSfTiMY

Our 18-year-old daughter enlisted in the Marines without discussing with me or my husband. What should we do now?

Every few weeks, bake 100 chocolate chip cookies, wrap them in wax paper, put them in a large Tupperware container, and mail them to her in Boot Camp.

Whatever you do, NEVER send packaged cookies from the supermarket! If you do this, her Drill Sergeants will hold them up for everyone to see at Mail Call and mock her mercilessly, saying, “This means yer parents do not love you!” Seen that happen in Army Basic Training a few times.

Homemade cookies the sergeants hand out to everyone and she will be the most popular and well liked Boot for the next half hour.

Why were the Japanese so merciless to Chinese people during World War II?

It happened, but not only to China.

Japan has historically been a very xenophobic and racist culture. Once you’ve convinced yourself your enemy are subhumans not even worthy to live, and you’re a dick, you go nuts.

The interesting contrast between the German and Japanese atrocities is that the German stuff was much more hidden. People have the impression that the holocaust was openly known to everyone, but the Germans took great pains to tell the population that they were shipping undesirables off to newly conquered territory to the east, to live seperately from Germans.

Whereas the the Japanese, their atrocities were rarely hidden. Entire military units would make a contest out of beheading prisoners. They’d round up women and children into a tall building and set it on fire and watch them jump from the roof in desperation. Their newspapers would cover these incidents and it would be celebrated back home.

Not to downplay the evil of the Germans at all, but the Japanese never get their due – I consider them to be as evil or more than the Germans, but you almost never hear about it, whereas you’ve heard about the holocaust at least 100,000 times in your life.

In addition to that, the official policy in Japan is dangerously close to the equivelant of holocaust denialism, whereas at least the Germans are thoroughly ashamed and sorry for what they did.

The American Dream is a Scam

Long comment. -MM

I think this subject matter is 100% correct and I agree with you on it and I also think that its a major part of the reason why America steadily has been becoming more toxic of a place over time.

I think its the perfect storm of capitalisms worst traits being compiled on and exacerbated by the people that are winning at capitalism.

What I’m saying is, in the course of the last 80 years at least our capitalist society has become more and more structurally corrupt.

Because the only people with any real power over how these systems are built and the people that they screw over vise versa, the people that it benefits.

Are the people who have the power and the success to influence it.

This is done with lobbying and both political parties USE lobbyists to this day which is essentially legal corruption for the political system to thrive on.

How it works is this, If im the owner of Apple or something like that and I value things like gun control or mandator vaccines and a community based culture , Im gonna give the politician that most closely values what I value and ima give him multi millions of dollars to run his campaign for election.

THEN I ask this person for political favors and to represent ME a little more than anyone else BECAUSE im handing them a multi million dollar check to run for whatever.

America has done this for a very long time and its one of the reasons way our election cycles are meaningless.

The elite class literally have more valuable voters than you do lol. Its NOT an even playing field. I think red or blue doesnt matter because the problem is both parites are dog shit.

Both parties got some good they wanna do and the bad shit they do is there too.

With republicans its the positive of them understanding personal freedom and things like guns remaining protected rights. but negatively speaking the republican party Is just as tone deaf and stupid about stuff like corporate greed and how bad that is, as the democrats are tone deaf to the importance of gun rights and being able to have the scary shit they wanna be able to dictate HOWEVER democrats do understand corporate greed and greedy elite cocksuckers who are siphoning the people of this country of their time and labor value. It sickens me that republicans will support selfish people like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk who are prime examples of people who do ALL THE SHIT that’s killing society over time.

This idea that they “earned” this when the money the get is being farmed off the backs of 20k employees.

We live in a country where we got the worlds largest GDP and the most ready to fight population of people ready to defend our country if someone wants to try us. and we got people like Jeff Bezos living in massive excessiveness while FAMILIES of people cant afford insulin or food or housing without government assistance programs and hand outs.

I mean its really no wonder why drugs are such an issue in the modern world, and people are doing shit all the time like walking into a place and killing your fucking children because theyre fucking sick.

This country BREEDS sickness. The hormone changing foods we eat. The garbage media we consume way to much of.

The sheltered life we have in dependency to the system being the norm and self sufficiency being a less sought after thing. People need to understand what freedom is. Sometimes it sucks.

But its way more liberating than this shallow illusionary world we created for ourselves. It dont even make sense to go out here and farm money like we do with our jobs, killing our bodies and our backs to MAINTAIN a life style when that money your working for is being PRINTED off a press by the trillions in our government. Its MAKE BELIEVE.

There is no backing to the value of our currency other than what we say its worth. Its just a catalyst to make way for modern slavery.

The type of slavery where the average slave doesn’t even see the shackles attached to them or they see it as a necessary inconvenience rather than what it is. Its a scam. Its a rigged game built to siphon the actual value of your life way from you. Money is nothing.

The value comes from skill and time.

The reason they created curency like money is because with this extra step in between, you can figure out ways to siphon it down without people knowing. I These companies use every dirty trick in the book to maximize profits.

Oh our employees want better pay, well just make everything we sell twice as expensive as to not take any cut to our current lifestyle.

This is why I was pushing back against minimum wage being increased to 15 an hour. Because this DOES NOTHING. People could do more with their money back when they made 1.35 an hour at minimum wage. The wage isn’t the problem its the scope of how much these companies WANT out of what they put in to a product or service. Its the fact that per hour of your time, you make less than half of what the same money could afford back when the world had a better capitalist balance going on before every motherfucker was exploiting every facet of every thing for maximum profits.

The average American doesn’t understand this concept of how they are stealing from you, while making it look like their giving you more when they aren’t.

The ONLY way to fix the issues is if these rich greedy cocksuckers decide one day that they are tired of being super duper rich and excessive, which has no chance of happening.

The people who hold the heys to the cookie jar are gonna dip into the most for themselves when nobody is looking.

That’s just human nature.

I do think that if people don’t mentally evolve enough to realize this entire system wand cultre we have is bogus and we dont need it at all to have everything we got, and keep working just like we have.

The only difference is, instead of working for selfish reason and necessity, people would work for others and out of wanting to serve the human race. Like if EVERYTHING was free..

I think people would still work. The only difference would be people wouldn’t settle for a job because they NEED money to eat, they’ll do shit they find more meaningful to them to do. It would actually probably IMPROVE the quality of work being done IF we just made it to where we operated as a community.

You like building houses ok, go build some hosues for people.

You know tech?

Okay go build tech or set it up for people. You know farming and food? Okay teach people how to be self sufficient and help them get set up. Society CAN function perfectly WITHOUT this idea of being in competition with each other and having more than the next guy.

That’s all that capitalism really is, its the idea of fuck the community I live in so I can get ahead of all of them and earn my status in society. And I don’t think capitalism is even the problem.

I think its just people. People are the ones who infest something and start corrupting it to be beneficial to themselves.

It doesn’t matter what system we call ourselves because people will always find a way to reach the top rungs of society in any society and they will begin to manipulate how society is from then on built, and they will most likely create it in a way where its unfairly exploiting one class of people sop another class can have more than they honestly need or deserve.

Communism wouldn’t fix it because that system is just as exploitable and manipulatable as capitalism and any other system controlled by human beings. I hope this all makes some sort of sense. people really need to fully wake up and we do need to throw this system overboard as a whole and we need to start restructuring society in a way where its beneficial to the human race equally.

Nice Picture

2023 09 26 16 51
2023 09 26 16 51

What is a true personal story that people have a hard time believing?

I was representing the USA in an international table tennis (ping pong) tournament in Osaka, Japan. The night before, I wandered over to the tournament site to check it out. When there, I noticed a guy wearing a Chinese team jacket. They were and still are the best in the world. Being somewhat cocky, I went over and asked him if he would like to hit some. He did and we eventually played a best-of-three match. I was playing well and managed to eke out a win.

Back with my teammates I modestly mentioned that I had beaten a Chinese player. To my astonishment some skepticism was expressed. Being fed up, the next day I suggested to the most skeptical teammate that we stroll over to where the Chinese team was camped out. I didn’t see the player from last night, so I started talking to one of the other Chinese players. Finally I casually mentioned that I had won a match with one of his teammates. “Which one?” he asked.

“Well I… Oh there he is, walking over now.”

“Ah yes”, he said, “That’s Mr. Chen. He’s our cook.”

Have you ever lost any respect for someone instantly?

I had worked at the car dealership for a year when they decided to shift me from sales to service. It wasn’t what I wanted, but at least I still had a job.

The Saturday before my job changed, the service manager grabbed me by the arm and dragged me into his office. He then filled me in on his philosophy…

“I can’t stand having women working for me”, he said. “They have menstrual periods. They’re nothing but bitches for 3 weeks out of the month. They can’t make rational decisions. You can’t trust them.”

I just sat there, silently. He’d apparently decided that I would be replacing a woman who I had great respect for. She’d helped dozens of my customers, and they loved her. Nobody ever had a bad word to say about her.

I was floored at his attitude. He could think what he wanted, but by opening his mouth, he became a liability to the company. I have no idea why he felt the need to ”share” that with me.

Months later, I had to testify against him in an unlawful termination lawsuit brought about by that female employee. I don’t know what it cost the company, but I hope it was worth it to them.

My mother raised me by herself until I was about 5 years old, and I have nothing but respect for hard working women in the workplace.

With his unsolicited diatribe against women, he instantly lost my respect.

How to Leave the USA in Five Steps

I think this guy is a puke. However, his information is pretty good. Hold your nose and watch. -MM

Why does the West feel so intimidated by Russia when Russia has shown by its poor performance on the battlefield and its looking for outside help that it is not a proper threat?

Poor Performance?

Aw give it up for heavens sake

The Western MSM have been forced to acknowledge that Russia has had a massive win against Ukraine and NATO by ensuring the 115 day long counter offensive with :-

  • 14 Fresh Brigades – 56,000 NATO Trained troops
  • 4 Fresh Divisions – 120,000 Ukrainian Reservists trained over 6 months in Ukraine from June to December 2022
  • 116 NATO Tanks
  • 440 Armored Vehicles
  • 540 Soviet Era Tanks (T 62, T 72)
  • 1.7 Million Artillery Shells 155 mm

Has been ground to dust

Literally

Only ONE BRIGADE the 71 UK Yeger is still left untouched

The Ukrainians have 258 out of 656 Tanks left

They have 190 out of 440 Armored Vehicles left

They have barely 200,000 Artillery shells left

They have lost in the last 115 days, around 44000 Men and another 27000 men have been seriously wounded and disabled for minimum one year from fighting

And what have they gained?

Exactly 152 Square Kilometers that too, territory still under Russian Offensive


That’s why the West are worried

That Russia of their imagination is a different Russia from this Vigorous fighting force

Apple Reacts to Huawei Challenge in China

Unconfirmed reports that Apple is reacting by:

  1. Apple corporate has decided that the newest Apple products would be supplied to China before the US market;
  2. Price war to keep China users from switching (back) to Huawei mobile phones.

Obviously Apple sees a major Huawei challenge with the Mate 60 Pro and upcoming products, and sees that this market is key to Apple’s future, even if it has to sacrifice profits.

What is something Westerners don’t know about Africans?

In many African countries, money changers effortlessly swap bundles of cash by the roadside, operating under the implicit but rock-solid assumption that they won’t be robbed. And we walk out of banks with wads of cash, sometimes on a tiny nylon or envelope. Such security measures are largely unnecessary.

Lawyers and signed agreements may be the norm elsewhere, but in many parts of Africa, your word is more valuable than gold. Break it, and you’ve essentially declared social bankruptcy. A broken promise doesn’t just tarnish your immediate reputation; it haunts you for life, impacting your relationships and prospects. I, for one, have family members I wouldn’t lend a penny to, much less enter a business deal with. All because they failed to uphold their word when it mattered.

In most Western cities, shoplifting is a perennial problem, and law enforcement often turns a blind eye. Not here. Young people aren’t emboldened by societal indifference. On the contrary, the idea of swiping even a candy bar sends shivers down their spines. In our world, retribution is swift and comes from the community itself. Misbehavior is universally scorned.

Kids don’t engage in senseless acts like random street attacks, burning of shops, or joyriding in someone else’s car. It’s not just the fear of punishment that deters them. Rather, it’s a collective societal understanding that these actions are fundamentally wrong. Our young people may admire your shiny sports car, but they’d rather beg you for money than dream of damaging or stealing it.

Respect is in our DNA. Children back-talking their parents happens rarely and is frowned upon. We quickly give up our seats to older people and pregnant women without being asked. Titles like Sir, Ma’am, Daddy, and Aunty aren’t just terms of address; they’re badges of honor for the wisdom that comes with age. We greet older people by bowing or semi-kneeling. Communities act as a self-regulating mechanism, making certain transgressions practically unthinkable.

Violent acts like public shootings of innocent people remain alien to us, not because we’re oblivious to the global mental health crisis, but because the fabric of our communities simply doesn’t allow such chaos to unfold.

While discussions around the treatment of women in Africa often lean toward the negative, there’s another side to the coin. Any man who dared to raise a hand against a woman in the presence of people would swiftly face communal justice even before the police arrived. Spectators don’t stand back to dial emergency numbers, we make the fight ours.

The Magic isn’t necessarily in governmental laws or policing. It’s in the unwritten code of conduct, the communal upbringing that checks our moral compasses and teaches us to respect one another.

U.S Hold Top Secret Talks With China in Malta! U.S Beg China

September 22, 2023

American plans are turning to shit, quickly. Actions must be taken. Can China bend a little to help out the Biden Administration?

It would be wonderful should the United States regain some measure of sanity again! Then we in the rest of the world may be able to breathe again without the thought of forever war and death intruding in our dreams only to become nightmares.”

What is the most eerie declassified CIA document you have seen or heard about?

A US Marine group had killed Sixty Afghans

So a group of angry Afghans pretended to be PRO US and requested a few marines to help them and abducted them

They proceeded to skin the marines alive literally and chop them into pieces and cook them

They then wanted to feed this to the other marines

However there was a road block and the truck was abandoned and the men saw the huge container that was full of some flesh

They soon DNA tested and found it was human remains , cooked meat of their comrades

The remaining Marines were so frightened that they were relieved immediately to stateside and took treatment for mental shock


This was related to a Congressional Committee in the late Obama era when the issue was declassified to justify keeping Guantanamo


The Taliban and the Islamic fundamentalists are the only mortals who can defeat the USA and bring them to their knees

Russia has missiles, China has missiles

No use

The Fundamentalists have a nice 14 year old boy who befriends a majors son, becomes a close friend and them calmly plunges a dagger into the kids heart and smiles as he waits for deliverance

Invincible!!

Sad but true

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED to the USA! (REVERSE CULTURE SHOCK)

I’m an American ex-pat who has been living overseas for 35 years. I try to fly to the States at least every other year (with the exception of the Corona-lockdown years), and I always get the reverse culture shock. I think what shocks me most is the huge increase in homelessness and drug addiction, as well as the political polarization. Back in the 80s, you could discuss politics with others, even if you didn’t agree, and in the end you stayed friends.”

22 things. Yuppur.

What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you’ve witnessed?

When I was about fourteen years old I was walking home, at about 8 PM, through a local park in The Bronx when three boys from the gang that came from an adjacent neighborhood appeared. It was about dusk. I knew I was in trouble. As things were getting tense for me, Ronnie appeared seemingly out of nowhere.

Ronnie and I attended the same public school from grades K to 6. In 2nd grade the teacher had me sit next to Ronnie. The seats were arranged in three rows of two. Each pair were adjacent. Ronnie was a slow learner. I taught him to read that year. We became friends…only in that class as we didn’t live “near” each other and didn’t have much in common. In those days, near was within 2 city blocks. For seventh grade I was sent to another school and I hadn’t seen Ronnie for two years.

Ronnie was short but he had bulked up a bit and had taken up boxing. I had lost track of him. As he stood next to me facing the three boys, it became clear as what was going to happen as Ronnie took a step closer to the other boys and slightly in front of me. They all took a step back. And then walked away.

Ronnie and I said the mandatory “Good to see yous”, walked a couple of hundred feet together and said. “see ya.”*

*A couple of years later I heard that Ronnie had become a Golden Gloves boxer and had done OK.

Bacon-Wrapped Filet Steaks
Topped with Roasted Garlic Butter

fm148
fm148

Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 12 large garlic cloves, peeled
  • 1/4 cup olive oil
  • 3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cut into small chunks
  • Kosher salt
  • 3 1/2 teaspoons chopped chives
  • 1/2 teaspoon coarsely ground black pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
  • 4 (6 to 7 ounce) filet steaks, about 1 inch thick
  • 4 very thin slices of lean bacon
  • 6 inch wooden skewers or toothpicks, soaked in water for 10 minutes and patted dry

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Place peeled garlic and olive oil in 1-cup, ovenproof ramekin, soufflé dish or custard cup. Cover dish tightly with aluminum foil and place in oven. Roast on center rack until garlic is golden and very tender and soft when pierced with knife, about 30 minutes (start checking cloves after 20 minutes and then every 5 minutes until done).
  3. With slotted spoon, remove garlic from bowl and reserve oil. Place garlic, 1 1/2 teaspoons of the reserved oil, butter and 1/8 teaspoon salt in food processor or blender and process, pulsing machine on and off for 30 seconds or less until garlic is coarsely chopped and blended with butter and oil. Transfer garlic butter to small bowl and stir in 2 teaspoons of the chives. (Garlic butter can be prepared 1 day ahead. Cover with plastic wrap and refrigerate. Bring to room temperature 30 minutes before ready to use.)
  4. When ready to cook steaks, oil a grill rack and prepare grill.
  5. In small bowl, stir together 1 teaspoon kosher salt, coarsely ground black pepper and thyme. Rub both sides of each filet with some of this seasoning. Then wrap each steak around its sides with 1 slice of bacon. Skewer bacon in place with wooden skewer or with 2 to 3 wooden picks.
  6. Grill steaks until lightly charred on the outside and until bacon is cooked, about 5 minutes per side for medium-rare.
  7. When done, remove steaks from fire and place on warm serving plate. Remove toothpicks.
  8. Top each steak with 1 generous pat of roasted garlic butter and sprinkle with some of remaining chives. Butter will start to melt and season the steaks.
  9. Serve immediately.

The United States is fucked

2023 09 26 15 5a7
2023 09 26 15 5a7

Ant farm prison planet

Back in the 1960’s, oh about 1966 or so, we used to read comic books. All of us kids did that. We would read Archie comix, and Richie Rich comix, and war comixs. SO many different kinds of comic books.

And at the back of these comix were advertisements that catered to us young kids. Boys and girls.

6a012875a9fd84970c0154348093f0970c 600wi
6a012875a9fd84970c0154348093f0970c 600wi

One of the advertisements was an “ant farm”. This consisted of two plates of clear plastic with sand between, and a ant colony trapped in the middle. You could go and watch the ants create their little rooms and passages in this tiny little world that they were trapped in.

Now, my friend “Dino” who lived across the street from me got one of those toys. And sure as shit, he would allow the farm to grow big, with all sorts of rooms, and what not.

ant farm
ant farm

And when the little tiny ant kingdom seemed to be well and functioning, he would pick it up and shake it vigorously. Thus destroying all the work those poor little ants put into it.

And they would start from scratch all over again.

Ugh!

We as boys, thought it was fun to do, and then we would lay the plastic ant farm on the table and then go outside to play and adventure throughout the day. Totally forgetting about what we had done to those ants.

I wonder…

If our “prison planet” existence is something like this. Where some other beings torture us, as a kind of intergalactic pastime. That they enjoy periodically. Then move on-wards to better experiences.

Sigh.

Today…

Have you ever caught your neighbor snooping around your property? If so, what did you do?

I sure did. I bought a house when I had gone thru a divorce in a nice neighborhood with a lot of retired people. Retired people are the best, free security system ever. One man would see me working in the yard and would always come help me. He might bring a tool to make the job easier or just help with heavy work. He asked me what all I was trying to get done in the yard, so I told him a list of things off the top of my head. He took it upon himself to come over while I was at work and finish some of the projects on my list. His yard was immaculate so I guess he was very nice and a little bored. I’d come home to rocks moved around, plants dug up, etc. Nothing not on my list. Occasionally I’d find a new hanging plant. He and his wife kind of adopted me. So I take care of them at Christmas and birthdays. It’s been awesome.

What changed in the US-China relationship that is pushing the two countries closer to war?

No one seems to know. Readers who follow developments in China closely, know that relations between the two superpowers have grown increasingly strained in the last few years. But while the US has taken a more hostile approach to China, no one seems to know why. Was there something in particular that China did that angered Washington leading to the imposition of economic sanctions, technology blockades and military provocations in the Taiwan Strait?

No, there’s no indication that China did anything. What changed was Washington’s approach to China. And—as you’ll see—Washington’s approach changed very quickly and very dramatically. China went from friend to foe almost overnight.

Here’s why.

Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, the US maintained a policy of engagement with China that accelerated its development and transformed the country into the main engine of global growth. In December, 2001, China was granted “most-favored-nation”(MFN) status which was followed shortly after by its entry into the World Trade Organization (WTO). These developments allowed China to access western markets which turned China into a manufacturing center for US multinationals like Nike, Apple and Dell. China’s opening also triggered a surge of foreign investment which pumped up growth while strengthening its financial assets and bond market. In short, US policy laid the groundwork for the “Chinese miracle” which set the stage for a great power conflict with the US.

No other country in the world is more responsible for China’s meteoric rise than the United States. Now, however, the foreign policy establishment has decided that it doesn’t like its own creation. It doesn’t like the fact that China took advantage of the opportunities it was given to transform itself into a peer competitor of the United States. It doesn’t like the fact that China’s economy is growing more than twice as fast as America’s and is set to surpass the US within the decade. It doesn’t like the fact that China is building a 21st century, state-of-the-art infrastructure grid that will economically integrate a large part of Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia into the world’s biggest free trade zone. It doesn’t like the fact that China’s expansive economic/political strategy will inevitably replace the “rules-based international order” with a Chinese-led system in which the renminbi is the world’s reserve currency and China’s financial markets are the largest and most liquid in the world. America’s foreign policy establishment is not happy about any of these developments especially since it is largely responsible for all of them.

Don’t get me wrong; the Chinese are intelligent, resourceful, creative, and industrious people. And the Chinese Communist Party has played a critical role in lifting 800 million people out of poverty while steering the nation’s economy towards unprecedented growth and prosperity.

But if China was not given access to western markets and entered into the WTO, there would be no Chinese miracle and no Chinese superpower today. Those opportunities were the result of widely-supported policies that were endorsed almost-universally by US foreign policy elites. So, if Washington now regrets having supported those policies, it can only blame itself. Here’s some more background from foreign policy expert John Mearsheimer:

During the Cold War and under the policy of President Nixon, the U.S. decided to engage China and form a quasi-alliance with China against the Soviet Union. That made eminently good sense. And Nixon was correct to help the Chinese economy grow, for the more powerful China became, the more effective it was as a deterrent partner against the Soviet Union. However, once the Cold War ended in 1989 and the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the U.S. no longer needed China to help contain the Soviet Union.

What we foolishly did was pursue a policy of engagement, which was explicitly designed to help China grow more powerful economically. Of course, as China grew economically, it translated that economic might into military might, and the U.S., as a consequence of this foolish policy of engagement, helped to create a peer competitor.

My bottom line is that the Nixon-Kissinger policy, from the early 1970s up until the late 1980s, made eminently good sense. But, after that, engagement was a colossal strategic blunder….

The U.S. was not only expecting China to grow more powerful—it was purposely helping China to grow more powerful. It was doing this based on the assumption that China would become a democracy over time and therefore would become a responsible stakeholder in an American-led international order.

Of course, that didn’t happen. China did not become a democracy. And China, in effect, has set out to establish hegemony in Asia and challenge the U.S. around the planet. We now have a new Cold War.” U.S. engagement with China a ‘strategic blunder’: Mearsheimer, Nikkei

2023 09 22 09 20x
2023 09 22 09 20x

While I agree with most of what Mearsheimer says, I strongly disagree with the notion that US leaders were genuinely concerned about China becoming a democracy. Nor does democracy explain why US policy changed from mutually-beneficial engagement to open hostility. What Mearsheimer fails to acknowledge is that the western economies are controlled by an oligarchy of elites who have been unable to make any significant inroads into the Chinese government’s power-structure. This is not because the Chinese government is ostensibly “communist”, but because Chinese leaders are strongly nationalistic and determined to maintain China’s own sovereign independence against the onslaught of western elites. In other words, the emerging confrontation with China is a power-struggle between the WEF globalist cabal and Chinese nationalists.

In any event, China is not responsible for the strained relations that exist today. The hostility and provocations are all coming from the United States which is trying to undo the damage it did by implementing policies that ran counter to its own national interests. In short, the Biden administration is trying to reverse 30 years of failed policy by doing an about-face and then blaming it on China. It’s a classic “bait and switch” operation. Here’s more from Mearsheimer:

As time has shown, the engagement strategy was a failure. The Chinese economy has made an unprecedented leap forward, but the country has not transformed itself into a liberal democracy or “a responsible glass holder (a player interested in maintaining the current international order).” On the contrary, Chinese leaders see liberal values ​​as a threat to their country’s stability. And they, as the leaders of the rising powers usually do, have a tough foreign policy. We must admit that economic involvement was a colossal strategic mistake. Kurt Campbell and Eli Ratner – two former Obama administration officials who admitted that engagement had failed and those in the Biden administration today – write: “Washington is now facing the most dynamic and formidable contender in modern history.” (U.S. engagement with China a ‘strategic blunder’: Mearsheimer, Nikkei)

The question that immediately arises is: If engagement was such “a colossal strategic mistake” then why did it take 30 years to figure it out? With a population that is 4 times the size of the US and GDP growing at roughly 9% for 2 decades, it should have been fairly obvious that China was going to be bigger and more powerful than the US in the not-too-distant future. And yet everyone in the political establishment pretended not to see what was right beneath their noses.

That’s shocking. And what’s even more shocking is the remedy our leaders have settled on to maintain their current advantage in the global order. They intend to do everything in their power to sabotage China’s economic development. This aligns perfectly with Mearsheimer’s observation that “the only opportunity that can change the dynamics is a dramatic crisis undermining China’s unrelenting growth.” And that explains what’s going on today, the Biden administration is making a concerted effort to target the vulnerable sectors of the Chinese economy and inflict as much damage as possible via sanctions, blockades and supplyline disruption. We expect that this economic war on China will gradually intensify in the next few years along with new provocations in the Taiwan Strait and South China Sea. If Mearsheimer’s analysis is correct, then we are still in the early rounds of a hybrid war that will undoubtedly drag on for years to come.

So, when did it occur to our foreign policy geniuses that fueling China’s growth might actually hurt US prospects for the future?

2023 09 22 09 20z
2023 09 22 09 20z

We don’t know the specific date, but it looks like sometime around 2017 the elite consensus that supported engagement began to fall apart as more and more people became aware of the policy’s shortcomings. Check out this comment by the Financial Times associate editor Martin Wolf who explains how quickly western elites turned against China:

I think what is happening is that western policymakers and above all, American policymakers have decided that the rise of China is a major strategic threat. And this has several dimensions. One of these is that the left of center has come to the view that “Well, they are never going to become a democracy as we thought they would, and that is problematic. We don’t like that.” But the bigger element—which is the view of the strategic community and quite a large part of the corporate community—is that “These people (China) are a serious threat. They have immense resources, the defense build up is quite substantial, and they getting are ahead technologically in some very important areas, and we are far too dependent upon them….. They see the interdependence on China as frightening, and this paranoia has now become a dominant element in American thinking…. And it has shifted very quickly and very much across the board in America although we are now seeing it in Europe as well. A paper was recently released by the German Industrial Confederation which basically said, “You know the Chinese technology policy; it’s a threat to Germany.” This is a big change and it’s happened quite recently.” China: Friend or Foe?, You Tube, 12: 35 minute

So, according to Wolf, overall views on China among foreign policy elites changed very quickly and very dramatically. (Wolf’s account is similar to many other elites who tell the same story.) Engagement was increasingly seen as damaging to western interests, and the search for a different approach began. What Wolf fails to tell us is what it was that convinced foreign policy mandarins that China had become “major strategic threat”? Was it due to the CCP’s increasingly activist oversight of foreign corporations or the Communist Party’s refusal to implement reforms of their massive State Owned Enterprises (SOEs) or did it have something to do with China’s impressive strides in advanced technology that put the future of AI and supercomputing up-for-grabs?

What was it?

While we can’t answer that question with 100% certainty, we can make an educated guess.

2023 09 22 09 19
2023 09 22 09 19

In 2013, Chinese president Xi Jinping launched his signature infrastructure program called the Belt and Road Initiative, which is a vast, multi-continent development strategy that is the most expensive and expansive infrastructure program of all time. The BRI has already garnered commitments from more than 150 nations representing 75% of the global population. The stated goal of the project is “to enhance regional connectivity and embrace a brighter future.” In fact, the project does all of that and much more. The BRI will improve ports, skyscrapers, railroads, roads, bridges, airports, dams, coal-fired power stations, and railroad tunnels. It will create a vast spiderweb of cutting-edge high-speed rail that will lower the cost of shipping while boosting the profits of manufacturers and wholesalers. The BRI projects a vision of a fully-integrated 21st century world in which Beijing lies at the very epicenter of global commerce. This is why the US and its allies—who are the staunch defenders of an archaic, extractive model of neoliberal capitalism—are prepared to do whatever-it-takes to derail China’s development and prevent this futuristic plan from going forward. Here’s how Sir Malcolm Rifkind, politician and former cabinet minister, summed up the significance of the BRI in a recent discussion of China on You Tube:

“I think if we’re going to look years ahead, I think the most important thing is the potential relevance of the Belt and Road Initiative to the relationship of Europe and China. For a thousand years, Europe and China have had to have contact with each other through the sea lanes. That huge central Asian landmass was, like the Atlantic Ocean- a barrier. What is happening now; and if we look 5, 10, 15 years ahead—already freight trains are going from China to western Europe in increasing numbers in both directions. So, what that means is, Europe and China could be looking directly at each other in a way that Europe and North America were able to do because of air travel and because the Atlantic became a bridge. That would be a historic change regardless of the politics China and Europe looking directly at each other and trading with each other in that way. That would have massive implications.” China: Friend or Foe? You Tube, 1:21:10 min

Rifkind is right. The opening of transit corridors and freight lines between China and Europe are “the most important thing” because they draw the continents closer together into a giant free trade zone which will inevitably increase their mutual power and prosperity while leaving the US on the outside looking in. This is why the Biden administration is so determined to make sure the BRI does not become a reality. Keep in mind, the primary foreign policy objective of the United States is “to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power.” The vast expansion of China’s Belt and Road across the Eurasian landmass and linking European capitals to Beijing and Shanghai, definitely fit that description and qualify China as Washington’s mortal enemy.

China’s leaders still believe that they can reach an accommodation with Washington that will help to avoid a direct confrontation. But Washington’s red lines have already been crossed and there’s bound to be trouble ahead.

*

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This article was originally published on The Unz Review.

Italy Foreign Minister Visited China to Get Free From the US’s Rule Over Europe!

Italy Foreign Minister Visited China to Get Free From the US’s Rule Over Europe!

https://youtu.be/yJi1j_JkmS0

Huawei M60 Pro shocked the world. Why is it?

Try imagining this.

For the U.S. to decide this Chip Act it must have been debated at length by hordes of parties and institutions including dozens of companies in the U.S. and throughout US allies.

Why?

Well simple. The repercussions are simply gigantic and colossal if indeed this act fail. It will cause trillions upon trillions of dollars lost over time. At least a hundred U.S. and its cronies chip firms may simply go out of business all together.

Worst is that this is the last thing the US can do to stop and contained China if this fails, that will be the end of US hegemony in technology. So for the U.S. to take this measure is like putting everything at stake into this one act. Billions has to be spend to build a plants in the U.S. that hinge on China’s failure to counter act. Billions need to be spend to protect and subsidise these hundreds of firms in case it fail.

Countries whose livelihoods depend on this precise technology and business to survive and thrive have to be bribed and coerce to cut out China. These bribes probably run in the trillions of dollars figures.

And all these hinge on one and only one assumption. That is China will not be able to design, make and manufacture this high end chips for at least a generation! If this assumption fail to materialised then the U.S. will be thoroughly fxxked for a generation and it will forever not able to compete with China.

In other words, there is absolutely no room at all for failure. Failure means China will now totally controlled every aspect of Chip making technologies from materials, to designing, to developing , to mass producing in the billions. And it will do it at a fraction of the costs of doing it in the U.S. which simply means the total implosion of all the U.S. chip firms!

So after a mere 3 years China did precisely what the U.S. fears most. Their worst fears has come true. The Chinese simply do not need a single technology from the U.S. and its cronies to launched this 5NM chip capable of 5G and satellite communications which also means there is zero possibility for the U.S. to hack it. 150 million orders have been placed and 40 million orders has been fulfilled in a mere 20 days from its launch.

This Huawei Mate 60 series including the Mate 5X is such a blow to the U.S. For a start the U.S. already lost 3 billion in profit had they not banned themselves from selling to China and up to a few trillion dollars have been wiped off the stock values of these chip firms from 27th August till now. The melt down will carry on and on and on till the U.S. economy collapse all together. We in the rest of the world call this Karma.

That is why it is such a big deal.

Given Biden’s evident senility, who is the real decision maker in US foreign policy? Anthony Blinken?

Right now?

There are three power blocs in US

Block 1 consists of :-

  • The Gun Lobby AKA NRA
  • The Energy Lobby
  • The Don’t ask Don’t Tell Lobby
  • The Anti Abortion Lobby
  • The Baptist and Deeply Religious Bible Group Lobby
  • The Selective Immigration Lobby

This Block mainly support Republicans and like a White Majority to be in charge of the country and preferably like straight men who stick to the gender they were born with

Fox News, Newsmax, Rush Limbaugh (Late), Lou Dobbs are sponsored by this Lobby

Block 2 consists of :-

  • Big Tech (Google, Meta, Amazon)
  • The Gun control lobby
  • The Freedom of Choice Lobby
  • The Anti DOMA Lobby
  • The Freely Agnostic, Atheist or Freethinker Lobby
  • The Pro Migrant Lobby

This block mainly supports Liberal Democrats, like minorities to be ostensibly in charge and have a fascination with Gay people and Transgenders and LGBTQ agenda

All MSM, Whoopi Goldberg, Seth Myers, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon are all sponsored by this lobby

Block 3 also called the TRUMP Block consists of :-

  • Donald J Trump
  • Friends of Donald J Trump
  • Russian Naturalized Citizens in US
  • East European Naturalized US Citizens
  • Indian Migrants outside California
  • The Trade Lobby
  • US Steel Lobby
  • Any Group that likes protectionism
  • Law Enforcement Lobby of 31 States
  • Blue Collar White Males with High School Diplomas

This Block liases with Republicans and has an uneasy alliance with the Republicans as it hates the democrats more

Tucker Carlson, Jimmy Dore, NTG are


Ultimately no matter who comes to power, there are two groups who have the last word in how the US must react :-

  • Wall Street
  • The Military Industrial Complex Or Defense Manufacturers / Contractors

Nobody can cross these two groups in US

These Two Groups give instructions through their tame organizations like

  • National Endowment of Democracy
  • WEF
  • The NEOCON think tanks

Trump, Biden, Obama – they need an OK from these two powerful groups and their tame organizations, or they will be unable to do anything

This Senile Old Man probably needs to be told when it’s time to change his diapers

He is a total puppet controlled by the Neocons

Pennsylvania Dutch Brown Butter Noodles

This is a delicious side dish to a pot roast, fried chicken, baked ham, or pork chop dinner. In true Pennsylvania Dutch style, serve with a side of fresh cottage cheese topped with apple butter!

Pennsylvania Dutch Brown Butter Noodles
Pennsylvania Dutch Brown Butter Noodles

Ingredients

  • Wide egg noodles
  • Butter
  • Salt
  • Pepper

Instructions

  1. Cook wide egg noodles according to package directions, in the amount needed. As the noodles are cooking, melt butter (1 tablespoon per person/serving) in a small skillet and allow the butter to brown lightly (do not burn!). Drain noodles well, place in serving bowl and toss with the hot browned butter. If desired, add a small amount of salt and pepper.

As a police officer, has a suspect ever asked you, “Do you know who I am?” indignantly, and how did you react?

Yes it did happen a few times.

One time my partner and I stopped a vehicle that cut off another vehicle and made a right turn into oncoming traffic. I approached the driver and was immediately told that I had no right to stop him and that I better be careful and to choose my words carefully.

So I slowly said “ Sir, I stopped you for illegal lane change, illegal right turn and impeding the flow of traffic, did you understand the words that I just spoke to you?

He proceeded to tell me that he was a Los Angeles City Councilman and that if I “ gave him any shit, he would have my job.”

I explained that I needed to see his operators license, proof of insurance and registration.

Mr. Councilman stated that he already told me who he was and that he didn’t have to show me anything. I explained to him that I was going to be exceptionally nice to him and politely ask him one more time, but if he was not going to comply with the lawfull instructions from a sworn police officer he would be arrested, period.

He actually said that I didn’t have the balls to “ try “ to arrest him for a vehicle code violation.

I then reverted to my interactions with my 4 year old son.

I said I’m going to count to 3, and if he was not going to comply he absolutely would be going to jail and also that I would be impounding his vehicle. He again refused and he went to jail and didn’t pass go, his vehicle was impounded and all was good in the world.

My favorite scene from “The Sixth Sense”

I think why this scene is so powerful is because everyone can relate to having lost someone in their life and have that desire to know that they made some kind of positive impact on the lost ones life.”

https://youtu.be/FLyYYHqVTsE

Who is a celebrity you have met accidentally? How was your experience meeting them?

I was in Scotland on holiday with my husband in May 2023. We were on the Isle of Skye and had stopped in at a remote cafe for breakfast. Behind us in the queue was a lady whose face was so familiar I was sure I knew her really well.

I was wracking my brains trying to remember if I’d worked with her, or if she was a friend of a friend. She was so familiar! I whispered to my husband that I was sure I knew her and he agreed that he’d recognised her too.

I finally decided to just ask her if we’d met before, and where. She looked at me and gently said: “No, we’ve never met. But I’m an actress so we’ve probably spent some time together but just not in person.”

It was Frances McDormand. A real REAL actress- not just a movie star. And then she introduced us to her husband, Joel Coen.

She was so utterly charming, I was fangirling so hard.

I can’t think of a lovelier way to tell someone they’ve made a mistake.

What is the worst thing to say on a date?

I am Egyptian. Arranged marriages are common here. And don’t get me wrong I actually really like them when done right. They are very close to the concept of blind dating.

However, sometimes you’ll get terrible suitors with no social intelligence. And yes guys there are Arab men who are way more decent than these not-so-bright ones. Take some examples:-

  • A friend of mine sat with a suitor for the first time and the chat was actually pretty decent. But before he left he looked at her and said “but if you want to get married to me, don’t you think you should lose some weight?”. He was immediately out of the picture from that second. Not only are you trying to change someone on the first time you met them, but you also have no social intelligence to know what should and should not be said.
  • Another friend of mine sat with a very rigid man. He told her “listen, starting off, I noticed several things about you that I cannot accept in a wife: 1- I noticed that your clothes need to be looser. 2- I heard you travelled with your friends several times before, I believe travelling is a waste of time unless necessary and I don’t like you travelling without me. 3- you mentioned something about having separate accounts? A man and his wife should be one. So one account is a must. 4- I know you’ve been working for years but I prefer that my wife doesn’t work. She politely went through the date and never got back to him. Who does he think he is again?
  • When my cousin proposed to his current wife, he told her that he actually saw her before but definitely didn’t want to propose because she looked a little darker than he likes a woman to be, but thankfully that time it was just the lighting and she’s not as dark as he thought so here he is ! And yet she still married him. For me, he would’ve been a goner. What will you do if I get tanned in a vacation? If I get a burn on my face one day? Divorce me? Meh.

Lesson of the day : never try to change someone or comment on their appearance (unless positively) on the first date !

China refuses to allow DJI drones to deliver $6 billion in penalties to the US!

Over recent years, the United States has ramped up sanctions against various sectors of China’s industry, including the booming drone sector.

DJI, the leading Chinese drone manufacturer, now faces staggering fines totaling $840 million, along with demands for access to its core source code.

This controversy has not only sparked resentment in China but also raised questions about the U.S.’s approach to China’s technological advancements.

These sanctions are more than just punitive measures; they reflect the United States’ concerns and competitiveness in China’s thriving drone manufacturing industry.

As drones play an increasingly crucial role in modern warfare, tensions have escalated.

However, DJI’s dominance in the global drone market is rooted in its own innovation, not the misappropriation of U.S. technology.

https://youtu.be/_LlbqXGKX9A

What does Warren Buffett mean by making a “classic value bet” on HP?

Unlike us mere mortals, Warren Buffett actually reads company financial statements. Even more than that, he understands them. Surprisingly, he’s not big on what lawyers call “due diligence”, where you have a team of accountants and lawyers look at the company to see if they’re hiding anything because, over his years of experience, Buffett has learned that companies always hide their weaknesses in plain sight.

The “Buffet Way” is to go over a company’s public information and then put a question mark next to anything that looks weird. Other people do that too, but then they start asking questions of the company’s management. Buffett doesn’t do that – if there are too many question marks he just stops looking at the company. Plenty of companies to invest in. He’s usually right too.

So, what does he mean by “value”? Well, throughout Buffett’s career, his favourite companies tend not to be “growth companies” or “the next hot technology”. Frankly, unless Buffett fully understands the company’s products and business model, those are both massive question marks and he would rather not risk Berkshire-Hathaway’s money on them. Instead, Buffett has always preferred companies with lots of revenue that are consistently profitable. I remember reading one of his annual reports where he explained why he bought a company that made chocolates – it had consistent revenue and profits, and had a good management team and workforce. Sold.

Now, HP has been in business forever and has often been at the forefront of technology, but lately it has settled down to produce everyday products for consumers instead of specialty products for engineers. It sells a lot of stuff (at wholesale, it’s not a retailer), has a good team of management and engineers, and can be found at both the high and low ends of the market. It has good revenues and profits.

Naturally, most investors ignore HP because its stock price is pretty steady. That’s not a problem for Buffett. He thinks that many stocks of profitable solid companies are undervalued. He bases a stock’s price on its fundamentals, how much it sells, what it’s profit is, and how much it spends on ongoing research and development. In other words, he’s not buying HP’s stock because he thinks it’s going to go way up. He’s buying it because based on its current price, he thinks the share price will keep up with inflation and still have money left over for shareholders.

And he may be right. I bought two HP laptops this year. My printer is HP. My three old computers are HP.

What is the most unusual punishment a criminal has ever received?

You didn’t necessarily need to be a criminal to receive this punishment. This punishment was meant for vagrants and undesirable people. The punishment was called the tramp chair.

The Tramp chair was invented by Sanford Baker in 1885, and it was designed for towns that were too small for the Jails or for towns that couldn’t afford to build one.

The undesirables as they were known would be locked in the cage as an encouragement to move along. The people being punished were sometimes stripped naked before being locked in the chair, leaving the person to deal with the thick and sometimes rusty bars heating and cooling depending on the temperature outside.

They were even paraded around town to be subjected to harassment and cruel taunts from the public. They would then be wheeled to the edge of town to be released and foisted to the next town.

The Last of Us | Episode 1 | Fungus Pandemic Takeover Explained Perfectly

The gradual shift from amusement to horror on the TV host’s face is just so damn perfect, that scene in particular sends chills up my spine.

If the CCP attacks Guam as part of an invasion of Taiwan ought to the US destroy the Three Gorges Dam?

Jonathan Stern,I noticed that you don’t understand the military strength of the United States.

Iran’s strength is weak, but the United States dare not blockade the Strait of Hormuz.

Only by understanding oneself and the enemy can we win war.

For decades, the United States has attacked many weak countries. This makes you think that the United States can attack any country on Earth without retaliation. The United States can attack China’s Three Gorges Dam, and China can also retaliate and attack New York, rather than attacking the US warships.

Think about it, can China attack New York City after the United States attacks China’s Three Gorges Dam?

I hope my answer can make you smarter.

What are some potential internal factors that could cause China to fail?

Well. Just follow the United States model…

  • Large numbers of Chinese people could start getting themselves addicted to heroin and fentanyl and dying from overdose.
  • The China cops could start stepping on citizens necks in the streets or choking them to death or shooting them 12 times in the back for minor offences.
  • Families could quarrel and argue and split up over differences in political beliefs.
  • Hate groups could be allowed to spring up and flourish and spread their hate, on the basis that they are exercising their freedom of speexh.
  • China could let its school standards in math and science deteriorate badly.
  • China could stop providing universal healthcare to its citizens and make essential medical services very expensive for its people.
  • China could allow free and easy access to guns for all, and improve its chances of having numerous mass shootings occur each month.
  • It could choose senile octagenarians or outright criminals to be its leader.
  • China could deny birth control and abortions to its women and girls.
  • Instead of building more homes, schools, hospitals and other public infrastructure, it could buy more and more deadly missiles and bombs and mines and use them in wars on foreign soil, faraway from itself.

Well, that would be a very strong start.

Your soul belongs to God Bedazzled

Great scene.

This scene is so powerful, just by looking at him and the friendliness of his voice, where he states that despite your mistakes everything is going to be just fine. This is by far the greatest interpretation of God I’ve ever seen, makes me happy to have witnessed it :)”

What’s the sleaziest trick a landlord tried to pull on you?

The landlord was this old witch in Ardwick Manchester.

She had a perfect set of furniture which she would move in and take photos of and develop them (this was still the age of paper photographs).

She would then move the furniture out and put some cheapo chipboard furniture into the house.

I took photos of these with time and date stamps.

She was an awful landlord and would always let herself in and root through our stuff. Absolutely nothing was repaired ever and I am almost certain she would steal money locked in our rooms. It was a shared house so when one of us had a day off and slept late she’d walk in on one of us sleeping and make excuses.

When the contract ended we decided to leave.

She of course kept the deposit because of significant damage to the furniture.

I showed my photographs she showed hers. This was back before deposit protection schemes so it went to the small claims court to get the house deposit back. She played the I’m an innocent old woman and these young men are scum.

She won, we lost. She kept the deposit.

The Ukrainian guy who lived with us didn’t like that at all. He went to Do it All bought a big lump hammer and caused massive structural damage to the house and went home to Kiev a couple days later.

CNN reported that the United States government is seeking more information about the Huawei Mate 60 Pro and to determine if parties bypassed American restrictions on semiconductor exports. What’s next?

Well, this is a prime example of the fog of war descending on America.

By forcing Huawei to cut ties with former partners, Huawei went dark, at least to the US government and foreign corporations vulnerable to US sanctions.

This is a problem America created, for America to solve.

The key pieces are all domestic mainland players who are sanction-resistant, or already under sanction. The US can certainly up the pressure and throw the kitchen sink at them, but they will not willingly divulge information based on a “query” by Americans.

You want it that way, you can have it.

Before 2018/19, the electronics industry was centered around East Asia, and people knew what the competition was working on, more or less, because the supply chain (and talent) was shared. Next-gen Apple and Google features were leaked months in advance, and many were right on the money.

But Donald the Orange changed all that.

Mainland players went dark, as multiple rounds of sanction tore up the eco-system for good.

It’s a brave new world, and there is a lot more uncertainty in the air ex-China, because the biggest unanswered questions are, what’s my Chinese competitors working on, and how is my largest market going to evolve? Remember, the Chinese government has mostly parried, and the Chinese will overwhelmingly buy Chinese once competitive domestic options come to market.

The electronics business is one with incredibly high bars for sunk cost, and mistakes can be very expensive, if not fatal.

The Chinese though, retain excellent business intelligence, because the major players are all represented in the industrial chain.

Good luck to the blind fighting the sighted, even if the spears are a little longer, and the swords sharper… for now.

When we study Russian military history, we realize that the Russian army always starts its wars badly and improves over time. Why does it happen?

This is not correct that it always happens, but instead of pointing out instances of this being wrong, because Russia eventually lost, or because Russia actually rolled their enemies right away, I will tell you why Russia has an affinity for this kind of warfare.

The answer is geography. Russia is an immense country, and even if most people live in the western regions it confers massive advantages. For example, Russia can hide things, even with modern intelligence gathering, Russia is so big, that yes you can take satellite images of all of Russia, but by the time that you analyze them things could have changed. For this reason many of Russia’s ICBMs are near invulnerable, as they are moved around Siberia on trucks, making it nearly impossible to have an accurate picture of where they actually are.

Historically, Russia has time on its side. Why? Because it has ample space to recover from defeats. Most enemies only ever fight a portion of Russia, with the rest of Russia supporting the economic efforts. If you advance 600km into Russia you will certainly hurt it, but you will have quite a bit more to go. If you advance 600km into Germany, you’re now in France.

As such, history is very forgiving to the country in Europe with the most natural resources, largest population, and most amount of room for failure. Russia can at least partially recover from nearly any initial failure militarily. This gives them time to adapt to what ever caused their initial defeat, and reverse the outcome of the war, provided they have the will to do so over the particular issue.
Other countries have the ability to do this, but rarely the time. For a small country, a defeat is usually decisive and they get no second chances.

The Sopranos || Fix You

The Sopranos is still the best written show to this date. Game of Thrones does some things better, The Wire does some things better, Breaking Bad does some things better, Mad Men does some things better, but The Sopranos takes the cake in terms of character interactions and making real lifelike characters. The Sopranos has more profound characters/character relationships than any show I’ve seen, and in my opinion characters are the most important part of a TV show, so it’s the GOAT no doubt. Plus the fact that it’s the foundation for HBO, TV dramas, and the “anti-hero.” The Sopranos is #1 all-time in my opinion.

TSMC prizes Japan’s chips skills after US stumbles

Taiwan’s TSMC, which is making an unprecedented push into chip manufacturing overseas, is taking an increasingly optimistic view of Japan as a production base, two industry sources said, as problems persist at its new factory in Arizona.

TSMC, the world’s largest contract chipmaker, is frustrated in Arizona, the sources said, where it has struggled to recruit workers for the gruelling chipmaking trade and faced pushback from unions on efforts to bring in workers from Taiwan.

The company has growing confidence in Japan, where an $8.6 billion fab under construction in a chipmaking hub on the island of Kyushu is on track to start producing mature-technology chips in 2024, the sources said.

While keen to ensure a smooth ramp up at the first fab, the chipmaker is considering adding capacity and a second fab in Japan, the sources said, which could include the production of more advanced chips.

Several chip industry sources spoke to Reuters about TSMC’s view of Japan and its global expansion on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.

Successful expansion by TSMC in Japan could give a boost to efforts by the country to regain its lost status as a chip manufacturing powerhouse and support its automotive and electronics industries amid growing regional competition.

TSMC said in a statement its overseas expansion depends on factors including the needs of customers, the level of government support and cost considerations.

In Arizona, TSMC plans to produce advanced chips but a shortage of skilled workers has forced the company to push back production at its first fab by a year to 2025.

“Any project… will have some learning curve. In the past five months the improvement has been tremendous,” TSMC Chairman Mark Liu said of the Arizona project last week.

Fabs in the U.S., Japan and Germany, where it is also expanding, are “inherently incomparable” due to differences in location, setup and scope, TSMC said.

NATURAL FIT

The U.S., Japan and Germany have offered TSMC billions of dollars in subsidies for it to localise production in efforts to diversify the supply of chips, which are essential to the defence, automotive and electronics industries.

The $40 billion investment in Arizona allows TSMC to add capacity outside Taiwan, where it faces constraints on land, power, water and labour.

But the company views Japan as a more natural fit in terms of work culture, and its government is easy to deal with and generous with subsidies, the sources said.

“The relationship between TSMC and the Japanese government is mutually beneficial,” said Lucy Chen, an analyst at Isaiah Research.

Japan’s advantages for the chipmaker include its network of chip equipment and materials suppliers, similarities in work culture and proximity to Taiwan, she added.

TSMC sees workers in Japan, which is known for long hours and strong commitment to employers, as more willing to work a punishing schedule with overtime as chipmaking machines run around the clock in sterile clean rooms, the sources said.

“A lot of machines cannot be shut down because it costs TSMC to recalibrate on rebooting,” said a chip industry executive.

It is only a two-hour flight to Kyushu, where TSMC is partnering with companies including Sony, a leading maker of image sensors.

Taiwanese workers arriving to help set up the fab are welcome, and the chipmaker will pay higher wages to secure local employees as it competes with rivals such as foundry venture Rapidus, the sources said.

“It seems to us that TSMC is really positive about investment in Japan,” said a senior official at the powerful Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), which has offered subsidies worth up to 476 billion yen ($3.23 billion) for the first fab.

“We will really welcome the second fab project in general but we have to see the detail first,” the official said.

While many equipment and materials makers already have global operations, to meet its exacting standards TSMC has also brought suppliers to Japan from Taiwan, the sources said.

RISING CAPITAL SPENDING

TSMC’s enthusiasm for Japan is being tempered by concerns about higher costs across the business and worries about the macro environment, the sources said.

Capital expenditure ballooned to $36 billion last year from $10 billion in 2018, with the company forecasting a slightly smaller outflow this year.

TSMC thought costs to build a fab would be 20% higher in the U.S. than in Taiwan but they are actually about 50% higher, an investor briefed by company management said.

The chipmaker plans to build an $11 billion fab in Germany with local firms but is also concerned the work culture there, with long vacations and strong unions, will hit output, the sources said.

Investors worry about the effect of higher costs but “the impact on TSMC today has not been that big because its leading technology gives it pricing power,” said Brady Wang, an analyst at research firm Counterpoint.

($1 = 147 Yen)

What is the most embarrassing incident while you were on a vacation to a different country?

In a very nice cafe in Malaysia, I was sitting with my husband about to order after we decided on what we want.

I do what I always do in Kuwait and Egypt, raising a hand and loudly saying “excuse me!”, my voice breaking the strange quietness of this cafe.

I’m not even exaggerating when I say that almost everyone in the cafe turned their head to look at me.

I whisper to my husband “um. Seems like this is not how they do it here.”

A waiter comes to us rushing to take the order. He then very politely explains to us that we should use the pieces of paper on the table (which I mistook for tissues till that moment) to write down the numbers next to each order in the menu, then ever so easily press on a button on the table.

There is literally no need at all to even talk to the waiter. He just comes, picks up the paper while smiling at us.

Well, I guess that explains why 30 people or so were staring holes at me when my “excuse me” echoed around haha.

I felt like such a peasant.

The Power Of The Neocon Narrative Is Evil

With respect gentlemen, Europeans are too busy chewing grass. Like most of humanity. The politicians are busy bowing down to the money changers and are firmly in their grip. Peace, love and blessings to those that seek it.

Do you trust a cop as your neighbor?

Short answer, NO.

Let me explain….

I use to live in a subdivision with my mother when I was under the age of 18 and we had a female police officer that lived at the end of the cul de sac. Whenever she had a party her guests would park in front of others driveways and on others property (I came out of my house to find several cars parked on my mothers front lawn). I had to be somewhere, so I went down and asked her if the people who parked on my moms property and in front of my driveway could move. I was told NO and the door was shut in my face. So, I went home and called a friend of mine that owned a wrecker service and explained the situation to him. He said that he had 3 wreckers in the area and that he would be happy to help. Well, 20 minutes later I had all 3 wreckers pull up and start hooking up cars. One of the ladies at the police officers party must of noticed because the next thing I know I have 4 ladies screaming at the tow truck drivers to put their cars down, each had to pay a “Drop Fee” of $200.00. This was the last time that any of her guests parked in front of my driveway. Whenever I had a party, weather people were parked in front of her house or not, I was guaranteed to have the police called.

Many Worlds Theory: You’re in a Parallel Universe | Can You Visit Your Other Lives?

The ability of this man to explain the complexities of quantum physics in an almost digestable way to the masses is a superpower. Leaves me awe struck at the time, attention, care, & talent that goes into this channel. Bravo.

Did Huawei’s launch of the Kiriin 9000s chip for the Mate 60 Pro show that <5nm processes are not necessary for modern mobile phones, and how will this affect TSMC’s business?

TSMC is on course for reduced margins, just because it is forced to build plants beyond Greater China, which are more costly to build and run, not to mention having to hire local and deal with culture and language barriers complicating operations, especially the crucial ramp-up.

These are risk management strategies, and not economically driven.

That is baked in, regardless of Huawei.


This is a rather curious time to ask the question, because we have arrived at the plateau of mobile computing. A cheap phone today has similar performance as the cutting edge 5 years ago, and that is enough computing power for the average user, even the occasional gamer. The same happened with laptops some years back, when the node dividend began delivering machines with all-day battery life.

Huawei’s Kirin 9000s is a 7nm chip with 5nm performance, and there are compromises to raw computing power, die area, and of course, power draw, compared to the cutting edge from the competition.

Huawei’s customers know the Mate 60 pro isn’t as good as the iPhone 15 Pro performance wise, but this hasn’t stopped them from joining the queue for the phone. My dad told me enthusiastically “even Jackie Chan can’t get a set!”. Wonder where he heard that from.

Obviously, different dynamics are at work here.

What made the difference was the return of Kirin and more importantly, the 5g modem. At the mobile computing plateau, the “speed” of a phone is more likely bottlenecked by the network rather than the CPU/GPU, unlike mobile gaming and other specialized tasks.

The Kirin 9000s has decent performance (especially the highlight: 5g network speeds), enough to join the flagship club in 2023. More importantly, it offers a package that cannot be found anywhere else, including Hongmeng, AI driven gestures and automated payments, and a really snazzy camera.

These features directly impact lifestyle usability, and breed customer loyalty, because it is technology that just work. A lot of engineering was committed to refine and polish them, and these are major selling points.


So Huawei has a “good enough” flagship for 2023, in terms of specs. But is there a future for a node-bound Kirin? I believe Huawei will struggle to meet demand for the next year or two, but beyond that, we will have to see how far along the indigenization of the chipmaking supply chain is.

What interests me more isn’t the chip, but the independent direction Huawei will forge with AI, Hongmeng and its integration with the IOT. Even Qualcomm is sending overtures to develop Hongmeng devices, just because it doesn’t want to be left out of a 700m user base market.

For example, what will a Hongmeng-enabled 5.5G IOT ecosystem look like in maturity? What other AI-enabled features are in the works? I’ve heard some impressive forecasts but I’m bound to secrecy.

Exciting times in virgin territory.


It isn’t the chip, but the overall ecosystem.

What is something that you can do in your country that a person in America cannot do?

American expat living in Denmark. I’ve been here for 12 years, and I can honestly say that I have far more freedoms than I ever did in the US.

Things I can do here that I couldn’t do in the US-

  • Get injured, sick, or have a baby without having to pay to see a single doctor or hospital bill. This includes having an MRI, x-rays, ultrasounds, EKG, various blood tests, several days in hospital while in labour, and quite a number of procedures during labour.
  • While mental health care isn’t free, there are ways to get mental health care which is free. I’ve finally been able to get a diagnosis of ADHD and bipolar disorder, after living my entire life struggling.
  • Because I am on medication I’ll need for the rest of my life, I’m able to afford it without going bankrupt.
  • I’m going to school to get my degree, free of charge. In fact I even get paid to go to school!
  • Other things less personal- we can walk around with open containers of alcohol. We can drink while sitting in a park, on the beach, or pretty much anywhere else within reason.
  • I could, if I so wished, walk down to the beach and sun myself completely naked. I could also sunbathe topless most anywhere.
  • I don’t have to worry about including enough tax when mentally tallying up the cost of groceries or a meal out and. Tax is included in all prices.
  • I also don’t have to spend even more money tipping since the wait staff, bartender, busboys, etc. are all paid properly.
  • I can bike safely, even in the middle of the city, without worrying about getting hit by a car. We have such excellent bike paths which are much like a sidewalk with a curb dividing it from the street. My 7 year old can bike as well without worry.

I could go on, but these are just the basic ones that I thought of first.

The Sopranos || Wonderful Life

That one clip of Carmela and Furio dancing, while the line, “It’s a wonderful life” plays in the background is so perfect. What an absolutely brilliant video. This brought tears to my eyes. Nothing will ever match up to this show. Masterpiece.

What is the most badass display of professional expertise you have ever witnessed?

  • 7 inches rain pour in a single night.
  • Roads flooded.
  • Cars were left on roadside by their owners as they couldn’t start them.

And 6am in the morning there was a knock at my door. The milk delivery boy was standing in front of me. Sleeves of his trousers folded, and with a smile on his face. I asked him “how did you manage to reach here?”. He replied “sir, I walked through the water with my friends, it is essential to make milk available to everyone in such conditions. Those who have kids can’t manage without it”.

It was a small incident but really worth giving a thought.

Education makes us capable but professionalism is self-taught.

The CRAZIEST MYTHS I’ve heard about CHINA! | UTTERLY SHOCKED***

Exactly, a young man who speaks the truth and not brain washed by US media.

Why are so many Americans so damn brainwashed?”

https://youtu.be/h8QtTxE3XKI

Given Huawei’s chip break thru with the Mate 60 pro, would it make any difference to the future outlook of American chip manufacturers if the US was to abandon the high tech sanctions against China?

Strictly speaking, it isn’t a “breakthrough” yet, because this is the Chinese being very creative with a set of heavily crippled tools and components, producing a world-class flagship mobile device against immense odds.

The Chinese came together and dug a tunnel using shovels because the excavators were taken off the market.

Nevertheless, they persevered… and saw light.

But, and here’s the but, they have one tunnel, and still don’t own any excavators.


Before we go on, we should take a cursory glance at the chipmaking industry.

To reduce the clutter, we can divide the history of chipmaking into two epochs, pre-2007, and post.

In the first period, Intel was dominant, and it almost drove AMD out of business, taking Global Foundries along with it. AMD was a “fabless” foundry model developed to challenge Intel’s vertically integrated model, betting that superior design married with partners who could better control (and share) manufacturing cost while keeping pace with Moore’s law would deliver competitive products. AMD ultimately failed because it couldn’t wrestle sufficient market share in the x86 market, which was already past its exponential growth phase.

In other words, the scraps that fabs fed on ex-Intel were not enough to drive progress.

What changed in 2007?

That’s right. The arrival of the smartphone, in Steve’s hand.

It ushered in a new eco-system, ARM, that was completely separate (but even more profitable) than Intel- and Microsoft-controlled x86.

Another watershed happened in 2007, but it was quietly announced to little fanfare, unlike the iPhone. Nvidia announced CUDA, ushering in the era of GPGPU.

ARM and the GPU revolutionized the business of fabs. The chief beneficiary was TSMC, and to a lesser extent, Samsung.

Set free from the chains of x86 and Windows, the singular pursuit of mobile computing in the early days of the iphone 3GS and 4 was this: how to squeeze ever more power (flops) from engines shrinking in size (die area) but increasing in fuel economy (flops/Watt)?

To be perfectly honest, the early smartphones were pretty much unusable from a modern standpoint. That’s because the fabs lagged far behind Intel, despite the same tools and ecosystem available to the competition. [The original iPhone was powered by a 90nm Samsung chip]. Apple’s orders and the potential of the smartphone becoming the one piece of tech everyone MUST own finally gave fabs the nitro-fuel needed to beat Intel at its own game.

The secret?

As with most economic problems, lots of cash to buy the best tools and talent.

As late as 2014/15, TSMC was still tapping out chips at 28nm for the flagship Snapdragon 800 series. The contemporaneous A8 was preferentially made on the 20nm node, TSMC’s cutting edge offering 8–9 years ago. Intel tapped out Broadwell at 14nm, the clear industry leader.

It was around this time that truly functional smartphone computing arrived, delivered by process node improvement. Apple’s A8 tapped out at 2 billion transistors, and TSMC completed its leapfrog past Intel in 2017 with the A11, a 10nm chip with >4 billion transistor on die area slightly smaller than the A8. Intel’s Kabylake was still stuck on the same 14nm node, albeit with finfet improvements.


Why did I attempt a grandfather’s monologue of seemingly disjointed developments?

TSMC completed a doubling of transistor density in less than 3 years to leapfrog past Intel, and subsequently broke new ground conquering sub-10nm physics with novel methods and tools, including the all-too-familiar EUV.

Most of the talent that achieved the breakthrough were Chinese, and a good number of them (several thousands) are currently working for mainland competition. Key managers were offered “out of this world” renumeration that were unheard of in the industry to sign up. These are cutting edge talent that know the business of chipmaking inside out, baptized by the fire of success that successfully dethroned Intel.

There are experienced captains steering the Chinese ship through the hurricane of US sanctions.


My friend, who still works at TSMC, thought the battle was lost the moment Donald the Orange declared war on Huawei. In fact, it was American belligerence that finally persuaded several of her colleagues to jump ship, and not the numbers on the contract. These were people who worked tireless to push yields to records during ramp-up, and methodically improved workflow for novel methods and equipment, without the benefit of recipes and practical limits. I like to think of them as chefs experimenting with a new menu earning three michelin stars, despite having to learn new ways of cooking with never-seen-before ingredients.

You can’t lose, with master chefs like that.

As she likes to say, 欺负中国没人,门儿都没有。


America picked the wrong fight, and boarded the wrong train.

路选错了是没有尽头的。

Pennsylvania Dutch Chicken and Flat Dumplings

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Ingredients

  • 1 large (5 pound) washed chicken
  • 1 large onion, quartered
  • 3 stalks celery, cut into large chunks
  • 1 teaspoon whole peppercorn
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons salt

Instructions

  1. Place chicken in a 6- to 8-quart stockpot. Add remaining ingredients. Bring to boil. Simmer until chicken is done, about 2 hours.
  2. When cool, remove bones and fat from chicken. Cut into pieces, and return to pot.
  3. Noodles: In a bowl, mix together 2 cups flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Make a well in the center, and gradually work 4 eggs into the flour until stiff dough is formed, adding water a little at a time if necessary. Knead until smooth. Divide dough in half. Roll each half as thin as possible then cut into thin 1-2 inch squares.
  4. Bring the broth back to rolling boil. Drop noodle squares one at a time, making sure each are drenched in broth. Reduce heat, cover and continue to cook until noodles are done, about 8 minutes. DON’T PEEK!
  5. Serve in large bowl and ladle onto plates at the table. Serve with chopped onion.

What would you do?

I’m asking.

My main beef

My main “beef” with my parents was a simple one. At every opportunity for me to do something outside of the school narrative…

“Study hard. Get a good job, and you will be set for life with a good pension.”

…They pretty much sucked at helping me.

I asked my mother; “How do I buy land”? And she looked at me for a moment and answered…

“You just go and buy it.”

Gosh, Mom. That was so helpful.

NOT!

At that time, there wasn’t any Google about. No internet. Only a small town library, and neither the teachers or anyone would help me out. No one could answer my questions.

I’d ask my dad; “How do I buy stocks”?

He would chuckled. Then thought about it, and he answered…

“You just go and buy them.”

Gosh dad. That was so helpful.

NOT!

And it wasn’t just that.

I asked my dad, “How do I ask a girl out for a date”?

And his answer was…

“What, who’s the girl?”

And I would say, “No one you know. So how do I do it”?

And he would chuckle, and he said…

“Oh, you just go up to her and ask her if she wanted to go out with you.”

Wow! So very helpful.

NOT!

Do not make the same mistakes that my parents made. Take the time. Enunciate. Explain. Be empathic, and be kind and considerate.

It will make a BIG difference.

Todays…

How China Destroyed US Sanctions and Changed Microchip Forever!

The USA did not declare war on Huawei. They declared war on hundreds of thousands of motivated Chinese set to go starving on the streets, unless they pushed themselves…

What many people don’t know is Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei only owns roughly 1% of the company, and the employees own 99% of the company, so imagine a body of hundreds of thousands of supercharged and super-talented people giving their all, not only for survival of their families but also with a vengeance to prove that they can’t be suppressed and will fight back.

It is unknown how many generations of Huawei-made chips ahead of the US- made chips. But the performance, especially the downloading and uploading speed of Huawei Mate 60 Pro is one to two generations ahead of the US-made Apple 15. Why?

Huawei is a networking equipment maker which makes mobile phones. This means it knows the backend first, and then how to connect the network to its Frontend devices, including mobile phones.

Apple only focuses on Frontend consumer devices, and not connecting with backend devices because its focus is on the user experience.

Apple relies on Qualcomm for its 5G transceiver; Huawei designs its own 5G transceiver.

That is the difference.

Newborn kitten cries when she sees her mother lying motionless on her left side full of thorns

Newborn kitten cries when she sees her mother lying motionless on her left side full of thorns The mother cat and her cubs have an accident on a strange fruit full of thorns A mother cat crashes next to the fruit back.

We have seen the mother cat and her two young children lying here. kittens just a few days old swaddled around their mother. and cried out of voice when he saw his mother in trouble.

next to it is a fruit full of thorns. This cat family is pitiful.

when I thought the fruit from the other corner fell on the mother cat. but luckily the other fruit is just next to the mother cat and the kittens.

Maybe the mother cat was exhausted.

We are walking in a tropical forest. There are a lot of dry leaves here. I came across a family of cats in distress here.

The kittens were crying when they saw their mother lying motionless. The mother cat lies next to the thorny fruit weevil. I come closer to check and will help the cat family.

The kittens are quite small. Luckily this thorny fruit didn’t hit the kitten. The mother cat is very weak. it needs immediate care. I will help this poor meod family.

https://youtu.be/WUKV-HSJypQ

Sweet Potato Layer Cake

This is a Southern classic.

Loaded Sweet Potato Cake recipe slice on a plate
Loaded Sweet Potato Cake recipe slice on a plate

Ingredients

Cake

  • 1 1/2 cups vegetable oil
  • 2 cups granulated sugar
  • 4 eggs, separated
  • 1 1/2 cups finely shredded uncooked sweet potato (about 1 medium)
  • 1/4 cup hot water
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 2 1/2 cups cake flour
  • 3 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 teaspoon ground cinnamon
  • 1 teaspoon ground nutmeg
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup chopped pecans

Frosting

  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1 1/3 cups granulated sugar
  • 2 (5 ounce) cans evaporated milk
  • 4 egg yolks, beaten
  • 2 2/3 cups flaked coconut
  • 1 cup chopped pecans
  • 2 teaspoons vanilla extract

Instructions

  1. Cake: In a mixing bowl, beat oil and sugar.
  2. Add egg yolks, one at a time, beating well after each addition.
  3. Add sweet potato, water and vanilla extract; mix well.
  4. In a small mixing bowl, beat egg whites until stiff; fold into the sweet potato mixture.
  5. Combine flour, baking powder, cinnamon, nutmeg and salt; add to potato mixture.
  6. Stir in pecans.
  7. Pour into three greased 9-inch round cake pans.
  8. Bake at 350 degrees F for 22 to 27 minutes or until a wooden pick inserted near the center comes out clean.
  9. Cool for 10 minutes before removing to wire racks.
  10. Frosting: Melt the butter in a saucepan; whisk in sugar, milk and egg yolks until smooth. Cook and stir over medium heat for 10 to 12 minutes or until thickened and bubbly.
  11. Remove from the heat; stir in the coconut, pecans and vanilla extract. Cool slightly.
  12. Place one cake layer on a serving plate; spread with a third of the frosting.
  13. Repeat layers.

Did witnessing someone’s death change the way you were living your life?

When I was in high school, in my senior year, I had a co-op job as an electronic tech, and worked for a small business. The business was on Rt 11, in a business district leading into Bloomsburg Pa.

One afternoon, while at my bench, we heard a car accident occur outside our building. Apparently, a young man no older than me was speeding and decided to use the enter lane to pass people, and caught a young family getting read to turn off to the seasonal hamburger place next door to so (to the right when facing the highway)

Tye family was ok, but a group of workers from the welding/fabrication shop next to us (on the left) ran out to the car and attempted to pull the young driver out.

But he apparently had a broken neck… I will never forget seeing how his head moved, it just sort of flopped around on his shoulders. That was 43 years ago, and I still remember that part vividly.

A day or two later his sister dropped by and asked us if we had seen a ring of his that was missing. We did walk around the accident scene but never found it.

Because he broke his neck on his steering wheel, I started to wear my seatbelt while driving, long before there was a campaign to require it.

What is an example of a dirty trick that a thief tried but backfired when they saw your dog?

Don’t know if this was a thief or not, but a number of years ago there was a rise in fake “Utility Company Representatives” knocking on people’s doors. In many cases things went missing if these people were allowed into people’s homes (they worked in pairs).

At the time we were living in a duplex. The first floor level was about 6–8 inches higher than the level of the front porch. We had a Siberian Husky/German Shepherd mix (both sides of his parentage were pure blood pedigrees), and he was the best burglar alarm even invented. 60–70 lbs of solid muscle, the face of a wolf, and the most disconcerting part, 1 blue eye and one brown eye. Our storm door had a solid panel that went about halfway up the door. High enough that you couldn’t see the dog if he approached the door. The top was screened.

My wife answered the door and was faced with 2 “Utility Company Representatives” that were checking the water meters which were inside, down in the basement. Their trick was to gain entry, get the person who answered to accompany one down to the meter while the other one stayed in side the front door and “waited”, picking up anything they could find that might be valuable. Like wallets from purses. True to form, they wanted to come in and check the meter. My wife knows better and told them they couldn’t come in without some sort of ID. They started arguing that they had a legal right to inspect their hardware (they didn’t), and she kept telling them no and flicked the lock on the storm door.

Our ever faithful guard dog had walked over to the door while they were trying to talk their way in. When their tone started changing he got interested and decided to see who was talking to the boss-lady like that. He popped up on his hind legs which put his face not too far from level with the people on the porch, who suddenly decided they no longer had to gain entry, and said ‘someone else will contact you later’ as they left for greener pastures.

Best alarm system ever.

EDIT… Punctuation repairs (Thanks Ed), and I thought you all might like to see this buddy of mine. We lost him to The Bridge from cancer 29 years ago now, and still miss him every day. Sadly, we didn’t do a lot of picture taking back then, so my choice of pictures is limited.

He had the black and white Husky markings, and the longer snout and some brown from the Shepherd side. Check out his eyes, and imagine them staring at you through a screen door at eye level.

China and technology

The reason Trump thought that he could stop China from making DUV machines is because DUV machines encompass a lot of technologies.

If China is unable to produce any of these technologies then the DUV machines China purchased from ASML would be completely useless in a year or so. The parts need to be replaced. No parts, no working machine.

The light source breaks down all the time. The coating on the lenses only last for a few months. 1 year at most. All those machines that China bought from ASML for over $500 billion would become very expensive scrap metal.

But China managed to develop these core technologies. And it required the entire Chinese scientific community to do so.

But now that China has the core technologies, there is nothing the US can do to stop China from advancing. The US no longer controls Chinese chip industry.

This video explains just how intricate chip production is and how much leading edge technology is required to make on of these machines work.

The Sopranos || Get It Up

This should get more views, it’s such a perfect clean edit

How do I change someone’s political opinion from left wing to right wing?

Start buying them lavish gifts, like expensive vacations at 5-star luxury resorts, free airline flights to exotic destinations, Rolexes, things like that. Then buy their mom’s house and let mom continue to live there for free. Then donate the money for their kid’s education at an expensive university.

Okay, that’s an extreme case, but it works. Most famously, the first black mayors of Los Angeles and Detroit suspiciously became a lot more pro-business after they were elected than before, and that was just the result of freely given campaign contributions, invitations to nice dinners, and perks like the odd bottle of whisky that remain within the rules for gifts.

Take a look at Krysten Sinema, who got elected mostly because she had a massive team of young volunteers who saw her as a progressive. After she got elected, she started getting massive donations from pharmaceutical companies and, all of a sudden, she’s shifted a lot further to the right.

One of the reasons why this works is that running for office is incredibly expensive. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s first campaign cost $2 million, mostly spent on the Democratic primary. She was funded by a group who wanted someone more progressive, and now she’s elected to a safe Democratic seat, she will need less money going forward, but her $170,000 salary (seems a lot doesn’t it) still doesn’t pay for her New York rent, her Washington rent, and her student loans.

One of the best tricks plays on vanity. The politician writes a book, which gets published, and “friends” buy enough copies to make it a best seller. This is really sleazy, but it happens all the time, and it is in no way illegal. There are allegations that Hilary Clinton’s success in the futures market was a set up where a benefactor essentially ate losses and just passed on the gains.

This is why the rich are heavily into “charity”, showing how good they are by building college buildings and universities (with their name on them of course). It’s certainly cheaper than paying taxes for the same thing, that’s for sure. Andrew Carnegie started it with libraries, and is seen as a saint, but governments still had to maintain those (most are now over a century old, including one or two in my home town of Toronto) and the donors usually don’t pay for the upkeep.

What is the strangest culture shock you experienced when visiting America?

This woman is an Egyptian living in Kuwait. -MM

I’ve already written about some shocking things I’ve come across in the states in another post, so I suppose this is part 2, but here we go:

  • Heard people going at it…you cannot imagine my shock as a person coming from a conservative area, one who hasn’t even seen her parents kissing, to witness such a thing. But while staying at a hotel, for the first time in my life, I heard two people going at it very loudly so that it was impossible to ignore them. I was so embarrassed and my husband was laughing at me for looking so shocked.
  • Serving water for free in restaurants. For a capitalist country like the states, I was surprised they didn’t benefit from this one thing that people will undoubtedly pay for. You certainly have to pay for water over here in restaurants.
  • Ice.. always. Continuing from the last point, water is always served with ice. Someone like me who can’t have very cold water had to specifically ask for it to be omitted.
  • Medical issues. I needed antibiotics during my visit because of an infection that I get frequently. Not having insurance as a simple visitor, we had to pay 400$ to see a doctor and get this simple prescription. Meanwhile back home, I got it for less than a dollar. So I swore to pack lots of meds next time I come over.
  • Vast spaces. Perhaps because I’ve been only to Buffalo, Niagara, and Oregon but there was always a ton of space between buildings. The markets were huge with vast parking lots. And the roads were very big for the most part.
  • Black people everywhere. In New York airport (JFK), almost all workers were black! That was a surprise because I always heard of the diversity in the states. But even later in Oregon, almost everyone was white.
  • Security at the airport. That one was quite funny. When you get scanned at the JFK airport, you have to stand in a certain cabin, face your right, raise your arms like a criminal, then they scan you. The woman worker shouted, “Put your arms up!” and I had no clue what she was talking about. She kept repeating then showed me the exact position and where to face. Then she said “Seems like you don’t travel often”. I wanted to say “Excuse me? I’ve been traveling since I was 4 but this doesn’t exist anywhere else I’ve been!”.
  • Coffee. That was no coffee. That was dirty water. Period. Lol. For real though, our definition of coffee in Egypt is Turkish coffee which is very heavy, dense, and intense in flavor.
  • Huge meals. Everyone said so before and yet I made the mistake of ordering an appetizer before the main dish, only to be surprised that the appetizer is so big that it’s a meal on its own. I felt so sad throwing half the food away as we were traveling and I couldn’t take it with me.
  • Reese’s everywhere. It was Reese’s heaven! All sort of sizes, shapes, and mixes. Like mixed with Cadbury, Oreos, and so on.
  • Credit card everywhere. I am not exaggerating when I tell you there hasn’t been a single place I’ve been to that doesn’t take credit.
  • Rich wildlife. Coming from a desert, it was so impressive to just casually come across deer and squirrels. And at some point, I saw a massive number of seals. I learned the hard way that they stink.
  • They use their attractions wisely. I’ve been to countries that don’t give enough attention to grand places that leave you in awe, meanwhile, the states try to give such attention to whatever place they feel people may like visiting. Whenever you go to an especially cool place, you’ll find stores near it selling stamps, mugs, and stickers with pictures of that attraction. I’ve seen that at Niagara Falls and the redwoods in California. Did I mention that I’d never seen such huge trees in my life?

I loved the States quite a bit.

US chip giant opens $4bn Singapore plant

The world’s third-largest contract semiconductor maker, GlobalFoundries, on Tuesday opened a $4-billion manufacturing plant in Singapore as part of a global expansion to help ease an industry supply crunch.

The new Singapore facility will produce an additional 450,000 wafers annually at full capacity by 2025 to 2026, general manager Tan Yew Kong told reporters, raising the city-state’s overall capacity to 1.5 million wafers each year.

The chips, usually used in smartphones and other mobile devices, are also increasingly in demand by automakers, especially for electric vehicles, adding to the pressure to raise production.

“The key megatrends of our industry — digitisation, connectivity, cloud computing — are all driving acceleration to a more connected and data-centric world,” GlobalFoundries president and chief executive Thomas Caulfield said at the launch.

“It demonstrates how central and critical the industry is to the world economy and how pervasive semiconductors are in enabling and enhancing all aspects of human life.”

Caulfield said that despite current economic headwinds, the company estimates the industry will double in the next decade.

“The catalyst for this growth will be AI (artificial intelligence),” he said.

The firm’s 23,000-square meter Singapore facility, which broke ground in 2021, will expand the global footprint of the company, which already has plants in the United States and Europe.

Singapore’s chip output currently makes up 11% of the global semiconductor market.

The global semiconductor market is predicted to experience a downturn of 10.3 percent this year but recover in 2024 and grow by 11.8%, according to estimates by the industry monitor World Semiconductor Trade Statistics.

Do intelligent people realize that they are smarter than everyone else around them?

Very often, the answer is no. Not only do intelligent people very often fail to realize how much smarter they are than everyone else, they also tend to overestimate other people’s intelligence even when they do. Let me tell you a little story.

Once upon a time, I was at a bar with some friends. The bar had an outdoor area where you could stand around and drink beer. There was a guy who thought it would be funny to ride past the bar repeatedly on an extremely loud moped. At certain times, he would stop, rev the moped so loud that nobody could hear themselves think, and begin whooping loudly. This same guy had been at it all day, not just by the bar, but riding up and down the streets and residential neighborhoods, screaming and hollering and bothering everyone he could with his moped.

I mentioned, casually, that I wouldn’t mind chucking my beer mug at his head if he were close enough. A friend of mine, whom we shall call Angus (not his real name), said, “Well, you should probably leave someone as unstable as that guy alone. He obviously has some serious emotional difficulties.”

Angus is a smart dude, but he misread the guy on the moped. The issue is that the guy on the moped was probably not suffering from some deep emotional trauma that had made him so obstreperous. Rather, Moped Guy’s thought process was, most likely, no more complicated than this: “YEAH! YEAH! LOUD! LOUD MOTHERFUCKER! YEAH LOOK AT IT MAN! YEAH! LOUD!”

The issue that Angus was having is that Angus, being an intelligent and empathetic individual, was trying to understand Moped Guy’s motivations and look at things from Moped Guy’s perspective. Angus was thinking to himself, “What would have to happen to me to get me to act that obnoxiously?” The thing is, intelligent people of high character, like Angus, are not moved to act like idiots unless they suffer something really bad, at which point a complicated emotional process leads to bad behavior. Angus’ miscalculation was that Moped Guy would have to have suffered some horrible trauma to act in the way he did. The big issue is that Angus did not account for Moped Guy’s stupidity, and forgot the simple fact that stupid people will act stupid without any suffering or instability. Dumb people just act dumb.

I have suffered from this problem myself. For the longest time, I did not realize that so much of human behavior was posturing, and did not realize how to read people correctly. I thought that, when someone talked to me about their interests, they were merely stating facts and not trying to talk to me about themselves. The vast majority of humans are so subjective that most of their communication is about themselves and not about things or ideas or even other people. Intelligent people have problems grasping that.

What is the worst thing that has happened because a patient lied to a doctor?

My father, as I may have said before, is an ER doctor.

One night, a case arrived to the hospital of a teen girl with what seemed like a regular fever. The team gave her the necessary meds and started running a few tests.

Her mother had rushed to the hospital with her and looked particularly nervous. The doctor asked her some typical questions such as when her daughter showed signs and so on, but she would have vague half-assed answers.

However, within a few hours, the girls fever was sky rocketing, and her blood pressure was getting very low, and for some reason she wasn’t responding to regular meds or fluids.

The mother looked very nervous then she timidly approached a nurse and told her “actually, I forgot to tell you something. My daughter just went through a liposuction a couple of days ago. I don’t know if these two things are related”.

Yet by the time this piece of information reached the doctors, the girl had already died. She was being treated for a regular fever until test results showed the real issue.

Turns out that the mother took her daughter, who was not even chubby to begin with, to undergo a liposuction. Given that the girl was underage, a parent’s approval is a must. Her father was completely against it but the mother went ahead and sneaked it with the daughter anyway.

And she was too scared of her husband knowing what she did so she didn’t want to let the secret out until she realized that the complications are more serious than she thought. But it was too late by then.

Lessons of the day:

1-Don’t put your child through unnecessary plastic surgery.

2-And don’t hold back information from the doctor for God’s sake.

Christopher Moltisanti – So Far (The Sopranos)

The most tragic character in fiction, even with all his flaws he will always be one of the greatest characters in the history of television…

https://youtu.be/idXp9arL83g

Is the Chinese government and economy transparent enough to gauge how good (or bad) their economy is going?

The Chinese government is a lot lot lot more transparent than the western government on the economy. It is simple Chinese government don’t need to be popular it need to be effective!

The U.S. government need to and use their media to fool Americans and hoodwinked them so that Yanks will always be highly naive and ignorant. How do they do that? Western media are profit motivated so they are free to make money by writing what westerners like to hear. So they write or broadcast what westerners like to hear.

After conniving you that China is at fault, China is your enemy, China is backward, China is evil, China steal your technology, China cheats, China take your jobs…..What do you like to hear? China fail and U.S. is great, it is exceptional, its economy is still wonderful. Your technology is unmatched. So you media cohort with your government to fool you and guess what that is what you want!

Chinese government don’t face election and popularity contest every 2 years! You do! China says and report as it is and encourage or motivate its citizens that it needs to buck up and work harder. Hence all the superlatives such ad the U.S. is exceptional, Britain is Great, US is the mist innovative, Britain invents everything…

China don’t do that. To us Empty vessels makes the most noise! Western media are simply lying media that spread half truths, fake news, misinformation, fabrications. Demonising others to distract your people from your impending collapse.

What did you learn “the hard way”?

I was studious, which resulted into me getting a scholarship in college. One of my friends asked me for some money (2500/-). He was my good friend, not best, and I was completely aware of his gambling and drinking habits.

I wanted to say “No”, because I knew the importance of money at that moment of my life. I was aware of the fact that he will never return it, but I still lent him the money, which was obviously never returned.


It was my first breakup and I was leading a miserable life. There was this girl who was my junior and she started taking interest in me.

I was uncomfortable, but she was pretty. I wasn’t ready for a relationship and she kept pushing me. Again, I wanted to say “No”, but it could have hurt her feelings.

Unwillingly, I said Yes. And that relationship survived for a month only.

Don’t judge me, I was an immature teenager back then.


There were many incidents in my life where I desperately wanted to say “No”, but ended up saying otherwise. And in return, I paid a huge price, not monetarily, but emotionally and mentally.

But today, things have changed. I have changed for my own good. And I have learned the art of saying “No”. People call me rude, arrogant etc, but who cares about their opinion?

This is my life, these are my struggles. They will only give their absurd opinion which is never required. Sometimes people think that saying “NO” is hard because your image will get maligned or it will hurt other people.

My question is, what will you do with your false pride? Maybe momentarily you will hurt people by saying “No”, but in the long term it will save you from huge disappointment.

This is what I learned the hard way: How to say “No” to the face when/where I am hesitant/uncomfortable.

It comes with multiple benefits:

  • You don’t have to lie.
  • You don’t have to make excuses.
  • You don’t have to justify anything.

I refused to please others at the expense of my emotional well being. Even if it is saying “No” to the people who are used to hearing “Yes”.

Learn the art of saying “No”. Don’t lie, don’t make excuses, don’t over explain yourself. Just simply decline.

The Sopranos || Easier

Man, thanks for this awesome work! This gives me power every time I rewatch it to deal with tough shit in evercold Moscow. I’d love to see more motivating sopranos vids from ya!”

What happened to your school bully?

When I first started High School, I had a guy that rode the bus with me every day, and made my life a living hell. His name was David R-. He was 18 years old and still in the tenth grade. He was bigger than me, and cussed like a sailor. He was mean and vicious, and he absolutely scared me to death.

I have vivid memories of him sitting behind me on the bus, slapping me in the back of the head as we rode home from school. It happened almost every day. This was 27 years ago and, back then, bullying was just a “common thing.” It was something you had to deal with. You had to learn to stand up for yourself and “be a man”. I would complain to the bus driver and the principal. Mr. Dave would get a good scolding, but he was right back at it the next day.


Well, after six months of this B/S, I’d finally had enough. I just snapped one day. I turned around and dove over the seat, and started pounding on him. Everyone went crazy. The driver slammed on the brakes, and brought the bus to a stop.


I was getting my tail kicked by this guy. He was bigger, faster and stronger, and the only thing I had on my side, was rage. We were up against the emergency exit, slugging it out, when, all of a sudden, the door just popped open, and we went tumbling into the street.


When we hit the pavement, Mr. Dave had his arm twisted behind his back. He landed on it, and I heard it snap like a piece of kindling. He pushed me off of him, and got up with a bone jutting out of his wrist. He was screaming his head off, and blood was pouring onto the asphalt.


Maybe I should have backed off at that point, but this guy had made my life hell for several months, and I wanted revenge. I twisted his broken arm behind his back, and took him down on the ground where I proceeded to beat the living daylights out of him. There were several cars that had stopped by this time, and it took two grown men to pull me off of him. It was the worst fight I’d ever had in my life, and it remains so to this day. My nose was busted and I had a black eye. Mr. Dave had a broken arm, a busted lip, two missing teeth, and a huge laceration across his forehead. They actually called an ambulance for him.


Both of us were suspended. Dave’s mother contacted my dad a few days later, and threatened to sue us. She wanted us to pay for Dave’s medical bills. However, I had a bus full of people, who absolutely hated Dave, and all of them were telling the principal about my six months of hell, and insisting that Dave had started the fight.


I was suspended for two weeks. I also got a month of detention, and couldn’t ride the bus for the rest of the year, but that was the end of my punishment. As far as I know, Dave never returned to school at all. I didn’t see him again for 15 years.


Then, right around 2005, I moved from Mississippi back to my hometown in Georgia. One day as I was walking out of a convenience store, I spotted my old high school bully picking up aluminum cans along the side of the road.


It totally shocked me, and I wasn’t absolutely sure that it was really him. After all, it had been 15 years. Still, I was PRETTY sure. So, I strolled over to the edge of the parking lot for a better look. Just as I walked up, he turned to stare at me, and I recognized him beyond a shadow of doubt. I’m not very good with names, but I rarely forget a face.


He looked terrible. His hair was long. He hadn’t shaved in several days. His clothes were torn and ragged, and he smelled like a wet dog. He was very thin and dirty, and half of his teeth appeared to be missing. He also had an old duffle bag slung across his shoulder, and I got the distinct impression that he was homeless.


“I’m sorry, you’re David R-, aren’t you?” I asked.


His eyes brightened for a moment, and he looked at me long and hard before responding. “Yeah, who are you?”


My first impulse was to tell him. I wanted to remind him of all those days that he had harassed the hell out of me, and then ask him if he remembered our little brawl and his trip to the hospital. Then I wanted to let him know how much money I had made the year before, and tell him all about the new job I had just started down in Atlanta. Instead, I just stood there, staring at him.


“I think we might have gone to school together,” I replied.


His eyes narrowed again, and he really studied my face. Still, I don’t think he had a clue who I was. Apparently, I had changed a lot in 15 years.


“What’s your name?” He finally asked.


I shook my head. “Not important”, I replied. I dug in my wallet, and pulled out a ten dollar bill. I held it out to him, and he took it. I said, “God bless”, and then slowly walked away.


The only thing I felt for him, was pity.

Global South won’t back Kiev as West demands

A push-back against Western influence is reportedly prompting countries to reject the pro-Ukraen agenda. Zelensky during a UN General Assembly session.

Western officials have overestimated the willingness of neutral nations to join anti-Russia policies in support of Ukraen, according to The Wall Street Journal.

It’s clear that the West overall has been surprised by the pretty widespread reluctance by many of the countries in the so-called Global South… to come on board.

“animosity toward the US and Europe” in some parts of the world and the desire of rising powers, such as Brazil and South Africa, to “assert their independence”, the article said.

The WSJ detailed purported successes and failures of Western diplomacy to rally the support of neutral nations for what it called “a fair peace settlement for Ukraen” ahead of next week’s gathering of world leaders at the UN General Assembly.

Loozensky has been internationally promoting his “peace formula” with Western backing. It includes Ukraen regaining control over all former territories, war reparations from Russia, and a tribunal for the Russian leadership. Moscow has dismissed the Zelensky plan as being detached from reality.

What is the biggest scam an auto mechanic ever tried on you?

My oldest son was driving a red Toyota 4×4 pick up . It was used but solid .

He worked at an auto parts store and had done a pretty good job of fixing it up . One weekend he did a tune up . Plugs , rotor , cap, plugs etc .. about a week later while I was working , he called and said it had statrting running rough then died.

At that point I had more money than time so we had it towed to a shop I had used before .

Next day shop calls me to tell me it jumped time and the engine was a complete loss .

Quoted me 2500 to rebuild .

Only paid 1500 for the truck .

I told them never mind and had it towed to the house .

Finally I was off work a few day and decided to check it out . Pulled the timing belt cover and checked the orientation of the cams to the crankshaft . It was perfect ! So at their point I’m a bit confused . Pop the distributor cap and noticed the rotor was on the wrong cylinder .

Come to find out my son forgot to put the holding screw back in the rotor and it had turned just a bit . This meant the timing was so far off it wouldn’t run .

Put the screw back in, cranked it up and it ran like a champ !

Drove it up to the shop and called out the boss .

Showed him and explained what was found .

His face turned 4 shades of red lol ! Come to find out the tech that looked at it got paid extra to do rebuilds and was condemning engines every chance he got !

Needless to say the tech got fired .3 hours of my time and I saved 2500$ and my son got his truck back .

Never went back .

Did Huawei’s launch of the Kiriin 9000s chip for the Mate 60 Pro show that <5nm processes are not necessary for modern mobile phones, and how will this affect TSMC’s business?

As an Ordinary user of a smartphone, can you really tell the difference between the 3nm and the 7nm Chips?

You can’t

The difference is more from an engineering point of view and a design point of view than a commercial point of view

The Average customer doesn’t understand 3nm and 7nm.

There is Zero difference from the POV of a retail customer who doesn’t understand Semiconductor Design Or Power Consumption Efficiency (99.9% of the world’s retail customers)

Here are the top six parameters based on which people decide which Smartphones to buy :-

  • Price
  • Camera
  • Battery & Charging
  • Gaming
  • Color & Design
  • BRAND

Do you see ‘Performance’ anywhere?

No

Performance is impossible to gauge for a normal user

You need advanced tools that tech blogger guys from YT have

Sure you can see the difference between a 32 nm Laptop Chip and a 7 nm Smartphone Chip

However it becomes tougher as you come closer and closer to each successive process

Take the I7 vs Loongson 3AC6000

Assuming Loongson had Windows integration

An Average user could not distinguish the two apart unless by GPU performance or Memory superiority

Yet a professional with tools can see that the Loongson is performing only at 50% the rate of the I7


So the answer is YES

My guess is the 3/2nm Chips are redundant for modern smartphones. They are too advanced and unnecessary for the average retail user

Cost effective 7/5 nm Chips are the Uppermost limit for smartphones

The Iphone 15 vs Mate 60 is the best example

The greatest advantage of the Iphone 15 was the GPU of NVDIA according to retail users

Mate60 won with the Camera, Gestures, Satellite Calling, 5G speeds etc

Iphone won with the Graphics

Nobody mentions the A17 Chip except as part of the textbook spec comparison table


3/2 nm Chips will be pathbreaking for the NEXT GENERATION after the Smartphone like maybe Advanced AI systems etc


TSMC will find the 3nm process overkill

Yet if they keep at it, they may find it easier to progress to the next generation of communication technology

Goodfellas | 𝑾𝑰𝑺𝑬 𝑮𝑼𝒀𝑺 | 𝙴𝙳𝙸𝚃

Very nicely done.

What was the most condescending comment someone made after seeing your new or newly renovated home?

We have built a vacation home in a nearby province. Husband took on the contracting while maintaining his full-time police job – so proud of him!

I did not announce this; I dislike the comparison games people play and do not want to be perceived as bragging.

A good friend asked to see pictures at a reunion luncheon. As I flipped through pix on my phone, an acquaintance from long ago came up behind us.

She peered over our shoulders and exclaimed, “When you married that low-ranked cop, I knew you’d end up this way! How far you’ve fallen! How can you live like THAT!!”

The look on her face was not one of concern, but a sneer.

She was looking at a picture of the shed where building materials had been kept (that has since been removed).

*sigh*

*Note Some have asked about my response. I smiled, told her that it was the raw materials shed and went back to my conversation.

Why didn’t I snap back, go for her throat, etc?

Because that (and to embarrass me) is what she expected, what she wanted. She is in her element when someone defends herself or gets angry.

But she has never been able to handle a calm, non-defensive response.

Was enlisting in the military a mistake for you?

No, it wasn’t.

My time in the Marines didn’t go at all as I expected; in fact, I was disappointed with almost all of it. However, I am grateful for these very disappointments. It took me a long time to come this viewpoint, but I am finally able to see the experience in a more wholistic way. As a Christian, I see it through the lens of Romans 8:28:

“And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” (ESV)

When I was planning to go into the Marines, my father encouraged me as he always had. He thought I had sound judgment and that I had made a wise decision. It was a sickening shock for me to find out in the Marines that very few people, men or women, thought this way.

I was generally despised as a woman Aircraft Maintenance Officer. Women hadn’t been allowed into this MOS for very long. I was about the sixth woman to choose it. People thought women couldn’t understand machinery or aircraft.

I personally got ugly comments. One was a note passed to me in AMO school that read, “A woman is a life support system for a cunt.” I was very quiet back then and kept to myself a lot, but other Marines’ hatred for me was so great they went out of their way to humiliate me.

At some point I found out I could not be assigned to a deploying squadron; no women Marines could deploy back then. So this fact meant I would not be assigned to any unit that actually had aircraft, unless it was to a training squadron. My dream of going to a deploying squadron and to a carrier ended.

I was so miserable. I had no friends after a while. A woman captain I knew went to Germany, and a woman TBS classmate with whom I was also close had to take a medical discharge. I was lonely and frightened and made bad personal decisions as a result.

But when I was at my lowest point, I reached out to God in desperation, and He answered. It was the beginning of our relationship which continues to this day. It was about that time my EAS rolled around, so I was then set free from the Marine Corps.

In spite of the traumatic stuff and in addition to my now having God in my life, I did however benefit from my service.

I was able to work for Sikorsky Aircraft as a technical writer. I wrote repair manuals for the SH-60B helicopter when it first came out. The job included testing the manuals out on the helicopter by doing an R and R (remove and replace) of all the parts on it, including the engines, blades, and rotor head.

Being a Marine helped me get a job with the Texas Department of Public Safety as a security officer. Marines are highly respected in the Department, and there are a lot of them in it. To my surprise, many other members of the Department admired me for my Marine service and accepted me because of it. That had hardly ever happened before.

A huge benefit was that my husband, a highly decorated combat Marine, chose me to be his wife. He said that when he learned I was a Marine, he knew I could understand him like no other woman could. We got married six weeks after we met.

So my military service was a rough go, but it prepared me for the rough life I had ahead of me. But most importantly, God used it to bring me to Him and to my wonderful husband.

How did the Vietnam War affect you and your family?

At so many levels… I was a small child in the 60’s. I remember on the news there was a symbol- a silhouette of a soldier walking – with a number in it, and that number was the number of casualties there had been that day. My cousin was in the 101st Airborne- it would take forever to hear anything so we both were encouraged and afraid when they mentioned the 101st.

Many people say the Gulf War was the first war played out on television. It wasn’t. It was Vietnam. I remember it so distinctly. It was terrifying. I asked my Dad what the war was for… he started to explain but in the end, he just said “There is never a good reason for war, and in the end, it won’t change anything anyway…” Looking back now, what did all that death and pain- on both sides- accomplish?

The city I lived in had a Marine base. Many of the kids I played with had dads who were “in country”, or mothers and fathers who worked at the base. I saw many of them saying goodbye because their lives had suddenly changed, either because their dad would not be coming home, or that he had come home and was now facing extended time in rehab. I remember playing in the stadium right in front of the entrance to the housing area for the base… when we saw a black car with a driver, an officer… and a chaplain… all the kids would run home in terror. Someone was about to get some bad news.

I was grateful that my Dad didn’t have to go to Vietnam. He was in the navy as the war started but I was a sick baby and he was discharged on compassionate grounds.

I remembering wearing a bracelet with the name of an MIA soldier… he didn’t come home, well, his remains didn’t come home, until the late 1970’s, I folded up his bracelet and sent it up to his family.

One of my dearest friends, “Sarge” Robert Hultgren, was a 2 tour vet- he campaigned tirelessly for the MIA and POW. “I can’t forget a single brother” he said. Sarge died several years, of Alzheimer’s Dementia. He forgot his daughter, his wife, his own name… but he thought he was in Vietnam. His PTSD pierced his soul so deeply it was too deep even for Dementia to wash away.

Sarge used to put up a bamboo Christmas Tree in front of Boston’s City Hall each Christmas. Lest we forget.

I remember standing on the front steps with my Mom when all the church bells and sirens from Fire Trucks and Civil Defense were sounding to say the war was over. But how could it be over? My friends were still waiting for their dads.

That next year at Memorial Day, the 1st World War vets marched, all snappily dressed and although old were orderly and looked dignified. The same was true of the World War 2 vets, the Korean War vets… then came the Vietnam vets. The looked slouched, and where people had cheered for the other men, they yelled things at the Vietnam Vets… Baby killer. Rapist. Bastards. WHy didn’t you just die there….

Some of the my friends were there watching their dads marching and they winced at the hatred. We had already seen it, protests at the gates of the base, “peace protesters” telling the small children there that their daddies were murderers and rapists. Who did they think they were to “peacefully” destroy these kids?

Neighbours of my grandparents, the place where we spent every spare minute, were a military family. One day when visiting them, the news came on the TV and they turned it off. “We don’t listen to that when we are here… this is our escape” said the lovely Mrs Wittman. Her husband was a senior military officer. This was the reason:

Lance Corporal Narvin O WIttman 26–9–1946 – 7–8–1967 Their son had died in Vietnam. When I went to see the “Wall”, I took a rubbing of his name. He didn’t even make it to 21.

It was years before we learned our lesson. It is this deep wound of guilt that led to Americans thanking Vets for their service… never again would we forget that it’s not the soldier’s fault when he does what his country asks him to do. I hope.

All those of my generation had the same experience… the pain and horror of Vietnam was all over the news, inescapable, imbedding itself in our psyche.

Thanks for your service… as my generation joins those who pass away, I just pray we as a human race never forget. We inflicted pain on those young men- draftees- and their families. For what?

The Sopranos || Lovely

Breaking bad is my all-time favorite show.. But this show is… its a masterpiece. I remember the first time i finished it. Had a feeling i need to watch it again right away…. They don’t make them like they used to before. What a great time it was for entertainment back then.

Southern Crusty Coconut Pie

IMG 0070
IMG 0070

Ingredients

  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 1/4 cups shredded coconut
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 1 cup granulated sugar
  • 3 eggs
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 (9-inch) unbaked pie shell

Instructions

  1. Pour milk over coconut and set aside while creaming butter and sugar together.
  2. Add eggs to creamed mixture and beat well.
  3. Add milk, coconut and vanilla extract.
  4. Pour into an unbaked pie shell.
  5. Bake at 350 degrees F for about 30 minutes or until pie is golden brown and firm.

Yield: 6 – 8 servings

This recipe may be doubled to make two pies.

Will China survive in a globalist world if they keep their average citizen closed off from the rest of the world?

Chinese are not closed off from the world; more than 130M Chinese travel outside China annually, and they spend about US$250B annually on their travels, making them the single largest tourist group by nation, and the biggest spending one.

Just because you disagree with Chinese government policies, do not say that Chinese are closed off from the rest of the world. It is you who are out of touch with what is really going on.

Bling Bling Kitty

I once had an old cat named Annie.

When I lived in Boston, there was this Pet Smart (store) that I would visit from time to time to get kitty supplies for my little buddies. It was on the road to my work, and not a big deal. It was a big warehouse like building, much like “Sam’s club” that hosed all sorts of pet supplies.

Off to the side they had a little adoption center for cats. You could look at the cats while you were waiting in line at the checkout.

I noticed one cat never left. It stayed there. Month after month. Season after season.

This was an older cat.

And no one wanted it. No one.

And so when I came to ask about it, the gal at the store said that she was really old, and that her owner passed away. The kids of the old man didn’t want the cat, and so the deceased children (adults really) gave it to them to find a home. They didn’t want the cat.

And so the kitty sat there, in the cage, month after month, after month alone.

That was bullshit.

So I adopted the kitty and named her Annie.

Poor thing. Sad all the time. Lonely. Depressed.

She became really attached to me.

She was a “rag-doll” breed and super clingy. My other cats didn’t want to have anything to do with her, and as soon as I made it home, she would come to me a meowing and crying. And so I would share my affection between her and all my other cats.

Now…

I had this little “thing” that I did with my cats. They all wore collars with two tags. An ID tag and a rabies tag. And when ever I opened up the door, I would get my keys and jingle them. I started to notice that my cats would do the exact thing with their collars.

If they wanted out, they would go to the door, and “jingle their keys” and I would let them out.

But, you see, Annie didn’t have any “keys”.

So we needed to get a cat collar, and some ID and rabies tags, and after a while we did. We ended up with a small box of say ten different collars. And then one day, when it was just me and Annie, I laid them all out in front of her to look at.

Now, she has always been very sad. Missing her owner, and then living with me in a house with other cats.

But something happened… a “light” went off when she saw the other collars.

She got up, and some “light”; some “energy” transformed her body.

And then, right there, in S-L-O-W motion…

I did it intentionally.

I selected the biggest, gaudiest, most “bling bling” fake jewel encrusted, fake diamond and pearl encrusted collar that I could find and placed it there off the side.

And then with it all next to her, she got up and walked over to all the collars.

She looked at big gaudy bling bling. She wanted ME to select.

bling bling cat collar
bling bling cat collar

She started to purr.

So I picked the big bling-bling collar.

And then…

Then she sat up, arched her back and allowed me to put it on her.

I wish that I could describe the moment; the transformation. The significance of that moment.

I swear… I mean it… she CHANGED.

So no more moping around. She was one of us.

She was accepted. She was great, and important and special, and she would walk with her head up high and her tail up high. She was so very proud of her collar, and it was truly a sight to behold.

She became a proud ROYAL KITTY PRINCESS.

What a moment.

I have never forgotten that.

Eventually, I had to move on, and my wife and I separated.

Annie went to live with her, while I had to continue on my life cat-less. Sigh. It’s called “life” and that is what happened then.

My ex-wife moved away to Pennsylvania while I stayed in Boston. And a few months passed.

My ex-wife, later on, however thought that Annie shouldn’t wear the collar, and took it off her.

Oh, yes. She. Did.

But you know the moping and sadness reappeared.

And my ex-wife couldn’t figure out what was going on. She just “chalked it up” on old age and a diet imbalance.

One day, I visited my ex-wife and checked on the kitties. And you know, I saw Annie. Sad and depressed as ever. No collar!

I went up to her. Man that was one depressed cat.

So… as soon as I saw that, I asked where the collar was.

My ex-wife went and rummaged around a bit, and found it. And I, well I put it back on her.

Guess what?

And BOOM! It was proud and happy city all over again.

If a cat could skip, then that is what Annie started to do. She was proud and happy all over again.

My ex-wife didn’t understand.

She mistakenly thought “freedom!” meant no collar.

But, Annie felt differently.

The Collar meant “belonging”.

It meant a role in the society; a “place at the table”. It meant status, and Annie had the most bling-bling of all the kitties. She was SPECIAL and she felt special.

Annie passed on, at a very ripe old age. She was a good little kitty.

She was buried with her precious collar.

I miss her.

Todays…

Russian Foreign Minister: “U.S. is waging war on Russia”

World Hal Turner 19 September 2023

Washington’s massive campaign to support Ukraine with arms amounts to a war against Russia, Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said, adding that the US has long groomed Kiev for this very purpose.

In a comment to Russian reporter Pavel Zarubin released on Sunday, Lavrov suggested that rumors about Washington possibly giving the green light to the delivery of Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS), which have a range of up to 300km, were aimed at “shaping public opinion.” 

According to the minister, these deliberations would not change the fact that “for many years Ukraine has been groomed to fight with its hands and bodies in order to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia.” Lavrov accused the US of controlling the hostilities between Kiev and Moscow.”  

In recent weeks, several Western media outlets have reported that the administration of US President Joe Biden is edging closer to approving deliveries of the ATACMS, which Kiev has been requesting for several months. The US has been reluctant to approve sending these missile systems, arguing that potential Ukrainian strikes deep into Russia could trigger a major escalation in the conflict.

Ukraine has already received long-range missiles from the UK and France, which, according to local officials, have been used to attack civilian targets and infrastructure in Russia’s Crimean Peninsula and Donbass.

While the US has yet to grant Kiev’s request for ATACMS, it has committed more than $43 billion in military aid to Ukraine since the conflict began, including air defense systems, armored personnel carriers, and M1 Abrams tanks. 

Moscow has repeatedly warned the West against supplying Ukraine with arms, saying that doing so will only prolong the conflict but will not change its ultimate outcome.

HAL TURNER EDITORIAL OPINION

I was reluctant to report these remarks by the Russian Foreign Minister for a simple reason: If the Russian Foreign Minister is now publicly accusing the U.S. of “controlling the hostilities between Kiev and Moscow” and also publicly saying the U.S. efforts for Ukraine amount to “the U.S. waging war upon Russia” then the only logical conclusion that __I__ can come to over such remarks is that at some point, Russia is going to strike the U.S.

Now, the mental weaklings of our society respond that such a thing is “impossible.”  In their little minds, the United States is so powerful that Russia “wouldn’t dare.”  In __my__ view, those people are wrong.

The reason they are wrong is because Russia sees the ongoing Ukraine conflict (with full material support from the west) as “an existential threat.”

They’re correct in such an assessment.   Want proof?

Back in April, I reported to you that Europe had revealed a map showing its plans to break Russia up into 43 separate countries (Story HERE).

Here is Gunther Fehlinger, Head of the Austrian Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) connected to the United Nations, showing the West’s map of a world without Russia:

The revelation of this map is literal PROOF that it is the actual intention of the West to do-away with Russia.    By even manufacturing such a map, the West has shown its intent.   Russia now faces an ACTUAL existential threat.  Their very existence is at stake.

Think about the time and effort that was necessary to research the populations and ethnicities in each of these areas, where they are, and how to draw actual lines along the geography of the demographics, to create this vision of new, autonomous, countries.  The research and planning alone had to take . . .  YEARS.

So the mental weaklings who say “Russia wouldn’t dare” have their heads up their ass.   Russia may decide it has no choice.

Thus, the remarks by Russia’s Foreign Minister Lavrov over this weekend, are “building a case” for a massive Russian strike at the U.S.  Lavrov’s public remarks are “building a record” for posterity.

Step-by-step the U.S. has escalated the Russia-Ukraine fight. Step-by-step the U.S. and its NATO vassals continue to escalate.

Well, while the West is doing its thing, Russia is systematically building an open, public, historical record of what is actually taking place.

When a man like Sergei Lavrov utters the words he spoke over the weekend, it is as serious as a heart attack.

I will preface my further remarks by admitting I very much admire Foreign Minister Lavrov.  In my view, he is the single most competent, most skilled, Foreign Minister on the entire planet.   He says what he means, and more importantly, he means what he says.

You never once hear the Russian Foreign Ministry “walking-back” anything Lavrov says.  You never once hear the Russian government having to “clarify” what Lavrov said.

That Lavrov has now said the US is “controlling the conflict between Moscow and Kiev” lays actual involvement and responsibility for war on the US lap.

Closer and closer we seem to be coming to the moment when Russia strikes.

None of us will ever be able to say We weren’t warned.

People say that World War One was more morally ambiguous than World War Two. What were the bad things the Allies did in the First World War?

Because it is. If you think about it, World War 2 was a bit odd—it’s one of the very few wars in history where you can legitimately point out who the bad guys were. The evils the Axis committed (Germany got all the spotlight, but Japan was even worse in many ways) was so over-the-top that it seemed like something out of a children’s cartoon.

The Allies were no saints but there’s a very big difference between the Japanese internment camps in America vs literal Holocaust death camps and rape brothels the Nazis and the Japanese ran. To say otherwise is intellectually dishonest. Except for the Soviets, Allied war crimes in World War 2 were not organized or structured (and even with the Soviets, probably a large proportion were also unorganized).

World War 1 is closer to your “average historical wars”. Who is guilty? It’s an extremely complicated topic that is not lost even back in the day. The simplest explanation was “it’s a very convoluted web of alliances and interests that forced everyone to fight for something that would otherwise be a local conflict”.

Why else would an assassination of an Austrian archduke made Japanese soldiers invade the German colony in China?

Nobody was particularly better or worse in World War 1.

Stay Away From Africa If You Don’t Like Us, Africa Leaders Warn Muslim Leaders With Bad Intentions

Voice TV Nigeria is an online community of reporters and social advocates dedicated to bringing you news reports from a Nigerian-African perspective.

Why is China not labelled a pariah state?

Well, it takes a lot for a country to be so bad that it is labelled a pariah state.

For example, look at the USA in the past 40 years. In that time, it dropped bombs, fired missiles, destroyed cities and killed men, women and children in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Grenada, Uganda, Bosnia etc. And the USA still is not labelled a pariah state!

In that same period of 40 years, China fought no wars at all. Sure, it had a few skirmishes here and there. For example, its navy vessels sprayed sea water at other countries’ fishermen in the disputed areas of the South China Sea. Another time, a few Chinese and Indian soldiers fought at a disputed border area. Not a single bullet was fired – however, a few soldiers fell into an icy river and later died from hypothermia.

But these were not wars. Nothing like how, for example, the USA made up a lie about Iraq having weapons of mass destruction, and then proceeded to kill 250,000 Iraqi men, women and children.

And yet, like I said, the USA is not labelled a pariah state. So clearly China wouldn’t be.

Today, China is even busily rebuilding schools, homes and hospitals in Iraq! (After all the destruction caused by the USA).

Southern Fried Chocolate Pies

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Ingredients

  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup vegetable shortening
  • 1/3 cup cold water
  • 3/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) cold margarine
  • Vegetable oil*

* Use peanut or safflower oil or solid vegetable shortening for frying.

Instructions

  1. Crust: sift flour and salt together; cut in the shortening with a pastry blender or 2 knifes, until mixture resembles coarse cornmeal.
  2. Add ice water a little at a time while tossing with a fork, until dough holds together. Do not get too moist.
  3. Roll out dough to 1/8 inch thick. Cut into circles about five inches in diameter.
  4. Mix cocoa powder with the sugar. Place 2 to 3 tablespoons of this mixture onto one half of the circle and place 3 very thin slices of cold margarine on top. Fold opposite side over mixture and seal with a fork dipped in flour.
  5. Pour oil to a depth of about 1/2 inch in a cast iron skillet. Heat over medium-high heat until very hot.
  6. Place pies in a single layer in oil and fry, turning to brown each side.
  7. Serve hot, warm, or cold.

WE RETIRED IN AMERICA AND MOVED TO GHANA WITHOUT VISITING!

African Americans are returning to countries like Ghana more than 400 years after their ancestors left Africa as slaves. Many say they want either to reconnect to history, or resettle on the continent. Helen and Timothy are retirees who had lived all their lives in the USA. Timothy was in the military while he worked and Helen was in the field of Social Sciences. They recently made the big decision to move to Ghana. In this video, they share the amazing experiences they have had since moving here.

What do you do if someone is trespassing on your property?

I have given all my neighbors permission to walk my land. I have posted signs saying private property please treat with respect. I have put up signs saying no motorized vehicles. On a website , the Google pin says you can cross to the river, on my property. Its a pin someone added, because they didn’t like the official pin. So a lot of people thought it was public access, because the website quite rightly says its public access where they have the official pin, but its not the first pin they see. I have had the erroneous pin removed three times, but someone keeps adding it back.

I grew up in the country, all the neighbors were friends, and they all allowed me access to their property. So I try to treat people the same way.

I finally had to block it off, because mudder truckers, atvers, and motor homes, and partiers were driving through. But I still allowed foot traffic.

One day I hear a thunk, thunk sound. So I wander over, and a group of 12–13 year olds were sitting with a raft in my driveway, throwing rocks at my private property, please treat with respect sign. Their parents had dropped them off, and then driven down stream to leave a vehicle there.

I raised my voice, I got all of their names. I threatened to wait for their father, and finally I told them that I would put up a gate, blocking access, with a sign saying access closed, because of the actions of these people, and then list their names. They apologized profusely, and never caused any more trouble.

One day while sitting on my deck on Sunday afternoon, two people walked across my yard, not 50 feet from me. I went and put on my shoes, to have a talk with them, by the time I caught up, they were naked having sex on the lawn furniture around my firepit. I took a picture and I asked them what they were doing, but it was already obvious. They said they were just going to go for a swim in the glacier fed river. They apologized, and put their clothes back on. I asked them why they walked right by my house, rather than use the trail I left open for people to walk to the river. They claimed that they were so excited to get to the river, that they never even noticed my house.

Another time I see somebody run into my outhouse, beside my firepit. So I wander over, and they had violent diarrhea, coating the toilet seat and their pants. I didn’t say anything rude, I just brought over the power washer, and made them spray it out. I also offered them an old pair of sweat pants, and a garbage bag for their pants, which they accepted.

After I blocked the driveway, because of motorized vehicles use, people started using the other driveway that went by my house. So I chained up the only river access past my house, so they would have to drive right back, beside my house on the way back.

Then they started randomly driving through bush and cutting trees to get to the river. I hauled in about 50 1 ton rocks, and placed them in easy spots. After a couple of years the brush had grown up beside the boulders.

One day I’m out splitting firewood, and I hear a big bang. Then this terrible squealing sound. So I wander towards the noise, and there is a truck just getting back on the road, steam shooting out of the grill, and oil dripping. The left front tire was at a 20 degree angle to the right tire. Something under the hood was squealing, and once he started driving down the road, he left a black mark for miles, and the tire screeched as well. I didn’t get the license plate, and I never saw the truck again. But it looked like he made it about 12 km, before the tire blew, judging by the black marks.

That’s what I do to trespassers. It depends on the circumstances

Remy: Try That in a Large Town (Jason Aldean parody)

It’s a sign of the times. America.

Funny.

What did someone do in TSA/airport security that made you say “You gotta be kidding me”?

I’d just spent a solid month working in Boulder, staying in a Residence Inn with a full kitchen… and I cook. I was heading home and decided to bring the small box of kosher salt I had purchased and used almost every night for a month. I got to the airport at my normal time… about 90 minutes before boarding. I checked one bag, and had a computer and a smaller bag that happened to have the salt box. I got to TSA, and the line was horrendous. No problem, I never get hassled, right?

The box of salt lit up the xray system. I got pulled out of line, the bag was to be searched, and just for good measure they were going to search and swab the computer bag. Oh. Damn.

I was asked if I had anything sharp or dangerous in the suitcase, and answered “No.” The bozo checking the luggage pulls out the box of salt and waves a couple of Denver cops over, convinced he’s found a terrorist. Holds the box of Morton Kosher Salt up to attract the attention of his supervisor. And then he pulls everything else out of the suitcase AND the computer backpack. I’m fed up. I’m watching time click down. He intends to make sure I miss my flight. I challenge him and he says it’s a white crystalline substance. I offer to taste it in front on him, and/or for him to taste it. I mean, it’s SALT. He tells me, first, that he’s an organic chemist, and then that salt is a normal constituent of organic explosives. I’m getting ready to go ballistic when one of the cops whispers, “Just calm down and let the idiot finish this thing”… THe TSA supervisor comes over, and calmly suggests I “surrender” the box of salt and the cop whispers “Do it”. I’m getting the sense the cops are really on my side. One’s quietly on his radio and neither are looking more than amused at the TSA agent being a salted idiot. Supervisor tells the agent to reassemble my stuff and get me out of there, and the agent wants to argue that, having had at least one piece of contraband there’s likely more. I think he wanted to find an assault rifle in my pocket or something. A little more persuasion by the supervisor, and my stuff is back in the xray system and is clean. I get my gear and start for the escalators that take you down to the train. Each cop grabs a bag from me, directs me to the escalator, and say, “Run, they’re holding a train.” Damn! There’s a train with lights flashing, and another cop keeping a door open and space clear in the car. We get to my departure terminal, and they still have my bags. Go up to the concourse and we’re a LONG way from a plane that’s supposed to be gone already. “RUN!”. I start heading for the gate and see 2 airline employees running toward me. They go past me and grab bags from the cops. One of the cops manages to get me his business card and says, “We saw everything he did. We have his name and badge number. If you want to file a complaint, we’ll back you up.” I stammered a thank you, and ran the rest of the way to the gate. They’d literally held a plane full of people so I could get home. My laptop was in my seat on the plane by the time I got down the aisle, and yes, my carryon bag was gate checked, and it, too, made the plane and the trip home.

All over a box of kosher salt and someone who might have had delusions of intelligence.

G60: the Story of China’s Other Starlink Competitor

By now, you have probably heard of China’s megaconstellation project to complete with Starlink: “Guowang”. But did you know that a second megaconstellation plan is emerging in the region of Shanghai? Called “G60 Starlink”, this constellation calls for 1,296 and then 12,000 satellites to be sent to low Earth orbit. There’s also a fascinating geopolitical twist involving Germany and the United States, highlighting the global struggle for licenses. Let’s dive deep into this story. Enjoy!

What’s the pettiest thing you’ve done to get back at a nuisance neighbor?

When we bought our house it became obvious rather quickly that we had a problem neighbor. Her property abutted ours at the back fence and she would throw her weeds over onto our property. I asked her politely to stop to no avail. She had also plumbed her washing machine from the garage through PVC piping that ran under our fence and over our property. Once again there was no reasoning with her as she told me she had lived in her house for over 20 years and we would just have to put up with it. Yes, I know I could have called the city to get it stopped but didn’t want to start an outright war in our new neighborhood. I got myself a long 2×2 and three lovely large Idaho potatoes and rammed them way up that drainage pipe. We all know what happens to potatoes in a dark, damp environment and I didn’t have to wait too long to know if my rather mean solution worked. The neighbor next door to her that was friendly towards me stopped to chat one day. He said “Poor Carol, her washing machine backed up and flooded her garage and when she called a plumber he told her it had been plumbed illegally and he had to replumb up to code; it cost her a lot.” “Oh what a shame,” said I and really had no guilt, or no more problems with her either.

What is the most expensive lesson a company got after firing an employee?

Ages ago, I worked for a magazine publisher, and was friends with a terrific editor in another department. She shepherded several “custom” magazines for important clients.

At some point, her husband landed a job in another state. Thinking she might like to live with him, so came up with a plan by which she’d continue with the magazines, working with staff via phone and overnight mail (this was the 1980s, so no email, videoconferencing, etc.) and monthly trips to HQ for face time.

Well, the idea of what today we know as remote working made no sense to the big thinkers in the front office, so they thanked her for her service and wished her well in the years ahead.

And found out that the clients weren’t in love with the company—they were in love with “their” editor! And when they learned they were losing her, they canceled their contracts.

Several million dollars. Gone. Just like that.

Worse: one of our regional competitors (who’d already hired away some of our people), swooped in, hired the editor, and landed at least one of the disgruntled clients she’d previously dealt with.

For the next several years she worked remotely for our competitor, exactly in the manner she’d outlined to her now former employer. Oops.

Footnote: The company we’d worked for, over 100 years old at that time, evaporated a few years later, under the peerless leadership described above. And our competitor? Still going, and bigger than ever.

Niger’s Bold Move: Halting Uranium Export to France and Expelling US Ambassador

Africa must unite as one continent and kick out all foreign military forces in their counters and remove all puppet governments…..enough is enough how long still have the African child to suffer under the hands of this wicked people….If they want war war it shall be…..But know one thing African child God is with you and God will fight this final battle for your total and completely liberation from your oppressors….”

What was a gift that made you speechless?

My husband passed away suddenly 6 years ago. We were living in a fairly remote place, and I wanted to return to the area we came from, in the northeast. It was a huge move, because not only did I have an entire household, but all his tools and musical equipment, and 3 dogs. I was really unsure how I was going to accomplish this.

I had a friend I had never met in real life – we had become friends on a forum for people who had Doberman Pinschers, but it was much more than that – there were ongoing, fascinating threads on philosophy, politics, medicine, religion/spirituality, cooking, crafts, photography – you name it.

Anyway, we clicked, and had become quite close. I helped him tweak a CV for a new consulting business he was building, and he called me every single day for 4 months after my husband died, to make sure I was OK. Even my family didn’t do that.

When I found a place in NY, I began to make plans to move. He told me that when it was time to go, he was going to come help me move. I was floored. I couldn’t believe someone would be so generous of their valuable time. Sure enough, he flew out west, and spent 2 weeks helping pack and load things into a POD, then rent a UHaul, load that up with immediate things, and then we took off on a 10-day, 2500-mile trek across the country.

When we arrived here, he unloaded the truck & trailer, set things up for me, cooked for me, and all kinds of really supportive things. When the POD was delivered, he and a couple of guys unloaded it, and he put things wherever I needed them. He stayed for many weeks, not willing to leave until he felt I was secure and stable, and the house functioned for me.

To me, that was the most generous, kind, selfless and thoughtful gift I’ve ever gotten. We remain the best of friends, even though we are 1,000 miles apart. We do whatever we can to help each other and support each other, and I am lucky to have such a fantastic friend. True friends are more valuable than anything.

What does Huawei’s new phone series mean for Apple in China?

Just as Apple benefitted by cannibalizing Huawei’s drastic reduction in volume shipped since 2018/19, Huawei will cannibalize Apple’s increased market share today.

China has reached peak iPhone. Apple will not set new sale records in Greater China anymore.

The iPhone depends on foreign suppliers for many components. America’s trade and tech war with China has forged a divergence in the supply chain, because doing business with certain entities can trigger landmines that cripple and maim. Industry players either have a reduced customer base or can only shop from a limited number of suppliers. This has worsened as America continue to abuse sanction privilege.

This strategy works only if one side is at relative disadvantage, such as a tech/quality gap. But what happens when there are different core strengths distributed between the sides? Apple won’t have open access to the best components, on account of risk or actual restrictions. Apple’s iphone is heavily dependent on Chinese engineering, and these partners have helped deliver new model generations like clockwork for more than 15 years. The very basis for the Apple hardware eco-system may need to be relooked.

As Huawei and partners continue to make independent inroads to the premium space, partners that used to rely heavily on Apple’s business will be enticed to offer their best components to domestic competition. This is prudent risk management, brought to the forefront by the draconian nature of the Huawei sanctions.

There may come a point in time where the best that Apple can find ex-China is a step down from what the Chinese competition can deliver. The smartphone standards of tomorrow will be increasingly written by the Chinese.

Case in point: batteries and chargers today. 6G, and imaging tomorrow.

Honor is headquartered in Shenzhen.

Note: There are really only three legs left in the smartphone business: Apple, Samsung, and the Chinese.

Oliver Anthony – “90 Some Chevy” REACTION

I like this song. Love her reaction.

Two Chinese phrases

In the Chinese-language reporting on the launch of the Huawei Mate 60 Pro, two Chinese phrases keep showing up:

  • 去美化 which means “de-Americanization” of the supply chain, and in a broader sense, removing anything American;
  • 自主品牌 which means “self-owned (Chinese) brands” as opposed to foreign brands like Apple

Huawei tapped into the pent-up Chinese anger at how China has been treated by the west, but which did not have a chance to show. The launch of the Huawei Mate 60 Pro and its record orders are a way for ordinary Chinese to show that they have had enough of the tough talk coming from the US, and even though the Chinese economy, and especially real estate are slow, they now have a way to show that the old way of doing things no longer work for them.

This is why they have rallied around de-Americanization of the supply chain and Chinese brands.

Chinese brands will now have to face questioning from Chinese customers.

  • “Do you have foreign components in your products? If you do, why do you need foreign components when Chinese components which are just as good are available?”

This means that the leading US chip brands: Intel, Qualcomm and Nvidia are going to be hit really hard. TSMC will be hit hard for siding with the US and supporting US decoupling from China.

Chinese nationalism is a very powerful force in Chinese history, and the US has released it. Only the Chinese Communist Party can control it and keep it from going completely wild.

While the US and many Americans hate the Party, it is the devil which the US knows.

The other devils are much, much worse than the Party.

MY HUSBAND COULDN’T STOP CRYING!!! OLIVER ANTHONY – I’VE GOT TO GET SOBER (REACTION)

One thing I’ve been noticing is that Oliver Anthony is making grown men cry, more than a lot of other sad songs people react to. And the reason why, I believe, is because here is this man. This God fearing, manly man, honest and true, expressing himself as a man. There is nothing weak about it. He touches men’s nerves from one man to another man, without any elements of weakness or inferiority or even femininity. He’s allowing men to feel understood and allowing then to express themselves.”

What is the most heartbreaking thing you have seen in the United States?

We didn’t know what to do.

We were in a mediocre restaurant in Arizona having flown there from Canada. Our waitress was in her early 80s and had rheumatoid arthritis in her gnarled, misshaped hands and feet, and there she was working as a waitress. She was suffering with every step and with every movement of her hands. Another waitress was the same. Their hands and feet were swollen. We didn’t know where to look.

In Canada we don’t see this. If an elderly woman with difficulties works in a restaurant it’s because she owns it and won’t go home.

So seeing a waitress this age with rheumatoid arthritis working this way was shocking to us and very upsetting. We ordered tea and toast so she would not have heavy plates to lift. We left her a $50.00 tip and got out of there.

Watching these women struggle this way was heartbreaking. I hope I never see this again.

What is the most offensive thing someone has ever asked you?

A friend of my wifes mother responded to my wife’s pleasant email, about taking her getting extra vacation this year, so she would be stopping by when visiting her mother. The mothers friend just replied WTF.

My wife was stunned, and wondered what she meant by it.

I said the best thing is to just ask her

So my wife asked what she intended by saying WTF.

The reply was “Fantastic”

My wife phoned her, to clarify.

It turns out her grand daughter always says WTF in her texts.

So she asked her what it meant, and the grand daughter, rolling her eyes had told her “Well That’s Fantastic”

So she had been using it to appear modern, whenever she heard good news.

My wife phoned her mother’s friends daughter, ( a school friend) and told her, what her 13 year old daughter had told her grandmother, and had her straighten it all out.

She couldn’t bear to let this nice old lady continue to use WTF in completely inappropriate circumstances.

African American moved to Ghana to build a 4 bedroom home and live her dream life |Exploring Asebu

In this video, we meet the very lovely Karen King and check out her 4 bedroom home in Asebu’s Pan African Village. We had such a great time talking to her, walking through her home and learning about her journey in Ghana so far.

What do Americans in the US love most about Americans?

My favorite part about Americans and American culture in general is what I call “the American Mulligan”. Here, in the US, failure is expected. Starting a business and having it collapse? Just a part of growth and improvement. Got fired from your senior manager role for performance? That’s okay, these kinds of things happen. Changed careers at 35? Great! We love that because it makes you more well-rounded.

In the US, we love a comeback to such a degree that in my business (tech recruiting), we almost look for candidates who’ve tried and failed to run a business. They are wiser and generally manage better than people who’ve had smooth sailing their entire professional career. When I talk with my professional friends from other countries, they generally cite this as one of the best parts about being in the US.

Should Apple distance itself from China?

If Apple were to distance itself from China, it must find another place that has skilled people in suffiucient numbers, the same level of automation as China, and the availability of alternative raw materials that China can provide.

The only country that is big enough to meet the needs is India. So Apple moved some production to India a few years go. But it turned out to be a disaster because there are not enough skilled people in India and they still need to rely on China’s supply chain. As a result of the lack of sufficient skilled workers, the defect rate came to about 50% – pushing costs ridiculously high.

Apple has now abandoned most of the production in India, suffering huge losses, and wants to come back to China.

THE NEW KING OF SOUL!!! OLIVER ANTHONY – 90 SOME CHEVY (REACTION)

We all going to church and didn’t even know it…this guy is showing us all that we do have a common bond…it’s called life…and trying to live it. Keep on preaching Oliver. Take us all to church

I caught my neighbor using my electrical outlets outside, and I told him I was going to call the cops and tell them what he was doing. He laughed and said I can’t prove it. What should I do?

As a master electrician, I solved my issue very easily. My (now ex) neighbor was using the outside outlet on my detached garage to build his addition. I turned the breaker off – he turned it on. I asked him to stop and he did not.

I simply rewired the neutral on the 120 volt outlet to convert it to 240 volts, watched (and grinned) as he burned up his table saw, his battery charger and a table router all within one day. He had no idea as to why.

If he has simply asked, as he should have, before using my power, I would probably have allowed it – as least for a reasonable amount of time.

EDIT 1: I have had some suggestions that I could get into trouble with my “fix”. I did disclose to the neighbor what I did a few days later and he called the sheriff’s office. The deputy that came out listened to both sides and then asked ME if I wanted to charge the neighbor with theft. I just let it drop and he moved out a short time later.

EDIT 2: I have had some people say that I should have put “warnings” on my answer about the possibility of fire and personal injury. C’mon people! This is a REPLY to a post – NOT a TUTORIAL!!!

Have you ever had a pet that was almost unnaturally intelligent?

My father bought a horse when I was about 13, mainly because he was very placid in the sales ring. He was an exceedingly nice and smart horse, a very good riding horse who loved people. He would respond to spoken instructions such as, “go and get the bucket and I will give you some oats.” I did not teach him that, I just said it one day and he brought me the empty bucket. Ten years later I was home for a visit and a car stopped by our pasture. A man of about age 30 got out and walked out to the horse who whinneyed and ran up to him, acting like a big dog to his favorite master. The man told us that he raised that horse from birth, but his father sold him when the boy was sent to Vietnam. He started giving him subtle signals and the horse would dance, kneel down, stand up on his back legs, and even gave that fella a kiss on the cheek. He asked how much to buy him back. My Dad said, “Son, he’s yours. Thanks for your service. Your horse is mighty glad you came back for him.”

MY SISTER COULDN’T CONTROL IT!!💔OLIVER ANTHONY – I’VE GOT TO GET SOBER

I grew up in the mountains of East Tennessee within the USA. Working very hard as a child in a family business. Worked my way through college and into a technical role. So, ladies, my life is very different from yours, but even so, I see both of you as my sisters in my heart because the unifying message within OAM has built a bridge from my soul to yours.”

FLASH: U.S. Moving Combat Jets to Romania – “in addition to others committed to NATO”

World Hal Turner

The United States is moving Combat Aircraft to Romania — but not for NATO.  What does THAT translate to, in your mind?  US v. Russia directly? Word of this came from US Ambassador to Romania, Kathleen Kavalec.

“The United States plans to station combat aircraft in Romania in addition to those performing NATO air policing duties” said the Ambassador.

Notice she said “Combat” aircraft.   Not refueling tankers or cargo planes . . . . no . . . .  she explicitly said combat aircraft.

Did all of us somehow miss a vote in Congress about some minor  little detail like direct US war against Russia?

How do you handle that one relative who insists every time on ordering the most expensive item at the restaurant when you are paying?

Not quite the same.

Every Mother’s Day the family would go out for dinner and of course we all chipped in the same amount & it covered Mom’s meal and the tip (10 people + Mom).

We’re 7 adults and 3 ‘kids’ so no big issue, right? But…this one time was too much for me.

Grand daughter came with her boyfriend, daughter & son, 2 of them are drinking age and I can’t remember how much alcohol they ordered but it was at least 3 mimosas and 3 glasses of wine.

Only 2 of their meals were from the Mother’s Day specials.

Rest of us ordered from the specials menu & I think 3 glasses of wine & 2 beers. This place was VERY reasonably priced.

I was single mother of 2, 1 of which was working & not able to attend and the other had health issues, not a big eater.

I ordered a special & my son ordered 2 appetizers & 2 glasses of milk (he asked before ordering the 2nd milk because money is tight for us).

I drank water with dinner & for dessert I had tea & son & I shared the dessert that came with my meal.

Bill comes & I hand over $40 hoping it will cover our share (if you took off the bar tab it should have been no more than $35!).

I asked if they needed more from us.

The grand daughter & crew on the other hand, chipped in $60 – wait? What? For 4 people + chip-in +tax & tip? The person handling the bill said something & I think they chipped in another $30 (really should have been at least another $40!

A year later Mother’s Day coming up again.

Family wants to make plans again to go out.

I told them no, I can’t afford it.

My sister pushed & pushed for why – I finally told them I can’t afford everyone’s bar tab!

We went, everyone paid their OWN bar tab & guess what?

Only cost me $35! Grand daughter & crew ordered more reasonably priced food & had a MUCH smaller bar tab!

Southern Pineapple Pound Cake

pineapple pound cake
pineapple pound cake

Ingredients

  • 8 eggs
  • 2 cups Crisco
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • 1 (20 ounce) can crushed pineapple, undrained
  • 3 cups flour
  • 3 cups sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt

Instructions

  1. Cream sugar and shortening.
  2. Add eggs one at a time.
  3. Add flour and salt gradually.
  4. Stir in vanilla extract and pineapple.
  5. Bake in a greased and floured tube pan at 350 degrees F for about 1 1/2 hours. Or bake in two greased and floured loaf pans for about 1 hour.

SINGING FROM HIS SOUL!!! OLIVER ANTHONY – AIN’T GOT A DOLLAR (REACTION)

A broken vessel was chosen to remind us GENTLY AND ONCE AGAIN, that we are one. This is generational. Who else could walk onto some side stage at a festival and immediately draw the entire crowd from every genre and have them all know that he’s their voice?…..huggi g…laughing…..crying. Again, this is NOT of this earth. We gotta all be praying for our bizarre, broken vessel RIGHT NOW. Evil despises this man.

Huawei raises production order for Mate 60 Pro by 10M due to high demand

The original order was 6M units.

Some project 35M units sold by year-end.

This will put strong pressure on the Apple iPhone 15 line which launches on Sept. 12. Huawei’s Mate 60 Pro line is expected to take sales from the high-end for Apple.

Xiaomi, OPPO are going to have a very hard time surviving in this very challenging environment.

Huawei is now Team China, and Apple is Team USA.

What is the reason for China’s sudden massive increase in their gold reserves?

Last year China held $1.3 trillion dollars worth of US bonds. … with other asset kept in US bank.. making a total of 3.5 trillions dollars in foreign reserves…ALL kept in the USA.

Last year, Biden confiscated US$300 billions of Russia’s foreign reserves …kept in the US banks. This was a warning to China…the same thing can or will happen to China.

The US is now bankrupt…unable to repay its debts. Biden plans play DIRTY… His plan was to start a war with China and using the war as the excuse …to confiscate all the US$3.5 trillions dollars China has in reserves (10 times more than what Biden has stolen from Russia).

China is not stupid.

Last year, China sold US$580 billions dollars in US bond and bought gold bars. (US bond is the easiest to liquidate). The first six months of 2023, China sold other asset in the US … China bought 108 tons of gold.

China will progressively sell off its holding of US bond and other US debts …to buy more gold …until all the 3.5 trillions dollars in US reserves are completely liquidated.

Holding gold bars is much safer than holding US bonds.

I miss my bust

When I left the United States, for China, I had to leave so many things behind. Over time they were stolen, discarded, or just junked. Others simply saw no value in the things that I had, aside from a few dollars at a “swap meet”.

One of my treasures was a historical (museum) reproduction of a ancient Greek torso. It was of a man’s chest, fragmented, and standing on a pole on a hard and heavy black square base.

It was my little treasure, and I would often feel the lines of the torso as I came back home and disgorged my keys on my hall table.

2012 NYR 02609 0023 000alva s eylanbekov torso093357
2012 NYR 02609 0023 000alva s eylanbekov torso093357

Over the years, I found it very difficult to give gifts. Often some money or a party or get together would suffice.

But, in a pinch, nothing is better (and long lasting) as a heavy cement or stone statue. I strongly believe this. It’s a present that is unique, has value, and too heavy to throw away.

Nothing too big. You know, the size of a turtle or door stop.

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5be6b6bebd6c85cf41d79fed8d2a8b13

Whether Art Deco, or lawn ornament style, take the time to select something wonderful…

Owl IP
Owl IP

Todays.

The Sopranos – Tony Meets With Carmine Lupertazzi Jr

Tex-Mex Chili Cheese Supreme

A delicious layered Tex-Mex casserole using three different cheeses.

tex mex chili cheese supreme
tex mex chili cheese supreme

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 1 medium green bell pepper, seeded and chopped
  • 1 clove garlic, minced
  • 1 (15.5 ounce) can kidney beans, drained
  • 1 (16 ounce) can tomatoes, with juice, coarsely chopped
  • 1 (15 ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 1 tablespoon chili powder, or to taste
  • 1 (15 ounce) carton Wisconsin ricotta cheese
  • 2 cups shredded Wisconsin Monterey Jack cheese
  • 1 (4 ounce) can diced green chiles
  • 1 bunch green onions, finely chopped
  • 3 large eggs, beaten
  • 1 (8 ounce) bag tortilla chips
  • 2 cups (8 ounces) shredded Sharp Wisconsin cheddar cheese

Instructions

  1. Heat oil in skillet over medium high heat. Sauté green bell pepper and garlic until tender.
  2. Add kidney beans. Set aside.
  3. In saucepan, combine tomatoes, tomato sauce and chili powder. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, for 15 minutes.
  4. Add to kidney bean mixture. Combine ricotta and Monterey Jack cheeses, chiles, onions and eggs.
  5. Spread 1/4 of cheese mixture evenly in greased 13 x 9 x 2-inch glass baking dish.
  6. Arrange 1/4 of chips over cheese.
  7. Spread 1/4 of tomato mixture over chips. Repeat layer 3 more times.
  8. Cover with aluminum foil and bake at 325 degrees F (160 degrees C) for 30 to 40 minutes.
  9. Remove foil and top with cheddar cheese and bake 10 to 15 minutes more.
  10. Let stand for 5 minutes before serving.

Yield: 8 to 10 servings

How technologically advanced is China? Can you give some perspective and examples of how advanced in technology they are?

China is the most advanced Nation in the world in terms of Applications of Advanced Technology

They can apply advanced technology on a scale that no other nation to this day can manage

It is undeniable that China is the world’s foremost nation to apply advanced technology

By comparison the US pales with most Americans using 4G speeds and with most applications falling flat. They actually use paper certificates for vaccines

South Korea comes second in this aspect followed by Japan and Singapore


My sons first word was “It looks like one of those Futuristic Cities shown in many 1980s Hollywood movies”


The Key here is CORE TECHNOLOGY

Now for instance, all these wonderful apps that are being built , they are coded in a specific language right?

They need high performance servers right?

You need processors right?

Every one of these is controlled entirely by the West in terms of their Core capabilities

It was a perfect relationship with China developing the most fantastic advanced applications and developing their software at fantastic pathbreaking pace

The West sold and licensed their Core Technology for a fat fee

The whole Global economy relished the partnership

The West chose to WEAPONIZE their core technology

In a mere decade China today controls almost 11% of the World’s Core Technology and Research in various areas

They are almost on par with Europe and Japan and well ahead of South Korea

Yet THEY ARE STILL ONLY A SIXTH IN TERMS OF CORE TECH CONTROL AS THE USA


Had the US simply shut the f*** up and simply encouraged Green Cards for Researchers from China with a 10 year path to Citizenship in 2012, China would have been in all sorts of trouble

Had the US encouraged actual competition on even grounds, the Intel and Qualcomms and Huawei would be on level playing fields and smaller Chinese entities would never have got the Billions of Yuan needed to leapfrog which would have instead gone into Real Estate & Paper

So Today China is surging ahead or at par on almost all modern commercial technologies like Rail, Green Energy, Latent Communications, Face recognition etc

Yet China is only around 16% in Control of Core Technology, far ahead than ANY ASIAN NATION IN POST WW II HISTORY but still a long way to go

Experts believe China will control 30% of all Core Technology by 2032


Conclusion is China is on its way

He Crashed Into A Train And Died, bringing back Messages From God on the Other Side

What are some of the best conversations in a movie?

The unpopular movie First K!ll (2017) has a conversation between an 11 year old kid and a bank robber, which I consider to be the best thing in the entire movie. The bank robber schools the kid about how to deal with bullies, something the kid’s own father couldn’t do… something many kids’ parents in real life can’t do actually.

(For a small prologue, The bank robber had taken the kid hostage, but as they spent time together they started getting acquainted.)

Bank Robber: What were you and dad doing in the woods that day anyway?

Kid: He took me on a hunting trip.

Bank Robber: Ah. You wanted to be a big man hunter huh?

Kid: No

Bank Robber: Why was he teaching you then? A little city boy and his son bonding?

Kid: … There’s this kid at my school that keeps beating me up, and he thought hunting would… I don’t know. I tried to tell him it was a stupid idea, but he wouldn’t listen.

Bank Robber: Well, [It was a stupid idea]. Especially since you already have what it takes to handle a bully.

(Kid looks surprised)

It’s true.

See, bullies are all about one thing, intimidation; and they feed off fear. Take that away from them, and you stop them cold.

You know when you’re playing your video games, and you’re fully into it, focused, ready for anything? It’s like you’re outside of yourself, but in control of this warrior. That’s the attitude you gotta give a bully. Completely still. In your mind, you’re able to change what’s about to happen. In your heart, there’s no fear. There’s nothing he can do to you that you can’t overcome. You stare at him, think you’re unstoppable, and shake your head. No more.

That’ll back them down 99 times out of a hundred.

Kid: What about that 1 time it doesn’t?

Bank robber: Well, In that case son, you just hit them with all you got. Or run. No shame in either.

This made me want to find a bullied kid and tell him/her the same thing.

America in the 1910’s – 1920’s / 55 Rare Impressive Photos in Color

Super interesting photos of over 100 years ago. Must watch for perspective.

Putin must know that the war is unwinnable by now. Why is he doubling down on a losing hand?

Why exactly is the SMO unwinnable?

Let’s leave the Military aspects aside and see the things Russia has achieved since it started?

Is Russia a Pariah as the West hoped?

Nopes. Putin holds meetings all over the world and they listen to him. Russians haven’t been even censured by any of the 147 countries outside the US and it’s 30 odd lackeys

Is Russias Economy in dire straits?

Nopes. 2% Growth predicted, now 2.5%

Fastest Industrial progress

They just flew their fully domestic aircraft yesterday

Food Inflation at 3.9%

General Inflation at 5.7%

Lower levels than almost every European Company

Now let’s see Russias so called Rivals

Germany – Recession and Industrial Decline of the highest level in 26 years

Netherlands – Recession

UK – Recession plus Inflation

US – Near Recession saved virtually by printing money and still having inflation

Plus

The Whole world is wary of US hegemony now and ready to hedge it’s bets

All that “Decoupling and Derisking” with China is really “Derisking with USA”

The Local currency trades increasing, The Yuan trades, BRICS expansion, Oil Cuts by MBS

Putins SMO has already delivered him more victories than any he could imagine

He stands today in a better position after the worst sanctions hit him

The whole world now sees sanctions in a much weaker light.

Another major defeat to the US

The world doesn’t fear sanctions that much anymore

The normally obedient Rhamposa after meeting Nuland, still voted to expand BRICS


Now on to the Military

The SMO seems unwinnable only because Ukraine keeps throwing body after body after body

Russia is a patient army

They kill and kill and keep killing

This is a war of attrition not territory as Brian Berletic says

Ultimately the Russians have soldiers and weapons while Ukrainians will lose too many men and weapons and the West can’t resupply them fast enough

The SMO is over

Russia has got what they wanted, they have to defend it and take around 4700 Sq Kms more

Mother secretly RECORDED teacher during meeting… HOLY.

America and the West is wholly bonkers.

The US likes to name airports, bridges, ships, etc. in honour of their beloved presidents. What would be an appropriate public facility that might be named after Donald Trump?

You know why Donald Trump is so fun to mock? Because, despite constantly insulting others, he has an incredibly thin skin when it’s turned around on him. If he had a sense of humor about it at all, it would be far less enjoyable.

Case in point: when John Oliver randomly made fun of Danbury, Connecticut on his show, the mayor of Danbury claimed they were going to name their new waste treatment plant after Oliver. The mayor later clarified that it was obviously a joke, but John Oliver was having none of it. He demanded his waste treatment plant. He publicly offered Danbury $50,000 for the naming rights, and when it was accepted, travelled to Danbury for the naming ceremony.

Point is, John Oliver is impossible to make fun of, because he happily owns the joke at every turn.

The reason I bring this up is because I’d love to see a Donald Trump Sewage Plant. Not because I think it’s appropriate (sewage treatment plants are necessary and useful pieces of infrastructure), but entirely because I’d love to see Trump’s reaction. If he could ignore it or take it in stride, it wouldn’t be funny. But I’m 100% sure he could do neither.

Casino (1995) – Blackjack Scene HD

Casino Blackjack scene.

Why didn’t the Germans detect that their encryption method Enigma had been broken by the British, given that it was a natural suspect when the enemy seems to anticipate your every move as if he could read your internal messages?

The British did not get greedy. They played a long game, only using a small percentage of the information available to them. When they did use information to score a victory, they used double agents to supply the Nazis with a credible alternative reason for their success.

When the Nazis cracked (or were supplied with) an Allied code, they DID get greedy. Supplied with British battle plans, Rommel won battle after battle, driving the British East across North Africa. His results were too good to be true. The British realised what was happening and changed their codes (and brought in the brilliant General Montgomery). Rommel’s string of victories turned into a string of defeats culminating in his nervous breakdown.

Admiral Doenitz became convinced that the encryption system was cracked by the British however and so another wheel was added to the Enigma machine. Fortunately, one Nazi sub commander forgot and sent a message in the old format and then, realising his mistake, sent the message again in the new format. Bletchley Park was back to ‘business as usual’ almost immediately.

This Is HUGE!!! U.S. Commerce Secretary Begs China for Help? – China’s Ultimatum!

The urgency surrounding the visit of the U.S. Commerce Secretary to China clearly signals a plea for China’s assistance in this critical situation. The purpose behind her visit is quite transparent: the U.S. is actively seeking a lifeline from China. In recent days, Gina Raimondo, the U.S. Secretary of Commerce, has touched down in Beijing, embarking on her trip to China. Even before her arrival, the objectives of her visit were evident. The main focus is on tackling the economic and trade disputes that have been ongoing between the U.S. and China. Simultaneously, the aim is to cultivate a practical and collaborative partnership between these two economic powerhouses. But What are the key factors driving the urgency of the U.S. Commerce Secretary’s visit to China and the apparent plea for China’s assistance in the current critical situation? Will China’s Strategic Divestment from U.S. Bonds Spell Disaster for the American Economy?

https://youtu.be/ZeNuyWjqG5Q

Why are nuclear power stations so unique?

Why are nuclear power stations so unique?

  • Hardly anything goes into them, and hardly anything comes out of them, except huge amounts of electrical energy, and waste heat. The amount of fuel consumed and waste produced amounts to the volume of a peanut per average consumer-year of electric power.
  • Given a few centuries of storage, and recycling, the waste is less radioactive than the consumed fuel, so they cleanse Earth of radioactive material.
  • Their grounds make nice public parks, and the slightly warmed water makes for good fishing.

Breaking Kitchen – Episode 6

Yo guys I must warn you that I can’t outdone myself every time because that’s not the point, this episode was planned six months ago. Walter could have thrown the pizza in the first episode, but I was leading up to a moment when it would fit best so it’s not about running out of ideas. Episodes are not made on the fly but are planned months ago (Vince Gilligan style lol) https://i.gyazo.com/0a2f75de07f8c4359… It’s no coincidence that events led up to Flyn’s appearance and then to the scene in Gordon’s office, and in what order the participants appear. For example, in order to make the line in the office about the meth make sense, I had to show it beforehand. The next episode with Gus, will have a small connection to the first episode, ect. And then there’s the bigger picture which is very difficult to implement.

The Time Tunnel – Inside Irwin Allens

Short documentary about the classic 60’s SF series ‘The Time Tunnel’.

Which actor accepted a film thinking it would go unnoticed and found himself at the helm of a gigantic success that transformed his career?

When Liam Neeson received the script for Taken , he thought it was a small project. He agreed to make the film because he was well paid, but without any illusions.

In an interview with 60 Minutes , he said:

“It was really a simple little story. I didn’t find anything complex about him. He’s a guy determined to find his daughter. He goes looking for her, and then, presto, he finds her. And, presto, he kills a lot of bad guys…

I was sure it wouldn’t go anywhere, it would go straight to video.”

$226 million later, Liam Neeson becomes Hollywood’s newest action star and his career takes on a new lease of life.

Not necessarily the one he was hoping for… but when you continue to be a headliner in Hollywood at over 65, it’s already not bad.

The Sopranos – The end of Jackie Aprile Jr

Business advice.

What are some effective military tactics used by Indian army during war?

During 1960s, Pakistan was the favorite of the USA and received over 1.2 billion dollars worth of military aid in equipment and money. In arrogance of newly received modern weapons, Pakistani military dictator Ayub Khan dreamed of defeating India and ruling over Delhi. Along with other modern technology, Pakistan received modern Patton tanks by US.

1965 Indo-Pak War.

Pakistan had 15 armored cavalry regiments consist of mainly modern Patton M-47 & M-48 tanks.

On the other hand India had comparatively less modern Centurion Mk 7s and Sherman tanks. During the start of war, Patton tanks proved their superiority and soon captured Khem Karan, an Indian town which is 5 kms inside the the international border.

Pakistanis were riding on sophisticated American weaponry and were confident they could maintain the same pace.

They were eyeing Amritsar. They knew the importance of Amritsar. If Amritsar fell, it would be difficult for India to negotiate.

After the fall of Khem Karan, Major General Gurbaksh Singh ordered the division to fall back and assume a horseshoe shaped defensive position in Asal Uttar in the sugarcane fields and ordered to fill the fields with water.

The fields were filled with water for 2 days and soil became very sticky. Indian forces lured the Pakistan tanks division towards their position. The defensive position was equipped with Centurion tanks and 106 mm recoilless guns mounted on jeep.

Pakistani Patton tanks were unaware of the swampy fields and were lured to the horseshoe trap. Soon these tanks were slowed down. By the time they could understand the Indian plan, many of them could not move because of the muddy slush.

In a few hours, the fields were covered with Pakistani tanks all stuck in the swamp, making them an easy target for Indian troops.

More than 100 Pakistani tanks were either destroyed or captured and the defeat of Pakistan Army in the battle of Asal Uttar was one of the greatest defeats suffered by Pakistan forces in the history.

Casino (1995) – Cheater’s Justice HD

“Throw him out in the alley and just tell the cops he got hit by a car.” CLASSIC!

Who stands out as the most morally reprehensible person in your experience?

The grifter is the worst, most morally reprehensible type of person in my opinion. They come in many shapes and forms. They cross ethnic, religious and political boundaries. Think of a man like, say, Joel Osteen. He wants your money. He tells you all sorts of reasons why you should give it to him. God is good to those who give, that sort of nonsense.

He’s a conman, his only love is money, but he’ll hide behind a thin veneer of religiosity and peddles “inspiration”, neatly packaged, to the masses. The way a Trump would have the masses pay for his legal defense and campaign costs, a man like Joel Osteen sells salvation, he sells eternity to you on a golden platter. And all you have to do is reach for your wallet, and it can all be yours.

Oh, he’ll save you, alright! And he’ll laugh all the way to the bank doing it… he’ll live lavishly off of the donations of his flock. These types always do. Fast cars, big mansions, private jets. His lifestyle is that of a celebrity. Like a Kardashian, but one who uses the words “God” and “Jesus” every second or third sentence and doesn’t say curse words.

Of course the grifter will go on shows like Oprah Winfrey’s, telling about his success, pretending to be humble as he counts his blessings… the grifter, to me, is the very worst humanity has to offer, because he sells hope. Hope for a better future. A better world. An eternity of peace. An ideologue at least has genuine passion, he wishes to see change. Be it a right-wing or a left-wing ideologue, there’s real drive, true desire to improve the world and organize it to his idea of perfection…

not the grifter. Never the grifter. All he wants is the insides of your wallet. He’ll pretend to love God, when all he loves is money. Pretend to love people, when all he loves is his own smiling reflection. I can forgive a great many sins. But I will forever side-eye those who get rich over the backs of the faithful, manipulating their beliefs for personal gain. This, to me, is the worst type of person out there.

I have some personal experience, too, with such grifters. After all I lived for years in the Philippines, where a cult named Iglesia ni Cristo is active. Iglesia ni Cristo (INC) literally translates as “Church of Christ”. Oh, the hubris! It’s leader, Eduardo Manalo, is the grandson of the churches’ founder. Each leader is the son of the one before him, kind of like North Korea. I remember a kid in the town I used to live in. He was sad after a service once. I asked one of his friends, why he was sad.

He wasn’t able to pay his tithethe monthly ten percent he’s supposed to pay…” his friend explained to me. Essentially, all members, no matter how young, have to give ten percent of their monthly income to the church. Even if you’re a kid, you have to give your allowance money, your lunch budget, whatever. If you don’t give it, you’ll get scolded. You’ll get shamed. Asked by your pastor if you “really love the Church”, or if you “really love God” because if you did, surely you would have spent a little less on your lunch yesterday at school? Bought a little less candy, perhaps, or one less lumpia?

It’s morally reprehensible to me. Because while the poor flock is told to “pay up and not ask questions”, the leaders always live lavishly. Huge family compounds. Enormous mansions in gated communities, private jets, expensive cars… and those who pay for it are indoctrinated from an early age to give, without question. The consequence of not giving? Hell, and eternal damnation. Because the way of the grifter and his minions is the only way to salvation. I cannot think of worse people.

Derby Day Burgoo Stew

Burgoo is a mishmash of meats and vegetables. You might call it the “kitchen sink soup.”

68de0327fccd0d0fc11b24c9cb0f8b8c
68de0327fccd0d0fc11b24c9cb0f8b8c

Yield: 8 to 10 main course servings

Ingredients

  • 1 pound mixed cooked meats (beef, lamb, pork, chicken, etc.)
  • 1/2 gallon chicken stock
  • 1/2 gallon beef stock
  • 1 ounce Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 cup tomatoes, diced
  • 1 large onion, diced
  • 1 stalk celery, diced
  • 1 small green bell pepper, diced
  • 1 large potato, diced
  • 2 large carrots, diced
  • 1/4 cup peas
  • 1/2 cup okra
  • 1/4 cup lima beans
  • 1/2 cup yellow corn
  • 2 teaspoons garlic, minced
  • Salt and pepper to taste

Instructions

  1. Combine all ingredients and bring to a boil.
  2. Reduce heat and simmer for two hours, skimming the top as needed.

The Rocket Launch. A Super 8 mm home movie from the 70’s.

Takes you back.

I know the beach has a seaweed smell. Does Venice, Italy have a smell to it also?

Actually, “Venice stinks” would be a way of describing the nauseating stench emanating from the hundreds of canals and backwaters of “La Serenissima”, especially in summer. “La Puzzona” – the little stinker – would be a better name.

This is due to the fact that Venice, to this day, does not have a functioning sewage system or sewage treatment plants. Until the 1960s, the sewage was slowly directed into the so-called “gatoli”, a brick sewer system that eventually led into the canals and that was developed as early as the 16th century.

These tunnels were built of clay bricks and were designed so that the heavier sediment sank to the bottom while the liquid part flowed into the canal. Today’s septic tanks operate on a similar principle. The solid parts of the “gatoli” were constantly emptied.

In order not to clog the outlets of the gatoli into the canals, they were raised further and further. As a result, they were exposed at low tide, which had quite unpleasant consequences: stench, terrible hygiene conditions in the canals, rats and swarms of insects – especially the “Chironomide”, a species of non-biting mites. The last major outbreak was in 1987, when I visited Venice and was appalled by the swarms of insects that covered the glass walls of the Vaporetto stations.

A few years later, at attempt was made to map the gatoli, but that proved almost impossible in the end because the system had been changed many times over the centuries. It was also sometimes difficult to understand into which channels the sewage from the houses was actually being emptied.

Today there are more than 7,000 septic tanks in the city which effectively constitutes a fragmented, decentralized sewage system. The septic tanks allow wastewater treatment so that the liquid part floats on top and is cleaned before entering the canal. The solid part, on the other hand, must be removed manually. You can see the special boats that empty septic tanks almost everywhere.

Septic tanks are mandatory for all establishments such as hotels, restaurants, cafes, museums, hospitals, offices, etc, but they can also be found in private homes, (where, however, they are not mandatory).

Septic tanks are not always feasible in Venice since they need space and cannot be built on public land or near the supporting walls of a house. The volume of septic tanks is calculated based on the number of people that live in a building, and often that proves impossible.

And even if there is space, digging in the foundations of the houses often expose their supporting piles, hastening their decay, so septic tanks aren’t built if it would seriously jeopardize the stability of historic buildings. In this case, owners have to fall back on the old “gatoli” system.

Living in Venice therefore also means accepting the stench. Of course, organic detergents and eco-friendly toilet paper can help a bit, and most inhabitants would welcome it if Venice were to stop discharging sewage into the canals. But the plan to provide Venice with a centralized and modern sewer system had to be abandoned in the end, as Venice would have had to be more or less completely demolished and rebuilt from scratch.

A compromise was finally reached that calls for a combination of septic tanks, maintenance of the existing “gatoli” and dredging of the canals. Nevertheless, large amounts of fecal matter, waste and, above all, toxic industrial residues and garbage still enter the lagoon. So if next time you visit La Serenissima and the stench gets particularly bad, just hold your nose.

Tony Soprano || The Scientist

“Man, this is one of your best works! All are so good put together, this songs really fits Tony. The effort you put into this is incredible, I know you took time doing this and for that, for that this is art. The song you choose for him was a good decision, this song is very melancholic and nostalgic, you are so talented at editing man, seriously. it was worth the wait for these wonderful 4 minutes, keep it up Alex.”

Tex-Mex Chicken and Rice Chili

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Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

Chili

  • 1 box Rice-a-Roni Spanish Rice
  • 2 3/4 cups water
  • 2 cups chopped cooked chicken or turkey
  • 1 (15 or 16 ounce) can kidney beans or pinto beans, rinsed and drained
  • 1 (14 1/2 or 16 ounce) can tomatoes or stewed tomatoes, undrained
  • 1 medium green bell pepper, cut into 1/2 inch pieces
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons chili powder
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin

Optional

  • 1/2 cup (2 ounces) shredded Cheddar or Monterey Jack cheese
  • Sour cream
  • Chopped cilantro

Instructions

  1. In a 3-quart saucepan, combine rice-vermicelli mix, special seasonings, water, chicken, beans, tomatoes, green pepper, chili powder and cumin. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low; simmer uncovered, about 20 minutes or until rice is tender, stirring occasionally.
  2. Top with cheese, sour cream and cilantro if desired.

1940s USA – Fascinating Street Scenes of Vintage America [Colorized]

Posted before, but just great.

Arriving with only the clothes on your back

When I left my retirement in Arkansas and flew to China, the airlines lost my baggage. So when I arrived in China, all that I had was a backpack, some of my most important papers, my laptop computer, and what I was wearing.

At that time, and to this day, I wear very comfortable clothes on planes during air travel. And given TSA back in the State’s, my clothes were simple;

Black hospital scrubs, and black slippers with black socks.

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So, here I am arrived in China, with literally only the clothes on my back.

And for the first month or so, I had to live and wear in them until I got settled in, reestablished, and start earning money again.

In hindsight, it’s kind of funny.

Everyone, including my wife, wanted me to toss those things and never wanted to see me in them ever again. As a result, she went on a spending spree and outfitted me right and proper.

I don’t know what the fuck I was doing when I planned this cluster-fuck of a life, but I’ve got to tell you all, it’s almost a parody. Seriously.

Did I have a sense of humor, or was my “crew” trying to make a point when they planned my pre-birth world-line template?

I wonder…

…how many meme’s have I personally experienced in this life? Hum….

Enterprise Under Attack from the Suliban Part II

Stra Trek Enterprise Season 2 Episode 16 Future Tense

Carolina Hot Dog Chili

hot dogging
hot dogging

Ingredients

  • 1 1/4 pounds ground beef
  • 1 large onion (about 1 cup chopped)
  • 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
  • 1/2 cup ketchup
  • 1 tablespoon chili powder
  • 2 teaspoons Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 teaspoon cider or white vinegar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper (optional)

Instructions

  1. Place the beef, onion and 2 cups of water in a Dutch oven or soup pot over high heat. Bring to the water to a boil. Reduce heat to medium and stir to begin breaking up the meat.
  2. Add the tomato paste, ketchup, chili powder, Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, salt and pepper, if using. Stir well until the tomato paste and ketchup are dissolved and the meat is mostly broken up.
  3. Continue to cook at a simmer, stirring about every 5 minutes, about 15 minutes. As the chili thickens, you may need to reduce the heat to medium-low or low so it doesn’t stick. Refrigerate, covered, up to 2 days, or freeze in small freezer bags for up to 6 months.
  4. Thaw or reheat in a microwave, stirring often.

If you want a finer texture, you can cool the chili at least 20 minutes and process in a blender or food processor for 30 to 45 seconds.

Are India’s GDP numbers intentionally misleading, suggesting that the country is faking its economic data?

I don’t really see GDP numbers too closely

They may fudged be but by very small margins

Say tomorrow we are at $ 4.981 trillion, then it’s possible we may fudge to somehow make it appear that we have reached $ 5 Trillion

There is no conceivable way that any GDP number is off beyond say 2% at the most


The Point is Economic Development can be seen with your own eyes and not on paper

Take UP

I visited UP and traveled to quite a few places

I saw nothing to indicate bountiful prosperity

There was nothing to indicate the hum of a busy growing economy

Sure they had nice roads and a lot of nice commercial and techno parks but frankly it looked like more like

If you build it they will come

That’s what happens when you don’t develop your own populace with good secondary and tertiary education and instead rely on only investments under gun point or unrealistic concessions by the state

Now Take Bangalore or Hyderabad or Chennai

They are buzzing with activity and you can see that the economies are doing well

The Problem in India is that a few cities and few hubs are carrying the weight of the entire nation


There are 3 Key points in a booming economy

  • Unemployment is pretty low
  • Savings are pretty high (>= 36%)
  • Inflation is typically 50% of RORR

India has neither of the three

  • Unemployment is way above the target 5%
  • Gross Savings are 30.20%
  • RORR is 7% and Inflation is 5.05% which is way above the 3.50% target

That alone tells me there are pending issues that need looking into

As a teacher, what’s the most personal thing a child has told you about their parent(s) that they definitely were not supposed to mention?

I taught a shop class in an inner city high school…One day as the students were changing into work clothes I noticed some relatively new wounds on Jerome’s back…I politely and discreetly took him into my office and asked him what happened…He told me his step father had tied him to a metal bed spring and beat him with a coathanger…I knew where he lived so when school was out for the day I went to his apt and his stepdad was there…I proceeded to beat the living shit out of that evil man…And told him if he wasn’t gone before Jeromes bus got there I’d finish the job…AND call the cops…I drug his worthless carcass down to his pos car and he drove off…never to be seen again. Jerome stayed in my class for the full 3 years and graduated high school…Neither of us ever mentioned it…30 years later Jerome still calls me to visit ever so often…

The US Bankrupting Itself on Wars -w/ Ron Paul, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Oh HELL yeah! The dignified and stately Dr. Ron Paul is one of the very best Americans living. Thanks very much for this, you guys.

A laughable 89% of the Chinese people actually trust their authoritarian government! Where are the renaining 11% who do not?

Laughable because you are ignorant and naive like a 5 years old kid. If you know the truth you will be the one of the 89% too.

While the U.S. real standard of living deteriorated back to the 1960’s Chinese real standard of living grew 30 times in 40 years! While 35% in the U.S. has no health insurance, every single Chinese gets free health care. While the U.S. kids get into debts for just getting into college Chinese are provided totally free college tuition.

Chinese average life expectancy overtook the U.S. in the last 2 years straight. While your infrastructure is crumbling China has the latest state of the art ports, airports, highways, high speed railways. While your trains travel at snail speed China’s high speed trains travel at 400 KM per hour.

Do you still laugh now? To be honest everyone in the world is laughing at you. You want to know about the 11% so that you can orchestrate a coup? Organised a protest and a demonstration? Do a colour revolution? And you think the Chinese are fools to give you the information? Just because you have a IQ of a snail doesn’t mean others are the same like you!

Tex-Mex Biscuits

Tex Mex Biscuits
Tex Mex Biscuits

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1/2 cup enriched hominy grits or quick grits
  • 4 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt (optional)
  • 1/2 cup butter or margarine
  • 4 ounces Monterey Jack cheese (with or without jalapeno peppers), shredded
  • 1/2 cup dairy sour cream
  • 1/4 cup milk

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Lightly grease a cookie sheet.
  2. Combine dry ingredients; cut in butter until mixture resembles coarse crumbs.
  3. Stir in cheese.
  4. Combine sour cream and milk; add to dry ingredients, mixing just until moistened. Shape dough to form a ball; knead gently on lightly floured surface 10 to 12 times. Roll dough to 3/4 inch thickness. Cut with floured 2-inch biscuit cutter. Place 1 inch apart on prepared cookie sheet.
  5. Bake for 10 to 12 minutes or until golden brown.

Yield: 12 biscuits

Have you ever applauded an act of vigilante justice?

This is Kalinka Bamberski, who used to be a 14-year-old from France.

During the summer of 1982, she briefly stayed in Lindau, Germany, with her mother and her stepfather, Dr. Dieter Krombach.

On July 9th of that summer, Krombach killed Kalinka. The next day, Krombach told the authorities that he simply found Kalinka dead in the morning.

Autopsies could not determine the exact cause of her death, and Krombach got away with the murder. This led Kalinka’s biological father, Andre, to grow suspicious and to investigate further.

Despite the authorities’ failure to discern the exact cause of Kalinka’s death, there were multiple red flags in the original autopsy: Kalinka’s corpse had multiple injection marks, fresh blood stains and a “whitish substance” around the genitals, and indigested food near the throat suggesting that she died soon after a meal.

Andre, rightfully suspecting that his daugher was raped, called for an additional investigation. This time, the authorities discovered clear evidence that, right before her death, Kalinka was injected with a drug named “Kobalt-Ferrlecit,” a substance capable of causing immediate discomfort and nausea in a victim. Andre pressed a case against Krombach, but the German courts judged that there was insufficient evidence for an indictment. Despite multiple red flags, Krombach was not indicted.

In 1995, however, the French courts officially sentenced Krombach in absentia to 15 years in prison for manslaughter.

Furthermore, later in 1997, Krombach admitted in a German trial that he had drugged and raped another girl using Kobalt-Ferrlecit, the same substance found in Kalinka’s corpse. Numerous other girls came forth, saying that Krombach had also raped them using the same drug. For this, the German courts took away his medical license, but did not sentence him to prison.

Unfortunately, in 2001, Krombach’s French manslaughter conviction of 1995 was annulled by the European Court of Human Rights, the reason being that Krombach was not capable of defending his case in that French trial. Not only was the 1995 French verdict annulled, but all attempts to extradite him for retrial were rejected.

But for Andre, the case was not over. Andre was deeply frustrated at the international legal system’s failure to bring justice; he decided he was going to take justice into his own hands.

In 2009, Andre and three other men secretly kidnapped Krombach from Germany, beat him up, and left him tied up near a French police station, allowing the French authorities to detain him and honor their 1995 decision.

Despite Germany’s requests to bring him back, French officials and courts ignored these complaints and officially re-tried Krombach.

With other victims testifying that Krombach had injected them with the same drug to rape them, on October 22, 2011, Krombach was finally sentenced to 15 years in prison for manslaughter.


Kalinka’s father, Andre, was convicted and given a suspended sentence for abducting Krombach.

But in my opinion? Andre Bamberski was a heroic father who spent 30 years of his life to bring justice for his daughter’s death. Yes, he broke the law — but refusing to convict Krombach earlier and ignoring the mountatin of evidence against him was a clear failure in the international justice system.

For Andre’s determination and commitment, I applaud him.

Prof. Richard Wolff on American Labor: Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow

Pretty good and very interesting.

If China is indeed collapsing, why is every leader visiting China? Why is the US commerce secretary visiting China?

Reality vs Propaganda

The USA imports almost $ 560 Billion of Goods from China

Guess the retail value of these goods?

$ 1.567 Trillion or almost $ 1.6 Trillion

This means a US importer who pays $ 27.50 for a Jeans from China sells it for $ 69.99 retail

A Laptop imported for $ 700 from China sells retail for $ 1199

A Burnished Ebony Table Factory made. Imported with 6 Chairs for $ 121 from China sells retails for $ 249

Hence $ 564 Billion of Imports from China makes around $ 1.6 Trillion to the US Importers

1.6 Trillion Dollars Or around 6.5% of US GDP

Now let’s do the opposite

The US exports $ 165 Billion to China

Guess their retail value?

Around $ 255–260 Billion only

Why?

Because China exports low cost products manufactured with CONTINUOUS VALUE ENHANCEMENT from Market pricing and Brand pricing and Technology pricing

A $ 37 Purse of Calf Leather retails for $ 360 with a Gucci brand name

A $ 3.10 T Shirt retails for $ 43.99 with a Tommy Hilfiger Brand name

However US exports products with almost ZERO VALUE ENHANCEMENT POTENTIAL

Soybeans, Wheat, Corn, Semiconductors, Advanced Machinery etc

There is very little value enhancement due to market pricing or Brand pricing or Technology Pricing

Even a Boeing makes at the most a couple of million dollars commission to a Chinese Importer while earning nearly 100 Million Dollars to the US Economy


You see right?

No Nation on earth can export $ 564 Billion worth of goods to the USA

It’s estimated that at thrice the manufacturing potential today – India, Vietnam and Mexico combined can export $ 338 Billion worth of Goods by 2030

This that’s around $ 226 Billion of Exports but also around $ 700 Billion of final retail goods

That’s the amount that US players and entities will be deprived off if US entirely decouples from China EVEN IN 2030 with India, Vietnam and Mexico tripling their Industrial Output

Even then US Economy and it’s players will be deprived of $ 700 Billion Dollars which by 2030 could be around $ 1 Trillion with inflation

That’s a lot of jobs, lots of payments GONE

Meanwhile China?

China may lose around $ 564 Billion of Exports in decoupling

At 0.4% inflation

That’s $ 580 Billion vs $ 1 Trillion


So even in the worst case scenario of US entirely decoupling from China and India, Mexico and Vietnam tripling their Industrial output today – China would lose $ 580 Billion while US would lose a whopping $ 1 Trillion

At normal Industrial output for these three nations, US would lose $ 2.4 Trillion or nearly 4.5 times as much as China stands to lose as an economy


Same for EU

Same for ASEAN

Same for India

Its why Raimondo visits China

It’s why 27 Chinese entities were removed from a Blacklist recently

The Media has been spinning fiction and propaganda so far and China hasn’t cared

Now if China decides to take their revenge by drastically cutting off key exports of say $ 100 Billion, then US cannot source more than $ 30 Billion from other countries

China loses $ 100 Billion but US loses around $ 210 Billion of value to it’s economy

That’s 44% of the projected $ 470 Billion that the US Economy hopes to enhance itself this year at 1.8% growth


So Raimondo says

Please keep trading with us as usual. Ignore what we say in our media. Our contention with you is for the $ 10–15 Billion portion of our Trade, let’s keep the balance $ 685–690 Billion of Trade as normal

That’s why China doesn’t need to visit everybody and reassure anyone much

Everyone loses far far more by decoupling with China

So ultimately it creates a slow down globally where China albeit having very low growth still beats the rest of the world

Solving The Most Mysterious Children in History

THREE STORIES: The Most Mysterious Children in History In 12th century England, two children were found lost in a forest.

They spoke only gibberish, wore strange clothing and had bright green skin.

When the children finally learned to speak English, they described where they were from.

And that’s why, after almost 1,000 years, people still talk about The Green Children of Woolpit.

In 1828, a teenage boy was shuffling through a public square in Nuremburg. He seemed confused and disoriented.

He had trouble walking and speaking. When police finally approached him, he was holding an envelope containing two letters.

And those letters sparked the mystery of Kaspar Hauser.

In April 1922, in Brittany, France, 2-year-old Pauline Picard went missing. A massive search turned up nothing.

The family was losing hope. A month later, Pauline was found wandering around a village over 200 miles away.

Though her parents were overjoyed to have her back, they soon realized something wasn’t quite right with their daughter. These are three unsolved cases of the most mysterious children in history.

POMPEO said ‘Covert operations, ousting democratically elected governments, inciting revolts and supporting transnational companies are run of the mill operations for the CIA.’ WHO GAVE THEM THOSE RIGHTS?

We did, all us minions. America was once set up having a government described as ‘a government of the people, for the people, by the people’, but the people couldn’t be bothered and went home, leaving ‘those who shouldn’t be’ in charge. Industry filled the vacuum created by our conspicuous absence, which over time gave way to the American Industrial Military Complex which runs the country today.

Now industry owns the puppet show called ‘Democracy’, which in no way should be confused with actual democracy, and yet we continually pretend they are one and the same, and that our vote counts, even though voting either left or right basically changes nothing of significance. Results may vary but the rich are always always always the primary beneficiary, either way they lean.

We demand and receive empty platitudes, and are duly amused by military antics across the globe, ignoring the fact that such behavior merely mirrors us here at home, and that the same shit is pulled on our own, until folks like Snowden and Assange et al dare to shatter our deliberately cultivated ignorance. No matter, we have ways to deal with such moral assholes, as throwing them under the bus in various ways has become a time honored national pastime.

So, when you want to look at who’s at fault, go look in the mirror. When you wish to look deeper, check out your family albums. We are the bloody problem, and as we are paying the price, with record numbers driven from their homes in this rich nation, and yet, still we refuse to accept responsibility for our democracy, knowingly leaving it in the manipulative hands of industry, which is exactly how to kill actual democracy, regardless of the puppet show which operates by the same name.

Whether you love Trump or hate him, he reflects us, and had he actually run the country as we pretend to believe, he would have surely killed it, as would Biden. We need to wake the fuck up to the reality we have created, and make the necessary changes within ourselves which can then be reflected through our leadership, before it’s too late, if it’s not already.

But who among us want to actually be the change we want to see?

Who?

What scary gut feeling did you have that turned out to be true?

Many years ago, when I was living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, I had a work commute on a typical Monday through Friday schedule.

One evening on my way home from work, I turned off a main street into the side streets that would lead me the rest of the way home. It was a very familiar drive and I knew each block well – which ones had a stop sign for me, which ones had stop signs for the cross traffic, and which ones had four-way stops. I was cruising the last few blocks toward home and had no more stop signs, so I was probably going about 35 mph when suddenly it was as if someone inside my head said, “Slow down!” It was so forceful and unexpected, I did just that. “Slower!” was the next command, and then again, “Slower!”

I was just about to chalk it all up to being a little kookie after a long day, when suddenly someone driving a vehicle on the cross street blew through their stop sign at an alarming rate of speed. I am 100% certain if I had not slowed down, I would have been T-boned by someone doing a good 60–70 mph. The close call freaked me out. I’m not a religious person, but it sure felt like I had a guardian angel that day.

Dead For 7 Minutes; Man Is Shown Past Lives During Incredible NDE

Have you ever had a bad gut feeling about someone and it was right?

Yes. My dad’s best friend growing up has a son my age. We were really close as kids but they moved away and I didn’t talk to him for years. When we were teens, my dad’s friend came to visit. Something about his son literally made my skin crawl. I was left alone at home with him and my three young siblings while the parents went out for the night and I was nearly frantic trying to ensure he did not have a moment alone with my siblings. When our parents returned I told them something was wrong with the son, and to please not leave me alone with him again. My dad was upset and demanded to know why I would say that, did the son do something? He honestly hadn’t actually done or said anything that I could pin this feeling on. So I told them, I think my animal brain just knows a predator when I see one. My dad thought I was being dramatic but my mom believed me and made sure we weren’t alone with the son for the rest of their visit. About a year later it turned out the son got caught in the act of raping his niece. He told the police he was glad he was caught because he couldn’t stop himself. My dad has never doubted my intuition since.

Tony Confronts Tony Blundetto – The Sopranos HD

When Tony B looks up after Tony S said someone got a look at the guy. That’s the reaction of someone who did it. Split second panic and then cool as a breeze. Steve Buscemi nailed it.

What work secret did you accidentally find out that changed everything?

I worked for a major retail company, in a team running the mainframe.

One task was keeping the (huge, size of a car trailer) printers running.

Some printouts were for the board, and these we were told to check for misprints and missing pages.

We’d just been told that we couldn’t have any pay rises since there wasn’t any money in the budget. Inflation was running high, so not getting a pay rise really meant a pay cut.

The company annual account report was printed and I was checking it before putting it in internal mail.

I noticed that the IT department budget was underspent by half a million!

No money for pay rises!

Showed printout to my manager. He ran off with it to the copier. Multiple copies of the page showing the surplus in the IT department were placed around the department.

We got pay rises.

Ralph Cifaretto Refuses Tony’s Drink – The Sopranos HD

Why is Huawei able to get a large number of chips to release new mobile phone products like Mate 60?

SMIC has been making 7nm custom GPUs for the past 2–3 years, mostly for crypto customers who couldn’t get in the TSMC queue.

This filled real market demand that other players didn’t, or couldn’t.

SMIC used this opportunity to refine its process, on the quiet.

Huawei, in the meantime, found willing partners to share talent and resources, in a concerted effort to save the high-tech industry on the mainland from American destruction through the threat of sanction.

How did Huawei et. al. find the tools necessary for chip design, especially the GPU? What black magic did Huawei use to improve the transistor geometry? How did they penetrate the Qualcomm 5g patent wall? I don’t know. Neither does my friend in TSMC. It’s a separate ecosystem now, and quite independent.

The fog of war has descended, but the outcome point to solidarity across the ranks, with competitors working together like they are part of a conglomerate.

The Chinese are capable of cooperation on unheard of scale, because of long history.

The Mate 60 Pro is merely a first step, lacking polish and maturity. What’s coming though, will be a deluge.

Alien Artifacts on Mars: What NASA doesn’t want you to know

This is fun. But don’t take too seriously.

Is it true that Huawei phones are monitored by the Chinese government?

Of course. The Chinese government really wants to know how many times you call your girlfriend every week, and which are your favourite games, and which pop stars you follow on Instagram, and most of all they are interested in the photos of your meals that you regularly post on Facebook.

These are vital secrets so critical for the national security of the USA, so the evil communist spies from China will be watching intently. Remember that well, and be careful! The everyday events of your online life have the devastating potential to alter the direction of global geopolitics and the history of the world, basically.

How Huawei Mate60 5G Overcome US Sanctions? | Time to invest in Chinese tech stocks

100 sanctions. Imprisonment of it’s CEO. Mandatory shutdown of partner factories in the West.

Huawei survived!

This is really good.

Are you worried that China’s new $40 billion state fund for semiconductor manufacturing will disrupt the global supply chain for advanced chips?

Why worry US. Remember most Yanks still think Chinese live in caves and eat bats! To these hubris Yanks China can only make T-shirts and toys. And U.S. can deprived them technologies and send them back to the Stone Age.

Well, what happened? While the U.S. is still in the midst of ordering and coercing Taiwan to build its chip plant to manufacture 7nm chips that it thinks China is unable to do. To the horrors of U.S. officials. It took a mere 3 years for China to. Make it and now inside the Huawei Mate 60!

Where are the neocons who convince Biden to spend a trillion in losses, in subsidies, in coercions, in tax breaks, in new shining plants, in luring specialist to the U.S. only to see that China get it done in no time and made products that are not only comparable but better, faster and cheaper!

Huawei may have developed its own 5G chip to bypass US sanctions

Huawei, under tight US sanctions since 2019, started selling its latest Mate 60 Pro smartphone this week, raising speculation about its 5G capabilities. Some online reviews claim the device comes with the Kirin 9000s chip to support 5G and satellite calls.

The US and some European governments have labelled the Chinese giant a threat to national security, despite the company’s denial. Huawei had restricted access to US components and software, including from foreign chipmakers.

Early this year, Japan and the Netherlands joined the US effort to curb the export of advanced semiconductors. However, Huawei has been rumoured to be actively trying to overcome these sanctions to return to the 5G smartphone market, even resuming production on advanced chips with China’s Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).

Why does it matter?

Huawei’s development of its 5G chip may have implications for the tech industry, the global economy, and national security.

The smartphone launch coincides with US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo’s visit to Beijing, reiterating the Biden administration’s stance on export controls to China.

If the new Mate 60 Pro is confirmed to have a 5G chip, that would mark a significant achievement for the Chinese tech champion.

China’s ability to produce its own advanced chips would also announce a considerable advancement in technological capabilities and would mean a serious blow to current US measures aimed at slowing its progress.

It could inspire the country’s largest tech firms to get around US sanctions, fueling the ‘whole nation‘ endeavor to produce Chinese innovation to beat the US.

Breaking Bad – Shooting Tuco Scene (S2E2)

Why do people support Bernie Sanders?

I’ll tell you.

In the United States, I was a conservative Republican working at a wage earning job. Then, while driving for my employer, on a delivery, on the clock, at a red light I was stopped. A person who was not paying attention smashed into my stationary vehicle and totaled it, and sent me to the hospital.

The hospital bill was thousands upon thousands of dollars. My employer didn’t cover any of it. My automobile insurance replaced my new vehicle with an old one that barely ran. I ran up many thousands of dollars of medical debt that I couldn’t afford.

Note: I spent one hour at the hospital, getting one scan. I received zero actual treatment, before or after that scan. It still cost me more than I made in a year. And no, the insurance didn’t cover it. Insurance that would have covered it, would have taken up half of my wages in a given month.

Cut to a few years later. I am now happily married, living in Norway. Still an American citizen. My wife is Norwegian and the pay is much, much better here, because they have things called unions. I literally earn three times as much as I did in Florida, working the same type of job. Scratch that, I was in management in the USA. Here, it’s an entry level job, no promotion. I still make far more money than I did in the states.

But the point is, whenever I need to see a doctor now, I just go. Whenever I need an operation, I can afford it. Whenever I am sick, I take time off. Because over here, in Norway, they have single payer universal healthcare.

I’ve never seen a doctor more often than I have since moving to Norway. I’ve gotten medical conditions diagnosed that I never would have found the money for before. I’ve gotten sick leave from work when I have been ill. Seeing a doctor tends to cost less than I make in a day, and if I go over a certain amount in a year, I can pay nothing.

Instead of getting bills from a doctor for thousands of dollars, I end up paying around 30 bucks out of pocket each time.

The doctor earns plenty. They make slightly less money here, but are still among the highest paid people in society. The citizens are healthier, they live longer. They take their health more seriously. Norway spends more per patient than almost any other country in the world, and they cover every citizen, every resident, completely.

Norway still spends only about half as much as US citizens are forced to spend on their healthcare.

The reason is because healthcare is considered a right here, like getting a public school education. People don’t go without simply because they’re poor.

And as a result, lifespans and healthcare outcomes and healthcare expenses are all a better outcome or a cheaper deal here in Norway.

Bernie Sanders is one of the few politicians in my native United States who understands that progressive ideas like universal healthcare would greatly enhance the lives of my fellow citizens.

I care about my fellow citizens, and I’d like for my son to be able to live in the USA someday, as he is born to a US citizen and he can certainly go far there.

The problem is, if he decides to come to the USA; there won’t be a union fighting for him against corporate greed. There will be greatly reduced wages. And if he gets hurt, sick, or otherwise needs medical care, he will likely need to have far more money than he earns in order to get that care.

That’s ridiculous.

Of course, he could just get a college education (something that is free in Norway) and then he could afford the outrageous healthcare prices in the USA.

But if he wanted to get such an education in the USA, he could find himself a hundred thousand dollars in debt just for college alone, in a shitty economic downturn, without even the benefit of having a place to live. Throw on a mortgage payment on top of that, and he would be downright stupid to deliberately choose the USA over Norway.

The difference is that Norway governs for its citizens and certain things are prioritized here, like education and healthcare.

Whereas in the USA most of the money you spend in taxes goes towards prepping for world war 3 and giving subsidies to already profitable corporations, and then giving them loopholes where they don’t have to pay any corporate taxes at all. And then billionaires pay for senators to give them even more tax breaks personally, and then they use that money that should be funding your government services to bankroll candidates for the Republican ticket that will never, ever do anything to help a working class person.

I support Bernie Sanders because he’s spent decades representing working class people, without ever selling out. It’s a shame people keep rejecting him in favor of billionaires who bail themselves out on the taxpayer’s dime like Donald Trump.

Norway isn’t alone. Basically any other modern, western nation has a universal healthcare system of some kind, and doesn’t shit on the poor like the USA does under Republican rule. Needless to say, I don’t think much of my former political party. They haven’t done anything for any working person in at least 4 decades. I was a fool to support them at all when I was younger. I believed their lies, basically.

China’s Punishes Japan, Cancels $154 4 Billion Order!

https://youtu.be/Xwrfk3eD3bc

Is the Huawei Mate 60 Pro chip equal to the latest iPhone chip or even better?

No

The Mate 60 is superior to the performance of the Iphone 13 and is on par with the performance of Iphone 14

Yet the Mate 60 is expected to be half a generation below the Iphone 15

The Price of the Mate 60 however is at least 3000 Yuan lesser than the Iphone 15 and given the mild differences in performance between the two, the market for the mate 60 is likely to zoom and surge and definitely affect the market for the Iphone 15

I believe Iphone will lose around 15% of it’s present market share in China to Huawei due to the Mate 60 and the Mate 60 Pro Plus to be released in 2024 April

Saudi & Russia Have CHANGED The Game!

How come some of these parents did not discipline their children at an early age and then as they get older and get more and more into trouble they end up having to either go to jail or prison because they weren’t raised up by parenting skills 101?

I’ve often told this story:

As a child, I was an incorrigible thief. Absolutely nothing could stop me.

I stole books. We had no local library, no school library, and no money to buy books. And I WANTED TO READ! (That may have been why I developed the habit of re-reading books.) I also stole art supplies, but that wasn’t quite the same problem, because you didn’t need a new set of pastels every week. When I was caught, I was punished — usually beat, because that was punishment in Little Italy in the 1960s.

My brother also stole. He tended towards candy and comic books. He also got beat when he got caught.

When I turned 16 I got a job, and I never had to steal a book again. Within three months I had enough books (and money) to build my first bookshelf. My current bookshelf, which is about half the size of its maximum ever, is 13′ long and 7′ high. I built that one, too.

I don’t steal art supplies, either. I order them online.

My brother decided stealing was fun, and meant he didn’t have to work. He made a living illegally hooking up electric lines after the power was shut off; later, he added cable TV installations. And he didn’t need a full-time job, ever.

Same parents, same beatings, same reason — poverty. When I had a choice, I stopped stealing. When he had a choice, he became a better thief. Good parenting helps, but nothing will tell you why a child turned out the way they did.

Clear interference shown in docs leaked to Mintpress

This is pretty good. Heads up!

Why is the Huawei Mate 60 phone called “the world’s first phone that the CIA can’t monitor”?

Theoretically, any cell phone that makes calls through a terrestrial carrier could be monitored by the CIA. It doesn’t matter whether the phone is made in the United States, South Korea or China.

After all, their signals and data must eventually be aggregated into the operator’s computer room and lines.

However, Mate60 is so unique that it is the first mobile phone in the world that can send short messages and make calls directly through artificial satellites. Previous similar products required the help of ground operators for transit.

Some people may say: CIA will also monitor satellites! Of course.

But what if these satellites are not operated by Americans?

Yes, if two people hold Mate60 at the same time, they can rely on a series of artificial satellites in space for global communication that do not rely on the United States. Perfectly avoiding every link that the CIA may touch.

The Future of the WORLD is here in CHINA!

A new trend: Leading young Chinese physicists, engineers refuse to study, work in the US

While many Chinese scientists and engineers have returned to China after working years in the US, there is a newer trend which just came to my attention: Young Chinese star physicists and engineers are refusing to go to US universities and companies for study and then work, and are choosing to do their post-graduate study and work in China.

Why?

They have seen how research and product patents are owned by US universities and companies, and are used against Chinese companies and interests if a tech war breaks out.

They do not want their inventions used against Chinese companies and interests, so they choose to stay in China.

Huang Qianqian 黄芊芊 is a leading student and researcher on electricity consumption in chips, who went to Beijing University for undergraduate work, and is now doing graduate work there. In spite of being offered full scholarships to US universities, she decided to stay in China to do her work. She already has several patents under her name.

The US wanted decoupling; it is getting decoupling.

Douglas Macgregor: They Moved Past The Border!

https://youtu.be/L8QFXPEfn4c

ISRAEL TO DEPORT ALL BLACKS BACK TO AFRICA!

World Hal Turner

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has called for plans to immediately deport Blacks out of Israel and back to Africa.

Plans should be drawn up to remove all African migrants from Israel after groups of Eritreans were involved in a violent clash in Tel Aviv, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says.

He also wants the migrants involved in the demonstration to be deported immediately.

His remarks came a day after rival groups of Eritreans clashed in bloody protests that left dozens of people injured.

The groups, supporters and opponents of Eritrea’s government, faced off with construction lumber, pieces of metal and rocks, smashing shop windows and police cars.

Israeli police in riot gear shot tear gas, stun grenades and live rounds while officers on horseback tried to control the protesters.

The violence broke out near the Eritrean embassy when protesters were stopped from reaching the building ahead of a cultural event set to take place there.

The issue of migrants has long divided Israel and the latest violence has brought it back to the fore.

“We want harsh measures against the rioters, including the immediate deportation of those who took part,” Mr Netanyahu said.

He requested that ministers present him with plans “for the removal of all the other illegal infiltrators,” and noted in his remarks that the Supreme Court struck down some measures meant to coerce the migrants to leave.

Under international law, Israel cannot forcibly send people back to a country where their life or liberty may be at risk.

About 25,000 African migrants live in Israel, mainly from Sudan and Eritrea, who say they fled conflict or repression.

Israel recognizes very few as asylum seekers, seeing them overwhelmingly as economic migrants, and says it has no legal obligation to keep them.

Stray Cat Follows Every Stranger and Asking to Take her Home Until This Happened

Heartwarming.

Media Say … Gloom And Doom In China

The New York Times, and other western media, are running a ‘doom and gloom in Xi’s economy’ campaign.

The latest entry is this piece:

China’s Economic Pain Is a Test of Xi’s Fixation With Control

The core claim is this:

Consumers are gloomy. Private investment is sluggish. A big property firm is near collapse. Local governments face crippling debt. Youth unemployment has continued to rise. The economic setbacks are eroding Mr. Xi’s image of imperious command, and emerging as perhaps the most sustained and thorny challenge to his agenda in over a decade in power.

But lets look at the sources the author quotes to make up ‘evidence’ for his claims:

  • Neil Thomas, a fellow at the Asia Society’s Center for China Analysis, said in an interview
  • Some experts say …
  • not all observers believe that China’s economy is in a sharp downward spiral. But …
  • Chinese internet users circulated an essay by a retired Hong Kong businessman, Lew Mon-hung …
  • Liu Shijin, a retired senior Chinese government economist, said …
  • said Alicia García Herrero, the chief economist for Asia-Pacific at Natixis
  • said Bert Hofman, director of the East Asian Institute at National University of Singapore
  • said Ms. García Herrero, the economist
  • Some Chinese economists and former officials have warned
  • Lou Jiwei, a former minister of finance said in a recent video interview with Caixin

The author of the gloom and doom piece is:

Chris Buckley, the Times’s chief correspondent in China, where he has lived for most of the past 30 years

If Chris Buckley lives in China why doesn’t he quote even one person who is really involved in China’s economy or policy making?

Isn’t there any active Chinese politician or Chinese CEO or Chinese economist or Chinese worker he could quote?

Why is he quoting an Asia Society fellow?

Founded in 1956 by John D. Rockefeller 3rd, Asia Society is a nonpartisan, nonprofit institution with major centers and public buildings in New York, Hong Kong, and Houston, and additional locations in Los Angeles, Manila, Melbourne, Mumbai, New Delhi, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Seoul, Sydney, Tokyo, Washington, D.C., and Zurich.

Why is he mentioning the disgraced Lew Mon-hung?

In 2016, he was found guilty and imprisoned after being found guilty of perverting the course of justice by asking Leung, in letters and emails, to stop the Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) from investigating him.

Why is he quoting the Vice-something professor of this or that Liu Shijin?

Former Vice-President (Vice-Minister), Development Research Center. Currently, Vice-Chairman, China Development Research Foundation.

Why Bert Hofman, the Dutch ‘expert’ of the EU financed Mercator lobby?

Why ask a Spanish ‘economist’ from a French investment bank?

Natixis is a French corporate and investment bank created in November 2006 from the merger of the asset management and investment banking operations of Natexis Banques Populaires (Banque Populaire group) and IXIS (Groupe Caisse d’Epargne).

Natixis provides financial data for the ‘Markets’ section on the news channel, Euronews. On October 26, 2010, Natixis Investment Managers (NIM) has acquired a majority stake in asset management start-up ‘Ossiam’.

Why use some other outlets interview with the retired Lou Jiwei without giving this (2019) context?:

Lou Jiwei, who has long been seen as a liberalizing force in China, an advocate of market reform and international openness. He served as finance minister, ran the country’s massive sovereign wealth fund, and has palled around with western economists since the 1980s. But recently he made a prediction that contained a startling phrase: At a forum in Beijing, according to reporting in the South China Morning Post, he said: “The next step in the frictions between China and the United States is a financial war (jinrong zhan). The U.S. has been hijacked by nationalism and populism, so will do everything in its power to use bullying measures [and] long-arm jurisdiction.”

In this financial war, he continued, the U.S. will exploit its dominance of the international financial system to hurt China—and China will fight back.

Now back to what matters:

Godfree Roberts @GodfreeTrh – 11:17 UTC · Sep 3, 2023

REALITY: Only four economies have ever grown by $1.5 trillion in a year, and 2023 will see the fifth. All five boom years are Chinese, of course. Its economy is booming and so are wages: 4.7% nominal rise last year, 4.2% after inflation. Bwahahah.

FT: China’s economic slowdown reverberates across Asia https://ft.com/content/…

bigger

But it’s all gloom and doom in China. The NYT says so.

Posted by b on September 6, 2023 at 8:23 UTC | Permalink

Tex-Mex Baked Potatoes

OIP Potato
OIP Potato

Ingredients

  • 4 baking potatoes
  • 1 pound lean ground beef
  • 1 (12 ounce) jar mild or hot salsa
  • 2 teaspoons chili powder
  • 1/4 cup diced green bell pepper
  • 1 tablespoon chopped stuffed green olives
  • 1 cup shredded Monterey Jack cheese
  • 1 cup thinly sliced iceberg lettuce
  • Sliced tomatoes

Instructions

  1. Scrub potatoes; pierce skin with fork. Bake at 400 degrees F until tender, about 1 hour.
  2. Fifteen minutes before potatoes are done, sauté meat in hot skillet until all pink disappears.
  3. Add salsa and chili powder to meat. Cover. Cook over medium heat for about 10 minutes.
  4. Add green pepper and olives to meat mixture. Heat through.
  5. Cut baked potatoes open. Spoon hot meat mixture into potatoes. Top at once with cheese so that it melts slightly.
  6. Serve with lettuce sprinkled on top and with sliced tomatoes alongside.

Apple In Tears: China Ban Iphone In Response to U.S Sanction

In today’s video, we dive deep into the recent ban imposed by China on the use of iPhones for its government officials and its potential impact on the U.S economy. From Apple’s position in the global market to the ripple effects on allied industries, join us as we uncover the implications of this significant move.

What was the stupidest thing someone has called the police on you for?

Some years ago I was living in rural Texas. My housemates decided to raise chickens. They thought it would be “fun.” As someone who had to raise chickens in the past, I did not agree with them, but compromised because chickens were probably the least expensive and bothersome livestock they could mess with. Eventually, they got bored of the chickens, so I processed the chickens for future consumption in the front yard where the light was good. My neighbors called the local police and claimed I was conducting Satanic Rituals. Once again, this was rural Texas (no HOAs, large tracts of land with the Piney Woods for our backyards). All of these neighbors claimed to be descended from farmers and country people. They should have damn well recognized what cleaning a bunch of chickens looked like versus “Satanic Rituals.”

Has a cop ever said something to you which was completely unexpected?

Yes.

About 15 years ago I was driving through a part of Miami, Florida in my work van, which contained lots of specialized tools. My company was based out of South Georgia, and we usually didn’t work this far South, but there I was, driving through unknown territory.

I was on a very long street with stop signs every block, and I dutifully stopped at each one before proceeding. Of a sudden, as I stopped at one of the stop signs, a police car pulled up on the left side of me, lights flashing. An officer jumped out of the passenger seat and stood at my window, asking me where I was headed. I told him that I was heading to the interstate so I could make my way back North to Georgia.

The officer asked what I had in the van, and I told him a bunch of tools. Wearing a pained expression, the officer told me that he and his partner had observed me stopping at every stop sign and then he said that it was several miles to the Interstate and that I was in a very rough part of town. In fact, the officer believed that my life would be in danger if I were to stop at every stop sign, as someone may jump on / in the van, shoot me, or whatever, and take the van.

The officer ordered me not to stop at any of the stop signs between where we were and the interstate. He said I could slow down and make sure it was safe to proceed, but under no circumstances was I to stop and that if anyone tried to stop me or signal me to stop, that I should ‘floor it’ and get the hell out of there.

The officer assured me that they were radioing my vehicle description / license plate # to other officers in the area to let them know what I would be doing.

I thanked the officer and proceeded toward the Interstate, running every stop sign on the way.

PASSPORT SIS Thought She Could Talk Down To Men In Africa Like In USA

The arrogance of US women is astounding. I live in a poor country, but that does not mean that their education is bad. Very smart people here.”

What is the extent of the U.S. dependence on China? Why is this allowed to happen? What can be done about it?

Yes you are 100% correct. The U.S. is totally dependent on the Chinese in 3 main ways.

Without the Chinese products the U.S. will suffer a 50% inflation at the very least.

Without China producing stuffs productively and efficiently for them they cannot sell a thing in the world.

Without access to the humongous Chinese market most U.S. companies will go bankrupt and out of business within a year.

Just take Apple and Tesla as an example. Without the Chinese market it will suffer a good 30% less sales. Without China making their products they will be totally uncompetitive and lose the entire world market.

What can be done about this? You can do something to avoid dependence on China but you won’t. And you can’t. You wanted the cake and eat it too. You see US wants to be the world’s baddest nation and fight wars upon wars upon wars. It needs to outspent the top 20 nations put together! If you do that much shit you need to watch your back, your side and your front, your top and your bottom too!

There lies your problem. You need to spent all your money on wars you have no more money to produce anything. You thought that your CEO can earn 100 times China’s CEO, your workers must be paid 5 times more than Chinese workers and get 10 times the Chinese benefits and the customer will pay for your excesses! But the customer won’t! Not even American customers!

It is that simple. The U.S. cannot have the cake and eat it too! The U.S. needs to choose being competitive or being hegemonic! It cannot have both. American need to decide!

You want to compete with China, do the following. Close your 800 foreign military base, turn your dozen aircraft carriers into holiday cruise! Divert your trillion dollar military budget to building U.S. infrastructure, stop spending money talking shit and doing shit spend it on building relationship with your customers. Disband NATO, CIA and NED! Ban Industrial Actions and Trade Unions!

Can you do this? I doubt so. So the U.S. will rather be dependent on China!

The Sopranos || Feelin’ Good

I am really starting to like these Sopranos themed fan videos.

Blinkin is delusional

Yesterday, Global Times critiqued the speech Blinken delivered at John Hopkins and said he decaled a New Cold War, “Blinken sounds a rallying cry for a ‘new cold war’ that US cannot win”:

The growing US’ geopolitical competition with Russia and China marks the end of the post-Cold War world order, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken said, speaking at the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies on Wednesday. “What we are experiencing now is more than a test of the post-Cold War order. It’s the end of it,” he noted. “Decades of relative geopolitical stability have given way to an intensifying competition with authoritarian powers, revisionist powers.” This statement appears to be a rallying cry for a “new cold war.”

Since the post-Cold War order is coming to an end, what kind of new world order does the US want? Various signs indicate that the US wants major power competition and camp confrontation in order to maintain its global hegemony, even at the expense of the interests of other countries, including allies, and partner nations. However, the reality is that major power competition goes against the trend of the times and cannot solve the US’ own problems and the challenges facing the world. It will only further divide the world, leading the world to slide toward a more dangerous cliff edge.

Regarding Blinken’s remarks, there are two main points to consider. Firstly, Blinken was creating a sense of crisis in the world. The underlying message to US allies and other countries is that there are challengers, particularly China and Russia, who want to change the existing order. Secondly, Blinken’s remarks also reflect a sense of anxiety in the US. The US is attempting to slow down China’s rise through strategic competition, while hoping to sustain its hegemony without jeopardizing its own interests. However, it seems that the US has no clear solution to this dilemma.

China is one of the beneficiaries of the existing system and does not seek to challenge or subvert this order. However, the US has viewed any legitimate demand made by China, even those that reflect the reasonable demands of the majority of developing countries, as a challenge and ill-intentioned sabotage….

As for China, the US is attempting to stifle its development by imposing unlimited technological restrictions, but it is unable to completely decouple from China economically. For the US and its main allies, China is either their largest single trading partner or one of the largest. Today, the US is a reckless strategic aggressor, attempting to unite its relatively weaker strength with its allies to wage a new cold war. It should be noted that the power of US allies has declined significantly, and the unity of the “West” is crippled due to the US transitioning from a “blood donor” to a “vampire”.

There’s no way the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals can contain China or the rest of the Global South. The degree of geoeconomic dependency noted in the final paragraph above is far too much for that Bloc to overcome. The attempts made so far beginning with Trump have illustrated the damage the Empire can inflict on itself in its ill-considered policy toward China and the world. The Outlaw US Empire’s illusion of “primacy” has faded into the mists of time and is irretrievable so matter what it tries.

Posted by: karlof1 | Sep 15 2023 14:31 utc | 4

An Elderly Cat was Scratching At People’s Door, Begging for Help

My goodness!

Datura tales

When I was in my “lost in the wilderness” period in my life (After I joined MAJestic, but not yet trained at China Lake, I wandered about.) we were living on a farm in Yanciville, NC. (I don’t know if I spelled that name right.)

And there was a guy (named Holt) who introduced us to the Datura plant.

Datura is a genus of nine species of highly poisonous, vespertineflowering plants belonging to the nightshade family (Solanaceae).[1] They are commonly known as thornapples or jimsonweeds, but are also known as devil’s trumpets[2] (not to be confused with angel’s trumpets, which are placed in the closely related genus Brugmansia). Other English common names include moonflower, devil’s weed, and hell’s bells.

All species of Datura are extremely poisonous and potentially psychoactive, especially their seeds and flowers, which can cause respiratory depression, arrhythmias, fever, delirium, hallucinations, anticholinergic syndrome, psychosis, and even death if taken internally.[3]

Due to their effects and symptoms, Datura species have occasionally been used not only as poisons, but also as hallucinogens by various groups throughout history.[4][5]

Traditionally, their psychoactive administration has often been associated with witchcraft and sorcery or similar practices in many cultures, including the Western world.[5][6][7] Certain common Datura species have also been used ritualistically as entheogens by some Native American groups.[8][9]

Non-psychoactive use of plants in the genus is usually done for medicinal purposes, and the alkaloids present in some species have long been considered traditional medicines in both the New and Old Worlds due to the presence of the alkaloids scopolamine and atropine, which are also produced by Old World plants such as Hyoscyamus niger, Atropa belladonna, and Mandragora officinarum.

And we all tried this old fashioned remedy using this dangerous plant.

We soaked the roots of the plant in water for a week, and then drank the water.

I know it was terribly stupid, but we were young and in our 20’s and we believed Holt.

The effect was that every thing turned very blue and soft to us. We heard the twinkling of soft bells, and when we went to sleep later on the night, had very vivid dreams.

I would NEVER do that again. And I DO NOT suggest anyone duplicate our stupidity.

But the point of this story is that …

  • Well-meaning friends can put you in life threatening situations.
  • When you are in your 20s you can do very stupid things.
  • Whatever the experience was, it was not worth the risk of death.

And so, I ask everyone to heed my story and pay attention to what might transpire in your own lives.

Today…

Huawei unveiled their new smartphone, which is undeniably impressive and packed with numerous technological breakthroughs. How many of you are keeping tabs on this development, and what are your thoughts on Huawei’s achievements with this phone?

I am following it closely; the Mate 60 Pro is just the first step.

Over the next decade, I expect China to launch many new products based on new technologies. Most of these products will be launched in BRICS markets instead of the G7 nations.

The West is poised to feel what it is like to live in a a “banana republic.”

Granny’s Old-Fashioned Bread Pudding
with Vanilla Sauce

grannys old fashioned bread pudding
grannys old fashioned bread pudding

Ingredients

Bread Pudding

  • 1 pound French bread, cubed
  • 1/2 cup raisins
  • 2 cups milk
  • 1/4 cup butter
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs, slightly beaten
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg

Sauce

  • 1/2 cup butter
  • 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 1/2 cup firmly packed brown sugar
  • 1/2 cup heavy whipping cream
  • 1 tablespoon vanilla extract
  • 1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.

Bread Pudding

  1. Combine bread and raisins in a large bowl.
  2. Combine milk and 1/4 cup butter in a 1 quart saucepan. Cook over medium heat until butter is melted.
  3. Pour milk mixture over bread; let stand for 10 minutes.
  4. Stir in all remaining pudding ingredients. Pour into greased 1 1/2 quart casserole.
  5. Bake for 40 to 50 minutes or until set in center.

Vanilla Sauce

  1. Combine all sauce ingredients except vanilla in 1-quart saucepan.Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until mixture thickens and comes to a full boil (5 to 8 minutes).
  2. Stir in vanilla extract and walnuts*, if using.

To serve

  1. Spoon warm pudding into individual dessert dishes; serve with sauce.
  2. Store refrigerated.

Notes

I usually serve this without the walnuts, but sprinkle them over individual servings if anyone likes walnuts.

Niger Raises Uranium Price From €0.80/kg to €200/kg

Niger Raises Uranium Price From €0.80/kg to €200/kg – In a groundbreaking development that signals a seismic shift in the global resource market, Niger, a prominent player in the uranium industry, has reportedly taken a bold step towards securing fair compensation for its invaluable natural resource, uranium.

Multiple reports suggest that Niger has substantially increased the price of its uranium, skyrocketing it from a mere €0.80 per kilogram to €200 per kilogram.

This remarkable decision underscores a burgeoning determination among African nations to break free from historical imbalances and demand equitable remuneration for their vital contributions to the global economy.

According to the World Nuclear Association (WNA), Niger is the world’s seventh-largest uranium producer.

The radioactive metal is the most widely used fuel for nuclear energy. It is also utilised in cancer treatment, naval propulsion, and nuclear weapons.

Uranium prices increased slightly in the aftermath of the military coup in Niger that saw the ousting of President Mohamed Bazoum, with many analysts forecasting larger gains in the future. For instance, Ben Godwin, head of analysis at London-based Prism Political Risk Management, said that current events in Niger, which produces about 4 percent of the world’s uranium supply, could be critical to Europe.

“It is certainly a topic of great interest in the moment, particularly as uranium markets are very, very tight at the moment,” he said.

“Demand has been going up over the last few years, and this year, we’ve seen the uranium spot price go up by nearly 40 percent year to date.”

Does the US believe that China is powerless to attack the US mainland if it attacks China first?

The Pentagon understands the true and real abilities that China possess.

There is absolutely no questions regarding whether or not China can attack the United States mainland. The answer is affirmative. China has numerous weapon systems designed to acquire, target, stealthy evade and strike with great accuracy targets within the United States geographical landmass.

This has been proved. Demonstrated beyond any question of doubt, and is known to be stockpiled in enormous quantities.

The Pentagon believes that China is capable of destroying targets within the United States without problem or interference.

That being said. What does the “government” think?

I’m sure that President Biden has his own points of view…

main qimg a7e1345fe6e7b99031320bb423d4606a
main qimg a7e1345fe6e7b99031320bb423d4606a

I’m sure that key and influential members of the US Senate has their ideas as well…

main qimg 31abfa22c7712659717f74bcead91cce
main qimg 31abfa22c7712659717f74bcead91cce

And since they will be the ones who will decide whether China shall use these weapons systems on American cities, perhaps we need to listen to what their thoughts are.

One way is to go though the people that elected them to office, and ask those people what they think.

main qimg c6c7f321775e90046cb10509a2a3b34d
main qimg c6c7f321775e90046cb10509a2a3b34d

But, you know, most are going through the “trials” of being an American. So perhaps the smarter thing to do is ask a more diverse cross section of the American population and see what they think…

main qimg ec46b35a182640dbd43e3faba5aa261f
main qimg ec46b35a182640dbd43e3faba5aa261f

My guess is that these people would have a diverse opinion that would be heavily influenced by their social media of choice. So, if you want some real unbiased opinion of what Americans think, perhaps you should visit the more rural areas…

main qimg eaea341906732b762833d5c79479a093
main qimg eaea341906732b762833d5c79479a093

And their opinion is “China ain’t gonna do shit. We’ll kick their ass!”.

And so, to answer the question…

  • Yes. China is fully capable of attacking the United States.
  • But Americans are not worried because…

IRAN’S VICTORY! China Takes Over Iran’s $2.7 Billion Strategic Project | Break US Sanctions!

The United States has long imposed a series of sanctions on Iran, including restricting oil exports and cutting Iran off from the international financial system.

This has greatly affected Iran’s economy and international status. In order to break through US sanctions, Iran has been working hard. Recently, Iran became a member of the BRICS as it wished.

In order to express its sincere desire to its Eastern partners, Iran signed an infrastructure agreement with China immediately after the BRICS summit ended. According to the agreement, Iran will invest at least US$2.7 billion in the expansion of the international airport, and Chinese companies have successfully become the sole builders of the project.

However, what is most concerning is that this time Iran’s $2.7 billion infrastructure cooperation with China will use a special payment method.

From an analysis point of view, the payment method reached by Iran and China not only effectively got rid of the sanctions of the United States, but may even accelerate the process of “de-dollarization”, which made President Biden feel very panicked.

So, what exactly happened?

https://youtu.be/XMoWgo4jUVQ

Why does Elon Musk blame a Los Angeles-based school for turning his transgender “woke” and making her hate him?

It’s kind of a crazy story.

One of those stories that seem almost surreal.

But essentially, Elon Musk sent his children to the finest schools money could buy. Only to discover, much to his chagrin, that such schools are rather progressive.

[1] Now his oldest son suddenly isn’t his son anymore, but his daughter. And she self-identifies as a “communist” and hates Musk for “being rich”.

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main qimg 58e59ff552016cd136f71523a814d6b0

This is where the whole “campaign against wokeness” comes from, for Musk — it’s a personal vendetta of sorts. This is why he bought up Twitter in the first place; because ‘the woke’ have gotten to his own family, and he resents it. I’m not entirely sure it’s this school in particular that turned his child transgender, however — the school boasts several famous alumni, among them Jack Black. And Jack Black is pretty much the bloke-iest bloke to ever bloke around.

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main qimg 192310e5ba870d220813b1e09d1eb4fb

Either way, Elon Musk decided that schools pushing woke narratives turned his own child against him, brainwashing her. He’s upset. I kind of get it. I would be, too. Change is scary. And when someone hates you to the point of legally petitioning for a name change (from Musk to Wilson, the last name of his ex-wife), that’s rather awful.

Anyway, it’s the school’s fault, not Musk’s. And now, the wider issue Musk identified, is the the type of policies peddled at schools and campuses in general. The left-wing ideologies, the gender-bending, the overly progressive attitude towards pretty much everything. I’ve never given much thuoight to what started Elon’s crusade against wokeness… but now we know the answer. Now we know what started it all.

The Death of Disney – Narrated by A.I David Attenborough

Sir David Attenborough narrates the rise and fall of Mickey Mouse (A.I parody).

As a police officer, have you ever received an unusual ‘thank you’ for taking care of someone?

Around 6 months after I finished field training, I was working a night shift and was dispatched to an animal cruelty call. Arriving at the home,I was met by a woman and her 4 year old son,both in tears. In this line of work, you quickly become accustomed to dealing with upset people, it’s just a part of the job. I introduced myself to both of them and listened as the mother explained the situation to me.

Arriving home from work, she and her son had parked in the driveway and walked to the side door of the house where they found the little boy’s 4 month old kitten lying on the steps. The kitten had been skinned by someone, and carefully placed on the steps to be noticed immediately. Being a cat person myself, my heart ached for this little boy. Not only was his kitten dead, it had been killed on purpose by someone and carefully skinned then left on display for maximum shock value! I took a report on the incident and then I helped the little boy bury his dead kitten in his back yard, fashioning a little cross out of some sticks.

There were really no leads of any kind on who may have perpetrated this horrible crime. I had the 911 telecommunicator search for any similar crimes in the area that had been reported recently and had no luck. I knew that the chance of finding out who did this was slim to none, but promised the little boy that I would do everything in my power to find and punish those responsible. Before clearing the call, I gave the little fella a tour of my patrol car, letting him play with the lights and siren. I always kept some stickers and stuffed animals in my trunk for situations just like this, and I let him choose a couple stickers and an animal.

About two weeks later, my Lieutenant called me in to his office after shift briefing. On his desk was a thank you card and a picture of a kitten that had been colored for me. My Lieutenant explained that the lady and little boy from the animal cruelty call had visited the office and left the items for me earlier that afternoon. It warmed my heart to receive this heartfelt thanks from them.

Maybe a month or so later, I answered a call about someone throwing a kitten out of a car window. Arriving on that scene, I found the kitten on the side of the road amazingly uninjured. Normally on a call like this we would turn the animal over to animal control, but I had an idea. I put the kitten in my patrol car and drove towards the little boy’s house, hoping that since it was a Saturday I would find them at home. I was in luck! Before showing the kitten to the little boy, I spoke with his mother to make sure she was OK with it. She agreed, so I got the kitten out of the car and presented it to the little boy. His eyes were the size of dinner plates when he saw the kitten! Both mother and son thanked me profusely and I left knowing that I had made that little boy happy.

It is situations like this that made being a law enforcement officer one of the most rewarding experiences of my life.

“Nuclear war between U.S. and Russia is inevitable” – Russian General | Redacted with Clayton Morris

Retired Major General Alexander Vladimirov, who wrote Russia’s three volume book called the ‘General Theory of War,’ says the moment war broke out in Ukraine is the moment that nuclear war with the West became inevitable.

Why is everyone talking about the G20 Summit?

The biggest point on every media outlet outside India is

WHY IS XI JINGPING BOYCOTTING THE G20?

That’s the only thing that has made the G20 summit newsworthy so far

In India locally – the G20 Summit isnt even the top news

It’s the renaming of India to BHARAT and Modi hiding slums with green posters or something like that


Every major outlet is only discussing that one thing on the G20

Why is Xi Jingping not attending?

Some say he has kidney ailments, Some say he fears CPC revolt, Some say Putin and he plan a major meeting and some others say something else

All of it nonsense of course


The G20 Summit will not make a splash unless it becomes G21 which means inclusion of the African Union

Li Qiang will support the proposal wholeheartedly as will Lavrov and i am sure so shall Modi

Then the G20 may draw some traction

Right now nobody is talking about it at all

Douglas Macgregor: What A Deep Penetration!

https://youtu.be/0ibt2nrh0IQ

What are the gayest things I should avoid?

According to my homophobic father?

There was an entire list.

  • Shorts. Invented by gay men so that they could check out men’s legs.
  • Football. All that back slapping and hugging when they score a goal. They’re all closet <insert homophobic slur here>.
  • Rugby. The scrum? Closet <insert homophobic slur here>, the lot of ‘em.
  • Art. They’re all <insert homophobic slur here>.
  • Actors. They’re all <insert homophobic slur here>. Putting on wigs and make-up – sends them “funny”.
  • Having female friends. Women are for looking at and for having sex with, not being friends with.
  • Wearing your watch on the right wrist. I never learned why.
  • Anything pink.
  • Looking at your nails “funny”. (This translated to holing your hand out, flat palm facing away from you, fingers straight).
  • Cooking.
  • Baking.
  • Garlic. The French use it a lot, and we all know the French are all <insert homophobic slur here>.
  • The French. A special rung of gay was reserved for the French (yes, the entire population) in his head. Apparently the women were gay and the men were gay. He never did elaborate as to how France has managed to still exist generation after generation. The “womanizing” Frenchman was a cover to hide his gayness.
  • Thai men. Yes. Every man from Thailand is a homosexual… apparently.
  • The Navy.
  • Glam Rock.
  • ABBA’s music. But only the one’s in which Bjorn sings lead in. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Do you want to know what my homophobic father regarded as the most macho, manliest-man, hetero thing in the world?

Wrestling.

Wasn’t regarded as gay, but eating garlic and hanging around with French girls was.

The Sopranos ( best ending scene ) season 6

When Phil says “no more Butchie. No more of this” and the music starts rolling, you know the war is about to start.

What was the moment you cancelled the friendship with your best friend?

My best friend spent most weekends with my husband and I, we had lots of fun cooking, going places, etc. She would get a guy, get serious, then find some awful thing wrong with him, call him names, and had to change her number numerous times.

When I got pregnant she seemed off. I know she always wanted a family and was jealous. She gave me an IOU for an expensive breast pump and bragged about it at my shower. 5 months after, no breast pump, whatever. But not even a pair of socks to welcome my child into the world. Yest she got a mani- pedi every two weeks, like clockwork. I am the type of person who yses the same old bargain pur for years, never get manicures or pedicures, and i get my hair cut twice per year. I shop at goodwill for clothes. I summoned up the courage to tell her I felt insulted that she never acknowledged my child, not even a pair of socks. She went of the deep end and called me materialistic! And all sorts of swear words. I never spoke with her again. Been 16 years. I couldn’t wrap my head around what she said to me.

Crunchy Taco Wraps

This taco wrap gets its crunch from a tostada in the middle of delicious taco fillings; and of course wrapped up in a delicious Rhodes grilled flatbread.

crunchy taco wrap
crunchy taco wrap

Prep: 15 min | Bake: 15 min | Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 12 Rhodes Dinner Rolls, thawed
  • 6 tostada shells
  • 1 pound lean ground beef
  • 1 small yellow onion, chopped
  • 2 tablespoons taco seasoning
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1 teaspoon garlic
  • 1 jar nacho cheese or Queso cheese dip
  • 1 cup sour cream (optional)
  • 2 cups shredded lettuce
  • 1 cup salsa
  • 1 cup shredded Mexican cheese blend

Instructions

  1. Lightly spray counter or table with nonstick spray. Combine two dinner rolls and roll into an 8 inch circle. Repeat with remaining rolls. Cover with sprayed plastic wrap and let rest.
  2. In a large skillet or griddle, over medium-high heat, brown ground beef and. Stir in taco seasoning, water and garlic. Reduce heat to low and let simmer for 5 more minutes.
  3. Heat griddle to medium heat. Carefully remove plastic wrap from dough. Grill dough for 20 to 30 seconds on each side or until cooked through.
  4. Lay one grilled flatbread on a flat surface. Spread 1/2 cup of taco meat onto the center of the flatbread. Spread queso over one side of the tostada and place it cheese side down on the meat.
  5. Spread a thin layer of sour cream or more queso on top of the tostada shell. Top with lettuce, tomato and cheese.
  6. To fold the taco wrap, start with the bottom of the tortilla and fold the edge up over the center. Continue to work your way around, folding the tortilla over the center fillings. There will be an open spot on the top in the center.
  7. Repeat with all remaining flatbreads, tostadas and toppings.

every store is CLOSED in San Jose

San Jose the Bay Area’s largest city has dropped out of the top 10 largest cities in the US by population and stores are closing left and right in this city tour I am exploring downtown San Jose, and what I found was shocking, blocks after blocks of empty storefronts.

Why don’t the Western countries “peacefully evolve” China by breaking the Chinese Great Firewall?

Has it ever occurred to you that the Great Fire Wall protects you? Yes, you!

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Imagine if suddenly 1.4 billion people flooded the internet with pro-China content. Okay, some are dissidents so make that one billion instead. My point is, in the Western world where “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” abound, unleashing the mainlanders into that environment en masse would have a profoundly negative impact for Westerners. I’m not sure they (the “outside” world) could handle it. Fun to think about though.

And the obese milking welfare…

Massive historical changes going on. Some geopolitical, and others domestic.

My you-tube channel has me locked out for a week. I got a “strike”. I posted inappropriate content on the internet that “violated Community guidelines”.

All I did was post a Chinese video about the Ukraine war.

Not that it matters. It only had 25 views total. My channel is buried deep in the sludge due to algorithm manipulation.

Anyways.

So much for “freedom of speech”, when Chinese can view things that are censored in the United States. But the USA censors anything made in China.

Hey!

Tell me all about that delicious “freedom”TM and Democracy”TM that the USA has. Eh?

First time hearing Oliver Anthony “I Want To Go Home” Reaction

What is the smog situation in Beijing? Why isn’t it talked about as much as it used to be?

Smog?

You mean the seasonal dust storms that darken the skies?

China eliminated it with draconian anti-pollution legislation, and green tree-planting efforts on the sandy soil.

This was coupled with corruption police and harsh (Chinese harsh) punishments for non-compliance of the pollution laws.

Air quality is still not perfect, but is actually much, much better than it used to be.

Worried mother cat took her kitten for medical checkup but kitten didn’t want to go!

Why does China have no illegal immigrants problem? Even people in poor neighbor countries like Vietnam, Laos, and Myanmar do not want to go to China.

China at one time, did have an illegal immigrant problem. This included areas of South-East Asia, and North Korea. And even today, there is a problem. Though, the magnitude of the problem is quite small. Trivial, actually.

China is a bonafied surveillance state.

I am not using that term neither lightly, or pejoratively. It is what it is. China has a massive population. Simply massive, and to keep things running, surveillance is the “name of the game”.

When you enter China legally, your bio-metrics are entered into the national computers, and the AI algorithm tracks your every move. As long as you are not doing anything wrong, you are ignored. And that is just the way it is. Those of us who are new to this kind of government are often frightened by it. Which is a “knee jerk” reaction after decades of contrary American pre-programming.

Now, when an illegal is inside of China, that person is immediately flagged as a non-database registrant.

If you look and watch the AI monitoring video in the local police station, you can easily see who is “ok” and who is “flagged”. This is done by the rectangular box that surrounds the person.

In general, there are different colors that are used. For instance; Green is fine. Red is a concern.

Any illegal cannot operate inside of China. They will “stand out like a sore thumb”, and be unable to do anything electronic.

A police visit, followed by incarceration and deportation are the usual outcomes upon being flagged.

Tucker Carlson’s VIRAL SPEECH DESTROYS Pro Ukraine LIES

https://youtu.be/Aa-sokRTBGo

Would BRICS have expanded so quickly if the West had not introduced broad sanctions against Russia and other governments they did not approve of?

Thanks for the request.

Yes, indeed. trump didn’t dare to but Biden did pul the trigger.

Biden crossed the red line by using SWIFT to sanction Russia and even worse, froze the country’s foreign reserve. This was the death blow of the U.S. that the world feared and expected the Russian economy and ruble to crumble down like the wall of Jericho.

But Russia withstood these and all the subsequent sanctions the G7 countries could muster.

The turning point is that when all these failed and the G7 tried coercing the rest of the world to join, the Global South chose not to, not so much because they’re a fan of Russia but because they did not want to be subjected any more to the economic hegemon of the West and saw a way out.

First to break ranks were Saudi Arabia and the UAE who started accepting Yuan for their oil deals with China. And now there’s the rush to join BRICS.

BRICS is the world’s irresistible force for de-dollarization. BRICS formalized their expansion that also officially signalize the demise of the petrodollar. When mortal enemies like Saudi Arabia and Iran at war with each other could set aside their differences and agree to work together as BRICS members, who together with the UAE and Russia are now constituting the most powerful block controlling the global energy market . . . and combine this with China and India, the world’s most populous countries as consumer countries, this is part of the clout of the irresistible force.

Further, Brazil’s Lula call to wholly dump the US$ is no empty threat. A BRICS roadmap is ready to actually do this – with Brazil and Argentina leading the way. And this is how it would work – with China’s yuan to be officially used as their bridge currency for trade.

China, Brazil and Argentina are already their own biggest trade partners and have begun using their own currencies in trade with China. With yuan as their main revenue currency, and like Russia with India’s Rupees, it’s the logical next step to use the yuan as their bridge currency for trade between themselves, thereby eliminating not just the U.S.$ but the FX volatility risk of their own currencies to each other.

Add to this the precedent set by the IMF accepting yuan to settle debts originally denominated in US$, Brazil and Argentina could completely not have to use the U.S.$.

To complete dethroning the U.S.$, BRICS will be issuing through their development bank a new currency backed by gold. This would serve as another role that U.S.$ had so far been the only option – as the reserve currency for the long-term depository of excess earning of countries like China, Japan and Germany, supplanting the need to buy U.S. treasury bonds.

The fiat money regime needs a reset and this is upon us.

WE REACT TO OLIVER ANTHONY: I WANT TO GO HOME – HITS OUR SOUL

He’s so relatable, the angst and soul in his voice is amazing.

Have you ever had a strange experience buying or selling something on Craigslist?

There had been a lot of stories on the news about people using Craigslist as a way to lure people into a robbery.

My dad really wanted to get rid of some random items he had stored in the garage, so he posted them for sale.

When he found a buyer off Craigslist, he asked me to go with him as “back up”.

I was already a little sketched out, but to make matters worse, we were meeting the buyer in a funeral home parking… after dark.

When we got there, my dad grabbed his pistol, looked at me, and said “just stay behind me until we know it’s not a set up.”

We got out of the car and slowly approached the buyer’s vehicle.

The other guy got out of his car, stood behind his door, and said

“Hey, just so you guys know, I have a gun on me.”

When we realized this guy was just as paranoid as we were, we started laughing.

The buyer and my dad spent about 15 minutes talking about their guns before they finally actually made the sale.

Craigslist is a wild place.

Rappers React To Oliver Anthony “Rich Men North Of Richmond”!

As a landlord, who was the strangest tenant you’ve ever had?

I had a man/boy with TBI(Traumatic Brain Injury). He smoked at least 3 packs a day and left the butts in Coke liter bottles out on the rear deck. He was very dirty. He screamed and blasted the stereo at all hours of the day. I was constantly calling his mother &/or Attorney. He was banging on the ceiling with a broom screaming at me during the night. I finally was able with the help of his attorney to move him out. But he took that broomstick and broke every fixture in the house, plus smashed the glass cooktop. The Attorney sent me a check for the excess cost over his security.

This one GOT to me.. Oliver Anthony – I Want To Go Home REACTION

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2023 08 24 20 52

What is the most outrageous “fee” you’ve ever been charged?

I own a 250 gallon propane tank and get it filled about once a year. Because I own the tank I get to choose who fills it. One afternoon a propane delivery truck comes to my home and start to set up like they’re going to fill my tank. I tell the driver that I’d not ordered any propane and I ask what’s going on? His reply was that they were in the area and saw that I’d not had my tank refilled in over 2 years so they thought that they’d just go ahead and fill it.

Well, that didn’t seem right to me. First, how did he check delivery records from his truck and why would he do so? Second, I recently had the tank filled from a different supplier so there was no room in the tank for any more. So I refused the delivery and other than putting a lock on the tank access lid thought no more about it. That is, until the bill for the delivery came. Only one item on the bill, a fee for an emergency delivery.

To their credit, when I contacted the supplier they quickly dismissed the bill.

Member of the European Parliament: “Stop Complying. Start Rebelling”

World Hal Turner 23 August 2023

MEP Christine Andersen large
MEP Christine Andersen large
Member of the European Parliament: "Stop Complying. Start Rebelling"

Powerful words from a member of the European Parliament, Christine Andersen, about the state of affairs in our world: “You cannot comply your way our of a tyranny.”

“In the entire history of mankind, there has never been a political elite concerned about the well-being of regular people,” said Andersen.

“And it isn’t any different now,” she stressed. “You cannot comply your way out of a tyranny. It is impossible. Trying to do so, you will only feed a gigantic alligator in the hopes of being eaten last. But guess what? Your turn will come,”

Andersen also warned. “Speak up! … stop complying — start rebelling,” she urged. “In order to deal with this unfree world, to defy this unfree world, I have decided to become so absolutely free that my very existence is an act of rebellion. And that’s what we all need to do.”

Saxx reacts Oliver Anthony Rich men north of Richmond. call this Racist next?

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2023 08 21 07 54

Have you ever met someone and disliked them instantly?

Originally Answered: Have you ever met someone and hated them instantly?

“LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE AND STOP STALKING ME!!!”

Heads immediately turned.

“I-I’m not stalking you…”

“SHUT UP!!!”

People’s eyes widened, and they began staring. Nevertheless, I continued.

“ YES YOU ARE!! I KNOW YOU ARE!!! NOW LEAVE ME THE FUCK ALONE AND BACK OFF! I AM SO TIRED OF YOU ENDLESSLY FOLLOWING ME AROUND!!”

My vocal cords started to hurt, but nonetheless, I continued screaming at the boy before me, shrieking my desire to be left alone.

At first, he was in my face. Then he was 20 feet away.

But… how did it come to this?

For nearly an entire year, this boy messaged me. Endlessly told me how he wanted to become friends with me, how he wanted to “figure me out,” told me how “we were the same,” he followed me home, taunted me, watched me, became friends with my friends, taunted me with things he supposedly knew about me, told me some personal things he knew about me. He’s slapped one of my friends. He’s dated another one of my friends before even knowing me.

When I first laid eyes on him, I knew something was off. I saw that he was an egotistical maniac.

I hated him.

And boy was I right.

Would going underwater in an upside down boat like Jack Sparrow actually work?

If you are a fan of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, you might remember the scene where Jack Sparrow and Will Turner use an upside-down boat to walk underwater and sneak into a fort.

But is this trick actually possible in real life? Or is it just another Hollywood fantasy?

The answer is: no, it is not possible. There are several reasons why this stunt would not work, and here are some of them:

The pressure problem.

Water pressure increases by about 1 atmosphere (atm) for every 10 meters of depth.

This means that the air trapped under the boat would compress as they go deeper, reducing the volume of air available for breathing.

For example, if they started with a boat that had 1 cubic meter of air under it, and they went 10 meters deep, the air would shrink to 0.5 cubic meters.

If they went 20 meters deep, it would shrink to 0.33 cubic meters, and so on. Eventually, they would run out of air or suffocate from carbon dioxide buildup.

The buoyancy problem.

The air under the boat would also make it very buoyant, meaning that it would tend to float up to the surface.

To keep it underwater, they would need to attach heavy weights to the boat, which would make it harder to move and balance. The weights would also add more drag, slowing them down.

The visibility problem.

The water under the boat would be very dark, since the boat would block most of the light from above.

They would not be able to see where they are going or what obstacles they might encounter. They would also have to deal with the turbulence and bubbles created by their movement.

The leakage problem.

The boat would not be perfectly sealed, so water would leak in through the gaps and holes.

This would reduce the amount of air under the boat and increase the weight of the boat. They would also get wet and cold, which could lead to hypothermia.

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2023 08 24 21 13

So, as you can see, walking underwater with an upside down boat is not a feasible idea. It might look cool in a movie, but in reality, it would be a very dangerous and impractical way to travel underwater.

What’s the best way to take down the CCP while I’m in China?

Next time you go to Beijing, go to Tiananmen and visit the area where Mao announced the founding of the People’s Republic. Then go to the ledge and unfurl a banner which says “Down with the Chinese Communist Party” and shout slogans against the Party.

Then jump off the ledge so that you go splat right in front of Mao’s portrait.

Make sure that you have photographers and videographers ready to record your actions before and after you go splat.

When the video goes around, all Chinese will rise up and overthrow the Party, and your name will live in history.

Savory Onion Brisket

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2023 08 21 09 02

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (4 1/2 pound) beef brisket, untrimmed
  • 3 tablespoons olive oil
  • 1/4 cup white wine vinegar
  • 2 tablespoons vegetable oil
  • 2 tablespoons ketchup
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 2 teaspoons garlic powder
  • 2 teaspoons pepper
  • 1 envelope dry onion soup mix
  • 1 cup water

Instructions

  1. Brown brisket in hot oil over high heat for 5 minutes on each side.
  2. Place brisket into a lightly greased 13 x 9 inch pan.
  3. Stir together vinegar and next 6 ingredients. Pour over brisket. Add the water to pan.
  4. Bake, covered at 350 degrees F for 2 hours, basting every hour.
  5. Reduce heat to 300 degrees F and bake 1 more hour.
  6. Skim fat from drippings. discarding fat; serve drippings with brisket.

HE DID IT AGAIN! (OLIVER ANTHONY – I WANT TO GO HOME REACTION)

How shocking is the news that Wagner boss Yevgeny Prigozhin has been killed in a plane crash in Russia, with nine other people on board also dead?

Not shocking at all.

The Russian, American, British and Ukraine security services likely all wanted him dead. Oh, I forgot to mention the Polish security services, since the Wagner Group is active across the border in Belarus. The French might have also wanted him dead because he was recently in Niger, where the Africans in the Sahel have decided that they have had enough of the French, and Wagner Group has offered assistance.

Probably the only thing they could agree about.

Now they can go back to fighting each other.

Why do I get a say on the USA? Oliver Anthony – I Want To Go Home (Reaction)

This reactor to the video has some really good things to say about the USA.

Almost every man carried a gun in the old days in the West and shootouts were quite common. Would the same thing happen if all men were allowed to carry today?

That’s simply not true.

The old school Westerns in which the stranger strolls into the saloon and the next minute everybody is brandishing a six iron are just movies.

In reality, few people would walk around with a gun on their hip and shootouts were in fact rare. The idea of the lawless frontier is mostly nonsense.

Most of our perception of the Old West is totally coloured by entertaining fiction like Rawhide and ten-a-penny old Hollywood pictures. It just wasn’t really like that at all, not least because the majority of people weren’t wandering from town to town like Clint Eastwood, or gathering at high noon to risk life and limb in a duel.

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I remember as a boy reading a book about the reality of the life of the cowboy, and how dull and uneventful most of it was, because they were herding cattle rather than running around shooting “injuns” or blowing up bank vaults.

In reality, what really tamed the West wasn’t the pistol or rifle, it was barbed wire, for with that came manageable territories and the end of the age of the cattle drive.

DJI Defies Astronomical US Fine, Faces Probe into Drone ‘Critical Tech’!A Battle of Resolve Begun!

A non-drone company (in the USA) is suing a Chinese Drone company. All evidence suggests some pretty underhanded dealings to acquire technology..

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2023 08 21 09 09
https://youtu.be/LPmo7wE1EyI

What are some examples of things that sound right but are actually wrong?

English astronomer Sir Patrick Moore pulled one of the biggest April Fools’ hoaxes of all time which fooled the country into thinking they could float.

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main qimg a51831939e77f0767ca6118229d53b76 lq

On April 1 1976, he made an announcement on BBC Radio 2 stating that, at exactly 9:47 a.m., Pluto would pass directly behind Jupiter in relation to the Earth. This would create a noticeable reduction in gravity on Earth itself.

[1]

He said that, if people jumped at this exact time, they would be overcome by a ‘strange floating sensation’.

This was known as the ‘Jovian-Plutonian effect’.

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main qimg 0680abb9e9c47b55ff65fc67f912ee4e lq

I’m no physicist, but in hindsight this is obviously rubbish—yet the public bought the whole thing—and I’m talking hook, line and sinker.

For a lot of people, this sounded completely right and reasonable, despite just how ridiculous it was. And fair enough—it came from a pretty reliable source.

The BBC reported getting a hell of a lot of calls from people all over the country telling them they were having bizarre gravitational experiences.

One woman claimed that she and her friends were sitting and had ‘wafted from their chairs and gently orbited around the room.’

[2]

Another woman said that she and her eleven friends were sitting at a table—and soon enough, everyone (and the table) began to ascend.

[3] (Kind of Harry Potter-esque in that scene with the inflation of Marjorie Dursley.)


The reason that Moore performed this hoax was really just to raise awareness of the fact that the whole idea of ‘planetary alignment’ and its effects on Earth are nonsensical.

‘Let us hear no more of this nonsense about the ‘planetary alignment.’ It happens every 170 years or so; nothing spectacular will be seen in the sky; and in the opinion of almost everyone, it can [a]ffect nobody and nothing.’


It’s strange how so many people thought it sounded right—but when it actual fact, it was completely wrong.

I guess a lot of it has to do with the mind—although the phenomenon wasn’t real, in a way people believed in it and so it felt real.

But a clever hoax on the part of Sir Patrick Moore nevertheless.

Footnotes

[1]

Jovian–Plutonian gravitational effect – Wikipedia

[2]

Martin Wainwright on some of the silliest April Fool tricks

[3]

Planetary Alignment Decreases Gravity

HEAR THE PAIN & SOUL!! Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond

2023 08 21 08 04
2023 08 21 08 04

Surovikin Reportedly Fired/Resigned as Chief of Russian Aerospace Force

World Hal Turner 23 August 2023

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Surovikin large
Surovikin Reportedly Fired/Resigned as Chief of Russian Aerospace Force

Gen. Sergei Surovikin, a top Russian general who has been out of public view since the Wagner mercenary rebellion, has now reportedly been dismissed as head of the country’s aerospace forces, Russian state media reported today.  

“The ex-Commander-in-Chief of the Aerospace Forces of Russia Sergei Surovikin has now been relieved of his post, Colonel General Viktor Afzalov, Chief of the General Staff of the Aerospace Forces, is temporarily acting as Commander-in-Chief of the Aerospace Forces,” Russian state news agency RIA reported, citing a single unnamed source.

Russian news outlet RBK and Rybar, a popular Telegram channel close to the country’s defense ministry, reported on Tuesday that Surovikin had been removed from his position. RBK reported, citing unnamed sources “familiar with personnel changes in the defense ministry,” that Surovikin was relieved of his duties due to a “transfer to another job,” and is currently “on a short leave.

The Izvestia newspaper, reported what it said was Surovikin resignation from the post, citing its own unnamed sources. 

Alexei Venediktov, former head of the Ekho Moskvy, a prominent independent radio station that was shut down by authorities within days of the Ukraine invasion was the first to report that Surovikin had been dismissed on Tuesday, but said the general was being “retained by the defense ministry.”

What have you heard accidentally after someone thought their phone call with you was over?

My 85-year-old grandfather is still learning to use his Android phone at a slow pace. Every day before lunch, I get a call from him enquiring if I had my food on time.

Grandpa : “Did you eat? If not, shall I bring you some dish?”

Me : “No, thatha(Grandpa in Tamil). I had my lunch an hour back.”

Sometimes, I wouldn’t pick up his call because I know the obvious question. I did not even have the courtesy to return the call because of my mood swings.

One afternoon, he forgot to click on the End call option and so did I. After what must be around 20 seconds, I realized it and checked if he was still on line.

Grandpa (to Grandma) : “Sandhya picked my call! I must have dialled it in the right procedure today. Anyway, she had her lunch. I am yet to check on Savi (my mother).”

Grandma : “You can check after having your lunch. Shall I serve you your food at least now?”

Grandpa : “No no! Let me check on them first. What if either of them forgot to eat.”

Hearing this made me pause for a moment and realize that in this fast paced world where we are all running towards eternity, not many people put you before themselves.

Moreover, he thinks he hasn’t dialled the right number when I don’t pick the calls.

From then on, I never miss his lunch call. Even on my bad days, it is a tiny, but happy reminder that someone remembers me in spite of their own bustling life.

THIS BROKE ME! First Time Hearing Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North of Richmond REACTION

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2023 08 21 08 00

Wasabi-Beer Braised Brisket

Enjoy the heat of wasabi with the complex flavors of beer in this beer-braised brisket, thinly sliced and served on a wheat baguette.

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2023 08 21 09 04

Yield: 12 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 beef brisket flat half (4 to 4 1/2 pounds)
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 tablespoon peanut or vegetable oil
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 2 medium onions, each cut into 12 wedges
  • 1 bottle (12 ounces) beer
  • 1 bottle (12 ounces) chili sauce
  • 2 teaspoons wasabi paste
  • Coleslaw (recipe follows)
  • 3 whole wheat baguettes, cut into 10 to 12 pieces (4-1/2 to 5 inches each), split

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 325 degrees F.
  2. Press garlic evenly onto all surfaces of beef brisket.
  3. Heat oil in large skillet over medium heat until hot. Place brisket in skillet; brown evenly. Remove brisket from skillet; season with salt and pepper.
  4. Add onions to large stockpot or large baking pan. Place brisket over onions. Stir in beer and chili sauce; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; cover tightly. Continue cooking in 325 degrees F oven for 3 1/2 to 4 hours or until beef is fork-tender.
  5. Meanwhile, prepare coleslaw.
  6. Remove brisket; keep warm. Skim fat from cooking liquid; bring to boil. Reduce heat and simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes. Stir in wasabi paste.
  7. Carve brisket diagonally across the grain into thin slices. Return beef to cooking liquid; keep warm. Divide beef and onions evenly over roll bottoms; close sandwiches. Serve remaining sauce for dipping, if desired. Serve with coleslaw.
  8. Coleslaw: Combine 1/2 cup rice vinegar, 2 tablespoons peanut or vegetable oil, 2 tablespoons toasted sesame oil, 2 teaspoons minced fresh ginger and 2 teaspoons honey in large bowl. Add 1 package (16 ounces) coleslaw mix and 1 package (8 ounces) shredded red cabbage; toss to coat. Season with salt, if desired.

Is it okay to wear other race’s cultural clothing?

I think the Xenomorphs don’t wear clothing, and I doubt most people would want to wear the bulky armor of the Predators.

But if you’re asking whether it’s okay to wear another (human) culture’s traditional clothing, my question to you would be: why wouldn’t it be okay?

I recently wrote a very short answer to the question:
Which Chinese fashion is still not adopted in Western countries?

I got a few replies, from non-Chinese Quorans, who mentioned that their wearing hanfu might be considered “cultural appropriation”.

Although I haven’t polled every Chinese, I’m pretty confident that the vast majority will consider “cultural appropriation” a load of bunkum.

If my non-Chinese friends were to wear hanfu, I think I’d be busy smiling, unleashing a lot of “wows” and “you look great!” and taking a thousand and one pictures on my phone (and probably on their phones too) rather than spend even one microsecond feeling offended by their wearing hanfu.

I don’t think Chinese are alone in this when it comes to “cultural appropriation”.
I believe that people from the vast majority of cultures would feel flattered and genuinely appreciative of your taking an interest in their traditional clothing.

So why not go ahead and don that traditional attire you’ve always wanted to try on?

Here are some pictures of Chinese and non-Chinese wearing hanfu.

Chinese wearing hanfu:

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Non-Chinese wearing hanfu:

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Oliver Anthony Performs Rich Men North of Richmond for a wild crowd in North Carolina

2023 08 21 08 10
2023 08 21 08 10

Is the CCP able to continue defying the laws of economics and pull off another economic miracle?

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Why not wait and watch?

You predicted their doom before based on complete garbage

You predicted Russia’s doom before based on gutter garbage

Let’s wait and see what happens

China has been predicted to collapse maybe 10,000 times so far based on absolutely zero economics

Maybe this time you will be right?

The point is the Chinese don’t give a damn what you think

They restructure their economy, They use experts and see what can or cannot be done and they do everything within the scope of economic forces

Ultimately neither the Chinese nor anybody else can hide Economic resilience or Economic Doom

Problem is the day you realize you were dead wrong about China for the 10,000th time, you would promptly change the goalpost and move on to something else


Let’s wait and watch

I put money on the Chinese as always

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I always liked Efficiency and Ability more than Gas and Propaganda

Let’s see how it goes

Guitar Teacher REACTS: OLIVER ANTHONY – I Want To Go Home

What was the best revenge you’ve ever gotten?

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2023 08 24 21 09

My dad was a coal miner in Yorkshire, UK. He started work aged 14 in 1935 and retired aged 60 in 1981.

Circa 1978 (when I was 15), he complained that somebody kept stealing his Kit Kat chocolate biscuit from his snap tin (sandwich box). This kept happening and he was getting really pissed about it, as much the principle as anything else: Miners didn’t steal from their workmates. Except that one was now doing that. Like most working guys those days, he had his routine. Lunch was a flask of tea, sandwiches and a chocolate biscuit. If somebody steals part of your lunch when you’re down a coal mine for 8 hours, you can’t just nip out to a nearby shop.

I was pissed too when he told me what was going on. He was a nice old guy and I didn’t like anyone doing anything bad to him. Nobody was gonna hurt my dad with impunity. So I had an idea.

Very carefully, I unwrapped a Kit Kat (the two-fingered variety). In the 70′s Kit Kat biscuits had an inner wrapper of aluminium foil and an outer wrapper of paper which you could slip off sideways (not the one-use sealed plasticated-paper wrap like now that you have to tear to open).

Having found a nice fresh soft brown dog turd out on the pavement, I used a knife to fill in the gap between the two fingers, creating a strip of shit maybe four inches long, a quarter inch wide and a quarter inch deep, right down the centre of the bar, where it wouldn’t be obvious. Technique-wise, it was like pointing masonry. Only somewhat smellier. Then I carefully re-wrapped the Kit Kat.

Dad thought it was a great joke and took it with him to work as usual. Halfway through his shift, he heard some guy further down the coalface barfing his guts up and spitting profusely. He couldn’t stop work to find out who it was as he drove a massive coal-cutting machine (known as working “on the chocks”). Sure enough though, come break time, he opened his snap tin to find the Kit Kat gone. That, however, was the last time it ever went missing again.

My dad died of emphysema and pneumoconiosis in 1993, the usual coal miners’ diseases. To his dying day though, he would still fall about laughing when regaling friends with the story of how his son had “put paid” to the Kit Kat thief with a shit sandwich.

Ep. 18 | Alarming Assessment of U.S. Military Decline and Ukraine War Dangers, Col. Douglas McGregor

This is REALLY good.

What was your best “Thinking outside of the box” idea at your place of employment?

One of my many contract engineer jobs was at a company that manufactured security doors. My main task during my 6 month contract was to find ways to improve their product and/or save costs. That’s kind of what I do everyplace because… well, that’s what I do.

So, by the time I get hired by a place, they have already gone through the most obvious solutions that they could think of. Generally what’s left, really needs to be found someplace out of the box. I enjoy finding these solutions, when others couldn’t. But there is one particular idea that sticks out as one of my most unconventional, which was a really big success. And it was at this door manufacturer, where it appeared.

One of their issues was that it took too damn long to put a door together along their assembly line, and there were numerous bottlenecks. One of the bottlenecks was at the station, near the end, where the 14″ square security-glass window was installed. Security glass is the glass that has that grid of criss-crossing wire embedded in it. Installing that glass securely, so that it couldn’t be removed from the outside required a complex framework of retainers that were first welded in place to the door, and then needed an additional steel frame that then screwed into the welded frame, holding the glass in place. There was always a terrible log-jam here, what with all the precision welding and screwing. It was ripe for an out of the box idea.

On the first day, it came to me… and it was brilliant, if I do say so myself.

I eliminated everything except the glass. No frames that had to be made, no drilling, no welding, no screwing, no second frame… all that was gone. All we had left was door and square of glass. The new process removed about 20 minutes from each door. That was about 20% of the entire time it took to make a complete door, start to finish.

In place of all the metal frames, welding, drilling and screwing, I used… Velcro!

I Velcro’d those windows in, directly to the door. This was the strongest Velcro that was made. Super Industrial strength. I used permanent glue to glue the “hook” part of the Velcro to the door, and the same glue to attach the corresponding “loop” part of the Velcro all around the edge of the glass, then just pressed them together, and… Bob’s your uncle! Done.

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To un-attach one part of the Velcro from the other part, a screwdriver was needed to carefully pry the glass away all around the edge. Took less than a minute, but could only be done from the inside-side of the door. And the Velcro was stronger than the glass itself. Smashing the glass in from the outside would break the glass before it released the Velcro.

Yeah, I’m kinda proud of that one. When I first mentioned it, they all said that was ridiculous. It was a “Security” door, after all. Not a basketball shoe.

What was ridiculous was the ridiculous success of the process. They all gave it their best shot at finding the flaw in the idea. Nope. It held tight no matter what was thrown at it. They’ve since permanently changed how they install their security glass. Your own security door, in fact, may have a Velcro attached window. No hardware at all. No worries, though. It works! Even if you know it’s Velcro, and you’re a potential burglar… it still works.

And with that… my horn-blowing in this article has come to an end. Thank you very much!

Life On The Streets Of China | SHOCKING AMERICANS !

2023 08 21 09 07
2023 08 21 09 07

Have you ever seen a pickpocket in action? What did you do?

I am a retired British Police Officer and was standing on a crowded train in Italy with my wife. I saw a woman and child enter the carriage. The woman had a large but open empty bag and the child immediately left her side and started mingling with the other standing passengers. I knew what was happening and got ready to pounce. I waited as I wanted to catch them in the act. However, just before I took action my wife shouted, “Attention everyone there is a pickpocket here and she is trying to steal your belongings”.

She had effectively stopped the crime but prevented my intervention. At the next station, we all alighted including the potential thieves. I asked my wife why she had done that and she responded that she knew what I was like and what I would be planning and didn’t want to spend the day in an Italian Police Station making statements when we should be taking in the local culture. Actually, I thought we might have been about to get immersively intertwined with the local culture, but I took her point.

What product has a common use that surpasses its intended use?

WD-40 isn’t just for squeaky doors.

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It’s rumored that before John Glenn circled the earth in 1962, NASA engineers slathered the Friendship VII with WD-40 from top to bottom, thinking it would reduce friction upon re-entry. That’s probably not the best example, but the company publishes a PDF on their website (linked below) with roughly 2,000 other uses.

Some highlights:

  1. Removes grime from book covers.
  2. Prevents mud and clay from sticking to shovels and boots.
  3. Removes grease and oil stains on clothes.
  4. Softens new baseball gloves.
  5. Cleans chrome fixtures in bathrooms.
  6. Makes puck slide faster on a hockey table.
  7. Cleans and softens paint brushes.
  8. Cleans and protects cowboy boots.
  9. Removes crayon from walls, carpet, wall-paper, plastics, shoes, toys, chalkboard, monitors, screen doors, and rock walls.
  10. Eases arthritis pain (spray the painful joint.)
  11. Cleans piano keys.
  12. Removes super strong glue from fingers.
  13. Keeps wicker chairs from squeaking.
  14. Removes scuff marks from ceramic floors.
  15. Cleans and protects copper pots and pans.
  16. Polishes and shines sea shells.
  17. Removes water spots from mirrors.
  18. Removes tea stains from counter tops.
  19. Keeps pigeons off window ledges (they hate the smell).
  20. Removes ink from carpet.
  21. Keeps metal wind chimes rust free.
  22. Prevents mildew growth on outdoor fountains.
  23. Removes gunk from plastic dish drainers.
  24. Cleans dog doo from tennis shoes.
  25. Removes tomato stains from clothing.
  26. Gets ink stains out of leather.
  27. Removes roller-skate marks from kitchen floor.
  28. Removes black streaks from RV’s and siding.
  29. Unkinks gold chains.
  30. Penetrates frozen mailbox doors.
  31. Removes tar from shoes.
  32. Cleans silver plates and trays.
  33. Removes soap scum in the bathroom
  34. Polishes wood.
  35. Takes the squeak out of shoes.
  36. Removes a stuck ring from a finger.
  37. Wipes off graffiti.
  38. Removes Silly Putty from carpet.
  39. Loosens burrs, thistles, and stickers from dogs and horses.
  40. Removes bumper stickers from cars.
  41. Removes duct tape.

Working Class Anthem Attacked By Establishment As “QAnon!”

Jimmy Dore responds.

I wasn’t able to save the kitten

On the 3rd of July, a few years back, I visited an animal shelter. And there in the back room was a little Maine coon kitten that was trying to get my attention. So I went up to it and we bonded strongly. I wanted it right then and there.

But the chick at the front desk was busy with a customer and closing up and told us to come back on the 5th of July (as tomorrow was a holiday). So I said “good bye” to the kitty and promised that I would come back for it.

I kept looking back over my shoulder and the kitty was imploring me “don’t leave. You are my last hope”.

And then on the 5th of July I came early, ready to get the kitty. I waited in the parking lost one hour early and just sat there listening to music.

Eventually they “opened up”.

And it was too late. They put the kitty down the day before.

I was too late.

When an opportunity occurs DO NOT TRUST IN SOMEONE ELSE, stand your ground and take action.

I should have just got the kitty then and there, and told them that I would come back in a day or two to do the paperwork.

Todays…

“This is what love looks like.”

“When I asked my 11-year-old son to help me unload dirt from our small pickup into his mother’s new garden boxes, his reaction was typical.

“Ummmm… I’m busy right now,” He said.

He was playing Roblock on the family laptop, wearing sweat pants and an old T-shirt, lounging on the sofa, feet on the coffee table.

“No you’re not,” I said.

There was a fight, moaning, excuses… the usual.

Moments later, we were next to a wheelbarrow shoveling dirt. He looked at me with flat eyes, his hood up, shoulders slumped, and said, “Why do we have to do this?”

I thought for a moment, because I’ll admit, it was a valid question. Neither of us were all that into flowers or vegetables, or any of the things that would be grown in those garden boxes. But my wife, Mel, loves gardening.

I thought, and he waited, and finally I said, “When you love someone, you serve them.”

I went on, telling him that I want him to grow up to be the kind of man who serves his family, friends, and community.

“This” I said while gesturing to the dirt, and the garden boxes I built the weekend before, and the wheelbarrow and shovel, and the first of many truckloads of dirt we would unload over the next few weeks, “Is what love looks like.”

He didn’t like my answer. I could see it in the way he reluctantly picked his shovel back up.

We finished unloading the dirt. The next day, while I was at work, and the kids and Mel had the day off because it was between terms, Mel sent me this picture. Mel picked up another load of dirt and before she had a chance to unload it, Tristan voluntarily started working. When she asked him “why,” he shrugged and said, “Because I love you.”

I’d never been prouder of my son.”

TEES

After the accident, she was left on the side of the road, no one stopped the car to help her!

An Englishman, taking a road trip through the US, notices he’s low on fuel, and pulls into the first gas station he sees.

An Englishman, taking a road trip through the US, notices he’s low on fuel, pulls into the first gas station he sees. The attendant walks out and approaches the car.

“How can I help you, sir?”

And in a posh voice, the man says, “I’m low on petrol; please top off the tank.”

With an odd look, the guy begins to fill ’er up.

The Englishman then says, “Also, while I’m here could you open the bonnet and check the oil?”

Now looking slightly peeved but still saying nothing, the serviceman does as requested.

“Oh, yes,” says the Brit, “It appears my windscreen needs a good cleaning. Would you mind terribly-”

Unable to hold his tongue any more the attendant angrily snaps, “Alright, that’s enough! It’s not Petrol, it’s gasoline! It’s not a bonnet, it’s a hood! And it’s not a windscreen, it’s a windshield! We invented cars, so you call them by their American names!”

And with that wonderful, charming, stiff-upper-lip UK wit, the Englishman calmly replies, “Well yes, my friend, you may have invented the automobile, but we invented the language!”

How Elites Will Create a New Class of Slaves | Whitney Webb | The Glenn Beck Podcast

Journalist Whitney Webb has worked to uncover some of the most dangerous stories of our lifetime, and she joins Glenn to reveal just how eye-opening it’s been. Her new two-volume book, “One Nation Under Blackmail: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein,” examines Epstein’s elaborate network of corruption and power, from Bill Clinton to Ghislaine Maxwell and many more. Her research into transhumanism has given her a terrifying perspective on the World Economic Forum and tech elites, including Elon Musk. And she tells Glenn the dark truth about Biden’s push for electric vehicles that she noticed while living in Chile.

What did you read on the internet that you did not like?

Few days ago, a very significant incident made headlines. Jacinda Ardern resigned as the Prime Minister of New Zealand. She strongly performed the role of PM for 5 years. Her reason for the resignation was simple – “I know what this job takes. And I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice. It’s that simple.”

Jacinda Ardern:

I’m leaving, because with such a privileged role comes responsibility – the responsibility to know when you are the right person to lead and also when you are not. I am human, politicians are human. We give all that we can for as long as we can. And then it’s time. And for me, it’s time.”

However, amidst all this, BBC came up with a very se*ist headline and an article to share the news with the world. It read, “Jacinda Ardern resigns: Can women really have it all?”

Saddened to see such a reductive, se*ist and inaccurate headline from the BBC World. This is so regressive and misogynist…The 1950s came by and picked up their headline.

This is absurd misogyny from BBC. Boris Johnson was ousted in a whirlwind of scandal & failure but BBC humanized him for the pain he felt. 🤔.

Jacinda Ardern gracefully led New Zealand through historic upheavals & leaves on her terms but BBC repeatedly dismisses her as a failure & quitter. 🤦‍♂️

An embarrassing day for the media. What a disrespectful way to celebrate a refreshingly phenomenal leader like Jacinda Arden.

Big Po “Rich Men North of Richmond” (Remix)

What are some advanced and modern military innovations that have failed?

I’m not sure if I would say it failed. But it was a very awesome piece of gear that for various reasons (namely budget, and politics) was cancelled. Full disclaimer: at one point I worked with the company that made this, and have seen and held parts of this system.

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The Xm-25 CDTE. It shoots programmable 25mm grenades.

Imagine a typical firefight scenario. Both sides end up behind cover, trying to deal with each other. Perhaps a heavy machine gun is mounted up in a window behind sandbags, etc. Maneuvering around and neutralizing the threat is dangerous and time consuming. But what if you had a grenade rifle that could precisely detonate a round just over their heads? Then you could aim just above the MG nest, pop of a shot, and those unlucky bastards would be no more. Firefight over in a minute. No need to call in artillery or air support!

The way this works is that scope has a rangefinder and a computer, and it can program the round to explode at the lazed distance, or before or after that distance in (I think) 1–3m increments. So, in the above example, you laze the sandbags or the side of the building, set the burst just after that distance, and fire. It’s very clever engineering to fit all that capability onto an electronics coin inside a 25mm casing. Unlike traditional grenade launchers, this one shoots a much flatter trajectory; and the range is 600–700m instead of 300ish. The Army was always pushing for more and more range.

When field tested, it apparently developed quite a reputation amongst insurgents, who would sometimes flee when they realized the US squad had one with them. I only heard glowing praise about the 2010 field tests. Being able to neutralize cover with a weapon like this is literally game-changing.

However, the project was ultimately cancelled in 2018. The ‘official’ reason always cites a particular misfire in 2013, although internal sources indicated it was more of a political fight over competing budget priorities. The misfire was only the propellant and not the charge itself. resulting in minimal injury; and, try as ATK did, they could not figure out what this particular soldier did to cause it. (Read: he almost certainly fucked up and did something he wasn’t supposed to, like a double feed.) This is the only incident of a misfire.

I think the other headwind is that current US squad tactics and organization don’t really have a good way to incorporate a system like this. Who wants to carry around a 14lb weapon and give up his rifle? They were patrolling around afghanistan, not taking Berlin. It is, however, a very outstanding little system. If I recall one particular conversation correctly, I believe the round can even punch through some wooden doors and explode on the other side. How’s that for breaching?

There were also problems with HK, who made the frame of the rifle itself, being a poor partner and failing to deliver on time. (This also angered program managers.)

The good news is that fitting this tech onto a 25mm grenade is the hard part. I can promise you that the same technology will find its way into a 40mm grenade system at some point. Imagine being able to lay precision, long range airbursts across a battlefield with one of these:

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Automatic grenade sniper rifle, anyone?

Men Are Refusing To Help Women and They are Panicking They don’t Know Why

https://youtu.be/qXWc6IxxfUs

Greek Style Skillet Supper

For a taste of Greece, this one-dish complete meal is sure to be a hit. Feta cheese accents the authentic flavor.

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Prep: 5 min | Cook: 25 min | Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1/2 cup chopped onion
  • 2 teaspoons McCormick® Oregano Leaves
  • 1 teaspoon McCormick® Cinnamon, Ground
  • 1/2 teaspoon McCormick® Garlic Powder
  • 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can reduced sodium beef broth
  • 1 (14 1/2 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 2 tablespoons tomato paste
  • 1 1/2 cups uncooked penne pasta
  • 1 1/2 cups frozen leaf spinach, thawed
  • 3/4 cup crumbled feta cheese, divided

Instructions

  1. Cook ground beef and onion in large skillet on medium-high heat until beef is no longer pink, stirring occasionally. Drain fat. Add oregano, cinnamon and garlic powder; mix well.
  2. Stir in broth, tomatoes and tomato paste. Bring to boil. Stir in pasta. Reduce heat to medium; cover and cook 10 minutes or until pasta is nearly tender.
  3. Stir in spinach and 1/2 cup of the feta cheese. Cover. Cook 5 minutes longer or until pasta is tender.
  4. Sprinkle with remaining 1/4 cup feta cheese. Cover. Let stand for 5 minutes.

Western Nations BANNED from Joining BRICS if they Apply “Sanctions”

World Hal Turner 25 August 2023

Western countries do not have a chance of joining the BRICS group of emerging economies as long as they pursue hostile policies against Moscow, says the Russian deputy foreign minister.

Sergei Ryabkov said on Friday that the “most important criterion” for membership was the “non-application by a potential BRICS participant of illegal sanctions against any member of the association.”

“All the countries who have been invited to join BRICS undoubtedly meet this requirement. 

As for Westerners, all of them as a group and each individual [Western] member pursue exactly the opposite line and thus inviting anyone from that group to join BRICS or even attend its events is out of the question. This is absolutely ruled out. And we will continue pursuing this course.”

If any Western state finds BRICS membership an attractive idea, and refrains from the sanctions policy against any BRICS member and applies to join, such an application will be considered.

“There is no other way.”

According to Taiwanese media reports on August 2nd, TSMC stated that the production delay at its Arizona factory was due to a lack of skilled American labor, and they have dispatched personnel from Taiwan to support the construction of the factory. However, labor union leaders in Arizona criticized TSMC, stating that it was using this as an excuse to introduce “low-wage foreign labor.”

https://youtu.be/GG5O-xmThFs

What has an employee said that immediately caused you to fire them?

Jerome (not real name) was a new worker with a big mouth. He was 28 years old at the time, quite older than most of the guys he worked with like myself yet he acted, at best, like a spoilt 15 year old.

He was always talking. He always had an opinion about something. He always had to question even the most simple orders and instructions. He believed himself to be the most intelligent person to ever walk the floor of the warehouse and always spoke at length of all the flaws he saw in our system and what he would do to fix the business if he were in charge.

Our job was simple: a retail store wants products that we have, we go out with our grocery carts, pallet jacks, forklifts etc, get the products and have them packaged and ready for delivery in the morning.

Not Jerome.

Jerome’s job was to distact you from what you were doing to talk shit about the company and how the money wasn’t worth it. He would quote some nonexisting OSHA law that the company wasn’t complying with and how he could sue the company if he wanted to. He would discuss his harebrained, get rich quick schemes that he never had to guts to actually attempt. He bragged about his family in the US waiting for him and how he didn’t need to work himself like a slave for chump change like we did.

At any given day he probably put out 20% of the output of the average worker. He was on a six month probationary period of which it would be decided whether he would be contracted as a permanent worker, given extended probation or let go. No one expected him to be permanently hired. Everyone basically tried to tolerate him for the six month probationary period as best as they could.

However he started taking his shenanigans to the next level.

He started making the (typically secluded) shampoos lane in the back warehouse his secret hideout. The lane was quiet, had no cameras and far away from our superiors’ field of vision. He decided to set up a makeshift man-cave behind a pallet of Tresemmé 2 in 1 Shampoo and Conditioner. There he would smoke, talk shit with the rare, harmless worker who came by for shampoos and he would watch rap music videos on his cell phone.

At the month’s end all warehouse workers were allowed to take from the damaged products. We had our own system of fairness whereby we rotated each worker to get a chance to get first pick among the damages.

Jerome couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the system. During the third month of his employ it was observed that practically all of the best damaged goods had gone missing. A co-worker and myself smelt a rat in Jerome and we went to his man cave while he was on lunch and saw the damages were there hidden in boxes.

We reported it to the supervisor who came and saw it. He held an emergency meeting and asked for the person who put those damaged goods in the back to come forward. Everyone eyed Jerome angrily but he remained silent. The supervisor reported the matter to the manager who reported it to the company owner and she immediately put a stop to the free damages giveaway.

Now the anger towards Jerome had turned into a bloodlust. However the more angry everyone got the more lazy and defiant Jerome became. He was smart enough to abandon his man-cave after his attempted theft but he still spent more than half his working day loitering and talking shit.

Every year the company paid for the company staff to have a party, usually at a classy sports bar or a nightclub. We all looked forward to it including Jerome who discussed at length his intention to get drunk off of free premium drinks and score with one of the pretty head office girls. However, one fateful afternoon the owner of the store had an impromptu meeting with everyone in the warehouse.

She explained that the company decided to change the format of the staff party. She explained that it was expensive and inefficient having this party every year when too many employees ran up a bill drinking premium drinks all night and then not being able to come to work the following day. She gave the disappointing news that this time the party would be held at 12pm — 7pm the upcoming Sunday.

Jerome released a snorting laugh while she spoke. Everyone in the warehouse went dead silent. No one had ever dared interrupt the owner, far less mock her.

‘Excuse me,’ she said, ‘Is there something amusing?’

‘Nobody ever heard of a party 12 o clock in the afternoon,’ Jerome said in his spoilt 15 year old voice.

‘I’ve been to many parties 12 o clock in the afternoon’ she replied.

‘Yeah, birthday parties for kids’ Jerome said smugly and looked about for someone to laugh but found only silence.

The owner asked Jerome his name and how long he worked in the warehouse. Afterwards she continued her talk uninterrupted but after the meeting was dismissed she, the manager and Jerome went into an office for a talk. Some minutes later Jerome was seen leaving the compound, he was terminated from the job.

Sad thing for Jerome was the owner apparently thought over what he said about the party and changed her mind about it. We were allowed to have our traditional, late into the night, party albeit minus the free premium drinks.

We had a great time dancing the night away and toasting Jerome whose big mouth finally done some good for a change.

MY SOUL!!! | Oliver Anthony – “I WANT TO GO HOME” | Reaction

2023 08 26 08 26
2023 08 26 08 26

What bad experience had you saying “I will never buy from that company or use their service ever again”?

Nissan. I bought a brand new Nissan Truck with a supercharger. The supercharger crapped out at 12,000 miles. They had to fix it because it was under warranty. The mechanic at the dealer told me they were all failing due to a manufacturer’s defect which was widely known in the company. I drove the truck a couple more years and the supercharger crapped out again, this time just about 200 miles beyond the end of the warranty. At about the same time, my son’s identical Nissan truck also lost its supercharger at 18,000 miles. I wound up talking to a factory representative. I asked him if they would split the $1,800 bill since it was a factory defect. He said no because Nissan just couldn’t afford to pay for all those repairs.

I later bought a Toyota truck which lost a head gasket. Toyota fixed it for free outside of the warranty period. They said that their engineering and design philosophy was that a head gasket should last at least 200,000 miles.

I have made a point to tell this story at least 100 times over the years. I know I have talked at least 20 people out of buying a Nissan.

What is the weirdest canine species?

In terms of uniqueness, it’s hard to find a canine species that rivals the short-eared dog. Genetically, it is very distinct from other living members of the canid family, and indeed in many ways it is more like a cat than a dog!

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main qimg 652937cca60a6da81536f998d6861a86 1

It is found only within the dense and dark jungles of the Amazon Basin in South America. Such densely forested habitats are unusual for canines, other than the bush dog, which I’ll mention later. What’s more, it is an extremely shy and reclusive creature, leading a solitary nocturnal lifestyle. All of the characteristics above are more typical of felines, interestingly.

Where the short-eared dog differs from your average cat is its affinity for water. As vast swathes of its Amazonian habitat are swampy or regularly flooded, it is well-adapted for a semi-aquatic world. Its feet are webbed, with membranes of skin stretching between the toes, which makes it an excellent swimmer. Much of its diet is actually represented by fish, crabs, frogs and the like. The dog makes short work of these slippery customers with its impressive set of cuspid teeth (another rather cat-like feature).

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main qimg 55d9ffacb1413422b8ed6023e94b79ec

As canid species go, the short-eared dog takes an exceptionally long time to reach sexual maturity. They cannot reproduce until the age of three, something we discovered relatively recently. Before it was known that it’s a bit of a late bloomer, one expert jokingly suggested it should be renamed the “small-balled dog”!

When they eventually do achieve sexual maturity, males get to work in the hopes of attracting a female (uniquely, the females are much bigger than the males!). They spray a strong-smelling musk secreted by the tail glands, and produce mating calls all through the night. These vocalisations are bizarre and haunting, sounding like those of owls!

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main qimg 4290a3b41bbb5df7b9b2b79d59c6a00a

During the day, they take shelter, usually dwelling inside burrows and tunnels dug by giant armadillos, after they’ve been vacated by the original owner. Short-eared dogs’ nocturnal lifestyle, in addition to their impenetrable habitat and shy evasive nature, means that they are still shrouded in mystery. They are rarely photographed in the wild – indeed, all the pictures above are of an individual called Oso, who was raised by humans since puppyhood (hence the collar). He’s taught us much of what we know about the species.

As such, we still have much more to learn about short-eared dogs. I, for one, am very curious to know more about how they interact with the only other wild canine species found in the Amazon Rainforest – the bush dog. This comically short and stubby little pupper lives in packs of up to twelve individuals, which specialise in hunting giant rodents such as capybaras and pacas. I’m sure the two species cross paths at times – what a fascinating interaction that would be.

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main qimg 553d64ecc8ed67d60c3fd1fed09a1d40

I eagerly await all the new short-eared dog discoveries that are sure to be ahead! In the meantime, this has been everything you need to know about this underappreciated and handsome creature. I hope you liked the answer, thank you for reading! And have an amazing day.

I failed out of college.

Not MM, mind you. -MM

I ended the 2nd semester of my freshman year with a 0.9 GPA.

You read that right: a 0.9 GPA

When the school year ended, my parents drove four hours to campus to help clean out my dorm room and take me home.

During the ride home I remember staring out the car window in complete silence the entire four hours.

I was devastated. I had no idea what I was going to do.

My parents were upset.

They were disappointed.

They didn’t have anything to say.

Neither did I.

Their disappointment was nothing compared to the numbness I felt. I was far more disappointed in myself than they ever could be. It was completely my fault and I knew it.

I struggled all through high school, so it was no surprise I struggled the way I did when I started college.

I was terrible at taking tests. I had such a difficult time studying. I have no idea why. It was something I lived with that I cannot explain.

In grade school I had special tutors to help with my test-taking anxiety. I can’t say it helped much.

As I finished my final year of high school, I did not know if I would get in to college. I only applied to one college.

I was accepted to attend the only college I applied to.

And now I failed out of the only college I applied to.

I struggled all through Freshman year of college until it got to a point where I felt I had no chance of success. My grades were terrible. So, I did not show up for any of my final exams. There was no way I could study well enough to get passing grades on my finals.

I gave up.

During the four hour drive home, I became painfully aware that I could have done better. I didn’t bother searching for an excuse to justify the horrible mistake I made.

I had to figure out a Plan B.

Not even a week passed after moving back home with my parents before I started piecing together a plan.

Even though I ‘failed’ as far as the university was concerned, I knew I was not a failure. I certainly did not feel like one.

I dug myself into a very deep hole and I knew it was up to me to pull myself out.

I had to figure out how to approach life differently. I wasn’t doing it right. And it felt horrible.

I knew I had to try again.

The problem was, since my GPA was so poor, I got suspended from attending that college.

I called the admissions office and asked how I could come back to earn my degree. They told me I needed to go to a community college for a year and earn a 3.0 GPA, then I could reapply to be accepted back.

My entire experience of life changed from that point on. I was never the same again.

All of a sudden I had a goal to accomplish. I never set ambitious goals for myself prior to that moment. I was social and active and participated in sports, but I was mostly just showing up. I never associated much of a purpose or goal with anything I was doing.

I now had a goal, fueled by an intense desire to accomplish that goal.

I did what the admissions office told me to do. I got a job. I took courses at the community college. I accomplished the GPA they required.

A year after failing, I reapplied and was admitted back in to the same college so I could finish my degree.

By the time I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree, I was getting grades that earned me a spot on the Dean’s List several semesters in a row.

Why was failing out of college the best mistake I ever made?

  • This mistake was a wake-up call that helped me discover what I am capable of.
  • I experienced what it feels like to recover from a major failure.
  • I shifted my mindset to one that is fueled with purpose.
  • I discovered the power of setting ambitious goals that are created from my own desire to accomplish those goals.
  • And most importantly: I remember feeling as though my entire life was over during that silent four hour drive home with my parents. The reality was, this failure ended up being a mere bump in the road. It was quite a rough bump at the time but it did not ruin me. I learned that our failures do not define who we are.

I Want To Go Home ( REACTION ) Something SPECIAL is Happening Here…

2023 08 26 11 32
2023 08 26 11 32

How does it feel to be secretly rich?

Originally Answered: What does it feel like to be secretly rich?

Around strangers, it’s easy. Around friends and neighbors, its work.

Most people in the United States have at least one of my products in their home, and would instantly recognize the company, but they wouldn’t know me. There’s never a random “hey, aren’t you the CEO of…” on the street, or checking into a hotel, so that part is fairly easy.

On the flip side, I think I’ve done a pretty good job of keeping things on the down low among friends. I personally bring home about $4 million a year, but I’m not really into displays of wealth – not because I’m actively hiding anything, I just think most of that stuff is kind of tacky and isn’t interesting.

Our house isn’t over the top. It’s larger than average, but we also have three kids so that’s expected. It does sit on 60 acres, but we tell people only five of those acres are ours. We have a couple of cars (her primary, my primary, a truck, and a couple of classics in the garage) but all are American made and none newer than five years old. Both of the classics are actually pretty rare cars which would fetch over $100k a piece if I ever sold them, but since I’m also known for being kind of a gear head and did a lot of work on it myself, everyone just assumes they were once junkers I brought back from the dead or aren’t all original parts.

This part is pretty easy since there visibly aren’t too many cues that would tip someone off. Everything was paid for with cash, including the house, but realistically outside of the land value, someone making $150k-200k could afford all of the same stuff if they financed/mortgaged it.

The main difficulty is trying to relate and being careful what I say. Most of our friends are in that $150–200k range, but they’re in debt up to their eyeballs to maintain their lifestyles. They’re driving new leased Mercedes and BMW’s and probably think they’re doing better than I am financially – which is fine by me.

Its just little things I have to watch out for. A buddy invited me to bring one of the classics to a car show he was going to once, but I declined and said it acting up and I needed to work on it. I left the hood up for a week in case he came over. Really I just didn’t want the attention – someone there would have recognized it for what it was. Occasionally when someone notices how much land surrounds my house, I’ll say something like I hope the owner never decides to build on it. Before we take a family trip, I will mention that I’m saving up for it a couple months prior, when really we could just go. I also own property in other states that no one knows about – one of them is a place along a river in Tennessee and a few of us are going down there next month to witness the eclipse. They think it’s just a place I rented for the weekend.

Honestly, I don’t like the deception – these are good friends, but seeing how they all are with their money and how they regard it, I don’t want them to know the truth. I hear about all of their money problems and how they talk about other people who are better off than they are, and there’s a lot of disdain and jealously there. it’s just not worth the hassle. The problem is I think most of the people I’ve met in my own income bracket and higher are pretentious douchebags, so I don’t really want to hang out with them either.

My life doesn’t revolve around money, and that isn’t the case for most of the people I’ve met with an income over $1 million, so I don’t really relate to them. I would rather vacation to a rustic cabin in the woods than some flashy five star resort.

Chili-Stuffed Potato Skins

OzzzIP
OzzzIP

Yield: 8 servings

Ingredients

  • 4 large baking potatoes
  • 2 tablespoons olive oil
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 small yellow onion, diced
  • 1 tablespoon minced jarred jalapeno peppers
  • 1 pound lean ground beef
  • 1 cup canned crushed tomatoes
  • 1 (14 ounce) can refried beans
  • Salt and ground black pepper, to taste
  • 1 1/2 cups shredded Cheddar cheese
  • 2/3 cup ricotta cheese
  • 1/2 cup milk

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 425 degrees F.
  2. Wash and dry the potatoes, then pierce each several times with a fork. Microwave on HIGH for about 10 to 12 minutes, or until cooked through. Timing varies by microwave.
  3. Meanwhile, in a medium saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the olive oil, garlic, onion and jalapenos. Sauté until the onion just begins to get tender, about 5 minutes.
  4. Add the ground beef and sauté until browned, about another 5 minutes.
  5. Add the crushed tomatoes and refried beans, then mix well and reduce heat to low. Bring to a simmer, season with salt and pepper, then cover and reduce heat to just keep warm.
  6. Carefully cut the potatoes in half lengthwise, then use a spoon to scoop out the insides and place them in a large bowl. Leave about 1/4 to 1/2 inch of potato all around the skin. Arrange the potato skins on a baking sheet. Set aside.
  7. To the bowl of potatoes, add 1 cup of the Cheddar cheese, the ricotta and milk. Mix well, then season with salt and pepper. Set aside.
  8. Fill the potato skins almost to overflowing with the meat-and-bean mixture. Carefully spoon a bit of the potato-and-cheese mixture over the meat. Sprinkle each with some of the remaining Cheddar.
  9. Bake until the cheese melts and the mashed-potato topping just begins to brown, about 12 to 15 minutes.

Jordan Peterson Tells the TRUTH about ALIENATED Young Men – (Better Audio Quality)

This is STUNNINGLY great!

2023 08 26 11 58
2023 08 26 11 58

It’s Official: “BRICS” Adds Saudi Arabia, Iran, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, and UAE; Will Control 80% of Global Oil

World Hal Turner 24 August 2023

brics 2024 nEW mEMBERS large
brics 2024 nEW mEMBERS large

It’s Official: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Argentina, Egypt, Ethiopia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE)  will become full members of BRICS on January 1st 2024.  All totaled, BRICS nations will control eighty percent (80%) of Global Oil and Gas production.The map below lays out what the newly enlarged BRICS will look like:

BRICS 2024 Control 80 Percent Worlds Oil
BRICS 2024 Control 80 Percent Worlds Oil

Cutting right to the chase, it should be stated that “The-Powers-That-Be (TPTB) cannot survive this without World War 3.”   

If the current globalist cabal stands back and does nothing as this new Commerce Alliance comes to life, then on January 1, 2024, they may wake up to find that no one in any of the countries shown above, will accept the U.S. Dollar or the EURO as payment for trade in goods and services anymore, because both the Dollar and the EURO are backed by nothing.

They may find that no one around the world is willing to sell oil in US Dollars anymore, and could demand that we convert OUR currency to some other currency to buy oil.

The way the Biden Regime has curtailed our own oil and gas production, we would see shortages and price increases the likes of which has never been seen before.

Since we in the United States do not manufacture much of anything here anymore – because CORPORATE IMBECILES shipped all our manufacturing jobs overseas– we could see our ability to buy things for import-severely curtailed as well.

Let’s not forget Economic Sanctions.   It was the excessive and arbitrary use of economic sanctions by the US, which spurred countries around the world to seek out – and now CREATE — some other means for settling international trade because they got tired of the US imposing Sanctions and forbidding the use of the US Dollar by countries under sanction.

Now that BRICS is creating its own Gold-Backed currency for settlement of international trade debts, the US won’t have any clout anymore because it won’t be able to sanction pretty much anybody.   The US Government will be toothless on economic sanctions . . . but the rest of the world will not.

What if the rest of the world decides it is “Pay Back Time” for the US?   What if THEY impose economic Sanctions upon us??????  The new BRICS organization and its coming currency could make that a reality.

All these facts make clear that the Powers-That-Be simply cannot allow this BRICS to go any further or TPTB will lose their grip on controlling the world.  Some of TPTB are such ego-maniacs, they would rather burn the entire world to the ground rather than lose control over it.

Thus, it seems logical to me, that World War 3 is coming before the end of this year.  Perhaps a lot sooner than that.

What is the best thing a teacher did for you that you still remember?

Too many things to name here, certainly. But I’ll narrow it down just to 2.


In Middle school, I got sick. Started falling all the time, couldn’t smile, could barely keep my eyes open and double-vision exhausted me trying to see the board and read, hands couldn’t write long, got brain fog and couldn’t remember anything etc. I was in and out of the hospital… diagnosed with anything from ‘imminent death’ to ‘attention seeking’. I missed A LOT of school.

After I was finally diagnosed a couple of years later, I was definitely in danger of failing. Had a thymectomy, which at that time required cracking open my sternum, and definitely couldn’t go back to school for awhile, but was feeling mentally better on my new meds.

Mrs. Howard, who had been my homeroom teacher the prior year, came to my house to bring me school work and tutor me, and administer me quizzes, so I wouldn’t get too far behind. I ended up passing my classes and was able to proceed to high school with the rest of my classmates.


We were poor. Like wringer washer and rotary dial phone (in the 90s) poor.

I wanted to take Home Ec and Shop, but we couldn’t afford the class fees. I ended up taking a couple of design courses. Web Design and Drafting. My hands still got weak pretty easily, and I was left handed (the drafting machines on the desks were only for right-handed people), so I got to use AutoCAD most of the time.

I ended up in Drafting classes for 3 1/2 years, and competed in regional and state for VICA (vocational industrial clubs of America) and the IDEA (Illinois Drafting Educators Association).

Turns out? Those classes and competitions had fees, too. My instructor, Pete Tucker, paid my fees. He also wrote me a glowing recommendation later for college.

When I was 19, I interviewed for my first drafting internship, and that 3 month internship lasted 13 1/2 years. I became a cad manager, then programmer, then solutions architect for facilities software, and had a side career as a technical editor and author, teaching others how to use AutoCAD and similar programs.

A few years ago, I looked him up on Facebook and thanked him for giving me an entry into a career that lifted me out of poverty, provided me with insurance coverage for my disability (fun fact, if you managed to live 5 years without treatment, you got to lie and say you didn’t have a pre-existing condition) and allowed me to raise my kids with everything I’d never had (both of them can use AutoCAD, too 😉 ).

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main qimg 9d81def631e060b32cb573b479671080

COUNTRY GOSPEL! Oliver Anthony – I Want To Go Home | REACTION Video

What’s the worst parenting advice you’ve received?

Our first child was not toilet trainable. We took her to doctor after doctor from age 3 to 6, eventually carrying an x-ray made by the local radiologist. Everyone agreed that poor parenting skills were the problem, though some added that our lovely daughter, who had a BM only when standing or lying down, really enjoyed tormenting us.

One of the last doctors said, “If she were my kid, I’d lock her in the bathroom until she did it on the toilet!”

A few weeks later, a surgeon hundreds of miles from home held up that x-ray and said, “She has a birth defect.” Her lower intestine was positioned in a way that made a BM impossible unless her body was absolutely straight, NOT sitting on a toilet. Surgery fixed that. Thank you, Dr. Hardy Hendren, and RIP.

Jason Aldean – Try That In A Small Town (Official Music Video)

I would have never even heard of this song if people hadn’t been upset about it.

Strange English phrases on t-shirts in China: where do they come from?

Some of them are a clever twist based on an underlying Chinese phrase.

For example, on the T-shirt, the Chinese characters read:

已读不回

Literal translation would be “Have Read, Not Replied”.

The context here is that this is a common behavior on instant messaging apps – the receiver (of the instant message) has left the sender (of the instant message) on Read or Seen: they’ve read/seen the instant message, but haven’t replied.

This is a common course of action for some girls who start getting a lot of instant messages from guys trying to woo them but to whom they feel no affection for.

Rather than outright telling her pursuer that his romantic overtures are unwelcome, she leaves him on read/seen and doesn’t reply his messages.

In this way, she hopes that he gets the hint and finally stops sending all those silly little messages.

She’s “seen” all his instant messages but never bothered replying any of them.

So, this girl, she is a “Seenderella”.

It’s a clever twist on Cinderella.

Clever and funny.

Well, to me anyway 😀
I am easily amused 😀

If you only saw “Seenderella” on the T-shirt, you might be going “Huh?”

But with the Chinese characters right there next to it, if you know how to read Chinese, the twist becomes immediately obvious.

Grammy Member Reacts to Oliver Anthony’s I want to go home

Hitting too close to home.

Final Report

In January 1969, the United States Arms Control and Disarmament Agency released Volume 1 of its “Final Report” on a field test involving the “Demonstrated Destruction of Nuclear Weapons.” The field test’s purpose, the publication’s abstract states, was to “develop and test inspection procedures to monitor the demonstrated destruction of nuclear weapons.” In addition, a goal of the test was to determine the extent to which the “proposed method of demonstrating destruction” would expose classified weapon information. The test included 40 actual nukes and 32 fake weapons.

As a result of the test, it was concluded that the proposed destruction techniques could, indeed, reveal classified information about the weapons’ design. However, by masking some of the weapons’ features and limiting inspectors’ visual examinations of the weapons, such disclosures could be prevented.

The inspectors’ poor ability to distinguish between bona fide and fake nukes might also conceal classified information, as could “evasion schemes,” suggesting that less U-235 was being used than was actually the case. The field tests suggested that, overall, the inspection procedures were reasonably secure but resulted in several recommendations for the conduct of such inspections.

Breaking Bad 2 – Official Trailer

This looks like its gonna be… confusing.

Japan has started to release the contaminated nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima disaster into the Pacific ocean. Would you stop consuming fish and seafood caught in the areas surrounding Japan, Alaska, the Pacific Ocean, Korea, and China?

I would definitely recommend you stop consuming any type of seafood imported from Japan, and be cautious towards seafood from Alaska, the Canadian west, South Korea, the Pacific islands, and eastern China.

Two reasons:

  1. The United States has been buying less Japanese seafood
    “Listen to a man’s words but observe his deeds”, as the Chinese idiom goes. While the US has shown public support at the government level for Japan’s discharge of radioactive wastewater[1] , in the first six months of 2023 alone, they have actually drastically reduced the amount of surimi (fish paste), scallops and sake imported from Japan[2], amounting to up to 8.3 billion Yen. This was before Japan officially admitted they were releasing the wastewater by the way.

    It would be interesting to see whether the Americans, post 24 Aug, would put their money where their mouth is, and start importing more Japanese aquacultural and agricultural products than ever before, perhaps as a show of solidarity with fellow neoliberal democracies.

    The more likely scenario, however, is that the US would cite concerns with radiation pollution but ban Chinese seafood instead. Feel free to check back in a few months.
  2. Even the Japanese themselves won’t eat their own seafood
    The release of the tainted radioactive water began only a couple of days ago, but already there are reports all over Japan that local consumers are steering clear of not just Fukushima seafood, but all kinds of local seafood [3]. Even people in Japan know better than to trust their government and Tokyo Electric – a company so ruthless and dishonest [4], it turned an INES level 3 incident into a level 7, same level as Chernobyl, and is now solely in charge of monitoring its own wastewater discharge.

    Imagine that, a nuclear power company that caused the disaster to begin with, is now put wholly in charge of the discharge operation, and every statistic the company reports is treated as gospel truth by the local government. We have truly reached peak cyberpunk, ladies and gentlemen.

    Moreover, the Japanese fishing industry has been protesting the government’s decision to release the tainted water for years [5]. Such an irresponsible move, as they have rightly predicted, would effectively destroy the prestigious brand and reputation of Japanese seafood, and is likely to affect other Japanese products such as agricultural products in the near future.

Oliver Anthony – I Want To Go Home Fiddle player REACTS WITH FIDDLE!!

What do real WW2 Nazis think about Holocaust deniers?

Oskar Groning was what nobody wants to be, a guard at Auschwitz. His primary job was sorting and valuables new arrivals turned over. A big source of income for the Third Reich was the valuables prisoners handed over.

When the war ended Oskar wasn’t brought up on charges. He was captured before the war ended, did some time in a British POW camp, and when the war ended he went home to his wife.

Upon seeing his wife again she asked about his experiences and he said “Girl, do both of us a favour: don’t ask” and she left it there. One day a while later someone made an offhand joke that Oskar could actually be a killer given his time at Auschwitz. He banged on the table and demanded that nobody ever mention Auschwitz again or he would leave.

Oskar wanted to put what he had done behind him. He was a devout Nazi, an Auschwitz camp guard no less, and he wanted this to remain a secret.

Oskar got a job at a glass factory and worked his way up into a management role. He worked there for decades and lived a very normal life. Oskar collected stamps and was even a judge.


In 1985 Oskar met a Holocaust denier and was given a pamphlet on Holocaust denial. Shocked that such a thing exists, Oskar came forward to dispute it. He made multiple statements and gave a full account of what he had seen.

I saw everything. The gas chambers, the cremations, the selection process. One and a half million Jews were murdered in Auschwitz. I was there.

I would like you to believe me. I saw the gas chambers. I saw the crematoria. I saw the open fires. I would like you to believe that these atrocities happened, because I was there

(letters/calls) From people who tried to prove that what I had seen with my own eyes, what I had experienced in Auschwitz was a big, big mistake, a big hallucination on my part because it hadn’t happened.”

Now Oskar was put on trial for this and found guilty. It mattered little as he died a few years later at the age of 93.

But this shows you what Nazis think about Holocaust deniers- they think deniers are idiots.

What screams “I’m upper class”?

I’m a school bus driver. I drove students in a VERY nice school district. If you were looking for kids to be the illustration of white privilege, these were the ones. (These were kids who got hoverboards from the tooth fairy.) Every single morning and afternoon, these kids, with much more expensive clothes than I have, would thank me for driving them. When parents would meet the kids at the bus, they would tell the kids “make sure you say thank you.” These people weren’t upper class simply from money, but from having habits and attitudes to make them better people in life. Behavior problems were rare.

PEPE ESCOBAR AND MICHAEL HUDSON JOIN ON BRICS PLUS SIX, UKRAINE, AND THE MULTIPOLAR WORLD ECONOMY!

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2023 08 26 08 57

How can intelligence help?

As Flaviane Carvalho was finishing her shift, a family of four was sitting in her section.

She immediately noticed that something was “off” about their behavior.

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main qimg 83a416535a93b8eeb261c759f3ec420a lq

As the mother of a teenager, Flaviane’s eyes were drawn to the 11-year-old boy who was sitting hunched over at the table.

His eyes were downcast and his family wouldn’t let him eat or drink.

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main qimg 5cc45c70524815b3eb955dea70aceec4 pjlq

Flaviane asked if everything was okay with the food and they said that the child would eat at home.

Warning signs ringing in her head, Flaviane took a closer look.

Under the boy’s hood, hat and face mask, there were deep bruises, cuts and scratches.

Thinking quickly, Flaviane wrote a simple note and held it behind the child’s parents so they couldn’t see.

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main qimg 77db2cd715b2f37800bcf3d4af92e185 lq

At first, the boy just nodded, but Flaviane quickly added another message: “Need help?”

A small nod told her all she needed to know.

“I will never forget the feeling I had when I saw that boy. I just knew something wasn’t right!

He was scared and so was I.”

Flaviane told her boss what was going on and then called 911.

When the police arrived, they told Flaviane that she probably saved at least one life that night.

“This could have been a homicide situation if she hadn’t intervened,” said Orlando, Orlando Rolon Police Chief .

“The lesson here for all of us is to recognize when we see something that isn’t right to act on it…. It saved a child’s life. ”

It turns out that the boy was being horribly abused at home by his stepfather, Timothy Wilson II.

He was covered in bruises from head to toe and was about 10 pounds underweight because he was often deprived of food as punishment.

His parents were arrested and charged with multiple counts of aggravated child abuse and child neglect.

Biden says that Russia has lost but Putin doesn’t know it yet

I think that Biden is delusional and demented, and has no clue.

He believes that Europe is now ready to start “crushing” Russia. This is right after the meeting of NATO leaders. Um… sure.

I am skeptical.

America is COMING TO AN END…

https://youtu.be/06dzkahfthQ

What was a loophole that you found and exploited the hell out of?

In a month and a half I would have had 20 years with my company and be fully vested in the retirement system. Except that I had just received notification that I was being terminated in four weeks.

They explained a couple of reasons for it, but I knew the real reason. The new president of the company used to be general manager of one of our operating units. I worked for corporate as a “firefighter,” and I was called into that unit to fix a production issue.

The issue was fixed in three days, and I gave him a full report. He offered me a job. Now, remember, I was part of the corporate staff, but he was offering me a position in an operating unit. Yes, it’s kind of a step down, but there was a 4% raise involved. Wait, just 4%? Yep.

I respectfully declined the offer. And my corporate boss was so happy that I was staying that I got a 22% raise!

Well, the general manager was named president, and he went through his list of people who had crossed him. I was way down on his list, but I was still on the list. So was my boss.

But my boss was old enough to retire comfortably. I was 45 and nowhere near retirement age, and now it seemed like I was going to be screwed out of my pension.

I was working remotely from my home in another state at this time as they were moving the corporate office to the new president’s state.

A friend heard I was being let go, and she happened to have some HR experience. She gave me some pointers.

I called the head of HR and asked if my position was being eliminated or was I being terminated. I was told that the position was being eliminated.

That was very important information because according to the law of my state a person being terminated must be given two to four weeks notice. However, if the position is being eliminated then the person must be given no less than eight weeks notice. Hmmmm.

Apparently, HR realized what I was asking, did a little research and called me back saying that they were giving me those eight weeks, which meant I would reach 20 years and collect my full pension.

Fortunately, I was in good standing with HR. After all we worked in the same office for many years.

I was also given a year’s severance pay. Cool, I could now coast for a year.

Except three days after my termination I accepted a job offer from another company.

That’s another story.

Pentagon Dragging Its Feet Over F-16 Gifts To Ukraine

Pushed by the weapon industry the U.S. Defense Department is dragging its feet over the delivery of F-16 airplanes to Ukraine:

Pentagon: Ukraine battlefield situation currently ‘not ideal’ for F-16 deployment

The battlefield conditions in Ukraine are currently “not ideal” for the employment of F-16 fighter jets, said Lieutenant General Douglas Sims, the director of operations of the Joint Staff, on July 13.

“The conditions right now for the employment of the F-16s are probably not – they’re probably not ideal,” the general said at a press briefing.

“I mean, the Russians still possess some air defense capability. They have air capability. And the number of F-16s that would be provided may not be perfect for what’s going on right now,” he clarified.

Lockheed-Martin, which still builds and sells the F-16 to various countries, is obviously not happy that the markets will soon learn that the F-16 have no fu**ing chance against modern Russian fighter planes and air-defenses.

Their coming destruction will scream “Buy Russian!” to the world and several countries will probably switch their provider and do so.

Posted by b at 15:39 UTC | Comments (92)

BOB IGER PLAN TO CANCELLING SNOW WHITE! DISNEY IS Beginning To Collapse As Panic Rises

With snow white 2024 gaining much criticism after the snow white leaked photos of the seven dwarfs surfaced online…..the film starring rachel zegler and gal gadot as the evil queen…bob iger and the board are now going through a phase of panic for the snow white remake….and with the snow whute plot leaks getting worse the plan to remake the snow white 2024 trailer is underway….however bob iger now has a full fledged plan to cancelling snow white all together…what the board thinks is another story in itself that we will be covering today.

The Most COLD HEARTED Interrogation Ever.

What could drive a loving mother to commit one of the most horrifying crimes of the 21st century?

Money, deception, an icepick, a simmering pot. All of these and more collide in a tragic tale that’s both heartbreaking AND gut wrenchingly gruesome

Our story takes place in a small commuter city in Florida between Daytona Beach and Orlando, named Deltona.

With a mixed demographic of both working and retired people, Deltona residents come and go often.

But sometimes, they leave, never to return again. And that’s exactly what brought Volusia County deputies to the home of 36 year old James Schaeffer on the afternoon of April 4th, 2013.

These are the interrogations of Angela Stoldt.

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2023 07 14 17 20

Chili Bowls

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34dd8845 3321 4b5d a363 069aa1085efd

Yield: 4 or 6 bowls

Ingredients

  • 16 ounces frozen bread dough
  • 2 tablespoons butter, melted
  • 3 cups favorite chili
  • 1/2 cup Cheddar cheese, grated
  • 1/4 cup onions, chopped
  • Garlic powder and grated Cheddar cheese

Instructions

  1. Thaw the bread dough until it is pliable. Cut the dough crosswise into 4 pieces. With lightly floured hands, shape each dough piece into a ball. Place balls 3 inches apart on a lightly greased cookie sheet. Brush balls with melted butter. Let bowls rise in a warm place until tripled in size.
  2. Bake at 375 degrees F for 20 to 25 minutes until golden brown.
  3. Remove from cookie sheet immediately and allow to cool on rack.
  4. To make chili bowls, slice off tops of loaves and hollow by pinching bread out with fingers. Brush cut side of tops with melted butter and sprinkle with garlic powder and Parmesan cheese.
  5. Toast bowls and tops by placing in the oven or under the broiler.
  6. Fill with hot chili and top with grated cheese and onions.

Notes

For smaller bowls, cut dough into 6 pieces.

15 Dinosaurs Caught On Camera And Seen In Real Life

WTF?

Deliberately Making Things Worse: Biden Calls-up 3,000 Military Reservists for NATO

World Hal Turner 13 July 2023

Deliberately Making Things Worse: Biden Calls-up 3,000 Military Reservists for NATO

The (illegitimate) President of the United States, Joe Biden, has just issued a call-up of at least 3,000 Personnel from the U.S. Armed Forces Reserve and roughly 450 from the Individual-Ready Reserve in order to Augment the Forces of U.S. European Command.

The Reservists will also be involved with the upcoming Exercise “Operation Atlantic Resolve” in the Region.

This comes just one day after the NATO Summit in Vilnius, Lithuania, agreed to increase NATO’s forces from 300,000 to 400,000 along Russia’s Border.

Apparently, the stunning effectiveness of the Russian army in Ukraine has significantly shaken-up the powers-that-be, not to mention the frighteningly poor effectiveness of Ukraine’s “NATO-Trained and Certified” army.

Remember, NATO began training Ukraine forces back in the year 2014 for a conflict with Russia.  From 2014 through 2022 before Russia entered Ukraine, NATO “Certified” the Ukraine Army as meeting NATO standards.

Now, almost a year and a half into the conflict between Russia-Ukraine, the world has gotten to see just how effective that NATO training and NATO Certification actually is:  Almost worthless!

As for “Operation Atlantic Resolve” that refers to military activities in response to Russian operations in Ukraine, mainly the War in Donbass.

It was funded under the European Deterrence Initiative. In the wake of Russia’s 2014 intervention in Ukraine, the U.S. and the U.K. took several immediate steps to enhance the deterrence posture along the eastern flank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), including augmenting the air, ground and naval presence in the region, and enhancing previously scheduled exercises.

The US described the activities as taking measures to enhance NATO military plans and defense capabilities and maintaining a persistent presence in Central Europe and Eastern Europe. Atlantic Resolve rotations are overseen by a regionally aligned headquarters there.

So here we are.  

NATO is upping their troop count from 300,000 to 400,000 and Biden is calling up Reservists.

You’re smart people, ask yourselves: Do governments move this number of troops if they don’t intend to use them?

I think it is safe to say World War 3 is close at hand.  We in the West have fomented this.  We in the West are wrong; we’re backing a NAZI-infested regime in Ukraine with the intent to put U.S. Missiles in Ukraine.

Russia has already, and repeatedly warned that missiles on Ukraine soil would have about a 5 minute flight time to Moscow.  This is a “red line” for Moscow; they will not tolerate this.

Yet Biden is now calling-up Reserves.

I earnestly hope you and your family have emergency food, water, medicines you need to live on.  I also hope you have a generator for electric power once the grid goes down, and some fuel for that generator.  You should also have some amount of CASH MONEY in the house because if the missiles start flying, all credit, debit, SNAP/EBT cards will cease functioning without machines to approve the charges.  So cash will be king.  If you have cash, you can eat.  If you don’t, you don’t.

This isn’t getting better, it’s getting very much worse.   With the NATO call-up of another 100,000 troops, Russia may decide it is better to strike now, rather than wait for NATO to get so many more men into position.

It is worth noting that the last time members of the Individual Ready Reserve were recalled to active duty in a number larger than 10 was right before Desert Storm in 1990, and in 2002 before the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Project Horizon – The US Military Moon Base

In March of 1959, the US Army issued a top-secret document titled Project Horizon to the United States government. Tensions were rising amidst the ongoing Space Race between the US and the Soviets, and the document called for the creation of a lunar outpost that was of critical importance for the armed forces and the interests of the United States on the Moon. Soon, a study to determine the feasibility of constructing a military and scientific Moonbase inhabited by 12 men was set in motion, and it was required to be powered by nuclear reactors, making it self-sufficient and equipped with unguided low-yield atomic warheads to defend it from Soviet incursions. Several top engineers, including Wernher von Braun, were tasked to overview the project, but when the US learned that the USSR intended to celebrate the October Revolution in 1967 on their own Moonbase, the clock began ticking…

Italian Sausage Sheet Pan Supper

Put healthy living fennel-sausage on the menu with our Italian Sausage Sheet-Pan Supper! This fennel-sausage dish is ready to serve in just 45 minutes.

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2023 07 14 18 01

Prep: 15 min | Bake: 15 min | Yield: 4 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 large fennel bulb (1 pound)
  • 1/2 cup KRAFT Balsamic Vinaigrette Dressing, divided
  • 2 cups cherry tomatoes
  • 1 (15 ounce) can cannellini beans, rinsed
  • 6 1/2 ounces (1/2 of 13 ounce package) OSCAR MAYER Natural Uncured Italian Style Herb Sausage, cut diagonally into 1/2-inch thick slices

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F.
  2. Cut stalks and fronds from top of fennel bulb. Chop enough of the fronds to measure 1 tablespoon; reserve for later use. Discard stalks and remaining fronds. Trim root end of fennel; remove and discard any tough or discolored outer layers. Cut fennel bulb lengthwise in half; remove and discard fibrous core. Cut remaining fennel into 1/4-inch thick slices; place in medium bowl. Add 2 tablespoons. dressing; mix lightly.
  3. Line 15 x 10 x 1-inch pan with foil; spray with cooking spray. Spread fennel mixture onto half the prepared pan. Bake for 15 minutes.
  4. Meanwhile, toss tomatoes and beans with 2 tablespoons of the remaining dressing.
  5. Drizzle fennel with remaining dressing; stir until evenly coated while keeping fennel on same side of pan. Add tomato mixture and sausage to other side of pan.
  6. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes or until fennel is tender.
  7. Sprinkle with reserved chopped fennel fronds.

My 14-year-old son thinks it’s funny to challenge me in public where I don’t want to discipline him in front of other people. How can I address this problem?

I agree, call his bluff.

I was shopping with my 12 year old grandson and picking up some things he needed and a few things he wanted.

He was mad that I wouldn’t buy him Twinkies for his lunch.

He said his best friend got a Twinkie every day.

Now he has a weight issue, so I was trying to be sensitive when I told him ‘no’.

He argued with me over several minutes and down several aisles, growing gradually louder.

Essentially this 12 year old was giving me a scolding, in public.

I looked at him and then down at the buggy full of items I was getting him and didn’t say anything.

I just started putting things back on the shelves.

He was horrified.

He took them back off the shelves and started yelling at me.

I finished putting the items back on the shelf, put my buggy away and walked out the door.

I left him standing with his arms full of the things he wanted in the store and went back to my vehicle.

I waited there for some time until he finally came out and got in the car.

He was still arguing with me.

I simply told him that my expectations are that he always speaks to me with respect, and if he didn’t then I wouldn’t do things for him.

And next time I will drive away, and he can find his own way home.

‘Giant Crash Coming:’ Rich Dad Poor Dad Author Says BRICS Meeting Will ‘Put Nail In Coffin Of Fiat’

World Hal Turner 13 July 2023

2023 07 15 10 12
2023 07 15 10 12
'Giant Crash Coming:' Rich Dad Poor Dad Author Says BRICS Meeting Will 'Put Nail In Coffin Of Fiat'

In a tweet on Wednesday, Robert Kiyosaki, the author of the best-selling book “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” warned of an impending financial crash. He suggested that the upcoming BRICS meeting could be the final blow to the fiat currency system.

He pointed to the BRICS meeting scheduled for August 22 in South Africa as a potential turning point.

“Giant crash coming. Fake money – aka fiat currency – to die.

BRICS meeting in S. Africa August 22 to put nail in coffin of fiat…fake money. Get into real gold, silver & Bitcoin asap. Take care. End of fiat (fake) money near,” he said.

Kiyosaki’s prediction comes at a time when the BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) — are reportedly considering a gold-backed common currency, which could pose a significant threat to the global fiat money system.

The author’s advice to invest in “real gold, silver & Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC)” aligns with his long-standing belief in the value of tangible assets and cryptocurrencies over traditional fiat currencies.

Previously, Kiyosaki has predicted that Bitcoin could reach $120,000, further emphasizing his faith in cryptocurrencies as a hedge against the potential downfall of fiat currencies.

Chris Hedges | United States Is CRUMBLING…

An amazing video. -MM

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, author, and public intellectual known for his penetrating analysis of contemporary social and political issues.

With a career spanning several decades, Hedges has reported from conflict zones around the world, including the Middle East, Latin America, and the Balkans.

Hedges has written numerous bestselling books, including “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning,” “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle,” and “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America.”

His work has been widely recognized for its critical examination of power structures, war, and societal decay.

A former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, Hedges has received numerous accolades for his reporting, including the Pulitzer Prize for Explanatory Reporting in 2002 for his coverage of global terrorism.

Today, he is an outspoken advocate for justice and human rights, unafraid to confront entrenched power structures and challenge prevailing narratives.

Hedges often emphasizes the importance of resistance against systems of power and injustice.

He has been critical of corporate capitalism, the influence of money in politics, and the erosion of civil liberties.

Hedges argues that genuine resistance requires a willingness to challenge and confront these structures, even if it means personal sacrifice and facing potential repression.

He has discussed the need for nonviolent civil disobedience as a means of resistance, drawing inspiration from figures like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.

Hedges believes that traditional avenues of change, such as voting or appealing to politicians, have become largely ineffective, and that direct action and grassroots movements are necessary to challenge entrenched power structures.

Hedges also emphasizes the importance of building solidarity and community in resistance movements.

He believes that individuals must come together to challenge the prevailing narratives and create alternative systems that prioritize justice, equality, and sustainability.

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2023 07 14 17 51
https://youtu.be/bOZVisknc-A

Does Secretary Anthony Blinken’s recap of his trip to China help you feel as if you have a grip on the Biden administration’s policy regarding Taiwan, or not?

The Biden administration’s China policy changes several times every day depending on who is talking, so I don’t even follow it.

Even the Chinese government no longer follows it, which explains why they have stopped dealing with the US.

To be taken seriously as a nation or a person, say what you mean and mean what you say. If you can’t do that, then don’t say anything.

Cluster Bombs Arrive in Ukraine

World Hal Turner 13 July 2023

Cluster Bombs Arrive in Ukraine

Ukraine has received cluster munitions, a military spokesperson said on Thursday, less than a week after the United States announced it would transfer such munitions to Ukrainian forces.

Valeryi Shershen, a spokesman for the Tavria military command in southern Ukraine, confirmed a CNN report citing the commander of the Tavria forces as saying Ukraine had just received cluster munitions but had not used them yet.

Cluster munitions are “in the hands of our defense forces,” Shershen told Ukrainian television but giving few details.

The U.S. announced on July 7 that it would send Kyiv cluster munitions as part of an $800-million security package intended to ensure Russian forces that invaded Ukraine nearly 17 months ago cannot halt a Ukrainian counteroffensive.

Russia has repeatedly warned the United States that this is another escalation by the West, and that Russia has Cluster munitions of its own which it WILL use against Ukraine if Ukraine uses the ones supplied by the West.

What is the strangest failure you have ever seen on a car?

When I was about 12 or 13 my father, normally very conservative (in his actions, NOT his politics) decided to buy a brand-new innovative GM car:

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main qimg 141157c7f4c4db15b3a1f603f1d6c1c0

That’s right, a CORVAIR. It had a rear-mounted “pancake” engine that was air cooled – no radiator or fluid to maintain. And the trunk was in the front, of course.

Some months later my parents decided to take us on a trip to visit relatives who lived about 1800 miles away. We’d covered about 300 miles when the oil-pressure “idiot light” started flashing. He pulled into the first gas station and found that the engine was over a quart low so he topped it off. Another 300 miles and again, blinkblinkblink … And so it went, guzzling a quart or every 6–7 hours for the duration of the trip.

When we got back my dad took it to the dealer where he’d bought it. Naturally the “explanation” was that “they all do it” and “it’s because the engine isn’t fully run in yet”.

The oil-burning continued as did my father’s trips to the dealer … and his frustration. He finally told them he was not owning a car that chewed through so much oil and they had to fix it or somehow make good on the sale. When they told him he could have a reduced price on a replacement he hit the ceiling (and you know how high showroom ceilings can be, hah!).

He knew a guy who ran a garage and had some names at GM. My dad fired off a letter to Ed Cole, then a big honcho at Chevrolet (and eventually CEO of GM). His letter was polite but very pointed. And it got results.

The dealership called him in to show what they’d found. He knew I was already interested in cars and let me tag along. Parts of our Corvair were sitting on blocks; the engine block was on a large work table. The mechanics told him that the block didn’t have a single oil port in it; the factory had forgotten to drill them.

The engine had been running dry ever since he’d taken delivery. It was “using oil” because none was making it to the block itself and was being burned off. Even more disturbing, they said we were very lucky the engine hadn’t seized up due to lack of lubrication. To this day I have no idea how or why it ran at all.

I was too young to follow much else in the saga but I do remember us getting a replacement car soon after.

Russia will view sending F-16s to Ukraine a ‘direct nuclear threat’

World Hal Turner 13 July 2023

2023 07 15 10 14
2023 07 15 10 14
Russia will view sending F-16s to Ukraine a 'direct nuclear threat'

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov today publicly stated that Russia will view the deployment of F-16 fighter jets to Ukraine as a direct nuclear threat.

Lavrov said Russia has privately warned the US, Britain, and France of the dire risks of the planned move to give Kyiv the advanced warplanes. He made clear that the use of F-16 – for which Ukrainian pilots are now being trained – was ‘just one more example of an extremely dangerous turn of events.

‘We have informed the nuclear powers, the United States, Britain and France, that Russia cannot ignore the ability of these aircraft to carry nuclear weapons. ‘No amount of assurances will help here.’

 ‘In the course of combat operations, our servicemen are not going to sort out whether each particular aircraft of this type is equipped to deliver nuclear weapons or not. We will regard the very fact that the Ukrainian armed forces have such systems as a threat from the West in the nuclear sphere.’ he continued.

He warned: ‘The United States and its NATO satellites are creating risks of a direct armed clash with Russia, and this is fraught with catastrophic consequences.’ The ultra-loyalist chief diplomat said: ‘The conditions for Russia’s use of nuclear weapons are clearly defined in our Military Doctrine. ‘They are well known, and I will not repeat them once again.’

NATO Defending Freedom Or Causing WAR | The Duran | Cyrus Janssen & Reporterfy

Join us for a riveting live stream as we delve into the heart of global affairs and shed light on the upcoming NATO meeting in Vilnius, Lithuania. Our esteemed guests, The Duran’s Alex Christoforou and Alexander Mercouris, alongside Cyrus Janssen and Reporterfy Media, will guide us through the intricate web of international relations.

In this highly anticipated broadcast, we’ll explore the pressing issues dominating the geopolitical landscape. The NATO meeting in Vilnius will take center stage as we analyze the organization’s role in fostering regional security and stability. Our knowledgeable panelists will provide invaluable insights into the strategies, challenges, and aspirations of NATO and its member states.

But that’s not all. We’ll also dive deep into the multifaceted relationship between China, Taiwan, the USA, and Russia. From escalating tensions to potential conflicts, our experts will offer a comprehensive analysis of the intricate dynamics shaping these global power dynamics. As we navigate the complex interplay between these influential nations, we’ll seek to unravel the implications for the international community.

This live stream promises to be a thought-provoking and intellectually stimulating event, combining expert analysis with insightful commentary. Join us as we unravel the complexities of the NATO meeting, scrutinize the China-Taiwan-USA-Russia conflict, and gain a deeper understanding of the intricate global chessboard.

Tune in for a captivating conversation that will broaden your perspective and deepen your understanding of the global stage. Don’t miss this unique opportunity to engage with our esteemed guests and gain valuable insights into the most pressing issues defining our world today.

Talking about China starts at 43:00.

Democrat Candidate for Elected Office CAUGHT Soliciting 14 year old Boy for sex, on Internet

Nation Hal Turner 14 July 2023

2023 07 15 10 15
2023 07 15 10 15
Democrat Candidate for Elected Office CAUGHT Soliciting 14 year old Boy for sex, on Internet

Brief video below shows an alleged candidate for elected office in Illinois Massachussetts, as he is intercepted during a planned meeting with who he THOUGHT was a 14 year old BOY, for sex, arranged on the Internet.   He allegedly told the “14 year old” that he wanted to “worship his balls.”

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2023 07 15 10 16r

When the perp realized he was being video recorded and had been tricked; that he wasn’t really meeting a 14 year old boy to sex, the perp briskly departed the meeting place, proceeded to his automobile parked nearby, with the license plate shown below, and departed the area:

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2023 07 15 10 1tttt6

US should stop playing tricks with China; otherwise, it will capsize: Global Times editorial

By Global Times Published: Jul 14, 2023 12:10 AM Updated: Jul 14, 2023 12:05 AM

In the past couple of days, the US has suddenly brought up the “all-purpose spare tire” of hyping up issues related to China – the so-called Chinese hacker problem. The spokesperson of the US White House National Security Council claimed that US officials have discovered China-based hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s cloud service to breach email accounts in the US. They then notified Microsoft, which later conducted tracking and investigation.

The matter has been extensively covered by the US media, causing a lot of fanfare. Subsequently, anonymous US officials jumped out and said they could not make a judgment on whether it is truly related to China. This reveals their sense of guilt, because they have never been able to present evidence.

They always surreptitiously throw mud at China and then retreat, trying to avoid a possible retaliation from China. This process and technique have become so familiar to the US that they can execute it skillfully even with their eyes closed.

Let’s look at the initial source of the news, which is the US White House National Security Council. Nowadays, in the US and Western countries, everyone can imagine what it implies for institutions with “national security” in their names. In the past, such news was often released by the US National Security Agency, which is essentially the US cyber command, the world’s largest hacker organization. This time, the news is released by the White House National Security Council instead, but it does not change the fact that the US is engaging in “thieves crying thief.”

Let’s take a look at the timing chosen by the US for this hype. It is reported that the hacked emails allegedly involved US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. On July 13, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce disclosed that it was in communication with the US regarding Raimondo’s visit to China, while also calling for lifting the unilateral sanctions on Chinese companies imposed by the US. In other words, Raimondo is about to visit China if nothing else. Is it a coincidence that the US suddenly reveals a Chinese hacker attack incident at this time? Based on the consistent approach of the US side, it is possible that they are using this as a means to gain the upper hand in public opinion and a bargaining chip for negotiations regarding Raimondo’s visit to China.

Just before US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s visit to China in June, the US hyped a round of “Chinese hacking incidents.” The whole process is almost the same as this time. But last time it was said that Chinese hackers had been “targeting critical US infrastructure and pursuing development of capabilities that could disrupt critical communications infrastructure between the United States and Asia region during future crises.” This time, it was claimed that “Chinese hackers” had breached e-mail addresses, and the attack was also said to have been discovered in June.

If we observe the recent years of the US hype about “Chinese hackers,” there is a general pattern. These incidents usually occur at critical points in China-US relations, coinciding with a period of “lack of progress” in issues related to China in the US. Thus, “Chinese hackers” or “Chinese spies” are timely fabricated to fill the void. Whether it’s hackers or spies, the US is an expert in this field and knows that such smearing is difficult to prove or disprove. It only causes trouble for others, and that’s the intended purpose.

The current China-US relationship is at a crucial, delicate, and uncertain juncture. The high-level communication between the two countries is recovering relatively quickly. However, the unfavorable winds and countercurrents emerging from the US side have largely interfered with the positive progress brought about by communication.

On July 13, Wang Yi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, met US Secretary of State Blinken on the sidelines of the ASEAN Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia.

It was the second meeting between the two in a month. The US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry and US Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo are both due to visit China in the near future.

This has raised expectations in the international community for a turnaround in China-US relations. China always holds an open and welcome attitude toward such communication and exchange, but we advise the US not to play dirty, otherwise, it will not only get a slap in its face, but also ruin the opportunity for the US-China relations to return to a healthy and stable track.

Cheez-It Chicken Casserole

2023 07 14 18jyt 01
2023 07 14 18jyt 01

Ingredients

  • 1 package chicken tenders
  • Salt
  • Pepper
  • 1 (8 ounce) carton sour cream
  • 1 box Cheez-It crackers, crushed
  • 1/2 cup melted butter

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 350 degrees F.
  2. Fill casserole dish with boneless, skinless chicken breast tenders; sprinkle with salt and pepper.
  3. Spread sour cream over chicken.
  4. Sprinkle crushed Cheez-It crackers over sour cream.
  5. Pour melted butter over Cheez-It crackers.
  6. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes or until golden brown.
2023 07 14 18 02
2023 07 14 18 02

Being accepted to Harvard Medical School without all the prerequisites and without taking the MCAT.

It was the fall of my junior year at MIT. I was studying/hanging out with a girl I had a crush on (a senior) and she was upset that her MCAT scores were not good enough. I was flipping through the brochure for Harvard Medical School, and saw what I thought might be a major loophole. I told her not to give them the MCAT scores, as they were not really an admissions requirement. Of course she didn’t believe me, and challenged me to apply and see if that “loophole” worked.

So I did.

I sent in my application on the very last day applications were accepted, despite being a junior and not having all the prerequisites, finishing my application at 4am after studying for a couple exams and doing a problem set or two.

Not surprisingly, a few weeks later I received a letter from the Dean of Admissions for Harvard Medical School, informing me that there was no record of me having taken the MCATs, so unless their information was incorrect, they would have to withdraw my application.

I called up the admissions office, and after several tries was finally able to speak to the Dean:

Dean Paul, I received a letter telling me that you would have to withdraw my application because I haven’t taken the MCAT.

I understand. Is that incorrect; have you taken the MCAT?

No, I haven’t.

Well, then I’m sorry, but we will have to withdraw your application; the MCAT is an admission requirement for Harvard Medical School.

With all due respect sir, I beg to differ. The MCAT is not an admission requirement for Harvard Medical School.

Wait, you’re telling me, the Dean of Admissions, what the admission requirements are?

Yes sir; I believe you are referring to the paragraph on page 29 that lists the entrance requirements for Harvard Medical School, and includes the MCAT on that list.

Yes, exactly.

Well, it clearly states that the MCAT is an entrance requirement; it doesn’t state that the MCAT is an admission requirement. So if you admit me in April, I will gladly take the MCAT over the summer and have it for you by the time I enter in September.

Ah, I don’t think that’s what it means.

I realize it may not be what you intended, but I’ve checked with two of my linguistics professors, including a Nobel prize winner, and they agree that is what the paragraph means.

Hmmm. Well, I’ll talk to the members of the committee and get back to you.

A couple of days later he called me back and told me that the committee had discussed the matter, and that while it was not what they intended, they agreed that it did indeed mean just that, so they would not withdraw my application.

At first I was very pleased, then I realized was that all that meant was that they were not going to officially withdraw my application, but they could still just unofficially withdraw it; i.e. ignore it and reject me, so I really didn’t think about it much, until I got a call to come in for an interview (that’s a whole different story!).

April rolled around, and a thick envelope arrived with my acceptance letter. Then a couple of weeks later I received another letter reminding me that I had not yet fulfilled all the entrance requirements, including the English and Biology requirements and the MCAT, and asking me to let them know when I would fulfill these.

Of course, the next year the language in the brochure was changed to close this loophole!

The Amazing Millennium Falcon Bedroom

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Redditor Dericrw and his wife built a Star Wars bedroom for their son, in the hopes that he will sleep in his own room. Who could resist? The sleeping pod of the Millennium Falcon is the size of a twin bed and is bolted to the ceiling joists. The rest of the ship is painted on the wall behind it. Check out the inside! It has a fan for air circulation and LED lights.

More info: Reddit (h/t: neatorama)

What was Chiang Kai-shek’s greatest mistake?

After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Zhou Enlai, premier of the PRC, maintained a secret correspondence with Chiang Kai-shek which went through an intermediary in Hong Kong. They had a personal relationship from 1921 to 1927: Chiang Kai-shek was the principal of the Huangpu Military Academy and Zhou Enlai was political commissar. Zhou Enlai also helped to keep Chiang from getting killed in the Xi’An incident in 1936.

In early 1975, Zhou Enlai wrote to Chiang Kai-shek urging a political compromise so that Taiwan, the seat of the Republic of China government, could be united with the People’s Republic. Chiang, Mao and Zhou were all in their 80s, and knew that they would not live much longer, and Zhou wanted Chiang to think of his role in history. He said that while the Nationalists and Communists were enemies, they were all Chinese patriots who had taken different routes to make China strong again. It was time to set aside their differences and come together before they died. In order to reach a compromise, Zhou offered the position of premier, his position in the PRC government to Chiang Kai-shek.

Chiang did not respond and died in April 1975. Zhou died in Jan. 1976 and Mao died in Sept. 1976.

If Chiang had taken up the offer, there would have been no Taiwan independence issue exploited by foreign powers, and China would have been united.

The US would not have been able to use Taiwan as an issue years later.

In the end, Chiang was true to his character. He had no plan beyond “recovering the mainland” and his own legacy fell apart in Taiwan as pro-Taiwan independence candidates and politicians took over the Republic of China government, and have dismantled his role in Taiwan’s development, framing him as a killer and persecutor of the Taiwanese.

His own personality prevented him from having the vision to think about how to protect his own legacy. Unlike Mao, he had no plan.

He could not accept that Mao was the better leader and had won.

This character trait continued with Chiang Kai-shek’s son, Chiang Ching-kuo, who had been friends with Deng Xiaoping while they were studying in Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s. Deng made numerous overtures to CCK for unification, but just like his father, he rejected them.

He died in January 1988.

America’s Lost Classical Architecture

2023 07 15 11 39
2023 07 15 11 39

The US is trying to use foreign mercenaries to plug gaps in Ukraine – they are in for a rude awakening

The propaganda machine is inciting ordinary citizens to go to war in Ukraine – where they go through hell

Western mercenaries from countries other than the US are dying for Washington’s interests while President Joe Biden warns Americans themselves to stay away.

Most of the foreign mercenaries in Ukraine at this point aren’t American, according

to Russia’s Channel One news. It’s actually Poland and Canada that lead the charge, with the US coming in third. And now reports are starting to emerge of US intelligence attempting to fill the void with even more foreign recruits to fight for US interests against Russia in Ukraine. The Russian Ministry of Defense estimates that about 2,000 of the approximately 7,000 ‘volunteers’ have been killed.

Recent reporting reveals a troubling trend among Western mercenary deaths: combatants whose military experience is virtually non-existent. Presumably it all looked like good Hollywood action hero fun from afar — until the bullets started whizzing by.

In a story published in May about two Canadian mercenaries who volunteered for Ukraine’s “International Legion” and were killed in the Artyomovsk (named Bakhmut by Ukraine) battle, the CBC revealed that one had previously served in the Canadian Forces as a medic and had been photographed working in search and rescue in Kharkov. Kyle Porter, a 27-year old from Calgary, had been in touch with Canada’s state broadcaster. “Let me figure out how I am going to survive the next few days,” he wrote. “It was a meat grinder the first time and I’m not expecting it any better this time around.” You’d think he’d have taken an offramp at that point. Nope, not Rambo here.

The question that everyone should be asking is how on earth Canadians, whose combat experience amounts to administering band-aids and applying tourniquets, could subsequently end up serving on the front lines — all while the Canadian government seemingly just shrugs. We’re talking here about a government that legislated zero-risk against overwhelmingly survivable Covid, but now can’t even be bothered to save unprepared Canadians from a much more likely death in Ukraine.

Last May, the CBC reported on yet another Canadian veteran, identified only as “Shadow,” describing how he and his colleagues had repeatedly come under fire in the Donbas. While “Shadow” might seem like a code name for a main character in a Hollywood movie about a badass who goes around single-handedly meting out justice, in reality he’s a meteorological technician who “experienced combat for the first time as a volunteer in Ukraine,” according to the report . The weather guy probably shouldn’t be placed in a position to be “blown out of their sniper’s nest by a shell.”

For all his weather expertise, Shadow doesn’t seem to be too well-versed in grand chess geopolitics either. “If NATO had stepped in, the war would have been done in like less than a week, but because everyone sat back and watched, well, we are seeing all those civilians dying,” he told

the CBC. Actually, direct NATO military confrontation with Russia would have resulted in World War III, and probably a few more civilian deaths than Shadow imagines.

The other Canadian mercenary whom Shadow was “assisting,” and whose own superhero name is “Wali,” has been described by the Western press as a “sniper” who had been working as a …software engineer. He, at least, had the sense to bail shortly after arriving in Ukraine, citing shoddy organization. “You had to know someone who knew someone who told you that in some old barbershop they would give you an AK-47,” he said .

It doesn’t look like much has changed since then. The International Legion mercenaries are still largely underqualified for combat, under supported, or both.

American Cooper “Harris” Andrews, died during battle in Artyomovsk in April, according to Fox News.

Described as a Marine with five years experience, he was discharged in January 2022 from Camp Lejeune — as a ground electronics transmission system maintainer. Shortly thereafter, he left for Ukraine where he was then close enough to the battlefront that he was killed by a mortar shell. What’s next — recruiting chefs from Western armies and sending them into the line of fire?

Two other American mercenaries caught recently near Kharkov reportedly complained of poor Ukrainian intelligence and lack of preparation for combat, according to Russia’s Channel One.

One pretty clear indication of that being the case is when the American “trainers” sent to Ukraine, legitimate special forces with combat and intelligence expertise, don’t end up faring much better than the amateurs. Former Green Beret Nicholas Maimer, was killed when his position came under artillery fire in Artyomovsk, Fox News reported in May.

There’s also the obvious question of how much mission creep exists for such “trainers.” After all, once you’re in the Wild West of a combat zone, it can be a slippery slope from training to fighting. What sounds to the average person back home like a classroom role or a desk job could, in reality, end up being something else entirely.

The pool of foreign personnel in Ukraine is dwindling, either because they end up killed or they come to their senses beforehand. Now, unconfirmed reports have emerged from the Middle Eastern press that US intelligence is recruiting a new batch of mercenaries in Syria. One would think that Turkey’s efforts over the past few years to recruit CIA and Pentagon trained “Syrian rebels” to fight in the Western-sparked Libyan civil war would have drained that particular talent pool, but it’s not hard to imagine the desperate measures needed for now desperate times.

Washington is unwilling to send troops en masse to die fighting Russia in Ukraine, to the point where the deaths of American military “trainers” are still considered terrible aberrations. Why, then, should anyone else, from any other country, be goaded or guilted or seduced into fighting in yet another Washington-led NATO conflict?

20 Rare Historical Photos That Scientists Can Not Explain

LOL. This is fun. Watch, but don’t take too seriously.

As a black person, when did you realize that not all black people are your allies and not all white people your enemies?

Well, let’s see. I grew up in one of the worst hell holes of a neighborhood in Chicago. Used to hear lectures of “black unity” and how we have to look out for one another and the white man is evil all the freaking time while at the same time, most of the same blacks calling the white man the enemy would go out and rob other blacks.

On the other hand, when I was sixteen I got a little part time gig delivering newspapers early in the morning. The driver of the truck was white and there was another white guy who rode along with us. These guys treated me like a younger brother and got me into rock music. The driver knew of my intentions to join the Navy someday and one morning at the end of the shift he took me to his parents’ home to introduce me to his dad, who was a Navy veteran. His parents were very kind and welcoming and his dad gave me a few pointers on what to expect in the Navy.

During basic training, there were no black, white, brown or yellow recruits. We were all part of a unit and we looked out for another.

What is one thing that I can learn from you today?

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main qimg 64785fcf2165227e5dcb1ddbd5a69a4d

A man who donated his mothers body to Alzheimer’s research found out she was strapped to a chair and blown up. In 2013, after Jim Stauffer’s mother died of Alzheimer’s he donated her body to the Biological Research Centre thinking it would be used to study the disease that killed her. Instead, 3 years later he learned that the BRC had sold her body the US Military to study the damage done by roadsides bombs.

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main qimg e1e772b99c7b8d653d1b025bea58613a

At a nurse’s suggestion, the family contacted Biological Resource Centre, and within the hour, BRC dispatched a driver to collect Doris. Jim Stauffer signed a form authorizing medical research on his mother’s body, but also checked a box prohibiting military, traffic-safety and other non-medical experiments.

Ten days later, Jim received his mother’s cremated remains, but what the BRC failed to mention was that they only cremated her hand and shipped the rest of Stauffer’s body to a taxpayer-funded research project for the U.S. Army.

Jim Stauffer is now suing the company along with 32 other people who’s family members bodies were used in tests without their consent.

The Soviet intelligence and their spy gadgets

In 1965, the Soviet intelligence agency, the KGB, developed a ring with a tiny camera embedded in it, which was used for espionage purposes. The ring was worn by Soviet agents who were tasked with gathering sensitive information from foreign governments and institutions.

The camera in the ring was incredibly small, and could take high-quality photographs without arousing suspicion. This allowed Soviet agents to gather valuable intelligence without being detected.

The use of spy gadgets like this ring was a common practice during the Cold War, as both the United States and the Soviet Union engaged in espionage and counter-espionage activities. These activities often involved the use of advanced technology and innovative techniques, as both sides sought to gain an advantage in the ongoing struggle for global dominance.

Today, the ring serves as a reminder of the lengths to which governments will go to protect their interests and gather intelligence.

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main qimg 5760a13098ecff59a5ab45be8c54d953

Ukraine soldiers being FORCED to do this!

Why do the Chinese not care about the lack of freedom?

I had a perfect answer for you, which is from French entrepreneur and Internet influencer Arnaud Bertrand, who compared Chinese and Western systems of governance during a debate held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by the American nonprofit educational organization Intercollegiate Studies Institute on April 5.

The following is edited excerpts of his perspective on freedom.

We’ve progressively come to have a rather skewed understanding of freedom in the West, where we equate freedom with individual freedom, when it’s actually very much not the same thing. When you have a broader understanding of freedom as we used to have in the past, it becomes quite obvious that China might not in fact be the unfree place most people in the West picture it as, and vice versa: The West might not be quite so free.

A prominent example of this is China’s war on poverty. Unarguably an immense success: the largest and fastest reduction in poverty the world has ever seen. Even China’s biggest detractors agree with this.

The fact is that the extreme poverty has, by and large, been totally eradicated in China. I’ve traveled all over China, and the results are obvious. Can anyone genuinely make the case this made people less free, that they were freer when they were poor? Of course not, poverty is the antithesis of freedom. When you live in poverty, you’re quite literally a slave to your condition.

In contrast, there is a lot of poverty in countries like France and the U.S. You go to certain areas of Paris and you see hundreds of tents of homeless people. Any one of you can go to China today, travel all around the country and it’s extremely unlikely you’ll see homeless people on street.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, 20.03 million people lived in deep poverty in 2021. Those in deep poverty represented 6.2 percent of the total population and 48.4 percent of those in poverty. Among them, a larger percentage of children under 18 live in deep poverty than adults in any age group. As defined by the bureau, “deep poverty” refers to living in a household with a total cash income below 50 percent of the national poverty threshold.

A recent study from the Urban Institute also revealed that, in 2022, a total of 25 percent of U.S. adults experienced food insecurity, meaning they sometimes can’t afford to eat. In France we’re at 14 percent of the population living under the poverty threshold. Can we genuinely say that those people are really free?

Many have forgotten this but Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 gave a so-called Four Freedoms speech in which he defined “freedom from want” and “freedom from fear” as two of the four freedoms America ought to achieve. He, too, recognized poverty alleviation was fundamental to freedom.

On the subject of “freedom from fear,” ask yourself a simple question: Do people feel free to walk alone anywhere in America at any time of the day or night? Do people have this freedom?

This freedom, by and large, does exist in China. The statistics are absolutely incredible: You’re 70 times more likely to be victim of a violent crime in the U.S. than you are in China. This is anecdotal, but in my seven years in China, not only have I never been a witness or victim of any crime but I’ve never had anyone in my acquaintance who was. It is a very, very safe country. This freedom from fear does exist.

The biggest form of freedom, a freedom that Charles de Gaulle, former French President, used to describe as the precondition for all other freedoms, is your independence as a country, your collective freedom to determine your own future.

Can anyone argue that when you’re a so-called “vassal state” or when you’re in a larger state’s so-called “sphere of influence,” you’re really free? Anyone can see that’s not quite true.

America isn’t of course anyone’s vassal state, quite the contrary in fact. But there is something that limits America’s freedom in that regard: its system of alliances. America is in many, many alliances: NATO, AUKUS, the Five Eyes, with Japan and so on and so forth. And of course this, too, limits your freedom of action since, on paper at least, you are committed to certain actions even if they might not be in your interest at that point in time. As we’ve painfully learned from World War I, alliances can be incredibly constraining and destructive.

China is unarguably the freest country in the world in this regard, as it cannot be even remotely considered as being any country’s vassal state and it just doesn’t do military alliances—it doesn’t have any. In fact, many argue that it’s precisely this independence that’s driving the current attempt to contain China. This high level of sovereignty allows China to focus on internal development and to maintain its freedom of action on the international stage.

US 3,000 reservists, mission creep or trip wire. Putin to ditch grain deal

2023 07 15 11 04
2023 07 15 11 04

Do any of Mao Zedong’s descendants hold power in the CPC?

No.

His grandson is the target of frequent jokes because he has an unearned title in the military.

Chinese enjoy making public fun of people who have anything which they have not earned and deserved, because they respect earned accomplishments.

Inherited wealth and accomplishments are NOT respected in Chinese society.

The head of the “Wagner Group,” Yevgeny Prigozhin, expressed his views on the root of the problems in Niger:

💬 “I will answer what is the basis for the change of power in Nigeria. The basis is the economy. The population of Niger has been driven into poverty for a long time.

For example, a French company that extracted uranium sold it on the market for $218, while paying Niger only $11 for it. You can work with investors on a 50-50 or 30-70 (%) basis, but it’s impossible to give back to the indigenous people of the country, who were born in this country, who live in this country, and who expect that the natural resources of this country belong to them, and according to the Constitution, they belong to them, only 5% of the wealth you receive.

To cover up these economic crimes, the country was saturated with a huge number of terrorists. This enormous number of terrorists, theoretically, should have been controlled by a vast number of different troops, financed by the UN, the European Union, Americans, the British, and others. As a result, the population of Niger, which should have been free and happy due to the economic opportunities in their country, was robbed, and to keep them silent, they were kept in fear for decades.

To show that these thieves and plunderers are needed in the state’s territory, I mean Western countries like France, the USA, and so on, crowds of soldiers were sent there who did nothing but received enormous budgets that were also embezzled at various levels. That’s why the transformation in Niger was simply necessary.

The power that was in league with Bazoum (ousted president) and his followers, simply covered up, allowing the coalition of people who plundered the nation to be present in Niger’s territory. That’s it. Therefore, this is a liberation struggle, a liberation movement for the independence of this country, and God grant them success.”

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The Most Arrogant Killer Ever

JCS criminal psychology Interrogation video.

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2023 07 14 17 22

My boss just loudly reprimanded me in front of my coworkers. How do I finish my day?

I was a young 2nd officer of a cargo ship when, in a tricky situation, the captain started to scream at me. I shouted back: ”Come down to help us instead of just shouting, or give me more people to help. Otherwise FU”. He never ever said anything bad or shouted at me again.

I was working with that captain for two years and whenever he got the upper hand on someone he was a mean bastard. For those who dared to answer back he was all right. I hated that kind of cowardliness and treating weaker crew members like shit.

The good thing is that I learned how not to behave and I was working as a captain for 10 years and hope I didn’t treat people badly.

This photo is of me when I later (for 25 years) was working as a ship’s pilot.

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main qimg 65bc62ef7b7053a75f2e896585b5a4fd

What is the most expensive meal you have eaten? How good did it taste?

I still remember the most expensive piece of food I’ve ever eaten, since it was also the only one that made me actually cry.

It happened in a two star Michelin restaurant. I’ve never been to a place like that before, but a group of investors had a big feast, and invited me over as the ‘futurist’ entertainment for the evening… and covered the cost for my meal as well.

The first few courses were nice. Nothing amazing, but definitely not bad either. But the fourth course really did the trick for me. It was a small glass with a peking duck soup, with some extra spices on top. And as soon as I sipped from it, I started crying. I just couldn’t control myself – my emotions welled up. Tears were actually falling down my cheeks.

Now, my comrades to the meal took notice, and demanded to know what it was all about. One of them, sensing a ‘ratatouille’ moment, called the chef (his personal friend) from the kitchen. They all surrounded me, and waited for me to answer.

Finally, I told them how the taste of the soup sent me back thirty years into the past, to when I was a wee sick child in the hospital, cold and scared and miserable. I hated the hospital food, and the only thing I liked in that place was the 0.5 Dollar chicken soup in a plastic cup from the automated kiosk in the corridor – your basic monosodium glutamate with hot water.

And that soup was exactly the same taste as the Peking duck soup from the two star Michelin restaurant.

They silently absorbed the revelation, and then the stone-faced chef went back to the kitchen without uttering a single word, everybody went back to eating their dishes, and I was never invited again to another Michelin-grade restaurant.

But I still think it was the best soup I ever had.

US-Saudi-Ukraine peace summit, doomed to fail

2023 08 05 08 28
2023 08 05 08 28

https://youtu.be/N6AGFbFlDOQ

Could the USA ever defeat China in a long-term military conflict?

This is by MM today. -MM

No.

I know that there are many sipping the “electric kool aide” from the Western media. You all want to believe that America; a nation of Rambo heroes. Where everyone fights for democracy, freedom and individual rights.

You can believe what ever you want.

But…

[1] All credible military studies and war games say otherwise. Not one single RAND study, and military (not supplier) sponsored studies indicate otherwise. In fact, every study show catastrophic defeats at all levels for the United States.

[2] The United States hasn’t won a war against a peer since 1945. There was a short “victory” in Grenada. But aside from that, the United States military has been a glorified police and occupation force against very weak nations that it exploits.

[3] Wars can only be fought with a willing population. During the Vietnam war, the televising of its horrors turned many, many Americans against war. Since that pivotal moment, the American government took control of the vast bulk of media. And today controls either directly, or “in the shadows” all discourse in the USA. From Twitter, to Facebook, to mainstream media to blogs.

Were a war to erupt between the United States and China, China would be destroying American cities, and resources. This would be brazen, horrific and “in your face”. There will be no way for the American government to control the “spin”. As a result, the already balkanized (and armed) American population will be difficult to corral. Only a small percentage of Americans would approve of the war.

Nothing quite ruins your day as having your place of employment bombed and gutted, food is unavailable, as is wifi, and the President is openly lying to you when your personal experience says otherwise. Without popular support, what remains of the USA will implode. China will hasten this process. You can guarantee it.

[4] China is far too big to be defeated. Most people in the West are really unaware of how huge; gigantic; and colossal China actually is. Five (x5) United States can fit inside of one China. There are more Chinese people speaking English than the entire rest of the world combined. The Largest city in the United States is NYC with around 8 million. That qualifies as a town by Chinese standards. The Pearl River delta ALONE is approaching 100 million.

[5] China is a warrior nation. This runs counter to the anti-China propaganda. But it is the truth. China has been fighting battles with thousands of men, in organized assaults at a time when the Europeans were still living in caves and discovering fire. The Qing absorbed the life-blood of the Khan, and the Chinese people have become absolutely terrifying warriors. Battle training and disciplinary is mandated by law to start in first grade.

[6] China is ABOVE peer-capable in military. Again, a hidden truth that must be denied at every turn. China flies stealth bombers, fighters, drones, and uses weapons so advanced that the West hasn’t been able to keep up with naming them. They have search-and-destroy flying grenades, robotic suicide dog-bots, sonic bombs, enhanced neutron (clean green energy) nuclear bombs, penetration creepy-crawlers, railguns, and stuff that nightmares are made from.

[7] China is a nuclear nation without the limitations of public opinion. China will not hesitate, or doubt their use of nuclear weapons. They just do not care what the rest of the world thinks. If your nation is angry, and don’t want to trade with China….fine! Enjoy a life without iphones, cars, tampons, Viagra, televisions, computers, and blood pressure medicine. China “holds all the cards”.

[8] China is peaceful until it isn’t. China is this huge sleeping dragon. It allows you to play around next to it. But it watches you with a careful eye. One misstep, one dangerous move, and you are gone.

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2023 07 15 11 00

There are many that place “The blanket of scoff” on the idea that China is dangerous. Along with them is a well NSA funded anti-China narrative that is designed to “armor up” Americans and those in the West to HATE China, as well as NOT TO FEAR it. Just do as you are told, and march to your death. Brave Australians to fight China. The Japanese to invade Taiwan. South Korea to be a staging base. The Philippines to base bombers to bomb China…

The entire world KNOWS the plans that the United States has for China.

And…

So does China.

To think that somehow China would allow the United States to poke it into a war, on American terms, where the United States defines the battlefields and the the proxy client nations march to their death is DELUSIONAL.

China will not allow that to happen.

A conflict with China will not, and never be, “long term”. It will be a long drawn out period of de-faning, followed by death blows.

There are many, many instances in Chinese history where military leaders employed a strategy of attrition and destruction of resources to weaken their enemies.

One notable example is the campaign of the famous military strategist Sun Tzu during the Warring States Period (475-221 BCE). Sun Tzu is believed to have used a combination of psychological warfare, deception, and destruction of resources to wear down his enemies and force them to surrender without engaging in direct combat.

His famous book, “The Art of War,” is still studied today as a classic military strategy guide. And his techniques are well employed daily by Chinese military leaders and businessmen alike.

Another example is the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), which employed a strategy of “defensive warfare” against the Mongol Empire. Rather than seeking to conquer the Mongols, the Ming focused on fortifying their borders and destroying resources, such as crops and water sources, to weaken the Mongols and prevent them from launching further attacks.

During the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 CE), the warlord Cao Cao used a tactic of burning and destroying crops and villages to deprive his enemies of resources and weaken their armies. This strategy was particularly effective against the armies of Liu Bei, who relied heavily on civilian support.

During the Taiping Rebellion (1850-1864), the Taiping rebels led by Hong Xiuquan fought against the Qing Dynasty. The Taiping rebels employed a scorched-earth strategy, burning crops and villages and killing civilians to weaken the Qing army and terrorize the population. This led to widespread famine and displacement, with millions of civilians dying from starvation and disease. The rebellion ultimately failed, but its impact on Chinese society was profound.

The use of attrition and destruction of resources as a military strategy has been employed throughout Chinese history, with examples ranging from the Warring States Period to the Ming dynasty and beyond. These tactics have been used to wear down enemies, weaken their armies, and force them into surrender without engaging in direct combat.

Here are a few more examples of military leaders in Chinese history who employed the strategy of attrition and destruction of resources:

1. Zhang Xianzhong: During the late Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), Zhang Xianzhong led a rebellion against the imperial government. He followed a strategy of scorched earth, burning crops and killing civilians along his path, to prevent the Ming armies from resupplying and isolating them. This weakened the Ming forces and allowed Zhang to gain control over much of Sichuan province.

2. Yuan Shao: During the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 CE), Yuan Shao led a coalition of warlords against his rival Cao Cao. When Cao Cao’s forces advanced towards his territory, Yuan Shao ordered the destruction of crops and villages along the way in a scorched earth strategy. This not only weakened Cao Cao’s army but also deprived them of resources, forcing them to withdraw.

3. Li Zicheng: In the mid-17th century, Li Zicheng led a peasant rebellion against the Ming dynasty. He followed a similar strategy as Zhang Xianzhong, burning crops and killing civilians to weaken the Ming forces. This strategy was successful in helping Li Zicheng to capture the capital, Beijing, and overthrow the Ming dynasty.

4. Mao Zedong: During the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949), Mao Zedong’s communist forces followed a strategy of guerrilla warfare, which included the destruction of infrastructure and resources, such as bridges and railways, to weaken the Nationalist government’s control over the country. This strategy ultimately led to the communist victory and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.

5. Zhuge Liang: During the Three Kingdoms period (220-280 CE), the famous strategist Zhuge Liang led the Shu-Han army against the Wei army. When the Wei army advanced towards the city of Chengdu, where Zhuge Liang was based, he ordered the destruction of crops and the poisoning of wells to deprive the enemy of resources. This weakened the Wei army and forced them into a retreat.

6. Yue Fei: During the Southern Song dynasty (1127-1279), the general Yue Fei led a campaign against the Jurchen Jin dynasty. Yue Fei employed a scorched-earth strategy, burning crops and destroying infrastructure along the Jurchen army’s path to prevent them from resupplying and isolating them. This weakened the Jurchen army and allowed Yue Fei to win several battles.

7. Qi Jiguang: In the late Ming dynasty (1368-1644), the general Qi Jiguang led a campaign against the Wokou pirates, who were raiding the coast of China. Qi Jiguang employed a strategy of attrition, cutting off the pirates’ supply lines and destroying their ships and resources. This weakened the pirates and forced them to surrender.

8. Lin Biao: During the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949), the communist general Lin Biao led a campaign against the Nationalist government’s forces in Manchuria. Lin Biao employed a strategy of guerrilla warfare, destroying infrastructure, such as railways and bridges, to prevent the Nationalist forces from resupplying. This weakened the Nationalist forces and allowed the communists to gain control over the region.

These few (out of many) examples demonstrate how Chinese generals and military leaders have used the strategy of attrition and destruction of resources throughout history to weaken their enemies. While this strategy can be effective in military terms, it can also have a significant impact on civilian populations and non-combatants, as noted earlier.

These examples demonstrate that the strategy of attrition and destruction of resources has been used by military leaders in various periods of Chinese history. While it can be a brutal tactic, it has proven to be effective in weakening and defeating enemy forces long before they are able to gather their strength to ready up for a long battle or conflict.

The use of the strategy of attrition and destruction of resources in warfare throughout Chinese history has often had a devastating impact on civilian populations and non-combatants.

Scorched-earth tactics, for example, involve the intentional destruction of crops, livestock, and other resources that civilians depend on for their survival. This can lead to famine, disease, and displacement, as well as the loss of homes, property, and livelihoods. Civilians who are caught in the crossfire or who live in areas controlled by the opposing forces can also face violence, abuse, and forced conscription.

Furthermore, the destruction of infrastructure, such as bridges, roads, and railways, can disrupt trade, transport, and communication, which can further harm civilian populations. This can lead to economic instability, social unrest, and political instability, which can have long-term consequences.

In some cases, military leaders have intentionally targeted civilians as part of their strategy, using violence, rape, and other forms of abuse to terrorize the population and undermine support for their enemies. This can lead to widespread trauma, physical and emotional harm, and the breakdown of social and cultural institutions.

Overall, the use of the strategy of attrition and destruction of resources in warfare has had a significant and often devastating impact on civilian populations and non-combatants throughout Chinese history. And the populations once weakened create a situation where the nation is UNABLE to fight long and protracted wars without internal domestic collapse.

It is simple, really.

It will begin with [1] a drawn out period of de-fanging the American out-of-control beast.

Pluck, by pluck.

Inflation, raging unemployment, money that is useless, inability to get healthcare, massive drug abuse, and a collapse of the industrial base will be just a bad fore-taste of the deadly future that awaits when the United States walk into the rat-trap set for it.

Then, trapped, check-mated, and helpless with come [2] the one-two blows that China and Russia (oh, yeah, China and Russia are none nation now. Or haven’t you noticed?) will unleash.

Don’t like that?

Tough.

Here’s the High Tech capital (Pasadena California) in the United States “today”. Ruined by the out-of-control government that makes the grandiose statements that only the putile ignorant believe.

See what the grand and strong America looks like when “you pull the curtain back” and see it for what it actually is; a toothless old fumbling man with dementia.

I argue that the moment that the United States declared war with China back in 2014, China sat-up and took notice. They formalized their plans and initiated counter-military actions. As the United States follows it’s well-worn RAND play-book, so is China. And today we are seeing the fruits of this on-going “stealth” war.

Stealth… because it is not being reported.

You can expect the civilian populations of the United States and its proxy nations to suffer. You can expect raging inflation, a drop in basic services, and a gradual encroachment of madness in the “leadership” cadres.

Along with that, will be an emptying of the national treasuries of the belligerents, as well as a destruction of military systems to a point where basic parts, ammo and fundamentals become unobtainable. You will note a cannibalization of existing weapons systems, and an outrageous propaganda machine geared up for a “hot conflict” that the United States will be unable to implement.

The United States today is like a “junkie” that needs his “fix” of drugs. He hates the drug dealer that sells it to him, and he hates his life, but he knows that he cannot go “cold turkey” without the drugs. So he yells, and screams. He screams to everyone how bad the “drug dealer” is, but is so nice an friendly when talking face to face with the dealer.

He knows, as bad as his situation is, it can be many, many, MANY times worse if the “drug dealer” closes him out, and turns his back on him. The drug dealer not only has control over his needs, but is healthy, powerful, and has abilities that the junkie doesn’t.

Bottom line…

Do not fuck with China.

They will fuck you right back.

America’s Secret Space Program and the Alien Connection: Solar Warden

This is a perfect example about “going down the rabbit hole”.

Please DO NOT take this seriously. It’s not real,

Why is the US so worked up over a 28nm equipment from China when it can’t make even 3nm chips?

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2023 08 05 08 26

Ah

That’s because this 28nm DUV Lithography machine is FULLY INDIGENOUS and has come to the commercial line in 3 Years and 10 months

There are 15,800 components in this machine and everyone if them is MADE IN CHINA

The Wafer layering is also Chinese

The Final Tested 28nm Chip had a 94.1% yield which is only 1.7% lower than the 95.8% that a 28nm chip made with Western equipment delivers

Even 7% was acceptable by the Chinese (88.8% Yield) so a 94.1% yield was OUTSTANDING

The Chip is estimated to be priced at 4840 Yuan for a stack compared to 5410 Yuan for a stack of 28nm chips that use Western Equipment and are made in China

That’s a 12.50% price cut

Experts estimate that the same 28nm chips being made in Taiwan or Korea using Western equipment would cost 7200 Yuan or almost 50% higher than China’s price

This Machine is now commercial which means by 2027 it will replace existing western DUV equipment completely and also have enhanced quality

This means China have gained full Independence in their 28 nm Chips from any Western Control and technology

Until now it was possible only for 90 nm Chips and above


Thats not why the US is mad though

This was something that was expected by the US the minute the same equipment passed protocol stage in 2018 May with a 59% Yield (Now 94.1%)

It entered Commercial phase in 2019 December

The US is mad because China can use these 28 nm Chips and stack them and get the equivalent of 14 nm and even 7 nm chips

China has made massive strides in stacking

It means China can now have fully Indigenous 14 nm Chips at 89% of the quality that the West delivers and Indigenous 7% Chips at 70.1% of the quality that the West delivers

Now these stacked chips cannot be used commercially as their price would be too high (A 28 nm Chip stacked as a 14 nm would cost 91400 Yuan a stack against a mere 11260 Yuan that it would cost for a Western Equipment made 14 nm Chip in China and 16220 Yuan for a stack made in Taiwan)

However they can be used in Defence applications and National Security related applications where China won’t mind the higher price in exchange for more flexibility

Better to have 71% Quality home chips at 11 times the price for Defence Equipment than have none at all and have a 100% disadvantage with the West


Thats why the US is hopping mad

A Senator named Tom Cotton said this was all Bidens fault and he was too slow and gave too much time for China to catch up


China still has a long way to go

China is around 3/4 the way there

It still needs the last 25% of the race against the toughest of circumstances

Pineapple Tequila

Keep a large jar of this tequila working on your kitchen counter. It makes terrific margaritas. After the mixture has been topped with fresh tequila two or three times, you can finely dice the softened pineapple, warm it in butter with extra brown sugar to taste, and serve it as an ice cream topping.

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2023 07 15 12 23

Ingredients

  • 2 large just-ripe pineapple, trimmed, peeled, cored, cut into 2-inch chunks
  • 2 (1 liter) bottles gold tequila
  • 2 cones (5 ounces total) piloncillo or 1/2 cup packed light brown sugar
  • 2 whole vanilla beans

Instructions

  1. In a large, decorative jar, combine the pineapple chunks and tequila.
  2. Add the sugar and vanilla beans.
  3. Cover and let the tequila stand at room temperature, stirring it occasionally, for at least 1 week.

Notes

Variation: Use rum instead of tequila.

Have you ever had a “why did I do this” moment?

I went to college almost exactly 1,000 miles from my hometown. That’s about 16 hours if you drive it. When I was in college, I would drive home once per year. I’d drive straight through, stopping only for gas, food, and bathroom breaks. Not to rest.

I’d leave at 3am, and get there around 7 or 8pm that evening.

Those were fun trips. I was young, single, and free. I had the windows down, going 80mph down the highway, usually smoking a cigarette with the music blasting.

Years later, in my early 30s, I thought I could still do that. Not the smoking part—I quit that after college. And not the loud music part-I preferred talk radio at a reasonable volume by then. And I didn’t like the windows down as much. Too windy and noisy and it lets dust into the car.

But still, I thought it would be fun to drive the 1,000 miles, without stopping, to visit my mom.

I left at 3am. By noon, I realized I had made a mistake. I was exhausted. I tried drinking coffee, but that didn’t help. By 2pm, I realized that I wasn’t going to make it. I had to find a hotel. If I continued driving, I would be a danger to myself and others.

My exact thoughts were: “Why did I do this? I’m too old for this shit.”

So I called my mom to tell her I’d be a day late, found a hotel, spent the night, and finished my trip the next day.

I’m planning another solo road trip this summer, to somewhere even farther away. But now I have a minivan, so I’m just going to take the seats out of the back, put in an inflatable mattress, and sleep there whenever I feel tired. I hate paying $100 or more just to sleep at a hotel.

What is China’s secret weapon?

American “news” constantly underlines that China “only” has 400 nuclear weapons. While MM has told you that the amount is 10x that.

A Pentagon report states that China has enough launchers to support the MM statement, though they still argue for small numbers of nukes…

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5wC51DeqDTI?feature=share

What’s the most gruesome, disturbing thing you’ve ever witnessed? Not videos you watched, but actual real life, in-person experiences.

My mother sold vegetables at the local market, and every now and then she would send me to the shops.

She sold stuff like tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger, et.c. and on that particular day she sent me to buy a box of chicken seasoning. We called them Maggi Cubes and they came in small packets like this.

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main qimg 1e46a14d1d6b74a598eaf19e04a42eff

This has nothing to do with the Maggi Cubes, or my mother’s vegetables.

So, while exiting the shop with my box, I heard a commotion outside. My nosy self quickly walked towards it, where I saw people dragging a man to a car while everyone else stood by and watched. The man looked faint and fucked up, but that didn’t stop the people from roughly dragging him to the car and shoving him inside, all the while cursing at him.

“Brukim pes blo disla rascal ya!”

“Stealman ya!”

“Paitim em ya!”

From what people were yelling I deduced he was a thief. A pickpocket.

Ah, of course. Leave it to us Papua New Guineans to mind our own business when it’s a man beating the shit out of his wife in public but bring out the vigilante squad when it’s a harmless little pickpocket.

From listening to people who were standing around tsk-tsking and talking, I figured out he had tried to pick someone’s phone. The people assisting him to the car weren’t taking him to the hospital; they were taking him to the police station.

Something else they said caught my attention.

“Ol katim han blo em.”

“Ol man lo hap ya, ol holim han blo em stap.”

I looked to where they were pointing to; it was a smaller crowd. I inched closer, and there it was.

A severed hand. The pickpocket’s hand, apparently.

Some guy was holding it up like a trophy. People crowded around to take photos.

I would have taken a pic too but I felt queasy and left. Now I realise no picture is needed; that disturbing scene has been seared into my mind.

For a phone a man loses his hand while corrupt politicians steal much more and walk free. Such is life.

Of all the crimes we suffer from in the land of PNG, pickpocket is the least common. If you’re caught pickpocketing, people would handle you themselves before turning you over to the police to deal with what’s left.

What are some weird facts about Japan?

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main qimg 314ea0d2f9fcda8e9f04fd817d0f3aac

There are Temples in Japan where the ceilings are drenched in blood of dead Samurai. In 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi constructed the Fushimi Castle after he united Japan. After the death of Hideyoshi’s the Kingdom began to fragment and the warlord Tokugawa Leyasu occupied Fushimi Castle with 2000 men.

In 1600, an army of 40,000 men under the command of the Samurai Ishida Mitsunari, marched against the castle. Tokugawa’s companion, Torii Mototada decided to remain in the castle with the 2000 men, while Tokugawa’s marched west.

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main qimg 141d08e0dc84de75c0eda2a69b2e6a21

Mototada and his men defended the castle against overwhelming odds for 11 days. On the 11th day, with only ten of his men left alive, Mototada realised he had lasted as long as he could, and rather than surrender he and his remaining men committed Seppuku (ritual suicide via disembowelment).

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main qimg 15aef6832a54567571d07ed04de6c962

Though Mototada died, he succeeded in holding Mitsunari long enough that his campaign was critically delayed, leading to his defeat and execution.

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main qimg db6a6d65b7204ff3f3e066afa39bdac2

The Gruesome mass suicide of the defenders drenched the floors of the castle with blood, and though the castle was later dismantled, its wood was used in the construction of five temples across Kyoto. And to this day, bloodstains from the siege can be seen on the ceilings of some of these temples.

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main qimg 2aaa65f4260f1e243a7a0643b680bac9

As a police officer, has someone you pulled over ever threatened to call “Daddy”?

Originally Answered: As a Police officer, has someone you pulled over ever threatened to call “Daddy”?

Oh yeah….. and it was the Sheriff’s 18 year old daughter. (Sigh) I pulled her over at 2:00 a.m. for running a red light. From my initial contact, based upon her language, attitude, and the odor of alcohol, I determined she was inebriated.

I removed her to the rear of her vehicle. The entire time she was screaming that she was THE Sheriff’s daughter. I knew that. The first step I conduct in my field sobriety tests is the HGN. Horizontal Gaze Nystagmus. That’s where I “wave” my pen in front of your eyes, asking you to track the movement of my pen. It requires me to place my body in close proximity to the body of the detained individual. On this night, that was my mistake. She sucker punched me in the face. Broke my nose.

Hard to believe a 120# female could punch like she did. She knocked me to the ground. I hit my dispatch panic button, and the world responded. The next I knew, she’s cuffed and stuffed, and the paramedics are wanting to transport me.

We finally all arrive at the jail, and my supervisors interviewed me again. They were more concerned about my health than anything. I kept asking for a status on my prisoner, and their only response was “who gives a …. , let’s get you taken care of..”

Then the Sheriff arrived. He spoke with my supervisors… both of them, the Lieutenant and the Sergeant. He spoke with my fellow Deputies who also responded. Then he spoke with his daughter… confined in a holding cell.

Then he approached me, and asked how I was. He really was concerned about my health, and the state of damage to my gear. We talked for several minutes. He apologized profusely for his daughter’s behavior. I kept telling him it wasn’t his fault. And then he said, and I’ll never forget this….. “…., this is a direct order. You will charge this miscreant with Underage consumption, Operating While Intoxicated, Assault on an officer causing injury, and Resisting arrest. You do that, and do it now… or I’ll have your badge.” And with that, he spun on his heels and left without another word to anyone.

The Prosecutor reduced some of the charges (imagine that) but she ended up with time served (bail, for some unknown reason took 2 days), a large fine, and suspension of her DL for 6 months.

Additionally, the Sheriff had her apologize in person in front of the entire Patrol Division, (60 deputies) and I understand the entire Corrections (jail) Department (100 officers).

EDIT: Wow I never thought I’d get this much response. Thank you all. This is a very humbling experience.

Perhaps I should get knocked on my azz more often. LOL NOT.

Please allow me to elaborate on a few of the comments:

*The Prosecutor reduced her charges through a very necessary plea bargain process. It’s not perfect, but it’s usually the best form of justice served in our County. We have 80 ADA’s and only 5 Judges. Judicial gridlock would occur with out this process.

*”Her sentence was too light.” Legally? Perhaps. But here’s the rest of the story….. She had a full ride scholarship to a Big 10 University. She lost it. She lost the car her Father was providing. She lost the nice part time job she had. For the next year, instead of enjoying life as a college student, she worked 70 hrs. a week at a convenience store, to make the weekly payments on a Buy Here Pay Here junk car. And to pay her newly instituted rent at her parents’ home.

She’s now in college…. paying her own way. She’s an often sought speaker at MAAD and AA meetings. She always starts out the same way…. “Let me tell you about the most stupid decision I ever made….. which caused the most miserable night of my life.”

I see her often. Our Agency has family BBQ’s and other events. We all know each others’ family. We all see each other often. She’s a good kid. A good kid who made a poor decision.

And now, she’s paying the price. I’ve let it go. I hope you all will too 🙂

Col Macgregor On Gonzalo Lira DISAPPEARANCE

The same disregard with human rights and the rule of law in Julian Assange’s case.

https://youtu.be/2RBEaUGlwzw

What’s the point to life? You just end up dying anyway; why not die now?

My mother died of a heart attack at 72.

During a dark period of my own, I asked her if she had ever considered ending her life. She said she had, and I asked what had stopped her.

She replied, “Curiosity, I guess. I wanted to see what would happen next.”

I don’t consider suicide a sin or a crime. I think it’s a failure of the imagination. The pain of the current moment eclipses the knowledge that there will be many more moments, and you just don’t know what they will bring.

About 35 years ago, after a break-up with a girl, I cocked a pistol and held it to my own head. I was alone in my apartment, and in great emotional pain. I couldn’t imagine anyone ever loving me again. Obviously, I didn’t pull the trigger.

Since that decision not to end my own life, I moved to Los Angeles, became a successful voice actor, and was cast as a series regular on a Cartoon Network show that ran for 6 years and won an Emmy. People have told me, on multiple occasions, “You were the voice of my childhood.” I also met my wife and stepson and traveled the world.

My advice, for what it’s worth: Don’t kill yourself, because then, you’ll never find out what happens next.

What is the best thing that has ever happened to you for being nice?

Originally Answered: What is the best thing that ever happened to you for being nice?

Going anonymous because don’t want the attention.

When I was in college a new person moved across the hall from me in my building.

One day I came home and heard him crying and hysterical in his apartment. I listened for a minute, but finally knocked on the door, as it sounded like he needed help.

He came to the door. We had seen eachother a couple times but never really talked. He had recently moved to New York from China for grad school in biology, and spoke very little English. He explained that he had lost his lab position, had stopped going to class, and would soon fail out and would have to return home. Said he would be the shame of his family.

He explained that he had no other options.

Luckily I worked in the biochemistry department, and had a lot of contacts there. I spent some time with him and helped make a plan to get back on the right track. I introduced him to some professors and administrators in the university, reviewed his letters and emails, and helped him get a job in my cancer research lab, even though he had no experience in cancer research.

I gave him some of my favorite American novels and he read them and seemed very grateful.

I moved a couple years later, but we have stayed in touch; I’ve helped him out with writing and encouraged him along the way when he comes to me with concerns.

It’s been 15 years since we met. He completed two Masters degrees at a great university, and a PhD and now has a position developing drugs to treat and cure cancer.

I like to think I’ve helped to impact his trajectory for the better.

NEARLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD FEEL THIS!! 😰 Oliver Anthony – Rich Men North Of Richmond | reaction

NATO moves away from Ukraine, lunges toward Taiwan

It seems that the re-posturing is in process, right on a schedule established decades ago. One; mind you, without any allowance for change in the Geo-political situation.

Todays…

You know, I was watching Babymetal the other day, and it occurred to me that the entire band is the embodiment of a cat.

Yes. Seriously.

The elements of [1] hard, and fast along with [2] the very cute.

It’s one manifestation of a cute kitty cat. Then it gnaws on your hand… and draws blood.

Seriously. Check this one out with that thought in mind.

BABYMETAL – メギツネ – MEGITSUNE (OFFICIAL)

Though… it is about a FOX (which is a human female embodiment of a feline).

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2023 07 27 06 48

What is the best case of “You just picked a fight with the wrong person” that you’ve witnessed?

Walmart My friend, 5″10″ 185 was walking out of the store on an Friday night. There were several high school boys horsing around with each other. As my friend walked past the biggest one, he went into a Rocky boxing stance behind him.(The store cameras caught the whole thing). He push punched my friend’s right shoulder enough to almost unbalance him. When my friend turned and saw a large figure in a fighting crouch, he continued his turn and placed the point of his elbow on the far side of the kid’s jaw.

Resulting in the kid flying backward to land flat of his back unconscious, with a broken jaw. Took about 2 seconds start to finish. The jaw was unintentional.

Kid’s dad was angry until he watched the vid.

Why is China way stronger in industry than the USA? Will the USA collapse and China make the world lead?

In the past 40 years, Chinese have worked hard, and the government has continued to invest in soft infrastructure (education, etc.) and hard infrastructure including transport and manufacturing.

In the US, Americans have voted to cut taxes and the size of government, which meant that there has been no investment in hard and soft infrastructure.

The “rise of China” is simply the result of those different policies.

How effective would the US government be after a nuclear war?

How effective is the United States today?

According to the United States constitution, the purpose of the Government is as a vehicle to serve its people.

Are they being served?

  • Is inflation under control?
  • Are the streets clean, and safe?
  • Are people happy, employed in useful productive activities.
  • Is the nation as a whole, healthy mentally, physically and emotionally?
  • Does the future look bright?
  • Is food, and shelter affordable?
  • Is medical care cheap and easy to obtain?
  • Is the government meeting the needs of the individual?

As I see it, the most basic, of basics is neglected.

This is not only unhealthy, but completely unsustainable.

You do not need a nuclear conflagration to destroy the United States, it is already destroyed. It is torn up and sitting in the garbage swill of past glories.

The American society is dead. DEAD. Gone, and slaughtered.

There are ZERO vibrant and healthy cities in the United States today. The downtowns are boarded up, squalor rat and rodent infestations exist, and tent cities abound. Those that exist fumble and mumble in their drug haze like the zombies they are. Today, the United States (though there are a handful of “pockets” of normalcy) is simply a ghost-nation.

Hollowed out.

Void of any real and actual leadership.

Inept, incompetent, and runs a well produced “clown show” in front of green screens, reading well produced scripts to keep the rabble in line.

No.

A nuclear war will not kill the United States.

It is already a carcass.

Pick it up off the side of the road, and start fresh. It’s the only thing that is left to do.

Remember…

Nuclear weapons are designed to destroy large functioning cities, and masses of military. That are their targets. If the cities are just crumbling, and the only strategic targets are a warehouse here, a factory there, or a government building over there, then it makes far more sense to use conventional munitions in “surgical” strikes.

As the United States stands today, a nuclear war would have very little effect on the nation.

A dead dog is still a dead dog. To shoot it full of holes will not change anything. It doesn’t matter if you use a .22 caliber revolver, or a 10 gauge shotgun.

Thus, to hasten the demise of the United States (as it is already post-collapse) is to target the few remaining assets that keep it alive;

  • The factories that make the bombs and missiles.
  • The “leaders” that run the remains of the nation.
  • The transportation hubs that distribute goods and services.

That is the true and real reality of the situation.

The United States is a carcass.

Any action by the rest of the world would be to add lime to it and advance the decay.

SHOCKING PRE BIRTH EXPERIENCE! I Saw Why I Chose a Life of Suffering!

Please enjoy my interview with Betty Guadagno about he Near Death-Like Experience and pre-birth memories!

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2023 07 25 15 39

Is China waiting for the right time to invade Taiwan?

No, why would China invade Taiwan now when Chinese sovereignty over Taiwan was restored and recognised in 1945? The only question is whether or not the rival PRC and ROC governments which do not recognise the right of the other to govern China, intend to finally finish the Chinese Civil War. Admittingly, it does not take a genius to realise that at this point, if the fighting does resume, it is but a matter of the PRC finishing off the last remnants of the ROC rump on Taiwan, since the ROC forces have no chance of reconquering the entire mainland by now (though they did hold on to this desire as late as the 1970’s).

And the answer to whether or not the fighting should resume is a resounding ‘no’ on both sides as well. Everyone on both sides of the strait is Chinese, and quite frankly most of the irreconciliable points of contention in ideological dogma and political doctrine between the KMT and CCP have long since become obsolete.

What most Chinese wish for is to find a peaceful long term resolution to the civil war which does not involve bloodshed, and most people from across the Chinese World regardless of political affiliation recognise or are at least willing to trust that those advocating for ‘Taiwanese Independence’ are but a small albeit vocal minority on Taiwan. Meanwhile, no one finds writing systems or pinyin romanisation standards to be worth fighting and dying over. My own hometown is somewhat inland but not entirely remote from Xikou, where Jiang Jieshi himself grew up. There are plenty of people in Xikou nowadays who in principle do not object at all to the prospect of welcoming the remains of the KMT leader back for a proper burial when the situation permits it (which was his own dying wish).

Of course, negotiations will not be straightforward, and it is completely understandable that ROC officials will have concerns about their specific status within a reunified Chinese state, and what protections and guarantees will be offered for the specific particulars of their own way of life. However, almost everyone of political prominence in the 1930’s and 1940’s is either dead or rather senile, so most understand there is no concern of anyone being dragged away to a public trial by the people.

The only reason why there would be a motivation to achieve reunification by force would be if something drastic happens, such as if the MJD attempts to change the ROC’s name and contitution, or the US uses ROC territory as a base for attacking other parts of China.

Is China–Russia Alliance is Likelier than we think?

On 4FEB22, it was formally announced that China and Russia formed a new “national structure” together. In short, they joined together into one singular “state” of a type never before seen on the planet. This nation state is tighter than any kind of individual nation, and stronger economically than any other singular nation in the history of the globe.

Since today is late July 2023, this new “nation-state”; a unified Asia, has been in force and operating now for a goodly one and a half years. And we have seen some amazing changes take place.

  • Both the paramilitaries of China and Russia integrating together.
  • Joint leadership in the various national organizations.
  • A wide selection of free trade and energy activities.
  • Massive infrastructure projects.

Of course, NONE of this is reported in any of the Western “news”. You have to be able to read Chinese, Russian, or Persian to keep abreast on the massive big changes going on in the world today. The English reporting is absent, and if reported, it is distorted beyond recognition.

For instance, take the joint Naval exercises with Russia and China around Japan last week. Western reporting equals zero. Or, the new rail lines connecting Western Russia to China, the Western reporting is yet again; zero. How about the new manufacturing plants in Russia? Zero. Or the trade corridors from the Middle east into the Heart of Russia, via the China “bridge”? Reporting is zero.

And so, with the West living in this bubble of ignorance, it can be expected that those in the West are unaware that China and Russia are one.

It is a united Asia.

To a person in the West, it is almost like waiting to get an invite to a big party. And you wait and you wait and you wait. Then you find out that the party came and went, and no one told you. Yeah. It’s like that.

So to answer the question;

Is China–Russia Alliance is Likelier than we think?

It happened a year and a half ago. It is more than an alliance; it is a new global superpower. If the USA is considered to be a superpower, then the new Russia-China “new national form” is a Super-Duper-Supreme-power. And that is how things stand today.

Which is why…

  • The people; the citizens, worry about war, Taiwan, nuclear bombs.
  • The multinational companies, are all renewing investments in China and Russia independent of any American-led sanction efforts.
  • The nations are all abandoning the USD in favor of a BRICS “basket of currencies”.

So do not be confused by the dearth of actual “news” reporting. Watch what people, companies and nations are actually doing. Not what they are saying.

For instance, as an example…

Thailand elected, via color-revolution, a pro-USA leader. However, just this week the Thai Navy spent all week drilling with the Chinese Navy, and the the BRI projects are proceeding that connects Thailand to China, and Laos without any interruption.

Pay attention to what is physically going on. Not, what is being “reported.”

Fluffy Dumplings

unnamed
unnamed

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2/3 teaspoon salt
  • 4 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tablespoon melted shortening or oil
  • 2/3 cup milk

Instructions

  1. Sift flour, salt and baking powder into mixture of beaten eggs, shortening and milk.
  2. When ready to serve, drop by teaspoonsful into boiling gravy (about 4 cupsful), cover and cook gently for 8 to 10 minutes or until done.

Hunter Biden Plea Bargain FALLS APART

Nation Hal Turner 26 July 2023

The Hunter Biden plea deal appears to have collapsed.  The so-called ‘Sweetheart deal’ on tax and gun charges seems to have fallen apart in a stunning twist after prosecutors said president’s son could STILL be charged with other crimes.

During his appearance in front of a judge in a federal court in Delaware the president’s scandal-hit son said ‘yes, your honor’ when asked by the judge if he was going to plead guilty, and admitted he’s been to rehab six times in 20 years for addiction to drinking and drugs.

But then the Judge demanded a recess when an agreement between prosecutors and attorneys for the president’s son appeared to fall apart.

Hunter’s attorney Chris Clark said the agreement was ‘null and void’ after top prosecutor Leo Wise said the president’s son could still be charged with other crimes – including violations related to representing foreign governments.

Has anyone ever gained superpowers in real life after an accident?

Jason Padgett

main qimg d1073e9363ff76dbdb2252182c4349e9 lq
main qimg d1073e9363ff76dbdb2252182c4349e9 lq

He was a party guy who hated school and got really bad grades. One day, two men savagely attacked him and robbed Jason outside a bar, leaving him with a severe concussion.

This damage turned him into a math genius and made him learn fractal geometry, which he had never learned before. He then became a renowned mathematician.


Derek Amato

2023 07 25 16 1y9
2023 07 25 16 1y9

At 39, he hit his head after diving into a pool. He was diagnosed with a concussion and 35% hearing loss. After that Derek started seeing black and white keys on his head and out of nowhere started playing the piano like an expert and eventually became a composer.

Ben McMahon

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2023 07 25 16 20

He was in a car accident in 2015 and was in a coma for a week. When he woke up, he spoke perfect Chinese, even though he had only learned the basics in childhood.

Tony Cicero

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2023 07 25 16 20fd

He was struck by lightning while making a call in a phone booth. Within days, he became addicted to music, which wasn’t the case before. After experimenting with the piano, he became a musical artist who composes his own music.

I may not call them superpowers, but they are definitely powers for the uninitiated.

NDE: Woman is Shown Pre-Birth Plan and is SHOCKED to see she Did Not Accomplish her Life’s Purpose

Please enjoy my interview with Norma Edwards about her Near Death Experience!

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2023 07 25 15 41

The CIA

an ALL powerful organization unlike anything the world have ever seen

  • far more powerful than the Illuminati, the Free Masons and all powerful Men like Kim Jong-un
  • this organization had, thru mission creep, amassed GREAT POWERS for itself and now control the most powerful nations on earth
  • in a demonstration of its power, it had also made possible the Presidency of Joe Biden. It was in Ukraine that the CIA co-opted Hunter Biden as it fund bio labs. It also suppressed critical information that allow Joe Biden to win the 2020 election
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2023 07 25 15 51

What most Americans are NOT aware is that the CIA:

  • is the largest drug smuggler in the United States and in many parts of the world. It also arms Narco trafficker in Latin America which destabilized MANY countries
  • the slush funds created from drug smuggling enable it to fund activities outside state control
  • throughout the world, it is responsible for the death of tens of millions of people as it funds wars, mayhem and overthrow governments
  • overseas and in the United States such as in Fort Detrick, it operates bio.chemical labs that conducts research into bio weapons designed to kill and eliminate whole races of people

In the United States, the CIA:

  • spies extensively on Americans
  • control pedophile rings such as those run by Jeffrey Epstein which allows it to control American business and political elites (Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Bill Gates were just some of the individuals who were frequent visitors to Epstein’s island). This control allows it to direct America’s domestic and foreign agenda
  • thru its funding of American and foreign media and think thanks, it promote hate in the United States against China, Russia, Muslims and others distracting Americans from what it is doing and the governing Plutocrats openly stealing from the country and its people
  • it CENSORS books in the United States and fund major Hollywood movies in order to manipulate Americans while funding studies on thought control experiments
  • it’s involvement in the opiate trade has led to the death of millions of Americans devastating lives and communities.

From an organization which was created to gather intelligence from foreign countries, the CIA have evolved to spy on and manipulate Americans as it wage wars and inflict death and chaos which affect millions around the world while controlling bio-chemical weapons. Most of all, it now controls American political and business elites.

What is the CIA up to? As we have seen, the CIA is involve with much nefarious activities. If Oliver Stone is correct, this could also include the assassination of an American President

It has now united the countries of Europe and Japan – countries with a long and bloody history of waging wars of racial domination – after triggering the Ukrainian crises by funding neo-Nazis Ukrainians and triggering the Maidan revolution

for it is clear that the CIA objective is world domination and to set the world alight triggering an orgy of death, chaos and destruction

more than anything else, the CIA represent the physical and spiritual manifestation

of the Dark Angel himself where it has now found a HOME

always seeking power and domination while sowing death and chaos in its wake

it is now in the cusps of accomplishing its objectives of lighting the world on fire

in this world, in a country that is big and small, haven is preparing its favourite son

for that epic confrontation against Evil itself

in order to save the world from a fiery end

Most DETAILED Near Death Experience Ever Recorded; Woman is given TOUR of the Universe! Venia Hill

Please enjoy my interview with Venia Hill about her incredibly in-depth Near Death Experience!

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2023 07 25 15 45

These Humorous Stinker Station Signs Helped to Provide Comic Relief for Motorists in Idaho During the 1950s and ’60s

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When traveling to distant places, it is well to remember where you come from. If you come from Idaho, chances are you are familiar with the Stinker gas stations, which used to put up gag signs along the roads. Those bright yellow Stinker Station signs all with black print truly were an “Idaho only” institution. The Stinker gas stations used to break the monotony of traveling through southern Idaho’s miles of sagebrush with their comic signs.

h/t: vintag.es

“BALLISTIC MISSILE LAUNCHES” UPDATED AGAIN 1:13 PM EDT — Major Air Strikes Against Ukraine

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2023 07 27 10 25

Reports are coming in that Russia has launched 12 TU-95 aircraft carrying missiles for Ukraine

If each aircraft is carrying a full load, that is up to 96 cruise missiles.

Air Raid Sirens are sounding throughout the red shaded areas of Ukraine shown on the map above.  Explosions likely to follow.

Check back.

UPDATE 11:31 AM EDT —

13 Russian Tu-95MS and a number of Tu-160M Strategic Bombers are currently noted Airborne across Western Russia heading towards “Launch Zones” over the Caspian Sea.

A Large Missile Attack on Ukraine _SEEMS_  Imminent.

UPDATE 11:34 AM EDT — 

Preliminary launches of X-101/555 missiles from Tu-95 from the Caspian direction.

CONFIRMED!   Initial Detection by the Ukrainian Air Force of Cruise Missile launches by at least 12 Russian Tu-95MS Strategic Bombers over the Caspian Sea; the Missiles should be entering Ukrainian Airspace within the next hour. 

UPDATE 11:38 AM EDT — 

ADDITIONAL MISSILE ATTACKS NOW TAKING PLACE!  High-speed missiles entering Ukraine from the north, Ukraine’s air force says.

These are DAYLIGHT launches, not something the Russians usually do.

UPDATE 11:40 AM EDT —

Cruise Missiles Flying towards Kharkiv, Donetsk, Dnipropetrovsk .

Possible direction – Kremenchuk, Kropyvnytskyi!

Explosions are reported in Berislav district of  Kherson region and in Kharkov.

UPDATE 11:43 AM EDT —

Right now, Ukrainians are in a panic that has long crossed the line of hysteria.

Rockets over the Kirovograd region towards Kiev;

More missiles in the direction of the Vinnitsa region;

Rockets over the Zhytomyr region;

Zhytomyr region Powerful explosions;

Borispol, Kiev region, Explosions; Zhytomyr region.

Detonation of two warehouses with ammunition.

UPDATE 12:07 PM EDT —

Apparently, the Russian Air Force took significant steps to deceive the Ukrainian air defense; today’s missiles are constantly changing course in mid-flight!

 Russian cruise missiles are flying to Vinnytsia, Mykolaiv and Odesa regions, — Ukrainian Air Force.

Explosions reported in Dnepropetrovsk region.

The second wave of Russian missiles is entering from the East.

Cruise missiles on the approaches to Vinnytsia, Mykolaiv, and Odesa regions!

MORE:

Explosions Reported in Dnepropetrovsk and Kirovograd Regions

It appears that a portion of the Iskander missiles have successfully struck their intended targets.

The activation of the air raid alert following the initial strikes indirectly confirms the accuracy of the hits on these targets.

Moreover, there are indications that a ballistic missile strike targeted an assembly shop in Kharkov, which was allegedly involved in the production of drones.

As for the cruise missiles launched from the Caspian region, they have not yet reached their intended destinations.

There is speculation that these missiles could potentially target certain sites belonging to the Armed Forces of Ukraine in the Khmelnitsky and Vinnitsa regions.

NEW:  A group of missiles is moving along the border with Moldova in the direction of Khmelnytskyi region!

UPDATE 12:13 PM EDT —

Multiple explosions heard in Khmelnytskyi region

UPDATE 12:25 PM EDT —

Missiles entering Lviv.

Lviv region advised to take cover immediately, missiles inbound.

 Volyn and Rivne regions. Missiles also fly towards you.

 COURSE CHANGES – AGAIN:   Several RU cruise missiles turned from Lviv to Volyn region NOW!  Some rockets in the Ternopil region made a 180-degree turn.

 A group of missiles from Ternopil Oblast changes course to Zhytomyr Oblast, another group in the direction of Lviv Oblast and Volyn Oblast.

 UKRAINE authorities in panic, now hysteria: screaming to citizens “Missiles constantly change their flight path. Stay in shelters!”

UPDATE 12:46 PM EDT —

Russian “Dagger” missiles heading in the direction of Kyiv!

(NOTE: Today’s ongoing missile barrages appear to be the largest and longest-sustained attack since the Russia-Ukraine conflict began.   Ter for months, we were all told “Russia is running out of missiles.”  HMMMMM.  Looks like the people telling us that were . . .  ahem . . . wrong.)

AT LEAST FOUR (4) HYPERSONIC “KINZHAL” MISSILES HAVE BEEN LAUNCHED AND APPEAR HEADING TOWARD KIEV.

MORE:

Iskander missiles have JUST BEEN launched from the Bryansk region Russia.

***** FLASH *****

Multiple reports coming in claiming land-to-land BALLISTIC MISSILE LAUNCHES have taken place inside Russia, heading toward Ukraine.

UPDATE 12:57 PM EDT —

Explosions heard once again in the City of Khmelnytskyi in Western Ukraine.

UPDATE 1:13 PM EDT

The attack seems to have subsided.  No additional missiles are being tracked in, or toward, Ukraine.

Unconfirmed Reports that Starokostiantyniv Air Base in the Khmelnytskyi Region of Western Ukraine has been struck by at least 5 Russian Cruise Missiles.  This Base is Home to the 7th Tactical Aviation Brigade who operate Su-24 Tactical Bombers which are claimed to be the __ONLY__  Ukraine aircraft capable of utilizing “Storm Shadow” Air-Launched Cruise Missiles provided by the UK and France. 

If this base and its planes have been put out of commission, then Russia achieved multiple wins; knocking out more Ukraine air power and HALTING the ability of Ukraine to use STORM SHADOW missiles, anywhere in the country.

Reports are that this is attack was focused on NATO Assets, Supplies, and Command Centers inside Ukraine, which would explain the daylight strikes.

THIS ENDS ONGOING UPDATES

Cajun Pork Chili

2023 07 27 11 25
2023 07 27 11 25

Ingredients

  • 2 pounds ground pork
  • 2 large onions, chopped
  • 4 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 sweet red bell pepper, chopped
  • 1 sweet green bell pepper, chopped
  • 3 stalks celery, chopped
  • 1 (28 ounce) can tomatoes
  • 1 (28 ounce) can kidney beans, drained
  • 1/4 teaspoon hot pepper flakes
  • 1 teaspoon dried oregano*
  • 1/4 teaspoon cayenne pepper
  • Dash of hot pepper sauce
  • Salt and pepper

Instructions

  1. In a heavy saucepan, cook the pork over medium heat, stirring to break up the meat, for about 5 minutes or until browned. Pour off the fat.
  2. Add onions, and cook until tender. Add garlic, red and green peppers and celery. Cook, stirring occasionally, for 5 minutes or until vegetables are softened.
  3. Add tomatoes, breaking them up with the back of a spoon. Stir in kidney beans, hot pepper flakes, oregano, cayenne pepper, hot pepper sauce and salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil; reduce heat and simmer for 20 minutes.

Notes

* If you prefer a more traditional chili flavor, use cumin instead of oregano, and add chili powder to taste.

What is it like to live on a small island? What does it smell like? What do people miss from the mainland?

Originally Answered: What is it like to live on a small island?

I’ll answer for an island of 300 in the Maldives.

  • Enjoy? Things get boring very quickly unless you LOVE water sports or fishing. After we exhausted these options, cabin fever set in really quickly. Chess is a favorite pastime for locals.
  • Lizards and spiders galore, bats hanging in trees all day. Mosquitos are everywhere and the sand fleas are worse. Locals seem to have developed a tolerance for both though.
  • Translucent crabs COVER the edges of the island closest to the ocean from dusk to dawn.
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2023 07 25 16 29

Biggest swimming pool ever

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2023 07 25 16 2r9

The reefs are absolutely magnificent

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2023 07 25 16 30

Fantastic visibility

  • Supplies come once and sometimes twice a week – you miss everything and if you don’t order it or get it on the day or even hour it’s delivered, you’re out of luck that week.
  • There is one small general store that has a regular refrigerator for Kit Kat ice cream cones and bottled water/soda (only Holstein’s that I can’t even find online) – while they last.
  • Most mosquito coils in the general store are so old they won’t light
  • More coconuts and fresh fish than you could ever begin to try to eat
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2023 07 25 16 3ew0

The boat that brings the supplies

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2023 07 25 16 3ge0

Waiting to board the boat – yep, you can go for free but you’re gonna ride with the bananas, pineapples, bread and orange juice headed for the resorts

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2023 07 25 16 31v

Knocked out on the floor of the ship. There wasn’t an open spot left anywhere.

  • It smells like ocean, sand, coconuts, fish, and musky people – no deodorant, obviously
  • Air conditioning and heating don’t exist – ditto for heated water.
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2023 07 25 16 31g

We caught all these fish using fishing line and a hook tied to a water bottle. We just let the line drop and our “captain” drove around until one of us got a bite. No more than five minutes and usually less than a minute. I’ve never fished so easily in my life.

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2023 07 25 16 32y

Brian with the fancy fishing “rod”

  • Sometimes fish is cooked by gutting, covering with salt, spearing with a freshly picked palm frond and roasting lightly over a coconut husk fire
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2023 07 25 16 328

Cooking on the deserted island across the atoll from where we stayed

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2023 07 25 16 3s2

Yeah, there were plates on the deserted (read: private party) island. They get rinsed in the ocean.

  • Everyone eats with their hands. All the time.
  • Everyone knows everything about everyone – this cannot be underestimated. You have ZERO privacy
  • Even though everyone knows everything, there are still drug (heroin) and alcohol abuse problems – they are isolated enough that they protect each others privacy from the rest of the world.
  • You can walk from one side of the island to the other in under 15 minutes if you go slow. 10 minutes for a nice, brisk pace.
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2023 07 25 16 3e3

One of the two main “streets”

  • Most furniture is made from wood and rope – withstands the sand and wind quite well
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2023 07 25 16 3ere3

Finishing off another coconut in my favorite chair

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2023 07 25 16 34

Pretty cool six seater chair

  • There is a plane ambulance for major health emergencies – it has to fly to the island and fly back out
  • There is a speedboat ambulance within the atoll that will take you to another, slightly larger island with doctors for less major medical emergencies
  • There is one doctor from India who lives on the island part time for basic checkups and minor health care needs
  • There’s a large soccer (football) field that is used nightly, an open air mosque, and an open air two room school house
  • ZERO automobiles, a couple bicycles, a motorbike (maybe 50cc) every local rolls their eyes at because it’s so ridiculous (I think they’re waiting for him to accidentally ride into the ocean), and a couple carts for hauling what comes in on the boats
  • Two plastic lawn chairs at the end of one lane that faces the nearby resort island. On a good day, you can pick up the wifi from across the ocean. Spotty, but workable. Some days, people wait in rotation for a chair.


Hope that helps. Perhaps you’re looking for details about a bigger island, but some stuff should be similar. Good luck!

US Begins Draw-Down of ACTIVE ARSENAL to Give to Ukraine

World Hal Turner 26 July 2023

The US is giving another $400 MILLION (Corrected) of Military aid to Ukraine but this time, the weaponry is coming out of the ACTIVE ARSENAL and NOT coming from reserves or excess inventory! The Active Arsenal exists to defend the USA itself.

The US confirmed a new aid package to Ukraine valued at up to $400 million. It comes direct from Department of Defense stocks.

The capabilities in this package include:

1. Additional munitions for Patriot air defense systems and National Advanced Surface-to-Air Missile Systems (NASAMS);

2. Stinger anti-aircraft systems;

3. Additional ammunition for High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS);

4. 155mm and 105mm artillery rounds;

5. 120mm and 60mm mortar rounds;

6. 32 Stryker Armored Personnel Carriers;

7. Tube-Launched, Optically-Tracked, Wire-Guided (TOW) missiles;

8. Javelin and other anti-armor systems and rockets;

9. Hornet Unmanned Aerial Systems;

10. Hydra-70 aircraft rockets;

11. Tactical air navigation systems;

12. Demolitions munitions for obstacle clearing;

13. Over 28 million rounds of small arms ammunition and grenades;

14. Night vision devices and thermal imagery systems; and,

15. Spare parts, training munitions, and other field equipment.

This latest gift of military aid is now directly impacting the ability of the United States to defend ITSELF.

It’s almost as if someone in government is deliberately doing things to the country to make us vulnerable to invasion!

Smoky Pasta and Bean Soup

Warm up with this hearty soup. Serve with warmed bread sticks and a salad.

68e34c05d98c7e4635fa7ee0ba9b663c pasta dinner recipes recipe pasta
68e34c05d98c7e4635fa7ee0ba9b663c pasta dinner recipes recipe pasta

Ingredients

  • 6 slices bacon
  • 1 small onion, finely chopped
  • 1 rib celery, finely chopped
  • 1 medium carrot, peeled and grated
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1/8 teaspoon hot red pepper flakes, crushed
  • 2 cups canned crushed tomatoes
  • 2 1/2 cups canned white beans, drained
  • 6 cups chicken broth
  • 3/4 cup macaroni or other small paste shape
  • Fresh Parmesan cheese, grated (optional)

Instructions

  1. In a large deep skillet, sauté bacon until some fat is rendered; add onion, celery, carrot, garlic and red pepper to skillet and sauté until vegetables are softened, about 10 minutes.
  2. Stir in tomatoes, cook and stir occasionally for 10 more minutes.
  3. Stir in beans; add broth and bring to a gentle boil. Add macaroni (or other small pasta) and continue cooking until pasta is tender, but still firm, about 15 minutes.
  4. Serve immediately with Parmesan cheese if desired; or cover, refrigerate and reheat gently to serving temperature.

Prep: 15 min | Cook: 45 min | Servings: 8

Nutrition information: Calories: 180 calories Protein: 10 grams Fat: 6 grams Sodium: 1310 milligrams Cholesterol: 10 milligrams Saturated Fat: 1 grams Carbohydrates: 26 grams

Can the US fight against all its adversaries at once like Russia, China, Iran and North Korea?

Right now, as of 2023, the “adversaries” against the United States is roughly about 85% of the global population.

The United States is a tiny part of the globe, and getting smaller each day.

So, who is the United States, and it’s allies, that the Mainstream Media like to refer to as “most of the world”…

American proxy nations.

These nations will do what the United States say. The methods of control vary from nation to nation, but they are not independent at all. It is extremely unlikely that these nations would do anything without asking the United States for permission first.

  • Canada
  • UK
  • Minor European states
  • Japan

American friends.

These are proxy nations that might have the ability to “break away” from the United States if conditions are favorable. Each nation operations under their own unique conditions. Some desire to be United States proxies, but Geo-political realities prevent full engagement, others wish to be more distant, but again, Geo-political realities prevent that as well. These nations are in a sort of limbo, and political expedience results in a default abeyance to American dictates.

  • Israel
  • Germany
  • Poland
  • France
  • Switzerland
  • Sweden
  • Finland

Neutral

These nations are trying to walk the razor-thin line of neutrality. There are internal elements that are dividing the ruling leadership. The issues involved in these nations are complex. Yet, their actions suggest that they are trying to “play both Geo-political blocks”.

  • Australia
  • Philippines
  • South Korea

The Global South.

These are the current “enemies” of the United States “Western” ideological block.

Some are codified, and formalized, such as Russia. Some are not formally engaged, such as China. Some are considered to be “American easy lays” such as South East Asia, though they are anything but that.

  • Russia
  • China
  • North Korea
  • Iran
  • Pakistan
  • All of the ‘Stan’s
  • South East Asia
  • Much of Africa
  • Brazil
  • South Africa
  • Argentina
  • Much of South America

Neutral but leaning with the Global South

These nations are currently picking sides. Most intel suggest that they are strongly leaning towards the Global South and rejecting the “American way of life”.

  • Mexico
  • Most of Latin America
  • India
  • Turkey
  • Bulgera

And that is pretty much the entire world. So, if you look at the list above, you can see the reality of what the world has fractured into.

A “West”; led by the United States. It promotes “American values”, “American democracy”, and woke progressive ideology. They use the USD as the dominant trade currency, and are referred to as the “English speaking world”. (Though that is NOT an accurate statement.) It’s an “American rules” order. It represents 15% of the world

An “East”. Led by the China-Russia-Iran-Saudi Arabia- Brazil-South African nexus. It’s a “multi-polar” order. Organized fundamentally under the UN charter. It is further subdivided into sub-blocks such as G20, BRICS+, and SEO. They use a basket of currencies based on hard tangible resources to trade. And combined, represents 85% of the world.

No.

It is unlikely that the United States can fight the entirety of the rest of the world and win. How likely or unlikely, is dependent on your personal point of view, and the intelligence or “news” that you (personally) consume.

  • American neocon = Likely that the United States will win, because it is blessed by God.
  • Typical proxy nation citizen = Tough call. Maybe the United States can persevere.
  • Global South Citizen = We are constantly underestimated. The United States cannot win.

Road to Bali (1952, Adventure) Bing Crosby, Bob Hope, Dorothy Lamour | Full Movie, Subtitles

Today’s treat. Full movie. Great background movie.

Actually this movie is AWESOME!

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2023 07 27 11 39
2023 07 27 11 4r2
2023 07 27 11 4r2
2023 07 27 11 e42
2023 07 27 11 e42
2023 07 27 11 40
2023 07 27 11 40
2023 07 27 11 41
2023 07 27 11 41

It is fun. Enjoy your opportunities today.

The USA is terminal at Late Stage Death.

The United States is in absolute LATE STAGE collapse.

The society is destroyed, and there isn’t a middle class left. Businesses still operate and manage under the few pockets of commerce that still exist, however the labor force is unemployed, unskilled and have “checked out”. Nothing much remains outside of the enclaves.

The American “leadership” are fixated on war, and profits from that war. More war they demand, and now they want really BIG wars so that they can make really BIG profits.

They are absolute idiots.

China is aptly dancing around these Bozos, but how long can this charade keep up? No one knows, not indefinitely. There’s gonna have to be some bitch-slapping sooner or later. I’ll tell you what.

Enjoy these videos. Must watch all. As they describe the true measure of what we all can expect…

Allow me to say something crazy that you haven't heard elsewhere.

While Putin may have foolishly believed in Minsk 2, and now Russia is in a shooting war with a neighbor and kin that it cannot afford to lose (and as a nuclear armed nation, will not lose). Strategically, it will be weakened whatever the outcome.

On the other hand, America has committed an even more grievous mistake. 

It is the greatest blunder since the establishment of the empire. You can trust something like this will happen because the empire is now run by morons and imbeciles. America has made the Ukraine War an existential conflict for the empire. 

It has now committed the entire empire and all its vassals in a total war against Russia. There are no negotiations, no cease fire, no peace, only unconditional surrender (the chance of Russia surrendering is zero). 

The US could afford to lose to Vietnam and Afghanistan, but it cannot afford to lose this war to Russia. 

When that happens, guess what the vassals will do. This is the last war of the empire, folks. Meanwhile, China and BRICS+ will continue to attack the USD, with or without India (I'm guessing the BRICS currency will be a trade instrument like the SDU rather than a sovereign currency like the EURO, it will be designed to compete against the USD in trade, particularly among BRICS+ nations, no one will be forced to use it, but one can circumvent the USD ecosystem with it). Let's see how long the empire and its fake economy can hold out on this two-front war.

"You fool, you fell victim to one of the classic blunders. Never get involved in a land war in Asia (or with Russia)." -- Vizzini the Sicilian (Princess Bride)

-PM

American “democracy”

The thing you need to understand is that it’s not just how much influence a billionaire has. It’s also how trivial it is for them to exert it.

A billionaire can pay the equivalent of a nickel to a team of lobbyists that he never even needs to see or hear from, who will work relentlessly to accomplish that billionaires desires.

An average person needs not only to vote, but donate far greater sums across huge groups of people, they need to call legislators and go to protests and organizations.

main qimg 635655e338c4eb3c2039d30a7f5957d5
main qimg 635655e338c4eb3c2039d30a7f5957d5

1940s USA – Fascinating Street Scenes of Vintage America [Colorized]

This is totally cool!

Immerse yourself in the vibrant atmosphere of bustling cities and charming small towns that defined the American landscape during this transformative decade.

Witness the stylish attire, iconic automobiles, and timeless architecture that painted the backdrop for everyday life.

From the shimmering lights of New York City to the laid-back charm of small-town America, each image tells a story of a bygone era.

What is one thing that happened on the school bus that you’ll never forget?

When I was in grade 6, I was bullied everyday by this idiot at the back of the bus. I tried telling the bus driver, but he didn’t care. One day, I was wearing a sweater that my mom got me when she went to England for my grandmother’s funeral. The back of the bus idiot had a water pistol filled with grape juice and was spraying other kids, and of course he started spraying me. By this time I had had enough of this idiot and trying to ignore him everyday wasn’t working. I was mad he got grape juice on my new sweater, so I stood up, went to the back of the bus and told the idiot to stand up, he asked why he should and I told him I wasn’t going to beat the shit out of a guy who’s sitting down. Then I yelled at him to stand up, he went all quiet and wouldn’t look at me, so I told him if he ever bugged me again, I’d beat his ass, then I went and sat down again. I heard his friend ask him “who you going to pick on now?” and he replied “shut up”. The next day I got on the bus, this guy called me to the back of the bus as he saved a seat for me. I never did like that guy but we now had an understanding. The main thing I learned from that was to stand up for myself, a lesson I have carried with me to this day. Bullies really are cowards.

Young Gals Are In DISBELIEF As Men Are No Longer Attending Singles Events

We begin after a view of the past to notice TRENDS of what is going on in the present. These are AMERICAN trends. Nothing like this even remotely resembling this in China.

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2023 07 18 16 00

Korea del Norte shows middle finger to US on peace talks

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2023 07 18 15 29

Pyongyang has dismissed a US proposal for negotiations, saying the country’s nuclear program cannot be stopped.

North Korea has dismissed a US proposal for peace talks as a ploy, accusing Washington of provoking conflict in the region while holding out false hope that it can persuade Pyongyang to halt its nuclear weapons program by temporarily easing sanctions or suspending military exercises.

Kim Yo-jong, North Korea’s foreign policy chief and sister of leader Kim Jong-un, said on Monday that the best way to ensure peace and stability on the Korean peninsula is for Pyongyang to amply display its military might, “rather than solving the problem with the gangster-like Americans in a friendly manner.” She called Washington’s latest offer of peace negotiations a “trick” to buy time.

Kim made her comments one day after US President Joe Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, told reporters that Washington was willing to negotiate with North Korea “without preconditions” concerning its nuclear weapons program. He said the Biden administration is closely monitoring the threats posed by North Korea’s missile launches and is concerned that Pyongyang will conduct its seventh nuclear warhead test.

Similarly, Kim said the US and its allies could easily renege on diplomatic concessions. “It is as easy as pie for the US political circles to exclude the DPRK from the list of ‘sponsors of terrorism’ today but re-list it tomorrow.” She claimed that tensions in the region have escalated on Biden’s watch to the point that “the possibility of an actual armed conflict and even the outbreak of a nuclear war is debated.”

Why do you think Iran wants to go the same way? Its insurance for them. Once 20–25 countries have these nukes, it would be a multipolar world all by itself.

Well done NOKO!

$32.1 Billion Chinese Chip Order Canceled, China Installs First Domestic Lithography Machine!

Amid U.S. chip limitation rules, the Chinese chip sector is undergoing a dramatic shift. China has responded by moving decisively in the direction of reaching self-sufficiency. China is giving local chip production top priority with the lofty goal of achieving a 70% self-sufficiency rate in chips. The increased research and development efforts Shanghai Microelectronics has made in the area of lithography machines are a noteworthy development in this endeavor. Chinese businesses have successfully accepted the first lithography machine made locally, which is a significant achievement and an indication of this growth.

Roasted Asparagus with Feta

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2023 07 15 14 05

Ingredients

  • 2 1/2 pounds medium asparagus, trimmed
  • 2 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • 2 ounces feta cheese, crumbled (1/2 cup)

Instructions

  1. Put oven rack in lower third of oven and preheat oven to 500 degrees F.
  2. Toss asparagus with oil, salt, and pepper in a large shallow baking pan and arrange in 1 layer.
  3. Roast, shaking pan once about halfway through roasting, until asparagus is just tender when pierced with a fork, 8 to 14 minutes total.
  4. Serve asparagus sprinkled with cheese.

RICHARD WOLFF ON CHINA, BRICS, AND THE DECLINE OF THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

Economist Richard Wolff joins the program to discuss his latest work analyzing the rise of China, BRICS, and how an emerging new world economy is putting an end to the delusions of the US empire.

Switzerland will classify information about the collapse of Credit Suisse

(EurAsia Daily, July 17, 2023 — in Russian)

Swiss parliamentary commission will classify the results of its investigation into the collapse of Credit Suisse for 50 years, Reuters reports, citing commission documents. Typically, such documents are out of the public domain in Switzerland for 30 years.

“After the completion of the investigation, the files should be transferred to the Federal Archives and should be subject to an extended period of protection of 50 years,” the parliamentary commission decided.

The president of the Swiss Society for History, Sacha Zala, expressed concern to the head of the commission, Isabelle Chassot, about the decision to classify documents for such a long period.

“If researchers want to scientifically investigate the 2023 banking crisis, access to the CS files will be invaluable,” Zala said.

The parliamentary committee, on the contrary, believes that the disclosure of data is detrimental to the credibility of the commission and may have “negative consequences for the financial center of Switzerland.”

Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s second largest bank, found itself in a difficult position after the collapse of U.S.’s Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and Silvergate Capital. Shares of Credit Suisse on the Swiss Stock Exchange (SIX) on March 15 reached a historical low. Price collapsed by 30.8% to 1.55 Swiss francs, which was the biggest drop in one day. At the close on March 15, the fall was 24.2%, to 1.7 Swiss francs.

In addition to the situation with U.S. banks, the decline in price was affected by the refusal of the largest shareholder of Credit Suisse, Saudi National Bank, to buy more of the bank’s shares. They said they would not buy more shares so as not to violate regulatory requirements.

After that, Credit Suisse turned to the Swiss National Bank (SNB) and the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) for support, the Financial Times reported, citing sources. As a result, the Swiss National Bank approved the plan to rescue Credit Suisse: the country’s second bank was to be absorbed by the UBS group. The merger of the two largest and oldest Swiss banks took place on March 19. The transaction took place on the terms of 0.76 Swiss francs per CS share, that is, the total amount was 3 billion francs ($3.24 billion).

In the spirit of true openness and transparency, Switzerland, a mature democracy, classifies information about what happened to its second largest bank for 50 years. Totally unlike those closed opaque authoritarian countries of China and Russia!

Posted by: S | Jul 17 2023 20:14 utc | 20

Back to the Future Mall (Puente Hills) is completely dead no business

Today I went to the Puente Hills mall in the city of commerce. The mall is best known for the 1984 movie back to the future. They filmed right in the parking lot of Coors. I had to match up pictures from the movie back to the future afterwords I walked into the mall and I was completely shocked. The inside is totally dead. Barely any people only a few shops are open. It’s really sad to see that. What once was an awesome mall is now almost like a graveyard.

Have you ever purchased a used car and found something interesting the previous owner forgot to remove?

When travelling around New Zealand a few years back I purchased an old BMW 325i coupe as it was cheaper than a rental for the 6 months i was there for. It was a South African built car that had been brought over when the owners emigrated to NZ.

Anyway. I was driving in the South Island when a car driven by German tourists slid across the road and hit me head on causing a major accident, the airbags went off and I was knocked unconscious.

When I awoke I was being treated in the car and the police were asking me where had the gold kruggerands come from?

I was baffled and then I saw that they were everywhere and the police were picking them up from the floor of the car, on the seats and outside.

What had happened was there was a large stash of the coins hidden in the car when it went to New Zealand as it was illegal to take out so much currency when you left South Africa and they had been behind the dash board for some 8 years.

The police were unable to find the original owners of the car when it was imported as they had moved to Australia so after 3 months I was deemed to be the rightful owner as they were found in the car i owned.

It was a tax free windfall that netted me just over $250,000 NZD which I used to buy a beach house in New Zealand in sunny Northland where I still live to this day.

China Public Toilet vs India Public Toilet – This is truly shocking…

Can China develop its own chip industry?

China already has.

There are a lot more machines than lithography in a fab. You also need ion implanters, ovens, cleaning machines (don’t discount this. Cleaning is needed after every step. And it uses ultra pure water which is difficult to do. The water must be 99.9999% pure H2O.), epitaxy machines, photo resist at the nm level that you want to create circuits at, metrology (measurement and testing. How do you know your chips works?), packaging (we don’t use chips by themselves. They have to be put into a package and connected to external pins.), etc.

And China has everything down to 3nm except for lithography machines. Photo resist is at 7nm, it will hit 5nm next year, maybe 3nm. Lithography machine is still at 48nm. And will go into mass production soon. 28nm machine will be done by next year and will be tested either next year or the year later.

EUV machines require 3 core technologies. One is the light source. China has a couple that works. They need to do reliability and then shrink the package down as much as possible.

The second one is the stage. This is the thing that carries the wafer and moves it into place for the lithography to happen. It has to be precise at the nm that you want to make.

Third is the lens and coatings to ensure proper light transmission and reflection. The light must be directional and collimated to a high degree. If any of the light is traveling not in a straight line, then your image on the photoresist will be smeared. China also has done this.

The only thing left is to put it all together and then do testing. This will take 3–5 years. Then test in a production facility, which will take another 6 months to year. Then they will adjust the design, finalize the design, and go into production. So anywhere between 4–7 years.

But China is the only nation that has the entire industrial chain for producing micro chips. No other nation has this. If they want to build a fab, it requires technology from a bunch of countries.

Graham Hancock on What Could Be HIDDEN In Antarctica

New member of the family

Not MM. -MM

I finally got around to adopt another cat. My home is set up for 2 cats. I have two of everything, two food bowls, two litter boxes, two cat perches by the window, etc., etc. Looking at two of everything and yet only one cat just makes me feel miserable.

So I went to the local shelter and adopted a new cat.

Introducing the new cat.

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2023 07 17 16 58e

Her name was Cinnabun at the shelter, but I hadn’t thought of a name yet. I figure since Newt never really warmed up to his name, and with Jonesy’s death, I want to do away with “Alien” themed names. Maybe I’ll go with food-themed names, like Bean Bun, or Dumpling, or Putting, or Boba.

Cinnabun was a 4-month-old rescue (hence the docked ear). She was playful and very curious. Love to explore and purrs like a diesel engine.

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2023 07 17 16 58

Newt is doing OK so far. I think he’s more confused than hostile. He hissed at the new girl a few times and mostly just watched her from his high perch (places the new cat isn’t able to go). I haven’t observed any other aggressive behavior from Newt other than the occasional hissing. I hope they become good friends, the way Jonesy and Newt never were.

I feel a lot better now I have a new kitten to keep me busy. She is a handful, always climbing around and sneaking into places.

I hope Cinnabun, Newt, and I have many happy years to come.

Poverty in America is by design

Poverty in America is intentional.

Centipede, Spider And Other Creepy Animal-Inspired Handbags Created By A Japanese Artist

5d96fd5dd648a insects 2 5d94891a5942c 700
5d96fd5dd648a insects 2 5d94891a5942c 700

How does a giant centipede sound to you? Or a giant spider? Or maybe a football-sized flea? Would you wear one of these creepy-crawlies as an accessory? Well, if your phobias hadn’t kicked in yet, we’ve got something interesting for you. Japanese artist Amanojaku to Hesomagari creates eerily lifelike handbags and accessories inspired by all sorts of insects and animals that not only look cool but are also a great way to give your friends a nice scare.

More: Amanojaku to Hesomagari, Twitter h/t: demilked, boredpanda

This is a nice speech.

Very interesting. Whether you like him or not. Very interesting content.

https://youtu.be/bEDDG-FuEn4

“I would just like to share what I witnessed yesterday morning at Bagels N’ Buns.

Not MM. -MM

I was waiting at the counter for an order and a homeless man asked one of the employees to please fill his half gallon, plastic milk carton with water. The worker said “what are you going to use it for?”

Now I’m jumping the gun in my head, thinking he was going to say that if he wanted it for drinking he has to buy a bottle blah blah blah…

The man said “to drink”, the employee told him to “please go over to the cooler and get whatever size water he’d like.”

He then filled up the milk carton as requested. The man thanked the employee for the water but said he was really hungry and could use a meal.

The worker Benny said “no problem! What would you like?”

The man gave him his order and he got to it with a smile on his face.

I then went over to the register to ask Kathie (who is AMAZING) if I could give her money for him, to use a credit for a few meals.

She replied “Janessa, that is so kind, but we feed him whenever he is hungry. He always has a meal here, when he needs.”

They’ve been doing it for years!!!

Another reason for me to love them over there. I was really moved by the whole situation.

I felt the need to share this because when businesses give from the heart, when they are hurting the most, they deserve a shout out BIG love shout to Mike, Katie, and the whole crew at Bagels n Buns.”

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main qimg 156ae5d7ec9d6c4623cfefb49678cb1a

Russian Airstrike Annihilates Ukraine’s Drone Control Centre, Starlink Station In Kherson

Not reported elsewhere. But I have been wondering when Russia would get around to this…

Ukraine’s UAV control centre and a Starlink communication station have been destroyed in a fresh Russian airstrike.

The Starlink Centre was located on the right bank of the Dnieper River in the Kherson Region.

Russia also claimed to have destroyed 25 Ukrainian soldiers in an SU-35 airstrike on the command post of the 222nd separate battalion of the Ukrainian armed forces. Watch this video to know all the latest from Russia-Ukraine war.

Russian S-550 That Can Hunt ICBMs Spooks Putin’s Enemies; Air Defence System Can Cripple Even U.S.

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2023 07 16 17 24

Russia is developing its most advanced air defence system, the S-550. The formidable weapon system is able to eliminate intercontinental ballistic missiles at a longer range as well as satellites. According to TASS, the S-550 could be commissioned as early as 2025.

Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoygu cited the statement of President Vladimir Putin about the necessity to “deliver the air defence systems S-550 to the Russian troops”. It implies that Russia has successfully developed an undeniably unknown weapon and is about to deploy it.

This announcement took the public by surprise, yet the military circles have not unveiled any details about this new machinery nor have they agreed on giving any relevant commentaries. Also goes by the name 55R6M “Triumfator-M”, S550 is a Russian surface-to-air missile/anti-ballistic missile system created to replace the A-135 missile system presently in service, and to also provide support for the S-400.

The S-500 was developed by the Almaz-Antey Air Defence Concern. According to the Pravda report, due to its characteristics, S-550 is unrivalled by any other similar system in the world, being the top of its classes of space-defence weapons. Still citing the same report, it is known that the weapon shares similarity with the US Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) system in that it will be synthesized into a single network of assets of defence in aerospace.

INTERVIEW: The President’s brain is scrambled

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2023 07 15 14 59

Would you rather live in the state of Ohio or China?

I feel called out.

Jonathan Carlson’s answer to Would you rather live in the state of Ohio or China? is great, but in his own admission he’s from Minnesota.

I’m actually from Ohio, the good old Buckeye state with all those (American) Indian

[1] burial mounds, covered bridges, and the most natively born US presidents (*shifty eyes at Virginia*). We’ve got Dayton and the beginnings of flight, Neil Armstrong, canals and railroads, and a lot of hogs.

[2] Also Lake Erie.

Ohio is, at best, quaint. It’s as “middle” as it gets for America (*shifty eyes at KC, MO*) and incredibly American in the most understated, fact-of-the-matter way. Ohio doesn’t seek respect nor deserve it, and it is the butt monkey of the US as a result. It isn’t even unknown enough to fade into the background like those more gracious and wild plains states — being the proverbial fat kid on the playground, it is just impossible to miss, even though everyone wants to miss it.

Everyone knows the joke; round on the outside, high in the middle. Or for the younger folk, it means “hello” in Japanese (*shifty eyes at the Japanese*). Yes, we make fun of ourselves too — haha, welcome to Ohayocon , the local anime convention.

Shockingly high amount of decently sized cities, at least for American standards.

You also will not care for most of them and that’s okay. The state always surprises people with how many electoral votes it gets. And while it’s not iconic with its niceness like the rest of the Midwest (and especially those southern Canadi- I mean, Minnesotans), we still embrace that niceness like we belong. Even if the rest of the Midwest keeps giving us the side eye when roll call happens.

I just described the Ohio of 20 years ago.

Ohio today is so much more desperate than back then. To put it simply, Ohio is what America abandoned — railroad, industrialized, cooperative USA brimming with heavy industry and evenly distributed urban centers.

It is a free state that doesn’t act like one anymore. It is a place of extreme brain drain, where the Ohioans who could amount to something have long moved away. Those who remain pick up the dregs and make do with one of the rustiest parts of the rust belt.

Ohio is a place of the past.

If you have plenty of wealth and want a nice, quiet place to just exist in, then Ohio is your game. If, however, you are young, not rich, ambitious, or otherwise eager to meet interesting people, Ohio is a death sentence.

China is basically the exact opposite.

It’s a dynamic, roiling mass of chaos that will leave you in the dust if you don’t keep up. Everything there is couched in hurry up and wait, yet things happen super fast far too often so there’s no way to really relax. Ambitious people are everywhere important and will screw the honest, gullible ones, but even the country as a whole seems to be changing that. You can’t say anything you want on the internet, but shooting the shit and talking politics with a beer on the street is incredibly easy and liberating.

China is abandoning the countryside while also featuring the lives of rural folk 24/7 on state television. It has a lot of really patriotic young people who do not see eye to eye with the older folk who tend to think that everything the US does is great and everything the Chinese government does is foul and misguided. Again, the exact opposite of Ohio — the kids are all disillusioned, while the older folk cling to former glory (at least they also think the Chinese government is foul and misguided!).

There is no honest way to get an image of China.

The whole place is so big and diverse, each place proves your ignorance, as if you’ve never been around. Ohio can do that too, but it won’t shove your ignorance in your face. The place is more content to be ignored. Such is the curse of suburbia — every corner looks the exact same.

China is too unpredictable. Ohio is too predictable. There’s no clear answer.

If I had to give a preference, probably China. I’m an introvert, and there is something truly magical about being able to disappear into a dense city behind anonymity and just be alone among a sea of people. Also I enjoy walking, and there are plenty of places in China that meet the 15 or even 10 minute walkable city standard.

Ohio? You better have a car. There’s not even a subway system in the entire state, and only a couple places have light rail.

2023 07 15 13 31
2023 07 15 13 31

What could have been…

[3]

Also, good luck finding a high paying job in Ohio… oh, I suppose that’s why my family moved out.

Footnotes

[1]Miami people – Wikipedia

[2]Big Pig Gig – Wikipedia

[3]Cincinnati Subway – Wikipedia

Putin’s expected visit to China shows growing mutual trust: experts

By Fan Anqi Published: Jul 13, 2023 08:51 PM

Wang Yi, director of the Office of the Foreign Affairs Commission of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee, met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov on Thursday on the sidelines of the ASEAN-China Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Jakarta, Indonesia. The two sides agreed to maintain high-level exchanges and enhance cooperation amid a turbulent world.

The meeting came amid reports of reported visit of Russian President Vladimir Putin to China within this year, which experts said shows a growing mutual trust despite Western attempts to sow discord between the two sides, and that the trip is expected to yield more results in multilateral and bilateral pragmatic cooperation.

One day before their meeting, the Kremlin confirmed on Wednesday that a visit by Russian President Vladimir Putin to China was on the agenda, and the Kremlin noted that now was a good time to maintain high dynamics in the development of relations between Russia and China.

In the face of profound changes unseen in a century, China and Russia firmly support each other in safeguarding legitimate interests, adhere to the path of harmonious coexistence, cooperation and win-win development, and jointly promote world multi-polarization and democratization of international relations, Wang noted, according to the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

Wang called on the two sides to follow the important consensus reached by the two heads of state, maintain high-level exchanges, strengthen strategic communication and coordination, demonstrate the responsibility of major countries, defend their respective national interests and national dignity, and maintain international fairness and justice.

Russia and China have maintained high-level exchanges, and the successful meeting between the two heads of state this year has injected strong impetus into bilateral relations, said Lavrov. He noted that the Russian side is willing to work with the Chinese side to implement the important consensus reached by the two heads of state, further strengthen strategic coordination, and deepen cooperation in various fields.

Russia is also willing to promote the process of multipolarization in the world, oppose all powers and hegemonies, and jointly support the centrality of ASEAN, Lavrov said.

The exact date of Putin’s trip will be announced when it is finalized, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov told a news briefing, according to Reuters on Wednesday.

Former Russian Ambassador to China Andrey Denisov said on Tuesday that the Chinese side was getting ready for a visit by the Russian president in October in order to participate in the Third Belt and Road Forum.

Currently, both China and Russia are facing a complex international environment against the backdrop of a deteriorating security situation, with tensions growing in both the Eurasian and Asia-Pacific regions and posing serious challenges for both countries, Yang Jin, an associate research fellow at the Institute of Russian, Eastern European and Central Asian Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Economically, there is also an urgent need for China and Russia to cooperate when the world economy has become more volatile and fragile in the post-pandemic era, Yang noted.

Yang stressed that the China-Russia comprehensive strategic partnership of coordination for a new era is an established, long-term relationship that will not be affected by issues of the day, and it is not engaged in any political or military alliances or confrontations against third parties.

“After the Ukraine crisis, the US-led West has been trying to morally coerce China into pressurizing Russia. However, this coercion has failed. This reflects the advancement in the level of mutual trust between the two sides,” Li Yongquan, director of Eurasian Social Development Research at the Development Research Center of the State Council, told the Global Times on Thursday.

Peskov said that during Putin’s expected trip to China, the two presidents will focus on bilateral trade and economic cooperation and on global issues.

“Based on the similarity in Moscow and Beijing’s vision of the essence of international relations… we have very, very good prospects for further discussions and, most importantly, for constructive interaction,” Peskov noted.

In addition to reaching new consensus within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, there may also be new cooperative projects signed, including the development of the Far East as proposed by Russian experts, as well as cooperation in previously challenging areas such as transportation and agriculture in Siberia, which had faced various obstacles in the past but now the obstacles are now largely removed, Yang noted.

Li explained that the similarity in the two countries’ perspectives on international issues lies in their common belief in a multipolar world and opposition to hegemony, and rejection of the use of sanctions in handling international relations.

He noted that the two sides’ stance in respecting the UN Charter and international law as the basic norms of international relations has received support from the majority of countries around the world.

The Ukraine issue will likely be on the agenda for Putin’s expected visit, experts said, and China will continue to make efforts to promote peace and dialogue because, given the current situation, it will be difficult to resolve these issues if China’s proposal for a peaceful solution is not followed.

This is James Harrison.

When he was 18, he learned that his blood contained an antibody that could treat a rare blood disease in infants. He donated blood every week for the next 60 years.

main qimg b1d07ccd067e4a910755bb8ea8fb9340
main qimg b1d07ccd067e4a910755bb8ea8fb9340

By the time he was done, he’d saved more than 2.4 million lives.

THOUSANDS Of Foreign Soldiers FLEE UKRAINE

A must watch video.

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2023 07 15 15 07
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2023 07 15 15 06
https://youtu.be/fgLqq8piDJw

What is the strangest thing that ever happened to you?

Oh this is an easy one…

Before I divorced my husband, but while we were still living in California, I used to adore going to thrift shops. One day, while visiting a shop in Venice beach, I saw, in the “odds and ends” bowl, a very peculiar earring. It was a sort of ‘seashell’ design, hand made, with a pendant black pearl dangling from it. From the shape of the shell, it would only go “frontways” on the left ear. It was obviously a shop project, but was *so* unusual, I decided I had to have it! I could always take it apart and use the pearl for something… so I bought it for maybe $0.25. That was in 1979.

The earring went into my “scraps” box. Years passed. I divorced, found my new love, we moved to Hollywood, then in 1988, to Albuquerque. One day, while walking to the book store I saw a sign “GARAGE SALE!” … well… I love garage sales, so I went to the house and looked around.

The lady had a big wooden bowl set out with beads, rings, bits and bobs… and as I sorted through the jumble I saw… a very peculiar earring… with a stylized “seashell” and a dangling black pearl! And it was hand made and fit the right ear! I immediately showed it to the lady “I have an earring at home… that looks exactly LIKE this!”

The lady looked perplexed “Well, dear… I don’t think so… my boyfriend made those for me in Shop… and I lost one of them many years ago.”

I froze. “Where?”

She smiled “Oh a long way from here… it was in California… I’ve forgotten the place… a beach… named like a place in Italy.”

“Venice Beach?” I said, feeling a bit dizzy.

She nodded eagerly. “Wait here!” I said, somewhat illogically… after all it WAS her home… and when I came back with the matching earring, they were a PERFECT match!

I offered to give my earring back to her so she would have the completed pair again, but she refused “I never liked him very much. You keep them, Dear.”

So I still have them, a handmade pair, separated by hundreds of miles and nine years, and reunited completely by chance.

Cream Cheese-Chive Sauce

chive cream cheese radishes 2
chive cream cheese radishes 2

Ingredients

  • 8 ounces cream cheese, cubed
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 tablespoon chopped chives
  • 1 teaspoon lemon juice
  • 1/4 teaspoon garlic salt

Instructions

  1. Combine cheese and milk in saucepan; stir over low heat until smooth.
  2. Stir in remaining ingredients.
  3. Serve over hot cooked potatoes, green beans, broccoli or asparagus.
chive cream cheese radishes 1
chive cream cheese radishes 1

As a car mechanic, what is the craziest discovery you have found on an automobile?

Years ago I used to work for BMW as a mechanic. Eventually I ended up working on a Z4 Roadster and found a curious hollow tube running alongside the engine and securing to the firewall with a grommet.

Inspecting the tube, it appeared to be a factory installed device, but had no conceivable mechanical purpose, which I could find. What made it even more curious is that none of the other shop mechanics knew what this was either.

I finally asked one of the older mechanics, who had worked with BMW for some time and he correctly pointed out that the purpose of the hollow tube was to collect and resonate some of the engine sound back through the firewall so the driver could hear and feel the engine. It’s hard to believe, but it was true. An engineered piece to literally increase the engine noise inside the cabin…

How can America stay an economic superpower and a military superpower in the 2040s-2100s?

It cannot.

This is not simply political hyperbole. It is the simple truth.

There is no evidence that the United States is a functioning nation-state in any way aside from a media that says so. The society has completely collapsed. The industrial manufacturing base, aside from a handful of industries, is gone. The cities are pictures of boarded up businesses, poverty, homelessness, and rat infested squalor.

What remains of the Untied States is evident in the many many overseas military bases, and the grandiose political class that films itself in front of green screens, reading scripted lines, and promotional staged events lauding the fictions of “democracy” and “freedom”.

In a world where (formerly) impoverished Laos, and Indonesia have High Speed Trains and free 5G wifi access; where (third world nations such as) Zambia, Nigeria, and Bangladesh have new hospitals, and affordable medical care, and where immediate bank transactions are conducted electronically…

…there is no actual evidence that the United States can ever achieve what these poorer nations currently possess.

To think that “somehow” the United States can regain what it has long since squandered is an exercise in futility. The United States has been looted and now it is an empty vessel; a land of the impoverished. Where feral dog-like packs of “things” (transgen, fluid-gen, and non-binary) prey on what remains of American society.

It is open knowledge that the rest of the world is running away from the USD as fast as it can. And no wonder. There no longer is any gold left in the treasury. As Ron Paul discovered in hearing with the Federal Reserve, there is no longer ANY gold held in reserve.

The United States is dead; and there is no inheritance left for its children.

They will move forward into the 22nd century impoverished; a “has been” nation, one that showed so much promise, but one that was doomed to die. Killed by its very notion; the belief that everyone is equal on paper, but unequal in governance.

“A Short Text on Keanu Reeves’ Life

Keanu was born in Lebanon. His parents split when he was three and he grew up with three different stepfathers.

As a kid he

was diagnosed with dyslexia and dreamed of becoming a hockey player. He played goalie for a junior league team in Canada but quit after breaking his leg to focus on acting.

He lost his best friend, River Phoenix, in 1993 due to an overdose.

He got married in 1998, experienced a miscarriage with his daughter in 1999, and ultimately lost his wife as well due to a car accident in 2001.

In 2002, Keanu put the Matrix sequels on hold to care for his sick sister. He sold his house to move nearer to his sister, while also helping by cooking meals, cleaning her house, and preparing medication. He also donated 70% of the money he made from The Matrix to leukemia research.

In 2006, when he was filming the movie “The Lake House,” he overheard the conversation of two costume assistants, one crying as he would lose his house if he did not pay $20,000 – on the same day, Keanu deposited the necessary amount in his bank account.

In 2010, on his birthday, Keanu walked into a bakery & bought a brioche with a single candle, ate it in front of the bakery, and offered coffee to people who stopped to talk to him.⁣⁣

To this day, Keanu is often seen wandering around New York City, riding the subway, and interacting with people.

A certified legend.”

main qimg 8beaf5df93b83d59f7c0df8dbcdd0c4b
main qimg 8beaf5df93b83d59f7c0df8dbcdd0c4b

By ordering the deployment of 3,000 reservists to Europe, Joe Biden is preparing to fight Russian forces on the ground in Ukreen.

2023 07 16 07 55
2023 07 16 07 55

Biden has lost his way,” Kennedy tweeted, arguing that the president should focus on America’s domestic problems instead of trying to achieve “global military dominance.”

“I want people to understand what this troop mobilization is about. It’s about preparing for a ground war with Russia,” he said.

The idea of defeating Moscow in its conflict with Kiev is a “futile geopolitical fantasy” of the Biden administration, the Democratic presidential candidate added.

Thousands of Ukreenions have already lost their lives because “America’s foreign policy establishment manipulated their country into war… Now, rather than acknowledge failure, Biden admin prepares to sacrifice American lives too,” Kennedy said.

Biden signed an executive order mobilizing 3,000 members of the US military’s Selected Reserve to boost the ranks of Operation Atlantic Resolve, which Washington launched in Europe in 2014 after Crimea rejoined Russia following the Western-backed coup in Kiev.

The leading Republican presidential candidate, former President Donald Trump, also had some harsh words to say about Biden’s decision to send more American troops to Europe. The “reckless escalation in Ukreen” pursued by the White House is “straining the US military to the point of disaster,” he said.

“Joe Biden can’t even walk up the steps of Air Force One without tripping. The last thing this incompetent administration should be doing is pushing us further toward World War III.”

Trump reiterated his earlier claim that if he becomes president again, he would end the conflict in Ukreen in 24 hours. “Not one American mother or father wants to send their child to die in Eastern Europe. We must have peace.”

2023 07 16 08 13
2023 07 16 08 13

What is something you learned very late in life, but wish you knew much earlier?

I was a very good student in school. I was the house prefect, class monitor, vocabulary champion, General knowledge quiz champion, basically an overachiever. I put a lit of pressure on myself to maintain my academic rank and put lot of hard work in extra curricular activities.

I finished college, got a job but this overachiever in me wasn’t satisfied. I used to put extra hardwork in everything that I did. My job was very stressful. I would live and breathe work. I would stay late everyday to work.

As a result I started getting headaches on a regular basis. I developed backache at a very early stage (29). But old habits don’t change easily. I continued my workaholic ways.

I wanted to be the best at everything I did. The headaches continued and with time became nastier. I got a heamoragic stroke when I only 31 which paralyzed my right hand side. My speech was gone and I could barely walk. I couldn’t use my right hand.

Though I have recovered 95% but it took me 2 years. I can’t see myself in a stressful environment now.

Its like nature put a stop to my busy life. Now I have all the time in the world to sit and think, play games. I have started my own business. There is work but I do it at my own convenience. I take breaks and rest.

main qimg 128b8c09acacf9b1d35c558307d7766b lq 1
main qimg 128b8c09acacf9b1d35c558307d7766b lq 1

I wish someone would have told me that the unhealthy competition and rat race that we learn from an early age be it in school or at home is not good. It can seriously harm your physical and mental health.

Take care of yourself. Health is the biggest asset we have. We should take care of it.

What was the kindest thing someone did for you when you were young?

I was 17 and just out of highschool, having been kicked out of home at 16 and moved to a new town to be closer to my girlfriend. I thought I’d planned everything out - rent, gas money, etc. but learned that my new job paid only twice a month and withheld the first week.

That meant I had very little money and had to make groceries last 3 weeks. Not knowing how to cook, I bought rice and tomato paste, thinking I could make something palatable.

My new job was at a hospital laundry. I had to gather dirty laundry from all the floors in the hospital and bring them to the laundry. I was the only white guy.
The man who ran the machines must’ve noticed that I never ate lunch.

On the third day, he complained that his wife had packed one sandwich too many and asked if I would eat it so he wouldn’t have to throw it away.

Well, I must’ve wolfed it down pretty fast, because the following days she packed 2 sandwiches ‘too many’!

I was a stupid teenager and just felt lucky for his wife’s “mistakes”. 

I wish I could tell him today, how much those sandwiches meant to me.

The California PURGE has begun.

Yuppur…

2023 07 18 17 29
2023 07 18 17 29

Ah, like this…

What is the reason that people say that China has a weak military? Is this claim true or false?

It is normal to malign an enemy before you attack it.

Presently, the NED has funded (along with the NSA funding) a hate-China narrative designed to galvanize the American people, and the rest of the world against China.

This narrative has multiple components. However, for reasons of brevity, we will concentrate in one specific narrative; “China has a weak, inexperienced military” narrative.

Of course, it is wrong, erroneous and deceptive. It is generated to convince soldiers, and the population to go to war, and NOT to expect consequences.

  • China has the oldest military in the world. Over 6000 years worth. The Chinese were conducting long organized campaigns with thousands of soldiers at a time when the Europeans were still living in caves and discovering fire.
  • China has the oldest Navy in the world. The first formal Chinese Navy was laid down around 1160. And was fighting huge naval engagements that involved hundreds of ships and thousands of men long before the British Navy in 1546 under Henry VIII was even a dream.
  • China is a military nation of warriors. Just because China prefers peace, does not mean that they are afraid of war. The first recorded military campaigns in China can be traced back to the Xia Dynasty (c. 2100–1600 BCE), which was followed by the Shang Dynasty (c. 1600–1046 BCE) and the Zhou Dynasty (1046–256 BCE). Some of the most significant military campaigns in Chinese history include the wars of the Qin Dynasty (221–206 BCE), which united China under a single emperor, the campaigns of the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE), which expanded China’s territory and influence, and the conquests of the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE), which established a powerful empire that controlled much of Asia.
  • Everyone in China is given military training. But the active duty forces are volunteers. One of the great joys that I have is watching my little girl line up in her camouflage fatigues and calling off roll call. Inside of China, it is the law that military training starts in first grade, and continues in every single year of school.
  • China has an enormous military. Unlike the United States which is spread out everywhere, and filled with a large proportion devoted to logistical concerns, China has a massive CONCENTRATED military. And it is larger that what the United States IS ABLE TO FIELD in battle.
  • China’s military is not only state-of-the-art but ABOVE peer to the USA. China has stealth bombers, fighters, drones, and submarines. It possesses weapons such as hyper-velocity delivery systems, search-and-destroy flying hand grenades, invisibility attire, platoon-level rail-guns, and suicide robot dogs. And that is just some of the impressive technology that is fielded by China.
  • China’s military is merit driven. In fact, the entire Chinese society is merit-driven. On the battlefield this makes all the difference between victory and defeat and life and death.

So the reason why “people” say that China is weak is due to complete ignorance. They are simply regurgitating NSA / NED talking points and believing them.

Overall, I advise people never to step into a boxing ring with someone who you know nothing about and with whom you never sparred with. You can get clobbered. Sure as shit.

This is why you do not want to be involved in a war with China…

Police officers, have you ever had to arrest someone off duty?

Yes. My (ex) wife took the kids to the store to get groceries. On the way a drunk driver hit them. They were lucky to be alive.

She called me because it was only 2 miles from the house and the guy was trying to leave (his car was disabled).

I drove over there and immediately arrested him. We lived in The country of a farming rural area. State officers arrived not long after.

Most of the time I would just call incidents in and be a good witness if I didn’t need to intervene. I have called in crimes in progress and then just got into a position to watch safely. Like the time I saw a naked young Hispanic male doing karate moves on the side of the road in the middle of the day.

I parked down the street and called the local agency. I described what I was seeing including that he was a young Hispanic male adult.

When I was asked what he looked like I couldn’t resist. I said, “like a naked guy doing karate, it’ll be hard to miss him.”

The dispatcher laughed and said, “you’re a cop aren’t you?”

What is the best moment you witnessed in which somebody proved they weren’t “all talk”?

I watched a 90 lb female put a 235 lb guy in the hospital. This was a fight between 2 neighbors in my neighborhood. This guy harassed her for weeks then for some reason he decided to walk up to her front porch and knock on her door. I was sitting on my front porch when it happened. I was thinking this is not going to be good, and had my cell phone within reach.

She open her door and in a clear loud voice, she requested he get off her property. He said, what are you going to do about it. She said, I’ll call the police. He laughed at her and reached for the screen door. Before I could move she kicked him in the head twice, swept his legs out from under him, and he was down and bleeding.

I started to call the police, but again before I could dial the number a patrol car pulled up and the officer put the guy in handcuffs. I just sat there, drank my coffee and waited for him to come over and ask what I saw. I told him and signed the bottom of the form.

As he walked away he said you know the woman? I replied yes, she’s a former Marine. He chuckled and said. I guess the guy didn’t know that, and I laughed.

As a cashier, what is the boldest thing you ever said to a customer knowing that you might get fired afterwards?

I was ringing up a lady’s stuff. Belt was to my left. I was going pretty quickly.

Lady behind her: thats MY stuff

The other lady apologized but i told her the things behindher werent her responsibility. She leaves. I tell the next lady to just use a red divider next time.

Lady: WHAT… 3 FEET OF SPACE ISNT ENOUGH SPACE FOR YOU TO KNOW THE ORDER ENDED?!

Grrrrr not today. Id already had people pushing all my buttons for hours. That was it

Me: I DONT KNOW WHAT SCHOOL YOU WENT TO, BUT THIS (holds hands about 4 inches apart) IS NOT “3 FEET”! THATS WHY WE HAVE DIVIDERS! HER STUFF, YOUR STUFF. HOW DO I KNOW? ITS DI-VI-DED! NOW I KNOW 3 SYLLABLES MIGHT ME KIND OF DIFFICULT FOR YOU…

I sat there absolutely berating the woman the entire time i was ringing her up. As she was walking away after i had finished, im still on fucking FIRE. HEY! IM NOT DONE WITH YOU YET! and i audibly growl as i turn to the next person in line.

Next person, terrified: I used a divider

2nd person: i used a divider

3rd person: i used two!

It was really hard not to laugh right then, as furious as i was. No idea how a manager or supervisor didnt hear me putting this woman in her place.

well LOLOLOLOLOLOL I can’t believe it took over a week for a single “Karen” to find this post and tell me that she would’ve gotten me fired. I am glad the rest of you had a good laugh.

What did someone say/do that made you close down your account and go to another bank?

My mother died. The administrator of her estate began closing down her various accounts and sending checks to all her kids. My first check was $31,000. I took it to my bank (Bank of the West) where I had been banking for about 25 years, expecting them to tell me it would take a week to clear. Instead they told me that they couldn’t accept it. Then they said they could accept it tentatively and that I couldn’t have the money for 30–60 days and there would be a $40 charge to process it. I went down the street to Chase, opened a new account and they accepted the check and it cleared in 6 days.

When I went back to BoW to close my account the manager said “I’m sorry you feel that way” and I replied “I’m sorry you made me feel that way”.

What is your most memorable cultural shock?

Originally Answered: What is your most memorable cultural shock ?

I went to Paris for my honeymoon with my ex.

It was a long flight from NYC, neither of us had been to Europe before. We were excited and didn’t really know what to expect.

Getting off the plane in France, I’ll never forget the first thought as I saw crowds of Europeans: “Wow – everyone is really skinny here!”

Seriously I couldn’t believe it.

I love my country, but we can be some tubby-tub-tubs at times 🙂

Best speech by a Presidential Candidate ever

Now that Pakistan has finally accepted IMF loan and obtained almost $100billion dollars from other countries, is Pakistan considered a rich and developed country again?

$ 100 Billion?

Are you sure

I read it as $ 6.8 Billion — $ 3 Billion from IMF , $ 2 Billion from the Saudi Royal Bank , $ 1 Billion from the Emirati Central Bank and $ 800 Million from Oman

$ 7 Billion is 11–12 months of Imports and that would make Pakistan quite comfortable again

Pakistan claimed a loss of PKR 6 Trillion due to floods and earthquake ($ 30 Billion)

However the real figure is closer to PKR 500 Billion ($ 2.5 Billion)

So Pakistan has been given QUITE A BIT MORE


$ 100 Billion is almost 6 years of Imports

Unless Oil was discovered in Pakistan


Anyway Pakistan is rescued for now

They will get $ 333 Million a month from IMF for 9 months

They have got $ 3.8 Billion from Saudi and UAE and Oman

They now have Russian Oil and pay for it in Yuan. In the last 2 months, they only spent 26% of their last USD reserves & 74% of their Yuan reserves

Two CPEC Projects declared a 15% profit for the first time and AFTER PAYING INTEREST TO CHINA

Bad news for Imran Khan

My guess is the West were so worried about Imrans return and a complete cut off with the US and the West that they decided to give the loans and agree to Status Quo with China and Russia

However there is another reason

main qimg 8a8a526290bade6ae8165f6fe13ae35e
main qimg 8a8a526290bade6ae8165f6fe13ae35e

The US are VERY ANGRY with India and Mr Modi because he didn’t bite on a single temptation offered by the US

They thought he would be firmly in the US Camp and sign orders for those Hornets (F18) and Predators and turn down those Migs

Instead Modiji (Deeply appreciative of him) maintained his advise from Jaishankar and rightly signed with a more reliable partner France

He also agreed to continue the contracts for those Migs


The IMF bailout was proforma signed a few days before Modi’s visit

My guess is if Modi had done what US wanted, the IMF would have walked back and said SORRY PAKISTAN. WE NEED ANOTHER YEAR

However strategically MBS and UAE walked in with their $ 3.8 Billion Loan (Around 6 months imports , 9 months with the Yuan) and IMF had no choice. Either say yes or risk complete alienation with Pakistan

Plus Modi didn’t bite

The IMF signed the final bailout agreement barely 24 hours after Modi’s visit ended (23/6/23)

WHERE HAVE ALL THE CARPENTERS GONE?

The growing trade labor shortage is a crises that has not quite struck home yet…but it’s about to. This short video from The Honest Carpenter discusses how the generational decrease in trade participation is hitting the entire construction industry. But it’s affecting some trades more than others…

Must watch.

(Why The Trade Labor Shortage Is Only Beginning…)

For what it’s worth, I think that the trade labor shortage is a reflection of a true paradigm shift.

A hundred years ago, nearly every job in the world was primarily physical.

For that reason, physical labor was considered cheap, because everyone engaged in it to some degree.

You had your choice of workers to pick from.

Now, so many of our jobs are intellectual in nature.

There are so many places to go and work that aren’t really physical at all.

When these jobs were fewer, and fewer people were qualified to do them, they were considered high-value.

But as they have multiplied, their relative value has decreased overall (except for certain positions).

But at the same time, people have maintained their view that trade labor is not very valuable.

And yet, they completely neglect the fact that FAR FEWER people are doing it now, and it is in EXTREMELY high demand.

In a way, I think that blue collar jobs will slowly become sort of the next steady white collar jobs, as the general population is forced to adjust, slowly over decades, its understanding of the value of these jobs.

When you can’t find a carpenter anywhere, a good, independent carpenter will suddenly seem very high value.

And I believe that this should be reflected in their pay.

Mike Rowe explains why more workers are ‘quietly quitting’

Yes. This is a trend int he United States. Why work when the lazy makes more than you? Paid to do nothing.

What makes your husband a good husband?

I met him when he was 39 and I 33. He had never been married and I had been. I had three children ages 7 to 12. I thought “he won’t commit” but I was still intrigued. A year later, we were living together. Five more and we were engaged. He had all the assets and I had all the liabilities when we met, but he never held it against me. He was supportive and took to the kids like they were his own. He took my son to little league and my daughter to ballet. He ferried kids around including their friends and made dinner for all of us when I had to work late. Whenever they got in trouble, he kept his cool. We survived and thrived.

Now, whenever an opportunity arises, I tell him he has already given me the most wonderful present a woman could want. A great husband, and the best father my children ever knew. Their natural father was a deadbeat dad who moved away and didn’t support them either financially or emotionally. My husband is the man they think of as their father. They are all in their late 40s and early 50s and they let him know how much he means to them. If they need help fixing something, he will go and help even though it means travel and inconvenience. They call him as often as me.

He has told me many times, he would do it all over again. That’s nearly 40 years of a commitment to me and my three children. Not only is he a good husband, he is a good father and a phenomenal human being. I am the luckiest woman in the world.

China Bans Exports Of Word’s Thinnest Hand Torn Steel To U.S And Europe!

2023 07 18 15 41
2023 07 18 15 41
https://youtu.be/95y5Wa7laFo

What’s the best lesson you’ve learned from someone in dealing with tough situations?

I was a financial analyst at a large construction company and sat in on production meetings to track progress on high rises and analyze risk.

I could fill a book with the stories of what happened at this company. Large-scale construction isn’t for the faint of heart. So many things can go wrong and you can get fired on the turn of a dime. The pressure of deadlines and tight budgets has the toughest guys sweating.

We were in a routine group meeting. There were six of us in the room discussing a construction project we were working on. We gathered around the table to review the details of the project.

Suddenly, the manager, Steve, gets a call. He holds his hand up to pause us and says, “Hang on, it’s the customer.”

Steve puts the phone to his ear and right away, you hear right through his cell phone, “IT’S F%#KING EMBARRASSMENT. NONE OF THE GOD DAMN REFRIGERATORS WORK. NONE OF YOUR TEAM KNOWS WHAT THEY ARE DOING.”

We could hear it clear as day, going through Steve’s skull and into the conference room.

Everyone froze and looked at each other.

Steve stands up and slides out of the room as the customer continues yelling through the phone.

For 2 minutes, we can hear the customer yelling as Steve paces up and down the hallway.

About 5 minutes later, Steve steps back into the room and sits down in his chair. The room is silent.

Then, one of our more sarcastic engineers says to Steve,

“So Steve — was he mad?”

It got a few chuckles out of the guys. Steve looked up, smiled, and said, “No. Not mad at all.”

Sometimes — doing the opposite of what seems logical in a dire moment can be the exact thing you need.

A friend of mine is a military trauma surgeon who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. He saw the absolute worst things come through his operating room doorway each day. He spent years putting mangled people back together and saving lives. Consequently, it was the ultimate trauma surgeon training ground (if you end up needing urgent surgery, these veterans are the ones you want).

main qimg ff41a695dcd72b95bc03f185961b5aa5
main qimg ff41a695dcd72b95bc03f185961b5aa5

I asked him, “How did you deal with the horror show that kept replaying each day?”

He said he and the other doctors had several mechanisms, but they always maintained their sense of humor with each other. Specifically, they had a gallows humor. They stared directly into the abyss and it became an odd sense of relief.

For the record, these jokes were between each other — not to patients, but this was my favorite he told me:

A patient wakes up from surgery and the doctor tells me, “I have good news and bad news, which would you like first?”

The patient pauses for a moment, then, looks up at the doctor and says, “How about you give me the bad news first, and then the good news so it brings me back up.”

The doctor says, “Well, the bad news is, I had to amputate both of your legs.

The patient sighs in dissapointment. Shrugs and says, “And the good news?”

“The guy down the hall wants to buy your shoes.”

If it doesn’t hurt anyone, find humor when you can. Be tactful. Don’t make a joke after someone just found out their mother died.

Can you believe this is China? Inside my new apartment Part 2

Yup! This is what it is like.

What was the best revenge you’ve ever gotten?

The best revenge I ever heard of was not mine, but a friend of my father’s. There was a bar owner in Astoria who received an enormous rent increase after the landlord noticed how profitable his bar was. The landlord was certain that he would not want to move such an established and profitable business and start over again in a new location.

After giving him the bad news, the landlord demanded to know again and again whether he would renew the lease. The bar owner kept mum. On the very last day of the lease, with a bar full of patrons, the bartender announced to all that he had rented the spot across the street from his old place and offered everyone free drinks on the house in exchange for helping him move.

They all grabbed tables and chairs and equipment and moved it across the street, piece by piece. Before the day was out, he was moved and without losing a single customer. The landlord got an empty space and the loss of a few month’s rent.

Most MASSIVE military bill EVER just announced by U.S. Congress

The House of Representatives passed a new defense budget for 2024 that comes in at $886 billion.

Even though this is a military bill, it has some hidden social policies included such as limiting abortion access for service members and a ban on transgender procedures such as cross-sex hormones and surgeries on military health plans.

The bill also includes a 5.2% raise for troops as well as a new branch of the military called the Space National Guard. The Senate is working on its own version of this bill before some version of it goes to President Biden to sign.

Uh. Oh.

Do you think Americans will be attacked in China because lots of Chinese people are angered by America’s controversial actions?

Attacked? Yes, you will be attacked if you plan to parade like this in Asia

main qimg 217bc3026fc0a0b82e112761f13334b7 lq
main qimg 217bc3026fc0a0b82e112761f13334b7 lq

Some Asians do not take lightly to such actions, just like Jews not taking people parading Hitler Germany in their face. These some Asians aren’t weakling if they work with their hands everyday. They are simple and honest people who aren’t afraid to show you their fists. Doesn’t matter if you are Mike Tyson, 200 men come at you, you will be Mike Mincemeat.

This is probably the only time a foreigner will face violence in Asia (outside of random crime spree). But hey, I heard China is incredibly safe. Even women aren’t afraid to walk alone at night. So you will be ok.


About American controversy…

Are Chinese always right? Not really. China has 1.4 billion people. Who knows what everyone thinks? Chinese has a fair share of lunatics, conspiracy theorists, Falun Gong cultists, scam artists, murderers, rapists, drug dealers, kidnappers…

I will not jump to a Chinese person’s defense without first finding out what’s going on. I can tell you that much.

However…

If you truly live in the West, especially America, you would be used to the frenzy political atmosphere of America. Pro-gun, anti-gun, pro-life, pro-choice, pro Trump, anti-Trump, Go Brandon, Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, etc…. You know not to discuss politics with coworkers and strangers, especially not antagonizing them.

I always say “let’s leave politics for the politicians” when someone tries to get political. Not because I am not passionate about politics, but because these debates in real life will often get out of hands. No benefit, all risks.

Why is it any difference in China? Don’t go arguing with local Chinese, whether you think you are right or not. If you trust them, you can let them in for a friendly and respectful discussion. Otherwise, do not instigate politics discussion anywhere you go, with taxi drivers, shopkeepers, people you met on the trains, security guards at the mall. Keep your fancy politics to yourself!

This advice is good for everywhere you go in the world!

If you are a CIA agent who wants to instigate troubles, then do the opposite of what I said.


Will Chinese attack me?

Just for being an American? Highly unlikely. Chinese aren’t violent in nature. And Chinese cares about face a lot. Chinese people do not want foreigners to think they are rude, violent, and unreasonable. Most Chinese anyway.

If one Chinese angrily charges at you, you yell out “Don’t be unreasonable. What did I ever do to you?

He will stop and think twice about his reckless action. At least he will shout out his reasons for wanting to attack you. You will get a chance to reason with him. You can go “I am not American government. I cannot control what they do. But they also do not control what I do and think”.

Pause 3 seconds and say: “I am in China because l like China enough to be here. Don’t you see?

This will perplex most brutes. Then he will feel embarrassed. He will offer to treat you for a meal and some beer. And there you go, you will have turned an ass whooping incident into a friend making opportunity. Who knows, you two will be good friends.

Most brutes are honest and straight forward people. They mean what they say. They are very dependable friends. Far better than those friends of yours who only show up when they want something from you.


Chinese has an idiom: 不打不相识

(Bù dǎ bù xiāngshí)

Meaning: [sometimes] we make friends through initial conflict. Because of a misunderstanding, we get into a fight with them. Through conflict resolution, we get to know them and become good friends.

Hahah, I think I got carried away writing stories. But seriously, most Chinese are law-bidding citizens who find no benefit in senseless violence. They will lecture or curse the hell out of you though.

So be a smart person and avoid politics. You will get along with Chinese just fine. If you ever hear someone say “go back to America, you are not welcome here”, let me know. Because this is a one in a million story. Time to buy lottery.

The USA wasn’t expecting the Chinese reverse sanctions

Today, China is aligning itself and playing the “hard game” against the USA. The previous six years of prep-work are starting to come to fruition. Yellen was in China trying to mitigate a difficult situation and the neocon war hawks are “chomping at the bit” to start world war 3. They have no friggin’ clue what they are asking for.

Meanwhile, China is on a war footing and Xi Peng is touring the military districts and inspiring everything to play a very tense and detailed battle plan. China is ready.

Meanwhile…

The USA is really fucked up and about to be harshly butt-fucked. You all have no friggin’ idea.

Almost getting kidnapped..

This is when I was in 1st standard and was on a train trip to Goa with my family.

I was looking through the window and was annoyed by the crying of my little sister who was just 6 months back then

Getting a bit more annoyed I decided to just roam here and there so asked my father to take me near the washroom of the train.

I went inside, used the toilet and came out…

My father saw me and started getting back to our seat but…. Till the time I asked my father to wait, someone just pulled their hand over my face.. I was just terrified! He was trying to kidnap me.. But but my father felt something unusual when he turned back and the waiter just ran away leaving me super frightened..

I was crying while whole journey and just was holding my father’s hand all the time..

Well, here i am safe and all well 😆

Just want to say that keep a bit special care of your little ones whenever you’re going outside..

What was the moment you cancelled the friendship with your best friend?

I was applying for a job, and a mutual friend set me up to talk to someone who worked there. Well we hit it off and became instant buddies.

I never really understood why she was so unpopular with the rest of the staff. Sure she was a “different” person, but I like different people.

Then the cracks appeared. It became obvious that there was some mental issues. She was extremely literal, for one. She would tell me something like she wasnt allowed to use the elevator-only her-but somehow the rest of us could-even though she was never told that. Or our boss asked us to sign out if we were leaving the building-only she took that to mean only she had to sign out for everything and I mean everything. She’d sign out if she went to look out the window. She’d sign out if she was using the copier-which was literally two feet away. And she was hostile and paranoid about everything. Someone would bring in donuts and she’d go off on a tirade about how she didnt eat donuts blah blah blah, just say no thank you. She’d just get angry over the most minor things, stomp around, slam doors, etc. Once she didnt speak to me for two weeks because she found out I was able to put a larger percentage of my paycheck into savings than she did. It was just exhausting to deal with her, never knowing what would set her off.

Then she started trying to steal my clients and take credit for my ideas. That was the last straw.

She could be a really supportive and funny person, so I stuck around a lot longer than I should have. But I realized she’d done this stuff to everyone, which is why most of the staff hated her.

Voyage to the bottom of the sea: Terror

What did someone do or say at the bank that made you say, “You gotta be kidding me!”?

In Australia, banks have “pop up security screens” that can be activated by the tellers in the event of a bank robbery. when they do, a big steel panel slams up (“pop up” is an understatement) out of the counter in about 1/10th of a second…

I was making a deposit in my bank one morning when BANG up went the screen…

It made a HUGE noise that scared the sh*t out of me. I am staring at a steel wall that has a sign that says “Do not attempt to communicate with Bank Staff – The Police have been called”…

Now I froze – because I was aware that there was only one other customer in the bank at the time and I knew that it wasn’t me that was robbing it.

I was now on the wrong side of the security screen with (probably) an armed robber…

I kept my hands still and looked very slowly to my left and saw a very similar gentleman that was frozen and pale faced too, and looking very slowly to his right – obviously thinking exactly the same thing that I was…

Then the Manager came bursting out a side door – very apologetic to us that the screen had been accidentally triggered…

Just then a Police Car arrived with two officers running in with guns drawn yelling “Everyone on the floor!”

The Manager was trying to explain herself but the Police just told her to shut up and lay still – they must have been initially convinced that they had successfully caught three armed robbers…

And all I wanted to do was deposit a $200 check…

Trade without USD. BRICS currency (backed by gold) coming soon

The REAL reason why Blinkin and Yellen are trying to meet with China. Big changes. It is going to disrupt the USD, so we will have a situation where the USD will function alongside each other.

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2023 07 09 16 49

Biden’s mega-mess up. Wholly shit!

Did you ever go to hospital in an emergency and were admitted immediately?

I was bitten by a snake once and it was only eight blocks to the Hospital. I was in bed and felt him bite my leg. I went to find something to put him in and when I looked down at my leg, I noticed it swelling. Looked at the snake and said “You’re poisonous aren’t you, ya little bastard.”

I stuck the snake in a jar, tied off my leg and proceeded to walk to the Hospital.

Once I got to the Hospital, I was getting the “OMG/WTF” staredown. I was apparently extremely pale looking.

I put the snake/jar on the counter and said “This guy bit me.”

The nurse came around with such speed, she must have found the closest of those rolling beds she could and yanked me onto it. I couldn’t have been waiting for more than 5 minutes before the Doctor came in with anti-venom.

I was laughing from the time I got stuck on the bed because I didn’t know what to say in that situation, it just all seemed so hilarious to me at the time.

I then got the “You idiot! Why did you walk here?” conversation. My initial response to the question was “Because I could?” ~ I was 16 at the time.

Grilled Meat Loaf Meal Packets

Dinner’s in an easy-to-assemble packet! Grill meat, potatoes and carrots for a satisfying meal.

1428427044591
1428427044591

Make these packets up to 24 hours in advance. Pop them on the grill when you are ready to eat.

Although these hearty packets can be a complete meal, a crisp mixed-greens salad would be a nice addition.

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 pounds lean (at least 80%) ground beef
  • 1 (1 ounce) package onion recipe and dip soup mix (from 2-ounce box)
  • 1 egg
  • 3/4 cup milk
  • 1/2 cup Progresso plain bread crumbs
  • 1/3 cup ketchup
  • 1 bag (1 pound 4 ounces) refrigerated new potato wedges*
  • 3 cups ready-to-eat baby-cut carrots
  • Fresh parsley, if desired

* Fresh new potatoes, cut into wedges, can be used instead of the refrigerated potatoes. Because the refrigerated potatoes are partially cooked, microwave the fresh ones for 4 to 6 minutes before adding them to the packets.

Instructions

  1. Heat gas or charcoal grill. Cut 6 (18 x 10-inch) sheets of heavy-duty foil; spray with cooking spray.
  2. In medium bowl, mix beef, dry soup mix, egg, milk and bread crumbs.
  3. Shape into 6 loaves, 4 x 2 1/2 x 1 inch.
  4. Place 1 loaf on each foil sheet; top each with about 1 tablespoon of the ketchup.
  5. Place about 1/2 cup potatoes and 1/2 cup carrots around each loaf.
  6. Bring up 2 sides of foil so edges meet. Seal edges, making tight 1/2-inch fold; fold again, allowing space for heat circulation and expansion. Fold other sides to seal.
  7. Place packets on grill. Cover grill; cook over medium heat 25 to 30 minutes, rotating packets 1/2 turn after 15 minutes, until vegetables are tender and meat thermometer inserted in center of loaves reads 160 degrees F.
  8. To serve, cut large X across top of each packet; carefully fold back foil to allow steam to escape. Garnish with parsley.

Yield: 6 servings

What happened to you as a child that feels like a punch to the gut every time you think about it?

When I was 4 years old, my dad married my stepmom, who already had 3 kids of her own.

One night, my dad woke up me and my sister and took us to the kitchen.

We could tell from his angry tone that something was wrong, and I wondered if I had done something to make him mad at me.

The kitchen was a mess, with open cabinets and things thrown around everywhere. On the table, there was a pile of bags of cookies, snack cakes, candy bars, and other treats.

My dad pointed to the table and said, “Go ahead! Eat whatever you want!

Eat all of it if you want to!”

My stepmom, stepbrother, and stepsisters were all in the kitchen, not saying anything.

My sister and I nervously walked up to the table, took something, and started eating our treats carefully.

The snack cake I was eating was a new one for me. I reached for another one and said, “These are really good, do you want one?” and offered it to one of my stepsisters.

My stepmom and step siblings looked scared, and my dad grabbed the cake from my hand and threw it back on the table.

“No! I said YOU eat it!” my dad yelled.

My older sister asked, “What’s going on?”

My stepmom shouted, “Just eat the damn cake!” and my dad gave my stepmom a look that made everyone else stay quiet until me and my sister finished our snack cakes.

My dad said, “Do you want another one?

Go ahead, eat everything on the whole table if you want to!”

Feeling really nervous with everyone watching us eat, my sister and I said we weren’t hungry and went back to bed.

We never talked about that night again.

It took me several years to understand what had happened.

My stepmom, whose kids were older than me and my sister, had been hiding the snacks and giving them to her kids after she sent us to bed, and my dad caught her.

After that night, there always seemed to be snacks in the house.

It made me realize that my stepmom cared very little about me and my sister, and favored her own kids more.

China Hits Back In CHIP WAR Restricts Chipmaking Metal Exports To Europe And The U.S

So the USA can ban this, and sanction that. It doesn’t matter.

2023 07 09 16 52
2023 07 09 16 52

China controls the MATERIALS that IC chips are made from. The massive ignorance of the USA is on full display as they shoot themselves in the feet once again.

https://youtu.be/54g2k6TBjgA

What is something someone who has never been poor wouldn’t understand?

My gardener, a poor elderly man who earns a daily wage as a gardener, had to buy a washing machine.

Being poor, he had to buy it on credit because he didn’t have $400 in cash.

The total cost of his purchase including various fees, charges and interest came to about $1300, for a $400 washing machine which would have cost me $300 if I’d bought the same machine online. (The amounts were actually in South African Rand, I’m just using a rough dollar estimate).

He came to show me the contract because he didn’t understand it.

When I saw what they were charging him, I was really upset on his behalf and posted a copy of the contract on social media.

I called out the retailer on their exploitative lending practices, which prey on the poor with outrageous lending fees and ripoff charges and costs to pad their profit.

The post went viral and the story was picked up by the newspapers.

The retailer threatened to sue me, so I posted that letter on social media as well to expose their threats and bullying.

My post got massive public support and in the end the retailer relented, took back the washing machine and refunded the man’s money.

The media loved the story.

There were scathing articles in several papers, I was asked to do radio interviews and I got requests from hundreds of other consumers who felt cheated by retailers, asking if I would take up their cause.

The story has a happy ending for my gardener.

A generous stranger who followed the story on social media offered to buy the man a brand new washing machine after the store collected the one he bought and refunded his money.

Using the money donated by the good samaritan, I managed to buy the same washing machine for my gardener for $300.

My gardener is a gentle old man. He was so happy and grateful about getting a free washing machine, he burst into tears.

Why am I telling this story?

Because I was shocked to find out that a poor person might have to pay $1300 for an appliance that would cost a rich person $300.

This is something few rich people understand, if they’ve never been poor and never had to buy on credit.

What happened at a Thanksgiving dinner that made you say, “You gotta be kidding me?”

The first Thanksgiving I brought my girlfriend, now wife, home to my family. Most of us were sitting in the living room when we hear a loud thud and ran into the kitchen and find my father is lying on the floor and my girlfriend pulling off his pants, while he yells take off my pants take off my pants!

He was taking the turkey out of the oven, and dropped it spilling the burning hot juices all over his pants. Since my girlfriend was the one in the kitchen with him the pants pulling fell to her!

What a great way to meet your future father-in-law! Fortunately no serious burns were sustained

What is the best revenge you ever had on your bully?

I grew up poor. I took my lunch to school because I didn’t have money for school lunches. When I made it to high school some of the older high school bullies found it “cool” to pop my school locker open and eat my lunch. This got to be all too regular. So … I baked a large batch of chocolate chip cookies with extra chocolate chips — and 2 boxes of Exlax. These were locked securely in my school locker so no-one would accidentally dose themself with an extreme dose of laxative.

Yes, the cookies disappeared. So did five people — for three days. I never lost a lunch again. Yes, this may have been a shitty thing to do, but it worked!

Does China want ULTIMATE power?

China recently passed the Foreign Relations Law, which lays out foreign policy with an aim to “multipolarity.” The West is freaking out about it saying that it is a power grab.

We have a guest to break down the anti-China rhetoric today.

Carl Zha is the host of the “Silk and Steel Podcast focusing on China, history, culture and politics. He explains how this is a reaction to Western sanctions and why the West is having a fit about it.

He talks about WHY the new Chinese Foreign Relations Law has been put in place this last month. It is super important.

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2023 07 09 16 54

My 20-year-old daughter wants to move in with us until she is finished with college. She says she will pay the bills but she is a grown adult. How do I tell her that adults leave the nest?

What the hell is wrong with you people?

She is only 20 and trying to attend college, which is so very expensive it’s sickening…once she completes college then I would give her a year to find a job, if she does not, then she need a job doing whatever.

Waitressing until she finds her job.

And start paying for rent or food and maintaining her own vehicle yes.

But at least help her out while she is going to school trying to better herself.

What are some examples of bad manners when dating someone new?

I have a story about dating someone new!

I went on this date because my friend introduced him to me. “He’s good looking, has a decent job and fun!” – He sounded like a great man, right?

The plan for the date was he would pick me up, then we would go for a breakfast then he would drop me off at work – it sounded like a great way to start a day, right?

It was a winter morning. He showed up. My friend was right. He’s gorgeous. His smile melt the cold away. He handed me a hot coffee, winked at me and said: “I was sneaky and asked [my friend’s name] about your favorite coffee to impress you. Here it is. I hope you’re impressed!”. I laughed and told him I was impressed. “This is going to be awesome!!” – I screamed in my head.

We arrived at the breakfast place, were walking in. It’s a bit early and there were a janitor sweeping outside the restaurant. To my surprise, he dropped his empty coffee cup. In front of the janitor. Not in the trash can, not in the dust pan that the janitor had right there. In front of the janitor’s broom. I asked him why did he do that? He said because the janitor was sweeping and he would sweep it up anyway.

I didn’t say anything. I saw the janitor’s eyes. I went and picked up the coffee cup and put it in the trash can. Then I got a *sudden* phone call and I needed to be in the office *immediately* so I had to take a cab.

We didn’t talk after that.

Was that “bad manner”? I don’t know. But I’m sure that the janitor’s eyes were sad.

While at an animal shelter, what did your pet do that caused you to adopt him or her?

My 6 year old son and I were looking to adopt a full grown cat as they are less likely to be adopted. I passed a grey and white female and she caught my eye. “No, that one isn’t friendly at all” said the shelter worker. I asked she be taken out of the cage so I could meet her. As soon as the cage was unlocked, she jumped into my arms and started nuzzling my face. “Well!” Said the surprised worker, “I guess she’s your cat!”

I took her home that day, she stood guard at the foot of my son’s bed every night and if a stranger came in his room while he was sleeping, she would growl at them until they left.

She lived to be a ripe old age and was the sweetest girl you ever met.

What did a family member do to you to never talk to them again?

My younger brother needed a place to stay for a bit while he got back on his feet.

I was single with 2 kids (14yr girl & 7yr boy) and worked graveyard shift so I let him sleep on my sofa.

One night about midnight my daughter calls me at work and very calmly said mom can you come home?

This was out of the norm for us.. she never called me.. if she needed me she’d text.

I worked so close to home..literally 5 min away..I’d usually go home during lunch.

I asked her if everything was OK and again she very calmly said yes just come now.

I asked her who was there and she didn’t reply so I started guessing.. is your uncle there.. she said yes..I said where.. she said right here!!.

I dropped my shit so fast I made it home in 2 min flat!!

I had a pocket knife in hand ready to kill him but the second I walked thru the door I dropped it and told him..if he didn’t get the hell out of my house on in 2 min I was gonna let the cops deal with him.

My sister tells me i didn’t kill him because I’m a mother before I’m a killer.

My daughter was brave enough to realize he was acting REALLY weird and she wasn’t afraid to call me.

She made me very proud.

Ex-CIA: White House PANICS Over Exposed Dark Secrets

Former CIA Ray McGovern shares with Stephen Gardner the dark agenda of the US involvement in Ukraine.

How they plan to hurt Russia while making billions of dollars for at-home donor corporations. Putin will be forced to move West if NATO continues to block Ukraine’s ability to seek peace with Russia.

Zelenskyy is blocking elections to remain in power. Obama and Victoria Nuland carry more responsibility for the state of Ukraine than the main stream media cares to admit.

Barrack Obama helped orchestrate the coup against Ukraine to install the US desired government.

What did a judge say during sentencing that made you say “You gotta be kidding me”?

I was representing an elderly woman charged with tax evasion. Many years before his death, her husband had opened a Swiss Bank account and funded it with an inheritance he received from an aunt who lived in Europe. He invested the money wisely and it grew into a large fortune.

After he died, the US government started its all out offense against Swiss banks that were holding accounts for US taxpayers who were avoiding US taxes. My client knew about the Swiss account but never took any substantial action with it.

When she came under investigation we spent around two years trying to convince the tax division of the Department of Justice not to indict her. They did indict her but allowed her to enter into a plea agreement that was very favorable.

The federal judge on the case at sentencing made it very clear to the government that they had overreached by charging her. He placed her on probation, remained silent for 15 seconds, then said he was terminating her probation and discharging her.

How did you see your child acting that made you say “something’s not right”? What happened?

My youngest son was a very cranky baby .

He cried a lot and the only thing that would calm him was when I held him close to my chest.

I told his pediatrician that something wasn’t right with him and he told me that I worry to much and that my son was perfectly healthy.

One day I had placed my son in his playpen on his belly so that he could grasp his soft toys.

I was standing behind him watching him and I noticed that when my six year old daughter was talking to him (she was kneeling beside his playpen) my son didn’t pay any attention to her when she talked to him.

I stood behind him and I yelled real loud and he never even flinched.

I got a pan and a large metal spoon and had my daughter bang on it a few times from where she was kneeling and still he never flinched or look her way.

I knew then that he was deaf.

I called his pediatrician and told him that my son is deaf and I wanted a referral for my son to see a ears, nose and throat doctor.

Again he told me that my son is perfectly fine. I fought with quite a few doctors before I found one that actually listened to me.

After arguing with different doctors for four years I finally got the referral that I needed to see a specialist. (back in the 80’s you needed a referral to see a specialist).

My son also constantly had a runny nose.

I was told he had allergies that caused that.

When I finally saw the specialist he told me that my son was deaf and that he felt my son needed surgery to put tubes in his ears.

Finally at the age of four, my son had the surgery.

The surgeon came out to talk to me after the surgery and told me that my son suffered with pain since he was born because he had extra skin covering his eardrums and because of his allergies his sinuses were impacted and the fluids built up in his ears and his ears were so infected he couldn’t believe that the doctors wouldn’t listen to me.

His surgery was successful and the surgeon removed the extra layer of skin and put tubes in his ears.

My son was finally free of pain and could hear.

I had to teach him everything that he didn’t learn in those four years.

I even recited nursery rhymes to him along with teaching him the alphabet and how to count, how to tell time.

I even had to tell him the names of things and people.

When he went to school I had them hold him back in first grade because he I felt that he needed that extra year of learning because he had a difficult time learning.

I’m glad I held him back because he then became an honor student through the rest of his school years.

The chip counterattack worked! The U.S. and the Netherlands compromised with China.

Excellent news.

If your son was getting beaten up on the school bus every day and the school did nothing about it, what would you do to solve this matter if you did not have transportation?

My daughter was in first grade in a Catholic school.

On Wednesday before Easter I picked her up from school and found her with small holes in both palms and a huge scratch down her side.

I took her straight to the pediatrician who cleaned her up and put her on antibiotics.

We asked her what happened and she said some older boys took her to the side of the building and played Crucifixion .

We asked where the teachers were and she said talking by the fence on the other side of the playground.

She said she told them what happened and they called her a tattle tale.

I called the school the next morning and said she wouldn’t be there until Monday.

I told them what happened and asked why the teachers weren’t supervising better as there were two out there.

Their answer was they can’t watch everyone at once and there are sticks on the ground.

I asked what punishment the kids would receive and they said none.

The kids were too young to remember yesterday .

I waited until Monday morning when I walked my child in to school carrying a Louisville slugger bat and told the principal that since it was okay to attack each other with sticks my kid would have a big one.

The school yard was cleaned up and teachers had to patrol the playground after that.

Baked Burrito Packets

Vertical Double Stacked Burrito with Jalapenos Cilantro and Guac
Vertical Double Stacked Burrito with Jalapenos Cilantro and Guac

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 tablespoons yellow cornmeal, divided
  • 1 (15 ounce) can low-fat turkey chili with beans
  • 1/2 cup shredded reduced-fat Cheddar cheese
  • 2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
  • 1 (10 ounce) can refrigerated pizza crust

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 425 degrees F. Coat a baking sheet with cooking spray; sprinkle with 1/2 tablespoon cornmeal.
  2. Mash chili until beans are almost smooth. Stir in cheese and cilantro.
  3. Unroll and stretch crust into a 12-inch square. Cut into four 6-inch squares.
  4. For each packet, place 1 square on baking sheet and spoon 1/4 chili mixture in center. Fold 2 corners together to form triangle. Press edges together with fork; poke holes in top (to let steam escape).
  5. Sprinkle with remaining cornmeal.
  6. Bake for 10 minutes or until lightly browned.

Yield: 4 servings

For spicier flavor, add 1 minced jalapeno pepper to chili mixture.

Nutrition information: Per serving: 309 cal., 18% from fat; 18 g protein; 6 g fat (2 g sat); 44 g carbo (4 g fiber); 1,037 mg sodium; 22 mg chol

Disclaimer: For health reasons, we do not encourage cooking in aluminum foil. We suggest either parchment baking paper or, if grilling, natural cedar wraps.

Alien Bases On The Moon | The Amazing True Story of Ingo Swann

Ingo Swann claimed to be a psychic who was employed by the CIA to remote-view the dark side of the moon. Specifically to look for an alien presence. It sounded like science fiction. But in 2006, when the CIA started releasing documents on the Stargate Project, Swann’s participation in the program was confirmed. When Swann was asked about the existence of extraterrestrials, he said not only were they already here, but they are building something on the far side of the moon. And, according to Swann, these aliens — aren’t friendly.

What is something someone who has never been poor wouldn’t understand?

Fifteen years ago, I was starting life over with my 3-year-old daughter after filing for divorce, quitting my sales job and listing my home for sale. As a previously gainfully-employed college graduate, I didn’t think it would be hard to find flexible employment. I hadn’t planned on the 2008 recession, however, so things didn’t exactly work out as expected.

We coasted on savings for about 6 months while I interviewed and sent out hundreds of resumes. After that money ran out, we were perpetually in danger of utilities being shut off. We lived on the cheapest possible food: eggs, tinned meat, cheap bread, and pasta. We didn’t have any of the usual amenities: no cable, no internet, no air conditioning, no garbage service and no telephone. My car was repossessed, but only after I let the insurance lapse. I was fortunate to own our small home outright (family asset).

What people don’t understand is that it’s extremely expensive to crawl out of the poorhouse, made even harder the poorer one grows.

A repossession meant I only qualified for high-interest loans. Lapsed insurance meant I had to pay extra to get it reinstated. Poor credit meant I had to pay over $150 a month for PLPD insurance. Utilities? Needed a down payment. Without internet, it was harder to look for a job. Although my daughter had health insurance through the state, I did not. I ignored all of my health issues, some of which were permanently aggravated by years of neglect.

Every day felt like drowning.

For my birthday I asked for, and received, toilet paper. That was the biggest surprise to me “How am I going to wipe my ass?” A question I never thought I’d ask had become our reality. (The answer: with washcloths.)

When I was poor, it was hard to feel good about myself. I couldn’t provide for my daughter and at the end of every day, after she was tucked in for the night, I let myself feel hopeless. And so lonely. I had no way to contact friends and, as a single mother, had very little time to socialize anyway. It felt like the world was against me, and that I would never, ever be anything different.

Yes, times were rough.

Eventually I got a temp job, making $300 a week, and finally got Internet. With that, I taught myself web design and ran a pretty popular site for a bit.

I regained confidence. I found a better job that turned into a successful career. We have things now. We have food, working utilities, a beautiful home, clothing for days, two insured vehicles, and a pantry full of toilet paper.

Today, I will never, ever allow someone to stand at the cash register in front of me, trying to decide between toilet paper or food. Take my $50, please, and feel just a bit like a human again.

Has someone told you something that still bothers you today?

In so many words, that our parents fought over who had to take me in their divorce.

My biological father passed away several months ago. I didn’t feel good about it but it did not hit me hard because he never was that involved with me, even as an elderly man he expressed little interest in my life, albeit he was friendly. He was a hippy with kids and growing up with him was very unorthodox. Think instead of going to Disneyland, instead we’d go door to door selling pamphlets about Marxism.

There was some conflict about the will, and not being in it, I wished to stay out of it. My sister ultimately became very hostile and aggressive in her demands that I not just get involved, but she wanted me to retain the lawyer and run point on what would be a lawsuit. I finally e-mailed her saying “I’m absolutely not going to do this.”

She called me and for some weird reason thought that she had a card to play that would goad me into getting involved: “When mom and dad were getting divorced, just so you know they fought over who got me and (other two siblings), but they fought over who had to take you, and that was their most bitter fight — in the end, a 3rd party ordered dad to take you.”

It made sense. My dad was not involved with me and my mom, who got the other three siblings, was simply gone from my life for a long time (eventually I did come to see her).

My parents had misdiagnosed me as being slightly retarded. What ended up happening was it was found that I had an IQ of 146 (when I was tested at age 8) and did not understand the point of the inane things people were saying to me like “ga ga goo goo hey there little champ”, I thought I was surrounded by morons. It wasn’t until teachers started actually engaging with me with something halfway interesting that it was spotted that I just didn’t like the world I was in. Then I got put in advanced classes and it was fine. I graduated at age 16 despite being lazy in school (lazy because I had parents who did not give a crap how I did, later on I realized how foolish I was for not caring for MYSELF enough to do well and from that point on, I succeeded in life).

It bothers me that my parents really just didn’t ever care that much about me. They were friendly. But looking back, I realize how focused they were on the other kids, and/or not really interested in me. I got straight A’s at age 10 due to deciding I wanted straight A’s. My dad was disinterested. It all makes sense now, in a dumb way.

With America going down the drain, should I move to Australia?

We moved here from California in 2009, and are so thankful that we did. We have a better quality of life living on one salary (husband stays at home, and we have a teen) than we did in Southern California. Instead of living in a 2 bedroom condo, we own a sprawling 3.5 acre property with 4 bedrooms in the heart of wine country and just 30 minutes from a capital city. The public school is fantastic, teaching the regular subjects but also art, music, drama, agriculture (wine making), and PE. Healthcare is much less of a hassle and you never need to worry about affording it.

The biggest challenge is dealing with negative perceptions of Americans, and the only way through this dilemma is by being the best person that you can be. You will be judged by everyone once you open your mouth, so be kind. Be generous, and be prepared to show the population that you would be a good neighbor and friend.

I Wasn’t Going to Upload This: SOME VERY BAD NEWS

It’s long past due to clean out the “brush” that has accumulated over the centuries. It’s a great talk.

No. He is not talking about trees and forest fires. He’s talking about everything. Trees, people, behaviors…

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2023 07 09 17 20

A lot of “dead wood” that needs to be burned off…

What are some examples of co-worker revenge or getting back at someone for something they did at work (not a boss)?

Decades ago I was working my first job out of high school, so young and inexperienced, and very naive. Some of my coworkers were about my age, and at least a couple were retirement age and widows. For the most part we all got along.

Our boss was the director of our department. The business we worked for had a contract that sent our boss (Mike) to another facility one day every 2 weeks, the same day of the week each time.

EVERY single day Mike was at the other facility one of the older ladies would punch out at the usual time and she would also punch out the other lady also. The ladies would work only one half day. They alternated who would take the half day. Of course, this was not announced or on the books. They got time off paid by doing this. It was illegal as it was stealing from the company. Also, the rest of us didn’t get extra pay but we did have to pick up the extra work that they were being paid to do. I quickly got fed up with this arrangement and took time to figure out how to handle it.

Everybody in the department except Mike knew exactly what was going on, yet nobody said anything. One day, the day after Mike worked at the other facility, I said to him that it would be better for the department and us coworkers if the department would tell the rest of us in advance that someone was going to be leaving early, “like yesterday”.

I knew Mike had no idea what was happening, but I played it like he did. I mean he would be derelict in his duties as manager if he didn’t know people were taking time off. At first he tried to say that nobody took the afternoon off yesterday. I named the person who did. I said “I’m sure you know that (and named the 2) alternate who has the afternoon off when he is gone.

Within 2 work days the two ladies confronted me. I forgot how they asked, but it was very specific. I had not told Mike whatever it was they suggested. I would not have lied. I certainly did not elaborate on what I did say. But after this the problem was solved and the ladies took vacation time if they were not in work.

What is the most unusual and incorrect reason you’ve had the police called on you?

A guy was giving the staff of a KFC a hard time and was very rude with a young, rather shy staff member. I intervened; he got very upset and quite agitated. He called me a swine and a Nazi. He was from Spain. I told him in no uncertain words that I was not berating him because he was from Spain, but because he behaved like an asshole. Out of the blue, he pulled some pepper spray and attacked me. Luckily I was able to dodge most of it — though not all. This will become important later. All this took mere seconds.

Bystanders and the poor staffer were not as lucky as I was. Just let that sink in: That guy used pepper spray and hit multiple bystanders, as well as half of the counter full of food. He called the police. They stormed in, berating me and were close to handcuffing me when the restaurant manager stepped in, told the police that I was just protecting his staff member and that he would gladly provide the police and DA with the video tapes. Furthermore, he insisted on IDing that Spanish guy because he had to close down the shop and would have losses (it was a Saturday evening, iirc). So we were both taken for questioning, me as a witness, which took roughly two hours — and a lot of waiting.I did not file a complaint, because I was pretty sure that guy was in deep shit anyway.

When finally free to go, I went back to the KFC to check on that poor girl. The manager told me that she was treated in a hospital, but already had called him and was feeling much better. Turned out I was right with my assumption that the Spanish guy was in deep shit. The restaurant belonged to a corporate franchisee and was about to sue him. And I finally, got a meal. And a coffee. When I tried to pay, that manager looked at me as if he wanted to kill me for a second, then winked.

Last thing I heard that the Spanish guy is charged with multiple cases of aggravated assault and this and that other stuff. Turned out pepper spray is illegal to use against humans in Germany and considered a “dangerous weapon” as defined by law. PLUS he is being sued by a rather large corporation for damages for two hours of a prime evening during prime time. AND the corporation will pay all legal fees for the poor girl as a joint plaintiff for damages and compensation.

What happened to you as a child that feels like a punch to the gut every time you think about it?

I was really eager for first grade. I heard you got a “big kid desk” instead of the cubbies we had in kindergarten. I got to see my new school on an orientation day. We were the first class to attend the newly built Plum Cove School in Gloucester, MA. A friend of the family, Don Monell, was the architect, and he himself told me how special he thought it was. I couldn’t wait!

The problem was that they didn’t hire new teachers. Most were the miserable old crones that typified the grade-school teachers of the 1960s and earlier. They came from whatever old school Plum Cove replaced.

I wound up getting Miss Stark as a teacher. To me she looked to be 100 years old. When I look back, I realize she was just riding out the last few years until retirement. Her teaching methods were literally old-school: humorless, draconian, based on threats of failure and direct punishment.

Miss Stark had two volumes of speech: a screech and a louder screech. She didn’t have an ounce of empathy and didn’t hesitate to send a kid to the Principal’s office (the worst fate in the world if you were a kid back then).

But I loved my “big kid desk!” I loved books, and the school library let us check out five at a time. We got to buy and bring in our own supplies; no more sharing crayons, pencils or rulers. My parents made sure I had everything on my school shopping list. Despite getting a miserable teacher, I did enjoy getting lost in stories and art projects.

One day Miss Stark yelled “desk inspection!” I was confused. Miss Stark actually got up from behind her desk (I didn’t know she could move; she barked her lessons slouched in her chair). She gradually moved from one desk to the next, making us step away from our desks as she peeked into each one.

She made it halfway through the room until she got to my desk, which was in the middle of the classroom. She stopped and asked two boys to come over. “Turn Melissa’s desk over!” She screeched. The boys looked confused. “Take it and dump it out right here on the floor!” They hesitated, but did what Miss Stark ordered.

I stood there in absolute shock and embarrassment. My things went everywhere all over the floor. The boys who dumped out my desk went to set it back upright; Miss Stark told them to leave it upturned; if I wanted my desk back I could turn it over myself.

I watched in horror as just about all the kids in the class descended on my things and started taking them. My crayons, some little toys I brought for recess. I had library books; two of the girls decided to score brownie points with Miss Stark by running up to her with them—“look! Melissa’s got overdue books!” “Look! She has a bunch of old papers!” Some began to taunt me. I was “messy Missy, the slob!” Miss Stark sat and grinned. She enjoyed the torment. She allowed the other kids to take my things: “if she cared about her things, she would have taken better care of them.”

Miss Stark had returned to her desk. She stopped “desk inspection” with me; apparently I was the target all along and her inspection was a ruse.

Miss Stark launched into a lesson while I desperately tried to get my scattered things in order. I went to turn my desk upright, but I wasn’t strong enough. One of the boys who dumped my desk did feel bad, so he jumped up to help me; Miss Stark ordered him to “stay in your seat! It’s lesson time! Leave Melissa alone, she has to fix what she’s done!”

I was missing what Miss Stark was teaching because my textbooks and pencils were everywhere. I continued to try to lift my desk. I was 6 years old and all I could manage was to flop it on it’s side. I finally sat in my chair and cried.

Miss Stark ignored me and continued with her lesson. At the end of the school day, I didn’t know what to do; my things were piled up and my desk upended. Finally, a custodian came in and put my desk upright. I could put my things back, finally, and ran to the bus.

That cruel humiliation has stayed with me my entire life. Of course my parents didn’t believe me when I tearfully told them what happened.

I hated school and teachers from that day forward. I also learned that your parents always sided with the teacher. If you got into trouble at school, you were also in trouble at home. School wasn’t the rosy world that was depicted on our “Janet and Mark” early reading textbooks.

Over 30 years later, I told this story to my then-husband. He nodded his head and said, “well, that’s how you get kids to learn. Embarrass them, and they shape up.” I couldn’t believe that the man I married would say something so utterly stupid, while having no sympathy for my plight. I did eventually divorce the moron; he turned out to be a lot like Miss Stark.

This happened to me when I was 14 or 15 years old.

I was very reserved person and at that point of time, I hardly interacted with the opposite gender.

A classmate of mine was dating a guy and then they broke up for reasons unknown. This guy started approaching me to help him with the relationship. I told him, “I don’t want to get into all this. My parents are very strict and if they get to know all this then I would be trouble”.

He vanished for about six months and I completely forgot about him. After 6 months, that idiot came to me and proposed to me, I just walked away without answering him. I thought, ignoring him is an answer in itself but then he started stalking at all places. He started coming near my house, tuitions and wherever I went. I was dead scared. not about that guy, but my father.

I continuously ignored him. After about 2 months, he walked behind me to the railway station. I was on my way back home, after meeting my friends. There was hardly anyone at the station. Then the train came. This idiot pulled my hand and said, “if we cannot live together then let’s die together”. Maybe, he wanted to jump in front of the train. A lady rescued me from him and he just ran off.

That was the most terrifying experience I ever had.

For initial couple of seconds, I feared death. But later, I started to think that if I die today with this idiot then people would think that we were in a relationship. My father would hate me for life.

What is the most unusual and incorrect reason you’ve had the police called on you?

my dad was a complete bastard. He was abusive, and although I repeatedly tried to work through it, and even go as far as go to counseling, he never felt in the wrong for beating me up (black eye, fractured both wrists, busted my lip, bruised my ear to name a few) and I wanted an apology. I was at his house speaking to him after my grandmother died, and he was pretty drunk at 10am. We got into an argument so I wanted to leave, but he grabbed my purse, not knowing I had a hide a key.

eventhough my purse had my wallet, phone, money, ID, keys to my apartment etc, I just wanted to get away from him.

I’m sitting at the light a few miles away from my dads house when I notice police running in between the cars in my rear view mirror. I’m looking at them thinking someone is in trouble. Imagine my surprise when the cop points the gun at my head and tells me to get out of the car. I’m confused, but I cooperate. I get out and then he tells me to get on the ground so he can cuff me. It’s like nasty dirty black road in a really busy intersection but I do it. When they get me to the side of the road, handcuffed and out of traffic, I tell them I am not a car thief, that it’s in fact my car. They get the registration and insurance out and also in my registration, I have an extra license. When they saw that, they were very apologetic and told me, that my father had called my car in as stolen by a girl that he thinks was armed, and the car belongs to his daughter, who was currently out of town.

now he didn’t know I had another ID, so he thought that I’d have no way to prove I am who I am, and I’d get arrested and my car would be impounded, and it would just show me who can make my life hell.

funny thing is, that’s illegal. It’s called “misuse of 911” and they’ll arrest you for it, so they let me go and went and arrested my father.

the craziest part of this whole thing, was my father called me to bail him out.

I did not.

Operation Highjump | Mission: Find and Destroy the Secret Nazi UFO Base In Antarctica

Operation Highjump commenced in August 1946. It was the largest, most heavily armed naval task force ever sent to Antarctica.

Leading the mission was Admiral Richard E Byrd, one of the most famous naval officers in history.

The official purpose for the expedition was scientific research and military training. But that was just a cover story.

Operation Highjump had other goals.

One was to extend American sovereignty over Antarctica. Something that was denied many times by the US government.

Another was to locate and destroy a secret Nazi base. AND, capture the nazi’s new secret weapon: the flying saucer.

UFOs were seen all over the area; suspected to be Nazi test flights. Admiral Byrd was sent to find out.

When he finally arrived to Antarctica, he found a lot more than that.

What’s the nicest thing you’ve done for a neighbor, or have they done for you?

Ten years ago, I lived in a block of flats comprised of a single room ground floor and my flat, first floor.

A female student rented the downstairs flat and although I was old enough to be her mother, we got on very well because she was polite, quiet and yet very funny and hard-working.

Her family was not well-off so she thought she owed it to her parents to work hard at university.

I occasionally invited her to share my meals and she was really thankful because she missed her parents.

One morning, she knocked on my door.

She was in a panic, crying her eyes out.

Her laptop had stopped working and she was meant to give an important presentation at the university that very morning.

Without it, she would fail her exam. I didn’t think long: although I needed my laptop for work, too, I lent it to her.

She passed and was able to go back home to her proud parents with a degree.

I really wouldn’t have let just anybody take my laptop. She was a special girl.

The Black Knight and some video out of China

In this article / post we will chat a little bit about extraterrestrials, and mysteries. Mainly by posting a few videos up, and some associated articles. The idea behind this post is to show some of what it “out there” in internet land, and to state that they tangentially touch on things that I have so painfully explained. Often they are just blind people in the dark trying to figure things out through disinformation…

So enjoy the videos and the articles. Do not get too caught up.

Now, at the end of the article is the “The Black Knight” mystery spacecraft. And the “reports” all take a few NASA images and “run with them”.

Totally oblivious to the fact that China is in space, has a huge space presence, and has also been filming and videoing these various objects.

Yes. China has been very active in filming UFOs and other strange things.

And I will be putting some of this stuff on MM in the future.

At the very end of this article / post, is my Chinese video taken of what The Black Knight” seemingly is. I am convinced that you all will find it very interesting.

Not available on any American or English Speaking websites, eh?

Imagine that.

Just the same old regurgitated bullshit, endlessly discussed, and theories bantered about, but with no new information of value.

Except here on MM.

Have fun guys…

First a daily dose of geo-political, and some other stuff…

Who has been the strangest world leader of the last five decades?

Definitely this guy.

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2023 07 09 08 49

His name is Duterte and he is the current president of the Philippines.

(A little background about the Philippines – The country of Philippines can be called ‘Mexico of Asia’. It is plagued by drug dealers. It is almost a normal occurrence in the Philippines for drug lords to kidnap citizens for ransom. Watch drugs in Philippines-2014 documentary Al Jezeera)

It is a normal custom for the president of the Philippines to issue Christmas greetings message to the citizens, every year. Duterte got elected in 2016. Following is his 2016 Christmas greetings message.

“I’m only human. So let me say ‘Merry Christmas’ to all the thieves, drug lords, drug pushers, corrupt and whoever made the life hard for Filipinos (People of Philippines). By the way, if you don’t cease and still continue your brutality, this will be your last Merry Christmas’

And this man ain’t kidding.

Within a few months of this message, two mayors who were caught in corruption were killed during the operation. 3600 drug lords were killed during the operation and 1.3 million drug addicts surrendered.

More than 1 million drug addicts surrender to gov’t

Duterte told his cops, ‘Go and hunt them. If possible arrest them. If he/she attacks you, just shoot him first.’

And all this happened in just 6 months after the message. In an interview with CNN, Duterte quoted, “We Filipinos are poor and our kids are our wealth. When we get old, we depend on our kids to pay for our medicine and even for burial. Drug lords and users, I warn you ‘Do not destroy the lives of young Filipinos with drugs. If you do so, I will surely kill you’.

The self-proclaimed moral consciences of the world (Read West) condemn Duterte for his ‘War on drugs’. President Obama condemned Duterte and Duterte had this following thing to say…

‘You bomb Syria and you kill thousands of innocent civilians, yet you have guts to call me? You bomb schools and hospitals and kill hundreds of innocent kids. You went to Iraq with an excuse of ‘Weapon of mass destruction’ and slaughtered thousands of innocent civilians, yet you found nothing. In your country, policeman shoots a handcuffed Black man for he is simply a Black. At least in my country, I shoot criminals. So Obama, _______ yourself

And by the way, Duterte’s approval rating as of 2019 is 87%

Duterte trust, approval ratings unchanged after Recto Bank incident

Personally I don’t like him using ‘Colorful’ languages in public, cause he is seen as an inspiration by many young people, so it is good if he stops using those words, but this man really introduces a new unconventional political style.

Note; For those commenting, ‘Duterte jokes about rape’ and other bunch of crazy stuff you better come up with video evidence. After Duterte refused to be the American puppet, Western media has been spreading this propaganda and sadly many fell for it. Any comment accusing Duterte with out video proof will be deleted.

Note 2: WESTERN MEDIA HAS A HABIT OF TAKING DUTERTE’S QUOTE WAY OUT OF CONTEXT. IT IS EASY TO DO SO CAUSE DUTERTE SPEAKS MOSTLY IN HIS NATIVE LANGUAGE. Any comment accusing Duterte with out video proof will be deleted.

Why has China been cracking down on private enterprises like Ant Group?

A Message had to be delivered

China is not USA or India or Russia. Try any tricks and we will castrate you

Ant Group has been playing with capitalism hard and fast

First is their following the US mode of creating monopolies and throttling smaller entities. Jack Ma had this bad habit of identifying any potential business and shackling it under Alibaba . Later suppliers and vendors were squeezed because Alibaba and Ant controlled their markets

Second is their brazen credit lending without actual substance or collateral. They would lend a lot of money belonging to banks with minimal compliance and without a tenth of the assets and collateral.

Third is their valuation models and their repeated ability to keep using investments to float value. The sort of thing Byjus does in India.

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2023 07 08 18 59

China and the CPC in 2019 began to realize that if companies like Ant group were allowed to do things so rampantly ,China would be floating and bloating with paper values in a matter of years (Like India will be by 2025)

So they began squeezing on all the players including Ant Group

  • First they ended credit lending without a minimum 40% asset backing.
  • Next they ended the monopoly by providing a 120 day period to all suppliers and vendors to counter with their own price bid
  • Next they ensured that bloated valuations would have no role in China by linking valuation to technology development and profits

The Fine of $994 Million is just the culmination of all the excesses that Any Group has enjoyed all these years

China simply says “No Illusions and No fast bucks. You want to grow, grow the right way and benefit society and yourself. Develop Technology along the way”

The message is for all other Tech Companies and other companies in China

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2023 07 08 19 01

Had this been 2017, Ant could have scoffed and shrugged and left China and gone to US or UK

Sadly this is 2023

Chinese Entities have no other way to go but into the Chinese economy and market which gives them more than two thirds of their revenues


So it’s a message at the end of the day

Do things right and we are always with you. Try to fool people and line your pockets at the expense of the Chinese people and we will destroy you

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2023 07 08 19 0z1

Jack Ma for instance made the cardinal mistake of becoming too capitalist and putting his pocket above that of the people through ruthless monopolies and blind valuations

So he has been neutralized and the message has been very strong indeed

It’s why no other Tech CEO since 2020 violated the Tech Laws set in place by the Chinese Government


Always the message with the Chinese

They always deliver a message through such actions

The Moon Revealed: It’s a Hollow Spaceship, so who built it and why?

Ah, sort of.

But don’t get too caught up. I wrote about this earlier. Fun view, though. Enjoy.

“Today while at the gas station I overheard a lady in her late 20’s telling 2 other men to leave her alone

so I decided to walk over to them and I asked her ” how was the meeting today darlin? ” she looked at me and said ” it was good, I’ll tell you more about it when we get home in a few “. I replied with ” wonderful I’ll pick up your favorite for dinner”.

The two guys left in a hurry and she told me ” you have no idea how much that meant to me …. thank you.” I said “you’re very welcome ma’am …. you can never be too careful. “

I made sure the guys left before I walked back to my car and as I was walking back all I could do was think ” I hope a man does that for my future daughter one day”.”

~ Cody Bret

City School Pizza

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2023 07 09 08 5fa6

Yield: 24 servings

Ingredients

French-Style Pizza Crust

  • 2 packages dry or cake yeast
  • 1 tablespoon granulated sugar
  • 3 1/2 cups lukewarm water
  • 9 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon salt

Topping

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 tablespoon instant minced onion
  • 1 (8 ounce) can tomatoes, drained and chopped
  • 1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
  • 3/4 cup water
  • 3/4 teaspoon oregano
  • Salt
  • 3/4 teaspoon dried sweet basil
  • 3/4 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 3/4 pound ground or chopped luncheon meat
  • 1 1/2 cups grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

French-Style Pizza Crust

  1. Dissolve yeast and sugar in water.
  2. Add flour and salt. Knead until smooth.
  3. Cover and let rise until doubled in bulk.
  4. Cut into 2portions. Let rest 15 minutes.
  5. Pat or roll to even thickness in 2 (15 1/2 x 10 1/2-inch) jellyroll pans. Set aside.

Topping

  1. Brown ground beef and onion in a large skillet.
  2. Add tomatoes, tomato paste, water, oregano, salt to taste, basil, garlic powder and luncheon meat. Sauté until mixture comes to a boil. Simmer for a few minutes.
  3. Spread sauce on prepared French-Style Pizza Crust in pans. Sprinkle each crust with cheese.
  4. Bake at 400 degrees F for 30 to 35 minutes or until cheese layer is bubbly and browned.

Is corruption the only reason some countries in South Asia are stranded in “developing” status?

Do you think Corruption doesnt exist in China or Singapore or South Korea?

Of course it does. Corruption exists everywhere and wherever there is position of power.

It is when Corruption and Development become Mutually Exclusive that trouble starts.

Lets take the Chinese and Singaporean Example:-

The “Golden Rule” of Deng Xiaopeng (Later emanated by Lee Kuan Yew) was that Corruption is inevitable.

So Deng developed his golden rule.

The Rule was called the “Bridge on the Village River” rule – where Deng would instruct his ministers

I want a Bridge on the Village River. It should be strong and it should be durable for 20 years and should not break or develop any problems or issues. I estimate the budget to be 100000 Yuan (Purely arbitary number) so i will sanction 120000 Yuan – so that 20000 Yuan can be used for miscellaneous purposes. I dont care how this money is going to be spend or who gets what portion. I will turn a blind eye to it BUT if the bridge collapses due to shoddy construction – i will personally crush any and all persons who were responsible for it.

That is the BOVR rule followed by China or Korea or Singapore.

End Results are all that matter. This way – the Nation gets the best product and the Nation develops and moves forward. People get enriched but Chinese or SIngaporeans regard this as a sort of Service Charge rather than Corruption or Bribes or Graft.

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2023 07 09 08 15

The Hong Kong police consisted of Chinese Nationals upto the rank of Sergeant and Britishers from the ranks of Inspector and above.

Every Chinese National would get at least 100% of his salary amount from Graft (Bribes) from Nightclub owners, Businessmen etc etc.

The Result – Hong Kong was almost completely crime free. The Triads did not touch common man. Not a single pistol could be brought into HK without consequences.

A Contractor who can get a superb building made within budget – takes a 10000 yuan commission will not be penalized until the building collapses in which case he is finished as are the party officials who chose him in the first place.

In Singapore – to ensure corruption does not exist – Lee Kuan Yew established measures like Huge Salaries to Ministers and Bonuses to Officials. A $ 100 Million contract into Singapore – would mean a bonus of $ 200000 for the Officials at the concerned ministry. With such incentives – why would anyone turn to corruption????

Check out the Chinese Ministers – Each one wears a $ 12000 – $25000 Suit – tailored in London or New York or by Expats living in Shanghai. They have Rolls or Bentleys and the big ministries have exclusive helicopters.

They earn between 70% to 450% higher than the Median Base Pay for College Graduates.

Conclusion:-

A. Corruption Exists in China or Korea – but the Corruption is regarded as a Service Charge as long as the End Result is not harmful to the public or is not defective or of poor quality – NOBODY CARES. Imagine a Agent who is able to bring a 100 Helicopter Deal to China – he takes a kickback of $ 1 Million. As long as the Helicopters are top notch – nobody in China will care.

B. These countries pay commissions, incentives and higher salaries (Like Singapore) to ensure that Corruption is kept out or at least minimized completely. Imagine you get $ 10 Million a year as Minister – would you be stupid enough to accept or coordinate a bribe?

Gifts like Rolex Watches, Works of Art, Jewelry are commonplace and wont generate a huge public controversy.


Now lets see India and Pakistan and Bangladesh

Thats where the Hypocrisy starts

main qimg 3584056107ac1261b9f6f3002f96f472 lq
main qimg 3584056107ac1261b9f6f3002f96f472 lq

Our Leaders pretend to be simple people. They Wear Khadi in the peak of summer, the Gandhian Caps, They balk at gifts which exceed over Rs. 5000/- and our Newspapers go on and on about a Chief Minister who accepted a $ 10000 Watch (Siddaramaiah) as a gift and he has to prove that he gifted the watch to a museum.

main qimg cab2904aa1cd996d7b833e35b90d14df pjlq
main qimg cab2904aa1cd996d7b833e35b90d14df pjlq

Yet 60% of the Politicians Ministers all have assets exceeding Rs. 50 Crores with allegations of exceeding Rs. 1000 or even Rs. 5000 Crores.

The Simplicity is a Deception on the People of India (Some people like Lal Bahadur Shastri were born simple but most of them are deceiving the people).

Poor Christian Michel gets thrown in Jail for bribery whereas the people on both sides are scot free.

CBI pursue a small time Havildar who took Rs. 1000/- bribe on Diwali

And we claim to be Tough on Corruption

And in our case – since unlike China or Singapore or South Korea – Our Leadership is Illiterate or Semi Literate in most cases – the Corruption affects our Quality very badly

Roads that get Potholes with 2 days of rain , Bridges that Collapse regularly, Structures that are rarely steady and would not receive certification by the blindest Quality Engineer anywhere outside India or Pakistan or Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, Poor Quality Manufactured goods etc.

The Gandhian Mentality is solely responsible for why our Leaders pretend to be simple yet why they become richer and richer while the country gets zero or near zero quality products or infrastructure.

Had we been China – we would have offered a 1.5% flat commission to the Officers who got us the Rafale Deal. This would have eliminated corruption since the bribe money would have come in the form of incentives and service charges.

Had we been Singapore or Korea – we would have ensured that Christian Michel would be regarded as nothing more than a Commission Agent and we would not have even glanced in his direction considering his “Payments” as nothing more than “Service Fees”

Instead our System is a Gigantic Hypocrisy – as is the case of Pakistan or Bangladesh or Sri Lanka.

Pretence, Pretence, Pretence

Punish the small fry and ignore the huge sharks and whales

Ensure that corruption has a direct and total impact on the quality of products

Ensure that Rhea Chakraborty is sent to jail with the whole nation clapping and cheering while Ministers who ordered Bridges to collapse or Contractors responsible for building roads which kill due to potholes – end up getting more contracts.

That is why – while the Asian Countries like China or SIngapore grow – India is doomed. It is the system that is corrupted completely and totally.

JRE: What Scientists Just Discovered At The Grand Canyon TERRIFIES The Whole World

Just a reminder that the “powers that be” control what you know and what you do not know.

This is a fun video.

However, why would Egyptians be in Arizona, or New Mexico without any Egyptian communities on the coasts for their ships to travel to? A lack of infrastructure is troubling.

So do not get too caught up.

The “missing pieces” might be trivial or alarming, but they are still MISSING.

https://youtu.be/Ivv79NU6tRw

What are the reasons behind China being the dominant producer of gallium and germanium?

Profitable Extraction!!!!!

China has the reserves and the procedure to extract the elements profitability and purify them profitably

China is able to deliver a processed product at lowest cost ($ 2400/PTK) and make a 17% Profit

It’s estimated the US can deliver the processed product at lowest cost of $ 8900/PTK and make a 35% Loss which needs subsidy

Thus instead of $ 2400/PTK with 17% profit , the raw material and base material now costs $ 8900/PTK and the US Govt or Taxpayer has to pay $ 3080/PTK as subsidy

That’s $2400 vs $11980

Unless US manages to import slaves again and manufacture the machinery on its own — US can’t lower costs

Because GUESS WHAT?

CHINA CONTROLS THE ENTIRE EXTRACTION MACHINERY FOR RARE EARTHS!!!!!!

You have a Lithium mine?

Without China, you can’t extract a nano gram of Lithium because the machinery is theirs and they control the market


Plus Environment is a big big thing here

The Green party will hate any processing foundry or extraction mine for Gallium or Germanium or Lithium in US due to pollution that is almost guaranteed


Solution?

Start making extraction machinery in India and Vietnam and ship them to US along with 100,000 migrant workers

And maybe in 20 years , US can take up around 30–40% of the market share of Gallium or Germanium

It’s a headache but US are idiots and that’s exactly what those stubborn fools will do

“Stay single until someone actually complements your life in such a way that makes it better to not be single” What do you consider someone complementing your life to be?

I got divorced 12 years ago. After that, I stayed single for almost 7 years. Well, 1. I was too busy, and 2. I was hurt.

After that, I decided to start dating again. Man, it was so difficult. I had a few first dates, and either they escaped from me or I escaped from them.

Then I saw him.

The way he smiled was like this:

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main qimg a885f47d2ec13b655ad21b793c1214a3

You know what I mean? The smile that makes you want to smile. The smile that makes you feel all the stresses you are carrying get lighter a little bit. I knew I wanted to be around him.

He asked me out, I told him I was busy and didn’t have much time. He said then we could date the busy way: he showed up at my lunchtime to have a sandwich that I prepared; sometimes just a small walk before bedtime late at night. He understood my priorities and supported me.

Sometimes, I got a text from him saying, “I know you have an important meeting today, try not to kill anybody.” Sometimes, I “escaped” from the office to go to a coffee shop with him next to me. We both worked on our laptops, didn’t talk to each other the whole time; we just enjoyed the feeling we were together.

I smile more and live fuller with him in it. I truly feel that the pain I had in me, turned into the memory, it’s not hurt anymore. Is he complementing my life? I think so. Because he healed me.

12 ALIEN CRAFT In US Custody, Per Intel

From “The Hill” which is a MAJOR political organization in Washington DC.

OK. Whoop! Whoop!

Now what?

Stupid Jackasses. At the end of the day, nothing will change. The reality of what is going on is far too dangerous to expose.

Why do liberals think that sexually explicit books should be available in school libraries?

I remember this quote, I think from Neil Gaiman, about fairy tales and stories. It goes something like this. Fairy tales didn’t tell children there were dragons. We already knew dragons existed. Fairy tales tell children that dragons can be defeated.

Books don’t tell children sex or violence or gay people exist in the world. They already know. Books tell them how to deal with these complicated things. Books and stories allow them to explore uncomfortable ideas and situations in a safe environment. It helps them process their emotions.

My family didn’t believe in “age-appropriate” books. As long as I could read it, every book on the bookshelves was open for grabs. The community library right next to our house did not have special library cards for children. Everyone has the same type of cards and has access to the same collections of books. I was reading The Decameron in middle school. In case you didn’t know, it’s a collection of stories, including some pretty graphic sex scenes and gore.

You know what my grandma did? We talked.

I remember telling her about this story I read from Decameron, about this priest and bread and oven. It’s a sex joke. It took me quite some time to figure it out, and I talked to my grandma about it. We all laughed, not because of the sex innuendo but rather because of the hypocrisy of the whole situation. And that’s the whole point of the story, the hypocrisy of the catholic priests during the 14th century. I got that in middle school. Children aren’t stupid. They understand things if you take the time and help them figure it out.

I talked to her about the books I read, the parts I don’t understand, and/or make me uncomfortable. Whatever dysfunctions my family had, we could always get together and talk about books.

That’s what being a parent is about.

I always suspect parents who want to ban books don’t really want to “protect” their children, but rather, they don’t want to or don’t know how to have difficult conversations with their children about the books they read. Either they themselves do not read books and don’t understand how to discuss literature and narrative. They don’t know how to apply lessons learned in books to real life. They don’t understand the importance of stories. Or they simply don’t give a shit. They would rather put off these conversations and wait until the kids are old enough and have them figure it out themselves.

There’s no such thing as a dangerous book. Ideas do not “corrupt” children. Not if they have good parents to talk to. When children are “corrupted” by the internet or social media, or books, it’s not because the materials are dangerous. It is because they are isolated, they’re confused, and there are no adults in their lives they can rely on to guide them.

Banning books is never about “protecting children.” It is always about shitty parents who couldn’t be bothered to be proper parents.


I started to get conservative comments that defended the book ban, and I got a common theme from these comments that they seemed to believe that there are books in school libraries or public libraries that contain graphic depictions of extreme pornographic/fetish content.

One comment talks about how they don’t want their children to learn about sex fetishes that involve human feces from books in school libraries. Another comment says they don’t want their children to learn about blow jobs from books containing young boys giving each other blow jobs, other comments talk about “government teaching my son how to give a hand job.”

… like… I’m so confused. Like… have you been to a library?! What kind of books do you think they have?!

Seriously people, stop watching Fox News, and go visit a public library.


Also, I got this gem today.

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2023 07 09 08 24

What is proof for you that karma exists?

The suicide bomber who died alone.

In 2016, Abdullahi Abdisalam Borleh was a suicide bomber with a laptop full of explosives who boarded a plane from Somalia, Daallo Airlines.

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main qimg 60ed8fc71c78d7a1985fbaf732a25abc pjlq

He had embarked as a disabled person and claimed to be on a trip for a medical check-up.

Twenty minutes after takeoff from Mogadishu, Somalia at an altitude of 14,000 feet, an explosion occurred inside the aircraft. There were 74 passengers and 7 crew members on board.

The explosion created this opening.

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main qimg fc509f2401747ea89e98508081adec34 pjlq

He was the only one to be sucked into the opening.

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main qimg a85e4a3cc52df49a67965e4151d83217 pjlq

His intention was to kill all the passengers of the plane but according to fate, he had to be the only one to die.

The plane’s controls were not affected by the explosion, allowing the pilot to return the plane to Mogadishu safely.

Karma sometimes works… as if by magic.

The evidence we are living in a Simulation is everywhere. All you have to do is look.

No problem with this.

What do engineers no longer think about today?

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main qimg ddb4845850372969ea39f392189692a9 lq

To the little things that make life easier for people.

The designer of the castle of this medieval door probably liked to drink a little too much.

And when it got late, it was pitch black.

So it was a great thing if the design made it a little easier to find the keyhole to finally get some well-deserved sleep.

This designer was a real humanitarian.

Why do Indians have so many problems against a Sino-Indian trade alliance?

As on date China doesn’t see value in a Sino Indian Trade Alliance

China isn’t like US or UK , a nation that makes decisions in a hurry

China is evaluating India and has decided that as on date India is not valuable enough for China to seriously offer a trade alliance and make some serious concessions

China is more impressed with Vietnam which follows China’s own building strong bases, building a workforce and then slowly layering to the top

China isn’t impressed with India’s hotch potch ‘Cant manufacture a Ball point pen fully but sure let’s build 2 nm chips’ method

Today India’s entire manufacturing is because of the fact that Indian government says unless you manufacture in India, we won’t buy your product (or assemble)

That was never the Chinese model

The Chinese were always about “Manufacture in China, we will give you land and labor and you give us jobs and development”

So as on date this Make in India is a gimmick meant for elections and to impress gullible people into making them think India is heading to becoming a superpower

China knows too well the real state of India manufacturing

The real state of regressive taxation

The horrible political system

The atrocious labor laws

The greedy and inefficient manufacturing environment

China knows India hasn’t made 0.0001% effort to improve any of them

So China knows all this Indian manufacturing is just a gimmick like everything else for headlines and some random numbers

Simple example is Vietnam makes 11% of all Smartphones on earth and India makes around 17%

Yet scale and size wise India is around 6.65 times the trade scale of Vietnam

India needs to be making around 77% of its smartphones by now to be equivalent to Vietnam in manufacturing

Plus India assembles smartphones on a 69:31 basis

Vietnam does so on a 38:62 basis

It shows how much superior Vietnam is to India

And if Vietnam is like M.Sc first year then China is like five years post Doctorate


So frankly China isn’t impressed much with India

Sure it will make noise here and there but there is no serious view of India managing anything remotely significant in the next few years without serious reforms and serious changes in national policy towards manufacturing


The Day India is serious about manufacturing and we see laws changing and tax laws changing and separate jurisdictions and liberal policies and judicial reforms

Then China definitely will make offers to India including potential concessions on Arunachal or Ladakh

Until then it’s not worth it

A Sino Indian Trade Alliance with Today’s India in exchange for giving up claims on Ladakh or Arunachal is a bad bad deal for China

Today’s India is 90% Talk and 10% Actual Progress

When it’s 60% Talk and 40% Actual Progress, China will handle the issue differently

What are some examples of scientists who had brilliant ideas and became millionaires? 😶‍🌫️💡

One recent example is a 34-year-old Japanese mathematics professor who decided to host his lectures on… Pornhub.

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main qimg 5a9b455284fb95c2bfcfb83ed3a1db77 pjlq

His earnings of €250,000 per year stem from the fact that even though many may not be interested in the subject, they are nonetheless curious about his presence and attempt to watch the video, generating views.

What is your biggest “only in China” moment?

This…

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main qimg 48ed91e13ba47a177e4ad126815d787f lq

A Buddhist monk seeking religious advice from a Taoist.

If it’s hard to understand how unusual this is, imagine a Catholic priest seeking religious teachings from an Islamic cleric or vise versa.

Chinese religions (Buddhism was localized after settled in China) are very tolerant to each other. It’s pretty hard for Chinese to understand why there could be centuries of hatred and violence just because of different beliefs.

Michio Kaku JUST LEAKED China’s SHOCKING Discovery On The Moon!

This is a fun and interesting video.

Keep in mind a date of 11,000 – 13,000 years ago. Notice that this date disagrees with my own beliefs, but please pay attention to their argument. Have a good time. Enjoy.

Cafeteria Cole Slaw

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2023 07 09 08 56

Ingredients

  • 1 head cabbage, chopped fine
  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 1 tablespoon lemon juice
  • 2 or 3 tablespoons mayonnaise or salad dressing

Instructions

  1. Mix all ingredients well until cabbage is completely coated.
  2. Salt and pepper to taste.

China plans to perform a crewed lunar landing before 2030. What do you think of this goal?

China is 99% possible to keep its words.

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2023 07 09 08 52

This is a photo of 2 newspapers in 2004.


Let one is about China’s moon project. China Lunar Exploration Project was announced in Feb 2004, and it was already in implementation stage. China was planning to have a moon orbiting satellite within 3 years, a soft-landing on the moon in 6 years, and have moon dirt sample taken back by a robot before 2020.

By the end of 2020, in December, Chang-e 5 returned with 1731 gram of moon dirt. China barely kept its words, due to delays caused by rocket making.


On the right, it was moon projects announced by the US, Russia, Japan, and India.

The US was going to land on the moon again in 2015, and establish an international moon base no later than 2020.

Russia was going to have a test launch of its latest moon landing ship.

India was going to launch its first unmanned moon ship Chandrayaan-1 in 2008.

Japan was going to eastablish its moon base in 2025, and send robots there.


Chinese newspaper reported moon projects from 5 countries in 2004.

So far, only China managed to keep on schedule.

So when China says that it’s people will land on the moon before 2030, it’s highly possible that it knows exactly where it is now, and how fast its moon project will go.

If universal healthcare is actually cheaper than our current system and covers everybody. Why not just do it?

I’m a retired US citizen who moved to Uruguay in 2015 after spending my entire working career in “Corporate America”.

It’s entertaining to read discussions about the possibility of implementing Universal Healthcare in the United States.

It will NEVER happen. It’s 1000% impossible. The reason? Health insurance companies.

The concept of Universal Healthcare does not involve insurance companies. There is no need for a bloated middleman.

There are 563,366 Health & Medical Insurance Employees in the US, costing approximately $50 billion annually.

These companies would have to be closed, freeing up all this cash for actual medical care, instead of bloat.

The main problems with the US Healthcare system are listed below. None of these problems exist with Universal Healthcare.

a. Greedy Health insurance companies run by highly-paid executives.

b. High-paid pharmaceutical & insurance company lobbyists.

c. Greedy congressmen who take millions of dollars in bribes annually.

d. Expensive TV commercials pushing expensive drugs.

e. Doctors who earn outrageous salaries to pay for outrageously expensive college educations with insane education loans.

f. Outrageous malpractice lawsuit settlements, requiring doctors to carry outrageous liability insurance.

g. People with no medical knowledge make decisions about whether a patient can have a medical procedure, overruling the attending physician.

Now, with the outsourcing of call centers, people with no medical knowledge in Jamaica, India, and Pakistan make those decisions.

Here are some typical costs in Uruguay:

Office visit: US $8.00

ER visit: US $ 10.00

House call: US $12.00.

Electrolyte blood analysis: US $7.11.

Cerebral CT Scan: US $23.29

If you call an ambulance, it arrives with a full-fledged MD, not an EMT.

Before I turned 70 years of age, I paid around US $55 per month for health coverage.

Now I pay around US $70 per month. For that, I get totally free hospital stays and all costs are free, including hospital stay, surgery, medications, doctor care, and nursing care. When you check out, regardless of what was done or how long you were hospitalized, you pay nothing.

The monthly cost for my cancer medication is around US $2.50. The same medication in the US is around $500.00.

Here are the main reasons everything is so cheap:

No claims to file

No EOB

No Deductible

No Out-of-Pocket

No Coinsurance

No Allowed amount

No Benefit period

No Preauthorization

Why does communist China feel entitled to export cheap products to foreign countries and destroy their local manufacturing industries?

China just takes purchase orders and supplies, be it from a rich country or a poor one. You should rather ask this question to those countries, why they go to China to get cheaper things.

However, the point of “destroy” is interesting, indeed. Chinese cheap products have destroyed industries in the higher-income countries like Europe and America. And those developed countries deliberately did this to save cost, but eventually ended up at the cost of their own citizens’ unemployement. Surely they had a vision, though probably a wrong one. But they would know it better.

But China’s “cheap” products helped the poor countries a lot, particularly those who did not yet have industries. For example let’s talk about Bangladesh where the vast majority people are poor. They could not afford to buy Europe/Japan/America-made products even they were in a dire need. But they can manage to get the similar peoducts from China at their afforable price. Thus, life has become much easier and even safer when they got this products-support from China.

Take few essential products for example:

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2023 07 09 08 38

This mosquito killer racket helped save millions of lives from life-threatening Malaria and Dengue fever in Bangladesh.

energy-saving bulbs:

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2023 07 09 08 3af8

These bulbs from China lit up millions of households in Bangladesh where electricity cost is rocket-high.

Then this:

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2023 07 09 0ger8 38

Thousands of commuters have benefitted from this cheap motorbike in Bangladesh where public transports are rare and nightmare.

Now, let’s talk about the other, even life-changing benefits gotten from these imported products. Bangladeshis acquired the technical knowhows, bought cheap machineries and raw materials back from China and now have started making them in their own country. Means, now they have established their own industries, providing employment to their own people and altogether contributing to the national economy. And gradually this country is climbing the ladder of self-industrialization. I think such transformation is taking place in many other poor countries as well.

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2023 07 09 08 39

Bangladesh recently started making its own motorbikes

Then, how are you going to blame China? Or thanking China, instead?

Sunman-Dearborn School Chili

This very popular Sunman-Dearborn School Chili was always served with cornbread and butter on the side.

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2023 07 09 08 58

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1 tablespoon brown sugar
  • 2/3 cup ketchup
  • 1/2 cup tomato paste (6 ounces)
  • 4 ounces spaghetti, broken into thirds
  • 3 tablespoons onion
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper
  • 1/2 teaspoon chili powder
  • 2/3 cup tomato sauce (8 ounce can)
  • 2/3 cup pinto beans (15 ounce can)

Instructions

  1. Brown ground beef and onion. Drain off extra fat.
  2. Add remaining ingredients, except spaghetti. Add one quart water. Bring chili to boil. Add spaghetti.
  3. Serve when spaghetti is soft.

How can greed harm someone?

50 Cent gave her son’s mother $500,000 a year (about $40,000 a month) as child support, and she said it wasn’t enough.

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main qimg 28b3959dea162bede13f019f1734e9ba

So, she turned to the family court to ask for an increase in maintenance. To his disappointment, the court said 50 cents would have to reduce the amount to just $6,700 a month.

Most of the money given before the court decision was used to maintain a lifestyle for the mother and not for the maintenance of the child.

Why are rural towns in America dying?

Let’s say you grew up in Lander, Wyoming — a decent-sized town at about 7,500 people.

Unless you’re Catholic, there are no colleges in your town. So when you graduate high school, you can either:

  • Go into a trade
  • Get a minimum-wage job
  • Move to another town

In this case, you want to go to college so you move.

Fortunately, Wyoming has about 6 community colleges to choose from. You choose the second-largest town in Wyoming at 55,000 people, Casper. You do your two years and when you’re done, you realize you’ll need a Bachelor’s to further your career.

Now you have 4 options:

  • Give up on your degree and move back home
  • Move to Laramie to attend the University of Wyoming — the state’s only 4-year public institution
  • Stay in Casper and finish through the UW/CC program
  • Move to another state

As many kids find, the program you want isn’t even offered at UW (or what they do offer is really, really poor).

If you give up on your degree, you won’t have many job prospects, so you relocate again to Colorado where you can choose from ~14 4-year schools — actually, those are just the public ones. There are ~14 more private 4-year schools you could attend, too.

After graduating, you have a bunch of new job connections down in Colorado. You look online and see jobs in Boulder, Denver, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, and elsewhere — so you can live virtually anywhere in the state you want. And, most of those cities are near smaller towns, so you can feel like you’re back home while reaping the benefits of city living.

Or, you can go back to Lander — population, 7,500 — which is a 4-hour drive to the nearest cities (both Fort Collins and Salt Lake City).

So your options are:

  • Stay in Colorado, where you have tons of work options
  • Move back to Lander, where the few local businesses might have job openings that might be in your industry, and you have no option to commute to larger cities if opportunities open up

You stay in Colorado. Because that’s where the work is.


This is what a lot of kids who grew up in rural Wyoming end up doing. They move for school — often to Laramie, which is right on the WY/CO border — then when they need to find a job they migrate where the work is: cities.

Brain drain is a huge problem and it’s one Wyoming, in some ways, is trying to combat. You can go to college for free at any community college and get cheap tuition at UW if you’re a Wyoming resident. They very, very actively promote the community colleges and UW to Wyoming high schoolers, hoping that if they go to college here, they’ll stay after they graduate.

But a lot of people are still flocking out of the state for college because of the opportunities. Because Wyoming has no major cities, the opportunities you get in cities are inaccessible to Wyoming residents.

It’s why I left. Why my whole family left. Because we like having job options, and going to concerts, and eating new foods (have you ever had Ethiopian? WOW). And while Wyoming is wonderful in many ways… it doesn’t have that.

One reason rural life is dying is that people want to do things. They want options.

And you don’t get that in rural areas.

Ancient Craft Watching us From Orbit | The Black Knight Satellite

This is fun.

Spending a little bit more time on this that what I normally do with these kinds of you-tube videos. It is important and holds some clues.

Keep in mind of a date of 11,000 years ago.

EPSILON BOÖTIS REVISITED.

by Duncan Lunan   (Analog, 1998;  revised August 2013).

In January 1974 Analog published my article ‘Space Probe from Epsilon Boötis?’1, which caused such a stir that I’m still asked about it every time I appear in the magazine.   It was based on the mystery of long-delayed radio ‘echoes’  (LDEs), first reported in the 1920s.

Actually, the ‘echoes’ were much too powerful to be simple reflections of signals from Earth.   Experimenters studying round-the-world propagation of radio waves found their outgoing pulses were being returned to them with a delay of three sec­onds, as if they were being amplified and returned by something at the distance of the Moon – but definitely not the Moon it­self.   In later experiments the delay times began to vary up­wards from three seconds, in increasingly complicated sequen­ces, but with no variation in intensity – still indicating a single source amplifying and returning the pulses.

Prof. Ron Bracewell of Stan­ford suggested in 1960 that the ‘echoes’ might have been re­broad­cast by an unmanned probe from another civilis­ation, trying to attract our attention, and in 1972 I worked out a ‘trans­lat­ion’ of the 1920’s echo patterns.    The variations of delay times appeared random;  but Prof. Brace­well himself had suggested the first signal from such a probe might be a star map, and the stars are spaced at random in the sky.   I tried plotting the delay times against the order in which the echoes were received  (fig. 1(A)), and at only the second attempt I found what looked like a star map – in which it appeared that the probe had come from the double star Epsi­lon Boötis, in the constell­ation Boötes, the Herdsman  (fig. 1(B)).   Arc­turus, the brightest star in the constell­ation, seemed to be out of place in the map;  but on checking, was shown at its place about 13,000 years ago.

Other parts of the supposed message seemed to give the scale of their planetary system, orbiting Epsilon Boötis A, and seemed at first to make sense.   Epsilon Boötis A is an orange giant star, and the translation indicated that the probe makers had evolved on its second planet, emigrating later to the sixth when their sun began to expand.   But there was a problem:  the com­panion star  (Epsi­lon B)  was bright blue, ap­par­ently a short-lived sun of spectral type A2.   It emerged that the dis­tance given for the star in most refer­ence books was too low, and at the true distance of 203 light-years, Epsilon B really was an A2 star and the orange giant Epsilon A had been an AO, like Sir­ius – too massive and with too high a radiation output to sustain habit­able planets, too short-lived for life to have evolved there.   At the same time, more accurate 1920s records were located, and most of the ‘star map’ trans­lations were ruled out – not the ‘Epsilon Boötis’ one, but it too had to be treated as suspect.   I with­drew the entire translation,2 but now it seems I may have gone too far.

Dropping it didn’t rule out the space probe sug­gest­ed by Prof. Bracewell  (though he himself has abandoned the idea).3   James Strong suggested that the probe could be located in either the ‘Lagrange 4’ or ‘L5’ point, also called ‘Trojan’ or ‘Equi­lateral’ points, equi­distant from the Earth and Moon.4   The dates and times of the 1920s LDEs showed that the L5 point was at least one source of the effect.5   Anthony Lawton of the British Int­er­planetary Society suggested that in ideal conditions the Trojan points could form tempor­ary, stable iono­spheres of their own which would generate LDE’s;6  it was reported that I accepted that, but scientists I consulted re­plied that such clouds would be dis­rupted by currents in the Earth’s mag­neto­sphere, or at other times of the month by the Solar Wind, the constant outflow of charged particles from the Sun.   In any case, as the Lagrange points have no gravitat­ional fields of their own, a cloud of charged particles would be sca­t­tered by their mutual electro­static repulsion – unless there was a powerful magnetic or electrostatic field to hold them in place.   If this was prod­uced by a space­craft, I sug­gested, Lawton might have hit upon the method by which the Brace­well probe generated LDE’s – by accident!

Many books and articles said that Lawton conducted an act­ive radio search for LDEs, but in reality he stopped after get­ting an initial ‘reply’, on the grounds that further trans­missions “would constitute a biassed experiment”.   Opti­cal searches of the Lagrange points failed to find anything as large as the Skylab space station, or, in a later search, as large as the Pioneer 10 space probe.7   Meanwhile, however, Epsilon Boötis just would not lie down.

There are several real or suggested Zodiacal star maps, laid out on the ground, which centre on Boötes.   That’s just because the constellation lies near the pole of the Ecliptic, perpendicular to the Earth’s orbital plane around the sun, so any Zodiacal map will be centred near it.   But also, we are in Boötes as viewed from Tau Ceti, one of the nearest stars like our Sun, and at relativistic speeds, Epsilon Boötis would be a prime navigational reference on the journey here.8   And there was an even stranger develop­ment.

After my book “Man and the Stars” came out,9 I was con­tacted by Alan Evans, who was then a British Army Captain.   He liked the analysis I’d made of Erich von Daniken’s claims, where I concluded that Earth had not been visited more than four times, at most.   Alan sug­ges­ted we jointly attempt some­thing still more systematic:  if the Earth had ever been visited, our aim would be to find proof.   He stressed that his was purely a personal interest, which had to remain confid­ential, but as he’s since left the Army that no longer applies.

We tightened up my approach into four categories of poss­ible evidence.   Category A would be our objective, an artifact of unquestionably extraterrestrial origin.   Category B would be optical or electromagnetic anomalies pinpointing such an object  (like the Tycho monolith in 2001);  Category D would be the ‘von Daniken material’ of legends, drawings etc. which were no use except in suggesting areas to search for other types of evidence.   But Alan pressed me to include a new category, C, which would be anomalous astronomical alignments in man-made structures – anomalous because they revealed knowledge which the builders should not have had.   For example, on high-reso­lution photographs of Stonehenge, he had identified markings which seemed to indicate galactic alignments.

I wasn’t impressed at first.   I had studied megalithic astro­nomy under a leading expert, Prof. Archie Roy, and seen nothing unusual;  there was no correlation even with Category D;  and when I did the calculations, the markings Alan had found didn’t seem to be galactic.   At the time when he put this to me, circa 1975, it was supposed that Stone­henge I was built in 1800 BC, near the end of the Stone Age in Britain  (not many people realise that Stonehenge was one of the last megaliths), with Stonehenge III, the inner circle, still later in the Bronze Age.   Soon afterwards, however, Archie Roy himself published an article from which we learned that the radio­carbon dating scale had been revised, pushing Stonehenge I back from 1800 BC to 2700 BC.   Further revision made it c.2840 BC, and that radically changed the whole position.

Archaeoastronomy at Stonehenge.

Fig. 2A shows the celestial sphere as viewed by an observer in the northern hemisphere.   The altitude of the pole above the northern horizon is equal to the observer’s latitude, and the heavenly bodies circle around it, parallel to the equator, with the daily rotation of the Earth.   The altitude of a body above the horizon, and its azimuth measured along the horizon from the north point, change constantly as the Earth turns.   Apart from the circumpolar stars, which are too near the pole to rise and set, everything else rises in the east and sets in the west at a position which is determined by the declination of the object, measured from the equator  (Fig. 2B).   Where the dec­lination equals the observer’s latitude, the star passes over­head once a day.

Horizon positional astronomy was all the Stonehenge build­ers could do  (Fig. 3).   Stonehenge I incorporated the ditch, bank, Avenue, Heelstone and Station Stones;  what most people think of as ‘Stonehenge’ are the great sarsen archways of the inner circle, Stonehenge III, erected in the early Bronze Age.   It’s universally agreed that the Stonehenge Avenue and the later structure both mark the midsummer sunrise.   But few arch­aeologists agree with Gerald S. Hawkins that the ‘Station Stones’ of Stonehenge I mark the extreme positions of the Moon’s 18.6 year cycle;10  and still fewer with Prof. Alexander Thom, that the megalith builders had a soph­isticated programme of lunar observatories, spread over the British Isles.11   Person­ally, I’m convinced;  I’ve even built a modern megalith, under the auspices of Glasgow Parks Dept., to compare its per­formance with the prehistoric sites, and demonstrated that high precision could have been achieved by naked-eye observations.12

When it comes to star alignments, the position is more complex.   Because the Earth’s equatorial plane doesn’t coin­cide with the Ecliptic, nor with the orbit of the Moon, the com­bined pulls of the Sun and Moon on Earth’s equatorial bulge cause the Earth’s axis to ‘wobble’ around the Ecliptic Pole with a period of 26,000 years  (Fig. 4).   13,000 years ago the north pole star was Vega in Lyra, and 5,000 years ago it was Thuban in Draco, at the time of Stonehenge I.   The pull makes the equator move around the Ecliptic, constantly changing the position of the Vernal and Autumnal Equinoxes  (Precession of the Equinoxes).   As a result a star’s declination is const­antly changing – like­wise its Right Ascension, which is mea­sured from the Vernal Equinox along the equator, in the same direction as the Sun’s motion on the Ecliptic shown by the arrows in Fig. 2(B).

Astronomers can partly get round the problem of coordinate change by giving star positions in Ecliptic Latitude, which remains constant, and Ecliptic Longitude, which changes smooth­ly with time.   But for coordinates which are fixed over human time-spans, even the spans of civilisations, we have to use Galactic Latitude and Lon­g­itude, whose zero point is the Galactic Centre and whose pole lies on the perpendicular to the plane of the Milky Way  (Fig. 5).

On the high-resolution photographs of Stonehenge Alan Evans pointed out a curious horseshoe-shaped marking on the north­west, cutting the bank and overlying Station Stone 93  (Fig. 3).   It’s not on official plans and may not be sig­nif­icant:  the photos were taken in 1966, eight years after one of the fallen trilithon archways was re-erected, and the ‘horse­shoe’ coincides at least in part with the tracks of the heavy mach­inery used then.   We have located a smaller version of it in a prewar aerial photo, but it’s still historically suspect.   Still earlier photos, taken by balloon, show a similar but different pattern.10   But the relationship the horseshoe pointed out to us was real enough.

As Fig. 3 shows, the orientation of the horseshoe is to the rising point of the Galactic Centre, and of the Galactic Equator’s intersection with the Ecliptic, c.2840 BC.   Even more extraordinarily, it turns out that the declination of the North Galactic Pole was then equal to the latitude of Stone­henge.   Consequently, when the Galactic Centre was on the horizon, the Galactic Pole was in the zenith and the Galactic Equator coincided with the horizon  (Fig. 6).

It would be remarkable if that was a coincidence, but if it’s not coincidence, it’s an extraordinary finding.   The Galactic Centre is 27,000 light-years from us and hidden behind dense clouds of absorbing dust in the inner regions of the Milky Way, so its location cannot be pinpointed visually, only with a radiotelescope.   Until you know exactly where the Centre is, you can’t determine the true plane of the Galactic Equator and the true positions of the Galactic Poles.   At the Moscow General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in 1958, new values for the positions of the poles and the Centre were officially adopted, based on the distribution of neutral hydrogen in the inner Milky Way and study of the radio source Sagittarius A.   Prev­ious optical studies had suggested the Centre was in Scorpius, so it was a big change.   Maps using the old galactic coordin­ates were still on sale as late as 1963, with addenda giving corrections to the new system.13    Yet apparently the builders of Stonehenge knew exactly where the Galactic Centre was, or took their cue from something or somebody or who did.

In this context, why are galactic coordinates so import­ant?   Imagine a spacecraft travelling be­tween the stars.   Its attitude sensing platform might be orien­ted to its home world – its own Right Ascension and dec­lination – or its home planetary system, its own Ecliptic co­ord­inates.   But neither will be relevant when it enters our Solar System:  the only coordinate system common to its system and ours is the galactic one.   In any manoeuvres or landings it made here, you would expect it to navigate in galactic co­ord­inates;  and if it chose a landing site on the declination of the galactic pole, then once a day the azimuth and altitude of any star, measured from the rising point of the Galactic Centre, would correspond to its galactic coordinates, like B’s in Fig.6.   If the spacecraft’s attitude-sensing platform was fixed, built into its structure, it would still be correctly lined up with the sky once a day.

So if the horseshoe marking is modern, its ‘prehistoric’ align­ment might be a curious coincidence.   What looks more likely, on Fig. 3, is that there was something in the centre of Stone­henge I, which was gone by the building of Stone­henge II and III.   In fact, after Stonehenge I was built, around 2700 BC the site was abandoned for over 200 years while the same neolithic people built the much larger complex of Avebury and Silbury Hill, due north of Stonehenge itself.14

What would annoy archaeologists, who don’t even admit most ‘con­ventional’ archaeoastronomy, is the suggestion that the Stonehenge orientation is galactic at all.   I looked for an optical marker, something which would have let the builders create Stonehenge without knowing about galactic coordinates or even without a spacecraft necessarily being there.   And I found one, but it didn’t exactly make the alignments less con­tro­versial.   The star which had the same declination as the North Galactic Pole in 2840 BC, equal to the latitude of Stone­henge, was Epsilon Boötis itself.

It was so hard to believe, when I’d abandoned the Epsilon Boötis ‘translation’ of the radio patterns, that I arranged to see for myself, twice in the planetarium of the Jewel & Esk College in Musselburgh, then all over again at the much larger one in Armagh.   It feels extraordinary to see such findings, worked out with long pages of calculations, simulated on the planet­arium ‘sky’ overhead.   With the date set for 2840 BC, at the Stonehenge latitude, the Milky Way really does line up with the horizon once a day and Epsilon Boötis really does go through the zenith as well, earlier each day.

The Ecliptic and the Pyramids.

But Alan Evans has a strong intuitive grasp of spatial re­lat­ion­ships, and he had found another which he wanted me to verify.   Projected north, the alignment of Station Stones 94-91, and 93-92, meets the Arctic Circle at a tangent  (Fig. 7).   As the Earth turns, when the Ecliptic Pole comes overhead at that tan­gential point, those stones mark the Ecliptic Meridian passing through Stonehenge.   And when that line is projected south, it meets the equator due south of the Egyptian ‘Memphite Necropolis’, containing the great pyramids of Giza.   Putting it another way, the Ecliptic merid­ian through Stone­henge meets the prime meridian of Giza at the equator.   And Alan realised this created another extraordinary relation­ship:  at midsummer sunrise at Stone­henge, the one alignment there which even the sceptics recog­nise, the Vernal Equinox was on the prime meridian at Giza.

That one can’t be verified optically in a planetarium with the same certainty, because the tilt of the Earth’s axis to the equator is not constant, varying between 22 and 24 degrees.15   In 2840 BC it was near maximum, and has since declined by over half a degree.   None of the planetaria we’ve used could allow for that, but the relationship is extremely close, even today.  I had my calculations confirmed by Paul Benson, then curator of Airdrie Observatory;  and more recently Alan had it all done from scratch by Peter Tyler, (of the Posi­tional Services Dept. of GECO-PRAKLA, Oslo, a leading internat­ional seismic survey company), who confirmed that around 2700 BC the alignment was close.   In his calculations the margin of error was less than one-fifth of a degree;  my own put it even closer.

The oldest feat­ures of all at Stonehenge lie over the brow of the hill, northwest from the circle.  The ‘Car Park Post Holes’ held huge vertical tree trunks or totem poles, and radio­carbon dating has them as old as 8000 BC.16   Even that was a mystery:  it was believed that the first mesolithic settlers reached Britain long after the Ice Age, around 6000 BC,17  but now we know that people returned to Britain as soon as the glaciers retreated.    It’s possible that the weathering on the Bluestones of Stone­henge II, which were brought from the Prescelly Mountains in Wales, makes them older and perhaps once erected elsewhere;  that could have been any time after they were first exposed to the atmosphere around 12,000 BC.18   The ice sheets never covered Stonehenge and Pres­celly, even at their greatest extent in 20,000 BC.15

As Alan Evans pointed out, the Ecliptic Meridian passes through the line of Post Holes,19 on the line of stones 92-93  (fig. 3).   If there really was a space­craft, and its attitude sensing plat­form was relating our ecliptic and celestial co-ordinates to the gal­actic ones, then if galac­tic alignments determined the latitude of the touchdown site on Salisbury Plain, then the ecliptic ones show an intent­ion to go to Egypt afterwards, which determined the longitude and brought it down at the future site of Stone­henge I – which raises the interest­ing speculation, were the Posts still standing at that time, as if to mark the landing place?   Below, we’ll see some reason to think that might have been their intended purpose, at least.

The next question is, are any of the Stonehenge galactic align­ments repeated at the Old Kingdom Egyptian pyramids?   The Step Pyramid at Saq­qara, whose longitude is one-tenth of a degree east of Giza’s, was the first stone build­ing in the world, created around 2650 BC by the architect Imhotep for the pharaoh Djoser (Fig. 9).  Imho­tep changed the design several times during con­struct­ion, and some arch­aeologists suggest that he filled in the steps with rubble and faced them with lime­stone, to give the illusion of a true pyr­a­mid.27   (The next two, intended to be true pyramids, were par­tial failures before the Great Pyramid’s builders got it right.)

And if the Step Pyramid was originally faced in that way, then as nearly as we can measure it, a perpendicular line up the north face met the prime meridian at the declination of the southern intercept between the galactic equator and the eclip­tic, marked I2 in Fig. 3 – one of the same alignments we’d found at Stonehenge.   But, extraordinary as all this was, we were still a long way from our goal;  we knew what we wanted to do next, but it was beyond our financial means.   So we with­held public­ation, until April 1996, when a whole new situation developed.

The Pyramids and the Sphinx.

Archaeoastronomers are in some ways remarkably conservative.   Their own ideas about science in ancient society are rejected by many astronomers and most archaeologists;  in consequence, they refuse to entertain any more controversial notions, such as a previously unknown civilisation on Earth, or extraterrest­rial visitors.   I suggested to the 1996 Edinburgh Internat­ional Science Festival that we organise a seminar on ‘Heresies in Archaeoastronomy’, examining the ideas that were too contro­versial even for archaeoastronomers to consider.   Prof. Archie Roy gallantly agreed to introduce it, and not surprisingly it drew a capacity audience.   Naturally, Alan Evans was there to present his paper on the Ecliptic meridian.20

Another participant was Robert Bauval, whose book “The Orion Mystery”21 suggested that the three giant pyramids of Giza not only incorporated star alignments in their so-called ‘air-shafts’  (Fig. 8), but represented the stars of Orion’s Belt mapped on to the landscape.   When Alan Evans checked their findings, he found that the same shaft which marked the meridian transit of Alnitak, the left-hand star of Orion’s Belt, also marked the transit of the Galactic Centre.   So of the two galactic alignments marked at Stonehenge, one was incorporated into the Step Pyramid and the other into the Great one.

Robert had now collaborated with Graham Hancock on a new book, “Keeper of Genesis”, based on the possibly great age of the Sphinx.   The apparent evid­ence of water erosion sug­gests that the Sphinx and its flanking temples were built as long ago as 10,500 BC, when Egypt last had a wet climate towards the end of the Ice Age.22    The Vernal Equinox was then in the constellation Leo, and Robert and Graham suggest that the Sphinx was built to face its counterpart in the sky.   Furthermore, the orientation of the Belt stars to the Milky Way cor­responds to the Pyramids’ in rel­a­tion to the Nile – not when they themselves were built, but when the Sphinx was carved out 8000 years before.

In 10,500 BC, as far as we know, the Nile delta was inhab­ited only by hunter-gatherers, wholly lacking the techno­logy to carve out the Sphinx and build the temples in 200-ton blocks.   In a previous book Graham Hancock tried to get round this by sug­gest­ing a world-spanning civilisation, unknown to us, which lasted over 8000 years and was based on the coast of Antarc­tica.23   It used to be thought that the Antarctic coast was ice-free during the Ice Age in the northern hemisphere;  how­ever, that idea had been attacked by the early 1980’s15 and more recent Antarctic surveys continue to stack up evidence against it.   And it’s very hard to believe that such a world-spanning, long-lasting civilisation would leave so little evidence behind.

Graham couldn’t attend the Edinburgh seminar, but he and Robert were both in Glasgow three weeks later and I was able to arrange a continuation, in which we went to the planet­arium at the College of Nautical Studies.  First I showed them what Alan Evans and I had discovered, and when they saw the galactic align­ment at Stonehenge I, Robert Bauval made an extraordinary remark, which I’ll come back to in a moment.

Then, holding the date c.2700 BC, we shifted to the lati­tude of Giza, and verified Robert’s calculations for “The Orion Myst­ery”.   It had never occurred to him to do so in this way, and he was as moved as I had been at seeing the lay­out of the ancient skies for himself – especially since everything he had calculated was confirmed.   So too were the “Keeper” calculat­ions for 10,500 BC, Leo, Orion and the Sphinx, when we moved the setting back to that date.   When the Sun rose below Leo at the Vernal Equinox in 10,500 BC, Orion was on the meridian, and the orientation of the Belt stars to the Milky Way matched that of the Giza pyramids to the Nile 8,000 years later.   Whatever its significance, that claim is true:  we saw it with our own eyes, re-enacted.

But when I showed the galactic orientation of Stonehenge I, and explained what it might mean in terms of an ET landing, Rob­ert’s show-stopping remark was, “It’s the same at Giza in 10,500 BC, we just didn’t know what it meant.”   Now the time had come to verify that.   Once again, if it was true at all, it would be true once a day, every day, at that latitude and date.   So, just by let­ting the stars wheel on, we verified it at once.   At Giza, in 10,500 BC, due to the effect of pre­cession, the same gal­actic relationship existed as at Stone­henge c.2840.   Once a day, the sky took up the same Fig. 6 configuration, with the galactic pole in the zenith and the plane of the Milky Way coinciding with the horizon.   We saw it for ourselves:  like a galactic ‘compass rose’ at each location, but separated by eight millennia in time.

But in that case, what was happening then at Stonehenge?

We kept the date at 10,500 BC, and the custodian took the plan­et­arium ‘back up’ to the latitude of Stonehenge.   Having no idea what to look for, once again we just let the stars wheel freely around, through a normal day.   And Epsilon Boötis went through the zenith!   It was doing that daily in 10,500 BC, when the galactic alignments were in force at Giza, and the effect of precession on it, over the next 8000 years, was to bring it back to the Stonehenge zenith, as an optical marker for the same galactic alignments at Stonehenge itself when Stone­henge I was created.   Unless it’s all coincidence, it can only mean that the events of 2840-2500 BC represented a return to both sites.   And the first, 10,500 BC date goes along with the ‘approx­imately 13,000 years ago’ given by Arcturus’s posi­tion in that first map of my 1973 ‘trans­lation’, fig. 1(A).   If that map meant any­thing, it would have to be as a time marker, not a navigational reference as I thought.

It still isn’t Category A evidence, the artefact of indis­put­ably extra­terrestrial origin, nor the Category B anomaly that leads us to it.   In this context, Category C might stand for ‘circum­stantial’.   But I can’t believe that all those circumstances are coincid­ental;  these multiple high-tech astronomical alignments are, in my opinion, the best evid­ence for Past Contact ever put forward.   The syn­er­gistic com­bination of our research with Bauval and Hancock’s has con­vinced me that we’re on the track of something big.

It left two questions to answer:

1.  What about the Green Children?

In the September 1996 Analog I suggested Past Contact in 12th century England.  Is there a connection?   There’s one I pointed out in that article.   The latter half of the 12th cen­t­ury AD featured the most violent solar activity since the Bronze Age, indicated by aurorae, car­bon-14 ratios, tree-rings etc.24   And that previous peak was a triple one, between 2700 and 1800 BC, covering the building of Avebury, the Pyramids, Stone­henge II and Stonehenge III.   It may be coin­cid­ence;  but it’s interesting that it was the case in both hist­orical per­iods which I’d consider candidates for Contact events.

Even more remarkably, however, Alan Evans discovered that during the crucial years of the 12th century, between the Second Crusade and the fall of Jerusalem to Saladin, Jerusalem too had the same galactic alignment as Stonehenge I and Giza in 10,500 BC.   At that point, the three enquiries – in the three very different areas of ancient positional astronomy, mediaeval history and the 1920s radio echoes – are actually three aspects of the same enquiry.   It’s still circumstantial, all of it, but it looks as if it may add up to something very significant.

2.  So what about the Space Probe?

Optical searches of the Lagrange points in the late 1970s found nothing.   But in April 1995 Dr. Duncan Steel drew atten­tion to the dis­covery, at Kitt Peak in Arizona, of a most unusual ast­eroid de­s­ig­nated 1991 VG.   In December 1991 it passed Earth at a distance of only 485,000 miles.  Its diameter was est­im­ated at 9-19 metres, as­sum­ing that it was made of one of the more common ast­eroidal rocks.  However, observ­ations at clos­est approach suggested “strong, rapid bright­ness variations which can be interpreted as trans­ient specular reflections from the surfaces of a rotating spacecraft”.25

During the space age 1991 VG would have passed only twice be­fore, in February-March 1975 and in mid-1958 – possibly 1959, if the 1975 approach altered the orbit.   Nothing that big was launched in 1958-59, nor in 1975;  the European Helios 1 was launched in December 1974, but its carrier’s upper stage did not escape from the Earth into orbit round the Sun.   Per­haps, instead, 1991 VG was orbiting Earth then, until it was ‘dis­cov­ered’ and moved away before any­thing more ser­ious happened.

But when it comes backin 2017, let’s hope that a major attempt is made to look at it.   The solar-sailing ‘Comet-chaser’ Gordon Ross and I sug­gested here would be ideal,26 but it can be done by conventional means:  NEAR, the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous, is to orbit the asteroid Eros shortly, and Europe’s Rosetta probe is to do the same with a short-per­iod comet after 2000;  NASA’s Deep Space 4 will reach Comet Tempel in 2006, and a Japanese probe will reach asteroid Nereus the same year.   1991 VG should be next on the list.

References.

1.  Duncan Lunan, ‘Space Probe from Epsilon Boötis?’, Analog XCII, 5, 66-84, January 1974.

2.  – , ‘Long-Delayed Echoes and the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis’, Journal of the Society of Electronic and Radio Technicians, 10, 8, 180-182, September 1976.

3.  Ronald N. Bracewell, ‘Manifestations of Advanced Civilis­ations’, in John Billingham, ed., “Life in the Universe”, MIT Press, 1981.

4.  James Strong, “Flight to the Stars”, Temple Press, 1965.

5.  George Sassoon, ‘A Correlation of Long-Delay Radio Echoes and the Moon’s Orbit’, Spaceflight, 16, 7, 258-265, July 1974.

6.  Anthony T. Lawton, Sydney J. Newton, ‘Long Delayed Echoes:  the Search for a Solution’, Spaceflight 16, 5, 181-187, May 1974.

7.  Robert A. Freitas, Jr., Francisco Valdes, ‘A Search for Natural or Artific­ial Objects Located at the Earth-Moon Libration Points’, Icarus 42, 442-447  (1980);  ‘A Search for Objects near the Earth-Moon Lagrangian Points’, Icarus 53, 453-457  (1983).

8.  James R. Wertz, ‘Interstellar Navigation’, Spaceflight, 14, 206-216, June 1972.

9.  Duncan Lunan, “Man and the Stars”, Souvenir Press 1974;  US editions “Interstellar Contact”, Henry Regnery Co., 1975, “The Mysterious Signals from Outer Space”, Bantam, 1977.

10.  Gerald S. Hawkins, “Stonehenge Decoded”, Souvenir Press, 1966.

11.  A.Thom, “Megalithic Sites in Britain”, Oxford University Press, 1967;  “Megalithic Lunar Observatories”, OUP, 1971;  (with A.S. Thom), “Megalithic Remains in Britain and Brittany”, OUP, 1978.

12.  Duncan Lunan, ‘Solar Events at Sighthill’, Griffith Observer, 50, 6, 2-11, 20, June 1986.

13.  J. Gall Inglis, Arthur P. Norton, “Star Atlas”, 14th edition, Gall & Inglis, 1959.

14.  Dates for the various construction phases at Stonehenge remain in some dispute;  Aubrey Burl, “Prehistoric Avebury”, Yale University Press, 1979, puts the earliest construction around 2800 BC, as do the Thoms  (ref.19), with no further work until c.2150 BC.   Some recent reports compress the building into one continuous process;  yet there seems to be clear evidence for an interruption, during which the Stonehenge I ditch silted up, although its discoverer put the event strangely far back, dating it at 3100 BC, well before the starting dates given elsewhere.   (Christopher Chippendale, ‘Life around Stonehenge’, New Scientist, 101, 1404, 12-17, 5 April 1984).

15.  Fred Hoyle, “Ice”, Hutchinson, 1981.

16.  Sean O’Neill, ‘Totem Poles Give Pointer to Siting of Stonehenge’, The Daily Telegraph, 28 June 1996.

17.  Robert Dawson Scott, ‘Silent Power from a Time of the Ancients’, The Daily Telegraph, 10th January 1997.

18.  Nigel Hawkes, ‘Stonehenge Dating Dispels Icesheet Theory’, The Times, 5 December 1994.

19.  A. Thom, A.S. Thom and A. Thom, ‘Stonehenge’, Journal for the History of Astronomy, 5, 13, 71-90  (June 1974).

20.  A.C. Evans, ‘The Three Dimensional Grid’, paper presented at ‘Heresies in Archaeoastronomy’, Edinburgh International Science Festival, 16th April 1995.

21.  Robert Bauval & Adrian Gilbert, “The Orion Mystery”, Heinemann, 1994.

22.  Robert Bauval & Graham Hancock, “Keeper of Genesis”, Heinemann, 1996.

23.  Graham Hancock, “Fingerprints of the Gods”, Heinemann, 1995.

24.  John A. Eddy, ‘The Case of the Missing Sunspots’, Scien­tific American, 236, 5, 80-88 & 92, May 1977;  ‘The Maunder Minimum’, Science, 192, 4245, 1189-1202  (18th June, 1976.)

25.  Duncan Steel, ‘SETA and 1991 VG’, The Observatory, April 1995;  ‘Of Asteroids and Aliens’, The Skeptic, 15, 1, 9-10  (1995).

26.  Duncan Lunan, ‘Keep Watching the Skies!’, Analog, CXIV, 12, 70-84, October 1994.

27.  I.E.S. Edwards, “The Pyramids of Egypt”, Penguin, 1947.

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Do you believe that love avoids problems?

In 2016, Kanye West had a $52 million debt and everyone turned their backs on him. His wife Kim created a game called Kimoji that generated 80 million dollars, with this transferred 52 million to her common account cleaning up her husband’s debts.

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main qimg a957d3fd690e549d4e82b2aa397ac943 pjlq

Today Kanye, thanks to the sales of his Yeezy product line, has a fortune of more than almost 2 billion dollars.

A man also needs an intelligent and strong woman who will stand by his side, regardless of the situation at the time. What would Kanye be without his wife’s support?

Raw Feed of the Dark Knight from China

This is RAW feed from a Chinese satellite used for land surveying. The image is NOT captured by camera. Only the background is captured by the camera. Instead, the “collision avoidance radar” captured the 3D object in the foreground and rendered it in this clip. Thus you have a rendered 3D object overlay over the satellite camera background.

The clip is a Chinese commentator discussing the object and its features.

It is part of a much larger video clip which also includes other anomalous objects captured by an array of Chinese satellites.

The Black Night is the conventional name for this object that is believed to be an extraterrestrial vehicle in orbit around the earth for the last 11,000 years.

There are clearer photographs of this object in great detail, but they only show one singular side. This clip is unique as the entire shape is rendered and we can observe how it travels in orbit around the earth, though without the photographic clarity that the NASA photo has.

American insanity By Dawn’s Early Light

I used to work as a “Project Scientist” in an electronics company outside of Boston. We designed cutting edge electronic sensors for automobiles. And it was a scene right out of the movie “Officespace”.

Anyways, they were trying to cut costs. Not because the income revenue was going down. No. It was because they wanted to boost the dividends for the shareholders to keep them happy.

So we employees were “caught in the middle”.

So all raises were frozen and all sorts of “song and dance” activities were being implemented to “save money”.

One of the ideas was to stop buying birthday cakes for the employees. Th company had perhaps 500 employees, and each one got to have their own birthday cake on their birthday. So this was an expense worth a few thousand dollars a year.

The idea was to cut costs.

The party still took place, and people still sang “happy birthday”, but instead of a cake that we would eat, there was a plastic cake, one bought from a child toy store that we would sing around.

Imagine this;

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Except of instead of eating anything, we all stood around a table with a cheap plastic cake, and sang “happy birthday”.

In hindsight, it was ridiculous.

But not one of us Beta-clucks would dare say anything negative about it. And when the issue came up we would just mindlessly obey and shuffle up to the table for yet another futile action and meaningless gesture.

It was shared throughout the building and sometimes we would have to stagger the birthday party so that there wouldn’t be any conflicts on the use of the plastic cake.

Pretty bad, eh?

Yeah. That was in the 1990s. I can only imagine what it is like right now in the ‘States. Must be horrific…

NATO Erects Air Defense “Fortress” for Upcoming Summit

World Hal Turner 07 July 2023

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NATO will host a major Summit next week in Vilnius, Lithuania and frankly, NATO is scared.  They have erected a full Division of PATRIOT air defense missiles around the country, to “protect the Summit” while NATO bigshots have their meeting.

At this Summit, the questions about the corrupt armpit of Europe, Ukraine, becoming a NATO member will be discussed.  But Ukraine is unable to join NATO because it is presently in an active conflict with Russia.

What mechanism may be employed to thwart that obstacle to Ukraine joining NATO is not yet known, but the meddlesome, and aggressive, NATO alliance —  which long ago outlived its usefulness — may just find a way to sneak it through.

The photo above was taken from a passenger jet as it landed in Vilnius yesterday.  In it you can see several PATRIOT missile batteries active with missile launchers aimed at the sky.

Clearly, NATO fears that Russia may decide it has had enough of NATO meddling in Ukraine, and smash the Summit in one fell swoop.

(HT REMARK: If that happens, it seems to me that NATO will have brought it upon itself.  I wouldn’t shed a tear if all those Nazi collaborators in NATO got wiped out by Russia.)

You are on a plane that is about to crash, what do you say to the person sitting next to you?

I would tell him these things:

  1. Put your passport, phone and money in your trouser pockets – you’ll need your ID card on the ground.
  2. Count the number of lanes up to the emergency exits – both front and back – and be ready to exit from any side (actually recount because you already did it when you sat down at the beginning, right?).
  3. Put your glasses inside your shirt (they will fly away on impact).
  4. Wear some extra clothes (sweatshirt or jacket) to stay warm afterwards or to have first aid supplies.
  5. Put basic medicines in your pocket.
  6. Forget your carry-on luggage – you can’t take it.
  7. Prepare for impact, and keep your arms between your legs (elbows hurt a lot when they slam against the armrests)
  8. Only 10% of crashes (or even less) are lethal, so there is a good chance.
  9. On the ground get away from the plane and follow the instructions of the emergency personnel – they will be as confused as you are.
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main qimg d1de77020945c500c80d7e6369802d8e lq

No talks without sanctions being lifted

The spokesman for China’s Embassy in Washington, Liu Pengyu, said on Wednesday that Washington “knows the reason for difficulties in its military-to-military relations with China. It actually imposed unilateral sanctions on China.”

“Such obstacles should be removed before any exchange and cooperation could take place between the two countries,” Liu said.

It was not clear which sanctions Liu was referring to, but Chinese officials have previously pointed to sanctions against Chinese Minister of National Defense Li Shangfu for their refusal to engage with US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin.

Li has been the target of US sanctions since 2018 over his alleged involvement in the purchase of Russian advanced weapons.

In a rare trip to Beijing earlier this month, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called on President Xi Jinping to set up a crisis communications line between the two countries. Xi, however, rejected the offer.

Back in late May, China also refused a meeting between the two countries’ defense chiefs.

Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang has already reaffirmed that the US needs to “take concrete actions … stabilize the relationship from further deterioration and bring it back to the track of healthy and stable development.”

Biden administration officials say setting up direct lines of communication between the two sides are necessary to cut through crises and tamp down high tensions before they spiral into conflict.

In an incident in February, Chinese officials held back from answering a call from Austin in the wake of the US shooting down a Chinese balloon.

The secretary was rejected again this month when China’s defense minister refused to meet with him at a defense summit in Singapore.

Over the past few months, the two sides have repeatedly clashed publicly over air and naval confrontations in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait.

Is China’s future economy doomed by the falling birth rate?

Oh this nonsense again

There is only one way in which falling Population can doom an economy

A. Decimation of Population through War or Famine or Disease

B. Nuclear Holocaust

Natural declining birth rate never affects the economy of a nation or the economic forces that govern the nation

Even Nations with much lower populations than China have been declining must faster since the 1990s and yet haven’t even experienced the remotest setback such as Korea or Japan

S Korea is expected to have its first economic recriminations by 2038 , almost 43 years after the decline begun

By the Scale and Size of China’s , the same number will mean China will have its first economic impacts by 2127 at the earliest that too assuming AI and Robotics are the same in 2127

Even assuming China’s birth rate declines at 50% faster rate , that’s still 2065 at the earliest that China will begin to feel the slightest economic impacts of a declining population

At 25% faster, it’s 2093

So we can safely say that China will have no worries until at least 2065 in the worst case scenario

That’s 42 years away MINIMUM

China have an advantage that Japan or S Korea never had.

They know what is in store and knowing the Chinese, they will find a solution

Meanwhile the next 42–104 years is their best time and when they are at their peak

What do you think of a single Chinese woman who doesn’t want to get married, stays home and eats her mom’s food everyday?

There’s this Chinese woman.

At age 29, she was single. She stayed at home everyday, played video games and ate her parents’ food. She didn’t go out. She didn’t seem to do anything other than hiding in her room and doing god knows what on her computer, or playing video games.

A total loser, isn’t she?

However, if you got to know her a bit better, you’d know she was laid off a few months ago. She didn’t have money to pay for an apartment. She was ever so grateful her parents took her back. She didn’t go out because going out meant spending money. She hid in her room because she felt ashamed staying with her parents. She worked on her computer everyday sending out resumes, and the only entertainment she had was video games.

That woman was me, a few years back.

Don’t judge.

You don’t know the whole story.

That woman could be in similar situation. Had some bad luck, laid off from work, just trying to get back on her feet. Or that woman could be the caretaker of her parents. Or the family simply enjoys living together under one roof. Or she could be preparing for her GRE and get into grad school. Or divorced and was kicked out of her house with no place to go.

Or, she could be some lazy ass woman who couldn’t bother to get a job and rely on her parents to support her lazy ass life.

It could be that. Or it could be 10 million other things.

Don’t judge.

Voyage to the bottom of the sea:The Deadly Dolls

We start with this little priceless flick. Of how evil entities can control others and use them like puppets. Worth your time to watch and soak it all in.

This is the full episode. In this jewel is the “master” Vincent Price. Love It.

Enjoy.

How likely is it that strained relations between the US and China could lead to a split in global markets, slowing innovation and economic growth?

Absolutely, on both splitting global markets and slowing innovation and economic growth.

Re: Split in global markets

A significant consequence of the tech trade war between the US and China is the potential divergence in technological standards. As the two countries pursue their own separate paths in innovation and technology, there is a risk of creating two distinct and incompatible standards. This situation can undermine the goal of the US to exert control over global technology.

Standardization plays a crucial role in ensuring interoperability, compatibility, and widespread adoption of technologies. It allows for seamless communication and integration between different devices and systems. When countries diverge in their development of standards, it can lead to fragmentation and incompatibility issues.

If the US and China continue to develop separate standards for emerging technologies like 5G, 6G, quantum communication, or other areas where China is already ahead, it may result in a divided technological landscape. This fragmentation can create barriers to global collaboration, impede the exchange of knowledge and ideas, and limit the potential for widespread innovation and adoption of new technologies.

Moreover, the US has historically been a global leader in technology, driving and setting standards that other countries often follow. However, if the US is unable to maintain control over the global technical standards due to the trade war and China’s advancements, it can diminish its influence in shaping the future of technology.

Re: slowing innovation and economic growth

The ongoing trade tensions between the United States and China have indeed had an impact on both countries’ innovation, technological advancements, and future economic growth. The tech trade war between the two nations has resulted in negative consequences for both parties.

Firstly, US tech companies relying heavily on the Chinese market have faced significant challenges. China has a large consumer base and represents a lucrative market for many American tech firms. By forgoing the potential profits earned from China, these companies may experience a financial setback, which can affect their ability to invest in research and development (R&D) activities. The loss of revenue can limit their capacity to innovate and create new technologies.

Secondly, denying the US access to certain technological advancements in which China is ahead could hinder American innovation in those areas. China has made significant progress in various fields like 6G telecommunications, quantum communication, green energy, electric vehicles (EVs), and batteries. By restricting collaboration or knowledge exchange, the US may miss out on valuable insights and developments happening in China. This lack of exposure and learning from advancements in China could slow down innovation and hinder the US from remaining at the forefront of those industries.

Star Trek – Evil Kirk Comes Aboard

Finance, power, integration: The SCO welcomes a new ‘Global Globe’

Discussions at the recent SCO Summit in New Delhi now point to the inevitable: The merging of new multipolar organizations and their collective reorganization of global finance.

By Pe.pe Esco.bar

JUL 06, 2023

The 23rd summit of the heads of state of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), held virtually in New Delhi, represented History in the making: three BRICS (Russia, India, China), plus Pakistan and four Central Asian “stans” (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan), finally and formally, welcomed the Islamic Republic of Iran as a permanent member.

And next year will be Belarus’ turn, as confirmed by India’s First Deputy Foreign Minister Vinay Kvatra. Belarus and Mongolia took part in the 2023 summit as observers, and fiercely independent Turkmenistan, as a guest.

After years of US “maximum pressure,” Tehran may now finally get rid of the sanctions dementia and solidify its leading role in the ongoing process of Eurasia integration.

Arguably, the star of the show in New Delhi was Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko, who has led his country since 1994.

Old Man Luka, unbeatable in the headline-stealing department, especially after his mediator role in the Prighozin saga, may have coined the definitive slogan of multipolarity. Forget the western-termed “golden billion” which in fact barely reaches 100 million; embrace now the “Global Globe” – with a firm focus on the Global South.

As the clincher, Lukashenko proposed total integration of the SCO and BRICS – which in their upcoming summit in South Africa will be heading the BRICS+ way. And it goes without saying, this integration also applies to the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU).

The next step for the “Global Globe” – what the collective west dismissively qualifies as “the rest” – is to work on the complex coordination of several development banks and then the process to issue bonds linked to a new trading currency.

The main ideas and the basic template already exist. The new bonds will be a real safe heaven compared to the US dollar and US Treasuries, and will imply accelerated de-dollarization. Capital used to purchase those bonds should be used to finance trade and sustainable development, in what will be a certified, Chinese-style “win-win.”

A converging geoeconomic focus

The SCO declaration

made it clear that the expanding multilateral body is “not directed against other states and international organizations.” On the contrary, it is “open to broad cooperation with them in accordance with the purposes and principles of the UN Charter, the SCO Charter and international law, based on consideration of mutual interests.”

The heart of the matter is of course the drive towards a fair multipolar world order – the polar opposite of the Hegemon-imposed “rules-based international order.” And the three key nodes are mutual security; trade in local currencies, and eventually, de-dollarization.

It’s quite enlightening to outline the converging focus, expressed by most leaders, during the New Delhi summit.

India’s Prime Minister Modi stated in his keynote address that the SCO will be as important as the UN. Translation: a toothless UN controlled by the Hegemon may end up being sidelined by a real “Global Globe” organization.

In parallel to Modi praising the key role of Iran in the development of the International North South Transportation Corridor (INSTC), Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi firmly supported SCO trade in national currencies to decisively break the US dollar’s hegemony.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, for his part, was adamant: China is all in favor to sideline the US dollar, stand firm against all forms of color revolutions, and fight against unilateral economic sanctions.

Russian President Vladimir Putin once again stressed how “external forces have put Russia’s security at threat by unleashing hybrid war against Russia and Russians in Ukraine.”

Pragmatically, Putin expects trade within the SCO, using national currencies, to grow – 80 percent of Russia’s trade is now in rubles and yuan – plus a renewed cooperation drive in banking, digitalization, high-tech, and agriculture.

Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov also stressed mutual settlements in national currencies, plus a crucial move: the setting up of a SCO development bank and development fund, quite similar to the BRICS’s New Development Bank (NDB).

President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev of Kazakhstan, which will exercise the SCO presidency in 2024, also supported a common investment fund, plus the configuration of a network of partners of major strategic ports connected to China’s BRI as well as the Astana-based Trans-Caspian International Transport Route , linking Southeast Asia, China, Kazakhstan, the Caspian Sea, Azerbaijan, Georgia, and Europe.

Of course all SCO members agreed that no Eurasia integration is possible without stabilizing Afghanistan – in fact linking Kabul geoeconomically with both BRI and the INSTC. But that’s another long, twisting story entirely.

Strategic connectivity rules

Now compare all that action in New Delhi with what happened in Tianjin a few days before, in late June: the World Economic Forum (WEF) event known as the “summer Davos”, held for the first time after the Covid-19 pandemic.

Chinese Premier Li Qiang’s critique of the new US/EU “de-risking” slogan may have been predictably sharp. What was way more intriguing was a BRI panel discussion

titled “The Future of the Belt and Road Initiative.”

In a nutshell, that was some sort of “green” apotheosis. Liang Linchong, from the National Development and Reform Commission’s (NDRC) Department of Regional Opening-Up, which is essential to promote BRI, detailed several clean energy projects, for instance, in key BRI nodes Kazakhstan and Pakistan.

Africa was also prominently featured. Sekai Nzenza, Zimbabwe’s Minister of Industry and Commerce, is very much in favor of BRI projects increasing trade “and bringing the latest technology” within Africa and globally.

Beijing will revive the Belt and Road Forum later this year. There are huge expectations across the “Global Globe.”

Liang Linchong did go for a breakdown of what lies ahead: “Hard connectivity” (that means infrastructure building), “soft connectivity” (emphasis on skills, technologies and standards), and “connection of hearts,” which translates into the notorious Chinese concept of “people to people exchanges.”

So what the “Global Globe” should expect, according to Liang, is a surge of “small is beautiful” projects, very pragmatic. That ties up with the new focus by both Chinese banks and companies: Very large infrastructure projects around the world may be problematic for the time being, as China concentrates on the internal market and regimenting every front to fight the Hegemon’s multiple Hybrid Wars.

Strategic connectivity

though won’t be affected.

Here is a prime example. Two crucial China industrial nodes – the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macau Greater Bay Area, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei cluster – launched their first China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan (CKU) international multimodal freight trains on the same day of the SCO summit in New Delhi.

This is classic BRI: Top connectivity, using the containerized “railway-road” multimodal system. The INSTC will be using the same system for trade between Russia, the Caspian, Iran and then by sea to India.

On the CKU, cargo reaches Xinjiang by railway, then goes on the road via the Irkeshtam border, passes through Kyrgyzstan and arrives in Uzbekistan. The whole journey saves nearly five days in transit time. The next step is to build the China-Kyrgyzstan-Uzbekistan railway: construction starts in late 2023.

BRI is making proverbial inroads in Africa. For instance, last month the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) handed over a prototype satellite

co-developed with Egypt to Cairo’s Space City. Egypt is now the first African nation capable of satellite assembling, integration, and testing. Cairo hails it as a prime example of sustainable development.

That’s also the first time Beijing assembles and tests a satellite overseas. Once again, classic BRI: “Consultation, Cooperation and Shared Benefits,” as defined by CASC.

And don’t forget the new Egyptian capital: An ultra-modern satellite of Cairo built literally from scratch in the desert for $50 billion, financed by bonds and – what else – Chinese capital.

The long and winding de-dollarization road

All this frantic activity correlates with the key dossier to be treated by BRICS+: De-dollarization.

India’s External Affairs Minister Jaishankar has confirmed there will be no new BRICS currency – for now. The emphasis is on increasing trade in national currencies.

When it comes to BRICS heavyweight Russia, the emphasis for now is to drive commodity prices higher for the benefit of the Russian ruble.

Diplomatic sources confirm that the unspoken agreement among BRICS sherpas – who this week are preparing the guidelines for BRICS+ to be discussed at the South Africa summit next month – is to hasten the fiat dollar’s meltdown: The Financing of US trade and budget deficits would become impossible at current interest rates.

The question is how to hasten it imperceptibly.

Putin’s trademark strategy is to always let the collective west embark in all sorts of strategic mistakes without direct Russian intervention. So what happens next in the battlefield in Donbass – NATO’s larger than life humiliation – will be a crucial factor in the de-dollarization front. The Chinese, for their part, worry about a collapsed dollar rebound on China’s manufacturing base.

The road map ahead suggests a new trade settlement currency first designed at the EAEU, supervised by the Eurasia Economic Commission’s head of macroeconomics Sergey Glazyev . That would lead to a wider BRICS and SCO deployment. But first the EAEU needs to get China on board. That was one of the key issues recently discussed by Glazyev, in person, in Beijing.

So the Holy Grail is a new supranational trade currency for BRICS, SCO, and EAEU. And it’s essential that its reserve status does not allow overriding power to one nation, as it happens with the US dollar.

The only practical means of tying the new trade currency to a basket of multiple commodities – not to mention a basket of national interests – would be through gold.

Imagine all that being discussed in depth by that interminable queue for BRICS membership. As it stands, at least 31 nations have entered formal applications or expressed interest in joining an upgraded BRICS+.

The interconnections are fascinating. Apart from Iran and Pakistan, the only full SCO members that are not BRICS members are four Central Asian “stans,” which already happen to be EAEU members. Iran is bound to become a member of BRICS+. No less than nine nations among SCO’s observers or dialogue partners are among BRICS applicants.

Lukashenko called it: The merging of BRICS and SCO seems virtually inevitable.

For the top twin drivers of both organizations – the Russia-China strategic partnership – this merger will represent the ultimate multilateral institution, based on real free and fair trade, capable of dwarfing both the US and the EU and extending well beyond Eurasia to the “Global Globe.”

German industry/business circles already seem to have seen the writing on the wall, as well as some of their French counterparts, which notably include France’s President Emmanuel Macron . The trend is towards an EU schism – and even more Eurasian power.

A BRICS-SCO trade bloc will make western sanctions absolutely meaningless. It will affirm total independence from the US dollar, offer an array of financial alternatives to SWIFT, and encourage close military and intel cooperation against serial black ops by the Five Eyes, part of the ongoing Hybrid Wars.

In terms of peaceful development, West Asia has shown the way. The minute Saudi Arabia sided with China and Russia – and is now a candidate to both BRICS and SCO membership – there was a new game in town.

Golden Ruble 3.0?

As it stands, there’s huge potential for a gold-backed ruble. If and when it hits the road, that will be a revival of the gold-backing in the USSR between 1944 and 1961.

Glazyev has crucially observed that Russia’s trade surplus with SCO members has allowed Russian companies to pay off external debts and replace them with borrowing in rubles.

In parallel, Russia is increasingly using the yuan for international settlements. Further on down the road, key “Global Globe” players – China, Iran, Turkey, UAE – will be interested in payment in non-sanctioned gold instead of local currencies. That will pave the way for a BRICS-SCO trade settlement currency tied to gold.

After all, nothing beats gold when it comes to fighting collective western sanctions, pricing oil, gas, food, fertilizers, metals, minerals. Glazyev already laid down the law: Russia’s got to go for Golden Ruble 3.0 .

The time is fast approaching for Russia to create the perfect storm to deliver a massive blow to the US dollar. This is what’s being discussed behind the scenes at the SCO, EAEU, and some BRICS sessions, and this is what’s driving the Atlanticist elites livid.

The “imperceptible” way for Russia to make it happen is to let markets drive up the prices of nearly all Russian commodity exports. Neutrals all across the “Global Globe” will interpret it as a natural “market response” to the collective west’s cognitive dissonant geopolitical imperatives. Soaring energy and commodity prices will end up provoking a steep decline in the purchasing power of the US dollar.

So it’s no wonder that several leaders at the SCO summit were in favor to what amounts, in practice, to an expanded BRICS-SCO Central Bank. When the new BRICS-SCO-EAEU currency is finally adopted – of course it’s a long way away, perhaps in the early 2030s – it will be traded for physical gold by participating banks from SCO, BRICS, and EAU member-nations.

All of the above should be interpreted as the sketch of a possible, realistic path to real multipolarity. It has nothing to do with the yuan as reserve currency, reproducing the existing rent-extracting racket to the profit of a minuscule plutocracy – complete with a massive military apparatus specialized in bullying the “Global Globe.”

A BRICS-SCO-EAEU union will be focused on building – and expanding – the physical, non-speculative economy based on infrastructure development, industrial capability, and tech sharing. Another world-system, now more than ever, is possible.

Star Trek – This Isn’t A Game!

Biscuit Meat Pies

This is a high yield recipe. It’s a great one to make and put into the freezer for later use!

496b9943 4143 4666 b66a 512f8e9fe82a
496b9943 4143 4666 b66a 512f8e9fe82a

Yield: 40

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground pork or beef
  • 1 medium onion, chopped
  • 2 tablespoons tomato paste
  • Juice of 1 lemon
  • 1 (8 ounce) carton sour cream
  • Ground cinnamon, to taste
  • Salt and pepper
  • 2 (10 ounce) cans flaky refrigerator biscuits
  • Oil for deep frying

Instructions

  1. Brown meat and onion, breaking up meat while browning.
  2. Add next 5 ingredients. The meat does not have to be cooked; just stir until all ingredients are mixed. Place in the refrigerator until cold.
  3. Pull apart each flaky biscuit to make two. Roll each one out on a floured board.
  4. Place a heaping teaspoon of cold filling on each biscuit round. Fold over and crimp edges to seal. Place on a tray in the freezer.
  5. When frozen, take out and drop into hot oil to fry. Drain and serve or return to freezer.

Notes

These will freeze for up to 3 months.

Why is there a sudden propaganda that Bangladesh is progressing faster than India? Do these messages have any proof? Is the quality of life there better?

2023 07 08 08 51
2023 07 08 08 51

Yes. There is no propaganda here. Bangladesh is surging ahead in its manufacturing potential.

From 2017 to Present – Over 150 Factories of Chinese Low grade Manufacturing like Phone Charger Body, Small Toys, Laptop Casings have moved to Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. And surprise is Bangladesh is much much more efficient than either Pakistan or Sri Lanka.

China has also invested and improved the Bangladesh Leather and Textile Industry massively taking them to the #1 Spot in the World.

Thanks to 97% Bangladeshi Products being duty free in China – Bangladeshi Exports to China have increased significantly and thanks to the Chinese Low End Manufacture moving to Bangladesh – the Volume of Exports from Bangladesh to Singapore / Shanghai have quadrupled since 2015.

This means more jobs, more money to spend and higher consumer demand and relative disposable income for Bangladeshis.

Finally Sheikh Hasina has allowed China to control all the financial aspects so Corruption has reduced significantly. All Payments come from China and are paid directly to the end recipient without any intermediaries or with minimum intermediaries. This resulted in 92% reaching the intended benificiaries in 2019 as opposed to only 41% in 2006. Pakistan is not allowing the same that Sheikh Hasina did.

2023 07 08 08 5t1
2023 07 08 08 5t1

From 2012 – Bangladesh has opened up 24 Polytechnics (They had 27 from 1990 to 2012) – with modern equipment and professors from countries like China and Singapore. Instead of Engineering Colleges, they focus on Production, Manufacturing and Shipping Business.

The Labor Growth rate is higher in Bangladesh due to favorably low wages of $ 120 per month compared to $ 210 in India.

The Training Programs are so good to watch.

A Villager who is 19 arrives without any knowledge of anything – is trained for 6 months – with food and shelter provided and a Stipend of roughly $ 50 per month (Around INR 6500). He is trained in Machinery, Communication Skills, Warehousing, Checking levels etc. Within 6 months – he is employed as Line worker 1 for $ 120 a month and within 5 years is promoted to a post known as Supervisor for $ 350 a month. He has a 7 year contract after which he is renewed or can leave. Bus after Bus pick up young men ready for this from Village after Village. No force whatsoever. You have a demand of 20 Men for 1 Training position.

This Training is fully organized by China and the Trained worker is an Asset to the nation. He is better than most trained workers in Asia (Except China, Singapore, Japan and Maybe South Korea) in terms of technological know how.

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2023 07 08 08 5gwe1

Bangladesh have also done something India have not. They have created their own Made in Bangladesh Laptop for the Walton Brand.

Fully made in Bangladesh with all components except the Processor and Chipset being locally manufactured.

The Quality is of course far lower than Lenovo or some other brand but the Walton Brand has a 27% market share in Bangladesh which means more revenue.


So while the whole world is looking at CPEC or Gawadar and at China – Pakistan or China – Sri Lanka. It is Bangladesh which is fully taking advantage of the Chinese Knowhow and is improving by the day.

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2023 07 08 08 52

And Yes!!!

As on date they are the only country that is capable of beating India as the Worlds leading Manufacturer of Generic Drugs.

Their Medical Industry was ZERO until 2002 but now in 18 years they are already at around the 40% mark. Their Domestic Production of 8 Major Medicines are at 100% Supply (No Imports).

They have opened up 50 New Pharma Colleges in just 3 years

Their BEXIMCO is among the 200 Superbrands – the Only Bangladesh drug company (Pakistan, Lanka have none)


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2023 07 08 08 5mx2

And they also have Better Infrastructure Financing than India does.

Their projects recoup at around 62% against Indias 24–25%.

Their Financing is also based on Concurrent Growth and Logistics unlike Indias.

UAE Companies prefer Bangladesh for Infrastructure in terms of recouping than India.


So Yes – Bangladesh is here to stay

Like the Father of the Bride – Sheikh Hasina told Xi – “I am entrusting my daughter to you. Make sure she is happy”

So far she has been very well taken care of.

The Future…..who knows???

As on date – Bangladesh is a much more efficient Bet for China than Pakistan

Note:-

Bangladesh can NEVER hope to beat India economically in size.

However the Prosperity of people and overall living is the key

Jeffrey Sachs Interivew – Path to War With China.

It is an AMAZING interview.

Ukraine – Biden Again Escalates

The Washington Post says that the U.S. will now give cluster munition to Ukraine.

Biden approves cluster munition supply to Ukraine

President Biden has approved the provision of U.S. cluster munitions for Ukraine, with drawdown of the weapons from Defense Department stocks due to be announced Friday.

The munition will be 155mm grenades, Dual Purpose Improved Conventional Munitions (DPICM), that can be fired by ‘western’ provided artillery.

dpicm
dpicm

The decision, likely illegal, was made because the U.S. and its allies have run out of other 155mm munitions:

The move, which will bypass U.S. law prohibiting the production, use or transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate of more than 1 percent, comes amid concerns about Kyiv’s lagging counteroffensive against entrenched Russian troops and dwindling Western stocks of conventional artillery.

It is accompanied by false statements that Russia has used such ammunition in Ukraine:

It follows months of internal administration debate over whether to supply the controversial munitions, which are banned by most countries in the world.

Cluster weapons explode in the air over a target, releasing dozens to hundreds of smaller submunitions across a wide area.

More than 120 countries have joined a convention banning their use as inhumane and indiscriminate, in large part because of high failure rates that litter the landscape with unexploded submunitions that endanger both friendly troops and civilians, often for decades after the end of a conflict. The United States, Ukraine and Russia — which is alleged to have used them extensively in Ukraine — are not parties to the convention. Eight of NATO’s 31 members, including the United States, have not ratified the convention.

It is well documented, by Human Rights Watch and others, that the Ukrainian military has used cluster munitions. There is nothing to support a claim that Russia has done so. The Pentagon has rejected claimed evidence of Russian cluster munition attacks:

Commenting on videos depicting alleged Russian cluster munition use, DOD officials stated during a March 1, 2022 press conference that “we’ve seen the same video that you have but we have not assessed that it is definitive with respect to the use of cluster munitions. So we are not in a position to confirm the use of cluster munitions at this time.” In a similar manner, a DOD official stated during March 3, 2022, press conference that DOD was still unable to confirm Russia’s use of cluster munitions.

Cluster munition are banned by most countries because they often fails to explode on impact and thereby leave a lot of unexploded mines on the ground:

The principal weapon under consideration, an M864 artillery shell first produced in 1987, is fired from the 155mm howitzers the United States and other Western countries have provided Ukraine. In its last publicly available estimate, more than 20 years ago, the Pentagon assessed that artillery shell to have a “dud” rate of 6 percent, meaning that at least four of each of the 72 submunitions each shell carries would remain unexploded across an area of approximately 22,500 square meters — roughly the size of 4½ football fields.

Last year the Congressional Research Service found that the real dud rate is higher than what the Pentagon claims:

There appear to be significant discrepancies among failure rate estimates. Some manufacturers claim a submunition failure rate of 2% to 5%, whereas mine clearance specialists have frequently reported failure rates of 10% to 30%. A number of factors influence submunition reliability. These include delivery technique, age of the submunition, air temperature, landing in soft or muddy ground, getting caught in trees and vegetation, and submunitions being damaged after dispersal, or landing in such a manner that their impact fuzes fail to initiate.

The Pentagon claims that the ammunition it will provide has a lower dud rate. But it never produced data from tests that would support its claims.

By agreeing to provide the munition Biden is circumventing or breaking the law:

There is no waiver provision in the 1 percent limit Congress has placed on cluster munition dud rates, written into Defense Department appropriations for the last seven years. Biden would bypass it and Congress, according to a White House official, drawing down the munitions from existing defense stocks under a rarely used provision of the Foreign Assistance Act, which allows the president to provide aid, regardless of appropriations or arms export restrictions, as long as he determines that it is in the vital U.S. national security interest.

Unfortunately neither Congress nor the courts are likely to intervene.

The cluster ammunition, like the Uranium tank ammunition the U.S. and Britain have sent to Ukraine, will make large parts of the country inhabitable and unusable for agricultural purposes. It will also make attacks and retreats through affected areas difficult for military forces on both sides.

Cluster ammunition was made during the cold war for defending against large scale armored attacks. They are imprecise area attack weapons. Their usefulness against the small unit attacks with a handful of tanks which we have often seen during this war is doubtful.

As the U.S. has run out of other ammunition what will it provide to Ukraine after the DPICM fail to turn around the fate of the Ukrainian army?

Chemical weapons? Nukes?

Posted by b on July 7, 2023 at 14:02 UTC | Permalink

Star Trek – Classified Material

What’s the best possible solution to the Taiwan Issue? I mean a realistic and win-win solution.

Simple

The Verdict:— The Land belongs to China. That is indisputable.

The Real Estate is China’s

China is the Landlord , Taiwan is the Tenant

That is indisputable

So the Tenant has certain rights and the Landlord has certain rights


Taiwan must pay a rent

The Rent must be in the form of concessions :—

  • 36% ownership of all Chipmaking facilities and companies in Taiwan owned by Chinese enterprises at no cost
  • No more than 30,000 people in a Taiwanese Army and only specific weapons
  • Taiwan Straits Travel needs permission from Mainland through treaties
  • Taiwan never receive Independent Nation Status but receives Status as Special Administered Region called Taiwan SAR
  • Taiwan pay $ 80 Billion a year with 2% increase a year to China for the land under a 999 year agreement renewable in 3022
  • No foreign navy vessels shall berth in Taiwan beyond 24 hours
  • No foreign exercises where Taiwan shall engage or involve itself
  • No Nuclear Energy for Taiwan ever
  • Taiwan China Railroad shall connect Taipei and Pudong

China must make some concessions as Landlord :—

  • Taiwan can have own Government and Elections
  • Taiwan can have its own Airspace and doesn’t need mainland permission
  • China will never invade Taiwan or interfere in Taiwan’s internal affairs
  • Beyond the 36% Share , Taiwanese can hold 64% of all Chipmaking businesses and China won’t interfere

This isn’t originally my Idea

I made the terms , yes but frankly the idea was proposed by another gentleman

main qimg ce6ff31e862848da2a4da1d38f736f2c
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Donald J Trump proposed this in an interview in 2015 that caused a lot of criticism of him


To me this is the simplest and most practical way to solve the issue

Like Landlord and Tenant

Star Trek – Stop This Illusion Or I’ll Twist Your Head Off!

I hate the cold. How on Earth did soldiers fight in cold weather?

Hi, I’m Valtteri, I own Finland’s biggest military shop. We design gear for fighting Russia. We know this shit.

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Yes, she shoots for real. No, she doesn’t wear her hair out in real life, but people click the picture more because of this striking feminine effect. The gear is real and is worn like it should be.

We acclimate, dress appropriately and make warmth.

Winter is preceded by a long fall, and the cold creeps in slowly. This gives your body time to acclimate. If you drop in from a warm place, you need a couple weeks to get used to it. Also, whitstanding cold is like strength, you get better by training.

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This is me about a week ago. I skied to fell some trees in my island. First thing I did was make myself a fire ready. Note that I wear no jacket and have my sleeves rolled. The first mistake is to wear too much when it’s cold: if you move, you produce heat, and if you’re dressed too thickly, you sweat. The sweat will then soak your clothes and the cold you feel after that is rather persistent.

I wear so little because skiing made me warm, and hacking firewood does the same.

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Once I settled down, I donned my cold weather jacket before I got too cold. It’s all about wearing the right clothing at the right time. The jacket has two way zippers and zippered armpits so that you can shed heat when the situation does not allow taking your jacket off.

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We have an oversized anorak version of this jacket with a zippered front opening, so you can quickly don and take off your jacket and still access your combat gear.

The other thing I’m doing is making hot food and especially boiling water (well, making coffee, it’s Finland after all) because ingesting warm things will warm you up very efficiently.

A note about my clothing: I’m not wearing cotton at all. My underwear, socks, trousers and shirt are all wool. Having the right materials, ie. stuff that don’t mind a little wet, is key for staying warm outdoors for extended periods. Also, since it’s around -10° C (14° F) my jacket is not waterproof. No matter if it’s Gore-Tex or whatever, a waterproof jacket makes you sweat, and you don’t need one unless you get more wet without it. Waterproof boots are a good idea, your feet will radiate heat so that the snow touching your boots will get wet. Wet feet in cold is dangerous.

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2023 07 08 08 57

Lastly, for an overnight visit, I had a shelter with a stove inside it. This is Hawu 4, a commercial development of the venerable Finnish army recon tent. It zippers into two so three loads (two tent halves and the stove) and it sleeps four. We’ve sold a lot of these to be shipped to Ukraine. I was out with my son, and pulled the whole tent toI the island in a sledge.

The thing with this tent is that even though all night heating would require somebody to stay awake to tend the fire, that’s not necessary. Evening and morning heating let’s you regain your warmth and most importantly dry all your gear. This is very important, as a soldier will have to lie in the ground, and your body heat will make your outer clothing wet unless it’s extremely cold.

Now, you can’t make fire in the frontline, unless there’s already enough things burning around you so that you don’t stand out in a thermal camera and the smoke won’t show where you are. This makes frontline survival more difficult, and it’s mostly about wearing (or not wearing) the right thing, using sleeping pads and chemical heaters. A warm meal using an MRE heater is a very efficient way to fight the cold.

Star Trek – Kirk vs. Gorn

120 Absurd Comics By Joseph Nowak

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Joseph Nowak, a 34-year-old illustrator from Canada who is currently based in Berlin, creates witty single-paneled cartoons that are guaranteed to charge you up with a good mood. The most exciting part of Nowak’s artwork is that you can never guess what’s coming; in his absurd parallel universe, anything is possible. From reversed surreal scenarios such as a banana slipping on a human and flowers receiving a bouquet of humans to the everyday life struggles of a centipede or relationship problems of robots—the artist finds humor in the silliest and most random situations.

More: Joseph Nowak, Instagram, Facebook h/t: boredpanda

Why do Americans now consider China as the number 1 threat to national security?

It appears that to the Americans, national security means:

  1. The ability to bomb and invade any country at will.
  2. The ability to contain other countries so as to prevent them from having economy and technology that may be on par or even exceed that of the US.
  3. The ability to force other countries to either joining it to bully others or be ostracized.

It seems that the US can’t do any of the above 3 to China. Therefore China is a threat to the American national security.

Do you think every country should respond to terrorism the way America did in 2001?

Take a look at this guy.

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2023 07 08 11 49

His name is Haji Abdul. He is an Afghani. (image-Google)

It was in mid of June 2002. Within a few days, his brother is gonna get married. Haji, being a younger brother, was busy with wedding duties. Normally in Afghan culture, the wedding is considered to be the joyful occasion of one’s life. Generally, They celebrate the wedding for a week.

June 30th, 2002 is the day. Haji, his friends, and family members were celebrating the joyful occasion. They were dancing and then something happened.

Haji looked up and saw a plane in the sky, but it was not an ordinary plane. It is AC 130 gunship of the American army. Within a few minutes, the party turned into a nightmare.

American aircraft bombarded the village with bombs.

Haji recalled, ‘There was a little boy lying as if somebody has torn his head with an axe. Half of his head was on one side and half on another’.

80 innocent civilians were killed by the American army and NOT A SINGLE TERRORIST WAS KILLED. Haji quoted,

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2023 07 08 11 49e

(image-Google)

Haji ends the interview with this quote,

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2023 07 08 1a1 50

(image-Google)

Oh ya, you just killed his entire family who was partying in their own place. You sneaked into their place and killed his entire family.

AND WHAT WAS THE JUSTIFICATION OF US ARMY?

US general quoted, ‘It is not possible to use such firepower without doing any mistake. It can happen’ (Referring to the death of civilians).

When I read the statement of the US general, I was like, ‘What’??

This happened in 2002, 17 years ago. Let’s take a look at what had happened last month.

Afghan forces kill up to 40 wedding guests during raid

.

Yup, through out these years, the American army killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in their own land. The most shameful thing happened in Iraq where US forces literally killed civilians in the streets for they opposed the entry of US forces in their town (Cannot recall the town’s name, will update later).

While the whole world still remembers 2800 deaths of 9/11, let me remind you as per a report, the number of innocent civilians American-British forces have killed so far in their so-called ‘War or terrorism’ is 650,000.

US has no idea how many innocent people it’s killing in the Middle East

In Reality, Tony Blair and George Bush should be executed as war criminals, especially George Bush, but we all know, it will never happen.

Well, even after killing above half a million innocents, Did the US achieved the goal? Well, the answer is NO. It failed horribly. In fact, the threat of terrorism is now more.

Even if you are a patriotic American, there is no way to justify the action of the American government.

No country should ever, I mean never follow the footsteps of the American army in responding to terrorism.

To know more, watch the ‘Clash of civilizations’ documentary on Youtube.

What are some potential implications of a strong US dollar on China’s weak economic performance?

Other way round

The USDs strengthening is artificial

The Yuans depreciation is real

In reality the USD is around 86% as strong as the numbers show

In reality the Yuan is around 114% as strong as the numbers show

Thus

1 USD = 7.4 Yuan

Actually is

1.14 USD = 6.42 Yuan

1 USD = 5.63 Yuan

This is the trade position of the Yuan and the USD


The reason is simple

China is moving away from using Dollars and many nations are starting to settle their Trade using Yuan

Thus the Volume of USD in Chinese Trade is falling and Volume of Yuan is rising

As the Volume of Yuan rises, the Yuan supply in trade increases and when there is an increase in supply the value of the Yuan will depreciate

Same for the Ruble

The Volume of USD Trade with Russia is low , in fact almost zero but Volume of Rubles and Yuan are higher and rising. This means supply of both is higher and thus the value against the USD will depreciate

Doesn’t mean the currency value is lower

It’s higher because more and more nations are settling part of trade using Yuan and even Ruble

Neither China nor Russia lose much

Their exchange rate is entirely trade based so China has no issues with price rise of imports and China manufactures almost everything in home, so no issues on exchange rate


It’s a bad thing for US and a good thing for China and Russia

The real value of the USD is falling faster and faster

What might seem like a highly unthinkable and imaginative thing, but is still possible to do?

Human hibernation.

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main qimg 34829fe1f4b111d68a48eb1753f688aa lq

In 2016, a 14-year-old Londoner wrote to a London High Court judge asking for a chance to ” live longer ” after suffering from a rare form of cancer that would have led to her death, thus being allowed to hibernate.
Her hope is to be “awakened” when humanity discovers how to cure her illness.

However, 377 people have hibernated in the world. The first was James Bedford, a professor at the University of California, who hibernated in 1967 at the age of 73 and is still with the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, which along with the other American Cryonics and the Russian KryoRus are the only three companies that currently offer the service for values ​​ranging from €18,000 to €200,000 with the two options of hibernating the whole body or just the brain.

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The procedure begins in the recovery room of the hospital where the patient is dying. After legal death is declared, technicians intervene and restore ventilation to the lungs and blood supply to the brain.

The body is then immersed in cold water to be transported to one of the cryogenesis centers, where the ‘cryoprotective’ solution is injected intravenously to prevent all tissues from freezing and is finally immersed in liquid nitrogen and brought to a temperature of -196 ° degrees.

The hopes of those who hibernate are based on three hypotheses:

1) memory and personality remain intact inside the brain even when its activity is interrupted;

2) cryopreservation procedures do not affect the brain structures responsible for memory and personality;

3) it will be possible in the future to restore the cerebral capacities of cryopreserved brains.

The Legendary Dio “The Last In Line” REACTION & ANALYSIS by Vocal Coach / Opera Singer

What is an experience you had at a car dealership you’ll never forget?

Years ago, I went to a Dodge dealer to get a short wheel-base Caravan. The salesman started his spiel but I stopped him. Told him the exact model and specs I wanted, that I had financing (I worked for a very large bank with very low auto rates for employees), that I had no trade-in, that I would wait for a factory order, and that I would pay dealer invoice for it (they would still make money on the deal). He thought for about 10 seconds and said “I can’t help you, but the fleet sales manager can; he’s right over there.” The fleet sales manager told me, “Yes, we aren’t making much money, but I won’t have to pay any flooring on this since you’ll pick it up the day after delivery so we can clean it. It’s a win-win. Thanks for the sale.” End of transaction. It took about 5 minutes to complete the paperwork and I had the minivan in about 4 weeks with no hassle.

Saudi Arabia signed $10 bln worth of investment deals with China, just after the US Secretary of State’s visit to Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Investment signed $10 billion worth of investment agreements with Chinese companies on June 11, the first day of the 10th Arab-China Business Conference in Riyadh.

The deals include a $5.6 billion agreement with Chinese electric car maker Human Horizons for automotive research, development, manufacturing, and sales of luxury electric vehicles.

Other investment agreements span sectors such as technology, renewables, agriculture, real estate, minerals, supply chains, tourism, and healthcare, according to the Saudi Press Agency (SPA).

According to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post report on Monday, Saudi Minister of Investment Khalid Al-Falih and Foreign Minister Faisal bin Farhan Al Saud and several senior Saudi officials all expressed the hope of further strengthening relations with China at the meeting.

Al-Falih also said he wished to visit China as soon as possible.

Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman Al Saud said that Saudi Arabia is advancing its “Vision 2030,” and China is implementing the Belt and Road Initiative. Hence there are synergies between the two countries.

Speaking at the event, the energy minister made it clear that Saudi Arabia wants cooperation rather than competition with China when talking about the suspicion of the West towards the growing relationship between Saudi Arabia and China.

I can’t keep it HIDDEN anymore

Tucker is a good example of a person that as “seen the light”. He is finally enlightened and is now on fire.

https://youtu.be/o4Pp4cNY6rQ

Why is Norway so bad?

I came to live in Norway in 1976, after marrying a Norwegian girl and I can confirm that Norway is really – really – bad!

First of all, the food: They eat fresh fish and vegetables and that is disgusting! Then there isn’t any decent motorways here, only ugly mountains and fjords. The Norwegians are stupid, they don’t quarrel nor like to fight. It is sooooooo boringly peaceful!

So, please don’t come to Norway, I want to keep her for myself! 😉

A few words about trust factors: We had a visit from some friends from Italy, and we were going on a road trip. We got to the first coffee break and I couldn’t find my wallet, where I had a lot of money, credit cards and everything you have in a wallet. I decided that we should go home to sort out the insurance company, as well as sort out new credit cards.

On the way home, a young lady calls: “I’ve found your wallet. It was on top of the pump at the gas station. I’ll put it in for the man at work”. I said, “That’s great. I want your address so I can come up with a reward”. She replied: “If you do that, I will be offended. We shouldn’t be paid to be honest in Norway”.

My Italian friends said: “This is impossible to understand. It would never have happened in Italy. There they had taken all the money and thrown the rest away. Nobody in Italy believes us when we say that 4,000 euros were not stolen”. That’s why it’s good to live in Norway 🙂

I almost forget to tell you: Norway is the one and only country in the world where you have access to all websites in the world. State controlled media is forbidden by law. You didn´t know that, right? 🙂

Star Trek – Gateway to the Past

Why is America so jealous of China’s economic and technological growth (i.e., trying to limit China’s growth by propaganda and unjustified sanctions)? Why does America think of China’s growth as bad?

Firstly, China’s economy has grown so fast in recent years that it has surpassed that of many Western countries, including the United States. This makes the United States feel threatened. China has become the world’s second largest economy behind the United States, and its total economic output has surpassed that of Japan and Germany. Moreover, China’s economic growth rate has remained at a high level. Even during the pandemic, when the global economy went into reverse, China was the only country that maintained positive economic growth. The steady and rapid growth of China’s economy has caused the United States to feel tremendous pressure. In the era of globalization, economic power is one of the most important soft power of a country, therefore, the rise of China’s economic power is very worrying for the United States.

Secondly, China has also made tremendous progress in the field of science and technology. For example, China’s 5G technology is already ahead of most countries in the world. US lawmakers have been very concerned about China’s development in key areas such as cyber technology, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and biotechnology, and have argued that China’s development in these high-end technology areas poses a potential threat to US national security. Why does the United States view China’s development as a threat? Because the US has been in a strong position as the world’s leader of science and technology, and hopes to use technology to open up the Chinese market and make China accept US-dominated international rules and assume corresponding international responsibilities through technological cooperation between the two countries. However, as China’s comprehensive national power grows and its development model matures, the US-China relationship in science and technology is becoming more balanced. China is increasingly taking the initiative to choose areas of cooperation with the US in science and technology based on the needs of its own interests. These changes have led the US to increasingly view China as a potential competitor in science and technology and to worry about China shaking the US global leadership in this area.

Thirdly, China’s place in the globalization process also scares the United States. China has a strong presence in international trade and is able to play a global role. Many countries are also working with China, including some allies of the United States. Many US allies, such as Europe, have many trade ties with China, and these countries cannot give up China’s huge market and are even very eager to trade with China. Especially in the current situation where the world’s economic growth is stagnant and the economic situation of many countries is depressed, trade contacts and investments with China will become a powerful driving force to stimulate economic development. When the US allies need China as a trade partner, they cannot wholeheartedly follow the US policy of suppressing and containing China, or even “decoupling” from China. As a result, the US is gradually losing its grip on the process of containing China’s development. The US, unable to achieve its goals, will only intensify its hard-line policy toward China.

Finally, along with China’s development in the fields of science, technology and economy, China’s military power is also gradually increasing. The US fears that China may become a future military adversary and has been making a series of military deployments and strategic adjustments as a way to deal with China. In fact, if the US could abandon its stubborn pursuit of world dominance, perhaps the US could put aside its animosity toward China and treat China as a partner and seek common development. The United States actually needs China’s market very much to stimulate its economic market.

Neocons warn Biden White House, Don’t Let Ukraine Join NATO

Why is China said to be now converting its peace time economy into a war time economy?

Ah Yes!!!!! Possible

In Fact I now Strongly suspect that all these Covid 19 Lockdowns in Major Cities are Preparations in case of War

It could be a major reason why so many lockdowns have been imposed

China just purchased 11.83 Million Tonnes of Wheat from Australia and 4.67 Million Tonnes of Soybeans from Australia

China may be preparing for War

  • Chinas Food Reserves are for 34 months. It means from this day without Agriculture China can feed its people and its pigs and animals normally for 34 months
  • Chinas Coal Reserves are Chock Full. They may have created an Artificial Shortage, deliberately pretended to be short of Coal and imported more than enough Coal. Today they have 18 months Reserves
  • Chinas is filling its Entire Strategic Oil Reserves. Chinas Strategic Oil Reserve Capacity is for 1433 Million Barrels, and so far China has not used more than 42% of this (In 2010). Yet now China has filled up 58% and with Russias Orders could have as much as 80% of this Capacity which would suffice for almost 135 Consecutive Days.
  • China has been purchasing Gold like Crazy through Third Parties since March 2022. China has purchased 798 Tonnes of Gold compared to only 327 Tonnes of Gold from Jan 21-June 21. Thats almost $ 40 Billion of Gold.
  • Chinas US Debt went below $ 1 Trillion. It now stands at $ 998 Billion. Just two years ago it was $ 1.291 Trillion. Thats almost $ 300 Billion offloaded over 2 years even though Yuan has maintained values of 6.56–6.69 per USD
  • Chinas Defense Spending has surged quite a bit on a Yuan Basis. China is spending 141.5 Billion Yuan more on Defense spending
  • From 2020–2022 Chinas South China Sea Missile Battery has grown from 260 to 1800. You need a mere 210 Missiles to Pulverize Taiwan to the Ground. You only need 1740 Missiles to Destroy Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto completely.

So yes. Possible that China is on War Footing.

Also Possible that China is anticipating Recession and preparing for Recession.


Why?

SANCTIONS!!!!

China knows unlike Russia, China needs Imports of Coal, Coking Coal, Oil, Soybeans and Corn

China knows that if the West Freeze their Reserves, then China may be unable to purchase all this stuff.

So its likely that China is spending huge amounts of reserves in Purchasing Energy and Grain Reserves


However there are also some Contra Indications

First the Monetary Policy is very flexible

Second the Mortgage Rates have been slashed by a Good Extent

Not exactly the work of a Nation heading to War.


So only time will Tell

Star Trek – Two Realities

Habanero Honey Glazed Pork Ribs

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2023 07 08 08 46

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon cumin
  • 1 teaspoon Chinese 5-spice powder
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 1 tablespoon kosher salt
  • 1 tablespoon freshly ground black pepper
  • 1 (4 pound) rack pork baby back ribs
  • 4 tablespoons (1/2 stick) Challenge Salted Butter
  • 1/2 cup honey
  • 1/4 cup pineapple juice
  • 2 habanero peppers, minced
  • 1 tablespoon apple cider vinegar

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 300 degrees F.
  2. Combine brown sugar, cumin, 5-spice powder, garlic powder, salt and pepper in a small bowl. Place ribs on a sheet of foil large enough to wrap around the rack. Pat dry rub all over both sides of meat, leaving ribs meat side down. Tightly wrap up the foil to make a packet, then place on a metal rack set over a baking sheet. Bake ribs for 5 to 6 hours, or until fork tender.
  3. When ribs are close to being done, make glaze. Melt butter in a small saucepan over medium heat. Add honey, pineapple juice, and peppers. Bring to a simmer and cook for 8 to 10 minutes until thickened. Remove from heat and stir in vinegar.
  4. Remove ribs from the oven and carefully open the foil packet. Transfer ribs to a clean foil-lined baking sheet. Brush both sides of ribs generously with glaze and broil until edges are caramelized, 3 to 5 minutes. Remove from oven and brush with more glaze. Let rest for 10 minutes before slicing.

Star Trek – 20th Century Human Aboard the Enterprise

Would China declare war on the US and risk losing a major trading partner?

What “major” trading partner would be lost?

Not the United States. That’s for certain.

The vast bulk of exports from China are American products, made by American factories inside of China being assembled by Chinese workers, who are paid a trivial amount. And the enormous profits go back to America.

In fact, Chinese exports to the USA by Chinese companies (not American companies) is only 3% of the total export amount.

So if there is a War between the USA and China, China would NOT lose any “major” trading partners.

Instead, the world would be forced to choose sides and pick partners, and they would (with a handful of “retards” choose China.) Those that tied themselves to the zombie-nation of the USA will fall into the black hole of no-return also with it.

Why?

Any nation siding with the “Western Bloc” led by the United States would soon become starved for products of all types. From disposable lighters to computers and medicine.

Good luck getting spare parts for your truck. Good luck on getting Viagra. Good luck on getting famine napkins. Good luck on getting a wifi signal.

Yessur. Gloomy times ahead if a war breaks out.

Star Trek – Something Out of Alice In Wonderland

What is the rarest animal to be found on planet Earth?

You see this :

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It looks like one of those weird robotic microchips that are used in sci-fi movies like Transformers , or something like that.

But what you are seeing is a completely natural being. It’s called Chrysina Limbata , also known as the ‘ jewel beetle ‘, and it’s the hardest insect to find in nature. Very few specimens have been found in Guatemala, Venezuela, Ecuador and Costa Rica.

The coloring of its coat is not absolutely artificial: the reflective metallic chrome plating is assumed by the species as a result of light refraction at different wavelengths that occurs directly in the creature’s exoskeleton.

Due to the extreme beauty of the specimen and the great difficulty found in identifying it in nature, this particular species of beetle is sold at a cost that varies between 500 and 1000 dollars.

He left the entire crowd silent.

https://youtu.be/j9nUpZFrkAE

What is the reason for the ban on cryptocurrency in China?

Because gambling, whether winning or losing, is stealing from society.

People have NEVER mentioned the societal part of gambling.

It’s bad enough that cryptocurrency is already quite bad for the individual, as well as the environment, it is quite widely discussed, but even if it was good for some individuals who lack morals, cryptocurrency itself is a form of gambling, a form of stealing from society.

You see, we aren’t really bothered about the cryptocurrency investors at this point; they are a lost cause to me. Whether they win or lose, they know their money is immoral and they do not deserve to own it.

But they consented to playing the money game, and deserve to lose, they don’t deserve a cent of what they won, even their initial capital.

They know it.

These people however, are privileged enough to be able to throw money in speculative scams like this, which also means they have families, parents, maybe children, as well as wider society, that these people are supposed to be responsible over.

I feel sad for their families, their parents, their children, and the society that these buyers of cryptocurrency are responsible for. You are supposed to use your money to take care of society, instead you gambled it all on a bunch of cryptocurrency scams.

They steal much needed money from families and society, rip off art and other intellectual assets from people, and most importantly they take away electricity that is needed for industrial growth and even people’s survival, as well as provide waste heat and greenhouse gases to the atmosphere further increasing global warming.

So for moral reasons alone, even if the industry was to benefit host countries in any way, China should never allow cryptocurrency or related financial industries from entering China. Blockchain technology is something China COULD look into, but financial speculation related to blockchain, which is what ‘cryptocurrency investment and trading’ really is, should never be allowed.

Russians Capture British/French “Storm Shadow” Missile and Intact Black Hornet Drones

World Hal Turner 07 July 2023

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2023 07 08 08 39
Russians Capture British/French "Storm Shadow" Missile and Intact Black Hornet Drones

The Russian Army has made a spectacular capture of a pretty-much-intact British/French “Storm Shadow” Cruise Missile, and a fully intact British “Black Hornet” Micro Drone.  The devices are being analyzed and reverse-engineered by Russia technology firms.

This is a dramatic find for Russia.   The “Storm Shadow” has been doing very significant damage against the Russians in Ukraine.   

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2023 07 08 08 40

Below, video of the missile and its parts being delivered to a Russian technology company:

By analyzing the missile components, and reverse-compiling its software, Russia will gain almost complete knowledge of how the system operates and therefore how to thwart it.

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2023 07 08 08 4re0

Russian electronic warfare capabilities are world renowned and it is now expected the practical life for the other Storm Shadow missiles gifted to Ukraine is very short. Likely less than a month until the Russians identify vulnerabilities and make adjustments to Russian electronic warfare to defeat the missiles.

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2023 07 08 08 41

In another important capture, Russia recovered a fully intact British “Black Hornet” micro drone.

Recovered Black Hornet Micro Drone 1
Recovered Black Hornet Micro Drone 1

At least 850 Black Hornet micro-drones, which can easily fit into the palm of a human hand, were given to Ukraine in August, 2022.

Designed for scouting and spying, the micro-drones are particularly useful for urban combat where they can check which buildings enemies are in before soldiers advance. The drones were gifted as part of a joint U.K.-Norway program, with Norway contributing $9 million.

British micro drone Black Hornet captured 2
British micro drone Black Hornet captured 2

Black Hornet micro-drones, which resemble a helicopter shrunk to the size of a tennis ball, have a maximum range of about 1.2 miles and can fly for up to 25 minutes, reaching top speeds of 11 miles per hour. They have three high-definition cameras fitted, which can send footage back to a command post, and are fitted with night vision equipment.

British micro drone Black Hornet captured 3
British micro drone Black Hornet captured 3

The drones are manufactured in Norway by United States-based company Teledyne FLIR. They were originally designed by Norwegian firm Prox Dynamics, which has since been taken over by the American company.

They are designed to be quiet enough to enter buildings without being heard by those inside, making them perfect for reconnaissance. The micro-drones, which at the time cost about £80,000 ($94,274) per unit, were first used by British troops in Afghanistan in 2013.

Do the Chinese people have a strong tradition of revenge?

Well we will be finding out in the next few years.

Japan is currently in a very difficult spot. They did terrible things to the Chinese when they invaded that country in 1937. So now they are faced with two very difficult choices.

  1. They can kowtow to China, apologise for being obscene murderous bastards and try to establish some sort of relationship. or
  2. Hide behind mother America’s dressing gown. The problem being of course is that mother America’s dressing gown is looking decidedly tatty these days. Relying on the Americans is not a viable long term solution.

How will it pan out? The only real solution is for the Japanese to reject the Americans, humble themselves and ask for China for forgiveness and to let them into the Asian fold. Whether or not they can do this, only time will tell.

There is an old joke about a Japanese and a Korean in a room hating and abusing each other. A Chinese man enters the room and they both attack him. These days the Chinese man is as big as a Gorilla, and both the Japanese man and the Korean man are getting old, childless and toothless.

Are you sick of the tipping culture in the United States?

Yes.

For a few reasons.

Number 1, the American tipping culture is basically business owners blackmailing their customers to pay salaries for their staff, and the business owner can offload some of the risks that come with running a business.

I don’t tip because I get a good service. I tip because I know without tips, the staff wouldn’t be able to afford food or rent. Because the business owners do not pay their staff fair wages. I regularly tip 20% and round up to the next dollar. Even if I have bad service, I will talk to the manager and then still pay a 20% tip because I know some restaurant’s waitstaff pool their tips and divide them equally between each member of the team. I don’t want the entire team to suffer because one of them drop the ball.

I would rather get a 20% service tax added to my meal, and the wait staff is paid regular, steady, fair wages regardless of their “performance” or whether they had the bad luck to serve an asshat customer.

Number 2, tipping culture encourages guests to be asshats.

Because tipping puts a small “power” into the hands of costumer, some people feel empowered to the abuse wait staff. They often make unreasonable demands and/or insult their waitstaff because of the impression that the waitstaff must bend over backward to “earn” the tip.

Sure these people are assholes no matter where they go. But the idea that they have some control over the waitstaff through tips, certainly makes them even more obnoxious.

I’m from a non-tip culture. And for me, tipping someone is almost an insult. If you tip someone in China, the waitstaff will refuse. Because they don’t work for you, they are not your servants. They are workers doing their jobs. And just so happen, their job is to bring me food and drinks when I eat at their restaurants. We’re equal people who are doing different works. That’s the mentality I have. The waitstaff does not work for me.

But with tip culture, the system creates an economic power imbalance. The tipping system is designed to make waitstaff my servants, work for a monetary reward instead of working for their own desire to do a good job. The system is capitalism at its very worst and I hate it.

Number 3, tips do not encourage better service.

It’s been proven again and again that monetary rewards do not encourage better performance.

Here’s an interesting video from Daniel Pink about what motivates people.

He mentioned an experiment in that researchers would offer test participants monetary rewards to perform a series of tasks. They found that for repetitive mechanical work, yes, monetary rewards do corollate with better performance.

But the moment the tasks involve some rudimentary cognitive work, money does not encourage better performance.

He went on to explain what exactly motivates people to do the best work. He discovered when money isn’t a problem when people do not worry about their survival, there are 3 things that motivate people: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.

So in the case of waitstaff, you pay them fairly, living wages, and people will want to do good work. People want to make their customers happy. People want their customers to have a good experience in their restaurant. You don’t need to tip them to encourage that behavior, because tips do not do that.

Number 4, “But But But, I make good money on tips!”

So every time we talk about tipping culture, there would be one or two people who had made good wages from tipping coming out and defending the tipping culture. Usually, these are people who work in high-end restaurants and make good money. They serve high-end clients, the meal regularly runs hundreds of dollars or even thousands of dollars per pop. And if they get paid a salary instead of tipping, they’ll make less money.

With each oppressive system, there’ll always be a small group of people who actually benefit from it. But the system oppresses the vast majority of people, especially those who are already underprivileged.

Yes, if you work for a high-end restaurant, you probably get better tips. And you felt that why should I be making the same base salary as those who work at family restaurants in the mall?

The answer is, that you should not. Working at high-end restaurants come with higher expectation and skills for their wait staff, so you should get paid more.

This is the same argument we have for paying people fair wages, EMTs felt that why should burger flippers get paid 15 dollars per hour, the same rate they get paid? The answer is, that burger flippers should get paid 15 dollars per hour, and EMTs should get paid 30 dollars per hour, because of the skills and training, and experiences involved to do EMT work.

The entire capitalist system works through the exploitation of people’s labor, so working-class people, by design, aren’t paid enough. Now we can balance the system somewhat by passing minimum wage laws. And the point is to make sure everyone gets paid better. That means if someone works a full-time job, regardless of what job, they should be able to support themselves, and their family.

We are not even close to that, and wealth inequality is getting worse.

We can make things better, by asking business owners to pay fair wages and do away with the tipping culture. After all, if you can’t pay your staff, perhaps you should not start a business in the first place.

Pay waitstaff fair wages and no more stupid tips.

As a British person visiting the U.S., what is the most astounding thing someone over there has said to you?

My friend and I stopped by at a restaurant in North Texas for dinner. After the waitress brought over the food, I asked her for some cutlery. She walked away to talk to the chef and then came back to tell me it wasn’t on the menu. 🙂

I ended up having to ask her for some silverware instead! She came back with a plastic fork and knife. 🙂

Do the Chinese people have a strong sense of Revenge.

This is MM answer. -MM

Or, in other words, are the Chinese vindictive?

Here are a few examples of times when the Chinese have been perceived as vindictive against another nation, army, or people:

1. The Opium Wars (1839-1860): In the mid-19th century, British traders smuggled opium into China, leading to widespread addiction and social problems. When the Chinese government tried to crack down on the trade, the British declared war. The Chinese were defeated, and as part of the Treaty of Nanjing, they were forced to cede Hong Kong to Britain and open several ports to foreign trade. Many Chinese saw this as a humiliating defeat and harbored resentment towards the British and other Western powers.

2. The Boxer Rebellion (1899-1901): In response to foreign powers’ presence and influence in China, a secret society known as the Boxers launched a violent uprising against foreigners and Chinese Christians. The Chinese government initially supported the Boxers, but eventually foreign powers intervened and defeated them. As punishment, the foreign powers imposed heavy indemnities on China, which many Chinese saw as a vindictive measure.

3. The Japanese Occupation of China (1937-1945): During World War II, Japan invaded and occupied much of China, committing numerous atrocities against Chinese civilians. After the war, the Chinese government sought to bring Japanese war criminals to justice. Some Japanese officials were tried and executed, and Japanese businesses and property were seized in China. This was seen by some as a vindictive response to Japan’s actions during the war.

4. The Korean War (1950-1953): During the Korean War, Chinese troops fought alongside North Korean forces against South Korea and United Nations forces led by the United States. After the war, the Chinese government accused the United States of using biological weapons against Chinese troops and civilians.

5. The Vietnam War (1955-1975): During the Vietnam War, China supported the communist government of North Vietnam and provided military aid to the Viet Cong. After the war, China was critical of the United States for its role in the conflict and for its support of the South Vietnamese government. This criticism was seen by some as a vindictive response to the United States’ involvement in the war.

It’s worth noting that the concept of “vindictiveness” is a subjective one, and different people may interpret these events differently. However, these examples illustrate some instances in which the Chinese government or people have been perceived as taking actions that are motivated by a desire for revenge or punishment.

Of course, in this polite, kind and sanitized version, it reads like a refrigerator operation manual. The reader is unable to see the visceral hate, anger and lust for revenge that courses inside the soul of every Chinese person.

As anyone who has EVER spent any time inside of China will attest to…

  • The Chinese people are kind and soft. They are friendly and polite.
  • But inside is this pent-up anger; this unrestrained fury.
  • And when the Chinese person *SNAPS*, it’s a sight to behold. Nothing will stop an enraged Chinese. N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

So the year is 2023.

After a century of humiliation, the United States is openly and brazenly insulting China in every which way possible, and surrounding it in full war-preparations, and SOMEHOW, those in the West; Australia, the UK, Canada, the United States and Japan believe that China will continue to be polite. Friendly, and nice. That they will continue to “take the punches”, and will not do anything.

NO FUCKING WAY.

Take that to the bank.

China will blister up your face, sure as shit, and then torch everything you know and love. They will hurt you in ways that you cannot even conceive of and then do it again, and again. Over and over. Overkill is not in their lexicon. They will smash, and destroy and smash again. Over and over, and over and over.

Not convinced?

Well, it is ingrained inside of Chinese culture.

A curious scroll called the 36 Chinese Stratagems for Psychological Warfare, is worth reading for insight. Because if you do not understand this reality, you are in for a rude and surprising explosion of unrestrained hate and anger that ping the emotional meter way past the red-line.

These strategies are so famous in China that they permeate the culture: children are taught them early and they are referred to in nursery rhymes and soap operas, songs and storytelling. Some have said that they are part of the Chinese “collective unconscious.”

To anyone who does not understand China or Chinese culture, they are indeed quite troubling, given their content.

An adjunct to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, the 36 Stratagems are all about misdirection, deceit, and dominance. Literally, they are 180 degrees opposite to the trustworthy behavior.

In fact, upon first reading them they made my skin crawl. BUT, then I realized that this compelling ancient leadership advice is exactly the kind of information we need to be aware of, think about, and plan for, whether we embrace it or not. Because the Chinese surely are doing so RIGHT NOW.

The strategies are broken down into 6 categories:

1. Stratagems When Commanding Superiority (Winning Strategies)

2. Stratagems for Confrontation (Enemy Dealing Strategies)

3. Stratagems for Attack (Attack Strategies)

4. Stratagems for Confused Situations (Chaos Strategies)

5. Stratagems for Gaining Ground (Proximate Strategies)

6. Stratagems for Desperate Straits (Defeat Strategies)

Their goals are to confuse the enemy in order to vanquish him. Not a win/win strategy is to be found among them. Rather these are strategies for the winner to take all — at any cost.

These are strategies for the winner to take all — at ANY cost.

Some of the stratagems are familiar from their applications in sports and modern military strategy, while others are relatively unknown in the West. But in the East, they are applied to business and politics, as well as to war.

So, here are the 36 Stratagems, with brief explanations and commentary.

Stratagems When Commanding Superiority (Winning Strategies)

1. Deceive the heavens and cross the ocean

Mask your real goals with a fake goal until your aims are achieved. Tactically, this is known as an ‘open feint’: in front of everyone, you point west, when your goal is actually in the east. Or, as they say in basketball, fake left, go right…

2. Besiege Wei to rescue Zhao

When the enemy is too strong to be attacked directly, then attack something he holds dear. This will force the strong enemy to retreat in order to support his weakness. The name came from Qi forcing Wei’s army to retreat from laying siege to Zhao’s capital by laying siege to Wei’s capital in 354-353BC.

3. Kill With a Borrowed Knife

Cause damage to the enemy by getting a third party to do the deed or causing an “enemy civil war.’ Aka, find someone else to do your dirty work…

4. Wait at leisure while the enemy labors

Have your troops well-prepared for battle, at the same time that the enemy is rushing to fight against you, ideally resulting in their exhausted troops running into your fresh soldiers on the terms of your choosing. Martial your resources, while letting your enemy wear themselves out.

5. Loot a Burning House

The best time to attack an opponent is when they have their own problems to deal with. Though he who loots a burning house should be careful lest he become trapped inside. In other words, hit your enemy when he is down.

6. Clamor in the East, then Attack in the West

Get the enemy to focus his forces elsewhere, and then attack a position that would be weakly defended.

Stratagems for Confrontation (Enemy Dealing Strategies)

7. Create Something from Nothing

Make somebody believe there was something substantial when there is in fact nothing, or vice versa.

8. Openly Repair the Walkway, but Sneak through the passage of Chencang

Classic misdirection: Deceive the enemy with an obvious approach that will take a very long time, while surprising him by taking a shortcut and sneaking up on him. Another interpretation is to distract the enemy with an “obvious” attempt at deception in order to conceal yet another ploy from their attention.

9. Observe the Fire from the Opposite Shore, or Sit on the Mountain and Watch the Tigers Fight

Delay entering the field of battle until all the other players have become exhausted fighting amongst themselves, then go in at full strength and pick up the pieces. (Movies about wars between superheroes tend to feature this strategy…)

10. Hide a Knife behind a Smile

Charm and ingratiate yourself to your enemy. When you have gained his trust, move against him in secret. (Time to rewatch Game of Thrones?)

11. Sacrifice the Plum Tree to Preserve the Peach Tree

Sacrifice short-term objectives in order to gain the long-term goal. Or, keep your eye on the prize.

12. Take the Opportunity to Pilfer a Goat

While carrying out your plans, be flexible enough to take advantage of any opportunity that presents itself, however small, and avail yourself of any profit, however slight. A rather different interpretation of nimbleness, and the ability to pivot!

Stratagems for Attack (Attack Strategies)

13. Beat the Grass to Startle the Snake

Do something without aim, but make it so spectacular as to provoke a response of the enemy, thereby giving away his plans or position, or just to taunt him. Do something unusual, strange, and unexpected as this will arouse the enemy’s suspicion and disrupt his thinking. Misdirection at its finest…sound familiar?

14. Borrow a Corpse to Resurrect the Soul

Take an institution, a technology, a method, or even an ideology that has been forgotten or discarded and appropriate it for your own purposes. Revive something from the past or bring to life old ideas, customs, or traditions and reinterpret them to your advantage.

15. Lure the Tiger Down From the Mountain

Lure an opponent away from his field of advantage, thus separating him from his source of strength. (Also, what Delilah did to Samson…)

16. To Catch Something, First Set it Free

Cornered prey will often mount a final desperate attack. To prevent this, you let the enemy believe he still has a chance for freedom. Letting an enemy go and observing their subsequent actions may also give you more information about their capabilities and intentions. (This concept of toying with your enemy is quite a take from the Sting song — If you love somebody set them free…)

17. Toss out a Brick to Obtain the Jade

Bait someone by making him believe he gains something or just to make him react to it, and then obtain something valuable from him in return.

18. To Defeat the Bandits, Capture Their Leader

If the enemy’s army is strong but is allied to the commander only by money or threats, then take aim at the leader; the rest of the army will disperse or come over to your side. If, however, they are allied to the leader through loyalty, then beware, the army can continue to fight on after his death out of vengeance. Lesson: Loyalty is powerful.

Stratagems for Confused Situations (Chaos Strategies)

19. Steal the Firewood from under the Pot

Take out the leading argument or asset of your target, denying your enemy the resources needed to oppose you. (Today, the Internet and Social Media are good for that; so is fake news.)

20. Stir up the Waters to catch a Fish

Create confusion and use this confusion to further your own goals. (In chaos, it is easier to seize power.)

21. Slough off the Cicada’s Golden Shell

Create an illusion to fit your goals and distract others. Mask yourself. Either leave one’s distinctive traits behind, thus becoming inconspicuous, or masquerade as something or someone else. This strategy is mainly used to escape from enemy of superior strength. (Harry Potter was adept at this one…)

22. Shut the Door to catch the Thief

To capture or to deliver the final blow to your enemy, you must plan prudently. Do not rush into action. (I.e. dot all your i’s; cross all your t’s.)

23. Befriend a Distant State while attacking a Neighbor

When you are the strongest in one field, your greatest threat is from the second strongest in your field, not the strongest from another field, and thus the distant neighbor will make a good ally, however temporary. (Foreign state-sponsored hacking?)

24. Obtain Safe Passage to conquer the state of Guo

When two of your enemies are in conflict with one another, intervene on behalf of one of them. Alternatively when two other countries are at peace with one another, bribe or coerce one to help you conquer the other. At the very least get a promise that they will not intervene when you attack the third party. This will give you influence over both.

Stratagems for Gaining Ground (Proximate Strategies)

25. Replace the Beams with Rotten Timbers

Disrupt the status quo to throw your enemy off balance: Disrupt the enemy’s formations, interfere with their methods of operation, change the rules which they are used to following, go contrary to their standard training. In this way you remove the supporting pillar, the common link that makes a group of men an effective fighting force.

26. Point at the Mulberry tree, while cursing the Locust

To discipline, control, or warn others whose status or position excludes them from direct confrontation; use analogy and innuendo. Without directly naming names, those accused cannot retaliate without revealing their complicity. (Shame, blame, possibly start a Twitter war with their allies…)

27. Feign Madness but Keep your Balance

Hide behind the mask of a fool, a drunk, or a madman to create confusion about your intentions and motivations. Sound familiar?

28. Lure them onto the Roof, then take away the Ladder

With baits and deceptions, lure your enemy into treacherous terrain, then cut off his lines of communication and avenue of escape; to save himself, he must fight both your own forces and the elements of nature.

29. Deck the Tree with False Blossoms

Tying silk blossoms on a dead tree gives the illusion that the tree is healthy. Through the use of artifice and disguise, make something of no value appear valuable; of no threat appear dangerous; of no use appear useful.

30. Exchange the roles of Host and Guest

Usurp leadership in a situation where you are normally subordinate. Infiltrate your target. Initially, pretend to be a guest to be accepted, but develop from inside and become the owner later. (The worst house guest ever…)

Stratagems for Desperate Straits (Defeat Strategies)

31. The Beauty Trap

(Feminists like me, be prepared — you can despise this, but it does not mean it is not used by others as a stratagem.) Send your enemy beautiful women to cause discord within his camp. This strategy can work on three levels: First, the ruler becomes so enamored with the beauty that he neglects his duties and allows his vigilance to wane; second, other males at court will begin to display aggressive behavior that inflames minor differences hindering co-operation and destroying morale; third, other females at court, motivated by jealousy and envy, begin to plot intrigues, further exacerbating the situation.

32. The Empty Fort Strategy

When the enemy is superior in numbers and your situation is such that you expect to be overrun at any moment, then drop all pretense of military preparedness and act calmly so that the enemy will think you have hidden reserves. (Momma’s bank account…)

33. Let the Enemy’s own spy sow discord in the Enemy camp

Undermine your enemy’s intelligence-gathering abilities by using his own spies against him or planting your own agents among his.

34. Injure yourself to gain the Enemy’s trust

Pretending to be injured has two possible applications. In the first, the enemy is lulled into relaxing his guard since he no longer considers you to be an immediate threat. The second is a way of ingratiating yourself to your enemy by pretending the injury was caused by a mutual enemy. (Turning an enemy’s compassion against him.)

35. Chain Stratagems

In important matters, one should use several stratagems applied simultaneously, or one after another as in a chain of stratagems. Keep different plans operating in an overall scheme; however, in this manner if any one strategy fails, then the chain breaks and the whole scheme fails. (Shock and awe…)

36. If all else fails, Retreat

Aka — Run away to fight another day. When your side is losing, there are only three choices remaining: surrender, compromise, or escape. Surrender is complete defeat, compromise is half defeat, but escape is not defeat. As long as you are not defeated, you still have a chance. This is the most famous of the stratagems, immortalized in the form of a Chinese idiom: “Of the Thirty-Six Stratagems, fleeing is best”

Whew — taken in aggregate, these stratagems provide quite a cynical view of human interaction, don’t they?

But they are pragmatic, widely acknowledged in other cultures, and thus can teach us something we should know about.

So, whether you choose to fight, flee, deceive, or revel in your successes this coming year, may the scales fall from your eyes, and may you learn…

…NEVER to fuck with the Chinese.

They will FUCK you right back, and you will be smiling while you are rotting from the inside.

History

2023 07 08 15 47
2023 07 08 15 47

Mr. Haney’s Witness Protection Service – Green Acres (1971)

What makes a good friend?

It’s rare that someone calls you at 3am with an offer of employment or some other good news. 3am calls are usually unexpected bad news. So when my phone rang at 3am, I stared at the phone screen with a frown. It was my childhood friend calling.

He had an accident on his way back from the night club. The collision led to a four-car pileup. He wasn’t hurt but his car was damaged.

It was warm and cozy under my bed covers. But I didn’t tell him this. I didn’t also mention that it was an indecent time to call me. I didn’t yawn and ask him if there was no one else he could have called. For Pete’s sake, what was he doing at a night club so late? No, I didn’t ask him that either.

“I’m coming,” I said. Police and other emergency services were at the crash scene. The vehicles were moved off the road and out of the line of traffic. I took my friend home with me.

I left the country about a year after this incident. Someone called me at about 3am some weeks ago. 3am calls rarely bring good news. My dad was stabbed multiple times by a mugger who robbed him of his valuables. I was frantic with worry. How was he doing? He was at the hospital but was he getting the best medical care? Were the injuries life threatening? I reached out to my childhood friend. He didn’t ask me why I called him at such an ungodly hour. He didn’t ask why my dad was not mindful or careful. He only asked me for the address of the hospital and he went there to see my dad. He kept me constantly updated.

That’s what a friend does. A friend is someone you can count on in times of adversity. They love you and support you unconditionally.

By Dawn’s Early Light 1990

The FULL exciting movie.

A great flick. Especially important during these crazy times. Watch it.

Not an option.

https://youtu.be/AFLtRIwMqxY

Secret agent stories

From time to time, approximate every three years or so, I am “visited” (or make contact with) a “person”.

These people say there are one thing, but are actually something else. For instance, a massive “billion dollar company” that is looking for a COO, or a businessman who works in China, and so forth. On the surface, it is an “interview”, or a “friendly meeting”, or something along those lines.

Its all very nice and cordial, and I absolutely respect the people that I meet with. Without exception.

But, not everyone is what they say they are. For certain, I have been approached by the “five eyes” under one excuse or the other, as well as some other entities.

My hunt for the truth was interesting as to all the “dead ends ” that it generated. That is a story in itself, I’ll tell you what. A multi-billion dollar company that has no employees, tax records, or products???

Anyways…

The overall impression that I get is that they are providing a “courtesy visit”. To Check off a box or two on a form. It doesn’t matter what organization or nation that they represent, as this seems to be the over all impression. Just “checking up on me”. As they know that I have a “past”, but it is so HYPER-BLACK that they don’t know what I did or was involved with.

Not that it matters mind you.

I am either a threat, or not.

To this, I must add that …

  • They all KNOW that I was a W(U) – SAP “operator” for MAJ, (which is a branch of the ONI.) And I wiggled out of a retirement “cage”.
  • That they also recognize that I was “traded upstairs” to a more powerful and hidden organization (of some type) to do some (under-specified) tasks. No one knows the details of.
  • That I was properly “retired”. Closed off. Shut down. No longer in contact with anyone. Life in the USA is over.
  • That I am probably inert / neutered at this point in time, though reactivation is possible if unlikely.
  • That (as far as the “five eyes” are concerned), that I am out of their geographical pervue and thus not their concern, being relatively “harmless”.

That is my impression about the check-ups from the West. As far as my new home, and my love…

  • I am sure that China (intelligence) is aware of me. Though, to the massive bureaucracy, I am just an innocent foreigner.
  • Moreover, China considers me to be exactly what I say I am. They do not consider me to be a threat, but rather as a friendly “neutral”.

All in all, I’m like one of those footnotes at the end of a book. Useful if a more in-depth study is required, but often enough ignored as there will probably not be any active contemporaneous participation or contribution in my regard.

Overall, I cannot provide any useful assistance to any agency or government. What I actually did is beyond the utility and use of anyone. I am just a fellow with an interesting story.

What I can do is remind everyone that there are powers that control what we think our reality is. And there are powers that control them. And powers above them that control even that. And finally, there are the powers that I was a part of.

From everyone’s point of view. Let sleeping dogs lie.

The Woke movement is ending long standing American institutions on every level. The latest battlefront is DISNEY…

It is nuts.

2023 07 27 16 19

Somewhat white and the seven affirmative action hires…

Chicken Ravioli Soup

IMG 2279 2
IMG 2279 2

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon olive oil
  • 2 boneless skinless chicken breast halves, cut into bite-size pieces
  • 2 (10 1/2 ounce) cans condensed chicken broth, undiluted
  • 2 (14 1/2 ounce) cans diced tomatoes with garlic and onion, undrained
  • 2 small zucchini, diced
  • 1 (25 ounce) package frozen cheese ravioli
  • 2 teaspoon dried parsley
  • Freshly-grated Parmesan cheese

Instructions

  1. In Dutch oven, sauté chicken in hot oil for 2 minutes, stirring constantly. Add chicken broth, tomatoes and zucchini; cover and bring to boil. Add frozen ravioli; simmer, uncovered, about 7 minutes or until ravioli reaches desired doneness. Stir in parsley.
  2. To serve, ladle into soup bowls; sprinkle with Parmesan cheese.

What Edward Snowden just said about UFO’s is TERRIFYING and should concern all of us

Edward Snowden now has access to some of the most closely kept secrets in the country as a former CIA employee and NSA contractor. And so, as any inquisitive mind with access to the CIA’s equivalent of Google might do, he looked for solutions to some of the most important questions asked by society. Attention Area 51 Stormers, chemtrail believers, and doubters of climate change: Edward Snowden has discovered information regarding UFOs that should worry us all.

How did China import so many chips from Vietnam when there was an export ban in place?

Vietnam?

No

China imported a huge amount of NVDIA top memory chips bypassing sanctions in 2023 and that has resulted in a congressional inquiry against NVDIA

The way they did so is simply using brand name and model

NVDIA specifically had a grade of Memory Chips made for the Chinese market that was 98–99% of the grade of those Memory Chips that were restricted

Both NVDIA and China estimated a ban almost 2 years earlier

These Chips were not on the ban list but almost 99% effective and thus NVDIA decided to export and China purchased a whopping amount of Chips

China’s import rose 27% YoY of these Chips

They take care of China’s supply upto 2024 December and keep China’s plans intact until then

main qimg 3689605d7c1d969a7524727bc2bcd3a5
main qimg 3689605d7c1d969a7524727bc2bcd3a5

The US was INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE

That’s how Sanctions are by passed

The Tech companies ensure they have a specific variant of the product that conveniently by passes sanctions and they sell that in huge numbers to China and keep their profits alive

Another thing was NVDIAs sales to Singapore soared by 111% from 2019–2023 and I can bet most of the those Chips are re exported to China

SNOW WHITE PLOT LEAKS ARE HYSTERICAL!

"With the snow white backlash getting worse for disney and bob iger as the indy 5 box office collapse created more issues for lucasfilm, star wars and kathleen kennedy given the dial of destiny box office failure was so bad that dinsey cut back on budgeting for disney movies.....with the snow white 2024 aka snow white remake by disney getting much criticism after the snow white leaked photos of the seven dwarfs....the film which stars rachel zegler and gal gadot as the evil queen just got more embarrassing through some of the snow white plot leaks."
2023 07 27 14 56
2023 07 27 14 56

Do people know that America has the greatest education in the world?

Wrong. First of all, public education in the USA has been declining for decades. Student test scores are in the toilet.

The average American is borderline illiterate.

Second, American universities are widely regarded as the best because of marketing. Schools like Harvard, MIT, Stanford, Yale, etc. are prestigious by reputation. This reputation may have been earned a long, long time ago but today most of these schools are coasting on their names.

Let’s look at the list of universities ranked by the quality of their scientific research. According to the CWTS Leiden Ranking 2023 , most of the universities that produce the most scientifically impactful research are Chinese — that’s 16 out of the top 25 universities!

2023 07 27 11 57
2023 07 27 11 57

I’m totally stunned that MIT, Caltech, and Princeton aren’t in the top 25.

If all you care about is a good-looking resumé, then, sure, choose an Ivy League US school. But if you want a good education, choose a Chinese university.

The UFO Incident That Shocked Ariel School: Telepathic Extraterrestrials

September 14th, 1994 was a quiet night in Zimbabwe. Then suddenly, boom! An explosion startled people all over the country.

Windows rattled. Doors shook.

Shocked and confused, people sheepishly stepped outside to see what happened.

Everything looked fine. They went back inside. But one woman wasn’t satisfied.

Cynthia Hind drove around the capital city of Harare, searching for the source of the sound but, nothing seemed unusual.

But back at home, Cynthia’s phone rang relentlessly. She was a UFO investigator and witness reports were coming in one after another.

The news claimed the sound was a sonic boom caused by a meteor shower. But Cynthia wasn’t so sure.

Eyewitnesses near Lake Kariba described bizarre lights in the sky earlier that week.

Lights in a row that moved erratically: fast then slow. First north to south. Then east to southwest. Meteors don’t do that.

Cynthia suspected there was much more to the story. And two days later, she’d find out that she was right.

https://youtu.be/rdr0j_Kf-uk

CNL

My boss was friends with a guy who had been a tunnel rat in the Vietnam War. The guy wasn’t much to look at…he looked like Chuck Norris’s skinny brother. My boss swore up and down this guy was a badass.

One night my boss invited me and my girlfriend to meet him and his lady and his friend and his friend’s wife to hang out at a place where there was dinner and dancing.

We’ll call this guy Chuck Norris Lite…(CNL for short).

CNL’s wife saw an old boyfriend of hers. When the old boyfriend saw she was there, he got up from his table and headed to ours to say hi. At first he was cool, but within a few minutes, he started talking crap…things like how they shouldn’t have broken up, he was better looking than CNL, she needed a real man, and other insults to CNL. Pretty sure he was drunk.

CNL listened to the insults and played it off. He didn’t need the fight, he had the girl.

Then the ex asked her to dance. She said, “No, if I want to dance, I’ll dance with my husband.” A clear clue to him to back off. He didn’t take it.

He protested and wouldn’t take no for an answer. CNL did not get angry. He quietly said, “You heard my wife say no. Take a hike.”

It was then the ex made the mother of all mistakes. He said, “F**k you, p***y. What you going to do about it?” AND SLAPPED THE BACK OF HIS HEAD.

CNL didn’t even get up from his chair. He moved quickly, taking his right hand and doing a palm strike under his left armpit straight into the ex’s stomach. The ex dropped to his knees, and then CNL’s left elbow got him in the nose. The ex slumped to the floor out cold. After a few minutes, he got up and staggered for the door.

About twenty minutes later, the cops came in and approached the table. CNL went over and talked to them, motioned to his wife; she talked to them, they nodded, shook hands and left.

The ex had left and called the cops (this was in the days of phone booths). The officer in charge knew CNL as they both took martial arts classes together. The OIC (Officer In Charge) went back out and told the ex he was at fault, and to take his whuppin’ like a man and go home. He did so.

I was mightily impressed. Any man who can kick your butt and not even get up from his chair is a badass in my book.

MIND BLOWING – American Youth Knows NOTHING (American reaction)

The USA has collapsed.

I heard a lot about “rule-based international order”, what are the rules to be specific? What happened to the countries that break these rules?

Make us simple.

Rule No*1 Every nation on earth must be subservient and submissive to the U.S. and the west.

Rule No*2 The US and its cronies are allowed to steal, loot and plunder from everyone else.

Rule No*3 The US and the west decides who can sell, who can buy, who can live, who should die, which nation will be bomb and which nation to spare. Who to sanction and for how long.

The Critical Drinker – Snow White Looks Hilariously Bad – Reaction!

Spirited Away: A Miyazaki Fan Recreated The Bathing House With An Impressive Model

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The Japanese Sorakio, a big fan of the universe of Chihiro, Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, had fun recreating the famous bath house of the cult movie Spirited Away in an impressive ultra-detailed model! An amazing work created using hundreds of pieces from other models, but also pieces of plastic or wood.

More info: Twitter (h/t: ufunk, boredpanda)

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DISNEY’s Snow Brown & The Seven Climate Activists that Glue Themselves to Artwork!

Holy Moses!!! Some pick-up shots have been seen from the upcoming Disney Snow White live action movie. It looks like the most WOKE by committee inclusive and diverse crud you have ever seen!!

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2023 07 27 15 20

How real is the possibility of a Chinese attack on Taiwan?

Low

Very Low

China has no urgency to invade Taiwan

China has no urgency to get into armed conflict with anyone

China would rather be the ‘Peacemaker’ for the world and slowly portray the US and the West as ruthless warmongers

China would like to send a message to the Taiwanese that they would benefit with a Mainland Union instead of lackeyship with the US

Plus the Chinese don’t like being baited and would certainly not plunge into a war where the US can force Taiwanese to keep dying just like they are doing to Ukraine

They will have to bleed the US first and weaken the West

Or rather give them a long rope to hang themselves


What if Taiwan declare Independence?

Even then I don’t think China will invade

It will prefer to fight through UN and BRI and trade related import embargos than invade while simultaneously activating it’s agents in Taiwan to protest and cause violence

Iran, Russia and Saudi will choke off Crude Exports

None of these nations need 7 nm chips exactly

Chinese Shipping will be stopped and LNG Containers

Mainland will offer a chance to many Taiwanese to come to the Mainland and many will come

Then China will defeat the Usurpers from Within Taiwan

This Is The Worst City We’ve Ever Seen…

Why do the Chinese believe their own government over the rest of the world?

Overkill!!!

The Western Media became too ridiculous after a point and their propaganda became an open joke to all mainlanders

Initially it’s probable that they believed the Western media reports. They probably believed in the treatment of Uyghurs and the camps and all that stuff.

I remember China closing off Xinjiang for a few years after those bad ETIM days and that was when the propaganda was seriously being believed by the locals

However the stories became more and more ridiculous and suddenly it was just too unbelievable

It’s logical to assume Uyghurs are placed in a camp and re-educated and their culture is being destroyed

However to imagine women being impregnated by other men, drinking blood — these stories became so unbelievable that the Mainlanders began to wonder if indeed the earlier stories were lies too.

And as a master stroke China opened up travel to Xinjiang even for foreigners and invited muslim dignitaries to visit the province along with youtubers

Slowly Chinese Media & Social Media celebrities posted on Xinjiang and said “There is nothing here. It’s all lies”

Once this disbelief was generated, China began to slowly believe that the entire Western media was full of lies which served extremely well for the CPC

Today most Mainlanders don’t trust Western media or twitter on any news from China

They trust Taiwanese media or Singaporean Media much more when it comes to foreign media.


So basically Overkill

In 2001, I believed the BJP when they said at 8:00 AM that Mr Karunanidhi was arrested and there was a Law and order problem

Then I walked out and all stores were open , buses were plying, things were as normal as they could be

Then I walked home and heard Arun Jaitley then a spokesperson for the BJP saying “There was a Reign of Terror in TN and nobody could put a foot on the road due to riots”

Immediately I knew it was fully a lie

Once you know a lie, you keep wondering whether the lie will be repeated

Same with Western Media

They lied so much that the Chinese no longer trust them even if they tell the truth

What is the worst case of a spoiled person you have ever seen?

When I was in college, my middle-class-roots fiance lived in a fraternity house with some relatively wealthy people.

One particular person sticks out for me as the high bar for spoiled behavior.

He had a penchant for wearing Calvin Klein Boxer Briefs:

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main qimg a67e111c0ff6420a56fbf0b851120e5a lq

They were roughly $25 each, (and this was before you could buy them at Costco.)

He sent out his laundry to be washed and folded (and dry cleaned), and never did any of it himself, but he absolutely *refused* to have anyone touch his underwear. In fact, because of this, he *refused* to wear the same pair more than once.

So, every single day, he would open a brand new, $25 pair of underwear.

And, every single day, he would throw out yesterday’s underwear.

If someone happened to touch his underwear for any reason, there would be another change.

He was ordering them by the case.

No one else has ever even come close to this on my spoiled-o-meter.


How do I know this?

His fraternity brothers, always happy to scrounge through the garbage, noticed that perfectly good underwear was going to waste. So they all stocked up. And then when they all (and I mean all) had more than enough underwear to go around, and there was still an endless supply, they started an underground underwear selling ring.

Part of me chuckles everytime I see this:

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2023 07 26 11 11

because I absolutely believe that it is a reference to what actually went on in this specific Ivy League frat house.

Cabbage Roll Soup

Cabbage Roll Soup is guaranteed to be a fall and winter favorite. This delicious soup has all the flavor of traditional baked cabbage rolls.

cabbage roll soup
cabbage roll soup

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef or ground turkey
  • 2 teaspoons extra-virgin olive oil
  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 4 teaspoons minced garlic
  • 1/2 head cabbage, chopped
  • 32 ounces beef broth
  • 29 ounces tomato sauce
  • 2 (15 ounce) cans diced tomatoes with juice
  • 2 tablespoons brown sugar
  • 1 cup uncooked rice
  • 1 bay leaf
  • Kosher or sea salt, to taste
  • Pepper, to taste

Instructions

  1. Heat the olive oil in a large pot over medium-high heat. Add the ground beef and season with salt and pepper to taste.
  2. Cook, breaking up the meat, until beef is browned.
  3. Add the onion and garlic cook for 2-3 minutes.
  4. Add the remaining ingredients, except rice, to the pot. Bring to a boil.
  5. Reduce heat to simmer; cover pot and cook for 1 hour.
  6. Add rice and cook for an additional 20 to 25 minutes.
  7. Remove bay leaf and discard.

Notes

If you want to use brown rice instead of white rice, cook for 45 minutes instead of 25 minutes.

The Looming War Against China

Economic Logic has been Replaced by National Security Overrides

Michael Hudson • July 22, 2023

The July NATO summit in Vilnius had the feeling of a funeral, as if they had just lost a family member – Ukraine. To clear away NATO’s failure to drive Russia out of Ukraine and move NATO right up to the Russian border, its members tried to revive their spirits by mobilizing support for the next great fight – against China, which is now designated as their ultimate strategic enemy. To prepare for this showdown, NATO announced a commitment to extend their military presence all the way to the Pacific.

The plan is to carve away China’s military allies and trading partners, above all Russia, starting with the fight in Ukraine. President Biden has said that this war will be global in scope and will take many decades as it expands to ultimately isolate and break up China.

The U.S.-imposed sanctions against trade with Russia are a dress rehearsal for imposing similar sanctions against China. But only the NATO allies have joined the fight. And instead of wrecking Russia’s economy and “turning the ruble to rubble” as President Biden predicted, NATO’s sanctions have made it more self-reliant, increasing its balance of payments and international monetary reserves, and hence the ruble’s exchange rate.

To cap matters, despite the failure of trade and financial sanctions to injure Russia – and indeed, despite NATO’s failures in Afghanistan and Libya, NATO countries committed themselves to trying the same tactics against China. The world economy is to be split between US/NATO/Five Eyes on the one hand, and the rest of the world – the Global Majority – on the other. EU Commissioner Joseph Borrell calls this as a split between the US/European Garden (the Golden Billion) and the Jungle threatening to engulf it, like an invasion of its well-manicured lawns by an invasive species.

From an economic vantage point, NATO’s behavior since its military buildup to attack Ukraine’s Russian-speaking eastern states in February 2022 has been a drastic failure. The U.S. plan was to bleed Russia and leave it so economically destitute that its population would revolt, throw Vladimir Putin out of office and restore a pro-Western neoliberal leader who would pry Russia away from its alliance with China – and then proceed with America’s grand plan to mobilize Europe to impose sanctions on China.

What makes it so difficult in trying to evaluate where NATO, Europe and the United States are going is that the traditional assumption that nations and classes will act in their economic self-interest is not of help. The traditional logic of geopolitical analysis is to assume that business and financial interests steer almost every nation’s politics. The ancillary assumption is that governing officials have a fairly realistic understanding of the economic and political dynamics at work. Forecasting the future is thus usually an exercise in spelling out these dynamics.

The US/NATO West has led this global fracture, yet it will be the big loser. NATO members already have seen Ukraine deplete their inventory of guns and bullets, artillery and ammunition, tanks, helicopters weapons and other arms accumulated over five decades. But Europe’s loss has become America’s sales opportunity, creating a vast new market for America’s military-industrial complex to re-supply Europe. To gain support, the United States has sponsored a new way of thinking about international trade and investment. The focus has shifted to “national security,” meaning to secure a U.S.-centered unipolar order.

The world is dividing into two blocs: a post-industrial US/NATO vs the Global Majority

U.S. diplomats became increasingly worried as Germany and other European countries came to rely on imported Russian gas, oil and fertilizer as the basis for its steel, glass-making and other industries. They became even more worried as China had become the “workshop of the world” while the U.S. economy de-industrialized. The fear was that growth by China and its neighboring Eurasian countries benefiting from the Belt and Road expansion threatened to make that part of the world the main growth area, and hence a magnet for European investment. The logical prospect was that politics would follow economic interest at the expense of America’s ability to maintain a unipolar world economy with the dollar at its financial center and trade subject to U.S. protectionist unilateralism.

By joining America’s crusade to destroy the Russian economy and promote regime change, Germany’s and other European countries’ refusal to trade with Russia has destroyed the basic energy foundation of their industry. Destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline has plunged the German and other European economies into depression involving widespread bankruptcies and unemployment. In place of Russian gas, the NATO countries must now pay up to six times as high a price for U.S. liquified natural gas (LNG), and must build new port facilities to physically import this gas.

The European leaders sponsored and financed by U.S. election meddling over the past seventy years have done what Boris Yeltsin did in Russia in the 1990s: They have agreed to sacrifice Europe’s industrial economies and end what had been its profitable trade and investment integration with Russia and China.

The next step is for Europe and the United States to stop trading and investing with China, despite the fact that these NATO countries have benefited from the flowering of this trade, relying on it for a wide range of consumer goods and industrial inputs. That line of prosperous trade is now to be ended. NATO’s leaders have announced that importing Russian gas and other raw materials (including helium and many metals) runs the “risk” of becoming dependent – as if Russia or China might find it in their economic or political interest to abort this trade simply to hurt Europe and to do to it what the United States has been doing to force it into submission.

But submission to what? The answer is, submission to the logic of mutual gains along lines leaving the U.S. economy behind!

By trying to prevent other countries from following this logic, U.S. and European NATO diplomacy has brought about exactly what U.S. supremacists most feared. Instead of crippling the Russian economy to create a political crisis and perhaps breakup of Russia itself in order to isolate it from China, the US/NATO sanctions have led Russia to re-orient its trade away from NATO countries to integrate its economy and diplomacy more closely with China and other BRICS members.

Ironically, the US/NATO policy is forcing Russia, China and their BRICS allies to go their own way, starting with a united Eurasia. This new core of China, Russia and Eurasia with the Global South are creating a mutually beneficial multipolar trade and investment sphere.

By contrast, European industry has been devastated. Its economies have become thoroughly and abjectly dependent on the United States – at a much higher cost to itself than was the case with its former trade partners. European exporters have lost the Russian market, and are now following U.S. demands that they abandon and indeed reject the Chinese market. Also to be rejected in due course are markets in the BRICS membership, which is expanding to include Near Eastern, African and Latin American countries.

Instead of isolating Russia and China and making them dependent on U.S. economic control, U.S. unipolar diplomacy has isolated itself and its NATO satellites from the rest of the world – the Global Majority that is growing while NATO economies are rushing ahead along their Road to Deindustrialization. The remarkable thing is that while NATO warns of the “risk” of trade with Russia and China, it does not see its loss of industrial viability and economic sovereignty to the United States as a risk.

This is not what the “economic interpretation of history” would have forecast. Governments are expected to support their economy’s leading business interests. So we are brought back to the question of whether economic factors will determine the shape of world trade, investment and diplomacy. Is it really possible to create a set of post-economic NATO economies whose members will come to look much like the rapidly depopulating and de-industrializing Baltic states and post-Soviet Ukraine?

This would be a strange kind of “national security” indeed. In economic terms it seems that the U.S. and European strategy of self-isolation from the rest of the world is so massive and far-reaching an error that its effects are the equivalent of a world war.

Today’s fighting against Russia on the Ukrainian front can be thought of as the opening campaign in World War III. In many ways it is an outgrowth of World War II and its aftermath that saw the United States establish international economic and political organizations to operate in its own national self-interest. The International Monetary Fund imposes U.S. financial control and helps dollarize the world economy. The World Bank lends dollars to governments to build export infrastructure to subsidize US/NATO investors in control of oil, mining and natural resources, and to promote trade dependency on U.S. farm exports while promoting plantation agriculture, instead of domestic food-grain production. The United States insists on having veto power in all international organizations that it joins, including the United Nations and its agencies.

The creation of NATO is often misunderstood. Ostensibly, it depicted itself as a military alliance, originally to defend against the thought that the Soviet Union might have some reason to conquer Western Europe. But NATO’s most important role was to use “national security” as the excuse to override European domestic and foreign policy and subordinate it to U.S. control. Dependency on NATO was written into the European Union’s constitution. Its objective was to make sure that European party leaders followed U.S. direction and opposed left-wing or anti-American politics, pro-labor policies and governments strong enough to prevent control by a U.S.-client financial oligarchy.

NATO’s economic program has been one of adherence to neoliberal financialization, privatization, government deregulation and imposing austerity on labor. EU regulations prevent governments from running a budget deficit of more than 3% of GDP. That blocks Keynesian-type policies to spur recovery. Today, higher military arms costs and government subsidy of energy prices is forcing European governments to cut back social spending. Bank policy, trade policy and domestic lawmaking are following the same U.S. neoliberal model that has deindustrialized the American economy and loaded it down with debt to the financial sector in whose hands most wealth and income is now concentrated.

Abandoning economic self-interest for “national security” dependence on the US

The post-Vilnius world treats trade and international relations not as economic, but as “national security.” Any form of trade is the “risk” of being cut off and destabilized. The aim is not to make trade and investment gains, but to become self-reliant and independent. For the West, this means isolating China, Russia and the BRICS in order to depend fully on the United States. So for the United States, its own security means making other countries dependent on itself, so that U.S. diplomats won’t lose control of their military and political diplomacy.

Treating trade and investment with other countries than the United States as involving “risk,” ipso facto, is a projection of how U.S. diplomacy has imposed sanctions on countries that resist U.S. domination, privatization and subordination of their economies to U.S. takeover. The fear that trade with Russia and China will lead to political dependency is a fantasy. The aim of the emerging Eurasian, BRICS and Global South alliance is to benefit from foreign trade with each other for mutual gain, with governments strong enough to treat money and banking as public utilities, along with the basic monopolies needed to provide normal human rights, including health care and education, and keeping monopolies such as transportation and communication in the public domain to keep the costs of living and doing business low instead of charging monopoly prices.

Anti-China hate has come especially from Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s Foreign Minister. NATO is warned to “de-risk” trade with China. The “risks” are that (1) China can cut off key exports, just as the US cut off European access to Russian oil exports; and (2) exports could potentially be used to support China’s military power. Almost any economic export COULD be military, even food to feed a Chinese army.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s trip to China likewise explained that all trade has a military potential and thus has a national-security element. All trade has a military potential, even selling food to China could be used to feed soldiers.

The US/NATO demand is that Germany and other European countries should impose an Iron Curtain against trade with China, Russia and their allies in order to “de-risk” trade. Yet only the US has imposed trade sanctions on other countries, not China and other Global South countries. The real risk is not that China will impose trade sanctions to disrupt European economies, but that the United States will impose sanctions on countries breaking the US-sponsored trade boycott.

This “trade is risk” view treats foreign trade not in economic terms but in “National Security” terms. In practice, “national security” means joining the U.S. attempt to maintain its unipolar control of the entire world’s economy. No risk is acknowledged for re-orienting European gas and energy trade to U.S. companies. The risk is said to be trade with countries that U.S. diplomats deem “autocracies,” meaning nations with active government infrastructure investment and regulation instead of U.S.-style neoliberalism.

The world is dividing into two blocs – with quite different economic philosophies

Only the United States has imposed trade sanctions on other countries. And only the United States has rejected international free trade rules as national security threats to US economic and military control. At first glance the resulting global fracture between US/NATO on the one hand and the expanding BRICS alliance of Russia, China, Iran and the Global South might seem to be a conflict between capitalism and socialism (that is, state socialism in a mixed economy with public regulation in labor’s interests).

But that contrast between capitalism and socialism is not helpful upon closer examination. The problem lies in what the word “capitalism” has come to mean in today’s world. Back in the 19th and early 20th century, industrial capitalism was expected to evolve toward socialism. The U.S. and other industrial economies welcomed and indeed pressed for their governments to subsidize a widening range of basic services at public expense instead of obliging employers to bear the costs of hiring labor that had to pay for basic needs such as health care and education. Monopoly pricing was avoided by keeping natural monopolies such as railroads and other transportation, telephone systems and other communications, parks and other services as public utilities. Having governments instead of business and its employees pay for these services increased the global competitiveness of national industry in the resulting mixed economies.

China has followed this basic approach of industrial capitalism, with socialist politics to uplift its labor force, not merely the wealth of industrial capitalists – much less bankers and absentee landlords and monopolists. Most important, it has industrialized banking, creating credit to finance tangible investment in means of production, not the kind of predatory and unproductive credit characterized by today’s finance capitalism.

But the mixed-economy policy of industrial capitalism is not the way in which capitalism evolved in the West since World War I. Rejecting classical political economy and its drive to free markets from the vested rent-extracting classes inherited from feudalism – a hereditary landlord class, a financial banking class and monopolists – the rentier sector has fought back to reassert its privatization of land rent, interest and monopoly gains. It sought to reverse progressive taxation, and indeed to give tax favoritism to financial wealth, landlords and monopolists. The Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector has become the dominant interest and economic planner under today’s finance capitalism. That is why economies are often called neofeudal (or euphemized as neoliberal).

Throughout history the dynamics of financialization have polarized wealth and income between creditors and debtors, leading to oligarchies. As interest-bearing debt grows exponentially, more and more income of labor and business must be paid as debt service. That financial dynamic shrinks the domestic market for goods and services, and the economy suffers from deepening debt-ridden austerity.

The result is de-industrialization as economies polarize between creditors and debtors. That has occurred most notoriously in Britain in the wake of Margaret Thatcher and the New [Anti-]Labour Party of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s “light touch” deregulatory approach to financial manipulation and outright fraud.

The United States has suffered an equally devastating shift of wealth and income to the Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sectors in the wake of Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy, anti-government deregulation, Bill Clinton’s “Third Way” takeover by Wall Street. The “Third Way” was neither industrial capitalism nor socialism, but finance capitalism making its gains both by stripping and indebting industry and labor of income. The new Democratic Party ideology of deregulated finance was capped by the massive bank-fraud collapse of 2008 and Barack Obama’s protection of junk-mortgage lenders and wholesale foreclosures on their financial victims. Economic planning and policy was shifted from governments to Wall Street and other financial centers – which had taken control of in government, the central bank and regulatory agencies.

U.S. and British diplomats are seeking to promote this predatory pro-financial and inherently anti-industrial economic philosophy to the rest of the world. But this ideological evangelism is threatened by the obvious contrast between the US-British failed and de-industrialized economies compared to China’s remarkable economic growth under industrial socialism.

This contrast between China’s economic success and the NATO West’s “garden” of debt-ridden austerity is the essence of today’s campaign by the West against the “Jungle” countries seeking political independence from U.S. diplomacy so as to uplift their living standards. This ideological and inherently political global war is today’s counterpart to the religious wars that tore European countries apart for many centuries.

We are witnessing what seems to be an inexorable Decline of the West. U.S. diplomats have been able to tighten their economic, political and military control leadership over their European NATO allies. Their easy success in this aim has led them to imagine that somehow they can conquer the rest of the world despite de-industrializing and loading their economies so deeply in debt that there is no foreseeable way in which they can pay their official debt to foreign countries or indeed have much to offer.

The traditional imperialism of military conquest and financial conquest is ended

There has been a sequence of tactics for a lead-nation to carve out an empire. The oldest way is by military conquest. But you can’t occupy and take over a country without an army, and the US has no army large enough. The Vietnam War ended the draft. So it must rely on foreign armies like Al Qaeda, ISIS, and most recently Ukraine and Poland, just as it relies on foreign industrial manufactures. Its armaments are depleted and it cannot mobilize a domestic army to occupy any country. The US has only one weapon: Missiles and bombs can destroy, but cannot occupy but not occupy and take over a country.

The second way to create imperial power was by economic power to make other countries dependent on U.S. exports. After World War II the rest of the world was devastated and was bullied into accepting U.S. diplomacy maneuvering to give its economy a monopoly on basic needs. Agriculture became a major weapon to create foreign dependency. The World Bank would not support foreign countries growing their own food, but pressed for plantation export crops, and fought land reform. And for oil and energy trade, U.S. companies and their NATO allies in Britain and Holland (British Petroleum and Shell) controlled the world’s oil trade. Control of world oil trade has been a central aim of US trade diplomacy.

This strategy worked for US assertion of control over Germany and other NATO countries, by blowing up the Nord Stream pipeline and severing Western Europe from access to Russian gas, oil, fertilizer and also crops. Europe has now entered an industrial depression and economic austerity as its steel industry and other leading sectors are invited to emigrate to the United States, along with European skilled labor.

Today, electronic technology and computer chips have been a focal point of establishing global Economic Dependency on U.S. technology. The United States aims to monopolize “intellectual property” and extract economic rent from charging high prices) for high-technology computer chips, communications, and arms production.

But the United States has deindustrialized and let itself become dependent on Asian and other countries for its products, instead of making them dependent on the US. This trade dependency is what makes U.S. diplomats feel “insecure,” worrying that other countries might seek to use the same coercive trade and financial diplomacy that the United States has been wielding since 1944-45.

The United States is left with one remaining tactic to control other countries: trade sanctions, imposed by it and its NATO satellites in an attempt to disrupt economies that do not accept U.S. unipolar economic, political and military dominance. It has persuaded the Netherlands to block sophisticated chip-engraving machinery to China, and other countries to block anything that might contribute to China’s economic development. A new American industrial protectionism is being framed in terms of national security grounds.

If China’s trade policy were to mirror that of U.S. diplomacy, it would stop supplying NATO countries with mineral and metal exports needed to produce the computer chips and allied inputs that America’s economy needs to wield its global diplomacy.

The US is so heavily debt-laden, its housing prices are so high and its medical care is so extremely high (18% of GDP) cannot compete. It cannot re-industrialize without taking radical steps to write down debts, to de-privatize health care and education, to break up monopolies and restore progressive taxation. The vested Financial, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE sector) interests are too powerful to permit these reforms.

That makes the U.S. economy a failed economy, and America a Failed State.

In the wake of World War II the United States accumulated 75% of the world’s monetary gold by 1950. That enabled it to impose dollarization on the world. But today, nobody knows whether the U.S. Treasury and New York Federal Reserve have any gold that has not been pledged to private buyers and speculators? The worry is that it has sold European central-bank gold reserves. Germany has asked for its gold reserves to be flown back from New York, but the United States said that it was unavailable, and Germany was too timid to make its worries and complaints public.

America’s financial quandary is even worse when one tries to imagine how it can ever pay its foreign debt for countries seeking to draw down their dollars. The United States can only print its own currency. It is not willing to sell off its domestic assets, as it demands that other debtor countries do?

What can other countries accept in place of gold? One form of assets that may be taken as collateral are U.S. investments in Europe and other countries. But if foreign governments seek to do this, U.S. officials may retaliate by seizing their investments in the United States. A mutual grabbing would occur.

The United States is trying to monopolize electronic technology. The problem is that this requires raw-materials inputs whose production presently is dominated by China, above all rare-earth metals (which are abundant but environmentally destructive to refine), gallium, nickel (China dominates the refining), and Russian helium and other gasses used for engraving computer chips. China recently announced that on August 1 it will start restricting these key exports. It indeed has the ability to cut off supplies of vital materials and technology to the West, to protect itself from the West’s “national-security” sanctions against China. That is the self-fulfilling prophecy that U.S. warnings of a trade fight has created.

If U.S. diplomacy strongarms its NATO-garden allies to boycott China’s Huawei technology, Europe will be left with a less efficient, more expensive alternative – whose consequences help separate it from China, the BRICS and what has become the World Majority in a self-reliant alignment much broader than was created by Sukarno in 1954.

Metal Vocalist First Time Reaction – BABYMETAL – メギツネ – MEGITSUNE (OFFICIAL)

We start off HARD…

BREAKING NEWS: CUBA ANNOUNCES IT IS READY TO ACCEPT RUSSIAN MISSILES (AGAIN) AS RUSSIAN NAVY ARRIVES 90 MILES FROM U.S. COAST

World Hal Turner 25 July 2023

Russian Navy Returns Cuba large
Russian Navy Returns Cuba large
BREAKING NEWS: CUBA ANNOUNCES IT IS READY TO ACCEPT RUSSIAN MISSILES (AGAIN) AS RUSSIAN NAVY ARRIVES 90 MILES FROM U.S. COAST

The “Vice-Admiral Kulakov,” an Udalay-class Destroyer of the Russian Navy has arrived in Cuba for an official visit for the first time in a long time, and there is dangerous news for the United States . . .

Shortly before the Russian navy warship arrived, talks were held between the leaders of Cuba and Russia and their defense ministries. The result is statements to strengthen not only economic cooperation, but also military-technical cooperation.

According to American military experts, this could mean the return of Russia to Cuba with all the resulting consequences: the deployment of Russian troops and long-range missiles.

This will be a decisive Russian response to the threats posed by the expansion of NATO’s presence in Northern Europe and Japan.

Earlier, Cuban leader Miguel Díaz-Canel strongly condemned the entry into NATO of new members bordering Russia. “In light of hostile actions by the (NATO) alliance, Cuba is ready to place Russian missiles on its territory, again.”

COVERT INTEL INDICATES CARGO SHIPS IN RUSSIA, “WITH A PRE-FILED TRANSIT ROUTE TO CUBA, “SEEM TO BE” IN PROCESS OF BEING LOADED WITH COMPONENTS FROM RUSSIAN MISSILE MANUFACTURING FACTORIES” 

Readers should note that back in 1962, the then-Soviet Union placed Medium Range and Intermediate Range nuclear missiles in Cuba with a five minute flight time to Washington, DC.  This resulted in the “Cuban Missile Crisis” wherein then U.S. President John F. Kennedy, imposed a naval blockade of Cuba and began massing U.S. troops in Florida for an invasion of Cuba to destroy those missiles.

For the 13 days when the crisis erupted, the world stood on the precipice of actual nuclear war.  The US had blockaded Cuba and was massing troops.  The Soviets faced a choice with the missiles: USE THEM or LOSE THEM.

This brief compilation of scenes from the Hollywood Movie “13 Days” briefly lays out how things went back then:

Of course, the movie is a dramatization. Compressing Thirteen Days into 145 minutes necessitates distortion of many specific historical facts. But the central themes of the movie and the principal “takeaways” are essentially faithful to what happened when JFK and Khrushchev stood “eyeball to eyeball” in 1962.

Back then, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to dismantle and remove those missiles, and the US agreed to remove its “Jupiter” missiles from deployment in Turkey, where they were aimed at the Soviet Union.

Today, the U.S. wants to bring Ukraine into NATO . . . to place US missiles on Ukraine soil . . . with a five minute flight time to Moscow.   Same situation as the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in reverse!

Russia told Ukraine “no.”  Ukraine ignored Russia.  The Russian Army went in and is now smashing Ukraine.

The US and NATO are supplying Ukraine with weapons to kill Russians, so the Russians are now sending naval vessels to Cuba and Cuba says it is willing to accept Russian missiles.

Same type of crisis as in 1962, only this time, it was the US and NATO that started it by trying to bring Ukraine into NATO, so as to put US missiles in Ukraine.

This time, the prospect for actual nuclear war is very much greater because the fighting has already begun in Ukraine.

What The F*ck Is Going On Here?

Very strange.

Is China waiting for the right time to invade Taiwan?

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Yes

Chinese believe in Favorable Winds

Chinese also believe in ‘Being Chinese’

Taiwanese ARE CHINESE

Eventually there will be reunification


Today the Chinese don’t want an Invasion barring very very rare circumstances

Neither MAINLANDERS nor Taiwanese want a straits war

Right now they are just slowly coming out of the three year lockdown and waking up from a slumbering economy to a global scenario where half the world is heading to recession

Plus their property values are upto 35% lower today and that’s pretty upsetting

This is hardly time to discuss a war or invasion


The US is dying

In maybe 2 decades it will be a retired country , strong and powerful yet no longer the hegemon

China is still very much surging and two decades later will be immensely powerful and control over 50% of the Global Value Chain

Point is CHINA CAN AFFORD TO BE PATIENT

USA CANNOT


Right now the US is doing all it can to provoke China into some action against Taiwan

Yet China has the time and so doesn’t react too much

US is losing the time fast. It’s power and influence are reducing faster than people think.

China will only invade if Taiwan declare Independence but that will be done only if US provoke Taiwan into doing so through tame politicians like Tsai or her successor

Snow White Looks Hilariously Bad

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2023 07 27 14 59

“Don’t even THINK about it!” China issues warning to CIA over spies | Redacted with Clayton Morris

China is warning that it is not going to sit still while the U.S. rebuilds its spy network inside of its borders. Between 2010 and 2012, China killed or imprisoned between 18 and 20 CIA sources. Recently, CIA Director William Burns said that the agency was rebuilding that network and China says that they will not just let that happen.

2023 07 26 10 18
2023 07 26 10 18

Have you ever had a kid behind you on an airplane kicking the seat the entire flight?

Not me, but a passenger across the aisle from me. The nasty little piece of business, about 9 or 10 years old, seated behind him, kicked his seat a number of times. The man turned around and very politely asked to the kid to stop kicking his seat. The kid’s Karen of a mother told the man not to tell her kid what to do, in an imperious & entitled tone. The passenger then ask the mother to take her kid in hand and stop him kicking his seat. The mother essentially said that the kid could do what he liked. The passenger whose seat was being kicked explained to the mother that he was of a nervous disposition, and every time the kid kicked the back of his seat, it startled him. Karen didn’t really care. The offended passenger sat quietly & asked the FA for a cup of coffee. The coffee came. The man was holding it when the little brat kicked his seat again. The man jumped in his seat and dumped his coffee backwards all over the mother – accidentally of course 🤪. The entitled Karen called the FA who simply said that the offended passenger had explained that he was a nervous flyer, and when the back of his seat was kicked, he started, and it was an unfortunate happening, but the mother could’ve anticipated it if she did not take her little brat in hand. The kicking stopped, amidst a few muffled chuckles from the passengers in the immediate area

Life In The 1970s For Kids!

The 70s was a time when kids spent the majority of their time outside playing. They made friends with other neighborhood kids and they did all sorts of things together. This was a time when most kids didn’t have a video game system until the very end of the decade. Home computer systems for kids were almost unheard of. In this video we will discuss life in the 1970s for kids prior to those becoming much larger in the 1980s.

https://youtu.be/sLftRzewGk8

Have you ever refused an inheritance? Why?

Yes. My brother died last September without signing his will (they had it filled out but he didn’t sign it).

I have helped his widow out with cleaning the house.

Because he was intestate, I’m technically entitled to 25% of his inheritance under my state law as our parents are dead, but he was married (75/25 split by law).

He literally told me he wanted everything to go to his wife, who I would consider my sister now.

I’m not screwing a 60 year old lady out of her house.

Yeah, as a working class guy, I could REALLY use 100k+ dollars if I fought it, but I will absolutely NOT destroy his dream of his wife having a nice little home.

Them home cooked meals, talk and sharing memories a couple times every few months are worth more to me than money.

Maybe I’m an idiot, but I love him and her too much to go by “the law”.

Signing that form for her lawyer was about the easiest moral choice I’ve ever had to take.

12 Things People Couldn’t Live Without in the 1960s

2023 07 26 11 35
2023 07 26 11 35

What will be endgame of U.S.-China Chip War?

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A week ago, the New York Times published a rare long article entitled “‘An Act of War’: Inside America’s Silicon Blockade Against China”, which comprehensively analyzed the U.S. chip war against China. In the author’s view, the strategic importance of this article is no less than that of “The Long Telegram” which elaborated on the exclusion policy during the white terror period of McCarthy’s era, and it is recommended that anyone who cares about the direction of the Sino-US confrontation should read it in detail. The importance of this article is unprecedented in the 172 years of the New York Times’ existence.

According to an article signed by Faraway Qingmu from Hubei province three days ago, the New York Times has rarely exposed many political insiders in the U.S., which is very informative and has historical reference value. In the author’s opinion, this is the official kick-off of the 21st century war between China and the U.S., and this is just a warm-up preparation. The unveiling of the war began on October 7 last year, when Biden announced the expansion of sanctions against Chinese chips. Alan, Director of the Vadhwani Center for Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Technology at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C., likened it to a war, which has been going on for more than nine months now. The author is still delving into it, trying to digest the vast amount of information related to it. This is a major event of this century, and the author intends to analyze it in detail in the next few articles.

The New York Times describes the chip war as an act of war by the U.S. against China. It is defined as an attempt by the U.S. to influence China’s artificial intelligence industry, and sanctions against China’s semiconductor industry are an important means of achieving this goal. The purpose of Biden’s new policy of October 7 last year is that the U.S. will not only not allow China to make any progress in the relevant technology, but will also actively reverse and obstruct China’s current technological level of progress, in essence, in order to eradicate China’s entire advanced technology ecosystem, to “cut the grass and remove the roots”.

The New York Times quoted Mathney, the former Deputy Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, as saying that China is trying to catch up in chip technology, and to some extent that’s trying to replicate an entire human technological civilization in the short term. Trump initially sanctioned Huawei as the goal, and then proposed to use the chip as a weapon, but only against a few companies in China. After Biden’s rise to power, his goal has changed to stifle China’s high-tech development on all fronts. While Trump targeted individual companies, Biden is targeting the entire industry. The U.S. is now expanding its sanctions against China in almost every way, to the point of no return.

Why is this happening? The significance of the U.S. blockade of China’s chip development lies in its strategy of geopolitical and financial-military hegemony, aimed at eliminating competitors, subjugating them to the U.S. military and the U.S. dollar, accepting U.S. command, engaging in the U.S.-designated international division of labor, and obeying the U.S.-defined sense of value. Therefore, the U.S. believes that China should not make any progress in some key technological areas (artificial intelligence driven by the chip industry) that happen to be the drivers of future global economic growth and development.

Now, in the face of the menacing and hostile policy of the U.S., will China be able to cope with it successfully in the next three to five years? Will it be able to turn the corner and overtake the U.S.? No one can predict. The only thing we know for sure now is that the U.S. will not change its extreme tactics of stifling China’s chip industry, and whether or not it will ultimately get what it wants will depend on the future development of the international situation. The world today is not the same as it was after World War II, and it is impossible for the U.S. to unilaterally call the shots.

For China, the battle for technological autonomy is an unprecedented challenge. Can China succeed? Can it do the unthinkable that the U.S. says is impossible? For now, it’s hard to say.

The U.S. still holds a technological advantage in chips, but why is the U.S. in such a hurry to completely shut down the Chinese chip industry? It is because the U.S. interest class believes that chips are the core of future economic development. The research and development of modern technology depend more and more on supercomputers, and the core of supercomputers is the chip.

While Trump’s initial goal was to use chips as a weapon to gain profit, Biden’s goal has now changed to stifle China’s high technology on all fronts. Through export controls, the U.S. is attempting to cripple China’s ability to produce and purchase high-end chips. Although the controls are implemented in a low-profile manner under the guise of so-called updated export rules, they are essentially designed to eradicate China’s entire advanced technology ecosystem. If the U.S. approach succeeds, it could affect China’s technological progress for an entire generation; but if it fails, it could have the opposite result of China catching up. Whether it succeeds or fails, it will affect Sino-U.S. competition and the global order in the coming decades.

The unprecedented extralegal control (the use of domestic law to override international law) practiced by the U.S. in the area of chips is unprecedented and has infiltrated from the political sphere to the economic sphere, violating the basic principle of free competition in capitalism. According to a report in the New York Times, the former Assistant Secretary of Commerce of the U.S., Mr. Wolfe, who was in charge of export administration, opined that this kind of control meant that even if there was only one kind of American equipment in the foundry in China, and even if there were hundreds of other kinds of non-American equipment, the wafer production of the entire production line would be related to the U.S.. This rule makes all the world’s semiconductors subject to U.S. law, because all the world’s chip foundries (not only for China) are not immune, must be at least to a certain extent, the use of some aspect of U.S. equipment. This is a so-called champertous strategy, which is exactly the same as the U.S. habit of “I call the shots, I set the rules” and considers itself to represent the whole world, which is the same as and no different from the U.S. practice. The U.S. has taken the position of a global hegemon to set the international order for chips. Even if a chip product is manufactured and shipped outside the U.S. and has never entered the U.S., and its final product does not contain any U.S.-origin components or related technology, it can still be considered a U.S. product. Even if only 1% of the U.S. goods appear in China’s production line, China must comply with U.S. law, even if the remaining 99% is developed in China. In short, it’s all-inclusive.

The New York Times is of the view that the U.S. has taken a great risk in deciding to do so and may have to pay a heavy price. It is because this kind of tactic is so tough that it is tantamount to a declaration of war, which is irreversible. If there is any country that can overcome such a tough challenge from the U.S., it is China. The introduction of the U.S. chip export control law on October 7 of last year, although in the foreseeable future will cause a major blow to China’s advanced chip manufacturing capacity, but in the end may be able to stimulate China’s long-term growth, catching up with the curve.

The U.S. chose this irreversible option, obviously after a thorough risk assessment, as a well-considered decision. In the past, the U.S. had a choice between national resilience (because of its belief in the superiority of the system) and commercial development (because of its belief in free competition), but now this choice no longer exists. The subtext is that the U.S. has lost faith in its own political system and traditional market freedom. If a significant portion of the $400 billion that China spends annually on chip imports were spent domestically in China (the economic term is import substitution), its domestic chip companies would be given the opportunity, the motivation, the means, and the ability to catch up.

In the author’s opinion, this is exactly the case with Huawei. When the US uses chips as a weapon to attack Huawei, Huawei’s cell phone market share can plummet at once, but Huawei is mainly a communication equipment supplier, and it is in the process of turning around, the US can’t beat it to death. Huawei’s case proves that even the most severe sanctions can’t directly put Huawei to death. The New York Times believes that the U.S. industry is very mindful and vigilant in this regard, which shows that U.S. public opinion is skeptical of Biden’s extreme measures, rather than blindly supporting them unilaterally.

China has to catch up in terms of high technology. How should China respond? It seems to be the same as before: work hard, and be self-reliant. China has been at the mercy of the Western powers since 1840, and this has never changed. Back then, the country was weak and in danger of being partitioned. Now that the country is rich and strong, it is still being coveted. The characteristic of the Chinese nation is that once it awakens, it will become stronger and stronger, and it will definitely respond to challenges. 183 years ago, China did not have a modern education system, modern mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology, scientific experiments, or numerical management, and today, 183 years later, Chinese-style modernization is on track. To overcome the fact that nanotechnology and chip technology are still at a relatively backward stage, it is believed that with time, we will be able to accomplish all our tasks, and we should be optimistic but still cautious. What is the prospect in the author’s view? It is estimated that in three to five years’ time, we will see whether we have won or lost.

CIA Classified Book about the Pole Shift, Mass Extinctions and The True Adam & Eve Story

CIA Classified Book about the Pole Shift, Mass Extinctions and The True Adam & Eve Story In 1966 a well-known engineer released a book with information that could impact everyone on earth. But before anyone could read it, it was classified by the CIA. We only learned of its existence a few years ago because of a Freedom of Information request. The CIA only released 57 pages of the original 284-page manuscript. And those pages have been, in the CIA’s own words, “sanitized”. Why does the CIA think this book is so dangerous that they had to hide it from the public for 60 years; and continue to hide most of it? It’s because the man who wrote it describes the end of the world.

What is the most ridiculous “crime” someone has been reported to the authorities for?

This harmless-looking fellow, Guido Menzio, was flying to Syracuse from Philadelphia.

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Once settled into his seat, the busy 40-year-old took out his work papers and got to working.

His seatmate, a blonde-haired white woman in her thirties, later claimed she had tried to strike up a conversation with him but he was evasive.

She took a look at what he was writing, and fear struck.

He was working on some cryptic plans! Strange letters and symbols she couldn’t understand.

She bravely approached a flight attendant, claiming she felt too ill to fly.

She slipped her a note, warning her about a suspicious man working on something in a foreign language.

The woman was then discreetly escorted off the plane, where her bullshit suspicions were entertained for many minutes while the plane waited on the tarmac.

Then Menzio was also taken off-board and questioned.

And so what should have been a quick 40-minute flight ended up being delayed for two hours.

But what was he working on?

Maths. Differential equations.

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And he wasn’t “Muslim” or “Arabic”. He was Italian. An Italian Ivy League professor.

After they established he was not a threat, they let him reboard. The woman refused to reboard, and opted to take the next flight. Hopefully her next seatmate won’t do something drastic like use the calculator app around her.

I understand math can be scary for some people, like that brave lady. Who does this guy think he is, doing math where anyone could see him?

Summers In The 1980s!

The 1980s was full of fun during the summertime. Some of the things that kids used to do are no longer done. In this video we will remember what summers in the 1980s were like.

https://youtu.be/785fnWWdtLs

Why aren’t there laws to prohibit old people from squandering their children’s inheritance?

The saddest thing I’ve ever done was handle my Mum’s estate after she died. What made is so sad was that there was so much money there, not counting her house. She had far more than she could have used even if she’d lived longer (she died at 80). They weren’t exactly wealthy – she was a retired teacher, and my Dad had been a college lecturer and had died 8 years earlier, but she still had a big chunk of money when she died.

She should have spent that money herself. Yes, her heirs benefited from it, but I’d rather she’d spent it herself, either to enjoy herself, or to have the pleasure of giving it away herself.

Hairy Yoga Pants From Orenburg In Russia Have Swept Over The Internet

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“Gods gift to men” this is how men usually think of Yoga pants. However, after the Orenburgs hairy Yoga pants, we think this opinion could suddenly change. Many have thought this is a fake product or a parody but in fact you can get it over Ebay where it is sold as “Leggins / pants Longhair 100% Goat Down Russian Cashmere Mohair FETISH men woman”. It’s the latest hit from Orenburg, because who can wear tin Yoga pants on severe cold temperature?

h/t: slavforum

Why we need to teach geography (AMERICAN REACTION) YIKES

Across the West, People Are Dying in Greater Numbers. Nobody Wants to Learn Why

Jonathan Cook • July 18, 2023

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2023 07 26 16 15

During the pandemic, the challenge for each of us was to maintain critical distance: spurning both the tribalism of those insisting Covid was a hoax and the counter-tribalism of those who demanded complete acquiesence to a corporate-political agenda dictated by Big Pharma under the mantle of “Follow the science”.

Fear of living under Big Brother or of dying from plague drove many people not only into the arms of one of these two oppositional camps but fuelled a pandemic mania in which reason and compassion were replaced with either extreme cynicism or extreme compliance. We are still living with the consequences.

There has been a spate of “excess deaths” over the past two years across the West – well above what would normally be expected – and yet this sustained trend is being universally ignored by governments, establishment media and medical bodies. No one is protesting. The cult of compliance is still in the ascendant.

More on that in a moment.

But it is worth first revisiting briefly the climate of intolerance and willed ignorance that predominated at the height of the pandemic, as I documented in real time in a series of essays that upset more of my readers than any I had written before.

It was always unwarranted to press for vaccine mandates, if only because they violated the critically important principle of bodily autonomy. But the demand became completely unhinged once it was clear – as it was much earlier than publicly let on by Big Pharma, the World Health Organisation and national regulators – that the vaccines were doing little to halt virus transmission.

Similarly, it was always unethical to insist that children should be routinely given the vaccine and boosters when it was evident that the virus posed no threat to the overwhelming majority of them – and all the more so given that the mRNA vaccines were based on a new technology whose development had been rushed through on an emergency licence.

By definition, no one could know the long-term effects of mRNA vaccines on humans because there had been no long-term studies. The science was built on a wing and a prayer, which is part of the reason the Joint Committee on Vaccinations and Immunisation, the British government’s official advisory body on vaccinations, demurred for so long, and despite huge political pressure, on recommending vaccination for children.

And it was always deeply irresponsible to refuse to consider, or even study, other treatments that might have had an impact on the virus. Medical authorities ignored or warned the public off potential prophylactics and immunity-boosting treatments and behaviours – even when those interventions could have complemented the role of the vaccines, rather than serving as an alternative to them.

Nothing could be allowed to dilute the public’s exclusive reliance on vaccinations.

One prize example was Vitamin D, the sunshine hormone that, uniquely, every cell in the human body has a receptor for. Most people in the West are deficient in Vitamin D, many of them severely so, and doctors still have little understanding of what the consequences of that deficiency – beyond osteoporosis – might be.

Even before Covid, there were many studies suggesting that Vitamin D was critical to improving the health of our immune systems, including by warding off and aiding recovery from coronaviruses. That evidence has only grown stronger subsequently.

But definitive proof has been lacking because full-scale controlled studies are extraordinarily expensive and only Big Pharma has deep enough pockets to fund such studies (given that our captured governments refuse to dig deep themselves), but Big Pharma has no interest in proving a cheap hormone like Vitamin D – one it cannot patent or profit from – might offer the public health benefits not only in relation to Covid but for a wide range of chronic health conditions.

The fact that most medical regulators and media commentators continue to prefer to shut down debate about the potential benefits of Vitamin D rather than demand that governments fund research to confirm or refute the growing body of evidence for such benefits should be a scandal. But, predictably, it isn’t.

Blanket silence

I set this out as a preface to this latest scandal on excess deaths, one that – like so much else related to the pandemic and its aftermath – continues to elicit a blanket silence from the establishment media, politicians and, of course, our medical authorities.

The consistent and markedly elevated death rates each month across most of the Western world are not due to Covid and are far above the seasonal five-year average before the pandemic.

Such deaths have been significantly raised since late 2020 or mid-2021. That is all the more surprising because, after early waves of Covid killed off those who were already sick and vulnerable, the expectation was that excess deaths would fall, not rise. That anomaly needs explaining – scientifically.

Despite the backlash inevitably provoked by asking critical questions, I want to examine this development because it highlights something important about the way of our supposedly democratic governments, and the regulatory and adversarial institutions meant to hold them in check, have been hollowed out. We imagine we live in societies where scientific reason and compassion guide our response to a medical crisis. The reality is different. In our societies, one thing rules: money.

The issue of excess deaths is only one of many problems – though probably the most serious – that have emerged in the aftermath of the pandemic. Unless you have made an extraordinary effort to do your own research and managed to evade the internet censors and their algorithms, you will most likely not know about these developments. Neither politicians nor establishment media have publicised them.

Instead troubling data is buried away in obscure, peer-reviewed scientific journals, or has to be squeezed out of government authorities through freedom of information requests – and even then the information is often heavily redacted.

Such data would remain largely unnoticed but for the efforts of a few brave souls daring to draw attention to it – only to be smeared as cranks and crackpots, whatever their formal qualifications.

Dr John Campbell, whose Youtube channel became an invaluable internet resource during the pandemic and since (at least for those trying to sift the wheat from the chaff), has done sterling work shedding light on many of those problems.

Some notable videos have covered:

  • the mishandling and lack of oversight of Pfizer’s research into its vaccine;
  • the astounding admission that Pfizer never actually tested whether its vaccine stopped transmission;
  • continuing efforts to obscure evidence demonstrating that natural infection confers superior immunity to the vaccine;
  • the troubling discovery that mRNA can remain in the blood for at least a month after vaccination, with no understanding of what it might be doing in that time to our immune systems;
  • high variation in adverse reactions caused by different batches of mRNA vaccine, with some off the scale;
  • the involvement of US researchers and Pfizer in engineering Frankenstein’s monster-type coronaviruses of the very kind that, it increasingly seems, led to the Covid pandemic in the first place;
  • new research demonstrating the lack of evidence for reduction in virus transmission from masking;
  • the failure of policymakers to weigh the serious financial, social and possibly medical costs of lockdowns;
  • and a causal connection, confirmed by the WHO, between vaccination and the development of autoimmune disease like multiple sclerosis.

There is doubtless much worse, but we cannot learn of it – at least from qualified sources – because any effort to discuss it publicly will almost certainly result in banning by the corporations that run social media, our modern town squares.

For his efforts shining a light into the darkest recesses of the West’s pandemic response, Dr Campbell has been pilloried by the tribe that still identifies with Big Pharma. Arrogantly, they dismiss him as a glorified “nurse”, even though he has written widely read and authoritative medical textbooks.

More to the point, the smears are designed to distract from the fact that, more often than not, Dr Campbell is not speaking for himself but relaying in intelligible language the findings of peer-reviewed studies or interviewing respected experts in their field to draw attention to their work.

Complete mystery

Nonetheless, the issue of unexplained excess deaths is an order of magnitude more serious than even these other matters, which is why Dr Campbell has dedicated so many of his videos to discussing it.

Many, many thousands more people, including young people, are now dying each month across the Western world (where such data is reliably collected) than should be, compared to previous years. And they are dying for entirely mysterious reasons.

Yet:

This deeply troubling phenomenon barely merits a mention from politicians, the media or medical authorities.

Governments are failing to fund research to determine the causes of these extra deaths, even though the rates have been elevated for two years or more.

This reckless, self-imposed climate of ignorance is being sustained even as expert medical bodies warn that we face future pandemics.

It is almost as if Western governments prefer to let large numbers of people die unnecessarily, and potentially at great cost to health care services, rather than learn the truth. It seems these governments are quite happy, if they believe another pandemic is on the way, to risk repeating any mistakes they made during Covid that may have caused those excess deaths.

In a world where we are supposed to “follow the science”, how can that possibly be the case? What is going on?

If we try to understand why a blind eye is being turned to the shocking data showing a sustained and unexplained rise in deaths, it is hard not to arrive at one, and only one, conclusion.

Governments, establishment media and the medical regulators are frightened. They are scared of what they may discover if the research is carried out.

And that suggests something further. That these are not groups with their own discrete or competing interests and agendas.

The media, whatever it claims, is not a watchdog on government or the medical establishment. It colludes with them against the public. In fact, the corporate interests of all three are closely aligned.

Why? Because the government is captured by Big Business. Because the medical authorities are funded by Big Pharma, which can make or break careers. And because the media is owned by billionaires, and serves as little more than the public relations arm of concentrated wealth and as cheerleader for a neoliberalism that normalises the criminal profiteering of drug manufacturers like Pfizer.

Cultivated ignorance

Before I continue further, let me state unequivocally – because sadly, these things need emphasising in our ever-more tribal, polarised societies – that I have no idea what is causing this wave of excess deaths.

The point of this piece is not to pre-judge the matter or adopt a tribal position.

Rather, I’m trying de-tribalise your and my own thinking so that we can better understand why our governments and medical agencies prefer that no research is conducted, and why our establishment media chooses not to expose this glaring failure.

Dr Vibeke Manniche, a member of the Danish medical team whose peer-reviewed research showed that some batches of the mRNA vaccine caused off-the-scale adverse reactions, believes there are likely to be an array of contributory factors. That sounds right to me.

Her team are now undertaking as their next project an investigation into the mysterious rise in deaths. It is their private initiative, rather than research funded, organised or assisted by the Danish government. In fact, according to Dr Manniche, Danish authorities have been throwing obstacles in their way.

But why are these authorities so afraid?

The answer is simple. They suspect that any research will implicate them in those excess deaths. They are frightened – rightly or wrongly – that the narrative they constructed around the pandemic, and the powers they accrued to themselves, will unravel.

The reason they are in no hurry to find out why so many extra people are dying is because they fear that significant contributory factors are either the lockdown policies they imposed or the side-effects of the vaccines they championed – or both.

Again, I’m not saying that is what I think. I have no expertise to evaluate all the possible causes, including the ongoing erosion of socialised health care in much of the Western world and its transfer to yet more corporate profiteers – for which our governments areundoubtedly responsible.

But governments and medical regulators have access to the same data and graphs as Dr Manniche, showing a relentless and near-identical rise in excess deaths beginning in spring 2021 in Denmark, Norway and Finland, in the immediate wake of the mass vaccine rollout. Similar graphs are available for other Western states.

The inference that there is a connection between the vaccines and excess deaths may be wrong. But it is not a hypothesis they wish to test. The consequences are far too serious for them. They would rather enforce general ignorance, or perpetrate a deception on the public, than risk undermining their own authority – and the crucial levers they control both to sustain their privileges and to further concentrate their wealth.

There are some uncomfortable lessons here for us all.

The truth is Western governments – all of them – dare not test the evidentiary basis for their insistence on lockdowns and experimental vaccines as the only way out of the pandemic. They dare not do so in the full glare of public scrutiny for fear that the truth will not serve them, and more likely will damage them. So they cultivate public ignorance.

The truth is that the medical regulatory authorities were long ago captured by Big Pharma, and the revolving door it offers, leading to prestigious jobs and lucrative salaries in the industry. So they favour public ignorance too.

The truth is that the media will not hold the feet of governments or the medical establishment to the fire because, whatever the media claim, they are not in the business of enforcing real, systemic accountability. The billionaire-owned media corporations are embedded in the same model of corporate profit as Big Pharma. Indeed, the media’s own corporate profits depend on the advertising and sponsorship of drugs companies – fellow corporations – like Pfizer. So they benefit from public ignorance as well.

World of illusion

We live in a world not, as we are told and tell ourselves, of democratic accountability and transparency. Beyond formal, surface appearances, the system of political, economic and social control is designed to lack all but the most minimal checks and balances, institutional safeguards and oversight.

We live in a world of illusion, of elites that look out for their own, that develop ever more sophisticated technological tools to manipulate and deceive us, and that have progressively rigged the system to accrue to themselves ever more wealth and power.

We are not, as we like to imagine, informed citizens. The system cannot afford to provide us with the information we need to be informed – information that might reveal to us that we have been duped, that the rich steal from the poor to give to themselves, that our rulers have no clue how to fix the biggest problems facing us, aside from lining their pockets with more gold as the ship goes down.

As the last year has demonstrated, our elites had no more idea how to deal with the pandemic than they currently do with the climate crisis, or with the Ukraine war (without risking nuclear conflagration), or with rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence. Faced with the biggest challenges, they are like children – shouting “Follow the Science” or “Green New Deal” to distract the rest of us as they grab as many sweets as they can thrust into their pockets.

For these elites, Covid was a party – quite literally in the case of the British government – in which the biggest corporations not only profiteered but drove small businesses into the ground. Excess deaths are but a hangover, one that must be studiously ignored if the fiction of responsible, accountable, democratic government is to be maintained.

Our world has been carefully constructed to ensure we do not get to peek behind the curtain, to see the con-men at work. Unless we dispel this central illusion – that science, reason and compassion are the forces driving the West – the charlatans will take us with them over the edge of the cliff in their pursuit of suicidal “economic growth” and chimerical “progress”.

Snow White Becomes Snow Latinx

2023 07 27 15 07
2023 07 27 15 07

Cheesy Lasagna Soup

Lasagna in a bowl, chock full of what you love in regular lasagna, with the added ‘Florentine’ touch of spinach!

2023 07 27 15 02
2023 07 27 15 02

Ingredients

  • 1 pound bulk sweet (mild) Italian sausage
  • 1 yellow onion, thinly sliced
  • 2 garlic cloves, minced
  • 1/4 teaspoon red chile flakes (optional)
  • 1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
  • 4 cups (32 ounces) chicken stock
  • 1 to 2 cups water
  • 8 ounces lasagna noodles (not no-boil), broken into 1 to 2 inch pieces
  • 1/4 cup fresh basil leaves, plus additional for serving
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper
  • 2 cups fresh spinach, packed and roughly chopped
  • Salt
  • 2 cups (8 ounces) Wisconsin mozzarella cheese, shredded
  • 2 cups (16 ounces) Wisconsin ricotta cheese
  • 1/2 cup (2 ounces) Wisconsin parmesan cheese, shredded
2023 07 27 15 0gs3
2023 07 27 15 0gs3

Instructions

  1. Heat Dutch oven or large pot over high heat. Brown sausage for 5 minutes, breaking up as it cooks.
  2. Add onions; cook for 3 to 4 minutes, until onions are softened and sausage is cooked through.
  3. Add garlic and red chile flakes; cook for 1 minute.
  4. Add crushed tomatoes, scraping bottom of pan with wooden spoon.
  5. Add stock, 1 cup water, lasagna noodles, basil and pepper. Bring to boil.
  6. Reduce heat to medium-high; cook at a gentle boil for 10 to 12 minutes, until noodles are cooked through, stirring occasionally to prevent noodles from sticking to pot.
  7. Stir in spinach. Add salt to taste. If soup is too thick, add additional 1 cup water. Remove from heat.
  8. To serve, divide mozzarella among 6 serving bowls. Ladle soup over cheese. Top with spoonsful of ricotta, parmesan and additional basil.

Prep: 10 min | Cook: 30 min | Servings: 6

2023 07 27 15 03
2023 07 27 15 03

Energy tips for Empaths, Highly Sensitives, and ye on the path of the Mystic

This is good. I hope it helps someone in MM land out there.

Do you support the opaque polity of CCP in China where a foreign minister goes missing and foreign ministry feigns ignorance? You may refer to the report of Mint “The curious case of China’s missing foreign minister”.

main qimg 8b91c5d92cebb9f4183c9d9c801ec33f
main qimg 8b91c5d92cebb9f4183c9d9c801ec33f

First off he is not missing

The Party knows where he is

His colleagues know where he is

Just because the US or UK or the West don’t hear from someone for a month, doesn’t mean he has gone missing

This obessession of always talking to the press every day is slavish and a Western compulsion

Same with Tweeting every day

He simply has not been seen in the Public Domain

Why should the Chinese care about why he has not been seen??

It’s not their problem right?


main qimg 4a4382708d7b875712ab956be4cea4bd
main qimg 4a4382708d7b875712ab956be4cea4bd

The CPC has a message

It’s called MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS

In China, it is the business of the CPC to run the country, govern the country and help it develop and grow and regulate policies to sustain the country and defend the country

The Average Citizens have their own business — Work Hard, Take advantage of the free and heavily subsidized education, Do well, Pay Taxes and ENJOY LIFE — take vacations, buy stuff, play games, have fast food

China is not India

The Average Chinese doesn’t spend all his time discussing Modi vs Raga or saying “Ayega to Modi Hi”

He doesn’t even know the names of most standing committee members and won’t recognise them if they stood in front of him without escort or the party’s No 8 Cars

The CPC tells the Citizens what they HAVE TO KNOW

The CPC doesn’t need to tell them anything more because it won’t be productive

The CPC won’t tell all the problems to the Citizens because the Citizens knowing the problems is counter productive and could complicate stuff

Instead the CPC SOLVES THE PROBLEMS and ensures that the Citizens don’t even feel the negative effects


The CPC will take care of the Governance

The CPC will replace ministers and members if they cannot be fully capable of doing their job which underlies the Meritocracy of the Chinese System

In India, Arun Jaitley and Sushma Swaraj worked for a year despite taking cancer treatments half the time

Not in China

China wants 100% and if they don’t get it — you get a golden handshake and a goodbye


You want my opinion

I love such a system and the opacity

Knowing only what I NEED TO KNOW and being protected by a system and confident in such a system is very productive and helps me focus on what my business should be

The Greatest Growth and Development in the world took place under such a system

IT WAS CALLED MONARCHY !!!!!

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main qimg 135bf5bd324bc975d935d01b615a0076

The World’s greatest inventions — Machine Guns, Spinning Jenny, Steam Engine, Dynamite, Shopping, Telegraph and Modern Banking all took place under this system

Where the Common men did what their business man and where the people who should rule, did their job and ruled

Mixing them was catastrophic and luckily China hasn’t done that yet


Note:—

My point here is to hail the opacity of China and the CPC and not discuss why Qin Gang didn’t make a public appearance for 3 weeks

The Opacity for whatever reason is what makes China the world’s fastest rising threat to the West and it’s degraded political systems

SNOW WHITE ENDING LEAKS GET EVEN MORE PATHETIC! What On Earth Is DISNEY THINKING!

2023 07 27 17 30
2023 07 27 17 30

How is the Make in America Chip plan cracking as was reported by Bloomberg?

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main qimg 65bfae6f585737c720c16dccbbbeb9fe

Economics!!!

TSMC estimates that they need 13 Factories plus another 7 from Korea to be able to match the demand and achieve sufficient scale to maintain some profitability

The cost would be minimum $ 240 Billion a year

Add to this at least 6000 Specialized Workers who were to be paid $ 34,000 a year from Korea and Taiwan who refuse flat and demand $ 61,000 minimum

That’s $ 1.05 Billion a year including all other services and labor costs and welfare measures

Thus the US Chip program needs around $ 2.7 Trillion in the first 10 years

Their budget is $ 230 Billion in 5 years

So the simple question is where is the MONEY ?

main qimg 2ad8649ae5f758a834131f4187f515d7
main qimg 2ad8649ae5f758a834131f4187f515d7

Mrs Raimondo is unwilling to release any more money


Add to this is the US demanding

  • Full Access to every Customer
  • Full Access to profits and financial records
  • Full Access to all Process Technologies not controlled by the US

TSMC and Samsung are Loth to agree to these terms and have decided to go to their lawyers and use the courts to fight the issue


Thus the Make Chips in USA has gotten derailed and side tracked

It is likely to take 2028 before the first commercial chips will be sold from USA and that too only 13% of the actual demand

It will take 2036 before the first commercial chips are sold to fulfil the whole demand

That gives the Chinese 13 years to take over the market and if they manage to make chips at a larger scale and lower cost

That’s $ 2.7 Trillion DOWN THE DRAIN and Taiwan and Korean entities are finished


Its why the Tech war has been in place

To hope to ensure China isn’t able to crack any of these technologies by 2036

Is nature cruel?

A police man by the name of Joseph James DeAngelo had a habit of going into the houses of people. He enjoyed to observe them from afar. Then, he would enter their houses at night, and leave, and enter… and if he felt he had familiarized himself sufficiently with their homes, he’d subdue them.

main qimg eb68de40152c1c5e00913210ecee4a47 lq
main qimg eb68de40152c1c5e00913210ecee4a47 lq

DeAngelo would often attack couples, a man and a woman, together. He’d tie the husband or boyfriend up in one room. And he would place teacups, plates, cups on the back of the man. He’d tell the victim not to move because if he did, “the cups will fall, I’ll hear you and I will come back to kill you…” DeAngelo would then go to the other room, and rape the wife

The husbands would be on the floor, tied up, and forced to listen to the agonizing sounds of their wives being brutalized in the other room. Always, without fail, they would wiggle and try their hardest to escape to save their wives. The porcelain would drop and break, and DeAngelo would then drag them to the bedroom. Bludgeon the wife in front of the tied-up husband… and then, kill him last. The killer repeated this several times. Some victims survived. Most didn’t. For decades, the man capable of such great cruelty got away with his crimes, unpunished, a family man, father, grandfather.

A policeman, he heard of DNA evidence being a thing by the late 1980s. Which is when he stopped his spree of terror. DeAngelo lived another thirty years in relative peace and quiet. He had a little boat he would sail on. And he enjoyed his retirement. DNA evidence did take him down, in the end — genealogy websites used to track down relatives allowed law enforcement into their database and found a match. Before he ‘retired’ from his career as a maniac, DeAngelo raped 45 people and murdered twelve.

Nature is straightforward. An animal gets hungry, he’ll kill another animal and eat it. It’ll hurt, it will be brutal but there’s no inate cruelty or sadism involved… the killing is a mean’s to an end. Nature produces no Joseph James DeAngelo’s. Humanity alone does.

Young Girl REINCARNATED from an Ancient World | The Ghost Inside My Child | LMN

This is pretty good and well worth your time to watch.

If the Chinese Communist Party collapses, would there be looting, pillaging and killing of non-Asian & mixed blacks throughout China?

Obviously you think that the Party is a very top-down organization where only a few people at the top make all the decisions for 1.4B Chinese, and everyone underneath follows. Following on this, you think that if the Party collapses through the elimination of this top few, it will collapse and everyone will go wild.

Let me correct your view:

  • The Party has 98M members now. This means about one in 14 Chinese is a Party member.
  • In order to join the Party, one must either apply to join, or be invited to apply.
  • The Party permeates through all levels of Chinese society with branch organizations. Every company, school or organization with more than ten employees has its own party branch secretary who convenes monthly meetings for all Party members. At these meetings they discuss policy and developments, and how to implement Party policy in their organization.
  • It is common for applicants to be rejected on the first application. The current general secretary, Xi Jinping, was rejected nine times before finally being accepted on the tenth application.
  • On joining, the new members swear an oath of loyalty and sacrifice if called to do so.
  • In an emergency, such as a flood, earthquake or COVID crisis, the party mobilizes its members FIRST. This is why when the COVID crisis broke out in Wuhan in January 2020, most of the victims were Party members; they had been called to use their skills and experience to fight the virus. Ordinary Chinese who are not Party members know about Party members being called up and in some cases dying.

This is not to say that the Party is a perfect organization which has never done anything wrong. For instance, the Cultural Revolution is now officially considered to have been a disaster.

At the same time, it has lifted more than 600M Chinese out of poverty, and is building a modern infrastructure in China which puts western societies to shame. It has made Chinese proud of China.

No one has been able to offer a better alternative to replace the Party. Do you have a better alternative aside from vague statements about freedom and democracy? That will not work with ordinary Chinese because they want some firm alternatives.

Would you offer to give every Chinese a US passport, and a free one-way ticket to the US? I am sure that would attract 50–100M Chinese, maybe more. Do you want to do that? I don’t think Biden or Trump have plans to do that right away.

So why would it collapse? If you can tell me how such an organization and society would collapse, I would like to hear about it.

I’m all ears.

Father Takes Away Daughters College $ After They Crossed The Ultimate Line, Now They’re LOSING IT!

My wife and I went into town to shop.

My wife and I went into town to shop.

When we came out, there was a cop writing out a parking ticket.

We went up to him and I said, “Come on man, how about giving a senior citizen a break?”

He just ignored us and continued writing the ticket.

I called him a “butthead.” He glared at me and started writing another ticket for having worn-out tires.

So my wife called him a “jerk.” He finished the second ticket and put it on the windshield with the first.

Then he started writing more tickets. This went on for about 20 minutes.

The more we offended him, the more tickets he wrote.

He finally finished, sneered at us, and walked away.

Just then our bus arrived, and we got on it and went home.

We try to have a little fun each day now that we’re retired. It’s so important at our age!

Did China’s anti-corruption campaign work?

Yes, it worked very well because it restored the faith of most Chinese in the Chinese Communist Party.

If Xi Jinping did not have the anti-corruption campaign, China would have become as corrupt as another leading superpower, where money can buy anything, including the presidency.

Broken Peach – Tainted Love (Halloween Special)

Why do Chinese people eat dead animals?

Animals are easier to pick up with chopsticks if they are dead, and they don’t fight back as they are being eaten.

Chili Dog Soup

IMG 9753 scaled 1
IMG 9753 scaled 1

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • 1 package hot dogs, cut up
  • 1 (28 ounce) can diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 2 (16 ounce) cans dark red kidney beans, undrained
  • 2 (15 ounce) cans tomato sauce
  • Salt and pepper
  • 1 cup shredded cheese
  • 1 bag Fritos Corn Chips

Instructions

  1. Cook ground beef. Drain.
  2. Stir in hot dogs, diced tomatoes, kidney Beans, tomato sauce, salt and pepper. Cover and simmer for 30 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  3. Serve over Frito chips and top with cheese.

12 People Reveal The Saddest Thing They’ve Seen at a Casino

July 18, 2023

1. A woman asking security if she could come back in clean clothes, after she got kicked out for shitting herself while working the slots. She wouldn’t leave that machine, even to use the bathroom. Gross. She wasn’t even phased or embarrassed by the scene she was making in public.

2. Casino dealer here for 10 years. I’ve worked at three casinos and worked in many departments . Young best buy worker comes in buys in for 500 on roulette and loses it. Goes to the parking lot and sells his car for 500 and comes back and racks up 75,000 bucks. In 20 minutes he loses it all. 25 years old I couldn’t believe it. Feel free to ask any question.

3. Not a dealer and it was a card room, but while playing poker a guy sat down with the max buy in and got wiped out on his first hand at the table. He reloaded for the max and lost it all his second hand dealt. He reloaded max a third time, and no shit, went broke again on his third hand of the night. Like, wtf? He stood up real quick and stared at the board stunned. Then, proceeded to freak out about how his wife was going to divorce him. He grabbed as many chips off the table as he could and made a break for the door. Unfortunately, he tripped over the back of someone’s chair and chips went flying everywhere. Police kindly escorted him out as he was having what had to be a mental breakdown.

4. I am not a dealer but I am a cocktail server at a local casino. I am still fairly new but it is a very sad place. I work anywhere from 7-10 hours shifts at a time. People will sit at a slot machine for my entire shift and put every single dollar they have into it hoping to win big. They constantly visit the ATM or main bank for cash advances on credit cards or go into the negative in the bank account. I see the same people there daily. Most are friendly but some bark orders at me or don’t thank me. I am always smiling and friendly with everyone I come into contact with.

I’ve witnessed people win thousands of dollars and be completely miserable because it wasn’t enough for them and they are still in debt from their addiction.

I’ve heard horror stories about people pissing or shitting because they refuse to visit the restroom in fear of leaving their machine for a few moments.

5. Former slot attendant and cage cashier at Showboat in Atlantic City (RIP): the worst is watching the people who clearly don’t have enough money to be in there coming in, losing it all, and begging for a marker (a line of credit that allows them to keep betting) so they could try to win it back.
Showboat was a Harrah’s casino, and Harrah’s made a very big deal about their commitment to responsible gaming. We were told to refer them to Gambler’s Anonymous or point out the brochures and signage about needing help if we determined a guest was gaming irresponsibly, but we couldn’t actually stop them if they had the money. Once they were out, though, you’d still get a few sad sacks a day that tried to open the marker. I don’t know which was worse: watching them get the application accepted and piss away even more money, or watching them get denied and leave in tears.

6. Tossup between:

  1. Coming into work to see some of the same people still playing that were there when i left the previous night.
  2. Watching other dealers take their tokes and sit down at a table and lose it all after their shift ended.

7. Been in the casino industry for about 14 years. Dealt for about 8 of those, I have since moved up and am in management now.

The saddest thing I’ve seen is death.

Death by itself is tragic and rare, and seeing someone keel over from a heart attack is sad to say the least. But you are trained and ordered to never stop dealing if there are bets that need to be paid or taken.

Case in point: A normal, slightly overweight guy has a heart attack. He drops. It happened across from me in a different pit, but I saw it just the same. Concerned crowd, EMTs arrive, all of what you would expect. But he had this misfortune of dying on a live craps table. In the middle of a good roll. People complained that the game stopped, so they kept the game going as EMTs were doing their thing. People were straight stepping over the guy’s legs to place bets.

In St. Louis if you are curious. I’ve seen two other people die in my casinos, but this one was the saddest by far.

8. The first time I was ever in Vegas a security guards came up to the slot next to me and removed the stool from the floor. Another guard wheels up an old lady and she starts throwing her money in to that slot. Within a minute of her losing every last dime the guard is back wheeling her away while the other fixes the stool back in to the floor. I notice them taking her out the front door towards Fremont street. A couple hours later as I am leaving the casino I see her right by the front door where they wheeled her and I figure perhaps she is waiting for a ride. Four hours later when I come back she is still in the same place so I ask her if I can pay for a taxi for her and she asks if I can give her $20 dollars to buy some groceries. I give it to her and a few minutes later see security wheeling her back to the slots.

9. 90 (ish?) year old woman wearing tattered rags, and in a wheelchair that was falling apart, cigarette in one hand, a drink in the other spending what I could only assume was her life savings on the slot machines.

10. I used to work as a change person, pushing a cart around and making change for gamblers. I once saw a grown man at about 3am – desperately walking from slot machine to slot machine, dropping coins into the slots, pulling the handle, and watching the tumblers roll – quietly sobbing and mumbling to himself, seemingly looking desperately for a winner. I left that job the next day and never forgot his face (it’s been about 25 years).

11. I worked as a croupier for 3 years, I had an Irish student come into the casino drunk. He proceeded to spend his entire years worth of student loads and bursary. He stood at my blackjack table and begged me and my manager for his money back, trying to explain to me that he was only 18 and why it was illegal for us to put him in such a position e.g. bent over the table and looted of all monies.

12. I wasn’t a dealer but i use to work security at a casino. I remember a relatively wealthy couple explaining to me that they sold their fridge and stove so that they could use the money to keep gambling. They said they had no need for them because the casino comped them so many meals. All i could think of was how sad of people they were.

This one for some reason bothers me more than anything though; seeing a mother leave her children at the entry gate so she could gamble. This was like 2:30am and the children were something like 4 and 16. We told her numerous times to take them home but she wouldn’t. We contacted DCI (state troopers basically that are always on property) to come and talk to her. Because the 16 year old was watching the other child they couldn’t do anything. We also had a policy that if they were at the table games, the pit boss had to make the call to kick her out. He wouldn’t because she was spending too much. I just watched as these kids sat on a bench for hours waiting for their mom. They complained they were hungry and thirsty but i couldn’t do much more than get a waitress to grab a soda.

“We have alien bodies and they are hiding it from you” Bombshell UFO testimony

On Wednesday, Congress held a hearing about UAP’s or “unidentified aerial phenomena.”

This is government speak for UFO. During the hearing, U.S. intelligence official David Grusch, a whistleblower, testified under oath before Congress that the United States has the bodies of alien pilots who were recovered from crashed UFO’s.

He also said that we have crashed craft and that he will give more details about that in separate closed-door hearings.

8 Parents Revealed Why They Home-Schooled Their Children

July 27, 2023

1. My number one reason was I wanted my kids to like learning. And they do, they love both reading and math. But it ended up being so much more. We have a lot more bonding time as a family, and my kids are best friends. They have more time to spend with their friends, and they have friends of all ages, from all around our city, not just the kids their age, in their neighborhood. They have lots of time to pursue multiple hobbies and interests. We as a family aren’t tied to a school schedule.

2. Our homeschool journey started because of food allergies. As we began to research our options we were flooded with reasons to homeschool that really resonated with us.

  1. Safety- pandemic, a growing anti-vax movement and violence (bullying, shootings,etc)
  2. We wanted our girls to get accurate and useful information regarding sex education. Not just the abstinence nonsense that is taught in schools. When our girls eventually go down that path, we want to make sure they know how to protect themselves as well as how to advocate for themselves and what they want.
  3. We want to make sure that our girls are being taught accurate, truthful and fully represented history. I’m not interested in my kids learning a conservative, white-washed version of history.
  4. My kids are only kids once and I genuinely enjoy spending time with them. Homeschooling lets us do that.
  5. Flexibility. We’re able to do extracurricular activities such as gymnastics during the day while public school is in session. This usually means better instructor to kid ratios. Also, it means more time to spend as a family in the evening once my husband gets off work so he doesn’t miss out on time with the kids.

Private school was never an option for us because all of the private schools in our area are religious. We don’t feel that religion has anything to do with education and shouldn’t be included during school time.

3. I personally don’t have too much of a problem with the material taught in public school (though with a lot of recent developments in some states re: religion butting it’s way in, book bans etc, I’m wary of the future) but large classes have to, by default, teach to the middle. The kids who are behind will stay behind, and the kids ahead will get bored and disruptive. There’s also incredible stigmatization of kids held back OR skipped forward, even if they need it, so it rarely, if ever, happens. The way I see it, public schools prioritize putting kids in boxes and keeping them there, regardless of their needs academically or developmentally (it’s really not developmentally appropriate for young kids to sit in one place for hours at a time). I don’t blame them, though, because you kind of have to exercise a lot of control if you are the sole adult in charge of 20+ young children all day.

We looked at a lot of private schools in the area and none of them met our needs. We want our kids to have a low pressure academic atmosphere where they are allowed to act like young kids, and where there are enough teachers to meet kids where they’re at. That’s just not offered around here in a school we can drive to and afford right now.

4. Ultimately, I don’t believe that the material taught or the way it is taught will be of any benefit to my children in their future and may even be detrimental.

5. There’s a lot of reasons..

Like you, I don’t think what is taught in schools is quality information and nothing applicable to life skills.

I also don’t like the idea of my kids sitting in a chair 7 hours a day.

I think kids should be around a lot of different people and different age groups. I don’t see that there’s a lot to gain by being with the same group of kids the same age for 12 years.

I don’t like the political climate of our nation and I don’t like that it’s so apparent in schools. Our children’s education isn’t a game and shouldn’t be messed with the way it is.

I am fine with people having differing opinions than me, and I also don’t want to shelter my kids from different opinions and ideas but I also don’t trust a bunch of strangers having such a big part of my kids lives.

I genuinely love my kids, enjoying being around them and hate the thought of them being gone 40+ hours a week starting at age 5.

We homeschool now. As our kids are reaching middle school levels, we have discussed possibly putting them into private school. Financially, it’s definitely doable for us. Right now, we like homeschool, our kids like it and are thriving. Private school is always an option for us if thats what we decide. There is one we’ve toured and really like near us that will be what we choose if that’s the path we go down.

6. We decided to homeschool after we already had three kids in public school. I watched their love of school, turn into dread. The younger kids, no longer felt safe. They were coming home crying because of their peers or confused over classroom assignments. I watched my older kid turn into robot mode to please the system with A’s.

After my oldest graduated high school, we pulled the younger kids and decided to homeschool. We love the freedom of homeschool. Being able to tackle assignments in a way that benefits each child. Going to zoo’s, museums, and state parks anytime we want too. Learning about any thing we want, just because we want too. I can tailor their education to the career fields that they are interested in. We can enjoy play groups other extracurricular activities at our own pace.

Ultimately, learning is a life long process and I wanted them to have a good foundation. Classroom learning is a small percentage compared to the rest of their lives. I considered their physical, emotional, intellectual, social, spiritual, environmental and occupational well-being when we decided to homeschool.

7. I like homeschooling and the freedom that comes with it. I like that my kids can spend time outside, playing, reading, and I like that we can choose a curriculum that they enjoy and that works for them. My kids are young and I don’t like the idea of them being in public school for 8 hours day. They can sleep late if they need to, and can take days off when they’re struggling. The public schools in my area are overcrowded and there is so much crime; schools are frequently on lockdown due to crime in the surround area or because of threats made.

We actually homeschool through a public charter. So the charter school provides funds for students that we use to purchase curriculum and that is used towards extracurriculars. We use the charter funds for piano lessons, gymnastics, and a learning co-op that meets weekly. Private schools in our area are expensive and also overcrowded.

8. Our catalyst for homeschooling was originally the pandemic and some academic trauma and bullying that came before that. We continued for many reasons but mainly because one of my kids especially needs lots of time to work through struggle and build confidence. If he were in public school his anxiety would be unmanageable and he wouldn’t be thriving as he is. It also fits our lifestyle and gives us flexibility to live the way we want and not be ruled by a societal schedule.

My favorite reason for homeschooling though is that learning and growing becomes an ongoing, long-form conversation. It’s stream-of-consciousness across the years where we reach back, make connections, and are continually building on the day before in an organic, developmentally appropriate way that revolves around hand-picked curricula and materials we believe in. I as their teacher can see where they are compared to where they have been and I can be a better steward of their progress. Pair all this with the ability to do year-round school, friends of all ages and walks of life, field trips around our town or country to learn about their world first hand, 4H and other clubs, and their being involved in a few different family businesses, often working events with adults, and living on and working a farm, and we’ve got invaluable real life living year round. After doing it this way school seems even more artificial and not the right path for us.

HOUSE PASSES THE TAIWAN INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY ACT

Washington, D.C. — Today, the House passed the Taiwan International Solidarity Act, bipartisan legislation authored by Congressman John Curtis (R-UT) and Congressman Gerry Connolly (D-VA), co-Chair of the Congressional Taiwan Caucus that seeks to counter Beijing’s attempts to exclude Taiwan from participating in international organizations.

“The passage of the Taiwan International Solidarity Act is a significant step in reaffirming our commitment to Taiwan and in opposing attempts by the People’s Republic of China to use international organizations to distort Taiwan’s status,” said Rep. Curtis. “Building on my TAIPEI Act, this bipartisan legislation stands strong in support of Taiwan’s rightful place on the global stage.”

“For too long, the People’s Republic of China has distorted policies and procedures at international organizations to assert its sovereignty claims over Taiwan, often to the detriment of global health and security efforts,” said Rep. Connolly. “This bipartisan legislation ensures that we stand against Beijing’s weaponization of international organizations and in solidarity with the wishes and best interests of the people on Taiwan. I’ve been proud to partner with Rep. Curtis on this effort and I look forward to continuing to work together to get this important legislation signed into law.”

The Taiwan International Solidarity Act builds on Congressman Curtis’ TAIPEI Act to reaffirm that the United States will oppose any efforts by the People’s Republic of China to interfere with Taiwan’s ability to conduct diplomacy and participate in international organizations. In addition to Connolly and Curtis, the legislation was cosponsored by Representatives Ami Bera, Andy Barr, Mario Diaz-Balart, Dina Titus, Lisa McClain, Brian Fitzpatrick, Ted Lieu, Darrell Issa, Chris Smith, Brad Sherman, David Cicilline, and Michael Lawler.

Full text of the legislation is available here.

Casino tricks that everyone falls for

Online casinos are a great way to spend time, especially if you win simultaneously. However, there are some nuances that online casinos hide from you.

Modern online casinos with lightning roulette demo, primarily legal and premium ones, offer a lot of entertainment, including state-of-the-art slot machines, live dealer games, and much more.

Most decent online casinos have fully informative websites. Detailed descriptions accompany most games and services.
However, there are some things that online casinos need to inform players about.

Some things online casinos hide from you

None of these nuances alone will make you a great player who regularly withdraws huge sums from online casinos. However, knowing these things can help you significantly reduce your losses in online casino gambling.

Blackjack offers the best odds of winning

A casino wants to keep the online game that offers the best odds of winning. That’s why you often see promotions that focus on Blackjack. A casino won’t advertise that Blackjack offers the best odds of winning. Nevertheless, considering that the casino’s advantage can be as low as 0.5%, it is true. Try playing it yourself – it’s easy to learn and understand.

Betting systems do not guarantee winnings

Nothing can guarantee you a win when you play at a casino. It would help if you understood that:

• Even professional casino players sometimes win.
• You shouldn’t rely too much on a betting system and expect always to win.

It’s best to place responsible bets on the games you choose. This way, you can limit your gambling opportunities and potential winnings.

Time flies by when you gamble

Although this feature is more typical for offline casinos, it applies here.

Land-based casinos have no clocks or windows, so you never know the time of day. It helps you forget the time because the establishments want you to stay longer and spend more.

The same thing happens online, and you can lose track of time when playing like this. Even safe online casinos do not inform you of this fact.

Maximum bets can pay off on slots

Many players often make the mistake of thinking that the size of the bet doesn’t matter.
So, they continue to place small bets, hoping that a crazy multiplier will appear on the slot. However, this never happens.
That’s because, in many cases, bonuses are awarded only at the highest bets.
Therefore, using a higher bet can guarantee the activation of these critical special features.

Ignore advertising of “hot” slots

Casinos often use a kind of petty fraud by “highlighting” certain games.
Usually, they indicate that these games are “hot” and others are “cold”. Such labelling is explained by how often they have paid out money recently.
However, there are no actual trends in the frequency of game payouts. All outcomes of online games are random due to the random number generation technology. Therefore, nothing says that the probability of paying out in one game is higher than in another.

The casino always has an advantage

It is something you can figure out for yourself. However, casinos are not very happy that players know this.
Why? Because it means that players know that the casino always makes a profit. For every bet you place, the casino gets a certain percentage.
The casino’s edge (House edge) exists, so the casino/operator makes money when you play.
Even fast-payout casino sites have to make money somehow. That’s why the casino tries to steer you towards games with a higher casino edge.

Casinos don’t like bonus hunters

It is a pretty obvious statement. Online casinos want to avoid bonus hunters coming to them. Why? Because these players sign up and make deposits with the sole intention of redeeming a bonus.

They build up a balance, withdraw money, leave, and never play again. Casinos do not like such players. They prefer players who play for a long time and often, and with their real money.

Online casinos don’t want you to withdraw your winnings

When you win a decent amount of money at an online casino, the ideal thing to do is to withdraw it.
However, casinos want you to do something other than that. Instead, they want you to keep gambling, hoping to win even more. In the end, there is a chance that you will lose everything you won and more.

That’s why it’s better to set a winning goal and leave the online casino when you reach it.

The hype around jackpot winners is not accidental

Casinos go to great lengths to get people to spend money. It applies to both land-based and online gambling establishments. Both illegal and completely honest.
Casinos love advertising and excitement around the enormous payouts they make to lucky players who hit the jackpot. Such sums are often life-changing. So they want you to believe you can win the same amount. It is their way of getting you to register, deposit, and play. If you hope to win big, the casino will grab hold of you.

Card counting is not illegal

Land-based casinos are more guilty of this than online sites. However, if you visit live casino sites, this applies to games in the rooms.
Card counting is something that experienced players can use in these games. Knowing which cards have already come and gone gives you an advantage. However, some casinos prefer you to have something other than this kind of knowledge. It puts them at a disadvantage. The thing is, if you can do it, it’s not illegal. So take advantage of it if you can.

What probably happened to Qin Gang

What probably happened to Qin Gang.

The following is a compilation of a plot-line that seems to have solidified on international social media.

No one knows for certain what is going on in regards to the Qin saga, however, internet sleuth armies (many located inside of China) have pieced together this most-probable scenario. Knowing what I know of the quality of the “keyboard warriors” of China, the sleuthing tends to be of high quality and speculation is kept at a minimum. Its another animal all together compared to the West.

Is this explanation the full story? No.

For internet sleuthing, the amount of detail, with names, dates, times, and actions are all very *specific*. It is a great amount of detail. This suggests a Chinese government “seeding” effort into social media as opposed to an “organic” discovery.

But, please keep in mind that this is the best explanation that you will ever get. It is the story with the highest probability. And keep in mind that the Chinese government, though its “unofficial” key-board warriors DOES actually “seed” narratives onto social media.

On 26/6/2023 — Qin Gang received a phone call from a mysterious ANDRE asking him to meet at a secret location in Beijing

QG was about to refuse when Andre said it was about “FU” or Fu Xiaotian, his mistress or girlfriend.

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2023 07 28 14 40

QG decided to travel alone and meet Andre who confirmed he worked for the CIA and revealed pictures and secret tapes of QG and Fu and their affair and confirmed that Fu was a CIA Asset.

  • Andre = CIA agent
  • Fu = CIA asset

Andre informed QG that he would either [1] see that these photos delivered to the Security Committee and his wife and made public or [2] he would have to do whatever the CIA wanted him to do.

QG nodded and Andre said he would mail the instructions and call him for their next meeting.

However QG drove straight to the Security Committee and confessed the entire affair plus the blackmail.

The Committee [1] recorded his statement and [2] imposed a section 15(iii) violation — Ethical and Moral Breach, and [3] placed him on leave from that moment on.

As he left, three security men followed him, his regular driver was gone and instead Captain Wen of the MSS was at the wheel

At Zhonganhai, his home was covered by security guards.

Andre watched as the MSS men began to hunt for him and realized he had made a mistake with the Chinese Foreign Minister.

Westerners usually cracked under blackmail but QG came clean mainly because being a misguided philanderer was better than being a traitor to his country.

Andre fled China as fast as possible to Taipei realizing that the mission had failed and Fu (the CIA sponsored mistress) was blown.


On 3/7/2023 — the Security committee decided to impose a full investigation on every member of the ministry who had meetings with QG and 181 officials fell under suspicion and were investigated.

Xi Jingping who was notified agreed that the safest course was to give the Foreign Ministry to Wang Yi, a man above suspicion and not in QGs sphere of influence in the last year.

Qin Gang came clean and revealed all aspects of the affair after which his phone and laptops and suits were examined for bugs.

There were none.

It was likely that now that QG would live in Beijing and it was impossible for Fu to follow him there, the CIA rushed things.

China couldn’t blame the CIA because that would expose China.

So instead China continued with Wang Yi.

After many days the committee decided that Qin Gang had not divulged any state secrets and that Fu was part of a long term operation that had been accelarated due to QGs sudden promotion to Foreign Minister.

Thus Qin Gang was retained as State Councillor and as Party Member.

He will never leave China now.

His Passport was confiscated on 26/6/2023.

He will be under surveillance for life or until he turns 80 or if a later standing committee votes against the same.

Of the 181 others —69 have been cleared fully and 46 more have been cleared for their last 3 years activities.

Likely by 1/1/24 — a new foreign minister will replace QG — someone chosen by Wang Yi from his old guard


Andre (CIA agent)

Andre was found at 4:45 AM.

His mouth was gaping open and he had suffered a massive seizure.

His mouth was purple and a needle prick was found near his lower right elbow.

On 18/7/23, he was buried anonymously under the name of Regis Waller (1971–2023)

The Experts found traces of substances that seemed similar in composition to NOVICHOK.

Fu Xiaotian (Mistress)

Fu is in a safe house in Brazil waiting for evacuation to Vancouver under a false name and terrified of retaliation.

Reminds me of a scene from the Sopranos

Exactly like the show.

What does U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken think about Chinese diplomats’ negotiation skills?

Americans were once pretty decent diplomats

Today all they want to do is LOOK TOUGH AND TALK TOUGH

So they are all bullies

From Madeline Albright to Powell to Rice to Hilary Clinton to John Kerry to Pompeo to Blinken — their message is always the same

You better do what we say or else…

British diplomats always want to look condescending to Asian & Middle Eastern & African countries

European & American diplomats always threaten Asian, African and Middle Eastern countries

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main qimg 9fb4cad30516286d6b6702d0d7a62ea2

US Diplomats have all but forgotten the art of quid pro quo

It’s all about being terrified of “Looking Weak”

The result is they are more and more hawkish than ever

If you don’t have a democratic system, then you are a dictatorship and a threat to the world

If you don’t do what I say, i will sanction you or embargo you

If you don’t stand against Russia, i will create a color revolution and ensure you are defeated in elections


Blinken is one of these diplomats

Now Chinese Diplomats are DIAMETRICALLY OPPOSITE

They always believe in deals that benefit everyone so that nobody leaves with a grudge

Nobody LOSES FACE

They are terrified of LOSING FACE and they would do anything in their power to not lose face

When Nancy Pelosi went to Taiwan, the Diplomat Wang Yi lost a lot of face

He regained his face and gained even more face after his Solomon Island deal and the SAUDI IRAN DEAL that helped him gain so much face that we was rewarded plentifully with a huge promotion to the Politburo

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main qimg 94a24fcd67ed5e19bb034750effdad89

Zhao Lijian on the other hand, got a promotion and a higher salary but he LOST FACE and that meant his power and his responsibilities have reduced


So US vs China is always a tough battle

Both sets of Diplomats have their restrictions

US diplomats cannot appear weak so they threaten and posture

Chinese diplomats cannot lose face so they react and cause US to lose more face

It’s a vicious circle

However Chinese Diplomats are reasonable while US Diplomats are not. They won’t yield a millimeter at any cost but demand that China does.

As US becomes less and less of the only Superpower in the World , their stubbornness will rise accordingly

China meanwhile have a 5000 year civilization and their diplomacy is much different and they won’t put with the US and it’s brash bullyboy tactics

So one side has to yield or be made to yield

The jury is out on who


So who are US Diplomats are terrified of?

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main qimg c52d6c9899f61af30b5387545f210ade

Yep the Taliban

When a 14 year boy can smilingly cut blinkens granddaughters throat and laugh saying Allahu Akbar and happily get shot believing he will be in Jannat

That’s enough to terrify the living daylights of any American including a Pentagon Five Star General

In 2001, Afghanistan was an isolated nation

Today 4.7 Million Afghans are in US and at least 30% are pro Taliban having infiltrated through as victims

If a single mullah asks them to do god’s work and kill 7 Women and Kids before sacrificing their lives — US would fold in a week and make a compromise

Stuxnet | The Computer Virus That Caused World War 3

STUXNET. The virus that prevented; then started the next world war. Cyberwar is being waged right now in your name.

No matter what country you call home, your government is engaged in highly dangerous combat on the Internet. Infrastructure around the world is under siege and everyone is at risk. Even you.

In 2010, the Stuxnet virus was discovered in Natanz, Iran and thousands of control systems that operate factories, power plants and nuclear reactors around the world.

It was 20 times more sophisticated than any malware ever recorded.

It could halt oil pipelines, destroy water treatment plants and bring down entire power grids.

Stuxnet is back, stronger than ever. And we should all be concerned.

Cyber-security experts knew Stuxnet wasn’t ordinary malware thrown together by some basement hacker. This was something different.

A tale of pasta and Satan

When I was still in High School my maternal grandmother had a stroke. And while I was busy dealing with my jobs, and school, I was a tad divorced from the on-going strife and adventures with my grandmother. Which apparently was rather lively. She being a feisty old gal…

Well, my grandmother lived in a suburb of Pittsburgh, PA. And the word was out that a local spaghetti factory and warehouse was going out of business, and they were liquidating all their stock.

Seeing opportunity, my mother and my two aunties went to the warehouse and bought up an entire van of spaghetti. Perhaps a five years supply for all three families. No precise figure can be bantered about, but it was a van full of poxes of pasta. And all three paid some “hard earned cash” to stock up with.

Being so located in the city, after driving and getting the various types of pasta, they then drove to my grandmothers house.

There, they unloaded all the boxes of spaghetti, pasta, and various types of pasta into the living room, and then went off to the mall for some shopping and lunch. It was still early in the morning. Maybe 10am.

They returned back after eating dinner.

It was around 8pm.

They had been gone almost the entire day. And were not paying attention to the state of my grandmother, or what she might think of a living room filled with boxes of spaghetti and assorted pasta.

And when they went to my grandmothers’ house was sight to behold.

My grandmother (now, stroke impaired) had been busy all day cooking up the pasta. All 3 x 5 years worth. There was pasta everywhere in every pot and pan in the house, and then when she ran out, she used laundry baskets, and plastic garbage cans to hold the rest.

As well as old shoe boxes, and every plate and bowl in the house.

Obviously my mother and aunties were all disgusted, and didn’t say a word. In fact, they all refused to talk about the event. When we would bring it up, she would get a very ugly expression on her face and just turn away. It must have been painful for her.

However…

Us High School kids thought it was hilarious. But, perhaps we shouldn’t of. I’m sure that there are lessons abound for everyone to take heed of here.

I suppose.

First up today…

Can most Chinese families afford watermelons?

Oh, very funny question.

Before I answer it, may I know the reason you post this question? Is the watermelon every expensive in your country?

From my past 30 year life, watermelon is never a expensive fruit in China. I thought it is cheap in every countries.

The fact is, watermelon is a kind of fodder in China.

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main qimg e97e582081eaefd7d44a6a2387c15bd1

I am not kidding.

How bad is it to live in China?

How bad is living in China ?

It is really bad :

Because I have some grey hair I am treated in the same embarrassing way every time I get on a city bus or on the subway …… younger people get up and offer me a seat.

Recently I had problems with a tooth. One morning I went to one of the dental hospitals. They did xrays and preformed a root canal in a 2 hours. It cost me 1/6th of the price of a root canal I had done 30 years ago in North America. Just terrible prices.

I am invited out to eat or to go to some celebration a few times a month. I never have to pay for the meal, while I am offered beer and cigarettes. I do not smoke so I decline the cigarettes but accept free beer.

Oh how terrible to invited out by the locals constantly. I have been to at least 25 weddings, more then dozen birthdays and half a dozen 100-day celebrations for babies.

There are 100+ channels on the TV, with a few in English as some western movies. The nightly news reports on all the major news around the world. I have internet access 24/7 and spent way too much time browsing the internet from Europe to North America. It is a terrible way to waste time.

I often visit my daughter who works 300km away in another Province. Being so far away, I am forced to take the train which takes 1hr 30 minutes to make the trip with 2 or 3 stops along the route. I could drive my car but that would make for a much longer trip.

The really bad thing in China is access to food.

  • We have 2 farmers markets within 2 city blocks. These are markets where the farmers come into the city around 6-7 am every morning to sell that days fresh crop of fruit vegetables and meat.
  • This in addition to 2 grocery stores and a Walmart in the area.
  • Then on my small city block, we have 14 restaurants, open 7 days a week.
  • There are even the evil food chains – KFC, McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Starbucks, plus all the Chinese ones etc
  • We have the French Carrefour and Auchan super stores and the Germany’s Metro cash & carry stores.
  • Worst of all, we have these applications on our smartphones (80% of folks own a smartphone). Where we can see menus of hundreds of restaurants in our area, order food and they deliver it to your door usually within 30 minutes.

If we need to go to the bank, we can not go 365 days of the year. There are about a dozen days a year when the banks are closed.

Schools are much more demanding on students compared to North America, with homework every night.

  • However they do get a month off in summer.
  • My daughters students spend some of their summer travelling. The US and Europe for some, others within China or to nearby places like South Korea or Thailand.

So far no one has noticed any difference due to the Trump Tariffs, but according to western media China is under some sort tremendous pressure. Or maybe there were talking about the tropical storm? In either case it was a lot of wind.

That is how bad it is living in China.

Please have pity on our oppression, as we say in my group of expats who live in China as well, some for over 20 years.

Of course we live a large city. The situation differs in rural areas as it does in most countries.

Russia Jamming U.S.-Supplied “HIMARS” in Ukraine

World Hal Turner 05 July 2023

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2023 07 06 17 05
Russia Jamming U.S.-Supplied "HIMARS" in Ukraine

Russia has found a way to interfere with GPS-guided artillery rounds, including munitions for US-made HIMARS multiple rocket launchers, Defense Minister of Ukraine Aleksey Reznikov has claimed.

When those systems first arrived on Ukrainian battlefields last year they were “highly accurate,” Reznikov recalled, in an interview with the Financial Times on Wednesday.

However, Russia, which has strong radio-electronic systems, eventually found a way to jam GPS-guided artillery and HIMARS projectiles, he acknowledged.

“It’s like a constant pendulum. This is a war of technology,” the minister said, describing the ongoing conflict between Kiev and Moscow.

“The Russians come up with a countermeasure, we inform our partners and they make a new countermeasure against this countermeasure,” he explained.

Reznikov reiterated Kiev’s earlier claim that “for the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground” than Ukraine.

Kiev’s Western backers “can actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded”, he said.

Ukraine has been supplied with several dozen High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS), which have a range of 85 kilometers (53 miles), by its foreign backer since June last year. Western outlets described the system as a game-changer in the conflict.

In May, CNN reported, citing five sources from the US, Britain and Ukraine, that the US-designed multiple rocket launchers had been rendered “increasingly less effective” from the intensive blocking by the Russian forces. The electronic jammers throw off the GPS-guided targeting system of HIMARS rockets to cause them to miss their targets, the channel said.

Throughout the conflict, the Russian Defense Ministry reported destroying dozens of HIMARS systems through the use of kamikaze drones and artillery fire. However, these claims have been disputed by Kiev and Washington. 

Now, there is no dispute. Russia can — and is — jamming HIMARS systems.  

A Metal Container

A metal container from Roman times, believed to be around 2,000 years old, was found to contain a face cream with distinct ancient finger marks. The cream was analyzed and found to be a mixture of refined animal fat, starch, and tin. To recreate the cream, researchers followed the same recipe and applied it to their skin, resulting in a white layer with a smooth powdery texture. This texture was achieved by the starch, which is still used in modern cosmetics for this purpose.

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main qimg 8323df3450de5c3fc7bc3b4b596a2e1a

Professor Richard Evershed from Bristol University explained that in Roman times, white face paint was trendy and typically obtained its color from a lead compound. However, a tin compound could serve as an acceptable substitute, and since it was abundant in Cornwall, it would have been readily available.

Lead was widely used in ancient Rome and could be found in various items such as cups, plates, coins, pipes, cosmetics, face powder, paints, food seasoning, and even birth control. Surprisingly, research has revealed that tap water in ancient Rome had up to 100 times more lead than local spring water. Some historians speculate that lead poisoning might have contributed to the decline of the Roman Empire.

Finally, Satan Has an Instagram Account, And It’s Funny as Hell

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We have compiled a list of the funniest Instagram posts from the Dark Lord himself who posts cheeky, biting one liners. Scroll down to check them out don’t forget to follow him on Instagram (not in real life).

More: Instagram

Why has no video of forced cotton pickers labour in Xinjiang been leaked?

They have been leaked, here are some of the photos from there. This is how they are forced to pick cotton in China isn’t it bloody awful?

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Making those slaves drive those big horrible machines, there should be a law against it, we should report it to amnesty international.

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main qimg b1a831995049a48d2e0d0501e4cdb98d

This is disgraceful, why are they not allowed to pick the cotton by hand?

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Like the USA says they should?

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Flight 235

An engine flame-out caused a domestic flight in Taiwan to topple in midair, then crash into the Keelung River in front of hundreds of eyewitnesses. 43 of the 58 people on board lost their lives. These are some of the frames from a dash cam video showing moments before it crashed.

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main qimg 655974effe5b2ea7f629b00391a856ec

Burgers with Cream Cheese and
Sun-dried Tomato Filling

Say goodbye to boring cheeseburgers. These patties contain a hidden mixture of cream cheese and sun-dried tomatoes. Flavorful, moist and exploding with a delicious surprise.

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2023 07 06 16 52

Yield: 6 servings

Ingredients

  • 1 (8 ounce) package Challenge Cream Cheese, softened
  • 1/4 cup chopped (1/4 inch) sun-dried tomatoes (not in oil)
  • 1/2 teaspoon garlic salt
  • 2 pounds lean ground beef (less than 12% fat)
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 3/4 teaspoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 6 Kaiser or hamburger rolls
  • Lettuce, onion slices (optional)

Instructions

  1. Thoroughly combine cream cheese, sun-dried tomato, and garlic salt in small bowl. Set aside.
  2. In a large bowl, mix ground beef with salt and Worcestershire sauce.
  3. Divide meat into 12 equal portions (about 1/3 cup each) and flatten portions into 4 1/2 inch round patties.
  4. Place 2 tablespoons of filling on 6 of the patties and spread to within 1/2 inch of the edge.
  5. Cover with remaining 6 patties and pinch the edges closed.
  6. Grill or broil patties.
  7. Serve on rolls with optional lettuce and onions.

Tiger kills 20-year-old in Delhi zoo ..

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In Sept. 2014, a mentally ill visitor at Delhi’s National Zoological Park jumped into a tiger enclosure. A white tiger attacked him for 15 minutes, leading to his unfortunate demise. Despite attempts to stop the tiger, the man’s screams echoed throughout the park.

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2023 07 05 18 34

Is nuclear war with Russia IMMINENT?

Logging

The giant sequoia tree pictured was a magnificent specimen that had an estimated age of 2600 years at the time of its unfortunate felling in the 1890s. Giant sequoias (scientifically known as Sequoiadendron giganteum) are among the largest and longest-living trees on Earth, and their existence spans several millennia. They are native to the western slopes of the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California, USA.

During the late 19th century, the logging industry experienced a significant boom in the United States, driven by the high demand for timber to support expanding cities and infrastructure projects. This period coincided with the industrial revolution, which led to an increased need for lumber. The immense size and durability of giant sequoias made them particularly sought after, and sadly, many of these ancient trees were felled during this time.

The cutting down of the 2600-year-old giant sequoia tree in the 1890s represents a tragic loss of natural heritage and a poignant reminder of the environmental impact caused by human activities. Today, there are efforts to protect and preserve the remaining giant sequoias, as they hold immense ecological value and are regarded as national treasures in the United States.

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main qimg d9e8055c93f3845fea34b6c1a1addf6b

“It’s a Bag of Lies”- Brace Yourself for the Unthinkable | Gregory Mannarino

China takes a HARD stance

  • EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs Josep Borrell was due to visit China next week for talks with Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang.
  • But Beijing called off the visit without providing specific reason.
  • U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen is due to visit Beijing on Thursday.
  • On Monday, China announced new export restrictions on two metals key to the manufacturing of semiconductors and electronics.

Beijing No longer want to waste time on unfriendly crusader who talks tough before visiting China.

Article HERE

What Are They Hiding Underneath? The Truth about the Denver International Airport Conspiracy

Survival

On November 17, 2012, José Salvador Alvarenga, a Salvadoran fisherman, embarked on a two-day fishing expedition into the Pacific Ocean from a small fishing village in Mexico.

Accompanying José was Ezequiel Córdoba, a 22-year-old day worker who tragically did not make it back to shore when their ship set sail.

During their journey, the two men encountered a powerful storm that left them incapacitated. Their boat’s engine failed, and lacking paddles and sufficient food supplies, they faced a dire situation.

For a staggering 14 months, their boat aimlessly drifted across the Pacific Ocean. Tragically, Ezekiel succumbed to starvation after just four months into the journey.

José, determined to survive, resorted to consuming anything he could catch using the only tool he possessed—a knife. His desperate diet included raw fish, turtles, small sharks, and sea birds.

In his struggle to stay hydrated, José resorted to extreme measures. He resorted to drinking turtle blood and even his own urine to sustain himself.

It wasn’t until January 30, 2014, that José was discovered naked on Marshall Island, clutching only a knife in his hand.

Throughout his harrowing ordeal, he had drifted for an astounding 438 days, covering a distance of over 10,000 kilometers. To put this into perspective, the Earth’s diameter measures 12,742 kilometers.

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Medvedev: “Any war can be ended quickly . . . using Nuclear Weapons”

World Hal Turner 05 July 2023

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Medvedev: "Any war can be ended quickly . . . using Nuclear Weapons"

Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Federation Council (Senate) said today “Any war can be ended quickly, either with a peace treaty or by doing what the United States did in Hiroshima, using nuclear weapons.”

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2023 07 06 17 07

More as it becomes available

Funny

There is a black humor piece from Chinese:

When you have 1 nuke, you are a force of terror that must be eliminated at all cost.

When you have 10 nukes, you are dangerous rogue that must be dealt with carefully.

When you have 100 nukes, you are an important and responsibly nation guaranteeing regional peace and stability.

When you have 1000 nukes, you are the cornerstone of world peace and prosperity.

France under attack

The pawns are fighting in the streets of France, but the war is between France and the Anglo-American Empire.

By Alex Krainer [originally published on Trend Compass]

The government of French President Emmanuel Macron is under attack by the Anglo-American imperial establishment. The civil unrest that erupted across the nation was triggered by the 27 June 2023 Police killing of the 17-year old Nahel Merzouk (NM) in the Paris suburb of Nanterre. NM was driving a car without a driving license, failed to comply with police orders and for that he was shot point blank by two officers in full riot gear. NM was of Algerian origin. The next day, riots broke out in many cities across France: Paris, Marseille, Lille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Grenoble and also Brussels in Belgium. Some areas were left looking like war zones.

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2023 07 06 19 26

In fact, some of the riots did resemble low-intensity warfare. According to some reports, US weapons donated to Ukraine have found their way through black markets to the streets of French cities and into the hands of the protesters who used them in coordinated attacks on police and firefighters. Just on the night of Jun 30/July 1, 41 police stations were attacked, 79 police officers injured, 2560 fires were set in the streets, 1360 cars and 234 buildings were burnt. The government deployed 45,000 police and gendarmes to bring the situation under control, but thus far, the rioting has continued with great intensity for five straight days, threatening to destabilize the nation.

President Emmanuel Macron is under increasing pressure, not only from the rioters and the opposition, but more ominously, also from his own Police forces and the military. Police Unions of France wrote to Macron threatening to revolt: “Today the police are in combat as we are at war. Tomorrow we will be in the resistance and the government should be aware of this.” Certain military circles appear ready to turn against Macron. General Pierre Villiers, who is apparently well respected among the French military commanders said that the army should be loyal to the people, not to Emmanuel Macron.

Nothing is what it seems…

So far, the events may seem straightforward to understand at the levels of pawns opposed to one another in the streets of French cities: the abusive government of President Macron and its security apparatus is under attack by the people whose legitimate grievances went past the boiling point. From there, it’s easy to assume that Macron’s government even instigated the riots deliberately in order to crack down and tyrannize the people according to their plan. Heck, Macron is the Rothschilds’ errand boy and a loyal World Economic Forum young leader.

You’re either with us, or you’re against us.

All of that sounds plausible, but there’s a far broader context to this story. The present crisis draws root from the very strained relationship between French ruling elites and the Anglo-American imperial establishment, which spans centuries. A more thorough analysis of this relationship could fill many volumes but for now we’ll focus on just the more recent developments. In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terror attacks in the US, President George W. Bush announced to the world that, “you are either with us, or you are against us.” He wasn’t just saying words: the empire was preparing to cement the unipolar global order, eliminate its rivals, establish full-spectrum dominance and launch its Project For The New American Century.

France has never accepted the role of a junior partner or unquestioning ally, let alone a vassal to the Anglo-American Empire. It has continued to be a pain in its side at critical junctures. Here are a few examples of the last two decades’ spats between the two sides:

2003: French opposition to US invasion of Iraq

In late 2002 and early 2003, the Administration of George W. Bush was working feverishly to secure its allies’ support for an invasion of Iraq. In February 2002, US State Secretary Colin Powell waved a vial of white powder at the UN Security Council, accusing Iraqi President Saddam Hussein of possessing biological weapons of mass destruction. French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin wasn’t impressed. In a searing speech he poured cold water on US case for war and called out Powell’s performance as dubious and unconvincing. A few weeks later, on 10 March 2003 President Jacques Chirac made it clear that France would vote against any UN Resolution authorizing US attack on Iraq. In this, France would vote on the side of Russia and China (talk about foreshadowing).

2008: France opposes Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO

One of the most important projects of the Anglo-American empire over the past three decades has been to encircle Russia by absorbing all of her neighbors to the west and southwest into the NATO alliance. In several waves of eastward extensions, NATO added 14 new member states, moving more than 1,600 km toward Russia. Ukraine and Georgia were next: at the April 2008 NATO Summit in Bucharest, the alliance proclaimed the Bucharest Memorandum. Referencing Ukraine and Georgia, they explicitly declared that, “We agreed today that these countries will become members of NATO.” While not yet a full-fledged member of the alliance’s integrated command, France was openly opposed to the resolution on the grounds that it would exacerbate the risk of war with Russia.

2019: Emmanuel Macron calls NATO a ‘brain-dead’ alliance

In an interview with The Economist in October 2019 titled, “Emmanuel Macron warns Europe: NATO is becoming brain-dead,” French President warned European countries they can no longer rely on US-dominated military alliance (note, by now France was a full-fledged NATO member): “What we are currently experiencing is the brain death of NATO,” and declared that Europe needed to “wake up,” as it stood on “the edge of a precipice” and needed to start thinking of itself strategically as a geopolitical power, otherwise as Europeans, we’ll “no longer be in control of our destiny.” Worse, when asked whether he believed in the effectiveness of Article Five which provides that if one NATO member is attacked all would mobilize to defend it, Macron gave a convoluted, cryptic reply: “I don’t know, … what will Article Five mean tomorrow?”

But President Macron and his government would become still more problematic for the Anglo-American cabal with the escalation of conflict in Ukraine. Of all European leaders, Macron has spent the most time visiting with or speaking on the phone with his Russian counterpart; he sought to improve relations between Russia and France and he tried to influence other European nations to chart a more independent policy on the continent.

2022: Macron says Russia has legitimate security concerns

In an interview that aired on Saturday, 3 Dec. 2022 Macron urged the West to take seriously Russia’s security concerns regarding NATO expansion near its border. He called for greater willingness to give Moscow the “guarantees” necessary for negotiations to be successful. He called them ‘essential’ if the West wants to get serious about talks and peaceful settlement. “We need to prepare what we are ready to do, how we protect our allies and member states, and how to give guarantees to Russia the day it returns to the negotiating table.” Macron added that, “One of the essential points we must address — as President Putin has always said — is the fear that NATO comes right up to its doors, and the deployment of weapons that could threaten Russia.” These comments elicited rage and disbelief among the Anglo-American allies and western media who accused the French President of being a pro-Kremlin stooge.

April 2023: Macron visits China, flirts with BRICS nations

Emmanuel Macron provoked even more rage and disbelief after his three day high-profile, red-carpet visit to China, from 6 through 8 April 2023. Western “national security experts” were so alarmed by this visit, they called the event “one of the greatest blunders by a major European power since the end of the Cold war…” Indeed, it was a slap in the face to the Anglo-American establishment.

On 7 April 2023 President Macron visited the Sun Yat-Sen University in South China’s Guangdong Province where he received an enthusiastic welcome. He delivered a speech on China-France ties and took questions from the students. There may have been a subtle message in the very venue chosen by his hosts. Sun Yat-Sen was a vocal critic of the British Imperial system and their foreign policy. In his book, “The Vital Problem of China,” Sun Yat-Sen wrote that,

“When England befriends another country, the purpose is not to maintain a cordial friendship for the sake of friendship but to utilize that country as a tool to fight a third country. When an enemy has been shorn of his power, he is turned into a friend, and the friend who has become strong, into an enemy. England always remains in a commanding position; she makes other countries fight her wars and she herself reaps the fruits of victory. She has been doing so for hundreds of years.”

[h/t Cynthia Chung for highlighting this passage]

We shouldn’t be America’s vassals

Speaking to journalists on the return flight from Beijing, Macron said that, “Europe must resist pressure to become America’s followers…” that the “great risk” Europe faces is getting “caught up in crises that are not ours, which prevents it from building its own autonomy,” and that, “Europe had increased its dependence on US for weapons and energy and must focus on boosting its defense industries.” In referring to Ukraine, Macron said that it was, “a faraway country of which we know nothing…” But even this wasn’t as unforgivable as his swipe at the “extraterritoriality of the US dollar.”

While in China, Macron signed many deals expanding bilateral trade between France and China, many of which will be denominated in Chinese yuan. Already before Macron’s visit, in March 2023 French companies began to strike such deals, the first of which was the purchase of 65,000 metric tons of liquid natural gas settled in yuan. French leadership’s willingness to craft their own bilateral relations with Anglo-American Empire’s chief rival and bypassing the US dollar is simply unforgivable. But Macron would soon go farther: according to the newspaper L’Opinion, during last month’s telephone conversation, French President asked his South African counterpart, Cyril Ramaphosa to extend him an invitation to participate in the 15th BRICS Summit planned to be held in South Africa in late July/early August.

It’s about the two systems of governance…

It is important to keep in mind the broadest context of the current global conflict. As George Soros laid it out in his annual address to the World Economic Forum in May 2021, it is the conflict between the two systems of governance. Soros mischaracterized them as “open societies” and “closed societies.” In reality, we’re witnessing the conflict between the western imperial colonial system and pretty much the whole rest of humanity.

The imperial system governance is controlled by the western occult oligarchy which, while it gives lip-service to the rule of law, freedom, democracy and human rights, in reality it consistently sows mayhem abroad and misery at home. Truth be told, the French ruling elites have also enjoyed the massive privileges of this system for centuries. However, they never accepted subservience to the Anglo-American establishment and always sought to plunder and exploit its colonies on their own terms.

Ukraine is some faraway place to you?

We don’t know yet whether France will indeed be invited to the upcoming BRICS Summit, but in the world where not being “with us” equals being “against us,” the Empire simply can’t tolerate the uppity independence of France. You think our military alliance is brain-dead? You don’t want to be our vassal? You dare to strike trade deals with China and trade in yuan? You want to seek peace with Russia? And Ukraine is some faraway place to you? Clearly, this is unacceptable and the Anglo-American establishment has had enough of France’s insubordination. It was time to teach France a lesson and bring her into line with the Anglo-American agenda.

AUKUS alliance: a stab in the back to France

The most recent sign of the Anglo-American cabal’s contempt for the French was the 2021 announcement of the AUKUS alliance between the US, UK and Australia. In 2016, France made a deal with Australia to supply 12 conventional submarines for her navy. The deal was worth $37 billion – a very substantial amount by any measure. French diplomacy celebrated it as the “contract of the century,” important not only for its sheer size and the strengthening of France’s relationship with Australia but also in terms of securing French strategic influence in the Indo-Pacific region.

But then, on Wednesday, 15 Sep. 2021 US President Joe Biden, UK PM Boris Johnson, and “that fellow down under,” as Biden addressed Australia’s then PM Scott Morrison, announced a “historic” security alliance between the US, Britain and Australia. Part of the deal included US and UK providing Australia with nuclear submarines and a significant transfer of US military technology.

With no prior consultations or warning, Britain, Australia and the US, otherwise well known for the high value they place on sanctity of contract, simply sidelined France, tore up her contract with Australia and threw French interests overboard provoking indignation and anger in France. French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian referred to the AUKUS announcement as evidence of duplicitytreachery, and a stab in the back to France from her supposed allies and partners.

France recalled its ambassadors to the United States and Australia and Le Drian stated that there was now a crisis of trust with the US. EU Council’s President Charles Michel also strongly criticized the AUKUS announcement, accusing the Anglo-American club of leaving Europe “out of the game in the Indo-Pacific region.” This was not the first massive humiliation dished out to France from the same “friendly” Anglo-American circles.

Haiti’s reparations: how the US punished France’s opposition to Iraq invasion

American diplomacy and secret services found it easy to punish France’s opposition to the Iraq invasion and the embarrassment that France’s Foreign Minister Dominic De Villepin inflicted on the US delegation in the UN Security Council in February of 2003.

Jean Bertrand Aristide had first become Haiti’s president in 1991, but was deposed in a military coup after less than eight months in office. He spent years in exile in the US before coming back to power again in 2000 elections, with the help of the US. His US liaison was the diplomat and CIA agent Luis Moreno. On 7 April 2003 Aristide suddenly started calling for colonial-era reparations from France (note, this was 18 days after the start of the US invasion of Iraq). The precise amount that Aristide was demanding was $21,685,135,571.48 – that sum represented the lower-end of the scale of estimated damage inflicted on Haiti by France.

Formerly known as Saint Domingue, Haiti was a French colony, supplying sugar, coffee and tobacco to much of Europe. It was a boon to French merchants, slave owners and financiers. But in 1791 Haiti’s slaves staged a successful rebellion and won their freedom. In 1801, when Napoleon sent a large armada to subjugate them again, they defeated his troops and in 1804 Haiti’s leaders declared independence.

But France wasn’t ready to give up Haiti. King Charles X sent another armada in 1825 offering to recognize Haiti’s independence, provided that Haiti’s government agreed to pay an extortionate tribute in the amount of 150 million gold Francs. How much money was that? In 1803, France agreed to sell the Louisiana territory to the United States for 80 million Francs – an area that was 77 times larger than Haiti. But Haiti’s choice was simple: pay up, or it’s war!

The French would have been able to impose a naval blockade on Haiti and entirely cut them off from global trade and payment systems. Haitians had no choice but to submit to French ultimatum. To pay the ransom, Haiti was forced to borrow the sums from French bankers and pay back the loans plus interest from the proceeds of their commodity exports. Incidentally, this was the beginning of the new model of colonialism based on financial debts rather than military occupation. That, essentially is the imperial model of governance plaguing humanity to this day.

Haiti’s tragic experience was the only time in history when freed slaves had to pay restitution to their former masters and borrow funds from them to meet the ransom payments. This is why Haiti’s humiliation was called the Double Debt: it took Haitians over 130 years to pay it back and doomed the nation to chronic austerity, underdevelopment and crushing poverty.

It also made Aristide’s demand for restitution legitimate and an absolute bombshell for France. His campaign grew bolder over time with banners, bumper-stickers, government adds and graffiti spread all around the country. Not only was Aristide demanding a very substantial amount of money from France in reparations, he also encouraged other former colonies to join his fight and demand their own reparations from France.

French government was stumped with this development which their Ambassador to Haiti Mr. Yves Gaudeul called explosive. He urged his government to open discussions with Haiti to diffuse the situation, but he was firmly rejected. Instead, France recalled Gaudeul and sent a less sympathetic Ambassador to Haiti, Mr. Thierry Burkard, who explained the situation in stark terms: “Algeria can perfectly make claims, as well as most of our colonies… There’s no end to it. It would have set a precedent that we would have been greatly blamed for.”

Thankfully for France, the problem disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared. Before dawn on 29 February 2004 Luis Moreno, that same US “diplomat” who helped bring Aristide to power in 2000, came to his residence flanked with security officials and demanded Aristide’s resignation. Mr. and Mrs. Aristide were simply abducted and flown out of the country on a US-chartered plane back into exile. Haiti’s new, western-backed leader, Gerard Latortue dropped the restitution demands and the whole messy affair was closed.

Even though Jean Bertrand Aristide had been in power since the beginning of 2001, his calls for reparations came more than two years later, seemingly out of nowhere, but soon after France’s snub to the US over the Iraq invasion. Aristide demanded reparations from France, but never from the United States which had occupied it, or held it in debt bondage since 1915, subjecting it to equally rapacious exploitation.

Even before military occupation, in December 1914, US Marines landed in Haiti’s capital, Port-Au-Prince, broke into Haiti’s National Bank and simply took some $500,000 worth of gold belonging to Haiti’s government. Within days, Haiti’s gold was in the vaults of New York banks. Still, Aristide apparently made no precise calculation of damages inflicted on Haiti by the United States.

Furthermore, in an email exchange between Aristide’s government legal counsel Ira Kurzban, and their international law advisor Gunther Handl, the latter advised Kurzban that “Haiti must convey to France,” that there are suitable opportunities “for washing France’s dirty laundry in public.” It’s almost as though the affair was about pressuring and embarrassing France rather than securing justice for Haiti.

That notion is confirmed by the simple fact that France’s problem disappeared only after US agents removed Aristide from power, rather than after earnest negotiations with Haiti’s representatives and France’s acceptance of some obligation to Haiti. This fact alone suggests that France yielded to the United States in some backroom deal, not to Haiti. Perhaps France dropped its challenge to the New American Century and its full-spectrum dominance, and pledged her allegiance to the hegemon.

In 1966 under President Charles de Gaulle, France removed all her troops from NATO’s integrated military command and asked all non-French NATO troops to leave France. In 2009, only a few years after the Haiti affair (plus the destabilizing 2005 riots for a good measure), France once more became a full-fledged member of the North Atlantic alliance. But everyone did not live happily ever after and the relations with France remained difficult.

The Damocles’ sword of France’s colonial past

The Damocles’ sword of France’s ugly colonial past (though no more ugly than that of Spain, Belgium, Portugal, Great Britain or Germany), was brought up again in November 2022 when Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appeared on Italian channel 7 airing some of France’s particularly ugly-looking colonial dirty laundry. She showed the Italian public two exhibits: a CFA Franc banknote and a photo of a child working in a gold mine in Burkina Faso: “This is called the CFA franc. It is the colonial currency that France prints for 14 African nations, to which it applies seigniorage and by virtue of which it exploits the resources of these nations…

Meloni claimed that thanks to the CFA Franc, 50% of everything that Burkina Faso exports ends up in the French treasury. In addition to being the Prime Minister of Italy, Meloni is also a member of the powerful Aspen Institute. Headquartered in Washington, D. C., the institute is funded by some of the most powerful exponents of the Anglo-American establishment including the Gates Foundation, Ford Foundation, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Carnegie Corporation and Lumina Foundation and Meloni might be doing their bidding in antagonizing France.

In another jab at embarrassing France, in May 2022, the New York Times published a 19,000-words long special report about the French colonial abuse of Haiti. Titled, “The Ransom: How a French Bank Captured Haiti,” the report reads almost as though it was the French who invented slavery and colonialism.

Preannouncing the attack on France

The most bizarre element that suggests that the current uprising in France is a planned destabilization attack by the Anglo American imperial cabal is the fact that it may have been preannounced in what appears to be their habitual modus operandi. Last month I had the privilege of participating in the Better Way Conference in Bath, organized by the World Council for Health. One of the speakers on my panel was Mr. Mark Devlin (@DJMarkDevlin) a DJ who made it his challenge to study how the ruling establishment use popular culture and entertainment to disseminate propaganda and manipulate the masses.

One thing he picked up on is that they invariably preannounce their plans to the public through popular films and TV series. Mr. Devlin claimed there are literally hundreds of examples of this, and he shared one with us: a short clip from the American TV show, The Dead Zone which aired in 2005. The plot involved a Coronavirus contagion. The virus originated from China and caused high fever and respiratory infections, necessitated lockdowns, quarantines, wearing of masks, tracking and tracing of contacts, etc.

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The clip was profoundly disturbing to see, but it suggested that Devlin was onto something important. As it happens, the case of riots in France also corroborates his hypothesis. Namely, in 2022 Netflix launched a film titled “Athena” about a future ethnic civil war in France, which would erupt after the police killing of an Algerian youth. On 27 Jun 2023, French police killed an Algerian youth.

Seeking justice for Nahel by attacking Chinese tourists?

Another detail about the riots could have symbolic relevance: namely, Reuters reported that Chinese tourists were injured when rioters attacked a bus carrying a Chinese tour group in Marseille. The attack, which took place on Thursday, 29 June 2023 again reveals the cabal’s modus operandi. Recall, when the US and NATO bombed Belgrade in 1999, five U.S. Joint Direct Attack Munition guided bombs hit the Chinese embassy, killing three Chinese state media journalists. One bomb might have gone astray and hit the embassy by accident, but five bombs were a message, as was (probably) last Thursday’s attack on Chinese tourists. It would be difficult to explain why rioters who had grievances against the French government and demanded Justice for the young Nahel Merzouk, thought they’d obtain that justice in attacking the Chinese.

What now?

Should we regard Emmanuel Macron and his government as the good guys in this saga? Will they be able to pacify the situation, or will it escalate? For my part, I’ve never been even slightly fond of Emmanuel Macron, but I believe that today France’s sovereignty is at stake, and it was Macron who invited Anglo-American cabal’s wrath. If France fights back, things will get ugly. Yes, they’ll have to crack down and yes, western media will accuse them of all the standard faults of tyranny, repression, intolerance and censorship.

If France capitulates, things will get uglier still and uglier for longer. But to defend France, the government of Emmanuel Macron will have to try to bring together all of France and this could prove their toughest challenge. Macron represents the French elites which do have much to answer to – not only to their colonial subjects but also to the French people whose country has been stolen from under them (though Macron is not the only one to blame for this).

In 1996, when I moved to Monaco, I recall that for several years in a row, France was winning the top spot as the country with the highest quality of life (I believe the quality of life surveys were conducted by Conde Nast or some such publication). Over the last 25 years however, quality of life in France has deteriorated precipitously. If France is to survive and lead Europe once more, the elites backing Macron will have to reconcile and make nice with the people.

With regards to her colonial past, France will at the very least need to set up a truth and reconciliation commission and offer an earnest apology and a helping hand to its former colonies to rise and develop as equal trading partners rather than simply territories to strip mine of their resources and subjugate in a cold and inhumane fashion.

The world should consider offering a helping hand to France, because with the present struggle, a very large opportunity has presented itself to humanity: to defeat the imperialistic system of governance that’s caused the unspeakable tragedies of our colonial past and its most powerful beneficiaries, the Anglo-American imperial establishment. If they succeed at taming France and making her their vassal, they will grow stronger.

If France prevails and joins humanity, the multipolar integrations and the other model of governance, the imperial cabal will suffer a crushing blow. I know where 99.9% of us stand and for my part, I would love to see Emmanuel Macron in South Africa at the end of this month, for once listening and earnestly seeking partnership and reconciliation with the world and securing France’s place as an equal in a new community of nations.

The Mistake That Got So Many CIA Agents Killed in China🎙Darknet Diaries Ep. 75: Compromised Comms

A Letter

On the morning of May 19th, 1902, a huge explosion ripped through Fraterville Coal Mine in Tennessee, its devastating power instantly killing most of the 216 miners who were below ground.

For the 26 who survived the initial blast, a side passage of the mine proved to be a safe haven, but not for long—when rescuers eventually reached them, all had suffocated.

Found next to a number of the those 26 bodies were letters to loved ones, one of which can be seen below.

It was written by Jacob Vowell to Sarah Ellen, his beloved wife and mother to their 6 children, one of whom, 14-year-old Elbert, was by his side in the mine. (“Little Eddie” was a son they had lost previously.)

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All but three of Fraterville’s adult men were killed that day; over a hundred women were instantly widowed; close to a thousand children lost their fathers. The Fraterville Mine disaster remains the worst of its kind in Tennessee’s history.

Last photo of the survivors of HMAS Armidale

Last photo of the survivors of HMAS Armidale, which was sunk on 1 December 1942 after being attacked by a Japanese aircraft. This photo was taken from a Catalina flying boat on the 8th but was unable to land due to rough seas. The men in the raft would never be seen again.

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The Western Societies…

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2023 07 05 17 53

Why you have “child-proof” caps on medicine bottles

On September 12, 1982, a 12-year-old girl named Mary Kellerman fell ill and was admitted to the hospital after ingesting a Tylenol capsule, a popular brand of acetaminophen. Tragically, she passed away the following day.

Around two weeks later, six more deaths occurred, including three individuals from the same family who had taken the painkiller from the same bottle.

Wednesday, September 29, 1982 was a school day, but 12-year-old Mary Kellerman woke up with a runny nose and a headache. So her parents told her to stay home, take a couple of Tylenol and get some rest.

“I heard her go into the bathroom. I heard the door close. Then I heard something drop,” recalled Dennis Kellerman, Mary’s dad. “I went to the bathroom door. I called, ‘Mary, are you OK?’ There was no answer. I called again: ‘Mary, are you OK?’ There was still no answer. So I opened the bathroom door, and my little girl was on the floor unconscious. She was still in her pajamas.”

Mary was pronounced dead at the hospital from unknown causes.

A few hours later, in a nearby suburb of Chicago, a 27-year-old postal worker named Adam Janus had also taken a sick day. After lunch, he complained to his wife about a headache and took two Extra-Strength Tylenol. Like Mary, Adam collapsed on the floor almost instantly and couldn’t be resuscitated. The paramedics ruled it a massive heart attack.

Adam Janus’s relatives rushed to the house to console his grieving wife. Overcome by Adam’s sudden passing, his younger brother and sister-in-law asked for some Tylenol. They were the next to die.

All told, seven people in the Chicago area died suddenly and mysteriously on September 29 and 30, 1982. One was a mother of four, including a week-old infant. Another, a healthy, 31-year-old, crumpled to the floor at work. The last victim, a flight attendant, was found dead in her apartment three days later, an open bottle of Tylenol still on the bathroom counter.

Investigators and toxicologists quickly identified the culprit: tampered capsules of Extra-Strength Tylenol. Someone had opened the capsules and replaced the pain-relieving medicine with deadly doses of potassium cyanide. One of the most common over-the-counter pain relievers had been turned into a murder weapon.

The 1982 Tylenol murders rocked the nation. The seven deaths were the top story in every major newspaper on October 1, the official start of the Halloween season, and the “Tylenol Terrorist,” as the media dubbed him, was still on the loose.

For decades, Americans had been told scary tales of Halloween treats supposedly spiked with razor blades and rat poison, but the Tylenol murders ratcheted up the anxiety around treat-or-treating to new levels, prompting cities and towns across the country to cancel Halloween.

The official response to the Tylenol murders was swift.

The manufacturer of Tylenol, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson called McNeil Consumer Products, initiated the largest consumer product recall in American history, ordering pharmacies and grocery stores to pull 31 million bottles of Extra-Strength Tylenol from their shelves. Several more bottles in the Chicago area were found to contain cyanide, but thankfully no one else was hurt.

The federal government also swept into action. Congress passed the Federal Anti-Tampering Act, which promised up to 20 years in jail for anyone found tampering with medications, food or other consumer goods. And the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) passed new regulations requiring drugmakers to package medications like Tylenol in new, tamper-proof bottles. (“Child-resistant” caps had been around since 1970.)

“[The 1982 Tylenol poisonings] was one of those pivotal moments,” says Dr. Alan Woolf, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hospital and a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School. “Forty years later, we take it for granted that bottles of over-the-counter medicine are shrink-wrapped in plastic and there’s a piece of foil that you need to peel back. Those tragic killings changed the pharmaceutical industry and changed federal labeling laws.”

The Johnson & Johnson lost so much… The company’s chair at the time, James E. Burke, abided by corporate responsibility and made the difficult and expensive decision to recall 30 million Tylenol products voluntarily. This cost the company over $100 million.

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“Haunted Beauty”: Mysteriously Bizarre Photo and Art Works of Natalie Shau

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Natalie Shau is mixed media artist and photographer based in Lithuania (Vilnius). She found interest in fashion and portrait photography as well as digital illustration and photo art.

Despite her personal work, Natalie also creates artwork and photography for musicians, theater, fashion magazines, writers and advertisement. She also worked as an art director for a short 3d movie of Kamel Ouali musical “Dracula”

More: Instagram, Twitter, Behance, Foundation

Formerly Jeff Bezos started an online bookstore from a garagebox, having access to the internet. What could a person start with low capital these days that could be a gap in the market?

That’s the entire problem…if an idea was easy to come up with – then it wouldn’t be a gap in the market.

TO PICK AN EXAMPLE:

This is a true story.

Back in 2004 (I think) a lady named Linda Katz decided to learn how to build a Web site. The Kansas farm which she lives on had recently been infested with tumbleweeds – a common problem in that part of the world. So for a joke, she created “Prairie Tumbleweed Farm”.

Supposedly, according to the (fake) web site – they organically farmed, harvested and sold the world’s choicest tumbleweeds: A small one for $15, $25 for a big one.

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To her extreme surprise, actual, for real orders started rolling in ones and twos – so grinning ear-to-ear, she found some cardboard boxes, stuffed a tumbleweed into each one – and mailed it off to her customers. Selling maybe one or two per month…not exactly a “business”. But it was hilarious…so she kept the website alive.

Then one day, a Hollywood movie props company needed some tumbleweeds for a Western movie set and ordered MANY HUNDREDS of them … at $25 each! THOUSANDS of dollars in one order.

This brought money AND publicity.

Then NASA bought a bunch of them to test the Mars Rover (Why?!? I can’t imagine!).

Then NPR did a radio show piece about the “farm” – I think as an April Fools thing…and with free publicity she was actually selling these generally worthless dead weeds at an impressive rate!

The website had to be translated into Japanese because tumbleweeds had become some kind of Feng Shui miracle!

She’s sold tumbleweeds for 13 years and claimed to earn around $40,000 a year.

ANALYSIS:

What’s the lesson here?

Nobody in their right mind would sit down one day and SERIOUSLY consider selling a dried up weed for $15 to $20. But there’s a thing on the Internet called “Long Tail Marketing”.

If you imagine a graph of the popularity of items that people need, it’s going to be something like this…

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2023 07 06 21 15

On the left are things like groceries, books, TV sets, lightbulbs…mundane things that a hell of a lot of people want. Being in that market is a major pain – you’re competing against the biggest retailers in the world. Amazon, Walmart, etc – it’s extremely price-competitive – you need to advertise – keep postage costs to a minimum…URGH!

But way over to the right – on the “long tail” of the curve are things like tumbleweeds – which VERY NEARLY nobody wants – and neither Walmart nor Amazon sells. In 2004 – if you searched on “Buy Tumbleweed” – there was only ONE hit.

The point being – in the era of brick and mortar stores – you could open a Tumbleweed store in a major city – and never sell a single tumbleweed for months on end.

But on the Internet – with a few billion people searching Google several times a day – if you can be the ONLY source for tumbleweeds – and then 100% of the (admittedly very small) market is yours – people will come to you to buy – and you won’t need advertising or to compete on price.

So the trick is to be the first – and to be the ONLY source for something. Even if it’s something incredibly rare and unusual. Because out of a few billion people, SOMEONE is looking for what you’re selling.

HOWEVER:

If you Google “Buy Tumbleweeds” today – there are DOZENS of businesses trying to do the exact same thing – with various degrees of seriousness.

It’s gone from being a fun, joke thing to being…well…BORING.

The original website for Prairie Tumbleweed Farm seems to have vanished…and I’m not surprised. The market for tumbleweed probably hasn’t grown by much – and with a dozen “Me Too!” knock-off websites beating down the prices – there’s simply no money in it anymore.

CONCLUSION:

If you can come up with a “long tail market” – and can get in, make money and get out again before Amazon is selling tumbleweeds too…you can do very well indeed.

But I can’t tell you what that product or service is…or how to make it…or how to be sure that people see your store.

It’s one of those things that – if it was both easy and obvious – everyone would be doing it.

This is one of those things that was easy in the early days of the Internet – because there were lots of things that you couldn’t find on the Internet – so you could be out on the long-tail and make good money.

You can still do that – but it’s just harder and harder to come up with an idea.

Tucker Carlson: Free Gonzalo Lira

https://youtu.be/to15UBjtswk

A tale of survival

In 1993, Emile Leray, was on a journey , enjoying his cruise across the Moroccan desert when he crashed his car in the middle of the desert.

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He was stranded and had to save himself or he would die in the desert. This was when his intelligence came to rescue him.

Emile Leray, a 43-year-old former electrician, had to rebuild his car, a Citroen 2CV into a motorbike using no special tools.

He built his motor bike in ten days using materials from his crashed car. He had no drills, no power tools or welding equipment, he screwed all the parts together.

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Seven Generations

In 1989, in Wisconsin, USA, an extraordinary feat was achieved: seven generations of a family were alive at the same time. This remarkable occurrence remains undisputed and stands as a world record. The individuals involved were Augusta Bunge, aged 109, accompanied by her daughter Ella Sabin, aged 89. Ella’s daughter, Anna Wendlandt, aged 70, was also present, along with Anna’s daughter, Betty Wolter, aged 52. Betty’s daughter, Debra Bollig, aged 33, attended alongside her daughter, Lori Bollig, aged 15. Lastly, Lori’s son, Christopher Bollig, aged only one month, completed the seven-generation lineup.

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main qimg c947143e9767b29f83ebcf874d38121d

Why do most Westerners continue to think of China only as a factory to serve their consumer needs, and do not attempt to understand the dynamics driving China’s development and foreign policy?

Simple

Chinas growth has simply been too fast

They transformed from a Manufacturing Base to an Economic Giant with a strong domestic market in a matter of 10 years

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2023 07 07 18 41

Back in 2012 – China was still a country to whom you went to build a factory and build your own stuff and export it globally.

Their Domestic Industry was very small and evolving

Today in 2022 – China is different. Its Domestic Industry is slowly getting dominated by Chinese Brands and they are spilling over Globally. They have taken the lead in High Speed Railways, 5G Communications and AI from the West and once they manage to lick their Chip problem – they could leapfrog by a further decade.

No Democracy can understand such growth that always happens under an Efficient Autocracy

As a Result the West cannot understand the Fast Growth of Chinas and constantly struggle to understand that China is on par or even ahead of them in several areas.

So they convince themselves that China is still the same old Manufacturing Factory it was 10 years or 15 years ago and they feel comfortable thinking so

Shots Fired! Iran Tries to Seize Two Vessels in Strait of Hormuz; US Navy Responds

World Hal Turner 05 July 2023

12:13 PM EDT — Within the hour, Iran tried to seize two oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz that is the entry/exit to the Persian Gulf.  Shots were fired.

The US Navy Responded and says it “prevented” Iran from seizing the vessels.   

Marianne Williamson for president

Never heard of a sane, smart, brave, non-Trumpian, non-senile, non-token black and non-LGBTQ+ female presidential candidate telling the obvious? She’s scaring the shit out of the American voters with the simple truth. Everyone in the audience listening to her looks like a deer staring at a headlight.

Survival

In 1992, Annette Herfken’s partner of 13 years persuaded her to follow him on a romantic vacation; he never knew that would be his worst decision.

Fifty minutes into the flight going to Vietnam, the plane suddenly plummeted into the mountains. When she woke up, everywhere was dark with people screaming.

A dead passenger strapped to his seat was lying on top of her. Gradually, the noisy and chaotic enclosure was replaced with utter silence; everyone had died except her.

She was left alone with decomposing bodies until the 8th day when rescuers came, before then she battled the thoughts of cannibalizing the bodies around her to survive.

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main qimg fd560ca123b39312d7dfca19200a81ab

Sleeping Beauty of Palermo

Known as the “Sleeping Beauty of Palermo,” the impeccably preserved body of Rosalia Lombardo is among the most remarkable mummies in the world.

When Lombardo died in 1920 just a to her second birthday, her heartbroken father took her to an embalmer and asked him to make her appear as if she would “live forever” before laying her in a glass-topped coffin and entombing her in the Capuchin catacombs beneath the Sicilian capital.

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The embalmer used a secret zinc mixture to petrify her body and even posed her with her eyes slightly open so that she would appear as if she was either just falling asleep or waking up from a nap.

In fact, this illusion is so convincing that some mourners who come to visit her still swear that her eyes opened and closed throughout the day, revealing beautiful blue irises beneath her delicate eyelids.

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main qimg ed1c7094acdab795662ae975d9a70b16

Western ideas of beauty…

Before is so much more beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. How can anyone approve this downgraded architectural design.

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China unveils first open-source desktop operating system

By Fan Feifei | chinadaily.com.cn | Updated: 2023-07-06 13:47

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2023 07 07 16 35

China rolled out its first open-source desktop operating system, called openKylin 1.0, on Wednesday, a key move that indicates the country has the ability to build its own self-developed operating system and fill the gaps in this field.

The openKylin 1.0 was developed by a group of Chinese companies led by China Electronics Corp, the country’s largest State-owned comprehensive electronic information enterprise group. Other participants include the China Industrial Control Systems Cyber Emergency Response Team, Kylinsec Technology and more than 10 other software companies.

The launch of openKylin 1.0 will help bolster the iteration and upgrade of the domestic operating system; guarantee the security in key fields such as government affairs, finance, communications, energy and transportation; and provide reliable basic software services for the country’s IT industrial chain.

Currently, China’s software operating system industry is dominated by foreign labels, such as Microsoft Windows, Google Android and Apple Mac OS.

The openKylin system can be applied in some hardware devices, including computers and mobile phones. Last year, CEC unveiled China’s first desktop operating system developers’ platform openKylin.

Flirty Witches and Naughty Demonic Beauties In Pin-Up Illustrations By Alejandra Oviedo

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Based in Bogotá, Colombia, Alejandra Oviedo draws funny and seductive pinup girls in all kinds of variations. Sometimes they are classic beauties, but most of the time Oviedo draws very unusual women – vampires, zombies and even pumpkinheads. And in each work there is a perfect balance of humor and sex – a real art.

More: Alejandra Oviedo, Instagram

Flight 123

In 1985, a Boeing747 in Japan had a sudden explosive decompression in mid-air because of a faulty repair. The plane then crashed into Mount Takamagahara. All 15 crew members and 505 of 509 passengers lost their lives. This picture was taken by a passenger during the same incident.

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main qimg 5b06883671584d6966444617ce0c21c1

Kuwait Clears Country of 3,000 Trans-genders/Homosexuals

World Hal Turner 05 July 2023

Kuwait has deported 3,000 transgender “people” from the country, and strict instructions from the Minister of Interior stresses “the need to clean the country of homosexuals.”

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2023 07 06 17 03

Wow. 

Do you think China’s move to manage exports of rare elements is justified? Why or why not?

Legally?

Not sure

Gallium and Germanium come under ‘Resources’

The US could argue that China is restricting exports of ‘Resources’ while US is restricting exports of ‘Technology’

Core Tech can be protected by law

Resources can’t be withheld unless you establish existing demand domestically

I am sure the Chinese will claim they need all the germanium and Gallium they can get


Bottom line is — US chose to play hard and fast with WTO rules, now they can’t argue that China is doing the same thing

Cheeseburgers with Caramelized Onion Butter

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2023 07 06 16 51

Prep: 30 min | Cook 15 min | Yield: 6 cheeseburgers

Ingredients

Caramelized Onion Butter

  • 1/2 cup (1 stick) + 2 tablespoons Challenge Butter, softened
  • 2 large yellow onions, coarsely chopped (2 cups)
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper

Cheeseburgers

  • 2 pounds lean ground beef (less than 12% fat)
  • 6 Kaiser or hamburger rolls
  • 6 slices sharp Cheddar cheese
  • Lettuce, tomato slices and bacon (optional)

Instructions

Caramelized Onion Butter

  1. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in a cast iron or nonstick skillet over medium heat. Add onions, season with salt and pepper, and stir to combine.
  2. Cook onions slowly for at least 20 to 25 minutes, stirring occasionally to prevent burning. You may need to adjust your heat to low as well. Cook onions until they become translucent and golden brown and then allow to cool.
  3. Cream butter in small bowl using a fork or electric mixer.
  4. Gradually blend in caramelized onions. Butter mixture can be used while still soft; or it can be rolled into a cylinder in parchment paper or plastic wrap and refrigerated or frozen, then sliced into thin rounds.

Cheeseburgers

  1. Divide meat into 6 equal portions (about 2/3 cup each) and flatten portions into 4 1/2 inch round patties.
  2. Broil or grill patties.
  3. Place 1 tablespoon of caramelized onion butter on each patty and top with a slice of Cheddar cheese.
  4. Serve on rolls with optional lettuce, tomatoes and bacon.

Notes

Flavored butter can be stored a couple days in the refrigerator or it can be frozen for several weeks.

Marianne Williamson: ‘We should treat the drug issue the way countries like Portugal do’ | Conver…

Asked about the opioid crisis during the portion of her “Conversation with the Candidate” event that airs exclusively online, Democrat Marianne Williamson says the government should treat the drug crisis as a mental health crisis and make other changes to its approach.

She also answered a number of other questions including the abortion issue and how to address the national debt without harming Social Security or Medicare. Conversation with the Candidate is a town hall-style program.

It is intended to allow the candidate to convey their points of view on a wide range of topics. During the program, the moderator may challenge the candidates’ assertions, but every fact may not be checked in real time.

Britain Closed Waters off its East Coast July 4, Looking for Russian “Posiedon” Torpedo

World Hal Turner 05 July 2023

Britain Closed Waters off its East Coast July 4, Looking for Russian "Posiedon" Torpedo
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2023 07 06 16 55

The British government issued Notice to Airmen and Mariners (NOTAM) closing almost the entire east coast waters off England yesterday for 15 hours.  Turns out, they were searching for a Russian “Poseidon” autonomous Torpedo with a 100 MT nuclear bombs aboard! The public knew nothing.

It began around 4:00 AM UK time on July 4.  Notices to Airmen and Mariners (NOTAMs) were issued by the UK closing vast swaths of ocean off the UK east coast as “Danger Areas.”  The NOTAM below shows the enormous areas that were closed.

Intelligence sources inside the UK have revealed the British were extremely worried that Russia may have already deployed at least one of its “Poseidon” torpedoes off the UK coastline, to create a nuclear Tsunami that would destroy most of the country without warning!

They were also concerned that other Russian Ballistic Missile submarines may have already taken-up station off the coast, to launch missiles in retaliation for what the UK has been doing to Russia inside Ukraine.

British news services did NOT carry any information about this search, nor did they even report the vast parts of the ocean closed-off for the intense searches.  The British public was left blissfully unaware.

POSEIDON

Russia’s new “Poseidon” autonomous torpedo is a nuclear powered device that can travel the world’s oceans unaided, and undetected.  It can be programmed to travel to – and lay off the coast of – an adversary, at a depth of at least 1 km.

At the programmed time, the torpedo would detonate a nuclear bomb it carries, that has a yield of up to 100 megatons.

Ru Kanyon illustration1 940
Ru Kanyon illustration1 940

The design of the weapon is such, that most of the blast energy could not make it to the surface of the sea because of the great depth at which the explosion takes place.   Instead, that energy would PUSH the water in a sudden, violent blast, causing a gigantic Tsunami tidal wave.   As the wave approaches the coast of the adversary, the waters get shallow as they rise up to the shoreline, which causes the moving water to begin piling-up on itself.

When the wave finally comes ashore, it does so as a 1500 foot tall wall of water, moving at about 600 MPH.

Everything on the shore, and perhaps as deep as twenty five miles inland, is wiped off the face of the earth.

No warning.  No evacuation time.  Just a wall of water killing everything in its path.

What makes this especially horrifying is that all the nuclear blast energy is still in the water, so it is highly radioactive.

Once the water comes ashore, it deposits that radiation onto the land, making the entire area uninhabitable for over a hundred years.

If not killed outright by the wave, nothing would be able to survive once exposed to the tremendous radiation.  

Russia is the only country on earth that has this technology.  The west is fully aware of it, yet continues to “poke the bear” in Ukraine.

The west, it seems, has become suicidal.

Washington’s Real Policy Toward China

04.07.2023 Author: Brian Berletic

After an intense escalation between the US and China over the former’s persistence in “containing” the rise of the latter, and particularly over US interference with the island province of Taiwan, US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken traveled to Beijing supposedly to repair tattered US-Chinese relations.

As part of the process, Secretary Blinken even publicly recited the US One China Policy, acknowledging that the US does not support Taiwan independence. However, even while acknowledging China’s sovereignty over Taiwan, Secretary Blinken reiterated US “responsibilities” under the unilateral Taiwan Relations Act “making sure Taiwan has the ability to defend itself,” or in other words, selling arms to Taiwan without Beijing’s approval and thus trampling Chinese sovereignty.

Following this, US President Joe Biden would refer to Chinese President Xi Jinping as a “dictator” during a speech featured on the official White House website. Days later, Secretary Blinken would affirm President Biden’s comments, as reported by US government-funded media outlet Voice of America in their article, “US Officials Agree: China’s Xi Is a Dictator.”

Why is the United States attempting to appear to be pursuing diplomacy while deliberately sabotaging any improvement in US-Chinese relations?

Before answering this question, it is important to understand just how long-running the US policy of containing China actually is and how unlikely it is we are witnessing any serious attempt to change it today.

US Policy Seeking to Contain China Stretches Back Decades 

US foreign policy toward China has been for decades and remains focused on encirclement and containment. Even as Secretary Blinken traveled to Beijing, a myriad of US government-funded programs led by the National Endowment for Democracy (is banned in Russia) and adjacent organizations worked to coerce, destabilize, and even replace governments along China’s periphery in Southeast Asia to shape the region into a united front against Beijing.

The US is also still working closely to expand the activities of its two key anti-China alliances, the Quad (the US, India, Japan, and Australia) and AUKUS (Australia, the UK, and the US).

The US continues its military build-up in the Indo-Pacific region, including through expanding the US military’s presence in the Philippines and continuously sailing US warships off China’s coasts.

Additionally, US government and corporate-funded think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the Atlantic Council are currently planning both economic sanctions to impose on China, as well as, military intervention meant to enforce and exacerbate sanctions.

Today’s posture of US belligerence toward China is a continuation of a policy articulated decades ago in US government documents. On the US State Department’s official website under the Office of the Historian, a multitude of documents and memorandums explaining Washington’s policy of containing China can be found.

One document dated 1965 with the subject “Courses of Action in Vietnam” written by then US Defense Secretary Robert McNamara to then US President Lyndon Johnson would note:

The February decision to bomb North Vietnam and the July approval of Phase I deployments make sense only if they are in support of a long-run United States policy to contain Communist China.

China looms as a major power threatening to undercut our importance and effectiveness in the world and, more remotely but more menacingly, to organize all of Asia against us.

The memo would also note “three fronts to a long-run effort to contain China” which included, “the Japan-Korea front, the India-Pakistan front, and the Southeast Asia front.”

Omitting references to Vietnam and the Soviet Union, the memo sounds like it could have been written today, a reflection of how US foreign policy pursuing China’s containment has persisted for decades regardless of which US President resides in the White House and who controls the US Congress.

Feigned Diplomacy for Consensus Building Toward Sanctions and War 

If the US has pursued China’s containment for decades and has no intention of stopping, why has the US State Department attempted to appear to pursue diplomacy with China?

The answer is simple. It fits a wider pattern of Washington attempting to portray itself as “diplomatic” and “reasonable” and its adversaries as belligerent and unreasonable. When the time comes to impose sanctions and even wage war, the perception that the US does so only reluctantly helps build consensus amongst American allies who are needed to help enforce US sanctions across the global economy and bolster US forces on the battlefield.

In 2009, then US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton would hand Russian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sergey Lavrov a physical “reset” button as a symbol of Washington’s supposed interest in “resetting” relations with Moscow. However, even as Secretary Clinton conducted the charade, the US State Department and related agencies and organizations were engineering the upcoming 2011 “Arab Spring” and the violent overthrow of multiple Russian allies across the Arab World including Libya and Syria, the New York Times would later admit.

Another example is the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, also known as the “Iran Nuclear Deal.” While the agreement wasn’t publicly revealed until 2013 and only signed in 2015, US-based think tanks began planning for it years earlier.

In the Brookings Institution’s “Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran” paper, US policymakers would admit the proposal was essentially a trap aimed ultimately at regime change in Tehran.

The paper would admit:

The ideal scenario in this case would be that the United States and the international community present a package of positive inducements so enticing that the Iranian citizenry would support the deal, only to have the regime reject it.

In a similar vein, any military operation against Iran will likely be very unpopular around the world and require the proper international context— both to ensure the logistical support the operation would require and to minimize the blowback from it.

The best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that the Iranians were given but then rejected a superb offer—one so good that only a regime determined to acquire nuclear weapons and acquire them for the wrong reasons would turn it down.

Under those circumstances, the United States (or Israel) could portray its operations as taken in sorrow, not anger, and at least some in the international community would conclude that the Iranians “brought it on themselves” by refusing a very good deal.

While it was clear the US-Russia “reset” was disingenuous, the Brookings paper offers documented proof that the US uses apparent good will and diplomacy as a means of consensus-building ahead of predetermined sanctions and even military intervention.

Several years after the Iran Nuclear Deal was signed and put into effect, the US would unilaterally withdraw from the agreement, accuse Iran of having “violated” it, reimpose sanctions on Iran, and begin pursuing a combination of US-sponsored subversion within Iran (as planned elsewhere within Brookings’ paper) and proxy war across the Middle East region against Iran and its allies.

Just as was stated in 2009 by Brookings policymakers, the US attempted to appear to extend an offer of peace and reconciliation, only to then attempt to portray Iran as having violated the nuclear deal in bad faith, justifying sanctions and military actions the US had prepared against Iran and intended to inevitably use all along.

With Secretary Blinken’s recent visit to Beijing, the United States is pursuing a similar strategy against China.

US Sanctions and War with China Already Underway 

Just as with Russia or Iran, the US has already planned and is implementing both a campaign of escalating economic sanctions and military aggression against China, both directly and through proxies.

The US has for years sponsored armed groups from Pakistan’s Baluchistan region to Myanmar in Southeast Asia, to the Solomon Islands in the Pacific to attack Chinese diplomats, citizens, infrastructure projects, and businesses.

The US has already implemented sanctions on Chinese economic activity. Through US government and Western industry-funded think tanks like the Council on Foreign Relations, further sanctions are being prepared, which are intended to be even larger than those imposed on Russia after the Special Military Operation began in February 2022.

The CFR’s paper, “U.S.-Taiwan Relations in a New Era, Responding to a More Assertive China,” spells out Washington’s plans to continue undermining its own agreements with Beijing over Taiwan, recommending a host of political, economic, and military measures to maintain US influence over the island province and thus US primacy over China in Asia.

Measures such as further arming Taiwan, separating Taiwan economically from the rest of China, and building up a US military presence in the region all aim to prevent China from stopping what is essentially the political capture of Taiwan by Washington. Maintaining control over Taiwan is key to an admittedly wider policy of maintaining US “influence” and “access” in Asia.

Echoing the 1965 memorandum published by the US State Department on its own official website, the CFR paper concludes “it is not only Taiwan’s future at stake but also the future of the first island chain and the ability to preserve U.S. access and influence throughout the Western Pacific.”

The paper even includes a map showing how Taiwan “anchors a network of US allies,” a network which clearly encircles and threatens China.

It is clear that the United States seeks to encircle and contain China. Because of China’s growing power, Washington is unable to do so alone. It requires increasingly extreme economic sanctions and military aggression in its attempts to subordinate the rising superpower, requiring consensus between itself, its allies, and nations around the globe it will attempt to coerce into supporting both its sanctions and military aggression as tensions expand.

Just as US policymakers stated regarding Iran, “the best way to minimize international opprobrium and maximize support (however, grudging or covert) is to strike only when there is a widespread conviction that” in the case of China, the US “tried” diplomacy, and it was “China’s” decision to pursue belligerence leaving a “reluctant” US no other option but economic sanctions and military intervention, hopefully convincing, compelling, or at least making it easier to coerce the rest of the world into going along.

It appears that both Russia and Iran were well aware of US duplicity in its supposed diplomacy. It is unlikely that China is unaware. China likewise seeks global support amid growing US-Chinese tensions, but is doing so through patience, persistence, and through constructively engaging with the rest of the world, providing a compelling and stark contrast to the accusations leveled by Washington against Beijing.

Judging at the rate of decline of the unipolar “international order” led by Washington, and the rise of multipolarism advocated by not only China but also Russia and Iran, it appears China is pursuing the winning strategy. Only time will tell if the increasingly dangerous and desperate measures Washington is resorting to in its long-running policy of containing China eventually succeeds, or ultimately backfires and unravels the current circles of power in Washington and on Wall Street who conceived and perpetuated this policy.

What made you laugh hard recently?

This photo that went viral recently. Amidst the riots in Paris a couple is enjoying their evening.

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It’s been compared to the “this is fine” meme on social media.

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Playing around with AI image generation

Well, I have been playing around with the image-generation AI for a while now. I have passed the “introduction” stage, and am nor in the “novice user” stage.

I have been focusing my attention on one particular program known as DeepAI.

I have bought some “AI call” time, and been “mucking around” with it. This is what I have learned about this one particular type of image AI generation software…

  • Each time you click on the generation button”, a new picture is generated. Even if the rest of the settings stay the same. No two images are the same.
  • Word text description orientation makes a big difference.
Big grey elephant with monkey riding on top

Will have a very different image result than…

Monkey riding on top of a big grey elephant
  • Make sure you spell things properly. Steel is different than steal. A spelling mistake can have substantial impact on your resultant art.
  • The simple sentence will generate “pure” drawings, while the complicated description will provide more accurate results.
  • The art seems to generate some kind of “feel” for the imagery that you detail out, not any actual anatomical, or functional details.
  • The image context “style” groupings make all the difference in the world.
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2023 06 01 13 56

Quick note; Double Click on the images to see the full size.

Example – Spaceship interior

In this example, I have created a text that looks like this…

detailed interior view of the control deck of a futuristic and shiny chrome and metal style spaceship

And the screen will look like this…

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2023 06 01 13 52

Resulting in the following images… very futuristic, and stylish. Reminds me a little of the spacecraft in the movie “Alien”.

output 3
output 3
output 2
output 2
output 4
output 4
output1
output1

Now, I then went and changed some wording. What I intended “black lit” was obviously not understood by the AI ‘Bot. I wanted to have a kind of “2001 space odyssey” kind of interior.

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2023 06 01 14 15

Resulting in the following images… not really what I intended. But pretty cool. Anyways.

detailed interior view of the control deck of a futuristic and shiny chrome with black lit controls in a metal style spaceship
2output 3
2output 3
2output 2
2output 2
2output 1
2output 1

Whoops!

I should of said “Back lit” instead of “black lit”.

Oh well…

Make a change…

Jules Verne style.

2023 06 01 14 34
2023 06 01 14 34

With this… very interesting. You do get the “feel” of Victorian science fiction.

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship
3a
3a
2023 06 01 16 00
2023 06 01 16 00
er 2023 06 01 16 04
er 2023 06 01 16 04
er2 2023 06 01 16 08
er2 2023 06 01 16 08
er3 2023 06 01 16 12
er3 2023 06 01 16 12
er4 2023 06 01 16 16
er4 2023 06 01 16 16

Make the following changes…

From this…

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship

To this…

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the view ports and widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun.

Resulting in… this very beautiful and interesting drawing.

X1 2023 06 01 16 23
X1 2023 06 01 16 23

And some more… looks good with the blue skies, eh?

X2 2023 06 01 16 29
X2 2023 06 01 16 29

More…

X4 2023 06 01 16 44
X4 2023 06 01 16 44
X3 2023 06 01 16 37
X3 2023 06 01 16 37

Let’s jazz up the interior some…

Let’s add brass, and red velvet.

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the view ports and widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet.

And look at the interior now… damn!

Z1 2023 06 01 16 52
Z1 2023 06 01 16 52

But, of course, some of the results can be really unexpected…

Z2 2023 06 01 17 00
Z2 2023 06 01 17 00

My gosh! Check out this one!

Z3 2023 06 01 17 08
Z3 2023 06 01 17 08

And this one…

Z5 2023 06 01 17 14
Z5 2023 06 01 17 14

The images build upon each other, as you can see in this train of images.

Z6 2023 06 01 17 19
Z6 2023 06 01 17 19

Let’s further refine the description…

From

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the view ports and widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet.

To

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet. leather chairs. Many levers and switches.

And it’s getting closer and pretty impressive.

Z6 2023 06 01 17 29
Z6 2023 06 01 17 29
Z7 2023 06 01 17 35
Z7 2023 06 01 17 35
Z8 2023 06 01 17 45
Z8 2023 06 01 17 45

.

Let’s add some carved ivory handles…

Let’s make this change.

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet. leather chairs. Many levers and switches. There are white carved ivory handles for the doors, switches and fixtures.
Z9 2023 06 01 17 51
Z9 2023 06 01 17 51

Let’s do something radical…

It’s going in a direction that I am not that interested in. Let’s change the description.

From

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant blue sky with white fluffy clouds and bright morning sun. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet. leather chairs. Many levers and switches. There are white carved ivory handles for the doors, switches and fixtures.

To

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a stormy and rainy sky. The interior is one of brass, and red velvet.

Resulting in this…

Z10 2023 06 01 17 59
Z10 2023 06 01 17 59

More playing with changes…

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant morning sky. The interior is one of brass, polished wood, and red velvet.

Resulting in this…

Z11 2023 06 01 18 05
Z11 2023 06 01 18 05
Z12 2023 06 01 18 12
Z12 2023 06 01 18 12

Changing the style…

As in this image displays…

2023 06 01 20 51
2023 06 01 20 51

Results in this…

ZZ0 2023 06 01 20 52
ZZ0 2023 06 01 20 52

Pretty impressive, though all the details are sketchy and there really isn’t any conformity in Industrial Design…

2023 06 01 21 09
2023 06 01 21 09

And…

2023 06 01 21 21
2023 06 01 21 21

It can also make very beautiful, but complex and nonsensical images…

2023 06 01 21 27
2023 06 01 21 27
2023 06 01 21 33
2023 06 01 21 33

Another alteration to the text…

Let’s try this, shall we…

detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant morning sky overlooking lush green hills. The interior is one of brass, polished wood, and red velvet.

Resulting in…

2023 06 01 21 39
2023 06 01 21 39
2023 06 01 21 42
2023 06 01 21 42

Another change…

Adding a cupola bubble.

A view from the observation cupola bubble that is part of detailed interior view of the control deck of a Jules Verne Victorian century style spaceship. Outside the many big view ports and wide widows is a brilliant morning sky overlooking lush green hills. The interior is one of brass, polished wood, and red velvet.

Resulting in…what?

2023 06 01 21 47
2023 06 01 21 47
2023 06 01 21 50
2023 06 01 21 50
2023 06 01 21 54
2023 06 01 21 54
2023 06 01 22 00
2023 06 01 22 00
2023 06 01 22 03
2023 06 01 22 03

Sigh.

I think that you all can get a “feel” for how this systems works. Right?

A view from the Palaeozoic period

New attempt. Different subject area.

2023 06 02 08 34
2023 06 02 08 34

Next try…

2023 06 02 08 37
2023 06 02 08 37
2023 06 02 08 56
2023 06 02 08 56
2023 06 02 09 00
2023 06 02 09 00
2023 06 02 09 10
2023 06 02 09 10

Back to Basics…

We revisit the initial statement with an add-on, and removed the requirement of metal.

detailed interior view of the control deck of a futuristic style spaceship. the interior is clean and organized

Resulting in…

2023 06 02 09 45
2023 06 02 09 45
2023 06 02 09 49
2023 06 02 09 49
2023 06 02 14 12
2023 06 02 14 12
2023 06 02 14 08
2023 06 02 14 08

And now let’s make yet another change…

detailed interior view of the control deck of a futuristic style spaceship. the interior is clean and organized. The walls are brushed and anodized aluminum, the controls are back-lit.
2023 06 02 14 44
2023 06 02 14 44

Conclusion

I have started playing with this software and find it has potential. You are able to effortlessly create your own royalty free art to illustrate your projects instead of paying for images, or using the tired old “internet” art.

That being said, it’s a cantankerous beast. You have to run through many iterations before you can find anything usable.

In this example, I tried to obtain a spaceship interior, but none of the generated art fit my notions of what it should be. Though the art was in many cases spectacular, more practice must be mastered before it can be of any use.

I will tell the reader that I continue to play with this software and I will have further reports in the future.

Playing around with CrAIyon

OK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.

2023 04 26 11 11
2023 04 26 11 11

And here’s my first attempt…

First trial

2023 04 26 11 13
2023 04 26 11 13

My images

I just screen-shot them…

2023 04 26 11 a16
2023 04 26 11 a16

2023 04 26 11 16
2023 04 26 11 16

Second Trial

2023 04 26 11 19
2023 04 26 11 19

The image matrix

2023 04 26 11 20s
2023 04 26 11 20s

2023 04 26 11 20a
2023 04 26 11 20a

Your Turn

Go click on this link to try it yourself…

CrAIyon

Playing around with Stable-diffusion

OK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.

This is pretty good. Style options are not present, though.

2023 04 26 10 38
2023 04 26 10 38

The first try pictures

4 rabbit
4 rabbit

3 rabbit
3 rabbit

2 rabbit
2 rabbit

1 rabbit
1 rabbit

My second try

2023 04 26 10 42
2023 04 26 10 42

My second try pictures

biff 4
biff 4

biff 3
biff 3

biff 2
biff 2

biff 1
biff 1

My third try

2023 04 26 10 54
2023 04 26 10 54

My pictures from the third try

pres 4
pres 4

pres 3
pres 3

pres 2
pres 2

pres 1
pres 1

My fourth try

2023 04 26 10 58a
2023 04 26 10 58a

The images

a4
a4

a3
a3

a2
a2

a1
a1

My fifth try

2023 04 26 11 06
2023 04 26 11 06

The images

in 4
in 4

in 3
in 3

in 2
in 2

in 1
in 1

Your Turn

Go click on this link to try it yourself…

Stable-diffusion

Playing around with runwayML

OK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.

Personally, I do not like the results…

2023 04 25 15 40
2023 04 25 15 40

2023 04 25 15 39
2023 04 25 15 39

2023 04 25 15 38e
2023 04 25 15 38e

2023 04 25 15 38
2023 04 25 15 38

2023 04 25 15 37
2023 04 25 15 37

2023 04 25 15 36
2023 04 25 15 36

Your Turn

Go click on this link to try it yourself…

RunwayML

Playing around with Dreamstudio.AI

OK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.

This one takes a little bit of time to figure out and work with, but it’s not that difficult.

You upload a “seeder” image. Blur it to represent the amount of change you want, pick a style. Write a description and the AI does the rest…

2023 04 25 15 10
2023 04 25 15 10

Here’s some examples when I typed in a sentence, and then clicked on the style icon…

I think that it is fun.

3136204005 tomato soup and cheese sandwich xl beta v2 2 2
3136204005 tomato soup and cheese sandwich xl beta v2 2 2

2151311876 tomato soup and cheese sandwich xl beta v2 2 2
2151311876 tomato soup and cheese sandwich xl beta v2 2 2

Now, let’s put a completely different image in the system. Everything else stays the same…

2023 04 25 15 16
2023 04 25 15 16

Some notes

This is part of a much larger “package” of tools for image manipulation and what-not. All in all it holds promise.

Go HERE to see the full “toolbox”.

Money issues

You need to purchase “credits’ to continue using this product.

It shows promise, but playing around for ten minutes isn’t enough time for me to judge it’s worth and utility.

I probably will get back to it and play around some more. Just not right now. I have others that I will evaluate before then.

2023 04 25 15 22
2023 04 25 15 22

Your Turn

Go click on this link to try it yourself…

DreamstudioAI

Playing around with Pixlr-X

OK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.

2023 04 25 11 35
2023 04 25 11 35

Here’s some examples when I typed in a sentence, and then clicked on the style icon…

I think that it is fun.

Some of my art renderings…

I just set up a brief sentence (I only have five tries), and then conducted variations…

2023 04 25 11 33y
2023 04 25 11 33y

2023 04 25 11 33b
2023 04 25 11 33b

2023 04 25 11 33s
2023 04 25 11 33s

2023 04 25 11 32re
2023 04 25 11 32re

2023 04 25 11 32
2023 04 25 11 32

2023 04 25 11 31
2023 04 25 11 31

2023 04 25 11 31a
2023 04 25 11 31a

Your Turn

Go click on this link to try it yourself…

Pixlr-X

Playing around with Dream by Wombo

OK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.

The capabilities of artificial intelligence just keep expanding, and this includes different kinds of art. We’re going to introduce you to an app that lets you create digital images with the help of AI technology.

Dream by Wombo is available for mobile and online, but the former has more to offer. Learn how to use this AI artwork mobile app and what you can expect from it in just a few steps.

2023 04 25 12 05
2023 04 25 12 05

Here’s some examples when I typed in a sentence, and then clicked on the style icon…

2023 04 25 12 08
2023 04 25 12 08

I think that it is fun.

Now, I did all of this on my computer. But you don’t need to. You can download the APP.

Summary on this…

It’s good.

It’s free, though you can buy a premium subscription.

It produces basic, recognizable art. The art style is cute / childish / basic illustration. Suitable for graphics, presentations and children’s books.

It makes nice renderings of cats and kittens. And after all, if you cannot render a kitty, then what is your value?

APP

This app is perfect for decorating books, websites, walls, or custom playlist art without hiring a professional illustrator or graphic designer. It’s fast and easy.

Whether you’re on your phone or computer, Dream by Wombo’s AI can quickly produce stunning images in an artistic style of your choice with a simple prompt.

The browser-based version is simple enough to use and has a Mint as NFT option, while it lets you download or buy a print of your AI artwork. The mobile app, however, puts more tools at your disposal.

We’re going to show you how to use Dream by Wombo on your smartphone or tablet, step by step. But first, make sure you have the app.

Download: Dream by Wombo for AndroidiOS (Free)

Some of my art renderings…

dream TradingCard37
dream TradingCard37

dream TradingCard13
dream TradingCard13

dream TradingCard12
dream TradingCard12

dream TradingCard26
dream TradingCard26

dream TradingCard25
dream TradingCard25

dream TradingCard24
dream TradingCard24

dream TradingCard23
dream TradingCard23

dream TradingCard22
dream TradingCard22

dream TradingCard21
dream TradingCard21

dream TradingCard20
dream TradingCard20

dream TradingCard19
dream TradingCard19

dream TradingCard18
dream TradingCard18

dream TradingCard17
dream TradingCard17

dream TradingCard16
dream TradingCard16

dream TradingCard30
dream TradingCard30

dream TradingCard36
dream TradingCard36

dream TradingCard35
dream TradingCard35

dream TradingCard34
dream TradingCard34

dream TradingCard33
dream TradingCard33

dream TradingCard32
dream TradingCard32

dream TradingCard31
dream TradingCard31

dream TradingCard29
dream TradingCard29

dream TradingCard28
dream TradingCard28

dream TradingCard15
dream TradingCard15

dream TradingCard14
dream TradingCard14

dream TradingCard11
dream TradingCard11

dream TradingCard10
dream TradingCard10

dream TradingCard9
dream TradingCard9

dream TradingCard8
dream TradingCard8

dream TradingCard7
dream TradingCard7

dream TradingCard6
dream TradingCard6

dream TradingCard5
dream TradingCard5

dream TradingCard40
dream TradingCard40

dream TradingCard39
dream TradingCard39

dream TradingCard38
dream TradingCard38

dream TradingCard4
dream TradingCard4

dream TradingCard3
dream TradingCard3

dream TradingCard2
dream TradingCard2

dream TradingCard1
dream TradingCard1

dream TradingCard
dream TradingCard

Your Turn

Go click on this link to try it yourself…

Dream

Playing around with Nightcafe

OK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.

2023 04 25 16 02
2023 04 25 16 02

My first attempt

2023 04 25 16 05
2023 04 25 16 05

Alteration 1

2023 04 25 16 07
2023 04 25 16 07

The results

mWh6BvWZ0AmfFCN7Xq5O 4 rjccz
mWh6BvWZ0AmfFCN7Xq5O 4 rjccz

mWh6BvWZ0AmfFCN7Xq5O 3 oc4qj
mWh6BvWZ0AmfFCN7Xq5O 3 oc4qj

mWh6BvWZ0AmfFCN7Xq5O 1 1miqo
mWh6BvWZ0AmfFCN7Xq5O 1 1miqo

mWh6BvWZ0AmfFCN7Xq5O grid
mWh6BvWZ0AmfFCN7Xq5O grid

Alteration 2

Rabbits instead of cats. Same style generator.

2023 04 25 16 13
2023 04 25 16 13

The results

NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF 4 7cmm7
NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF 4 7cmm7

NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF 3 agt6a
NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF 3 agt6a

NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF 2 ipm8q
NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF 2 ipm8q

NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF 1 p0t5n
NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF 1 p0t5n

NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF grid
NTl4T9TmgngkShCwLqfF grid

Alteration 3

Changed the preset to Anime.

2023 04 25 16 15
2023 04 25 16 15

Your Turn

Go click on this link to try it yourself…

NightCafe

Playing around with DeepAI

OK, so as of late, I have been experimenting with this “new” kind of Artificial Intelligence system. This one takes a sentence, a statement and then generates art from it. It’s fun, cool and quite an amusement. Something that I am just starting to “toy around with”.

2023 04 24 21 22
2023 04 24 21 22

DeepAI offers an easy-to-use text-to-image generator that produces decent results with the right prompts. There are many image styles on offer, and almost half of those are free.

The free ones include basic text-to-image, cute creatures, fantasy worlds, cyberpunk, old, renaissance painting, and abstract, among a few others.

All of these styles produce images according to that theme, pretty much like the other tools on this list. However, among these styles, there is a logo generator as well that you can use to produce interesting logo ideas. It’s particularly useful for artists who are looking for inspiration to build on or to overcome a block.

Here’s some examples when I typed in a sentence, and then clicked on the style icon…

2023 04 24 20 12
2023 04 24 20 12

Pretty good.

You need to play with it, because if you use the wrong feed generation icon, your images won’t look “right”.

Here, I used the architectural icon for a house-based sentence…

2023 04 24 21 01
2023 04 24 21 01

I think that it is fun.

Some of my art renderings…

This one tuned out pretty good…

8R6PLiBj
8R6PLiBj

a 88aa0g
a 88aa0g

kEKcarf7
kEKcarf7

IepYGqeH
IepYGqeH

YANr vfv
YANr vfv

kT8YfW85
kT8YfW85

07pjuIFb
07pjuIFb

kBYZqMFq
kBYZqMFq

QrFSv12X
QrFSv12X

M7niZQZu
M7niZQZu

frELcIXz
frELcIXz

feYmB5U1
feYmB5U1

H9Cdw I9
H9Cdw I9

NT7GkYt0
NT7GkYt0

8YbCW0eT
8YbCW0eT

X7O4 E04
X7O4 E04

l180aZdx
l180aZdx

QTPwZBYd
QTPwZBYd

W Pq5g5n
W Pq5g5n

LKQApQFE
LKQApQFE

86Cp0M2U
86Cp0M2U

7H4p0ejU
7H4p0ejU

ppYTQpTe
ppYTQpTe

WbFEboto
WbFEboto

NvD97LPe
NvD97LPe

hrk7DX6O
hrk7DX6O

56mcsTds
56mcsTds

c6k fKPu
c6k fKPu

vuA4OUB7
vuA4OUB7

2afEpM8D
2afEpM8D

Your Turn

Go click on this link to try it yourself…

DeepAI

My cat says fuck you

Actually, that’s a name of an “art series”.

...that's the thing... all this money going to the military and banking complex means eroding living standards for the same citizens.. 

the destruction of the fabric that holds a country together - medical system, gov't funding for any number of programs that benefit people - have to be removed so that more can be spent on the military.. 

oh and forget about this global economy where all boats rise.. no.. cordon it off into areas of exchange that remove all the so called bad guys... 

i hope this bites the west in the ass really hard to the point more people wake up to this bullshit.. 

i am not counting on anyone waking up though, or if they do - probably too late...

Posted by: james | Jan 31 2023 18:24 utc | 11

Today we are going to have some irreverent fun. Lot’s of cussing, profanity, and other anti-social behaviors. We are “letting loose”.


When I was in second grade, we were living in our new home in Monroe, CT. (Which by the way, ended up turning into a multi-million dollar house, in a very exclusive neighborhood. Too bad we sold the house, for a job in Pittsburgh. But it was the 1960’s, and my dad couldn’t peer into a crystal ball for the future…)

It was Easter.

My bad brought a cute white rabbit home. And all of us kids played with it all day. And of course, it being Easter, we had tons of hard-boiled Easter eggs, and chocolate. And of course, being kids, we fed that rabbit a long stream of our chocolate.

What we did not know, being all of seven or eight years old, and what our parents did not know, is that while we (as humans) could eat chocolate, little animals such as a dogs, cats and rabbits could not.

The next day; Monday, we woke up to a dead rabbit.

And there, on Monday morning, we had a little memorial service and buried the rabbit in our back yard.

The End.


Let’s get on with today’s installment…

This Instagram Account Creates Sinister Parodies of Kid’s Cooks To Ruin Your Childhood Memories

0 36
0 36

Thomas Columbo is the creator of Digital Meddle. He alters vintage children’s books through the use Photoshop, adding the text in order to give the stories a different meaning with a comedic effect. Something that drives his passion for this unique art form is people’s disapproving comments, although overall his work is well received.

More: Instagram

174326039 1132162847297700 957452926923010520 n
174326039 1132162847297700 957452926923010520 n

200510946 391593412216538 8495082616923375429 n
200510946 391593412216538 8495082616923375429 n

200351952 509874450440704 1787650128162545429 n
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195477156 565060934899055 3062968629557859123 n

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194522074 541384903520849 4452995071740130235 n

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192309080 1096584734084814 5316491564629381516 n

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191807384 485244429569379 2337448150423934787 n

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185849804 496153861701511 4522680189247872111 n

185275559 753347848697084 4036913694370563154 n
185275559 753347848697084 4036913694370563154 n

184119102 825472534769916 1519164347322134138 n
184119102 825472534769916 1519164347322134138 n

183672366 297682525291088 8979529150655417067 n
183672366 297682525291088 8979529150655417067 n

182377377 508143853892819 5291600349324565406 n
182377377 508143853892819 5291600349324565406 n

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181110334 163062635645549 4458093370956082882 n

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Egyptian FM delivered a Blinkie message to Russia

Lavrov: Blinken’s message on Ukraine contains only calls on Russia to ‘quit and stop’

From HERE

“It is reported that [yesterday] Jens Stoltenberg said in one of his speeches that Russia must lose, must be defeated, and that the West cannot afford to let Ukraine lose, because in that case the West will lose and the whole world will lose”

MOSCOW, January 31. /TASS/. US Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s message on Ukraine, handed over by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shoukry, contains only calls on Russia to “quit and stop,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told a media conference following talks with his Egyptian counterpart on Tuesday.

Mr. Minister, while answering the previous question, said that he had conveyed a certain message from Secretary of State Blinken, who was recently on a visit to Cairo. I confirm this,” Lavrov said, answering a question from TASS. “Russia is ready to listen to any serious proposal that is aimed at resolving the current situation in its comprehensive context.”

“We have had one more message Egypt’s foreign minister has handed over to us to the effect that Russia should stop, that Russia should quit, and then everything will be fine,” Lavrov went on to say, adding that at the same time “Blinken omitted something.”

“The other part of the message, showing the true interest of the United States and the West, was stated by NATO Secretary General Mr. [Jens] Stoltenberg, when he was in the Republic of Korea yesterday,” Lavrov noted. “He said in one of his speeches that Russia must lose, must be defeated, and that the West cannot afford to let Ukraine lose, because in that case, he argued, the West will lose and the whole world will lose.” Stoltenberg, as Lavrov pointed out, “took the liberty of speaking not only on behalf of the North Atlantic Alliance, but also on behalf of all other countries of the world.”[.] (emphasis added)

Certainly, that message will not move 1 millimeter for talks.
3 Strikes: the West cheated at Minsk. Theft of RF’s foreign reserves. “Terror attack” on NordStream 1, 2 and last week very publicly bragged about the dastardly act.

Wake up. It will take decades to restore Confidence, Trust, Credibility.
Russia will soldier on (pun intended) until ALL its goals for de-militarizing and de-NATOfying to its 1993 borders are achieved.

Posted by: Likklemore | Jan 31 2023 18:39 utc | 19

Common School Blueberry Muffins

IMG 7463 682x1024 1
IMG 7463 682×1024 1

Ingredients

  • 1/4 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 cups all-purpose flour
  • 2 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1 cup blueberries
  • 1 egg, beaten
  • 1 cup milk
  • 1/4 cup melted butter

Instructions

  1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Grease tins.
  2. Sift together dry ingredients; add blueberries to flour mixture and stir gently.
  3. Mix egg, milk and butter together. Add to flour mixture; mix only enough to moisten flour. Do not beat. Fill tins 3/4 full.
  4. Bake for 25 minutes.

Size Matters – On A U.S. Ground Intervention In Ukraine

A European financial research company has sent me one of their quarterly research letters. It is a ‘contrarian review of political and military ramifications’ of the war in Ukraine. It analyzes ‘winners and losers’ of the war.

It is contrarian only in the sense that it counters the false views of ‘western’ mainstream media with reality. The losers of the war are all on the ‘western’ side with the only two winners being the owners of the U.S. defense industry and Russia.

I was sent the courtesy copy because, as the company writes, the discussions at Moon of Alabama were “immensely helpful” in forming their view.

Note to the authors: You are welcome.

I will not quote from the paper as it seems to be a somewhat confidential business product. But I will steal two graphics from it that will help to understand the size of the war in Ukraine and how it will NOT end.

There have been theories that Poland or some U.S. led coalition force would intervene with their troops on the ground in Ukraine to ‘kick the Russians out’.

The two graphics though dispel any hope for such an operation.

The following is an operational map of Desert Storm. The U.S. led operation in spring 1991 to kick Iraq out of Kuwait.

 

iukr1
iukr1

biggerIt took the U.S. some nine month to assemble a forces of some 700,000 U.S. and 250,000 allied troops with all their equipment. Iraq had an estimated 650,000 troops in the theater. The U.S. first created total air superiority by destroying Iraq’s fighter aircraft and air defense forces. With that done it took only 100 hours of ground operation to destroy a third of the Iraqi forces. The rest of the Iraqi army retreated under fire towards Baghdad.

There are some 550,000 Russian troops in and around Ukraine. A hypothetical operation to ‘kick Russia out’ would thereby have about the same size as Desert Storm. But the geographic dimensions differ drastically.

The following is an operational map of Desert Storm from above overlaid in scale on the map of Ukraine.

 

iukr2
iukr2

biggerThe map was turned to the left by 90 degree. North is to the left, east at the top and Crimea in the south to the right.

Russia occupies some 87,000 square kilometer of Ukraine. The Desert Storm theater around Kuwait was five times smaller.

A hypothetical U.S. coalition of the size of Desert Storm could probably cross the Dnieper and cut of Crimea. But it could do little more than that. The Donetz and Luhansk oblasts and Crimea itself would still be in Russian hands.

But there are many reasons why no such operation will ever be planned and executed.

  • The U.S. no longer has a force of the size it committed to Desert Storm. Nor do its allies.
  • The U.S. was able to create air superiority in Iraq because it could fly from nearby Saudi airfields and from aircraft carriers in the Persian Gulf. Air superiority in eastern Ukraine could only be achieved with the destruction of long range air-defenses within Russia. The next safe air fields the U.S. could use are in Poland and Romania. No U.S. aircraft carrier will dare to enter the Black Sea. U.S. fighter planes to not have the necessary reach for combat missions in eastern Ukraine.
  • The Ukrainian rail system is by now a mess. It is incapable of moving a large force from the west into east Ukraine.
  • Any attempt to move a large force through Ukraine would be subject to deep battle interdiction by Russian and Belorussian forces.
  • Iraqi equipment was badly maintained and Iraqi forces were barely trained. Russia has a well trained high tech army.

I could go on but you can certainly see the point.

No U.S. ground troops will move into Ukraine. It is ludicrous to think otherwise.

Posted by b on January 30, 2023 at 16:23 UTC | Permalink

Humorous Illustrations Blending Sarcastic Nature and Adopted Cat’s Attitude

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The Internet has been abuzz in recent years with the phenomenon of cats taking over, and now we have one more artist to add to their ranks. @st.aftercigs, an Instagram account with 190K+ followers, gives a whole new dimension to cat appreciation with their bold, humorous artworks inspired by the artist’s own adopted cat.

The artist behind the account expresses the stark contrast between cats’ sassiness, and their ability to be inspirational muses. By blending the artist’s own sarcastic nature with their cat’s grumpy cattitude, a unique and lively art style has been born. The artworks are a great reminder of the many nuanced personalities our cats possess and the joy they can bring to our lives.

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About the USA

The US only engages in direct conflict against a far weaker opponent.

It’s preferred method of controlling other states is to work in the shadows – propaganda and psy ops to turn people against their government, support of extremist factions, manipulation of elections, color revolutions, and sanctions.

All underhanded and sneaky.

The neocons were sure their toolkit would work in Ukraine.

The US government is committed to this as long as it doesn’t have to confront Russia directly.

The US public is committed to this as long as it doesn’t come down to thousands of boys coming back in body bags.

Otherwise it’s one big reality show to entertain.

There are descriptors to be used for people who act like the US acts, none of them complimentary.

Posted by: Mike R | Jan 30 2023 17:08 utc | 19

School Style Sloppy Joes

2023 01 30 21 09
2023 01 30 21 09

Ingredients

  • 1 pound ground beef
  • Chopped onion
  • 1/2 cup ketchup with water to make 3/4 cup
  • 1/4 teaspoon dry mustard
  • 1 tablespoon brown sugar
  • Shake of Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 can tomato soup (undiluted)

Instructions

  1. Brown ground beef with onion and drain.
  2. Add other ingredients and simmer until warm through.
  3. Serve over hamburger buns.

Selected daddy-daughter movies that we watch together

I do not have enough time to devote myself to the needs of my little daughter. She (at her age) is 24-7, and I am working multiple jobs and multiple projects.  But, you know, I always try to give her priority. So, I have these little events. One of which is an occasional movie with her and myself. I try to do it weekly.

Our time.

Give her momma a break.

So we sit down on the sofa, and watch a movie. Given her age, and my activity schedule, we usually break the movie down into two segments,; the first half on one day, and the the rest on another.

During the movie, we eat a snack. Mostly being a small bag of potato chips, or some crunchy “kid snacks”, and we sit down and watch the movie. I like “American style” Lays (yellow bag) potato chips. We set the bag down, and using scissors, cut a big hole on the side so it forms a kind of disposable tray.

I also make sure that she went to the bathroom before we get started.

Mostly we watched downloaded movies in torrent format, then saved on the drive. I just pull them up and we watch uninterrupted.

The movies that I select are based on things that I want her to concentrate on…

  • Love
  • Tenderness, compassion
  • Independence
  • Winning over adversity

And so my list is not going to be the average fare that you find on the internet. In fact, you might be surprised in the lack of Disney films (though some are included), and the high concentration of Studio Ghibli films (all in English over dub animation).

Most of the videos you can find easily on the internet with a little bit of sleuthing.  Since my child is bilingual (English and Chinese) versions of the movies in these languages are fine, and interchangeable. However, we seek out English versions (say for example) the Japanese movies.

Here’s my preferred videos, in no particular order…

Castle in the Sky

A magical adventure. All kids need one.

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2023 02 05 11 54

Full INFO

A delightful fantasy that will bring out the child in anyone

Have you ever wished that you could escape your dull and stressful life at school or work and go on a magical adventure of your own, with one of your closest friends at your side, facing all sorts of dangers and villains, and unraveling the mystery of a lost civilization that's just waiting for someone to discover all its secrets? 

Even if you're not quite that much of a fantasy-lover, have you ever wished you could simply experience what it's like to be a kid again, and not have a care in the world, for just a couple of hours? 

This is exactly what Miyazaki's "Castle in the Sky" is all about. 

Pazu, a young but very brave and ambitious engineer, lives a rustic life in a mining town until one day, a girl named Sheeta falls down from the sky like an angel and takes him on a journey to a place far beyond the clouds, while all the while they have pirates and military units hot on their trail. 

Simply put, it is just the incredible adventure that every kid dreams of at one point or another, and I can't help but feel my worries melt away every time I see it.

An English dub of this film was produced by the Walt Disney Company in 1999 (originally intended to be released that same year), but wasn’t released on DVD until 2003. The English dub shortens the title to “Castle in the Sky,” removing the word “Laputa,” since it means “the whore” in Spanish.

Cat Woman (2004)

A adult film, not an animation. Talks about a strong woman, transformation, change, righting wrongs, and being a cat.

I want my daughter to be strong, and tough. When we watch this movie, she loves the scenes of cats, and how “cat woman” behaves. For days afterwards, she acts a little cat-like in her walk, talk and playing ball. LOL.

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2023 02 05 11 57

Patience Phillips (Halle Berry) is a visual artist who is stuck working in the advertising division of a large beauty product manufacturer, Hedare. When she acquires information that could potentially put the company out of business, they try to dispose of her. Because she had previously, unwittingly passed a "test", however, she is saved by a group of cats and transformed into a Catwoman.

First, let me note that I loved this film. It's a 10 out of 10 for me. Since I'm well aware that most critics, professional and amateur alike, have trashed this film, I'll focus on why I thought it was so good. Maybe this will help some new viewers consider giving it a look, and possibly encourage some reevaluation by those who have already seen the film.

The script immediately drew me into the film, and although I'm male, I identified with Patience. I'm also a visual artist. I have also worked for a company similar to Hedare in the past (although a much smaller and less nefarious beauty product company). I lived in an apartment that looked, on the outside, almost exactly the same as Patience's apartment complex. I also had neighbors who night after night played loud music or television until three or four a.m., while I first tried to block out the sound in any way that I could, then asked politely for them to turn the music down, and so on, until I finally called the cops on them so I could get some sleep.

Not that I need to identify with a character to like a film, but that made this one have extra resonance with me in the beginning. Additionally, I was immediately drawn in by the fantastic cinematography and set design. Those kinds of things are just as important in a movie as the story is. Film is a visual and aural artform. The whole package is important. Creative, attractive visuals such as those in Catwoman are part of the package.

The script, including the subtexts, worked well for me. Catwoman is a film about discovering identities, peeling away literal and metaphorical masks, and the difference between various stages of public versus private "faces". That the plot is centered on a beauty product manufacturer, then, is perfect. These themes permeate every aspect of the film. For example, Tom Lone (Benjamin Bratt) is continually peeling away the appearances of Patience, throughout the length of the film, and Patience is doing the same for herself--discovering her "true self". I can't think of a scene that doesn't touch on this theme in some way. That's very clever and thought-provoking scriptwriting, and it doesn't end there. There are also themes about femininity cleverly woven through the film, for example.

I thought the cast did a fantastic job. Berry is great as a Catwoman, and subtly referenced most of the previous screen Catwomen. She also incorporated a lot of crafty cat-like behavior. I enjoyed the supporting cast, especially Alex Borstein as Patience's friend, Sally. The effects worked well for me, and at times they were also very subtle and clever, such as Catwoman's whip representing a tail in many shots (most of this was achieved via digital effects). I was also impressed with the creativity and different approach of many of the fight scenes. It was nice to see Brazilian martial arts incorporated for a change.

Some of the negative criticism probably stems from a kind of purism that is disproportionately found among comic book fans when it comes to comic book films. I'm not much of a purist, but in any event, for anyone paying close attention, you'd note that Berry's character isn't supposed to be Selina Kyle. In the mythology of as presented here, "Catwoman" isn't a lone token, but a type. Patience is just another instantiation of a long line of catwomen. So departures from previous portrayals of Selina Kyle aren't relevant, even if we believed that filmmakers were obligated in some way to previous depictions of the "same" fictional characters (which I don't believe, not being a purist).

Catwoman is worth a (second) chance if you can leave some of your preconceptions at the door and if you're prepared to think a bit about a comic book film.

2023 02 05 11 57d
2023 02 05 11 57d

Epic (2013)

Shrinking to the size of ants, and inhabiting a huge ancient forest; with a mad-scientist father… it’s stuff that kids just eat up. The parade scenes, and all the interplay is mesmerizing to my daughter. She just cannot keep her eyes off it.

2023 02 05 12 09
2023 02 05 12 09

I didn't think I'd like this movie, but I took my 10-year-old cousin to see it anyway, and I really loved it.

I've heard this film compared to everything--FernGully, The Borrowers, Avatar, etc., and while it is another film in that genre and it may be a little cliché, it does create its own fascinating world and tell its story in a unique way. Its themes are heavy (family and belonging, the balance between growth and decay/life and death) but are handled in a successfully child-friendly manner.

The animation and design are gorgeous. I love the cute fairy-like flower and leaf people; I even love the design of the goblin-like bad guys (the Boggan). I want to see more stories set in this incredible little world. I also appreciate how much care went into animating that forest.

While the characters are pretty familiar, they're still delightful. I thought the choice of voice actors was particularly good. I liked Amanda Seyfried as the main character, M.K. (Mary Katherine), I looooved Colin Farrell as Ronin, and I have to say, I was really pleasantly surprised by Beyonce as Queen Tara. She has a voice just like honey, which fits the queen's sweet, playful personality. Queen Tara emerges as one of my favorite animated characters of all time (and NO, I do not find her voice "too ghetto." I don't appreciate people sniffing down their noses at others that way) because she carried so much of the movie with what turned out to be really minimal role. Plus, I always love to see people of color portrayed positively in children's films.

I would definitely take kids to see this again, although it might be too scary for kids younger than 6 and too slow for kids older than 12. Folks have to admit, this is a fun movie to watch, and highly imaginative kids especially will love it.

2023 02 05 12 03
2023 02 05 12 03

Free Guy (2021)

Just fun. Modern. Interfaces clearly with social media usage by children. Totally relatable, with deep messages…

…strong woman character. Nice guy.

A message of helping others

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2023 02 05 12 13e

One glance at FREE GUY, the newest big budget offering from Hollywood's favorite action-star/comedy master Ryan Reynolds, will cause most to approach with valid skepticism. 

The plot seems like a cheap knockoff of films like Ready Player One or even The Matrix, but made in a crude fashion to make more money at the box office. 

The actual movie, however, could not be further from the worst estimates. 

Not only is FREE GUY constantly hilarious due to Reynolds and an inventive screenplay, and not only is this possibly the feel-good event of the summer, but it also has a considerable amount of thought put into the meaning of its premise and places a mirror in front of modern-day video game culture.

To put it simply, perhaps the main reason this movie comes together so well is because of Ryan Reynolds' constant charisma and hilarity. Most of his dialogue is clearly either written by him or created by him on the spot (I have no idea how he hasn't received a screenwriting credit for this and the Deadpool movies), and the film is that much better as a whole because of it. He also interacts with the other actors in the film very well, including Jodie Comer and Joe Keery, two underrated actors who prove here that they aren't just one-time stars from their respective television shows (Killing Eve and Stranger Things). The ensemble combines to create the most consistently funny movie of 2021 so far.

However, this movie isn't just hilarity and crazy antics, although it could easily get by on those aspects alone. 

FREE GUY has tons of heart and authenticity despite its virtual reality-based plot, and is about very human emotions such as disillusionment, the feeling of being trapped, and, of course, love. 

There are times where the heartwarming aspects of this film resemble a charming romantic comedy and others where it gets so existential that it almost feels like The Truman Show. 

It never dives quite as deep as the latter film, but the fact that it even has the guts to include these themes made this easygoing big-budget movie a far better watch for me. 

Sure, the last thirty minutes are very cheesy and contain a lot of clichés, but the buildup is so solid that it earns some dumb rom-com moments near the end.

FREE GUY is worth going to see because it is one of the few quality films right now that increases one's faith in human nature. 

Lately I feel as though I have lost my faith in humanity with all that is happening in the world, so it is refreshing to get a movie that feels confident in the human experience. 

Maybe I'm looking too deep into the message of FREE GUY and maybe it was conceived just so Ryan Reynolds could screw around for two hours, but either way the price of admission is well worth it for an amazing time at the theater.

2023 02 05 12 13
2023 02 05 12 13

Home (2015)

A fun adventure about an independent girl searching for her mother (a big hit with my young daughter) and her cat. It teaches to face face your fears, friendships, promises, and handling adversity. All to a fun soundtrack.

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2023 02 05 12 29

...there's something so utterly sweet and innocent about Home that it zooms by with an enchanting charm. 

When people tell you to calm down by going to your happy place, it probably looks something like this. 

It's arguably the most child-centric movie Dreamworks have produced for a few years too. 

The adult-targeted humour is kept to a minimum and the physical comedy is amped up to levels that is normally irritating but here works an absolute treat. 

Its success can be attributed, in a big way, to the lovable alien Oh (Jim Parsons). A clumsy go-getter with endearing optimism, cuddly colour-changing looks, and amusing speech patterns, Oh steals the spotlight whenever he is on screen, which is about 95% of the time. 

As his plucky partner in adventure, Tip, Rihanna's precocious human child is fairly stock standard, whilst Steve Martin's dim-witted leader of Oh's Boov race lands a few hilarious moments among some dull ones. Vibrant, energetic and with an unexpected tear-jerking finale, Home falls on the right side of simple.

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2023 02 05 12 28

Here’s the Music Video, with scenes from the video.

Howl’s Moving Castle (2004)

In a time of war and falsity here it is a dancing poetry from Japan against all the cruelty and pain.

The moving castle leads us to a magic place where life has a strong value and elderly people have an important role to play. Also in an apparent hostility or in a scarecrow, Hayao Miyazaki gives us the chance of finding a friend and not letting the dream go down.

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2023 02 05 13 51x

The perfect technique and the emotional stream are in complete harmony. If the jury of the Venice Film Festival had been more far-seeing, it would have given a more prestigious prize to this masterpiece.

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2023 02 05 13 51

Kikis Delivery Service (1989)

One of our favorites. A young girl leaves home with her cat to begin her start as a young witch. Calm, peaceful and enchanting. My little girl loves the imagery, pace and feeling of the movie.

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2023 02 05 13 56

One of the greatest children’s films ever made

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2023 02 05 13 5f5

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2023 02 05 13 55ff

 

Labyrinth (1986)

A kids’ movie. I remember watching this on Betamax in the late 1980’s. But my daughter absolutely adores it.

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2023 02 05 14 0g3

Labyrinth was directed by Jim Henson of the Muppet and The Dark Crystal fame. It was produced by George Lucas and featured David Bowie as the villain Goblin King. It's also one of Jennifer Connelly's first films. And it just might be the best live-action Alice in Wonderland film ever made.

Sarah (Connelly) is a proud cloudcuckoolander, someone whose head is permanently stuck in the clouds and who can very easily lose entire days playing make-belief in the parks. And then she's given the unenviable task of looking after her baby brother while her parents go out on a date. And of course the kid gets kidnapped by goblins within fifteen minutes. Top notch job there, Sarah.

To Sarah's credit, she's obviously distraught by this and does everything she can to get her brother back. Nevertheless, her character is a bit tough to get behind most of the time. You can see that her heart is in the right place, but otherwise she's a brat. Not helping the matter is Connelly's acting. It's atrocious, especially in the early scenes. As the movie progresses, she does get better, but she's not going to be winning any Oscars anytime soon. (Which is ironic because fifteen years later she did just that with her role in A Beautiful Mind.)

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2023 02 05 14 0d3

But, putting that aside, the film is otherwise a whole lot of fun. David Bowie is an absolute blast, although the songs he's given to sing could have been better. Jim Henson's puppet work is also on full display and is easily the best part of the film. Furthermore, the story has that mad, no logic whatsoever dream quality to it, which makes it enjoyable to watch, and the characters aside from Sarah are very enjoyable.

Mars Needs Moms (2011)

This plays upon the “must save momma” theme that my daughter is a big fan of. Her eyes are glued to the video, and he’s hopping up and down as they race to save “momma”. It’s one of our favorites.

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2023 02 05 14 11

I wasn't going to watch this movie at all because of the terribly low score (4) on IMDb. Luckily, my kids talked me into it, and I was very pleasantly surprised indeed.

I am amazed that this movie scored so low. Yes, granted, its nothing groundbreaking; there are plenty of well-worn formulas applied. But its far from unusual in this regard, and the story is full of fun situations and characters.

Visually, its very nice to look at, and I found myself thoroughly enjoying the time I spent watching it. So did my kids, 8 and 10, who both thought it was great! I don't usually review movies here, but I often check the ratings before watching films. In this instance, I am amazed at the low rating this film received, and feel its unrepresentative of the actual quality.

2023 02 05 14 09
2023 02 05 14 09

I wasn't expecting this at all. I really wasn't. I hadn't read the bad reviews, however I saw the trailer and figured it would be quite cheesy and probably lame. Oh no aliens took my mother and I have to stop them! Sounded like a cheesy cartoon which would involve shooting aliens and running around to find his mom and save her, yada yada yada.

Well... boy was I surprised.

The movie started out with the whole alien world and because I knew the title was Mars needs Moms it implied the aliens were looking for moms. I watched them show two moms who's kids weren't listening, then it showed a third one who minded his mom. Satisfied by this result, it shows the boy and his mom and how the boy is in that age where he doesn't know why he should listen to his mom. Before they go to bed he says he wishes he didn't have a mom. The emotion from that makes you feel so bad.

Now many scenes later the mom got abducted by the aliens, and the boy managed to hitch a ride and meets some new friends and learns a lot. By the time the ending comes you really hope he can save his mom. 

The emotions I felt were amazing. 

More amazing though was the fact that I eve got some tears near the end. I won't say what happens, but it was very emotional and powerful to me.

So I would recommend this movie to anyone. And I'm 18 for your information, so hearing that a young adult got tears from a movie like this must be something.

Meet the Robinson’s (2007)

“Keep on moving forward”

Lewis is an 12-year-old orphan who is always inventing things. However, in a science fair, he meets Wilbur, a 13-year-old boy from the future who is chasing after a Bowler Hat Man who came to the past to steal Lewis' invention, a machine that shows memories. When he steals it, Wilbur takes Lewis to the future, as Wilbur explains he is chasing the villain due to him stealing a time machine. This would lead to an adventure where Lewis meets Wilbur's family, The Robinsons, and stop The Bowler Hat Man from changing the future.

This is a horribly underrated film. 

The characters are actually enjoyable, especially the members of Wilbur's family, from Uncle Art, the galactic pizza delivery guy voiced by the late Adam West, to Tiny The T-Rex, each character has an unique personality and talent. 

Also, the film is beautifully animated and teaches a lesson: keep going forward, despite your failures. 

This is worth checking out.

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2023 02 05 15 41

Moana (2016)

Just fun, and a great happy movie with depth.

Wow, what a great great movie! The visuals in this movie are breathtaking!! They are so gorgeous! But, besides the visuals there is such a heart and imagination and creativity to this movie. Moana is such a likable, smart, and relatable person. the voice work for Moana is so sweet and so good. The chemistry between Moana and Maui is so great and so natural. The songs in this movie are so charming, catchy and fun! But, How Far I'll Go is such an emotional song and it has such heart...I dare say I like it a little more than Let It Go! The way Moana sings it and you can feel it!! Wow, I just looved this movie and it is great for kids and adults. I will always love it and I wanna see it again!

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2023 02 05 15 44

My Neighbor Totoro aka Tonari no Totoro (1988)

This is our all-time favorite movie to watch. If you are a father, and you want to spend an afternoon with your daughter, this is perfect. Track down the English version. I got mine via a torrent.

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2023 02 05 15 50

This is the movie I watch to restore my faith in humanity

I first saw "My Neighbor Totoro" when I was maybe seven.At the time, I thought that it was really boring(that was still when I liked Disney movies). Years later, when I discovered "Princess Mononoke" I learned that MNT was by the same director and watched it again. And I find that I appreciate this film a whole lot more now then I did when I was seven.

The animation is absolutely stunning(as with all Miyazaki films)and the story is deceptively simple, told with patient, subtle attention to detail. The best example IMO is the scene where Mei falls asleep on Totoro's stomach.It's fruitless to try and describe it;you have to see it for yourself.

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2023 02 05 15 51

I absolutely agree with Roger Ebert who called "My Neighbor Totoro", "One of the most beloved of all family films". 

Its colorfully bright and sparkling animation is enchanting. 

It is incredibly realistic and at the same time makes us along with two main characters, the young sisters ready for a miracle to happen any minute. 

The gentle story is touching, uplifting, funny, and tender without being overly sentimental or didactic. 

The film takes place in the early 50s, when 10-year-old Satsuki and her baby sister, curious and energetic 4-year-old Mei spend one summer in an old house in the country side with their University professor father while their mother recovers from a serious illness in the nearby hospital. 

The great master Hayao Miyazaki remembers well what it is like to be a child, to see magic in the everyday life and be always ready to encounter it. 

This ability usually disappears as the child becomes adult but it stays forever in a few chosen, and they become the visionary Artists - just like Miyazaki himself. 

The film is partially autobiographical for the writer/director/storyboard artist. "When Miyazaki and his brothers were children, his mother suffered from spinal tuberculosis for nine years, and spent much of her time hospitalized. 

It is implied, yet never revealed in the film, that Satsuki and Mei's mother also suffers from tuberculosis. 

He once said the film would have been too painful for him to make if the two protagonists were boys instead of girls." (From the IMDb film trivia)

Totoro of the title is an adorable funny blue forest spirit who lives in the nest beneath a huge tree and makes the trees grow and the winds blow. 

Totoro becomes the friend and protector of the sisters and one day he sends them on the bus journey that is like nothing they and the viewers could ever imagine. 

I wish I could ride that cat bus. 

What a wild and kind imagination an artist should have to create it. 

How much happier we all are knowing that Hayao Miyazaki exists and makes his amazing films at the Studio Ghibli for which King Totoro is the mascot.

Spirited Away (2001)

No only a classic, but a movie about a young girl who is trying to get her parents back. There’s magic, dragons, friends, and so many details to mention that it boggles the mind.

2023 02 05 15 56
2023 02 05 15 56

This is a wonderfully imaginative and fantastical children's fantasy. It is easy to see why it was perhaps the critical hit of 2002. The film is glorious to look at. It is a testament to old fashioned animation techniques that seem to be resigned to foreign animations. Of course there is some use of computer imagery for certain shots but they blend seamlessly and the overall artistry involved is superlative.

2023 02 05 15 57
2023 02 05 15 57

This is the first Hayao Miyazaki film I have seen and I will certainly watch his others. The story plays on many elements successful with kids films, that transport you back to your own childhood and also allows the young audience to connect with the themes in the movie too. The story centres around Chihiro, a young girl about to move into a new place and who feels insecure about the new environment she will be living in. These fears become a part of her encounter with a strange abandoned amusement park that she and her parents find when they reach a dead end in their car. At the park they find that their is a stall that is seemingly open, with glorious displays of mouth watering food. There are no people about but Chihiros parents decide to gorge themselves on this bounty and pay later. As Chihioro explores she comes across a strange boy who warns her to get out before dark. It is too late however, because as night falls, ghosts are awakened, and then by the time she gets back to her parents they are turned into pigs. She then finds that the route she came from is gone and she is now trapped in this place, her only allie being the boy she met earlier. She is told to get a job at the centre piece of the park, a bath house run by Yubaba, an evil power mad witch. This is a bath house for the spirits and Chihiro has to find a job there before she is found and turned into an animal herself, then unable to save her parents.

2023 02 05 15 5s8
2023 02 05 15 5s8

The story is imaginative and the characters and animations endlessly unique and strange. This is just so much more creative than Hollywood. The characters are likeable and we become engrossed with Chihiros adventures inside this bathhouse, and the characters she comes into contact with as she tries to get her parents back as humans and whilst trying to get back to the human world. What I also loved in this film is that the animation gives it a real sense of cinematography, the drawing makes the film stand out in a way that American animations rarely do. Another film I think of that looked really good was Bellville Rendezvous. Another great point in fact the best part of it, is the fantastic score. It really is uplifting and very original. This is just great film making.

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2023 02 05 15 58

The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

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2023 02 05 16 04c

Oh, the dog; Snowy makes this movie fun for the young kids, it’s really fun for the entire family. Treasure, adventure, high-seas adventure, planes, desert, and so much more…

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2023 02 05 16 03x

As you may know Tin Tin is a very old character and there has been books and TV programs made about his great adventures by his inventor Hergé. 

This new film has been voted the best animated film and once you've seen this film you'll know why. 

The film is well paced out and there's never a dull moment in this film. The 3D in this film is spectacular and it's well worth seeing this film in 3D if you can. 

The film is around 1 hour 47 minutes long and in this time Steven Spielberg manages to squash in a good few adventures into one in this film. 

This makes it much more exciting and you really get to know how Tin Tin and Captain Haddock were in the old days. 

As a projectionist, I've seen this film about 6 times now and I still don't get bored watching it. 

Absolutely brilliant film, I really recommend going to see this film as soon as you can. 

Hope the review helps your thoughts on the film. Thanks for reading, I'll be making more reviews on the films that I see at my cinema so you can get the latest thoughts from me on the films. Thanks again BPH projectionist

2023 02 05 16 03
2023 02 05 16 03

The Cat Returns (2002)

One of my daughter’s favorite movies. Cats, kids. School. And magical adventure. The English dub version is just lovely.

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2023 02 05 16 08s

After the wild but fully justified furore surrounding Spirited Away, Studio Ghibli's next production is a much lower key affair, clearly aimed at a younger market. Having said that, this cynical thirty-something loved it to bits. Ghibli purists seem to be somewhat snobbish about the studio's output, but If this is an example of one of their films designed more for harmless family entertainment, I can stand to see a lot more of it.

This is a wonderful fantasy film, cute and funny, and full of remarkable and memorable characters. The animation is solid and detailed, occasionally even breathtaking, and the soundtrack is gorgeous. The brisk running time ensures the light story doesn't outstay its welcome. In fact, I could easily have watched more, and I'm already looking forward to Ghibli's or Miyazaki's next flight of fantasy.

2023 02 05 16 08
2023 02 05 16 08

Up (2009)

There are many more that I can add, but I really want to add this masterpiece. It is well known, but should never be over-looked if you want to share some time with your daughter….

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2023 02 05 16 12g

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2023 02 05 16 12

Ugly truths about the United States

Ever since the Military coup in November 1963 (President Kennedy Assassination) the United States became a military empire. It is run by wealthy oligarchs associated with the military-industrial complex. By the very nature of this situation, the United States serves the interests of the hidden cabal, and ignores the needs of the citizenry. And it shows.

To keep the system running, the United States must be constantly engaged in war; feeding the military-industrial complex.

The United States, over the decades has become a nation of raw plunder, manipulation, and shadow activities to feed the handful of wealthy oligarchs.

But all that is now coming to an end.

The military empire model that the United States is built upon is not a sustainable model. You can only destroy so much, and steal so much, and pillage so much until limits are reached. Now, with much of the world plundered of it’s materials and products, a new competitor has entered the world; the re-awakened giant dragon; China.

As China flexes its muscles and sharpens it’s claws, other nations are flocking to China for support, aid, assistance and protection. Leaving the corrupt, inept, and tarnished American military to go elsewhere. And the American stature is shrinking as a result.

The smart thing for the hidden leadership to do is to accept the change in global stature and adapt to it. But, that is not what is going on. They wish to clutch onto what they have in some mistaken belief that their plundering, rape, robbery, and theft was ordained by God.

And with this belief is the idea that the United States military can actually fight China, defeat it, and then plunder it like it has so many times in the past.

It’s a fantasy.

The world has changed.

And that is why the United States is constantly trying to provoke a Gulf of Tonkin incident with China over the South China Sea and Taiwan. It is an attempt to change the developing world order back to one when a military dictatorship can rule the world.

royal tomb
royal tomb

Breaking: Ancient Royal Tomb Discovered in Egypt

Egyptian authorities have announced that a never-before-seen royal tomb has been uncovered in Luxor, Egypt, dating back around 3,500 years. Archaeologists believe it belongs to a royal of the 18th Dynasty of Pharaonic Egypt (1550 BC to 1292 BC), but it has not yet been revealed who and what is inside.

Dr. Mustafa Waziri , General Secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said the tomb was unearthed on the west bank of the Nile River, where the famous Valley of the Queens is located.

Valley of the Queens

The Valley of the Queens, also known as Biban el-Harim, is a valley in Luxor, Egypt that was used as a necropolis for the wives and children of pharaohs during the 18th, 19th, and 20th dynasties of ancient Egypt. The valley contains around 75 tombs, including the tomb of Nefertari, the wife of Pharaoh Ramses II, which is considered to be one of the most beautiful tombs in the valley. The tombs in the valley are known for their well-preserved paintings and inscriptions, which provide valuable insights into the lives and beliefs of the ancient Egyptians.

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location 26

The location of the newly-discovered tomb on the west bank of the Nile in Luxor. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

A Royal of the Thutmosid Lineage?

Phys.org reports that Piers Litherland of the University of Cambridge, head of the British research mission, said the tomb could be of a royal wife or princess of Thutmosid lineage.

The Thutmosid pharaohs include some of the most famous kings of ancient Egypt, such as Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Amenhotep II, and Tutankhamun. During their reign, the Thutmosid pharaohs expanded the territory of Egypt through military campaigns, built monumental architectural projects such as temples, tombs and statues, and promoted the arts, literature and religion. They also increased the power and wealth of the central government and the royal court. The 18th dynasty was considered a golden age for ancient Egypt and it was the most powerful and prosperous dynasty in the New Kingdom. The significance of this discovery cannot be overstated, as it will shed new light on the cultural heritage of this era.

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photo 3

A photo taken from inside the entrance of the tomb looking out. The tomb has been secured with a metal gate to prevent looting. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

Damage from Floods

The joint Egyptian-English mission between the Supreme Council for Archaeology and the Modern State Research Foundation of Cambridge University, led by Dr. Fathi Yassin, is continuing its excavation and documentation of the cemetery. However, it is in poor condition due to ancient floods, which filled the tomb with sand and limestone.

Recent discoveries in Egypt are playing a crucial role in reviving the country’s vital tourism industry. The highlight of these efforts is the highly anticipated opening of the Grand Egyptian Museum, located at the base of the iconic pyramids.

Top image: The royal tomb discovered in Luxor. Credit: Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.

By Joanna Gillan

Chart of the week

trade with russia
trade with russia

Thessaloniki Metro Construction Reveals Unimaginable Treasures

Thessaloniki metro 2
Thessaloniki metro 2

The construction of local metro facilities in the ancient Greek port city of Thessaloniki have uncovered a massive stash of thousands of archaeological treasures from different periods of Thessaloniki’s history. This booty includes a  decumanus (an east-west oriented road, one of the primary highways of the time), along with a Byzantine avenue.

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Construction 0

Construction site of Thessaloniki’s Metro seen from the inside of a tunnel. (Konstantinos Stampoulis /  CC BY-SA 3.0 GR )

Thessaloniki’s Tryst with Momentous Greek and Roman Heritage

There are architectural remains of many 15th to 17th century buildings built on top of the remains of Hellenistic and Roman buildings – a  nymphaeum, a marble paved square, a bathhouse heated by an underfloor hypocaust system and a large mosaic with intricate geometric patterns. There is even a paved  road with colonnades and a line of Byzantine period shops and workshops. Stunning images of the same have been released by  Attiko Metro SA .

The metro follows the path of the ancient  decumanus, which now serves as the main historical avenue cutting through  Thessaloniki, reported  Arkeo News . The ancient road begins at the famed Golden Gate ( Porta Aurea ), the contemporaneous Vardario Square, all the way to Kassandriotik Gate, known today as Syntrivani Square. Currently, the excavation of Thessaloniki is the largest in northern Greece and covers an area of as much as 20,000 square kilometers (7,722 sq mi).

According to  Arkeonews, over 300,000 artifacts have been uncovered so far, dating to the 4th century BC, excavated from six of the twelve station sites currently under  construction. This figure is likely to increase immensely as the rest of the sites are excavated. The unearthed artifacts are likely to be exhibited at the stations where they were uncovered, as well as two new museums set to be created before the end of the year.

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images 4

The images released of the Thessaloniki metro excavations show the sheer scale of the project. ( Attiko Metro SA )

The Thessaloniki Metro Excavation that Keeps on Giving

Owing to its strategic placement along the Thermaic Gulf of the Aegean Sea, Thessaloniki received a fair bit of human traffic throughout its history. Located in the Macedonian region, it is Greece’s second largest city today and new finds from various phases of its history keep popping up at frequent intervals, including the declaration of Thessaloniki as a “Byzantine Pompeii” during 2013 metro excavations.

In 2012 a pre-Cassandrian small town from the 4th century BC was discovered in Pylaia during excavations of the main line of the metro. It led to an ensuing 31-acre (125,000 sq m) excavation in the area, with part of the city being laid out according to the Hippodamian grid plan – an urban planning system along the line of the great cities of  Macedonia, Olynthos and  Pella.

In 2018, the statue of  Aphrodite was discovered at the  Hagia Sophia  station, named after one of the oldest churches in the city, revealing an entire fountain complex around the area. Meanwhile, a  Roman cemetery  (2nd to 4th century AD) was discovered within the confines of Fleming Station, revealing previously unidentified settlements on the outskirts of ancient  Thessaloniki.

In the same area, a 3 kilometer (1.86 mi) cemetery basilica with mosaic floors was discovered on the site of a previous structure, revealing thousands of funerary monuments from the Hellenistic to Late Antiquity period. The tombs were of all kinds – pit-shaped, box-shaped, pot burials, altars, altar-shaped constructions, single and double vaulted, clay and glass vessels, silver and gold jewelry, and all kinds of coins.

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Centuries of history has been unearthed thanks to the construction of a metro line in Thessaloniki. ( Attiko Metro SA )

Thessaloniki: A Checkered History of Power and Prestige

These finds are not surprising – after all, Thessaloniki was known as  Symvasilévousa or the co-reigning city of the  Byzantine Empire , alongside  Constantinople. Prior to that too, Thessaloniki had a strong economy and established socio-political structures and institutions, with the greatest development occurring in the second half of the 4th century.

In 315 BC,  Kassandros founded the city, though it was briefly abandoned after the fall of the Kingdom of Macedon in 168 BC. It regained its prestige and importance with the emergence of Rome as a trading hub with a vital highway running through it, known as the Via Egnatia, connecting Byzantium with Dyrrachium.

Thessaloniki reinvented itself as a seat of power away from Rome in the second half of the 5th century AD, after the  fall of Rome  and with the emergence of the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, explained  Heritage Daily It was sacked again in 904 AD in a naval attack led by Byzantine converts to Islam led by Leo of Tripoli, and finally passed out of Byzantine hands three centuries later during the  Fourth Crusade .

Top image: Thousands of artifacts and architectural remains have been uncovered during metro excavations in Thessaloniki. Source:  Attiko Metro SA

By Sahir Pandey

What is the (ridiculously named) United States of America doing to ‘knee-cap’ or ‘hamstring’ China’s recovery from Euro-American/Japanese colonial ruination — a recovery which, given China’s share of humanity’s global population, naturally makes it a ‘superpower’? To the end of (to the American consensus) “keeping the Chinese ‘in their place’”?

Everything in their power.

The ‘running total’ ‘bottom line’ return on the (lol) ‘United’ States of America’ effort to handicap the PRC?.

Less. Than. Nothing.

Less than nothing? Yes. Less than nothing. Their every effort has worked to bouy-up China’s good global reputation — and to both justify and grow its defensive resolve.

The American consensus lives in gob-smacking denial re: how near to universal … let’s call it the ‘global antipathy’ towards America is — despite the evidence — and despite how indisputably earned thus reasonable that global contempt is. Perhaps a picture might help. (A long shot … but hey . . .)

Here, to use the American vernacular, is the map of “The New World Order” as of 1/1/2023:

main qimg 31568b8afffb33e0f11cd9ace58d972b pjlq
main qimg 31568b8afffb33e0f11cd9ace58d972b pjlq

Green hue nations are committed members of at the least one China-fostered strategic community. The deeper the green the more such cooperative arrangements.

Blue hue represents nations drinking out of the American kool-aid well. They comprise America, the UK, Australia, Japan, Canada — and (sort of) Mexico. Think ‘5 Eyes’ and ‘AUKUS’ plus Japan.

‘Europe’ is purple-hued. Well, sort of. Here’s the close-up of Europe as of 1/1/2023:

main qimg dd114939d4e9eb873b763fbd842a6c8a pjlq
main qimg dd114939d4e9eb873b763fbd842a6c8a pjlq

All of those purple w/green stripes nations are ‘committed’ to BOTH the EU AND Belts & Roads Initiative. Europe’s in a complex and increasingly fragmenting situation.

Here’s another world map to obviate how far the global majority have come in feeling empowered to shrug an “and these are the f___s we have to give you” in America’s bossy face.

main qimg 2fb8165bd9ab04843d5d371971f86970 pjlq
main qimg 2fb8165bd9ab04843d5d371971f86970 pjlq

The blue hue represents the nations who are now investors in the Belts & Roads Initiative’s primary funding agency — the AIIB (Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank). Notice how America has only managed to “ahem” Japan to shunning the AIIB. Every nation with the capital to invest is doing so. Already this year Africa’s Mauritania has begun the paperwork in a trend that’s seeing borrowers empowered to become investors.

So. Why is America — the planet’s only ‘power projecting’ superpower — a status that it’s held for well over a generation — 30+ years — why’s it been increasingly powerless to sabotage China’s recovery and success? Why has America failed to isolate China? Why have America’s efforts to undermine China proved so . . . impotent?

Here it comes . . . another map. This one is of an organization improbable in its members’ ethnic, spiritual, cultural and political diversity. And why that community has thrived for 60 years. Here’s the map:

main qimg 486d95999ffb591c9d8206f055c8e52a pjlq
main qimg 486d95999ffb591c9d8206f055c8e52a pjlq

The Non-Aligned Movement was born and grew to include 120 of the world’s 195 nations. It did so because those 120 nations (plus observers) had no desire to ‘fall in line’ behind any power.

At the outset that meant America or Russia. By 1990 it was clear the only superpower they need fear was America. By 1992 there was zero room to doubt that America was the only hegemonic superpower threat. Russia having unilaterally, voluntarily, relinquished all its authority over the Warsaw Pact — followed by all the non-Russian republics of the USSR. Russia then having made nothing other than verbal responses to American (‘NATO’) exploitation of Russia’s de-militarization of the entire central ⅓ of the European continent for a full generation — 25 years.

No sooner had Russia retired from seeking to be a global hegemonic rival to America than the US began manufacturing ‘legitimacy’ to bombard to smithereens then invade — “Shock & Awe” they called it — assorted nations. The message made clear “If we can starve then smite into rubble Iraq imagine what we can do to you”.

Without Russia as a constraining counterbalance America’s 11 Carrier Battle Groups were free to ‘Commodore Peary’ swagger into any port they felt the urge to. Thru that full generation America doubled-down on its neo-colonialist ‘crusade’. (Hell, Bush Jr. called it a crusade. A blitzkrieg undertaken on what we’re clearly false pretenses . . . a ‘crusade’. Not even a mumbled “oops, our bad”. Americans in general revealed themselves such a**-holes they didn’t rush out and buy all The Dixie Chicks albums in contrition and compensation.

The world watched and weighed and judged — and found Americans wanting. Found America wanting. 1850 ‘gunboat diplomacy’ steroidally bloated to battle group diplomacy.

Decades of unrepentant self-righteous gunboat bullying shrugged off by Americans as perfectly okay left zero doubt America was the greatest threat to their sovereignty and success. China? Zero global ‘projection of power’.

Instead of the 11 super-carrier battle armadas gunnels-full with freedom-killing F-22s, F-35s, and missiles? China’s ‘blue-water fleet’ boasts equally massive bulk carriers heaped full of a cargo of capital and container ships filled and mounded high with 20,000 each of rail-cars of affordable life-enhancing consumer goods.

So. While China has treated its global villager neighbours with respect? America’s done little other than condescend — and coerce.

America simply by being its same old self doing the same old disrespectful things has stood in a stark contrast to China — making the choice of so easy.

Sorry, but I would do that for my cat too.

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52 63be700dd204e 700

Odd Thrift Store finds…

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thrift shop 40

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thrift shop 39

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thrift shop 21

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thrift shop 13

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thrift shop 15

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thrift shop 17

This Artist Created Cartoons That Are Too Relevant To Anyone Who Likes Alcohol, Sex And Being An Idiot

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Iamnotanartist_ is an illustrator who creates comics about the stupid things that happen to him. The (not an) artist says the inspiration comes from their nights out with their mates: “Fortunately for me, they are degenerates and are really easy to write about.” From drunk abilities to life’s great mysteries, everyone who likes to have a pint (or five) once in a while will relate.

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Chicken Soup Mexicana

All of your favorite Mexican flavors mix together in this soup while the canola oil and avocado supply healthy fats. ¡Muy delicioso!

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2023 01 22 16 18

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon canola oil 15 mL
  • 2 cloves garlic, minced
  • 1 medium onion, sliced (about 1 cup/250 mL)
  • 4 celery stalks, sliced (about 1 cup/250 mL)
  • 1/8 teaspoon ground black pepper 0.5 mL
  • 2 teaspoons cumin 10 mL
  • 1 teaspoon red pepper flakes 5 mL
  • 8 cups low-sodium chicken stock 2 L
  • 2/3 cup lentils 150 mL
  • 1 (19 ounce) can tomatoes, chopped 540 mL
  • 3 medium carrots, thinly sliced (about 1 cup/ 250 mL)
  • 2 pounds cooked chicken, cubed 1 kg (about 7 cups/1.75 L)
  • 1 small zucchini, thinly sliced (about 1/3 cup/75 mL)
  • 1 cup frozen peas 250 mL
  • 1 small avocado, peeled and sliced (about 1/2 cup/125 mL)

Instructions

  1. In Dutch oven, heat canola oil. Add garlic, onion and celery. Sauté until vegetables are tender.
  2. Season with black pepper, cumin and red pepper flakes.
  3. Add chicken stock, lentils, tomatoes and carrots. Simmer, covered, for 30 minutes, or until carrots are tender.
  4. Add chicken, zucchini and peas. Cover and simmer for 10 to 15 minutes longer, or until vegetables are tender.
  5. Garnish with avocado slices.

Prep: 10 min | Cook: 50 min | Yield: 10 (2 cup) servings

Nutrition per serving: Calories 270 Total Fat 6 g Saturated Fat 1 g Cholesterol 75 mg Carbohydrates 17 g Fiber 6 g Sugars 5 g Protein 35 g Sodium 170 mg Potassium 571 mg

Vietnam’s ‘mini-China’ days may be numbered

President Phuc’s likely forced resignation could signal a less reform-friendly direction in one of Asia’s hottest economies
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With so many headwinds zooming Vietnam’s way, now seems an incredibly inopportune moment for Hanoi to carry out a major political shakeup.

That’s precisely the dilemma global investors faced this week as pro-market President Nguyen Xuan Phuc suddenly resigned.

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2023 01 22 16 16

Government officials claim that the unparalleled purge led by Communist Party chief Nguyen Phu Trong was all part of an anti-corruption effort in the halls of Vietnamese power.

Investors, though, can’t help but wonder if Phuc’s departure is more of an internecine Trong power grab that will delay urgently-needed economic reforms in one of Asia’s hottest economies.

Phuc has been president since April 2021 and was prime minister from 2016 to 2021. Generally speaking, he significantly strengthened Hanoi’s ties with the US and European Union.

The EU-Vietnam Free Trade Agreement signed in 2019 was emblematic of Phuc’s determination to internationalize the economy and an example of why he garnered considerable gravitas in global market circles.

It’s worth noting, too, that Phuc’s ouster follows recent news that numerous technocratic and Western-leaning officials have been shown the door as Trong centralizes power.

As such, notes Zachery Abuza, professor at the National War College in Washington, Phuc’s comeuppance is “good for China and Russia” and a sign that “Trong has effectively won the war against technocrats.”

From HERE

Planning the move…

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2023 01 22 16 22

If China and the US are persons. Here is the conversation.

USA: I hate you, commie bastard.

China: I don’t like you, too. Imperialist scum.

USA: You treat millions of your Uyghur people brutally, setting up Firewalls to contain your people from accessing cyberspace outside your turf, and you are stripping off the autonomy of Hong Kong, you don’t allow anyone to criticize your governance and make fun of “The Party”, and criminalize religious people and dissidents. You’re such a totalitarian dystopia, your people would be happy if you adpot democracy.

China: You are lynching a lot of African-American people, many streets in your cities are infested with homeless and gangsters, your cops are enforcing law by violence, let your people own guns to kill each other, you’re deporting a lot of Latino parents from their children and drugged them, bombing other countries that made a lot of refugees and terrorists in the world, and making my people turn against me by indoctrinating them by your so-called “freedom” and “human rights”. Your media is making a lot of lies and baseless accusations about me, and keep sticking your nose into other people’s businesses. You can only make your living from wars and conflicts. You are the source of chaos in this world.

USA: South China Sea is not your belonging, it belongs to everyone, douchebag.

China: South China Sea is not your pond in your backyard, get the hell out of there, jerk.

USA: I won’t afraid of you cuz your navy still sucks though you can build carriers.

China: Yeah, come to take it if you dare. My DF-21D supersonic anti-ship missiles would send billions worth of your carrier battle groups into Davy Jone’s Locker.

USA: You are enslaving a lot of 3rd countries by kicking them into your debt trap, a$$hole.

China: Oh, better than what you did to the Native Americans a century ago, you murderous dickhead.

USA: You plagiarized and stole all my hi-tech stuff! Unless you pay me the copyright licensing fee then I will let you make them!

China: Those stuffs were figured out all by myself! I don’t need to steal them from you! And why must I pay you for those?

USA: I’m selling weapons to Taiwan! Protect their democratic government!

China: And I’m buying those stuff from Russia!

USA: I’m putting more sanction and tariffs to you!

China: Bring it on! I still got a lot of friends would like to do businesses with me!

USA: You’re an eyesore, China! I’m just want to keep this world in order, but you are always standing in my way!

China: You’re a prick in my heart, America! I am just want to make this world a better place but you are always messing things up!

USA: I wanna destroy you but I can’t.

China: Yup, we are going down each other if we really flipped out.

USA: I will think the other ways to stop you from rising above me, just you wait. I will show you who’s the boss!

China: Come on, you know I’m not interested to preveil you as the “Big Brother” of the globe, there’s no need to be confrontational, we can sort this out together. However, if you are still being so worked up against me, then so be it. I got thousands of “ancient Chinese secret” techniques to put you on knees and don’t complain that I didn’t warn you.

“The Way We Fall”: Eerie Illustrations Of An Apocalyptical World By Yuri Shwedoff

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Whether we imagine the world as a futuristic dystopia or a charred wasteland, post-apocalyptic images weigh heavily on our cultural imaginations. In a stunning series of illustrations, Russian artist Yuri Shwedoff has created an intensely atmospheric vision of the “end of days,” one that blends fantasy imagery with science fiction. Among his scenes are sword-wielding warriors, blasted roads, alien architecture, and falling skies; as vestiges of the lost world, animals seem to take on a symbolic significance, communing with the human figures in moments of intensity and reflection. Pulled between oscillating states of violent destruction and quiet despair, Shwedoff’s images are bound together by a powerful atmosphere that emanates from the brooding, ash-filled skies.

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While many of Shwedoff’s artworks feature otherworldly phenomena — such as the telekinetic gladiator — what makes them most evocative are their ties to the world we know. The space shuttle, for example, sits dormant on its launch pad, embedded in dust and waste. Perhaps it was prepared to escape the world; now, it becomes aged scenery for the lone horseman who regards it on his journey. Similarly, the alien pods in “Cradle” suggest a landing with no escape plan; now, the structures are merely shelters for those who survive. Instilled with imagination and emotion, Shwedoff confronts us with powerful images of a lost humanity that has surpassed its technological limits and reached an inevitable end.

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You can view more of Shwedoff’s work on Behance, Facebook, and Instagram. He also has a page on Patreon where you can make pledges in exchange for artwork, undersketches, and process videos.

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Ugly truths about the United States

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https://youtu.be/TlUCkxnYWVE

Chicken Pot Pie Soup

All the ingredients for chicken pot pie – the chunky chicken and vegetables and the savory broth – are in this soup. A crisp crouton stands in for the pie crust.

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2023 01 22 16 19

Ingredients

  • 1 1/2 teaspoons McCormick® Rosemary Leaves, crushed
  • 1 1/2 teaspoons McCormick® Thyme Leaves
  • 1 teaspoon McCormick® Garlic Powder
  • 4 teaspoons butter, divided
  • 1 (8 ounce) package mushrooms, sliced
  • 1 cup sliced carrots
  • 1/2 cup all-purpose flour
  • 4 cups reduced sodium chicken broth
  • 1 1/2 cups frozen pearl onions
  • 1 pound boneless skinless chicken thighs, cut into 1-inch pieces
  • 1 cup frozen peas
  • 8 thin bread slices
  • 1 teaspoon oil

Instructions

  1. Mix rosemary, thyme and garlic powder in small bowl. Reserve 1/2 teaspoon.
  2. Heat 1 teaspoon of the butter in large saucepan on medium heat. Add mushrooms, carrots and remaining seasoning mixture; cook and stir for 3 minutes. Remove from saucepan. Set aside.
  3. Melt remaining 3 teaspoons butter in saucepan on medium heat, stirring to release browned bits from bottom of skillet. Sprinkle with flour; cook and stir for 3 to 4 minutes or until flour is lightly browned.
  4. Gradually stir in broth until well blended. Bring to boil. Reduce heat to low; simmer for 10 minutes or until slightly thickened, stirring occasionally.
  5. Add vegetable mixture, chicken, pearl onions and peas; simmer for 8 minutes or until chicken is cooked through, stirring occasionally.
  6. Meanwhile, preheat oven to 350 degrees F.
  7. Cut bread into rounds with 3 inch cookie cutter. Place on baking sheet. Brush bread with oil and sprinkle with reserved seasoning mixture. Bake for 10 minutes or until toasted.
  8. To serve soup, ladle into soup bowls and top each with 1 crouton.

Yield: 8 (1-cup) servings | Prep: 15 min | Cook: 25 min

2023 is a year of the Water Rabbit let’s take glimpses of the past to see the future

Let’s have a nice and easy slide into the new year of the Rabbit.

2023 is a year of the Water Rabbit, starting from January 22nd, 2023 (Chinese New Year), and ending on February 9th, 2024 (Chinese New Year's Eve). The sign of Rabbit is a symbol of longevity, peace, and prosperity in Chinese culture.

2023 is predicted to be a year of hope.

I’ll gather up some videos and put it up on you-tube when I get a chance.

Let’s check out today’s post…

Back in the day…

Most of us believe that Victorian era was a grim and serious era, full of hardworking people, so that they didn’t even have time to enjoy their lives and having some fun. While this isn’t true, because cameras were very expensive and for a single photograph one had to sit in static position with same facial expression from few seconds to 10 minutes. So it seems impossible for a person to smile or laugh for minutes, that’s why majority of the Victorians preferred to sit in static position with strict expressions.

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Hilarious side of Victorian era life 1890s38

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Hilarious side of Victorian era life 1890s2

The All New Baby Safety Seat. Never Leave Your Kid Inside A Hot Car While You Shop Again. Late 1950s, Early 1960s

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63be8adb0f76b ak6hpowiyvh91 700

East Texas Buttermilk Pie

buttermilk pie2
buttermilk pie2

Ingredients

  • 1 (9-inch) pie shell, baked
  • 3 rounded tablespoons flour
  • 1 1/2 cups granulated sugar
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 cup butter, melted
  • 3 eggs, slightly beaten
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
  • Nutmeg, to taste (optional)
  • Cinnamon, to taste (optional)

Instructions

  1. Mix flour, sugar and salt; add to butter.
  2. Add eggs, buttermilk and vanilla extract. Mix and pour into pie shell; sprinkle with nutmeg and cinnamon, if desired.
  3. Bake at 350 degrees F for 50 minutes. Test with knife. It should come out clean when pie is done.

https://youtu.be/6Aa-zF6-yGE

We Won’t Be Fooled Again – Inflation Is Most Definitely Not “Under Control”

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Inflation is going down!  Let’s all celebrate!  We all knew that when the Federal Reserve began aggressively hiking interest rates it would have an impact on inflation.  Higher rates have caused a new housing crash, they have crushed the tech industry, and they have sparked the biggest wave of layoffs that we have seen since the Great Recession.  We have entered a significant economic downturn, so it was inevitable that the annual rate of inflation would start to moderate.  But as I will explain below, that doesn’t mean that inflation is now “under control”.  The real rate of inflation is much higher than we are being told, and people all over the country are being absolutely crushed by the rising cost of living.

Let’s start with the good news first.  According to the Labor Department, the annual rate of inflation is rising at the slowest pace since October 2021

Consumer prices increased 6.5% from a year earlier, down from 7.1% in November and a 40-year high of 9.1% in June, according to the Labor Department’s consumer price index, a measurement of what people pay for goods and services, which labor released on Thursday.

The rise last month marks the slowest annual gain since October 2021 and matches economists’ estimates.

Okay, but Fox Business has just reminded us that the annual rate of inflation “remains about three times higher than the pre-pandemic average”

Still, inflation remains about three times higher than the pre-pandemic average, underscoring the persistent financial burden placed on millions of U.S. households by high prices.

So we are still definitely in a high inflation environment.

But let’s dig deeper.

Most Americans don’t realize that the way that the inflation rate is calculated has literally been changed more than two dozen times since 1980.

And every time it has been changed, the goal has been to make inflation appear to be lower than it actually is.

If the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, the real rate of inflation would be close to 15 percent right now.

That would be comparable to the peak inflation that we witnessed during the Jimmy Carter era.

So don’t let anyone try to convince you that inflation is “low” or “under control” or anything like that.

The main reason why the rate of inflation moderated somewhat during the month of December is because energy prices have been falling

Americans saw some real reprieve last month in the form of lower energy costs, which fell 6.1% in December. Gas prices dropped 12.5% over the month, the biggest contributor to the overall headline decline in inflation in December.

That is great news, but it is already being projected that gas prices will rise significantly later this year.

And once war in the Middle East erupts, gas prices will go to heights that most people never even dreamed was possible.

Meanwhile, services inflation has just spiked to a level that we haven’t seen in decades.

The cost of living has become extremely oppressive, and the American people are becoming increasingly frustrated by this.

I would like to share a video with you that illustrates what I am talking about.

The woman in this video doesn’t understand all of the numbers that I have just shared in this article.  All she knows is that when she goes to the grocery store, prices are way higher than they once were.  This video contains some graphic language, and I apologize for that in advance.  But I want you to see her anger, because this is how millions upon millions of Americans are feeling about inflation right now.

 

Would you like to be the one that tries to convince her that inflation is “under control” now?

Sadly, the truth is that over the past few years the cost of living has been rising faster than our paychecks have, and so U.S. families have steadily been getting poorer

The average American family has lost the equivalent of more than a month’s salary in annual income since President Biden took office as high inflation and rising interest rates eat away at their finances, according to research by the Heritage Foundation.

Experts at the conservative think tank analyzed consumer prices and interest rates and found in their latest report released Thursday that the average American household has lost the equivalent of $7,400 in annual income since Biden’s inauguration Jan. 20, 2021. The income loss represents an increase of $200 from September, when the think tank’s research found a $7,200 decline in annual income for the average American household dating back to the start of Biden’s term.

Prior to the pandemic, we were in a low inflation and low interest rate environment.

Now that the Federal Reserve has dramatically hiked interest rates, we now find ourselves in a high inflation and high interest rate environment.

And higher interest rates are also hammering our standard of living

While their elected representatives in D.C. struggle to pay the nation’s bills, Americans are facing a similar challenge as their household budgets are stretched thin due to inflation and higher borrowing costs. Those financial challenges led more than one-third of households to rely on credit cards or loans to buy necessities in December. Average credit card interest rates reached a new record high of 19.14% APR compared to a Bankrate.com database.

“Americans are increasingly relying on credit cards to make it from paycheck to paycheck, resulting in higher levels of indebtedness. Rising credit card balances in an era of rising interest rates is a path to insolvency,” Antoni told FOX Business. “The average interest rate on credit cards is now around 20 percent while half of Americans cannot pay off their credit cards each month, and balances are growing at a 16 percent annual rate.”

We are getting hit from both ends.

We have to pay more to buy the things that we need, and we have to pay higher interest rates when we borrow money to pay for those things.

The Federal Reserve has lost control, and we are careening toward the sort of historic economic crisis that I have been warning about for years.

But those that are under the spell of the corporate media will continue to assume that everything is fine and that our leaders have a plan to get us out of this mess.

I truly wish that was true.

Unfortunately, the short-term economic outlook is extremely dismal, and prominent voices all over Wall Street are warning that 2023 will be a really rough year.

Remarkable Behind-The-Scenes Photos From ‘Back To The Future’ That Will Bring You Back To The ’80s

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Some people have speculated for a while now that there will be a remake of the legendary movie series Back To The Future. But this mindset is not without criticism and skepticism since many fans feel that without Michael J. Fox and Christopher Lloyd there simply is no way that a remake would be good enough to even be considered.

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Here’s a great collection of rare behind the scenes photos for Robert Zemekis’ film Back to the Future. These images came from the incredibly well researched Back to the Future site Outatime, offer a candid behind the scenes look at this classic movie. Be sure to check out these 70 pics below, and let us know what your favorite Back to the Future scene is.

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Yikes!

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Vision-Dieter glasses

There have been countless weight loss hoaxes over the years, from pills and elixirs to topical treatments, fad diets, and more. One product sold in the 1970s with glaringly false claims was Vision-Dieter glasses, which were said to decrease cravings and hunger by using “secret European color technology.”

The initial objective of the creator was to manufacture glasses that would distort the color of food packaging in hopes of making shoppers less likely to purchase products just because they were in colorful containers. But realizing how much money could be made in the dieting field, he decided to market the glasses as a tool for consumers who were trying to lose weight.

It should come as no surprise that the Food and Drug Administration took action. These color-tinted weight reduction glasses were seized due to misbranding. Most pairs were eventually destroyed by the FDA when the claimant refused to come forward.

Totally cool!

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2023 01 21 09 54

Recently discovered?

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2023 01 21 09 58

A Starfish Waking Back To The Water

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Chef Eddie Jackson’s Smoky Texas Chili
with Cheddar Jalapeño Dumplings

This chili is absolutely divine. It’s rather labor-intensive, but the result is well worth the effort.

chef eddie smoky chili
chef eddie smoky chili

Yield: 16 servings

Ingredients

Smoked Chuck Roast

  • 4 pounds beef chuck roast, smoked, cut into 1 inch cubes
  • Salt and pepper

Chili

  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1 large yellow onion, diced
  • 1 red bell pepper, coarsely chopped
  • 1/4 cup dark chili powder
  • 1 tablespoon smoked paprika
  • 1 teaspoon paprika
  • 1 tablespoon cumin
  • 1 tablespoon fine black pepper
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder
  • 2 roasted poblanos, coarsely chopped
  • 1 quart (4 cups) beef stock
  • 1 (28 ounce) can crushed tomatoes
  • 1 teaspoon Mexican oregano
  • 1 teaspoon beef base
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • Kosher salt to taste (optional)

Cheddar Jalapeño Dumplings

  • 1 cup cornmeal
  • 1 cup all-purpose flour
  • 1 teaspoon baking powder
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 cup honey or 1/2 cup granulated sugar
  • 2 eggs
  • 1 cup buttermilk
  • 1/4 to 1/2 cup shredded sharp Cheddar cheese
  • 1 small jalapeño, finely diced

Instructions

Smoked Chuck Roast

  1. Add wood chunks, chips, pellets or charcoal to smoker according to manufacturer’s instructions. Preheat to 250 degrees F.
  2. Season trimmed chuck roast generously with salt and pepper.
  3. Place chuck roast on rack in smoker according to manufacturer’s instructions. Set timer for 8 hours.
  4. After 4 hours, or when the roast reaches an internal temperature of 180 degrees F, wrap with unwaxed butcher paper and place back on smoker.
  5. After 4 more hours, or when the roast reaches 208 to 210 degrees F internal temperature, remove roast from smoker.
  6. Let rest in the butcher paper for at least 1 hour.
  7. Slice the roast into cubes right before adding to the chili.

Chili

  1. In a Dutch oven, heat vegetable oil over MEDIUM-HIGH heat. Add diced onion and sprinkle with salt, if desired. Saute until onions are translucent, about 5 minutes.
  2. Add the red peppers and saute for 2 minutes.
  3. Add chili powder, paprika, cumin, black pepper, and garlic powder stirring frequently for about a minute allowing the spices to bloom, but not burn.
  4. Add the cubed smoked chuck roast and poblano peppers. Once all ingredients are coated with spices, stir in beef stock and tomatoes to the pot, deglazing the bottom.
  5. Add oregano, beef base, and Worcestershire sauce to the pot. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
  6. Bring chili to a boil then turn stove to LOW heat and simmer covered for 40 minutes, stirring occasionally.Meanwhile, make Cheddar Jalapeño Dumplings.

Cheddar Jalapeño Dumplings

  1. Mix together cornmeal, flour, baking powder, salt, and sugar for Cheddar Jalapeño Dumplings.
  2. Add eggs folding gently to combine. Then stir buttermilk into the mixture until combined.
  3. Fold in cheese and jalapeños, being sure not to over mix the batter.
  4. Place 1 to 2 ounce dollops of dumpling batter into the chili. Continue to simmer chili, covered, for 20 minutes or until dumplings are firm, but fluffy.
  5. Serve chili in bowls garnished with shredded cheese, sliced scallions, cilantro leaves and a dollop of sour cream, as desired.

You Guys Are Cute With Your Scary Spiders. I Found This Under My Couch A Month After I Fumigated

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This is “Wow Cool”!

I imagine the plumage must have been impressive.

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2023 01 21 10 03

Cool Pics That Show How People Enjoyed Parties In The 1970s

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Here below is a photo collection that shows how people enjoyed parties from the 1970s.

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This Will Haunt My Dreams

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We Are Witnessing An Enormous Wave Of Bankruptcies And Layoffs During The Early Stages Of 2023

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Is your job safe?  Right now, we are witnessing so much turmoil is so many different sectors of our economy.  The housing market is crashing, the cryptocurrency industry has imploded, the tech industry is laying off workers at an extremely frightening pace, and some of our most important retailers are heading into bankruptcy.  The information that I am about to share with you is deeply troubling.  It has become exceedingly clear that our economy is in huge trouble, and I fully expect that our problems will accelerate even more as the year rolls along.

Let me start by pointing out what is currently happening at Microsoft.  It is one of the wealthiest companies in the entire world, but due to a shift in “macroeconomic conditions” executives have decided that it has become necessary to lay off 10,000 workers

Microsoft announced thousands of job cuts this week, becoming the latest tech company to pluck its workforce as the global economy slows.

The software company confirmed Wednesday its reducing workforce by 10,000 people through the end of the third quarter of the 2023 fiscal year.

The cuts come “in response to macroeconomic conditions and changing customer priorities,” the company’s CEO Satya Nadella released in a statement to its employees Wednesday.

If even Microsoft is laying off thousands of workers, is any job in the private sector truly safe?

Meanwhile, some of the biggest names in the retail industry are plunging into bankruptcy now that the holiday season is over.

On Tuesday, it was Party City’s turn

Party City filed for bankruptcy protection Tuesday, weighed down by competition and years of financial losses.

The largest party goods and Halloween specialty retail chain in the United States said in a regulatory filing that it reached an agreement with debtholders to cut its $1.7 billion debt load.

Even more alarming is the fact that it is being reported that a bankruptcy filing for Bed Bath & Beyond has become “likely”

Bed Bath & Beyond has been in discussions with prospective buyers and lenders as it works to keep its business afloat during a likely bankruptcy filing, according to people familiar with the matter.

The retailer is in the midst a sale process in hopes of finding a buyer that would keep the doors open for both of its major chains, its namesake banner and Buybuy Baby, said the people, who weren’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

So many brick and mortar retailers are really struggling right now, and many of them are blaming competition from Internet retailers such as Amazon.

But if Amazon is doing so well, why did they start laying off approximately 18,000 workers on Wednesday?

Earlier this month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a blog post that the company was laying off about 18,000 people as it seeks to cut costs and would begin contacting impacted employees on Jan. 18.

“Amazon has weathered uncertain and difficult economies in the past, and we will continue to do so,” Jassy said in the Jan. 4 post. “These changes will help us pursue our long-term opportunities with a stronger cost structure.”

The wave of layoffs that we have been witnessing in the tech industry is truly unprecedented.

Prior to this week, more than 25,000 tech industry workers had already been laid off this year, and this comes on the heels of the massive layoffs that we saw last year…

According to the data tracking website, more than 101 tech companies around the world have laid off 25,436 employees so far in 2023. Most of the layoffs have taken place in the United States, accounting for 22,400 employees fired.

The number of workers being laid off from tech companies is a trend that is continuing since 2022, when 154,336 workers were fired from over 1,000 tech companies around the world, according to the data.

But at least the tech industry is in far better shape than the cryptocurrency industry is.

Let me share four major announcements that have all happened within the past 10 days…

#1 It is being reported that Genesis Global Capital “is laying the groundwork for a bankruptcy filing”

Genesis Global Capital is laying the groundwork for a bankruptcy filing as soon as this week, according to people with knowledge of the situation.

The cryptocurrency lending unit of Digital Currency Group has been in confidential negotiations with various creditor groups amid a liquidity crunch. It has warned that it may need to file for bankruptcy if it fails to raise cash, Bloomberg previously reported.

#2 Crypto.com announced that it will be laying off “20% of its workforce”

Crypto.com announced plans to lay off 20% of its workforce Jan. 13. The company had 2,450 employees, according to PitchBook data, suggesting around 490 employees were laid off.

CEO Kris Marszalek said in a blog post that the crypto exchange grew “ambitiously” but was unable to weather the collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto empire FTX without the further cuts.

#3 Coinbase has decided “to cut about a fifth of its workforce”

On Jan. 10, Coinbase announced plans to cut about a fifth of its workforce as it looks to preserve cash during the crypto market downturn.

The exchange plans to cut 950 jobs, according to a blog post. Coinbase, which had roughly 4,700 employees as of the end of September, had already slashed 18% of its workforce in June saying it needed to manage costs after growing “too quickly” during the bull market.

#4 The founder of cryptocurrency exchange Bitzlato has actually been arrested.  Apparently he was laundering money on a scale of epic proportions…

The founder of the Hong Kong-based cryptocurrency exchange Bitzlato was arrested early Wednesday in Miami in connection with a vast money laundering operation, accused of transmitting more than $700 million in illicit funds in the past four years.

Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco said Anatoly Legkodymov, 40, a Russian national, oversaw a major “high-tech financial hub that catered to known crooks,” including cybercriminals and drug dealers seeking to process dirty money.

The cryptocurrency industry will never look the same again after all of this turmoil.

On top of everything else, the Saudis appear to be poised to make a major move that could literally change everything.

At the yearly gathering of the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Saudi finance minister decided to drop a bombshell

Saudi Arabia is open to discussions about trade in currencies other than the US dollar, according to the kingdom’s finance minister.

Needless to say, this could potentially completely undermine the dominance of the petrodollar.

Of course we cannot afford to have that happen, because the dominance of the dollar is one of the only things that is keeping our system afloat.

At this point just about everything is moving in the wrong direction for the U.S. economy, but most people still do not understand the bigger picture.

A lot of the “experts” assume that we will just suffer through a temporary recession and then things will eventually return to normal.

I wish that was true.

Unfortunately, our entire system is starting to crack and crumble all around us, and those that are currently running things are not going to be able to put it back together again.

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I'm a retired trauma nurse, and, you did EXACTLY what you should do. Cold truly does slow the dying process!! Im in love with that adorable little fur ball!!! You are a genuinely good and kind person!!!

On the back side…

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2023 01 21 10 01

What is being hidden regarding the Hunter Biden laptop and the Russia and China alliance

This year 2023 is going to be a pivot year.

Things can go really bad, or a managed up-swing that changes the Geo-political situation forever.

I’m looking at an “event” of some sort towards the tail end of this 2023.

Meanwhile, everyone, please continue with your campaigns and living your own lives. Eat WELL.

Please do not get too CAUGHT UP in the “news”, it’s all fake.

And enjoy life a little bit more.

The American way! Don’t you know!

Chicken Lazone

“This recipe comes from the restaurant “Brennan’s” located in New Orleans. No one has to know how simple and quick it is. I posted this recipe exactly as it was in the book, however, if you like a little “heat” please feel free to add some cayenne pepper to taste.”

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2022 12 31 16 11

Ingredients

Directions

  • Combine the seasonings and coat chicken breasts.
  • In large saute pan melt half of the butter and cook chicken over medium heat for about 7 to 8 minutes, turning once.
  • Pour the cream into the skillet and lower the heat.
  • Simmer for several minutes, stirring until the sauce thickens then add the remaining butter.
  • When butter is melted place chicken breasts on four plates and top with the sauce.

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2022 12 31 16 13

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2022 12 31 16 15

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2022 12 31 16 1w3

Its so nice to see these shows again. Loved watching them week to week when I was little. These shows made you forget everything and laugh at anything.

If you think the laptop is bad, consider how much COORDINATION went into silencing it to ensure a certain candidate got positioned where he is.. It is no simple task to organize a 100% media blackout. Along with inter-agency buffer operations. Whatever entity needed this candidate in, went to extreme lengths, and it sure don’t seem to be because they had America’s “best interests” at heart.

“Suburbia”: The Melancholic and Mythological Artworks by Carlos Barahona Possollo

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Degree in Painting, final mark of 18/20, from the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Lisbon University. In 1995 Carlos Barahona Possollo accepted an invitation to teach at the Faculty. He had read Architecture at the Technical University of Lisbon from 1986 to 1989.

He was officially commissioned to paint the Portrait of the Portuguese president Cavaco Silva, shown at the Presidents’ Gallery permanent collection in the Museum of the Presidency of the Republic, since 2016. Since 1995 he has been co-operating with the Portuguese Mail in the production of originals for the printing of stamps, notably their commemorative series of the 500th anniversary of Vasco da Gama’s arrival in India (1996-98), and also with the Portuguese edition of the National Geographic Magazine (first nine issues).

His works can be found in private collections in Portugal, Spain, France, Switzerland, Italy – most notably, of many in this country, in that of Prince Jonathan Doria- Pamphilj – The Netherlands, the United Kingdom, U S A and Argentina. Also, in public collections such as the Vatican (IOR), The White House, the Bank of Portugal, the Portuguese Museum of Communications, The Setubal Museum, and the Union of Portuguese Speaking Capital Cities.

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Did you notice when the kids realized they had way too many presents, the first thing they thought was to donate them? They really are raising them right.

https://youtu.be/U19Bizv-LQQ

I love this series of a slightly anosmic chemist’s perilous quest to find a smell that moves him.

This is just GREAT!

Artist Challenges Herself To A 100-Day Cat Meme Drawing Challenge

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5f48b4bf3541e 8 5f43a8338179d jpeg 700

Emily Paquin, aka Catwheezie, is an animation student who challenged herself to draw a cat meme every day for 100 days back on the 13th of June. She is currently on day 75 and it looks like she’s determined to reach that 100!

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5f48b4bf54040 5f43a9582fd8a F449cc5 700

Emily said that cats were actually the first thing that she ever learned to draw. She says that she always loved funny cat pictures and used to print out similar ones and glue them on her school notebooks.

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5f48b4bf71668 148 5f43abd2a4a58 700

As for the current 100-day challenge, the artist says that she finds most of the cats for her drawings on Instagram, and says that each one of the drawings takes her 2 to 3 hours to finish. “Usually, I work on several of them at a time so I can make sure I’ll have a new cat to post everyday,” says Emily. “A lot of planning goes into this project.”

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Former President of France Admits: Minsk Agreements Were to DECEIVE Russia; Allow Ukraine to build for war

MinskMeeting large
MinskMeeting large

In an interview with the “Kyiv Independent” newspaper, former President of France, Francois Hollande, claimed that the Minsk agreements had brought Russia to diplomatic territory, leaving Kiev’s army time to strengthen. An admission contradicting the peaceful declarations of the time.

While Vladimir Putin was advancing in the Donbass using the pro-Russian separatists ( … ) “we led him to accept the Normandy format and to come to Minsk for the negotiations.” said Hollande.

The former French president aligned himself with Angela Merkel who, December 7 in an interview at “Die Zeit,” claimed that the Minsk agreements had been  “an attempt to give Ukraine time” to strengthen militarily for a future confrontation with Moscow.

Officially, these agreements, signed on September 5, 2014 were concluded with the stated objective of restoring peace between Kiev and the Donbass Republics. That conflict left nearly 15,000 ( civilians and soldiers ) dead between 2014 and 2022.

To the question of whether the Minsk negotiations were intended to delay Russian progress in Ukraine, François Hollande replied in the affirmative: « “Yes, Angela Merkel is right on this point. The Minsk agreements stopped the Russian offensive for a time. What was important was how the West would use this respite to prevent any subsequent Russian attempt.”

Holland claims to have enabled the strengthening of the Ukrainian army, a respite that the West and Kiev seem to have taken advantage of:  “Since 2014, Ukraine has strengthened its military capabilities. Indeed, the Ukrainian army is completely different from that of 2014. She is better trained and better equipped. It is the merit of the Minsk agreements to have given the Ukrainian army this opportunity” he said.

According to him, the latter also prevented the area controlled by the separatists from expanding. In winter 2015, they were at the gates of Marioupol and had just won two decisive battles, taking over Donetsk airport and the city of Debaltsevo.

Regretting divisions within the EU and German ambiguity, refusing to question the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, François Hollande reports today that he was in favor of maximum sanctions, recalling that he himself had canceled the sale of Mistral ships to Russia in 2014.

In 2022, trust between Moscow and the West disappeared. Strangely, François Hollande, who believes that a lasting solution is necessary for peace in Ukraine, completes his remarks by affirming that “the Minsk agreements can be resuscitated to establish a legal framework already accepted by all the parties.”

Angela Merkel’s confession, however, already provoked a strong reaction from Russian President Vladimir Putin on December 9. Putin said “Trust is almost nonexistent, but after such statements, a question of trust arises: how to negotiate, on what, and if it is possible to negotiate with someone, what are the guarantees?”  Putin went on to say “I still hoped that the other stakeholders in this process were sincere with us. It turns out that they also cheated on us. It was only a question of strengthening Ukraine with weapons, by preparing it for hostilities” he added.

Vladimir Putin then estimated that in view of these new facts, Moscow should have, perhaps, had to launch its military operation in Ukraine earlier, stressing that Russia, for its part, hoped to be able to resolve the conflict in the Donbass through the Minsk Agreements.

Hal Turner Analysis and Editorial Opinion

So there you have it: Both Angela Merkel of Germany, and Francois Hollande of France, personally KNEW they were attending the Minsk Negotiations as a ruse, as a deception, for the express purpose of buying time for Ukraine to prepare for . . . .  WAR . . .  with Russia.   The very war which is taking place right now.

Back in February of 2022, when Russia finally sent its troops into Ukraine, both France and Germany, along with the United States, feigned horror that Russia was engaging in battle, when all along, that was the precise goal of Germany, France, and without doubt, the United States and the rest of NATO.  Their “shock” at Russia using its military, was phony.  They not only knew Russia was going to act militarily, it was THEY who set the entire stage for it!

In my opinion, this was a criminal conspiracy to facilitate war.

Some may argue that both Merkel and Hollande enjoy Sovereign Immunity.  They do not.   Fraud vitiates everything, and both Merkel and Hollande perpetrated premeditated and willful fraud upon the peoples of Europe, Russia, and America, as the very crux of their meetings in Minsk, Belarus back in 2014.

The fraud perpetrated by Merkel and Hollande has cost the people of the United States, tens-of-billions of dollars in war support for Ukraine, cost Ukraine hundreds of thousands of dead soldiers, cost Russia tens-of-thousands of dead soldiers and countless billions in war costs.  The consumers in both Europe and America have had to pay Billions more in increased costs for natural gas, oil, gasoline, and diesel fuel as a result of the Sanctions imposed, over a war, they planned to start!

I want Merkel and Hollande criminally prosecuted at the world court, for Fraud and criminal conspiracy to facilitate war.  And if such a prosecution takes place, it will be interesting to find out what role then-U.S.-President Barack Obama played in this fraud.  It seems to me that neither France nor Germany would have engaged in such acts without the express approval of the United States.

Merkel, Hollande, and likely Barack Obama, belong in prison for the rest of their lives because the war they deliberately facilitated has killed hundreds of thousands of people, whom they used as pawns for their “sport of kings” — war.

Very happy to learn more of Russian/Chinese alliance to combat the insane neo-cons in the US! The whole world rejoices also. Thank you both and happy New Years as 2022 comes to an end!

This is an important video.

Stolen Elections Have Consequences: Stocks Suffer Worst Year Since 2008

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WorstStockYearSince2008 large
WorstStockYearSince2008 large

Stocks slipped on Friday to end a brutal 2022 with a whimper, as Wall Street wrapped up its worst year since 2008 on a sour note.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average slid 73.55 points, or 0.22%, to close at 33,147.25. The S&P 500 shed 0.25% to end at 3,839.50. The Nasdaq Composite ticked down 0.11% to 10,466.88.

Friday marked the final day of trading in what has been a painful year for stocks. All three of the major averages suffered their worst year since 2008 and snapped a three-year win streak. The Dow fared the best of the indexes in 2022, down about 8.8%. The S&P 500 sank 19.4%, and is more than 20% below its record high, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq tumbled 33.1%.

Sticky inflation and aggressive rate hikes from the Federal Reserve battered growth and technology stocks and weighed on investor sentiment throughout the year. Geopolitical concerns and volatile economic data also kept markets on edge.

“We’ve had everything from Covid problems in China to the invasion of Ukraine. They’ve all been very serious. But for investors, it is what the Fed is doing,” said Art Cashin, director of floor operations for UBS, on CNBC’s “The Exchange.”

As the calendar turns to a new year, some investors think the pain is far from over. They expect the bear market to persist until a recession hits or the Fed pivots. Some also project stocks will hit new lows before rebounding in the second half of 2023.

Lemon Chicken Milanese

“This dish makes a quick, filling meal. Great served with rice or pasta. Enjoy!”

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2022 12 31 16 1r7

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2022 12 31 16 17

Ingredients

Directions

  • Season chicken with salt and pepper and set aside. Combine breadcrumbs, parmesan cheese, parsley, and salt and pepper to taste.
  • Pour flour onto a plate and set aside. Do the same with eggs and then with breadcrumb mixture.
  • Dredge chicken in flour and tap away excess. Dip chicken into egg. Cover chicken with breadcrumbs and press them inches.
  • Heat oil in frying pan. Fry chicken on the first side for about 2 minutes, flip and fry for another 2 minutes. Repeat until chicken is browned and cooked through. If you’ve pounded the chicken thin enough, cooking time is greatly reduced.
  • Once chicken is cooked, place on a paper towel-lined plate in order to absorb excess oil.
  • Serve with a squeeze of lemon and additional lemon wedges.

A MUST watch!

For those of you not in California, it is 100 times worse than what you are being told. Homelessness is literally INSANE here. Drug problems are WAY out of control.

Surface Tension by James Blish (Free full text)

This post is a free (short) science fiction story called “Surface Tension”. It’s a classic story, and well worth the read.

A contributor wrote a story (or two) Heh Heh… and it was good, I’ll tell you what. But I will not publish it here. What I will say is that it reminded me of another story. Not that I know why… the two stories are completely different in every way. But it did jar my memories, and so I unearthed this gem.

It’s a story I read when I was 12 years old or so, and man oh man, did it awaken my soul and stir up some stuff inside.

It’s funny that way. How unrelated things can come together and create thought movements.

Such as this post…

“Surface Tension” by James Blish first appeared in the August 1952 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. In 1957 it was published by Gnome Press as The Seedling Stars along with three other pantropy stories by Blish to make a fix-up novel.

When the Nebula Awards were being created in the 1960s, the Science Fiction Writers of America voted for their favorite science fiction short stories published before the advent of the awards and “Surface Tension” was included in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One in 1970.

It has been anthologized many times.

The version of “Surface Tension” in The Big Book of Science Fiction is different from the one that appeared in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame.

It has “Sunken Universe” (Super Science Stories, May 1942) inserted into it after the introduction, which is the way it is in The Seedling Stars. However, the introduction had additional paragraphs not in the Hall of Fame version, and I expect a careful reading of the later sections should show changes too. H. L. Gold was known for editing stories and Blish was known for rewriting his stories, so we don’t know which happened.

My guess is Blish came up with additional ideas to add to the story for the book version. I’ve read the slightly shorter version three times before over my lifetime, and a few paragraphs in this version stood out to me as new. Mainly they were about the original crew theorizing about their future pantropic existence.

Lately I’ve been writing about why I disliked a story, but for “Surface Tension” I need to explain why I love a story, and that might be even harder to do.

Every once in a while, a science fiction writer will come up with an idea that’s so different that it lights up our brains.

  • Wells did it with “The Time Machine.”
  • Heinlein did it with his story “Universe.”
  • Brian Aldiss did it with his fix-up novel Hothouse.
  • Robert Charles Wilson did it with his novel Spin.

“Surface Tension” is one of those stories. It has tremendous sense of wonder.

I’m torn between explaining everything that happens and not saying anything. But I need to talk about “Surface Tension,” so if you haven’t read it, please go away and do so.

As I’ve said before about great short stories, they have a setup that allows the author to say something interesting – not a message, but an insight.

The setup for “Surface Tension” is five men and two women have crashed on the planet Hydrot that orbits Tau Ceti. Their spaceship can’t be repaired, their communication system was destroyed, and they don’t have enough food to survive.

However, their ship is one of a swarm of seed ships spreading across the galaxy that colonizes each planet with customized humans adapted for each unique environment.

This is called pantropy, also representing a kind of panspermia, and anticipates the idea of transhumanism.

In other words, Blish has a lot to say with this story.

Because no large organisms can survive in the current stage of Hydrot’s development, the crew decide to seed it with intelligent microorganisms.

The seven will die, but each of their genes will be used to fashion a new species of roughly humanoid shape creatures that can coexist with the existing microorganisms of the freshwater puddles on Hydrot.

They won’t have their memories, but they will have ancestral abilities.

The crew creates these creatures and inscribe their history on tiny metal tablets they hope will be discovered one day by their tiny replacements.

From here the story jumps to the underwater world of the microorganisms and we see several periods of their history unfold. Blish used his education in biology to recreate several concentric analogies of discoveries that parallel our history in his puddle world of tiny microorganisms.

The wee humanoids form alliances with other intelligent microorganisms in wars to conquer their new environment.

Then they begin an age of exploration that eventually parallels our era of early space exploration. But you can also think of it paralleling when life first emerged from the sea to conquer the land.

One reason this story means so much to me is Blish makes characters out of various types of eukaryotic microorganisms and that reminds me of when I was in the fourth grade and our teacher asked us to bring a bottle of lake water to class.

That day we saw another world through the eyepiece of a microscope.

Blish made that world on a microscope slide into a fantasy world where paramecium becomes a character named Para who is intelligent and part of a hive mind that works with the transhumans.

Their enemies are various kinds of rotifers. However, I know little of biology and don’t know what the Proto, Dicran, Noc, Didin, Flosc characters are based on.

The main transhuman characters are Lavon and Shar who’s personalities are preserved over generations.

I wondered if the seven original human explorers (Dr. Chatvieux, Paul la Ventura, Philip Strasvogel, Saltonstall, Eleftherios Venezuelos, Eunice Wagner, and Joan Heath) were archetypes for the microscopic transhuman characters? Blish suggests that in the opening scene:

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2022 12 06 16 52

However, I never could decipher who Lavon and Shar were. Each time I reread this story I notice more details, and more analogies. “Surface Tension” is both simple and complex.

At a simple level its just a space adventure tale about exploration and survival.

But in creating a fantasy ecology, Blish hints at the deeper complexity of a writer becoming a worldbuilder.

And Blish is also philosophical about the future of mankind, reminding me of Olaf Stapledon.

This is the kind of story that can blow adolescent minds. Like mine.

The entire story is HERE in PDF form. Enjoy the free download and the great story!

-MM

 

The CIA has been busy in China these days, eh?

Why would China be going to all these extreme measures to prevent outbreaks, if it did not suspect Bio-weapons? 

-Jeff

This is right after the entirety of the Western media has proudly announced that China is undergoing collapse. They argue that the protests being run by the NED is “bringing down” China.

Didn’t happen.

Won’t happen.

Such more silly wishful thinking from the clown-show known as the United States.

Bougatsa with custard vanilla cream

bougatsa thessaloniki 3
bougatsa thessaloniki 3

Thessaloniki is also known as a crossroads of flavors, a metropolis of tastes, a gastronomic capital. Nowhere else in Greece can one find so many different flavors combined on the same table: the Ottoman palaces heritage and traditions of Greek refugees from Asia Minor or Istanbul, with their own bold, rich cooking identity features, are combined with customs of the Balkan hinterland fashioning the distinct gastronomic profile of the city.

Bougatsa is delicious Greek breakfast, which became known in Thessaloniki when some traditional confectioners from a nearby area moved to the city. This luscious custard pastry became a much loved sweet snack and hundreds of special pastry shops opened where a sweet or salty with cheese, minced meat, or spinach bougatsa is served.

bougatsa thessaloniki 1
bougatsa thessaloniki 1

Here is Bougatsa recipe, as featured in the Gastronomic Guide of Thessaloniki, issued during Thessaloniki Food Festival.

Ingredients

1+ 1/2 liter milk
250 gr caster sugar
1/2 tablespoon vanilla extract
250 gr fine semolina flour
3 tablespoon unsalted butter
Pinch of salt
1 pack filo pastry
150 gr unsalted butter
80-100 gr icing sugar to dust
2 tablespoon ground cinnamon

Preparation

Combine the sugar and milk in a medium size saucepan. Place over a medium heat and bring to a simmer, stirring to dissolve the sugar. Stirring constantly, gradually add the semolina and a pinch of salt and cook for

3 minutes until the mixture thickens. Add 1 tablespoon of butter and the vanilla extract and stir to combine. Pour the mixture into a bowl, cover the surface with baking paper and allow cooling completely. Melt the remaining butter and set aside. Unroll the filo pastry and place between two clean tea towels on the benchtop. Brush a 34 x 36 cm cake tin with butter. Brush a sheet of filo with butter and lay it in the tin with the edges overhanging.

Repeat with 6 more sheets changing the angle slightly each time as you lay the filo into the tin (this creates an even edge of filo around the tin). Spoon the semolina custard evenly over the filo. Cover the surface of the tin folding the overhanging sheets buttering one by one. Brush each of the remaining sheets with butter and fan the sheets over the tin to cover the surface.

Brush with butter on the top, place the baking tin in the oven and bake at 180 C for 30 minutes until golden. Allow to cool. Combine the icing sugar and cinnamon and generously dust the surface before cutting into slices.

bougatsa thessaloniki 2 1
bougatsa thessaloniki 2 1

The protests aren’t anti-Xi. Most of them are about the Zero-COVID restrictions, on the surface at least.

A lot of protests in China in recent years have a similar pattern – they start off as spontaneous grassroots movements; they are then infiltrated by external forces, and twisted till it becomes unrecognisable; the native Chinese don’t approve of this mutated freak show, and the protest goes out with a whimper.

It’s actually not that hard for those of us who are born and raised in China to tell if a protest is genuine or not:

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main qimg 9b469849b958f7db5916844b65ea531e lq

The philosophy of protesting
This may come as a surprise to some, but Chinese people are allowed to protest. 

The thing is that the Chinese culture is very subtle, yet practical, and the way people protest is the same. They like to get straight to the point, and be honest and direct with their tone - people don’t like it when you’re enigmatic and caustic. 

If you want your scumbag boss to pay your outstanding wages, just say you want your boss to pay your outstanding wages. You don’t say “my boss isn’t paying me, fuck the government”. 

With westerners and western-funded protests, the way people protest is very odd and flamboyant from a Chinese perspective. They'd do things like holding specifically-colored flowers, paper, cloth or some shit like that, and chanting western-centric “politically-correct” keywords and phrases that are quite alien in the Chinese context. An example of this being "give me freedom or give me death”. Real Chinese people would simply say “fuck your mother and your pandemic measures, I need to feed my family”. 

The reason westerners protest this way is because it looks good in front of a camera (hence the term “virtue-signalling”). Western media loves eye-catching snapshots and emotion-invoking soundbites - it tells a better story in a shorter time. 

This might work in the western context, but it just instantly feels "off" to Chinese people in a way that's hard to describe. It's like when an alien infiltrator says “greetings, fellow humans”. There’s nothing technically wrong with that phrase, but it’s just not something people on earth actually say.

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main qimg d157261ac436eebeaf16852327092c76 pjlq

The wrong people at the wrong time
Just because we’re Chinese, doesn’t mean we all speak Mandarin. China has a very diverse array of cultures and dialects, and most people prefer speaking their own dialect when they’re in their hometown. Someone needs to tell this to whoever organizes these protests, because they keep making the same mistake of deploying protesters who didn’t speak the local dialect.

This happened last year with the protests in Chengdu, Sichuan after a student committed suicide on campus, and the school tried to cover it up. People were rightfully outraged, but then the protests got weird, as Mandarin-speakers with thick (Hong Kong) Cantonese accents suddenly started to show up at the rallies. That’s when the locals stopped attending them. 

Same thing has been noted with the ongoing protests in Shanghai, which is championed by people who either didn’t speak the Shanghainese dialect, or only spoke broken Mandarin. 

Imagine an anti-US, pro-China rally in Washington DC, where everybody speaks Cajun for some reason. Don’t you think that might raise a few questions?

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main qimg 391fbc9cd76ffdcec49073e79c773c93

Money cannot buy loyalty
Some say us Chinese are the Jews of Asia, and not just because of the way we’re persecuted everywhere we go. It’s because we love money more than anything else. 

Depending on where you are sent to protest, you could be paid hundreds of Yuan per day. This is a country where a lot of people make around 3,000 to 4,000 Yuan per month, so the prospects are very attractive. But the thing is word gets around quickly, and soon people will be talking about how someone’s deadbeat son got paid thousands by the US Consulate, just by holding a specific-colored candle, freeing his nipples or some stupid shit to make China look bad. 

And other people will say, “That dishonorable son of a bitch!”

“How dare he not cut me in!”

And when enough people know about it, it’s no longer a secret. That’s why there has never been a lack of evidence for foreign funding in local protests. 

What, you didn’t think all that “foreign aid” to China was for buying everyone sandwiches, did you?
From HERE… Britain gives China £51.7m foreign aid despite pledge to end handouts
Bottom line is, every society has its own issues. Regarding Zero-COVID, even its supporters (such as myself) have a lot to say about the way it was implemented.

But when outsiders try to take advantage of another’s domestic situation, by driving it out of control and creating chaos, they’re really helping no one, no matter how virtuous they might pretend to be.

People looked at Ukraine and shockingly decided they don’t want any of that.

Yes, Patrice, it was the NED:

Provided by <redacted name> within my e-mail feed. A great source who publishes great material on a blog, website and is well-known throughout the blog-a-sphere.

Video HERE

Published November 29, 2022

Video: US CIA & NED are the black hands behind the protest in China universities campuses, US & UK agents disguised as foreign press & many entered China through HK

Second VIDEO here

Today is November 28, 2022. The shocking news from different cities in the mainland last night kept coming from my mobile phone. At first I watched it and thought it was an old video from Hong Kong in 2019.

After communicating with netizens, I learned that it was the latest mainland video. Major cities live. When everyone was still spreading the news that Taiwan Province Tsai Ing-wen resigned as the chairman of the Democratic Progressive Party, it turned out that foreign forces had already deployed in the mainland.

Netizens who love the country and love Hong Kong immediately use the power of the Internet to investigate and track down these black violence promoters.

It turned out that one of them was an extreme anti-China element.

He was originally the leader of the Hong Kong gangsters.

Because of the relaxation of the epidemic prevention policy in Hong Kong, he quietly fled to Guangdong.

Announced that color revolutions were launched in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Urumqi, Zhengzhou, Chongqing, Chengdu, Wuhan and other places last night, inciting mainland citizens to gather and protest against the mainland’s epidemic prevention policies.

He also said that the Weibo account certified by the mainland publicly threatened and slandered him.

On the other hand, netizens in Shanghai have found out the WeChat accounts, names, and occupations of important contacts at the protest rally.

They are all reporters from foreign media organizations, including the New York Times and CNN. Many of them, as journalists, took advantage of the relaxed anti-epidemic policies between Hong Kong and Shenzhen to enter various provinces and cities in the mainland.

Mainland netizens have sent relevant information to the National Security Agency.

Based on my recent experience in Hong Kong, these reporters are very young.

They were sent by these media organizations to different think tanks and mainland organizations to inquire about news. At first, most of them used the interview method to extract information and pretend to report for you, but after many months, not a single report has been published, and you are required to provide more information on the structure and deployment of the mainland’s official agencies.

All discerning patriots know that these reporters are collecting information on behalf of foreign forces.

In addition, if you invite these journalists to participate in some patriotic activities, most of them will keep their distance and refuse, saying that they are media organizations, so they must be neutral, and it is inconvenient to participate in related activities.

Today, as long as everyone opens the news of these foreign media organizations, the headlines will all say that many places in China have erupted in protests due to epidemic prevention policies or social accidents.

Please everyone, when distributing news on the Internet, you must first objectively analyze whether the news is true, or whether someone is deliberately acting to challenge and incite public dissatisfaction with the epidemic prevention policy.

Secondly, please be more careful about the initiative and enthusiasm of journalists from foreign media organizations. Their superficial ignorance and stupidity are just to get your news and use your network to obtain more information.

Now is the troubled time, all patriots must be mentally prepared, another struggle has quietly begun. Please unite and send the information of the person in charge of the protest rally to the National Security Agency and other law enforcement agencies, so that they can have first-hand information and stabilize the overall situation of the country.

No time to translate.

I listened to this while having my dinner. Really good.

1) Both Shanghai and Beijing white paper protests very close to US embassies.

2) large number of people arrived in those protest cities from Hong Kong and Taiwan,

3) money was given to protesters , Beijing received the highest amount rmb1000, Shanghai rmb500, and other part of the cities with much lower amount.

Etc etc.

The only china model we should be following globally is the “uprising” Model there…

Strange meteorite that crashed into Earth contains two never-before-seen minerals

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2022 11 30 12 35

TWO minerals that have never before been observed on Earth have been uncovered inside a meteorite.

Dubbed El Alie, the 3,000lb space rock was found in Somalia in 2020 and is the ninth-largest meteorite ever discovered.

Scientists unearthed the two new minerals inside a single 2.5-ounce sheet of rock taken from the meteorite.

The two minerals have been named elaliite after the meteor, and elkinstantonite after Lindy Elkins-Tanton, the managing director of the Arizona State University Interplanetary Initiative.

Researchers identified El Ali as an Iron IAB complex meteorite – or a type of space rock made of meteoric iron with specks of silicates.

And it was while looking at the meteorite sample that the scientists noticed the odd-looking minerals.

“In the course of doing the classification — describing this new rock for science — I came across some inclusions, some potential different, interesting minerals inside the meteorite,” Chris Herd a professor in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Alberta, told Global News.

“What we’ve now discovered is there are at least two new minerals in this meteorite from Somalia that have never been discovered before.”

“Most people in my profession will go through their career and not even find one new mineral. Here… we came across two,” Herd added.

The researchers uncovered the minerals by looking at the rock’s chemistry and the ratio of elements that are in there.

They then compared the minerals with versions that had been previously synthesized in a lab.

“Whenever you find a new mineral, it means that the actual geological conditions, the chemistry of the rock, was different than what’s been found before,” Herd said in a separate statement.

The two minerals were sent to the University of Arizona for official classification, and a third new mineral may be under consideration.

Should the researchers obtain more samples from the meteorite, there’s a possibility that even more minerals might be found, Herd said.

For now, the researchers plan to use the meteorite to help them better understand the formation of asteroids.

“That’s my expertise — how you tease out the geologic processes and the geologic history of the asteroid this rock was once part of,” Herd said.

“I never thought I’d be involved in describing brand new minerals just by virtue of working on a meteorite.”

Elkins-Tanton is also acting as the principal investigator of Nasa’s upcoming Psyche mission, which will investigate space rocks in the asteroid belt.

In China, there is a formula for ending protests:

  1. Local official/s are named, blamed and fired for not acting properly. They are fired by the central government. This is to show that the government has heard the protests and has acted.
  2. The central government then appoints new local officials to announce new policies and clean up the mess. If they are successful, they will make their careers through their actions by demonstrating they know how to handle a crisis.
  3. The security services review the video from the demonstrations, identify the leading troublemakers and arrest them in their homes. All done without announcements.

End of crisis.

It is because the ones who benefit from the absurd housing prices would sooner kill themselves before they allowed the prices to drop.

You think I am being hyperbolic, but I mean this quite literally.

Back when Tung Chee-hwa was still the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, he proposed what is known as the “85,000 Plan”, pledging to build 85,000 houses every year. This would have freed up lots of undeveloped public land, and ensured that more people would have had a proper home.

Sounds pretty decent, right?

“Fuck your mother”, said Hong Kong’s middle class.

It wasn’t just big property developers who were against this policy. The middle class (i.e. private landlords) also saw this as a direct threat to their livelihoods, since they have worked all their lives to be able to hold one or more residential apartments hostage for rent. As housing prices plummeted, so did their hopes of raking in crazy amounts of money just from sitting on their arses. I remember hearing about people committing suicide by burning charcoal or jumping off heights every day on the radio when I was a kid.

Not being able to exploit others financially so as to maintain a fragile bourgeois identity for ourselves, is literally worse than death to us. Let that sink in.

Tung Chee-hwa was endlessly ridiculed and cursed, and his name still carries a lot of baggage even to this day. So forget about opening up more land for property development, because as long as some people depend on the housing prices to be as ridiculously high as possible, things will never change.

And it’s not just undeveloped land. Property developers and the middle class are always pro-conservation and against land reclamation (i.e. creating new land from the sea), not because they give a shit about the dolphins or anything, but to preserve their own social status.

The so-called “Lion Rock Spirit

” is a joke and nothing more. If there is one trait above all that defines what Hong Kong is about, it is greed. The kind of raw greed that would make even Mr. Monopoly blush.

Italian Tomato Sausage Ragu With Penne

“I use Chianti wine for this recipe but any good dry red wine will do, this can be made using a mixture of ground beef and pork but Italian sausage meat is so much better — if possible prepare this a day ahead and refrigerate to allow flavors to blend just rewarm on top of the stove.”

Oh, and do NOT use cheap wine.

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2022 11 30 15 56

Ingredients

Directions

  • In a large skillet heat oil over medium heat.
  • Add in the sausage meat, garlic, oregano and pepper flakes; sauté until brown, breaking up the meat with a fork (about 7 minutes).
  • Add in finely chopped carrots, onion and celery; sauté for about 10 minutes.
  • Mix in chopped tomatoes; reduce heat, cover and simmer about 20 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  • Add in 1 cup broth and wine; simmer uncovered until liquid is slightly reduced (about 20 minutes).
  • Add in the fresh basil; cover and simmer until the veggies are very tender, stirring occasionally.
  • Continue to simmer for about 45-50 minutes, adding in more broth by about 1/4 cup if the liquid evaporates to quickly, and cook until the Ragu thickens to desired consistency.
  • Season with salt and pepper to taste.
  • Cook the pasta in a large pot of boiling salted water until just firm-tender; drain but reserve about 1/2 cup cooking water.
  • Return the pasta to the pot; add in the Ragu; mix to combine.
  • Add in about 1/2 – 3/4 cup Parmesan cheese and 2-3 tablespoons olive oil; mix to combine.
  • If the mixture seems too dry then add in some of the reserved cooking water from the pasta.
  • Season with more salt and pepper.
  • Divide on plates and top with more cheese.

2022 11 30 15 57
2022 11 30 15 57

Can westerners make up your mind?

You have been spreading lies that Chinese cannot protest for decades! And you guys repeat a million times China is draconian and authoritarian and now that your narrative is totally debunked you are concerned about the people’s protest?

So make up your god damn mind, do you want them to have freedom to protest or do you want to use the smallest protest to build a mountain out of a mole hill!

Your lying media needs to get a new instruction how to demonise China now that this angle of lack of freedom is gone! What do they do to hurt China’s reputation now? Kinda version upgrade on China demonisation instruction from state department!

Confessions of a Quadriplegic Man

What happened?

I was ran over as a kid. A truck backed over me when I was about four.

Did the driver face any repercussions?

He had a paralyzed son for the next 21 years, so I guess that counts. Nobody deserved repercussions though. It was just a freak thing.

 

Can you survive on your own?

I cannot survive on my own. I must be under watch 24/7.

Do you breathe on your own?

I cannot breathe on my own. I require a vent.

Do your arms work?

My arms don’t work.

What was the mental change like at that age? Meaning, how did you mentally and emotionally react to the event and dealing with the paralysis going forward?

I was a very angry child, lashing out at everyone in an attempt to regain control in my life. I didn’t cope well, but I could have always been worse. My teenage years is when it REALLY took its toll.

Since you’re paralyzed from the neck down how do you do simple tasks like type and stuff like that?

I have a stylus in my mouth and my phone is mounted.

How does peeing and pooping work? Can you still control the muscles or do you have a catheter and some other manual mechanism for number 2s?

I use a catheter, yes. As for number 2’s, I have to use adult diapers and make a schedule.

Who switches the diapers for you?

Nurse or family member.

Would you be able to feel sickness or infections in your body? For example a stomach ache?

Oh yeah. I can get sick to my stomach, have chest pains, stuff like that. Can’t feel kidney stones though, oddly enough

What happen if someone hit you in the legs?

If somebody hits my legs, I would feel the vibration through my body, but no sensation. No pain either!

How do you fill your time?

I play video games, write, use the internet. I have a fair amount of assistive tech that allows me to live a normal life, as long as it’s digital.

How does playing videogames work?

I have a device called a quadstick. I’ve used it since I was 7, and the device only continues to improve. The streamer and e-sports gamer RockyNoHands uses an identical device.

What’s your education level? Was school hard for you?

I have a Bachelor’s degree. School was not hard at all. I excel with structure and am remarkably intelligent, if my grades are an indicator of intelligence. Loved school. I was in the top 10 of my graduating class.

Are you able to work/have a career? If not, what is your financial situation like?

US Disability compensation is shit. You get enough a month to sit comfortably on the poverty line.

If I ever want to be financially independent, a job is required. Unfortunately, finding work is very hard when you have few skills, no experience, and can’t relocate.

Is it hard dating?

INCREDIBLY hard. I live in a remote community, so there’s not many social opportunities. Plus, you know, the disability

Ever had sex and if so do you still feel the orgasm?

I have never had sex. The orgasm part I’m unsure on. I’ve experienced intense arousal, but I don’t know if it went anywhere.

Do you think you’d be able to have sex (in other words, do you think you could get an erection and ejaculate)?

Yes, I do believe that I could have sex.

Please explain how.

When you lose feeling in your body like I have, where you can feel becomes far more sensitive. You get new spots that turn you on.

There’s also other methods of sex besides penetration. Even if you’re set on penetration, there’re methods to force an erection to be maintained.

I admit the orgasm is a mystery since I’ve not experienced one, but I don’t see it being impossible.

It’s a physiological reaction after all. I just wouldn’t expect the stamina before climax to be very impressive since you can’t hold it back.

When you meet new people, do you prefer when they acknowledge your disability and try to be careful with your needs or do you prefer to be seen as any other guy and not having people reminding you of your condition?

This is a tricky one. I want to be treated like any other guy. I’m a human first and a quadriplegic second. I’d rather be treated normally, but I don’t want people to be afraid to ever bring up my disability. It’s a part of my core identity and should be respected, but not focused on.

What’s something you wish people would change about the way they interact with you?

Not treat my needs like a burden. If I could move, I would get my own water or scratch myself if I itch. Don’t make me feel like my needs are lesser and make me wait for assistance. I can be patient, but only to an extent. I still want respected

Do you get sick and tired of being told what an inspiration you are and how brave you are?

I’m not an inspiration. At least not for my disability. I’m just a person tackling life’s problems in a different way.

If all your spoons are dirty and you have to eat cereal with a fork, it’s harder, but not impossible. That’s not inspiration worthy. Same with my life.

I’m in a chair, yeah, which makes me work harder than most, but I’m not achieving much. I’m not a famous writer or a world champion gamer or some rich playboy with girls all over him. I’m just me.

I’ll never see myself as inspirational, but if my story can positively affect even one person, well that’s an accomplishment that I can be proud of.

What’s something you’ve noticed others take for granted? In other words, what’s something most people don’t think about being hard or impossible to do when paralyzed?

Weight loss. Even getting off the couch or walking down the hall burns more calories than I do in a week. People don’t realize how carefully I have to watch my nutrition.

Do you ever have suicidal thoughts because of your situation?

I have my moments like that, but I’m good at identifying problems and tackling them instead of letting them fester.

You seem to have a very positive outlook on life. Was it always like that or have you had ups and downs over the years?

Oh no. I struggle with depression pretty bad, though not as bad as I used to. It used to dominate my life. Now, it doesn’t control my brain. It’s just a roommate.

When did that change happen?

For me, it was therapy. I’d been on a downward spiral for years and therapy saved my life and redeemed me. Now I tackle my mental health way differently.

Do you have anything you would say to somebody who is depressed?

My advice for a depressed person is to identify what’s wrong and fix it.

If someone is a negative influence on your life, cut them out. If you’re out of shape, do one workout a week. Problems don’t correct themselves.

You have to tackle them, no matter how intimidating they are. And if they’re big goals, set tiny ones. Recovery is a marathon, not a sprint. If you’re lonely, the goal isn’t to make friends.

The goal is to find a group online to participate in. Break your big goal into baby steps that allow you to feel accomplished.

If there was an experimental surgery that could heal your spine , would you apply for it?

Already working on it!

Do you have any hope of some kind of recovery some day?

Yes, I do have hope for a recovery. Not a lot of hope, but some.

E-mail train from China on the protests.

Very interesting.

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Huawei HarmonyOS has more users than the entire US population!

Recently, Huawei held a series of press conferences, revealing too much information. To sum up, the number of users of the Hongmeng system has exceeded 570 million, and the localization rate of Huawei mate50 has exceeded 70%, showing that Huawei is still firmly promoting de-Americanization.

This is undoubtedly a huge blow to the US technology industry.

Recently, Huawei held the 2022 Huawei Developer Conference. The data released at the conference pointed out that the number of Huawei devices equipped with HarmonyOS has reached 320 million, and the shipment of Harmony Zhilian products has reached 250 million, both of which have achieved double-speed growth. Together, the two push HarmonyOS to 570 million users, further cementing its position as the world’s third-largest mobile operating system.

Yu Chengdong, CEO of Huawei’s consumer business, also announced that HarmonyOS will further enter the automotive industry, and cooperate with Celis, BAIC, and Changan to launch more automotive products equipped with HarmonyOS. This will provide new development impetus for HarmonyOS, and the number of users of HarmonyOS is expected to be further accelerated.

In terms of hardware, Huawei’s recently released pocket S and mate50 mobile phones are all using Chinese-made components as much as possible. The folding screen used by pocket S is made in China. Others such as radio frequency chips, power management chips, memory chips, etc. have all adopted Chinese domestic chips, and the proportion of domestic components in mobile phone components has reached 70%.

This shows that Huawei still insists on promoting the development of the domestic mobile phone industry chain. Industry insiders believe that once Huawei’s Kirin chips are mass-produced, Huawei’s mobile phones will be expected to achieve 100% localization, turning purely domestic mobile phones into reality, which will also be the first purely Chinese-made mobile phones.

It can be seen that Huawei is actively promoting localization of both software and hardware, and is striving to get rid of American technology, which highlights Huawei’s resilience. What happened to Huawei has prompted it to strengthen its determination to get rid of American chips. Although its revenue has declined in recent years, it still invests more than 100 billion R&D funds every year. Under its insistence, the research and development of chip technology is still continuing, and the chip stacking technology and superconducting quantum technology have all shown its technological breakthroughs in difficult situations.

Govt. Database Shows 10,000% Increase In Cancer Reports Due To Covid mRNA Vaccines

.

A researcher who queried the Centers for Disease Control’s (CDC) Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) discovered a 10,661.4% increase in cancer reports as a result of experimental Covid-19 gene-base vaccines as compared with all FDA-approved vaccines over the last 30 years.

Brian Shilhavy, who is the editor of Health Impact News, traced his steps in the search providing links to documentation of his various findings.

Having first queried the cases of ‘the most common cancers [that] had been reported following Covid-19 vaccines,’ he found “837 cases of cancer, including 88 deaths, 66 permanent disabilities, and 104 life threatening events.

He emphasized that even these numbers were not exhaustive, and the VAERS database could not handle the larger search of ‘ALL cancers listed in VAERS’ under this category of Covid inoculations. ‘Using the exact same search terms for cancer,’ he wrote, ‘I then searched ALL FDA-approved vaccines for the previous 30 years and found only 140 cases of cancer reported.’

‘That result is for 360 months (30 years), whereas the 837 cases following the experimental Covid-19 vaccines were reported in just 20 months, since the roll out of the Covid-19 shots beginning in December of 2020,’ Shilhavy wrote. ‘That is an increase of 10,661.4%!’ he concluded.

Shilhavy, whose organization is located in Texas, also made note of the significant number of the cancer cases in the database that were of young people, from age 12 up through many young adults in their 20s. Last October, a Swedish lab study found that the spike protein associated with the Covid-19 illness, and its experimental vaccines, enters the nucleus of cells and significantly interferes with DNA damage-repair functions, compromising a person’s adaptive immunity and perhaps encouraging the formation of cancer cells.

In March 2021, board-certified pathologist Dr. Ryan Cole reported that he was seeing a massive ‘uptick’ in various autoimmune diseases and cancers in patients who have been Covid-vaccinated. ‘Since January 1, in the laboratory, I’m seeing a 20 times increase of endometrial cancers over what I see on an annual basis,’ he said.

In regard to overall adaptive immunity, Cole describes, ‘post-vaccine, what we are seeing is a drop in your killer T-cells’ that ‘keep all other viruses in check,’ leaving the patient susceptible to a variety of illnesses.

In January, data leaks given by three ‘decorated high-ranking soldiers who are doctors and public health officials,’ in sworn declarations under penalty of perjury, showed enormous spikes in dozens of diseases following Covid vaccine uptake in the U.S. military.

These included:

  • Miscarriages — 279% increase,
  • Hypertension (high blood pressure): 2,281% increase,
  • Diseases of the nervous system: 1,048% increase, and
  • Cancer: 296% increase.

VAERS data released July 29 from the CDC reported 1,357,937 total adverse events in the United States after injections of experimental Covid-19 gene-based vaccines, including 29,790 deaths and 247,686 serious injuries between December 14, 2020, and July 22, 2022.

These also include 55,719 permanent disabilities, 50,739 cases of myocarditis/pericarditis, and 14,374 reported cases of shingles. As such figures are based on voluntary reports, it is important to note that they are very likely just ‘the tip of the iceberg’ in actual figures.

A 2010 Harvard-executed study commissioned by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) revealed that ‘fewer than 1% of vaccine adverse events’ are reported to VAERS, and vaccine manufacturer Connaught Laboratories calculated at least a ‘fifty-fold underreporting of adverse events’ in a confidential study.”

How China is changing the world..

This is from Godfree Robert’s newsletter and I strongly suggest you all subscribe to it.

So China’s IC-chip industry is in tatters with the great Biden restrictions, eh?

China news that makes you think.

Cheap as Chinese Chips?

China is making a billion ICs daily..

Godfree Roberts
Before his election in 2012, planners warned President Xi of China’s vulnerability to restrictions on integrated circuit imports. Xi launched an internal crash program designed to put the country a generation ahead of the USA in ICs by 2030 then, in 2015, opened a $50 billion financial floodgate.The first fruits of the program will appear on the market next year, ten years after it began. Their quality and freshness suggest that China will beat its 2030 IC goal as easily as it will beat its 2030 Paris Accords goal.WorkforceChinese researchers utterly dominate global math, engineering and computer science, in both quality and quantity of their published papers, and will graduate 1.4 million engineers this year.America will graduate 197,000 engineers, 20% of whom will be Chinese, and five of whom will be super geniuses with IQ 160+. The kind of people who play viola in a symphony orchestra and invent new fields of engineering mathematics.China will graduate 40,000 of such smartypants – a numerical advantage it sustains across its entire workforce (who cost employers as much as Americans cost theirs). Together, as a coordinated teams of hundreds of thousands of young people, they planted, nurtured, and developed the products that are about to change our lives and their country’s future.First Fruits

  • Early this month, China lifted its chip manufacturing to one billion a day, up 44% on 2021. China leads the world with 8 out of 19 new fabs under construction.
  • At the high end, China’s own chips power its three exascale computers, with the fourth – of a promised ten – is under construction. The US produced one such machine, a year after China.
  • Shenzhen’s RoboSense launched the Holy Grail of self-driving sensors: the first automotive, flash, solid-state LiDAR chip. With a simple bill of materials and no moving parts, it excels in detection, cost, safety and reliability. Built in China with Chinese IP and protected by a thicket of patents.
  • Cambricon builds the fastest AI chip.
  • Biren’s BR100 GPU is 3x faster than NVIDIA’s A100
  • China dominates the exploding EV chip market.
  • Tsinghua University demonstrated the next generation of ICs, which it calls “Sidewall transistors”. Much smaller than current chips,  using one-atom-thick graphene sheet for gates, easily manufactured with current technology.
  • Recently, the CEO of Dutch etching company, ASML said, “A Chinese customer told us, “We make mature power ICs. We need your help building a 300-millimeter (wafer diameter) fab”. Chip guru Dylan Patel says 300 nm wafers have twice the yield of 200 nm wafers, so “ASML will teach China everything and they will destroy power semiconductors’ profitability for every US and European fab.”

ConclusionAfter banning Huawei and ZTE, the FCC banned CCTV leaders Hikvision and Dahua, and two-way radio maker Hytera.The USA is falling further behind China each year. US bans, intended to inhibit China’s development, inhibit America’s. ZTE, for example, provides better 5G coverage across Tibet than San Francisco’s. Americans pay tariff-driven higher prices for imports and, increasingly lack access to affordable, leading edge Chinese technologies.¹1National semiconductor tax subsidies are $150 billion and local subsidies larger with a 5:1 private-to-public investment ratio. The CHIPS Act ratio, which will reach 4.2:1, will only boost US semiconductor manufacturing value from 10.5% of to 14% by 2026, when China will exceed 20%. By 2030 the US will fabricate 10% of the world’s semiconductors and China will make 30%.‘Assuming a normal distribution, there are 10,000 Americans performing at +4SD, IQ 140+, and a similar number in Europe, the top few hundred high school seniors each year in each. Extrapolate NE Asian numbers to 1.4 billion Chinese produces more than 300,000 at this level, which is pretty overwhelming’. Asian-White IQ variance from PISA results.China has submitted the most accepted research papers at a prestigious international academic semiconductor conference, bumping the US to number two. Of 629 papers submitted, 59 from China were selected for presentation, 42 from the US, and 32 from South Korea.Guangdong IP Court hears more patent cases annually than the entire United States court system.Graphene is lightweight, two hundred times stronger than steel, with thermal and electrical conductivity and heat dissipation better than copper, for efficient batteries and more. China’s Graphene Copper Innovation Consortium is with bringing graphene to chip manufacturing, offering ten times the performance of silicon-based chips at one-tenth the cost.

The key on understanding ourselves is retaining all of our memories

You know what? I remember my earliest days. I mean, literally, I remember entering the physical womb of my mother as a pre-birth infant. And I well remember the words that I repeated over and over… “this is going to be a real adventure life; don’t forget it”. LOL. Yeah. I actually did that.

I remember opening my eyes for the first time, and looking at my hands. I remember seeing my parents for the first time and thinking “so those are my parents”, and I remember the little butterflies (toy mechanism at the top of my bassinet.)

I remember Kindergarten, and I remember playing “store”, playing the triangle in the class “band” and trying to build a clay house. So many things that I remember. It’s our memories that helped to shape me as I am today.

It is mind-boggling to me that religions JUSTIFY the erasure of memories (as in reincarnation) as an important part of growth, when the absolute opposite it true.

I placed a you-tube video up today…

Five minutes after it went up, the ten-minute video had these metrics…

2022 11 23 17 34
2022 11 23 17 34

One must wonder how anyone could find the video in such a quick time and vote on it’s worthiness without viewing it completely? I know about the down-vote. There’s a jackass troll who down votes each and everyone of my videos within minute of it going up. But the two up-votes? That’s a mystery.

2022 11 23 17 34b
2022 11 23 17 34b

It’s just a simple and short video. But why is it partially blocked by You-tube? What did I do or say? It’s really just a simple little thing. All it is, is some simple views of China.

Let’s investigate…

2022 11 23 17 35c
2022 11 23 17 35c

Ok, so one of the songs used in the video is specified that it cannot be shown to people in certain regions.

What region do you suppose it is?

2022 11 23 17 36
2022 11 23 17 36

Oh. It’s because China must be blocked. Oh, it’s “Believe Music SMC”.

According to Wikipedia…

Believe (also known as Believe Music; previously known as Believe Digital) is a global digital music company headquartered in France.

So some french folk, owned the copyright on this Chinese song, and banned it from being used in China. What do you know. It must be a trend in the West. Like you-tube. Like Linkedin. Like Twitter.

Ah. China-bad. Eh?

But wait! There’s more…

Copyright controversy

Believe has been accused of copyright trolling, particularly on YouTube, where it has been alleged to engage in claiming copyright for works that are either copyright free or that they do not own the rights to.

The company was the subject of a New York federal lawsuit alleging that they were behind large scale, willful, copyright infringement.

Ah hah.

So now you know.

Always so damn polite for all those attackers to wait one by one to attack.

Birria

“BIRRIA This recipe is from Guadalajara in the state of Jalisco, Mexico, where the broth is served with everything, even sandwiches on the street. Jalisco prides itself on being the home of this spicy chile-based broth. Heat Scale = Medium Recipe By: Adapted from David Rosengarten’s (FoodTV) I have further adapted it having just having returned from Guadalajara and eaten alot of the real thing.”

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2022 11 24 17 45

Ingredients

Directions

  • PREPARE THE MEAT: Trim the fat from the meat; cut into 2 large pieces. Put meat into a large non-corrosive baking dish or pan.
  • PREPARE THE MARINADE/GLAZE: Heat a griddle or large cast-iron skillet over medium heat. Tear chiles into flat pieces and toast a few at a time, pressing them against the hot surface, until they crack and blister; flip them and press down again. Transfer chiles to a large bowl and cover with boiling water; weight down with a plate to keep them submerged, and soak at least 30 minutes. Meanwhile, roast the garlic in the same griddle or skillet, turning frequently, until soft inside and blackened outside, about 15 minutes. Cool and peel. Drain chiles, reserving 3/4 cup soaking liquid; put chiles into a blender with garlic, cloves, sesame seeds, vinegar, cumin, peppercorns or ground pepper, and salt. Process/blend until mixture is smooth; then strain through a medium-mesh sieve into a bowl. Remove 1/2 cup of mixture to a small bowl, and stir in the sugar; set aside to use for the final glazing.
  • MARINATE THE MEAT: Spread the rest of the chile paste thoroughly over the meat. Cover completely and refrigerate at least 18 hours.
  • COOK (SLOW-STEAM) THE MEAT: Preheat the oven to 325 degrees. Use a deep wide roasting pan that has a tight lid. Put a roasting rack into the bottom of the pan (it must sit at least 1 inch above the bottom of the pan—if not, prop it up with custard cups, tin cans, etc.) Measure in 4 cups of water. Then lay the marinated meat onto the rack and spread any marinade remaining in the marinating pan or dish. Cut a double thickness of heavy-duty foil to cover the roasting pan; place the pan lid over, making sure the pan is covered as tightly as possible. Bake 4 hours.
  • FINISHING THE BROTH: Remove the pan lid and foil; carefully remove the tender meat to a platter. Take out the rack; spoon the fat off the broth with a ladle. Measure out the broth into a 1-quart container; add water to equal 1 quart liquid if necessary, and pour into a saucepan. Puree the tomato in a blender and add it to the broth along with the oregano and cinnamon. Cover; simmer over medium-low heat 45 minutes. Season with salt.
  • GLAZE THE MEAT: Heat oven to 375 degrees. Remove meat from the bones, keeping pieces of meat as large as possible; discard bones, gristle and excess fat. Set meat on a baking sheet; brush lightly with reserved chile paste glaze, and bake 10 minutes to set the glaze.
  • TO SERVE: Keep tortillas warm in a towel-covered basket. Serve the broth in a tureen. Present the meat on a large platter, or slice meat across the grain to serve it in deep plates, awash in the broth. Combine onion and coriander in a small bowl to pass with the lime at the table.

2022 11 24 17 50
2022 11 24 17 50

Ukraine – Lights Out, No Water And Soon No Heat

Earlier today the Russian military shut down the Ukrainian electricity network.

Previous attacks had limited the distribution capacity to some 50% of demand. Controlled blackouts over several hours per day allowed to give some electricity for a few hours to most parts of the country. The attack today created a much larger problem. Not only were distribution networks attacked but also so the elements that connect Ukraine’s electricity production facilities to the distribution network. All four nuclear power stations of Ukraine with their 15 reactors are now in shutdown mode.

 

ukrelhit1
ukrelhit1

biggerKiev along with most other cities of Ukraine no longer has electricity.

Moldavia is likewise effected as it received some 20% of its electricity from Ukraine. When the Ukrainian network shut down the only local thermal power plant shut down too. It is likely that it can be switched on again but that can be a complicate process.

Limited electricity imports from the European system into Ukraine may still be possible but that electricity would only be available in Ukraine’s western cities.

Before today’s attack the Washington Post reported of the difficulties in repairing the network. As we ad explained before the Russian attacks are hitting the transformers that connect the national 330 kilovolt backbone network. These are hard to replace:

As the scope of damage to Ukraine’s energy systems has come into focus in recent days, Ukrainian and Western officials have begun sounding the alarm but are also realizing they have limited recourse. Ukraine’s Soviet-era power system cannot be fixed quickly or easily. In some of the worst-hit cities, there is little officials can do other than to urge residents to flee — raising the risk of economic collapse in Ukraine and a spillover refugee crisis in neighboring European countries. 
...
Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said that about half of the country’s energy infrastructure was “out of order” following the bombardment. 
...
For weeks, Russian missiles have targeted key components of Ukraine’s electrical transmission system, knocking out vital transformers without which it is impossible to supply power to households, businesses, government offices, schools, hospitals and other critical facilities.

During a briefing for reporters on Tuesday, Volodymyr Kudrytskyi, the head of Ukrenergo, the state-run power grid operator, called the damage to the power system “colossal.” 
...
Russians, he said, were mainly targeting substations, nodes on the electrical grid where the current is redirected from power stations. The main components of these substations are autotransformers — “high-tech and high-cost equipment” that is difficult to replace. 
...
A list of “urgent needs” from DTEK, the country’s largest private energy company, circulating in Washington, lists dozens of transformers along with circuit breakers, bushings and transformer oil. 
...
But it is the autotransformers — the “heart” of the substations, in the words of Kudrytskyi — that are at the top of the Ukrainians’ list of needs and the key to keeping the country’s electrical grid functioning.

The Ukrainians have tried to buy up every autotransformer they can find, going as far as South Korea to purchase them, but they still need to place orders for more to be built.

“We try to collect everything around the world that they have now, and order more,” said Olena Zerkal, an adviser to Ukraine’s Energy Ministry.

Any attempts to repair the network are useless as long as Russia continues to attack it.

To stop these attacks requires a political solution. Ukraine will have to give up and find some agreement with Russia.

Russia also attacked some of the natural gas sources Ukraine has:

Russia last week broadened its targets. Oleksiy Chernyshov, chief executive of Ukraine’s state energy company Naftogaz, said in an interview that a “massive rocket attack” hit 10 gas production facilities in the Kharkiv and Poltava regions, including Shebelinka, one the largest production and drilling areas.

“Of course, we will do our best now to recover, but this will take time and resources and material,” Chernyshov said. “Time is of the essence,” he added. “Because winter is now.”

The targeting of the gas supply was a critical development, said Victoria Voytsitska, a former member of parliament now working with civil society groups on getting Ukraine the equipment it needs. If Moscow takes out the gas system, she said, cities and villages across the country could become “uninhabitable.”

The Russian gas provider Gazprom has announced that it will reduce the transport of gas through Ukraine to European customers as the Ukraine is stealing from it:

Gazprom says that it has noticed some of the gas intended for Moldova under a contract with the local gas firm is being diverted by Ukraine. If the imbalance in gas transit continues, Gazprom will start reducing gas flows via Ukraine on the morning of November 28, the Russian gas giant said today, as carried by Russian news agency TASS.

Without electricity there is no water flowing in the water distribution systems of the cities. Without water toilets can not be used. Public hygiene will suffer. The internet in Ukraine is also down.

 

ukrelhit2
ukrelhit2

biggerA country that is becoming ‘uninhabitable’ has little chance to wage and win a war. When there is no transport, no electricity, no heat and no communication everything becomes incredibly difficult.

The refugee stream all this will cause will increase pressure on Europe to push Ukraine into negotiating for peace with Russia. Tough conditions will be applied but there is no other way out of this mess.

Throughout the last weeks Ukrainian attacks on the frontline have been remarkably ineffective. There is no longer any coordination of larger formations. The units attacking now are mostly only company size or even smaller. A 12 minute video that showed drone footage of such an attack was published yesterday:

What's the media hiding? @narrative_hole - 11:20 UTC · Nov 23, 2022

I can’t believe I missed this one today, the editing is unbelievable.

A 12 minute clip of Ukrainians conducting what was sadly a suicide attack on Russian trenches

...  just to be pummeled by Su-25’s, infantry, heavy mortars, a tank, MLRS and finished with an Su-34 bombing run.
video

Sitting on top of an armored infantry vehicle some 20 Ukrainian soldiers drive up to a fortified area and enter the first empty row of trenches. From there they try to attack the second row of trenches that is held by a handful of Russian soldiers.

The Ukrainian troops seem to be fairly well equipped with helmets and armor vests. But they have no support.

The Russian infantry fights back. It is supported by well targeted mortar fire, artillery, tank and air attacks. The Russians have drones up in the air that can see the whole scene. The Ukrainian units have nothing but their rifles and a few hand grenades. After the attacking platoon is destroyed the Russian artillery attacks and destroys the industrial area from where they had been coming. The whole operation ends up as a complete disaster. All Ukrainian troops involved seem to be dead. The Russian side seems to have had no or only few casualties.

What's the media hiding? @narrative_hole - 1:04 AM · Nov 23, 2022

This battle took place some time ago, but it’s still incredible to watch now that they made the concise edit.

If we consider that such attacks happen by the dozens every week, the Russian MoD estimates of Ukrainian daily losses aren’t that farfetched.

There are several such attacks per day and only very few are successful.

From today’s clobber list:

In Donetsk direction, units of Russian army continued their intense operation. More than 60 Ukrainian servicemen and five armoured fighting vehicles have been eliminated.

In South Donetsk direction, artillery fire and decisive actions by Russian troops have repulsed an attack by the AFU with up to a company's tactical group forces towards Pavlovka.

In addition, as a result of a pre-emptive fire attack, enemy reserves advancing from Ugledar have been destroyed.

A sabotage and reconnaissance group of the AFU has been destroyed near Novodarovka (Zaporozhye region).

The enemy's losses amounted to more than 40 Ukrainian servicemen killed and wounded, three armoured vehicles, a MT-LB and four pick-up trucks.

In Kupyansk direction, an attempt to launch an attack by an AFU mechanised infantry company near Novosyolovskoye (Lugansk People's Republic) has been thwarted by artillery fire and heavy flamethrower systems.

As a result of Russian artillery fire more than 30 Ukrainian servicemen, two motor vehicles and one mortar have been destroyed.

In Krasniy Liman direction, an attempt to move the AFU company tactical group to attack the Chervonopopvka (Lugansk People's Republic) has been disrupted by pre-emptive fire.

Up to 20 Ukrainian servicemen, three mortar crews and two motor vehicles have been eliminated.

Operational-Tactical and Army Aviation, Missile Troops and Artillery have neutralised the AFU 128th Mountain Assault Brigade's command post deployed near Volnyansk (Zaporozhye region), as well as 72 artillery units at their firing positions, manpower and hardware in 144 areas. 
...

That are at least 150 dead Ukrainian soldiers just there.

I do not understand hwy the Ukrainian command is still ordering such senseless attacks. Militarily it should have long gone into defensive mode. It would save Ukrainian lives and would make it more costly for the Russians to attack.

The European parliament, which has no serious legislative function, voted today for a non-binding resolution that declared Russia to be a ‘state sponsor of terrorism’. Some Russian’s found that outrageous. A few hours later the Parliament was hit by a ‘sophisticated’ cyber attack:

The European Parliament website was affected by a hacking attack, officials said on Wednesday.

Parliament President Roberta Metsola said it was a "sophisticated attack" and that a pro-Kremlin group had claimed responsibility.

She noted that the attack followed the EU lawmakers' vote to name Russia a "state sponsor" of terrorism over its war in Ukraine.

"My response is: Slava Ukraini (Glory to Ukraine)," Metsola said.

That irrelevant Maltese conservative still has a lot to learn.

Posted by b on November 23, 2022 at 16:56 UTC | Permalink

No mincing of words when Colonel answers any question in clear and concise and factual answers .

https://youtu.be/dfgF4x7TCmM

Multimillion-Dollar Supercars Abandoned in dimly lit storage

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Never thought you’d see a Bugatti or Pagani left to rust? Neither did we. But that’s exactly what this set of sobering images shows.

Jesus H. Christ.

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This last image is HEARTBREAKING…

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This scene is incredibly powerful. This is how humans should treat each other. Mutual respect without judgement. Not trying to gain advantage. We can all help each other if we just let down our egos and fears.

Mentorship and encouraging. A Father to a young lady in need of protection and guidance.

The beauty of this scene was the young girl was screaming inside for help not knowing the man in front of her, whom she barely knew, heard every.. single.. word..

Chief of Czech General Staff: “Prepare for major war with Russia”

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KarelRzehka large
KarelRzehka large

The Chief of the Czech Republic General Staff (Army) is today publicly urging his country to “prepare for a large-scale war with Russia.”

General Karel Rzehka went on to tell his government and countrymen “If a direct military clash between the Russian Federation and NATO takes place in Europe, the Czech Republic will become a “participant” in this conflict from the first minute.”

Developing.

Well, we were aware of the imbalance at Twitter but it is gratifying to have our suspicions confirmed.

Very Serious Shortages Of Amoxicillin, Augmentin, Tamiflu, Albuterol And Tylenol Have Erupted All Over The United States

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Hospitals are filling up all across America, and there are extremely alarming shortages of some of our most important medications.  Health authorities are warning that RSV, the flu and COVID are combining to create a “tripledemic”, and there are simply not enough medications to go around.  Personally, I am most concerned about RSV.

It is spreading like wildfire from coast to coast, and we are being told that very young children and the elderly are particularly vulnerable.

I wrote an entire article about the RSV outbreak earlier this month, and since that time things have gotten even worse.  Our medical system is being absolutely flooded with sick kids, and this has caused very serious shortages of Amoxicillin, Augmentin, Tamiflu and Albuterol…

America is facing a shortage of four key medications used for common illnesses in children as virus season comes back in full force.

Officials have declared a shortage of first-line antibiotics amoxicillin and Augmentin, which are used to treat bacterial infections. Tamiflu, the most common flu medication in the US, and albuterol, an inhaler for asthma and to open airways in the lungs, are also in short supply, according to the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

But we haven’t even gotten to the heart of flu season yet.

In fact, the beginning of winter is still about a month away.

So what will things look like by the time we get to the middle of January?

At this point, things are already so bad that we are also starting to see a very serious shortage of Tylenol

A children’s Tylenol shortage currently affecting Canada has carried over into the United States, pharmacists in multiple American cities have warned.

The drug’s short supply, experts say, stems from a recent spike in pediatric sickness as seasonal bugs come back with a bang after being suppressed during COVID-related lockdowns.

This is nuts.

In all my years, I have never heard of a shortage of Tylenol in the United States.

Unfortunately, we now have millions of people with compromised immune systems all over the country, and so RSV and the flu are hitting us extremely hard.

One doctor told CNN that “I’ve never seen anything like this”…

“In my 25 years of being a pediatrician, I’ve never seen anything like this,” pediatric infectious disease specialist Dr. Stacene Maroushek of Hennepin Healthcare in Minnesota told CNN. “I have seen families who just aren’t getting a break. They have one viral illness after another. And now there’s the secondary effect of ear infections and pneumonia that are prompting amoxicillin shortages.”

The reason for shortages is due to increased demand, especially with a surge in respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) and flu cases. The combination of RSV, flu and COVID circulating has been called a “tripledemic.”

This is going to be one long winter for our medical system.

As I mentioned earlier, hospital beds are rapidly filling up all over the nation

These surges have filled children’s hospitals across these states. The Children’s Hospital of Alabama, the state’s largest pediatric hospital located in Birmingham – 91 per cent of beds are filled, according to official figures.

Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which includes the largest children’s hospital in Tennessee, is at 98 per cent capacity as of Tuesday.

And as I discussed in my article about RSV earlier this month, there are some hospitals that have already filled up all of their beds.

Of course most children that get sick don’t end up in the hospital.

Most of them just stay home and are cared for by their parents until they recover.

In October, more Americans missed work to take care of sick children than ever before

More than 100,000 Americans missed work last month – an all time high – because of child-care problems, many of which come down to sick children and sick daytime caregivers.

Sadly, we will almost certainly set another new all-time record this month.

It sure would be nice if the federal government would step in and help to ensure that everyone has enough medications to give to their children during this medical emergency.

But instead of doing that, the Biden administration has decided to give another 4.5 billion dollars to Ukraine…

The United States, through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and in coordination with the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Department of State, is providing an additional $4.5 billion in direct budgetary support to the Government of Ukraine. The funding, which will help alleviate the acute budget deficit caused by Putin’s brutal war of aggression, was made possible with generous bipartisan support from Congress. The Government of Ukraine will receive the funding in two tranches before the end of 2022.

In addition, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken has just announced that the Ukrainians will be receiving another 400 million dollars in military aid…

Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced a new $400 million military aid package to Ukraine on Wednesday.

The package will include “additional arms, munitions, and air defense equipment from U.S. Department of Defense inventories,” Blinken said in a statement, which didn’t provide many specifics on the weapons heading to Ukraine. It is the 26th time the administration is using the presidential drawdown authority, which allows the United States to take from its stockpiles and provide those weapons to Ukraine.

Rather than giving so much money to the Ukrainians, why can’t we spend it on some antibiotics for our children?

It seems to me that our priorities are really messed up.

The RSV outbreak that we are witnessing right now is really serious.  If you have young children, you will want to closely monitor developments in your local area.

After a couple of really tough years, a lot of people had been hoping that we would experience a “return to normal” in 2022.

But as I keep warning my readers, we have now entered an era of great pestilences.

This year we have seen the bird flu kill tens of millions of our chickens and turkeys, a global monkeypox epidemic has spread all over the globe, and now RSV and the flu are ripping across the nation.

We really are living in unprecedented times, and the challenges that we are facing are only going to get even greater as the months roll along.

Music from the same time period as the movie “Dazed and Confused”. My era, back in the day.

Trillions Upon Trillions Of Dollars Of Wealth Is Being Wiped Out As The “Everything Collapse” Accelerates

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Have you checked on the health of your investments lately?  If not, you may be surprised to find out where things currently stand.

As the “everything collapse” accelerates, trillions upon trillions of dollars of wealth is being wiped out.  Many that thought that they were financially set for the rest of their lives are now in panic mode as asset values rapidly crumble.  Just look at what happened to Sam Bankman-Fried.

He was worth 16 billion dollars coming into this month, and now the value of his assets has been “reduced to zero”.  In fact, when you factor in all the money that he owes to creditors, it is likely that his net worth is actually less than zero.

That is how fast it can happen.

Overall, the cryptocurrency industry “has lost more than $1.4 trillion in value this year”

The cryptocurrency market has lost more than $1.4 trillion in value this year as the industry has been plagued with problems from failed projects to a liquidity crunch, exacerbated by the fall of FTX, once one of the world’s largest exchanges.

FTX wasn’t the first domino to fall, and it certainly won’t be the last.

In fact, now we are being warned that Genesis “may need to file for bankruptcy”

Digital-asset brokerage Genesis is struggling to raise fresh cash for its lending unit, and it’s warning potential investors that it may need to file for bankruptcy if its efforts fail, according to people with knowledge of the matter.

Ouch.

If Genesis fails, that is going to hurt.

So why is Genesis in so much trouble?  Well, it turns out that Genesis had “$175 million locked in an FTX trading account”

Genesis has spent the past several days seeking at least $1 billion in fresh capital, said the people, who asked not to be identified because discussions are private. That included talks over a potential investment from crypto exchange Binance, they said, but funding so far has failed to materialize.

The rush for funding was precipitated by a liquidity crunch at the lender after the sudden collapse of FTX, one of the world’s largest crypto exchanges. Genesis halted redemptions shortly after revealing on Nov. 10 that it had $175 million locked in an FTX trading account.

Needless to say, that 175 million dollars is now gone and it isn’t coming back.

Meanwhile, Coinbase continues to spiral downhill as well.  According to Axios, the market cap for Coinbase has now fallen under 10 billion dollars…

The market capitalization of Coinbase just dropped below $10 billion. This time last year, it was more than $70 billion.

Of course it isn’t just the crypto industry that is in enormous trouble.

For years, Tesla’s stock price just kept going higher and higher.

But now Tesla’s market value is about 670 billion dollars lower than it was at this time last year…

Business Insider reports that Tesla’s market valuation has plummeted by nearly $700 billion from its peak a year ago. Insider notes that the $670 billion decline is equivalent to the market value of three Disneys, four Nikes, or six Starbucks.

Meanwhile, ordinary U.S. consumers are losing a tremendous amount of wealth as well.

According to the New York Post, U.S. homeowners “lost a staggering $1.3 trillion in home equity in the third quarter”…

US homeowners lost a staggering $1.3 trillion in home equity in the third quarter during a major slump in the housing sector, according to data published by mortgage analytics firm Black Knight on Tuesday.

Home equity – broadly defined as the value of a homeowner’s property minus what is still owed on their mortgage – has plummeted during a rapid market correction.

The equity losses in just three months were “by far the largest quarterly decline on record by dollar value and the largest since 2009 on a percentage basis,” according to Black Knight data & analytics president Ben Graboske.

We have never seen a quarter like that before.

Not even during the crisis of 2008 and 2009 did we see such a huge quarterly loss.

A new housing crash is here, and it has already gone global.  In fact, Spain has already developed a plan to offer “mortgage support relief” to over a million Spanish households…

Spain’s cabinet on Tuesday gave its approval to mortgage relief support for more than one million vulnerable households and help for middle-class families a day after the government and banks reached an agreement in principle.

The measures are subject to final negotiations with banking associations, Economy Minister Nadia Calvino said, adding that banks had a month to sign up ahead of their planned implementation next year.

Sadly, we will see much more government intervention all over the western world as this nightmare gets even worse in the months ahead.

The pace of layoffs is really starting to pick up, and there is a lot of fear out there right now.

Just about everyone can feel that very tough times are in front of us, and some experts are now issuing bold pronouncements that are quite chilling.

For example, Nouriel Roubini is warning that what we are facing is probably going to be “as bad as during the Global Financial Crisis”…

“History suggests it’s going to be near mission impossible to avoid a hard landing. You’re going to get not only inflation, not only a recession, but what I call the ‘Great Stagflationary Debt Crisis.’ So it’s much worse than the ’70s, and it’s probably as bad as during the Global Financial Crisis.”

Actually, if all we go through is a repeat of what we experienced in 2008 and 2009 we would be extremely fortunate.

Because the truth is that it isn’t just the economy that is failing.

As I have repeatedly warned my regular readers, what we are now witnessing is literally the collapse of everything.

Our entire society is slowly but surely coming apart at the seams all around us, but most people still expect that conditions will eventually return to “normal”.

Unfortunately, “normal” has left the building, and a tremendous amount of pain is ahead.

Cuernitos Menonitas (Mennonite “little Horns”)

“”For most Mexicans, the Mennonites are tall, light-skinned people, dressed in overalls, who produce their famous cheese… Every family has at least one cow that produces the milk, cream and butter for daily use, as well as chickens for meat and eggs. Pigs are primarily raised for home-cured hams, cold cuts and bacon. The homemade garlic beef sausage has become popular in the [Chihuahua] region, where people know that the Mennonite products are made from all local ingredients, using traditional methods.” (Recipe translated and adapted from recetasycomidas.com)”

2022 11 24 17 54
2022 11 24 17 54

Ingredients

  • 2 (8 ounce) cans crescent roll dough
  • 8 links mennonite salami (or substitute another hard salami)
  • 1 cup mennonite cheese, finely grated (or substitute monterrey jack)
  • 1 egg
  • 1 tablespoon water, ice-cold

Directions

  • Preheat the oven to 450F (250C).
  • Beat well egg and water.
  • Open and separate crescent rolls. Place a salami link on each one, and sprinkle with cheese. Roll up from the long side and curve to form a “little horn”.
  • Brush with beaten egg mixture and place on a greased or parchment paper lined cookie sheet.
  • Bake 12-15 minutes, or until golden.

2022 11 24 17 56
2022 11 24 17 56

You-tube. Comedy. Fun. Enjoy your Thanksgiving holiday.

https://youtu.be/s3dZAnr0Nhc

Lots of exciting military stuff out of China, plus the usual array of nut-job bullshit from the United States

Today’s post is dedicated to the NOV22 Zhuhai airshow.

It’s pretty darn “ground breaking”.

I hope you all get something out of this.

China’s “J-20” Stealth Fighter Jet: I’ve Never Seen American Planes Do These Things!

At an air show in China Saturday, the Chinese Air Force displayed their J-20 Stealth Fighter Jet capabilities.   I’ve never seen an American fighter Jet be able to do some of these maneuvers!  Utterly amazing.  Video below . . .

They would be shocked to see this comparison.

main qimg 5f90d4342bcf0c479ad1e5542e75b214 pjlq
main qimg 5f90d4342bcf0c479ad1e5542e75b214 pjlq

What are the economic consequences of authoritarian rule in China?

The consequence is:

The fastest improvement of living standard in human history.

In 1949, Chinese GDP per capita was around 45 dollars. That number grew to 12500 dollars in 2021, an almost 280 times growth.

What does that translate into people’s lives? In 1949, life expectancy was 35 years in China. Slavery and drug addiction was rampant. Famine was always around the corner. Many people living in the countryside shared one pair of pants amongst the whole family. There was no public medical system to speak of. 85% of the population was illiterate.

70 years later, in just one life time, China grew to become one of the greatest world power of our time. People no longer worry about starvation but obesity, and are rich enough to send their children to universities in other countries, or take vacations overseas, while watching the country’s rovers roll on the moon and Mars.

In the province of Taiwan, authoritarian rule also worked wonders. The Taiwanese military dictatorship built the island’s economy and single-handed created companies like TSMC that we all respect today.

TD550 unmanned helicopter

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2022 11 14 15 16

I went to a club in new york and a guy at the bar offered to buy me a drink. I politely declined.

He insisted again, and I knew it was a scam to get me to hang out with him. before I could order my drink for myself he buys both of us a round, which was, you know, “the nice thing to do”.

I immediately got weird vibes from him and didn’t think I owed him anything for the beer and shot.

I made up an excuse to get away from him.

I didn’t want to leave the club because I spent a hefty cover so I got my friend to come save me. my friend was 30 mins away so this guy kept following me around the club calling me a b***h for not being interested in his little game.

I told the bouncers and they didn’t really care about the situation and just brushed it off.

I was so furious with this guy I stuck my finger down my throat and threw up all over him and said, “here’s your drink back, now leave me the f**k alone”. byyyeeeee ya f****n nerd.

This video showed us that the airplane can fly and turn. WOW MIND = BLOWN.

Don’t do this…

A random guy held my crutches for me as I walked down some stairs at uni. He seemed nice and joked about how he once broke a foot, it’ll get better, etc etc. We get to the bottom and he asks if we could get some coffee. I thank him, but tell him I’m seeing someone so he just drops my crutches on the floor and walks away

creepy nice guy stories 5 635a969e47bd1 700
creepy nice guy stories 5 635a969e47bd1 700

WJ-700 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)

2022 11 14 15 18
2022 11 14 15 18

The Fremont Troll—Seattle, Washington

In so many old folktales and fairytales, we hear of mysterious, troublesome, or mischievous trolls who live under bridges. Often asking for a toll or price for passage, they cause a nuisance and, in some cases, can be quite frightening and creepy.

Well, luckily, they’re a work of fiction. That is unless you’re wandering through underpasses in the Fremont area of Seattle. Here you’ll find a huge stone troll holding up the underpass on their broad shoulders. If you’re not expecting it or are walking in bad lighting, it’s a creepy and surprising sight to behold.

The result of a local art competition in 1989 to revamp the area that had become an unsafe and dirty place, the Fremont Troll towers 18 feet (5.5 meters) and even has a shining metal eye that glints in the light. It’s not uncommon to see a horde of tourists standing around and even climbing up onto the troll’s shoulders for the perfect photo op. Keep an eye out for the Volkswagen Beetle that’s been crunched up in the troll’s hand…

J20s is the world first twin seats Stealth fighter that can command 3 or more loyal wing man drones to help attack its enemy in the sky. Something the F22, F35 cannot do.

I constantly forgot to breath while watching it making those magnificent moves, very impressive.

https://youtu.be/zAVYy9x0Kdc

I certainly have seen U.S. fighter jets be able to vertically “hover” with their nose pointed straight up, but I have never seen the reversal of direction in flight that these Chinese jets perform.  It shocked me as to the skill of the pilots, AND as to the maneuverability of the jets.

I kept waiting to see one of them just fall out of the sky with the maneuvers they were doing, but that didn’t happen.

US will build small modular nuclear reactor in Ukraine

WTF? I mean is President Biden pushing buttons, or what? -MM

Oddporium—Arden, Delaware

Sometimes you just want to wander around somewhere downright weird with a friend or loved one, pointing out old dolls, vintage medical equipment, or pig remains in a jar, cringing back and laughing. Whether you get grossed out easily or have a dark sense of humor when it comes to curios, consider checking out the Oddiporium on your next trip through Arden, Delaware.

If you’re traveling through in the evening, the Oddporium also screens horror films in the outdoor portion of the venue. Especially if you’re checking out the place around Halloween, you can expect plenty of spooky goings on. The perfect creepy combo: nighttime horror films and weird paranormal things in jars![HERE]

Don’t Poke The Panda!

https://youtu.be/E7B9TrGosr8

Maybe we’ve been out-classed by China?????

Maybe we shouldn’t be picking a fight with them over Taiwan?

Maybe we’re not as good as we think we are?

Saudi Arabia Reiterates Commitment To China, Regardless Of U.S. Concerns

Editor OilPrice.com
2 November 2022, 10:00
From HERE
Apparently confirming the view of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) that the U.S. is now regarded as just another one of its partners in a new global order that would see Beijing and its allies share the leadership position with Washington, Saudi Arabia last week reiterated its commitment to China as its “most reliable partner and supplier of crude oil,” along with broader assurances of its ongoing support in several other areas. 

That MbS seemingly now sees the U.S. as a partner just for its security considerations, with no meaningful quid pro quo on Saudi Arabia’s part, whilst regarding China as its key partner economically and Russia as its key partner in energy matters, should not surprise the U.S.

Back in March last year it was made clear enough at the annual China Development Forum hosted in Beijing, when Aramco chief executive officer, Amin Nasser said: “Ensuring the continuing security of China’s energy needs remains our highest priority - not just for the next five years but for the next 50 and beyond.” 

And yet, the U.S. is surprised by the apparent finalization of the transition of Saudi Arabia away from Washington and towards China, which effectively marks the end of the 1945 core agreement between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that defined their relationship up until extremely recently. This transition has

Satellites discovered two “dark ships” near Nord Stream before the explosions

"I was in shanghai in 2017 and my accommodation was in the Marriott hotel overlooking a big re-development . So when I left in March of that year , only the foundations were laid . I came back to shanghai in July of the same year and was astounded to see 5 tower blocks were built up to the 17th floors . Eventually it was completed in a record time of 18 months . So I can see why America was not chosen .The world trade center was destroyed in September 2001 and the replacement one world trade Center officially opened in November 2014 . Taking 9 times longer to build than the Chinese".

Traditional vaccines like Sinovac may prevent severe disease in Covid-19 patients: Study

Duh! -MM

SINGAPORE – Though often considered inferior due to their induction of a lower antibody response compared with their mRNA counterparts, inactivated virus vaccines can play a role in preventing the development of severe Covid-19, a recent study has found.

This could mean that a combination of the two vaccine types may offer better protection against the coronavirus, researchers said, noting each had its own advantages.

The study by the Duke-NUS Medical School found that inactivated virus vaccines such as Sinopharm and Sinovac, which were used extensively in Asia, and mRNA vaccines – which include Pfizer-BioNTech’s Comirnaty and Moderna’s Spikevax – trigger different T-cell responses in fighting the coronavirus.

Inactivated vaccines – an older technology used in the polio and influenza vaccines, among others – are made up of dead viruses, unlike mRNA vaccines, which use just parts of the virus’ genetic material to stimulate an immune response.

While mRNA vaccines induce T-cells – a type of white blood cell – targeting the spike protein of the coronavirus, inactivated vaccines elicit a broader immune response against different proteins on the virus.

This means that while inactivated vaccines might not be as good at preventing Covid-19 infection, they can play a role in preventing the development of severe disease, said the study’s senior co-author Anthony Tanoto Tan, a senior research fellow with the Duke-NUS’ Emerging Infectious Diseases programme.

Earlier studies had shown that mRNA vaccines help patients produce a far greater number of antibodies, compared with their inactivated virus counterparts. However, newer variants have proved to be more adept at evading the antibody response, Dr Tan said.

Read the rest HERE

Damn china looking good.

PUBLISHER’S NOTE:

Some people who *think* they know it all, are claiming these are Remote Control model jets.   They are not.

The audio alone proves they are actual fighter jets, with actual jet engines – you can HEAR them for cryin out loud!  Full-throated jet engines!

This story is accurate. The jets are real, although I am now told they are J-16’s and not J-20’s.

Anyone who tells you otherwise does not know what they’re talking about.

Very advanced level weapons.

Many missed the point. This video is a catalog for weapons FOR SALE by Norinco. What PLA uses are going to be even more advanced.

All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy

Despite their temperament, Vikings took time out to play and make merry. They would often celebrate achievements by throwing parties. These parties they threw depended on the rank and wealth of the person or people hosting. The parties created not only an opportunity to make merry but also a “pissing contest” to display wealth and stature.

The wealthier a Viking or a group of Vikings were, the bigger the party would be and the longer they could hold it down. As archeological evidence suggests, Vikings were robust men and women. Considering their body size and way of living, one can easily conclude they could eat and drink a lot. Hosting a Viking party, therefore, was a noteworthy achievement. An achievement that earned the host a distinguished position in the community.

Did you know that Vikings found skiing amusing as well? They did, in fact, find it fascinating. One would be forgiven for assuming they did not have what it took to ski back in the day, considering how advanced the equipment we use today is. Archeological evidence points to the fact that they had wooden boards that they used to ski. They used to ski for fun when hunting and as a way of general movement.

Trainloads of Armor and other NATO Military Gear in Poland, Moving Toward Kaliningrad

Video has emerged of trainloads of NATO armor and other military gear moving through Poland, toward the Russia enclave of Kaliningrad.

The video, below, shows one of the trains moving through Gdynia, Poland:

The scalable map below shows Gdynia, Poland in relation to Kaliningrad:

2022 11 14 15 10
2022 11 14 15 10

Each day, NATO moves more and more military gear either toward Russia or Ukraine, and toward the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.  It doesn’t stop.

Today, the Russian Ministry of Defense ORDERED manufacturers to DOUBLE the production of hypersonic missiles.

It won’t stop unless or until citizens in NATO countries, get their governments back under control — and fast — or else World War 3 is on the menu.

Funny Failed Test Answers

So it’s exam day, you’ve forgotten to study, and you’re staring blankly at the test in front of you wondering how on earth you’re going to pass. What are you going to do? Well, you’re going to fail, that’s what. But that doesn’t mean you can’t fail in style! Take a look at this collection of funny exam answers to see how to do just that!

test answers14
test answers14

test answers9
test answers9

test answers6
test answers6

test answers4
test answers4

test answers3
test answers3

test answers22
test answers22

test answers15
test answers15

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test answers26

test answers8
test answers8

test answers7
test answers7

test answers5
test answers5

test answers25
test answers25

test answers10
test answers10

Looks like a sexy gun. From what I’ve heard, it’s a righteous beast and even Americans are drooling and wish they had this gun. All China’s newest equipment is making USA jealous. Like type 055 destroyer which they decided to copy with their next gen destroyer.

https://youtu.be/wc4BB2Nr888

American Soldiers Found in Kherson – Video!

Duh! American soldiers fighting Russian soldiers directly. -MM

Many have been asking “What is happening in Kherson and why is Russia pulling out?” It’s complicated. One thing is now certain: Americans have entered Kherson.

This is no longer Ukraine versus Russia. This now appears to be Russia VS NATO…Ukraine is just the battlefield.

The video below comes from inside Kherson. Note the flag on the backpack first aid kit and note the language being spoken:

According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, they have had to bring their troops back to across the Dnieper River for several reasons:

1) Bridges are mostly out on the Kherson City side of the river which makes it logistically very hard to bring ammunition and supplies to those troops, AND;

2) American HIMARS Rockets have been so horrifically precise, the Russian Army cannot set up Ammunition Dumps because HIMARS takes them out.

So they cannot bring large amounts of ammo (just yet) and they cannot store large amounts of ammo (for now) and that makes their forces incredibly vulnerable.

Therefore, the Russians say they took their troops out of one side of Kherson, had them cross the river to the other side, where the logistics problems will not exist and will not endanger the lives of Russian forces.

Kherson city is now Russia.   Russia will not give up that territory permanently, they say.  But a strategic fallback was necessary.

Now, as seen in the video above, we see Americans in Kherson.

If Russia can show that American soldiers have invaded Russia territory, that makes American territory subject to Russian attack.   It’s that simple.

https://youtu.be/eSvPZANKgzw

Gentle Paintings of Girls by Huaishen J

We know nothing about Huaishen J’s gender or any other orientation. All we know is that Huaishen J lives in the United States and paints fantastically gentle and charming young ladies. And that’s all we need.

0 44
0 44

4 22
4 22

3 24
3 24

2 22
2 22

1 24
1 24

Great video. You should add Beidou was born out of necessity. In 1990s, US used / blocked GPS to disable a Chinese ship in an incident. And China joined Europe’s Galileo program but was blocked repeatedly. Beidou was born after China realized Europe’s true intension (and wasted time and money on Galileo.

UKRAINE “MILITARY AID” FROM USA — WAS INVESTED IN CRYPTO “FTX” BY UKRAINE!

From HERE

The sudden collapse of crypto exchange “FTX” and its Bankruptcy filing today, has revealed that FTX presently suffers from $10-$50 BILLION in liabilities with almost ZERO assets . . . and among those liabilities, are “investments” made by . . . . UKRAINE . . . .

At this early hour, it __appears__ that tens-of-billions in American “Military Aid” to Ukraine, which was allegedly to be used to fight Russia, was cash that Ukraine DID NOT use to fight Russia, but instead invested into FTX!

And, as you might guess from the Bankruptcy filing . . . . it now seems that all the money . . . is gone.

Yes, you read that correctly: Instead of using US Military Aid to fight Russia, Ukraine “invested” part or all of it, into FTX, and right now, it looks like all the money is gone.

Democrat Donations

Also at this early hour, it now also __appears__ that the Chief of FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, was the #2 donor to the Democrats. He was only outspent by Soros himself!

It __seems__ Ukraine was receiving money from the US, Ukraine sent it to FTX, and FTX sent it to Democrats, who originally voted to send it to Ukraine.  At this hour, it __appears__ to some observers, to be pure, criminal, money-laundering, and a criminal conspiracy to violate campaign finance laws.

It now seems to closely-watching observers that the kid (Bankman-Fried) burned his own company — and his own ass — just to make sure the Dems won the mid-term elections, and seems to have done it by pulling the rug out from all those that had funds there in FTX.

So the collapse of FTX is now linked not only to Ukraine, but also to US Democrat politicians who got money from Sam Bankman-Fried, to campaign for the just-ended elections!

Here.  Learn:

From wiki
Sam Bankman-Fried was born in 1992 on the campus of Stanford University into a family of academics. Born and raised to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in California, he is the son of Barbara Fried and Joseph Bankman, both professors at Stanford Law School.[2] His aunt Linda P. Fried is the current dean of Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health.[15] His brother, Gabe Bankman-Fried, is a former Wall Street trader[16] and the director of the non-profit Guarding Against Pandemics.

Politics
Sam Bankman-Fried was the second-largest individual donor to Democratic causes in 2021–2022 election cycle with total donations of $39.8 million, only behind George Soros.[59][60][61] Of this, $27 million was given to Protect our Future PAC, bankrolled by Bankman-Fried.[62]

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FhUd8B7WYAE 4s5

And the funniest bit of all? Who is handling the bankruptcy??? None other than Jon J Ray III who just happened to be in charge of the liquidation of….. ENRON!

Then too, there’s this:

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The US Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission are looking into whether FTX.com mishandled customer funds. Bankman-Fried is also being investigated by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for potential violations of securities rules.

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UPDATE 11:34 AM EST –

Sam Bankman-Fried used the money to bankroll DEMOCRATS!

$10,000,000 PROTECT OUR FUTURE PAC 4/14/2022
$9,000,000 PROTECT OUR FUTURE PAC 2/4/2022
$6,000,000 HOUSE MAJORITY PAC 4/4/2022
$5,000,000 FF PAC 10/7/2020
$4,000,000 PROTECT OUR FUTURE PAC 6/13/2022
$4,000,000 PROTECT OUR FUTURE PAC 3/15/2022
$2,000,000 GMI PAC, INC. 1/18/2022
$1,000,000 AMERICA UNITED 4/18/2022
$500,000 SMP 5/19/2022
$500,000 DNC SERVICES CORP / DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 5/5/2022
$400,000 DEMOCRATIC GRASSROOTS VICTORY FUND 8/31/2022
$350,000 VOTE TRIPLING PAC 9/24/2020
$300,000 OPPORTUNITY FOR TOMORROW 4/22/2022
$300,000 AMERICA UNITED 6/13/2022
$250,000 SMP 8/2/2021
$250,000 SMP 8/16/2021
$250,000 DMFI PAC 5/25/2022
$220,000 CENTER FOR ESSENTIAL INFORMATION 10/13/2020
$109,500 DNC SERVICES CORP / DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 5/3/2022
$109,500 DNC SERVICES CORP / DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 5/3/2022
$109,500 DNC SERVICES CORP / DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 5/3/2022
$109,500 DCCC 6/22/2022
$105,000 ALABAMA CONSERVATIVES FUND 6/10/2022
$104,000 DCCC 6/22/2022
$50,000 BIDEN VICTORY FUND 10/23/2020
$50,000 HEARTLAND RESURGENCE 9/23/2022
$36,500 DNC SERVICES CORP / DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 5/3/2022
$36,500 DCCC 6/22/2022
$36,500 NRCC 7/22/2022
$35,500 DNC SERVICES CORP / DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE 10/23/2020
$30,000 DSCC 3/21/2022
$30,000 DSCC 3/31/2022
$22,000 ACTIVATE AMERICA 9/1/2021
$20,800 STABENOW VICTORY FUND 1/13/2022
$20,800 MAGGIE HASSAN VICTORY FUND 7/29/2021
$10,800 GILLIBRAND VICTORY FUND 6/20/2022
$10,000 NEW HAMPSHIRE DEMOCRATIC PARTY 7/31/2021
$10,000 MICHIGAN DEMOCRATIC STATE CENTRAL COMMITTEE 2/2/2022
$8,500 NRCC 7/22/2022
$6,500 DSCC 3/31/2022
$5,800 RICHARD BURR COMMITTEE; THE 8/2/2021
$5,800 BILL CASSIDY FOR US SENATE 8/2/2021
$5,800 JEFFRIES FOR CONGRESS 7/24/2021
$5,800 COLLINS FOR SENATOR 10/2/2021
$5,800 BOOZMAN FOR ARKANSAS 1/21/2022
$5,800 CITIZENS FOR BOYLE 5/9/2022
$5,800 HOEVEN FOR SENATE 6/13/2022
$5,800 HOEVEN FOR SENATE 6/13/2022
$5,000 LIMITLESS HORIZONS 10/17/2022
$5,000 GRANITE VALUES PAC 7/31/2021
$5,000 SUMMITT PAC 9/28/2022
$5,000 GREAT LAKES PAC 2/9/2022
$5,000 GUARDING AGAINST PANDEMICS PAC 4/27/2022
$5,000 HEARTLAND VALUES PAC 2/8/2022
$5,000 JERSEY VALUES PAC 1/24/2022
$5,000 GREATER TOMORROW POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE 7/22/2022
$5,000 THE NEXT 50 PAC 3/31/2022
$5,000 PRAIRIE POLITICAL ACTION COMMITTEE 3/19/2022
$5,000 BFB PAC 5/9/2022
$5,000 OFF THE SIDELINES PAC 6/20/2022
$5,000 AXNE PAC (AMERICANS X-PECT NEW ENERGY) 9/28/2022
$5,000 SERVING OUR COUNTRY (SOC) PAC 9/28/2022
$4,000 ACROSS THE AISLE PAC 10/19/2022
$2,900 ALESSANDRA BIAGGI FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 MANCHIN FOR WEST VIRGINIA 7/24/2021
$2,900 MANCHIN FOR WEST VIRGINIA 7/24/2021
$2,900 JASMINE FOR US 3/31/2022
$2,900 FRIENDS OF DICK DURBIN COMMITTEE 3/19/2022
$2,900 CONOLE FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 TINA SMITH FOR MINNESOTA 3/30/2022
$2,900 TINA SMITH FOR MINNESOTA 3/30/2022
$2,900 COLLINS FOR SENATOR 8/3/2021
$2,900 COLLINS FOR SENATOR 9/2/2021
$2,900 BILL CASSIDY FOR US SENATE 8/2/2021
$2,900 JEFFRIES FOR CONGRESS 7/26/2021
$2,900 MAXWELL ALEJANDRO FROST FOR CONGRESS 6/10/2022
$2,900 PETE AGUILAR FOR CONGRESS 7/24/2021
$2,900 PETE AGUILAR FOR CONGRESS 7/24/2021
$2,900 COLLINS FOR SENATOR 9/2/2021
$2,900 COLLINS FOR SENATOR 8/2/2021
$2,900 GILBERT VILLEGAS FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 SHONTEL BROWN FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 QUARTEY FOR CONGRESS 4/27/2022
$2,900 JAKE AUCHINCLOSS FOR CONGRESS 3/10/2022
$2,900 JAKE AUCHINCLOSS FOR CONGRESS 3/10/2022
$2,900 ALEX PADILLA FOR SENATE 7/24/2021
$2,900 ALEX PADILLA FOR SENATE 7/24/2021
$2,900 PEOPLE FOR PATTY MURRAY 7/24/2021
$2,900 PEOPLE FOR PATTY MURRAY 7/24/2021
$2,900 JOSH GOTTHEIMER FOR CONGRESS 1/24/2022
$2,900 ROBERT GARCIA FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 JOSH GOTTHEIMER FOR CONGRESS 1/24/2022
$2,900 CORY BOOKER FOR SENATE 10/18/2021
$2,900 FOUSHEE FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 GILLIBRAND FOR SENATE 6/20/2022
$2,900 GILLIBRAND FOR SENATE 6/20/2022
$2,900 GALLEGO FOR ARIZONA 3/31/2022
$2,900 GALLEGO FOR ARIZONA 3/31/2022
$2,900 STABENOW FOR US SENATE 2/11/2022
$2,900 STABENOW FOR US SENATE 2/11/2022
$2,900 JIM COSTA FOR CONGRESS 7/11/2022
$2,900 HALEY STEVENS FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 BRITTANY PETTERSEN FOR COLORADO 3/31/2022
$2,900 FRIENDS OF LUCY MCBATH 3/31/2022
$2,900 TORRES FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 WELCH FOR VERMONT 3/31/2022
$2,900 MAGGIE FOR NH 7/31/2021
$2,900 MAGGIE FOR NH 7/31/2021
$2,900 MENENDEZ FOR CONGRESS 4/27/2022
$2,900 CARRICK FLYNN FOR OREGON 3/31/2022
$2,900 BOOZMAN FOR ARKANSAS 1/21/2022
$2,900 CITIZENS FOR BOYLE 5/9/2022
$2,900 MORGAN MCGARVEY FOR CONGRESS 5/16/2022
$2,900 SEAN PATRICK MALONEY FOR CONGRESS 6/17/2022
$2,900 MAX ROSE FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 SEAN PATRICK MALONEY FOR CONGRESS 6/17/2022
$2,900 JOSH HARDER FOR CONGRESS 9/28/2022
$2,900 NIKKI FOR CONGRESS 3/31/2022
$2,900 LOU CORREA FOR CONGRESS 9/28/2022
$2,900 CHUY GARCIA FOR CONGRESS 6/10/2022
$2,900 HOEVEN FOR SENATE 7/1/2022
$2,900 SALUD CARBAJAL FOR CONGRESS 10/19/2022
$2,900 BECCA BALINT FOR VERMONT 6/10/2022
$2,900 SALUD CARBAJAL FOR CONGRESS 7/2/2022
$2,900 SANFORD BISHOP FOR CONGRESS 7/2/2022
$2,900 LISA MURKOWSKI FOR US SENATE 8/2/2021
$2,900 LISA MURKOWSKI FOR US SENATE 8/2/2021
$2,900 ANGIE CRAIG FOR CONGRESS 7/2/2022
$2,900 SYDNEY KAMLAGER FOR CONGRESS 6/10/2022
$2,900 GILLEN FOR CONGRESS 4/27/2022
$2,800 BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT 10/23/2020
$2,800 CORY BOOKER FOR SENATE 10/18/2021
$2,500 CHC BOLD PAC 3/31/2022
$1,000 BENNET FOR COLORADO 10/27/2010
$1,000 DEMOCRATIC STATE CENTRAL COMMITTEE OF MARYLAND 4/27/2022
$1,000 ACROSS THE AISLE PAC 7/18/2022
$780 ARIZONA DEMOCRATIC PARTY 10/23/2020
$780 PENNSYLVANIA DEMOCRATIC PARTY 10/23/2020
$780 NORTH CAROLINA DEMOCRATIC PARTY – FEDERAL 10/23/2020
$780 COLORADO DEMOCRATIC PARTY 10/23/2020
$780 MINNESOTA DEMOCRATIC-FARMER-LABOR PARTY 10/23/2020
$780 DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF VIRGINIA 10/23/2020
$780 OHIO DEMOCRATIC PARTY 10/23/2020
$780 NEBRASKA DEMOCRATIC PARTY 10/23/2020
$780 DEMOCRATIC EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE OF FLORIDA 10/23/2020
$780 GEORGIA FEDERAL ELECTIONS COMMITTEE 10/23/2020
$780 DEMOCRATIC PARTY OF WISCONSIN 10/23/2020
$780 TEXAS DEMOCRATIC PARTY 10/23/2020
$780 NEVADA STATE DEMOCRATIC PARTY 10/23/2020

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wBWo1je

This doesn’t include “donations” by two other principles from FTX, the total is almost $80 million dollars, THIS CYCLE.

Imagine knowing your crypto money was stolen to pay for liberals to import illegals from 3rd world countries that are there to replace you!

Tom Brady is rumored to have lost $650,000,000.

UPDATE 6:45 PM EST —

Want to know how high this corruption goes?   Look who attended an FTX Event in the Bahamas, THIS PAST APRIL (2022):

Bill Clinton and former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, seen in the photo below, sitting on-stage with Sam Bankman-Fried!!!!!

FTX Event April 2022 Bahamas BillClinton TonyBlair
FTX Event April 2022 Bahamas BillClinton TonyBlair

Not only are the two former officials at the event, the event marquis clearly says “This Session is OFF THE RECORD.”  Here. Look:

FTX Event April 2022 Bahamas BillClinton TonyBlair OFF THE RECORD
FTX Event April 2022 Bahamas BillClinton TonyBlair OFF THE RECORD

Now, aside from the obvious millions of dollars in campaign donations shown above, the much bigger question is: How much cash ended-up in Politicians PRIVATE Crypto Accounts ??????     Many observers believe “Billions” got siphoned-off the Ukraine “Aid” and other “Foreign Aid.

Kittencal’s Perfect Prime Rib Roast Beef

“NOTE…THE INTERNAL TEMPERATURE NOT THE TIME IS YOUR BEST GUARANTEE FOR DONENESS so for a perfectly cooked prime rib roast invest in a meat thermometer and you will never go wrong with this recipe!

— if desired you may omit the au jus and just serve the roast, I prefer to make the au jus especially if I am serving this at a holiday table

— Use nothing else but only fresh garlic, a little salt and lots of fresh ground black pepper for this or you could use 1 teaspoon garlic salt, using any other spices will take away the flavor, nothing else is needed

— Cooking on very high heat then reducing the temperature will seal in all the meat juices to produce the most tender and flavorful prime rib, this actually is the method that a lot of the higher end restaurants use to make there prime rib and is the method I always use when I make prime rib roast at my home

— The cooking time stated on the recipe is for a 3-4 pound prime rib, you can use this method for a larger prime rib and increase the cooking time please see bottom of directions

— For a perfectly cooked prime rib roast a meat thermometer inserted in the roast should read about 140 degrees for medium-rare doneness, it is advised not to cook prime rib more that medium-rare

—– Using more that the specified amount of salt will draw out the juices from the roast, you could add a little more but it is best to salt the meat after it is cooked, using a minimum amount of salt will insure a juicy tender prime rib roast, 1 teaspoon or less of salt will be fine, remember to remove your roast from the fridge about 2 hours before cooking

2022 11 14 17 19
2022 11 14 17 19

Ingredients

  • 3 -4 lbs center-cut prime rib roast, nicely marbled, and trimmed, but leave a layer of fat on top of roast for flavor
  • 8 fresh large garlic cloves, sliced in half (or use many as desired)
  • fresh ground black pepper (use lots!)
  • 12 teaspoon white salt (can use up to 1 teaspoon salt) or 1/2 teaspoon seasoning salt (can use up to 1 teaspoon salt)
  • 12 cup dry white wine
  • 2 cups beef stock (or use a good quality beef broth)

Directions

  • Using a knife, poke small holes all over uncooked roast, and insert a half of a clove of fresh garlic in the hole (as many holes and as much garlic as desired).
  • Cover roast, and refrigerate overnight.
  • The next day, remove the roast from fridge and uncover; let sit out at room temperature for about 2 to 2-1/2 hours (this is an important step to relax the meat fibers, it will make for a more tender juicy roast, the length of counter-time will depend on the size of your roast).
  • Set oven to 450°F and allow the oven to preheat for a minimum of 15 minutes.
  • Season the roast with only a small amount of salt but lots of fresh ground black pepper pepper (that’s all nothing else but a little salt and fresh ground black pepper, using any other spices will take away the flavor from the prime rib!).
  • Place the roast fat-side up on a rack in a shallow-sided pan, then insert a meat thermometer in the middle of the roast but not touching any rib bones.
  • Roast uncovered at 450°F for 20 minutes (a few more minutes won’t hurt at 450°F).
  • After 20 minutes of high heat cooking reduce heat to 350°F and continue to roast for 1 hour to 1 hour and 15 minutes OR until the meat thermometer reads 130°F for rare doneness OR 140°F for medium-rare doneness, that is the way a prime rib really should be served, check your roast after 1 hour cooking time.
  • *NOTE* It is strongly advised to remove the roast slightly before desired degree of doneness is achieved as the roast will continue to rise in temperature several degrees after removing from the oven.
  • Remove meat to a carving board.
  • Cover loosely with foil and allow let rest (DO NOT CUT INTO ROAST for at least 20 or more minutes or all juices in the meat will flow out).
  • While the roast is resting prepare the au jus; place the roasting pan on top of the stove over high heat.
  • Add in the wine; cook for 8-10 minutes, stirring and scraping any brown bits.
  • Add in the beef stock; cook and reduce the juice by half (this might take about 20 minutes).
  • Add salt and pepper to taste.
  • Slice roast (just before serving!) and drizzle with some of the juice.
  • *NOTE* if desired you can cover the roast loosely with foil the first hour and then uncover and cook for the remaining time.
  • ——————————————–.
  • APPROXIMATE COOKING TIMES for the prime rib cooked at 350°F after the 20 minute cooking time at 450°F.
  • Rare; cook 12-13 minutes per pound or to 130°F.
  • Medium-rare; cook 14-16 minutes per pound or to 140°F (I would not recommend cooking a prime rib any more than medium-rare).
  • Since every oven cooks differently cooking times are only approximate.
  • SUGGESTED SERVING PORTIONS PER PERSON —-for a generous serving of prime rib roast you should figure on 2 people per rib, that means if you plan to serve 6 people you should be able to do so with 3 ribs/ eight people with 4 ribs/ do not bother with less than 3 ribs anything less than that is not a roast but rather a steak and would be better treated as such.

The aerobatic flight show conducted by four J20s yesterday was absolutely exhilarating even in relatively imperfect weather conditions. People on site were so obsessed with it that most still kept their eyes fixed on J20s after their landings, talking about their shows and nobody realized that a J16 has already taken off and performed several amazing maneuvers.

TSMC 7nm process capacity utilization falling rapidly

Monica Chen, Hsinchu; Eifeh Strom, DIGITIMES Asia
From HERE
This report coincides with an earlier report that China has already begun to mass produce the 7nm chipset. 

Biden policy NOW helps to hand over the world biggest chip market exclusively to Chinese chip makers. 

The end result is all other chip makers will lost economic of scale, and become noncompetitive. 

Capacity utilization rates for TSMC’s 7nm process platform and its process variants N6, N7 have fallen below 50%, according to industry sources.

Many IC design customers are cutting orders and delaying pull-ins of TSMC’s 7nm process. Companies that have had the biggest impact include MediaTek, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), Qualcomm, Apple, and Intel, as well as Chinese companies like Unisoc, which have been restricted by bans. TSMC has not responded to market rumors.

Despite the market downturn, TSMC recently expressed confidence. However, TSMC’s utilization rates for its 7nm and 6nm processes have fallen and are not expected to return to previous levels until the first half of 2023, according to sources.

The largest application for 7nm and 6nm is smartphones, PCs, servers, and other high-performance computing (HPC). High inventory levels in the mobile phone and PC supply chains, combining with performance pressures, have led to order adjustments, even at the risk of affecting long-term relationships with TSMC.

Qualcomm and MediaTek have both warned about the seriousness of smartphone inventory levels and have taken conservative views of the near future.

MediaTek has high levels of entry-level and mid-range smartphones, and has been more affected by the weak market. It expects fourth-quarter performance to fall by 20% sequentially. Sources pointed out that MediaTek is one of the largest players in this wave of foundry order cuts.

Sources revealed that the utilization rate for the 7nm family at Fab 15B in Taichung is lower than expected. It has reportedly dropped below 50% and is expected to worsen in the first quarter of 2023. Plans for Fab 22 in Kaohsiung have been shelved indefinitely, according to sources. TSMC is expected to revisit the plans depending on future production capacity requirements.

Construction progress of Fab 12 P8 in the Hsinchu Science Park is also unknown, sources said.

According to sources, Intel was previously expected to expand its outsourcing strategy with a large order using TSMC’s 7nm process, but reduced its order as a result of weak market conditions and lower-than-expected PC and server shipments. Intel’s Arc A series of GPUs are built using TSMC’s 6nm process node, while its Xe-HPC architecture Ponte Vecchio uses the 7nm process node.

Despite the continuous launch of new products, pull-in momentum is weak, sources said. TSMC’s top 10 customers have all made order adjustments, including the return of new orders from Nvidia for 7nm A100 chips and 4nm H100 chips, as well as adjustments and pull-in delays for the RTX 40 series. Intel has also made significant changes to its 4nm and 3nm orders.

Regardless, TSMC remains the leader in advanced processes. Order visibility for 5nm and below is still relatively high. Not only does AMD’s newest Zen 4 architecture Genoa server and RDNA 3 architecture GPU use TSMC’s 5nm process, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 uses the 4nm process.

Starting in 2023, TSMC will take a large order for Apple’s latest Mac series, which has an annual shipment scale of 20 million units, sources said. Orders for iPhones and iPads will be stable.

Sources noted that once inventory has been cleared, global IC design customers including Broadcom, Marvell, and MediaTek will expand their orders with TSMC.

DHS Censorship Agency Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On Election

Very long. Bored me to no end, but important for Americans to read. -MM
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Unfortunately, this country is headed for a horrible outcome. No self-governing society can suffer the strain to civil society that comes from loss of regime credibility.  This overt and actual illegal censorship, in violation of the First Amendment, must be brought to a halt.  How that takes place, really doesn’t matter anymore.

The US Department of Homeland Security is actively engaged in the deprivation of American’s constitutionally protected free speech rights.  They are using our own tax money to strip away our rights.  The full report, done by the Foundation for Freedom Online, appears below:
DHS Censorship Agency Strange First Mission: Banning Speech That Casts Doubt On Election
SUMMARY
  • Network throttled millions of posts ahead of 2020 election, blocked “emerging narratives” from reaching “virality threshold.”
  • Censors boast on video of getting tech companies to ban entire categories of election speech under threat of “huge regulatory pressure.”
  • Months before the 2020 election, censors systematically targeted all speech categories that could challenge a future “red mirage, blue shift” election scenario.
Last week, The Intercept published a set of leaks that drew broad interest in perhaps the most under-covered scandal inside the US government today: the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) quiet move to establish, for the first time in US history, an explicitly inward-facing domestic censorship bureau.What The Intercept glimpsed, however, is just the tip of a much larger iceberg.The size, scale and speed of DHS’s censorship operation are vastly larger have been reported. Based on our investigation, below are seven bottom-line figures summarizing the scope of censorship carried out by DHS speech control partners, as compiled from their own reports and videos:

    • 22 Million tweets labeled “misinformation” on Twitter;
    • 859 Million tweets collected in databases for “misinformation” analysis;
    • 15 tech platforms monitored for “misinformation” often in real-time;
    • <1 hour average response time between government partners and tech platforms;
    • Dozens of “misinformation narratives” targeted for platform-wide throttling; and
    • Hundreds of millions of individual Facebook posts, YouTube videos, TikToks, and tweets impacted, due to “misinformation” Terms of Service policy changes that DHS partners openly plotted and bragged tech companies would never have done without DHS partner insistence and “huge regulatory pressure” from government.

The citations above are from just the DHS censorship network’s impact on the 2020 election cycle alone. That was two years ago, when the narrative management machine referenced by The Intercept was first getting formed. Even the above figures, however, just scratch the surface of the full story.

While The Intercept rightly noted that DHS’s “truth cops“ now take on a range of other topics – such as Covid-19 and geopolitical opinions – it all started from, and grew out of, DHS’s speech control infrastructure set up to censor speech about elections.

That started with the 2020 election. But it continues, importantly, with the 2022 midterm elections, which are ongoing this week.

At Foundation for Freedom Online, for more than six months, we have been publishing and sharing research findings about a wide span of shocking components to DHS’s speech control operations. Our investigation has spurred multiple members of Congress to vow aggressive probes into DHS’s “government censorship by proxy.”

The whole story, however, has not all been published in one place. In this report, we seek to provide a comprehensive history and network map of DHS’s public-private censorship network, as told through a deep dive into its first mission — the censorship of the 2020 election.

Along the way, we will highlight the network’s role in censoring the ongoing 2022 midterm elections.

In the final section of this report, we will cover a particularly disturbing aspect of this story — DHS’s pre-censorship of speech that could “cast doubt” on a so-called “red mirage, blue shift” election scenario, months in advance of such an exact sequence playing out.

Background History & Cast Of Characters

In this background section, we will present a history and overview of the key players participating in DHS’s extended censorship network, with special attention to its formation in the run-up to the 2020 election.

This story has two main institutional sides: the government within DHS and the non-governmental side consisting of a web of like-minded private sector and civil society partners. Together, this network forms the DHS public-private censorship network that is the subject of this report.

The Government Side: Chris Krebs’s CISA

The key coordinating hub for the government side is an “obscure government agency” named CISA, which is tucked within DHS, and was created by act of Congress in November 2018, nominally to defend America against cybersecurity threats from hostile foreign actors (e.g., Russian hackers).

CISA’s longform name, the “Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Agency” has none of the Orwellian overtones of the “Disinformation Governance Board”. CISA took great pains to cloak itself as just a simple, security-focused cybersecurity directorate. CISA’s founding director, Chris Krebs, was fond of telling audiences that CISA was just “The agency that cares so much about security, it’s in our name twice”.

CISA’s mission was supposed to be cyber security. Not cyber censorship.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the 2020 election.

First, on January 6, 2017, outgoing Obama Administration DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson designated “election infrastructure” as being “critical infrastructure” under the purview of DHS protection.

This designation, born out of unsubstantiated claims that Russia had just stolen, hacked or otherwise materially interfered with the 2016 election, tasked DHS with protecting election-related structure, such as polling places, voting machines and computer systems.

CISA’s Internet censorship power grew out of interpreting “critical infrastructure” beyond its hard physical meaning to apply to meta-physical concepts. By 2019, “foreign disinformation” on social media was increasingly framed as a “cyber threat” to election infrastructure.

Through this framing mechanism, CISA’s “cybersecurity” authority morphed into a “cybercensorship” authority. However, this move was initially limited to CISA only targeting “foreign disinformation”, through DHS’s Countering Foreign Influence Task Force.

But when the 2016 election-era “Russian interference” Special Prosecutor’s probe ended in July 2019 with former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s failure to find “collusion” between then-President Trump and outside Russians, DHS and CISA began to change their tunes.

The entire “countering Russian disinformation on social media” apparatus that had been constructed before July 2019 to censor, throttle and identify “foreign disinformation” was quietly, but entirely, pivoted to focus inward on “domestic disinformation.”

This “Foreign-To-Domestic Disinformation Switcheroo” on censorship was never widely conveyed beyond DHS doors out to the American people. It was plotted on DHS’s own livestreams and internal documents. DHS insiders’ collective justification, without uttering a peep about the switch’s revolutionary implications, was that “domestic disinformation” was now a greater “cyber threat to elections” than falsehoods flowing from foreign interference.

This meant that, henceforth, any US citizen posting what DHS considered “misinformation” online was suddenly conducting a cyber attack against US critical infrastructure. That was the legal framework under which DHS – and CISA particularly – drew their jurisdiction.

To illustrate this, we’ve put together a supercut of DHS censorship network partners switching from a “foreign” to a “domestic” predicate for censorship between the 2016 election and the 2020 election:

o CISA’s self-invented censorship powers against “foreign disinformation” went from being pointed outward against supposed Russian bot accounts to being pointed inwards at tens of millions of US citizens simply talking lawfully about their own elections.

The main character in the CISA side of this story is its then-director in 2020, Chris Krebs. After the 2020 election, CISA’s leadership baton was handed to current head Jen Easterly, covered below.

Since this is a story about government censorship and abuse of power, Chris Krebs’s public statements on censorship issues provide insight into the founding intent of the government censorship operation that first grew out of Krebs setting it up. Here are eight data points useful to bear in mind:

    • Krebs, who administered the federal side of the 2020 election after DHS effectively nationalized election infrastructure on January 6, 2017, said that every lawyer who represented conservative clients on claims concerning 2020 election irregularities should be permanently disbarred and banned from legal practice for life.
    • Krebs said that the sitting President in 2020, Donald Trump, was a national security threat because he espoused domestic “disinformation.”
    • Krebs has repeatedly said on record that “misinformation” is the single biggest threat to election security. Note that Kreb’s role in government was not supposed to be as arbiter of truth; he was supposed to be a cybersecurity expert from Microsoft. Yet US domestic citizen opinions on social media became, in Kreb’s estimate, the top “cyber” security threat facing the US, replacing foreign hacking and malware.

After leaving CISA, both of Krebs’s two new jobs in January 2021 were outgrowths of the very CISA censorship network Krebs established with outside partners while in government.

First, shortly before President Biden’s inauguration, Krebs started a private consulting firm with former Facebook executive Alex Stamos, simply called “Krebs Stamos Group.”

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Stamos, covered extensively below, was perhaps the top figure overseeing the entire private sector side of the public-private censorship enterprise that Krebs and Stamos jointly built to censor populist political voices during the 2020 election.

It was Stamos who, according to his own group’s report, pitched the idea in July 2020 for DHS to even create a government censorship apparatus in the first place. Although, as we will cover, there is reason to believe such plans between Krebs and Stamos may have started considerably earlier than that reported date.

We will cover this Krebs-Stamos government-academia censorship relationship further below.

Krebs’s other role right after leaving CISA was becoming chair of the Aspen Institute’s “Commission on Information Disorder,” to galvanize a stronger “ whole-of-society” approach to censoring rumors and misinformation on the Internet.

Thus, Krebs – the original government censor – transitioned seamlessly through the revolving door of industry, into lucrative partnerships with private sector censorship professionals and prestigious civil society groups whose stated goal is decreasing the freedom of US citizen speech on the Internet.

Today, Krebs’s seat at the head of CISA is now occupied by Jen Easterly, a former military intelligence official who was deputy director of the National Security Agency (NSA) for counterterrorism. She appears to be taking her military intelligence experience squashing foreign terrorists from Tehran and using it to squash American populists on Twitter.

In October 2021, Easterly and Krebs held a 30-minute taped discussion for CISA’s “Cybersecurity Summit 2021: Continuity of Excellence” summit, in which they mutually agreed that Krebs’s construction of a “counter-misinformation” conglomerate with the private sector was among the top structures to preserve and expand at DHS going forward.

Easterly’s inheritance of Krebs’s censorship machine appears to be corroborated in the ongoing State Attorney General “big tech collusion” lawsuit versus the Biden Administration. There, the court recently ruled that Easterly can be deposed because of her “first-hand knowledge” of the censorship “nerve center” run out of CISA, her seeking “greater censorship… done by federal pressure on social media platforms”, and her reported statements that CISA’s “most critical infrastructure is a cognitive infrastructure.”

Before discussing the private sector side, it should be noted that the government apparatus at DHS is now larger and scattered beyond just CISA. As we have previously reported.

Let’s now move on to the private sector side of the equation. To whom did Chris Krebs and CISA outsource the task of mass social media censorship of the 2020 election? Who runs the private sector side and how is it all structured?

The Election Integrity Partnership

The main institutional character on the private sector side we will focus on in this story is a “counter-disinformation” collective called the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP). EIP is made up of four of the most powerful and politically well-connected social media monitoring and mass-reporting groups in the world. Their respective directors were all early industry pioneers in the rise of the censorship industry after the 2016 election.

The four entities comprising EIP are two universities, an influential foreign policy think tank, and a private social media analytics firm. They are, respectively:

    • Stanford Internet Observatory;
    • Washington University’s (UW) Center for an Informed Public;
    • The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Lab; and

 

    • Graphika.

One common thread connecting these four entities is that each of their directors were involved in aggressively alleging (unsubstantiated) claims from January 2017 through early 2020 that Russian interference had helped Donald Trump win the 2016 election by using inauthentic bots and troll accounts on social media.

Each of the four entities comprising EIP is also deeply connected to the US military and foreign policy establishment. These four institutions further came into the 2020 election cycle with deep pre-existing connections to the major social media companies’ content moderation teams, having worked together on censorship issues since the field first began developing in 2017.

It is very helpful to understand EIP’s network and operations in depth, because it was through EIP that DHS built the infrastructure for its current role as government coordinator of takedowns and throttling of US citizen speech online.

Just to make this all perfectly clear up front, below is EIP leader Alex Stamos explaining the whole DHS-EIP partnership was set up to outsource censorship through EIP, “to try to fill the gap of the things that the government could not do themselves” because the government “lacked both kinda the funding and the legal authorizations”:

Massive article with much more HERE

China’s military hardware is incredibly impressive. It will be well received.Well done China.

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Rage as a tool

Rage is an emotion, and as such it can be useful or dangerous. It’s up to us to figure out how to use it adequately. Many people would use other techniques to funnel their rage so that it wasn’t destructive.

Some would run, lift weights, or apply themselves in sports.

Others would internalize it, drink, brawl, or jut be an asshole.

Still others funnel that rage into music.

Those of us who are from the United States, or from the Domain, or have survived a broken marriage, a bad boss, or a corrupt government have all experienced real cold rage. I know I have. And I do my best to control it, least my “incredible hulk” comes out.

This post is going to be a tad different.

And it isn’t for everyone. What this post contains is some pretty harsh rock-n-roll music that has often served me (personally) in releasing and dealing with rage.

As such, it’s a bid dangerous and a tad toxic if you are not ready for it.

If you are not ready, then just skip this article and wait for a calmer and gentler post tomorrow. But if you are ready, or willing, or adventuresome, then have some fun…

BUT DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU

Here we go…

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World War III continues, evidence of micro-nukes, bio-weapons, full spectrum warfare are clear. Interesting things in Korea, Germany, and the Middle East

Stay tuned. All of the subjects mentioned in the title has already been covered within the messy slush-file of MM articles. All intentionally buried within a safe coverage of delicious food, cats, music, and stories of the human condition. Impossible for computer algorithms and troll agents to root out and locate. It’s the MM way, don’t you know. What subjects?

  • Nordstream pipeline detonations
  • The Pentagon using the Musk satellites to ram the Chinese space station, and then China taking down all of them with an electromagnetic cannon
  • The UK launching a micro-nuke in Ukraine and caught red-handed by Russia
  • Bio-Weapons NATO general captured at a weaponized development facility (Ukraine) performing “gain of function” studies. Also known as “weaponizing the virus”.
  • China stopping the bio-weapon attempts to induce famine
  • China capturing and killing off all of the CIA and NED assets
  • North Korea missile attacks
  • Disabling an American nuclear sub that was “this close” to being captured outright.
  • Sinking another one that had to be recovered (F-35 splash into the South China Sea anyone?)
  • The Trump mega-flotilla that turned around and sailed back home
  • Covid-19, the tick-virus and the humanized swine-flu virus bio-weapons and the Taiwan “surprise” virus.

And that’s all right off the top of my head. But I’m not trying to keep score. In this “game” of world war III, it’s impossible to keep score and absolutely meaningless. You have to keep in mind the objectives of all parties (as best as we can ascertain) and then observe the elements play out. And as they play out, we migrate to areas that will not be affected by the fallout (both figuratively and literally). Remember, the reason why everyone is so confused as to what is going on is simply because no one can see the full picture. There’s a plan. There’s always a plan. Keep in mind why things appear to be a world run by crazy people…

  • They might actually be crazy.
  • The Western “news” is a propaganda arm of the US government.
  • Actual “news” and events are not being reported on.
  • Trivial events are blown all out of proportion.
  • Real secrets are kept secret.
  • Counter intelligence operations are at full-speed.

So just sit tight. The latest information from the Domain Commander is…

  • No change to the previous predictions; small to medium bads lie ahead.
  • Events are playing out within predictable patterns well known and understood by Domain (Historians).
  • Some humans will experience discomfort, but any areas of conflict and turmoil will be isolated and geographically segmented.

Take care. Be prudent.

Important note

WordPress has “updated” it’s software, and messed up everything MM side.  Do not be frustrated, but much of the grammar corrections, formatting, and pictures were deleted or screwed up in this post, and I am too exhausted to repair what amounts to 10,000 words of text.

Self-format if you must.

Singapore and China sign 19 agreements to boost cooperation

Singapore and China sign 19 agreements to boost cooperation at annual apex meeting

The agreements were signed at the 18th Joint Council for Bilateral Cooperation meeting, co-chaired by DPM Heng Swee Keat and Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng

China is where the world future lies :
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Slow Motion Economic Train Wreck; Nearly 40% of small businesses in the US failed to pay rent in October

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Small businesses in various states are struggling to pay their rent, a new report shows, with rent delinquency at nearly 40 percent this month. 

The findings, published Tuesday by Boston-based business tracker Alignable, are raising more than eyebrows, as they illustrate the stark effect inflation is having on everyday Americans. 

The survey of 4,789 randomly selected small business owners saw more than half of respondents say their rent is at least 10 percent higher than six months ago. 

If you go back seven months, the majority said their rents had increased by at least 20 percent. 

Moreover, the study found that roughly 37 percent of small businesses - almost half of all Americans working in the private sector - were left unable to pay rent in October. 

Compounding concerns is the fact that several states, including New York and California, are well over the already-high national average. 

Offering an explanation for the phenomenon, study author Chuck Casto wrote that small business owners are steadfast, but that their incomes are 'basically being eaten away by inflationary pressures' as grim figures continue to rock financial markets. 

Alignable discerned that one-third of businesses are at risk of closing if revenue does not 'ramp up' significantly in the coming months, as consumers shy away from spending amid fears of an impending recession. As to the reasons for the short funds, poll-takers blamed higher rents, the impact of more than a year of high inflation, steeper-than-usual gas prices, increases in supply chain costs, rising labor expenses and shortages, and reduced consumer spending. 

Worse, about 49 percent of restaurants were unable to pay their rent this month, up from 36, in September, while an identical 49 percent of car dealership and repair shop owners defaulted on their October rent.

Chips Act Won’t Work

It doesn’t make sense for the US to invest billions of dollars to support the manufacturing of semiconductors if they have to be shipped to Asia to be completed.

Interesting story from MoA

Down Time Recently the provider of this Website, Typepad, moved their systems to a new datacenter. It then announced an additional maintenance period to update the system’s architecture. That ended up in a mighty screw-up. For the last days Moon of Alabama was a casualty of it. After a while the Typepad engineers recognized the problems and decided, correctly, to roll everything back to the old version. It took a while, but finally most stuff is working again. There are two maxims in Information Technology. I. Never change a running system. Unfortunately there are circumstances, like growth pain etc, where one HAS to change things. That usually ends up in trouble. Another IT maxim is: II. Never change multiple things at a time. This is where the recent Typepad screw-up happened. Multiple components of the system were changed at the same time and did not interact properly with each other. Been there, done that. Back around 1995, I was working for a large international access provider who’s systems always had growth pains. Everything was well prepared for a down time and a major update of the architecture. A short maintenance period was announced and we proceeded with it. Every element had been tested before. But unbeknown to the software engineers the network providers, those with the physical access lines, had decided to use our announced down time for a change in their systems too. The two changes collided with each other and it took more than 24 hours to even find out what had happened. The roll back, not well planned, created more of a mess. We were down for 72+ hours. We had several million customers at that time. They weren’t happy. Typepad is now back and with it all the blogs that are running on it. I am pretty sure that there are still some bugs that will have to be cleaned up over the next days. But the service has, in general, been good over the many years Moon of Alabama existed and ran on it. It is relatively cheap and relieves me of setting up and administrating my own servers. That’s why I will stick to it. For now.

Posted by b at 6:13 UTC

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European Union Gets Nasty Dose of Reality over Natural Gas

The European Union (EU) got hit with a double dose of nasty reality today. When the European Union “Sanctioned” Russian natural gas, they stopped buying it and had to look elsewhere, which sent the price skyrocketing for everyone.
Then The EU decided it would impose a Price Cap on . . .  RUSSIAN . . .  natural gas, telling all other countries they must not pay over the price cap! Imagine the nerve of the EU trying to tell the entire world what price they MUST pay for someone ELSE’s natural gas?!?!?!
Today, Qatar told Europe it will stop sending natural gas to Europe of they try to impose a price cap on RUSSIAN fuels!
Europe is already in a massive mess over natural gas; it’s not only costing them triple or quadruple what it used to, there are actual shortages.
If Europe alienates Qatar by imposing a price cap on RUSSIAN gas, and thereby gets cut off from Qatar gas – people in Europe might freeze to death this winter for lack of natural gas. Power plants in Europe would have no fuel to generate electric.   Europe would be plunged into the dark ages.
Speaking of shortages, GAZPROM announced today that, by their measurements, Ukraine has presently stored 14.6 Billion cubic meters (m3) of natural gas.
But the country needs 19 Billion m3 to get through the winter.  Ukraine doesn’t have that much . . .  and cannot get it, either.
So it seems at first glance, people in Ukraine, will actually end up freezing to death this winter. So much for Ukraine “winning” it’s war with Russia.
Maybe, if Ukraine surrenders now, they can settle things fast enough so that their people don’t freeze to death?
Or is noble surrender too much to ask from the Zelensky tyrants in Kiev?
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Interesting, though he’s got a problem with communism. I suppose it’s legacy fear. But check it out.

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https://youtu.be/E4ZDEaqYQDs

Russians Hack U.S. “DELTA Command & Control System” – Complete Ukraine Battle Plans Exposed

. The United States “DELTA” Command and Control System is the computer network that the US uses for battle operations. It is constantly updated by military planners and intelligence sources with troop deployment info, weapons stock info, and complete attack plans. Russia has HACKED it; Ukraine’s battle plans totally compromised. Equally important, the DELTA system is also constantly updated with information about the OPPOSING forces, in this case, Russia. Here is what a Russian computer Hacker got access to, with videos proving he got access, and how it is likely to be dispositive of the entire Ukraine war, in Russia’s favor.

Enjoy. https://youtu.be/f_DDvG-yv4c

Iran Raises “Red Banner of Retaliation” Over Mosque; Saudis on High Alert

Iran has raised the Red Banner of Retaliation over the dome of Jamkaran Mosque in Qom city, which amounts to a declaration of war. What caused the raising of the Red Banner is yet to be said. The last time the Red Banner was raised was when Qassem Suleimani was assassinated in 2020. After that banner was raised, Iran fired missiles which hit a US Base in the region, injuring many US military personnel. Whatever the present issue may be, Saudi Arabia notified its US Military contacts they expect what they call an “imminent” attack against Saudi Arabia by Iran.  They are not certain if the attack will be by missiles, or by Iranian Drones. US and Saudi air defenses are now on high alert.

Fun. https://youtu.be/qHR8IdyTO1M

New Fudan Report: US-China Chip War

From HERE Securitisation of the US’s Semiconductor Industry Policy”. Its authors are Shen Yi (沈逸) and Mo Fei (莫非). The former is a controversial professor of international politics and the director of the Centre for International Cyberspace Governance at Fudan University. With a following of almost two million on Weibo as well as regular videos and opinion pieces discussing international relations, he has become a well-known public intellectual in China. Shen has previously written about his experience of being interrogated by the FBI and having his US visa revoked back in 2018. The second author, Mo Fei, is a PhD candidate at Fudan University’s School of International Relations and Public Affairs and a research assistant at the aforementioned Centre for International Cyberspace Governance. This report appears to have been written, or at least completed, in September, in other words, prior to the US’s most recent high-tech export controls. The authors, however, were aware that “the Biden administration plans to further strengthen export controls on China in the areas of artificial intelligence and chip manufacturing, and that it was considering establishing a system within the US government that would give it the power to directly block US entities from investing in China and require information disclosure.” The following summary and excerpts should therefore be read keeping this background in mind. On a side note, I may occasionally post special editions such as this one in addition to Sinification’s weekly format if and when I feel that a particular study is noteworthy, topical and too long to share as a thread on Twitter.


Key arguments from this report:

  1. The US is making a strategic mistake in channelling most of its energy into outdoing China in the tech sector. Semiconductors only constitute a small part of the US-China rivalry.
  2. The US’s chip manufacturing capacity lags far behind that of East Asia. The CHIPS Act is unlikely to provide enough funding and incentives to change this.
  3. US allies will not be willing to sacrifice their own interests for the sake of America’s.
  4. China has the financial firepower, unrivalled capacity for government-industry coordination and absolute determination to accelerate the development of its chip industry, come what may.

On the drivers and dynamics of the US-China chip war:

“China's fundamental national strategy is to strengthen its national power, improve the standard of living of its citizens and enhance its international status through peaceful economic development. The US’s strategy towards China is to 'lock up' China's rise, curtail its international influence and increase its dependence on the US in the international system. Therefore, the essence of the strategic competition between the US and China is a struggle between economic development and domestic governance rather than a traditional hegemonic or military-security struggle.

“The US, however, has rather simplistically focused on the nature of the strategic competition between the US and China as being a 'technological battle', and then even more simplistically determined that a series of [tech-related] policies will be able to successfully block the strategic challenge posed by China in a relatively short period of time and at a relatively low cost.”

The US has [now] put anti-China national security concerns ahead of such economic interests as ‘cost’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘market’.

Advanced semiconductors have become an outlet for the US to release its security-related anxieties about China and have been turned into a symbol … demonstrating the US’s superior strength and its gradually winning in the context of US-China rivalry. At the same time, in the absence of one single effective ‘tool’ to contain China's technological rise and as one of the very few holds the US [still] has in the economic sphere that can effectively handicap China, any action that can widen the gap between China and the US in advanced semiconductor technology will have the psychological effect of ‘easing the anxiety’ and ‘increasing the smugness’ of US policymakers. Each [US] crackdown on China's advanced semiconductor technology will release the US’s security-related anxiety about China in stages. [But] when new security-related anxieties reach a certain level, it will once again drive the US to take further restrictive measures against [the development of] China’s advanced semiconductor technology.”

“At the [current] stage of the strategic stalemate between the US and China, the US can only add to the semiconductor technology embargo compulsively and frequently to demonstrate that it still has considerable coercive power and strategic advantages over China.”

But the fact is that advanced semiconductors only constitute a small part of the strategic competition between the US and China.

On the difficulty for the US to rebuild a chip manufacturing base at home, gain the backing of its allies and shut out China:

“Global economic integration, the formation and consolidation of global supply chains, and China’s deep roots in the global economic system make it almost impossible for the US to replicate its Cold War strategy against the Soviet Union in its strategic competition with China.

“History repeats itself but never in exactly the same way. The United States today does not have the same strategic capabilities as it did thirty years ago, and China is now already highly integrated into both the new international division of labour and the world’s science and innovation cycle. Even in the area of semiconductors, where the US is in a position of power and China is at a disadvantage, the US is no longer in a position to [simply] remove China from the supply chain of advanced semiconductors. The inherent vulnerability of the Biden administration's chip strategy leaves room for China's semiconductor industry to break out of the US’s siege. More specifically:”
  1. The Biden administration's semiconductor strategy runs counter to the global semiconductor industry’s development pattern and lacks an adequate domestic semiconductor manufacturing base to support it.”
    
    “US semiconductor manufacturing capabilities lag far behind those of East Asian countries. [This is explained by] the wave of de-industrialisation that began in the late 20th century in the US, coupled with the fact that most American IC companies have opted for a 'Fabless' operating model, focusing on design and outsourcing manufacturing.”
    
    “The US’s heavy reliance on East Asian semiconductor production capacity exacerbates the risk of disruption to the US chip supply chain, while also increasing the US's vulnerability in the context of its strategic competition with China.”
    
    “Now, for national security and geostrategic reasons, the US is planning to bring semiconductor manufacturing back to its shores … However, such a systemic change will be very difficult to achieve with just a single ‘chip bill’.”
    
    “The US’s current approach has seen it use mainly federal funding to invest domestically in high-tech R&D … to train new talent and to attract foreign firms to set up factories in the US. However, … if the US wants to restructure the [current] layout of the global semiconductor industry, US$50+ billion from the federal government will clearly not be enough to solve this issue.”
    
    “In September 2022, the Center for a New American Security released [a report] … which stated that the US CHIPS Act is designed to close the cost gap between producing chips in the US versus in East Asia, but that current financial support and related incentives were still far from sufficient to close the cost gap across the industry.”
    
    “The actual effectiveness of the CHIPS Act may differ quite significantly from the optimistic estimates (in favour of the US) that are now being made in a large number of studies; one cannot exclude a scenario in which the buzz is followed by business as usual.
    
    “Frankly speaking, although we still need to wait for [these measures] to be put into practice … it is arguably the ‘pull’ by the end customer that will prove more important than the ‘push’ by the US government’s industrial policies. If the end-consumer market proves unwilling to pay a premium [for these high-tech products] … the Biden government's semiconductor strategy … will not be able to [fully] restructure the [current] layout of the global semiconductor industry.
  2. The US’s influence within its chip alliances is not sufficient to convince its allies to follow the Biden administration's semiconductor strategy on the premise of ‘America First’ and ‘each country has to pay its own way [i.e. with no help from the US]’.”
    
    “[In reality,] the core of the US’s semiconductor strategy, is, on the one hand, to siphon off resources from Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands and other relevant semiconductor companies to make up for the technological shortcomings in its own semiconductor manufacturing sector. On the other, to convince its allies and partners, using its position of power in the high-tech world, to stop semiconductor technology deals and manufacturing cooperation with China.”
    
    “The Biden administration is [effectively] strengthening itself at the expense of others … thus increasing the vulnerability of the Biden administration's semiconductor strategy. In other words, US allies and partners have their own semiconductor strategies and are not willing to sacrifice their own interests in order to serve the US’s semiconductor strategy.”
    
    “[For example,] South Korea cannot [simply] decouple from China, just for the sake of cooperating with Washington in building up the US’s [new] supply chain, without taking into account the fact that China is South Korea’s largest semiconductor market … South Korea is ambivalent about the ‘CHIP 4’ alliance currently being assembled by the US.”
    
    “Taiwan, on the other hand, still has illusions about [the effectiveness of] its ‘Silicon Shield’ and does not want the US semiconductor industry to develop in the direction of self-sufficiency for national security reasons.”
    
    “There are deep-rooted conflicting currents in the underlying logic of Taiwan's semiconductor strategy with the US. Politically, Taiwan is investing in US factories to curry favour with the US on geopolitical issues. Economically [however], Taiwan's semiconductor industry … does not view the US ‘chip strategy’ favourably.”
    
    “In addition to [the Netherland’s] ASML, the Biden administration has also tried to pressure Nikon, a Japanese DUV equipment manufacturer, to stop exporting such equipment to China, but the Japanese have also refused. This shows that, when it comes to the technological embargo imposed on China, although the ‘public-private’ alliance formed by the US will cooperate with the US’s strategy, there is a limit to such cooperation. This can be explained by two factors: the pull of the Chinese market and a concern for US technological hegemony [among its allies].

On the US’s tech crackdown on China and the the medium-to-long term prospects for both the US and China:

“The specific technical details involved in the semiconductor industry are complex enough to ensure that [only] a small group of elite politicians in Washington can monopolise the content and future direction of these discussions, thereby making it easier to gain indulgence and support for their contrarian actions both at home and abroad.”

“Take the latest US chip sanctions against China on 1 September as an example … The ban presents a remarkable internal paradox. It was initially intended to create additional barriers to the development of China's high-tech industry. However, it may well end up having the opposite effect. Ironically, in the medium to long term, US pressure is set to ‘force’ China's high-tech industry to develop a more solid industrial base as well as [its own] core technologies. Objectively speaking and from the US’s perspective, this will lead to [the emergence of] a more challenging, comprehensive, and thus more-difficult-to-contain, powerful adversary.”

“In the short term, US tech-related policies targeting China will indeed create a window of opportunity. That is to say, a window during which China will be seeking to fix the adverse consequences caused by the US’s technology crackdown. For the US, this window will mean that the US is given more time to develop itself in a number of key and emerging technologies, including advanced manufacturing and artificial intelligence, so as to gain the upper hand over China … But such a turn of events is far from being a given. In other words, in addition to restricting technology exports to China, the US government will also need to implement effective domestic policies to support and guide its efforts in these areas. However, if we look at the US’s performance on related issues since the 1980s, the picture is not particularly promising. Of course, the recently passed CHIPS Act provides some room for imagination. However, … in terms of the type of governance capacity required to steer and organise such large-scale strategic industries, the US government is not currently in a position to provide a convincing answer to observers.”

In the short term, the most immediate and tangible effects of the Biden administration's tech-crackdown on China will be: (i) to create real obstacles for the development of related industries in China; (ii) to generate a public opinion wave of pro-US and anti-China rhetoric; and (iii) to use ‘hurting the US’s strategic rival’ as political leverage during the upcoming US mid-term elections and the presidential elections two years later.

“In terms of [economic] weight, the US economy is still the largest in the world, but its lead over the second-placed has narrowed to the point where it is within sight and able to be overtaken. The US still has an overall advantage in terms of cutting-edge technology, but this advantage does not ensure that its use will simply lead to the continued development of its strengths and consolidation of its superiority. It will [probably] not be possible for the US to maintain its overwhelming technological dominance over the rest of the world. In other words, there is a lack of certainty surrounding the US’s ability to make further technological breakthroughs. Its traditional strengths are shrinking or even [already] lost, and its toolbox lacks an obvious ‘magic bullet’ like the US’s containment strategy during the Cold War, which could simply ‘solve the problem once and for all’ vis-à-vis the US’s main strategic rival. In fact, the anxiety that is spreading in Washington's policy-making circles is constantly forcing the US government to look for, and subsequently try out, any type of tool that can produce short-term results. Thus, for policy makers at least, it is a way of justifying domestically that ‘something has already been done’ and avoiding simply looking on [helplessly] at the gradual erosion of the US’s hegemonic powers.”

“The specific condition [to the US’s success] is that the target of such a weapon [export controls] must have a sufficiently weak political will to abandon its intention to develop the industry in question immediately after the US’s strike … [However,] China has both the will and an unmatched capacity for industrial policymaking to drive and guide the development of its own alternative technologies [替代性能力]. Chinese companies and industries have long since begun the production of related products but are [currently] in the uncomfortable position of being constrained by the superior and more mature products of US companies. The subtlety of US bans is that it is the US government, rather than the Chinese government, that has helped these companies to achieve the effective exclusion of their competitors from the [Chinese] market [i.e. this will, according to the authors, allow Chinese companies, in the medium-to-long term, to grow even faster and invest even more in R&D].”

“In terms of China's [overall] development, the development of its technologies, the development of its industries as well as a number of other dimensions, this [i.e. pressures from the US/West] does not really constitute a [catastrophic] threat akin to ‘the sky is falling’. Objectively speaking, the discomfort caused by the bans will be the best possible impetus to stimulate and push forward the upgrading of alternative industries and technological capabilities [in China]. China's [past] experience shows that once this short-term discomfort has been overcome and alternative capabilities and industries have been developed, what will follow is a complete rewriting of the rules of the game by China by virtue of the country’s superior production capacity. The potential outcomes of such a scenario are truly exciting.”

“For [Chinese] policy analysts [政策观察者], it is important to maintain a greater degree of composure, resilience and patience when dealing with US policy decisions, and to analyse more systematically the [potential] discrepancies between policy intentions, policy content and, ultimately, policy effectiveness. For the Chinese government, the more pressing issue is to build [more] effective and refined countermeasures against US [policies], while maintaining the trend of opening up to the outside world and encouraging globalisation, so that the Chinese market and the benefits gained by US companies in China can be used more fully as leverage and, when necessary, a strategic weapon in China's competition with the US. This is a crucial and necessary part of expanding and improving [our] capabilities in the context of China’s rise.”

Zhu hao (祝好), Thomas

Comeback kid Lula in the eye of a volcano

by Pepe Escobar, first posted at the Asia Times, and reposted with the author’s permission

Lula wins but his room for maneuver will be limited by powerful forces aligned against his Global South agenda

Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva may be the ultimate 21st century political comeback kid. At 77, fit and sharp, leading an alliance of 10 political parties, he has just been elected as Brazilian president for what will be a de facto third term after his first two from 2003 to 2010. Lula even staged a comeback-inside-a-comeback, during the extremely fast and tight electronic vote counting, reaching 50.9% against 49.1% to the incumbent, extreme right President Jair Bolsonaro, representing a difference of only two million votes in a country of 215 million people. Lula’s back in office on January 1, 2023. Lula’s first speech was somewhat anti-Lula; noted for his Garcia Marquez-style improvisations and folksy stream of consciousness, he read from a measured, carefully-prepared script.

Lula emphasized the defense of democracy; the fight against hunger; the drive for sustainable development with social inclusion; a “relentless fight against racism, prejudice and discrimination.” He invited international cooperation to preserve the Amazon rainforest and will fight for fair global trade, instead of trade “that condemns our country to be an eternal exporter of raw materials.” Lula, always an exceptional negotiator, managed to win against the formidable state machine apparatus unleashed by Bolsonaro, which saw the distribution of billions of dollars in vote-buying; an avalanche of fake news; outright intimidation and attempts of voter suppression against the poor by rabid Bolsonarists; and countless episodes of political violence. Lula inherits a devastated nation that, much like the US, is completely polarized. From 2003 to 2010 – he rose to power, incidentally, only two months before America’s “shock and awe” against Iraq – it was quite a different story. Lula managed to bring to the table economic prosperity, massive poverty alleviation and an array of social policies. In eight years, he created at least 15 million jobs.

Vicious political persecution ended up canceling him out of the 2018 presidential elections, paving the way for Bolsonaro – a project entertained by the hard-right Brazilian military since 2014. Collusion between Brazil’s Public Ministry and dodgy “justice” stalwarts to persecute and condemn Lula on spurious charges forced him to spend 580 days in jail as a political prisoner as notorious as Julian Assange. Lula ended up being declared not guilty in no less than 26 motions against him by a lawfare machine at the heart of the – deeply corrupt – Car Wash operation. Lula’s Sisyphean task starts now. At least 33 million Brazilians are mired in hunger. Another 115 million are fighting “food insecurity.” No less than 79% of families are hostages to high levels of personal debt. In contrast to the new “pink tide” rolling across Latin America – of which he is now the superstar – internally there’s no pink tide.

On the contrary, he will face a deeply hostile Congress and Senate and even Bolsonarist governors, including in the most powerful state of the federation, Sao Paulo, which concentrates more industrial firepower than many latitudes in the Global North.

Round up the usual suspects

The absolutely key vector is that the international financial system and the “Washington Consensus”, already controlling Bolsonaro’s agenda, have captured Lula’s administration even before it begins. Lula’s vice-president is center-right Geraldo Alckmin, who can be catapulted to power the minute that deeply hostile Congress decides to fabricate some Lula impeachment scheme. It’s not an accident that the neo-liberal The Economist magazine has already “warned” Lula to shift to the center: that is, his government must be run, in practice, by the usual financial suspects. Much will depend on who Lula appoints as his finance minister. The top candidate is Henrique Meirelles, former CEO of FleetBoston, Brazil’s second largest external creditor after CitiGroup. Meirelles has expressed unrestricted support for Lula, for whom he previously worked as central bank chief.

Meirelles is likely to prescribe the exact same economic policies as Bolsonaro’s top economic enforcer, investment banker Paulo Guedes. That happens to be exactly what Meirelles himself created during the rapacious Temer administration, which came to power after the institutional coup against President Dilma Rousseff in 2016. And now we get to the real juice. None other than US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland visited Brazil “unofficially” last April. She refused to meet Bolsonaro and praised the Brazilian electoral system (“You have one of the best in the hemisphere, in terms of reliability, in terms of transparency.” ) Afterward, Lula promised the EU a sort of “governance” of the Amazon and had to publicly condemn the Russian “special military operation” in Ukraine. All that after he had already praised Biden, in 2021, as “a breath for democracy in the world.” The “reward” for the accumulated performance was a Time magazine cover. All of the above may suggest an incoming, shady pseudo-Left government by the Workers Party – neoliberalism with a human face – infiltrated by all sorts of right-wing vectors, essentially serving the interests of Wall Street and the Democrat-controlled State Department. Key planks: acquisition of key economic assets by the usual globalist suspects, and thus no room for Brazil to exercise real sovereignty. Lula, of course, is too smart to be reduced to the role of mere hostage but his room for maneuver – internally ­– is extremely slim. Toxic Bolsonarism, now in the opposition, will continue to institutionally prosper dressed up as – fake – “anti-system”, especially in the Senate. Bolsonaro is a self-described “myth” created and packaged by the military, coming out in the open about a month after Dilma’s election victory that propelled her to a second term in late 2014. Bolsonaro himself and countless fanatic supporters flirted with Nazism; unabashedly praised known torturers during the Brazilian military dictatorship; and milked serious fascist leanings lurking in Brazilian society. Bolsonarism is even more insidious because this is a military-concocted movement subservient to hardcore neoliberal globalist elites and comprised of evangelicals and agribusiness tycoons while posing as “anti-globalist.” No wonder the virus contaminated literally half of a dazed and confused nation.

Old China hand

Externally, Lula will play a whole different ball game. Lula is one of the founders of the BRICS in 2006, which evolved out of the Russia-China dialogue. He’s immensely respected by the leaders of the Russia-China strategic partnership, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin. He has promised to serve only one term, or up to the end of 2026. But that’s exactly the key stretch in the eye of the volcano, straddling the decade Putin described in his Valdai speech as the most dangerous and important since World War II. The drive towards a multipolar world, institutionally represented by a congregation of bodies from BRICS+ to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization to the Eurasia Economic Union, will profit immensely to have Lula on board as arguably the natural leader of the Global South – with a track record to match. Of course, his immediate foreign policy focus will be South America: he already announced that will be the destination of his first presidential visit, most probably Argentina, which is bound to join BRICS+. Then he will visit Washington. He has to. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. Informed opinion across the Global South is very much aware that it’s under Obama-Biden that the whole, complex operation to topple Dilma and expel Lula from politics was orchestrated. Brazil will be a lame duck at the upcoming G20 in Bali in mid-November but in 2023 Lula will be back in business side-by-side with Putin and Xi. And that also applies to the next BRICS summit in South Africa, which will consolidate BRICS+, as an array of nations are itching to join, from Argentina and Saudi Arabia to Iran and Turkey. And then there’s the Brazil-China nexus. Brasilia has been Beijing’s key trade partner in Latin America since 2009, absorbing roughly half of China’s investment in the region (and the most of any Latin American investment destination in 2021) and firmly placed as the fifth largest exporter of crude for the Chinese market, second for iron and first for soybeans. The precedents tell the story. Right from the start, in 2003, Lula bet on a strategic partnership with China. He considered his first trip to Beijing in 2004 as his top foreign policy priority. The goodwill in Beijing is unshakeable: Lula is considered an old friend by China – and that political capital will open virtually every red door. In practice, that will mean Lula investing his considerable global clout in strengthening BRICS+ (he already stated BRICS will be at the center of his foreign policy) and the inner workings of South-South geopolitical and geo-economic cooperation. That may even include Lula formally signing up Brazil as a partner of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in a way that won’t antagonize the US. Lula, after all, is a master of this craft. Finding a path in the eye of the volcano, internally and externally, will be the definitive political challenge for the comeback kid. Lula has been written off countless times, so underestimating him is a bad bet. Even before starting his third term, he has already performed a major feat: to emancipate a majority of Brazilians from mental slavery. All eyes will be on what the Brazilian military – and its foreign handlers – really want. They have embarked on a very long-term project, control most levers in the power structure, and simply won’t give up. And so the odds may be stacked against an aging neo-Ulysses from northeast Brazil reaching his Ithaca ideal of a fair and sovereign land.

Really? In six days, eh? It is pretty weird that a Walmart Distribution Center in South Carolina, US. Is usually really busy this time of year. They have not hired anyone in months now. With it being seasonal time also, that is so strange to me!! Also the ones that are working there, are getting NO hours. This has been going on for months, since February. No departments are working full shifts. Check out the video and then monitor the prices at your local grocery store. Let’s watch the clown-show together. https://youtu.be/SXCtROaU-AE

Brandon’s “Usable Nukes” Are the Fast-Track to Jopocalypse

Mike Whitney • October 31, 2022

“The Biden administration’s Nuclear Posture Review is, at heart, a terrifying document. It not only keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk, in many ways it increases that risk.
Citing rising threats from Russia and China, it argues that the only viable U.S. response is to rebuild the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal, maintain an array of dangerous Cold War-era nuclear policies, and threaten the first use of nuclear weapons in a variety of scenarios.” Stephen Young, Union of Concerned Scientists
Maybe you’re one of the millions of people who think the US would never use its nuclear weapons unless the threat of a nuclear attack was imminent.
Well, you’d be wrong, because according to the recently-released Nuclear Posture Review, the bar for using nukes has been significantly lowered. The new standard reads like this: (nukes can be used) “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.”
Defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies”??
That’s a pretty broad net, isn’t it? That could include anything from a serious threat to national security to an ordinary economic competitor. And that loosy-goosy definition appears to be just what the authors were looking for. The hardliners wanted to fundamentally change US nuclear doctrine so the conditions under which nukes could be used was greatly expanded.
The obvious objective of this dramatic policy-shift is to eliminate any obstacle to the free and unfettered use of nuclear weapons. Which is precisely what the neocons have always wanted; a green light to Armageddon.
Now they got what they wanted. Here are a few of the changes in policy that suggest that a full-blown nuclear war is no longer a remote possibility, but an increasingly likely prospect.
1– First-Strike Use: Biden refuses to rule out first-strike use of US nuclear weapons …in reversal of his campaign promise. This is from The Daily Mail:
“… on the campaign trail, Biden had vowed to switch to a ‘sole purpose’ doctrine, which maintains that the US would only use nuclear weapons to respond to another nation’s nuclear attack….
President Joe Biden is abandoning a campaign vow to alter longstanding US nuclear doctrine, and will instead embrace existing policy that reserves America’s right to use nukes in a first-strike scenario, according to multiple reports.” (Daily Mail)
2– Nuclear Escalation: The Biden team has accelerated the deployment of modernized U.S. B61 tactical nuclear weapons to NATO bases in Europe. (The B61-12 carries a lower yield nuclear warhead than earlier versions but is more accurate and can penetrate below ground.) This is from Reuters:
Russia said on Saturday that the accelerated deployment of modernised U.S. B61 tactical nuclear weapons at NATO bases in Europe would lower the “nuclear threshold” and that Russia would take the move into account in its military planning.
Amid the Ukraine crisis, Politico reported on Oct. 26 that the United States told a closed NATO meeting this month that it would accelerate the deployment of a modernised version of the B61, the B61-12, with the new weapons arriving at European bases in December, several months earlier than planned.
We cannot ignore the plans to modernize nuclear weapons, those free-fall bombs that are in Europe,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told state RIA news agency. (Reuters)
3– ‘Tactical’ means ‘Usable’: Biden’s new regime of low-yield nukes (which can still blow up a city the size of New York.) are called “tactical” weapons because they are designed for use on the battlefield, which is to say, Biden no longer limits the use of nukes for national defense but also supports their use in conventional wars. (like Ukraine?) This is from Aljazeera:
Tactical nuclear warheads were created to give military commanders more flexibility on the battlefield. In the mid-1950s, as more powerful thermonuclear bombs were being built and tested, military planners thought smaller weapons with a shorter range would be more useful in ‘tactical’ situations,” according to Al Jazeera’s defence analyst Alex Gatopoulos. (Aljazeera)
4– Fasttrack to Nuclear War: Biden’s New Euro-Nukes have lowered the threshold for nuclear war. This is from MSN: Russia said on Saturday that the accelerated deployment of modernized US B61 tactical nuclear weapons at NATO bases in Europe would lower the “nuclear threshold” and that Russia would take the move into account in its military planning…
The United States is modernizing them, increasing their accuracy and reducing the power of the nuclear charge, that is, they turn these weapons into ‘battlefield weapons’, thereby reducing the nuclear threshold,” Grushko said….
Russia’s ambassador to Washington, Anatoly Antonov, said on Saturday on Telegram that the new B61 bombs had a “strategic significance” as Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons were in storage, yet these U.S. bombs would be just a short flight from Russia’s borders.
“We cannot ignore the plans to modernize nuclear weapons, those free-fall bombs that are in Europe,” Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Alexander Grushko told state RIA news agency. (MSM) 5– Increasing the Reasons for using Nukes: The Nuclear Posture Review abandons Biden’s promise to ensure that US nuclear weapons would be used for the “sole purpose” of deterring or responding to a nuclear attack. Instead, the NPR states that the US will consider the use of nuclear weapons “in extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners.”
Sole purpose could significantly reduce the risk of unintended escalation and increase the credibility of more flexible and realistic nonnuclear response options in a range of importance contingencies.” (Federation of American Scientists)
6– More Escalation: The US now reserves the right to use its nukes against non-nuclear weapon countries. This is from an article at Bloomberg News: The Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy rejected limits on using nuclear weapons long championed by arms control advocates and in the past by President Joe Biden.
Citing burgeoning threats from China and Russia, the Defense Department said in the document released Thursday that “by the 2030s the United States will, for the first time in its history face two major nuclear powers as strategic competitors and potential adversaries.” In response, the US will “maintain a very high bar for nuclear employment” without ruling out using the weapons in retaliation to a non-nuclear strategic threat to the homeland, US forces abroad or allies.” (“Pentagon’s Strategy Won’t Rule Out Nuclear Use Against Non-Nuclear Threats”, Bloomberg) Here’s more from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:
In the Defense Department briefing, this point is elaborated. The NPR, a department official stated, “establishes a strategy that relies on nuclear weapons to deter all forms of strategic attack. This includes nuclear employment of any scale, and it includes high-consequence attacks of a strategic nature that use non-nuclear means.”
The publication of the document was rapidly condemned by arms control experts. “The Biden administration’s unclassified Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) is, at heart, a terrifying document,” wrote the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).
It not only keeps the world on a path of increasing nuclear risk, in many ways it increases that risk,” the UCS argued, by claiming that “the only viable U.S. response is to rebuild the entire U.S. nuclear arsenal, maintain an array of dangerous Cold War-era nuclear policies, and threaten the first use of nuclear weapons in a variety of scenarios.”…
This marks a significant development from Trump’s 2018 National Defense Strategy, which largely referred to the use of military force to secure economic interests in the negative—asserting that it was China that was doing so. While this was the clear implication of the 2018 document, the definition of “national interests” advanced by the Pentagon’s 2022 document to include “economic prosperity” constitutes an even more open step toward advocating the doctrine that war is an acceptable means to secure economic aims.
A section of the 2022 National Defense Strategy:
These documents, which were not seriously discussed in the US media, make clear the fundamental falsehood that the massive US military buildup this year is a response to “Russian aggression.” In reality, in the thinking of the White House and Pentagon war planners, the massive increases in military spending and plans for war with China are created by “dramatic changes in geopolitics, technology, economics, and our environment.”
These documents make clear that the United States sees the economic rise of China as an existential threat, to be responded to with the threat of military force. The United States sees the subjugation of Russia as a critical stepping stone toward the conflict with China.” (“Pentagon national strategy document targets China”, Andre Damon, World Socialist Web Site) he White House, the Pentagon and the entire US foreign policy establishment now march in lockstep behind the most fanatically-lethal defense policy in the nation’s 246-year history. The National Defense Strategy, the Nuclear Posture Review and the National Security Strategy all embrace the same reckless warmongering policy that will inevitably lead to mass annihilation and civilizational collapse. The doves and critical thinkers have all been removed from the foreign policy apparatus while the madmen and warhawks drag the world inexorably towards catastrophe. God help us.

War Without End

Honey Garlic Pork Chops

What is wrong with the United States of America?

Philip Giraldi • November 1, 2022

Prussian Major General Carl von Clausewitz famously drew on his own experience in the Napoleonic Wars to examine war as a political phenomenon. In his 1832 book “On War” he provided a frequently quoted pithy summary of war versus peace, writing in terms of politico-military strategy that “War is a mere continuation of politics by other means.” In other words, war-making is a tool provided to statesmen to achieve a nation’s political objectives when all else fails. One can reject the ultimate amorality of Clausewitz’s thinking about war while also recognizing that some nations have historically speaking exploited war-making as a tool for physical expansion and the appropriation of foreigners’ resources. As far back as the Roman Republic, the country’s elected leaders doubled as heads of its consular armies, which were expected to go out each spring to expand the imperium. More recently, Britain notably engaged in almost constant colonial wars over the course of centuries to establish what was to become history’s largest empire. America’s dominant neocons characteristically believe they have inherited the mantle of empire and of the war powers that go hand-in-hand with that attribute, but they have avoided other aspects of the transition in turning the United States into a nation made and empowered by war. First of all, what comes out the other end after one has initiated hostilities with another country is unpredictable. Starting with Korea and continuing with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq as well as other minor operations in Latin America, Africa and Asia, American war-making has brought nothing but grief on those on the receiving end with little positive to show for the death, destruction and accumulated debt. Also forgotten in the rush to use force is the raison d’etre to have a federal national government at all, which is to bring tangible benefit to the American people. There has been none of that since 9/11 and even before, while Washington’s hard-line stance on what has become a proxy war against Russia over Ukraine promises more pain – perhaps disastrously so – and no real gain. If one has any doubt that going to war has become the principal function of both Democrats and Republicans in Washington, it is only necessary to consider several stories that have appeared in the past several weeks. The first comes from the Republican side, and it includes a possibly positive development. House Minority leader Republican Kevin McCarthy warned two weeks ago that the GOP will not necessarily continue to write a “blank check” for Ukraine if they obtain the House majority in next month’s election, reflecting his party’s growing skepticism about unlimited financial support for the corrupt regime in place in Kiev. McCarthy explained “I think people are gonna be sitting in a recession and they’re not going to write a blank check to Ukraine. They just won’t do it. … It’s not a free blank check.” America’s uncritical support for Ukraine, which has been a contrivance by the White House and media since the fighting started, has led to a growing number of Republicans, particularly some of those aligned with Donald Trump’s “America First” approach, to challenge the need for massive federal spending abroad at a time of record-high inflation at home. Since Russia launched its invasion in February, Congress has approved tens of billions in emergency security and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine, while the Biden administration has shipped billions more worth of weapons and equipment from military inventories, all done with only limited or even no oversight of where the money and weapons are winding up. But, unfortunately, the GOP is far from unified on its approach to Ukraine-Russia. Congressman Liz Cheney demonstrated that her apple did not fall far from her father’s tree, taking some time off from trying to hang Donald Trump to denounce what she refers to as the “Putin wing of the Republican Party.” She put it this way: “You know, the Republican Party is the party of Reagan, the party that essentially won the Cold War. And you look now at what I think is really a growing Putin wing of the Republican Party.” Cheney criticized Fox News for “running propaganda” on the issue and in particular called out Fox host Tucker Carlson as “the biggest propagandist for Putin on that network… You really have to ask yourself, whose side is Fox on in this battle? And how could it be that you have a wing of the Republican Party that thinks that America would be standing with Putin as he conducts that brutal invasion of Ukraine?” Cheney notably did not address the issue of how the war developed in the first place because the US and UK preferred saber rattling to diplomacy with Moscow. Or why the United States feels compelled to tip-toe to the brink of a possible nuclear war over a foreign policy issue that is of no real national interest to the American people. And where did she make her comments? At the McCain Institute in Arizona. Yes, that’s a legacy of Senator John McCain another Republican who never saw a war he couldn’t enthusiastically support. Both President Joe Biden and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi have confirmed that the US is in with Ukraine until “victory” is obtained, whatever that is supposed to mean, while other Administration officials have indicated that the actual purpose of the fighting is to weaken Russia and remove President Putin. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre glibly spouted the party line when asked about McCarthy’s comments. She thanked congressional leaders for bipartisan work to “support Ukraine to defend itself from Russia’s war crimes and atrocities,” adding that “We will continue to work with Congress and continue to monitor those conversations on these efforts and support Ukraine as long as it takes. We are going to keep that promise that we’re making to the brave Ukrainians who are fighting every day, to fight for their freedom and their democracy.” Perhaps more bizarre than Cheney’s comments is the tale of a letter that was prepared by thirty Democratic Party progressives urging US support for negotiations to end the fighting in Ukraine. The letter was prepared in June but not released until last week before being quickly retracted under pressure on the following day. Pramila Jayapal, who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said it was retracted because it “was being conflated with [the] comments” made by McCarthy over his warning about budget cutting for Ukraine. Jayapal referred to the letter as a “distraction,” but what she really meant was that her group had no desire to make common cause with the Republicans over any issue, including war and peace in an escalating conflict that is manifestly pointless. A clueless Jayapal also took pains to contradict the message put out by her own group, emphasizing that there has been no opposition to the administration’s Ukraine policy from Democrats in Congress. She said Democrats “have strongly and unanimously supported and voted for every package of military, strategic, and economic assistance to the Ukrainian people.” She doubled down on the White House message, affirming that the war in Ukraine will only end with diplomacy after “a Ukrainian victory.” So basically, anyone talking sense about Ukraine in Washington is being shut down by forces within the political parties themselves working together with a compliant national media that is mis-representing everything that is taking place on the ground. It is a formula for tragedy as the Biden administration has shown no sign of seeking diplomacy with Russia to end the conflict despite the president’s recent surprising warning that the world is now facing the highest risk of nuclear “Armageddon,” which he, of course, blames on Putin. Given all of that, in my humble opinion a government that is unable or unwilling to take reasonable steps to protect its own citizens while also avoiding a possible nuclear catastrophe that could end up engulfing the entire world is fundamentally evil and has lost all legitimacy. It should recognize that fact before submitting its resignation.

To the Chinese, it brings back very bad memories to see Western powers sending fleets to China’s coasts, forming alliances against China, working closely with a brutally Sinophobic Japan, speaking of the breakup of China into Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, etc., tolerating racist attacks on Chinese immigrants, trying to embargo China and cut off its access to markets and resources, speaking of the desire to overthrow China’s government (e.g. far-right scumbag Arkansas senator Tom Cotton and scumbag British diplomat Roger Garside, author of China Coup), vilifying and barbarizing China’s culture, political system, history, and even regional cuisines, and proclaiming the superiority of Western belief systems.

Anyone who doesn’t understand why should really just exit any discussion of China because they don’t know anything about China’s history over the past 200 years. All of this is extremely familiar to the Chinese. In fact, it makes up most of China’s historical experience with the West. Major Western (British) diplomats visited China for the first time in 1793. Most of the 200 years after that were quite a miserable time for all Chinese.

This is why the CPC has always refused to restore or reconstruct the Old Summer Palace (Yuanming Yuan) in Beijing, which was once world-famous, breathtakingly beautiful and something like China’s Pyramids or Hanging Gardens. It was looted and destroyed by the French and British in 1860, and today 47 Western museums exhibit and profit from its treasures. This is all that’s left of the Old Summer Palace, and it’s a depressing sight in the capital city of the world’s second-richest nation; but the dilapidated ruins are a reminder to new generations.

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Can you imagine that these charred pillars and scattered stones mark the spot where the emperors of China once lived and governed for 125 years? Not in ancient times, but from 1735 to 1860.

I think the average patriotic Chinese is thinking, You did all of this before, and we were weak and you won. You really want to do this again? Well this time, we’re just as big as you are.

The story of the Old Summer Palace increases the kinship I feel with China as an Egyptian, because my country’s stolen treasures also fill Western museums from Boston to Berlin.

The West has always seen non-Western peoples more of less as barbarians, but I don’t think barbarians are people who practise polygamy, eat dog meat, worship idols, have no written language, or are ruled by an emperor instead of a parliament. Barbarians are people who have to brutalize and plunder every corner of the earth they ever go, simply because they can.

These absolute sacks of shit.

This is the Westboro Baptist Church. A Baptist church based in Topeka, Kansas. Every day, WBC pickets approximately six locations. They claim to have picketed in all 50 states. What kind of events do they picket? Any events that don’t align with their homophobic, transphobic, anti-Catholic, anti-Orthodox, anti-atheist, Islamophobic, antisemitic, antiziganist, and anti-American views. Organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League have accused them of brainwashing, and the church is often heavily criticized for resembling a cult (which it completely is). Some notable events that they picketed are:

  • Hundreds, possibly even thousands, of military funerals.
  • The funeral of Michael Jackson.
  • The funeral of Ronnie James Dio.
  • The funeral of Christina Green, a 9 year old victim of the 2011 Tucson Shooting. Luckily, they were unsuccessful because the Arizona legislature passed an emergency bill banning protesters within 300 ft of the memorial.
  • On October 5, 2011, Margie Phelps (daughter of the church’s founder) tweeted from her iPhone that the church would be picketing Steve Jobs’ funeral. Read that again. She used an iPhone to tell the world that they were going to protest STEVE JOBS’ funeral.
  • They tried to picket Leonard Nimoy’s funeral, but they couldn’t find it.
  • They picketed the funerals of the victims of the Sandy Hook shooting.
  • They picketed the funerals of the Orlando nightclub shooting.
  • They protested the National Holocaust Museum, stating that the Jews are the real Nazis.
  • They also picketed the 9/11 memorials, with signs that said “Thank God for 9/11,” yet they also demanded that “teh gayz” be punished for causing 9/11.

These slippery little shits use every loophole in the book (or rather, the constitution) to ensure that they can continue their heinous activities.

These parasitic barrels of monkey nuts make me ashamed to not only be American, but a human being. I find some comfort in the parody of the church that was featured in Kingsman: The Secret Service.

This is pretty important. Really. Please watch this video. https://youtu.be/6lSLks0XaAY

They Won’t Be Able To Deny The Cold, Hard Reality Of What Is Happening To The U.S. Economy Much Longer

by Michael They are trying really hard to convince all of us that everything is just fine.  But close to one-fifth of the U.S. population is skipping meals because food prices are too high.  And nearly 40 percent of our small businesses couldn’t pay rent in October.  Our leaders are trying to put a positive spin on things, but the truth is that we are witnessing a tremendous amount of economic suffering all over the United States right now.  The core consumer price index just surged to “the highest level since 1982”, and this is putting an enormous amount of financial stress on American families and businesses. This week, I was stunned to learn that a survey that was just released found that 37 percent of all small businesses in the United States could not pay rent last month…

The survey of 4,789 randomly selected small business owners saw more than half of respondents say their rent is at least 10 percent higher than six months ago.

If you go back seven months, the majority said their rents had increased by at least 20 percent.

Moreover, the study found that roughly 37 percent of small businesses – almost half of all Americans working in the private sector – were left unable to pay rent in October.

Prior to getting this news, if someone had asked me to guess the percentage of small businesses that are currently unable to pay rent, I would have responded with a figure that was far lower. So often, things turn out to be even worse than I thought they were. If those small businesses continue to be unable to pay rent, they will eventually be forced to shut down. So what will our communities look like if millions of small businesses suddenly close up shop on a permanent basis? Meanwhile, a different survey has discovered that 18 percent of Americans are now skipping meals because food prices have become so crazy…

Over the last 12 months, nearly two in five American households (40%) received food or goods from a food bank (22% for Millennials), and the same amount (17%) stopped buying healthier foods (organic or high-priced healthy foods).

Nearly one in five Americans (18%) say they skipped meals or didn’t buy groceries due to high inflation (including 28% of Gen Z and 23% of millennials).

Skipping meals can be a positive thing, because fasting is actually really good for your health. But most of these Americans are not skipping meals for the health benefits. In addition, the same survey found that many Americans are not taking medications or seeing their doctors because prices have gone up so much

Many have cancelled or postponed plans in the past 12 months to see a specialist (14%), take a prescribed medication (10%) or get an annual physical (11%) due to high inflation.

If things are this bad already, what will those numbers look like next year at this time when economic conditions are significantly worse? The American people are going to become increasingly frustrated as our standard of living continues to plunge. All of us have to eat, and so many of the products that so many of us buy on a regular basis have gone up dramatically in price

A year ago, a bag of potato chips at the grocery store cost an average of $5.05. These days, that bag costs $6.05. A dozen eggs that could have been picked up for $1.83 now average $2.90. A two-liter bottle of soda that cost $1.78 will now set you back $2.17.

Sadly, this is just the beginning. Even though the Federal Reserve has declared war on inflation, food prices are going to continue to rise for a variety of reasons. And as the cost of living keeps becoming more oppressive, more American families are going to struggle to make it from month to month. Even now, nearly two-thirds of the entire country is currently living paycheck to paycheck

As rising prices continue to outpace wage gains, families are finding less cushion in their monthly budget.

As of September, 63% of Americans were living paycheck to paycheck, according to a recent LendingClub report — near the 64% historic high hit in March. A year ago, the number of adults who felt strained was closer to 57%.

“Consumers are not able to keep up with the pace that inflation is increasing,” said Anuj Nayar, LendingClub’s financial health officer.

The worse things get, the more we will see people clamoring for the federal government to help them. In fact, one recent survey actually discovered that 63 percent of all U.S. voters are in favor of “inflation stimulus payments”

A recent poll found that almost two-thirds of Americans are proponents of the federal government sending out inflation stimulus payments.

About 63% of eligible U.S. voters expressed some degree of support for federal inflation relief checks being distributed, the Newsweek poll conducted by Redfield & Wilton Strategies showed. Of those who agreed the federal government should do so, 42% indicated they “strongly agree” while 21% said “agree,” according to the poll.

Sadly, most voters don’t seem to understand that sending out more stimulus checks would create even more inflation. There is always a cost when the government gives out “free money”. If our politicians would have exercised discipline over the past several years, we would not be in the mess that we are in today. But now years of very bad decisions are catching up with us in a major way, and economic conditions are rapidly deteriorating. At this point, the vast majority of the U.S. population can see this.  According to one recent Gallup survey, a whopping two-thirds of all Americans believe that economic conditions in this nation are getting worse. So many people are talking about the possibility of a recession in 2023. If all we have is a recession next year, we would be extremely fortunate. Because right now the economy is starting to crack and crumble all around us, and the outlook for the months ahead is exceedingly bleak indeed. .

1. 1+1 = 3 if you don’t use the condom.

2. Alcohol increase size of the “SEND” button by 89%.

3. Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.

4. Sometimes we create our own heartbreaks through expectations.

5. Life is too short to be with the wrong person.

6. Just because you love them, it doesn’t mean they’re right for you.

7. Feelings that come back are feelings that never left.

8. Everything’s not as easy as getting fat.

9. Even a bad day is just 24 hours.

10. It’s not your job to fix people.

Lainey Molnar Draws Comics On Her Observations About Society

Here’s a nice art interlude. Please enjoy this post.

I know that there are some people in the MM audience who can ABSOLUTELY relate to these comix. I hope that it resonates with you all. Please enjoy this nice little interlude.

31-year-old Lainey Molnar is on a mission to empower women, and she’s using her creative expression to do so. Molnar creates honest comics that cut through all of the filters and focus on women’s role in society and the way it perceives them.

More: Instagram h/t: boredpanda

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“I believe that the pressure on women comes from both inside our own community and outside, be it family, media, or men,” the artist told Bored Panda. “It is incredibly hard to navigate all of their expectations and reach the milestones society has set out for us, like maintaining the perfect size and shape, being maternal but also ambitious, strong but also sensitive, staying youthful and fresh while gracefully accepting the aging process, looking ideal but not overdoing plastic surgery. I could go on and on and on, and we are all so tired of this.”

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You could say the series was a long time in the making. Molnar, who is from Hungary and works as a digital business strategist, deals with content creators and women-owned businesses to align their goals with their social media, facilitating growth. “I started my career as my country’s first personal blogger and ran my blog and the fashion store attached to it for almost 8 years, wrote a guidebook for powerful women, and I also wrote for women’s magazines.”

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Drawing and art in general has been Molnar’s hobby for over two decades now. “After my blogging days, I stepped away from the limelight because of the habitual online harassment I received, so when [the place I live in] went into lockdown [due to the pandemic] earlier this year, I decided to create a comic-style avatar for myself and started posting drawings about her to process what I’m going through (or all of us go through) as a woman under the pressure of society and just simply… life.”

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I hope that you enjoyed this little treat of art, commentary and fun. Have a great day! And remember… I believe in you!

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Fate Forecasting using a weather analogy

This is a Patreon video that I am releasing to the general pubic and MM readership. I hope that it finds you well and that you all obtain some good information from it. This post will interrupt the normal flow of MM postings of latest (cough, cough) “news”.

Please enjoy it.

A Walk in the Dark by Arthur C. Clarke (Full Text)

Arthur C. Clarke

Through his distinguished career in science fiction, Sir Arthur C. Clarke (1917-2008) was known both for writing the hardest of hard science fiction stories and novels and also for visionary far-future stories showing the influence of Olaf Stapledon. But there were more sides to Sir Arthur, as in the humorous stories he collected in Tales from the White Hart, and in his being a fan of celebrated horror writer H.P. Lovecraft (“[H]is best stories were masterpieces in their genre,” Clarke wrote in a letter to fantasy master Lord Dunsany), which led to his writing, early in his career, “At the Mountains of Murkiness,” a Lovecraft parody. “A Walk in the Dark” is definitely not a parody, and starts out apparently in Clarke’s best hard science vein, but gradually takes a sinister turn. A distinguished science fiction editor once wrote that the first story she read by Clarke, when she was very young, was this one, and it frightened her so much that it was years before she could bring herself to read anything else with his name on it. Of course, the typical reader isn’t going to grow up to be an editor, and can probably handle this story. Right after they make sure all the lights are on and check the batteries in their flashlight . . .

Known for being one of the “Big Three” writers of modern science fiction (with Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov), co-author of and technical advisor for the now-classic movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey, author of many best-selling novels, commentator on CBS’s coverage of the Apollo missions, and winner of numerous awards, Sir Arthur C. Clarke surely needs no introduction (though I just snuck one in anyway). In a technical paper in 1945, he was first to describe how geosynchronous satellites could relay broadcasts from the ground around the world”., bringing a new era in global communications and television. His novels are too numerous to list here (but I’ll plug three of my favorites: The City and the Stars, Childhood’s End, and Earthlight), let alone his many short stories. He was equally adept at non-fiction, notably in his The Exploration of Space in the early 1950s, his frequently reprinted Profiles of the Future, and another bunch of books also too numerous to mention. So, instead of not mentioning them further, I’ll just say, go thou and read.


A WALK IN THE DARK

Arthur C. Clarke

Robert Armstrong had walked just over two miles, as far as he could judge, when his torch failed. He stood still for a moment, unable to believe that such a misfortune could really have befallen him. Then, half maddened with rage, he hurled the useless instrument away. It landed somewhere in the darkness, disturbing the silence of this little world. A metallic echo came ringing back from the low hills: then all was quiet again.

This, thought Armstrong, was the ultimate misfortune. Nothing more could happen to him now. He was even able to laugh bitterly at his luck, and resolved never again to imagine that the fickle goddess had ever favored him. Who would have believed that the only tractor at Camp IV would have broken down when he was just setting off for Port Sanderson? He recalled the frenzied repair work, the relief when the second start had been made, and the final debacle when the caterpillar track had jammed.

It was no use then regretting the lateness of his departure: he could not have foreseen these accidents, and it was still a good four hours before the Canopus took off. He had to catch her, whatever happened; no other ship would be touching at this world for another month.

Apart from the urgency of his business, four more weeks on this out-of-the-way planet were unthinkable.

There had been only one thing to do. It was lucky that Port Sanderson was little more than six miles from the camp—not a great distance, even on foot. He had had to leave all his equipment behind, but it could follow on the next ship and he could manage without it. The road was poor, merely stamped out of the rock by one of the Board’s hundred-ton crushers, but there was no fear of going astray.

Even now, he was in no real danger, though he might well be too late to catch the ship. Progress would be slow, for he dare not risk losing the road in this region of canyons and enigmatic tunnels that had never been explored. It was, of course, pitch-dark. Here at the edge of the Galaxy the stars were so few and scattered that their light was negligible. The strange crimson sun of this lonely world would not rise for many hours, and although five of the little moons were in the sky, they could barely be seen by the unaided eye. Not one of them could even cast a shadow.

Armstrong was not the man to bewail his luck for long. He began to walk slowly along the road, feeling its texture with his feet. It was, he knew, fairly straight except where it wound through Carver’s Pass. He wished he had a stick or something to probe the way before him, but he would have to rely for guidance on the feel of the ground.

It was terribly slow at first, until he gained confidence. He had never known how difficult it was to walk in a straight line. Although the feeble stars gave him his bearings, again and again he found himself stumbling among the virgin rocks at the edge of the crude roadway. He was traveling in long zigzags that took him to alternate sides of the road. Then he would stub his toes against the bare rock and grope his way back onto the hard-packed surface once again.

Presently it settled down to a routine. It was impossible to estimate his speed; he could only struggle along and hope for the best. There were four miles to go—four miles and as many hours. It should be easy enough, unless he lost his way. But he dared not think of that.

Once he had mastered the technique he could afford the luxury of thought. He could not pretend that he was enjoying the experience, but he had been in much worse positions before. As long as he remained on the road, he was perfectly safe. He had been hoping that as his eyes became adapted to the starlight he would be able to see the way, but he now knew that the whole journey would be blind. The discovery gave him a vivid sense of his remoteness from the heart of the Galaxy. On a night as clear as this, the skies of almost any other planet would have been blazing with stars. Here at this outpost of the Universe the sky held perhaps a hundred faintly gleaming points of light, as useless as the five ridiculous moons on which no one had ever bothered to land.

A slight change in the road interrupted his thoughts. Was there a curve here, or had he veered off to the right again? He moved very slowly along the invisible and ill-defined border. Yes, there was no mistake: the road was bending to the left. He tried to remember its appearance in the daytime, but he had only seen it once before. Did this mean that he was nearing the Pass? He hoped so, for the journey would then be half-completed.

He peered ahead into the blackness, but the ragged line of the horizon told him nothing. Presently he found that the road had straightened itself again and his spirits sank. The entrance to the Pass must still be some way ahead: there were at least four miles to go.

Four miles—how ridiculous the distance seemed! How long would it take the Canopus to travel four miles? He doubted if man could measure so short an interval of time. And how many trillions of miles had he, Robert Armstrong, traveled in his life? It must have reached a staggering total by now, for in the last twenty years he had scarcely stayed more than a month at a time on any single world. This very year, he had twice made the crossing of the Galaxy, and that was a notable journey even in these days of the phantom drive.

He tripped over a loose stone, and the jolt brought him back to reality. It was no use, here, thinking of ships that could eat up the light-years. He was facing Nature, with no weapons but his own strength and skill.

It was strange that it took him so long to identify the real cause of his uneasiness. The last four weeks had been very full, and the rush of his departure, coupled with the annoyance and anxiety caused by the tractor’s breakdowns, had driven everything else from his mind. Moreover, he had always prided himself on his hardheadedness and lack of imagination. Until now, he had forgotten all about that first evening at the Base, when the crews had regaled him with the usual tall yarns concocted for the benefit of newcomers.

It was then that the old Base clerk had told the story of his walk by night from Port Sanderson to the camp, and of what had trailed him through Carver’s Pass, keeping always beyond the limit of his torchlight. Armstrong, who had heard such tales on a score of worlds, had paid it little attention at the time. This planet, after all, was known to be uninhabited. But logic could not dispose of the matter as easily as that. Suppose, after all, there was some truth in the old man’s fantastic tale. . . ?

It was not a pleasant thought, and Armstrong did not intend to brood upon it. But he knew that if he dismissed it out of hand it would continue to prey on his mind. The only way to conquer imaginary fears was to face them boldly; he would have to do that now.

His strongest argument was the complete barrenness of this world and its utter desolation, though against that one could set many counterarguments, as indeed the old clerk had done. Man had only lived on this planet for twenty years, and much of it was still unexplored. No one could deny that the tunnels out in the wasteland were rather puzzling, but everyone believed them to be volcanic vents. Though, of course, life often crept into such places. With a shudder he remembered the giant polyps that had snared the first explorers of Vargon III.

It was all very inconclusive. Suppose, for the sake of argument, one granted the existence of life here. What of that?

The vast majority of life forms in the Universe were completely indifferent to man. Some, of course, like the gas-beings of Alcoran or the roving wave-lattices of Shandaloon, could not even detect him but passed through or around him as if he did not exist. Others were merely inquisitive, some embarrassingly friendly. There were few indeed that would attack unless provoked.

Nevertheless, it was a grim picture that the old stores clerk had painted. Back in the warm, well-lighted smoking room, with the drinks going around, it had been easy enough to laugh at it. But here in the darkness, miles from any human settlement, it was very different.

It was almost a relief when he stumbled off the road again and had to grope with his hands until he found it once more. This seemed a very rough patch, and the road was scarcely distinguishable from the rocks around. In a few minutes, however, he was safely on his way again.

It was unpleasant to see how quickly his thoughts returned to the same disquieting subject. Clearly it was worrying him more than he cared to admit.

He drew consolation from one fact: it had been quite obvious that no one at the Base had believed the old fellow’s story. Their questions and banter had proved that. At the time, he had laughed as loudly as any of them. After all, what was the evidence? A dim shape, just seen in the darkness, that might well have been an oddly formed rock. And the curious clicking noise that had so impressed the old man—anyone could imagine such sounds at night if they were sufficiently overwrought. If it had been hostile, why hadn’t the creature come any closer? “Because it was afraid of my light,” the old chap had said. Well, that was plausible enough: it would explain why nothing had ever been seen in the daylight. Such a creature might live underground, only emerging at night—damn it, why was he taking the old idiot’s ravings so seriously! Armstrong got control of his thoughts again. If he went on this way, he told himself angrily, he would soon be seeing and hearing a whole menagerie of monsters.

There was, of course, one factor that disposed of the ridiculous story at once. It was really very simple; he felt sorry he hadn’t thought of it before. What would such a creature live on? There was not even a trace of vegetation on the whole of the planet. He laughed to think that the bogey could be disposed of so easily—and in the same instant felt annoyed with himself for not laughing aloud. If he was so sure of his reasoning, why not whistle, or sing, or do anything to keep up his spirits? He put the question fairly to himself as a text of his manhood. Half-ashamed, he had to admit that he was still afraid—afraid because “there might be something in it after all.” But at least his analysis had done him some good.

It would have been better if he had left it there, and remained half-convinced by his argument. But a part of his mind was still trying to break down his careful reasoning. It succeeded only too well, and when he remembered the plant-beings of Zantil Major the shock was so unpleasant that he stopped dead in his tracks.

Now the plant-beings of Xantil were not in any way horrible. They were in fact extremely beautiful creatures. But what made them appear so distressing now was the knowledge that they could live for indefinite periods with no food whatsoever. All the energy they needed for their strange lives they extracted from cosmic radiation—and that was almost as intense here as anywhere else in the universe.

He had scarcely thought of one example before others crowded into his mind and he remembered the life form on Trantor Beta, which was the only one known capable of directly utilizing atomic energy. That too had lived on an utterly barren world, very much like this . . .

Armstrong’s mind was rapidly splitting into two distinct portions, each trying to convince the other and neither wholly succeeding. He did not realize how far his morale had gone until he found himself holding his breath lest it conceal any sound from the darkness about him. Angrily, he cleared his mind of the rubbish that had been gathering there and turned once more to the immediate problem.

There was no doubt that the road was slowly rising, and the silhouette of the horizon seemed much higher in the sky. The road began to twist, and suddenly he was aware of great rocks on either side of him. Soon only a narrow ribbon of sky was still visible, and the darkness became, if possible, even more intense.

Somehow, he felt safer with the rock walls surrounding him: it meant that he was protected except in two directions. Also, the road had been leveled more carefully and it was easy to keep it. Best of all, he knew now that the journey was more than half completed.

For a moment his spirits began to rise. Then, with maddening perversity, his mind went back into the old grooves again. He remembered that it was on the far side of Carver’s Pass that the old clerk’s adventure had taken place—if it had ever happened at all.

In half a mile, he would be out in the open again, out of the protection of these sheltering rocks. The thought seemed doubly horrible now and he already felt a sense of nakedness. He could be attacked from any direction, and he would be utterly helpless . . .

Until now, he had still retained some self-control. Very resolutely he had kept his mind away from the one fact that gave some color to the old man’s tale—the single piece of evidence that had stopped the banter in the crowded room back at the camp and brought a sudden hush upon the company. Now, as Armstrong’s will weakened, he recalled again the words that had struck a momentary chill even in the warm comfort of the base building.

The little clerk had been very insistent on one point. He had never heard any sound of pursuit from the dim shape sensed, rather than seen, at the limit of his light. There was no scuffling of claws or hoofs on rock, not even the clatter of displaced stones. It was as if, so the old man had declared in that solemn manner of his, “as if the thing that was following could see perfectly in the darkness, and had many small legs or pads so that it could move swiftly and easily over the rock—like a giant caterpillar or one of the carpet-things of Kralkor II.”

Yet, although there had been no noise of pursuit, there had been one sound that the old man had caught several times. It was so unusual that its very strangeness made it doubly ominous. It was a faint but horribly persistent clicking.

The old fellow had been able to describe it very vividly—much too vividly for Armstrong’s liking now.

“Have you ever listened to a large insect crunching its prey?” he said. “Well, it was just like that. I imagine that a crab makes exactly the same noise with its claws when it clashes them together. It was a—what’s the word?—a chitinous sound.”

At this point, Armstrong remembered laughing loudly. (Strange, how it was all coming back to him now.) But no one else had laughed, though they had been quick to do so earlier. Sensing the change of tone, he had sobered at once and asked the old man to continue his story. How he wished now that he had stifled his curiosity!

It had been quickly told. The next day, a party of skeptical technicians had gone into the no-man’s land beyond Carver’s Pass. They were not skeptical enough to leave their guns behind, but they had no cause to use them for they found no trace of any living thing. There were the inevitable pits and tunnels, glistening holes down which the light of the torches rebounded endlessly until it was lost in the distance—but the planet was riddled with them.

Though the party found no sign of life, it discovered one thing it did not like at all. Out in the barren and unexplored land beyond the Pass they had come upon an even larger tunnel than the rest. Near the mouth of that tunnel was a massive rock, half embedded in the ground. And the sides of that rock had been worn away as if it had been used as an enormous whetstone.

No less than five of those present had seen this disturbing rock. None of them could explain it satisfactorily as a natural formation, but they still refused to accept the old man’s story. Armstrong had asked them if they had ever put it to the test. There had been an uncomfortable silence. Then big Andrew Hargraves had said: “Hell, who’d walk out to the Pass at night just for fun!” and had left it at that. Indeed, there was no other record of anyone walking from Port Sanderson to the camp by night, or for that matter by day. During the hours of light, no unprotected human being could live in the open beneath the rays of the enormous, lurid sun that seemed to fill half the sky. And no one would walk six miles, wearing radiation armor, if the tractor was available.

Armstrong felt he was leaving the Pass. The rocks on either side were falling away, and the road was no longer as firm and well packed as it had been. He was coming out into the open plain once more, and somewhere not far away in the darkness was that enigmatic pillar that might have been used for sharpening monstrous fangs or claws. It was not a reassuring thought, but he could not get it out of his mind.

Feeling distinctly worried now, Armstrong made great effort to pull himself together. He would try to be rational again; he would think of business, the work he had done at the camp—anything but this infernal place. For a while he succeeded quite well. But presently, with a maddening persistence, every train of thought came back to the same point. He could not get out of his mind the picture of that inexplicable rock and its appalling possibilities. Over and over again he found himself wondering how far away it was, whether he had already passed it, and whether it was on his right or his left.

The ground was quite flat again, and the road drove on straight as an arrow. There was one gleam of consolation: Port Sanderson could not be much more than two miles away. Armstrong had no idea how long he had been on the road. Unfortunately his watch was not illuminated and he could only guess at the passage of time. With any luck, the Canopus should not take off for another two hours at least. But he could not be sure, and now another fear began to enter his mind—the dread that he might see a vast constellation of lights rising swiftly into the sky ahead, and know that all this agony of mind had been in vain.

He was not zigzagging so badly now, and seemed to be able to anticipate the edge of the road before stumbling off it. It was probable, he cheered himself by thinking, that he was traveling almost as fast as if he had a light. If all went well, he might be nearing Port Sanderson in thirty minutes—a ridiculously small space of time. How he would laugh at his fears when he strolled into his already reserved stateroom in the “Canopus,” and felt that peculiar quiver as the phantom drive hurled the great ship far out of this system, back to the clustered star-clouds near the center of the Galaxy—back toward Earth itself, which he had not seen for so many years. One day, he told himself, he really must visit Earth again. All his life he had been making the promise, but always there had been the same answer—lack of time. Strange, wasn’t it, that such a tiny planet should have played so enormous a part in the development of the Universe, should even have come to dominate worlds far wiser and more intelligent than itself!

Armstrong’s thoughts were harmless again, and he felt calmer. The knowledge that he was nearing Port Sanderson was immensely reassuring, and he deliberately kept his mind on familiar, unimportant matters. Carver’s Pass was already far behind, and with it that thing he no longer intended to recall. One day, if he ever returned to this world, he would visit the pass in the daytime and laugh at his fears. In twenty minutes now, they would have joined the nightmares of his childhood.

It was almost a shock, though one of the most pleasant he had ever known, when he saw the lights of Port Sanderson come up over the horizon. The curvature of this little world was very deceptive: it did not seem right that a planet with a gravity almost as great as Earth’s should have a horizon so close at hand. One day, someone would have to discover what lay at this world’s core to give it so great a density. Perhaps the many tunnels would help—it was an unfortunate turn of thought, but the nearness of his goal had robbed it of terror now. Indeed, the thought that he might really be in danger seemed to give his adventure a certain piquancy and heightened interest. Nothing could happen to hims now, with ten minutes to go and the lights of the Port already in sight.

A few minutes later, his feelings changed abruptly when he came to the sudden bend in the road. He had forgotten the chasm that caused his detour, and added half a mile to the journey. Well, what of it? He thought stubbornly. An extra half-mile would make no difference now—another ten minutes, at the most.

It was very disappointing when the lights of the city vanished. Armstrong had not remembered the hill which the road was skirting, perhaps it was only a low ridge, scarcely noticeable in the daytime. But by hiding the lights of the port it had taken away his chief talisman and left him again at the mercy of his fears.

Very unreasonably, his intelligence told him, he began to think how horrible it would be if anything happened now, so near the end of the journey. He kept the worst of his fears at bay for a while, hoping desperately that the lights of the city would soon reappear. But as the minutes dragged on, he realized that the ridge must be longer than he imagined. He tried to cheer himself by the thought that the city would be all the nearer when he saw it again, but somehow logic seemed to have failed him now. For presently he found himself doing something he had not stooped to, even out in the waste by Carver’s Pass.

He stopped, turned slowly round, and with bated breath listened until his lungs were nearly bursting.

The silence was uncanny, considering how near he must be to the Port. There was certainly no sound from behind him. Of course there wouldn’t be, he told himself angrily. But he was immensely relieved. The thought of that faint and insistent clicking had been haunting him for the last hour.

So friendly and familiar was the noise that did reach him at last that the anticlimax almost made him laugh aloud. Drifting through the still air from a source clearly not more than a mile away came the sound of a landing-field tractor, perhaps one of the machines loading the Canopus itself. In a matter of seconds, thought Armstrong, he would be around this ridge with the Port only a few hundred yards ahead. The journey was nearly ended. In a few moments, this evil plain would be no more than a fading nightmare.

It seemed terribly unfair: so little time, such a small fraction of a human life, was all he needed now. But the gods have always been unfair to man, and now there were enjoying their little jest. For there could be no mistaking the rattle of monstrous claws in the darkness ahead of him.

Awesome Movies – 2019: After the Fall of New York

A movie to entertain you.  Yeah. Ukraine. China. Biden. Etc. Etc.

Take a break today.

The Characters:

  • Parsifal – Granted, this is a strange moniker to give to the film’s main character, but he does kick tail. He also gets stabbed a lot. He probably carries a tube of Neosporin in his jeans.
  • Giara – She is blonde, attractive, and eats rats (this is unusual for blondes). Parsifal falls in love with her at first site. Stabbed in the gut with a piece of scrap iron.
  • Bronx – The aptly named expert on New York City. He has a claw for a hand, but that does not help when he is shot in the head.
  • Ratchet – Truly intimidating with his large size, inhuman strength, and eye patch. Gets his cybernetic head crushed by Parsifal.
  • Shorty – A midget, what else? Commits seppuku.
  • Big Ape – In the spirit of “names that make sense,” this guy is tall, strong, and has abundant facial hair. Microwaved.
  • The President – Of the Pan-American Confederacy, that is. Dying of cancer.
  • The Homeless Prophet’s Brother – Witty, “They baked the Big Apple.” and a talented musician.
  • The Last Fertile Woman on Earth – Let us just call her “Eve.”
  • Ms. Ania – One of the Eurac officers, even though she acts severely demented.
  • Bald Eurac Leader – This poor guy was having a bad week. First Bronx claws his eyes out. Then, after a lengthy and painful looking restoration process to restore his sight, Ms. Ania shoots him in the center of the back.

The Plot:

The year is, if you have not guessed, 2019. The Eurac alliance (Europe, Asia, and Africa) nuked America and now control the mass of rubble that was New York City. They use the remaining inhabitants as subjects for inhumane experiments. The problem is sterility; not one fertile female is known to exist anywhere in the world. Apparently, some of us guys still have swimmers aplenty, but the radiation made the gals barren.

The Euracs also devote considerable effort to eliminating the contaminated squatters who still run free in the city. The movie opens with one such scene. A mass of men, armed with post-apocalyptic weapons (flamethrowers, spiked maces, etc.) face off opposite a detail of Eurac cavalry. I was expecting them to fight, but both groups begin attacking unbroken windows. The unmounted skirmishers are apparently mercenaries, assisting with enforcing city ordinances. The ordinances are: turn yourself in for dissection or else we will kill you. Yes, I know, that sounds like just one ordinance. The “or else we will kill you” part applies multiple times. No, Rudolph Giuliani is not still the mayor of New York in this movie. Why would you think that?

Pause the events in New York, because the hero is in Nevada. Parsifal was once the best operative in the Pan-American Confederacy. Now he participates in a savage race that involves armored vehicle combat. The cars are festooned with spikes and a small cannon, that looks like a sailing warship’s swivel gun, is attached to the roof. I have no idea how the firing mechanism works, let alone reloading. Anyway, the protagonist manages to defeat the other car and claims his prize. In addition to winning more tokens that pay for killing another person (neat idea, I could use a few of those), he wins a female slave. This “woman” worries me. As in I could see her looking into a mirror and saying, “I’d f**k me.” in that heavy voice of hers. You will be more than relieved to hear that, after providing the slave with a convenient horse for transportation, Parsifal lets “her” go. Then two Confederate soldiers stun the benevolent killer; they take him back to their headquarters in Alaska.

I am being obtuse about the “female” slave used as a prize. The movie openly calls “her” a hermaphrodite. I wonder if you could trade two of them for a real woman.

In order to survive, the human race must reproduce. What is left of the American government wants the future to be filled with patriotic little boys and girls, not Eurac bastards. The President ordered Parsifal’s capture for one reason: a fertile woman has been located in New York and the champion of the Nevada Race is the only person who can get her out. The intent is to place her aboard a waiting spaceship with a crew of carefully selected men, then harvest her eggs as they mature and use in vitro fertilization to make the babies. The goal is for Eve to produce five hundred mature eggs. Methinks that the little lady will be getting a few injections…

The spaceship is going to Alpha Centauri. I guess that the proposed star system is a romantic location. Not that the plan provides for much romance, unless Eve gets hot at the notion of twenty dudes spanking their monkeys to make special sauce for the test tubes. Of course, doing it the old fashioned way would result in fewer babies and her developing calluses in awkward places.

Joining Parsifal for the mission are Ratchet and Bronx. The trio gain entry into the city with little trouble, but quickly run into a gang. The hoodlums are no match for the three operatives. Especially not after Ratchet deploys his secret weapon. He has these metal balls on a wire. The cyborg (note: we are not supposed to know that he is artificial yet) swings the weighted spheres in an arc before striking opponents in the head. Sounds painful to me. It looks painful when one hoodlum gets hit. In the end, the gang is defeated.

Something that you may notice about this film is that the writer hated rats. Ratchet squeezes one rodent before chucking it, then the trio encounters the rat hunters. A crazed-looking Asian man leads a pack of mangy (one of them is Giara, she is decidedly not mangy) people down a corridor. The Asian guy totally flips out and starts flagellating rats with his whip! Plus, the other hunters use sticks that look like frog gigs to impale the rats. Just when you think this scene has to slow down, the rat-hating mob flushes a midget out of the rubble. They are about to murder the unfortunate little guy when Parsifal intervenes. Unfortunately, there are too many bad guys. The feral tribe takes the companions prisoner.

Uh, there was not a “No animals were harmed in the filming of this picture.” disclaimer at the end. Not that I really care about the rodents, but I like seeing the PETAphiles get riled up.

The rat hunt is more than just a search for subsistence; it is a ritual. Whoever bags the most rodents gets to have sex with whoever they want. This is why it really, really sucks to be Giara, because guess who probably gets picked all the time. Parsifal watches as the woman is dragged into a side room for some post rat-mashing nookie. Lucky for her that the Euracs pick that moment to attack. The rat hunting tribe is either killed or captured, along with Parsifal and Bronx (Ratchet breaks his chains and escapes). The crazy Asian guy bites it hard. A mercenary smashes his skull with a crude weapon that is either a sharp mace or a blunt hatchet, your choice.

Ms. Ania and the Eurac commander know something is up with Parsifal and his buddy. The two men are in good physical condition, along with being free of weeping sores. The Euracs correctly deduce that the pair are Confederate agents. Quick thinking on the part of Parsifal deflects the interrogation. He tells Ania that they are searching for the last fertile woman on Earth, but he also misleads her by saying that Giara is that woman. The terse Eurac commander fares worse while interrogating Bronx, because the prisoner uses his metal claw to gouge the officer’s eyes out. (I wonder why they did not put a big rubber band on the claw. We do that to lobsters.)

The commander’s maiming is not permanent. Later we see the eye replacement surgery. Strangely, the Eurac doctors cover the patient’s head with crushed ice. Did somebody check the manual? Do they have that backwards? I need to know.

With the help of Ratchet and Shorty, Parsifal and Giara escape from the prison. The group crawls through tunnels until they reach a cave under the old United Nations building. A colony of midgets uses the cave as their secret hideout! Hahahaha! Man, I just…whew, that really satisfied some deep emotional need that I did not even know I had. Too bad for the midgets that the Euracs are relentless in their pursuit. The bad guys also carry along a device that projects harmful sound waves through the tunnels. Only the main characters, and Shorty counts as one, escape. All of the midgets die gruesomely from the gadget’s sonic emanations.

Following their escape, the Confederates finally meet Big Ape and his troupe of gaudily costumed monkey men. It does not take them long to finally locate Eve. She was placed in suspended animation by her father, a great scientist. Shorty leads Parsifal to the refuge, where they find the father dead of old age and the comatose daughter enclosed in a glass display case like some sort of Disney fetish gone horribly wrong. Also present is a station wagon. The vehicle is present to transport the girl, container and all, out of the city. One little problem: the Lincoln Tunnel is the only way out of New York and it is heavily defended by Eurac troops. Only by armoring the station wagon will they have any chance of making it through alive.

Big Ape and Giara are left behind to guard the girl, while Parsifal, Ratchet, and Shorty sneak into a junkyard to find some armor plating. The midget proves himself a hero when he leads a Eurac patrol away from his friends. The award is posthumous – Shorty is killed by the towering oppressors. Parsifal and Ratchet do not die, but are consigned to dragging steel plate a few miles. On the other hand, Big Ape has a much better afternoon. He is fertile. He wants children. He knocks Giara unconscious and opens Eve’s display case. The next time we see Big Ape he has a smug look on his face.

Okay, whoever wrote this script had some serious relationship problems.

The armored station wagon proves well-suited to the task of breaking through the Eurac checkpoints. Using his superb driving skills, Parsifal avoids two minefields that were planted to deny the tunnel as an escape route. “Minefields” is a little misleading. What emerge from the ground are large, blinking caltrops. The contraptions are tipped with razor-sharp spikes and light up like glow sticks. Anyway, they get past those, survive a hail of fire from a laser cannon at the last checkpoint, and burst clear of the tunnel. Then a bunch of red beams hit the car, turning Big Ape into a pile of steaming bones. Oddly, though he was directly on top of Eve’s Tupperware bed, she is unharmed. The glass case does not even show signs of condensation on the inside! Oh, sure, I try to heat up sloppy joe mix and get a royal mess, but sleeping (and fertile) beauty’s molecules refuse to be agitated.

Still remaining is for Parsifal and Ratchet to have a reckoning, apparently on account of the hero guessing that the brute is really a cyborg. At the end of the fight there is an indescribable scene with Giara, fatally wounded, spouting gibberish about love to a grieving Parsifal. The entire speech comes out of left field; no idea what to make of it. Maybe somebody accidentally shuffled in a page from the script for “Terms of Endearment.”

I really enjoyed this film. The plot is complete lunacy, most of the characters are poorly developed, and the lines are over the top, but it works! The pacing flies by at breakneck speed and you feel like you are being carried along with Parsifal. Everything happens so quickly that he cannot get to know his companions. All that he has time to do is evaluate their motivation and loyalties, then continue trying to stay one step ahead of the Euracs. Pretty much, “You are not working for the Euracs and do not want to kill me? Good to go, let’s get moving.” Assisting the audience in getting their bearings is the fact that the characters are all very simple. Nobody needs much development.

The models used to represent the ruined city are serviceable, as were the shots showing the American craft flying in and out of the Alaskan base. I did mistakenly believe that the base was located on the moon, until I watched the film a second time. Then I discovered the last bastion of freedom was in Alaska. The ruined city streets used for some of the scenes were also impressive. You have to wonder where they found so many derelict office buildings, long before the Dot-Com crash.

Things that I learned from this movie:

  • A flamethrower is the ultimate eviction notice.
  • Ring mail armor was made with gymnasts in mind.
  • It is difficult to tell the difference between Alaska and Europa.
  • Midgets are bad luck.
  • American stun guns are much more effective than European models.
  • Leftover cooking fat can be used to make field expedient hearing protection.
  • Midgets never surrender.
  • When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he could not stop thinking about sex.

Stuff to watch for:

  • 14 mins – The fact that his dork was hydraulic, spun at 10,000 rpm, and shot brake fluid did not give you a clue?
  • 21 mins – I think that dirt bikes or ATVs would have been more appropriate.
  • 23 mins – Trains used this tunnel?
  • 29 mins – What really sucks: that was a pot of boiling diarrhea.
  • 41 mins – Somebody has been filming my dreams again.
  • 63 mins – If Charlton Heston survived the bombs, he would probably not be a part of this group.
  • 75 mins – “That way, if he decides to rape her, he has to kill you first.”
  • 79 mins – Guess who got full this weekend?
  • 93 mins – Nobody is strapped in! I mean, the g-forces they are going to experience could kill someone in poor health, but these people are all milling around without a care in the world.

Quotes:

  • Parsifal: “The President sent us. He says there’s a woman around here who can make babies.”
  • *Her*: “That thing back there was a cyborg, half man, half robot. I knew one once. I didn’t know what he was until I had made love with him.”

Some articles as the West tries to grapple with their fantasies

A bunch of “kids” or otherwise ignorant Americans are flooding Quora with all sorts of leading anti-China questions. It’s giving me indigestion.  AH. I just cannot wait until they find other things to preoccupy their lives with. Maybe like scrounging around for bits of coal, or fighting over a moldy turnip.

Here’s today’s installment. It will be short and quick.

I hate to get into the middle of this one as there are some real stories of legendary marksmanship told in here however my story is about me, so fuck it here it is. An honest to god no shitter and witnessed by 50+ people.

In the mid 80’s I was a genuine real life gunners mate guns with the United States Navy stationed onboard the USS Mount Hood AE-29. We were just finishing up a rare world cruise and the ship was allowing a “Tiger” cruise for the last 3 days. Google it but essentially it’s where the Navy lets any male over the age of 14 come aboard the ship and live with you and do what you do in the Navy for the last three days of the cruise. Think dad‘s, grandfather’s, uncles, brothers etc. It’s really a neat thing as a lot of times the “Tigers” are veterans themselves. Even WW II vets in some cases. We picked them up in SanDiego and for 3 days, and they ride the boat back to our home port of San Francisco.

I’m happen to be the senior enlisted GMG onboard at the time also serving as the ships armorer (in charge of the armory) and my GQ (battle station) was mount captain of the forward gun mount. We’re going to do a big gun shoot for the Tigers so we tape a huge man overboard flare to a 55 gallon drum and chuck it over the side then pull out about 3 miles and shoot at it with the ships main guns. So here’s my dad up in the forward gun mount, watching his son be the mount captain shooting at this 55 gallon barrel 3 miles away and I can see he’s really digging watching me up in the mount captains chair, sound powered phones on my head barking orders to the gun crew and shit. Very cool moment in hind sight.

We expend about 12 rounds so the Tigers can hear and feel the big guns go BOOM but we don’t hit the barrel directly obviously, because that would be bullshit, however the shrapnel from the 27lb. shells exploding all around it (because we’re fucking accurate boys) tears a few holes in the barrel but it doesn’t sink. It floats upright now about 1/2 sunk still spewing flame and smoke as the man overboard flairs are about the size of small SCUBA cylinder.

Now it’s against maritime law to leave anything floating in the ocean that could be seen as a navigation hazard. So the call comes down from gun control into my headset in the gun mount for me to send somebody to the armory and draw a weapon and report to the bridge wing to shoot the barrel so it’ll sink and we can be on our way.

Except my dad is with me so instead, I take him to the armory with me, as I’ve got the keys to it already and if anybody is going to shoot the barrel, it’s gonna be me in front of my dad……right?

Stay with me, this is awesome. So I’m in the ships armory with my dad and he’s looking at all the weapons I can pick from and he looks right at the rack of (2) M- 60’s we have and asks…can you take that??? For those of you that don’t know what an M-60 is, think John Rambo and that handheld, belt feed machine gun. 7.62 (.308) caliber he shot up that town with. I mean I could have taken a M-14 rifle, .45 cal pistol or a shotgun but noooo, not me. I grab the crowd pleaser and a 100 round belt of ammo for my dad to carry and off to the Starboard bridge wing we go.

We open the bridge wing hatch and who do I see sitting in his chair but the captain of the ship himself, who takes one look at me and the M 60…….and my dad carrying the 100 rnd. belt of ammo and shakes his head and says “only you Carpenter. you’re the only one that would think to bring that fucking thing up here”.

Now all of the tigers are out on the bridge wing with the captain as they’ve all assembled there for the shoot. So I lock and load the 60 and lay it up on the bridge wing railing and I’m all ready to let it eat. Then the captain,,,,realizing that this could look bad for any number of reasons, comes to his senses and right before I pull the trigger says “Single shot only please”. Now that particular weapon platform doesn’t have a single shot option…..at all. I’ll have to just squeeze it and then let it go instantly to try and get just 1 shot out of it as it’s built for full auto all the time. No selector switch, single fire, 3 round burst anything. It also doesn’t have any kind of scope or even a rear site of any kind, just a small little blade out on on the end. In short, It’s made for everything BUT accuracy and single shots. We’re easily 200–300 yards away from the barrel and I ask him if he could possibly move the ship a little closer in order for me to have a better chance but he skipper isn’t having any of that changing course and speed crap. He just mean mugs me and sais “just shoot the damn thing”. I mildly start to protest but here’s these 50 or so Tigers staring at me along with my dad and I realize I’m gonna have to just give it the old “Kentucky Windage” try so I dig in, get behind it and draw the best bead I can.

Now mind you this is in the open ocean boys and I’m 75’ above the waterline and the ships rolling and pitching as we’re doing about 6 knots and the 300 yard barrel is rolling and pitching as well although (mild seas) and it’s basically fucking hopeless. I say a quick silent prayer and it’s a fucking miracle. I somehow manage to squeeze off 1 single round. All you could hear was the faintest “ping” with no splash and the thing instantly sinks. All the while still spewing flame and smoke. I mean it disappears so fast if you blinked, you missed it. Like a magic act.

The entire bridge wing goes crazy!!! All these Tigers are high fiving me, the captain, the XO,,,,, everybody. It all happened so fast, I still can’t believe I hit it but I’m gonna take the win and walk out obviously. As I go to safe and clear the gun, the Captain asks me if I thought I could manage to burn the now 99 rnd belt up over the side without shooting the ship. I assure him I can, he nods his head and I proceed to burn up 99rds of full auto 10’ away from all these guys who really proceed to go crazy now. I mean it’s fucking pandemonium on the bridge wing. Then,,,,,as all the empty brass and links are piling up and as the smoke clears….all the noise is fading away, I happen to see my dad in the middle of the crowd collecting slaps and claps galore all while beaming at me like he never had any doubt that I wouldn’t hit it. It was like I had practiced that shot a hundred times and somehow he was responsible for it all in that brief 15 seconds of time

I just cradled the gun in 2 hands, collected a few hand shakes from several WW2 vets and walked off like I had done done exactly that. There was nothing left to say.

You know that was 35 years ago and my dad is 87 now. He still finds a way to tell that story once or twice a year to new unsuspecting folks that haven’t heard it in a way that still makes him beam at me……at least when he gets to the good part. All these years I never had the heart to tell him that it was just shit ass luck. Maybe part of me wants to believe there was a pinch of skill involved………..but I doubt it.

There’s lots of “better” feats of marksmanship in here to be certain. But how many young men will ever get the opportunity to even take a shot like that, under those circumstances with a belt feed full auto machine gun, on a US war ship in the open ocean and then pull it off ……in front of their dad?

Cheers boys.

John C.

Pork Goulash

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A lot of people think one-pots all taste the same. Not true! Especially with this recipe. Its blend of spices, pork, and cream sure taste special to me.

What You’ll Need

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 2 1/2 pounds boneless single pork loin, cut into 1-inch cubes
  • 2 onions, chopped
  • 1 garlic clove, minced
  • 2 tablespoons paprika
  • 1 teaspoon dried dill
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon black pepper
  • 1 can (10 ounces) condensed beef broth, divided
  • 2 tablespoons cornstarch
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream

What to Do

  1. In a large skillet, melt butter over medium-high heat and add pork, onions, and garlic. Saute 5 minutes, or until pork is no longer pink on outside. Stir in paprika, dill, salt, pepper, and all but 2 tablespoons of beef broth.
  2. Reduce heat to low, cover, and simmer 20 minutes. In a small bowl, whisk together remaining beef broth and cornstarch; pour into skillet and stir until sauce has thickened.
  3. Slowly add cream and stir until warmed through.

Notes

  • Don’t overcook this once you add the cream because the sauce will separate. And then there won’t be any sauce left for spooning over some hot cooked egg noodles.

Will China be the new global power, despite everything that happened?

China is already a global power. Its strength is economics.

If by “new global power” you mean the sole superpower. The answer is no. It will not.

I am not sure what you have in mind about “everything that happened”. China has been on the growth and development road for a long time. US tried to contain it without success. This will continue. You will hear more and more bad things said about China. But China will be unperturbed and continues to pursue its own goals.

If you are shaken by the talks about the impending collapse of its economy, citing its zero-Covid policy and problems in the property sector. Don’t be. They are all nonsense. As for its Covid policy, no need to go further than to check the statistics of infections and deaths. As for the property sector, just know that it was triggered by the Chinese authorities to rein in the debt addiction in the industry. It is paying the price now to ensure that the sector will be strengthened and be able to grow without the dangers of financial over-leveraging. Give it 3 years.

Know that despite these problems, the Chinese economy is probably the strongest among the major countries. It had not poured untold quantities of cash to save the economy from Covid – it was not needed – and caused the inflation that are raging in the US and the rich countries. Notice the governments are helpless, leaving everything to the central banks to raise interest rates and sell their bond holdings. Politicians are engaged in their favourite sport of blame-game, while the people suffer.

Stock markets will drop another 40% as a severe stagflationary debt crisis hits an overleveraged global economy

NEW YORK (Project Syndicate)—For a year now, I have argued that the increase in inflation would be persistent, that its causes include not only bad policies but also negative supply shocks, and that central banks’ attempt to fight it would cause a hard economic landing.

When the recession comes, I warned, it will be severe and protracted, with widespread financial distress and debt crises. Notwithstanding their hawkish talk, central bankers, caught in a debt trap, may still wimp out and settle for above-target inflation. Any portfolio of risky equities and less risky fixed-income bonds will lose money on the bonds, owing to higher inflation and inflation expectations.

Roubini’s predictions

How do these predictions stack up? First, Team Transitory clearly lost to Team Persistent in the inflation debate. On top of excessively loose monetary, fiscal, and credit policies, negative supply shocks caused price growth to surge. COVID-19 lockdowns led to supply bottlenecks, including for labor. China’s “zero-COVID” policy created even more problems for global supply chains. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent shock waves through energy and other commodity markets.

From HERE

let me tell you about iran.

My father was a low level police officer when the Shah of Iran ( a puppet of USA) was the official leader of Iran.

when the revolution came – my Father fled with the others – I was 5–7 years old. I still remember my mother asking my father why we were fleeing our motherland, and his reply was that many officials who had committed atrocities will be executed.

my mother asked him why – “WE” were fleeing our mother land? and his reply was – Although he had not commited any atrocities – the revolution will not have the time or the patience to differentiate between the good and the bad. – so we all left.

you know – my father applied for American VISA – and he was rejected – because he was not important – then we fled to India because my father’s sister had married an Indian and we lived and settled in Delhi first then to Kolkata and then to Gangtok – Sikkim.

later I grew up and studied in China and then moved to the USA – that is a different story for another day, today is my father’s day.

Much of my Father’s life in India was spent selling dried fruits in Delhi then Kolkata and then in Sikkim, he left everything in one day and we arrived at India in just the clothes and two suitcases – our house, our land, our friends everything was left in one single day.

do you know why my father was not granted a USA VISA – he was too moderate – too by the book – too kind, he would not indulge in extra judicial killings – too soft on the revolution – too attached to his homeland – too patriotic.

but all those who killed others at the drop of a hat – who did not mind violating extra judicial killings etc – all of them got USA – VISA because they were considered assets who could be used against the State of Iran later.

My Father always told me – We are Iranians – no matter where we live – our identity is Iran – today we may not have a favorable wind but the winds will change and we will go back to Iran. We cannot hate our motherland just because we are paid some bribes to hate our motherland. we cannot hope for the destruction of our motherland because our motherland is our identity and we cannot allow our identity to be destroyed.

he also told me – The USA has no Identity – its history is just a few hundred years old and no matter how hard it may try it cannot create an identity as solid and firm as our – ASIAN civilization and IDENTITY – so never hate or attempt to destroy our IDENTITY. – the USA attempts to do this because it cannot match the history or identity of our past so it wants to bring all down to its present level by recreating definitions of identity etc.

in my belief Guo wengui is just one of the many stooges that the USA has used in the past – similarly you will find many such iranian stooges who work for the state department.

Can you guess what car this is?

Car interior 1…

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Car interior 1

I lived in Hong Kong for a year and Shenzhen for about five years.

I found Shenzhen to be more spacious and relaxed than Hong Kong.

In Hong Kong I found that there were a few incredibly rich people, many struggling and too many poverty stricken people.

In Shenzhen there were many rich people, a large and growing middle class and the poorer people there lived much better than the poor in Hong Kong. Housing is generally better, more modern and with more room for people to live in. Hong Kong has a more vibrant tourist industry, but that’s about it. It’s much better for people’s living standards to live in Shenzhen now.

U.S. Continues to Build Military Presence in Europe – Because Europe Must Be killed

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A decision was made inside the United States last year to “kill off the competition” and as a result, Europe must be industrially killed. War was the means chosen; Ukraine is the theater in which it is to take place.

Today, 12 US Air Force F-15E Strike Eagle fighter-bombers, as seen in a file photo above, are expected to arrive in the UK.

In total, there are already fifty (50) F-35s.

For months, the world has watched as the U.S. and its NATO vassals, take deliberate steps to engage Russia in direct war.  Russia has not taken the bait . . . yet.

The reasoning behind the militant actions of the U.S. and NATO escaped most folks.  Sure, the whole “protect democracy” nonsense has been spewed endlessly and the dupes in the general public believe that, but slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people through war is never a good option.

So what is the __real__reason for the whole blow-up?

Well, Ukraine has a well-earned reputation for being the most corrupt nation in Europe and likely, the world.   Politicians launder “foreign aid” money through Ukraine, then filter it back to their own pockets through non-governmental organizations  and then into shell corporations they control.  So that’s a reason the powers-that-be want to keep Ukraine in existence; it feeds their cash.

Child sex trafficking is another reason.  Ukraine is a literal hub for kidnapped children being forced into the sex trade for deviant, degenerate, perverts that infest the so-called “elite.”  The upper classes of society have become so evil, so filthy, that rich perverts enjoy sexing children. So that’s another reason the rich and powerful want Ukraine in existence.

Cocaine and Heroin trafficking throughout Europe and into the USA is very lucrative and Ukraine is so saturated with illicit drugs that even their President has a reputation for being a coke-head.  So that’s another reason the rich and powerful want Ukraine around.

But while these activities and the cash they generate are sizeable, something much, much, bigger had to be in the works.

I have found out what that “something” is.

Europe Must Be Killed

The real goals of the US in Ukraine are the destruction of Europe and its economic leader: Germany.

Why?

Let’s describe the world situation at the beginning of 2022 (immediately note that I give inaccurate figures to do justice to MMI and @Spydell_finance, but the approximate figures do not affect the disposition itself or the conclusions):

China: GDP: $16.9 trillion. Industrial sector ~30.5%, or $ 5.1 trillion. Export economy 15.3% with an export degree of 1.35 (easily interchangeable, technologically not advanced, but massively price-elastic, requires low profit margins of producers and not expensive labor, as well as agglomeration of producers).

Germany: GDP $4.2 trillion USD. Industrial sector ~27-30%, or $ 1.1-1.3 trillion. 35% with the world’s highest export ratio of 2.07 (only Japan has an even higher ratio of 2.49). That is, exports are irreplaceable, technologically complex and therefore VERY HIGH MARGINS)

The EU as a whole. GDP 17 trillion USD (suddenly !!! more than China, or at least the same amount). Industrial sector ~25%, or $4.1 trillion. (suddenly a little less than China). Only this branch of industry, as already written above, is a high-tech sector, that is, a marginal area that allows rapid positive capital growth.

US. GDP $22.9 trillion USD. However, the industrial sector accounts for only 18%, or $ 4.1 trillion. (Suddenly less than China and just as much as the EU)!!! And the financial sector is over 20%, as is the entire service sector with 77% of the economy.  But even this industrial sector accounts for only 7.7% of exports and has an export development index (ECI) of only 1.57 (just like China).

To go back to the beginning of the year, the accumulated imbalances in Quantitative Easing (QE) by the federal reserve are accelerating inflation and could bury the entire dollar system.

The end of QE and the beginning of the Fed’s balance sheet reduction would guarantee the collapse of the services sector, the near-death of the financial sector and a large part of venture capital IT as zombie companies with negative revenue margins or without cache flow.

In order to survive, the United States urgently need to develop the real economy, i.e. industry.

However, since the world has become global, no new markets are foreseen. The system cannot conquer Mars and then sell to Martians, so therefore it will have to grow on intensive investments, which means negative capital work.  Since aggregated venture capital investments on intensive investments do not pay off, which has been obvious since 2009, the U.S. is staring at an economic dead end.

So what to do?

Kill the competition.

To get more industry, the US has to get it from somewhere it already exists.   Let’s look at each possible candidate for the US to grab industry:

Option 1: China.
But, firstly, China is a subject (sovereign), secondly, the Chinese and US economies are too intertwined, and thirdly, the development of an industry comparable to China means low profit margins, long payback periods and falling personal incomes. And a decrease in personal income is a revolution in the USA. The option is not suitable.

Option 2: EU.
Fits perfectly, no subjectivity and high margin business.

However, the business is so profitable because it is very technological, i.e. it has a high and long entry threshold. It takes decades of development, thousands of patents and the construction of a team of specialists.

But the patents, specialists and companies do not belong to the EU.

The US has to force these companies in their entirety to move to the USA, just as, for example, low-margin production migrated to China in the 90s.

To do this, you need to create unbearable conditions for the economy: war, hunger and cold.

Take a look at the EU now!!!

https://t.me/c/1417137205/16884

News 1:
German industrial production fell by 1.8% in the first 8 months of 2022 due to sanctions against Russia, and the German chemical-pharmaceutical sector (high gas dependence) recorded a decrease of 10.7%.

News 2:
The Wall Street Journal published a report on the mass relocation of large German companies to the New World on September 21.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/high-natural-gas-prices-push-european-manufacturers-to-shift-to-the-u-s-11663707594

News 3: Explosion at branches of Nord Stream 1 and 2.

To those watching closely, all these things are links in a single chain of events: The EU must be destroyed. At any cost.

It doesn’t matter how many people get killed, there’s $4+ TRILLION dollars a year (of real industry) at stake.

It doesn’t matter how many cities or even countries get wiped out, there’s $4 TRILLION dollars a year  (of real industry) at stake.

People will breed, so they can replace whatever war dead take place.  Cities and countries can be rebuilt.  But the $4 TRILLION a year (of real industry) absolutely, positively, must — and will — come to the US.

Period.  Full stop.

This war is about money.  $4 TRILLION a year in real industry.  Anyone who gets in the way of that will be steamrolled.

 

This is the main goal of the USA in Ukraine.

 

Bad Girls: Movie Posters of Dangerous Dames, Sizzling Sirens, and Gun-Toting Gals

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To be fair, it’s the US politicians that are animalistic and barbarian in their conduct and behavior. From my dealings and working together with Americans, I estimate at least 40% of them are fair-minded and reasonable people. And these 40% too hate their politicians, regardless of their party affiliations.

The question is then; why are US politicians so notorious? My observation is that:

  1. American politicians are absolutely useless and impotent in terms of the country’s development and progress. They are absolutely incapable of contributing to the growth and development of USA. The achieve of the country has been the outcome of research, study, innovation and investment by scientists, academics, thinkers, investors, etc. Just think about any field of achievement that America has made significant process; can you name a politician who was leading it, contributing directly to it, etc?
  2. So, American politicians are basically parasites, sucking the money/benefit out of the ‘democratic systems’ they prey and dependent on. And once they manage to get on a juicy position, they will fight against the next parasite in order to remain in that sucking position for as long as possible.
  3. Once the American politicians get on to some juicy position, their benefit is far, far, far beyond the official perks and incomes. They, again regardless of Democrat and Republican, will think of ways and means to create ‘legislations’ first to make life difficult for the productive segments of the society. Then, depending on who (after failing to content with the complexity of the myriad legislations) offer more bribes, will once again fight with other parasite to formulate/pass more legislations to make life a little easier for the bribe givers. Of course the in-position parasitic politicians are hugely rewarded in the form of bribes/kickbacks, etc
  4. This is the reason American politicians and their families are enjoying lifestyles way, way, way beyond what their official perks/salaries could afford. Again, both Democrats and Republicans are playing the same game, they simply take turns at the expense of regular Americans.
  5. Until and unless regular Americans wake up to this reality and overthrow the regime structure in Washington, their country will continue to go down the sewers of history.

F-35s Struggle To Fly! Frustrated South Korea Says Its US-Origin Stealth Fighters Marred By Defects

South Korea’s F-35 stealth fighter jets, which it touts as a critical component in deterring North Korean threats, appear to be experiencing severe maintenance challenges. 

The ruling People Power Party’s Rep Shin Won-sik presented Air Force data to demonstrate the issues the South Korean Air Force is encountering in making F-35s fully operational. He mentioned that the fighters were grounded 172 times during the timeframe.

He also noted 62 cases where the jets could fly but couldn’t complete specific missions. Shin revealed the information, highlighting the need for the South Korean military to exert significant effort in introducing and maintaining such cutting-edge weaponry.

“Grounded fifth-generation fighters could carry out missions for only 12 days on average last year and 11 days in the first half of this year,” Yonhap reported. In contrast, throughout the course of the 18 months, the older generation aircraft F-4E and F-5 were grounded 26 and 28 times, respectively.

However, the South Korean Air Force stated that the F-35As achieved their goal operation rate of 75%, which indicates that sustaining the readiness posture was not a problem.

The service admitted difficulties obtaining parts for defects in the newly launched model. It further noted that it would work to obtain them as soon as possible from the manufacturer.

It is important to remember that Australia made headlines when it intended to spend an astounding AUD14.6 billion ($10.87 billion) to maintain its Lockheed Martin F-35A Lightning II fleet until 2053.

From HERE

Can you guess what car this is?

Car interior 2…

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Mystery car interior 2

It is a completely groundless charge. Note that the US has never presented a single shred of credible evidence to support its allegation. Why not?

In the age of smartphones, there should be plenty of hard evidence.

For the US to criticize China on human rights is rich, for example:

  • recall the native American genocide
  • recall the Japanese-American internment
  • recall the use of Agent Orange on Vietnamese civilians
  • the US has mass incarceration — over 2 million Americans incarcerated, mostly for minor offences, for the highest incarceration rate in the world
  • the US has mass surveillance — recall PRISM as exposed by Edward Snowden
  • abuse and torture of Muslims at Guantanamo Bay

Pot. Kettle. Black.

China Warns U.S. of Grave Consequences if Ukraine Joins NATO

LOL. China warns the United States?

China warned the United States it could face severe consequences—including the prospect of nuclear war—if it allows Ukraine to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), drawing the 30-member alliance into the country's conflict with Russia.

Article HERE

The Dodge Corporation Make Al An Offer He Can’t Refuse | Married With Children

Solomon Islands Insisted China References Be Removed Before Signing US-Pacific Partnership Declaration

Foreign Minister Jeremiah Manele explained why his government was going to refuse to sign the pact.

China’s human rights record is criticized from the Western perspective, based on the West’s value system. Why should China adhere to the West’s value system? What makes the West’s value system so much more desirable or righteous?

It’s not as if the West’s value system has a spotless record. This is a system that has supported waging endless wars around the globe causing unimaginable human carnage.

This is a system that has supported sanctioning dozens of countries causing enormous human suffering.

This is a system that has censored the West from presenting the other side of the story in the Russia-Ukraine crisis.

This is a system that has supported colonialism in Africa and Asia, enslaving millions of people, and robbing their countries of their natural resources.

In the United States, people are denied shelter and health care and protection from gun violence and systemic racism. Early in its history, USA slaughtered millions of indigenous people to steal their land.

China has a different value system based on thousands of years of history. China respects and honours its ethnic minorities, all 55 of them. China protects its citizens, even from themselves. China places a very high priority on harmony, safety and stability.

You don’t have to agree with China’s value system, but you cannot deny that it works extremely well. The Chinese people are happy and prosperous and safe. The Chinese people are very proud of their country’s progress.

Can you guess what car this is?

Mystery car 4…

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Mystery car 4

Finally, The victims of imperialism dare to stand up in solidarity against the USA

London | The global oil producing cartel OPEC on Wednesday (Thursday AEDT) agreed to cut output by 2 million barrels a day, driving up prices and creating a new economic and political headache for the West.

OPEC’s decision came just hours after the European Union had signed off a new Ukraine-related sanctions package on Russia that included a price cap on Russian oil....

Article HERE

Can you guess the make of this mystery car?

Mystery car 5…

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Mystery car 5.

Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia blasts Australia over US nuclear submarine deal

Singapore | Australia’s planned acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines has made armed confrontation in the South China Sea more likely, according to veteran Malaysian politician Dr Mahathir Mohamad.

In an exclusive interview with The Australian Financial Review, Dr Mahathir said an arms race in the region was inevitable after the creation last week of the AUKUS pact as part of Canberra’s decision to buy nuclear-powered submarines

He also fears the agreement could prompt China to match its claims with actions in the South China Sea.

“This agreement indicates you openly regard China as a possible enemy and that, if it comes to the crunch, you might even go to war. Just imagine what war would do to south-east Asia,” Dr Mahathir said.

His comments follow those of Malaysia’s Prime Minister Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri Yaakob, who on Friday expressed concerns about the new security partnership.

According to a statement released by his office, Mr Ismail Sabri told Prime Minister Scott Morrison that Malaysia feared AUKUS could spark a nuclear arms race in the Indo-Pacific.

This would be the opposite of the peaceful coexistence on which AUKUS participants say the agreement is pinned.

Dr Mahathir, who dealt with three Australian prime ministers during his long first stint as Malaysian PM from 1981 until 2003, said Canberra had again proved that Australia identified as a European nation that just happened to be located away from Europe and the United States.

‘Australia looks west’

“Australia keeps talking about the region, and about being much closer to the region. Yet, every time there is a crisis or problem, Australia looks west. It seeks friends from the West, not from the East,” he said over Zoom from his office in Kuala Lumpur.

The 96-year-old said the AUKUS agreement, and Australia’s role in particular, had changed the dynamic.

“You have improved your capacity to fight. Even if these submarines are not carrying warheads, they will introduce nuclear capabilities to the region,” Dr Mahathir said.

“So you have escalated the threat. This will elicit a response from China.″⁣

China until now has permitted boats to traverse the contested waters of the South China Sea. This could change, Dr Mahathir said.

“China has declared the South China Sea belongs to China. But it has not stopped ships sailing through, even warships. So far, China’s claim has just been a statement; they have not really been carrying out what they claim is their right to do certain things.

“If you bring in military weapons in the region and the alliance is supplying them with weapons, I think that will elicit some reaction.″⁣

Dr Mahathir, who fronted a coalition that won an historic victory in 2018 only to lose it due to infighting less than two years later, noted the Malay states had co-existed with China for centuries before the Federation of Malaya was formed in 1957.

The bilateral relationship has its frictions. Along with Brunei, the Philippines and Vietnam, Malaysia claims sovereign rights that clash with China’s view that it owns 90 per cent of the South China Sea.

Like other claimant states, Malaysia’s preferred forum for dealing with this territorial issue is the Association of South-east Asian Nations (ASEAN). Since 2002, ASEAN has been working with China to develop a code of conduct for the South China Sea.

The long process shows no sign of resolution but for many involved, the process itself is successful if it keeps armed conflict at bay.

‘We ASEAN countries like to solve problems through negotiation.’

— Mahathir Mohamad, former Malaysian prime minister

“We ASEAN countries like to solve problems through negotiation,” Dr Mahathir said. “Malaysia is a small country; we are aware of that. We value China because it’s a big market for us, and they value us because they get some raw materials from us.

“We have to live next door to China, and we can’t be confronting them.” In Dr Mahathir’s view, Australia and the US are trying to push ASEAN states to take sides.

“You keep on trying to persuade ASEAN to confront China, to be unfriendly. We cannot do that. The United States has a lot to contribute to south-east Asia. But so has China,” Dr Mahathir said.

In his view, the idea of a balance of power, “that groups of countries are a threat to other countries” is “an old kind of thinking”.

He believes AUKUS is the latest sign the West has not adjusted to the rise of Asia.

“In the past, you were very comfortable because Eastern countries did not have the capacity that Europe and America had, but now many Eastern nations – Korea, Japan and China – have almost the same capacity as you.

“They want to send out rockets to outer space and so on. Let them do that. Compete there; that doesn’t hurt us. But don’t disrupt our market.”

Article HERE

DIY retro mini lawnmower

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Spring is here and the grass will need to be mowed soon. But if you have this sweet DIY retro mini lawnmower that looks like a vintage automobile, the job will surely be a satisfying one.

More info: Old Mini Bikes

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Forum user Jeep2003 chronicled his “Mini Push Mower” build project over at Old Mini Bikes (which itself is a fascinating community of people who ride and build mini motorcycles). The mower uses a two-stroke engine from an old snowblower and the deck comes from an old smoker grill. The tail lights are fantastic!

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Diamond Dredging Vessel – MV Pacific

I really enjoy these scale models of ocean vessels. Here’s a particularly nice and detailed one. From HERE.

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Politics By Other Means

Putin and Clausewitz

46 Trillion Dollars In Financial Wealth Has Already Been Lost During The Great Global Market Crash Of 2022

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In less than one year, 46 trillion dollars in financial wealth has been wiped out.  If that isn’t a “crash”, how would you define one?  Since last November, stocks and bonds have been plunging all over the globe.  When there is a good day like we saw on Monday, sometimes that can fool us into thinking that everything is going to be okay.  But in order to understand what is really going on we need to step back and look at the bigger picture.  And when we look at the bigger picture, it becomes exceedingly clear that we are in the midst of a historic worldwide market crash.  According to Bank of America, a whopping 46.1 trillion dollars in financial wealth has already been wiped out since last November…

It’s been a tough year for investors, with global stock and bond markets erasing $46.1 trillion in market value since November 2021, according to Bank of America.

The massive drawdown has led to forced liquidations on Wall Street, the bank’s chief investment strategist Michael Hartnett said in a Friday note, highlighting the recent break below 2018 support in the NYSE Composite Index.

When I first came across that number I could hardly believe it.

But it is accurate.

Stocks have been falling and falling and falling, and Bank of America is warning that this is one of the worst global bond market crashes that we have ever seen

Analysts at BofA liken it to going “Cold Turkey” and blame it for causing the third “Great Bond Bear Market.”

They calculate the 20% plus losses suffered by government debt investors over the last year are now a par with the post World War I and II years of 1920 and 1949, and the Great Depression rout of 1931.

The combined collapse in global stock and bond markets means global market capitalisation has been slashed by over $46 trillion.

That is an amount of money that is difficult to comprehend.

The total value of all goods and services produced in the United States last year was approximately 23 trillion dollars.

So we are talking about an amount of money that is roughly twice as large as our GDP for an entire year.

When the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world took the punch bowl away, it was obvious that something like this would happen.

Central bank intervention pushed global financial markets to absolutely absurd levels, and there was no way that they could remain there once the artificial support was removed.

Here in the United States, all of the major stock indexes have fallen for three quarters in a row, and tech stocks have been leading the way down

The S&P 500 Index closed on Friday at 3,586, down 25.6% from its intraday high on January 3, and where it had first been in November 2020.

The Russell 2000, which tracks small-cap stocks, is down 31.8% from its high on November 5, having thereby maintained its function as early warning signal.

The Nasdaq closed at 10,576, down 34.8% from its intraday high on November 22, the very day Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella dumped 50.2% of his Microsoft stock in a bunch of frenzied trades, totaling $285 million. On the list of best-timed insider trades ever, he must be at the very top. Since then, Microsoft shares have plunged 33.4%, to $232.90, the lowest closing price since March 2021.

As I discussed a few days ago, the wealthiest tech tycoons have collectively lost 315 billion dollars over the past year.

Ouch.

The Federal Reserve giveth and the Federal Reserve taketh away.

The same thing is true for the housing market.  Fed policies created the largest housing bubble in our history, but now that bubble is bursting.

In fact, it is being reported that we just witnessed “the largest single-month price declines” since the last financial crisis…

… today Black Knight confirmed that the US housing market has turned decidedly ugly with the two biggest monthly declines since the global financial crisis.

According to a Monday report from mortgage-data provider, median home prices fell 0.98% in August from a month earlier, following a 1.05% drop in July.

The two periods marked the largest monthly declines since January 2009. In fact, at the current pace of declines, we may soon see a record drop in home prices, surpassing the largest historical slide hit during the global financial crisis.

The report noted that July and August 2022 mark the largest single-month price declines seen since January 2009 and rank among the eight largest on record.

If the Federal Reserve does not reduce rates, things will soon get really, really ugly for the housing market.

Unfortunately, the Fed is actually going to keep raising rates because Fed officials are scared to death of the raging inflation crisis that they originally helped to create.

Thanks to the Fed, grocery prices were up 13.5 percent in August…

We’ve seen the higher prices at the grocery store, and it looks like they won’t be coming down anytime soon.

New government data shows grocery prices climbed 13.5% in August from the year before. That’s the highest annual increase since March 1979.

Food producers say the surge is a result of paying higher prices for labor and packaging materials. They also point to extreme weather, disease and supply issues.

As long as we keep seeing numbers like that, the Fed is going to keep raising rates.

And the price of gasoline just hit another all-time record high in Los Angeles

Gas prices hit a record high in Los Angeles County of $6.466 per gallon on Monday morning, soaring past the previous record set during the nationwide price surge this past spring.

If you think that is bad, just wait until California residents are paying 10 dollars a gallon for gasoline.

The cost of living has become incredibly oppressive, and one recent survey found that 73 percent of Americans believe that their incomes are “falling behind inflation”…

Scott Rasmussen’s Number of the Day survey results on Ballotpedia also found that 73% of Americans say that over the past year, their income has been falling behind inflation. The survey’s sample size was 1,200 registered voters, and it was conducted online by pollster Scott Rasmussen on Sept. 15-17. The margin of error for the full sample is +/- 2.8 percentage points.

Until inflation is under control, the Fed is going to keep raising rates.

And inflation is not likely to be under control any time soon, because the vast majority of U.S. manufacturers are planning more price increases in 2023

In a new Forbes/Xometry/John Zogby Strategies survey shared with Secrets about the impact of inflation and the continued supply chain crisis under President Biden, 87% of manufacturing CEOs said they planned to increase prices in 2023.

Many cited the ongoing supply chain crisis, problems getting materials from China, and sellers taking advantage of the economic mess to jack up prices.

“Our margins are under pressure as costs creep up throughout the supply-chain network,” one CEO told the poll conducted by Jeremy Zogby, the managing partner of John Zogby Strategies.

So the Federal Reserve will not be riding to the rescue of the financial markets this time around.

Fed officials are absolutely petrified of high inflation, and so rates will continue to go up.

And that means that this financial bubble will continue to implode.  As Eric Peters has aptly noted, market crashes can take a long time to fully play out…

“It’s important to remember that the bursting of a bubble takes a long time to play out. It may feel fast and chaotic at various points in the process, but it isn’t really. Look at 2008. Everyone thinks of Lehman’s Bankruptcy on September 15, 2008, as the big catalyst for that crisis, but the S&P 500 had peaked the previous November. Bear Sterns failed on March 13th, 2008. From the Friday before Lehman’s bankruptcy to the end of that month, the S&P was only down 7%. The real weakness was in October with a local low in November.”

The final bottom wasn’t until March of the next year. “The bubble was bursting before Lehman Brothers.” That was just the large cathartic event that caught our attention, ignited our imagination. “And even after that it took months for the market to bottom. Markets don’t clear imbalances instantaneously. So we should be preparing ourselves for a marathon, not a sprint.”

We are still only in the very early chapters of this story.

As I have been relentlessly warning my readers, things are going to eventually get really, really bad.

The Federal Reserve and other central banks flooded the global financial system with money, and so now we are facing a horrific worldwide inflation crisis.

They are attempting to fix things by rapidly raising rates, but that is causing absolutely enormous problems for global financial markets.

This isn’t going to end well, and we have finally gotten to a point where this should be exceedingly obvious to everyone.

Very true. Absolutely true.

The 2019 Hongkong riot was actually a coup led by USA to put a US puppet as the HK Chief so as to destabilize China. USA has been destabilized the entire world since WW2.

USA almost succeeded by infiltration into every walk of HK life such as govt, education, court etc. They failed only after China handed down a national security law that targets secession, subversion, collusion & terrorism. Note all countries have similar security laws.

Why HK had no security law before? Simple. It was a plot by UK before they returned HK to China. In 1984, UK realized they must return HK in 1997. UK had a China-UK treaty to rule HK but China did not honor it. Because UK militarily forced China buy opium from UK’s colony India. Make Chinese addicted, so that UK could make money/silver. It was similar to US D Trump’s trade war in 2017. The only difference is that Trump used high tariff and UK used weapons.

UK then plotted HK rebellion from China, in name of democracy. Note that colonizer UK never gave HK democracy. Anyway, UK recruited HK traitors. Remove all the laws that dealt with riots & treason.

No place in the world has no security law to protect themselves. Five years after return, HK also introduced laws to deal with riots etc. Rebels rallied a mass protest & the security law was voted down by the democrat-traitors. Now looking back, it was part of the plot to leave HK unable to deal with a coup.

Later US took over from UK. In 2014, there was an Occupy Central in HK & an Occupy London in UK. UK suppressed the movement in 1 day. After investigation, UK reported that HK rebels were recruited by USA.

Occupied Central was a drill for a coup. The 2019 riot was for real.

There were always “white” (a politically incorrect word) people near the riot spot or on the vandalism spot. One got caught & has an ID card from CIA. Junior leaders were caught meeting US embassy officials in hotels & restaurants. A senior leader was caught meeting US ambassador/or top embassy personnel. The #1 HK traitor has a former CIA agent as his assistant/boss. And there was an unusually large number of US officials working in HK (the # has shrunk now).

There were many NGO, unions, organizations for human rights & animal rights etc. Most if not all were directly or indirectly funded by NED. Most if not all movement leaders have a large sum of money that they could not explain.

In Hongkong, NED has spent thousands of millions of dollars. Even “little” people got paid. Show up in a peaceful mass would get paid HK$200-300. Higher on riot spot. Injure or even kill a police also got paid. 1 person was so rich to buy 2 apartments, cash.

Old or pregnant women were used. It is always the police who pushed them to the ground. One pregnant woman was caught on CCTV that she lay on the ground before police approached her.

Fake news like the above drowned HK. They came out daily if not hourly to create & simmer hatred of HK govt, police & China. … fake news spread as fast as weed thru internet. … it is the 1st time I see ugly human nature can go that far. It is beyond a normal human can go that ugly.

Rebel-journalists on the riot spot took pictures on police so as to simmer police brutality. In fact, it was the other way round. Rioters were paid to injure police. $$$. Their brutality is animal type of brutality If I disclose their weapons & brutality here, Quora probably will ban me.

There was always a big group of people on the riot spot. Other than (rebel) journalists, there were (rebel) first-aid people too. Looking back, they were there to block the police from normal work to deal with the riot. One (rebel) journalist was only 12-13 years old.

There is a picture of a one-eye woman published by NYT. She claimed she was blinded by police. But, based on privacy reason, she went all the way to the highest court to block police from obtaining her medical report from the hospital that treated her injury. She has gone to Taiwan today but was caught having 2 bright eyes at HK airport. Why block police investigation? Don’t you want justice & compensation from police?

Because of this woman’s eye, HK has become lawless but rioters’ law.

Ordinary HKers dared not talk in public. Rioters used verbal & even physical violence against those who expressed different opinion. Once they (in a group) rounded up a scholar. I watched TV: 1 rioter lay on the ground but he said the scholar pushed him which is not true.

Rioters set fire on a by-standers who said he is Chinese. Or use bricks to hit the head of a worker (causing death) who was hired by govt to clean up the bricks scattered by rioters on the road. Or house arrest & beat up a journalist from China for days. Or bully & even beat up passers-by who did not speak Cantonese the HK dialect. One who could not speak Cantonese is a Japanese. Or block international air travellers.

Rebel-air hosts once released oxygen from aeroplanes, endangering the life of passengers.

Rebel-judge let go of arrested rioters. Righteous judges would receive death threats. It is lawless, said one retired righteous judge.

Rebel-doctor or nurse “torture” patients if the patient was a police or not on their side. One doctor prescribed medicine to harm the health of a policeman-patient. … medical staff is supposed to care for the patient. Professionalism is supposed to be above politics, Besides democracy calls for respect & coexist with the different.

Because it was a plot that started in 1980’s, one generation of HKers were brought up on hatred of authorities, being rude & violence (verbal & physical).

I saw on TV that 1 kindergarten teacher on the protest spot telling the kids police are bad people. A history expert who has power in HK education circle changed Chinese history by glorifying UK’s opium/trade war with China. Instead of saying UK militarily forced China buy opium from UK, he said UK was trying to help addicted Chinese to stop smoking opium. Some published picture books to depict the govt or police or China as wolves who bully them the lambs.

This generation made their own law. One university vice principal was cornered because rioter-students demanded university to drop Chinese language as a requirement to graduate.

There were school bullies who would bully those who did not agree to violence/riot.

Students who did not do well in school were recruited as leaders to mark a territory under their control. Similar to the underground organizations we see in a movie.

In court, rebel-lawyers always said “this rioter is mentally disadvantaged.” & hence should not go to jail but a place for re-education.

Rebels propagated that China is poor, uncivilized, dirty etc. But they have never visited China.

This propaganda happened in HK. And is also in Taiwan.

If you cannot imagine how people can be brain-washed that much, then …

Let us discuss human nature.

I study ancient civilizations. I find all cultures have creators. All creators made the same sun, rain, humans, animals, plants etc. It means it is the same creator. All humans are creator’s children.

Creator gives us different wisdom. It means creator designed a diverse world. You use flour to bake cakes. I make noodles. Diff wisdom. Diversity. So there should be many cultures & religions in the world.

Some spread their religion to other cultures & wipe out local religions. That is, they have damaged creator’s design of diversity. Yet they claim they love creator.

They suppress the god-given wisdom of creator’s other children.

They violate human right – indigenous people’s cultural right, according to article 8.2a in UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Yet they claim they love fellow humans ie creator’s children.

UN says all gods & religions are equal. When China asks them not to propagate that theirs is the only true one, they cry religious suppression.

China also asks them not to erect a big cross outside a building. Keep (small) crosses inside their private property. A cross was an old tool for criminals on death sentence. It damages local belief in Feng Shui. Again they cry religious suppression.

Lesson learnt about human nature:

Leaders work for POWER & MONEY. Love of creator is just a slogan to gather followers to build power.

Followers take leader’s word as truth. Lack independent & critical thinking. Dismiss different views right away. Stay inside box.

Another human nature: those who cry suppression are the ones who disrespect/suppress others, or break law. Bullies.

Human nature applies to politics too:

EU Pushes For More Sanctions Which Will Come Back To Bite It

On February 22, two days before Russian troops entered the Ukraine, the U.S. and the EU put reams of sanctions onto Russia. They also confiscated some $300 billion of Russia’s reserves that were invested in the ‘west’. The sanctions had been negotiated between the EU and the U.S. and prepared for over several months.

The idea was to bankrupt Russia within a few weeks. The deluded people behind those sanctions had no idea how big and sanctions proved Russia’s economy really is. The sanctions failed to influence Russia in any way but their consequences led to a shortfall of energy in Europe and increased the already high inflation rates. Inflation in Russia is sinking and its general economic numbers are good. The now higher energy prices generate sufficient additional income to completely finance its war efforts.

A sane actor would conclude that the sanctions were a mistake and that lifting them would help Europe more than it would help Russia. But no, the U.S. and European pseudo elites are no longer able to act in a sane manner. They are instead doubling down with the most crazy sanction scheme one has ever heard of:

[T]he European Union pushed ahead on Wednesday with an ambitious but untested plan to limit Russia’s oil revenue.

If the global price of oil remains high, it would complicate the European Union’s effort to impose a price cap on Russian oil that was expected to gain final approval on Thursday, after E.U. negotiators reached an agreement on the measure as part of a fresh package of sanctions against Moscow.Under the plan, a committee including representatives of the European Union, the Group of 7 nations and others that agree to the price cap would meet regularly to decide on the price at which Russian oil should be sold, and that it would change based on the market price.

Several diplomats involved in the E.U. talks said that Greece, Malta and Cyprus — maritime nations that would be most affected by the price cap — received assurances that their business interests would be preserved, the diplomats said.

The countries had been holding up what would be the eighth sanctions package the European Union has adopted since the Russian invasion of Ukraine because of worries that a price cap on Russian oil exported outside the bloc would affect their shipping, insurance and other industries, the diplomats said.

With oil prices at a high, Russia is raking in billions of dollars in revenue, even as it sells smaller quantities. The cap — part of a broad plan pushed by the Biden administration that the G7 agreed to last month — is intended to set the price of Russian oil lower than where it is today, but still above cost. The U.S. Treasury calculates that the cap would deprive the Kremlin of tens of billions of dollars annually.

How do you make a big producer of a rare commodity sell those goods below the general market price? Unless you have a very strong buyers cartel that can also that product from elsewhere you can not do this successfully. It is an economic impossibility.

To make the measure effective, and cut Russian revenue, the United States, Europe and their allies would need to convince India and China, which buy substantial quantities of Russian oil, to purchase it only at the agreed upon price. Experts say that even with willing partners, the cap could be hard to implement.

Russia has declared that it will not sell any oil to any party that supports the G7 price fixing regime. That is why neither China nor India nor any other country besides the EU and U.S. will agree to adhere to it.

The whole idea is crazy and way too complicate to achieve anything:

Under the new rules, companies involved in the shipping of Russian oil — including shipowners, insurers and underwriters — would be on the hook for ensuring that the oil they are helping to transport is being sold at or below the price cap. If they are caught helping Russia sell at a higher price, they could face lawsuits in their home countries for violating sanctions.Russian crude will come under an embargo in most of the European Union on Dec. 5, and petroleum products will follow in February. The price cap on shipments to non-E.U. countries has been championed by U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen as a necessary complement to the European oil embargo.

Under the E.U. deal, Greece, Malta and Cyprus will be permitted to continue shipping Russian oil. Had they not agreed to place their companies at the forefront of applying the price cap, they would have been forbidden from shipping or insuring Russian oil cargo outside the European Union, a huge hit for major industries.

More than half of the tankers now shipping Russia’s oil are Greek-owned. And the financial services that underpin that trade — including insurance, reinsurance and letters of credit — are overwhelmingly based in the European Union and Britain.

This is of course an open invitation to other countries to enter the oil shipping and related financial services businesses at the cost of European companies.

China and India will both it to increase their market shares in those fields. Their ships will transport Russian oil to whoever wants to buy it for the market price minus the always negotiable Russian rebate. Greek ships will sit idle or will be sold off while Indian and Chinese and other Asian tankers will be very, very busy. China’s big insurance companies will happily join that new global services business.

That European bureaucrats agreed to his stupid U.S. idea, which will foremost hurt European businesses, is another sign that Brussels has given up on having any agency.

Today OPEC+ countries, the seller cartel for oil, reacted to the crazy sanctions idea and the upcoming global depression by agreeing to decrease their daily output by 2 million barrels. This was not done out of Saudi solidarity with Russia. Saudi Arabia needs oil at above $80/bl to finance its budget.

Brent Crude, which had fallen to $83/bl on September 26, has since risen to $93/bl.

The global demand for oil is around 100 million barrels per day. Should the demand stay up the 2% reduction in OPEC+ production will have significant price effects and $100 per barrel will be in easy reach.

But OPEC+ is committed to stable prices, not to significant price increases. During the OPEC+ session today the Saudi Prince Abdulazis showed this table:

 

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biggerSince the beginning of the year the prices for all forms of carbon based energy except crude oil have increased considerably. Abdulazis argued that the chart shows that OPEC+ is managing oil prices responsibly. The EU is certainly not doing similar.

The Biden administration has meanwhile nearly halved the content of the U.S Strategic Petroleum Reserve. This to keep U.S. pump prices down and the Democrats in power.

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Neither is a responsible step to take.

Posted by b on October 5, 2022 at 16:48 UTC | Permalink

What the hell, the light switches are backward!

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This switch is *ON*, when it’s pressed on the bottom.

The second thing I noticed was, “What the hell, I’m sure I plugged in my phone!” (but I hadn’t switched on the “electrical receptacle” — Australian power points are most often turned on and off at the wall plate or on the “power board” (power bar).)

The first thing my kids were confused by was which button to depress to flush the toilet. Every Aussie toilet I saw had a half-flush and full-flush option. And it’s not a potty, and it’s not in the “bathroom”. It’s a toilet.

There’s a drain in the floor of the bathroom where the tub or shower is. This is quite standard.

There are no “no shirt, no shoes, no service” signs. Quite a few people go barefoot.

!@#$!@ bindis.
Not the South Asian forehead mark. Not Steve Irwin’s daughter.
No, I mean these:

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They’re like little lawn caltrops. They’re painful. I don’t know why there are so many barefoot Aussies given these little nasties. (I was told they’re properly Bindii

(pronounced bindi-eye) but I rarely heard people call them that. They’re the seedpod of a vicious weed. I might have some strong feelings about them.)

You let entire flocks of these expensive birds fly around freely as if they were…

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…oh wait, right, this is where cockatoos are from.

Burger King has renamed itself:

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and despite their 1950’s diner decor, they don’t have any ketchup.

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ketchup for their french fries. Which would be “tomato sauce for their chips”, actually. Toh-mah-toe, not toe-may-toe. But seriously. THEY HAD NO KETCHUP FOR THEIR FRIES. (Not even Rosella, or any of the other local brands, which all taste far too clove-y and vinegary for my own taste, although my kids adapted.)

Also, shopping centers have amazingly short “trading hours” (that’s business hours, for us Yanks). Except for late closing day (and varies by state). Which is usually midweek. But otherwise the whole place may close down at 6:30 p.m. or earlier. Aussies take their work/life balance seriously.

Oh, and all the school age children are wearing uniforms. It’s like Hogwarts! But not always nearly so attractive:

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(No disrespect to the model. I don’t think there’s any issue of her being homely. Just her pinnie.) I haven’t been able to find any images that do justice to the disturbing “nothing fits any of these kids!” impression that an entire school’s worth of kids in these uniforms gives, with the two or three styles of hats, as well as the oddly fitting shirts and shorts on the boys. Every school has a different color scheme, and you can often tell the posh schools from the less affluent ones.

This is the default “sushi” around Oz.

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It’ll cost you somewhere between $2.40 AUD in Melbourne to $3.50 AUD in Sydney (per piece). Most common are avo-salmon or tuna-sweetcorn. The little soy sauce fish in the background of this image are ubiquitous, too.

Every. Single. Restaurant uses this particular style of takeaway container.

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Some are deeper or shallower (I saw three different sizes) but they’re all essentially the same. Except that the corner curvature varies, so if you use them as miserly substitutes for proper kitchen storage, you’ll go a bit mad.

Unless otherwise specified, a lemonade is something like this:

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Yes, it’s fizzy. It’s like a mostly lemony 7-Up or Sprite. (For the non-Americans reading this, in the U.S., a lemonade consists of lemon juice, sugar (or other sweetening) and water. Period.)

…and there’s an amazing barrage of traffic signs in Sydney. I’ll spare you the imagery.

Homemade Biscuits and Gravy

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This recipe will take your taste buds down South, to where good old-fashioned recipes are still king. Our Homemade Biscuits and Gravy recipe is full of so much down-home goodness, you’ll want to eat these homemade biscuits at breakfast AND dinner, which is perfectly all right by us!

What You’ll Need

  • 2 cups pancake and baking mix
  • 2/3 cup buttermilk
  • 1/2 stick (1/4 cup) butter, melted, plus 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1 (16-ounce) package hot pork sausage
  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 tablespoon Worcestershire sauce
  • 1 1/2 cups milk
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 teaspoon black pepper

What to Do

  1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
  2. In a medium bowl, stir baking mix, buttermilk, and the 1/2 stick melted butter until soft dough forms. Drop 8 equal spoonfuls of dough onto an ungreased baking sheet.
  3. Bake 14 to 16 minutes, or until golden brown.
  4. In a large skillet over medium-high heat, melt remaining butter; cook 1 to 1-1/2 minutes, or until browned. Add sausage and cook 6 to 8 minutes, or until no pink remains, stirring to crumble sausage. Add flour; mix well. Add Worcestershire sauce, milk, salt, and pepper; mix well. Cook 2 to 4 minutes, or until gravy thickens, stirring constantly.
  5. Cut biscuits in half and spoon sausage mixture evenly on bottom halves. Replace tops and serve.

I’m sitting on my bed, doing my math homework and simultaneously writing this whilst blasting no love again by taeyeon, in a quarantine facility in Guangzhou, China. I seem to be in no immediate danger of being arrested. When I opened my door earlier to take my covid test, I had red flavour by red velvet playing in the background – I was not arrested by the nurse and sent to a prison camp, and as far as I’m aware, my organs are all present and functioning perfectly fine inside my body.

Heck, I probably did not need to write all of that because if I was taken to a prison camp, I would not be posting this.

also note to whoever asked this question: in order for the sentence to be grammatically correct, I would suggest changing listen to listens, as with your current grammar I doubt you will make it far in the political field in which you seem to be so heavily invested in.

have a nice day.

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Adjustments and adaptations as the West unravels and the East starts it’s ascendancy

At the core of all of this is the US attempt to remain the world’s hegemonic power, by augmenting military alliances around the world to contain or defeat China and Russia. 

It’s a dangerous, delusional, and outmoded idea. 

The US has a mere 4.2% of the world population, and now a mere 16% of world GDP (measured at international prices). 

In fact, the combined GDP of the G7 is now less than that of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), while the G7 population is just 6 percent of the world compared with 41 percent in the BRICS.

There is only one country whose self-declared fantasy is to be the world’s dominant power: the US. 

It’s past time that the US recognized the true sources of security: internal social cohesion and responsible cooperation with the rest of the world, rather than the illusion of hegemony. 

With such a revised foreign policy, the US and its allies would avoid war with China and Russia, and enable the world to face its myriad environment, energy, food and social crises.

-Jeffrey D. Sachs

EU has made some realizations. The United States is clueless. And Russia and China are locking down and will not allow any American bullshit.

Here we continue on our collective of article during this most historical period of time.

We can say the following that appear to be crystal clear at this time;

  • The United States leadership, and their proxy nations, all appear to be clueless; meaning that they have no “real world” experience. That humbling series of experiences that impart wisdom, community, and communication.
  • They also appear to be either suffering from advanced mental illness, or on very strong drugs.
  • Most, if not all, the efforts designed to suppress and contain both Russia and China have failed, are failing, or are destined to fail.
  • The above points clearly (and cleanly) explain the domestic, economic, and social turmoil in the West as no other theory can.
  • More additional information, as it drips towards our understanding, clearly point to far greater damage and problems coming upon the West.
  • It appears that all containment efforts in favor of a uni-polar world has failed, and the USA leadership is unable to accept this fact.
  • Thus leading up to a VERY dangerous time; a time of desperation by the moronic, without EVER having the harsh real-world experience of consequences (for their actions).

A dangerous time to be yourself. Speak your mind, or be opposed to the current “Leadership” in the West.

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Settle down. Cuddle with a kitty. have a cup of tea or coffee, and enjoy the read.

I just tell people “he was a late bloomer”.

A lifetime of events happened to my husband in less than 10 years.

I met him when he was 60 and I was 50, in 2008. He had been a bachelor all his life, although he’d lived with two different ladies at different times for about a year each. He had no children. We dated a couple years until my kids were out of the nest, then moved in together in 2010. We married in 2011. We moved out of the Seattle area and bought a house in Oregon in 2012. His sisters never thought he’d get married, especially once he hit 60, and when he had asked one of his buddies (who was into owning real estate) if he thought it was possible to still buy a small piece of property and put a mobile home on it for cheap, the guy said “At 60? Nah, man, you’re too late for that.” So that was the first set of milestones-a girlfriend, a wife, stepkids, and a house in 4 years. Not bad.

The next piece is the best part. We hummed along for about 5 years, enjoying life and doing the semi-retired lifestyle in our own place. No big changes. Then, everything changed in the blink of an eye. We got our Ancestry dot com results back, just wondering how much of whatever ethnicity we might be. Two weeks later he got a match on his account that was astronomically high. It was a young girl with Asian and UK heritage. Long story short, this girl submitted her DNA to look for her Vietnamese parents’ American GI fathers. Both her mom and dad were Amerasian children born during the Vietnam war to Vietnamese mothers and American fathers. We got on face time with the family and had the parents send in their own DNA. Sure enough, he matched as the father of the girl’s mother. In an instant my husband was a father, a father-in-law, and grandfather to not one, but four grandchildren (ages 16, 18, 20, and 24). Three girls and a boy! A few months later, the 20 year old grandson and his girlfriend got married and had a baby girl. Now he’s a great-grandfather, and they are expecting their second child.

We met his daughter and her family for the first time the week he turned 70. The family all live in Florida and have all come here to Oregon to visit, more than once. I’ve been to see them in Florida (my husband cannot travel) and his sisters have taken the whole family into their lives and hearts, traveling to see them and hosting them in their homes in Georgia and Texas. It’s truly been a miracle. In 10 years my husband went from lonely bachelor in a run-down duplex to husband, stepfather, homeowner, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, all over the age of 60.

I just tell people “he was a late bloomer”.

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Daddy and Daughter, First Christmas together in 2018:

Ukraine – ‘Game Changing’ Policy Moves That Ain’t Game Changing

When politicians throw around big numbers or plans one should always look at the details to see what they really entail.

In May Biden announced and Congress passed a $40 billion package ‘for Ukraine’.

The former U.S. Marines intelligence officer Scott Ritter was very impressed with it. On May 22 he went on a talk show with Garland Nixon and Ray McGovern and claimed that Russia would have to change its special operation to counter all the new weapons. Ritter was very agitated (47:55 min). A few days later, in an email-interview with Sputnik, he called the $40 billion package a “game changer”:

Sputnik: On 21 May, Biden signed a $40 billion military aid package to Ukraine. Could the provision of new weapons become a game-changer for Kiev?

Scott Ritter: It's not could, it is a game changer. That doesn't mean that Ukraine wins the game. But Russia started the special military operation with a limited number of troops and with clearly stated objectives that were designed to be achieved with this limited number of troops.

Today, Russia still has the same number of troops and the same objectives. But instead of going up against the Ukrainian military as it existed at the start of the conflict, it's now going up against a Ukrainian military that is supported by a weapons package that by itself nearly matches the defence budget for Russia in all of one year. I think the defence budget for Russia in 2021 was around $43 billion.

This package that was just provided nearly matches that and when you add it to what has already been provided during the first five months of 2022, that's $53 billion. That's nearly $10 billion more than Russia spends on the totality of its military in one year. That changes the game. Again, the $40 billion package is not all weapons. A lot of it is humanitarian support and then some other financial support. But it's still... The amount of money it's provided through in terms of weapons, it's a lot.

The United States and NATO are also providing real time intelligence support to the Ukrainians. That's a game changer. And NATO's countries have now provided Ukraine with strategic depth going back through Poland and Germany, where bases are being used to train Ukrainian forces on the new weapons that are being provided.

However, as Larry Johnson and others pointed out to him, the $40 billion was just a talking point and the real sum was much smaller:

Mark Cancian at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (aka CSIS) provides an excellent breakdown of what was actually appropriated. Here is a quick summary:

  • $19 billion for immediate military support to Ukraine
  • $3.9 billion to sustain U.S. forces deployed to Europe
  • $16 billion for economic support to Ukraine and global humanitarian relief
  • $2 billion for long-term support to NATO allies and DOD modernization programs

Right off the bat, you can see that Ukraine is not getting $40 billion dollars worth of military goodies to whack Russians. They are not even getting $19 billion. The $19 billion is carved up into smaller packages:

  • $6 billion for training, equipment, weapons, logistic support, supplies and services, salaries and stipends and intelligence support to the military and national security forces of Ukraine (and the specifics of the expenditures remain to be determined).
  • $9 billion to replenish U.S. weapons stocks already sent to Ukraine.
  • $4 billion for the Foreign Military Financing Program (this allows a foreign country like Ukraine to buy brand new weapon systems).

New weapon systems must first be build which takes quite some time, often years, to do.

Last week the Biden administration made another announcement:

Biden announces $3 billion in additional aid to Ukraine

President Biden announced Wednesday that the U.S. is sending its largest security package to Ukraine to date, valued at $3 billion. The announcement coincided with the six-month anniversary of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

The package will come from the Ukraine Security Assistance (USAI) funds process, which means the U.S. will buy the weapons through contracts instead of drawing from existing Defense Department inventory and sending them immediately.

People got the impression that this was additional money on top of the previous announced numbers. But, as Politico detailed, this spending is part of the previously announced $40 billion package. More specific it comes out of the $6 billion for training, equipment, weapons, etc. It also only means that the Pentagon will start issuing contracts to manufacturers to produce the weapons and ammunition. The Ukraine is unlikely to receive any of them over the next months:

The Biden administration announced a new $3 billion package on Wednesday that will directly fund contracts with the U.S. defense industry for artillery rounds, mortar rounds, surface-to-air missile systems; a new counter-drone capability; additional drones; and 24 counter-battery radars. The move marks a major shift in how the U.S. has supplied Ukraine, from pulling existing weapons off of shelves to awarding contracts to defense firms for weapons that need to be built.

None of that equipment will arrive for months, if not years. But officials say the investment will allow Kyiv to begin planning for its own future defense. The hope is that other wealthy European nations, which have at times lagged in their support for Ukraine, might follow suit in the coming months. 
...
In all, Congress has set aside $6.3 billion for the Pentagon-administered effort: $6 billion as part of May’s $40 billion supplemental assistance legislation and $300 million in a government-wide funding package that passed in March. As of Aug. 1, just $1.8 billion of that cash had been used, according to Pentagon documentation seen by POLITICO. Wednesday’s announcement leaves roughly $1.5 billion left to be spent.

U.S. weapons are notoriously expensive. A billion or three will not buy much.

A similar misinterpretation of a government announcements as Scott Ritter has made is now playing out on the other side. As the New York Times today headlines:

Putin Orders a Sharp Expansion of Russia’s Hard-Hit Armed Forces

President Vladimir V. Putin on Thursday ordered a sharp increase in the size of Russia’s armed forces, a reversal of years of efforts by the Kremlin to slim down a bloated military and the latest sign that he is bracing for a long war in Ukraine, where Russia has suffered heavy losses.

The decree, stamped by the president’s office and posted on the Kremlin website, raised the target number of active-duty service members by about 137,000, to 1.15 million, as of January of next year, and ordered the government to set aside money to pay for the increase.

In yesterday’s analysis Dima of the Military Summary Channel debunked that announcement as a repeat of orders that had already be given months ago.

The Russian Federation consists of 85 federal subjects which are federal cities, oblast, republics or autonomous ethnic regions. In June the Kremlin asked the governors of each of these subjects to set up one or more volunteer battalions of former soldiers who are no longer active reservists. The bigger federal subjects, like Moscow and St.Petersburg, will set up multiple units. On August 8 Kommersant reported (in Russian) that some 20 federal subjects had already set up 40 battalions and that more will become available (machine translation):

In the Perm Territory, a motorized rifle company "Parma" of 90 people and a tank battalion "Molot" (about 160 people) are being formed. Another tank battalion named after Kuzma Minin is being created in the Nizhny Novgorod region. The Amur region, as reported in mid-July by local media, is gathering the Amursky motorized rifle battalion, which is expected to consist of 400-500 people. On the website of the government of the Leningrad Region, an announcement appeared about the recruitment to the artillery battalions "Nevsky" and "Ladoga". And in the Tyumen region, they announced the formation of three units at once with different specializations: the Tobol sapper battalion, the Taiga sniper company and the Siberia artillery battalion. According to the official version, Tobol was formed on the initiative of veterans of the Tyumen Higher Military Engineering Command School. The first groups of volunteers from these units went to the NWO at the end of July.

The people in these units have signed contracts with the Ministry of Defense. They will be equipped with refurbished weapons out of Russia’s endless depot reserves that are left from earlier downsizing. These are now full times soldiers for which the Ministry of Defense had yet to have a budget. All that Putin’s new order does is to arrange the funding for those new volunteer units.

To form military units, named after local heroes, from men who come from the same region has some advantages. These people will not feel like  strangers to each other which gives them some extra cohesion.The Chechen units which are already operating in Ukraine have shown that such an approach can be very successful. The regional approach has also the advantage of involving every part of Russia in the endeavor. It makes the ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine a national project.

While the men in these units will be older than fresh recruits they will also have valuable life and work experience. These new units will probably not be the most agile but they will certainly be able to do a decent job. Moreover these are trained soldiers who will have the standard tanks and other equipment for combined arms operations. Their units will be way more powerful than the drafted Territorial Defense and Jager Infantry Brigades that now make up the bulk of the Ukrainian forces. Currently the new units are training at various facilities throughout Russia. When they are ready they will start their rotation into Ukraine.

Likes Biden’s ‘new’ announcement of the $3 billion ‘additional’ aid, Putin’s decree is only a detail of a previously announced policy.

But neither of those announcements, nor the HIMARS systems, are ‘game changers’.

Big Serge ☦️🇺🇸🇷🇺 @witte_sergei - 13:27 UTC · Aug 27, 2022

Ukrainian channels are reporting that at least 60% of the HIMARS have been destroyed, and they are doubtful of the attempts to destroy the bridge in Kherson. Another wonder weapon gone bust.

First saw this on Legitimniy, repeated by Rezident. Both reliably optimistic Ukrainian insider channels. HIMARS activity has definitely dropped off, so there isn’t any particular reason to assume they’re lying.

The thing about the HIMARS isn’t that there’s something particularly wrong with it. It’s a fine system. It’s just meant to function as part of a competent combined arms force. It has a specific role, and can’t single-handedly prop up a defeated army.

Posted by b on August 27, 2022 at 16:06 UTC | Permalink

Soldiers of the Bashkir battalion

The Russian army switched to the formation of battalions for the SVO on a national basis. This renders the radio interceptions by Ukrainian intelligence and NATO intelligence useless, so radio communications are conducted in national languages,and NATO simply does not have translators from the languages ​​of the small peoples of Russia.
Irina
С уважением,
Бойко Ирина Львовна

Transformation

This is my sister’s cat Sandy. One day a tiny, starving kitten came to our house and refused to leave. My husband took her to the vet, and it turned out she was feline AIDS positive. The vet said my husband needed to decide whether to put her down or not, but he couldn’t get a hold of me to help him make the decision, so he took her home again. After weeks of feeding, treatments and lots of love, she recovered and was taken in by my sister. Even her red coat underwent a transformation! Today she is happy and healthy and much loved.

Before

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After

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On Dwelling in Insane Places

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In 1973, a study entitled “On Dwelling in Insane Places” shocked psychologists and psychiatrists around the world.

Nothing for them was as it once was. What made this study so remarkable ?

The Rosenhan experiment was conducted by a psychologist named David Rosenhan and has since been considered one of the most remarkable studies in the field.

The Stanford professor and his associates pretended to hallucinate in order to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals.

When they were admitted, the men behaved absolutely normally.

They told the hospital staff that they had recovered and no longer had any hallucinations.

But in the psychiatric wards they were simply not released and forced to admit that they were suffering from a mental illness.

On average, the team members had to stay in the “closed” for 19 days and were diagnosed with schizophrenia, except for one of them.

They were released on the condition that they take anti-psychotics.

Rosenhan had reassured his family before the experiment, telling them that yes, he could leave when enough was enough.

But they locked him up for two months.

One was released only if one admitted that the psychiatrists were right in what they said.

You had to admit that you were crazy, but you could say that you were better now.

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The “patient” who had to stay the longest was kept for 52 days, although he said from the beginning that he no longer heard voices.

All of the pseudo-patients were diagnosed with schizophrenia “in remission” prior to their release.

Rosenhan felt that this indicated that mental health problems were not considered diseases that could be completely cured.

After all, having schizophrenia “in remission” does not mean that one is completely healthy.

It was enough for psychiatrists , if you heard voices once in your life , to label you as sick for the rest of your life .

Rosenhan made his study and its results public.

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And the psychiatric guild naturally got very upset about it and rejected all the accusations.

They claimed that they themselves would never fall into his trap and could quite safely distinguish pseudopatients from real patients.

One of the psychiatric hospitals contacted Rosenham and asked him to send pseudo patients to their hospital without warning.

In their hospital, he said, such a thing could never happen, and they would be able to distinguish whether patients were faking their symptoms.

Rosenhan sent them a total of 193 patients, and the hospital identified 41 of them as pseudopatients.

But Rosenhan hadn’t sent any pseudopatients at all. All of them actually had serious mental health problems.

All of this triggered an earthquake. Psychiatry changed. And that’s fortunate.

But there is still a lot to do.

A harsh slap of reality

The phone rang at 1:40 AM.

“Hello?” I answered in a sleepy voice.

“Mr. Quintanilla?” said the man on the phone.

“Who is this? How can I help you?”

“This is the sheriff from the local police station. I want to notify you that your building is on fire.”

“What a bad joke!” I hung up the phone and went back to sleep.

Two minutes later… RING!

“Please, stop bothering!” I said.

“Do not hang up, Sir, this is the Sheriff’s office. One of your tenant’s cars at your building is on fire. Your building is at risk. The fire station has been notified.”

I drove to the building as fast as I could. The fire was contained before it got to the building.

It was a disaster. Two cars were consumed by the flames and the parking area was devastated.

After the fire was out, the Policemen circled the area with a yellow tape waiting for the detectives to determine what had happened.

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One day went by. We couldn’t remove the cars nor start the restoration process.

Two days… no detectives.

I visited the police station, “You’ve got to file a report,” the lady instructed. Done.

Three days… nothing.

Four days… Again, I visited the Police station, but nobody would take care of the case.

Five days… another day lost.

I decided to call a good friend who is an attorney.

“Hey, Adrian, I need your help to get this solved.”

“No problem, Hector, let me make a few phone calls,” he said.

Three hours later, “Okay, Hector, I have a solution. It will cost $50,000 pesos, in cash (about $3,800 back in 2009).”

I was furious! “No way, Adrian! This is not acceptable. Please help me any way you can. I don’t want to pay bribes to further feed our corrupt people. They must do their job!”

“I’ll do what I can, Hector,” he said.

“Thank you, my friend!”

Twenty minutes later Adrian called back, “I’m sorry, Hector. This fee is non-negotiable. They want the money.”

“Oh no! Adrian, how can this be possible?”

“Well sadly, this how the system works.”

“I will not feed this corrupt system! I won’t pay them anything!”

I hung up the phone and drove to the police station again requesting a solution to my problem. I felt powerless.

Two days later I escalated my complaint to the Police chief. This is when my friend Adrian called me again, “Hector, you’ve got to stop this. This is getting out of my control.”

“What do you mean, Adrian?” I said.

“They’re threatening me with an ultimatum: either you pay or they will make you liable for the incident and the insurance of the car that initiated the fire will not pay anything. You will be responsible for all the damages, about $1.5 million pesos ($115,000).”

I was in shock.

“I’m sorry, Hector, this is how the system works.”

“Tell those miserable rats I’ll give them the money. Thank you for your help, my friend.” I hung up.

I felt defeated. The very people in power supposed to protect us were stealing from me.

Hours later, a cynical man visited my office, took the cash and in two hours everything was solved.

This was the incident that caused me to change how I see the world:

Public servants leveraging their authority to abuse citizens instead of taking care of them.

This made me understand that there may be things I want to change in the world; but I can’t.

Spicy Beef Burritos

These beef burritos contain various peppers and seasonings on top of refried beans. Top them off with lettuce, sour cream, cheese, and wrap up in a soft shell.

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Spicy Beef Burritos

Ingredients

Ingredient Checklist

Directions

Instructions Checklist
  • Mix jalapeno peppers, tomato, green chile peppers, green bell pepper, red bell pepper, onion, hot sauce, and cayenne pepper together in a large bowl.

  • Cook beef in a large skillet over medium-high heat, stirring to break up clumps, about 5 minutes. Drain excess grease. Add jalapeno pepper mixture and burrito seasoning; cook, covered, stirring occasionally, until flavors combine, about 10 minutes.

  • Pour refried beans into a saucepan over medium-low heat. Cook and stir until heated through, about 5 minutes.

  • Warm each tortilla in the microwave until soft, 15 to 20 seconds. Spread a layer of refried beans on top. Divide beef mixture among tortillas. Top with lettuce, sour cream, and Cheddar cheese. Fold in opposing edges of each tortilla and roll up into a burrito.

Triple or Quadruple COVID-Vax Recipients Now Developing SORES — **NOT** Monkeypox

Doctors in the United Kingdom say they are “baffled” as numerous persons who admit receiving either three or four doses of the COVID-19 “vaccine” are starting to develop strange, painful, sores all over their bodies.

These are **NOT** Gay or bi-sexual men.  They are **NOT** people who engage in an “orgy lifestyle.”   And all of them test NEGATIVE for Monkeypox.   This . . .  is something new.

The ***ONLY***thing any of these people have in common is they are ***ALL** wither Triple or quadruple COVID vaxed.  No other commonality — at all.

The sores are developing on hands, then spreading to the rest of their bodies.

The male in the image above was fine seven days ago.  Then this appeared, and is spreading all over his body.

The sores are said to be extremely painful.  They are, as seen above, disgusting to look at.

Tests of the contents of the sores DO NOT detect any Bacteria.  Nothing from inside one of these sores grows in a Petri Dish, even after five days.

Tests also cannot see any Viruses.

Additional tests for Fungus, Mold, etc, are pending.

So far, no explanation of what this is, or if it is contagious human-to-human.

Some folks are already pointing to the Bible, Revelation 16:

The First Six Bowls of Wrath

1 And I heard a great voice out of the temple saying to the seven angels, Go your ways, and pour out the vials of the wrath of God upon the earth.

2 And the first went, and poured out his vial upon the earth; and there fell a noisome and grievous sore upon the men which had the mark of the beast, and upon them which worshipped his image.

My perfect cat

i’m still a (high school) student, last year of secondary school & i spent my entire life begging for a pet, but it was never “convenient.”

i was lucky to have a few hamsters, but a cat or dog was never something we could never hack.

i asked for a cat every Christmas and birthday and tried to volunteer at the spca since middle school (never could because i was too young).

every year i gave my parents Christmas cards with animals on them & brought up the possibility of getting a pet to the point of driving them up the walls (understandable after hearing it for 17 years).

last year, i sat down and spent half a day researching and creating a powerpoint of reasons we need a cat, how they’re beneficial to health, & all of their concerns & what we can do about it.

they were so impressed by the powerpoint by how professionally done it looked & how much work i put into it that they finally considered it & eventually said yes.

i was over the moon & had an appointment to meet a kitty at the spca in less than a week.

my parents met her & loved her immediately & we took her home the next day. we really got the perfect cat & all my work truly paid off.

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Rolling Blackouts Begin in Europe; Not Enough Gas to Generate Electricity

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Rolling blackouts have begun in Kosovo because the country cannot find enough supply of natural gas to keep power plants running at full capacity.

Other European countries, from the UK to Bulgaria, are also developing plans to cut off electricity.

The reason: These countries imposed economic sanctions upon Russia over its Special Military Operation into Ukraine, and as a result of their own Sanctions, these countries now refuse to buy Russian oil and natural gas.

Rather than mind their own business when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine problems, Europe has decided that its citizens can live in the dark, so Europe can virtue signal how wonderful they are, by not buying Russian natural gas.

The politicians in Europe have personally caused this energy problem and the price hikes, by imposing sanctions upon Russia.

Citizens in Europe should get rid of these politicians before Winter arrives, and folks start freezing to death from no heat due to no natural gas.

Love at first meow

I was staying in my camper, having just vacated a beautiful, but bat-infested house on beautiful Lake Chapala, a few miles south of Guadalajara, Mexico.

A tiny grey and white kitten showed up outside, mewing his fool head off.

I didn’t have any cat food, so I put a bit of dry dog food out for him, as well as some water.

When the neighborhood kids stopped by, I asked them if they knew where he belonged, and they told me that he lived across the street from them.

Already having a 65 pound dog and a sick puppy, I didn’t feel as if I was ready for another pet in that truck camper, so I had the kids take him home.

Long story short, he came back every time I sent him home.

I finally had the kids ask the owner if she wanted to get rid of him.

She did, I found a house, and now I have the grey and white male kitten I had wanted for 20 years.

I’m pretty sure he loves me, as he has spent the biggest part of the past 9 years on my lap!

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UK: Criminals Stealing COOKING Oil over Prices of Diesel Fuel

Criminal gangs are raiding eateries and restaurants in the United Kingdom in search of cooking oil as an alternative to diesel fuel amid soaring gasoline prices.

“There is a new type of crime in the UK – criminals steal large tanks of cooking oil.

Others deceive businesses by posing as recycling teams.

The stolen oil is then processed into biodiesel and sold on the black market.

This once again shows how resourceful criminal gangs are. Because they are looking for profit anywhere, and with the rising cost of fuel, their market is only thriving.

All this is taking place because Europe imposed “Sanctions” upon Russia over the Special Military Operation into Ukraine.   It is Europe who banned Russian oil and Gas.  Then Europe had to go elsewhere to find replacement for the oil and gas they banned.

The only places they could find other oil and gas, were places that were already supplying other countries.  So when Europe came to that market, the prices went up: Supply-and-Demand!

Thus, Europe has done this to itself by refusing to mind their own business when it comes to the Russia-Ukraine matter.

Europe and all the rest of the world could still be paying about $2.00 a gallon for gasoline and heating oil, but the Sanctions Europe imposed set all the price hikes in motion.

The skyrocketing cost of fuel for energy is a self-imposed harm.

Will China nuke the U.S. over Taiwan?

This is MM response on Quora. -MM

Yes.

Let me explain why. Key points are [numbered].

Make no mistake. Taiwan is part of China. The United States and it’s proxy nations are interfering in Chinese domestic matters and [1] China considers this action an ACT OF WAR.

Further, let it be well understood. [2] The Chinese do not play “political games”. They are pragmatic. They see things as they are, and they accept them. If something needs fixing; they fix it. They don’t endless debate it.

Specifically, all this prodding and interference in Chinese domestic affairs, whether it is Tibet, Uighur’s, Hong Kong, or Taiwan are considered to be  dangerous military ventures. They are not considered to be anything other than that. [3] The United States interfering in Taiwan are considered to be WAR provocations.

As such, the Chinese do not view a “color revolution” as a “hybrid war”.

[4] Chinese view alternative conflicts as an actual war. A chemical war is a war. A biological war is a war. A economic war is a war. A hybrid war is a war.

With that being stated…

Historically, China has learned many, many lessons regarding war. They have plenty of practice. With over 6000 years of experience. And to understand what China is capable of doing you have to see what you are working with; what China actually is, and not the Western narrative.

So let’s face reality…

[5] China believes in overwhelming firepower, manpower, weapon destruction, and wholesale slaughter to accomplish it’s military goals. This differs substantially from the American belief in “precision air strikes”. The United States would use a drone to kill an Iranian General, for instance. China would level the complete city so that no one would survive. Both techniques accomplish the same end goals. But China’s is much more damaging; as it creates tremendous collateral damage.

[6] China has nuclear weapons. No one actually knows how many. The figure of 300 is from a RAND study in the 1970’s and is woefully out of date. Anyone relying on this figure is a fool. Just clueless “armchair generals” using a singular meaningless number on a spreadsheet as a gauge of resolve, determination and objective realization.

[7] China has a different nuclear policy than that of the United States. The US has developed “bunker buster” precision nukes, and micro-ordnance nukes, and nukes that are designed to be carried on the F-35. China is different. China has “enhanced radiation” nukes. The often cited “neutron bomb”. These are “clean” nuclear weapons. They have a wider range of effect than the Western nukes, but the damage is primarily due to the initial radiation blast. It is designed to completely sterilize huge sections of geography (buildings, cities, etc) of life, while leaving the vast bulk of structures intact.

[8] China possess Hyper-sonic ABM systems. These can shoot down any ICBM, SLBM that the United States fires at China. They have been producing these systems in great quantities.

[9] Agreements with the USA are worthless. All this being said, China and the United States, as well as Russia signed a “no use policy” of nuclear weapons. But since the Chinese government has openly stated that the Untied States lies, and cannot be trusted to hold to their agreements, don’t be so sure that China would abide to that faux signature on a worthless document were China to be attacked.

[10] Russia has China’s back. Were nuclear weapons engaged, both Russia and China would use them simultaneously against the United States in unison. You can easily observe the great deal of cooperation of the strategic military forces, even today in the on-going “exercises”.

All of this combined paints a picture of a very catastrophic result were the United States push for war against China around the Taiwan island.

I would advise “upstairs” to refrain from the political machinations currently going on. But those days are long gone. The current crop of dunder-heads in Washington DC are clueless idiots who seemingly wish to ignite a global nuclear holocaust.

Whether they will stop or not is well beyond my pay grade. My guess is that they will not. And thus, if they continue, well… sadly… yes. The United States cities (at least the top 20) will experience nuclear armageddon over Taiwan.

This follows Chinese military doctrine.

“It is difficult for an army to wage war when their homes, families, cities, language and culture are all erased from history. They stop fighting for ideals and start fighting to survive.”

Our cat remembers

Not abandoned as such but definitely neglected by others.

We got her for £50 from an old woman who already had a very well groomed, fat cat and a 13 year old child with obvious anger issues.

She hated me for months, would hiss and bite but now she cuddles up to me and lets me carry her about with no issues.

She was always defensive of food, and would attempt to get out to hunt birds, and we were told she is an outdoor cat. She wasn’t, she was flea bitten and terribly thin. We think she only went out to hunt because the old woman looking after her didn’t feed her but did the other cat.

When sat at my desk she would sit on the bed and watch what I was doing , but every time I stood up from my chair she would run out of the room, and we think the boy used to play his games or what have you, get defeated and get angry and take it out on the cat. She doesn’t do it as much now but she still does.

And if you scratch her under her chin she starts dribbling everywhere and it’s adorable, she’s a part of our family now and will be until she passes on.

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Has China met its powerful match.?

This is MM response on Quora. -MM

China is not “picking a fight” and is not going to have any conflict over Taiwan. I know youse guys don’t want to hear that, and you all believe the onslaught of “news” from the American propaganda mills, but the fact remains, China and Taiwan are brothers and share the same past and the same future.

ASEAN, SEO all the ‘Stans, and Russia are all fully on-board with China. China is peer-capable in most weapons systems, and ahead of the West in robotics, AI, manufacturing and very specific and unique and dangerous systems. But all those THINGS are of no consequence.

As problems are resolved by people. Not weapons. Not ideology. Not political slogans. Not religion. Not things. Not “news”. Not public opinion.

People.

I can positively state that in the realm of People, China has the upper-hand. Not just a little bit, but by a substantial margin. Quantity, quality, and determination, its’ very difficult to maintain a fantasy of anyone being a match against China. Seriously. There is no comparison.

This VIDEO discusses how everyone in China gets military training.

It starts in Kindergarten, and the discipline continues throughout the lives of the Chinese citizenry. I captured videos of elementary school students training on mortars, throwing grenades, and being involved in weapons training. It’s stuff you won’t find in the Western “news”. To fully understand my opinion and answer to this question, you must OBSERVE how the Chinese people train.

Oscar the Therapy Cat

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You see this cutie above? This is Oscar, the cute, snuggly, lovable therapy cat.

“Therapy cat?” you may ask. I know, I was surprised when I saw it too. In case you don’t know already, a therapy cat is basically a cat that helps humans deal with emotional problems. Don’t all cats do that?

Well, Oscar the therapy cat was raised in the dementia unit of the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. In 2007, he was featured in an article by David Dosa called the New England Journal of Medicine.

This is where things start getting creepy. According to David Dosa, Oscar is able to “predict the impending death of terminally ill patients”. How does he do this?

By lying down with them a few hours before they die.

Funny enough, there are many real stories concerning him. But here’s a summary.

After Oscar had been at Steere House for around six months, staff noticed that Oscar often chose to nap next to residents who died within several hours of his arrival. It seemed to staff as if Oscar were trying to comfort and provide company to people as they died.

Joan Teno, a physician at Steere House, clarified that “it’s not that the cat is consistently there first. But the cat always does manage to make an appearance, and it always seems to be in the last two hours.”

After Oscar accurately predicted 25 deaths, staff started calling family members of residents as soon as they discovered him sleeping next to someone in order to notify them and give them an opportunity to say goodbye before the impending death.

As of January 2010, Oscar had accurately predicted approximately 50 patients’ deaths.

I don’t know about you, but this absolutely freaks me out. Just imagine you’re chilling on the sofa, drinking a soda and maybe eating some chips. And then your cat walks halfway across the room just to lie down next to you…

I’d go ballistic.

Maybe I should’ve gone to the gym…

Mary Ellen

As a Black domestic worker in 1850s California, Mary Ellen Pleasant eavesdropped on her wealthy clients so that she could learn how to invest her money wisely. She later used this knowledge to build a real estate empire — which was worth over $30 million.

Pleasant put her investment profits to good use by purchasing businesses like laundries and boarding houses before building a real-estate portfolio. Before long, she owned shares in other businesses like restaurants, dairies, and a bank.

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It’s believed that her white male business partner helped her acquire numerous investments under his name so that she wouldn’t have to encounter as many issues as other aspiring Black businesswomen of the era.

Pleasant soon became one of the wealthiest women in America, and she always tried to use her money for good, first by supporting antislavery causes and then later by fighting against racial discrimination. When it came to standing up for what she believed in, she once famously said, “I’d rather be a corpse than a coward.”

This is MM response on Quora. -MM

It’s a good question.

Let’s chat about this.

Mainland China is absolutely a “first-world futuristic nation”. The cities, all of them are brand-spanking new. High technology, and clean. Parks are everywhere. Food, transportation and shelter are cheap. The towns and minor villages are developing. They lag behind, but not so far behind as one would think. Overall, the impression that people have when they visit China is that of a futuristic world. High speed trains. Robots. Bioscans. A fully cashless society. APP driven government. Accountability. Clean. Productive.

Hong Kong is “American standard”. Or, perhaps I should refer to it as a “Western Standard”. For decades it has been a FIRE (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate) based society. Overcrowding in the cities. High costs of living. Empty and unimproved rural areas. There are two classes of people. There are the super-rich, and then there are the worker / renters / serfs. Since China has clamped down on this piss-poor treatment of Chinese people (2019 and on) by the British aristocracy that ran HK, things are slowly moving and correcting. The arrest of Jimmy Lai and others has really sent many of the overlord parasite-class scurrying away to their homes in the UK, and the United States.

Macau is “European Socialist”. It’s a haven for the wealthy and the “well-heeled”. While at the same time, providing generous living standards, and social support for the working, lower-income classes. Many people in Macau are very happy there, and support their government entirely. The Casinos tend to be nice, new and glitzy, but the rest of society live and work in older, often very shabby buildings and structures. I can positively affirm that the vast bulk of society travel back and forth between Macau and Zhuhai via the Gongbei port.

Taiwan is “American Proxy”. In 2014, (then) President Obama installed a puppet regime in Taiwan. Just like he did in Ukraine. While it is supposed to be a “democracy”, like Ukraine, all opposition parties were banned, and American military now run the government with nominal local personalities (notably hand-selected actors, and fame promoted personalities) running things. There are basically two classes of people, and wedged between them is a tiny middle class. The oligarchy, the serf/renters, and the small middle class. As a result, you will see a mixture of society. Nice gleaming buildings that represent banking interests, military interests, and industry, and old and neglected structures that serve the bulk of the citizenry. Much like what we see in Ukraine.

Where are the Islands of the South China Sea located?

This is MM response on Quora. -MM

They tend to lie within the “heart” of the South China Sea in the South East quadrant of China off the Chinese coast. There are some minor atolls and other land masses, but those are of minor consequence. They primarily form two groupings.

Paracel Islands. Which lie off the coast of China’s Hainan island. And the Spratly Islands that lie close to the Phillippines.

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Oh, you are referring to the United States. Well, while it is true that the United States lost the Vietnam war, it’s really hard to justify that war in the first place. The United States had no precise objectives. meaning, there wasn’t any measurables that would certify if a war was won or lost.

If you are referring to the Chinese-Vietnam conflict, then you are wholly confused about history. That action achieved it’s objectives. And that is, after all, the pure tell-tail of success. Indeed, today the ties between Vietnam and China has never been stronger.

If you are referring to the Cambodian-Vietnamese conflict, then you are again in error. Vietnam conducted a police action to remove the Kilmer Rouge from power and remove Pol Pot. They were successful in that venture. Cambodia never claimed to be a superpower.

The United States has a uranium problem and that will severely impact USN fleet operations

The US will not be able to replace Russian uranium in the event of an import ban, Assistant Secretary of Energy Kathryn Huff has warned, saying Washington must develop enrichment capabilities domestically.

“Worldwide, there’s not enough capacity to replace that gap from trusted sources,” Huff told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday, adding that it was the US’s responsibility to “encourage and incentivize that enrichment and conversion capability” on American soil.

Huff told the Examiner that US reliance on Russian-sourced uranium posed unique energy security and national security risks, and noted that Russia still provides about 20% of the low enriched uranium at existing US reactors.

“We have the largest nuclear fleet in the world, and we currently do not have the capability to provide fuel for all of our reactors,” she said, claiming that Russia is “no longer a trustworthy source of our fuel, and we need to find alternatives here and build up that supply chain.”

Article HERE

Romans Added Lead Sweetener to Their Wine and it Killed Them

From HERE

How far did ancient people go to enhance the flavor of their food and drinks? Would they consume toxic substances if it made things a little more appetizing? Well, the Romans did, by adding a sweet version of lead to their wine and, later, to their food. Some scholars say that widespread lead poisoning contributed to the fall of the powerful Roman empire.

Pliny the Elder Cato the Elder , and  Columella wrote that a syrup was produced by boiling unfermented grape juice in order to concentrate its natural sugars. If the juice was reduced to one third of its original volume, it was called  sapa.

As the juice was boiled in kettles made of lead alloys, this harmful element seeped into the syrup. By reacting with the acetate ions in the  grape juice , lead(II) acetate was produced, a highly toxic chemical compound. In fact, sapa, or ‘sugar of lead’, contained lead levels 200 times higher than today’s acceptable level.

The ancient  Romans used sapa as a form of artificial  sweetener, especially in  wines. They eventually found a way to turn sugar of lead into crystal form. This meant that the toxic substance could be produced in the way  table salt  or sugar is produced today. As a consequence of this innovation, the consumption of sugar of lead became even more widespread, and started to be used in cooking as well. In the 4th century Roman recipe book of  Apicius, almost a fifth of the recipes were made with sugar of lead in its syrup form.

The writings of some ancient Roman authors indicate that the Romans were aware of the dangers of lead consumption; but by then, the damage had already been done. Side effects included dementia, infertility, cognitive difficulties, fatigue, gout and eventually organs shutting down.

Sugar of lead wasn’t the only source of lead poisoning in ancient Rome. Romans also drank water transported through lead pipes , making the water hazardous for their health. Research in 2019 suggested that more than half the population in Roman-era London was dealing with health issues caused by lead poisoning.

Using the analogy of the United States leadership following the same path as the Roman leadership, then what is the analogy or substance that American leadership are ingesting? Things to think about. -MM

First of all, the “independence movement” in Taiwan is a small minority that is generously funded by the United States and various Taiwanese oligarchs.

Second of all, there is never a good reason to have a war. Wars should always be the last result, when every other realm of compromise has failed.

Finally, yapping little American poodles snapping at the heels and shins of a massive armor-clad, fire breathing, winged, and clawed, Chinese dragon deserve what ever they provoke. It’s called “natural selection”, don’t you know.

Learn about what you all are dealing with HERE.

Real Life Hero. JACOB ALBARADO

The Texas school shooting was horrible. This man is one of the Border Patrols Most elite agents trained to kill. News don’t want to talk about him much but he deserves the recognition.

His wife is a teacher and his Daughter named Jayda was also in the school. He sat down for a haircut with his barber when he got a text from his wife saying “there’s an active shooter, I love you” .

He jumped up, grabbed a gun and went right to the school.

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When the police couldn’t do anything they needed a new plan and that’s when he showed up.

He went right into the school , saved his wife, hugged his daughter as other officers escorted them out of the school safely.

He didn’t stop when his own family was safe, he continue to help save other children ,This man was first in the line of fire, no hesitation .

This is an example of a Fucking Rufus! Give this man some Recognition His words

“I did what I was trained to do”

You sir Are the fucking MAN!!!

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I have a beautiful gray and white male cat named Gizmo. About a year ago, several things happened all at once, and it was a very stressful and taxing time.

I was renting a house from my parents while we waited for my sister to sell her house (so she could move into the house and I could move out to a cheaper town home). I had a good job, my roommate (and best friend of over 10 years) had a good job, all was good and well.

But my sister was having issues, and those issues were overflowing onto us. She was asking us to cover things, to let her dogs stay over at the house, and just making the entire situation far more stressful than it needed to be. In addition, my roommate and I were trying to save money for the move as well as having to buy moving supplied and worry about the deposit and first month’s rent.

We managed this all, but it basically knocked out our entire savings.

So we get to this new home, and within the first week, we notice that Gizmo is MISERABLE.

The first day that we lived at the town home, he buried himself in my blankets and was overheating, but refused to leave. I managed to fix that by moving him to one of his condos, draping a blanket over it so he was covered, but air could pass through.

He stopped eating as much, and I would routinely wake up to vomit and diarrhea in the kitchen. I thought it was just him adjusting to the move, and in a way, I was right.

I didn’t start to panic until I saw the blood in the sink… and then on the floor, and then in the litter box.

I immediately took him to a vet, and they diagnosed him with Bladder Stones — which can be fatal, especially for male cats. They believed that the stress of my sister’s dogs coupled with the stress of the move had caused them. I needed over 1,300 USD to pay for surgery, or Gizmo would pass within a week.

We JUST moved. Our Savings, which we had been building up, was completely destroyed. We didn’t have 1,300 USD to just pay for surgery. I took to the internet and pleaded for help… and I got it. GoFundMe was able to successfully fund Gizmo’s surgery.

However, I received a message when I was promoting the GoFundMe, that essentially told me that because I could not pay for my cat’s surgery, that I was a horrid pet owner and that I deserved to lose Gizmo.

I’ve had Gizmo since he was FOUR weeks old. I’ve practically raised him. He was the ONLY kitten of his litter to survive, and ONLY survived because I fought to take him home at four weeks old. IF I hadn’t JUST moved, I could have paid for the surgery without asking for help.

The message crushed me, especially when I was already terrified that I was going to be losing my Gizmo within a week if I couldn’t get the money.

It’s not just something that shouldn’t be said to a cat owner, it’s something that shouldn’t be said to ANY pet owner.

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Things are starting to line-up on the Geo-political front

After running circles for two weeks North of Taiwan And staying way outside of China's missile range, it seems that the (American aircraft carrier) Reagan has tucked its tail and gone back to Japan,where the sailors are free to run over some random Japanese with a simple slap on the wrist.

-cindy6

I am crazy busy. Please enjoy this latest article for today.

What China’s Taiwan white paper is saying

This important document is intended to remind the West that China will not budge on its position on Taiwan
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This excellent piece by a true China expert, George Koo, is all you need if you don’t want to read the White Paper on Taiwan produced by the People’s Republic of China government.
Four essential realities from Koo's article :

1- Taiwan will be reunited with the Mainland.

2- The Taiwanese are waking up to the reality (obvious for any non brainwashed outsider with a tad of common sense) that the US government is not their friend and Americans will not die for Taiwan. The Taiwanese don't seem to be strongly attracted to the role of cannon fodder. What's happening now in Ukraine is certainly a cautionary tale for them.

Moreover, the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan backed off and sailed away when the People's Liberation Army Navy started at the beginning of August 2022 the naval exercises around the island of Taiwan. That event was definitely an eye-opener for all the Taiwanese, even the most obtuse ones.

3- The more the Taiwanese learn about Mainland China's pĺace in the world, the more they will want to be part of it.

4- The Taiwanese enjoy immense benefits by their close economical association with Mainland China. And more and more Taiwanese realize it's truly valuable.

By flying to Asia and landing in Taipei, the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, disregarded the “one China” principle and the fact that Taiwan is a province of China.

Pelosi stepped over China’s red line.

And, as promised, China responded by holding live-fire drills all around the island for the first time in the history of cross-Strait relations.

The military exercises by the People’s Liberation Army prompted the aircraft carrier USS Ronald Reagan to sail away from the waters of Taiwan.

This made it abundantly clear to the people in Taiwan that while the United States wants to encourage Taipei to start a war with the mainland, Taiwan would have to fight the PLA by itself.

Seeing these developments, the collective wisdom of the people in Taiwan as reflected by the media is to conclude that to declare independence and break away from China would be suicidal.

The US Congress and President Joe Biden’s administration, however, have continued to test China’s resolve and attempt to push the red line.

Since the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) normalized relations in 1979, Congress has enacted a series of legislation to weaken the bilateral agreement progressively as expressed by three communiqués.

The first communiqué was agreed in 1972 when then-US president Richard Nixon went to China. Each communiqué stating that Taiwan is a part of China was signed by both Washington and Beijing and is binding on both parties.

Unlike these joint agreements, the US government arrogantly presumes that any law enacted by its Congress is unilaterally binding on China as well.

In response to this American arrogance, the State Council Information Office in Beijing has issued a white paper on the “Taiwan Question and the Cause of China’s Reunification in the New Era.”

This important document is obviously intended to remind the West that China will not budge on its position on Taiwan.

First of all, the paper reiterates that Taiwan is part of China, that reunification is inevitable, that the way reunification will take place is a matter between Taiwan and the mainland, and that Beijing will brook no outside interference.

This is a re-statement of the red line about Taiwan that has never changed but is now stated in no uncertain terms.

Second, the white paper reviewed Taiwan’s place throughout the history of China. The terms of Japan’s unconditional surrender at the end of World War II mandated the return of Taiwan to China after 50 years of Japanese occupation.

At present, 181 countries including the US recognize the PRC as the legal government of China and that Taiwan is part of one China.

Advantages of being part of China

Some people in Taiwan may not fully appreciate the intertwined cross-Strait economic relationship. If so, they should read the white paper and understand the advantages of Taiwan being a part of the national economy.

As just one of the indicators, Taiwanese businesses have over the years invested more than US$71 billion in more than 1.2 million projects on the mainland – not to mention an annual trade surplus of $170 billion that Taiwan enjoys with the mainland.

From 1980 to 2021, the mainland’s economy grew three times as fast as Taiwan’s and has become the second-largest in the world, and is soon to overtake the US to become No 1. China has become a major power not only economically but in science and technology and in military prowess.

As more people in Taiwan come to understand China’s place in the world, they will appreciate being a part of China.

Winding through Congress is the Taiwan Policy Act of 2022, which according to its sponsors will promote the security of Taiwan, ensures regional stability and threatens China with broad economic sanctions.

But the consequences of Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan showed that such an act will do just the opposite: The island will become less secure and the region less stable.

As we have also seen from the Ukraine war, the US sanctions imposed on Russia backfired badly, causing worldwide food shortages, rising energy prices and overall inflation, and solidified the ruble’s place among the world’s major currencies.

Any attempted sanctions on China would inflict blows to the US economy many times more serious than the sanctions on Russia.

One only need look at the foolhardy tariff war waged by former US president Donald Trump and continued by Biden. The American consumer had to pay a higher price for goods made in China because of the tariffs, and the trade surplus by China only increased rather than reduced. For Washington to threaten China with sanctions is meaningless if not just stupid.

Moreover, the white paper has reasserted China’s red line on Taiwan, leaving no room for ambiguity or equivocation.

This is a matter of sovereignty for China.

The Chinese do not make empty threats.

They will view stepping over the line as an act of war.

No independence without US support

Taiwan’s ruling pro-independence (taidu) faction would not be so foolish as to declare independence without US support.

If the US does show support, then China will most likely strike at the US naval ships first and take them out of action.

Without American military presence, the taidu faction will become irrelevant and negotiations between Taiwan and the mainland for a peaceful reunification can begin.

Article HERE

Creamy Dijon-Bacon Pasta Salad

If you’re a potato salad fan but want a new twist on the dish, try this Creamy Dijon-Bacon Pasta Salad. Loaded with bacon, cheese, chopped eggs, green onions and crunchy celery, it’s sure to be a hit at your next barbecue, picnic or potluck. Short on time? Just opt for a few premade ingredients to make this easy recipe go even quicker!

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Creamy Dijon-Bacon Pasta Salad

Ingredients

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A Rescue

This is a starving kitten who was abandoned, actually physically

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tossed out of an apartment, by a couple of persons who were rapidly discovering the joys of meth addiction.

I took her in three years ago, and she has had a forever home since.

Here she is at around six months. She was a little hellion, and still is.

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Williams Moldt

It was the year 1997, a middle-aged man called his girlfriend, to let her know that he had left a party and was already on his way home, the thing is, he never came.

The man left the club at approximately 11 at night, and as I told you he called his girlfriend, told her that he was already getting into the car to go home, he was not drunk and the few witnesses who saw him stated that the man had only had one or two beers at most.

And that is the last that is known of Williams Moldt.

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The case was closed and for many of his friends and family the case had become an unsolved mystery.

Twenty-two years have passed since the disappearance of Williams, a resident of the Grand Island community in Wellington (USA) was looking at the neighborhood on Google Earth, when suddenly he saw something that caught his attention:

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Although it blended into the background, a car could apparently be seen at the bottom of the pond.

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He notified the authorities that with the help of a crane they removed the car, the car of Williams Moldt who had been missing for more than two decades, with Williams still inside.

The exact reason for how he ended up there is not known, it could have been that he lost concentration or that he was actually more drunk than the witnesses had stated and that is why he lost control of the vehicle.

What is certain is that thanks to the internet and Google Earth, an apparent mystery that had been unsolved for 22 years could be solved.

Dudley

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A best cat.

Dudley, the best cat I ever had, came to me off death row at the city animal control kennel. He was a notorious disciplinary problem, and honestly, the first six months of living with him were pretty hellish. I especially could have skipped some of his more territorial behaviors. Fortunately, he never sprayed in the house. But he did go through the cat door to the garage and shower the inside of the garage door. The first few times I stood under the door as I opened it and got covered by cat piss, I was less than amused. Generally he wasn’t cuddly, and he tended to bite and scratch. He’d been adopted out more than once and brought back before I pulled him back from euthanasia with only a few hours to go.

Eventually, he settled down — at least with me. And it got to the point where he actually did cuddle. I’d get in bed, and he’d tuck himself up into my left armpit, push his nose into my left ear, and begin snoring loudly.

Still, he insisted on going out and tearing up the neighborhood. Thankfullly, he understood that after the sun went down I wanted him home, and he didn’t abuse the priviledges. The neighbors dogs were all exceedingly frightened of him, as were the trash collectors, since he liked to chase their truck and attack them. When the city got trucks with claws to pick up the cans so nobody had to get out anymore, it was a sad day in Dudley’s life.

We had many happy years together, and to this day, he’s my gold standard of cat. The “Beware of Cat” sign still hangs in front of my house. And people who’ve lived in the neighborhood know that it wasn’t put there as a joke.

UAE

I have many Chinese friends. I’ve studied Mandarin for a year and even learnt a bit of Kung fu!

Here is an old photo of me at my friend’s birthday party:

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I bet you noticed. I was the only non-Chinese invited.

And here is another photo with my friend Li at our bachelor degree graduation (bad timing though):

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I mostly interacted with the Chinese abroad through studies or work. In the Emirates, I rarely interact with Chinese people. So I’m guessing that Emirati-Chinese interactions within the UAE are mostly at the workplace.

My view (as an Emarati and from my minimal experience) is that the Chinese have a very rich history and culture and that they are polite people.

I like the outspoken individuals who share their views and opinions. I’ve learned a lot from such Chinese people.

I also noticed that some form clusters or groups abroad and keep to themselves and hardly interact with other non-Chinese.

On a different note, I once went to buy some goods from a shop owned by Chinese in Abu Dhabi. Went in and started talking basic Mandarin. The shocked looked on their faces was priceless. Their faces turned red hahaha. This Arab wearing a white dress and a red head turban comes in and starts speaking Chinese. We kept laughing later on.

Naoto Matsumura

Naoto Matsumura, who was one of the people involved in the Fukushima disaster, has stayed behind. He was feeding stray animals:

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Naoto Matsumura

And helping to take care of the environment:

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He continues to put himself at risk and give back, tending to wildlife. Thousands of animals had already died while locked in cages, and he rushed to save as many as he could:

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He is the sole inhabitant in that region. They told him he’d get sick within 20–30 years if he stayed. He figured he’d be dead by then so why not stay and help the animals out:

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Why China will become more prosperous after this…

In reference to a series of Western Media article painting and predicting the ultimate collapse of China, and the lynching of President Xi Peng…

To Quote:

Their boycott represents one of the most widespread acts of public defiance in China. Despite efforts from internet censors to quash the news, collectives of homeowners have started or threatened to boycott in 326 properties, according to a crowdsourced list. By some estimates, they could affect about $222 billion of home loans, or roughly 4 percent of outstanding mortgages.
The boycotts are also a sign of a growing economic fallout as China reckons with the impacts of its Covid restrictions. The country’s economy is on track for its slowest growth in decades. The real estate market, which drives about one-third of China’s economic activity, has proved particularly vulnerable.

And a response from a long-time Chinese, China “Watcher”…

China is the only country dare to address such real estate over values problem due to speculative profit manipulation by the 0.1%. The outcome if such problems is not address:

1) unaffordable housing, low home ownership, rising number of working poor and homeless population

2) when households spend so much on mortgages repayment or rental, the average people will have less money for food, health care, children education, and others. And thus a lost in consumption power = sluggish economy and income inequality = lost of financial ability to get marriage and have children = aging population

3) high rental and high housing cost also generate high cost of doing business and cost of living = inflation = DEMAND for wage rise = further rising cost for everything = lower PPP = unattractive investment environments for manufacturing = unsustainable economy

4) In the West, politicians dare not face the consequences of expected real estate bubbles burst, so they deliberately keep to bubble expanding by encouraging more and more overseas migrants to support the consumption economy and property market, and not releasing the equal amount of new land for housing to support the increased population, and thus keep the real estate market pricing continues to expand. As a result, a declining middle class and expanding population living in poverty.

5) In the crusader west, if the people default on mortgage repayment, they will soon lost their home and become homeless. Such as the massive foreclosure across the US during the 2008 GFC and the cash rich billionaires will took the opportunity to take control of more real estate at bargain price. And push up the market price against for the cash rich new migrants =, more local population poverty and homelessness.

However, the CCP tackle the rising housing market head on. The current drastic drop in housing price across China is an deliberate policy induce market adjustment.

As a result, some Chinese people refused to live on a negative wealth property , and refused to pay their mortgage.

The people oriented CCP understand their pain and is brainstorming to sort out the issues.

Once the issues resolved, the policy objectives of housing affordable will be achieved, inequality reduced, people happiness and satisfaction with government and society will enhance.

With real estate price down, the cost of running a business in China will further reduce. The condition for attracting more FDI investment will be strengthen, social stability will be even more solid, people with less financial stress will be more willing to spend on other things, more babies will be affordable. the country will become the magnet to the rest of the world.

Chinese people will love their country and their government more.

Cheers
Chua

Wealth

I’m not going to post an actual picture but one of my neighbors dresses and looks almost identical to Richard from Silicon Valley:

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And his house looks like:

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The starting price for a home in this neighborhood is around 2.5M and his home is probably worth closer to 4M.

And he dresses this way every single day…

And he is not alone…

Almost every other person in my neighborhood dresses in the same casual attire void of any branding and logos. Do they look like “bums”? No, but they definitely don’t dress in a manner that says, “hey, look at me”.

If you ran into my neighbor on the street, you would probably not give him a second look and if you did, you probably would assume he is going to have trouble making this month’s rent lol…

What is funny is that less than a mile away there are a lot of small condos and you constantly see the women living there carrying LV bags and guys sporting all sort of clothing with high-end branding, while most of them are living paycheck-to-paycheck.

I have noticed that the wealthy don’t seem to feel that it’s necessary to bring attention to the fact that they are wealthy and those that wish they were wealthy, want to appear in a manner that makes them look wealthy. It’s quite amusing.

Then there is the super wealthy and most of them will only wear branded clothing that they have a vested interest in. In other words, unless they own the company, or at least a part of it, they aren’t going to walk around advertising their competitors. But that’s on an entirely other level 🙂

Here is the way I see it…

If we are truly honest with ourselves, there are probably only 2 or 3 things that you are REALLY into and you should feel free to spend your hard earned money on those things.

So if you are into fashion, by all means… buy and wear the clothing that you like.

Where the issues start is when you begin spending money on things that you don’t really care about because you want to impress other people.

That’s something most wealthy people simply don’t do. If they aren’t into shoes, they aren’t going to spend 1k on a pair of Gucci loafers. Regardless if they can easily afford it or not. While someone else will max out their credit card so they can try and impress someone that they don’t even like…

So whether it’s clothes, watches, cars or whatever… if you are truly into it and if you have the means to enjoy those luxuries, go for it. Just forget about the rest of the stuff you don’t really care about. At the end of the day, the only person you should be worried about impressing is yourself.

Tent Cities Are Taking Over Vast Stretches Of Our Major Cities (And It Is Only Going To Get Worse)

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If brighter days are ahead for the U.S. economy, why are so many tent cities popping up all over the nation?  At this point things are so bad that even the New York Times is admitting that “America’s homelessness problem has the makings of an acute crisis”.  That article goes on to explain that our homeless population is steadily rising.  Tonight, hundreds of thousands of our fellow Americans will be sleeping in tents, under bridges, in overcrowded shelters or in their vehicles.  Of course there are many that are so addicted to drugs or alcohol that they just sleep wherever they end up passing out.  This is a tragedy that is growing with each passing day, and it is only going to get worse in the months ahead as the U.S. economy slows down even more.

Earlier today, I was truly stunned by a Fox News article about what is going on in Portland right now.  Tent cities are literally taking over entire neighborhoods, and many residents are “resorting to selling their homes” as a result…

Residents in a Portland, Oregon, neighborhood are resorting to selling their homes and moving due to homeless encampments right outside their front doors.

“It’s a little scary because I know there is mental illness and that concerns me,” North Portland resident Maria Inocencio told KGW8.

Residents of North Portland said at least three families on one street have left in recent days due to the homeless camps, and KGW8 reported seeing for-sale signs up and down streets.

Portland was once such a beautiful place, but now it has literally been transformed into a hellhole.

Needless to say, Portland is far from alone.  From Seattle all the way down to San Diego, communities all along the west coast are being plagued by relentlessly growing encampments.  In many cases, such encampments are magnets for drug addicts and other societal outcasts.

But this is not just a west coast problem.

Let me give you are couple of examples.  In recent weeks, tent cities have been popping up all over Pittsburgh

“We want immediate action. We want to see people in homes. There’s a humane way to deal with homelessness,” said Pittsburgh City Council president Theresa Kail-Smith.

Homeless camps are popping up all over the Northside.

You’ll see them on the Riverfront Trail to Millvale.

Another makeshift tent city popped up underneath the Andy Warhol Bridge.

And in Fayetteville, North Carolina one burgeoning homeless camp recently made news because it features quite a few registered sex offenders…

There are 843 registered sex offenders living in Cumberland County. For dozens in Fayetteville, their home is a tent alongside the road.

Deputies in the Sheriff’s Office Sex Offender Registration Enforcement Unit (SOREU) learned the group of offenders are homeless and stay in a tent community along where the busy Martin Luther King Jr. Freeway (Highway 87) goes over Gillespie Street. Some live under the overpass while others live in a nearby field beside Gillespie Street.

From coast to coast, this is becoming an enormous issue.

And the truth is that it is only going to intensify as the months roll along.

In 2008 and 2009, millions of Americans lost their jobs as the economy plunged into a major downturn.

Once those people lost their jobs, many of them could no longer afford their homes and soon found themselves on the streets.

I wish that we would never have to see anything like that again.  It was truly a very dark chapter in our history, and countless people had their lives turned completely upside down.

Unfortunately, it is starting to happen again.

As I detailed earlier this month, large companies are starting to lay off workers in substantial numbers.

This even includes Facebook.  This week, we learned that Facebook recently used a very unique method to lay off one group of workers…

A group of about 60 contractors who work with Facebook learned they were laid off this week after they were chosen ‘at random’ by an algorithm.

The layoffs are the latest example of Big Tech reining in spending and hiring, as just days ago Apple let go of about 100 recruiters.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also recently said he will weed out underperforming employees with ‘aggressive performance reviews’ as the company braces for a deep economic turndown.

I suppose that is one way to avoid personal responsibility for firing someone.

“Don’t blame me – it was the algorithm”.

If a big corporation that is swimming in cash like Facebook already feels forced to “thin the herd”, I think that is a very bad sign for the employment market as a whole.

In the months ahead, I think that there will be a lot more layoffs all over the country.

And this comes at a time when the housing market is starting to collapse.

Existing home sales in the United States have now fallen for six months in a row, and the numbers for the month of July were downright depressing

Sales of previously owned homes fell nearly 6% in July compared with June, according to a monthly report from the National Association of Realtors.

The sales count declined to a seasonally adjusted annualized rate of 4.81 million units, the group added. It is the slowest sales pace since November 2015, with the exception of a brief plunge at the beginning of the Covid pandemic.

Sales dropped about 20% from the same month a year ago.

I anticipated that home sales would be lower than last July, but a 20 percent drop is pretty catastrophic.

And as the Federal Reserve continues to raise interest rates, it is probably inevitable that the numbers will get even worse.

The stage is being set for a historic economic meltdown, and I would encourage you to do what you can to get prepared for it.

2008 and 2009 were extremely bitter.

What is coming will likely be even worse.

And as the economy deteriorates, tent cities will continue to take over more neighborhoods all over America.

But don’t look down on those that are living in tents.

With a run of bad luck, you could be one of them too.

Apple and Foxconn will be forced to rely ONLY on Taiwan supplies of IC’s

Taiwanese electronics manufacturer and Apple supplier Foxconn will likely be forced to back out of a $800 million investment in Chinese chipmaker and foundry operator Tsinghua Unigroup, thanks to rapidly deteriorating international relations.
The government in Taiwan was already considering fining Foxconn around $835,000 for failing to secure regulatory approval on the investment. But now, reports have emerged that Taiwanese national security officials want the whole thing called off altogether.

From HERE

China Warns U.S. Over Sailing Warships Through Taiwan Strait

China’s ambassador to Washington, Qin Gang, said Tuesday that China viewed such Taiwan transits as an escalation by the U.S. and an effort to support the “separatist” government in Taipei. He delivered the warning after Senator Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, wrapped up the second trip to the island in less than two weeks by a U.S. congressional delegation.

“The US side has done too much and going too far in this region,” Qin said in response to a question about potential naval patrols. “I do call on our American colleagues to refrain, to exercise restraint, not to do anything to escalate the tension. So if there’s any moves damaging China’s territorial integrity and sovereignty, so China will respond. China will respond.”

The Biden administration has said it WOULD conduct air and maritime transits through the Taiwan Strait after China responded to Pelosi’s trip with a series of military drills around the island, including likely firing ballistic missiles over Taipei. The U.S. has long held that such transits, like congressional visits, are consistent with its “one China” policy not to formally recognize the democratically elected government in Taipei.

Article HERE

Older folk

As I am 73, I am going to share my experience.

Three 1/2 years ago my dog, Homie, crossed over the 🌈 Bridge. I missed him terribly, but decided not to get another dog as I have ambulatory issues and had fallen several times while walking him.

I have always had dogs and cats and love them equally, so I went to the local Animal Shelter and told the receptionist I wanted to meet the oldest cat they had, or the one hardest to adopt out.. They took me to meet a slender long-legged tuxedo cat who had been surrendered several months before.. her card said she was 15, declawed, spayed, her name was Spooky, and they didn’t want her anymore. I changed her name to Schatzi (German for Treasure or Darling) because she is a Diva!

About 3 weeks later, I was on the porch talking to my son when this little tabby tom cat climbed up in my lap and I heard, plain as day, I been ‘bandoned’ will you be my Mommy and I’m Hungry.. I found out later that this little skinny guy, covered in fleas, was about 3–4 months old and had been left in our little trailer park when the woman who owned him moved. I named him Mickey.

He is almost 4 and she is close to 19. I love them both very much and they sleep with me.. They give me a reason to get up every day and enrich this old lady’s life!

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German air force sending warplanes to fly around Taiwan and intimidate China

Amid the tense situation in the Taiwan Strait, the German air force sent fighter jets to Asia for the first time on Tuesday (Aug. 16) to take part in exercises in Australia and will also fly near Taiwan, marking the largest overseas deployment of German military aircraft since WW II.

Six German Eurofighter Typhoons took off from an airbase in the southeastern German state of Bavaria on Monday evening (Aug. 15). Their first stop was Singapore, covering a distance of 12,800 kilometers within 24 hours with the help of three A330 aerial tankers. The squadron is scheduled to fly to Australia to take part in a 17-nation joint military exercise from late August to September dubbed “Pitch Black.”

At the end of September, the squadron will head north from Singapore. After visiting Japan and South Korea, the fighter jets will begin the long journey back to Germany and will fly in “airspace adjacent” to Taiwan along the way, reported CNA.

In order to carry out the mission, which is code-named “Rapid Pacific 2022,” the German air force will also dispatch four A400M transport aircraft, bringing the total number of aircraft to 13 with 250 officers and enlisted men participating. This is the first time the German air force has flown aircraft to the Indo-Pacific since its founding in 1956.

German fighters will fly through the airspace near Taiwan at a sensitive time when the situation in the Taiwan Strait is tense with daily People’s Liberation Army (PLA) intrusions across the median line following a visit by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Aug. 2-3. German air force chief, Ingo Gerhartz, was cited by DW as saying that the fighters will “barely touch” the South China Sea, and will not pass through the Taiwan Strait as they stick to international routes.

Regarding the flight path of the jets near Taiwan, “The South China Sea, Taiwan — these are obviously the sticking points in the region,” said Gerhartz. He then denied “sending any threatening message towards China” by participating in the war games in Australia.

From HERE

Having lived in China for about 4 years now and in the USA for over 14 years I think I’m well qualified to shed some light on this matter.

And since I’m neither Chinese nor a Westerner, you can be assured I won’t be sugar-coating anything or favor one over the other. These are simply my observations.

The biggest difference I discovered between the two, at a fundamental level is their priorities. Chinese culture tends to prioritize the result or the end whereas Western society prioritizes the process or the means.

China is Outcome-Driven

To put it very bluntly, China cares more about money than the west. The ideal outcome that every Chinese person strives for is to have more money. Yes, money is EXTREMELY important in Chinese culture because it guarantees security for the family. They have no social safety net to fall back on. And the memories of the difficult times is still fresh in the minds of the older generations.

This is why it is extremely important in Chinese culture to have your own house and car to show people that you have wealth. You’ve made it. How you attain that wealth is not really important or up for discussion, as long as you reach that status or checkmark. Life is brutal and unforgiving. It is a culture where they respect power and money more than anything else.

Chinese are also more productive and industrious at the business level. There is less red tape or regulations to deal with so they get $hit done. Competition is fierce because everyone is hustling to outgrow and out-compete and out-produce you. The Chinese are remarkably pragmatic and solution-oriented people.

Since Chinese culture focuses on results, people tend to be more successful in life. They are good at “obtaining” things like permits, quotas, meeting deadlines or requirements, etc.

The West is System-Driven

While China is an outcome-driven culture, the west is a system-driven one. The outcome is important, but what’s more important in western culture is the processes and the art that you use to reach that outcome.

That is why in the west it’s taboo to ask someone how much he/she makes. What’s more important is what the person does for a living.

In business, the Chinese will focus on reducing costs and increasing efficiency while Westerners, especially Europeans, will care more about how that product is made and provide valuable experiences with that product.

To illustrate this let’s look at watches. The Quartz watch was perfected by the Japanese, an eastern culture similar to the Chinese. It was revolutionary because it was more precise than mechanical watches. A perfect example of focusing on the outcome. The desired outcome of the watch is to tell the time as accurately as possible at the lowest cost. Japan delivers. However, can a Casio G-Shock watch evoke the same kind of experience and emotion as a Rolex or a Vacheron Constantin can? Probably not. Even though they are less accurate, there’s something special about these mechanical watches in how they are made and the history that a Casio can never compete with.

In western culture feelings or experiences are important while they are suppressed in eastern cultures. Westerners will say things like “how are you feeling today?” “how do you feel about bla bla bla?” etc. This is rare in China. The west has a more literary and artistic output from the west.

Living in Asia I noticed how westerners are just wired differently from East Asians. They will have tons of small talk even at work, talking about the news or some difficulties they encountered on their way to work that day, trivial affairs that are never really the topic of conversation among the Chinese. For the Chinese, they made it to work on time, there’s nothing more to say on the matter.

Since western culture focuses on the how, it is an extremely legalistic or litigious society. In the west, a company must abide by certain regulations or codes. For example, they have to follow specific animal protection laws when making leather products. So generally it’s more costly to get things done in the west. That’s why so many businesses have moved their productions to China where the regulations are lax.

Westerners also tend to be more inquisitive. Science has traditionally been a forte of western culture. And science is really about taking things apart and learning how they work, learning the processes and the mechanics. While westerners are very good at discovering new ideas, the theoretical department, the Chinese are experts at commercializing those ideas and implementing them in a practical setting.

To sum up the global economy today: The west supplies the designs, China implements those designs. Be it iPhones or Shanghai skyscrapers.

Collectivism vs Individualism

The second biggest difference between China and the west is that the former is a collectivist or conformist society, while the latter is an individualistic society.

China as a whole is much more unified and centralized than the west. The Chinese practice conformity to a truly remarkable extent, largely due to its Confucius and Communist past. You could be thousands of miles away in a different city in China and still expect to find the same kind of architecture, shops, signage, amenities, etc. There’s both the upside and downside to this. It can be a tad boring to see the same stuff everywhere you go, but it affords a certain level of convenience. This is why I think there is a stronger sense of national identity in China.

The West is more individualistic and this is reflected in the political landscape. Europe is a fragmented continent. It is divided into many small countries which are in turn divided into many small regions and towns. And each of these regions and towns has its distinct culture, architecture, customs, and sometimes even languages.

For example, Scotland has its own separate unique identity that is different from the UK or Europe. And Scotland is a country of only about 5 million people. Many medium-sized cities in China have more people than the entire country of Scotland. The same goes for regions like Wales, Northern Ireland, Cornwall, Andalucia, Catalunya, Bavaria, Veneto, Flanders, etc.

Mango

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Mango

You shouldn’t, unless your life style will prevent you from giving the traumatized cat a good life. When I went to the shelter to find a new cat, they told me about Mango. Mango was rescued from the street, in a big city, as part of a litter of kittens, whose mother had been killed. They found the six week old kittens next to the dead mother, and the bloody bat that was used to bash the mother’s brain by some horrible human.

She was just so terrified of everything. Especially, humans. Can you blame her?

They tried to foster her with families, but she couldn’t adjust to kids, other pets, noise or humans. When I arrived at the shelter, they had her in a cage, in the lobby, in an attempt to socialize her. She was visibly shaking. Since I lived alone with no kids, I agreed to adopt her. For the first month, she rarely came out from under the guest room bed… but slowly and surely she came around.

That was 13 years ago. Does she still jump off the couch and hide when I sneeze? Yup. Are there friends and family that have NEVER actually seen her? Yup. She doesn’t like strangers. Does she loudly howl, like I are putting her in boiling oil, when I try to coax/trick her into a large dog kennel (cat carriers are too hard to get her into) to go to the vet? Yup.

But, I have never regretted adopting her. Or her adopting me.

‘Kids-for-cash’ scandal judges ordered to pay more than $288 million to nearly 300 victims

Two former Pennsylvania judges who ran a scheme to send children to for-profit prisons for kickbacks have been ordered to pay more than $US200 million ($288 million) to their victims in one of the worst judicial scandals in US history.

Article HERE

Murphy

A friend of ours was gassing up her SUV at the Murphy’s gas station one morning when she heard a kitten crying. She and the station attendant searched for the kitten, including opening the engine compartment of the vehicle, but they couldn’t find it and then it went silent, After a few more minutes of not finding the cat she gave up and drove 14 miles to home.

When she got home and turned off the vehicle, she could hear the kitten crying again. Once again searched and this time found a five week old kitten in the spare wheel under the rear of the SUV. Happily the little booger had not fallen out on the way home.

She had a lot of dogs and didn’t think it would go well for the kitten at her house, so she called my wife and asked if we wanted it. We did but we were 50 miles away in another city at medical appointments and couldn’t come fetch it right away.

So we called our veterinarian and asked if our friend could drop the kitten at the clinic and would the vet examine it and treat necessary, and we would pick it up and pay on our way home from the other city.

We have several critters already and it’s been pointed out to me that there are low cost Vaccination clinics in our town That would make it cheaper for us to get our animals their annual shots. But I always take them to our vet for annual exams as well as the shots because I want to maintain medical history of the animals and the relationship with the veterinarian in case I ever need “something extra,“ and this was one of those times. The vet readily agreed to have the cat dropped off without payment in advance and he would take care of it.

When we got to the vet’s office in late afternoon he was holding the kitten with a big grin on his face. I don’t want to post his photo on the Internet without his permission, but we got a great picture of him and the kitten. He told us it was in good shape overall, he gave it fluids for dehydration, it was negative for feline leukemia, and he treated some scratches on its nose. When our friend had dropped it off the staff asked for a name to put on its records; she came up with “Murphy” after the gas station.

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We kept the name and took Murphy home to meet his new sister, another five-week-old kitten that we had found under a bush at my office a couple weeks earlier. The two instantly bonded and grew up together playing and raising hell around the house like kittens do. After his 14 mile ride under the SUV, Murphy turned into a Joe-Cool-nothing-really-bothers-me kind of cat. Except aerosol sprays. Those are scary.

How the Taiwan lobby helped pave the way for Pelosi’s trip – Responsible Statecraft

US Chip 4 plan hands South Korea a devil’s choice

Washington puts Seoul on the spot with proposed chip making alliance, which ultimately threatens to torpedo Korea’s trade relations with China

SEOUL – Samsung Electronics heir and de facto leader Lee Jae-yong was today (August 12) granted a presidential pardon in a corruption case, lifting a legal cloud that has hung over his head since 2017.

Though Lee has been out of prison and conducting executive duties since last year, the head of South Korea’s national flagship firm might, feasibly, wish he could take a lower profile just now.

He is back on the front pages just as Korea Inc’s worst nightmare is becoming manifest: It is being forced into choosing between key trade partner China and strategic ally the United States.

Washington is seeking a decision from Seoul, within weeks, on whether to join the nascent “Chip 4” semiconductor alliance that would bind together American, Japanese, South Korean and Taiwanese chipmakers while deliberately excluding China.

DID NOT WORK. -MM

South Korea strives to secure China ties amid US pressure on chips, missile system

Biden admin unlikely to force Seoul to sever ties with Chinese market: expert
Published: Aug 08, 2022 11:32 PM
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With South Korean Foreign Minister Park Jin set to kick off a three-day visit to Qingdao in East China’s Shandong Province on Monday, the first high-level official to travel to China since South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol took office in May, on the same day, South Korean media cited an unnamed presidential official as saying that the country has decided to attend a preliminary meeting for “Chip 4” – an alliance created by the US that some believe aims to set up a semiconductor barrier against the Chinese mainland.

The simultaneous message also illustrated South Korea’s political dilemma in striking a balance between China and the US in the face of increasing pressure from Washington, analysts said, warning that South Korea may face more losses if it totally sides with the US to counter China.

Chinese State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi will meet with Park during his stay in China, according to information from the Chinese Foreign Ministry. China is willing to take Park’s visit as an opportunity to strengthen communication, focus on cooperation and promote the healthy and stable trend of bilateral relations.

Before coming to China, Park told a press conference that his trip would be a chance to reduce misunderstandings and boost cooperation in areas including trade, health and the environment, Reuters reported.

Park’s visit to China has drawn close attention in China and South Korea, as the two countries are about to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations. At the same time, there are many new and old issues that need to be urgently discussed, and compared to its more frequent interactions with the US, Japan and Europe, the new South Korean government has had fewer exchanges with China, Wang Junsheng, a research fellow of East Asian studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, told the Global Times.

Wang noted that Korean Peninsula issues, the chip pact among the US, Japan, South Korea and the island of Taiwan, and the deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) missile system will be covered in bilateral meetings between senior officials from the two sides.

Li Kaisheng, a research fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, pointed out that Park’s visit was made against the backdrop of the China-US tensions after US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s provocative visit to the island of Taiwan and the Biden administration actively pulling China’s neighbors into a small circle to counter China.

Despite China’s stern warnings, Pelosi made a highly provocative visit to the island of Taiwan last week. When she traveled to South Korea after the Taiwan visit, South Korean President Yoon had a phone conversation instead of meeting her in person. This arrangement was interpreted by some analysts as an attempt to avoid the diplomatic fallout of Pelosi’s visit to the island of Taiwan.

However, Li told the Global Times that the Yoon government has taken a value-oriented diplomatic approach, and given the differences between China and South Korea in their political systems and ideologies, many challenges to bilateral relations remain.

Li noted that the deployment of THAAD and whether South Korea will cooperate with the US in deploying more missiles are all uncertainties hampering China-South Korea relations.

China had urged the Yoon government to keep the preceding Moon Jae-in government’s “Three No’s” policy on the THAAD issue and act prudently on major issues concerning its neighbors’ security, after Park said at the National Assembly in July that the “Three No’s” policy is not a commitment to China.

Analysts warned that the Yoon government should understand the seriousness of the THAAD issue, as it had sparked outrage among Chinese people and pushed bilateral relations to their lowest in decades, adding that  South Korea should not sacrifice its interests to follow the US.

However, the US has always wanted South Korea to be the bridgehead to counter China and will put more pressure on the Yoon government, analysts said, adding that given the closeness in trade relations between China and South Korea, leaning to the US will not fit South Korea’s interests.

Balancing its relations with China and the US amid a more complicated geopolitical situation has and will be one of the major challenges for Yoon, said Xiang Haoyu, a research fellow at the China Institute of International Studies, noting that the heated discussions in South Korea over whether to join the Chip 4 alliance with the US, Japan and the island of Taiwan is one example reflecting South Korea’s plight.

Dilemma for South Korea

On the same day that Park is scheduled to start his visit to China, South Korean media reported that Seoul has agreed to hold a preliminary meeting to lay down the ground rules for joining the Chip 4 alliance with Washington next month. Yoon said on Monday that the government is looking into the issue in the light of national interests.

Facing pressure from the US, the South Korean government has shown a tendency to sit on the fence, as it doesn’t want to offend the US by refusing to be part of the Chip 4 alliance, but at the same time does not want to provoke China’s anger, which might hurt their economic interests in the vast mainland market, analysts said.

Xiang Ligang, an independent tech analyst, told the Global Times that there is a  high chance that South Korea will eventually become a member of the alliance, but the country is very likely to become a counterforce to the US within the alliance on many issues, in that it will object to many requirements raised by the US to crack down on China’s chip market.

South Korea has massive interests related to the mainland market when it comes to the semiconductor industry. For example, it exports a vast amount of chips to China annually, including mobile phone chips and memory chips.

The Chinese mainland and Hong Kong accounted for 60 percent of South Korea’s semiconductor exports last year, a report of the Korea Times noted.

Observers pointed out that South Korea may also raise more requirements on reducing the negative impact on its chip exports to China, for example on export and technology restrictions.

Xiang Ligang said that it’s unlikely that the Biden administration will use very tough measures to force South Korea or other regions to sever themselves from the Chinese market, as it doesn’t have enough political influence to control its allies at will.

Moreover, South Korea knows that cutting its chip business ties with China might prompt the latter to speed up its chip technological development. And once China manages to produce high-end chips at very low prices, those products will easily flood the South Korean market, as cars and home appliances have done in the past, Ma Jihua, a veteran semiconductor observer, told the Global Times.

Besides, friction on the chip issue could also trigger backlash on other products such as daily consumption products, which would bring huge economic losses to South Korea, whose economic development in recent years has been hugely dependent on business interactions with the Chinese market.

South Korean public opinion also differs on topics related to the chip pact, with many people opposed to cutting the chip business or decoupling with China, as such moves do not meet South Korea’s interests, Xiang Haoyu pointed out, noting that although the Yoon government is aligned with the US, the latest drop in Yoon’s approval rating showed that conservative forces in South Korea cannot fully represent the public will.

The conservative party may lean toward the US but South Korea’s overall national strategy and public opinion will not overwhelmingly follow. This is also why China can work with South Korea to expand cooperation and shared interests, said Xiang Haoyu, noting that South Korea should also know that due to its own long-term strategic interests, it has little room to play the geopolitical card of closely following the US in countering China.

Solomon Islands moving ahead with contentious plan to build Huawei mobile phone towers with $100 million loan from Beijing

The Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance and Treasury McKinnie Dentana told reporters in Honiara on Wednesday that the towers would expand and improve mobile coverage across the country.

He also confirmed it would be funded by a concessional loan from China, the first time the government of Solomon Islands has borrowed from one of Beijing’s main overseas lending institutions.

“The project will be fully funded with a concessional loan facility under the EXIM Bank of China of approximately CNY448.9 million ($96 million) at a rate of 1 per cent interest rate for a period of 20 years,” he said.

Mr Dentana said the government would roll out the project over the next three years, and wanted to complete almost half of the towers ahead of the Pacific Games, which will be held in Honiara in November next year.

“This will help people in rural areas to enjoy the Games, even if they don’t come to Honiara,” he said.

He also claimed external advisers had told the government they would be able to repay the loan with revenue generated from the towers.

“The independent review of the project shows the project would generate sufficient revenue for the government to fully repay both the principal loan amount and the interest cost within the loan period,” he said.

From HERE

The article continues to describe what a bad and terrible deal the Solomon's are getting using inferior Chinese equipment, "debt trap", and all the rest. Ah. Standard boilerplate anti-China stuff, don't you know. -MM

Big shout out to officer Mike Carpinelli

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Here is a photo that captures the character of of a great police officer.

Almost 2 years ago a father took this photo when he was driving his son to rehab in St Lawrence.

His son decided he didn’t want to go and took the father’s phone and called 911 and told them he was being kidnapped.

When the man got pulled over, his son got out of the vehicle and the state trooper had stood on the side of the road with his addict son for about an hour patiently convincing him to let him drive him to rehab.

The father was astounded at the Sheriff and Trooper’s dedication to the cause of addiction. Officer’s successfully got the son in a vehicle without force and drove him to St Lawrence from Lowville about an hour and a half drive.

He literally walked in with him to the rehab. Here is a tribute to great, loving public servants that truly care.

Big shout out to officer Mike Carpinelli

Taiwan biggest underground society leader openly pledges to take action to overthrow the DPP regime if the PLA begin military action.

He said, we are not going to allow the DPP behaviour resulted in many died in bombing. As far as my knowledge is concerned, He is the second one openly make such statement.

Umbry

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Umbry

This is Umbry, the love of my life.

I took him into my care 2 years ago because his owner didn’t want him.

I wasn’t a cat person before, I was in fact scared of cat.

I took him in out of pity.

He was skinny, with flu and full of fleas. My initial plan was actually to nurse him to health and put him up for adoption.

But I grew fond of him and eventually decided not to.

Last year, Umbry was diagnosed with Wet Neuro FIP.

Almost every cat owner knows this is an almost always a fatal disease.

When I got the news, I was bawling my eyes out at the clinic but I didn’t want to give up on him. I did some research and found that there is an antiviral treatment by Dr Pederson.

The fact that the treatment is still not approved makes it harder to source and even more expensive.

I had to fork out all of my savings and took a part time job to fund his treatment.

He had to go through 84 days of daily injection which was very painful to watch.

It really was a difficult time for both of us.

But it has been over 5 months now since his last day of treatment and Umbry is looking as healthy and as happy as ever.

I hope he continues to stay healthy for a very long time and grow old with me.

Rufus saves a kitten

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As any New Yorker will tell you, you see a lot of unexpected stuff on the subway. But one woman saw something that left her truly inspired.

Gillian Rogers is the founder of Pet Rescue Squad Inc, and is passionate about helping animals. And last week, she saw something that gave her hope.

She was riding the 1 train home when she spotted a man on the other side of the car, with something in his lap.

She was amazed to realize it was a tiny kitten, wrapped in a towel. Not only that, but the man was bottle-feeding the cat.

“You could see the caring,” Gillian told The Dodo

. “My heart felt like it was going to explode to see someone with that much caring. He was so in the moment.”

“The kitten was looking up at him as he fed her. It was so heartwarming.”

Rainwater everywhere on Earth unsafe to drink due to ‘forever chemicals’, study finds

Rainwater almost everywhere on Earth has unsafe levels of ‘forever chemicals’, according to new research by scientific experts.

Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) are a large family of human-made chemicals that don’t occur in nature. They are known as ‘forever chemicals’ because they don’t break down in the environment.

They have non-stick or stain repellent properties so can be found in household items like food packaging, electronics, cosmetics and cookware.

But now researchers at the University of Stockholm have found them in rainwater in most locations on the planet – including Antarctica. There is no safe space to escape them.

Article found HERE

“A week ago I saw a post on Facebook from a young boy in my town: ‘Hi I’m an autistic 19-year-old living on my own and my bike was stolen opposite the McDonalds by High Street. My Grandma got me this bike for Christmas. I have been feeling really down about this as there aren’t many things I enjoy in life. My bike is one of those things; thank you to anyone that may be able to help I really do appreciate any information.’

I shared it on Facebook and Twitter but suspected deep down that the chance of him getting his bike back were slim. I had had my own one stolen a few months ago and now the weather was nicer I had been thinking about replacing it. I set myself a budget and had started researching what kind of bike to get.

I went to bed that night so sad that someone would steal his bike that was so precious. I woke up wondering about a GoFundMe but thought it would take too long to do and I didn’t want to waste any time. So I decided to use the money I’d set aside for my shiny new folding Carrera Hybrid and get him a new bike instead. Because life is short and kindness can be paid forward. I’m only HERE because of countless random acts of kindness, and I try to do what I can to repay them into the world. I can save up and get myself another bike, another day. AND I got an excellent cuddle and they’re priceless.

I didn’t just do this for Harvey. I did it for the people who donated to the food bank for me. I did it for the friend who bought SB some shoes when his rubbed sores onto his feet but I had no money for a new one. I did it because a stranger replaced my buggy when it was stolen off my doorstep. I did it for the friend who paid my rent instead of having work done on her house when I was under threat of eviction.

I did it for the church who left 2 bags for life of food on my doorstep when I wrote Hunger Hurts. For the firefighter who left me a mini Christmas tree with decorations on my back porch a week before Christmas having clocked during a routine safety check that we had nothing at all. I did it for the friend that drove me to a party to have a good time when I was freezing and starving and hadn’t seen anyone for days because I was hiding away. Kindness saved my life. Again and again. I have some to spare.

Do good things. Smile at people. Hug your kids. Phone your family. Check on your neighbours. Give your gloves to that freezing cold homeless person. Hold doors open. Ask the crying person if they are okay instead of looking awkward. Rebuild your communities by looking out for each other. Think of others. Connect. Respond. Love. In the end only kindness matters.”

Great Links for the Greenville Post

You will find one or two MM posts in the mix. -MM

 

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A “clear the shelter” day

Locally, we have a “clear the shelter” day when they waive all of the fees normally associated with an adoption. It’s a great opportunity, though of course the reason is unfortunate – too many abandoned/homeless animals.

I had decided to go to my local shelter to look for a cat – we had shop cats at work for years, and the last one, who was extraordinary, lived the life of Riley after he had kidney issues, commuting to work with me every day, and living it up at home. After he died, I wasn’t really ready to jump back in, but something told me this was an opportunity that I shouldn’t miss.

So, off to the shelter on Saturday afternoon. As I wheeled in, there was a crowd of almost 100 people standing outside, waiting to go in, where the shelter was going to assign you a “pet counselor” to guide you to all the animals. I’d been there before, and this was an incredibly awkward way to look at the animals, and I found out some people had been waiting over an hour just to take a look. Disappointed, I thought, “Well, maybe next time.”

Then I remembered that PetSmart was listed as an alternate location for this event, and there was one between the shelter and my house, so I decided to stop by. I looked into the cat area, and this little guy was there.

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His breathing rate was about 110, and he looked miserable. His shelter name was Sebastian, and I walked around the store to check out the price of litter and supplies, then walked back over and looked at him again.

He didn’t even really look at me, but he needed someone who wouldn’t mind that. The volunteer said, “He’s really sweet, would you like to hold him?” I told her that I didn’t need to. He needed the kind of home I was ready to give him, and I’d come back after I bought the food and litter to pick him up.

She said, “He might hiss, but he won’t bite you, I promise.

A lot of people have looked at him, but no one wants him because he’s so scared.” I told her that was fine, and that if she could get his paperwork ready, I’d be back in a moment for him.

This medium haired guy was in his box when I got back, and I took as little time as possible to file his paperwork, pick up his tags, and take him to the car.

When I got him inside, I slowly turned the carrier on its side. And this is what I saw.

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He was breathing so fast, and I could see his heart racing, but when I moved to scratch him on the chest, he started purring, but he didn’t want to come out at all.

I left him in peace, in a darkened room, and when I came back, the box was empty.

He had fled to some secret place under the bed, so I set out food, water and the litter box right next to the edge of the bed and left him to settle in.

Then, as luck would have it, this happened –

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Straight line winds of about 80 mph tore through the back yard, and this poor little terrified guy was stuck right inside the room where a freight train and explosive sounding tree destruction happened. Not two hours after getting home.

I felt so bad for him, and honestly, didn’t see him for about a day and a half, but food was gone, and water was gone, and the litter box was used, so he must have been OK.

He progressed for a week at a time, first, not running off when I looked at him if he was eating, then walking around if I was in the room, and one day he jumped onto the bed, and let me pet him.

Three weeks of letting him do it his way, changing from a scared little cat into one with more and more confidence.

He kept his shelter name, though there’s no easy way to shorten it, and it turns out that it doesn’t matter anyway – he is the most cat like cat I have ever had. He is capable of ignoring me completely if he wants to, no matter what he is doing.

It’s infuriating, and hilarious, because he’s also so happy to hang out now. Most of the time, this is his general posture.

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Belly up, and sleeping so he can race around at 3 in the morning like his tail is on fire. And that medium hair description at the shelter?

Nope, long, long, fluffy, flies through the air in tufts no matter how much you brush him hair. He is literally with me in some form no matter where I go, no matter how great a lint brush I might have.

I was taken by a fearful cat that needed someone who didn’t mind. Best decision I ever made.

Italian Meatball Pasta

This Italian Meatball Pasta is an easy-to-make skillet dinner with Hamburger Helper™ Beef Pasta, precooked Italian-style meatballs and juicy tomatoes. Serve up a heaping plate of meatball pasta topped with melty cheese for a deliciously flavorful weeknight meal. And don’t be surprised if people start asking for seconds after a single bite!

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Italian Meatball Pasta

Ingredients

  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 1/2 cup chopped onion
  • 2 cups hot water
  • 1/2 cup milk
  • 1 can (14.5 oz) petite diced tomatoes, drained
  • 1 box (5.9 oz) Hamburger Helper™ Beef Pasta
  • 32 frozen cooked Italian-style meatballs (1/2 oz each)
  • 1 cup shredded Italian cheese blend (4 oz)
  • Chopped fresh parsley leaves, if desired

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How The Threat Of China Was Made In The USA

A fantastic video.

Western mainstream media are spreading a great deal of anti-China propaganda disinformation. They’re literally brainwashing Westerners into hating China.

Sorry to say but you are one of the victims. You’ve been taken for a fool; you are being manipulated.

Second, whether or not you care about China is entirely up to you. Perhaps China isn’t at all important to you, to your daily life.

Third, there is no reason to be afraid of China. China is a peaceful and benevolent nation.

  • China hasn’t fought a single war since 1979.
  • China is pursuing diplomacy throughout the Middle East rather than bombing the shit out of the region. Recently, China signed a 25-year cooperation deal with Iran.
  • China is negotiating with the Taliban instead of invading and occupying Afghanistan for 20 years.
  • China is leading the ASEAN countries in peaceful trade through RCEP, the world’s largest free trade bloc.
  • China is helping countries in the Global South, as well as in Europe, build their infrastructure through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Over 149 countries have already signed up; that’s 3/4 of the world’s nations!
  • China is helping countries in the Global South vaccinate their population as the rich Western nations abandoned them through vaccine hoarding.
  • China is inviting all nations to participate in its space station program, including the United States. Recall that USA banned China from the ISS.
  • China is trying to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine, countries with whom China has excellent relations. What is USA doing? Sending arms to Ukraine, throwing fuel to the fire and prolonging the war.
  • China is forging powerful economic and security alliances in BRI, BRICS, RCEP, SCO, etc. China is trying to unite the world, not divide it (as the Americans are doing).

You have more reasons to be afraid of America, which wages endless wars around the world, which sanctions numerous countries that don’t comply with US foreign policy, which interferes in foreign elections and politics, which overthrows foreign regimes it doesn’t like.

Fourth, if you really care to know the truth about China, there is only one way: go visit China. See China with your own eyes. Bypass Western mainstream media.

Your own eyes will confirm that Western media have been lying to you. China is not evil. Life in China is very good. The people are happy. The country is peaceful and safe.

  • You can visit Xinjiang and learn about the Uyghurs.
  • You can visit Hong Kong and see how well the city is doing now that the violent protesters have been booted out of China.
  • You can visit Tibet and witness the beauty of its culture.
  • You can visit Shenzhen and Chengdu and Shanghai and see the technological wonders.

China is the fourth most popular country in the world for tourism!

The future looks beautiful!

From Chua…

China patiently extenting massive goodwill to the Taiwanese people over the decades to win heart and mind. As a result, there are more than 2 million Taiwanese living and working in China (but they are not allow to vote outside Taiwan) 

And the Taiwanese economy is growing with massive trade surplus:

Mainland China and Hong Kong accounted for 42% of Taiwan's exports last year, while the U.S. had a 15% share, according to official Taiwan data accessed through Wind Information.

About 22% of Taiwan's imports last year came from mainland China and Hong Kong, versus 10% from the U.S., official data showed.

Many Taiwan-based companies operate factories in mainland China. In 2021, Taiwan businesses received $200.1 billion in U.S. export orders, according to the U.S. Congressional Research Service. (note: their factories in China make even more money from the rest of the world including the Chinese Market)

Taiwan’s Trade with China is FAR LARGER than trade with the USA

However, the US and Japan offer Taiwanese politicians personal gain in speech fees, kick back.... So, today, China have to get rid of these handful of low quality, selfish, me-only foreign puppets controlling the island through the capitalist democratic system by withdrawing the massive goodwill to cause pain across Taiwan, and use massive military to surround the island and cause further pains and soon may do it by restricting their energy supply etc.

Within the next few weeks, if the US fail to carryout the threat of sending its aircraft carrier through the Taiwan Straits, the will in the island US puppets will collapsed.

And...

The PLA will definitely won't allow the crusader warships the freedom of navigation across their inner water this time. 

US will be proven a paper tiger 🐯 soon.

When live become harder and harder in Taiwan, the power of the patriotic forces will growth, a colour revolution will be in the making. A peaceful reunification will be ensured.

We should have a little gathering in Taiwan on the day of reunification to celebrate the day that spell the drastic and permanent decline of the world most war monger crusader nations in the past 2 century.

When the world most evil crusader is down, the Palestinian liberation day will no longer be a dream, Latin America will have their freedom back and the economy will growth through the win win belts and roads, NATO may be dismantle and Europe will be back to a lot of small countries completing with each other to trade with the outside world.

Once they (Europe) don't act collectively against the rest of the world, they will become less aggressive and learn to deal with the world through mutual respect, and trade through value for money.

Europe will learn that collective bullying and looting for profit have no future. They will learn to work hard and living within their means.

Russian - Ukraine conflict will be resolved with Ukraine surrender and begin rebuilding as part of Russia. The flow of Russian gas to Europe will resume

The world will abandon the US currency and the US economy will collapsed, followed by the military, and a with drawal of US overseas military bases will be a must to cut expenses. The country will be split into a few parts. The rich states would like to keep their tax money to themselves by declaring independent, the black, the white, the Latino etc with no love with each other will form gangs and split their territory and power base.

Once the crusader nations across the world can no longer threaten the world, The world can spend less in military and use the money to improve the environment and standard of living of the average population.
The 21st century world already looks beautiful to me.

Taiwanese Government pledges to “fight to the last Taiwanese” in defense of American “democracy”

Sounds familiar, eh?

You just can’t make this stuff up. It’s so surreal.

Here we will review what’s going on with the “Taiwan Issue”, and cover some other article in geopolitics, society and culture. For after all, this is a historical time. Historians will look back at this moment in time as “the great change”, it represents the start of the “big after”…

U.S. Congressional delegation arrives in Taiwan for two-day visit

08/14/2022 08:42 PM
CNA English News (An American propaganda outlet)

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Taipei, Aug. 14 (CNA) A U.S. Congressional delegation led by Democratic Senator Ed Markey arrived in Taiwan on Sunday for a two-day visit that will involve meetings with top-level Taiwanese officials.

In a press release, the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) said the other members of the delegation are representatives John Garamendi (D-CA), Alan Lowenthal (D-CA), Don Beyer (D-VA) and Aumua Amata Coleman Radewagen (R-AS).

Their two-day visit is part of a larger visit to the Asia-Pacific region, the AIT said, and will include meetings with senior Taiwan leaders to “discuss U.S.-Taiwan relations, regional security, trade and investment, global supply chains, climate change, and other significant issues of mutual interest.”

In a statement, Taiwan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) welcomed the bipartisan and bicameral delegation, which it said demonstrated the United States’ firm support amid China’s recent escalation of regional tensions.

During the delegation’s visit, the U.S. lawmakers will meet with President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), attend a banquet with Foreign Minister Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) and visit the Legislative Yuan’s Foreign and National Defense Committee to discuss Taiwan-U.S. security and economic relations, MOFA said.

Meanwhile, Presidential Office Spokesperson Xavier Chang (張惇涵) said that the visit “once again demonstrated the U.S. Congress’ resolute support for Taiwan,” as well as its commitment to working with democratic partners to maintain peace and stability in the Taiwan Strait and the region.

The delegation’s trip comes less than two weeks after U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi concluded a 19-hour visit to the island on Aug. 3, the first visit by a sitting U.S. House speaker since 1997.

In an apparent response to that trip, Beijing launched an unprecedented set of live-fire military drills in six maritime zones encircling Taiwan from Aug. 4. to Aug. 7

(By Huang Ya-shih and Matthew Mazzetta)

Enditem/AW

> Chinese Version

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Related News

Aug. 12: 22 Chinese warplanes and six warships spotted near Taiwan: MND

Aug. 11: Taiwan not seeking conflict escalation but will defend sovereignty: Tsai

Aug. 11: Taiwan’s allies to condemn China at U.N.: SVG prime minister

Aug. 11: Chinese white paper limits room for Taiwan post-unification: expert

Aug. 11: Government to spend NT$200 million on marketing food amid China bans

Aug. 10: MAC slams ‘wishful thinking’ and ‘lies’ in China’s Taiwan white paper

Aug. 9: 45 warplanes, 10 warships spotted near Taiwan as PLA drills continue

Aug. 9: Taiwan’s diplomatic ties stable amid possible China retaliation: FM

Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs

Aug. 8: Chinese drills aligned with plans for taking Taiwan by force: Expert

Aug. 7: Taiwan to hold live-fire artillery drills to test combat readiness

Aug. 6: U.S., Japan, Australia urge China to stop military drills

Aug. 6: Defense ministry says China simulating attack on Taiwan

Aug. 5: China’s drills a ‘new normal’ aimed at changing status quo: Experts

Aug. 4: President Tsai calls China’s live-fire drills ‘irresponsible act’

Aug. 4: China fires 11 Dongfeng ballistic missiles into waters off Taiwan: MND

Aug. 4: China cannot stop world leaders from visiting Taiwan: Pelosi

Aug. 3: China’s military exercises aimed at blockading Taiwan: defense ministry

Aug. 3: China imposes new trade restrictions on Taiwan as Pelosi visits

Aug. 2: Visit to honor ‘unwavering’ U.S. commitment to Taiwan: Pelosi

Here Is Why 37 Percent Of U.S. Farmers In The Western Half Of The Country Are Killing Their Own Crops

Food doesn’t just magically show up at the grocery store.  If farmers and ranchers do not produce it, we do not eat.  I know that I have been writing about the rapidly growing global food crisis a lot lately, but that is because this really is a big deal.  All over the globe, agricultural production is going to be below expectations in 2022.  As a result, those of us that live in wealthy countries will pay much more for food in 2023, while many of those that live in poor countries will either deeply suffer or die.  In fact, children are already dropping dead from starvation in large numbers in some parts of Africa, but most Americans haven’t heard about this because they aren’t showing it on the news.

Of course this isn’t just a crisis for poor countries on the other side of the planet.

Here in the United States, the food that is not being grown in 2022 will cause immense economic pain in 2023.

There are 17 western states that collectively produce almost half of our food, and right now those 17 states are being absolutely devastated by the worst multi-year megadrought in 1,200 years…

The 17 states including and north of Texas, up along the Central Plains to North Dakota and west to California are vital to the U.S. agricultural sector, supporting nearly half of the nation’s $364 billion production by value. This includes 74% of beef cattle, responsible (in total) for 18% of U.S. agricultural production by value; 50% of dairy production, responsible (in total) for 11% of U.S. agricultural production by value, over 80% of wheat production by value and over 70% of vegetable, fruit and tree nut production by value. Drought conditions, which have persisted well into 2022, put production of these commodities at risk, along with the stability of farms, ranches and local economies reliant on crops, livestock and downstream products and services for income.

The American Farm Bureau Federation wanted to know how farmers in that half of the nation are faring during this drought, and so they conducted a survey.

And what they discovered is extremely alarming.  Here is one example

This year’s drought conditions are taking a harder toll than last year’s, as 37% of farmers said they are plowing through and killing existing crops that won’t reach maturity because of dry conditions.

Do you understand what that is saying?

37 percent of all farmers in the western half of the country are killing their own crops because those crops won’t even reach maturity because of the endless drought.

I was absolutely floored when I first saw that figure.

And that same survey also found that staggering numbers of ranchers in some western states have been selling off their cattle…

Farmers in Texas are being forced to sell off their cattle herds earlier than normal due to extreme drought — as water sources dry out and grass burns up. Farmers in the Lone Star state reported the largest reduction in herd size, down 50%, followed by New Mexico and Oregon at 43% and 41% respectively.

The cattle that are being slaughtered now are helping to stabilize short-term beef prices.

But in the long run we will see a much smaller cattle population and far higher beef prices.

In fact, some beef producers in Oklahoma are warning that “cheap ground beef could eventually top $50 per pound”

Thanks to the unending economic symptoms of the pandemic and 2022’s inflation double-punch, average beef prices are currently about twice what they were in 2019. Add in the deepening widespread drought, a shortage of hay and feed, skyrocketing prices, transport costs, and various other metrics, some Southwest Oklahoma beef producers suggest cheap ground beef could eventually top $50 per pound.

Could you imagine paying 50 dollars for a pound of ground beef?

Even now, we are being told that U.S. consumers are increasingly switching to chicken

Inflation-weary shoppers are pulling back on buying pricey steaks and switching to cheaper chicken at the grocery store.

Tyson (TSN), the meat processing giant, said Monday that “demand for chicken is extremely strong,” while demand for its higher-priced cuts of beef has softened.

Of course it isn’t just the United States that is moving into unprecedented territory.

We just learned that there will be crop losses in France of up to 35 percent

France’s fruit and vegetable crops have fallen by nearly 35% due to the extreme drought this summer, Jacques Rouchausse, president of the French national association of vegetable producers, Legumes de France, said on Tuesday.

“We have losses on the yields. For the moment, we estimate that these losses are between 25% and 35 percent. We have to stress that if we want food sovereignty, if we want food security, we really have to find ways to continue producing on our territory,” Rouchausse said on air of Radio Franceinfo.

Yesterday, I discussed the fact that there will be crop losses in the UK of up to 50 percent in some cases.

And in Italy, it is being reported that there will be crop losses of up to 80 percent in certain areas.

As global food supplies get tighter and tighter, the wealthy countries will have enough money to import the food that they need.

But what will the poorer countries do?

At this point, tens of millions of Africans are already dealing with severe food shortages

Drought is gripping the Horn of Africa, leaving some 26 million people facing food shortages in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia over the next six months. More than 7 million livestock animals have already been wiped out. Across East Africa as a whole, some 50 million people are facing acute food insecurity.

This is a crisis that isn’t going away.

Not too long ago, UN Secretary General António Guterres openly admitted that it is likely that there will be “multiple famines” in 2023…

In a video message to the meeting, UN chief António Guterres commended the partners for joining forces at what he called “this critical moment”, noting that the number of people who are severely food insecure has doubled in the last two years.

“We face a real risk of multiple famines this year. And next year could be even worse. But we can avoid this catastrophe if we act now,” said Mr. Guterres.

Of course this is exactly what I have been saying for years.

Global famine is coming.  There is no way to avoid it, and it is going to turn the entire global economy upside down.

When you know that a global famine is coming, the prudent thing to do is to get prepared.  So I hope that all of you are taking action while there is still time to do so.

Cheeseburger Mac Soup

All your favorite cheeseburger flavors in this creamy soup topped with chopped dill pickles.

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Cheeseburger Mac Soup

Ingredients

  • 1 lb lean (at least 80%) ground beef
  • 1/2 cup chopped onion
  • 1 clove garlic, finely chopped
  • 1/4 teaspoon ground black pepper
  • 1 box Hamburger Helper™ cheeseburger macaroni
  • 1 can (15 oz) Muir Glen™ organic diced tomatoes, undrained
  • 2 cups milk
  • 2 cups water
  • 3 tablespoons ketchup
  • 1 tablespoon yellow mustard
  • 2 cups shredded American cheese (8 oz)
  • 1/2 cup chopped dill pickles

Steps

  • 1
    In 4-quart Dutch oven or saucepan, cook beef, onion, garlic and pepper over medium-high heat 5 to 7 minutes, stirring occasionally, until no longer pink; drain.
  • 2
    Stir in sauce mix (from Hamburger Helper™ box), tomatoes, milk, water, ketchup and mustard. Heat to boiling, stirring constantly.
  • 3
    Reduce heat. Cover; simmer 10 minutes, stirring occasionally.
  • 4
    Stir in uncooked pasta (from Hamburger Helper™ box) and cheese. Cover; cook 15 minutes longer, stirring occasionally or until thoroughly heated. Top with pickles.

Reminder on China’s “White Paper”

China released a “white paper” on the Taiwan reunification issue. It’s comprehensive and explicit. China has explicitly explained – in great detail – what will happen, and how.

  • Taiwan will be reunified with China just like HK and Macao have been.
  • Taiwan will keep it’s own governance system.
  • Taiwan is not permitted to possess political parties that promote separatist movements. They must be disbanded, and then banned.
  • Taiwan will have complete access to the great resources of the mainland China.
  • Taiwanese citizens get automatic citizenship and all residency documents will automatically be converted to regional “household registers”.
  • Taiwan will have significant representation in the Chinese government.
  • China will not hurt, harm, or attack any Taiwanese citizen, as they are Chinese citizens, UNLESS they are working in behalf of a foreign government.
  • There can be ZERO foreign interference.
  • If there is foreign interference, China will go to war against that foreign nation and all forces, and “tricks” at it’s disposal will be used. There will be no restraint.
  • Any foreign interference suggesting, funding, supplying or actuating interference in the reunification process is a war-generating “red line”.
  • The foreign government will be viewed as the enemy of the reunification process. Not the Taiwanese people.

And much, much more. Of course, it’s not being reported in the Western “news”, but China has made the situation very EXPLICITLY clear.

My video on this issue is HERE

Here are two examples, and there are many more alikes if you need.

In Linyi City, east China’s Shandong Province, policeman Zeng Chang was on duty at a local primary school at 8 a.m before class today (Sept. 28). He noticed a schoolgirl standing next to the entrance for a while, seeming helpless. So he went over to see what was bothering the little girl, and found out that she got up late and her mom didn’t have enough time to tie her hair up.

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And the girl asked Zeng, “ Uncle Policeman, would you please help tie my hair up?”

Then that’s what we can see in the video: Zeng did it, skillfully, for her. And she then went into the school.

I can only find the video for the story in Chinese for you. “警察叔叔,你能帮我扎一下头发吗?”

Also in the link, there is another similar story, but happened a bit earlier in another province.

In Haining City, east China’s Zhejiang Province on September 19, policeman Shen Ren told fairy tales to a 4-year-old girl, who was unexpectedly locked out of her home.

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Shen and his colleagues then contacted the parents and kept her company as she waited. To relieve her stress, Shen read her four storybooks until her parents returned.

And actually, when my son was little and we often told him whenever he met any problems outside without us, the first one to seek for help should be the police.

So, if all parents are willing to trust their kids to the police, do you think we’ll be afraid of them? I think, only those with hidden reasons would be.

Will Catastrophic Crop Losses In 2022 Lead To Unprecedented Shortages In 2023?

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Crops are failing all over the globe this summer, but most people don’t even know that this is happening because the big television news channels aren’t talking much about it.  Instead, they remain intensely focused on politics day after day.  Without a doubt, the political realm is important, but there should also be plenty of time to discuss a raging global crisis which is going to deeply affect all of us.  The food that is not being grown this year is not going to be on our plates next year, but the vast majority of the population doesn’t understand this.  They see plenty of food in the stores now and they just assume that everything is going to be okay.

Unfortunately, everything is not going to be okay.  Over in the UK, a major British news source is warning of “widespread crop failures across England”…

Experts have warned of widespread crop failures across England, as charities and farmers criticised water companies for dithering over hosepipe bans despite drought being declared across much of the country.

So what sort of losses are we talking about?

Well, it is now being projected that losses could reach up to 50 percent for a wide variety of crops…

Half of the potato crop is expected to fail as it cannot be irrigated, and even crops that are usually drought-tolerant, such as maize, have been failing.

The group was told “irrigation options are diminishing with reservoirs being emptied fast”, and losses of 10-50% are expected for crops including carrots, onions, sugar beet, apples and hops. Milk production is also down nationally because of a lack of food for cows, and wildfires are putting large areas of farmland at risk.

The British are assuming that they will just get enough food to feed their population from someone else.

But that is what everyone else is assuming too.

As global food supplies get tighter and tighter, the wealthy countries will buy up food at elevated prices, and many poor countries will be left out and will suffer tremendously.

Things are even worse in Italy.  As I covered the other day, some farmers in Italy have already lost “up to 80% of their harvest”

In Italy, farmers in some parts of the country have lost up to 80% of their harvest this year due to severe weather anomalies, the Coldretti farming association said Thursday.

So where will Italy get enough food to feed their population?

Just like the British, the plan to get it from someone else.

But who is the someone else going to be?

Here in the United States, agricultural production is going to be way below expectations because of the endless drought that is plaguing about half the country.

Just yesterday, I wrote an article about how tomato production is being absolutely devastated in the state of California.

It is being reported that tomato paste prices have already increased by up to 80 percent, and we are being warned that if rain doesn’t come soon there simply will not be enough tomatoes to meet demand.

That means that there won’t be enough spaghetti sauce and pizza sauce to go around.

For a lot of my readers, that statement is really going to hit home.

Over in Texas, the cotton crop is going to be bitterly disappointing this year

US cotton prices continued to surge above the boom days of 2010-11 after a massive crop estimate cut by the USDA, shocking Wall Street analysts and traders, due primarily to a megadrought scorching farmland of Texas, according to Bloomberg.

Futures in New York for December delivery were up 4.5% to $1.1359 a pound and up more than 21% this month.

Normally, there would be vast fields of cotton being grown all over the state at this time of the summer.

But this year many of those fields look like barren wastelands

Last Friday, the USDA’s bigger-than-expected cut to domestic cotton crop stunned many on Wall Street. Crop output plunged to 12.57 million bales, the lowest in a decade. The cut also pushed down the US from the world’s third-largest producer to the world’s fourth.

Barbera said the western Texas region (around Lubbock and Lamesa), the epicenter of America’s cotton-growing belt, has “literally nothing” in fields that are just desert sand. He said fields that had drip irrigation were harvestable, but ones that weren’t weren’t salvageable.

So are we going to experience a shortage of cotton in 2023?

If so, that would be really bad news.  Cotton is used in thousands of different products.

Without enough water, we cannot grow the things that we need.

I don’t know why this is so hard for people to grasp.

And the truth is that our entire way of life depends on sufficient supplies of fresh water.  Right now, there are seven western states that are facing the prospect of emergency water restrictions in the months ahead because the Colorado River is rapidly drying up

Two months ago, federal officials took the unprecedented step of telling the seven states that depend on Colorado River water to prepare for emergency cuts next year to prevent reservoirs from dropping to dangerously low levels.

The states and managers of affected water agencies were told to come up with plans to reduce water use drastically, by 2 million to 4 million acre-feet, by mid-August. After weeks of negotiations, which some participants say have at times grown tense and acrimonious, the parties have yet to reach an agreement.

Nobody wants to give up their water.

In the end, all of those states are going to have to make severe sacrifices.  At a minimum, the amount of water being taken from the Colorado River needs to be reduced by 2 million acre-feet, and that is an amount of water that is four times greater than the entire city of Los Angeles uses in an entire year

The latest round of closed-door talks occurred Thursday in Denver. Participants said they wouldn’t publicly discuss the offers of water reductions made, but they acknowledged those offers have amounted to far less than 2 million acre-feet. For comparison, the total annual water use of Los Angeles is nearly 500,000 acre-feet.

Needless to say, this is going to affect agriculture in a major way.

Farmers and ranchers use a tremendous amount of water, and they are about to be hit with restrictions that will be extraordinarily painful.

Everything that I have discussed in this article is happening in the context of a horrifying global food crisis that is getting worse with each passing month.

But don’t worry, the elite have a plan.

For a long time they have touted the benefits of eating bugs, and now such products are actually on our store shelves

On Sunday, carnivore diet guru Dr. Shawn Baker tweeted a photo of a bag of cheddar cheese puffs, only instead of being made of corn meal these snack foods were chock-full of insect protein.

The snack item from Canadian brand Actually Foods states the puffs are “powered by crickets” to the tune of 10 grams of protein per serving.

The ingredients label on the back of the bag indicates “organic cricket flour” was used in the puffs’ production, and an allergy warning on the back of the bag also cautions, “People who are allergic to shellfish may also be allergic to crickets.”

Doesn’t that sound delicious?

Instead of suffering through the nightmarish global famines that are coming, we can all eat “cricket puffs” instead.

Unfortunately, the truth is that they can’t make enough “cricket puffs” to rescue us from the “perfect storm” that has hit global food production.

There simply is not going to be enough food for everyone in 2023, and it will be the poorest countries that will suffer the most.

Lenochka

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Lenochka

She was so little and exhausted, that she forgot her last name. She lost a whole family; mother, grandmother, elder brother…

A special group of skinny girls found her – they were going from apartment to apartment during a terrible blockade winter looking for children whose parents had died or were dying…

This is how they discovered Lenochka and could evacuate her. She didn’t remember being carried across the ice with other children in a shaking truck, she didn’t remember getting to the orphanage; she was little. Like a skinny midget with a big head on a thin neck…

And she refused to eat anymore. This is what happens with dystrophy. She was laying in bed or sitting in a chair by the stove. She was getting hot. And she kept her mouth shut. They thought Lenochka would die. Many children died already during the evacuation; severe exhaustion and no strength to live and eat. And to play. And to breathe…

One-legged topper, war veteran uncle Kolja, about twenty years old, unpacked a doll from an old towel. Somehow he cut it, folded it, sewn it and it became an ugly doll. He drew the doll’s eyes and mouth with an indelible pencil. And a crooked nose.

He gave a doll to Lenochka and seriously said:

"You, Lenochka, cradle the doll. And teach her to eat well! You are now a mommy doll. Take good care of her. "

And this Lenochka suddenly grabbed a doll and pressed it together. She began to pet her with thin hands. At dinner, she fed the doll porridge and whispered something loving to her. And in the end, she ate porridge and a piece of bread herself…

And so Lenochka slept with the doll and warmed her by the stove, hugged her, and got upset because of her. Because of an ugly doll made of an old towel with painted eyes …

The girl has survived.

Because she couldn’t die; she had to take care of the doll, you know?

HAVING SOMEONE TO TAKE CARE OF IS A HUGE LIFE FOR SOME PEOPLE.

For people like this girl was. Who later became a nurse and lived a long life. And her hands were always busy.

And she had a heart full of love.

Ukraine Artillery Hits Reactor Cooling System and Nuke Waste Containers

Despite over a week of warnings from Russia that Ukrainian forces were deliberately targeting the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant and could cause a disaster, Ukraine continued firing.  Today, artillery shells hit the cooling system for a reactor, and hit containers with nuclear waste.

This report is published at 5:08 PM eastern US time.  The attack took place about 3 hours ago.

It is not yet known (to me) if there is any reactor trouble or radiation leak from either the reactor cooling system or the nuclear waste storage containers.

One-Pot Philly Cheese Steak Mac and Cheese

The classic Philly cheese steak flavor really hit the mark in this hearty dinner. It’s a one-pot wonder that you only have to travel to your pantry to make!

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One-Pot Philly Cheese Steak Mac and Cheese

Ingredients

  • 2 tablespoons butter
  • 1/2 cup Progresso™ plain panko crispy bread crumbs
  • 1 lb extra-lean (at least 90%) ground beef
  • 2 cups thinly sliced onions
  • 2 medium green bell peppers, cut in thin bite-size strips
  • 4 teaspoons Montreal steak grill seasoning
  • 4 cups water
  • 1 lb uncooked elbow macaroni
  • 1 package (16 oz) Kraft™ Velveeta™ cheese, cut into cubes
  • 1 cup shredded provolone and mozzarella cheese blend (4 oz)

Steps

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    In 5-quart Dutch oven, melt 1 tablespoon of the butter over medium heat. Add bread crumbs; cook and stir 2 to 5 minutes or until toasted. Transfer to small bowl, and wipe out pan.
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    In same Dutch oven, melt remaining 1 tablespoon butter over medium-high heat. Add beef, onions, bell peppers and grill seasoning; cook 6 to 8 minutes or until beef is cooked through and onions are tender. Pour mixture into large bowl; cover with foil to keep warm.
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    Stir water and macaroni into Dutch oven; heat to boiling over high heat. Reduce heat to medium; cook 4 to 6 minutes, stirring frequently, until macaroni is cooked through. Do not drain.
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    Stir beef mixture into macaroni mixture; cook and stir 1 minute to heat through. Remove from heat; stir in cheese cubes until melted. Top with shredded cheese blend. Cover and let stand 3 to 5 minutes or until cheese melts. Top with toasted bread crumbs.

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A few days ago, I was surfing the Internet and there is a video that caught my eyes. It is a video that uploaded in bilibilli and named Take a look at a restaurant for poor people living in Shenzhen.

And then I found that people filmed this type of video a lot on this website. I checked out a few videos. These videos are all in Chinese. So, here, I’ll show you guys what do poor people in China eat in my words with some screenshots from those videos.

This video producer chooses the cheapest restaurant on a Dianping app (similar to YELP). That is a Henan province noodle restaurant.

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Apart from this, another vlogger also explored a very cheap cafeteria in Shenzhen, merely priced 15 RMB per person. The following pictures are some dishes in this buffet. To be honest, it is not too much to ask for three times as much(said by the producer).

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Isn’t it unbelievable?! It’s only 15 yuan for this much food.

However, that is not cheap enough. Have you ever had noodles for 3 yuan a bowl? In Shenzhen, there is a place that people do daily-wage jobs and the restaurants here sell noodles for only 3 yuan.

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The definition of poor people in this answer may differ from the typical concept. These people have jobs in a metropolis city but depending on selling off their physical power for a low pay, maybe 100 yuan a day.

Fortunately, they can enjoy the food at a vey low cost in China.

And FYI, if you are interested in what do Chinese people eat for breakfast, you can watch this video.

Here is the link:

People Are Going To Go Absolutely Insane When Food Prices Double Or Triple From Current Levels

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If you think that people are getting pretty crazy now, just wait until the cost of food skyrockets to levels that hardly anyone ever anticipated.  Most people don’t realize this, but to a very large degree we are still eating the food that was grown in 2021.  Unfortunately for all of us, far less food is being grown in 2022 than originally projected, and that is going to cause immense global stress in 2023.  Nightmarish droughts are absolutely devastating crops in the United States and Europe, the major war that is happening on the other side of the globe is greatly restricting the flow of agricultural goods from Ukraine, and the fact that some fertilizers have now more than quadrupled in price is deeply affecting farmers all over the planet.  In 2023, there is going to be a lot less food to go around, and we are all going to pay a lot more for it.  Needless to say, this is not good news.

Of course the cost of living has already gotten completely out of control.  According to Zero Hedge, the median rent in the United States has now surpassed $2,000 a month for the very first time…

The cost of rent in the U.S. is moving higher at the highest pace in three decades, the report notes, blowing past a median of $2,000 per month for the first time ever. Rents are now above where they were prior to the pandemic in most major cities.

Areas just outside cities, which saw a large influx of new renters during the pandemic, have seen their rents rise disproportionately higher. People returning to large cities, post-pandemic, have also not helped prices cool off.

Who can afford to pay $2,000 a month for rent?

According to the Social Security Administration, the median yearly income for U.S. workers in 2020 was just $34,612.04.

No wonder most families need to have more than one income just to survive these days.

This is what I mean when I say that our standard of living is being systematically destroyed.

Many people have to work as hard as they possibly can just to pay the bills each month.

Yes, the top 10 percent are still doing well, but the vast majority of the country is really struggling.

And that is why the soaring price of food is such a big deal right now.  The latest numbers that we just got from the government tell us that the cost of “food at home” has been rising at the fastest rate since 1979

The food-at-home index, which represents food purchased in places like grocery stores for consumption at home, jumped by an annual 13.1 percent, which is the fastest pace since March 1979.

“Consumers are getting a break at the gas pump, but not at the grocery store,” Bankrate Chief Financial Analyst Greg McBride told The Epoch Times in an emailed statement. “Food prices, and especially costs for food at home, continue to soar, rising at the fastest pace in more than 43 years.”

But the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.

What we see at the grocery store right now is largely a reflection of what happened last year.

Let me give you an example that illustrates what I am talking about.

In the last few days, the mainstream media has been buzzing about the fact that there is now a potato shortage in Idaho.  But what most people don’t realize is that this shortage was caused by a tremendous heat wave that happened last summer

Idaho has a potato shortage. If you haven’t heard about it already or noticed fewer and fewer potatoes in your grocery store’s produce section, you will soon.

So, what’s the problem? The weather. Not this year’s weather, mind you. It’s the weather from over a year ago that’s to blame.

“I’m not sure if you remember last June, but we had some just unbelievably hot temperatures here in Idaho. It did a number on our potato crop,” said Jamey Higham, president and CEO of the Idaho Potato Commission. “And so, our yields were significantly down last year.”

So did you catch that?

A bad harvest in 2021 is now being felt in the latter stages of 2022.

Looking ahead, what our farmers are experiencing right now will be felt very keenly in 2023.

For example, it is being reported that the price of some fertilizers has now more than quadrupled

“Last year [fertilizer] was around $270 per ton and now it’s over $1,400 per ton,” Meagan Kaiser, of Kaiser Family Farms and farmer-director of the United Soybean Board, told NBC’s “Nightly News with Lester Holt.”

“It’s scary. It turns my stomach a little bit to think about the amount of risk that our family farm is taking right now.”

Farmers are finding themselves forced to pass some of those costs along to customers, resulting in higher grocery prices.

When those cost increases get passed along to us in 2023, a lot of people are going to be screaming bloody murder.

But at least we will have food to eat.  On the other side of the globe, there simply will not be enough food for everyone.

For years, I have been trying to explain that global famines would inevitably be coming, but I still don’t think that it is sinking in for many people out there.

And of course famine is just one of the elements of “the perfect storm” that we are now facing.  Recently, Egon von Greyerz listed some of the other major elements…

  • Debts at levels that can never be repaid – sovereign, corporate & private
  • Epic global bubbles in stocks, bonds & property – all about to collapse
  • Major geopolitical conflicts with no desire for peace – major wars likely
  • Energy imbalances and shortages, most self inflicted
  • Food shortages leading to major famine and civil unrest
  • Inflation, leading to hyperinflation & global poverty

We have got a giant mess on our hands.

And conditions are going to get worse and worse and worse in the months ahead.

As things deteriorate, a lot of people out there are going to go completely nuts.

In fact, a lot of people are already going completely nuts.  Let me give you an example that just happened

An unidentified man reportedly set his car on fire by driving into a U.S. Capitol barricade early Sunday morning. He then got out of his car and began firing a weapon indiscriminately before shooting himself, police say.

U.S. Capitol police say officers immediately responded when they heard the sound of gunfire at roughly 4 a.m. There were no reported injuries aside from the driver.

The only reason you would do something like that is if you have lost all hope.

And in the months and years ahead, much of the general population will lose all hope.

Let us endeavor to be beacons of hope, because hope will be greatly needed during the times that are in front of us.

The biggest regret of a cat owner

My biggest regret as a cat owner is that I used to board my cat with one of those “cat hotels” in a big chain store.

When I first got Jonesy, I was traveling a LOT.

At the time, I thought cats are independent animals, and they can live happily without their owners around all the time.

So when I was out on business trips, I left Jonesy with “cat hotel”. Until one time, when the clerk told me that they were unable to get Jonesy out of his “cottage”, and they led me back to the so-called “hotel”.

It’s not a fucking hotel. It’s not even a motel. It’s the fucking shelter cages!

When Jonesy recognize me, he grabbed me, with all his little claws. And I was heartbroken.

Jonesy was a shelter cat when I adopted him.

And all those times I traveled, he must have thought I abandoned him and he’s back to the shelter.

I never board my cats with those fucking chain stores again.

Now when I travel, I hire a sitter. She’s super nice. She came to my place once a day, clean the litter box, replenish the food and water.

I still feel horrible for doing that to Jonesy the poor boy.

Please don’t board your cats with those big chain stores. Find a sitter, or find a reliable family-owned cat foster place.

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Friendship

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Friendship

This is maybe not your usual friendship. I was 22 years old, and that man was 65 years old. He was my real friend, the best friend I ever had and I took him for granted.

To avoid any doubt, no, there never been any sexual activity involved. (If you have doubt in your mind, please be considerate enough not to leave rude comments, we are talking about a person who has passed away)

We met online when I was looking for a job, he hired me as his marketing manager for his business. I worked for him for 2 years but unfortunately the business didn’t take off, but the friendship remained.

He took me under his wing, he taught me about life, I accepted my bipolar outbreak every now and then. He supported my dreams, helped me financially, and was always there for me. He was my safety net. I moved to his place to save money as I wasn’t able to afford rent, I’ve been his roommate for 7 years.

Last year he fell off his motorbike and needed operation, he went home to UK and after a few months, he still needed some help. While he was waiting for his recovery, he caught Covid-19. A month after, he passed away in his sleep.

I called him and video chatted with him while he was in Covid ward. Everyday I checked up on him. Due to time difference, I called 3 times a day – when I woke up, when he was alert and before I went to sleep. I could only speak with him once a day but I called the nurses just to get an update.

I told him that I didn’t want to live in a world where he’s not in it. He said he knew and he will be okay. Every single day I checked up on him as I was the only person who ever called him. Never once did he say his goodbye and I didn’t want to say goodbye to him.

I promised him that I would call, but on 6 May 2020, the hospital was busy. I called the hospital 3 times a day, every day, to check up on him. They said that they will call me the next day. 2 hours later, they did call me and informed me how sorry they were that my granddad passed away in his sleep.

This picture was taken 8 years ago, a few weeks after we met. And I don’t have any other pictures of us together. I thought we had time.

You can’t choose your family, but this is the only family that I ever chose. Who thought a 22 years old Indonesian can be a best friend with a 65 years old British man?

RIP, Grandpa.

I miss you every single day, you took a huge part of me when you died.

Nigel

Three Kittens

My wife passed away last summer (not from Covid), right after things had pretty much been locked down.

We had been married over 40 years, during which we had a dog, and then two cats. The last cat died several years ago. My wife never wanted to get another, because she was afraid the cat would outlive us.

During her last couple of months, when she knew she didn’t have much time left, I let her know that after she was gone I wanted to adopt a kitten to keep me company. Actually two, so they could keep themselves company when I was working. (Even though I am 74, I still work full-time and have no plans on retiring.) She was okay with that.

So a few days after my wife passed, a friend took me to a pet adoption center. Since we had only had black and white (“tuxedo”) cats before, I was planning on getting something different. But there were three black kittens (one with white paws) in a cage who got our eye, and they were put in a small room for us to play with. They were about ten weeks old.

I immediately knew these were the ones. I couldn’t leave one behind, so I adopted all three. Two brothers and a sister.

Here they are, just after I brought them home:

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Three kittens

Here they are again, five months later. This how I wake up in the morning now.

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Wake up!

They just had their one-year birthday a couple of weeks ago. I am so glad I have them to keep me company. I never realized three kitties from the same litter could grow up to have completely different personalities.

I’ve been working from home for over a year now, and will probably continue doing so for a while longer. If I do starting going back into work, I’ll know they’ll look after each other during the day, and I’ll look forward to coming home to them in the evening.

Kaymakli Underground City

The year is 1963, a Turkish man is renovating his basement when he finds a strange old stone wall, which he promptly breaks through.

What he found was a large pitch-black dank space, a cold void behind the wall. Armed with a torch, our intrepid home renovator crawled through the hole and found a series of barrel roofed rooms, that had been carved from the volcanic bedrock.

Those first mysterious rooms turned out to be just a small section of what was actually an ancient labyrinth of living spaces, communal areas and tunnel networks, comprising 13 levels the deepest being 85 metres underground. This ancient place was large enough to house 20,000 people, a massive forgotten underground city.

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Complete with multiple wells fed from an almost unlimited source of water having vast aquifers aka subterranean lakes, directly beneath the city.

Having explored the nearest rooms and tunnels, our renovator eventually reached a narrow passageway blocked by a huge circular stone, similar to a giant millstone, only this one seemed to have been intentionally rolled into place to block further progress into the subterranean city.

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Imagine setting out to renovate your basement, perhaps intending to create your own Man Cave, but instead, you discover an ancient underground city, right beneath your house.

This is just one of several ancient underground cities that have since been discovered in this region, Kaymakli Underground City being another fantastic example, Derinkuyu and Kaymakli are linked by a well-built tunnel, many miles long.

While no exact age has been established, these large underground cities are thought to have been first built at least 2,800 years ago. But potentially the first caves in the soft volcanic bedrock could have been inhabited far earlier.

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What is certain, is that for more than a thousand years various cultures lived in these underground cities, including early Indo-Europeans, then Greek-speaking people, then the Romans interacted with these underground civilisations, then early Christians sheltered here, they expanded the city and built underground churches, chapels and even schools.

Later during the age of the Byzantine Empire, these two cities were linked together by miles of tunnels and became a thriving hidden society, a safe haven for many thousands when the Muslim Arabs raided, and later when Mongol and Steppe tribes pillaged these regions, they likely had no idea that thriving cities with vast populations were directly beneath the hooves of their steeds.

While some of these strange ancient cities built beneath the earth continued to be used until the 14th century, they were all abandoned and forgotten in the following centuries. Yet some of these cities show evidence of being briefly used since then, by Jewish and Christian groups as sanctuaries during times of horrific persecution, as recently as two hundred years ago.

How to lose with dignity.

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This is Ray Reardon.

He’s a former professional snooker player who pretty much dominated the game in the 1970s when he won the World Championship six times.

He didn’t win all the time of course particularly in his later years when his form started to fail and younger players came along.

The point is whatever the result of the match he always had a huge smile on his face. When he lost and his opponent had potted the final ball, he’d get out of his seat immediately and go over to his opponent with a wide smile on his face to shake his hand, congratulate him warmly and put his arm around his shoulders as they left the auditorium together.

I once saw him interviewed when he was asked why he had such a big smile on his face even when he’d lost. The interviewer actually said to him…

“Don’t you mind losing?” (not a great question to ask a professional sports person!).

His response was…

“Actually I hate losing more than you would know. The point is I love this sport and I see it as part of my role to promote the game and show it in a good light whenever I can. And I can't do that with an angry, upset look on my face. Snooker is bigger and more important than I am!”

Now that, ladies and gentlemen, is how to lose with dignity.

This beautiful girl is Itty bitty.

Itty bitty found me in a dope house. She was almost 3 weeks old, eyes swelled shut with infection, so starved she had no muscle left on her at all. Someone had hurt her throat so she couldn’t even meow. She broke my heart. I thought I was bringing her home to die because she was so far gone.

She held onto my shirt the whole ride home.

I was determined to at least give her a full belly and a warm place with lots of love the time she had left.

She’s a fighter though and here she is today.

My sweet Itty bitty.

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My sweet Itty bitty.

Russia warns of ‘direct military clash’ with US

Washington’s behavior on the world stage risks direct conflict between the nuclear states, the Russian embassy in the US has warned.

“Today, the United States continues to act with no regard to other countries’ security and interests, which contributes to an increase in nuclear risks,” the embassy said in a statement on its Telegram channel.

“The [US’] steps to further engage in a hybrid confrontation with Russia in the context of the Ukrainian crisis are fraught with unpredictable escalation and a direct military clash of nuclear powers.”

The embassy noted that Washington has recently withdrawn from two key arms control agreements, the 1987 Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, which banned certain classes of land-based missiles, and the 1992 Treaty on Open Skies, which allowed for surveillance flights over each other’s territories.

The embassy urged the US to “take a closer look at its own nuclear policy instead of making unfounded accusations against the countries whose worldviews do not coincide with the American ones.”

“Our country faithfully fulfills its obligations as a nuclear-weapon state and makes every effort to reduce nuclear risks,” the diplomats said.

The statement comes after the US accused Moscow of using the Zaporozhye nuclear power plant in southern Ukraine as cover for its soldiers. The plant, the largest in Europe, was seized by Russian troops during the early stages of Moscow’s military operation in Ukraine, which was launched in late February. It continues to operate with Ukrainian personnel under Russian control.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken called Russia’s action at the facility “the height of irresponsibility.” Russia and Ukraine, meanwhile, have been accusing each other of shelling the plant. According to Moscow, artillery fire by Ukrainians forces caused several fires and partial power outages this month.

Russia initiated a UN Security Council meeting last week regarding the situation around the Zaporozhye power plant. Russian envoy Vassily Nebenzia said that Moscow supports the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to inspect the facility as quickly as possible.

Finland: Everyman’s rights.

There are some in other countries, but ours are quite extensive. You can fish, pick berries/mushrooms/etc., even hunt and stay overnight no matter who owns the land. This is all free (you are being scammed if someone asks you money for this alone).You just need to be very careful not to do any harm to the nature and its animals! Pick up your thrash and do not cause any ruckus during your stay.

These rights are based on the belief that everyone should be able to enjoy nature and that it really doesn’t “belong” solely to anyone.

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Finland: Everyman’s rights.

A pickled-onion picker-upperer

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It was in a Cats’ Protection League shop in Portobello, staffed by three elderly, very refined Edinburgh ladies. The conversation wen t like this:

Me: “How much do you want for the pickled-onion picker-upperer?”

They: “Oh, is *that* what it is? We were wondering.”

Me: “Yes, it’s a pickled-onion picker-upperer.”

At that point, one of these very nice, refined old ladies picked the thing up and flexed the claw thoughtfully. “Or”, she said, “you could use it for pinching men’s bottoms in pubs.”

Deluxe Pizza Goulash

Love pizza? Trade the crust for noodles in this easy family-pleasing skillet dinner with everything in it—pepperoni, ground beef, mozzarella and more.

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Ingredients

  • 2 cups uncooked elbow macaroni (8 oz)
  • 1/2 lb lean (at least 80%) ground beef
  • 1 small onion, chopped (1/4 cup)
  • 1 package (3.5 oz) sliced pepperoni
  • 1 jar (4.5 oz) sliced mushrooms, drained
  • 2 cans (15 oz each) pizza sauce
  • 1 cup shredded mozzarella cheese (4 oz)

Steps

  • 1
    Cook and drain macaroni as directed on package.
  • 2
    Meanwhile, in 12-inch skillet, cook beef and onion over medium-high heat 5 to 7 minutes, stirring frequently, until beef is brown; drain. Stir in macaroni, pepperoni, mushrooms and pizza sauce.
  • 3
    Cover and cook over medium heat 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until hot. Remove from heat. Sprinkle with cheese. Cover and let stand 2 to 3 minutes or until cheese is melted.

A Rufus Kitty-cat

There is a feral cat that lives in an abandoned home next to me. I feed him everyday which is easy to do as he’s usually alone. One day out of nowhere he pops up with a pretty white and gray cat. Unlike him, she was super friendly and loved being held and pet. I think he brought her so that I can help him save her from the streets as she was more than likely abandoned by her family. I ended up finding her a home.

Him, he won’t let me touch him, but he’s met another girlfriend and he brings her over a lot.

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Rufus kitty

She’s the one eating. She hisses at me a lot, so it’s hard to pet her!

He’s a good boy

The October Game (full text) Ray Bradbury

The October Game || Ray Bradbury

He put the gun back into the bureau drawer and shut the drawer.

No, not that way.

Louise wouldn’t suffer.

It was very important that this thing have, above all duration. Duration through imagination.

How to prolong the suffering?

How, first of all, to bring it about?

Well. The man standing before the bedroom mirror carefully fitted his cuff-links together.

He paused long enough to hear the children run by swiftly on the street below, outside this warm two-storey house, like so many grey mice the children, like so many leaves.

By the sound of the children you knew the calendar day.

By their screams you knew what evening it was.

You knew it was very late in the year.

October.

The last day of October, with white bone masks and cut pumpkins and the smell of dropped candle wax.

No.

Things hadn’t been right for some time.

October didn’t help any.

If anything it made things worse.

He adjusted his black bow-tie.

If this were spring, he nodded slowly, quietly, emotionlessly, at his image in the mirror, then there might be a chance.

But tonight all the world was burning down into ruin.

There was no green spring, none of the freshness, none of the promise.

There was a soft running in the hall.

“That’s Marion”, he told himself. “My little one”.

All eight quiet years of her.

Never a word. Just her luminous grey eyes and her wondering little mouth.

His daughter had been in and out all evening, trying on various masks, asking him which was most terrifying, most horrible. They had both finally decided on the skeleton mask.

It was “just awful!” It would “scare the beans” from people!

Again he caught the long look of thought and deliberation he gave himself in the mirror.

He had never liked October.

Ever since he first lay in the autumn leaves before his grandmother’s house many years ago and heard the wind and sway the empty trees.

It has made him cry, without a reason.

And a little of that sadness returned each year to him.

It always went away with spring.

But, it was different tonight.

There was a feeling of autumn coming to last a million years.

There would be no spring.

He had been crying quietly all evening.

It did not show, not a vestige of it, on his face.

It was all hidden somewhere and it wouldn’t stop.

A rich syrupy smell of sweets filled the bustling house.

Louise had laid out apples in new skins of toffee; there were vast bowls of punch fresh-mixed, stringed apples in each door, scooped, vented pumpkins peering triangularly from each cold window.

There was a water tub in the centre of the living room, waiting, with a sack of apples nearby, for dunking to begin.

All that was needed was the catalyst, the inpouring of children, to start the apples bobbing, the stringed apples to penduluming in the crowded doors, the sweets to vanish, the halls to echo with fright or delight, it was all the same.

Now, the house was silent with preparation.

And just a little more than that.

Louise had managed to be in every other room save the room he was in today.

It was her very fine way of intimating, Oh look Mich, see how busy I am! So busy that when you walk into a room I’m in there’s always something I need to do in another room!

Just see how I dash about!

For a while he had played a little game with her, a nasty childish game.

When she was in the kitchen then he came to the kitchen saying, “I need a glass of water.”

After a moment, he standing, drinking water, she like a crystal witch over the caramel brew bubbling like a prehistoric mudpot on the stove, she said, “Oh, I must light the pumpkins!” and she rushed to the living room to make the pumpkins smile with light.

He came after, smiling, “I must get my pipe.”

“Oh, the cider!” she had cried, running to the dining room.

“I’ll check the cider,” he had said.

But when he tried following she ran to the bathroom and locked the door.

He stood outside the bathroom door, laughing strangely and senselessly, his pipe gone cold in his mouth, and then, tired of the game, but stubborn, he waited another five minutes.

There was not a sound from the bath.

And lest she enjoy in any way knowing that he waited outside, irritated, he suddenly jerked about and walked upstairs, whistling merrily.

At the top of the stairs he had waited.

Finally he had heard the bathroom door unlatch and she had come out and life below-stairs and resumed, as life in a jungle must resume once a terror has passed on away and the antelope return to their spring.

Now, as he finished his bow-tie and put his dark coat there was a mouserustle in the hall.

Marion appeared in the door, all skeletons in her disguise. “How do I look, Papa?”

“Fine!”

From under the mask, blonde hair showed.

From the skull sockets small blue eyes smiled.

He sighed.

Marion and Louise, the two silent denouncers of his virility, his dark power. 

alchemy had there been in Louise that took the dark of a dark man and bleached the dark brown eyes and black hair and washed and bleached the ingrown baby all during the period before birth until the child was born, Marion, blonde, blue-eyed, ruddy-cheeked?

Sometimes he suspected that Louise had conceived the child as an idea, completely asexual, an immaculate conception of contemptuous mind and cell.

As a firm rebuke to him she had produced a child in her own image, and, to top it, she had somehow fixed the doctor so he shook his head and said, “Sorry, Mr. Wilder, your wife will never have another child.

This is the last one.” “And I wanted a boy,” Mich had said eight years ago.

He almost bent to take hold of Marion now, in her skull mask.

He felt an inexplicable rush of pity for her, because she had never had a father’s love, only the crushing, holding love of a loveless mother.

But most of all he pitied himself, that somehow he had not made the most of a bad birth, enjoyed his daughter for herself, regardless of her not being dark and a son and like himself.

Somewhere he had missed out.

Other things being equal, he would have loved the child.

But Louise hadn’t wanted a child, anyway, in the first place.

She had been frightened of the idea of birth.

He had forced the child on her, and from that night, all through the year until the agony of the birth itself, Louise had lived in another part of the house.

She had expected to die with the forced child.

It had been very easy for Louise to hate this husband who so wanted a son that he gave his only wife over to the mortuary. But — Louise had lived.

And in triumph!

Her eyes, the day he came to the hospital, were cold. I’m alive they said.

And I have a blonde daughter! Just look!

And when he had put out a hand to touch, the mother had turned away to conspire with her new pink daughter-child — away from that dark forcing murderer.

It had all been so beautifully ironic.

His selfishness deserved it. But now it was October again.

There had been other Octobers and when he thought of the long winter he had been filled with horror year after year to think of the endless months mortared into the house by an insane fall of snow, trapped with a woman and child, neither of whom loved him, for months on end.

During the eight years there had been respites.

In spring and summer you got out, walked, picnicked; these were desperate solutions to the desperate problem of a hated man.

But, in winter, the hikes and picnics and escapes fell away with leaves.

Life, like a tree, stood empty, the fruit picked, the sap run to earth.

Yes, you invited people in, but people were hard to get in winter with blizzards and all.

Once he had been clever enough to save for a Florida trip.

They had gone south.

He had walked in the open.

But now, the eighth winter coming, he knew things were finally at an end.

He simply could not wear this one through.

There was an acid walled off in him that slowly had eaten through tissue and bone over the years, and now, tonight, it would reach the wild explosive in him and all would be over!

There was a mad ringing of the bell below.

In the hall, Louise went to see. Marion, without a word, ran down to greet the first arrivals.

There were shouts and hilarity.

He walked to the top of the stairs.

Louise was below, taking wraps.

She was tall and slender and blonde to the point of whiteness, laughing down upon the new children.

He hesitated. What was all this? The years? The boredom of living? Where had it gone wrong?

Certainly not with the birth of the child alone.

But it had been a symbol of all their tensions, he imagined. His jealousies and his business failures and all the rotten rest of it.

Why didn’t he just turn, pack a suitcase, and leave? No. Not without hurting Louise as much as she had hurt him.

It was simple as that.

Divorce wouldn’t hurt her at all. It would simply be an end to numb indecision. If he thought divorce would give her pleasure in any way he would stay married the rest of his life to her, for damned spite.

No he must hurt her. F

igure some way, perhaps, to take Marion away from her, legally. Yes. That was it. That would hurt most of all.

To take Marion away. “Hello down there!”

He descended the stairs beaming. Louise didn’t look up. “Hi, Mr Wilder!” The children shouted, waved, as he came down.

By ten o’clock the doorbell had stopped ringing, the apples were bitten from stringed doors, the pink faces were wiped dry from the apple bobbling, napkins were smeared with toffee and punch, and he, the husband, with pleasant efficiency had taken over.

He took the party right out of Louise’s hands.

He ran about talking to the twenty children and the twelve parents who had come and were happy with the special spiked cider he had fixed them.

He supervised pin the tail on the donkey, spin the bottle, musical chairs, and all the rest, amid fits of shouting laughter.

Then, in the triangular-eyed pumpkin shine, all house lights out, he cried, “Hush! Follow me!” tiptoeing towards the cellar.

The parents, on the outer periphery of the costumed riot, commented to each other, nodding at the clever husband, speaking to the lucky wife.

How well he got on with children, they said. The children, crowded after the husband, squealing.

“The cellar!” he cried. “The tomb of the witch!”

More squealing. He made a mock shiver. “Abandon hope all ye who enter here!”

The parents chuckled.

One by one the children slid down a slide which Mich had fixed up from lengths of table-section, into the dark cellar. He hissed and shouted ghastly utterances after them. A wonderful wailing filled dark pumpkin-lighted house. Everybody talked at once. Everybody but Marion.

She had gone through all the party with a minimum of sound or talk; it was all inside her, all the excitement and joy.

What a little troll, he thought.

With a shut mouth and shiny eyes she had watched her own party, like so many serpentines thrown before her. Now, the parents.

With laughing reluctance they slid down the short incline, uproarious, while little Marion stood by, always wanting to see it all, to be last.

Louise went down without help. He moved to aid her, but she was gone even before he bent. The upper house was empty and silent in the candle-shine. Marion stood by the slide.

“Here we go,” he said, and picked her up. They sat in a vast circle in the cellar. Warmth came from the distant bulk of the furnace.

The chairs stood in a long line along each wall, twenty squealing children, twelve rustling relatives, alternatively spaced, with Louise down at the far end, Mich up at this end, near the stairs.

He peered but saw nothing. They had all grouped to their chairs, catch-as-you-can in the blackness. The entire programme from here on was to be enacted in the dark, he as Mr. Interlocutor.

There was a child scampering, a smell of damp cement, and the sound of the wind out in the October stars. “Now!” cried the husband in the dark cellar.

“Quiet!” Everybody settled. The room was black black.

Not a light, not a shine, not a glint of an eye. A scraping of crockery, a metal rattle. “The witch is dead,” intoned the husband. “Eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee,” said the children.

“The witch is dead, she has been killed, and here is the knife she was killed with.”

He handed over the knife. It was passed from hand to hand, down and around the circle, with chuckles and little odd cries and comments from the adults.

“The witch is dead, and this is her head,” whispered the husband, and handed an item to the nearest person.

“Oh, I know how this game is played,” some child cried, happily, in the dark. “He gets some old chicken innards from the icebox and hands them around and says, ‘These are her innards!’

And he makes a clay head and passes it for her head, and passes a soup bone for her arm. And he takes a marble and says, ‘This is her eye!’ And he takes some corn and says, ‘This is her teeth!’ And he takes a sack of plum pudding and gives that and says, ‘This is her stomach!’ I know how this is played!” “Hush, you’ll spoil everything,” some girl said. “The witch came to harm, and this is her arm,” said Mich. “Eeeeeeeeeeee!”

The items were passed and passed, like hot potatoes, around the cirle. Some children screamed, wouldn’t touch them.

Some ran from their chairs to stand in the centre of the cellar until the grisly items had passed.

“Aw, it’s only chicken insides,” scoffed a boy. “Come back, Helen!” Shot from hand to hand, with small scream after scream, the items went down, down, to be followed by another and another.

“The witch cut apart, and this is her heart,” said the husband.

Six or seven items moving at once through the laughing, trembling dark. Louise spoke up. “Marion, don’t be afraid; it’s only play.”

Marion didn’t say anything. “Marion?” asked Louise. “Are you afraid?” Marion didn’t speak. “She’s all right,” said the husband.

“She’s not afraid.”

On and on the passing, the screams, the hilarity. The autumn wind sighed about the house. And he, the husband stood at the head of the dark cellar, intoning the words, handing out the items. “Marion?” asked Louise again, from far across the cellar.

Everybody was talking. “Marion?” called Louise.

Everybody quieted. “Marion, answer me, are you afraid?”

Marion didn’t answer.

The husband stood there, at the bottom of the cellar steps.

Louise called “Marion, are you there?”

No answer.

The room was silent.

“Where’s Marion?” called Louise.

“She was here”, said a boy. “Maybe she’s upstairs.”

“Marion!”

No answer.

It was quiet.

Louise cried out, “Marion, Marion!”

“Turn on the lights,” said one of the adults.

The items stopped passing.

The children and adults sat with the witch’s items in their hands.

“No.” Louise gasped.

There was a scraping of her chair, wildly, in the dark.

“No. Don’t turn on the lights, oh, God, God, God, don’t turn them on, please, don’t turn on the lights, don’t!”

Louise was shrieking now.

The entire cellar froze with the scream.

Nobody moved.

Everyone sat in the dark cellar, suspended in the suddenly frozen task of this October game; the wind blew outside, banging the house, the smell of pumpkins and apples filled the room with the smell of the objects in their fingers while one boy cried, “I’ll go upstairs and look!” and he ran upstairs hopefully and out around the house, four times around the house, calling, “Marion, Marion, Marion!” over and over and at last coming slowly down the stairs into the waiting breathing cellar and saying to the darkness, “I can’t find her.”

Then ……

…some idiot turned on the lights.

The art of Bo Bartlett

Guys, I am busy as all get out.

Normally, I conduct a 3/3 affirmation campaign. This is a fine balance for world-line travel and seems to mesh well with the fate-forecasting. But, as long time readers will recognize, I am running 3/4 campaigns (three months off and a four month wait (dwell) time) and the result are (personally) stunning. My life has cranked up a notch and there’s all sort of discomforting changes in my life. In short, seriously, MM’s life is upside down.

Not in a bad way mind you, but in an exhausting and time-consuming way. New things are being forced into place as a matter of necessity, and other things have dropped to the side.

For instance, being in a new home, you adapt to the new environment.

  • When I lived in Shenzhen, we rode subways all the time to get around.
  • When we lived in Zhuhai, we rode bikes or took ride-hail services or buses.
  • Now in Tanzhou, a (growing, developing, but) rural section of China, we must rely on buses, electric scooters, or cars.

This is forcing the purchase of a car. Not something that I want to do, but (well) it’s a different situation, and I have to adapt to the changes as they materialize. And a car, will force a change in daily routines, habits, and finances.

That’s just one example.

I am conducting the campaign with pluck and still plowing forward, and I hope that you all do so as well. Good things are in your future. I just know it.

For today, here’s another art post. The world needs art.

Please enjoy this post.

A midcareer figurative painter with a distinctive and haunting narrative vision, Bo Bartlett composes large-scale contemporary portraits and landscapes that combine the memories and impressions of his upbringing, his faith, his family, and his friends. Presenting iconic American subjects subtly underlined with open-ended questions, Bartlett implies that there is a chance for magic and wonder in everyday life. Bo Bartlett belongs to the tradition of American realist painters defined by such artists as Andrew Wyeth, who called Bartlett “fresh, gifted and what we need in this country.”

More info: Bo Bartlett, Instagram

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Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…

ART

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MM Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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This Artist Illustrates His Sweet Childhood Memories So Well The Results May Move You To Tears

Here’s a nice break from the usual MM fare. I hope that you all appreciate it, and are not offended by the art. Whether it is cute kids, cats, or pretty women. It’s not the imagery that is what is important, as it is the feelings that you have when you look at the pictures.

Childhood… youth… young adulthood… private memories.

Although everyone has very different memories about this significant period of their lives, there‘s no doubt it‘s full of magic. Magic of discoveries, your first friends, pets, first family trips, the smell of a fresh pie baked by Grandma… And so much more!

  • The smell of the cold damp cellar when you went to get a soda at Grandma’s house…
  • The quite moment alone in the dark in a deep, dark, snowy night.
  • Being with “the gang” and riding bicycles during Summer break from school.
  • That moment in time that evokes… feelings.

Omario Brunelleschi is an English-Italian freelance artist who is illustrating exactly those sweet childhood memories that bring back the nostalgia of those heartwarming moments. Scroll down and go back in time with these delightful creations!

More: Facebook, Instagram h/t: boredpanda

Have you ever been here…

Or, here…

A romantic night out…

Tromping though the snowy woods under a full moon… some of my favorite memories…

Waking up and out at the crack of dawn…

In the public and someone catches your eye…

Early morning beach walk…

With your childhood crew out for a “hike”…

Singing at night on a date…

A bike ride in early Spring…

It’s how the sunlight hit her hair…

The moment you saw sunlight through your fingers…

With your friends at school…

…don’t forget the rule of three.

A shelter while it rains…

Cool Fall air…

A kitty waiting outside…

The end and a new beginning…

Hanging out on a quiet Summer night…

Running through a field…

A perfect day for kites and play…

A special moment alone…

Playing under blankets…

When you just have that one opportunity to start something new…

Love…

Meeting a new friend…

Nap with your little buddy…

It was only brief, but you never forgot…

Fall is coming…

On the dock / pier alone…

Coffee outside, and a cat walking about unencumbered…

Walking home after playing all afternoon…

Surprise!

Jogging togeher…

Cat meets fish.

Thinking about life… and what to do…

Making friends with a bird…

Daddy and daughter…

Daddy and kid on a walk…

Counting stars…

A sudden discovery…

Keeping warm…

First grocery shopping for your new apartment…

Hanging out with friends while pulled at the side of a lake and chillin’…

Rooftop cats…

Smell the coffee…

Exercise to music. Your personal time and space…

Just a pause to enjoy the moment…

A nice camp out…

Surprise!

Listening to music during a full moon…

Getting to know each other…

Surprise meet…

Just taking time…

Falling in love with a stranger…

A tough talk…

Grandma…

A family moment..

Just a special moment…

Conclusion

Normally, I’m not an overt fan of this electronic art medium. But there are exceptions, and this is one of them. The composition of these images are exquisite. And they hit me deep down inside where it matters.

I cannot say that EVERY picture resonates with me, but a number really, REALLY do. They take me back to good, fine and pleasant memories that I treasure. It is my hope that you, to, find one or two images that resonate with you. And as with art; that’s all that it takes.

Enjoy the moments that you have. Don’t try to make them special. That comes naturally. Just be mindful of the moment, and don’t be so fixed on goals, objectives or work schedules. Just appreciate what you have NOW.

I hope that there is SOMEONE in the MM audience that finds just ONE of these images that resonate with them deep inside.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…

ART

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MM Articles & Links

Master Index

.

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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The always sexy Arsinoitherium

It’s sort of like a rhinoceros, only twice the fun.
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Today, I want to play some “catch up” and explore some of my often “set to the wayside” subjects when the hot portion of World War III broke out in Ukraine.  And the United States decided to “make it’s move” to carve up the world like one big birthday cake.
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This little adventure concerns a member of the megafauna that used to roam the world at about the time the humans started to gather and form societies.

In terrestrial zoology, the megafauna (from Greek μέγας megas "large" and New Latin fauna "animal life") comprises the large or giant animals of an area, habitat, or geological period, extinct and/or extant. 

The most common thresholds used are weight over 46 kilograms (100 lb)[1][2][3] (i.e., having a mass comparable to or larger than a human) or over a tonne, 1,000 kilograms (2,205 lb)[1][4][5] (i.e., having a mass comparable to or larger than an ox). 

The first of these include many species not popularly thought of as overly large, and being the only few large animals left in a given range/area, such as white-tailed deer, Thomson's gazelle, and red kangaroo. 

In practice, the most common usage encountered in academic and popular writing describes land mammals roughly larger than a human that are not (solely) domesticated. 

The term is especially associated with the Pleistocene megafauna – the land animals often larger than their extant counterparts that are considered archetypical of the last ice age, such as mammoths, the majority of which in northern Eurasia, the Americas and Australia became extinct within the last forty thousand years.[6] 

Among living animals, the term megafauna is most commonly used for the largest extant terrestrial mammals, which includes (but is not limited to) elephants, giraffes, zebras, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and large bovines. Of these five categories of large herbivores, only bovines are presently found outside of Africa and southern Asia, but all the others were formerly more wide-ranging, with their ranges and populations continually shrinking and decreasing over time. 

Wild equines are another example of megafauna, but their current ranges are largely restricted to the old world, specifically Africa and Asia. 

Megafaunal species may be categorized according to their dietary type: megaherbivores (e.g., elephants), megacarnivores (e.g., lions), and, more rarely, megaomnivores (e.g., bears). 

The megafauna is also categorized by the order of animals that it belongs to, which are mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, fish, and invertebrates. 

-Wikipedia

This beast has long died off. No one knows why. But there are many interesting theories. Don’t you know.

Arsinoitherium

Quick Arsinoitherium Facts

  • Lived from the Late Eocene through the Early Oligocene Periods
  • Lived on the plains of North Africa
  • Was as long as a black rhino
  • Weighed more than a cow
  • Was an herbivore

About Arsinoitherium

Arsinoitherium is an extinct paenungulate mammal which lived approximately 35 to 30 million years ago during the Late Eocene through the Early Oligocene Periods.

It’ bones were first discovered in the early twentieth century and was named in 1902 by paleontologist Mr. Beadnell.

The name of this dinosaur means “Arsenoe’s beast.” It was given this name because it was found in Egypt near the palace of Queen Arsinoe – a queen who in this area in 305 B.C.

If you look at Arsinoitherium pictures, then you might think that this mammal looked quite like a rhinoceros with two big horns jutting out of the top of its nose. However, that isn’t really true because these mammals weren’t a direct relative of the rhino.

No, they were more closely related to elephants, sea cows and dassies than they were rhinos.

These herbivorous mammals roamed the Egyptian plains.

They had primitive teeth which were pretty well suited for handling the tough vegetation in this area at this point in time.

One of the most fascinating facts about Arsinoitherium is that is probably lived off a diet of water plants, mangroves and a variety of other plants. It probably had to eat a whole lot of plants in order to meet its nutritional and caloric needs. It might have needed to eat in excess of 150 pounds of plant material a day in order to survive.

Arsinoitherium walked on all four legs – much like a rhino – and it was approximately 10 feet long and weight around 1 Ton or 2,000 pounds. These animals were about 5’9” tall at the shoulders – which means they were as tall as the average human man.

That’s pretty big.

The horns on its nose probably had very little to do with defending itself from predators. Instead, they were probably cosmetic and used to attract females during mating season. Paleontologists believe that is had very little use beyond mating.

You do know that women are always attracted to pairs of large predominant horns. Ah, don’t you know.

Some paleontologists have speculated that this mammal had to be in or near water all of the time in order to prevent from drying out. Much like a modern-day hippo.

Other paleontologists don’t believe that was the case at all, however. Until further evidence is produced, well,  I suppose we’ll never know.

Arsinoitherium Pictures

Arsinoitherium by Lynus

Arsinoitherium by Marcio Luiz de Castro
Arsinoitherium by SameerPrehistorica
Arsinoitherium by Dmitry Bogdanov

Arsinoitherium by Roman Yevseyev
Arsinoitherium by Alexey Katz
Arsinoitherium by Roman Uchytel

Arsinoitherium by Mehdi Nikbakhsh
Arsinoitherium by Nobu Tamura

The Striking Art Of Corrado Vanelli

Let’s take a little break away from the insanity of global politics. The United States has a death wish, but that is not our problem. Instead, let’s appreciate some art, why don’t we…

Corrado Vanelli is an extremely talented digital artist living and working in Italy. He discovered computer graphics around the mid 90′s. After some experiments with 3D modeling he decided to work only with 2D painting because its the best way for him to expand and concretize his ideas. His artwork are really brilliant. Don’t pass by and make sure to check them. It’s worth it!

“To eat and pay bills I work like mechanical designer because for me art is a passion, not a job. I’m not looking for job or commissions, I want only share my pieces and have your feedback to improve my art. I believe in the energy that every artist puts in his personal projects: it’s the genuine sense of the art.”, says Corrado.

More: Corrado Vanelli

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I do hope that all of you have enjoyed this as much as I have. The work is breathtaking at times.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Cat Cafe Inspiration

I hope that this puts a smile on your face and warmth in your heart.

I want to post some uplifting happy stuff.

I hope this post makes the grade.

It all began in 2004, when the first cat cafe opened its doors in Osaka. Since then, the petting zoo/coffee house hybrids have invaded Tokyo, and business is booming. After removing your shoes and washing your hands, you can relax or play with the cats and kittens while you have your drink. Prices are reasonable, and the rules are simple: no flash photos, no grabbing tails or waking sleeping kitties.

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Life is too short not to spend it with friends, family and our furry little friends. There are numerous cat, dog, and bird themed coffee houses and tea houses in China. They are nice to visit, and to spend some time in.

This is one in Japan.

It’s a great way to enjoy yourself and to make friends with some of the creatures that roam the tea / coffee establishments.

I know that this is a short post, but I am in the start of a new affirmation campaign and a large number of affirmations are coming into reality, and that means all sorts of upset, stress and change. Don’t freak out. It’s normal!

Have a great day you all.

Remember! I believe in you!

The art of the sketch by An Jae Hyun (안재현)

Let’s have some fun. Let’s look at some wonderful sketches. As, after all, I have always felt that sketches are the backbone of the work of art, irregardless as to what medium you employ. I hope that you enjoy this little interlude.

If you’ve ever learned to draw, you know it’s not easy (unless you were born a Da Vinci). South Korean drawing teacher An Jae Hyun (안재현) will clearly show you how to feel and correctly depict the structure of an object. This will help you learn and improve your drawing skills.

More: Instagram

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Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…

ART

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MM Articles & Links

Master Index

.

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

.

 

“Dinotopia”: The Fantastical Art Of James Gurney

Here’s a nice change of pace for MM. I hope that you all enjoy this art.

Inspired by archaeology, lost civilizations, and the art of illustration, James Gurney’s children book Dinotopia creates an extraordinary place where humans and dinosaurs live in harmony.

“The thing I love about dinosaurs is that they are on that balance point between fantasy and reality,” says Gurney. “It might be hard to believe that mermaids and dragons really existed, but we know that dinosaurs did—we can see their footprints and skeletons but we can’t photograph them or see them, except in our imagination.”

The Dinotopia storyline chronicles the adventures and remarkable experiences of Professor Arthur Denison and his son Will on Dinotopia, a mysterious “lost” island inhabited by dinosaurs and shipwrecked travelers. The faraway land of Dinotopia—wholly the product of Gurney’s fertile imagination, scientific knowledge and meticulous artistic ability—is a civilization like no other. The society has its own language, alphabet, colorful festivals and parades. The lively cast of characters includes the inquisitive Professor Denison; Will and Sylvia, the adventurous young Skybax riders-in-training; the devious curmudgeon Lee Crabb; the beautiful musician Oriana Nascava; and a multilingual, diplomatic Protoceratops named Bix.

His first Dinotopia book, Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time, appeared in 18 languages in more than 30 countries and sold two million copies. Gurney has written and illustrated three other volumes in the series, Dinotopia: The World Beneath and Dinotopia: First Flight. A fourth volume, Dinotopia: Journey To Chandara was published in the fall of 2007. In 2002, Hallmark Entertainment produced a lavish television miniseries for ABC TV based on the Dinotopia books that received record-setting ratings and an Emmy award for best visual effects.

More info: James Gurney, Dinotopia, Instagram, Facebook

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The Whimsical Art of Jose S. Perez

Let’s go back to some core MM subjects. Here, we will dust off some fine art. I hope that you all appreciate this art as much as I do. Please enjoy.

With a personality as unique as his art, Jose Perez has painted his way through life. His paintings are his voice, his method of expressing himself, his commentary on society.

Born in Houston, Texas, on June 30, 1929, of Mexican parents, Perez moved with his family to Mexico when he was five years old. Returning to the United States as a teenager, Perez swam across the border carrying the papers which proved he was a U.S. citizen. His brother, also a U.S. citizen, had lost his papers and so talked Jose into swimming back to their country. This incident is a foreshadowing of the personality Perez was to become.

h/t: nlm

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Jose developed a sense of humor in his early years, and it’s been an integral part of his life and his art ever since. Through years of working in menial jobs, through his struggle for recognition as an artist, through a bout with glaucoma — through all the trying times of his life, Jose Perez has maintained his sense of humor.

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The confusion Perez had felt in earlier years evaporated when he began to concentrate on satirical art and pursue his profession seriously. His work is owned by a wide variety of art collectors in the United States and Europe.

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Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…

ART

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MM Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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“Sci-fi drink” stories by Kingsley Amis

These two unusual and very original stories [1] are examples of a rare genre invented by the brilliant author of Lucky Jim: “SF-drink”. They had me chuckling and even hooting, an enjoyable and all-too-rare experience indeed, and I dare say that they will have you doing the same!


1. The 2003 Claret (1958)
A scientific team in 1970 is anxiously awaiting the return of a member of their team who had been sent on man’s first exploratory mission into the future, to 2010 to report on the social and political situation then. But what intersts the scientific team most is the wine situation in those far-off days, and what the time-traveler has to tell them about the reversal of tastes that has occurred is quite a shock indeed.

2. The Friends of Plonk (1964)
Where people in 2145 after a terribly dsstructive atomic war try to recreate the fabled drinks of the past with no documentation at all apart from some garbled descriptions of the ceremonies surrounding the consumption of fine wines and liqueurs. With astonishing results.

 

THE 2003 CLARET (1958)

’How long to go now?’ the Director asked for the tenth time.
I compared the main laboratory chronometer with the dial on the TIOPEPE (Temporal Integrator, Ordinal Predictor and Electronic Propulsion Equipment). ’He should be taking the trance-pill in a few seconds, sir,’ I said. ’Then there’s only the two minutes for it to take effect, and we can bring him back.’
’Supposing he hasn’t taken the pill?’
’I’m sure he’d survive the time-shift even if he were fully conscious, sir. It’s instantaneous, after all.’
’I know, but being snatched back from fifty years in the future can’t do a man’s mind any good, can it? We just don’t know what we’re up against, Baker. I wish those blasted politicians had let us go slow on this project. But no, there mustn’t be any delay or the Russians will have developed time-travel before the Atlantic Powers, so we bundle Simpson off to the year 2010 and if we lose him or he turns up a raving lunatic it’s our fault.’ The Director sat moodily down on a work-bench. ’What happens if he gets tight?’
’He won’t have done that, sir. Simpson’s one of the Knights of Bordeaux. They never get drunk — isn’t it a rule of the society?’
’I believe so, yes.’ The Director cheered up a little. ’He’ll probably have a good deal to tell us, with any luck. The Douro growers are saying that last year was the best since 1945, you know, Baker. Imagine what that stuff must be like where Simpson is. Just one glass —
’Did you actually tell Simpson to sample the wines in 20I0 ?’
The Director coughed. ’Well, I did just make the suggestion to him. After all, part of our terms of reference was to report on social conditions, in addition to the political situation. And drinking habits are a pretty good guide to the social set-up, aren’t they? Find out how people treat their port and you’ve found out a lot about the kind of people they are.’
’Something in that, sir.’ I’m a beer man myself, which made me a bit of an outsider in the team. There were only the four of us in the lab that night — the VIPs and the press boys had been pushed into the Conference Room, thank heaven — and all the other three were wine-bibbers of one sort or another. The Director, as you will have gathered, was fanatical about port; Rabaiotti, my senior assistant, belonged to a big Chianti family; and Schneider, the medical chap, had written a book on hock. Simpson was reputedly on the way to becoming a sound judge of claret, though I had sometimes wondered whether perhaps tactical considerations played their part in his choice of hobby. Anyway, I considered I was lucky to have got the job of Chief Time-Engineer, against competition that included a force-field expert who doubled as an amateur of old Madeira and an electronics king named Gilbey [2] — no relation, it turned out, but the Director couldn’t have known that at the time.
’The receiver is tuned, Dr Baker.’
’Thank you, Dr Rabaiotti. Would you like to operate the recall switch, sir?’
’Why, that’s extremely kind of you, Baker.’ The Director was shaking with excitement. ’It’s this one here, isn’t it?’ His hand brushed the trigger of a relay that would have sent Simpson shooting back to about the time of Victoria’s accession. This may have been half-deliberate: the Director often got wistful about what pre-phylloxera stuff might or might not have tasted like.
’No, this one, sir. Just press it gently down.’
The switch clicked and instantly the figure of Simpson — tallish, forty-ish, baldish — appeared in the receiver. We all gave a shout of triumph and relief. Rabaiotti killed the power. Schneider hurried forward and there was tension again. `I’d give a case of Dow 1919 to see him conscious and mentally sound,’ the Director muttered at my side.
’Everything all right so far,’ Schneider called. ’I’ve given him a shot that’ll pull him round in a minute or two.’
We lit cigarettes. ’Pity conditions wouldn’t allow of him bringing anything back,’ the Director said. ’Just think of a forty-year-old 1970 all ready to drink. But I suppose it would have cost too much any­way. Next time we must find a better way of handling the currency problem. Very risky giving him raw gold to pawn. And we’re res­tricted to a lump small enough not to arouse too much suspicion. Oh, well, he should have been able to afford a few glasses. I hope that champagne’s all right, by the way?’
’Oh, yes, I put it in the molecular-motion-retarder myself, with the setting at point-three. It’ll be nicely chilled by now.’
’Splendid. I do want the dear boy to get a decent livener inside him before he faces all those cameras and interviews. I should have preferred a dry port myself, or possibly a Bittall, but I know what the occasion demands, of course. It’s a Lambert 1952 I’ve got for him. I don’t understand these things myself, but the Director of Lunar Projectiles swears by it.’
’He’s coming round now,’ Schneider shouted, and we all pressed forward.
There was an intense silence while Simpson blinked at us, sat up and yawned. His face was absolutely impassive. Very slowly he scratched his ear. He looked like a man with a bad hangover.
’Well?’ the Director demanded eagerly. ’What did you see?’
’Everything. At least, I saw enough.’
’Had there been a war? Is there going to be a war?’
’No. Russia joined the Western Customs Union in 1993, China some time after 2000. The RAF’s due to be disbanded in a few months.’
Then everyone hurled questions at once: about flying saucers, the Royal Family, the sciences, the arts, interplanetary travel, climatic conditions in the Rheingau — all sorts of things. Simpson seemed not to hear. He just sat there with the same blank look on his face, wearily shaking his head.
’What’s the matter?’ I asked finally. ’What was wrong?’
After a moment, he said in a hollow voice, ’Better if there had been a war. In some ways. Yes. Much better.’
’What on earth do you mean?’
Simpson gave a deep sigh. Then, hesitantly, to a silent audience and with the bottle of champagne quite forgotten, he told the following story.

The landing went off perfectly. Hyde Park was the area selected, with a thousand-square-yard tolerance to prevent Simpson from materialising inside a wall or halfway into a passer-by. Nobody saw him arrive. He changed his gold into currency without difficulty, and in a few minutes was walking briskly down Piccadilly, looking into shop-windows, studying dress and behaviour, buying newspapers and magazines, and writing busily in his notebook. He had several fruitful conversations, representing himself according to plan as a native of Sydney. This brought him some commiseration, for England had just beaten Australia at Lord’s by an innings and 411 runs. Yes, everything seemed normal so far.
His political report and much of his social report were complete by six-thirty, and his thoughts started turning to drink: after all, it was a positive duty. As he strolled up Shaftesbury Avenue he began looking out for drink advertisements. The beer ones had much in common with those of 1960, but were overshadowed in prominence by those recommending wines. MOUTON ROTHSCHILD FOR POWER, BREEDING AND GRANDEUR, one said. ASK FOR OESTRICHER PFAFFENBERG – THE HOCK WITH THE CLEAN FINISH, enjoined another. MY GOLLY, MY ST GYOERGHYHEGYI FURMINT, bawled a third. Well, practical experiment would soon establish what was what. Simpson slipped quietly through the doorway of an establishment clearly devoted to drink.
The interior was surprising. If some French provincial cafe had not been gutted of decor and furnishings to get this place up, then a good job of duplication had been done. Men in neat, sombre clothing sat at the tables talking in low tones, wine-glasses and wine-bottles before them, while aproned waiters moved silently about. One of them was decanting a red wine from a bottle that was thick with dust and cobwebs, watched critically by all the nearby drinkers. Simpson crept to a seat in an unfrequented part of the room.
A waiter approached. ’What can I bring you, monsieur?’
Here it must be explained that Simpson was not quite the claret-fancier the Director thought him. He enjoyed claret all right, but he also enjoyed other French wines, and German wines, and Italian wines, and Iberian wines, and Balkan wines, and fortified wines, and spirits, and liqueurs, and apéritifs, and cocktails, and draught beer, and bottled beer, and stout, and cider, and perry— all the way down to Fernet Branca. (There were some drinks he had never drunk — arak, kava, Gumpoldskirchner Rotgipfler, methylated spirits — but they were getting fewer all the time.) Anyway, feeling dehydrated after his walk round the streets, he unreflectingly ordered a pint of bitter.
’I’m sorry, monsieur, I don’t understand. What is this bitter?’
’Bitter beer, ale; you know. Haven’t you got any?’
’Beer, monsieur?’ The waiter’s voice rose in contempt. ’Beer? I’m afraid you’re in the wrong district for that.’
Several men turned round, nudged one another and stared at Simpson, who blushed and said, ’Well. . . a glass of wine, then.’
’France, Germany, Luxembourg, Austria . . .’
Simpson tried to think. ’A claret, please. Let’s say — a nice St Emilion.’
’Château Le Couvent, Château Puyblanquet, Château Bellefore Belcier, Château Grand Corbin d’Espagne . ..’
’Oh . . . I leave it to you.’
’Bien, monsieur. And the year? Will you leave that to me too?’
’If you don’t mind.’
The waiter swept away. Conscious that all eyes were upon him, Simpson tried to sink into his chair. Before he could compose himself, a middle-aged man from a nearby table had come over and sat down next to him. ’Well, who are you?’ this man asked.
’A — a traveller. From Sydney.’
’These days that’s no excuse for not knowing your wines, friend. Some of them Rubicons and Malbecs are as firm and fully rounded as all bar the greatest Burgundies. And I found a Barossa Riesling on holiday this year that was pretty near as gay as a Kreuznacher Steinweg. You well up on the Barossas, friend?’
’No, not really, I’m afraid.’
’Thought not, somehow. Otherwise you wouldn’t stalk in here and screech out for beer. Ger, ought to be ashamed of yourself, you ought.’
’I’m awfully sorry.’
’Should hope so and all. Now, I’m an honest working man, see? I’m a DRIP, I am.’
’A drip?’
’Domestic Reactor Installation Patentee. Don’t they go in for them down under? Now you listen to me. When I come in here to meet my colleagues and crack a bottle or two after the daily round, I don’t want my palate soured by some toff yelling out about beer, especially not when we got a really elegant Gevrey Chambertin or Chambolle Musigny or something of that in front of us. It’s psychosomatic, like. Just the idea of beer’s enough to cut off some of the subtler overtones, get me?’
’I’m sorry,’ Simpson said again. ’I didn’t realise. But tell me: don’t you eat while you’re drinking these wines?’
’What, and foul up the taste-buds with fat and sauces and muck? You got a nerve even mentioning food in a place like this. We’re oenophiles in here, I’ll have you know, not a bunch of pigs. Ah, here’s your claret.’ The stranger held the glass up to the light, then sniffed it delicately. ’Right, now let’s see what you got to say about this. And get on with it.’
Simpson drank. It was the most wonderful wine he had ever known, with a strange warm after-taste that seemed to seep upwards and flood his olfactory centres. He sighed deeply. ’Superb,’ he said at last
’Come on, come on, we want more than that; you got to do better than that. Give us a spot of imagery, kind of style, a reference to art, that type of stuff.’
’It’s — I don’t know — it’s the richness of summer, all the glory of . . . of love and lyric poetry, a whole way of life, profound and . . . some great procession of — ’
‘Ah, you turn me up,’ the man said violently. ’This is a 2003 Chateau La Bouygue, reconstituted pre-phylloxera of course. Now, light and free, not rich in association but perfectly assured without any insincerity, instrumental where the ’01s are symphonic, the gentleness of a Braque rather than the bravura of a Matisse. That’s as far as you can go with it. Love and lyric poetry indeed. I never heard such slop in my life. You aren’t fit to come in here, friend. You get off out to one of the pubs with your boss-class pals, that’s where you belong.’
Simpson threw down some coins and ran, a gust of ill-natured laughter sounding in his ears. He felt like walking the streets for the two hours in 2010 that still remained to him, but a nagging curiosity emboldened him to ask to be directed to a pub.
The place he finally made his way to was on the corner of a narrow street on the edge of Soho. It was a red-brick affair like a miniature grammar school or a suburban bank. As he approached, a bus drew up and a crowd of young people got off, chattering loudly to one another in what Simpson made out as a version of the upper-class tones current in his own time. He was more or less swept in through the front door of the pub, and had no time to puzzle out the significance of a notice above the entrance, painted by hand with what seemed deliberate inelegance, and bearing the legend: CRACKED UP BY THE WALLOP AND SCOFF MOB.
He found himself in a large, ill-lighted and crowded room of which the main feature was a long counter that ran from end to end zig­zag-wise, as if to accommodate as many as possible of the tall stools that were closely packed along it. What were evidently glass sandwich cupboards stood every couple of feet along the red plastic top. A group of people, half-crowd, half-queue, was clustered round the entrance, and Simpson mingled with them. He noticed that most of the stools were occupied by persons drinking beer or some such liquid out of pint glasses and eating rolls or sandwiches. Conversa­tions were bawling away around him.
’My dear, simply nobody goes to the Crown these days. Simon and I were given fresh crisps the last time we went.’
’It doesn’t surprise me. We had some mustard that couldn’t have been more than a day old.’
’The wallop’s first-class down at the George, and as for the scoff— the bluest piece of ham you ever saw. A really memorable thrash. I’m getting the secretary of the Mob to crack them up in the next issue of the Boozer Rag.’
’Have you bagged stools, sir?’
’I beg your pardon?’
’Sorry, mate. Have you bagged, mate?’
’No, I’m afraid not. May I see the head potman?’
’I’ll get him over directly, mate.’
’Shall we start thinking about what we’re going to have? Pickled onions to start? With a glass of mild?’
’Nuts for me. Mixed and salted.’
’Right, that’s three onions, one nuts. And then I can recommend the cheese rolls. They know me here and always see that I get the three-day-old, with plenty of rind.’
After some time, Simpson obtained a stool and ordered a pint of bitter from the grubby barmaid.
’Certainly, love. A fresh barrel has just come on.’
`Oh, I’ll have mild instead, then.’
’By all means, love, if you wish for it. Your taste is your own. And what will you have in the way of scoff, love?’
’Oh, er — nothing to eat, thank you.’
`If I may say so, love, with all due respect, you might perhaps do better at the wine-bar if you don’t wish for any scoff. We have standards to maintain here, love.’
’I’m awfully sorry. What. . . scoff do you recommend?’
’Our gherkins have frequently been cracked up, love. Not a dish is sold till it’s two days old.’
’They sound delightful. One dish, please.’
’Very good, love. With cigarette-ash garnishings, of course.’
The beer came. It was horrible. The gherkins came. Simpson took no notice of them. Dazedly he watched and listened to those around him. A kind of ritual seemed to be being enacted by a group of four immediately next to him. The two couples raised their pints in concert, intoned the word ’Cheers’ in a liturgical manner, poured a few drops on to the front of their greasy pullovers, and sank their drinks in one swallow. Afterwards they all sighed loudly, wiped their mouths with their hands, banged the empty glasses down on the counter, and spoke in turn.
’Lovely drop of wallop.’
’First today.’
’I needed that.’
’Lays the dust.’
’You can’t beat a decent pint.’
’Full of goodness.’
’Keeps your insides working.’
’It’s a real drink.’
When this point was reached, all four shouted ’Let’s have another’ in unison, and were immediately served with fresh drinks and small plates of sandwiches. The bread on these was curled up at the cor­ners, revealing purple strips of meat criss-crossed with gristle. One of the men felt the texture of the bread and nodded approvingly. ’I told you this place was good,’ his friend said. Then the party got down to what was clearly the pièce de résistance, alternately biting at the sandwiches and taking pulls of beer, chewing the resulting mush with many a belch of appreciation. Simpson lowered his head into his hands. The talk went on.
’What’s the fighting like here?’
’Oh, excellent. The governor of the boozer gets it under way at ten-thirty sharp, just outside on the corner. I did hear a whisper that he’s going to allow broken bottles for the last five minutes tonight. The police should be with us by then. They’re very keen round here.’
’At the Feathers, you know, they kick off at ten-fifteen inside the bar. Don’t know whether I agree with that.’
’No. After all, it’s only the finale of the evening.’
’Absolutely. Shouldn’t make it too important.’
’Definitely not. Getting tight’s the object of the exercise.’
’Quite. By the way, who’s that fellow next to you?’
’No idea. Wine-bar type, if you ask me.’
’Hasn’t touched his gherkins. Refused fresh bitter. Shouldn’t be here at all.’
’Couldn’t agree more. I mean, look at his clothes.’
’Wonder how long since they were slept in.’
`If they ever have been.’
’Disgusting.’
’And what would you like to follow, love?’
This last was the barmaid. Simpson raised his head and gave a long yell of fury, bewilderment, horror and protest. Then he ran from the room and went on running until he was back at the point where the TIOPEPE was to pick him up. With shaking fingers he put the trance-pill into his mouth.

The Director broke the silence that followed the end of Simpson’s story. ’Well, it’s a long time ahead, anyway,’ he said with an attempt at cheerfulness.
’Is it?’ Simpson shouted. ’Do you think that sort of situation develops in a couple of weeks? It’s starting to happen already. Wine-snobbery spreading, more and more of this drinking what you ought to drink instead of what you like. Self-conscious insistence on the virtues of pubs and beer because the wrong people are beginning to drink wine. It’ll be here in our time, don’t you worry. You just wait.’
‘Ah, now, Simpson, you’re tired and overwrought. A glass of champagne will soon make you see things in a different light.’
’Slip away with me afterwards,’ I murmured. ’We’ll have a good go at the beer down in town.’
Simpson gave a long yell — much like the one, probably, he vented at the end of his visit to 2010. Springing to his feet, he rushed away down the lab to where Schneider kept the medical stores.
’What’s he up to?’ the Director puffed as we hurried in pursuit. ’Is he going to try and poison himself?’
’Not straight away, sir, I imagine.’
’How do you mean, Baker?’
’Look at that bottle he’s got hold of, sir. Can’t you see what it is?’
’But . . . I can’t believe my eyes. Surely it’s . . .’
’Yes, sir. Surgical spirit.’


 

THE FRIENDS OF PLONK (1964)

The (technical) success of Simpson’s trip to the year 2010 encouraged the authorities to have similar experiments conducted for a variety of time-objectives. Some curious and occasionally alarming pieces of information about the future came to our knowledge in this way; I’m thinking less of politics than of developments in the domain of drink.
For instance, let me take this opportunity of warning every youngster who likes any kind of draught beer and has a high life-expectancy to drink as much of the stuff as he can while he can, because they’re going to stop making it in 2016. Again, just six months ago Simpson found that, in the world of 2045, alcoholic diseases as a whole accounted for almost exactly a third of all deaths, or nearly as many as transport accidents and suicide combined. This was universally put down to the marketing, from 2039 onwards, of wines and spirits free of all the congeneric elements that cause hangovers, and yet at the same time indistinguishable from the untreated liquors even under the most searching tests — a triumph of biochemitechnology man had been teasingly on the brink of since about the time I was downing my first pints of beer.
Anyway, by a lucky accident, the authorities suddenly became anxious to know the result of the 2048 Presidential election in America, and so Simpson was able to travel to that year and bring back news, not only of the successful Rosicrucian candidate’s impending installation at the Black House, but also of the rigorous outlawing of the new drink process and everything connected with it. After one veiled reference to the matter in conversation, Simpson had considered himself lucky to escape undamaged from the bar of the Travellers’ Club.
For a time, our section’s exploration of the rather more distant future was blocked by a persistent fault in the TIOPEPE, whereby the projection circuits cut off at approximately 83.63 years in advance of time-present. Then, one day in 1974, an inspired guess of Rabaiotti’s put things right, and within a week Simpson was off to 2145. We were all there in the lab as usual to see him back safely. After Schneider had given him the usual relaxing shots, Simpson came out with some grave news. A quarrel about spy-flights over the moons of Saturn had set Wales and Mars — the two major powers in the Inner Planets at that period — at each other’s throats and precipitated a system-wide nuclear war in 2101. Half of Venus, and areas on Earth the size of Europe, had been virtually obliterated.
Rabaiotti was the first to speak when Simpson had stopped. ’Far enough off not to bother most of our great-grandchildren, anyway,’ he said.
’That’s true. But what a prospect.’
’I know,’ I said.
’Well, no use glooming, Baker,’ the Director said. ’Nothing we can do about it. We’ve got a full half-hour before the official confer­ence — tell us what’s happened to drink.’
Simpson rubbed his bald head and sighed. I noticed that his eyes were bloodshot, but then they nearly always were after one of these trips. A very conscientious alcohologist, old Simpson. ’You’re not going to like it.’
We didn’t.

Simpson’s landing in 2145 had been a fair enough success, but there had been an unaccountable error in the ground-level estimates, conducted a week earlier by means of our latest brain-child, the TIAMARIA (Temporal Inspection Apparatus and Meteorological-Astronomical-Regional-Interrelation Assessor). This had allowed him to materialise twelve feet up in the air and given him a nasty fall — on to a flower-bed, by an unearned piece of luck, but shaking him severely. What followed shook him still further.
The nuclear war had set everything back so much that the reconstructed world he found himself in was little more unfamiliar than the ones he had found on earlier, shorter-range time-trips. His official report, disturbing as it was, proved easy enough to compile, and he had a couple of hours to spare before the TIOPEPE ’s field should snatch him back to the present. He selected a restaurant within easy range of his purse — the TIAMARIA’s cameras, plus our counterfeiters in the Temporal Treasury, had taken care of the currency problem all right — found a vacant table, and asked for a drink before dinner.
’Certainly, sir,’ the waiter said. ’The Martian manatee-milk is specially good today. Or there’s a new delivery of Iapetan carnivorous-lemon juice, if you’ve a liking for the unusual. Very, uh, full- blooded, sir.’
Simpson swallowed. ’I’m sure,’ he said, ’but I was thinking of something — you know — a little stronger?’
The waiter’s manner suffered an abrupt change. ’Oh, you mean booze, do you?’ he said coldly. ’Sometimes I wonder what this town’s coming to, honest. All right, I’ll see what I can do.’
The ’booze’ arrived on a tin tray in three chunky cans arranged like equal slices of a round cake. The nearest one had the word BEAR crudely stamped on it. Simpson poured some muddy brown liquid from it into a glass. It tasted like last week’s swipes topped up with a little industrial alcohol. Then he tried the can stamped BOOJLY. (We all agreed later that this must be a corruption of ’Beaujolais’.) That was like red ink topped up with a good deal of industrial alcohol. Lastly there was BANDY. Industrial alcohol topped up with a little cold tea.
Wondering dimly if some trick of the TIOPEPE had managed to move him back into some unfrequented corner of the 1960s, Simpson became aware that a man at the next table had been watch­ing him closely. When their eyes met, the stranger came over and, with a word of apology, sat down opposite him. (It was extraordinary, Simpson was fond of remarking, how often people did just this sort of thing when he visited the future.)
’Do excuse me,’ the man said politely, ’but from your expression just now I’d guess you’re a conozer — am I right? Oh, my name’s Piotr Davies, by the way, on leave from Greenland Fruiteries. You’re not Earth-based, I take it?’
’Oh . . . no, I’m just in from Mercury. My first trip since I was a lad, in fact.’ Simpson noticed that Piotr Davies’s face was covered by a thick network of burst veins, and his nose carried the richest growth of grog-blossom Simpson had ever seen. (He avoided look­ing at the Director when he told us this.) ’Yes,’ he struggled on after giving his name, am a bit of a connoiss — conozer, I suppose. I do try to discriminate a little in my — ’
’You’ve hit it,’ Piotr Davies said excitedly. ’Discrimination. That’s it, the very word. I knew I was right about you. Discrimination. And tradition. Well, you won’t find much of either on Earth these days, I’m afraid. Nor on Mercury, from what I hear.’
’No — no, you certainly won’t.’
’We conozers are having a hard time. The Planetary War, of course. And the Aftermath.’ Davies paused, and seemed to be sizing up Simpson afresh. Then: ’Tell me, are you doing anything tonight? More or less right away?’
’Well, I have got an appointment I must keep in just under two hours, but until then I — ’
’Perfect. Let’s go.’
’But what about my dinner?’
’You won’t want any after you’ve been where I’m going to take you.’
But where are you — ?’
’Somewhere absolutely made for a conozer like you. What a bit of luck you happened to run into me. I’ll explain on the way.’
Outside, they boarded a sort of wheelless taxicab and headed into what seemed to be a prosperous quarter. Davies’s explanations were copious and complete; Simpson made full use of his supposed status as one long absent from the centre of things. It appeared that the Planetary War had destroyed every one of the vast, centralised, fully automated distilleries of strong liquors; that bacteriological warfare had put paid to many crops, including vines, barley, hops and even sugar; that the fanatical religious movements of the Aftermath, many of them with government backing, had outlawed all drink for nearly twenty years. Simpson shuddered at that news.
’And when people came to their senses,’ Davies said glumly, ’it was too late. The knowledge had died. Oh, you can’t kill a process like distillation. Too fundamental. Or fermentation, either. But the special processes, the extra ingredients, the skills, the tradition — gone for ever. Whisky — what a rich, evocative word. What can the stuff have tasted like? What little there is about it in the surviving literature gives a very poor idea. Muzzle — that was a white wine, we’re pretty sure, from Germany, about where the Great Crater is. Gin — a spirit flavoured with juniper, we know that much. There isn’t any juniper now, of course.
`So, what with one thing and another, drinking went out. Real, civilised drinking, that is — I’m not talking about that stuff they tried to give you back there. I and a few like-minded friends tried to get some of the basic information together, but to no avail. And then, quite by chance, one of us, an archaeologist, turned up a primitive two-dimensional television film that dated back almost two hundred years, giving a full description of some ancient drinks and a portrayal of the habits that went with them — all the details. The film was called ’The Down-and-Outs’, which is an archaic expression referring to people of limited prosperity, but which we immediately understood as being satirically or ironically intended in this instance. That period, you know, was very strong on satire. Anyway, the eventual result of our friend’s discovery was . . . this.’
With something of a flourish, Davies drew a pasteboard card from his pocket and passed it to Simpson. It read:

THE FRIENDS OF PLONK
Established 2139 for the drinking of
traditional liquors in traditional
dress and in traditional surroundings

Before Simpson could puzzle this out, his companion halted the taxi and a moment later was shepherding him through the portals of a large and magnificent mansion. At the far end of a thickly carpeted foyer was a steep, narrow staircase, which they descended. When they came to its foot, Davies reached into a cup­board and brought out what Simpson recognised as a trilby hat of the sort his father had used to wear, a cloth cap, a large piece of sacking and a tattered brown blanket. All four articles appeared to be covered with stains and dirt. At the same time Simpson became aware of a curious and unpleasant mixture of smells and a subdued grumbling of voices.
In silence, Davies handed him the cap and the blanket and himself donned the sacking, stole-fashion, and the trilby. Simpson followed his lead. Then Davies ushered him through a low doorway.
The room they entered was dimly lit by candles stuck into bottles, and it was a moment before Simpson could take in the scene. At first he felt pure astonishment. There was no trace here of the luxury he had glimpsed upstairs: the walls, of undressed stone, were grimy and damp, the floor was covered at random with sacks and decaying lumps of matting. A coke stove made the cellar stiflingly hot; the air swam with cigarette smoke; the atmosphere was thick and malodorous. Against one wall stood a trestle table piled with bottles and what looked like teacups. Among other items Simpson uncomprehendingly saw there were several loaves of bread, some bottles of milk, a pile of small circular tins and, off in a corner, an old-fashioned and rusty gas-cooker or its replica.
But his surprise and bewilderment turned to mild alarm when he surveyed the dozen or so men sitting about on packing-cases or broken chairs and squatting or sprawling on the floor, each wearing some sort of battered headgear and with a blanket or sack thrown round his shoulders. All of them were muttering unintelligibly, in some instances to a companion, more often just to themselves. Davies took Simpson’s arm and led him to a splintery bench near the wall.
’These blankets and so on must have been a means of asserting the essential democracy of drink,’ Davies whispered. ’Anyway, we’re near the end of the purely ritualistic part now. Our film didn’t make its full significance clear, but it was obviously a kind of self-preparation, perhaps even prayer. The rest of the proceedings will be much less formal. Ah . . .’
Two of the men had been muttering more loudly at each other and now closed physically, but their blows and struggles were symbolic, a mime, as in ballet or the Japanese theatre. Soon one of them had his adversary pinned to the floor and was raining token punches upon him. (We’re rather in the dark about this bit,’ Davies murmured. ’Perhaps an enacted reference to the ancient role of drink as a sequel to physical exertion.’) When the prostrate combatant had begun to feign unconsciousness, a loud and authoritative voice spoke.
’End of Part One.’
At once all was animation: everybody sprang up and threw off his borrowed garments, revealing himself as smartly clad in the formal dress of the era. Davies led Simpson up to the man who had made the announcement, probably a member of one of the professions and clearly the host of the occasion. His face was sprayed with broken veins to a degree that outdid Davies’s.
’Delighted you can join us,’ the host said when Simpson’s presence had been explained. ’A privilege to have an Outworlder at one of our little gatherings. Now for our Part Two. Has Piotr explained to you about the ancient film that taught us so much? Well, its second and third sections were so badly damaged as to be almost useless to us. So what’s to follow is no more than an imaginative reconstruction, I fear, but I think it can be said that we’ve interpreted the tradition with taste and reverence. Let’s begin, shall we?’
He signed to an attendant standing at the table; the man began filling the teacups with a mixture of two liquids. One came out of something like a wine-bottle and was red, the other came out of something like a medicine bottle and was almost transparent, with a faint purplish tinge. Courteously passing Simpson the first of the cups, the host said: ’Please do us the honour of initiating the proceedings.’
Simpson drank. He felt as if someone had exploded a tear-gas shell in his throat and then sprayed his gullet with curry-powder. As his own coughings and weepings subsided he was surprised to find his companions similarly afflicted in turn as they drank.
’Interesting, isn’t it?’ the host asked, wheezing and staggering. ’A fine shock to the palate. One might perhaps say that it goes beyond the merely gustatory and olfactory to the purely tactile. Hardly a sensuous experience at all – ascetic, almost abstract. An invention of genius, don’t you think?’
’What — what’s the . . . ?’
’Red Biddy, my dear fellow,’ Piotr Davies put in proudly. There was reverence in his voice when he added: ’Red wine and methylated spirits. Of course, we can’t hope to reproduce the legendary Empire Burgundy-characters that used to go into it, but our own humble Boojly isn’t a bad substitute. Its role is purely ancillary, after all.’
’We like to use a straw after the first shock.’ The host passed one to Simpson. ’I hope you approve of the teacups. A nice traditional touch, I think. And now, do make yourself comfortable. I must see to the plonk in person — one can’t afford to take risks.’
Simpson sat down near Davies on a packing-case. He realised after a few moments that it was actually carved out of a single block of wood. Then he noticed that the dampness of the walls was main­tained by tiny water-jets at intervals near the ceiling. Probably the sacks on the floor had been specially woven and then artificially aged. Pretending to suck at his straw, he said nervously to Davies: ’What exactly do you mean by plonk? In my time, people usually. . .’ He broke off, fearful of having betrayed himself, but the man of the future had noticed nothing.
`Ah, you’re in for a great experience, my dear friend, something unknown outside this room for countless decades. To our ancestors in the later twentieth century it may have been the stuff of daily life, but to us it’s a pearl beyond price, a precious fragment salvaged from the wreck of history. Watch carefully — every bit of this is authentic.’
With smarting eyes, Simpson saw his host pull the crumb from a loaf and stuff it into the mouth of an enamel jug. Then, taking a candle from a nearby bottle, he put the flame to a disc-shaped cake of brownish substance that the attendant was holding between tongs. A flame arose; liquid dropped on to the bread and began to soak through into the jug; the assembled guests clapped and cheered. Another brownish cake was treated in the same way, then another. ’Shoe-polish,’ Simpson said in a cracked voice.
’Exactly. We’re on the dark tans this evening, with just a touch of ox-blood to give body. Makes a very big, round, pugnacious drink. By the way, that’s processed bread he’s using. Wholemeal’s too permeable, we’ve found.’
Beaming, the host came over to Simpson with a half-filled cup, a breakfast cup this time. ’Down in one, my dear chap,’ he said.
They were all watching; there was nothing for it. Simpson shut his eyes and drank. This time a hundred blunt dental drills seemed to be working at once on his nose and throat and mouth. Fluid sprang from all the mucous membranes in those areas. It was like having one’s face pushed into a bath of acid. Simpson’s shoulders sagged and his eyes filmed over.
’I’d say the light tans have got more bite,’ a voice said near him. ’Especially on the gums.’
’Less of a follow-through, on the other hand.’ There was the sound of swallowing and then a muffled scream. ’Were you here for the plain-tan tasting last month? Wonderful fire and vehemence. I was blind for the next four days.’
’I still say you can’t beat a straight brown for all-round excoriation. Amazing results on the uvula and tonsils.’
’What’s wrong with black?’ This was a younger voice.
An embarrassed silence, tempered by a fit of coughing and a heartfelt moan from different parts of the circle, was ended by someone saying urbanely: ’Each to his taste, of course, and there is impact there, but I think experience shows that that sooty, oil-smoke quality is rather meretricious. Most of us find ourselves moving tanwards as we grow older.’
`Ah, good, he’s . . . yes, he’s using a tin of transparent in the next jug. Watch for the effect on the septum,’
Simpson lurched to his feet. ’I must be going,’ he muttered. ’Important engagement.’
’What, you’re not staying for the coal-gas in milk? Turns the brain to absolute jelly, you know.’
’Sorry . . . friend waiting for me.’
’Goodbye, then. Give our love to Mercury. Perhaps you’ll be able to start a circle of the Friends of Plonk on your home planet. That would be a magnificent thought.’

’Magnificent,’ the Director echoed bitterly. ’Just think of it. The idea of an atomic war’s too much to take in, but those poor devils . . . Baker, we must prepare some information for Simpson to take on his next long-range trip, something that’ll show them how to make a decent vodka or gin even if the vines have all gone.’
I was hardly listening. ’Aren’t there some queer things about that world, sir? Shoe-polish in just the same variants that we know? Wholemeal bread when the crops are supposed to have — ’
I was interrupted by a shout from the far end of the lab, where Rabaiotti had gone to check the TIAMARIA. He turned and came racing towards us, babbling at the top of his voice.
’Phase distortion, sir! Anomalous tracking on the output side! Completely new effect!’
’And the TIOPEPE’s meshed with it, isn’t it?’ Schneider said.
’Of course!’ I yelled. ’Simpson was on a different time-path, sir! An alternative probability, a parallel world. No wonder the ground-level estimate was off. This is amazing!’
’No nuclear war in our time-path — no certainty, anyway,’ the Director sang, waving his arms.
’No destruction of the vines.’
’No Friends of Plonk.’
’All the same,’ Simpson murmured to me as we strolled towards the Conference Room, ’in some ways they’re better off than we are. At least the stuff they use is genuine. Nobody’s going to doctor bloody shoe-polish to make it taste smoother or to preserve it or so that you’ll mistake it for a more expensive brand. And it can only improve, what they drink.’
’Whereas we . . .’
’Yes. That draught beer you go on about isn’t draught at all: it comes out of a giant steel bottle these days, because it’s easier that way. And do you think the Germans are the greatest chemists in the world for nothing? Ask Schneider about the 1972 Moselles. And what do you imagine all those scientists are doing in Bordeaux?’
’There’s Italy and Spain and Greece. They’ll — ’
’Not Italy any more. Ask Rabaiotti, or rather don’t. Spain and Greece’ll last longest, probably, but by 1980 you’ll have to go to Albania if you want real wine. Provided the Chinese won’t have started helping them to get the place modernised.’
’What are you going to do about it?’
’Switch to whisky. That’s still real. In fact I’m going to take a bottle home tonight. Can you lend me twenty-five quid?’

Do you want more?

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Gumbo, Girls, Ghosts, and a Heck of a thing to just have sitting around

Gosh. It’s a really crazy world right now, eh? I’ve really been shaken by some of the writings by the United States neocons. They are advocating limited nuclear strikes to “put China in line, and in its place”. Jesus. H. Christ. They have absolutely no idea of what they advocating. It’s horrific.

I’m convinced, now more than ever, that these people have NEVER actually ever been in a situation where they had to deal with blood-thirsty, dead-ass serious, lethal, killers with their back to the wall…

…they are fixing to discover what it is like.

‘Ghost of Kyiv’ hero fighter pilot was myth, Ukraine admits

Of course.

But, it’s nice to know that some one in the many thousands of writers for the big mainsteam media has dusted off their journalistic diplomas and doing some actual “reporting”, for a change.

From HERE.

Mike Pompeo advocates crossing China’s RED LINES

He’s a grandstanding idiot who is going to get many, many Americans killed.

This is an immediate trigger for war. This is a Chinese RED LINE, and will result in immediate war.

 

2022 05 02 14 12
war 2022 05 02 14 12

He must believe that he has a seat reserved inside some kind of a nuclear bunker. Eh?

Russia is under attack by Western military operating inside of Russia

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Vladimir Putin has officially declared a state of emergency in the Belgorod region for 60 days.  Reason: The Russian Federation is “under attack” from either foreign military, mercenaries of that foreign military, or terrorists.”  Key point: Russia is “under attack.”

Machine auto-translated from image, so font size and scaling is “off.”

2022 05 02 15 03
2022 05 02 15 03

It isn’t hard to see where this is leading.  If Russia is “under attack” they have a right to defend themselves, right?  A formal declaration of war, perhaps?

On the Edge of a Nuclear Abyss

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Two days after Russia attacked Ukraine and the day before Vladimir Putin put Russia on nuclear alert, I wrote a little article whose first sentence was: “Not wanting to sound hyperbolic, but I am starting to conclude that the nuclear madmen running the U.S./NATO New Cold War they started decades ago are itching to start a nuclear war with Russia.”

It was an intuition based on my knowledge of U.S./Russia history, including the U.S engineered coup in Ukraine in 2014, and a reading of current events. I refer to it as intuition, yet it is based on a lifetime’s study and teaching of political sociology and writing against war. I am not a Russian scholar, simply a writer with a sociological, historical, and artistic imagination, although my first graduate academic study in the late 1960s was a thesis on nuclear weapons and why they might be someday used again.

It no longer sounds hyperbolic to me that madmen in the declining U.S. Empire might resort, like rats in a sinking ship, to first strike use of nuclear weapons, which is official U.S. policy. My stomach is churning at the thought, despite what most experts say: that the chances of a nuclear war are slight. And despite what others say about the Ukraine war: that it is an intentional diversion from the Covid propaganda and the Great Reset (although I agree it achieves that goal).

My gut tells me no; it is very real, sui generis, and very, very dangerous now.

The eminent scholar Michel Chossudovsky of Global Research agrees that we are very close to the unthinkable. In a recent historical analysis of U.S.-Russia relations and nuclear weapons, he writes the following before quoting Vladimir Putin’s recent statement on the matter. “Vladimir Putin’s statement on February 21st, 2022 was a response to U.S. threats to use nuclear weapons on a preemptive basis against Russia, despite Joe Biden’s “reassurance” that the U.S. would not be resorting to ‘A first strike’ nuclear attack against an enemy of America”:

Let me [Putin] explain that U.S. strategic planning documents contain the possibility of a so-called preemptive strike against enemy missile systems. And who is the main enemy for the U.S. and NATO? We know that too. It’s Russia. In NATO documents, our country is officially and directly declared the main threat to North Atlantic security. And Ukraine will serve as a forward springboard for the strike.” (Putin Speech, February 21, 2022, emphasis added) 

Putin is absolutely correct. It is why he put Russia’s nuclear forces on full alert. Only those ignorant of history, which sadly includes most U.S. Americans, don’t know this.

I believe that today we are in the greatest danger of a nuclear war since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, something I vividly remember as a teenager. The same feelings return. Dread. Anxiety. Breathlessness. I do not think these feelings are misplaced nor they are simply an emotional response. I try to continue writing on other projects that I have started but feel stymied. The possibility of nuclear war, whether intentional or accidental, obsesses me.

In order to grasp this stomach-churning possibility within the context of Ukraine, we need to put aside all talk of morality, rights, international law, and think in terms of great power politics, as John Mearsheimer has so clearly articulated. As he says, when a great power feels its existence is threatened, might makes right. You simply can’t understand world politics without thinking at this level. Doing so does not mean justifying the use of might; it is a means of clarifying the causes of wars, which start long before the first shots are fired.

In the present crisis over Ukraine, Russia clearly feels existentially threatened by U.S./NATO military moves in Ukraine and in eastern Europe where they have positioned missiles that can be very quickly converted to nuclear and are within a few minutes range of Russia. (And of course there are U.S./NATO nuclear missiles throughout western and southern Europe.) Vladimir Putin has been talking about this for many years and is factually correct. He has reiterated that this is unacceptable to Russia and must stop. He has pushed for negotiations to end this situation.

The United States, despite its own Monroe Doctrine that prohibits another great power from putting weapons or military forces close to its borders, has blocked its ears and kept upping the ante, provoking Russian fears. This fact is not in dispute but is shrugged off by U.S./NATO as of little consequence. Such an attitude is pure provocation as anyone with a smidgeon of historical awareness knows.

The world was very lucky sixty years ago this October when JFK and Nikita Khrushchev negotiated the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis before the world was incinerated. Kennedy, of course, was intensely pressured by the military and CIA to bomb Cuba, but he resisted. He also rejected the insane military desire to nuke the Soviet Union, calling such people crazy; at a National Security Council meeting on September 12, 1963, when the Joint Chiefs of Staff presented a report about a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union which they wanted for that fall, he said, “Preemption is not possible for us.”

Such leadership, together with the nuclear test ban treaty he negotiated with the USSR that month, inter alia (such treaties have now been abrogated by the U.S. government), assured his assassination organized by the CIA. These days, the U.S. is led by deluded men who espouse a nuclear first strike policy, which tells one all one needs to know about the danger the world is in. The U.S. has been very sick with Russia hatred for a long time.

After the terror of the Cuban Missile Crisis, many more people took the threat of nuclear war seriously. Today very few do. It has receded into the ”unimaginable.” In 1962, however, as James W. Douglass writes in JFK and the Unspeakable:

Kennedy saw that, at least outside Washington, D.C., people were living with a deeper awareness of the ultimate choice they faced. Nuclear weapons were real. So, too, was the prospect of peace. Shocked by the Cuban Missile Crisis into recognizing a real choice, people preferred peace to annihilation. 

Today the reality of nuclear annihilation has receded into unconsciousness. This despite the recent statements by U.S. generals and the U.S. Ukrainian puppet Zelensky about nuclear weapons and their use that have extremely inflamed Russia’s fears, which clearly is intentional. The game is to have some officials say it and then deny it while having a policy that contradicts your denial. Keep pushing the envelope is U.S. policy. Obama-Biden reigned over the U.S. 2014 coup in Ukraine, Trump increased weapon sales to Ukraine in 2017, and Biden has picked up the baton from his partner (not his enemy) in this most deadly game. It is a bi-partisan Cold War 2, getting very hot. And it is the reason why Russia, its back to the wall, attacked Ukraine. It is obvious that this is exactly what the U.S. wanted or it would have acted very differently in the leadup to this tragedy. All the current ringing of hands is pure hypocrisy, the nihilism of a nuclear power never for one moment threatened but whose designs were calculated to threaten Russia at its borders.

The media propaganda against Russia and Putin is the most extreme and extensive propaganda in my lifetime. Patrick Lawrence has astutely examined this in a recent essay, where he writes the same is true for him:

Many people of many different ages have remarked in recent days that they cannot recall in their lifetimes a more pervasive, suffocating barrage of propaganda than what has engulfed us since the months that preceded Russia’s intervention. In my case it has come to supersede the worst of what I remember from the Cold War decades. 

Engulfed is an appropriate word. Lawrence rightly points to this propaganda as cognitive warfare directed at the U.S. population (and the rest of the world) and notes its connection to the January 2021 final draft of a “diabolic” NATO study called “Cognitive Warfare.” He quotes it thus: “The brain will be the battlefield of the 21st century,” . . . “Humans are the contested domain. Cognitive warfare’s objective is to make everyone a weapon.”

This cognitive warfare, however, has a longer history in cutting edge science. For each successive decade beginning with the 1990s and a declaration from President (and ex-Director of the CIA) George H. W. Bush that the 1990s would be the Decade of Brain Research, presidents have announced additional decades long projects involving the brain, with 2000-2010 being the Decade of Behavior Project, followed by mapping of the brain, artificial intelligence, etc. all organized and funded through the Office of Science and Technology Project (OSTP) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). This medical, military, and scientific research has been part of a long range plan to extend MK-Ultra’s mind control to the population at large under the cover of medical science, and it has been simultaneously connected to the development and funding of the pharmaceutical industries research and development of new brain-altering drugs. RFK, Jr. has documented the CIA’s extensive connection to germ and mind research and promotion in his book, The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma, and the Global War on Democracy and Public Health. It is why his book is banned from the mainstream media, who do the prime work of cognitive warfare for the government. To put it clearly: these media are the CIA. And the issue of U.S. bio-weapons research and development is central to these many matters, including in Ukraine.

In other words, the cognitive warfare we are now being subjected to has many tentacles connected to much more than today’s fanatical anti-Russian propaganda over Ukraine. All the U.S. wars of aggression have been promoted under its aegis, as have the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the economic warfare by the elites, the COVID crisis, etc. It’s one piece.

Take, for example, a book written in 2010 by David Ray Griffin, a renown theologian who has written more than a dozen books about 9/11. The book is Cognitive Infiltration: An Obama Appointee’s Plan to Undermine the 9/11 Conspiracy Theory. It is a critique of law professor Cass Sunstein, appointed by Obama to be the Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. Sunstein had written an article with a plan for the government to prevent the spread of anti-government “conspiracy theories” in which he promoted the use of anonymous government agents to use secret “cognitive infiltration” of these groups in order to break them up; to use media plants to disparage their arguments. He was particularly referring to those who questioned the official 9/11 narrative but his point obviously extended much further. He was working in the tradition of the great propagandists. Griffin took a scalpel to this call for cognitive warfare and was of course a victim of it as well. Sunstein has since worked for the World Health Organization (WHO) on COVID psychological responses and other COVID committees. It’s all one piece.

Sunstein’s wife is Samantha Power, Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations and war hawk extraordinaire. She gleefully promoted the U.S. destruction of Libya under the appellation of the “responsibility to protect,” a “humane” cover for imperialism. Now she is Biden’s Administrator of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), an arm of the CIA throughout the world. It’s all one piece.

The merry-go-round goes round and round.

I have gone off on this slight tangent to emphasize how vast and interconnected are the players and groups on Team Cognitive Warfare. They have been leading the league for quite some time and are hoping their game plan against Team Russia will keep them there. So far they are winning, as Patrick Lawrence says:

Look at what has become of us. Most Americans seem to approve of these things, or at least are unstirred to object. We have lost all sense of decency, of ordinary morality, of proportion. Can anyone listen to the din of the past couple of weeks without wondering if we have made of ourselves a nation of grotesques?

It is common to observe that in war the enemy is always dehumanized. We are now face to face with another reality: Those who dehumanize others dehumanize themselves more profoundly. 

Perhaps people are too ignorant to see through the propaganda. To have some group to hate is always “uplifting.” But we are all responsible for the consequences of our actions, even when those actions are just buying the propaganda and hating those one is told to hate. It is very hard to accept that the leaders of your own country commit and contemplate unspeakable evil deeds and that they wish to control your mind. To contemplate that they might once again use nuclear weapons is unspeakable but necessary if we are to prevent it.

I hope my fears are unfounded. I agree with Gilbert Doctorow that the Ukraine-Russia war separates the sheep from the goats, that there is no middle ground. This is not to celebrate war and the death of innocent people, but it does demand placing the blame squarely where it belongs and not trying to have it both ways. People like him, John Mearsheimer, the late badly missed Stephen Cohen, Ray McGovern, Scott Ritter, Pepe Escobar, Patrick Lawrence, Jack Matlock, Ted Postol, et al. are all cutting through the propaganda and delivering truth in opposition to all the lies. They go gentile with fears of nuclear war, however, as if it is somewhat possible but highly unlikely, as if their deepest thoughts are unspeakable, for to utter them would be an act of despondency.

The consensus of the experts tends to be that the U.S. wishes to draw the Russians into a long protracted guerrilla war along the lines of its secret use of mujahideen in Afghanistan in 1979 and after. There is evidence that this is already happening. But I think the U.S. strategists know that the Russians are too smart for that; that they have learned their lesson; and that they will withdraw once they feel they have accomplished their goals. Therefore, from the U.S./NATO perspective, time is reasonably short and they must act quickly, perhaps by doing a false flag operation that will justify a drastic response, or upping the tempo in some other way that would seem to justify the use of nuclear weapons, perhaps tactical at first.

I appreciate the input of the Russia experts I mentioned above. Their expertise dwarfs mine, but I disagree. Perhaps I am an excitable sort; perhaps I am one of those Patrick Lawrence refers to, quoting Carl Jung, as too emotional and therefore incapable of clear thinking. (I will leave the issue of this long held but erroneous western philosophical belief in the division of emotions and thoughts for another day.) Perhaps I can’t see the obvious that a nuclear war will profit no one and therefore it cannot happen. Yet Ted Postol, MIT professor of technology and international security, while perhaps agreeing that an intentional nuclear war is very unlikely, has been warning of an accidental one for many years. He is surely right on that score and well worth listening to.

But either way, I am sorry to say, perhaps because my perspective is that of a generalist, not an expert, and my thinking is informed by art as much as social science and history, my antennae pick up a very disturbing message. A voice tells me that the danger is very, very real today. It says:

 Beware, we are on the edge of a nuclear abyss. 

The AXIS Act, a Step toward World War III

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The Axis powers, including Germany and Japan, were the foes of the United States and other Allied powers in World War II. Decades later, President George W. Bush chose to term some other nations — Iraq, Iran, and North Korea — as a new “axis of evil.” That was followed by a US invasion and overthrow in Iraq. Decades later, US troops remain in Iraq, and US sanctions and hostility directed at the other two nations continue.

This week, the United States House of Representatives is set to bring the Axis designation back to the big time — seeking to lump China in with Russia as the new Axis powers the US should be devoted to opposing. The movement toward a new world war — the first one with nuclear powers on both sides — grows stronger.

The House is scheduled to consider the AXIS Act (HR 7314) this week. “AXIS” in the title is the kind of ridiculous acronym that has become common in US legislation. It stands for “Assessing Xi’s Interference and Subversion.” “Xi” is Xi Jinping, the leader of China’s government.

The AXIS Act is being considered under suspension of the rules. Legislation deemed noncontroversial by House leadership can be considered under suspension of the rules in which there is usually a relatively brief House floor debate. Suspension legislation is also often passed by voice vote on a nearly empty house floor. Pressing forward toward World War III is not controversial? For many oblivious House members that probably is the case.

The AXIS Act starts off with a series of findings attempting to paint China as an aider of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The accusations included are underwhelming: China and Russia made a strategic partnership announcement a few weeks before the invasion; China abstained from voting on resolutions condemning the invasion in the United Nations Security Council and General Assembly; China has not publicly condemned the invasion.

That’s it. The resolution implicitly admits its backers cannot really tie China to supporting the invasion of Ukraine. Still the resolution proceeds, in what it states is the “sense of Congress,” to bluster that …

“the People’s Republic of China’s disinformation efforts relating to the Russian Federation’s war against Ukraine make it culpable in whitewashing Russia’s war crimes, which include the indiscriminate killing of countless Ukrainian men, women, and children.”

It is the second and final listed “sense of Congress” that is the heart of the resolution and that holds the threat of increased animosity toward China and the potential eruption of World War III. It states that it is the sense of Congress that,

“if China is found to be materially supporting Russia in its war against Ukraine, there should be swift and stringent consequences for China.”

Swift and stringent consequences have already been imposed against Russia. They amount to nearly everything short of US troops fighting against the Russian military, though, with US history as a guide, it should be suspected that US troops are engaged covertly in some military actions against Russians. The US has established expansive sanctions on Russia, extensively blocked investment in and commerce with Russia, and excluded Russia from financial systems including SWIFT that facilitate participation in international trade. The US has also been funding, supplying, and training Ukraine military forces that are fighting against Russians.

In an apparent effort to justify the US treating China similarly, the AXIS Act requires the real experts at depicting other nations as enemies — the Department of State — to…

“submit to the appropriate congressional committees” within 30 days and then every 90 days thereafter “a report on whether and how the People’s Republic of China, including the Government of the People’s Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party, any Chinese state-owned enterprise, and any other Chinese entity, has provided support to the Russian Federation with respect to its unprovoked invasion of and full-scale war against Ukraine.”

These reports will provide House members keen on ramping up hostilities against China with the steady stream of pro-war propaganda they desire. And have no doubt that the executive branch will be happy to provide such. The Biden administration’s interests are in the same direction as the House members raging at China. President Joe Biden has already been out using the Ukraine War as a reason for threatening China. Indeed, the AXIS Act notes one example of this:

“In his call with Xi Jinping on March 18, 25 2022, President Joe Biden communicated that there would be ‘implications and consequences if China provides material support to Russia as it conducts brutal attacks against Ukrainian cities and civilians’.”

The AXIS Act is a significant step in the effort by Congress members and the Biden administration, using the Ukraine War as an excuse, to direct against China hostilities already directed against Russia, and maybe more.

Most of the backers of this effort probably expect that such actions will not lead to World War III. Hopefully, they are correct in that assessment.

Even if they are correct that the most dire consequences will be avoided, the toll of expanding hostilities against China will still be harsh for people across the world.

For what gain? None is clear.

What is clear is that there is much potential danger ahead and that US politicians are propelling Americans and the world toward it.

Chinese brainstorming…

Think about the implications of this, big picture. The stock market and economy are shaky. China may have to dump everything they own in the US, along with Treasuries. All triggered by the sanctions on Russia from Ukraine.

Chinese state regulators held an emergency conference with major domestic and foreign banks to discuss means to protect the People’s Republic’s assets should the US impose sanctions similar to those it slapped on Russia in February, the Financial Times reports, citing people said to be familiar with the situation.

The meeting, said to have taken place on 22 April, reportedly involved officials from the People’s Bank of China, the country’s powerful central bank, as well as the Finance Ministry. Representatives from every major national bank took part, as did major foreign lenders operating in the Asian nation, such as HSBC, according to the paper’s sources.

An unnamed "senior finance ministry official" was said to have kicked off the meeting by saying Beijing had been "put on alert" of the West’s ability to seize foreign assets by observing what the US and its allies did to Russia.

In March, officials from the Russian Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance reported that the United States and its allies had seized "about $300 billion" of the country’s estimated $642 billion reserve cushion, with the US alone accounting for roughly $100 billion of that. In recent weeks, officials and lawmakers in Washington and Brussels have threatened to confiscate these assets, or transfer them to Ukraine.

Found HERE.

Yes. If China disengages from US, the US is without a prayer. 

We need them far more than they need us. 

For decades they sent us manufactured goods, we gave them pieces of paper called Treasury Bills. That is over.

Then they started taking businesses and land. If they can’t operate a business or make use of the land there is no reason for them to play with us.

In theory US could do what it used to do and make stuff. 

Before such an adjustment is made the largest part of the population would be dead. 

Only reason for China or Russia to engage with US at all is to preserve stability. 

When US policy amounts to throwing all the cards in the air and kicking over the table they can’t much help us with stability.

-oldhippie
So the Chinese have received a wake up call- they watched as the US/UK walked away with Afghani bank assets, with Venezuelan Gold (Guido seems happy), with Libyan, and Serbian Gold, with Iranian Assets, and of late with Russian bank assets to the tune of $300 Billion.

So what can be a rational game plan for the Chinese who have ? $1.5 Trillion in Assets/T bills tied up in the US. 

How does one back out of this predicament, and reclaim their value, before the US preys on them???

-AParadiseLost

Caught RED-HANDED!

China recently introduced a new law and policy that discloses the IP address of all Internet users.

Now, as a result of this, many people claiming to be inside of Shanghai and upset about the Coronavirus restrictions have been unmasked.

This policy resulted in the discovery of “Shanghai residents” who have been vocally complaining about their dissatisfaction with China, actually being outside of China, and constructing narratives that paints China in a horrible light.

There are many, many “Chinese accounts” originating out of Taiwan, a handful out of Australia and Japan, and a large group from both the UK, and Canada. All of which pretend to be Chinese residents inside of Shanghai.

This has forced Chinese social media, as well as foreign social media (operating inside of China) to suspend many of these fake accounts. As a result, many of these individuals are suddenly stopping their Internet activities using China social media.

So anyone on wechat etc, will now notice that there are suddenly less rubbish materials and postings critical of China.

One such “caught” faux-Shanghai “resident”…

An Dong, an IT support staffer for the EU delegation, often expressed candid political takes and spoke in favor of democratic principles on WeChat. His account has previously been suspended “likely as a result of his political views,” per the Wall Street Journal.

Ten countries open accounts to pay for gas from Russia, Hungary says – The Frontier Post

MOSCOW (RIA Novosti): In addition to Hungary, nine European countries have opened Russian bank accounts to pay for natural gas under the scheme proposed by Moscow, Gergely Gouyash, head of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s office, told Rádió Kossuth.
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“Hungary has opened a euro account, to which the price of gas in euros is credited, and then the bank converts it into rubles… In addition to us, nine other countries do this, but they do not say that they do the same, simply because in Europe now “being good for Europe” means that the leadership of the country does not speak honestly with its people and in international life,” he said.
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The politician once again reminded that the European Union has not adopted any sanctions that make it impossible to pay for Russian gas in rubles, this is regulated by a civil law agreement between states and companies.
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Earlier, Hungarian Foreign Minister Szijjarto also emphasized that some European companies importing natural gas from Russia agreed to the payment scheme proposed by Russia, but they do not talk about it honestly and spread false information about the position of Hungary with the help of Western media.
In turn, Orban noted that the country is ready to pay for Russian gas in rubles, and Szijjártó pointed out that the cessation of supplies to Bulgaria will not affect transit to Hungary.
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On March 23, Russian President Putin announced the transfer of payment for natural gas supplies to the EU countries and other states that have introduced restrictive measures against Russia into rubles in order to abandon the use of dollars and euros in calculations. Then the president si-gned a corresponding dec-ree and said that if unfriendly countries did not pay in rubles from April 1, then Russia would consider this a default on gas contracts.
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According to the new scheme, Gazprombank will open special currency and ruble accounts for foreign buyers to pay for gas. The buyer will be able to transfer funds to the first acc-ount in the currency specified in the contract for the supply of “blue fuel”, the b-ank will sell it on the Mos-cow Exchange, after which it will credit rubles to the account of the buyer of gas and from this account settlements will be made with gas supplier – Gazprom”.ARTICLE

German energy firm Uniper ready to meet Russian pay demand – BBC News

You don’t say?

Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s interview with the Xinhua News Agency (China), April 30, 2022

From HERE

Question: What do you think is at the root of the Ukrainian crisis? What can the international community do to solve this problem?

Sergey Lavrov:  When we talk about the Ukrainian crisis, first of all we need to look at the destructive policy of the Western states conducted over many years and led by the United States, which set a course to knock together a unipolar world order after the end of the Cold War. NATO’s reckless expansion to the East was a key component of those actions, despite the political obligations to the Soviet leadership on the non-expansion of the Alliance. As you know, those promises were just empty words. All these years, NATO infrastructure has been moving closer and closer to the Russian borders.

The West was never concerned about the fact that their actions grossly violated their international obligations not to strengthen their own security at the expense of the security of others. In particular, Washington and Brussels arrogantly rejected the initiatives put forward by Russia in December 2021 to ensure our country’s security guarantees in the west: to stop the expansion of NATO, not to deploy armaments that pose a threat to Russia in Ukraine and to return the Alliance’s military infrastructure to the 1997 configuration, when the NATO-Russia Founding Act was signed.

It is well-known that the United States and NATO member states have always viewed Ukraine as a tool to contain Russia. Over the years, they have actively fuelled anti-Russia sentiments there, forcing Kiev to make an artificial and false choice: to be either with the West or with Moscow.

It was the collective West that first provoked and then supported the anti-constitutional coup d’etat in Kiev in February 2014. Nationalists came to power in Ukraine and immediately unleashed a bloody massacre in Donbass, and set the course on the destruction of everything Russian in the rest of the country. Let me remind you that it was precisely because of this threat that the people of Crimea voted in a referendum for the reunification with Russia in 2014.

Over these past years, the United States and its allies have done nothing to stop the intra-Ukrainian conflict. Instead of encouraging Kiev to settle it politically based on the Minsk Complex of Measures, they sent weapons, trained and armed the Ukrainian army and nationalist battalions, and generally carried out the military-political development of Ukraine’s territory. They encouraged the aggressive anti-Russia course pursued by the Kiev authorities. In fact, they pushed the Ukrainian nationalists to undermine the negotiating process and resolve the Donbass issue by force.

We were deeply concerned about the undeclared biological programmes implemented in Ukraine with Pentagon’s support in close proximity to the Russian borders. And, of course, we could not disregard the Kiev leadership’s undisguised intentions to acquire a military nuclear potential, which would create an unacceptable threat to Russia’s national security.

In these conditions, we had no other choice but to recognise the Donetsk and Lugansk people’s republics and launch the special military operation. Its aim is to protect people from genocide by the neo-Nazis, as well as to demilitarise and denazify Ukraine. I would like to stress that Russia is acting to fulfil its obligations under bilateral agreements on cooperation and mutual assistance with the DPR and LPR, at the official request of Donetsk and Lugansk under Article 51 of the UN Charter on the right to self-defence.

The special military operation launched on February 24 is progressing strictly in accordance with the plan. All its goals will be achieved in spite of our opponents’ counteractions. At the moment we are witnessing a classic case of double standards and hypocrisy of the Western establishment. By publicly supporting the Kiev regime, NATO member states are doing everything in their power to prevent the completion of the operation by reaching political agreements. Various weapons are flowing endlessly into Ukraine through Poland and other NATO countries. All of this is being done under the pretext of “fighting the invasion”, but in fact the United States and the European Union intend to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian.” They do not care at all about the fate of Ukraine as an independent subject of international relations.

The West is ready to jeopardise the energy and food security of entire regions of the globe to satisfy its own geopolitical ambitions.What ither explanation is there for the unrestrained flywheel of anti-Russian sanctions launched by the West with the start of the operation and which they aren’t thinking of stopping?

If the United States and NATO are truly interested in settling the Ukrainian crisis, then, first, they must come to their senses and stop supplying weapons and ammunition to Kiev. The Ukrainian people do not need Stingers and Javelins; what they need is a solution to urgent humanitarian issues.Russia has been doing this since 2014. During this time, tens of thousands of tonnes of humanitarian cargo have been delivered to Donbass, and about 15,000 tonnes of humanitarian aid have already arrived in the part of Ukraine liberated from the Kiev regime, the DPR and the LPR, since the launch of the special military operation.

Second, it is essential that the Kiev regime stops cynical provocations, including in the information space. Ukrainian armed formations are barbarically shelling cities using civilians as living shields. We saw examples of this in Donetsk and Kramatorsk. Captured Russian servicemen are being abused with animal cruelty, and these atrocities are being posted online. At the same time, they use their Western patrons and global media controlled by the West to accuse the Russian army of war crimes. As they say, laying the blame at somebody else’s door.

It is high time for the West to stop unconditionally whitewashing and covering up for Kiev. Otherwise, … Washington, Brussels and other Western capitals should consider their responsibility for complicity in the bloody crimes perpetrated by the Ukrainian nationalists.

Question: What measures has Russia taken to protect the lives and property of civilians? What efforts has it made to establish humanitarian corridors?

Sergey Lavrov: As I mentioned earlier, the special military operation is proceeding according to plan. Under this plan, the Russian military personnel are doing everything in their power to avoid victims among civilians. Blows are carried out with high-precision weapons, first of all at military infrastructure facilities and places where armoured vehicles are concentrated. Unlike the Ukrainian army and nationalist armed groups that use people as living shields, the Russian army provides the locals with all kinds of assistance and support.

Humanitarian corridors open daily from Kharkov and Mariupol to evacuate people from dangerous districts, but the Kiev regime demands that the “national battalions” in control of those areas do not release the civilians. Nevertheless, many are able to leave with the assistance of Russian, DPR and LPR servicemen. During the special military operation, the hotline of the Interdepartmental Coordination Headquarters of the Russian Federation for Humanitarian Response in Ukraine has received requests for assistance in evacuating 2.8 million people to Russia, including 16,000 foreign citizens and employees of UN and OSCE international missions. In total, 1.02 million people have been evacuated from Ukraine, the DPR and LPR, of which over 120,000 are citizens of third countries, including over 300 Chinese nationals. There are over 9,500 temporary accommodation facilities operating in Russian regions. They have space for rest and hot meals, and everything that may be necessary. Newly arrived refugees are provided with qualified medical and psychological assistance.

Russia is taking measures to ensure civilian navigation in the Black and Azov seas. A humanitarian corridor opens daily, a safe lane for ships. However, Ukraine continues to block foreign ships, creating a threat of shelling in its internal waters and territorial sea. Moreover, Ukrainian naval units have mined the shore, the ports and territorial waters. These explosive devices disconnect from their anchor lines and drift into the open sea, so they pose a serious danger to both the fleets and the port infrastructure of the Black Sea countries.

Question: Since the special military operation was launched in Ukraine, Western counties have adopted a large number of unprecedented sanctions against Moscow. How do you think these sanctions will affect Russia? What are the main countermeasures taken by Russia? Some say that a new Cold War has begun. How would you comment on that?

Sergey Lavrov: It is true that the special military operation was used by the collective West as a pretext to unleash numerous restrictions against Russia, as well as its legal entities and individuals. The United States, Great Britain, Canada and EU countries do not conceal that their goal is to strangle our economy by undermining its competitiveness and blocking Russia’s progressive development. At the same time, the Western ruling circles are not embarrassed by the fact that anti-Russian sanctions are already beginning to harm ordinary people in their own countries. I mean the declining economic trends in the United States and many European countries, including growing inflation and unemployment.

It is clear that there can be no excuse for this anti-Russian line and it has no future. As President Vladimir Putin said, Russia has withstood this unprecedented pressure. Now the situation is stabilising, though, of course, not all risks are behind us.

In any case, they will not succeed in weakening us. I am confident that we will restructure the economy and protect ourselves from our opponents’ possible illegitimate and hostile actions in the future. We will continue to give a fitting and adequate response to the imposed restrictions, guided by the goal of maintaining the stability of the Russian economy and its financial system, as well as the interests of domestic businesses and the entire nation. We will focus our efforts on de-dollarisation, de-offshorisation, import substitution, and promotion of technological independence.We will continue to adapt to external challenges and step up development programmes for promising and competitive industries.

During the period of turbulence, our retaliatory special economic measures needed to ensure the normal functioning of the Russian economy will be continued and expanded. As a responsible player on the international market, Russia intends to continue scrupulously fulfilling its obligations under international contracts on export deliveries of agricultural products, fertilisers, energy carriers and other critical products. We are deeply concerned about a possible food crisis provoked by the anti-Russian sanctions, and we are well aware how important the deliveries of essential goods, such as food, are for the socioeconomic development of Asian, African, Latin American, and Middle Eastern countries.

I will be brief as regards the second part of your question. Today we are not talking about a new “cold war,” but, as I said earlier, about the persistent desire to impose a US-centric model of the world order coming from Washington and its satellites, who imagine themselves to be “arbiters of humankind’s fate.” It has reached the point where the … Western minority is trying to replace the UN-centric architecture and international law formed after World War II with their own “rule-based order.” These rules are written by Washington and its allies and then imposed on the international community as binding.

We must realise that the United States has been carrying out this destructive policy for several decades now. It is enough to recall NATO’s aggression against Yugoslavia, attacks on Iraq and Libya, attempts to destroy Syria, as well as the colour revolutions that Western capitals staged in a number of countries, including Ukraine. All of this came at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and resulted in chaos in various regions of the planet.

The West tries to crudely suppress those who carry out an independent course in their domestic and foreign policy. Not just Russia. We can see how bloc thinking is being imposed in the Asian-Pacific Region. We can recall the Indo-Pacific strategy promoted by the United States, which has a pronounced anti-China tendency. The US seeks to dictate the standards according to which Latin America should live, in the spirit of the outdated Monroe Doctrine. This explains many years of the illegal trade embargo on Cuba, sanctions against Venezuela, as well as attempts to undermine stability in Nicaragua and other countries. The pressure on Belarus continues in the same context. This list can go on.

It is clear that the collective West’s efforts to oppose the natural course of history and solve its problems at the expense of others are doomed. Today the world has several decision-making centres; it is multipolar. We can see how quickly Asian, African, and Latin American countries are developing. Everyone is getting a real freedom of choice, including where it comes to choosing their development models and participation in integration projects. Our special military operation in Ukraine also contributes to the process of freeing the world from the West’s neocolonial oppression heavily mixed with racism and a complex of exceptionalism.

The faster the West accepts the new geopolitical situation, the better it will be for the West itself and for the entire international community.

As President Xi Jinping said at the Boao Forum for Asia, “We need to uphold the principle of indivisible security, build a balanced, effective and sustainable security architecture, and oppose the pursuit of one’s own security at the cost of others’ security.”

Question: Russian-Ukrainian talks have attracted close attention of the international community. What are the main obstacles to the talks today? How do you regard the prospects of a peace treaty between the two parties? What kind of bilateral relations does Russia intend to have with Ukraine in the future?

Sergey Lavrov: At present the Russian and Ukrainian delegations are holding discussions on the possible draft almost daily, via videoconference. This document should contain such elements of the post-conflict situation as permanent neutrality, the non-nuclear, non-bloc and demilitarised status of Ukraine, as well as guarantees of its security. The agenda of the talks also includes denazification, recognition of the new geopolitical reality, the lifting of sanctions and the status of the Russian language, among other things. Settling the situation in Ukraine will make a significant contribution to the de-escalation of the military and political tensions in Europe and the world in general. The establishment of an institution of guarantor states is envisaged as a possible option. First of all, they will be the permanent members of the UN Security Council, including Russia and China. We share information on the progress in the talks with Chinese diplomats. We are grateful to Beijing and other BRICS partners for their balanced position on the Ukrainian issue.

We are in favour of continuing the talks, although the process is difficult.

You are right to ask about the obstacles. For example, they include the militant rhetoric and incendiary actions of Kiev’s Western patrons. They are actually encouraging Kiev to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” pumping the country with weapons and sending mercenaries there. Let me note that the Ukrainian security services staged a crude bloody provocation in Bucha with the help of the West, to complicate the negotiation process among other things.

I am confident that agreements can only be reached when Kiev starts to be guided by the interests of the Ukrainian people, and not the advisors from far away.

Speaking about Russian-Ukrainian relations, Russia is interested in a peaceful, free, neutral, prosperous and friendly Ukraine. Despite the current administration’s anti-Russian course, we remember the many centuries of all-embracing cultural, spiritual, economic and family ties between Russians and Ukrainians. We will definitely restore these ties.

Simple Cajun Seasoning

Here is a simple way to make Cajun seasoning using normal kitchen spices.

seasoning mix
seasoning mix

Ingredients

Original recipe yields 20 servings
Ingredient Checklist

Directions

Instructions Checklist
  • Combine the salt, oregano, paprika, cayenne pepper, and black pepper in a plastic bag and shake to mix.

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Poland and NATO: Sneaking Troops Around; Forbids Public Photos/Videos!

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The Polish Government has announced that Large-Scale Military Exercises will be taking place across the Country beginning today involving the Polish Military and multiple NATO Member States.  Heavy Military Equipment is expected to be seen on Highways and roads around the Country.

This, the world already knew about.   What’s very different this time is as follows:

The Polish State Security Service has requested that people refrain from Photographing or Posting about Military Movements including Aircraft landings and take-offs, people who do continue to publicly document Allied Military Movements are subject to prosecution.

The Polish State Security Ministry has threatened Fines and Jail Time for posting pictures and announcing Force Movements over Social Media since the Russian Invasion of Ukraine began, though so far no Polish Citizens have been prosecuted.

There has been covert intelligence coming out of Poland which CLAIMS (not yet confirmed) that Poland and perhaps other nations are planning to put armed troops into western Ukraine as “peace keepers.”   HOWEVER, along with such rumors are other CLAIMS (also not verified) that Poland intends a land grab f western Ukraine; to reincorporate what was once actual Polish territory before World War 2, back into Poland.     These claims are Furiously DENIED by the Poland government.

Yet, given the announcement by Polish security services, that the public must not take photos, video or make troop movement postings on social media, one has to wonder why all the secrecy?  If Poland is not going to send troops into Ukraine, why the secrecy?

It is widely believed by many seasoned observers that if Poland tries to insert troops into Ukraine, they would be immediately engaged by Russian armed forces, regardless of Poland’s stated purposes.

American Georgetown professor advocates doubling the United States defense spending so as to have a war with both China and Russia simultaneously

Current spending; United States budget is…

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2022 05 02 15 09

So it’s not enough. More military spending must occur! Double the spending. Is this even possible?

Ok. I knew that the United States was run by idiots, but this is over the top.

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2022 05 02 14 16

Russia’s chip technology is backward, why is its weaponry advanced?

2022-05-02 13:08 HKT

As we all know, chips are the soul of information-based weapons and equipment. A country’s chip level directly determines the advanced level of weapons and equipment. If the ranking is based on revenue, in 2020, the United States will account for 6 of the world’s top ten semiconductor manufacturers. , South Korea accounted for 2, Japan accounted for 1, Xiaowan accounted for 1.

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2022 05 02 14 39

 

If the ranking is based on R&D expenditure, personnel size, etc., the ranking is different, but without exception, no Russian company can make the list.

From the current point of view, Russia’s chip research capabilities are not strong. Compared with the United States and Europe, its chip level is at least 10 years different.

Due to this, you can’t see any popular mobile phones, cars and household appliances in Russia. Many civilian products in Russia are subject to chip technology, and there are almost no sales in the world, and of course there is no sense of existence.

Although Russia’s chip technology is not strong, its weapons and equipment are extremely advanced. This is also an important reason why Russia’s arms trade has been ranked second in the world for many years.

According to Western media reports, in 2019, the GPS system of the United States covering the Middle East was suppressed by the interference of mysterious electromagnetic waves, and it was completely paralyzed in a period of time, which interrupted civil and military communications in Israel and other countries. reached thousands of square kilometers.

The U.S. military immediately analyzed it and believed that the electronic interference was carried out by Russia, because Russia has a Khomeimim air base in Syria, which contains the Russian electronic warfare system. The U.S. military judged the distance and believed that the interference signal was the Khomemim airbase. Sent from Memim Air Force Base.

The Russian army was able to use the electronic warfare system to effectively interfere with the GPS of the US military, causing many of the US military’s precision-guided weapons to fail under the interference of the Russian army. This also shows that the Russian military’s electronic warfare equipment is still extremely advanced.

Russian weapons and equipment have always given people the impression of being stupid and clumsy, and it is difficult to create very small and delicate electronic warfare equipment.

Chip technology is listed as a key technology by the United States. The United States and other Western countries not only block chip technology from Russia, but also impose embargoes on high-performance chips. Russia’s chip technology is backward, and Russia, which does not have high-performance chips, why is its weaponry so advanced?

To figure this out, we have to figure out why Russia’s chip technology lags behind?

Russia’s chip technology and foundation were inherited from the Soviet Union, which implemented a planned economic system, and the Soviet Union divided labor among countries and regions, such as East Germany producing precision instruments, Vietnam planting rice, Ukraine farming and raising cattle, and Kazakhstan picking cotton. Belarus-made trucks, etc.

At that time, microelectronics was an absolute high-tech, and all the republics wanted to develop. In order to balance the interests of the various republics, the Soviet Union split and distributed the production of microelectronics to the republics. This led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The electronics industry is very fragmented in various republics and cannot form a complete industrial chain.

Because the Soviet Union implemented a planned economic system, all microelectronics units and enterprises belong to the state, and of course they all eat financially, so it doesn’t matter if they make money or not. The key microelectronics products must be able to ensure national defense and security, because there is no market competition. , so the efficiency is not high.

At the beginning of the Cold War, integrated circuit technology was just emerging, and integrated circuits had two development routes, namely the transistor route and the electron tube route.

As far as electronic tubes and transistors are concerned, transistors are small in size, low in power consumption and long in service life, and have obvious advantages over electronic tubes. It can be said that transistors are a more advanced form of electronic tubes.

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2022 05 02 14 40

 

But also because transistors are small and advanced, there are many failures, and the anti-interference and anti-radiation capabilities are weak. Under the conditions of nuclear war, the anti-radiation capabilities of electron tubes are much stronger than that of transistors. At that time, in terms of volume, transistors were smaller than electron tubes, but The technology back then was not much smaller.

Although the technology of electron tubes and transistors has developed, the development of transistor technology is faster, especially the miniaturization of transistors, and later it has developed to the nanometer level, which is probably not expected by the Russians.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union has left Russia with a mess. The development of light and heavy industries is uneven, and the semiconductor industry is lagging behind, especially in chip technology. Russia wants to catch up, but it has more than enough energy.

Compared with other industries, the semiconductor industry requires continuous technological iteration. It is not only a technology-intensive industry, but also a capital-intensive industry. It not only requires a large amount of investment, but also requires a certain market scale, and requires a long period of accumulation.

When Russia was first established, shock therapy was implemented. As a result, the economy was seriously regressed, and private enterprises were even more backward. In addition to the troubles in Chechnya, Russia was forced to launch two Chechnya wars in 1994 and 1999. Although Chechnya was eventually conquered by Russia, it also cost a fortune. Russia’s treasury is empty.

After 2000, Russia’s economy began to recover, but in 2008, it fought a war in Georgia. In 2011, the economy just turned a few years ago. In 2014, the Crimea crisis occurred again. emptied the treasury.

Coupled with the constant sanctions by the United States, a large number of scientific and technological talents have been lost, and without capital injection, most of the budding private enterprises have died prematurely.

For example, there is a Yoga Devices mobile phone company in Russia, which produces the YotaPhone series of smartphones, and its YotaPhone 3 mobile phone also won the 2018 German iF Design Award.

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2022 05 02 14 4e0

But the company went bankrupt in 2019. Because the Russian domestic market is limited, mobile phones from China, the United States and South Korea are very competitive, and there is not much capital injection, the Russian mobile phone company eventually went bankrupt.

The premature death of this Russian mobile phone company is just a microcosm of the development of the Russian electronics industry.

Because Russia does not have many civilian electronic products, there is not much demand for chips. Today’s Russian civilian consumer electronics market only accounts for less than 2% of the global share.

The American Semiconductor Industry Association released a research report in which Americans estimated that Russia’s semiconductor purchases accounted for less than one thousandth of the global total.

Most of today’s consumer goods require chips, such as mobile phones, automobiles, home appliances, computers, etc. It is precisely because Russia’s chip technology is backward and the United States has imposed a strict blockade on high-performance chips, which has led to the development of civilian products that require chips in Russia. If it fails, Russia’s economy can only be supported by energy and military industries.

This creates a vicious circle, and it is expected that Russia’s economy will become increasingly difficult due to chip technology.

Russia’s chip technology is backward, but why is the military industry developed? This is related to Russia’s anti-sky system engineering capabilities.

What is systems engineering capability? To use an analogy, with the same stack of wood, ordinary people can build houses, but experts can build warships, planes, and cannons. This is the ability of systems engineering.

Anyone who has watched Romance of the Three Kingdoms knows that Zhuge Liang can use ordinary wood to create a wooden cow and a horse. This wooden cow and horse can be used to transport military rations and is a means of transportation that surpasses the level of technology at the same time. Zhuge Liang’s ability to create a wooden cow and a horse depends on the system engineering ability.

We can compare the phased array radars of the United States and Russia. The signal processing part of the American Patriot phased array radar uses advanced digital chips, so the flight speed of the detection target can be quickly calculated.

Russia does not have high-end chips at all, so it replaced the chip with an “other-excited crystal oscillator”. This “other-excited crystal oscillator” is an outdated analog circuit design. Integrated circuits are smaller.

Therefore, Russia’s air defense missile phased array radar is larger than that of the United States, and it looks a bit stupid and bulky, but from the perspective of core indicators, it is at the same level as the United States, and its anti-jamming performance is stronger than that of the United States.

Americans have specially studied the Russian S300 radar, and they are full of praise for the performance of this radar. They believe that this radar is “high-performance, low-cost, and low-power consumption”, and they evaluate the Russians’ ability to innovate independently.

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2022 05 02 14 41

 

That is to say, Americans use the most advanced components and advanced assembly technology to create advanced equipment, while Russian components are not advanced, but relying on the system engineering capabilities against the sky, they can also create advanced equipment.

Russian equipment can be said to be cheap and not beautiful, but it is very easy to use.

Some people say that if you give the Russians a pile of scrap metal, the Americans can only sell it as scrap iron, but the Russians can become a big killer that sweeps away thousands of troops.

On September 6, 1976, Belenko, a pilot of the Soviet Air Defense Air Force, flew a MiG-25 fighter through Japan’s tight air defense network and stopped at Hakodate Airport in Japan, which surprised Japan and the United States. In front of 25 fighters, Japan’s air defense system is useless.

After the Americans got the news, they immediately sent technicians to Japan to study the MiG-25 fighter plane. The plane was disassembled and transported to the Baili Air Force Base in central Japan.

As a result, the American technicians were very surprised that the material of this fighter was very common, mainly made of stainless steel, only a little titanium alloy was used for the key parts, and the welding was done by hand, and the workmanship was relatively rough.

The radar of the aircraft has a huge power of 600 kilowatts, but the main components are outdated vacuum tube components, not advanced solid-state electronic components, so the radar volume is large, but it is more suitable for extreme high temperature, and also reduces the avionics equipment compartment. cooling requirements.

Americans looked at these backward technology and rough parts, but they couldn’t figure out how the Soviets turned it into a fighter with excellent performance. The Americans adjusted the performance parameters of the next-generation heavy fighter based on the performance of the MiG-25, and finally gave birth to the F-15 fighter.

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2022 05 02 14 42

There are two main reasons why the Russians have such incredible systems engineering capabilities:

One is that Russia’s high-end manufacturing industry is underdeveloped, and it cannot make the most advanced weapons with the most advanced chips like the Americans. Instead, it can only use less advanced chips to make weapons and equipment that can compete with the West.

This dilemma of “smart women can’t cook without rice” made the Russians have to improve their systems engineering capabilities to solve the problems, and the Russians’ systems engineering capabilities were also forced out.

Today’s Russia can make low-end chips, mainly to meet the needs of the military, because the military’s demand is small and cannot be produced on a large scale, and of course it cannot be industrialized.

Practice has proved that it is feasible to solve a specific problem with super system engineering capabilities, but after all, this is not a long-term solution. For any industry, the return on investment must be considered. Can not increase R & D investment, is not conducive to long-term development.

China’s early chip development also encountered this problem. To solve this problem, marketization can only be implemented under the guidance of the state.

Second, Russia’s super-strong systems engineering capabilities benefit from Russia’s solid level of basic theoretical research, because only by mastering basic theoretical knowledge can we support the ideas and assumptions of systems engineering.

For example, the Italian painter Leonardo da Vinci, the teacher always asked him to repeat the painting of eggs. In fact, the teacher asked him to do basic skills, and Da Vinci felt very tired at first.

The teacher told Da Vinci that eggs in the world are not absolutely the same. Even if it is the same egg, standing at different angles, the projected light is different, and the drawing is also different. Therefore, painting eggs is a basic skill. Once you have mastered it, you can draw anything.

Da Vinci, who was very intelligent, listened to the teacher’s words, and began to paint eggs carefully and patiently. Eventually, he laid a good foundation for painting and became a world-renowned painter.

The author is an engineering graduate. The author has a feeling that if you want to find a paper with a certain degree of mathematical foundation, then you can find references in the paper, and then find the references in the paper. Within five steps of iteration, it must be Russian. Literature.

Don’t look at American higher education, but when it comes to basic education, especially basic mathematics education, Russia is stronger, and basic education in the United States cannot even (?) keep up with China.

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2022 05 02 14 43

If the basic theory is regarded as the starting point and the product is regarded as the end point, only by thoroughly understanding the basic theory can we design the best route from the starting point to the end point of the product.

Russia has its own unique features in this regard, which are worthy of our study and reference, and also worthy of our deep reflection.

Chinese girl with a “to die for” tummy

Look at that waist! Wow. video 3MB

America Wants War with China – Why This American is Saying No!

Pretty damn good.

Cheeseburger Buns

My mom stuffs soft homemade yeast rolls with ground beef, tomato sauce and cheese to make these tasty sandwiches. They’re great leftovers, too. My son takes them in his lunch the next day. —Nancy Holland, Morgan Hill, California

545ee1f52fcc602c7dca743d9aadb6f4
545ee1f52fcc602c7dca743d9aadb6f4

Ingredients

  • 2 packages (1/4 ounce each) active dry yeast
  • 1/2 cup warm water (110° to 115°)
  • 3/4 cup warm whole milk (110° to 115°)
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 1/4 cup shortening
  • 1 large egg
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 3-1/2 to 4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1-1/2 pounds ground beef
  • 1/4 cup chopped onion
  • 1 can (8 ounces) tomato sauce
  • 8 slices process American cheese, quartered

R.cc7773a4e60cf1ab7cd9c21b0597d775
R.cc7773a4e60cf1ab7cd9c21b0597d775

Directions

  1. In a large bowl, dissolve yeast in warm water. Add the milk, sugar, shortening, egg, salt and 2 cups flour; beat until smooth. Stir in enough remaining flour to form a soft dough.
  2. Turn onto a floured surface; knead until smooth and elastic, about 4-6 minutes. Place in a greased bowl, turning once to grease top. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 30 minutes.
  3. In a large skillet, cook beef and onion over medium heat until meat is no longer pink; drain. Stir in tomato sauce. Remove from the heat; set aside.
  4. Punch dough down; divide into 16 pieces. On a lightly floured surface, gently roll out and stretch each piece into a 5-in. circle. Top each circle with two pieces of cheese and about 3 tablespoons beef mixture. Bring dough over filling to center; pinch edges to seal.
  5. Place seam side down on a greased baking sheet. Cover and let rise in a warm place until doubled, about 20 minutes. Bake at 400° for 8-12 minutes or until golden brown. Serve warm. Refrigerate leftovers.

American neocon leadership advocate nuclear war with China to “put them in their place”

That will trigger a MASSIVE bludgeoning of the United States by both Russia and China simultaneously.

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2022 05 02 14 19

An e-mail from You-Tube explaining things…

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2022 05 02 20 14

RUSSIAN TV 

Tonight (Sunday) Russian television broadcast a simulation of Russia launching a SARMAT missile, with its fifteen nuclear warheads, against Britain!  The TV commentator says the UK – their little island – will be wiped out.   Here, look:

video 7MB

BUT WAIT . . . THERE’S MORE!

Not only did the Russian Television network show this to the entire country, but they went even farther . . . finally admitting what has long been rumored about Russia having developed a 100 MEGA-ton nuclear drone torpedo.    Look at what the Russian people were told on their TV’s tonight: Plunge Britain into the sea by Tsunami from a nuclear torpedo drone!

video 9MB

In the U.S., perhaps one of the most useful idiots in Congress, Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, a complete political moron the best part of whom likely dripped down his father’s leg,  has introduced a Joint Resolution in Congress authorizing the Use of military force (AUMF) inside Ukraine “if Russia uses chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons.”

In my opinion, that Joint Resolution would _really_ be a US declaration of war on Russia.  Let’s not fool ourselves with the diplomatic language.
By the time that law is passed, the USA will likely already be at war with Russia, everything else is diplomatic trifles.

 

A Giant Statue From Old Trash Movies Is Now Rests In Someone’s Backyard

According to a Tumblr user trulyunpleasant:

“This statue is a couple miles from where I live, just sitting in someones backyard. It was in two crappy Atlantis sword-and-sandal movies back in the 50′s/60′s. Then it sat on top of a bar (or club) for a few years, and then someone bought it for their house.”

It’s a Hell of a thing to have lying around.

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Video: Col. Richard Black: U.S. Leading World to Nuclear War

Mike Billington of the Schiller Institute interviewed  (former) Senator and Col. (ret) Richard Black, who served 31 years in the US Marines and Army.

Sen. Black talked about his military service in Syria, how and why Russia got involved in the war militarily, and how such involvement contrasts with the US’ and NATO’s justification for military intervention in the said war. 

Sen. Black also addresses the recent Russian military invasion of Ukraine and the failure to dissolve NATO.

40.12: Colonel Black focusses on the risk of World War III. 

“The decision of Peace or War is made in Washington DC,

As long as we [US government] want the war to continue, we will fight using the Ukrainians as proxies, and we will fight it to last Urainian death”

*

Good New Orleans Creole Gumbo

This is a fine Creole gumbo recipe.

"I learned to cook from my mother and grandmother who were born and raised in New Orleans and really knew how to cook. Most of the time, you could not get them to write down their recipes because they used a 'pinch' of this and 'just enough of that' and 'two fingers of water,' and so on. This recipe is a combination of both of their recipes which I have added to over the years. Serve over hot cooked rice. The gumbo can be frozen or refrigerated and many people like it better the next day. Bon appetit!"

delicious gumbo
A delicious gumbo.

New Orleans-style gumbo is a true taste of Southern tradition. This boldly flavored stew is bursting with fresh, filling ingredients like bell pepper, sausage, stewed tomatoes, and crabmeat. Hot sauce ad Cajun seasonings add a kick that makes this Lousiana dish a favorite amongst our community of home cooks. Learn how to make the best homestyle gumbo right here.

What Is Gumbo?

Gumbo is one of the most famous dishes to result from Louisiana’s shared Creole-Cajun heritage. Gumbo falls somewhere between a thick stew and a hearty soup and can contain ingredients such as chicken, sausage, ham, seafood, okra, tomatoes, and greens.

As varied as the recipes can be, there are a few ingredients that all gumbos have in common: homemade stock; the “holy trinity” of celery, onions, and green peppers; and roux.

gumbo
New Orleans Creole Gumbo

How to Make Gumbo

Boldly delicious New Orleans-style gumbo is surprisingly easy to make at home. You’ll find the full recipe below with step-by-step instructions, but here’s what you can expect when you make this top-rated recipe:

Great gumbo starts with roux, a flavorful thickening agent made from equal parts fat and flour. Once the roux is a deep golden color, add diced veggies and sausage to the mix. Then, incorporate beef bouillon, hot sauce, tomatoes, and seasonings to intensify the flavor.

Let the gumbo simmer for 45 minutes before adding file powder, okra, and seafood. The result will be a lusciously hearty stew packed with Creole spice.

What Is Gumbo File?

Gumbo file, or file powder, is made from dried sassafras leaves. This ingredient was first used by Choctaw Indians and was later adopted by Acadians (Cajuns) when they arrived in the American South.

Gumbo file has a deep, earthy flavor similar to thyme and should be added to gumbo in the last minutes of cooking — it helps to thicken and enrich the stew for an authentic taste of New Orleans.

Serving suggestions

You serve it with rice.

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New Orleans Creole Gumbo.

How to Store Leftover Gumbo

Leftover gumbo can be stored safely in the refrigerator for three to four days. Let the dish come to room temperature before placing it in an airtight container to enjoy later. Gently reheat on the stovetop for best results.

Community Tips and Praise

“This is one of the best gumbos I’ve ever had and my family is from the South so that is saying a lot — just don’t tell my mother or grandmother,” shares reviewer mellie18_99. “I added shrimp, sausage, chicken, and crab meat.”

“This recipe is the real deal,” raves home cook Pat. “Don’t forget the file gumbo at the very end, it makes a big difference. You will know when the roux is done when it has the color of a Hershey’s milk chocolate bar.”

“This was my very first time making gumbo and my guests who had come over for a King Party loved it!” says Shaw Kitty. “Some of these guests were born and raised Louisianans and they gave their approval as well!”

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R.ccacbd783423f0f2596f10f81d84d7e1

Serve with rice!

Ingredients

Original recipe yields 20 servings
Ingredient Checklist

Directions

Roux:
  • Whisk together flour and 3/4 cup bacon drippings in a large, heavy saucepan over medium-low heat until smooth. Cook roux, whisking constantly, until it turns a rich mahogany brown color. This can take 20 to 30 minutes; watch heat carefully and whisk constantly or roux will burn. Remove from heat; continue whisking until mixture stops cooking.

Gumbo:
  • Place celery, onion, green bell pepper, and garlic into the work bowl of a food processor, and pulse until all vegetables are very finely chopped. Stir vegetables into the roux, and mix in sausage. Bring mixture to a simmer over medium-low heat, and cook until vegetables are tender, 10 to 15 minutes. Remove from heat, and set aside.

  • Combine water and beef bouillon cubes in a large Dutch oven or soup pot and bring to a boil over medium-high heat. Stir until bouillon cubes dissolve, then whisk roux mixture into the boiling water.

  • Reduce heat to a simmer, and mix in sugar, salt, hot pepper sauce, Cajun seasoning, bay leaves, thyme, stewed tomatoes, and tomato sauce. Simmer soup over low heat for 1 hour; mix in 2 teaspoons of file gumbo powder at the 45-minute mark.

  • Meanwhile, melt 2 tablespoons bacon drippings in a skillet over medium heat. Add okra and vinegar and cook for 15 minutes; remove okra with a slotted spoon, and stir into the simmering gumbo.

  • Mix in crabmeat, shrimp, and Worcestershire sauce, and simmer until flavors have blended, 45 more minutes. Stir in 2 more teaspoons of file gumbo powder just before serving.

German gas contract with Russia

Even if German stop buying from Russia, German has the contracted obligation to pay $140b through to 2030 independent of Force Majure.

2022 05 03 11 30
2022 05 03 11 30

Pretty Chinese Girl

In a scooter park. video 3MB

Destroying China requires the defeat of  Russia first

Read the neocon writings. Moscow’s war in Ukraine  isn’t a distraction. It’s part of a plan. It’s part and parcel of a plan to destroy China.

Apparently, the United States neocons have targeted Russia in the belief that she is an easy target to defeat. Then, once “suppressed”, the full weight of combined efforts can then move on to China…
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That is my thought also.
Russia without China is endangered and vice versa.
I heard a saying on The Duran Channel on YouTube which has the knowledgeable and wise Alexander Mercouris as main speaker.

"Russia and China do not stand so much shoulder to shoulder but back to back."

p.s. My piece on CounterPunch and Asia Times today has drawn a lot of commentary. Many said that they felt alone and isolated in their opinion on the US proxy war on Russia in Ukraine. They felt better on reading the piece, because they did not feel alone. I think these people are a little bit more likely to speak their opinions and spread them. I feel good about the essay for that reason.

-John V. Walsh

Russian TV Is Talking Very Frankly About Nuclear War (While America Stands with Ukranus)

The Americans will push until there is a disaster. 

-Leander

Again, it is just this kind of “hahahaha – LOL” attitude.

I don’t really know why Westerners are spamming these clips – “look – Russia doesn’t even care about nuclear war and they think it’s funny” does not seem like a good argument in support of pressing for war with Russia.

It’s like if you were trying to get someone to fight someone else and you were like “just go start shit talking that guy – he’s got a gun and he’s not at all afraid of dying or going to prison.”

That’s probably the purpose of these segments – to have them disseminated in the West and show that Russians are really blasé about nuclear war. Julia Davis and many others can’t help but do the thing.

Domestically, telling people “nuclear war is lolz” is just hilarious and intelligent. Having a population that responds to “we’re all going to die in a massive war” with “ikr, roflmao” is extremely advantageous. While the US is talking about “our values of who we are in a democracy rules based order of stolen yachts,” Russia is saying “well, we’re all going to die some day anyway.”

For the record, there is zero evidence or reason to believe that a nuclear war would “kill everyone on earth.” Primarily, this is because of the gibberish surrounding the idea of “nuclear fallout,” and even more goofy stuff like “nuclear winter.”

I like the Fallout video games series, but this isn’t real life. As the Russians say – and this is true – there is not even any evidence that if Russia started firing nukes, the West would even respond. They would more likely just start crying and looking for a safe space for their snowflakes.

American B61 Mini-nukes Deployed in Western Europe

From HERE.

The latest B61-12 “mini nuke” is slated to be deployed in Western Europe, aimed at Russia and the Middle East (replacing the existing of B61 nuclear bombs).

B-61-12 is portrayed as a “more usable” “low yield” “humanitarian bomb” “‘harmless to civilians”. That’s the ideology. The reality is “Mutual Assured Destruction” (MAD).

The B61-12 has a maximum yield of 50 kilotons which is more than three times that of a Hiroshima bomb (15 kilotons) which resulted in excess of 100,000 deaths in matter of minutes.

If a preemptive attack using a so-called mini nuke were to succeed, targeted against Russia or Iran, this could potentially lead humanity into a WW III scenario. Of course these details are not highlighted in mainstream media reports.

F-15E Eagle Strike Eagle Fighter for the Delivery of the B-61-12 

Low Yield Nukes: Humanitarian Warfare Goes Live

And when the characteristics of this “harmless” low yield nuclear bomb are inserted into the military manuals, “humanitarian warfare” goes live: “It’s low yield and safe for civilians, let’s use it” [paraphrase].

The US arsenal of B61 nuclear bombs directed against the Russian Federation are currently under the national command of 5 non-nuclear states (Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Turkey). The command structure pertaining to the B61-12 is yet to be confirmed. The situation with regard to Turkey’s Incirlik base is unclear.

2022 05 02 14 26
2022 05 02 14 26

The Prodigal.

Yeah. This is the name of the movie that the statue comes from.

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This movie’s title is The Prodigal.

The Prodigal is a 1955 Biblical epic film made by MGM starring Edmund Purdom and Lana Turner. It was based on the New Testament parable about a selfish son who leaves his family to pursue a life of pleasure. The film also features James Mitchell, Louis Calhern, Joseph Wiseman, Cecil Kellaway and Walter Hampden. The dancer Taina Elg made her film debut.

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The story is loosely based on Jesus Christ’s parable of the prodigal son, from the Biblical New Testament Gospels, although considerable liberties are taken with the source material, chief among them being the addition of a female lead in the form of the high priestess of Astarte, Samarra.

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It’s About Time

.

Isn’t it always?

With the start of World War III by the United States “declaring” war against Russia by its actions in Ukraine, we have entered a time when the end of time has become very possible. I am speaking of nuclear annihilation.

I look down at my great-uncle’s gold Elgin pocket watch from the 19th century. His name was John Patrick Whalen, an Irish immigrant to the U.S. who fled England’s colonialist created famine in Ireland. It tells me it is 5:15 PM on April 21, 2022, a date, coincidentally, with a history. No doubt John looked at his watch on this date in 1898 when the United States, after the USS Maine exploded from within in Havana harbor (a possible false flag attack), declared war on Spain in order to confiscate Spanish territories – Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. One colonial power replaced another and then proceeded over the long decades to wage war and slaughter these island peoples. Imperialism never dies. It is timeless.

One hundred-and twenty-four years go by in a flash and it’s still the same old story. In 1898 the yellow press screamed Spanish devils and today it screams Russian devils. Then and now the press called for war. If the human race is still here in another 124 years, time and the corporate media will no doubt have told the same story – war and propaganda’s lies to an insouciant and ignorant population too hypnotized by propaganda to oppose them. This despite the apocalyptic sense that permeates our lives because of demonic technology and its use to transform humans into machines who can’t think clearly enough to perceive reality and realize the threat posed by that quintessential technological invention – nuclear weapons.

This is not uplifting, but it’s true. The nuclear weapons are primed and ready to fly. The U.S. insists on its first-strike right to launch them. It openly declares it is seeking the overthrow of the Russian government. Russia says it will use nuclear weapons only if its existence is threatened, which has become increasingly so because of U.S. provocations over a long time period and its current expanding arming of Ukraine’s government and its neo-Nazi forces.

The Russian President Vladimir Putin and its Foreign Secretary Sergei Lavrov have just warned the U.S. that such involvement has made nuclear war a “serious” and “real” risk, in Lavrov’s words “we must not underestimate it,” which is a mild form of diplomatic speech. Putin said that Russia has made all the preparations to respond if it senses a strategic threat to Russia and that response will be “instant, it will be quick.” The U.S. response is to shrug these statements off, just as it has done so for many years with Putin’s complaints about NATO forces moving up to its border. Incredibly, Biden has said, “For God’s sake, this man (Putin) cannot remain in power.”

Despite endless media/intelligence anti-Russian propaganda – “a vast tapestry of lies,” to use Harold Pinter’s phrase – many fine writers have provided the historical details to confirm the truth that the U.S. has purposely provoked the Russian war in Ukraine by its actions there and throughout Eastern Europe, which the mainstream media avoid completely. This U.S. aggressive history against Russia is part of a much larger history of imperial hubris extending back to the 19th century. I will therefore here follow Thoreau’s advice – “If you are acquainted with the principle, what do you care for a myriad instances and applications?” – since how many times do people need to hear lies such as “Iraq has weapons of mass destruction” in order to justify wars of aggression around the world. The historical facts are very clear, but facts and history don’t seem to matter to many people. Pinter again, in his Nobel Address, bluntly told the truth about the U.S.’s history of systematic and remorseless war crimes: “Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.” Which is still the case.

So time is my focus, for the last days have arrived unless there occurs a radical awakening to the obvious truth that the U.S. government is pushing the world to the brink of disaster in full awareness of the consequences. Its actions are insane, yet insanity has become the norm. Insane leaders and a catatonic, hypnotized public lead to disaster.

I write these words with an old fountain pen, a high school graduation gift, to somehow comfort and remind myself that when we were this close once before in October 1962, Kennedy and Khrushchev miraculously found a solution to the Cuban Missile Crisis; and to find hope now, and that when my time is up and I join John Patrick in the other world, things will have changed for my children and grand-children. It is admittedly the hope of a desperado.

The last few years of the Covid-19 propaganda have served to further distort people’s sense of time, a distortion years in the making through the introduction of digital technology with its accompanying numerical time clicks and its severing of our natural sense of time that is tied to the rising and falling of the tides and the turning of the days and seasons, a feeling that is being lost. Such felt sense of time’s texture could be slow or faster, but it had limits. We now live in a world without limits, which, as the ancient Greeks knew, demands payback.

For years before Covid-19, the sense of speed time was dominant, supported by the politically-introduced state of a constant emergency after September 11, 2001 with the urgency to hurry and keep up or one would fall behind. Keep up with what was never explained. Hurry why? Fast and faster was the rule with constant busyness that served the very useful social function of leaving no time for thinking, which was the point, but it made many feel as though they were engaged. And constantly alert for “terrorists” to come knocking. Thus the long wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc., all of which continue via various subterfuges.

Then, presto, all this frenzied time sense came to a stop with the 2020 lockdowns, when time got very slow, but not slow in the natural sense but an enforced slowness. People were locked up. Not only was it stupefying but stultifying and an existential drag. This went on for two years with the prisoners allowed short respites only to be rounded back up and locked down again. Jabbed and jolted was the plan. When will it ever end? was the common cry, as despair and depression spread and scrambled minds led to suicides and mindless screen entertainment. This was planned education for a trans-human future in which the cell phone will be central to totalitarian control if people do not rebel.

Those behind the Covid-19 and war propaganda are fanatical technocrats who seek total control of the world’s population through digital technology. Now they have temporarily let the people out of one type of cell and dramatically sped up time with frantic war propaganda against Russia. The great English writer John Berger said it perfectly:

Every ruling minority needs to numb, and, if possible, to kill the time-sense of those whom it exploits. This is the authoritarian secret of all methods of imprisonment. 

Everyone is now doing time while scrolling messages on the walls of their cell phones. A twisted, convoluted, distorted, mechanical time in which it seems that there is no history and the future is an endless road of more of the same.

Some say we have all the time in the world. I say no, that we have entered a new time, perhaps the end-time, when the world’s end is a very real possibility. Hypnotized people can agree to anything, even mass-suicide, unless they snap out of it. This can only happen with a return to slowness in the old sense, when people once felt time in their hearts’ rhythms attuned to the rising and falling of nature’s reality. Time to think and contemplate the fate of the earth when nuclear war is contemplated. Yes, “We must not underestimate it.”

It’s about time.

Isn’t it always?

Chinese Style Meat Buns

char siu 1 11 750x422 1
char siu 1 11 750×422 1

If you’ve ever been to a Chinese bakery, you have seen this type of meat buns among many other delicious goodies. These buns are also called pork buns, or Char Siu Bao which basically is a barbecued pork filled bun. They can be either steamed or baked, as in this write-up.

I love both versions, and here in Southern China the steamed buns are the most common. Up North and to the West, the baked buns are very common.

These buns are pretty easy to make. You should love them and they will turn out amazing, and they were gone in no time.

The dough is quite a simple dough with simple ingredients.

In a small bowl, mix the warm water, sugar and yeast and let it sit until it starts foaming, for about 15 minutes. In a large bowl add the flour and to it add the egg, oil, salt and the yeast mixture.

char siu 1 750x422 1
char siu 1 750×422 1

Mix it all together using your hands, if you find the dough too sticky just add more flour. Knead the dough on a floured surface for a few more minutes, until it becomes elastic. Â Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl and let it rise until doubled in size, in a warm spot.

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char siu 1 2 750×422 1

While the dough is resting we can make the filling. I used one pork loin that was about 1 1/2 lb in weight. To make the marinade, is simple as well. Cut up the pork loin in small pieces and set aside. In a medium sized bowl, add the garlic and ginger paste, vegetable oil, honey, Hoisin sauce, soy sauce, wine, pepper, salt, five spice powder, and sesame oil. Whisk everything all together and add the pork to it. Let the pork marinate for about 1 hour, or until the dough is almost ready.

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char siu 1 3 750×422 1

Heat a skillet, over medium heat and add a tablespoon of vegetable oil to it. When the oil is hot add the pork mixture including the marinade to it and cook until the pork is cooked thoroughly, for about 5 minutes. Before removing it from heat, add the green onions to it and mix well.

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char siu 1 4 750×422 1

After all this is said and done the dough should have doubled in size nicely.

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char siu 1 5 750×422 1

Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball.

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char siu 1 6 750×422 1

Using a rolling pin, roll out each ball into a disc, so that it’s about 4 or 5 inches in diameter. Place heaping tablespoon of the meat mixture in the middle of it.

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char siu 1 7 750×422 1

Seal the bun by gathering up the edges of the disc.

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char siu 1 8 750×422 1

Place the sealed side down bun, on an ungreased baking sheet. Repeat with remaining balls and meat mixture.

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char siu 1 9 750×422 1

Brush the buns with egg wash and bake in a preheated oven at 350 F degrees for about 15 to 20 minutes or until the buns are nice and golden brown.

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char siu 1 10 750×422 1

They look so good and are so delicious, you will love them.

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char siu 1 12 750×422 1

These Chinese Style Meat Buns also known as Char Siu Bao are delicious pork filled buns, made incredibly easy and so delicious!
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Ingredients

Dough

  • 1/2 cup water water
  • 2 1/2 teaspoon dry yeast
  • 1/4 cup sugar
  • 2 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  • 1 large egg beaten
  • 3 tablespoon oil
  • 1/2 teaspoon salt

Filling

  • 1 pork loin 1 1/2 lb
  • 2 teaspoon garlic and ginger paste
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 2 tablespoon honey
  • 2 tablespoon hoisin sauce
  • 2 tablespoon soy sauce low sodium
  • 1 tablespoon red wine
  • 1/2 teaspoon pepper freshly ground
  • 1/4 teaspoon salt
  • 1/2 teaspoon five spice powder
  • 1 teaspoon sesame oil
  • 1 tablespoon vegetable oil
  • 2 sprigs green onion finely chopped

Egg wash

  • 1 egg beaten

Instructions

  • In a small bowl, mix the warm water, sugar and yeast and let it sit until it starts foaming, for about 15 minutes. In a large bowl add the flour and to it add the egg, oil, salt and the yeast mixture.
  • Mix it all together using your hands, if you find the dough too sticky just add more flour. Knead the dough on a floured surface for a few more minutes, until it becomes elastic. Place the dough in a lightly oiled bowl and let it rise until doubled in size, in a warm spot.
  • Cut up the pork loin in small pieces and set aside. In a medium sized bowl, add the garlic and ginger paste, vegetable oil, honey, Hoisin sauce, soy sauce, wine, pepper, salt, five spice powder, and sesame oil. Whisk everything all together and add the pork to it. Let the pork marinate for about 1 hour, or until the dough is almost ready.
  • eat a skillet, over medium heat and add a tablespoon of vegetable oil to it. When the oil is hot add the pork mixture including the marinade to it and cook until the pork is cooked thoroughly, for about 5 minutes. Before removing it from heat, add the green onions to it and mix well.
  • Preheat oven to 350 F degrees.
  • Divide the dough into 12 equal pieces. Roll each piece into a ball.
  • Using a rolling pin, roll out each ball into a disc, so that it’s about 4 or 5 inches in diameter. Place heaping tablespoon of the meat mixture in the middle of it.
  • Seal the bun by gathering up the edges of the disc.
  • Place the sealed side down bun, on an ungreased baking sheet. Repeat with remaining balls and meat mixture.
  • Brush the buns with egg wash and bake for about 15 to 20 minutes or until the buns are nice and golden brown.
These were FANTASTIC and I only used ground beef, onion, red pepper flakes, salt and extra monterey jack and mozzarella cheese. The roll is very light and not heavy on the bread like other recipes I've seen. These could be stuffed with pretty much anything. Next time I'm trying chicken and mushroom. I baked an extra 5 minutes to get the right golden color. HIGHLY recommended! YUM. 

- Kristi

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Clash of Christianities: Why Europe cannot understand Russia

By Pepe Escobar, posted with the Author’s permission and cross-posted with The Cradle

Under an ubiquitous, toxic atmosphere of cognitive dissonance drenched in Russophobia, it’s absolutely impossible to have a meaningful discussion on finer points of Russian history and culture across the NATO space – a phenomenon I’m experiencing back in Paris right now, fresh from a long stint in Istanbul.

At best, in a semblance of civilized dialogue, Russia is pigeonholed in the reductionist view of a threatening, irrational, ever-expanding empire – a way more wicked version of Ancient Rome, Achaemenid Persia, Ottoman Turkey or Mughal India.

The fall of the USSR a little over three decades ago did hurl Russia back three centuries – to its borders in the 17th century. Russia, historically, had been interpreted as a secular empire – immense, multiple and multinational. This is all informed by history, very much alive even today in the Russian collective unconscious.

When Operation Z started I was in Istanbul – the Second Rome. I spent a considerable time of my late night walks around Hagia Sophia reflecting on the historical correlations of the Second Rome with the Third Rome – which happens to be Moscow, since the concept was first enounced at the start of the 16th century.

Later, back in Paris, banishment to soliloquy territory seemed inevitable until an academic pointed me to some substance, although heavily distorted by political correctness, available in the French magazine Historia.

There’s at least an attempt to discuss the Third Rome. The significance of the concept was initially religious before becoming political – encapsulating the Russian drive to become the leader of the Orthodox world in contrast with Catholicism. This has to be understood also in the context of pan-Slavic theories springing up under the first Romanov and then reaching their apogee in the 19th century.

Eurasianism – and its several declinations – treats the complex Russian identity as double-faced, between east and west. Western liberal democracies simply can’t understand that these ideas – infusing varied brands of Russian nationalism – do not imply hostility to “enlightened” Europe, but an affirmation of Difference (they could learn a bit from reading more Gilles Deleuze for that matter). Eurasianism also weighs on closer relations with Central Asia and necessary alliances, in various degrees, with China and Turkey.

A perplexed liberal west remains hostage to a vortex of Russian images which it can’t properly decode – from the two-headed eagle, which is the symbol of the Russian state since Peter the Great, to the Kremlin cathedrals, the St. Petersburg citadel, the Red Army entering Berlin in 1945, the May 9 parades (the next one will be particularly meaningful), and historical figures from Ivan the Terrible to Peter the Great. At best – and we’re talking academic level ‘experts’ – they identify all of the above as “flamboyant and confused” imagery.

The Christian/Orthodox divide

The apparently monolithic liberal west itself also cannot be understood if we forget how, historically, Europe is also a two-headed beast: one head may be tracked from Charlemagne all the way to the awful Brussels Eurocrat machine; and the other one comes from Athens and Rome, and via Byzantium/Constantinople (the Second Rome) reaches all the way to Moscow (the Third Rome).

Latin Europe, for the Orthodox, is seen as a hybrid usurper, preaching a distorted Christianity which only refers to St. Augustine, practicing absurd rites and neglecting the very important Holy Ghost. The Europe of Christian Popes invented what is considered a historical hydra – Byzantium – where Byzantines were actually Greeks living under the Roman Empire.

Western Europeans for their part see the Orthodox and the Christians from the East (see how they were abandoned by the west in Syria under ISIS and Al Qaeda) as satraps and a bunch of smugglers – while the Orthodox regard the Crusaders, the Teutonic chevaliers and the Jesuits – correctly, we must say – as barbarian usurpers bent on world conquest.

In the Orthodox canon, a major trauma is the fourth Crusade in 1204 which utterly destroyed Constantinople. The Frankish chevaliers happened to eviscerate the most dazzling metropolis in the world, which congregated at the time all the riches from Asia.

That was the definition of cultural genocide. The Frankish also happened to be aligned with some notorious serial plunderers: the Venetians. No wonder, from that historical juncture onwards, a slogan was born: “Better the Sultan’s turban than the Pope’s tiara.”

So since the 8th century, Carolingian and Byzantine Europe were de facto at war across an Iron Curtain from the Baltics to the Mediterranean (compare it with the emerging New Iron Curtain of Cold War 2.0). After the barbarian invasions, they neither spoke the same language nor practiced the same writing, rites or theology.

This fracture, significantly, also trespassed Kiev. The west was Catholic – 15% of Greek catholics and 3% of Latins – and in the center and the east, 70% Orthodox, who became hegemonic in the 20th century after the elimination of Jewish minorities by mainly the Waffen-SS of the Galicia division, the precursors of Ukraine’s Azov batallion.

Constantinople, even in decline, managed to pull off a sophisticated geo-strategic game to seduce the Slavs, betting on Muscovy against the Catholic Polish-Lithuanian combo. The fall of Constantinople in 1453 allowed Muscovy to denounce the treason of Greeks and Byzantine Armenians who rallied around the Roman Pope, who badly wanted a reunified Christianity.

Afterward, Russia ends up constituting itself as the only Orthodox nation that did not fall under Ottoman domination. Moscow regards itself – as Byzantium – as a unique symphony between spiritual and temporal powers.

Third Rome becomes a political concept only in the 19th century – after Peter the Great and Catherine the Great had vastly expanded Russian power. The key concepts of Russia, Empire and Orthodoxy are fused. That always implies Russia needs a ‘near abroad’ – and that bears similarities with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s vision (which, significantly, is not imperial, but cultural).

As the vast Russian space has been in constant flow for centuries, that also implies the central role of the concept of encirclement. Every Russian is very much aware of territorial vulnerability (remember, for starters, Napoleon and Hitler). Once the western borderland is trespassed, it’s an easy ride all the way to Moscow. Thus, this very unstable line must be protected; the current correlation is the real threat of Ukraine made to host NATO bases.

Onward to Odessa

With the fall of the USSR, Russia found itself in a geopolitical situation last encountered in the 17th century. The slow and painful reconstruction was spearheaded from two fronts: the KGB – later FSB – and the Orthodox church. The highest-level interaction between the Orthodox clergy and the Kremlin was conducted by Patriarch Kirill – who later became Putin’s minister of religious affairs.

Ukraine for its part had become a de facto Moscow protectorate way back in 1654 under the Treaty of Pereyaslav: much more than a strategic alliance, it was a natural fusion, in progress for ages by two Orthodox Slav nations.

Ukraine then falls under the Russian orbit. Russian domination expands until 1764, when the last Ukrainian hetman (commander-in-chief) is officially deposed by Catherine the Great: that’s when Ukraine becomes a province of the Russian empire.

As Putin made it quite clear this week: “Russia cannot allow the creation of anti-Russian territories around the country.” Operation Z will inevitably encompass Odessa, founded in 1794 by Catherine the Great.

The Russians at the time had just expelled the Ottomans from the northwest of the Black Sea, which had been successively run by Goths, Bulgars, Hungarians and then Turkish peoples – all the way to the Tatars. Odessa at the start was peopled, believe it or not, by Romanians who were encouraged to settle there after the 16th century by the Ottoman sultans.

Catherine chose a Greek name for the city – which at the start was not Slav at all. And very much like St. Petersburg, founded a century earlier by Peter the Great, Odessa never stopped flirting with the west.

Tsar Alexander I, in the early 19th century, decides to turn Odessa into a great trading port – developed by a Frenchman, the Duke of Richelieu. It was from the port of Odessa that Ukrainian wheat started to reach Europe. By the turn of the 20th century, Odessa is truly multinational – after having attracted, among others, the genius of Pushkin.

Odessa is not Ukrainian: it’s an intrinsic part of the Russian soul. And soon the trials and tribulations of history will make it so again: as an independent republic; as part of a Novorossiya confederation; or attached to the Russian Federation. The people of Odessa will decide.

Louisiana Crawfish Étouffée

In Louisiana, there’s nothing better than this classic during crawfish season. This recipe is easy and can be substituted with shrimp when crawfish are out of season. Even better when served with hot garlic French bread! Start cooking the rice first since this is a quick and easy dish.

meal
Louisiana Crawfish Étouffée.

Ingredients

Original recipe yields 6 servings
Ingredient Checklist

Directions

Instructions Checklist
  • Combine the rice and 6 cups water in a saucepan, and bring to a boil. Cover, and reduce heat to low. Simmer for 15 to 20 minutes, until rice is tender and water has been absorbed.

  • While the rice is cooking, melt the butter in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the onion, and saute until transparent. Stir in the garlic, and cook for a minute. Stir in the flour until well blended. Gradually stir in the tomato sauce and remaining 1 cup water, then add the crawfish tails and bring to a simmer. Add the green onions and season with salt, pepper, and Cajun seasoning. Simmer for 5 to 10 minutes over low heat, until the crawfish is cooked but not tough. Serve over hot cooked rice.

Pretty Chinese Girl

She’s advertising clothes on a a treadmill. video 3MB

 

America is Preparing for Something Bigger than Russia Ukraine…

Yes. It is VERY disturbing. Especially, as I know how China will react.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…

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

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Heartwarming Illustrations By Pascal Campion

Now, I don’t want ANYONE bitching and moaning that I am presenting art for scuzy-ball males to drool over. Ok? Art is something that I love, and while my tastes in art are out of the mainstream, it is not a reflection of my thoughts, but rather of my emotions.

How not to love a good set of heartwarming illustrations?

Pascal Campion comes up with artworks that some of us will relate to. Like that time in your childhood when you would hangout with your buddies and explore the neighborhood… or that time when it was really snowy/rainy when you would sit by the window and think about life.

That’s the beauty of Pascal’s work… it’s really relatable, and it brings a sense of saudade (in portuguese, it’s a sense of missing things that might have happened or not, a kind of nostalgia). These are some fine examples of art with a sentiment.

More info: DeviantArt

Please enjoy.

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Cat videos and art with Cats Reimagined As Marvel And DC Superheroes

Are youse guys all getting tired of  the geopolitical stuff? Yeah. I thought so. Yes, it’s a major time and period of historical change. And we are front-row seat spectators at it. But, you know, we need a break from it all. And there’s always a good reason to look at cats, art, and food. Here, we are going to go full-out cat in this article.

It’s a short article, but I hope that it does put a smile on your face, eh?

Part 1 – Heroic Kitty Art

What if they had your life in their heroic paws?

fajareka setiawan 28070619 10211147987755207 4102162554792210643 o
fajareka setiawan 28070619 10211147987755207 4102162554792210643 o

To all the geeky cat-lovers out there – we bring the purrfect artwork you will not be able to resist. A talented Indonesian illustrator and concept artist Fajareka Setiawan is creating fun mashups of cute kittens and Marvel and DC characters that we didn’t know we needed in our lives.

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fajarekas 31463383 630139993994494 730395949309886464 n 768×768 1

In his personal ‘Catvengers’ series, Fajareka transforms kittens into our favorite superheroes (or the other way around) with amazing precision, and it’s not only about the detailed costume.

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fajarekas 36159984 193753054809418 1505839714643476480 n 768×768 1

If you look closely, you will recognize the character traits in each illustration. From Catpool to AquaCat, these are the fierce supurrheroes we would truly love to see on a big screen.

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Oh my goodness!

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Fish kitty!

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Spidey cat!

Pretty amazing stuff, eh.

Now for some fun videos.

Part 2 – Kitty cat videos

We start out with a fairly sad video. But note that the Rufus rescued the kitten, and it is now in a good home and doing very well.

Video – The dead cat mother and the kitten trying to feed it

This is a bitter-sweet video. The mother cat is dead. But it’s kitten stays nearby, not knowing what to do. So it goes forth and hunts grasshoppers and mice to bring back to it’s sick mom. Eventually, though, the mother cat passed on. Luckily, a Rufus saw what is going on and tries to help. He catches the kitten and takes both to a vet for love and care. video 32MB

Video – Watch how its done.

Cats are natural hunters. video 13MB

Video – Cat childcare

video 2MB

Video – So cute

Momma cat teaches its kittens. video 20MB

Video – kitten mouser

video 10MB

Video – standoff

video 3MB

Video – cat and baby

video 21MB

Video – Rescue of a kitten in a ring

video 31MB

Video – dog and cat

video 11MB

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I have more articles like this one in my Cat Index, found in my Happiness index  here…

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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The art of Sam Yang

Normally, digital art doesn’t really do anything for me. But this art is different. Please kindly enjoy his work. I hope it makes you feel clean, and new, and reminds you of special times, like it does for me.

It speaks to me; my God, it really, really does.

Sam Yang is a digital artist. He lives in Toronto. He has a Youtube channel, an Instagram account and a patrean account. He draws digitally. That guy focused more on the characters.

Although he is quite young, he makes great drawings that can be used in many places! His talent is at an uncommon value. His drawings can be used in many areas such as computer games and animes. He has a youtube channel. And he shares the stages of his drawings on this channel. Thus, it sets an example for people who are interested in drawing like him. This generosity he has done also gives him a reputation!

More: Instagram, Patreon

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2022 03 01 21 31
2022 03 01 21 31

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2022 03 01 21 42
2022 03 01 21 42

Conclusion

I love his art. It’s special and he has real skill.

It speaks to me. It takes me to other places, and carries me away. That is special, and unique. And thus, I present this here. I hope that you have enjoyed this article.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…

ART

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MM Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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The slow slide to destiny

International relations can be likened to a game of 3D chess. 

In this great game Putin, in the finest Russian tradition, or like Mr. Spock in Star Trek, is a grand master. 

I don’t believe the chess players in the U.S. State Department, such as Victoria Nuland (wife of the Robert Kagan mentioned above) and the other neocons who are at the helm, are quite at Putin’s level, but they had the great advantage of being able to make a series of aggressive moves (e.g., the series of NATO expansions and the 2014 Ukraine coup) before Putin was able (i.e., was strong enough) to make a counterplay in response. 

By comparison, the general run of media journalists, commentators and even supposed analysts are tiddlywinks players. 

-UNZ "Russia is back"

Ok, the peak of the event sequences for this phase of “bumpiness” has passed. We are an a momentary adjustment period. See? It wasn’t all that bad. just your fears screeching towards you, eh? Well, you will be fine. Just stay calm.

Let’s go this array of odds and ends at this particular point in time.

Spaceballs – They’ve gone into plaid

We start with a funny clip of a parody of Star Wars known as “Spaceballs”. It’s a Mel Brooks classic. I hope to remind everyone not to get too serious. It’s really cramping our happiness, don’t you know.

Cool find

2022 04 13 19 46
2022 04 13 19 46

US aircraft carrier & strike group to enter East Sea as ‘show of force’

North Korean news agency Yonhap quoted on Monday sources as saying that US nuclear-powered aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln will access the international waters of the East Sea this week as a "show of force" movement to fend off any possible North Korean provocations. 

 The aircraft carrier along with a strike group will stay in the sea for about 5 days, Yonhap reported, adding that it will be the first incident of its kind since November 2017.  

The news agency quoted the spokesman for US Forces Korea, Lee Peters, as saying that "as a matter of operational security," he refuses to comment on the matter.

2022 04 12 21 24
2022 04 12 21 24

Article

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A strange find

1644842972 e46hz4jday
1644842972 e46hz4jday

Now for something funny…

Father of 5-year-old pterodactyl: It’s not easy to get species-affirming care in America

Don't be too serious, folks -MM

Local man and father of a 5-year-old trans pterodactyl Bradley Mingastank is struggling to find the medical care his young dinosaur son needs, as it is very difficult to find species-affirming care in the United States.

2022 04 12 21 35
2022 04 12 21 35

“Seriously, it’s 2022, and we still haven’t figured out how to provide adequate medical care to children who think they’re extinct flying lizards,” said Mingastank. “I do my best to raise my son Madison as a pterodactyl per his wishes, which is important for his self-esteem. I only communicate to him in ear-piercing dinosaur screeches, I feed him small rodents and fish, and every once in a while I push him off the roof of the garage so he can try flying. But no other doctors seem to be willing to help him get the ultraviolet heat lamps and lizard medicine his pterodactyl body desperately needs.”

According to sources within the family, Madison first discovered his true pterodactyl identity when he put on a Halloween costume and then refused to take it off. It was then his parents knew he was a dinosaur trapped in a human child’s body.

“According to science, If someone thinks they are something, then they are automatically that thing, and the whole world must pretend they are that thing or they’ll die. That’s just proven science,” said Mingastank as he called a veterinarian to set up an appointment for his son.

UPDATE: Madison has changed his mind and has decided he is now a sea lion. His parents are currently looking for a giant aquarium to keep him in.

Dracula meets Lucy Westenra – “Dracula: Dead and Loving It”

One of my favorite scenes. Funny but sensual. I really like those old 1960s style vampires and their attractive female companions.

How To Make 1950’s good wife’s guide

I found this. It's really very dated. I found it interesting, but I do not recommend that anyone follow the guidelines. Never the less, I do think that this is good advice for either mean or women in regards to talking to strangers, friends, or family.

Don't shoot the messenger. -MM
  • Food – Dinner

    Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal ready on time for his return. This is a way of letting him know that you have be thinking about him and are concerned about his needs. Most men are hungry when they get home and the prospect of a good meal is part of the warm welcome needed.
  • Prep

    Prepare yourself. Take 15 minutes to rest so you'll be refreshed when he arrives. Touch up your make-up, put a ribbon in your hair and be fresh-looking. He has just been with a lot of work-weary people.
  • Be interesting and happy

    Be a little gay and a little more interesting for him. His boring day may need a lift and one of your duties is to provide it.
  • No clutter

    Clear away the clutter. Make one last trip through the main part of the house just before your husband arrives. Run a dustcloth over the tables.
  • Fire

    During the cooler months of the year you should prepare and light a fire for him to unwind by. Your husband will feel he has reached a haven of rest and order, and it will give you a lift too. After all, catering to his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction.
  • Peace and quiet

    Minimize all noise. At the time of his arrival, eliminate all noise of the washer, dryer or vacuum. Encourage the children to be quiet.
  • Welcoming

    Be happy to see him.
  • Smile

    Greet him with a warm smile and show sincerity in your desire to please him.
  • Listen

    Listen to him. You may have a dozen important things to tell him, but the moment of his arrival is not the time. Let him talk first - remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours.
  • Be positive

    Don't greet him with complaints and problems.
  • No complaining

    Don't complain if he's late for dinner or even if he stays out all night. Count this as minor compared to what he might have gone through at work.
  • Comfort

    Make him comfortable. Have him lean back in a comfortable chair or lie him down in the bedroom. Have a cool or warm drink ready for him.
  • Shoes and pillow

    Arrange his pillow and offer to take off his shoes. Speak in a low, soothing and pleasant voice.
  • No questions

    Don't ask him questions about his actions or question his judgment or integrity. Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him.
    Yes, it’s dated advice.
    .
    But if you look at it closely, just about all of the advice pertains to cats and their “owners”.
    .
    And you know, both of my grandparents were happy folk and had functioning families. Perhaps they knew something that we have forgotten over the years.

A very strange find

1644842968 77wxuhdy3j
1644842968 77wxuhdy3j

Reports: Chemical Weapons Dropped in Mariupol (False Flag???)

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Numerous reports are coming in claiming an unmanned aerial vehicle dropped some type of chemical or nerve agent against a target in Mariupol, Ukraine, killing several and injuring 100’s.

We have no OFFICIAL confirmation, but the reports are flooding-in anyway.

This could be the exact, precise, FALSE FLAG that the USA and NATO have been “warning” the Russians “might use” which could spark a formal NATO military response into Ukraine.

It was back on March 24 that NATO publicly stated a Chemical attack would prompt their intervention (Story HERE)

The headline to that story looked like this:

2022 04 12 21 54
2022 04 12 21 54

More info as it becomes available.   Check back.

UPDATE 4:59 PM EDT —

One (a single, isolated report) claims the following:

"Russian forces used a poisonous substance of unknown origin against Ukrainian military & civilians in the city of Mariupol, which was dropped from an UAV. The victims have respiratory failure and vestibulo-atactic syndrome."

Now, there are real problems with this report.

1) It does not say WHERE in Mariupol the attack allegedly took place.

The _only_ major fight zone where any type of chemical weapon would prove useful, is at Asovstal Steel Mill, where thousands of AZOV nazis are scattered through vast catacombs beneath the sprawling plant.  It is in these catacombs, where a reported Biolab exists, consisting of allegedly 8 full floors deep, all beneath the plant, and initial rumors (not confirmed) claim this lab was working on genetic-specific bioweapons in violation of treaties.

2) The decision to FLOOD those underground catacombs by using fire trucks to pump water into the air shafts, to force out the Nazis, was already publicly reported (Story HERE)

Thus, it makes no sense at all to turn around and use a chemical weapon or nerve agent against the very target they intend to flood-out.

3) NATO has been itching for an excuse to enter the war inside Ukraine, and has, on more than one occasion, said the use of chemical weapons would meet that excuse.

Interesting timing now that a Biolab has been proved to be under that steel mill, and if Russia successfully takes over that Biolab, they will find PROOF that the US and others were working on Biological weapons in violation of Treaties.  Or, worse, that they were working on race-specific bioweapons, designed to wipe out . . .  only . . . . Russians.

4) The report cites “vestibulo-atactic syndrome”

Pathogenesis

In the practice of a neuropathologist, the vestibulo-atactic syndrome is most often observed in patients with cerebral ischemia, when the brain receives insufficient oxygen because of a violation of blood flow.

The pathogenesis of this pathology includes the lack of blood flow in the vertebro-basilar system, which unites the vertebral and central (base) arteries of the brain, the violation of blood circulation in the brain stem structures, as a result of which their energy supply and connections with other parts of the central nervous system (CNS) are disrupted.

Stem brain formations are sensitive to hypoxia (oxygen starvation of systems and organs), which causes a large prevalence of vestibular-ataxic syndrome and also the variety of forms and manifestations of this pathology in cerebral ischemia.

The clinical picture can vary depending on the cause of the disease, age and condition of the patient. For example, in elderly patients, the disruption of the central part of the vestibular analyzer is often combined with the lesion of its peripheral part, which forms a peculiar picture of the pathological disorder.

This pathology – a combination of motor and vestibular disorders due to violations of the general and cerebral circulation. It is quite common, many of its symptoms have been noticed in itself, without giving them much importance. If, when walking, a person begins to feel dizzy, he throws from side to side, coordination of movements is disturbed – this is an occasion to immediately consult a doctor.

What constitutes a vestibulo-atactic syndrome and what are its causes we have figured out. What are the signs and complaints of patients that enable the neurologist to diagnose ataxia?

Ischemic disorders in the work of the brain are dangerous because in the early stages they can simply not be noticed, since the first symptoms that appear can correspond to various disorders of the patient’s health and condition. A person can simply not pay attention to individual cases of malaise. This makes it difficult to timely diagnose and treat diseases that are the companions of the vestibulo-atactic syndrome.

The first signs of the initial stage of the disease are:

  • Frequent dizziness, especially when walking.
  • Flicker and “flies” before the eyes.
  • Nausea and vomiting.
  • Headache.

In later stages, motor disorders appear:

  • Loss of balance.
  • Throwing from side to side.
  • Falls.
  • Involuntary twitching of the eyelid

Hal Turner Analysis / Take-away: 

If NATO officially asserts that chemical weapons WERE used (and that’s a big “if”) and that NATO is entering the war, Russia has already said publicly it will use its nuclear missiles.

UPDATE 5:28 PM EDT —

Kira Rudik, a member of the Ukrainian Parliament, confirms recent reports about Mariupol attack: “The unknown substance was sprayed by Russians in Mariupol.  People are suffocating.”

UPDATE 5:42 PM EDT —

The mass-media is starting to “run” with the story of a “Chemical attack” in Mariupol.   They would only be running with it if their government masters told them to.  And Government would only tell them to, if the plan is for NATO to announce they are intervening.   Here, from the London “Mirror” newspaper (Link)

This is getting worse by the hour.

UH OH . . . 5:46 PM EDT — Now NEWSWEEK in the USA is carrying the story . . . . (Link)

5:49 PM EDT — Microsoft Network (MSN) now carrying the story too . . . (Link)

Whatever and whomever is in that lab is worth potentially destroying the world to them.

UPDATE 6:08 PM EDT —

UK'S FOREIGN MINISTER TRUSS TWEETS: REPORTS THAT RUSSIAN FORCES MAY HAVE USED CHEMICAL AGENTS IN AN ATTACK ON THE PEOPLE OF MARIUPOL. ANY USE OF SUCH WEAPONS WOULD BE A CALLOUS ESCALATION IN THIS CONFLICT AND WE WILL HOLD PUTIN AND HIS REGIME TO ACCOUNT.

6:52 PM EDT –

All the latest info TONIGHT at 9:00 PM Eastern (8:00 Central, 7:00 Mountain, 6:00 Pacific, 5:00 Alaska, 4:00 Hawaii) on the Hal Turner Radio Show.  Set a REMINDER in your cell phone!

You can tune-in FREE as follows:

WBCQ Shortwave on Frequencies 7.490 and 6.160 AM

WRMI Shortwave on Frequency 5.950 AM

KYAH – 540 AM, Utah’s Talk Authority

or here on the Internet at this link:  http://stream.halturnerradioshow.com:8000/ (Click LISTEN)

NOTE: This link does not go active until about one hour BEFORE showtime.  During that hour, it streams commercial-free music until the show begins.

FINAL UPDATE —

It turns out that the “reports” of this “Chemical attack” originated from . . . . wait for it . . . . the Azov Battalion which is stuck in the Asovstal Steel Mill, and under siege from Russian forces.   It appears to have been a blatantly fraudulent claim, designed to instigate the entry of NATO into the Ukraine situation.

The claim was repeated and re-circulated by the press and PR machine backing Ukraine.  That’s why reports “flooded-in.”

Here’s the “rub.”   If NATO, which appears to be run by sociopaths and psychotics, CHOOSES to treat this report as legitimate and CHOOSES to enter Ukraine, then it’s war with Russia and the nuclear missile will fly.

None of us knows right now if NATO sociopaths and psychotics will try to put lipstick on this pig of a report, and treat it as legitimate.  Until we know, there is very real danger that this will be the match that ignites world war.

Isn’t the Iraq/Saddam trick with the “chemical weapons” a little out of date?

Or they are hoping that we don’t remember how the fake war started over there?

Well, some of us remember.

A decent thrift store find

thrift shops 19
A thrift shop find.

INTEL: U.S. Delta Forces and U.K. “SAS” Fighting inside Ukraine since February!

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A source in the French intelligence community reportedly informed a Le Figaro reporter last week that elite special forces from the UK and the US have been deployed in Ukraine since the start of hostilities with Russia in late February.

The claim was made public by the newspaper’s senior international journalist Georges Malbrunot on Saturday, the same day that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson paid an unexpected visit to Kiev. Although this information has not been officially confirmed, the British leader was reportedly accompanied by special SAS guards.

SAS units “have been present in Ukraine since the beginning of the war, as did [sic] the American Deltas,” Malbrunot tweeted, citing a French intelligence source. He went on to say that Russia was well aware of the “secret war” waged against its troops by foreign commandos, according to the source. His information was mentioned in Le Figaro’s Ukraine updates.

The French journalist who returned from Ukraine after arriving with volunteer fighters told broadcaster CNews that “Americans are directly “in charge” of the war on the ground.”

The United Kingdom and the United States have been among Kiev’s most ardent military supports. Johnson is said to have personally urged his Ukrainian colleague, Volodymyr Zelensky, to continue fighting Russia until better terms are presented.

It seems that the United States and Europe lost their bet on Ukraine and Zelensky. They will not receive anything for the supplied weapons

Something tells me, dear readers, that, in the end, the Anglo-Saxons will get nothing from Ukraine but losses.

These losses will become the operating costs of the West.

There are several reasons for Western operating losses:

- the current power of the Nazis is illegitimate, even if the state of Ukraine will exist due to the succession of the DPR and LPR;

- it is not a fact that the state of Ukraine will exist after the completion of the special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces;

- to save the Nazi regime in Ukraine, Russia must suffer a military defeat and disappear as a state. This is the "wet" dream of the West, which is not destined to come true. From the word "never".

With a probability of up to 97%, in my opinion, instead of the state of Ukraine, the Southwestern Federal District of Russia may appear on the map.

Variants of names - Little Russia, Malorossia

After the victorious completion, of course, of the special military operation of the Russian Armed Forces on the territory of Ukraine.

All the enslaving "rights" of the West, to the best of my understanding, exist exactly until the moment when, instead of today's illegitimate government, legitimate successors come to govern Ukraine - the DPR and LPR.

That's when the United States and the rest of the West will get a "donut hole", nothing more.

All their costs will become their sunk costs.

Similar to the Nazis, who armed the collaborators, during the war with the USSR.

I don’t remember that in the history of the wars of the West against Russia, the Republic of Ingushetia, the USSR, such issues were resolved somehow differently.

And this will happen after the cleansing of the current Nazi regime in Ukraine.

With a high degree of probability, even shameful for the part of the Russian people living there, the name "Ukraine", invented by the Poles, will cease to exist.

Unfortunately, or fortunately, "soon the fairy tale is told, but the deed is not done soon."

Social processes, in comparison with the life expectancy of people, are slow.

For them, 100-300 years is not a period.

But, to the best of my understanding, this time. all the main events that cleanse the part of the Russian people living there from Nazism (constituting, somewhere, at least 80% of the total population), will occur much faster.

It will work out the social law of three generations, at least there are signs of this.

In addition, dear readers, as far as I know, Ukraine did not find time to register the 1991 treaty borders with the UN.

It directly follows from this that the entire territory of Ukraine was and is, from the point of view of the UN and international law, under the administrative control of Russia, as the legal successor of the USSR.

(The Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, inhabited mainly by Russians, having not agreed to become part of Romania, has a similar legal status, similar to that of the DPR and LPR.)

This explains why Russia, in this case, legally, is not at war with another state.

This fact legally confirms that civilians who are not at war with the Russian Armed Forces are OWN for Russia.

Which he confirmed with his order of the Supreme Command of Russia.

Russia, in its own right, conducts a special military operation on the territory that is legally one of the administrative units of Russia.

Yes, a few specific units, but nothing more.

It should also be borne in mind that there can be no war, other than a civil one, between territories under common administrative control.

As well as no annexations, etc., etc.

But, administrative reforms on the territory of Ukraine, in my understanding, can and, perhaps, should be in the future.

Moreover, Russia has the right to carry out administrative and other reforms at its own discretion, and, of course, in its own interest.

On the above basis, there is the only internationally recognized state western border of the USSR with the countries of Eastern Europe.

The rights of Russia, as the successor of the USSR, are registered with the UN.

So, Russia paid the debts of the USSR for all the republics, including for Ukraine, in accordance with international law.

Thus, from the point of view of international law, no one has any grounds for a dispute with Russia about the territorial affiliation of Ukraine.

Author – Gennady Tsybanev

Cool thrift shop find…

thrift shops 34
thrift shops 34

Dr Lexus!

One of the best Scenes. Dr. Lexus! Idiocracy 2006 comedy film, directed by Mike Judge. Starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph.

British Mercenary “CossackGundi” Surrenders To Russian Forces in Mariupol Ukraine

CossackGundi Merc SurrendersToRussia large
Cossack Gundi Merc SurrendersTo Russia

We have received reports that British “volunteer” Aiden Aslin, better known as “CossackGundi”, and other international “volunteers” in the Ukrainian Marines, have chosen to lay down their arms to Russian forces around Mariupol, Ukraine, after running out of food and ammunition.

A source close to Aiden, who previously served with him in the YPG (Syria) spoke with him by phone and told us “I just spoke with Aiden. His unit is out of food and ammo. They have no other option but to surrender. He said he loves you all.”

He is surrendering to Russians which is only slightly better than surrendering to Chechyns.

He’s upset.  Likely he knows he’s going to spend the rest of his life in some Russian prison.   Worse, for him, is that once Russia tells the world they have him, the country of Syria is likely to issue an arrest warrant for the mercenary role he played in THAT country.   This likely translates to life in prison not only in Russia, but in Syria as well.

Hal Turner Analysis

THIS is what happens to British forces who actually believe the mentally retarded British government.  The people inserted into government positions are such incredible fools, and such blatant liars, they will fabricate just about __any__ story to get people to go do things for them.   And when those things go bad . . . . the government fools who caused it all, are nowhere to be found.

British officials like Liz Truss are unimaginable liars; they deliberately falsify information to the public – and likely in private as well – to cause people to do things that are not in the interests of others.   Those others fight back and whoever volunteers to help the British, gets the consequences.  Just like CossackGundi is getting right now.

Same thing with the Americans.  Look at what they did to Afghans.  Pulled out of Kabul, and simply LEFT all the Afghans who helped them.  Those Afghans – what few were allowed to live — were dealt with by the Taliban.

DO NOT FIGHT FOR THE UK OR FOR THE USA.   If you choose to believe the lies of those government nitwits, liars, and sociopaths, you will likely get what CossackGundi is getting right now.

For what its worth, Ukraine is losing this conflict and is going to lose. Period. Full stop.

Ukraine never had a chance against Russia.  Only an idiot would think otherwise.

Ukraine lost when they decided to accept western money to overthrow the Democratically elected President, Viktor Yanukovich, in 2014.

They lost again when they elected a west-financed puppet government in Kiev.

They lost again when the people of Crimea voted in a referendum, to leave Ukraine and return to Russia.

They lost again when the people of Luhansk and DOnetsk decided they, too, were leaving Ukraine for Russia – but Ukraine said “no” and sent the Ukraine Army to bomb them.

Ukraine lost again when their army in Luhansk and Donetsk was confronted by “Little Green men” sent in by Russia to protect the civilians in Luhansk and Donetsk.

Ukraine lost again when they signed the Minsk Agreements, then did absolutely NOTHING to implement them for five years, and instead continued to bomb civilians in Luhansk and Donetsk.

Ukraine lost again when they openly incorporated actual NAZIS into their government, police, and military.

Ukraine lost again when Luhansk and Donetsk declared Independence and invited Russia in to protect them.

Ukraine lost again when the Kremlin called on February 23, and gave Ukraine five hours to accept the terms of the Minsk Agreement, accept that Crimea was now Russian territory, and allow Luhansk and Donetsk to be free, then IGNORED the Kremlin ultimatum at the behest of the British and Americans.   Once that five hour window expired, the Russian Army entered Ukraine.

Ukraine’s public relations machine would have people think that Ukraine is the victim; they are not.  They are the perpetrators . . .  they brought all this upon themselves and they are losing.

Discovery 1

2022 04 13 19 37
2022 04 13 19 37

The United States Begs China to help them deal with the American economic crisis

Translated from Chinese. This is from an article out of Hong Kong. I don’t know how accurate it is. While my factories and logistics carriers are seriously nervious about shipping to the USA, none of them has actually refused making products for Americans. -MM

2022-04-12 18:23 HKT
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The trade war between China and the United States has been fought for several years, but judging from the current overall situation, it is clear that the outcome has been divided. The United States has fallen into a serious economic crisis, while China will enter a new round of golden age of economic development. Even when the United States has been forced to do nothing, it has repeatedly released goodwill hopes to China to soften China and get China's help to get out of the crisis.

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According to a New York Times report, in mid-May, the U.S. Trade Representative made two requests for dialogue with senior leaders of the Chinese commerce sector, but both were rejected by China.

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The current US economic crisis is indeed very serious.

.

 In 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has brought a huge blow to the US economic order, because the US government at that time did not consider to achieve effective control of the coronavirus, and in response to the 2020 election. .

.

The Trump administration's policy of only focusing on economic data has directly led to the loss of control and raging of the domestic epidemic in the United States, which also caused headaches for the Biden administration, which had just taken office only a few months ago.

.

Although the Biden administration has adopted a relatively clear epidemic prevention and control policy after taking office, it has also vaccinated the people on a large scale, hoping to achieve herd immunity. 

.

However, the epidemic in the United States cannot be completely controlled in just a few months. Under the influence of the epidemic, the unemployment rate in the United States has reached about 10%, and it is difficult for many Americans to maintain their basic survival. 

.

Moreover, the coronavirus pandemic is after all spreading throughout the world, which has also had a huge impact on the overall world trade. It is already difficult for the United States to export its goods to all parts of the world without hindrance as before, and the world It is still unknown when the economy can be fully restarted.

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What's more terrible is that in order to restore the instability of the economic order, the Biden administration unilaterally began to seek economic recovery after taking office. The Biden administration proposed a trillion-dollar infrastructure construction plan, but the current U.S. finances clearly cannot support it. According to data released by the U.S. Department of Finance, the U.S. government debt ratio reached 137% in fiscal year 2020, which is a historic high.

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If the US government wants to pay back the money, it will take at least 20 years, so the Biden administration can also be said to have completely abandoned its control of the inflation rate. The Biden administration implemented monetary easing and fiscal stimulus plans, requiring the Fed to step up printing trillions of dollars into the market to revitalize the US economy. From the perspective of existing economic indicators, this is indeed useful.

.

The U.S. government has given the people a lot of money for consumption, thereby promoting the stability of the U.S. economic order. Therefore, in the first few months of this year, U.S. economic growth has at least returned to a normal track, but what this has brought is The domestic inflation rate in the United States has increased as never before. (note : when the world stop buying US treasury debt and begin to sales those in hand, US lost its power of printing money without domestic inflation) 

.

In May of this year, the U.S. consumer price index rose to 5%, and the inflation rate was as high as 53%. This will bring more serious obstacles to the future economic development of the United States, and even now the United States is overdrafting its global economic hegemony. And the US dollar hegemony to temporarily stabilize the economic order.

.

The high inflation rate means that the domestic price level in the United States is rising rapidly, but the average salary of American residents has not followed up, and even has declined to a certain extent. After all, the coronavirus pandemic still exists, and various American companies want to guarantee themselves. The business interests of the United States have carried out large-scale layoffs and reduced employee salaries. Therefore, the economic harm caused by inflation to the United States has actually been hit on ordinary Americans, while the rich in the United States have entered the rotation of leeks. Carnival.

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Because these wealthy people can also receive government financial subsidies, they have invested all the financial subsidies they received in the stock market to plunder the wealth of the American middle class. Therefore, we can clearly see that in the last half of the year, the top 10 wealthy individuals in the United States have completed their own rapid accumulation of capital, and their average asset ratio has increased by nearly 40%. Therefore, under the influence of the coronavirus pandemic, the inflation rate in the United States is rising rapidly, and the gap between the rich and the poor in the United States is becoming wider and wider.

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The U.S. government must be responsible for all this. After the end of World War II, the U.S., as a capitalist country, has encountered economic crises more than once, but because of the existence of the Bretton Woods system and subsequent U.S. dollar hegemony and economic hegemony, the U.S. When suffering from an economic crisis, it is possible to transfer the crisis to the entire international community by investing a large amount of US dollars in the market. The facts have proved that such measures are indeed effective. The US economy protected by the international economic order has guaranteed its long-term prosperity, but now the US dollar hegemony has been challenged unprecedentedly.

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The first point is that the global de-dollarization process is constantly being promoted. According to the data released by the IMF, the proportion of the US dollar in the world trade orientation system has dropped from 85% at its peak to 57%. Although it still has an advantage, But the advantage is far from what it used to be.

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Moreover, in 2020, the entire world will be severely affected by the epidemic. .

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The United States can indeed ensure its own economic order by transferring the economic crisis, but this has a premise that the world trade market must be stable, and all countries must buy American products. Products, or export products to the United States, but now obviously there is no such condition.

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Because most countries are unable to maintain their trade stability under the influence of the epidemic. Vietnam, India and other well-known markets in the international community have begun to reduce their product imports. 

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It is no longer possible for them to import products from the United States on a large scale. As the world's largest and most dynamic market, China is of course also It is impossible to allow American products to enter the Chinese market on a large scale. After all, the Sino-US trade war has not completely ended until now.

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But for the current U.S. government, there is not much that can be found. The U.S. needs China. As we have mentioned above, the inflation rate in the United States is very huge, which has even reached a historic high. The domestic price level in the United States has risen by 31% in just three months

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(note : apparently, China stop export subsidies and imposed export tariff on certain strategic products such as steel help to keep the domestic prices stable, while making US cost rise to counter US irresponsible money printing.)

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In order to quell domestic prices in the United States, they must obtain goods from China, because China's industrial output is huge, and because we have the advantage of the entire industrial chain, Chinese goods are characterized by good quality and low prices. 

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Once Chinese goods are acquired, the domestic price level in the United States will inevitably fall. Therefore, many American companies have begun to place orders with Chinese factories, but most Chinese factories have rejected orders from the United States. There are two main reasons for China's rejection of orders.

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The first point is because of the coronavirus pandemic. Although the overall domestic epidemic in China has been brought under control, China's economic recovery level and factory resumption rate rank first in the world. However, the impact of the coronavirus pandemic on us still exists. Unhindered large-scale industrial production as before is obviously unrealistic, which is not conducive to our overall epidemic prevention and control.

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Therefore, the main purpose of China's industrial operation is to ensure its own market demand, not to save the United States. It is obvious that the rejection of US orders by Chinese companies is understandable. After all, the catastrophe is imminent. 

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Even if China is a responsible country, the first consideration is its own national interests and market needs. (note: still remember last winter, in the name of energy shortage and prices, China deliberately cut certain factory output? I believe it is deliberately cutting those output so that they can reject US order to avoid the dollar they received become useless in a foreseeable future. )

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The second is that Sino-US relations have not yet returned to normal.

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Before, the United States initiated a full-scale trade war against China, but now the United States has taken the initiative to show its favor to China, hoping that Chinese goods will enter the United States and quell American inflation. .

How can this be possible? 

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The initiative in the relationship between China and the United States is in China's hands. It is impossible for us to maintain the economic order of the United States by harming our own commercial and corporate interests.

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And if Chinese factories do not accept US orders, US inflation may fall into an endless loop, because the US's own industrial manufacturing obviously cannot meet the needs of the market. 

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The U.S. has a population of hundreds of millions, and the U.S. economy is also the world's No. 1, but we can see that in the total U.S. economy, manufacturing accounts for only 10% of the total, while U.S. manufacturing and industry are only about 27% of China's. , It is simply impossible to meet the domestic market demand in the United States.

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Not to mention that most of the US manufacturing and industry are concentrated in military weapons and high-end information industry. 

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These industrial categories and product categories can bring huge commercial benefits to the United States in peacetime, but they are severely affected in global trade. Under the circumstances, this does not have any positive effect on the United States' current idea of ​​consolidating economic order. After all, Americans can't eat bullets. It's not realistic to let them eat mobile phones.

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Although the Biden administration has put forward a large-scale infrastructure construction plan and a US secondary industry plan since it came to power, it takes time and money. So now the US needs China to help. If there is no China, the US inflation rate will only be Progress expands.

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And the economic crisis in the United States really tells us that the economy of this country is mainly based on manufacturing and industry. About 80% of the total US economy comes from the tertiary industry, and about 7% of the total US economy is created by the lawyer industry. 

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That is to say, the total output value of the US manufacturing and industry is only more than that of the lawyer industry. The created GDP is 3% higher, and the US economy can be said to be built on castles in the air

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In the past, the US economy was able to stabilize because the US possessed global hegemony and dollar hegemony. However, when US hegemony was challenged, their economic order did not have a solid foundation. China can certainly help the United States, but the premise is that the United States must respect our national sovereignty and give up unrealistic suppression and blockade of China. China is no longer an object that the United States can suppress at will.

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Another cool thrift shop discovery

thrift shops 42
A must have!

China Firms Pulling-Out of USA, BRITAIN, CANADA

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China’s top offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC Ltd. is preparing to exit its operations in Britain, Canada, and the United States, because of concerns in Beijing the assets could become subject to Western sanctions, industry sources said.

All in a Day’s Work

From <redacted> a fine MM follower…

Back when we were supposed to be locked down for some unknown period of weeks or months, Wifey and I stocked up on some barterable and essential slop that we both could tolerate in an emergency.

Booze, beans and bullets.

Yesterday I came in for lunch from my yardwork tasks in the swampy bitch that is our backyard; muddy, but wet enough that the soles of my boots were pretty clean. Wifey was rotating out some of the A-Bomb supplies and a large can (12oz) of tuna + greenery was my awaiting meal. The can said that it had expired
over a year ago like I give a shit what those lying planned-obsolescence assholes say. I pound down that mound of an enhanced salad in about fifteen minutes. I suited back up and headed to the quagmire to distribute Wifey’s latest “all natural” cure upon our weed farm that the neighbors love so. About fifteen
minutes into the task, I felt something gurgling down deep in my processing plant.

Fuck!

Read the rest HERE in glorious PDF.

Discovery 2

2022 04 13 19 38
2022 04 13 19 38

South Korea is on China’s “Hit List”

Article 9 of the South Korea-US Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) stipulates that a custom’s examination “shall not be made” in case of “military cargo consigned to the US armed forces,” according to a document posted by the South Korean Foreign Ministry.
“According to the SOFA, the US military cargo is exempt from customs inspection, allowing (the USFK) to bring in whatever it wants … (South) Korea is a very friendly country for the United States to import germs and conduct tests,” Lee Jang-hie, emeritus professor at law school of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, told Xinhua.
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Russians aren’t that different from Americans

wtf russia 11
Russian fishing.

1950″s Brownie Recipe

This is the recipe we used in Home Economics in the l950’s.  It’s very moist and chewy, a super rich brownie. It goes great with pudding, ice cream, or fudge toppings.

And a fine brandy or hot coffee.

2022 04 12 21 50
So yummy!

Here’s the recipe:

1 cup softened butter
2 cups sugar
3 large eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
4 ounces semi-sweet bar
1 1/4 cups of sifted all-purpose flour
(measure flour after sifting)
1/2 teaspoon salt

Optional: add 1 cup of chopped pecans or walnuts.
dark can be used

Preheat oven 350 degrees
Use 13″ x 9″ pan, greased and floured
Bake 40-45 minutes until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
Allow cool in pan before slicing.
These brownies freeze very well, they will keep months.

So Pun-ny

fails on snapchat 21
Booby trap.

Poland “attacks” Belarus border post

A few days ago—and I’m not sure it was the first time—Polish uniformed personnel “attacked” a Belarus border post.

In the short video clip below, one Polish serviceman shoots a slingshot (see around 0:27) and another one shines a stroboscopic lamp, towards the Belarussian position.

 

You might think this is not serious.

It is serious.  This is an international border.  Unless you think the Polish border guard (or army, or whoever this is) is a hooligan rabble, they would not be doing this without orders.

Imagine if Mexico’s army did this to the U.S. Border Guard, how would Americans feel?  (We know the cartels do much worse, but they’re not the government, so Mexico gets a pass.)

Next, the Poles may deploy a watermelon catapult, or sound warfare, or tear gas, or whatever, and someone on the Belarussian side will get hurt, or worse.

Poland will say, “It’s just a catapult!”, but if it breaks someone’s neck, Belarus would have to respond…..

…..And then it’s “NATO Article 5”, and the 10,000-plus U.S. military personnel in Poland, most located within 30 miles of the Ukrainian or Belarussian borders (for just such an eventuality), get drawn into it.  Not to mention, just now I got video of this U.S. or German (these are not in the Polish arsenal) howitzer train—at least two batteries’ worth—moving into Poland.

 

In short, the border actions are a provocation.

This is one step in a campaign of escalation.

Poland has been trying to pull off a regime change in Belarus since 2020.

Claims that Uncle Sam is directly behind the regime change efforts are mostly false.  It’s Poland, with Lithuania and Germany in second place.

In response, Belarus had been facilitating a wave of chaotic illegal migration of Iraqis and others into Poland, however, that more or less stopped, many months ago.

Recently, a team of railway saboteurs was arrested in Belarus; one of the three resisted and was shot (not killed.)  They were found to have a pistol and some professional radio gear.  I have videos of their apprehension and the damage they caused, but it’s not that interesting.

It’s likely they were operating under pay and orders from Polish intelligence.  The railway is a target because it moves Russian army gear.

Poland’s intelligence service has set up a virtual “front group” called BYPOL, allegedly consisting of Belarussian security personnel who want to see a democratic Belarus blah blah.

BYPOL might have some uniformed collaborators in its employ.  (We don’t know, because no one is identified—it’s made out like it’s an undercover network inside Belarus, probably imaginary.)

Even if it’s not 100-percent fake, it’s a front.  You know who is writing the checks and pulling the strings.

BYPOL “exists” so that any sabotage inside Belarus can be “plausibly denied” by Poland. “It wasn’t us, it was BYPOL.”

BYPOL’s English-language website is here.  It’s ridiculously slick, probably made in the USA, or with the help of an American PR firm.

Poland has been looking to expand its influence over its neighbors.

Much of Belarus and the Ukraine were controlled by Poland from the 1400s to the early 1700s, and then western Belarus and northwest Ukraine were occupied by Poland again from 1919 to 1939.

Now, Poland wants it back. 

Don’t just take my word for it.  Polish-American tweeter Jack Posobiec—1.7 million followers, and a regular on Steve Bannon’s show—has been calling for a renewed Polish empire for over a year.

A retired commander of Polish ground forces recently told Poland’s leading tabloid that Russia’s Kaliningrad province (taken from Germany in 1945) is rightfully Polish and must be conquered.

That’s the sort of crap that is going around in their media space.  Their public is being primed for intervention and expansion.

In recent weeks, Poland has mobilized an entire infantry division (with the help of U.S. trainers) to move into northwest Ukraine, to “protect” the Ukrainians, even though the Ukraine-Russia fighting is hundreds of miles away.

A few military targets in this part of the Ukraine have been bombed, but no one seriously thinks Russia wants—or would be able to—move its ground forces into the area anytime soon.  If the war comes here, unlikely as that is, it is still months away.

So far, the European Union and NATO Command have told Poland, “No!”

That may change if something heats up on the Poland-Belarus border.

If Poland and Belarus start fighting, that would be bad enough, it would involve NATO and possibly nuclear weapons.  But (if we’re still here), Poland would also have some pretext and political cover to move into northwest Ukraine and establish a long-term protectorate there.

(This “expeditionary force” would be supported by NATO Patriot missile batteries now deployed in Slovakia.)

That’s their goal.  That’s what this Belarus border drama is about.

Everyone must understand now, if the Russia-Ukraine war gets “out of control”, and turns into a broader Russia-NATO war, or a nuclear war, it won’t be thanks to Brandon.

It would be thanks to Poland.

It’s a common enough problem.

2022 04 13 20 25
2022 04 13 20 25

FLASH TRAFFIC: RUSSIA TO CONSIDER US/NATO VEHICLES BRINGING WEAPONS TO UKRAINE AS LEGITIMATE MILITARY TARGETS

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Russia will consider US and NATO vehicles that transport weapons to Ukraine as legitimate military targets, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Ryabkov said.

He did not elaborate on WHERE such vehicles would be treated as legitimate military targets.  While it may be normal to treat them as such INSIDE Ukraine, the statement seems deliberately ambiguous on that point.

In other news, however, there was no ambiguity:

The Russian Ministry of Defense today publicly warned Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenski that if Ukraine continues to attack targets inside Russia, then Russia will commence targeting the “centers of decision making” in Ukraine.   Read that to mean, government buildings in the national capital, Kiev.

Earlier, the governor of the Kursk region in Russia reported several attacks at border crossings perpetrated on the Ukrainian side of the crossing. The attacks with mortars and small firearms have not yet caused any casualties, the governor said.

Russia’s Defense Ministry has warned that Russian armed forces will launch strikes on Ukrainian “decision-making centers”, including Kiev, if Ukraine doesn’t stop trying to hit objects on Russian territory. The ministry added that, so far, Moscow had avoided hitting these centers, but this policy might change.

Russia announced its decision drastically to scale down its military activities near Kiev after making such progress in the last in-person bilateral talks with Ukraine, which took place in Istanbul on 29 March. Moscow explained that key decision-makers, who can make the final call in peace talks, live in Kiev and hence the city should be spared any hostilities in the near future.

The defense ministry’s announcement comes in the wake of several incidents, in which the Ukrainian Armed Forces carried out attacks on Russian territory. Governor of the Kursk region, Roman Starovoit reported that a border crossing was shelled from the Ukraine side on 9 April and that the mortar position was suppressed when the Russian side returned fire. Starovoit also said that a group of Russian border guards came under small arms fire from the Ukrainian side on 13 April. There were no casualties among Russians in both incidents.

Discovery 3

2022 04 13 19 40
2022 04 13 19 40

4 Checkmate – Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner

This show should be watched in its entirity. This is a classic 1960s show about the retirement of “secret agents”. This is a really nice segment, and you really should watch the ENTIRE clip. It’s just… precious.

I hope you enjoy it. It seems very bizzare, but as you watch it you can see the beauty in the entire production.

Sweden Expects to Join NATO in June of this year

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The Social Democrat party leadership in Sweden has allegedly decided on the NATO issue. Party Leader Magdalena Andersson‘s goal is for Sweden to join NATO in June this year, say sources in the party.

OIP C.eOONJwi3vNvHft1Bxr9yagHaE9
Magdalena Andersson

The application is planned to be submitted at the NATO meeting in Madrid on June 29-30.

The official neutrality of both Sweden and nearby Finland, has kept the peace with Russia for decades.

It is not yet known what Russia’s reaction might be to such a decision by Sweden, but the reaction by Russia over Finland joining is not in question: Russia has publicly stated that the only thing Finland would achieve by joining NATO would be the destruction of their country.

The America Competes Act of 2022

The America Competes Act of 2022 contains a proposal for a new outbound review process that would screen investments in offshore supply chains, notably in China
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Though there is bipartisan political support for the investment regime, it is not yet clear what shape it will take or how it will impact US firms in China, say experts
.

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Discovery 4

So you lift up this crappy old rug, and you find a crappy owld wooden floor. On closer inspection,  you see that it is real hardwood, and so you fix the holes and sand and clean it up then a fine layer of acrylic. Look at the transformation!

2022 04 13 19 41
2022 04 13 19 41

Russia’s role in space program is irreplaceable, Roscosmos boss says as EU suspends cooperation on Mars mission

Western countries are heavily sanctioning Russia’s space program. The European Union has decided to suspend cooperation with Russia on exploring Mars. But the head of Russia’s space program, known as “Roscosmos” told CGTN that Moscow’s role in space exploration is indispensable.

LI JIANHUA CGTN Reporter “Mr. Rogozin, thank you for accepting our interview. The EU has halted cooperation with Russia on ExoMars. How has this affected the Russian Space Agency and what is the impact on manned space exploration?”

DMITRY ROGOZIN Director General, Roscosmos “It’s a cooperative mission. If Russia doesn’t join, Europe won’t go ahead with the mission, because Russia’s contribution to the mission is huge. It is not only about the heavy rockets that send these instruments into orbit and to Mars. It’s also about the landing vehicles. These vehicles must help achieve a soft landing on Mars or the research rovers. The module itself is a research station. We have been waiting so long to realize this mission. If it is delayed, it will never happen. They may change Russia’s landing module, but that decision could take a lot of time and money.”

LI JIANHUA CGTN Reporter “Without international cooperation, will Russia be able to conduct the expedition research on its own?”

DMITRY ROGOZIN Director General, Roscosmos “The problem is when someone does it on their own, it costs a lot of money. It will be a huge burden on the budget. In the construction of ExoMars, the main element is the landing module. The Mars research rover is not the essential element. I think we can make this mission happen with another partner like China or someone else.”

LI JIANHUA CGTN Reporter “How about the International Space Station? NASA has said the Russia-US cooperation on the ISS will not be affected by the new sanctions. What’s your take on that?”

DMITRY ROGOZIN Director General, Roscosmos “The sanctions have been imposed on Russia to make our economy and high-tech companies suffer, to make our people’s lives more difficult, and to bring Russia to its knees. Clearly, it’s not possible because of the strength and will of our people and country.”

LI JIANHUA CGTN “So let’s say there are more sanctions on Russia and Russia decides to withdraw from the ISS programme. You previously warned that the ISS could collapse as a result of the sanctions. I’m quoting you as saying ‘if you stop cooperation with us, who will save the 500-ton ISS from going out of control, derailing and falling on Earth.’ What’s your take on that?”

DMITRY ROGOZIN Director General, Roscosmos “Russia’s role is vital. Only Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft can transport American, European, Canadian, Japanese astronauts and their guests. Soyuz is irreplaceable, because America doesn’t have any spacecraft. Russia helps the international space station avoid space rubbish and maintain orbital correction. The ISS is in a low earth orbit. It helps deliver fuels to the station. These are the main contributions from Russia and Roscomos in particular. So working without Russia is impossible, just like working without America. If they pull us out of this, the ISS wouldn’t exist anymore.”

LI JIANHUA CGTN Reporter “China’s Shenzhou-13 crew are set to come back to Earth in mid-April. What’s your comment on their mission? What do you think of China’s promise of international cooperation in the future?”

DMITRY ROGOZIN Director General, Roscosmos “We work well with our Chinese friends. We have Glonass, and China’s Beidou system was built in orbit not long ago. They are compatible, very compatible. The second project is interesting, which is the International Lunar Research Station. We have signed all the necessary documents with our Chinese friends. Regarding China’s space station, we can talk about creating new modules. To be friends in space, we must be friends on Earth. Russia and China are friends on Earth. I think China and Russia can work together in manned cosmonautics.”

Article

Discovery 5

You remove some drywall, and you discover windows that were covered up. Why?

2022 04 13 19 43
2022 04 13 19 43

Discovery 6

There’s all sorts of things lying around that are interesting.

2022 04 13 19 g43
2022 04 13 19 g43

The Inflation Crisis Of 2022 Is Now Worse Than Anything That We Experienced During The 1970s

America is going to be in for some trying times. -MM
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Most Americans don’t realize this, but we truly have entered historic territory.  As you will see below, the inflation crisis of 2022 has now escalated to a level that is beyond anything that we experienced during the horrible Jimmy Carter era of the 1970s.  If you are old enough to have been alive back then, you probably remember the constant headlines about inflation.  And you also probably remember that it seemed like the impotent administration in power in Washington was powerless to do anything about it.  In other words, it was a lot like what we are going through today.  Unfortunately for us, this new economic crisis is still only in the very early chapters.

Of course the mainstream media would like us to believe that what we are experiencing today is not even close to what Americans went through in the late 1970s and early 1980s.  According to CNN, the U.S. inflation rate hit a peak of 14.6 percent in the first half of 1980…

The inflation rate hit a record high of 14.6% in March and April of 1980. It helped to lead to Carter’s defeat in that fall’s election. It also led to some significant changes in the US economy.

Compared to that, the numbers we have been given in early 2022 seem rather tame.  On Tuesday, we learned that the official rate of inflation in the U.S. hit 8.5 percent in the month of March…

Prices that consumers pay for everyday items surged in March to their highest levels since the early days of the Reagan administration, according to Labor Department data released Tuesday.

The consumer price index, which measures a wide-ranging basket of goods and services, jumped 8.5% from a year ago on an unadjusted basis, above even the already elevated Dow Jones estimate for 8.4%.

8.5 percent is much lower than 14.6 percent, and so to most people it would seem logical to conclude that we are still a long way from the kind of nightmarish crisis that our nation endured during the waning days of the Carter administration.

But is that the truth?

In reality, we can’t make a straight comparison between the official rate of inflation in 2022 and the official rate of inflation in 1980.  The way that the inflation rate is calculated has been changed more than 20 times since 1980, and every time it was changed the goal was to make the official rate of inflation appear to be lower.

What we really need is an apples to apples comparison, and fortunately John Williams over at shadowstats.com has done the math for us.

According to Williams, if the inflation rate was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, the official rate of inflation would be somewhere around 17 percent right now.

17 percent!

That means that the inflation that we are seeing now is even worse than anything that Americans went through during the Jimmy Carter era.

And government figures for individual categories seem to confirm that inflation is now wildly out of control.  For example, the price of gasoline has risen by 48 percent over the past year…

The price of gasoline rose by 48.0 percent from March 2021 to March 2022, according to numbers released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In just one month—from February to March—the seasonally adjusted price of gasoline went up 18.3 percent.

Vehicle prices have escalated to absurd levels as well.  If you can believe it, the average retail selling price of a used vehicle at CarMax has risen by 39.7 percent in just 12 months…

CarMax experienced a slowdown in fourth-quarter used car sales volume as its average retail selling price jumped 39.7% year-over-year to $29,312, an increase of approximately $8,300 per unit.

And I discussed yesterday, home prices in the United States have jumped 32.6 percent over the past two years.

We have entered a full-blown inflationary nightmare, and the Biden administration is trying to blame Vladimir Putin for it.

Needless to say, that is extremely disingenuous of Biden, because prices were already skyrocketing even before the war in Ukraine started.

But it is true that the war is making economic problems even worse all over the globe, and that isn’t going to end any time soon.

A couple of weeks ago there was a bit of optimism that some sort of a ceasefire agreement could be reached, but now there appears to be no hope that there will be one any time soon.

On Tuesday, Putin told the press that peace talks have reached “a dead end”

Talks with Ukraine have reached “a dead end,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said in fresh Tuesday remarks. “We will not stop military operations in Ukraine until they succeed.” He explained that Ukraine has “deviated” from agreements and any possible prior progress reached during the Istanbul meetings, according to state-run RIA.

The strong remarks aimed at both Kiev and the West were given during a joint presser with his Belarusian counterpart Alexander Lukashenko. He further hailed that the military operations is still going “according to plan,” Bloomberg reports, however while admitting to the domestic population that “Russian logistics and payment systems remain a weakness and the long-term impact of western measures could be more painful.” But he also said the county has withstood the economic “blitzkrieg” from the West.

And Volodymyr Zelensky is now saying that the return of Crimea is a “red line” for him

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky named recognition of the annexation of the Crimea region as one of his red lines for Moscow in any potential peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end war between the two countries.

Russia annexed the southern region of Crimea in 2014. Russian-backed separatists and forces, as well Ukrainian soldiers, have since been fighting in the eastern region of Ukraine.

Russia will never, ever willingly give Crimea back to Ukraine.

Anyone that thinks otherwise is simply being delusional.

So unless someone changes their tune, this war between Russia and Ukraine is going to keep going until someone achieves total victory.

And that could take a really long time.

Meanwhile, global food supplies will get tighter and tighter, and global economic conditions will continue to rapidly deteriorate.

In other words, the kind of nightmare scenario that I have been warning about for years is now upon us.

And so what happens if another “black swan event” or two hits us later in 2022?

We are so vulnerable right now, and it wouldn’t take much at all to push us over the edge and into an unprecedented worldwide crisis of epic proportions.

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Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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This Man Designed A Purrfect House For His 20-Plus Rescue Cats

Probably most cat owners have dreamed of building their cat a little home at some point, but not like this! Peter, the founder of the ZenByCat organization, and the builder of this wonderful cat paradise that we’re about to show you, slowly but surely executed his life’s dream: living in harmony surrounded by the cuddly and perfectly happy rescued fluffballs.

Just how many cats, you might ask? Over twenty. But it’s alright, Peter’s house is built for it. Literally. So scroll right down and check out the catopia, the Shangri-La of cat homes, except this one exists for real.

God bless this man.

Here’s Peter, the founder of the “House of Nekko”

This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedc30869c 700
This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedc30869c 700

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Nobody could’ve imagined that he’d turn his house into catopia (cat utopia), but he did

This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedbd06c5b 700
This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedbd06c5b 700

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Peter, who bought the house in 1988, has designed the house to meet all of the needs of his rescue cats

This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedc03f081 700
This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedc03f081 700

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house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise 508502ab 620c463769f5e jpeg 700
house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise 508502ab 620c463769f5e jpeg 700

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house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise 528bf1bf 620c462594790 jpeg 700
house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise 528bf1bf 620c462594790 jpeg 700

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It has platforms specially made for cats to roam around without sacrificing the high ground

This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced88dc4d7 700
This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced88dc4d7 700

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house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise ae0ca037 620c463bb2665 jpeg 700
house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise ae0ca037 620c463bb2665 jpeg 700

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There are tons of plants and feeding spots so they feel like the kings and queens of the jungle

This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ceda5b47a1 700
This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ceda5b47a1 700

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Separate feeding spots ensure that they’re never fighting for their food

house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise 30389b66 620c462e4011c jpeg 700
house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise 30389b66 620c462e4011c jpeg 700

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It even has spiral stairways that have access to floors only cats can get to

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Even the bathroom is decked out to suit the needs of the felines

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced9a8eacc 700

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Yes, this is a cat hamster wheel

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced9cad3e2 700

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There are even some plant-themed rooms just so they feel like in great outdoors

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced8d9cdaf 700

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house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise afca573b 620c463d4cc24 jpeg 700

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced8bd0c7e 700

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house of nekko man turned his house into a cats paradise 36cd1584 620c46247d3a5 jpeg 700

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The house has lots of high spots that cats love

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedabc3fa4 700

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced98ad255 700

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Of course there are scratchers and beds, too

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced94c1191 700

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced94c1191 700 1

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“I heard you like cat houses, so we put a cat house inside a cat house, so you can live while you live”

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced92958dd 700

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ceda9cd9a0 700

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Overall, Peter has over 20 rescued indoor cats living with him

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedb00c299 700

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedb6e5a3a 700

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The cats are well taken care of. As if all of it is not enough, they even have their own pillows and blankets

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedb50013b 700

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedba5deab 700

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Peter’s ZenByCat non-profit organization was found to fight a deadly disease called FIP, Feline Infectious Peritonitis

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620cedb2ed279 700

The story of Zen By Cat begins with a kitten Peter adopted in, 2016, Miss Bean.

Miss Bean was diagnosed with Feline Infectious Peritonitis (FIP). With her condition rapidly deteriorating Peter seemingly had no choice but to euthanize her.

But before the decision was final, Peter received a message from a friend of his. She said she knew a vet at UC Davis, who might be able to get Miss Bean into a Drug Trial for young kittens with FIP.

Peter decided he had to try.

Over the course of the next 31 days Peter and Miss Bean went on a roller coaster of improvements and setbacks against FIP.

Sadly, Miss Bean lost her fight on July 26, 2016.

In honor of Miss Bean and all other victims of FIP, Zen By Cat was set up as a nonprofit to raise money and awareness for FIP research. Since this, Dr. Pederson and others at UC Davis, have made great strides in their research and have successfully cured many cats from FIP, including Peter’s cat Smokey.

But there is still work to be done to bring the drug that saved Smokey and others to market.

Peter’s workstation just screams “I love cats”

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced96b2225 700

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And last but not least, an obligatory stalking window

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This Man Turned His Home into a Cats Paradise 620ced8731c37 700

Conclusion

Sure, the world is undergoing a realignment. And the West, led by the United States, is putting up a fit, and a fight. But it will lose, and the world will calm down soon enough.

This little article is designed to show you what one person can do to make their little corner of the world a better place to live in.

Participate.

Contribute.

Make the world a better place.

And if the rest of the world howls, let them howl. You have far better things to do with your time. I believe in you.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my cat section in my happiness index here…

Life & Happiness

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

Ukraine trigger to global-political change along with HO trains, Chinese girls, and Euroweenie Trolls

There’s quite a bit going on in the world today. And if you listen to the “news”, well, it’s all very frightening. It just seems like the entire world is going to shit. Well, it seems that way, but don’t be so sure that that is the case. Actually, the people in control are actually very smart, and they live in Asia.

But the USA, well, it’s going to Hell in a handbasket.

Here we are just going to throw out some representative articles about the global Geo-political situation mixed up with other tidbits of a MM interest. I hope that  you enjoy this adventure.

Rufus gets wet

You have to stop being a spectator and start participating in life. Stop watching and start doing. Here is what happens when you make that change. you become a Rufus, and your entire life changes. video 2MB

American Consumers Ditch Brand Names For Generic Food As Inflation, Shortages Hit Supermarkets

U.S. consumers’ loyalty to brand names at supermarkets is quickly evolving as they try new grocery products amid snarled supply chains and high inflation.

Top food companies like Kraft Heinz Co. and Kellogg Co. are at dire risk of losing market share as supermarket operators grapple with shortages and fill empty store shelves with lower-cost brands, industry insiders told WSJ.

American households are money-conscious more than ever as inflation hits four-decade highs and takes a bite out of their monthly spending budgets. Some consumers have broken ranks of years and years of brand loyalty only to buy whatever is on the shelf, often generic brands.

“We see people make more choices on items because they are available,” said Tony Sarsam, chief executive officer of grocery chain SpartanNash Co.

Sarsam said SpartanNash had reduced shelf space for food products from major brands because of shortages, allowing it to expand room for local brands, which had more dependable supply.

Private-label consulting company Daymon Worldwide Inc. conducted a survey between May 2020 and August 2021 and found 70% of U.S. consumers bought new or tried different brands in a post-pandemic world. This means brand loyalty could be collapsing as consumers buy what is available and the cheapest.

Even though consumers generally buy familiar brands, industry analysts show high inflation and belt-tightening by households have forced many to find a better deal to make their dollars go further, even if that means buying generic brands.

84.51 LLC, a data analysis business of supermarket giant Kroger Co., also confirms consumers are switching to low-cost brands.

Kroger’s 84.51 said that 90% of consumers are willing to try another brand if their primary brand is unavailable.

WSJ spoke with one consumer in Fort Lauderdale who has been, like many other Americans, trying out new brands because the ones they wanted were out of stock or because prices were too high.

The days of supermarkets carrying only top-shelf brands could be over as shortages and inflation open new opportunities for food companies that can deliver low-cost products.

The shift in shopping behavior is a significant warning for major brands as supermarkets are desperately trying to fill shelf space amid shortages. People are more inclined to try new brands, and many seek low-cost ones.

“There hasn’t been a lot of customer resistance,” said Jonathan Weis, chief executive of Weis Markets Inc., referring to consumers trying generic brands. “They’d rather get orange juice than no orange juice,” he added.

Your comments please.

Old-Fashioned Tangy Cabbage

Here’s something fun and super easy to make.

When was the last time that you had a side of cabbage with your meal? Probably in ages. I’ll tell you what, you are not going to get this in a restrurant as you will have to make it yourself. There is not a single fast-food establishment that will serve this great dish. But don’t worry. It’s delicious and easy to make.

Old Fashioned Tangy Cabbage ArticleImage CategoryPage ID 1157697
Old Fashioned Tangy Cabbage

Old-Fashioned Tangy Cabbage is the perfect go-along for almost any main dish. It’s a simply delicious combination of cabbage and apples, simmered in cider and a few other great seasonings, too!

Your comments please.

What You’ll Need

  • 1 green cabbage, shredded (about 12 cups)
  • 2 red apples, cored, seeds removed, and cut into 1-inch chunks
  • 1/2 cup light brown sugar
  • 1 teaspoon salt
  • 1/4 cup apple juice
  • 1/4 cup apple cider vinegar

What to Do

  1. In a soup pot, combine all ingredients.
  2. Bring to a boil over high heat, reduce heat to medium, and cook 25 to 30 minutes, or until liquid is absorbed and cabbage is tender.

People have hardships

Oh, yes they do, and a Rufus is aware of them. This is becuase a Rufus has experienced them himor herself. We know. We understand, and we are there to help. Be the helping-hand Rufus. Show empathy and understanding. video

Your comments please.

The United States should have heeded Lee Hsien Loong’s advice.

Published: Apr 01, 2022 12:21 AM
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Singaporean Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong is on an eight-day visit to the US. Lee mentioned many times the solidarity and cooperation of the international community.

He reminded Washington that if the US cuts off China, “the price is very high.”

He also emphasized that the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework should be built “on a win-win basis,” and “as a way to engage the region and not just on strategic or security and potentially hostile basis.”

This is not the first time that Lee raised kind reminder to Washington.

He has expressed similar views many times before, including describing the two superpowers, China and the US, as “conjoined twins,” and warning that clash between the two powers would be a disaster for the world.

In addition, Lee has many times expressed the attitude that Singapore cannot take sides.

Singapore is one of the US’ closest partners in Southeast Asia, though not a formal treaty ally. Former US president Barack Obama once said Singapore is an anchor for the US presence in the region. At the same time, Singapore has  significant influence in ASEAN. Therefore, Lee’s remarks are sincere to Washington and representative and symbolic in ASEAN.

“When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.” This phrase is being brought up more and more frequently today, which reflects a sense of realistic anxiety. ASEAN countries are reluctant to be forced to take sides between China and the US, and they are more worried about becoming a wrestling ring in the game of major powers.

Singapore can be regarded as one of the countries that have achieved a relatively good balance between China and the US.

But with the promotion of the US’ strategic containment against China, it has become more and more difficult to maintain this balance. It is noticeable that when Lee made objective remarks on China-US ties this time, he was labeled a “Beijing whisperer.”

But in any case, even if the US covers its ears, wears a blindfold and exerts brute force, it still cannot change the reality that the US’ Indo-Pacific strategy is unpopular in the region.

Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi recently said publicly that the US needs a stronger economic agenda for the Asia-Pacific region, as opposed to its current focus on security issues. “What the people want is prosperity, not only security… our people will ask what is the meaning of developing the concept if [‘the Indo-Pacific strategy’] doesn’t bring economic benefits for the people,” she noted. ASEAN countries are generally aware that the US only wants to create a “bridgehead” against China in the region.

For a while in the past, some countries believed that if they made enough concessions, the US could provide enough support to them. However, it has been proven time and again that US promises are like window paper.

Washington’s “America First” agenda, which only cares about itself and not others, has made some countries suffer and made others more alert. Singapore had actively embraced the US-sponsored Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), but it ended in vain, with the US withdrawing from the agreement. Today, the US is trying to promote another NATO in the Asia-Pacific and expand NATO to the region, embedding more risks of conflict in the region.

As a country embedded in globalization, Singapore cannot afford a geopolitical confrontation between major powers and attaches particular importance to the security and stability of its surrounding environment. Thus, it is extraordinarily sensitive to geopolitical risks and has a forward-looking judgment on the situation. In the past two years, Singaporean politicians have warned on various occasions that the Asia-Pacific region is moving in a very dangerous direction and have repeatedly expressed their call for the US to accept China’s rise, and that they “don’t wish to be forced into making invidious choices,” while stressing that this is also in the fundamental interests of the US. Such voices of reason, however, are often ignored by Washington.

An unavoidable reality is that though the US wants to weave a tight net to besiege China, the net cannot withstand scrutiny. Be it the Five Eyes alliance, Quad or AUKUS, none of the members are ASEAN countries. Public opinion has noticed that at the press conference after US President Joe Biden met with Lee Hsien Loong, Biden mentioned the Indo-Pacific six times, but Lee hardly used this term which is an American concept that carries strong bloc politics, and chose “Asia Pacific,” a clear indication of a gap with the US’ stance.

A just cause has many helpers while an unjust one finds few followers. No force can run counter to the trends and hearts and minds. Even though Washington can continue to fool the public opinion, it cannot fill up the hollowing out of the Indo-Pacific strategy. If Washington cannot even listen to the advice of Singapore, a close ally, reality will teach it a profound lesson.

Barry White

He has been such an inspiration in my life. Seriously. Most especially his later stuff. And unfortunately he died young. Be that kind of inspiration.

Learning about China by looking at the Chinese girls here

This is a great and a fun way to get a snapshot of another nation. You take a look at the society, and in this case, you look at the women and girls there. Of course, if all you do is watch American “mainstream media” you might think that Chinese girls are flat-chested, thin waifs that tremble becuse they are overwhelmed by the great mass of horny menfolk (due to the one child policy). Of course, it’s a massive lie, but heck. If you want to be stupid, stay that way. I just don’t give a fuck. Here’s what Chinese girls really look like. Video.

Girl one Nice cityscape. 4MB

Girl two – Girl in a tight black top. 4MB

Girl three A nice lass in yellow. 4MB

Girl four – Pale in browns and tans. Still, nice. 4MB

Girl Five – Nice friendly and approachable girl in her livingroom. 5MB

Do these girls look like they are downtrodden, helpless, thin, look like little girls desirous of American democracy?

Model Trains

About twenty five years ago I subscribed to a HO scale catalog. This was sort of my dream book. There, I would leaf through the pages in this 30mm thick (one inch think… telephone sized book) catalog with all sorts of glossy images of toy trains and homes, and buildings.

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Farm supply building.

Its not that I actively had a HO layout or was involved in this hobby. Instead, it was a fantasy that I employed to relax with.

I would go to the bathroom, and take a nice dump while I would leaf though the pages. There, I would imagine the model layouts that I could construct, were I to have thousands of dollars in disposible income. Alas, it never happened, but it was a nice escape.

Though, for me, instead of visualizing trains, and train lines, I actually visualized building towns, bridges, farms, and tiny, tiny communities. All peopled with tiny, tiny people.

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Used Book Store.

You can visit their web page here, and get lost in the latest in cool minitures and tiny, tiny people.

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Barber Shop.

Of course, there are locomotives and train cars galore.

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Box car.

Did you ever have a train set growing up? How old were you and what kind was it?

Chinese patriotism

The big lie parroted and regurgitated thoughout the Western media is that the Chinese are downtrodden, unhappy and yearning for democracy. All that needs to happen is a “regime change” and then the United States can come on into China and fix things the “American Way”. It’s a big bunch of sloppy, juicy bullshit. The Chinese approval ratings for the Communist Party are around 98%.

Here’s some glimpses of just how overwhelmingly patriotic the Chinese are about their Communist Government. video 74MB

The United States is supposed to be the beacon for the world. Why isn’t this level of patriotism experienced inside the ‘States?

Inside Info: Israeli Pay Sheet for Internet TROLLS

Israel pays people to be Internet TROLLS, and to intentionally “steer” Internet conversations and information in a pro-Israel direction. The pay sheet below shows what these TROLLS are being paid to do:

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Paid Troll.

So while YOU are out on the net, perusing public opinion about issues and news, these folks seem to be out there intentionally steering content to achieve THEIR goals.

They don’t have to tell the truth. They don’t have to actually believe what they’re posting. They get paid to post.

Remember that as you peruse the Internet. There are people and groups and entities deliberately manipulating what you read to manipulate YOUR opinion and views.

As I have clearly stated, the algorithms that decide which websites to harrass are totally flummoxed by the MM systems of multiple subjects covering a wide variety of topics.

Australia’s big new move on China: Major announcement expected

A major announcement is expected to be made in response to a controversial decision involving China and a crucial Australian site. It appears the Australia is going to place a massive American logistics base near Darwin port, or break their contract with the Chinese. Why would they do such a thing?

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The door has been left open to building a new port facility in Darwin port amid concerns over a Chinese company leasing the existing port.

A Defence review found there was no national security grounds to recommend the Morrison government to overturn the port’s 99-year agreement with China’s Landbridge Group.

Buried in a media release from Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce was the inclusion of $1.5bn for “new port infrastructure” in Darwin.

Asked if it was for a new Darwin port, to be announced as an election commitment, Defence Minister Peter Dutton did not rule it out.

“There's a massive commitment from the government into the Northern Territory and that does look at port development and ways in which we might be able to look at support through contracts in defence for example,” Mr Dutton told reporters in Canberra.

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More War!

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Italian Style Sourdough Melt

It seems “new” and fancy. When really, it’s a flavor experiment that is really a fun thing to make up on a nice lazy weekend.

Italian Style Sourdough Melt ArticleImage CategoryPage ID 1143406
Italian Style Sourdough Melt

Sourdough bread adds a special artisan touch to this easy Italian Style Sourdough Melt. Inspired by a famous San Francisco sourdough bread, this sandwich is easily made at home.

What You’ll Need

  • 2 tablespoons pesto
  • 4 slices sourdough bread
  • 1/4 pound sliced deli ham
  • 1/4 pound sliced deli salami
  • 1 tomato, sliced
  • 4 slices provolone cheese

What to Do

  1. Spread pesto evenly over one side of each bread slice. Equally divide the ham, salami, tomato, and provolone cheese on two slices of the bread.
  2. Heat sandwiches open-faced in a toaster oven, or on a baking sheet in a 350 degree F. oven for 5 to 7 minutes, or until cheese is melted.
  3. Top with remaining 2 slices of bread, and serve.

MM discusses public services

It’s a nice walk around near my house. I just chat some about public services, streets, easy transportation access. Maintenance. Public toilets. Trash pickup. Etc.

Video 105MB

Do you like my walk abouts? If so, then tell me your thoughts.

The Euro-weenies to order China to sanction Russia

The European Union and China will hold a virtual summit today. Before the summit started Brussels has strewn rumors that it would pressure China to not support Russia. That’s not going to happen. As of 4FED22, Russia and China are one single nation; a United Asia.

China is of course rejecting any pressure and retaliates by pointing out Europe’s weak strategic autonomy:

Hours before the China-EU leaders' meetings on Friday, Chinese analysts warned that China-EU relations cannot be kidnapped by the Ukraine crisis, and Europe should no longer be abducted by the US in foreign policy, as it will greatly undermine the EU's own interests, making it difficult to ensure economic recovery and people's livelihood, and runs counter to Europe's aim of pursuing strategic independence. 
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As the Russia-Ukraine conflict stretches to over a month, Europe has sustained great pressure resulting from sanctions against Russia and its over-reliance on US-led NATO security structure.

"The EU is now kidnapped by the US on security, but that does not conform to the strategic independence EU has pursued," [Cui Hongjian, director of the Department of European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies] said.

To avoid being caught in hot water again, the EU must take control of its own destiny. And developing ties with China provides the EU an opportunity to develop in a more balanced and comprehensive way in the long term, he said.

Its reliance on the U.S./NATO is Europe’s core strategic weakness. The U.S. has used it to infiltrate Europe’s decision making structures.

How could EU possibly consider that they have any persuasive power to dictate to China? The truth is easy to see. China shall satisfy its national interests. Nothing more, and nothing less. Meanwhile, the EU will satisfy its master’s interests; The Unittied States.

These bucco’s are all a bunch of hallucinating fruit-cases.

I am not at all exaggerating. This is the absolute definition of insanity.  When you have repeatable experiences that has time and time again, proven a repeatable result, and yet, a person (or organization) insists on a different result. Sheech! Didn’t China reject Europe’s requests of abandoning Russia multiple times in the past?

Schools in Finland

Think about this.

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1646927442 1

Good idea or bad one?

In Ukraine

From: https://twitter.com/realGonzaloLira/status/1509807142634766338

>The recent failed attempt by 3 Ukrainian helicopters to evacuate troops from Mariupol was a desperate mission with very low chances of success. This raises the question why would Ukraine risk what little is left of its airforce for something so suicidal?

>Macron started spamming Putin with calls, demanding permission to carry out a "humanitarian evacuation" in Mariupol with the help of French, Greek forces.

>The head of the French military intelligence is getting fired for "failures" to "proper assess" the situation in Ukraine.

So we have:

>.ua suicide mission to evacuate someone
>Macron shitting bricks and begging Putin
>Head of French military intelligence getting sacked

From: https://twitter.com/gbazov/status/1509555914449293317

Further sources indicate the presence of two #France intelligence #DGSE operatives (both said to be dead) on board the crashed helicopter. This would explain #Macron's desperate please to #Putin as of late to organize a French-led evacuation from #Mariupol

#MARIUPOL—With respect to the 2nd chopper shot down, it fell several kilometres off the coast of Mariupol, in the #Azov sea. The location is currently being investigated.

#MARIUPOL—Sources indicate that, at #Azovstal, a group totaling 20—of #US (#American) & #UK (#British) military advisors of #Azov defenders, as well as several UK #SBU (#Ukraine|ian secrete police) advisors—is holed up, together with Azov fighters. They were too late to evacuate.

And a video of Ukrainian woman speaking the truth: https://twitter.com/backtolife_2022/status/1509569989321318400

It’s a woman thing

You get this great item of clothing on the internet, and you can’t wait until it arrives. You check the size and and put it on, and this is what happens…

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Not quite ideal.

Women can add their thoughts.

Secrets

Everyone has a story to tell. Some are good, and some are not so good. But that’s life. It’s what makes us human. Here’s a story from a man that holds a secret inside that he can never let out.

A while back, I was cheating on my wife with a coworker. It went on for months, and I never really cared for the woman I was cheating with. She was super hot, though. 

After a while my coworker started getting really crazy and threatening to tell my wife (whom I had a child with and a baby on the way) about everything. Obviously, I kept trying to cut things off because I realized I was making a mistake. 

She lost it one night and was freaking out and texting me telling me she was going to come to my house, and a drunk driver hit her. She died instantly. 

No one knows I was having an affair, and my family went to her funeral.

Some secrets are left buried. There’s no need to tell anyone about this, and there’s no justifiable reason to do so.

Oh Hell no!

Yikes!

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Your comments.

Why Chinese audiences don’t love Hollywood blockbusters any more?

A new change By Chen XiPublished: Mar 30, 2022 07:24 PM

March is coming to an end, but the three highly anticipated foreign language films The Batman, Moonfall and Uncharted have failed to inject new life into the current stagnant Chinese mainland box office.

As of Wednesday, the total box office of the three films has not been able to surpass the 300 million yuan ($47 million) mark, with The Batman, Moonfall and Uncharted grossing 117 million yuan, 74.68 million yuan and 90.31 million yuan respectively, according to China’s ticketing platform Maoyan.

The current surge in COVID-19 cases nationally has probably been a large barrier preventing them from maximizing their box office as Maoyan shows that as of Tuesday only 46.8 percent of mainland theaters are open.

Pessimistic outlook

China’s Qingming Festival holiday is set to kick off in the beginning of April. In recent years, more small and medium-budget domestic films have chosen to debut during this time because, unlike the Spring Festival, they do not have to worry about competing against big blockbusters.

For example, Sister took home 860 million yuan when it was released during the Qingming Festival period in 2021, driving the overall box office of this period to a record high.

However, due to the current COVID-19 outbreak in China, four domestic films that were set to debut during the Qingming Festival have delayed their release dates. This has allowed two foreign language films Escape Room: Tournament of Champions and Hotel Transylvania 4: Transformania to take the lead in the schedule, although they may find the Chinese film market a tough nut to crack, according to a report from Maoyan on Wednesday.

The report noted that more domestic films are likely to be released in April only after the outbreak is brought under control.

Looking at the overall schedule, only one to two foreign language movies are set to be released each week throughout April in the mainland film market, including the highly anticipated The Secrets of Dumbledore, US action thriller film Ambulance and Indian blockbuster Drishyam.

Inevitable trend

Chinese film observers, however, say that the COVID-19 pandemic has only been a “catalyst” and that it is inevitable for Chinese audiences to eventually lose interest in Hollywood movies.

According to industry insiders, there are many reasons behind this trend.

First of all, Hollywood has been producing fewer original stories in recent years as the industrialization of Hollywood has caused it to focus more on movie franchises, comic book adaptations and visual effects blockbusters, Shi Wenxue, a film critic based in Beijing, told the Global Times on Wednesday.

“Whether it is The Batman or Spider-Man, Hollywood only captivates audiences through nostalgia without any creative expression about the current international situation and the impact of the pandemic on human beings,” he added.

Shi is not the only one to think this way.

The hashtag “Why does the Chinese audience dislike watching Hollywood movies?” began trending on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo recently. Some netizens said they feel the main reason is that Hollywood has indeed become too commercialized, producing routine “fast-food”-like movies without any innovation by assembly line, and that the current Hollywood output is incomparable with past classics such as The Godfather, Forrest Gump and Avatar.

Shi Chuan, vice chairman of the Shanghai Film Association, told the Global Times on Wednesday that films from other countries, especially those made in Japan, South Korea and India, also pose a threat to Hollywood movies in China.

“Movies like Japanese film Shoplifters and Indian blockbuster Dangal achieved huge success in the Chinese film market, as the stories from neighboring countries resonate more with Chinese audiences. This shows that only good stories can hit people’s hearts,” he said.

He added that in the past, when the China’s economy was lagging behind the rest of the world, people only had access to simple means of entertainment, and so were naturally attracted to the technology and culture of economically developed regions. However, now that Chinese audiences are more open-minded and confident, their taste in movies has improved.

The huge successes of Wolf Warrior 2, The Wandering Earth and The Battle at Lake Changjin prove that the Chinese film market has been rapidly developing.

“We create our own heroes and most of them are adapted from real historical stories, which makes them more convincing.”

In 2020, China surpassed North America to become the world’s largest film market in terms of box office.

Shi pointed out that a deeply rooted reason for the decline may also stem from Chinese audiences questioning the US-centric ideology on display in Hollywood films, which tend to be about the American Dream or portray the ideological embodiment of US hegemony.

“Chinese no longer believe in US heroes in their stories. In the current international context, we don’t seem to need this kind of salvation, let alone fully identify with what they value,” he said.

Diversity by law

Meanwhile in the United States…

  • NFL Orders Teams To Hire Minority Or Female Offensive Assistant Coaches For 2022 Season
    The policy was adopted by NFL owners during their annual meeting on March 28 and requires all 32 NFL teams to hire an offensive assistant coach who is “a female or a member of an ethnic or racial minority,” regardless of whether or not the team already has a coach who satisfies those requirements among their staff.

    In the Clinton 1990s, the wisdom circulated that White America was getting replaced and therefore, business needed to cater to the New Americans.

Various comically condescending attempts followed, after which point they finally hit on a solution of sorts: continue affirmative action but through private industry.

To be part of the goodthinker club in the coastal cosmopolitan metroplexes where the executives, publicists, journalists, and investors live, therefore, it seemed like a logical rationalization from precedent to start with more of these programs, even though it is steadily driving away their core audience.

It is one hell of a piss-boor business model.

The curse of the white cat.

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The curse of the white cat.

White cat owners please chime in.

Why it is important to not use cheap measuring tapes

This is shocking!

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1646830403 11

It gives “China” a bad name. Though, actually the white tape looks to be from Vietnam.

Confessions Of A Father With A Psychopathic Son

From HERE.

My son was very troubled. VERY troubled. If you have seen the movie “We Need To Talk About Kevin”, it will really help to understand what I’m talking about, because I swear to God when I watched that film I thought I was watching a documentary of my life, I felt like the writer must have had cameras hidden in my damn house, that’s how accurate it was. The only difference is that in the movie, the boy appears normal to his father and only reveals his true nature to his mother, with my son he didn’t have that mask. His insane behavior was the same with everyone.

From the day he was born, my son just came out wrong. He was planned, my wife and I tried to get pregnant and were ecstatic when he was born. He was wanted and loved. We showered affection on him and really tried to give him a happy childhood. But from the day we brought him home from the hospital, he was miserable. He cried for 13 months straight. I’m not exaggerating, 13 months without a break, he cried until he had no voice left and kept crying, you could see his little face scrunched up and no sound coming out, totally hoarse. There were times he would literally be crying in his sleep, I’ve never seen or heard of any other kid able to do that. We brought him to doctors, specialists, tried changing his diet, held him, rocked him, toys, swaddling, music, mobiles, everything we could think of. Nothing worked. 13 months of grating, grinding, no sleep hell.

Once he got over the crying stage, we thought we were out of the woods. But it quickly became clear that for some unknown reason, he was just angry at being alive. I never saw that kid have a genuine, joyous smile once in the time I knew him. I saw him grin a vicious, horrible grin many times, taking a perverse pleasure from causing pain or suffering or breaking a rule, but a smile from real pleasure at something nice? No, never. Not once. He had no interest in anything positive; he was fueled by hate, and everything he did was bent toward that.

As soon as he could walk, his mission in life was to destroy things. He would break or try to break anything that came in his range, smash it, chew it, throw it in the toilet, whatever he could. After a while he figured out how to get his diaper off and took great pleasure in shitting and pissing anywhere he could. After a while he figured out he could hide it, and started pissing and shitting in places we wouldn’t find right away, grinding it into carpets making it even more of a problem to clean and making the house stink. When he got older, (ages 9-15) he would piss and shit in our bed, until we got a lock on our door and he wasn’t able to get in anymore; then he’d just take a dump in the hallway in front of our room. That biological warfare started around a 2 and a half years old and he never grew out of it.

I’ll try to speed it up as I could literally go on for days about this stuff, but as he grew older, he became more and more unmanageable. He would bite, kick, scream, scratch and spit at anyone trying to do anything with him. He was kicked out of school twice before he was 9, then let him back in and then kicked him out for good, he had to change schools. The next one put him in a special class that kept him away from the other students. We had to install a door and lock on the kitchen because he would steal knives and use them to gouge the walls/furniture or chase people with them. When he was 10, he stabbed me pretty good in the hip and ass, I still have the scars. As he grew older, he grew darker. He moved into setting things on fire, and torturing local animals. There was a stray dog that hung out around the park near our house, my son blinded it in one eye with a BBQ fork. He would dip cat’s tails in gasoline and light them on fire. He became a violent, stinking, vicious beast that lived in our house. We couldn’t do anything with him.

YES, we had the kid in fucking therapy. He saw a psychiatrist twice a week, and had god knows how many different medications prescribed to him over the years. Nothing worked. Therapy didn’t work. Meds didn’t work. Nothing fucking worked. He was like a poison cloud of hate and fury lashing out at anything in his reach.

When my son was 16, my wife got pregnant again. I can’t tell you how different our reaction was. Instead of joy, we felt horror. This pregnancy had not been planned, and we really were at a loss over what to do. My son had been such an unending nightmare for 16 years, we couldn’t take the idea of starting again from the beginning. We talked a lot about terminating, but a) access to abortion was not as easy in those days as it is now, and b) my wife was very against it. We talked about many options. In the end, we decided that my wife would have the baby, and if it turned out evil we would put it up for adoption. We knew we just couldn’t do it again with another child like our son.

We had a daughter. She was normal. Suddenly we saw what our lives should have been like the whole time, how things would have been had our son not been himself. She laughed at things. She breast fed without biting (she didn’t have teeth yet anyway, but you could tell she was just trying to eat, not tear her mom’s breast off). After 4 months she was sleeping through the night. She was happy. She was NORMAL. I can’t describe the relief and happiness that we both felt, I don’t have the words for it.

This where I believe I may have started really pulling back from my son. Up until that time, whatever mistakes I made, I had always tried to do the best for my son, I am convinced of that. I tried to help him and love him and care for him, I really tried. But when my daughter was born, my wife and I both instinctively just turned toward her. She became our focus, not from malice, but just because she was so much EASIER. She was so happy and sweet, every moment we were with her was like magic. I understand this was wrong, but we honestly couldn’t help it. I don’t have a better explanation than that.

My son hadn’t given a shit about my wife being pregnant, I honestly don’t know if he really understood it, but when we brought our daughter home he started acting out even more. I didn’t think it was possible, but he took it up another notch. At this time he was 17, and we were having blow-out screaming matches daily. Usually after we fought, he would storm out of the house and disappear for hours at a time, or come back the next morning. It was a relief. I started to actually look forward to our fights because it would get him away from us for a while.

After the birth of our daughter, my relationship with my son was almost entirely gone, our only real interactions were screaming at each other. My wife was even worse with him, she just had nothing left. By that time, if our son even came in to the same room as her, she would just stop whatever she was doing and start screaming “GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME! GET AWAY! GET THE FUCK OUT!” until he left. He started spending more and more time out of the house, which was a blessing for us. I have no idea what he got up to out in the world, but we were just happy it wasn’t being inflicted on us.

As a consequence of our son’s behavior, we had invested heavily in locks around our house. All of the cheap, thin interior doors in our home had been replaced with think, dense wood doors that couldn’t be kicked through, equipped with keyed locks that my wife and I carried keys to. I know it sounds extreme, but locks and heavy doors were the best way we had found to create safe spaces from him. I was not locking my son in rooms like a prisoner, he had free reign of the house and could come and go as he pleased. My wife and I would lock OURSELVES in rooms to protect ourselves from him, if anything WE were the prisoners in our own home.

On the day in question, I had fought with my son in the morning and he had left the house in a rage. My wife and I were enjoying some peace and quiet in the kitchen while our daughter napped in our bedroom. And then my daughter began crying. Any parent who has young children can tell you, you get used to your child’s cries and you can tell after a while what they need, they cry differently if they are hungry, or need changing, or are just restless and want to be held. Babies can communicate pretty well before they can speak. This cry was none of those things. This cry was terror. The second we heard it my wife and I were both up out of our chairs and running to the room. The door was locked of course, and it took a few seconds to get the right key and get it open.

My son was in the room. We lived in a bungalow, and the bastard had climbed in the window to get to her. He was standing over her crib with a steak knife in his hand. I have no idea where he got it, it wasn’t one of ours; we controlled our knives very carefully and always kept them in locked drawers. I think he may have stolen it from one of our neighbor’s houses. He had broken her skin twice already, once in the belly area and once on her arm. I could see blood running down. When I entered the room he was dragging the back of the knife down her face, not cutting, almost tickling her with it, teasing her while she screamed. He looked up at us and smiled.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was already moving, running to put myself between them. I didn’t think about it, I just moved instinctively. Even with that, my wife got there faster, it was like a movie on fast forward, she got to our son and bashed his hand away, knocking the knife across the room and then shoved him with her whole body weight, so hard that he flew away from the crib and bounced off the wall. I picked up my daughter and held her while my wife screened us. I could see her shaking, almost convulsing. I can remember the smell of the room, the sound of my daughter screaming and wailing. The look on my son’s face as he stood there. Just nothing. Blank, dead, there was nothing in his eyes, no emotion. He looked like an alien to me. I watched my wife take a step toward him. I could have reached out and stopped her, but I didn’t. She stepped forward again, very close to him. I could have stopped her again. But I didn’t. She waited, looking at him for maybe 3 to 5 seconds without moving. And then she punched him in the face.

Now until this point, you may have been picturing my wife as a typical woman, small frame, dainty, delicate. This is not the case. My wife does have a small frame, but dainty and delicate she is not, never has been since I’ve known her. Since her early teens, my wife has been a boxer. MMA didn’t exist back then, but karate and boxing were big in those days, and my wife was a VERY talented amateur. She was about 130 pounds, she carried a lot of muscle and she knew how to punch. I had 70 pounds on her back then, and I have no doubt that in a real fight between me and her she could have and would have pounded me flat. Neither of us had ever laid a hand on our son in anger before, but something broke in her that day, and all the years of anger and pain and sorrow and frustration just came pouring out. When she hit him his head snapped back and blood started pouring out of his nose. He hardly reacted, he just looked at her with this shocked expression like he didn’t know how to process what had just happened. She waited another second. And then she hit him again.

I could have reached out and stopped her. I could have dragged her out of the room, taken her away, calmed her. I didn’t. I just stood there and watched while she systematically started to pound him to a pulp. Every time he brought his hands to cover one part she would blast him somewhere else, body, head, body, head, over and over. He started screaming, crying out, yelling for her to stop. It’s the most genuine reaction I’d ever seen him have to anything in his whole life. But she wasn’t stopping. I watched her ramping up, hitting harder, faster, working him like a heavy bag. He tried to swing at her and she slipped him easily. She was on auto pilot, sinking down into her training. I stood there watching for a minute. Then I turned my back on them and took my daughter out of the room.

I brought my daughter to the kitchen and gave her a bath in the sink. I found that he had cut her a third time on the sole of her foot. All the cuts were superficial. I cleaned her up and held her until she calmed. I put Polysporin and Band-Aids on her cuts. In our bedroom, I could hear my son screaming, calling my wife horrible names, telling her he would cut her head off and fuck her corpse. After a while, I didn’t hear him saying anything anymore, didn’t even hear him crying out. I assumed that he must have been knocked out. But I could still hear her beating him.

That went on for a long time. Long enough for my daughter to drift off to sleep in my arms. I just sat at the kitchen table waiting for her to finish. Finally she came out and sat down across from me. Her hands were swollen and red. Her face and arms were splattered with blood. Her chest was heaving. We just stared at each other without saying anything. After a while I asked her “Is he dead?” She looked back at me and answered “I fucking hope so”. I nodded. That was all there was to say about that. I understood how she felt perfectly. I felt the same. I didn’t know what to do, so we just sat there waiting silently. Eventually my wife started crying and went to go take a shower. I just stayed where I was holding our daughter.

After a long while, I heard moaning and sobbing coming from our room. It turned out that my son wasn’t dead. I went in to see how bad it was, and it was… pretty bad. I’ve never seen a more merciless beating laid onto anyone, before or since. He was lying on the floor, rolling around with blood leaking out of his face, lying in a pool of vomit. His nose was squashed flat out across his face, both of his eyes were completely swollen shut and starting to blacken already. I could see that a couple of his fingers were bent out at weird angles and he had pissed his pants. I think he must have been missing teeth, but I couldn’t see any on the floor and I couldn’t see inside his mouth, his lips were all puffed up and swollen. From talking to my wife about it later, I know now that she had systematically beaten every part of his body, focusing heavily on his legs. She told me she kicked him in the groin repeatedly until her legs got tired, and had kept beating his body long after he had passed out.

When my wife came out of the shower, I still didn’t know what to do about our son. I didn’t know whether to call the police or an ambulance, take him to the hospital myself, I honestly didn’t have any idea what to do. After a while I realized that I simply didn’t care what happened to him anymore, and we decided to just let him live or die on his own. There was an in-law suite in the basement that we had never really used, and my wife, my daughter and I just moved down there. We simply ceded the top floor of the house to my son and locked everything down, separated our lives entirely. There was plenty of food in the upstairs cabinets, enough for a couple weeks or more, he had a washroom and bedrooms to use. We had a washroom in the basement, a small kitchenette, and a separate entrance so we just stopped going upstairs. We just decided we were done with him. I figured we’d let his food run out and see what happened.

Over the next week we could hear him moving around upstairs sometimes. I think he just spent most of time lying in bed recovering. I went to work, watching on high alert in case he attacked me in the driveway, but he never did. My wife stayed home with our daughter. She was never out of our sight. One night we heard him going ballistic, smashing things and banging. We didn’t respond. He never tried to get downstairs or get near us though. I think he was afraid that if he got near us again, my wife might finish the job on him. After three weeks down in the basement, we hadn’t heard anything from up above for a few days, and I ventured upstairs to the main floor of the house.

The place was demolished, and there was no sign of my son. He was gone. It took months to repair the damage he had done and get the main floor back to normal again. There was food and shit smeared all over the walls and broken glass on the floor, big holes in the dry wall, he had ripped the place apart. He tore up the linoleum in a corner of the kitchen and emptied an entire foam fire extinguisher into the living room. I feel thankful that he didn’t burn the house down with us in it, I’m honestly not sure why he didn’t, the kid wasn’t shy about lighting things on fire. After that, I lived in fear every day that he would come back, that he would ambush us out of the blue and try to kill us. We moved house about 3 years later and I finally stopped being afraid that he would show up again, as now he had no idea where we were. I finally felt safe from him.

All this happened a long time ago. My son was born in the spring of 1971, my daughter was born in ’88. I’m an old man now, I’ll be 70 this year and my wife passed from cancer in 2016. My daughter is 31 now, I moved in with her and her husband after my wife passed. I’ve got two granddaughters and they are the joy of my life. I see a therapist a couple times a month to talk about all this. I don’t know where my son is. The last time I saw him was when he was lying on the floor of our bedroom, bleeding and smashed. I haven’t heard from him since he left, more than 30 years now. I don’t want to.

I carry a lot of guilt from that time, and a lot of conflicted emotions. I didn’t beat him myself, but I allowed him to be beaten, and I thought he deserved it. I was happy it happened. I didn’t try to kill him, but I would have been happy if he died. I will say that I do hope he was able to overcome his demons and go live a normal life somewhere. If he wasn’t able to do that, if he stayed the way he was, then I truly do hope someone out there killed him. When I knew him he was a rabid dog, and whichever way it went I just hope he isn’t still out there hurting anyone else.

This entire write up has shooken me. As someone who was married to a mentally ill person, I could very much relate to the situation that I found myself in when her personality went Dr Jekkle and Mr Hyde. Comments?

MM commentary

I’m sure that he moved into politics, and is probably in a great position of power inside Washington DC today.

A great deal on a “fixer Upper”.

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A great deal on a “fixer Upper”.

It looks like a lot of work, don’t you know.

‘Tattooed Lady”, Rory Gallagher performs live at Rockpalast (1977)

When asked how it felt to be the greatest guitar player in the world, Jimi Hendrex responded “Ask Rory Gallagher”. Please enjoy this section of one of the guitar greats from my youth.

This ornament has a hole for a light to poke through so it mimics the lit lighter from Die Hard.

Die Hard is a classic Christmas movie. Don’t you think?

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Die Hard Christmas.

Remember to be the Rufus

It defines your sentience. When the going gets tough, the survivors are those that are members in a community. The idea that the lone-wolf can win and survive is just a Hollysood fantasy. History celarly tells us otherwise. Be that Rufus. video.

Woman gives birth on a stairway. video of Rufus help. 4MB

Be the Rufus

The alarm bells are ringing. Are you going to step up to the plate and participate in life, or are you going to still stand by and be a spectator? Be a Rufus. video 2MB

“Russia is Succeeding Wildly in its Objectives!” Scott Ritter on the War in Ukraine

Outstanding interview! Read this and get a fresh perspective. -MM

Transcript – Interview with Scott Ritter, March 23, 2022

Global Research: The last time you were on the show, about a month before Russia authorized a military incursion into Ukraine you mentioned that if it did happen it would not be trying to occupy the country. It would be in your words “lancing the boil.” An attempt to demilitarize and destroy Ukraine as a modern nation-state. It seems based on mainstream media coverage that it is in fact trying to occupy the country. Millions of Ukrainians are literally leaving the country as we speak, and this is not an operation that would end in days. It’s now approaching a month. Several Russian soldiers have been killed. They seem to be bogged down outside of cities. Certainly NATO is not yet going to engage them it’s true. Russia isn’t succeeding, no doubt due in part, it seems, to the resistance of the Ukrainian soldiers.

So let me ask you if you’ve changed your mind about what you said two months ago. I mean, did you err in your assessment of the Russian logistics in the situation?

Scott Ritter: NO! I’m a hundred percent correct! I mean, the fact of the matter is Russia isn’t occupying Ukraine!

Ukraine is a nation of forty one million people. Now, they say ten million of those are displaced, some internally some have fled. That still leaves thirty million people occupying expansive areas of terrain, including cities such as Kiev where you have over three million people. Russia came in with two hundred thousand troops. Military math just simply says no, you’re not occupying Ukraine with two hundred thousand troops!

So, let’s just stop that kind of nonsense right off the bat! This is politicized rhetoric, what people say, that Russia is trying to occu – because what you’ve done now is create a straw man that says therefore Russia has failed in its objectives!

Russia is succeeding wildly in its objectives! I don’t have to speculate. Russia has stated what its objectives are! There are two military objectives that will lead to one political objective.

The first military objective is de-Nazification. That is, the absolute destruction, liquidation, annihilation of the neo-Nazi and ultra-right wing nationalist military formations and the political parties that sustain them, along with any legislation that empowers them.

For instance, legislation passed in January of 2021 which made Stepan Bandera, a right wing Nazi supporting, Jew killing Ukrainian nationalist, elevated him to the status of national hero! And then went around – they passed additional legislation which named streets after him, named boulevards, named places, raised monuments and then also brought back into the mainstream people of his ilk. Nazis, people who had enlisted and served in Waffen SS units during World War II. People who had served in Einsatzgruppen that killed Jews during World War II. These people are now rehabilitated, and their names are put up in places of honour!

The Russians want to eliminate this. They want legislation passed in Ukraine which de-legitimizes Nazis instead of praising Nazis.

The Russians are doing very well on this front! They’re in the process of finishing off the last Nazi defenders of the city of Mariupol. This is where the Azov battalion, now a regiment, was headquartered. These are right-wing neo-Nazi extremists, many of whom have swastikas and other Nazi symbols tattooed on their bodies. This is where they tormented the Russian speaking population for the past eight years! They are now in the process of being killed, or captured by the Russians.

That is what de-Nazification looks like. Similar de-Nazification processes are taking place elsewhere in Ukraine anywhere where the Russian forces find a neo-Nazi national unit of Ukrainian army. So anybody who thinks that the Nazis are doing well against the Russians, think again!

The second is de-militarization! This means that Russia is going to dismantle the NATO army that had been built in Ukraine. A lot of people don’t realize that there were 260,000 active duty Ukrainian military personnel, most of whom have been trained by NATO in the past eight years to NATO standards. That means that Ukrainian military units were inter-operable with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. You could take a battalion, a NATO trained Ukrainian troops, and place them under NATO command and they would perform well.

This isn’t theory. This is reality. Ukrainian troops participated in numerous NATO-led operations around the world and in Europe. So, Russia has said that this – the existence of a NATO proxy-force is unacceptable, and that its goal is to de-militarize Ukraine.

Now, this could be done peacefully with Ukrainian soldiers staying in their barracks, while the Russians dismantled and removed from Ukraine all NATO provided equipment and oversaw the reorganization of Ukrainian military in a manner which made it no longer a de-facto proxy of NATO. Or if they wanted to resist, Russia would destroy them.

Now Russia came in a little soft handed early on. They didn’t bomb the barracks. They went out of their way to avoid unnecessary deaths among the Ukrainian troops. But the Ukrainians decided to fight!

Lets be clear here. This is a big army: 260,000 active duty, 310,000 reservists and security forces. Normally in the military if you want to launch an offensive operation, you want a three-to-one advantage. That is, for every single defender, you want three of your own troops. Russia went into Ukraine with a three to one disadvantage! Meaning for every single Russian, there were three Ukrainians. And yet, Russia is winning on the battlefield. They are advancing at a rate faster than the German army advanced during the Blitzkrieg of World War II! They are engaging the Ukrainian forces on large scale combat operations the likes of which have not been seen in Europe since World War II. And they are prevailing.

They are in the process of entrapping 60-100 thousand Ukrainian troops in Eastern Ukraine, one of the largest bedlam development cauldron type operations seen since World War II. They are doing the same around Kiev. And they are doing the same in the area of Odessa.

A lot of people will look at video-tapes that have been put out on YouTube and elsewhere showing destroyed Russian columns, dead Russian troops. This is war on a scale that people can’t imagine! It’s well beyond anything the United States and its allies undertook in Iraq and Afghanistan. When you have war on this level, there will be tactical setbacks.

Ukrainians who are extremely hard fighting, well-trained, well equipped groups are capable of limited combat success. And they are enjoying limited combat success on the battlefield. There is multiple occasions where they had defeated the Russians. Where they have inflicted serious casualties on the Russians. But from an operational and strategic stand-point, the Russians are winning and winning decisively. Ukrainians cannot sustain their defence. They lacked a logistical depth. They’re running out of gas. They’re running out of ammunition. They’re running out of food and water. Their troops are worn out, worn down, and are rapidly disintegrating as we speak. As we speak!

The Ukrainian defences in Eastern Ukraine are collapsing. They’re starting a panicked retreat westward. They’re going to be cut off by the Russians, and probably killed by the Russians if they don’t surrender to the Russians. So no, the Russians are doing quite well. People are…

GR: Did you say the Russians, I mean, put on your military and analyst glasses for a moment. Is Russia going to prevail? And how far away is the victory? IS it weeks away, or…

SR: Russia will prevail. And I believe that Russia is closer to victory than they were starting this conflict. Meaning that Ukrainian military is collapsing as we speak, and the ability for Ukraine to sustain large scale resistance is diminishing if not being eliminated.

This war’s over! It’s all over but the shouting! That’s all just a statement of fact.

GR: If you’re right about this, then what do you make of the role of Zelensky in this situation? Because he’s been speaking to governments around the world, and he’s a national hero and everything. But dies he think that he can still win this? The forces will, you know, “close the sky” and all the other things? Or is there something more going on in terms of seeing the writing on the wall as it were?

SR: Well, Zelensky knows what the outcome of this will be.

Think about it for a second. Every time he says, “if you just close the skies, if you just give us a no-fly-zone, we can win!” But what’s he really saying? That the Russians are winning the war! Okay? I mean there’s no other way of interpreting that!

GR: Yeah…

SR: He’s not saying, “hey, don’t worry about not closing the skies because we’re doing pretty well on the battlefield. We’re going to win this thing!” He’s saying that if you don’t close the skies, we have lost this war!

GR: Ahhh! Okay…

SR: And that’s exactly what’s happening. Because NATO is not going to close down the skies, and Ukraine is losing the war. He knows this. His generals know this. His troops know this. This is why at every single chance, everybody involved in the Ukrainian resistance is demanding a no-fly-zone because without this, they’re doomed, and they know it!

GR: What about the sanctions aspect of it. I mean, are they going to wear down the Russian public over time? Or will the boomerang effect of the sanctions wear down the US, Canada, and the EU first? How do you see that the sanctions aspect playing out?

SR: Well, let’s look at this strategically for a second. Joe Biden looked Vladimir Putin in the eye last June and threatened him with massive sanctions should he act on Ukraine. Sanctions like you’ve never seen before! Alright, now Putin as soon as he got done changing his pants and everything because I’m sure that just scared him to death. He had months to sit down with his inner circle and say, “how do we prepare for this?” Nothing the U.S. and its allies are doing has taken the Russians by surprise. NOTHING! They anticipated EVERYTHING! And they have a plan in response.

As for instance today, when the sanctions came out, remember Russia had 650 billion dollars in sovereign fund in reserves – foreign reserves, gold reserves – and half of that was dispersed in banks around the world. And people went, “why would you do that?” Because the West is going to freeze them, which the West did. And the answer is because Russia was setting the West up for a trap, which was sprung today.

2022 04 02 18 41
2022 04 02 18 41

Today, Vladimir Putin gave a speech in which he said the following: “Because you froze our assets illegally, you have defaulted on every obligation you have in regard to Russia. Therefore, Russia will not only never again accept foreign currency, you know, for payment for Russian services or goods, we are going to demand from this moment on that all nations that are on the non-friendly list that is everybody who sanctioned them must now pay in Russian Rubles for natural gas.

Okay Europe cannot survive! One of the big things that came out of this economic sanctions was that the United States had been promising Europe, “Don’t worry about Russia gas! We have a plan B! We will be able to bring together resources and make sure that you have the gas you need!”

Well, there is no plan B. There aren’t the resources available. There’s not enough gas. And Europe will shut down immediately.

Now, Russia hasn’t shut off the pipelines. Because Russia was laying a trap. Russia now has confirmed that Europe is addicted. Germany has admitted right now that if Russia turns off the gas pipelines, Germany won’t have any gas for next winter. It’s over! All she wrote! Their economy will collapse! The French economy will collapse! Every economy in Europe will collapse! And there will be a rebounding effect in Canada and the United States.

So now, Europe is in the difficult position of if they want to keep the gas going, that they must keep going in order to survive, they’ve got to pay in Russian Rubles. Take a look at what’s happened to the Russian Ruble just today! IT’s rebounding! Everbody said the Ruble is collapsing. No! It’s the dollar that’s collapsing right now! Because the Russians have laid a trap. They set the trap. And this is just the first of many! The Russians have many other traps out there that they have set, and they can initiate at a time of their choosing. So, the notion that the sanctions…

Look, the sanctions are hurting Russians right now. There’s no doubt about that. But the sanctions also liberated Putin for the first time since he took power to be able to divorce Russia from the Western economy. And in doing so, eliminate in totality any leverage the West had over Russian domestic political affairs. The West used to be able to threaten sanctions. And the Russians are saying, “gosh, maybe we don’t want to do that so we’ll…” The West no longer has – the West has sanctioned everything. It’s over!

Putin has said, “thank you very much! Thank you! You’ve done me a big favour! The first thing you’ve done by freezing all the assets is that you have disembowelled the oligarchs!” You know that corrupt class of Russian businessmen that came to life during Boris Yeltsin’s ten years as a president. That Putin inherited!

Putin was able to neuter them politically by telling them that if they get involved in domestic politics he will destroy them, and he did. Several of them have been forced to flee to London and elsewhere because Putin will put them in jail for life.

The others that remained were able to retain their riches and continue to get rich, but they were not allowed to be involved in politics. But their existence has always been a thorn in Putin’s side. He doesn’t like them. He doesn’t want them. And he hates the fact that he needed them.

But now that the West has gone in and seized all their assets, they’re bankrupt and broke! And guess what! Putin doesn’t want them now! He’s told them to get the heck out of Russia! HE has no use for them! Go live where you wanted to live over there! You’re no longer welcome here!

The other thing that’s happened is about 20 percent of the Russian population that was relatively apolitical, who tended to vote for the status quo, meaning vote for Putin would have turned on Putin had Putin initiated a divorce with the West. These are the Russian middle class whose economic well-being had become so intertwined with the West that there could be no thought of breaking with the West. If any move by Russia, by Putin, by anybody, to do so would have caused a backlash that any democracy, and Russia is a democracy, would have cost the incumbent the vote. Putin would have been voted out.

But now that the West has sanctioned Russia, it is not Putin that has made the divorce, it’s the West!

Putin is now applying shock therapy to these people, seeking to rapidly reinstate their middle class status, by pivoting eastward to China, to India, to elsewhere, to recapitalize the Russian economy. And now that he has made gas based upon the Ruble standard, those Rubles that these Russians had in the bank that last week were worth nothing, they’re worth twice as much today! And this time next week, they’ll double in value again! And the middle class is going to forget the West ever existed.

GR: Amazing analysis! Scott Ritter, it’s been a pleasure hearing your unique take on this situation. We thank you so much for your time!

SR: Thanks for having me!

Do you think that Scott is right?

The United States spending tax dollars

So true.

did it ever happen to you when 01

Don’t Rely on fate

It is up to YOU, no one else, to adjust to change, and make and forge a great wonderful life to live in. That means control of your thoughts, and control over your actions. Don’t rely on others. Don’t rely on fate. Don’t pretend that somehow space aliens are going to come down and prevent a nuclear war. (They sure as fuck didn’t stop any of the bioweapons attacks, and pretending that Bioweapon World War III isn’t in process; it’s a “pandemic”, is just a childhood fantasy.) Stop living childish dreams. Now is your time. NOW IS YOUR TIME. Make a difference today.

video 23MB

A fine example of good, solid Rufus behaviors.

You have to do kind, just and maningful things. Sure, it’s nice to watch heroes in action, but just smiling, buying a cup of coffee for a co-worker, inviditng a co-worker to your home for cards, or volunteering at an animal shelter are all fine Rufus actions. Make a difference. Now is that time. video 6MB

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Which kind of computer user are you?

I’ve been posting too many serious articles as of late. This has pretty much skewed the content. Just like it was skewed during the President Trump’s administration. This article and others, are my attempt at trying to reestablish balance in MM. Let’s put a big happy smile on our faces. And I hope this article helps facilitate that.

Now, that being said, let’s face the facts. Most people work in front of a computer, or use a cellphone. Or else how do you read MM, eh? And if you are one such person, then this article is for you…

Whether your desk is messy or tidy, your walls adorned with pop culture posters or neatly framed art pieces, you could see yourself in one of these delightfully stereotypical character illustrations.

The project was started by Serbian artist Dmitry Narozhny, who drew a new character each month for Devexperts’ company calendar, with designs ranging from the hipster to the hippy, goth to the geek.

So, can you spot someone resembling you among these geeky stereotypes?

More info: Behance (h/t: creativebloq)

Who are you?

The [1] artist / poet compared to the [2] wholly-organized creator.

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6 4d9

Or, perhaps, you are the [3] Travel dreamer / adventurer, or the [4] fastidious organized worker…

5 5d0
5 5d0

Consider the [5] cellphone as the primary medium of communication, or the [6] busy and disorganized MM. (Yup! That’s me.)

4s 51
4s 51

Not found yourself yet? How about the [7] hedonistic or the [8] comfortable gamer.

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3 a53

Then there’s the [9] urban hipster, or perhaps the [10] hard-core designer type.

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a2 54

What ever you may be, I am sure that you have found comfort in your life. What ever it might be.

I will tell you that I would like to hear what kind of person you all are, and what archetype that you fill. It’s my curiosity, only. I’m not going to collect the information and sell it to some data-collection agency. LOL.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…

ART

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MM Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Grasshopper Pie, Body Snatchers, Prank Gifts, Vaxx, Nanobots, crashing planes, CIA and their Nazi Operations, American collapse and treasure. Just another day at MM land.

Meanwhile, by every single fact we are able to observe, the decadent leaders of the West are acting as though Russia and China are Iraq and Libya. 

It appears that they genuinely believe they can use brute force and threats of brute force to come out on top in this conflict. 

(It’s also worth mentioning that the West, due to the ultra-low moral character of its leaders and the utter lack of any unifying ideal beyond anal sex, has lost the ability to cooperate cohesively as a single body in the way that the Chinese do.)

-UNZ

What do all these things have in common? They all are attributes of a period of time that is going though change. Some people might refer to it as an unravelling, while others might consider it the “second coming”. I think that it’s darn uncomfortable, and bothersome. It’s a period of change and it is nearing it’s peak.

Sheech!

I need a drink.

What? I’m already drinking. Oh, well. Color me silly.

This article has a bunch of videos. Most are small, but depending on your internet connection, they may or may not load. Just click on the link and watch them open up in another window. Most are really quick.

Strange stuff guys…

Strange and unusual things going on.

In China, a passenger aircraft took a highly unusual nose dive. Engines went full throttle, and the plane dove straight into the ground. It’s almost like the plane decided to commit suicide by ramming itself into the ground at full speed.

It’s not normal airplane behavior.

Don’t you know.

The unusual nature of this crash has everyone scratching their heads, and MM is no exception. Since this is Boeing plane that openly admits that the plane’s computer can override the pilot and fly itself…

So, and I do mean it … the software can take the input, decide the pilot is in error, and take over…

… so why have a pilot then?

Hum?

It is very concerning.

The opinions sent to me privately are running near 100% that the United States government / CIA are somehow involved in this fiasco. I would not be surprised if this is the case, but the truth is that I really do not know.

But…

You do know that we are going to flush out this issue.

Right here.

Right now.

MM style.

What I do know is that this entire event has shaken the Chinese people to the core. No one. And I do mean NO ONE wants to fly. Airline prices are now less than $5 USD to fly round-trip to Beijing from Zhuahi. It’s insane.

Just like the crash of the Hindenburg completely ended commercial travel by dirigible, it seems that this even will seriously impact commercial aviation inside of China. There will be far greater use of the High Speed Trains, and far less use of domestic air transport.

I predict.

The Hindenburg

From HERE.

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The Hindenburg bursts into flames.

In 1936, the future looked bright for rigid airships, the hydrogen-filled, lighter-than-air behemoths also known as dirigibles or zeppelins.

The Hindenburg, Nazi Germany’s pride and joy, spent one glorious season ferrying passengers across the Atlantic in its luxurious belly. The following year, the airship era screeched to a spectacular halt when the Hindenburg burst into flames while landing in Lakehurst, New Jersey. The disaster claimed the lives of 36 people and received an unprecedented amount of media coverage.

The Hindenburg was a 245-metre- (804-foot-) long airship of conventional zeppelin design that was launched at Friedrichshafen, Germany, in March 1936. It had a maximum speed of 135 km (84 miles) per hour and a cruising speed of 126 km (78 miles) per hour. Though it was designed to be filled with helium gas, the airship was filled with highly flammable hydrogen owing to export restrictions by the United States against Nazi Germany. In 1936 the Hindenburg inaugurated commercial air service across the North Atlantic by carrying 1,002 passengers on 10 scheduled round trips between Germany and the United States.

On May 6, 1937, while landing at Lakehurst, N.J., on the first of its scheduled 1937 trans-Atlantic crossings, the Hindenburg burst into flames and was completely destroyed. Thirty-six of the 97 persons aboard were killed.

The fire was officially attributed to a discharge of atmospheric electricity in the vicinity of a hydrogen gas leak from the airship, though it was speculated that the dirigible was the victim of an anti-Nazi act of sabotage.

The Hindenburg disaster marked the end of the use of rigid airships in commercial air transportation.

Forever.

Grasshopper Pie

A staple among southern desserts in the 1950s and 1960s, this creamy mint pie sports an Oreo crust, all of which makes it strange that it hasn’t remained as popular as it once was.
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Grasshopper Pie

This American retro dessert was inspired by the popular 1950’s chocolate-mint cocktail, and it was a favorite of Southern hostesses in the 1950s and 1960s. Originally, grasshopper pie always had a crust of either cookies or graham cracker crumbs, but today it is most often made with a base of Oreos, desiccated coconut, and butter, while the gelatine-set cream filling mainly consists of heavy cream flavored with crème de menthe—a sweet, mint-flavored liqueur—and melted marshmallows.

Grasshopper pie is usually so named because of its green color, though modern recipes may omit coloring the pie green. It was likely invented in the 1950s in the United States, and may have been inspired by a drink called the grasshopper developed at about the same time. It is a chiffon pie usually made with a cookie crust.

There is an earlier grasshopper pie type dating back to the beginning of the 20th century. Some versions of this pie from the Philippines used real grasshoppers. These insects are eaten in many cultures, and they can be used in various desserts, where they may be sugared and baked, providing a crunchy, and to some very appetizing, confection. The 1950s grasshopper pie bears little resemblance to versions produced that have insects as a primary ingredient.

Chiffon pies in the 1950s were often a combination of whipping cream, gelatin, sugar, eggs, and flavoring. In the case of the grasshopper pie, common flavoring used was alcohol in the form of crème de menthe, and sometimes other alcohols like crème de cacao. 

For teetotalers, mint flavoring could be achieved by using mint extracts instead, though these might still contain a tiny amount of alcohol. Green food coloring was a frequent addition to give the pie a light green color.

Most often the cookie crust is made with chocolate wafers, so that the pie has a chocolate and mint flavor. The crust is baked for few moments and then chilled. When the chiffon is prepared, usually over a double boiler, it is chilled and then spooned over the crust. The pie tends to be served cold and many love its refreshing mint taste.

There may be very large differences between classic recipes for grasshopper pie and modern ones. Since gelatin can be somewhat annoying to work with, many people now prepare the pie by melting marshmallows and blending them with milk or whipping cream, and sometimes cream cheese. Green food coloring can be optional, and when not used the pie could be called “mint patty pie” instead. Some people may prefer using a graham cracker crust, and other recipes advocate the use of specific cookies like Oreos®.

In the US, grasshopper pie tends to be most popular in the South, but other parts of the country enjoy it too. The pie rose in popularity especially up until the 1970s, but it is now served with less frequency. Many ice cream stores capitalized on the flavor of this pie by producing their own version with mint or mint chocolate chip ice cream and a cookie crust. Some ice cream stores are particularly known for their grasshopper pie variants.

-Delighted Cooking

The pie is traditionally served well chilled, topped with dollops of whipped cream, and decorated with dark chocolate shavings.

Grasshopper Pie

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Nice Robust Chinese girl

In American terms, we would refer to this “body shape
or “Body build” as “built like a Brick House”. It’s generally a nice compliment for a fine robust woman. In this case, a Chinese woman. video. 5MB

Lavrov’s History Lesson – Germany’s Downfall – Russian Forces Develop Routine

Great writeup on MoA. b is cooking at his best.

Th Saker has reproduced the transcript of a talk Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergej Lavrov has given three days ago. It is quite long with a Q&A at the end but it is a very good history lesson on how we got to the point that Russia felt it had to intervene in the Ukraine.

Here are just a few graphs of it. I recommend to read it all of it:

This meeting takes place against the backdrop of events now occurring in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has repeatedly spoken at length about the origins of this crisis. I would like to briefly reiterate: this is not about Ukraine. This is the end-result of a policy that the West has carried out since the early 1990s. It was clear back then that Russia was not going to be docile and that it was going to have a say in international matters. This is not because Russia wants to be a bully. Russia has its history, its tradition, its own understanding of the history of its peoples and a vision on how it can ensure its security and interests in this world.

This became clear in the late 1990s-early 2000s. The West has repeatedly attempted to stall the independent and autonomous development of Russia. This is rather unfortunate. From the start of President Vladimir Putin’s “rule” in the early 2000s, we were open to the idea of working with the West in various ways, even in a form similar to that of an alliance, as the President has said. Sadly, we were unable to do this. We repeatedly suggested that we should conclude treaties and base our security on equal rights, rejecting the idea of strengthening one’s security at the expense of another.

Neither were we able to promote economic cooperation. The European Union, which back then showed some signs of independent decision-making, has now devolved toward being completely dependent on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation and the US. The story of Nord Stream 2 was the highlight of this change. Even Germany, which defended its interests in the project to the very end, was persuaded that the “project was not in its interests.” Germany and its people were told what their interests were by people on the other side of the Atlantic. Many other international areas were blocked despite our commitment to close cooperation on an equal basis.

Germany’s traitorous role towards Russia, especially under chancellor Angela Merkel, is laid out throughout the piece. The current chancellor Olaf Scholz, never a smart man, capitulated to U.S. demands to sanction Russia and thereby committed Germany to economic suicide.

 

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2022 03 23 13 14

That spells death for Germany’s machine industry. It is said to see my country come down like this.

Hey Olaf, when the U.S. illegally invaded Iraq for absolutely no good reason how many sanctions did Germany apply to it?

Russia has at least cited sound and understandable, if not fully legal, reasons for its current acts. It was by the way you, Olaf, and your predecessor who have let it come to this. Why didn’t you write a letter to Putin that declared that Germany will veto NATO membership for the Ukraine. That might have solved the whole problem.

There is some talk that Russia has screwed up its campaign and some even hope that it might be losing the war. That’s nuts.

Back when I was a military officer we ran yearly large scale ‘free running’ maneuvers. Over nearly four weeks my tank company had to switch positions several times a day and march and ‘fight’ in between. The first week was cumbersome with lots of errors made by everyone. The second week was worse. Everyone was sleep deprived and folks screamed at each other. We had several accidents and twice parts of the company missed turns and got lost at night. During the third week things became gradually better and more routine. The drivers knew where to put their tanks without much command. The camouflaging done by the loaders and gunners was fast. The food that found its way to us was still hot and maintenance was done in no time. In the fourth week it was all pure fun.

The reason behind it was that people needed to learn by doing. Before the maneuvers everyone had been ‘fully trained’. But a few days on the training range do not give the experience one needs in the real world. Driving and ‘fighting’ through real villages and cities, real camouflaging against an ‘enemy’ airforce, real dueling in the open landscape day after day are different than training range time.

Russia’s forces are now in their routine mode. They will now grind down what is left of the Ukrainian forces.

According to the Pentagon the Russian airforce yesterday flew 300 sorties over Ukraine, mostly at night. That are 50% more per day than last week. That means 300 Ukrainian weapon factories, ammunition depots, convoys and fighting position get destroyed every day, day after day. How long will it take until there are no more targets?

Andrew Milburn, a former Marine colonel, is in the Ukraine from where he reports for Task and Purpose:

The Russians are already adapting, and by doing so are narrowing the Ukrainians’ tactical edge. The one-sided culling of Russian armored columns that characterized the opening days of the war, and kept YouTube subscribers around the world happy, are a thing of the past. The Russians now lead their formations with electronic attack, drones, lasers and good-old-fashioned reconnaissance by fire. They are using cruise missiles and saboteur teams to target logistics routes, manufacturing plants, and training bases in western Ukraine. Realizing that the Ukrainians lack thermal sights for their stinger missile launchers, the Russians have switched all air operations to after dark. It may be for this same reason that Russian cruise missile strikes in western and southern Ukraine have also been at nighttime.

The Russians have learned to play to their strengths. While Ukrainian soldiers mock their Russian counterparts, they are deeply respectful of Russian artillery, an asset that the Russians are using more frequently to compensate for their infantry’s deficiencies. Several snipers I spoke with recently agreed that the Russians’ indirect fire capability was the most concerning — a result of sheer reckless mass rather than technical skill. They told some hair-raising stories to illustrate their point, and one amusing one: Ukrainian soldiers defending Kyiv commute to the battle in their own vehicles. After a recent three-day insertion, the sniper teams returned to their extraction site to find their cars all flattened by Russian artillery – a contingency apparently not covered by their insurance plans.

Overconfidence may obscure for the Ukrainians one salient fact about this conflict: Time is not on their side.

Posted by b on March 22, 2022 at 17:55 UTC | Permalink

Hilarious Prank Gift Packages To Surprise Your Friends This Christmas

How will you wrap your Christmas presents this year? Will you buy some expensive wrapping paper and then silently weep in the corner when you realize you have no idea what you’re doing? Or just give up entirely and pay someone else to do it? Lucky for you, one company out there is aiming to make gift wrapping a little more fun.

Pranko-O is a Minneapolis-based company that creates hilarious prank gifts, called Prank Packs. A fart filter or an earwax candle might sound insane at first but don’t worry – that’s where the ‘prank’ part of Prank Pack comes in. The products, sadly, don’t exist and are just gag boxes. But imagine your partner’s reaction when they were hoping to get a Pandora necklace for Christmas but receive a cheese printer instead – priceless!

Here’s a few for some inspiration. This is a Cheese printer. Surprise your friends!

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Cheese Printer. You’ll be amazed how you were ever able to live without one!

Here’s another. It’s a “must” for every pet owner.

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It’s a “must” for every pet owner.

And yet another. Fun for kids of all ages!

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Fun for kids of all ages four and older.

Confirmed: Nazis are the proxy army of the US imperialists against Russia in Ukraine

From HERE.

Couldn’t be said more clearly.

The former US secretary of defense and CIA director, Leon Panetta, admitted openly that

We are engaged in a conflict here. It's a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not ...”.

Referring to the Ukrainian forces, the US imperialist warhawk claimed that

"These are good fighters, they are small-unit operations, they are working well ...".

The description “small-unit operations” fits to proxy forces – mercenaries, rather than an organized national army.

As we mentioned in our previous article, for eight years, the NATO criminals and the “free” and “democratic” West, were provoking Russia by arming and training the far-right and neo-nazi militia groups who also infiltrated in the Ukrainian army and operate in East Ukraine against Russian populations. Which is something similar with what happened in the long-suffering Syria by the US proxy war against Assad. Only there, the US imperialists armed and trained some so-called “moderate rebels”, with most of the arms ending in the hands of ISIS islamofascists who spread chaos and destruction.
Panetta’s statements are essentially an official admission by the US side that this is the case.
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This also explains why the Russians are so obsessed with Mariupol, which appears that it suffered most from the war in Ukraine so far. It seems that they won’t retreat from their demand to Ukraine to surrender the besieged city. Not only because of its critical strategic importance, but mostly because it’s the base of the Azov Battalion, which is essentially the major US proxy Nazi force in the Ukrainian soil.
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Indeed: [emphasis added]
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In March 2015 Interior Minister Arsen Avakov announced that the Azov Regiment would be among the first units to be trained by United States Army troops in their Operation Fearless Guardian training mission. 

US training however was withdrawn on 12 June 2015, as the US House of Representatives passed an amendment blocking any aid (including arms and training) to the battalion due to its neo-Nazi background. 

However, the amendment was later removed in November 2015, with The Nation reporting that the "House Defense Appropriations Committee came under pressure from the Pentagon to remove the Conyers-Yoho amendment from the text of the bill."

Azov published a media release on its website on 20 November 2017 stating that it had met with a foreign delegation of officers from the United States Armed Forces and Canadian Armed Forces on 16 November. 

Writing for Jacobin, Branko Marcetic says that members of Azov have been pictured meeting with U.S. military and NATO officials.
 .
This is a particularly revealing information because it proves beyond doubt that the US imperialist apparatus was very well aware of the nazi nature of the Azov Battalion. And did everything to overcome any political actions that were aiming to block any aid to its members.
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Recall that new information – coming from the elite section of the US think tank apparatus – proved that the US imperialists wanted to drag Russia into a war with Ukraine since at least 2019.
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Everything we wrote back in 2014 turns out to be right:
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What was left to do, for the moment, is to challenge Putin in order to drag Russia in an endless attrition war in East Ukraine and this explains to a degree Putin's hesitation to act like he did in Crimea. Against Russian army, of course, the West will not risk to put an organized military force, but only teams of mercenaries of private armies, as already did. It is certain, however, that, despite that the global economic oligarchy has lost valuable time because of its wrong moves, it will not give up its plans for Russia easily ...
Mapping proxy wars of the last decades around the globe we also wrote back in 2015 that the Ukraine conflict is a proxy war against Russia by the West, next to the Russian borders. Behind the color revolutions, one can always find US financed organizations. The Western allies would not dare to face directly the Russian army. In the Ukraine conflict one could find private armies of mercenaries. The most stupid action by the Western puppets was to support neo-nazis against the local Russian populations. This was something that exposed their real intention, which is to encircle Russia through puppet regimes who would permit the Western military presence in their territories.
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By aiding the nazis in Ukraine, the US and the West generally, lost their last remnants of their alleged “superiority” on matters related with democracy, human rights, or, international law. West’s moral bankruptcy and cultural decline are now irreversible and mark the beginning of the end of its global domination.
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CIA use Nazi forces

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A fine Chinese woman in red

In China, red is considered a lucky and happy color. I like this woman in this outfit. She is pleasing to the eye and I am sure that she would be fun to be with. video 2MB

Strange coincidences

I offer up this following graph. It shows an association between belief in the mainstream media (the United States government narrative) and number of mRNA injections.

The more mRNA injections you have, the more that you believe whatever the MSM (Main Stream Media) says.

graph1
Relationship between the official government narrative and mRNA injections.

Look over the results.

It is errie.

It could be a coincidence. It might be. But, you know, there are secrets, and secrets, and the United States is run by very selfish, sick, evil people. Something is up. But what?

What is going on?

I don’t know…

It reminds me of the old 1950s movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Imagine that you and everyone else are normal. You go to work, and you play. You go drive your car, and listen to the radio.

There’s a pandemic. Everyone must get these “special” injections.

Not a vaccine, mind you. But something “new” and “special”. And so you plan on getting one, but your entire community beats you to it. Everyone is injected with the “special” formulation but you, and so when you finally go into town to get your injection, you notice something different.

Everything is the same.

Yet everything is different.

You have a difficult time trying to describe what is do different. They all look the same. They act the same. They all have absolute perfect memories. But something is missing…

…you just cannot pin it down; you just cannot put your finger on it…

Well…

Everyone is mad. They are angry. When you bring up certain subject, you know that the person you are talking to will fly into a rage. There are simply things that you just cannot talk about.

  • Face masks.
  • Racial issues.
  • Russia
  • China.
  • Vacinations.

You think “everyone is so polarized”. But it’s strange. People were never so polarized. Not before. Now they are just really upset and really on a “hair trigger”.

The movie

In 1956 the movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” came out.

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Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

The narrative’s premise is most interesting.

A peaceful town is imperceptibly taken over by an alien force: Giant plant pods, products of atomic mutation, turn themselves into replicas of people. The pods turn human beings into faceless, emotionless automatons, incapable of any feeling, be it anger or love.

Once again, the image used is that of an initially normal and ordinary town, suddenly thrown out of balance.

“At first glance, everything looked the same,” the narrator says, “It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.” The rest of the film explores that “something.”

Called back to Santa Mira from a medical conference, Doctor Miles Bonnel (Kevin McCarthy) is greeted at the train station by his nervous nurse, Sally. Looking through his clinic’s window, everything “looks” the same:

Wally Everhard is talking someone into buying insurance, Bill Bittner is taking his secretary to launch. Yet something strange is going on. In the back of his mind, Miles senses a warning bell: “Sick people who couldn’t wait to see me, suddenly were perfectly all right.”

A general practitioner, Miles believes that, “the trouble is inside you!” thus recommending that she sees a psychiatrist.

The first “solution” to the problem is psychiatric help, with the film acknowledging the increasing popularity of psychiatry in the 1950s.

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“At first glance, everything looked the same,” the narrator says, “It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.”

Miles rationalizes his advice to Wilma by saying, “you don’t have to be losing your mind to need psychiatric help.” But Wilma is firm: “It’s a waste of time, there’s nothing wrong with me.”

Like many other films of the decade, Invasion deals with three issues: [1] the definition of normal and abnormal behavior; [2] the legitimate authority to label behaviors as abnormal or deviant; and [3] the negative effects of conformity, apathy, and complacency.

The film suggests that the town’s experts and professionals are not to be trusted. The police force, an agency entrusted with the legitimate use of physical force, can’t solve the problem. In fact, when Jack’s clone is found, they refuse to call the police, because cops tend to rely too much on logic and dry laws.

Miles represents the center of the moral center.

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“At first glance, everything looked the same,” the narrator says, “It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.”

He is a professional, but a general practitioner, not a specialist, thus able to see the problem overall, in its entirety.

Even so, Miles proves that his common sense and critical faculties as a responsible individual are more important than his narrow professional skills. Thus, when Jack first describes the problem he says: “Would you be able to forget that you’re a doctor for a while” .

For the duration of the film, Miles “forgets” his occupation.

The movie advocates independent judgment, common sense, intuition, and self-reliance, and shows suspicious toward anyone in a position of power or professional expertise.

Invasion, like Capra’s movies of the Depression era, singles out the role of an exceptional individual, a charismatic leader, in preventing society from dehumanization, from gradual transformation into an aggregate of unfeeling robots.

Sleep is the metaphor used to convey mass complacency and conformity.

The pods take over human beings when they are not alert, when they are (literally or figuratively) asleep, thus passive.

Escaping from town, Miles gives Becky and himself a large dose of pills to stay awake. “We can’t close our eyes all night,” he tells her, because “we may wake up changed.” “Sooner or later,”

Kauffman tells Miles, “You’ll have to go to sleep,” i.e. you’ll have to conform and join the majority.

But Kauffman also reassures him that as soon as he falls asleep, the pods will “absorb your minds, your memories, and you’re reborn into an untroubled world.”

The new world will be without love, ambition, grief, or any emotions, “Life will be much simpler and better.”

invasion of the body snatchers 1956
invasion of the body snatchers 1956

Indeed, during their escape, chased by every member in town, Becky can’t stay awake any longer and she falls asleep. “I went to sleep and it happened,” says Becky. “A moment of sleep,” narrates Miles, and “their bodies were now hosts harboring alien forms of life.”

Santa Mira is a typical small town; there is nothing special or distinctive about I; what happened in Santa Mira couldand would–happen in other towns. In most sci-fi films, the disaster first occurs on a local level before spreads all over the country.

The catastrophe begins in a small town, then moves to bigger regional centers, and finally inflicts the entire nation.

Attempting to get assistance, Miles first calls the F.B.I. in Los Angeles, but there is no answer. His call to the governor in Sacramento also fails; the circuits are busy in both places.

Invasion differs from other sci-fi features because there is no immediate confirmation of the hero’s report of the “strange” phenomenon by other witnesses; the conflict is between one individual and the entire community.

Invasion shows that the authorities, both scientific and political, are neither trustworthy nor competent.

Other films went out of their way to reassured audiences that they were “in good hands,” that politicians (or the military) and scientists would come to the rescue when needed. In contrast, Invasion’s ending is so tentative and abrupt that it provides no such reaffirmation, instead urging its viewers to be always alert.

kevin mccarthy2
“At first glance, everything looked the same,” the narrator says, “It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.”

Puckering fish look

For some reason, the Chinese women like to make these puckering fish expressions, as they view them as being very cute. I don’t know about that. Really. I just like a nice big smile, myself. video. 3MB

Sanctions

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Western production depends on China no less, than on Russia. And once again, on the tip of my tongue there is a Russian proverb with a deep meaning – what is good for a Russian is death for a German.
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And what will happen to the West, when Russia imposes her own retaliatory sanctions?
Consider this article…
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Immediately (in several European capitals), they realized that those sanctions, (introduced by them), would return to them like a boomerang and more than once

The words of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz about the reverse effect of sanctions against Russia can be called a sensation. It seems that the West is beginning to see clearly and see what damage they inflict on the economies of their countries with their own sanctions.

After the successes of the first days on the sanctions fronts, when Western countries managed to bring down the Russian stock market and the ruble exchange rate, a process of sobering up begins in European capitals and there is an acute desire to return the situation back.

By the way, the fall of the market and the collapse of the ruble did not become catastrophic for Russia . There was no default – Russia regularly pays its bills, and the ruble is slowly, but still winning back its positions.

A funny situation can happen with the stock market. Against the backdrop of a fall in the price of shares of Russian companies, Western investors began to actively sell them for next to nothing. Now the most interesting question is:

Who bought them?

Some European experts suggest that Russian business and the Russian government took advantage of the situation and bought almost everything for next to nothing. In other words, Russian companies have become Russian again. Forever at the bottom, the shares will not be and sooner or later they will go up, but they will no longer bring dividends to Western investors. And they will no longer have levers of influence on the Russian economy.

Chancellor Scholz , of course, did not talk about these deep processes. He spoke about the need to prepare and impose sanctions very carefully. The reverse effect of them should be surmountable for Western economies. But so far everything is working out exactly the opposite.

The imposed sanctions blew up the market and the prices of absolutely everything flew up.

Inflation all over Europe

Everyone knows the situation with gas – at some point it rose in price to a completely unthinkable 3,800 dollars. Now, thanks to the efforts of Gazprom, it has been brought down to an acceptable $1,050.

  • Oil prices rose, followed by gasoline and all fuel in general.
  • Steel and cast iron, building materials. Nickel. Aluminum. Products of the petrochemical industry and fertilizers.
  • Wheat and all food products.

The list can be continued, but this is quite enough to understand what kind of “return line” has flown through the European economy.

French President Macron is already talking about the introduction of food checks in the country for the poorest. In the Czech Republic, wheat and flour more than doubled in price.

In Italy and Spain, pasta and vegetable oil disappeared from the shelves, and in Lithuania, salt and soda.

And all this at a record level of inflation. In some European countries it has already exceeded 10%.

The West was sure that by depriving Russia of income from the export of energy resources and raw materials, they would bring it to her knees, but it turned out that Russia’s participation in almost any area is so significant that it immediately affects the economies of Europe and the United States.

Britain

Britain banned the import of products, incl. food, from Russia. In addition to raising prices for communal and gasoline, the British can part with their national dish – fish and chips, in other words – potatoes with fish.

For British Prime Minister Johnson, it came as an unpleasant surprise that most of the fish eaten in Britain is Russian. Iceland and Norway will not be able to provide even half of the amount that Russia was selling.

Britain urgently needs to find new routes for the supply of fish, otherwise unrest cannot be avoided and this is not a joke. For the British , fish and chips is more than food, it is part of the culture, it is their genetic code.

That is why such a heated debate broke out in the European Union today on the issue of an embargo on the import of Russian oil. Everyone is worried about the consequences of this step. Will this be another nail in the coffin of the European economy?

Russia’s retaliatory measures

But even more Europeans should worry about Russia’s retaliatory measures. Nothing is known about them yet, and this is scary. Retaliatory sanctions can set the European economy back several decades, and the EU is very unwilling to do so.

Reverse Sanctions

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Cute Chinese girl

I really like the Chinese girls. They are sweet, cute and they take care of themselves. Here’s a nice cute girl. video 4MB

Beef Stroganoff

Let’s talk about food.

Good. Healthy. Delicious. Food.

The story goes that this beef, noodles, and cream sauce dish exploded in America after U.S. servicemen, stationed in the dish’s homeland of Russia, brought it home after World War II.
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Beef Stroganoff.

Meat. MEAT. I love it, I really do.

My recent visits to my Vegetarian Restaurant, aside, I love and yearn for meat. Good tasty meat. Beef. Mutton. Pork. Chicken. Turkey. Meat!

I grew up in the heart of the United States. Pittsburgh. The land of steel, coal. beer and perogies. There, the basic food groups consisted of potatoes, cream of [insert mushroom, chicken, or celery here] soup, butter (or Land-O-Lakes margarine), tall cold glasses of milk with every meal and…meat.

I had a recent craving for beef stroganoff.

Although I ate this dish frequently as a child, I had yet to make it myself. The beef stroganoff of my youth was a retro reflection of my Polish-American-Irish upbringing – a nostalgic combination of ground beef, cream of mushroom soup, condensed beef broth, and low-fat sour cream.

Although I (of course) I could have gone out and had my fill of some delicious steak, turtle or mutton, I wasn’t really feeling that desire. I wanted to create something myself. I wanted a taste from my childhood, and you just aren’t goign to get that inside of China. No matter how hard you try.

I wanted comfort food, and I figured that beef stroganoff would foot the bill.

This is comfort food at its finest.

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Get your beef in some sputtering, aromatic, delicious SALTED butter. Work quickly – you’re just browning and the thinness of the meat doesn’t require much time in the pan. Set beef aside. Sauté your onions and garlic in the same pan.

After making a few (regional) tweaks to the Simply Recipes version, I came up with a winner. Gather up some easy basics: butter, beef, onions, garlic, mushrooms, sour cream (be sure to read my footnote on the sour cream!). If you have tarragon, nutmeg, and Worcestershire sauce on hand, even better.

Beef Stroganoff

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Meanwhile in America

2022 03 24 19 44
2022 03 24 19 44

Draft is a prelude for an invasion force

Why would the United States decide to institute a draft? Well, it seems that there are decisions being made and systems put in place right now. If you are an American under 35 years of age, you should be concerned.

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Screenshot.

US Draft

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Here’s what I have been eating

Some home movies. Actually not in my home, in various eating establishments in China. Oh, China is supposed to be in famine right now! OMG. My bad. Sorry to break the narrative.

Video 1 – Dongbei salad. 43MB

Video 2 – Sichuan beef and mushrooms. 63MB

Video 3 – Gung Pao Ji Deng 82MB

Some intel to share…

A while back I recieved some intel from one of my spook-ish sources. Good or bad, right or wrong, I just filed it away for “a rainy day” (It’s a play on an American idiom. It means, it’s valuable and interesting, but you don’t need it now. You save it for later.)

It’s how I run my life.

Good or bad, right or wrong. I just take all input, and consider it. File it, and move forward. Always move forward. You just cannot drop everything and take action on some other’s time-tables. That would be like running around, from tree to tree, pissing indiscriminately.

So I took the information. Filed it both securely in my email folders, and on my hard disk. And forgot about it.

It does not mean that I agree or disagree with it. It just means that there is nothing that I can do with the information at the time that I recieved it. So I put it aside. And, instead, work on things that I can do something about.

Month pass by.

After seeing that graph that connects mRNA with thoughts and political agreement with the United States government, it triggered my memory. There was something about this dialog that really seemed to connect to the events that I was witnessing.

The (archived) intel that I was informed on was directly related to this association.

The message suggested that there were vault 7 algorithms and frequencies that worked together in association with various ingredients in the <redacted> portion of the mRNA injection “stew”.

mRNA nanobots + Vault 7 + MSM “news” = Easily manipulated serf / slave

These associations would then “hand shake” with embedded subsonic frequences transmitted along “news” messages, of all sorts. Thus making the injected person, who is exposed to the “news” messages believe them without any critical thought.

Sounds far-fetched.

Perhaps…

I filed it away, as it was something worthy of further study.

And then I saw the graph, and I sought to revisit my communication on this subject. So, like the good and investigative fellow I am, I went to dig it out of my archives.

And it’s gone.

I mean, as in GONE.

The darnest thing!

All records gone. All archives gone. All backups gone. It’s a full spectrum erase. Oh, the folder is there. But it’s empty. Even the screen shots that I took and put in a special folder… it’s gone as well.

OIP C.PUIfTNrpU5w DYrL nP9tgHaCl
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What the fuck?

It could be a slide. I could be forgetting things. It could be an accident. I don’t know…

… what a coincidence.

It’s a nagging pain in the ass, that’s what.

Some more fun gag gift boxes…

I found this one funny. Perfect for getting your children to eat. Child refuses to eat? Just plop them down and watch them eat their hearts out. Children cry for more!

Oh, and Daddy won’t mind…

2022 03 23 11 32
Perfect for getting your children to eat. Child refuses to eat? Just plop them down and watch them eat their hearts out. Children cry for more!

This one is unique. Everyone wants their home to fill with the aroma of sizzling bacon. Now it can be an everyday affair.

“Breakfast fresh scent”.

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Everyone wants their home to fill with the aroma of sizzling bacon. Now it can be an everyday affair.

Who thinks up these things? “Millions of satisfied customers.”

Do you want to shake up your company? Hold a meeting where you announce that the company is going to save money by stop buying toilet paper. Instead, they will install these rotowipe devices in all the stalls. Make the announcment “dead pan” and watch the reactions.

2022 03 23 11 35
“Millions of satisfied customers.”

A Huge Cleavage

A huge cleavage is developing between the East and West in tandem with the Ukraine ops. The US State Dept. just sanctioned some Chinese officials due to "human rights". China didn't take well to it at all. Meanwhile, India is not going along with the Western sanctions on Russia and got threatened with sanctions earlier but the US has since backed off that threat.

Victoria Nuland is in India today trying again to coerce India into getting on board the sanctions train. I dont't think it will work.

Also, it seems that China and India are making renewed efforts to bury the hatchet regarding tbeir border duspute. It really seems like a great re-alignment happening, especially taking into account all the other countries not taking part in the anti-Russia sanctions.

Russsia essentially said "fuck it" in deciding to launch into Ukraine. If the West keeps it up, China will arrive at the same point.

Interesting times.

-Woogs

Speaking of “huge cleavage”; here’s a nice Chinese girl with an impressive chest… video 1MB

Russian Foreign Minister

Here’s the entire question being used against Lavrov:

"Why was the military operation launched now and not eight years ago? At that time, a pro-Russian “anti-Maidan” movement emerged in Odessa and Kharkov, which installed the Russian flag on top of the Kharkov regional administration without firing a shot. The city supported Russia. Now these people are hiding from shelling."

I find it impossible to verify the veracity of the question. I know in Odessa the police didn’t do anything to stop the Nazis from their killing and burning. I imagine a similar performance happened in Kharkov. Russia acted to save its strategic asset, Crimea, but clearly wasn’t prepared to intervene further.

Lavrov’s initial sentence is very honest:

"A lot of factors influence developments at each specific historical moment."

I’ve read both the English and Russian transcripts, and what I see by reading between the lines is commiseration by Lavrov with the questioner, not any attempt to mislead. Lavrov says They took advantage of our nature:

"We must have trusted them because of some naivety and kindness of heart, which is something Russians are known for.

"I have no doubt that lessons will be learned."

And if you’ve watched Lavrov while speaking his recent denunciations of the West, that Russia will never again put its trust in any part of the West, you’ll see the resolve that Russia will not get fooled again as it’s now taking everything into its own hands.

IMO, some part of all Russians, especially Putin, Lavrov, Shoigu, and other leaders, was burned and died with those in Odessa and in Donbass. They pled and pled and pled some more with the Western pukes to obey the fucking law put forth in UNSCR 2022–the Minsk Agreements.

But inaction and outright refusal followed by the breaking of it all by the fucking West. And now all the rest that was uncovered with the military operation!!

I’ll bet the fucking national debt that Putin, Lavrov, et al wish they would’ve done more in 2014 but felt they couldn’t.

The Syria intervention helped to provide some solace. But it’s very clear to Russia now that the Outlaw US Empire is the #1 predator state on the planet and must be neutralized somehow without resorting to nuclear weapons.

Yes, that’s how fucking serious this is.

Lavrov knows that gravity of the situation. It’s fucking existential!

And it’s that fact the West badly wants to cover up. And just as importantly, it’s that fact that we must try to expose and broadcast.

karlof1

Steak au Poivre

2022 03 23 18 53
Steak au Poivre

I’m probably going to catch some flac for this, but for me – it isn’t off the BBQ. No, no, no. MY perfect steak is done on a stove top (gasp!). Classically considered a French bistro dish, Steak au Poivre is my perfect way to indulge.  If you’re a meat lover, this post is for you.

2022 03 23 18 54
Simple and clean.

I think a part of what appeals to me so much about this recipe is its simplicity. The steak is seasoned with two ingredients: salt and peppercorns. It might sound crazy to coat two steaks with 2 whole tablespoons of peppercorns, but when they aren’t finely ground the spice is much more subtle. Dressing the meat this way also lets it shine through. This is beef at its best.

2022 03 23 18 55
What appeals to me so much about this recipe is its simplicity.

Using a cast iron pan is my second secret. These pans retain heat well and are practically non-stick. Cooking the steaks on high heat, turning ~once per minute creates an even, golden crust with no burning. Depending on the thickness of your steak, you’re looking for a total of 3-4 minutes per side for rare.

If there is a side of fat on your steak, render it down for a couple minutes by propping the steak up.

In the final minutes, we add some butter for extra flavour and to start providing the base for a delicious Cognac pan sauce. When the steaks are cooked to your liking, remove to a cutting board and tent with foil. You’ll be left with something closely resembling this:

2022 03 23 18 57
In the final minutes…

Up last is to create a rich cognac pan sauce that sends this over the top. In your pan, we will add shallot, (more butter), Cognac, cream, thyme and parsley. After cooking and reducing the sauce, we pour it over the sliced steak. When I have this for dinner, steak is all I need. There is something ridiculous & awesome about eating just steak for dinner, I hope you try it!

2022 03 23 18 58
Time to EAT!

Meanwhile in China

It’s a thing. Partly due to Coronavirus. Partly due to the plans for Space, and bases on the Moon and Mars. Cute. Odd. video 23MB

Digging up the e-mail

I was able to retrieve the email concerning the connection between mRNA “vaxx” and the United States government.

Now, I do not endorse the content of this e-mail. I just provide it in it’s raw form for others to  muse over. Please take it as it is. It is raw information that could be from anyone.

Anyone at all.

I am using anonymous email because this is above top secret information. 

You are correct that the vaccines will kill an estimated 70% of the US population due to prion disease.  This is being done to avoid world problems and reconstruct world society as described by the World Economic Forum (ocean acidification, food shortages, food poisoning and job replacement by artificial intelligence).

However, what is not currently known is that the chemtrails contain a mixture of advanced nanobots along with complexed radioactive materials (germanium, indium, etc) and a shielding material that releases hard to detect bursts of radioactivity (2 sec) on the back of the spine, femoral heads, pelvis, ribs and under the chin when exposed to nanorouter EMF.  

The nanorouters are powered by electric fields and local utility companies have conspired to alter their current to emit very high EMF and magnetic fields periodically to kill and injure through direct exposure to this radiation plus the activated chemtrail dust.  

The US government has contracted stalking activities to private companies such as Replica.ai (Lucas in San francisco) and has artificial intelligence monitoring large numbers of people through Patriot Act hacked cell phone sim cards, cameras, hacked routers and PCs.  

However, they have the ability to do additional spying due to the nanobot infestation.  Nanobots around the occipital lobe allow them to steal passwords and watch vision.  They also can do voice to skull transmission of voices, start terrifying abnormal dream sequences when initiating sleep, blank memories and control people through trance to commit suicide etc.  Low intelligence and highly opinionated people are extremely susceptible and literally zone out and lose their memory while they are being manipulated.

The nanobots also have a slew of programmed harassments that can be extremely disabling-hyperurination due to stimulated hormone secretion, waking people up from sleep due to external nanobots, depression, anxiety stimulation, simulated Mernier's disease where the room shakes up and down. If they are active you'll get tinnitus.  All of the symptoms stop once you are out of Wifi range.

The nanobots are magnetized and they are being used to shake housing structures apart.  All over the US buildings are having roof collapses due to smartmeter arson from power companies plus shaking by hidden resonance frequency generators which is known as the world hum.  The nanobot programs reduce the intensity of the humming so it sounds like typical noise but it is not.  The building shaking can be measured on a linear accelerometer (Physics Accelerator Toolbox app).

The chemtrail dust is how they plan to kill uncooperative unvaccinated people.  Planed flyovers seed beds and clothing with the dust and then it is activated and the person is slowly irradiated.  Due to the short half-life of the materials it is very hard to detect however a small EMF/magnetic field detector can be used to scan the areas.  As this is dust, vaccuuming and spongebathing it off is very effective before or during activation.

Resistors are also being targeted using the vircator microwave satellite targeting program as described at targetedjustice.com. It is very hard to shield requiring 12 layers of aluminum foil at the highest setting.  Pointing an emf detector in the area of strongest magnetic field will show you where the satellites are. Active vircators will show high EMF up to 106 V/m.

The buffered radioactive nanobot dust is being sprayed all over the world and is being used along with NSA hacked servers to control political leaders without their knowledge.  

This most likely is why Vladimir Putin has now invaded Ukraine. An invasion of Ukraine will most likely lead to an EMP strike that will damage the European illuminati.  Agents I have spoke with claim that the USA is currently controlled by the US branch of the New World Order/Illuminati and they seek to damage the European branch with the EMP attack.

The nanobots are also converting prions all over the world due to NSA hacking.

You are a targeted individual and can expect all of these attacks.  You need to take appropriate precautions to shield your equipment from hacking as well as from nanobot visual access (band of 10 layers of foil around the occiput with a strap works well.  The irradiation can cause bone marrow edema syndrome, severe abdominal pain, skin burning and back pain.

We are in a bit of a tricky situation on this one.  It probably is too late to stop the prion disease and we do need to have the European illuminati, religion and black antisocial behavior weakened however I have concerns about the excessive targeting as anyone who knows about their plans is having hits put out on them (including me) and the competency of the people running this thing.  Take appropriate precautions.

Covering beds with a plastic sheet until used to shield from the dust and shielding from vircator also is important.

Given the scope of this thing I doubt there is anything anyone can do.  The US Federal government is completely taken over, people are mind controlled and the population is being attacked with weapons we have never seen before.  Also, if we don't allow it to happen we suffer all the world problems that the WEF describes.  If we do then we will most likely be slaves to elite billionaires and forced to live in a controlled society.

<redacted>

Indeed it is far-out stuff.

It’s well beyond my understanding.

But…

It is the ONLY content that I have / possess that answers the strange graphic association posted above. Take it, and use it as you see fit. Personally, it’s way, way above my head. And I have no ideas; no clue how accurate or valid it actually is.

When I asked a person whom I greatly respect on the content of this, the response was thoughtful…

Whoever sent you that - just please PLEASE listen to the content of what the implications are for China - Xi is a WEF placement. This is NOT Unknown.  It’s literally on the WEF website. He pissed off the WEF and now he is going to be removed. China has been under attack since I have been warning you. It has. A company called Blackrock - in THIS fucking world line is the muscle of the WEF.

Want to know why we did Afghanistan so quickly? BLACKROCK provided allll of the security force in Afghanistan since 2017. We drew down troops but they never left. They changed uniforms and got paid a TON of cash. Look it up. So Blackrock decides to pull alllll of the security forces outside Kabul that it paid - as a message. 

Think about that - about 85% of security force outside of Kabul - gone. Like that. And all that kept the Taliban from overrunning the country was a small force. So - Biden left rather than get slaughtered. 

But to my point - The WEF has a stake in a securities trading firm called Blackrock that hired mercenaries - tens of thousands of combat veterans that you see fighting in Ukraine.

Look it up. 

I cannot speak about the specifics of ANY of that - at all - but I’m telling you - you hit paydirt.

And we ARE pulling out when the fight gets bloody. 

Blackrock is on Chinas doorstep. And I am telling you - nothing can prevent what they are doing. THAT I know from actual friend that is IN Blackrock. As a mercenary. 

This all is online. If you can’t access it through China ask someone to look it up. Also look up “Blackrock woke”. It’s fun. 

And if that is AI that created that email - fucking bravo. THAT is a programmer I want to hang out with.

And feel free to post my shit - just please keep the name out of it. But I know some of your people that emailed me and I gave them my thoughts. Ask how accurate so far. 

Again - I wish you all peace and happiness there - because our lights are going out soon.

Much love - <redacted>

Have you ever gotten the idea that you are somehow way over your head? Yeah. I get that all the time. It’s not that I believe everything. I listen. I learn. I drink. I move forward, and I adapt.

Everyone needs to learn, and adapt as situations permit.

Each and everytime I chat with the Domain Commander, on comm, it’s just a window into how much I really don’t know. WHile I know much, there is still so much more to learn.

Sometimes I just feel like I am a little ball in one of those old pin-ball machines. I’m just being batted around like crazy.

Take what is provided and move forward.

Always move forward.

And while you are at it; eat well.

video 3MB

Crab Rangoon

Although this fried crab dumpling fits in among postwar tiki culture and is often purported to be of southeast Asian provenance, it was very likely invented in America.

OIP C.dKAUGkBEnA7cVfxeWd1PmAHaLH
Crab Rangoon

It’s easy to make. Delicious to eat, and fun to try.

Crab Rangoon

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The United States Blinked

The United States is reposturing itself. This is occuring soon after the warning from China on a package of 2nd stage sanctions regarding Russia and Taiwan.
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Did you know that China bought none of the extra $200 billion of US exports in Trump’s trade deal. Imagine that.
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The US-China trade: Washington’s review of US$300 billion in tariffs cannot be ‘half-hearted’. You either do it and suffer the consequences or abandon it completely.
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“But what about the costs?” Ah. The Total Cost of U.S. Tariffs.
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From a neocon publication. The longer Trump’s China tariffs are in place, the greater the harm to America.
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Be the Rufus

If everyone did small, little things the world would be so much nicer, and so much better. video 6MB

Downfall of the USD

From one of my feeds…

The best way to accelerate the downfall of the empire is to attack its Dollar Hegemony (not the same as attacking America). 

I said that in my Quora posts "Trade War between China and America" and "Who will win the trade war" early 2018 at the beginning of Trump's "war by any means except guns" -- euphemistically termed trade war -- against China. 

Without the Dollar hegemony, America may have to act like a more normal country. Less unilateral sanctioning, less bullying, less acting like the Mafia, less war crimes, less color revolutions, less media lies, less war budgets, less war-mongering, less bases around the world, less profligate printing of money, less plundering of other countries, etc. 

Bullied countries will have alternatives. For protection, they will have Russia and for trade they will have China. All previous vassals of America, including European countries are welcome. Then we will have some peace.

Acting like a more normal country in a more balanced world is actually good for the powerless people of America. 

They may learn to demand for guaranteed basic housing, food, healthcare, and education rather than asking for more shit-paying soul-crushing slave-wage jobs or one-time checks that eventually go to the coffers of the 1% money-changers and MIC, giving those miscreants more power to ravage America and the world, meanwhile the national debt of Americans increases to generate the checks and the rest of the world suffers inflation, which is of course borne by the common masses of the world. 

Capitalism won't solve the problems. 

The fall of the empire may help people think differently or see more clearly how some countries with so many people and so little resources can live gainfully, peacefully, and happily together in a diverse yet harmonious society.

I'll share a passage from my book under chapter title "The Dragon's Dream":

"Where is this paradise? Is it on earth or is it only in his dreams (the dreamer's name means tattoo-dragon)? Where all parents are strong and wise and capable, and all the children are happy and beloved. Where brothers and sisters neither slaughter each other, nor enslave one another, nor tell lies to everyone from morning till night, where the children love and help each other, share everything and take care of one another, and all of them live peaceful, fruitful, and happy lives. 

Where is this place? 

Is it China?"

Does this sound familiar? It comes from a Coen brothers movie, with a couple of changes and replacing Idaho with China. 

-<redacted>

Power reshuffling

China says Russia is an ‘important’ G20 member. It cannot simply be expelled by others, no matter what they might want. In short, Beijing has spoken up for Russia, describing it an “important” global member after the possibility of a major move against Vladimir Putin.
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Unfriendly Lists

Both Russia and China, and probably India (soon), have generated an “Unfriendly nation list”. These lists catagorize nations in accordance to their behaviors and put them into catagories.

  • Close relationship
  • Friendly
  • Neutral
  • Unfriendly
  • Enemy

These are not meaningless lists. They will be used to determine policy. And the policy that Asia uses against other nations is determined by where it sits upon these lists.

Today, President Putin made his first move in a chess game with the West. Gas will be sold to unfriendly countries only for rubles.

Putin wants ‘unfriendly countries’ to pay rubles for gas – ABC News
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Volunteers

In China, people; ordinary people, volunteer to help others. It is their nature to be the Rufus. They don’t ask for payment. They don’t ask for anything. They help others as it is their nature. Volunteers going to remote villiages to help others. Everyone being the Rufus. video 12MB

Cute Chinese girl

Yet another beauty. video 3MB

 

Chem-Trails

For the longest time I have dismissed the idea about “chem-trails” as just crazy “tin foil hat” conspiracy bullshit. Chem-trails are just water vapor at high altitude, don’t you know.

For the longest time. I believed this.

Then, I moved to China. It’s calm. It’s peaceful. It’s pleasant. It’s like walking slowly into a body-temperature pool of water.

And, do you know what?

There’s no “chem-trails”. None. As in zero.

So, maybe (I figured) that it was because that China has these stringent air pollution standards on all fuel. Except, well.. just how does that actually affect water vapor emissions? No clear answers.

But one thing is for certain; there are no vapor trails from aircraft of any kind, at any place, within China.

MM car ride in an industrial factory section of Guangzhou. video 43MB

None.

N-O-N-E.

Why? Why are there no Chemtrails in China? MM video 23MB

The Problem with the Nano-bots mRNA Vaxx and Vault 7

Ok, then. Let’s do a simple “sanity check”.

The big problem with this concept is that the American / Western “leadership” must be totally isolated from the effects of this control mechanism. How can you possibly isolate the leadership from Chem-trails, audio playing on the radio, media on television and movies, and the social networks on the internet.

Heck! They are addicted to them!

So, and the sanity check is clear, as brilliant and complex the system is, it will affect everyone within that society. No one will be immune. Sure, you might need to place yourself into isolation, but eventually, one way or the other, you WILL feel the influence of these systems. No one is immune.

The “leadership” might find a way to pretend getting an mRNA injection, but it’s a cut-throat world at the top. There can be all sorts of ways to place tiny nano-bots inside of your enemy to turn them into your pawn.

So, really…

No matter how hard they try, they will live within the very same, exact “echo box” that they subject their citizenry to. They will live inside an “echo chamber” of lies; lie that they ordered others to create.

Here’s a response to the lies on MSM. video 22MB

And now they are in an echo box of lies.

They are boxed in, and they believe the lies. They actually believe them.

And as leaders, they will make decisions based on those lies, and the entire nation;

They will start to say things that will sound crazy, and act in ways that will seem strange and crazy. They will act so very convinced of the strangest and most outlandish narratives.

And in doing so…

…by the leadership…

…the entire system will evenually be destroyed. Leadership needs REAL intel to make decisions upon. There is no excuse. You eaither have real intel (good and most especially bad) or you don’t. And history is clear. Bad intel results in very bad results.

We call those results; fiascos.

How can anyone possibly have a leadership that…

  • Does not take the mRNA Vaxx injection.
  • Does not read, watch or enjoy American media, social networks or media.

It cannot occur.

Maybe at some time, some radicals believed that it was possible. Maybe back in the 1960s, or 1970s they might have believed this. But in todays society. It is impossible.

Simply Impossible.

Perhaps, the reason why there is such an accelerated failure at all levels in the West is becuase the “leadership” has themselves been affected by their very own poison.

I shake my head.

How can they be so stupid?

Please ponder this thought.

Let’s take a break from this to let your mind relax. New subject. New thoughts.

Chinese respect

Boy locks himself in his bedroom. The fire station is called and they go to the house to break him out…video 2MB

Here’s yet some more gag boxes…

Now here’s a jigsaw puzzle that is suitable for the whole family. Just set aside a card table and get at it. It’s a true challenge.

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Want a challenge?

Plants cry for more! Amaze your friends!

Environmentially safe!

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Plants cry for more!

The latest in animal entertainment!

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The latest in animal entertainment!

The world needs more people skipping

If you cannot dance, try skipping. Smile. Skip as you walk down the street, and say nice things to people. While the rest of the world is on a roller coaster to Hell, you can stop that descent. Skip as you walk. video 15MB

Take care of yourself

We all might not look like this 20-something Chinese woman, but we can certainly smile and be great; we can do great things. Stop waiting. Start doing. video 3MB

Suppose you are a leader in the West

Just imagine that you are a leader of one of the major Western nations. And you best scientists come running to you; scientist that you believe and trust. And they tell you that the situation is DIRE for mankind. They tell you, convincingly that human population grown and energy depletion is unsustainable and that a major disaster lies ahead…

…and they offer senarios and solutions.

And the best one, whatever it might be, is one when a great mass of humanity dies off.

And you, as a leader believe them.

Perhaps you are an independent thinker. Perhaps you are a massive follower of social media and use twitter all the time, and are heavily influenced by Vault 7. What ever.

You believe them. In your heart; you believe them.

And their solution is to kill off 80% of the human population. ..

Insane. Unheard of. But, they present it in a clear and defined manner…

  • Intentionally cull the human race to 20% of it’s size … or…
  • Lose 100% of the human species and everyone dies.

What would you choose?

Truth or fiction

It does not matter if there’s such a real thing as “climate change”. What actually does matter is what the “leadership” believes. Because if they inherently believe that the world is going “to Hell in a handbasket”, they have the power, and ability, and the willingness to perform some really drastic actions.

Actions, mind you, that will affect you and your families directly.

Let’s eat.

Chicken Pot Pie

Likely another cost-cutting holdover of the Great Depression and World War II, this savory chicken and vegetable pie is now mostly found only in the grocery store freezer aisle. Don’t go there.
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Make up your own. It tastes better. It lasts longer. It’s easy to make, and great and easy to reheat in the microwave. Chicken Pot Pie, why didn’t we think about this sooner?
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Chicken Pot Pie.

Chicken Pot Pie

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A strange thing about that plane crash

(If) the software of the plane took over the controls from the pilot… and we con’t know that this is what happened, but if it did… why in God’s Name did it decide to aim the plane straight towards the ground at full throttle?

How the plane behaved. video. 2MB

No self-respecting engineer, or software designer would allow that kind of radical action. None.

So, we are left with two POSSIBLE causes…

  • The sensors to the plane indicated that a nose dive at full-throttle was needed. Which suggests a very complicated mash-up of sensors.
  • Someone used software to hyjack the plane and intentionally decided to ram it straight into the ground.

Who would be so evil?

Man gets word that his entire family were on the plane and died. video 16MB

And here’s what’s left of the plane. video 4MB

The black box fight recorder has been recovered. I believe investigators are considering that sabotage is involved.

Talking about evil and the United States, let’s interrupt this train of thought to explore more gag boxes…

Here’s some more gag boxes…

Have your pet treat you as a king!

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Have your pet treat you as a king!

Take a nap anywhere and at anytime.

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Take a nap anywhere and at anytime.

And what about the Ukraine?

Unlike the theoretical secret deals between the West and the Chinese (or Russia), the deals between China and Russia are very much visible and are largely committed to paper.

The West started this conflict, of course. I don’t know when they realized Russia was going to move into the Ukraine, but they had ample opportunity to prevent it by simply agreeing to the previous status quo. They appear to believe that they can create a protracted conflict in the Ukraine like they did when Russia invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s. 

That shows a fundamental lack of understanding of the situation. 

Ukraine has historically been a part of Russia. There is not really any such thing as a “Ukrainian identity” outside of being a vassal state. In the west of the country, they tend to feel closer to Poland, and there is some bad blood all around with regards to the USSR. But none of this is in any way similar to fanatical Islam. The US has backed neo-Nazism as a kind of “Ukrainian ISIS,” but you can’t rally a country around cartoonish neo-Nazism (particularly while the entire leadership of the country is Jewish).

The idea of using neo-Nazis as rebels against a Russian occupation or a Russia-backed government in the Ukraine is nonsensical, and reeks of the kind of stupid thinking that led to America’s Afghan debacle. The US government pays people to lie to them, and when people tell the truth, they get fired and end up on obscure livestream interviews answering superchats. These liars are telling the decision-makers that the Ukraine is Afghanistan and a protracted conflict can be used to drain Russia, which will ultimately result in the collapse of the Putin government.

The fact that they have no idea what they’re doing is blatant in the fact that they are sanctioning the entire Russian race. Putin’s support is going up rapidly among the people, many of whom didn’t like his policies before but now feel compelled to rally around him since they are being attacked personally for their race by the West.

-UNZ

Perfect for the busy man on the move!

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Perfect for the busy man on the move!

So what are we looking at here?

Well, as far as I can figure out, we have the following situations all moving ahead at this time…

  • The United States is pushing the world towards war.
    • They are crossing both China’s, and Russia’s red lines to provoke them.
    • They believe the myth of “American greatness”.
    • They believe that America has liberty and freedom.
    • They believe that a uni-polar world is necessary and there are no alternatives.
  • The American leadership are acting strangely.
    • President Biden seems to be senile with dementia.
    • Vice President Kamala Harris appears to be a “ding-bat, dunderhead”.
    • The US Senate are mostly radical neocon war-hawks.
  • The Coronavirus pandemic was strange.
    • All Western nations insisted in mRNA injections.
    • All Eastern nations treated it as a bio-weapon and used dead-host vaccines.
    • Western nations are all now “open”, while Eastern nations remain closed.
  • Full-scale on-going “hybrid-warfare” against the East by the West.
    • Military engagements, sanctions, trade restrictions on Russia.
    • Strange unusual events inside of China. All centering around American products, food, livestock, or systems.
  • A strong difference in the West vs. East societies.
    • Everyone in the West seem angry, agitated, and frustrated.
    • Thos in the East are calm, relaxed, happy.
    • No contrails in the East.
    • Hyper-inflation hitting the West.
    • Up-tick in some inflationary measures in the East.

But what does it all mean?

It’s not like I can just immediately agree that all Americans (and those in the west) have nano-bots, and chem-trail poisonings, and all the rest. I see strange behaviors, but I do not see any evidence that the cause is some kind of mad-scientist stew of frequency manipulation, vault 7, nano-bots, MSM algorithms, and the rest.

I have no proof.

And even if I did, I really wouldn’t know what to do about / with it.

So, in the interests of all…

We have to approach the strangeness, not with theories that suggest causes and answers but rather empirical study.

Empirical study

Empirical research is research using empirical evidence. You see evidence. You study it. You come to conclusions about it. You do not come up with theories on the causes. You just put all of the observations into one singular box.

It’s important that you put ALL of the observations in that box. Omitting one singular element can give you distorted or skiewed conclusions. So you collect all the observations…

  • An American-built plane had a highly unusual crash inside of China.
  • The plane possessed software that can override the pilot commands.
  • The plane is of the same make and model that had similiar crashes before.
  • “Conspiracy kooks” believe that this type of plane can be hyjacked remotely.
  • The crash came immediately after two warnings to Xi Peng (Blinkedin, and Biden) that there would be immediate consequences if China did not Sanction Russia.
  • It’s been one week now since the warnings. No other “immediate consequences” occurred (that the public is aware of).

You see, empirical study a way of gaining knowledge by means of direct and indirect observation or experience. Here’s another example.

  • There are contrails all over the West.
  • There are no contrials in the East.

And…

  • Everyone in the West are agitated, upset, angry and frustrated.
  • Everyone in the East seems to be calm, realxed and comfortable.

And…

  • While there are exceptions, the vast bulk of injections in the West are mRNA.
  • There are no mRNA injections in China, and few in Russia.

Empiricism values some research more than other kinds.

  • A measure of “happiness” is relative.
  • While a measure of inflation is measurable.

Empirical evidence (the record of one’s direct observations or experiences) can be analyzed quantitatively or qualitatively. And from that, you can suggest what is going on…

  • Until MM mixed different subjects in the articles (food, girls, China, history), there was a near constant stream of Trolls, and hacking attemps on the site.
  • When the mixed subjects were introducted, Troll and DDOS attacks dropped to zero.

As well as come up with theories as to why it is going on…

  • Trolls and hacks use some <unknown method> to select the websites to harrass.
  • By mixing content within articles, the <unknown method> is bypassed, and the articles are no longer harassed or attacked.

About China

An interesing quote…

We are clearly facing down a world ruled by the Chinese. A lot of people are uncomfortable with that. But most of the discomfort comes from the idea that the Chinese are somehow going to rule us in the same fashion that the US has ruled the world since World War II. 

They have no such plans for us. The Chinese have a vision of conquering the world through commerce, rather than war, threats of war, and geopolitical maneuvering.

We started out on the issue of the economic dominance of the US, and that economic dominance is indeed the key to everything. However, US economic dominance was entirely a result of US military might. The reigning US philosophy for global economic dominance has been: “we will literally bomb you.” 

Conversely, the Chinese philosophy has been: “we will sell you high quality products at reasonable prices.”

When the Mongols consistently raided them, stealing their women and wealth on horseback and riding off with the booty, they said “cannot allow.” Instead of mounting an army to crush the Mongols, they built a gigantic wall, and told the Mongols that if they wanted Chinese products, they would have to buy them at the wall.

It is precisely the same logic as a Chinese immigrant family setting up a store in an all black neighborhood and covering the counter, cash register, and expensive items with bulletproof glass.

China has always been, fundamentally, a merchant empire, and that hasn’t changed. If it were not for the belligerence of the West, they wouldn’t have bothered to build up a large military at all. Historically, virtually every war the Chinese have fought has been a civil war, as they don’t look at the rest of the world as enemies or friends, but rather customers and potential customers.

-UNZ

Cream Cheese Pumpkin Pie

Although pumpkin pie and cheesecake have obviously remained popular, this hybrid, a Kraft classic, has fallen out of favor.
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This variation on pumpkin pie comes from actress and writer Mae West. It appears in a 1933 community cookbook published by the Assistance League of Southern California, alongside contributions from several other Hollywood stars such as Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Constance Bennet, Marion Davies, and Cary Grant.

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2022 03 24 09 50

Unfortunately, Mae West doesn’t give us much information beyond the actual recipe. The pie is titled “Pumpkin Pie Robert,” but it’s unclear what the name “Robert” refers to – it could be the name of a person who gave her the recipe, or perhaps even the name of a place the recipe came from.

Mae West includes brandy in her recipe, which is pushing the boundaries just a little, since the cookbook was published in 1933 and Prohibition wasn’t repealed until the end of that year. She is far from the only contributor to this cookbook to do so, however, and finding alcohol in recipes from the Prohibition years isn’t at all uncommon.

The strangest ingredient in this recipe to me is the Nippy cheese called for in the topping. I wasn’t able to find out exactly what Nippy cheese is, although it looks like it was some type of cheese spread originally made by Kraft. It was apparently not the same as cream cheese, since Kraft made that too, but for lack of a better substitute I decided to go with cream cheese. Any kind of flavored cheese spread honestly sounds like it would be disgusting when combined with whipped cream, so I’m hoping that the original Nippy cheese was something neutrally-flavored.

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2022 03 24 09 52

Oh that Mae…

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2022 03 24 09 53

Pumpkin Pie Robert:

  • 1 1/2 cups pumpkin
  • 1 cup brown sugar
  • 1 tsp cinnamon
  • 1/2 tsp cloves
  • 2 tsp ginger
  • 1/2 tsp salt (reduced from original)
  • 2 eggs
  • 2 cups milk
  • 2 oz/4 tbsp brandy
  • 2 oz cream cheese
  • 1/2 cup heavy cream
  1. Beat the eggs until light, then add the sugar, spices, and salt and beat until mixed.
  2. Scald the milk, then slowly add milk to the egg mixture while whisking constantly.
  3. Stir in the pumpkin and brandy.
  4. Line a pie pan with pastry (no recipe for pie crust is given in the book, so use your favorite recipe or store-bought).
  5. Pour in the filling. With a 9-inch pie pan, I ended up with some extra filling; the recipe is probably intended for a larger or deeper pan.
  6. Bake at 450 degrees for 10 minutes, then turn down the oven to 325 degrees and bake for another 30-40 minutes. Set aside to cool.
  7. Topping: whip the cream until stiff. Mash the cream cheese with a fork, then stir into the cream. Once the pie is cold, use a piping bag to decorate it with the cream cheese mixture.

Like many pies, this one is definitely at its best the day after its made. When I tried it on day 1, the flavors were much too strong, with the brandy in particular overwhelming everything else. The flavors melded much better the second day, although it was still a strongly-flavored pie. I did end up reducing the salt, since 1 teaspoon seemed much too salty to me.

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A nice fun pie. Goes great with coffee.

I liked the cream-cheese topping, but I think I am more of a whipped cream purist. I also wonder whether cream cheese was a good substitute for Nippy cheese, or if the original cheese was something more savory. There are people who put cheddar cheese on apple pies, although I’ve never heard of it used on a pumpkin pie. Was Mae West a cheese-on-dessert-pie person? (I am very firmly not a cheese-on-dessert-pie person – but cream cheese is ok).

Overall, my verdict is that this was a decent pumpkin pie, but it just wasn’t quite to my taste. Sorry, Mae West, but Amelia Simmons’ Pumpkin Pie is still the top historic pumpkin pie for me!

Here’s some more fun gag boxes…

Perfect during these days of Coronavirus.

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Perfect during these days of Coronavirus.

For ages two and older.

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For ages two and older.

Now with musical Accompaniment. Choose your own theme song.

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Now with musical Accompaniment. Choose your own theme song.

A unique, one in a lifetime gift.

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A unique, one in a lifetime gift.

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China is still under lockdown

Do not believe the lies that China is reconsidering it’s hard Coronavirus restrictions. Maybe the West has relaxed it’s stance dealing with the “pandemic”, but China has not.

China is still under DEFCON 2; they still accuse the USA of launching bioweapons against it, and they are VERY VERY concerned about the biolweapons labs in Ukraine. They will stay at DEFCON 2 until there is no longer any threat of bioweapon attack from the West.

Here’s a viewo of some of the many many volunteers fighting on this front. video 7MB

Renegade interviews Michael Hudson: Sanctions, the blowback

https://www.rt.com/shows/renegade-inc/552236-michael-hudson-sanctions-ukraine/

Ross [00:00:29] Welcome to Renegade Inc. Whatever the outcome in Ukraine, one thing is for sure the economic reverberations will be felt by everyone for years to come as the world divides between the West and a rapidly reshaping Eurasia.

Ross [00:00:49] Michael Hudson, always a pleasure to have you on the programme, welcome to Renegade Inc.

Michael Hudson [00:00:53] Thank you for inviting me.

Ross [00:00:55] Michael, sanctions, sanctions, sanctions is all we hear now. We’re sanctioning people. The West sanction people back to the Stone Age. What are the unintended consequences of sanctions?

Michael Hudson [00:01:05] Well, one is to serve very much like a protective tariff on the sanctioned country. For instance, when America made sanctions on European trade with Russia, Lithuania dutifully stopped exporting cheese to Russia. Well, the result is that Russia set up its own cheese’s sector, and now it’s self-sufficient in cheese. If you sanction a country, you force it to become more self-reliant and across the board, from agriculture to dairy products to technology, Russia is forced to become more self-reliant and at the same time to depend much more on trade with China for the things that it is still not self-reliant in. So America is bringing about exactly the opposite of what it intended. It’s hopeless to somehow isolate Russia and then be able to go after China without Russia. And instead, what it’s doing is integrating the Eurasian core, Russia and China, exactly the policy that Henry Kissinger warned against going all the way back to Mackinder a century ago that said, Eurasia is the world island, Russia and China could be the whole world centre. That’s what the fight is all about. Well, American sanctions are driving Russia and China together, and America has gone to China and said, Please don’t support Russia. It most recently, on Monday, March 14, Jake Sullivan came out and told China, we will sanction countries that break our sanctions against Russia. And basically, China said, fine. You know, we’ll just break off all the trade between East and West now and the East, Eurasia is pretty much self-sufficient. The West is not self-sufficient since it began to industrialise, and it’s heavily dependent on Russia for not only oil and gas, but palladium and many raw materials. So the sanctions are ending up driving a wedge between the European countries.

Ross [00:03:31] Don’t people who apply these sanctions think this through? Are they so short-sighted they don’t understand that these sanctions are going to build further capacity within Russia, push Russia further towards China, make that economic alliance concrete and, ultimately, you’re not going to be able to keep the lights on in in Europe? All the while underestimating the fact that from a food security point of view – take the U.K., for instance, a net importer of food – not appreciating the fact that, for instance, Russia/Ukraine, they create twenty five percent, a quarter, of all wheat annually. The estimation this year is one hundred and two million tonnes Russia and Ukraine, wheat. Don’t people realise that there’s going to be a massive knock on effect?

Michael Hudson [00:04:23] Yes, they do realise it. Yes, they’ve thought it all through. I worked with these people for more than 50 years.

Ross [00:04:31] Who are these people?

Michael Hudson [00:04:32] The neocons, basically, the people who are in charge of U.S. foreign policy? Victoria Nuland and her husband, Robert Kagan, the people that President Biden has appointed all around him, from Blinken to Sullivan and right down the line. They are basically urging people around the New American Century. They’re the people who said America can run the whole world and create its own reality. And yes, they know that this is going to cause enormous problems for Germany. They know that not only will it block the energy that Germany and Italy and other countries in Europe need through their oil and gas, but also it’ll block the use of gas for fertiliser, upping their fertiliser production and decreasing their food production. They look at this and they say, How can America gain from all of this? There’s always a way of gaining what something looks to be bad. Well, one way they’ll gain is oil prices are going way up. And that benefits the United States whose foreign policy is based very largely on oil and gas. The oil industry controls most of the world’s oil trade, and that explains a lot of the US diplomacy. This is a fight to lock the world energy trade into control by U.S. companies, excluding not only Iran and Venezuela, but also excluding Russia.

Ross [00:06:16] So as Europe pushes towards more and more green and renewable energy and this for the Americans they must think it’s a dreadful scenario insofar as they can’t sell the oil as Europe becomes or wants to become more self-sufficient. So ultimately, and Britain net zero, whatever that means. But but going down the renewables path, going down the solar path takes America’s dependency or dependency on America out the game, doesn’t it?

Michael Hudson [00:06:49] This is exactly the point that the European public has not realised. While most of the European public wants to prevent global warming and prevent carbon into the atmosphere, U.S. foreign policy is based on increasing, and even accelerating, global warming, accelerating carbon emissions because that’s the oil trade. Suppose that Europe got its way. Suppose if the Greens got what they wanted and Germany and Europe were completely dependent on solar energy panels, on wind energy and to some extent, on nuclear power, perhaps? Well, if they were completely self-sufficient in energy without oil or gas or coal, America would lose the primary lever. It has over the ability to turn off the power and electricity and oil of any country that didn’t follow U.S. diplomatic direction.

Ross [00:07:48] So when we take your analysis here and we think about how the sanctions are going to build capacity, push Russia and China together, when we start to look at sort of piggy in the middle, if you like the EU, when we’re thinking about America, the EU has had a sort of abusive relationship with the Americans for quite some time now, hasn’t it?

Michael Hudson [00:08:06] Well, that’s that’s true in the sense that EU foreign policy has basically been turned over to NATO. So instead of European voters and politicians making their policy, they’ve relinquished European foreign policy to NATO, which is really an arm of the US military. So yes, Europe has had a decent relationship with the United States diplomatically by saying yes, yes, please or yes, thank you by not being independent. Of course, if it were independent, the relationship would not be so friendly and decent.

Ross [00:08:46] So for countries that are net importers of food, need to keep the lights on, need heating and need cheap oil. How does this pan out? What does it look like for the UK? What does it look like for the EU?

Michael Hudson [00:08:59] Well, Vice President, Kamala Harris the other day said to Americans, Yes, life is going to be much more expensive. Our oil prices are going up and squeezing families. But think of the poor Ukrainian babies that we’re saving. So take it on the chin for the Ukrainian babies. So basically the United States is presenting horror stories of the Ukraine and saying, if you don’t willingly suffer now by isolating Russia, then Russia is going to roll over you with tanks just like it rolled over Central Europe after World War Two. I mean, it’s waving the flag of Russian aggression, as if Russia or any country in today’s world has an army that’s able to invade any other industrial nation. All military can do today of any country is bomb and kill other populations and industrial centres. No nation is able to occupy or rollover any industrial country. And the United States keeps trying to promote this mythology that we’re still in the world of 1945. And that world ended really with the Vietnam War when the military draft ended. And no country is able to have a military draft to raise the army with necessary to fight to invade. Russia can’t do it any more than Europe or the United States could do it. So all the United States can do is wave warnings about how awful Russia is and somehow convince Europe to follow the US position. But most of all, it doesn’t really have to. Europe doesn’t really have a voice, and this is what the complaint by Putin and Foreign Secretary Lavrov have been saying. They say that Europe is just following the United States and it doesn’t matter what the European people want or what European politicians want. The United States is so deeply in control that they really don’t have much of a choice.

Ross [00:11:15] When does the consumer start to feel this? When does the European or British consumer start to feel the pinch when these sanctions are enacted? And what does that look like?

Michael Hudson [00:11:25] Well, it depends on how fast the sanctions work. The United States said Well, in another year and a half, we’ll be able to provide Europe with liquefied natural gas. Well, the problem is, first of all, they’re not the ports to handle the liquefied natural gas to go into Europe. Secondly, there are not enough ships and tankers to carry all of this gas to Europe. So unless there are very warm winters, Europe is not going to have a very easy time for the next few years. And that’s only for oil and gas. It’s dependent on raw materials that Russia produces. For instance, palladium is necessary for catalytic converters. Titanium is necessary to make the screws that are especially used on aeroplanes that are strong enough not to buckle and break when winds go up and down and when they’re full. Russia even produces the neon and the crypton that are necessary for making some kind of electronic uses and also for many components that go into computers and information technology. There’s a whole range of exports that Europe is highly dependent on, and the United States has provided Putin with a whole list of these exports, saying, Well, OK, we’re going to fight against Europe buying your oil and gas but you can certainly sell us your heavy oil that we need since we’re not buying it from Venezuela. We certainly need the following list of critical materials that we need, like helium and crypton. These are our pressure points. Please don’t press on them. Well, you can imagine what Putin and his advisers are saying. Thank you for giving us this list of the pressure points that you’re exempting from the trade sanctions. I think if you really want a break in the unilateral, unipolar world, I think we should break now and see whether you really want to get along without trading.

Ross [00:13:51] Michael Hudson, welcome back, second half, Renegade Inc. Wonderful to have you. In that first half we followed the money, if you like. We talked about sanctions and the unintended consequences. I just want to pull back a little further if we can and just talk about the sort of tectonic shifts that are going on in the world. I spoke to somebody from Russia recently and what he said was very straightforward. He said, now what we have to do is begin to learn to live without the West. Do you think that that sentiment is proliferating across Russia now? Is that the mindset?

Michael Hudson [00:14:22] Well, if you read President Putin’s speeches, that’s exactly what’s happening. And Secretary Lavrov has voiced exactly the same feeling. There’s almost a disgust with the West and a feeling from Putin, Lavrov and the other Russian spokesmen, how could we everhave hoped to have an integration with Europe after 1991? Europe really was not on our side at all, and we didn’t realise that Europe is really part of the U.S. diplomatic sphere. It’s like all of Europe is now backing the attack on Russia. The best to do is reorient our economy towards China, Asia and Eurasia and become our own self-sufficient, independent centre

Ross [00:15:15] De-dollarisation and the amassing of plenty of gold by both the Russians and the Chinese. Just talk us through that.

Michael Hudson [00:15:21] Well, Ross, you asked in the first half of this interview how has American sanctions worked against it? I should have mentioned what you just mentioned, the dollar. The United States just grabbed all of Russia’s foreign exchange reserves, just as England a few months ago grabbed all of Venezuela’s gold that was held in the Bank of England when Venezuela tried to spend this gold on buying medical supplies to cope with the COVID virus. So basically, the United States have said, if any foreign country holds its reserves in the United States or accounts in U.S. banks. If a country in the global south tries to pay its foreign debt by holding its reserves in US banks in order to be the paying agent on the interest on its foreign debt. And if that foreign country does something we don’t like, like trade with Russia or permit more labour unionisation or try to become independent in food, we’re just going to do what we did to Venezuela, what we did to Iran when we grabbed its foreign exchange reserves or what we did to Russia. And that means that other countries all of a sudden see what they thought was their flight to security, what they thought was their most secure savings, their holdings in U.S. banks, US treasury bill, all of a sudden, is holding them hostage and is a high risk. Even the Financial Times of London has been writing about this, saying, how can the United States that was getting a free ride off the dollar standard for the last 50 years, ever since 1971, when foreign countries held dollars instead of gold and basically holding dollars means you buy U.S. Treasury bonds to finance the US budget deficit and the balance of payments deficit. How can the United States kill the goose that’s giving it the free ride? Well, the answer is that other countries can only move into gold and there’s an alternative to the dollar because that’s something that all the countries of the world have agreed upon is an asset, not a liability. If you hold any foreign currency, that currency is a liability of a foreign country, and if you hold gold, it’s a pure asset. There’s no country that can cancel it, the Americans can’t cancel Russia’s gold supply that’s held in Russia, although it can grab Russian gold supply if it were to hold it in the New York Federal Reserve Bank or the Bank of England. So other countries are not only moving to gold, Germany is bringing its gold back from New York, the Federal Reserve, in aeroplanes back to Germany, so it’ll have its own gold just in case German politicians would do something the United States didn’t like and the United States would simply grab Germany’s gold. The United States sanctions, and it’s especially it’s grabbing on foreign reserve, has started a war that is dividing the world between the West and Eurasia.

Ross [00:18:40] A technical part to all of this because let’s face it, it is an information war and it’s also an economic war. Is it the FIRE sector that you point out – the financial, insurance and real estate sector. Is it that they want to continue the exorbitant privilege of credit creation, because ultimately, if you think about gold, there’s no counterparty risk. Gold is gold and it has been for millennia. Far from being a barbarous relic, by the way now, people are starting to realise the intrinsic value, especially as crypto falls apart. Can you just talk a little bit about this, the FIRE sector wanting the exorbitant privilege of creating credit?

Michael Hudson [00:19:19] This is really what the new world division and global fracture is all about. You’re right, Ross. If you look at after World War One, the American fight against Soviet communism, was basically a fight of industrial capitalism against the threat of socialism. But after 1991, and especially in the last two decades, America deindustrialised. So the fight is not by industrial capitalism against countries pushing their labour up. It’s a fight of neoliberalism against industrial capitalism or socialism abroad. It’s against industrial capitalism evolving into socialism. It’s a belief that, well, now that America’s be industrialised, how is it going to control the world economy? Well, it’ll control it through a financial means by being the creditor and foreign countries debt payments to America will enable it to make its military payments abroad and finance its trade deficit. But also, America’s purchase of key natural resources will give it natural resources when its purchase of takeover of real estate is going to essentially make the United States the landlord class and monopoly class, that mediaeval Europe had to hold the rest of the population in serfdom. That basically is the American strategy of neoliberalism fighting against countries that reject privatisation and financialization of their economy, and specifically financialization under the control of U.S. banks, U.S. private capital and allied satellite banks and capital from England or France or Germany. This is exactly the fight. Will banking and finance control the world economy or will other countries try to build up their own economies through labour and tangible capital formation?

Ross [00:21:27] Where do you stand on that? And I’m only asking you to predict the future, Michael. How do you think this plays out? Because the way you’ve depicted it is the rent seekers, the neoliberal rent seekers on one hand, and there are value creators on the other. And by the way, those two things don’t sit very well together, as we know. How does that play out?

Michael Hudson [00:21:51] Even though the United States is the largest debtor economy in the world, it’s a creditor vis-a-vis the global south and other countries and it uses its creditor position to take over their natural resources, real estate, oil and gas, mineral rights and public utilities and natural monopolies and that are being privatised in government infrastructure. It’s becoming basically the landlord monopoly class of the entire world. That’s the U.S. strategy, and that’s the key to why the world is fracturing globally. And in the past, the global south countries were unable to fight against this tendency in the 70s and 80s with the Vendome conference on. But now that China and Russia threatened to be a self-sufficient core in Eurasia, this is the great threat to the American dream of becoming a landlord and financier of the world.

Ross [00:22:50] How do you think this pans out?

Michael Hudson [00:22:52] Well, the question is whether the United States is if we can control the world, who wants to live in a world like that, let’s blow it up. The question is whether the United States will actually go to war. The only lever that it has left is to drop bombs and to destroy and make the world look like Ukraine. So from the U.S. point of view, Europe’s future and Eurasia’s future is the Ukraine. Look at what we will do to you if you don’t follow our policy. America has just moved al Qaeda very heavily in the Ukraine to sort of repeat in Ukraine and Europe what it was doing in Syria and Libya. And the United States says this is what we can do. What are you going to do about it? Do you really want to fight. But the rest of the world, certainly China and Russia says, Well, we’re ready to fight. So there is no telling what you. And it comes down to personalities. Putin has said, well, do we really want to live in a world without Russia? If the United States is to attack us, we might as well end the world. The United States says, Do we really want to live in a world that we can’t control? If we’re not completely in control, we feel very insecure and we’re going to blow up the world. So you have this countervailing position in a world where all the arms control has been dismantled by the United States in the last few years. The United States has withdrawn from all of the agreements that Russia and China have tried to promote. And Europe is standing by and apparently is willing to be the sacrificial lamb in all of this as Ukraine is being the sacrificial lamb. So the United States and Russia say, let’s fight to the last European. And Russia initially didn’t want that because it was hoping that Europe and Russia would have a mutual gain in trade and investment relationships. But now it doesn’t feel that way. And there may be a proxy war between the United States over the European economy, not necessarily bombing Europe, but trade sanctions, energy sanctions, the kind of disruption that Europe is going to be seeing in the next year is if it loses Russian oil and gas and minerals and also, I think Chinese exports.

Ross [00:25:25] Is there a moment where cooler heads prevail and suddenly the West and other places realise that they’re dependent from a food security point of view, from an energy security point of view that we are dependent? And is there a moment at that point that you can thaw a frozen conflict by saying, actually, if we both meet, we just take a step toward each other, actually, we can do something in a collaborative way? Now I get what you’ve said throughout the rest of the programme, and I give this a percentage possibility of about three percent, but isn’t there a strategy to say, actually, we’ve had all the grandstanding, we’ve had all the brinksmanship, we should now sit around the table and try and work something out?

Michael Hudson [00:26:03] I don’t see any cooler heads in the United States. The surprising thing is that here it’s the right wing channel, the Republican Fox Channel, is the only channel that’s taking the anti-war stand and is saying we shouldn’t be at war in Ukraine. It’s the only channel that’s talking about here is how Russia sees the world. Do we really want to take a one sided perspective or do we want to see the actual dynamics at work? So it was the Republicans and the right wing that is now primarily against the NATO war in the Ukraine. The left wing seems to be all for it, but the left wing of the Democratic Party is in office and I don’t see any cooler heads in the Democratic Party at all. And I’ve known many of these people for many decades, and they are willing to go to war for a death. There are still back in the world of World War Two when the fight was against the Nazis and anti-Semitism. They’re still living in a kind of mythology world, not in the real world. And the thought that the world can come to an end either doesn’t have a reality to them or as Herman Cain said, Well, somebody is going to survive.

Ross [00:27:29] Michael Hudson always a pleasure, a great insight. And, you know, it’s just refreshing to hear. Thank you very much for your time.

Michael Hudson [00:27:38] Well, thank you very much for having me, Ross.

Chinese Girl

Such a cute girl. video 3MB

More Sanctions On Russia Will Destroy Europe

From MoA.

On February 21 Russia announced that it would recognize the Donbas republics. A day later it did so. The ‘west’ immediately announced sanctions which in fact had been prepared in advance. On February 24 Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine.

The Russian ruble immediately took a big hit. It has since recovered a bit.

oday’s news will bring the ruble to a new heights.

Kommersant reports (machine translation):

Putin instructed to convert gas contracts with unfriendly countries into rubles

President Vladimir Putin instructed to issue a directive to Gazprom to convert contracts into rubles for unfriendly countries. In his opinion, supplying Russian goods to the EU, the USA and receiving payment in dollars and euros "does not make any sense for us." Against this background, the ruble moved to growth on the Moscow Exchange.

“Both the US and the EU have basically defaulted on their obligations to Russia. And now everyone in the world knows that obligations in dollars and euros may not be fulfilled. <...> It is quite obvious that in this regard, it makes no sense for us to supply our goods to both the EU and the USA and receive payment in dollars, euros and a number of other currencies. Therefore, I have decided to implement in the shortest possible time a set of measures to transfer payments for our natural gas supplied to unfriendly countries to Russian rubles,” Mr. Putin said at a meeting with the government.

The President instructed the Central Bank and the government to determine within a week the order of operations for the purchase of rubles on the domestic market by buyers of Russian gas. He claims that Russia will continue to supply gas "in accordance with the volumes and according to the pricing principles concluded in the contracts."

The dollar exchange rate on the Moscow Exchange fell below 100 rubles. for the first time since March 3rd. As of 15:37, the US currency is trading at 101.55 rubles. (-2 rubles). The euro exchange rate fell by 2.85 rubles to 111.65 rubles. The maximum dollar fell to 94.99 rubles, the euro - to 109.7 rubles.

The European Union, the United States, Great Britain and a number of other countries have imposed sanctions against Russia in response to the military operation in Ukraine, which has been carried out since February 24 on the orders of Mr. Putin. One of the measures was the freezing of about half of the Central Bank's gold and foreign exchange reserves ($300 billion).

To pay in ruble one first has to buy rubles. With higher demand for rubles and no change in supplies the price for the Russian currency will go up. As Russia is selling hydrocarbons and other resources for billions of dollars per day the ruble is likely to soon reach record heights.

On February 28 another round of sanctions hit Russia. The part of the Russian central bank reserves that were stored in the ‘west’ were frozen. The central bank immediately pushed its interest rate from 9% to 20% to prevent a flight from the ruble. This helped to lessen the damage but made credit expensive and has hit the future growth potential in Russia.

But with a high new rubles demand from the outside of Russia the central bank will soon be able to lower its interest rate to more normal levels. Credit conditions will ease and investment in Russia, to replace products that had so far been imported, will rise again.

Today’s move to demand rubles for hydrocarbons is only on of the many steps Russia can, and likely will take, to retaliate for sanctions from the ‘west’.

As I wrote previously:

All energy consumption in the U.S. and EU will now come at a premium price. This will push the EU and the U.S. into a recession. As Russia will increase the prices for exports of goods in which it has market power - gas, oil, wheat, potassium, titanium, aluminum, palladium, neon etc - the rise in inflation all around the world will become significant.

Meanwhile the New York Times writes:

As he heads to Europe, President Biden will press U.S. allies to help impose even more aggressive sanctions on Russia.

Biden demands that Europe suicides itself while he is protecting the U.S. industry. I hope that some people in the European capitals are still able to think clear enough to recognize the racket the U.S. is trying to run here:

Together with the economic devastation that U.S. and European sanctions on Russia are causing in their own economies this will end in regime-changes in several European countries. The U.S. is of course again protecting itself from as much as it can at the cost of others.

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2022 03 24 10 05

Tony Wood asks:

The question remains, why did all those who for so long foretold this war do so little to stop it, and so much to hasten the disaster Russia has now set in motion?

Indeed. Why didn’t the government of Germany guarantee in writing that it would veto any additional NATO membership? It would have solved at least half of the problem. Why didn’t any other NATO government do so?

And what are they doing now? Where are their initiatives for peace?

Wake up. Otherwise this will end in disaster. Not for Russia but for the rest of Europe.

Kids and cats

Ah. This is funny. Poor kitties, but they know that the big stupid humans can’t be helped. video 124MB

AGAIN! Reference to NUKES!

NATO'S STOLTENBERG SAYS ANY USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS WILL CHANGE NATURE OF CONFLICT, RUSSIA MUST UNDERSTAND THAT IT CAN NEVER WIN A NUCLEAR WAR.

UPDATE 5:10 PM EDT —

NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg said that NATO has plans in place to protect all allies from nuclear threat, and that there should be no doubt about its readiness.

MORE:

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has warned of a “direct clash” between Moscow and NATO forces if peacekeepers from the military alliance are deployed to Ukraine.

Lavrov made the remarks on Wednesday while speaking to students and staff at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (MGIMO) in response to Polish proposals for a NATO and international “peace mission.”

“Our Polish colleagues have already stated that there will be a NATO summit now, we need to send peacekeepers. I hope they understand what is at stake,” Lavrov said, according to Russian state-owned news agency TASS.

STILL MORE:

Russian lawmaker Alexei Zhuravlyov on state TV threatens nuclear strike on Warsaw, Poland and NATO forces or any peacekeeping contingent that might try to enter Ukraine.

Hal Turner Editorial Opinion

This issue has been surfacing far too frequently of late, and there’s a very good reason for it:  The West has attacked Russia economically over the Ukraine situation, and has done it so badly that Russia is in actual danger of collapsing as a country.

The West seems to think that Russia’s only option is to sit back and take the sanctions, or change its behavior with Ukraine to abide what NATO and the west wants.

The Russian’s don’t see it that way.

The West PROMISED Russia, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that they would “not move one inch eastward from the Re-unified East-West Germany” (1997).   Yet NATO did precisely that in the ensuing years, to the point were NATO nations are now directly bordering Russia.

Those NATO nations have NATO troops rotating in and out of them.  The West lies about it by saying they’re only there “temporarily” when in fact, as thousands leave after a few months duty, thousands more come to replace them.  The result: An ever-present NATO conventional force.

Then too, there’s the missiles.  US Missile Defense systems . . . now in several of the former Soviet Block nations, all aimed directly at Russia.

Ukraine was simply the latest Domino to fall in the long line of NATO expansion.  The reason NATO wanted Ukraine has to do with its proximity to Moscow and to Russia’s Strategic Nuclear missile silos.   If American missile defenses can be placed on Ukraine soil, they will have a flight time of only 5 minutes to Moscow, and less than ten minutes to Russia’s nuclear silos.  Russia cannot defend against missiles that are so close and can travel so far and fast.

Worse, the technology of missiles has evolved and now, the very same “conventional” missiles claimed to be “defensive” can be re-fitted with OFFENSIVE NUCLEAR WARHEADS within an hour.  And the re-fit can be done while the missiles remain in their launchers, so no one would know the missiles had been converted from conventional to nuclear.

These facts pose an existential threat to Russia, the very same way that Soviet nuclear missiles in Cuba posed an existential threat to the USA under President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

What did Kennedy do?  He told the Soviets either those missiles had to go, or . . . .  the US would invade Cuba to destroy those missiles.   (Gee, the exact same cause for invasion that is now seeing Russia inside Ukraine!)

Yet no one screeched to President Kennedy about Cuba being a sovereign country that could align itself however they liked.  No one even questioned Kennedy’s decision that either those missiles go, or Cuba gets invaded.   The reason no one questioned it is because every RATIONAL person knew Kennedy was right.

Well, guess what?  Today, with the situation in Ukraine, Russian President Putin is . . . . right.  He is doing in Ukraine what then-US-President  Kennedy was preparing to do with Cuba.   It’s no different.

NUKES

Russia knows – and has said publicly – that its conventional military forces cannot compete against the collective force of NATO.   But Russia ALSO said (publicly) that they have the largest nuclear arsenal, and their hypersonic missile technology is far superior to all of NATO.

So the Russians, from the start, have made clear they fully understood what they were getting themselves into with Ukraine and the possibility of NATO involvement.  Russia would be forced to use nukes. Period.

They knew this.  They still know it.

NATO knows it too.

So why then, is NATO’s nitwit, Jens Stoltenberg saying today “ANY USE OF NUCLEAR WEAPONS WILL CHANGE NATURE OF CONFLICT, RUSSIA MUST UNDERSTAND THAT IT CAN NEVER WIN A NUCLEAR WAR.”  ?????

One possibility is that Stoltenberg knows that NATO has actual plans to get involved.   The latest iteration of those plans is for NATO countries to “enter” Ukraine as a “Peace keeping force.”   Russia has made it explicitly clear that if NATO tries such a move, Russia will engage NATO Troops in battle.  War will be the result.

Period End.

And since it is already established that Russia cannot win against NATO conventional forces, Russia would have to “go nuclear.”  Stoltenberg and the west think Russia wouldn’t dare.

Stoltenberg and the West are wrong.

Russia would.

They’ve said it publicly.

Several times.

The soyboys of the West think they can talk their way out of anything they do.  This time, they cannot.

The message from Russia seems to me to be very simple: NATO cannot have Ukraine as a member. Period.

American missile defenses cannot be placed on the territory of former Soviet Block nations. Period.

If my assessment of this Russian Position is correct, then either NATO accepts that these facts are real and stops what it has been doing since 1997 by adding former Soviet Bloc Nations and withdraws NATO troops and missiles from those nations, or NATO refuses to take “no” for an answer, enters Ukraine, and it is World War 3, with nuclear weapons, VERY VERY SOON.

Those appear to me to be the facts.

That no mass-media outlets in the West are bothering to report them to the general public, will leave their citizens blissfully ignorant, until the bright, white, flashes start.

Thankfully, YOU are not being left blissfully ignorant.  YOU have chosen to avail yourself of this web site and radio show and as such, YOU know what’s really going on.  We are being marched directly into a (NUCLEAR) World War 3.

MAYOR OF KYIV: "WORLD WAR III HAS ALREADY BEGUN AND UKRAINE IS THE BEGINNING"

Hal Turner

.

A very fine and cute Chinese girl

She is very, very fine. Really nice build and look at that fantastic smile! My goodness, I could just eat her up, I’ll tell you what! video 3MB

Dream griddle and alarm clock.

Wake up on the right side of bed!

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Wake up on the right side of bed!

Joe Biden Speech

Interesting stuff…

“We’re at an inflection point [in] not just the world economy [but] the world that occurs every three or four generations,” the president said.

“[A general told me that] 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946 and since then we’ve established a liberal world order, and it hasn’t happened in a long while.”

“Now is the time when things are shifting and there’s going to be a new world order out there, and we’ve got to lead it. We’ve got to unite the rest of the free world in doing it.”

Here’s what Russia thinks…

Biden says US must lead ‘new world order’

The 46th president highlighted the role Washington would have among the “free” states.US President Joe Biden raised eyebrows on Monday after he claimed a “new world order” would soon be established and that it was up to the United States to lead it.
.

During a speech at Business Roundtable’s CEO Quarterly Meeting, Biden claimed the world was at “an inflection point” which “occurs every three or four generations” and that it was up to the US to determine the outcome.

“As one of the top military people said to me in a security meeting the other day, 60 million people died between 1900 and 1946, and since then we’ve established a liberal world order and that hadn’t happened in a long while,” the president said.

The comment raised eyebrows in both the US and around the world and resulted in ‘New World Order’ becoming one of Twitter’s trending topics on Monday.

The term ‘new world order’ has historically been used to refer to an era of great global change and has been used by politicians such as former US President George H. W. Bush, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

For decades, however, the phrase has also been the subject of a major conspiracy theory which alleges a secret, elitist plot to form an oppressive global government.

Politicians and government officials have previously received criticism for using the term – most recently Dr. Kerry Chant, the chief health officer of the Australian state of New South Wales.

“We will be looking at what contact tracing looks like in the new world order,” said Chant during a September Covid-19 press conference, prompting the term to trend on social media.

Journalists and other social media users criticized Chant for using the term, with former journalist Chris Urquhart writing that “government officials would be well advised to avoid phrases like ‘the new world order’ when they’re talking at press conferences about massive limitations on people’s freedoms.”

Some comments…

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2022 03 24 19 39

A Rufus has understanding

If you are not making the world a better place, you are contributing to it’s destruction. For God’s sake, be good, and kind. If you cannot. Then be neutral. But do not make others sad or hurtful. video 8MB

While the United States goes into hyper-inflation, China is stable

I really like how one prominent economics professor recently made this point

“They’re flying blind, and are too little, too late,” Steve Hanke says in disbelief, an Applied Economics professor of John Hopkins University. “It’s utter rubbish and nonsense” that Fed Chairman Jerome Powell sees supply chain issues as a root cause for inflation, he tells me, as we decipher the Federal Reserve’s latest official statements on the shape of the U.S. economy.

“The money supply in excess causes inflation, and the Federal Reserve appears to be almost clueless,” 

Hanke shares with me as we discuss last week’s conversation between U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping. 

“Obviously the Chinese know this,” which is why their inflation rating is less than 1%, the former Senior Economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers articulates to me.

Inflation is always destructive.

I can confirm that while prices have been rising inside of China, it is in no way resembling the kinds of inflation that is being seen in America, Europe or the rest of the West. The reason is simple. China has been managing the flow of USD for payments for decades. THis managment is intentional and it insulates China from inflationary effects of the USD due to poor management of debt by the United States.

United States Inflation Rate – February 2022

United States Inflation Rate Annual inflation rate in the US accelerated to 7.9% in February of 2022, the highest since January of 1982, matching market expectations. Energy remained the biggest contributor (25.6% vs 27% in January), with gasoline prices surging 38% (40% in January).

What happens when your QR goes orange

Everyone must take regular swab tests, and be up to date on their injections. IF you are not, your status goes from green to orange. This video shows what happens when you try to go though a tollbooth with an orange QR code in China. video 3MB

Three-Cheese Fondue

I got this easy recipe from my daughter, who lives in France. It’s become my go-to fondue, and I make it often for our family.

—Betty A. Mangas, Toledo, Ohio

What are you waiting for?

OIP C.Wqb p2vQCQp XFqMScXmtwHaC9
Three Cheese Fondue.

Crib Dribbler.

Perfect for hot soups, milkshakes, and energy drinks.

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Perfect for hot soups, milkshakes, and energy drinks.

Europe’s LARGEST Natural Gas Storage Facility: EMPTY

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Empty.

The largest natural gas storage facility in northern Europe is now EMPTY of gas.

The facility, run by (Russia’s) GAZPROM, dropped like a rock once Europe instituted economic sanctions against Russia.

With this largest facility now empty, industry will have to shut down for lack of fuel for heating and generation of electric.

With the largest storage facility now empty, the draw-down from all the smaller facilities will speed up by orders of magnitude, emptying them with ten days to two weeks.

What will Europe do when it has no gas to generate electric or to heat buildings?

Of course, all of this trouble has to do with Europe sticking its nose into the affairs of Russia-Ukraine.

Now that Europe is demonstrably running out of natural gas, watch for things between Russia-Ukraine-NATO to get VERY VERY VERY much worse, very fast.

Grandma Davidson’s Baked Apple Pudding

My savvy grandmother whipped up recipes like this homey cinnamon-scented apple pudding in the Depression years. Many of us still make them today. 

—Holly Sharp, Warren, Ontario

OIP C.H6y ITWayCXZdV3FGauGMgHaE8
Grandma Davidson’s Baked Apple Pudding

China is FAST

So President Biden thinks that it will be easy to compete against China. Americans think that it will be no problem, because America is exceptional, and great? This echo chamber in the Untied States that gives this illustion that China is dark, dingy, dirty and backwards, while America is so wonderful is a lie. It amazes me. Becuase this is what China is like… video 21MB

Chinese weddings

The Chinese have heart. Real, honest to goodness heart. video 22MB

China rebukes US as ‘world’s biggest human rights violator’

Beijing has promised “countermeasures” if Washington doesn’t revoke sanctions over Uyghurs
.

Beijing has promised to respond in kind unless the US revokes the blacklisting of Chinese officials it said were guilty of human rights violations.

Speaking at a regular press conference on Tuesday, Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin accused the US of “smearing China, oppressing Chinese officials for no reason, violating international law… and grossly interfering in China’s domestic affairs.”

Wang said Beijing will respond with reciprocal countermeasures if the US does not immediately revoke its sanctions.

The statement came after US Secretary of State Antony Blinken accused the Chinese government of committing “genocide and crimes against humanity” against the Uyghurs, a Muslim ethnic minority living predominately in China’s northwestern Xinjiang Region. He added that Washington has blacklisted Chinese officials who it said were guilty of human rights violations.

Wang responded in kind, calling the US “the biggest human rights violator in the world,” whose historical treatment of Native Americans “constitutes de facto genocide.” He also criticized Washington for the “long-lasting systemic racial discrimination” of black Americans.

Multiple global human rights groups have long accused China of oppressing the Uyghurs and forcing them to work in labor camps. Beijing has denied the allegations, insisting that the Uyghurs are studying in vocational education and training centers as part of state integration and deradicalization programs.

Blankeez

Now available in classroom sized versions.

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Now available in classroom sizes.

Creamy Chicken Vol-au-Vent

My friends and I have been getting together for "ladies lunches" for years. These vol-au-vents are the perfect no-fuss fancy food; they look complicated, but are actually simple and fun to make. Whenever I think of good friends and good company, I think of these savory pastries. 

—Shauna Havey, Roy, Utah

R C.e0845439e71aa3ecaa9cdc05201923a9
Creamy Chicken Vol-au-Vent.

China can build

OMG! It’s insane how fast and efficiently that China can build things. You all just wait and see what happens when China and Russia build their Moon and Mars cities. video 23MB

A 737 crashed in China.

A Boeing 737 carrying 132 people crashed early Monday in China. Although Boeing’s 737 has faced extraordinarily high-profile safety concerns over the past three years, the plane that crashed Monday was a different version of the aircraft than the embattled 737 Max that shook Boeing to its core.

The cause of Monday’s crash has yet to be determined. The plane had been in service since 2015. The flight, operated by China Eastern Airlines, was flying from the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming to Guangzhou when it crashed.
.
It’s crash profile; being a full-throttle nose-dive directly to the ground is highly unusual.
.
Evidence suggests any of the following;
.
  • Intentional Pilot (and co-pilot) action to destroy the plane.
  • Software override of the pilot commands.
  • Remote operation of the software to override the pilot.

The manufacturer of the aircraft has had problems with the software. Other crashes of similiar planes has been the result of software overrides of the pilot.

We do not know (as of yet) the real cause for this crash. But one thing seems clear, somehow the plane overrode the directions of the pilot. It put the plane in a nose dive straight towards the ground and set the engines on full-throttle, full speed, as it plunged towards the ground.

Why it did so, is unknown.

Yet, the United States government black operations regarding taking control of the software should NOT be ruled out.

This reminds me of HAL in the 1969 movie; “2001; A Space odyssey”.

2001 A Space odyssey

So, Boeing makes aircraft that can override the pilot. Brilliant! Why do you need pilots? How about having full robotic planes?

Maybe it’s because no one will fly in them.

Isn’t technology wonderful. Remember when fully automatic self-driving cars were crashing left and right? Yeah, I do. Well, somehow Boeing things that this would be a good thing to implement in passenger planes. Who would doubt it?

Anyways, I have to ask the moronic question of the day…

 "Well, with fully robotic planes, then why still have pilots, when the airplane can override the pilot?"

Well, perhaps its because you keep the illusion of human control, when the truth is that the software is in full control…

… as well as the “authorized” owner of that software who can control the plane and tell it to do whatever he/it wants. Like the United States. Hum?

Let’s talk about HAL. Specifically what it did.

HAL

2022 03 23 23 08
HAL

From the 1969 movie…

HAL is a computer system. And it is built into the Discovery One spacecraft, and is in charge of maintaining all mechanical and life support systems on board.

HAL also has several “eyes” placed periodically around the spacecraft.

About three weeks into the flight, Hal picks up a fault in the AE-35 unit, the system responsible for keeping the satellite dish antenna aligned with the Earth, and states that it will go one-hundred percent failure within 72 hours.

He suggests that they go EVA and replace the faulty unit with a new one.

Dr. David Bowman goes out and retrieves the unit. But when he brings it back and runs it through diagnostics, they can find no problem with the AE-35.

They radio Mission Control about the problem, and Mission Control says that Hal is in error predicting the fault.

2022 03 23 23 16
HAL

This is a bit of a surprise, as the 9000 series has a perfect operational record.

Noting that this kind of thing has always been because of human error when it has occurred before, Hal suggests that they go out and “replace the malfunctioning unit and allow it to fail.

Then it should be a simple matter to track down the problem.”

But by this time, both Dr. Frank Poole and Bowman are becoming suspicious of Hal’s behaviour. They climb into one of the EVA pods, out of earshot of Hal. Poole states that he has “a bad feeling about him”. Bowman and Poole suggest disconnecting Hal if he is wrong about predicting the fault.

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Bowman and Poole suggest disconnecting Hal if he is wrong about predicting the fault.

Unbeknownst to them, Hal read their lips through the window of the spacepod.

Translating their lip motions, Hal learns of their plans for his disconnection; according to Clarke, “he (will) be deprived of all his inputs, and thrown into an unimaginable state of unconsciousness. To Hal, this (is) the equivalent of death. For he (has) never slept, and therefore he (does) not know that one (can) wake again.”

Poole goes out to replace the supposedly malfunctioning AE-35 unit.

As he drifts through space to the satellite dish, Hal takes control of the pod and rams it into Poole, disconnecting his oxygen hose and venting the air in his suit, killing him.

Bowman, obviously distraught by the loss of his friend, goes out to retrieve Poole’s body.

However, while Bowman is out on his excursion, Hal shuts off the life support systems on the three astronauts in hibernation, which kills them all.

2022 03 23 23 58
Bowman in a pod.

After Bowman returns to the Discovery I, Hal denies him reentry into the pod bay. So Bowman has to maneuver the pod over to the emergency airlock. Unfortunately, in his haste to retrieve his friend, Bowman had not bothered to don the helmet of his life-support suit because he had not believed he would need it, making it very difficult to enter the emergency airlock, as he would have to travel through the vacuum of space in order to do so.

This, however, does not stop Bowman.

Risking the hazards of explosive decompression, he eventually gets inside, grabs a space helmet, and goes to Hal’s logic memory center to erase his memory.

There he pulls out the memory tablets that control Hal’s higher functions.

OIP C.z1to2Lu sHRrOgNxhg0wlQHaD4
Disconnecting HAL.

As his memory degrades, Hal begins to give off information programmed very early in his life, such as the date he became operational. When all his logic is gone, he begins to sing the song “Daisy Bell.”

His final act of consciousness is to play a briefing that Dr. Heywood R. Floyd pre-recorded about the Tycho Monolith before their departure, and the real purpose of the Discovery One’s mission. As well that the insane idea that the owner / designers of HAL programmed it to lie.

Now…

Please consider that any systems; any devices; any mechanisms designed by man should NEVER have the capability to override human input.

This is well descried by the move, with the HAL computer system, and it seriously seems to be the case with all these Boeing aircraft crashes.

I can POSITIVELY tell you that one singular event resulting is one singular death would  ABSOLUTELY stop the adoption of that system in other industires. It doesn’t matter what industry it is.  Ceiling fans. Clothes irons. Motorcycles. Chainsaws. Rifles. One fatality, and the system is gone and will NEVER be revisited.

But somehow these systems in airplanes and automobiles are exceptions. At least in American products.

One cannot help thinking, especially if you ARE an American, that the United States is involved and WANTS the ability of the software to override the driver / pilot in the vehicle.

If you accept that notion…

…then many of the software related “accidents” of planes and automobiles with these systems are used as mechanisms of control by the United States “leadership”.

Remember boys and girls…

… REAL secrets are secret.

Every evidence is that this is exactly what is happening. While there might be some debate on the nuiances of implementation, the technologies and the systems involved, one thing is unmistakable…

The seriously ODD behaviors of the United States government is best explained by this exact senario.

Think about it.

Break.

Animal death and spirits visiting

All this talk about plunging planes, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons and everything all initiated by the Untied States government is disturbing to me. They obviously have never experienced sorry and grief.

They are not NORMAL people.

There is something wrong with them.

Here’s how normal animals act…video 34MB

Bathe and Brew

Perfect for the jet-set on the go!

2022 03 23 11 55
Perfect for the jet-set on the go!

Funny and fun cats

Here are some really great examples of how much fun you can have with your cat friends. video 100MB

Amazing Cats

Cats areally are amazing. Just some great cat adventures. They are truly very special creatures. video 16MB

Happy times

Treasure the times that you have. Make them happy and share them with your friends. Cat love video 18MB

We all need each other now

Now, more than any other time in our lives, we need others. Make friends. SHare your time. Appreciate what you have. Make your life a good one. Be a Rufus. Show friendship. Show love. Show care. video 90MB

Be the Rufus

Take part in society. Stop being a spectator, and stop thinking that everything is someone else’s problem. The future depends on YOU. Take an active role in it. In every way, every day. Be the best you can be and help others. make the world a better place to live in. I believe in your. video 11MB

Make those around you smile

You will bring happiness to your environment. Smile. Say good things. Even if they are lies. Make your environment better. It’s quantum physics 101. video 120MB

Conclusions

I cannot say that one thing or the other is happening, and the causes and reasons for them. Later, I will ask the Domain Commander for some insight. However, right now, I know nothing.

Sure there might be all sorts of reasons for the observed behaviors, the strange actions by the USA and the West, and all the craziness. There’s really no way to really know the actual causes. So don’t worry about it. And believe me, as much as I want to know, the fact is, I don’t NEED to know.

I don’t know anything about chem-trails, nano-bots, or anything like that. I do know that everyone in the United States and the West are acting really, really weird. It’s like they are all having some kind of mass insanity.

After 30 years of glue sniffing euphoria, the US is now crashing. 

And when it realizes it is cutting off its limbs to keep its jaundiced organs alive, it will have to make major, and costly, changes in living arrangements. 

Mass transit in lieu of suburban sprawl. No more bloated military. A return to local industry and farming. Far more labor intensive cooperatives that actually do things and make stuff. Regional cultural and quasi-sufficiency. The end to industrial entertainment and woke academia. A resurgence of a proletariat based religion of hard work and respect. A return to classical literature and art. 

Oh, how to pay for it all on NO budget?

America is in shambles, but the leadership doesn’t realize it yet.  It’s like a family living off maxed-out credit, the family is stunned then the credit cards no longer work at the register.

That’s where the USA, and the EU are at right now.

Oh, they still have their shopping list, and two shopping carts filled with expensive steaks, groceries and all sorts of pricy items. But the cashier is there looking impatient, stamping her foot, and ready to call her manager. Oh, you have to pay in cash. She says.

Soon, very soon, the situation will accelerate to something bad.

It’s just really, really fucked up.

FUTURE

Evidence strongly suggests that the remote viewing of the 2025 by the Deagal Report is correct. It also validates the theory of Generational Turnings and the rise and fall of nations.

You will see many more strange things occur in the future.

We are not anywhere near the peak inflection point. But it is moving forward and I hope to be out of it’s way. I hope you all are as well.

BASIC PREP

Hyper-inflation is starting to hit the West. Be prudent.

Make sure that you have a garden, and a larder with lots of basics. Rice. Flour. Canned goods. Powdered milk.

Remember that one Burger King extra value meal is the same price as a massive bag of rice. Remember that one Starbucks coffee is the same prices as a massive bag of flour; and make sure that you have the tools to strain out the flour.

Learn to fish.

Own a bicycle, and use it. If you use it to ride to work one day a week, you will cut your commute expenses by 20%.

Have a solar panel to charge your phone with.

ADVANCED PREP

Have a good supply of your medicines, and lots of antibiodics. Set up a medical kit. Tell your doctor that you are equipping a sailboat for a long sea cruse, and give him a list of medicines for the first aid box. Get the prescriptions and fill it out.

It’s never too late to start. Do not plan on trying to go to the woods and forests. Those places will be crowded with the unprepaired. Your best solution is to “bug out in place”. Be mobile within your well-established community.

If you think that you can survive being alone, I’ve got news for you; that’s a fiction. Survivors are those that band together into groups. There’s strength in community. Read your history.

FUNDAMENTALS

For God’s sakes, turn off that bullshit “news”. It’s all screeching lies.

Have a skill, asset, ability, or feature that you can provide to your community that is beneficial to the community.

If you don’t have one. Get one. Learn, make, create or establish. Volunteer. Network locally.

  • Handiman skills.
  • Welding, plumbing, machining, autorepair.
  • Medical.
  • Farming, fishing, harvesting, growing.

It doesn’t mean that you will need to endure a post-nuclear fiasco. But in whatever changes that might hit your own individual communities, you will have the skills, networking and abilites to make you locally valuable.

Don’t believe me?

Ask PL. He’s doing this, and is very busy. Maybe too busy for MM here, but it’s the future. Participate. Make a difference. Smile. Socialize. stick to the fundamental basics.

Don’t get caught up in what you cannot change. It’s stressful, don’t you know.

Don’t get all wrapped up in the causes or the reasons, or the people behind the curtains. They won’t be revealed until the history books are written.

Be kind, calm and adaptable. Do your verbal affirmations. Be the Rufus. I beleive in you all.

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

More updates on the changing of the Geo-Political scene

I just spoke this morning with a Russian friend in Moscow. He is more optimistic about the future of Russia than I have ever heard him to be in the past. 

He says good riddance to all the U.S. companies, and sees this as a real opportunity for Russia to further develop their economy and restore their culture from Western cultural imperialism. 

The devaluation of the Ruble has little effect on the economy except for imported goods. 

Since 2014 Russia has been becoming self-sufficient. 

The lower Ruble will protect home industries and be a defacto tariff against imports. 

He and others are talking about a welcome return to an economy similar of the Soviet Union. 

I hope he is right because for the past 20 years that I have been going to Russia I saw a troubling trend to neoliberalism and austerity. 

Many Russians did to and were not happy about it. 

It cost Putin a lot of lost popularity including from my friend who I spoke to today. My wife and I are hearing similar stories from others inside Russia.

-David

Good news if you are Russian. Good news if you are Chinese. Bad news if you are part of the collapsing United States Empire. But you would never know this by reading the daily “news” feeds.

By gosh! The propiganda is thick.

Really. It’s thick like tar.

I need waders to trudge through the muck. It is think, stinky and relentless. And then interspersed in all the grime are the oily “experts” who have a thing or two to say about everything. You pretty much can tell from which basket of USD they are paid from. How can you sort everything out? Well, this article is my attempt.

I’m a simple guy and I look at things simply. So let’s look at the big-picture overview.

  • Major Geo-political realignments happen every 70 to 85 years.
  • This one is on time and on schedule.

It’s always the same template; the same pattern. Oh, there might be some new twists; mostly technology, but it’s pretty much a well understood process.

In this Geopolitical shake-up it’s a new beast of sorts. It has a new “twist” to the old template. And this new feature is critical to understanding what is going on.

  • Russia is not alone. It is not “isolated”.
  • China is not alone.
  • Russia and China have created a unified block; an “Asia”.
  • And now, India has joined this block officially (and distanced themselves from QUAD).

Asia = Russia + China + India.

.

So, what are we witnessing? What is all the “hubbub” on the Internet and in the “news” all about? Is it about Ukraine?

No. It’s not. It’s about something else.

Keep your focus.

It’s all about a much larger Geo-Political realignment. And the wars, color revolutions, strife, inflation, battles, wars, revolutions, and all the rest are just confusion and smoke during this period of change.

Keep focused.

  • The former global leader; The United States is collapsing.
  • A united Asia is rising (Russia plus China with India).
  • Normal expected death thrashing by the USA is in process.

The death throes are at all levels. This includes International as well as domestic. Big changes at all levels.

But, people say, “it seems so spontaneous and out of control”. To which I argue. “No it isn’t”.

Instead the collapse is being managed.

The collapse of the West is being MANAGED.

It is being managed by Russia and China, with some help by our friends (wink – wink).

None of this managment is being written about. None of it can be seen, as the dying empire has flooded all “news” with complex and detailed lies, and nonsense. And if you get caught up in the lies, and fabrications you will read about the failure of Russia to take over the Ukraine, and how Putin is on the way out, and how China is going to collapse any day now, and so on and so forth.

It’s just noise. Tune it out.

In this article, I will take some hand-picked articles to help direct the reader through the swampy muck of lies. Each article has strengths and weaknesses, and I will do my best to help describe what’s going on through them.

In these articles, read them not for the specific points that they are trying to point out, but rather for how they fit within the much larger picture. Keep in mind that larger picture.

The death of the existing world power results in…

  • High inflation resulting in money becoming worthless (within the dying empire).
  • A retraction of actual military action, but an uptick in military threatenings.
  • A change in the dominant global reserve currency.
  • Economic, social, and other “bubbles” all popping in the dying empire.
  • A confused state of Geo-political alignments as the empire dies.

We begin with some excellent stuff from MoA. In this article, “b” argues that the dying United States empire is impotent. That both Russia and China (Asia) have played the Geopolitical chess game, and has the empire “boxed in”. No matter what it does, it will make losing (no-win) moves…

[1] To Punish Russia The ‘Liberal Order’ Attempts To Suicide Itself

Two days ago we looked at why Russia is doing what it does:

Russia understood Zelensky's remark in Munich as a threat by Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons. It already has the expertise, materials and means to do that.

A fascist controlled government with nukes on Russia's border? This is not about Putin at all. No Russian government of any kind could ever condone that.

I believe that this credible threat, together with the artillery preparations for a new war on Donbas, was what convinced Russia's government to intervene by force.

The ‘west’ had failed to understand Russia’s need to act. It has failed to make the necessary commitments, and accept Russia’s reasonable demands, to avoid the struggle. In consequence it will now fall apart. The knee-jerk reaction to Russia’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine will, as Alastair Crooke writes, lead to the end of the ‘liberal order’:

So Biden, finally, has his foreign policy ‘success’: Europe is walling itself off from Russia, China, and the emerging integrated Asian market. It has sanctioned itself from ‘dependency’ on Russian natural gas (without prospect of any immediate alternatives) and it has thrown itself in with the Biden project. Next up, the EU pivot to sanctioning China?

Will this last? It seems improbable. German industry has a long history for staging its own mercantile interests before wider geo-political ambitions – before, even, EU interests. And in Germany, the business class effectively is the political class and needs competitively-priced energy.

Whilst the rest of the world shows little or no enthusiasm to join with sanctions on Russia (China has ruled out sanctions on Russia), Europe is in hysteria. This will not fade quickly. The new ‘Iron Curtain’ erected in Brussels may last years.

But what of the unintended consequences to last Saturday’s ‘sanctions Blitzkrieg’: the ‘unknowable unknowns’ in Rumsfeld’s famous mantra? The unprecedented switch-off affecting a key part of the Globalist system did not download into a neutral, inert context – It developed into an emotionally hyper-charged atmosphere of Russophobia.

Now reality comes back to bite the inept minions who attempt to rule over us.

2022 03 14 10 49
2022 03 14 10 49

Europe can not sustain this, Russia can:

In sum, the changes set out by von der Leyen and the EU, with surging crude oil costs, could potentially tip global markets into crisis, and set off spiraling inflation. Cost inflation created by energy costs spiraling higher and food disruptions are not so easily susceptible to monetary remedies. If the daily drama of the war in Ukraine starts to fade from public view, and inflation persists, the political cost of von der Leyen’s Saturday drama is likely to be European-wide recession.

“Since well before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Europeans have been struggling under the weight of runaway energy bills”, OilPrice.com notes. In Germany, for some, one month’s energy costs the same as they used to pay for a whole year; in the UK the government has raised the price cap for energy bills by a whopping 54%, and in Italy a recent 40% domestic energy cost hike could now nearly double.

The New York Times describes this impact on local businesses and industries as nothing short of “frightening”, as all kinds of small businesses across Europe (prior to last week’s events) have been forced to cease their operations as energy costs outweigh profits. Large industries have not been immune to sticker shock either. “Almost two-thirds of the 28,000 companies surveyed by the Association of German Chambers of Commerce and Industry this month rated energy prices as one of their biggest business risks … For those in the industrial sector, the figure was as high as 85 percent.”

And it is not only Europe. Energy prices are based on global markets. As are the prices for many other minerals and metals which have suddenly become rare:

 

2022 03 14 10 44
2022 03 14 10 44

The U.S. will be hit just as much as Europe. Early today oil prices in Europe hit $139 per barrel, well above last week’s market close. They will increase further. Gasoline prices in the U.S. will soon hit $6-7-8 per gallon.

The attempt by the U.S. to rush towards a new Iran deal to get Iranian oil flooding the markets has failed. Russia, together with Iran, has successfully blocked that move. Sanctions on Russia mean that Iran can not export its enriched uranium to Russia to be turned into nuclear fuel. No Iranian export of enriched uranium means no JCPOA deal. Secretary of State Blinken has failed to understand that. The supposedly ready to be signed return to the nuclear deal is now in jeopardy.

Some U.S. refineries at the south coast are designed to only process heavy oil variants. Since 2019 the U.S. has blockaded heavy oil imports from Venezuela and replaced them with imports of heavy Ural variants from Russia. It has now send too officials to Caracas to try to get Venezuela’s oil flowing again. That would of course require to lift all sanctions off Venezuela and to return all confiscated companies and the gold that is owned by that country. It is not going to happen anytime soon.

High end German cars are build with aluminum from Russia. Boeing needs Russian titanium to build planes. These manufacturers will soon start to lay off people. All this while food, heating and mobility costs will increase dramatically. A deep recession combined with strong inflation will rip social cohesion apart. I do expect strong anger in the streets of Europe and the U.S. There will be riots and in consequence a strong political move to the right. The mid-term elections will destroy the Russophobic Democrats.

Michael Hudson notes the immense strategic damage the U.S. has done to itself:

The recent escalation of U.S. sanctions blocking Europe, Asia and other countries from trade and investment with Russia, Iran and China has imposed enormous opportunity costs – the cost of lost opportunities – on U.S. allies. And the recent confiscation of the gold and foreign reserves of Venezuela, Afghanistan and now Russia, along the targeted grabbing of bank accounts of wealthy foreigners (hoping to win their hearts and minds, along with recovery of their sequestered accounts), has ended the idea that dollar holdings or those in its sterling and euro NATO satellites are a safe investment haven when world economic conditions become shaky.

So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving dollar diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States. But U.S. officials are forcing them to overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.

This will not just happen with China or Russia but the whole world will over the next years turn away from the dollarized U.S. system:

Nobody thought that the postwar 1945-2020 world order would give way this fast. A truly new international economic order is emerging, although it is not yet clear just what form it will take. But “prodding the Bear” with the U.S./NATO confrontation with Russia has passed critical-mass level. It no longer is just about Ukraine. That is merely the trigger, a catalyst for driving much of the world away from the US/NATO orbit.

The next showdown may come within Europe itself as nationalist politicians seek to lead a break-away from the over-reaching U.S. power-grab over its European and other Allies to keep them dependent on U.S.-based trade and investment. The price of their continuing obedience is to impose cost-inflation on their industry while relinquishing their democratic electoral politics to subordination to America’s NATO proconsuls.

These consequences cannot really be deemed “unintended.”

All the consequences of the ‘west’s’ reaction to Russia’s move were foreseeable. It is pure recklessness and stupidity that have allowed them to take place. The ‘west’ will now get punished for the bad movie it has launched.

Too bad that I don’t speak Russian … It is now the place to be.

Jimmy Salford @1Fubar - 7:06 UTC · Mar 6, 2022

Russia has already been cut off from CNN, Pornhub and Facebook. The US is now working on depriving Russians of MacDonalds and CocaCola. If they keep going with these sanctions, Russians will soon be among the healthiest, well adjusted and best informed people on the planet.

Next up is this piece from the UK tabloid “Dailymail.com”.

Now this tabloid is all gung-ho about how great the West is, and all of that. They have written tons of articles that are a just lies. And that includes starvation in Shenzhen, slave trade in Xinjiang and all the rest. fun reading science fiction, but not actual reporting.

This here is it’s the first “reasonable” article that isn’t full of lies and fantasies. The comments in the article are interesting, and the vast bulk of it’s readership must welcome a more “level-headed” viewpoint.

Read this article, and note the idea that Russia is managing a threat vector from the West. Not tht an evil Putin dictator is going to invade Europe. What is so surprising is that this article is from the shrill-mills of the UK.

[2] Putin is NOT crazy and the Russian invasion is NOT failing.

The West’s delusions about this war – and its failure to understand the enemy – will prevent it from saving Ukraine, writes military analyst BILL ROGGIO

Wishful thinking has the upper hand in the battle to shape Western perceptions of the war in Ukraine.

Sympathy for the outnumbered and outgunned defenders of Kyiv has led to the exaggeration of Russian setbacks, misunderstanding of Russian strategy, and even baseless claims from amateur psychoanalysts that Putin has lost his mind.

A more sober analysis shows that Russia may have sought a knockout blow, but always had well-laid plans for follow-on assaults if its initial moves proved insufficient.

The world has underestimated Putin before and those mistakes have led, in part, to this tragedy in Ukraine.

We must be clear-eyed now that the war is underway.

Yet even the professionals at the Pentagon are letting sympathy cloud their judgement.

Just two days into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. Department of Defense briefers were quick to claim that failing to take Kyiv in the opening days of the war amounted to a serious setback.

DoD briefers implied that Russia’s offensive was well behind schedule or had even failed because the capital had not fallen.

But U.S. leaders should have learned to restrain their hopes after their catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Once again, U.S. and Western officials are falling into the trap of failing to understand the enemy and his objectives.

2022 03 05 09 00
2022 03 05 09 00

Allegedly, Putin believed that the Ukrainian government would collapse once Russian troops crossed the frontier and pushed to Kyiv, and that the operation has failed because the Ukrainian government remains in place.

Putin certainly hoped for a swift victory, but he clearly was not relying on his opening salvo as the only plan for success.

Rather, the Russian military was prepared to take the country by force if a swift decapitation strike fell short.

This kind of plan should be familiar to Americans who remember the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

In the first hours of the war, the U.S. Air Force launched its ‘shock and awe’ campaign in an attempt to kill Saddam Hussein and other key leaders and bring down the government. Saddam survived, but the U.S. military was fully prepared to follow up with a ground assault.

A look at the Russian military offensive demonstrates there was a plan for a full-scale invasion, which Russia is now executing.

Conventional, mechanized warfare is a time and resource consuming enterprise, and an operation of this scope isn’t cobbled together in days.

The Russian offensive is taking place on four separate fronts. On a fifth front, in eastern Ukraine, which Putin declared independent last week, Russian forces are tying down Ukrainian troops that are needed elsewhere.

The bulk of the Russian forces are advancing southward from Belarus to Kyiv.

Russian advance forces, including air, mobile and reconnaissance troops, have been engaged with Ukrainian troops outside of Kyiv since the start of the war.

A massive column of Russian troops, estimated at over 40 miles long, is just 20 miles north of Kyiv, and is likely assembling to surround the capital.

If Russian forces can take Kyiv and push southward to link up with forces on the Crimean front, thus splitting Ukraine in two, it would be a major blow to the Zelensky government.

What matters more than a handful of setbacks is that Russian forces have pushed 70 miles into contested terrain in less than a week and are on the outskirts of the capital.

2022 03 05 09 01
2022 03 05 09 01

This is not a sign of a disorganized, poorly assembled, and failed offensive.

The southward push from Belarus to Kyiv is supported by another Russian column, launched from the east in the vicinity of Kursk.

If this column can link up with Russian troops near Kyiv, it will envelop Ukrainian forces in most of Chernihiv and Sumy provinces, depriving the Ukrainian military of much needed soldiers and war material needed elsewhere, and cutting off the government from two northern provinces.

Further east, Russian forces have launched a broad offensive aimed at Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which is now under siege.

In the south, Russian forces, supported by amphibious assaults from the Sea of Azov, have poured into Ukraine from Crimea.

On this front, Russian forces have branched out along two main axes, one northwest along the Pivdennyi Buh River, and another northeast along the coast and inland towards the Donbas region, which Russia declared independent shortly before the invasion.

If Russian columns from either southern front can link up with forces further north, they would cut off many Ukrainian troops from reinforcement—one of the two columns has already advanced roughly 160 miles.

Russian generals have often chosen to bypass towns and cities that are putting up stiff opposition and isolating them to deal with later.

There are reports that Russian forces have escalated attacks on civilians, particularly in Kharkiv.

At the moment, the artillery and rocket attacks there have been limited, perhaps to send a message to the citizens as a warning of what may come.

Putin appears to want to take Ukraine intact, but will not hesitate to increase the level of brutality if needed.

The systematic nature of the Russian assault is at odds with speculation that Putin has lost control of his senses.

Nobody knows for sure, but Putin’s actions appear to be that of a cold and calculating adversary.

Dismissing his decision to invade Ukraine as a form of madness is effectively an excuse to ignore Putin’s likely motivations and future actions.

Strategically, Putin’s advance on Ukraine began well over a decade ago, when he invaded and Balkanized Georgia by recognizing the Kremlin’s puppet regimes in the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia.

2022 03 05 09 05
2022 03 05 09 05

In 2014, Putin occupied and annexed the strategic Ukrainian region of Crimea, which served as a launchpad for the current invasion.

Putin paid little price for either action.

The United States and Europe imposed limited sanctions but continued to engage with him on the Iranian nuclear deal and other top issues.

Today, Putin has calculated that taking Ukraine by force is in his and Russia’s interest.

He no doubt anticipated that the West would impose diplomatic and economic sanctions, which U.S. and European leaders threatened beforehand.

Putin may have miscalculated Ukrainian resistance and the intensity of the West’s opposition, but it doesn’t mean he is crazy, or didn’t consider the possibilities and chose to invade regardless.

It remains to be seen if Putin’s plan will succeed or fail, but what is clear is that there was a plan to invade Ukraine in force, and that plan has been executed since day one.

Ukrainian troops are putting up a valiant fight facing long odds and difficult conditions. Russia holds most if not all of the advantages.

It can, and has, attacked Ukraine from three different directions. The Russian military holds a decided advantage in manpower, as well as air, naval and armor superiority.

It has vast resources to draw on. While Ukraine has the support of much of the international community, which is providing weapons, Ukraine is fighting alone.

Believing Russia’s assault is going poorly may make us feel better but is at odds with the facts.

We cannot help Ukraine if we cannot be honest about its predicament.

I suppose that the author is trying to say to his fellow journalists;

"look, guys, our propaganda must be subtle. Not so obviously false, and easily disproved. Tone it down some"...

Next up is this item. Here, we see that all the “news” onslaught is just that. Nonsense, and that the truth is that very little that the United States, and NATO does has any effect on Russia.

It’s like a screaming child having a tantrum, and the adult closes the door and locks it. Meanwhile the child has a fit.  Louder and louder it cries. But the adults, go eat a nice dinner, drink some wine. Sing, dance and have sex. And the child still has the tantrum oblivious to the reality going on…

[3] Russians don’t care what American opinions are

Source: https://expert.ru/

It would be childish to assume that ‘when we are beaten, we get stronger.’ Although we have indeed strengthened our national sovereignty in the economic sphere under the influence of American sanctions, but not to such an extent that we do not pay attention to them at all. The damage from sanctions, of course, is there and it is significantly enhanced by the passive policy of the monetary authorities.

Permanent intimidation of Russia with new ‘sanctions from hell’  has long ceased to excite Russian public opinion. I remember how in 2014, like others in the first list subjected to US sanctions, I was interviewed and we all assured journalists that we were proud of such recognition of our services to Russia. Since then, the number of individuals and legal entities sanctioned by the United States and its satellites has increased many times and has not had any noticeable impact on our country. On the contrary, the retaliatory measures introduced by our Government in terms of restricting food imports from these countries significantly contributed to the growth of domestic agricultural production, which has almost completely replaced the import of poultry and meat.

Defense and energy industry enterprises have learned to circumvent these sanctions by refusing to use the dollar, and at the same time American banks,  in favour of national currencies and banks of partner countries. The next step is the development of digital currency instruments that can be used without resorting to the services of banks which are afraid of falling under sanctions. The Russian people are following with interest the return to the country of the capital exported by the oligarchs and themselves, who are afraid of confiscation and arrest in NATO countries.

American sanctions have affected not so much Russia as third countries which have been subjected to pressure from Washington. First of all, our European neighbours, who have curtailed most of the cooperation projects in the scientific, technical and energy spheres. They also affected Chinese commercial banks operating in the dollar zone, which preferred to stop servicing Russian customers. Russia’s trade turnover with the EU and the United States has naturally decreased, while with China it has grown. In the period 2014-2020, in monetary terms, Russia’s trade turnover with China increased by 17.8% from $88.4 billion to $104.1 billion. The share of APEC [Asia Pacific Economic Conference] and SCO [Shanghai Cooperation Organisation] countries in the external trade turnover of the EAEU [Eurasian Economic Union] increased during this period from 29.6% to 36.4% and from 16.3% to 24.1%, respectively. The share of the EU in the external trade turnover of the EAEU, on the contrary, decreased from 46.2% in 2015 to 36.7% in 2020. Trade turnover with the United States during the period under review decreased by 18.1% from $29.1 billion to $23.9 billion.

In fact, with the help of sanctions, the United States is trying to oust Russian goods from the markets of its satellites, replacing its own. This was most clearly manifested in the European natural gas market, where the US share has increased sharply, although it has not yet been possible to displace Russia in the European natural gas market.

The main result of the US-European sanctions was a change in the geographical structure of Russian foreign economic relations in favor of China, the expansion of cooperation with which fully compensates for the curtailment of trade and economic relations with the EU. European consumers have to switch to more expensive American energy carriers, and their producers simply lose the Russian market. The total losses of the EU from anti-Russian sanctions are estimated at $ 250 billion.

Another important result of the US sanctions was the fall in the share of the dollar in international settlements. For Russia, as for other countries which have been subjected to US sanctions, the dollar has become a toxic currency. By tracing all dollar transactions, the US punitive authorities can block payments, freeze, or even confiscate assets at any time. For 8 years after the sanctions were imposed, the dollar’s share in international settlements decreased by 13.5 percentage points (from 60.2% in 2014 to 46.7% in 2020).

Sanctions have become a powerful incentive for the transition to settlements in national currencies and the development of national payment systems. Thus, in the mutual trade of the EAEU states, the share of the dollar decreased by more than 6 percentage points (from 26.3% in 2014 to 20.0% at the end of 2020).

I remember how ten years ago, when considering the risks to the Russian banking system at the National Banking Council, I asked the then head of the Central Bank: ‘Is the risk of disconnecting Russian banks from the international SWIFT banking transmission system being considered, as Western partners did in relation to Iran?’

To which I received the answer: ‘We cannot consider the risk of an atomic bomb hitting the Bank of Russia.’

However, the management of the Central Bank has taken measures — today Russia has its own system for transmitting electronic messages between banks — the Bank of Russia’s Financial Message Transmission System (SPFS), as well as its own payment system for Mir bank cards, which is interfaced with the Chinese Union Pay system and can be used for cross-border payments and transfers.

Both of them are open to foreign partners and are already widely used not only in domestic, but also in international settlements.

Disabling SWIFT is no longer seen as a large-scale threat — it will benefit the development of our payment and financial information systems.

However, it would be childish to assume that ‘when we are beaten, we get stronger.’ Although we have indeed strengthened our national sovereignty in the economic sphere under the influence of American sanctions, but not to such an extent that we do not pay attention to them at all. The damage from sanctions, of course, is there and it is significantly enhanced by the passive policy of the monetary authorities.

Since 2014, when, with the connivance of the regulator, currency speculators brought down the ruble exchange rate by manipulating the market, the latter has been used by sanctions as a fail-safe fuse of macroeconomic stability. At the same time, it was in 2014, on the eve of the already announced US sanctions, that the Bank of Russia switched to a free-floating exchange rate regime.

And only after that, the United States introduced their sanctions, being sure that speculators would multiply their negative effect.

When the ruble fell by almost half, Obama was pleased to say that ‘the Russian economy is torn to shreds.’  As a result of this manipulation of the Russian currency market, ruble incomes and savings depreciated, and speculators received over 35 billion rubles.in profit. But this happened not because of sanctions, but rather because of the complicity of the Bank of Russia, which left the exchange rate formation at the mercy of international speculators on the recommendation of Washington financial organizations.

Only very naive people can believe in the formation of an equilibrium ruble exchange rate in the free-float mode. The Bank of Russia’s exclusion of itself from ruble exchange rate regulation means that international currency speculators are engaged in this. On the rocking of the ruble exchange rate, which has become one of the most unstable currencies in the world with a threefold provision of foreign exchange reserves, international speculators receive multibillion dollar profits, and Russians, the depreciation of their ruble savings and income together with bursts of inflation. At the same time, the investment climate is hopelessly deteriorating — the instability of the ruble exchange rate creates uncertainty about the main parameters of investment projects using imported equipment and export-oriented products.

Thus, the damage caused by US financial sanctions is inextricably linked to the monetary policy of the Bank of Russia which is the ideal one for them. Its essence boils down to a tight binding of the ruble issue to export earnings, and the ruble exchange rate to the dollar. In fact, an artificial shortage of money is being created in the economy, and the strict policy of the Central Bank leads to an increase in the cost of lending, which kills business activity and hinders the development of infrastructure in the country.

Sanctions restrictions have caused an extremely high demand for corporate financing in the domestic market. Against the background of a relatively low key rate and access to cheaper funding, large banks consistently keep a net interest margin above the average market level,  5.4% to 6%; whereas for the largest banks in China, the USA, Germany, France, Great Britain and Japan, the net interest margin ranges from 0.8% to 2.3%.

However, these windfalls are not directed to financing infrastructure projects, but to the acquisition of disparate non-core businesses that are combined into ecosystems. Most of these businesses remain unprofitable even at the EBITDA [earnings] level. Despite this, billions of rubles are still spent on their development.

These figures are quite comparable to the volume of investments in a major infrastructure project in the real sector of the economy, which can bring both job growth and contribution to the development of the economy. But such projects (as well as filling the budget) are still left to the raw materials companies, while the largest financial corporations prefer to direct their income to the creation of chimeras.

In fact, it was the connivance of the Central Bank which led to the fact that Russia and its industry were drained of blood and unable to develop.

If the Central Bank fulfilled its constitutional duty to ensure the stability of the ruble — and it has all the possibilities for this due to the threefold surplus of the currency reserves of the monetary base — then financial sanctions would be nothing to us. They could even be turned, as in other sectors of the economy, to the benefit of the banking sector, if the Central Bank replaced the loans withdrawn by Western partners with its own special refinancing instruments. This would increase the capacity of the Russian credit and banking system by more than 10 trillion rubles.

Also, it would fully compensate for the outflow of foreign financing of investments, preventing a decline in investment and economic activity without any inflationary consequences. Thus, it would be possible to avoid a long period of decline in real incomes of the population caused solely by the peculiarities of the monetary policy pursued in Russia, which ensured the effectiveness of sanctions in the monetary and financial sphere.

Assessing the consequences of anti-Russian sanctions, it is impossible to ignore the consequences of severing economic ties with Ukraine. The mutual abolition of the free trade regime and the imposition of an embargo on a wide range of goods led to the rupture of cooperative ties that ensured the reproduction of many types of high-tech products. Blocking the work of Russian banks led to the depreciation of multibillion-dollar Russian investments. The refusal of the Ukrainian authorities to service the debt to Russia caused several billion dollars’ more losses. In total, their volume is estimated at about $100 billion for each of the parties. This is really significant and in many ways irreparable real damage, which we ourselves have aggravated with retaliatory sanctions.

To date, the outcome of the economic consequences of anti-Russian sanctions is as follows. Ukraine suffered the biggest losses relative to GDP, in absolute terms — the European Union. Russian losses of potential GDP, since 2014, amount to about 50 trillion rubles. But only 10% of them can be explained by sanctions, while 80% of them were the result of monetary policy. The United States benefits from anti-Russian sanctions, replacing the export of Russian hydrocarbons to the EU, as well as China; replacing the import of European goods by Russia. We could completely offset the negative consequences of financial sanctions if the Bank of Russia fulfilled its constitutional duty to ensure a stable ruble exchange rate, and not the recommendations of Washington financial organizations.

Consider the threats of American and European Russophobes against the new ‘sanctions from hell’.  It has already been mentioned above that the threat of disconnecting Russian banks from the SWIFT system, widely discussed in the media today, although it will interfere with international settlements at first, will benefit the Russian banking and payment system in the medium term.

The threat to ban transactions with Russian bonds will also benefit us, since their issue in a budget surplus is nothing more than a source of profit for foreign speculators.

And their profitability is overestimated three times in relation to the market assessment of their riskiness. The termination of the self-serving [самоедской] policy of the monetary authorities, who are borrowing money which is objectively unnecessary to the budget at exorbitant prices, will allow us to save billions of dollars. If the sanctioneers try to prohibit the purchase of the foreign currency bonds of Russian corporations, then it will be possible to compensate for the missing financing for the purchase of imported equipment by buying them out at the expense of part of the excess foreign exchange reserves. If foreign loans are cut off to them, then the risk of their default will fall on the European and American banks themselves.

There is also a potential risk of seizure of Russian state assets. But we can respond to this symmetrically by imposing an embargo on servicing debt obligations to Western creditors and also arresting their assets. The losses of the parties will be approximately equal.

There remains, in fact, one threat – to take away foreign assets from Russian oligarchs. For all its popularity among the common people, this will stimulate the return of capital exported from the country, which will also have a positive effect for the Russian economy.

At the same time, we need to protect ourselves as much as possible from the expected escalation of US-European sanctions.

The most vulnerable place for our economy is its excessive offshoring.

Up to half of the assets of the Russian industry belong to non-residents. There are more than a trillion dollars of capital exported from the country abroad, half of which is involved in the reproduction of the Russian economy.

The simultaneous freezing of these assets can really dramatically worsen the situation of a number of strategically important enterprises dependent on the external market.

The Americans showed how this is done using the example of Rusal, establishing their control over it under the threat of stopping foreign trade activities. We could respond to this by nationalizing at least the giant hydroelectric power plants transferred to this corporation for a song and on dubious grounds, on the operation of which the lion’s share of its profits is based. But for some reason, they did not protect this one of the structural branches of our economy from the raider seizure by the US Treasury.

So, then Russia is cautious, aware and has plans in place. The harsh slap of American sanctions fell like a wisp of a feather on a pillow. Now, let’s see how it will actually happen.

Next up… what REALLY going to happen…

[4] Follow the money: how Russia will bypass western economic warfare

The US and EU are over-reaching on Russian sanctions. The end result could be the de-dollarization of the global economy and massive commodity shortages worldwide.

March 01 2022

So a congregation of NATO’s top brass ensconced in their echo chambers target the Russian Central Bank with sanctions and expect what?

Cookies?

What they got instead was Russia’s deterrence forces bumped up to “a special regime of duty” – which means the Northern and Pacific fleets, the Long-Range Aviation Command, strategic bombers and the entire Russian nuclear apparatus on maximum alert.

One Pentagon general very quickly did the basic math on that, and mere minutes later, a Ukrainian delegation was dispatched to conduct negotiations with Russia in an undisclosed location in Gomel, Belarus.

BOOM!

Expecting to lay economic warfare with Russia's Central Bank, Russia responded with the full force of hard, physical nuclear weaponary. Oh, so you want to play "hard ball" eh? You want to deal with us? You want to see what the flash or light, and hard gooey blood on your chest looks like? Do you?

Meanwhile, in the vassal realms, the German government was busy “setting limits to warmongers like Putin” – quite a rich undertaking considering that Berlin never set any such limits for the western warmongers who bombed Yugoslavia, invaded Iraq, or destroyed Libya in complete violation of international law.

While openly proclaiming their desire to “stop the development of Russian industry,” damage its economy, and “ruin Russia” – echoing American edicts on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, Venezuela and others in the Global South – the Germans could not possibly recognize a new categorical imperative.

They were finally liberated from their WWII culpability complex by none other than Russian President Vladimir Putin. Germany is finally free to support and weaponize neo-Nazis out in the open all over again – now of the Ukrainian Azov battalion variety.

To get the hang of how these NATO sanctions will “ruin Russia,” I asked for the succinct analysis of one of the most competent economic minds on the planet, Michael Hudson, author, among others, of a revised edition of the must-read Super-Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire.

Hudson remarked how he is

 “simply numbed over the near-atomic escalation of the US.”

On the confiscation of Russian foreign reserves and cut-off from SWIFT, the main point is “it will take some time for Russia to put in a new system, with China.

The result will end dollarization for good, as countries threatened with ‘democracy™’ or displaying diplomatic independence will be afraid to use US banks.”

This, Hudson says, leads us to “the great question: whether Europe and the Dollar Bloc can buy Russian raw materials – cobalt, palladium, etc, and whether China will join Russia in a minerals boycott.”

Hudson is adamant that “Russia’s Central Bank, of course, has foreign bank assets in order to intervene in exchange markets to defend its currency from fluctuations.

The ruble has plunged.

There will be new exchange rates.

Yet it’s up to Russia to decide whether to sell its wheat to West Asia, that needs it; or to stop selling gas to Europe via Ukraine, now that the US can grab it.”

About the possible introduction of a new Russia-China payment system bypassing SWIFT, and combining the Russian SPFS (System for Transfer of Financial Messages) with the Chinese CIPS (Cross-Border Interbank Payment System), Hudson has no doubts “the Russian-China system will be implemented.

The Global South will seek to join and at the same time keep SWIFT – moving their reserves into the new system.”

I’m going to de-dollarize myself

So the US itself, in another massive strategic blunder, will speed up de-dollarization. As the managing director of Bocom International Hong Hao told the Global Times, with energy trade between Europe and Russia de-dollarized, “that will be the beginning of the disintegration of dollar hegemony.”

It’s a refrain the US administration was quietly hearing last week from some of its own largest multinational banks, including notables like JPMorgan and Citigroup.

A Bloomberg article sums up their collective fears:

“Booting Russia from the critical global system – which handles 42 million messages a day and serves as a lifeline to some of the world’s biggest financial institutions – could backfire, sending inflation higher, pushing Russia closer to China, and shielding financial transactions from scrutiny by the west. It might also encourage the development of a SWIFT alternative that could eventually damage the supremacy of the US dollar.”

Those with IQs over 50 in the European Union (EU) must have understood that Russia simply could not be totally excluded from SWIFT, but maybe only a few of its banks: after all, European traders depend on Russian energy.

From Moscow’s point of view, that’s a minor issue. A number of Russian banks are already connected to China’s CIPS system. For instance, if someone wants to buy Russian oil and gas with CIPS, payment must be in the Chinese yuan currency. CIPS is independent of SWIFT.

Additionally, Moscow already linked its SPFS payment system not only to China but also to India and member nations of the Eurasia Economic Union (EAEU). SPFS already links to approximately 400 banks.

With more Russian companies using SPFS and CIPS, even before they merge, and other maneuvers to bypass SWIFT, such as barter trade – largely used by sanctioned Iran – and agent banks, Russia could make up for at least 50 percent in trade losses.

The key fact is that the flight from the US-dominated western financial system is now irreversible across Eurasia – and that will proceed in tandem with the internationalization of the yuan.

Russia has its own bag of tricks

Meanwhile, we’re not even talking yet about Russian retaliation for these sanctions. Former President Dmitry Medvedev already gave a hint: everything, from exiting all nuclear arms deals with the US to freezing the assets of western companies in Russia, is on the table.

So what does the “Empire of Lies” want? (Putin terminology, on Monday’s meeting in Moscow to discuss the response to sanctions.)

In an essay published this morning, deliciously titled America Defeats Germany for the Third Time in a Century: the MIC, OGAM and FIRE conquer NATO, Michael Hudson makes a series of crucial points, starting with how

“NATO has become Europe’s foreign policy-making body, even to the point of dominating domestic economic interests.”

He outlines the three oligarchies in control of US foreign policy:

First is the military-industrial complex, which Ray McGovern memorably coined as MICIMATT (military industrial Congressional intelligence media academia think tank). Hudson defines their economy base as

“monopoly rent, obtained above all from its arms sales to NATO, to West Asian oil exporters and to other countries with a balance-of-payments surplus.”

Second is the oil and gas sector, joined by mining (OGAM). Their aim is

“to maximize the price of energy and raw materials so as to maximize natural resource rent. Monopolizing the Dollar Area’s oil market and isolating it from Russian oil and gas has been a major US priority for over a year now, as the Nord Stream 2 pipeline from Russia to Germany threatened to link the western European and Russian economies together.”

Third is the “symbiotic” Finance, Insurance and Real Estate (FIRE) sector, which Hudson defines as

“the counterpart to Europe’s old post-feudal landed aristocracy living by land rents.”

As he describes these three rentier sectors that completely dominate post-industrial finance capitalism at the heart of the western system, Hudson notes how

“Wall Street always has been closely merged with the oil and gas industry (namely, the Citigroup and Chase Manhattan banking conglomerates).”

Hudson shows how

“the most pressing US strategic aim of NATO confrontation with Russia is soaring oil and gas prices. In addition to creating profits and stock market gains for US companies, higher energy prices will take much of the steam out of the German economy.”

He warns how food prices will rise “headed by wheat.” (Russia and Ukraine account for 25 percent of world wheat exports.)

From a Global South perspective, that’s a disaster:

“This will squeeze many West Asian and Global South food-deficient countries, worsening their balance of payments and threatening foreign debt defaults.”

As for blocking Russian raw materials exports,

“this threatens to cause breaks in supply chains for key materials, including cobalt, palladium, nickel, aluminum.”

And that leads us, once again, to the heart of the matter:

“The long-term dream of the US new Cold Warriors is to break up Russia, or at least to restore its managerial kleptocracy seeking to cash in their privatizations in western stock markets.”

That’s not going to happen.

Hudson clearly sees how

“the most enormous unintended consequence of US foreign policy has been to drive Russia and China together, along with Iran, Central Asia and countries along the Belt and Road initiative.”

Let’s confiscate some technology

Now compare all of the above with the perspective of a central European business tycoon with vast interests, east and west, and who treasures his discretion.

In an email exchange, the business tycoon posed serious questions about the Russian Central Bank support for its national currency, the ruble,

“which according to US planning is being destroyed by the west through sanctions and currency wolf packs who are exposing themselves by selling rubles short. There is really almost no amount of money that can beat the dollar manipulators against the ruble. A 20 percent interest rate will kill the Russian economy unnecessarily.”

The businessman argues that the chief effect of the rate hike

“would be to support imports that should not be imported. The fall of the ruble is thus favorable to Russia in terms of self-sufficiency. As import prices rise, these goods should start to be produced domestically. I would just let the ruble fall to find its own level which will for a while be lower than natural forces would permit as the US will be driving it lower through sanctions and short selling manipulation in this form of economic war against Russia.”

But that seems to tell only part of the story.

Arguably, the lethal weapon in Russia’s arsenal of responses has been identified by the head of the Center for Economic Research of the Institute of Globalization and Social Movements (IGSO), Vasily Koltashov: the key is to confiscate technology – as in Russia ceasing to recognize US rights to patents.

In what he qualifies as “liberating American intellectual property,”

Koltashov calls for passing a Russian law on

“friendly and unfriendly states. If a country turns out to be on the unfriendly list, then we can start copying its technologies in pharmaceuticals, industry, manufacturing, electronics, medicine. It can be anything – from simple details to chemical compositions.”

This would require amendments to the Russian constitution.

Koltashov maintains that

“one of the foundations of success of American industry was copying of foreign patents for inventions.”

Now, Russia could use

“China’s extensive know-how with its latest technological production processes for copying western products: the release of American intellectual property will cause damage to the United States to the amount of $10 trillion, only in the first stage. It will be a disaster for them.”

As it stands, the strategic stupidity of the EU beggars belief.

China is ready to grab all Russian natural resources – with Europe left as a pitiful hostage of the oceans and of wild speculators. It looks like a total EU-Russia split is ahead – with little trade left and zero diplomacy.

Now listen to the sound of champagne popping all across the MICIMATT.

And you all must see how this collapse of the USD will fit into the big picture with what is happening inside of the United States right now…

[5] WILL THERE BE A 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION?

“All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed, they must rely exclusively on force.” George Orwell

The smell of tyranny is in the air.

The level of propaganda, disinformation, and mistruth has reached astounding heights, as the ruling oligarchy/Deep State/globalist cabal are thrashing about violently because their frauds are being exposed on a daily basis.

This shift to the tyranny of force has massive implications for everyone on the planet.

When every quote from Orwell’s 1984 applies every day to everything swirling around us, you begin to realize we are in the midst of a dystopian nightmare which gets more ghoulish by the day.

The last two years have been a fraud of epic proportions, conducted by a cadre of evil money titans, their financial, media, and medical apparatchiks, with the objective of tearing down our existing social and economic structure…

…and “resetting” the world where they own everything and you own nothing, eat bugs, and provide the slave labor needed to keep society functioning.

Of course, this will be after they dispose of tens of millions of useless eaters through their Covid/Vaxx scheme, global war, and mass starvation.

The past two weeks have denoted a remarkable transformation in the pushing of the fraudulent fearmongering narrative about a relatively non-lethal flu…

  • vaccine mandates,
  • masking and shaming those with the common sense to rely on their immune systems,
  • to trying to provoke a world war over a border dispute with absolutely no relevance or strategic value to our country, other than to further enrich the military industrial complex and
  • the parasites and leeches in government, finance, media and war making industry who live for and love war.

The shift has been effortless because the ruling Party, over the last two years, learned they could make the willfully ignorant and indoctrinated masses believe the most absurd story-lines with broadcast propaganda, social media influencing, and using highly compensated “experts” to lie, obfuscate, and say whatever they were paid to say.

And just like that, the pandemic was over and a war the U.S. and NATO provoked has shifted the focus of the willfully ignorant to a new boogeyman – Vladimir Putin (aka the unhinged madman Hitler reincarnation).

Again, the plotline is eerily reminiscent of Orwell’s Two Minutes of Hate.

The members of the Party participated in a public setting to watch the enemy of the state (Emmanuel Goldstein) on a film screen and loudly express their hate for the enemy du jour.

I can’t help but recognize the similarities to the last six years here in our very own dystopian empire of lies and propaganda.

From 2016 through 2020 the face of Trump was on that screen, with the hatred of Hillary, her Deep State coup co-conspirators, the fake news media outlets, and the brain-dead liberal sycophants reaching historic levels of vitriol.

Once Trump was eradicated, the Covid virus became the enemy on the screen, but the masses were infused with fear and incited to hate those who refused to fear this Fauci created flu.

“The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in. Within thirty seconds any pretense was always unnecessary. 

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledgehammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one’s will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. A

nd yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.” 

 Orwell – 1984

The Party needed a human face to hate.

Once they began to rollout their Big Pharma clot shots, after falsifying their safety trial data and suppressing proven safe therapeutics like ivermectin and hydroxychloquine, the face of hate became everyone who refused to be the research in this despicable medical experiment which has been an epic failure thus far, with the long-term deadly consequences only beginning to be revealed.

The un-vaxxed (aka pure bloods) have been treated like dirt, hated, de-platformed, banned, fired, and ridiculed.

The two minutes of hate has extended for a year.

But our overlords have decided the time has come to change the channel of hate towards Putin, Russia, Alex Ovechkin, Russian vodka, Russian dressing and anyone who points out the U.S. and their NATO lapdogs have provoked this conflict by surrounding Russia with military bases and missiles.

A simple map shows why Putin felt it necessary to make a stand and confront his adversaries with a punch in the mouth.

NATOExpansion1997
NATO signed a treaty with Russia pledging NO WESTWARD expansion. They violated it 14 times, as the map clearly shows.

Thus far the sanctions are toothless because neither Europe nor the U.S. can stomach the pain of being cut-off from Russian gas and oil.

So, for the time being they will settle for their media mouthpieces conducting two minutes of hate on a grand scale until someone does something stupid and hell on earth is unleashed across the globe.

The timing of this Ukraine conflict has been impeccable for Biden, his Covidian Cultists, their hapless discredited media lapdogs, and all the authoritarian state and local politicians whose destruction of lives and businesses has been complete.

Now that everything the “conspiracy theorists” have been saying for two years has been proven right, these soulless goblins must distract from their criminal acts by using their power of media propaganda to lead the same clueless low IQ saps who believed their bullshit about masks, lockdowns, social distancing, vaccines, and vaccine mandates into believing we should go to war with Russia over an historical border dispute 5,000 miles from our shores.

The same dumbasses riding alone in the car with a mask on are the ones calling for the banning of Russia vodka as a patriotic gesture to support those brave neo-Nazi Ukrainians.

I find it endlessly amusing to see Maddow and the rest of the MSNBC left wing loonies supporting people they would classify as red neck white supremacist Trump supporters if they lived in the U.S.

They wear their hypocrisy and imbecility proudly, while foaming at the mouth at whoever they are paid to attack.

It’s as plain as the vacant look on Biden’s face during a press conference that Biden, his handlers, and his pollsters decided two weeks ago to Wag the Dog, scrap the covid farce, rally the country around the flag, and pretend their policies have not unleashed raging inflation, destroyed our economy, shattered the lives of millions, and unleashed an ongoing and long-term death sentence for the millions of trusting souls who believed their safe & effective narrative – injecting themselves with a DNA altering experimental drug which has already killed and maimed millions.

Amazingly, even though Covid cases have plummeted, they are still at the same levels as November 2021 – when mandatory masking, vaccine mandates, and heavy restrictions were in full effect, with Biden and his cronies committing un-Constitutional acts, in coordination with mega-corporations and mass media, to force supposedly free Americans to participate in their warped failed experiment.

2022 03 05 09 33
2022 03 05 09 33

 

It’s funny that Walensky and her corrupt CDC cohorts now are sure it is safe to go maskless, even though, according to their own statistics, covid deaths are now 65% higher than they were in November 2021.

If I recall, senile Joe was warning us about the dark winter ahead for the unvaccinated.

Another bogus narrative proven false.

After witnessing his brilliant prediction, I’m a little worried about his judgement on matters of nuclear war.

Fauci told us to trust the science, and he was the science.

But now he is completely on-board with rolling back everything he said was essential for society to function just a month ago.

His profile is being quickly diminished.

He has proven to be a Big Pharma hack, who sold his soul to Satan, and will go down in history as a sociopath mass murder.

Let’s face it, this was never about medical science, but political science.

  • Masks have never worked. Social distancing was a farce.
  • Lockdowns did not stop the virus.
  • The vaccines have failed on an epic scale.
  • The vaccines are killing and maiming people.
  • Vaccine mandates and passports are nothing more than a control and punishment mechanism.

The critical thinking resisters have been proven right on every front. Even the gullible masses began to realize they were lied to and manipulated for political purposes.

This is where political science overrode the faux medical science sold by Fauci and his Big Pharma puppeteers.

The polls show Biden and his party of far-left wingnuts are going to experience YUGE losses in the November midterms.

And just like that, Democrat governors and mayors are lifting mask mandates and vaccine mandates faster than the Biden vote count increase at 3:00 am.

They are reversing everything they never had the authority to implement in the first place.

They want you to forget how they destroyed the lives of millions, bankrupting hundreds of thousands of small businesses, demolishing our civil liberties, and permanently wrecking the lives of our children.

Their plan is to switch the narrative to Russia hate and expect the ignorant masses to forget what they have done and how they severely damaged the social fabric of our society.

They have supreme confidence in the foolishness and witlessness of the suckers who swallowed their scamdemic scheme, and after a week of observing the complete transformation of the fearful mask/mandate brigade to the “I Hate Putin” army, it appears the Bernays’ propaganda machine is running like a finely tuned fake news propagator for the globalist new world order cabal.

Orwell’s observation that every war needs to be sold as self-defense against a homicidal maniac has been duly noted by those pulling the strings of society, as they have enlisted Vladimir Putin to be that “homicidal maniac” in their ongoing quest to destroy the world and reinvent and reset it as a techno-gulag.

Once they can force everyone into a cashless society, we will all be wearing digital slave chains, enabling them to control our behavior by cutting us off from the ability to conduct commerce, eat, or have opinions contrary to the government narrative.

Does the daily ebb and flow of one crisis after another, requiring greater government control of every aspect of our existence, have a Truman Show feel to you?

The usurpation of our civil liberties, human rights, freedoms, and liberties had been gradual and almost undetectable to the indoctrinated sheep who have been distracted by their iGadgets, counting their likes and followers on social media, professional sports bread and circuses, and the filth that passes for Hollywood entertainment over the last couple decades.

The last two years have seen a precipitous acceleration in the lawless disregard for any and all Constitutional rights, bodily rights, and human rights.

The illegal and heavy-handed enforcement of lockdowns and vaccine mandates reveals a desperation in the actions of our globalist oligarch controllers.

The question is whether this acceleration is part of the master plan, or an acknowledgement the endgame is approaching, and they need to gamble it all in an effort to reconfigure and reset the world to make it great for oligarchs and hell on earth for the rest of us.

I’m convinced Orwell and Huxley were the two most prescient minds of the 20th Century when it came to understanding the human condition and how power-seeking psychopaths would always rise to the top of society and inflict their psychosis upon the masses.

The mass formation psychosis (aka madness of crowds), which has overtaken a large swath of the population over the last two years, did not happen naturally, but was purposely initiated by propagandists who know how to manipulate the minds of the already willfully ignorant masses using mass media, social media, and parading of paid “experts” and “influencers” to sell their narrative.

The power of groupthink is overwhelming when it is driven by fear, hatred, and the power of psychopaths like Fauci willing to lie, mislead and cover-up facts that do not support the narrative. Huxley’s description of “herd poisoning” perfectly fits how the mindless, frantic, lunacy of the Covidian Cult overrode all of the critical thinking rational non-sheep in a stampede of idiocy, engineered by those pulling the strings of society.

“Groups are capable of being as moral and intelligent as the individuals who form them; a crowd is chaotic, has no purpose of its own and is capable of anything except intelligent action and realistic thinking. 

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice. 

Their suggestibility is increased to the point where they cease to have any judgment or will of their own. 

They become very ex­citable, they lose all sense of individual or collective responsibility, they are subject to sudden accesses of rage, enthusiasm and panic. 

In a word, a man in a crowd behaves as though he had swallowed a large dose of some powerful intoxicant. 

He is a victim of what I have called “herd-poisoning.” Like alcohol, herd-poison is an active, extraverted drug. 

The crowd-intoxicated individual escapes from responsibility, in­telligence and morality into a kind of frantic, animal mindlessness.” – Aldous Huxley – Brave New World

The same men who engineered the covid plandemic hysteria, are now making a segue directly into provoking a World War 3 scenario and urging the Covidian Cultists to rally around the Ukrainian flag and their brave patriot army to fight off the evil psychopath despot of Russia.

It doesn’t matter that a week ago these dupes couldn’t find Ukraine on a map, had never seen their flag, didn’t know the comedian president of Ukraine’s name, and had no idea about the CIA coup that overthrew the actual president of Ukraine in 2014.

Animal mindlessness is their specialty.

And those trying to cause global destruction in order to build back better are wallowing in the apparent success of their plan thus far.

Global disorder and chaos are proceeding with reckless abandon, as an already teetering, debt saturated, global economy was in danger of spinning out of control with raging inflation, rapidly decelerating GDP, and stock markets which peaked in early January and had begun to fall.

Now you add the first real war in Europe in 77 years into the mix and you have a combustible environment threatening to blow our modern world back to the stone age.

The world continues to spiral towards the bloody climax that mark all Fourth Turnings.

What happens between now and then is guaranteed to be tumultuous, try men’s souls, test the mettle of freedom minded patriots, push the world to the brink, and clearly demarcate the frontier between good and evil.

Current events related to this confusing conflict in the Ukraine may seem confined for now, but as the sanctions and countermeasures are inflicted by all sides, the unintended consequences will begin to rear their ugly head.

The current heads of state and their trusted advisors are not intellectually competent, morally superior, or capable of analyzing the long-term impact of their emotionally driven actions, which will lead to a much broader conflict and disastrous consequences for the citizens of this world, who are nothing more than pawns in this global game of chess being played by shadowy oligarchs attempting to checkmate our freedoms, livelihoods, and ability to live our lives free from their authoritarian mandates.

Everything we’ve been put through over the last two years has been pre-planned by Schwab, Soros, Gates, the Davos World Economic Forum crowd, and their acolytes positioned in governments across the world.

They have been testing how far they could push their citizens before getting pushback. Lockdowns, masks, vaccines, electronic vaccine passports, social credit scoring, and conspiring with Big Pharma, Big Media, and Big Corporations to force a fake vaccine into the veins of hundreds of millions has all been part of the plan.

Trudeau’s totalitarian crackdown on peaceful protestors, declaring dictatorial emergency powers, stealing their donated funds, freezing their bank accounts, beating them, imprisoning them, seizing their property, and trying to ruin their lives by publicly releasing their names and addresses, was just another test run by one of Schwab’s young global leader graduates.

The same has been done in New Zealand and Australia. These actions are a prelude to what comes next. Orwell was right.

Once they have seized power, they have no plans of relinquishing it and the object of power is power.

The next chapter in this dystopian Truman Show is how this conflict in the Ukraine will be used to further the aims of Schwab’s Great Reset.

You can be absolutely sure it will be used to further restrict our freedoms, rights, and free speech.

Anyone not participating in the daily two minutes of hate will be declared a Russian asset.

Anyone not toeing the anti-Russia narrative will be penalized financially, just as they were for not getting the jab.

Joe Biden was a low IQ angry gaffe machine as senator and vice president. He is now a dementia ridden husk, who can barely read what his handlers tell him to say on his teleprompter.

His weakness has led to emboldening Putin in pushing back against the US and NATO placing missiles on his border, by attacking Ukraine.

  • Economic sanctions are acts of war.
  • Cyber-attacks are acts of war.
  • Sending arms to participants in a conflict are acts of war.
  • It was economic sanctions which led to the rise of Hitler.
  • It was oil sanctions by FDR that created the desperation of Japan’s leadership, leading to the attack on Pearl Harbor.
  • If this conflict drags on, the measures and countermeasures are likely ignite a wider conflagration.

With real inflation already at 15%, GDP at 0.0%, oil now up 20% in the last two weeks, the Fed backed into a corner and about to end QE and raise rates, and the supply chain in a shambles, these economic sanctions are going to create havoc and extreme economic pain for billions across the globe.

Incompetent leaders, with mediocre minds, who have been installed because they will do as they are told by the globalist puppeteers, are steering the world into World War 3.

At this point virtually no one believes we will not have a presidential election in 2024.

Candidates are positioning themselves, pundits are calculating odds, pollsters are taking the temperature of the populace, and the media is spinning their web of lies.

But there are multiple scenarios which could result in no presidential election in 2024. With inflation already at 40-year highs, these accelerating levels of sanctions will surely give inflation a further boost, making it impossible for Powell and his cronies to pretend it is transitory.

They will be increasing rates and withdrawing liquidity as we enter recession, making the chances of a depression the highest in decades. This will absolutely cause the stock market and housing market to crash.

A large swath of the population is already outraged and irate at being abused and victimized by their leaders for the last two years and told it was for the common good.

Trucker convoys are converging on DC. to voice their displeasure. Seeing their 401ks vaporized once again and going back underwater on their recent mortgages will not be accepted without a violent reaction.

Civil unrest has been purposely generated by the controllers over the last few years but is poised to go kinetic in the near future.

The party that weaponized the flu to complete the coup they started in 2016 against a duly elected president and stole the 2020 election through mail-in ballot fraud and voting machine rigging, is not going to willingly relinquish power by losing the 2022 mid-terms and 2024 presidential election.

Will they roll-out the next variant in the fall, just in time to force mail-in voting once again, so they can steal enough seats to retain power? Seems unlikely.

If the GOP takes Congress in November, that essentially leaves Biden with executive orders to force his left-wing agenda down our throats.

An attempt at using illegal means to enforce his agenda could meet violent resistance.

They have already gated off their Swamp and posted the military to protect the vermin crawling around the halls of Congress.

They have already thrown the selfie-insurrectionists into their dungeons with no due process for their “crimes”.

What makes you think Biden and his Obama handlers will not use some excuse or false flag to declare martial law and suspend the elections?

The more likely scenario will be driven by war scenarios. As already documented, with inflation raging across the globe, the supply chain disintegrating, the world retreating into competing camps, a declining American empire desperately trying to fend off China, and a nuclear power run by a ruthless, serious, intelligent, “Russia First” dictator, the chances of the current level of global disorder to spiral out of control are high.

Politicians, when confronted with domestic issues they cannot solve by PR and throwing money at it, need a foreign confrontation to distract the masses from their failures.

Biden and his bevy of like-minded EU political hacks have gladly jumped on the anti-Russia bandwagon like a pack of rabid wolves.

Watching corporations and the media likewise go on the attack is eerily reminiscent of their extreme reaction to the un-vaxxed.

Covid has disappeared from the daily lexicon just in time for Biden’s State of the Union and the fast-approaching November elections.

Revisionist history is in process by the left-wing media. It was Trump’s fault.

Someone somewhere is bound to do something stupid, whether it be a dictator, president, prime minister, general, assassin, soldier, or just a pissed off parent, which sets off the fuse for the bloody portion of this Fourth Turning.

Once this war goes global and countries choose sides, anything can happen, and it will. Picture the domino scene in V for Vendetta.

Once it starts it can’t be contained until there are clear victors and clear winners. The difference between this Fourth Turning and previous Fourth Turnings is the ability of several countries to initiate thermonuclear war which would end life as we know it.

Even use of tactical nukes, EMPs, or cyber-attacks taking down crucial systems could transform our modern world into the 3rd world.

So, a global conflict could also create an atmosphere where our ruling junta couldn’t possibly allow Donald Trump to be re-elected president.

This, of course, would lead to civil war in the streets. It’s almost as if an orange fireball rising up above the Swamp would be preferable.

Just remember, the current scenario was placed into motion by Schwab, Soros, Gates, and the Great Reset billionaire cabal. If we get out of this alive, you know who to hang from the lampposts.

“Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end, they always fall. Always.”Mahatma Gandhi

So, we now know that the United States is ripe for revolution or Civil War. It’s ready. It’s ripe, and it’s amazing to me that it hasn’t yet ignited.

All five articles so far has absolutely indicated clearly that the United States, as well as it’s “allies” are in late-stage collapse. It’s looking like any day now a switch will be flicked and a new day will begin…

Next up…

Alastair Crooke from HERE.
March 12, 2022
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Ukraine may be many things … but a ‘gospel of democracy’?

We all know that the western media’s Ukraine coverage has been highly charged, playing on western feelings of sympathy for (some) underdog ‘victims’, and directing feelings towards a moral outrage that insists – even demands – retribution and punishment for the perceived perpetrators.

David Brooks in the New York Times elevates this feeling of guilt to higher planes:

“The creed of liberalism is getting a second wind [and has] reminded us not only what it looks like to believe in democracy, the liberal order and national honour; but also to act bravely on behalf of these things. They’ve reminded us how the setbacks [may] have caused us to doubt and be passive about the gospel of democracy. But despite all our failings, the gospel is still glowingly true”.

Ukraine may be many things … but a ‘gospel of democracy’?

Every serious crisis, of course, is also an opportunity for mythopoesis – especially at a time of anomie, when a dispirited less than half of a society believes that their country is not invested in them and “that the economic and political systems (and the people who run them), are stacked against [them] – no matter what you do”.

The Anglo-American Establishment has proved adept at intuiting: that owing to such anomie and erosion of our ‘sacred canopy’, a ‘noble lie’ can be used to give a rules-based order a last gasp.

Its’ inherent power can be harnessed to generate the outrage as casus belli for global liberalism.

After all, what better unifying force than the ‘grand American project’ of war to energise one’s desire for a reappropriated national significance.

The West has taken dominance of the ‘information space’ to new heights: consolidating the media; tightening its hold on information; marginalising the few investigative journalists that remain; and nullifying scepticism as examples of appeasement, or of “Putinism”.

Freedom of online thought is disallowed; selective broadcast perspectives are removed or allowed (for example, pro neo-Nazi sympathies and politically-charged violence against Russians and Russia); and a monopoly over truth is established.

So that when caught in falsehoods, any errant intrusion simply is algorithmically ‘disappeared’.

There is no doubt that the West has refined this mode of battle-scape to the highest degree, but its very success also diffuses its own pathogens throughout the western capillaries.

Once set in motion, it possesses all the addictive power of online gaming.

Write the script for a new scenario; direct its production; and then stage it on video.

Many may disbelieve the resulting piece, but there is nothing for them to do, except to watch it in mute, frustrated silence.

Game over.

You have ‘won’.

Except you don’t.

This game generates its own momentum.

There is always another, at hand, to trump the last player’s taunt at Putin; to hail the victim’s new act of selfless bravery; to speculate about yet more foul deeds planned against him.

And so the demand for retribution and punishment is invested with unstoppable momentum. The logic to its structure makes it almost impossible for any political leader to stand against the swelling tide.

That’s where we are: Three realities that are so severed from each other that they do not touch at any point.

There is the reality of PsyOps that bears almost no resemblance to the reality of the military situation on the ground.

      • “News” of the Ukraine conflict = PsyOps
      • Actual events and battles in the conflict.

Indeed, they manifest as polar inversions of each other. PsyOps: A heroic resistance versus a failing, demoralised and hobbled Russian army.

Whereas the reality is that “Putin is NOT crazy and the Russian invasion is NOT failing”.

Then there is the clashing realities of a Europe and U.S. conjoined in ‘an economic, moral enterprise of social power and fighting morale’ (albeit at certain self-sacrifice/self-flagellation to themselves) to punish Russia.

And the other reality that a ‘world at war’ – whether kinetic or financial – will be a disaster for Europe (and America).

War is inflationary.

War is contractionary (and inflationary too).

Everything – oil, gas, metals – the lot – are going up vertically, and the whole production chain for food is under pressure from every side.

But this situation clearly is less disastrous for a super food and commodity supplier like Russia.

The third set of severed realities are, on the one hand, the contextless, exclusive focus on the Ukraine events, which effaces this moment of global political and economic inflection, and – on the other – the elephant-in-the room which is the Russia-China mega project to force a withdrawal and containment of the entire ‘rules-based’ hegemonic order.

There are other severed realities out there (such as the one about Russia isolated and shunned versus the reality that much of the planet does not support U.S. and European punitive sanctions) – but never mind that.

The point here is not just what happens when these realities collide, but what happens when one or other ‘reality’ that already holds a hyper emotional, moralising charge is forced into full consciousness as having been WRONG?

This is the pathogen inherent in taking the battle-scape of information dominance to an extreme: It begs the question: in what way will emotions turn if all the hype falls flat, and the ‘bad guy’ wins the game?

Will people turn against their present leaderships, or opt to double-down, demanding more ‘war’ as instincts rebel against any the realisation of failure inflicted upon settled quasi-religious convictions?

The outcome to this psychic dilemma may determine whether we are heading to escalation and extended war, or not.

U.S. intelligence officials claimed on Tuesday that Putin is ‘desperate’ to end the conflict over Ukraine, with some privately suggesting he could even set off a tactical nuclear weapon in a Ukrainian city to get the job done.

Fuelled by his disappointments, Putin could resort to using a small nuke:

“You know, Russian doctrine holds that you escalate to de-escalate, and so I think the risk would rise, according to the doctrine,” 

-CIA Director, and former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow

There it is … the next stage of escalation.

This now is being attributed to Putin, but the point is that it has been put ‘out there’ very publicly by the CIA.

Is this ground preparation?

An escalation to this level is likely not on the cards, so long, and only so long, as the option of sticking Russia into a Ukrainian quagmire remains firmly on the cards.

If the PsyOps narrative – on which so much hangs – doesn’t stand up to the ground reality, the public will demand answers.

Why were they led up “the Primrose Path”?

The setback to the ‘sacred canopy’ would be immense.

Biological labs have been found in Ukraine that reportedly have a U.S. connection:

When asked about them, Victoria Nuland surprisingly admitted their existence, but said “she’s worried Russia might get them and that she’s 100% sure if there is a biological attack – it’s Russia”.

On Thursday, the UK media led with the headline, “Putin plotting chemical weapons attack in Ukraine”.

Plainly, the fear factor is being ramped to sustain a long-term insurgency/quagmire strategy for Russia in western Ukraine. It is, as David Brooks hinted, the last gasp in the defence of the liberal world order.

Can all this hype – small nukes, bio and chemical weapons – really take us to war? James Carden, in his piece says it can – and has. He quotes one instance:

“In a private letter written in 1918, the recently deposed German chancellor admitted that in the run-up to the Great War, “there were special circumstances that militated in favour of war, including those in which Germany in 1870-71 entered the circle of great powers” and became “the object of vengeful envy on the part of the other Great Powers, largely though not entirely by her own fault.”

“Yet Bethmann saw another crucial factor at work: that of public opinion. “How else,” he asked, “[to] explain the senseless and impassioned zeal which allowed countries like Italy, Rumania, and even America, not originally involved in the war, no rest until they too had immersed themselves in the bloodbath? Surely this is the immediate, tangible expression of a general disposition toward war in the world.”

Against the prospect that Putin may achieve his aims, short of general war, how might Europe and America react? They might react very differently.

Firstly, we must recall that one object of this ‘war fever’ always was to bind Europe to the U.S., and into NATO, and to prevent Russia-China co-opting Europe into the Great Asian Heartland economic integration project – thus leaving the U.S. as an isolated maritime ‘island’, strategically speaking.

The hardcore Neo-cons have had positive results: Nordstream 2 is cancelled – leaving Europe without a cheap secure source of energy.

From the outset, the European project was conceived as a marriage of Russian resources to European manufacturing capacity.

This option is now over.

The EU has fully bound itself into the ‘fever’, and into U.S. sphere.

And it has erected an ‘iron curtain’ against Russia (and by extension China).

It has ‘sanctioned itself’ into a high-cost energy and commodity paradigm and made itself a captive market for the U.S. energy majors and American technology.

The EU has been fond of imagining itself as a liberal imperium.

But that surely is gone now.

Its’ Davos-style ‘re-set’, designed to steal a march on America, is defunct.

The four key ‘transitions’ on which Brussels was depending to lift its reach from the national-level, to the global supra-national level, are defunct: Global ‘green pass’ health regulations, Climate, automation and monetary regulatory frameworks – for one reason or another – have failed and are off the agenda.

The EU was counting on these transitions as the peg to print a huge amount of money.

They need it in order to liquefy an over-indebted system. Absent this peg, they are mulling a (highly inflationary) slush fund (ostensibly for defence and Russian energy substitution), financed by euro-bonds. (It will be interesting to see whether the so-called ‘frugal four’ EU states buy into this ploy for mutualised debt).

Yet inflation – already high and accelerating – is at the root of the crisis Brussels is facing. There is little to be done about this in light of the sanctions which the EU has enacted on Russia – with prices of everything going up vertically.

And as for the other lacuna, there’s no way Europe can find 200 billion cubic meters of gas anywhere else to replace Russia, be it in Algeria, Qatar or Turkmenistan – not to mention the EU’s lack of necessary LNG terminals.

Europeans face a bleak future of soaring prices and economic contraction. For now, they can offer little political dissent to the controlling élites. The frameworks for genuine (as opposed to token) opposition in Europe, largely have been dismantled in the zeal of Brussels to suppress ‘populism’. EU citizens will bear the prospect in sullen anger (until the pain becomes unbearable).

‘Populism’ in the U.S. however, is not dead. Some 30 GOP Congressmen have opted to retire at the coming midterms.

We may well witness an upsurge in the American populist sentiment in November.

The point here, is that American populism traditionally is fiscally conservative.

And it seems that Wall Street is shifting in that direction too: i.e. they may be getting ready to ditch Biden, and to support more fiscal rigour.

This potentially is huge. This week the Federal Reserve head said that whilst a part of the record U.S. inflation may be put down to Fed responsibility, Congress however was responsible too.

This translates roughly as ‘stop the Big Spend, Biden!’.

The Fed needs the space to raise interest rates. The head of Citibank spoke in a similar vein.

Will Wall Street swap horses (they backed Biden at the last election), and thus magnify the margin to the likely Republican majority in Congress? If so, with a big enough majority – anything may (politically) become possible. Republican conservatism traditionally (i.e. before the flirt with neo-con hawks) is highly cautious of foreign adventurism.

‘Whether it be BLM, Coronavirus, or now Ukraine, every single issue is talked about in apocalyptic terms and with gargantuan fear. But, as for all these frights:

“The deplorables are done”’. (paraphrased)

Next up…

[7] The Great Decoupling: How Western Sanctions Are Pushing Moscow East

Scott Ritter. From Energy Intelligence

By seeking an economic divorce from Russia, US President Joe Biden and his European allies ignored the time-tested saying, “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer.” In doing so, they have enabled the complete economic decoupling of Russia from the West. The resulting Russian economic union with China will transform global geopolitical reality, to the detriment of those who sought these sanctions in the first place.

Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has had a Jekyll and Hyde relationship with the US and the West. In the dire economic reality of post-Soviet Russia, many in the West believed the Soviet ghost could best be exorcised through a crash program of democratization, which would accompany the transformation of the ruined, centrally controlled Soviet economy into a vibrant free market built along Western capitalist lines.

The result was a disaster.

Post-Soviet Russia President Boris Yeltsin proved unsuited for the task, and what passed for democracy in Russia was quickly quashed in October 1993, when Yeltsin ordered the Russian Army to open fire on the Russian legislature. The strangulation of democracy was completed when Yeltsin won re-election in 1996 in a heavily tainted contest.

Rise of the Oligarchs

The Russian economy, meanwhile, had been taken over by Western carpetbaggers looking for a quick profit and unethical Russian entrepreneurs, who shaped domestic laws and policies that enabled them to acquire former state enterprises at rock-bottom prices.

The resulting oligarch class of billionaires began an incestuous relationship with their Western benefactors, trading access to Russian resources for help in transferring billions of dollars to offshore shelters, in the form of prime real estate, bank accounts out of reach of Russian authority, and prestige investments such as sports teams.

Left in the wake of this unscrupulous acquisition of wealth were average Russian citizens, who got only the meloch (loose change) of Russia’s experiment in capitalism, the stores and services that constitute the trappings of an ostensibly better life. Russia struggled, but survived. And the end of the 1990s, as Yeltsin turned over the sickly body of post-Soviet Russia to his hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, there was a class of people in Russia who had tied their fortune and livelihood to the promise of Western-style capitalism.

Putin undoubtedly saw the promise of a Russian economy guided by the principles of capitalism. But he faced the reality that, under Yeltsin, Russia had sold itself to outside interests which, in concert with an increasingly corrupt oligarch class, was throttling Russia’s economic potential. Putin also brought to the Russian presidency a strongly held belief that Russia needed to restore its position as a great power — not fully elevated to the status of the former Soviet Union, but at least equal to other world powers as part of a multilateral approach to global geopolitics.

All Except Russia

Putin’s efforts put him at odds with the US and Western Europe, which had taken advantage of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites to create a new European security framework that sought to unify all of Europe under a single economic, political and military umbrella — all of Europe, that is, except Russia.

Russia’s role in this great transformation was to remain militarily weak and politically compliant. Putin’s efforts at restoring Russia as a great power threw a wrench into this plan, and Russia found itself increasingly viewed as a threat by both the US and Europe. Putin’s suppression of the oligarchs, where he allowed them to retain their wealth and assets in exchange for their retreat from politics, weakened Western access to and control of Russian domestic affairs.

Moreover, Russian pushback against the expansion of Nato into Eastern Europe, when combined with the US-initiated termination of some core Cold War arms control treaty relationships, transformed Russia from a political nuisance into a geopolitical rival.

Russia’s war with Georgia in 2008 and annexation of Crimea in 2014 opened the door to US-led economic sanctions designed to punish Russia for its actions. These sanctions, when coupled with similar US sanctioning of Iran, forced Russia to confront the reality that the era of unconstrained economic association with the West was ending.

Pivoting East

Russia, together with China, began looking for alternatives to the US dollar-dominated model of global economic interaction. In doing so, they began to find common cause in crafting a geopolitical alternative to the US-led “rules-based international order,” which had dominated the global political and economic scaffolding constructed at the end of World War II.

Any Russian pivot to the East, however, was constrained by the reality that the Russian economy remained inextricably intertwined with the West. Not only was the Russian oligarchs’ wealth squirreled away in offshore shelters, but there was an entire class of Russian citizens whose daily livelihood was woven into the fabric of an economy that had absorbed Western businesses and practices. Any attempt at a divorce from the West would transform what had been a largely pro-Western Russian middle class into a politically active constituency that, if coupled to a hobbled but still powerful oligarch class, could challenge Putin’s hold on power.

Strategic Error

But Biden and his European allies decided to drop their “Keep your friends close but your enemies closer” approach in favor of the opposite.

The mistake was to believe that bringing enough pain to bear on the Russian people would prompt a political backlash that could lead to Putin’s removal from power. But for this pain to bring meaningful domestic political change, Russia would need to retain some economic connectivity with the West. Otherwise, the pain would be intense, but short-lived.

Left to his own devices, Putin would never have been able to divorce Russia from the West, and thus insulate Russian society — and, by extension, his ability to govern — from Western sanctions. Here, the US and Europe are doing Putin a huge favor, with current sweeping sanctions giving him the ability to separate Russia from its economic association with the West without the politically fatal consequences of being seen to do this on his own volition.

Thanks to the US-led sanctions, Putin will now be able to neuter the Russian oligarch class for good. The sanctions have likewise politically neutralized that portion of the Russian middle class that was economically married to Western businesses, goods, services — and mystique.

Putin has been granted his divorce without so far paying any meaningful political price. While the US and Europe may claim that Putin brought this on by invading Ukraine, to the Russian people, US and European actions led to the divorce. The demonization of everything Russia-related by many in the West only helps the Russian government deflect blame from itself, and onto the West. The West made it personal.

“I assure you,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov told the press on Mar. 10, “we will overcome adversity, and we will do everything to no longer depend on the West in any strategic sectors of our life that are of decisive importance for our people.” Russia, Lavrov said, “will no longer depend on any Western companies.”

As Lavrov delivered his remarks, Deputy Chairman of the Security Council of Russia Dmitri Medvedev announced that the government was considering the possibility of nationalizing or bankrupting the property of foreign companies leaving Russia. The decoupling has begun.

What we have here are just a few of the many, many articles describing this particular snapshot in time.

What we can see from all these writings is that all the elements for late-stage collapse of the dominant United States empire are in place, and that the rising Asia (Russia, India and China combined) are more than capable in displacing it.

During the inflexion point, anything can happen…

  • American hyper-inflation
  • American civil war
  • Numerous wars throughout the globe
  • A major war, maybe nuclear or bioweapon
  • Change of the reserve currency
  • Mass famine, discord or die-offs

Note that during this period of inflexion and change, you want to stay FAR away from the strife, and be in a place where you can handle the changes adroitly. You might want to stay in a safe location in the receeding empire, or move to the growing empire. You could also move to a safe isolated third nation well out of the fray.

But what nation?

Use history as a guide.

During the last period of change, when the European Empires (a collective group) was displaced by the United States, we learned that…

  • The collapsing world power (Europe) was completely destroyed and in ruins
    • All of Germany, France, Italy, and all of Eastern Europe.
    • Much of the UKs overseas colonies; India, Africa.
    • France was a mess.
    • Poland was in rubble.
    • Western Europe, Hungary and all the rest absolutey rubbled.
  • The rising world power (The United States) remained intact
  • The emerging powers (Russia, China) were broken and in turmoil

In this current bout of change, we should take note that…

  • The collapsing world power = Is now the United States.
  • The rising world power = Is Asia (Russia, India and China together)
  • The emerging powers = Korea, Japan, Australia, Pakastan, Brazil will experience change, and possible turmoil.

Take note of history and plan accordingly.

  • Go to either a Rising World Power, or one of the Emerging Powers.
  • Try to bail out and leave the Collapsing World Power.

Remember that during a cycle-based change…

  • The collapsing world power becomes absolutely destroyed, and in ruins.
  • The rising world power is unscathed and left intact.
  • The emerging powers undergo social, economic, military, and structural change. A well prepaired family can adjust to the opportunites afforded in this changing environment and profit from them.

The destruction comes in many forms…

“In two weeks, China, Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan will reveal an independent international monetary and financial system. It will be based on a new international currency, calculated from an index of national currencies of the participating countries and international commodity prices” 

-Sputnik News, Mar. 14, 2022.

Along with the new currency, Russia and China will also reveal their Unfriendly Nation Lists.

Andrei hits it on the head.

From HERE.

The reports about the Russians losing a million tanks, soldiers, missiles and men are gradually being replaced with more sober assessments and the maps produced by western outlets are gradually starting to look more or less similar to the maps produced by the various “Putin propaganda outlets”.

I see two things coming next:

  • The much announced “Russian atrocity” false flag (several have failed over the past few days, including one chemical one which was thwarted when the wind blew in the “wrong” direction – that is away from the targeted town.
  • Poland will try to convince the USA to allow it to hide behind Uncle Shmuel’s back and conduct a “peacekeeping operation” to create a mini-Banderastan in western Ukraine.

Now there is no doubt in my mind whatsoever that the USA want three things:

  1. A war lasting as long as possible
  2. As many civilian victims as possible
  3. To flood the Ukraine with weapons to then direct a “stay-behind” insurgency

I am not at all convinced that the USA will go along with the Polish plan.  Why?  Because I believe that a Russian Iskander strike INSIDE POLAND (similar to the ones we saw in Iavorovo, the ammo dump in Kiev and in Novaia Liubomirka) is a quasi-certitude (remember: Russia IS ready to fight both NATO and the US together!).  BTW – the one in Iavorovo blew up a huge ammo dump which was buried under 60 meters of rock.  I have no explanation for how that was achieved.  Does anybody?

Bottom line is that if the Polaks organize another little “peacekeeping training camp” and think that the Russians won’t dare to strike a NATO country they are quite wrong.  They are probably too dumb/delusional to realize that, but the folks at the US DoD probably do and don’t need this.  Why, well precisely because NATO member or not, Article 5 or not, nobody will come to aid the Polaks against the wrath of the entire Russian military, the manpower and resources needed a not there anyway…

Unless the Russians and the US Americans agree to a partition of the Ukraine.  Not likely, but always possible.  It is going to almost certainly happen anyway, the only way to prevent that is Russian tanks at the Polish border, and not just for a quick visit, but to create something like the 201 base in Tajikistan.

Anyway, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, this is all still in the future.

What about the events on the front line?

I won’t into details here but I will offer a few bullet points

  • Very heavy combats near Avdeevka and Mariupol.
  • Combat pretty much everywhere the line of contact, which result in slow positional warfare with artillery exchanges and very careful mopping up building by building and even room by room.
  • On average Russian forces advance between 5 and 20 kilometers per day, which is rather fast against a defense in depth prepared for years.
  • The key cities of Kiev and Odessa are almost completely blocked, but not fully surrounded yet.
  • The Black Sea fleet basically controls the entire Ukie coast and all of the Black Sea itself.
  • The Black Sea fleet also prevents any resupply of Odessa from Romania.
  • Russia has full air superiority over the entire Ukie airspace
  • The Ukies are STILL firing both Tochka-U and Grad/Smrech missiles in the general direction of liberated cities just to create as many casualties as possible, but the Russians have become very skilled at not only shooting down these missiles (the destruction ratio has gone up very sharply) but also a destroying the key Ukrainian ammo dumps were they hide those missiles (this is what happened with the big building in downtown Kiev which the Russians totally vaporized with one perfectly aimed Iskander missile.  If you have not seen this amazing video, you can quickly re-watch it here:
Lordy! That is an AMAZING FUCKING Video!
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And here is a video of what the Ukies were hiding under this commercial building (photo from a local resident since disappeared by the Ukie SBU:

2022 03 23 10 19
2022 03 23 10 19

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And, finally, I want to share something very important with you: the Ukronazi forces cannot resupply or rotate themselves.  Why?

  • Because moving around when the air is full of Mi-24/35s, Mi-28Ns, and Ka-52s in “free hunting” mode requires a type of courage very few people have.
  • Because most roads are carefully monitored by multi-sensor Russian reconnaissance/intelligence capabilities
  • Because more big roads (you cannot use small dirt roads to resupply or rotate effectively) are either already physically controlled by the Russians or are “shot through”, which in Russian indicate that while Russian soldiers have reached each other and hugged they can shoot at any location from these roads from any side.

So it does not matter how motivated the Ukrainians are.  Even with we assume 100% of the Ukrainians are well trained, well-armed and would rather die than retreat or surrender, they still need many TONS of stuff (food, ammo, water, MRE, medicine, batteries, petroleum, diesel, lubricants, oil and many more things!) EVERY DAY.  Just to give you an idea, read this pretty decent discussion of some aspects of logistics by the US military.

So once the Ukies are blocked by Russians, it is essentially over for them.  Anybody with a basic understanding of modern warfare can confirm that to you.

Add to this in the very first day Russia destroyed all the Ukie communication centers and capabilities in the first few hours of the operation, and you will see that while the Ukrainian side has “brigades” and “battalions” these are all undermanned and, crucially, cannot cooperate with each other.  In other words, they cannot jointly maneuver to support each other.

To put it in the simplest terms, the Ukrainians are not able to conduct any operations, and that is why all their so-called “counter-attacks” always fail and mostly never even materialized.  At best, they can destroy a Russian checkpoint, blow up a truck or even shoot down a helicopter, but none of that solves their real problem which is that they are now mostly reduced to WWI type of warfare against a 21st-century ultra-modern military which has the total control of the situation.

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PS: found a very decent map of the situation on Telegram (the place to go for good info!).

2022 03 23 10 22
2022 03 23 10 22

The most important video of this article

All of these articles lead up to the final purpose of this article.

It is to calm the reader to see that everything that is going on is [1] being managed and [2] following a well-known and well-established  process.

Do not freak out. No matter what bullshit is present in the “news” onslaught.

The following is an exceptionally well done video that explains a theory of Geo-political cycles. This in many ways resembles the Fourth Turning theory of generational changes. It is presented simply, and brilliantly.

I personally believe that true information can be conveyed by others in simple terms, and this video is one excellent example of this.

Now, this video differs from my personal view. In that it claimed that the UK was the single dominant nation displaced by the United States in the 1940s. They view this by reserve currency only. Where I claim that it was the totality of Europe (Germany, the UK, France, Poland, and all the rest) that were displaced by the United States. Reserve currency is but one aspect of the totality of issues involved in change. But aside from this difference, it’s never the less a great video.

Here we end this article with this great video. Please watch it.

You will be glad that you did.

Video here on You-Tube.

2022 03 14 14 23
2022 03 14 14 23

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

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Howard Pyle’s illustrations of Blood-Thirsty Buccaneers and Cut-Throat Marauders

When I was a boy, my father bought me this used hard-cover book.

I was in the bedroom, playing around. He came home from work, and handed me the book. Stuck around a while, and then back downstairs. I way a young boy. Maybe eleven years old.

I loved the illustrations in it. They were well done, beautiful, really. I treasured that book. And I kept it with me for years and years until I was “retired”, and my belongings sold by my “friends” and “family” for what ever profit they could derive from our relationship.

2022 03 11 10 25 1
Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates.

Later, as I got older, I realized what I once had. Sigh.

It’s called life.

Today, we will visit the beautiful illustrations of pirates and buccaneers that so colored my childhood with adventure, treasure and high piracy on the seven seas.

Pyle created images which made the public buy a magazine or a book for its cover alone.

Vincent Van Gogh admitted to his brother Theo, he was struck “dumb with admiration” when he saw Howard Pyle’s illustrations in a magazine. Pyle (1853-1911) was the top American illustrator circa 1880-1910. His work made top moolah pulling in five times the going rate or $75 for a double-page spread in Harper’s Bizarre, 1878.

010 HOWARD PYLE DEAD PIRATE
010 HOWARD PYLE DEAD PIRATE

Pyle created images which made the public buy a magazine or a book for its cover alone. In modern parlance: his work was cinematic, powerful, and dramatic. If he’d been born a few decades later, Pyle may have been a film director. He used strange angles to look down on battle scenes or cast figures centre frame while mayhem occurred all around. He sketched deserted figures in a landscape which explained the whole narrative in a single frame.

When I, as a boy of perhaps 11 or 12 was given the Book of Pirates by my father, I was enthralled.

The book was a collection of popular pirate stories, which mostly centered around brave non-pirates who crossed paths with an infamous pirate and yet who lived to tell the tale.

Sure, they were very romanticized stories focusing on the more adventurous side of piracy than the true aspect of it (though the sacking and slaughter of entire towns is mentioned, just not in gory detail). But for me, as a young boy, I found it all to be an enjoyable, quick read.

09 HOWARD PYLE CITIZENS GIVE TRIBUTE
09 HOWARD PYLE CITIZENS GIVE TRIBUTE

Pyle was born in Wilmington, Delaware. His parents early recognised his prodigious talent for drawing and painting. They encouraged him to focus on developing this talent. He was lucky he got sent to a private school which fostered his genius.

08 HOWARD PYLE KIDD WATCHES PIRATES BURY TREASURE
08 HOWARD PYLE KIDD WATCHES PIRATES BURY TREASURE

When he first moved to New York to become a magazine illustrator, he had no idea how to sell himself. He needn’t have worried.

One glance by the editor of Pyle’s artistry pulled in commissions.

He was soon illustrating books like the The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood which created the imagery we are all familiar with today. Or books about knights in shining armour like Men of Iron and Otto of the Silver Hand.

Publishers would hire Pyle knowing no matter how trashy the novel, Pyle’s artwork would make it a hit.

07 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES FIGHT CAPTAIN
07 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES FIGHT CAPTAIN

In the 1890s, Pyle, by then married with seven kids, was asked to teach drawing at university.

This led him to set up the Howard Pyle School of Illustration Art in 1900. His school launched a whole new generation of artists who shaped the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s.

As a young boy, when I read the book, what really stood out were the absolutely stunning and beautiful illustrations throughout the book. Looking at them, you could smell the rum, fish and cannon powder and hear the ocean and gun shots.

06 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES LONGBOAT NIGHT
06 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES LONGBOAT NIGHT

Pyle’s imagination created a universal template for pirates.

05 HOWARD PYLE BURIED TREASURE
05 HOWARD PYLE BURIED TREASURE

Every book, magazine, and Hollywood film used Pyle’s illustrations of pirates to dress Errol Flynn as Captain Blood or Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow.

04 HOWARD PYLE SHOT IN THE HEAD
04 HOWARD PYLE SHOT IN THE HEAD

What is not well know, however, is that once he mastered his work, he turned to teaching others in his technique.

Howard Pyle was an instructor at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry (now Drexel University) from 1894-1900, and in that time, he taught a generation of celebrated illustrators including, Maxfield Parrish, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Elizabeth Shippen Green, Frank E. Schoonover, and Violet Oakley.

03 HOWARD PYLE WALK THE PLANK
03 HOWARD PYLE WALK THE PLANK

More than 20 oil paintings will hang in the Paul Peck Gallery, including Howard Pyle’s “Here, Andre! A Spy! (1897)” on display with a variety of works on paper, as well as accompanying artifacts.

A majority of the exhibit will be presented in the Paul Peck Alumni Center, which is a historic Frank Furness designed building itself.

Some of the featured original paintings and drawings decorated American homes during their time period — also gracing the covers of publications such as Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post.

02 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES AN ATTACK
02 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES AN ATTACK

“A.J. Drexel founded the Drexel Institute in 1891, and when he died, he made it clear that his vision should be accessible to men and women from all backgrounds, which was unique for a college of that time period,” said Paula Marantz Cohen, Pennoni Honors College dean.

“Pyle’s time at Drexel undoubtedly shaped the field of American Illustration. He was an early parallel advocate of Drexel’s philosophy of  ‘learning by doing’ encouraging his students to go out into the world to study their subject matter, an approach reflected in Drexel’s present-day Co-op program.

01 HOWARD PYLE CAPT KIDD
01 HOWARD PYLE CAPT KIDD

Not long after Drexel’s founding, Philadelphia’s publishing industry took off — greatly influencing Pyle’s artistic philosophy.

Pyle honored Drexel’s mission of experiential, democratic learning. His influences greatly contributed to illustrative painting and drawing becoming one of the truest forms of applied art.

He taught his students to be practical and commercially focused by observing reality first-hand.

020 HOWARD PYLE DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES 1280x900 1
020 HOWARD PYLE DEAD MEN TELL NO TALES 1280×900 1

“Today everyone knows the name Norman Rockwell but few people know the name Howard Pyle, let alone his art or his impact on generations of artists and American illustration,” says Judy Goffman Cutler, co-founder of the National Museum of American Illustration.

019 HOWARD PYLE HE STRUCK HIM
019 HOWARD PYLE HE STRUCK HIM

After his death from Bright’s disease in 1911, a giant compilation of Pyle’s illustrations of swashbuckling buccaneers was published under the title Howard Pyle’s Book of Pirates.

It became a go-to-book for Hollywood costumiers and pulp fiction illustrators when conjuring up those daring pirates of the seven seas.

018 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES FIGHT
018 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES FIGHT

The book that I dedicate this entire article towards is a formula for (almost) every piece of swashbuckling fiction, namely scarred pirate captains, roguish and witty surogates, forced romance and the triumph of the just and lawful citizen whose virtue is rewarded with oh-so-fairly-gained and definitely-not-tainted-by-piracy wealth.

It’s perfect fodder for the young boy in all of us, and yes, you girls too.

018 HOWARD PYLE BUCCANEER
018 HOWARD PYLE BUCCANEER

Many pirates were women. And I hear that many of them were absolutely ruthless.

017 HOWARD PYLE DROWNED SAILOR
017 HOWARD PYLE DROWNED SAILOR

I lament that I lost the book to someone who found more pleasure in getting the fifty cents from a used book store from it, than any real value. To others, I suppose it’s just an item to profit from. Not one that held value. For me, the greatest pleasures of this book are the occasional descriptions that place you on a ship or an island, where you can briefly feel yourself bobbing over the swells or smell the brine.

016 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES KILL EACH OTHER
016 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES KILL EACH OTHER

The illustrations in the book are phenomenal, and it reads like you are at the bar or a pub during a rainy day and your friend is recounting a story his grandfather once told him.

015 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES IN JAIL
015 HOWARD PYLE PIRATES IN JAIL

Here’s an excerpt from the book…

Then the pirates marched into the town, and what followed may be conceived. It was a holocaust of lust, of passion, and of blood such as even the Spanish West Indies had never seen before. Houses and churches were sacked until nothing was left but the bare walls; men and women were tortured to compel them to disclose where more treasure lay hidden.

Then, having wrenched all that they could from Maracaibo, they entered the lake and descended upon Gibraltar, where the rest of the panic-stricken inhabitants were huddled together in a blind terror.

014 HOWARD PYLE THE TREASURE WAS DIVIDED 1280x871 1
014 HOWARD PYLE THE TREASURE WAS DIVIDED 1280×871 1

I will admit that the writing style is old and not easy for all of us used to contemporaneous feeds.

After him came one Mansvelt, a buccaneer of lesser note, who first made a descent upon the isle of Saint Catharine, now Old Providence, which he took, and, with this as a base, made an unsuccessful descent upon Neuva Granada and Cartagena. His name might not have been handed down to us along with others of greater fame had he not been the master of that most apt of pupils, the great Captain Henry Morgan, most famous of all the buccaneers, one time governor of Jamaica, and knighted by King Charles II.

013 HOWARD PYLE CUT AND SLASHED
013 HOWARD PYLE CUT AND SLASHED

But for a young boy of eleven the stories were rich and ripe of adventure…

The attack of the castle and the defense of it were equally fierce, bloody, and desperate. Again and again the buccaneers assaulted, and again and again they were beaten back. So the morning came, and it seemed as though the pirates had been baffled this time. But just at this juncture the thatch of palm leaves on the roofs of some of the buildings inside the fortifications took fire, a conflagration followed, which caused the explosion of one of the magazines, and in the paralysis of terror that followed, the pirates forced their way into the fortifications, and the castle was won. Most of the Spaniards flung themselves from the castle walls into the river or upon the rocks beneath, preferring death to capture and possible torture; many who were left were put to the sword, and some few were spared and held as prisoners.

012 HOWARD PYLE BULLETS HUM FLY
012 HOWARD PYLE BULLETS HUM FLY

With the text and the illustrations, as well as the swash-buckling battles, it was a great escapist adventure for me to live out my boyhood dreams.

011 HOWARD PYLE LED TO THE CAPT
011 HOWARD PYLE LED TO THE CAPT

As for the bulls, as many of them as were shot served as food there and then for the half-famished pirates, for the buccaneers were never more at home than in the slaughter of cattle.

Then they marched toward the city. Three hours' more fighting and they were in the streets, howling, yelling, plundering, gorging, dram-drinking, and giving full vent to all the vile and nameless lusts that burned in their hearts like a hell of fire. And now followed the usual sequence of events—rapine, cruelty, and extortion; only this time there was no town to ransom, for Morgan had given orders that it should be destroyed. The torch was set to it, and Panama, one of the greatest cities in the New World, was swept from the face of the earth. Why the deed was done, no man but Morgan could tell. Perhaps it was that all the secret hiding places for treasure might be brought to light; but whatever the reason was, it lay hidden in the breast of the great buccaneer himself. For three weeks Morgan and his men abode in this dreadful place; and they marched away with one hundred and seventy-five beasts of burden loaded with treasures of gold and silver and jewels, besides great quantities of merchandise, and six hundred prisoners held for ransom.

Whatever became of all that vast wealth, and what it amounted to, no man but Morgan ever knew, for when a division was made it was found that there was only two hundred pieces of eight to each man.

2022 03 07 210 20
2022 03 07 210 20

The rest of them sailed away to the East Indies, to try their fortunes in those waters, for our Captain Avary was of a high spirit, and had no mind to fritter away his time in the West Indies, squeezed dry by buccaneer Morgan and others of lesser note. No, he would make a bold stroke for it at once, and make or lose at a single cast.

On his way he picked up a couple of like kind with himself—two sloops off Madagascar. With these he sailed away to the coast of India, and for a time his name was lost in the obscurity of uncertain history. But only for a time, for suddenly it flamed out in a blaze of glory. It was reported that a vessel belonging to the Great Mogul, laden with treasure and bearing the monarch's own daughter upon a holy pilgrimage to Mecca (they being Mohammedans), had fallen in with the pirates, and after a short resistance had been surrendered, with the damsel, her court, and all the diamonds, pearls, silk, silver, and gold aboard. It was rumored that the Great Mogul, raging at the insult offered to him through his own flesh and blood, had threatened to wipe out of existence the few English settlements scattered along the coast; whereat the honorable East India Company was in a pretty state of fuss and feathers. Rumor, growing with the telling, has it that Avary is going to marry the Indian princess, willy-nilly, and will turn rajah, and eschew piracy as indecent. As for the treasure itself, there was no end to the extent to which it grew as it passed from mouth to mouth.

2022 03 07 20 2220
2022 03 07 20 2220

And now Blackbeard, following the plan adopted by so many others of his kind, began to cudgel his brains for means to cheat his fellows out of their share of the booty.

At Topsail Inlet he ran his own vessel aground, as though by accident. Hands, the captain of one of the consorts, pretending to come to his assistance, also grounded his sloop. Nothing now remained but for those who were able to get away in the other craft, which was all that was now left of the little fleet. This did Blackbeard with some forty of his favorites. The rest of the pirates were left on the sand spit to await the return of their companions—which never happened.

As for Blackbeard and those who were with him, they were that much richer, for there were so many the fewer pockets to fill. But even yet there were too many to share the booty, in Blackbeard's opinion, and so he marooned a parcel more of them—some eighteen or twenty—upon a naked sand bank, from which they were afterward mercifully rescued by another freebooter who chanced that way—a certain Major Stede Bonnet, of whom more will presently be said. About that time a royal proclamation had been issued offering pardon to all pirates in arms who would surrender to the king's authority before a given date. So up goes Master Blackbeard to the Governor of North Carolina and makes his neck safe by surrendering to the proclamation—albeit he kept tight clutch upon what he had already gained.

2022 03 07 20 2s0
2022 03 07 20 2s0

It was a glorious thing for our captain, for here were thirteen Yankee crafts at one and the same time. So he took what he wanted, and then sailed away, and it was many a day before Marblehead forgot that visit.

Some time after this he and his consort fell foul of an English sloop of war, the Greyhound, whereby they were so roughly handled that Low was glad enough to slip away, leaving his consort and her crew behind him, as a sop to the powers of law and order. And lucky for them if no worse fate awaited them than to walk the dreadful plank with a bandage around the blinded eyes and a rope around the elbows. So the consort was taken, and the crew tried and hanged in chains, and Low sailed off in as pretty a bit of rage as ever a pirate fell into.

The end of this worthy is lost in the fogs of the past: some say that he died of a yellow fever down in New Orleans; it was not at the end of a hempen cord, more's the pity.

2022 03 07 20 20
2022 03 07 20 20

The cheat was kept up until the fruit of mischief was ripe for the picking; then, when the governor and the guards of the castle were lulled into entire security, and when Davis's band was scattered about wherever each man could do the most good, it was out pistol, up cutlass, and death if a finger moved. They tied the soldiers back to back, and the governor to his own armchair, and then rifled wherever it pleased them. After that they sailed away, and though they had not made the fortune they had hoped to glean, it was a good snug round sum that they shared among them.

Their courage growing high with success, they determined to attempt the island of Del Principe—a prosperous Portuguese settlement on the coast. The plan for taking the place was cleverly laid, and would have succeeded, only that a Portuguese negro among the pirate crew turned traitor and carried the news ashore to the governor of the fort. Accordingly, the next day, when Captain Davis came ashore, he found there a good strong guard drawn up as though to honor his coming. But after he and those with him were fairly out of their boat, and well away from the water side, there was a sudden rattle of musketry, a cloud of smoke, and a dull groan or two. Only one man ran out from under that pungent cloud, jumped into the boat, and rowed away; and when it lifted, there lay Captain Davis and his companions all of a heap, like a pile of old clothes.

Capt. Bartholomew Roberts was the particular and especial pupil of Davis, and when that worthy met his death so suddenly and so unexpectedly in the unfortunate manner above narrated, he was chosen unanimously as the captain of the fleet, and he was a worthy pupil of a worthy master. Many were the poor fluttering merchant ducks that this sea hawk swooped upon and struck; and cleanly and cleverly were they plucked before his savage clutch loosened its hold upon them.

Marooned
Marooned

Not a word was spoken after they had thus left the shore, and presently they might all have been ghosts, for the silence of the party. Barnaby True was too full of his own thoughts to talk—and serious enough thoughts they were by this time, with crimps to trepan a man at every turn, and press gangs to carry a man off so that he might never be heard of again. As for the others, they did not seem to choose to say anything now that they had him fairly embarked upon their enterprise.

And so the crew pulled on in perfect silence for the best part of an hour, the leader of the expedition directing the course of the boat straight across the harbor, as though toward the mouth of the Rio Cobra River. Indeed, this was their destination, as Barnaby could after a while see, by the low point of land with a great long row of coconut palms upon it (the appearance of which he knew very well), which by and by began to loom up out of the milky dimness of the moonlight. As they approached the river they found the tide was running strong out of it, so that some distance away from the stream it gurgled and rippled alongside the boat as the crew of black men pulled strongly against it. Thus they came up under what was either a point of land or an islet covered with a thick growth of mangrove trees. But still no one spoke a single word as to their destination, or what was the business they had in hand.

The night, now that they were close to the shore, was loud with the noise of running tide-water, and the air was heavy with the smell of mud and marsh, and over all the whiteness of the moonlight, with a few stars pricking out here and there in the sky; and all so strange and silent and mysterious that Barnaby could not divest himself of the feeling that it was all a dream.

So, the rowers bending to the oars, the boat came slowly around from under the clump of mangrove bushes and out into the open water again.

2022 03 07 20 19
2022 03 07 20 19

There he lay for I know not how long, staring into the darkness, until by and by, in spite of his suffering and his despair, he dozed off into a loose sleep, that was more like waking than sleep, being possessed continually by the most vivid and distasteful dreams, from which he would awaken only to doze off and to dream again.

It was from the midst of one of these extravagant dreams that he was suddenly aroused by the noise of a pistol shot, and then the noise of another and another, and then a great bump and a grinding jar, and then the sound of many footsteps running across the deck and down into the great cabin. Then came a tremendous uproar of voices in the great cabin, the struggling as of men's bodies being tossed about, striking violently against the partitions and bulkheads. At the same instant arose a screaming of women's voices, and one voice, and that Sir John Malyoe's, crying out as in the greatest extremity: "You villains! You damned villains!" and with the sudden detonation of a pistol fired into the close space of the great cabin.

Barnaby was out in the middle of his cabin in a moment, and taking only time enough to snatch down one of the pistols that hung at the head of his berth, flung out into the great cabin, to find it as black as night, the lantern slung there having been either blown out or dashed out into darkness. The prodigiously dark space was full of uproar, the hubbub and confusion pierced through and through by that keen sound of women's voices screaming, one in the cabin and the other in the stateroom beyond. Almost immediately Barnaby pitched headlong over two or three struggling men scuffling together upon the deck, falling with a great clatter and the loss of his pistol, which, however, he regained almost immediately.

What all the uproar meant he could not tell, but he presently heard Captain Manly's voice from somewhere suddenly calling out, "You bloody pirate, would you choke me to death?" wherewith some notion of what had happened came to him like a flash, and that they had been attacked in the night by pirates.

2022 03 07 20 18
2022 03 07 20 18

The vessel in which they sailed was a brigantine of good size and build, but manned by a considerable crew, the most strange and outlandish in their appearance that Barnaby had ever beheld—some white, some yellow, some black, and all tricked out with gay colors, and gold earrings in their ears, and some with great long mustachios, and others with handkerchiefs tied around their heads, and all talking a language together of which Barnaby True could understand not a single word, but which might have been Portuguese from one or two phrases he caught. Nor did this strange, mysterious crew, of God knows what sort of men, seem to pay any attention whatever to Barnaby or to the young lady. They might now and then have looked at him and her out of the corners of their yellow eyes, but that was all; otherwise they were indeed like the creatures of a nightmare dream. Only he who was the captain of this outlandish crew would maybe speak to Barnaby a few words as to the weather or what not when he would come down into the saloon to mix a glass of grog or to light a pipe of tobacco, and then to go on deck again about his business. Otherwise our hero and the young lady were left to themselves, to do as they pleased, with no one to interfere with them.

As for her, she at no time showed any great sign of terror or of fear, only for a little while was singularly numb and quiet, as though dazed with what had happened to her. Indeed, methinks that wild beast, her grandfather, had so crushed her spirit by his tyranny and his violence that nothing that happened to her might seem sharp and keen, as it does to others of an ordinary sort.

2022 03 07 20 16
2022 03 07 20 16

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Book of Pirates

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A first-hand experience at the starvation and famine in Shenzhen China by the Chinese CCP regime

Not the kind of title that you would expect from me, eh?

I woke up on Wednesday and found this article posted all over my LinkedIN feed. It’s from ZeroHedge, and discusses famine, starvation, disunity, sadness, in the evil gloom that lies under the shadow of the evil Chinese communist regime. The article goes to great lengths to describe a hopeless population, upset but powerless, to deal with on-going famine and the massive corruption of the CCP regime.

Here’s the article…

2022 03 11 15 59
2022 03 11 15 59

Well, I own a home in Shenzhen, and live across the bay from it. Everyday, I’m here, either looking at Shenzhen, or visiting it.

That’s what happens when you live next to a big city. You do know it’s population is 14 million people. That’s easily three times the size of New York City.

My relatives who live “on the island” (Long Island) feel the same way about “THE City” (New York).

Anyways. I live next door to Shenzhen, and own homes in Shenzhen. I visit it often, and I live right across the bay. From my living room, I can see the gleaming skyscrapers and glimmering light off the water.

I live in the Shenzhen region.

I live in the very place this article is written about.

It is now March. The same date and time when the article was written.

The purpose of this article is to present videos to show what life is like in Shenzhen, and the neighboring  areas under the evil repressive Chinese communist regime. Especially, and most notably, at the time that this article was written and published.

I think videos do better than some text written by a moron who doesn’t even realize that it doesn’t even snow in Shenzhen. Never has. Never will. It’s a fucking tropical area. Sheech!

Snow?

Blizzard? Give me a break!

Shenzhen?

It’s tropical.

When was the last time it snowed in Hawaii? Sheech!

So I went and took videos all week to illustrate what it is like in the Shenzhen – Zhuhai area; my home.

We start with food. After all, that’s what the article is all about. It’s about a lack of food, resulting in starvation, followed by famine.

Food

There is no famine.

No starvation anywhere in China. And certainly NOT in Shenzhen.

I swear, Western “news reports” have morphed into fantasy / science fiction episodes with very little resemblance to reality. I am convinced that they are handed a bullet-list of bad things to say about China, and then write a fantasy narrative based upon the bad things.

It’s got to be exactly that.

No other explanation is possible. Not even remotely.

Who is doing this? It must be the people, or entities, that pay them. Either a government, or an NGO aligned “fake” pseudo organization. It must be. It takes time, and effort to write these articles. They just don’t magically appear out of the air.

I took all of these videos the SAME WEEK that this “news” report wrote about starvation in the Shenzhen / China area. I filmed in different middle-class restaurants throughout this general region. (You can tell by the different dishes and tablecloths.) None of these meals were overly expensive. Just typical middle-class Chinese fare.

Since I don’t eat at Fast Food, you won’t see any videos of the fast food franchises that are big here in China. Sorry, but it’s not my thing. I tend to eat at home, and then go out once or twice a day to a nice, reasonably priced restaurant. So I didn’t change my routine. Just filmed the food to show that there is no starvation, nor famine.

Pork with peppers and bitter melon. Very delicious. I ate this in one of the many local malls. Sorry for the noise, it like the rest of China, are filled with many people enjoying their time eating delicious food. video 26MB

Very Spicy Beef. Here’s a different restaurant. This one specializes in beef. Very delicious. video 31MB

Chinese Sloppy Joe and a fine wide noodle salad. All so very delicious. You can see why I have gained so much weight since I moved to China, eh? video 35MB

Stuffed Baozi with vegetables. Very delicious. I love the meat versions, especially the pork version. This was particularly delicious. video 53MB

Some Chinese vegetarian food. All good and healthy. Tasty too, but you know guys, I do love my meats. LOL. video 42MB

Handmade noodles with peanuts. Very, very delicious. I think most of my American readership would love these food dishes. Too bad you cannot get them out in the States. Just here in China. video 36MB

Guys. You DO KNOW, that if there were REAL famine and REAL starvation, you would not see meals like this anywhere. In a nation with a population of 1.4 billion people, you would be overwhelmed.

Even posting pictures on the (so called anonymous) internet would get you targeted. In China, no one is isolated, and no one is alone. We are all connected together.

Toys – Legos

Here are some videos that I took in a toy store. These are Chinese Lego’s. Same lovely Lego brand, only marketed to the Chinese. Interesting cultural differences, eh?

Military Lego kits. If I were still a boy, I would really enjoy playing with these Legos. Especially the DF-41, and the J-20. video 31MB

Chinese Harbin Ice Festival. There are all sorts of fascinating Chinese-themed Legos for the local markets. And of course, since the Chinese have so many things to celebrate, the diversity of the products are pretty intriguing. video 30MB

Starving girls in Shenzhen

All of these girls live in Shenzhen. According to my untrained eyes, these girls don’t look like they are starving, unhappy or desirous of regime change for democracy™. I guess that I am not so good at picking out starving, hungry waifs like the BBC, FOX “news” and CNN are.

But what do I know? I only live here, and I have never seen anyone starve. And I’ve been living here or nearly twenty years.

But I am not a qualified “journalist”. I guess that to qualify, you must accept money from a Western government, and then write to their narrative. There are many who have “sold their souls” for some gold coins and baubles. It has generated a small cottege industry. Don’t you know.

No one is starving.

I think much of it has to do with the fact that the Chinese government believe that food is a natural Right, and makes sure that it is plentiful and cheap. This is considered a REAL Right.

Not the psuedo “Rights” like the United States has. You know a Right with exceptions

  • Freedom of Speech… controlled by the FCC, and Tech-oligarchy.
  • Right to bear arms… restricted by the government agency ATF.
  • Ninth Amendment… restricted by the FDA, FCC, NSA, and many, many others.
  • Tenth amendment…dead. A worthless, meaningless, phrase.

China believes that a fundamental Right is FUNDAMENTAL.

Of course, you’d never hear about that in the Western “news”. In that for-profit cesspool, everything comes at a price. It’s a land with a million tiny hands in your wallet.

Let’s look at the starving waifs yearning for freedom™ and democracy™…

We start with this slightly whisp of a lady…

video 2MB

And here’s the second gal. Love that fine tan dress. I like how it moves. You can tell that she’s hungry. After all, look at the sad and forlorn expression on her face.

video 1MB

Here’s a girl being sexy in the kitchen. Sorry that you can only see her backside. But I guess you might think that she is starving because she is not obese like so many American women. But that’s just cultural. The Chinese eat far better, healthier, and have far less stress than their American counterparts. video 5MB

Here’s another girl. She’s considered to be fat. In China, due to the diet, and perhaps genetics, the fat tends to go to the chest area, not to the stomach. As us, Americans and Europeans must deal with. I really think that the fact that GMOs are banned in China has a lot to do with it. video 2MB

This woman has great posture. I really cannot see the kind of starvation that resembles hunger like I saw when I lived in Pennsylvania. There, at that time, people couldn’t afford food, and with the collapse of the steel industry, many had to make due. They would fish, and eat rabbit, and other things to keep their bellies full. I’m not seeing it in China. Sorry. video 6MB

Elementary / kindergarten teacher. I suppose that this girl is borderline starving. You can tell by her sunken ass-cheeks and lack of stomach.

She reminds me of the many friends that I made when I first arrived in China. Many girls. Many dates. Many fun times.

But I must tell you, we all ate very well, and no one was starving. video 1.5MB

Life in Shenzhen / Nanshan / Zhuhai

Various “home” videos taken by myself. All in Shenzhen, and Zhuhai. All that I took with my fine four-year-old Huawei cellphone camera, with DouXing editing and music. Enjoy…

Afternoon outside my office. Video 11MB

Along the beach road. If you look at the water, you can see Shenzhen on the horizon. video 11MB

Riding the subway in Shenzhen. video 11MB

A view of the Shenzhen-Zhuhai-HK-Macao bridge. It’s that long bridge in the background. video 11MB

At the ferry port from Shenzhen to Zhuhai. This view is taken on the second floor of the Shenzhen side, where you go to the kiosks to get your tickets. video 11MB

One of our photo shoots. This was taken a few months ago. For you newbies, yea MM does photoshoots. It’s all a part of the affirmation campaigns along with thought direction for manifested reality, don’t you know.

Anyways, do these people look like they are starving and desirous for democracy™ and freedom™? video 26MB

Eating dinner in a small local restaurant at night. Friends, and family. That’s little mm playing with the cell phone. Oh, I’m so bad. Don’t worry, it was for less than 20 minutes. video 44MB

Here’s what it is like riding a bus at night. Do these people look like they are ready to revolt against the evil CCP regime? Sheech! You have got to be an idiot to believe the anti-China narrative. video 65MB

Prekindergarten education. Learning starts at two years old in China. Then there’s kindergarten, followed by elementary school, and military training, and into the pipe with middle school and upwards. video 45MB

What it is like on the streets. After all, the picture that is being sent to millions of people is  snowy winter Shenzhen filled with unhappy and starving Chinese. So what’s the real story? video 2MB

Conclusion

Most “news” out of the collective West (in this case referring to China) are nothing more than made-up, fabricated lies. Lies that have no resemblance to the truth.

It’s a well-funded (to 5 billion dollars) effort (by the United States federal budget) to demonize China to the point where all Westerners (and most especially Americans) are filled with hate and loathing towards China.

This is for a build up for a major war.

Make no mistake. The USA is on a War-footing. A war, that the United States expects to win. For, after all, everyone knows, that it is exceptional™.

You don’t have to believe me.

But here it is.

This is what it is like. This is what China is like in Early March 2022, while articles on Gab, Zerohedge, Free Republic, and FOX regurgitate the “starving Chinese” lies.

This is the real deal, and no, I am not “brainwashed by the evil CCP”. Sheech! And no, I don’t live in exclusive areas. This is what it is like.

Lower-middle class life.

In Shenzhen / Zhuhai China. Real deal reporting. Real home-made videos. Real experiences. Real thoughts, and real reporting. All for free.

Soak it in and take a good, hard look at what “news” you read. Becuase if one simple thing like this can be distorted and twisted out of reality, what else can be? Eh?

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“When Time Was New” (1964) by Robert F. Young

Robert F. Young (1915-1986) was a prolific science-fiction writer whose 200-odd stories were published in all of the leading s-f magazines of his day as well as in Colliers, The Saturday Evening Post and Playboy. Although many of his stories were also published in book form, they are today almost all out of print and are unfortunately very hard to find, even in second-hand bookstores, on the Internet or elsewhere.

This charming and very inventive tale first appeared as the cover story of the December 1964 issue of Worlds of IF magazine.

It recounts with humor and brio, the adventures of a time-travelling explorer, and had me hooked from the beginning, had me smiling and chuckling throughout, and left me with a most agreeable warm feeling about having so well spent my reading time.

As an added bonus, the story solves a long-standing literary mystery as to the identity of the visitor who interrupted Cole­ridge in 1797 while the poet was writing down his masterpiece Kubla Khan, which he had just composed in his sleep. The visitor had hung around for an hour, and afterwards Coleridge hadn’t been able to remember the rest of the poem, which has thus remained unfinished. Now we know why!

It is I dare to say a fine example of the quality of the writing of an author of humble origins (science-fiction fans were astonished to learn, towards the end of his life, that he had been a full-time janitor in a Buffalo public school during most of his writing career) who is well worth discovering or rediscovering.

“When Time Was New” (1964) by Robert F. Young

The stegosaurus standing beneath the ginkgo tree didn’t surprise Carpenter, but the two kids sitting in the branches did. He had expected to meet up with a stegosaurus sooner or later, but he hadn’t expected to meet up with a boy and a girl. What in the name of all that was Mesozoic were they doing in the upper Cretaceous Period!

Maybe, he reflected, leaning forward in the driver’s seat of his battery-powered triceratank, they were tied in in some way with the anachronistic fossil he had come back to the Age of Dinosaurs to investigate. Certainly the fact that Miss Sands, his chief assistant who had cased the place-time on the tirnescope, had said nothing about a couple of kids, meant nothing. Timescopes registered only the general lay of the land. They seldom showed anything smaller than a medium-sized mountain.

The stego nudged the trunk of the ginkgo with a hip as high as a hill. The tree gave such a convulsive shudder that the two children nearly fell off the branch they were sitting on and came tumbling down upon the serrated ridge of the monster’s back. Their faces were as white as the line of cliffs that showed distantly beyond the scatterings of dogwoods and magnolias and live oaks, and the stands of willows and laurels and fan palms, that patterned the prehistoric plain.

Carpenter braced himself in the driver’s seat. “Come on, Sam,” he said, addressing the triceratank by nickname. “Let’s go get it!”

Since leaving the entry area several hours ago, he had been moving along in low gear in order not to miss any potential clues that might point the way to the anachronistic fossil’s place of origin – a locale which, as was usually the case with unidentifiable anachronisms, the paleontological society that employed him had been able to pinpoint much more accurately in time than in space. Now, he threw Sam into second and focused the three horn-howitzers jutting from the reptivehicle’s facial regions on the sacral ganglion of the offending ornithischian. Plugg! Plugg! Plugg! went the three stun charges as they struck home, and down went the a posteriori section of the stego. The anterior section, apprised by the pea-sized brain that something had gone haywire, twisted far enough around for one of the little eyes in the pint-sized head to take in the approaching tricer­atank, whereupon the stubby forelegs immediately began the herculean task of dragging the ten-ton, humpbacked body out of the theater of operations.

Carpenter grinned. “Take it easy, old mountainsides,” he said. “You’ll be on all four feet again in less time than it takes to say ’Tyrannosaurus rex’.”
After bringing Sam to a halt a dozen yards from the base of the ginko, he looked up at the two terrified child­ren through the one-way transparency of the reptivehicle’s skullnacelle. If anything, their faces were even whiter than they had been before. Small wonder. Sam looked more like a triceratops than most real triceratops did. Raising the nacelle, Carpenter recoiled a little from the sudden contrast between the humid heat of the midsummer’s day and Sam’s air-conditioned interior. He stood up in the driver’s compart­ment and showed himself. “Come on down, you two,” he called. “Nobody’s going to eat you.”

Two pairs of the widest and bluest eyes that he had ever seen came to rest upon his face. In neither pair, how­ever, was there the faintest gleam of understanding. “I said come on down,” he repeated. “There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
The boy turned to the girl, and the two of them began jabbering back and forth in a sing-song tongue that re­sembled Chinese, but only as the mist resembles the rain.

It had no more in common with modern American than its speakers had with their surroundings. Clearly they hadn’t understood a word he had said. But, equally as clearly, they must have found reassurance in his plain and honest face, or perhaps in the gentle tone of his voice. After talking the matter over for a few moments, they left their aerie and shinned down the trunk, the boy going first and helping the girl over the rough spots. He was about nine; she was about eleven.

Carpenter stepped out of the compartment, vaulted down from Sam’s steel snout and went over to where they were standing. By this time, the stego had recovered the use of its hind legs and was high-tailing – or rather, high-backing ­it over the plain. The boy was wearing a loose, apricot-colored blouse which was considerably stained and disheveled from his recent arboreal activities, a pair of apricot-colored slacks which were similarly stained and disheveled and which terminated at his thin calves and a pair of open-toe sandals. The girl’s outfit was identical, save that it was azure in hue and somewhat less stained and disheveled. She was about an inch taller than the boy, but no less thin. Both of them had delicate features, and hair the color of buttercups, and both of them wore expressions so solemn as to be almost ludicrous. It was virtually a sure bet that they were brother and sister.

Gazing earnestly up into Carpenter’s gray eyes, the girl gave voice a series of sing-song phrases, each of them, judg­ing from the nuances of pronunciation, representative of a different language.

When she finished, Carpenter shook his head. “I just don’t dig you, pumpkin,” he said. Then, just to make sure, he repeated the remark in Anglo-Saxon, Aeolic Greek, lower Cro-magnonese, upper-Acheulian, middle English, Iroquoian and Hyannis-Portese, smatterings of which tongues and dia­lects he had picked up during his various sojourns in the past. No dice. Every word he spoke was just plain Greek to the girl and the boy.

Suddenly the girl’s eyes sparkled with excitement, and, plunging her hand into a plastic reticule that hung from the belt that supported her slacks, she withdrew what ap­peared to be three pairs of earrings. She handed one pair to Carpenter, one to the boy, and kept one for herself; then she and the boy proceeded to affix the objects to their ear lobes, motioning to Carpenter to do the same. Com­plying, he discovered that the tiny disks which he had taken for pendants were in reality tiny diaphragms of some kind. Once the minute clamps were tightened into place, they fitted just within the ear openings. The girl regarded his handiwork critically for a moment, then, standing on tiptoe, reached up and adjusted each disk with deft fingers. Satisfied, she stepped back. “Now,” she said, in perfect idi­omatic English, “we can get through to each other and find out what’s what.”
Carpenter stared at her. “Well I must say, you caught on to my language awful fast!”

“Oh, we didn’t learn it,” the boy said. “Those are micro­translators – hearrings. With them on, whatever we say sounds to you the way you would say it, and whatever you say sounds to us the way we would say it.”

“I forgot I had them with me,” said the girl. “They’re standard travelers’ equipment, but, not being a traveler in the strict sense of the word, I wouldn’t have happened to have them. Only I’d just got back from foreign-activities class when the kidnapers grabbed me. Now,” she went on, again gazing earnestly up into Carpenter’s eyes, “I think it will be best if we take care of the amenities first, don’t you? My name is Marcy, this is my brother Skip, and we are from Greater Mars. What is your name, and where are you from, kind sir?”

It wasn’t easy, but Carpenter managed to keep his voice matter-of-fact. It was no more than fair that he should have. If anything, what he had to say was even more incredible that what he had just heard. “I’m Howard Carpenter, and I’m from Earth, A.D. 2156. That’s 79,062,156 years from now.” He pointed to the triceratank. “Sam over there is my time machine – among other things. When powered from an outside source, there’s practically no limit to his field of oper­ations.”

The girl blinked once, and so did the boy. But that was all. “Well,” Marcy said presently, “that much is taken care of: you’re from Earth Future and we’re from Mars Present.” She paused, looking at Carpenter curiously. “Is there some­thing you don’t understand, Mr. Carpenter?”

Carpenter took a deep breath. He exhaled it. “In point of fact, yes. For one thing, there’s the little matter of the difference in gravity between the two planets. Here on Earth you weigh more than twice as much as you weigh on Mars, and I can’t quite figure out how you can move around so effortlessly, to say nothing of how you could have shinned up the trunk of that ginkgo tree.”

“Oh, I see what you mean, Mr. Carpenter,” Marcy said. “And it’s a very good point, too. But obviously you’re using Mars Future as a criterion, and just as obviously Mars Future is no longer quite the same as Mars Present. I – I guess a lot can happen in 79,062,156 years. Well, anyway, Mr. Carpenter,” she continued, “the Mars of Skip’s and my day has a gravity that approximates this planet’s. Centuries ago, you see, our engineers artificially increased the existent gravity in order that no more of our atmosphere could escape into space, and successive generations had adapted themselves to the stronger pull. Does that clarify matters for you, Mr. Carpenter?”

He had to admit that it did. “Do you kids have a last name?” he asked.
“No, we don’t, Mr. Carpenter. At one time it was the custom for Martians to have last names, but when desentimen­talization was introduced, the custom was abolished. Before we proceed any further, Mr. Carpenter, I would like to thank you for saving our lives. It – it was very noble of you.”


“You’re most welcome,” Carpenter said, “but I’m afraid if we go on standing here in the open like this, I’m going to have to save them all over again, and my own to boot. So let’s the three of us get inside Sam where it’s safe. All right?”

Leading the way over to the triceratank, he vaulted up on the snout and reached down for the girl’s hand. After pulling her up beside him, he helped her into the driver’s compartment. “There’s a small doorway behind the driver’s seat,” he told her. “Crawl through it and make yourself at home in the cabin just beyond. You’ll find a table and chairs and a bunk, plus a cupboard filled with good things to eat. All the comforts of home.”

Before she could comply, a weird whistling sound came from above the plain. She glanced at the sky, and her face went dead-white. “It’s them!” she gasped. “They’ve found us already!”

Carpenter saw the dark winged-shapes of the pteranodons then. There were two of them, and they were homing in on the triceratank like a pair of prehistoric dive-bombers. Seizing Skip’s hand, he pulled the boy up on the snout, set him in the compartment beside his sister, and told them to get into the cabin fast. Then he jumped into the driver’s seat and slammed down the nacelle.

Just in time: the first pteranodon came so close that its right aileron scraped against Sam’s frilled head-shield, and the second came so close that its ventral fuselage brushed Sam’s back. Their twin tailjets left two double wakes of bluish smoke.

Carpenter sat up straight in the driver’s seat. Ailerons? Fuse­lage? Tailjets?
Pteranodons?

He activated Sam’s shield-field and extended it to a dis­tance of two feet beyond the armor-plating, then he threw the reptivehicle into gear. The pteranoclons were circling high overhead. “Marcy,” he called, “come forward a minute, will you?”

Her buttercup-colored hair tickled his cheek as she leaned over his shoulder. “Yes, Mr. Carpenter?”

“When you saw the pteranodons, you said, ’They’ve found us already!’ What did you mean by that?”

“They’re not pteranodons, Mr. Carpenter. Whatever pter­anadons are. They’re kidnapers, piloting military-surplus fly­abouts that probably look like pteranodons. They abducted Skip and me from the preparatory school of the Greater Martian Technological Apotheosization Institute and are hold­ing us for ransom. Earth is their hideout. There are three of them altogether – Roul and Fritad and Holmer. One of them is probably back in the spaceship.”

Carpenter was silent for several moments. The Mars of A.D. 2156 was a desolate place of rubble, sand and wind inhabited by a few thousand diehard colonists from Earth and a few hundred thousand diehard Martians, the former living beneath atmosphere-domes and the latter, save for the few who had intermarried with the colonists, living in deep caves where oxygen could still be obtained. But twenty- second century excavations by the Extraterrestrial Archaeol­ogical Society had unearthed unquestionable evidence to the effect that an ultra-technological civilization similar to that of Earth Present had existed on the planet over 70,000,000 years ago. Surely it was no more than reasonable to as­sume that such a civilization had had space travel.

That being the case, Earth, during her uppermost Mesozoic Era, must have presented an ideal hideout for Martian criminals, kidnappers included. Certainly such a theory threw considerable light on the anachronisms that kept cropping up in Cretaceous strata. There was of course another way to explain Marcy’s and Skip’s presence in the Age of Dinosaurs: they could be A.D. 2156 Earth children, and they could have come back via time machine the same as he had. Or they could have been abducted by twenty-second century kidnappers, for that matter, and have been brought back. But, that being so, why should they lie about it?
“Tell me, Marcy,” Carpenter said, “do you believe I came from the future?”

“0h, of course, Mr. Carpenter. And I’m sure Skip does, too. It’s – it’s kind of hard to believe, but I know that someone as nice as you wouldn’t tell a fib – especially such a big one.”

“Thank you,” Carpenter said. “And I believe you came from Greater Mars, which, I imagine, is the planet’s largest and most powerful country. Tell me something about your civilization.

“It’s a magnificent civilization, Mr. Carpenter. Every day we progress by leaps and bounds, and now that we’ve licked the instability factor, we’ll progress even faster.”

” ’The instability factor’? ”

“Human emotion. It held us back for years, but it can’t any more. Now, when a boy reaches his thirteenth birthday and a girl reaches her fifteenth, they are desentimentalized. And after that, they are able to make calm cool decisions strictly in keeping with pure logic. That way they can achieve maximum efficiency. At the Institute preparatory school, Skip and I are going through what is known as the ’pre-desentimentalization process.’ After four more years we’ll begin receiving dosages of the desentimentalization drug. Then —”

SKRRRREEEEEEEEEEK! went one of the pteranodons it sideswiped the shield-field.

Carpenter watched it as it wobbled wildly for a moment, and before it shot skyward he caught a glimpse of its occup­ant. All he saw was an expressionless face, but from its forward location he deduced that the man was lying in a prone position between the two twelve-foot wings.

Marcy was trembling. “I – I think they’re out to kill us, Mr. Carpenter,” she said. “They threatened to if we tried to escape. Now that they’ve got our voices on the ransom tape, they probably figure they don’t need us any more.”

He reached back and patted her hand where it lay light­ly on his shoulder. “It’s all right, pumpkin. With old Sam here protecting you, you haven’t got a thing to worry about.”

“Is – is that really his name?”

“It sure is. Sam Triceratops, Esquire. Sam, this is Marcy. You take good care of her and her brother – do you hear me?” He turned his head and looked into the girl’s wide blue eyes. “He says he will. I’ll bet you haven’t got any­body like him on Mars, have you?”

She shook her head – as standard a Martian gesture, ap­parently, as it was a terrestrial – and for a moment he thought that a tremulous smile was going to break upon her lips. It didn’t, though – not quite. “Indeed we haven’t, Mr. Carpenter.”

He squinted up through the nacelle at the circling pter­anodons (he still thought of them as pteranodons, even though he knew they were not). “Where’s this spaceship of theirs, Marcy? Is it far from here?”

She pointed to the left. “Over there. You come to a river, and then a swamp. Skip and I escaped this morning when Fritad, who was guarding the lock, fell asleep. They’re a bunch of sleepyheads, always falling asleep when it’s their turn to stand guard. Eventually the Greater Martian Space Police will track the ship here; we thought we could hide out until they got here. We crept through the swamp and floated across the river on a log. It – it was awful, with big snakes on legs chasing us, and – and – ”

His shoulder informed him that she was trembling again. “Look, I’ll tell you what, pumpkin,” he said. “You go back to the cabin and fix yourself and Skip something to eat. I don’t know what kind of food you’re accustomed to, but it can’t be too different from what Sam’s got in stock. You’ll find some square vacuum-containers in the cupboard – they contain sandwiches. On the refrigerator-shelf just above, you’ll find some tall bottles with circlets of little stars – they contain pop. Open some of each, and dig in. Come to think of it, I’m hungry myself, so while you’re at it, fix me something, too.”

Again, she almost smiled. “All right, Mr. Carpenter. I’ll fix you something special.”

Alone in the driver’s compartment, he surveyed the Cretaceous landscape through the front, lateral and rear viewscopes. A range of young mountains showed far to the left. To the right was the distant line of cliffs. The rear viewscope framed scattered stands of willows, fan palms and dwarf magnolias, beyond which the forested uplands, wherein lay his entry area, began. Far ahead, volcanos smoked with Mesozoic abandon.

79,061,889 years from now, this territory would be part of the state of Montana. 79,062,156 years from now, a group of paleontologists digging somewhere in the vastly changed terrain would unearth the fossil of a modern man who had died 79,062,156 years before his disinterment

Would the fossil turn out to be his own?

Carpenter grinned, and looked up at the sky to where the two pteranodons still circled. It could have been the fossil of a Martian.

He turned the triceratank around and started off in the opposite direction. “Come on, Sam,” he said. “Let’s see if we can’t find a good hiding place where we can lay over for the night. Maybe by morning I’ll be able to figure out what to do. Who’d ever have thought we’d wind up playing rescue-team to a couple of kids?”

Sam grunted deep in his gear box and made tracks for the forested uplands.

The trouble with going back in time to investigate anach­ronisms was that frequently you found yourself the author of the anachronism in question. Take the classic instance of Professor Archibald Quigley.

Whether the story was true or not, no one could say for certain, but, true or not, it pointed up the irony of time travel as nothing else could. A staunch Coleridge admirer, Professor Quigley had been curious for years – or so the story went – as to the identity of the visitor who had called at the farmhouse in Nether Stowey in the county of Somersetshire, England in the year 1797 and interrupted Cole­ridge while the poet was writing down a poem which he had just composed in his sleep. The visitor had hung around for an hour, and afterward Coleridge hadn’t been able to remember the rest of the poem. As a result, Kubla Khan was never finished. Eventually, Professor Quigley’s curiosity grew to such proportions that he could no longer endure it, and he applied at the Bureau of Time Travel for permission to return to the place-time in order that he might set his mind at ease. His request was granted, whereupon he handed over half his life-savings without a qualm in ex­change for a trip back to the morning in question. Emerging near the farmhouse, he hid in a clump of bushes, watching the front door; then, growing impatient when no one showed up, he went to the door himself, and knocked. Coleridge answered the knock personally, and even though he asked the professor in, the dark look that he gave his visitor was something which the professor never forgot to the end of his days.

Recalling the story, Carpenter chuckled. It wasn’t really anything for him to be chuckling about, though, because what had happened to the professor could very well hap­pen to him. Whether he liked it or not, there was a good chance that the fossil which the North American Paleontolog­ical Society had sent him back to the Mesozoic Era to inves­tigate might turn out to be his own.

Nevertheless, he refused to let the possibility bother him. For one thing, the minute he found himself in a jam, all he had to do was contact his two assistants, Miss Sands and Peter Detritus, and they would come flying to his aid in Edith the therapod or one of the other reptivehicles which NAPS kept on hand. For another, he had already learned that outside forces were at work in the Cretaceous Period. He wasn’t the only candidate for fossildom. Any­way, worrying about such matters was a waste of time: what was going to happen had already happened, and that was all there was to it.

Skip crawled out of the cabin and leaned over the back of the driver’s seat. “Marcy sent you up a sandwich and a bottle of pop, Mr. Carpenter,” he said, handing over both items. And then, “Can I sit beside you, sir?”

“Sure thing,” Carpenter said, moving over.

The boy climbed over the backrest and slid down into the seat. No sooner had he done so than another buttercup- colored head appeared. “Would – would it be all right, Mr.. Carpenter, if – if -”

“Move over and make room for her in the middle, Skip.”

Sam’s head was a good five feet wide, hence the driver’s compartment was by no means a small one. But the seat itself was only three feet wide, and accommodating two half-grown kids and a man the size of Carpenter was no small accomplishment, especially in view of the fact that all three of them were eating sandwiches and drinking pop. Carpenter felt like an indulgent parent taking his offspring on an excursion through a zoo.

And such a zoo! They were in the forest now, and around them Cretaceous oaks and laurels stood; there were willows, too, and screw pines and ginkgos galore, and now and then they passed through incongruous stands of fan palms.

hrough the undergrowth they glimpsed a huge and lumbering creature that looked like a horse in front and a kangaroo in back. Carpenter identified it as an anatosaurus. In a clearing they came upon a struthiomimus and startled the ostrich-like creature half out of its wits. A spike-backed ankylosaurus glowered at them from behind a clump of sedges, but discreetly refrained from questioning Sam’s right of way. Glancing into a treetop, Carpenter saw his first archaeopteryx. Raising his eyes still higher, he saw the circling pteranodons.
He had hoped to lose them after entering the forest, and to this end he held Sam on an erratic course. Obviously, however, they were equipped with matter detectors. A more sophisticated subterfuge would be necessary. There was a chance that he might bring them down with a barrage of stun-charges, but it was a slim one and he decided not to try it in any event. The kidnappers undoubtedly deserved to die for what they had done, but he was not their judge. He would kill them if he had to, but he refused to do it as long as he had an ace up his sleeve.
Turning toward the two children, he saw that they had lost interest in their sandwiches and were looking apprehen­sively upward. Catching their eye, he winked. “I think it’s high time we gave them the slip, don’t you? ”

“But how, Mr. Carpenter?” Skip asked. “They’re locked right on us with their detector-beams. We’re just lucky or­dinary Martians like them can’t buy super Martian weap­ons. They’ve got melters, which are a form of iridescers: but if they had real iridescers, we’d be goners.”

“We can shake them easy, merely by jumping a little ways back in time. Come on, you two – finish your sand­wiches and stop worrying.”

Their apprehension vanished, and excitement took its place. “Let’s jump back six days,” Marcy said. “They’ll never find us then because we won’t be here yet.”
“Can’t do it, pumpkin – it would take too much starch out of Sam. Time-jumping requires a tremendous amount of power. In order for a part-time time-machine like Sam to jump any great distance, its power has to be supplemented by the power of a regular time station. The station propels the reptivehicle back to a pre-established entry area, and the time-traveler drives out of the area and goes about his business. The only way he can get back to the present is by driving back into the area, contacting the station and tapping its power-supply again, or by sending back a dis­tress signal and having someone come to get him in an­other reptivehicle. At the most, Sam could make about a four-day round trip under his own power but it would burn him out. Once that happened, even the station couldn’t pull him back. I think we’d better settle for an hour.”

Ironically, the smaller the temporal distance you had to deal with, the more figuring you had to do. After directing the triceratank via the liaison-ring on his right index finger to continue on its present erratic course, Carpenter got busy with pad and pencil, and presently he began punching out arithmetical brain-twisters on the compact computer that was built into the control panel.

Marcy leaned forward, watching him intently. “If it will expedite matters, Mr. Carpenter,” she said, “I can do simple sums, such as those you’re writing down, in my head. For instance, 828,464,280 times 4,692,438,921 equals 3,887,518,032,130,241,880.”

“It may very well at that, pumpkin, but I think we’d better check and make sure, don’t you?” He punched out the first two sets of numerals on the calculator, and depressed the multiplication button. 3,887,518,032,130,241,880, the an­swer panel said. He nearly dropped the pencil.

“She’s a mathematical genius,” Skip said. “I’m a mechani­cal genius myself. That’s how come we were kidnaped. Our government values geniuses highly. They’ll pay a lot of money to get us back.”

“Your government? I thought kidnappers preyed on parents, not governments.”
“Oh, but our parents aren’t responsible for us any more, Marcy explained. “In fact, they’ve probably forgotten all about us. After the age of six, children become the property of the state. Modern Martian parents are desentimentalized, you see, and don’t in the least mind getting rid of – giving up their children.”

Carpenter regarded the two solemn faces for some time. “Yes,” he said, “I do see at that.”

With Marcy’s help, he completed the rest of his calcula­tions; then he fed the final set of figures into Sam’s frontal ganglion. “Here we go, you two!” he said, and threw the jumpback switch. There was a brief shimmering effect and an almost imperceptible jar. So smoothly did the transition take place that Sam did not even pause in his lumbering walk.

Carpenter turned his wristwatch back from 4:16 P.M. to 3:16 P.M. “Take a look at the sky now, kids. See any more pteranodons?”

They peered up through the foliage. “Not a one, Mr. Carpenter,” Marcy said, her eyes warm with admiration. “Not a single one!”

“Say, you’ve got our scientists beat forty different ways from Sunday!” Skip said. “They think they’re pretty smart, but I’ll bet they’ve never even thought of trying to travel in time. . . How far can you jump into the future, Mr. Carpen­ter – in a regular time-machine, I mean?”

“Given sufficient power, to the end of time – if time does have an end. But traveling beyond one’s own present is forbidden by law. The powers-that-be in 2156 consider it bad for a race of people to find out what’s going to hap­pen to them before it actually happens, and for once I’m inclined to think that the powers-that-be are right.”

He discontinued liaison control, took over manually and set Sam on a course at right angles to their present direction. At length they broke free from the forest onto the plain. In the distance the line of cliffs that he had noticed earlier showed whitely against the blue and hazy sky. “How’d you kids like to camp out for the night?” he asked.

Skip’s eyes went round. “Camp out, Mr. Carpenter?”

“Sure. We’ll build a fire, cook our food over it, spread our blankets on the ground – regular American Indian style. Maybe we can even find a cave in the cliffs. Think you’d like that?”

Both pairs of eyes were round now. “What’s ’American Indian style,’ Mr. Carpenter?” Marcy asked.

He told them about the Arapahoes and the Cheyennes and the Crows and the Apaches, and about the buffalo and the great plains and Custer’s last stand, and the Conestogas and the frontiersmen (the old ones, not the “new”), and about Geronimo and Sitting Bull and Cochise, and all the while he talked their eyes remained fastened on his face as though it were the sun and they had never before seen day. When he finished telling them about the settling of the west, he told them about the Civil War and Abraham Lin­coln and Generals Grant and Lee and the Gettysburg Ad­dress and the Battle of Bull Run and the surrender at Appomattox.

He had never talked so much in all his life. He won­dered what had come over him, why he felt so carefree and gay all of a sudden and why nothing seemed to matter except the haze-ridden Cretaceous afternoon and the two round-eyed children sitting beside him. But he did not waste much time wondering. He went on to tell them about the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the Amer­ican Revolution and George Washington and Thomas Jef­ferson and Benjamin Franklin and John Adams, and about what a wonderful dream the founding fathers had had and about how much better it would have turned out if oppor­tunistic men had not used it to further their own selfish end and about how relatively wonderful it had turned out anyway, despite the many crimes that had been com­mitted in its name. By the time he finished, evening was on hand. The white cliffs rose up before them, shouldering the darkening sky.

At the base of the cliffs they found a jim-dandy of an untenanted cave, large enough to accommodate both Sam and themselves and with enough room left over to build a campfire. Carpenter drove the reptivehicle inside and parked it in the rear; then he extended the shield-field till it in­cluded the cave, the side of the cliff and a large semi­circular area at the base of the cliff. After checking the “front yard” and finding that it contained no reptiles except several small and harmless lizards, he put the two children to work gathering firewood.

eanwhile, he generated a one-way illusion-field just within the mouth of the cave. By this time Skip, at least, had shed his reserve. “Can I help build the fire, Mr. Carpenter?” he cried, jumping up and down. “Can I – can I – can I?”

“Skip!” Marcy said.
“It’s all right, pumpkin,” Carpenter told her. “You can help, too, if you like.”

The walls of the cave turned red, then rosy, as young flames grew into full-fledged ones.

Carpenter opened three packages of frankfurters and three packages of rolls and showed his charges how to spear the frankfurters on the end of pointed sticks and roast them over the fire. Afterward he demonstrated how to place a frankfurter in a roll and smother it with mus­tard, pickle relish, and chopped onions. It was as though he had flung wide magic casements opening on enchanted lands that the two children had not dreamed existed. The last vestiges of solemnity departed from their faces, and dur­ing the next half hour they created and consumed six hot dogs apiece. Skip got so excited that he nearly fell into the fire, and the smile that had been trying all afternoon to break upon Marcy’s lips at last came through, teaching the flames to burn bright.

Carpenter had made a pot of cocoa in Sam’s kitchenette, and nothing more was needed to round out the cookout except marshmallows. Was it remotely possible, he wondered, that his efficient chief assistant had included such nostalgic delicacies among the various supplies in Sam’s tail-compart­ment? It was doubtful at best, but he took a look anyway. To his delight, he found a whole box of them.
Again, he performed a demonstration, while the two chil­dren looked on in open-mouthed awe. When the two marshmallows which he had speared on his stick turned golden brown he thought for a moment that Skip’s eyes were going to fall out of his head. As for Marcy, she just stood there and stared as though Carpenter had said, “Let there be light!” and the first day had come into being.

Laughing, he removed the marshmallows and handed one to each of them. “Skip!” Marcy said when the boy popped his into his mouth and dispatched it with a single gulp. “Where are your manners?” She ate hers daintily.

After the marshmallow roast, he went outside and cut enough laurel and dogwood branches for three mattresses. He showed the children how to arrange the branches on the cavern floor and how to cover them with the blankets which he took out of Sam’s tail-compartment. Skip needed no fur­ther invitation to turn in: exhausted from his enthusiastic activities and becalmed by his full stomach, he collapsed upon his blanket as soon as he had it in place. Carpenter got three more blankets, covered him with one of them and turned to Marcy. “You look tired, too, pumpkin.”

“Oh, but I’m not, Mr. Carpenter. Not in the least bit. I’m two years older than Skip, you know. He’s just a kid.”

He folded the remaining two blankets into impromptu pillows and placed them a few feet from the fire. He sat down on one of them; she sat down on the other. All evening, grunts and growls and groans had been coming sporadically from beyond the shield-field; now they were supplanted by an awesome noise that brought to mind a gigantic road-repair machine breaking up old pavement. The cavern floor trembled, and the firelight flickered wildly on the wall. “Sounds like old tyrannosaurus,” Carpenter said. “Probably out looking for a midnight snack in the form of a struthiomimus or two.”

“’Tyrannosaurus,’ Mr. Carpenter?”

He described the ferocious theropod for her. She nodded after he had finished, and a shudder shook her. “Yes,” she said, “Skip and I saw one. It was a little while after we crossed the river. We – we hid in a clump of bushes till he passed. What terrible creatures you have here on Earth, Mr. Carpenter!”

“They no longer exist in my day and age,” Carpenter said. “We have terrible ’creatures’ of another order – ’creatures’ that would send old tyrannosaurus high-tailing it for the hills like a flushed rabbit. I shouldn’t be complaining, though. Our technological debauchery left us with a cold-war hang­over – sure; but it paid off in quite a number of things. Time travel, for one. Interplanetary travel, for another.” At this point, the road-repair machine struck a bad stretch of pavement, and, judging from the ungodly series of sounds that ensued, blew a rod to boot. The girl moved closer to him. “Take it easy, pumpkin. There’s nothing to worry about. An army of theropods couldn’t break through that shield-field.”
“Why do you call me ’pumpkin,’ Mr. Carpenter? On Mars, a pumpkin is an unpleasant squashy vegetable that grows in swamps and midden-marshes.”

He laughed. The sounds from beyond the shield-field di­minished, then faded away, as the theropod thundered off in another direction. “On Earth, a pumpkin is quite a nice vegetable – or maybe it’s a fruit. Whichever, it’s quite re­spectable. But that’s beside the point. ’Pumpkin’ is what a man calls a girl when he likes her.”

There was a silence. Then, “Do you have a real girl, Mr. Carpenter?”

“Not actually, Marcy. You might say that figuratively speaking I worship one from afar.”

“That doesn’t sound like very much fun. Who is she?”

“She’s my chief assistant at the North American Paleon­tological Society where I work – Miss Sands. Her first name is ’Elaine,’ but I never call her by it. She sees to it that I don’t forget anything when I retro-travel, and she cases the placetimes over a time-scope before I start out. Then she and my other assistant, Peter Detritus, stand by, ready to come to the rescue if I should send back a can of chicken soup. You see, a can of chicken soup is our distress signal. It’s about as big an object as a paleontologivehicle can handle in most cases, and the word ’chicken’ in our language connotes fear.”

“But why do you worship her from afar, Mr. Carpenter?”

“Well you see,” Carpenter said, “Miss Sands isn’t just an ordinary run-of-the-mill girl. She’s the cool, aloof type – a goddess, if you know what I mean. Although I don’t see how you possibly could. Anyway, you simply don’t treat goddesses the way you treat mere girls – you keep your distance and worship them from afar and humbly wait for them to bestow favors upon you. I – I worship her so much, in fact, that every time I’m near her I get so frustrated that I can hardly say anything. Maybe after I get to know her better it’ll be different. So far, I’ve known her three months.”

He fell silent. Marcy’s hearrings twinkled in the firelight as she turned and looked gently up into his face. “What’s the matter, Mr. Carpenter – cat got your tongue?”

“I was just thinking,” Carpenter said. “Three months is quite a long time at that – long enough for a man to tell whether a girl is ever going to like him or not. And Miss Sands isn’t ever going to like me – I can see that now. Why, she doesn’t even look at me unless she absolutely has to, and she won’t say two words to me if she can possibly avoid it. So you see, even if I did stop worshipping her from afar and got up enough nerve to tell her that I love her, she would probably only be annoyed and tell me to get lost.”

Marcy was indignant. “She must be out of her mind, Mr. Carpenter – just plain out of her mind. She should be as­hamed of herself!”

“No, Marcy – you’ve got her all wrong. You can’t expect a girl as beautiful as she is to go for a good-for-nothing time-bum like me.”

“A good-for-nothing time-bum indeed! You know, Mr. Carpenter, I don’t think you understand women very well. Why, I’ll bet if you told her you love her, she’d throw herself into your arms!”

“You’re a romantic, Marcy. In real life, such things don’t happen.” He stood up. “Well, young lady, I don’t know about you, but I’m tired. Shall we call it a day?”
“If you wish to, Mr. Carpenter.”

She was asleep by the time he pulled her blanket up to her chin. As he stood there looking down at her, she turned on her side, and the firelight caught the buttercup-hue fuzz on the back of her neck, where her hair had been cut too short, and tinted it red-gold. All he could think of were buttercup-clad meadows in spring, and the warm clean sun rising and ushering in the dew-jeweled day . . .
After checking to see if Skip was all right, he went over and stood in the cave mouth and stared out into the dark­ness. With tyrannosaurus’ departure, the lesser Cretaceous creatures had come out of their hiding places and were making their presence known again. He glimpsed the gro­tesque shapes of several ornithopods; he saw an ankylosaurus standing immobile by a coppice of fan palms; he heard lizards scurrying both inside and outside the shield-field. A moon subtly different from the one he was most accus­tomed to was climbing into the prehistoric heavens. The difference lay in the number of meteorite craters. There were far fewer of them now than there would be 79,062,156 years in the future.

He realized presently that although he was still looking at the moon he was no longer seeing it. He was seeing the campfire instead, and the girl and the boy enthusiastically roasting marshmallows. Why hadn’t he gotten married and had children? he wondered suddenly. Why had he passed up all the pretty girls he had ever known, only to fall hopelessly in love at the age of thirty-two with a beautiful goddess who preferred not to know he was alive? What had given him the notion that the thrill derived from adventure was somehow superior to the contentment derived from lov­ing and being loved? – that getting the bugs out of historical and pre-historical times was more important than getting the bugs out of his own life? That a lonely room in a board­ing house was a man’s castle and that drinks drunk in dim-lit bars with fun-girls he could no longer remember the next day spelled “freedom”?

What treasure had he expected to find in the past that could equal the treasures he had passed up in the future?

The night had grown chill. Before lying down to sleep he added more wood to the fire. He listened to the flames crackle and watched their pale ffickerings on the cavern walls. A lizard regarded him with golden eyes out of pre­historic shadows. In the distance, an omithopod went Wa­roompf! Beside him in the Mesozoic night the two children breathed softly in their green-bough beds. Presently he slept.

The next morning, Carpenter wasted no time in getting the show on the road.
Marcy and Skip were all for remaining in the cave in­definitely, but he explained to them that, were they to stay in one place, the kidnappers would find them that much sooner, and that therefore it would be better if they kept on the move. Thus far, everything he had told them had rung a bell in their language just as everything they had told him had rung a bell in his, but this time, for some rea­son, he had a hard time getting through to them. Either that, or they just plain didn’t want to leave the cave. Leave it they did however – after ablutions performed in Sam’s compact lavatory and a breakfast of bacon and eggs cooked in Sam’s kitchenette – when he made it clear to them that he was still the boss.
He hadn’t as yet decided on a definite plan of action. While trying to make up his mind, he let the triceratank pick its own course over the plain – a feat for which its hypersensitive terrainometer more than qualified.

Actually, he had only two choices: (1) – continue to play big brother to the two children and elude the kidnappers until they gave up or until the cavalry, in the form of the Greater Martian Space Police, arrived on the scene, or (2) – return to the entry-area and signal Miss Sands and Peter Detritus to bring the triceratank back to the present. The second choice was by far the safer course of action. He would have settled for it without hesitation if it had not been for two things: (a) Marcy and Skip, while they undoubtedly would be able to adapt to a civilization as similar to their own as twenty-second century terrestrial civili­zation was, might never feel completely at home in it, and (b) sooner or later, they would come face to face with the demoralizing information that their own civilization of 79,062,156 years ago had long since turned to dust and that the technological dreams which they had been taught to re­gard as gospel had come to nothing. A possible third choice lay in taking them back to Earth Present, keeping them there until such time as the kidnappers gave up and left or until the Space Police showed up, and then returning them to Earth Past; but such a procedure would involve several round trips to the Cretaceous Period. Carpenter knew with­out having to ask that, owing to the fantastic expense in­volved, NAPS’ budget couldn’t support even one such non-paleontological round trip, to say nothing of several.

Pondering the problem, he became aware that someone was tugging on his sleeve. It was Skip, who had come for­ward and climbed into the driver’s seat. “Can I steer him, Mr. Carpenter? Can I?”

Carpenter surveyed the plain through the front, lateral, and rear viewscopes; then he raised Sam’s head and took a long look at the sky through the nacelle. A dark speck hovered high above the line of cliffs they had left less than an hour ago. As he watched, it was joined by two others. “Later on, Skip. Right now, I think we’ve got com­pany.”

Skip’s eyes had found the specks, too. “The pteranodons again, Mr. Carpenter?”
“I’m afraid so.”

The specks grew rapidly larger, resolved into winged shapes with narrow, pointed heads. Marcy had come for­ward, and her gaze, too, was directed at the sky. This time, she didn’t seem to be in the least bit frightened, and neither did Skip. “Are we going to jump back in time again, Mr. Carpenter?” she asked.
“We’ll see, pumpkin,” he said.

The pteranodons were clearly visible now. There was no question but what they were interested in Sam. Whether they would try attacking him again was another matter. In any event, Carpenter decided that, even though the tricer­atank’s shield-field was in operation, his best bet would be to head for the nearest stand of trees. It was a stand of palmettos, and about half a mile distant. He threw Sam into high, and took over the controls again. “Come on, Sam,” he said, to keep the kids’ morale from faltering, “show Marcy and Skip what you can do!”
Sam took off like a twentieth-century locomotive, his flex­ible steel legs moving rhythmically, his alloy-hoofs pound­ing the ground in a thunderous cadence. Nevertheless, he was no match for the pteranodons, and they overtook him easily. The foremost one swooped down a hundred yards Lead, released what looked like a big metal egg and soared skyward.

The metal egg turned out to be a bomb. The crater that it created was so wide that it took all of Carpenter’s skill to guide Sam around it without rolling the reptivehicle over. Instantly he revved up the engine and shifted into sec­ond. “They’re not going to get us that way, are they, old timer?” he said.
“URRRRRRRR!” Sam grunted.

Carpenter glanced at the sky. All of the pteranodons were directly overhead now. Circling. One, two, three, he counted. Three . . . yesterday there had been only two. “Marcy,” he said, suddenly excited, “how many kidnappers did you say there were?”

“Three, Mr. Carpenter. Roul and Fritad and Holmer.”

“Then they’re all up there. That means the ship is unguarded – unless there’s a crew.”

“No, Mr. Carpenter – there’s no crew. They did the piloting themselves.”

He lowered his gaze from the circling pteranodons. “Do you kids think you could get inside?”

“Easy,” Skip said. “It’s a military-surplus flyabout-carrier with standard locks, and standard locks are simple for someone with a little mechanical ability to disengage. That’s how come Marcy and I were able to escape in the first place. You just leave everything to me, Mr. Carpenter.”

“Good,” Carpenter said. “We’ll be there waiting for them when they come back.”

With Marcy doing the figuring, retro co-ordinate calculus was a breeze. Sam was ready for jump-back in a matter of seconds.

Carpenter waited till they were in the stand of palmettos, then he threw the switch. Again, there was a shimmering effect and a slight jar, and daylight gave way to pre-dawn darkness. Behind them in a cave at the base of the cliffs, another triceratank stood, and another Carpenter and another Marcy and Skip still slept soundly in their green- bough beds.

“How far did we jump back this time, Mr. Carpenter?” Skip asked.

Carpenter turned on Sam’s headlights and began guiding him out of the stand of palmettos. “Four hours. That should give us plenty of time to reach the ship and get set before our friends return. We may even reach it before they start out – assuming of course that they haven’t been searching for us round the clock.”
“But suppose they spot us in this time-phase?” Marcy objected. “Won’t we be in the same pickle we just got out of?”

“It’s a possibility, pumpkin. But the odds have it over­whelmingly that they didn’t spot us. Otherwise they wouldn’t have gone on searching for us – right?”
She gazed at him admiringly. “You know something, Mr. Carpenter? You’re pretty smart.”

Coming from someone who could multiply 4,692,438,921 by 828,464,280 in her head, it was quite a compliment. However, Carpenter managed to take it in his stride. “I hope you kids can find the ship now,” he said.

“We’re already on the right course,” Skip said. “I know, because I’ve got a perfect sense of direction. It’s camou­flaged as a big tree.”

For the second time that morning, the sun came up. As had been the case yesterday, Sam’s size and mien cowed the various Cretaceous creatures they met although whether tyrannosaurus would have been similarly cowed had they come upon him was a moot question at best. In any case, they didn’t come upon him. By eight o’clock they were moving over the same terrain that Carpenter had come to not long after leaving the forested uplands the day before. “Look!” Marcy exclaimed presently. “There’s the tree we climbed when the humpbacked monster chased us!”

“It sure is,” Skip said. “Boy were we scared!”

Carpenter grinned. “He probably thought you were some species of flora he hadn’t tried yet. Good thing for his di­gestive system that I happened along when I did.”

They looked at him blankly for a moment, and at first he thought that the barriers of two different languages and two different thought worlds had been too high for his little joke to surmount. Such, however, did not prove to be the case. First Marcy burst out laughing, and then Skip.

“Mr. Carpenter, if you aren’t the darndest!” Marcy cried.

They went on. The landscape grew more and more open, with coppices of palmettos and clusters of fan palms constituting most of the major plant-life. Far to the right, smoking volcanos added their discolored breath to the hazy atmosphere. In the distances ahead, mountains showed, their heads lost in the Mesozoic smog. The humidity was so high that large globules of moisture kept condensing on Sam’s nacelle and rolling down like raindrops. Tortoises, lizards, and snakes abounded, and once a real pteranodon glided swiftly by overhead.
At length they came to the river which Marcy had mentioned and which the increasing softness of the ground had been heralding for some time. Looking downstream, Carpenter saw his first brontosaurus.

He pointed it out to the kids, and they stared at it bug-eyed. It was wallowing in the middle of the sluggish stream. Only its small head, its long neck, and the upper part of its back were visible. The neck brought to mind a lofty rubbery tower, but the illusion was marred by the frequency with which the head kept dipping down to the ferns and horse tails that lined the river bank. The poor creature was so enormous that it virtually had to keep eating day and night in order to stay alive.

Carpenter found a shallows and guided Sam across the stream to the opposite bank. The ground was somewhat firmer here, but the firmness was deceiving, for the repti­vehicle’s terrainometer registered an even higher frequency of bogs. (Lord! Carpenter thought. Suppose the two kids had blundered into one!) Ferns grew in abundance, and there were thick carpets of sassafras and sedges. Palmettos and fan palms were still the rule, but there were occasional ginkgos scattered here and there. One of them was a veri­table giant of a tree, towering to a height of over one hundred and fifty feet.

Carpenter stared at it. Cretaceous Period ginkgos generally grew on high ground, not low, but a ginkgo the size of this one had no business growing in the Cretaceous Period at all. Moreover, the huge tree was incongruous in other first respects. Its trunk was far too thick, for one thing. For another, the lower part of it up to a height of about twenty feet consisted of three slender subtrunks, forming a sort of tripod on which the rest of the tree rested.

At this point, Carpenter became aware that his two charges were pointing excitedly at the object of his curios­ity. “That’s it!” Skip exclaimed. “That’s the ship!”

“Well, no wonder it caught my eye,” Carpenter said. “They didn’t do a very good job of camouflaging it. I can even see one of the fly-about-bays.”

Marcy said, “They weren’t particularly concerned about how it looks from the ground. It’s how it looks from above that counts. Of course, if the Space Police get here in time they’ll pick it up sooner or later on their detector-beams, but it will fool them for a while at least.”

“You talk as though you don’t expect them to get here in time.”

“I don’t. Oh, they’ll get here eventually, Mr. Carpenter, but not for weeks, and maybe even months. It takes a long time for their radar-intelligence department to track a ship, besides which it’s a sure bet that they don’t even know we’ve been kidnaped yet. In all previous cases where In­stitute children have been abducted, the government has paid the ransom first and then notified the Space Police. Of course, even after the ransom has been paid and the children have been returned, the Space Police still launch a search for the kidnappers, and eventually they find their hide­out; but naturally the kidnapers are long gone by then.”

“I think,” Carpenter said, “that it’s high time a precedent was established, don’t you?”

After parking Sam out of sight in a nearby coppice of palmettos and deactivating the shield-field, he reached in under the driver’s seat and pulled out the only hand weapon the triceratank contained – a lightweight but powerful stun-rifle specially designed by NAPS for the protection of time-travel personnel. Slinging it on his shoulder, he threw open the nacelle, stepped out onto Sam’s snout and helped the two children down to the ground. The trio approached the ship.
Skip shinned up one of the landing jacks, climbed some distance up the trunk and had the locks open in a matter of seconds. He lowered an aluminum ladder. “Everything’s all set, Mr. Carpenter.”

Marcy glanced over her shoulder at the palmetto coppice. “Will – will Sam be all right do you think?”

“Of course he will, pumpkin,” Carpenter said. “Up with you now.”

The ship’s air-conditioned interior had a temperature that paralleled Sam’s, the lighting was cool, subdued. Beyond the inner lock, a brief corridor led to a spiral steel stair­way that gave access to the decks above and to the engine rooms below. Glancing at his watch, which he had set four hours back, Carpenter saw that the time was 8:24. In a few minmutes, the pteranodons would be closing in on the Sam and Carpenter and Marcy and Skip of the “previous” timephase. Even assuming that the three kidnappers headed straight for the ship afterward, there was still time to spare – time enough, certainly, to send a certain message before laying the trap he had in mind. True, he could send the message after Roul and Fritad and Holmer were safely locked in their cabins, but in the event that something went wrong he might not be able to send it at all, so it was better to send it right now. “Okay, you kids,” he said, “close the locks and then lead the way to the communications-room.”

They obeyed the first order with alacrity, but hedged on the second. Marcy lingered in the corridor, Skip just behind her.

“Why do you want to go to the communications-room, Mr. Carpenter?” she asked.
“So you kids can radio our position to the Space Police and tell them to get here in a hurry. You do know how, I hope.”

Skip looked at Marcy. Marcy looked at Skip. After a moment, both of them shook their heads. “Now see here,” Carpenter said, annoyed, “you know perfectly well you know how. Why are you pretending you don’t?”

Skip looked at the deck. “We – we don’t want to go home, Mr. Carpenter.”

Carpenter regarded first one solemn face and then the other. “But you’ve got to be home! Where else can you go?”

Neither of them answered. Neither of them looked at him. “It boils down to this,” he proceeded presently. “If we suc­ceed in capturing Roul and Fritad and Holmer, fine and dandy. We’ll sit tight, and when the Space Police get here we’ll turn them over. But if something goes wrong and we don’t capture them, we’ll at least have an ace up our sleeve in the form of the message you’re going to send. Now I’m familiar with the length of time it takes to get from Mars to Earth in the spaceships of my day, but I don’t of course know how long your spaceships take. So maybe you two can give me some idea of the length of time that will elapse between the Space Police’s receipt of our message and their arrival here on Earth,” he asked.

“With the two planets in their present position, just over four days,” Marcy said. “If you like, Mr. Carpenter, I can figure it out for you right down to a fraction of a – “
“That’s close enough, pumpkin. Now, up the stairs with you and you too, Skip. Time’s a-wasting!”

They complied glumly. The communications-room was on the second deck. Some of the equipment was vaguely familiar to Carpenter, but most of it was Greek. A wide, deck-to-ceiling viewport looked out over the Cretaceous plain, and, glancing down through the ersatz foliage, he found that he could see the palmetto coppice in which Sam was hidden. He scanned the sky for signs of the returning pteranodons. The sky was empty. Turning away from the viewport, he noticed that a fourth party had entered the room. He unslung his stun-rifle and managed to get it half­way to his shoulder; then, ZZZZZZTTT! a metal tube in the fourth party’s hand went, and the stun-rifle was no more.
He looked incredulously down at his hand.

The fourth party was a tall, muscular man clad in clothing similar to Marcy’s and Skip’s, but of a much richer material. The expression on his narrow face contained about as much feeling as a dried fig, and the metal tube in his hand was now directed at the center of Carpenter’s forehead. Carpen­ter didn’t need to be told that if he moved so much as one iota he would suffer a fate similar to that suffered by his rifle, but the man vouchsafed the information anyway. “If you move, you melt,” he said.

“No, Holmer!” Marcy cried. “Don’t you dare harm him. He only helped us because he felt sorry for us.”

“I thought you said there were only three of them, pump­kin,” Carpenter said, not taking his eyes from Holmer’s face.

“That is all there are, Mr. Carpenter. Honest! The third pteranodon must have been a drone. They tricked us!”

Holmer should have grinned, but he didn’t. There should have been triumph in his tone of voice when he addressed Carpenter, but there wasn’t.

“You had to be from the future, friend,” he said. “Me and my buddies cased this place some time ago, and we knew you couldn’t be from now. That being so, it wasn’t hard for us to figure out that when that tank of yours disappeared yesterday you either jumped ahead in time or jumped back in it, and the odds were two to one that you jumped back. So we gambled on it, figured you’d try the same thing again if you were forced into it, and rigged up a little trap for you, which we figured you’d be smart enough to fall for. You were. The only reason I don’t melt you now is because Roul and Fritad aren’t back yet. I want them to get a look at you first. I’ll melt you then but good. And the brats, too. We don’t need them any more.”

Carpenter recoiled. The dictates of pure logic had much in common with the dictates of pure vindictiveness. Probably the pteranodons had been trying to “melt” Marcy, Skip, and himself almost from the beginning, and if it hadn’t been for Sam’s shield-field, they undoubtedly would have succeeded. Oh well, Carpenter thought, logic was a two-edged blade, and two could wield it as well as one.

“How soon will your buddies be back, Holmer?”

The Martian regarded him blankly. Carpenter tumbled to the fact that the man wasn’t wearing hearrings then.

He said to Marcy: “Tell me, pumpkin, if this ship were to fall on its side, would either the change in its position or its impact with the ground be liable to set off an explosion? Answer me with a ’yes’ or a ’no’ so that our friend here won’t know what we’re talking about.”

“No, Mr. Carpenter.”

“And is the structure of the ship sturdy enough to prevent bulkheads from caving in on us?”

“Yes, Mr. Carpenter.”

“How about the equipment in this room? Is it bolted securely enough to prevent its being torn loose?”

“Yes, Mr. Carpenter.”

“Good. Now, as surreptitiously as you can, you and Skip start sidling over to that steel supporting pillar in the center deck. When the ship starts to topple, you hold on for dear life.”

“What’s he saying to you, kid?” Holmer demanded.

Marcy stuck her tongue out at him “Wouldn’t you like to know!” she retorted.
Obviously, the ability to make calm, cool decisions strictly in keeping with pure logic did not demand a concomitant ability to think fast, for it was not until that moment that the desentimentalized Martian realized that he alone of the four persons present was not wearing hearrings.

Reaching into the small pouch that hung at his side, he withdrew a pair. Then, keeping his melter directed at Car­penter’s forehead with one hand, he began attaching them to his ears with the other. Meanwhile, Carpenter ran his right thumb over the tiny, graduated nodules of the liaison-ring on his right index finger, and when he found the ones he wanted, he pressed them in their proper sequence. On the plain below, Sam stuck his snout out of the palmetto cop­pice.
Carpenter concentrated, his thoughts riding the tele-cir­cuit that now connected his mind with Sam’s sacral gang­lion: Retract your horn-howitzers and raise your nacelle-shield, Sam. Sam did so. Now, back off, and get a good run, charge the landing-jack on your right, and knock it out. Then get the hell out of the way!

Sam came out of the coppice, turned and trotted a hun­ched yards out on the plain. There he turned again, aligning himself for the forthcoming encounter. He started out slow­ly, geared himself into second. The sound of his hoofbeats climbed into a thunderous crescendo and penetrated the bulkhead of the communications-room, and Holmer, who had finally gotten his hearrings into place, gave a start and stepped over to the viewport.

By this time Sam was streaking toward the ship like an ornithischian battering-ram. No one with an IQ in excess of 75 could have failed to foresee what was shortly going to happen.

Holmer had an IQ considerably in excess of 75, but some­times having a few brains is just as dangerous as having a little knowledge. It was so now. Forgetting Carpenter com­pletely, the Martian threw a small lever to the right of the viewscope, causing the thick, unbreakable glass to re­tract into the bulkhead; then he leaned out through the resultant aperture and directed his melter toward the ground. Simultaneously, Sam made contact with the landing jack, and Holmer went flying through the aperture like a jet-propelled Darius Green.

The two kids were already clinging to the supporting pillar. With a leap, Carpenter joined them. “Hang on, you two!” he shouted, and proceeded to practice what he preached. The downward journey was slow at first, but it rapidly picked up momentum. Somebody should have yelled, ’TIMBER!” Nobody did, but that didn’t dissuade the gink­go from fulfilling its destiny. Lizards scampered, tortoises scrabbled and sauropods gaped for miles around. KRRR­ERRUUUUUUMMMP! The impact tore both Carpenter and the children from the pillar, but he managed to grab them and cushion their fall with his body. His back struck the bulkhead, and his breath blasted from his lungs. Somebody turned out the lights.

At length, somebody turned them back on again. He saw Marcy’s face hovering like a small pale moon above his own. Her eyes were like autumn asters after the first frost.

She had loosened his collar and she was patting his cheeks and she was crying. He grinned up at her, got gingerly to his feet and looked around. The communications-room hadn’t changed any, but it looked different. That was be­cause he was standing on the bulkhead instead of the deck. It was also because he was still dazed.

Marcy, tears running down her cheeks, wailed, “I was afraid you were dead, Mr. Carpenter!”

He rumpled her buttercup-colored hair. “Fooled you, didn’t I?”

At this point, Skip entered the room through the now horizontal doorway, a small container clutched in his hand. His face lit up when he saw Carpenter. “I went after some recuperative gas, but I guess you don’t need it after all. Gee, I’m glad you’re all right, Mr. Carpenter!”

“I take it you kids are, too,” Carpenter said.

He was relieved when both of them said they were. Still somewhat dazed, he clambered up the concave bulkhead to the viewport and looked out. Sam was nowhere to be seen. Remembering that he was still in tele-circuit contact, he ordered the triceratank to home in, after which he climbed through the viewport, lowered himself to the ground and began looking for Holmer’s body. When he failed to find it he thought at first that the man had survived the fall and had made off into the surrounding scenery.

Then he came to one of the bogs with which the area infested, and saw its roiled surface. He shuddered. Well anyway, he knew who the fossil was.

Or rather, who the fossil had been.

Sam came trotting up, circumventing the bog in response to the Terrainometer’s stimuli. Carpenter patted the reptivehicle’s head, which was not in the least damaged from its recent collision with the landing-jack; then he broke off liaison and returned to the ship. Marcy and Skip were stand­ing in the viewport, staring at the sky. Turning, Carpenter stared at the sky, too. There were three specks in it.
His mind cleared completely then, and he lifted the two children down to the ground. “Run for Sam!” he said. “Hurry!”

He set out after them. They easily outmatched his longer but far-slower strides, gaining the reptivehicle and clambering into the driver’s compartment before he had covered half the distance. The pteranodons were close now, and he could see their shadows rushing toward him across the ground. Unfortunately, however, he failed to see the small tortoise that was trying frantically to get out of his way. He tripped over it and went sprawling on his face.

Glancing up, he saw that Marcy and Skip had closed Sam’s nacelle. A moment later, to his consternation the triceratank disappeared.

Suddenly another shadow crept across the land, a shadow so vast that it swallowed those cast by the pteranodons.

Turning on his side, Carpenter saw the ship. It was set­tling down on the plain like an extraterrestrial Empire State Building, and, as he watched, three rainbow-beams of light shot forth from its upper section and the three pteranodons went PFFFFFFTTT! PFFFFFFTT! PFFFFFFTTT! and were no more.

The Empire State Building came solidly to rest, opened its street doors and extended a gangplank the width of a Fifth Avenue sidewalk. Through the doors and down the sidewalk came the cavalry. Looking in the other direction, Carpenter saw that Sam had reappeared in exactly the same spot from which he had vanished. His nacelle had reopened, and Marcy and Skip were climbing out of the driver’s compartment in the midst of a cloud of bluish smoke. Carpenter understood what had happened then, and he kissed the twenty-second century good-by.

The two kids came running up just as the commander of the cavalry stepped to the forefront of his troops. Actually, the troops were six tall Martians wearing deep-purple togas and stern expressions and carrying melters, while the com­mander was an even taller Martian wearing an even purpler toga and an even sterner expression and carrying what looked like a fairy godmother’s wand. The dirty look which he accorded Carpenter was duplicated a moment later by the dirty look which he accorded the two children.

They were helping Carpenter to his feet. Not that he needed help in a physical sense. It was just that he was so overwhelmed by the rapid turn of events that he couldn’t quite get his bearings back. Marcy was sobbing.

“We didn’t want to burn Sam out, Mr. Carpenter,” she said, all in a rush, “but jumping back four days, two hours, sixteen minutes and three and three-quarter seconds and sneaking on board the kidnapper’s ship and sending a message to Space Police Headquarters was the only way we could get them here in time to save your life. I told them what a pickle you’d be in, and to have their iridescers ready. Then, just as we were about to come back to the present Sam’s time-travel unit broke down and Skip had to fix it, and then Sam went and burned out anyway, and oh, Mr. Carpenter, I’m so sorry! Now, you’ll never be able to go back to the year 79,062,156 again and see Miss Sands, and—”

Carpenter patted her on the shoulder. “It’s all right, pumpkin. It’s all right. You did the right thing, and I’m proud of you for it.” He shook his head in admiration. “You sure computed it to a T, didn’t you?”

A smile broke through the rain of tears, and the rain went away. “I’m – I’m pretty good at computations, Mr. Carpenter.”

“But I threw the switch,” Skip said. “And I fixed Sam’s time-travel unit when it broke down.”

Carpenter grinned. “I know you did, Skip. I think the two of you are just wonderful.” He faced the tall Martian with the fairy-godmother wand, noted that the man already had a pair of hearrings attached to his ears. “I guess I’m almost as beholden to you as I am to Marcy and Skip,” Carpenter said, “and I’m duly grateful. And now I’m afraid I’m going to impose on your good will still further and ask you to take me to Mars with you. My reptivehicle’s burned out and can’t possibly be repaired by anyone except a group of technological specialists working in an ultra-modern machine shop with all the trimmings, which means I have no way either of contacting the era from which I came, or of getting back to it.”

“My name is Hautor,” the tall Martian said. He turned to Marcy. “Recount to me, with the maximum degree of conciseness of which you are capable, the events beginning with your arrival on this planet and leading up to the pres­ent moment.”

Marcy did so. “So you see, sir,” she concluded, “in help­ing Skip and me, Mr. Carpenter has got himself in quite a pickle. He can’t return to his own era, and he can’t survive in this one. We simply have to take him back to Mars with us, and that’s all there is to it!”

Hautor made no comment. Almost casually, he raised his fairy-godmother wand, pointed it toward the kidnappers’ prostrate ship and did something to the handle that caused the wand proper to glow in brilliant greens and blues. Pres­ently a rainbow beam of light flashed forth from the Empire State Building, struck the kidnappers’ ship and relegated it to the same fate as that suffered by the three pteranodons. Turning, Hautor faced two of his men.

“Put the children on board the police cruiser and see to it that they are suitably cared for.” Finally, he turned back to Carpenter. “The government of Greater Mars is grateful for the services you have rendered it in the pre­serving of the lives of two of its most valuable citizens-to-be. I thank you in its behalf. And now, Mr. Carpenter, good-by.”

Hautor started to turn away. Instantly Marcy and Skip ran to his side. “You can’t leave him here!” Marcy cried. “He’ll die!”

Hautor signaled to the two Martians whom he had spoken to a moment ago. They leaped forward, seized the two children and began dragging them toward the Empire State Building. “Look,” Carpenter said, somewhat staggered by the new turn of events, but still on his feet, “I’m not begging for my life, but I can do you people some good if you’ll make room for me in your society. I can give you time travel, for one thing. For another—”

“Mr. Carpenter, if we had wanted time travel, we would have devised it long ago. Time travel is the pursuit of fools. The pattern of the past is set, and cannot be changed; and in it that has not already been done. Why try? And as for the future, who but an imbecile would want to know what tomorrow will bring?”
“All right,” Carpenter said. “I won’t invent time travel then, I’ll keep my mouth shut and settle down and be good solid citizen.”

“You wouldn’t and you know it, Mr. Carpenter – unless we desentimentalized you. And I can tell from the expression on your face that you would never voluntarily submit to such a solution. You would rather remain here in your prehistoric past and die.”

“Now that you mentioned it, I would at that,” Carpenter said. “Compared to you people, Tyrannosaurus rex is a Sal­vation Army worker, and all the other dinosaurs, saurisch­ians and ornithischians alike, have hearts of purest gold. But it seems to me that there is one simple thing which you could do in my behalf without severely affecting your desentimentalized equilibrium. You could give me a weapon to replace the one that Holmer disintegrated.”

Hautor shook his head. “That is one thing I cannot do, Mr. Carpenter, because a weapon could conceivably become a fossil, and thereby make me responsible for an anachro­nism. I am already potentially responsible for one in the form of Holmer’s irretrievable body, and I refuse to risk being responsible for any more. Why do you think I iri­desced the kidnappers’ ship?”

“Mr. Carpenter,” Skip called from the gangplank, up which two Martians were dragging him and his sister, maybe Sam’s not completely burned out. Maybe you can rev up enough juice to at least send back a can of chicken soup.”

“I’m afraid not, Skip,” Carpenter called back. “But it’s all right, you kids,” he went on. “Don’t you worry about me – I’ll get along okay. Animals have always liked me, so why shouldn’t reptiles! They’re animals, too.”

“Oh, Mr. Carpenter!” Marcy cried. “I’m so sorry this hap­pened! Why didn’t you take us back to 79,062,156 with you? We wanted you to all along, but we were afraid to say so.”

“I wish I had, pumpkin – I wish I had.” Suddenly, he couldn’t see very well, and he turned away. When he looked back, the two Martians were dragging Marcy and Skip through the locks. He waved. “Good-by, you kids,” he called. I’ll never forget you.”

Marcy made a last desperate effort to free herself. She al­most, but not quite, succeeded. The autumn asters of her eyes were twinkling with tears like morning dew. “I love you, Mr. Carpenter!” she cried, just before she and Skip were dragged out of sight. “I’ll love you for the rest of my life!”

With two deft movements, Hautor flicked the hearrings from Carpenter’s ears; then he and the rest of the cavalry climbed the gangplank and entered the ship. Some cavalry! Carpenter thought. He watched the street doors close, saw the Empire State Building quiver.

Presently it lifted and hovered majestically, stabbed into the sky just above the ground on a wash of blinding light. It rose, effortlessly, and became a star. It wasn’t a falling star, but he wished upon it anyway. “I wish both of you happiness,” he said, “and I wish that they never take your hearts away, because your hearts are one of the nicest things about you.”

The star faded then, and winked out. He stood all alone on the vast plain.
The ground trembled. Turning, he caught a great dark movement to the right of a trio of fan palms. A moment later, he made out the huge head and the massive, upright body. He recoiled as two rows of saberlike teeth glittered in the sun.
Tyrannosaurus!

A burned-out reptivehicle was better than no reptivehicle at all. Carpenter made tracks for Sam.

In the driver’s compartment, with the nacelle tightly closed, he watched the theropod’s approach. There was no question but what it had seen him, and no question but what it was headed straight for Sam. Marcy and Skip had retracted the nacelle-shield, which left Carpenter pretty much of a sitting duck; however, he didn’t retreat to Sam’s cabin just yet, for they had also re-projected the horn-howitzers.

Although the howitzers were no longer maneuverable, they were still operable. If the tyrannosaurus came within their fixed range it could be put temporarily out of action with a volley of stun-charges. Right now, it was approaching Sam at right angles to the direction in which the howitzers were pointing, but there was a chance that it might pass in front of them before closing in. Carpenter considered it a chance worth taking.

He crouched low in the driver’s seat, his right hand with­in easy reaching distance of the triggers. With the air-conditioning unit no longer functioning, the interior of the triceratank was hot and stuffy. To add to his discomfort, the air was permeated with the acrid smell of burnt wiring. He shut his mind to both annoyances, and concentrated on the task at hand.

The theropod was so close now that he could see its atrophied forelegs. They dangled down from the neck-width shoulders like the wizened legs of a creature one tenth its size. Over them, a full twenty-five feet above the ground Rod attached to a neck the girth of a tree trunk, loomed the huge head; below them, the grotesque torso swelled out and down to the hind legs. The mighty tail dragged over the landscape, adding the cracking and splitting noises of crushed shrubbery to the thunder thrown forth each time the enormous bird-claw feet came into contact with the terrain. Carpenter should have been terrified. He was at a loss to understand why he wasn’t.

Several yards from the triceratank, the tyrannosaurus came to a halt and its partially opened jaws began opening wider.

The foot-and-a-half-high teeth with which they were equipped could grind through Sam’s nacelle as though it was made of tissue paper, and from all indications, that was just what they were going to do. Carpenter prepared himself for a hasty retreat into Sam’s cabin; then just when things looked blackest, the therodon, as though dissatisfied with its present angle of attack, moved around in front of the reptivehicle, providing him with the opportunity he had been hoping for. His fingers leaped to the first of the trio of triggers, touched, but did not squeeze it. Why wasn’t he afraid?

He looked up through the nacelle at the horrendous head. The huge jaws had continued to part, and now the whole top of the skull was raising into a vertical position. As he stared, a pretty head of quite another nature appeared over the lower row of teeth and two bright blue a eves peered down at him.
“Miss Sands!” he gasped, and nearly fell out of the driver’s seat.

Recovering himself, he threw open the nacelle, stepped out on Sam’s snout and gave the tyrannosaurus an affectionate pat on the stomach. “Edith,” he said. “Edith, you doll, you!”

“Are you all right, Mr. Carpenter?” Miss Sands called down.

“Just fine,” Carpenter said. “Am I glad to see you, Miss Sands!”

Another head appeared beside Miss Sands. The familiar chestnut haired head of Peter Detritus. “Are you glad to see me too, Mr. Carpenter?”

“Well, I guess, Pete old buddy!”

Miss Sands lowered Edith’s lip ladder, and the two of them climbed down, Peter Detritus was carrying a tow cable, and presently he proceeded to affix it to Sam’s snout and Edith’s tail respectively. Carpenter lent a hand. “How’d you know I was in a pickle?” he asked. “I didn’t send back any soup.”

“We had a hunch,” Peter Detritus said. He turned to Miss Sands. “There, she’s all set, Sandy.”

“Well, let’s be on our way then,” Miss Sands said, She looked at Carpenter, then looked quickly away. “If, of course, your mission is completed, Mr. Carpenter.”
Now that the excitement was over he was finding her presence just as disconcerting as he usually found it. “It’s completed all right, Miss Sands,” he said to the left pocket of her field blouse. “You’ll never believe how it turned out, either.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. Sometimes the most unbeliev­able things of all turn out to be the most believable ones. I’ll fix you something to eat, Mr. Carpenter.”

She climbed agilely up the ladder. Carpenter followed, and Peter Detritus brought up the rear. “I’ll take the controls, Mr. Carpenter,” the latter said, pulling the ladder. “You look bushed.”

“I am,” Carpenter said.

In Edith’s cabin, he collapsed on the bunk. Miss Sands went over to the kitchenette and put water on to boil for coffee and took a boiled ham down from the refrigerator-shelf. Up in the driver’s compartment, Peter Detritus closed the nacelle and threw Edith into gear.

He was a good driver, Peter Detritus was, and he would rather drive than eat. Not only that, he could take a paleon­tologivehicle apart and put it back together again blind-folded. Funny, why he and Miss Sands had never gone for each other. They were both so attractive, you’d have thought they would have fallen in love long ago. Carpenter was glad that they hadn’t of course – not that it was ever going to do him any good.

He wondered why they had made no mention of the Space Police ship. Surely, they must have seen it when it blasted off . . .

Edith was moving over the plain in the direction of the uplands now, and through the cabin viewport he could see Sam shambling along behind on motion-provoked legs. In the kitchenette, Miss Sands was slicing ham. Carpenter concentrated on her, trying to drive away the sadness he felt over his parting with Marcy and Skip. His eyes touched her slender shapely legs, her slender waist, rose to her cupreous head, lingering for a moment on the silken fuzz that grew charmingly on the back of her neck where her hair had been cut too short. Strange, how people’s hair got darker when they grew older –
Carpenter lay motionlessly on the bunk. “Miss Sands,” said suddenly, “how much is 499,999,991 times 8,003,432,111?”

“400,171,598,369,111,001,” Miss Sands answered.

Abruptly she gave a start. Then she went on slicing ham.

Slowly, Carpenter sat up. He lowered his feet to the floor. A tightness took over in his chest and he could barely breathe. Take a pair of lonely kids. One of them a mathematical genius, the other a mechanical genius. A pair of lonely kids who have never known what it is like to be loved in all their lonely lives. Now, transport them to another planet and put them in a reptivehicle that for all its practicability is still a huge and delightful toy, and treat them to an impromptu Cretaceous camping trip, and show them the first affection they have ever known. Finally, take these things away from them and simultaneously provide them with a supreme mo­tivation for getting them back – the need to save a human life – and include in that motivation the inbuilt possibility that by saving that life they can – in another but no less real sense – save their own.
But 79,062,156 years! 49,000,000 miles! It couldn’t be!

Why couldn’t it?

They could have built the machine in secret at the preparatory school, all the while pretending to go along with the “pre-desentimentalization process”; then, just before they were scheduled to begin receiving doses of the desenti­talization drug, they could have entered the machine and time-jumped far into the future.
Granted, such a time-jump would have required a vast amount of power. And granted, the Martian landscape they would have emerged on would have given them the shock of their lives. But they were resourceful kids, easily resourceful enough to have tapped the nearest major power source, and certainly resourceful enough to have endured the climate and the atmosphere of Mars Present until they located one of the Martian oxygen caves. The Martians would have taken care of them and have taught them all they needed to know to pass themselves off as terrestrials in one of the domed colonies. As for the colonists, they wouldn’t have asked too many questions because they would have been overjoyed to add two newcomers to their underpopulated community. After that, it would merely have been a matter of the two children’s biding their time till they grew old enough to work and earn their passage to Earth. Once on Earth, it would merely have been a matter of acquiring the necessary education to equip them for paleontological work.

Sure, it would have taken them years to accomplish such a mission, but they would have anticipated that, and have time-jumped to a point in time far enough in advance of the year A.D. 2156 to have enabled them to do what they had to do. They had played it pretty close at that, though. Miss Sands had only been with NAPS for three months, and as for Peter Detritus, he had been hired a month later. On Miss Sands’ recommendation, of course.

They had simply come the long way around – that was all. Traveled 49,000,000 miles to Mars Past, 79,062,100 years to Mars Present, 49,000,000 miles to Earth Present, and 79,062,156 years to Earth Past.

Carpenter sat there, stunned.

Had they known they were going to turn out to be Miss Sands and Peter Detritus? he wondered. They must have – or, if not, they must have gambled on it and taken the names when they joined the colonists. All of which created something of a paradox. But it was a minor one at best, not worth worrying about. In any event, the names certainly fitted them.

But why had they passed themselves off as strangers? Well, they had been strangers, hadn’t they? And if they had told him the truth, would he have believed them?

Of course he wouldn’t have.

None of which explained why Miss Sands disliked him.

But did she dislike him? Maybe her reaction to him resulted from the same cause that was responsible for his reaction to her. Maybe she worshipped him as much as he worshipped her, and became as tongue-tied in his presence as he did in hers. Maybe the reason she had never looked at him any longer than was absolutely necessary was that she had been afraid of betraying the way she felt before he learned the truth about her.

He found it suddenly hard to see.

The smooth purring of Edith’s battery-powered motor filled the cabin. For quite some time now there had been no other sound.

“What’s the matter?” Miss Sands said suddenly out of clear blue sky. “Cat got your tongue, Mr. Carpenter?” He stood up then. She had turned, and was facing him. Her eyes were misted, and she was looking at him gently, adoringly . . . the way she had looked at him last night, in one sense, and 79,062,156 years ago in another, by a Meso­zoic campfire in an upper Cretaceous cave. Why I’ll bet if you told her you loved her, she’d throw herself into your arms!

“I love you, pumpkin,” Carpenter said.

And Miss Sands did.

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Spies, Nazis, Beautiful Women, Mobs, Daredevil Explorers, Heroes & Traitors In Incredible Adventure Artworks Of Mort Künstler

Mort Künstler is best known today for his vivid paintings of scenes from American history, specifically the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. These works have been featured in books and calendars, and spotlighted in exhibitions around the country.

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Less known is Künstler’s early work in men’s adventure magazines, a unique genre that populated newsstands from the 1950s through the late ‘70s. Also known as “men’s sweats,” because most covers featured a sweaty, shirtless guy facing some type of peril, scores of adventure titles vied for a reader’s attention with eye-popping headlines such as “Death Orgy of the Leopard Women” and “Weasels Ripped My Flesh!”

Men’s adventure magazines were the bastard child of the popular pulp magazines of the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s, and many of the artists who worked for the pulps also put paint to canvas for this next evolution, most famous among them being Norm Saunders. Numerous publishers saw an easy buck in the men’s adventure magazines, but none more so than Martin Goodman’s Magazine Management, whose titles included Male, Stag, Action For Men, Battlefield, Complete Man, For Men Only, Man’s World, and many others.

 

Künstler started working for the men’s adventure magazines shortly after graduating from Pratt Institute in the early 1950s.

“I was a hungry guy, and I was persistent,” he says. “I clicked with several [men’s adventure magazine] publishers, and it almost became a competition for my services. I ended up with Magazine Management mostly because they paid better and offered me as much work as I could handle.”

Künstler also did a lot of work for other publishers, whose titles included True, Argosy, Adventure, American Weekly, and The Saturday Evening Post. The men’s adventure magazines specialized in lurid headlines and even more lurid covers, often depicting over-the-top war stories, daring tales of escape, deadly encounters with dangerous animals, and sex. Most of the stories were pure fiction but presented as fact – an easy way to lure gullible readers. Künstler illustrated them all with a straight face.

“I always tried to make my covers and interior illustrations as believable as possible,” he says. “That was my knack, and instrumental in why the magazines sold so well. And I was rewarded as a result. It worked out very well and I had a lot of fun with it.”

The stories with a sexual component sometimes made Künstler a little uncomfortable, and he admits to turning down a couple of assignments because of that. When he did say yes, however, the results were stunning – sexy in a clean, classical style.

“By today’s standards, none of them are offensive,” Künstler says, “but they were slightly risque. I never painted an illustration in which a woman’s breasts were seen; they were always covered by long hair or a torn blouse.”

More: Mort Künstler, Wikipedia

Ah.

Now, if you will, picture, if you can, a time before man buns and rompers on the covers of “men’s magazines.” A time before the easy reach of internet porn, when magazines were a source of escape, fantasy and inspiration.

We’re not talking GQ, Maxim or Esquire, but instead titles that left nothing to the imagination, like Complete Man’s Magazine or True Men Stories or All Man or my personal favorite (for obvious reasons), Stag.

The publishers didn’t try to mine focus-group-driven demographic data to determine their audience. The editorial staff knew who they were after: Men.

Real men.

Guys who were just coming back from war or who were headed back into it.

Guys who were away from their families, girlfriends and wives, who wanted nothing more than to feel like a man in an environment that was trying to rob them of their souls.

They wanted to be transported back into the shit and to read stories about survival and sweat and combat and conquest.

These men’s magazines of the 50s and 60s offered the perfect respite from life’s drudgery. Packed with heroic stories of war or more salacious articles like the “‘Private Love Club’ Girls of London.”

Ads for well-paying jobs like meat cutting (“People Must Eat!”). These magazines went straight to the heart of what drives men to be only slightly-better-dressed cavemen. Action, adventure, women, fighting, danger, lust and an unwavering addiction to being a proud American.

The covers of these magazines were absolute works of art, typically depicting pulse-pounding scenes such as an outdoorsman shooting bloodthirsty wolves trying to attack his downed horse, a sailor rescuing crewmates from Nazis, or a swimmer beating a shark to death with a raft paddle.

Many of the publications featured artwork depicting the age-old damsel-in-distress with an imminent rescue by a Burt Lancaster-meets-Paul Newman type.

The foes didn’t matter — Nazis, bloodthirsty Mongolians or Pacific Island natives. What these stories had in common was that they raised the heart rate of the reader.

When I scrounged around the dusty, moldy boxes in an old used book store in a collapsing central Pennsylvania building, they had no idea that I was a fan of Men’s Magazines.

Before I unwrapped them, I could smell the musty pages that instantly transported me back to my grandfather’s basement, where I first saw some of these rags.

There was a stack there against a back wall sitting in a wooden apple crate wedged between an old oil tank piled with books and the remains of a sewing machine buried under bags of paperbacks.

I remember when I was a young boy.

Sometimes I would sneak down and leaf through them, not really understanding what I was looking at, but nonetheless fascinated by the pictures. I mean, how is an eight-year-old supposed to understand the subtle intricacies of article titles like “Nude Love Slaves of the Master of Pain”?

I got to see barely covered boobs on the covers and that was enough for me. (The “Playboy” stash would be uncovered later, scrounging though garbage cans outside. And yes, that was a different level of reading comprehension.)

Decades later, I still remember the impact of some of those covers, and this treasure trove that arrived in the mail was a perfect walk down memory lane.

I fell into the articles and pictures again, completely consumed by them.

Seriously, the cover images blew me away and I wanted to find out more about the artists who designed them.

Research kept leading me back to Mort Künstler, an illustrator and artist best known for his historical, war-themed pieces.

However, Künstler started like many of us do, freelancing for jobs as a way to pay the bills. In the 50s and 60s this meant illustrating the covers for many of the men’s pulp titles.

Want a man depicted fighting a shark? Künstler was your go-to guy.

There were others, of course.

Norman Saunders was also very well known for his illustrations across all men’s magazines, eventually branching out from pulp into westerns and science fiction. Saunders spent time as an MP and as a member of the Army Corps of Engineers during World War II.

Perhaps the military experience fine-tuned his skill at creating lifelike fantasy perfectly suited for pulp.

Throughout that period Künstler and Saunders progressed in their careers, prolifically creating works for magazines like National Geographic and Newsweek.

As cover art was slowly replaced by photography in the 70s, Künstler shifted directions and became a historical artist, while Saunders worked for Topps trading cards and continued illustrating other fantasy magazines.

There were several other artists that helped to shape this era as well, but many were never credited or else worked under pseudonyms so as to not affect their “real” art careers.

What they left in their wake, though, was an epic genre of images that sparked the imagination like no photography ever could.

At the time these magazines were being published, the country was in the midst of a cultural shift. Hippies were on the rise, political correctness was in its infancy, and we had Viet Nam looming.

These men’s magazines offered a release and a non-PC point of view. Drawn in by the cover art, the men who bought these mags were captivated by their stories that often blurred the lines between fact and fiction.

Inside these 25-cent rags there were no glossy pages or color photos. Each page was filled with black-and-white text on cheap, newspaper-type material. The articles were littered with testosterone-fueled, somewhat realistic fiction.

These pieces weren’t exactly an imitation of hardcore journalism — unless you are thinking of that other sort of hardcore.

Essentially, these magazines were eighty pages of pulp fodder, laced with sex, adventure, history and menace. The ads were reflections of society at the time, too.

Flipping through them, you could almost picture Don Draper sipping a third martini in his office before noon, dreaming up quick-hit ads that sold everything from love pills to binoculars to early precursors of cell phones.

What’s interesting is that all of the same types of ads are still in play today, only the quality of the images and sales copy has changed.

Suffice it to say, men are always going to be men, drawn to the same stuff. These magazines just gave zero F’s about subtlety. Remember, they weren’t trying to appeal to Harvard-educated executives. Their core readership were the GIs that had served in World War II or Korea, or who would be going to Viet Nam.

Pictures were key, but in-depth research was not. The heavyweight titles and subtitles were enough to keep the pages turning.

One of my favorite patriotic pictorials was simply titled, “Invasion!” It included grainy black-and-whites from Normandy. That would be cool in and of itself, but the subtitle was even better: It can be a platoon carrying M-1s or an Army corps backed by atomic cannon.

Once they’re dumped on that beach, an invasion boils down to just plain guts. Guns, guts, military superiority, nostalgia and pride. All the ingredients that would ensure the reader would come back for more.

But once the initial content got the reader’s heart pumping, it was time to send that blood elsewhere.

Toward the middle of the magazine were the women. Bikinis, bed sheets, blondes and brunettes — the centerfolds were tame by today’s standards.

Remember though, there was no Tinder, Instagram or PornHub for a guy to get his fix.

For a quarter, the reader was immersed in a world that catered to his every desire. From Japanese wrestling girls to The Case of the Nude Lady Bartenders.

These literary gems also tried to answer medical questions like “What is Sexual ‘Excess?’” (A good question if we’ve ever heard one.)

The back pages of the magazines were very much like they are today. A collection of ads, business “opportunities” and promises of better living through consumption. The publishers had the formula nailed.

As societal tastes have changed over the decades, so has the content of most major men’s magazines. Impossibly beautiful men living impossibly extraordinary lives are the substance that publishers and advertisers think we want.

As a middle-aged man with a few kids and a world-class “dad-bod,” I just can’t relate. I want to hear stories from guys with scars that they got in some unknown part of the world. Authenticity is what sells, and a bit of creative license here and there just makes the reading fun.

So, the next time you’re cruising the local bookstore or men’s magazines at the supermarket, take a look at the covers and ask yourself if there is anything actually piquing your interest.

Do you really want to learn “7 Secret Tips to Grooming the Perfect Beard?”

Or do you want to see a leather-clad biker saving his old lady from the clutches of the Nazi sadists?

Yeah, us too.

Yeah. I know.

It’s an old clichéd joke to say you read adult magazines for the articles. However, if you’re talking about men’s mags from the 1950s and 60s, there might actually be some truth in your statement.

Magazines like Playboy, Adam, Jem, and Rogue often featured genuinely well-written articles and short fiction.

Getting published in a men’s magazine wasn’t the shameful smudge on an author’s reputation as it is today – in fact, it was a common stepping stone for soon-to-be-famous authors.

But it isn’t just the stories that deserve respect – it’s the artwork that complimented them. Often sleazy and purposefully outrageous, the illustrations were designed to entice you to read the story in a not-so-subtle way.

In my mind, Mort Künstler  was one of the best. And I hope that I can impress upon you all why I loved his work. What follows are some of his art, and I hope that it teleports you all to another time and place…

Defending a house full of school girls from the rampaging communist menace…

Escaping on a raft with beautiful ladies and trying to navigate over rapids while the enemy tries to bomb you with explosives tied to kites…

Assault on a Nazi German stronghold…

Fighting off pacific islanders while on a captured Japanese patrol boat, while you protect the beautiful lasses who want to be saved…

Fending off ME-109s with a “tommy gun” while in a high altitude balloon, as you try to infiltrate the German V2 secret rocket program…

Rescuing women in a slave rape camp from their evil Nazi captors…

The crew of a merchant marine ship sunk by the Japanese, take control of the submarine and claim it for themselves…

Fighting off mutant, rapid, attack gophers…

Blowing up a secret Nazi installation while saving a beautiful scuba-dame…

Crashing through a bases gate with a red haired raven…

Battling sharks while shipwrecked on the high seas…

Fighting the evil communist Chinese with help from pretty attractive native women…

Special forces seize the personal quarters of a ranking Nazi German officer and commandeer his (ahem) possessions…

Military vet fights off thugs to protect the pretty lass…

Bank robbery, mission impossible style…

Hunting bigfoot for fine eating…

Taking over a Nazi German training aircraft and using it to bomb German bridges…

When the airfield is under attack, the hero races to a forgotten vintage biplane on display…

Dealing with evil Chinese triad mobsters…

Secret mission and convincing an attractive lass to help…

Separating the women from the Japanese as spoils of war…

Captured and a meeting of the Sheik…

When elephants rampage!

Freeing Russian women from the pleasure quarters…

Battle of Midway.

The fighting of the giant stingray!

A femme fatale…

Braving the wild rino!

Fighting a very agressive panther.

Staked down in the sand and being fed upon by vultures…

There’s a new shirtless cowboy in town…

Lone survivors. A man and two lovely women.

Mob action on board a yacht.

An art of seduction…

Seduction of two Nazi officers.

The rescue of a dame…

Battle in the skies…

A bank robbery…

Saling in the rough South Pacific…

Fighting together…

Party times Nazi style…

Balloon fun…

Rescue of trapped ladies from the Japanese…with tanks!

Plans within plans…

More heists…

Capture of a German military train…

Raid in a casino…

Seduction of Nazi elite…

A ruse for the big attack…

A surprise awaits inside the tent…

A paratroop rescue from the wild barbarians…

Hiding from the evil Chinese commies…

Seizing the beauty from the military base…

A bomb based bank heist…

Remember the Catina!

battle on the high seas…

The rewards of vice…

Stealing the oil…

Placing bombs on the hulls of the evil Japanese navy…

Mobsters caught poaching…

Capturing a key bridge…

And inside of China, some serious skull duggery…

Shootout in the subway…

Brave race for life…

Top secret mission to the South Pole.

The rewards of ill gains can provoke female inspiration…

Escape from a prisoner of war camp…

A historical battle…

Or battling the evil Chinese communists on their home turf…

Tromping though Vietnam…

Or being rescued by attractive native dames…

A civil war story…

Or fighting the wild indians…

Surprise awaiting at home…

Learning how to survive in the Northern wilderness…

Fighting the British…

Defending the South…

Destruction of the South…

Fun and games in the French Foreign Legion…

Secret mission to destroy the evil communist navy…

Taking away valuable assets…

Breaking up an evil Nazi party…

Destruction of a SAM missile complex…

Gathering of battle forces…

Taking over the port…

Taking over Nazi submarines…

Fighting a wild bear…

Prep for battle…

Recon the enemies new secret weapon…

Wagon train adventures…

And so on, and so forth.

I hope you all enjoyed this. My fingers are tired. Have a great rest of the day.

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This Japanese Artist DHK Imagined What Cats Would Look Like As Anime Girls

Here’s a nice distraction for a change. And Lordy do we all need it.

No talk about war today. We are going to shelve it.

Instead, We are going to play around with art and cats. As I know that many MM readers are pet lovers, and many of them love kitties. And you all know how special cats are. So we are just going to take a nice fun break and play around with cats and anime.

Japanese artist known as DHK recreated funny cat pictures in an anime style, turning the kittens into girls. The recreations are cute and professional. The artist manages to keep the resemblance to the original picture while creating stylish and beautiful characters that will probably make you wonder how your pets would look as humans.

More: Twitter h/t: boredpanda

A pinch of the cheek…

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Now, how about a cat stretching…

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Cute cat meme on the computer…

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I guess you could say it’s a meme about a meme regarding a meme. And now how about a cat dazing out into space…

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4 33 650×609 1

Or…

Perhaps a pensive tuxedo kitty…

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Or a cat taking a playful bite out of an arm…

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6 28 650×650 1

Or, how about this meme…

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And my cat used to do this all the time…

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As well as do this. In fact, I would always rub my hand across his back, up to his tail…

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9 27 990×825 1Fun huh?

 

Fun huh?

Yeah. I think so.

I just wanted to give everyone a break. We all need it. Don’t you think? Now for some more fun with your little buddies…

If you have a cat, you’ll love this.

Cat guardians (that means youse guys) will do anything to get their feline friends happy and purring. Sometimes this means spending dough (also known as moola) on toys and treats.

But wait!

You don’t have to spend a ton of money when the DIY versions are just as fancy.

So, Come on! Take a look at some favorite DIY cat toys. And keep in mind that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to make much of these items. Just some creative skills and a desire to help your beloved kitties play around.

We think they’re pretty purr-worthy:

Tree Stump Scratch Pad

This scratch pad is too cute for words. This is DIY at its best. When I was a boy, we used to roll up cardboard like this and melt wax in the grooves. It makes for great fire starters. This one just wraps cardboard and then holds it in place with Hot-melt glue.

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Peek-a-Boo Puzzle

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You can replicate this adorable toy by grabbing a box that’s similar to the one in the above photo. Hum…? What kind of box? I suggest a pizza box. Or, perhaps the box that your laptop came in.

Anyway. No problem! If you don’t have a box, then no problem! Just order take out. Problem solved!

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Then, after you eat the pizza, simply cut holes in it and grab a ball or two.  I suggest those little mini pom-poms that you can get at DIY hobby craft stores.

Your kitty’s mind will be stimulated, and his or her heart will be full!

DIY Cat Puzzle

No cardboard boxes, eh? Well, I’m sure that you have some old Tupperware lying around. Don’t you?

By making holes in the lid of your Tupperware container, you can transform a Tupperware container into a brain exercise for your cat! All you need is to add some different-sized and colored balls in the container and your kitty is good to go.

This DIY cat puzzle will be lots of fun for inquisitive felines. No more bored kitty!

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DIY Cat Tree With Hammock

A simple stepladder gets a serious upgrade with this scratch-pad cat tree plus hammock. Just lay out an old towel, Tee-shirt, or cloth for your little buddy to lay upon. If you are creative, you can add cushions, zippers, thread, and all sorts of dangling things.

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McDonald’s stirrers

Come on! What cat owner doesn’t know of this trick?

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Double-Decker Cat Snug and Scratch Post

This is a bit more involved, but if you love your little buddies, perhaps you can throw something together. It doesn’t matter if it is made out of cardboard, or wood, or old furniture. Just make it cat-playful-friendly.

For me, here’s the big secret…

Just get cat-sized cardboard boxes. Don’t do anything else. Let the cats explore.

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Aluminum foil ball

Take a piece of aluminum foil – Crinkle it up – And make it into a ball. Yup, that simple, of course. You can decide whether to have the ball very tightly packed in, or if you’d rather, it can be less packed and bigger. You can have a number to see which your cat prefers.

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T-Shirt Cat Toy

Here’s another crafty way to repurpose that old T-shirt that you were planning to toss out. Cut the shirt into long strips and tie them into bows. What’s so difficult about that?

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Cat Wand

You probably already know that cats love wand toys. The thing is, they destroy them, and you end up buying one after another. Stop the spending cycle with this easy DIY cat-wand tutorial.

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A bag of DIY feathers

Heck! You don’t even need to open the bag up. Just throw it on the floor and let them “go to town”!

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Ice Cube Tray Food Puzzle

All you need is an ice cube tray and some kibble to make a new food puzzle for kitty.

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Wine Corks To DIY Kitty Toys

I have boxes of corks, don’t you know. I hope you’re saving your wine corks! In addition to these fun wine cork crafts, you can make some adorable wine cork kitty toys for your furry friend.

To make these adorable DIY cat toys, first, soften your wine corks by boiling and then make a hole in each of the softened wine corks. Using epoxy to make sure nothing comes loose, insert and stick some feathers, pipe cleaners, ribbon, jute, or anything else that will attract and keep your kitty busy for hours. Allow the toy to fully dry before giving it to your kitty.

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2022 03 04 15 31

DIY Cat Tent

While this DIY isn’t a cat toy, we know that every cat needs a place to hide — a little sanctuary to get away in when the house becomes too busy.

A DIY t-shirt cat tent is just the ticket! Simply make it with wire clothes hangers (to shape the tent) and an old t-shirt. DIY’ing cat toys and stuff for your kitty couldn’t get easier than this!

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2022 03 04 15 33

Some Cat Videos

Have some fun.

Video 1 – Bra thief. 1MB

Video 2 – Russian super cat -1MB

Video 3 – Cat furiously attacks dog – 2MB

Video 4 – Great Mouser – 7MB

Video 5 – Kung Fu Kitty – 4MB

Video 6 – Kitten has the makings of a great mouser – 4MB

Video 7 – Monkey hasn’t a chance – 7MB

Now, let’s end this article with some fun cat pictures…

With a doll.

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2022 03 04 15 41

The cat at play Painting by Henriette Ronner-Knip

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2022 03 04 15 43

And some purrrrr-fect inspiration…

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2022 03 04 15 44

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Cat Index,  which is part of my happiness index here…

Life & Happiness

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MM Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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The Fascinating Sketchbook Of Russian Artist Elena Limkina

The young Russian artist Elena Limkina reveals the inside of her fascinating sketchbook, where each page contains beautiful drawings in ink or watercolor. A wandering into the world of the artist through her creative diary, where she experiments styles and techniques, moving from architectural drawing to animal or floral illustration.

More info: Elena Limkina, Instagram, Behance, Facebook, Shop (h/t: ufunk)

Throughout my life, I have maintained my own MM sketchbooks. Being both an artist, an engineer, and a scientist, having a well documented record of my thoughts was important. And like this artist, my books were very similar to these works.

I would use ink, pencil, and blue pencil in the journals. The light blue pencil was used to outline the shapes, and then I would use an ink pen to illustrate.  I preferred to use a light green, or light tan notebook with lines. And for highlighting, I would use a white pencil.

On some notebooks, I would use a light wash of watercolor. This helped me add depth to my sketches.

However, many of my notes also incorporated formula, calculations, part numbers, addresses and the like. So I would often use a red pen, a blue pen, and sometimes other colored pens to highlight specific information.

I would use a yellow highlighter for passwords and access codes. And many of my notebooks used tape to hold in various photos, documents and other items that I wished to include in my journals.

One of the things that I was doing, up until I was incarcerated for my “retirement” was to print out photos on adhesive-backed paper. I would then cut out the paper, and place it nicely and tightly in the journal.

This included photos of new friends that I would make during my trips to China and the KTV establishments, maps, schedules and photos of projects.

Often, people would see me writing in my books and would want to take a look, and they would really love to go page by page through it. I am sure that it was meaningless to them, but they really seemed to like the mixture of sketches and thoughts.

Honestly, it looked a lot like the notebook that the Saint used in the movie of the same name. With sketches, and papers, and photographs.

I always instructed my engineers, designers, and interns to take up the habit of using and engineering notebook and using it in a more or less traditional manner. I also insisted that they do this religiously, as all it takes is one computer melt down to wipe away years of hard work.

The younger “kids” don’t understand as they believe that once in the “could” the data is forever safe. I don’t believe that that is true at all.

But having a journal is more than that. You can write down your dreams and monitor your personal non-physical life. You can include your affirmations. You can internally debate your wishes and dreams in your journal, and you can write down things in one place so that you would never forget about them. Whether it is a recipe, or some notes, you will always know where to find the information.

Most people, in modern society, do not understand the concept of privacy. Especially Americans, I am sad to say. Even though the Bill of Rights authorize “security and privacy in one’s personal papers and documents”, that hasn’t been functionally true for centuries.

I am one to tell you that AS A FACT.

In fact, it was my journals that were used against me when I was “retired”. Ah. Any excuse serves a tyrant.

But privacy is a natural need. We all require time alone. Whether it is to gather our thoughts, take a dump in the toilet, say our affirmations, pray, or masturbate. We, as humans, require privacy. Anyone who cannot recognize that basic need is an evil, selfish, and self-centered busybody.

Run away from them as fast as you can.

My first wife maintained dream journals, and as she gradually lost her mind (she had a mental illness), her journaling became an obsession. She would wake up and spend five hours writing down her dreams. Which was obviously unhealthy.

My brother maintained magick journals for his studies, incantations, and other projects that he worked on. He loved to use these thick, soft leather-bound books with a strap to hold everything tight and in place. While I really used a spiral bound lined notebook that I would buy in packs of ten.

Notebooks offer a person, such as myself, a canvas to illustrate our thoughts and concepts. It was when I was in prison that I cluttered up my notebooks (well, actually, there were just tablets of paper. We were unable to own notebooks in the ADC.) with sketches of the MWI and world-line travel.

Long time readers of MM will be able to imagine the kinds of sketches and drawings that I made regarding souls, consciousness, and travel on the MWI. As well as thoughts on the teleportation device, and the mathematics behind it’s operation.

I would place my personal thoughts and concepts there in my journals. While in prison, I used a kind of pencil known as a “golf pencil” because of its diminutive size, and I sharpened it with sandpaper that I could get from the commissary store. We were also permitted a small pen. I would use that to ink my sketches.

All was very crude, but it served its purpose. Yes, there were others while in prison that maintained a sketchbook where they practiced their art. But most of the people int eh ADC were illiterate. Often what we would call “urban youth”, “trailer park trash”, and “gang members. Folk like myself were a minority.

Of course, most of my sketch books, journals, and writings occurred while I was working as an inventor, designer, engineer, and scientist for the US government, large technical corporations and the like. And when they would let me go (i.e. fire me / downsize me / lay me off) they would demand to retain my journals and notebooks, often claiming that they contained company secrets.

These notebooks shown here are obviously not mine, but they have well been mine. The look, the feel, and the drawings are all similar.

I seriously encourage everyone to have their own journal or notebook. I do not suggest that they rely on electronic media, no matter how seductive it appears, and I have had multiple bad experiences in using these software programs.

Aside from the computer dying and a hard-drive death meant the end of everything that I wrote and collected, but other things happened as well. For instance, I once used an electronic diary. It was nice and worked really well. Then it suddenly stopped working.

As it turned out, the diary was only configured to work for five years, then you had to ask for an upgrade for a small fee of course. So when it stopped working, I called the company and discovered that they went out of business and all of my writings and documents were unable to be recovered.

And don’t get me started on Microsoft. You are typing away, and suddenly MS wants you to register, and pay for yearly updates. And when you don’t pay, you are locked out of your documents. It wouldn’t be all that bad, but last year they demanded $350 from me.

It’s one of the reasons why I switched to Lunix.

And forget about freeware. Or donationware. My experience with them have been hit or miss. You have to have one that is directly configured for your needs. Right now I have three folders (on my Lunix computer) each one containing a separate group of files unique to that particular program. All of which are not available in Lunix format.

Now, of course, there are benefits to using electronic media. For instance, you can lock it with a password. That makes it safe so that only you or the NSA can open it up. Passwords are transparent to the American government. If you don’t believe me, read my story about how I was retired.

But there are some disadvantages to putting things in journals. For one, they take up space. Unless you have a lot of room, and don’t mind hauling them around, it could be a problem. Another thing is many people, notably your spouse and the United States government, have no respect for boundaries, personal space, privacy or secrecy.

If you don’t want anyone to access them, you must either write in code, not write at all, or use symbology that only you understand.

This woman does a nice job in her artistic renderings and I find her work noteworthy. It’s a joy to look at, and takes and carries me away to an other place and other thoughts. I start to muse and dream. All very good things.

What ever your desires are, I urge you all to start sketching and journaling.

Of course, I no longer have my notebooks.

When I was retired, the police seized many of my notebooks as evidence of my devious character. They were subsequently “lost”. The remaining notebooks were acquired by my father, desirous of protecting me, promptly burned them.

Those sketches and notes, that I made while in prison, were often confiscated and misplaced. I never got them back. Of the few that I was working on at the time of my departure from prison, were in my luggage that was misplaced and ended up in the lost-luggage section in Newark, NJ.

I started anew. A “blank slate” as they say. And married a woman who respects my privacy, my confidentiality and my space. If you don’t have that, perhaps you should reconsider your relationships and what kind of life that you have.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Art Index here…

ART

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MM Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Incredible Western Paintings by Mark Maggiori

I woke up today, only to find my “news” feeds all stuffed up with a most amazing psyops campaign. Wow! I’ll tell youse guys, it’s really impressive. They must have unleashed every free ‘bot they could get their hands on. Jeeze!

According to the “news”, Russia is deeply regretting invading the Ukraine and trying to fight the forces of “democracy”, with little old grandmothers fighting to protect their cabbage patches, and fields littered with the carcasses of destroyed Russian armor.

“The same pilot who shot down six Russian warplanes, he was nicknamed the ‘Ghost of Kiev”. “A column of scorched Russian equipment near Konotop”. “Snake Island recaptured”. Such messages have quickly gone viral on Russian-language telegram channels, which are a major source of information for the world media. 

The impression is that Russia has already lost the war and its last reserve are Kadyrov’s 10,000 guards, an army of absolute evil, who lined up outside the Chechen leader’s gloomy palace, preparing to be sent to Ukraine. Well, it also looks like Russia has lost the war, the war of fake news.

The first time Ukrainian telegram channels were caught in a lie was on the morning of February 24, just a few hours after the war broke out, when they started spreading photographs of the first Russian tanks knocked out by the Ukrainian military. 

It soon transpired, however, that the snapshots had been taken in Syria and were several years old, yet the unverified information about Russian losses had already been picked up by the media. 

The fact is that the Russians had unwittingly played into the hands of the Ukrainian PR people. 

The Russians advance in mobile, self-directed columns. Therefore, if a vehicle breaks down (the cruising range of a tank or infantry fighting vehicle is several times shorter than that of a civilian jeep), they simply abandon it, because they have to move fast. 

Before long, the photos of the abandoned tank or APC appear on Ukrainian messenger services and in social networks as a “destroyed tank of the invaders.” 

-Batko Milacic

Who are “they”?

“They” of course, is the United States DoD who is running this proxy war against Russia. Make no mistake about that. So the USA got what it wanted. The USA is fighting Russia, and it is doing so where they planned, and engaging it in such a way to become a long-drawn-out war.

It’s not going to be one. So don’t worry.

Now, you can go on the internet and read all about the brave Ukrainians, but Jeeze!, it’s all disinfo. I’m sure the well-armed, and well-dug-in neo-Nazi forces are fighting heroically. But they will be overwhelmed. The timetable is in motion, and the clock is ticking and things are going according to plan, so don’t worry about it.

Let others chat about that.

We’ve got better things to do.

I just got a comment from a Korean who is living in the High Desert of California. Yeah. I lived there, don’t you know. That’s where I got my MAJestic probe calibration and training. It’s awfully nice. Well, if you like pine tree forests on gravel, twisty and turny roads on the edge of cliffs with no guardrails, and fresh cool mountain air.

There’s a real Western “cowboy” vibe about the High Desert. And that has inspired me to present the work of one of the best “Western” themed artists that I have ever come across.Let’s take a look at some of his amazing work.

I hope you enjoy this post.

Mark Maggiori is a French painter who paints modern cowboys in the nostalgic American West. Maggiori’s approach is realistic and academically tuned.

Maggiori is a graduate from the prestigious Academie Jullian in Paris, France and currently resides in the United States.

More: Mark Maggiori, Instagram, Facebook

At the age of 15, Maggiori visited the United States and drove cross-country with his uncle, it was love at first sight. Ever since that trip, he dreamed of returning to live in the American West.

After graduating Academie Jullian in 2000, Disney Studios recruited Maggiori with a prestigious Art Director position in Los Angeles, CA. Maggiori declined the offer to stay in Paris where he could be free to excel in various types of art including photography, animation, and music video directing, all while heading the rock band Pleymo as their lead singer.

In 2001 Pleymo signed with Sony records and toured the globe for 10 solid years, and still the dream of the American West never left him.

With his desire to discover America, he returned to the USA with a film camera and lost himself in the rural South for months.

Through directing music videos, he had the opportunity to wander the country, including Los Angeles, where his life changed.

Petecia Lefawnhawk, was a talented and very creative artist living in Los Angeles.

Maggiori was lucky enough to work with her in one of his music videos; this encounter changed the course of his life forever. Lefawnhawk introduced Maggiori to the ghost towns of the west, including Chloride, Arizona where she grew up.

It was in this setting that Maggiori directed a feature film “Johnny Christ” in 2010.

Soon after they visited the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City…and it was that day that Maggiori decided he would stop everything and dedicate his life to documenting the American West.

Today, Maggiori lives in Los Angeles, CA with his wife Petecia and paints the American West full time.

“I love to paint and dream about the good old times, Cowboys always represented, for me, a time when America was still a promise land…a huge dream for whoever wanted it, before corporations and plastic…I am trying to paint pieces that will tell a story itself and bring to the viewer certain nostalgia, a moment to remember what it felt to be riding a horse on a wide-open range. I am so fascinated by the era 1860 to 1910 in Europe and in America. Those were some golden ages.” 

– Mark Maggiori

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This next painting has got to be the best of the best…

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Lost mines

He’s a pretty awesome artist, eh?

As a boy, I grew up reading “Treasure Magazine” that talked about gold and silver and precious stones, all in great abundance in the California deserts. I would daydream about being a cowboy of the Old West, or even better, finding the discoveries that lie hidden in plain sight.

Things, like old belt buckes, and rusty old swords and pistols were of chief interest in those days. I also used to daydream about finding some of those “lost mines” and venturing inside to gather a handful of precious gold nuggets, and then becoming wealthy as only a ten-year-old boy could conceive.

Of course, when I actually lived in the desert, it was a different story. But still, the romance of the west is undeniable. Here’s some pictures of abandoned mines of the California deserts.

Keep out!

Of course, most of the mines areound Ridgecrest were just a hole in the ground that went deep, deep, deep down, and if you accidently fell into one of these holes you ain’t never getting out.

But if you start venturing up into the high mountains, you start seeing some green grasses and plants. And you can sometimes stumble upon scenes like this…

Or perhaps something like this…

Of course, Treasure Magazine no longer exists as a paper magazine. Instead, it went online with a host of other organizations.

The Lost Treasure Magazine Obituary

It’s a well-known fact that print is in decline. However, despite this, a number of niche magazines have been able to hold on. Sadly, Lost Treasure magazine met its untimely end in December 2018, ending its over 50-year run covering treasure hunters past and present.

Lost Treasure first launched way back in 1966 and from there it came out monthly from its Grove, Oklahoman headquarters, far from the epicenter of publishing. One of its common features were reviews of metal detectors that modern-day prospectors might use in their quest for gold.

Where Lost Treasure really went above and beyond, however, was in talking about the treasure hunters of old, not as events frozen in time, but in terms of their relevance for gold prospectors in the present day.

The lost treasures of America were a particular focus, as the name might imply, with a particular interest in gold lost during the War Between the States. But there were also gripping tales of old-time stagecoach robberies and the golden age of bank robbery. Lost mines were another focus of the magazine, as well as sunken pirate treasure still sitting around waiting to be taken.

Photos were used, but the magazine also had a distinctive style of drawings that kept readers coming back for more. These were old-timey looking illustrations of everything from six-shooters to scorpions, evoking the symbolism of the Old West. Most were in a charcoal-and-pencil format, which further evoked a bygone age, though watercolors did sometimes appear in the pages of Lost Treasure.

Sadly, it isn’t just the print version of Lost Treasure that disappeared when it ceased publication. The website and Facebook page likewise went the way of the Old West.

The magazine suffered from the generalized decline in publishing, however, its content did not lend itself to continued survival as a niche magazine. Information about metal detectors is not only readily available to the general public on the Internet, it is also much more reliable than the “reviews” in Lost Treasure, which were oftentimes glorified advertisements. What’s more, the historical events cataloged in the magazine are likewise easily available to anyone with an Internet connection. As with the reviews of metal detectors, the information is also far more accurate.

The treasure stories were what sold the magazine — the notion that you could go out today with nothing but a metal detector and be the man who discovered the next mother lode of gold ore to become a millionaire.

It was an aspirational magazine before there was such a word for such a thing. One didn’t need to strike gold or even hunt for it to appreciate Lost Treasure magazine. One could get a little piece of that life every time one opened up a copy of Lost Treasure. That was where the magazine’s enduring appeal came from rather than practical advice.

Practical advice is now readily available for those seeking to hunt treasure. What’s more, large capital investments are no longer necessary to get your start at hunting for treasure. Such materials can now be rented, allowing you to dip your toes in the pond to find out if a prospector’s life is for you or not.

Speaking of treasure…

Read the Reader’s Digest article that inspired Rick Lagina to hunt for treasure on The Curse of Oak Island

The Curse of Oak Island star Rick Lagina was just 11 years old when he picked up an edition of Reader’s Digest and first his eyes on an article that would change his life forever.

The January 1965 edition of the publication — which was at the time the best-selling magazine in the United States — included an article reprinted from The Rotarian magazine and written by David MacDonald.

It’s title? “Oak Island’s Mysterious ‘Money Pit’.”

The subheading, enough to entice any 11 year old worth their salt (and any mystery-loving adult for that matter), added: “There is something down there — but for 170 years no one has been able to solve the riddle of how to get at it.”

He didn’t know it yet, but for the young Rick — who like his younger brother Marty loved adventure stories like The Hardy Boys books — that article sealed his future.

The Reader’s Digest story was in fact the same one that sparked an interest in the Oak Island mystery in fellow treasure-hunter and The Curse of Oak Island star Dan Blankenship, who moved to the island the same year it was published.

The article delved into how the famous Money Pit was first discovered by 16-year-old Daniel McInnes all the way back in 1795, when he stumbled across an “odd depression” at one end of the island. McInnes and two of his friends, Tony Vaughan and Jack Smith, then found mystery oak platforms every 10 feet down as they dug deeper and deeper into the ground.

The article went on to chronicle the massive and repeated efforts by various teams over the decades to try and find out just what is down there. Booby traps, deaths, $1,500,000 (at the time) already spent on trying to uncover the island’s secrets — this story had it all.

The article also included a diagram showing what had been found at various depths in the Money Pit, and included a picture of a prominent oak tree that used to sit at the top — which has since gone.

The article ended with a 1955 quote from petroleum engineer George Greene, who had spent time drilling on the island for a syndicate of Texas oilmen.

It said: “Someone went to a lot of trouble to bury something here. And unless he was the greatest practical joker of all time, it must have been well worth the effort.”

And so with that sentence did the little Rick Lagina set off into a future that would one day see him and his more skeptical brother Marty find themselves at the center of the biggest treasure hunt the world has ever seen.

The Reader’s Digest article had a slightly different layout in the US and Canadian versions of the magazine — with it starting on page 136 of the American edition and more prominently, on page 22, of the Canadian one.

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Inspiration

And if you all are so inclined for some inspiration, perhaps these links might send you in the right direction. Happy treasure hunting!

Western Treasures – An online magazine.

FMDAC – The Federation of Metal Detector & Archaeological Clubs, Inc. (FMDAC) was organized in 1984 as a legislative and educational organization and incorporated as a non-profit, non-commercial, non-partisan organization dedicated to preserving the sport/hobby of recreational metal detecting/prospecting.

SMARTER HOBBY – Getting started with a metal detector. Everything you need to know.

THE RING FINDERS – Lost rings, lost watch, lost brooch, lost pendant, lost jewelry?

TOP10METALDETECTORS – Ranked by price, vote for your favorite.

USMETALDETECTOR – Shop for metal detectors, accessories on Amazon, etc.

DISCOVER DETECTING – Discover Detecting is a site aimed at both metal detecting beginners and longtime enthusiasts.

RELIC HUNTER APPAREL

RARE GOLD NUGGETS – Where/how to find gold, natural gold for sale, gold mining equipment, gold panning/prospecting tips.

STOUT STANDARDS – Musings from an old “beeper”.

HOBBY HELP – A beginners guide to metal detecting.

KELLY NOELLER – Metal detecting treasure hunter.  Learn how to metal detect, we have the equipment and knowledge for all your treasure hunting needs.  Read my blog.

UNDERCOIL.COM – A beginners guide to metal detecting.

DETECTING RESEARCH SITE – Detecting Research is your online portal to help you expand your knowledge of places to detect.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this in my Art Index here…

ART

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

The art of Myeong-Minho and his portraits of love and relationships

All of these Earth-shattering events have really eaten up my time and had to; and forced me, to put important articles / posts on the “back-burner”. Here, in this article, we are going to explore the beauty of art. Oh, don’t give me that look. Art is wonderful and stupendous. And I happen to treasure it.

I hope you enjoy this article as much as I enjoyed putting it together.

South Korea is full of talented artists, and Myeong-Minho is one of them. This man is slowly but surely taking over the hearts of people all over the internet with his beautiful drawings. And after looking at them, you might feel the beauty of falling in love yourself.

Myeong-Minho draws cozy, intimate daily moments of a cute couple’s lives – from cooking, napping together, to travel.

The cat that can be seen in most of Myeong drawing ideas is inspired by his real-life cat Dorim.

But the art is about family.

And it is about relationships.

It is about feelings.

And it is about community.

“Dorim has a lot of charm and playfulness like a puppy,” illustrator wrote on his Instagram.

“He is really cute and pretty, except for his hand and claws.”

Myeong-Minho adopted the kitten when in the early fall of 2016, a woman came to him when he was drawing near The Dorimcheon river and asked him to hold the cat for a few minutes but then disappeared.

And so the kitten left in the artist’s hands.

Myeong-Minho is an amazing illustrator whose warm and cute drawings are worth the praise and recognition, so take a look at some of his creations below.

And so let me present this…

And this…

And so let me present this…

And this…

And so let me present this…

This too…

And so let me present this…

And this…

Yes. So many beautiful prints.

Ah, it’s only the “tip of the iceberg”.

Here’s one about COVID…

So many drawings to select from.

This is only a small sampling.

Imagine these prints all over your home…

Looks like paradise? It’s reality. If you allow it.

If you allow these images in your life, they will manifest for you.

Understand the power of thought.

It bends your reality and changes it.

It’s quantum physics 101.

To understand how to control your life, you have to realize this basic principle.

Thought is everything.

Control your thoughts and you control your life.

How do you feel after looking at all these drawings?

Do you feel sad? Gloomy? Or, do you feel positive and hopeful?

Whatever your age, and whatever your situation, I promise you that there is a GREAT life waiting for you.

Whether alone with a sunshine monkey daughter…

Or getting old and grouchy…

We all have some traits that define us in a good way. Embrace them.

You deserve it. You really, really do.

The art is about a boy and a girl falling in love.

Then, they get married and set up a home.

Then, they have a child.

And a kitty cat.

And another child.

And then they grow old together.

The art carries me away to happy times.

And I hope, that it carries you also to good places and happy times.

Have a wonderful day!

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my (underutilized, and rarely visited) Art Index. Please go there to see some more beauty…

ART

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Rare and Charming Photos of A Leopard Couple Playing Love Games in A ‘Land of The Leopard’ National Park

Land of the Leopard National Park is a national park in Primorsky Krai in the Russian Far East, covering an area of 2,799 km2 (1,081 sq mi) west of Razdolnaya River. It was established to protect the Amur leopard which was at the time the world’s rarest cat with an estimated population of 30 individuals.

The Leopard National Park is a national park in Primorsky Krai.

According to the Park Administration: “Old-timer leopard Valera married a young female!

At the advanced age of 13, a big cat arranged a date – a camera trap captured the meeting of the rarest leopards in the world and the mating process.

Amur leopards, Land of the Leopard National Park, Russian Far East.

There are only 110 of the leopards in the world.

By the beginning of the 21st century the Amur leopard population was on the verge of extinction.

As a result of poaching and fires, the vast habitat of the beast had shrunk to a narrow stripe in the southwest of Primorsky Krai.

By then, a Kedrovaya Pad nature reserve and several breeding grounds existed here, but only expansion of the protected area and integrated management of the existing natural territories could solve the problem of conserving the rare cat.

The Land of the Leopard National Park was founded on April 5, 2012, thanks to the efforts of ecologists and personal attention to the problem of Sergey Ivanov, the former Director of the Executive Office of the President of the Russian Federation.

Its territory in the area of “262 th. ha” has covered the most part of the rare predator’s habitat including the land of Khasansky and Nadezhdinsky Districts of Primorye, the Ussuriysky Urban District, as well as a little part of Vladivostok city.

I think that these big cats are just great.

I love that they have found companionship, and are enjoying a fine romp in the grass.

They seem to be similar to snow leopards, and appear to be very happy and content in their game preserve.

I, for one, am happy that Russia has set aside land to preserve these big beautiful felines. Just like China did for the Panda Bear, the world is waking up to the need to preserve our habitat and our wild life.

Unfortunately, the opposite is happening in the United States. The American “leadership” cannot find any profit in preserving nature and wildlife.

I get a mix and range of emotions when watching this cute feline couple frolic and play. They inspire me to get my “play” on and have more fun. MM deserves to frolic too, don’t you know.

So, I’m telling you all.

Eat well. Pick a good delicious food, and either cook it yourself, or find a friend to cook it with…

Chicken Marbella

Chicken Marbella.

No one ever cooks chicken with olives and prunes these days. But the taste sensation is really wonderful.

When you want a chicken with an extra flavor kick, looking to the past is never a bad idea. My mom used to make this when I was in elementary school, but stopped for reasons unknown around the time of the Moon Landing.

This Mediterranean take on chicken was all the rage decades ago but has fallen out of popularity. Spanish olives, oregano, and even prunes develop a complex flavor that will keep this recipe in rotation at your home for generations to come.

Get the recipe from Inquiring Chef.

Chicken Marbella.

And of course, you need to have a friend, a family member, or someone else to share this unique and (for many people) unknown dish with. Surprise a friend or family member, or make new ones.

Like perhaps…

Nice Chinese girl in burgundy

You know, I think that burgundy is a nice color for a top. Perhaps it’s a bit underrated, but when you see a fine woman wearing a burgundy top, there’s something pleasant and refreshing about it. It seems light, but still earthy.

video 3MB

And that’s not all.

What about a nice stroll in the countryside. Get some fresh air. Smell the breezes. Enjoy the moments together.

Does anything calm the spirit more than lying back on a mossy bank, taking a deep, pine-scented breath, then looking up to see a crowd of tree trunks tapering to a leafy canopy waving gently against a blue sky? Woods are places of wonder. Your senses are alert, your mind is calm, your heart is full, you feel rejuvenated. To explore them is to step into a different world, and come back a different person.

A river bubbles away nearby. Occasionally a woodpecker’s knock echoes from afar. The air is perfumed with pine. You are at peace, surrounded by stillness. Best of all, there is mile after mile of this feeling in every direction. Seven out of the ten largest forests in the UK are in Scotland. The largest is Galloway Forest Park, which covers 770 km2 of countryside in a gorgeous green blanket.

Galloway Forest Park.

And after a nice walk…

Perhaps a nice snack. Maybe a cup of tea, or coffee.

Maybe a blueberry muffin with a nice fresh cup of coffee. Now, doesn’t that sound nice? Enjoy the time that you have and make it special.

A nice blueberry muffin and a fine cup of coffee.

Maybe, instead…

Might I suggest a used book store? You find one that you haven’t ever visited, and you go inside and look around. The books will probably be cheap. It will smell of books, and I’m sure that you will find a book or two that will be unique and different. Sit down, and enjoy yourself.

A used book store.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

Or, perhaps instead, if you are not the kind of person who like books and reading, maybe going and doing something that you probably haven’t done in ages. Like, perhaps, going to a horse stable and take a few horses out for a ride?

Ah…

Perhaps I’m getting a little off track.

Just spend time with friends. Cook a meal together. Make a day of it and have some fun. Make it special.

Cook a meal together.

Just like it should be.

And don’t forget to try a new dish that most people will not be aware of. Like Chicken Marbella. You could serve it with rice. The nice sauce / broth would go well on a pile of rice. Maybe some long white Thailand rice.

Chicken Marbella.

Doesn’t that look great? Here’s another picture. In this photo, the chicken is shown plain on a plate. Notice how easily the chicken falls off the bone, so nice and tasty.

Chicken Marbella.

Perhaps you could serve it was some toasted rye bread, maybe buttered with a garlic spread, or maybe some crème cheese.

You could make the meal a little special. Just get a blender and whip up some butter with honey, or some seasonings.

Or, why not some whipped up crème cheese with some flavor seasonings, and a wide bladed knife to spread it with.

Don’t forget a side of steamed asparagus, or broccoli. They are great with a fine butter, or lemon slice.

Chicken Marbella.

While the main dish is important, don’t neglect a nice salad.

I like to make my salads with a fruit. Whether it is an orange, an apple, or some raisins / dates, this really spruces up the salad if you aren’t going for a nice themed salad.

Look at how delicious the meal is…

Chicken Marbella.

And when you cook it, it should look like this…

Chicken Marbella.

And remember…

Share your time with a friend.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Happiness Index.

Life & Happiness

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Articles & Links

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Perspective in a world undergoing change; what’s going to happen to all the trolls?

The world is a changing.

During change, somethings die, while other trends are birthed. New starts, and new understandings flavor the lives and lifestyles of the survivors of the change.

I have long argued that many of the on-going bad elements that we have long endured are now starting to come to an end. It’s all about time and good riddance.

I just banned a jackass because a newcomer just simply PISSED ME OFF. I suppose that his voracious reading of my articles should have pleased me, but it did not. I don’t like to hear things like…

"What do these girls have to do with the article title? –It’s just more juvenile objectification of women, and a form of trolling."

I love women. Somehow that’s wrong? What’s the matter with you? And, by the way, how can I troll my own venue?

Don’t go a pulling that SJW shit with me bucko.

I don’t like, nor appreciates these mindless comments, as well as endless snipes, and swipes at myself and what I am doing here. Such as…

(On the subject of trolls and their behaviors)  I stated; “They can take your nice happy and calm, pleasant day, and turn it into a sad stormy day of worry and distress.”

"If this is the case, then I submit that you have ego issues and need to learn to master your emotions."

So, then Trolls make everyone happy. And of course, if you disagree then you have a brused ego?

As well as a long steam of other silly bullshit such as…

Please accept my apologies, as I had to redact large portions of this section. It is not proper that I speak so freely about this at this time.

It cannot be “redacted” if it was never published.

Of course it’s published, you dunderhead. It’s published on the internet, and it’s published in book form. Haven’t read the main index? Obviously not. You can’t possibly be this moronic, this stupid, this foolish, this much of a simpleton.

You know, I waited two full days. Hoping that some other MM influencers would come to my defense, but no one did. I guess I must have expected too much.

“All MAJestic members, are service to others sentience.”

I doubt that far more than I doubt your story.

Sheech!

I don’t like getting up in the morning and checking my feeds to read comments about my life by a jackass. Do you? Do you feel better about yourself by reading those things? Do you think that this “individual” has improved your life, or helped you to understand the dialog or text better?

Rufus he is not.

I will argue that this individual is more sophisticated than most of the trolls and jerk-offs that I encounter. So it took me two entire days before I erased his presence. I will say one thing though, he was plowing though my articles at a prodigious rate.

He sure must have had [1] a lot of time on his hands, and [2] enjoyed the free stuff without appreciation of the effort it represents. Both high-swater-marks of trolling.

So he’s gone. Bye bye.

Well, for youse guys that is. I still have to manually erase him out. If he persists then I’ll give him some things to work out. There’s nothing quite like a cornfield to really occupy your time and give you a dose of “humble pie”.

How about this for a new world-line template?

A template map of the cornfield.

Anyways, on to this article…

This article here is just a mish-mash of stuff that I have lying around and cluttering up my thought streams. It’s all over the place, and that’s fine. I just want to put some things down on paper and then move forward.

First up is a …

Pretty girl and her car

Here’s a photo taken some time around the 1940s. My guess is that she just bought the new car and was proudly photographed near it, being all “dolled up” and all. Looks to be early winter. Maybe Indiana, Pennsylvania, Ohio or New York.

She’s wearing a fox stole, white gloves, to match her white hat, and a black skirt outfit. The image takes me to a time and a place far away from here. That was not the reason for the photo (in the first place) but it is why I so admire it so.

When white gloves were an everyday fashion accessory for women.

She’s lovely.

Right?

Yes she is. She really is.

Here’s a beautiful Chinese girl…

She’s one of my favorites, don’t you know. (Actually, I think you all do know.) I think she is lovely.

video 4MB

Am I objectifying her?

Yeah. Maybe I am. You all got a problem with that? She’s beautiful. She’s pretty. She’s awesome and when I see her in the video it takes me away to calmer and sweeter states of being. And I love that feeling. I love the images and feelings that she generates inside of me.

The video is an object. But she is a teleporter to a new mental state. She carries me away.

Like a beautiful cat pal. Or, a nice hot fudge sundae. Or, a freshly baked fudge brownie with some nice delicious vanilla icecream on top.

Hot fudge brownie with ice cream on top.

Now, let’s go to something contemporaneous.

I mean, the United States does this all the time, but China (somehow) is a very bad entity for soing so. Right?

Is it legal for the Chinese government to build artificial islands, airfields, and deploy troops in the South China Sea islands?

From my morning email feed…

Just for fun!

https://www.quora.com/Is-it-legal-for-the-Chinese-government-to-build-artificial-islands-airfields-and-deploy-troops-in-the-South-China-Sea-islands/answer/Gavin-McGregor-1?__nsrc__=4&__snid3__=32994900067

It is often claimed that China is breaking international law by building artificial islands in the South China Sea and that it is illegal to militarise those islands.

The short answer is that it is “not illegal” to build an artificial island if it does not conflict with some other nations legal rights that might be defined under the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), or other international agreements of which both China and the other nation was a signatory.

Building airfields and deploying troops on those islands is also “not illegal” if you are entitled to build and occupy the islands.

An analogous question might be “Is it legal for warships and aircraft carriers to cast anchor in International waters?”. An anchored aircraft carrier is an artificial island with an airfield and a military presence.

The UNCLOS offers a general protection to a nations territorial waters and exclusive economic zones that extend from baselines derived from recognised land territory’s baselines. However outside those boundaries, in the high seas, any nation is free to construct artificial islands and erect installations that are not otherwise restricted under international law.

The territorial sea extends to a limit of 12 nautical miles from the baseline of a coastal State. Within this zone, the coastal State exercises full sovereignty over the air space above the sea and over the seabed and subsoil. There is also a contagious zone of an additional 12 nautical miles that grants certain rights of legal enforcement.

The Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) extends no more than 200 nautical miles (370 Km) from the territorial sea baseline and grants exclusive rights to marine resources, including the “exclusive” right to establish artificial islands, structures and installations.

Where zones intersect the zones of other states, the zones default to the median point between the respective baselines.

To be clear, artificial islands cannot acquire territorial rights on their own; they at best obtain a safety exclusion zone. So a nation cannot extend their territorial claims by constructing or extending islands anywhere. Smaller natural islands may be entitled a 12 nautical mile territorial claim but not a 200 nautical mile zones.

Having said that, two or more nations could be in dispute over every aspect outlined above or could be in dispute with the interpretation of international law applying to particular cases. And various interpretations of definitions and determinations could lead to quite different outcomes.

I am not commenting specifically on which islands could or could not be considered legally or illegally constructed or the selective outrage at China’s activities in the area to the exclusion of all others. But consider the following:

In the application of the Permanent Court of Arbitration ruling on the status of Taiping Island, currently occupied by the Taiwan, which regards the largest island in the Spratly archipelago as a “rock” with limited maritime rights, and allows the Philippines to extend its EEZ at least as far as the island.

Taiwan, however, has a reasonable case to reject the ruling, and in any event continues to claim full maritime rights.

The Peoples Republic of China, with an overlapping claim to Taiping island can also dispute the ruling, even make a reasonable claim not to be bound by it, and therefore argue the legality of the establishment of an artificial island within Taiping Island’s claimed EEZ at Mischief Reef less than 80 nautical miles from Taiping Island.

And a very nice follow-up commentary…

It’s a well stated commentary rather than a rebuttal.

Answering a lie is to perpetuate it. If you gather all your information about China from the West, you will not get a smidgen of truth. China is not in the habit of engaging in tongue jousting. They simply defend their rights — bloviate all you want but I dare you to touch my cheese. I think they have good reasons to do so, as they are not adept at lying, and the West is a cesspool of lies populated by lying maggots who consume bullshit and regurgitate bullshit and know nothing but bullshit.
 
Here are a few facts that can be found if one makes a bit of effort and look underneath the superficial scum. I read these on the same day the Hague Arbitration Court came out with its decision. I think it’s by a female blogger who seemed to have some knowledge on the issues. The truth is therefore not arcane or hidden, it’s just never spoken in the Western lying machine. I’m doing this from memory but you’re welcome to check. The truth is out there.
 
1. The issue of the South China Sea (SCS) is not UNCLOS but sovereignty. There is overlap of course, but they are two very different issues. To talk only about UNCLOS but not China’s sovereignty claim is Big Lie Number 1. The Nine Dash Lines is China’s claim of sovereignty of the area of the SCS within those lines including all its islands and EEZ. It is a successor claim from the Republic of China (which is why Taiwan, still run by the government of the ROC, must maintain the same claim), as it was not contested by the victorious allies of the Second World War, and was recorded on maps of the era (published by the West). The PRC, which is the globally and UN accepted government of China, has a duty to defend this claim.
 
2. One must defend one’s sovereignty and negotiate for peaceful borders, not rely on third parties to decide your rights, especially not by those which have no jurisdiction and no teeth. The lesson of Munich comes to mind, when France, UK, and Italy decided to cede Czech Republic’s Sudetenland to Germany. That is what happens to countries which cannot defend their sovereignty. The meme that China is the big bully encroaching on its neighbors is laughable. It is Big Lie Number 2. Except for India, China has in fact negotiated stable land borders with all its neighbors including Vietnam and Russia, considering both these countries had land wars with China in recent decades. Even Bhutan, a de facto protectorate of India which had been prevented from reaching a border agreement with China, appears ready to defy its overlord in the near future.
 
3. The Nine Dash Lines and UNCLOS do have overlaps. It is not strange, as almost all neighbors sharing a coastline or are island nations have UNCLOS claims that overlap. UNCLOS has a suggestion for how to settle these disputes. Negotiate or arbitrate. Arbitration is however not a court of law, where one party can sue another based on the jurisdiction and laws of where the court is located. Even this jurisdiction must have some basis of prior agreement or when none is available, some basis in law. It does not get decided by one party of a dispute. Anyone who has any experience in arbitration (a mechanism actually used by many international companies doing business in China) understands that arbitration must be agreed to by both parties of a dispute. They must also agree to the quasi-judiciary organization that holds the hearing and makes the adjudication, share in the costs, and accept the decision with no further recourse. Since China never agreed to the arbitration initiated by the Philippines, never agreed to the jurisdiction of the court, never participated in the hearing, and never paid any costs relating to the one-sided arbitration, it was just a farce and a circus. To answer any questions coming from this comedy is to give substance to fart.
 
With the internet, everyone can have a voice and an opinion. I’ll readily admit that I have no real legal expertise. I have however quite a bit of experience working with top lawyers in Canada on both litigation and quasi-judiciary (Broadcast Commission) matters for well over ten years. For several years, I was also a court appointed receiver manager for the national television station I built. So I’m not speaking out of a vacuum. In fact, some of the cases I was involved in became landmark cases, causing the government to make real changes. While I’m no expert on UNCLOS or sovereignty claims, I usually apply whatever legal ideas I can understand and in most parts commonsense.
.
As I like to say, the First Law of Economics is “you do not own anything you cannot defend.” That is the meaning of sovereignty, the rest is bullshit and balderdash.

A beach beauty….

Looks like the 1960s. I can easily see myself (as a young boy) wearing the same clothes (as those two boys wore) as the folk in the picture. I can see myself there. Enjoying the sun. Listening to the waves crash, and enjoying the late afternoon sun as the beach gets deserted. Nice times.

I see the woman in the back is holding either a set of binoculars, or a purse. It’s difficult to see what it is. I don’t think that it is a purse. She’s also wearing a sleeveless top over her stunning green one-piece swimsuit.

Judging from the cars in the background, I would guess 1963, maybe 1965.

Family outing.

I do love these old photos.

It makes me want to crawl up into some old dusty attic and explore. Who know what I’ll find. Maybe a 1950 Lionel train set, a metal closet with all sorts of 1950’s womans’ hats, or a mason jar full of old pennies, buttons and indian arrow heads.

A beautiful girl showing off a nice pair of jeans

Actually I really like these jeans because they are warm. Today is frosty cold, and I am shivering while I type this. Normally Zhuhai is around 30°C (86° F) and 80% RH. But over the last few weeks it has been cold. 7°C (44°F) and spitting cold drizzle rain. Keep in mind that the homes here in the tropics are not heated. THus her outfit looks mighty appealing to me.

video 50MB

Trying to tie China to the Ukraine debacle

Sheech! Can’t these “people” give it a rest?

It was US & NATO military expansion and deployment to Russia border that caused the current Russia – Ukraine drama.  However, the United States aggression against Russia can not be effective as long as Russia has the support of China.
So, in the past weeks, there are so many imaginary articles and news that link China to the conflict.
Below are 13 links and their headlines from the western media + a piece from the Global Times explaining the Western efforts to smear China. It’s the “Smear China campaign”.
First up, the United States overt propaganda mill; VOA…
China Eyes Risks and Rewards of US-Russia Standoff Over Ukraine
https://www.voanews.com/a/china-eyes-risks-and-rewards-of-us-russia-standoff-over-ukraine/6416467.html
Next, the UK overt propighanda mill; BBC…
.
China: What does it want from the Ukraine crisis with Russia? – BBC News
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-60242549
More from the “5 eyes”. Here’s “The Diplomat”…
.
Why China Will Not Support a Russian Invasion of Ukraine – The Diplomat
https://thediplomat.com/2022/02/why-china-will-not-support-a-russian-invasion-of-ukraine/
LOL. Russia is not moving into the Ukraine. Sheech!
.
Analysis: China would back Russia, diplomatically, if it moved on Ukraine | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/china-would-back-russia-diplomatically-if-it-moved-ukraine-2022-02-19/
In all the bone-headed actions of morons, this has to be the most bone-headed of all…
.
The United States’ Russia Sanctions Package Must Include Secondary Sanctions Against China
https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/02/17/russia-ukraine-china-united-states-secondary-sanctions-putin-xi/
And from the massive NBC mouth-piece…
.
China would ‘end up owning some of the costs’ if Russia invades Ukraine, national security adviser warns.
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In a joint statement with Russia last week, China said it opposed NATO expansion and blamed the U.S. for rising tensions
.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/china-would-end-owning-some-costs-if-russia-invades-ukraine-n1288712
A neocon publication…
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What China Is Actually Saying About Russia and Ukraine
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Bits of pro-Russian rhetoric are a far cry from substantive support—or preparations for an invasion of Taiwan.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/02/what-china-actually-saying-about-russia-and-ukraine/361561/
Another neocon publication; “Foreign Affairs”…
.
China’s Ukraine Crisis; What Xi Gains—and Loses—From Backing Putin
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2022-02-21/chinas-ukraine-crisis
The United States “says” as reported by the rabid anti-China SCMP…
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US says China ties won’t stop Russian economic ‘catastrophe’ after any Ukraine invasion | South China Morning Post
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3165764/us-says-china-ties-wont-make-consequences-if-russia-invades
The United States warns… (sigh. That’s all they ever do, eh?)
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U.S. warns Chinese firms not to help Russia avoid potential Ukraine sanctions
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/04/us-warns-chinese-firms-not-to-help-russia-avoid-potential-ukraine-sanctions.html
More silliness. No. If Russia moves into the Ukraine, it would be a win for the Untied States…
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Russian war in Ukraine could win for China, Iran, North Korea
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2022/02/17/russian-war-ukraine-winners-china-iran-north-korea/6784820001/
The United States warn some more. This is from a hardline neocon publication…
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United States Warns China Not to Ignore Sanctions if Russia Invades Ukraine | The National Interest
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/united-states-warns-china-not-ignore-sanctions-if-russia-invades-ukraine-200360
More nonsense…
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How China could win in Russia-Ukraine row. Potential conflict in Europe highlights ‘deepening ties’ between Beijing and Moscow
https://www.theweek.co.uk/news/world-news/china/955616/what-does-china-think-russia-war-ukraine
And let’s put a bow on all of it.
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US media smearing China-Russia ties on Ukraine issue: foreign ministry – Global Times
https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202201/1246802.shtml
Enjoy your leisure reading

Chinese elementary school.

As I have often stated that everyone in China gets military training. It starts in first grade, and it really appeals to me. With disipline and organization, self esteem follows naturally.

Here’s a third grade mortar crew. video 6MB

Nice short girl.

This next Chinese girl is short and so very cute. I just want to run around with her in the wide forest and drink hot coco with her, and eat some buttered cinnamon toast. video 5MB

From my dad’s generation…

This next phot comes from the 1950’s somewhere in the United States.  It’s a couple “making out” (i.e. “smooching”) in the back seat of a station wagon. Notice how the rear window opens up and is held up with a nice strut.

I’ll bet that they were playing some fine 1950s music. Maybe some Fats Domino, Bill Haley, Elvis Presley, or Bobby Darin. Good times.

Young Love.

Those days are gone. But, you know, there are new days here that we can enjoy in a similiar manner.

Have you ever thought about a fine coffeecake and a cup of coffee?

Coffeecake

China High Speed Train

China started making, designing and building their own domestic trains at the same time that the United States announced that it would build a High Speed Train network starting in California. Today, they are all over China and a normal everyday sight. Meanwhile 15 miles of track has been laid down in California. No trains. No stations. America has bumpkis.

video 1 – 4MB

A video from above showing just how many there are. Impressive.

video 2 – 3MB

Here’s the interior of a HST sleeper car. Most HST travel too fast to need a sleeper car, but these sleepers are great for long distance travel.

video 3 – 3MB

Nice Chinese girl in her living room

I actually really like the display console behind her. It’s go these glass cabinets that you can display your treasures inside. Whether it is these cute collectable dolls, or dishes, artwork, or brick-a-brack. I really like it. Of course, I would stain it a dark brown instead of the light color but that’s just me.

You’ll notice that she has a fine oval face. Oval faces really fit the Chinese face and with a nice long black hair, it’s a super nice effect.

video 3MB

A beautiful cat

This is a very beautiful white kitty.

video

Downtown America

If it wasn’t for the styles of the automobiles, you would say that this is pretty much contemporaneous America. Most of America hasn’t changed much. Sure, theres some cell phone and all that, but the Untied States has been spending it’s money destroying mud huts, strafing cows, and bombing cabbage patches. Very little remains for domestic improvements and infrastructure.

And it hasn’t happened yet either, no matter the promises that President Biden made. The federal budget is all about more machines of war, and more efforts to “contain” China.

Philadelphia, 1957

Some pictures of cats

Why not? Right?

I do love my relationships with the kitties and they always really mellow out the place and terrorize the rats and mice. I am a strong believer that every household needs a good mouser.

This cat here reminds me of my first childhood cat; Sedwick. We called his “Sedgie”. He died a ripe old age when I was living in Indiana. He was a good cat.

Sedwick clone.

Cycles of life

So much truth here… perhaps the reason why everyone in China gets military training. Learns how to shoot, fight, and endure.

Video 28MB

Little military soldier in China.

China understands.  Build strong little soldiers for a stong unified nation. This is how it is done. Training starts in first grade. video 3MB

The start of the Playboy Empire

He was a man who had a dream. Then he followed his dream and it took him to many interesting places, along with attractive and interesting people. In this photo below he is in England in 1966. Ah. The “swinging 60s”.

Playboy editor and tycoon Hugh Hefner is greeted by a group of bunny girls from his Playboy Clubs, upon his arrival at London Airport, 1966. (Photo by Dove/Getty Images)

Here’s the cover for the August issue of Playboy in 1966…

Playboy cover.

And a glimpse of what it looked like on the inside… this is the September 1966 issue…

Index page.

And what the advertisements were like. This is the back side of the magazine. Each issue seemed to have either a cigarette ad, or a alcohol advertisement of one sort or the other…

Advertisement.

My guess is that the men-folk would keep the playboy magazines in the bathroom on a low stool with other magazines, and then flip the cover over so that the Mrs’s wouldn’t notice (too much). Thus predominantly displaying the cigaretter or booze ad inside the privacy of the “man’s” bathroom.

Ladies! Get yourself an ugly man.

So funny, but…

video 82MB

A photo before going off to war!

You know, to fight those evil Japanese! Those horrible Germans, and those pesky Communists! We MUST spread freedom™ and democracy™ to the world, don’t you know!

A group poses for a picture at Pier 86, on 46th Street.

This kid below has some wisdom to share…

You can do anything you set your mind to…

This kid is going places. He’s right. I hope, I sincerely hope, that school teachers, and peers don’t beat this inner strength out of him. video 50MB

Russia Has Just Issued An Ultimatum To Ukraine, And The Conditions For War Are Now Set

This is not a game.  As this crisis has been unfolding in Ukraine, I have been seeing people all over the Internet cheer for either side like they would cheer for their favorite football teams.  But these people don’t understand what is at stake.  If World War III erupts in Ukraine, it will very likely lead to nuclear war between the United States and Russia down the road.  So we should all be deeply grieved over what is happening, because we are getting really close to a point of no return.

One of the good things about the Trump years was that President Trump was not interested in messing with Russia.  So the status quo in Ukraine was respected by both sides for four years, and there was relative peace in the region.

But then Joe Biden took power, and he has surrounded himself with an all-star team of warmongers.  National security adviser Jake Sullivan, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff General Mark Milley, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Secretary of State Antony Blinken are all card-carrying members of the War Party, and they don’t seem interested in finding a way to have peace with Russia at all.

After having his security concerns mocked and laughed at for the past year, Vladimir Putin finally admitted that negotiations are at “a dead end” on Monday.  It would have been so easy to negotiate a peaceful solution with the Russians that would have kept Russia out of Ukraine, but that isn’t what the War Party wanted.

Now Putin has run out of patience, and on Monday he greatly escalated the crisis by formally recognizing the independence of Donetsk and Luhansk and by announcing that he would be sending troops into the two separatist republics…

Russian President Vladimir Putin recognized two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine as independent on Monday and ordered the Russian army to launch what Moscow called a peacekeeping operation in the area, upping the ante in a crisis the West fears could unleash a major war. Putin told Russia’s defense ministry to deploy troops into the two breakaway regions to “keep the peace” in a decree issued shortly after he announced recognition for Russia-backed separatists there, drawing US and European vows of new sanctions.

I think that Putin wanted to make a move before the Ukrainians did.  According to one Russian official, there were “almost 60K Ukrainian military personnel concentrated near the borders of the Republics of Lugansk & Donetsk”, and I think that Putin decided that the only way to keep Ukraine from overrunning the two republics was to move his own forces in first.

Hopefully that actually works.

Hopefully the Russians will stay in Donetsk and Luhansk, and hopefully the Ukrainians will stay on their side.

Ukraine crisis assets Showing the area of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine

If that is the end result, there may still be hope of defusing the situation.

But I wouldn’t count on it.

Putin sounds like a man that is convinced that war is coming.  The following comes from a very rough translation of his speech on Monday…

“from those who took power in kiev we demand to stop any and all military actions against donbass. otherwise, the consequences will be on ukraine. i count on the support of all patriotic forces in russia.”

Russia has essentially issued an ultimatum to Ukraine.

If Ukraine invades Donetsk and Luhansk, the Russians will invade Ukraine.

Of course some western media sources are actually using the term “invasion” to describe Russian troop movements into the separatist republics.

If you have bought into that propaganda, let me ask you a question.  Do the people in this video look like they have just been “invaded”?…

Twitter can be a horrible place at times, but tonight’s decision by President Putin to recognise the Donbass republics is the news people there have been looking forward to for 8 years. I’ll sign off tonight with this video from Lenin Square in Donetsk. #Donbass 🇷🇺 pic.twitter.com/l8YJVF84tf

— Dean O’Brien (@DeanoBeano1) February 21, 2022

This would be a good opportunity for both sides to take a deep breath and start backing down.

But that isn’t going to happen.

Western leaders continue to use extremely harsh rhetoric and they continue to insist that a full-blown invasion of Ukraine is imminent.  The following is what Jake Sullivan just told the Today Show

“We believe that any military operation of the size, scope and magnitude of what we believe the Russians are planning will be extremely violent. It will cost the lives of Ukrainians and Russians, civilians and military personnel alike,” Sullivan said during an appearance on NBC’s “Today.”

“But we also have intelligence to suggest that there will be an even greater form of brutality because this will not simply be some conventional war between two armies,” he added. “It will be a war waged by Russia on the Ukrainian people to repress them, to crush them, to harm them.”

And another U.S. official is alleging that Russia has a list of people that they will be specifically targeting once the invasion has been completed…

“Disturbing information recently obtained by the United States that indicates that human rights violations and abuses in the aftermath of a further invasion are being planned,” Ambassador Bathsheba Nell Crocker, the US Representative to the Office of the United Nations and Other International Organizations in Geneva, alleges in a letter to Michelle Bachelet, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights.

“These acts, which in past Russian operations have included targeted killings, kidnappings/forced disappearances, unjust detentions, and the use of torture, would likely target those who oppose Russian actions, including Russian and Belarusian dissidents in exile in Ukraine, journalists and anti-corruption activists, and vulnerable populations such as religious and ethnic minorities and LGBTQI+ persons,” reads the letter, which was first reported by The Washington Post and obtained by CNN.

So Russia plans to violently round up dissidents, activists and anyone else that is opposed to their rule?

Oh, you mean that it will be kind of like what just happened in Canada with the full approval of the U.S. government?

If the Biden administration actually cared about human rights, they would be condemning the horrific brutality that we just witnessed in Ottawa.

But of course that will never happen.

Let’s watch and see what happens over in Ukraine during the next several days.  One very alarming sign is that the Russians have just closed off much of the airspace over the Sea of Azov

Russia’s Aeronautical Information Center issued a NOTAM (a Notice to Airmen) on Sunday which will close most of the airspace over the Sea of Azov starting at midnight between Sunday and Monday, as the US continued to warn that Russia intends to invade Ukraine.

I don’t think that this indicates that a full-blown invasion of Ukraine is imminent.

But at this point the conditions for war have been clearly set.

If Ukraine invades Donetsk and Luhansk now, the Russians have made it exceedingly clear that they will invade Ukraine.

So this actually puts a lot of power into the hands of the War Party in Washington.

Joe Biden and his all-star team of warmongers now know exactly what it will take to spark a war.

Will they decide to pull the trigger?

Let us hope not, because once World War III begins nothing will ever be the same again.

Nice Chinese girl

With nice S-shaped body and a rocking red sweater. I like this build. I’ll bet you that she has that kind of smoth “baby bottom” stomach. You know, when you are thin and you feel comfortable in you clothing, and in your skin, everything fits you wonderfully. Like this gal.

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Salisbury Steak with Mushroom Gravy

Do you know what I haven’t had in a while? Yes. That’s right. Home made Salisbury steak with mushroom gravy.

Salisbury Steak with Mushroom Gravy.

If you have memories of eating the microwave meal version of Salisbury steak, don’t be scared off by this retro favorite. The home-cooked steak pairs excellently with a creamy sauce and when seasoned to perfection redefines what people loved about this classic in the first place. Take a second chance with this meal and it will be your new all-time favorite. It certainly is mine.

And for youse guys who wants to cook this bad boy up, well…

Get the recipe from Tin Eats.

Why there are no internet trolls in China.

It’s true.

All behaviors are monitored by AI. Troll behaviors are observed and then the police come by and evaluate the criminal to set up treatment and punishment on a individual to individual basis.

That is why China is a nation of Rufus’s and many Trolls find themselves spending substantial time in work camps, and re-programming facilities.

Here’s what the world looks like when you imprison the mentally ill, and criminal in society… it becomes a paradise.

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Managerial Menticide

The Monday Taki post is up. The subject of it and today’s post is the new way to look at the system ruling over us. Of course, Sunday Thoughts is up behind the green door for those needing audio stimulation. Much of it is about the situation in Europe and the evolving Canadian dictatorship.

One of the problems with the Opposite Rule of Liberalism is that it relies on the old Left-Right dichotomy of American politics. This framing persists despite the fact that it is a vestige of a bygone era that no longer works today.

  • Democrats = Liberals
  • Republicans = Conservatives

It no longer exists.

The political divide is now between those who adhere to the basket of ideas called Western liberalism and those who defend the post-Marxist managerial state. The latter group is made up almost entirely of members of the ruling class.

  • The Haves = The post-Marxist managerial state.
  • The Have-nots = Western liberalism

In other words, we now live in a world divided by those in the system of control that hovers over the West and those who live under it. The Dirt People versus Cloud People framing is a much more honest, if a bit sarcastic, framework for the world.

  • Cloud People = Rulers
  • Dirt People = Serf / slaves

The ruling system is like a miasma that hangs over society, infecting the minds of the people and their relations with one another. We can see the elites at the top, just barely, but the system they control is all around us.

A big part of what ails society is this sense that things are not as they seem, but it is hard to get a read on why.

That noxious miasma that lingers in every aspect of society often leads people to doubt their own senses. Their experience tells them things about the world and people in it, but everywhere they look they are getting messages telling them that what they think they see is not true.

Instead, they are to believe something that is often the opposite of what they experience.

This is where the Opposite Rule continues to work. Those who are aware of the contradictions of daily existence can apply the rule to the information stream that comes from the system, filling the area around them. Whatever is in the air at the moment, start from some version of the opposite, and the truth will be near. The Opposite Rule of Liberalism is best restated as the Opposite Rule of Managerialism. This organic, self-aware system that rules over us is the opposite of truth.

A useful example comes from the daily barrage of “information” from the system about the crisis in Ukraine.

Here is a story from the New York Times headlined, “Russia has been laying groundwork online for a ‘false flag’ operation, misinformation researchers say.” Note that this story is not behind the usual paywall, as they want wide circulation of it. Note also that the writer is one of the infants they employ to copy and paste material into “news reports.”

This news report starts with a news report from a European based group called European Expert Association, which is described as “a research group that focuses on security in Ukraine.”

When you take a look at who these people are, it becomes obvious that they are Ukrainian activists.

These are not neutral observers searching for the truth about the crisis. More important, when you look at their resumes you see all the familiar NGO’s that are pushing for war with Russia.

  • NGO = CIA funded Neocon organization.

Of course, this is the New York Times, the first draft of history and the leader in the American news media. They do not just take this at face value. They hand it to a group called the Global Disinformation Index, a nonprofit “research” group. These are the go-to guys for the Times reports on misinformation and disinformation.

To the shock of no one in the Times offices, the researchers at Global Disinformation Index confirmed everything said the European Expert Association.

The reason the Times was not surprised by what they heard back from the Global Disinformation Index is the person running it is Anne Applebaum. She is a notorious warmonger and neoconservative.

Anne Applebaum.

Here she is advocating for the liquidation of the Afghanis and the Syrians as a “solution” to those problems. Applebaum is a big believer in what Stalin supposedly said about people causing problems for the regime. No man, no problem. Applebaum just scales it up.

Her partner in this enterprise is a Ukrainian activist named Peter Pomerantsev, who is probably on the payroll of a Western intelligence service. His biography does not pass the laugh test. His role in life has been to seed Western media with anti-Russian information dressed up as Ukrainian nationalism. The rest of the staff of the Global Disinformation Index all have an axe to grind with some enemy of the neocons, past, present or in the future.

Peter Pomerantsev.

The point of this walk through the swamps behind the ministry of disinformation is to illustrate how the new rule works;

  • If a media outlet is claiming to root out disinformation, you can be sure they are not doing that.
  • Instead, start with the assumption that they are waging a disinformation campaign.
  • That is what you see in the New York Times story and any story containing the words “Global Disinformation Index.”
  • Then you can begin to figure out what is really going on with the story.

Of course, the entirely new obsession with misinformation and disinformation by government and mass media is a big lie. Since forever, people have known that governments lie all the time.

They have known that the media is partisan, a form of activism more often than not. Yet suddenly we are being told that the media and the government are now declaring war in false information.

Since they are the only possible source of disinformation, this means war on themselves.

The big lie, for those unfamiliar, is a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. This is now the default tactic of the managerial state.

  • They tell us that Eskimo truckers protesting vaccine rules are white supremacists.
  • Then they bring in a “hate expert” to claim that freedom is a form of violence.

These outlandish whoppers are then signed off on by new experts who sagely tell us the moon is made of cheese.

Unlike normal propaganda techniques, this new tactic is not to further a cause, although it can be used that way as we see with Ukraine. The neocons are simply taking advantage of a defense mechanism that has evolved since the Cold War.

By flooding the zone with outlandish nonsense, the system prevents cogent analysis of what it is doing or contradicting it in any way.

It is a form of menticide to paralyze the people by suspending them in a solution of false narratives.

The concept of "menticide" indicates an organized system of judicial perversion and psychological intervention, in which a powerful tyrant transfers his own thoughts and words into the minds and mouths of the victims he plans to destroy or to use for his own propaganda.

-menticide

This is the utility of the Opposite Rule.

It helps clarify the new relationship between the leviathan and the people.

  • Rulers = leviathan
  • People = serf / slaves

Instead of viewing society as a hierarchical structure that is responsive to the will of the people, you see that it is an adversarial relationship between a ruling organism and the people.

This ruling organism is the vast administrative state made up of government, corporations, the academy, non-profits and the mass media.

It is a fully integrated organism.

The endless waves of information, mostly false information, is its primary defense mechanism against what it sees as a threat.

That threat is the people over whom it hovers like a noxious cloud.

The point of the false information is to keep the people in a fog of confusion about who really rules over them.

You cannot rebel against that which you are not even sure exists.

Menticide is the primary defense mechanism of this system of social control we call managerialism.

A nice night in the city

Isn’t she just great? Well, I love her.

One of my favorite things to do is get dressed up a tad and go out for a night in the city. Though it’s mostly a nice meal in a restrurant, followed by a coffee and a snack at one of the bars or coffee houses, I would love to go out and feel the night city air. Great times.

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Chinese J-20

Superior or roughly comparable (depending on who your read) to all the American fighter aircraft. 100% Chinese designed. 100% Chinese avionics. 100% Chinese engines.

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According To The ‘Big Mac Index’, China’s Yuan Is 34% Under-Valued

The Big Mac was created in 1967 by Jim Delligati, a McDonald’s franchise owner in Pennsylvania. It was launched throughout the U.S. the following year, and today you can buy one in more than 70 countries. However, as Visual Capitalist’s Jenna Ross details below, the price you pay will vary based on where you are, as evidenced by the Big Mac Index.

What Does the Big Mac Index Show?

The Big Mac Index was invented by The Economist in 1986. It is intended to be a lighthearted way to demonstrate the concept of purchasing power parity. In other words, it helps illustrate the idea that market exchange rates between countries may be “out of whack” when compared to the cost of buying the same basket of goods and services in those places.

Given that McDonald’s is one of the biggest companies in the world and the Big Mac is widely available globally, it means that the famous burger can be used as a basic goods comparison between most countries. It also has the advantage of having the same inputs and distribution system, with a few minor modifications (like chicken patties in India instead of beef).

Using the price of a Big Mac in two countries, the index can give an indication as to whether a currency may be over or undervalued. For example, a Big Mac costs ¥24.40 in China and $5.81 in the United States. By comparing the implied exchange rate to the actual exchange rate, we can see whether the Yuan is over or undervalued.

According to the Big Mac Index, the Yuan is undervalued by 34%.

Beyond currency misalignment, the index has other uses. For instance, it shows inflation in burger prices over time. If we compare the price of a Big Mac across countries in the same currency—such as the U.S. dollar—we are also able to see where burgers are cheaper or relatively more expensive.

Burger Costs Around the World

Big Mac prices have been converted from local currency to U.S. dollars based on the actual exchange rate in effect at the time.

Switzerland takes the cake for the priciest Big Mac, followed closely behind by Norway.

Both countries have relatively high price levels but also enjoy higher wages when compared to other OECD countries.

Venezuela has seen the largest jump in burger prices, with the cost of a Big Mac climbing nearly 250% since 2004. The country has been plagued by hyperinflation for years, so it’s no surprise to see large price swings in the country’s data.

While it appears that the price of a Big Mac has decreased in Turkey, this is because the prices are shown in U.S. dollars. The new Turkish lira has depreciated against the U.S. dollar more than 90% since it was introduced in 2005.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Russia has the cheapest Big Mac, reflecting the country’s lower price levels. Labor costs in Russia are roughly a third of those in Switzerland.

The Limitations of Burgernomics

The Big Mac Index is useful for a number of reasons. Investors can use it to measure inflation over time, and compare this to official records. This can help them value bonds and other securities that are sensitive to inflation. The Big Mac Index also indicates whether a currency may be over or undervalued, and investors can place foreign exchange trades accordingly.

Of course, the index does have shortcomings. Here are some that economists have noted.

  • Non-traded services can have different prices across countries. The price of a Big Mac will be influenced by the costs of things like labor, but this is not a reflection of relative currency values. The Economist now releases a GDP-adjusted version of the Big Mac Index to help address this criticism.
  • McDonald’s is not in every country in the world. This means the geographic reach of the Big Mac Index has some limitations, particularly in Africa.
  • The index lacks diversity. The index is made up of one item: the Big Mac. Because of this, it lacks the diversity of other economic metrics such as the Consumer Price Index.

Despite all of these limitations, the Big Mac Index does act as a good starting place for understanding purchasing power parity. Through the simplicity of burgers, complex economic theory is easier to digest.

Walking the rails in the countryside.

Gosh! I’ll bet this woman is so much fun!

She’s one of my favorites and she’s on the tracks. I used to do this don’t you know. We had all these traintracks that ran in and out and though the countryside in Western Pennsylvania. I would go hiking with my friends (when I was a boy) and often we would try walkign on top of the rails. Just like this girl does. So nice. Good memories.

When was the last time that you walked the rails?

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Do you all know what would be good and fun?

How about taking a little short walk down some tracks alone with your cell phone set to OFF.

A reminder of how unified the Chinese are

This is a clip from a movie. It depicts a true event where (during the Korean war) no matter how many times the American military destroyed the bridges, the Chinese rebuilt them and kept on moving forward. True story. Remember that.

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Nice healthy Chinese girl

Gosh she looks good. Doesn’t she?

I really like her lipstick. Personally, I think that many women look great wearing lipstick, but the color and texture selection is critical. Not every color and texture fits every woman. In this case, this red sade really complements her skin complexion and her hair color. Don’t you think?

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Final Thoughts

Do you all know what really pisses off a lot of Trolls?

It’s one of the first things that Trolls disparage.

It’s off-subject meandering. Whether pretty girls. Food. Cats. Personal stories, and all the rest.

It drives them bonkers.

It’s rambling trains of thought. They are unable (due to some kind of mental block, or mental illness) focus on wide-ranging topics. They can handle a singular topic, and get involved in it, but they really, REALLY hate meandering expressions of thoughts, images, senses and pictures of another life in it’s great complexity.

They cannot handle articles like this.

Their tiny minds cannot handle it.

You all know, that I am going to continue on my meandering adventures, for most healthy people can easily handle my topics and how they are presented. I hope that you too (my dear reader) understand why I structure MM the way I do.

There’s an order and a reason behind the “madness”.

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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“Uncommon Sense” (1945) by Hal Clement

This is a great science fiction story.  This interesting tale of conflict and survival in a hostile and unknown land was first published in the September 1945 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, with the striking illustrations by Williams that we have reproduced here.

Its author Hal Clement (1922-2003) was a trained astrophysicist who brought an emphasis on the “science” part of science-fiction that was particularly effective, interesting and convincing in this quite perfect little story that has so well passed the test of time.

He was serving as a pilot in the US Air Force at the time of publication of this story, and had flown dozens of combat missions during the war in Europe. He later retired with the rank of Colonel.

“Uncommon Sense” (1945) by Hal Clement

“So you’ve left us, Mr. Cunning­ham!” Malmeson’s voice sounded rougher than usual, even allowing for headphone distortion and the ever-present Denebian static. “Now, that’s too bad. If you’d chosen to stick around, we would have put you off on some world where you could live, at least. Now you can stay here and fry. And I hope you live long enough to watch us take off—without you!”

Laird Cunningham did not bother to reply. The ship’s radio compass should still be in working order, and it was just possible that his erstwhile assistants might start hunting for him, if they were given some idea of the proper direction to begin a search. Cunningham was too satisfied with his present shelter to be very anxious for a change. He was scarcely half a mile from the grounded ship, in a cavern deep enough to afford shel­ter from Deneb’s rays when it rose, and located in the side of a small hill, so that he could watch the activities of Malmeson and his com­panion without exposing himself to their view.

In a way, of course, the villain was right. If Cunningham per­mitted the ship to take off without him, he might as well open his face plate; for, while he had food and oxygen for several days’ normal consumption, a planet scarcely larger than Luna, baked in rays of one of the fiercest radiating bodies in the galaxy, was most unlikely to provide further supplies when these ran out. He wondered how long it would take the men to discover the damage he had done to the drive units in the few minutes that had elapsed between the crash landing and their breaking through the con­trol room door, which Cunningham had welded shut when he had dis­covered their intentions. They might not notice it at all; he had severed a number of inconspicuous connections at odd points. Perhaps they would not even test the drivers until they had completed repairs to the cracked hull. If they didn’t, so much the better.

Cunningham crawled to the mouth of his cave and looked out across the shallow valley in which the ship lay. It was barely visible in the starlight, and there was no sign of artificial luminosity to sug­gest that Malmeson might have started repairs at night. Cunning­ham had not expected that they would, but it was well to be sure. Nothing more had come over his suit-radio since the initial outburst, when the men had discovered his departure; he decided that they must be waiting for sunrise, to en­able them to take more accurate stock of the damage suffered by the hull.

He spent the next few minutes looking at the stars, trying to ar­range them into patterns he could remember. He had no watch, and it would help to have some warning of approaching sunrise on succeed­ing nights. It would not do to be caught away from his cave, with the flimsy protection his suit could afford from Deneb’s radiation. He wished he could have filched one of the heavier work suits; but they were kept in a compartment for­ward of the control room, from which he had barred himself when he had sealed the door of the latter chamber.

He remained at the cave mouth, lying motionless and watching alter­nately the sky and the ship. Once or twice he may have dozed; but he was awake and alert when the low hills beyond the ship’s hull caught the first rays of the rising sun. For a minute or two they seemed to hang detached in a black void, while the flood of blue-white light crept down their slopes; then, one by one, their bases merged with each other and the ground below to form a connected landscape. The silvery hull gleamed brilliantly, the reflection from it lighting the cave behind Cunningham and making his eyes water when he tried to watch for the opening of the air lock.

He was forced to keep his eyes elsewhere most of the time, and look only in brief glimpses at the dazzling metal; and in consequence, he paid more attention to the de­tails of his environment than he might otherwise have done. At the time, this circumstance annoyed him; he has since been heard to bless it fervently and frequently.

Although the planet had much in common with Luna as regarded size, mass, and airlessness, its land­scape was extremely different. The daily terrific heatings which it un­derwent, followed by abrupt and equally intense temperature drops each night, had formed an excellent substitute for weather; and eleva­tions that might at one time have rivaled the Lunar ranges were now mere rounded hillocks, like that con­taining Cunningham’s cave. As on the Earth’s moon, the products of the age-long spalling had taken the form of fine dust, which lay in drifts everywhere. What could have drifted it, on an airless and consequently windless planet, struck Cunningham as a puzzle of the first magnitude; and it bothered him for some time until his attention was taken by certain other objects upon and between the drifts. These he had thought at first to be outcrop­pings of rock; but he was at last convinced that they were specimens of vegetable life—miserable, lichenous specimens, but nevertheless vegetation. He wondered what liquid they contained, in an environ­ment at a temperature well above the melting point of lead.

The discovery of animal life—medium-sized, crablike things, covered with jet-black integument, that began to dig their way out of the drifts as the sun warmed them—completed the job of dragging Cunningham’s attention from his immediate problems. He was not a zoologist by training, but the sub­ject had fascinated for years; and he had always had money enough to indulge his hobby. He had spent years wandering the Galaxy in search of bizarre life forms—proof, if any were needed, of a lack of scientific training—and terrestrial museums had always been more than glad to accept the collections that resulted from each trip and usually to send scientists of their own in his footsteps. He had been in physical danger often enough, but it had always been from the life he studied or from the forces which make up the interstellar trav­eler’s regular diet, until he had overheard the conversation which informed him that his two assistants were planning to do away with him and appropriate the ship for un­specified purposes of their own. He liked to think that the prompt­ness of his action following the discovery at least indicated that he was not growing old.

But he did let his attention wan­der to the Denebian life forms.

Several of the creatures were emerging from the dust mounds within twenty or thirty yards of Cunningham’s hiding place, giving rise to the hope that they would come near enough for a close ex­amination. At that distance, they were more crablike than ever, with round, flat bodies twelve to eighteen inches across, and several pairs of legs. They scuttled rapidly about, stopping at first one of the lichenous plants and then another, apparently taking a few tentative nibbles from each, as though they had delicate tastes which needed pampering. Once or twice there were fights when the same tidbit attracted the attention of more than one claim­ant; but little apparent damage was done on either side, and the victor spent no more time on the meal he won than on that which came un­contested.
Cunningham became deeply ab­sorbed in watching the antics of the little creatures, and completely for­got for a time his own rather pre­carious situation. He was recalled to it by the sound of Malmeson’s voice in his headphones.
“Don’t look up, you fool; the shields will save your skin, but not your eyes. Get under the shadow of the hull, and we’ll look over the damage.”

Cunningham instantly transferred his attention to the ship. The air lock on the side toward him—the port—was open, and the bulky fig­ures of his two ex-assistants were visible standing on the ground be­neath it. They were clad in the heavy utility suits which Cunning­ham had regretted leaving, and appeared to be suffering little or no inconvenience from the heat, though they were still standing full in De­neb’s light when he looked. He knew that hard radiation burns would not appear for some time, but he held little hope of Deneb’s more deadly output coming to his assistance: for the suits were sup­posed to afford protection against this danger as well. Between heat insulation, cooling equipment, ra­diation shielding, and plain mechan­ical armor, the garments were so heavy and bulky as to be an almost insufferable burden on any major planet. They were more often used in performing exterior repairs in space.

Cunningham watched and lis­tened carefully as the men stooped under the lower curve of the hull to make an inspection of the dam­age. It seemed, from their con­versation, to consist of a dent about three yards long and half as wide, about which nothing could be done, and a series of radially arranged cracks in the metal around it. These represented a definite threat to the solidity of the ship, and would have to be welded along their full lengths before it would be safe to apply the stresses incident to second-order flight. Malmeson was too good an engineer not to realize this fact, and Cunningham heard him lay plans for bringing power lines out­side for the welder and jacking up the hull to permit access to the lower portions of the cracks. The latter operation was carried out im­mediately, with an efficiency which did not in the least surprise the hid­den watcher. After all, he had hired the men.

Every few minutes, to Cunningham’s annoyance, one of the men would carefully examine the land­scape; first on the side on which he was working, and then walking around the ship to repeat the performance. Even in the low gravity, Cunningham knew he could not cross the half mile that lay between him and that inviting air lock, be­tween two of those examinations; and even if he could, his leaping figure, clad in the gleaming metal suit, would be sure to catch even an eye not directed at it. It would not do to make the attempt unless suc­cess were certain; for his unshielded suit would heat in a minute or two to an unbearable temperature, and the only place in which it was pos­sible either to remove or cool it was on board the ship. He finally decided, to his annoyance, that the watch would not slacken so long as the air lock of the ship remained open. It would be necessary to find some means to distract or—an unpleasant alternative for a civi­lized man—disable the opposition while Cunningham got aboard, locked the others out, and located a weapon or other factor which would put him in a position to give them orders. At that, he reflected, a weapon would scarcely be neces­sary; there was a perfectly good medium transmitter on board, if the men had not destroyed or dis­charged it, and he need merely call for help and keep the men outside until it arrived.

This, of course, presupposed some solution to the problem of getting aboard unaccompanied. He would, he decided, have to examine the ship more closely after sunset. He knew the vessel as well as his own home—he had spent more time on her than in any other home— and knew that there was no means of entry except through the two main locks forward of the control room, and the two smaller, emer­gency locks near the stern, one of which he had employed on his de­parture. All these could be clogged shut from within; and offhand he was unable to conceive a plan for forcing any of the normal entrances. The view ports were too small to admit a man in a spacesuit, even if the panes could be broken; and there was literally no other way into the ship so long as the hull re­mained intact. Malmeson would not have talked so glibly of welding them sufficiently well to stand flight, if any of the cracks incurred on the landing had been big enough to admit a human body—or even that of a respectably healthy garter snake.

Cunningham gave a mental shrug of the shoulders as these thoughts crossed his mind, and reiterated his decision to take a scouting sortie after dark. For the rest of the day he divided his attention between the working men and the equally busy life forms that scuttled here and there in front of his cave; and he would have been the first to ad­mit that he found the latter more in­teresting.

He still hoped that one would ap­proach the cave closely enough to permit a really good examination, but for a long time he remained unsatisfied. Once, one of the crea­tures came within a dozen yards and stood “on tiptoe”—rising more than a foot from the ground on its slender legs, while a pair of antennae terminating in knobs the size of human eyeballs extended themselves several inches from the black carapace and waved slowly in all directions. Cunningham thought that the knobs probably did serve as eyes, though from his distance he could see only a featureless black sphere. The antennae eventually waved in his direction, and after a few seconds spent, apparently in assimilating the presence of the cave mouth, the creature settled back to its former low-swung carriage and scuttled away. Cunningham wondered if it had been frightened at his presence; but he felt reasonably sure that no eye adapted to Denebian daylight could see past the darkness of his threshold, and he had remained motionless while the creature was conducting its inspec­tion. More probably it had some reason to fear caves, or merely darkness.

That it had reason to fear some­thing was shown when another creature, also of crustacean aspect but considerably larger than those Cunningham had seen to date, appeared from among the dunes and attacked one of the latter. The fight took place too far from the cave for Cunningham to make out many details, but the larger animal quickly overcame its victim. It then apparently dismembered the vanquished, and either devoured the softer flesh inside the black in­tegument or sucked the body fluids from it. Then the carnivore dis­appeared again, presumably in search of new victims. It had scarcely gone when another being, designed along the lines of a centi­pede and fully forty feet in length, appeared on the scene with the graceful flowing motion of its ter­restrial counterpart.

For a few moments the new­comer nosed around the remains of the carnivore’s feast, and devoured the larger fragments. Then it ap­peared to look around as though for more, evidently saw the cave, and came rippling toward it, to Cun­ningham’s pardonable alarm. He was totally unarmed, and while the centipede had just showed itself not to be above eating carrion, it looked quite able to kill its own food if necessary. It stopped, as the other investigator had, a dozen yards from the cave mouth; and like the other, elevated itself as though to get a better look. The baseball-sized black “eyes” seemed for sev­eral seconds to stare into Cunning-ham’s more orthodox optics; then, like its predecessor, and to the man’s intense relief, it doubled back along its own length and glided out of sight.

Cunningham again wondered whether it had de­tected his presence, or whether caves or darkness in general spelled danger to these odd life forms.

It suddenly occurred to him that, if the latter were not the case, there might be some traces of pre­vious occupants of the cave; and he set about examining the place more closely, after a last glance which showed him the two men still at work jacking up the hull.

There was drifted dust even here, he discovered, particularly close to the walls and in the corners. The place was bright enough, owing to the light reflected from outside ob­jects, to permit a good examination—shadows on airless worlds are not so black as many people believe—and almost at once Cunningham found marks in the dust that could easily have been made by some of the creatures he had seen. There were enough of them to suggest that the cave was a well-frequented neighborhood; and it began to look as though the animals were staying away now because of the man’s presence.

Near the rear wall he found the empty integument that had once covered a four-jointed leg. It was light, and he saw that the flesh had either been eaten or decayed out, though it seemed odd to think of decay in an airless environment suf­fering such extremes of tempera­ture—though the cave was less sub­ject to this affect than the outer world. Cunningham wondered whether the leg had been carried in by its rightful owner, or as a separate item on the menu of something else. If the former, there might be more relics about.

There were. A few minutes’ ex­cavation in the deeper layers of dust produced the complete exo­skeleton of one of the smaller crab-like creatures; and Cunningham carried the remains over to the cave mouth, so as to examine them and watch the ship at the same time.

The knobs he had taken for eyes were his first concern. A close examination of their surfaces revealed nothing, so he carefully tried to detach one from its stem. It finally cracked raggedly away, and proved, as he had expected, to be hollow. There was no trace of a retina in­side, but there was no flesh in any of the other pieces of shell, so that proved nothing. As a sudden thought struck him, Cunningham held the front part of the delicate black bit of shell in front of his eyes; and sure enough, when he looked in the direction of the brightly gleaming hull of the space­ship, a spark of light showed through an almost microscopic hole. The sphere was an eye, constructed on the pinhole principle—quite an adequate design on a world fur­nished with such an overwhelming luminary. It would be useless at night, of course, but so would most other visual organs here; and Cun­ningham was once again faced with the problem of how any of the crea­tures had detected his presence in the cave—his original belief, that no eye adjusted to meet Deneb’s glare could look into its relatively total darkness, seemed to be sound.

He pondered the question, as he examined the rest of the skeleton in a half-hearted fashion. Sight seemed to be out, as a result of his examination; smell and hearing were ruled out by the lack of at­mosphere; taste and touch could not even be considered under the cir­cumstances. He hated to fall back on such a time-honored refuge for ignorance as “extrasensory percep­tion”, but he was unable to see any way around it.

It may seem unbelievable that a man in the position Laird Cunningham occupied could let his mind become so utterly absorbed in a problem unconnected with his per­sonal survival. Such individuals do exist, however; most people know someone who has shown some trace of such a trait; and Cunningham was a well-developed example. He had a single-track mind, and had intentionally shelved his personal problem for the moment.

His musings were interrupted, be­fore he finished dissecting his speci­men, by the appearance of one of the carnivorous creatures at what appeared to constitute a marked dis­tance—a dozen yards from his cave mouth, where it rose up on the ends of its thin legs and goggled around at the landscape. Cunningham, half in humor and half in honest curiosity, tossed one of the dis­membered legs from the skeleton in his hands at the creature. It obviously saw the flying limb; but it made no effort to pursue or de­vour it. Instead, it turned its eyes in Cunningham’s direction, and pro­ceeded with great baste to put one of the drifts between it and what it evidently considered a dangerous neighborhood.

It seemed to have no memory to speak of, however; for a minute or two later Cunningham saw it creep into view again, stalking one of the smaller creatures which still swarmed everywhere, nibbling at the plants. He was able to get a better view of the fight and the feast that followed than on the pre­vious occasion, for they took place much nearer to his position; but this time there was a rather differ­ent ending. The giant centipede, or another of its kind, appeared on the scene while the carnivore was still at its meal, and came flowing at a truly surprising rate over the dunes to fall on victor and van­quished alike. The former had no inkling of its approach until much too late; and both black bodies dis­appeared into the maw of the crea­ture Cunningham had hoped was merely a scavenger.

What made the whole episode of interest to the man was the fact that in its charge, the centipede loped unheeding almost directly through a group of the plant-eaters; and these, by common consent, broke and ran at top speed directly toward the cave. At first he thought they would swerve aside when they saw what lay ahead; but evidently he was the lesser of two evils, for they scuttled past and even over him as he lay in the cave mouth, and began to bury themselves in the deepest dust they could find. Cunningham watched with pleasure, as an excellent group of specimens thus collected themselves for his convenience.

As the last of them disappeared under the dust, he turned back to the scene outside. The centipede was just finishing its meal. This time, instead of immediately wan­dering out of sight, it oozed quickly to the top of one of the larger dunes, in full sight of the cave, and deposited its length in the form of a watch spring, with the head rest­ing above the coils. Cunningham realized that it was able, in this position, to look in nearly all direc­tions and, owing to the height of its position, to a considerable dis­tance.

With the centipede apparently settled for a time, and the men still working in full view, Cunningham determined to inspect one of his specimens. Going to the nearest wall, he bent down and groped cau­tiously in the dust. He encountered a subject almost at once, and dragged a squirming black crab into the light. He found that if he held it upside down on one hand, none of its legs could get a purchase on any­thing; and he was able to examine the underparts in detail in spite of the wildly thrashing limbs. The jaws, now opening and closing futilely on a vacuum, were equipped with a set of crushers that sug­gested curious things about the plants on which it fed; they looked capable of flattening the metal fin­ger of Cunningham’s spacesuit, and he kept his hand well out of their reach.
He became curious as to the in­ternal mechanism that permitted it to exist without air, and was faced with the problem of killing the thing without doing it too much mechani­cal damage. It was obviously able to survive a good many hours with­out the direct radiation of Deneb, which was the most obvious source of energy, although its body tem­perature was high enough to be causing the man some discomfort through the glove of his suit; so “drowning” in darkness was im­practical. There might, however, he some part of its body on which a blow would either stun or kill it ; and he looked around for a suitable weapon.

There were several deep cracks in the stone at the cave mouth, caused presumably by thermal ex­pansion and contraction; and with a little effort he was able to break loose a pointed, fairly heavy frag­ment. With this in his right hand, he laid the creature on its back on the ground, and hoped it had some­thing corresponding to a solar plexus.

It was too quick for him. The legs, which had been unable to reach his hand when it was in the center of the creature’s carapace, proved supple enough to get a purchase on the ground; and before he could strike, it was right side up and de­parting with a haste that put to shame its previous efforts to escape from the centipede.

Cunningham shrugged, and dug out another specimen. This time he held it in his hand while he drove the point of his rock against its plastron. There was no apparent effect; he had not dared to strike too hard, for fear of crushing the shell. He struck several more times, with identical results and in­creasing impatience; and at last there occurred the result he had feared. The black armor gave way, and the point penetrated deeply enough to insure the damage of most of the interior organs. The legs gave a final twitch or two, and ceased moving, and Cunningham gave an exclamation of annoyance.

On hope, he removed the broken bits of shell, for a moment looked in surprise at the liquid which seemed to have filled the body cavi­ties. It was silvery, even metallic in color; it might have been mer­cury, except that it wet the organs bathed in it and was probably at a temperature above the boiling point of that metal. Cunningham had just grasped this fact when he was violently bowled over, and the dead creature snatched from his grasp. He made a complete somer­sault, bringing up against the rear wall of the cave; and as he came up­right he saw to his horror that the assailant was none other than the giant centipede.
It was disposing with great thor­oughness of his specimen, leaving at last only a few fragments of shell that had formed the extreme tips of the legs; and as the last of these fell to the ground, it raised the fore part of its body from the ground, as the man had seen it do before, and turned the invisible pin­points of its pupils on the space-suited human figure.

Cunningham drew a deep breath, and took a firm hold of his pointed rock, though he had little hope of overcoming the creature. The jaws he had just seen at work had seemed even more efficient than those of the plant-eater, and they were large enough to take in a human leg.

For perhaps five seconds both beings faced each other without mo­tion; then, to the man’s inexpress­ible relief, the centipede reached the same conclusion to which its pre­vious examination of humanity had led it, and departed in evident haste. This time it did not remain in sight, but was still moving rapidly when it reached the limit of Cunningham’s vision.

The naturalist returned some­what shakily to the cave mouth, seated himself where he could watch his ship, and began to ponder deeply. A number of points seemed interesting on first thought, and on further cerebration became positively fascinating. The centi­pede had not seen, or at least had not pursued, the plant-eater that had escaped from Cunningham and run from the cave.

Looking back, he realized that the only times he had seen the creature attack was after “blood” had been already shed —twice by one of the carnivorous animals, the third time by Cunning­ham himself. It had apparently made no difference where the vic­tims had been—two in full sunlight, one in the darkness of the cave.

More proof, if any were needed, that the creatures could see in both grades of illumination. It was not strictly a carrion eater, however; Cunningham remembered that car­nivore that had accompanied its vic­tim into the centipede’s jaws. It was obviously capable of overcom­ing the man, but had twice retreated precipitately when it had excellent opportunities to attack him. What was it, then, that drew the creature to scenes of combat and bloodshed, but frightened it away from a man; that frightened, indeed, all of these creatures?

On any planet that had a respect­able atmosphere, Cunningham would have taken one answer for granted—scent. In his mind, how­ever, organs of smell were associ­ated with breathing apparatus, which these creatures obviously lacked.

Don’t ask why he took so long. You may think that the terrific adaptability evidenced by those strange eyes would be clue enough: or perhaps you may be in a mood to excuse him. Columbus prob­ably excused those of his friends who failed to solve the egg prob­lem.

Of course, he got it at last, and was properly annoyed with himself for taking so long about it. An eye, to us, is an organ for forming images of the source of such radia­tion as may fall on it; and a nose is a gadget that tells its owner of the presence of molecules. He needs his imagination to picture the source of the latter. But what would you call an organ that forms a picture of the source of smell?

For that was just what those “eyes” did. In the nearly perfect vacuum of this little world’s surface, gases diffused at high speed—and their molecules traveled in practically straight lines. There was nothing wrong with the idea of a pinhole camera eye, whose retina was composed of olfactory nerve endings rather than the rods and cones of photosensitive organs.

That seemed to account for everything. Of course the crea­tures were indifferent to the amount of light reflected from the object they examined. The glare of the open spaces under Deneb’s rays, and the relative blackness of a cave, were all one to them—provided something were diffusing molecules in the neighborhood. And what doesn’t? Every substance, solid or liquid, has its vapor pressure; under Deneb’s rays even some rather un­likely materials probably evaporated enough to affect the organs of these life forms—metals, particularly. The life fluid of the creatures was obviously metal—probably lead, tin, bismuth, or some similar metals, or still more probably, several of them in a mixture that carried the sub­stances vital to the life of their body cells. Probably much of the make­up of those cells was in the form of colloidal metals.

But that was the business of the biochemists. Cunningham amused himself for a time by imagining the analogy between smell and color which must exist here; light gases, such as oxygen and nitrogen, must be rare, and the tiny quantities that leaked from his suit would be ab­solutely new to the creatures that intercepted them. He must have af­fected their nervous systems the way fire did those of terrestrial wild animals. No wonder even the cen­tipede had thought discretion the better part of valor!

With his less essential problem solved for the nonce, Cunningham turned his attention to that of his own survival; and he had not pon­dered many moments when he real­ized that this, as well, might be solved. He began slowly to smile, as the discrete fragments of an idea began to sort themselves out and fit properly together in his mind—an idea that involved the vapor pres­sure of metallic blood, the leaking qualities of the utility suits worn by his erstwhile assistants, and the bloodthirstiness of his many-legged acquaintances of the day; and he had few doubts about any of those qualities. The plan became com­plete, to his satisfaction; and with a smile on his face, he settled him­self to watch until sunset.
Deneb had already crossed a con­siderable arc of the sky. Cunning­ham did not know just how long he had, as he lacked a watch; and it was soon borne in on him that time passes much more slowly when there is nothing to occupy it. As the afternoon drew on, he was forced away from the cave mouth; for the descending star was beginning to shine in. Just before sunset, he was crowded against one side; for Deneb’s fierce rays shone straight through the entrance and onto the opposite wall, leaving very little space not directly illuminated. Cun­ningham drew a sigh of relief for more reasons than one when the upper limb of the deadly luminary finally disappeared.

His specimens had long since recovered from their fright, and left the cavern; he had not tried to stop them. Now, however, he emerged from the low entryway and went directly to the nearest dust dune, which was barely visible in the star­light. A few moment’s search was rewarded with one of the squirming plant-eaters, which he carried back into the shelter; then, illuminating the scene carefully with the small torch that was clipped to the waist of his suit, he made a fair-sized pile of dust, gouged a long groove in the top with his toe, with the aid of the same stone he had used be­fore, he killed the plant-eater and poured its “blood” into the dust mold.

The fluid was metallic, all right; it cooled quickly, and in two or three minutes Cunningham had a silvery rod about as thick as a pencil and five or six inches long. He had been a little worried about the centipede at first; but the creature was either not in line to “see” into the cave, or had dug in for the night like its victims.

Cunningham took the rod, which was about as pliable as a strip of solder of the same dimensions, and, extinguishing the torch, made his way in a series of short, careful leaps to the stranded spaceship. There was no sign of the men, and they had taken their welding equipment inside with them—that is, if they had ever had it out; Cunning­ham had not been able to watch them for the last hour of daylight. The hull was still jacked up, how­ever; and the naturalist eased him­self under it and began to examine the damage, once more using the torch. It was about as he had de­duced from the conversation of the men; and with a smile, he took the little metal stick and went to work. He was busy for some time under the hull, and once he emerged, found another plant-eater, and went back underneath. After he had fin­ished, he walked once around the ship, checking each of the air locks and finding them sealed, as he had expected.
He showed neither surprise nor disappointment at this; and with­out further ceremony he made his way back to the cave, which he had a little trouble finding in the star­light. He made a large pile of the dust, for insulation rather than bed­ding, lay down on it, and tried to sleep. He had very little success, as he might have expected.

Night, in consequence, seemed unbearably long; and he almost re­gretted his star study of the pre­vious darkness, for now he was able to see that sunrise was still distant, rather than bolster his morale with the hope that Deneb would be in the sky the next time he opened his eyes. The time finally came, how­ever, when the hilltops across the valley leaped one by one into bril­liance as the sunlight caught them; and Cunningham rose and stretched himself. He was stiff and cramped, for a spacesuit makes a poor sleep­ing costume even on a better bed than a stone floor.

As the light reached the spaceship and turned it into a blazing silvery spindle, the air lock opened. Cun­ningham had been sure that the men were in a hurry to finish their task, and were probably awaiting the sun almost as eagerly as he in order to work efficiently; he had planned on this basis.

Malmeson was the first to leap to the ground, judging by their conversation, which came clearly through Cunningham’s phones. He turned back, and his companion handed down to him the bulky di­ode welder and a stack of filler rods. Then both men made their way for­ward to the dent where they were to work. Apparently they failed to notice the bits of loose metal ly­ing on the scene—perhaps they had done some filing themselves the day before. At any rate, there was no mention of it as Malmeson lay down and slid under the hull, and the other began handing equipment in to him.

Plant-eaters were beginning to struggle out of their dust beds as the connections were completed, and the torch started to flame. Cun­ningham nodded in pleasure as he noted this; things could scarcely have been timed better had the men been consciously co-operating. He actually emerged from the cave, keeping in the shadow of the hil­lock, to increase his field of view; but for several minutes nothing but plant-eaters could be seen moving.

He was beginning to fear that his invited guests were too distant to receive their call, when his eye caught a glimpse of a long, black body slipping silently over the dunes toward the ship. He smiled in sat­isfaction; and then his eyebrows suddenly rose as he saw a second snaky form following the tracks of the first.

He looked quickly across his full field of view, and was rewarded by the sight of four more of the mon­sters—all heading at breakneck speed straight for the spaceship. The beacon he had lighted had reached more eyes than he had ex­pected. He was sure that the men were armed, and had never intended that they actually be overcome by the creatures; he had counted on a temporary distraction that would let him reach the air lock unop­posed.

He stood up, and braced himself for the dash, as Malmeson’s helper saw the first of the charging centi­pedes and called the welder from his work. Malmeson barely had time to gain his feet when the first pair of attackers reached them; and at the same instant Cunningham emerged into the sunlight, putting every ounce of his strength into the leaps that were carrying him to­ward the only shelter that now existed for him.

He could feel the ardor of De­neb’s rays the instant they struck him; and before he had covered a third of the distance the back of his suit was painfully hot. Things were hot for his ex-crew as well; fully ten of the black monsters had reacted to the burst of—to them—overpoweringly attractive odor—or gorgeous color?—that had resulted when Malmeson had turned his welder on the metal where Cun­ningham had applied the frozen blood of their natural prey; and more of the same substance was now vaporizing under Deneb’s in­fluence as Malmeson, who had been lying in fragments of it stood fight­ing off the attackers. He had a flame pistol, but it was slow to take effect on creatures whose very blood was molten metal; and his companion, wielding the diode unit on those who got too close, was no better off. They were practically swamped under wriggling bodies as they worked their way toward the air lock; and neither man saw Cun­ningham as, staggering even under the feeble gravity that was present, and fumbling with eye shield misted with sweat, he reached the same goal and disappeared within.
Being a humane person, he left the outer door open; but he closed and clogged the inner one before proceeding with a more even step to the control room. Here he un­hurriedly removed his spacesuit, stopping only to open the switch of the power socket that was feeding the diode unit as he heard the outer lock door close. The flame pistol would make no impression on the alloy of the hull, and he felt no qualms about the security of the inner door. The men were safe, from every point of view.

With the welder removed from the list of active menaces, he fin­ished removing his suit, turned to the medium transmitter, and coolly broadcast a call for help and his position in space. Then he turned on a radio transmitter, so that the rescuers could find him on the planet; and only then did he contact the prisoners on the small set that was tuned to the suit radios, and tell them what he had done.

“I didn’t mean to do you any harm,” Malmeson’s voice came back. “I just wanted the ship. I know you paid us pretty good, but when I thought of the money that could be made on some of those worlds if we looked for something besides crazy animals and plants, I couldn’t help myself. You can let us out now; I swear we won’t try anything more—the ship won’t fly, and you say a Guard flyer is on the way. How about that?”

“I’m sorry you don’t like my hobby,” said Cunningham. “I find it entertaining; and there have been times when it was even useful, though I won’t hurt your feelings by telling you about the last one. I think I shall feel happier if the two of you stay right there in the air lock; the rescue ship should be here before many hours, and you’re fools if you haven’t food and water in your suits.”

“I guess you win, in that case,” said Malmeson.

“I think so, too,” replied Cun­ningham, and switched off.

THE END

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When multiple unusual things are all happening all at once.

Sometimes, it just seems like the United States is just one big science-fiction movie. Seriously it does. Why? Well, there are various “news” articles popping up here, and then there, that all seem to point to a dystopic future; one that resembles a horrific science fiction film.

I argue that there are two vectors that are intersecting right now. One [1] is that of a fear-based narrative; be afraid, be very afraid. And the other [2] is one of general collapse while everyone is acting crazy and running around in crazy insanity.

These two vectors create a very horrific narrative, and it is one that is now commonplace within the United States.

Here we review some of these events. And discuss what they could mean and look at them as an impartial observer witnessing a geographic area going down the tubes in insanity.

We start with…

Bioweapon tainted monkeys escape into the population…

So many movies had this theme. Remember that that was the “cover story” for “American Ultra”, and the theme for numerous science fiction movies. Such as Outbreak (1995).

“American Ultra”

Woman claims she is sick after carrying hissing monkey that escaped truck in Pennsylvania crash. The woman’s pinkeye was so bad that she checked herself into an emergency room.

Note: Biological weapon experimental monkeys escape? Check the earlier local news from Pennsylvania to know how they activate their military and police forces to blanket search for the 4 escape monkeys, and alerted the local residents to report to the authorities if they come by any monkey and not to get close to the monkeys.
The evil American country is very scary, and a constant threat to the survival of humanity and all living thing on the planet.
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Bioweapon monkeys, eh?

Remember that right before the release of the Coronavirus in the Wuhan games, that an “event” occurred where an agency closed down Fort Detrick. Of course, agencies do not have the power to close American miltiary facilities and bases. It was closed for other reasons, not for the stated reasons.

Only ONE person can close down a military base. That’s the President of the United States.

Remember that right before the release of the Coronavirus in the Wuhan games…an odd closure of the Major Bioweapons facility by the EPA.

Bioweapon monkeys, eh?

Yeah. Sure.

Right before XXXXX, an odd escaped monkey started to terrorize America.

Bioweapon monkeys eh?

The United States and rules…

Obviously the “news” is full of such bullshit, partial truths and distortions and no one knows what is really going on. most Americans are completely confused by the onslaught of lies, and many beleive them.

And that makes it easy for the USA to do what it wants.

Thus, it is not unusual for the USA to make the rules as they see fit.

[A] Laws, and rules domestically no longer have any validity, and [B] international treaties are used when it provides advantage, and discarded when they do not.

Combined, [A] and [B] clearly show a nation in chaos where there are no rules, no structures, and very little in the way of law.

As I see it, the United States is like this big thrashing monster, and it is trying desperately to cling to power and relevance. But it is failing at every level, and that is why it is engaged in World War III right now. The opening salvos hit this month, and they are concerning…

Sitrep on the emerging actions of World War III

Let’s look at some of the “news” that can be found in the American, Britsh and Australian “news” media…

Supermarket tabloids

Of couse, it’s just bullshit, and made up stories. However, these things sell, and that means that there ARE people who read them. I remeber when I lived in Kokomo, Indiana, USA  that my next door neighbor (a girl named Misty, a stripper by the way) would read these things weekly and believed every word written in them…

Ah.

Then we have just day to day news.

I have no doubt that this actually occurred, but think about it. Look at this chick, and note that he has convinced the police detective to investigate fifteen (15!) men of raping her.

Woman Who Falsely Accused 15 Men Of Rape Given 10 Year Sentence

A woman from West London is to be jailed for a decade for falsely accusing over a dozen men of sexually assaulting her. 27-year-old Jemma Beale, who hails from Bedfont, west London, was handed a lengthy prison sentence for perverting the course of justice and perjuring innocent men in 2017, one of whom was jailed for two years.

Now, Beale has challenged her sentence throughout the latest appeal process, in a bid to clear her name. However, the prosecution presented evidence that Beale texted her then-girlfriend, saying that she was “glorying in his discomfort” when giving false evidence against one of her victims.

Beale made her first complaint on the morning of 26 November 2010, telling police that she’d been sexually assaulted by Mahad Cassim the previous night. Cassim was sentenced to seven years in prison for rape in 2012.

According to her, all men cannot wait to rape her.

Beale had been supported by the authorities throughout her case as a victim of sexual violence, whose account was to be believed. Professionals will have been on hand to give her support, in addition to a police victim-liaison officer.

She received compensation from the taxpayer amounting to £11,000. Meanwhile, the innocent man whom she had falsely accused was rotting in a prison cell, his reputation destroyed and his life effectively over. Before his conviction was quashed, he had already served over two years of his seven-year sentence.

Beale later told police she had been the victim of two other sexual assaults that year, and allegedly fabricated similar allegations against six other men in 2013.

Commenting on the case, Lady Justice Hallett, the judge presiding over the appeal, stated:

“This case went far further then myths and stereotypes about a complainant’s behaviour. The appellant was accused of being a serial liar who fabricated accounts mostly of a sexual nature. In the light of the evidence called even if the guidance was given it would not have assisted the appellant.”

She added:

“The system of justice has suffered considerable harm – considerable resources have been spent investigating and prosecuting crimes which never happened. There has been no indication of remorse on the appellant’s part.

Then we have this article. Knowing what I know of certain individuals that I have met in prison, this seems to be much more common than one woud think…

But… why?

There must also be betting, and gambling, and probably other vices as well. Don’t you know.

But you do know that maybe it’s how American children are being raised today. Consider this next article…

And when the children grow up, and they discover alcohol, drugs and influence on social media, they start to act really strange.

Like this fellow.

Why?

Well, you need to understand that the United States is fragmented, and balkenized.  As this next article illustrates…

Tennessee Pastor Who Repeatedly Raped 14-Year-Old Daughter Gets Lenient Sentence Because He Was A Good Christian

A former pastor who repeatedly raped his adopted teenage daughter has been given an effective 12 year prison sentence.

The Knoxville News Sentinel reports prosecutors sought the maximum term of 72 years behind bars. The judge on the case, Steve Sword, took Richards work as a pastor, the support he still receives and his role key role in leading a Bible study at the prison as mitigating factors.

During his trial in February, 41-year-old David Lynn Richards Jr. had taken the stand in his own defense and asserted his innocence.

He claimed that the victim, Amber Richards, was a defiant teenager who made the allegations of sexual abuse against him after he tried to impose stricter rules on his children.

The victim was 16 when she reported the abuse, saying it began two years earlier.

She told authorities where they could find DNA evidence at her home and said Richards had texted her about taking their relationship “to the next level.” A

uthorities said they found her mattress stripped bare and his phone factory reset, but they were able to recover Forensic evidence showing traces of Richards’ semen on his daughter’s bed frame

Amber, who has chosen to identify herself and speak out after Richards was found guilty, delivered a powerful impact statement before Richards’ sentencing on Thursday.

“I wanted to throw my body away. Not a day goes by that I don’t, in some way, think of what he did to me. … I firmly believe if given the opportunity, he would victimize another young girl.”

Despite the overwhelming evidence, many in the community refused to believe that Pastor Richards was a rapist.

Over 30 parishioners from the church came to court to show support not for the victim, but for the rapist.

Pastor David Thompson, who shared ministry duties with Pastor Richards at My Father’s House Church of God in Lenoir City, said:

I find it impossible for me to believe he’s guilty of this. His business needs him. His family needs him. Our church needs him.

Despite being found guilty, Richards Jr continued to maintain his innocence while asking the judge for leniency in the sentence.

I stand before you convicted of crimes I did not commit. … I’m not sure why I’m here. … but I assume it’s for His purpose.

Welcome to America.

You know Hollywood, and alcohol dosen’t always mix. ..

And things are even weirder in Great Britian…

But I have to tell you all that things are off-the-wall in certain parts of the United States. Consider the American “Bible Belt”.

Here’s a map of the “Bible Belt”.

Bible Belt.

And this is what goes on there as everyday fodder…

Christian TV Host: Plant-Based Burgers Are A Satanic Plot To Create A “Race of Soulless Creatures”

Rick Wiles warned on his “TruNews” program that the rise of companies that make plant-based alternatives to meat and dairy products, is part of a satanic plot to alter human DNA so that people can no longer worship God.

Appearing on his program earlier this week, Wiles said:

When you go to your favorite fast food restaurant, you are going to be eating a fake hamburger. You’re going to go to the grocery store and buy a pound of fake hamburger or a fake steak, and you won’t know that it was grown in some big corporation’s laboratory. This is the nightmare world that they are taking us into. They’re changing God’s creation. Why? Because they want to be God.

Wiles continued:

God is an environmentalist. He takes this very seriously. He created this planet, he created the universe and he’s watching these Luciferians destroy this planet, destroy the animal kingdom, destroy the plant kingdom, change human DNA. Why? They want to change human DNA so that you can’t be born again. That’s where they’re going with this, to change the DNA of humans so it will be impossible for a human to be born again. They want to create a race of soulless creatures on this planet.

Yuppr.

Things are awfully strange in the ‘States right now.

No more fun in the sun for Jake.

I guess sex is a great motivator.

Consider this screen shot…

I mean, if you are hungry… well…

America is insane, and it is exploding in all sorts of strangeness.

Colorado University Warns Students Not to Say ‘America’, ‘American’ Because It’s Not Inclusive

Colorado State University has included the words “American” and “America” on its list of language to avoid because they are not inclusive.

The school’s Inclusive Communications Task Force compiled a list of words in its Inclusive Language Guide that serve to help those on campus foster “inclusion, respect, and social justice.”

The guide states that it is not about being politically correct but instead is there to help “communicators practice inclusive language” and make everyone on campus “feel welcomed, respected, and valued.”

CSU lists both “American” and “America” as non-inclusive words “to avoid,” due to the fact that America encompasses more than just the U.S.

“The Americas encompass a lot more than the United States,” the guide states. “There is South America, Central America, Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean just to name a few of 42 countries in total.”

By referring to the U.S. as America, the guide claims that one “erases other cultures and depicts the United States as the dominant American country.” The school suggests using “U.S. citizen” or “person from the U.S.” as substitutes.

The guide advises students to use the words “U.S. citizen” or “person from the U.S.” instead of “American.”

Among other words and phrases on the list are:

The words “male” and “female” (because this “refers to biological sex and not gender,” and “we very rarely need to identify or know a person’s biological sex and more often are referring to gender”), “cake walk” (because it apparently has origins in “the racism of 19th century minstrel shows”), “freshman” (because it “excludes women and non-binary gender identities”), “Hispanic” (“because of its origins in colonialization and the implication that to be Hispanic or Latinx/Latine/Latino, one needs to be Spanish-speaking”), “hold down the fort” (because “the U.S. the historical connotation refers to guarding against Native American ‘intruders’ and feeds into the stereotype of ‘savages’”), “no can do” (because it was “originally a way to mock Chinese people”), “peanut gallery” (because it “names a section in theaters, usually the cheapest and worst, where many Black people sat during the era of Vaudeville”), “straight” (because it “implies that anyone LGBT is ‘crooked’ or not normal”), “food coma” (because it “directly alludes to the stereotype of laziness associated with African-Americans”), and “war” or “battle,” when used any way other than to describe a literal war or battle (because “they evoke very real tragedy that can be problematic for survivors of war or Veterans”). (National Review)

The guide does note, however, that the recommendations are not official policy.

What some people will do for a lawn tool.

And what some people will do for fun…

But, you know…

This kind of disconnect from rules, laws and tradition occur world-wide. It’s just that the United States is really very sick.

Consider the middle east…

Saudi Millionaire Who Said He Accidentally “Tripped and Penetrated” Teenage Girl Cleared of Rape

Ehsan Abdulaziz, a Saudi millionaire property developer, was cleared of rape charges in London after he claimed that he had tripped and fallen on an 18-year-old girl who was sleeping at his apartment after partying with him, penetrating her by accident.

The Saudi property developer said he had already had sex with the young woman’s 24-year-old friend and it was possible his penis may have been poking out of his underwear when he tripped

The Mirror reported the group had met at an exclusive West End club last year where he entertained them before offering them a lift home.

The 18-year-old claimed that after a number of drinks at Abdulaziz’s north London home, she went to sleep on the couch.

She said she woke up to find him on top of her, forcing himself on her.

“She woke up with the defendant kissing her and his penis in her vagina,” prosecutor Jonathan Davies told the Southwark Crown Court.

“She said: ‘What are you doing?’ and he said ‘It’s fine,’ indicating that her friend was asleep.

“She got up to find her friend, tried to wake her but couldn’t, she then tried to get out of the flat as quickly as she could.”

Abdulaziz said he had accidentally fallen on the teenager and that she tried to seduce him, and that was how his DNA got onto her vagina.

“I’m fragile, I fell down but nothing ever happened, between me and this girl nothing ever happened,” he said.

He also told the court it was possible he had semen on his hands after having sex with the young woman’s friend.

The jury acquitted Abdulaziz after just 30 minutes of deliberations.

They believed his excuse. He was obviouly being truthful as he was man and a “pillar of the community”.

Tripped.

And of course, there’s all sorts of lies on the Western “news” too.

Like this one about China.

Hey, do you see their faces? Do you see their clothing? How can you tell where this picture was taken?

Well. Look at the pavement. That’s asphalt.

It’s against the law to pave large public areas in China, only certain roads can be paved with asphalt. Only bike lanes maybe paved (and on special permission) cerain senic roads. But never large public areas. They are either cement, if in the rural areas, or dressed stone, which is the norm. This pavement is NOT of dressed stone.

My guess is that someone staged this photo in the UK or USA and wrote a bullshit story around it. It’s pretty common for American “news” these days.

Indeed.

It’s awfully strange in America these days.

Awfully strange.

And it’s not just that.

It’s everything.

Dodgeball Is “An Unethical Tool Of Oppression” And Should Be Banned, Say Researchers

Researchers in Canada say that dodgeball is nothing more than legalized bullying.

When you’re setting up the environment for students to learn, and you introduce the idea that it’s okay to slam the ball at whomever you like, even if it’s with a soft ball, the intention is there,’ Joy Butler, a professor who studies pedagogy and curriculum development said to the Washington Post.

‘When students think it’s okay because they’re being told it’s okay to do that, what do they learn? People say dodgeball is being used as an outlet for aggression or catharsis. I suspect that this is where they’re learning that.

‘Phys-ed should be an arena where teachers are helping students control their aggression and move on instead of expressing themselves through anger.’

Researchers interviewed middle-school students about their physical education classes and say the overwhelming feeling was that students hated dodgeball.

The team’s findings are to be presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences this week in Vancouver and will argue that the playground favorite actually ‘reinforces the five faces of oppression’ identified as exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism and violence by political theorist Iris Marion Young.

‘I think of the little girl who is running to the back to avoid being targeted,’

Professor Butler said.

‘What is she learning in that class? Avoidance?’

Researchers also noted that they had observed the more athletic, authoritative students had created their own rules and purposely stacked the teams.  This, naturally made it more difficult for the less athletic or popular to compete.

‘The message is that it’s okay to hurt or dehumanize the ‘other,’

Butler said.

‘The competition is about annihilating one’s opponent, and the true definition of competition is between two evenly matched teams. Well, kids stack their teams, and they really enjoy beating the other team. What’s the enjoyment of that?’

“Despite the fact that many physical educators understand their vital role in helping students develop robust, equal, productive relationships and critical awareness, their practices on the ground do not always reflect this agenda,”

they write.

“We suggest that this tension becomes sharply visible in the common practice of allowing students to play dodgeball.

They ultimately recommended that Physical Education curriculum’s focus more on health, wellness and fitness rather than just sports.

Next up is Brazil. I wonder how many followers he had…

Holy milk, eh?

I wonder if he told them that those that drank the “fresh milk” would get special privileges. Perhaps if they bent over, and prayed really hard…

Meanwhile in Utah…

Yuppur.

Strange things in the United States these days.

And in Africa…

Say what?

And again, inside the United States…

From the low-lives, to the high brow… all of the United States has gone insane.

Insane.

Colorado State University: Saying ‘Long Time, No See,’ ‘You Guys,’ ‘Freshman’ is Offensive

Students at Colorado State University (CSU), apparently, should no longer say “long time, no see,” “you guys” or “freshman,” because those terms are not considered “inclusive language.”

That’s according to a student, Katrina Leibee, who writes for the campus paper, The Rocky Mountain Collegian. Leibee met with Zahra Al-Saloom, director of diversity and inclusion at CSU, who showed her an entire packet of terms and phrases considered contrary to the university’s mission of fostering inclusion.

“One of these phrases was ‘long time, no see,’ which is viewed as derogatory towards those of Asian descent,” wrote Leibee.

The packet says the phrase originally mocked “Native Americans or Chinese pidgin English” without providing an ounce of historical context. It suggests saying the flaccid, unmeasured, structureless, “I haven’t seen you in a while” in the phrase’s place.

“We were told that the popular term ‘you guys’ was not inclusive of all genders, and we should instead replace it with ‘y’all,’” she wrote. “We were told to use the term ‘first-year’ instead of ‘freshman,’ because ‘freshman’ is not inclusive of all genders.”

“A countless amount of words and phrases have been marked with a big, red X and defined as non-inclusive,” she continued. “It has gotten to the point where students should carry around a dictionary of words they cannot say.”

When the CSU student confronted the campus language commissars about the fact that nowhere in the country are phrases like “long time, no see” being regulated, she was given empty platitudes about making the world a better place where she stands.

Even if the world isn’t good, you should be good,” one superior told her. “CSU abides by the principles of community, and we want to make it an inclusive space.”

And no one is immune.

Such as this “Chinese man”…

And it affects everyone.

Did you know that Gordon Ramsay had a dwarf porn double? And that he died in a “Badger Den”? And that they had Badger Dens in Wales?

I’ll tell youse guys it’s an awfully strange world we are living in.

Next up should be a “Florida man” article. But no. Sorry.

It’s “Oregon Man”.

High on life, I’ll bet.

And some things just make me cringe.

And if you think that things just cannot get worse, well then you have this…

Let’s see.

Oh, yeah. Here’s a “Florida man”…

Florida Man Arrested For Attempting To “Barbecue” Child Molesters

Osceola County police officers arrested a Florida man after it was discovered that he attempted to “barbecue all the child molesters on fire and kill them.” Jorge Porto-Sierra, 50, confessed to investigators that he had attempted to kill several people who were at a motel in Kissimmee.

Witnesses say the suspect was carrying a cigarette and shouting threats such as “I’m going to kill you, child molester,” during the incident at the motel. He allegedly poured gas on several doors, broke a window to pour gas into a room. In addition, Porto-Sierra allegedly attacked two other individuals inside a car in the hotel parking lot, first by pouring gasoline into the car through an open window. When the driver attempted to flee, Porto-Sierra got into his black Ford Focus and started ramming their car.

Deputies then arrived on the scene, where they say Porto-Sierra surrendered right away. Waiving his Miranda rights, Porto-Sierra confessed and told the authorities, “they raped kids, they are child molesters that all live here and deserve to die.”

Sex offenders in Florida are required to publicly register their home address with the Sexual Offender and Predator System. That system shows more than 20 offenders are using the Friendly Village Inn & Motel as their home address.

When deputies asked why he didn’t flicker his lit cigarette at the gasoline he had poured, the old man simply said, “You got here too soon.”

But at least people are starting to trust the police more.

What’s next?

I mean it’s all getting pretty bad.

Maybe cats and dogs will start fighting, and mass hysteria will hit new York (a paraphrased quote from “Ghostbusters”.)

Some final thoughts

Question to the reader. Sure these are interesting, and curious “news” items. But do they really improve your life? Are you better informed in the world directly around you and that with you interact with? Or, as I allude to, it is all puzzle pieces thrown on the floor in disarray…

Some are just made up lies. Like the China nonsense.

Some are news items; regional, small-time strangeness that takes place far away in areas that you have no idea about, haven’t visited, and know nothing of the culture there.

Some are government related, and of course, anything out of the Untied States govenrment is scheduled, preplanned and presented as “leaked” info to give it legitimity.

Some are stores of fraudsters, crooks, and criminals who use a new angle or technique to fleece others for money, or sex.

So I must ask again. Is your life better for reading about this stuff? Did you really learn somehting that you can apply to your life right now?

I argue that it just wasted your time.

Like sitting in a circus tent and watching clowns juggle bowling pins. A curious waste of time. Novel, perhaps, but does not improve your lfie.

So what things can you do to improve your life, eh?

Well, for starters. Do what you love to do. Seriously. I am not kidding. Do what you like to do.

Just do it and let the rest of the world scream! video 3MB

Identify who your friends are. Sure you can and should have all sorts of friends. But you need to identify which ones are REAL, the REAL DEAL friends, video 3MB

Get started right now. Do little things. Like Make Your Bed.

Great video. Listen to the great words of wisdom from a Navy Seal. video 7MB

If you start being nice and kind, irregardless to what others think, and act better and smile more, you will be the Rufus.

And if you are the Rufus you will find that your world-line template gets easier to endure. You will find that things get easier becuase instead of your mind filled with the daily garbage from the “news” you will have good things, and tangible things in yoru life… generated by the good thoughts of all those around you.

Be the Rufus. video 18MB

Not only that, but being a Rufus means so much more.

It means being there and acting instantly. video 5MB

Go perform deeds of kindness.

Make the world a better place. video 17MB

American and Western society is predicated in a civilian population of spectators. Those that are being told how great they are for doing nothing more than sitting into little grey cubicle boxes and giving 50% of everything that they make to the government.

That is not living.

But you can change all that.

Maybe not the entire society, but you can change your little part of it. Perform your affirmation campaigns. Mesure your fate forecast. Perfrom centering exercises though Hemi-sync, and be the Rufus. Your life will change dramatically.

Not overnight.

Certainly years of programming and fear-induced habits will not disappear in a week or so, but if you keep up with the exercises and do the best with what you have, it WILL change.

I promise you that.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my “Growth as a Person” Index here…

Growth

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

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Stepan is a sincere wine friend like me

The Italian fashion house Valentino bought advertising from a cat Stepan aged 13 that lives in Kharkiv, Ukraine. The pet posed next to the bag that cost 4 000 euros.

I personally believe that his expression encompasses the feeling of many an MM reader, and survivor in the total and complete fiasco that is, don’t you know, this planet earth.

Stepan is a celebrity cat. On most of its photos, it sits in a chair and looks thoughtfully at cocktails. People call the cat “the king of sad parties”. But the owner of the cat says it is not sad, it’s sleepy.

As he looks on dreamily at the wine, we can most certainly relate to his feelings, emotions and needs.

In ancient Greece a host at a dinner party would always take the first sip of wine to assure guests the wine was not poisoned and that is where the saying “drinking to one’s health.” comes from!

Stepan also got attention from Britney Spears who wrote in her Instagram…

“If I go quiet from time to time, you can catch me with this cat somewhere 😜😹🤪 !!!!⁣”

I guess Britney understands.

Wine tasters call the smell of a young wine an “aroma” while a more mature bottle of wine has a “bouquet.”

This darn cat communicates so friggin’ well.

Let’s talk about wine.

Wine and life

There are 2 types of people: Those who drink wine and those I hate so much I scratch!

I know…

… many MM readers are American and really don’t drink alcohol, nor smoke. It’s mandated by the government and enforced by laws and society. So most Americans believe that it’s their choice. You know, for a healthier life, and all that.

Well, I live in Zhuhai which is next door to Macau.

  • Life expectancy for men in the USA is 70 years. (HERE)
  • Life expectancy for men in Macau is 84.2 years. (HERE)

Yuppur!

Cigarette smoking, alcohol guzzling Macau, China has a life expectancy much larger than that for America. I’ll bet you all weren’t aware of it.

“Wine improves with age. The older I get, the better I like it!”

Like all things USA, good news out of China is suppressed, while bad news is promoted with loud megaphones. Video 7MB

The death of free media-1-2022-02-13_10.42.42

The banning of alcohol and cigarettes in the USA has more to do with control than any health reason. And if you cannot see that, then you are deluded. Just like in ancient Rome.

Back in the days of Early Roman (194 B.C) women were forbidden to drink wine, in fact, it was so illegal that any husband who found his wife drinking wine was free to kill her without fear of reprisal!

It’s about lifestyle. Stress. Family. Tradition.

You simply cannot try to change your recreational habits, while living in an oppressive, tyrannical environment full of stress, personal distress and bad unhealthy food. You just can’t.

Anyway…

…here we will chat about cats and wine.

You got a problem with that?

”99% of the world's problems could be solved with a glass of wine! Or 2,3 half a bottle.”

I sometime lurk in and around wine lover blogs, and extracted this treasure trove of information…

What Are The Most Popular Types of Wine?

You know, guys, wine is very, VERY versatile. It can taste like sweet liquid candy, all the way to oily melted butter and everything in between. It’s sort of like how there are all sorts of colas, and sodas. In fact, I will go as far is to say that there are more different flavors and tastes in wine than there are for beer. If you can believe that!

Want to find out what wine you like best?

Check out just 18 different grape varieties, commonly referred to as international varieties.

They include light sweet white wines like Moscato and Riesling to deep dark red wines like Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon.

Once you’ve tried all 18, you’ll actually have a pretty good handle on the entire range of wine. You’ll also know more about your personal preferences.

What Are the Most Popular Wine Regions?

Knowing that Italy, France and Spain are the top three wine producing countries (as determined by the European council of wine) in the world tells you three things.

For one, they probably produce the majority of bulk wine in the world. Two, they also produce some of the best wine in the world. And three, France, Italy and Spain are the source of all of the most popular varieties of wine in the world.

But that has been a changing.

There’s some most excellent wine out of Chile, and Australian wines are outstanding, and let’s not forget Chinese wines. So, while the European wines are the oldest and best established, and thus they are considered the “most popular”, they are in fact no longer.

By bulk of wine produced, nothing can compete against the Chinese wine industry.

Cats and wines. Two of my favorite subjects.

Why Do Some Wines Taste More Tart Than Others?

“Come on! It is not like I have a problem, I only drink a glass or 2 in days ending in ‘Y'”

Now that you know what wine is and where it comes from, find out what are the basic characteristics of wine? And no, I’m not talking about color, or bottle size.

Some wines taste tart. The tartness of wine is called acidity.

Some wines will warm/burn the back of your throat, which is the alcohol level.

Finally, some wines leave a lingering bitter/dry taste in your mouth, which is called tannin. Learn the basic wine characteristics, so you can better describe what you like.

How Can a Wine With No Sugar Still Taste Sweet?

In the wine world, we call this trait fruit forward.

How is it that a completely dry (ie no residual sugar) wine can taste sweeter than other wines?

There are a few factors that go into this phenomenon including grape variety, region and oak aging. For instance, if you have a Malbec from France compared to a Malbec from Argentina, the latter tastes sweeter.

The region where the grapes grow greatly affects the flavor.

How To Ask For Wine You Like

The oldest bottle of wine in the World is located in Speyer, Germany, inside one of two Roman sarcophaguses and it is said to date back to A.D. 325!

Now that you’ve tried some wine and have opinions, how do you communicate to others what you like? Well, it helps to know what regions or varieties that you prefer, but what if there’s a better way?

For me, I just sample different budget wines and try them. If the price is right, and they taste good, I buy ten or so cases.

A little cat.

Look Like a Badass When You Drink Socially

A wine glass by uniform form has a gently curved rim at the top to help contain the aromas in the glass, as a general rule the thinner the glass and the finer the rim, the better the glass!

Wine is social. Learn about basic social wine etiquette. It will help you maintain cool and calm, even in the most intense dining situations… say, dinner at Per Se?

Tough wine drinking kitty.

When are Most Wines Meant To Be Drunk?

The best place to store wine is under the stairs! The worst place is usually in the kitchen because it is typically too warm or the fridge because they are too cold.

I suggest any time, all day. The more, the merrier.

Happy feline.

But seriously, though. 90% of wine is meant to be drunk in the year it’s released. This is a fact.

Some wines do, however, improve with age.

Want to know the traits of an age-worthy wine? There are four traits: Acidity, Tannin, Low Alcohol and Residual Sugar. Not what you thought eh?

Why Wine Doesn’t Taste the Same Year to Year

If a wine tastes watery or is said to taste “diluted.” then the chances are good that it was picked during a rainstorm! And thus no grape farm worth its salt would pick them during rain, the hottest, sunniest days are apparently best.

Does this ever happen to you? You find a stupid-awesome wine and you buy a ton of it.

Eventually you drink up your stash and buy more, except the new wine doesn’t taste the way you remember.

Relax. You’re not crazy.

Formal.

Check the vintage, more than likely you’re a victim of Vintage Variation. Vintage variation happens more often in cooler climate regions. So if you’re a Pinot Noir lover, pay attention to vintage.

What Should You Expect to Spend on Decent Wine?

We all hear about them.

Those amazing deals on fantastic wines; either declassified, relabeled or sold through a stressful 3-day sale site. Yes, some of these deals are great, but you can still find great wines without a discount tag.

What a cute little glass of wine!

How much should you expect to spend on a decent bottle?

And if you’re buying in a restaurant, how much does that bottle of wine really cost?

Which is why I find a good wine and buy in bulk for my daily bottle or three.

Drinking Wine is an Adventure

A study in Italy argues that women who drink at least two glasses of wine a day on average have much better sex than those who don’t drink at all!

Well…

There’s only one way to find out if this study has merit and their conclusions are true. Don’t you know?

If you’re drinking the same old crap just to get drunk then you’re not really enjoying all the uniqueness wine has to offer.

Wine is an accompaniment to life experiences; where you are, and who you’re with.

There will always be peaks and valleys.

Expand your understanding by being experimental and trying new things. If you ask a wine expert what their favorite wine is, they’ll never give you a straight answer because the truth is, they love it all.

Conclusion

So you see, there’s no mention on how wine is made, or the nuances of the color of wine, because those aren’t (as) important.

Remember, pay attention to what you’re drinking and use those observations to make educated guesses to seek out new wine.

Use wine as a vehicle to enjoy the moment…

Use wine as a vehicle to enjoy the moment

use wine to taste and savor the food…

“Meals without wine are not worth eating!”

Taste and savor the moment.

Use wine to rest and relax your mood and emotions…

The purring of a cat and a bottle of wine makes a great snuggle atmosphere of calm contentment.

Some final thoughts…

If you are so inclined, may I suggest a nice delicious meal with the wine, with bread, some light music and some friends and a cat or two…

Fondue and wine.

If you want guidance, there are all sorts of websites that offer suggestions for pairing wine and fondue. But here is my suggestion…

  • Go to a store and buy a couple of bottles of wine.
  • Make some fondue.
  • Share it with friends and family.

It’s more important to prioritize what is important in your life, then strive for perfection. So, just get started.

If you’ve got a cat, well, you are half-way there already.

Do you want more?

Well, this article can fall under cats under my cat index , found within my happiness index, here…

Life & Happiness

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Family home-made cooking and meals are the best!

Here’s a nice look at some of the meals that my mother used to make for us kids when we were young. And we will also chat some about family meals eaten together.

I can tell you, with my first-hand experience that as we grew up and moved away from home, these delicious home cooked meals were replaced by fast food, and restaurant set meals. In truth, for decades I lived off of a mixture of fast food, easy to prepare cheap foods at home (spaghetti, hamburger, chicken) and restaurant staples.

I argue that many people still live this kind of pitiful life; not getting to live a life filled with delicious and tasty, healthy food.

This article looks at what my family used to cook for me that no longer exists in the diets of most Americans today. How many families in America today have sit-down family meals with lamb-chops, fresh fish, or a rump roast?

I personally beleive that once you start taking the time to eat well planned, healthy meals at home, your life and your families lives will become better and greater in every way possible.

The Real Benefit of Family Dinners

The importance of regular family dinners has been a hot topic in the world of sociology and family studies, and you’ve probably seen many articles these last few years touting their benefits. It’s been argued that family dinners do everything from decrease obesity to lower your children’s risk for teen pregnancy, crime, and drug use. It seemed as though family dinners were a silver bullet in preventing your kids from becoming deadbeats, and a failure to regularly sup together pretty much destined your child for a life on skid-row.

However, when researchers recently took a closer look at the supposed benefits of family dinners, what they found was that a lot of them could be chalked up to correlation rather than causation. That is, parents who had a strong marriage, better relationships with their kids, and set more guidelines for them, were more likely to have family dinners, and more likely to have well-adjusted children. It is these other factors, rather than the dinners themselves, that account for this effect.

The study’s authors concluded that while family dinners alone won’t prevent your kids from turning into cigarette smoking, teen mom juvies, the ritual can serve as a valuable part of a set of family habits, routines, and practices that contribute to a child’s overall well-being.

One clear benefit of family dinners that they found held up, even when controlling for the other factors, was a significant reduction in adolescent depression.

So consider family dinners to be another tool in your goal of building a positive family culture.

Their real benefit is the chance they provide for your family to slow down, get together face-to-face, talk without distractions, cement your values, create a feeling of support, and build loving bonds.

These benefits accrue to families who not only try to regularly have dinner (or another meal) together, but who approach these chances to break bread in an intentional way.

Let’s look at some of the tasty reasons why dinners whould be cooked at home.

Bacon-Wrapped Pork Tenderloin

Bacon-Wrapped Pork Tenderloin.

Roasts have existed for centuries, but the simplest versions are often to be the best. This double pork combo features a rich and luscious tenderloin wrapped in crispy, salty bacon that will leave your mouth watering. Just make sure to cook up some extra portions, as you know everyone will want seconds of this classic dish.

Here’s a Crème cheese stuffed version. Yum!

Crème cheese stuffed Bacon-Wrapped Pork Tenderloin.

Beef Stew With Dumplings

Beef Stew With Dumplings.

Stews have existed through time as some of the most durable, family-favorite dinners.

This recipe allows you to whip up a pot of this classic dish that could feed an army and explore the original flavors that made stew such an appealing dinner.

By adding in some dumplings, you can guarantee this meal will stick to your ribs and keep you well-fed.

Instant Pot Pot Roast and Potatoes

Instant Pot Pot Roast and Potatoes.

Instant Pots have been a kitchen blessing, and they can make cooking classic recipes a whole lot easier.

This quick and easy pot roast will make you see this dish in a new light and fill in any craving you have for a meat-and-potatoes meal. After just one bite, you might find your new weekday meal.

I must tell youse guys that I ate a lot of this when I was growing up. Pot roasts were my absolute favorite, and I just loved the potates, and we ate them with a full salad, at least two vegitable sides and a pile of sliced bread. Good eating, and long neglected.

Instant Pot Pot Roast and Potatoes.

Boneless Leg of Lamb with Parsley Mint Chimichurri

Boneless Leg of Lamb with Parsley Mint Chimichurri.

This retro recipe takes a twist on the classic lamb and mint jelly formula by turning the jelly into a mint chimichurri. This recipe is sophisticated enough to serve at any dinner party and can be easy enough to make any day of the week. If you haven’t given lamb a shot, this should be your gateway in.

Boneless Leg of Lamb with Parsley Mint Chimichurri.

Double-Crust Chicken Pot Pie

Double-Crust Chicken Pot Pie.

Pot pies are instant classics, but very few home cooks tend to make them these days. Why not explore the past with this classic recipe that takes all the flavors of this vintage dish and makes it easy to fix up at home?

This easy-to-concoct meal is a great way to start more comfortable working with pastries, and if you don’t feel confident in your abilities, you can use store-bought dough to save some time.

Double-Crust Chicken Pot Pie.

Corned Beef Hash

Corned Beef Hash.

You may have seen canned corned beef hash for sale at stores or watched your grandparents eat it, but nothing compares to making it at home. With one bite, you’ll remember why this dish became such a staple that has survived through the years. Just make sure to pace yourself, as you’ll want to gobble everything you make up in one go.

Herb-Crusted Grilled Lamb Chops

Herb-Crusted Grilled Lamb Chops.

Rediscover why lamb chops were such a hit by grilling up the perfect lamb with an herb crust that could please any palate. The deep flavor combinations can’t compare to any other boring lamb you’ve had in the past, and the herbs liven up this retro dish for the new era.

I have to tell youse guys, I really ate well as a kid. What the Hell went so wrong? My mother really knew how to cook and budget great meals for us kids. But then, somehow, I ended up living off of spaghetti and hamburger. Man, oh man!

Herb-Crusted Grilled Lamb Chops.

But the kids don’t want to sit at supper…

Well, then your family must be too far gone.

And you are just a limp-wristed pale shadow of a parent. You must provide rules, and guidelines and routines. Your children will grow to respect them, and after a month, they will learn to love them.

Ugh.

Sounds like me. So don’t get too offended. I’m talking about myself here.

Electronic media is a terrible seduction.

How to get the kids “on board”…

Yeah. It’s tough to pry them away from games, social media, and movies. But here’s some (lame) idea to get them interested.

[1] Teach them how to prepare their favorite food, and make a meal out of it. Then you make it formal and strat the ritualization of it.

[2] When you make their favorite food, make sure it is always formalized and ritualized. Make it special. There are different ways to make it special. Everyone is different. When I lived in the monastery, there was a bell that was rung. But it could be anything that fits your life, and your home.

[3] Always have delicious desserts. Let the children know that after they eat, they will have a very tasty dessert.

[4] Kids are easily distracted. So make sure that all distractions are switched to “off”.

How to Get the Most Out of Family Meal Times

Ritual. Strive for consistency. Try to make family dinner a sacrosanct ritual. Whenever you can, schedule your work and activities around this immovable block. Sometimes very busy high-powered executives will come home from work, eat dinner with the family, and then go back to work later. They do what they can not to miss it.

What’s great about prioritizing family dinners is that it gives you a goal to shoot for. If you know the wife and kids won’t be sitting down together and will just be fending for themselves, it’s tempting to rationalize continuing to plow through your work. But if you’re expected to be at the table, it’s easier to break away from what you’re doing and get home.

Don’t beat yourself up if you have to forgo your family dinner sometimes. Research indicates that children who have dinner with their family at least three times a week enjoy the benefits of family dinners. So just try to be as consistent with it as you can.

Any meal will do. It doesn’t actually have to be dinner. Many families today have schedules that make it hard to get everyone home for dinnertime. Dad or Mom works late, and one kid has soccer practice at 6PM while the other kid has a piano recital on the other side of town at 7. It only gets worse as the kids get older. I remember when I got into high school, I was barely ever home for family dinner due to football, work, or student council.

Sometimes the solution is a much-needed simplification of our schedules, but it’s just not always possible to get everyone to the table at 6:00. Because of this, many families simply give up altogether on the idea of regularly sharing a meal.

But research shows that when it comes to the benefits of breaking bread as a family, there’s nothing magical about doing it at dinnertime. It’s just as beneficial to sit down together for other meals — breakfast, lunch, even dessert! The key is that you’re together as a family on a regular basis (food helps in this by adding a level of comfort, texture, and enjoyment).

Maybe evenings are crazy for your family, but mornings not so much. Make family breakfast your thing. Let’s say mornings and evenings are bad, but things are pretty chill right before bedtime. Make time for a pre-bed snack as a family. It could be cookies and milk, or if you’re paleo, try some coconut blueberry balls. The important thing is that you get together with your family on a regular basis for some quality conversation and bonding time.

So instead of thinking about making the most of family dinnertime, think of it as getting the most of family meal times.

Teach them the love of cooking. Get your kids involved with making the meal. Kids love to help out with cooking. And letting them do so will help them forge a better appreciation of food and teach them a valuable skill in self-reliance that will really come in handy once they head out on their own. Plus, it gives you a chance to start talking to your kids before you even get to the table.

Take-out (or dining out) is a-okay sometimes. Home cooking is ideal for reasons of both health and cost, but there are always going to be times where you or your wife don’t have time to make a meal from scratch. That’s okay – remember, the important thing is just making the time to sit down together. Getting take-out or going to a restaurant can actually be more relaxing for everyone, and the latter is a lot of fun for the kids.

No TV, cellphones, or tablets. The purpose of family meal times is to strengthen the familial bond. You can’t do that when you’re all silently staring at the TV or while everyone has their eyes glued to their phone. Make it an ironclad rule: no electronic devices at the table.

Play music in the background. This is something we do in our house sometimes. We often play big band or classical tunes, and I try to teach Gus the sounds of the different instruments. If we’re eating Mexican food, I’ll put on some rock en español — Maná and Juanes are two of our favorites. If Kate’s the DJ, it’s often the Guster channel on Pandora. Some quiet background music adds to the atmosphere and just makes the occasion feel a little more special and fun.

Say grace. Saying grace before a meal teaches your kids the importance of gratitude and what a blessing it is to simply have food on their plates. It also teaches delayed gratification – it can be hard for kids to even wait a minute before digging in! If you’re religious, saying grace reaffirms your family’s religious identity as well.

Teach manners. Shared meals are the perfect time for teaching your kids manners. It’s something you have to reiterate over and over and over again with the little ones, but ingraining this ritual will help them cultivate a civil and polite mindset that will extend far beyond the dinner table.

Practice the 10-50-1 Rule. To get the most out of family meal times, you need to get your family talking. And not just about whether the food is too spicy (research has found that most conversation at family meals centers on the quality of the food!). In his book, The Secrets of Happy Families, author Bruce Feiler shares a guideline he uses for family meal times: the 10-50-1 Rule.

  • Aim for 10 minutes of quality talk. Researchers have found that’s about the average amount of quality talk time an average meal yields, so it’s a good minimum goal. It’s not much, but a little bit each day on a sustained basis really adds up over the long haul.
  • Let your kid speak 50 percent of the time. Research shows that adults usually hold the floor for 2/3 of that 10-minute conversation time. There are benefits for kids in overhearing adult conversations, but you want to hear what they have to say, too.
  • Teach your kids 1 new word every meal. Studies indicate that kids who have regular family meal times have larger vocabularies than kids who don’t. But holding regular family dinners won’t magically teach kids new words. Be intentional about it like Bruce is. At every dinner he teaches his kids one new word by playing different games. For example, he’ll throw out a word like “fruit” and then have everyone come up with as many related words as possible. Another game he’ll do is to bring a newspaper to the table and have everyone find a word they don’t know, try to figure out what the word means, and discuss it with the rest of the family.

Conversation. Get good conversation going. If you want to have at least ten minutes of quality talk at each meal, and you want your kids to do half of the talking, you’re going to have to ask them questions. Sometimes kids will give you one-word or non-answers, but just keep trying to elicit a response from different angles. Don’t just ask, “How was your day?” Ask them to tell you one thing they learned that day or what the best part of their day was so far. Ask them if they saw or read anything interesting. As they get older, bring up current events and ask for their opinions on them.

History. Talk about your family history. Psychologist Marshall Duke and his colleague Robyn Fivush found that children who know about their family’s history have a stronger sense of control over their lives, higher self-esteem, and feel more connected to their families than children who don’t know their family’s history. In fact, they discovered that the best single predictor of a child’s emotional health and happiness was their ability to answer questions about their family history, such as:

  • Do you know where your grandparents grew up?
  • Do you know where your mom and dad went to high school?
  • Do you know where your parents met?
  • Do you know of an illness or something really terrible that happened in your family?
  • Do you know what went on when you were being born?

Duke and Fivush believe that knowledge of his or her personal family history provides a child with a strong “intergenerational self,” which makes them feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves.

As they hear stories of family struggles and triumphs, kids learn about family narratives that instill resilience.

According to Duke, the most powerful narrative for building resilience in children is the oscillating narrative.

It’s basically the story of continual ups and downs in your family, where, despite what happened, the family always stuck together.

How empowering and inspiring is that for a kid who’s going through a tough time?

Knowing that great-great-great grandpa managed to create a thriving business even after suffering hardship and the death of family members along a wagon trail in the middle of nowhere can help a kid understand that life will be okay even if he doesn’t get into his college of choice.

If grandpa thrived during adversity, he can thrive, too.

No children?

No problem.

Dinners are a time to build your relationship, talk and discuss and make special moments over food and drink. You can make it very special. And that is wonderful.

Enjoy your time together.

Make the dinner a little romantic and memorable Apart from making a great dinner, here are some tips that you must know if you want to make this night memorable.

1. Choose the right drinks

A romantic dinner is not complete without drinks – but your choice of beverages depends on your dishes.

  • A steak dinner can be paired with an earthy red wine.
  • You could serve a crisp, chilled white wine if you decided on chicken.

Whatever your decision, make sure you have a bottle opener handy, you don’t want to be caught without one.

If you’re not into alcohol, pick up some fruity, fizzy drinks to go with your date night meals. LIke orange juice, or a nice tea. Or, a well made coffee.

Be sure to have your date’s favorite drinks on hand for after dinner – so stock up on beers, whiskey, or gin. And if it is to be served cola,, make sure that it’s really cold.

Their favorite drink will go well with dessert.

2. Choose easy, simple recipes

When people are trying to find out how to make a romantic dinner, they probably forget that the most romantic dinner recipes are a piece of cake.

You don’t want to worry about too many aspects, complicated sauces, and preparations. Choose a dish that is easy to make with only a few ingredients. Remember this one tip as one of the most important romantic dinner ideas. Else you would be thrown in for a loop!

In a pinch, you can buy a premade instant pizza, and toss a bunch of extra pepperoni and globs of cheese on top of it. Think “adaptation” and “improvement”. You are striving for an event. Not particuliarly a meal.

3. Create the perfect setting

When you are looking up romantic dinner date ideas and trying to figure out how to plan a romantic dinner, you might think of recipes and ingredients.

But here’s the thing – you want to create the entire package. That means food, drinks, and the most important of all – the setting! It could be anything from a home-made special moment, to a plain tablecloth and a candle. Just try to make the dinner a little special.

A special and relaxed atmosphere is the perfect backdrop for a romantic dinner.

4. Relax and enjoy the meal and the company

Don’t forget to sit back, relax, and relish the romantic dinner. If something goes wrong with the food, let it. You don’t want to be stressing over everything so much that you forget to enjoy the experience. It’s all about the conversation and the food.

5. Talk about the good things

Nothing really serious, or anger generating.

You can spend some time reminiscing about the good times, especially if you both have had very little time together recently. So just keep it light and easy. Nothing serious. It’s a time of relaxation and rest.

6. Do not exert yourself too much

As much as you want to make this special, make sure you are not too tired by the end of all of it. Take time to rest and feel good about the night.

7. Dress up

Even if you are both staying home, dress up nicely for each other. You will feel so much better when you put on nice clothes and sit with each other. Guys, maybe you wear a T-shirt all the time, but what’s the harm of thowing on a blazer over it?

I well remember my Zambian (African) girlfriend, who would dress up for every meal. It did not matter if it was at home or outside. Nice outfit. Hair done. Perfume. And ladies, let me tell you what, it’s hard to compete against THAT.

8. Take photos together

Take out some time to take photos of each other, of the food, and together. Pictures are a great way to create memories, and you can always look back on them and relive these moments.

I put mine in a ton load of folders.

Don’t be like MM here. Organize better. My filing system is a shambles. Ugh!

9. Try something new

Make it a point to try something new. It could be a new cuisine, drink, or dish. New experiences with the one you love are a great way to bond. Even the shitty events, and the meals and places that didn’t work out are bonds and stories that we share and remember.

10. Get rid of distractions

Again. No distractions. Put your phone, laptops, and other gadgets away. Put away anything that distracts you and your partner, and spend time only with each other.

I will tell you that even I, almighty MM, slip up and forget this rule from time to time. And my wife, Mrs. MM hits me on the head (as she’s the only pne premitted to do this) and stops me from getting sucked into the information overload vortex.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Food Index associated with my Happiness Index here…

Food!

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Some forgotten meal dishes prepared by my mother that deserve to be on everyone’s dinner table today

Here’s a nice look at some of the meals that my mother used to make for us kids when we were young. As we grew up and moved away from home, these delicious home cooked meals were replaced by fast food, and restaurant set meals.

Sigh.

What began as an occasional trip once or twice to “Big Boy”, became a weekly event in the late 1970’s, and almost daily after the early 1980’s. That coiencided with the absolutely frenzied rise of McDonald’s and Burger King franchises.

In those days, McDonalds’ used to have the words “Over XXXX customers sold”.

      • Thousands became Millions.
      • Millions became Billions.
      • Billions became, “Billions and Billions”.

And everyone was living this sort of frenzied, fast-paced lifestle.

In truth, for decades I lived off of a mixture of fast food, easy to prepare cheap foods at home (spaghetti, hamburger, chicken) and restaurant staples.

I argue that many people still live this kind of pitiful life; not getting to live a life filled with delicious and tasty, healthy food.

This article looks at what my family used to cook for me that no longer exists in the diets of most Americans today. It’s not what I used to make to eat, or what my first and second wives made for me to eat. It’s what my parents, and my grandparents made for me to eat.

We start off with something that doesn’t seem to be that popular any more. Perhaps it’s becuase no one knows how to make it right. I am referring to meatloaf.

Meatloaf?

Yeah. Sure. Meatloaf.

You do NOT use the cheapest cuts of meat, and throw everything into it. You do not live in a school cafeteria. No. You should use quality ingredients, and keep things simple.

Classic Meatloaf

Delicious meatloaf.

Even if you have nightmares of cafeteria meatloaf, giving this classic another shot can make you realize why this staple was such a hit. This throwback recipe brings everything home and reminds you of all the rich flavors of beef, tomatoes, and that iconic meatloaf texture.

Just like it is easy to use the cheapest ground meat, the cheapest left over bread, and the near-expiration-date ingredients, don’t. Take the time and use good, healthy ingredients, and present it in a fine loving way that it deserves. Your family will love you for it.

  • Cooked tomatoes, peppers, and onions instead of store bought ketchup.
  • Ground beef instead of ground chuck.
  • Go easy on the bread crumbs.

I like to eat it with sliced bread and (real salted) butter, mashed potatoes, and corn, peas, or some other well steamed vegitable.

Southern-Style Cornmeal Catfish with Tomato Gravy

Southern-Style Cornmeal Catfish with Tomato Gravy.

Fried fish has always come across tables as a dinner standard, but it gets harder and harder to find fried catfish on the menu at most dinners.

This recipe will make you remember why this economical fish was such a favorite, and it will evoke memories of fish fries and summer days. With a crispy cornmeal crust and an easy frying technique, this recipe is achievable for any home cook.

The best and most important thing to remember is to debone it, and serve deep fried, breaded filets.

Tasty catfish.

It goes really good with pickled tomatoes, Southern “hushpuppies”, french fried potatoes and really icy cold beer. Don’t you know?

Chicken and Dumplings

Chicken and Dumplings.

Whether you grew up in the North or the South, you’ve likely tried some variant of this classic dish that has stretched far and wide across America. The tender, chewy dumplings provide a perfect textural pairing with the moist chicken. It all gets coated in a down-home gravy that whips up nostalgia in an instant. For a trip down memory lane, bring this classic to a table near you.

And don’t forget the wide sturdy spoon to gather the great amount of broth. I always liked to eat it with salt and some sprinkled cheddar cheese. But that’s jsut me.

Classic Green Bean Casserole

Classic Green Bean Casserole.

Everyone remembers their first green bean casserole, likely made with cream of mushroom soup and fried onion straws. Even if you eventually burnt out on this dish as a kid, now is the perfect time to explore the casserole again.

By mixing up the ingredients, you can avoid any traumatic memories of canned green beans and use only the freshest produce to make this dish pop.

Try using green beans, AND asparagus, with some real sauteed mushrooms.

That’s the real secret. Get fresh ingredients and let it cook for a good long time so that all the savory flavors mix and become outrageously delicious.
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Brown Butter Honey-Glazed Carrots

Brown Butter Honey-Glazed Carrots.

Sometimes, simplicity brings out the best flavors from quality ingredients. This old-fashioned recipe takes that mentality to heart by pairing fresh carrots with a sweet and rich honey butter glaze. You’ll not only evoke generations past, but you’ll also whip up a new family favorite everyone can love that costs little time and money to prepare. To round out your dinner, this should prove an instant favorite.

Healthy food, cooked properly, is the key to great family happiness.
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This is not a stand-alone meal, but rather a dish that acts as a side ot other food entres.

Honey-Glazed Ham and Cheddar Muffins

Honey-Glazed Ham and Cheddar Muffins.

When you imagine an old-fashioned Sunday meal, each table spread probably includes a baked ham and bread offered up for everyone. This take on a classic refines what everyone loved about a night at home on the weekend by featuring a delectable honey-glazed ham. Paired with the fluffy cheddar muffins, each bite of ham will be a taste of heaven.

The secret is that the cheddar cheese, and honey-glazed ham mix together scrumpiously.

Hamburg Steaks

Hamburg Steak.

You probably haven’t thought about Hamburg steaks in quite some time, but there’s no reason you shouldn’t take a crack at this once-popular staple. They’re easier to make than traditional steaks on the grill. And each portion packs in so much flavor, you’ll wonder why you never tried this recipe sooner.

I find that the secret is to let the steaks cook a nice long time at lower heat in a deep savory broth. You can add garlic, onions, and mushrooms to really kick out that flavor.

Hamburg Steaks cooking in a long savory broth / sauce.

Sunday Chili

Sunday Chili.

It’s harder to find Sunday Chili on home menus nowadays. This classic not only provides a cumin kick to liven up any night, and one big pot could last for days. With easy-to-find ingredients and little prep work, this dish deserves a revival.

Keep in mind that it goes really well with rice, and lots of cheese. When I was younger, I would crunch up crackers and eat with it, but I discovered that if you pair this with garlic bread you will have an absolutely satisfying meal.
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Oh, and by the way, this meal goes great with an icy cold beer or two.

Root Beer-Glazed Ham

Root Beer-Glazed Ham.

In the ’50s and ’60s, home cooks paired novel items in ways you might never have expected. While many of these recipes deserve to have died out, some deserve a second chance.

For instance, root beer-glazed ham stood out from the crowd by providing that sugary bite usually drawn from a honey glaze.

And the acidity of the soda helps tenderize the meat, making for one delectable ham. If you’ve only heard rumors of this dish, now is the best time to give this recipe a shot!

I can tell you that this goes great with a table “spread”.

You lay out sliced lettice (all fresh and washed completely), sliced tomatoes (I add salt and olive oil to the slices), some thin sliced onions (the restrurants all trend is to have these super thick onion slices, I like mine paper thin), and fresh hot baked bread. Add some pickles, cheeses (a selection in sandwich slices), and some marinated olives, marinated peppers.

Ah, some marinated olives.

Oh and don’t forget a fine selection of condiments…

  • Horseradish
  • Wasabi
  • Sweet salad dressing.
  • Mayonaise.
  • Ketchup.
  • Sweet butter chips (sliced pickles)
  • Dill pickles (spear shape)
  • Olive oil.
  • Butter.
  • vinegar.
  • Salt and pepper.
  • Hot mix

Hot mix.

Keep the bread warm, and the ham hot.

The tomatoes should always sit in warm water for a few minutes to push out the flavor and punch them into a state of mouth watering organism. then slice them and add salt and olive oil, and then place on their own plate.

Then you make yourself a fine sandwich and eat it with wine, and some great conversation.

Some thoughts

If you get on the internet and search for food, you will come up with all kinds of articles on the recipes on how to make the food. You might even come across some diet guru that is trying to get you to invest in “their plan”. (A subject in itself.) But you will hardly ever find articles on the joys of eating the food everyone prepares.

I don’t like that.

Food is a very important part of our lives.

It is more than just nutrition, it is a social venue. One, that is terribly neglected in modern Wester society.

And here, here, I argue that it shouldn’t be that way. I argue that food should be a major part of your life, and well planned healthy meals should be the stable from which everything else is derived.

And that’s where the family comes in.

[1] Savings

You will find and discover that a singular weekly meal might cost just slightly less than a restaurant meal, but the time it took to make it was problematic. Ingredient costs alone might equal that of a mid-range restrurant meal. And yet, it might take you an hour or more to make.

Don’t freak out.

Buy in bulk, and plan the meals a week in advance. Like adults do; like people who are in control of their lives do.

Of course, all families are different, which is why I strongly advocate a very traditional division of labor for the family and disparage the idea of a home with two people working for others. One person stays home and take on all the domestic issues and controls the money. The other earns the money, and handles maintence and repairs.

Now, if you plan on five such meals a week, and budget accordingly, you will discover a substantial savings in money, and an improvement in your family communication. And these particular changes will really positively affect your life.

This will be true EVEN if you subtract the secondary source of income. (And all the other expenses that come with it.)

[2] Social

We are social creatures. Every opportunity for us to share times with others in a neutral to positive way should be embraced and nurtured.

No one ever told you this.

Well, maybe it’s becuase they don’t appreciate things as they used to be.

Eating food historically is a social and cultural construct that helps us connect with each others. In England, this resulted in pubs. In China this resulted in those big private meal rooms.

Unfortunately, one of the very first social reengineering efforts in the United States was to destroy this social activity and replace it with a for-profit, fast and isolated eating format. Two hour lunch hours were reduced to thirty minutes, and in some cases only fifteen minutes (at work). Car drive-throughs in fast food chains popped up everywhere, and even table sizes shrank. All facilitating a most lonely singular existence  of socially disconnected loners.

Eating alone in the car.

Listening to talk radio.

Not to each other. Not savoring the flavors.

Instead, isolated, and shoving cheap, mass-produced animal feed to keep them toiling in companies, and manipulated in every singular manner possible.

So think in terms of fine sit-down ritualized meals.

No, this meal-time is not an event for horse-play and arguments. It’s a time of kindness and shared emotions. Be positive. Be kind. Be uplifting. Say good and nice things. Make the other people want to share more meals with you.

Your life will improve.

[3] Health

Healthy foods prepared with care and affection, and served  in a fine healthy environment will certainly help improve your over all health, general well-being and happiness.

It will.

You will live longer, and have a much better overall quality of life too boot.

How to use this article

It is my hope that you will go through the various food items I have shown herein and pick one. Then search the internet for a recipe for it, and then gather the materials and make it.

But it’s more than that.

Record your costs in a notebook. Record how long it took you to make it, and then have a formal sit down meal with your family or friends and record (in the notebook) how it went.

Then compare that to the “normal” everyday meals that you have been eating over the last month or so.

Conclusions

You will find that the mixture of cooking, delicious food, fellowship over a meal and the cost savings are far superior to what you (most probably) have been living off of for the last few months.

You will.

A social life will emerge.

A closer and better relationship with your family will occur.

You will make new friends, and will be healthier and happier.

And if so, I encourage you to keep it up. Start small and simple. Mix it up some. And have a great time with it. Enjoy life. (If everything goes well…) This one will be your last.

Oh, and don’t forget an after-dinner dessert and coffee (or whatever beverage that appeals to you). It’s stuff that magic memories are made out of.

An after dinner dessert and coffee.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Food Index associated with my Happiness Index here…

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On the joys of traditional wooden sailboats

One of the things that I was involved in; a hobby really, was the design of numerous wooden sail boats. This occurred when I was in land-locked Indiana. It was hot, boring, corn as far as the eye can see, and I worked in a “real life” Office Space environment. My only escape was hope.

I well remember the day trip that I, as a young AOC at NAS, NASC Pensacola, Florida and my class 21-83, enjoyed. It was on a 53 foot (as I recall) ketch, and we spent the afternoon sailing in Pensacola bay.

I well remember the sun, the breeze and how all my troubles melted away as we enjoyed the day. We learned basic seamanship, watched dolphins sail along side. We practiced overboard drills, and watched our sails go luffing.

But Indiana was harsh, cold and barron. I worked as a drone in a cubicle mill for the mega-company General Motors in one of their divisions; Delco Electronics.

And in those days, the hope was to sail away to an interesting place at the other side of the world.  Here we will touch on some of the beauty of wooden sail craft. I had met numerous people who were building their own sailboats, mostly out of steel, and then hauling them to the great lakes and living their dream of freedom and escape. It appealed to me at that time, and I bought every book that I could get, and read them all voraciously.

I subscribed to magazines about sailing and adventure. I also equipped my home with a fine tool shop of wood and metal working tools, and bought the plans to construct a 53-foot ketch. I was that “into” the dream. There is really so much to cover in this venue, that I am just going to bounce around from here to there and let the pictures tell the story.

Sailboat Hull Types

Sailboats ride on different hulls, which differ in the total number of hulls and their shape. It’s really simple, actually.

Alden schooner plans.

The basic three hull types include:

  • Monohulls (one hull)
  • Catamarans (two hulls)
  • Trimarans (three hulls)

Monohulls Monohulls have one hull but that doesn’t make them all the same. Traditional monohulls may have full keels (heavy encapsulated ballast that runs along the bottom of the hull), cutaway keels (similar to full but the forefoot is cutaway allowing the boat greater maneuverability in tight quarters) or bolted on fin keels that may have a bulb at the bottom for extra ballast to keep the vessel stable.

Monohull.

Monohulls can also have a swing keel, daggerboard or centerboard that retracts up into an appendage in the hull itself.

With the keel or board up, the boat can enter shallow water and can travel faster downwind. With the keel down, the vessel tracks better upwind. Small monohulls like sailing dinghies, may also have shallow planing hulls that can surf off a wave.

Finally, monohulls can also foil on appendages (usually made of carbon fiber) with the actual hull out of the water when a minimum speed is reached.

Catamarans Catamarans (often nicknamed “cats”) have two hulls with a deck or trampoline in between. Large cats (35 feet and over) have become popular in charter use because they offer more interior and deck space and an easier motion to induce less seasickness. Small catamarans usually have just a trampoline in between the hulls and make fun daysailers.

Catamaran.

Because catamarans don’t have deep and heavy keels, they tend to sail faster off the wind.

Foiling catamarans were made popular by the America’s Cup races and are proliferating into general cruising use.

Trimarans Trimarans have three hulls: a main hull and two amas (side hulls used for stability). On some trimarans, the arms that hold the amas can fold inward, making the trimaran narrower and in some cases trailerable. Large cruising trimaranas are gaining popularity because they are stable and fast sailers.

Sailboat Rig Types

Sailboat rigging includes:

  • the mast(s);
  • boom(s);
  • and the shrouds or stays that hold up the mast.

A sailboat with one mast is usually a sloop with one mainsail and one headsail. A cutter rig usually has one mast but two or more headsails. This rig “cuts” the foretriangle between the head (forward) stay and the main mast. Multiple headsails allow for flexible sail combinations in variable wind conditions.

1897 William Fife Gaff Cutter.
A 40 foot gaff-rigged cutter.

Ketches and yawls have a secondary mast behind the main one. The ketch configuration places that mizzenmast behind the mainmast but ahead of the rudderpost while the yawl places it behind the post.

The second mast is shorter than the main mast. Both of these designs (split rigs) provide more sail area that isn’t reliant solely on the height of the mainmast and therefore can be easier to manage when sailing shorthanded.

A gaff-rigged ketch.
An Alden 56 Yawl.

Schooners also have multiple masts—two or more. However, the foremost mast is shorter than the main mast. Tall ship rigging is in its own category and can get quite complex.

Gaff rigged schooner.

Most Rigs are Marconi Rigs

Most of the rigs are known as Marconi rigs. Meaning that it’s just one sail to catch the wind. But my love is for the Gaff rigs. Here is there is a sail above it to catch the littlest wisps of air that lie above. It’s rarely seen today because it’s really a lot of work.

The top triangular sail is the top-sail on a gaff rig.

Sailboat Types by Primary Use

You can do many of the same things on all sailboats, but some types are more specialized.

Sailing dinghies: Small boats usually sailed by one or two people, sailing dinghies are often used to teach new sailors. That said, experts on high tech sailing dinghies compete in athletic racing up to Olympic level.

Day cruisers: Although any sailboat can be cruised for a day, day cruisers are often boats shorter than 30 feet that are designed to be sailed for an afternoon. They’re usually more Spartan in their outfitting and may or may not have a cabin with amenities.

Sailing cruisers: These sailboats can be monohulls or multihulls and are designed to cruise for weekends or longer. They usually have a berth (bed), a head (toilet) and a galley (kitchen). They can be sloop, cutter, ketch, yawl or schooner-rigged and vary in length (from 25-85 feet). Larger sailboats tend to fall into the crewed superyacht category.

Racing sailboats: Most offshore racers are larger boats crewed by multiple individuals while smaller racers can be single or double-handed. Racing boats are usually built lighter, have fin keels and laminate performance sails.

Racer/cruisers: These designs try to straddle the two above. They’re usually more lightly built cruisers with full amenities so they can be weekended. Some people will argue that these boats are a compromise for owners who want to primarily cruise but also race.

Bluewater cruising sailboats: These boats are designed to cross oceans or sail “blue waters.” They’re typically heavier in build with a stout rig and are fully equipped for extended offshore use.

Motorsailers: This term has fallen out of favor since it’s often pejorative. These sailboats may rely on the engine to sail in light wind conditions, especially due to their excessive weight.

Antique/classic sailboats: These are usually older restored vessels. They may be built of wood and have classic yawl rigs. These sailboats are often showcased in special events.

Sailboats occupy multiple segments and experienced sailors learn the finer points of design and use. Then, they never see two sailboats the same way again.

Just some pictures of beauty

We start with…

The 39m Schooner-rigged yacht VAGRANT from 1913.

And this…

Not a sailboat, but a wooden lovely never the less.

My love for these works of art has never diminished.

I love the lines, the craftsmanship and the quality.

And…

Nice weathered teak decking.

And…

A gaff-rigged catboat.

And…

Sailing day boat in a yawl configuration.

Some interiors

Let’s take a look what’s inside…

This is what you see when you step inside.

And…

Many sailboats have a pilot house inside so that you don’t need to get wet sailing in the rain. This is what it looks like.

And…

This is the interior of a motor-sailer. It has a sail, but relies on a motor to get from point A to point B.

And…

The pilot house in the aforementioned motor-sailer.

And…

Here’s what a berth looks like.

And…

Interiors can be quite cozy.

And why I Love it

video 53MB

Conclusion / The end of the story

I was laid off. I wasn’t given any notice. I was just told to hand in my badge and never come back.

For the remaining five months I laboriously tried to find work elsewhere, and then when I did, I had to sell off most of my tools, books, and abandon the framework of my dream sailboat.

It’s called life.

You would think that my manager and his manager, and his boss, and the boss above them would have the compassion to give someone who worked for them for five years the consideration of a month’s notice, or some severance pay. But they didn’t.

I was only an engineer, and a disposable one at that.

So I left Indiana, and moved on with my life. And two years later, my life was substantially better, nicer, and in every way a great improvement.

So don’t get all caught up in the negative aspects of the twisty and turny thing called life.

You adapt to the changes as they are and not pine away for what you wish them to be.

I still have and possess my love of sail, water, the ocean, boats and all the rest.

Years passed.

I obtained work in the South Pacific in American Samoia.

However, after living in Pago Pago and actually meeting the people who wrote those articles praising the lifestyle, I (and my wife) decided that we really didn’t want to have any part of it. Pago Pago was beautiful. It was lovely. But the sailing LIFESTYLE was not.

Not at all. It’s a life of hardship and not as glamorous as it was made out to be in all those magazines and books that I read.

Yet, here I am.

I am living a life of adventure and delicious food.

So when one dream collapses another materializes to take it’s place. That too is called life.

Embrace it.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Happiness Index here…

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Groovy CB radios, bell-bottom trousers, and the astounding WeChat application

Groovy. You bet.

I come from a generation that had phones that were stuck on walls, and the idea of a cell phone was a science fiction adventure on Star Trek. In fact, our house had a rotary dial phone that was stuck on the wall in the kitchen.

It was yellow.

It fit in the orange decour with the olive colored refrigerator, and stove, and the red countertops.

Back in those days, I didn’t use the phone often. My sister was the one hogging up the phone all the time.

Oh, did she have a gift for chatting away. It got to be so bad that my father bought an extra one for her to use so that “she would get out of our hair” in the kitchen all the time.

She treated the telephone as her own private kingdom. Outside our local township, the phone rates were extremely enormous (this was before the breakup of “Ma Bell”) and to call a girlfriend in Pittsburgh (around a 2-hour drive away) would cost me more than what I could make a week in the mines and the grocery store combined.

So it was special.

Indeed, the two most important items in the household were the telephone and the television.

We got five channels on the television!

We were fortunate.

In Pittsburgh, my grandparents were lucky to get two. Or course, as a growing boy, the refrigerator and microwave fought for those top spots.

I must have eaten my weight in food many times a week. I was always scrounging in the ‘fridge for some leftover pot roast to make up a sandwich with cheese and microwave it in the “microwave oven” as we called it then.

A growing boy.

Then later, when I was around 16 years old or so, I discovered girls, FM music, cars and alcohol.

Not all at once, mind you, but all within months of each other. (Truth be told, I had an interest in the old throwaway Playboy magazines that I scrounged in the garbage cans since I was five years old, but it wasn’t until when I hit 16 did everything “come together”.)

My life has never been the same since.

You know, or should rightfully assume, I was a pretty groovy guy.

I had bell bottom pants, a choker necklace, a MIA braclet, and a big belt buckle with my astrological sign on the front. I had longish hair, and rockstar shoes.

I was the guy in the purple shirt. LOL.

Anyways, if we wanted to place a telephone call from outside our home, we would use these tiny little rooms called “phone booths”.

And they would frequently have this big yellow book inside. Where you could find the telephone numbers of everyone in the city that you were calling from.

A phone booth.

And if you were attending college, or were in a Navy barracks, you would use the line-up of phones at the end of the hallway.

Privacy was obtained by these little foot-sized dividers to provide the illusion of privacy.

They didn’t do anything more than that and often had graffiti on them colored by bored college students.

Rack of phones in a college dorm.

Times came and went. I began my teens with “muscle cars” and boy oh boy do I miss my GTO, but things merged in the haze of the 1970s.

We still drove those cars around, but we were starting to complain about the high cost of gas, and we were all afraid that it would break the $1 gallon ceiling.

1970 Dodge Charger.

Ah… When cars were cars!

When you went into a turn in these babies, boy oh boy could you feel it.

It was a time when people would take off all their clothes and go a “streaking” in public areas. It was a time whenpeople asked if President Jimmy Carter dropped acid, and if the cost of coffee would go back to being five cents a cup.

As time moved on, my GTO was replaced by an AMC Pacer (due to finances) and then that too was replaced with a 1974 Dodge tradesman minivan. I was so hip and so cool.

Dodge van.

My van was carpeted in lime green shag carpeting, and had a couple of sky roofs. I was proud of my pumped up shocks on it, and the state-of-the-art cassette player with FM radio!

No phone though.

I had a CB.

CB Radios

Mention ‘CB Radio’ to most people and they will instantly mime holding a mic and spew phrases like ‘breaker-breaker-9’, ‘big 10-4 rubber duck’ in a bad US accent or even start singing the theme tune to ‘Convoy’. Interestingly for a craze that burned out over 30 years ago, the social and linguistic paraphernalia of the CB world continues to live on strongly even today.

  • The CB radio was invented in 1945 by Al Gross, the inventor of the walkie-talkie and owner of the Citizens Radio Corporation.

The radio became popular with small businesses and blue collar workers like carpenters, plumbers, and electricians who used the radio as a tool to communicate with coworkers.

  • By 1960, the costs to produce the 23 channel radio were low enough that everyday Joes could afford to buy one.
  • By 1973, coinciding with the onset of the oil crisis, the CB Radio craze erupted.

FCC opens up CB radio channels to the public

When Al Gross invented the CB radio in 1945, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) quickly opened up radio services for personal users of the radio.

Most countries have similar radio services. In the United States, Citizen’s Band Radios operate on the 27-Mhz band whereas in Canada it is known as General Radio Services and operates on the 26 Mhz and 28 Mhz bands.

CB Radio.

Unlike amateur radio, CB radio does not require a license (although at one time, they did require a license to operate). CB radio channels are shared by many users at the same time and other stations must listen and wait for the shared channel to be available.

By the 1960’s, the CB radio was popular with businesses and radio hobbyists. By the late 1960’s, advancements in solid state electronics allowed the size of the radio to be greatly reduced as well as the cost.

Suddenly, the general public had access to a communications medium that previously had only been available to specialists. CB radio clubs were formed and hobbyists developed their own unique CB slang language along with 10-codes similar to the codes used by emergency services.

The CB Radio Craze

By 1973, the oil crisis caused the cost of gasoline to skyrocket and shortages quickly developed. In response, the United States government issued a 55 MPH nationwide speed limit.

This caused an angry fury in the ‘States. “How dare the government tell us how to drive!”.

Smokey and the Bandit.

Drivers quickly learned that CB radios could be used to communicate with other drivers to inform them of gas stations that had gas and to notify speeders where police (smokeys) had speed traps set up.

The CB radio became so popular, by 1977 additional channels were opened up and 40 channel radios were introduced to the market.

Newsworthy events related to CB radios further added to the excitement. Truck drivers used the radios to organize convoys ( huge lines of trucks that travelled down the nation’s highways).

In several instances, blockades were organized using CB Radios where trucks would fill all available highway lanes in protest of the high gas prices and new trucking regulations.

CB Radios began to play prominent roles in movies such as Smokey and the Bandit and Movin’ On. Novelty songs about the new electronic toy, such as CW McCall’s Convoy and Cletus Maggard’s White Knight (see lyrics below), were played regularly on the radio.

Smokey and the Bandit

During the CB radio craze, citizens of Great Britain began illegally using American made CBs.

We deserve to live like Americans they demanded! The British government told its citizens that the CB radio would never be legalized on the 27 Mhz wavelength and instead, proposed a different technology on the 860 Mhz “open channel” instead.

The citizens of the United Kingdom took to the streets in high profile public demonstrations and UK government officials bent to the will of the people. Al Gross made the first British ceremonial CB radio call from Trafalgar Square in London.

Later the United Kingdom added more than 40 channels giving UK citizens 80 CB radio channels to work with.

Handles

Years prior, CB radios required a licensed to operate. The license cost about $20 in the early 1970’s and was reduced to $4 in the late 1970’s.

In addition, there were many rules and regulations concerning antenna height, distance restrictions, allowable transmitter power, and call sign rules. People ignored the laws and to hide their identity, developed “handles” or fake names to identify themselves on the radio.

After the FCC started receiving over 1,000,000 license applications a month, the license requirement was dropped entirely but as the culture had already developed, people continued using handles such as “Big Mama” or “Timberwolf” to identify themselves while on the air. Some famous celebrity handles include:

  • Betty Ford, a former First Lady of the United States, whose CB handle was “First Mama”.
  • Voice actor Mel Blanc , an active CB Radio operator, often used the CB handles Bugs or Daffy and talked over the air in the Los Angeles area using his many voices.

Channels

Channels evolved to fill specific purposes. For instance, channel 9 was kept open for emergency use and channel 19 was used for highway communication west of the Mississippi River.

Eventually channel 19 became the “trucker’s channel” and was used for highway communication all over the United States.

In the early days of the CB radio craze, channel 11 was used solely for the purpose of initiating communications (after which the two radio callers switched to a mutually agreed upon channel).

Towns that were close together often adopted a specific channel as their “home” channel so that they could communicate with each other.

Talking the Talk

CD etiquette developed and evolved during the craze. CB radios were intended to be used to warn other drivers of Smokeys up the road or to report roadside emergencies.

Chit chatting with other CB radio users is ok but it is not considered courteous to hold up a channel for more than a few minutes. Cursing is also frowned upon. It is common for CB radio operators to use hidden code or unique slang to communicate.

For instance, when giving a warning that a police officer is running a hidden speedtrap, they might say “smokey in the bush” or to warn truckers to watch out for a broken down school bus they might say “watch out for the kiddy car at mile marker 200″.

Many of the CB slang from the 1970’s hung around and became slang that continued to be used outside the realm of CB radio communications. Below is a large list of CB radio slang used during the 1970’s CB radio craze.

CD Radio slang from a to z
  • ACE – an important or well known CB radio operator
  • Apple – a person who is addicted to the CB radio
  • AF -Audio Frequency
  • Afterburner – Linear amplifier
  • ALERT – Affiliated League of Emergency Radio Teams
  • All the good numbers –  good luck and best wishes to all
  • Alligator – shredded tread from the tires of an 18 wheeler truck
  • Amigo – friend or good buddy
  • ANL – Automatic noise limiter
  • Ankle biter- a little kid
  • Antenna Farm- a CB radio ase station with many antennas strung up in the air
  • Antler Alley – an area known for deer crossings
  • Appliance Operator – degrading term for a non-technical person who barely knows how to turn on their radio
  • AM -Amplitude Modulation
  • Ancient Mariner –  someone who uses AM radio
  • Baby Bear – a rookie police officer
  • Backdoor – vehicle behind the one who is ahead of it.
  • Backdoor closed – the rear of a convey with trucks stacked across the lanes to keep the Smokeys out
  • Back em up – slow down or reduce speed
  • Back off the hammer – slow down or reduce speed
  • Backslide – return trip from a trucker’s run
  • Bad scene – a crowded CB radio channel
  • Ballet Dancer – a CB radio antenna that sways and bends in the wind
  • Base Station – a CB radio installed at a fixed location such as a house
  • Beast  -a very good CB radio rig
  • Beam – Directional Antenna
  • Bean House Bull –  trucker conversation carried on at a truck stop
  • Bear Bait – a speeding car
  • Bear Cage- police station or jail cell
  • Bear Cave – police station
  • Bearmobile – police car
  • Bear Trap – stationary police car running a radar trap
  • Bear in the air- police in their helicopter
  • Bear – police officer
  • Beat the bushes – driving ahead of the other truckers in an effort to draw the police out of hiding
  • Beaver – good looking female
  • Beaver Bear – female police officer
  • Beaver Fever – missing the wife or girlfriend
  • Beaver Palace – a club or bar known for loose female patrons
  • Beaver Patrol – looking for a good looking woman to spend time with
  • Big Charlie or Big Daddy – the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
  • Big Mack – Mack truck
  • Big Slab – freeway or highway
  • Big 10-4-  hearty agreement.
  • Bit on the seat of the britches – pulled over and issued a speeding ticket
  • Black and White – police car
  • Black Ice – patch of iced over blacktop road
  • Bleeding/Bleedover – strong signals from a base station on another channel that interferes with another channel’s reception
  • Blew my doors off – car passed by at high speed
  • Blue Slip- speeding ticket
  • Boast Toastie – CB expert
  • Boat Anchor – an old, broken radio that can no longer be repaired
  • Bodacious- Awesome
  • Boy Scouts – State Police
  • Box -Tractor Trailer
  • Break (or breaker, break for) – request to use the channel
  • Breaking Up – CB radio reception is poor
  • Breaking the “˜ol needle – very strong CB radio signal
  • Bring it back – answer the question that was posed
  • Brown paper bag – unmarked Police car
  • Bubble gum machine- police car with flashing lights
  • Bucket Mouth – obnoxious radio operator or someone who cusses a lot on the air
  • Bug Out – signing off or leaving the radio channel
  • Bumper Lane – the left most passing lane
  • Button Pusher – another CB radio operator who is trying to breakup your communication with another station by keying the microphone
  • Camera -police radar
  • Candy Man – Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
  • Casa – house
  • Cash Register – toll booth
  • Catch you on the flip-flop – will talk to you on my return trip
  • Channel 25 – the telephone
  • Charlie – Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
  • Chew and choke – Restaurant or truck stop eatery
  • Checking My Eyelinds For Pin Holes – I am tired or sleepy
  • Check the seatcovers – look at that passengers in the passing car
  • Chicken Coup – weigh station
  • Chicken Coup is Clean – weigh station is closed.
  • Chicken Inspector – weigh station inspector
  • Chopped Top- a very short antenna
  • Christmas Card – speeding ticket
  • Chrome Dome – a mobile radio with a dome antenna on top of the car
  • Clean Cat – a unmodified CB radio
  • Clean Shot – the road ahead is free of obstructions, construction, and police
  • Cleaner channel – CB radio channel with less traffic on it
  • Clear – Final transmission “This is 505 and I’m clear”
  • Clear after you  – you are ending transmission after the other person finishes signing off
  • Coffee Bean – Waiter or waitress
  • Cold Rig – 18-wheeler pulling a refrigerated trailer
  • Collect Call – call for a specific CB radio operator
  • Colorado Kool Aid – beer
  • Come again – repeat your last transmission
  • Come Back – answer my call
  • Comic Book  -truckers log book
  • Coming in Loud ‘n Proud – loud and clear signal
  • Concrete Blonde – prostitute
  • Convoy – 2 or more vehicles traveling the same route in a row
  • Cooking – driving
  • Cooking Good – reached desired speed.
  • Copy – receiving a message
  • Copying the mail – listening to the communications on the channel
  • County Mountie – county police or sheriff
  • Covered Up – transmission was blocked by interference
  • Crack ’em Up – traffic accident
  • Cradle Baby – radio operator who is afraid to ask someone to stand by
  • Cup of Mud – cup of coffee
  • Cut Out – leaving the channel
  • Cut Some Z’s – get some sleep
  • Cut The Coax – turn off the radio
  • Daddy-O – Federal Communications Commission (FCC)
  • Dead Pedal – slow moving car or truck
  • Dead Key – keying the mike without talking
  • Decoy – empty or unmanned police car
  • Diesel Digit – cchannel 19
  • Diesel Juice – truck fuel
  • Dime Channel – channel 10
  • Dirty Side – Eastern Seaboard
  • Dixie Cup-  female operator with southern accent
  • Doing the Five-Five- traveling at 55mph
  • Doin’ it to it – Full speed
  • Doing our thing in the left-hand lane – full speed in the passing or left-hand lane
  • Do it to me – answer back
  • Do you copy? – Do you understand?
  • Don’t Tense – calm down
  • Don’t Feed The Bears – don’t get a ticket
  • Double key – two radio operators talking at the same time
  • Double L – telephone call
  • Double Nickel – 55mph (the speed limit during the 1970’s CB radio craze)
  • Down “˜n Out or Down and gone – signing off
  • Down and on the side – through talking but will continue listening
  • Drag Your Feet – wait a few seconds before transmitting to see if someone else wants to break in
  • Dream Weaver – sleepy driver who is weaving across the lanes
  • Dress For Sale – prostitute or dressed like a prostitute
  • Drop Out – fading signal
  • Drop Stop Destination – where freight will be dropped off
  • Drop the Hammer – drive fast
  • Dropped it off the shoulder – ran off the shoulder of the road
  • Dusted your britches – keyed up at the same time
  • Dusted my britches – passed me very fast
  • Dusted Your Ears- transmission interrupted
  • DX – Long Distance
  • Eager beaver – anxious young woman
  • Ears ON – CB radio turned ON
  • Eights or Eighty-eights – love and kisses
  • Eights and other good numbers – love and kisses, and best wishes
  • Eighty-eight’s around the house – good luck and best wishes to you and yours
  • Eyeball- Personal meeting
  • Everybody must be walking the dog – all channels are busy
  • Evil Knievel – motorcycle policeman
  • Fake brake – driver riding with his foot on the brake
  • Fat load – overweight or big truck load
  • Feed The Bears – paying a speeding fine
  • Fender bender – traffic accident
  • Fifty Dollar Lane – passing lane
  • First Sargent – wife
  • Flag waver – highway repair crew
  • Flaps down – slow down
  • Flappers -ears
  • Flip flop – return trip
  • Flip-Flopping Bears – police reversing direction or turning around
  • Flop it – turn around
  • Flop box – motel or room in truck stop
  • FM – Frequency Modulation
  • Follow the stripes home – have a safe trip
  • Footwarmer – Linear amplifier
  • Forty weight – coffee
  • Four Wheeler – cCar
  • Four lane parking lot – highway with traffic backed up
  • Four legged go-go dancers – ugly women
  • Fox – pretty female
  • Fox Charile Charlie – FCC
  • Fox hunt – FCC hunting for illegal operators
  • Fox jaws – Ffemale with nice voice, but not necessarily a body to match
  • Free Ride – prostitute
  • Freight Box – trailer for the truck
  • Friendly Candy Company – FCC
  • Front Door – the lead in a convoy
  • Full of vitamins – running all out
  • Full Bore – driving fast as you can
  • Full Throttle – driving fast as the truck will let you
  • Funny Candy Company – FCC
  • Funny channels – channels that are outside the legal band
  • Gallon – 1000 watts of power
  • Garbage – too much small talk on a channel
  • Gas Jockey – gas station attendant
  • Gear – overnight bag or supplies
  • Get horizontal – go to sleep
  • Get Trucking – start driving
  • Girlie Bear – female police officer
  • Give me a shout – call me on the radio
  • Glory Card – Class D License
  • Go Breaker – OK to go ahead and break into the channel
  • Go Ahead – your turn to talk or reply
  • Go Juice – truck fuel
  • Go to channel 41 – a joke to get someone off the radio (there is no channel 41)
  • Going Horizontal – going to sleep
  • Gone – leaving the channel
  • Gone 10-7 – permanently dead
  • Good Buddy – friend (modern day means homosexual)
  • Goon Squad – persons who do not share the channel
  • Got my shoes on – Switched the linear ON
  • Got your ears on? – are you listening on this channel
  • Got my eyeballs peeled – looking hard
  • Got my foot in it – speeding up
  • Go to 100 – go to the bathroom
  • Green Stamps – cash money
  • Green Stamp Collector – police with radar
  • Green Stamp lane – passing lane
  • Green Stamp Road – toll road.
  • Grease monkey – mechanic
  • Greasy Spoon – restaurant with bad food
  • Ground Clouds – fFog
  • Gypsy – trucker who drives for an independent company
  • Hack – taxi cab
  • Hag Feast – group of female CB radio operators on the channel
  • Haircut palace – bridge or overpass with low clearance
  • Hairpin – sharp curve
  • Hamburger helper – Linear Amp
  • Hammer – gas pedal
  • Hammer Off – slow down
  • Hammer Down – speed up
  • Hang it in your ear – that was a stupid comment
  • Handle – CB radio code name
  • Hay Shaker – truck transporting a mobile home
  • Heading for a hole – about to head into a low spot where radio transmission may not be possible
  • Heater – Linear amplifier
  • Hell bent for leather – driving fast
  • Hiding in the grass – police parked on a median strip
  • Hiding in the bushes, sitting under the leaves – hidden police car
  • Highball – drive non-stop to the destination
  • High Rise – large bridge or overpass
  • Hippie Chippie – female hitchhiker
  • Hip Pocket – glove box
  • Hit the cobblestones – hit the road
  • Hog – Harley Davidson
  • Home Twenty – location of your home
  • How tall are you? – How tall is your truck?
  • Hundred mile coffee – very strong coffee
  • Ice Box – Refrigerated trailer.
  • Idiot Box – TV set
  • In a short – soon
  • In a short-short – very soon
  • In the mud – noise on the channel
  • In the Pokey with Smokey – arrested
  • Jack – good friend
  • Jack Rabbit – police officers
  • Jam – deliberately interfere with another station.
  • Japanese toy – CB
  • Jargon – CB lingo
  • Jaw Jacking – talking, talking needlessly
  • Jewelry – lights on a rig
  • Jingle – call on the telephone
  • Johnny Law – police officer
  • Juke Joint – small or out-of-the-way place to eat
  • Jump Down – switch to a lower channel
  • Jump Up – switch to a higher channel
  • Keep “˜em Between the Ditches – have a safe trip
  • Keep the shiny side up and the greasy side down – drive safely
  • Keep the wheels spinning – drive safely
  • Keep your noise between the ditches and smokey out of your britches – drive carefully, lookout for police
  • Keying the mike – activating the microphone without speaking
  • Kicker – Linear amplifier
  • Kiddie car – school bus
  • Knock the stack out – speed up
  • Knuckle Buster – fight
  • Kojak – police officer
  • Kojak with a Kodak – policeman with a radar
  • Lady Bear – female police officer
  • Lady Breaker – Ffemale CB operator asking for a break.
  • Lame – broken down vehicle
  • Land Line – telephone
  • Land Yacht – mobile home or camper
  • Lane Flipper – car or truck that keeps changing lanes
  • Lane Lover – driver who will not get out of the lane
  • Latrine Lips – radio operator who cusses
  • Let the channel roll – it’s ok to break in and request use of the channel
  • Legal Beagle – person who always follows the rules
  • Lettuce – money
  • Lights green, bring on the machine – road is clear of police and other slowdowns
  • Linear – RF amplifier
  • Little Bear – local police officer
  • Little Beaver – daughter
  • Little Bit – prostitute
  • Little Brother – friend
  • Local Bear – local police officer
  • Local Yokel – small town police officer
  • Log some Z’s – get some sleep
  • Loot Limo – armored car
  • M20 – place to meet
  • Magic Mile – the end of a trip
  • Mama – girlfriend or wife
  • Mama Bear – female police officer
  • Man in White – doctor
  • Mashing the mike – keying the mike (usually without talking)
  • Meatwagon – ambulance.
  • Modulate – talk
  • Modulating – talking
  • Money Bus – armored truck
  • Motion Lotion – fuel
  • Motorcycle Mama – woman riding on a motorcycle
  • Muck Truck – cement truck
  • Nap Trap – hotel or other place to sleep
  • Negative – no
  • Negative Copy – did not hear
  • Neon, Freon, Ion Jockey – truck driver with many lights on his rig
  • Nightcrawlers – many police in the area
  • Niner – channel 9
  • Ninety Weight – alcohol
  • Oil burner – diesel truck
  • On the by or on the standby – listening but not talking.
  • One foot on the floor, one hanging out the door, and she just won’t do no more – driving as fast as I can
  • Other Half – girlfriend or wife
  • Out – through transmitting
  • Over – your turn to transmit
  • Over modulation – talking so loud that audio is distorted
  • Pack it in – ending transmission
  • Pair of sevens – no contact or answer
  • Papa Bear – state trooper with CB radio
  • Paper hanger – police giving ticket
  • Parking Lot – traffic jam
  • Pavement Princess – prostitute
  • Peanut butter in his ears – is not listening
  • Pedal to the metal – drive fast
  • Peeling Off – getting of the freeway
  • Plain Wrapper – unmarked police car
  • Play Dead – stand by
  • Picture taking machine – radar
  • Pit Stop – stop for a bathroom break
  • Popcorn – hal
  • Porcupine – cr with a lot of antennas on it
  • Pounding the pavement – waking
  • Press some sheets – slep
  • Pull the hammer back – slow down
  • Pull the plug – signoff and turn the radio off
  • Put an eyeball on him – saw or see
  • Put it on the floor and looking for some more – trying to drive as fast as possible
  • QSL Card – Personalized postcard sent to confirm a conversation
  • QSK – break
  • QRM – nise or interference
  • Q-R-Mary – nose or interference
  • QSY – changing channels/frequency.
  • QRT – signing off
  • QRX – wait
  • QSB – nise
  • QSO – conversation
  • QTH – location
  • Quasar – female
  • Radio Runt – child breaking in on a channel.
  • Rain Locker – shower
  • Rake the leaves – last vehicle in a convoy
  • Ratchet-Jaw – non-stop talker
  • REACT – Radio Emergency Associated Citizens Teams
  • Rebound – return trip
  • Red Lighted – pulled over by police
  • REST – Radio Emergency Safety Teams
  • RF – Radio Frequency
  • Road Jockey – truck driver
  • Road Ranger – police officer
  • Rock – slang for crystal
  • Rockin’ chair – car in the middle of a convoy
  • Roger – O.K.
  • Roller Skate – car
  • Rolling – driving
  • Rolling Bears – police officers driving
  • Rugrats – children
  • Rubberneckers – onlookers
  • Running Barefoot – using a radio at the legal output
  • Running on rags – driving a vehicle with little to no tread on the tires.
  • Running Shotgun – driving partner
  • San Quentin Jailbait – under age female hitch hiker
  • Seatcover – good looking female
  • Shaking the windows – loud and clear reception
  • Shim – illegally amplified transmitter
  • Shoot the breeze – casual conversation
  • Shovelling coal – speeding up
  • Show-off lane – passing lane
  • Skip – atmospheric conditions that cause signals to travel much farther than they normally would
  • Skippers – radio operators talking long distance
  • Sidedoor – oassing lane
  • Sitting in the saddle – middle truck in a convoy
  • “S” Meter – meter on your radio which which indicates the signal strength
  • Smokey – State Police
  • Smokey Bear – State Police
  • Smokey report – police location report
  • Smokey Dozing – police sitting in a parked car
  • Smokey’s thick – police are everywhere
  • Smokey with a camera – police with radar
  • Smokey with ears – policeman with CB radio in their car
  • Somebody stepped on you – someone transmitted while you were talking
  • Splatter – bleedover from another channel
  • Squelch – control on radio which silences the speaker until a signal of a certain strength breaks through it
  • Three’s and eights – signing off, best wishes
  • Thin – very weak signal
  • Twelves – I have company present
  • Twenty – Location
  • Two Stool beaver – very fat woman
  • Uncle Charlie – FCC
  • Walking on you – someone talking over you
  • Wall-to-wall and treetop tall – strong, clear signal
  • Wall-to-wall and ten feet tall – strong clear signal
  • Warden – girlfriend or wife
  • Watch the pavement – drive safely
  • Water hole – truck stop
  • Wear your bumper out – following too close
  • Wearing socks – has linear amplifier
  • What am I putting on you? – how strong is my signal
  • What’s your twenty? – what is your location
  • Whip – long cb antenna
  • Who do you pull for? – who do you work for?
  • Wooly Bear – female
  • Z’s – Sleep

In addition to CB radio slang, CB radio operators used a series of “10 codes” similar to the codes used by emergency radio operators.

The Complete CB 10 codes
  • 10-1 Receiving Poorly
  • 10-2 Receiving Well
  • 10-3 Stop Transmitting
  • 10-4 Ok, Message Received
  • 10-5 Relay Message
  • 10-6 Busy, Stand By
  • 10-7 Out of Service, Leaving Air
  • 10-8 In Service, subject to call
  • 10-9 Repeat Message
  • 10-10 Transmission Completed, Standing By
  • 10-11 Talking too Rapidly
  • 10-12 Visitors Present
  • 10-13 Advise weather/road conditions
  • 10-16 Make Pickup at…
  • 10-17 Urgent Business
  • 10-18 Anything for us?
  • 10-19 Nothing for you, return to base
  • 10-20 My Location is ……… or What’s your Location?
  • 10-21 Call by Telephone
  • 10-22 Report in Person too ……
  • 10-23 Stand by
  • 10-24 Completed last assignment
  • 10-25 Can you Contact …….
  • 10-26 Disregard Last Information/Cancel Last Message/Ignore
  • 10-27 I am moving to Channel ……
  • 10-28 Identify your station
  • 10-29 Time is up for contact
  • 10-30 Does not conform to FCC Rules
  • 10-32 I will give you a radio check
  • 10-33 Emergency Traffic at this station
  • 10-34 Trouble at this station, help needed
  • 10-35 Confidential Information
  • 10-36 Correct Time is ………
  • 10-38 Ambulance needed at ………
  • 10-39 Your message delivered
  • 10-41 Please tune to channel ……..
  • 10-42 Traffic Accident at ……….
  • 10-43 Traffic tie-up at ………
  • 10-44 I have a message for you
  • 10-45 All units within range please report
  • 10-50 Break Channel
  • 10-62 Unable to copy, use phone
  • 10-62sl unable to copy on AM, use Sideband – Lower (not an official code)
  • 10-62su unable to copy on AM, use Sideband – Upper (not an official code)
  • 10-65 Awaiting your next message/assignment
  • 10-67 All units comply
  • 10-70 Fire at …….
  • 10-73 Speed Trap at …………
  • 10-75 You are causing interference
  • 10-77 Negative Contact
  • 10-84 My telephone number is ………
  • 10-85 My address is ………..
  • 10-91 Talk closer to the mike
  • 10-92 Your transmitter is out of adjustment
  • 10-93 Check my frequency on this channel
  • 10-94 Please give me a long count
  • 10-95 Transmit dead carrier for 5 sec.
  • 10-99 Mission completed, all units secure
  • 10-100 Need to take a break
  • 10-200 Police needed at ……….

How to operate a CB radio

There it an etiquette that CB radio operators follow in order to be “polite” and courteous to the other CB radio users.  The following rules should always be followed.

  • When two or more people are talking on a channel they are said to “own the channel”.  FCC regulations require they give other users an opportunity to use the channel so they should not hold the channel hostage for more than several minutes.
  • CB radio users should not “step on” other units.  “Step on” means to transmit at the same time another radio operator is transmitting.  They should also never key over someone else.
  • If you hear one unit break for another unit, give some time for the unit to respond before you say anything yourself.  It may take a radio user time to grab the mic or get from the kitchen to the living room radio unit.
  • After your break has been acknowledged, keep the next transmission short.  For example, a break might go something like this: “Break one-nine for Super Trooper.  Super Trooper, do you have your ears on?”.  if Super Trooper does not answer after a minute or so, it is nice to acknowledge that you are finished by saying something like “thanks for the break”.
  • If you are carrying on a conversation and someone “walks over” you, you have one of two options.  You can ask the person you were speaking to to repeat.  For example, “10-9, you were stepped on.  Please repeat”.  Alternatively, you can hand the channel over to the breaker.
  • If your break is not acknowledged, wait several minutes before attempting to contact them again.

Enough of the CB craze in the 1970s in the USA…

Of course, today is quite different. There are all sorts of systems competing for our telecommunication needs. They vary from Skype to zoom, and everything in between.

Dilbert.

But I live in China, and EVERYONE uses WeChat.

Man oh man! 

WeChat is far more than I ever realized it was, and I have to tell you all that I am just blown away by some of the many features and functions that it has. And you all must realize that I have been using it for many, many years.

Over a decade.

So whether you have the APP, or are considering the APP, check out this “discovery tour” of WeChat.

First off, it’s a handy communication platform.

Duh! In fact, I will tell you that it is an all-in-one phone, instant messaging, video conference, and teleconference package.

All for free.

No costs to use.

You see, in China, the government has decreed that communication is a basic right and need. It should not be part of a for-profit model.

Sure, in the “old days” you used to have to pay for landlines, and maintenance, but now, since the infrastructure is in place, the costs to use this (and other applications) this APP is free to communicate with.

While my cell-phone certainly has telephony (telephone access), I find that it is often far easier to just  communicate back and forth with people using WeChat.

You just select your contact… and you can call, text, video immediately with zero charges anywhere in the world…

Connect with your friends.

But it’s more than that. You see you can have family, business, or friends groupings.

And while I am sure that it is available on other APP platforms, it’s just so deliciously easy to use on WeChat. You set up a group call, a group chat, a group message board, or a group video. Oh, and did I say that it’s all free?

The WeChat group chat, text, phone, or video are all so very easy to set up and use. It’s almost instinctive.

Now, these two aspects of the entire WeChat platform are reason enough to have it on your phone. If that’s all that you ever use your phone for, then it is most certainly worth it.

But there’s so much more.

You see, there’s all kinds of things that you can do when you are chatting on the phone using WeChat. It’s more than just chatting away.

You can text while chatting, video while chatting, translate things while chatting, read a text in Icelandic and have it instantly translated into English.

You can point your phone at a strange road sign in Afghanistan and have it instantly translated, and if you are unable to see the translation, it will read the translation out to you in English for you.

Translate Text

Sometimes you will get messages in Chinese and, unless you can read Chinese characters fluently, this can be a problem.

So, WeChat has added this feature that will translate messages for you. Press and hold on the message you want to translate and then select the right arrow and then press ‘Translate’ and it will automatically translate the message.

So there’s a message.

You click on it, and select translate.

Translate.

And low and behold, it will translate to your assigned default language on your phone. Pretty cool. I will tell you that living inside of China, I use this feature extensively. But also when I travel to Thailand, Japan, Korea, or Saudi Arabia it most certainly comes in handy.

Scan

One of the most used applications inside of China is the scan function. You scan for everything. You scan to enter buildings.

You scan to pay.

You scan to get information.

You scan to visit internet and government websites. All you need to is go to the top of the APP and click on Scan QR Code

.

And then scan the code. It’s just like this…

Scan the QR code.

Now…

Here’s a power tip.

Scan and Translate

Can’t read the instructions or menus in China?

China’s most popular social platform offers AR-based real-time translation.

This feature can be accessed from the scan feature in the upright corner, which is regularly used to scan QR codes.

To use the real-time translator, simply capture an image of anything with either Chinese or English text in it, operating on a point and translate model.

First, go to the + sign > Scan > Translate, Then take a photo to translate or select a photo from your gallery. Finally, wait for the text to be translated and understand the text in English.

The default is on the lower left. It will scan the QR code. However, if you click on “Translate”, something else happens… [1] You are prompted to take a photo.

Take a photo.
[2] It is translated for you.

Currently, WeChat Translate only supports Chinese and English, it works similarly to the Waygo App, which was designed to help non-Chinese speakers translate food menus and signs. An indication that WeChat wants to appeal to foreign users and tourists living in China.

WeChat’s trend of taking successful features from apps and integrating the technology into their platform shows their ambition to grow and compete with US tech giants: Google, Snapchat and Instagram.

However, WeChat still has a long way to go to reach the levels of Google Translate augmented reality feature, which now supports 30 languages.

Translate Image Text

“Translate Image Text” is another cool hidden feature that you will want to know. Instead of scanning and translating, you can now choose any image that you have in either your phone gallery or chat and long-press until the menu appears with the option of translate image to text. [1] Pull up the image. [2] Long press until the menu comes up. [3] Translate. Now, all this is really cool, but that all isn’t the really great stuff. Let’s get to some of the really cool things…

Voice messages to text

I use this all the time. It’s a dictation feature on the text messaging section of WeChat. You just click on the button and dictate. What you speak is automatically converted from voice to text, and you can send the message so easily. It sure beats the singular thumb method of typing on a little screen.

This voice input function allows users to speak into WeChat and immediately convert their words into text. All you have to do is to long-press the voice message button, say what you want to be translated to text and just before letting go, swipe up and right and let go when you reach the bubble on the right side. 

WeChat voice to text feature.

Shazam

Want to find the name for that TV show you’re watching? Under the Shake feature you can also select ‘TV show’ and, when you shake, WeChat will act like Shazam and tell you the name of the TV show you’re watching.

What’s that show, or that song?

It is also useful for Douxing videos, music and many other things. This is a great way to identify music you like on a video. Because when the answer comes up, a link is provided to the QQ application that allows you to put that particular song in your play list.

More, more and MORE!

There is so much more that you can do. From sharing videos to creating facebook like environments, to group collaborating to dressing up and editing presentations.

It’s an all inclusive complete platform. But I am really not up to go through all the nuiances of it. Others have, and they have been doing a better job than I.

Let me just say that time has changes, and the advances in technology are truly wonderful.

Let’s appreciate what they are and use them to the fullest, so that we can benefit from their use.

Becuase sooner or later they will go away and be replaced with something different. And you will long for the days that you have RIGHT NOW.

Enjoy what you have and eat it all up!

It’s a new world

As some of these meme’s attest to… Great cat, by the way. Some of these are just funny… I suppose there are many more… As I said. Some are really spot on…

Well all this talk about communicaiton makes me hungry…

Maybe something simple delicious and easy to make. Maybe something a little bit like this…

An easy to make, healthy and delicious meal.

It’s better than fast food, I’ll tell you what. However, if you really are in the mood, why not make a home made pizza? It’s not all that hard, and it’s cheap. If you make the dough from scratch a entire pizza is only a few dollars tops. Maybe something like this…

Homemade pizza.

Of course, while you are a smunching, you can go forth and invite some friends over to your porch and “shoot the breeze”… you know, talk a bit. It doesn’t matter what you talk about. Just chat. Everyone has things to say. Just listen. Maybe you can impress them with your local knowledge. Maybe something like this… .

Maybe if they are some neighborhood kids, you can teach them how to whittle, or something similiar.

Most kids these days need some real uncle-like behaviors in their neighborhoods.

Don’t wait for others to take action.

You go ahead and do it yourself. Whittle.

Whittling.

Just take the time and make friends.

Whittling.

.

And you know, it doesn’t hurt to smoke a cigarette, drink a beer, or share a pizza with some neighborhood friends.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Happiness Index here… Life & Happiness .

Articles & Links

Master Index . You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Special Chinese New Years Eve Treat 2022

Please enjoy this video to get the feeling of what it is like in China right now. It is the New Years Eve. It’s a special time; a magical time. This video captures it exactly. Please enjoy.

video 14MB

chinese new year eve 2022-2022-01-31_08.27.58

 

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings 3

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Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Koreans come to grips with the Chinese Ticktock videos

Ah.

I just read that wine is bad for you. It’s all over the Western “news” media. My guess is that soon there will be a temperance movement to rival the anti-smoking movement. For the “children” don’t you know.

It’s all so silly.

I really don’t think I want to live in a place that bans drinking wine.

Wine and cheese.

I mean, really! Wine is bad, but lard burgers deep fried are good. Sheech!

You know, the longer I stay outside the “West” the more insane it appears.

Dionysus cat agrees!

Dionysus cat.

It’s been accepted that the Western Bloc (in defiance of Donald Trump’s executive orders to the contrary) pretty much uses Tictok as an Application to make and share movies. It’s a division of the Chinese version known as Douxing. It is NOT the same thing.

In fact, most of the videos posted inside of China are banned by the non-Chinese versions.

Thus, because of that, the presentation of what China actually is; is withheld from the global readership. (It’s something that I do not fully understand why, but it offers strong hints of Geo-political manipulation for domestic consumption purposes on a regional basis.)

To get around this limitation, you must have a Chinese cellphone and install Douxing on it while you are in China.

Now, with that awkward introduction, let’s get to the meat of this article. Here is a South Korean group of video-blogers that take various Chinese Douxing videos and comment on them. I find that it is interesting, and amusing and telling on how the Korean society reacts to the Chinese society. Because, after all, they are both of the Han race.

Please enjoy this great peer into cross society insights.

2021 Overview

We start with this video.

At the end of 2021 were a bunch of videos that summarized the events of 2021. Some are actually quite good. Of course, most of the world outside of China has no idea what has been going on inside of China. Their government (especially if you are an America or Brit) won’t allow it. Here, the Koreans get to watch some of the videos and comment on them.

video 33MB

Chinese minorities on display

The Chinese honor, fund and keep the traditions and societies of all the minorities within China alive and prospering. Here is a selection of the various videos in this category.

The PRC officially recognizes 55 ethnic minority groups within China in addition to the Han majority. 

As of 2010, the combined population of officially-recognized minority groups comprised 8.49% of the population of mainland China. 

In addition to these officially-recognized ethnic minority groups, there are Chinese nationals who privately classify themselves as members of unrecognized ethnic groups, such as the very small Chinese Jewish, Tuvan, and Ili Turki communities, as well as the much larger Oirat and Japanese communities. 

-Wikipedia

video 40MB

CN Military

Of course, there are all sorts of videos about the Chinese military. Here, the Koreans get their first look at some fan, and government videos…

video 13MB

China VR

Chinese virtual reality similar to “Google Glass” is getting to be popular in the first tiered cities. video 38MB

Dancing to pop music done in traditional style

The song is from Jay Chou, but done traditionally. And the people dance to it in a traditional manner. video 14MB

Different personalities

This is a common theme inside Chinese culture. That you can have many different “faces” or side to your personalities. video 21MB

Girl Actor

A very famous girl actor. Perhaps you have heard of her or seen her in some movies, perhaps? video 10MB

Girl singing group

Here’s a group of girls that love to dress up and sing traditional Chinese opera. It’s kind of cool. video 10MB

Good vs Bad

It’s all about the Yin and the Yang. video 23MB

Gung Fu

What’s not to love? This is the real deal, with many Shaolin monks participating. video 26MB

Han Clothing

Very popular. On display here for thoughts and comments. video 13MB

Han Cosplay

These are videos of people dressed in Han Clothing and meeting in cosplay events and fashion shows. video 14MB

Honoring the family

This is a big thing. Not only does China have a firm belief in the importance of the traditional family life and culture, but it funds videos that are sprinkled in with all the other videos to remind people of the importance of family and community. It’s sort of how the LGBT “news” and “issues” are all being driven in the United States today. It’s a very big part of what China is all about. When was the last time that you saw a video or a commercial stressing the importance of family, community and care for others in America? video 14MB

I love how this scene mesmerized the movie critics.

Honoring the Rufus firefighters

In praise of Rufus. You just don’t see this kind of stuff in the West. video 14MB

In another time

In another time. Sigh. It reminds us, through these videos, that  while times, clothing and society has changed, we are still the same. We are still people who work, earn a living, have a family and participate within society. video 20MB

Little gung fu master

Great little guy! I love it. Video 29.5MB

Martial arts for morning exercises

I see this every morning. The people do these exercises all the time and everywhere starting at 5am. Here are some videos of them doing so. Great.

video 31MB

Stage dancing

Dancing and moves on the stage as part of opera and other venues. video 22MB

Sword dance

Sword dance. It’s a great way to limber up, and start the day, as well as manage a very good defensive posture in a battle. video 45MB

Sword exercise

Another group of sword exercises. Quite well done. video 24MB

Transformations

It’s all about change. Good stuff. video 11MB

Uighur Culture

And of course, the Chinese promote the Uighur culture and Xinjiang. And oh baby! The USA hates that. Great video 17MB

One last thought…

Dionysus is strongly associated with the satyrs, centaurs and sileni. He is often shown riding a leopard, wearing a leopard skin, or in a chariot drawn by panthers and has been called the god of cats and savagery. He may be recognized by the thyrsus he carries. 

-Dionysus - Crystalinks

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A fun look at a MM as a rambunctious youth. A look at childhood in the 60’s and 70’s.

Hey Guys!

There’s been a bunch of big earth-shattering changes going on Geo-Politically and domestically. And Though I try to be topical, it’s really freaking out a lot of my MM readership. So I’m going put the brakes on that stuff. Sort of, and get back to some easier stuff to sooth our souls.

And this post is dedicated to Michelle. The stress of moving to a new area, and caring for family has been taking it’s toll. It’s time for a cool look and reminder of whence we came from.

If you didn’t personally live through the 1970s, it’s easy to make assumptions.

You probably picture everyone dressed in bell-bottoms, their shirts unbuttoned down to their navels and their perfectly coiffed shag haircuts not budging as they boogie-woogied all night long.

And while that may be a fairly accurate snapshot—especially the bell-bottoms—it’s by no means the complete picture.

For those who came of age during the grooviest decade in history, memories run deeper than Donna Summer (Ohhhh I love to love ya baby.) and questionable fashion choices. LOL.

But seriously folks…

The best parts of your childhood probably involved things today’s kids will never know

From an article that I picked up and chopped up out of my unedited stash slush box...

The endless stretch of a lazy summer afternoon. Visits to a grandparent’s house in the country. Riding your bicycle through the neighborhood after dark. These were just a few of the revealing answers from more than 400 Twitter users in response to a question: “What was a part of your childhood that you now recognize was a privilege to have or experience?”

That question, courtesy of writer Morgan Jerkins, revealed a poignant truth about the changing nature of childhood in the US: The childhood experiences most valued by people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s are things that the current generation of kids are far less likely to know.

That’s not a reference to cassette tapes, bell bottoms, Blockbuster movies, and other items popular on BuzzFeed listicles. Rather, people are primarily nostalgic for a youthful sense of independence, connectedness, and creativity that seems less common in the 21st century.

The Partridge Family.

The childhood privileges that respondents seemed to appreciate most in retrospect fall into four broad categories:

[1] The ability to take risks

“Riding my bike at all hours of the day into the evening throughout many neighborhoods without being stopped or asked what I was doing there,” was one Twitter user’s answer to Jerkins’ question.

Another commenter was grateful for “summer days & nights spent riding bikes anywhere & everywhere with friends, only needing to come home when the streetlights came on,” while yet another recalled “having a peaceful, free-range childhood.”

Countless others cited the freedom to explore—with few restrictions—as a major privilege of their childhood.

American children have less independence and autonomy today than they did a few generations ago.

For many of today’s children, that privilege is disappearing.

American children have less independence and autonomy today than they did a few generations ago. As parents have become increasingly concerned with safety, fewer children are permitted to go exploring beyond the confines of their own backyard.

Some parents have even been prosecuted or charged with neglect for letting their children walk or play unsupervised.

Meanwhile, child psychologists say that too many children are being ushered from one structured activity to the next, always under adult supervision—leaving them with little time to play, experiment, and make mistakes.

That’s a big problem.

Kids who have autonomy and independence are less likely to be anxious, and more likely to grow into capable, self-sufficient adults.

In a recent video for The Atlantic, Julie Lythcott-Haims, author of How to Raise an Adult, argues that so-called helicopter parents “deprive kids the chance to show up in their own lives, take responsibility for things and be accountable for outcomes.”

That message seems to be gaining traction. The state of Utah, for example, passed a “free-range” parenting law in 2018 meant to give parents the freedom to send kids out to play on their own.

[2] Lots of time with family

Another privilege cited by many Twitter respondents was regular time with their parents—around the dinner table, on weekends, on vacation—and access to meaningful interactions with other family members, especially grandparents.

One respondent wrote “My paternal grandparents were my daycare and their house in the country was my playground.”

Another said, “my Italian grandparents lived on a street with a slew of their brothers and sisters. Nobody had any money. Everyone’s doors were open all day. Coffee always on, something on the stove. Endless stories and laughter. The happiest world.”

In an email to Quartz, Jerkins said that many of the respondents “were talking about having their grandparents around, which I thought was incredibly heartwarming.”

Spending time with grandparents is also an important part of child development: Close grandparent-child relationships have significant mental health benefits both for kids and for grandparents, and encourage prosocial behavior in children.

But in the stressed, tired, and rushed modern American family, time together is a limited resource. A recent Pew survey found that 36% of American parents, for example, felt they spent too little time with their children.

That’s especially true of dads, 63% of whom say that they spend too little time with their kids.

Fondue.

[3] Reading books

Reading is good for children. It makes them more literate, better at math, and more academically successful in general.

So it’s no wonder that a large majority of the respondents to Jerkins’ Twitter question answered cited time for reading as a major privilege of their childhood.

“Books. Hundreds and thousands of them moving through our house—from libraries, bookstores, passed from friends and coworkers of my parents.

No idea too frightening or taboo to discuss or analyze,” one Twitter user wrote. “Books saved my life,” another said.

Today’s teens, however, are reading significantly less than their predecessors. In 1984, 8% of 13-year-olds and 9% of 17-year-olds said they “never” or “hardly ever” read for pleasure.

In 2014, that number had almost tripled, to 22% and 27%. And entire cities have now become “book deserts,” wherein the chances that kids in low-income urban neighborhoods finding children’s books for loan or purchase are slim to none.

[4] A screen-free existence

Gratitude for a childhood free of Facebook and smartphones was another common thread.

“No social media,” one user wrote.

Another user answered: “A childhood without social media, tablets, mobile devices, apps, etc.” “I am so happy and blessed,” she continued, “that I can reflect on a childhood filled with books, board games, Razor scooters, and VHS tapes.”

Freedom from the constraints of an online presence is something that not a lot of US kids get to experience these days.

The latest research from Pew shows that 95% of teens report owning a smartphone or having access to one, and that 45% of teens say they are online on a “near-constant” basis.

That’s a marked change from even three years ago, the last time Pew conducted a survey of teens’ technology use, and found that 24% of teens went online “almost constantly.”

With the technology habits of today’s kids comes an increased risk of isolation, depressoin, and other mental health issues, along with the rise of cyber-bullying. A recent study in the journal Emotion showed that “the more hours a day teens spend in front of screens, the less satisfied they are.”

Reinventing childhood…

It’s only after we grow up that we’re able to recognize all the factors that made us into the people we are today.

Jerkins tells Quartz that she’s grateful for many privileges she was afforded: “Private tutoring. Flute lessons. Tap lessons. Dance and gymnastics lessons. Overnight summer camps. Regular summer camps. Books. Travel. Frequent trips to Disney World.” “I was very lucky,” she wrote.

A safe, healthy childhood is a privilege that far too few children in the US and around the world ever get to experience.

But even children who are lucky enough to grow up in a stable environment may not have the kind of adventurous, family-oriented, independent childhoods that the Twitter users who responded to Jerkins’ question describe.

Kids seem to be all the more unhappy for it. Maybe it’s time for a change.

A time for change…

And with the current state of the world as bizarre and challenging as it is right now, who could blame you for having some serious reappraisals on your life and the lifestyles of your family.

Is it time yet?

When I moved to China, I was stunned how community oriented it was, how the children were all out playing, or working with their parents, or spending time with their grandparents. These were things that I grew up with back when I was young, but that is wholly absent today.

Now, I’m not saying that suddenly everyone needs to get a pet rock, or put on some earth shoes, but maybe we all need to be a little less serious and a little more accommodating.

Let’s look at what it was like when I was growing up…

Taking care of Pet Rocks

A pet rock.
Pretty fucked up. I know. But it wasn’t as really serious as we all make it. It was a sort of shrug, and “let’s fuck with someone” kind of play.

.

So…

In the ’70s, we begged our parents for $4 so that we could buy… a rock. Sure, this makes it sound like ’70s kids were the victims of the biggest con in history—and we were.

But we have no regrets.

I almost bought one as a Christmas gift for my “secret Santa” at work. But I was fortunately persuaded to buy something else. So I bought a gallon (about four liters) of a very, very, very cheap perfume. He he. Well, I was, after all, only 16 years old.

It’s the season. You all had to feel like we do….

Peter Frampton.

We got to feed our Pet Rocks, take them for walks, and even clean up after them, just like a real pet. Call us fools if you must, but we loved our Pet Rocks.

Ah, the ’70s. They really were simpler times.

You know. Between the weed, the acid, and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman… it just all seemed normal.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.

Yeah.

The 1970’s was a a place; a “state of mind”. It really was “dazed and confused.

Like going to a movie theater and being traumatized for months afterwards…

Being afraid to go in the ocean after Jaws

Yikes!

Jaws. A mighty big fish.

All it took was one seriously terrifying movie—Steven Spielberg’s 1975 shark fright fest Jaws—to keep an entire generation of children out of the ocean. All of us ’70s kids would scan the water for signs of a shark fin, hearing da-dum, da-dum, da-dum in our heads as we did.

And let’s not forget Linda Blair in the movie “The Exorcist”.

The Exorcist

Yeah. I was on a date with a girl when I watched it, I had to carry her in my arms to the car afterwards. BTW, my old GTO, don’t you know.

My GTO. Sigh.

I do miss my GTO.

Schoolhouse Rock

I myself didn’t like it, but my younger brother and sister did. I guess that is how they ended up learning math and grammar. You know,  from Schoolhouse Rock.

Schoolhouse Rock

These educational animated shorts popped up amid our usual Saturday morning cartoon line-up. And their songs were so darn catchy that we didn’t even mind that they were tricking us into learning.

With educational hits like “Conjunction Junction” and “Three Is a Magic Number,” Schoolhouse Rock probably taught us more than our actual teachers did. Ask anybody who grew up in the ’70s to explain how laws are made in our country and they’ll likely start singing “I’m Just a Bill.”

Oh yeah.

We all wore them…

Tube Socks

Everyone wore tube socks.
.
Everyone.
Tube Socks.

No self-respecting ’70s kid would ever walk out for gym class without a pair of tube socks, preferably one long enough to reach their knees. We all suffered from the same delusion that tube socks made us look athletic and not incredibly silly.

At least we weren’t alone, though. Everyone from Farrah Fawcett to Kareem-Abdul Jabbar made a very convincing case that tube socks were cool.

Yuppur.

Real cool beans.

Worshipping Fonzie

Everyone was into the Fonz.

The Fonz looks at Richie.

Kids didn’t tune in to the sitcom Happy Days because they were nostalgic about the ’50s. They did it to see the Fonz, the coolest character on TV. All across the country, kids would be practicing their Fonzie thumbs up and saying “Ayyyy” with the perfect Henry Winkler inflection.

Then, they would go off and ride their bikes.

Having Tupperware pride

Tupperware

Of course, people still use Tupperware today, but it’s nothing like it was in the ’70s. Our Tupperware was colorful and bold, something that you actually wanted to show off when you opened your lunch at school.

The generation before us even had Tupperware parties to sell these much sought-after storage containers. In the 1970s, you’d have an easier time walking into somebody’s house and stealing a lamp than leaving with their Tupperware. Seriously, we loved it that much.

Using the 8-track player in your car

An 8-track player.

Nobody actually liked 8-track tapes—they were simply the only thing available in the ’70s for recording and listening to music before the cassette came to town. They were incredibly complicated, with four “programs” instead of sides. You had to toggle from program to program, making the whole enterprise hugely annoying and clunky.

In my “neck of the woods”, we had an 8-track player when I was 16 years old and dating my 14 year old girl friend. An FM adapter came when I was 18 years old, and then when I was 19 came the cassette.

Witnessing TV go off the air at night

Then dead air and static. No problem, though. We would just put a few albums on the turntable.

Television station went off the air.

Television wasn’t available 24/7 during our childhood. At around 1 or 2 a.m., most TV stations signed off for the night, playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before leaving us with a test card of color bars. Anyone suffering from insomnia didn’t have a lot of options in those days.

Seeing Star Wars in theaters for the first time

I watched it with another girl. It was her idea, and after a successful date watching “Raiders of the Lost Ark”, we went to Butler, PA and watched this gem. She drove. Not me. She had a silver Chevy Chevelle.

Those were the days.

Hot cars. Fun girls.

A large pizza for a $1.

I guess it was in a galaxy a long, time ago. Sigh.

Star Wars

When George Lucas’s space opera first hit movie theaters in 1977, it was unlike anything the world had ever seen. If you ask anyone who saw the original Star Wars in theaters about their experience, they’ll be able to tell you every little detail, right down to how long they waited in line. For a ’70s kid, it’s easy to get goosebumps just thinking about it.

Yeah. I do remember getting on the phone and talking for hours about the movie.

Chatting on the phone for hours.

Practicing the Hustle

Everyone did it. Though many of us deeply regretted it in the morning.

Dancing the Hustle.

Before there was the Macarena, there was the Hustle. When Van McCoy implored us in his 1975 hit to “do the Hustle,” we all knew we had to learn this dance or we’d be left behind.

Sinking our feet into shag carpeting

God. You all have no idea.

Shag Carpeting.

Shag carpets looked hideous, almost like the hair on the head of a gigantic Muppet. And yet, they were also surprisingly cozy on bare feet. The material felt so soft to the touch that it made an entire generation overlook its heinous appearance.

When Marcia Brady moved out of the house, it was probably to an apartment like this…

Groovy.

With enough black laquer, your den would be fit for a villain from Kung Fu.

They just don’t make houses this way any more.

The perfect kitchen for spilling tomato sauce.

Perfect.

Laughing at Saturday Night Live

Went great with beer.

The crew of Saturday Night Live.

If you weren’t old enough to stay up late and watch Saturday Night Live when it first launched in 1975, you probably had an older sibling or a parent who was—and did. The morning after, you’d beg them to recount every hilarious moment, even if you didn’t always understand all the jokes. If nothing else, the merciless torture of a clay figure named Mr. Bill felt like the most brilliant bit in the world.

Doing the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” dance

Yeah. People danced back then.

The Village People.

The Hustle was hardly the only iconic dance to come out of the ’70s. You can immediately tell if somebody came of age during the decade by whether or not they reflexively spell out the letters “Y,” “M,” “C,” and “A” with their arms whenever this Village People song is played.

Growing up with Sesame Street

Sesame Street.

Every child born in the last 50 years has likely been influenced by Sesame Street in some way. But for ’70s kids who got to experience the PBS show from the beginning, the program was a revelation. We were the first generation to fall in love with Big Bird, Grover, Bert, and Ernie, the fictional characters who taught us everything we needed to know growing up.

For me, I was busy watching Mary Harman, Mary Hartman.

Mary Harman, Mary Hartman.

Expressing ourselves with mood rings

It was very cool.

Mood Ring.

This ’70s fashion accessory was also a liquid crystal thermometer, which is how it could “recognize” your emotional state. Blue meant you were calm or relaxed, amber meant you were nervous or anxious, and black meant you were angry. For ’70s kids, showing someone the color of their mood ring was much easier than talking about feelings.

And who can forget…
 

Smashing clackers together

Clackers.

What’s surprising isn’t that ’70s kids loved this toy, which consisted of two heavy acrylic balls attached to string intended to be banged together at full force—it’s that it took years before somebody noticed that clackers produced a lot of shrapnel. In 1976, the United States government finally deemed the toy a “mechanical hazard,” and they were taken off store shelves.

Well.

Well.

It was a different time and a different place. And it’s fine to remember the good, the bad and the truly messed up. But you know, the things that we miss today are the things that we took for granted back then.

If something is going well for you; put it in your affirmations so that it keeps supplying you with good and happy memories. Don’t take it for granted. Things taken for granted often disappear.

To underline and appreciate what you appreciate in your affirmations. It’s not just about your future. It’s also about keeping intact things that matter to you.

You know if more people do this, we would still have $1 pizza pies everywhere, we’d be zooming around in GTO’s, and listening to “real” music.

Right?

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Having fun with the 007 movie Goldfinger (1964)

This is part 2 of my orgy of James Bond movies. This time it’s with a classic movie titled “Goldfinger”.

Usually during Christmas I spend extra time to make the holiday a little bit special. One way that I do this is with rituals, and pomp. That means a Christmas tree, some decorations and music. I also like to wear a special Santa hat. Another way is with food. KFC, and hot ham and tomatoes on fresh bread. Mustard with sausages, and lots of cold cuts. And a third way is with movies. Not just Christmas movies, but some older movies just for the fun of it. Today, we will chat a little about a nice fine James Bond movie “Goldfinger” (1964).

So you sit down with your favorite beverage. You gather your friends, family and pets. Or if it is late at night, you gather a bowl of potato chips alone, and sit down to enjoy this movie.

Today I would like to promote the idea of enjoying some delicious chocolate moose, on a nice tray, while you enjoy the movie.

A delicious chocolate moose.

Doesn’t that look tasty…?

And here is our hero;

James Bond fighting the powers of evil during the Cold War. He does look good in suits, and I really do like how he is able to keep his hair all nice and tidy when he gets involved in a tussle.

James Bond in Goldfinger

This movie differs from Dr No in that it is more action / adventure. There is more fighting. More science. More gadgets. and really only one girl that James Bond cavorts with.

Just one. Or maybe two.

Perhaps three.

But that’s it.

Tops.

It’s treated as a top 007 Bond movie because of that, but you know, I think that it fails in that regard as much as it is praised.

Certainly the laser beam that going to cut bond in two is enticing for the six year old boy inside of me, and the idea of scientific geniuses taking over the world has merit, but really, where’s the interesting chit-chat and the fine bed-side manner?

It’s all cavort and plunder. Cavort and plunder.

Hum…

James Bond in Goldfinger

She’s a feisty vixen. Eh?

I’ll bet you that she (removes the snarl and fierce expression) would be a blast to go out with. Maybe go for some nice dessert. And in my mind, a nice dessert is a strawberry shortcake. No question about it at all. hands down.

I know. I know. I know.

Strawberry shortcake is for Springtime dates, and Summer outings. Oh don’t fall for that disinformation. It’s just perfect anytime of the year. Look at just how Christmassy festive it is.

A nice strawberry shortcake.

So imagine that you are out with this chick (girl). Her name is Pussy Galore…

Which in American slang means “always open for copus quantities of indiscriminate sex”. Which is kind of an “inside joke” if you are an American.

And then after a fine delicious strawberry shortcake, a nice walk down the boardwalk (well, I am imagining a seaside stroll after all). Then a stroll to the hotel, or bungalow.

Maybe a passionate embrace and wet sexy kiss once the door is closed.

I wonder what is going to happen in their relationship? Well, knowing what I know about James Bond movies I can extrapolate. Let’s see how accurate I am…

Adventures in bed.

Oh my!

By their expressions it does seem like they are having some fun. I’ll bet that about twenty to forty minutes later, Bond is smoking a cigarette, and she’s just purring while looking at herself in the mirror, and primping a bit.

And I am not complaining. I think that women look their best while they are getting pretty. Not afterwards. Life is a journey. Not a destination. Which is why I wrote my article on why it is critically important for a woman to have her own very special vanity, with a HUGE circular mirror. HERE.

But you know, being a secret agent is difficult business…

James Bond in Goldfinger

You never know when a car passes you by and shreds up your tires! Yikes.

I’m not sure, but I believe that this movie was the one that set the trend for automobile gadgets in the James Bond vehicles. When I was younger I had a Corgi version of the James Bond car. It had a escape passenger seat, a rear shield that would cover the rear window, machine guns in the front, shredding do-hickeys in the wheels, and a jet engine exhaust in the trunk. It was pretty cool, I’ll tell you what.

Toy James Bond Car.

Here we see Jame Bond in a well appointed private jet, and a very attractive Chinese stewardess. You know, I could never figure out why the costume would expose her cute belly, but not show her bellybutton. That belly button is the most erotic part of a woman’s belly, don’t you know.

But that’s life.

Hollywood has distinct rules on what can and cannot be shown on the “big movie screen”. And belly buttons are absolutely verboten! (Sounds of marching, goose-stepping Nazi Germans in the background. No. I’m not insulting Germans. I’m just playing with mental images of World War II movies.)

I see all the classics are on the shelves, as well as a quaintly dated telephone on the desk.

That “wood trim” is obviously cheep vinyl wall-paper. Sheech! You would think that evil scientists would appreciate the natural hues and textures of real wood in their private jet aircraft.

Vinyl is just…

…tacky.

Well, it is.

It’s sort of like giving a starving dog a rubber bone. It looks like the real things, but it isn’t and once you taste the bitterness of vacuum, the nightmare memories of what you thought you were getting ring like a hollow bell in a deep dark cavern.

Anyways, James Bond is a man of many talents.

Here’s James Bond tackling with some kind of a bomb. I’ll bet you that there a count-down going on and that he only has seconds left before every thing goes kablooey! How nice that the bomb has these red and yellow indicator lights and wires that you can rip out to render the bomb inert.

James Bond in Goldfinger

And here we have the “bad guys” trying to use a laser to break into Fort Knox to get all the gold there. Good luck with that! That place has been looted and sitting empty for decades.

Is it me, or does that laser look like a giant syringe?

The uniforms are curious. They are wearing battleship greys, and Chinese 19th century Boxer slipper. Though, I have yet to figure out what the black and yellow thing-a-min-jib around their waists are. Maybe it’s some kind of henchmen life preserver. Eh?

Why does the door to the vault look like a suburban garage door?

James Bond in Goldfinger

This movie has lots and lots of twists and turns. We’ve got James Bond fighting with landing a plane, laser beams, lots and lots of gold, henchmen, pretty girls with some fine charms and incredibly strong vixen capabilities.

The movie starts off with a bomb.

Seriously. There a bomb that has to be dealt with. And you know, it’s a job that only James Bond can handle.

James Bond bomb.

That’s where things start to get interesting.

After a quick tussle, some fighting and the bathtub electrocution, we are introduced to the always calm and confident James Bond. I do love him in the white tux, and I have to admit that the red carnation is a nice touch. Don’t you all think so?

You will note that a white tux is formal, while a deep blue tux is for semi-formal events. Nice lapels, but I think a shawl collar would have been a slightly better touch. Look at those nice shoulders. A nice cut suit for certain.

Too bad he’s in what appears to be a garbage-variety boat garage. I can just smell the rotting fish, the stale dried sea moss, and hear the waves lap up against the bollards.

James Bond in top style.

So many cool things in the movie don’t you know.

There’s all sorts of cool adventures. All done and carried out in a span under five minutes. Bombs, killings, good guys, bad guys. Nice fancy and swanky venues.

Even a few cats.

Somehow Bond finds his way into a room with an attractive nude woman taking a bubble bath in the tub. Of course, this is the 1960’s and since he is wearing a tux, and he is (after all) James Bond, he seduces her which his devilish good looks…

…and well, you can guess the rest.

James Bond getting some “nooky”

After the credits finish rolling, we find James Bond by the pool.

Certainly the fashions have changed, but a beautiful girl is a beautiful girl, and I for one would not throw her into the pool. I’ll tell you what.

I do like her cleavage. I wonder whats down there. Maybe some money, a set of keys, or a venomous poison spider to attack 007 with. Being a secret agent is a risky business, don’t you know.

Nice cleavage.

Boy!

James bond is hairy. Don’t you think?

Ah. But the ladies don’t mind. They think it is sexy.

Of course, my chest hair is all white, and sometimes my wife absentmindedly plucks a chest hair away. Ouch! Come on girls. It’s sensitive!

Oh, and by the way, I do like how all the maids fall into the arms of James Bond. He’s quite the “Ladies Man” don’t you know.

Look at his legs. So very hairy as well. No wonder he is rarely shown rearing shorts.

Ladies man.

He really is, however, quite the ladies man.

Here’s James Bond “copping a feel” with the fine girl that massaged the oil on his back. I note that the evil villain NPC smiles in approval.

Copping a feel.

There’s many half-clad girls in James Bond movies.

Here’s a chick that will feature predominately later on. Shes busy on the VHF, or is it a UHF, or maybe just a CB radio.  She’s got a fine backside. Nice and oiled up and toasty from the hot sun. She’s really just eye candy for the audience, though, don’t you know.

She’s a lure to take James Bond on an adventure.

Nice backside.

Of course, we know that shes a spy.

Gasp!

And James Bond is going to use her… well, he thinks anyways. Here she is spying away. And James is very interested in her technique. And she, obviously, is very interested in his manly chin.

Spycraft. Always a tense moment.

The movie has all sorts of interesting adventures and situations.

And some of the most interesting occur in, on, and beside, the beds. But you know, for some reason there’s always telephones near and on the beds. I mean… really. You want to rest on a bed, or you want to have sex on a bed. But the telephone is just a distraction. You really don’t want to be interrupted when you are in a dream, or having sex. I mean, that’s just not fun. How can you concentrate?

Right?

Nothing quite breaks up the mood as a ringing telephone when you are in the middle of something interesting.

Telephones and beds so not match.

Oh, and by the way, she’s a pretend blonde. You can tell by her eyebrows. She’s intentionally dyed her hair a harlot platinum blonde. Not that it’s bad, mind you. I happen to enjoy harlots. It’s a personal favorite activity of mine, don’t you know. But I do like women to be themselves.

I am so turned on by a woman wearing pajamas, in the house, or a tee shit and jeans outside rather than get all dressed up. Of course, I do enjoy when a woman gets dressed up, but on the sexiness scale, a “real” woman being herself just oozes sex. It’s like when they cook food. OMG.

There is few things sexier than a woman cooking.

Well, aside from coming out of the shower.

Anyways…

Anyways, having sex with James bond can be dangerous. As is shown in this scene here…

…Yikes!

Yikes!

For you all who are unawares, this chick didn’t get a chance to read the “Time magazine” on the table, nor flick though those stacks of phone books. Poor girl. She has missed on on so much.

Well…

Life goes on.

Here he is flirting with his bosses secretary…

Flirting for fun and advantage.

Ah, there’s a lot of things happening…

And I don’t want to give away the plot.

But, I can give you a hint of things to come. There’s guns, sex, difficult situations, lasers, plans, evil, and airplanes.

Oh my goodness!

A lot of things happen from here to there.

There’s a guy , Asian no doubt, that has this decapitating hat, and he’s a sight to behold. The evil genus is a pug-like portly fellow.

However, things aren’t always tea and crumpets. Sometimes you can get hit on the head and wake up on a slab with a evil laser ready to cut you into two.

Not that I ever had THAT particular experience, don’t you know.

Things aren’t always tea and crumpets.

And on and on.

Oh! By the way. Do you all put up stockings for Christmas? We do. And we fill it with these little Japanese (actually Chinese, sold under a Japanese brand name) little figurines, and some healthy candy.

You do not have to spend a lot of money on Christmas. All you need to do is make it special for the ones you love.

And that, of course means left over turkey sandwiches…

Left over hot turkey sandwich.

This one looks like it uses English muffins, or grilled crumpets, potato bread with coleslaw, cranberries, stuffing, and turkey to make the delicious dish. I would add hot turkey gravy, myself.

Or, turkey soup..

A nice bowl of hot turkey soup.

And what is soup without some nice crusty bread and butter / cheese. Eh?

Here we see Bond and his latest newly acquired vixen friend trying to land a dangerously out of control airplane.

James Bond in Goldfinger

Of course, everyone is concerned.

You can tell that they are by looking at their expressions in the airport control tower.  It’s all a matter of high international importance!

James Bond in Goldfinger

But you know all ends well.

James Bond lands safely using a parachute, and he and his vixen friend decide to celebrate! You know, in ways that are relaxing, strenuous, and enjoyable.

Twenty minutes later, Bond is smoking a cigarette, and the Vixen (whose name is Pussy Galore – wonder if she lives up to the name) is adjusting her hair so the next great adventure.

A happy ending

James Bond in Goldfinger

Now wasn’t that nice?

If I were to host a movie party…

Obviously I don’t. My idea of a movie is a rare thing that I do as a special family time. But in the past I would host a movie “party”. But I used to do it. And if I were to do it again, I would project the movie big on the wall. (I used to do this, but the projector remains stolen. Sigh.)

And I would play some vintage  “Let’s go to the movie” cartoons, and about three or four vintage movie trailers. To get the entire scene going. Not to mention popping some popcorn for the proper smells of a movie theater.

If you are going to do something, why not go all out and make it special? Hum?

Now for some fun

Now for a real gold-finger girl. Video 2MB

And a Christmas girl…

Merry Christmas to you all from China. video 2MB

Sexy video 1

This video is so sexy! video 3MB

Sexy video 2

Man oh man! Sexy! video. 1MB

Sexy girl 3 plus a fine pussy.

How to make delicious gourmet cat food. OMG, and a kitty cat too! video 3MB

And some real deal fun . fun . fun.

Bouncy – bouncy – bouncy. Put it on a loop. Jeeze!

I could watch this all day. LOL. Video 1MB

Finally…

Spend time with your friends. Life is too short not to have fun. video 2MB

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Enjoying the 007 movie Dr No (1963) as a fine pastime with friends and family

Usually during Christmas I spend extra time to make the holiday a little bit special. One way that I do this is with rituals, and pomp. That means a Christmas tree, some decorations and music. I also like to wear a special Santa hat. Another way is with food. KFC, and hot ham and tomatoes on fresh bread. Mustard with sausages, and lots of cold cuts. And a third way is with movies. Not just Christmas movies, but some older movies just for the fun of it. Today, we will chat a little about a nice fine James Bond movie “Dr No” (1963).

It’s a classic, and I love it. Guys wearing tuxes, nice suit jackets, cavorting with pretty ladies who are wearing gowns, bikinis, or just a simple towel. And the gambling, alcohol and the cigarettes. Not to mention the occasional fist fight and small arms fire. Classic. It speaks to the man in me.

No CGI here. It’s mostly dialog and chatting.

I can really relate to this scene. Can’t you?

Why do women look so tasty when their hair is disheveled? And my oh my, why aren’t men wearing blazers any more. Look at now nice it fit him.

Simple blazer. Simple black tie. Simple blue-white shirt. All alone in a tropical bungalow. You can almost smell the tropical lushness, hear the ocean waves, and listen to the tropical birds out the window.

Oh, and my she does have nice shoulders. Doesn’t she?

Nice tux. With a nice thin bow tie. He looks good, don’t you think?

When a man wears a tux, all eyes should be on the lady that accompanies him. In this case she is wearing an eye-popping red dress with one shoulder exposed. It’s her best shoulder, I believe. Nice lips. Look at her lips. And by the way, those earrings are nice match for the dress. Lips, fingernails, dress all nicely coordinated.

She’s carrying a gold purse and lots and lots of gambling chips. My goodness!

Here’s a great shot showing all the cool gadgets 007 has. In this scene he is off picnicking and cavorting with a beautiful gal in a nice pattern bikini, while talking on a telephone in his car! Imagine that! A phone in the convertible. WOW!

Love those James Bond gadgets.

The phone plays a big role in this particular James Bond flick. You have phones in cars. Phones in hotel rooms. Phones in the rooms of the beautiful girls. Phones with the bad guys. Phones with the evil doctor. Phones in the 007 office and phones on the bed.

Nothing like making a quick call while you are discussing important matters in bed with the girl you just met.

Pack of cigarettes, and a notepad by the bed. Oh, how charming!

I once read that by wearing a tux, the perceived attractiveness of a man increase three points. (On a scale of zero to ten.) There’s something about a well made, well fitting, tux, with the clean lines and appearance that speaks to me. Too bad I never have any opportunities to wear my tuxes any more. The last time I wore it was at my father funeral.

I think that a tux is better reserved for seduction, personal enjoyments and pleasures. Who doesn’t want to look their best? And besides, any (American) policeman would think twice before pulling over or arresting anyone in a tux.

Doesn’t he look good?

The room decor seems a bit dated. For a while in the 1960’s everyone seemed to have paintings / pictures of clowns, cats with big eyes, and old fashioned cars. Don’t ask me why. It was a “thing” back then.

Like this…

Big eyed kids.

Yeah. I guess that you would need to have lived through that area to appreciate it.

I do love this next picture. He thinks he’s in control, but it’s really the woman who is controlling the entire scene.

This interplay is just great.

Hey! Do you all know what goes great with a nice James Bond classic movie? Aside from beer or wine?

That’s right.

Cheese, crackers, bread and cold cuts. My father used to make up a platter of these kinds of cheeses, sardines, olives, pickles, and crackers when he would watch a movie. It sort of looked a little bit like this…

Cold cut spread.

I suppose everyone is different. I hear that the preferred snack food in the States these days are Doritos, or Lays potato chips. I can understand why, but you all know that you need to have a decent dip with them to fully appreciate and savor the enjoyment of the food.

Now, when I was growing up, one thing that my father liked to do was eat Limburger cheese sandwiches with a big thick slice of tomato. Yeah, I guess it’s sort of a generational thing don’t you know. He also liked liverwurst. I ended up getting a taste for it myself, but only on sandwiches.

Liverwurst sandwich.

Anyways, Christmas is a time of many things. For me I really enjoy the movies, the food, the friends and the general atmosphere. It’s a chance to eat well, and to eat things that you enjoy. You know, most of the time people don’t give pickles a second thought, but at Christmas time, well that’s when all the dill pickles, the baby gherkins, and the Grandma’s butter chip pickles come out. Yum!

This next picture show some lousy bread, but some pickles and good selection of cheese. Personally I think that the ingredients are enough for one or two sandwiches max. Kinda skimpy if you ask me. But it looks good. Oh, yeah. Don’t forget the horseradish, the wasabi, the kielbasa, and  the various kinds of relishes that can be bought and found everywhere.

Sometimes you don’t always have the right ingredients on hand, so you make do.

i think that it’s really a great thing to do, don’t you know, to sit down with a glass of wine. Some fine cheeses, and watch an older movie. I really enjoy the older movies. they are not so adrenaline-rush run-run-run action packed CGI affairs. It’s full of personal interactions, gestures, and movements. It’s more intellectually stimulating.

And more so with wine, cheese, and olives.

Did I ever mention that olives go great with wine? I really think so. A fine green or black olive dip is just wonderful. You heat up some olive oil with some thin cut up olives and mushrooms. A little Italian spices, and then spread the olives and mushrooms on the french bread. Oh so tasty.

The you sit down and watch the interesting interplay on the movie.

I do love that phone. It was state of the art back then. See the nice rattan chairs on the balcony on the porch, and the Chinese themed dangling red ornamental lantern. Curious eh? I most especially love the shadow of the phone cord on her soft chest. Sexy but not overt.

Of course, I am an old man, and this lass was my mothers age. So I’m looking back in time. When this movie was made, we had Robert Kennedy in office, and he was talking about getting out of Vietnam and shutting down the military-industrial complex. As it was getting too powerful.

Well, we do know what happened to him, don’t we?

Here’s some lox and bagels. You see the salmon to the left, and a fine cream cheese spread. You put the cream cheese on the bagel. Then lox, then lemon, then tomatoes and onions. Don’t forget the olives. (I note some sliced hard boiled eggs. What an interesting turn of events!) The wine is not shown, but no matter. Maybe a fine glass of orange juice is near by.

A good movie serves as a perfect excuse to eat.

And speaking about Christmas, James Bond, food and movies… I will bet you all that the most festive places to spend Christmas at must be in a pub or a brasserie. I remember one Christmas (When I say Christmas, I actually mean the entire month of December, and into January.) I went to an Irish Pub. Wow! So very festive. Drinking pints. Singing songs. Eating bangers and mash.

Bangers and mash served with a good stout. Yum!

I think that there is something really magical and special about the pub environment. It’s something that never was present in the Untied States. Pretty soon, America will probably ban bars completely. You know follow in the footsteps of NZ in banning everything. You know. “For the children”. Sigh.

I can only imagine what it must be like in Scotland, Ireland or in the UK today. Chilly and damp, but warm inside the pubs. I tell youse guys that you are so fortunate to be where you are. Don’t take what you have for granted. It’s special.

Here’s the interior of a typical British pub. People are hanging out. Talking, chatting. Drinking beer. Not too much in the way of electronic media, eh? Nope. Just companionship, friendship and acceptance. I really love that.

British pub.

I hear that some pubs really get festive and decorate everything up. I have no first hand knowledge about that. What I do know is what I have seen on the internet, and some places do more than just put up a tree. They make it special.

Christmas themed pub.

There are pubs in Hong Kong, and some are very nice. I can imagine that there would be pubs all over the former British territories.  I haven’t gone to the pubs in Hong Kong in years, even though I can see Hong Kong from my living room. It’s the Coronavirus thing don’t you know.

British pub in Hong Kong.

Now in Australia, they have these things called a brasserie. They are not found in the USA because one reason or the other.  It’s hard to tell why. I happen to like them.

In France, Flanders, and the Francophone world, a brasserie is a type of French restaurant with a relaxed setting, which serves single dishes and other meals. The word brasserie is also French for "brewery" and, by extension, "the brewing business". A brasserie can be expected to have professional service, printed menus, and, traditionally, white linen—unlike a bistro which may have none of these. Typically, a brasserie is open Wednesday to Sunday and serves the same menu all day. A good example of a brasserie dish is steak frites. 

-Wikipedia

The last time that I was in Sydney, Australia it was near Christmas time, and I truly enjoyed the Brasserie’s there. Again, like a pub, it was cheery and festive and warm. It was a very comfortable atmosphere to hang out in and enjoy the time with friends or family.

Sydney Australia, Brasserie.

Anyways, one of the things about Christmas is that you can socialize and spend time at home too relaxing. Good food. Being around those that you care about. Talking. Chatting. Exploring. Listening. Man, I need to do more listening, I’ll tell you what.

And watching good movies that relaxes and stimulates. Like 007 James Bond.

James on the beach being warned by the locals of hidden dangers and adventure.

In Dr. No, James Bond travels to the Caribbean. Being well attired, he meets interesting and colorful people. He embarks on a mission to save the world from evil and their evil influences. All the time enjoying the company of the attractive lasses whom he meets along the way.

Typically, as I would watch this kind of movie, I would set a platter or a plate of food nearby to smunch and nibble with. During Christmas, I’m trying to assign special foods like French breads, chocolate, and peanut-butter.  Not to mention the aromas wafting from the kitchen of fresh bead in the bread making machine (fun fact, I helped design bread makers for Sunbeam-Oster) and simmering sauces on the stove with garlic, onions, spices and peppers.

Here’s a lox and bagel platter.

Salmon snack tray.

Or course, my household always has alcohol.

You know, I never drank as much as I do now prior to my “retirement”. After I was retired, I  pretty much said “Fuck this”. And stopped worrying about what other people thought. If I wanted to smoke, I smoked. If I wanted to drink, I’d drink. If i wanted to to spend some time in a bedroom with a new friend, I would. You know, the USA has so many restrictions on you, that you have to tear them off and say STOP!

Live life on your terms.

Like James Bond.

Jame Bond talking with his bosses secretary. I do love the tea set on the filing cabinet.

Most men like to imagine ourselves like James Bond. Wearing a tux. Going to interesting places. Eating good food, and drinking. Being the master of our world. Cavorting with pretty women, and making new friends every night.

Alas, most of us is something else. We are actually more like Bruce Willis in “Die Hard”. That movie resonated to me on all sorts of areas and for all sorts of reasons. Of course, one is simply because of my MAJestic role. But another is because I am really just a normal guy; a regular man.

That’s John McClane. (Bruce Willis).

Die Hard

It’s neither good or bad. It’s just that being Bruce Willis in “Die Hard” is far more painful than being James Bond in “Dr No”. It’s something that us men can relate to. It’s about life, and being thrown into situations that aren’t really what you ever intended to happen.

Which is why movies are great. All movies, if they are well done, can become something that you not only enjoy, but something that you can relate to on some level.

Like food.

Now, doesn’t this look tasty?

Move review of Dr No, on “Empire“;

The beginning of the super-successful franchise, this remains one of the most satisfying Bond films.  Connery, with only a hint of irony, is the suave secret agent, introduced at a gaming table while lighting an expensive fag, enjoying an expense account Caribbean holiday that must have seemed like  unparalleled hedonism to British audiences who’d only just got over rationing. 

The license to kill gets several endorsements as Bond efficiently and brutally sees off dastardly baddies who are threatening world peace, and – in another fantastical touch – Britain holds the key to the balance of power. 

Dr No, a German-Japanese genius with metal hands, is about as credible as Fu Manchu, but Joseph Wiseman mints all the Bond villain clichés, from the gorgeously-designed island lair (courtesy art director Ken Adam) with built-in nuclear power plant (and a then-famously-stolen portrait of the Duke of Wellington hung on the wall) through to purred threats and attempts to convince 007 to sell out and join his evil organization (‘I thought you had some style, Mr Bond, but I see you’re just a stupid policeman’).  And, of course, there’s Ursula Andress as prototypical Bond girl Honey Ryder, emerging from the seas in a bikini with a knife strapped to her thigh, with her own reasons for wanting to see Dr No’s scheme for world conquest thwarted. 

That twangy guitar theme and the gunsight-iris titles sequence are in place already.  Series regulars Bernard Lee (M) and Lois Maxwell (Moneypenny) make their debuts, but Peter Burton plays Q (to be replaced by Desmond Llewellyn) and Jack Lord is CIA agent Felix Leiter (to be replaced by a succession of stooges).

Here’s James Bond deep inside the secret lair…

I do love how the attractive woman gathers near to him. You know, I like her better in this dress than the bikini (with the knife strapped to her thigh).  Notice that she has her top button unbuttoned. That’s not how you wear a qu pao. But it is erotic.

What do you think of her hair?

In those days all the ladies wore their hair “bee hive” style. I think that she started the trend for flowing lions manes like Raquel Welch in “one million years BC.”

Jame Bond rides the elevator.

You know, as much as I love this movie, you have to admit that the women of the 1960’s were all stunners.

Here’s Raquel Welch. I personally think that she would have made a fine, fine Bond girl. Don’t you?

Raquel Welch

Well, the point here is that Christmas is a time of togetherness. And that means making friends, spending time with the friends and family that you do have, and that you spend the time eating, drinking and talking. Emoting and sharing.

Whether it is in a pub, or at home in a restaurant. It does not matter.

Now, I do have to admit that my little daughter is not so interested in these kinds of “grown up” movies. She is more apt to watch “Peppa Pig”, or some kid-oriented Christmas movie. So you have to take that into account.

Though, she really enjoys “Two Broke Girls”. Who figures?

But she also really likes to sit by me (MM) – her daddy, and taste what I am eating, and be next to me. As a two year old she has a short attention span, so it’s still a trial. But it’s a precious trial. it’s family. It’s togetherness. It’s special.

I believe that a good movie is best shared with friends, family, alcohol and lots of delicious food. Oh, and a cat or two as well.

Oh yes. Did I fail to mention that cats love snack trays as well.

What would your cats do to a snack tray with thin sliced meats, salmon, and sausages? Well, I can tell you that they would jup up, snag a tasty morsel and then scamper away with it. Especially the ham. My goodness!

James Bond eating with Dr. No, and enjoying a fine smoke. Not much on the table though. Fruit and wine.

I love that view of the underwater ocean behind Dr. No. Not only does he have a secret lair built inside a volcano, but it reaches deep down underground and has windows so that the staff can enjoy the ocean view. How thoughtful of him. You see, bad guys aren’t all that terrible!

Here’s another scene. I love the newspaper on the bed, and the rotary dial phone nearby. What’s with her wearing high heels to bed? Are those her house slippers? If so, where the fur lining? Oh, sometimes the 1960’s can be so very confusing to me, don’t you know.

I have always loved the simple white robe on a woman.

You know, eating all the foods while you watch these olde timey movies can put some weight on, and make your belly grow. You don’t want to look nine months pregnant with twins, do you?

The way to control this is to add some nice fruit. Pay the extra money and buy some fruits that you normally don’t buy. Like cherries, or duran, or grapes. Don’t let the cost dissuade you. Let Christmas be the time for “outrageous” purchases.

Notice the generous quantities of cheese and meats.

Of course, with James Bond, you will always have the guns and the violence. But in Dr. No it’s rather tame. Less than 50 people were killed, and the karate chops were all rather quick and simple. No matrix-style events, or Chinese flying warriors walking on tree tops here.

It’s all rather calm and relatable.

Hot gun action!

Nice grey suit. I do like the black tie with the grey suit. It fits him nicely. It’s a nice color combination, and the cut of the suit fits him. It’s well cut, nice thin material, it’s the tropics after all, and his hair is always in place. Must be the Brill-creme hair tonic.

Here’s another view. You know it must be sweltering on the beach, but James Bond is calm and composed. His nice jacket sways in the slight breeze, while the boat captain is sweating in his red tee shirt.

James Bond on the beach.

When you make up a food spread choose your foods carefully.

Don’t go for processed cheese spread. Use real cheese instead. Do not use cheap inexpensive margarine. Use real salted bread instead. Do not use cheap chocolate with fillers. Use real chocolate. Pay the extra money to make the holiday special.

And presentation is everything.

Ok, so you aren’t going to drink wine. You are going to drink coke instead. Well then, crush up the ice and fill a tall glass with crushed ice, then pour the coke into the hyper iced glass. Presentation is everything. Wine uses wine glasses. Whiskey uses thick glass base tumblers, and beer, well… an iced mug is precious.

We should all appreciate cheese.

And when you are enjoying the movie, taking the savory bites, and chatting with friends and loved ones observe. Observe what they are doing, and saying and what is going on in the movie. All sorts of little details will “pop out” at you if you just are mindful…

Evil villain in anti-radiation attire.

And enjoy yourself.

Smile, say only good things. Listen to what others want and GIVE IT TO THEM. No need to argue. SO what? Make their day special. It’s a good feeling. And if someone wants to sing Christmas carols, then sing along. Get the dog a barking, and the cats following with you all as your all parade around the house to “Frosty the Snowman”.

Live life.

Food done right. Live life on your terms.

Live life on your terms.

Live like James Bond.

James Bond.

And be your best.

Smile, be kind, be helpful and do what you can to make the season special for all those around you.

Christmas is not about buying gifts, but you know, if you have gifts to wrap up, go overboard. Like @old-wine has. My goodness!

Making Christmas special .

And if you are not so talented, like MM here, perhaps something simpler like a bunch of aluminum foil wrapped ham and cheese sandwiches that toast comfortably in the oven.

Have a great time with your loved ones.

Show your appreciation, and share a good 007 James Bond movie. You will enjoy it. I promise you.

Ham and cheese sliders.

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The art of Jacob Collins

Jacob Collins is a living artist that I consider to be very talented and quite the master of the medium. His works speak to me, and I would like to share them with you. This is a simple article where we enjoy the art for the sake of beauty and nothing much else.

Please let’s enjoy the beauty of his art, for the sake of enjoyment only. Consider how you feel when you look at the paintings. I find art to be satisfying to me personally.

His art speaks to me. Like this first painting.

Nantucket Pines

Nantucket Pines

Candlemaker’s Stove

Candlemaker’s Stove

Seated Nude

Seated Nude

Trequanda Hillside

Trequanda Hillside

Tracks in Snow

Tracks in Snow

Calle des Hornes

Calle des Hornes

Grimaldi in Studio

Grimaldi in Studio

Interior

Interior

Reclining Nude

Reclining Nude

Conclusion

Art isn’t a singular painting that some wealthy patron buys and hoards inside his house. It is everything.

It is the dew on the grass in the morning, to the sleek lines of your clothes iron. It is the smile on your pet’s face when it is napping after a meal, and the warmth of a pile of clothes out of the dryer on a cold, cold Winter day.

I just wanted to share these images with you all. I hope that you enjoyed them.

Have you ever wanted to try your hand at painting? It’s not hard. You watch a few Bob Ross videos and get started. It’s fun, and a great way to relax and pass the time.

I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Art comes in many forms. From cooking up a delicious meal, to planting a garden, to woodworking a fence or mailbox. I for one enjoy art in all it’s many forms.

I hope that you too appreciate art. Whether it is a painted image, or a delicious steak, or maybe a nice handmade rocking chair, or perhaps a hand made whimsy for your front yard.

Savor the creative aspects that lie inside of us all.

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And now on the light side; A look at the Pakistan military

Have you guys ever seen the pomp and ceremony that constitutes the army and military of Pakistan? Well you should. It’s a sight to behold. Here, we take a moment to watch some videos of the Pakistani military doing various things. I have found it very interesting. I hope that you do as well.

It’s not what you would think, and it looks like they are making things much more involved and difficult than they need to. But, perhaps that’s their culture. Don’t you know.

I think it’s all a hoot.

Firing Artillery

Impressive video. 3MB

Changing of the Guard

Also impressive, and a tad comical. So very British. Video 14MB

Military in action

Very organized. Must be very tiring. video 3.1MB

Conclusion

Watching the military conduct their procedures and maneuvers is far better than fighting them in a war. Don’t you think? What ever you might think of this bit and their actions, know that when it comes to fighting and using their weapons, they are nothing to take for granted. They are quite capable and serious. And I for one, applaud them.

I hope that you enjoyed this little glimpse at the nation wedged between India and Afghanistan.

Oh, and one more thing…

Be the Rufus

Here’s a compilation of videos where everyday people, show their appreciation to others. Mostly teachers, janitors, cooks, beggars, drivers, lorry-men, and so forth. Video 60MB

 

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

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A interesting collection of time capsules

When I was married to my first wife, she told me a story about what happened when her grandmother died. Once this 90-something woman died, the “children” all went over to her old house “on the hill” and started probate on the belongings. And there they discovered that there was a very large, and very heavy bureau that had been against the one wall for as long as anyone could remember. And when they emptied the bureau, and moved the heavy massive piece away, they discovered a locked door.

When they opened it, they found a child’s bedroom dating from the 1920’s all perfectly preserved.

Apparently, my wife’s oldest uncle told the story that when he was five years old, he and his older brother, who was six went out playing on the frozen river, and the older brother fell into the ice and died. Since he was so young at the time, he had forgotten about the older brother and the event, but the grandmother simply walled up the room. Closed the blinds, shut the drapes and never spoke of the lost son ever again.

Inside was the room just as the boy had left it. With clothing on the floor, an unmade bed. Toys about, and other things of that period such as books, cast metal toys, an an old baseball mitt and bat.

It’s a fascinating story, and one that comes up time and time again over the years.

  • Time capsules are purposely built to contain interesting and unique items meant to be uncovered at a predetermined date in the future. This can often be a century or more after the capsule is buried.
  • Unintentional time capsules are something else altogether as they are far rarer and only appear when least expected. These are places and items lost for a time. But when they are revealed, they showcase what life was like in the past.

Here we can look at some other time capsules as we explore this interesting subject.

Lost Purse From 1957 Discovered In 2019

In 1957, a young woman named Patti Rumfola was attending Hoover High School in Ohio when something terrible happened: She lost her purse. That stroke of bad luck for Rumfola turned into an incredible discovery in 2019 when her handbag was finally found by a custodian.

Unfortunately, it was a bit too late for Rumfola as she had passed away in 2013 at age 71. Still, the purse was found, and with some Internet sleuthing, the original owner was identified. The handbag was given to one of her daughters, who had the opportunity to peek into her mother’s life from 62 years in the past.[1]

The purse, which had fallen behind some lockers, ultimately became an unintentional time capsule filled with the kinds of items you might expect to find in a young girl’s handbag in 1957. There were several pristine tickets to her school’s football games, a couple of library cards, a photograph of one of her friends, a wallet, and a small amount of change. Each of her five children kept a penny from the purse to remember their mother.

The Town Of Bodie, California

Shortly before the US Civil War broke out, gold was discovered east of the Sierra Nevada mountains. By the late 1870s, the site had grown to become a boomtown called Bodie with some 10,000 residents. By 1915, the gold was gone, and people had to leave the town for good.

Bodie became an unintentional time capsule because it’s more than 2,500 meters (8,300 ft) above sea level. In the early 20th century, it wasn’t easy to get in and out of the little town. As a result, the residents left most of their possessions there as it was too expensive to have them hauled over miles of mountain trails.

In 1962, California State Parks stepped in to establish the ghost town as Bodie State Historic Park. It is preserved in an arrested state, so nothing is disturbed except for the occasional repair to ensure that a wall or roof remains intact.

The place is exactly what people envision a ghost town to be. But more than that, it’s a glimpse back in time to the Old West without the kitschy tourist traps found in places like Tombstone.[2]

Completely Intact Shoe Store Rediscovered After Half A Century

From the 1940s to the 1960s, the Fashion Shoe Shop stood as a staple mom-and-pop store. But it eventually shut down. Years later, it was bequeathed to a man who went by to see what the property looked like. He found a shoe store that had been shuttered several decades earlier.

The shop was something of a step back in time as the shoe store looked just as it had when the doors were locked years earlier. Instead of cleaning out an abandoned space, the new owner found a treasure in perfectly preserved vintage shoes. As the shoes were still inside their boxes, they were preserved without damage from dust, mold, or anything else.[3]

The time capsule was also filled with fashion from previous eras. In such well-preserved conditions, the items were worth quite a lot of money. In addition, the shop had a Victrola Credenza Talking Machine full of vintage records, a vintage stove, and more incredible finds from 40 years ago when the shop was closed.

Abandoned Home In Ontario Revealed A Link To The Past

Not every abandoned property is a decaying mess that people should avoid. Occasionally, a place will turn up something surprising, which is exactly what happened when a home in Ontario, Canada, was discovered by an urban explorer in 2013.

The home wasn’t in the best shape. But looking past the “usual smell of decay and years of abandonment” revealed a hidden gem showcasing how people lived in the 1960s when the property was abandoned.

Inside the home was a plethora of items from the 1960s and earlier, including several musical instruments, a shaving kit, a shoeshine polish kit, a cache of vinyl albums, cartons of food far beyond their expiration dates, furniture, books, clocks, televisions, a gramophone, a piano, jewelry, and two complete sets of polished silverware, which are worth their weight in . . . well, silver.

It’s unclear why the home was abandoned with everything left inside. But it helps to paint a picture of the people who lived there more than 50 years before the property was rediscovered.[4]

A Shop Boarded Up For 30 Years In Lancashire

Typically, when a shop goes out of business, its contents are sold, the building is vacated, and then it’s taken over by someone else. But something that seldom happens turned up in Accrington, Lancashire, in October 2008.

As builders were working in the area, they uncovered a shop that had been boarded up for at least 30 years. Instead of a decrepit empty space, they found a perfectly preserved corner shop and ice cream parlor. It was filled with items from the shop’s earliest days in the 1920s to products dating to the early 1970s.[5]

These included cigarette advertisements from the 1950s, a magazine that went through the day-by-day happenings of then Princess Elizabeth’s tour of Australia in 1938, old-fashioned sweet jars, and ice cream spoons. The original owners had left the property over 30 years earlier without removing the contents.

Paperwork found within the shop dated back more than 80 years. It indicated that the establishment had belonged to the Boyd family for several generations. The building was renovated, but the items were preserved by the developer.

A Victorian-Era Pharmacy Hidden For 80 Years In Somerset Village

In the early 1800s, John Wellington opened a chemist shop at South Petherton, Somerset. He also sold groceries. After John’s passing in 1845, the shop stayed in his family for more than four decades. Then it was sold to W.C. White in 1887.

White operated the shop’s chemist side until he died in 1909. Then his son and heir, Charles White, continued with the grocery business only. Charles wasn’t qualified to dispense medications, so the store’s chemist side was sealed behind a locked door.

Despite having several other owners, it remained that way until 1987. That year, the shop was sold and the locked door was finally opened. Inside was the chemist shop precisely as it had looked when it was sealed 78 years earlier.

The Victorian-era pharmacy was purchased in its entirety by Flambards Theme Park in Cornwall. The shop was moved and reestablished exactly as it had looked nearly a century before. Some items didn’t make the transition—but not because they were damaged.

Certain chemicals were now considered dangerous and deadly. They were confiscated by the British Home Office. But everything else has been perfectly maintained and preserved.[6]

A Long-Forgotten Closet Revealed A Treasure Trove Of Civil War Artifacts

In 2010, the former Carnegie Library in San Antonio, Texas, was undergoing some renovations when something unexpected turned up. The workers found a closet that had been walled up in the early 1950s. Inside, they discovered a treasure trove of artifacts dating back to the US Civil War.

More than 200 items were found in the closet. Although most were from the Civil War era, the oldest was a priceless copy of the 1615 King James Bible printed in London. Beth Graham, a spokesperson for the library system, described it as “in astoundingly good shape for being nearly 400 years old.”[7]

At least one document was dated 1861. According to Graham, another was “a proclamation by the Governor of New Mexico calling up the militia to repel Confederate raiders coming into the territory from Texas.”

Several magazines were dated 1952, which suggests that the closet was walled up before the building housed the Hertzberg Circus Museum in the late 1960s. The library staff cataloged the items and put them on display at the San Antonio Public Library.

Parisian Apartment Left Untouched For 70 Years Discovered In 2010

In 1942, as the Nazis invaded Paris, playwright Solange Beaugiron, the granddaughter of Madame Marthe de Florian, fled the city. Beaugiron left behind her apartment but continued to pay the rent until her death at age 91, almost 70 years later.

It is believed that Beaugiron didn’t return at all between 1942 and her death in 2010. So the apartment remained closed. Initially Marthe de Florian’s home, it was filled with opulent furniture and paintings. All of them remained untouched.[8]

The apartment was finally opened in 2010. Although it was an amazing unintentional time capsule of 1940s Parisian life, it also contained many valuable artifacts. One such item was a portrait of de Florian by Giovanni Boldini. It sold at auction for €3 million, a record for the artist.

Other paintings by famous artists, ornate furniture, a piano, a phonograph, and much more were uncovered in the apartment. Somehow, the place survived World War II without a scratch as did everything sealed inside.

Thomas Jefferson’s Lost Chemistry Lab Found Hidden Behind Wall

From HERE.

Conservators working at the University of Virginia’s Rotunda have inadvertently uncovered a chemical hearth designed by Thomas Jefferson. The discovery is offering fresh insights into how chemistry was taught over 200 years ago.

The iconic Rotunda, constructed in 1826, is located on The Lawn of the original grounds of the University of Virginia and is currently undergoing renovations. Inspired by the Pantheon in Rome, Thomas Jefferson designed it to symbolize the “authority of nature and power of reason” and the separation of church and education.

Back in 1895, a fire destroyed much of the building’s interior. But during the 1850s, the chemical hearth—part of an early chemistry classroom—was sealed in one of the lower-floor walls of the Rotunda, which protected it from the fire. Recently, while preparing for the current renovations, workers examining the cavities in the walls unexpectedly discovered the lost chemistry hearth.

Back in Jefferson’s day, chemistry was taught on the Rotunda’s bottom floor. His collaborator, professor of natural history John Emmet, taught the classes. UVA Today explains how it worked:

The chemical hearth was built as a semi-circular niche in the north end of the Lower East Oval Room. Two fireboxes provided heat (one burning wood for fuel, the other burning coal), underground brick tunnels fed fresh air to fireboxes and workstations, and flues carried away the fumes and smoke. Students worked at five workstations cut into stone countertops.

Brian Hogg, senior historic preservation planner in the Office of the Architect for the University, said the chemical hearth may have been for Emmet’s use; the students may have had portable hearths with which they conducted experiments.

“Back then, the different experiments would get different levels of heat from different sources,” said Jody Lahendro, a supervisory historic preservation architect for U.Va.’s

Facilities Management. “For some, they would put the heat source under a layer of sand to more evenly disperse and temper the heat.”

According to Hogg, this may be the oldest intact example of early chemical education in the United States.

The University of Virginia will put the chemical hearth on display once renovations are complete.

Now some other stuff…

All of this stuff is interesting and a curiosity. There is no question about that. But what about today? What about your life now? What about things, people, places, food, friends, drink, pets and other interests? Well…

…lucky for you all, I have some videos that I am gonna deposit here for your enjoyment. And as you look at them remember that those relics that you read about are from another person’s time; another person’s life. But this time; this life, is yours NOW.

Make it a good one.

Please contribute. Don’t disparage.

Check out this guy who used to ice skate when he was in elementary school, and then life carried him away. Now, for the first time in 50 years, he tries to ice skate again. Not so easy is it? video

Remember!

You are not your age. You are not your color, nationality, your style, your wealth. You are not your job. You are not your career or your education. You are very unique and you are very, very special.

Never forget that.

Here’s a video where a middle-school student discovers what her dad does for a living. It’s a bit of a shock, but you know what…? It doesn’t matter. video.

What the world needs now is more understanding; more humanity; and more kindness. Help others. Be the Rufus. Show understanding, compassion and kindness. Help others. And when someone is in need, help them.

video.

Finally…

Do not be afraid to volunteer. You can join the volunteer fire department, be an auxiliary in the police. Help in the local community. Volunteer at the food pantry. Go to the local humane society and just volunteer. Be part of the community. Smile. Make friends.

Act like a real Rufus does. Video.

 

I hope you enjoyed this article. Please have a wonderful day.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Advice for lonely women who cannot find a partner to live out their life with

I do love a delicious baked lasagna. It’s not like I can get it often. Here in China, it’s truly a rare thing.

A fine baked lasagna.

It’s great with a fine bottle of wine. Red wine. Dry red, would be lovely.

Though I do get to eat other kinds of food often enough instead. I think that food is something that needs to be savored. You know, most people, in most nations savor their food. unlike the United States (where I grew up) which was dash, grab, smunch, and return.

Meals should be shared. They should be savored, and they should be enjoyed.

Our health is determined not only by what we do, but what we eat and who we eat the foods with. A solitary life is unhealthy. It really is. I know, I have been solitary on and off for much of my life. I didn’t like it then, and I sure as heck don’t now.

Your weight, I strongly believe, correlates on HOW you eat, WHAT you eat, and WHO you eat with. If you want to trim down, then start going out more with friends and savoring the food.

Isolation is toxic.

Most MM readers are older, and are or have been married. Never the less, every now and then I get a email or a message from someone who is alone and very lonely. I have been there before, and so I just cannot sit by and let this pass.

This is me, ol’ MM, dishing out advice.

I’m going to be straight and honest, and abrupt. And I might upset some people. I apologize for that. I guess that this is my way to plow through a bunch of fears and bullshit, and tell you all things that are truthful. I hope that it connects and changes someone’s life for the better.

Background

This article was inspired by this letter…

I’m almost 32 and still a virgin. I can honestly say I don’t feel human. I hate to admit this but suicide seems more and more like a viable option as every day goes by.

The worst thing is when I try to reach out for help. I don’t know why I am a masochist and try to get advice from my mom…. I told her that I am desperate for a relationship and can’t find one. Her answer was that I should pray to God that I lose my feelings of wanting a relationship. Implying that I should give up and not try.

She even told me that one of her friends had a relative my age and they suggested setting us up. She told me that she said to them “I wasn’t interested”…. not that I would actually want to have someone set me up with a stranger but…. really??? Most moms are dying to help their daughters with this. Mine seems to get a KICK out of sabotaging me and not wanting me to just find someone.

And I was talking to my mom last night and brought up the idea of liposuction. Cue a huge fight between the two of us. I am not overweight but I do have a few odd body proportions that I think make me unappealing…. It’s like an affront against nature for me to try to improve my chances of finding someone. Literally the world turns on me the moment I think of maybe being alluring. Almost every other woman can have her moment, but when I get ideas of trying to be pretty? It’s like I murdered someone. I am now reeling after this conversation, wondering what types of rope would be best to hang myself with.

I don’t know how to navigate life and frankly, killing myself is less of a horrible idea every day. I know that it’s a “permanent solution to a temporary problem” but my situation feels like I am trapped and there is no other way out. People reading this, can you blame me for wanting this to end?

It is unbearable being someone like me, who wants a relationship but can never have it. I am not human. I’m not even sure I should be alive.

I’d almost think of losing my virginity to a prostitute but frankly that would just be me adding to a larger problem of abuse. I’d rather not do that. Frankly, there is no future for me. I am starting to plan out suicide methods at the same time most women are planning baby showers and weddings. I am toying with the idea of going out into the snow during winter and just falling asleep. There is something dignified about just falling “asleep” in the snow. Maybe nobody would find me and it would be a mystery as to what happened to me.

I’ve lost hope.

And, it hurts.

I know it hurts. It really hurts.

So I am going to talk as a man, who appreciates women.

[1] There is a man for every woman.

The very first thing that YOU must understand is that there is a Mr. Right out there, somewhere for you.

This is a TRUTH.

This is an undeniable truth.  Somewhere, out THERE, is a guy that is just like you, wanting to share his life.

It’s just that he is not available in your area, with the group of friends that you have, or anywhere near your school, industry or day to day activities.

Hell, I didn’t get to go out with girls / women (myself) until I started getting out of the male-dominated schools, industries, and societies that I frequented. I had to break out of the little close knit life that I had.

You might have to break out from your normal circle of friends to find him. You might have to go out further to find him. You might even have to employ an agency, or travel overseas to find him…

…but find him, you will.

I am convinced that there is a man for every woman simply because I have been exposed to so many men who all have such a wide array of tastes and interests. Many of the women who I wouldn’t be that interested in would really cause some of my male friends to just fall madly in love.

For instance, I am not interested in a woman who is taller than I am. It’s a personal taste. I just feel very odd looking up to a woman, and having to stand on my tippy-toes to kiss her. But that is just me. However, when I have mentioned to this to other men, I find that a goodly 25%, or one in four counter with “so what?” they argue (for the most part) that sex would be great; that our kids would be either fashion models or basketball players, and that all the other guys would think that I was a “stud” because I was with such an extraordinary woman.

I am also freaked out by Polydactylyism. But that is again, just me. It’s not that I am revolted by it, it just seems a little odd to me, and I don’t know if I can focus on the relationship if the woman had eight fingers on each hand. I’d always be wondering what our children would be like.

But on the other hand, a person’s kindness, confidence, experience, ability to communicate and participate in my interests, food, and just being fun goes a long… long way in me wanting to spend time with them.

[2] Men are attracted to a wide variety of shapes, and sizes.

I know I am.

There is NO SUCH THING as being too fat, too “thick”, too thin, too ugly, or too short. Nor is there too old, or too young.

I will tell you that, me personally, I generally have an upper limit on size for a woman that I am interested in. If she is bigger, wider or heavier than I am, I tend to lose interest. It’s NOT that I don’t like thick or fat people, it’s that I lose my interest in them as my interest lies towards smaller women than I am.

But I am not the average.

I have discovered, to my GREAT surprise, that many American men love bigger women. The urban ethnic folk call it “having booty”, and they absolutely go “ape shit” over a bigger voluptuous woman. I mean, really! And they are beyond themselves in how they react to the bigger women. And I mean it, too. The bigger… the better!

Like… really big… is really great. They just love a “pear shaped” woman.

Me, well, robust busty woman with big hair, big smile, and big shoulders are a turn-on. And I am not alone.

And I can see their point of view. I once dated a woman who was much larger than I was, and she had the nicest personality, she loved to cook and I ate well, and Lordy did she have an awesome chest. Purely amazing! So, this one woman altered my perceptions of what I like and favor in a woman. Who would have thought?

So, no matter what you size is… tiny, petite, slim, slender, curvy, athletic, rotund, bouncy… etc, you would be surprised at how others might find you to be attractive. And that is in everything. You NEVER know.

So accept yourself.

Just. As. You. Are.

[3] Stop trying to please your friends

When I was in High School there was a girl that was infatuated with me, and everyone at my work just hassled me and hassled me, and hassled me over it. They kept on saying how ugly she was. Well, I didn’t think that she was ugly, and she sure as heck had a “rocking body”, but I didn’t go out with her after the few precious dates. It wasn’t that I didn’t like her, it was that I hated the non-stop hassling at work, about how ugly she was.

She wasn’t ugly. I thought she was rather strong and handsome in a very womanly way. Like Loni Anderson.

But I listened to the asshole co-workers. Oh, how I regret that decision. Oh, how I lament my ignorance, and my piss-poor decision making ability!

Then one of those co-workers went out with her and they ended up getting married. And I remained single.

Single as in alone with no dates, at all.

Opportunist, jackass, asshole.

She wasn’t ugly. And she had a very appealing body shape. And I didn’t end up with her, even though she was really interested in me. Why?

It was because I listened to my friends and co-workers.

I often think of her. I often wonder what my life would have been if I spent some time with her. i often wonder what it would do to me, and affect my personality, but I never got that chance. I was young and I was a fool. I didn’t know any better. I made mistakes.

But I learned.

Slowly. Unfortunately.

As you get older, you learn that the opinions of others DO NOT MATTER when it comes to your own personal happiness. So shut them off, and go ahead and go after what YOU want. Stop trying to please others.

This goes to both men and women.

On another occasion, I was on a date where my (then) girlfriend brought two of her girlfriends along. I liked the girl. She liked me, but both of her girlfriends disapproved of me. And that was it. Who knows what kind of relationship we could have had. But I do know one thing, it went nowhere because her friends did not like me. I failed in pleasing three girls. I thought that pleasing one would have been enough.

Lesson learned.

Do not listen to your friends. Listen to your heart. Video.

[4] The most important thing that attracts a man is confidence.

It’s the same for women. Isn’t it?

I do not want you all to confuse being aggressive with confidence. I mean being comfortable with you you are, and what you are doing. Confidence. It’s such a turn on. In fact, many men will not ask a confident woman out on a date because they are afraid that she would say “no”.

So be very careful with this power.

You need to be who you are. Be comfortable with your good and your bad traits, and accept them. Think of yourself as a a nice comfortable pair of jeans. Just accessorize yourself as need be and as the occasions arise.

Myself, I am clearly a comfortable tee-shit kind of man, with a clean pair of jeans, and some well worn, but well tended for loafers.

Who are you?

A confident woman, would be able to throw on a dress, put on a thin foundation and some light makeup and run out the door in some low heels without a second thought. Are you that kind of woman?

Be confident on who you are, and what you are. Spend time with friends, and cherish the time with them. Share. Laugh. Enjoy a good drink and good food, and NEVER, ever, ever make a man feel uncomfortable around you. Men are attracted to confident comfortable women. That’s a fact. Video.

Ask any KTV hostess. They will tell you who the most popular girls are. They are the ones smiling, and joking around. Not the ones that are “beautiful” or who “look like fashion models”.

Fact.

This poor girl needs some confidence…

Important day tomorrow yet here I am. I would try to make myself more palatable/acceptable to people by being extra nice to them. Try to please them. At least let’s be the sweet ugly girl than bitter ugly b**ch I thought. No surprise but it doesn’t work. People just walk all over you and don’t treat you well still.

I tried to be cold, strong and someone who stands their ground but I couldn’t. The thing is, my voice gets shaky easily during confrontations and it immediately turns to full on bawling. I once lowkey embarrassed myself in public by crying like that.

So here I am, total people pleaser, doormat, someone who’s taken advantage of, always ditched, flakes out on and yet I take it without standing up once for myself. I hate it. I resent people because I end up giving more than what I get from them. I lost count the times I said sorry when I didn’t have to.

Since I never had good friendships since 17 or so, I don’t know how a healthy adult friendship is supposed to be. I don’t know what to expect, I’m in constant worry “is it okay to share this? Am I burdening this person?”. I never had friends (both online n irl) who I could go and vent to. It feels as if no one will ever understand me and support me.

I’m tired and lonely af. I feel vulnerable and weak.. I’m crying my eyes out as I write this.

Confidence. It’s very important. video.

Do you know what is missing?

Yeah. A smile.

How about this confident woman, instead…video

Or this lovely lass. See how her personality comes out when she smiles… video.

[5] Have a Passion.

So please find out what you love. What are the things that you can go on and on talking about? Food? Dogs? Cats? Horses? Houses? Furniture? Fashion? Televisions Shows? Alcohol? Hunting or fishing? Politics?

Cast iron miniatures?

Gardening? Crafting? Cooking? Trees? Novels?

Find out your passion, and then find a man what has the same passion. You would be surprised. Yes you would.

You see, men are interested in COMPANIONSHIP.

If your passions match that of a man, then he will over look any of your (perceived) faults and really show an interest in you. You see, men are not looking for 100% perfection. They want 50%, and they will work on the other 50% to meet you half way.

You will be amazed at how they will not be able to see the imperfections that you are so worried about. And you will end up scratching your head at the things… the everyday things… that you do that really “turn him on”.

Something as silly as this video, perhaps.

And…

Here’s a woman who loves to cook. Being able to cook well is on my top personal requirements, and this gal is cooking bacon with peppers, onion and garlic. OMG! video.

I used to date (well we actually lived together) with a very attractive fashion model. I mean she was gorgeous. And though she was amazingly beautiful and we did eventually break up, the thing that attracted me to her was our shared love of poetry. And there she would sit listening to me read my poetry over coffee and absorb it all in.

I loved that.

Alas, she had faults that I could not bear, but that is immaterial. What attracted me to her was our shared passions.

From HERE

Max was peeved. “I am so sick of boring profiles on the dating sites. The first thing people want is to hold hands and walk with someone at sunset on the beach. The second thing is to cuddle up on a couch and watch TV. Why can’t they think of something more interesting?”

I explained to Max that this yearning for sharing quality time is a universal because it reflects close companionship. This is what we all need and desire. It’s especially vital for older folks who must move at a slower pace and have the opportunity to savour shared quality time.

“But I’m not slow!”, declared Max. “At 68, I can keep up with the 40 year olds when we cycle round the bay on Sunday mornings. I want the companionship of a woman who can ride her bike with me at least for two hours into the country and pitch a tent an enjoy the peace and quiet of the bush”.

Where Max wanted active companionship, John was different. He was the film buff who enjoyed nothing more than holding hands with his woman for a film-fest and then having dinner and debriefing the film.

Both men could find their ideal companion. The significant thing about companionship is that there’s no “have tos” – it’s just time shared where you feel bonded and content.

But is companionship better than sex? It’s actually expressed in good sex!

Trust is an essential ingredient of companionship and trust is essential for good sex.

Kevin believes that love is also essential for good sex. He said, “Sex is empty without love. Sure the physical sensations are exciting and pleasurable but it dissipates quickly and leaves in its wake a sense of longing for what was missing. If loving intimacy is missing I feel both sad and upset during the act, like I’ve used the other and abused my own values – a vacuum forms and I feel it in the pit of my stomach – and in my heart. When everything is in place though and sex is love-making – there is nothing that compares!”

Seniors can be sexual in order to express affection, passion, love, loyalty and appreciation of life as opposed to merely a sexual release.

I acknowledge that some older folks become very limited in being able to engage in enthusiastic love-making. For them, non sexual touch is also magical. An arm around a loved one, a small caress on the back or a brush along the cheek with the back of hand are affirming, reassuring and reflect a partnership where the couple are caring companions.

To be truly loving, a relationship would need to work on a number of levels – spiritual, mental, physical, emotional. All of these are intricately interwoven and in balance, with caring companionship, can enhance longevity and quality of life.

[6] Change what you don’t like.

If there is something that you don’t like about yourself, don’t tolerate it. Change it.

As we get older, our faults become deeper and more ingrained. Our problems multiply, and our issues become real personality faults. Change what you cannot bear.

  • For some people it is their job.
  • For others it is their negative friends, or their over-bearing family.
  • For still others it is their appearance.
  • What ever it is that bothers you… change it.

We haven’t been taught to change things, but rather to deal with them; to accept them. And that generates anxiety and worry…

We have been worrying ever since we were little about making people angry or disappointed. These are worries that negatively affect us and are not at all beneficial for us.

Are you the type of person that thinks that they worry too much? Have you ever thought that you worry more than others? If that’s so, it’s time for you to change that situation, because you probably don’t like it, right?

Not worrying excessively doesn’t imply that we’re free of worrying, but it does mean we should learn to not give it as much importance as we currently are.

Many of the worries that currently hassle us are pretty silly. Do they really deserve all of our attention? Everybody else doesn’t give them their full attention, you shouldn’t either. Start changing today.

It’s incredible how much your life can change when you decide to change how you think. There are many things that have been instilled in us from our childhood, considerations that torment us when we become adults because something is just simply not working.

So do not worry about the things that you don’t like. You change them into something that you DO like.

If it is your weight, then you can exercise, and change your eating habits. I did not say diet. I said change what your eat, how much you eat, when you eat and all the rest.

If it is your shape, and exercise won’t do it, then sculpture your body.

If it is your outfits, clothing or whatever, you have the power to change it. Bleach away the old and embrace in the new.

[7] Don’ t force the change, embrace it.

Never force things. Always adapt to them.

Maybe you wish to be slim and petite, but you are tall, chunky and robust. No problem. Embrace it. Personally, I like robust women. But you need to know how to wear the proper clothes and how to carry yourself. Here’s some more robust girls that are fine with tight clothing.

It’s the same with me. If I wear tight fitting clothing, I need to exercise on my push-ups and sit-ups to make my frame fit the clothing. Otherwise, I look like an old man with a pot belly so big that it looks like I am nine months pregnant.

So what I do is wear bigger clothing, looser clothing. I just look like a regular guy. You cannot tell that I wear size 2xxL, instead of a M.

This trick is the same with women. Now some more robust women can wear tighter clothing and “pull it off”, but it’s difficult.

Video.

Accept who you are. Then adapt your lifestyle to fit. video

The rule is a simple one.

Tight clothes go on thin bodies. Loose clothes go on thick bodies.

The thicker, or fatter you are, the looser the clothing should be.

The girl below has a “barrel” shaped body, but look how absolutely gorgeous she looks in the nice wide flowing dress. She displays her best features; hair, eyes, cleavage, shoulders, and minimizes the things she doesn’t like.

The heavier you are the looser the clothes should be.

So maybe you wore tight fitting clothes when you were in your teens, today, being twice that size means that you must adapt with the changes and adapt to the newer, more mature you.

Don’t live in the past.

Accept who you are right now.

This is how good a plus sized woman looks when she is wearing roomy clothes that fit her. WOW! Video.

[8] Good enough is good enough

Don’t wait for the perfect relationship to come. Go forth and make friends. One day, one of those friends will end up being the guy that you would like to settle down with. For some people this is quick, but for others it takes a lot of time. Don’t rush it.

Friends first.

Then something better later on, if you want.

Don’t look for perfection. Just look for friends. Given enough friends, you will be able to find the very special person, but the important key is getting out there and meeting him.

Remember; perfection is an ideal. It is not actually possible to obtain.

Do not seek perfection in yourself or in others. It will only cause you heartache and despair. Accept things, people and situations as they are. Not as you want them to be.’

It’s called being pragmatic.

[9] Turn off your preconceived notions.

Men are men.

Women are women.

Cats are cats.

If you think that you are going to change a cat to fit your lifestyle, then you are wholly mistaken. The same is true with just about every other animal, and that includes men and women.

If you are looking for a mate then get to know them first. Over time they will change to fit your needs, and you will change to fit their needs. You do not need to force this as it will happen naturally. But what you do need to realize that in a loving relationship, there is always room to grow… to expand… and to accept.

Be realistic about what men are, how they think, and what their desires are. It is neither a 14 year old teenager’s fantasy, or a feminist nightmare. It is something else entirely.

[10] What a man REALLY wants in a relationship.

I have a post on this. And it boils down to the simple rule of “best fit”.

There are about ten major things that a man looks for in a woman. If you can meet most of those items, you can definitively snag yourself a good decent man that would make a fine husband.

But if just meet the top three, you have a very good chance at a mutually sustaining long-term relationship.

Remember this simple fact; Men play the percentages.

Go here, for the detailed article…What Men Want

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[11] Be the best YOU that you can be.

Be clean. have nice habits. Dress in clothes that fits you. Avoid bad people, toxic people, and horrible bosses.

Be kind. Show compassion. Take the time to make others happy. Participate in your community and always do good things.

Be the Rufus. Video.

Not convinced? Here’s six minutes of being a Rufus, and showing compassion. video. 256MB.

Still not convinced? Here’s another three minutes of being a Rufus and showing compassion. video. 78MB

[12] Desperate times call for desperate measures

Forget about the free dating sites. (Or almost free computer dating sites.)

Go to a professional and pay the money.

Get a real assessment of your chances in obtaining dates and meeting desirable men. You will be surprised with the results. If they are good, they will help you and perform an entire “package image makeover”. They are worth their weight in gold.

[13] Smile

A smile is everything. video

The world might be falling apart, you might be ugly and have the body of a whale, but your smile will be what people will remember.

Never forget that.

Make a difference by smiling big and huge and radiating for the entire world to see.

[14] Nothing lasts

You might believe that you have found Mr. Right, and for a set period of time everything is just great. But over time, people learn, change, adapt and all sorts of things happen. For many of us, it means that often we all change. And when we change, we tend to move in different directions and our relationship might become strained.

There is nothing good or bad about this. It is just the way life is. You need to accept it, and realize that you have a window or an opportunity to get the best that you can in life. Accept what you have right NOW, and realize that things… all kinds of things can upset that perfect balance that you are living. So enjoy it. Savor it, and by all means NEVER compare yourself to another person.

Conclusion

I think that this gal is going to take some of my advice. In any event she has moved on, and MM is just a stepping stone on her life road. I hope that I performed some beneficial role in it. She said thank you and moved on. And that was that.

Don’t get caught up in the “woe is me” syndrome.

What ever you do, keep in mind that you are perfect as you are. Improve upon your perfection, and seek out others who share your interests. Get out, and go forth into the world with confidence and gusto.

Do not try to live up to the expectations of others, just know that somewhere out there is someone who understands you. Seek them out.

And know that you might have to travel a bit to find this person. Do not be afraid. Take the fist step in a journey that will continue for the rest of your life. I believe in you.

Do not try to live up to the expectations of others, just know that somewhere out there is someone who understands you. Seek them out.

Do you want some more?

I have more posts in my Relationship Index here…

Relationships

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Long term strategies for stringing affirmation Intention campaigns together

In this article we will look at different techniques, tricks and things that you can do to improve your affirmation campaigns so that they all fit together into one unified strategy. This article is one of strategy and long-term planning so that you can manifest your desires over time.

For those of you who are unaware of what this subject is all about, I would suggest visiting the Affirmation Prayer Campaign Index here…

Intention Campaigns

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What many people do

When most people conduct affirmation campaigns they do so “on the fly”. When they collect and acquire their affirmation statements, they do so with the knowledge of what they desire at that particular moment in their life line. Not realizing that the way to achieve long term substantive changes is through long term strategies.

That’s what I have done. And it has caused me problems “down the road” as I got older.

You need to construct a strategy that includes both your immediate short-term objectives along with a master grand plan for eventual objectives to be realized. Noting that long term strategies are the end result of years of directed thought.

The importance of a grand strategy

I strongly believe that any grand strategy much include the simplest narratives of contentment. Think in terms of you being an old person. What would you want, and then incorporate those primal elements inside of every one of your campaigns. Such as…

  • I have a calm and peaceful life.
  • I always eat well, and the food is delicious and healthy.
  • I am in good health. There are no medical issues or problems.
  • I am happy, contented, and live a full enchanted life.
  • I never worry about money, taxes, bills, or encumbrances.

If you have these affirmations in your campaign, then you can guarantee that you will achieve them in your later years. After all, thirty, forty, or fifty years of directed affirmation campaigns will absolutely manifest these things.

Keep an awareness that you will change over time

Our experiences change us.

Our experiences change us.

The man that I was when I was in university is not the man who I am today. That man who worked in the steel mills is not the man I am today. That man who worked in corporate America is not who I am today. My experiences changed me, and yours will change you.

Affirmation campaigns generate new experiences for you. And as they generate, they will change you. Understand and expect that.

Embrace it.

Mapping the campaigns

I have often resorted to, or utilized topographical terrain maps to illustrate the MWI. They are effective ways to see where you are going and the problems that you will encounter.

I use topographical terrain maps to illustrate the MWI.

But a mind concept differs substantially from actual event experiences. So how can you peer into your future to see what “mountains” and hurtles lie ahead of you?

Well, the answer is easy.

You add phraseology to manifest that knowledge, second sight, and ability. May I suggest the following…

  • I have the ability to sense the MWI “mountains” that lie on my life-path, and take immediate measures to make sure that they are avoided.

Sign posts / tell-tales

You might want to inject “sign posts”, or “tell-tales” into your affirmation campaigns to make sure that you are on the right trajectory, and not getting sidetracked on other issues. These are little “markers” or events that you will know when you see them, to reaffirm that you are on the right path.

These little “markers” differ person to person, but the one thing that they all have in common is that you would recognize them.

  • They could be a sequences of numbers or letters.
  • They could be a string of automobile license plates.
  • They could be a kind of food, or a deja vu moment.
A deja vu moment.

To incorporate these kinds of “sign posts” you need only add them into your campaign. Such as…

  • Periodically, sign-posts or tell-tales are provided to me to reaffirm that I am on the correct vector path to achieve my goals dreams and objectives.

Putting it all together

In order to incorporate a grand strategy in your individual affirmation prayer campaigns, you need only add a few phrases to your campaigns. These phrases will assure that a final goal can be realized, and that sign-posts are provided to you along the way as you move ahead on that path.

Plan your adventure with the affirmation campaigns all lined up into a singular unified goal and objective.

You can conduct prayer affirmation campaigns as you would normally conduct them, it’s just that by adding a few extra affirmations you are now part of a much larger theme and objective. Great going you!

Recording your journey

I always try to record my life in a series of notebooks and journals.

Recording your adventure.

Over time they get displaced or lost, and for the last twenty years they have been all electronics, with their destruction a matter of the collapse of hard drives and computer malfunctions. Never the less, it is always enlightening to read your entries from six months ago, one year ago, two years, ago and so on and so forth.

You can actually see how your life has changed and has adapted.

Conclusion

This was just a short article. Please everyone keep conducting your affirmation prayer campaigns and working to improve your life so that you can be the best that you can ever possibly be. I believe in you.

I hope that all of this will be beneficial to you on a very personal basis.

A final note.

To facilitate your successful implementation of your goals, intentions and prayers, it is always beneficial to be the Rufus in everything that you do. video. 130MB

Do you want more?

I have more posts related to this in my Affirmation Campaign index here…

Intention Campaigns

More Links

Master Index

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News and stuff a collection of tidbits

Well, here’s some stuff for thought. I’m going to be all over the place here. With Scotland, China, the United States, food, girls, and being a Rufus all thrown together to make a disjointed point about being a human and showing humanity. So enjoy my ramblings and take a nice stroll in MM land here today. I hope you all enjoy it.

We start off with America

America’s Judges Are Putting My Life on the Line

Sara Nelson [New York Times, via Naked Capitalism 11-12-2021]

America needs more judges who understand and support the rights of workers. For too long, the courts have sided with corporations over labor, fundamentally and perniciously reshaping American law, life and liberty. Today, they are doing their part to unravel the American dream — and the social contract that has been in place since the 1940s, offering the working class a good life if they spend 40 hours on the job, the means to enjoy it in off hours and a secure retirement.

In one stark example, a judge in Alabama in October barred union mineworkers from picketing within 300 yards of mine entrances, even as the authorities there have failed to charge the drivers of vehicles that struck lawful picketers. In a more common infringement of free speech, a judge in Iowa limited United Auto Workers picket lines outside a John Deere plant in Davenport last month to just four people at each entrance to the plant….

This didn’t happen by accident. Republican presidents have stacked the federal courts with judges who hail from elite law schools, white-shoe law firms and corporate boardrooms. (More than a quarter of all federal judges on the bench in January had been appointed by Donald Trump.) As a result, the corporate win rate in American courts is sky-high.

This is especially true in cases heard by the Supreme Court, which has sided with the Chamber of Commerce 70 percent of the time since 2006. A study published in 2013 ranked Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas among the five most-corporate-friendly members of the court since 1946, and the pro-corporate voting rate of its conservative wing is only growing. According to one recent report, the court agrees with the Chamber of Commerce more now than it had at any other time in recent history….

This isn’t just an academic question, or even an economic one — it’s often a matter of life and death. Before he joined the Supreme Court, Neil Gorsuch, as a judge on the Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, voted to allow the firing of an employee who abandoned an unheated company truck in a blizzard to avoid freezing to death. This is just one example of the judicial callousness toward workers that has put our livelihoods and lives in real danger.

How Other Nations Pay for Child Care. The U.S. Is an Outlier.

[New York Times, October 6, 2021, via The Big Picture 11-7-2021]

Rich countries contribute an average of $14,000 per year for a toddler’s care, compared with $500 in the U.S.

GRAPH

The truth HURTS. Exceptional, my ass!

The carnage of mainstream neoliberal economics

Yves Smith, November 10, 2021 [Naked Capitalism]

Broken chain of supply

We chartered a boat with a logistics expert to look at port congestion up close and saw how American greed is leading to shortages and empty shelves

[Business Insider, via The Big Picture 11-7-2021]

A second tour of the The Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. “‘I blame 150 years of supply chain optimization,’ Nathan Strang, Flexport’s director of ocean trade lane management, told Insider of why ships are still steaming towards Los Angeles and Long Beach. ‘It’s a sign of their success, that’s causing the congestion.’”

….the ports can’t just stack up the containers until a driver comes to pick them up: “There’s no space,” Rice said…. “A lot of the congestion is due to the fact that there’s nowhere to put the empty containers.” Flexport’s Strang said. “Having some way to get those empties stored and off the chassis so that we can pick up live containers, that would actually go very far.”

American GREED. Stop blaming China.

How American leaders failed to help workers survive the ‘China Shock’

[NPR, via The Big Picture 11-7-2021]

But most economists, like most American leaders, had believed that workers would adapt somewhat smoothly to economic change and that they would find solid places to work in other sectors. “We had this notion that the American economy is this incredibly dynamic place,” says Hanson, an economist at Harvard Kennedy School. “We create millions of jobs every year, and we destroy millions of jobs every year. 

We thought we could handle moving a couple of million manufacturing workers from one sector to another.”

Autor, Dorn and Hanson’s first peer-reviewed papers from their China Shock saga were published in 2013. The economists found that between 1990 and 2007, trade with China killed about 1.5 million American manufacturing jobs, or about a quarter of all manufacturing jobs lost during that period. 

But what was even more startling: These losses were heavily concentrated in small- and medium-size communities dotting America’s heartland — and workers who lost their jobs in those areas struggled to find other work. The China Shock created what looked like miniature Great Depressions in these places.

Standard economic theory said that the non-college-educated workers who lost their jobs would move or retrain and find work in other places or sectors. But they didn’t. 

Most stayed put and were never fully employed again. “It ended up creating these pockets of distress,” Hanson says. “That was the surprising part. That’s what we economists didn’t know was going to happen.”

As Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wrote in 1791: 

Experience teaches, that men are often so much governed by what they are accustomed to see and practice, that the simplest and most obvious improvements, in the [most] ordinary occupations, are adopted with hesitation, reluctance and by slow gradations … To produce the desirable changes, as early as may be expedient, may therefore require the incitement and patronage of government…

Too bad Hamilton is not required reading for economics students…

Bill Mitchell — When labour shortages just signal management caprice

[via Mike Norman Economics 11-9-2021]

I have been researching the so-called labor shortage that business types are talking about relentlessly as part of their on-going strategy to undermine the conditions of work and make more profit. 

In the course of that inquiry, I came across an interesting juxtaposition between two US companies that illustrate a lot of what we have known about for years but have allowed this relentless, neoliberal, race-to-the-bottom to obscure. 

Well-paid workers with job security, work better and are happy workers. 

Companies that pursue the ‘race-to-the-bottom’ strategy and seek to build profits by trashing the conditions they offer workers eventually struggle to prosper because their bad reputation undermines their ability to attract productive workers. 

In the case we discuss today, the so-called ‘labor shortage’ is really just a signal of management caprice. 

Rather than being a shortage of workers, there is a shortage of workers who will tolerate the indignity of low wages, onerous conditions and capricious management. 

It is also a union versus non-union type of discussion where the unionised work places generate high productivity and worker attachment, while the non-unionised workplaces find it hard to attract reliable staff and blame it all on ‘labor shortages’….

It’s all over the “West”. The capitalist democracies are all falling apart.

They’re not capitalists – they’re a criminal predatory class

[International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, via Mike Norman Economics 11-10-2021]

No shit! Dick Tracy.

David Dayen, November 12, 2021 [The American Prospect]

A new report identifies 20 major corporate recidivists, with rap sheets that should be in the sights of the Justice Department’s new approach to white-collar crime.

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 12, 2021 [Wall Street on Parade]

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 10, 2021 [Wall Street on Parade]

Pam Martens and Russ Martens: November 9, 2021 [Wall Street on Parade]

As for leverage at hedge funds, yesterday’s Fed report had this to share:

“Hedge fund leverage remained somewhat higher than its historical average in the first quarter of 2021, according to the most comprehensive available measures. On-balance-sheet leverage at hedge funds, based on confidential data collected by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), decreased in the first quarter to a level close to its historical average. Gross leverage at hedge funds—based on the same source but including off-balance-sheet derivatives exposures—continued to be above its historical average in the first quarter.”

One needs to carefully parse the above paragraph. Why does the Federal Reserve, which has bank examiners in every mega bank that owns a trading house on Wall Street, need to ask the SEC for data about hedge fund leverage? The prime brokerage operations of those mega banks are the ones making those highly leveraged loans to hedge funds. (See our report: Archegos: Wall Street Was Effectively Giving 85 Percent Margin Loans on Concentrated Stock Positions – Thwarting the Fed’s Reg T and Its Own Margin Rules.)

Climate and environmental crises

[Twitter, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-12-2021]

Take a look at who actually emits the most carbon. And take a look at how much rich people in the US emit, compared to absolutely anyone else https://t.co/XGjRhj1OKE pic.twitter.com/UbNjGlx9Ld

— Vincent Bevins (@Vinncent) November 8, 2021

Yeah blame China, instead of looking at yourselves.

[Financial Times, via Tweet above]

The fight to protect the planet is shifting in ways that could soon exacerbate conflicts within countries, particularly between social classes. Or, to put it bluntly, between the rich and the rest. The top 1 per cent by income of the world’s population account for about 15 per cent of emissions, according to UN data. That is more than double the share of the bottom 50 per cent.

[Digg, via Naked Capitalism 11-13-2021]

[Slate, via The Big Picture 11-10-2021]

The challenge is not identifying the solutions, but rolling them out with great speed.

[South China Morning Post, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-11-2021]

“The Iceland plant, called Orca, is the largest such facility in the world, capturing about 4,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. But compared to what the planet needs, the amount is tiny. Experts say 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide must be removed annually by mid-century…. Leading scientific agencies including the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say that even if the world manages to stop producing harmful emissions, that still won’t be enough to avert a climate catastrophe. They say we need to suck massive amounts of carbon dioxide out of the air and put it back underground – yielding what some call “negative emissions”… As dire warnings have accelerated, technology to vacuum carbon dioxide from the air has advanced. Currently, a handful of companies operate such plants on a commercial scale, including Climeworks, which built the Orca plant in Iceland, and Carbon Engineering, which built a different type of direct air capture plant in British Columbia. And now that the technology has been proven, both companies have ambitions for major expansion. At Climeworks’ Orca plant near Reykjavik, fans suck air into big, black collection boxes where the carbon dioxide accumulates on a filter. Then it’s heated with geothermal energy and is combined with water and pumped deep underground into basalt rock formations. Within a few years, Climeworks says, the carbon dioxide turns into stone.”

[Pro Publica, via Naked Capitalism Water Cooler 11-11-2021]

“ProPublica’s analysis of five years of modeled EPA data identified more than 1,000 toxic hot spots across the country and found that an estimated 250,000 people living in them may be exposed to levels of excess cancer risk that the EPA deems unacceptable. The agency has long collected the information on which our analysis is based. Thousands of facilities nationwide that are considered large sources of toxic air pollution submit a report to the government each year on their chemical emissions. But the agency has never released this data in a way that allows the public to understand the risks of breathing the air where they live. Using the reports submitted between 2014 and 2018, we calculated the estimated excess cancer risk from industrial sources across the entire country and mapped it all.”

Creating new economic potential – science and technology

[Bloomberg, via Naked Capitalism 11-9-2021]

[MIT Technology Review, via Naked Capitalism 11-11-2021]

[Brighter Side, via Naked Capitalism 11-13-2021]

  • Information Age Dystopia

Securing your digital life, part one: The basics

[ars technica, via Naked Capitalism 11-13-2021]

Collapse of Independent News Media

David Sirota [The Daily Poster, November 8, 2021]

This morning, the New York Times published a screed from pollster Mark Penn and former New York City lawmaker Andrew Stein demanding Democrats abandon their promised agenda ahead of the midterm elections. The massive 1,500 word op-ed — designed to define the political news cycle for the coming week — echoes a house editorial from the newspaper making much the same argument, and it mirrors previous Penn diatribes that the Times has platformed in the past.

In the process, this essay offers a rare glimpse of how corporate media imperceptibly puts its thumb on the scale for a particular ideology that is decidedly neither centrist nor objective.

The Times’ original headline on Monday’s piece (which has since been changed) read “A Way Forward for Biden and the Dems in 2022 & 2024.” It argues that President Biden should “listen to centrists (and) push back on the left” and insists Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema “are in fact the very heart of the Democratic Party.”

It’s a hot take that might be mildly interesting, if it came from voices who genuinely had the Democratic Party’s best interests in mind. However, the Times decided to not tell readers that Penn is a private equity mogul with myriad connections to the corporate world that’s looking to kill the Democratic legislative agenda that the op-ed seeks to curtail. The paper doesn’t mention Penn’s ties to No Labels, a dark money group funded by big donors that’s been vilifying Democrats’ reconciliation bill. The paper also declines to mention that Penn advised President Donald Trump during his first impeachment, nor does it mention that Stein is the guy who

The Windows XP wallpaper is now a vineyard

Who would figure?

Ammonia-based fertilizers

Ammonia-based fertilizers are made from nitrogen (it’s most of our air, so never in short supply) and natural gas or methane (CH4), and make up almost 70% of all fertilizers used world-wide to support major agriculture crops such as wheat, corn, rice and even coffee. As natural gas prices have soared by anywhere from 300% to 500% over the past months, this has had a devastating impact on world fertilizer production, where some 80% of the cost of making ammonia fertilizers is due to the natural gas cost.

What’s more, big Ammonia plants in many countries are now closing (for how long?), and  China, who is said to make 30% of the world supply of ammonia, has just banned its export.  (Check to verify).  Early next year this will all become very evident.  First hit will be animal feed so it looks like meat eating will diminish greatly.  I don’t see any way it won’t happen.

https://journal-neo.org/2021/11/12/now-the-organized-takedown-of-global-fertilizer-supply/

Here’s Guangzhou, China.

It’s a very middle class city. Full of factories and just blue-collar Chinese people. Check it out. Video.

“Where’s Waldo” Beach addition for warmer wallpaper weather!

Some stuff on China

From the Daily Stormer

Since Biden has taken over, there have been nonstop threats against China, and US warplanes and warships are racing in and out of their territories. Biden’s Secretary of Defense flew to Japan to demand that they sign a blood pact to defend Taiwan. Most of the US military activity is not much reported on in the American media (I usually read about it on RT), but we are hearing rising nonsense about the poor and pitiful Moslems, and the importance of Americans devoting their military to defending the sacred democracy of the very important nation of Taiwan.

What is incredible to me is that both the right and the left are so easily manipulated into thinking conflict with China is a good idea. For the left, I guess it makes sense. As we’ve mentioned before, the Antifa type neo-socialists who have been so heavily force-memed on social media as the Democrat Party’s internet defense force (Vaush, for example) spend a lot of time talking about how China is a “fascist state.”

For the right, the support for anti-China sentiment makes no real sense, and is mostly based on stupidity and a lack of information. Republican leaders are openly saying that they need to protect Antifa in Hong Kong, Islamic terrorists in Xinjiang, and gay marriage in Taiwan. But Sean Hannity and Mark Levin continue to talk about “the threat of Chinese communism.”

As I’ve written about before, China is not a “communist country.” The average Chinese person knows nothing about Marxism. They have a very free market (much more free than America’s), where small business is encouraged.

As I’ve written before, the fact that it is even called “The Communist Party” in English is sort of deceitful, and an exploitation of the fact that Westerners know nothing about China or its culture, including the total difference of the nature of their language. “中国共产党” is translated as “communist party” consistently, yet a direct translation, as it would be spoken in Chinese, would be something like “The Party of People Working Together to be Productive.”

That’s how Chinese people view it.

Even with their supposed “communist” connections to Southeast Asian countries, they frame it as a historical cultural connection, rather than one based on a political system designed by a German Jew in London in the 19th century.

If you asked a working class Chinese person why China, Laos, and Vietnam all use the hammer and sickle, they would say something like: “this is the symbol of Asia people,” and laugh and point at their eyes, then say “eat rice, eat noodle,” and laugh again. A more educated Chinese person might be vaguely aware of the history, but would claim that no foreigner ever influenced China in any way, ever, in all of history: “we make a big, strong wall. Cannot allow.”

Under Emperor Xi, China has become increasingly more traditional, and backing away from the kind of modernism that had been encroaching. He is attempting to reestablish a form of Confucianism.

The Chinese are effectively the opposite of everything the modern West stands for:

  • Extreme ethno-nationalists
  • Patriarchal
  • Anti-feminist
  • Anti-gay
  • Pro-family
  • Pro-middle class and anti-elitism
  • Meritocratic
  • Militaristic in individual discipline

The Chinese government recently announced a program to build masculinity among boys, as they recognize that the school environment (which was largely imported from the West) is too feminizing, that the high tech environment itself is feminizing, and they recognize masculinity as a foundation of society.

In February, the Chinese government published “The Proposal to Prevent the Feminisation of Male Adolescents,” and said that they would use sports to toughen boys up.

The Western media outright declared this to be evil. (You might not have noticed, but at some point between 2018 and 2020, the media made the jump from talking about “toxic masculinity” as a social evil to simply referring to “masculinity” as a social evil. When they began talking about “toxic masculinity,” I noted that they were playing a terminology game, and that “toxic masculinity” just meant “masculinity.”)

Chinese cultural values are virtually a direct inversion of the modern Western values created and promoted by the Jews. But it is simply the basic order of nature they are promoting. No one in any society anywhere in history before the development of the modern West could have imagined a reality in which instilling masculinity in boys or discouraging family-destroying feminist ideology was a negative thing.

Most of us still living are not old enough to even be able to imagine a situation in which a Western government encouraged masculinity or discouraged feminism. So it’s hard to say how a right-winger in America can look at Joe Biden’s government, then look at the Chinese government, and say “yes, Joe, I agree – these people are so evil that we need to put our own nation’s problems on hold and use our military to defend the Taiwanese secessionist movement from this encroaching communism or fascism or whatever.”

The only thing right-wingers can ever say about the Chinese is that they are “too authoritarian.” Generally, that person will then immediately move to “muh social credit system.”…

…Conversation falls apart…

No “Where’s Waldo” Wallpaper? Couldn’t be me.

And about the US and Taiwan…

From HERE.

…the possibility of conflict between China and Taiwan, between whom tensions have been steadily rising.

Most members of the Blob, as the foreign policy establishment is called, believe the U.S. should be ready to go to war with China over the island, which escaped the Chinese Communist Party when Chiang Kai-shek and his defeated Nationalists fled there after their defeat on the mainland.

Indeed, U.S. analysts have been debating the idea of dropping Washington’s currently ambiguous stance—refusing to say yes or no—and making a clear commitment. Although the idea of not going to war is almost entirely absent in the capital, most analysts have convinced themselves that talking tough would be enough to scare off the Chinese.

"Scare the Chinese". Fools. 

-MM

However, Taiwan is the final Chinese territory stolen away during the “Century of Humiliation,” and even younger Chinese back their government’s claim. In such a contest angry nationalism commonly trumps good sense, as in America’s Civil War.

Americans who believe Beijing will yield its claim to Taiwan without a fight risk sleepwalking into a major war, as have so many other self-assured fools throughout history.

In any case, the president recently went off-script and declared that America would fight.

His aides quickly corrected the record, so to speak, as did President George W. Bush after making a similar promise in 2001. Nevertheless, Beijing has seen more than enough continuity between the Trump and Biden administrations toward China and assume the worst, irrespective of Washington’s verbal legerdemain.

So if the People’s Republic of China decides war is necessary and believes the U.S. will fight, the People’s Liberation Army will act swiftly and brutally, hoping to win before the U.S.—nearly 8000 miles away—can interfere.

War with China would be even worse than with Russia.

The PRC would have more at stake in the fight, local superiority, a couple score bases on the mainland roughly 100 miles away, and a victim that so far has shown little inclination to defend itself.

In combat the U.S. would have little choice but to strike the mainland, which would trigger escalation, with no obvious endpoint.

Indeed, Washington, attempting to fight from half a world away, has done poorly in wargames.

It is far easier for Beijing to deter the U.S. than for America to project sufficient power to defeat the PRC. And even a U.S. victory would probably be just the first round, as a nationalistic Chinese public prepared for round two. How much is Taiwan worth to the U.S.?

Worse, imagine if Washington faced simultaneous crises, perhaps with Iran, Russia, and China at once. While most of America’s allies discovered that they were busy, very busy, but nevertheless wished the U.S. well. Indeed, they would make a very strong statement as the bullets and missiles started flying.

President Biden has always seen himself as an internationalist. That doesn’t mean he should start a war, however. Indeed, he is one of the few policymakers who today understands the reality of war. He entered public life about the same time that the Nixon administration was pulling the last U.S. troops out of Vietnam. It has been almost a half century since America fought a conflict with heavy casualties, extended ground combat, heavy air action, and mass protest at home.

However, all could return if the administration managed to stumble into one or more major wars. At least a conflict with Russia or China would make the American people forget Biden’s ragged exit from Afghanistan. However, if he wants to be reelected—and, more important, to be a good president, however long he serves—then he should concentrate on avoiding real war with real opponents, and especially multiple conflicts at once.

It’s never a good thing.

Do something to make others happy

Like this subway artist. This gal was obviously having a bad day, but the emotion on her face says it all. video.

Oh, and don’t even think about starting a war with China or Russia

"Should there be any loss of life in the US as a result of a conflict the US federal government would disintegrate. Immediately as in ungovernable. Russia as a country has strength in the solidarity of it's people. The US and Europe not so much. A price to be paid for letting the ruling class and it's masters destroy the poor and the middle class."
-So | Nov 12 2021 20:27 utc | 15

A Brief History of the Cheez-It

From HERE.

Dayton’s historic Edgemont neighborhood is cocooned inside a crook in the Great Miami River, a winding waterway that snakes through the heart of southwest Ohio. Two miles from downtown, with its air of industry, the community hearkens to a time when Dayton was hailed “The City of A Thousand Factories.”

Cheez-It crackers.

In the early 20th century, inside a foregone factory on the corner of Concord and Cincinnati Streets, Green & Green cracker company cooked up its Edgemont product line, a collection of grahams, crackers and gingersnaps that were shipped across the region. But of the company’s four Edgemont products, only one, in particular, a flaky one-by-one-inch cheese cracker, would revolutionize snack time. On May 23, 1921, when Green & Green decided to trademark the tasty treat’s unique name, the Cheez-It was born.

“In 1921, Cheez-It didn’t mean anything, so Green & Green marketed the cracker as a ‘baked rarebit,’ ” says Brady Kress, president & CEO of Dayton’s Carillon Historical Park, a nationally recognized open-air museum centered on the city’s history of innovation. (Inside Carillon Brewing Company, a fully operating 1850s brewery at the park, costumed interpreters still bake crackers over an open hearth.) “People were familiar with rarebit, a sort of melted cheddar beer cheese spread over toast. Cheez-It offered the same great taste, only baked down into a cracker that will last.”

Cheez-It’s 11-month shelf life is impressive, but so is the company’s history. In May 2021, America’s iconic orange cracker turned 100. But the Cheez-It story stretches even further back than that.

In 1841, Dr. William W. Wolf moved to Dayton to practice homeopathy, a branch of alternative medicine that believes in the healing power of food. Hailed Dayton’s “Cracker King,” Wolf concocted the Wolf Cracker, a curious hard-butter snack made for medicinal purposes.

“In the 19th century, crackers were linked to Christian physiology and sectarian medical practitioners,” says Lisa Haushofer, a senior research associate at the University of Zurich’s Institute for Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine. “Christian physiologists like Sylvester Graham, of Graham Cracker fame, were concerned about a modern diet that contained too many stimulating substances.” (In addition to being a cracker evangelist, Graham was also a pro-temperance Presbyterian minister who preached a vegetarian diet). Wolf echoed Graham’s concerns that food was far too rousing (though Graham also dubiously believed his crackers could cure licentiousness), so he launched the Wolf Cracker Bakery to churn out his wholesome snacks.

“They believed there was too much nourishment per food unit in modern bread, too much excitement,” says Haushofer. “So they recommended grain products made from coarse flour, which, they believed, contained a more natural ratio of nourishing and non-nourishing parts. Crackers were considered health food.”

Cheez-It

According to Haushofer, homeopaths at the time were also concerned about digestibility, and since they believed heating food aided digestion, baked Wolf Crackers were just what the doctor ordered. But Wolf’s patients weren’t the only ones after his crackers. What started as a medical remedy soon became a sought-after treat.

In the 1870s, while living on the barren plains of North Dakota, Dayton natives J.W. and Weston Green often longed for a taste of home. “In those days food supplies were both expensive and scarce in that region,” wrote the Dayton Journal Herald in its October 31, 1907, edition, “and the father and son regularly sent back to their old home city, Dayton[,] for those necessities that could not be obtained there. ‘Invariably,’ Mr. Green says, ‘we would include in that order a good supply of … the ‘Wolfe Cracker’ [sic].”

J.W. Green never forgot the savory, buttery, nut-like flavor of Wolf Crackers. In 1897, when Wolf died, Green purchased the Wolf Bakery Company, then enlisted his son, Weston Green, to join him in business. The Greens renamed the enterprise Green & Green Company, and while Wolf’s recipe remained the same, they rebranded the doctor’s famous treat as the “Dayton Cracker.”

By the turn of the 20th century, Dayton held more patents, per capita, than any U.S. city; surrounded by this innovative environment, Green & Green flourished, expanding its operations to nearby Springfield and Lima, and delivering baked goods across southwest Ohio. But soon, the company’s crackers became more than a regional concern. During World War I, Green & Green fired up its ovens for the war effort.

“All our facilities but one little oven that can’t be used for Hard Bread will be speeded up to keep two car loads a day going by express,” read a Green & Green ad in the Dayton Daily News’s July 14, 1918, edition … “that OUR BOYS at the front may have their Fighting Bread.”

Cheez-It

Though far less tasty than the Dayton Cracker, Dayton’s Fighting Bread sustained countless soldiers during the Great War. Typically made from salt, flour and water, Hard Bread—also known as hardtack, teeth dullers or jawbreakers—was often soaked in water before being served. If stored improperly, weevils and maggots made Hard Bread their home, prompting soldiers to dub the wartime ration “worm castles.”

“We are mighty glad and proud to be a cog in the big machine that will win the war,” read Green & Green’s ad. However, Doughboys weren’t the only ones helping win the war. “P.S. We could still use a few more women in the packing of Hard Bread.”

After World War I, Green & Green Company sidelined Hard Bread in favor of more flavorful fare. By Armistice Day, the Dayton Cracker (still made with Wolf’s original recipe) had been baked in Dayton for nearly 80 years. But while the hard butter-cracker was a local treasure, customers yearned for a delicate, flakier treat. Soon, Green & Green launched its Edgemont line, and in 1921, unveiled the “baked rarebit,” known as the Cheez-It.

“Welsh Rarebit, at its most basic form, is essentially a cheese sauce spread on toast,” says Rachael Spears, a living history specialist at Dayton’s Carillon Historical Park. “Some 19th-century English recipes specifically call for cheddar cheese. To this day, Cheez-It still advertises 100 percent real cheese, which draws a connection to its rarebit roots.”

But in 1921, Americans needed more than a novel snack. Following the Great War, the global economy dipped, and American wallets were increasingly thin. “Rarebit is a lesson in frugality,” says Kress. “It’s a nutritious dish that doesn’t cost a lot of money. When it’s baked down into a Cheez-It, it becomes a tasty treat. And just like hardtack, if you store it correctly, it will stay for a very long time. You don’t run the risk of it growing weevils.”

Cheez-It

In 1915, one pound of Green & Green crackers sold for 10 cents, roughly $2.65 in 2021 dollars. “When Uncle Sam picked men for his army overseas,” read a June 1920 Green & Green ad, “he also picked foods that would keep those picked men robust and healthy—fit for the strenuous duties ahead of them. Just as the crackers for our soldiers kept sweet and fresh in tins, so Edgemont Crackers … keep crisp and creamy in the Family Tin. Ask mother to keep a tin in her pantry.”

Cheez-Its kept Americans fed during the post-war recession, throughout the Roaring Twenties, and at the onset of the Great Depression. But by 1932, Green & Green packed up its last Family Tin and sold the business to Kansas City’s Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company.

In 1947, the Loose-Wiles Biscuit Company became the Sunshine Biscuit Company; in 1996, Keebler acquired Sunshine; and in 2001, Kellogg acquired Keebler.

“The Cheez-It name has accompanied the baked cracker since its creation in 1921,” says Jeff Delonis, senior director of marketing for Cheez-It. “The original Cheez-It packaging was green and white. In the 1930s, red was introduced into the brand logo, and by the 1940s, the box included the iconic red and yellow-orange colors that remain today. The general shape and look of the cracker has largely stayed the same.”

Cheez-Its may still look the same, but the cracker’s production has soared. Once baked on the corner of Concord and Cincinnati Streets in Dayton’s Edgemont neighborhood, then shipped to regional grocers, Cheez-It sold more than 400 million packages in the U.S. alone in 2020.

Scene from Ghostbusters. Cheez-It crackers and bud beer.

“It’s super fun to think about all the cities around the country that were producing foods for local audiences,” says Kress. “Every city had them. Here’s an idea that came out of Dayton, Ohio.”

But “baked rarebit,” once a prevalent idiom used to describe an obscure cracker, has since faded, replaced by the now-ubiquitous term, Cheez-It.

“When you bake a cracker, you roll the dough out thin, kind of like a pie crust,” says Spears. “But at the heart, it’s like a thin, crispy biscuit. When you bite into a Cheez-It, you get those nice layers. Those are the layers that form if you cook it a bit.”

Like the Cheez-It itself, we need only bite into the snack’s history to uncover countless compelling layers.

“Cheez-It is a survivor from a bygone time,” says Kress.

Why I like Chinese girls…

A big smile. Happy times. Food. video.

A local Chinese girl shows you her life…

Sure, I make a couple of videos, but there are other people who are more photogenic than myself, and easier on the eyes. They show their life, and their food, and their homes.

Here’s one such girl. A friend. video.

American “democracy”…

China slams the US:

“The electoral democracy of Western countries are actually democracy ruled by the capital, and they are a game of the rich, not real democracy.

I would gladly ignore this and write it off as Soviet style propaganda, were it not for some shocking statistics from Pew research poll that supports the thesis.

According to a new Pew survey published last week, many American’s seem to share concerns about the direction of the US’s democracy. The survey can be found here: (https://cnb.cx/3ooDsKw)

“Americans largely share the view that their democracy is no longer a model: 72% say U.S. democracy used to be a good example for others to follow but has not been recently.”

Frankly, I thought the number was shocking and perhaps reveals a nation tired of covid and legislative gridlock.

Pew continues with more stunning statistics from polling in 17 advanced economies:

“Few believe U.S. democracy, at least in its current state, serves as a good model for other nations. A median of just 17% say democracy in the U.S. is a good example for others to follow, while 57% think it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. Another 23% do not believe it has ever been a good example.”

For the record I am not agitating for a change in government, nor professing undying love for China’s communism. Some will undoubtedly make these accusations.

I present this because I think it is important to acknowledge that the US’s “global brand” has been severely tarnished. Covid, Afghanistan and an assault on the nation’s capital among others are taking their toll on the US across the globe.

If it takes harsh critique from China to get the US to pay attention so be it. And it does seem to have hit a nerve , as this article is No 1 in google news search for “China” 24 hrs running.  That’s why I’m running it.

China isn’t making this critique up out of the blue, they are going for the jugular and calling out a problem at least roughly supported by global sentiment. Interestingly, they don’t often criticize the US so this inflammatory rhetoric is a bit of a departure especially after progress with the climate deal.

You can see the influences of large banks or techs on the American government. Money has created enormous lobbying groups that make Banks and large industry unassailable. Big tech seems impossible to control. Whistleblowers from Meta, election interference, and consumers asking for privacy don’t seem to count for much.

Lest I get comments that I am “paid by China.”  This isn’t about China but about a the real problem of money’s influence in government.

If the US’s economic rival China, sees the problem, as do American citizens, why doesn’t anyone in Washington?

Hum?

China schools compared to American schools…

Check out this little dialog. video.

And this followup. Also good. video

And, thus how it manifests for a typical Chinese family. Video.

Data Testing Julian Cope’s Dunnideer Hill Alignments Theory

A great adventure in Scotland.

It’s the story or tale of how one person took the time and effort to investigate ancient ruins in his own backyard. I applaud him, and you should too. -MM

From HERE.

In his popular guidebook to British prehistoric monuments, The Modern Antiquaria n, rock musician and poet Julian Cope proposed that a distinctive Aberdeenshire hill in Scotland, the 264 meter (866 ft) high Dunnideer Hill, formed a visual focal point of reference in the landscape in relation to the positioning of ten nearby Scottish Recumbent Stone Circles (RSCs).

Notably, no physical survey data was presented by Cope so I can only assume his comments were intuitively based, undoubtedly after physically visiting each circle and seeing for himself their collective inter-visibility with Dunnideer Hill (Figure 1). A reasonable assumption, but as an archaeologist I have to be careful when accepting such intuitively based information. More so given the fact that he used emotive language such as “Mother Earth Hill” to describe it. However, I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and test his “inter-visible-theory” by conducting a quantifiable survey using GPS technology .

Figure 1. Dunnideer Hill. The remains of the hill’s medieval Chapel enhances its visibility amongst the surrounding landscape. (Author provided)

Recumbent Stone Circles (RSCs) Surrounding Dunnideer Hill

The stone circles surrounding Dunnideer Hill belong to a greater class of stone rings known as Recumbent Stones Circles (RSCs). A distinctive class of prehistoric circles which were confined to North-east Scotland.

Their architecture was consistent, set out in a ring, they often contained between ten or eleven standing stones plus an outlandishly large recumbent stone that was deliberately laid flat in the southern quadrant of the respective circle – hence their name (Figure 2). Amazingly 156 of these monuments were built across the entire landscape of Aberdeenshire.

Regrettably, only 71 of them survive today.

Carbon dating places their construction to the Late Neolithic, circa 2500 BC. The original purpose for building these stone circles remains unknown but what we can say with certainty is that no human burials have been found in any of their primary contexts.

I have already written about these RSCs in a previous article published on Ancient Origins . In that paper I proposed that a single specialist was responsible for designing every one of these RSCs.

As I also mentioned in that article, these RSCs were positioned across the landscape so that they were astronomically aligned towards each other forming clusters of circles within their respective landscape settings.

See the first of my freely available YouTube videos here explaining more about how these alignments work at the circles.

Although I had suspected that these clusters of circles were deliberately aligned towards natural features of the landscape, such as hilltop summits, I did not have any survey data to prove it.

So here was an opportunity to not only test the extent of stone circle alignments towards natural hills but also see if Julian Cope was correct.

Figure 2. The distinctive architecture of an RSC. A ring of standing stones plus its recumbent stone as seen at the Strichen House RSC. (Author provided)

The Ancient History of Dunnideer Hill

Of course my starting point was Dunnideer Hill. Located close to the small town of Inch, Aberdeenshire, this hill possesses its own long archaeological history.

Unfortunately, if ever a stone circle stood on the summit of this hill then whatever evidence for it is now lost.

Nevertheless, some 440 meters (1,443 ft) downslope, north-west of the summit, are the remains of the Dunnideer RSC (B), indicating that the hill was at least known to the Neolithic communities as far back as 2500 BC.

Survey Method Used at Dunnideer Hill

To survey the alignments between the Dunnideer Hill and its surrounding cluster of ten stone circles , I utilized GPS technology in the following manner. Standing on the summit of Dunnideer Hill, the GPS plotted my precise position on the ground.

This information was then relayed back to me via a positional coordinate for where I was standing.

Then systematically moving to each of the surrounding RSCs, the GPS plotted my successive positions, each time providing me with the corresponding coordinates. Using the “go to” facility on the GPS, I could then obtain the distance and direction travelled between each coordinate.

After completion I was able to cross-reference the combined GPS data to produce the maps discussed here.

What I was particularly looking for with the GPS data was to search for astronomical alignments between the hill and the surrounding ten stone circles .

Now, if I know the angle of the ecliptic (between the Sun and Earth) at around 2500 BC, I can divide that angle by the exact latitude for the hill and whichever stone circle I was standing at.

This “scientific calculation” then gives me the directions of where the Sun rose or set on the days of midwinter and midsummer for Aberdeenshire around 2500 BC.

With some adjusting (to cater for the angle of the moon’s orbit around the Earth), I could also determine similar positions for the Moon as well. After obtaining this scientific calculation I was ready to start.

The Dunnideer summit has been subjected to many alterations and much disturbance since that time. For instance, during the British Iron Age, a hill fort (circa 700 – 500 BC), was dug out across its summit. 1,500 years later, a medieval Chapel with both solid stone flooring and walling was built above the foundations of the fort, destroying anything below it.

Still, the views from the top of Dunnideer Hill are amazing (and well recommended – despite the short climb). Certainly, I could imagine the Neolithic specialist builder standing here some 4,500 years ago, viewing the landscape below, pondering where to position the ten stone circles in relation to those areas of land below being opened up for domestication and cultivation.

Figure 3. The ten RSCs selected for survey that are also inter-visible with Dunnideer Hill. (Dr. John Hill)

Dunnideer Hill Survey Results

I had established with my GPS an arbitrary distance equal to a radius of 6 km (3.72 mi.) circumnavigating Dunnideer Hill.

This radius immediately captured the ten RSCs (Figure 3). The logic behind this arbitrary distance being that (at the most) it would take an hour to walk from the farthest RSC to the hill. Secondly, all ten circles were physically inter-visible with good views of Dunnideer Hill.

Incidentally, another interesting observation uniting this cluster of circles is that they all shared similar oval-shaped large but thin recumbent stones – usually these recumbent stones are very broad and thick (Figure 4).

Possibly, these thin recumbent stones signified a specific local identity associated with this particular cluster surrounding the Dunnideer Hill.

Figure 4. Three examples of the thin, oval-shaped recumbent stones. 1 = Dunnideer RSC; 2 = Wantonwells RSC; 3 = Stonehead RSC. (Author provided)

After compiling the GPS data from Dunnideer Hill, the rock musician’s theory of it being a focal point for the surrounding stone circles was proving to be disappointing. I could not find any data that would indicate that the hill possessed any astronomical correspondences towards the surrounding ten circles other than them being inter-visible with the summit.

Incidentally, Dunnideer Hill is not the only hill in this landscape, there are other hills which could have acted as alternative focal points. Nonetheless, I wanted to give Cope the benefit of the doubt, so I continued to collect GPS data from the surrounding stone circles.

As I visited each of the stone circles I needed to re-compute my original scientific calculation. When I was standing on top of Dunnideer Hill’s summit I was looking downward towards the directions of the surrounding stone circles, so the altitude factor (within my first equation) did not matter with regard to the astronomical data I collected.

Now, standing at the circles, I was looking upward, towards the summit of the hill, so I had to make the necessary adjustments for the “upward” angle of altitude.

Having made these adjustments to my second equation the results I was anticipating began to materialize but not in the manner I expected. Yes, Dunnideer Hill was important to the astronomical alignments connected with the ten circles, but it was not the single focal point as I thought it would be.

Rather than being a single point of reference in the landscape for any one of its surrounding RSCs, the data suggests that Dunnideer Hill appears to have acted like an axis mundi around which the rising and setting of both the Sun and Moon would be seen to rotate during the seasons.

And it all depended on when and where one was standing in order to see the corresponding astronomical event at each of the respective stone circles. Indeed, one would have to follow a circular route around the hill, visiting each circle at different seasons to appreciate how the Neolithic communities organized their agricultural and ceremonial calendars.

In short, they were using the hill as a gigantic beacon in the landscape to monitor the movements of the Sun and Moon. Or rather, the cosmos above revolved around the earthen-hill below, with the hill acting as the axis mundi .

Let me explain further.

In Figure 5 we see an alignment between Ardlair RSC (A), Dunnideer Hill and Old Rayne RSC (F). Taking into account the altitude factor for the hill, then the alignment runs due east / west. So let us imagine that we are standing at Ardlair RSC, looking eastward, and watching the Sun as it appears to rise behind the eastern summit of Dunnideer Hill. When the Sun appears to rise in this direction then we have an astronomical alignment between the two circles (and the hill between them).

Now, this is the alignment that would only occur on the morning of either the spring, Vernal (21st March), or autumn equinox (21st September). And vice versa, standing at the Old Rayne RSC, looking westward we can watch the equinox sunsets, setting behind the hill in the direction of the Ardlair RSC. Thus, the two circles and the hill align with the equinoxes and as such we have an ingenious method of predicting the times in the agricultural calendar for sowing (i.e. spring) and harvesting (i.e. autumn).

Figure 5. The equinox alignments between two RSCs and Dunnideer Hill. (Dr John Hill)

Similarly, in Figure 6, we can see an alignment between Wantonwells RSC (G) and Dunnideer RSC (B), with Dunnideer Hill again positioned in the middle of the two circles. The axis of this alignment corresponds to the direction of the summer solstice sunset (21st June) and vice versa the direction of the winter solstice sunrise (21st December). So if we were to stand at Wantonwells RSC and watching the sunset behind the hill then we would be looking in the direction of both north-west and the Dunnideer RSC (at the time of midsummer sunset). Such an observation might have been a cue for the Neolithic farmers to move their cattle northward, during the warm summer months, to the higher pastures around the Candle Hill RSC (D).

Alternatively, standing behind Dunnideer RSC and watching the sunrise behind Dunnideer Hill in the direction of Wantonwells RSC, then we would be looking towards the direction of the midwinter sunrise. Seeing the sunrise in this direction may have been the cue for the Neolithic communities to commence the culling of their surplus livestock which would have provided them with plenty of meat for the cold winter months.

The GPS also provided data to support the statement that the Neolithic communities were also using Dunnideer Hill as a means to monitor the movements of the Moon. For instance, the alignment between Wantonwells RSC (G), the hill and the Stonehead RSC (C) captures the setting position of the midwinter full moon at its most southerly position on the distant horizon. In effect, by using Dunnideer Hill as an axis mund i, the Neolithic communities could operate (albeit a basic) solar-lunar calendar.

Figure 6. Solar and lunar alignments revolving around the axis mundi of Dunnideer Hill. (Dr John Hill)

I did not want to bombard the reader with too much of the astronomy in this article, so the above examples are just a sample of the alignments I have obtained for this particular cluster of stone circles. For sure, there are many more alignments that I could have discussed here. Of course, the reader may question as to how these astronomical alignments were achieved when their inter-visibility between the stone circles mentioned here was blocked by Dunnideer Hill.

Certainly, this is an important question and in in my recent book The Recumbent Stone Circles of Aberdeenshire I propose a number of solutions. But for now, I would ask the reader to view my second freely available video which demonstrates how the geometry used to construct these circles and captured the symbolism associated with the astronomical alignments across the landscape: Ancient knowledge, Sacred geometry at the Loanhead of Daviot stone circle .

But here is another one of my solutions. That is the people were using “smoke signals” across the landscape in order to set out their stone circles in alignments (Figure 7). We have good archaeological evidence that fires were regularly set alight before, during and even after these RSCs were constructed. Although whatever the reasons for these fires remains conjectural, I can reasonably propose that they were a sure way for the Neolithic communities to set out their stone circles in straight lines across the landscape, especially when their visibility was blocked by natural hills such as Dunnideer Hill.

Figure 7. The Neolithic communities used smoke signals to set out accurate alignments across the landscape. (Dr John Hill)

Dunnideer Hill as Axis Mundi

As well as acting as a visible focal point in the landscape, Dunnideer Hill also operated as an axis mundi for the local Neolithic communities to organize their agricultural activities. Of course, I have so far interpreted the GPS data within the practical terms of farming and there is no reason why sacred explanations could not also be offered. Social ceremonies such as weddings or funerals could have been scheduled around the hill in accordance to the relative positions of the Sun and Moon.

Indeed, at certain times of the year the solar and lunar orbs may have even been invited guests to visit the stone circles. An ethnographic analogy springs to mind here with the ancient Japanese, shamanistic religion of Shinto, which was populated by kami-spirits who lived on the summits of certain sacred hills across the Nippon landscape. The Shinto-shamans would place special stones and rocks at the bases of such hills in order to entice the benevolent spirits to come down from their summits and enjoy both the seasonal gatherings and offerings left by the people in exchange for good fortune and productive harvests.

Finally, I should thank Julian Cope for his intuitive observations. Had he not written about his ideas about the “inter-visibility-theory” between Dunnideer Hill and its surrounding stone circles then I would not have undertaken this GPS survey nor written this report.

MM video riding in the taxi on tuesday

Here’s what it’s like in my “neck of the woods”…video

I do love watching people who love their jobs…

We should all be doing what we love.

And more about China from the Daily Stormer…

“Jewish conservatives” and shill conservatives in general have a script to inject China into everything, despite the fact that China is not running Western governments. This is partially a way to protect the people who are running our governments, by offering the distraction of a foreign enemy, but also a way to pump up anti-Chinese sentiment so that people will support conflict with them.

My goal is first and foremost to simply tell the truth. My goal is not to defend every aspect of Chinese society and culture. Politically, however, I am opposed to a war with the Chinese. Even more than that, I am against this obsession with the Chinese, which is so obviously a result of the fact that they are not on board with the globalist agenda. If you go around talking about China all the time, the only thing you are doing is shifting blame from our own leaders and feeding this drive for world government.

To the extent that I am a Chinese shill, this is the thing: as long as China is standing as an independent country, this world government cannot exist. Therefore, I am “pro-CCP” in that I am against this lunatic plan for a global tyrannical government. I also admire their strength as a people, nation, and race. How could I not admire them, when they’re the only thing standing between me and a brutal hell on earth? Furthermore, the Chinese haven’t ever done anything to me. Well, I take that back. One time I was staying at a hotel in Bangkok, and a group of Chinese tourists checked in, and they were spitting in the hallways and the elevator, so I had to switch to a different hotel. Eventually, in Bangkok, you learn that there are hotels that do not allow Chinese tourists.

But even with the spitting/yelling/cigarette-flicking – you can uncover something admirable about the Chinese. The reason that so many Chinese tourists behave in ways that we consider crude is that the overwhelming majority of the Chinese middle class are the children of literal rice farmers, who grew up in fields without electricity. Now, in one generation, their children are rich, living in a futuristic society.

China’s social credit system is a result of something called “being Asian.” The Asian social contract is totally different than the white one. No one in China other than criminals and CIA cults opposes the social credit system.

Everyone has seen this clip (regularly used by Ezra Levant), and talked about how terrible it is.

‘Social Credit Score System China’ … and how it works! 😡 pic.twitter.com/vOzt0lZphf
— daisymay4263 (@daisymay4263) October 1, 2021

But in the clip, the Chinese all say they support social credit scores. The response is “oh they’re scared not to say that.” Okay, well, we don’t see Chinese diaspora around the world opposing this system.

You can disagree with that, and I certainly would not want a social credit system in America, but nations should have self-determination.

Whining about the social credit system and supporting anti-CCP policy because of it is no different than saying that you support the war in Afghanistan because you’re against Sharia Law.

All of this stuff about how America is becoming like China is totally nonsensical.

I have a few simple questions for conservatives making these claims:

  • Where are my masculinity classes for young boys? Where is my program to discourage feminism?
  • Where is my nonstop propaganda about the superiority of my race, culture, and nation?
  • Where is my economic program to strengthen the middle class?
  • Where are my low taxes for family businesses and high taxes for large corporations?
  • Where are my anti-trust laws?

Comparing the Chinese social credit system to the attempts to force this vax pass thing in the West is apples to Doritos. “We’re becoming more like China because of the vaccine passport being like the social credit system” is a shallow, stupid take aimed at people who have low IQs or are just uninformed about the world.

It’s like saying America is becoming like Afghanistan because women have to cover their faces in public because of the virus.

It’s moronic on par with Dinesh D’Souza saying that Black Lives Matter is inspired by Adolf Hitler.

The only reason someone would make an argument so obviously dumb is if they were trying to manipulate you.

I will say again that I have no specific desire to defend everything the Chinese government does. I will certainly not defend everything they have done since the revolution.

However, while I do not agree with it, the “one child policy” is very overstated by Western critics. Westerners generally have no idea at all how Asian culture works. And they shouldn’t be expected to.

I personally find it interesting, but outside of that, no one in America should be under any obligation to understand the dynamics of Chinese culture.

Unless of course, they are making judgements about them – which apparently everyone in the West feels compelled to do now.

There are many things that Westerners simply could not possibly ever understand about Asia, no matter how much information they had, simply because the historical development of the culture, and the genetics behind it, are too different.

The role of law and the concept of law enforcement is an example of something no white person is ever going to grasp.

Here’s a big think for you: during most of 2020, Christians in America were banned from attending church, while Chinese Christians were not.

In Australia, the number two country which claims to be fighting against China to create freedom, Christians are still banned from attending church.

It’s again just utterly dishonest and slimy to have these publications that express open hatred for Christianity claim that the Chinese government is at war with Christianity, while the CIA is using these home churches to incite revolution against the government.

It’s like if the CIA were using hamburger stands to traffic guns into China and the Chinese government arrested them and the New York Times ran the headline “Inside China’s Brutal Crackdown on Hamburgers” – of course, right next to “You Must Eat Bugs: Americans Have Only One Week to Stop Eating Burgers Before Cow Farts Cause Deadly Earthquake.”

By pointing to “authoritarianism,” people who are trying to demonize China can make a superficial surface level critique without any context and leap to “China is the model for the New World Order.”

The attacks on China are disorganized and weird, but they are working very well.

Frankly, I’m the only person I’m aware of that is offering meaningful analysis of the China situation in the English language, aside from a few white guys who live in China.

China is a closed society, due not to communism, but to the massive language and cultural gap.

Food cubes – Can you name them all?

Food cubes.

And some more stuff from the Stormer…

Though it is clear that the globalist agenda hinges on regime change in China…

… that rampant anti-Chinese propaganda abounds…

… and that the entire political and military apparatus in Washington supports using the military to “defend Taiwan,” ….

… the US plan to destroy the CCP is completely unclear.

Right now, China is finally standing up and pushing back against this bullying.

If they decided to “invade” Taiwan, the Taiwanese military would put up less of a fight than the Afghan military.

Americans have no idea what is going on in Taiwan.

I would be surprised if even one soldier fired a shot if the CCP military landed in Taipei, and at least 40% of the people would openly greet them as liberators.

The people who are still against reunification in theory would just shrug, and carry on with their day.

No one in Taiwan even understands the concept of the mainland “taking their freedoms.”

No one thinks that anything substantial that affects them personally would change, other than gays and maybe some feminist women.

A lot of people want the CCP to come in and ban gay marriage.

The US forcing the gay marriage thing really rustled a lot of Taiwanese people.

Imagine the internet being flooded with videos of PRC troops landing in Taiwan and people either smiling and waving or just going about their business.

Imagine the female president of Taiwan giving a public statement apologizing to the Chinese people for “disrespectful behaviors and mean-spirited actions.”

Chuck Schumer and Ben Sasse could call a bipartisan press conference to release secret satellite photos of buildings in Taiwan that look shockingly similar to the infamous Hitler steam chambers.

They could bring in the daughter of the Taiwanese ambassador to cry and say she saw CCP soldiers eating babies.

But the jig would be up.

Seriously: what is the US going to do if China takes Taiwan? They’re going to start World War III?

I guess?

Every US military simulation about defending Taiwan from an “invasion” shows China winning, meaning the only option would be for the US to escalate.

China has consistently said they are going to fire nukes.

So we’re going to go to nuclear war for gay sex in Taiwan?

I sure looks like it.

How prepared is the US for nuclear war?

Who has been running the strategy on that front for the last two decades or so?

Mark Milley and Lloyd Austin?

Do what you can to help others.

Again, this subway artist strikes again. video.

Mysterious Carved Stone Balls Found in Scottish Isle Tomb

There’s a lot of interesting history in Scotland. Like this very curious article.

From HERE.

A 5,500-year-old tomb discovered on a Scottish island will soon be reclaimed by the sea. Archaeologists racing to excavate the site, “before it’s lost forever,” have discovered two enigmatic carved stone balls at the site.

Over the last two centuries archaeologists in Scotland have only discovered about 500 of these mysterious balls.

Dating back to between 3500 BC and 1500 BC, most carved stone balls measure around 3 inches (7.6 cm) in diameter, therefore, fitting easily into the palm of a closed hand. A 2017 Ancient Origins article explored a range of possible purposes for these stone balls.

While some archaeologists maintain they were hunting projectiles and fishing weights, others point out that most are flawless, and suggest they were sacred artifacts passed down from generation to generation.

The Press and Journal article reported that Dr Hugo Anderson-Whymark, senior curator of prehistory (Paleolithic – Neolithic) at National Museum of Scotland, posted about the discovery of the two balls on Twitter.

He pointed out that only about 20 carved stone balls dating to the Neolithic have ever been found on Orkney.

The two balls recently discovered on Orkney were described by Dr Anderson-Whymark as a “cracking find from the tomb.”

The researcher described one of the balls as “size of a cricket ball,” and that it was “perfectly spherical and beautifully finished.”

The second carved stone ball found in the Neolithic tomb site at the edge of the sea at Tres Ness, Sanday, Orkney, Scotland. ( University of Central Lancashire )

The Rare Carved Stone Balls Of Scotland: Purpose Unknown!

Carved from both hard and soft stones, most carved stone balls have six projections (knobs) but they have been discovered with as many as 160. In 1876, J. Alexander Smith suggested that when bound to wooden handles the balls would have made efficient “ axe-like weapons .”

However, in the 1970s Dorothy N. Marshall pointed out that most of the balls are nearly flawless, and that ancient people wouldn’t have spent that much time and effort on spherical accuracy for a weapon.

The most recently discovered stone balls were found on what is, arguably, the most astoundingly beautiful of the many spectacular beaches in Orkney .

Tres Ness, on the island of Sanday, is according to Orkney.com “a special place.”

The website says you will often be the only people on the beach, “soaking up the ancient scenery as if you’re on a deserted island.”

However, for the last few years the prevailing silence has been disturbed by the chinking and chipping sounds of archaeologist trowels resounding from one of the island’s Neolithic and Bronze Age settlement that is about to fall into the sea forever.

Changes Times, Changing Coast Lines

The two Orkney stone balls were discovered within a Neolithic burial tomb. According to a report in Press and Journal the tomb on Tres Ness is formally known as “a stalled cairn” where the burial space was compartmentalized.

Dating back to around 3,500 BC the burial structure represents one of the oldest remaining buildings in Scotland and it was here that a team of archaeologists found the two rare stone balls. And luckily too, as the site is quickly being clawed away by the encroaching sea .

Professor Vicki Cummings is a reader in archaeology at the University of Central Lancashire.

She speculates that the tomb at Tres Ness was probably associated with the Neolithic settlement at the Cata Sand archaeological site.

Located about a mile-and-a-half away from the Tres Ness tomb, Cummings said that both sites and the beautiful beach at Tres Ness are under immediate threat from coastal erosion .

Another view of the Neolithic cliffside tomb side on Sanday. The left edge of the tomb is a seaside cliff that is eroding quickly. (University of Central Lancashire)

Sadly, The Sanday Orkney Site Is Vanishing Into The Sea

In the early Neolithic period both sites would have been located on a headland high above the coastline overlooking the sea from the distance and from above.

However, like sugary drinks working away at the roots of teeth, over time, the headland has been eaten away leaving the sites on the edge of a new, super-erosive, tidal coastline.

Cummings added that one major factor for the rapidly changing environment is the lack of trees, whereas in the Neolithic the entire area was wooded.

Cummings said, “sadly the site is vanishing into the sea,” so the focus of the site archaeologists is to extract as much information as possible “before it is basically lost forever.”

The discovery of the two rare carved stone balls really is what Dr Anderson-Whymark said, “a cracking find from the tomb.”

More from the Stormer…

Who is even running the US government?

Where are the adults?

The people running the US government are going around trying to force vax everyone, turn children into trannies as part of a program to normalize sex with children, and claiming that there’s a secret QAnon terrorist group planning to overthrow the government.

Then behind those freaks you’ve got freaks like Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab planning to turn themselves into genetically-engineered cyborg immortals.

Everything that is going on in the Western world is just as absurd and unserious as it is sickening and evil.

Here’s a thing which is happening: people – probably most of you reading this – are confusing the total power of the current US government for competence.

This is very natural, psychologically – it makes fundamental sense that people with absurd amounts of power would have to have competence.

But, if we break down the fact that these people inherited this power structure, then you might look at it like the logic of assuming a guy driving a Lamborghini must be rich, before you find out it was stolen.

It took me a long while to process it myself, and I definitely didn’t have a full understanding of it until Joe Biden took over as our overlord, but these people are not competent.

Upon closer inspection, we realize they are actual morons.

As a thought experiment: try to think of one single thing that the Democrats have done since assuming total domination of America that is indicative of competence.

The only thing you will likely be able to think of is the fact that they’ve managed to keep this virus thingy rolling, but that is obviously virtually entirely managed by the media.

And the success of the project is entirely dependent on the docility of the American people.

Same people, ten years later

MM home video

I took a minute to record what China is like. I was on my way to my office, and the contract of what China is compared to the crazy insanity that America is is breathtaking. It’s calm here. It’s nice and pleasant here. It’s clean, safe, relaxed, and healthy. video.

K-pop dance studios

As I have repeatedly stated in previous other articles, There’s three k-pop studios in my office building, and I often do down to watch the girls dance, make some friends, and find an opportunity to “pal around” with all the pretty girls there.

Here’s a gal performing vibrato by Stellar. video.

Some fine butt action there. LOL.

Some more from the Stormer…

China is understandably tired of having their country surrounded by the US military…

They are tired of being threatened and bullied.

And they’re tired of the humiliation of not being able to control their own internationally recognized national borders.

Yes, even the US recognizes Taiwan as a part of China…

…I guess people apparently don’t even know that.

Maybe the US will go to war, maybe they won’t – I have no way of predicting that.

I think it’s impossible to predict, given that there is no real order to the decisions being made by the people running the US government, other than that they are following this “New World Order” plot that was laid out by people who are already dead.

Most likely, if China took Taiwan, the leaders of the US would flinch, and that would signal the end of US global supremacy.

The empire would then enter into rapid decline, as without US military supremacy, there is no logic to the dollar as global reserve currency.

This would be a total tailspin, and America would look like the opening of that Dawn of the Dead remake.

It’s going to be a rough scene.

The best thing for you in such a situation would be if you – wait for it – lived in a rural community.

There will be serious rioting and all of the Walking Dead type stuff.

The blacks will probably form cannibal gangs pretty early on, but they’ll just end up eating each other. After eating his last remaining lieutenant, the last cannibal warlord in any given city will be totally alone, and his last words before he starves to death will be: “muffuggen wite ppl did dis.”

What will not happen: the Chinese will not invade America to enslave people in communism with their social credit system.

If you think that the Chinese want to invade America and enslave people, then you basically need to accept that you just don’t really have any idea what is going on.

Why would the Chinese want to invade and enslave Americans?

Just to be mean?

Do Chinese people strike you as that emotional, that they would waste huge amounts of resources in order to engage in an act of geopolitical meanness?

The entire Chinese mindset, and their entire marketing strategy as a superpower, is that they don’t invade countries, and instead trade with countries and invest in countries’ infrastructure.

There are all of these books published by Western universities over the last five years talking about how the US strategy of trying to convince countries to side with them over the Chinese was failing, and that all the countries who had made economic pacts with the Chinese were generally happy with the results.

China’s strategy has been to basically portray the US as a country of violent lunatics trying to enslave the planet with their military and their debt economic system.

And they are 100% accurate. -MM

Anthony Blinken was apparently chosen as Secretary of State because, along with being a Jewish Zionist, he’d given a bunch of speeches about the need for a new strategy to confront China in order to maintain US dominance.

It turns out he does’t have any such strategy, but he’s adamant that there needs to be a new one, which is more than the other candidates for Secretary of State were able to offer, apparently.

During his March meeting with Chinese adults, his first and thus far only major appearance on the global stage, Blinken brought a woman with purple hair and channeled Holden Caulfield when the Chinese “phonies” said that Americans need to start applying themselves to their job of maintaining world order.

America is viewed as weak by the rest of the world under the Biden administration. 
Putin is challenging Biden with live debate. 
And at the Alaska Summit, China told Blinken how he views America. ⬇️⬇️⬇️

pic.twitter.com/dNvSHFa0GN

— Rob Stark (@starkrob21) March 19, 2021

It’s rumored that during his interview for the job, Blinken did a pretty decent rendition of “Stairway to Heaven,” which Biden’s wife and caretaker “Doctor” Biden found “so dreamy.”

(Yes, Blinken actually was in a band and has admitted that his first choice for a career was “pop star.” Yes, he really had a single called “Lip Service,” which he wrote for Kamala Harris. Yes, that last part is a joke. I mean the Kamala Harris part. He really did release a single called “Lip Service,” which is on Spotify. This is going to go down in history alongside Caligula marrying his horse.)

Yes, after the total collapse, if you survive, then in 2050, there’s a high likelihood you will have a Chinese landlord.

Except maybe not, because if you survive the meltdown, it probably means you own rural land.

The point is: everything is probably all going to work out.

The ZOG empire is going to collapse, and the world is going to then be controlled by a Chinese merchant network, where the concept of “empire” is based on trade rather than military strength.

People will be fine in such a situation.

Certainly a lot better than we are now, under these guys.

In the Chinese version of Star Wars, Darth Vader has a pet triceratops.

Also, instead of blowing up Alderaan, he blows up the Kennedy Space Center.

Furthermore, Obi-Wan rides a motorcycle and wears a knight’s armor.

Han Solo is heavily grizzled, but he wears a heart locket.

Ask yourself: wouldn’t the new Star Wars movies have been better if instead of being about feminism and race-mixing, they explored Darth Vader’s relationship with his triceratops?

I rest my case.

Built like a fish.

In China, the idea of the perfect shape is one that resembles the smooth thin lines of a fish. Much like this girl does. video.

Or this woman who is shaped like a fish…

Nice bouncy Chinese woman. My guess is that she had implants, and the only way you can achieve such an aggressive bouncy softness is with the Motiva Ergomax implants. video. Yeah, these sixth generation implants are truly something.

It makes me want to play with her boobies. Jiggle. Jiggle. Jiggle.

China infrastructure projects.

It’s all totally under reported in the West.

video

Delivery guy stops and becomes a Rufus…

Just an ordinary guy, doing ordinary things, when he sees a boy drowning. In a split second he make the decision to dive in and save the boy. video

How to make authentic Pepper-pork

Here’s how you do it. It’s so easy, and OMG so very, very delicious. Give it a try, you will not regret it. video.

What it is like leaving the KTV going to the hotel…

Ah. For those of you who are not aware. This is what it is like leaving the business KTV hostess and having an evening of fun. It’s riding in the car to the hotel for the final enjoyment of the evening.

It was a fun evening. video.

Finally, Be the Rufus!

Imagine a world where everyone is nice to each other. Where families can live without worries, fear or threats. Imagine a place where everyone is helpful. Well, you don’t have to wait. You can start doing it now. Today. Just go forth and do some random acts of kindness. Smile at people. Go out of your way to be nice. Just put a little bit of sunshine in the lives of others. Be the Rufus. video.

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

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A short history of the Chinese hopping vampires

And more…

And now for some amusing history. I like to believe that the world is full of interesting tales, histories, people and events. Yet many of these things are hidden from view. It’s treated as just some arcane knowledge that lies hidden in an attic trunk, or the garage of a long dead relative. Just waiting there, so that one day, an inquisitive young ten year old (boy or girl) would venture into that dusty realm and explore and discover treasures worth appreciation.

My curiosity was sparked by this vintage advertisement. Which makes me wonder if future historians will believe that everyone in the 1970’s wore swimming clothes when they operated a computer.

Computing in the 1970’s.

And speaking of the past. Have you ever wondered what modern Russian people think of the KGB and the days of the fading Soviet Union? We, it’s interesting, they think about it a lot. And there are some interesting meme’s floating around. Like this one…

Russian starter pack 1980s

An Anzio 20mm rifle. They’re legal to own in the US

For when you really need to take down an armored vehicle. Legal to own in most States.

An Anzio 20mm rifle. They’re legal to own in the US.

Good Debt vs. Bad Debt

Good debt: you buy a house. You now own the bank $300,000 and after your loan term you end up paying the bank $400,000 after interest. It took 30 years to pay that debt but since houses went up in price your initial $400k spent is now worth $500k.

Bad debt: you see this nice new TV at best buy. It costs $3k, but its top of the line. Now, you don’t have $3k to drop on a TV, so you put it on the credit card. It takes you ~3 years to pay it off @ 20% interest. In the end you will pay about $4k for the TV, and in 3 years time that TV will most likely be worth 1/10 of what was paid.

The idea that you need to avoid all debts is not practical to most people and not really good financial advice. The exception are people who can’t handle the responsibility of credit (which tend to be the people who get this advice, and tend to be younger people) or people who have jobs that are too inconsistent to keep up with regular payments (which tend to be poorer people).

Johnny Depp was in a wedding band back in 1982

Well, we all have to start somewhere.

Johnny Depp

What I really wanted when I was a boy

I didn’t get it though. Sigh.

A totally cool floor

Well, at least I think so. Anyways.

Cool floor

Married with Children

One of my favorite television shows of the 1980’s.

A Stop at Willoughby

The Twilight Zone is known for the weird, the macabe and the dark. However, this episode isn’t so black and white. Well, the show’s physically still in black and white, but in the case of Gart Williams, a tired and overworked advertising executive, life is a nightmare and The Twilight Zone offers relief every evening on his train ride home. Williams pictures an idyllic society, one that he feels at ease in. “A Stop at Willoughby” is about man’s search for paradise. Some call it heaven, Williams calls it Willoughby.

“A Stop at Willoughby”

The OTS-135 12.7mm Revolver: For when you need to blow a hole through Neptune’s rings

A bit over-kill. I would like to see the holster fro this monster.

Enjoy this little adventure.

From HERE.

The Hopping Vampires (jiang shi) are a type of undead creature found in Chinese folklore. Although its Chinese name is often translated as ‘Chinese hopping vampire / zombie / ghost), its literal meaning is ‘stiff corpse’. These creatures may be identified by their attire – the uniform of a Qing Dynasty official. Additionally, the jiang shi is recognizable by its posture and movement. The arms of these creatures are permanently outstretched, apparently due to rigor mortis, and they hop, rather than walk.

As a result of the stiffness in their bodies, there are many ways to turn a corpse into a jiang shi, and as many ways to defeat them. These undead creatures appear in quite a number of Chinese films.

What are Jiang Shi?

While most jiang shi share the same type of attire, bodily posture, and mode of movement, variations also exist among these creatures. For example, some of these beings look like normal humans, while others are a little more decomposed as a result of being dead for a longer period of time. Yet others have been depicted with sharp teeth, long nails, and emitting a green phosphorescent glow. In some versions of the story, jiang shi are said to be able to grow stronger, thus allowing them to acquire skills such as flying and transforming into wolves.

How a Jiang Shi is Created

There are apparently many ways for a dead body to turn into a jiang shi. For instance, according to one version of the myth, a jiang shi is created when a person suffers a violent death, for instance, suicide, hanging or drowning. Such deaths cause the soul to be unable to leave the body, thus resulting in a reanimated corpse.

Another belief is that a corpse may become a jiang shi if it is not given a proper burial. For instance, if a burial was postponed after death, a dead body may become restless, and return to haunt the living. Another supposed way of a corpse turning into a jiang shi is that it fails to decompose even after burial. Corpses that have been struck by a bolt of lightning or hopped over by an animal (particularly cats) are also said to turn into this undead creature.

Some Truth to the Story?

Stories about the jiang shi are not entirely without basis in fact. During the Qing Dynasty, efforts were made to return the bodies of Chinese workers who died far away from home back to their place of birth. This was done so that their spirits would not grow homesick.

It seems that there were those who specialized in this trade and handled the transportation of the corpses back to their ancestral homes. These ‘corpse drivers’, as they are called, are said to have transported the dead at night. The coffins were attached to bamboo poles that rested on the shoulders of two men. As they went on their journey, the bamboo poles would flex. Viewed from afar, this would look as is the dead were bouncing on their own accord.

It is from here that rumors about reanimated corpses began. Initially, it was speculated that the ‘corpse drivers’ were necromancers who were able to magically reanimate the corpses of the dead. Under the supervision of the ‘corpse drivers’, the dead would hop back home.

This was done overnight to minimize the decay of the body. Additionally, travelling at night meant that there would be a lower chance of encountering the living, and meeting the dead is considered bad luck. For added measure, a priest with a bell is said to lead the procession, thus warning people of their approach.

How to Defeat a Hopping Vampire

The jiang shi are commonly said to come out at night. To sustain themselves, as well as to grow more powerful, the jiang shi would steal the qi (life force) of living victims. The living, however, are not entirely defenseless against these creatures. There seems to be several ways to defeat a jiang shi, these include:

  • the blood of a black dog
  • glutinous rice
  • showing it a mirror because it fears its reflection
  • chicken eggs
  • throwing money on the floor (they’ll stop to count it)
  • the urine of a virgin boy
  • holding one’s breath
  • sticking a Taoist talisman on its forehead
  • a rooster’s crowing

During the 1980s, the jiang shi was a popular subject in the film industry of Hong Kong. While these undead were often featured as antagonists, they have sometimes been depicted as more human-like, and at times even served as comic relief!

Now that was fun huh? Well, we’re on a roll. Let’s keep a rolling.

Selected Alternative Media

The art of Electronics (full PDF – FREE)

This is the complete PDF of chapter 9 of the amazing work “The art of electronics”.  It is provided free with no encumbrances. No registration. No credit card “to verify if you are human” and other bullshit methods to squeeze money from you. It’s presented here for fellow geeks and mad scientists to enjoy.

PDF of Chapter 9 ; VOLTAGE REGULATION AND
POWER CONVERSION. HERE.

Thoughts In The Middle Of An Economic Collapse?

From Busted Knuckles

It’s being done intentionally in case anyone was wondering.

I see Gold and Silver are trying to break out.

There’s a sign all is not well in Koo Koo land right there.

Inflation is killing us, eating at our buying power.

I saw an article last night that I am too lazy to find at the moment showing that Shadow Stats compared what the official inflation rate is compared to how they used to calculate it back in the 80’s and it would be right about 15%.

Anyone who has recently bought groceries or fuel of any kind has seen that with their own eyes.

I also saw where Homeland Security is still pushing the Domestic Terrorism button.

Standing on it actually.

TPTB would love nothing better for someone to snap and start shooting the place up so they could start with the Purge they already have unwrapped and sitting on the table waiting.

People are quitting and getting fired left and right over the horse shit OSHA enforced Vaxx Mandate that we are all waiting to see some Black Robed Nazgul’s say is perfectly legal when anyone with a lick of sense can see through like cellophane.

It’s either because [1] the Government is incompetent beyond rational understanding, or [2] they are criminally complicit in trying to destroy the lives and families of Americans. Either way, the USA is very toxic right now.

Other comments…

Just seeing a few holes in the grocery shelves, but nothing serious.  Gas is just under $4/gal (premium), and ammunition is outrageous when you can find it.  Help wanted signs everywhere with some restaurants short-staffed to the point of drive-thru only.  If Waffle House can only have one server and one cook, shit is baaad.  Same staffing shortages in retail as well.  It’s like 10% of the population just left the planet.  Just wish our local government retards would vanish.   New residential developments left and right.  Wondering who is going to pay those high prices for a house.  I’m hoping the asshole turning a corn field into a subdivision about 1/2 mile from me loses his ass.  Life seems to be normal, but even the wife senses “tension” (her word) when she’s out and about for provisioning.  I’m too old to wait too long, so whatever is going to happen I wish it would pop so I can have a little fun with it.

And…

Great vid that explains quite a bit fer the simple minded like me:

https://rumble.com/vn7lf5-monopoly-who-owns-the-world-must-see.html

Absurd

But cool.

Some Geo-politic stuff

From HERE. Interesting website.

The fight in Donbass is one of the major world’s flash points alongside Syria and Taiwan—where U.S. provocations threaten a major war with China.

If the West forces a military confrontation with Russia in Ukraine, it can be sure it will face one with China over Taiwan simultaneously, neither of which it has any chance of winning.

The Russians and Chinese have forged a partnership against Western, primarily U.S. aggression in the political, economic, and military spheres.

“Idiots in the Pentagon Are Pushing the U.S. into a Military Confrontation with China over Nothing,” Says Former Top Policy Adviser

From HERE.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley claimed last week that China was close to a “sputnik moment” due to its successful test of a hypersonic missile. 

However, U.S. space-based early warning systems can detect hypersonic missiles, marking them as no threat at all.

General Mark Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff warned on Wednesday, October 27th, that China’s development of a hypersonic missile system is “very concerning,” calling it “very close” to a “sputnik moment” that triggered the space race during the Cold War.

“What we saw was a very significant event of a test of a hypersonic weapon system. And it is very concerning,” Milley said during an interview with “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations” on Bloomberg Television. “I don’t know if it’s quite a Sputnik moment, but I think it’s very close to that. It has all of our attention.” 

Sputnik was the first artificial satellite launched into low Earth orbit in 1957 by the Soviet Union, which sparked the space race between the U.S. and USSR.

Theodore Postol, professor emeritus of Science, Technology, and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and a former top policy adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations, says that the Sputnik analogy advanced by General Milley is off base.

“The launching of Sputnik,” Postol said in an interview with CAM, “signaled at the time that the Soviet Union was able to compete with the U.S. in space and had been a surprise.” However, in the case of China and the testing of a hypersonic missile, U.S. intelligence agencies were “already aware about it and knew that China is very advanced in science and technology.”

The hypersonic missile, furthermore, “does not threaten the U.S. population in any way or provide China any military-technological edge.”

This is because the U.S. has “extraordinary space-based early warning infrared systems with the ability to detect hypersonic vehicles as they descend into the atmosphere and become heated to very high temperatures.”

General Milley’s statement, according to Postol, reflects how “idiots in the Pentagon” and political appointees are trying to “push us [the U.S.] into military confrontation with China over nothing.”

“Pushing us into military confrontation over nothing”

Launched via rocket, the hypersonic missile can travel over 6,000 miles at five times the speed of sound (3,836 mph). It runs parallel to the earth’s surface and can skip off it like a rock before reaching its destination after heating up to a very high temperature.

The space-based early warning system can see the hot spots of the hypersonic missile that’s moving when it dips into the boundary between space and the upper atmosphere. The exhaust from the hypersonic vehicle would also be recognizable.

According to Postol, a more real threat to U.S. national security are ballistic missiles—that Russia and China both possess—which are more accurate and launch balloons in space that radar cannot peer through and detect. The balloons are decoys which in frictionless outer space are very hard to distinguish from the actual warhead.

The U.S. military also cannot defend against cruise missiles that the Russians and Chinese have in their arsenals.

Testing the hypersonic missile, according to Postol, may provide “a statement from China that they are a technological competitor to the U.S.,” but it will “have little or no meaning in terms of adding significant nuclear-strike capabilities.”

“Someone gave Milley false information”

Postol says that he “does not think that Milley is a liar, but believes that he was provided false information from someone within the U.S. military or intelligence agencies and didn’t know any better.”

According to Postol, “Milley is both an unsophisticated consumer of intelligence and someone who is easily manipulated.”

In October, “when a drone strike in Kabul killed ten civilians, Milley stated that the attack was just”—though later acknowledged it had been a mistake.

“A dysfunctional system” and culture that “hypes threats”

Trained as a nuclear engineer at MIT, Postol said that his experience as a scientific policy adviser to the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Jim Watkins, from 1982 to 1984, “left him with a low regard for the accuracy of information provided by high-level government employees.”

This low regard has only intensified with time.

When Colin Powell gave his infamous speech at the UN in February 2003 about Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq, Postol—then a Pentagon adviser—knew right away that every line in the speech was wrong and that Powell himself knew this.

Recipient of the Leo Szilard Prize in 1990 from the American Physical Society for “incisive technical analysis of national security issues that [have] been vital for informing the public policy debate” and Norbert Weiner Award from Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility for “uncovering numerous and important false claims about missile defenses,” Postol earned the ire of the Bush I administration when he challenged the efficacy of the Patriot missile system—which had reputedly intercepted Scud missiles launched against Israel by Iraqi ruler Saddam Hussein during the first Persian Gulf War.

Since that time, Postol has been highly critical of the tearing up of arms control agreements like the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia reducing cruise missiles, and U.S. government investment in ineffective weapons systems that waste taxpayer dollars.

In Postol’s view, the intelligence agencies have some good people working for them, but have developed into “rigid, dysfunctional bureaucracies with weak leaders who are often politicized.”

Those who gain promotion “have their own motivations” and “do not always provide the best information.” They are “part of a culture that hypes threats,” and “provides higher ups with a storyline that is useful to the larger agenda which is to get more money from Congress.”

By amplifying threats, the intelligence agencies want to “scare people” so they will “sanction huge military budgets” and big-ticket “defense projects that often add little to national security.”

Syrian chemical gas hoax

According to Postol, the intelligence agencies deliberately deceived the American public when they claimed that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad carried out chemical weapon attacks against his own people—a claim that was adopted as a pretext for military strikes against Syria.

Postol reviewed key evidence about alleged attacks in August 2013 in the Ghouta district of Damascus and in April 2017 in the town of Khan Shaykhun in the Idlib Governate of Syria.

In the case of Ghouta, Postol said that the Obama White House presented a false intelligence report like in the Gulf of Tonkin incident that could have caused the nation to go to war.

According to Postol, what shows that the White House was lying is simple: The rockets that delivered the Sarin gas had a range of about two kilometers, roughly four to five times shorter than what was needed to execute the attack from Syrian-government controlled areas according to the White House map.

In the case of the attack on Khan Shaykhun, Postol said that the Syrian air force bombed a building—a meeting place for extremist leaders—with a supply store in its basement that stored pesticides and other chemicals which released toxic materials when it was struck.

The crater in the building had to have been caused by artillery rockets, and the scene was later staged to make it look like it was the target of a sarin nerve gas attack by Assad.

Jeffrey St. Clair wrote in Counterpunch that “China’s successful hypersonic missile test insures that over the next decade trillions will be diverted from health care, climate change, education and infrastructure budgets into a bottomless Pentagon slush fund for developing, testing and deploying missiles that by definition (or at least according to the logic of MAD theory) can never be used.”

This is how much food you can get for the cost of a pack of cigarettes in Australia

Part of Australian social engineering.

Australian cost for cigarettes

This all-female football tournament in Pakistan might have the best backdrop in the world

Pakistan is truly a beautiful place.

A cabbage farm kinda looks like a field of alien pods waiting to hatch

It does, doesn’t it?

Some video time

I would like to throw forth some videos now…

Show some love… video

Come on, ya gotta give out some love if you are ever going to expect to receive any. video

In China, people work together. In China, people take the time to make the world a better place. I like to believe that this aspect of the Chinese people is very much a human aspect that has been bleached out of many people because their societies have become evil, corrupted by the greedy. Start now. Take charge of your life. Start now, clean up your little part of the world. Start now and make the difference.

Stop waiting on others to do things. Instead, you go forth and do them yourself. video.

Please be the Rufus. Help others. Take action when it is needed. Do not fear anything. Go forth and go great things. Video

Show some humanity. Show some understanding. Show some kindness. Be the Rufus. Make a difference in the world around you. VIDEO.

Help others. Be kind. Go out of your way to do nice and helpful things. Do not be afraid about being late for work, or getting sued, or what others will think. Take the initiative and be the Rufus… video

Be the Rufus. Seriously. Be the Rufus. Like this cab driver does… video

Or like this cab driver does…

Video

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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A no nonsense comparison between the USA and China

There’s all sort of idiocy on the internet today, as well as very powerful forces that are trying to convince people of this ideology, or that ideology. Well, here we are going to cut through all the nonsense and spell things out plainly and clearly. And it is going to make some people very upset. But I don’t care. Truth hurts. Deal with it, and move on.

This article deals with things as they are. Not what we want them to be. It also deals with the truth as it manifests, not what we want, but what actually exists today.

This article compares China and the USA. If you cannot handle it, then leave. Your tender sensibilities are of no concern to me.

Governance

China is a meritocracy. America is a kakistocracy.

And that is the way it is. China is not communist “regime”. America is not a “free” republic, nor a democracy “on a shining hill”. And both nations are functionally different from their labels. So let’s look at what they functionally operate as.

The United States

There is a lot of bullshit floating about. When I grew up in the United States, I was taught that America was a republic, but when I asked my teacher why everyone called it a democracy, he told me that it was changed by amendment into a democracy by mandating popular elections. Republics don’t do that. Later on, in university, when studying history, I learned that all democracies evolve.

Here’s the evolutionary stages for a democracy. This is not my opinion. It is history. If you cannot handle history, then leave.

  • Democracy evolves to an oligarchy.
  • And if the oligarchy isn’t destroyed by popular revolt, it evolves into a Military dictatorship.
  • If unchecked, a military dictatorship evolves into a military empire.
  • And all military empires devolve into a kakistocracy.
  • And historically a kakistocracy always collapses one way, or the other.

This is where America is today. There is not a person who is alive who can deny this today.

kakistocracy = a government of a state by its most stupid, ignorant, least qualified and unprincipled citizens in power.

Now, let’s look at China.

China

Contemporaneous China was established by Chairman Mao as a Communist nation.

This changed upon his death, and there were various factions fighting for power. Eventually, under Mr. Deng, China embraced capitalism, and democracy, while maintaining a single party rule. Thus it became a “Social Democracy”.

Over the years, boundaries and limits have been placed on which elements of socialism fit the Chinese culture, as well as which elements of capitalism fit the Chinese culture.

Today, we have a unique government style, very reminiscent of the government described by Robert Heinlein in Starship Troopers. (My article on this subject is an important read. Click on the link for more.)

Government participation is voluntary. To join the government (the communist party) you must contribute to society without any profit motives. As they said in Starship Troopers, “Service guarantees citizenship”.

So, if you want to vote in China’s democracy, you must first volunteer for the military, or any other volunteer government agencies. Then you must apply, and your membership is reviewed by your merit. There is a strict grading system, and your sponsor into the communist party is held personally responsible for any failings or errors you may make.

Up the chain of command, every step toward leadership roles are though merit driven avenues. Further there are police; known as the “corruption police” that root out, and punish any communist party members that take bribes, involved in graft, do bad or poor behaviors, and they are punished MOST severely.

There is nothing like this anywhere else in the world. And nothing like this ever in history.

China is an absolute meritocracy.

So to recap;

  • China is a meritocracy; a society governed by people selected according to merit.
  • America is a kakistocracy; government by the least suitable or competent.

Middle Class

Both America and China have different cultures, and different societies. But I like to judge the benefits of one society over the other by the size of it’s middle class.

In this case, we will extract the size of the middle class in a binary fashion. Saying that aside from the top 0.01%, the society can be broken down into two categories.

There is the poor. And there is the middle class.

Where within the middle class are stratified levels or layers.

But as long as you are in this middle range, you are doing well. Sure, you might not own your own private jet, but you won’t be starving either. An idealized nation will have everyone living without want or need; they would all be middle class. They would own their own home, always have enough food, medical care, and a role in society.

Now keeping things real, “Middle class” is not a measure of how many houses, or cars that you own. It’s a measure of whether or not you need the government to assist you in meeting basic needs of food, shelter, and medical care.

Using published information…

Freedom and Responsibility

The “talking heads” on all the media talks up a “great game” about how America has “freedom!” as if it actually existed. Freedom is not just words on a piece of paper that can be taken away by legislation, hello!, it’s something that you live with. And since it is something that you live with, comes responsibility.

America and China differ substantially in this regard.

America is a land of “anything goes” freedom with zero responsibility. The boundaries on the use of that freedom are defined by law. Limitations on what laws can exist is supposed to be met under the terms of the Bill of Rights, but that document has been riddled with so many exceptions that it no longer is a functional document. Thus you have a society where people can do anything, just as long as they are not caught by the police in breaking a law.

China, on the other hand, treats freedom as something precious that is dished out in measured amounts to those who are responsible. This is measured by the “Social Scoring” system. If you are responsible, you are permitted great deal of freedom. If not, then you have your “wings clipped” and live a more restricted life.

  • America = All freedom. No responsibility, can act within the confines of law.
  • China = Freedom and responsibility are intertwined, and measured for compliance.

Community

I also like to measure society buy it’s communities. This measurement comes in many forms, but fundamentally it is a complex mixture of safety, social interaction with others, access to basic transportation, quality of life, costs of groceries, access to parts and public areas, and friendships.

This is all very difficult to measure. So we are going to look at this in a broader sense. We will look at the most popular community structures in China and America and then compare them.

In China, most people live in these housing complexes. These are enormous skyscrapers that are surrounded by a wall, and is secured by security police known as BaoAn’s. Within that complex is at least one park, multiple recreation areas, kindergarten and elementary schools, a police and local government administration office, a post office, and individual parking.

While homes can be rented in these complex’s, most people buy a house. Thus securing a long term residence that allow direct participation with all their neighbors. Additionally, people in the building complexes are all on social media and share thoughts, stories, issues and needs in real time, as they develop.

It is not at all unusual to see evenings filled with children playing in the open areas, the parks and the buildings. Old people walk on the sidewalks and walkways, and BaoAn’s mingle with the residence. This is normal China.

In America, most people yearn for a home. They buy a home in the country, or suburb, and (if they are rich enough) a home / apartment in a city. In all cases, they are isolated from each other. If they want to be part of the community, they must make an effort to do so. It is not automatic, and thus many people tend to stay inside and isolate. The suburbs in America are some of the quietest and loneliest places on the earth.

  • China = An active community of participation.
  • America = A nice home in isolation with little community participation.

Now, I could go on and on…

I can site facts and figures. Like the percentage of people who drive, or the percentage of people who are employed, or the effort it takes in literacy. But that’s an easy and a silly way to measure things. You just cannot take things in isolation and measure them. You need to provide a “level playing field” and then measure from there.

People use GDP, for instance. But GDP is flawed. And I will repeat my often used example…

  • Sally has one dollar and can buy two apples with it.
  • Tom has ten dollars, but can only buy one apple with it.

According to GDP, Tom is more successful than Sally.

We all need to measure our lives by our happiness. As well as by our purpose, and our relationships with the community.

If you are not happy, but instead working for money; if you don’t have a purpose other than to make money; and if you have no sense of community, then you are very likely to be living in the United States.

And of course, if you are happy, and you work as part of a community for the betterment of all, then you are probably living in China.

Reality Check

Of course, not everyone in America lives in suburbs, or in their own homes. And not everyone in China lives in these huge mega apartment complexes. And not everyone in America is isolated, and not everyone in China is part of the community. But the point is that the vast bulk of them are.

And that is what we are talking about here. As America is balkanized, you will have an occasional little oasis of community, and one of prosperity and safety. But those numbers are dwindling. And China is a homogenized nation. Everyone speaks one language, and no one is hyphenated.  You won’t hear any Chinese calling themselves Hunan-Chinese, or Xinjiang Chinese.

As I have said before, we have to see things as they really exist. Not as we want them to be.

Personally

Personally I think it is a good idea to have a choice in how you can live your life in different societies. It’s like being able to choose between steak or dog food for dinner. And if you are tired of dog food, you can smell that delicious steak and eventually go to a place where there is steak every day. Yum!

Some people like to eat dog food. They eat it day in and day out. They are told that dog food is good, and that everyone knows that dog food is the best.

Me; I like steak.

Judging from the billions of pro-America articles out in internet-land, so many people love living inside of America. They have this thing called “democracy” and “freedom”. Though what it actually is, is really hard to nail down. If you ask them if the election systems actually work, most would say no. If you ask them if their representatives will represent them, they would also say no. And if you ask them if the bill of Rights is being followed, they would also say no.

So, perhaps, America is just floating along on this vaporous cloud of ignorance and hope.

Meanwhile China has “been there and done that”. They went through the changes and have arrived at a stable place. They carved out a life and made it stable, and rock solid.

America is the land of the 0.1% of people. If you can become one of them, then this place is for you. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation toils to one day be able to reach that point. Maybe you too can be come a billionaire and fly into space!

China is the land of the 90% of people. Everyone can get a decent life. Some better than others, but all within a fine band of comfort. And you know, it is possible, that one day, you will be able to fly into space. If not you, then your kids. But it is really possible.

Today in the United States, the only think keeping the masses of people from revolting and hanging the government is the free welfare checks, and the television / internet. To me, it reminds me of Rome, where the rulers provided their citizens with bread and circuses.

In China, as I have repeatedly tried to relate, it is calm and peaceful. No stress at all. None. Kids play, people talk. Nothing is frantic. Nothing is fast paced. The skies are blue. The trees are green. Flowers are everywhere. Malls are open, stores are bright and cheerful This is throughout China, not “only on the coast” as one supposed China expat said in a comment.

Now for some videos…

With this in mind, let’s look at a few videos that serve to illustrate these points.

In a MERIT DRIVEN SOCIETY such as CHINA, everyone tries to do their best and excel. They work together. They study hard. They strive. (Video)

video

Yes they do, and this idea to be the best you can be, to be kind and to be helpful comes from how you are raised. Check out this next video. This is a Chinese preschool. (video).

video

In a SOCIETY DRIVEN BY GREED such as AMERICA, it’s every man for himself. And thus you have all sorts of crime and events related to fraud and deception. (Video)

video

“Is that your bike? No.”

And so what does this guy do? He films it and does nothing. Not a community. It is just every man for himself. (Video)

video

But it doesn’t have to be this way…

If you grew up in a land with a thousand tiny hands in your wallet, a leadership that are idiots, and where every person is scrambling for a “piece of the pie”, you can change that.

No. I am not talking about revolution. Nor am I talking about leaving the nation that you are part of for somewhere else. I am instead talking about what you can do to make the world around you a little bit better.

Participate.

Meet your neighbors. Say hi. Smile. Buy coffee for coworkers. Clean up the trash on the street. Feed the dogs and cats. Make your home open, welcome and friendly.

Use the “porch light system” for invitations. Tell everyone you meet in your community that when the porch light is on, that it is a welcome for them to come on over and have a cup of coffee and to chill out with you.

Be the Rufus. (video)

I love this Rufus doggie.

video

Be the Rufus!

You can make the world a better place. Just help others. (Video)

If everyone thought about others, their community, their purpose, and in making their little tiny part better, than we all will live a better life. Stop being alone and isolated. Reach out. Help others. Make friends. You will be surprised how much your quality of life will improve. Just participate in life.

Video

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

 

 

What it is like living in China the real-life “Twilight Zone” episode

Here, let’s just talk about some odds and ends for a change.

What it is like living in China the real-life “Twilight Zone” episode

I swear the disconnect between what is reported in the “news” in the West and what is actually occurring is so different it is mind blowing. And to underline; to underscore this, I am going to give a few examples on just how much bullshit if being fed to the cattle in the United States and Britain. It’s pretty enormous.

Elections in China

Now, you know, China is a Social Democracy that refers to it’s self as “Communist with Chinese Characteristics”. Just like Americans call themselves a “free Republic”. So anyways, there’s been elections this week. And in China that is a big deal. Wholly automated, Use QR codes and connect to the election system by your cell phone. Of course, it is efficient and quick, but only Communist Party members can vote. Like I said in my article about China being like the movie “Starship Troopers”. Service gives citizenship. So if you want to vote, you must volunteer to participate in society.

So anyways, it’s really different from the clown show of elections in the West.

Is it being reported? No. Not one single American or Western news organization is reporting on the elections inside China. Why?

Banned news item on LinkedIN

Well, the banned comments on LinkedIN tell the entire story. There are certain subjects that the American government FORBIDS to be discussed on any American internet platform. And one of those is elections inside of China.

Which is probably why you won’t find any “news” about this in Western media. It’s erased as if it doesn’t exist, and the readership of those “news” articles continue to believe that China is a single party communist dictatorship. That doesn’t have elections.

The United States censors anything that shows China to be a democracy.

WiFi Dongle

Well, long time MM readers will know of my struggles with Microsoft. Finally when I purchased the entire Windows 10 package and installed it complete on my laptop… it stopped working. Told me to purchase yet ANOTHER authentic Microsoft windows OS, and disabled most of my functionality on the system. I said “fuck this”, and installed Lunix on my new computer.

And it is “cherry”. It works beautifully.

Well, only one problem, though. The company that makes the chipset core in my computer is a company owned by Microsoft; Realtek. And they do not have official Microsoft approved drivers to run the wifi. SoI have to manually install third party drivers for the blasted wifi. Which is a real pain in the ass.

I have been Learning Lunix commands and tying all sorts of work-arounds. Finally using a Ethernet dongle connected to my 5G router. And it seems to work, but it is a pain in the ass to be manually wired to systems when you carry a laptop. I need mobility.

So I devised a plan.

I would buy a Ethernet USB adapter and use it. I would use one that would be plug and play compatible with my Lunix system. So I went on the Internet and searched for “best internet wifi adapters 2021”, and ended up HERE after I selected the top pick.

And here’s the item. Cost is $44 USD or 286 RMB.

Amazon.com Wifi adapter for Lunix

Well, the delivery time from the USA is around one to two months, It will arrive in early December, but Customs will need to clear it, and that will be another two weeks easy. So this is what I did…

I went on Alibaba and looked up the factories that make the “guts”; the electronics of these gadgets. As you can see there are a bunch of them.

Factories in China that make Wifi adapters

And then I asked one of my engineers to search for the factory that make this particular “Made in America” product. Because, after all, according to Amazon.com this product is made inside of America with American know-how, American skills, and American everything. But, you know, I have been doing international trade for many decades. Politics aside, it’s all made overseas. So we went a looking.

The bottom line is that we found the manufacturer that makes the guts for this “American product”. They are in Shenzhen.

And we talked directly one-on-one with the engineer there.

They have been manufacturing the inner workings for this “American product” for years now. Generally they started as an OEM supplier, and now they do their own design and their own products.

And he told us that while they could give us the exact product that is sold in America, it would be a mistake for us to use it. The American product has special chipset modifications required by the United States government in the core PCB. He didn’t know what they were, but suspected they were “back door” access of all the signals going to and from the adapter.

So instead, he would sell us the exact module without the American chipset addons. It’s all good, it’s just a different chip and different add on (parts delete) on the board. I said “sounds good to me”.

Cost was $6 USD or under 40 RMB with local shipping.

The United States has electronic access via “backdoors” in all American wifi products.

Taiwan

"There is almost no scenario in which the United States can successfully intervene in a war between China and Taiwan that will not leave our country in far worse shape than it is right now; in a worst-case scenario, American territory could be struck by nuclear missiles." 

-Business Insider

US officials who are ready to fight China over Taiwan don’t understand how much is at stake

Many of America’s leading military and political figures have issued increasingly alarmist warnings in recent days about the potential for conflict with China, especially related to issues surrounding Taiwan.

But before the US gets into a crisis that brings it to the threshold of war — or finds itself stumbling into one — policymakers and military leaders need to address some hard realities.

There is almost no scenario in which the United States can successfully intervene in a war between China and Taiwan that will not leave our country in far worse shape than it is right now; in a worst-case scenario, American territory could be struck by nuclear missiles.

In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, Adm. Phil Davidson, commander of US forces in the Indo-Pacific, warned that Chinese military developments looked to him like a nation planning for a war.

Davidson added that he believed China would attempt to forcibly reunify Taiwan “in the next six years.” To guard against this possibility, Davidson asked Congress to provide a whopping $27 billion in additional funding over the current defense budget.

One of the featured programs for this increase is the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. Last year Congress allocated $2.1 billion for the initiative. This year Davidson is asking for more than double that amount, to $4.6 billion.

The PDI’s main objectives will be to increase the number of ground-based cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and hypersonic missiles in areas closer to Chinese territory. That effort is already well underway.

In October the US Marine Corps completed construction on its first new permanent base in the Indo-Pacific area since 1952. The Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force have additional plans to establish new bases or expand existing ones at Tinian Island, Palau, Guam, and Australia — all along the so-called “first island chain” near China’s coastline.

The expansion is designed to enhance US’ ability to conduct “island-hopping” operations and create the ability to rapidly construct military airfields in austere environments.

The reason for this expansion, Davidson said, was to reduce or eliminate the time necessary for American military forces to engage Chinese targets.

The admiral said that right now it would take US forces on the West Coast more than three weeks to get within range of China and troops from Alaska 17 days. But the “perfect speed,” Davidson concluded, was “being there.”

Almost entirely absent from the hearing was any explanation of what’s driving the United States to elevate the risk of war by increasing the number of troops near the Chinese coast.

As a freedom-loving democracy, the United States is a strong advocate for the independence and freedom of any people, including those in Taiwan. But to that laudable belief must be added a willingness to assess the world in a realistic way.

Right now, both the United States and China are in a spiral in which one side expands its capabilities for war, citing rising threats from the other — which each then offers as justification for yet more military spending and preparation for war.

China is building infrastructure to project its power westward to the first island chain at the same time US forces are moving infrastructure eastward toward the first island chain and Chinese coast. Every day increases the chance of an accident or miscalculation leading to war.

Both the United States and China say they don’t want war, but both sides are accelerating and expanding their preparation for war.

If the United States were to one day fight China for anything other than an unprovoked attack, we would be choosing a course which would — in the best-case scenario — cause extraordinary harm to our military and markedly degrade our national security; in the worst-case, we could lose a war, putting at risk our very freedom.

It is crucial to understand that for China, the Taiwan issue is not merely a core interest, but an emotionally charged one. They are far more willing to pay extraordinary costs, sacrifice many men, and could risk it all to eventually compel unification with Taiwan.

The issue does not directly affect our national security unless we get involved.

If we eventually choose war with China over Taiwan, we will at best suffer egregious losses in ships, aircraft, and troops; in a worst-case, the war could deteriorate into a nuclear exchange in which American cities are turned into nuclear wastelands, killing millions.

America should never take such risks unless our security and freedom are directly threatened. Fighting China for any reason short of that would be a foolish gamble of the highest order.

If the USA gets involved in a war with China over Taiwan, the USA would lose. The magnitude of the loss is the only outcome in question.

Poverty

Two days ago, I received this comment from someone who read my article  “You must leave China now. China is not safe. America will destroy it completely and I will not be able to help you out”…

He said;

You keep pounding on points that no one disputes but which are irrelevant. What are you trying to convince Americans to do? Admire China? Be demoralized? Why would the Chinese care what we think of them? How is insulting America going to make us admire them, anyway? If it is to demoralize, then that, too is foolish — attacking your best potential ally while leaving everyone’s real enemy untouched.

Butt-hurt because America is performing so poorly on all fronts. And all I have to say about this is that America has failed in taking care of the social issues that are fundamental to a functioning society. American is becoming more like Bangladesh than a “free and prosperous” nation.

The MM readership will know that I was homeless for a period of time between when I left the Navy and then obtained my training at NAS China Lake. During this period of time, the general treatment of homeless people all over the country was to escort you out of the town, and if they cannot do that, then lock you up in jail until a social service can take you in.

Do you want to know what they do in China?

Everyone in China has an identity. They have a card, but also biometrics. When ever a beggar is found on the streets or a homeless person, the duty of the citizens are to contact the police who will then come to the beggar / homeless person.

The police will then escort them to the local social services office. They will be immediately provided with a shower, clean clothes, a meal (or two as needed), a physical examination to include mental health, and an interview.

During that interview they will determine if that person can stay or needs to return to their home town. You see, every ID card is associated with a local “home town” government. That government is wholly responsible for that person.

If the person is mentally unstable, looking for work, transient but having difficulties, or whatever the issue, the interviewer will make the necessary arrangements to get the person help.

Typically, in many cases, but not all, the person would be escorted to their home town and handed over to the local government there. They will immediately provide them with long-term housing, food, showers, and a simple but useful job. The person then need not worry about health care, housing, food, or being alone.

This is how China takes care of it’s citizens.

America just locks them up in prison / mental hospital / or allows them to be preyed upon in the wilds of urban streets.

America has FAILED in providing to the needs of it’s citizens, while China has been able to handle and take care of it’s citizenry.

Yahoo!

The Internet empire Yahoo! has decided to close off China from all of it’s services. No reason is given, but I cannot help but assume that it is political in nature.

Ah, yet another wall to isolate China from the Western World.

My Grandfather’s House

My fathers’ father lived on “Polish Hill” which is a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. This is a hilly area, and all the houses are built on the sides of very steep hills, many actually being full cliff faces. Thus, when you enter the house, you would have a “ground floor” which consists of the living room and kitchen, a second floor which has a bathroom and bedrooms, and two to four basements.

In my Grandfather’s house, there were two basements. A “main basement” which opened up to the “laundry room” with the mandatory (middle of the room) commode (ah, it’s a Pittsburgh thing) and his workshop.

Now, tucked away in his workshop was this tiny “broom closet” sized door tucked away in the far corner. His workshop was filled with all sorts of electrical appliances and televisions that he would repair and work on, and old magazines and documents for the electronics world that he was a part of. He also had quite a large collection of pocket watches that he tried to repair, and various mechanisms that he would fix for a few bucks (money) here and there.

But when you opened up that tiny broom closet door, you would find yourself at a old rickety wooden spiral staircase going down into the sub-basement grotto. There was a pile of old hardwood that was too valuable to discard, shelves of very dusty brick-a-brack, and other long forgotten treasures that a boy of ten would find absolutely fascinating.

And I was ten when I discovered all these adventures.

Yes, I would explore those dingy and dark areas with the radio playing “Up, up and away in my beautiful balloon”, wearing bell-bottom pants, while my mother and grandmother watched Laurence Welk on the television show, upstairs.

Now, fast forward from the early 1970’s to 1981. I am living with my grandmother as I worked at a job in one of the steel mills there. I stayed with her for about three months until I could afford my own apartment.

And She was cleaning out that subbasement. She was hauling away everything. Too much junk, worthless garbage and clutter, she said.

I had picked up this dusty old mason jar (an old canning jar for home made preserves) and was looking inside of it. There were a few pennies from the 1920’s, a old faded scrap of paper with some unintelligible writing on it (in Polish no less), two or three old buttons, a few military pins, and a hand made key to some kind of a closet or drawer.

When I showed it to my grandmother, she exclaimed “So THAT’s where that key was!”

Apparently there was a drawer in one of the pieces of furniture in the second bedroom that has been locked for decades! So, my grandmother and I went upstairs and used the key and opened up the drawer.

Inside was a bunch of jewelry / bracelets, and a couple of old coins. There was a couple of combs, a couple of old straight razors for shaving, and some silk handkerchiefs.  As well as a few old letters. There was a a very old and small diary and my grand mother picked it up and started to leaf though it, and then set it aside as we continued our explorations. There were some really old pictures of people that I did not know, and a really cool coin purse.

Now this coin purse was all metal. It was a metal bag like thingy like chain metal armor, with a cool 1920’s era design. And it had this cure little chain and it would open by a clasp. She gave it to me and I actually thought it was really cool. Inside of it, was a few more old coins. Which included pennies with faces of Indians on them, and a nickel with an Indian on the coin!

OK.

Now for part two.

Well, there was a penny in the purse, and I was messing around with my friends one weekend. And my brother had this metal (cast iron, actually) little bank mechanism thingy. You would put this penny in this part of the contraption (a representative of a guy holding a gun) and then press the latch and the mechanism would actuate a spring that would “shoot” the penny into a slot in the metal bank.

And so, on that fateful day, I lost the penny that was in the purse that I found at the grotto under the sub-basement of my grandmother’s house.

I never did get that penny back. I soon moved away after being laid off, and my life took on another direction. And somewhere, someone, took that bank that had perhaps ten or fifteen pennies, and opened it up and obtained that precious memory of when my grandmother and I discovered the key to her memories.

Why China is building more nuclear missiles…

From the article above…

One of the featured programs for this increase is the Pacific Deterrence Initiative. Last year Congress allocated $2.1 billion for the initiative. This year Davidson is asking for more than double that amount, to $4.6 billion.

The PDI's main objectives will be to increase the number of ground-based cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and hypersonic missiles in areas closer to Chinese territory. 

That effort is already well underway...

Well, it should be obvious, for every new location where the USA places it’s missiles to attack China, China now needs to arm a nuclear salvo to rubble and glass-over those weapons sites so that they are impotent in a war scenario.

Good going, Congress!

Do not be under the impression that all the weapons are for the areas right next door to China, you God damn morons. It’s for YOU. It’s for YOUR homes. It’s for YOUR cities. It’s for YOUR country.

China is NOT reactionary. They provide reactions on a event by event basis until it become clear that it is an all or nothing situation. Then, they take the necessary step to extinguish all enemy leadership and their support networks immediately.

Jews! Jews! Jews!

Lordy! One of my posts from 2019 hit the internet recently, and landed in the lap of some hard-right folks.  Aside from slowing my servers to a crawl, MM now came up (yet again) on American “watch lists”. Which is a headache in itself.

Sigh.

I have been getting a lot of comments about how “wrong” I am. And that Jews are the cause of everything! Jews started communism. Jews created Ebola. Jews are the reason homosexuality exists. Jews cause all wars. Jews, Jews, Jews!

Sheech!

I hope all this ruckus dies down soon. Because now a subgroup of “Chinese 5G is a plan to brainwash Americans to take vaccinations for a hoax virus” is starting to make the rounds. Who knows? Maybe the next thing will be “Donald Trump will win the next Presidential Election, and the China issue will be settled once and for all“.

I need a beer.

I am making more enemies than friends, it seems…

You know, in my last Q&A I post an eight part question by a contributor. And the Domain Commander didn’t answer it, and this was at a time where everyone was sending me questions to ask the Commander. So I just took one of the smaller lists and tried to ask it. And the results were posted.

Now the fellow who asked the question is upset, and doesn’t want me to throw him to the cornfield. Understandable, and now he fears that I have ill intent or beliefs about his intent.

Sigh.

Guys, Please understand that I had maybe 15 to 25 people throwing all sorts of multiple part questions at me to ask. I did not realize that I would become so famous. Some were very sincere. But some were just busy work.

Now put yourself in my shoes. You get questions, you cut and paste them into a MS Word file, and the list grows and grows.

Then you start the tasking. And it wears you out.

Imagine ten people asking 15 questions. That’s 150 questions!

Which ones are sincere? Which ones are critical? Which ones are important? Which ones are just busy work? I really don’t know.

So what I did, was I got a group from the top of the question list, and started my “flight plan”, and I printed the result in the Q&A.

Everyone, please I really sincerely want to make a difference in this world, and I sincerely want to answer your questions. If you have something pressing, please send to me at the laobanGBH@163.com email address, along with some background on the one singular question. I need to know why it is important to you personally.

As to those that asked questions that I did not answer, please wait. I am still a human, though I have many faults and cracks in my personality. Do not be offended. I just need to set up systems to handle the huge influx of questions, participants, and “noise” that is being directed at me right now.

Though, I will really get angry if someone sends me a tabulated spreadsheet of 200 multiple part questions like …

“Question 145, part 7, subpart 4, section B”

Which actually DID happen. Jeeze!

I responded back to him, but I guess he used a throw-away email address. I haven’t heard back from him.

Vaxx Stuff

For all youse guys who are into the anti-mRNA vaccination protocols, might find this article of value. The title speaks for itself…

https://www.conservativebeaver.com/2021/11/05/ceo-of-pfizer-arrested-charged-with-fraud-media-blackout/

I don’t know if it is legit or not.

System collapse

All internet traffic to MM reached an unusually huge level and over taxed the system. Points of origination came from inside the United States, and I also received multiple DOS attacks. My system shut down, a secondary group of attacks came out of Hong Kong and overwhelmed my normal local internet as well.

Thus the two locations Metallicman…

  • Hosting Servers inside of America
  • Point of origin servers inside of China.

Have BOTH been simultaneously attacked by numerous DOS attacks. All on top of an abnormally large traffic stream.

My guess that it isn’t about my fine taste in cheeseburgers. I’ll be willing to bet that it is about my predictions, and the Commander’s confirmation, that the USA is planning a first strike nuclear salvo against China. Can’t allow the rest of the world to know. Heh. Heh.

I guess I am big stuff.

You all know that I have been battling with getting the systems up and running, but right now, I am unable to do anything. All internet access is overwhelmed locally, and I am simply helpless.

Well, as my cat taught me, “life is hard, then you nap”.

Well, no need to fret about it all. I’m just going to get some beer and chill out. It’s a nice day out. Blue skies. Pleasant temperatures. Fresh air.

So, as soon as a window of opportunity opens up, I will do what I can to get things back up and running again.

-MM

Have a good day you all and remember…

You, I, we… we all are a community. Never forget that.

We are all part of something much bigger.

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Some really pretty Chinese girls and learning about China (Nov21 issue A)

This is a continuation of my posts on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. It’s all good fun. The idea behind this, is of course, to help expose people to what China is like, and by doing so while watching pretty girls. As the women within a nation are the best description that you can ever get of a nation and it’s society.

I’ve been putting this all off for a while as I have been dealing with other things and other issues, and then today, I am reading comments to my posted articles on LinkedIN. And some of them are astounding on how absolutely STUPID Americans have become. I mean STU-PID!

"You have now idea what kinds of filthy lives the Chinese live."

I don’t?  I’ve only been living here for twenty years now.

And..

"You are crazy to ever want to live in that Communist sweat-shop. I hope that you enjoy your lack of freedom in that gulag."

Coming from an American in Philadelphia. Tell me about all that “Philadelphia freedom” eh? And…

"More lies from the fifty cent agitprop."

What’s an agitprop?

Sigh.

Ok. China is not just a match of the bulk of American middle class, it has surpassed it, and the bulk standard of living for the vast majority of Chinese is well beyond anything that Americans can ever hope to have.

Chinese homes are not made out of the cheapest materials or substances.

  • China windows = thick 6mm vacuum dual pane with aluminum anodized frames
  • USA windows = thin 3mm glass with cheap plastic vinyl frames.

Or the flooring…

  • China flooring = Real actual stone (marble, granite) on reinforced cement.
  • USA flooring = carpet over lowest cost plywood.

Or the doors…

  • China doors = Solid wood interior. Hardwood facing. Metal exterior doors.
  • USA doors = Interior doors are sandwich panel. Outside doors are typical vinyl.

In China, the typical family owns two houses all paid for and at least one car.

They enjoy working at companies with a two hour long lunch that includes nap time, and allowances for alcohol consumption . They get yearly bonuses.

They also have two months off a year for vacation that they must take. Nearly free healthcare. Top rate transportation and infrastructure, and for the vast bulk of the Chinese, only one singular tax. An income tax which is roughly fixed at 3%.

America cannot even dream of competing.

All, and the only thing that it can do, is lie.

The images

When you look at these women, look at their homes around them.

Or this one. These are typical kitchens. This is the real China.

The Girls

I’ve packed the girls up in neat zip files. You simply download the file, unzip it,  and they start watching the movies. 

Easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Most are very short. Under a minute, some are only seconds long. And some are screen videos with either me, my kid, my wife, or others talking in the background. Well, it’s a mess. If you think you can do better, then do so.

Some really awesome gals here. Like REALLY.

Some Examples

Here’s a video or two to show you what is inside these ZIP files. Don’t be the jackass that looks at the pictures, fails to download the content, and says “oh they are pretty, but American girls are so much more attractive”.  Download and view, otherwise the message is not provided.

It’s like going into a restaurant filled with delicious food, taking a few sniffs, and then leaving without tasting the food.  (Video)

Don’t be that guy. (Video)

Seriously now. Don’t be that jackass.

Lecture time

I notice that many of the Americans that talk with me are grouchy, irritable and demanding. I think that it is because their world is crumbling all around them and there is nothing that they can do about it.

They are wrong.

YOU can do something about the world around you. You can make your tiny slice of the world good, and decent and special. Like this person does…

And he strikes again.

Make the most of your skills and talents. He made these women smile. He made them happy. he made their day. He uplifted their spirits. What are you doing today? Are you making a difference in the world, or are you just going sit there and demand others work so you have something to criticize?

If we all work together

The oligarchy wants people to live in tiny boxes surrounded and manipulated by fears.

Just look at what amounts to “news” these days.

But if you venture out, and become part of your society, and when you participate with others. When you don’t ask for anything. You just be good, nice, kind and helpful… together we all can CHANGE the world.

Be the Rufus.

Please be the Rufus

Do the good works that make the world a little bit better place to live.

Do you want more?

I have more posts related to this in my Pretty Girls of China index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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The snake from Hell; Titanoboa

History has always interested me. Whether it is early humans, or geology, it’s always been an interest of mine. One thing that I have not really been too keen on was ancient animals. With the exception of dinosaurs and the occasional saber-tooth tiger, I have pretty much ignored the zoology of the past as a triviality.
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But you know, ah…
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…Maybe I shouldn’t have.
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Here, and in my notes, are a wide selection of animals that early proto-humans encountered. These creatures lived on the earth say from five million years ago up until very recent, and there is more than just a good chance that our distant humanoid relatives encountered these creatures.
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And some of these creates are just down-right scary.
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Here, we look at a HUGE, as in enormous and gigantic, snake. It is appropriately named Titan-o-boa. Yikes!
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This creature was ENORMOUS!

Titanoboa

Ah. The “snake from Hell”.

Titanoboa was a true monster among prehistoric snakes, the size and weight of an extremely elongated school bus. Research has indicated that the giant snake looked like a boa constrictor—hence its name—but hunted like a crocodile.

Quick Titanoboa Facts

  • Lived during the Paleogene Period
  • Lived in what is now South America
  • Was twice as long as the biggest modern snake
  • Was four times as heavy as a Giant Anaconda
  • Was a Carnivore

Titanoboa Pictures

About Titanoboa

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Titanoboa is an extinct snake which lived approximately 60 million years ago during the Paleogene Period. Its fossils were first discovered in coal mines in La Guajira, Colombia in 2009. Later that year, it was given its name – a name which means “titanic boa.”

If you look closely at Titanoboa pictures, then you can clearly see just how huge this snake really was. It was approximately 50 feet long and weighed around 2,500 pounds. To put that into perspective, that is twice as long as the longest snake living today and 4 times as heavy as the giant anaconda. It is definitely a snake that you wouldn’t want to meet.

One of the most interesting facts about Titanoboa is that while it looked quite a bit like a modern-day anaconda, it most likely didn’t hunt like one. Modern anacondas hunt by wrapping themselves around their prey and constricting them to death. Titanoboa probably didn’t do that. Most likely, it sneaked up on its prey and with one quick strike, bit them in the jugular. That would have allowed it to consume it meal at its own leisure.  However, like a boa, it was capable of constricting on its prey when necessary, although it wasn’t its first option.

Why did this prehistoric snake grow so large? Well, the fact of the matter is that the area in which it lived contributed to its growth. During this period of time in Columbia and Peru – the part of South America in which this snake thrived – it was very hot and humid. In fact, temperatures would have been in the 90F all of the time. Which is really beneficial for cold-blooded reptiles like Titanoboa. Cold-blooded reptiles always grew much larger sizes in areas which have both high temperature and high humidity.

Another fact about this reptile is that it was a carnivore which preyed on a variety of different animals. It could have eaten a variety of reptiles and birds, and may even have hunted crocodiles! It certainly would have been big enough to hunt them.

Maybe it’s favorite prey were mastodons…!

Maybe…

 

The art of Emile Friant

This one is called “Political Discussion”.

Emile Friant was an artist who produced a known 75 artworks. He is considered to be a French Naturalist artist. He was born 1863 and died in 1932. He lived a good solid life. And he left behind some wondrous works of art.

Chagrin d’Enfant

Fantastic. Just fantastic.

It’s examples of paintings like this that convince me that the art medium has a degree of superiority over the digital camera. Accuracy is not always what we look for (unless you have a mental illness). Instead we are looking for a reflection of our feelings when we experience things. I think that this painting captures this moment wonderfully.

The Familiar Birds

Just lovely. I love how the colors in the outfit blend together. As an artist I cannot help but admire her foot, the way her hand rests on her hip, and her nice breast. The artist painted her beauty and her eyes all framed with her wonderful hair. I just love this work.

Homme et son chat près du poêle

Man and his cat. What man didn’t want to get warm to a cozy fire, and share his daily catch of fish with his beloved kitty? This picture has charm. It appeals to me.

Wood Nymph

The creatures of the woods. Often depicted as young girls au naturelle. I love the wood and the glade that it opens up towards. Charming, sensuous, and calming all at the same time.

Les Amoureux (Soir d’automne)

Romantic discussion over the water. It’s autumn.  The man is smoking a cigarette and discussing life and his view with the fine lady beside him. It is something that is both calming and tender. I love it.

L’ébauche

The outline sketch. A well done painting. Quite small in size comparatively. Very nice. Nice picture frame. It’s a nice bedroom or hallway painting.

Mère et ses enfants dans un intérieur

Watching over the baby. I do love the color selection, and the over all layout of this work. The historical clothes are a nice touch, but the baby face is just charming.

Les Canotiers

The boatmen. Just a group of friends having dinner or lunch on a nice day outside. Lovely. This type of activity used to be very common. Not so much any longer. Sadly. There is so much that we have tossed aside in the name of progress and modernization.

Studio Visit

Don’t you love those outfits? When I see this work I love the colors and the shadings, as well as the particular attention to details. Like the artists’ hands, and the hair bonnet, and the oily rag, while other aspects of the painting are left blurry or unfinished. It’s true art.

The Tramp

The stonework is all impressionist style. I love it. It’s a hard life; a solitary life. A lonely life.

The Entrance of the Clowns

I love the uniqueness of the subject matter. This would be a nice living-room, kitchen or bedroom painting. I think and believe. It’s just curious and well done.

Angelus

This work really appeals to me. I created a similar work. Alas it was discarded when I was fired on Christmas eve and they didn’t box it up. After the holiday, I came back to retrieve it and discovered that the custodians threw it in the trash. Such is life.

Le Repos des Artistes

And this idealistic idyllic life is certainly appealing. As we see a fine lass strolling along the path on a wonderful day. One can only hope that there is some wine, cheese and baguettes in that satchel. It would be a nice time to take and enjoy the day.

Conclusion

Art isn’t a singular painting that some wealthy patron buys and hoards inside his house. It is everything. It is the dew on the grass in the morning, to the sleek lines of your clothes iron. It is the smile on your pet’s face when it is napping after a meal, and the warmth of a pile of clothes out of the dryer on a cold, cold Winter day.

I just wanted to share these images with you all. I hope that you enjoyed them.

Have you ever wanted to try your hand at painting? It’s not hard. You watch a few Bob Ross videos and get started. It’s fun, and a great way to relax and pass the time. I recommend it wholeheartedly.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Art Index here…

ART

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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The long years by Ray Bradbury (Full text)

This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. It takes you to a point in time. It’s about being alone. I do hope that you appreciate this story like I do. It’s a great story that takes place on Mars. This is in PDF format for easy reading.

The long years

Ray Bradbury

 

Conclusion

It’s a very short story.

I think that this story stands alone on it’s own merits.

Loneliness is an unpleasant emotional response to perceived isolation. Loneliness is also described as social pain—a psychological mechanism which motivates individuals to seek social connections. It is often associated with an unwanted lack of connection and intimacy. Loneliness overlaps and yet is distinct from solitude. Solitude is simply the state of being apart from others; not everyone who experiences solitude feels lonely. As a subjective emotion, loneliness can be felt even when surrounded by other people; one who feels lonely, is lonely. The causes of loneliness are varied. They include social, mental, emotional, and environmental factors. 

- Wikipedia

Today’s society insists that we communicate via e-mail and social media. But face to face, in depth human to human contact is what we require. Accept that fact and do everything in your power to make sure that you are never, ever alone. Your strength is your community.

Never forget that.

 

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I have more posts in my Ray Bradbury Index here…

Ray Bradbury

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Another nice collection of pretty Chinese girls – look at what China is today

Here is another article in my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. This particular collection is a response to a Bloomberg article of never ending hate found on LinkedIN that was splashed all over Gab, Freerepublic, and the normal set of mouthpieces… FOX, CNN, MSN, etc. etc. etc.

Someone please screenshot his series of tweets and translate into English. I understand he has begin to criticize the western media ongoing negativity against China. 

One of his tweets claims his dream of being a journalist has been destroyed by the requirement to keep up the massive campaign of anti-China demonetization over the years of his journalism career. 

https://mobile.twitter.com/javihagen

Yada. Yada. Yada.

You know this multi-million dollar funded program of lies and distortions is really too high of a mountain for me to climb. So I won’t even bother. If you are still too brain-dead to see that it is all propaganda, then it’s not my business to change your mind. It’s your reality. Soak it in. How’s it going for you?

Are you a better person for believing that China is a pile of shit?

The idea behind these “pretty girls of China” articles is to give everyone a rather unique chance to see what China is… without someone yelling (at the top of their lungs) you are only showing the “wealthy” not the “real” people of China.

Yeah. Right.

What ever you say…

What ever you say…

This view is of the girls, or all sizes and shapes posting their videos on Douxing. Some are just being attractive butterflies. While others are just being cute and playful. Still others show off their wonderful eyes and nice cheeks. Some have amazing eyebrows (to die for – I’ll tell you what), while many have a nice backside, bouncy chest, or artistic arms.

Attributes that I love. By the way.

By looking at these videos you get to see what China is in all of it’s totality. You see the poor, the average, the wealthy. You see it all.

This is what China is.

  • Are they starving from famine?
  • Are the buildings in disrepair and neglect?
  • Are they yearning for (that delicious) freedom™ and democracy™?
  • Are they all wearing blue uni-sexy clothing?
  • Do they look like they are abused?

Today is a morning rain Thursday.

It’s right after the mid-autumn festival and normally it’s a cooler time of the year and dryer. Not this year. It has been hot and very humid. Being at the dew point for the last five or so days. Ugh!

Today we had a morning rain. This is what it looked like.

Anyways, that’s what it is like where I live. Video is from my back porch. My “laundry” porch.

You know, there is a calmness in the rain that I enjoy.

It’s a relaxing peace.

It doesn’t matter if you are in a car… or in a truck in a corn field… or if you are in a tent on the side of a gurgling brook. It is the same. Whether you are in a nice cozy bedroom, and reading a book in a gathering darkness living room. Or a porch…

…a rain is lovely. Don’t you think?

A lovely rain.

I’m a little hungry

As the rain falls, it’s sort of cozy inside. It’s dry. Nice. Quiet. Peaceful. A perfect time to snack.

So I made myself a “Back to School” sandwich.

A “Back to school” sandwich.

About the concept here…

Let’s get on to the girls of China, eh?

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

She’s attractive. Right?

A typical girl of Communist China.

Girls and food

The girl above is most certainly a cheeseburger gal. Maybe with a pearl tea, a side of fries, perhaps a beer later on. Not too much though, and a nice stroll though a park. I can picture it.

You have to be able to viscerally imagine and image your role in the world that surrounds you.

A fine delicious burger.

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing. So it’s a pretty quick event once you download the archives and open them up.

Another beautiful girl of Communist China.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not.

For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

While I tend to prefer ladies with a more motherly and robust appearance, I find all of them to be very attractive. From the tall thin leggy beauties to the short cute little kitten like cuddle balls. One of the things that I enjoy about China are the oval face and the oval eyes.

Like this girl here…

You can learn so much about (Communist) China just by looking at the girls and the surroundings.

Girls remind me of food

Long time readers of MM will well know of my association of women and food. For some odd reason, I associate girls with types of food. Just like I associate guys with cars, truck, motorcycles and construction machinery.

I’m a Mercedes Benz C-class, if you must know.

If MM were a car.

Many times I will imagine myself taking this or that particular woman out and enjoying a nice meal together, having a great conversation.

Drinking some wine.

More talk. More wine.

A couple of jokes. Some crazy light-hearted stuff.

Just having a nice time. You know, dressed up a little bit. Shined and buffed shoes. Beard trimmed. Nice cologne. Finger nails manicured. A nice well chosen restaurant.

Or even if it is just a nice “burger joint”, you all can make it special with a theme. You eat and then go for a walk on the boardwalk, or explore a mall and window shop. Or even just ride those rent-a-bikes together.

There’s nothing stopping you from a fine delicious hamburger.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. Not everyone agrees what is beautiful or not. Which is just fine. I think that there is a woman for every man, and a man for every woman.

Or, in the case of the movie “Land of the Lost” (2009), maybe 7000 girls for every man.

A happy ending on “Land of the Lost”.

And I have said this many, many times before.

You all have to close that “idea” or concept that what you should do, should date, should eat, should consume, should inject your selves with, is what is being defined by your electronic media. It isn’t.

None of that garbage is real.

Try running a prayer / affirmation campaign based on the images and directions that you get off the media, television, movies or social media. Then you’ll see.

You, and only you, can define what you like.

Not media.

Whether it is an apple on the table, a new pair of shoes, a nice car, or making friends with someone. You are the only person who can make that decision.

Beautiful girls and women are all over the world. These are the girls of China.

Now, when I was younger, my tastes in women were shaped by the images and magazines of the time such as Playboy, and Penthouse. That’s all I had to go on, and as a young man, with my hormones a raging, all I could do is tremble as I asked a girl out.

Which most of the time was a failure.

But it’s all a growth phase that we all go through.

Now, all I want to do is meet folk, and share a meal, some drink and a laugh. And if we hit it off and have a great conversation, well, buy goodness gracious! That’s marvelous!

A fine healthy woman that I would love to share a hot pot and some wine with.

Guys.

You know it, or you will.

And eventually you reach a balance point where your hormones are under control and all you really want to do is get to know the girl, have a good time together, and enjoy the moments. And really as you get older this becomes more and more pronounced.

Yikes!

Men change as they age.

Nah. It’s all good.

You savor the steaks you eat. You enjoy the perfume she wears, you listen to her talk and enjoy the night air after the dinner. You joke, you laugh, and maybe sing a song or two while walking on the jetty.

Women are magical.

Women are magical and wonderful.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see. It’s their choice of clothing, the area where the video was filmed, the selection of music, the way their hair is done up, and so much more.

Each little video is like a window to the soul. Where you get a little glimpse of the girl behind the mask. That little presentation is just pure gold.

The pandemic (Bio-weapons attack) really put a clamp on everyone’s style.

Some have personality.

And some really do. While others just have a strong softness. Some are calm and composed, some are happy and light. And some are stunning and serious while others remind you of Summer carnival rides, cotton candy and “bear claw” cakes to s’munch upon.

A steak dinner girl. She reminds me of red lipstick, a dry red wine. Baked potatoes and candlelight in a high-rise restaurant.

Some have a great body.

They have long legs, or great dimples. Some have just long, long hair or dark, dark eyes. Some have a soft touch, while others have a careful composed prettiness.

Some have a great personality.

Some are special in ways that cannot be adequately explained.

A thin, curvy body, long hair. What’s not to love?

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. Girls, ladies, women are like beautiful flowers that should be treasured and cherished. For they are all wonderful.

A little aside...

In 2004 - 2005 the Winter fashion for all the women in China were these knee-high boots. I have no idea what it was all about, but it drove me into a sexual frenzy every time I saw a girl in those things. And believe you me, they were friggin' everywhere.

Later on, Spring came and it was ultra-high mini-skirts and "ladder" high heels. (Yeah, 6" (150cm) high) High heels. Lord, how could you possibly walk in those things. But it was an awesome spectacle.

Anyways...

But do not mistake the cuteness of a tiger for the damage it could cause if you angered it. Chinese women are very, very capable people. You can take that “to the bank”. Never fail to understand that they are strong, knowledgeable and powerful in their own right.

Oval face with nice eyebrows. How is it even possible?

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more.

A beautiful girl of China. This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

That fat gal at the store that you see every day, she’s a kind, lovely beauty, who could use some TLC. There is nothing stopping you for saying hi, and saying something nice. Just do it, and if they don’t understand… well, don’t worry about it. Your mission is just to be nice.

It’s easy for me because the girls in China like to listen to others saying good and nice things about them. They get this big old smile. It’s like a sun shining though parting clouds. Try it some time.

Maybe if you two hit if off and don’t want to go out and get a coffee, how about a nice back or leg massage. Here in China it’s pretty cheap and a good way to pass a few hours. You just sit back and get pampered. I love it and I am a man, and all the gals I know think that this is a most excellent idea. It’s a great way to spend some time with someone you just met.

A nice relaxing massage. Yessur!

And that older woman wearing that elaborate outfit, just look at her, see how the light plays upon the details.

Oh, and I do love a cheerful gal with a sense of humor.

Cute and playful at any age. That’s how we should all be. Don’t you agree?

And that young girl going out with “her crew”, see the beauty of her age around and what they are doing. There’s a world of cheap eats out there. Ice cream cones to share. BBQ to enjoy. Little pockets of nachos and chips. French fries. Sushi.

Food and friends.

Lot’s of smiles all around.

What could possibly be nicer?

Share some delicious food with some new friends.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

When I meet a woman I always think of scenarios. Whether it is hiking in mountainous crags looking for the mysteries of the past, or having a cup of coffee in a pub on a foggy day. This is true whether it is images of romantic nights or just fun times on a train, or trolley. I always think of scenarios.

Cherish the moments.

Of course, I wasn’t always this way.

When I was younger, my mind was fully dedicated to sex and the more visceral elements of relationships. It’s that darn testosterone that all males have pumping through their body. But now that I am older I cherish so much more.

I cherish everything.

Most especially the little things. Like the details on her purse (You can tell a lot about a woman by her purse.) to the smell of her shampoo to how she treats her fingernails.

Oh by the way...
I do love those purses that have those little baubles and pockets and whimsy's all over it. But that is just me.

To the shoes she wears.

Notice the fingernails on this gal.

I do love the more sturdy and robust women.

The Videos

Let’s have a look at the videos shall we? I’ve got a bunch for certain.

What a beautiful set of legs. I would love to see her in a little black dress. I’d bet that she would look like steamed fish and oysters with a chardonnay.

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Collection one. FF-A

Download the archive HERE. 131MB.

 

FF-A

Collection Two. FF-B

Download the archive HERE. 155MB.

FF-B

Collection Three. FF-C

Download the archive HERE. 135MB.

FF-C

Collection Three. FF-D

Download the archive HERE. 196MB.

FF-D

Collection Three. FF-E

Download the archive HERE. 151MB.

FF-E

Collection Three. FF-F

Download the archive HERE. 141MB.

FF-F

You all might wonder why I am posting these pictures on the internet. But you shouldn’t.

Try to find pictures of beautiful girls from China using Google, Bing or any American or Western search engine. What you will get are stock images, advertisements, pictures of children, and professional photos associated with some Western “journalism”.

Google the women of China… this is what you will get.

What an American search engine thinks the women of China look like.

Nonsense.

This in these series of articles, is what it’s really like.

This is the real, honest to goodness deal.

Oh, and don’t leave yet! Let’s talk about the girls for a spell….

She is wearing a lovely short skirt, that flows outwards. What fun. I am a real sucker for cute dresses and skirts. I really am.

Cute skirts

I really, I mean REALLY, love cute dresses or shirt flowing dresses. They are like sunshine and flowers under a rainbow sky. They are like popcorn, and blueberries and cream on a hot Summer day. They are like lipstick, and smile and cute little purses big enough for a cell phone, some makeup and a tissue.

They are like this. VIDEO.

I just love how those skirts move. It’s like poetry.

TWICE – What is love MV.

Gosh! I just love those cute dresses! OMG!

Swish. Swish. Swish.

And I also really like the puffy yellow one, and the pearl dress to the right, don’t you know.

About the girls

These girls are mostly between the ages of 18 years and 45 years old. The vast bulk of them are in their late 20’s. In China, if you are a woman, the ages between 23 years old and 30 years old are the dating years where you look for a husband worthy to start a family with. In China, if a woman cannot find a man by the time she is 28, she is considered a Spinster.  And is considered unmarriageable.

This lass is approaching the unmarriageable age, and in a few months she will be considered a “spinster”.

The age to get married for a woman in China is between 25 and 28. If they do not get married their entire family will sponsor these date-a-thons where they will have these programmed courting-rituals where the girl and the boy (part of a long line of boys) will spend time together.

The family won’t tell the girl beforehand either. She’ll walk into the house, and before she knows it, she’s on the fast track to get married. In the USA we call this a “shotgun wedding”. Only in China it’s the other way around.

The fish shape is considered very attractive in China.

I don’t know about you’se guys, but all these girls look pretty darn marriageable to me.  They would be on the “A” list in any man’s personal list.

Isn’t China beautiful.

Comment

To give you an idea of just how evil the United States and their client nations (UK, Japan, Australia) are, they want to have a war with China, and start killing all these lovely, lovely people.

They want to kill all these women here for democracy™ and freedom™!

And don’t give me that bullshit that a war “isn’t going to happen”.

American Military expenditures as a function of GDP is higher than at any other time for any other war in the entire history of America. The USA is planning for a very large, long duration conventional war against China.

Hey!

I’ve got news for you all.

It ain’t gonna be conventional, and it isn’t going to be against China alone.

It’s going to be the USA (+it’s surrogate nations) against a unified nuclear Asia. And not to see that reflects a true head in the sand regarding the true and real situation in this world today.

So enjoy what you have around you now.

Enjoy what you have. Spend time with friends and family. If you see someone make friends with them. Especially if you want to know them better. There is no better time than right now.

Who know what it might lead to. Eh?

James Bond.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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There will come the soft rains by Ray Bradbury (Full text)

This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. It takes you to a point in time. It’s about a life after the insanity of mad kings and corrupt politicians. I do hope that you appreciate this story like I do.

Especially since it takes place in America in the year 2026

There will come the soft rains

Ray Bradbury

 

Conclusion

It’s a very short story.

I think that this story stands alone on it’s own merits.

People have forgotten. The American leadership has forgotten what a cold war was, and the threat of any day having your complete life turned upside down by nuclear war. This week, America is going to base it’s nuclear SLBM missile subs in Australia, and Australia agrees to host the systems.

Jesus!

This kind of nuclear-war level posturing is dangerous. On one hand Biden says that “America doesn’t want war”, on the other hand, it was one year after it launched three lethal bio-weapons strains on China. And is placing nuclear weapons in the QUAD that rings the Chinese mainland.

Do they think that the rest of the world is as ignorant as the dumbed-down Americans are?

I guess so.

The United States is a run-away train and it ain’t stopping or slowing down for shit. The final crash is going to be spectacular, and horrific at the same time. This story here describes that aftermath.

Ray Bradbury’sThere Will Come Soft Rains” tells the story of a house that has survived a nuclear blast in the year 2026. The house has automated systems, not unlike a modern-day smart home. Each day, the house makes the beds, cooks dinner, and throws out the trash—despite the fact that its owners have died.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Ray Bradbury Index here…

Ray Bradbury

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Why everyone from 6 years olds to those in retirement, within China, are all ready to fight tooth and nail to survive.

This article is about China. More specifically it is about the people of China and why everyone has military training, and why everyone is organized into military units, and why everyone is willing to blow up the rest of the world in a nuclear fireball without giving it a second thought. Yeah. It’s what all the bullshit out of Washington DC is saying, except they are not telling you that China is backed into a corner and this time…  THIS time, they are ready.

No. This is not your usual hate – hate – hate China bullshit that flows so readily out of the Western media mouthpieces. No, this is just an American expats view on what I see, based upon what I know, and in my discussions with members of other black programs. China is ready. Russia is ready, and Iran is ready, and the out of control “loose cannon” that America is is just about ready to have it’s wings clipped.

Don’t say that I didn’t warn you.

Introduction

I’ve written about all this before. I’ve discussed training for military warfare starting at six years old to the unification of the social structure, and the intense anger towards what happened in China by the Japanese. There’s no need to rehash much of that. You all can go through the archives.

The big news this week is how Australia has torn up it’s agreements with France and the EU to become the nuclear staging point for American submarines in the South Pacific. Big News! Except no one else really understands the implications.

Let this video tell you…

By hosting American nuclear weapons, Australia has now made itself a target for immediate decapitation were a war between the USA and China to break out. There is no way that it can remain neutral. All of it’s coastal cities are now at risk for total and complete obliteration.

Sheesh.

No one is taking China seriously and this is disturbing.

No one understands

Given the great ignorance in the Untied States and much of the West, it should be understandable. But it isn’t. I see otherwise intelligent people saying that a big buildup towards war is a good thing.  Maybe it’s because they haven’t held their loved ones in their arms while they died away in a painfully bloody broken death.

War is not a computer simulation.

War is not social media or a talk show.

War is not a newspaper you read while drinking your morning coffee. Nor it is a news feeds that you swipe away.

It is a nasty, nasty earth-shattering event. And it is coming to the West faster than you can what “wat”?

Even if the USA launches a first-strike nuclear salvo…

Systems are NOW in place to fucking throw America back into the coal age. You all do know what I mean by the coal age, eh?

It’s January 20th. Snow is blowing outside. There is no gasoline for your cars. All electrical systems are fried. Refrigerators are gone. Computer is a useless door stop. Cell phones are all dead. And you haven’t eaten for three weeks.

Coal age.

Here’s a small video of what each God Damn City in China has for their LOCAL RESERVIST CADRES… (VIDEO). Yes. This it the local reservist militia. Just imagine what the actual military would be like.

Local reservists.

Afghanistan it ain’t.

These are God Damn reservists guys. Do you have any fucking idea of what a war against China would be like?

It would be like a tiger against a Chihuahua.

No, it’s not going to be a throw back to the iron age (as I suggested before). Not the bronze age. Not the stone age. It’s gonna be into the coal age. The few straggling survivors will need to figure out how to make fire from sticks, how to tan hides for clothing, and how to farm without mechanized machinery.

75% of America will die.

Oh that’s so unfair, you might meep!

Some basic History.

Japan took over China and abused it horribly. This occurred after nearly 100 years of abuses of the British and European rule. If anyone thinks that China will “turn the other cheek” they are mistaken. China is ready for pay-back time. (video)

I do not blame them.

Somehow…

Somehow, everyone thinks that China is a peer manufacturer. Equal to that of the manufacturing giants of the West. Wrong. China is THE global manufacturer and they make everything and they have been busy making all sorts or reliable weapons systems for their 1.6 billion people nation. They do not play around.

(Video)

China does not play.

Learn to pay attention.

This is supposed to be a message to the American military establishment. Check out all those neutron bomb smart missiles. Yes, tactical missiles for use in conventional warfare. I guess that the American military are too brain dead to realize that any war with China will be nuclear.

Vehicle after vehicle of ugly, messy, dirty neutron warhead missiles. Some for taking out land targets like towns and cities. Some for taking out fleets of ships, flotillas and armadas. Some for blasting the entire sky into a fireball to wipe out aircraft assaults.

Watch it.

(Video)

Any war with China will be a nuclear war.

Why all this military posturing?

Well… The United States is being a fucking dick. The out of control giant is all about war, and the entire purpose of the QUAD is to support a war against China. Let’s be real. It’s not about fishing. It’s not about technology transfer. It’s not about immigration. It’s not about borders. It’s about conducting a war against China via the QUAD surrogates.

So China is ready.

Only an idiot (which pretty much describes most of the Western “leadership”) would still even conceive taking on Russia / China and Iran / North Korea simultaneously.

But you know…

While all this public display of terror and bluster is unsettling, let’s not forget what is going on behind the scenes.

Taiwan

What is NOT BEING REPORTED in the American “news”…

From PM…

An important event is going to happen tomorrow (Saturday;  Sep. 25th) but one can’t seem to find any news reports in the West about it.
.
Taiwan’s Kuomintang, the political party of Dr. Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, is going to elect a new leader. No one cares, right? Kuomintang has been totally discredited by its string of failures.
.
Its young members have left the sinking ship in droves.
.
There is no hope when all the candidates are well known imbeciles who know nothing beyond repeating the same drivel that everyone is tired of hearing.
.
Yes, let’s get back to the 1992 Consensus and keep the ambiguous status quo forever, as if Xi will let that happen.
.
I have a Taiwanese friend (an old ROC soldier, descendant of the Yunnan warlord’s clique) who is so disgusted with the KMT that he has given up hope that the party will survive.
.
Until a professor and the principal of the Sun Yat-sen School  leaps into the fray, and over the course of one month, goes from being an unknown to the top of the polls over his three opponents, two of them with significant entrenchment in the party.
.

His name is Chang Ya-chung [张亚中]. How does he do it? He advocates unification with mainland China to form One-China!

The grassroot support for Prof Chang is amazing.
.
There are thousands of comments on Youtube clips in which the dark horse candidate explains his policy, and practically 100% supports him.
.
It appears that he has stirred up a political storm.
.
If he intends to push for unification regardless of whether he wins the KMT leadership or not, and therefore creates a movement, he may become a power to be reckoned with.
.
In fact, Prof Chang could overturn the Taiwan political “applecart“.
.
We are now faced with several scenarios all of which mean the realization of the One-China union probably within the next five years. Let me explain. It’s another long essay; have patience.
.
I wrote in August of 2020 about a great strategic opportunity for China to unilaterally unify with Taiwan with minimal risk.
.
It was based on the predictions, all of which were backed by simple observation, that (1) Trump would certainly lose the election (2) Trump would certainly not concede (3) Trump would therefore try to destabilize America in order to remain president (4) Trump would likely not succeed but he would create a royal mess (5) Biden would no doubt continue the war on China, and would use Taiwan as a pawn. Biden’s public protestations of America’s love of peace are laughable lies that will fool no one. 
.
All of the predictions have come about.
.
There was however an overestimation of Trump’s team. Trump was not surrounded by geniuses, and rather than stopping the legal ratification of the Electoral College’s votes in December, he used the mob to disrupt the formality at Congress in January. It was an asinine and meaningless task. Trump will suffer the consequences of his stupidity. 
.
At the end of October 2020, just a few days before the presidential election, I wrote another article explaining how it would be possible for China to unilaterally effect reunification with Taiwan without much risk of bloodshed.
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One only needs to look at how Russia reunified with Crimea without firing a single bullet, and recently how easy it has been for the Taliban to reconquer Afghanistan to know that it’s possible.
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First of all, the narrative must be changed from “Unification by Military Force” or Wutong [武统] to “Defending Taiwan from Traitors and Foreigners.”
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I’d like to see anyone try to stop the PLA from doing its duty of defending the sovereignty of China.
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ROC soldiers are conscripted, most of them are ordinary young men and women with a family and the prospect of going home to live a long and fruitful life, hopefully in a peaceful and prosperous society.
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They’re not going to be stupid, as long as they understand that the PLA is coming to help them do their job, which is also to defend Taiwan from traitors and foreigners.
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Now, it is not possible that I was the only person who had the perspicacity to notice the strategic situation.
General Miley noticed it and he made secret calls to his counterpart in China before the election on Oct. 30th and two days after the Jan. 6 Trump revolution fiasco.
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Pundits and mouthpieces have made all kinds of comments on Miley’s secret calls to the enemy, but they’re all wrong. It was indeed as General Miley had explained, he was simply doing his job.
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General Miley called to deliver a tiresome Nixonian madman threat–we have a mad man at the helm and he may send nukes your way, so don’t do anything to give him an excuse.
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The poor general also had to deliver a contradicting message–at the same time, America is not falling apart; everything is hunky dory and the well-oiled machine is running smoothly.
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Which is to say, the Pentagon and the army are standing ready to attack when ordered. 
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If I was General MIley and I knew China had a window of opportunity to take Taiwan at no cost, completely turning the geopolitical tables on the US ring of fire around China, as well as controlling the majority of the world’s output in microchip, that’s what I would do to stop them.
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If I was China, I would of course ignore him.
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America is good at posturing and bullying small countries; just check out its wars since WWII.
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It will not destroy its dollar hegemony and the printed façade of its wealth by starting a nuclear war with China.
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Just think if you’re the owner of a vast orchard with your finger on a button that will burn everything to ashes, including yourself and your family, would you do it just to kill off squirrels picking nuts from your trees?
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I guess not.
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The madman threat is just a ruse. it won’t even fool the squirrels. As I said before, not a single American will die for Taiwan. The orchard owners are not as stupid as we think, or they would not be owners and we their slaves.
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I think, although I don’t know for sure, that China should know about all this, but it probably felt that a major factor was missing, and therefore preferred to wait for another opportunity.
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This factor is mentioned in the second article.
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Once the PLA takes Taiwan, how will China govern it?
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It is a headache if you do not know for certain that everything will run smoothly rather than turn into a bloody mess. China no longer trusts the KMT, whose leaders are discredited and ridiculed, how can China depend on them to maintain order?
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The emergence of Prof Chang and his army of ardent supporters from the general population provides a clarity that China needs for the Unification. .
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What China needs is to change its narrative of Wutong to defending China and Taiwan.
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The final contest for the KMT Chair is between Prof Chang Ya-chung and KMT Party apparatchik Eric Chu Li-luan [朱立伦]. The younger incumbent Johnny Chiang Chi-chen [江启辰] is a distant third. The fourth candidate Cho Po-yuan [卓伯源] is non-existent.
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Prof Chang and Eric Chu are in a dead heat.
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No one can predict the outcome of Saturday’s vote. Prof Chang’s participation and his Unification policy will at a minimum create a historic turnout.
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The dark horse candidate is already causing much excitement not only for the KMT but his carrion call for peace talks with mainland China is eliciting a groundswell of support from outside the party.
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This exposes the lie that people of Taiwan support only DPP’s (Democratic Progressive Party) policy of antagonism against China or KMT’s policy of the everlasting status quo of ambiguity.
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A new and powerful voice says let us negotiate for union and peace for prosperity and a future for our children, and it is resonating on the island. 
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Scenario 1: Prof Chang wins the chair and proceeds with his Unification plan. I won’t go into details here, but his plan is a viable one and receives quite a bit of grassroot support even at this early stage.
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It may have something to do with Prof Chang’s charisma and his ability to win all his debates by logic and eloquent elocution, letting his opponents expose themselves as morons and moral midgets.
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Assuming the Unification path becomes a KMT policy, it will culminate in the presidential election in 2024 as a contest of KMT’s peace with China vs DPP’s antagonism leading inevitably to war with China.
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If KMT’s candidate wins, then there will be a peaceful progression towards a negotiated unification.
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Let me place a caveat right here. It will likely not happen smoothly because the US will not let it happen. When push comes to shove, expect the chaos of Hong Kong to repeat on the streets of Taiwan or worse. 
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Scenario 2: Many obstacles stand in front of Prof Chang even if he wins the KMT Chair. He may have to resign because the party scuttles his Unification plan, his Unification MOU with China may not be passed in KMT, and the KMT presidential candidate may lose out to the DPP candidate in 2024. Then what? 
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Scenario 3: Eric Chu wins the KMT Chair, the comatose establishment of KMT breathes a sigh of relief, and goes back to their sinking ship, hoping the ship will somehow right itself by a miracle. It will not.
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So all three scenarios say Prof Chang’s plan will fail.
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How will Unification happen? It will happen because China now knows about the latent support for peace in Taiwan with the mainland. The Taiwanese people didn’t have a smart and courageous politician to take them to the promised land.
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But now they have Prof Chang.
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It is therefore important for China to change its narrative from Wutong to Defend the Homeland. It is a unifying call, and it’s not hard to understand what it means.
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China and Prof Chang should talk about Unification regardless of what official status Chang has. Hire Prof Chang as a Peace consultant if necessary. But direct talk means that Prof Chang will understand his potential role as the leader and organizer of an interim government in case the PLA needs to defend Taiwan from traitors and foreigners, most likely within hours and without bloodshed. 
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It will take time for Prof Chang, assuming he agrees, to prepare the infrastructure for such an interim government without violating any laws. .
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The reward to Prof Chang for doing this is the solemn undertaking by the Chinese government to provide a high degree of self-rule for Taiwan and to let the Taiwanese people run their own affairs despite China having effected unilateral unification.
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The five year period is a reasonable timeline, and by then, China will have surpassed the US in all aspects of wealth production, America will still be dealing with another Covid wave (I wrote an article explaining why), and Xi will be confident of success, establishing his legacy for future generations, so that the Central Committee of the CPC could start working on an orderly succession by bringing the next generation of leaders to the forefront. .
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Beyond that, all is murky and muck, but stay healthy and we will live to witness history.
 
PM

Remember – what’s really going on is not televised

We really do not know all of the story. We really do not know what everyone is thinking. What we do know is the visible actions that are taking place.

The news is talking about how Australia has torn up the agreement to buy submarines from France, and instead are going to buy them from the USA. Nuclear subs with nuclear weapons.

And that everything is under control with the QUAD meetings with Japan and India.

And the long-expected collapse of China is finally happening with the Evergrande collapse!

Nope. No. Not going on.

Evergrande

Evergrande’s share price collapse: The world’s biggest no-big-deal default
The monster debt crisis that utterly failed to cause any catastrophe this week was that of Evergrande, the Chinese property giant.
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Read in Axios: https://apple.news/AK9D5MyFXSmCoHX4VPBt7kg

Evergrande’s share price collapse: The world’s biggest no-big-deal default

The monster debt crisis that utterly failed to cause any catastrophe this week was that of Evergrande, the Chinese property giant.

Why it matters: Evergrande’s share price has collapsed to pennies, its bonds are pricing in a default with very limited recovery, and even its customers are demonstrating across China. But so far the broader repercussions have been minimal.

Driving the news: Global markets fell on Monday on fears that Chinese markets would collapse on Wednesday morning, when they reopened after a two-day holiday for the Mid Autumn Festival. When Shanghai did reopen on Wednesday, it closed the day up rather than down.

Between the lines: A deal with domestic bondholders, combined with the company’s deep political connections at both the national and local levels, have combined to reassure investors that the Chinese government will contain any fallout.

Evergrande is the first big test of the global financial system — and especially the Chinese financial system — since the pandemic-induced chaos of March 2020, when central banks around the world were forced to take unprecedented measures to prevent total collapse. So far, world markets seem to be coping just fine.

Context: By any measure, an Evergrande debt default is likely to be one of the largest in history of the world.

To put its $305 billion debt load in perspective, Argentina’s massive foreign-debt default in 2001 was about $93 billion; Greece’s restructuring in 2012 was about $200 billion; and Lehman Brothers had about $600 billion in debts when it filed for bankruptcy.

Those defaults shook entire economies. Evergrande, by contrast, seems to have been successfully contained.

Between the lines: Evergrande debt has always carried a low junk rating, and the company was being described as “the biggest pyramid scheme the world has yet seen” as long ago as 2017. As a result, investors in Evergrande, much like investors in bitcoin or GameStop, were acutely aware that they were taking a big risk.

Financial crises generally happen when (seemingly) safe assets unexpectedly default, not when risky assets do something that was largely foreseen.

The bottom line: It’s normal and healthy for markets to fall when giant companies fail. The fact that Chinese markets have been so sanguine this week implies the existence of some kind of “Xi put” — and the idea that Evergrande is, ultimately, too big to fail.

So what is actually going on?

We have a bunch of school-yard bullies hitting each other in the arms and congratulating each other on how tough they are.

The Asian kids are in a corner of the school yard, writing in their books. Planning things. Drawing diagrams in the sand, and taking notes.

The rest of the kinds in the school yard are playing but keeping an eye on both groups; the bullies and the smart Asian kids. They are not doing anything. Just watching and waiting.

Do not believe anything that you see in the “news”. The situation is still fluid.

Watch “Meng Wanzhou Wins Her Freedom!

US Drops Extradition Charges Against Huawei Executive!” on YouTube. I trust this report more than any on the western media …

Meanwhile, here’s some Chinese military videos…

Just some video that I collected. Some are training films. Some are recruitment films. Some are just studies. Some are personal videos. All in all a good mix. It will give you all a great idea about the Chinese military capability.

Group 1

You can download the Video Archive HERE.101MB.

Some of the films have children in it going through training. These are the elementary-school Pioneers (the Chinese cub scouts). Everyone in China gets full military training. Those older kids, are in middle school. They are the ones wearing blue slacks with the white line training and shooting AK-74’s.

You will see closeups of the various electronic weapons systems, and the state of the art Chinese SEAL and Special Forces troops as well. You will see some videos about how Japan came into China and killed off so many innocent civilians. And note that now that every civilian can fire a gun, and fight, that is never going to happen ever again.

Group 1

Group 2

You can download the Video Archive HERE. 257MB.

It starts off with some more middle school assault weapon training.

Next is the elementary school pioneers who undergo physical obstacle course training. Notice that they do it while carrying a full military rifle. Also note that it’s both boys and girls. No one gets a pass. VIDEO.

Boys and Girls no one gets a pass.

The third video is the reservists. China has an active military and the reserves that meet every few weeks. VIDEO.

Reservists practice and drill over and over and over and over.

Fourth video is for the young Pioneers. For inspiration and training. Very, very interesting.

It’s all your fault that all the people are being rounded up in the city.

So many interesting videos. Watch them all in this massive collection.

Group 2

Group 3B

Here’s another group. HERE. 381MB

Of course there are all sorts of interesting things in these videos.

Group 3B

Conclusions

Those videos are very interesting. Especially the ones where New York City is destroyed by a massive nuclear explosion. As you watch the movies, you can see that the military is infused in every aspect of the Chinese life. From elementary school through middle school and into college. There are layers upon layers of military. All driven by merit. All with the latest technology. All with a memory of how China has been hurt and abused int he past.

Next time you watch CNN, FOX, Hal Turner, or any of the rest and they are talking about hate – hate -hate China, keep in mind that it is a narrative based on insane levels of ignorance. There is not going to be any war against China, for if there were, America would cease to exist. While China might take a few dings, and then brush itself off and rebuild up bigger, better, faster.

Where SHTF in America it will be every man for himself, and that will be a fiasco.

So, don’t poke the Panda.

Realize that what you read is all bullshit propaganda. And that China has everything well under control. So turn off that propaganda outlet, focus on what you see around your life and your home, family and friends. That is what really matters.

What you read in the “news” is just a lie to anchor your thoughts towards a catastrophic fiasco. Ignore them.

Just go forth and live your life. Adults are in charge. Never forget that.

Just go forth and live your life.

Finally…

While this article is about China and it’s efforts to continue and thrive while the enormous American Military Empire has a hissy fit, do not think that that’s what is actually going on. Military Empires MUST have wars.

If they can’t have one with China right now, or soon, perhaps they can have one else where…

More than fifty-nine ships have massed in the central Atlantic Ocean, south of the Equator, in a non-shipping route area, and ALL have turned off their automated ship Identification transponders.

Ships massing off the coast of Venezuela.

No one can tell whose ships they are, or why they are gathering there.

Here’s a closer look:

Somethings up.

Somethings up…

Prep for an invasion.

Stand by.  What is this all about?

  • Invasion build-up?
  • Flotilla to collect Haitian refugees and send them to the Untied States?
  • Collect American Haitian refugees and send them back to Haiti?

Stand by?

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “China index” over here…

China

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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A comparison of American Cub / Boy scouts and Chinese Pioneer Scouts

This is somethings that I have been wanting to do for a while now. What this is; is comparing the scouts programs for children. In particular we compare the programs found in the United States and those found in China. In America, the scouts are co-ed, which differs from what I grew up with. But that’s fine they are co-ed in China too. In China they are called the “Pioneers”. And they are quite active.

Actually, I don’t want to get into too much detail here. It’s not like a member of the American scouts is going to move to China and become a member of the Pioneers! LOL. Instead what this is; is a short visit to see how the philosophies of the two scouting programs differ.

Essentially, as far as I can make out, the United States scouting programs teach self-reliance, individualism, basic woodland skills, and obedience to authority.

Cub scouts of America.

While the Chinese Pioneers teach communication, working as part of a team, nationalism, and overcoming adversity.

It seems that the United States is about making the scout a better “rounded” person overall, while the Pioneers is a paramilitary organization that teaches defense of the homeland, strength during times of adversity, and leadership skills.

The United States Scouts

American Cub Scouts.

Cub Scouting is part of the Scouting program of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), available to boys and girls from kindergarten through fifth grade, or 5 to 10 years of age and their families. Its membership is the largest of the five main BSA divisions (Cub Scouting, Scouts BSA, Venturing, Exploring and Sea Scouting ). 

- Wikipedia

And the Boy scouts…

American Boy Scouts.

The Boy Scouts of America places the greatest importance on creating the most secure environment possible for our youth members. To maintain such an environment, the BSA developed numerous procedural and leadership selection policies and provides parents and leaders with resources for the Cub Scout, Scouts BSA and Venturing programs. 

-Boy Scouts

The Cub Scouts are one of the BSA’s premier programs, offering citizenship, character, personal fitness, and leadership for youth in grades K to 5.

Cub scouts of America.

The mission of the Boy Scouts of America is to prepare young people to make ethical and moral choices over their lifetimes by instilling in them the values of the Scout Oath and Law.

[Note 1] According to Wikipedia there were 21,000,000 males age 10 -19 in 2000 in the US. Also according to Wikipedia there are 2,739,692 boy scout youths (age 11-17). That would indicate that more then 13% of boys are in scouting at a given time. 13% of American Children are in the scouts.

Cub scouts of America.

I think it sounds ok. Don’t you?

It’s a program to help young youth to become better rounded individuals.

Chinese Pioneers

I do not know about this program as an expert. I know of it as a parent. And that is a little different. But I can tell you that being in the Pioneers is a very important step in your child’s education within China.

It is very, very few people who will not allow their children to join the Pioneers. Mostly Christian fundamentalists. No problem with the Chinese Uighur Muslims,

It is a program that runs in parallel with the education system that provides group and community activities, rallies, a sense of community and belonging, not to mention skills, training, and social interaction. It is a critical system of development within China.

The following is an article that says more than I could ever say…

Chinese Pioneers.

This is from the Global Times

“Be prepared to struggle for the cause of communism!” As other children saluted the Communist Party of China (CPC) and swore their loyalty on the playground, Tao Hongkai, 6, was alone in the classroom studying.

Tao, a primary student at Wuhan’s Shuiguohu Primary School in Hubei Province, was the only one among his 50 classmates to not join the Young Pioneers – a State-run organization of 130 million children under the leadership of the CPC.

Check out this video…

As a result, he was not allowed to wear a red scarf, the emblem of the Young Pioneers, or join any related activities.

“I envied them so much that I saluted in front of a mirror at home,” Tao told the Global Times. “But I never felt empty because I had my own goals.”

Chinese Pioneers.

Six decades later, Tao is a sociologist and an expert on helping Internet-addicted children.

“I could focus on studying and accomplishing my goal – to be a useful person in society,” he said, looking back to the days when he was not a Young Pioneer.

[Note 1] Almost every primary school student between 6 and 14 years of age in China joins the Young Pioneers, which is widely seen as being a great honor. Being excluded from the organization would be seen as a blemish on one’s record. 98% of Chinese Children are in the Chinese Pioneers.

However, in recent years, as social values have diversified, some parents have begun to doubt the meaning of their children being “successors of communism” and discourage their kids from joining the Young Pioneers. They say they worry their children might be influenced by an ideology at such an early stage of life.

Chinese Pioneers.

Chinese Christians don’t want to participate

Xiao Yan, a Christian from Shandong Province whose son is about to attend primary school, told the Global Times that she and other religious parents are reluctant to see their children become Young Pioneers.The Chinese Young Pioneers National Working Committee declined to comment for this story, only emphasizing that membership in the movement is optional.

Even though it is officially optional to join, in many schools, new members are elected directly by teachers without being consulted or the entire student body is forced to join up.

Chinese Pioneers.

“I will tell my child the difference between the communism and Christianity, and I will make myself clear that as a parent I don’t want him to join,” she said. However, she admits that “if my child insists, I will let him do so.”

Xiao suggested that joining the Young Pioneers should be conducted by a third party.

“Schools are a place to teach knowledge, it should stay out of politics,” she said, “So if children are interested to join, they can apply to an external organization.”

However, Xiao said most children from religious families choose to be Red Scarves, often for fear of being left behind.

Chinese Pioneers.

Don’t be left behind!

In a secular society where many people do not share religious convictions and are not too bothered about ideology, Xiao’s case is rare.

“Parents often ask the teachers why their children are not in the Pioneers yet, and if there is anything that they can improve,” said Ma, a teacher in charge of recruiting new Young Pioneer members at the elite Asia-Pacific Experiment School of Beijing Normal University.

In Ma’s school, 1,100 of 1,400 Grade 1 students are all members of the Young Pioneers. The rest are on the waiting list. The head teachers for each class elect candidates based on their overall performance. “Star students” with good grades and talents will be the first batch to join, others join in the second batch.

Chinese Pioneers.

“But no one will be left behind. All the children will join the Young Pioneers eventually,” she said.

Many students are reportedly upset and unhappy if they are not part of the first batch. Ma explained this division exists to motivate students to behave themselves and study harder.

“Being a Young Pioneer means being outstanding. Of course star pupils should join first and set a good example for others,” she said.

Chinese Pioneers.

Scarves not so red

Most Chinese elites follow a set political career path: Students who graduate from the Young Pioneers can expect to join the Communist Youth League and then compete to become full-fledged members of the Party.

However, this ladder is not always straight and narrow now. Some teachers reportedly accept bribes from parents in exchange for helping their children become Pioneers first, and some teachers have even put their own children at the head of the line.

Earlier this month, an online post accused teachers at Southwest Central Primary School in Foshan, Guangdong Province, of ensuring their children to become Red Scarves before anyone else. This attracted thousands of hits and broad debate on wielding this kind of influence.

The Guangzhou-based Nanfang Daily quoted the school’s deputy headmaster Liu Xiuying as saying that some children in the first batch were teachers’ children, but that they were elected first because of their behavior and academic track record.

Chinese pioneers.

This was not the first time netizens had questioned the ideology of the Red Scarves. Last year, teachers from a primary school in Shaanxi Province gave green scarves to students with poor grades or bad behavior records, which drew criticism from both parents and educators, forcing the principal into an apology.

It was an easy leap for netizens to associate the elections of Red Scarves to the real world where power holds absolute sway.

Last year, the nickname of Five Stripes Boy, was given to Huang Yibo, 13, from Hubei Province who was pictured with a five-stripe badge on his uniform. The picture was to promote the Young Pioneers, but netizens said it resembled pictures of high-ranking officers. The Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday that a primary school in the province had canceled the use of the five-stripe badge to “let kids live as kids.”

Tao sees this phenomenon as a consequence of cultural deterioration.

Chinese Pioneers.

“I feel pity that some good traditions are fading and losing their meaning,” he explained. “It reflects concerns about the deterioration of China’s cultural, political and ideological environments.”

Considering this, some non-religious parents discourage their children from joining the Young Pioneers.

Fu Yongjie, the father of a young girl daughter from Shaanxi, said he would not push his child to join.

“What does a 6-year-old kid know about the goal of the Young Pioneers? I hope my daughter’s first lie will be denying she stole money to go out with her friends, not that she would struggle for a cause she doesn’t understand,” Fu told the Global Times.

Some religious parents have also expressed their concerns that they do not want their children to get involved with politics at such an early age.

Tao said the goals that the Young Pioneers are not always met, even once children join up.

“Interestingly, some badly behaved children I deal with are Red Scarves, that means being a member does not guarantee exemplary behavior,” he said.

Chinese Pioneers.

“Therefore, parents should not worry too much if their children are Young Pioneers or not, they should focus on their studies and their goals,” he continued.

Poor guidance

One reason why the organization has been losing its glory is also because Young Pioneers’ counselors, mainly head teachers or officials assigned by the educational bureau, do not know much about how to guide the Young Pioneers, Yan Kai, editor of Guangdong-based Children magazine, told the Global Times.

“Many children find it hard to accept the way they explain the organization as there are too many political terms,” he said.

The current generation of students has grown up with new media, which has become part of their lifestyle and affected the way they think, according to a survey issued in May by the Guangdong Provincial Social Sciences Academy.

It found out that half of the 5,000 students surveyed in 50 Guangzhou primary schools had microblogs and many had access to cell phones and iPads.

The education ministry announced in September that Young Pioneers activities would be listed as a required course in all primary schools, with one class every week for students from Grade 1 to 8.

Yan suggested that Young Pioneers’ counselors should broaden their approach to keep up with the new generation by organizing public or charity events rather than simply focusing on classes.

The organization also has a plan B. Earlier this month, on its 63rd anniversary, it announced that the Young Pioneers in Guangdong would now only receive counselors with master’s degrees.

Chinese Pioneers.

Three universities in the province launched a pilot project to create a new postgraduate program – children’s organization and ideological education. This aims to produce well-educated Young Pioneers’ counselors who could use positive discipline and show exemplary behavior to guide children, Xinhua quoted an unnamed director from the provincial working committee as saying.

There are over 170,000 counselors in the province. However, the pilot program will only recruit five students for 2013 although the provincial working committee said this number would increase according to the volume of applications.

“Those graduates can work in many education sectors like schools or NGOs. They will play a very important role in children’s education in the future,” the director said.

Chinese Pioneers.

Chen Xinyue, 12, who just graduated from Yahetang Primary School in Guangzhou this summer, was elected as the 2010-2011 excellent Young Pioneer of Guangzhou.

When asked whether she is aware that the organization has not lived up to its ideal, she said the title was a great honor but that she did not know much about what it mean to be an excellent Young Pioneer.

“I am really unlucky,” she said. “The reward was supposed to add some 5-10 points to my middle school entrance exam score, but the policy was canceled because some parents complained to the education ministry that it was unfair.”

Let’s look at some videos…

In China membership not only educates, but provides social scoring, and lays out a path for university and future careers. In America it is only a social club that helps one become a better person.

Here’s a bunch of videos that I’ve collected.

These little kids are tough little boys and girls and I really like how they use scaled down full-auto rifles firing smaller cartridges to train with.  When I say that China is a tough, tough nation that does not play, I really mean that.

Group 1 – 11 short videos

You can download the archive HERE. 79MB.

Tough little kids.

Group 2 -12 short videos

You can download the archive HERE. 67 MB.

Training in the use of firearms in elementary school.

Group 3 – 17 short videos

You can download the archive HERE – 17 Videos / 89MB

Tough little kids.

Conclusions

Throughout elementary school, Chinese children are encouraged to join the Pioneers. They become adept at working as a team, undergoing hardship, and learning basic paramilitary fighting, combat and shooting skills. Perhaps 98% join the Pioneers.

In Middle School, it is no longer optional. 100% of all Middle School students must take a two week “Boot Camp” military training every year while they are in school.

As all Chinese students study both English and Chinese, the students who graduate from High School make up the members of the irregular military force in their communities, were the need ever to arise. The best and the brightest are scored on their abilities, and their ability to become a Rufus. As China is a merit driven society, only the best can join the Communist Party, and then if they so desire go into the political administration of it.

USA – China meeting in Anchorage Alaska, in April 2021.

Which differs substantially from the buy-your-way into power, and set up a puppet show, “democracy” style. And you can see this.

USA-China meeting Anchorage Alaska April 2021.

China, being much larger than the United States is indeed a formidable giant, and the thought that somehow American (with Japanese and Australian military) could (somehow) invade China is a laughingly pathetic.

If you teach your youth to be strong, be tough, to overcome and to work as a team, there is nothing that they will not be able to accomplish.

Perhaps it would be best if America tackles it’s many, many systemic problems at home on the domestic front rather than worrying about what is going on at the other side of the globe.

And maybe, just maybe if the scouts would devote more time to community, communication and endurance, American wouldn’t be such a nation of ho-hos, donuts and booty wagging misfits.

Learning about the dangers of slingshots and chewing gum…

Teaching safety to cub scouts in slingshot use at the slingshot range.

…instead of having to rescue others in need during times of discord.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my China and America comparisons index…

USA vs CHN

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

Music of “Tool” Complete Discography

This post consists of music from the group “Tool”. I was inspired to provide it here after reading a comment on the Forum by Pissed Lizard, who said…

I am opening this up as a general music area because I am VERY seriously interested in all of your music - I have had some people share some seriously moving music.

There is a band called Tool that nobody can really categorize - for those of you who aren’t aware. It’s fans are RABID for some reason and we can pick each other out in crowds - at least here in the states.

I got into a little trouble in my psychiatry years and stumbled upon an old, cranky, narcissistic to the bone neurologist that sort of saw the way things were going and for some reason-intervened. He has passed away since but I mention him because he truly changed my life and our friendship became more meaningful than I ever could imagine. Everyone saw him as a total asshole. GREAT doc - brilliant - just a dick. He was from Ukraine and made sure they got a few CT scanners and MRI’s. He paid for them out of his own pocket. And passed away alone. Lots of family - so close - but alone.

He is connected to my Tool story because one day, out of the clear blue - I was blasting Tool in my car and he needed a ride - but he said he wanted to get me in a functional MRI and see if my brain lit up differently than his when we both listened to the same tool songs. We selected 7 at random and one each for a total of 9 (my Holy number - arbitrary, but - we were messing around.

Sure as shit certain areas of my brain - and take a wild freaking guess which area (pineal gland) lit up like a neon bulb.

He ended up taking that little “hey, let’s mess around with a hospitals toy because America” and turned it into a straight up research project regarding how different visual art lights up different areas in different peoples brains.

I’ll keep his name to myself, because he is a one of many passes souls I love, that, like me, like a bit of privacy. Or as much as we can control. But as much as he was hated - and I hated him as a resident - he became a great, loyal friend to the end.

RIP, brother! I hope you are where you need to be. Frigging hand delivered MRI machines to Ukraine - a legend.

The song he saw me reacting to is called “Vicarious”. What’s funny in the machine - I was lighting up like a Christmas tree - and THAT mother f—er - HE fell asleep!

But Tool has that effect on my brain, I am CERTAIN some of us are wired the same way.

How? And where the hell am I going with this - on THIS forum?

As you all know I am WAY late to the party, so if I am repeating stuff that is old news to you - awesome. PLEASE correct me where I am misunderstanding things because it is the hardest topic I have studied - EVER. But anyway I am studying “vertical” time (per my Mantid buddies and yes I can say this part) so I am studying vertical time and I go down the whole “memory implant” rabbit hole and hit the whole Central Race DNA (HUMAN) template of creation.

So I am there - I take a freaking left turn into holy shit town - to THIS - the hard one - and the topic is pretty much how our DNA responds to vibrations - that quantum physicists are bringing all the way down as far as CERN will let them!

I am telling you - I have a witness - I think he filmed it at the time - suffice to say I was at a concert - SUBSTANCE FREE - people were smoking - it was in Colorado - but I am telling you I felt my DNA changing - and I told my buddy OVER AND OVER it was happening - yet I have no recollection of it. It REALLY freaked the dude out - like bad! But something must have happened.

And this was a couple of years ago before I ever even found MM or quantum physics.

My gut is that Tool also messes with my DNA some how - but in a positive way - only a Tool fan will understand.

But has this happened to any of you and what music btw?

The concert was a Wardruna show BTW. It was the only one in the states that year. And again - I know for a fact I was 100% sober and substance free.

I am very interested to hear if anyone else feels that strongly about their music and if you could, please share a link. I am genuinely interested - even to you lurkers out there (we see you) - please - come contribute!

It got me curious, and so, if anyone wants to check out this music, please feel free to download and enjoy.

The Music

You can download the zipped CD/Albums by clicking on any of the links below…

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The Luggage Store by Ray Bradbury (Full text)

This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. As I reread this story, I couldn’t help but relive the “news” that enters my feeds on a daily basis. It sounds so familiar. It’s just hard to believe that this story was written in the 1950’s. I do hope that you appreciate this story like I do.

THE LUGGAGE STORE

Ray Bradbury

 

It  was   a   very  remote  thing,  when  the  luggage-store

proprietor heard  the  news  on the night radio, received all the

way from  Earth  on  a  light-sound beam. The proprietor felt how

remote it was.

There was going to be a war on Earth.

      He went out to peer into the sky.

Yes,  there   it   was.   Earth,  in  the  evening  heavens,

following the  sun  into  the  hills.  The words on the radio and

that green star were one and the same.

“I don’t believe it,” said the proprietor.

“It’s because  you’re  not  there,”  said  Father Peregrine,

who had stopped by to pass the time of evening.

“What do you mean, Father?”

“It’s like  when  I  was  a boy,” said Father Peregrine. “We

heard about  wars  in  China.  But we never believed them. It was

too  far   away.  And  there  were  too  many  people  dying.  It

was impossible.  Even  when  we saw the motion pictures we didn’t

believe it.  Well,  that’s how it is now. Earth is China. It’s so

far away  it’s  unbelievable.  It’s not here. You can’t touch it.

You can’t  even  see  it.  All  you  see  is  a  green light. Two

billion people  living  on  that  light?  Unbelievable!  War?  We

don’t hear the explosions.”

“We will,”  said  the  proprietor.  “I  keep  thinking about

all those  people  that  were  going  to  come to Mars this week.

What was  it?  A  hundred  thousand  or  so coming up in the next

month or so. What about _them_ if the war starts?”

“I imagine they’ll turn back. They’ll be needed on Earth.”

“Well,” said  the  proprietor,  “I’d  better  get my luggage

dusted off.  I  got  a  feeling  there’ll be a rush sale here any

time.”

“Do you  think  everyone  now  on Mars will go back to Earth

if this _is_ the Big War we’ve all been expecting for years?”

“It’s a  funny  thing,  Father, but yes, I think we’ll _all_

go  back.   I   know,   we   came   up  here  to  get  away  from

things–politics,  the   atom   bomb,   war,   pressure   groups,

prejudice, laws–I  know.  But  it’s  still  home there. You wait

and see.  When  the  first  bomb  drops  on America the people up

here’ll start  thinking.  They  haven’t  been  here  long enough.

A couple  years  is  all.  If  they’d been here forty years, it’d

be different,  but  they  got  relatives  down  there,  and their

home towns.  Me,  I  can’t  believe  in  Earth  any more; I can’t

imagine it  much.  But  I’m  old.  I don’t count. I might stay on

here.”

“I doubt it.”

“Yes, I guess you’re right.”

They  stood   on  the  porch  watching  the  stars.  Finally

Father Peregrine  pulled  some  money  from his pocket and handed

it to  the  proprietor.  “Come  to think of it, you’d better give

me a new valise. My old one’s in pretty bad condition. . . .”

The End

Conclusion

It’s a very short story.

Do you really think that if you were living off in a far away nation, and war broke out on American soil, that you would leave and return to America?

I don’t.

I’m in China. America is thrashing and snarling. It is going bat-shit-crazy and the LAST thing that I want to do is return to that cesspool of greedy ignorant psychopathic monsters.

Never the less, this story was written at a different time, in a different place, and the values reflected in this story has long since disappeared from the world. It’s all gone like whispers and vapor.

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Beautiful places where a cat might want to romp, and play.

This is just a very simple article. I just want to throw out some areas and places where (I believe) cats would enjoy to romp and play at. You know, often I would walk by a scene, a glade, a tree line, or a place and think to myself “My. This would be a nice area to explore were I to be a cat.” And this is what this article is all about.

Cats love nature.

Cats love nature.

Places to practice the art of catting

Cats love to cat around. They like to play and practice, and when I go look at these fine woodland places I imagine them playing and being a cat. Like in the “first blood” GIF below…

First blood.

And they do love to play…

Major cat-play.

Shady Glade

You come across these glades from time to time. Often it’s simply an open area in a wood or in a forest. They are often filled with shrubbery, and grasses and maybe a boulder or two, and surrounded by deep dark, lush woods all around.

A shady glade is the perfect spot to pause and get your bearings on the world around you.

A shady glade is the perfect spot to pause and get your bearings on the world around you.

Maybe you should go there, or a place like it. A quiet and secluded place. Take a friend with you and just be…

Take a friend with you.

Deep woods

I love deep woods. And so did my cats.

Deep dark woodsy forests.

The deep dark and cool forests are often clear of substantive under-growth, but very shady and nice. Fine tromping space, and scatter about areas for the cats to play in.

Nice soft mossy mounds for the cats to romp and play in.

The woods are filled with wildlife to listen for, scent trails to follow, and  the music of nature. The cat’s paws walk on soft deep lush carpeting underfoot, nice mosses, and the songs of birds that inhabit the tops of the trees.

Deep trails that lead into lush greenery and moisture.

Cats love to play

They do as this example clearly indicates…

Being playful.

Bubbling brook

Where there were hills, there would be rocks and brooks. These were always filled with life (and insects) but my cats enjoyed exploring the area immensely.

Boulders and rocks in the forests.

And a creek that the little guys would need to navigate, jump over or test their footing with…

A kitty adventure land.

Cats love nature.

Cats love nature.

A place to play and to hunt

As this cat clearly demonstrates.

Playing around cat style.

A large fallen tree

My little guys would love to climb on these things and trim their claws and race about it up and down. Sometimes I would play with them and we would bat at each other, swipe at each other and just play around.

The cats would love to scamper and play about any all fallen trees. First order of business was to climb up, and then they would look down. LOL.

Fallen trees were always a top priority in cat exploration and adventure. As this following picture plainly indicates…

Fallen tree in the forest.

Cats do love to play

They really do.

Cats do love to play.

A rural village road

You do not need to live in a cottage in a forest to make your kitty happy. The most exciting places for them to romp and play could be right there in your own backyard.

Village road.

And here…

Nice woody road.

Rabbit lair

A lair is filled with tunnels in the brambles and briars. Humans cannot enter, unless you are a five or six years old, but they are perfect size for a fine adventuresome cat to prowl.

Rabbit lair…

Places to hunt

Cats love to hunt. Whether it is cockroaches, mice or birds, they stalk and stalk and then pounce. Sometimes it doesn’t work out quite like they planned. Sigh.

Hunting gone wrong.

And other times, it’s payback time…

Payback time.

A light birch wood

A birch wood isn’t so deep and dark as old growth hardwood forests. they are light, and airy. As such they create a unique environment for cat exploration and meanderings.

A light birch wood. Perfect place for feline adventures.

Massachusetts boulders

When I lived in Massachusetts, the near perfect temperatures in the Summer, and the lovely natural surroundings were like a balm of calmness for my cats. They would hang out on these boulders and just chill out while the world around them scampered.

Massachusetts rocks in the woods.

Typical places for a cat who was busy “catting around” to lick his / her paws, feel the sun on their skin and take a much needed nap. As you well know; life is hard. Then you nap.

A fine rocky shelf.

Cats love to play

They most certainly do.

Cats love to play.

Old fence line

An old fence line offers lots of fine cat resting places, and spaces to observe, hunt, track and just play about in. It’s like a cat fairground.

Old Fence Line.

A nice woodland trail

I would often think of my furry friends when I would go on walks or hikes in the various State Forests or parks.

Caldwell fork trail

Old barn

An old barn is often a great place for cats to hunt the local rodents that inhabit the farms. There’s a lot to do, a lot of climbing and jumping, and often many aged bales of hay that make fore great rest areas.

No matter what the weather is…

Cats love equal parts of cuddling and romping outside with you. Sort of like this image here…

Cozy time for kitties.

A fine time for kitty cuddles…

Kitty cuddles.

You can tuck your loved ones in bed, nice and safe…

Tuck in your loved ones for the night.

And my political statement

Up until the 1970’s zoo’s were horrible bare cement and cinder block places where the caged and trapped animals would waste away until they died of loneliness and boredom. Such as this lion…

Poor, sad kitty.

But that has changed. Well managed zoo’s now take the time to provide better care and more “natural” habitats for our friends to live in and exist in. I for one welcome this change.

A modern zoo.

Conclusion

When I had my little guys I would sometimes take them out to the forests with me, or barring that, I would have a house that was next door to a forest. They would love those excursions. All of their senses would perk up and they would be ALIVE.

I hope that you enjoyed this article.

I hope that you enjoyed this article.

This is my tribute to all the cat and cat lovers in the world. Maybe I’m weird for thinking these things, but we shared many a great time together. It is my hope that the cat lovers in the audience will love and appreciate this post as much as I enjoyed writing it.

A kitty on the prowl.

The big cat seal of approval

Big kitty approves of this article.

I approve!

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Why do many of the girls of China resemble an Asian version of the large chested Dolly Parton

No. It’s not all girls. And no, it’s not even most girls. But it is a lot of girls.

It’s that in China, a fish-like shape is considered to be very beautiful and appealing. And so the women wear flattering clothes, and wear cute outfits. It’s really nice to go out in a restaurant and see the beautiful ladies go out and about. It’s like being in a beautiful garden full of wonderful flowers.

Here, we will present some of these appealing Chinese women for you to look at.

But first… Note that these Chinese girls look this way because they [1] eat healthy food, [2] have good traditional habits and [3] all maintain a healthy and vibrant social life.

And that is the key.

You must have a vibrant and healthy social life, with friends, and family, if you want to be healthy, and look great.

Chinese girls and American girls are the same

The fact is that if you remove the weight that many Westerners now have (due to poor diets, broken up families, fast foods, and GMOs) the women would resemble what is common in China today. the only difference between Chinese women and American women is that they are not eating GMO-laden food.

And they are not under stress.

And they eat good healthy food.

And they are active in a vibrant social life.

Here, we take a normal American girl (on the left). She has a robust rotund shape. And then slim her down to what the shape was in America before the rise of big AIG industry, GMOs and the rise of Fast Food. She is at a woman’s body shape mid 1960’s in America.

The girl on the left is a typical American woman, while the girl on the right is what she would look like in the 1960’s…

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

And if you look, you will notice that many Chinese women have bodies that resemble this 1960s era shape. If you look at the shape and the body proportions the current typical Chinese female body structure resembles the typical female body structure of American women in the 1960’s.

Here’s another one…

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

Who does she sort of look like from the 1960’s and 1970’s? If you pay attention, her body structure on the right side of the image greatly resembles the typical body images of actresses from the 1960’s and 1970’s. And this is no mistake.

Loni Anderson

Raquel Welch

Sharon Tate

Sharon Tate

Notice that when you slim down, the rest of the body proportions stay the same. That gives the illusion of a healthier and more swan-line or fish-like body. And in my mind, I think that American women are just as beautiful as Chinese or Asian or African women.

It’s just that the culture, the diet and the society has distorted them.

And GMO’s has played a major role, no doubt. Once can only imagine how the mRNA changes in the bodies of Westerners will react to GMO laden food. If the bodies we see today are the end result of sugars, starches, and GMO’s combined with a stress-filled environment, one can just imagine what horrors will manifest with an mRNA alternation.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

France in the 1960’s

Did you know that you used to drink wine in French schools, have long lunches to savor the food followed by a nap, and then strolled back to school and work.

Then, when France decided to adopt the American / British “improvements” in society…

… such as wine replaced with sugar-laden soft-drinks…

France used to require children to drink their daily wine.

Last night I was standing at the counter of our local café on Boulevard Saint Germain, finishing off a last glass of wine after work before heading home for the evening, when I noticed something behind the bar. I thought I must have been reading it wrong (I was on my third glass) because it said in French: “Never more than one litre of wine per day… the correct serving: one quarter of a bottle per meal,” and then beneath in large capital letters, “HEALTH, SOBRIETY“.

France before it became British.

What kind of alcoholism prevention poster sets the recommended limit at one litre of wine per day? And are they suggesting we drink wine at breakfast? I suppose this is France…

“It’s from the 1950s”, explained Pierre, the owner of the Café Maubert. “I think it’s from a campaign when they were trying to stop everyone from drinking too much wine everyday. I bought it on eBay for 70 euros”.

Drink wine. It’s good for the health.

It would be worth mentioning here that it wasn’t until 1956, two years after the start of this campaign, that the consumption of alcohol was outlawed in French schools for children under 14.

Mothers were known to send their small children to the local schoolhouse with lunch baskets containing a bit of cheese, some saucisson … and a half bottle of wine or cider to drink.

-Messie Nessy

France implemented all sorts of “progressive improvements”. Not just the switching of wine for soda beverages, but other things as well. Such as…

… butter replaced with artificial margarine…

… and a two hour long lunch break replaced to a 20 minute cram and dash lunch…

… and the 65 religious day-off holidays replaced with 6 holidays a year, that people became fat, sad, depressed, sickly and obese?

Things were much better before these “improvements”.

Improvements?

Bread and cheese.

Pretty soon you will see the famous (and delicious baguettes) replaced with white American processed white bread loaves. Followed by cheese replaced with cheese-it in a can (or a jar). It’s more “progressive” don’t you know.

American improvements in the way we eat bread and cheese.

These improvements to our lives, as dictated by the powers that be, have created an enormous tidal wave of secondary effects that has destroyed the Western society and has wrecked ruin throughout our individual cultures.

And this is American “culture” today…

Walmart reality.

Bond girls – Chinese style

Here’s another picture. I think that the girl on the right resembles a typical Chinese lady today, and I can easily picture her in a 1960’s James Bond film taken in France in the 1960’s.

2021s American Girl / 1960s French Girl shape

She has that “Bond Girl” look, don’t you think?

Doctor No.

It’s not just women. It’s men too.

Everyone has ballooned up to enormous proportions by the crazy stress and piss-poor lifestyle choices available to people in the West.

I know that women do not like big, fat gluttonous men. I think that they prefer thinner guys that take care of their appearance and are strong and confident. At least that is what I like in a woman, and I figure that women are much the same as I.

You know, when I compare my pictures of me back around twenty years ago, when I first started to spend serious time in and out of China, to now, I am astounded.  In those days, I ran a three weeks in China, followed by a six weeks in the USA. And my body shape reflected that. I looked like a rather large American man.

Today, my physical size is  much slimmer, though I do believe that I have gained weight.

Funny that.

Thin and confident secret agent.

Just like men don’t really care for the rotund women in the pictures to the left. Everyone, men and women, want a healthy partner.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

People want a healthy partner.

Not necessarily a weight lifter, or a marathon runner, but someone who takes care of their appearance, is a great conservationist, and is fun to be with.

Not just for sex, companionship and pride, but also for long life and healthy activities. Don’t you think?

2021s American Girl / 1960s American Girl shape

I think that it is important to live a lush, fruitful and enjoyable life. This means good food, good drink… wine instead of sugary soda. It means being around loving animals, dogs and cats.

It means taking pride in your appearance.

It means having an active social life with people who respect and trust you.

It means happiness, and good long health.

So I am not getting down on any chunkier women in the MM audience. As I too am getting a tad chunkier myself. But what I am saying is that we ALL need to start mixing up our social and friend and family circles around companionship, social interaction, and really good healthy food.

The weight loss will follow.

There’s something about have a great engaging conversation with people who you are comfortable with that will really tone up your body.

What would you rather do? Cozy up in from of your computer monitor and read what Washington DC is planning to do, or get dressed up, and meet some friends to the local pub, bar, brasserie, restaurant or lounge and just chat. Chat and smile. tell some stupid jokes that you heard a thousands times before. catch up on the latest gossip, talk some politics, and just enjoy the evening?

What is healthier?

What is healthier?

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

Life in your 20’s

Consider what it was like when you were slim.

You were probably in your youngish 20’s. Slim, going out with friends, and dating. Eating out. eating good food. drinking some. Enjoying life. Optimistic with a life in front of you.

Now, what’s your life?

Oh, it’s such a simple thing to say. It’s all that bad fast food that you put into your mouths. It’s this. Or, it’s that.

It’s everything else except what is staring you straight in the face. Instead of looking at the bigger picture.

Your lifestyle changed.

In history, those families that adopted a traditional lifestyle with an active social life, and fine delicious home-cooked meals by the spouse who was in control of the finances were all THIN. They were not fat, and they held a very important role in their communities.

You need to be part of a community, and you need to socialize.

Living in Boston

When I lived in Boston, I hardly ate fish. Why? Because it was outrageously expensive, and I simply could not afford it. But if I did, perhaps I would have avoided some of my later healthy issues that hit me a few years later.

You must plan.

So it’s expensive, well, go out and plan on a meal out with friends and have a fine delicious fish and lots of vegetable side dishes. Some wine. Lots of talk. Dress up a little smartly for it. make it a great event.

Do it often enough.

You will live much longer. I promise you.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

“What’s going on?” You might ask.

Food and losing weight?

Here I am talking about going out and eating at the same time where I am discussing losing weight. How does it all relate. Ah. Let me explain.

You see your weight has no bearing on the amount of food you eat. Women in the 1960’s ate as much food as they do today. That is true for both China and the USA. The difference is what you eat, and how you eat it.

  • What you eat.
  • How you eat it.

These are critical points that you will not find anywhere else on the internet. I suppose it is another thing that make MM unique. Our weight is connected to our thoughts, and our thoughts are connected to our well-being. And our well-being is connected to our society. To lose weight, you must go forth and make yourself some good friends.

Even if I am full of bullshit, at least you will be with others and having a good delicious time at it.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

Not about diet entirely…

So I am not talking about dieting or anything like that.

[1] I am not talking about those diets or loading up on salads. I am saying that you eat IN A SOCIAL VENUE as much as possible. Be it with family, or with friends. You should only be eating alone very, very rarely.

[2] When you eat, you should be eating a balanced meal of meats / fish / foul with three other vegetables and a staple. Be it rice, breads or potatoes. They might cost slightly more, but they are worth it. Don’t always select foods based on price and convenience.

American breakfast is often nothing more than disguised dessert. And we keep eating sugar throughout the day — in cupcakes, soda, even salad dressing. So many of the additional calories in our diet that weren’t there a few decades ago are coming in the form of sugar. Back in 1977, the average adult got 228 calories per day from sugar in food and drinks. By 2010, it was up to 300 calories a day. Added sugar consumption increased almost as much — 20 percent — among kids.

[3] All sugar laden drinks are out. You can have tea, beer, wine, water, or anything else you can think of.

People who drink soda have more obesity, Type 2 diabetes, tooth decay, and other health problems compared with people who don't -- the research on this is clear. And Americans are drinking way, way too much of the sweet stuff. According to Euromonitor’s most recent data, Americans remain the world leaders when it comes to per capita sales of soft drinks.

[4] Fast foods are NO NO NO.

Fast foods are NO!

American breakfast is often nothing more than disguised dessert. And we keep eating sugar throughout the day — in cupcakes, soda, even salad dressing.

So many of the additional calories in our diet that weren’t there a few decades ago are coming in the form of sugar. Back in 1977, the average adult got 228 calories per day from sugar in food and drinks. By 2010, it was up to 300 calories a day. Added sugar consumption increased almost as much — 20 percent — among kids.

Then watch your weight disappear. I honestly believe that social interaction is the KEY to all this problem that we are discussing here.

2021s Girl / 1960s Girl shape

Oh, so you don’t believe me?

Overeating obviously leads to excess weight, right? A team of scientists says not so fast, it’s actually what you eat, not how much you eat that leads to obesity. Their study finds processed food and rapidly digestible carbohydrates may be what’s really behind society’s growing waistline.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 40 percent of American adults classify as obese. This places nearly half the population at higher risk of heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes. The USDA’s current Dietary Guidelines for Americans for 2020 to 2025 maintains the belief that losing weight “requires adults to reduce the number of calories they get from foods and beverages and increase the amount expended through physical activity.” 

...

Unlike the energy balance model, study authors say the carbohydrate-insulin model claims overeating is not the main cause of weight gain. Instead, the researchers say consuming foods with a high-glycemic load are the real culprit. These foods include processed, rapidly digestible carbohydrates.

The study finds such foods also cause hormonal responses which alter an eater’s metabolism, drives fat storage, and leads to weight gain. When people consume carbohydrates, the body increases the amount of insulin it secretes. This signals fat cells to store more calories and leaves fewer calories for the body to use as muscle fuel.

- Study Finds

Medicines…

Now, I know that there are other things that can contribute to weight gain, such as medicines. depakote is the worst. (If you need some control, try risperdal, it will slim you down three sizes and pop up your boobs three sizes larger as well. And you’ll stop smoking as a side effect.)

But it’s a MAJOR tranquilizer, and should only be taken if you have problems in that area.

But there are many other factors Yet, I argue that stress alleviation, and mitigation can be handled by social support groups. And as your stress goes down, so will your weight. So go forth make friends and eat well.

Anyways…

Why do so many Chinese girls resemble the large chested beauties of the 1960’s and 1970’s?

When you get fat, the excess body fat conceals your natural curves and body shape. You end up looking like a huge tomato, a squash or a big pear. When if you just keep fit, the other parts of your body; the chest, the legs, the hips will form in their normal proportions. this will give you a more chesty look, a more shapely look and a more healthier look. As the photos above illustrates.

Now there are all kinds of people in this world. There are tall, short, fat, thin, robust, and frail people. And what ever body you inherited at birth is just fine. Just keep it well maintained, and enjoy what you have. Feet it well. Use it to socialize with and enjoy your time on this planet.

The large busy girls of China

This is part of my “Beautiful girls of China” series. Here, we introduce the reader to China, and what it is today, by looking at the girls, women and ladies of China. In all cases the ladies are dancing, posing or just being themselves around their homes, businesses or city centers where they live.

By looking at them, listening to the music, and paying attention to their surroundings you will end up getting a very clean and pristine vision of what China is, what it stands for and what it is actually like.

For convenience, I have arranged the videos in zip files. I am sure that you will enjoy them.

Group AA. All very nice.

We will start with these gals. All are grouped in individual zip files.

Group AA-A.

Group DD. All exceptional.

This is where the beauty for this cover picture is. (Her individual video here.) Click on the folder to download the zip files.

Conclusion

There is nothing different between an Asian woman, an American woman, a Russian woman and an African woman. All are naturally thin with a nice swan (or fish) shape. The differences in body SHAPE that we see today are a function of the social and cultural climate that exists within the different geographic and national regions.

In nations that are toxic; that have a suppressed social life, where the foods are not really healthy, and where the lifestyle is one of isolation… the women (and men) get enormously fat.

In nations that are healthy; where society allows for personal interaction, and communication, and where fresh food choices are easy to obtain, plentiful and cheap, the people are thin and attractive with finely shaped bodies.

Thus is the difference that we see between the USA and China today.

Do you want more?

 

I have more articles like this one in my Learning About China by Looking at Pretty Girls Index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

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Some of my favorite cat pictures Part 2

This article is just a collection of some of my favorite cat pictures. Some are cute. Some are inspirational. Some are funny, and some are “head scratchers”. I hope that it brightens up your day today.

It’s just a bunch of cat related quotes, pictures and other related things.

First some Pharaoh comix…

Which leads up to this…

Some really BIG cats…

And some funny cartoons

Upper case and Lower case

More big cats

Something worthy of a chuckle

More and more big kitties

Some kitty humor

Shit my wife has said…

From Tumblr

Cat vape station

Kissing a kitty

And more big cats

Cat Language

Strange emotion cat

Physics Cat

Garlic Thief

More big cats

The King.

Tough Russian and Northern Europe Cats

Just keeping it real

Mozzarella Cat

You do not have permission to leave

Siberian Cat

Cat names

Coronavirus Kitty

Plot Twist

Cat quotes…

The life of a cat owner…

Putin is a cat lover…

Not lost, just visiting.

A Fat Cat

A Russian oligarch cat

A very busy cat

Dogs and Cats

All cat owners can relate…

A cat owner after a bad day at work…

Not about cats, but funny never the less…

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my Cat Heaven Index. Here…

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Glimpses of contemporaneous Vietnam. Oh, it is so very different from what you would expect

Here, I continue on my “bender” on taking a look at other nations in our world. In each case, so far, I have shown the reality to be something different from what you would ever read about in the Western (especially the American) press. I have looked at China, Russia, Thailand, Cambodia, the middle East, and now, Vietnam.

Vietnam is a very interesting place full of great beauty, beautiful women, delicious food, and an easy going happy-go-lucky lifestyle.

Enter Donald Trump and his neocon war-mongers

Vietnam continued their easy and laid back lifestyle since the tumultuous 1960’s when America decided to churn up and rape the countryside for freedom™ and democracy™. And it continued that way through the decades, up until Donald Trump took office and started his “War on China”.

He demanded that American companies leave China or face all sorts of consequences. In American “language” this means that “border-line legal” actions might (and probably would) be directed at the company. Such as suspicious hard-line tax audits, and review of OSHA and EPA policies and factory operation shut-downs during the “investigations” as well as mysterious fires in the warehouses, random union uprisings and personal tax audits and random arrests of key corporate executives.

Many, but not all, American companies started to relocate a number of their operations out of China. The vast bulk did not return to America, however. Instead, they went to Mexico and Vietnam.

About Factories

When America switched from manufacturing inside of America to outsourcing to China, they did NOT teach the Chinese how to make factories or build products. Instead, they went to existing factories, handed over the blueprints, and quality specifications, moved their tooling and equipment, and said “make this for us”. And that is pretty much (as harsh as it sounds) what actually happened.

Now, in the thirty to forty years that America has been devoid of solid manufacturing skill, the American companies that manufactured inside of China were in a bind. Just how do you move your factory, when you don’t own it?

Do you start from scratch? Hire new engineers? Try to reverse engineer your systems to fit a Mexican or Vietnamese work force? What do you do?

Well, I can’t say that this is what happened to all of the factories, but I can tell you that a sizable number took this action…

…the Chinese factories that supplied the American companies, set up divisions inside of Vietnam.

Thus, the Donald Trump trade war, as far as bringing manufacturing capability back to the United States failed. Instead, all that happened is the existing Chinese factories continued to supply the American companies. The only difference is that they did so out of Vietnam.

Vietnam Changed.

Of course, all of this movement of Chinese factories into Vietnam, and with it, the Chinese support structures, have made great changes to Vietnam. While it is still a sluggish and rather backward nation, it is growing and expanding. And this has created a rather unique mix of older traditional Vietnam, with modern Chinese industry and support structures. Very few American influences are present. As America is rather a nation of bankers, accountants, lawyers, and diversity experts. Very few have an kind of impact on Vietnamese society.

Here we are going to look at some videos out of Vietnam taken these last two months. It’s a quite interesting mix of color and tradition.

The Videos

Let’s go through these videos.

I suggest you watch them in order to get the full diverse effect. And I hope hope that you enjoy them and get “something out of them”. This group has around 85 (give or take) videos. So to prevent you from getting carpal tunnel syndrome (yikes!) clicking on each individual video, I have clustered the videos into small zip files that you click on, download and then browse through at your leisure.

Group A

  • Cooking some kind of purple Vietnamese food.
  • Foreigner in Vietnam trying to pick up a local butterfly girl.
  • Young love having some fun.
  • Lunch in a Chinese factory located in Vietnam.
  • Dressing up to go out on a date.
  • You ride scooters to get anywhere.
  • Making supper.
  • Loved ones going off to do their mandatory military service.
  • Some girls getting down at a local gathering.
  • Another foreigner trying to pick up some butterfly girls.
  • Night life in one of the bigger cities.
  • Two girls on the way to work (my guess is a massage or restaurant).
  • Bar Life.
  • Home made turbo-generators for local village power needs.

Group A

You can download this entire archive HERE.

Group B

  • Single 20-something girl in her one-room apartment.
  • Hair stylist.
  • Wedding party.
  • Bride’s Maids showing their disdain for the bride for leaving them behind.
  • Pretty Vietnam girl in a tea house.
  • Pretty Vietnam farm girl in the field.
  • Some 20-something’s “hanging out”.
  • Pretty factory girl on the factory campus.
  • Drunk factory girl in her shared dorm room.
  • Classmates cheering up a sad girl.
  • Before a wedding.
  • Prep-cook.
  • Lunch with beer and pigeon eggs.
  • Vietnam government taking guidance from China and fighting COVID.

Group B

You can download this entire archive HERE.

Group C

  • What small-town Vietnam is actually like.
  • A typical highway between towns.
  • Pretty girl doing a Tictok.
  • Wedding tradition.
  • Wedding reception activity.
  • Girls of the night looking for customers.
  • Picnic Vietnamese style.
  • Female Vietnamese kick-boxer.
  • Haircut and a shave.
  • Happy birthday.
  • Handing out money to those wearing masks.
  • Chilled girl stopping by the side to put on a warmer top.
  • One of the many wedding rituals.
  • Butterfly Girl on the prowl in the night-life section.

Group C

You can download this entire archive HERE.

Group D

  • Foreigner interacting with some “ladies of the night”.
  • Not quite sure what is going on.
  • Laundry on the porch.
  • Young love at the factory.
  • A beautiful Vietnamese girl.
  • Leaving his house as he has to go off to work now.
  • Lining up for vaccinations.
  • Household savings.
  • Nothing is sexier than a woman cooking.
  • Working the farm.
  • Washing hair outside.
  • Traditional outfit.
  • [Video messes up on MS systems about 50% of the time.]
  • Traditional family.

Group D

You can download this entire archive HERE.

Group E

  • Butterfly girls (prostitutes) lined up for some customers.
  • making waffles for breakfast.
  • City night ride.
  • China giving away free “dead virus” (traditional) vaccines in Vietnam.
  • Pretty girl 1.
  • Pretty girl 2.
  • A factory lunch.
  • A friend had a little too much to drink.
  • Off to the honeymoon.
  • Night life.
  • A girl of the night.
  • Making products for American consumers in a Chinese factory in Vietnam.
  • Farting at loved ones.
  • I am not too sure what is going on here.

Group E

You can download this entire archive HERE.

Group F

  • Foreigner picking up a butterfly girl.
  • Another butterfly girl scores BIG.
  • Pretty girl in traditional attire.
  • OMG! What a sexy video!!!!!
  • Night time going out to be with friends.
  • Confrontation or something…?
  • It’s hot! HOT!
  • Healthy dinner.
  • China is assisting Vietnam in the construction of hospitals.
  • KTV fun. I wish I was there.
  • Later on at the KTV things are getting a little crazy.
  • You have to wear pants over your miniskirt while riding a scooter.
  • Wedding exchanges.
  • Friends partying.
  • A bit of fun at a Chinese factory inside of Vietnam making products for Americans.

Group F

You can download this entire archive HERE.

On a topical note…

As the Biden administration consolidates its foreign policy, it has predictably turned its attention towards Southeast Asia in a bid to “counter China”.

Just last week, Mid-August 2021, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin visited Vietnam, the Philippines, and Singapore in a bid to increase military ties between Washington and the region.

Means… allow American military bases there, American war ships to sail there, and the placement of American offensive missile systems there.

Right on China’s “doorstep”.

Imagine that!

Now, Kamala Harris is also set to visit two of these countries (Vietnam and Singapore), where the reported main message will be ‘America is Back!’ – a sentiment which will no doubt go down a storm in Hanoi.

You know like swallowing bile that rise up in your throat.

The vice president’s aim with this trip is to “call out” China over its maritime claims in the South China Sea.They can’t do it personally face-to-face with China. They will no longer play “that game”. So like cowards, they are trying to undermine all the relationships of all the nations that border on China.

They come with suitcases (no cross that out) pallets, (no cross that out) Shipping containers full of freshly minted US dollars.

Freshly minted.

Hot off the (over worked) printing presses.

For, you know, the leadership to do what ever they want with the nice crisp “green backs”.

This comes amid America’s attempts to militarize the region.

They’ve been really busy, don’t you know.

The anti-China QUAD; those vassal states of the UK and Japan who will be compelled to “die on their swords” at the push of a button from the American Pentagon. To Australia who has only become a vassal state for reasons not so obvious. In my mind, a treasonous Morrison government with many, many skeletons in his closet is willing to sacrifice his people for Washington DC.

As well as continuously sailing aircraft carriers through the sensitive waters in a bid to project American power.

It comes as Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi attends the ASEAN-China ministerial meeting, where he has warned against “external interference” by “extraterritorial powers” in the region.

No prizes here for guessing who he was talking about…

The US says that it’s “back” to Southeast Asian countries.

It’s just bullshit.

The reality is this: apart from all the militaristic “sabre rattling” and pushing a non-stop hate China narrative while convincing everyone (with a pulse) to oppose China, the United States actually doesn’t have a strategy for the region.

But Beijing does.

In many ways, the legacy of recent US policies in this area of the world has been self-defeating.

The “political space” (the room to maneuver and work around is) that Biden has to turn it around is really quite limited.

In other words, it’s essentially still Trump’s ‘America First’ sentiment.

And that is quite telling as the biggest gaping hole in America’s strategy towards Southeast Asian countries is failing to offer them anything in return.

There are no, absolutely zero, economic incentives to oppose China. All they have to offer is personal riches for the rulers. As well as promises to offer them “green cards” and citizenship if the whole plan goes “tits up”.

China, need I remind you, which is right next door to these nations.

On this front, America has isolated itself.

In so many ways too.

Most notably by withdrawing from the mega trade deal which Obama fashioned as an anti-China initiative known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Now rebranded CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership) amongst local partners.

On the level of US domestic politics, this is toxic because the consensus is that free trade is bad, especially if it detracts from jobs at home.

Therefore, Biden faces protectionist pressure not to re-join it, thus it has not come back on the Biden agenda.

China, on the other hand, has comprehensively doubled down on its economic ties with the surrounding region and entrenched its presence. Most notably through joining the ASEAN-led Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, which it quickly ratified.

This creates an obvious problem for America.

China is increasingly integrating itself with the region on an economic level.

In which local parties (Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, etc.) welcome with open arms gleefully.

But, you know, the United States is not happy with in the least.

China has, in addition, begun to move away from the US dollar in its business with these countries. This includes a local currency trade agreement with Indonesia and the setting up of an RMB bank in the Philippines, amongst other things.

No longer is trade being conducted in the “almighty” US Dollar. It’s local currency to the e-yuan. And as time moves forward, more and more nations are following this lead.

The US doesn’t have an answer to any of this.

Recently, it was reported that Washington wanted to try and propose a ‘digital trade deal’ among the economies of the Asia-Pacific. This “digital trade deal”  is intended to lock China out of trade with any nations that sign that agreement. This is by regulation.

A favorite technique, mind you, well established and mature to crush nations that do not “toe the line” with American Geo-political policy.

This is intended to be done by setting strict rules and regulations on the ‘digital economy’ of the region.

Diplomatic sources dismissed it as a complete non-starter.

Why?

Because it’s absolutely untenable for these countries to lock China out, and it’s not hard to see why.

Yesterday (Mid-August 2021) Huawei announced it would be investing $100 million into over 1,000 software start-ups throughout Southeast Asia. And that’s just one of the many initiatives in bringing manufacturing, development, growth and prosperity to all the nations that surround China.

With a high degree of integration and economic benefits, it is impossible for the US to now shape the region’s initiative while keeping China excluded.

There’s nothing left.

This leaves the military.

And this is where China is increasingly powerful, but the US remains competitive and relevant.

Many countries in the region accept the presence of the United States and its allies militarily, because it gives them strategic space to prevent them from being completely dominated by China.

For a small city state like Singapore, this inclination makes obvious sense, but this is not so much ‘siding’ with America as it is a geopolitical balancing act between both powers.

Walking the “tight rope”; the “fine line” of neutrality.

Here lies the problem: America wants countries to align with it against China in a binary way, but the nations themselves want neutrality.

And ASEAN (The association of South East Asian nations) as an institution officially seeks such.

Singapore’s prime minister stated several days ago that it seeks balance between both powers, and did not want to become torn between them.

Seeks balance.

Seeks neutrality.

Seeks a uni-polar world.

Some of these states of course are formally allied with America, such as the Philippines. Yet, you know, for all intents and purposes they utilize a strategy of ‘hedging’ between both sides.

And for certain, they do not seek confrontation with Beijing.

If Washington pushes too hard on anti-China initiatives, these countries become uncomfortable, and this may have the ‘opposite’ result.

Recognizing what the US is doing, China is now pre-empting it by making diplomatic breakthroughs and concessions on the ‘South China Sea code of conduct’ – a proposal that has been in gridlock for decades.

This aims to ease tensions, and brands the US a ‘troublemaker’.

Duh!

Again, Washington doesn’t have the ability to conduct close diplomacy with these countries as a neighbor, only as a ‘visitor’.

America is an outsider.

China is local.

China is right there.

All in all, geography works against America. China is the neighbor of Southeast Asia, not the US.

Beijing is the largest economy in the region and is irreversibly integrated in terms of trade, technology, and finance.

America is not.

Yet, the US foreign policy strategy seems to pursue the bizarre premise that they can somehow dominate this region…

… push back China…

…and match its growing power…

… despite the fact they physically cannot, simply because they are not based there.

This means that whilst these countries are not necessarily rejecting an American presence, they are never going to adopt any serious anti-China policies or the militarization of the region that Biden hopes for.

Would you start a fight with your much bigger next-door neighbor?

Biden has no economic incentives to offer either.

China is, in many ways, continuing to lead and shape the regional agenda through its own initiatives, and as its own military presence in this area also grows, it has plenty of options to counter US posturing.

And the United States is impotent in the region, no matter what the American media says to the contrary.

Conclusion

Most of the world is still being influenced by the American media in one form or the other. And on subjects that everyone seems to have adjusted to what ever narrative that the American government made, the belief is that what ever Washington DC says is the truth. Nope. It is not.

Vietnam is many things, but an American proxy nation, whether military, commercial or economic, is simply not true.

This article broaches the true and actual state of affairs, and I do hope that it was interesting and meaningful at the same time. I have tried to present a diverse collection of videos showing the great breadth and width of the colorful Vietnamese society, and I hope that I put it in a positive light.

I have many friends how go to Vietnam, as it’s not too far from where I live, and they pretty much confirm what I have listed here. I hope that you all can see that it has a bright future ahead, and some deep and wonderful culture and traditions. I sincerely hope that they hold on to them and not allow them to disappear.

And when the pandemic ends, perhaps a nice visit to Vietnam would be a wonderful trip, and I am sure that you would make some wonderful, maybe even lifelong friends. And isn’t that what we all want out of life?

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Happiness Index here…

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Some of my favorite cat pictures

This article is just a collection of some of my favorite cat pictures. Some are cute. Some are inspirational. Some are funny, and some are “head scratchers”. I hope that it brightens up your day today.

Fat Cat

Fat cat.

The love bond.

The love bond.

Hello Kitty

Hello Kitty

There’s a Japanese Show About a Samurai and the Adorable Cat He Wouldn’t Assassinate

It’s a classic Hollywood story: an assassin on a job can’t go through with it when he meets his would-be victim, then the two form an unlikely friendship against their common enemy.

Samurai Cat.

It’s a pretty reliable trope, although it can be hard finding new ways to keep it fresh. But that not a problem for one Japanese show, which had the greatest version of this story we’ve ever come across:

The amazing tale of the friendship between a samurai and the adorable cat he refused to kill.

Fighting for the Cat.

Neko zamurai (translation Samurai Cat), which we only just learned about at Reddit, was a Japanese TV mini-series that ran for two seasons from 2013 to 2015.

A time for a meeting of the minds.

It followed Madarame Kyutaro, known as Madara the Devil, a “humorless samurai, nearly desperate for work” who agrees to kill Tomanojo, the cat “accused of possessing a man’s soul.”

Protecting the Cat.

One problem, though: when he actually saw the adorable little kitten, his Katana became a Kan’t-ana, so he took Tomanojo home with him.

Man and cat.

Kitty in the snow

Kitty in the snow

Lion Love

Lion Love.

A fine tail

A fine tail.

Are you alive?

Are you alive?

Expert at game play.

Expert at game play.

Cartoon Kitty.

Cartoon Kitty.

Ready to pounce.

Ready to pounce.

An outdoor excursion.

An outdoor excursion.

Walking Around.

Walking Around.

Little guy.

Little guy.

Needing snuggles.

Needing snuggles.

A very fine looking cat.

A very fine looking cat.

And…

A very fine looking cat.

Climbing up to say hi.

Climbing up to say hi.

Mine. Mine. Mine.

Mine. Mine. Mine.

Where I keep my spare cats.

Where I keep my spare cats.

Chow Hall.

Chow Hall.

Adjacent Cattery.

Adjacent Cattery.

A natural hunter.

A natural hunter.

A close call.

A close call.

Cat ladder.

Cat ladder.

Beautiful Eyes.

Beautiful Eyes.

Fail!

Fail.

Under the sheet fun!

My cats used to love to play this game when we made up the beds.

Under the sheet fun!

Who is this stranger?

Who is this stranger?

Come to mommy.

Come to mommy.

Smart Cat.

Smart Cat.

Climbing the walls.

Climbing the walls.

Wants to be the one and only.

Wants to be the one and only.

Ready or not; here I come.

Ready or not; here I come.

Service please.

Service please.

I will not be ignored.

I will not be ignored.

Kitten fight!

Kitten fight!

Boop!

Boop!

Caught up in a first person mouser!

Caught up in a first person mouser!

A clean escape.

A clean escape.

Conclusion

Cats make wonderful and funny companions. Those who visit MM might be able to see similar GIFs and pictures that resemble events that they too have experienced. This is just a fun post, and I do hope that you all enjoyed it.

Masterless Samurai Kyutaro Madarame is hired by a dog-loving gang to get rid of their rival gang’s beloved pet, an adorable white cat. Upon raising his sword, however, he cannot bring himself to go through with the act and the cat melts his heart.

Do you want more?

You can find more articles related to this in my Cat Heaven Index. Here…

Heaven

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  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Some videos of China discussing global politics, what is actually going on and other neato things

This article is going for a kind of minimalist look where I present some “meaty” videos for you all to watch and ponder. And of course, it’s going to include China, because (well, you know) it’s the dominant force in the world today.

My intention is to provide a broad swath of videos that give the reader a fuller, and better understanding of China in all the many aspects of it. From personal to Geo-political, to social to governing, to people. By watching all these videos (and some are from myself) you will see exactly what China is today, free of the bullshit that you would find elsewhere on the internet.

I try to describe what is going on in the videos, but you can come to your own conclusions. Each video is from 15 seconds to five minutes long. Not really prohibitively large, but long enough to make the necessary points. Most videos presented are either banned, censored, or otherwise prohibited in the United States, Australia and the UK today.

I strongly suggest you watch each video one by one, in the order presented. I tried hard to put them in a balanced order to make a more reasonable impression to you, the reader.

This is what China is today..

Bridge Building in China

It makes America look like the corrupt, un-Godly moronic group of misfit nincompoops that it is. Here’s what the rest of the world thinks of America. Soak it up, and this video was made in 2017, and it’s only gotten much, much worse since then. HERE.

Night Life in China.

Here’s an expat walking around China at night. To those of you who are unaware, when the sun sets, China comes alive with activity. Kids, retired folk, workers and everyone come out to play and enjoy. No, it’s not a holiday. It’s just a typical night on a typical day in a typical part of China. HERE.

Give Credit Where Credit is due

In America it’s Communism is evil and bad, so says the person who knows nothing at all about Chinese communism, and who ASSUMES that it “must be horrible” because, after all Mike Pompeo, John Bolton, FOX “news”, Rush Limbaugh and CNN say so. You can trust them, right? Here’s who gets the credit for the amazing transformation of China. HERE.

Pretty Chinese girl in her house

For the last five years, the American (and Western) “news” media has cultivated the idea that the Chinese are poor, downtrodden, and helpless under a repressive communist regime. Don’t believe me? Google “repressive Chinese communist regime“. There are millions of articles with this them. And you know what? It’s all fucking LIES! Here’s a typical girl, in her typical house, in a typical small town, in a typical part of China. HERE.

End of the Year bonuses

Unlike the United States, China has end-of-the-year bonuses, monthly bonuses, and year-around award programs. And no, this isn’t a coupon for a cup of coffee, or a $10 gift card at Walmart. These are substantial bonuses equal to one to more months of salary. And on top of that, with the one to two month annual vacation, the companies offer generous dinner meals for the staff, and often they play these bonus award games. Like this one. You drink the alcohol, and you keep the money that it sits upon. HERE.

Facial Recognition is everywhere

Not only has QR replaced dollar bills and coins, but facial recognition is replacing key fobs, which (of course) replaced  keys. China is advancing in leaps and bounds. Seriously. HERE.

American attacks against China has no plan or goal

One of the first things that any student in the STEM fields recognize is that you MUST have a goal. Then you construct a plan to achieve that goal. But people who haven’t had that training, such as people who inherited their positions through wealth, relatives, or “connections” have no idea or concepts of plans, goals and objectives. And these are exactly the kind of people running the United States today. HERE.

A visit to the local clinic down the street

This is an MM video. here I narrative what my (old) clinic is like. I walk in and about. I show the traditional medicine offices, the Western medicine offices, the lab, and the pharmacy as well as the unhurried, easy going lifestyle that is so common throughout China today. HERE.

Some more Scouts

Here’s another video of the scouts. In general the scouts are a voluntary organization, while the middle School military train is compulsory. Never the less, the core ideas of community, society, achievement, merit are all strong Chinese characteristics. HERE.

Living next to a factory has it’s advantages

The bulk of the world’s goods are manufactured in China. The direct close proximity of these factories and the resulting personal and business relationships makes it very easy for wanna-be young designers and clothing manufactures to make limited runs of clothing and then sell them on social media. Such as this gal. HERE.

America is a Military Empire

In the last nearly 250 years of it’s existence, it has been involved in wars every single year since when it was founded in 1776. Only five years out of that time was peace, and only while the military-industrial establishment was retooling for the next war. Up until this week, America is currently fighting eight simultaneous wars with over 500 military bases all over the world. China isn’t like that at all. Listen to what Xi Peng has to say. HERE.

Africa is a rising star

With China’s help, both Africa, and the Middle East will experience exceptional growth and measurable, and tangible increases in their quality of living. China has set forth to make this a reality, and are busy building rail lines, hospitals, roads and much needed infrastructure to the people in these often (American instigated) war-torn nations. HERE.

A pretty girl.

I do like pretty girls. Here’s a nice pretty Chinese girl. There’s a softness, and a pleasantness that comes with life inside of China that I haven’t felt in the United States for decades. HERE.

An American comic tells it like it is

This one is classic. It’s funny because it’s true. There’s only one error in the video. He said that California is spending $6 billion dollars to build the high-speed rail line in California. The actual number is $77 billion plus an additional $6 billion to finish it by making the train to ride on the rails. HERE.

Chinese High Speed Train

These are commonplace all over China. They are cheap, fast, clean, and comfortable. They are far better than taking a plane. And the Chinese are all very used to them. HERE.

No one should underestimate China

This following speech snippet was twisted and distorted by the New York Times, and the standard neocon publications out of the North East of the United States. Who used this speech to declare that China was going to invade the world and displace the Untied States. This speech said no such thing. Instead, Xi Peng made it very clear that they will only be pushed so for before they bite back, and believe you me, you do not want to be on their bad side. HERE.

In America we salute the flag and say the “Pledge of allegiance”…

Here’s what they do in China. This is in a pre-kindergarden school. You must take note that the Chinese are very relentless patriots and since they serve their community and society, they think nothing of dying for it either. Any bull-shit ideas that China will run into the arms of “American liberators” for freedom™ and democracy™ is a pure fantasy. Check this video out! HERE.

Old Grandmother gives a wedding present

Even those on tiny incomes want to participate in good, happy and joyous occasions. Here we have an old little old lady grandmother giving a “red envelope” full of cash to the bride as her way of welcoming her to marry her grandson. Cute. Precious. HERE.

In a society where everyone participates…

The difference between the USA and China couldn’t be starker. In China, everyone participates and helps and works together for the greater good. In America it’s the “lone wolf” being the biggest and the baddest hoarding up all the money, and vacuuming up all the change so that they can sit on top of the pile of money. Here is what happens in China when you break the law. HERE.

China growth compared to America’s growth

Ai! It’s stark. China has grown, and no (it’s not like the USA) where only the rich become filthy rich and the rest suffers. Everyone inside of China has experienced enormous, and amazing increases in their standards of living. It is profound, noticeable and stunning. HERE.

MM posts a video

I made this video as I walked near my house. It’s just a bunch of first and second grade students hanging out together and playing near one of the family shops. It’s a young biker gang. LOL. HERE.

Africa is modernizing.

Soft power from China. America has decades (if not centuries) of proving pallet loads of money to local war-lords to buy American guns and weapons, so that those on K-street in Washington DC get rich. China has a better idea. They are surrounding themselves with prosperity. Those nations that have a growing middle class, that shun war, and want to be productive will become great friends of China. And that is what we are seeing in Africa today. HERE.

Chinese space station I

Congress and successive American presidents have forbidden China to have any access to American technology. This includes all rocket and space and avionics technology. So China had to build everything from scratch and just like the United States did in the early 1960’s, so did China, and now China has met, and surpassed the United States technology markers in space exploration. HERE.

A sexy video

Here is a Chinese woman making her family a fine delicious and healthy meal in the kitchen. Not only are women far better cooks than men (well, maybe not all the time, but in my case they are certainly much better than me) but they are expert financiers. No one can budget a household, AND provide daily tasty delicious meals like a woman can. And that’s my strong opinion in this matter. If you want to be healthy in body and mind, and you want to be free of financial worries, put the woman of the house in charge of fiances and domestic issues. Your life would be so much better. And besides, it’s so sexy! HERE.

Chinese and Russia Space Station II

There is also another video that also shows just how much larger the joint Chinese and Russian space station will be when it is completed. Of course, this is nothing that you will find on any of the Western media outlets. HERE.

Pretty Chinese girl

I am constantly amazed that Americans believe that all the women in China look like pre-adolsescent children. In fact, this was the argument that was used against me by the DA in Little Rock, Arkansas who actually made the point that the sole reason that I lived, worked and traveled to China was to indulge my fantasies of having sex with little children, and the Chinese women would naturally, by their child-like bodies would satisfy me. Disgusting. HERE.

Everyone Participates

When someone gets unruly, and rude, the rest of China will take action. This is their nation; their country. And it’s up to them to police it. And people must behave. There are far too many people, to not take an active role in society. HERE.

Hong Kong official discusses the HK Riots

It is no secret that the United States funded, armed, taught, organized and pushed for the (so called) “pro-democracy” riots. These riots killed dozens, caused massive hardship, interrupted the flow of life inside of China and caused millions of dollars in damages. Who is the ultimate culprit? Why, it is clearly the United States. HERE.

Chinese Scouts

In America we have “Boy Scouts” and “Girl Scouts”. But in China there is just “The Scouts”. And they learn discipline, culture, working together, and some basics of para-military training. I am always amazed and glad that China trains their children to be parts of the community, than a bunch of couch-potatoes that demand “me, me, me”. HERE.

Be the Rufus

In a society that has people caring for each other you will start seeing Rufus activities. Not because of some kind of reward, but that it is what you do when you are about others in your society. Such as this quick video illustrates. HERE.

America speak with a forked tongue

Here’s an interesting side by side comparison of (then) Vice President Biden telling the Chinese that America is committed to a “rising China”. And then next to it we see President Biden announcing to the White house press corps that America must stop China from rising at all costs. Sheech! HERE.

Nice Chinese girl

Here’s a nice Chinese girl. According to Arkansas she looks young. They told me that “everyone” in China looks like children. That’s the ONLY reason why anyone would ever want to visit that slimy, filthy, oozing, cesspool of pollution, crime and corruption. Look at her ooze childish filth! HERE.

Rural Africa now has factories

The Chinese have spent the time building factories, and training workers to make basic items in the  very remote villages and settlements of Africa. These areas used to be poverty ridden, and controlled by war-lords who lived on United States funds and corruption. But with the investments of infrastructure and a market for manufactured goods, the money now flows to these workers who make these products inside of Africa. HERE.

This vblogger was attacked horrifically by the BBC

They claimed that he was only saying good things about China because the communist regime paid him to do so. And then they took frames from his video, used photoshop to darken them, turn the lush green trees grey, turn the blue sky grey and then produced it to their audience of millions. Never a retraction. HERE.

The BBC tries to attack China on Global Warming

It’s unsuccessful. Anyone who knows anything about China will now defend China and no longer take the bullshit narrative at face value. That game is over. And here’s a nice video that illustrates this spectacularly. HERE.

BBC Journalist admits his directives

Pretty ballsy. After all, his future as a “journalist” in the West is now over.  He pretty much admits that the primary directives in most (heck, all) Western media is to malign China, and to provide a very false image and picture for the viewers of the BCC of what China is and what is going on. HERE.

Chinese cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is real and it is present today inside of China. The rest of the world, hidden behind agendas and fear-mongering has lied itself into a box, and the rising China, and all of Asia makes the rest of the world look like ignorant psychopathic used car salesmen in comparison, with collapsing infrastructure, a lack of morals, and no accomplishments except the theft of money from others. HERE.

This fellow tells you why the USA was in Afghanistan…

And also explains why the neocons on K-street in Washington DC are all “up in arms” and enraged over the American troop withdrawal. But don’t worry, the UK “news” media is already spinning how unstable that region is and the Biden made a “power move”, and yada, yada, yada. HERE.

Comparison in starting a business

Here’s an American telling you how it is when you try to start a digital business int he United States compared to one in China. The difference is striking and he is right. America is the land with a million tiny, tiny hands in your wallet all taking a million little bites of your money. And why no one in America is doing well today (unless they are a super wealthy oligarch). HERE.

Look at all those volunteers

First day of school. All those in red are not all teachers, but actually many are volunteers for their community. A mother brings her handicapped child to the school. Being a little kid, scared, and frightened on top of having a handicap, must be really difficult. Not so, if the school welcomes you as one of their own. HERE.

China is showing the way forward…

…And the United States leadership are petrified of it. Their cushy lifestyle, the belief that they are the “kings” sitting all on the top of the money pile, only works as long as the downtrodden slave-serfs are happy in their lot. But increasingly they are not happy, and they want change. And China is showing them the answer out. HERE.

A show of kindness

In a “dog eat dog” kind of society, everyone is living in fear, and hiding from others. They never stick their neck out for anyone else other than themselves. But in a society where the well being of the community is important, then everyone has a role, as this little girl clearly shows. HERE.

The duty of government is for it’s people

And if the government stops doing that, and / or doesn’t care or is unable to help the citizenry of that nation, then it must be replaced. We have seen this in China with the events of the “cultural revolution”, and then the efforts of Mr. Deng. Now, we see with great surprise how well China prospers when it’s government cares for it’s people. But we see the opposite in the United States. What went wrong? HERE.

Will you marry me?

This just happened at the Olympics. I guess that you all weren’t aware of it because it showed China in a good light, and that (of course) goes against American (and UK) “news” guidelines. HERE.

A five minute overview of what the Chinese Communist Party is

Here it is in a “nutshell”. In five minutes you get a very good, thick and comprehensive overview of what the Chinese communist party is, and why it has been so successful inside of China. It’s really quite well stated, and tell you as it is. Like it or not. HERE.

Inner Mongolia

Well, when was the last time you have seen a picture of Inner Mongolia? Don’t remember? Well, that’s understandable. There’s hardly anything on this subject in the Western press. Here’s an absolutely great video that covers so many subject areas, from infrastructure, to beauty, to planning, to nature. HERE.

Trade Tariffs

Well, what about those 20% trade tariffs that President Trump put on American products, and that Biden decided to keep in place. You know, “to keep the pressure on China”. What is going on? I have to tell you guys, the American leadership is so moronic it defies description. HERE.

Built like a fish

In the United States, when we see a well-built woman, we say that she is “built like a battleship”. Another term is that she is “built like a brick house”. African-American men, who almost uniformly prefer huge asses on women like to say “she has a big caboose”, or “she has some fine booty”. In China, an attractive woman is one that has the lines and shape of a fish. And so people say that she “has a nice fish shape” as this woman HERE.

Chinese Military

I’ve got tons of videos on the Chinese military. But let me just say that the Chinese believe in using enormous quantities of AI guided robotic missiles to destroy everything in it’s path before unleashing hordes of tactically trained professional troops to take over a given area. China does not play. HERE.

Oh, but China cannot innovate

They can only copy. Right? That’s the narrative. Isn’t it? Who are they copying with their bridge building machines? Who are they copying with their nuclear systems? Who are they copying with their 6G? Or their HarmonyOS, or their QR codes, or their High Speed Rail. The lies are so outrageous that when I hear someone repeat them, I no longer get angry. Instead I look at the person as being one of the most out-of-touch and ill-informed ignoramuses on the planet. HERE.

Playing with fire

In the United States, we have an idiom called “playing with fire”. It means to do something dangerous or risky. These provocations that the United States Navy is doing in the South China Sea could end up getting people killed. It’s not so much that I worry about China. They have time and time again, proven themselves to be intimately capable. But I would hate to see the seventh fleet destroyed with all those lives lost. HERE.

Dancing at night

I have discussed this numerous times. It all started with the “dancing grandmothers”, and now with the government’s help and direction, it has become a national pastime. Everyone loves to dance in China, and if you want to go and dance, you just go and do it. Woo woo! HERE.

Senator Mikulski warns that going against China would be very, very dangerous

I normally don’t care for her (personally). but she is actually quite right here. Pushing China like the USA is currently doing is very, very dangerous. And the morons in the control of the nation of America haven’t a clue as to how dangerous it can actually get. HERE.

Who are the CPC Members?

Another very good, and short video that tells you exactly what is going on and just how absolutely insane the Neocon United Sates radical military-lovers are when they make such outrageous pronouncements and demands upon China. Crazy! HERE.

Going to help others

A scooter gets in an accident in the middle of an intersection of two six lane highways. What happens? Everyone gets out of their cars and runs over to help the poor guy in his overturned vehicle. This is what communities do. They don’t drive slowly by and gawk or take pictures like an American does. HERE.

Conclusion

In the $4 trillion dollar budget passed by President Biden are billions of dollars to “suppress” China, further censor media so that China is villainized and made out to be an evil “thing” to be destroyed. It is my hope that this little article helps put things in perspective.

Do you want more?

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Metallicman’s notes on dressing well if you are an older man

Here’s some notes that I collected over the years, and pulled together for myself. It’s just some thoughts, and some guidelines that I collected in a file that I promised myself that I would get to “one of these days”. On Saturday, I was going though a dusty old hard drive and found this collection. And so, I decided to “put it up there” for everyone to read and (perhaps) to scoff at. (Hopefully not.)

Now, I have gone in and out of fashions and styles all my life. There were times when I was truly fashionable. Such as the bell-bottom, long-haired 1970’s, and the cargo pants and layered pastel polo 1980’s. This evolved over time into the early 1990’s when I was wearing pencil thin neck-ties, double breasted suits and mullets. And so on and so forth.

But something happened to me.

Maybe it was prison.

Maybe it was no longer working in a corporate environment.

Maybe it was China.

Or maybe it was when my facial hair started to turn grey.

There comes a time, in every man’s life, where you take a step back and say, “well, I just want to wear clothes that are comfortable, and where I look good in them”. And that is what caused me to generate this collection of guidelines.

Don’t you know…

Introduction

There’s a joke that “we spend all our lives trying to look older, right up until we spend all our lives trying to look younger.”

Terrible idea, really.

The perfect age to be is always the one you are.

Although you all have to admit that being of legal age to do everything is always an improvement.

When you start seeing your hair turn grey (or white) is when a man should fully come into his own. You’re a gentleman with a firm idea of himself and his place in the world, and your wardrobe should reflect that.

Casual Attire

Your business wardrobe is your business wardrobe. Sigh. It’s dictated by the necessity of your profession. Whether you wear a uniform, or meet the company “dress code”. Do it well — but do your “casual” wardrobe better.

Your casual clothes are, quite simply, what you wear for yourself. It’s the most obvious outward expression of your taste, your attitude, and your place in life.

Don’t go on confusing “casual” with “sloppy”.

Big mistake.

Just because you’re not at the office is no reason to look like you don’t care. Your clothes should still look like a deliberate choice and a conscious statement — a powerful one, too, at this age.

Here are some things an older man wants to keep in mind when choosing his casual wardrobe:

[1] Fit

Wear ONLY clothes that fit you well.

Do not wear clothes that don’t fit.

Do not wear clothes that are too tight. Or clothes that are too big. You wear clothes that fit you well. I know that you all probably have nice clothes that cost some money, but you never wear because they don’t fit you well. But you keep them anyways.

Throw them out or give them away.

Fitting well on a man’s frame.

By this decade of your life, you should have a very good sense of your body.

[2] Tailoring clothes to fit you well

I go on the internet, and especially on English websites, they talk about having a tailor make some perfectly fitting clothes for you. How wonderful! But let’s face it, most men don’t have a few thousand dollars to dedicate to this. And having clothes that fit is not on the main list.

Instead, it is on a secondary list that includes chores, repairs, and special purchases for the family. And at that, unless you are single, it’s at the bottom of that list.

But think a minute.

If you had no other issues; no other attachments, wouldn’t clothing rank as your top priority after food? (Fine, delicious food, by the way.)

The guy (or gal) you go to doesn’t have to be someone who actually creates tailor-made clothing, though they’re often the best. There are perfectly good tailors at basic clothing repair shops and even some dry cleaners that can do adjustments. The point is that you should be getting those adjustments done.

They don’t cost a lot of money.

In the days when I worked for a massive automotive electronics company, our dress code was a white shirt and a red tie. But I made sure that I would buy off-the-shelf high quality shirts, and then spend a few dollars having each one tailored to fit me exactly. It did make a difference on how I looked and felt about myself.

Get everything trimmed to fit you.

Shirts, and trousers are mandatory. Suits and jackets go without saying. About the only thing you should be leaving unadjusted at this age are your socks, underwear, and gym/chore clothing. Everything else gets a tailored fit.

Oh, and don’t be afraid to toss old underwear, too. And, ladies… this includes old bras. Toss those fancy wire things that you love that never wear, and those bras that are old, and frayed. Go get yourself a nice VERY WELL fitting bra. Make sure that you have the right cup size, and the right under boob width. Wearing a comfortable bra makes all the difference in the world.

Or, so I am told.

This has a twofold benefit: it makes your body look better, flattering the best parts of your figure, and it also makes you more comfortable.

A big part of looking good when you get old is looking relaxed and at ease with yourself — hard to pull off when you’re constantly re-tucking your shirt or tugging the crotch of your pants into place. (It’s a guy thing, don’t you know.)

[3] Comfort

I wear black tee-shirts all the time.

But that’s just me. When they get old I toss them and get a newer one. These are plain black shirts that fit me well, and that either have a small logo on my left chest, or an embroidered pattern. I rarely wear large garish patterns, or designs.

Again, that is just me.

Look good. feel good.

And remember that I live in the tropics. Zhuhai temperatures are much like Singapore. We have two seasons. Warm, and very Hot and very humid.

On that note, an older man really should look comfortable, and even relaxed, at nearly all times. Leave the hard-edged, high-strung look to the younger guys.

A lot of looking comfortable in your clothes comes down to actually being comfortable in your clothes, but you can do a lot with tailoring and styling too.

For those of you who still wear suits, and even I do from time to time, this is a good time of life to be moving away from aggressively fitted “power suits” and sharp-edged European cuts. The American, slightly looser suit was made with the middle-aged man in mind — give it a try.

For less dressy styles, try relaxed looks like sweaters and knitted tee-shirts, or other more relaxed shirts. You just need to move away from the business-standard dress shirt and its turn-down collar (and tie) ensemble. (Burrr.) Handsome, well-fitted clothing that’s obviously made for leisure tells people that you’re prioritizing your own pleasures.

A man who is comfortable, will look comfortable.

A man who is happy, and confident, will look happy and confident.

The key here is to have stylish comfortable options. Yeah, stretch-waist sweatpants are comfortable, but there’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. Buy clothes that fit your personality; grown-up clothes, just buy them in soft fabrics, relaxed cuts, and a nice casual variety of colors.

[4] Luxury

Not to be confused with comfort, though it often provides it, luxury in clothing is the province of the older gentleman.

This mostly comes about as increased discretionary income intersects with a life’s worth of dressing experience. Even if you never got that serious about your wardrobe, decades of putting fabric on your body gives you some idea of what feels good and what feels cheap. And of course you know this. Don’t you?

Look good and feel good.

Rich wools, soft cottons, light linens — live ’em all up.

The texture and “drape” of a good fabric are more noticeable, even at a distance, than we often think.

It’s the reason a bunch of men in $99 blazers from the sale rack at Men’s Wearhouse all look vaguely insubstantial — and the reason a man in the middle of them wearing a $599 blazer made from top-notch worsted wool stands out like a lighthouse.

Buy less frequently than you did when you were younger, but more expensively.

Decades of accumulation should have your wardrobe in decent shape for the staples. That frees up your clothing budget to add a couple really nice things for yourself.

Whatever you like to wear most, buy it in the best quality you can get…

…Then wear the hell out of it.

[5] Some “Looks”

When you were younger, your style perhaps could have been summed up in one or two words: “urban cowboy,” “power exec,” “thrift-store hipster,” whatever.

By now you should be past that.

Your clothing should just be you, defying categories. It should look like what you wanted to wear, not like what a “style blog” told you to wear.

Maybe the most important thing at this age is for everything to look like an outfit, rather than a collection of unrelated clothes all thrown on together.

Look good and feel good.

You should put some time and care into selecting not just the big pieces (trousers, shirt, jacket), but the accents as well (everything from the necktie and shoes to things like scarves, watches, hats, pocket squares; even your eyeglasses if you wear them).

For me, I tend to wear (and keep in mind that I am in the topics), a nice well fitting black tee-shirt, and long well made (hiking) trousers. I wear with a special kind of canvas loafer local to China, and accessorize with my (good will energy) bracelet, watch, and belt.

With that in mind, here are a couple of looks that will always look good on a man in his older years…

The Sunday Best

We’ll start at the top end of your casual wardrobe: the social suit and tie.

For most men, especially younger men, this doesn’t exist anymore. Suits are strictly business wear, and not even then are they a necessity for a lot of professions.

That just makes it even easier for you to stand apart from the crowd when you dapper it up don’t you know. A suit in a casual color and pattern offers all the things we talked about above: luxury, comfort, and, if your tailor did his job right, a perfect fit as well.

But what ever you do, don’t look like a used car salesman!

The traditional time for a man to wear his social suit was on Sunday, to church and then to the inevitable social activities afterward, but don’t let that middle-American habit limit you. A casual suit, with or without a necktie, is always good daytime wear when you want to look sharp.

When I wear a suit, I always simply wear a black blazer over my black tee-shirt. It’s simple. I’m dressed up. Ya gotta problem with that?

For a real impression, I buy a brand new crisp white tee shirt. Then wear it instead of a black one. You gotta break out of your mold every now and then, don’t you know.

Shirts. I do wear them from time to time. Especially when the temperature drops below 90C (30C or so).

After 5:00 or so be sure to skip the necktie — you don’t want to be mistaken for a businessman with dubious professionalism coming home from work. Leave the collar open unless you’re going somewhere very fancy (and if you are, maybe wear a darker, more somber suit).

The Stroller

A “stroller” is an older phrase for daytime semi-formal wear, especially for being out and about — truly strolling somewhere.

It’s really a cool thing to do. But what ever you do, don’t clasp your hands behind your back, carry a boom-box playing forty-year old pop music, or wear pristine white tennis shoes as you do so.

Not recommended.

You should own a good walking outfit, or several, because frankly a man in his silvering years needs to be walking from time to time. It keeps you in good shape — and strolling down Main Street, taking in the crowd for no reason other than personal pleasure is both a perk and a tradition of the silver-haired years.

So own some simple, comfortable trousers and nice clean top, and a good pair of walking shoes, and then…  Suddenly you’re a respectable gentleman of means out for a stroll.

A couple of good accents help with this one.

Own some scarves, hats, and gloves with a little flavor to them. Yes, you could wear a baseball cap and stick your hands in your pockets, but (come on!) you can do better than that.

Besides, if a fine attractive lady and you strike a nice conversation, take it inside and enjoy their company over some delicious food!

The Silverback Badass

Style in your older years (not ancient years) is all about not trying too hard. You don’t want to look like a rebel without a cause. That was silly when you were 20, and now it’s really silly.

But can you still be a bit of a rebel from time to time?

Sure. An older gentleman can still wear a leather jacket and jeans, or a denim coat and cords. He just has to make it a little more dignified.

This is a great age for plain-fronted leather jackets — think stripped-down bomber or fatigue styles, not too heavy on the details and fitted close but not hyper-streamlined. Don’t be shy of a little surface weathering; it goes well with gray hairs (assuming you have those — some guys don’t, even in their fifties).

If leather’s not your thing, show some attitude with mix-and-match levels of formality instead. Wear a plush velvet suit jacket over a pair of jeans and let people like it or lump it. You do what you want, right? You gotta problem with that?

It’s important not to get too experimental — you don’t want to look like a runway designer’s latest vision. That’s for younger men. If you can’t wear the look with casual confidence, skip it. But if you can, go ahead and be a rebel now and again.

Here’s some things that an older man should own by now…

Given your environment, obviously.

A Wool Cardigan

No, it’s not a grandpa sweater.

Did Steve McQueen wear grandpa sweaters? No. He wore cardigans, and he looked rugged as hell doing it. So did John Wayne. So does Daniel Craig. They’re awesome, and you should have one.

Look good; feel good.

A good cardigan should be knit wool, heavy enough to be your outer layer for much of the fall and spring. An inner lining of something like flannel makes it warmer and can minimize dry cleaning needs as well. Stay away from hugely oversized floppy collars or really big buttons — those are a little feminine — but otherwise feel free to play around with styles.

Gray is always a reliable color if you don’t feel like experimenting. For the more adventurous man in his fifties, try a cardigan in deep shades of bright primary and secondary colors — burgundy red, forest green, burnt goldenrod.

You can throw a good cardigan over almost anything and be ready for everything from brunch to a cozy late night coffee date. Expect to, once you’ve bought one you like.

A Good Scarf Collection

Scarves?

Yeah. I tend to dress in dark colors and when I am wearing a black blazer over my black tee-shirt, a few nice black scarves really makes the outfit “pop”! And it’s a great conversation piece with the ladies.

Scarves as a style piece rather than a functional necessity are a direct descendant of early airmen and fighter pilots. That made them popular during the interwar years in America, and worn well they still lend you a little of that old-fashioned, dashing appeal, like a gentleman who goes about in something called a “motorcar.”

Start with the basics (black and brown) and then start adding color and pattern. A scarf can be an eye-popping centerpiece or it can blend right into your jacket until the moment when the wind catches the end and whisks it about. Both are good.

Look good, feel good.

While you’re at it, practice a few different ways of looping/tying your scarf. There’s no reason to use the same knot every time. Thin materials look better in different knots than thick materials, and you may want a more or less structured look depending on the rest of your outfit.

So are you fully scarf literate yet? If not, that’s a good project for your later years.

Suede / Canvas topped Shoes or Boots

I have been told that I’m done with sneakers and court shoes at this point in life, except for on the actual court. But that is ok. Suede / Canvas toppers are your new casual, comfortable footwear default.

For the classically-styled man, bluchers in white, gray, blue, and brown are the way to go. If your style is more modern, suede skate-style shoes with contrast lacing make a nice grown-up alternative to teenager’s footgear.

And if you’ve never tried the look, go ahead and get yourself a pair of high-ankled boots in suede. They’ll serve you from about the time it gets too cold for sandals to when the snow starts falling, and the reverse in the spring.

Skin Care Lotion That You Respect

Ignore the commercials; there’s nothing wrong with wrinkles. Your face ought to have some creases after fifty years of well-lived life. If it doesn’t, you weren’t using it enough.

But…

But you want your skin to feel good, and as you age that means taking a little more care of it than you did when you were younger. Find a product or two that keeps your hide feeling supple and healthy. I use moisturizing cream twice daily, and I live in the tropics. If I didn’t my face would probably look like the grand canyon with all sorts of deep crevasses and wrinkles from my days of working the chain-gain at Brickey’s East Arkansas Regional Unit’s Hoe Squad.

If it makes you feel artificially slick or dried out, it’s the wrong product. A really basic moisturizing cream made from natural ingredients if often all a man needs. Lightly scented if you please — you don’t want it to clash with your cologne.

(You are putting a splash of subtle cologne on when you get dressed up at this point in your life, aren’t you? Work on that if you’re not.)

Looks to avoid

There are no completely hard and fast rules in fashion. Someone, somewhere, has probably pulled one of these off in his later years. But you’re not him, and you’ll probably just look bad if you try. So don’t.

  • Sneakers/trainers. You’re done with ’em. Give it up and get over it. A pair for the gym or other athletic endeavors is fine, but unless you’re in a rock band and on stage, you shouldn’t be wearing athletic shoes as a style choice.
  • Neckties without jackets. This is a look men should avoid in general, but once you get into your fifties it can only make you look like a depressed, mid-salary cubicle worker with nothing left to live for. Very Death of a Salesman. Throw a jacket on if you’re wearing a necktie. For that matter, throw a jacket on if you’re wearing a dress shirt in general, even without the tie.
  • Sleeveless shirts. Even on the beach. Tank tops, especially the scoop-neck kind, should be firmly left behind as soon as your hair starts receding and/or going gray. And if you’re in your fifties and it hasn’t, good for you, but still don’t wear sleeveless shirts as your only upper-body covering. (Though, I do wear them in the house as house clothing in the impossibly hot Summers of the South China Sea.)

Also worth avoiding is anything with too much of an “advancing age” feel to it — the really chunky orthopedic shoes, thick, dated eyeglasses, worn-out sweatshirts, or elastic-waist trousers. Oh, and don’t forget to toss that Alice Cooper Tee-Shirt from 1971.

If there’s something you need for your physical health, do it, and don’t ever let anyone make you feel ashamed of it. But go ahead and keep the element small and surrounded by other, purely aesthetic accents, so that it’s not defining who you are the moment people look your way.

Youth is almost always wasted on the young, but with a bit of sharp dressing, middle age can be made to work great for the man in his fifties. Have fun with it. You might be surprised how well you feel, how well you look, and the kinds of people you will meet and strike up conversations with. You never know.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Happiness Index here…

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Master List of Heirloom Tomatoes

Here’s a “master list” of heirloom tomatoes that I have collected off the internet. I have extracted the data from heavy advertisement saturated websites, and other pay-wall blocked for-profit venues. Whether or not you enjoy heirloom tomatoes, I hope that this list will be beneficial to you.

What is a Heirloom Tomato…

An heirloom tomato (also called heritage tomato in the UK) is an open-pollinated, non-hybrid heirloom cultivar of tomato. They are classified as: family heirlooms, commercial heirlooms, mystery heirlooms, or created heirlooms. They usually have a shorter shelf life and are less disease resistant than hybrids. They are grown for a variety of reasons: for food, historical interest, access to wider varieties, and by people who wish to save seeds from year to year, as well as for their taste.

Wikipedia

But first…

I wish that I was as talented as some of the women that I know. They have a real understanding, or a “feel” on how food comes together and mates with other foods. And they have this kind of innate ability that I seem so very clumsy with. And they seem to know which is the right tomato for the right application.

Never the less, I do know that I like to eat. I know that when I go to a store, I like to smell the produce, and if I am growing things, I am always smelling the tomatoes on the vine. There’s a real connection between scent and taste. Seriously.

Here’s some pictures to illustrate what you can do with heirloom tomatoes…

The best thing about heirloom tomatoes is the taste.

I strongly argue that the best thing to do with heirloom tomatoes is to eat them. After all, they are so very delicious.

Tomatoes are meant to be eaten.

Not a full sandwich, but tasty never the less…

Good eating.

A recipe

Here’s a great heirloom tomato sandwich recipe. Yum!

A very delicious heirloom tomato sandwich.

And the details…

A story…

When I was around 12 years old, I was given free reign in the family garden, and there, every day I would how the ground, pull the weeds, water the plants and so forth. I developed a real love for the plants. With tomatoes, and zucchini being my favorites. Peppers and cucumbers grew too slowly for my tastes, while onions and carrots remained hidden under the ground.

There, every day during the middle to late summer I would pick my tomatoes and was amazed at the enormous big bounty and delicious flavor that they provided.

I remember my mother coming in to the kitchen one day and asking what “the heck” I was doing. Why, I had made a thick, fresh, tomato sandwich with mayonnaise, salt and pepper on plain white (store bought) bread. And I was busily smunching down on it over the sink, with the tomato drippings falling into the sink. I guess she must have thought me to be so silly.

But it was glorious.

And I still remember that day. I still remember how great it tasted. I still remember how wonderful it was.

In China…

Chinese stir fry tomatoes and eggs 番茄炒蛋.

One of the top favorite foods is this dish called eggs and tomatoes. It’s not prepared American style, where you simply scramble the tomatoes in with the eggs. No NO. Instead, there is a certain procedure and the results are glorious.

Here’s what the dish looks like…

Chinese stir fried tomatoes with eggs.

Here’s a video of how it is done…

…So sexy! So delicious! So wonderful!

Here’s a recipe…

Ingredients

  • 3 eggs
  • 2 teaspoon salt
  • 2 tablespoons sugar
  • 2 tablespoons ketchup optional
  • 4 medium/large tomatoes
  • Steamed rice for serving
  • 1 teaspoon corn starch mix in 2 teaspoon water, optional

Instructions

  • In a bowl, beat the eggs with 1 teaspoon of salt.
  • At the bottom of each tomato, use a knife to cut the skin to make a cross opening.
  • In a large pot, add 1 cup of water and bring it to a boil over high heat. Add the tomatoes with the bottom side down into the hot water.
  • Cut them into 1/2-inch wide wedges. Make sure to reserve the core as much as possible for the sauce later.
  • Heat a wok/pan over high heat with 2 tablespoons of oil. Add the eggs, stir well with a spatula, about 30 seconds. Use the spatula to cut up the curds for stir fry. Transfer the eggs to a plate.
  • Heat the wok over high heat with 1 tablespoon of oil. Add the tomatoes and salt to taste; give it a stir and cover with a lid for 2 minutes. Cook until the flesh is softened. Use a the spatula to break up the big tomato pieces so that the flesh would quickly form a sauce.
  • Add salt, sugar and ketchup (optional) and mix well. Return the eggs to the wok. Stir until it’s well incorporated.
  • Optional: If the sauce is too watery, you can mix the cornstarch and 2 teaspoons water in a small bowl until well combined. Add the cornstarch slurry to the wok and cook for a few more seconds and transfer to a plate.
  • Serve with rice.

Some comments

From HERE.

Because of the many different regions in China, defining a Chinese national dish is nearly impossible. But if you ask Chinese people their favorite childhood dish, stir fried tomatoes and eggs is THE ONE that everyone will agree on!

There’re a few variations of this dish. I sometimes stir fry the tomatoes with tofu or beef.

You won’t find this dish in American-Chinese restaurants often, but it’s definitely a staple dish served with rice at home.

Hint: In China, just about every restaurant will serve this dish on the menu.

If you are just starting to learn how to cook in a wok, this is a great recipe for a beginner.

Back in Guangzhou, China, there’re fresh fruits and vegetables all year long and tomatoes are in season most of the time. My mom usually doesn’t add ketchup to this dish, but I do that when tomatoes are out of season in Cleveland. This helps enrich the flavor of the tomato sauce and enhance the color of the dish.

Here’re a few things to know when cooking this dish:

    • Tomatoes must be fresh, ripe and soft. Ripe tomatoes make the sauce flavorful and juicy.
    • Pealing off the tomato skin will help soften the flesh and make them melt in your mouth.
    • Serving the dish with rice is a must.

The Heirloom Tomato list…

Ace 55

These determinate tomatoes grow in abundant crops. They come with low acidity.

Alaska

The semi-determinate tomatoes are characterized by bushy plants. Originating in Russia, they are suited to colder environments.

Alaskan Fancy

These are the earliest semi-determinate plum-shaped tomatoes. They are suitable for colder weather.

Allerbest

The indeterminate tomatoes come from Germany. They are characterized by fruits with few seeds.

Alicante

The tomatoes are indeterminate. They take up to 70 days to mature and at the moment, they are popular across the UK.

Amber Colored

With Ukrainian roots, the semi-determinate tomatoes are characterized by a sweet flavor.

Amish Paste

The indeterminate heirloom tomatoes are known for their juicy flesh. They are used for sauces and fresh eating.

Anahu

These determinate tomatoes were bred by De. Jim Gilbert of Hawaii. They have a deep red color and they are known for their sweet flavor.

Andes

With French origins, the semi-determinate tomatoes are recognizable with their long pointed shape. They are suitable for sauces.

Ananas Noire

These bi-color tomatoes have an indeterminate profile. The yellow-red tomatoes come with fruit sizes of 16oz.

Aunt Ginny

With rich pink color, the indeterminate tomatoes are suitable for sandwiches and salads. They resist cracking.

Aunt Ruby

With a distinct green look, the indeterminate tomatoes take at least 80 days to mature. They were first introduced in 1993 in Wisconsin.

Aussie

With a rich flavor, the indeterminate tomatoes are meaty. They are suited to warmer climates.

Anna Russian

The indeterminate tomatoes have a sweet taste. Their fruits can grow up to 1 pound.

Arkansas Traveler

The indeterminate tomatoes are made for hot and humid climates. The tomatoes have disease resistance.

Aunt Ruby

The green indeterminate tomatoes are sweet. The beefsteaks also have a yellow tint.

Aurora

Named after the Aurora Borealis, these Russian determinate tomatoes produce heavy crops. They are suitable for colder environments.

Austin Red Pear

As their name suggests, the indeterminate tomatoes come are shaped like pears.  They are known to be very productive.

Azoychka

The indeterminate tomatoes come from Russia. When they are ripe, they have a pale orange color.

B

Backa

These determinate tomatoes come from Yugoslavia. They are used in sauces, sandwiches or canning.

Banana Legs

These determinate tomatoes come in 4-inch fruits. Their name comes from their light banana color.

Basket Vee

The red determinate tomatoes have a size of 9in for the fruit and 4feet for the plant. They are resistant to Verticillium.

Beaverlodge Slicer

The determinate tomatoes come from the Beaverlodge Research Center in Canada. With only 54 days to reach maturity, the tomatoes are suitable for colder environments.

Besser

Dating back hundreds of years, the indeterminate cherry tomatoes have a sweet taste. The tomatoes originate in Germany.

Big Brandy

The indeterminate tomatoes have a pink color. They have a tangy flavor.

Big Rainbow

The yellow and red indeterminate tomatoes have low acidity. They are shaded by large leaves.

Big Red

The indeterminate vines are suitable for sandwich tomatoes. The fruits have a deep red color.

Big Zac

The meaty indeterminate tomatoes are rich in taste. The fruits are large and suitable for slicing.

Big Zebra

The indeterminate beefsteak tomatoes have a mildly sweet flavor. They have a distinct red-green color.

Bison

Developed by North Dakota University, the determinate tomatoes produce dwarf compact plants. They are suited to damp cold weather.

Black From Tula

The indeterminate tomatoes grow up to 14 ounces. They were exported from Ukraine by Marina Danilenko.

Black Cherry

The indeterminate tomatoes ripen through the season. They can take up to 75 days to reach maturity.

Black Krim

Bearing the name of the Crimean Peninsula, the indeterminate tomatoes reach maturity within 80 days.

Black Plum

Black Plum indeterminate tomatoes come from Russia’s Marina Danilenko. They can be used for a rich pasta sauce.

Black Prince

The indeterminate tomatoes have a red-black color. They are known for their juicy profile.

Black Sea Man

With attractive marble flesh, the tomatoes come from seed woman Marina Danilenko. The determinate tomatoes are medium in size.

Black Trifele

Known as Japanese or Russian Black Trifele, the indeterminate tomatoes take between 70 and 80 days to mature.

Blondkopfchen

The 1-in yellow indeterminate tomatoes have a sweet flavor. They come from Germany.

Bloody Butcher

The indeterminate tomatoes are known for their rich crops. The fruits have a rich flavor.

Beam’s Yellow Pear

The indeterminate tomatoes were first introduced in 1983 in Indiana. They are known for their bright yellow color.

Beefsteak

These tomatoes are known for the size. They can reach a weight of up to 4lbs. The indeterminate tomatoes are common in the US.

Boondocks

With a beefsteak profile, the indeterminate tomatoes have a deep pink-red color. The fruit size can reach 16oz.

Big Rainbow

The indeterminate tomatoes take up to 85 days to mature. They have a distinct yellow look with red swirls.

Bonny Best

The indeterminate Bonny Best produces fruits of up to 8 ounces. The fruits are suitable for all purposes.

Box Car

The red indeterminate tomatoes come in weights of up to 16 ounces. The color of the fruits is red with dark undertones.

Brandywine

The indeterminate tomatoes were first introduced in 1889. They were offered to Johnson and Stokes by a customer in Ohio.

Brandywine Pink

With a pink color, the indeterminate tomatoes are rich in flavor. They are not heavy producers.

Brandywine Yellow

The indeterminate tomatoes come with a distinct yellow color. The fruits weight from 12 ounces to 2 pounds.

Brandywine Sudduth’s Strain

Popularly called Pink Brandywine, the tomatoes are rich in flavor. Their indeterminate fruits ripen through the season.

Burbank Slicing

The determinate tomatoes were introduced by Luther Burbank. They are high in amino acids.

Burgess Stuffing

The indeterminate tomatoes are small at 4 inches. The hollow interior makes them look similar to peppers.

Bush Beefsteak

These determinate red tomatoes are already popular for shorter growing regions. The plant grows up to 3 feet.

C

Campbell 33

The determinate tomatoes are suitable for salads and sandwiches. They have a deep red color.

Chef’s Choice Orange

The indeterminate tomatoes come with a distinct bright orange color. They are used in soups and sauces.

Cherokee Chocolate

With red-black color, the indeterminate tomatoes are ripe late in the season. They are suitable for slicing.

Cherokee Green

With a distinct green color, the juicy indeterminate tomatoes are best served fresh.

Cherokee Purple

The indeterminate tomatoes come with a brownish red color. The tomatoes have regular leaves.

Cherry Brandywine

With a dark red color, the indeterminate tomatoes grow in clusters. The plant height reaches 6 feet.

Cherry Roma

The indeterminate tomatoes are great fresh or dried. They are considered very productive.

Chianti Rose

The beefsteak indeterminate tomatoes have a deep pink color. The fruit size varies between 1 and 2 lbs.

Copia

With an orange color with red stripes, the indeterminate tomatoes have a distinct look. They originate in the US.

Cosmonaut Volkov

The determinate tomatoes have a rich flavor. They are suitable for areas with a short growing period.

Costoluto Genovese

Originating in Italy, the indeterminate tomatoes have a slight tart flavor. Their color is bright red.

Cream Sausage

The determinate tomatoes are very productive. They were introduced by Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in 2004.

Crimson Cushion

The indeterminate Crimson Cushion takes 95 days to mature. The fruits can reach up to 2 pounds in weight.

Crnkovic Yugoslavian

The indeterminate tomatoes have a delicious flavor. They were introduced to the US by Yasha Crnkovic.

Cuostralee

Rich in production, the indeterminate tomatoes can measure up to 4 inches.

Czech’s Bush

The red indeterminate tomatoes have a juicy profile. The tomatoes can be traced back to Czechoslovakia.

D

David Davidson

The tomatoes fruits come in variable shapes. The indeterminate tomatoes grow in clusters of 7 fruits.

Dester

The tomatoes are believed to come from Germany. The indeterminate tomatoes grow pink fruits of up to 1lbs.

Dixie Golden

Going back to the 1930s, the indeterminate yellow tomatoes have a mild taste. They are suitable for slicing.

Djena Lee

With a yellow-orange color, the indeterminate tomatoes can be traced back to 1929.

Druzba

Originating in Bulgaria, the indeterminate tomatoes have a bright red color. They have a robust tomato flavor.

Dr. Wyche

With a distinct golden color, the indeterminate tomatoes have a meaty flesh.

Dutchman

Growing up to 3 pounds, the indeterminate tomatoes have a mild flavor. They can be traced back to 1920.

Dwarf Pink Passion

As a result of the Dwarf Tomato Project, the determinate tomatoes have a hybrid profile. They are a cross between Roza Vetrov and Anna Banana Russian. The tomatoes have a balanced sweet flavor.

Dwarf Purple Heart

Developed by the Dwarf Tomato Project, the determinate tomatoes are a cross between Dwarf Wild Fred and Brad’s Black Heart. They have a purple-black color.

E

Earliana

Introduced in New Jersey in 1900, the indeterminate tomatoes grow come in clusters of 4-5 ounce fruits.

Early Annie

With few seeds, the determinate tomatoes are suitable for canning. They take 60 days to mature.

Early Wonder

These determinate tomatoes were first introduced in 1950. They are suitable for container-based growing.

Elbe

The indeterminate tomatoes originate in the Elbe River’s area in Germany. They come with a sweet and tart flavor.

Ethiopia Roi Humbert

The red determinate tomatoes are suitable for canning or snacking. They can grow up to 2”.

Eva Purple Ball

Believed to come from Germany, these indeterminate tomatoes are recommended for humid areas. They have a distinct vivid red color.

F

Fargo

The semi-determinate tomatoes come in a pear shape form with a yellow-orange color. They are suitable for specialty salads.

Federle

With fruits of up to 7 inches, the indeterminate tomatoes can easily be processed. They can be the base for salsa sauces.

Ferris Wheel

Up to 90 days is needed for the tomatoes to reach maturity. The indeterminate tomatoes have been developed in 1894.

First Pick

Traced back to France, the indeterminate tomatoes can be grown in colder climates. The fruits have a deep red color.

Fireworks

The pointed tomatoes are available early in the season. The indeterminate tomatoes grow up to 6oz.

Fox Cherry

The indeterminate tomatoes come with fruit sizes of up to 1oz. They are suitable for salads.

G

Garden Peach

The tomatoes come in a yellow color. They are indeterminate and distinctly fuzzy, as their name suggests.

Gardener’s Delight

The indeterminate tomatoes take up to 65 days to mature.

German Pink

The meaty fruits of the tomato can grow up to 2 pounds. The indeterminate tomatoes take up to 85 days to mature.

German Johnson

The indeterminate tomatoes come with low acidity. The fruits have a pink color.

German Red

The indeterminate German heirloom has a strawberry color. They come with a rich flavor.

Glacier

The semi-determinate tomatoes are suitable for early season harvest. They are consumed fresh.

Glamour

With a slightly flattened shape, the tomatoes grow up to 10oz. The indeterminate tomatoes grow up to 4 feet.

Gold Medal

With larger orange-yellow fruits, the indeterminate tomatoes are known for their large size and good flavor.

Giant Beefsteak

The indeterminate tomatoes have a meaty profile. The fruits can reach up to 2 pounds in weight.

Giant Belgium

With a sweet taste, the tomatoes have a deep pink color. The tomatoes can vary from 1 to 3 pounds.

Giant Syrian

The meaty tomatoes are flavorful. The indeterminate tomatoes are suitable for salads and sandwiches.

Gill’s All Purpose

Suitable for canning, juicing or slicing, the semi-determinate tomatoes are a cross between Wasatch Beauty and Pepper tomatoes.

Gold Medal

The yellow-red tomatoes have a rich flavor. Their juicy profile recommends them for fresh eating.

Gold Nugget Cherry

The determinate cherries have a yellow to orange color. They are suitable for snacking.

Gold Rush Currant

With up to 80 days needed to reach maturity, the indeterminate tomatoes offer hundreds of fruits per plant.

Grandma Freida’s

The indeterminate ribbed tomatoes come in sizes from 8 to 16 ounces. They have an old-fashioned taste.

Great White

The average flavor tomatoes are indeterminate. They are average in flavor intensity.

Green Grape

The determinate tomatoes have a distinct olive yellow color. The fruit ripens within 2 weeks.

Green Sausage

With a distinct look, the determinate tomatoes have a green color with yellow stripes. They have a long pointed shape.

Green Thumb

The determinate yellow-orange tomatoes ripen slowly. They are suitable for high altitudes.

Green Zebra

The indeterminate tomatoes are known to be very productive. They were first bred in 1983 by Thomas Wagner.

Grushova

These determinate heirloom tomatoes come from Siberia. They produce 2-3 inch fruits.

H

Hartman’s Yellow Gooseberry

With a mildly sweet profile, the indeterminate tomatoes come from a seed company in Indianapolis. They are used in salads.

Hawaiian Pineapple

The beefsteak indeterminate tomatoes are known for their pineapple resemblance. The tomatoes are mildly sweet.

Healani

The determinate tomatoes are bred to resist hot water. They are tolerant of the tobacco mosaic virus.

Heinz

The determinate red tomatoes are suitable for canning. They take 76 days to mature.

Heinz 1350

The mid-season determinate tomatoes are used for sauced and canning. They were developed for Eastern Canada and Northeast U.S.

Heinz 9129

The determinate heirloom tomatoes are used for canning and sauces. They are slightly larger than other Heinz varieties.

Hillbilly

The large beefsteak indeterminate tomatoes can reach weights of up to 2 pounds. They have a yellow-orange color.

Homestead 24

The determinate tomatoes are thriving in hot and humid areas. They are resistant to cracking.

Hillbilly Potato Leaf

With yellow and red, the tomatoes look distinctly juicy. The tomatoes are indeterminate, originating from Ohio.

Hungarian Heart

The indeterminate tomatoes resist cracking. They originate from a village near Budapest.

I

Ildi

Growing in clusters, the indeterminate tomatoes reach fruit sizes of 0.5oz. They are suitable for salads and decoration.

Igleheart Yellow Cherry

The yellow indeterminate tomatoes ripen through the season. They are rich in flavor with moderate acidity.

Isis Candy Cherry

The red tomatoes come with a sweet flavor. These indeterminate tomatoes take between 70 to 80 days to ripe.

Italian Heirloom

The indeterminate tomatoes grow up to 1lbs. They are suitable for slicing and sandwiches.

Italian Beefsteak

The Italian indeterminate heirlooms have a meaty flesh. They are suitable for sandwiches or served fresh.

Italian Roma

The determinate vines bear elongated fruits. They are larger than Roma tomatoes. The tomatoes are also higher in sugar.

J

Japanese Black

Shaped as pears, the tomatoes have a red-black color. They are resistant to cracking.

Japanese Trifele

With distinct potato leaves, the indeterminate tomatoes are rich in flavor. They are often canned.

Jaune Flamme

Great for drying or roasting, the indeterminate tomatoes are known for their deep orange color. They come from France.

John Baer

Rich in flavor, the indeterminate tomatoes are eaten fresh. The tomatoes were introduced in 1914.

Jubilee

The indeterminate heirloom tomatoes were released in 1943 by the Burpee Seed Company.

K

Kewalo

The determinate tomatoes are a bred of the University of Hawaii. With a sweet flavor, the tomatoes were bred to resist bacteria and viruses.

Kanner Hoell

Probably originating from Germany, the indeterminate tomatoes have red beefsteak fruits which can grow up to 1.5 pounds. Double fruit is common with the low acidity tomatoes.

Kellog’s Breakfast

The indeterminate tomatoes have a distinct orange glowing color. They can take up to 90 days to mature.

Kentucky Beefsteak

With an oval shape, the indeterminate tomatoes have a meaty flesh. They are recognized due to their distinct orange color.

Kolb

Originating in the Kolb Greenhouse of Storm Lake, the indeterminate tomatoes have a pink color. They are rich in flavor.

L

Large Red Cherry

These tomatoes are very productive. With fruits between 1 and 2 inches, the indeterminate tomatoes are used in salads or eaten fresh.

Lemon Drop

With a transparent yellow-green color, the tomatoes are indeterminate. They are known for their resilience in cold and wet weather.

Lillian’s Yellow

These potato leaf indeterminate tomatoes were first collected by Lillian Bruce in Tennessee.

Lime Green Salad

The determinate tomatoes stay small. As a result, they can be grown in containers.

Livingston Paragon

These red tomatoes have an indeterminate growth habit. They are named after Alexander Livingston’s seed trade.

Long Keeper

These semi-determinate tomatoes were introduced in 1979. They are suitable for winter storage.

M

Mamie Brown

These pink tomatoes are indeterminate. They are sweet in flavor.

Mama Leone

With meaty fruits, the indeterminate tomatoes are plum-shaped. The tomatoes reach up to 6 feet in height.

Manitoba

With a red color, the determinate tomatoes are suitable for small gardens in cooler climates.

Marglobe

The juicy indeterminate tomatoes come with an orange-red skin. They are suitable for canning.

Marion

The indeterminate tomatoes are resistant to disease. They come in a dark red color.

Martino’s Roma

With a distinct Italian profile, the determinate tomatoes are known to fall off when fully ripe.

Marizol Magic

Similar to beefsteaks but smaller in size, the indeterminate tomatoes can grow up to 2oz.

Matt’s Wild Cherry      

Smaller than regular indeterminate cherry tomatoes, Matt’s Wild Cherry come from Mexico’s wild tomatoes.

Marvel Stripe

These indeterminate orange tomatoes also feature distinct orange stripes. They have juicy flesh.

Milano Plum

The determinate tomatoes have a sweet flavor. They are suitable for sauces.

Mexico Midget

Bering very productive, the indeterminate tomatoes are rich in flavor. Their size varies between ½-¾ inches.

Mini Orange

The indeterminate smooth tomatoes grow in clusters of 4 to 6. The tomatoes have a rich flavor.

Missouri Pink Love

As their name suggests, the tomatoes come in a pink color. The indeterminate tomatoes have a juicy profile.

Moneymaker

With inexpensive seeds, the indeterminate tomatoes take 80 days to mature.

Moonglow

With a bright orange color, the indeterminate tomatoes ripen through the season. They have a distinctly-solid flesh.

Mortgage Lifter

These beefsteak indeterminate tomatoes used to pay off a mortgage.

Moskovich

These indeterminate tomatoes have a rich taste and slightly flattened shape. They are suitable for cold climates.

Mr. Stripey

The indeterminate tomatoes grow up to 1lbs. They come with high sugar content and with a yellow color with red stripes.

Mule Team

The red indeterminate tomatoes resist drought. They are also disease-resistant.

N

Napoli

The determinate tomatoes are suitable for sauces and soups. They have a tangy flavor.

Nebraska Wedding

These determinate tomatoes ripen over a two-week period. They can be traced back to 1983.

Neves Azorean Red

The beefsteak indeterminate tomatoes are rich in flavor. Their fruits grow large, up to 16oz per piece.

New Big Dwarf

The determinate tomatoes were introduced in 1919. They are a cross between Ponderosa and Dwarf Champion.

New Hampshire Red Pickling

The determinate tomatoes are small but pear-shaped. Their fruits grow up to 0.7oz.

New Yorker

The determinate tomatoes are suitable for cooler climates. They mature in 63 days.

Northern Delight

With a determinate profile, the tomatoes are sweet and suitable for early crops for cooler seasons.

Nyagous

Free from blemishes, the indeterminate tomatoes have a brown-red color. They are very productive.

O

Old German

The indeterminate red and yellow tomatoes come with few seeds. The color of the skin is also visible in the flesh of the tomatoes.

Old Virginia

The indeterminate tomatoes are suitable for hot climates. They come with thick skin which resists cracking.

Omar Lebanese

The indeterminate beefsteaks have a rich sweet flavor. The fruits reach up to 2 pounds.

Opalka

Growing between 3 and 6 inches, the fruits of the tomatoes have few seeds. The indeterminate tomatoes hold well on the vine.

Orange Banana

With a distinct orange color, the indeterminate tomatoes have fruits of up to 6oz. They are plum-shaped.

Orange Minsk

The beefsteak indeterminate tomatoes have a dark orange color. They grow up to 12 oz per fruit.

Oregon Spring

The determinate vines are recommended for early growth. The fruits come with a low number of seeds.

P

Pantano Romanesco

With a rich flavor, the indeterminate tomatoes take 80 days to mature.

Paul Robeson  

With a dark red to black color, the indeterminate tomatoes mature in 90 days. They come from Russia.

Peach Jaune

With a pink look and a fuzzy skin, the indeterminate tomatoes have a refreshingly sweet flavor.

Pearson Improved

The determinate wines can be grown in dry regions. The tomatoes are juicy and used for canning.

Persimmon

Originating in Russia, the orange tomatoes can reach 1lbs in weight. The indeterminate tomatoes are blemish-free.

Picardy

Traced back to the 1890’s France, the indeterminate vines produce until frost. They have a meaty texture.

Pineapple

The yellow skin with red streaks is what inspired the names of these indeterminate tomatoes. They come in large sizes.

Pink Accordian

These distinct indeterminate tomatoes are suitable for slicing. They come in a light pink color.

Pink Oxheart

The indeterminate vines are known for their 1-2 pound size. They come with a firm texture.

Pink Ping Pong

At 3oz, the indeterminate tomatoes have the size of a ping pong ball. The tomatoes are suitable for salads.

Plum Lemon

The indeterminate tomatoes look similarly to lemons. Their taste is mild-citrusy.

Polish Pastel

The ribbed indeterminate tomatoes come with a 1-pound weight. The tomatoes have a rich flavor.

Ponderosa

The indeterminate tomatoes can be traced to 1891. They usually come in sizes between 1 and 2 pounds.

Porter

With rich red color, the indeterminate tomatoes are crack-resistant. They are suitable for canning.

Principe Borghese

The plum-shaped indeterminate tomatoes have a rich taste. They are suitable for drying.

Prudens Purple

With a dark pink-purple color, the indeterminate tomatoes are rich in taste. They have firm flesh.

Purple Calabash

With a dark marooned color, the indeterminate tomatoes have a complex flavor. They grow in crops of 3-inch tomatoes.

Purple Russian

The red indeterminate tomatoes have a sweet flavor. They are distinctly pear-shaped.

Powers

Probably originating in Mexico, the indeterminate tomatoes come with a translucent yellow color. They are very productive.

Prescott

These determinate heirloom tomatoes are suitable for higher altitudes and colder climates. They are used for canning and salads.

Pride of Flanders

These black determinate tomatoes were developed by Tom Wagner. The cherry tomatoes still have a novelty profile as they were introduced around 2.000.

Principe Borghese

The Italian tomatoes are suitable for drying. They are determinate and they produce plum-shaped fruits.

R

RAF

The semi-determinate round tomatoes have a red color. They mature in 75 days.

Red Currant

The miniature tomatoes take at least 65 days to mature. Their indeterminate profile also comes with regular leaves.

Redfield Beauty

The indeterminate tomatoes originate in Florida. They are characterized by productive plants.

Red Fig

With pear-shaped fruits, the indeterminate tomatoes originate in Philadelphia. They are suitable for drying.

Red Oxheart

The heart-shaped indeterminate tomatoes are recommended for slicing. They have a rich fruity taste.

Red Pear

Dating back to the 1700s, the indeterminate tomatoes can deal with early blight. Their fruits are distinctly blemish-free.

Red Robin

With 54 days needed to reach maturity, the determinate tomatoes have a sweet flavor. They are consumed fresh.

Red Rose

The indeterminate beefsteak tomatoes can be consumed fresh. They reach 10oz per fruit.

Red Sweet Pea Currant

The small ¼in indeterminate tomatoes come with a rich taste. They are consumed fresh.

Red Zebra

Discovered on the fields of California, the indeterminate tomatoes come with a distinct red look with orange stripes.

Redfield Beauty

Selected from Livingston’s Beauty, the indeterminate tomatoes have a pink color. The plant reaches 6 feet.

Riesentraube

Originating in Germany, the indeterminate tomatoes can bear fruits of up to 1in.

Rowdy Red

Suitable for hot climates, the indeterminate tomatoes have a red color. They make fruits of up to 8oz.

Roma

The indeterminate tomatoes are known for making good sauces. Their fruits weigh between 2 and 3 ounces.

Rose

The indeterminate tomatoes have an Amish origin. They are rich in flavor.

Rosella Crimson

These pink determinate tomatoes have a balanced flavor. They are a cross between Budai Torpe and Stump and one of the results of the Dwarf Tomato Project.

Rosso Sicilian

These bright red tomatoes can grow up to 6 ounces. The indeterminate fruits are used for sauces.

Rounghwood Golden Plum

The semi-determinate yellow-orange tomatoes were developed by William Woys Wearer. They are suitable for salads.

Rutgers

The indeterminate heirloom tomatoes are a cross. They come from Marglobe and J.T.D.

S

Salvaterra Select

With a sweet flavor, the indeterminate tomatoes are used for sauces. They have average productivity.

San Marzano

The indeterminate tomatoes take 85 days to mature. Their seeds are available for purchase.

Santorini

Originating from Greece’s Santorini, the indeterminate tomatoes are small by nature.

Sasha Altai

The indeterminate tomatoes were gifted in 1989’s Siberia by a man called Sasha. They have been seen as one of the best early producing tomatoes in the world.

Sausage

The indeterminate vines are very productive. They are known for heavy crops and banana-like shape.

Sheboygan

With a pink color, the plum-shaped indeterminate tomatoes are used in pasta. Their fruits vary between 4 and 6 inches.

Scarlet Beefsteak

With a meaty texture, the indeterminate tomatoes come with weights of up to 1 pound. They can be grown in small gardens.

Schellenberg Favorite

The oval red-orange indeterminate tomatoes come from Germany’s Manheim family. The tomatoes resist cracking.

Sean’s Yellow Dwarf

The yellow-orange determinate tomatoes are medium-sized. They mature in 80 days.

Sheboygan

Growing up to 6 ounces, the indeterminate tomatoes originate in Sheboygan, Wisconsin.  They are very productive.

Siberian

These determinate tomatoes have fruits of up to 3 inches. They are not to be confused with Siberia tomatoes.

Siletz

The determinate red tomatoes are acclimatized to cooler climates. They are used as slicing tomatoes.

Silvery Fir

These determinate tomatoes grow on 24” plants. They have Russian roots.

Soldacki

The indeterminate tomatoes are believed to originate in Poland. They have thin skin susceptible to cracking.

Sophie’s Choice

The determinate tomatoes were introduced in Edmonton, Canada. They are suitable for cooler areas.

Southern Night

With a rich tomato flavor, the indeterminate plant grows to 4 feet producing 10oz fruits.

Speckled Roman

The indeterminate tomatoes are red with orange stripes. The tomatoes are a cross between Antique Roman and Banana Legs.

Speckled Siberian

The determinate red tomatoes produce 2-inch fruits. They are suitable for salads.

Slava

Producing well in Northern climates, the indeterminate tomatoes are believed to originate from former Czechoslovakia.

Sprite

Made for salads or eating fresh, the determinate tomatoes produce until frost. They have thin skins.

Stripped German

The distinct red-yellow indeterminate tomatoes are made for slicing. They have a tart flavor.

Stupice

With 62 days needed to reach maturity, the indeterminate tomatoes have distinct potato-type leaves.

Sub-Arctic Plenty

With upright stems, the determinate vines are made for colder environments. They are recommended for early harvests.

Sugar Lump

Growing in clusters of 12 fruits, the indeterminate German tomatoes have a sweet taste. They are characterized by vivid red color.

Super Italian

The elongated Italian indeterminate tomatoes are used for sauces and canning. The fruits can reach weights of 10 ounces.

Super Sioux

The globe-shaped indeterminate tomatoes are suitable for hot weather. They are used for canning or consumed fresh.

Sweetie

With high sugar content, the indeterminate tomatoes are sweet. The sweet tomatoes grow in clusters of up to 20.

Swiss Alpine

The small 5-ounce tomatoes originate in Switzerland. They are suitable for cold weather.

Surrender’s Indian Curry

The red determinate tomatoes have regular leaves. They come from Indian gardener Surender Katta.

Sweet Israeli

The determinate red tomatoes have bushy, regular leaves. They come from Israel.

Sweet Pea Currant

With an indeterminate profile, they are used as a garnish. They are considered one of the best red currant tomatoes.

T

Tangerine

With a distinct tangerine shape, the indeterminate tomatoes have a tart-citrus flavor. The fruits grow up to 7 ounces.

Tasty Evergreen

The tomatoes have a green color. The indeterminate tomatoes are very sweet.

Taxi

The determinate yellow-orange tomatoes are suitable for hot and humid regions. They are good for slicing and sandwiches.

Thessaloniki

The Greek indeterminate tomatoes have medium acidity. They resist cracking and high temperatures.

Tigerella

With a distinct look with yellow stripes, the tomatoes measure up to 2 inches. They have a tangy-tart taste.

Ten Fingers of Naples

The red determinate tomatoes have an Italian elongated shape. They have a rich flavor and they can be used for canning.

Tiny Tim

With only 45 days needed to reach maturity, the determinate tomatoes were developed by the University of New Hampshire.

Tondino di Manduria

The semi-determinate tomatoes originate from Southern Italy. They are suitable for dryer regions.

Tommy Toe

Being indeterminate, the cherry tomatoes are considered to be very productive. The plants are very vigorous.

Trophy

These round tomatoes can grow up to 7 ounces. The indeterminate tomatoes are used for slicing as a result.

Traveler

Originating from Arkansas, the indeterminate tomatoes come with regular leaves.

Trip-L-Crop

The meaty indeterminate vines grow up to 25 feet. The fruits are used for slicing and canning.

Tomaccio

The round indeterminate tomatoes come with a distinct red color. They were developed in Israel.

Trucker’s Favorite Pink

The 3” pink tomatoes are known for their strong flavor. The indeterminate tomatoes have good blight resistance.

U

Ukrainian Purple

The indeterminate tomatoes are resistant to cracking. They might also be available under the name of Purple Russian.

V

Variegated

With fruits growing all season, the indeterminate tomatoes have variegated coloration. The tomato fruits can reach a size of 2 inches in diameter.

Velvet Red

These tomatoes are easy to recognize with due to the silvery-grey foliage. The indeterminate tomatoes can grow up to an inch.

Viktorina

The determinate tomatoes have a pink color. They take 68 days to mature.

Vintage Vine

With a pale-pink color, the indeterminate tomatoes have a sweet taste. They can be served fresh.

W

Watermelon Beefsteak

The indeterminate vines grow in heavy crops. The meat of the fruit is purple-red, similar to the flesh of a watermelon.

Wapsipinicon Peach

As most Peach tomatoes, Wapsipinicons have a fuzzy skin texture. These indeterminate tomatoes can be recognized due to their distinct yellow color.

White Cherry

These indeterminate tomatoes mature early. Their color is pale yellow to ivory.

White Tomesol

With a distinct color combination of pale yellow and pink, the indeterminate tomatoes have a sweet flavor.

White Wonder

With high sugar content, the indeterminate vines are white when fully ripe. Fruits weigh up to 4 ounces each.

Window Box

The oval 3-ounce red fruits are planted in the fall. The determinate vines grow oval tomatoes.

Whittemore

With deep ribbings, these indeterminate tomatoes grow fruits of up to 2 pounds.

Wisconsin 55

With a distinct bright red color, the indeterminate tomatoes are seen on rich soils. They are used for canning.

Wisconsin Chief

Developed by the University of Wisconsin, the semi-determinate tomatoes are good for all purposes. They are not as red as Wisconsin 55.

Y

Yellow Pear

The indeterminate tomatoes come with a lemony-yellow color. With smaller seed cavities and lower acidity, they are used in salads and sandwiches.

42 Days

The openly-pollinated determinate tomatoes come with a plant size of up to 2 feet. The fruits have very few seeds.

Want to learn more about heirloom tomatoes?

See these helpful resources:

Heirloom Tomato & Goat Cheese Napoleon

Serves 6

Ingredients
1 sheet puff pastry, thawed
4 ounces soft, fresh goat cheese
2 tablespoons cream (or half and half)
1 tablespoon chopped fresh tarragon leaves
1 tablespoon chopped fresh basil leaves
1/8 teaspoon freshly ground black pepper
2 tablespoons tomato jam (or apricot or other light colored jam)
1-1/2 pounds heirloom or vine-ripened tomatoes, cored and sliced 1/3-inch thick

Method
1. Heat the oven to 400°F. Line a baking sheet with a Silpat or parchment paper.

2. Unfold puff pastry on a lightly floured surface. Cut along the fold lines into three strips. Place on baking sheet and bake until golden brown, about 15 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool slightly. Cut in half with a serrated knife, creating a top and bottom.

3. Stir the cream, herbs and pepper into the goat cheese.

4. Spread the goat cheese on the top and bottom of two of the puff pastries. (The third top and bottom will become the middle layer of the other two.)

5. Spread the middle layer with the jam (just 1 side of each, it doesn’t matter if you do the inside or the outside.)

6. Layer 1/4 of the sliced tomatoes on each of the two bottom halves with the goat cheese. Top each with the jam smeared layer. Layer with the remaining tomatoes and place the tops on. Cut into thirds, crosswise, to create six pieces and serve.

Time in Thy Flight by Ray Bradbury (Full text)

This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. I like it because it reminds me of the treasures of being a kid in the 1960’s / 1970’s. There things that our communities and parents provided for us that are now seemingly absent in America today. But in those days were simply precious treasures. Ray Bradbury captures these ideas and images so well.

Time in Thy Flight

A wind blew the long years away past their hot faces.

The Time Machine stopped.

“Nineteen hundred and twenty-eight,” said Janet. The two boys looked past her.

Mr. Fields stirred. “Remember, you’re here to observe the behavior of these ancient people. Be inquisitive, be intelligent, observe.”

“Yes,” said the girl and the two boys in crisp khaki uniforms. They wore identical haircuts, had identical wristwatches, sandals, and coloring of hair, eyes, teeth, and skin, though they were not related.

“Shh!” said Mr. Fields.

They looked out at a little Illinois town in the spring of the year. A cool mist lay on the early morning streets.

Far down the street a small boy came running in the last light of the marble-cream moon. Somewhere a great clock struck 5 A.M. far away.

Leaving tennis-shoe prints softly in the quiet lawns, the boy stepped near the invisible Time Machine and cried up to a high dark house window.

The house window opened. Another boy crept down the roof to the ground. The two boys ran off with banana-filled mouths into the dark cold morning.

“Follow them,” whispered Mr. Fields. “Study their life patterns.

Quick!”

Janet and William and Robert ran on the cold pavements of spring, visible now, through the slumbering town, through a park. All about, lights flickered, doors clicked, and other children rushed alone or in gasping pairs down a hill to some gleaming blue tracks.

“Here it comes!” The children milled about before dawn. Far down the shining tracks a small light grew seconds later into steaming thunder.

“What is it?” screamed Janet.

“A train, silly, you’ve seen pictures of them!” shouted Robert.

And as the Time Children watched, from the train stepped gigantic gray elephants, steaming the pavements with their mighty waters, lifting question-mark nozzles to the cold morning sky. Cumbrous wagons rolled from the long freight flats, red and gold. Lions roared and paced in boxed darkness.

“Why— this must be a—circus!” Janet trembled.

“You think so? Whatever happened to them?”

“Like Christmas, I guess. Just vanished, long ago.”

Janet looked around. “Oh, it’s awful, isn’t it.”

The boys stood numbed. “It sure is.”

Men shouted in the first faint gleam of dawn. Sleeping cars drew up, dazed faces blinked out at the children. Horses clattered like a great fall of stones on the pavement.

Mr. Fields was suddenly behind the children. “Disgusting, barbaric, keeping animals in cages. If I’d known this was here, I’d never let you come see. This is a terrible ritual.”

“Oh, yes.” But Janet’s eyes were puzzled. “And yet, you know, it’s like a nest of maggots. I want to study it.”

“I don’t know,” said Robert, his eyes darting, his fingers trembling.

“It’s pretty crazy. We might try writing a thesis on it if Mr. Fields says it’s all right …”

Mr. Fields nodded. “I’m glad you’re digging in here, finding motives, studying this horror. All right—we’ll see the circus this afternoon.”

“I think I’m going to be sick,” said Janet.

The Time Machine hummed.

“So that was a circus,” said Janet, solemnly.

The trombone circus died in their ears. The last thing they saw was candy-pink trapeze people whirling while baking powder clowns shrieked and bounded.

“You must admit psychovision’s better,” said Robert slowly.

“All those nasty animal smells, the excitement.” Janet blinked. “That’s bad for children, isn’t it? And those older people seated with the children.

Mothers, fathers, they called them. Oh, that was strange.”

Mr. Fields put some marks in his class grading book.

Janet shook her head numbly. “I want to see it all again. I’ve missed the motives somewhere. I want to make that run across town again in the early morning. The cold air on my face—the sidewalk under my feet—the circus train coming in. Was it the air and the early hour that made the children get up and run to see the train come in? I want to retrace the entire pattern.

Why should they be excited? I feel I’ve missed out on the answer.”

“They all smiled so much,” said William.

“Manic-depressives,” said Robert.

“What are summer vacations? I heard them talk about it.” Janet looked at Mr. Fields.

“They spent their summers racing about like idiots, beating each other up,” replied Mr. Fields seriously.

“I’ll take our State Engineered summers of work for children anytime,” said Robert, looking at nothing, his voice faint.

The Time Machine stopped again.

“The Fourth of July,” announced Mr. Fields. “Nineteen hundred and twenty-eight. An ancient holiday when people blew each other’s fingers off.”

They stood before the same house on the same street but on a soft summer evening. Fire wheels hissed, on front porches laughing children tossed things out that went bang!

“Don’t run!” cried Mr. Fields. “It’s not war, don’t be afraid!”

But Janet’s and Robert’s and William’s faces were pink, now blue, now white with fountains of soft fire.

“We’re all right,” said Janet, standing very still.

“Happily,” announced Mr. Fields, “they prohibited fireworks a century ago, did away with the whole messy explosion.”

Children did fairy dances, weaving their names and destinies on the dark summer air with white sparklers.

“I’d like to do that,” said Janet, softly. “Write my name on the air.

See? I’d like that.”

“What?” Mr. Fields hadn’t been listening.

“Nothing,” said Janet.

“Bang!” whispered William and Robert, standing under the soft summer trees, in shadow, watching, watching the red, white, and green fires on the beautiful summer night lawns. “Bang!”

October.

The Time Machine paused for the last time, an hour later in the month of burning leaves. People bustled into dim houses carrying pumpkins and corn shocks. Skeletons danced, bats flew, candles flamed, apples swung in empty doorways.

“Halloween,” said Mr. Fields. “The acme of horror. This was the age of superstition, you know. Later they banned the Grimm Brothers, ghosts, skeletons, and all that claptrap. You children, thank God, were raised in an antiseptic world of no shadows or ghosts. You had decent holidays like William C. Chatterton’s Birthday, Work Day, and Machine Day.”

They walked by the same house in the empty October night, peering in at the triangle-eyed pumpkins, the masks leering in black attics and damp cellars. Now, inside the house, some party children squatted telling stories, laughing!

“I want to be inside with them,” said Janet at last.

“Sociologically, of course,” said the boys.

“No,” she said.

“What?” asked Mr. Fields.

“No, I just want to be inside, I just want to stay here, I want to see it all and be here and never be anywhere else, I want firecrackers and pumpkins and circuses, I want Christmases and Valentines and Fourths, like we’ve seen.”

“This is getting out of hand …” Mr. Fields started to say.

But suddenly Janet was gone. “Robert, William, come on!” She ran.

The boys leaped after her.

“Hold on!” shouted Mr. Fields. “Robert! William, I’ve got you!” He seized the last boy, but the other escaped. “Janet, Robert—come back here!

You’ll never pass into the seventh grade!

You’ll fail, Janet, Bob— Bob! ”

An October wind blew wildly down the street, vanishing with the children off among moaning trees.

William twisted and kicked.

“No, not you, too, William, you’re coming home with me. We’ll teach those other two a lesson they won’t forget. So they want to stay in the past, do they?” Mr. Fields shouted so everyone could hear. “All right, Janet, Bob, stay in this horror, in this chaos! In a few weeks you’ll come sniveling back here to me. But I’ll be gone! I’m leaving you here to go mad in this world!”

He hurried William to the Time Machine. The boy was sobbing.

“Don’t make me come back here on any more Field Excursions ever again, please, Mr. Fields, please—”

“Shut up!”

Almost instantly the Time Machine whisked away toward the future, toward the underground hive cities, the metal buildings, the metal flowers, the metal lawns.

“Good-bye, Janet, Bob!”

A great cold October wind blew through the town like water. And when it had ceased blowing it had carried all the children, whether invited or uninvited, masked or unmasked, to the doors of houses which closed upon them. There was not a running child anywhere in the night. The wind whined away in the bare treetops.

And inside the big house, in the candlelight, someone was pouring cold apple cider all around, to everyone, no matter who they were.

 

The End

Conclusion

This story takes me back to a time when things were simpler and reminds me of how precious the moments were that we possessed. Don’t let the preciousness of the moments that you have today slip from your hands.

Whether it is the 1950’s or the 1990’s, or even today. Treasure what you have now. For it is all fleeting….

Treasure what you have now.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Ray Bradbury Index here…

Ray Bradbury

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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Pillar of Fire by Ray Bradbury (Full text)

This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. Three hundred years after his death, William Lantry awakes from his coffin. One thing is very clear to him – this sterile world without superstition, fear, or imagination must be destroyed. Ray Bradbury was one of the best-known writers of our time. He was a master storyteller, a champion of creative freedom, and a space-age visionary.

Pillar of Fire

I

He came out of the earth, hating. Hate was his father; hate was his mother.

It was good to walk again. It was good to leap up out of the earth, off of your back, and stretch your cramped arms violently and try to take a deep breath!

He tried. He cried out.

He couldn’t breathe. He flung his arms over his face and tried to breathe. It was impossible. He walked on the earth, he came out of the earth.

But he was dead. He couldn’t breathe. He could take air into his mouth and force it half down his throat, with withered moves of long-dormant muscles, wildly, wildly! And with this little air he could shout and cry! He wanted to have tears, but he couldn’t make them come, either. All he knew was that he was standing upright, he was dead, he shouldn’t be walking! He couldn’t breathe and yet he stood.

The smells of the world were all about him. Frustratedly, he tried to smell the smells of autumn. Autumn was burning the land down into ruin. All across the country the ruins of summer lay; vast forests bloomed with flame, tumbled down timber on empty, unleafed timber. The smoke of the burning was rich, blue, and invisible.

He stood in the graveyard, hating. He walked through the world and yet could not taste nor smell of it. He heard, yes. The wind roared on his newly opened ears. But he was dead. Even though he walked he knew he was dead and should expect not too much of himself or this hateful living world.

He touched the tombstone over his own empty grave. He knew his own name again. It was a good job of carving.

WILLIAM LANTRY

That’s what the gravestone said.

His fingers trembled on the cool stone surface.

BORN 1898—DIED 1933

Born again…?

What year? He glared at the sky and the midnight autumnal stars moving in slow illuminations across the windy black. He read the tiltings of centuries in those stars. Orion thus and so, Aurega here! and where Taurus?

There!

His eyes narrowed. His lips spelled out the year:

“2349.”

An odd number. Like a school sum. They used to say a man couldn’t encompass any number over a hundred. After that it was all so damned abstract there was no use counting. This was the year 2349! A numeral, a sum. And here he was, a man who had lain in his hateful dark coffin, hating to be buried, hating the living people above who lived and lived and lived, hating them for all the centuries, until today, now, born out of hatred, he stood by his own freshly excavated grave, the smell of raw earth in the air, perhaps, but he could not smell it!

“I,” he said, addressing a poplar tree that was shaken by the wind, “am an anachronism.” He smiled faintly.

He looked at the graveyard. It was cold and empty. All of the stones had been ripped up and piled like so many flat bricks, one atop another, in the far corner by the wrought iron fence. This had been going on for two endless weeks. In his deep secret coffin he had heard the heartless, wild stirring as the men jabbed the earth with cold spades and tore out the coffins and carried away the withered ancient bodies to be burned. Twisting with fear in his coffin, he had waited for them to come to him.

Today they had arrived at his coffin. But—late. They had dug down to within an inch of the lid. Five o’clock bell, time for quitting. Home to supper.

The workers had gone off. Tomorrow they would finish the job, they said, shrugging into their coats.

Silence had come to the emptied tombyard.

Carefully, quietly, with a soft rattling of sod, the coffin lid had lifted.

William Lantry stood trembling now, in the last cemetery on Earth.

“Remember?” he asked himself, looking at the raw earth. “Remember those stories of that last man on Earth? Those stories of men wandering in ruins, alone? Well, you, William Lantry, are a switch on the old story. Do you know that? You are the last dead man in the whole world!”

There were no more dead people. Nowhere in any land was there a dead person. Impossible! Lantry did not smile at this. No, not impossible at all in this foolish, sterile, unimaginative, antiseptic age of cleansings and scientific methods! People died, oh my God, yes. But— dead people?

Corpses? They didn’t exist!

What happened to dead people?

The graveyard was on a hill. William Lantry walked through the dark burning night until he reached the edge of the graveyard and looked down upon the new town of Salem. It was all illumination, all color. Rocket ships cut fire above it, crossing the sky to all the far ports of Earth.

In his grave the new violence of this future world had driven down and seeped into William Lantry. He had been bathed in it for years. He knew all about it, with a hating dead man’s knowledge of such things.

Most important of all, he knew what these fools did with dead men.

He lifted his eyes. In the center of the town a massive stone finger pointed at the stars. It was three hundred feet high and fifty feet across. There was a wide entrance and a drive in front of it.

In the town, theoretically, thought William Lantry, say you have a dying man. In a moment he will be dead. What happens? No sooner is his pulse cold when a certificate is flourished, made out, his relatives pack him into a car-beetle and drive him swiftly to—

The Incinerator!

That functional finger, that Pillar of Fire pointing at the stars.

Incinerator. A functional, terrible name. But truth is truth in this future world.

Like a stick of kindling your Mr. Dead Man is shot into the furnace.

Flume!

William Lantry looked at the top of the gigantic pistol shoving at the stars. A small pennant of smoke issued from the top.

There’s where your dead people go.

“Take care of yourself, William Lantry,” he murmured. “You’re the last one, the rare item, the last dead man. All the other graveyards of Earth have been blasted up. This is the last graveyard and you’re the last dead man from the centuries. These people don’t believe in having dead people about, much less walking dead people. Everything that can’t be used goes up like a matchstick. Superstitions right along with it!”

He looked at the town. All right, he thought, quietly, I hate you. You hate me, or you would if you knew I existed. You don’t believe in such things as vampires or ghosts. Labels without referents, you cry! You snort. All right, snort! Frankly, I don’t believe in you, either! I don’t like you! You and your Incinerators.

He trembled. How very close it had been. Day after day they had hauled out the other dead ones, burned them like so much kindling. An edict had been broadcast around the world. He had heard the digging men talk as they worked!

“I guess it’s a good idea, this cleaning up the graveyards,” said one of the men.

“Guess so,” said another. “Grisly custom. Can you imagine? Being buried, I mean! Unhealthy! All them germs!”

“Sort of a shame. Romantic, kind of. I mean, leaving just this one graveyard untouched all these centuries. The other graveyards were cleaned out, what year was it, Jim?”

“About 2260, I think. Yeah, that was it, 2260, almost a hundred years ago. But some Salem Committee, they got on their high horse and they said,

‘Look here, let’s have just one graveyard left, to remind us of the customs of the barbarians.’ And the government scratched its head, thunk it over, and said, ‘Okay. Salem it is. But all other graveyards go, you understand, all!’”

“And away they went,” said Jim.

“Sure, they sucked out ’em with fire and steam shovels and rocket-cleaners. If they knew a man was buried in a cow pasture, they fixed him!

Evacuated them, they did. Sort of cruel, I say.”

“I hate to sound old-fashioned,but still there were a lot of tourists came here every year, just to see what a real graveyard was like.”

“Right. We had nearly a million people in the last three years visiting.

A good revenue. But—a government order is an order. The government says no more morbidity, so flush her out we do! Here we go. Hand me that spade, Bill.”

William Lantry stood in the autumn wind, on the hill. It was good to walk again, to feel the wind and to hear the leaves scuttling like mice on the road ahead of him. It was good to see the bitter cold stars almost blown away by the wind.

It was even good to know fear again.

For fear rose in him now, and he could not put it away. The very fact that he was walking made him an enemy. And there was not another friend, another dead man, in all of the world, to whom one could turn for help or consolation. It was the whole melodramatic living world against one. William Lantry. It was the whole vampire-disbelieving, body-burning, graveyard-annihilating world against a man in a dark suit on a dark autumn hill. He put out his pale cold hands into the city illumination. You have pulled the tombstones, like teeth, from the yard, he thought. Now I will find some way to push your Incinerators down into rubble. I will make dead people again, and I will make friends in so doing. I cannot be alone and lonely. I must start manufacturing friends very soon. Tonight.

“War is declared,” he said, and laughed. It was pretty silly, one man declaring war on an entire world.

The world did not answer back. A rocket crossed the sky on a rush of flame, like an Incinerator taking wing.

Footsteps. Lantry hastened to the edge of the cemetery. The diggers, coming back to finish up their work? No. Just someone, a man, walking by.

As the man came abreast the cemetery gate, Lantry stepped swiftly out. “Good evening,” said the man, smiling.

Lantry struck the man in the face. The man fell. Lantry bent quietly down and hit the man a killing blow across the neck with the side of his hand.

Dragging the body back into shadow, he stripped it and changed clothes with it. It wouldn’t do for a fellow to go wandering about this future world with ancient clothing on. He found a small pocket knife in the man’s coat; not much of a knife, but enough if you knew how to handle it properly.

He knew how.

He rolled the body down into one of the already opened and exhumed graves. In a minute he had shoveled dirt down upon it, just enough to hide it.

There was little chance of it being found. They wouldn’t dig the same grave twice.

He adjusted himself in his new loose-fitting metallic suit. Fine, fine.

Hating. William Lantry walked down into town, to do battle with the Earth.

II

The Incinerator was open. It never closed. There was a wide entrance, all lighted up with hidden illumination, there was a helicopter landing table and a beetle drive. The town itself was dying down after another day of the dynamo. The lights were going dim, and the only quiet, lighted spot in the town now was the Incinerator. God, what a practical name, what an unromantic name.

William Lantry entered the wide, well-lighted door. It was an entrance, really; there were no doors to open or shut. People could go in and out, summer or winter, the inside was always warm. Warm from the fire that rushed whispering up the high round flue to where the whirlers, the propellors, the air jets pushed the leafy gray ashes on away for a ten-mile ride down the sky.

There was the warmth of the bakery here. The halls were floored with rubber parquet. You couldn’t make a noise if you wanted to. Music played in hidden throats somewhere. Not music of death at all, but music of life and the way the sun lived inside the Incinerator; or the sun’s brother, anyway. You could hear the flame floating inside the heavy brick wall.

William Lantry descended a ramp. Behind him he heard a whisper and turned in time to see a beetle stop before the entranceway. A bell rang. The music, as if at a signal, rose to ecstatic heights. There was joy in it.

From the beetle, which opened from the rear, some attendants stepped carrying a golden box. It was six feet long and there were sun symbols on it.

From another beetle the relatives of the man in the box stepped and followed as the attendants took the golden box down a ramp to a kind of altar. On the side of the altar were the words, “WE THAT WERE BORN OF THE SUN RETURN TO THE SUN.” The golden box was deposited upon the altar, the music leaped upward, the Guardian of this place spoke only a few words, then the attendants picked up the golden box, walked to a transparent wall, a safety lock, also transparent, and opened it. The box was shoved into the glass slot.

A moment later an inner lock opened, the box was injected into the interior of the flue, and vanished instantly in quick flame.

The attendants walked away. The relatives without a word turned and walked out. The music played.

William Lantry approached the glass fire lock. He peered through the wall at the vast, glowing never-ceasing heart of the Incinerator. It burned steadily, without a flicker, singing to itself peacefully. It was so solid it was like a golden river flowing up out of the earth toward the sky. Anything you put into the river was borne upward, vanished.

Lantry felt again his unreasoning hatred of this thing, this monster, cleansing fire.

A man stood at his elbow. “May I help you, sir?”

“What?” Lantry turned abruptly. “What did you say?”

“May I be of service?”

“I—that is—” Lantry looked quickly at the ramp and the door. His hands trembled at his sides. “I’ve never been in here before.”

“Never?” The Attendant was surprised.

That had been the wrong thing to say, Lantry realized. But it was said, nevertheless. “I mean,” he said. “Not really. I mean, when you’re a child, somehow, you don’t pay attention. I suddenly realized tonight that I didn’t really know the Incinerator.”

The Attendant smiled. “We never know anything, do we, really? I’ll be glad to show you around.”

“Oh, no. Never mind. It—it’s a wonderful place.”

“Yes, it is.” The Attendant took pride in it. “One of the finest in the world, I think.”

“I—” Lantry felt he must explain further. “I haven’t had many relatives die on me since I was a child. In fact, none. So, you see I haven’t been here for many years.”

“I see.” The Attendant’s face seemed to darken somewhat.

What’ve I said now, thought Lantry. What in God’s name is wrong?

What’ve I done? If I’m not careful I’ll get myself shoved right into that monstrous firetrap. What’s wrong with this fellow’s face? He seems to be giving me more than the usual going-over.

“You wouldn’t be one of the men who’ve just returned from Mars, would you?” asked the Attendant.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“No matter.” The Attendant began to walk off. “If you want to know anything, just ask me.”

“Just one thing,” said Lantry.

“What’s that?”

“This.”

Lantry dealt him a stunning blow across the neck.

He had watched the fire-trap operator with expert eyes. Now, with the sagging body in his arms, he touched the button that opened the warm outer lock, placed the body in, heard the music rise, and saw the inner lock open.

The body shot out into the river of fire. The music softened.

“Well done, Lantry, well done.”

Barely an instant later another Attendant entered the room. Lantry was caught with an expression of pleased excitement on his face. The Attendant looked around as if expecting to find someone, then he walked toward Lantry.

“May I help you?”

“Just looking,” said Lantry.

“Rather late at night,” said the Attendant.

“I couldn’t sleep.”

That was the wrong answer, too. Everybody slept in this world.

Nobody had insomnia. If you did you simply turned on a hypnoray, and, sixty seconds later, you were snoring. Oh, he was just full of wrong answers. First he had made the fatal error of saying he had never been in the Incinerator before, when he knew that all children were brought here on tours, every year, from the time they were four, to instill the idea of the clean fire death and the Incinerator in their minds. Death was a bright fire, death was warmth and the sun. It was not a dark, shadowed thing. That was important in their education.

And he, pale, thoughtless fool, had immediately gabbled out his ignorance.

And another thing, this paleness of his. He looked at his hands and realized with growing terror that a pale man also was nonexistent in this world. They would suspect his paleness. That was why the first attendant had asked, “Are you one of those men newly returned from Mars?” Here, now, this new Attendant was clean and bright as a copper penny, his cheeks red with health and energy. Lantry hid his pale hands in his pockets. But he was finally aware of the searching the Attendant did on his face.

“I mean to say,” said Lantry, “I didn’t want to sleep. I wanted to think.”

“Was there a service held here a moment ago?” asked the Attendant, looking about.

“I don’t know, I just came in.”

“I thought I heard the fire lock open and shut.”

“I don’t know,” said Lantry.

The man pressed a wall button. “Anderson?”

A voice replied. “Yes.”

“Locate Saul for me, will you?”

“I’ll ring the corridors.” A pause. “Can’t find him.”

“Thanks.” The Attendant was puzzled. He was beginning to make little sniffing motions with his nose. “Do you— smell anything?”

Lantry sniffed. “No. Why?”

“I smell something.”

Lantry took hold of the knife in his pocket. He waited.

“I remember once when I was a kid,” said the man. “And we found a cow lying dead in the field. It had been there two days in the hot sun. That’s what this smell is. I wonder what it’s from?”

“Oh, I know what it is,” said Lantry quietly. He held out his hand.

“Here.”

“What?”

“Me, of course.”

“You?”

“Dead several hundred years.”

“You’re an odd joker.” The Attendant was puzzled.

“Very.” Lantry took out the knife. “Do you know what this is?”

“A knife.”

“Do you ever use knives on people any more?”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean—killing them, with knives or guns or poison?”

“You are an odd joker!” The man giggled awkwardly.

“I’m going to kill you,” said Lantry.

“Nobody kills anybody,” said the man.

“Not any more they don’t. But they used to, in the old days.”

“I know they did.”

“This will be the first murder in three hundred years. I just killed your friend. I just shoved him into the fire lock.”

That remark had the desired effect. It numbed the man so completely, it shocked him so thoroughly with its illogical aspects that Lantry had time to walk forward. He put the knife against the man’s chest. “I’m going to kill you.”

“That’s silly,” said the man, numbly. “People don’t do that.”

“Like this,” said Lantry. “You see?”

The knife slid into the chest. The man stared at it for a moment.

Lantry caught the falling body.

III

The Salem flue exploded at six that morning. The great fire chimney shattered into ten thousand parts and flung itself into the earth and into the sky and into the houses of the sleeping people. There was fire and sound, more fire than autumn made burning in the hills.

William Lantry was five miles away at the time of the explosion. He saw the town ignited by the great spreading cremation of it. And he shook his head and laughed a little bit and clapped his hands smartly together.

Relatively simple. You walked around killing people who didn’t believe in murder, had only heard of it indirectly as some dim gone custom of the old barbarian races. You walked into the control room of the Incinerator and said, “How do you work this Incinerator?” and the control man told you, because everybody told the truth in this world of the future, nobody lied, there was no reason to lie, there was no danger to lie against. There was only one criminal in the world, and nobody knew HE existed yet.

Oh, it was an incredibly beautiful setup. The Control Man had told him just how the Incinerator worked, what pressure gauges controlled the flood of fire gases going up the flue, what levers were adjusted or readjusted.

He and Lantry had had quite a talk. It was an easy, free world. People trusted people. A moment later Lantry had shoved a knife in the Control Man also and set the pressure gauges for an overload to occur half an hour later, and walked out of the Incinerator halls, whistling.

Now even the sky was palled with the vast black cloud of the explosion.

“This is only the first,” said Lantry, looking at the sky. “I’ll tear all the others down before they even suspect there’s an unethical man loose in their society. They can’t account for a variable like me. I’m beyond their understanding. I’m incomprehensible, impossible, therefore I do not exist. My God, I can kill hundreds of thousands of them before they even realize murder is out in the world again. I can make it look like an accident each time. Why, the idea is so huge, it’s unbelievable!”

The fire burned the town. He sat under a tree for a long time, until morning. Then, he found a cave in the hills, and went in, to sleep.

He awoke at sunset with a sudden dream of fire. He saw himself pushed into the flue, cut into sections by flame, burned away to nothing. He sat up on the cave floor, laughing at himself. He had an idea.

He walked down into the town and stepped into an audio booth. He dialed OPERATOR. “Give me the Police Department,” he said.

“I beg your pardon?” said the operator.

He tried again. “The Law Force,” he said.

“I will connect you with the Peace Control,” she said, at last.

A little fear began ticking inside him like a tiny watch. Suppose the operator recognized the term Police Department as an anachronism, took his audio number, and sent someone out to investigate? No, she wouldn’t do that.

Why should she suspect? Paranoids were nonexistent in this civilization.

“Yes, the Peace Control,” he said.

A buzz. A man’s voice answered. “Peace Control. Stephens speaking.”

“Give me the Homicide Detail,” said Lantry, smiling.

“The what? ”

“Who investigates murders?”

“I beg your pardon, what are you talking about?”

“Wrong number.” Lantry hung up, chuckling. Ye gods, there was no such a thing as a Homicide Detail. There were no murders, therefore they needed no detectives. Perfect, perfect!

The audio rang back. Lantry hesitated, then answered.

“Say,” said the voice on the phone. “Who are you?”

“The man just left who called,” said Lantry, and hung up again.

He ran. They would recognize his voice and perhaps send someone out to check. People didn’t lie. He had just lied. They knew his voice. He had lied. Anybody who lied needed a psychiatrist. They would come to pick him up to see why he was lying. For no other reason. They suspected him of nothing else. Therefore—he must run.

Oh, how very carefully he must act from now on. He knew nothing of this world, this odd straight truthful ethical world. Simply by looking pale you were suspect. Simply by not sleeping nights you were suspect. Simply by not bathing, by smelling like a—dead cow?—you were suspect. Anything.

He must go to a library. But that was dangerous, too. What were libraries like today? Did they have books or did they have film spools which projected books on a screen? Or did people have libraries at home, thus eliminating the necessity of keeping large main libraries?

He decided to chance it. His use of archaic terms might well make him suspect again, but now it was very important he learn all that could be learned of this foul world into which he had come again. He stopped a man on the street. “Which way to the library?”

The man was not surprised. “Two blocks east, one block north.”

“Thank you.”

Simple as that.

He walked into the library a few minutes later.

“May I help you?”

He looked at the librarian. May I help you, may I help you. What a world of helpful people! “I’d like to ‘have’ Edgar Allan Poe.” His verb was carefully chosen. He didn’t say ‘read.’ He was too afraid that books were passé, that printing itself was a lost art. Maybe all ‘books’ today were in the form of fully delineated three-dimensional motion pictures. How in blazes could you make a motion picture out of Socrates, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud?

“What was that name again?”

“Edgar Allan Poe.”

“There is no such author listed in our files.”

“Will you please check?”

She checked. “Oh, yes. There’s a red mark on the file card. He was one of the authors in the Great Burning of 2265.

“How ignorant of me.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “Have you heard much of him?”

“He had some interesting barbarian ideas on death,” said Lantry.

“Horrible ones,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Ghastly.”

“Yes. Ghastly. Abominable, in fact. Good thing he was burned.

Unclean. By the way, do you have any of Lovecraft?”

“Is that a sex book?”

Lantry exploded with laughter. “No, no. It’s a man.”

She riffled the file. “He was burned, too. Along with Poe.”

“I suppose that applies to Machen and a man named Derleth and one named Ambrose Bierce, also?”

“Yes.” She shut the file cabinet. “All burned. And good riddance.” She gave him an odd warm look of interest. “I bet you’ve just come back from Mars.”

“Why do you say that?”

“There was another explorer in here yesterday. He’d just made the Mars hop and return. He was interested in supernatural literature, also. It seems there are actually ‘tombs’ on Mars.”

“What are ‘tombs’?” Lantry was learning to keep his mouth closed.

“You know, those things they once buried people in.”

“Barbarian custom. Ghastly!”

“Isn’t it? Well, seeing the Martian tombs made this young explorer curious. He came and asked if we had any of those authors you mentioned. Of course we haven’t even a smitch of their stuff.” She looked at his pale face.

“You are one of the Martian rocket men, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Got back on the ship the other day.”

“The other young man’s name was Burke.”

“Of course. Burke! Good friend of mine!”

“Sorry I can’t help you. You’d best get yourself some vitamin shots and some sun lamps. You look terrible, Mr.—?”

“Lantry. I’ll be good. Thanks ever so much. See you next Hallows’

Eve!”

“Aren’t you the clever one.” She laughed. “If there were a Hallows’

Eve, I’d make it a date.”

“But they burned that, too,” he said.

“Oh, they burned everything,” she said. “Good night.”

“Good night.” And he went on out.

Oh, how carefully he was balanced in this world! Like some kind of dark gyroscope, whirling with never a murmur, a very silent man. As he walked along the eight o’clock evening street he noticed with particular interest that there was not an unusual amount of lights about. There were the usual street lights at each corner, but the blocks themselves were only faintly illuminated. Could it be that these remarkable people were not afraid of the dark? Incredible nonsense! Every one was afraid of the dark. Even he himself had been afraid, as a child. It was as natural as eating.

A little boy ran by on pelting feet, followed by six others. They yelled and shouted and rolled on the dark cool October lawn, in the leaves. Lantry looked on for several minutes before addressing himself to one of the small boys who was for a moment taking a respite, gathering his breath into his small lungs, as a boy might blow to refill a punctured paper bag.

“Here, now,” said Lantry. “You’ll wear yourself out.”

“Sure,” said the boy.

“Could you tell me,” said the man, “why there are no street lights in the middle of the blocks?”

“Why?” asked the boy.

“I’m a teacher, I thought I’d test your knowledge,” said Lantry.

“Well,” said the boy, “you don’t need lights in the middle of the block, that’s why.”

“But it gets rather dark,” said Lantry.

“So?” said the boy.

“Aren’t you afraid?” asked Lantry.

“Of what?” asked the boy.

“The dark,” said Lantry.

“Ho ho,” said the boy. “Why should I be?”

“Well,” said Lantry. “It’s black, it’s dark. And after all, street lights were invented to take away the dark and take away fear.”

“That’s silly. Street lights were made so you could see where you were walking. Outside of that there’s nothing.”

“You miss the whole point—” said Lantry. “Do you mean to say you would sit in the middle of an empty lot all night and not be afraid?”

“Of what?”

“Of what, of what, of what, you little ninny! Of the dark!”

“Ho ho.”

“Would you go out in the hills and stay all night in the dark?”

“Sure.”

“Would you stay in a deserted house alone?”

“Sure.”

“And not be afraid?”

“Sure.”

“You’re a liar!”

“Don’t you call me nasty names!” shouted the boy. Liar was the improper noun, indeed. It seemed to be the worst thing you could call a person.

Lantry was completely furious with the little monster. “Look,” he insisted. “Look into my eyes …”

The boy looked.

Lantry bared his teeth slightly. He put out his hands, making a clawlike gesture. He leered and gesticulated and wrinkled his face into a terrible mask of horror.

“Ho ho,” said the boy. “You’re funny.”

“What did you say?”

“You’re funny. Do it again. Hey, gang, c’mere! This man does funny things!”

“Never mind.”

“Do it again, sir.”

“Never mind, never mind. Good night!” Lantry ran off.

“Good night, sir. And mind the dark, sir!” called the little boy.

Of all the stupidity, of all the rank, gross, crawling, jelly-mouthed stupidity! He had never seen the like of it in his life! Bringing the children up without so much as an ounce of imagination! Where was the fun in being children if you didn’t imagine things?

He stopped running. He slowed and for the first time began to appraise himself. He ran his hand over his face and bit his fingers and found that he himself was standing midway in the block and he felt uncomfortable. He moved up to the street corner where there was a glowing lantern. “That’s better,” he said, holding his hands out like a man to an open warm fire.

He listened. There was not a sound except the night breathing of the crickets. Finally there was a fire-hush as a rocket swept the sky. It was the sound a torch might make brandished gently on the dark air.

He listened to himself and for the first time he realized what there was so peculiar to himself. There was not a sound in him. The little nostril and lung noises were absent. His lungs did not take nor give oxygen or carbon dioxide; they did not move. The hairs in his nostrils did not quiver with warm combing air. That faint purling whisper of breathing did not sound in his nose.

Strange. Funny. A noise you never heard when you were alive, the breath that fed your body, and yet, once dead, oh how you missed it!

The only other time you ever heard it was on deep dreamless awake nights when you wakened and listened and heard first your nose taking and gently poking out the air, and then the dull deep dim red thunder of the blood in your temples, in your eardrums, in your throat, in your aching wrists, in your warm loins, in your chest. All of those little rhythms, gone. The wrist beat gone, the throat pulse gone, the chest vibration gone. The sound of the blood coming up down around and through, up down around and through.

Now it was like listening to a statue.

And yet he lived. Or, rather, moved about. And how was this done, over and above scientific explanations, theories, doubts?

By one thing, and one thing alone.

Hatred.

Hatred was a blood in him, it went up down around and through, up down around and through. It was a heart in him, not beating, true, but warm.

He was—what? Resentment. Envy. They said he could not lie any longer in his coffin in the cemetery. He had wanted to. He had never had any particular desire to get up and walk around. It had been enough, all these centuries, to lie in the deep box and feel but not feel the ticking of the million insect watches in the earth around, the moves of worms like so many deep thoughts in the soil.

But then they had come and said, “Out you go and into the furnace!”

And that is the worst thing you can say to any man. You cannot tell him what to do. If you say you are dead, he will want not to be dead. If you say there are no such things as vampires, by God, that man will try to be one just for spite. If you say a dead man cannot walk, he will test his limbs. If you say murder is no longer occurring, he will make it occur. He was, in toto, all the impossible things. They had given birth to him with their practices and ignorances. Oh, how wrong they were. They needed to be shown. He would show them! Sun is good, so is night, there is nothing wrong with dark, they said.

Dark is horror, he shouted, silently, facing the little houses. It is meant for contrast. You must fear, you hear! That has always been the way of this world. You destroyers of Edgar Allan Poe and fine big-worded Lovecraft, you burner of Halloween masks and destroyer of pumpkin jack-o-lanterns! I will make night what it once was, the thing against which man built all his lanterned cities and his many children!

As if in answer to this, a rocket, flying low, trailing a long rakish feather of flame. It made Lantry flinch and draw back.

IV

It was but ten miles to the little town of Science Port. He made it by dawn, walking. But even this was not good. At four in the morning a silver beetle pulled up on the road beside him.

“Hello,” called the man inside.

“Hello,” said Lantry, wearily.

“Why are you walking?” asked the man.

“I’m going to Science Port.”

“Why don’t you ride?”

“I like to walk.”

“Nobody likes to walk. Are you sick? May I give you a ride?”

“Thanks, but I like to walk.”

The man hesitated, then closed the beetle door. “Good night.”

When the beetle was gone over the hill, Lantry retreated into a nearby forest. A world full of bungling, helping people. By God, you couldn’t even walk without being accused of sickness. That meant only one thing. He must not walk any longer, he had to ride. He should have accepted that fellow’s offer.

The rest of the night he walked far enough off the highway so that if a beetle rushed by he had time to vanish in the underbrush. At dawn he crept into an empty dry water drain and closed his eyes.

The dream was as perfect as a rimed snowflake.

He saw the graveyard where he had lain deep and ripe over the centuries. He heard the early morning footsteps of the laborers returning to finish their work.

“Would you mind passing me the shovel, Jim?”

“Here you go.”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute!”

“What’s up?”

“Look here. We didn’t finish last night, did we?”

“No.”

There was one more coffin, wasn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“Well, here it is, and open!”

“You’ve got the wrong hole.”

“What’s the name say on the gravestone?”

“Lantry. William Lantry.”

“That’s him, that’s the one! Gone!”

“What could have happened to it?”

“How do I know. The body was here last night.”

“We can’t be sure, we didn’t look.”

“God man, people don’t bury empty coffins. He was in his box. Now he isn’t.”

“Maybe this box was empty.”

“Nonsense. Smell that smell? He was here all right.”

A pause.

“Nobody would have taken the body, would they?”

“What for?”

“A curiosity, perhaps.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. People just don’t steal. Nobody steals.”

“Well, then, there’s only one solution.”

“And?”

“He got up and walked away.”

A pause. In the dark dream, Lantry expected to hear laughter. There was none. Instead, the voice of the grave-digger, after a thoughtful pause, said, “Yes. That’s it, indeed. He got up and walked away.”

“That’s interesting to think about,” said the other.

“Isn’t it, though!”

Silence.

Lantry awoke. It had all been a dream, but, how realistic. How strangely the two men had carried on. But not unnaturally, oh, no. That was exactly how you expected men of the future to talk. Men of the future. Lantry grinned wryly. That was an anachronism for you. This was the future. This was happening now. It wasn’t three hundred years from now, it was now, not then, or any other time. This wasn’t the twentieth century. Oh, how calmly those two men in the dream had said, “He got up and walked away.” “—

interesting to think about.” “Isn’t it, though?” With never a quaver in their voices. With not so much as a glance over their shoulders or a tremble of spade in hand. But, of course, with their perfectly honest, logical minds, there was but one explanation; certainly nobody had stolen the corpse. “Nobody steals.” The corpse had simply got up and walked off. The corpse was the only one who could have possibly moved the corpse. By the few casual slow words of the gravediggers Lantry knew what they were thinking. Here was a man that had lain in suspended animation, not really dead, for hundreds of years. The jarring about, the activity, had brought him back.

Everyone had heard of those little green toads that are sealed for centuries inside mud rocks or in ice patties, alive, alive oh! And how when scientists chipped them out and warmed them like marbles in their hands the little toads leapt about and frisked and blinked. Then it was only logical that the gravediggers think of William Lantry in like fashion.

But what if the various parts were fitted together in the next day or so?

If the vanished body and the shattered, exploded Incinerator were connected?

What if this fellow named Burke, who had returned pale from Mars, went to the library again and said to the young woman he wanted some books and she said, “Oh, your friend Lantry was in the other day.” And he’d say, ‘Lantry who? Don’t know anyone by that name.’ And she’d say, “Oh, he lied.” And people in this time didn’t lie. So it would all form and coalesce, item by item, bit by bit. A pale man who was pale and shouldn’t be pale had lied and people don’t lie, and a walking man on a lonely country road had walked and people don’t walk any more, and a body was missing from a cemetery, and the Incinerator had blown up and and and—

They would come after him. They would find him. He would be easy to find. He walked. He lied. He was pale. They would find him and take him and stick him through the open fire lock of the nearest Burner and that would be your Mr. William Lantry, like a Fourth of July set-piece!

There was only one thing to be done efficiently and completely. He arose in violent moves. His lips were wide and his dark eyes were flared and there was a trembling and burning all through him. He must kill and kill and kill and kill and kill. He must make his enemies into friends, into people like himself who walked but shouldn’t walk, who were pale in a land of pinks. He must kill and then kill and then kill again. He must make bodies and dead people and corpses. He must destroy Incinerator after Flue after Burner after Incinerator. Explosion on explosion. Death on death. Then, when the Incinerators were all in thrown ruin, and the hastily established morgues were jammed with the bodies of people shattered by the explosion, then he would begin his making of friends, his enrollment of the dead in his own cause.

Before they traced and found and killed him, they must be killed themselves. So far he was safe. He could kill and they would not kill back.

People simply do not go around killing. That was his safety margin. He climbed out of the abandoned drain, stood in the road.

He took the knife from his pocket and hailed the next beetle.

It was like the Fourth of July! The biggest firecracker of them all. The Science Port Incinerator split down the middle and flew apart. It made a thousand small explosions that ended with a greater one. It fell upon the town and crushed houses and burned trees. It woke people from sleep and then put them to sleep again, forever, an instant later.

William Lantry, sitting in a beetle that was not his own, tuned idly to a station on the audio dial. The collapse of the Incinerator had killed some four hundred people. Many had been caught in flattened houses, others struck by flying metal. A temporary morgue was being set up at—

An address was given.

Lantry noted it with a pad and pencil.

He could go on this way, he thought, from town to town, from country to country, destroying the Burners, the Pillars of Fire, until the whole clean magnificent framework of flame and cauterization was tumbled. He made a fair estimate—each explosion averaged five hundred dead. You could work that up to a hundred thousand in no time.

He pressed the floor stud on the beetle. Smiling, he drove off through the dark streets of the city.

The city coroner had requisitioned an old warehouse. From midnight until four in the morning the gray beetles hissed down the rain-shiny streets, turned in, and the bodies were laid out on the cold concrete floors, with white sheets over them. It was a continuous flow until about four-thirty, then it stopped. There were about two hundred bodies there, white and cold.

The bodies were left alone; nobody stayed behind to tend them. There was no use tending the dead; it was a useless procedure; the dead could take care of themselves.

About five o’clock, with a touch of dawn in the east, the first trickle of relatives arrived to identify their sons or their fathers or their mothers or their uncles. The people moved quickly into the warehouse, made the identification, moved quickly out again. By six o’clock, with the sky still lighter in the east, this trickle had passed on, also.

William Lantry walked across the wide wet street and entered the warehouse.

He held a piece of blue chalk in one hand.

He walked by the coroner who stood in the entranceway talking to two others. “… drive the bodies to the Incinerator in Mellin Town, tomorrow …”

The voices faded.

Lantry moved, his feet echoing faintly on the cool concrete. A wave of sourceless relief came to him as he walked among the shrouded figures. He was among his own. And—better than that! He had created these! He had made them dead! He had procured for himself a vast number of recumbent friends!

Was the coroner watching? Lantry turned his head. No. The warehouse was calm and quiet and shadowed in the dark morning. The coroner was walking away now; across the street, with his two attendants; a beetle had drawn up on the other side of the street, and the coroner was going over to talk with whoever was in the beetle.

William Lantry stood and made a blue chalk pentagram on the floor by each of the bodies. He moved swiftly, swiftly, without a sound, without blinking. In a few minutes, glancing up now and then to see if the coroner was still busy, he had chalked the floor by a hundred bodies. He straightened up and put the chalk in his pocket.

Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party, now is the time …

Lying in the earth, over the centuries, the processes and thoughts of passing peoples and passing times had seeped down to him, slowly, as into a deep-buried sponge. From some death-memory in him now, ironically, repeatedly, a black typewriter clacked out black even lines of pertinent words: Now is the time for all good men, for all good men, to come to the aid of—

William Lantry.

Other words—

Arise my love, and come away—

The quick brown fox jumped over … Paraphrase it. The quick risen body jumped over the tumbled Incinerator…

Lazarus, come forth from the tomb …

He knew the right words. He need only speak them as they had been spoken over the centuries. He need only gesture with his hands and speak the words, the dark words that would cause these bodies to quiver, rise and walk!

And when they had risen he would take them through the town, they would kill others, and the others would rise and walk. By the end of the day there would be thousands of good friends, walking with him. And what of the naïve, living people of this year, this day, this hour? They would be completely unprepared for it. They would go down to defeat because they would not be expecting war of any sort. They wouldn’t believe it possible, it would all be over before they could convince themselves that such an illogical thing could happen.

He lifted his hands. His lips moved. He said the words. He began in a chanting whisper and then raised his voice, louder. He said the words again and again. His eyes were closed tightly. His body swayed. He spoke faster and faster. He began to move forward among the bodies. The dark words flowed from his mouth. He was enchanted with his own formulae. He stooped and made further blue symbols on the concrete, in the fashion of long-dead sorcerers, smiling, confident. Any moment now the first tremor of the still bodies, any moment now the rising, the leaping up of the cold ones!

His hands lifted in the air. His head nodded. He spoke, he spoke, he spoke. He gestured. He talked loudly over the bodies, his eyes flaring, his body tensed. “Now!” he cried, violently. “Rise, all of you!”

Nothing happened.

“Rise!” he screamed, with a terrible torment in his voice.

The sheets lay in white blue-shadow folds over the silent bodies.

“Hear me, and act!” he shouted.

Far away, on the street, a beetle hissed along.

Again, again, again he shouted, pleaded. He got down by each body and asked of it his particular violent favor. No reply. He strode wildly between the even white rows, flinging his arms up, stooping again and again to make blue symbols!

Lantry was very pale. He licked his lips. “Come on, get up,” he said.

“They have, they always have, for a thousand years. When you make a mark

—so! and speak a word—so! they always rise! Why not now, why not you!

Come on, come on, before they come back!”

The warehouse went up into shadow. There were steel beams across and down. In it, under the roof, there was not a sound, except the raving of a lonely man.

Lantry stopped.

Through the wide doors of the warehouse he caught a glimpse of the last cold stars of morning.

This was the year 2349.

His eyes grew cold and his hands fell to his sides. He did not move.

Once upon a time people shuddered when they heard the wind about the house, once people raised crucifixes and wolfbane, and believed in walking dead and bats and loping white wolves. And as long as they believed, then so long did the dead, the bats, the loping wolves exist. The mind gave birth and reality to them.

But …

He looked at the white sheeted bodies.

These people did not believe.

They had never believed. They would never believe. They had never imagined that the dead might walk. The dead went up flues in flame. They had never heard superstition, never trembled or shuddered or doubted in the dark. Walking dead people could not exist, they were illogical. This was the year 2349, man, after all!

Therefore, these people could not rise, could not walk again. They were dead and flat and cold. Nothing, chalk, imprecation, superstition, could wind them up and set them walking. They were dead and knew they were dead!

He was alone.

There were live people in the world who moved and drove beetles and drank quiet drinks in little dimly illumined bars by country roads, and kissed women and talked much good talk all day and every day.

But he was not alive.

Friction gave him what little warmth he possessed.

There were two hundred dead people here in this warehouse now, cold upon the floor. The first dead people in a hundred years who were allowed to be corpses for an extra hour or more. The first not to be immediately trundled to the Incinerator and lit like so much phosphorus.

He should be happy with them, among them.

He was not.

They were completely dead. They did not know nor believe in walking once the heart had paused and stilled itself. They were deader than dead ever was.

He was indeed alone, more alone than any man had ever been. He felt the chill of his aloneness moving up into his chest, strangling him quietly.

William Lantry turned suddenly and gasped.

While he had stood there, someone had entered the warehouse. A tall man with white hair, wearing a light weight tan overcoat and no hat. How long the man had been nearby there was no telling.

There was no reason to stay here. Lantry turned and started to walk slowly out. He looked hastily at the man as he passed and the man with the white hair looked back at him, curiously. Had he heard? The imprecations, the pleadings, the shoutings? Did he suspect? Lantry slowed his walk. Had this man seen him make the blue chalk marks? But then, would he interpret them as symbols of an ancient superstition? Probably not.

Reaching the door, Lantry paused. For a moment he did not want to do anything but lie down and be coldly, really dead again and be carried silently down the street to some distant burning flue and there dispatched in ash and whispering fire. If he was indeed alone and there was no chance to collect an army to his cause, what, then, existed as a reason for going on? Killing? Yes, he’d kill a few thousand more. But that wasn’t enough. You can only do so much of that before they drag you down.

He looked at the cold sky.

A rocket went across the black heaven, trailing fire.

Mars burned red among a million stars.

Mars. The library. The librarian. Talk. Returning rocket men. Tombs.

Lantry almost gave a shout. He restrained his hand, which wanted so much to reach up into the sky and touch Mars. Lovely red star on the sky.

Good star that gave him sudden new hope. If he had a living heart now it would be thrashing wildly, and sweat would be breaking out of him and his pulses would be stammering, and tears would be in his eyes!

He would go down to wherever the rockets sprang up into space. He would go to Mars, one way or another. He would go to the Martian tombs.

There, there were bodies, he would bet his last hatred on it, that would rise and walk and work with him! Theirs was an ancientculture, much different from that of Earth, patterned on the Egyptian, if what the librarian had said was true. And the Egyptian—what a crucible of dark superstition and midnight terror that culture had been. Mars it was, then. Beautiful Mars!

But he must not attract attention to himself. He must move carefully.

He wanted to run, yes, to get away, but that would be the worst possible move he could make. The man with the white hair was glancing at Lantry from time to time, in the entranceway. There were too many people about. If anything happened he would be outnumbered. So far he had taken on only one man at a time.

Lantry forced himself to stop and stand on the steps before the warehouse. The man with the white hair came on onto the steps also and stood, looking at the sky. He looked as if he was going to speak at any moment. He fumbled in his pockets and took out a packet of cigarettes.

V

They stood outside the morgue together, the tall, pink, white-haired man, and Lantry, hands in their pockets. It was a cool night with a white shell of a moon that washed a house here, a road there, and farther on, parts of a river.

“Cigarette?” The man offered Lantry one.

“Thanks.”

They lit up together. The man glanced at Lantry’s mouth. “Cool night.”

“Cool.”

They shifted their feet. “Terrible accident.”

“Terrible.”

“So many dead.”

“So many.”

Lantry felt himself some sort of delicate weight upon a scale. The other man did not seem to be looking at him, but rather listening and feeling toward him. There was a feathery balance here that made for vast discomfort.

He wanted to move away and get out from under this balancing, weighing.

The tall white-haired man said, “My name’s McClure.”

“Did you have any friends inside?” asked Lantry.

“No. A casual acquaintance. Awful accident.”

“Awful.”

They balanced each other. A beetle hissed by on the road with its seventeen tires whirling quietly. The moon showed a little town farther over in the black hills.

“I say,” said the man McClure.

“Yes.”

“Could you answer me a question?”

“Be glad to.” He loosened the knife in his coat pocket, ready.

“Is your name Lantry?” asked the man at last.

“Yes.”

“William Lantry?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re the man who came out of the Salem graveyard day before yesterday, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Good Lord, I’m glad to meet you, Lantry! We’ve been trying to find you for the past twenty-four hours!”

The man seized his hand, pumped it, slapped him on the back.

“What, what?” said Lantry.

“Good Lord, man, why did you run off? Do you realize what an instance this is? We want to talk to you!”

McClure was smiling, glowing. Another handshake, another slap. “I thought it was you!”

The man is mad, thought Lantry. Absolutely mad. Here I’ve toppled his incinerators, killed people, and he’s shaking my hand. Mad, mad!

“Will you come along to the Hall?” said the man, taking his elbow.

“Wh-what hall?” Lantry stepped back.

“The Science Hall, of course. It isn’t every year we get a real case of suspended animation. In small animals, yes, but in a man, hardly! Will you come?”

“What’s the act!” demanded Lantry, glaring. “What’s all this talk.”

“My dear fellow, what do you mean?” the man was stunned.

“Never mind. Is that the only reason you want to see me?”

“What other reason would there be, Mr. Lantry? You don’t know how glad I am to see you!” He almost did a little dance. “I suspected. When we were in there together. You being so pale and all. And then the way you smoked your cigarette, something about it, and a lot of other things, all subliminal. But it is you, isn’t it, it is you!”

“It is I. William Lantry.” Dryly.

“Good fellow! Come along!”

The beetle moved swiftly through the dawn streets. McClure talked rapidly.

Lantry sat, listening, astounded. Here was this fool, McClure, playing his cards for him! Here was this stupid scientist, or whatever, accepting him not as a suspicious baggage, a murderous item. Oh no! Quite the contrary!

Only as a suspended animation case was he considered! Not as a dangerous man at all. Far from it!

“Of course,” cried McClure, grinning. “You didn’t know where to go, whom to turn to. It was all quite incredible to you.”

“Yes.”

“I had a feeling you’d be there at the morgue tonight,” said McClure, happily.

“Oh?” Lantry stiffened.

“Yes. Can’t explain it. But you, how shall I put it? Ancient Americans? You had funny ideas on death. And you were among the dead so long, I felt you’d be drawn back by the accident, by the morgue and all. It’s not very logical. Silly, in fact. It’s just a feeling. I hate feelings but there it was. I came on a, I guess you’d call it a hunch, wouldn’t you?”

“You might call it that.”

“And there you were!”

“There I was,” said Lantry.

“Are you hungry?”

“I’ve eaten.”

“How did you get around?”

“I hitchhiked.”

“You what? ”

“People gave me rides on the road.”

“Remarkable.”

“I imagine it sounds that way.” He looked at the passing houses. “So this is the era of space travel, is it?”

“Oh, we’ve been traveling to Mars for some forty years now.”

“Amazing. And those big funnels, those towers in the middle of every town?”

“Those. Haven’t you heard? The Incinerators. Oh, of course, they hadn’t anything of that sort in your time. Had some bad luck with them. An explosion in Salem and one here, all in a forty-eight-hour period. You looked as if you were going to speak; what is it?”

“I was thinking,” said Lantry. “How fortunate I got out of my coffin when I did. I might well have been thrown into one of your Incinerators and burned up.”

“Quite.”

Lantry toyed with the dials on the beetle dash. He wouldn’t go to Mars. His plans were changed. If this fool simply refused to recognize an act of violence when he stumbled upon it, then let him be a fool. If they didn’t connect the two explosions with a man from the tomb, all well and good. Let them go on deluding themselves. If they couldn’t imagine someone being mean and nasty and murderous, heaven help them. He rubbed his hands with satisfaction. No, no Martian trip for you, as yet, Lantry lad. First, we’ll see what can be done boring from the inside. Plenty of time. The Incinerators can wait an extra week or so. One has to be subtle, you know. Any more immediate explosions might cause quite a ripple of thought.

McClure was gabbling wildly on.

“Of course, you don’t have to be examined immediately. You’ll want a rest. I’ll put you up at my place.”

“Thanks. I don’t feel up to being probed and pulled. Plenty of time in a week or so.”

They drew up before a house and climbed out.

“You want to sleep, naturally.”

“I’ve been asleep for centuries. Be glad to stay awake. I’m not a bit tired.”

“Good.” McClure let them into the house. He headed for the drink bar.

“A drink will fix us up.”

“You have one,” said Lantry. “Later for me. I just want to sit down.”

“By all means sit.” McClure mixed himself a drink. He looked around the room, looked at Lantry, paused for a moment with the drink in his hand, tilted his head to one side, and put his tongue in his cheek. Then he shrugged and stirred the drink. He walked slowly to a chair and sat, sipping the drink quietly. He seemed to be listening for something. “There are cigarettes on the table,” he said.

“Thanks.” Lantry took one and lit it and smoked it. He did not speak for some time.

Lantry thought, I’m taking this all too easily. Maybe I should kill and run. He’s the only one that has found me, yet. Perhaps this is all a trap.

Perhaps we’re simply sitting here waiting for the police. Or whatever in blazes they use for police these days. He looked at McClure. No. They weren’t waiting for police. They were waiting for something else.

McClure didn’t speak. He looked at Lantry’s face and he looked at Lantry’s hands. He looked at Lantry’s chest a long time, with easy quietness.

He sipped his drink. He looked at Lantry’s feet.

Finally he said, “Where’d you get the clothing?”

“I asked someone for clothes and they gave these things to me. Darned nice of them.”

“You’ll find that’s how we are in this world. All you have to do is ask.”

McClure shut up again. His eyes moved. Only his eyes and nothing else. Once or twice he lifted his drink.

A little clock ticked somewhere in the distance.

“Tell me about yourself, Mr. Lantry.”

“Nothing much to tell.”

“You’re modest.”

“Hardly. You know about the past. I know nothing of the future, or I should say ‘today’ and day before yesterday. You don’t learn much in a coffin.”

McClure did not speak. He suddenly sat forward in his chair and then leaned back and shook his head.

They’ll never suspect me, thought Lantry. They aren’t superstitious, they simply can’t believe in a dead man walking. Therefore, I’ll be safe. I’ll keep putting off the physical checkup. They’re polite. They won’t force me.

Then, I’ll work it so I can get to Mars. After that, the tombs, in my own good time, and the plan. God, how simple. How naïve these people are.

McClure sat across the room for five minutes. A coldness had come over him. The color was very slowly going from his face, as one sees the color of medicine vanishing as one presses the bulb at the top of a dropper. He leaned forward, saying nothing, and offered another cigarette to Lantry.

“Thanks.” Lantry took it. McClure sat deeply back into his easy chair, his knees folded one over the other. He did not look at Lantry, and yet somehow did. The feeling of weighing and balancing returned. McClure was like a tall thin master of hounds listening for something that nobody else could hear. There are little silver whistles you can blow that only dogs can hear. McClure seemed to be listening acutely, sensitively for such an invisible whistle, listening with his eyes and with his half-opened, dry mouth, and with his aching, breathing nostrils.

Lantry sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, sucked the cigarette, and, as many times, blew out, blew out, blew out. McClure was like some lean red-shagged hound listening and listening with a slick slide of eyes to one side, with an apprehension in that hand that was so precisely microscopic that one only sensed it, as one sensed the invisible whistle, with some part of the brain deeper than eyes or nostril or ear.

The room was so quiet the cigarette smoke made some kind of invisible noise rising to the ceiling. McClure was a thermometer, a chemist’s scales, a listening hound, a litmus paper, an antennae; all these. Lantry did not move. Perhaps the feeling would pass. It had passed before. McClure did not move for a long while and then, without a word, he nodded at the sherry decanter, and Lantry refused as silently. They sat looking but not looking at each other, again and away, again and away.

McClure stiffened slowly. Lantry saw the color getting paler in those lean cheeks, and the hand tightening on the sherry glass, and a knowledge come at last to stay, never to go away, into the eyes.

Lantry did not move. He could not. All of this was of such a fascination that he wanted only to see, to hear what would happen next. It was McClure’s show from here on in.

McClure said, “At first I thought it was the first psychosis I have ever seen. You, I mean. I thought, he’s convinced himself, Lantry’s convinced himself, he’s quite insane, he’s told himself to do all these little things.”

McClure talked as if in a dream, and continued talking and didn’t stop.

“I said to myself, he purposely doesn’t breathe through his nose. I watched your nostrils, Lantry. The little nostril hairs never once quivered in the last hour. That wasn’t enough. It was a fact I filed. It wasn’t enough. He breathes through his mouth, I said, on purpose. And then I gave you a cigarette and you sucked and blew, sucked and blew. None of it ever came out your nose. I told myself, well, that’s all right. He doesn’t inhale. Is that terrible, is that suspect? All in the mouth, all in the mouth. And then, I looked at your chest. I watched. It never moved up or down, it did nothing. He’s convinced himself, I said to myself. He’s convinced himself about all this. He doesn’t move his chest, except slowly, when he thinks you’re not looking.

That’s what I told myself.”

The words went on in the silent room, not pausing, still in a dream.

“And then I offered you a drink but you don’t drink and I thought, he doesn’t drink, I thought. Is that terrible? And I watched and watched you all this time.

Lantry holds his breath, he’s fooling himself. But now, yes, now, I understand it quite well. Now I know everything the way it is. Do you know how I know?

I do not hear breathing in the room. I wait and I hear nothing. There is no beat of heart or intake of lung. The room is so silent. Nonsense, one might say, but I know. At the Incinerator I know. There is a difference. You enter a room where a man is on a bed and you know immediately whether he will look up and speak to you or whether he will not speak to you ever again. Laugh if you will, but one can tell. It is a subliminal thing. It is the whistle the dog hears when no human hears. It is the tick of a clock that has ticked so long one no longer notices. Something is in a room when a man lives in it. Something is not in the room when a man is dead in it.”

McClure shut his eyes a moment. He put down his sherry glass. He waited a moment. He took up his cigarette and puffed it and then put it down in a black tray.

“I am alone in this room,” he said.

Lantry did not move.

“You are dead,” said McClure. “My mind does not know this. It is not a thinking thing. It is a thing of the senses and the subconscious. At first I thought, this man thinks he is dead, risen from the dead, a vampire. Is that not logical? Would not any man, buried as many centuries, raised in a superstitious, ignorant culture, think likewise of himself once risen from the tomb? Yes, that is logical. This man has hypnotized himself and fitted his bodily functions so that they would in no way interfere with his self-delusion, his great paranoia. He governs his breathing. He tells himself, I cannot hear my breathing, therefore I am dead. His inner mind censors the sound of breathing. He does not allow himself to eat or drink. These things he probably does in his sleep, with part of his mind, hiding the evidences of this humanity from his deluded mind at other times.”

McClure finished it. “I was wrong. You are not insane. You are not deluding yourself. Nor me. This is all very illogical and—I must admit—

almost frightening. Does that make you feel good, to think you frighten me? I have no label for you. You’re a very odd man, Lantry. I’m glad to have met you. This will make an interesting report indeed.”

“Is there anything wrong with me being dead?” said Lantry. “Is it a crime?”

“You must admit it’s highly unusual.”

“But, still now, is it a crime?” asked Lantry.

“We have no crime, no criminal court. We want to examine you, naturally, to find out how you have happened. It is like that chemical which, one minute is inert, the next is living cell. Who can say where what happened to what. You are that impossibility. It is enough to drive a man quite insane.”

“Will I be released when you are done fingering me?”

“You will not be held. If you don’t wish to be examined, you will not be. But I am hoping you will help by offering us your services.”

“I might,” said Lantry.

“But tell me,” said McClure. “What were you doing at the morgue?”

“Nothing.”

“I heard you talking when I came in.”

“I was merely curious.”

“You’re lying. That is very bad, Mr. Lantry. The truth is far better. The truth is, is it not, that you are dead and, being the only one of your sort, were lonely. Therefore you killed people to have company.”

“How does that follow?”

McClure laughed. “Logic, my dear fellow. Once I knew you were really dead, a moment ago, really a—what do you call it—a vampire (silly word!) I tied you immediately to the Incinerator blasts. Before that there was no reason to connect you. But once the one piece fell into place, the fact that you were dead, then it was simple to guess your loneliness, your hate, your envy, all of the tawdry motivations of a walking corpse. It took only an instant then to see the Incinerators blown to blazes, and then to think of you, among the bodies at the morgue, seeking help, seeking friends and people like yourself to work with—”

“Blast you!” Lantry was out of the chair. He was halfway to the other man when McClure rolled over and scuttled away, flinging the sherry decanter. With a great despair Lantry realized that, like an idiot, he had thrown away his one chance to kill McClure. He should have done it earlier. It had been Lantry’s one weapon, his safety margin. If people in a society never killed each other, they never suspected one another. You could walk up to any one of them and kill him.

“Come back here!” Lantry threw the knife.

McClure got behind a chair. The idea of flight, of protection, of fighting, was still new to him. He had part of the idea, but there was still a bit of luck on Lantry’s side if Lantry wanted to use it.

“Oh, no,” said McClure, holding the chair between himself and the advancing man. “You want to kill me. It’s odd, but true. I can’t understand it.

You want to cut me with that knife or something like that, and it’s up to me to prevent you from doing such an odd thing.”

“I will kill you!” Lantry let it slip out. He cursed himself. That was the worst possible thing to say.

Lantry lunged across the chair, clutching at McClure.

McClure was very logical. “It won’t do you any good to kill me. You know that.” They wrestled and held each other in a wild, toppling shuffle.

Tables fell over, scattering articles. “You remember what happened in the morgue?”

“I don’t care!” screamed Lantry.

“You didn’t raise those dead, did you?”

“I don’t care!” cried Lantry.

“Look here,” said McClure, reasonably. “There will never be any more like you, ever, there’s no use.”

“Then I’ll destroy all of you, all of you!” screamed Lantry.

“And then what? You’ll still be alone, with no more like you about.”

“I’ll go to Mars. They have tombs there. I’ll find more like myself!”

“No,” said McClure. “The executive order went through yesterday. All of the tombs are being deprived of their bodies. They’ll be burned in the next week.”

They fell together to the floor. Lantry got his hands on McClure’s throat.

“Please,” said McClure. “Do you see, you’ll die.”

“What do you mean?” cried Lantry.

“Once you kill all of us, and you’re alone, you’ll die! The hate will die. That hate is what moved you, nothing else! That envy moves you.

Nothing else! You’ll die, inevitably. You’re not immortal. You’re not even alive, you’re nothing but a moving hate.”

“I don’t care!” screamed Lantry, and began choking the man, beating his head with his fists, crouched on the defenseless body. McClure looked up at him with dying eyes.

The front door opened. Two men came in.

“I say,” said one of them. “What’s going on? A new game?”

Lantry jumped back and began to run.

“Yes, a new game!” said McClure, struggling up. “Catch him and you win!”

The two men caught Lantry. “We win,” they said.

“Let me go!” Lantry thrashed, hitting them across their faces, bringing blood.

“Hold him tight!” cried McClure.

They held him.

“A rough game, what?” one of them said. “What do we do now? ”

The beetle hissed along the shining road. Rain fell out of the sky and a wind ripped at the dark green wet trees. In the beetle, his hands on the half-wheel, McClure was talking. His voice was susurrant, a whispering, a hypnotic thing. The two other men sat in the back seat. Lantry sat, or rather lay, in the front seat, his head back, his eyes faintly open, the glowing green light of the dash dials showing on his cheeks. His mouth was relaxed. He did not speak.

McClure talked quietly and logically, about life and moving, about death and not moving, about the sun and the great sun Incinerator, about the emptied tombyard, about hatred and how hate lived and made a clay man live and move, and how illogical it all was, it all was, it all was. One was dead, was dead, was dead, that was all, all, all. One did not try to be otherwise. The car whispered on the moving road. The rain spattered gently on the windshield. The men in the back seat conversed quietly. Where were they going, going? To the Incinerator, of course. Cigarette smoke moved slowly up on the air, curling and tying into itself in gray loops and spirals. One was dead and must accept it.

Lantry did not move. He was a marionette, the strings cut. There was only a tiny hatred in his heart, in his eyes, like twin coals, feeble, glowing, fading.

I am Poe, he thought. I am all that is left of Edgar Allan Poe, and I am all that is left of Ambrose Bierce and all that is left of a man named Lovecraft.

I am a gray night bat with sharp teeth, and I am a square black monolith monster. I am Osiris and Bal and Set. I am the Necronomicon, the Book of the Dead. I am the house of Usher, falling into flame. I am the Red Death. I am the man mortared into the catacomb with a cask of Amontillado … I am a dancing skeleton. I am a coffin, a shroud, a lightning bolt reflected in an old house window. I am an autumn-empty tree, I am a rapping, flinging shutter. I am a yellowed volume turned by a claw hand. I am an organ played in an attic at midnight. I am a mask, a skull mask behind an oak tree on the last day of October. I am a poison apple bobbling in a water tub for child noses to bump at, for child teeth to snap … I am a black candle lighted before an inverted cross. I am a coffin lid, a sheet with eyes, a foot-step on a black stairwell. I am Dunsany and Machen and I am the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. I am The Monkey’s Paw and I am The Phantom Rickshaw. I am the Cat and the Canary, the Gorilla, the Bat. I am the ghost of Hamlet’s father on the castle wall.

All of these things am I. And now these last things will be burned.

While I lived they still lived. While I moved and hated and existed, they still existed. I am all that remembers them. I am all of them that still goes on, and will not go on after tonight. Tonight, all of us, Poe and Bierce and Hamlet’s father, we burn together. They will make a big heap of us and burn us like a bonfire, like things of Guy Fawkes’ day, gasoline, torches, cries, and all!

And what a wailing will we put up. The world will be clean of us, but in our going we shall say, oh what is the world like, clean of fear, where is the dark imagination from the dark time, the thrill and the anticipation, the suspense of old October, gone, never more to come again, flattened and smashed and burned by the rocket people, by the Incinerator people, destroyed and obliterated, to be replaced by doors that open and close and lights that go on and off without fear. If only you could remember how once we lived, what Halloween was to us, and what Poe was, and how we gloried in the dark morbidities. One more drink, dear friends, of Amontillado, before the burning. All of this, all, exists but in one last brain on earth. A whole world dying tonight. One more drink, pray.

“Here we are,” said McClure.

The Incinerator was brightly lighted. There was quiet music nearby.

McClure got out of the beetle, came around to the other side. He opened the door. Lantry simply lay there. The talking and the logical talking had slowly drained him of life. He was no more than wax now, with a small glow in his eyes. This future world, how the men talked to you, how logically they reasoned away your life. They wouldn’t believe in him. The force of their disbelief froze him. He could not move his arms or his legs. He could only mumble senselessly, coldly, eyes flickering.

McClure and the two others helped him out of the car, put him in a golden box, and rolled him on a roller table into the warm glowing interior of the building.

I am Edgar Allan Poe, I am Ambrose Bierce, I am Halloween, I am a coffin, a shroud, a Monkey’s Paw, a Phantom, a Vampire …

“Yes, yes,” said McClure, quietly, over him. “I know. I know.”

The table glided. The walls swung over him and by him, the music played. You are dead, you are logically dead.

I am Usher, I am the Maelstrom, I am the MS Found In A Bottle, I am the Pit and I am the Pendulum, I am the Telltale Heart, I am the Raven nevermore, nevermore.

“Yes,” said McClure, as they walked softly. “I know.”

“I am in the catacomb,” cried Lantry.

“Yes, the catacomb,” said the walking man over him.

“I am being chained to a wall, and there is no bottle of Amontillado here!” cried Lantry weakly, eyes closed.

“Yes,” someone said.

There was movement. The flame door opened.

“Now someone is mortaring up the cell, closing me in!”

“Yes, I know.” A whisper.

The golden box slid into the flame lock.

“I’m being walled in! A very good joke indeed! Let us be gone!” A wild scream and much laughter.

“We know, we understand …”

The inner flame lock opened. The golden coffin shot forth into flame.

“For the love of God, Montresor! For the love of God !”

The End

Conclusion

It’s a nice little story to read. A bit on the horrific side, but a good read never the less. I hope that you all enjoyed it.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Ray Bradbury Index here…

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Chrysalis by Ray Bradbury (Full text)

This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury. I dedicate it to the many, many MM readers that tell me that they have changed by visiting this site, and that they are all the better for it. They tell me stories, and adventures, and just amazing events that confirm that everyone is on the right track. This story is about a man who changes.

Chrysalis.

This story  is dedicated to youse guys. It’s my way of telling you that I recognize what you are tying to ell me, and that I am so gladdened by your stories. It’s just a fictional story, and you all, well, you all are the “real deal”.  But Ray Bradbury has such a way with the words, and he conjures up such imagery, that I think that this is a treasure.

A treasure that is worthy for you all.

Chrysalis

Rockwell didn’t like the room’s smell. Not so much McGuke’s odor of beer, or Hartley’s unwashed, tired smell—-but the sharp insect tang rising from Smith’s cold green-skinned body lying stiffly naked on the table. There was also a smell of oil and grease from the nameless machinery gleaming in one comer of the small room.

The man Smith was a corpse. Irritated, Rockwell rose from his chair and packed his stethoscope. “I must get back to the hospital. War rush. You understand, Hartley. Smith’s been dead eight hours. If you want further information call a post-mortem—”

He stopped as Hartley raised a trembling, bony hand. Hartley gestured at the corpse—this corpse with brittle hard green shell grown solid over every inch of flesh. “Use your stethoscope again, Rockwell. Just once more. Please.”

Rockwell wanted to complain, but instead he sighed, sat down, and used the stethoscope. You have to treat fellow doctors politely. You press your stethoscope into cold green flesh, pretending to listen—

The small, dimly lit room exploded around him. Exploded in one green cold pulsing. It hit Rockwell’s ears like fists. It hit him. He saw his own fingers jerk over the recumbent corpse.

He heard a pulse.

Deep in the dark body the heart beat once. It sounded like an echo in fathoms of sea water.

Smith was dead, unbreathing, mummified. But at the core of that deadness—his heart lived. Lived, stirring like a small unborn baby!

Rockwell’s crisp surgeon’s fingers darted rapidly. He bent his head. In the light it was dark-haired, with flecks of gray in it. He had an even, level, nice-looking face. About thirty-five. He listened again and again, with sweat coming cold on his smooth cheeks. The pulse was not to be believed.

One heartbeat every thirty-five seconds.

Smith’s respiration—how could you believe that, too one breath of air every four minutes. Lungcase movement imperceptible.

Body temperature?

Sixty degrees.

Hartley laughed. It was not a pleasant laugh. More like an echo that had gotten lost. “He’s alive,” he said tiredly. “Yes, he is. He almost fooled me many times. I injected adrenalin to speed that pulse, but it was no use. He’s been this way for twelve weeks. And I couldn’t stand keeping him a secret any longer. That’s why I phoned you, Rockwell. He’s—unnatural.

The impossibility of it overwhelmed Rockwell with an inexplicable excitement. He tried to lift Smiths’ eyelids. He couldn’t. They were webbed with epidermis. So were the lips. So were the nostrils. There was no way for Smith to breathe—

“Yet, he’s breathing.” Rockwell’s voice was numb. He dropped his stethoscope blankly, picked it up, and saw his fingers shaking.

Hartley grew tall, emaciated, nervous over the table. “Smith didn’t like my calling you. I called anyway. Smith warned me not to. Just an hour ago.”

Rockell’s eyes dilated into hot black circles. “How could he warn you? He can’t move.”

Hartley’s face, all razor-sharp bone, hard jaw, tight squinting gray eyes, twitched nervously. Smith— thinks. I know his thoughts. He’s afraid you’ll expose him to the world. He hates me. Why? I want to kill him, that’s why. Here.” Hardey fumbled blindly for a blue-steel revolver in his rumpled, stained coat. “Murphy. Take this. Take it before I use it on Smith’s foul body!”

Murphy pulled back, his thick red face afraid. “Don’t like guns. You take it, Rockwell.”

Like a scalpel, Rockwell made his voice slash. “Put the gun away, Hartley. After three months tending one patient you’ve got a psychological blemish. Sleep’ll help that.” He licked his lips. “What sort of disease has Smith got?”

Hartley swayed. His mouth moved words out slowly. Falling asleep on his feet, Rockwell realized. “Not diseased,” Hartley managed to say. “Don’t know what. But I resent him, like a kid resents the birth of a new brother or sister. He’s wrong. Help me. Help me, will you?”

“Of course.” Rockwell smiled. “My desert sanitarium’s the place to check him over, good. Why—why Smith’s the most incredible medical phenomenon in history. Bodies just don’t act this way!”

He got no further. Hartley had his gun pointed right at Rockwell’s stomach. “Wait. Wait. You—you’re not going to bury Smith! I thought you’d help me. Smith’s not healthy. I want him killed! He’s dangerous! I know he is!”

Rockwell blinked. Hartley was obviously psychoneurotic. Didn’t know what he was saying. Rockwell straightened his shoulders, feeling cool and calm inside. “Shoot Smith and I’ll turn you in for murder. You’re overworked mentally and physically. Put the gun away.”

They stared at one another.

Rockwell walked forward quietly and took the gun, patted Hartley understandingly on the shoulder, and gave the weapon to Murphy, who looked at it as if it would bite him. “Call the hospital. Murphy. I’m taking a week off. Maybe longer. Tell them I’m doing research at the sanitarium.”

A scowl formed in the red fat flesh of Murphy’s face. “What do I do with this gun?”

Hartley shut his teeth together, hard. “Keep it. You’ll want to use it—

later.”

Rockwell wanted to shout it to the world that he was sole possessor of the most incredible human in history. The sun was bright in the desert sanitarium room where

Smith lay, not saying a word, on his table; his handsome face frozen into a green, passionless expression.

Rockwell walked into the room quietly. He used the stethoscope on the green chest. It scraped, making the noise of metal tapping a beetle’s carapace.

McGuire stood by, eyeing the body dubiously, smelling of several recently acquired beers.

Rockwell listened intently. “The ambulance ride may have jolted him.

No use taking a chance—”

Rockwell cried out.

Heavily, McGuire lumbered to his side. ‘What’s wrong?”

“Wrong?” Rockwell stared about in desperation. He made one hand into a fist. “Smith’s dying!”

“How do you know? Hartley said Smith plays possum. He’s fooled you again—”

“No!” Rockwell worked furiously over the body, injecting drugs. Any drugs. Swearing at the top of his voice. After all this trouble, he couldn’t lose Smith. No, not now.

Shaking, jarring, twisting deep down inside, going completely liquidly mad. Smith’s body sounded like dim volcanic tides bursting.

Rockwell fought to remain calm. Smith was a case unto himself.

Normal treatment did nothing for him. What then? What?

Rockwell stared. Sunlight gleamed on Smith’s hard flesh. Hot sunlight. It flashed, glinting off the stethoscope tip. The sun. As he watched, clouds shifted across the sky outside, taking the sun away. The room darkened. Smith’s body shook into silence. The volcanic tides died.

“McGuire! Pull the blinds! Before the sun comes back!”

McGuire obeyed.

Smith’s heart slowed down to its sluggish, infrequent breathing.

“Sunlight’s bad for Smith. It counteracts something. I don’t know what or why, but it’s not good—” Rockwell relaxed. “Lord, I wouldn’t want to lose Smith. Not for anything. He’s different, making his own standards, doing things men have never done. Know something, Murphy?”

“What?”

“Smith’s not in agony. He’s not dying either. He wouldn’t be better off dead, no matter what Hartley says. Last night as I arranged Smith on the stretcher, readying him for his trip to this sanitarium, I realized, suddenly, that Smith likes me.”

“Gah. First Hartley. Now you. Did Smith tell you that?”

“He didn’t tell me. But he’s not unconscious under all that hard skin.

He’s aware. Yes, that’s it. He’s aware.”

“Pure and simply—he’s petrifying. He’ll die. It’s been weeks since he was fed. Hartley said so. Hartley fed him intravenously until the skin toughened so a needle couldn’t poke through it.”

Whining, the cubicle door swung slowly open. Rockwell started.

Hartley, his sharp face relaxed after hours of sleep, his eyes still a bitter gray, hostile, stood tall in the door. “If you’ll leave the room,” he said, quietly, “I’ll destroy Smith in a very few seconds. Well?”

“Don’t come a step closer.” Rockwell walked, feeling irritation, to Hartley’s side. “Every time you visit, you’ll have to be searched. Frankly, I don’t trust you.” There were no weapons. “Why didn’t you tell me about the sunlight?”

“Eh?” Soft and slow Hartley said it. “Oh—yes. I forgot. I tried shifting Smith weeks ago. Sunlight struck him and he began really dying.

Naturally, I stopped trying to move him. Smith seemed to know what was coming, vaguely. Perhaps he planned it; I’m not sure. While he was still able to talk and eat ravenously, before his body stiffened completely, he warned me not to move him for a twelve-week period. Said he didn’t like the sun.

Said it would spoil things. I thought he was joking. He wasn’t. He ate like an animal, a hungry, wild animal, fell into a coma, and here he is—” Hartley swore under his breath. “I’d rather hoped you’d leave him in the sun long enough to kill him inadvertently.”

McGuire shifted his two hundred fifty pounds. “Look here, now.

What if we catch Smith’s disease?”

Hartley looked at the body, his pupils shrinking. “Smith’s not diseased. Don’t you recognize degeneration when you see it? It’s like cancer.

You don’t catch it, you inherit a tendency. I didn’t begin to fear and hate Smith until a week ago when I discovered he was breathing and existing and thriving with his nostrils and mouth sealed. It can’t happen. It mustn’t happen.”

McGuire’s voice trembled. “What if you and I and Rockwell all turn green and a plague sweeps the country—what then?”

“Then,” replied Rockwell, “if I’m wrong, perhaps I am, I’ll die. But it doesn’t worry me in the least.”

He turned back to Smith and went on with his work.

A bell. A bell. Two bells, two bells. A dozen bells, a hundred bells.

Ten thousand and a million clangorous, hammering metal dinning bells. All born at once in the silence, squalling, screaming, hurting echoes, bruising ears!

Ringing, chanting with loud and soft, tenor and bass, low and high voices. Great-armed clappers knocking the shells and ripping air with the thrusting din of sound!

With all those bells ringing, Smith could not immediately know where he was. He knew that he could not see, because his eyelids were sealed tight, knew he could not speak because his lips had grown together. His ears were clamped shut, but the bells hammered nevertheless.

He could not see. But yes, yes, he could, and it was like inside a small dark red cavern, as if his eyes were turned inward upon his skull. And Smith tried to twist his tongue, and suddenly, trying to scream, he knew his tongue was gone, that the place where it used to be was vacant, an itching spot that wanted a tongue but couldn’t have it just now.

No tongue. Strange. Why? Smith tried to stop the bells. They ceased, blessing him with a silence that wrapped him up in a cold blanket. Things were happening. Happening.

Smith tried to twitch a finger, but he had no control. A foot, a leg, a toe, his head, everything. Nothing moved. Torso, limbs—immovable, frozen in a concrete coffin.

A moment later came the dread discovery that he was no longer breathing. Not with his lungs, anyway.

 

“BECAUSE I HAVE NO LUNGS!” he screamed. Inwardly he screamed and that mental scream was drowned, webbed, clotted, and journeyed drowsily down in a red, dark tide. A red drowsy tide that sleepily swathed the scream, garroted it, took it all away, making Smith rest easier.

I am not afraid, he thought. I understand that which I do not understand. I understand that I do not fear, yet know not the reason.

No tongue, no nose, no lungs.

But they would come later. Yes, they would. Things were—

happening.

Through the pores of his shelled body air slid, like rain needling each portion of him, giving life. Breathing through a billion gills, breathing oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and using it all. Wondering.

Was his heart still beating?

But yes, it was beating. Slow, slow, slow. A red dim susurrance, a flood, a river surging around him, slow, slower, slower. So nice.

So restful.

The jigsaw pieces fitted together faster as the days drifted into weeks.

McGuire helped. A retired surgeon-medico, he’d been Rockwell’s secretary for a number of years. Not much help, but good company.

Rockwell noted that McGuire joked gruffly about Smith, nervously; and a lot. Trying to be calm. But one day McGuire stopped, thought it over, and drawled, “Hey, it just came to me! Smith’s alive. He should be dead. But he’s alive. Good God!”

Rockwell laughed. “What in blazes do you think I’m working on? I’m bringing an X-ray machine out next week so I can find out what’s going on inside Smith’s shell.” Rockwell jabbed with a hypo needle. It broke on the hard shell.

Rockwell tried another needle, and another, until finally he punctured, drew blood, and placed the slides under the microscope for study. Hours later he calmly shoved a serum test under McGuire’s red nose, and spoke quickly.

“Lord, I can’t believe it. His blood’s germicidal. I dropped a streptococci colony into it and the strep was annihilated in eight seconds! You could inject every known disease into Smith and he’d destroy them all, thrive on them!”

It was only a matter of hours until other discoveries. It kept Rockwell sleepless, tossing at night, wondering, theorizing the titanic ideas over and over. For instance—

Hartley’d fed Smith so many cc’s of blood-food every day of his illness until recently. NONE OF THAT FOOD HAD EVER BEEN

ELIMINATED. All of it had been stored, not in bulk-fats, but in a perfectly abnormal solution, an x-liquid contained in high concentrate form in Smith’s blood. An ounce of it would keep a man well fed for three days. This x-liquid circulated through the body until it was actually needed, when it was seized upon and used. More serviceable than fat. Much more!

Rockwell glowed with his discovery. Smith had enough x-liquid stored in him to last months and months more. Self-sustaining.

McGuire, when told, contemplated his paunch sadly.

“I wish I stored my food that way.”

That wasn’t all. Smith needed little air. What air he had he seemed to acquire by an osmotic process through his skin. And he used every molecule of it. No waste.

“And,” finished Rockwell, “eventually Smith’s heart might even take vacations from beating, entirely!”

“Then he’d be dead,” said McGuire.

“To you and I, yes. To Smith—maybe. Just maybe. Think of it, McGuire. Collectively, in Smith, we have a self-purifying blood stream demanding no replenishment but an interior one for months, having little breakdown and no elimination of wastes whatsoever because every molecule is utilized, self-evolving, and fatal to any and all microbic life. All this, and Hartley speaks of degeneration!”

Hartley was irritated when he heard of the discoveries. But he still insisted that Smith was degenerating. Dangerous.

McGuire tossed his two cents in. “How do we know that this isn’t some super microscopic disease that annihilates all other bacteria while it works on its victim. After all—malarial fever is sometimes used surgically to cure syphilis; why not a new bacillus that conquers all?”

“Good point,” said Rockwell. “But we’re not sick, are we?”

“It may have to incubate in our bodies.”

“A typical old-fashioned doctor’s response. No matter what happens to a man, he’s ‘sick’—if he varies from the norm. That’s your idea, Hartley,”

declared Rockwell, “not mine. Doctors aren’t satisfied unless they diagnose and label each case. Well, I think that Smith’s healthy; so healthy you’re afraid of him.”

“You’re crazy,” said McGuire.

“Maybe. But I don’t think Smith needs medical interference. He’s working out his own salvation. You believe he’s degenerating. I say he’s growing.’*

“Look at Smith’s skin,” complained McGuire.

“Sheep in wolfs clothing. Outside, the hard, brittle epidermis. Inside, ordered regrowth, change. Why? I’m on the verge of knowing. These changes inside Smith are so violent that they need a shell to protect their action. And as for you. Hartley, answer me truthfully, when you were young, were you afraid of insects, spiders, things like that?”

“Yes.”

“There you are. A phobia. A phobia you use against Smith. That explains your distaste for Smith’s change.”

In the following weeks, Rockwell went back over Smith’s life carefully. He visited the electronics lab where Smith had been employed and fallen ill. He probed the room where Smith had spent the first weeks of his

“illness” with Hartley in attendance. He examined the machinery there.

Something about radiations

While he was away from the sanitarium, Rockwell locked Smith tightly, and had McGuire guard the door in case Hartley got any unusual ideas.

The details of Smith’s twenty-three years were simple. He had worked for five years in the electronics lab, experimenting. He had never been seriously sick in his life.

And as the days went by Rockwell took long walks in the dry-wash near the sanitarium, alone. It gave him time to think and solidify the incredible theory that was becoming a unit in his brain.

And one afternoon he paused by a night-blooming jasmine outside the sanitarium, reached up, smiling, and plucked a dark shining object off of a high branch. He looked at the object and tucked it in his pocket. Then he walked into the sanitarium.

He summoned McGuire in off the veranda. McGuire came. Hartley trailed behind, threatening, complaining. The three of them sat in the living quarters of the building.

Rockwell told them.

“Smith’s not diseased. Germs can’t live in him. He’s not inhabited by banshees or weird monsters who’ve ‘taken over’ his body. I mention this to show I’ve left no stone untouched. I reject all normal diagnoses of Smith. I offer the most important, the most easily accepted possibility of—delayed hereditary mutation.”

“Mutation?” McGuire’s voice was funny.

Rockwell held up the shiny dark object in the light.

“I found this on a bush in the garden. It’ll illustrate my theory to perfection. After studying Smith’s symptoms, examining his laboratory, and considering several of these”—he twirled the dark object in his fingers— “I’m certain. It’s metamorphosis. It’s regeneration, change, mutation after birth.

Here. Catch. This is Smith.”

He tossed the object to Hartley. Hartley caught it.

“This is the chrysalis of a caterpillar,” said Hartley.

Rockwell nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“You don’t mean to infer that Smith’s a— chrysalis?”

“I’m positive of it,” replied Rockwell.

Rockwell stood over Smith’s body in the darkness of evening. Hartley and McGuire sat across the patient’s room, quiet, listening. Rockwell touched Smith softly. “Suppose that there’s more to life than just being born, living seventy years, and dying. Suppose there’s one more great step up in man’s existence, and Smith has been the first of us to make that step.

“Looking at a caterpillar, we see what we consider a static object. But it changes to a butterfly. Why? There are no final theories explaining it. It’s progress, mainly. The pertinent thing is that a supposedly unchangeable object weaves itself into an intermediary object, wholly unrecognizable, a chrysalis, and emerges a butterfly. Outwardly the chrysalis looks dead. This is misdirection. Smith has misdirected us, you see. Outwardly, dead. Inwardly, fluids whirlpool, reconstruct, rush about with wild purpose. From grub to mosquito, from caterpillar to butterfly, from Smith to—?”

“Smith a chrysalis?” McGuire laughed heavily.

“Yes.”

“Humans don’t work that way.”

“Stop it, McGuire. This evolutionary step’s too great for your comprehension. Examine this body and tell me anything else. Skin, eyes, breathing, blood flow. Weeks of assimilating food for his brittle hibernation.

Why did he eat all that food, why did he need that x-liquid in his body except for his metamorphosis? And the cause of it all was—eradiations. Hard radiations from Smith’s laboratory equipment. Planned or accidental I don’t know. It touched some part of his essential gene-structure, some part of the evolutionary structure of man that wasn’t scheduled for working for thousands of years yet, perhaps.”

“Do you think that some day all men—?”

“The maggot doesn’t stay in the stagnant pond, the grub in the soil, or the caterpillar on a cabbage leaf. They change, spreading across space in waves.

“Smith’s the answer to the problem ‘What happens next for man, where do we go from here?’ We’re faced with the blank wall of the universe and the fatality of living in that universe, and man as he is today is not prepared to go against the universe. The least exertion tires man, overwork kills his heart, disease his body. Maybe Smith will be prepared to answer the philosophers’ problem of life’s purpose. Maybe he can give it new purpose.

“Why, we’re just petty insects, all of us, fighting on a pinhead planet.

Man isn’t meant to remain here and be sick and small and weak, but he hasn’t discovered the secret of the greater knowledge yet.

“But—change man. Build your perfect man. Your— your superman, if you like. Eliminate petty mentality, give him complete physiological, neurological, psychological control of himself: give him clear, incisive channels of thought, give him an indefatigable blood stream, a body that can go months without outside food, that can adjust to any climate anywhere and kill any disease. Release man from the shackles of flesh and flesh misery and then he’s no longer a poor, petty little man afraid to dream because he knows his frail body stands between him and the fulfillment of dreams, then he’s ready to wage war, the only war worth waging—the conflict of man reborn and the whole confounded universe!”

Breathless, voice hoarse, heart pounding, Rockwell tensed over Smith, placed his hands admiringly, firmly on the cold length of the chrysalis and shut his eyes. The power and drive and belief in Smith surged through him. He was right. He was right. He knew he was right. He opened his eyes and looked at McGuire and Hartley who were mere shadows in the dim shielded light of the room.

After a silence of several seconds. Hartley snuffed out his cigarette. “I don’t believe that theory.”

McGuire said, “How do youknow Smith’s not just a mess of jelly inside? Did you X-ray him?”

“I couldn’t risk it, it might interfere with his change, like the sunlight did.”

“So he’s going to be a superman? What will he look like?”

“We’ll wait and see.”

“Do you think he can hear us talking about him now?”

 

“Whether or not he can, there’s one thing certain— we’re sharing a secret we weren’t intended to know. Smith didn’t plan on myself and McGuire entering the case. He had to make the most of it. But a superman doesn’t like people to know about him. Humans have a nasty way of being envious, jealous, and hateful. Smith knew he wouldn’t be safe if found out. Maybe that explains your hatred, too. Hartley.”

They all remained silent, listening. Nothing sounded. Rockwell’s blood whispered in his temples, that was all. There was Smith, no longer Smith, a container labeled Smith, its contents unknown.

“If what you say is true,” said Hartley, “then indeed we should destroy him. Think of the power over the world he would have. And if it affects his brain as I think it will affect it—he’ll try to kill us when he escapes because we are the only ones who know about him. He’ll hate us for prying.”

Rockwell said it easily. “I’m not afraid.”

Hartley remained silent. His breathing was harsh and loud in the room.

Rockwell came around the table, gesturing.

“I think we’d better say good-night now, don’t you?”

The thin rain swallowed Hartley’s car. Rockwell closed the door, instructed McGuire to sleep downstairs tonight on a cot fronting Smith’s room, and then he walked upstairs to bed.

Undressing, he had time to conjure over all the unbelievable events of the passing weeks. A superman. Why not? Efficiency, strength—

He slipped into bed.

When. When does Smith emerge from his chrysalis? When?

The rain drizzled quietly on the roof of the sanitarium.

McGuire lay in the middle of the sound of rain and the earthquaking of thunder, slumbering on the cot, breathing heavy breaths. Somewhere, a door creaked, but McGuire breathed on. Wind gusted down the hall.

McGuire granted and rolled over. A door closed softly and the wind ceased.

Footsteps tread softly on the deep carpeting. Slow footsteps, aware and alert and ready. Footsteps. McGuire blinked his eyes and opened them.

In the dim light a figure stood over him.

Upstairs, a single light m the hall thrust down a yellow shaft near McGuire’s cot.

An odor of crashed insect filled the air. A hand moved. A voice started to speak.

McGuire screamed.

Because the hand that moved into the light was green.

Green.

“Smith!’

McGuire flung himself ponderously down the hall, yelling.

“He’s walking! He can’t walk, but he’s walking!”

The door rammed open under McGuire’s bulk. Wind and rain shrieked in around him and he was gone into the storm, babbling.

In the hall, the figure was motionless. Upstairs a door opened swiftly and Rockwell ran down the steps. The green hand moved back out of the light behind the figure’s back.

“Who is it?” Rockwell paused halfway.

The figure stepped into the light.

Rockwell’s eyes narrowed.

“Hartley! What are you doing back here?”

“Something happened,” said Hartley. “You’d better get McGuire. He ran out in the rain babbling like a fool.”

Rockwell kept his thoughts to himself. He searched Hartley swiftly with one glance and then ran down the hall and out into the cold wind.

“McGuire! McGuire, come back you idiot!” The rain fell on Rockwell’s body as he ran. He found McGuire about a hundred yards from the sanitarium, blubbering,

“Smith—Smith’s walking .. .” “Nonsense. Hartley came back, that’s all.”

“I saw a green hand. It moved.”

“You dreamed.”

“No. No.” McGuire’s face was flabby pale, with water on it. “I saw a green hand, believe me. Why did Hartley come back? He—”

At the mention of Hartley’s name, full comprehension came smashing to Rockwell. Fear leaped through his mind, a mad blur of warning, a jagged edge of silent screaming for help.

“Hartley!”

Shoving McGuire abruptly aside, Rockwell twisted and leaped back toward the sanitarium, shouting. Into the hall, down the hall—

Smith’s door was broken open.

Gun in hand, Hartley was in the center of the room. He turned at the noise of Rockwell’s running. They both moved simultaneously. Hartley fired his gun and Rockwell pulled the light switch.

Darkness. Flame blew across the room, profiling Smith’s rigid body like a flash photo. Rockwell jumped at the flame. Even as he jumped, shocked deep, realizing why Hartley had returned. In that instant before the lights blinked out Rockwell had a glimpse of Hartley’s fingers.

They were a brittle mottled green.

Fists then. And Hartley collapsing as the lights came on, and McGuire, dripping wet at the door, shook out the words, “Is—is Smith killed?”

Smith wasn’t harmed. The shot had passed over him.

“This fool, this fool,” cried Rockwell, standing over Hartley’s numbed shape. “Greatest case in history and he tries to destroy it!”

Hartley came around, slowly. “I should’ve known. Smith warned you.”

“Nonsense, he—” Rockwell stopped, amazed. Yes. That sudden premonition crashing into his mind. Yes. Then he glared at Hartley. “Upstairs with you. You’re being locked in for the night. McGuire, you, too. So you can watch him.”

McGuire croaked. “Hartley’s hand. Look at it. It’s green. It was Hartley in the hall—not Smith!”

Hartley stared at his fingers. “Pretty, isn’t it?” he said, bitterly. “I was in range of those radiations for a long time at the start of Smith’s illness. I’m going to be a—creature—like Smith. It’s been this way for several days. I kept it hidden. I tried not to say anything. Tonight, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and I came back to destroy Smith for what he’s done to me …”

A dry noise racked, dryly, splitting the air. The three of them froze.

Three tiny flakes of Smith’s chrysalis flicked up and then spiraled down to the floor.

Instantly, Rockwell was to the table, and gaping.

“It’s starting to crack. From the collar-bone to the navel, a miscroscopic fissure! He’ll be out of his chrysalis soon!”

McGuire’s jowls trembled. “And then what?”

Hartley’s words were bitter sharp. “We’ll have a superman. Question: what does a superman look like? Answer: nobody knows.”

Another crust of flakes crackled open.

McGuire shivered. “Will you try to talk to him?”

“Certainly.”

“Since when do—butterflies—speak?”

“Oh, Good God, McGuire!”

With the two others securely imprisoned upstairs, Rockwell locked himself into Smith’s room and bedded down on a cot, prepared to wait through the long wet night, watching, listening, thinking.

Watching the tiny flakes flicking off the crumbling skin of chrysalis as the Unknown within struggled quietly outward.

Just a few more hours to wait. The rain slid over the house, pattering.

What would Smith look like? A change in the earcups perhaps for greater hearing; extra eyes, maybe; a change in the skull structure, the facial setup, the bones of the body, the placement of organs, the texture of skin, a million and one changes.

Rockwell grew tired and yet was afraid to sleep. Eyelids heavy, heavy. What if he was wrong? What if his theory was entirely disjointed?

 

What if Smith was only so much moving jelly inside? What if Smith was mad, insane—so different that he’d be a world menace?

No. No. Rockwell shook his head groggily. Smith was perfect.

Perfect. There’d be no room for evil thought in Smith. Perfect.

The sanitarium was death quiet. The only noise was the faint crackle of chrysalis flakes skimming to the hard floor …

Rockwell slept. Sinking into the darkness that blotted out the room as dreams moved in upon him. Dreams in which Smith arose, walked in stiff, parched gesticulations and Hartley, screaming, wielded an ax, shining, again and again into the green armor of the creature and hacked it into liquid horror.

Dreams in which McGuire ran babbling through a rain of blood. Dreams in which—

Hot sunlight. Hot sunlight all over the room. It was morning.

Rockwell rubbed his eyes, vaguely troubled by the fact that someone had raised the blinds. Someone had—he leaped! Sunlight! There was no way for the blinds to be up. They’d been down for weeks! He cried out.

The door was open. The sanitarium was silent. Hardly daring to turn his head, Rockwell glanced at the table. Smith should have been lying there.

He wasn’t.

There was nothing but sunlight on the table. That— and a few remnants of shattered chrysalis. Remnants.

Brittle shards, a discarded profile cleft in two pieces, a shell segment that had been a thigh, a trace of arm, a splint of chest—these were the fractured remains of Smith!

Smith was gone. Rockwell staggered to the table, crushed. Scrabbling like a child among the rattling papyrus of skin. Then he swung about, as if drunk, and swayed out of the room and pounded up the stairs, shouting:

“Hartley! What did you do with him? Hartley! Did you think you could kill him, dispose of his body, and leave a few bits of shell behind to throw me off trail?”

The door to the room where McGuire and Hartley had slept was locked. Fumbling, Rockwell unlocked it. Both McGuire and Hartley were there.

“You’re here,” said Rockwell, dazed. “You weren’t downstairs, then.

Or did you unlock the door, come down, break in, kill Smith and—no, no.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Smith’s gone! McGuire, did Hartley move out of this room?”

“Not all night.’*

“Then—there’s only one explanation—Smith emerged from his chrysalis and escaped during the night! I’ll never see him, I’ll never get to see him, damn it! What a fool I was to sleep!”

“That settles it!” declared Hartley. “The man’s dangerous or he would have stayed and let us see him! God only knows what he is.”

“We’ve got to search, then. He can’t be far off. We’ve got to search then! Quick now. Hartley. McGuire!”

McGuire sat heavily down. “I won’t budge. Let him find himself. I’ve had enough.”

Rockwell didn’t wait to hear more. He went downstairs with Hartley close after him. McGuire puffed down a few moments later.

Rockwell moved wildly down the hall, halted at the wide windows that overlooked the desert and the mountains with morning shining over them.

He squinted out, and wondered if there was any chance at all of finding Smith. The first superbeing. The first perhaps in a new long line. Rockwell sweated. Smith wouldn’t leave without revealing himself to at least Rockwell.

He couldn’t leave. Or could he?

The kitchen door swung open, slowly.

A foot stepped through the door, followed by another. A hand lifted against the wall. Cigarette smoke moved from pursed lips.

“Somebody looking for me?”

Stunned, Rockwell turned. He saw the expression on Hartley’s face, heard McGuire choke with surprise. The three of them spoke one word together, as if given their cue:

“Smith.”

Smith exhaled cigarette smoke. His face was red-pink as he had been sunburnt, his eyes were glittering blue.

He was barefoot and his nude body was attired in one of Rockwell’s old robes.

“Would you mind telling me where I am? What have I been doing for the last three or four months? Is this a—hospital or isn’t it?”

Dismay slammed Rockwell’s mind, hard. He swallowed.

“Hello. I. That is— Don’t you remember—anything?”

Smith displayed his fingertips. “I recall turning green, if that’s what you mean. Beyond that—nothing.” He raked his pink hand through his nut-brown hair with the vigor of a creature newborn and glad to breathe again.

Rockwell slumped back against the wall. He raised his hands, with shock, to his eyes, and shook his head. Not believing what he saw he said,

“What time did you come out of the chrysalis?’*

“What time did I come out of—what?”

Rockwell took him down the hall to the next room and pointed to the table.

“I don’t see what you mean,” said Smith, frankly sincere. “I found myself standing in this room half an hour ago, stark naked.”

“That’s all?” said McGuire, hopefully. He seemed relieved.

Rockwell explained the origin of the chrysalis on the table.

Smith frowned. “That’s ridiculous. Who are you?”

Rockwell introduced the others.

Smith scowled at Hartley. “When I first was sick you came, didn’t you. I remember. At the radiations plant. But this is silly. What disease was it?”

Hartley’s cheek muscles were taut wire. “No disease. Don’t you know anything about it?”

“I find myself with strange people in a strange sanitarium. I find myself naked in a room with a man sleeping on a cot. I walk around the sanitarium, hungry. I go to the kitchen, find food, eat, hear excited voices, and then am accused of emerging from a chrysalis. What am I supposed to think?

Thanks, by the way, for this robe, for food, and the cigarette I borrowed. I didn’t want to wake you at first, Mr. Rockwell. I didn’t know who you were and you looked dead tired.”

“Oh, that’s all right.’ Rockwell wouldn’t let himself believe it.

Everything was crumbling. With every word Smith spoke, his hopes were pulled apart like the crumpled chrysalis. “How do you feel?”

“Fine. Strong. Remarkable, when you consider how long I was under.”

“Very remarkable,” said Hartley.

“You can imagine how I felt when I saw the calendar. All those months—crack—gone. I wondered what I’d been doing all that time.”

“So have we.”

McGuire laughed. “Oh, leave him alone, Hartley. Just because you hated him—”

“Hated?” Smith’s brows went up. “Me? Why?”

“Here. This is why!” Hartley thrust his fingers out “Your damned radiations. Night after night sitting by you in your laboratory. What can I do about it?”

“Hartley,” warned Rockwell. “Sit down. Be quiet.”

“I won’t sit down and I won’t be quiet! Are you both fooled by this imitation of a man, this pink fellow who’s carrying on the greatest hoax in history? If you had any sense you’d destroy Smith before he escapes!”

Rockwell apologized for Hartley’s outburst.

Smith shook his head. “No, let him talk. What’s this about?”

“You know already!” shouted Hartley, angrily. “You’ve lain there for months, listening, planning. You can’t fool me. You’ve got Rockwell bluffed, disappointed. He expected you to be a superman. Maybe you are. But whatever you are, you’re not Smith any more. Not any more. It’s just another of your misdirections. We weren’t supposed to know all about you, and the world shouldn’t know about you. You could kill us, easily, but you’d prefer to stay and convince us that you’re normal. That’s the best way. You could have escaped a few minutes ago, but that would have left the seeds of suspicion behind. Instead, you waited, to convince us that you’re normal.”

“He is normal,” complained McGuire.

“No he’s not. His mind’s different. He’s clever.’*

“Give him word association tests then,” said McGuire.

“He’s too clever for that, too.”

“It’s very simple, then. We take blood tests, listen to his heart, and inject serums into him.”

Smith looked dubious. “I feel like an experiment, but if you really want to. This is silly.”

That shocked Hartley. He looked at Rockwell. “Get the hypos,” he said.

Rockwell got the hypos, thinking. Now, maybe after all, Smith was a superman. His blood. That super-blood. Its ability to kill germs. His heartbeat.

His breathing. Maybe Smith was a superman and didn’t know it. Yes. Yes, maybe—

Rockwell drew blood from Smith and slid it under a microscope. His shoulders sagged. It was normal blood. When you dropped germs into it the germs took a normal length of time to die. The blood was no longer super germicidal. The x-liquid, too, was gone. Rockwell sighed miserably. Smith’s temperature was normal. So was his pulse. His sensory and nervous system responded according to rule.

“Well, that takes care of that,” said Rockwell, softly.

Hartley sank into a chair, eyes widened, holding his head between bony fingers. He exhaled. “I’m sorry. I guess my—mind—it just imagined things. The months were so long. Night after night. I got obsessed, and afraid.

I’ve made a fool out of myself. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” He stared at his green fingers. “But what about myself?”

Smith said, “I recovered. You’ll recover, too, I guess. I can sympathize with you. But it wasn’t bad … I don’t really recall anything.”

Hartley relaxed. “But—yes I guess you’re right. I don’t like the idea of my body getting hard, but it can’t be helped. I’ll be all right.”

Rockwell was sick. The tremendous letdown was too much for him.

The intense drive, the eagerness, the hunger and curiosity, the fire, had all sunk within him.

So this was the man from the chrysalis? The same man who had gone m. All this waiting and wondering for nothing.

He gulped a breath of air, tried to steady his innermost, racing thoughts. Turmoil. This pink-cheeked, fresh-voiced man who sat before him smoking calmly, was no more than a man who had suffered some partial skin petrification, and whose glands had gone wild from radiation, but, nevertheless, just a man now and nothing more. Rockwell’s mind, his overimaginative, fantastic mind had seized upon each facet of the illness and built it into a perfect organism of wishful thinking. Rockwell was deeply shocked, deeply stirred and disappointed.

The question of Smith’s living without food, his pure blood, low temperature, and the other evidences of superiority were now fragments of a strange illness. An illness and nothing more. Something that was over, down and gone and left nothing behind but brittle scraps on a sunlit tabletop.

There’d be a chance to watch Hartley now, if his illness progressed, and report the new sickness to the medical world.

But Rockwell didn’t care about illness. He cared about perfection.

And that perfection had been split and ripped and torn and it was gone. His dream^ was gone. His supercreature was gone. He didn’t care if the whole world went hard, green, brittle-mad now.

Smith was shaking hands all around. “I’d better get back to Los Angeles. Important work for me to do at the plant. I have my old job waiting for me. Sorry I can’t stay on. You understand.”

“You should stay on and rest a few days, at least,” said Rockwell. He hated to see the last wisp of his dream vanish.

“No thanks. I’ll drop by your office in a week or so for another checkup, though. Doctor, if you like? I’ll drop in every few weeks for the next year or so so you can check me, yes?”

“Yes. Yes,’smith. Do that, will you please? I’d like to talk your illness over with you. You’re lucky to be alive.”

McGuire said, happily, “I’ll drive you to L.A.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll walk to Tujunga and get a cab. I want to walk. It’s been so long, I want to see what it feels like.”

Rockwell lent him an old pair of shoes and an old suit of clothes.

“Thanks, Doctor. I’ll pay you what I owe you as soon as possible.”

“You don’t owe me a penny. It was interesting.”

“Well, good-bye, Doctor. Mr. McGuire. Hartley.”

“Good-bye, Smith.”

“Good-bye.”

Smith walked down the path to the dry wash, which was already baked dry by the late afternoon sun. He walked easily and happily and whistled. I wish I could whistle now, thought Rockwell tiredly.

Smith turned once, waved to them, and then he strode up the hillside and went on over it toward the distant city.

Rockwell watched him go as a small child watches his favorite sand castle eroded and annihilated by the waves of the sea. “I can’t believe it,” he said, over and over again. “I can’t believe it. The whole thing’s ending so soon, so abruptly for me. I’m dull and empty inside.”

“Everything looks rosy to me!” chuckled McGuire happily.

 

Hartley stood in the sun. His green hands hung softly at his side and his white face was really relaxed for the first time in months, Rockwell realized. Hartley said, softly,

“I’ll come out all right. I’ll come out all right. Oh, thank God for that.

Thank God for that. I won’t be a monster. I won’t be anything but myself.” He turned to Rockwell. “Just remember, remember, don’t let them bury me by mistake. Don’t let them bury me by mistake, thinking I’m dead. Remember that.”

Smith took the path across the dry wash and up the hill. It was late afternoon already and the sun had started to vanish behind blue hills. A few stars were visible. The odor of water, dust, and distant orange blossoms hung in the warm air.

Wind stirred. Smith took deep breaths of air. He walked.

Out of sight, away from the sanitarium, he paused and stood very still. He looked up at the sky.

Tossing away the cigarette he’d been smoking, he mashed it precisely under one heel. Then he straightened his well-shaped body, tossed his brown hair back, closed his eyes, swallowed, and relaxed his fingers at his sides.

With nothing of effort, just a little murmur of sound, Smith lifted his body gently from the ground into the warm air.

He soared up quickly, quietly—and- very soon he was lost among the stars as Smith headed for outer space …

The End

Conclusion

When you all tell me your stories, about how you have changed since arriving at MM… well, this is always what comes to mind.

And this is only the beginning.

Who knows what greatness lies in the futures ahead of you?

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Ray Bradbury Index here…

Ray Bradbury

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Intention Campaign affirmation tricks and techniques to maximize effectiveness

In this article we will look at different techniques, tricks and things that you can do to improve your affirmation campaigns. These are things that will concentrate on how you perform your affirmation campaigns with an idea to improve the “purity”, implementation, and successful implementation of it. All the time trying to control the relative distress associated with change.

These are easy additions for you all. It won’t take too much extra effort to incorporate these items.

Multiple daily affirmations

Yes, of course you can run your campaign multiple times in a day.You can have a prayer affirmation period (say) in the morning, and then another at the end of the day. You can run them three times a day. You can run them four times a day. Heck! You can run them ten times a day if you want and you have the time.

Just remember that when you go into your pause phase that it must be absolute. During the pause, you must come to a full and complete stop. No exceptions. Do not even think about it. Stop and move on with your life. Then when the pause time is completed, you can run your follow-up campaign.

A place to pray.

Now, running multiple daily affirmations most certainly strengthens the affirmations. You are spending more time thinking and dwelling on the affirmations. So the effects are doubled if you run two affirmation groups a day. Tripled if you run three affirmation groups a day, and quadruped if you run four groups a day.

The trade off is that things will happen more aggressively; more saturated. And, obviously, it will take up more of your time to do so. So with everything there are tradeoffs. If you have the time to run two campaign groups a day (say once in the morning and once in the afternoon) then you will have stronger effects.

Good things happen faster. The old peels away sooner. The discord associated with change increases. Everything is magnified.

So doing your affirmation prayer campaigns in this manner will [1] certainly speed up the implementation of your affirmations. However, it will [2] take up more of your time, and [3] would result in an increase in personal discord (as the old life peels away quicker).

Talisman

Those MM readers who have read the post on “The Intention Experiment” will understand the benefits of having “blessed” items in and around their home and person.

While a person can, themselves, bless an item and empower it with energy, in this case we will refer to things that were blessed by a local religious figure.

It does not matter who this person is, what religion they belong to, or where they are. What matters is that they create a charm; a talisman, that you pay for. Then you take that item and place it near you.

Here’s some blessed Buddha charms…

Blessed Buddha charms.

The procedure is simple…

  • Go to a local religious church, temple, shrine or monastery.
  • Provide an item for them to bless, or purchased an already blessed item.
  • Compensate them for their efforts either financially or through a donation.

I have had numerous things blessed in my life.

  • Catholic rosary beads.
  • A Catholic medallion of a Saint that I wore around my neck.
  • A string of small beads that I wrapped around my wrist. Blessed by Buddha. 
  • A bracelet of large wooden balls that was blessed by a shaman.
  • A special talisman made by a follower of the Golden Dawn occult society.
Examples of Catholic medallions.

The effect is like adding an octane additive to your gasoline in your car. It improves the quality of your gas and your automobile runs better. It no longer hesitates. It is quicker in response, smoother in operation, and quieter.  As well as the engine running cooler.

For a given prayer affirmation campaign, it will act like an “oil” or a “softener”. It will take off the “rough sharp edges” of the jagged hills and mountains that you might encounter in your MWI template.

The effect of a talisman.

In today’s profit oriented culture, it is easy to find “blessed” items on the internet that may or may not actually be blessed.

I suggest that you can buy what ever item you want off the internet, but assume that it is not blessed. Then take it to your local religious temples, church or shrine and ask for it to be blessed.

Blessed rosary beads.

If you go to a church or a temple, and they are selling something that has been blessed, then that is fine as well. The idea is that it MUST be actually blessed. Not simply advertised as blessed.

Finally, keep in mind that blessed items “lose their charge” over time. Depending on who you are, and the person performing the blessing, the “power” and effectiveness of the charm has a half-life. Some charms might dissipate over a period of months, while others might take decades. I would advise a new talisman every year based upon your individual situation, needs and present on-going affirmation campaign.

A place to pray

It is critically important that you perform and conduct your affirmations in a quiet place where you can concentrate and not be interrupted. For some people [A] this is the shower. No kidding. They put the affirmations in a waterproof sleeve, tape it to the wall and read it out loud while they shower.

For other people [B], being alone in their car (or truck) as they to and from work is perfect. They just fire the up the engine than then when they are at a place where no one can bother them, they park the vehicle and sit there and read off the affirmations out loud.

MM [C] likes to read his affirmations in the early morning when no one else is around and he has the peace and quiet to concentrate.

Some people [D] like to go into Catholic churches, and just go there and pray. The churches are open all the time and people go in to pray. The only thing with this is that you must whisper your prayers. You cannot say them out loud.

You can go into a temple with your affirmations, and read them in front of the image of the deity there. Most people will not question you. You can do this without being self conscious.

The good thing about this is that you can perform your prayer affirmations anywhere as long as you left alone in peace without being disturbed. Heck, this can even be [E] in a restaurant. You just park yourself at a booth in the back and focus reading your affirmations in a low voice.

You CANNOT multitask affirmations.

It requires your full, undistracted attention. Many people are already doing this. However, if you are not, and your affirmation campaigns are subject to interruption, then you might feel hurried or rushed.

You cannot allow this. You cannot hurriedly rush through your affirmation list. You need to read it slowly and savoring each word for maximum effect.

Never, ever, rush your affirmation readings. Never.

Remember; the longer it takes you to read your affirmation sentence, the stronger the effect. It means that you are spending more time switching from wave to particle form (and back again) while you are reading that affirmation statement.

So I want to stress that there are numerous people trying to multi-task affirmation campaigns, juggling them with the rest of their life. You just cannot do this and have a strong campaign. You need to focus on what you are doing at that time.

Why?

Imagine that you are typing to cook dinner, and reading your affirmations that are sitting there on the counter. Multitasking. You spouse walks in.  And the affirmation that you are trying to read is “I live a great, calm and peaceful life.”

This is what it would actually be like…

I live...

The boiling water is very vigorous now, and so you turn the temperature down.

... a great, and...

The Spouse asks you if you bought a new carton of milk, and you answer that no you didn’t.

...calm and...

You switch the water off and put some noodles in the hot water.

...peaceful...

The spouse comes in and goes out. Slamming the door behind. Bam!

...life.

In truth, you are not really running an affirmation statement this way. Instead all you are doing is adding disjointed words and phrases to your already hectic life. The end result would be that your life might mellow out a little bit, but the effects will not be the same as if you were to read off the entire affirmation sentence undisturbed.

Avoidance of places with “bad vibes”

Thoughts are “sticky”. They tend to fall to, and get absorbed by physical things. And like the talisman listed  up above, good pure thoughts and blessings are possible. As are curses, and negative thoughts.

We have all heard of “haunted houses”. Cursed cars. And damned places. These locations and physical items have “bad energy” or “bad vibes”.

Christine was a horror movie about a haunted automobile.

Some places are just THICK with the bad feelings and dearth of happy, positive energy. Go to any Family Dollar store in a distressed community. Go to a car lot in one of the poorer sections of town and sit in some of those cars. The hate, disgust, anger, and oily blackness can be tangible.

It can be felt.

You want to avoid these places, and you want to avoid purchasing anything from these places. You don’t want them to have anything to do with you or your family. Keep and stay away.

Reading affirmations after Hemi-Sync meditations

In today’s life, there are all sorts of distractions, and battles (for your mind) going on. These elements create a noise that jars your soul, and disrupts your being.  Being so “shaken”, it’s often difficult to feel calm when you are reading off your affirmations Sure, you read them, but somehow (it feels like) it’s not really getting any “traction”. You don’t feel like they are “fully released” to the universe.

The best way to avoid this is to meditate, or center yourself prior to reading the affirmations.

I have provided the Hemi-Sync systems to help you do this.

If you are not centered: your consciousness is not at the center, then your affirmation campaigns will not be operating effectively. Like an out of tune car engine, it might work, but not that well. You need to center yourself.

If you can have yourself centered most of the time, you don’t need to perform affirmations after a centering exercise. You just run Hemi-synci once a week, and do your affirmations normally. However, what I am seeing is this amazing level of strife and discord in the United States today. As well as in parts of Africa, and parts of Europe. You need to center your consciousness.

Physical Contact

Some cultures prevent physical contact, others allow it but only in the privacy in your own home. Having physical contact is a fundamental aspect of being a living, breathing, human being. You are NOT a machine.

When I was working in Boston, I was called in to the HR office because I had touched a fellow co-worker on the elbow. I personally believe that leaders need to transmit their intentions by tactile sensations. But that’s not in accordance with modern corporate culture. Instead humans are numbers that live in cubicles, perform tasks in front of machines, and obey strict behavioral and dress norms.

Anyways, when I talk to staff, co-workers and colleagues, as well as customers and other businessmen, I touch them. I give them handshakes. Some (from the West) I give hugs to. I touch the thigh, or knee cap. I touch the shoulder or the elbow.

Anyways, this touching is an important part of what being a human is all about. we connect with others.

It doesn’t matter if it is a dog, a cat, a horse, a spouse, a child, a friend… whatever. Do not be afraid of communicating though connections. Connect with others. When you do, you will find that your quantum network of connections expands. And for affirmation campaigns, you will discover that it acts as a kind of enhanced antenna or radar-dish.

So go forth and be a touchy-feely kind of person.

Humans biologically need touch, it’s built right into our physiology. When we are babies, touch is a crucial part of our ability to regulate our nervous systems and feel safe. When we’re very young, our bodies have not yet built the ability to self-regulate (feel safety and comfort), and thus our caregivers play the important role of not only touching to bring regulation and safety, but also using facial expressions to send the message that ‘all is OK.’

Further, humans thrive in a sense of community and connection. When we are too isolated, without a deep and dedicated practice like monk’s might do in a cave in Tibet, we begin to lose the benefits of co-regulation, and in turn our psychology can begin to suffer over time. Humans have built incredible things – together – when in community, and touch plays an important role in that.

It most cultures around the world, hugging is part of daily life. Other cultures might decide to greet one another with cheek kissing instead, but touch is often a common denominator. But it’s true, there are places that may be ‘less touch-y’ and will certainly find other ways to connect.

One thing I can say though, especially during this unprecedented time of isolation, make it a point to hug those close to you when you can. Make it a good one, 15 or 20 seconds! Pay attention to how you feel after.

As mentioned, hugging is not the only way we get a sense of co-regulation and connection. Looking into one another’s eyes, sensing facial movements and reactions are also important. We have millions of mirror neurons in our brains that are constantly reading what is happening in another person, and sending information to areas of our brain, subconsciously, that tell us how a person might be feeling, for example. When we witness someone taking an action, neurons in our brains respond to that action in the same way as if we were taking that action ourselves – hence ‘mirror neurons.’

This might mean that when we watch a nervous moment in sports for example, although we are not playing, we might take actions like covering our mouths or holding our chest, feeling the nerves the players are likely feeling. As you can imagine, this is not a perfect science. Sometimes we are nervous but the player is cool as a cucumber, but generally, mirror neurons tend to help us connect to what others are feeling or doing, giving us a sense of empathy.

It goes even deeper. Research from Institute of HeartMath has shown that the human heart emits a measurable electromagnetic field that contains information other people can pick up on and decode in their brains. Regardless of how ‘new-agey’ this might sound to some minds, it’s a reality of our physical bodies.

Just think, have you ever walked into a room with multiple people in it and noticed the energy of it? Perhaps you noticed right away it was very tense or very jovial. This sense likely comes from having an awareness of how our electro magnetic field is interacting with the collective field of the room.

What you’re feeling is how someone’s general emotional state is affecting the field they emit. The more we feel tension, anxiety, or depression for example, the more we also put that signal out into our communities. Now, this isn’t a call to get stressed out about how we’re affecting others, this is simply a realization of what’s going on.

In our current chaotic world, it’s quite common to feel anxious or uncertain about what’s happening, and acknowledging that is OK is perfectly fine. The next question becomes: how can I manage my emotional state and create a a felt sense of calm? (Which of course will change the field you emit as well.)

-Collective evolution

Conclusion

The majority of these suggestions are “add ons” to your current affirmation campaign that will enable you to fine-tune them to be more efficient and effective.

Some of the readership might already be incorporating these elements while others might have overlooked some key elements. But if you really start to implement all of them, you will be able to “turbo-charge” your affirmations for more efficient and effective implementation.

I hope that all of this will be beneficial.

Do you want more?

I have more posts related to this in my Affirmation Campaign index here…

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Beautiful Chinese girls modeling to Chinese pop music inside of China (1)

This is part of my “Beautiful girls of China” series. Here, we introduce the reader to China, and what it is today, by looking at the girls, women and ladies of China. In all cases the ladies are dancing, posing or just being themselves around their homes, businesses or city centers where they live. By looking at them, listening to the music, and paying attention to their surroundings you will end up getting a very clean and pristine vision of what China is, what it stands for and what it is actually like.

This is my own personal attempt to show others what I find so wonderful about China.

At the bare minimum you will at least get an opportunity to listen to contemporaneous Chinese pop music that plays all over the nation.

A beautiful Chinese woman in a wonderful flowing dress.

The girls and ladies come in all shapes and sizes. They all act and behave and dress differently. But the music selection and the short videos are wonderful in that it gives you a real idea what China is actually like. It’s the “feeling” that you get when you are here. And that is not easy to transmit. I hope that you all appreciate the images and visions that I present to you today.

Another lovely girl in China.

While I am showing images and videos of beautiful Chinese girls, I want to explain some of the great misconceptions about people, and relationships.

One thing that everyone doesn’t “get” (understand) is that when a couple wants to have sex, the Guy is always “ready to go”, and the woman “needs to warm up”. It’s not really accurate.

For men, watching a woman…

…being confident, looking good, smiling, acting cute; seductive, or just being playful is (de facto) foreplay. The mind, the thoughts and the emotions are engaged by watching the women be who they are. And when we say that it’s a “turn on”, we really meant it. Literally.

There’s few things more attractive to me than a confident woman, being herself, being clean, having a great conversation and eating delicious food. I think that many people don’t understand this. They think that being “sexy” is showing a lot of skin, and moving in provocative poses. That’s not true at all. Being sexy is just being yourself with all your faults and blemishes.

A normal, but very sexy girl. We all have to accept ourselves as we are, and be confident in that knowledge. That confidence makes us sexy.

In the following videos are girls being themselves, and showing their best images for the camera. And for me I think that it’s terribly sexy, and a great “turn on”. These ladies put the cream in my coffee if you get my mixed idioms, and they tenderize my meals. I like to believe that every single person on this planet, mean and women, are capable of being attractive.

All it requires is a good kind heart, and openness and willingness to be yourself. A kind of fearless acceptance of who you are. Smiling. Being open. And just engaging others. You are attractive.

Attractive Chinese girl on the escalator.

And while you are watching these ladies, please take note at the “feeling” you get. It’s a combination of imagery, motion, music, and environment. I can tell you that this “feeling” permeates all of China. From the smallest hamlets tot he largest cities. It’s a feeling of unity, of being one’s self, and pure unrestricted freedom. things that you really notice are missing in the United States today.

You do not need to show a lot of skin and wear skimpy clothing to be sexy. You just need to show personality.

When you watch the girls pay attention to the background. This is what China is. These are the homes that the Chinese live in. These are the buildings that they work in. These are the parks that they play in. These are the restaurants that they eat in.

Pay attention to the background. This is what China is actually like.

The video group A

I have broken down these videos into an easily downloaded zip file. HERE. Just download the file and open it up and start watching all the pretty girl videos.

Here’s a sample of part of the files…

Partial files from Pretty Girls 4AUG21.

Here’s Video Group B

You can access the files HERE.

And a quick display of what’s inside is here…

Pretty Chinese Girls part B 4AUG21

And some of these girls are…

Well, some you can just fall in love with them. Like this wonderful girl. She’s all about the delicious sundae (with a cherry on top) and coffee. Ahhhh!

And you do not need to be anything other than yourself…

There is nothing (to me) more attractive than a woman who is proud of herself, strong, yet oozing with kindness and softness. Like this lovely girl…

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this one in my Learning About China by Looking at Pretty Girls Index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

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The art of Eero Järnefelt

There’s a flush, lush beauty in pastels. A long time ago, my High School art teacher suggested that I try using the medium. He gave me some basic colors, but no direction. And so the effort fell by the wayside. Now, I see that perhaps I should have continued.

There’s numerous great artists of this medium. And here is just one of them. His works speak to me. Maybe they will to you as well.

Eero Järnefelt

He used both oils and pastels, and the results are quite impressive.

46 artworks. Finnish. Born 11/8/1863 – Died 11/15/1937. Born in Vyborg, Russia. Died in Helsinki, Finland.

Kaislikkoranta

Lake Shore with Reeds.  95.5 x 75.5 cms | 37 1/2 x 29 1/2 ins. Oil on canvas

Dead calm. Dreary winter day. Lovely trees. You can almost hear the lone leaf or two rattling in the breeze.

Leena

One of the first things I learns, back when I was young, was to outline the work in heavy dark pencil and then color it in. Later, I discovered by painting and highlighting it emphasized the work and framed it. Much like this work.

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Lady of the Island and Hero of the Sea

24.8 x 18.9 cms | 9 3/4 x 7 1/4 ins
Pastel

It’s unfinished, but I really do love this in it’s rough state.

Christ Calming the Waters

This, in itself is just beautiful. I love the colors and everything about this work. Even the simplicity of the sail is just beautiful. The ascetic is just wonderful.

He really has quite the way with the pastel medium.

Nude

1908. Oil painting. 23.6 x 21.7 cms | 9 1/4 x 8 1/2 ins

I love this work.

Though maybe others might not agree with me. It’s calming and lovely.

Jesus and the Fallen Woman

1908. Oil on canvas

Again, a wonderful allegory, and well painted and displayed.

After Jesus’ encounter with Nicodemus, Jesus left that area called Judea and was traveling back to Galilee. As he was traveling he went through Samaria and stopped at a city called Sychar. He stopped at what was called Jacob’s well. This was a well that his ancestor had dug himself and given to Joseph. 

Jesus sat at the well tired and hungry after a long walk. I picture the day that is talked about in the scripture as a hot day, the text tells us that it was about six in the evening. It was just about harvest time. I picture Jesus looking upward and seeing the famous Mt. Gerizim overshadowing that well. This mount would have been the home to the Samaritan temple. 

Jesus sat there by the well with only John with him, the other disciples were sent into the city to buy food. 

I picture our savior sitting down, tired, discouraged, and hungry. Then I picture this Samaritan woman coming into the picture to draw water from the well. I picture her looking timidly at Jesus because she would have recognized him as a Jew. She probably expected to be mocked because of her Samaritan roots. The woman realized quickly that Jesus was not the typical arrogant Jewish man. I want to look at the way in which Jesus dealt with this fallen woman from Samaria. 

Perhaps Jesus would respond in a similar way to us. We all though are forced to confront certain aspects of our lives when we hear and learn about Jesus. The Samaritan woman was forced to confront certain aspects of her life because of her encounter with Jesus and so must we.

-SermonCentral

Summer Night Moon

1889. Oil on canvas. 62 x 79.5 cms | 24 1/4 x 31 1/4 ins . Ateneum Hall, Finish National Gallery | Helsinki | Finland

Lovely. I really like how he did this. You know, it’s really difficult to paint these evening scenes, and when you do it right, well… it’s magical. This is a superb work, and I personally think it is wonderful.

Saimi in the Meadow

1892 . Oil on canvas. 70 x 100 cms | 27 1/2 x 39 1/4 ins. Järvenpää Art Museum | Järvenpää | Finland

Saimi means “lake” in Finland, and it is often used as a woman’s name. this is lovely yes? A nice day, lying in the grass and looking up towards the clouds. Quite wonderful.

Berry Pickers

45.4 x 69.7 cms | 17 3/4 x 27 1/4 ins
Oil on canvas

Again, this is a wonderful work. It’s a fine painting that would look good in a living room, a dining room, or even a well appointed bedroom. I love it.

And with that being said…

Let’s look at what life was like when these paintings and works were being made…

Historical Perspective

Just some photos. Here’s a bridge.

Bridges.

In those days, all was art.

Dining room on a steamer.

And then we have this…

Beautiful building.

And then we have this…

Library.

In those days, beauty was appreciated. Not for profit, or for sex, or for power and control (like we see in America and the West today), but rather simply for the sake of beauty itself. And isn’t that a valuable thing?

Conclusion

Art isn’t a singular painting that some wealthy patron buys and hoards inside his house. It is everything. It is the dew on the grass in the morning, to the sleek lines of your clothes iron. It is the smile on your pet’s face when it is napping after a meal, and the warmth of a pile of clothes out of the dryer on a cold, cold Winter day.

I just wanted to share these images with you all. I hope that you enjoyed them.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Art Index here…

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The art of Stanhope Alexander Forbes

I’ve been running my affirmation campaigns driving the results towards “general peace and calmness” along the lines of what I experienced as a young boy growing up in the 1960’s. In those days, my Summers were filled with a calmness, a warmth and an unhurried lifestyle that reflected everyone around me. And after the extremely hectic life of the last decades, I have finally decided to put my foot down and yell STOP! at the top of my lungs.

And of course. My affirmation campaigns always work.

As a result everything is really slowing down all around me. Everything is slower. Calmer. Better. Kinder. Softer.

I do not know how great this influence is, and whether it can cross the oceans and influence other MM readers, but there is a great noticeable difference around me and my reality.

Everything is so much slower. So much more relaxed. It is unhurried. It is not frantic. It is soft like soft butter, and slow like a tranquil Summer pond, and peaceful like a bubbling brook under the deep shade of deep dark trees.

Back in the 1960’s, as a boy, the only thing that I needed to worry about was the big tureen of spaghetti sauce simmering on the stove and filling the house with the luscious smells, the occasional slam of the screen porch door in the kitchen, and the dogs in the back yard wanting to go for a walk. In those days, the only concerns that I had were my friends who wanted to ride their bikes with me and go exploring in the woods, and my sister talking on the phone.

This is a “feeling” an overall “quality” that permeates everything in my life right now. And since it does, I find that art from one hundred years ago seems to resonate with me. And this is one such artist that painted those times. And when I view these paintings I can easily see how calm and unhurried those days were.

I hope that they register with you all as well.

Stanhope Alexander Forbes

127 artworks

Irish , Social Realist painter and draftsman

Born 11/18/1857 – Died 3/2/1947

On Paul Hill

1922. Oil on canvas. 89 x 119 cms | 35 x 46 3/4 ins. Currently located at Penlee House | Penzance | United Kingdom

Look at the picture. Notice what the children are doing in the background? Notice the pace of the boy leading the horses. Notice the way the horses are behaving. What about the weather.

It’s all calm.

It’s all unhurried. Pleasant. Easy. Soft. Clear. Nice.

The Fishermen’s Expedition

61 x 77.5 cms | 24 x 30 1/2 ins
Oil on canvas

Yet another calm, and relaxed scene. You can almost hear the splashing of the water against the wooden hull of the boat.

The Drinking Place

1900. Oil on canvas. 174 x 152.5 cms | 68 1/2 x 60 ins. Presently at Oldham Art Gallery | Oldham | United Kingdom

I like this late afternoon image. The horse drinking from the cool pool. The man on the horse pausing for a rest. The deepening gloom under the trees. Really lovely.

Off to the Fishing Ground

1886. Oil on canvas. 119.5 x 156 cms | 47 x 61 1/4 ins. At Walker Art Gallery | Liverpool | United Kingdom

It carries you off. Have you ever been on a fishing sailboat? Well this was what it was like. I do love the way he painted the water on the deck. And the details on the sails.

A Fish Sale on a Cornish Beach

1885. Oil on canvas. 121 x 155 cms | 47 1/2 x 61 ins. City Museum and Art Gallery | Plymouth | United Kingdom

Again. Just average people having an average day. You can just imagine this, can’t you? A calm unhurried life. No one screaming at you through media to buy! Buy! Buy!, or news about some great pronouncement for war, laws, or taxes. All is just devoid of all that bullshit.

The Huckster

1917. Oil on canvas.

I really love the colors and the proud, broad strokes. Obviously the idea of a horse and wagon carrying produce is well before my time, I do remember my grandmother in Pittsburgh getting fresh vegetables delivered in a horse drawn wagon with radial tires. Of course this was in the late 70’s and early 80’s.

Home-Along: Evening

1905 . Oil on canvas. 120.6 x 180.9 cms | 47 1/4 x 71 ins. Bristol Museum and Art Gallery | Bristol | United Kingdom

Dusk is my favorite time in the night. Here in Southern China, when the sun starts to set a cool breeze develops and the temperatures drop to nice manageable levels. People go outside to play, chat, have a meal, or just to sit. It’s really quite lovely. I love the collie in the lower left hand corner of the picture.

Amongst the Pines

111.8 x 137.2 cms | 44 x 54 ins
Oil on canvas

This speaks to me. I can’t for the life of me understand why. But it does. Maybe it reminds me of the pine groves near the lake in Erie. Or perhaps a forest trail, or the edge of a gold course. What ever, it’s a really calm and pleasant image. Having this painting grace my living room would be really lovely.

Women’s Royal Naval Service Ratings Sail-Making: Onboard HMS ‘Essex’ at Devonport

1918. Oil on canvas. 106.6 x 137.1 cms | 41 3/4 x 53 3/4 ins. Imperial War Museum London | London | United Kingdom

An interesting painting and would make for some great conversation. I really love the artist and his style. It effectively captures the mood at the vision at that time. Really quite lovely.

The Seine Boat

Another powerful painting. I wonder what they are looking at. Calm. Unhurried. Relaxed. Thoughtful. What happened to the human race?

The Terminus, Penzance Station, Cornwall

1925. Oil on canvas. 111 x 137 cms | 43 1/2 x 53 3/4 ins. National Railway Museum, York | York | United Kingdom

A lovely vision of a busy train station. Not really “my cup of tea”, but actually well done and calm. I just cannot imagine anything being as noisy and boisterous as your would find today.

Through the Marshes

1927.Oil on canvas. 64.8 x 74.8 cms | 25 1/2 x 29 1/4 ins. National Railway Museum, York | York | United Kingdom

Another lovely painting. I do love the colors. Isn’t this a lovely view? Doesn’t it just calm your soul? Doesn’t it make you feel good, and well?

The Little Smithy

1894. Oil on canvas. 61.3 x 77.2 cms | 24 x 30 1/4 ins.  National Museum of Wales | Cardiff | United Kingdom

I’ve never been in an actual smithy. I walked by one in an Amish community, and it did look a little bit like this. I also, as a boy, used to play in an old boarded up shed that at one time was a blacksmith. (You could tell by the faded letters on the front of the building.) We used to go root around in there getting old newspapers, old bottles and crocks.

The Pond

Oil on canvas. 49 x 61.5 cms | 19 1/4 x 24 ins. Newport Museum and Art Gallery | Newport | United Kingdom

Again. Lovely colors. Relaxing. Calm and pleasant.

Conclusion

I do hope that you enjoyed this nice visit to my art presentation. I hope that it means as much to you as it does for me. In any event, have a great day. Spend some time with your little guys (pets) , friends and loved ones, and go by yourself a Snickers candy bar. Enjoy the little things.

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this in my Art Index here…

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Movie Review of What Dreams May Come as it pertains to the Alien Interview and Heaven

Based on a story by Richard Matheson, What Dreams May Come is a surrealist tale of the afterlife. While there are numerous things in the movie that are visually appealing, and a compelling story line, the movie itself depicts some critical aspects of the “afterlife” and Heaven incorrectly.

Yet, it has some VERY IMPORTANT messages for MM readers.

What Dreams May Come would have to be one of the most intelligent, emotional, visually beautiful, and well acted projects ever to grace the screen. And when you add in the story-line that includes rescuing a loved one who is suffering from amnesia and needs to be rescued, you can see the value of the movie content.

Especially in light of the content of “Alien Interview”.

Aside from the faulty story-line, and the inaccuracies of the depiction of Heaven, I would like to use it to help depict what the non-physical reality resembles for a disincarnate entity that returns to it. And at that, this is the purpose of this article. It is to use already available imagery to describe the non-physical world(s) for purpose of education and understanding.

Brief Movie Summary

While vacationing in Switzerland, physician Chris Nielsen (Robin Williams) meets artist Annie Collins (Annabella Sciorra). They are instantly attracted to each other, and bond as if they had known each other for a long time. They marry and have two children: Ian (Josh Paddock) and Marie (Jessica Brooks Grant). Their idyllic life comes to an end when the children die in a car crash. Life becomes very difficult: Annie suffers a mental breakdown, and the strains on their marriage threaten to lead to divorce, but they manage to struggle through their losses.

On the anniversary of the day they decided not to divorce, Chris is killed in a car accident. Unaware that he is dead and confused when nobody can interact with him, Chris lingers on Earth. He watches Annie’s attempts to cope with the loss and he attempts to communicate with her, despite advice from a spirit-like presence that it will only cause her pain. When his attempts only leave her more distraught, he decides to move on.

Chris awakens in Heaven, and finds that his immediate surroundings are controlled by his imagination. He meets a man (Cuba Gooding Jr.) whom Chris seems to recognize as Albert, his friend and mentor from his medical residency, and the spirit-like presence from his time as a “ghost” on Earth.

Albert will be his guide in this new life.

Albert teaches Chris about his new existence in Heaven, and how to shape his little corner of it and to travel to others’ “dreams”. They are surprised when a Blue Jacaranda tree appears unbidden in Chris’ surroundings, matching a tree in a new painting by Annie, which was inspired by Annie’s belief that she can communicate with Chris in the afterlife. Albert explains to Chris that this is a sign that the couple are truly soul mates.

However, Annie is overcome with despair and decides that Chris cannot, in fact, “see” the painting and destroys the piece. Chris sees his version of the tree disintegrate before his eyes which coincides with the painting being destroyed in the real world.

What dreams may come.

Chris laments he will not see his wife and encounters an Asian woman with the name tag “Leona”, whom he comes to recognize as his daughter Marie, living in an area shaped like a diorama she loved in life. The two share a tearful reunion.

Meanwhile on Earth, Annie is unable to cope with the loss of her husband. She then decides to commit suicide. Chris, who is initially relieved that her suffering is over, quickly becomes angry when he learns that those who commit suicide are sent to Hell; this is not the result of any judgment made against them, but that it is their nature to create “nightmare” afterlife worlds based on their pain.

Chris is adamant that he will rescue Annie from Hell, despite Albert’s insistence that no one has ever succeeded in doing so. Albert agrees to find Chris a “tracker” (who takes the form of Sigmund Freud) to help find Annie’s soul.

On the journey to Hell, Chris finds himself recalling his son, Ian. Remembering how he’d called him the one man he’d want at his side to brave Hell, Chris realizes Albert is Ian.

Ian explains that he chose Albert’s appearance because he knew that Chris would listen to Albert without reservation. Before they part ways, Ian begs Chris to remember how he saved his marriage following Ian and Marie’s deaths. Chris then journeys onward with the tracker.

After traversing a field containing the faces of the damned, they come to a dark and twisted replica of Chris and Annie’s house. The tracker then reveals himself as the real Albert, and warns Chris that if he stays with Annie for more than a few minutes he may become permanently trapped in Hell. All that Chris can reasonably expect is a chance to say a final farewell to Annie.

Chris enters the house to find Annie suffering from amnesia, unable even to remember her suicide and tortured by her decrepit surroundings. Unable to stir her memories, he “gives up”, but not the way the Tracker hoped he would; he chooses to join Annie forever in Hell.

As he announces his intent to stay to Annie, his words parallel something he had said to her when he left her in an institution following their children’s deaths, and she regains her memories even as Chris is succumbing to her nightmare.

Annie, wanting nothing more at that moment than to save Chris, ascends to Heaven, bringing Chris with her.

Chris and Annie are reunited with their children in Heaven, whose original appearances are restored. Chris proposes reincarnation, so that he and Annie can experience life together all over again. The film ends with Chris and Annie meeting again as young children in a situation roughly parallel to their first meeting.

What Dreams May Come

Initial Reactions upon “arrival”

In the movie, he wakes up and doesn’t have any bearings. He doesn’t know what is going on, and is disoriented. Yet shortly afterwards, a companion and a beloved pet help him find his way.

In “real life”, this only occurs for the youngest consciousnesses.

Most entities pretty much realize what is going on rather rapidly. They realize that they are out of their physical body, and that things are different, and that they can hear things and understand things with a clarity that they did not have before.

Typically, those who have gone through many reincarnations (over and over again) know exactly what is going on and then immediate move outward and away from where the physical body may lie. Those really (inexperienced) consciousnesses get confused and disoriented, but they immediate see friends, family and associations that come to them and help them during this crisis.

What Dreams May Come

So you need not worry. It is extraordinarily rare to be surprised once you stop cycling in and out of world-lines. You just stay on the Exit Template and hang out as a disincarnate spirit for a while.

Depiction of Heaven

It’s such an arty movie. The colors are great, the CGI is wonderful. The backgrounds and backdrops are immense and profound. All of which is true in the non-physical reality.

What Dreams May Come

And true to form, there’s all sort of things going on that our physical senses are unable to discern. Everything from strange beings, to odd constructions and enormous (apparently man made) constructions. There’s all kinds of “stuff” in the non-physical reality that surrounds our physical reality.

Lack of a Life Review

One of the most disturbing things to me, about the movie is the lack of a “Life Review”. This is the most common event that disincarnate beings experience. And according to Dr. Newton, it occurs after the people enter the “tunnel of light”.

What Dreams May Come

This is a fundamental aspect of the reincarnation process. You are born, live a life, obtain experiences, have a life review and then are re-injected back in the reincarnation process.

A Trapped Soul

Trapped by amnesia.

What an interesting story plot. You go to Purgatory to prevent someone from staying in Hell. They have no memory. So therefore they are helpless and being ignorant have no idea how to escape the Hell that they exist within.

But isn’t that what all of us are, at least according to the Tpe-1 extraterrestrial in Alien Interview?

What Dreams May Come

Trapped on a never-ending cycle of endless reincarnations.

Pets and loved ones

Our loved ones are easy to track down. We, however, often need some help. As they often are in special locations (Heavens?) that require assistance to visit.

Of course you can meet up with beloved pets in Heaven. There’s just a simple process that you must go through. That’s all.

Never fear!

The good things you do now, and the good relationships that you build will never leave. Instead they will persist and be supportive of your journey in the non-physical worlds.

The decision to return to Earth together

I have covered this process on selection of the pre-birth world-line template and mapping out the life prior to reinsertion. Certainly there is a major review process involved, as well as particular elements of schooling. Dr. Newton has also covered this subject extensively.

Just because it wasn’t explored in great detail in the movie, does not mean that it is a minor decision. It’s a very involved process.

The most important lesson

All of this is fine and nice. But the real situation is that once you leave your body as a disincarnate consciousness, you are still attached to the MWI. You are really not in “Heaven”.

You are still running the world-line templates.

You still experience time.

Only now, stuck in the “wave” form. You are not in a physical form, and thus cannot alter the physical world around you.

Exit Template

So while you will see all sorts of things that you might have been unaware of when you were in the physical, you are really not in “Heaven”. Instead, you are still stuck on your “exit template”.

Exit Template
This is the MWI topographical map that your consciousness was on and following at the time of your death.

While…

A Pre-Birth World-line Template
Is the world-line template that was arranged for you (and by you) to obtain life experiences when you are first born.

For most people, the “Exit Template” will be the same as the “Pre-Birth World-Line Template”. For MM participants that practice affirmation prayer campaigns, and who have experienced “slides”, the templates will typically differ.

Slide
The movement from one template map on the MWI to another.

So what ever trajectory your consciousness was engaged upon at the time of your death, you continue it without reinsertion to the physical body. And all that “stuff” all around you is just what what you would be seeing if you were in the physical.

Now…

You, of course, are free to explore all over the non-physical worlds. But only around your world-lines as defined by your template.

You need to exist the Physical Earth Reality. (Both the non-physical and the physical) That will take you out and away and able to enter “Heaven”. And this bridge is known as the tunnel of light.

Uh Oh!

That’s right!

Alien Interview

This is what the type-1 grey extraterrestrial had to say…

Eventually The Domain discovered that a wide area of space is monitored by an "electronic force field" which controls all of the IS-BEs in this end of the galaxy, including Earth.  

The electronic force screen is designed to detect IS-BEs and prevent them from leaving the area.

If any IS-BE attempts to penetrate the force screen, it "captures" them in a kind of "electronic net".  

The result is that the captured IS-BE is subjected to a very severe "brainwashing" treatment which erases the memory of the IS-BE. 

This process uses a tremendous electrical shock, just like Earth psychiatrists use "electric shock therapy" to erase the memory and personality of a "patient" and to make them more "cooperative".

On Earth this "therapy" uses only a few hundred volts of electricity.    However, the electrical voltage used by the "Old Empire" operation against IS-BEs is on the order of magnitude of billions of volts!  This tremendous shock completely wipes out all the memory of the IS- BE. 

The memory erasure is not just for one life or one body.  It wipes out all of the accumulated experiences of a nearly infinite past, as well as the identity of the IS-BE!

The shock is intended to make it impossible for the IS-BE to remember who they are, where they came from, their knowledge or skills, their memory of the past, and ability to function as a spiritual entity.  

They are overwhelmed into becoming a mindless, robotic non-entity.

After the shock a series of post hypnotic suggestions are used to install false memories, and a false time orientation in each IS-BE.

This includes the command to "return" to the base after the body dies, so that the same kind of shock and hypnosis can be done again, and again, again -- forever. 

The hypnotic command also tells the "patient" to forget to remember.

What The Domain learned from the experience of this officer is that the "Old Empire" has been using Earth as a "prison planet" for a very long time -- exactly how long is unknown -- perhaps millions of years.

And this the the critical part…

So, when the body of the IS-BE dies they depart from the body. 

They are detected by the "force screen".

They are captured.

They are "ordered" by hypnotic command to "return to the light".  

So thus you have this issue. How do you get off from the Exit Template as a disincarnate entity, yet still avoid the “Old Empire” traps?

Evasion and Escape

The Type-1 grey extraterrestrial continued on…

The idea of "heaven" and the "afterlife" are part of the hypnotic suggestion -- a part of the treachery that makes the whole mechanism work. 

So, the idea of a “Heaven” and a life in Heaven is part of this entire illusion.

To me what this sounds like is that (he / she / it) is saying that being a disincarnate entity does not NEED to enter a tunnel of light to proceed any further. That, the access to other “places” in the non-physical worlds is obtainable without entry to Heaven.

But…

So, when the body of the IS-BE dies they depart from the body. 

They are detected by the "force screen".

They are captured.

They are "ordered" by hypnotic command to "return to the light". 

We, as consciousness, must figure out a way to avoid the “electronic force screen, get captured and go into the light for memory erasure and reprogramming.

Mind Blown!

Now, long time readers to MM will recognize this next  little graphic. I used it in describing how consciousness enters the MWI from Heaven…

Remember this?

The consciousness is connected to the soul by a device. This device is known as consciousness.
Consciousness is the passageway or “tunnel” that connects the physical reality to the soul.

Here, I stated that the MWI was a bubble inside of a bigger universe known as Heaven.

And that the Soul resided inside of Heaven.

And thus our consciousness creates a path resembling a tunnel to get back to our Soul within Heaven.

But I no longer believe this.

I actually believe the Type-1 grey extraterrestrial that was interviewed in “Alien Interview”.

Reincarnation

Also from an earlier MM post.

If you look at this, it seems clear that the common denominator is that…

…going to Heaven always starts the injection process into a physical body as part of the reincarnation process.

The reincarnation process and procedure.

The extraterrestrial reports…

After the IS-BE has been shocked and hypnotized to erase the memory of the life just lived,  the IS-BE is immediately "commanded", hypnotically, to "report" back to Earth, as though they were on a secret mission, to inhabit a new body.  

Each IS-BE is told that they have a special purpose for being on Earth.

But, of course there is no purpose for being in a prison -- at least not for the prisoner.

Animal Heaven

As far as I am aware of pets, and animals do not enter a “tunnel of light” to go to their respective Heavens. And they do retain all their memories and other experiences when they reincarnate. This is true for dogs, for cat and for horses.

  • Animals do not enter a tunnel of light and retain their memories and self.
  • Humans enter a tunnel of light and lose their memories and get re-injected fresh with no prior knowledge.

The only exceptions seem to be young men, who were killed and then reinserted to the MWI quickly without further processing. They remember their prior life but not the earlier ones.

Failure to go to Heaven

Let’s look at what happens when the consciousness fails to go back to Heaven.

This is what happens…

So the immediate effect is that you stick to your Exit Template.

The Guardian Angel / Mantid

I can tell you that you DO NOT NEED to enter the “Tunnel of Light” to meet your “Guardian Angel” (otherwise known as a Mantid). You can take an injection of DMA for a brief but immediate consultation. And because of this fact, it seems quite clear that they are associated with you within this MWI.

What are they?

Catholic religion say that they are sent from Heaven. And that they dwell in Heaven.

It also says that there were good Angels and Bad Angels.

And the Bad Angels were banished to Hell. While the Good Angels stayed in Heaven.

I really do not know how helpful this Intel is.

One thing is for certain, there is no reason at all why you cannot meet your “Guardian Angel” or Mantid upon you death from the Exit Template. Though, I do not know if that is a good or a bad thing.

I can tell you that in my dealings with them, I never left the Reality Universe, and entered “Heaven”.

At least not that I was aware of. As far as I recall, all my dealings has been on the strange worlds that surround our Reality Universe in the non-physical realms.

Therefore, you MUST conclude that you do not NEED to enter the “tunnel of light” to meet with Angels.

Rabbit Hole

I just had a podcast today where I discussed Rabbit Holes. The idea is that once we get on a “binge” chasing after something, we often lose our way. We get caught up in the what it’s, and elaborations, and create extensive background stories to figure everything out.

Such was the case with Y2k, Mad Cow, and Exploding cell phones near gas pumps.

Today it is 5G radiation, Draco Reptilians, and Vaxx mind control.

And we just don’t want to go down that “Rabbit Hole” in regards to what happens once you enter the “Tunnel of Light”. Which is the great works that Dr. Newton has explored. Instead, we must dwell on the scant references that are based on what happens if YOU DON’T enter the “tunnel of light”.

Remember

Escape is possible.

The net result is that an IS-BE is unable to escape because they can't remember who they are, where they came from, where they are. They have been hypnotized to think they are someone, something, sometime, and somewhere other than where they really are. 

The Domain officer who was "assassinated" while in the body of Archduke of Austria was, likewise, captured by the "Old Empire" force. Because this particular officer was a high powered IS-BE, compared to most, he was taken away to a secret "Old Empire" base under the surface of the planet Mars. 

They put him into a special electronic prison cell and held him there.

Fortunately, this Domain officer was able to escape from the underground base after 27 years in captivity.  

When he escaped from the "Old Empire" base, he returned immediately to his own base in the asteroid belt.  

His commanding officer ordered that a battle cruiser be dispatched to the coordinates of the base provided by this officer and to destroy that base completely.

This "Old Empire" base was located a few hundred miles north of the equator on Mars in the Cydonia region.

What to watch out for

Consider this warning…

The most basic method to capture and immobilize an IS-BE is through the use of various kinds of "traps". 

IS-BE traps have been made and put in place by many invading societies, such as the one that established the "Old Empire", beginning about sixty-four trillion years ago. 

Traps are often set up in the "territory" of the IS-BEs being attacked.

Usually a trap is set with the electronic wave of "beauty" to attract the interest and attention of the IS-BE. When the IS-BE moves toward the source of the aesthetic wave, such as a beautiful building or beautiful music, the trap is activated by the energy put out by the IS-BE.

One of the most common trap mechanism uses the IS-BE's own thought energy output when the IS- BE tries to attack or fight back against the trap.

The trap is activated and energized by the IS-BE's own thought energy.

The harder the IS-BE fights against the trap, the more it pulls the IBS toward it and keeps them "stuck" in the trap.

Sounds ingenious and difficult.

Conclusion

There is a lot of speculation and misinformation concerning Heaven and the non-physical reality. Most humans do not want to die, have amnesia, and then return to start all over again in a new life.

Fuck that!

If The Domain sent ships to every corner of the universe in search of "Hell", their quest could end on Earth. What greater brutality can be inflicted on anyone than to erase the spiritual awareness, identity,  ability, and memory that is the essence of oneself?

But looking at what we do know, and then extrapolating from reliable sources a picture emerges of what happens and how we can handle ourselves upon death.

We emerge from the Exit Template upon death and stay there in the non-physical reality until we enter the “tunnel of light”. Then, all indications are that what happens is exactly as described by the Type-1 extraterrestrial in “Alien Interview”, and we are recycled back to live yet another life all over again.

The Doctor Newton writings, as great as they are, approach this situation as normal. That this is just the way it is, and that there are no other options.

The Type-1 grey extraterrestrial says otherwise.

The question now becomes [1] How do we avoid the “tunnel of light”, [2] Avoid and evade the electronic “force field” that exists around this physical region, and [3] go “elsewhere” and stop the entire cycle of death and rebirth.

Stay tuned. I do have answers!

And they employ the Type-1 greys, and (possibly) your “Guardian Angel” the Mantid assigned to you.

Although the military base of the "Old Empire" was destroyed, unfortunately, much of the vast machinery of the IS-BE force screens, the electroshock / amnesia / hypnosis machinery continues to function in other undiscovered locations right up to the present moment.  The main base or control center for this "mind control prison" operation has never been found. So, the influences of this base, or bases, are still in effect.

And to this end, they seem receptive to assist…

The members of the lost Battalion and many other IS-BEs on Earth, could be valuable citizens of The Domain...

Unfortunately, there has been no workable method conceived to emancipate the IS-BEs from Earth.

... until such time as the proper resources can be allocated to locate and destroy the "Old Empire" force screen and amnesia machinery and develop a therapy to restore the memory of an IS-BE."

I do believe that now is that time.

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The Götterdämmerung of the United States

Definition of Götterdämmerungfc
: a collapse (as of a society or regime) marked by catastrophic violence and disorder 

In the 243 years since American independence in 1776, America has been at war in 225 of those years.

Yet, it’s been centuries since anyone even tried to invade the United States.

So why is America off gallivanting all over the world and fighting in wars if there isn’t a need to defend the territorial integrity of the United States?

No one can provide an answer for this.

Or to put it another way, for 92.5 percent of the time since 1776, the Americans have been at war, either of their own making like the annexation of the Philippines in 1899, as an intervening force in other wars like the Vietnam conflict or simply initiating regime change wars against those they dislike by covertly fermenting insurrections in South America using groups like the Contras.

It's not a record that sits well with the mythology of a peace-loving America upholding the global world order or liberal values. America has been described by former U.S. President Carter and others as the most warlike nation on Earth and it's a description that is backed by the historical record.

No answers are ever provided.

Instead, they say things like freedom™, liberty™, and democracy™. They interject it along with other sentences equally impotent.  Like “Plants love Brando because it’s got electrolytes”. And along with some grunts, and sneers are phrases like “you know…”, and “Wht?”

And then pull off their tops, stand on top of their pickup trucks and wave the United States flag shouting “Exceptionalism!” and “We’re the best!”

Woo Hoo!

It is the American elites who made deals with China at the expense of American workers. It’s not China that has failed to meet its obligations to American people: it has none.

American elites have made these deals. They did so at the expense of standards of living for American workers.

And small business owners. They did so even at the expense of national security and stability.

It is these very elites that failed to modernize the ancient, decrepit infrastructure. They failed to repair the road and bridges, and they ignored the plight of millions of Americans.

Americans as they fell into despair, and all the resulting addictions that result from it.

And they needed help. They cried for help. They pleaded for help. They demanded help.

Real serious help.

They need community. They need leadership. They need meaningful, purposeful employment. they need reasonable costs, abundant food at reasonable prices. Affordable housing, and basic no-frills or politically motivated education. They need their leadership to stop crime. Support them instead of wasting the precious resources that America used to have in abundance.

They need real representation.

They needed people who would do real WORK. People who would demolish the ruined failed systems, and put in brand new, well funded, and expertly run systems.

They need the basics. They need the fundamentals.

  • Affordable and healthy food.
  • Meaningful employment providing goods or services.
  • Affordable housing.
  • Low or no taxes, regulation, or rules.
  • A safe and secure environment free of crime, but not a police state.
  • They need to see a sizable amount of the tax money seized from them reinvested in their own lives.

And they do not see this.

And as a result the entire domestic interior of America is imploding upon itself in spectacular fashion. Today, you cannot tell the difference between Detroit and Damascus. Today, you cannot distinguish between an American “leader” from a poverty stricken banana republic dictator.

Aside from the clothing their actions, attitudes, and behaviors are identical.

Out of touch Government

Just how out of touch are the elites in Washington DC from the people? It’s pretty damn astounding.

Making U.S. Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class is a sort of bipartisan report guiding the current, bewildered Crash Test Dummy administration. 

One of the 11 writers involved is none other than National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan. 

The notion that a global imperial strategy and – in this case – a deeply impoverished and enraged middle class share the same interests does not even qualify as a lousy joke. 

With “thinkers” like these, the Hegemon does not even need Eurasian “threats”.

In case you all haven’t been paying attention, most American pay around 30% of their income to the Federal government, and an additional 16% (8 + 8) to it for “Social Security” promises. In exchange for this looting (46% of their paycheck) the American government has done nothing for them.

Not now.

Not in decades.

It’s just been squandering it off in far-away lands, and blowing up mud huts, machine gunning sheep, and loudly proclaiming to be doing it all for freedom™ and democracy™.

Yoo Hoo!

China may be many things, but it was the corruption and misleadership of American leadership (not Chinese) that led to the destruction of the middle-class and the imbalances in bilateral trade.

And there we have it.

At the expense of the American citizenry, the American elites are trying to rule the entire world. Not like before. But this time, they will “Build Back Better” so that no other nation dare opposes their rule.

Their plan is as clear as day, and their demands are astounding in their arrogance.

“Obey us!” they order.

“Follow our ‘rules based order’. The UN is useless and kneel before the great and almighty shining house on the hill.” they sneer.

Of course, after the last debacle in July 2020, I was truly surprised. I was surprised at the calm and composed stoniness of the Chinese.

If it was me, I would have sent the heads of those Jackasses back to the USA in a box. Genghis Khan style.

Washington trying to rule the world!

Are geopolitical analysts in the west seriously delusional enough to believe that Russia and China can be undermined?

It was only one month ago that the world found itself trapped on a fast track to nuclear war between NATO powers and Russia over tensions that had been brought to a boil in Ukraine.

Of course, it wasn’t only a Nazi-ridden Ukraine that was being used as a trigger for a major showdown, as evidence of Belarus regime change and even assassination attempts became publicized and MI6-Bellingcat antics were justifying new waves of anti-Russian sanctions across the trans Atlantic community.

These antics even led to the expulsion of Russian diplomats from the Czech Republic, media psyops attempting to lay blame on the Kremlin for cyber attacks on American pipelines.

Additionally, a zero-tolerance policy towards the completion of the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline appeared to be a non-negotiable red line for Washington up until recently.

No matter where you looked, the spectre of nuclear war abounded for all to see and only companies specializing in the sale of bomb shelters were content with the direction of world events.

And then something changed.

Life is a drag when the (global) free lunch is over and on top of it you need to face not only the emergence of a “peer competitor” in Eurasia (copyright Zbig “Grand Chessboard” Brzezinski) but a comprehensive strategic partnership. You fear that China is eating your lunch – and dinner, and nightcap – but still you need Moscow as the designated enemy of choice, because that’s what legitimizes NATO.

Call The Three Stooges! Let’s send the Europeans to patrol the South China Sea! Let’s get those Baltic nullities plus pathetic Poles to enforce the New Iron Curtain! And let’s deploy Russophobic Britannia Rules the Waves on both fronts!

Control Europe – or bust. Hence the Brave New NATO World: white man’s burden revisited – against Russia-China.

So far, Russia-China had been exhibiting infinite Daoist patience in dealing with those clowns. 

But not anymore.

Indeed. Something changed.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that certain power brokers among the Great Resetting crowd of the west realized that a smoldering earth of radioactive decay was not one they wished to rule over (or under).

Perhaps they realized that Russia had no intention of backing down in the game of nuclear chicken then being played.

Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that Russia’s advanced hypersonic nuclear missile delivery systems were not a part of the game theory-based computer models which war game scenario planners had based their military engagements on.

And all that full spectrum dominance encirclement of Russia for the past 20 years was ineffective.

Yeah.

While a “limited nuclear war” sounded like an acceptable risk decades ago, it isn’t so today.

There’s no such thing as this fantasy.

Use one nuclear weapon, and your entire nation is engulfed in nuclear carpet bombing.

It appears, from direct statements made by President Biden and Jan Psaki in July 2021, that the decision to pull back from the precipice of nuclear oblivion was a reappraisal of the situation.

The geniuses in the Washington DC think tanks came up with an alternative method to bring both Russia and China to heel.

This new strategic equation rests on two wildly foolish assumptions:

  • The belief that the foundations of the Russian-Chinese alliance contains fatal fissures which can be exploited by savvy American diplomatic maneuvering. And since everyone in Washington DC are experts, and capable, there wouldn’t be any problem doing this.

And…

  • The belief that Russia somehow really desires to be popular and rejoin the “cool kids” of the G7 leading the international liberal order. After all, everyone in Washington DC is this way. So obviously everyone else int he world is like this. It’s “common sense” don’t you know!

For these two assumptions to shape the calculus of western logicians playing on a “great game”show just out of touch from reality these Washington elites actually are.

After all, it is believed by these ignorant sycophants that Russia, who shares a 2600 mile border with China, must certainly feel threatened by China’s “global ambitions”

Biden stated on June 16:

“Russia is in a very very difficult spot right now. They are being squeezed by China. They want to desperately remain a major power. They desperately want to be relevant.”

It is thus assumed that Russia may yet be swayed into joining a real power block capable of countering China’s imperial Belt and Road Initiative.

Oh…

…brother!

Americans can see though this farce…

They have learned, over the years, decades and even centuries that the American government has little concern for them. For their ideals. For their culture. For their needs.

The key players in the Heartland have clearly seen through the imperial propaganda fog; it will be a long and winding road, but the horizon will eventually unveil a Germany-Russia-China-Iran alliance rebalancing the global chessboard.

This is the ultimate Imperial Night of the Living Dead nightmare – hence these lowly American emissaries frantically scurrying around multiple latitudes trying to keep the satrapies in line.

Americans are ripe to start the lynchings of the elites.

We are QUICKLY going downhill. The state of Florida may be the one that secedes first. There is not one person in my neck of the woods that isn’t seriously SERIOUSLY getting ready. All you hear at night is fully automatic gunfire - not the average - let me practice with my 9mm in the back, but full auto. And I know what it sounds like versus fireworks.

...

The vibe - it’s about to fucking hit the fan - Seriously.

So look at what you have.

A nation ruled by mad-men.

A nation ruled by mad-men.

A pissed off and angry citizenry that are ready to go feral and unleash bloody Hell against the entire nation.

An entrenched group of vampires living inside of Washington DC that act like leeches and who have sucked the life-blood of America dry. And now, like some kind of parasite are looking to start a long war of “distraction” for their personal profit and (possibly) enjoyment.

And…

And…

It’s getting intolerable.

China and Russia are united against the out of control American madness

Ah.

But it won’t be a long, drawn out war of “distraction”. It will not be another Syria. It will not be another Yemen. It will not be another Panama. It will not be another Afghanistan.

As an expat in China. I can tell you that not only is China a serious, serious nation, but Lord Help you if you piss them off…

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, China-Russia build submarines like there’s no tomorrow equipped with state of the art missiles – and Su-57s invite wise guys to a close conversation with a hypersonic Mr. Kinzhal.

Sergey Lavrov, like an aristocratic Grand Seigneur, took the trouble of enlightening the clowns with a between rule of law and their self-defined “rules-based international order”.

That’s too much for their collective IQ. Perhaps what they will register is that the Russian-Chinese Treaty of Good-Neighborliness, Friendship, and Cooperation, initially signed on July 16, 2001, has just been extended for five years by Presidents Putin and Xi.

Oh…

So far, the Washington elites think of war as some kind of remote video game. They believe that it can be fought remotely with drones, cruse missiles and though use of others. While the America military is used as an occupation force on the conquered lands.

They can’t possibly imagine what the FUCK WOULD HAPPEN if the roles were reversed and both China and Russia would start doing the same thing to America…

  • Paying and having assassination squads against the American leadership.
  • Inciting riots, and blowing up American hospitals, ports, infrastructure, bridges, train stations, and warehouses.
  • Moving battle groups off the coast of New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Newport Beach, Washington DC, Boston, and Miami.

And that’s just for starters…

…don’t even get me fired up about carpet bombing the USA with biological weapons, kidnapping industry leaders, and inciting riots in major cities. Heck! If America can get away with it, then it is “on the table” for Chinese use.

But…

But…

Somehow, the Washington elites think that they can open up “Pandora’s Box” and be completely safe from the consequences.

Metropolis

As I said before…

American “leadership” is bat shit crazy.

Easy sailing in Asia, but the West is a major fuck-up

America today is “ready to pop”. It is ready to explode. And I am not talking about “Black anger”. I am talking about “White fury”. Not at the blacks or other races. But directed at the tier after tier , after tier of corrupted criminal “leadership” of Washington DC.

Only this time, it won’t be a few Trump “patriots” walking into the Whitehouse on a lark. It will be something much darker.

As the Empire of Chaos is incrementally and inexorably expelled from the Heartland, Russia-China are jointly managing Central Asian affairs.

In the Central and South Asia connectivity conference in Tashkent, Lavrov detailed how Russia is driving “the Greater Eurasian Partnership, a unifying and integrational outline between the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans that is as free for the movement of goods, capital, labor and services as possible and which is open to every country of the common continent of Eurasia and the integration unions created here.”

Then there’s the updated Russian National Security Strategy, which clearly outlines that building a partnership with the US and hitting win-win cooperation with the EU is an uphill struggle: “The contradictions between Russia and the West are serious and are hard to solve.” 

By contrast, strategic cooperation with China and India will be expanded.

New global realignments are forming. The world is growing and getting better, and that evil military empire; the United States, the scourge of the world for nearly a century is imploding.

How that implosion will occur…

…no one knows.

But it wouldn’t take much to set it off.

We all saw what happened when New Orleans levy collapsed. Imagine that happening in every single city simultaneously, and all transport routes for food, gas, and staples all collapse.

It would be really bad.

So it appears that America is really trying to start a war of “distractions”, and China is viewed to be the villain to demonize.

China said ENOUGH!

Yup.

Any meetings where America comes and continues the same old litany of bullshit will not be fruitful. So China won’t have any part of them. The door is closed. Forgetaboutit.

Yet the defining geopolitical breakthrough in the second year of the  may well be China telling the Empire, “That’s enough”.

It started over two months ago in Anchorage, when the formidable Yang Jiechi out of the helpless American delegation. The piece de resistance came this week in Tianjin, where Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng and his boss Wang Yi reduced mediocre imperial bureaucrat Wendy Sherman to stale dumpling status.

This searing analysis by a Chinese think tank reviewed all the key issues. Here are the highlights.

– The Americans wanted to ensure that “guardrails and boundaries” are established to avoid a deterioration of U.S.-China relations in order to “manage” the relationship responsibly. That did not work, because their approach was “terrible”.

– “Chinese Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng hit the nail on the head when he said that the U.S. “competition, cooperation and confrontation” triad is a “blindfold” to contain and suppress China. Confrontation and containment are essential, cooperation is expedient, and competition is a discourse trap. The U.S. demands cooperation when it is in need of China, but in areas where it thinks it has an advantage, it decouples and cuts off supplies, blocks and sanctions, and is willing to clash and confront China in order to contain it.”

– Xie Feng “also presented two lists to the U.S. side, a list of 16 items requesting the U.S. side to correct its wrong policies and words and deeds toward China, and a list of 10 priority cases of China’s concern (…) if these anti-China issues caused by the U.S. side’s bent are not resolved, what is there to talk about between China and the U.S.?”

And while all this is going on, Biden wants to drive a wedge between China and Russia so that China can be left alone and vulnerable. And to this end, he treats President Vladimir Putin as “another one of him”.

With Biden stating:

“Russia doesn’t want to be known as the upper Volta with nuclear weapons’. It matters. And I found it matters to almost every world leader-no matter where they’re from- how they’re perceived, their standing in the world. It matters to them.”

To understand the thinking behind this second statement, it must be understood that a fundamental belief among all behaviorists (of which Biden is no exception being ruled by teams of them and being little more than a synthetic shell himself of impulses devoid of any actual substance himself), is that one of the fundamental drives of all soulless/blank-slates is the desire to be popular.

Being popular and adapting to the force of popular opinions works in all anarchist mobs, school yards and especially politics (which is seen as the ultimate game of popularity for any substance-free rhetorician).

The force of popular opinion will thus cause anyone to modify their beliefs, opinions, and behavior in conformity to whatever “norms” shape their environment.

While one would think it obvious that Putin was NOT the sort of individual to fall prey to this shallow definition of “practical” human nature, Biden and his handlers appear to think otherwise.

White House spokeswoman Jan Psaki amplified this view saying:

“I think the president’s view is that Russia is on the outside of the global community in many respects… what the president is offering is a bridge back. And so, certainly he believes its in their interests to take him up on the offer.”

So while the outcome of the Putin-Biden meeting resulted in some inarguably positive steps towards the creation of mechanisms to avoid blowing up the world….

Such as re-activating START, and committing to solid rules of engagement in the Arctic and other Russian border regions.

China has become the new primary target of western ire.

Of course, China is not going to stand for this.

Where Russia is defined as one among many authoritarian regimes capable of abrasive disturbances but ultimately controllable in the long run, the Chinese have been labelled a much greater threat to western unipolar hegemony.

And China is not going to accept this.

Why Russia would feel “squeezed” by this fact is an absurdity beyond belief.

After all, China is not the one who has lit fires across Russia’s underbelly, promoted a decade of shock therapy, Balkanization, NATO expansion, funded color revolutionary tactics, or corralled the world community to impose sanctions onto her.

The fact is that Russia and China enjoy a vastly increasing rate of trade now topping $100 billion annually (compared to the mere $20 billion of US-Russian trade).

Both are de-dollarizing at accelerating speeds.

Both are working on a common strategic philosophical concept of self-interest and economic value,

These facts that unite both great nations in a solid unassailable partnership are what is keeping the oligarchs up at night.

In his NBC Interview with Keir Simmons before meeting Biden, this is what Putin said of the Russian-Chinese relationships:

“Can I be completely honest? 

We can see attempts at destroying the relationship between Russia and China. 

We can see that those attempts are being made in practical policies. 

And your questions, too, have to do with it… 

We (China and Russia) are neighboring countries. 

One does not choose one’s neighbors. 

We are pleased with the unprecedentedly high level of our relationship as it has evolved over the last few decades, and we cherish it, just like our Chinese friends cherish it, which we can see.”

And the message has been clear.

The point has been made: “The Chinese have long had enough of American arrogance, and the time when the U.S. tried to bully the Chinese is long gone.”

Wang Yi’s three bottom lines to Washington. In a nutshell:

The BRI
“The United States must not challenge, denigrate or even attempt to subvert the socialist road and system with Chinese characteristics. China’s road and system are the choice of history and the choice of the people, and they concern the long-term welfare of 1.4 billion Chinese people and the future destiny of the Chinese nation, which is the core interest that China must adhere to.”

[ FYI; in May 2021, the U.S. Senate pledged up to $300 million to spread information on the "negative impact" of China's Belt and Road Initiative, and develop "anti-Chinese influence" programs and a scheme to "train journalists" with the goal of censoring Beijing's successes from world view.]

Chinese domestic growth.
“The United States must not try to obstruct or even interrupt China’s development process. The Chinese people certainly have the right to a better life, and China also has the right to modernization, which is not the monopoly of the United States and involves the basic conscience of mankind and international justice. China urges the U.S. side to expeditiously lift all unilateral sanctions, high tariffs, long-arm jurisdiction and the science and technology blockade imposed on China.”

[The invasion of Iraq in 2003 was based on a carefully constructed false narrative, something that former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and later U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, acknowledged decades later.

It is this consistent background that makes it essential that political leaders pause and independently fully evaluate the claims made by the United States and the secretive intelligence services who advise the U.S. decision makers. America's allies need to acknowledge that it has a history of violence and of the glorification of violence as a means of resolving problems.]

China is a nation. Not a territory of the USA.
“The United States must not infringe on China’s national sovereignty, let alone undermine China’s territorial integrity. The issues related to Xinjiang, Tibet and Hong Kong are never about human rights or democracy, but rather about the major rights and wrongs of fighting against “Xinjiang independence”, “Tibet independence” and “Hong Kong independence”. No country will allow its sovereign security to be compromised. As for the Taiwan issue, it is a top priority (…) If “Taiwan independence” dares to provoke, China has the right to take any means needed to stop it.”

[There is certainly evidence that China wants to protect its borders and maintain its sovereignty. This need has become more urgent as the pace of China threat rhetoric has increased. Despite the constant drip-feed of off-the-record security briefings generating China-scare stories in the Western media, there is scant genuine evidence that China wants to expand its borders. Unlike the United States, there is not a historical record of Chinese expansion or aggression.]

And while all this has been going on in the International sphere, let’s not forget the turmoil that is brewing inside of America right now…

We are the unwitting victims of a system so corrupt that those who stand up for the rule of law and aspire to transparency in government are in the minority.

This corruption is so vast it spans all branches of government: from the power-hungry agencies under the executive branch and the corporate puppets within the legislative branch to a judiciary that is, more often than not, elitist and biased towards government entities and corporations.

We are ruled by an elite class of individuals who are completely out of touch with the travails of the average American.

We are viewed as relatively expendable in the eyes of government: faceless numbers of individuals who serve one purpose, which is to keep the government machine running through our labor and our tax dollars. Those in power aren’t losing any sleep over the indignities we are being made to suffer or the possible risks to our health. All they seem to care about are power and control.

We are being made to suffer countless abuses at the government’s hands.

We have little protection against standing armies (domestic and military), invasive surveillance, marauding SWAT teams, an overwhelming government arsenal of assault vehicles and firepower, and a barrage of laws that criminalize everything from vegetable gardens to lemonade stands.

In the name of national security, we’re being subjected to government agencies such as the NSA, FBI and others listening in on our phone calls, reading our mail, monitoring our emails, and carrying out warrantless “black bag” searches of our homes. Adding to the abuse, we have to deal with surveillance cameras mounted on street corners and in traffic lights, weather satellites co-opted for use as spy cameras from space, and thermal sensory imaging devices that can detect heat and movement through the walls of our homes.

That doesn’t even begin to touch on the many ways in which our Fourth Amendment rights are trampled upon by militarized police and SWAT teams empowered to act as laws unto themselves.

In other words, freedom—or what’s left of it—is threatened from every direction.

The predators of the police state are wreaking havoc on our freedoms, our communities, and our lives. The government doesn’t listen to the citizenry, it refuses to abide by the Constitution, which is our rule of law, and it treats the citizenry as a source of funding and little else. Police officers are shooting unarmed citizens and their household pets. Government agents—including local police—are being armed to the teeth and encouraged to act like soldiers on a battlefield. Bloated government agencies are fleecing taxpayers. Government technicians are spying on our emails and phone calls. Government contractors are making a killing by waging endless wars abroad.

-John Whitehead

Yes.

To all my international readers, you have no idea just how messed up America has become.

Really messed up.

Slow motion train wreck

I think most Americans are either [1] oblivious to what is going on, [2] worried as can be, or [3] just waiting for the “blow to hit”.

And we can gauge this by looking at society.

And that means American movies and media…

Five Films About Post-Modern America

Be forewarned, these five hit hard and cover nearly everything: rape, miscegenation, drugs, abuse, you name it. But they do accurately reflect the Current Year in all its misery.

They are all depressing, disgusting, and upsetting. So I am not posting any links for further investigation. If you want to watch them, then you are on your own. Personally, I think all you need to realize is that there is a sizable Western population who’s lives resemble these expressions of video antagonism.

Climax (2018)

What might happen if you took a bunch of directionless, hedonistic, oversexed twenty-somethings, trapped them in a building, and gave them way too much acid?

Nights and Weekends (2008)

Nights and Weekends (2008)

Long-distance relationships are unbearable, and truly unique to our time. This Joe Swanberg indie hit covers the phenomenon with unbearable accuracy.

Storytelling (2002)

Storytelling (2002)

The best depiction yet of the horror of college and the misery of suburbia.

Ken Park (2002)

Ken Park (2002)

It’s relentless in its depiction of degeneracy, but as critic Lee Marshall noted, “In a weird way this is a moral film.”

The Decline of Western Civilization Part III (1998)

The Decline of Western Civilization Part III (1998)

Wonder what environments birth antifa?

Conclusion

Ok, there’s change going on.

The “West” led by either the USA or the UK, and influenced by banking interests are steering this massive colossal cultural-industrial-military-and-bureaucratic fiefdom towards conflict. The handling of it is so profoundly inept and transparent, that only the most manipulated and ignorant fail to see it.

Stuck on this massive block of rot and ruin are many innocents and good people. And due to their situation, and their knowledge their ability to change things is not really possible…

…except…

…in what they can do in their immediate reality This is their immediate area and zone of control.

Please hang on. There are other forces and interests that see this situation as it has been presented and will not allow this ruin to become the rest of the world, nor will they allow it to continue for too much longer. So hold on tight. perform your centering and prayer campaigns. Be good. Do your best, and help others in your community. You all will get through this.

Have some faith.

Alright?

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings

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The art of Luigi Crosio

This man was a great artist. Luigi Crosio was an Italian painter who lived and worked in Turin, Italy. He died in Turin and is recorded as having been born in Alba, but the town of Acqui Terme, a few miles south of Alba, claims Crosio was born there.

Luigi Crosio was born in Alba, Italy in 1835 and died in Turin, 1915. He often painted religious works for the Kuenzli Brothers in Switzerland. This company specialised in religious and pious works for printing and distribution. There was a legal case in the 1890s regarding his painting Refuge of Sinners. This was his most successful image and another artist claimed the copyright for it. However, the Kuenzli Brothers produced photographs that showed the face of the Virgin was based on the face of one of Crosio’s daughters. The last work that Crosio is recorded having painted for the Kuenzli Brothers was in 1911.

He was survived by Annette Crosio, one of several daughters, who is known to have been still living in Turin in 1923.

The Beautiful Slave

This is an “Orientalist” painting that depicts a man buying a female slave. One of my favorite art genres is the “Orientalist” imagery as depicted by the romantic painters of Europe one hundred years ago.

78.7 x 54.6 cms | 30 3/4 x 21 1/4 ins
Oil on Canvas

Sister’s Homecoming

Here, we see the relationship between the older sister and the younger sister as she arrives home. Note the possessive guardian stance of the loyal dog, and the open book of poetry next to the chair.

Oil on canvas

91.4 x 67.3 cms | 35 3/4 x 26 1/4 ins

New Friends

Paintings of ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt were always popular with these period painters. As an artist, I really enjoy the cool darkness of the nearby shrine, and the impression of a lovely day of moderate temperature.The goat is a nice touch, but I do love the rendered folds on the black woman’s dress.

Oil On Panel

A visit to an Art Museum

When was the last time that you visited an art museum? Be honest. It’s not the kind of thing you do every day. And unless you live in a city, it’s maybe a once every decade event.

In America, of course, all of the museums have turned into a for-profit model. So if you want to look at some art, sculptures, and walk around in the galleries, you must pay an entrance fee. Not so in China. Most are open to the public. Though, Hong Kong, in deference to the influence of the British Empire has also adopted the for-profit model.

All museums (well most) have a discount or “free” day. And you can go visit the museum and not have to worry about the fees. When I lived in Woonsockett, RI there was a historical museum of the city nearby, and they wanted $35 per person to go in. That’s pretty steep, and that was maybe 25 years ago.

To see what “specials” or events that the museums have, you just go to their web page. You might be surprised. I will tell you that going out to a museum is a great activity and a heck of a lot of fun. Then afterwards go out and eat a nice meal. Always a great activity.

Art museums tend to be fun. You go into the new progressive art section and will laugh at what people think is art, while you might go up and down corridors with nothing but tranquil landscapes. I always loved the statues, and that section of the museums.

In today’s really crazy world…

…perhaps a nice visit to a museum might be in order.

Types of Museums

There are different types of museums. Here are some of them:

Archaeology museums. They display archeological artifacts. They can be open-air museums or they can exhibit items in a building.

Art museums. Also known as art galleries. They are spaces for showing art objects, most commonly visual art objects as paintings, sculpture, photography, illustrations, drawings, ceramics or metalwork. First publicly owned art museum in Europe was Amerbach-Cabinet in Basel (Now Kunstmuseum Basel).

Encyclopedic museums. They are usually large institutions and they offer visitors a wide variety of information on many themes, both local and global. They are not thematically defined nor specialized.

Historic house museums. A house or a building turned into a museum for a variety of reasons, most commonly because the person that lived in it was important or something important happened in it. House is often equipped with furniture like it was in the time when it was used. Visitors of the house learn through guides that tell story of the house and its inhabitants.

History museums. They collect objects and artifacts that tell a chronological story about particular locality. Objects that are collected could be documents, artifacts, archeological findings and other. They could be in a building, historic house or a historic site.

A county historical museum.

Living history museums. Type of a museum in which historic events are performed by actors to immerse a viewer and show how certain events looked like or how some crafts were performed because there is no other way to see them now because they are obsolete.

Maritime museums. Specialized museums for displaying maritime history, culture or archaeology. Primarily archaeological maritime museums exhibit artifacts and preserved shipwrecks recovered from bodies of water. Maritime history museums, show and educate the public about humanity’s maritime past.

Military and war museums. Museums specialized in military histories. Usually organized from a point of view of a one nation and conflicts in which that country has taken part. They collect and present weapons, uniforms, decorations, war technology and other objects.

Mobile museums. Museums that have no specific strict place of exhibiting. They could be exhibited from a vehicle or they could move from museum to museum as guests. Also a name for a parts of exhibitions of a museum that are sent to another museum.

Natural history museums. Usually display objects from nature like stuffed animals or pressed plants. They educate about natural history, dinosaurs, zoology, oceanography, anthropology, evolution, environmental issues, and more.

Open-air museums. Characteristic for exhibiting outdoors. Exhibitions consist of buildings that recreate architecture from the past. First opened in Scandinavia near the end of the 19th century.

Pop-up museums. Nontraditional museum institutions. Made to last short and often relying on visitors to provide museum objects and labels while professionals or institution only provide theme. With that is constructed shared historical authority.

Science museums. Specialized for science and history of science. In the beginning they were static displays of objects but now they are made so the visitors can participate and that way better learn about different branches of science.

I like to believe that you will surprised by the large number of museums around you. You simply go to the local library, and go up to the librarian there and ask them where the local museums are. You will find city, state, and country historical museums. Natural museum for such things as local wildlife, and butterflies (great fun that one!). And many more.

Planning

If you did your research, you might discover that the local country historical museum is open to the public and free, but is only open two days a week.

Or you might discover a local national history museum is free but asks for donations.

Just plan out your event. I urge going budget, keeping in mind that the idea is not to tantalize the children, but for you all to have a nice outings with those you care about.

  • Pick a museum.
  • Pick a date.
  • Plan the trip.
  • Pick an unusual restaurant to make it special.

Special Meals?

What do I mean by special meals? Well, I mean that you go out and find a restaurant to eat in. NOT FAST FOOD.

  • A family Italian restaurant.
  • A seafood, or local restaurant that has good cheap prices. (I once found a Cuban restaurant in the middle of nowhere. I ate delicious food that I never had since.)
  • A diner that is out of one of those old fashioned diner cars.
  • A place that makes their own ginger beer.
  • A place that is listed in the local community newspapers as “unique” or “special” or that has a story that is interesting.

Maybe your budget is so slim that you cannot afford a real mean. Then consider an after museum picnic. And just plan where to go, and BBQ some chicken, or meat, And relax in the countryside.

The idea is, of course, to have a low budget fun and special time with those you love and appreciate.

Final thoughts

There is no reason why you can’t have fun regardless of your personal situation. If you are working, then take the time off. If you are not working, then go when no one else is around.

Keep in mind, from a budget point of view, the cheapest meals are breakfasts.

You would be so very surprised at how cheap two eggs, toast, and baked beans (fried potatoes) are with a cup of coffee.

Get up early, have a weekday early breakfast in a diner, then  go to the museum.

Have a great time.

Take a ton of “selfies”, and then head home.

All this for just a few dollars. And unlimited coffee refills.

Also, keep in mind that State Parks usually have cabins to rent, and that they are dirt cheap. But you have to reserve them months in advance.

Some of the most remarkable times that I ever had was staying in some of these (bare) cabins, and going out and tromping though the state forest paths at night under a full moon, or attending the local recreation of a log cabin community at night.

Magical times.

And the smells of the wood smoke and the fires were mystical.

Bastrop State Park (Texas) Cabin #14 (Wheelchair Accessible)

Note that the prices can vary from $5 to $35 a night. The cabins will be bare. With just a mattress, and a table and chairs. There will be a nice fireplace, and a cord of wood to use. Some may have electricity. Some might have such things as refrigerators and other amenities, but don’t count on it.

Just check out the local webpage of the park that you are interested in visiting.

Chickasaw State Park Cabins — Tennessee State Parks

Do you want more?

I have more articles like this in my Art Index here…

ART

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Why the United States Leadership has such crazy ideas about China

Here, in this article I argue that the United States leadership is bat-shit-crazy. And their dealings with China confirms this. With each instance of interaction between the USA and China we see absolute ignorance, rudeness and irritating bluster that makes the entire world cringe. Why is this? Well, we will look at that right now.

Background

From MoA. The article discusses the second group of talks between the USA and China. This time taking place in China in July 2021. It was a second fiasco.

U.S. – China Talks Point To A Longer Conflict

The U.S. wants to slice and dice its approach to China. It will use all means to take advantage of China where it can, while restricting China in those fields were it can no longer compete with it.

The Chinese reject that approach.

The U.S., they say, should not see China as an enemy. It should stop lecturing China, accept it as an equal and cooperate with it in all fields.

The U.S. is unwilling to do that.

The USA is unwilling to accept China as an equal.

Its media-military-industrial complex is already primed for a cold war with China. Trillions of dollars are to be made from it.

China on the other side is ready to play hardball if it must.

Today U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman held talks with the Chinese Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Feng, She also meet with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. The later meeting, demanded to be the main event by the U.S., had already led to some squabble. Wang Yi is beyond Sherman’s rank and her main discussion, the Chinese insisted, should be with a person on her own level:

The State Department emphasized Sherman will have “senior-level” communications but a statement from China’s Foreign Affairs Ministry emphasized that Sherman “will hold talks” with Xie and after that Foreign Minister Wang will “meet her.”

Let me elaborate…

The Department of State announced that Ms. Sherman is going to meet with State Councilor and Foreign Minister Wang Yi and others in Tianjin. However, a spokesperson from China’s Foreign Ministry made clear on Friday that Ms. Sherman is to negotiate with Mr. Xie, while Mr. Wang will receive her afterward. ( “会见”)

For anyone who appreciates the richness of the Chinese language, “会见” can mean a meeting, but only in the context of gracing an inferior. This is the approach taken by the Foreign Ministry in the case of Wang’s meeting with Sherman. 

When asked about Sherman’s visit on July 24, H.E. Wang remarked that China and the international community as a whole bear the responsibility to teach the US a lesson if the US has not learned to treat others as equals.

Accenting Sherman’s visit is China’s sanctioning of prominent US figures, including former Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross. The action serves as both a retaliation in the face of US warnings over Hong Kong and as a heads-up for the upcoming Tianjin talks.

From the Chinese perspective, Sherman’s Asia tour is assertive overall, as it seeks to solidify the encirclement of China. 

But the Tianjin meeting will move ahead in [1] the context of China as an equal to the US; [2] that Chinese are not to be offended, and [3] the US cannot conduct foreign policy from a position of strength. 

Professor Shirley Ze Yu's editors prepared a most insightful commentary ahead of Deputy Secretary of State Sherman's meeting with her counterparts ( or not) in Tianjin.

Please check out their commentary here https://lnkd.in/enBjf4i

On Saturday two ‘senior U.S. administration officials’ gave a preview of the talks:

As Secretary Blinken has said, the U.S. relationship with China will be collaborative where it can be, competitive where it should be, and adversarial where it must be. 

And we expect all dimensions of the relationship will be on the table for discussion during Wendy’s meetings.
...
In Tianjin, [Sherman is] going to make clear while we welcome stiff and sustained competition with the PRC, everyone needs to play by the same rules and on the level – on a level playing field.

She’s going to underscore that we do not want that stiff and sustained competition to veer into conflict. 

This is why the U.S. wants to ensure that there are guard rails and parameters in place to responsibly manage the relationship.

The second official added:

So let me also put this meeting into the context of the administration’s broader China policy effort. 

Since President Biden took office, we’ve put a lot of focus on strengthening our own competitive hand vis-a-vis China through many actions that we’ve taken domestically, investing in ourselves at home. 

We’ve also rallied our allies and partners, including to advance an affirmative vision of the rules-based international order. 

And we’ve confronted China when they’ve acted against our interests and values while working to cooperate with China on areas like climate change and nonproliferation.

We know we’re stronger when we work with our allies. We know this makes us more effective when dealing with Beijing. 

We aren’t seeking an anti-China coalition in our work with allies and partners, but rather trying to work together in a multilateral fashion to uphold the international rules-based order.

...
With all of those actions underway, we’re entering this engagement from a position of strength and of solidarity.
...
Even as we meet with our Chinese counterparts, we will also continue to hold China accountable. 

These things are not mutually exclusive, and it should be clear that we are not afraid to impose costs for China’s behavior that undermines international norms.

Yup.

This describes how the rest of the world views the American position…

My opinion is…

As Peter Lee commented with his usual snark:

chinahand @chinahand - 16:43 UTC · Jul 24, 2021
"We're going to keep kicking your ass. Don't kick back, 'kay?" Our fate now that dime store Machiavellis, excuse me, generational talents, run the FP show.

The emphasized words were not welcome in China.

On Sunday Foreign Minister Wang Yi responded in an interview with an attack on U.S. exceptionalism:

“The United States always wants to exert pressure on other countries by virtue of its own strength, thinking that it is superior to others,” 

Foreign Minister Wang Yi said on Saturday.

“However, I would like to tell the US side clearly that there has never been a country in this world that is superior to others, nor should there be, and China will not accept any country claiming to be superior to others.
“If the United States has not learned how to get along with other countries on an equal footing by now, then it is our responsibility, together with the international community, to give the US a good tutorial in this regard.

Today, after the talk between Sherman and Xie, the Foreign Ministry published a series of strong response snippets by Deputy Foreign Minister Xie Feng:

I especially like the one about the ‘rules based international order’:

On 26 July, during his talks with U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman, Vice Foreign Minister Xie Feng made the comment that the U.S. side's so-called “rules-based international order” is an effort by the United States and a few other Western countries to frame their own rules as international rules and impose them on other countries. 

The United States has abandoned the universally-recognized international law and order and damaged the international system it has helped to build. 

And it is trying to replace it with a so-called “rules-based international order”. 

The purpose is to resort to the tactic of changing the rules to make life easy for itself and hard for others.

As well as to introduce “the law of the jungle" where might is right and the big bully the small.

The SCMP summerizes this situation…

China has for the first time given the US a list of red lines and remedial action it must take to repair relations.

Including [1] lifting sanctions and [2] dropping its extradition request for Huawei financial chief Meng Wanzhou.

Chinese foreign vice-minister Xie Feng told US deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman on Monday morning that...

... US-China relations had reached a “stalemate”...

... and faced “serious consequences”.

According to a Chinese foreign ministry statement.
“The foundational reason is that some people in the US are treating China as an ‘imagined enemy’,” it quoted Xie as saying.
After the meeting, Xie said China gave two lists to the US.

[1] One with one remedial action for Washington to take towards China.
[2] And the other a series of Beijing’s key concerns.
...
Xie said the Chinese side also “expressed its strong dissatisfaction towards the wrong remarks and actions of the US” in relation to...

... investigations into [1] the origins of Covid-19, [2] Taiwan, [3] Xinjiang, [4] Hong Kong and [5] the South China Sea.
“We urge the United States not to underestimate...

...the strong determination, 
...firm will and 
...strong ability 

of the 1.4 billion Chinese people to...

...safeguard national sovereignty, 
...security and 
...development interests,” 

The state news agency Xinhua quoted him as saying.

In its summary of the talks the Associated Press points to the basic difference in the approaches:

High-level face-to-face talks between U.S. and Chinese diplomats on Monday highlighted sharp differences between the sides.

Although the tone appeared somewhat less contentious than at their last meeting.

...

Xie said China wants to [1] seek common ground while [2] shelving differences.

This highlights a divide in the basic approach to their relationship. 

The Biden administration has said it will cooperate in areas [1] such as climate.  But it will [2] confront China in others such as human rights. He described the relationship as collaborative, competitive and adversarial (at the same time).

As the U.S. is for now rejecting the Chinese offer for burying the hatchet…

… China will have to play hardball.

It will not be cooperative in the fields where the U.S. wants it to be cooperative (Iran, North Korea, etc.).

It will also be adversarial in fields where the U.S. has little ability to push back (rare earth exports, Boeing 737MAX re-certification).

The U.S. hopes that it can find and press ‘allies’ into confronting China. But Europe already rejected that. (Not happening.)

To others, especially in Asia, the U.S. looks like a declining power because it is a declining power and the economic interests of most nations now favor China.

Under these circumstances I for one fail to see how the U.S. could win in a longer cold conflict.

How long then will it take until the U.S. recognizes that and steps down from its illusion of supremacy?

You do know…

America has been very public in saying that the Chinese leadership will be assassinated. That military forces are being trained to invade China and the outlying islands. That secret hidden forces are being trained to perform dangerous secretive work to sabotage China. And that every action that China does that is positive, that America will try to undo it.

And somehow, the American people are just fine with this.

Ok! China won’t fight back you know. No worries. No problem.

Right?

Crazy!

From what I see today…

…never.

The entire American leadership suffers from some kind of mental illness. They are so sick that they are beyond repair.

Today, on the Chinese television and in social media everyone is playing the clip with the government authorities have stated that America is no longer reliable, believable and worthy of interaction with.

That means…

…all negotiations from now on are zero-sum efforts. They are not possible and cannot exist.

I argue that this idea of natural superior to the Chinese derives from decades of constant reinforcement of what the Chinese are.  Over time, this reinforcement gets crazier, and crazier, until today it is unrecognizable from reality.

Here is a movie that I believe represents the type of Hollywood movie fare that has shaped the political class in Washington DC today. You might read it and think “oh goodness! No one could possibly be that deluded as to believe such nonsense!”

To which I counter…

…you haven’t been to the USA lately have you?

BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH

A Chinese general goes berserk and has a system of tunnels dug all the way from China to USA, under the Pacific Ocean. The man who has discovered this is locked up because they think he is insane. US Navy soldiers go underground to repel the invaders.

BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH

The picture concerns upon Chinese communists (leader is Martin Benson as general goes berserk and who places atomic bombs) trying to destroy United States via some continued series of underground tunnels , made all the way from China under the Pacific Ocean , but some US Navy soldiers , scientists , military (Kerwin Mathews , Al Mulok , Ed Bishop) and a gorgeous geologist (Vivienne Ventura) discover the scheme and go underground to repel the invaders .

It's a pulp movie of science-fiction genre in which there are noisy action , suspense , intrigue , tension and results to be quite bemusing . 

The history deals with nasty Chinese people and American patriots who fight strongly to vanquish them . 

In spite of lack luster and budget is quite agreeable and fun . 

The plot is almost ridiculous and senseless but it's developed in fast moving and numerous surprises and that's why it is amusing . 

The movie has precedent in those films of the 30s with Fumanchu (by Sax Rohmer) and Boris Karloff as heinous starring and nearest the series of the 60s (produced by Harry Alan Towers with Christopher Lee as the Chinese baddie) in which the ¨yellow danger¨ was a fearful enemy . 

The motion picture takes part of a genre which in the 80s attained splendor , thus : ¨Red Dawn¨ (by John Milius with Patrick Swayze) , ¨Invasion USA ¨ (by Joseph Zito with Chuck Norris) and ¨Amerika¨ (by Donald Wyre with Kris Kristofferson) where the communists -Russkies generally- execute invasion on America . 

Rating : Average but entertaining .

Evil Communist Chinese woman using a powerful mind ray to seduce our young American hero.

The Characters:

  • Cmdr. Shaw – His experimental underwater laboratory imploded, so he is assigned as senior testing official, U.S. Navy Forces Out to Pasture, Ashore.
  • Tila Yung – I bet she gets tired of servicemen asking what a pretty girl like her is doing in a hole like this.
  • Dr. Arnold Kramer – Part anteater, part scientist, and all-American. He’s also mad as a hatter, though I doubt he’s ever worn a felt hat and presumably has enough sense to avoid drinking quicksilver.
  • SgtMaj. Mulberry – “Sir, if you call me ‘sergeant’ one more time, I am going to get Bataan on your a**.”
  • Cmdr. Cassidy – Computer technician who flies a desk. Because this is 1967, his computer is so big that it dwarfs his house.
  • Dr. Kengh Lee – You look just about as Chinese as Tony Randall.
  • Gen. Chan Lu – You look more like Tony Randall than a Chinese person.
So many opportunities to laugh at this film. Where does one begin? European actors in "yellowface" playing the bad guy renegade Chinese army. (Let's see here -- the bad guy in his lair always has an eccentric pet with him -- okay the guy has a parrot! Check that off the list!)

A film obviously made in Britain pretending to be a Hollywood film, which takes place in Las Vegas (unconvincing cardboard set inside a sound stage, plus some actual second unit stock footage), San Diego (England), Oregon (England again) and Hawaii (more stock footage, plus various underground tunnels (more paper mache sets in a sound stage).

Comically fake nuclear bombs. Laser guns mounted on bulldozers. Giant spinning tape reel computer banks...no wait, those were real at that time.

Bad directing, jump cuts, dropped frames, one establishing shot where the camera drops off the tripod. Awkward staging. Hokey dialog. The whole plot totally ridiculous. Well, it is like a live action comic book. So why should I take any bit of it seriously? Well, the characters seem to be dead serious about the whole enterprise. (That's good. True camp does not work if you give a "nod and a wink" to the audience...though that one scene with the slot machines in the mental hospital was perhaps a bit over the line...)

Yes, fans of The Batman or Green Hornet TV shows of this time period will be right at home here. Plenty of bright primary colors, swish pan transitions, and blaring cool-daddyo-jazz soundtrack. It's all here for the fan of 1960's camp and Cold War pop culture kitsch to treasure as an endemic artifact of its time, the likes of which we may never see again.

Thank goodness.

BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH

The Plot:

As the film begins, Las Vegas’ finest (meaning the police, not strippers, showgirls, or escorts) are called to the site of a disturbance. They find Dr. Arnold Kramer, eminent scientist, with his ear to the sidewalk, yelling about something digging underneath their feet. Arnold is not half as crazy as he appears to be. There are not giant ants making a nest under Las Vegas, even though I would happily pay money to see a movie about giant ants. What is slowly crawling below the Earth of free America is much more insidous.

Hold on, I’ll tell you what it is in a minute.

What is that sound under the ground? Dastardly Communists destroying the bedrock of society?

Elsewhere, Commander Shaw is not enjoying his reassignment to shore duty following an accident of undetermined nature that destroyed his pet project, SeaLab VII, and killed twenty-seven men. Instead of actual research or having a ship to command, the Commander finds himself testing pipes. It’s not exactly rewarding work for one of the brightest minds in the U.S. Navy, but at least he is not a guest at one of the military’s correctional facilities, peeling potatoes next to mother stabbers and father rapers. Nor is he experiencing the hospitality of a state mental institution, like Mr. Kramer. He goes to visit Arnold, because the two have known each other for years. The visit causes Shaw to think that his old buddy is as crazy as the psychiatrists say.

Later on, a random news report about a tragedy at a deep mine in Oregon gets Shaw to thinking. He takes a trip to personally investigate the mine collapse and discovers something fantastic: a mysterious medallion and an unexplained tunnel with smooth sides. Taking some samples back to the Navy lab only creates more questions. To find out what is really going on, the Commander leads two squads of Marines down into the hole. They discover a room filled with Chinese and atomic bombs! The Marines attack and easily defeat the Chinese in a decidedly one-side battle. The outcome is not surprising, since most of the Chinese are technicians who are only armed with clipboards.

BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH

What is surprising is that the Marines quickly set to work rendering the atomic weapons unusable. All of the bombs look like stainless steel milk tanks turned on their sides. Making them inert involves uncapping one end and reaching in to remove a small cylinder that is resting in a cradle. The cylinders appear to be 9 oz CO2 tanks. My trouble is knowing what they are, but not what they are supposed to be. They cannot simply be the fuse, because that would be easy to replace. Perhaps the cylinders are supposed to be the plutonium or tritium. If that is the case, then those Marines should not be handling the cylinders with their bare hands.

Deactivating an atomic bomb is not the sort of thing that you should rush. Unfortunately, the return of a Chinese tunnel-making machine means that the Marines are out of luck and out of time. Commander Shaw and his compatriots finish removing the tritium cylinders from the bombs, but then have to deal with the tunnel-making machine. While not a military vehicle, it is not the sort of thing that a Marine wants to run into in a dark tunnel. It does not have a huge drill on the front, because the tunnels are created with a super boring laser thingamajig. So, the Chinese tunneling machines look like armored zambonis. The Marines do what Marines always do when faced with armored vehicles: they throw grenades at it until it explodes.

Actually, that only happens in video games. When Marine infantry is forced to engage enemy armor, we like to use just about everything besides grenades. This makes everybody happy, except the crew of the armored vehicle. Especially thankful are the 0352 TOW gunners who finally get a chance to expend one of the missiles they have always wanted to shoot, but which are too expensive to use for training.

Battle beneath the Earth.

After conducting a tactical retreat from the Chinese tunnel, Commander Shaw returns to the laboratory so he and the other brass can plan their next move against the subterranean red menace. Gentlemen, this is not a matter for discussion. There is a Red Chinese tunnel under the United States! You should divert the Colorado River into it or else send in a lot of Marines to clear the artificial cave system room by room. Imagine how much fun a battalion of Marines would have in the Underdark. Well, except for encountering all sorts of weird creatures that could only be dreamed up by nerds with too much time. Having my skin turned into slime by an aboleth or my brain puréed by an illithid would suck (yea, mightily). On the other hand, a movie about a squad of Marines fighting beholders and cave fishers would be a lot of fun.

I know that the SyFy folks read the site, so consider the suggestion officially submitted. It will probably be made, get turned into a series, become extremely popular with a group of hardcore fans, and then get cancelled after the first season. That’s just the way the SyFy cookie crumbles. To be honest, that’s the way that every SyFy cookie crumbles.

Brave American hero easily takes over the unsuspecting evil Chinese soldiers.

Anyway.

While the Americans scramble to figure out what is going on under the purple mountains and fruited plains, the Chinese continue their tunneling activities. General Lu and Doctor Lee are only mildly concerned that the United States has finally discovered their tunnels. They are nearly ready to proceed with the final phase of their plan. The thermonuclear weapons are, of course, intended to be detonated below every major American city and military installation. I would guess that the Chinese intend to dig upwards and leave their little present inside someone’s basement, then set the timer and retreat to a safe distance until the “All’s Destroyed” signal. After the bombs are detonated, the Chinese are prepared to conduct a military invasion to overpower what is left of America’s military forces.

This tunnel stretches all the way from China to the United States. Where are they getting their fresh air? Heck, where are they getting the genuine imitation Chinese restaurant decor?

The Chinese might be master in technology, but are not a match for the American freedom and democracy!

There is one huge, glaring problem with this movie. No, it is not the general premise. Nor is it the Marines (even the Private) all looking like they reached retirement age ten years ago. It’s not even the idea that the Chinese use big vacuum tube capsules like the ones you see in a bank’s drive-through to get from one end of the tunnel to the other. The biggest problem with “Battle Beneath the Earth” is that the Chinese do not look Chinese; not even by my standards. I am talking about the two main characters, Lee and Lu. The job that makeup did on the two actors makes it appear that they are old men who have had way too much cosmetic surgery. They look more Botox than Chinese.

Battle beneath the earth.

General Lu’s second in command does look Chinese, but the general shoots him for incompetence. Meaning that we’re right back to square one. Hrumpf!

Back at the American lab, Dr. Kramer and the others are making good progress is replicating the Chinese tunneling technology. What they are having a problem doing is finding the existing tunnels. Even using the giant government computer, with its reels of magnetic tape and army of support technicians, proves fruitless. There is too much extra noise going on to pinpoint the relatively silent Chinese tunneling machines. What the scientists finally do is order the entire country to be quiet for ten minutes so the computers can listen for the Chinese moles.

Dangerous underground Communist Chinese cars!

Amazingly, it works. Mass transit grinds to a halt, construction workers stop jackhammering, farmers stop plowing, and rednecks stop fishing with dynamite. The last state to go quiet is Texas, which is probably on account of some idiot out in bumf**k digging out a stump. Stop digging for ten minutes, ya durn fool. The Chinese are coming! Nobody cares about that stupid stump. It’s almost time for supper anyhow.

The moments of silence work. The computer maps out the network of Chinese tunnels under the ocean and the United States. Commander Shaw and Doctor Kramer know where the Chinese are at, meaning that our national foundation has a fighting chance. Hooray for American ingenuity! Hooray for the big-a** computer! Hooray for all the female employees in white blouses and gray skirts!

Brave American soldiers hiding from the evil Chinese army.

Remember when science was all about big rolls of magnetic tape, pretty women in tastefully fitting skirts, and beeps? Man, I miss those beeps.

With the location of the Chinese tunnels mapped out, the Americans are finally ready to go on the offensive. Using a prototype tunneling machine built by Dr. Kramer using bits and pieces of the destroyed Chinese vehicle, the American forces intend to disrupt the tunnel at it’s most vulnerable point near Hawaii. I can hear the Marines now, “What? We have to go TAD to Hawaii? Oh, no!” Unfortunately, once the Americans descend into the tunnels things go terribly wrong. The small strike force is ambushed by Chinese troops and either killed or taken prisoner. In the end, it is up to the main characters to escape from their cell, hijack an underground atomic bomb train, and destroy the Chinese tunnel system.

Oh, and Commander Shaw hooks up with Dr. Yung, because she is hot.

BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH

Things I Learned From This Movie:

  • Never, ever follow any advice that you get from the sidewalks in Vegas.
  • The Department of the Navy has jurisdiction over all military operations that take place below sea level.
  • Marines are trained to defuse nuclear bombs while they are at Boot Camp.
  • The space race was a Red Chinese herring.
  • Both paper and halogen headlights beat rock.
  • The only tool needed to arm or disarm a nuclear weapon is a 5.5mm allen wrench.
  • If a Chinese person and an elf conceived a child it would look exactly like Mr. Spock.
  • Atomic bombs make a ticking sound when they are about to explode.
  • Radioactive fallout causes the most beautiful sunsets.

BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH

Stuff To Watch For:

  • 19 mins – It’s a genuine Fu Manchu belt buckle with decoder ring! I got one of those in a box of Count Chocula cereal when I was a kid.
  • 26 mins – “Oh, don’t shoot them.”
  • 38 mins – Paint cans filled with soy sauce. How diabolical!
  • 47 mins – You’d think that they would have unrolled a spool of comm wire as they went.
  • 56 mins – Ah, back when the Air Force was so poor they couldn’t even afford paint for their aircraft.
  • 61 mins – I would have died laughing if she replied that she had a doctorate in home economics.
  • 68 mins – Their handheld fan technology is years ahead of our own!
  • 82 mins – You just passed those same guys, with that same cart, a few minutes ago.

BATTLE BENEATH THE EARTH

Sheech!

Where the American Diplomats Learned about China…

All evidence that they picked up their knowledge from either B-grade budget movies made during the “cold war” or they found something stuck up their ass that they pulled out.

This is the university that taught American “diplomats” how to act with the Chinese.

Ok. Ok. I know it’s a bit of a stretch…

But if someone else can posit why the American diplomats are not acting like diplomats, and instead like power-crazed bullies being rude and bellicose, I will listen. Right now I am of the mind that it must be a combination of mass psychosis, insanity, massive quantities of mind altering drugs, greed, and nonsensical illusions of their real power and ability.

Or…

The American government WANTS the Chinese to get angry. They WANT to provoke a conflict. They WANT to have a war.

American illusions are shaped by fantastical notions that have no bearing on reality.

Why would they possible want that?

There are many reasons.

  • There’s no other options available. A war is the only remaining option in the American “playbook” to maintain a hope of survival. The future of America is bleak and an economic bubble is going to pop, and it might be any day now.
  • Maybe the USA has a “secret weapon” that they will engage once China falls and takes the “bait”.
  • Maybe America ACTUALLY IS stronger than it appears to us. Maybe all this weakness domestically and socially will magically end once a full-scale war is initiated.
  • Maybe America is convinced that China can be isolated and alone, and America can gather the rest of the world together and fight it as the leading superpower.
  • Maybe America is ruled by an aged senile passive figurehead, and the powers that control everything wants a war because their days of economic supremacy is over unless the Chinese banking system is extinguished.

I do not know.

What I do know, is that from the “front row seat” it seems like the United States government is just fucking useless, and that the only way for America to survive is to completely and totally scrap it’s form of governance and regress back to state control without a federal government.

China is not weak. Nor is it alone.

The rest of the world is not at all like it is portrayed in the American media.

You only live twice…

Well…

I wish. For most of us, it’s thousands and thousands of recycled events. But that doesn’t refer to us as much to an old 007 James Bond movie. “You only live twice.”

You only live twice.

.

The way that America was able to drag the entire nation into a war with Vietnam, and then again towards fighting country after country was because it maintained an artificial illusion of what the world is / was for the American population to consume.

This is the primary driver why CNN, FOX, BBC and all the rest doctor the pictures to make China look like a dirty shithole, and the “news” always describe China (and the rest of the world as really terrible places to be.).

But all in all, America is so absolutely mind-numbingly incompetent that it just doesn’t realize that it’s “too late”. China surpassed the United States in capability (full spectrum) decades ago.

Decades.

And now, America looks like some mangy old toothless dog snarling and snapping at a sleek, huge panther, that is deciding what to do with this piece of shit.

America is so hopeless.

Meanwhile…

Here’s a delicious Chinese fish.

Appreciate the good things in life.

Delicious fish.

OK, so what…?

Something is seriously WRONG.

I do not know what is wrong, but something is. The United States is treating China as if it is some minor small nation, and that American is going to “kick some ass” and “bust down some doors”. And I know China. China will blast the top 50 American cities into uninhabitable rubble as a result. Why can’t the United States leadership see this?

Are they that stupid. crazy, idiotic, or insane? What is their GOD DAMN MALFUNCTION?

Listen to me. It will not be like before. Everyone has learned.

 

CHINA and Russia will blast the United States into the bronze age.

I mean. They will REALLY do this.

Really.

But first they will collapse the American economy.

Then they will isolate it politically, globally and through trade.

Then they set fire to all the domestic problems, and then…

… then if the results are not satisfactory they will light the fuse to the gunpowder.

We cannot control the crazy.

No we cannot.

We can control our reality.

We can only run our prayers, our affirmations and our campaigns.

Death wishes by police is increasingly common in the United States today.

We can be kind to others and control our immediate reality; our neighborhood.

Never forget there is strength in numbers. Remember the rule of three.

And you will be just fine. And let the crazies try to engage in a world that is increasingly hostile to them and their crazy selfish ideas.

Never forget the rule of three.

It just boggles the mind!

The United States can’t make anything. Aside from some basic fabrication and some high-tech aircraft for military use, that’s about it. (And they source just about everything out of the country.) And yet they want to destroy the world’s factory.

What is their malfunction?

You cannot “bite the hand that feeds you”, nor should you pretend that you can make the parts in West-bumfuck USA at the same price and quality. It ain’t gonna happen.

Maybe…

Just maybe if you set up a plan, and work on the plan… perhaps in five years you can start getting some semblance of a kind of manufacturing capability. But the first products out of that factory will have incoherent quality, and all sorts of problems. I would suggest starting with rubber duckys, then work your way up to consumer appliances.

Really?

America is a nation for the wealthy and their fellow psychopaths.

America is “top heavy” in government “leadership” and severely lacking in manufacturing ability. And yet it really wants to destroy it’s source of products, and yet… and yet… it doesn’t realize that it can’t get that ability back easily. Somehow it believe s that it “grow on trees” and factories and workers are easy to come by.

What kind of deluded folk think like that?

I only met one person like that.

He was in a mental hospital in Rhode Island. He had other strange beliefs. Like he was the king of the world, and that God granted him unlimited power, and that he could not be destroyed or hurt because he was an agent for God. He was a crazy, childish, ignorant son of a bitch.

Sigh.

Seriously, I do not know what will happen in the future. I really don’t. But what I do know is that (increasingly) the United State looks like a crazy person that is going to run in front of the police and say “kill me… kill me!” and the police will not want to, but in the end, they will shrug their shoulders and simply shoot the mad man dead.

Sad.

But accurate.

What’s Next

I would brace for some non-violent retaliatory actions designed to suppress some of the bellicose nature that the American leadership seems to possess. If that fails, then expect a serious , SERIOUS “bitch slap” in your backyard. Sometimes the way to deal with a crazy, out of control child, is to paddle it’s butt so that it will never, ever, again “act up”.

China, and Russia both realize this. Do not expect half-baked measures. Brace for well thought-out next actions.

If the American “leadership” (and at this stage who can serious say that America has ANY kind of leadership) doesn’t listen to all the alarm bells, flashing lights, sirens and screaming hysterical people running for their lives…

…then a “kill shot” will be necessary.

One last thought

Never forget.

The rule of three.

The ONLY way that you are going to survive this crazy period of time, and handle an insane world seemly run by imbeciles is to help others, be the best that you can be, and do great works…

Do great works.

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Movie Review of cannibal women in the avocado jungle of death

Col Mattel: "Avocados are vital to this nation's security interests. With the communists already in control of Nicaragua and Guatemala and El Salvador strife with revolution California is the last secure supply of Avocados in the free world. We're on the verge of a major Avocado gap!" 

Introduction

Life is often too serious. So, perhaps the best solution is to relax, and look at something silly. And there is perhaps nothing sillier than what Hollywood produces these days. And so, let’s look at one of the “crown jewels” of Hollywood.

Better than reading American “news”.

The Characters

  • Dr. Margo Hunt – Shannon Tweed! Professor of Feminist Studies.
  • Bunny – Every liberated woman’s nightmare, but she wants to be a feminist. This girl has more outfits than you can shake a stick at.
  • Jim – Bill Maher! Inept guide who once had a one night stand with Margo.
  • Dr. Kurtz – Another feminist, author of “Smart Women, Stupid Insensitive Men.” Throws herself into a pool of Piranhas in the end.
  • Colonel Mattel – Head of the National Security Commission on Avocado Affairs. He has one eye.
  • Piranha Women – Savage feminists who believe men should be killed and eaten with guacamolle dip.
  • Barracuda Women – Savage feminists who believe men should be killed and eaten with clam dip.
The plot is straight out of California.

The Plot

Talk about strange and wonderous things!

This film is full of camp, not only is southern California transformed into wild avocado jungle but it is inhabited by man eating feminists! Shannon Tweed, whose breasts have starred in numerous films, is a teacher of women’s studies!

Then of course there is Bunny, this girl is every teenage guy’s dream and every feminists nightmare – but she wants to be a progressive woman.

There are plenty of little gags here and there, most of them involving Maher and Bunny being boneheads.

Dr. Hunt is recruited by the U.S. Government to make liaison with the Pirahna Women and hires Jim as her guide.

After encountering vicious hippos, catfish, and Donnahews (men who knit and cook) the explorers discover the Pirahna women are led by a savage ex-feminist and poised to wage war!

Bunny nearly joins the cannibals but is unable to complete the initiation rite, which involves her making love to then consuming Jim.

Everything works out in the end though, Kurtz is slain, Jim and Bunny marry, and Dr. Hunt returns to her college.

A fun film with plenty of women running around in leather loincloths and tops.

Bunny: "Well, sometimes when I'm with a guy I wish that he would tie me up with red licorice ropes and then spank me...and then he'd eat the ropes... and then he'd free me...and then we'd make love while the philharmonic played 'Bolero.'" 

Things I learned…

  • Most of southern California is virgin jungle.
  • Girls just want to tear men into strips and eat them with gaucamolle dip.
  • An hour and a half of feminine nonsense punctuated with half-nude women is tolerable.
  • Bill Maher is the last real man but he looks fairly effeminate in a white neck kerchief.
  • There are leopards living wild in California.
  • Lost female tribes speak French.
  • If given a choice between Bill Maher or Shannon Tweed in their underwear I would pick the latter.
  • Bunny has a damn lot of clothes, what is up with this girl?
Goodness!

Stuff to watch out for

  • 3 mins – RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOT!
  • 4 mins – Pretty pale skin for living in a jungle her whole life.
  • 14 mins – Now this is a shirt.
  • 18 mins – That’s a pretty small barrel for a .44 Magnum, maybe it’s a 44 Magnum divided by 2?
  • 19 mins – Bunny in one of many outfits, where she keeps them nobody knows.
  • 38 mins – Mallards in a tropical rain forest?
  • 46 mins – Just conjuring up cases of beer huh? But why Old Milwaukee? Ugh.
  • 75 mins – The compound must be right on the international date line, one side is day the other night.
Jim: "Okay, let's see...so she's going to make love to me, that's, that's good - but she's going to kill me and eat me, that's bad." 

Movie Clip..

Ugh. If there is ever a moment to capture, it is Bill Maher accusing Shannon Tweed of being a cannibal feminist. He makes a convincing argument. 

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The REAL reason why China converted all the for-profit schools to non-profit business entities

If you have been paying a little attention at the International scene, you will be aware that China “clamped down” on the for-profit school model that was working inside of China. By the singular ‘stroke of a pen”, many Chinese billionaires suddenly lost a ton-load of money. And the West (read: America and the UK) are all in Shock. “What are they thinking” they holler.

They don’t “get it”. They do not understand. They think that making billions of dollars in profits is a sign of success and vibrancy. But no. It is not.

Again, China is showing the world, that it’s primary role is to take care of it’s citizens first. And if a few billionaires are crushed in the process, then so be it.

China’s hammer blow to private education shows it will do whatever it takes to meet its goals

From HERE.  Tom Fowdy 26Jul21.

Perceived as promoting inequality and a hindrance to birth rates, tutoring in China has suddenly been transformed into a non-profit industry. It’s a ruthless reminder that Xi Jinping will always put the needs of society first.
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In a spectacular display of government authority, China has, with the stroke of a pen, demolished its $120-billion private education industry by forcing it to reform into a non-profit initiative.

The move has cost at least one billionaire his fortune.

It follows a number of crackdowns waged by Beijing against various sectors of the economy which were deemed to contravene the national interest. The ruthlessness of such sudden decision-making has undoubtedly shocked Western observers and capitalist advocates, yet its purpose appears to be twofold.

As highlighted by Reuters, Beijing is dismantling a sector which is not only exacerbating the inequality of education among rich and poor, but is also increasingly perceived as an obstacle to the country’s fertility rates.

So now the hammer has come down on it as a social disruption. It shows that Beijing is prepared to do whatever it takes to meet its national goals, and is another example of how the Chinese Communist Party’s authority has stiffened against the creeping liberalization which the West once welcomed.

Education is of exceptional importance in east Asian societies, and is often considered a determining factor in a family’s status. Parents invest heavily in their children’s future, and as a result the systems in these countries often turn out to be extremely competitive, resulting in an intense commitment towards extra-curricular and out-of-school private study.

This has sparked the development of a huge private education and tutoring sector, with parents investing vast amounts of money to ensure that their children can be among the very best. It is admirable yet strenuous, and it inevitably has a knock-on effect on fertility rates, as each child effectively becomes a massive investment.

The example of neighboring South Korea, which is fully developed, illustrates how in a capitalist society, the zealous over-competitiveness of the education system is having negative effects on society. High-school-age children typically go to school, only to attend private ‘Hagwon’ classes afterwards, which often offer miserable working conditions for the teachers involved.

As a country that is developing fast, China has increasingly been heading in the same direction. Despite being a communist state, this has created a growing urban-rural divide, where the wealthy children of cities such as Shanghai are able to afford these educational boosters, but the poorer children of the provinces are left behind.

This is an obstacle for future growth.

Beijing also now sees this arrangement as dragging down its birth rate, which has become a national priority. A new white paper called for extensive reforms to enable people to be able to afford more children, including in education and healthcare.

As a result, Beijing has clamped down hard on this sector by instantaneously transforming it into a non-profit, sending shares plunging. The goal is not to end tutoring, but to make it more affordable and accessible to all, so the vices of inequality and capitalism cannot strangle society.

It’s a stark reminder that although China embraces market economics, it is nonetheless still a communist – state and under Xi Jinping, it is in many ways hardening its resolve to be so.

And this is, of course, precisely why the West does not like Xi.

The CPC chairman has reversed the trajectory of liberalisation in society, which Western observers once hoped would see China ‘evolve’ into a democracy. Instead, Xi has centralized and consolidated CPC rule.

His strategy is not so much tyranny, as has been caricatured, but based on an increasing belief that if China’s problems are to be overcome, the political will invested into it needs to more resolute.

The education saga helps explain why.

If the private education system was simply allowed to spiral out of control as a capitalist initiative – which is acceptable from a Western point of view – it would become an obstacle for the country’s other socio-economic goals and development.

Increasingly, we see this kind of ruthlessness shape Xi’s leadership of the country – such as at the start of the pandemic, when he imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, which was condemned by the West at the time, yet ultimately paid off.

Although the uncompromising nature of the Xi era has put China on a collision course with the West, it nonetheless may be what the country truly needs to move forward.

Many of his actions are arguably ‘necessary evils’ in the pursuit of a longer strategy, even if one believes they are morally troubling or even unacceptable.

The South Korean model of education is a warning sign of what can happen if an over-competitive educational culture is superseded by the demands of profit. Xi has just made sure this will not happen in China. It shows how the state is continuing to dominate Chinese society and drive forward its vision for the future, even if it means culling billionaires along that road.

Tutoring, healing, feeding humans, providing water and energy should be non profit. Why? 

Why should someone profit by providing basic services? 

Tell me why? 

Remark, non profit does not mean low wages nor free... it could mean efficient, fair, good and appreciated by customers, who would choose the best for them.
Hear! Hear!
Well I agree with the Chinese President because he believes that every child should have equal opportunity at the educational level. 

A poor family cannot afford expensive private tutoring maybe leaving the child from that poor family at a disadvantage when it comes to performance in exams, and the opportunity for a place at university. 

This is the best way to produce the best talent and China as a country will benefit in the future because of this policy.
I have always believed that countries should provide free education based on ability especially in science, technology, maths and medicine. Let them pay for their airy fairy degrees themselves. This is exactly what farmers have done forever, cultivate for best yield.
A brilliant management move by China. 

As it will stop a lot of inequalities, people will blend better with 0ne streamline education, much of one class people, unlike in many countries private schools with troublesome, violent separate races, of different castes. And private schools tend to stretch the boundaries with different courses, subjects and outlandish thinking---not good for a society. 

So much better to have one good public system only- let China show the way. The benefits for all people are ENORMOUS. I bet more than half of the people in the world will applaud 'the one education system.'
The corrosive capitalist mindset will surely turn China into a failed state like the US. It is a relief to see China protect itself and its people from the cancer that will subvert China and lead to its fall. 

Keeping an eye on the pro-West cabals inside China will protect it from suffering the same fate as the Soviet Union. Learn from History!

American and Western media are shocked!

And you can tell how they just don’t have a clue as to what is going on. Reading it, it sounds so “breathless”, “gasping”, “exasperated”, and “frustrated”. Read this article from HERE.

Jeeze! Get a fucking life woman.

I highlighted the “kill words and phrases“.

Can you possibly tell me that this wasn’t processed through AI to develop a thoroughly negative impression of China? And this is just one example of how Americans are manipulated to hate and demonize China.

Check it out. Learn something.

China is extending its regulatory storm from tech to education

Just as China’s regulatory storm against big tech came abruptly and brutally, Beijing’s deepening crackdown on private education companies is plunging the entire sector into an existential crisis.

China’s State Council and the Party’s central committee have jointly issued a set of rules (link in Chinese) aimed at curtailing the sprawling sector that has flourished thanks to massive funding from global investors and ever increasing spending from families fighting to help their children gain a better footing in life. After years of high growth, the size of the after-school tutoring sector has reached upwards of $100 billion, of which online tutoring services account for around $40 billion.

“The timing is also interesting as it coincides with the crackdown on the tech companies, and further confirms the intention of the government to regain control [of] and restructure the economy,” said Henry Gao, an associate professor of law at Singapore Management University, referring to Beijing’s sweeping regulatory overhaul of tech companies including Alibaba and Tencent, which have either been fined for monopolistic practices, ordered to give up their exclusive rights in certain sectors, or, in the case of Didi, have fallen afoul of national security rules.

China’s “double reduction” policy

The rules, released over the weekend, aim to ease homework and after-school study hours for students, which the policy dubbed the “double reduction.” They stipulate that companies teaching subjects covered in primary and middle school, which are compulsory in China, should register as “nonprofit institutions,” essentially banning them from making returns for investors. No new private tutoring firms can register, while online education platforms also need to seek new approval from regulators despite their previous credentials.

Meanwhile, companies are also banned from raising capital, going public, or allowing foreign investors to hold stakes in the firms, posing a major legal puzzle for funds like US firm Tiger Global and Singapore state fund Temasek that have invested billions in the sector. In a further blow to China’s ed-tech startups, the rules also say that the education department should push for free online tutoring services across the country.

The companies are also banned from teaching on public holidays or weekends.

Double-digit reductions in Chinese stocks

The looming rules, first reported by Bloomberg last Friday (July 23), immediately led to a sell-off last week in US-listed veteran education players such as New Oriental Education & Technology and TAL Education. In trading in Hong Kong today, where Oriental floated a secondary listing last year, shares of the company plunged 47% today. Meanwhile, Larry Chen, the former schoolteacher who founded Gaotu Techedu, a major online education player, fell out of the ranks of China’s billionaires.

Major education companies have been quick to say they will comply with the new government rules. New Oriental, the largest Chinese player in this space, said that the new regulations will “have material adverse impact on after-school tutoring services, a sentiment echoed by TAL.

The regulatory developments also spurred a broader $2 billion selloff in Chinese stocks, as the bar on foreign investment for education firms coupled with the crackdown on foreign IPOs after ride-hailing giant Didi confirmed to foreign investors just how exposed their investments are from China’s regulatory actions. Social media and gaming Tencent was down 7.7% in Hong Kong today after China told it to unwind its monopoly on exclusive music licensing rights, while food delivery giant Meitu was down nearly 14% after Chinese regulators today ordered better protections for delivery workers.

Why is China cracking down on education?

While the harshness of the new measures is surprising, the fact that they were coming wasn’t. In March, president Xi Jinping called after-school tutoring services a “social problem,” and in May he again lashed out at the industry’s “disorderly development.” Following Xi’s criticism of the sector, authorities set up a dedicated department to supervise it, including examining tutor qualifications and fees, as well as imposing a ban on teaching preschoolers primary school materials.

In addition to Beijing’s desire to put the brakes on tech sectors that it believes expanded too chaotically, the turn to education indicates the government’s worries about China’s dropping birth rate. One of the major purposes of the new rules is to “effectively ease the anxieties of parents,” as well as reduce family spending on education, according to the government document. A major obstacle for Chinese citizens to have more than one child is the sheer cost of doing so, and in particular the difficulty of securing a quality education, which authorities promised to address in May, when introducing the third-child policy.

One Chinese teacher Quartz spoke to noted that it may be middle-class families who feel this policy the most, given they are most likely to push their kids into tutoring. Affluent families, after all, can still engage private tutors or send their children abroad to elite schools.

“The new rules will benefit those who are in the grassroots class that don’t have much time or energy to supervise children’s studies,” said the teacher. “But for people like us who are in the middle-class bracket, we will be hit the hardest.”

The next target of China’s infinite crackdown

The new rules are yet another razor-sharp warning to global investors that high returns from investment in China Inc can turn into huge losses overnight.

Yuanfudao, one of China’s largest online tutoring service startups, raised $2.2 billion in two funding rounds partly led by Tencent in October, pushing its valuation to over $15.5 billion. But now it is unclear what will happen to the stakes held by investment firms, especially foreign ones, after the new rules dashed hopes of cashing out through upcoming IPOs.

“This incident highlights the crucial importance for global investors to have people who understand China, who can decipher investment risks from minor nuances in mundane government documents…Any company that wish to operate in China should put China’s regulatory uncertainties as the biggest risk factor,” said Gao, the professor.

The education sector is not the only one that needs to worry about government scrutiny, however.

On Weibo, many commentators have pointed at the housing market, whose skyrocketing prices have been cited often by citizens as a major difficulty to having children, as the next target of crackdown. In an analysis, Chinese financial columnist Jin Lun argues that any industry that is seen as contributing to people delaying having children will be a potential target. “High housing prices will also be cracked down as an ‘enemy’ that has been weighing down the birth rate. While the industry will continue to exist to meet demand, there is basically no hope of continuing to see housing prices rise,” wrote Jin.

Conclusion

This little article combines two other articles. The first was one from RT written by a long time Chinese observer. He describes what is going on and why. China is trying to avoid the “death traps that has so violently polluted the West.

The second article is how the event is “reported” in the American “news”. In this case MSM. It’ reads like a breathless hysterical document, and when you highlight the “Kill Phrases and words” the enormous density of them is strongly suggestive of AI processing.

How American “news” is written.

And as I have reported in the past, the “millions of dollars” to “control the anti-China” narrative funded by neocons is pretty relentless. This is just one such example. Can you possibly imagine what others might be?

Currently, Western Media is mostly inundated with lies about China since it's being demonized as the Enemy du Jour by the Outlaw US Empire and its vassals, so much of what's published is rubbish. 

...Chinese media has much greater credibility. I'll close by saying this older publication detailing China's national plan for implementing the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development as promoted by the UN contains the underlying rationale for many of China's policies.

Posted by: karlof1 | Jul 26 2021 20:32 utc

Meanwhile, in China, all is good.

I took some videos today. Enjoy. It’s a video (in five parts) of me walking out of my house, down the street, and getting a breakfast at Burger King. It’s everyday MM, but it will give you all a glimpse of what the “real” China is like.

Video One – Out the door

Video Two – Outside the Complex.

Video Three – Down the street.

Video Four – Burger King

Video Five – Past the quarantine zone.

Some thoughts…

I was in China teaching English in universities and to private students for much of the last fifteen years. I tried to go to a different province every year in an effort to understand China better. My subject was Oral English, and so my classes were entirely conversation. 

Some things I saw:

1) Chinese generally are intensely patriotic although they may disagree with certain aspects of Chinese systems.

2) Class leaders and local leaders are ELECTED. Higher level leaders are selected by committees.

3) Chinese fashion looks longingly Westward, imitating hip-hop and clothing and even playing some latest Western hits to attract people into stores.

4) China has 95% eliminated paper and coin currency.

5) Chinese somehow think Western faces are more beautiful. Nose and eye jobs are common. I tell them their features are considered beautiful in the West. They are unfazed. 

6) A mask is commonly worn for issues like a big pimple, a cough, or heavy pollution.

7) People generally follow rules without a problem, except when they don't. Cheating happens.

8) China has large land masses of designated minority areas with nominal or actual autonomous government. The population in these areas is not large, however. 

9) Many many of those pushing their children in after school programs are hoping their children can go study abroad, and even maybe move abroad eventually.

10) Chinese by and large don't know how high their standard of living is compared to other areas. The world ranking don't actually compare cost of living. With good public transportation, well-planned neighborhoods, cheap medical care and top notch education, I admire China.


Posted by: HelenB | Jul 26 2021 23:19 utc | 63

China resembles the America that I grew up in.

What America was.

Not the America of today, a land ruled by psychopaths, serviced by zombie-serfs and slaves, and decay all around.

This situation, where the stark difference is a “bitch slap” to the American government, the American leadership, and the American structure is too alarming. And the evil, corrupt leadership dos not like it one single bit.

America used to be a land with factories. Real. Honest to goodness factories. Places where things, parts were fabricated and made. Like this…

America used to have real factories.

Today, America has precious few factories. Most of what constitutes as a factory (on the government listings) are best described as “design centers”, and “corporate headquarters”. The buildings look nice, and it’s all so shiny, new and clean. But, it’s a land of cubicles, and accountants. Of lawyers, and Human Resources. It’s staffed by finance and marketing types. Very few actual engineers or workers.

Anyways…

You have heard it all before. Haven’t you?

It just makes me want to get with a beloved pet, a cat and just hang out or snuggle.

Just some pictures of people snuggling with their cats…

Snuggle 1.

Snuggle 2.

Snuggle 3.

Snuggle 4.

Snuggle 5.

 

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Defending your Life

There’s a great movie from the 1990’s titled “Defending your life”. It’s a fantasy movie about what it is like when you die, and you have to justify the kind of life that you had when you were alive. It’s a fun movie, a lite comedy romance. It’s fun. But I want to look at it from are more serious angle. And that is what we are going to do here.

Advertising executive Daniel Miller dies in an auto accident and finds himself in Judgment City. He is taken to a hotel to rest, and the next day he takes a tram downtown to meet his lawyer, Bob Diamond (Rip Torn). Diamond informs him that there is to be a five-day examination of his life to decide whether he has overcome fear. At a comedy club he meets Julia and they fall in love. But as their trials progress, it becomes clear Julia has overcome fear and is moving on, while Daniel seems doomed to go back to Earth.

Diana Barahona

It is Albert Brooks‘ notion in this film that after death we pass on to a sort of heavenly way station where we are given the opportunity to defend our actions during our most recent lifetime.

The process is like an American courtroom, with a prosecutor, defense attorney and judge, but the charges against us are never quite spelled out. The basic question seems to be, are we sure we did our best, given our opportunities?

Defending your life.

In the movie, Brooks plays Dan Miller, a successful exec who takes delivery on a new BMW and plows it into a bus while trying to adjust the CD player. He awakens in a place named Judgment City, which resembles those blandly modern office and hotel complexes around big airports. He’s given a room in a clean but spartan place that looks franchised by Motel 6.

Defending your life.

At first Dan is understandably dazed at finding himself dead, but the staff takes good care of him. He’s dressed in a flowing gown, whisked around the property on a bus, and told he can eat all he wants in the cafeteria (where the food is delicious but contains no calories).

Then he meets his genial, avuncular defense attorney (Rip Torn), and his hard-edged prosecutor (Lee Grant). It’s time for the courtroom, in which we see flashbacks to Dan’s life as he tries to explain himself.

Defending your life.

… (and) he falls in love with another sojourner in Judgment City.

Defending your life.

She is a sweet, open-faced, serene young woman named Julia and played, of course, by Meryl Streep, who is the only actress capable of providing the character’s Streepian qualities. They fall into like with one another.

Dan visits her hotel and is dismayed to discover that she has much better facilities than he does – Four Seasons instead of Motel 6 – and he wonders if maybe your hotel assignment is a clue about how well you lived your past life. But nobody in Judgment City will give him a straight answer to a question like that.

Defending your life.

The best thing about the movie, I think, is the notion of Judgment City itself. Doesn’t it make sense that heaven, for each society, would be a place much like the Earth that it knows? We’re still stuck with images of angels playing harps, which worked fine for Renaissance painters. But isn’t our modern world ready for images in which the angels look like Rotarians and CEOs?

Defending your life.

The movie is funny in a warm, fuzzy way, and it has a splendidly satisfactory ending.

MM Thoughts

The movie is a fiction.

But it does get a number of things right.

  • Review Process. There is always a review process once you exit the physical reality and return to the non-physical reality.
  • Judgement of your Actions. Yes, you are judged by your actions. There is no escape from that.
  • No Golden Harps. Forget the notions of golden harps, big diamonds and all those other images that are so conventional regarding the non-physical reality. There are other “things” in the non-physical reality, and you might be surprised how “futuristic”, and yet “conventional” they actually are. As well as the enormous scale of them.
  • Not immediately returned via reincarnation. Certainly the narrative from “Alien Interview” cautions that consciousness is immediately processed and thrown back to the physical Earth reality, without memories, but that is not my experience. Nor is that the experience of Dr. Newton.
  • Planning is required. A return back to the earth physical reality requires work, planning, and coordination. The only way that consciousness can return back and enter a new born body quickly is if the consciousness is being “punished” in some way. Like for attempting suicide or something like that.

How do I know all this? Well, as I have stated that there are channels, and to continue my ELF interactions it is (was) with another entity and that provided me insight. Not to mention that the EBP provides <redacted>.

Defending your life.

I strongly urge people to watch this movie.

Because there are so many things in the non-physical world that resemble what we have in the physical world that you would be astounded.

Also you all need to recognize that the overall sequence is obtain experiences, die, review, map out more experiences, and repeat.

Defending your life.

The general human on Earth sequence

  • Birth in a body
  • Obtain experiences.
  • Die.
  • Life review.
  • Map out what is next.
  • If Earth as a human, then…
  • Repeat.

Alien Interview

I have discussed the book “Alien Interview” elsewhere. I personally believe that it is exactly what it says it is.

I believe [1] the back-story that the documents were actual transcripts of an interrogation with a type-1 grey extraterrestrial in 1947. I also [2] believe that everything that was recorded and written down are what the extraterrestrial said, and further, [3]I believe that it was mostly truthful and [4] saying things truthfully based on it’s understanding in 1947. All in a way or manner that [5] would be understood by the post world-war II generals and leaders gathered at the Roswell military base.

However, as I parsed the book in great detail, I came to realize the there were some elements within the statements that could easily be misunderstood.

Earth as a “Prison Planet” and us convicts and felons within it, are immediately recycled back to Earth upon death, over and over and there is no escape…

…however, it listed numerous people who have actually managed to escape this environment. One has total recall and made great contributions to this region and was reassigned elsewhere in the universe.

So, obviously there ARE avenues of egress.

Further, this “Alien Interview” event spawned the creation of MAJestic shortly afterwards, and it enlisted folk like myself (MM) and we were tasked with “participating in events that were bigger than any government, and that mattered to the entire human species”.

For the period from the creation of MAJestic to today, the type-1 greys (and a number of other species) have been working with MAJestic towards certain objectives, goals, and directives.

I cannot help but believe that there has been some substantial changes in the situation of 1947 to today in 2021. And these changes have manifested in many ways. Such as [1] the ability to map out the topography of Heaven like Dr. Newton has (HERE), and [2] the recovery of memories of reincarnation that we see from time to time, and [3] the growth of the “new age” movements.

Whether the “constructions”, “arrangements” and the extensive geography of the non-physical reality is a [1] fabrication designed to entrap us earth-bound prisoners, or actually [2] the non-physical reality that surrounds the earth is unknown.

My personal belief is that the non-physical reality is exactly that. And the systems that force earth humans to immediately return to earth is broken. It no longer exists. However, what does exist is a massive non-physical infrastructure that is dedicated to humans experiencing and obtaining physical experiences. These experiences are all recorded in memories and still exist and are not erased. At least I can access them, and I very convinced that others can as well.

My constant entanglement with the EBP, as well as how my ELF probes worked before I was “retired” clearly indicate that there is a vibrant and active non-physical world all around us. Older and more advanced species enter and leave this reality at will.

It is complex, active, vibrant, and substantive. You not need to fear it, or to remember one time when you were “put under anesthesia” before an operation and blanked out with no memories. That was not death. That was something different. You should never believe that being put under by drugs is the same experience that you would have upon death.

This is a fun movie, but it reminds us that our actions as we live all have consequences. You can believe that it is “karma”. You can call it cycling through “reincarnations”. You can believe that it is “quantum associations”, or that “like thoughts attract like actions”. You can believe what ever seems most comfortable with you.

But I will definitively tell you that there is a community that exists outside of our reality, and it is populated with humans (and a lot of other “stuff”). And if you want to (as they say in the movie “move on to bigger and better things”) make this life a good one.

Make this life a great one.

Make a difference in this world. Help others. Do great things. Perform great works. Smile. Be the sunshine that helps others. Do not be the dark pit of blackness that takes and takes from others. Don’t do that.

Be kind and be helpful.

In the non-physical reality you will glow like a big beacon or torch. And others of similar beliefs will be attracted to you. Be great. You will be wonderful.

Watch the movie, and tell me what you all think.

Defending your life.

USA Streaming Access to the movie…

If you are in the United States, these are your best streaming options. All are with a price. Nothing is free in the USA.

Other Access Alternatives

Torrents

If you don’t mind waiting for the download, you can download a torrent for the movie…

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A no frills edition of Chinese girls – a gaggle of girls to google, oogle and enjoy

Here is part ten of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. This particular collection consists of a very average selection of attractive Chinese girls, and you all might just be “blown away” by the content. Indeed, there are some favorites in here.

As I said, this is a “no frills” presentation. Download the zip file and open it up. Inside will be a bunch of pretty girls videos. I do hope that you enjoy them.

Of course, the idea behind this presentation is to show that the people in China, and most especially the girls, are good and fine folk that do not resemble anything that is being portrayed in the American “news” media. And when you watch the girls, listen to the (mostly) Chinese pop music, you will start to notice something…

…they are happy. They are well fed, the buildings all look like they are well maintained. They eat well, the night life is alive, families look normal, and these none of that crime, and LGBT ram-rodding down your throats like you would see in the West. It’s refreshing.

This is China. It’s the “real deal”.

And for “new comers”  it tends to be a bit of a shock. As they had no idea that Chinese women looked like this. They still hold on to the fantasies that are well promoted in the American press. But you know… it’s all a fiction.

Here’s what the girls in China look like…

Group AA

First up is this bevy of beauties. Some nice all around girls. For certain. The folder and files tend to be on the large size. Sorry for that.

You can get the zip file HERE. 490MB. It’s large and might take some time to download.

AA – A “buffalo wings” kind of girl

Here’s one of the girls from the mix. She reminds me of a dish that used to be common in the United States. They were called “Buffalo wings”, and you would get this basket of deep fried chicken wings and a small saucer of blue cheese dressing to dip them in.

Chicken wings girl.

I well remember one time in Syracuse New York, my wife (at that time) took me out to a restaurant on South Selina street, and we went to a (then famous) chain called “The Ground Round” and she bought me a set of eight “Buffalo wings” and clue cheese dressing to dip it in. The cost came to $120 something and just under her entire weekly pay check.

I wonder if the current crop of American leadership has ever had that experience? To live in a land where you work hard, and for your reward all you can afford is eight measly chicken wings. If you call that “exceptional government” then you have a hole in your head. China has a basic guideline that food, clothing, shelter, medical care, housing and clothing, as well as all government services should be affordable by 90% of the nation.

Anyways…

This girl reminds me of this basket of chicken wings.

And here is what a basket of chicken wings look like…

Buffalo wings.

By the way, does anyone know why this is called “finger food”, because sure as shit your fingers are gonna get messy eating these things.

Group BB

You can get the zip file HERE. 448MB. Again, it is a large file.

I tend to associate girls, women with food. It’s an association that I have, and I make no apologizes for it. Women are delicious, and so is food. Here’s some of my favorites from this group.

BB – Cream of Asparagus Soup girl

This lady reminds me of a nice bowl of cream of asparagus soup. With crackers, or those little “goldfish” crackers that you put in it. As well as a nice little mound of mild cheddar cheese, ground up and place don the top. And for some reason, I’m not quite sure why… A tall glass of mint iced tea.

Cream of asparagus soup girl.

If you compare her to the picture of an actual bowl of soup, you can easily see what I am talking about. Right? Or is it just me? This girl reminds me of this…

Cream of Asparagus Soup.

BB – (Not-a-Upside-down) banana split girl

This little cutie reminds me of an “banana split”. Served in a ceramic dish shaped like a boat, and a nice little flag on the top near the cherry.  Can’t you just imagine going to an ice cream parlor and sharing a split with her? I can. It would be wonderful.

(Not a Upside down) banana split girl.

Come on! Can’t you just picture yourself sharing a banana split with this lass, chatting and just handing out in a fine air conditioned ice cream parlor?

An “old fashioned” banana split.

BB – Poached eggs on toast girl

This little lass reminds me of a simple meal. Poached eggs on toast with salted butter, some peanut butter, chopped tomatoes, salt and pepper and a drizzle of olive oil. Oh, and orange juice. This is the kind of girl that is best enjoyed in the morning.

Poached eggs on toast girl.

This is a morning girl. And what is more, she is most certainly a poached eggs on toast kind of girl…

Great poached eggs on toast.

Group CC

You can get the zip file HERE. 299MB.

The following girl is representative of this particular group. She is most certainly a baked ziti lass.

CC – A Baked Ziti Lass

You would think that I would be eating baked ziti all the time. After all it’s cheap and delicious and it is easy to make and delicious if you take the time to add the proper meat, and cheese.  But guys, for me, that was not the case. I can never get it in China. And we tend to eat better than the cheapest foods that I grew up with. Further, I never ate it in prison, we mostly ate beans, global, artificial eggs and mashed turnips. So it’s been maybe two, possibly three decades since I enjoyed a fine well-made ziti dish.

And when I think of that dish I think of women like this. She is my ideal ziti girl.

My ideal ziti girl.

I can just see us going outside for some fresh night air, as the boisterous crowds in the orange lit interior carry on with singing, dancing and a clinking of glasses. Ziti is best served with wine; a nice red wine. And some crunchy Italian bread, some cheese, some olives, maybe some red lipstick on my collar…

…heh. heh.

And you know, maybe I’m wearing a nice tux. Not a rental. A custom fitted tux like the one I used to have years ago. Made out of a fine weave and dark blue material. Not a shawl collar. A nice set of cuff links and a chance to wear a very extraordinary bow tie. Maybe something in a vibrant red, or purple / blue pattern.

Oh, but I digress…

And here is what a deep baked ziti looks like…

Deep baked ziti.

CC – Australian Prawns girl

The largest shrimp that I have ever seen in the world come from Australia and they are called prawns. They are bout the size of a small chicken, and believe you me, they are delicious. It’s sort of like a cross between a lobster and a shrimp and so very tasty.

Well this girl reminds me of giant prawns.

On one of my trips to Australia, the staff took me out to a meal and we ate some prawns. they ordered two enormous prawns for me, and I surprised them by eating the entire things. Well, I was hungry!

Anyways, this girl reminds me of two giant prawns.

Giant prawns girl.

Australian prawns.

So very delicious.

Australian prawns.

Group DD

You can get the zip file HERE. 344MB.

The following is a notable girl from this collection…

I am always a “sucker” for a girl with a big smile on her face. The smile just attracts me to her. Smiles always do this. Don’t you know.

A smiling beauty.

Well…

I am going to call it “quits” for now. I hope that you enjoyed these tasty female delights and learned a little about China in the process. I have many more videos and I am going to post them when I get a chance.

Have a great day you all.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

Some videos of China taken by Metallicman in defiance of the Yahoo! report that China bloggers are being paid to say what we do

Yeah. It’s pretty silly. According to the MSM (American Main Stream Media) all those expats who talk about China, and show videos about China are lying. The real “truth” (they say) is that China is evil and dirty and nasty. So they warn their audiences to ignore anyone who is saying anything good about China.

Don’t believe me? Check THIS out…

"Some vloggers are suspected of co-operating with state-owned outlets to spread China's rhetoric to the world. But it's far from clear what really motivates them, or how effective this strategy is."

What strategy? We just film our lives and talk about our experiences. And those that don’t like it can howl all they want to.

It’s all so silly.

My Life

The following are some videos that I have taken as I live my life in Zhuhai, China. And I’ll just let you watch the videos and come to your own conclusions. This is what my life in China looks like.

I am not…

"...co-operating with state-owned outlets to spread China's rhetoric to the world."

I have spent 40 years in the United States, and 20 years in China. And I can tell you that my quality of life within China is SUBSTANTIALLY better than anything that the United States has.

And my videos show this.

It is so spellbindingly better, that I just cannot contain myself. All those things that I hated about America, but lived with, simply because I was told “there isn’t anything better” was a big fat lie.

And I am gonna shove that lie back in your faces.

A nice fish meal

Here’s one of my meals that I eat in China. This is a fish. It’s very tender, fresh, and tasty with all kinds of seasonings. I never had anything like this in the United States. At best I would get a small brook trout, or a river fish full of bones. But more often than not, it would be some kind of dethawed, deboned fish that was deep fried.

This is fresh fish. So tender. Cooked in spices and sauce. Eaten well with rice, and delicious vegetables.

Click on the picture to see the video.

Riding a Bus in Zhuhai China

Here’s a video that I took on a weekend when I rode a bus. It’s just a typical bus in China. Notice how quiet it is? Yes, all buses in China are electric and quiet. Notice the great air conditioning. Notice the relaxed atmosphere, and even though Coronavirus is pretty much under control, everyone is still wearing masks.

Lover’s Road

This is the road in front of my house. It’s called “Lover’s Road”, and many couples walk up and down it. I filmed it while riding a bus, and you can see one of the town bus stops in the front of the picture here.

Local Wines

I am not a “wine connoisseur” like you might find in the higher class circles of society. I just know my wines because I drink a substantial amount of wine all the time. Not the super expensive stuff. Just the low to mid quality stuff. And You could say that I am an expert on it. Not like there are “experts” who own a Ferrari, but rather “experts” because they work on the Ferrari’s.

Definition - What does Wine Connoisseur mean? A wine connoisseur is an individual who has deep knowledge of the subject of wine. This knowledge goes beyond knowing how to taste wine or having a deep appreciation. A seasoned connoisseur will, for instance, have the ability to assess a young wine and know its aging potential.

What is a Wine Connoisseur? - Definition from WineFrog

A school for one year old babies

In China, education starts early. Here is a school for toddlers up to three years old. The prices tend to be prohibitive for MM (personally), but I do like their programs and the subjects they teach and the general positive atmosphere. Click on the picture to watch the video.

Hunan Beef

I do enjoy a nice Hunan beef. This meat is cooked in tender little bite sizes and smothered in hot peppers which gives it that distinctive spicy flavor. I personally like it a lot.

Night time bus ride

This is the Jida city center area at around 8:00 pm at night. Jida is a section of Zhuhai where I happen to live. This video kind of shows what it is like at night. Notice all the people that are out. China is very, very safe. I personally believe that it is the safest nation on the planet.

Hunan Cauliflower

The best cauliflower is made Hunan style. It is cooked in bacon, with leeks, garlic, and spices. Very, very delicious.

A “birds eye view” of Jida in Zhuhai

This video is from Douxing. Also known as TicTok which is it’s “pale shadow” version available out in the West.

I live off to the left. This area is now being completely demolished. The road is being torn up and made into a nice lawn with walking paths. And there is a tunnel under construction that will go under this little hill and bypass all the traffic away from this park.

In fact, the entire sea coast is nothing but new construction for parks, malls, and scenic areas. In my entire time in the United States I have never, and I do mean NEVER, seen such an emphasis in parks, and human friendly free areas. In fact, the only thing that anyone ever cared for through my entire childhood was tearing down things to make money-making parking lots, and the like.

Outside of a mall at 6:00pm

This is the outside of one of the many malls in Zhuhai. The noise is the speaker telling people to line up and go through the temp checks, the QR location verification, the facial scanning, and the mask wearing prior to entering the mall.

To the right is a pile of construction machinery. They are a digging deep down. I suspect that it is part of the new Zhuhai to Zhongshan high speed rail, that will go underground in this section of the city. But I do not know for sure.

Notice the people. Do they seem like they are starving, and clamoring for “rescue” for the “American way of life”, and democracy™ and freedom™?

Cheaper than a cheap American “Value Meal” at Burger King

I eat very well in China. The food is good, tasty, prepared with care. There are no GMO’s. The establishments are sanitary, and clean, and the prices are cheap. Or said better, not exorbitant.

You see, the Chinese government believes that to serve the people best, they need to have affordable housing, affordable food, affordable medical care, and reasonable and affordable transportation. Which is quite unlike what is provided in America; the “for profit nation” where there is always a thousand tiny, tiny hands in your wallet. Check out the video…

And now for something different…

The USA has been probing Chinese defenses for years now. And China has “taken it on the chin”. But the latest bullshit about violating airspace and flying into Taiwan is pretty fucking ballsy and very dangerous. This next video is a depiction of an event that actually happened earlier this year (2021). Of course, you would never see this ever in the United States media.

Meanwhile in the United States…

My A#1 top posts are hard-running stuff on my SHTF indexes. Sure I get periodic hits on my KTV indexes, and some surprises out of the blue here and there. But the longest and most reliable source of new visitors are the SHTF articles. And the vast majority of the visitors come from America, and to a lessor extent Europe.

This video pretty much illustrates what Americans are “looking forward to”, and I am sure that it scares the living Dejesus out of them.

Putting it all together

I am absolutely convinced that American has been plundered by psychopathic personalities that took control of the government and “ran it into the ground”. They converted free citizens to a mixture of debit serfs, and slaves, and they are now scraping the bottom of the barrel (figuratively).  The endless spending on go-nowhere wars, the lack of infrastructure repair, the decline in education, and the rise of radical utopians, have all contributed to a dangerous slew of events.

What would normally occur at this juncture in time is that the people would rise up (one way or the other) and kill the leadership and start over fresh.

But the evil psychopaths in Washington DC know history, they might be evil, but they are not ignorant. So they have made it especially difficult for internal domestic resurrection. The only options that now lie available to them are;

  • Start World War III and direct the domestic anger outward to a figurehead. (Which is either China or Russia).
  • Or, a peaceful restructuring of the government like what happened with the Soviet Union to Russia.

What I am seeing is that Biden is trying to move America towards the second option, while there are enormously powerful self-interests inside of America that are pushing for the first option; World War III.

It’s a scary time for certain.

Discomfort is what happens as the population waltzes towards disaster. It happens each and every time. Consider the years leading up to the first American Civil War…

William  J. Cooper has written a magnificently researched account of the  political atmosphere that prevailed in the United States immediately  after the election of Abraham Lincoln and through the first shots of the  Civil War at Fort Sumter. 

What individual elements made up the call to  arms on both sides of the Mason Dixon line? 

Which persons were  conciliatory and which were belligerent? 

What contribution did the  nuances of the several political parties play in the mood of the  population? 

Was the Civil War inevitable no matter what action was taken  by Lincoln? 

Many  eminent  American Civil War historians tend to move  quickly throughout  the three year period preceding the onset of the War, as they move on  the War itself, however Wm. Cooper's work has  has  been devoted   entirely to a study of this critical era, and provides  significant  insight  as to the period's ultimate  result-- namely, the War itself.

Cooper   has  devoted  much effort to a study of the era's  significant  and   influential caste of characters, including an newspaper editor,  abolitionists, radical Republicans,, members of both houses of  Congress,and each of  the Presidents---both  sitting and  newly  -elected.. 

-Amazon reviews of "We Have the War Upon Us: The Onset of the Civil War, November 1860-April 1861" by Cooper, William J. (2012) Hardcover 

Examining the three prior Fourth Turnings may give us a window into where we stand and what may happen in the coming year.

We are in the thirteenth year of this Crisis. (The eleven-year anniversary was in September 2019.) Here we look at the three previous events.

  • The American Revolution Crisis
  • The Civil War Crisis
  • The Great Depression/World War II Crisis
A comparision of the last three "Fourth Turnings" in the United States.
A comparison of the last three “Fourth Turnings” in the United States. Full-scale war is shown in black. The vertical line running through them is 2019 when I made the graphic, and the comparative date in the previous turnings.
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You can see that in both the American Revolution crisis and the Civil War crisis, the wars took place BEFORE the target crisis date. And the events of World War II were immediately afterwards.
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If this was The Revolutionary War, we would be in the thick of it, right now and celebrating American independence. If we compare to the Civil war, you move the line over two years (2021) and you discover that we are in the middle of the “reconstruction period”. And if you compare to World War II, you would find that we are right before Pearl Harbor bombing and the destruction of the Pacific Fleet.
.
Taking note of “The Fourth Turning” and the Strauss and Howe generational theory of predictive behavior in America, we note that their dates are close but seem to be off by a few years. In our case, the “Crisis catalyst” did not occur in 2005 as predicted. It occurred in 2008 with the Wall Street “too big to fail” debacle. That is three years later.Adjusting the Strauss and Howe dates to account for the delay in the catalyst, messes things up a bit. They predicted…

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

But is that correct? Maybe it is really wrong…

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

And it makes sense if you argue that 2020 was the climax. After all, if you include the “not ever reported” bio-weapons attacks as war, then the actual map looks like this…

But none of that matters. We are in the “thick of it” right now. We are smack dab in the middle of it.

We are in the middle of it right now.

Seriously, just because no one is reporting on what is actually going one doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. America carpet bombed China with eight (8x) strains of biological weapons from 2016 through to 2019 (John Bolton plan to create starvation), and three strains of human-lethal bio-weapons in 2020. Not to mention all the other “hybrid-war” activities that they were involved in.

We are not out of the danger zone.

But I think that we are gliding in and on the hot zone.

Therefore, we are living in the tranquil period that America was in right before World War II.  We cannot be passive about it. We must all conduct our affirmation prayers, and make sure that the nightmare that is being set up is contained to an area outside of our personal lives.

And with this in mind, now we can see why it is important for the American (and British) “news” to demonize China. As the dream of a long drawn out war in far-away distant lands, safe and protected is an ignorant “pipe dream”. But that is why us “bloggers” and expats in China are all disparaged.

We upset the narrative that nuclear war is a good thing.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Vlog index here..

V-Log

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

Holiday extravaganza from MM to you all.

Ok, guys and girls. This is going to be a little bit of a strange article. I make no apologies for it. It’s going to be confusing, rambling, and apparently unordered, but that is by INTENTION. I fully intend to produce this article in this manner, and if you don’t understand, then it’s simply because you haven’t learned the most basic tenants of MM.

Life is complex.

You cannot isolate certain sections without influencing everything else.

Background

All through life we have been taught to do one thing at a time. We studied reading, then we put our books away, and then we studied History. Then we put those books away, and we went to gym class. After that, we change our clothes and studied Math. Everything was nice and compartmentalized. So nice. So neat, and so tidy.

But as we became adults we realized with a big shock that the world is not fine, nice, neat and tidy. It wasn’t that way at all. When we married a person, we inherited an entire slew of interpersonal relationships, not one singular one. When we went to work at a company, we were expected to perform multiple tasks simultaneously. Not one singular one that we studied in school. We didn’t like this change. But we adapted to it. We adapted coping mechanisms. We learned to “multitask”.

But no one has breached the most basic point. Which is that life is complex, colorful, and encompasses multiple things, events, relationships, ideas, thoughts and emotions simultaneously. And unless we train our mind to handle and sort out this onslaught of data, we will be forever easily manipulated by it.

And what is what is going on today. People are being manipulated by the “fire-hose” of manipulation. And since people see things out of context, they believe the manipulations without questioning what’s going on.

Even the most intelligent and skeptical people fall into this trap.

An Example

Today, for example, is this little blurb on the “Drudge Report”;

So..

The Chinese military announced HOW they will attack Taiwan!

Well!

Well, I (being an interested person) ran to the site to see what is going on, and there is a very detailed explanation of a war plan. It looks like something out of a World War I American military college. Not something that the Chinese leadership would ever do.

So many interesting pictures, details and diagrams.

Ok. I’ll bite, where did this come from. I want to read the original.

Screen capture of the article.

So if you look in the article it says…

"An article in a state-controlled publication has offered a glimpse of a..."

Ok. So what is this article, and where is it? Who wrote it?

Nope. Nothing. But the article does go on to say…

"The article states: "The attacks against Taiwan’s airports would continue until [Chinese] surface troops had accomplished an assault landing.""

Ok. I want to see the article. I want to see it myself.

Still nothing. But it does say…

"the article states YJ-91 and CJ-10 cruise missiles..."

Still nothing about the source. Where did they get this bullshit? I want to know. So I read further…

"Finally, the article said warships and land-based rocket forces would wipe-out any remaining obstacles so the PLA’s marine corps..."

So I scroll down all the fancy graphs, and maps showing fighting. I scroll down the pictures of Chinese military. And I go all the way to the bottom of the page.

NOTHING!

The entire article is based on one big lie.

How do I know. I did a Baidu search. I did it in Chinese. There are no Chinese articles about this at all. It’s all made up bullshit.

Summary
Drudge said that the Chinese Government released this battle attack plan. Instead the truth is that a supermarket tabloid claimed to translate an important document in a Chinese magazine. Both of which are lies.

Many things

Right now the globe is a caldron of quanta seething and boiling over with the various interactions being generated out of the United States (and the UK).

It’s spitting quanta balls, and most humans are unable to grasp what is going on. They are being pelted with quantum “slime balls” and it hits them, manipulates their thoughts and sets the stage for some very, very bad and catastrophic things to happen.

And if you get your Intel from the American (or Western) “news” media, mainstream of alt-any, you are being deceived. Nothing like what is being stated is actually happening.

We need to see things AS THEY ARE. Not as what is being presented to us.

This article

It began simple enough.

I just wanted so show the real and true face of China.

And I do this by my very successful method of showing very pretty Chinese girls in their homes, in the public spaces, on bridges, inside restaurants and other places inside of China. And people come to MM to look at the pretty girls, and in the process see that the China that they see does not resemble anything like what is being showed at them out of the Western oligarchy.

So…

Here is a part of what was intended to be part 11A of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. (Don’t ask me about the interruption between series nine and the rest. It’s a long story. )

This particular collection consists of a very average selection of attractive Chinese girls, and you all might just be “blown away” by the content. Indeed, there are some favorites in here. And with each grouping, I have isolated and make a key social and societal point that I want to make.

These points are well understood by long time MM readers. But I “feel” the need to underline, or “underscore” these points so that the reader can best understand things in the proper context, and the most important context; THEIR context.

Undoing American propaganda

When you look at these women, please pay attention to the China that they are being filmed in. And ask yourself “Does this in any way represent the narrative promoted by the American MSM “?

And you need to.

The United States is out of control, and it’s going to get each and every one of us killed.

The western world is being led by people who are functionally insane, that is not hyperbole. 

There are any number of things that we 'could' 'should' 'might' or 'must' do about the situation but a lack of sane and workable solutions is not the problem. 

The problem is the vast concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a very few mostly unelected people.

People who would (and probably will) see the world go up in flames rather than relinquish their largely unearned and unwarranted power.

Posted by: MarkU
"No U.S. president will risk New York over Taipei City." one would think, but the crazies running usa foreign policy seem to have undue persuasion with usa presidents, as witnessed the past number of years usa behavior... maybe they want to go down in a blaze of glory? what do the end of worlders, or born agains think?? 

Posted by: james

Please kindly excuse me for my entanglement of thoughts, opinions, beauty, China, and Geo-politics…

Group A of Chinese beauties

And the first point that I want to make is that all you see on the internet is a fiction. It is a lie. It is a construction. Just like Hollywood has created illusions, so has the internet. What you read, and what you get has no bearing on reality. So the first point that I want to make is…

The reality is much better than what you read about.

According to the National Review, the Chinese are miserable and are just “pining away” for liberation from the evil oppressive Chinese government. You can see this oppression in the videos out of China.

oops!

What? There are NO videos showing this “oppression.”

What, oh, that’s right, Chinese videos are BANNED in the United States. Well, here we will show you just how oppressed the Chinese are. Here’s a typical woman just wanting to be liberated by the proud United States Marines from the “Bright and shining city on the hill”.

One of the Chinese girls from group “A”. Does it look like she is living in squalor and filth and needs to be liberated from the oppressive Chi-Coms for Democracy and Freedom?

Ah yes.

If these people actually believe what they write then they are delusional and need to be locked up in a mental institution for a long, long time. If they aren’t and they are lying. Then they need to be put in a situation where they can personally experience the horrific consequences of what they are tying to provoke.

Group "A" here. You can download a file of about thirty or so micro-videos of amazingly beautiful Chinese women. OMG!

But forget about the crazy man on the “shining house on the hill”. He’s really a mess and so fucking crazy that he’s not worth your time of day.

American neocons started the pandemic, tried to start world war III, and are constantly pushing and pushing to start a major war with SOMEONE.

But their reality is not YOURS.

So instead, Let’s concentrate on the girls. Ok?

Some of the girls from group “A”.

They are all awfully pretty, don’t you know. And when I look at them (like this particular beauty, for example)  I think of strawberry shortcake. I mean, really, when was the last time that you had a strawberry shortcake?

When was the last time that you had a strawberry shortcake?

Let me “single out” one especially delicious lady.

I choose this girl to discuss (in this particular instance).

Man! I do love a cute little pleated skirt.

Actually, this (particular) girl reminds me of a girl that walked in the restaurant where I was eating dinner today.

We ate some szechuan food.  It was truly delicious.

A “gaggle” of beauties came on off from work, they must have worked at the same company as they were all wearing the standard black and white office address code attire, and a lanyard around their neck with an ID QR code.

Szechuan food.

I love it when friends get together and are all happy and smiling. I like there attitude, and their nice fellowship.

She was a smiling, and chatting away, and while I wasn’t rude enough to eavesdrop, I could tell that they were all passionate.

This kind of event warms my heart and gives me hope for the future. You just cannot expect mankind; humans to grow and advance as a species, when they are living and toiling inside of sterile grey cubicles and chained to electronics media. No matter what the wealthy oligarchy believes.

They are wrong.

Anyways, this girl is most certainly a strawberry shortcake kind of gal. Admit it! You do KNOW what I am talking about, right?

Strawberry shortcake.

Just looking at her and her happy smiles and friendships put me in a great mood. It really does!

And so dusting off this old song from my parolee-bicycling days in Erie, PA, I present to you…

Group “B”

And the point that I want to associate with this next group of Chinese girls are that happy people are a real treasure. You need to associate with the happy, with the up-beat, with the cheerful, and the energetic.

I haven’t yet covered this, but we can exchange quanta (qi energy) from each other. Sad, disturbed, mentally ill, sick, upset and angry people can steal from you. And close association will them will drain you. Long term effects will destroy you.

Be around happy and cheerful people.

Happy people are a treasure.

Surround yourself with them.

One of the Chinese girls from group “B”. I am such a “sucker” for a nice wide smile, beautiful and clear eyes, and long lush hair. I mean it. The hair in Asia and in Africa are just amazing.

Group "B" here. It's about twenty five to thirty great videos of amazing Chinese women.

Some stunners, indeed.

Here I go again, with my association with food and beautiful women. There’s something that I just cannot “put my finger on” but I really associate beautiful and attractive ladies with food, conversation and companionship. And for me, well at least for me, that means food and chatting at a table.

This girl reminds me of an Australian meat pie. I guess you could refer to her as my “meat pie lady”.

Australian meat pie.

All men need a nice meat pie lady in their lives.

You all don’t probably “get” (understand) what I am trying to say. Women are like these big capacitors, or reservoirs that men can use to recharge. If the men give to them, the woman’s “battery” charges up and is there and provides the energy for the both of them (or more, if they have a family) and then combined, anything is possible a great meat pie lady can do this.

I think that meat pie ladies are not appreciated. They are the people that go visit a dying friend, and violate the pandemic restrictions to do so. They are the kind of people who will go out of their way to help a friend, a loved one, and an animal. They are natural Rufus’s.

They communicate with the unseen. They are in tune with nature, and the hidden. They can talk with faeries, and humans. They can understand things in a much greater scope than most of us can.

Meat pie ladies.

Totally and completely underappreciated.

Group “C”

And you know what? I’m going to talk about mothers.

Appreciate your mother.

Women are amazing. When the world is falling apart, they gather their family together and offer hope, comfort and protection. They help relatives, and provide a refuge from the storm. Whether it is Haiti, or Southern California. Real women are amazing.

A smiling girl from group “C”.

Group "C" here. It's about twenty five to thirty great videos of amazing Chinese women.

She is , and the rest of the gals are just lovely. This woman above embodies how I remember my mother. She was such a happy person on the holidays. But me, nah. I was a sultry spoiled teenager, and I made fun of her singing when she was cooking the meal for the family on the holiday.

I was such a little dweep-shit.

Family often takes people, roles, contributions as “givens”, without taking the time to think about how just very special these other people are. You all shouldn’t worry too much about your families and how the family dynamic exists. Just accept it as it is, and be the best you that you can be.

Anyways…

Women, especially (and mostly) those that smile and participate, are like precious treasures.

Precious.

Treasure.

And you know what this woman above reminds me of? I cannot help myself. They remind me of fresh vegetables and a fine delicious fruit salad. She reminds me of my mother, and in the Summer she would help us cut up fruit, and add cream and make a fine luscious Summer snack.

That’s what a true and fine woman can do.

They can evoke strong, visceral emotions, and trigger actions… which could lead to great things.

A fine delicious fruit salad.

Group “D”

Be part of something bigger.

Then you are never alone.

Video "D" cluster. HERE.

Lately I have been going through my old archives. I wrote a post on what it was like while on parole. And the situation there. And one of the groups that heavily influenced me at that time was the Japanese group Funky Monkey Babys. Of course, here I was, trapped in the United States under the jurisdiction of the Arkansas crew and in a “recovery / rehabilitation” system in Erie which was smack dab in the middle of poverty-central.

Both places had good people, I am sure. But I surrounded by the under-educated, the impoverished, the mentally ill, the survival-group of the criminal class, and the professional social networks that supported them. I felt very much alone and out of my environment.

I coped with the materials at hand. One of which was healthy up-beat music, my cat, painting, and my prayer affirmations with a goal of living an exceptional life inside of China. One of the videos that I watched, I just managed to dig up. Like all the music and videos from that time, they brought up memories of the things and images that I clutched to keep me going.

You know, I felt alone.

I was alone. It’s very different to have friends as a “sex offender”. So I was really isolated.

But then I would watch a video from Asia. Whether it is Korea, Japan, or China they all pointed to being part of something. Not being alone, and lonely. These videos pointed a way; a route and a direction for me to follow. They reminded me over and over that YOU ARE NOT ALONE. You are always part of something bigger.

As this video shows. This man is part of a trio of three people, but he always believed that he was alone. Nope. He was one of three. Together we are strong. Together we can do great things. Together we are significant.

Entire video HERE. Zip of the MV video HERE.

You are not alone.

You are NEVER alone. You are part of something bigger.

It’s just that those in the West (most ESPECIALLY Americans) don’t see this because the entire government and social structure is one of divide and conquer. Put people in isolation. Make them alone. Feed them drugs and passive entertainment. Get them addicted, and feed off them.

But in watching this video spoke to me. I could see that there was an option out. That I could join a society where I was an equal contributor and one where I was appreciated, and had a role. And now I am part of something bigger socially. And like this video, where the fellow was part of three. I am now part of a place, and a people that accepts, appreciates me.

We all need this.

Do not buy into the belief of isolation is being a “lone wolf” and that it will make you fantastically rich and wealthy. It’s a fucking lie.

Be part of a community.

Group D Videos HERE. It's about twenty five to thirty great videos of amazing Chinese women.

And here’s a little preview on what to expect…

But America is exceptional!

Today is the 100 year anniversary of the government of China.

Do you guys have any idea what happened in America on it’s 100 year anniversary? Yeah. It was right after the American Civil War, [1] the Federal government formally dissolved the tenth amendment (States Rights), [2] legalized slavery by renaming it “being a felon”, [3] destroyed the entire South-East of the United States under “Reconstruction”. And shortly afterwards went forth to fight wars with everyone.

All this, all these actions, have consequences. They are not “something” that “happened in the past”. All things must be bought and paid for. Even though those particular individuals have died, and their bodies have long rotted away, their souls, and their beings live off the quanta that they accumulated in those times.

Those quanta are still active. They are still “alert”. They need to be “dispersed”.

It is not that there is some great celestial “goal keeper” keeping score.

But rather, a recognition that the physical reality is far more complex than most humans realize. Everything is attached with everything else.

And since there is no such thing as time, the events and crimes against humanity that happened two hundred years ago still must be atoned for. The quanta-attachments are not settled.

It’s a “ticking time bomb”.

My guess is that during this generational turning, the build-up of the unseen must be rather enormous.

In America today

I am glad that I am not living inside of America right now.

It’s all starting to unravel.

But it is not being reported in that manner.

Here’s a scene from New York city…

Here’s another scene from the United States.

Just a “random” event. Nothing to see here. Keep moving on. Eh?

Some thoughts on stuff

What does food, pretty girls, media manipulation, bombs in New York, the concept of being part of something, and meat pie ladies have in common?

What?

They are all the outcomes of elements, of a host of events, that are occurring in the NON-PHYSICAL reality.

Our brains make it so that we want to keep things isolated in nice little neat boxes. There is a war in Taiwan, and it will be way over there and won’t affect anyone in Utah. Or, wearing a mask is a sign of loss of rights. Or that America is number one! And was, and is the best!

Really?

Yes. Really!

Silly, me.

Let’s take a look at the deaths for the “pandemic” shall we? It seems that America is actually the WORST place to be on the entire world right now. And the only way that you can justify this kind of “in your face” data is to deny it. To go around saying that the COVID is a hoax. To go and say that all media is bullshit, except the USA media, and so on, and so forth.

But that’s the bullshit that is being fed to Americans today.

You cannot take these selected snippets of information and consider yourself an expert on things.That is silly, but that is exactly what these “experts” in Washington DC, and those “think tanks” do. They don’t see the entire picture.

They write about China, and have written about China for five decades now, and never ONCE stepped inside the nation, learned Chinese, or had shao Kou.

They are like the guy in a restaurant that is complaining about a broken toothpick will ignoring the food, the table, the others in the room and everything else. Eventually he will rant on and on about that fucking toothpick, walk outside and get hit by a truck.

It’s the Fourth of July

America is NOT exceptional.

America is a failure, and American democracy is a failure. And these two truths must be reckoned with before the United States, and the people of the United States can get off their collective asses and start to do something about it.

I want to see America perform a course correction.

I want to see the American government to start caring for the American people. Not promoting one war after the other. They are going to get huge numbers of people hurt.

US strategy looks to be based on the thought that China will capitulate when the stakes become nuclear. Limited conventional war to blockade China at which point China capitulates. It is going to be an exceptionally bloody war if US goes down that road.  They will experience what Modi's "brave jawan" experienced in the Galwin valley. 

Posted by: Peter AU1

From all indications, the American oligarchy will not permit a controlled implosion of the American nation. They want to externalize it. They want to go out in a volley of hell and destruction.

That scares the living crap out of me.

But…

Be part of a community.

What we see is only a fraction of what there is

This is what I am trying to vocalize, but the subject is way too deep to get involved in.

Beauty, food, love, relationships, being good, Rufus behaviors, constructive efforts all are positives in building quantum associations in the non-physical reality.

While the build up of negative and destructive elements of quanta continues as well. Generational turnings are a release from the build-up. If the release is suppressed or avoided, the build up will continue until it becomes an enormous avalanche. And is very dangerous.

YOU MUST SEE EVERYTHING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT IS ACTUALLY GOING ON.

Most of what you see is a distraction.

However, when taken as a whole you can see that there is a great deal of bullshit, distortions, and illusions that are shrouding the judgments in the West. The greater the media influences, the less people are able to reason things out.

What is actually going on is far more interesting, and not all that gloomy. Those in Washington DC think that they know what is going on, but they are about 45 steps behind in the great game of Geo-political chess.

  • Rufus is the embodiment of the good.
  • Guns, wars, threats and destruction is the embodiment of the bad.

Let’s look at some videos, and images. Here’s some things to ponder…

Boy Gets a mangled leg. Rufus rescues him

This is real-life. This is in China….

Video HERE.

A Rufus rescues a baby on a skyscraper

This is real-life. This is in China…

Video HERE.

Scene from a popular American Movie

This is a fiction, but accurately describes what America is today…

The community gathers as one Rufus

This is in China today.

The video is HERE.

Rufus saves a drowning boy.

This is in China today.

Video HERE.

American exceptionalism!

Here’s an example of what America is today.

Video HERE.

Rufus saves a driver who has collapsed at the toll booth…

This is China. I would post these kinds of Rufus movies from America if I could find them. But they are getting fewer and far between as time moves on.

Video HERE.

China teaches and instills discipline in elementary school.

All Chinese students MUST take part in paramilitary training. The big major training period is in middle school. This is the most fundamental training for the formation of the Chinese “irregulars”. But certain geographical regions require earlier training in elementary school. Check it out.

Video HERE.

Here’s another video.

Video HERE.

And a third video.

Video HERE.

And keep in mind that the Chinese DO NOT PLAY. They are a serious, serious nation and they are fighting for their lives against a belligerent American Military Empire run by complete psychopaths.

Video HERE.

In the UK (An American client state)…

We see how far the rot has crept…

Video HERE.

Helping an old man cross the street.

Chinese style.

Video HERE.

And THIS is how much the Chinese people LOVE their government!

Soak it in. The American main stream media would NEVER show this.

Video HERE.

And this is Downtown America.

Soak it in. If you are an American you know how true this is. This guy was waving the flag of Puerto Rico which is an American territory. But that angered the illiterate urban youth who shot him dead.

Video HERE.

And this is America too…

It is not a healthy nation. She’s doing “her thing”, and all that “freedom” stuff. That’s why she is dead today. There is no freedom, just a bunch of words bantered about by the ultra-wealthy.

Video HERE.

A Rufus comes in all shapes and sizes.

In China.

Video HERE.

Meanwhile in Turkey

No matter where you are, or your situation, show some humanity.

Video HERE.

He’s only a delivery boy…

But he really likes this one girl. This is China.

Video HERE.

Just because the United States is completely falling to pieces, does not mean that the rest of the world is.

Actually the rest of the world is getting on far better now that there are some attack-dogs (China and Russia) willing to bitch-slap the out-of-control monster that the West has become. And with the guardians of tradition and sensibility in charge, the psychopaths have only one, and only ONE option, to maintain control. That option is destroy the world and hope that they can survive in their bunkers.

So is there going to be world war III?

What is actually going on? Well, you know there’s a great big build-up of negative energy, quanta, or qi in the United States right now. Not so much in the rest of the world.

Just in the United States, and it’s client nations.

And a release valve needs to be tapped. It doesn’t matter if it is a nation, a people, a place, a thing or something else. Understand what it is.

Accept it as it is.

Video is HERE.

Spread the good stuff.

Please be the beacon; the light that shines happiness to those around you.

  • Contribute in your community.
  • Smile more
  • Be helpful
  • Be the best you can be.
  • Participate.
  • Make friends, over and over, until you have some good ones.

Be part of a community. Once you are part of a group you will never be alone ever again.

My final present

Absorb this. The measure of our worth, as determined by our benefactors, is how we help and assist others within our community. For that defines our most important trait. A trait which gauges our relative value.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

So many beautiful women! Yet, why do Americans consider Chinese women to look like adolescent children?

The narrative is out there, and well known.

"Chinese women look like adolescent children, they are flat chested, petite, subservient, timid, and look like little "brown" waifs."

It’s not at all true. It’s not at all realistic. It’s a terrible distortion of reality.

And it irritates me.

Most especially because I was facing 80 years at hard labor in the hot cotton plantations of Southern Arkansas. And the litany of excuses used to turn my life upside down were spellbinding in the lies, distortions, corrupted understandings, and just pure hatred that spewed forth from the Arkansas legal system.

  • I painted in figurine oils, so I must have a sex fetish.
  • I quit my career as a “heavy hitter” upper-management Vice President in a technology company to take care of my dying mother, and that became “lives with parent, unemployed, with no friends”.
  • And all my travels to China were not for business. Instead they were to indulge into my wild sick fantasies of sex with women who looked like little children.

Oh. It’s all fun and games. That is, until you are behind bars, and everyone despises you. They sit at you. They sneer, and call you names. All on bogus lies, and accusations.

The beliefs of many Americans are shaped by the government, wealthy oligarchs, and a rabid group of for-profit televangelists that emphasize the collection of money to fight “the scourge”.

And I was “this close” from spending the rest of my life behind bars because some red-neck hicks believed that Chinese women looked like little children.

About the girls

Chinese women are many things. But scared waifs, brown skinned, short tiny and petite, and flat chested are not them.

Rural Nigerian girl. Often confused as Chinese by her oval eyes.

Sigh.

Here is part ten of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. This particular collection consists of a very average selection of attractive Chinese girls, and you all might just be “blown away” by the content. Indeed, there are some favorites in here.

I was told, directly to my face, that “Chinese women look like five year old children”. This is by the entire Judicial Department in Little Rock, Arkansas. Does this woman look like a five year old to you? To me, she must be at least over eight years old.

Let’s get on to the girls of China, eh?

That’s why you are here, eh?

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people? And don’t you lie. It’s biologically encoded in all humans. (Bet you didn’t know that!)

And when I look at women, I look at them with different “eyes” than most do. Certainly, when I was younger I looked at at attractive woman and thought about sex. But that pretty much evaporated as life hit and I entered adulthood. Now when I look at an attractive woman I look at…

  • Form, and shape. This is my “artistic eye” that I use to judge what it would be like to paint her on canvas. Eyes are easy to paint. It’s the face frame is this more of a challenge.
  • Her personality. What characteristics she alludes.
  • Her body structure. I personally prefer a stout woman; a robust woman, that has a nice “fish shape”. But that does not mean that I am not attracted to other forms. A petite, or thin, or even short curvy woman are all attractive in “my book”.

And finally…

  • I always imagine what it would be like to go out. Maybe on a “date”, or simply just for lunch or dinner, or coffee. With them. Talking. Chatting. Looking good. Feeling good. Eating delicious foods, and drinking things in a nice slow pleasurably leisure pace.

And seriously guys. And then, say maybe mid-meal, I pretty much know how I want or desire to proceed with the relationship after the meal. Whether it’s going to be playful fun, a good friend, a ship that passes in the night, or something more substantive.

To Open the Files

Like my other posts.

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

A fine Chinese woman. She’s in her late forties, early fifties. She’s a “looker”, and attractive. She is in no way a “child appearing brown-skin waif”.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not.

For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

While I tend to prefer ladies with a more motherly and robust appearance, I find all of them to be very attractive. From the tall thin leggy beauties to the short cute little kitten like cuddle balls. But of course, most people from Arkansas think that my interest in these gals are because they look preadolescent.

A Chinese girl in her 20’s. She is attractive. But does not look like a child.

Really. Do you think that this beauty looks like a ten year old child?

I like women in all their attributes.

Just like I like cats in all their glory.

Women are like cats. You accept them as they are. You do not try to change them, or make them “better”. You live with them in peace and shared affection, or they will get up, leave the room, lick their wounds and find another place to hang out at.

Many women get this serious unsmiling look on their face. Not attractive. If you want to see attractive women, watch a J-Pop video. Like TWICE.

This gal has everything that I find attractive in a woman. Big smile. Clean appearance. Longish hair that is clean, healthy and well maintained. Robust Chest, is playful.  Is wearing comfortable clothes that fit her well.

TWICE “Heart Shaker”

You know, all of the girls of TWICE are ethnically Han Chinese. It’s a K-Pop group.

TWICE (트와이스) is a girl group consisting of 9 members: Jihyo, Nayeon, Jeongyeon, Momo, Sana, Mina, Dahyun, Chaeyoung, and Tzuyu. The band debuted on October 20, 2015, through the survival show Sixteen, under JYP Entertainment. As of February 2020, JYPE is partnering with Republic Records to help promote TWICE worldwide.

Here’s one of their videos. This one is “Heart Shaker”.

Notice how great and happy they “feel”. I argue that it is the smiles that they have. The smiles. The big glorious smiles! Watching the video will show that it’s the smiles that radiate…

Go ahead watch it. Pay particular attention to the smiles.

TWICE Official Accounts:
Official Website: twice.jype.com
Official Website (Japan): twicejapan.com
Twitter: @JYPETWICE
Twitter (Japan): @JYPETWICE_JAPAN
Instagram: @twicetagram
Instagram (Japan): @jypetwice_japan
Facebook: JYPETWICE
Youtube: Twice
Youtube (Japan): TWICE JAPAN OFFICIAL
Fan Cafe: TWICE9
V Live: TWICE
TikTok: @twice_tiktok_official
TikTok (Japan): @twice_tiktok_officialjp

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it.

This is true for the human sexes, as it is for animals, for flowers and for things such as building and art. Personally, I find art that massages the soul to be truly beautiful and inspirational. Which is why I have a complete index devoted to the subject.

If you had a choice, wouldn’t you prefer to surround yourselves with beautiful things, beautiful creatures, beautiful places, and beautiful relationships. It is up to us to attract and emit the same kinds of attractions. Whether it is beauty, kindness or happiness. We become what we emit.

Maybe that is why I associate women, girls, ladies with fine and delicious food.

Some women remind me of delicious steamy burritos covered in hot delicious cheese.

This post discusses Han Chinese women and why they do not at all resemble the American narrative. And I am also including a MM lesson here. Smiles will increase your relative attractiveness to others by a good three (3!) points. After all, four points are all you need to have someone consider you to be attractive.

  • Be clean and well-groomed. (+1)
  • Dress comfortably and be yourself. (+1)
  • Smile (+3)

You will attract others. With +5 points you will be unstoppable.

This is important if you are going out on a date, interviewing for a job, meeting in-laws for the first time, trying to get a customer, or just want to make new friends. Smile.

Again. Check out the smiles on these girls from the group TWICE. The song is called “Ooh-Aah.”

Go ahead watch it. Pay particular attention to the smiles.

As I have said before…

Being a man, eventually you reach a balance point where your hormones are under control and all you really want to do is get to know the girl, have a good time together, and enjoy the moments. And really as you get older this becomes more and more pronounced.

You savor the steaks you eat. You enjoy the perfume she wears, you listen to her talk and enjoy the night air after the dinner. You joke, you laugh, and maybe sing a song or two while walking on the jetty.

Women are magical.

When I think of women, I tend to think of doing things with them. You know like some Korean BBQ.

To go out, chat on in a mall, go window shopping with, and enjoy a nice meal. Maybe Thai or Viet food is always a pleasure with companionship. Colorful, tasty, delicious and relaxing. I can easily picture sharing a steamed fish and some coconut / pineapple rice together.

Delicious and savory South East Asian food.

 

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see. It’s their choice of clothing, the area where the video was filmed, the selection of music, the way their hair is done up, and so much more.

Like the clothes that they chose to spend the evening in, and the choice of shoes that they wore. Guys, you all had best be more attentive. Don’t you know.

I do not know what it is called, but boy does it look delicious.

Each little video is like a window to the soul. Where you get a little glimpse of the girl behind the mask. That little presentation is just pure gold.

They make me hungry.

I can’t help but think of buttered French baguettes, and some delicious soft cheese. Which reminds me of a friend that I was chatting with. She told me about the sad, sad story about how rural towns in France have been replacing their hand-made home-made (authentic) baguettes with machine made replacements. It’s horrible!

I mean… WHY! In God’s name; WHY?

Ah….(authentic) baguettes.

These wonderful, and delicious crunchy bits of Heaven are now being replaced by these pale imitations of robotic mass-production…

Fake baguettes have now flooded the rural French countryside.

For me, it is like replacing a nice dry red wine with grape soda. There is NO comparison.

For me it is like replacing a beautiful flower bed full of roses with plastic flowers stolen from a cemetery.

It’s horrible!

Notice the lack of air pockets, and the lack of a tough crusty exterior. No personality at all. Just a homogeneous blob.

Yuck!

I just cannot imagine any French person referring to this , this as a baguette.

Back to the girls of China

They like women all over the world, have beauty. And like elsewhere they all have their charms.

Some have personality.

Some girls have personality.

And some really do.

While others just have a strong softness. Some are calm and composed, some are happy and light.

Some have stories to tell, and adventures to experience.

Maybe you too can become part of their adventures.

Some girls are living an adventure.

 

Some have a great body.

Some girls work on physical training and it shows. I, myself, love to life weights. Though I have really toned down my passion in this area, I cannot help but admire the effort that these gals put into their program.

They have long legs, or great dimples. Some have just long, long hair or dark, dark eyes. Some have a soft touch, while others have a careful composed prettiness.

Some have a wonderful smile.

Some girls have a natural smile that is warm and inviting.

 

Some women are comforting.

They calm me. They sooth me. They relax me. They are like clean laundry blowing in the breeze on a sunny Spring day. Or like a nice toasted cheese sandwich that you eat with a bowl of tomato soup.

Some girls are like a nice toasted cheese sandwich that you eat with a bowl of tomato soup.

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment.

Some girls look great in a particular outfit.

Girls, ladies, women are like beautiful flowers that should be treasured and cherished. For they are all wonderful.

But do not mistake the cuteness of a tiger for the damage it could cause if you angered it. Chinese women are very, very capable people. You can take that “to the bank”. Never fail to understand that they are strong, knowledgeable and powerful in their own right.

The girls of China tend to be very beautiful.

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more.

Some girls remind me of a cat that ate the bird.

Some girls take me to another time and place; and reality.

Some girls alter my reality.

And that’s what relationships do. So if you want to have a great adventure on your world-line travels hook up with a partner that will accentuate your world-line adventures through the MWI.

Some girls remind me of ravioli. Good. Warm. Delicious. Tasty. Pleasant aroma, and so fulfilling.

Some girls remind me of ravioli. Good. Warm. Delicious. Tasty. Pleasant aroma, and so fulfilling.

This girl reminds me of ice cream stands on hot Summer days. Maybe with a nice creamy orange-cream ice-cream. Or, perhaps a “Blizzard” with crunched up Oreo cookies as a topping. Or maybe a frosty root-beer float.

This girl reminds me of ice cream stands on hot Summer days.

As I have elaborated upon in other posts, I now associate women, girls and ladies with food. In fact, when I look at food I think of women. And when I look at women I think of food. I suppose that you all must think that I am completely bonkers in this regard.

But that’s just the way it is.

This gal reminds me of hot buttered corn, with Lays potato chips, dill garlic spears (pickles), potato salad, and Mr. Pibb. (An American soft drink.)

When I think of women wearing comfortable casual clothes I imagine us in the house together. She’s cooking on the stove wearing an apron. I know, I’m such an old fashioned chauvinist guy, and us talking. I sit there sipping on a wine, and helping her, maybe doing some food prep and she’s busy talking about this or that. Nothing too serious, but fun, light conversation that is engaging and delightful.

A delightful woman is like a fine loaf of bread, piping hot, out of the oven, hot and toasty.

Now, I know. I know. I mean it; I know that this is not what anyone really WANTS to hear.

They want to hear about sex, and porn. they want to hear about expensive clothing, makeup and beauty perfection. They want to hear about the salacious details on dates and relationships that have turned sour.

Not here.

(I’ve) been there. Done that.

I just want to have a good time and munch.

These two girls remind me of the silliest thing. I imagine left over meatloaf, on two slices of white bread with a bunch of ketchup on top. Don’t ask me why. Because I am not aware of the associative meaning.

And just because I enjoy the more curvy robust girls, that doesn’t mean that I do not find other women just as attractive. Some of my favorite girls are short, thin and very petite. But that is just me.

I like them all.

Just like I like Pizza, cheeseburgers, steaks and fried chicken. Don’t force me to choose. I just cannot. I love them all. And that is the same with beauty. There is no set idea of perfection, but rather a wide and diverse spectrum of characteristics that all work together to create an “image”.

A wonderful woman is like a fine roasted chicken. Tender and hot on the inside, and a bit crunchy on the outside.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

Not every girl is a “ten”. But that rating scale is based upon appearance alone. When the actual characteristics of a person consists of a wide spectrum of attributes. From appearance to personal grooming. To manners, the way that they talk, their friends, and their interests. To kindness, dreams, and opinions on life. Everything combines to a whole. And you all will not get that in a static image.

This gal reminds me of kite flying, a blanket on the lawn, two bottles of red wine (or chardonnay) and some hard crusty rolls with Gorgonzola cheese.

When I look at something, or someone who is beautiful it first strikes my interest. This is a normal reaction and there is nothing evil, disgusting or slimy about it. People naturally gravitate towards the attractive. But you know, and I am certain that some dog owners know, that even the most ugly dogs have characteristics that make them very special and beautiful in our eyes.

And that’s one of the great things about life.

It’s to experience beauty in everything. To appreciate beauty in everything, and to contribute to that beauty in good, substantive, and helpful ways. To make the life better for friends and family; to improve society and to rid the world of the evil, the confused and the horrible.

This girl reminds me of a jar of hot mixed vegetables. When I mean “hot”, I mean spicy. When you pickle vegetables with hot peppers. It’s oh so tasty. Like this woman here.

 

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

You all might wonder why I am posting these pictures on the internet. But you shouldn’t.

Try to find pictures of beautiful girls from China using Google, Bing or any American or Western search engine. What you will get are stock images, advertisements, pictures of children, and professional photos associated with some Western “journalism”.

Now this is sexy.

Nonsense. This is what it’s like.

This is the real, honest to goodness deal.

The Videos

  • All the Videos HERE. It’s all in one big zip file. Just download and open up and watch. I hope you all enjoy them. 337 MB.

Oh, and don’t leave yet!

Special Bonus

Here’s another TWICE video. Please pay attention to all the smiles, and the upbeat action. This one is a favorite of mine (and my daughter) because it was filmed in Boston. And I have many, many fond memories of Boston Massachusetts.

The song and video is “Likey”. As you watch it, please keep in mind that people are attracted to smiles. You might be ugly as shit, but a big toothy smile will open doors for you.

Chalk it up to MM survival hints 101.

Go ahead watch it. Pay particular attention to the smiles.

Do not forget that a nice big smile can open up many doors.

And if you are a woman, and you want to snag a man, a very special guy, then smell like donuts. (Just joking. Kind of.) Actually, though, there is an entire website to the science behind perfume selection in this regard. You might want to visit it here.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

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Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

The Mad Scientists of Mammoth Falls

I am more than a bit “burnt out” on all the Geo-political bullshit. When I read an article about “containing China”, and how “America is roaring back” I just exit the browser tab. I’ve have enough. I am “toast”.

America is so full-on crazy right now, and they treat us “citizens” as slaves, and dumbed down nincompoops. It’s just an insult to see what constitutes “news” these days.

Instead, what I want to do do is relive a simpler time when I was a boy. And for me, that meant chilling out with my dog, and my cat in my tree house. It meant riding all over town and going on “hikes” and all-day-long “bike rides” and exploring old abandoned bridges, trestles, tunnels, and long abandoned rural homes. It meant lazying around eating home-made sandwiches, and sprawling out upon the couch as I read one of my hundreds of boyhood paperback books.

Rural Pennsylvania.

And one of the books that I loved then, and still love today, is the “Mad Scientist’s Club” series of short stories.

I still remember the book fair as one of the highlights of my elementary school year. For a half hour or so the teacher would take us down the long hall to the multipurpose room.  I lived in rural Western Pennsylvania, and my school was too small to have a separate gym. Though it did have a basement cafeteria and a  library on the nearby High School. There, in the gym where table after table had been set up with stacks of books arranged by interest and age level.

I loved books as a kid and I always looked forward to the event.

As a boy, I used to hang out in the tree house with my cat and read. But other times my friends would come up and we would read comic books together, and do other things that kids are forbidden to do.

Some of the books I purchased there would shape my reading habits for the rest of my life. I still remember taking the two dollars my mom gave me for the fair and investing it in Chariots of the Gods. It was astounding to me, and I found it impossible to put down.

Since then I have collected a small mountain of paperbacks. With science fiction and history being my favorites. I also had some war literature, some “how to” books, and Marmaduke comics paperbacks.

Another book fair introduced me to yet another author: Bertrand R. Brinley.

Few of you will recognize his name, though some will fondly remember series he authored: The Mad Scientists’ Club (referred to as MSC among fans).

His initial work consisted of two volumes of short stories and a novel. A second novel written by Brinley but not really published until after his death completes the set. In my opinion his stories rank as one of the best young people’s reading series ever created.

I mean…

…the BEST.

Dinky Poore didn't really mean to start the story about the huge sea monster in Strawberry Lake. He was only telling a fib because he had to have an excuse for getting home late for supper. So he told his folks he'd been running around the lake trying to get a closer look at a huge, snakelike thing he'd seen in the water, and the first thing he knew he was too far from home to get back in time.

His mother and father greeted the tale with some skepticism. But Dinky's two sisters were more impressionable, and that's how the story really got out. They kept pestering him for so many details about the monster that he had to invent a fantastic tale to satisfy them. 

That's one of the troubles with a lie. You've got to keep adding to it to make it believable to people.

It didn't take long for the story to get around town, and pretty soon Dinky Poore was a celebrity in Mammoth Falls. He even had his picture in the paper, together with an "artists conception" of the thing he'd seen. It was gruesome-looking -- something like a dinosaur, but with a scaly, saw-toothed back like a dragon. Dinky was never short on imagination, and he was able to give the artist plenty of details.

It was the artists' sketch in the newspaper that got Henry Mulligan all excited. Henry is First Vice President and also Chief of Research for the Mad Scientists' Club and is noted for his brainstorms. Neither Henry nor anyone else in the club actually believed Dinky had seen a real monster, but we were all willing to play along with the gag -- especially when Henry suggested that we could build a monster just like the one shown in the newspaper ...

Bertrand R. Brinley

Bertrand Brinley was born in Hudson, New York, in 1917. As a child he moved with his family from place to place, eventually living in West Newbury, Massachusetts as a teenager where he graduated from the local high school.

West Newbury, Massachusetts. Small town America.

He worked at Lockheed Aircraft Corporation in California as a systems analyst during the early years of World War II and joined the army in 1944. His tour with the army allowed him to see much of the world.

He left the army for a short time, then reentered it during the Korean War.

Much of his work with the army involved public relations and in the late 50’s, right after the Sputnik launch, he was put in charge of a program to instruct amateur rocketeers in safety.

This lead to his first book published in 1960, Rocket Manual for Amateurs.

1960, Rocket Manual for Amateurs.

This book taught young boys, and maybe High School teenagers, how to make their own rockets from scratch. Not just the shape; nose cones, and fins, but also how to make solid rocket propellant motors, firing systems, and parachute escape and retrieval devices.

Sigh.

You would never see that today.

This is ancient history – even to me – but the launch of Sputnik by the Soviet Union in 1957 sent the United States into a crisis.

The successful orbiting of a satellite by America’s rival after the failure of several of our own rockets created the impression of a scientific gap between the two countries.

In 1958 the U.S. would orbit its own satellite, Vanguard, but by then the idea that America was behind the USSR in science and technology was firmly planted in the public’s mind.

To close this supposed “gap,” money was poured into education for the next decade or so. Not just funding for schools, and extra courses, but real STEM courses for everyone.

Everyone, all over America, were training to be engineers, designers, and scientists.

The introduction of new curriculum – such as the so-called New Math designed to promote engineering and science-was common. While it is doubtful that New Math really turned ten-year-olds into rocket engineers, it is indisputable that these events had Americans thinking about science and technology.

Elementary textbooks for fourth through six grade doesn’t resemble anything being taught in America today.

It was in this atmosphere that Brinley conceived his stories.

In 1961 the first of Brinley’s tales was published in Boy’s Life. Boy’s Life was, and remains, the official magazine of the Boy Scouts.

Boy’s Life magazine.

The story, The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake, told of a group of small-town teenagers whose genius for technology gets them both into and out of trouble when they build a fake sea serpent.

The story of the club was continued in two more stories that year in Boy’s Life. In 1965 the first seven of the short stories were gathered into book form and published under the title The Mad Scientists Club. It was a paperback copy of this I came across and purchased at a book fair several years later.

The crew in their tree-house. Plotting and scheming.

To say that I liked this book would be quite an understatement.

I read the seven tales contained in it over and over again.

Each, while involving the same characters and setting, were very different and engaging.

My personal favorite is The Secret of the Old Cannon, where the club probes the mystery of what is in the breech of a giant civil war cannon in the local park.

Mammoth Falls

A strange sea monster appears on the lake...a fortune is unearthed from an old cannon ...a valuable dinosaur egg is stolen. 

Watch out as the Mad Scientists turn Mammoth Falls upside down! 

Take seven, lively, "normal" boys -- one an inventive genius -- give them a clubhouse for cooking up ideas, an electronics lab above the town hardware store, and a good supply of Army surplus equipment, and you, dear reader, have a boyhood dream come true and a situation that bears watching. 

In the hands of an author whose own work involved technological pioneering, the proceedings are well worth undivided attention, as the boys explore every conceivable possibility for high and happy adventure in the neighborhood of Mammoth Falls. 

To the unutterable confusion of the local dignitaries -- and the unalloyed delight of Bertrand Brinley's fans -- the young heroes not only outwit their insidious rival, Harmon Muldoon, but emerge as town heroes.

The stories were told in first person by character Charlie Finckledinck (who didn’t have a last name until the first novel came out) but clearly the club’s most prominent member was the bespeckled teenager Henry Mulligan.

Henry, the group’s resident science genius, was just as likely to come up with some outlandish prank as a legitimate experiment or invention.

Other MSC members included Jeff Crocker, the president (by virtue of the club meeting in his father’s barn), Homer Snodgrass and Mortimer Dalrymple (experts in electronics and radio).

The club membership was rounded out by Freddy Mulldoon and Dinky Poore, the group’s Mutt and Jeff pair.

A couple of points about the characters: Freddy Muldoon was originally called Fatso Brown, and his cousin, the notorious Harmon Muldoon, Skinny Brown, in The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake. My father changed the names in the version that was published in Boys' Life and subsequently in The Mad Scientists' Club. Charlie Finckledinck, the narrator, did not have a last name until The Big Kerplop!

-The Mad Scientists Club

The adults of the mythical town of Mammoth Falls where the stories were set found themselves forever involved in some scheme or prank the club had thought up.

These, for example, took the forms of a fake monster in the local lake, an electronically-haunted house at the city limits and a mad balloonist in the town square.

When the boys weren’t giving Mayor Scragg, Police Chief Putney or Constable Billy Dahr problems, they often found themselves at odds with a rival gang formed by Harmon Mulldoon who had been a MSC member but had been thrown out for activity unbecoming of a scientist.

It always amazed me how the characters in the books were so clearly and finely drawn. Unfortunately Bertrand Brinley is no longer with us, but his son, Sheridan Brinley, explained how his father had come up with the characters.

Like many authors, Bertrand Brinley’s own personality found its ways into the people he created. “Henry is my father through and through,” said Sheridan. “A guy who thinks before he speaks, has an unusual perspective on things, has a vivid imagination, secretly feeds the dog at the table, is late to dinner because he is thinking about something, etc., etc.”

“Dinky Poore, I have always thought, was in part me, as I was small and skinny as a child and a bit of a whiner,” said Sheridan. “The Poore name is a family name in Westbury, Massachusetts, which is the source of a number of the names and places in the stories. For example, Billy Dahr is based on the constable in West Newbury in the ’30s. He was a bumbling sort of cop, as is Dahr.”

At least some of the events in the stories were inspired by real incidents that would have appeared in the news at the time. The accidental loss of a nuclear device off the coast of Spain in 1966 surely provided inspiration for the first novel, The Big Kerplop!, where an atomic bomb splashes into Mammoth Fall’s Strawberry Lake.

The Air Force’s Project Blue Book, which investigated UFO sightings, may have also been material for Brinley’s imagination to chew on. “The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls was, I think, a parody of the Air Force program spending taxpayers’ dollars to trace down UFO sightings,” muses Sheridan.

“What a great joke: create a flying mannequin that makes fools of the town elders and police and scrambles the planes from the nearby Air Force base. Some of the same stuff is in The Flying Sorcerer.

Engineers and Scientists

I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years about how the original Star Trek TV show in the 60’s influenced people to become scientists and engineers, and as a longtime Treker myself, I believe it is true.

However, I think there may quite a few people who made their career choices based on Brinley’s work. A gentleman named Mark Maxham runs a MSC tribute site and has collected some quotes from anonymous fans including this one:

I have had at least 5 copies of the Mad Scientist's Club over the years. I just gave away my only duplicate set. [...] They too were my favorites when I was younger. I am now a spacecraft flight engineer (worked with NASA controlling the Magellan Spacecraft to Venus) thanks in part to those books. 

I suspect that this sentiment is widespread. There aren’t as many MSC fans around as Trekers, but those that exist seem to cherish their memories of the stories just as much as episodes of that seminal TV series.

I even suspect that my own choice of career as an Aerospace engineer hearkens back to Brinley’s tales of crazed boys tinkering around with electronics, rockets, and machinery. Sure there were many other influences. But only Brinley translated that love for gadgetry and messing around with machines that I so very love today.

Like all my books, I eventually lost my old tattered book. My best guess is that it lies at the bottom of some landfill in San Luis Obispo  California.

By the way, do you know what I could use right now?

I could use a thin-crust cheese pizza with a goodly amount of salt on it. Maybe with a icy Coke. Not a beer. My doctor is telling me that my beer-drinking days are over. Beer is a “cold” food. I can only drink “warm” foods; like red wine and 53% alcohol. Sigh.

Anyways. For some reason, when I would plop myself and read these books, it was always with either sandwiches or pizza. I guess that I am just that kind of a silly guy. Eh?

What I liked about the thin crust pizza was that you could fold it up, and eat it like a gooey taco. I would plop myself down on this big sprawling 1940’s chair inherited from my grandparents, or our La-Z-boy and chill out. Smunching on a pizza, book about other kids like you, a nice breeze though the window, and a television or radio playing softly in the other room was what my boyhood was like.

Anyways, I had two books. They actually had a second volume that I had bought. It was titled The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club. I thought that it was even better than the first!

Unfortunately a novel entitled The Big Kerplop! Came out that I was unaware of, and so I never had the opportunity to read it.

Trying to get all these books has been a herculean task over the years. Not only due to the lack of availability, but also to the fact that I am in China. And obscure books in English are not readily available.

Unfortunately all of them had been out of print for many years and were almost impossible to find. This was bad news as I desperately wanted to get a hold of them for both myself and all the kids.

Purple House Press Reprints

Sheridan Brinley had been trying to get his father’s works republished for a number of years without success.

No publisher wanted to risk the money necessary to run off several thousand copies of the books no matter how ardent the small fan base might be.

Fortunately, Brinley came in contact with Purple House Press (PHP), a new publisher formed by a woman named Jill Morgan. Morgan had been locating and collecting out-of-print children books and had come to realize the cost of these original volumes were being driven through the roof.

Parents who wanted to share their favorite children’s books with their own kids were priced out of the market.This is that profit-greed based society that I always lament about. People in America do not care about society. They care about themselves; as a nation driven by psychopathic personalities, those of us with a different value system are often left out in the cold.

Morgan started contacting authors and their heirs and arranging for these works to be reprinted in small volumes. The company now has thirty-two books in its catalog including the original Mad Scientists’ Club, The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club and The Big Kerplop!

In fact for MSC fans there was perhaps an unexpected bonus from this alliance with PHP. Bertrand Brinley had written a second MSC novel, but it had never been published in the United States. After some editing, The Big Chunk of Ice – the story of the Mad Scientists entangled in a mystery in Austria – became available for readers for what was probably the first time.

I truly believe that one of the secrets of getting your kids to be great readers is not just to read to them, but to read to them stories you yourself are in love with.

The kind of excitement you radiate can’t be faked and kids pick up on it. That is one of the reasons why I am so happy to see efforts like Purple House Press succeed.

As a Rufus I’ve had the opportunity to not only share MSC stories with my kids, but my nieces and nephews as well.

From a technical point of view the stories show some signs of age – the radios, model rockets and remote controls the MSC kids used aren’t exactly cutting edge technology anymore (one can only wonder what trouble Henry and friends could get into using computers, the Internet and various wireless devices), but the stories are still great and worth sharing with a new generation.

Author’s Legacy

Bertrand Brinley died in 1994, but not without having left a significant mark in a lot of people’s lives.

I still can’t see more than two hot air balloons together without thinking of The Great Gas Bag Race.

I was ecstatic a few decades ago when I visited Fort McHenry in Baltimore and found they had a 15-inch Rodman cannon (the same one featured in The Secret of the Old Cannon).

I stood there pondering, could Homer Snodgrass really have wiggled his way down that barrel to find out what was inside?

In a way I like to think of this website, The Museum of UnNatural Mystery, as partly a tribute to Brinley’s work. I’m sure his stories inspired my interest in weird science.

I’d like to think that the halls of the museum are a place where the spirits of Henry Mulligan and Jeff Crocker, embodied into the children of today, can still find some adventure, or at least some mischief, to get into that would vex Mayor Scragg and the citizens of Mammoth Falls.

The Mad Scientist’s Club Series

The Mad Scientists’ Club – Seven Short Stories

– The Strange Sea Monster of Strawberry Lake – The club decides to shake up the town with a fake lake monster, but things go frather than they ever envisioned.

– The Big Egg – The kids find a dinosaur egg and it hatches, or does it?

– The Secret of the Old Cannon – What is hidden in an old civil war cannon up on Memorial Point?

-The Unidentified Flying Man of Mammoth Falls – A mad ballooner upsets the town’s Founder’s Day celebration.

– The Great Gas Bag Race – The club enters a balloon in the annual race and find themselves up against their old rival, Harmon Mulldoon.

– The Voice in the Chimney – The old house on Blueberry Hill is haunted, or is it just peoples’ imagination?

– Night Rescue – The club tries to rescue a downed jet pilot.

The New Adventures of the Mad Scientists’ Club – Five Short Stories

– The Telltale Transmitter – The club goes up against bank robbers.

– The Cool Cavern – The kids try to rescue Harmon’s gang from a cave in.

– Big Chief Rainmaker – The club tries to bring an end to a devastating drought.

– The Flying Sorcerer – A UFO seems to be visiting Mammoth Falls.

– The Great Confrontation – Harmon Mulldoon’s rival gang goes too far.

The Big Kerplop!A full length novel that tells the story of the formation of the club during a scare when an atomic bomb is lost in Strawberry Lake.

The Big Chunk of IceA full length novel that tells the story of the club as it goes on a scientific expedition to Austria and gets entangled in the mystery of a lost diamond.

Do you want more?

You can go through the index page and explore. A lot of gems there. Have fun.

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A time to morn the lost buildings of the world

When I lived in Massachusetts, I noticed just how different it was from either New York, or Pennsylvania. Massachusetts had bigger homes… huge multi-generational homes. It had large beautiful cemeteries… not the spare plot of earth where you would toss the diseased into like the state of Indiana, and it had statues, and carvings, and character.

After learning about local history, and lore, I came to the realization that the people who lived in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and similar adjacent states all were founded by people who cared about their environment and their society.

And in many ways, that still exists in Massachusetts.

In those days, people would have picnics in cemeteries. (When was the last time you and your family had a picnic in a cemetery?) And went out for a stroll down the roads and lanes near your house at twilight? They, the people who lived there, designed the environment to be one that was aesthetically and socially appealing. Large lush and deep dark shady trees adorned the roads. Mailboxes, fences, and stairways were designed for beauty and appearance. Instead of the raw brutalist minimalism that had corrupted America since the psychopathic oligarchy took control in 1910.

Back in the day, say after the American Civil War, paintings depicted real art; real beauty. Buildings showed elements of interest and were designed for multi-generational families, and monies were allocated to those purposes. Parks were constantly created, maintained, and expanded upon. Statues were erected, and monuments created.

“The Royal Opera House In Valletta, Malta (1911). Built In 1866, It Was Destroyed In World War II From A Direct Hit By Luftwaffe Bombers”

All of these things are currently happening in China today because the government recognizes that to have a happy citizenry, you must create a healthy and happy environment to live in.

These things are NOT happening in America because America has devolved into a two class society. The oligarchy class of the 0.0001% live in isolated communities and live lavish and exorbitant lives. While the rest serve them in a very stratified existence. From their point of view (the ruling class), as long as the serf-sheeple are content enough not to revolt, who needs to provide them a good and healthy environment to live in. Rather to milk them dry while they are distracted in various political battles, and foreign wars.

And that’s the way it is.

Today we are going to look at the loss of these beautiful buildings and structure. We will not focus on the American progressive movement, and the American rise of the psychopaths. But rather we will simply morn the loss of buildings and structures as “works of art” in their own way. I hope you enjoy this post.

“The Original Neue Elbbrücke Bridge From 1887-1959 In Hamburg, Germany”

When I lived in Indiana I saw outdoor ice skating rinks that had been turned into open air garbage dumps, public swimming pools that had been cemented in, statutes what had been torn down and now all that existed was a plot of land with a pedestal and a bunch of old tangle weeds.

I saw housing complexes going up in areas that was fenced off “for posterity so that others can enjoy the beauty of old growth forests”, and I saw housing developments bull-dosing beautiful meandering streams, brooks and low rolling hills.

I also saw a parking lot where an old local swimming hole used to exist.

When the society becomes that of a money grabbing venture by the most evil psychopaths in society, there is no room for anyone else, beauty, or society.

““It’s Not Possible To Take Such A Photograph Anymore, As The Buildings Outside Block The Sun Rays.” Grand Central, NYC (1929)”

Indiana was an eye-opening experience for me. I used to visit the local libraries and go into the local history section and research the area where I lived. So much history.

While today it is flat and filled with soy beans and corn fields as far as the eye can see.

he Knoxville, Tennessee, courthouse circa 1903. With signage advising “Keep Off the Grass,” “No Loafing,” “Drink Hickman’s Coffee” and “Chew Ram’s Horn Tobacco.”

But you know, back when the “white settlers” were moving Westward, the land was mostly wooded with large and expansive old-growth forests, fine babbling brooks and tall wide based trees covered in deep plush mosses.

Not today. Indiana is a farming state. It’s changed, but not every change is for the best.

“Lost And Rediscovered”

So there is some hope.

One of the things that I lament about China, but I never talk about, is how the old is all being displaced with the new. yeah. I like the new malls, the clean and efficient public works and all the rest. But I believe that some attention must be made to preserve the past.

“The Hotel Netherland (NYC) Photographed In 1905 And Later Demolished In 1927”

Surely, China is trying.

Tree are being planted, parks are being established everywhere, and there are local committees all over the place dedicated to preserving the past. Some ancient and historical sites are going under.

The Wabash-Pittsburgh railway station.

If not, then are being renewed in some “architectural improvements” for the best of society. You know, maybe the ruins have their own beauty, maybe?

“Built In 1504, Demolished In 1910. What Was The Oldest House In Hamburg, Germany”

California was a land of forests that were actually nothing more than “Christmas trees on gravel”, and if you all have ever been to CA, you will know what I am talking about. however, there is some serous history in Northern California near Chico and the areas near San Francisco. The entire Pacific North West is dotted with character, and you can see it in the movies “Labyrinth“, “First Blood (a Rambo movie)” and “The Goonies“. You can see that it resembles Pennsylvania is so many ways, that I automatically became attracted and attached to it.

“The Elisabeth Bridge Built In 1903 Budapest, Hungary. It Was The Longest Single-Span Bridge In The World At The Time And An Engineering Marvel. Following The Retreat Of German Forces From The City In Ww2, It Was Blown Up In The Morning Of January 18, 1945. Replaced In 1964 By A Modernist Bridge”

The local towns all have historical societies and their history is all very interesting. I particularly loved Auburn in this regard. 

They had a museum, and in it was a full length ball-gown all made from a woman’s hair. I have never forgotten about it. I well remember going into the renovated Victorian style building and gawking at the dress while licking some frozen yogurt from TCBY. But that was on another world line and on this one people eat ice cream more than yogurt cones.

“Medieval Town Of Hildesheim, Lower Saxony, Germany. Once One Of The Most Picturesque And Pristine Late Medieval Towns In Europe. Destroyed On March 22nd, 1945, One Month Before The War’s End”

You know, when you are in a place, it is the environment that makes it special. The people, the smells, and the style of the local architecture all contribute to the ambience. It’s what makes events special.

I can relate to you special time that I have had singing with a girl on the pier in Salem Massachusetts after we had pizza and wine in a local restaurant (with red checkered tablecloths) and a candle in an old wine bottle. Or chilling out in the cemetery next to my university in Syracuse New York, or grabbing a hot dog in an obscure diner on a side alley in Philadelphia (maybe I should have gotten a Philly cheese steak sandwich).

The point is that if everything is nothing but white bland boxes or McMansions you miss out in life and special experiences that enhance the senses.

“Cincinnati Public Library 1871-1955”

When I lived in Indiana I was surprised how plain and sterile everything was. Restaurants, aside from well established chains were just empty rooms with the cheapest plastic chairs and the barest tables.  The food was the cheapest to make and the most expensive to sell. Iced tea came in a huge tureen and provided sugarless without lemon, mint twig or orange, and provided in the a really bland way. It was like eating in a school or hospital cafeteria.

Seriously.

“The Saltair Pavilion 1900-1925”

People you all need to look at things from a aesthetic perspective; one of pleasure and beauty instead of just one of profit. Why are water holes from the last century filled in or cemented over? Because no one could profit from them? That’s fucking sick! Seriously. Your society is demented if it allows them to be destroyed simply become someone cannot profit from them.

Don’t understand. I task you. Go to the local historical society and research where all the old (free) water holes were. Get the locations on a map (easy to do int he library) and go search them look. Look at what they are like today.

Replaced with tiny little hands grasping and clutching at your wallet. This is not a society. It is a concentration slave camp.

“Warsaw, Poland 1939. No Need To Say What Happened Here. Truly A Tragic Loss”

And you know what is supremely frustrating to me? It’s that no one else notices. They just accept it as a “good thing” and as “progress”. They do not see that taking something that is free and turning it into something that someone can profit from is EVIL. They fail to see this.

They are the one’s with a head problem.

One hundred years ago homes were quite different. People lived in multi-generation homes. The grandparents, the uncles and aunties and their kids, and you and your family all lived int he same house. Each family had a suite of rooms which consisted of a bedroom or two, a living area, a bath and a kitchen and a porch.

They didn’t need to mow grass. They had the lawns planted in clover.

They didn’t have or need air conditioning. They had high ceilings with above the door transoms, and large spacious deep porches with swings, swing gliders and porch swings and big enormous thick trees  that shaded the entire home form the relentless sun in the Summer.

Not today.

The design of homes is such that the owners NEED to purchase systems that they must pay for weekly or monthly to maintain a comfortable standard of living.

Now, of course, these homes are now considered to be mansions. After all they have multiple bedrooms, and living rooms, but really are they any different from McMansion’s?

In those days they didn’t have wall to wall carpeting. They had real hardwood floors. They didn’t have air conditioning. they used fans, and high vaulted ceilings to direct the hot air outward. They didn’t have refrigerators, they had cold cellars, and other systems that sound so primitive, but in all functionality work just as well today as they did back then.

A cold cellar would store vegetables and fruit for up to a week. So does a refrigerator. A high ceiling room can keep only slightly warmer than an air conditioned room set at  75 degrees F in the Summer. A house with windows open allows for the early morning and evening breezes to clean out the bad odors and smells that accumulate. Today we must use a selection of detergents to scrub the rooms to maintain a pleasant environment.

To live in the “old way” is to live cheaper, but only take a minor hit in benefit. Unless you like to keep your air conditioner set to freezing, there is no benefit in having a A/C unit unless you have enough disposable income to afford the monthly electrical bills.

And yeah. I get it. When the weather is super hot and humid, having an air conditioner does make all the difference. My point is this; how many days per year do you need to run it?

“The Late 3rd Century Tetrapylon Of Ancient Palmyra, Syria. Deliberately Destroyed By Isis, 2017”

If you have the money, and the ability, then go ahead use and have all the modern conveniences. I have, after all, spent many years designing these appliances. So it’s all up to you. But I want to underline that there is a very special characteristic of a home with a big wide porch and a nice sliding glider.

“Times Square (1919) Before All The Renovations And Billboards”

When I was 16 years old and working, one fine old lady came up to me and told me that her granddaughter really had a shine to me. She was 14 years old and the woman (Her name was “Auntie Gay”) arranged a date.

She had this big old Victorian home on one of the broad streets in East Brady, PA, and it was near the Captain Brady mansion. She invited me in, and made us some nice lemonade, and allowed us to drink it on the porch on a nice glider there. She left us alone, but we were not allowed off the porch. We were permitted to hold hands but when I tried to kiss her, the porch light went on.

I look back now. It was really charming.

“The Old Dutch House In Bristol, England. It Was Constructed In 1676 But Was Destroyed During The Bristol Blitz Of 1940 By The Luftwaffe”

She had this enormous kitchen with floor to ceiling cupboard that reached to the sky and two doors in it. One led to a pantry with was bigger than my bedroom (well, almost heh, heh) and another lead downstairs into the cold cellar. Where it was dark, damp, cool and gloomy. She had a thousand glass jars of all sorts of preserves and stored food there, as well as baskets of herbs and other items such as tree bark and Lord knows what.

“The Original Waldorf-Astoria Hotel In NYC, Demolished In 1929 To Serve As The Site For The Empire State Building”

The thing that I remember most about that house was the huge entryway. Once you existed the inner alcove and entered the house, you were in this large room, and in the middle of it was a circular table. Sitting in the middle of the table upon a lace table cloth was this wonderful Tiffany lamp. It was a beautiful work of art. I really admired it.

Tiffany lamp.

I have always admired the details in home and building design, and while I am a big fan of the Victorian style homes, I have to admit that I actually love those wonderful “Craftsman Houses” that become popular briefly before World War II.

These are truly works of art, and are quite adorable. Oh, to be a young boy growing up in either a Victorian or a Craftsman style home would have truly have been a wonderful experience. I can well imagine hanging out in a nook or two with my cat, and reading comic books while munching on a leftover chicken salad sandwich.

Such was my childhood dreams.

But I digress.

Why don’t we design buildings, parks, venues, environments for people to live in? Why does America seem to be nothing more than a bunch of hastily and cheaply produced boxes for people to rush from container one to container two? Why that’s exactly what it seems like. It really does.

“Bowhead House, Edinburgh, Scotland. Built In The Early 1500s, It Was Demolished In 1878. Many Locals Mourned The Loss, Having Regarded The House As One Of The Most Distinctive Relics Of The Old City”

To some people holding on to the old is a relic of the past, and to some degree I can actually see that. Change is how we grow. But that is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about taking things that work, things that are beautiful, things that make life pleasant and replacing them with the bland, the cheap, the simple and the ugly with no consideration what so ever to the people who live around those places.

it’s like the entire concept of American suburbia. It’s just a landscape of little boxes filled with little people doing little things.

“Sibley Breaker, Pennsylvania, Built In 1886 And Destroyed By Fire In 1906”

Here is some images of appreciation to the past.

Here are some thoughts and images that I have found that inspires me, and stirs the porridge in my soul. All credit to the wonderful and skilled architects and craftsmen who built these structures. And you too can enjoy them with me.

Detroit circa 1916. “Griswold Street from Capitol Park.” A scene last glimpsed here, before People’s Outfitting had its growth spurt. 8×10 inch glass negative.

And yeah, It’s just a park in a city. One that is now just mile and miles and miles of ruin. But before the psychopathic oligarchy took over, it was a place of commerce, and a place where people lived, made a living for themselves and their families and thrived.

The Hippodrome stood on 6th Avenue in New York City from 1905 to 1939. It was one of the largest theaters of its time, with a seating capacity of over 5,000.

I suppose that you can argue that it’s just fashion. Buildings come and go and its similar to fashion. The building styles change as the generations cycles.

I understand that.

The Old Metropolitan Opera House was built in 1883 in New York City. First home of the Metropolitan Opera Company, it was demolished in 1967, and performances were moved to Lincoln Center.

The thing is, and this is my point, is that for the last one hundred years, America has dominated the world.

And as the leader, it has influenced the rest of the world.

And the influences are driven downwards from Washington DC.

And since Washington DC has become to focal point for all the global psychopaths in the world, they have, in turn, influenced the entire planet.

And the ruins that you see in the West are but the debris from their carnage.

Chorley Park was the fourth Government House constructed in the early 20th century in Toronto. The birthplace of Toronto alderman John Hallam, it was bought by the city in 1960 and eventually demolished in 1961.

Many of the great building, the most impressive buildings, and the important building were all torn down in America between 1958 and 1965. Why?

Here’s one of the casualties…

The Schiller Theater Building (later known as the Garrick Theater) was built in Chicago in 1891 and was one of the tallest buildings in the city at the time. Inside was a 1,300-seat theater, which was razed in 1961.

Here’s another…

The Chicago Federal Building had a stunning post office and courthouse. The building was demolished in 1965, when it was replaced with the Kluczynski Federal Building.

The renovations towards the “new America” seemed to happen in waves. The 1960 (plus or minus a few years) seems to have a great affect on me personally, but the rapid destruction of American buildings had a second wave afterwards that hit around 1970 or so.

I wonder if this is a consequence of human herd behaviors.

The Old Toronto Star Building was built in 1929 and stood at 288 feet tall, an impressive feat at the time. It was torn down in 1972.

Here’s another casualty from that particular time, the Singer building. As an aside you all might know that I used to hang around with, and party with, Susan Singer the multi-Billionaire heiress to the Singer fortune. She was a nice girl. She was always worrying about how thick her ankles were though. Her ankles were just fine, and she was attractive, and nice.

But you know, that’s life. Its a really strange quirk she had, but I suppose she would tell you all that I was pretty much a weird dude in school as well. LOL.

Conclusion

I like to believe that change is a good thing. That is how we grow.

But I think that change FOR THE BETTER is and should always be welcome. While change for the worse should be avoided at all costs.

When we have a situation where profits for a tiny, tiny small minority governs the shape, appearance and structure of society, eventually that society will break down and collapse.

First you will see minor things disappear.

Then others will vanish with great rapidity. Until all that is left is the barely functional, most expensive, and of questionable utility for the people and the society to use.

And isn’t that what we see today in America?

The ONLY way that this is going to change is to [1] change the structure of the government so that psychopaths no longer can get into positions of control, and [2] Remove all the psychopathic personalities present int he Untied States today.

Which both seem to be quite unlikely.

Therefore…

It’s time to have a picnic and enjoy some companionship, some fine picnic food, and some frosty beers, or a few bottles of red wine. Life is too short to worry about things that you cannot control.

Have a great day you all!

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It’s time, now more than ever, to be the Rufus in our world and society. Be the Rufus.

More examples of personal heroism. It’s mostly inside of China as that is all that I have examples of. This is my 2021 Dragon Boat Festival edition.

I accidentally mixed up my posted videos with the un-posted so if you saw a particular video, I still urge you to re-watch it again.

These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help?

Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand?

Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser. Click on the picture and the video should pop up or appear in a new tab.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

A kind act deserves respect

I argue that all of us must be the best that we can be, and to do everything being mindful of the kindness that we provide. That requires an understanding of the needs of others; empathy. Which is something that psychopaths, and sociopaths are unable to understand. (The Western oligarchical leadership.) Which is why it is so missing and devoid in the West.

Be the Rufus. Show your humanity.

A fisherman gets fished

Throughout China are these little fishing ponds. A guy owns some land, he has a bulldozer dig up a pond, he then stocks it with fish, and charges folk a few yuan to fish all day. It’s a nice pastime. Well, at least it is if you don’t try to get in the water when you don’t know how to swim.

Luckily there is a nearby Rufus to pull him out.

Discovery on the Beach

You are walking along, and you spot a turtle upside down dying in the hot Australian sun. What are you going to do? Are you going to continue onward, shrugging your shoulders, and saying “not my business”? Or are you going to help the poor defenseless creature?

I know what a Rufus would do.

A tri-wheeled electric truck wrecks

And it’s right there in front of you. What are you going to do? Are you going to drive by? Maybe pull an “American”, you know what I mean… slowly drive by, gawk through your window, and say “well, I’m glad it’s not me“. And then forget about the entire event while you go into a drive through for your triple-decker double-cheese deluxe super-sized mega-burger..

Nope. Life is about being the Rufus.  Be good. Be helpful. Anything less is below you.

A community pulls together

A community pulls together and everyone participates. They all work as a team. Even if many are just unskilled go-gooders. A measure of a truly functioning society is the amount of contribution that an individual can provide to that community.

In America how much was my contribution? Very little. I wasn’t allowed to. I had to register to participate. I had to pay to take classes, then pay for registration. Then once registered, I had yearly dues to contribute, and a series of up-grades in skill sets.

And that was just for being a forest-fire-fighter.

In China, EVERYONE participates. And you don’t need to register, pay a fee, or yearly dues either.

 

We must help others

It’s not just turtles, dogs, cat, people. It can be ducks, and geese. We all need each other. We really do. Is your life so busy that you cannot stop and lend a helping hand to a mother with her chicks? Are you so all-important that you cannot slow down and be the guiding light and the shelter in the storm?

Be the Rufus.

Like this woman obviously is.

A delivery girl feeds her baby

It’s tough when you are in your 20’s. You have broken out from the parents, and are now off on your own. But what are you going to do? You need to work, and you have a six month year old baby. What do you do? Give it to daycare? No money. Have a friend or family member watch? Not always possible.

What’s a Rufus to do?

A Rufus does what needs to be done. And if it means you work with the baby by your side, you do it. A Rufus is what we should all strive to be.

Freak Accident takes down the driver

Notice how this Rufus handles himself, and how everyone else tries to assist. People, we are all part of something much larger than just scraping by trying to survived in a world dominated by psychopathic and sociopath personalities. And for us to shine!.. To really shine we must actually be the best that we can be.

We must be the Rufus. Nothing else matters.

Coronavirus B-strain takes down an officer

The COVID-19B is a very nasty and lethal bio-weapon and when it first started to hit China, it came out of nowhere. People started getting seizures and dying on the spot. No wonder trump wanted to inoculate the American population with the safe A-strain.

What would you do, if you were the Chinese leadership and you started to see this? Why you would take the most extreme measures possible. That is what you would do. China acted in unison like a Rufus.

Collapse on the street

A man collapses right then and there. People stand around not knowing what to do. The kids look on. The man goes by busy on his way to work. The old lady looks on. A teenager takes a video…

But a Rufus gets on his hands and knees and does CPR.

In this world if you are not making the world a better place; if all you care about is greed, money, lust, wealth, power… and you have no humanity what so ever… then you are not living. You are a potato.

Be the Rufus. It’s our highest calling.

Bike wreck with children aboard

So a woman wipes out while carrying three babies. The bike splatters all over the road, and she is hurt, confused, and all the kids are crying. What are YOU going to do? You don’t know her, you have businesses to run, people to meet, deadlines to deal with and an angry boss? What will you do?

I’ll tell you what I would do, I’d help her. Be the Rufus. It’s you highest calling.

Blocking the spray

The world needs people to do a lot of little things, a lot of tiny kind actions. Like this man (or woman) here. The street cleaner is spraying the road and will probably ‘take out” the motorcycle rider. But not if there is a Rufus around. Rufus will block the spray. Rufus will provide shelter. Rufus will be there.

A nation for and of Rufus’s is unstoppable.

Rescue at a car accident

A car gets into an accident. People see this and run to the car to lend help and support. This is what all Rufus’s do. But if you want to instead by the bystander, the potato…not do anything… not render help and assistance then you deserve the society that you created. The world needs each other. We must be open, helpful, caring, understanding and accepting of others. No matter what.

Which pretty much explains why the United States is in the dire mess it is today. It must change. It must.

A truck driver hit and dying

You don;t know what the day might bring. You just do not know. But you do know that as long as there is a Rufus around, that you are not alone. That you will be helped, and that others will take care of you with no questions and without asking for money.

The Rufus is ALWAYS there to help.

A car accident

When a car gets into an accident, are you the kind of person that slows down to watch what is going on? Or, do you stop everything, get out, and offer help and assistance? You action during these periods of stress and turmoil are what defines who you are.

Are you a Rufus, or are you a potato?

A man is beating up a woman on the street

You are minding your own business, checking your messages and getting ready to go out for a nice dinner with friends and then home. When suddenly you hear a woman calling for help and you see a guy hitting her, kicking her, and wresting with her. What would you do?

Would you pretend nothing is going on, and look the other way, or would you be the Rufus?

Helping a little old lady

You would think that EVERYONE would be helpful to a really old and feeble lady. Nope. Not in today’s modern age. It’s every man for himself. And “only the strong” survive. Which is why everyone in America admires the multimillionaires that rule them. Not here. You are either a Rufus, or you are a potato. There is no “shades of grey” in this matter.

Be the Rufus.

Rescue of a drowning boy

A small dot in the wide expanse of water is struggling. Others notice, but they do nothing aside from screaming and yelling. Some film the event. But no one goes out into the water. No one wants to get wet. no one cares. No one is willing to get uncomfortable in the icy cold water.

No one, except a Rufus.

Be the Rufus, its our highest calling!

A classmate is down

A guy is going down the steps, falls and hits his head. Hes out. So what are you going to do? Nothing? Call the police? Stand by. Run past… or stop and help. The Rufus in you SCREAMS help this man. Now!

Be the Rufus. Anything less is below you.

Another Drowning

And another drowning. It’s another place, at another time… Hundreds of people watch doing nothing. Not the Rufus.

The Rufus does not wait.

The Rufus does not hesitate.

The Rufus acts.

Lending a helping hand

A Rufus will contribute to make the world a better place. A Rufus will be helpful, will participate, and will be selfless. When you have a nation were everybody works for the well being of the society as a whole, the entire society wins, and everyone benefits.

Such as this Rufus demonstrates…

Yet another drowning

People getting caught up in large sudden flood happens all over the world and is far more common than one would realize. When I was a boy in Western Pennsylvania we once had a night of heavy rain, the next day, when walking to school I noticed that the trailer park on the banks of the river was missing.

At night the entire trailer park with sixteen trailers went into the river while the people were sleeping. Eight died. Another twenty has never been found.

Be the Rufus. Contribute. Be helpful.

Warning others of danger

Torrential rain has flooded the road. In the middle of it is a sewer drain. The top is gone, and if someone were to ride into it the would have a very bad accident. Someone might even get killed. The Rufus doesn’t wait. The Rufus doesn’t sit by and film. The Rufus acts.

Are you a Rufus?

Participation in Society

You are in school. Everyone gets one and only one banana. One banana doesn’t have the skin on, and so it is undesirable. Are you and your friends going to let the last person in the line get the undesirable food, or are you going to “man up” step to the plate and do one for your crew? For your friends? For your classmates? For your society?

What would Rufus do?

Rescuing a child in distress

Your baby is in trouble. Your child is very sick and you are in a complete panic. What are you going to do? Well, there is a traffic cop in the middle of the road. So you run to him. Can he help you? Will he help you? What’s the story?

No worry. He’s a Rufus.

Being “Spiderman” to save a toddler

A baby has crawled on the ledge of an air conditioner five stories up. What are you going to do? Will you call the police? Will you call the fire department? Will you call an ambulance?

Will you wait for the coroner?

If you are a Rufus, you will take action. Just like these fellows did. Be the Rufus. It’s your highest calling.

Putting out an electrical fire

A young body sees an electrical fire. What will he do? Will he go and get his parents? Will he run out of the house? Will he pretend that nothing is going on? Will he pour water on the electrical box that is on fire?

TH

Helping others

People, old ladies, children and dogs all need our help. But most people don’t care. They are just off in “la-la land” playing the “grab everything I can before I die game”. You know like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. They only offer the appearance of assistance when it serves their purposes. Like the “Buddy” the White House dog under Clinton’s. When the utility was finished, these beings were discarded like old hamburger wrappings in the garbage.

A Rufus would never do that. A Rufus is kind to all. A Rufus makes the world a better place in very small bits and pieces. A Rufus is what the world needs right now.

Rescuing a child under attack

A child is playing in their front yard near the family car. Suddenly a dog comes up and starts attacking the child. No one is around. What can the child do? The dog is about the same size with terrible teeth and a mean bite. Well, luckily there is a cat nearby and the cat protects the child.

It’s a cat Rufus.

Flooding is causing road barriers to collapse

A Rufus participates in society. It’s not “other people’s problem”, it’s all of ours. And we all need to work together to make the world a better place for all of us to live in.

America has 300 million people. For the last fifty years they all, each and everyone, sat on their asses and demanded “me-me-me”, in fact the 1990’s was labeled the “me decades”. But imagine what America would look like today, if everyone pitched in… if everyone worked together. If everyone contributed to society. If everyone picked up litter for free. If everyone volunteered to scrub graffiti, if everyone contributed their time and effort. If everyone was more understanding, and more compassionate.

Like they are in China.

A Rufus doesn’t wait. A Rufus acts. A Rufus makes the world a better place to live in. Not for money. Not for fame. Not for appreciation. A Rufus does it, because it is the right thing to do.

Be a Rufus.

Oh, and in case you all were unaware. All the guys doing this in the video are delivery guys working for “Kangaroo Food Delivery”.

Girl choking on food.

You are eating with others. Maybe schoolmates. Maybe classmates. Maybe colleagues. Maybe family. When suddenly one of the girls stands up and starts to choke. What are you going to do? Are you going to sit there, and pretend nothing is going on, or are you going to do something? Are you going to help the person in distress.

Are you a Rufus?

An old cat

The cat is 22 years old. This is ancient and equivalent to 150 “human” years. But we are guys. We have things to do, our careers, taxes to pay, emergencies to take care of. And our beloved pets get sidelined. Children come, and the pets are ignored. They get old, and forgotten. Oh, we give them food and water, but mostly let them fend for themselves.

They get old. Their bones hurt. They have trouble using the litter box, finding where the food is, seeing and smelling. They no longer can jump, climb or get around.

Rufus would never ignore loved ones. Not young pets. Not children, and not old ancient pets either. A Rufus would spend time with the loved ones, comfort them, help them and show them compassion and humanity.

Helping a stalled electric scooter

An old man is stuck in the middle of a torrential downpour. He’s old, the scooter is stalled. The rains are horrible and the multi-lane road is flooded. Its rush hour and he’s fucked. He’s in the worst place at the worst time, and everyone wants to get out of there and go home.

That is…

…everyone except a Rufus.

Be the Rufus, it’s our highest calling.

Stopping a kidnapping

Once a Rufus hears struggles, screams and cries for help they act. They don’t turn their head and pretend that nothing is going on. They don’t stand to the side. They don’t become an onlooker. They take action.

Such as this woman did.

Be the Rufus.

School boys take down a mugger

Society should act like an organism. When a cancer starts to take root, the healthy cells need to coordinate their efforts to expel the bad. That is the way the body works when fighting colds and illness. And that is how a healthy society works.

But over the years, very unhealthy society’s have grown, became famous, and teach that their sick and twisted systems as being the best, and the ultimate in perfection. It’s a lie.

Healthy societies find the bad, and expel it. Such as this group of young boys and Rufus’s illustrate.

Military reservist takes down a mugger

Maybe you were trained to be a Naval Aviator, but you are scrubbing commodes now. Maybe you have three university degrees in engineering and astrophysics, but you are on a hard-labor chain-gang break up rocks. Maybe you  were a trained special forces operator, but you are now a “delivery boy” for fast food. And you see a mugging. What are you going to do? What are YOU going to do?

You be the Rufus. It’s your highest calling.

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come.

However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.

The world needs us now. More, now more than ever.


Be the Rufus, or be a potato. There are no other options.

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If you enjoyed this post, please click on this link and check out the rest of my Rufus series…

Hero Stories

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What our world will look like after a war with China.

I wrote this with Australia in mind.

With all the flood, and I do mean flood, of war-war-war narratives being pumped out of both Washington DC, Australia, and even India no one is even contemplating what the result would be. Somehow it is being “painted” in large brushes as some way to “suppress” China, and “prevent it’s rise”. All the time absolutely ignoring the facts of the matter.

Jim Christian says:

June 7, 2021 at 3:43 pm GMT  Lem

The benefits of war with China? Well we’ll finally be done with carrier-based task forces. You’ll find said task forces at the bottom of the South China Sea. Sorry about the boys, girls, gays, trannies sent to the seabeds but that’s what they get, too. Fuckem.

Now, unlike other articles and other posts, where time is painstakingly devoted as to WHY I come up with the conclusions that I have, I am going to do something radical. I am going to spew out what the fuck is going to happen, with near total certainty, if the dreams and wishes of these moronic idiots who want war come to pass.

People! Listen up!

World War III with China will NOT be a long drawn-out series of skirmishes off in distant lands. It will be fast, dirty, nasty, full of betrayals, and up front and personal in YOUR home town. It will not be “news” reports of fighting in far-off bum-fuck-astan. It will be on your front lawn, while you will be busy trying to deal with things you don’t understand under conditions that you have no hope of controlling.

Jim Christian says:

June 7, 2021 at 3:38 pm GMT

@BluEidDvl

A war with China? Laughable shitstorm. An invitation to get our dumb asses kicked, our ineffective air wings and carriers sunk exposing the MIL as a grifting operation designed solely to extract profit from the goyim. For decades. Man, when you talk about torches and pitchforks, that’s the crew you get after.

But first, some really basic ideas and concepts…

Basic Concepts

I am not going to waste my time going into the details. I have covered them elsewhere in exhausting detail. But for those of you who are new here, I will outline the basic points.

  • America has been engaged in a war with China since 2017.
  • America tried to start a famine using eight (x8) strains of bio-weapons targeting food and livestock. Neocon John Bolton ran this operation. They failed.
  • America tried to cause a color revolution in Hong Kong using NGO assets. It failed.
  • America tried to stop the BRI in XinJiang by making up a fantasy about Uighur Muslims. It’s still in process, but it has pretty much failed.
  • America launched three (x3) “novel” bio-weapons against the Chinese people on CNY in 2020. (COVID-19 B-strain, Dabieshan tick virus / SFTSV, Swine G4) Neocon John Bolton ran this operation. They failed.
  • America modified drones to spray bio-weapon particles in a mist over livestock and people. Not only did it fail, but the CIA assets turned themselves into the PLA.
  • America tried to destroy the largest and newest VTOL carrier by China. China retaliated by destroying the largest American Navy VTOL carrier. It was a “wash”.
  • America launched an eight (x8) carrier naval flotilla against China in the South China Sea in late 2020 before the American Presidential Election. It steamed home with no conflict. Trump fired his senior Chief of Staff as a result. The entire fiasco was a big failure.

Now that is what can be found on the “news”. Everything that is listed above is well documented, though only a small fraction actually was published in American or Western “news” outlets. To read what actually happened regarding the above, you just have to read foreign reports. Often in Chinese, Russian, Hindu, Pakistani, Japanese and Korean.

Astuteobservor II says:

June 8, 2021 at 8:00 pm GMT

It is called threat escalation. John mearsheimer puts it very well. It is basically demonizing the target in the eyes of your own population. And it works on a minimum of 80% of the stupid public. How dare China not kneel!!!

All you would read and hear is Wuhan lab leak, not an American bioweapon attack.

We do know that America is acting like a big bully. Has threatened both China and Russia and laid out their terms for the rest of the world to surrender or face extinction in March 2021 during the Anchorage Alaska US-China summit.

This caused China and Russia (along with Iran) to join forces. Today, Russian headquarters, and strategic military planning is completely integrated with Chinese military, and vice versa.  As a defensive force, Russia and China can now act as one singular entity.

anonym25 says:
June 8, 2021 at 5:05 am GMT

That is true, since Russia will step in. Russia won’t certainly lose her biggest ally in face of more economic sanctions and possible exclusion from SWIFT. Also, Russia knows that China is not responsible from this outbreak as they spoke with them as early as February 2020.

We also know that America has decided that the future battlefield for World War III will not be on American soil, but has established Australia to be the land that is targeted for war. And it is earmarked to become ruins like Syria is today. Like Yemen is today. Like Afghanistan is today. Like Iraq is today. And Australians are quite fine with this. Many are very willing to sacrifice their families, their children, their homes, their businesses for people like Mike Pompeo, Tom Cotton and Donald Trump.

Many Australians are ready to die for the United States.

What we don’t know is the myriad of “black operations” against China. Most of which are not reported. We only hear a precious few things here and there that are oddities; suspicious oddities. A fire here, a missing plane there, the death of a key researcher, some missing American special force troops on “a training exercise”, and a software glitch.

Which is the way it works, don’t you know. Real secrets are actually secret. And if there is an inkling of what actually happened somehow hits the internet, immediate a flood of contrary narratives moves to bury the releases. Such as what happened with the “Wuhan bio-weapon accidental release” narrative to cover up the actual three-pronged bio-weapon attack by John Bolton.

Anon[347] • Disclaimer says:
June 9, 2021 at 4:52 am GMT

I am beginning to consider the possibility that our guys created Corona and then released into China in some dip-shit scheme to weaken China.

Anyways, both China and Russia have established “red lines” that the unilateral aggression’s by America and it’s allies dare not cross. If they do, an decide to cross those lines, then both Russia and China have warned that a MAD level response will occur.

anonym25 says:
June 9, 2021 at 11:02 am GMT

This is what Ron Unz has been saying from the beginning. If you look at it geostrategically, this is most plausible conclusion.

They released the virus in China but those who created it suffered a massive blow-back and even worse China came out of it even stronger than ever before.

They were hoping China would crumble but instead got stronger while they weakened. That’s why they are fanning out a major Anti-China propaganda campaign to contain her now openly with an overwhelming support of western citizens.

This frenziness displayed by western politicians is the reflection that China is on the verge an unstoppable economic powerhouse within a few years and they need to put the brakes right now. It is an implicit admission of desperation. The tussle between China and the US is going to dramatically intensify.

What is a MAD level response?

Mutually Assured Destruction, or mutually assured deterrence (MAD), is a military theory that was developed to deter the use of nuclear weapons. The theory is based on the fact that nuclear weaponry is so devastating that no government wants to use them. Neither side will attack the other with their nuclear weapons because both sides are guaranteed to be totally destroyed in the conflict. No one will go to all-out nuclear war because no side can win and no side can survive.

I idea behind MAD is that those that try to push the boundaries and cross the “red lines” would have a devastating war of the likes that their nations would never be able to recover from.

To many, mutually assured destruction helped prevent the Cold War from turning hot; to others, it is the most ludicrous theory humanity ever put into full-scale practice. The name and acronym of MAD come from physicist and polymath John von Neumann, a key member of the Atomic Energy Commission and a man who helped the US develop nuclear devices. A game theorist, von Neumann is credited with developing the equilibrium strategy and named it as he saw fit.

Proponents argue that the fear of MAD is the best way to secure peace.

One alternative to MAD, adopted by the Trump administration, and continued with the Biden administration, is fielding small sized nuclear weapons for “controlled” and target tactical strikes. This is an attempt to limiting the risk of MAD to “acceptable” levels and scope.

Life after a MAD level conflict would be unlike anything you would expect.

Mutually Assured Destruction is based on fear and cynicism and is one of the most brutally and horribly pragmatic ideas ever put into practice.

The idea that it is in place now, today, is a sign of how dangerous the United States is at this moment and point in time. Anyone who mistakenly believes that…

  • You can attack China, and Russia would do nothing.
  • You can attack Russia and China would do nothing.
  • That you can define a time, and a place, and a people to fight your war for you (e.g. Australia)
  • And that a “red line” is just “posturing” and is actually meaningless.

Are insane crazy.

American Advantage

All in all, taken as a whole, while America does enjoy a significant advantage in the size of it’s military, it’s enormous deployment capability, and it’s association with regional allies, it’s leadership are completely incompetent. Even if they were, somehow, to regain a level of maturity and sensibility, it might be too late to stop the “locomotive that they have set down on the tracks”.

Neocons Are Back With a Big War Budget and Big War Plans

Ron Paul wrote this prescient article back in 2018…

On Friday, President Trump signed the omnibus spending bill for 2018. The $1.3 trillion bill was so monstrous that it would have made the biggest spender in the Obama Administration blush. The image of leading congressional Democrats Pelosi and Schumer grinning and gloating over getting everything they wanted—and then some—will likely come back to haunt Republicans at the midterm elections. If so, they will deserve it.

Even President Trump admitted the bill was horrible. As he said in the signing ceremony, “There are a lot of things that we shouldn’t have had in this bill, but we were, in a sense, forced—if we want to build our military. . . .”

This is why I often say: Forget about needing a third political party—we need a second political party! Trump is admitting that to fuel the warfare state and enrich the military-industrial complex, it was necessary to dump endless tax dollars into the welfare state.

But no one “forced” President Trump to sign the bill. His party controls both houses of Congress. He knows that no one in Washington cares about deficits so he was more than willing to spread some Fed-created money at home to get his massive war spending boost.

And about the militarism funded by the bill? Defense Secretary James Mattis said at the same press conference that, “As the President noted, today we received the largest military budget in history, reversing many years of decline and unpredictable funding.”

He’s right and wrong at the same time. Yes, it is another big increase in military spending. In fact, the U.S. continues to spend more than at least the next seven or so largest countries combined. But his statement is misleading. Where are these several years of decline? Did we somehow miss a massive reduction in military spending under President Obama? Did the last Administration close the thousands of military bases in more than 150 countries while we weren’t looking?

Of course not.

On militarism, the Obama administration was just an extension of the Bush administration, which was an extension of the militarism of the Clinton administration. And so on. The military-industrial complex continues to generate record profits from fictitious enemies. The mainstream media continues to play the game, amplifying the war propaganda produced by the think tanks, which are funded by the big defense contractors.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory. This is conspiracy fact. Enemies must be created to keep Washington rich, even as the rest of the country suffers from the destruction of the dollar. That is why the neocons continue to do very well in this Administration.

And it just kept being pumped alive. When President Biden came to office, he increased the military budget to insane levels.

Thus we have the following most probable forecasts…

Things that no one is talking about.

If the “news” media are all talking about war, why isn’t anyone talking about how THEIR lives will be impacted. People (!) this is not going to be a “low intensity” conflict or “police action” in a far away place. It will be right there, at home, in your kitchen.

The Discussion

We will discuss, briefly, in an overview outline the highest probability outcomes for the following nations / locations were “red lines” be crossed.

  • Australia
  • The United Kingdom
  • Canada
  • Guam
  • Diego Garcia
  • America
  • Korea
  • Japan

Australia

Gosh, if you read the Australian “news” media the entire nation is gearing up to go off marching to China and fight for “freedom!™”, “Liberty!™” and “democracy!™”. All they need to do is hand each solder a jar of vegimite and a Fosters, and off he would go to die for Mike Pompeo!

It’s not going to happen that way.

Australia has agreed to be “ground zero” for a ground conflict. And America, and the Australian leadership are just fine with that. It’s (as they say in the land down under) it’s all “fair dinkum'”.

But China does not play.

Oh, maybe you didn’t hear me… let me tell you in words that you all can understand…

China . does . NOT . play !

Anyone who thinks that the Chinese leadership is going to be just fine and dandy engaging into a long, multi decade war on Australian soil is an idiot. Further, anyone who thinks that America will come to the rescue is also dreaming. America does what is good for the American leadership. No one else matters. they would easily throw Australia into the rubbish bin, if it gave America a slight edge in the international global standing.

The facts are that Australia is strong, but vulnerable.

  • Australia is self-sufficient in food and exports 7.3% to other nations.
  • Australia is 42% self sufficient in crude oil / gasoline.
  • Australia is more than self-sufficient in LPG.
  • Australia only produces two thirds of the amount of manufactured goods it consumes while most developed nations produce excess.
  • Manufacturing as a percentage of GDP has fallen from almost 30 per cent in the 1950s and 60s to just under 6 per cent in 2020.

Were there to be a war, and after all that is what the “news” is talking about, we can expect the following…

  • Russia and China would team up together.
  • All shipping in and out of Australia to end. Australia would end up ringed with hunter-killer Russian and Chinese submarines.
  • All Australian military bases would be devastated by Russian Kh-47M2 Kinzhal and Chinese DF-3, DF-4, DF-31 and their submarine launched cousins the CSS-2, CSS-3 missiles. This is not a singular strike at the HQ building. This is a major flattening of the entire region by the cleansing of a nuclear warhead.

At this point in time, the Chinese leadership would see how the situation evolves. If Australia does not immediately surrender, then China would cleans the nation of people by eviscerating each and every major city by the cleansing effect of high yield nuclear weapons.

Which wouldn’t take much. Look at where all the Australian people reside…

By strategic nuclear warheads targeting the major population centers of Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Perth, and Brisbane, China could effectively decimate the entire population of the nation due to the debilitating effects of radiation, and the complete collapse of the support services within Australia.

Yes. There would be survivors. And I am sure that they would be mightily pissed off too. Do you suppose that they would vent their anger at China and Russia, or would they vent it against their government to sleepwalking Australia into a war for America? I don’t know.

So in summary…

Australia would survive a blockade. But exports and internal industry would take hits, and the economy would collapse to a point where many of the services and benefits currently offered by the government will no longer be feasible. How will this affect the nation? Will the people roll up their sleeves and with a “can do” attitude, survive and grow as a people, and as a nation? Or will everyone break off into little groups squabbling amongst themselves, and how will this affect the government?

Australia could survive a military strike against it. Sure there would be causalities, massive ruin, billions of dollars in damages, and turmoil. At this point, what happens is up to the leadership of Australia.

If they [1] sue for peace. Australia will probably be permitted to keep it’s government, and systems intact, maybe even get rebuilding support, but will no longer to act as part of the QUAD. If [2] they get angry and cling on to America for protection, then a full war footing can be expected as promised. And thus, what is next is what China promised

Australia could NOT survive a MAD level nuclear salvo. I don’t care how proud and mighty the Australians are, when you have no electricity, no potable water, no gasoline, no food, no medical care and you turn to America for help, you all will end up as the worst form of beggars. You all will be like Calcutta style poverty in the radioactive ruins of something that looks like Yemen, or Iraq.

The ONLY way to prevent any of these very plausible events from occurring is for the Australian people to oust their moronic and crazy insane leadership before everyone in the nation dies.

And no, it will not be anything like what the movies portray.

Mad Max.

The United Kingdom

The UK and Russia are trading partners, big ones at that. Additionally, the UK trades with China rather substantially. While the UK is part of the “five eyes” an pretty much follows the United States lead in everything that it does, if push comes to shove and a hot war is imminent, we can expect the following likelihood of things to occur…

By following the United States, you can expect that your life would be completely changed. You would need to adapt, and to strive in ways that you can’t even dream of today.

Betrayal. The UK would sit out of any global conflict with Russia or China. While they will say the right things and offer a minimum of assistance to the United States, actual participation in a hot war is very risky for them. They will sail their ships to the South China Sea, participate in war games, and say all the right things, when the shit goes down, Britain will play it safe.

But if Britain agrees to join the United States in any substantive way, then we can expect nuclear salvos to decimate all strategic cities, bases and facilities within the UK.

Here’s a big map. Copy it. Study it. Yikes!

Notice the location of homes, and their prices outside of the blast zones. If you think and believe that the UK wants to participate in the madness of the United States, then you might want to relocate to one of these areas. And live the movie “Threads“.

Yes. Nothing quite describes what a nuclear war would do to the UK than this movie “Threads“.

Absolutely terrifying, utterly disturbing. (Spoilers) 
charlieboy809 September 2005

Having just purchased this on DVD I was eager to watch it after waiting years to see it after it was unofficially banned from ever being shown on the BBC again. I was four when it was first shown and my parents switched it off, too frightened to watch it themselves never mind let me see it.

I have to say it is absolutely terrifying and utterly terrifying in the extreme. This could have actually happened! I was impressed by the way the film conveyed what it would be like if thousands of megatons of atomic bomb was dropped on the U.K. Normal life comes to an abrupt stop. One minute people are shopping in their local supermarket, going to the pub and wallpapering their new flat and suddenly they are plunged into Hell. Civilisation is blown back into the stone age.

The most scary part was the way the authorities were shown unable to cope with the scale of the attack (perhaps why the BBC never aired it again). We always think that it could never be that bad because someone would come to our rescue, someone would maintain control. But no, the bombs / missiles keep raining down and down prompting one traumatised emergency committee member to scream, "not another one!" They just did not expect so devastation and are completely helpless. Later soldiers shoot people for food, people wish for death and the emergency committee, those meant to be running things, die in the supposed protective bunker, trapped by rubble.

Ten years later, nothing is back to normal. What young people there are behave like wild animals, raping and fighting and speaking in a bizarre caveman manner.

Since the Cold War ended people have stopped being frightened of nuclear weapons. Everybody in every country should watch this film and realise that if there ever was a nuclear war, still possible with growing tensions between a superpower and its rivals, those left alive would wish they had been caught in the blasts and killed outright.

I don't recommend this for sensitive viewers.
From the movie “Threads”.

About the movie “Threads”

Threads is about the horrible deaths our political leaders have prepared for us.

From HERE. All credit, etc, etc…

I still remember back in the early eighties having vivid nightmares about mushroom clouds above my street. Probably I was aged around nine or ten, hearing rumors that the city of Hull was a target for a warhead due to our city once being a major shipping port, etcetera, so as a child it does play on you. It was on the radio, the TV, in magazines and people in the street talked about the crisis.

Then along came Threads — a BBC production so chilling, so merciless, that viewed today it still leaves an impression. The Day After was good, but retained some mellowness. When the Wind Blows is a very strong touching message, but the bad dog of nuclear holocaust movies has to be Threads.

Scene from the movie “The Road”.

The BBC I assume put it together just to inject sheer terror into the hearts of everyone watching. When I introduced my Horror Soulmate to this a few years ago, her face fell, literally fell. Threads pulls no punches about the aftermath of a nuclear bomb on any country remaining.

As a spider weaves its web, a narrated introduction explains just how society is a mass of threads connected and how this can basically make society weak.

Welcome to Sheffield, UK, 1984. News reports have begun to tell of building tensions in Iran between the United States and Russia. The first mention is captured briefly as a teen, Jimmy, spins his car radio dial as he sits overlooking the city with his girlfriend, Ruth. Life continues, day by day, regardless of the news. People sip in their local pub, a papergirl does her rounds, meanwhile the tabloids lap up the tension.

Jimmy discovers Ruth is pregnant so their parents all meet up, and they discuss how Jimmy wants to marry Ruth and have a place of their own.

A typed heading tells us that Sheffield is England’s third largest city with over 54,000 people living there. So as the United States hint at sending troops to Iran, the Soviet Union see that as a direct threat. Life still continues, everyone goes shopping, people go to work. We’re introduced to Clive Sutton, a man who, if war breaks out, is handed governmental powers in the city. He’s making phone calls. Nothing critical, just in case.

The United States have accused the Soviet Union of moving warheads into their new base in Iran.” Jimmy sits in the pub watching this report and discusses it with his friend. “Don’t it scare you what it might lead to?” Jimmy says. Meanwhile Britain commits itself to the Middle East tension. Anti-War demonstrations march throughout the streets. “You cannot win a nuclear war!” shouts a woman.

One day in Iran, B-52’s attack and the Russians strike back. In Sheffield citizens are in the throes of panic buying tinned food and other items, emptying stores who are upping their prices.

American buying up toilet paper.

Then a new fight begins, Soviets versus United States all out attacks on ships. Violence erupts in the streets and many families decide to evacuate their homes. Jimmy’s father watches, “Won’t be safe anywhere.

A neighbor states, “Nothing will happen.

Hospitals are cleared for any possible casualties. Many able patients are returned home. Panic evacuations creates chaos on the roads. Sutton goes underground with a small team beneath the town hall to form an emergency HQ.

Radios and TVs hand out ‘helpful’ messages in case of an attack. “You are better off in your own home. Stay in there!

Americans are told to “shelter in place”.

At 8:30, one morning, the streets are busy with shoppers on their search for supplies. Sutton’s team are discussing things when the attack warning suddenly comes.

Sirens echo across the city and hundreds of screaming people run in every direction. Jimmy and his friend hide under a truck. At 8:35 a warhead explodes above the city, power goes out and the blinding mushroom takes the area apart, as blasting winds tear around. Jimmy sees the cloud, he tries to reach Ruth. His mum and dad hide behind doors and a mattress, Ruth and her family close up their basement.

All HELL will break lose under a MAD scenario. Why are the “leaders” so Hell-bent on engaging in such a war?

Then comes the heat wave.

In total silence we see streets burn (some stock footage included), milk bottles melt, buildings crashing down, and a lot of burning corpses. 210 megatons hits the UK altogether, amassing approximately two to nine million casualties.

This is the power of Threads in a nutshell.

Unlike The Day After, when each character seemed to have some kind of knowledge of fallout, radiation, whatever and repeats it like a government issued health scare, in Threads, nobody knows a thing.

There are scared, not ready, just bewildered and terrified.

These are real neighbors, real shoppers, real families thrown head first into a nightmare. I suppose the closest comparison would have to be Jim and Hilda from the aforementioned When the Wind Blows.

The holocaust itself, I could easily bring up the last moments of The Divide as Eva leaves the apartment building basement and sees the remains of the city. Take that brief section and then continue it on-wards. You get the idea.

Survivors find themselves either trapped without air like Sutton’s team buried under the town hall, or burnt like Jimmy’s mother, or traumatized by the bodies of loved ones.

Then along comes the ashes and the radioactive fallout bringing blisters and sickness.

Scene from the movie “The Road”.

Food supplies fall under government control which causes violence in the streets and looting. As the days go by people become more desperate.

Ruth leaves the basement and walks the streets seeing what is left of her city. A woman cradling the charred corpse of a baby, hands playing with burnt Star Wars figures, a bandage-faced traffic warden (who incidentally became a sort of poster boy for the production, featured on the cover of the Radio Times) and overcrowded hospitals.

It’s all kind of downhill for the survivors from then on unfortunately.

There is an impressive gallery of burn and blister make-up effects (by John Humphreys who also worked on TV series like Doctor Who and The Young Ones, as well as Rawhead Rex and Charlie & The Chocolate Factory), along with some blood here and there that makes Threads special.

Like I stated earlier, it’s not out to be kind, or make friends, it wants to wave a dead child in your face, it wants you to almost taste the ash in the air.

Scene from the movie “The Road”.

Oh things can get really bad.

Here’s another movie review. This one is about the movie “The Road”, from HERE

The story is straightforward: America has been devastated. Habitations have been destroyed or abandoned, vegetation is dying, crops have failed, the infrastructure of civilization has disappeared.

This has happened in such recent memory that even The Boy, so young, was born into a healthy world.

No reason is given for this destruction, perhaps because no reason would be adequate. McCarthy evokes the general apprehension of post-9/11. The Boy and The Man make their way toward the sea, perhaps for no better reason than that sea has always been the direction of hope in this country.

Scene from “The Road”.

The surviving population has been reduced to savage survivalists, making slaves of the weaker, possibly using them as food.

We’ve always done that, employing beef cattle, for example, to do the grazing on acres of pasture so we can consume the concentrated calories of their labor. In a land where food is scarce, wanderers seek out canned goods and fear their own bodies will perform this work for the cannibals.

Although we read of those who stockpile guns and ammunition for an apocalypse, weapon stores on the Road have dwindled down.

The Man has a gun with two remaining bullets.

He is a wary traveler, suspecting everyone he sees. He and The Boy are transporting a few possessions in a grocery cart. He encourages his son to keep walking, but holds out little hope for the end of their journey…

…yes. And that is the way it will be.

There will be a long period, maybe decades, where the world will try to rebuild. Some nations will do better than others. Some will not.

I would guess that Australia wouldn’t fare too well, because they want to be the “tip of the sword” for the United States. But you know, Canada might survive all right. It just depends on whether they decide to sit things out or not.

Canada

Canadians like to think of themselves as independent of the United States, but the fact remains that the Canadian government is just a puppet government under the control of the American oligarchy.

From the movie “Threads”.

What might happen?

Anything, actually.

Interspersed throughout the movie are still shots that are all the more disturbing because they are beautifully done. 

They make me want to hammer Brian Williams in the face with a brick, for ever saying anything as stupid as “guided by the beauty of our weapons.” [wp]

Fawning media totalitarian proto-fascists like Williams, who accept and glorify the necessity of nationalized violence, are the facilitators that are going to bring about this sort of disaster, if or (more likely) when humanity finally decides to pull the toilet-lever and flush all of everyone’s hopes and dreams away.

Jackson sets us up for exactly that scenario.

We meet a typical pair of English kids from the 60’s: they go to the pub, they drink, they make out in the back of his Cortina, parked on a pretty bluff with an idyllic view of the city of Sheffield.

Well, it doesn’t seem idyllic, at first – it looks like a typical industrial town full of people hanging on the edge of working too hard, drinking their desperation away.

The movie gets rolling slowly, and – did I mention? – it gets worse.

Naturally, the girl gets pregnant, and there are some poignant “meet the parents” and “set up an apartment” scenes.

Brilliantly interwoven in the ordinary dreariness of their lives are flashes of news: the USSR has invaded Afghanistan.

The US issues an ultimatum and deploys B-52 bombers and troops.

There are reports of skirmishes. Life in Sheffield stumbles on, gut-shot, but not knowing it yet.

-FreeThoughtBlogs

Since 1945, the world has had a nagging question in the back of its collective mind—what would it take for a nuclear war to start?

After the Cold War, it seemed nuclear fever had died down in North America—sure, India and Pakistan both got the bomb, but that was really far away.

Those fears have escalated again recently as the United States has begun signalling that it’s willing to take unilateral action against China.

While China is well known to have a sizable and formidable nuclear force with both ICBMs, and hyper-velocity MIRV vehicles, these new developments come as international institutions go through a period of intense instability.

The good news is, a nuclear war might not be the world-ending cataclysm you would think it is.

The bad news is it would still be very, very bad.

The worse news is that there hasn’t been any kind of plan for how to deal with such an attack on Canada since the 1980s. Worst of all? Canadian experts think a nuclear exchange in our lifetime is just a matter of time.

Canada stands to get out of this relatively unscathed. But Vancouver, grab a seat. We need to talk.

How it starts

No matter how unhinged you think Washington DC might be and how terrifying it is that anyone in Washington is handling nuclear codes, none of the experts I read about, thought it particularly likely that America, as provocative as it is, is likely to be the one to shoot first.

While several experts pointed to a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan as something that could conceivably happen at some point, it’s doubtful that would end up with any North American cities becoming targets. Of the other nuclear powers, it’s hard to think of a scenario that sees England, France, or Israel (whose nuclear arsenal has never been confirmed) striking out at the USA.

The consensus was that both Russia and China would have far too much to lose by hitting directly at North America (proxy nuclear wars in parts of Europe or Taiwan, respectively, remain on the table).

However, as I have repeatedly stated, both Russian and China has made it absolutely clear that any provocation or military action that crosses a RED LINE would result in the unleashing of a MAD level retaliatory response.

When the bomb hits

According to NUKEMAP, an algorithm that combines data from Google Maps and available information on nuclear weapon capabilities, the initial devastation of a strike on downtown Vancouver would be considerable—a fireball with a radius of 200 meters would appear over the city as the bomb explodes in midair. Every building within a two-kilometre radius would be virtually destroyed. Almost everyone within 16 kilometres of the explosion who survives the initial blast immediately suffers third degree burns.

The tally: almost 30,000 dead and over 100,000 injured almost immediately.

While NORAD radar would detect any ICBM or submarine launch, the warning time would be roughly 25 minutes—nowhere near enough to even begin evacuating a metro area with a population of over two million.

What would make matters worse is that currently there are absolutely no governmental plans for minimizing the death toll should a nuke hit a Canadian city.

“There isn’t [a plan],” John Clearwater, author of Canadian Nuclear Weapons: The Untold Story of Canada’s Cold War Arsenal, told VICE. “We’re all going to die.”

During the Cold War, Canada did have plans in the event of a nuclear strike. In 1961, an underground hideaway was completed outside of Ottawa. Located 40 kilometers away from Parliament Hill, it was meant to house hundreds of government officials and military officers in case of a nuclear attack (it now functions as Canada’s Cold War museum). Dubbed a “Diefenbunker” after then-prime minister John Diefenbaker, it was one of over 50 such multi-story units built across the country.

Fred Armbruster, the executive director and founder of the Canadian Civil Defence Museum Association, said parts of Canada are still home to the rotting and overgrown remnants of nuclear bunkers—a surprising amount of buildings in western Canada, in particular, are home to long-forgotten shelters.

Canada still has nuclear bunkers.

People don’t realize the amount of bunkers that were constructed in Canada,” he said. “It’s phenomenal. For example, every single municipality around Edmonton has a bunker.”

Today, almost none of those facilities remain operational, mothballed after Canada got rid of its nuclear weapons in 1984.

“There was no more plan because there was no more expectation that strategic nuclear weapons would fall on Canada,” said Clearwater.

Crawl out of the fallout

In the immediate aftermath, thousands would die due to untreated injuries, dehydration, exposure, collapsing structures, and general unpreparedness in the face of such a disaster.

Armbruster pointed to the Fort McMurray fire as an example—just as nobody expects a nuclear attack, nobody was prepared for a blaze of that size. During the peak years of nuclear panic during the Cold War, information was regularly distributed on how to prepare for a strike—blueprints for bomb shelters, what supplies to have on hand, what to do if an air raid siren went off. In Fort McMurray, few had the emergency supplies or knowledge necessary to get through the ordeal.

“People didn’t have bottled water, they weren’t able to react. Many people ran out of fuel because they let their fuel tank go past half full,” he said of the lack of preparedness that preceded the worst wildfire in Canadian history. “Back in (the Cold War), they were sending out pamphlets to every single household educating people on how to be prepared for a manmade or natural disaster.”

When a largely unprepared population is faced with a disaster of this magnitude, it puts even more strain on governmental institutions like Public Safety Canada, who would have to improvise ways to decontaminate, shelter, feed, medically treat and house hundreds of thousands of refugees.

Nukemap3D Shows What Nuclear Bombs Would Do To Canada's Cities

If you've ever stayed up late in bed worrying what a nuclear bomb would do to Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver or Ottawa, now you can find out.

Nukemap3D, an extension to Google Earth written by Alex Wellerstein of the American Institute of Physics in Mayland, allows you to model what nuclear blasts of different sizes would do to literally any location on the planet. (There have been server issues with the site, but you can also access it here).

The website allows you to select the size of the bomb, from the 15-kiloton weapon dropped on Hiroshima to the 50-megaton behemoth Tsar Bomba tested by the Russians in 1961. You can also watch an animation of the mushroom cloud, see an overlay of the blast effects and fallout and get an estimate of causalities.

The results can be terrifying. A bomb as small as the "Little Boy" weapon used on Hiroshima would cause nearly 400,000 casualties if dropped near the CN tower in Toronto, according to the program. A Tsar Bomba would cause more than 3 million.

Those downwind from the blast would be affected by fallout, but even then, according to Schofield, it wouldn’t be apocalyptic. Airbursts, where a bomb detonates several hundred meters over its target rather than on the ground, cause a larger shockwave but also result in less radioactive debris.

Of course, there would be no cars, the automotive ECM’s would all be fried into slag by EMP bursts, nor would there be electricity, and internet.

“The general rule of nuclear weapons is, the radiation effect which is lethal is well within the lethal zone of the shockwave,” he said. “Radiation is not going to kill you.”

Still, he warned, leukemia rates would likely spike in affected areas for several years.

On the ground, Canada’s third largest city would probably rebound fairly quickly. While fiction would have you believe that nuclear weapons leave nothing but a scarred, uninhabitable landscape in their wake, Schofield said he wouldn’t be surprised if Vancouver was rebuilt in a decade or less.

The bomb that struck Hiroshima in 1945 was 20 kilotonnes—not that much smaller than the largest tested North Korean bomb. But that city’s population had returned to pre-war levels by 1958.

“Hiroshima … was built out of wood, [so] the whole place burned down,” said Schofield. “There were a couple of buildings that were 200 meters from the Hiroshima bomb that were still standing.”

Of course, China and Russia field nuclear weapons thousands of times more powerful.

Canada gets mad

Canadians would go through a pretty intense period of mourning and shock after the detonation. Then they’d get really ticked off.

“If a bomb goes off in Vancouver, most people’s initial reaction is: we need to get a bomb so we can threaten other people so they don’t bomb us,” said Schofield. “For Canada, I think we’d say we need a nuke and then we’ll probably revert to the Americans and have a much tighter security cooperation.”

In 2005, then-prime minister Jean Chretien refused to let Canada participate in the construction of a continental anti-ICBM defense shield.

Still, it needs to be stressed: the likelihood of Canada being involved is very, very, very low. Our lack of a plan isn’t necessarily a bad thing—as Clearwater points out, it just means resources are being used on things that actually matter, like diplomacy.

“We should not be wasting taxpayers’ money on a plan for something that results in our deaths,” he said. “We should be using a fraction of that money working towards a global zero [amount of nuclear weapons]. You can get a lot more working towards zero than you can distributing survival packs, shovels, doors, water purification tablets and blueprints for backyard shelters.”

So take heart, Canadians. Yes, your government isn’t doing much to prepare for a nuclear strike, but that’s because no one thinks they really have to.

Guam

Would the Chinese, or the Russians conduct Naval assaults on that tiny island? Would they saturation bomb it, and then invade using landing craft?

No.

They would erase it.

Depending on the detonation altitude and the mega-tonnage of destructive power, the  remains could vary from a radioactive flat glassed mound protruding above sea level to a underwater crater. It all depends on the “message” that the Chinese wants to make.

Scene from the movie “The Road”.

Diego Garcia

This island will also go the way of the Dodo bird.

The idea that it would be eviscerated by the cleansing effects of a nuclear blast is so high that I would put it at a 90% probability.

If, somehow, it would survive I would say that anything trying to reach it would be destroyed long before they reached the island.

As the tension between the USSR and US, dimly glimpsed in flashes, ratchets up, the viewer begins to feel a very real and inescapable dread. 

I’ve seen scary movies that build tension but nothing like this, before.

Perhaps the worst part is that the fragments of news could so easily match what is coming from Korea:

Both sides rushing troops to the area, chest-puffing, threats.

Jackson’s decision to set the film in Sheffield, which is mostly uninvolved in the war, was doubtless because of the practical exigencies of movie-making and his target audience – but the sense that all of this war stuff is going on somewhere else, is brilliantly rendered in the half-heard snatches of news.

I spend a lot of time trying to hear those fragments about Kurdistan, Afghanistan, Korea, Nigeria – and reading between the lines in Threads is so well done there were times that my hair literally stood up on my neck.

It’s all “somewhere else”, until – wham!

We see a bit of the “preparedness” efforts of the government – the town administrator is told to begin storing medical supplies, water, gasoline, and so forth – he’s a well-meaning civil servant with no idea what is looming over him.

But, then, nobody does.

That’s why Watkins made the movie, after all.

In the last few months the US has seen images of hundreds of thousands fleeing by car, of the traffic jams and shortages: now, imagine people trying to flee from something from which there is no place to hide.

There is another movie in this vein, Miracle Mile [imdb] but somehow it becomes a disaster movie with a bit of action flick hidden in it.

Threads has this methodical rhythm that somehow makes it clear that nobody is getting out of anywhere – I think a lot of that is a result of positioning the film in Sheffield, far from where anyone would expect war to come, and probably far from where anyone expected to do anything about it.

-FreeThoughtBlogs
Scene from the movie “The Road”.

America

America would suffer the worst effects of MAD.  This is non-debatable. I have covered this in the past. I have many many articles regarding this. You might as well go to my supreme master index to read about this.

 

 

 

 

 

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That’s one of the most powerful messages I took away from the movie (other than “the living will envy the dead”) ...

...the vast mass of us sit in the shadow of this horrible thing our leaders have planned for us, and we feel that there is nothing we can do.

Or perhaps there is nothing we should do because it’s all so far away.

But they built this for us – they planned this for us – they used our money and our work to fund it, and the very worst of them talk about it as though it’s a casual game of golf.

No halfway decent human being should countenance this thing for anyone.

We, the people of the world, should rise and rip our political leaders to bits for preparing this bath of fire for us.

Naturally, our political leaders have bolt-holes, where they expect they can hide and weather out the worst effects of their utter failure.

Jackson doesn’t address that directly, but obliquely and powerfully shows us how that works, as well: the mostly well-meaning political leaders of Sheffield take shelter in their command center under the town’s office building, and are trapped when the building collapses over them.

They die slowly and horribly.

But so does everybody else.

-FreeThoughtBlogs
From the movie “Threads”.

Korea & Japan

Both are allies of the United States. Both hold military bases that station American troops, and both do not want to get involved in a war with China. Were there to be a military conflict, I am near positive that both would prefer to sit out and be as neutral as possible.

However, if any nation, or both decides to actively participate alongside the United States in attacking China, the consequences will be horrific for those nations.

My guess is that World War II would be short lived and over quickly. As a result the events would unfold before these nations would be drawn into a conflict and would sort out their relationships with America after the smoke clears and the radioactive radiation does down. Whatever leadership remains of the United States, I am confident that these nations would dictate the terms, and would side with their Asian neighbors irregardless to what events happened in the distant past.

Aside from it’s terrifying military, America has no friends in the world except for a handful of nationalists in Australia and Israel.

The story follows its little cast of characters that eventually dwindle to one, the young pregnant woman. Then, the documentary aspects begin to pop in, with freeze-screens that blandly state facts that are so scary your mind wants to crawl someplace safe instead of reading them. 

I imagined I had a pretty good handle on nuclear war, but there are things I hadn’t thought of, which Jackson’s researchers did.

-FreeThoughBlog

We’ve all heard of nuclear winter, but I’d never thought of the plagues of rats and flies that would follow having 20 million unburied corpses (never mind the sheep, cows, etc) or the side effect on agriculture.

There was a report yesterday about an intensive care unit in a hospital in Puerto Rico that suffered a power failure and all the patients are now dead.

In Threads we see doctors throwing up their hands in despair at the uselessness of trying to help patients who will die from radiation exposure.

The medical infrastructure at Hiroshima and Nagasaki collapsed, similarly.

What Watkins makes us see is that it’s not a partial collapse, like “no power or water” but a total collapse. “No nothing.” Our modern civilization is tightly integrated and god damn it we depend on each other – it’s like a Jenga tower – politicians imagine that they can just destroy part of the world without affecting the rest.

Fucking morons.

Morison and Trump both believe that a nuclear war is winnable.

Jackson’s projections are that, after radiation and secondary die off, nuclear winter and the destruction of agriculture and supply, England would be back to medieval-level population again, 30 years after the war – about 1.2 million people.

England, frankly, isn’t much of a target, so their suffering would be long-term collapse.

That saying about “bombing someone back to the stone age”? It’s not funny or accurate: it’d be early iron age.

I have more in common with a typical North Korean peasant than I do with Kim Jong Un or Donald Trump or any congressman. So, do you.

We are all living under the threat of this thing, built by power-loving politicians and their Renfields, in order to make themselves more important.

They are the same people who talk casually about “axis of evil” when they’re actually founding members of the axis, themselves.

We need to finally acknowledge that the nuclear powers (in spite of what they said in the Non Proliferation Treaty [npt] they shoved down everyone else’s throat) never intended to do anything but achieve and maintain a monopoly.

Non-nuclear states are obliged not to make or develop nuclear weapons, but the nuclear powers will continue to maintain and upgrade their arsenals. And when was the last time that the citizens of the USA or Russia had any say in whether more nuclear weapons would be developed?

When it comes to nuclear war, nobody is isolated.

Compared to the hostile powers our own leaders have arranged against us, any disagreement any of us might have with a citizen from another country is piffle.

ISIS?

They are nowhere near the threat to anyone that the commander of the US, North Korean, Russian, (on down the list) is.

Sure, they are repugnant, cruel, murderers – but they are rank amateurs compared to our leaders, who are prepared to murder on a vaster scale and who, in fact, have pretty much murdered ISIS (and 50,000-100,000 noncombatants along with them)

I can negotiate with ISIS – probably it wouldn’t go well, but I can try – militant nationalism doesn’t permit negotiation at all: they make us pawns in their game and they’ll throw us in the fire at any moment without feeling particularly bad about it (unless it’s bad for business).

Why can’t we rise up and put these motherfuckers up against a wall and shoot them all?

anon[390] • Disclaimer says:

June 7, 2021 at 4:53 pm GMT
Trump is now demanding reparation from China. Full time China hate is his only schtick left, no one is listening to him on anything else. China hate is the only thing that could still get a few of his mindless minions riled up.

But you know…

…it’s a dangerous game these morons are playing.

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings

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Master Index

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Some videos of China showing all kinds of stuff, and a ton load of other assorted Chinese videos

This is going to be the “everything but the kitchen sink” kind of post. I wander. I spew out videos and pictures. I discuss things like girls and hot dogs. I even spend some time on Russia and then throw in some stuff about unhappy Americans. So I guess you can actually call it a true garbage bag of stuff. A “sack” of stuff.

There is NO set theme, for those of you who like everything nice and orderly. But rather this is like a messy mechanics work bench, a chef’s kitchen during the preparation for a large and elaborate meal, the living room after three two years olds entered it, or what happens when you give a dog a laxative and lock him in the house. The shit is everywhere.

And that is what this is, don’t you know. It’s a collection of videos that I picked up out of Chinese media, and what I myself recorded, as well as some interesting articles that are banned or not being presented inside of America these days.

I took a bunch of videos over the last few weeks. I am going to post some of them here so that you all can get an appreciation for what it is like here. And that’s really good.

I also have collected some more pretty girls videos. And I am going to post some of them here too. I mean, why not?

Pretty Chinese girl.

While I am at it, I have collected some Chinese military themed videos which are interesting if you follow that sort of stuff. And who in America doesn’t these days? After all America is a big enormous military empire. Even the multi-trillian dollar budget was just throwing billions of dollars to ramp up the already enormous military to fight world war III.

And some pork and beans.

Oh, and some other themes too. I guess you could call this the “kitchen sink” of Chinese videos.

As an aside, we have all been having mass testing for COVID. Really, really efficient. They announce it, then three days later, it’s all completed. In a city five times the size of Seattle.

Today I made myself some hotdogs. I suppose that I am getting homesick a tad bit. I do miss those days where (as a boy scout) I would gather around a fire and cook up hotdogs and marshmallows. It’s that time of the year, and if you have the means I would suggest you all go out and explore and have some fun in the countryside.

Cooking hotdogs the American way.

You all should go out and do this.

It’s cheap. As I recall, a package of twelve hotdogs was under a dollar. If you buy a loaf of bread, and some ketchup, you can end up feeding a family for under $5 USD. Just don’t forget the beer. Add a bag of ice for a $1, and there, for around ten dollars you’ve got the great makings for an outing.

Well, things might be a little bit more expense today. But still, the point is that it’s a very inexpensive way to have fun. And just doesn’t the memories evoke stirrings in your soul?

There’s nothing quite like watching the hot fiery embers while roasting a hotdog and drinking beer. It’s a special treasure. One that seems to be over-looked in today’s society.

But before we get into the videos, let’s see what Mr. Putin has to say. Like Xi Peng, he is a calm and stable leader. When he speaks the world listens. Unfortunately the Western press refuses to to report on it. Thus leaving Americans and their allies unaware of the events going on in the world that America is part of.

Of course Putin has things to say. America is one BIG mess, and it is angry, belligerent, cocky and arrogant.

Sometimes, it just seems to me that there a only a precious few “adults” in the room remaining. Us “normal’s” are like rambunctious high school students, and the American and European leadership are like spoiled three year old children.

Encino Man

Excerpts of Putin’s Meeting with heads of international news agencies, St Petersburg, June 4, 2021 

http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/65749

VLADIMIR PUTIN

A. Causes of the Covid-19 pandemic:  

Allow me to refrain from speaking about the causes of the pandemic because so much has already been said about it that I think it makes no sense speaking on this topic, and I am unlikely to say anything new or intriguing.

Keep in mind that in 2020, both China and Russia filed formal complaints about the Coronavirus and the United State's role in it.

But I suggest we proceed from the fact that we have faced this pandemic and we are living with it now. The world has yet to overcome these challenges and restrictions and we must continue our joint fight as an effective outcome cannot be achieved unless we work together on combating the pandemic.

VLADIMIR PUTIN

B. RUSSIA-CHINA TIES (IMPACT ON INDIA) & RUSSIAN STANCE ON QUAD: 

Mr. Putin discusses the American led "QUAD", the "Asian NATO" that is designed to counter, contain, and suppress China.

We do (not) participate in this initiative, so I do not think I should give any assessments on the participation of other countries in it. Each country makes its sovereign decision about with whom, how and in what capacity, and to what extent it builds its relations.

Let me state, though, that any partnership between countries should not be aimed at being friends simply to align against someone else. We need to be friends with each other so as to achieve common goals, to solve the tasks that states face.

I will repeat once again that we do not see ourselves in this configuration.

However, this does not prevent us from working both with India and China. I do not see any contradictions here. Moreover, we have created conditions for India, China and Russia to be able to work within the same organizations and they are well known: we collaborate in BRICS, and the SCO, and we work together in the United Nations.

Yes, I know, of course, there are certain issues related to India-China relations.

But you see, there are always a plethora of issues arising between neighbors. But I know the attitude of both the Prime Minister of India and the President of the PRC, these are very responsible people and in their interactions they treat each other with great respect.

And I think that they will always find a way to resolve the problems and issues they face. The main thing is that extra-regional powers should not standing their way.

Mr. Putin wants the two nations of India and China to continue to work on their differences together, and he doesn't want "outsiders" (you know, like America) to interfere and cause problems.

As for Russia-India relations, I repeat, they are unfolding very successfully and in a trustful and traditional manner. We really appreciate this level of relations with our Indian friends.

These are relations of a truly strategic nature, as they cover a whole range of areas for interaction. They include economic issues, energy, and high technologies.

They also include the military-industrial complex, and here we are not only talking about the sale and purchase of Russian weapons.

I have already spoken about this more than once, that we have very deep and trusting relations with India, which manifested in the fact that we and India (probably the only such partner of ours) take up joint efforts to design and produce, including on Indian territory, cutting-edge and advanced weapons systems, including missile equipment.

Russia and India are working together to design cutting-edge military technology, and systems. This is R&D and NPD for brand new weapons systems.

But these are just a few; there are other areas in which we cooperate.

This is why I have no doubt that Russia-India relations will continue to develop consistently to the benefit of the peoples of India and the Russian Federation.

The outlook for India to work with Russia on strategic developments is highly positive.

C. RUSSIA-CHINA RELATIONS: 

You mentioned the [2011] Treaty, which undoubtedly played a vital role in the development of Russian-Chinese relations.

They are truly unprecedented in terms of the quality and level of interaction.

But we both understand that it is not just about the Treaty, although it really is a very important thing, an important document, and an important milestone.

The point is that Russia and China have many overlapping interests. This is what underlies the development of our interaction.

In this regard, one of the key fields of cooperation is the one you already mentioned at the start, and that is economic cooperation.

Quite so, several years ago now, President Xi Jinping and I worked out a plan to reach the $100 billion mark in our mutual trade.

Now I should tell you (you know about this) that we did actually reach this milestone, and more than this, even despite the challenges of the pandemic in 2020, we kept to that level. Despite the slight decrease, it amounted to 104 billion.

China and Russian foreign trade and cooperation is proceeding splendidly.

And I think that over a period of the next few years, as we agreed, as we wanted, we can reach 200 billion even by 2024, despite that slight decline. We have also discussed this with President Xi Jinping. The pace we have gained and the growth rate we have achieved in the first quarter of this year also confirm this.

It is of upmost importance that we cooperate across a wide variety of areas.

We are following global trends and we are increasingly focusing on the most important fields of high-tech.

I have repeatedly mentioned that we continue to work together in aircraft manufacturing, we are more and more expanding our cooperation in space, including the joint lunar program; there are very interesting prospects here.

Quite recently, you are aware, President Xi Jinping and I broke ground for four new nuclear reactors in China. This is very important high-tech collaboration.

Work continues in other segments in the energy industry too. On the other hand, I believe our cooperation in nature conservation and in the humanitarian field is no less important.

From year to year, we hold a variety of forums, all kinds of cross year projects.

This brings people ever closer together. All this requires good support in terms of infrastructure, so we are developing it as well. Quite recently, you know we have opened a bridge in one of the most important regions of the Russian-Chinese border.

Roads and rail between Russia and China are opening up, being forged and trade is increasing at an astounding level.

Russia and China are jointly working on major projects that have an international dimension.

As you are aware, China is promoting the New Silk Road idea, including in the economy. This is quite consistent with what we are doing within the framework of the Eurasian Economic Union.

The BRI benefits not only China but Russia as well.

We have many overlapping interests and fields of activity. I simply do not doubt for a second that we will continue to be as active as possible, keeping in mind both Russia’s and China’s interest in maintaining collaboration on the international arena…

… and this interaction is undoubtedly one of the most important factors of stability in international affairs.

The stability of the world depends on Russia and China working jointly and together in unity.

D. SUMMIT WITH BIDEN: 

You know, I am not expecting any breakthroughs following this meeting.

Now, what does that tell you all about how America is viewed by the rest of the world?

But I believe that (you are absolutely right) that, despite the disagreements, which were not created by the Russian side, we, nevertheless, have coinciding interests.

You have now mentioned some of the subjects that would be of interest to the United States and the Russian Federation.

This includes the solution of environmental problems, strategic stability and joint work to resolve a number of regional crises.

All this is highly important because this is linked with our countries’ security matters, considering intra-regional crises, such as in the Middle East. What do these unresolved crises lead to?

They cause an upsurge in terrorism, and this is extremely dangerous for everyone, including the United States, Russia, Europe and other regions.

These unresolved matters are the cause, and terrorism is the direct consequence of what is happening in these regions.

Strategic stability is extremely important.

Strategic military power is extremely important to maintain global balance and stability.

We don’t want to scare anyone with our new weapons systems.

Yes, we are developing them, and we have achieved certain results and successes here.

But all leading countries and leading military powers are doing this, and we are just one step ahead.

We realize that other high-tech countries, such as the United States and other states, will achieve similar results sooner or later.

Therefore I believe that it is better to reach agreement in advance on how we will live together in a changing world.

We are ready for this.

I assume that President Biden is a very experienced politician who has been dealing with politics all his life, he is well-versed in many of the problems I have mentioned because he was time and again involved in assessing similar matters, in different capacities.

This is why I hope that our meeting will be constructive. 

E. RELATIONS WITH GERMANY: 

Germany is one of our priority partners in the economy; on a global scale, it is one of our largest trade and economic partners, our largest partner in Europe and one of the biggest in the world after China.

We have a large number of friends in Germany and we have a strong interest in developing our trade and economic links.

Thousands of German companies operate in Russia, with our mutual investment amounting to $29 billion.

These are significant resources, and our business partners invest not in financial operations but in the real economy and real production.

We very much appreciate this and try to provide our help and support, which we intend to continue

In the political sphere, I really hope that, considering the special nature of our relations and our people’s particular interest in continuing cooperation, Germany’s future leadership will build its political relationships with Russia accordingly.

We are ready to fully cooperate to overcome all the difficulties you mentioned. 

It is true that Angela [Merkel] and I have a businesslike relationship, and I appreciate her a lot.

She is a very experienced politician and a straight-forward but reliable person.

If we have agreed on something, then I see – which is frankly surprising to me, but it is true – that she is consistent and knows how to defend her position.

We feel it too; we feel it in our joint affairs.

Some things we may like, some things we may not, but she is a reliable, stable partner. 

I would like stability and reliability to remain in the activities of the German government to come, too

Let me say this once again: Germany is an important partner for Russia, both in Europe and in the world, and we very much hope that the situation will consistently improve.

F. RUSSIA-US RELATIONS: 

The main thing that needs to be done is to treat each other with respect and take into account each other’s interests in the broadest sense of the word.

But this is not a general phrase, it is a meaningful matter.

It's not a platitude, or a saying. It's a very serious issue.

President Biden belongs, in my opinion, to the most experienced class of international politicians, as I mentioned earlier, because in different capacities and at various times over the course of many years, he has personally participated in the discussion and preparation of the decisions on all issues that matter today for the entire world and bilateral relations.

But it was not us who drove Russia-US relations into the state they’re in today.

We didn’t do this.

After all, we have never taken a single first step in matters that are detrimental to Russia-US relations.

Did we impose sanctions on the United States?

No, it was the United States that imposed sanctions on us and continues to impose them for every reason or for no reason at all, just because we exist.

But they will have to live with this, because Russia was, is and will be here.

Just as there is and will be the United States, which plays a very important role in the world.

I would very much like it to play a stabilizing role.

But in this context, in my opinion, Russia-US relations are also important.

To reiterate, I would very much like our meeting to be held in a constructive manner.

G. BELARUS: 

President Lukashenko explained to me, he did not order the plane to land.

There was a bomb alert and, as far as I remember, the captain, who could have landed in Vilnius, since the plane was closer to Vilnius than to Minsk, decided to land in Minsk.

Nobody forced him to land – at least this is President Lukashenko’s account of the events. That is it.

****

And I would like to strike the ball back to you: what do you think about President of Bolivia Evo Morales’ plane being forced to land in Vienna, escorting him off the plane and searching the presidential aircraft?

So, the same thing happened in Vienna; in Vienna they grounded the head of state’s airplane…

If you can ground the plane of the president of an independent country in Vienna, why can’t they land a plane in Minsk, especially if there was a signal that a bomb had been planted on board?

We just need to measure similar situations with the same yardstick, and not only in this case, but in general.

We need to get rid of double standards; you can’t always say that one person can do this, and another cannot.

Not with the United States. The USA is all about "double standards".

Let’s work out common approaches and come up with common assessments.

Using tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons to disperse demonstrations in Europe, and knocking out eyes with rubber bullets, is okay, but when there is an arrest in Belarus, maybe, done in a harsh manner, it is unacceptable.

Why?

Because European countries are democratic and they can do this in Europe.

Let’s then come up with acceptable ways of handling street protests and define what exactly is unacceptable.

Let’s develop common criteria and approaches, at least develop common definitions that will be understood by everyone the same way.

Then it will be easier for us to give assessments to the events that are taking place in various regions around the world, including Europe.

H. RUSSIAN VACCINE FOR EUROPE: 

The vaccine market is estimated at about $100 billion a year, probably even more

…the delays in registering the Russian vaccine in Europe are due to the commercial interests of those who are doing so…

…since they are thus gaining time for the competitors of Russian producers of the vaccine to take over the European market…

… since long-term contracts are being concluded for the supply of vaccines.

When the relevant European agency issues a permit to use the Russian vaccine in Europe, it will become clear that the market is already 100 percent full, and long-term contracts have already been concluded.

That’s it; the ship will have sailed for our companies.

We are the only country in the world that is ready to pass on technology.

We are doing so and starting production at foreign facilities.

We are ready to do this in European countries as well; we can see no obstacles here.

In fact, this is just another myth about the use of the vaccine. 

Before this, we had not produced vaccines at such a large volume, and primarily only for Russia.

I think that in July we will reach a production level of 20 million per month. We have enough for domestic consumption now.

I.RELATIONS WITH UK: 

The United Kingdom is one of few countries in Europe, and even the world, where economic relations continue to be on the up side.

Even last year – the pandemic year, when our trade with many countries slumped, trade with the UK grew by 54 percent.

This is record high.

So, if nobody interferes, everything will be good and mutual trade might help Russia turn from a withering country into a prosperous one.

If the USA doesn't interfere...

We strongly hope that Russian-British relations will contribute to this process…

The most important thing is that we have respect for each other, trust each other and hope that nothing occurs in the UK…

…that would allow us to come up with assessments like those given by the new head of your country’s intelligence service [MI6]…

…with respect to Russia [namely, that it is a declining power and behaves irresponsibly.]

J. PALESTINE PROBLEM: 

We welcome the normalisation of relations between different states of the region, including between Arab countries and Israel.

When ties between states are restored, it always benefits the peoples of these states.

At the same time, and we are now clearly seeing this, it is hardly possible to achieve a stable peace and a stable situation in the region without a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Here, we need to restore multilateral formats of cooperation and multilateral formats for discussing the problems at hand.

There are issues that require special attention from the international community.

Of course, overcoming inter-Palestinian differences is among the essential elements.

I think that this entire range (I am not talking now about Israel’s settlement policy etc., but many questions accumulated in that area), the entire range of issues, of course, needs to be studied very carefully.

And Palestinian settlement must not be pushed back to the periphery of international politics given the pressing nature of this issue and the importance of this problem not only for the Arab world but, I think, the entire world as well.

We very much hope that the issues of fundamental importance, namely, the creation of two states, including the Palestinian state, will be resolved on the basis of mutual interests of the peoples living in this region, and taking into account the future.

It is very important to look into the future, it is very important not to be guided by fleeting political opportunistic considerations, but to create conditions for a lasting long-term settlement.

K. DOLLAR AS WORLD CURRENCY: 

As for the dollar, I have already said that we are not trying to get rid of the dollar…

It’s not that we do not like the dollar because the United States is bad and it imposes sanctions on us, which forces us to get rid of it; of course not.

The question has a practical dimension. Let’s assume we are unable to make payments in dollars with our partners in defense cooperation.

Such as with Iran. -MM

You see?

We have a problem.

What should we do?

We switch to paying in national currencies or currencies of other countries.

Our US partners force us to do this.

We are not moving away from the dollar purposefully, we are compelled to do so.

When we do this, a system of financial relations with our partners is formed outside dollar transactions.

But why are the US political authorities doing this?

They are cutting off the branch they are sitting on and will crash to the ground in the end.

Everyone in the world can see this, you know?

Everyone can see it, hence the question about the reliability of dollar transactions.

This is leading to the decline of gold and foreign exchange reserves in dollars, and not just in our country, but almost all over the world, including US allies.

The volume of settlements in dollars is on the decline…

You will see that the volume of dollar transactions is decreasing every year, and gold and foreign exchange reserves in dollars are also going down, and not just in our country.

All of that is being done as part of some internal political processes in the United States.

The people who are doing this seem to operate on the premise that the economic power of the United States, its military and political power is so strong that it does not scare them – “we will get through this,” is what they are thinking.

America is about printing money endlessly without consideration of the mountain of debt that it is creating.

You know what the problem is? I will tell you as a citizen of the former Soviet Union. What is the problem with an empire?

And so he answers.

They think they are so mighty they can afford minor faults and mistakes. It is okay, we will buy these people and scare other people; we will reach an agreement with still others, give beads to those and threaten others with our warships – problem solved.

But he notes...

But problems are piling up, and there comes a time when it is no longer possible to cope with them all. And the United States is firmly and steadily following in the footsteps of the Soviet Union.

You don't say...

I will say it again: this is not our initiative. Some of our companies, for example, in the oil sector, are reluctant to leave the dollar, mindful of the volatility of national currencies. But if the United States continues to force them into this, eventually, they will find a way to de-dollarise their settlements and convert to national currencies or currencies of third countries. They will just find a solution, end of story. And this will be a severe blow to the dollar as the global reserve currency.

Multiple reserve currencies and units of account are a good thing for the global economy if we want to achieve a more stable situation in international finance and the global economy in general.

Nothing that you will find in the American “news”. Though you will find this understatement of the year…

Now that Mr. Putin said his piece, let’s get on with the videos…

Videos of pretty girls

"Chinese women look like pre-adolsecent girls. that is why all the child predators flock to China. So that they can have uncontrolled violent sex with these child-appearing women."

Long duration readers of MM know my love of the female form.

Chinese woman with a robust Chest.

Here’s just some more videos of Chinese girls being cute and attractive. I have other dedicated posts elsewhere, but I just wanted to throw some out right now and get them off my hard drive. Pretty girls, yeah, but I only have so much room. Don’t you know.

Chinese Hunan girl wearing her ethnic attire. (I just love Hunan food. You betya!)

Aside from girl after girl, I threw in two special videos.

  • One is a Tictok girl (just like these here) who died. And the hospital staff honoring her death.
  • A CGI showing the Chinese ideal.

Ugh. It’s a pretty big collection and it might take a little long to download. You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. 345MB.

Typical Chinese girl displaying her “fish shaped” body for the world to admire.

What is going on in America today?

I just read this most interesting article. It says…

Worn out and disgusted by crushing neoliberal policies at home and murderous neoconservative policies abroad, Americans elected a political neophyte who ran on a populist platform which criticized both Bush and Obama. Trump promised to “drain the swamp”, end the wars, and fight the establishment in the interests of ordinary people. This time for sure there would be change.

But the wars kept going, and the swamp got even fuller, and the US empire kept chugging along on the same trajectory it had been on throughout the Bush administration and the Obama administration. Despite all this, the Democratic Party and its allied media institutions acted as though some drastic deviation from the norm had taken place, insisting that the United States had been plunged from a free democracy respected around the world into an isolationist fascist dystopia.

In order to stop fascism, the American people had yet another people’s uprising against the corrupt status quo and… elected Obama’s vice president. Lifelong corporate crony and empire lackey Joe Biden now sits in the White House, advancing all the same murderous, oppressive, exploitative, authoritarian policies as his predecessors, as a result of the latest fake, decoy revolution against tyranny.

And that’s all mainstream electoral politics ever is in the US empire: a fake, decoy revolution staged for the public every few years so that they don’t have a real one. A symbolic ceremony where the public pretends to cast the abusive status quo into the sea so they feel like the battle against their oppressors has been won. And then their oppressors just keep right on oppressing them.

Every few years the public gets to choose between two reliable lackeys of the oligarchic empire, and then all of the evils of that empire get pinned upon the winner. The public then directs their rage at the lackey rather than the actual power structure which has been oppressing them, after which they have another election to rid themselves of the scoundrel once and for all. They hug, they cry, they celebrate, and the oppression machine continues completely uninterrupted.

And it is accurate, I believe.

As Gore Vidal once said:

“It doesn’t actually make any difference whether the President is Republican or Democrat. The genius of the American ruling class is that it has been able to make the people think that they have had something to do with the electing of presidents for 200 years when they’ve had absolutely nothing to say about the candidates or the policies or the way the country is run. A very small group controls just about everything.”
That small group is the plutocratic class whose legalized bribery and propaganda machine has immense influence over US politics, as well as the imperial war machine and special interest groups with whom the plutocratic class is allied. 

It is necessary to form coalitions of support within that power cluster if one wants to become president in the managed democracy that is the United States, and no part of that power cluster is going to support a president who won’t reliably advance the interests of the oligarchic empire.

From this point of view, the oligarchic power cluster is essentially running its own employees against each other and having them promise to end the injustices which are inextricably baked in to the oligarchic empire.

Americans live in a totalitarian state whose most important elections are rigged from top to bottom, and they’re fed news stories about Evil Dictators in other countries rigging their elections to remain in power.

Politicians cannot change the status quo to one which benefits ordinary people instead of their oligarchic owners, because the oligarchic empire is built upon the need for endless war, poverty, and oppression.

You cannot have a unipolar global empire without using violent force (and the threat of it) to uphold that world order, and you cannot have a plutocracy without ensuring that a few rulers have far more wealth control than the rank-and-file citizenry.

For this reason, even politicians who run on relatively progressive-sounding platforms are themselves a part of the fake decoy revolution unless they demand a complete dismantling of oligarchy and empire.

The politicians who present themselves as progressives in America today offer only light opposition to some aspects of empire and oligarchy, in effect merely supporting an oligarchic empire that gives Americans healthcare.

Since keeping Americans poor, busy and propagandized is an essential dynamic in the hub of a globe-spanning oligarchic empire, this is a nonsensical position; the oligarchs don’t want ordinary Americans to have money to burn on campaign donations and free time to research what’s really going on in their world, because then they might meddle in the gears of empire...

...A power structure built upon economic injustice will never permit economic justice.

The door to meaningful change in America via electoral politics has been closed, locked, bolted, welded shut, and barricaded with a metric ton of solid steel.

The only thing that can cause an end to the oppression and exploitation is an end to the oligarchic empire, and the only thing that can cause the end of the oligarchic empire is direct action by the American people: mass-scale activism, general strikes, and civil disobedience the likes of which the nation has never before seen, in sufficient numbers to bring down the plutocratic institutions which maintain the status quo.

The problem is that this will never happen as long as Americans are being successfully propagandized into being content with their fake decoy revolutions.

There is a zero percent chance of electoral politics leading to an end of the empire, but a concerted effort to spread awareness by those who understand what’s going on just might.

All positive changes in human behavior are always preceded by an expansion of awareness, whether you’re talking about awareness of the consequences of one’s addiction leading to their getting sober or an expansion of awareness of the injustices of racism leading to racial justice laws.

Making people aware that the mass media are lying to us about what’s real, aware of the horrors of war, aware of the underlying dynamics of the economic injustice which is grinding Americans into the dirt, that can lead to a chain reaction which sees the collective using the power of its numbers to shrug off the chains of oppression as easily as you remove a heavy coat on a warm day.

What’s needed is for the people to awaken to the truth. An entire empire is built upon a pair of closed eyelids.

Please read the entire article at the Greenville Post HERE.

Videos of Chinese Military Aviation

"The Chinese air force is a joke. The best that they have are 1980's old-Soviet Union hand me downs. All cobbled together with that shoddy Chinese workmanship and piloted by CCP members that would defect to the Untied States in a heartbeat."

It’s a narrative that has been pumped into the American heartland for decades. The truth is something all together different. Especially since 90% of the American military aviation, and parts are currently made inside of China. If China can design and manufacture for the United States Aviation companies, they can do so for themselves. Which is why we see all sorts of interesting home-grown and home-designed, and home-manufactured aircraft in China these days.

You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. 41MB.

Oh, I almost forgot about Pepe…

You know the drill. From HERE. All credit to the author and edited to fit this venue.

The upcoming G7 in Cornwall at first might be seen as the quirky encounter of “America is Back” with “Global Britain”.

The Big Picture though is way more sensitive. Three Summits in a Row – G7, NATO and US-EU – will be paving the way for a much expected cliffhanger: the Putin-Biden summit in Geneva – which certainly won’t be a reset.

The controlling interests behind the hologram that goes by the name of “Joe Biden” have a clear overarching agenda: to regiment industrialized democracies – especially those in Europe – and keep them in lockstep to combat those “authoritarian” threats to US national security, “malignant” Russia and China.

It’s like a throwback to those oh so stable 1970s Cold War days, complete with James Bond fighting foreign devils and Deep Purple subverting communism. Well, the times they are-a-changin’. China is very much aware that now the Global South “accounts for almost two-thirds of the global economy compared to one-third by the West: in the 1970s, it was exactly the opposite.”

For the Global South – that is, the overwhelming majority of the planet – the G7 is largely irrelevant. What matters is the G20.

China, the rising economic superpower, hails from the Global South, and is a leader in the G20. For all their internal troubles, EU players in the G7 – Germany, France and Italy – cannot afford to antagonize Beijing in economic, trade and investment terms.

A G7 rebooted as a Sinophobic crusade will have no takers. Including Japan and special guests at Cornwall: tech powerhouse South Korea, and India and South Africa (both BRICS members), offered the dangling carrot of a possible extended membership.

Washington’s wishful thinking cum P.R. offensive boils down to selling itself as the primus inter pares of the West as a revitalized global leader. Why the Global South is not buying it can be observed, graphically, by what happened for the past eight years. The G7 – and especially the Americans – simply could not respond to China’s wide-ranging, pan-Eurasian trade/development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

The American “strategy” so far – 24/7 demonization of BRI as a “debt trap” and “forced labor” machine – did not cut it. Now, too little too late, comes a G7 scheme, involving “partners” such as India, to “support”, at least in theory, vague “high-quality projects” across the Global South: that’s the Clean Green Initiative , focused on sustainable development and green transition, to be discussed both at the G7 and the US-EU summits.

Compared to BRI, Clean Green Initiative hardly qualifies as a coherent geopolitical and geoeconomic strategy. BRI has been endorsed and partnered by over 150 nation-states and international bodies – and that includes more than half of the EU’s 27 members.

Facts on the ground tell the story. China and ASEAN are about to strike a “comprehensive strategic partnership” deal. Trade between China and the Central and Eastern European Countries (CCEC), also known as the 17+1 group, including 12 EU nations, continues to increase. The Digital Silk Road, the Health Silk Road and the Polar Silk Road keep advancing.

So what’s left is loud Western rumbling about vague investments in digital technology – perhaps financed by the European Investment Bank, based in Luxembourg – to cut off China’s “authoritarian reach” across the Global South.

The EU-US summit may be launching a “Trade and Technology Council” to coordinate policies on 5G, semiconductors, supply chains, export controls and technology rules and standards. A gentle reminder: the EU-US simply do not control this complex environment. They badly need South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

Wait a minute, Mr. Taxman

To be fair, the G7 may have rendered a public service to the whole world when their Finance Ministers struck an alleged “historic” deal last Saturday in London on a global, minimal 15% tax on multinational companies (MNCs).

Triumphalism was in order – with endless praise lavished on “justice” and “fiscal solidarity” coupled with really bad news for assorted fiscal paradises.

Well, that’s slightly more complicated.

This tax has been discussed at the highest levels of the OECD in Paris for over a decade now – especially because nation-states are losing at least $427 billion a year in tax-dodging by MNCs and assorted multi-billionaires. In terms of the European scenario that does not even account for the loss of V.A.T. by fraud – something gleefully practiced by Amazon, among others.

So it’s no wonder G7 Finance Ministers had $1.6 trillion-worth Amazon pretty much on their sights. Amazon’s cloud computing division should be treated as a separate entity. In this case the mega-tech group will have to pay more corporate tax in some of its largest European markets – Germany, France, Italy, UK – if the global 15% tax is ratified.

So yes, this is mostly about Big Tech – master experts on fiscal fraud and profiting from tax paradises located even inside Europe, such as Ireland and Luxembourg. The way the EU was built, it allowed fiscal competition between nation-states to fester. To discuss this openly in Brussels remains a virtual taboo. In the official EU list of fiscal paradises, one won’t find Luxembourg, the Netherlands or Malta.

So could this all be just a P.R. coup? It’s possible. The major problem is that at the European Council – where governments of EU member-states discuss their issues – they have been dragging their feet for a long time, and sort of delegated the whole thing to the OECD.

As it stands, details on the 15% tax are still vague – even as the US government stands to become the largest winner, because its MNCs have shifted massive profits all across the planet to avoid US corporate taxes.

Not to mention that nobody knows if, when and how the deal will be globally accepted and implemented: that will be a Sisyphean task. At least it will be discussed, again, at the G20 in Venice in July.

What Germany wants

Without Germany there would not have been real advance on the EU-China Investment Agreement late last year. With a new US administration, the deal is stalled again. Outgoing chancellor Merkel is against China-EU economic decoupling – and so are German industrialists. It will be quite a treat to watch this subplot at the G7.

In a nutshell: Germany wants to keep expanding as a global trading power by using its large industrial base, while the Anglo-Saxons have completely ditched their industrial base to embrace non-productive financialization. And China for its part wants to trade with the whole planet. Guess who’s the odd player out.

Considering the G7 as a de facto gathering of the Hegemon with its hyenas, jackals and chihuahuas, it will also be quite a treat to watch the semantics. What degree of “existential threat” will be ascribed to Beijing – especially because for the interests behind the hologram “Biden” the real priority is the Indo-Pacific?

These interests could not give a damn about a EU yearning for more strategic autonomy. Washington always announces its diktats without even bothering to previously consult Brussels.

So this is what this Triple X of summits – G7, NATO and EU-US – will be all about: the Hegemon pulling all stops to contain/harass the emergence of a rising power by enlisting its satrapies to “fight” and thus preserve the “rules-based international order” it designed over seven decades ago.

History tells uss it won’t work. Just two examples: the British and French empires could not stop the rise of the US in the 19th century; and even better, the Anglo-American axis only stopped the simultaneous rise of Germany and Japan by paying the price of two world wars, with the British empire destroyed and Germany back again as the leading power in Europe.

That should give the meeting of “America is Back” and “Global Britain” in Cornwall the status of a mere, quirky historical footnote.

Oh, and let’s talk about some food.

It’s near supper time, and it is early Summer. To me, that means buttered corn on the cob, watermelon, baked beans, hamburgers, fried chicken, tomato-onion-salad, cole slaw, and potato salad. Most of which you simply cannot get here in China.

Hamburger with a side of baked beans.

Well, you can get mashed potatoes at KFC, and potato salad at a Japanese restaurant. All of the others you can get, but they will all be cooked Chinese-style, which for the most part doesn’t resemble what I think about as hot Summer American food.

I’m not really complaining.

It’s that you adjust to your situation. You appreciate what you have when you have it. You realize that it is fleeting and the idea that you just “can always go out and get a hamburger” isn’t really true outside of the United States. Just like you just cannot go out in America and get some Hunan fish when ever you feel like it.

Now, it’s kind of “cheating” to take frozen fries, some left over chili and cheese and wrap it all up in aluminum foil to throw onto a campfire, but I don’t care. This is the year 2021, not 1854. You learn, you adapt, you strive, and you accept.

Some may call this cheating.

Once, I am fed…

… I have some videos about the Chinese military forces. Well worth a look.

You see, China must build up it’s forces. America is eyeing it for invasion. And it is not going to go away, back down, or moderate it’s position. Conflict is inevitable.

And the world spins around and around…

Meanwhile from HERE, we have this jewel from UNZ …

China Notes That the Same Journalist Pushing Wuhan Lab Hoax Pushed Iraq WMD Hoax

 

 

Neocons. They are some sick people.

China is inching dangerously close to dangerous anti-Semitism.

RT:

 China’s Foreign Ministry blasted the resurgent interest in the Covid-19 lab-origin theory, noting that the journalist behind a report about Wuhan scientists falling ill is the same one who peddled lies that led to the Iraq War.

Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin took aim at Michael R. Gordon, a national security correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and one of the authors of the report that added fuel to speculation about Covid-19’s lab origin.

“Not long ago, Michael R. Gordon, an American journalist, by quoting a so-called ‘previously undisclosed US intelligence report,’ hinted [at] a far-fetched connection between the ‘three sick staff’ at the Wuhan lab and the Covid-19 outbreak,” Wang said at a briefing on Friday.

“Nineteen years ago, it was this very reporter who concocted false information by citing unsubstantiated sources about Iraq’s ‘attempt to acquire nuclear weapons,’ which directly led to the Iraq War,” he charged, referring to the 2003 US invasion.

The WSJ piece, published on May 23, cites “a previously undisclosed US intelligence report” as saying that three researchers from the Wuhan Institute of Virology fell seriously ill in November 2019 with symptoms “consistent” with Covid-19 as well as a seasonal flu.

The report got picked up by other mainstream media, which recently began shifting their coverage on Covid-19’s origins from outright dismissing theories that the virus was man-made to admitting that a lab leak remains a possibility.

Gordon is supposedly not Jewish, but he co-wrote the New York Times pieces with the Jew Judith Miller.

Furthermore, I wouldn’t personally point to Gordon as the source for the “Wuhan Lab Leak Hypothesis” – I would point to the Jewish neocon Josh Rogin.

Rogin, like Gordon, spent years promoting various atrocity hoaxes in the Middle East and pushing wars for Israel, and is the original source for the version of the “Wuhan Lab theory,” that is currently circulating, writing a Washington Post column promoting the hoax on April 14, 2020.

The point of course is that everywhere you look, there are neocons – most of them Jewish – promoting this Wuhan Lab stuff. They are the absolute source of the claim – they and a Falun Gong Hong Kong CIA feminist woman, Li-Meng Yan.

She is claiming to be a “whistleblower,” despite the fact that she in no way meets the definition of that term. The term necessarily implies insider knowledge – usually, a whistleblower is an employee or former employee of the organization they are blowing the whistle on.

Though none of the media promoting her says it outright, there is an implication that she worked at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. She did not. She worked at a university in Hong Kong when she was funded by Steve Bannon to write a paper making the claim that the supposed coronavirus is a Chinese bioweapon.

Bannon has recently been associated with Guo Wengui, a billionaire who was exiled from China for fraud and various crimes. In June of last year, Bannon declared that Guo is now the real ruler of China in a bizarre video on a boat.

While they were on the boat in front of the Statue of Liberty saying they were going to “overthrow the government of China,” they flew planes around with signs announcing their new government.

No one understood what was going on, and even Fox News reported on “confusion” regarding the banners and the livestream on the boat. The livestream has since been deleted, and there is no news from the Federal State of New China. But there is a Wikipedia page documenting this incredibly strange event.

Guo also runs a fake news website (I use that term in the most literal sense) where he published the Hunter Biden footjob videos.

The point is: this is a very weird operation, and it is absurd to take a person funded by these people seriously, as Tucker Carlson shamefully has.

(I’m not attacking Tucker over this, he’s overall great and is sometimes just really slow on the uptake, unfortunately – but it is shameful to get involved with a Hong Kong woman who was literally given money by Steve Bannon and his “Federation of New China” group to write a fake science paper.)

To pretend that she is a whistleblower, to pretend that political organizations funding papers with a predetermined outcome is serious science, is non-serious behavior.

The first time I heard the Wuhan lab leak theory it was being promoted by neocon extremist Tom Cotton. It was then promoted by neocon extremist Mike Pompeo, who was then in the process of trying to start a war with China. Now, it is being promoted by the Jews of CNN.

There is no one involved in claiming that the supposed coronavirus came from a Chinese lab who doesn’t have vested interests in starting a war with the Chinese. This goes for all of these Jews, as well as Steve Bannon, who has actually declared “overthrowing the government of China” (his words) to be his goal.

It’s very obvious to see how people who want a war with China would use this hoax, and it is great that China is making the link to the Iraqi WMD hoax. It truly is the same thing.

The United States is a country with a lot of problems. None of those problems are the fault of China. China is not promoting gay sex to children, they are not flooding us with millions of brown people, they did not steal our election, they did not take all of our freedoms and collapse the economy.

Our enemies are domestic and they are Jewish. Any attempt to fear-monger and attack China is intended as a distraction from what is going on in this country, and intended to stoke a war.

Furthermore, this “lab leak” nonsense is designed to get people to continue to believe in this coronavirus hoax.

I need a beer…

I swear, the United States is seventeen degrees shy of the loony-bin.

Everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else, and all of them are just shear nut-cases. I swear.

I’ll tell you… the world cannot take much more of this insanity. Something is going to break. Sooner or later

.

Videos of Chinese Military Forces

"The Chinese military are nothing more than a bunch of uneducated conscripts that has been handed a cheapo AK-47 clone, and told to fight. They are a cake-walk and nothing to worry about."

Um. Don’t test them. The Chinese are a serious-serious people. And if they fight, they will be defending their homes and their families.

I’ve got some great videos showing the Chinese forces using some of their weapons. The one with their unique flame-thrower / plasma projectile weapon blaster is really interesting.

Some of the videos are propaganda with a rah-rah-rah feel. Others are just illustrative of the techniques and the means that the Chinese military train to use. And some are just interesting.

You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. 377MB.

Videos related to Technology

"Just some videos related to technology".

And here they are.

You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one.

Videos related to America

"America is the bight and shining house on the hill that everyone wants to emulate, copy and be part of."

Um. Sure.

Here’s a collection of videos that show how America is viewed upon by the rest of the world. Some of the videos are just scenes from things like the televisions show “cops”, while others are international scholars discussing the Role of America on the global stage, and it’s relationships with China. It’s good stuff. This is how America is viewed by the rest of the world.

You can download the videos in a ZIP file HERE. Just open them up and they will play one by one. It’s 73MB.

Conclusion

I could use a beer. The world seems to be fucked seven ways past Sunday, and all I want to do is chill out, hang out with pretty girls, drink a few brews and munch.

BluEidDvl says:

June 6, 2021 at 9:46 am GMT • 5.1 days ago • 300 Words   

These times we’re living in are absolutely surreal. Not surprised though, we’ve been doing this for a long time now. Alas, a great many of my fellow White Americans will fall for it completely & be all in for a war with China.

None of them ever even contemplating what that would mean for us & the world. But, these are the same people who boast “we’re number one” when we rank at or near the bottom in positive stats for all developed nations, beset with crippling societal ills.

The same people who think we can vote ourselves out of this mess & Trump will win in ‘24 & somehow save the day. The same people who think our best days are ahead when our productivity base has been utterly gutted, our infrastructure is collapsing & our ability to maintain it & the skill set needed to sustain that productivity/infrastructure is slipping away. The same people who boast of “muh freedoms” when their freedoms & their children’s future is being pulled from right under their feet. The same people who think we’ll always be on top even when every example of history shows that every empire in history has collapsed.

We’re racing toward a cliff but they still think “god” is on their side & won’t let it happen or we’ll stay on top because, well, “we’re America”..

Utter denial & abject delusion seem to be a central aspect of our people..

Do you want more?

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

New Beginnings

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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Some selected favorite art by the amazing Genrikh Semigradsky

It’s time for another nice relaxing stroll through some art. I know, I cannot stop myself. When I am on a bender, I just go with the flow. Who knows where it will take me…

My art posts are not all that popular. Sadly, people would rather read about American propaganda leading up to world war III. Which is a shame.

This fellow is a new discovery of mine, and I do enjoy everything about his art. It speaks to me. The composition. The subject. The lighting. The folds in the clothing, and the art technique are all wonderful. Just wonderful.

Genrikh Semigradsky is also known as Henryk Siemiradzki.

Born Oct. 10 (22), 1843, in the village of Pechenegi, in present-day Kharkov Oblast, Ukrainian SSR; died Aug. 23, 1902, In Strzałkowo, near the city of Częstochowa, Poland. He was a Polish-Russian painter.

Siemiradzki attended the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts (1864–70); he received a stipend to study at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts (1871) and at the Rome Academy of Fine Arts (1872–77). He lived mainly in Rome but maintained contact with Russia and Poland. He became a member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Arts in 1873 and was made a professor there in 1877.

Depicting primarily ancient Greek and Roman and early Christian scenes, Siemiradzki produced works distinguished by masterful composition and line, a light palette, and meticulous rendering of sunlight.

Siemiradzki’s most important paintings include Luminaries of Christianity (1876, National Museum, Kraków), Dance Among Swords (1881, Tret’iakov Gallery, Moscow), and Phryne at the Feast of Poseidon in Eleusis (1889, Russian Museum, Leningrad).

As I have repeatedly stated, art is something that evokes and triggers thoughts, and memories. No easy feat when the world we live in is full of things that make us angry, hateful, spiteful, and envious. It is hard for a “thing”; a material object to evoke positive emotions. But that is what art actually is.

Art is a item, or object that causes the viewer or holder to evoke pleasant thoughts and / or emotions.

My first discovery

I first came upon this artist when I took a screen shot of this work of his…

Lovely isn’t it?

Everything about this painting speaks to me. Look at the rough stones that they stand upon. Look at the marble details in the base of the statue. I love the details on the clothing, the boat, and the feelings that are stirred inside of me when I view this momentary vision of wonder, love and emotional embrace.

Here’s another painting. In many cases I really do not know the names of the paintings and I will need to look them up. To look them up is pretty easy. I would go to the Art Renewal Center and type in Henryk Siemiradzki. As in this link HERE.

Rome. Village. Water

My second discovery was this little gem.

I guess that I am a really old fuddy-duddy man. I like the paintings of villages and simple life with families, and children doing day to day activities. And yes, most water comes out of a tap today, the idea that they would go to the neighboring lake, pond or stream and gather water to use in cooking and cleaning is an ancient one, but appeals to my base senses.

I like the painting above. It’s the kind of painting that might grace the wall in one of your great grandparents house’s or great uncles homes. It’s exceptional.

Below is an inspirational work that would fit above a fireplace, or in the entrance way to a home. Most of the older homes would have these huge ten foot tall mirrors, floor to ceiling, with intricate carvings, and a place to hand hats, coats, and a small shelf to place packages and shoes. Oh, in the past these were made out of hard woods.

Ah. Beautiful and substantive.

Here’s some more. All of which were selected randomly from the huge array on the pages of the Art Renewal Center.

Roman Idyll

Click on the link of the name for a much nicer higher quality image of the painting. I think that over all it is breath taking.

When I look at art, I enjoy how it makes me feel.

That is the most important thing that I look for in a painting or a statue. The second thing is the composition of the painting. is it beautiful or not? And the third thing is the story line (if any behind it). And then I start looking at the details, the technique and the methodology in creating the work of art. All, when taken as a whole, matter to me greatly.

Funeral of Ruthenian Noble

Here is a painting of a funeral of a leader of Lithuania.

The Ruthenian Nobility of a privileged social class who own inheritable nobility titles in the Kingdom of Ruthenia since the foundation of the Kingdom in 2014. The term “noblemen” is used in reference to the dignitaries of the royal court and the members of the national orders of knighthood.

Ruthenian nobility refers to the nobility of Kievan Rus and GaliciaVolhynia, which found itself in the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, Ruthenia, Samogitia, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth and later Russian and Austrian Empires, and became increasingly polonized and later russified, while retaining a separate, cultural identity. 

-Wikipedia

These paintings are what you could call as … epic.

Look at the scope and the size of the display. Look at the great range of facial expressions and the emotions of all of the participants in the funeral. It’s really an amazing work. Don’t you agree?

Roman Orgy in the Times of Tiberius on Capri

Of course, what is more salacious than a Roman orgy. They made it a national pastime it seems. When you get unlimited power, you also get unlimited debauchery. Both of which makes for very interesting paintings. Don’t you know.

The Romans were really depraved. It’s a bit too “rich” for my personal tastes, but you know that it was a different time and a different place.

The emperors of Rome could be wise, just and kind. They could also be vindictive, cruel and insane. And most of all, they could be the worst perverts the world has ever seen — at least according to ancient historians like Suetonius, Pliny, and Cassius Dio.

Here are nearly a dozen of the most immoral, disgusting behaviors the rulers of the ancient world indulged in… supposedly.

Chances are most of these were rumors made up by political enemies or gossiping plebs. But hey, just because they may not be true doesn’t mean they’re aren’t still entertainingly perverse.

1) Niece-Marrying

The Emperor Claudius married his brother’s daughter Agrippina (his brother being long dead, thank goodness).

"[H]is affections were ensnared by the wiles of Agrippina, daughter of his brother Germanicus, aided by the right of exchanging kisses and the opportunities for endearments offered by their relationship; and at the next meeting of the senate he induced some of the members to propose that he be compelled to marry Agrippina, on the ground that it was for the interest of the State; also that others be allowed to contract similar marriages, which up to that time had been regarded as incestuous." 

Yes, Claudius didn’t just make niece-marrying legal, he made it patriotic!

2) Hiring Anal Sex Experts

No judgments on anal sex here, but putting professional anal sex experts on the imperial payroll is a bit much.

"On retiring to Capri [Tiberius] devised a pleasance for his secret orgies: teams of wantons of both sexes, selected as experts in deviant intercourse and dubbed analists, copulated before him in triple unions to excite his flagging passions." 

In case these pros were somehow not up to the tasks Tiberius put them too, he had a sex library full of illustrated works so he could just point to what he wanted.

3) The Animal Game

Nero was so into being as depraved as possible — he supposedly defiled every single part of his body — that he had to think up some pretty original ways to keep it fresh.

 "[H]e at last devised a kind of game, in which, covered with the skin of some wild animal, he was let loose from a cage and attacked the private parts of men and women, who were bound to stakes, and when he had sated his mad lust, was dispatched by his freedman Doryphorus."

4) Sister-Sex

Say what you want about Caligula, but he was really, really good at incest.

"He lived in habitual incest with all his sisters, and at a large banquet he placed each of them in turn below him, while his wife reclined above." 

His sister Drusilla was his favorite, having had sex with her when he was but a boy, and when they were grown, he simply took her from her legal husband for more fun. His other sisters, he was somewhat less fond of, and thus he only often prostituted them. So he wasn’t just a sister-fucker, but a sister-pimp.

Jeeze! Louise!

5) Sex Rest Stops

Here’s an idea you’ve probably never had to make those long road trips more enjoyable: Set up stops full of prostitutes along your way! And when you do, thank Nero.

"Whenever he drifted down the Tiber to Ostia, or sailed about the Gulf of Baiae, booths were set up at intervals along the banks and shores, fitted out for debauchery, while bartering matrons played the part of inn-keepers and from every hand solicited him to come ashore." 

Better than vending machines, that’s for sure.

6) Mother-Fucking

In terms of sexual depravity, Nero even put Caligula to shame by going to the source (so to speak) and having sex with his own mother Agrippina. How did people know?

"[S]o they say, whenever he [Nero] rode in a litter with his mother, he had incestuous relations with her, which were betrayed by the stains on his clothing." 

Later, when Nero was Emperor, people tried to keep him from fucking his mother, mostly because they were afraid that would Agrippina would get too much power from the relationship.

It should probably go without saying that eventually Nero tried to murder his mother by putting her on break-apart boat, right?

7) Creating an Imperial Brothel

Caligula was fond of spending money, but not so good at making it. After depleting the coffers at one point, he had the bright idea to turn the palace into an impromptu whorehouse.

"To leave no kind of plunder untried, he opened a brothel in his palace, setting apart a number of rooms and furnishing them to suit the grandeur of the place, where matrons and freeborn youths should stand exposed. Then he sent his pages about the fora and basilicas, to invite young men and old to enjoy themselves, lending money on interest to those who came and having clerks openly take down their names, as contributors to Caesar's revenues." 

Rest assured, those who enjoyed themselves on credit eventually paid up, one way or another.

8) Part-Time Prostitution

The Emperor Elagabalus, who ruled from 203-222 AD, outdid Caligula in this regard: Elagabagus set up a brothel in the palace… and pimped himself.

"Finally, he set aside a room in the palace and there committed his indecencies, always standing nude at the door of the room, as the harlots do, and shaking the curtain which hung from gold rings, while in a soft and melting voice he solicited the passers-by. There were, of course, men who had been specially instructed to play their part. For, as in other matters, so in this business, too, he had numerous agents who sought out those who could best please him by their foulness. He would collect money from his patrons and give himself airs over his gains; he would also dispute with his associates in this shameful occupation, claiming that he had more lovers than they and took in more money." 

If only all politicians were so… flexible when it came to balancing the budget.

9) Making a Man His Wife

I’m not talking about gay marriage here, at least not really. I’m talking about Nero taking a man and “making him a woman” in the worst way possible:

"He castrated the boy Sporus and actually tried to make a woman of him; and he married him with all the usual ceremonies, including a dowry and a bridal veil, took him to his house attended by a great throng, and treated him as his wife." 

Eunuchs — when having sex with men and women just isn’t enough any more.

10) “Tiddlers”

Emperor Tiberius loved to swim, and he apparently also loved being pleasured by children. In a feat of inspiration, he managed to combine both these hobbies into one:

"...he trained little boys (whom he termed tiddlers) to crawl between his thighs when he went swimming and tease him with their licks and nibbles." 

It’s like the world’s most perverted aquarium!

11) Baby-Fucking

I’m sorry, did you think Tiberius’ “Tiddlers” were bad? He also used to get blowjobs from babies.

"Unweaned babies he would put to his organ as though to the breast, being by both nature and age rather fond of this form of satisfaction." 

What the Hell? These people are truly depraved animals.

Dishonorable Mention: Messalina

While not technically an Emperor, as wife of Claudius Messalina was an Empress, and she has the honor of having one of the earliest gangbangs in record history. And it was a contest, too!

"Messalina, the wife of Claudius Cæsar, thinking this a palm quite worthy of an empress, selected, for the purpose of deciding the question, one of the most notorious of the women who followed the profession of a hired prostitute; and the empress outdid her, after continuous intercourse, night and day, at the twenty-fifth embrace." 

Needless to say, when Claudius found out he was so depressed he ended up marrying his niece.

Oh, and had Messalina killed.

Obviously.

OK. Enough of all that Roman debauchery. It’s not my thing. It really isn’t.  I’m well beyond that. I just want to hang out. Make new friends. Drink a little and munch. So let’s get away from this subject, shall we?

Let’s get down to earth.

A Scene From Roman Life

And isn’t it pleasant?

I know that it is romanticized, but it’s awfully lovely. Isn’t it?

It makes you want to go travel there.

Actually the scene reminds me of some lakes inside of Massachusetts, that are “off the beaten path” and are quite lovely. You just walk around the lake. It would take hours, but it’s a pleasant exercise in nature, don’t you know.

It’s sort of like the movie “On Golden Pond“.

Scene from the movie “On Golden Pond”.

Speaking of ponds…

The Pond

I do love his use of color to extract scenes of tranquility, and daily life. Imagine what it must have been like back in those days. Calm, pleasant, good. Just as long as you weren’t caught up in some war or other such nonsense, your life was stable.

The women would tend to the children, instead of playing on the cell phones, watching the soap operas, or dealing with work, career and the demands of selfish relatives. In those days… ah… in those days it was much different. It was a different time.

Phryne at the Festival of Poseidon in Eleusin

What is this all about? Eh?

Phryne, (Greek: “Toad”) , byname of Mnesarete, (flourished 4th century bc), famous Greek courtesan. Because of her sallow complexion she was called by the Greek name for “toad.” 

She was born in Thespiae, Boeotia, but lived at Athens, where she earned so much by her beauty and wit that she offered to rebuild the walls of Thebes, on condition that the words “destroyed by Alexander, restored by Phryne the courtesan” were inscribed upon them.

At a festival of Poseidon and also at the festival at Eleusis she walked into the sea naked with her hair loose, suggesting to the painter Apelles his great picture of “Aphrodite Anadyomene” (“Aphrodite Rising From the Sea”), for which Phryne sat as model.

She was also (according to Athenaeus) the model for the statue of the Cnidian Aphrodite by Praxiteles, whose mistress she was; copies of the statue survive in the Vatican and elsewhere.

When accused of blasphemy (a capital charge), she was defended by the orator Hyperides.

When it seemed as if the verdict would be unfavorable, he tore her dress and displayed her bosom, which so moved the jury that they acquitted her; another version has Phryne tear her own dress and plead with each individual juror.

-Britannia

Phryne was the daughter of Epicles from Thespiae (Boeotia), but spent most of her life in Athens. Even though we don’t know the exact dates of her birth and death, various historians estimate that she was born around 371 BC, the year Thebes razed Thespiae not long after the battle of Leuctra and expelled its inhabitants.

Thanks to her extraordinary beauty, she became a model posing for various painters and sculptors, including the great Praxiteles (who was also one of her clients).

Actually, Praxiteles’s statue of Phryne was purchased by the city of Cnidus – after the city of Cos that had originally commissioned it, objected to its being nude – and became such a popular tourist attraction that the city managed to pay off its entire debt.

Phryne’s beauty also became the subject of many ancient Greek scholars, who praised her good looks, with Athenaeus providing the most details about Phryne’s life.

He mentions in his work titled The Deipnosophists,

“Phryne was a really beautiful woman, even in those parts of her person which were not generally seen: on which account it was not easy to see her naked; for she used to wear a tunic which covered her whole person, and she never used the public baths. 

But on the solemn assembly of the Eleusinian festival, and on the feast of the Poseidonia, then she laid aside her garments in the sight of all the assembled Greeks, and having undone her hair, she went to bathe in the sea; and it was from her that Apelles took his picture of Aphrodite Anadyomene; and Praxiteles the sculptor, who was a lover of hers, modelled the Aphrodite of Cnidus from her body"

Athenaeus also recorded that Phryne was possibly the richest self-made woman of her time. She became so vastly rich at some point of her life that she offered to fund the rebuilding of the walls of Thebes, which had been destroyed by Alexander the Great in 336 BC.

She demanded that the words “Destroyed by Alexander, restored by Phryne the courtesan” would be inscribed on the walls.

Intimidated of the idea that a woman – and for that matter not just any woman, but a prostitute – could rebuild what Alexander the Great had destroyed, Phryne’s offer was rejected by the town’s patriarchs and the walls remained in ruin.

Despite her “divine” looks, incredible wealth, and famous lovers, what immortalized Phryne in the history books is undoubtedly her famous trial.

Athenaeus writes that she was prosecuted for a capital charge and defended by the orator Hypereides, who was one of her lovers. He does not specify the nature of the charge, though some unverified historical sources ( Pseudo-Plutarch) mention that she was accused of impiety.

Even though there’s a great dispute among historians about what really happened that day in the court, one of the most credible sources (that of Athenaeus) states that Hypereides tore off Phryne’s robes in the middle of the courtroom to show the judges her beautiful breasts.

His reasoning was that only the Gods could sculpt a body so perfect and as such, killing or imprisoning her would be seen as blasphemy and disrespect to the Gods. Athenaeus mentions in The Deipnosophists,

“Now Phryne was a native of Thespiae; and being prosecuted by Euthias on a capital charge, she was acquitted: on which account Euthias was so indignant that he never instituted any prosecution afterwards, as Hermippus tells us. 

But Hypereides, when pleading Phryne's cause, as he did not succeed at all, but it was plain that the judges were about to condemn her, brought her forth into the middle of the court, and, tearing open her tunic and displaying her naked bosom, employed all the end of his speech, with the highest oratorical art, to excite the pity of her judges by the sight of her beauty, and inspired the judges with a superstitious fear, so that they were so moved by pity as not to be able to stand the idea of condemning to death "a prophetess and priestess of Aphrodite."

And when she was acquitted, a decree was drawn up in the following form:

"That hereafter no orator should endeavour to excite pity on behalf of any one, and that no man or woman, when impeached, shall have his or her case decided on while present."

What seemed as a lost case for Phryne, turned quickly into a triumph for her after the inspired act by Hypereides.

Phryne walked out the court victorious and her story went on inspiring several works of art, including the painting Phryne before the Areopagus by Jean-Léon Gérôme, from 1861, the 1904 painting Phryne, by José Frappa; the sculpture Phryné by French sculptor Alexandre Falguière; and the sculpture Phryne Before the Judges , by the American sculptor Albert Weine, from 1948.

More importantly, the famous hetaerae is seen by some scholars today as a symbol of freedom against repression disguised as piety, even though most of us will probably agree that some of her choices in life weren’t the most ideal or moral for a lady.

But on the other hand,  let it be known that the woman’s breasts were so perfect that a trial by angry old men were moved to tears at the sight of them, and thusly allowed her to go free.

Two Figures by a Statue of Sphinx

This is a study rather than a painting.

What is the difference between a study and a painting? I can only speak for my own style of working, but in general, both are original oils, but my studies are small, loose and are often the first stage in creating a larger work, which is more detailed.

Studies are the best way to test a composition, and I often use this when working  on custom oil paintings, making sure they get exactly what I want. Often I would mix the background colors to coordinate with the center images. But that is just me. I also use it to rough out the details, composition and folds in the fabrics that I am trying to paint.

I know, I know. But what of the composition and the purpose? Well, what thoughts and emotions does this painting trigger in you?

Roman Orgy in the Time of Caesars

And yet another orgy. This one from the time of the Caesars.

It’s kind of hard to pick a prominent person from the days of the Roman Empire who wasn’t a fan of drunken orgies. 

For these bacchanalia were an important part of everyday life. Still there are people like Julius Caesar who were known for their moderation, and there were some who were constantly the talk of the town because of their drunken escapades and extravagant behavior.

Emperor Tiberius, who ruled the Roman Empire for 23 years against his will, set the standard for the drunkest years Rome had ever seen.

Tiberius was born in the year 42 BC under the name Tiberius Claudius Nero and died 79 years later as Tiberius Augustus Caesar.

Roman names in the higher families changed all the time because of re-marriage, adoption or change of status. We therefor try to use as few as possible in this article to avoid confusion.

The only thing to remember here is that Tiberius was a general who was that successful in his military missions that emperor Augustus adopted him as a son. Later Tiberius married his own stepsister Julia and also became the emperor’s son-in-law. Just another day at the office in ancient Rome.

However Tiberius seemed quite different from the power hungry notables at the imperial court.

He became a national  hero with victories in Pannonia, Dalmatia, Raetia and Germania, where he discovered the source of the Danube river, but he showed no interest in political power.

Basically he preferred to party without the fear of being murdered all the time.

Tiberius was a simple guy with simple needs, which meant plenty of wine and different sex partners.

Stepfather Augustus saw his natural heir in the fighting machine, but Tiberius surprisingly retired in 6 BC and moved to the Greek island Rhodes.

…Also to get away from his wife Julia who wasn’t a big fan of him seeing other women.

Tiberius partied for ten years at Rhodes but when Augustus lost both his grandsons within 2 years the former general was called back to Rome to face his fate.

For some years he was granted the same powers as the emperor and after the death of Augustus in 14 AD Tiberius was mentioned as the sole surviving heir in his will.

From the start of his reign Tiberius showed no interest at all for the job.

He didn’t even want full power and suggested to the Senate he could rule just part of the state. In the end Tiberius couldn’t escape full responsibility, but Rome’s most powerful man refused a crown, laurels or fancy titles.

He also didn’t feel like getting involved in state business and practically let the Senate rule the empire by itself, while the new emperor honored the winegod Bacchus. Twice Tiberius tried to share some of his duties with others.

In 18 AD Tiberius gave the successful general Germanicus authority over the Eastern part of the Roman Empire and in 22 AD he shared the tribunician authority with his only son Drusus. Both however died within a year after being appointed.

In 26 AD Tiberius took it a step further and left Rome to live on the island Capri. While he turned that into a party island he basically left the Praetorian Prefect Sejanus in charge.

That is…

…until the puppet tried to overthrow his master and Tiberius had Sejanus executed in 31 AD.

If we may believe the Roman sources the emperor spent the last years of his life drinking and satisfying his perverted fantasies. While his will paved the way for a lot more chaos in Rome. If you ever considered it to be fun to write your will drunk, pay attention…

Tiberius stated that his nephew and adopted son Caligula should rule the empire together with his grandson Tiberius Gemellus. Practically the first act of Caligula was to have Tiberius Gemellus killed and seize absolute power. He then officially became the craziest Roman emperor in history, while totally proving his reputation as a sadist.

Caligula had people killed and tortured for his own sick amusement, lost a solid 2.7 billion sesterces (around 900 million dollars these days) of the family fortune and on top of all appointed his favorite horse as a member of the Senate.

By that time Tiberius wasn’t considered a national hero anymore.

There was a tradition that Roman emperors could be declared a God. Augustus for example got his divine honors after he died. But when Tiberius died people were revolting in the streets of Rome when some just mentioned this treatment.

In the end  the Senate decided Tiberius was not divine at all and he got a sober funeral.

So he wasn’t the best emperor Rome had ever known, he did initiate the drunkest years the city had ever seen as the next 4 emperors and their entourages partied their asses off. 

With that he ended a tradition of centuries in Greek-Roman culture of moderate drinking. It’s not without reason Tiberius even had a cocktail  named after him.  And therefor we say: ave Caesar, morituri te salutant, let’s get smashed!

The New Bracelet

Ah. I do miss painting. But I just don’t have the time for it. Not really. Sigh.

This is another wonderful painting. It teleports you and transports you to another time and another place.

Some of his works (paintings) are in a class by themselves. Seriously.

He really has a way to craft the deep dark, lush shade under a tree, the falling of water, and the coolness of stone. And look at these two lovely ladies. I love the posing, the attire, and the details on their clothing.

They are awe-inspiring. Such as this one…

The Future Victims of the Colosseum

What do you suppose the title and the content refer to?

With nearly two thousand years of history, there is much to know about the Roman Colosseum. The arena once witnessed bloody gladiator battles, epic hunts pitting humans against wild animals, and gruesome executions of prisoners of war and criminals.

Contrary to the popular vision of a gruesome free-for-all, gladiator fights were somewhat like contemporary boxing matches: fighters were divided into classes according to their size and fighting style, there were referees and doctors monitoring the fight, and often matches didn’t end in death. Match-ups were decided based on the experience, the record, and the styles of the fighters, and successful gladiators could become famous celebrities. Some gladiators had long careers in which they lost many fights without dying. However, this doesn’t mean they were bloodless, they were simply less chaotic than is often imagined. A very large number of gladiators did perish in the arena.

And they had violent half-time shows.

The enormous arena was empty, save for the seesaws and the dozens of condemned criminals who sat naked upon them, hands tied behind their backs. Unfamiliar with the recently invented contraptions known as petaurua, the men tested the seesaws uneasily. One criminal would push off the ground and suddenly find himself 15 feet in the air while his partner on the other side of the seesaw descended swiftly to the ground. How strange

In the stands, tens of thousands of Roman citizens waited with half-bored curiosity to see what would happen next and whether it would be interesting enough to keep them in their seats until the next part of the "big show" began. 

With a flourish, trapdoors in the floor of the arena were opened, and lions, bears, wild boars and leopards rushed into the arena. The starved animals bounded toward the terrified criminals, who attempted to leap away from the beasts' snapping jaws. But as one helpless man flung himself upward and out of harm's way, his partner on the other side of the seesaw was sent crashing down into the seething mass of claws, teeth and fur. 

The crowd of Romans began to laugh at the dark antics before them. Soon, they were clapping and yelling, placing bets on which criminal would die first, which one would last longest and which one would ultimately be chosen by the largest lion, who was still prowling the outskirts of the arena's pure white sand. [See Photos of the Combat Sports Played in Ancient Rome]
And with that, another "halftime show" of damnatio ad bestias succeeded in serving its purpose: to keep the jaded Roman population glued to their seats, to the delight of the event's scheming organizer. 

Half-Time Shows

The Roman Games were the Super Bowl Sundays of their time. They gave their ever-changing sponsors and organizers (known as editors) an enormously powerful platform to promote their views and philosophies to the widest spectrum of Romans. All of Rome came to the Games: rich and poor, men and women, children and the noble elite alike. They were all eager to witness the unique spectacles each new game promised its audience.

To the editors, the Games represented power, money and opportunity. Politicians and aspiring noblemen spent unthinkable sums on the Games they sponsored in the hopes of swaying public opinion in their favor, courting votes, and/or disposing of any person or warring faction they wanted out of the way. 

The more extreme and fantastic the spectacles, the more popular the Games with the general public, and the more popular the Games, the more influence the editor could have. Because the Games could make or break the reputation of their organizers, editors planned every last detail meticulously. 

Thanks to films like "Ben-Hur" and "Gladiator," the two most popular elements of the Roman Games are well known even to this day: the chariot races and the gladiator fights. Other elements of the Roman Games have also translated into modern times without much change: theatrical plays put on by costumed actors, concerts with trained musicians, and parades of much-cared-for exotic animals from the city's private zoos. 

But much less discussed, and indeed largely forgotten, is the spectacle that kept the Roman audiences in their seats through the sweltering midafternoon heat: the blood-spattered halftime show known as damnatio ad bestias — literally "condemnation by beasts" — orchestrated by men known as the bestiarii.

Super Bowl 242 B.C: How the Games Became So Brutal

The cultural juggernaut known as the Roman Games began in 242 B.C., when two sons decided to celebrate their father's life by ordering slaves to battle each other to the death at his funeral. This new variation of ancient munera (a tribute to the dead) struck a chord within the developing republic. Soon, other members of the wealthy classes began to incorporate this type of slave fighting into their own munera. The practice evolved over time — with new formats, rules, specialized weapons, etc. — until the Roman Games as we now know them were born. 

In 189 B.C., a consul named M. Fulvius Nobilior decided to do something different. In addition to the gladiator duels that had become common, he introduced an animal act that would see humans fight both lions and panthers to the death. Big-game hunting was not a part of Roman culture; Romans only attacked large animals to protect themselves, their families or their crops. Nobilior realized that the spectacle of animals fighting humans would add a cheap and unique flourish to this fantastic new pastime. Nobilior aimed to make an impression, and he succeeded. [Photos: Gladiators of the Roman Empire]
With the birth of the first "animal program," an uneasy milestone was achieved in the evolution of the Roman Games: the point at which a human being faced a snarling pack of starved beasts, and every laughing spectator in the crowd chanted for the big cats to win, the point at which the republic's obligation to make a man's death a fair or honorable one began to be outweighed by the entertainment value of watching him die.

Twenty-two years later, in 167 B.C., Aemlilus Paullus would give Rome its first damnatio ad bestias when he rounded up army deserters and had them crushed, one by one, under the heavy feet of elephants. "The act was done publicly," historian Alison Futrell noted in her book "Blood in the Arena," "a harsh object lesson for those challenging Roman authority."

The "satisfaction and relief" Romans would feel watching someone considered lower than themselves be thrown to the beasts would become, as historian Garrett G. Fagan noted in his book "The Lure of the Arena," a "central … facet of the experience [of the Roman Games. … a feeling of shared empowerment and validation … " In those moments, Rome began the transition into the self-indulgent decadence that would come to define all that we associate with the great society's demise.

The Role of Julius Caesar

General Julius Caesar proved to be the first true maestro of the Games. He understood how these events could be manipulated to inspire fear, loyalty and patriotism, and began to stage the Games in new and ingenious ways. For example, Caesar was the first to arrange fights between recently captured armies, gaining firsthand knowledge of the fighting techniques used by these conquered people and providing him with powerful insights to aid future Roman conquests, all the while demonstrating the republic's own superiority to the roaring crowd of Romans. After all, what other city was powerful enough to command foreign armies to fight each other to the death, solely for their viewing pleasure? 

Caesar used exotic animals from newly conquered territories to educate Romans about the empire's expansion. In one of his games, "Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome" author George Jennison notes that Caesar orchestrated "a hunt of four hundred lions, fights between elephants and infantry … [and] bull fighting by mounted Thessalians." Later, the first-ever giraffes seen in Rome arrived — a gift to Caesar himself from a love-struck Cleopatra.

To execute his very specific visions, Caesar relied heavily on the bestiarii — men who were paid to house, manage, breed, train and sometimes fight the bizarre menagerie of animals collected for the Games. 

Managing and training this ever-changing influx of beasts was not an easy task for the bestiarii. Wild animals are born with a natural hesitancy, and without training, they would usually cower and hide when forced into the arena's center. For example, it is not a natural instinct for a lion to attack and eat a human being, let alone to do so in front of a crowd of 100,000 screaming Roman men, women and children! And yet, in Rome's ever-more-violent culture, disappointing an editor would spell certain death for the low-ranking bestiarii

To avoid being executed themselves, bestiarii met the challenge. They developed detailed training regimens to ensure their animals would act as requested, feeding arena-born animals a diet compromised solely of human flesh, breeding their best animals, and allowing their weaker and smaller stock to be killed in the arena. Bestiarii even went so far as to instruct condemned men and women on how to behave in the ring to guarantee a quick death for themselves — and a better show. The bestiarii could leave nothing to chance. 

As their reputations grew, bestiarii were given the power to independently devise new and even more audacious spectacles for the ludi meridiani (midday executions). And by the time the Roman Games had grown popular enough to fill 250,000-seat arenas, the work of the bestiarii had become a twisted art form. 

As the Roman Empire grew, so did the ambition and arrogance of its leaders. And the more arrogant, egotistic and unhinged the leader in power, the more spectacular the Games would become. Who better than the bestiarii to aid these despots in taking their version of the Roman Games to new, ever-more grotesque heights? 

Caligula Amplified the Cruelty

Animal spectacles became bigger, more elaborate, and more flamboyantly cruel. Damnatio ad bestias became the preferred method of executing criminals and enemies alike. So important where the bestiarii's contribution, that when butcher meat became prohibitively expensive, Emperor Caligula ordered that all of Rome's prisoners "be devoured" by the bestiarii's packs of starving animals. In his masterwork De Vita Caesarum, Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (b. 69 A.D.) tells of how Caligula sentenced the men to death "without examining the charges" to see if death was a fitting punishment, but rather by "merely taking his place in the middle of a colonnade, he bade them be led away 'from baldhead to baldhead,'"(It should also be noted that Caligula used the funds originally earmarked for feeding the animals and the prisoners to construct temples he was building in his own honor!)

To meet this ever-growing pressure to keep the Roman crowds happy and engaged by bloodshed, bestiarii were forced to consistently invent new ways to kill. They devised elaborate contraptions and platforms to give prisoners the illusion they could save themselves — only to have the structures collapse at the worst possible moments, dropping the condemned into a waiting pack of starved animals. Prisoners were tied to boxes, lashed to stakes, wheeled out on dollies and nailed to crosses, and then, prior to the animals' release, the action was paused so that bets could be made in the crowd about which of the helpless men would be devoured first. 

Perhaps most popular — as well as the most difficult to pull off — were the re-creations of death scenes from famous myths and legends. A single bestiarius might spend months training an eagle in the art of removing a thrashing man's organs (a la the myth of Prometheus).

The halftime show of damnatio ad bestias became so notorious that it was common for prisoners to attempt suicide to avoid facing the horrors they knew awaited them. Roman philosopher and statesmen Seneca recorded a story of a German prisoner who, rather than be killed in a bestiarius' show, killed himself by forcing a communally used prison lavatory sponge down his throat. One prisoner who refused to walk into the arena was placed on a cart and wheeled in; the prisoner thrust his own head between the spokes of its wheels, preferring to break his own neck than to face whatever horrors the bestiarius had planned for him.

It is in this era that Rome saw the rise of its most famous bestiarius, Carpophorus, "The King of the Beasts." 

The Rise of a Beast Master

Carpophorus was celebrated not only for training the animals that were set upon the enemies, criminals and Christians of Rome, but also for famously taking to the center of the arena to battle the most fearsome creatures himself.

He triumphed in one match that pitted him against a bear, a lion and a leopard, all of which were released to attack him at once. Another time, he killed 20 separate animals in one battle, using only his bare hands as weapons. His power over animals was so unmatched that the poet Martial wrote odes to Carpophorus.

"If the ages of old, Caesar, in which a barbarous earth brought forth wild monsters, had produced Carpophorus," he wrote in his best known work, Epigrams. "Marathon would not have feared her bull, nor leafy Nemea her lion, nor Arcadians the boar of Maenalus. When he armed his hands, the Hydra would have met a single death; one stroke of his would have sufficed for the entire Chimaera. He could yoke the fire-bearing bulls without the Colchian; he could conquer both the beasts of Pasiphae. If the ancient tale of the sea monster were recalled, he would release Hesione and Andromeda single-handed. Let the glory of Hercules' achievement be numbered: it is more to have subdued twice ten wild beasts at one time."

To have his work compared so fawningly to battles with some of Rome’s most notorious mythological beast sheds some light on the astounding work Carpophorus was doing within the arena, but he gained fame as well for his animal work behind the scenes. Perhaps most shockingly, it was said that he was among the few bestiarii who could command animals to rape human beings, including bulls, zebras, stallions, wild boars and giraffes, among others. This crowd-pleasing trick allowed his editors to create ludi meridiani that could not only combine sex and death but also claim to be honoring the god Jupiter. After all, in Roman mythology, Jupiter took many animal forms to have his way with human women. 

Historians still debate how common of an occurrence public bestiality was at the Roman Games — and especially whether forced bestiality was used as a form of execution — but poets and artists of the time wrote and painted about the spectacle with a shocked awe. 

"Believe that Pasiphae coupled with the Dictaean bull!" Martial wrote. "We've seen it! The Ancient Myth has been confirmed! Hoary antiquity, Caesar, should not marvel at itself: whatever Fame sings of, the arena presents to you."

The 'Gladiator' Commodus

The Roman Games and the work of the bestiarii may have reached their apex during the reign of Emperor Commodus, which began in 180 AD. By that time, the relationship between the emperors and the Senate had disintegrated to a point of near-complete dysfunction. The wealthy, powerful and spoiled emperors began acting out in such debauched and deluded ways that even the working class "plebs" of Rome were unnerved. But even in this heightened environment, Commodus served as an extreme.

Having little interest in running the empire, he left most of the day-to-day decisions to a prefect, while Commodus himself indulged in living a very public life of debauchery. His harem contained 300 girls and 300 boys (some of whom it was said had so bewitched the emperor as he passed them on the street that he felt compelled to order their kidnapping). But if there was one thing that commanded Commodus' obsession above all else, it was the Roman Games. He didn't just want to put on the greatest Games in the history of Rome; he wanted to be the star of them, too. 

Commodus began to fight as a gladiator. Sometimes, he arrived dressed in lion pelts, to evoke Roman hero Hercules; other times, he entered the ring absolutely naked to fight his opponents. To ensure a victory, Commodus only fought amputees and wounded soldiers (all of whom were given only flimsy wooden weapons to defend themselves). In one dramatic case recorded in Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Commodus ordered that all people missing their feet be gathered from the Roman streets and be brought to the arena, where he commanded that they be tethered together in the rough shape of a human body. Commodus then entered the arena's center ring, and clubbed the entire group to death, before announcing proudly that he had killed a giant. 

But being a gladiator wasn't enough for him. Commodus wanted to rule the halftime show as well, so he set about creating a spectacle that would feature him as a great bestiarius. He not only killed numerous animals — including lions, elephants, ostriches and giraffes, among others, all of which had to be tethered or injured to ensure the emperor's success — but also killed bestiarii whom he felt were rivals (including Julius Alexander, a bestiarius who had grown beloved in Rome for his ability to kill an untethered lion with a javelin from horseback). Commodus once made all of Rome sit and watch in the blazing midday sun as he killed 100 bears in a row — and then made the city pay him 1 millions esterces (ancient Roman coins) for the (unsolicited) favor.

By the time Commodus demanded the city of Rome be renamed Colonia Commodiana ("City of Commodus") — Scriptores Historiae Augustae, noted that not only did the Senate "pass this resolution, but … at the same time [gave] Commodus the name Hercules, and [called] him a god" — a conspiracy was already afoot to kill the mad leader. A motley crew of assassins — including his court chamberlain, Commodus' favorite concubine, and "an athlete called Narcissus, who was employed as Commodus' wrestling partner" — joined forces to kill him and end his unhinged reign. His death was supposed to restore balance and rationality to Rome — but it didn't. By then, Rome was broken — bloody, chaotic and unable to stop its death spiral. 

In an ultimate irony, reformers who stood up to oppose the culture's violent and debauched disorder were often punished by death at the hands of the bestiarii, their deaths cheered on by the very same Romans whom they were trying to protect and save from destruction. 

The Death of the Games and the Rise of Christianity

As the Roman Empire declined, so did the size, scope and brutality of its Games. However, it seems fitting that one of the most powerful seeds of the empire's downfall could be found within its ultimate sign of contempt and power — the halftime show of damnatio ad bestias

Early Christians were among the most popular victims in ludi meridiani. The emperors who condemned these men, women and children to public death by beasts did so with the obvious hope that the spectacle would be so horrifying and humiliating that it would discourage any other Romans from converting to Christianity.

Little did they realize that the tales of brave Christians facing certain death with grace, power and humility made them some of the earliest martyr stories. Nor could they have imagined that these oft-repeated narratives would then serve as invaluable tools to drive more people toward the Christian faith for centuries to come. 

In the end, who could have ever imagined that these near-forgotten "halftime shows" might prove to have a more lasting impact on the world than the gladiators and chariot races that had overshadowed the bestiarii for their entire existence?

Read more from Aptowicz in her Expert Voices essay, "Surgery in a Time Before Anesthesia."

Thousands of people perished in the Colosseum over the years, and some of them were undoubtedly Christian, however there is no conclusive historical evidence to support the connection between stories of Christian martyrs and the Colosseum.

Nero’s Torches (Christian Candlesticks)

The allegorical and historical aspects to some of these paintings are stunning. Who cannot be moved by this painting. look at the expressions of all of the people. Look at their roles, and how they view the spectacle. Look at the slaves, both men and women. Look the ignorant and rude leadership.

It reminds me of Washington DC today.

Henryk Siemiradzki’s large Nero’s Torches or Christian Candlesticks from 1876 shows the emperor reclining under an elaborate canopy as a line of Christians are about to be burned alive for his entertainment.

Nero never had progressive policies when it came to Christians, but he got really hard on them after the Great Fire of Rome. When the people began turning against Nero, he used Christians as a scapegoat to get the heat off himself.

Christians were blamed for the fire and slaughtered en masse. But the really terrifying part was how they were killed. Slaughtering Christians was a spectacle that people would attend and cheer.

During parties, Nero would nail Christians to crosses and burn them alive as a source of light when the Sun went down. While his victims screamed and suffered, Nero would walk about in a chariot rider’s uniform making small talk with his guests.

So, Nero blamed the Christians for the fire. And everyone was satisfied. So how did he rebuild the city, you might ask?

One of Nero’s greatest accomplishments was building the Domus Aurea, a golden pleasure palace the likes of which the world had never seen. It was a massive building overlaid with gold, ivory, and mother-of-pearl. It was guarded by a 37-meter-tall (120 ft) statue of himself. It even had panels in the ceiling that would let a rain of flowers and perfume fall on his guests.

So what was it used for? Orgies, of course! Reportedly, people in the palace would eat until they vomited and then couple for massive sex parties while rose petals fell on them from above.

All the decadence might have been forgivable—except that Nero built his sex palace right after the Great Fire of Rome when people needed aid. The Domus Aurea was viewed as a symbol of his selfishness and, shortly after his death, was stripped of all its gold.

Italian Courtyard

Moving away from ancient Rome. Here’s a picture of what Italy become one thousand years later…

History. Art. Perspective. Understanding.

We all need to have it.

By a Temple (Idyll)

I love this picture. It just depicts some women and children outside a temple with large tree-like shrubbery. There’s many aspects of this painting that appeals to me. Much of the imagery inspires memories of other adventures and travels that I have embarked upon in my past.

Of course, I love the style, the layout, and the historical subject matter. Were I to own a nice large mansion, this painting would hang in one of my hallways. It’s not a central theme, but quaint, pleasant and tender. With great imagery and perfect implementation.

A Persecutor of Christians at the Entrance to the Catacombs

The persecution of Christians occurred throughout most of the Roman Empire's history, beginning in the 1st century AD. Originally a polytheistic empire in the traditions of Roman paganism and the Hellenistic religion, as Christianity spread through the empire, it came into ideological conflict with the imperial cult of ancient Rome. 

Pagan practices such as making sacrifices to the deified emperors or other gods were abhorrent to Christians as their beliefs prohibited idolatry.

The state and other members of civic society punished Christians for treason, various rumored crimes, illegal assembly, and for introducing an alien cult that led to Roman apostasy.

-Wikipedia

The persecution of Christians has a long history, starting in 64 AD until the fourth century, ending with the Edict of Milan in 313 AD. With the advent and spread of the new religion across the Roman Empire, the persecution against Christians has also emerged.

Christians were considered worshipers of a pagan, foreign god – as they refused making a sacrifice to the Roman gods and outside the society. Nero was the first and one of the most cruel persecutors – he was the emperor who set Rome on fire, blaming the Christians, who were immediately declared as enemies of the human race, threatening the life of the people, of the emperor and the Roman state.

The martyrs of this period who remained in the memory of humanity were Saints Peter and Paul.

After a short period of peace between Christians and worshipers of the ancient gods, the persecution of Christians returns in 90, with the coming to the throne of Domitian (Domitianus). The emperor Domitian, in order to help the public treasury of the Empire, imposed the paying of a Jewish Tax for Jews and Christians – who are guided by the Old Testament.

But the Christians refuse to pay this unfair tax, giving the emperor an impetus to start the persecution. Upper class Christians were exiled, and the ordinary Christians (the mass of the population) were barbarously tortured and executed.

This time, what was the crime the Christians were found guilty for, the crime of which they were accused? Atheism – because, as mentioned before, they refused to worship the pagan gods of the Empire. The martyrs –such as St. John the Evangelist – were subjected to horrific torture, then exiled or executed by crucifixion or burning at the stake.

After another short period of peace, the persecution of Christians starts again, under Emperor Trajan, from 98 AD until 117 AD. Christians refusing to deny (renounce) their faith and worship Roman gods had to be tortured and killed. The martyrs of this period who remained in the memory of humanity were St. Simon – who was crucified and St. Ignatius of Antioch – who was devoured by lions.

The persecution of Christians also continues under the reign of Septimius Severus, from 202 until 211, during which numerous martyrs were horribly murdered: they were thrown to the lions, leopards or bears. Especially new Christians (new converts to Christianity) have suffered, but the old Christians were relatively tolerated. After another short period of peace and tranquility, Maximinus Thrax, since 235, brutally attacked the entire Christian community.

Then, the persecution of Christians stopped for a while, especially with the reign of Philip the Arab, from 244 until 249, the first Christian emperor of the Roman Empire. But peace didn’t last long: in 249, Emperor Decius  starts the persecution of all Christians again, as they didn’t want to renounce their faith and embrace the official religion.

There was other persecution under the reign of Valerianus, in 257, in order to steal the riches and wealth of Christians, and also the Church riches and properties. The rule of this emperor only lasted a year, and his son, Galilenus, came to the throne. He gave an imperial edict regarding tolerance toward Christians (Edict of Toleration), returning them the confiscated possessions and properties.

Persecution of Christians experienced a sad flourish under the Emperor Diocletian (from 284 to 305). Diocletian commanded churches to be destroyed, burned all the Christian books and denied Christians their right to perform public functions in the Roman Empire.

It became a crime punishable by death to refuse to worship the pagan gods and lower class Christians were enslaved. This persecution continues with Galerius; he ordered mass murder of all Christians – regardless of their social condition – and the burning of Holy See archives. Towards the end of his life, seriously ill, this cruel emperor gave an Edict of Toleration.

The persecution of Christians ended with the rule of Emperor Constantine the Great, who in 312 issued an edict of toleration for Christianity. The following year, this edict becomes an Edict of freedom of Christian worship. Constantine was perhaps the most important political figure who came to the aid of the new religion: after he came to power he immediately prohibited any persecution of Christians, also imposing the restitution of their previously seized (confiscated) properties and wealth. Constantine supported the church and subsidized it from public funds, granting privileges to the clergy.

In 312, Constantine the Great converted to Christianity, giving up the worship of pagan gods and in 337 – when his health began to deteriorate – he was baptized. But Constantine the Great considered himself a servant of God even before his conversion to Christianity.

At the Source

This is a lovely painting. We see three young gals, unmarred gathering water for their individual families, all looking at another boy. A boy, don’t you know, their age and herding goats. What are this girls thinking about, do you suppose?

All in all, it’s a lovely pastoral scene.

Night on the Eve of Ivan Kupala

On the eve of Ivan Kupala Day. Ivan Kupala Day or Kupala Night is enthusiastically celebrated in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus on the night of 7 July. The celebration relates to the summer solstice when nights are the shortest and includes a number of Pagan rituals. The Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian name of this holiday combinesIvan” (John — the Baptist) and Kupala which is related to a word derived from the Slavic word for bathing, which is cognate.

-Ivan Kupala Day - All Russia, Russian culture

Another lovely painting. The date and holiday is meaningless to those outside of Russia, but the feelings and emotions that are conveyed by it are wonderful.

Fishing

He (the artist) has some absolutely spellbinding and amazing work. This is one of his best (in my humble opinion). It shows a woman and child trying to fish in a nearby pond or river. I really enjoy the shadows that color the environment, and the calmness of the entire scene.

You can almost hear the insects making their sounds, the occasional lap of the water against the shore, and smell the hot sun on the leaves and woody trees. It is an absolutely lovely work.

A Woman or a Vase

And yet, here is another one of my newly discovered favorites. This is more than awesome. It is magnificent. Everything about this painting is first class. From the subject matter, to the painting style, to the painted emotions shown on the frozen faces to the composition. This is just stunning.

What is he doing? Trading a woman for the vase? Deciding on which to buy… a female slave or a vase? We don’t know. But we see the emotions and the expressions on all their faces. And that all tell us everything that we need to know.

In those days, when the empire of Rome was strong, or the empire of Persia (it really didn’t matter what the empire’s name was), they engaged in slavery. Oh it was crude and in your face. But slavery was accepted, and it became part of the lifestyle of those inside of Rome.

Much like it is accepted inside of America today. For after all the 13th Amendment didn’t really ban slavery. It only changed it’s name. The actual text of the amendment reads…

And there you have it. You are a De Facto slave in the United States if you are a felon. The 13th Amendment states:

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

But it is more than that. Moat American are functional slaves and Paul Craig Roberts explains

If slavery was such an evil, why did Congress resurrect slavery with the 16th Amendment in 1909 and the states ratify it in 1913?  To understand what I mean, ask yourself what is the definition of a slave?  A slave is a person who does not own his own labor or the products of his labor. If you are subject to an income tax, you do not own your own labor.

Part of a slave’s work goes to his own maintenance.  Otherwise, if he is not fed, clothed, housed, and his health attended to, his owner loses his labor.  The rest of his labor could be appropriated by his owner to cover the cost of the slave’s purchase and to turn a profit.  For a 19th century slave in the US the tax rate was approximately 50%.  For a medieval serf, the tax rate was lower as he had less technology and therefore was less productive.  A medieval serf could not reproduce if his tax rate exceeded 30%, or such was the view years ago when I studied the medieval economy.  Unlike a slave, a serf was not bought and sold.  He was attached to the land.  Like a slave, he was taxed in terms of his labor.  The lord of the manor had use rights in the serfs’ labor, and the serfs had use rights in the land.

Formerly serfs were free farmers.  After the collapse of Roman power, they had no protection against Viking, Saracen, and Magyar raiders.  To survive they provided labor to a chieftian  who constructed a walled tower and maintained fighting men.  In the event of raids, serfs had a redoubt to which to flee for protection.  In effect, serfs paid a defense tax.  They exchanged a percentage of their labor for protection.  Serfdom became an established institution and continued long after the raids had stopped.  In England serfdom was ended by the Enclosures which stripped serfs of their use rights in land and created a free labor market.

Consider the US income tax.  When President Reagan was elected the tax rate on investment income was 70%.  The top tax rate on wages and salaries was 50%.  In other words, the privileged (mainly white) rich were taxed at the same rate as 19th century black slaves.

How is an American on whose labor the government has a claim a free man?  Clearly, he is not a free man.  We can say that there is a difference between a present day American and a slave, because the government only owns a percentage of his labor and not the person himself–unless the person does not pay his taxes, in which case he can be imprisoned and his labor hired out to private companies who pay the prison for the use of the prisoner’s labor.

And there I go again, getting off on a tangent.

At the Source

A lovely painting about a family. What a nice painting to hang on a living room wall. Wouldn’t you think?

This is an ideal. I know that. But it is lovely and isn’t that the kind of imagery that you want to have around your home? I know that I do. I want happy and meaningful characteristics of my life surrounding me. That’s family, friends, good food and drink, a stress-free environment, and happy times.

Corsairs

The term corsair is tied to the Mediterranean Sea, where, from roughly the late 14th century to the early 19th century, the Ottoman Empire dueled with the Christian states of Europe for maritime supremacy. On both sides, the struggle was waged with both conventional navies and state-sanctioned sea bandits called corsairs.

-Pirates, Privateers, Corsairs, Buccaneers

The Corsair Aces are the Master thieves of the Corsairs and leading teams of Bandits and Thugs, under the eye of the Overlord and the Vanguard of the Corsairs. They are adept at many different skills involving their chosen profession, and would be called upon to do very hard tasks that others wouldn’t otherwise attempt.

Or at least that the common narrative that is used in action computer games of this nature.

The truth is that they performed a task for their respective governments. Out-sourced as we call it today. And they led colorful lives that consisted of routine boredom, and occasional pitched fights that always involved danger.

Here we see a cabal of raiders with their loot. Captives to be sold off as slaves or put up for ransom, and booty in all forms, shapes and sizes.

(It) makes for a great conversation piece, wouldn’t you think?

Alexander the Great and Physician Philip of Acarnania

During the expedition and campaign across Asia, Alexander and his army had been involved in a lot of circumstances that deserved the attention of some professionals of the medicine.

The relationship between Alexander’s army and the Physicians is complex, and it is also a question to observe if there were in the army something like a medical unit. Nevertheless, the links between the Argeads and the practice of healing and medical arts and the professionals of medicine seems to have been usual in the Macedonian court.

So, Alexander’s episodes concerning his illness, and especially his abilities to heal or to help someone to be healed can be considered as a clue of the king’s connections with Asclepius, and even more, of Alexander’s use of this links to portrait himself as a healer, and in some way even as an incarnation of Asclepios, in his own way to divinization.

In Antiquity, nothing was left to chance in a military campaign, where soldiers shared space with a long list of members of the entourage of the generals, such as philosophers, artists, seers, physicians…

But along with these, there were other figures like assistants, bartenders, prostitutes, wheelwrights, squires, sons/daughters and women of soldiers, and so on, ad infinitum.

We can guess that the non-combatant collective in a military expedition would be equal or superior in number to that of the soldiers.

Dance Among Swords

The hassapikos, or butchers dance, of Turkey and ancient and modern Greece—now a communal social dancewas in the Middle Ages a battle mime with swords performed by the butchers’ guild, which adopted it from the military.

-
sword dance | Description, History, & Facts | Britannica

The study and practice of sword wielding has been developing for over 4,000 years and continues to fascinate. Its mastery demands a great deal of a person’s physical and spiritual capacity.

Like any sport, mastering the art of wielding the sword requires extensive physical training which also trains one’s perceptions and reactions, allowing for quick responses to any situation – a valuable skill for self-defense.

Finally, one of the most important aspects of the art of the sword frequently quoted in ancient sources seems to be its moral value, as the practitioner would need to learn patience, perseverance, and humility, enhancing one’s physical and spiritual life, thus placing the practice firmly between the realms of spirituality and defense.

Sword dancing has found its place in many different cultures. In Asia, the sword dance is often used for plot descriptions and characterization in Chinese opera. In Pakistan and Nepal, military dances are still commonly performed for weddings and other occasions. In India, the Paika Akhada (“warrior school”) previously used to train Odisha warriors, is performed in the streets during festivals. Sword dances are also performed all over Europe, particularly in areas corresponding to the boundaries of what used to be the Holy Roman Empire.

As the ancient Greeks were very effective in collecting and adapting the best from surrounding cultures, it was likely that the Greeks inherited their strong dancing tradition from Crete which was conquered by Greece around 1500 BCE.

For the ancient Greeks, wine-making, music and dance were activities which marked a civilized and educated person.

I guess that I am quite civilized by Ancient Greek standards, eh?

Therefore, learning to dance was considered a necessary part of any education which favored an appreciation of beauty, and it would have been normal for children to learn to dance at a very young age.

The art of dance is frequently mentioned in the Homeric poems. In the Odyssey , the suitors of Penelope amuse themselves with music and dancing and Odysseus himself is entertained at the court of Alcinous with the exhibitions of very skillful dancers.

However, as with many of the terms familiar to us today, it is important to understand that the definition of “dance” for the ancients may have been slightly different from our current interpretation.

For the ancient Greeks, the term “dance” included all expressions and actions of the body that suggest ideas. These ideas ranged from acrobatic performances, mimetic action to even marching.

Therefore, the definition of dance encompassed a broader range than aesthetic or symbolic movements that are more familiar to us today. This philosophy, combined with lively imaginations, paved the way for the use of many subjects for various kinds of dances – including combat.

The invention of military dances was attributed to Athena.  Plato, in Laws, mentions the sword-dance of the Kouretes in Krete, the Dioskouroi in Lakedaimon and in Athens, identifying them as features of cults of the Kouretes, Dioskuroi and Athena.

“Our Virgin-Lady Parthenos Athena, gladdened by the pastime of the dance, deemed it not seemly to sport with empty hands, but rather to tread the measure vested in full panoply. These examples would well become the boys and girls to copy, and so cultivate the favor of the goddess, alike for service in war and for use at festivals.”

To celebrate Athena during festivals dedicated to her worship, Athenians would perform the Pyrrhic dance. It was a male coming-of-age initiation ritual linked to a warrior victory celebration.

Dancer on a Tightrope

Here’s another curious artwork. In fact, the uniqueness of it makes it stand apart from the millions of other works. In fact, I would say that this would become a conversation piece no matter where it was hung.

Tightrope walking, also called funambulism, is the skill of walking along a thin wire or rope. Its earliest performance has been traced to Ancient Greece . [7] It is commonly associated with the circus.

-History

The act of rope walking has been documented in some form or other since at least the time of ancient Greece and Rome. (And that’s just what we know of! It is theorized that ropes and fibers have been in existence since at least 32,000 BC, if not longer!)

Rope walkers used ropes simply anchored at each end, with no guy wires and no pole for stabilization. (This was the only way to perform aerial acts until 1800, when steel cable was invented.)

The ancient Greeks were fascinated by rope-walking (though they likely attributed the skills of rope walkers to magic more than technique), and had four different words for rope-walkers:

  • the Oribat dances on the rope,
  • the Neurobat sets his rope at great heights, the Schoenobat flies down the rope and, the Acrobat does acrobatics on the rope.

In 260 BC Censor Messala did away with these distinctions, uniting them into a single word: funambulus [funambule], [from funis, a rope, and ambulare, to walk.]

 

Many different kinds of balancing acts already existed, including aesthetic dance movements and satiric routines.

Rope-walkers, together with members of the Senate, wore white to indicate that they required the special protection of the Gods. Although they were highly respected, the Greek’s fascination with rope walkers is the very reason why rope walking was excluded from the Olympics and other public games. Because of this, rope-walkers slowly started to fall into the classification of performers rather than gymnasts, and they often became the providence of jesters and other entertainers.

Sjesta patrycjusza

The Patrician’s Siesta. I tell you that this is just another one of his most extraordinary paintings that I would be proud to have grace my walls. It is just an amazing work that speaks to me.

To appreciate why I love it so, check out this description of what a Patrician was and came into being. From HERE.

The 4th century BCE Greek philosopher Aristotle once wrote in his essay Politics, “If liberty and equality…are chiefly to be found in democracy, they will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the utmost.” Regrettably for Rome, when the Etruscan king was finally ousted in 509 BCE, the aristocratic families of the city – the patricians – seized control of the government and created a republic, but a republic in name only. The noble patricians considered themselves privileged and better capable of ruling; certain people were born to lead and others were destined to follow. The majority of the citizens, the plebians, were denied any part in how, or by whom, they were ruled.

During the rule of the Etruscan kings, the patricians (the word comes from the Latin patres meaning “fathers”) owned most of the land, and while there were many wealthy plebians (a word meaning “the many”), a handful of patrician families rose to become advisors and warlords to the king, although some historians argue that even the king may not have always been a patrician. For decades to come, all patrician families could trace their ancestry to these original clans. Among these were the Claudii, the Julii or the Cornelii. This natural born right, the right to govern, became hereditary and thereby allowed the patricians to distinguish themselves from those they considered a lower class. With the advent of the republic, the patricians sought to maintain this hold on governmental power.

This new government was truly unique and, in all appearances, representative. There was a centuriate assembly or Comitia Centuriate, a Senate, and two co-consuls. The latter were elected by the assembly for a one-year term but had the power of a king. All of this was open only to the patricians and only concerned their welfare. This extreme authority allowed them to sustain both their economic and political status, but this was not the only method used to suppress the plebians. Another way was through the priesthood – something they would control for years to come. Religion had always been an integral part of a Roman citizen’s life, and one method of suppressing any possible rebellion among the plebians was for the patricians to maintain their role as the “gatekeepers to the gods.” They dominated both the college of priests and the position of pontifex maximus. The patricians simply claimed to have special knowledge of the gods and therefore served as custodians of religious law with authority to punish offenders.

Unfortunately for the patricians, this dominance would and could not last. There had always been little, if any, relationship between the two classes – by law they were even forbidden to intermarry. The patricians gradually began to lose control when many of the more wealthy plebians wished to secure some voice in the government, threatening, more than once, to leave Rome. As the majority of the Roman citizenry, the plebians were a diverse group. They were the urban poor, wealthy farmers, tradesmen, as well as the core of the Republican army. The menial positions of tradesman or craftsman were never considered a job for a patrician; he believed he was better suited for leadership positions in politics, law, or the army. However, the patricians realized they needed the plebians more than the plebians need them and decided to relinquish some, but not all, authority. Unfortunately, this battle between the two classes would continue for decades to come. 

This threat to abandon the city eventually brought about a compromise: the Conflict or Struggle of Orders, an agreement between the two classes that allowed the plebians to have a voice in government. The Concilium Plebis or Council of the Plebs, a legislative assembly that would make laws relative to the concerns of the plebians, was created in 494 BCE. Over two centuries later, in 287 BCE, the Lex Hortensia was passed, making all laws enacted by the plebian assembly binding to all citizens, patricians included. Initially, two officials or tribunes were elected by the Council to act on behalf of the plebians, but this number was later increased to ten. However, the creation of the Council was not enough. Without any law code in place, the plebians feared possible abuses by the patricians, so a series of laws, the Twelve Tables, was enacted in 450 BCE. These laws proved to be the foundation for Roman justice; one law that remained,  and was later discarded, was the prohibition against intermarriage between the two classes.

The Roman author and historian Livy wrote in his History of Rome of the patricians’ concern for maintaining the purity of their class:

… a tribune of the plebs, introduced a law with regard to the intermarriage of patricians and plebeians. The patricians considered that their blood would be contaminated by it and the special rights of the houses thrown into confusion. Then the plebeians … brought in a measure empowering the people to elect consuls from the plebeians or the patricians as they chose. The patricians believed that, if this were carried, the supreme power would not only be degraded … but would entirely pass away from the chief men in the State into the hands of the plebs. 

This latter concern was not so easily dismissed by either side. Gradually, as time passed, laws were relaxed, allowing plebians to become consuls, the first one elected in 367 BCE.

As the plebians began to obtain more and more control of their own government, several of them rose to the level of a dictator, a position that allowed an individual to assume supreme power in times of an emergency. Tiberius Gracchus, a 2nd century BCE tribune whose mother was a patrician, proposed land should be given freely to the poor and unemployed farmers, an idea not widely popular to many of the wealthy patricians in the Senate. Tiberius was killed, along with 300 of his followers. His brother Gaius would fair no better. In 81 BCE, Sulla, another tribune, rose to power, also assuming the title of dictator. One of his first moves was to eliminate all opposition, executing over 1500 patricians, although some chose to commit suicide in order to allow their families to keep their wealth; an executed individual would have relinquished all wealth to Sulla.

As time passed the patrician class still maintained some influence within the government, largely due to their wealth and land ownership. Unfortunately, the old idea of birthright changed; identity with the old clans was no longer valid. Julius Caesar established new patricians from the plebian class in order to strengthen his power. Emperor Augustus also named new patrician families in an attempt to create a revitalized sense of morality within the empire, along with loyalty to the state cults. He reestablished the old priestly colleges (naming himself pontifex maximus) and rebuilt old temples and shrines. And, while the patrician class would exist long into the Byzantine Empire, it was not the same as the small group of families who established the Republic. Emperor Constantine would use the term “patrician” only as a title. The original patricians’ attempt at controlling the power within the Republic had been short-lived, for the plebians chose to rise up and demand a voice. As Aristotle stated, a democracy or a republic can only truly exist when all people participate.

…As we watch the United States start to go up in flames, let’s all remember a little bit about history, shall we?

Kurtyna Teatru Wielkiego we Lwowie

Curtain of the Grand Theater in Lviv.

At the end of the 19 th century, Lviv was the capital of Galicia province, which belonged to Austro-Hungarian Empire. Grand Theatre, as it was called, should have emphasized the greatness of the city and became the center of cultural life. The project was designed by one of the most prominent architects, Zygmunt Gorgolewski. Such ambitious building required an appropriate location.

-History of Lviv Opera House

Gorgolewski chose as its location the very heart of the old city, which posed the problem of being densely populated, overcrowded, and lacking the space for such a monumental project. To overcome this challenge, he endeavored to enclose a part of the Poltva river and build over it, employing Europe’s first example of a reinforced concrete base instead of a traditional foundation. During the construction phase and its first few years at the turn of the century, the opera house slowly sank into the Poltva. However, by the time Gorgolewski died suddenly of heart failure in 1906, the Lviv Opera had settled permanently.

Check out this quote…

“We were amazed with the with magnificent stage curtain at that performance. I have never seen it before in the Lviv Opera. Its story is just unbelievable! 

Now check out this photograph. Does it look familiar? Amazing! Eh?

Dangerous Lesson

And indeed, it certainly looks dangerous. Yikes!

Design of a Curtain For the Theater Juliusz Slowacki in Krakow

“We were strolling along the old city wall when all of a sudden we came across this structure. It’s beautiful with the garden on the side. It looks almost like one of those palaces one sees in many European cities. It’s built in the Baroque style in 1893, so it’s less old than one would think. We didn’t go inside.”

They should have.

Yes. And guess who painted the stage curtain backdrop?

Dice Game

A dice game. Curious. maybe dangerous. You never know.

But it has been my experience that many girls like to play dice with you. Just don’t get too drunk in the process.

Christian Dirce

Nero watching how a captive Christian woman is killed in a re-enactment of the Greek myth of Dirce.

Of the Dirce (spring) DIRKE (Dirce) was the Naiad-nymph of the spring of Dirke near Thebes in Boiotia (central Greece). 

Her waters were sacred to the god Dionysos.

Dirke was originally the wife of King Lykos (Lycus) of Thebes who, as punishment for the mistreatment of her niece Antiope, was tied to a wild bull and torn limb from limb.

-
DIRCE (Dirke) - ThebanNaiadNymphofGreekMythology

The Roman event was intended to display this saga…

In Thebes, Antiope was still a prisoner of her uncle. While he was content to punish her with isolation and the loss of her status and reputation, his wife Dirce was far more cruel.

Dirce was jealous of the younger woman’s beauty and feared for her own position within the household. She had Antiope tied up and treated her as a slave.

Antiope remained a prisoner for many years, constantly mistreated and taunted by Dirce. One day, however, the ropes that bound her hands and feet magically loosened.

Zeus had intervened, invisibly untying the knots that had kept Antiope a prisoner for years. He guided her to Eleutherae, a city at the base of Mount Cithaeron.

Antiope escaped to the village and took shelter with a family that included two sons. One dutifully tended to their flocks while the other practiced music on a beautiful lyre.

The lyre had been a gift from Hermes, sent to Zeus to his mortal son. Antiope had been guided to the very home where her sons had grown up, unaware of their full lineage or that their guest was, in fact, their lost mother.

Antiope remained at the shepherd’s home, not knowing that she was living side by side with the twin sons who had been taken from her years before. Their life was peaceful and happy, until she was discovered by Dirce.

Dirce was a devotee of Dionysus and had come to Eleutherae to take part in a festival in his honor. A wild bull was to be sacrificed to Dionysus by his most devoted servants.

While the sacrifice was being prepared, Dirce saw Antiope among the crowd. She immediately decided to be rid of the troublesome princess once and for all.

She ordered two young men standing nearby to capture the woman and tie her to the horns of the wild bull. Of course, those two young men were none other than Amphion and Zethus.

They moved to obey the order immediately. Although the ordeal would almost certainly kill their guest, they had no power to disobey the orders of a queen.

They were stopped, however, by the old shepherd who had raised them. He had recognized Antiope as the girl who had given birth to the twins, but kept the secret to protect them all.

Now, however, he told the twins the truth about their lineage. Antiope was their mother and the current king and queen of Thebes were the ones who had separated them.

The twins instead turned in Dirce. As retribution for her treatment of their mother and the near-murder she had asked them to take part in, they bound her to the bull’s horns instead.

Not satisfied, they hoped to avenge their mother by killing their uncle as well. Hermes interfered, however, to stop them from killing the king.

Lycus was forced to step down as king, both in recognition of his nephews’ claims to power and to avoid a violent end. He went into exile and Amphion and Zethus took his place as rulers of Thebes.

Road to the Shrine. The Greek Merchant

An everyday event. You can see this commonly in China. Small vendors display their wares and products on a mat so that passers-by can select and buy a trifle or two. It’s a nice relaxing image, taken and portrayed in a most classical way. I really enjoy this painting, the imagery, the colors and the composition.

Take special note of his shadow work. Truly amazing!

Socrates Finds his Student Alcibiades at Heterai

Hetaira—or hetaera—is the ancient Greek word for a type of highly skilled prostitute or courtesan.

The daughters and wives of Athenian citizens were sheltered from men and most serious education at least partly in order to assure their suitability as citizen wives. Adult female companionship at drinking parties (the famous symposium) could be supplied by a high priced prostitute—or hetaira. Such women might be accomplished musicians, rich, well-educated, and agreeable companions.

Pericles—one of the most important leaders of his time—had a mistress named Aspasia of Miletus. Due to her status as a foreigner, she may have been doomed to become a hetaira. At the time, those who were not native citizens of Athens were unable to marry Athenian citizens. Her life was likely the richer for it, however.

Other hetairai (hetairai is a plural form of hetaira) provided funds for civic improvements.

According to an article from the Perseus Digital Library titled, “The Representation Of Prostitutes Versus Respectable Women On Ancient Greek Vases:”

"These women were essentially sexual entertainers and often had artistic skills. Hetairai had physical beauty but also had intellectual training and possessed artistic talents; attributes that made them more entertaining companions to Athenian men at parties than their legitimate wives." 

—Perseus Digital Library

According to Daughters of Demeter, women in Athens, though not trained in athletics, seem nevertheless to have had opportunities for sport and exercise. They go on to say that the wealthy learned to read and gathered in private homes to share music and poetry.

Little Brat

A nice family scene. Great composition. Brilliant colors.

Relatable.

Judgement of Paris

The Judgment of Paris is one of the best known Greek myths. The goddess Strife threw a golden apple marked “to the fairest” amidst the gods and Jupiter selected Paris, a Trojan shepherd, to award it. Each goddess tried to influence Paris with a special gift. Minerva, depicted here with a spear at her side, offered him victory in war.

THE JUDGEMENT OF PARIS was a contest between the three most beautiful goddesses of Olympos–Aphrodite, Hera and Athena–for the prize of a golden apple addressed “To the Fairest.”

The story began with the wedding of Peleus and Thetis which all the gods had been invited to attend except for Eris, goddess of discord. When Eris appeared at the festivities she was turned away and in her anger cast the golden apple amongst the assembled goddesses addressed “To the Fairest.” Three goddesses laid claim to the apple–Aphrodite, Hera and Athena. Zeus was asked to mediate and he commanded Hermes to lead the three goddesses to Paris of Troy to decide the issue. The three goddesses appearing before the shepherd prince, each offering him gifts for favour. He chose Aphrodite, swayed by her promise to bestow upon him Helene, the most beautiful woman, for wife. The subsequent abduction of Helene led directly to the Trojan War and the fall of the city.


Pokhorony rusa v Bulgare

The burial of the Rus in Bulgar. This is a study, but look at the composition of it. It would have been an extraordinary painting once complete.

It’s got the makings of something wonderful.

Funeral feast of Svyatoslav’s Russian warriors after battle in 971

Svyatoslav I, also spelled Sviatoslav, Russian in full Svyatoslav Igorevich, (died 972), grand prince of Kiev from 945 and the greatest of the Varangian princes of early Russo-Ukrainian history.

He was the son of Grand Prince Igor, who was himself probably the grandson of Rurik, prince of Novgorod. Svyatoslav was the last non-Christian ruler of the Kievan state. After coming of age he began a series of bold military expeditions, leaving his mother, Olga, to manage the internal affairs of the Kievan state until her death in 969.

The Russian Primary Chronicle (Povest vremennykh let) says that Svyatoslav “sent messengers to the other lands announcing his intention to attack them.” Between 963 and 965 he defeated the Khazars along the lower Don River and the Ossetes and Circassians in the northern Caucasus; he also attacked the Volga Bulgars. In 967 he defeated the Balkan Bulgars at the behest of the Byzantines, to whom he then refused to cede his conquest.

He declared his intention of establishing a Russo-Bulgarian empire with its capital at Pereyaslavets on the Danube River.

In 971, however, his comparatively small army was defeated by a Byzantine force under the emperor John I Tzimisces, and Svyatoslav was compelled to abandon his claim to Balkan territory.

Thus this painting…

In the spring of 972, while Svyatoslav was returning to Kievan Rus with a small retinue, he was ambushed and killed by the Pechenegs (a Turkic people) near the cataracts of the Dnieper River.

Christ and the Samaritan woman

Jesus Talks With a Samaritan Woman

Now Jesus learned that the Pharisees had heard that he was gaining and baptizing more disciples than John— although in fact it was not Jesus who baptized, but his disciples. So he left Judea and went back once more to Galilee.

Now he had to go through Samaria. So he came to a town in Samaria called Sychar, near the plot of ground Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob’s well was there, and Jesus, tired as he was from the journey, sat down by the well. It was about noon.

When a Samaritan woman came to draw water, Jesus said to her, “Will you give me a drink?” (His disciples had gone into the town to buy food.)

The Samaritan woman said to him, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.[a])

10 Jesus answered her, “If you knew the gift of God and who it is that asks you for a drink, you would have asked him and he would have given you living water.”

11 “Sir,” the woman said, “you have nothing to draw with and the well is deep. Where can you get this living water? 12 Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his livestock?”

13 Jesus answered, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, 14 but whoever drinks the water I give them will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”

15 The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water so that I won’t get thirsty and have to keep coming here to draw water.”

16 He told her, “Go, call your husband and come back.”

17 “I have no husband,” she replied.

Jesus said to her, “You are right when you say you have no husband. 18 The fact is, you have had five husbands, and the man you now have is not your husband. What you have just said is quite true.”

19 “Sir,” the woman said, “I can see that you are a prophet. 20 Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you Jews claim that the place where we must worship is in Jerusalem.”

21 “Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. 23 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. 24 God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth.”

25 The woman said, “I know that Messiah” (called Christ) “is coming. When he comes, he will explain everything to us.”

26 Then Jesus declared, “I, the one speaking to you—I am he.”

The Disciples Rejoin Jesus

27 Just then his disciples returned and were surprised to find him talking with a woman. But no one asked, “What do you want?” or “Why are you talking with her?”

28 Then, leaving her water jar, the woman went back to the town and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me everything I ever did. Could this be the Messiah?” 30 They came out of the town and made their way toward him.

31 Meanwhile his disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat something.”

32 But he said to them, “I have food to eat that you know nothing about.”

33 Then his disciples said to each other, “Could someone have brought him food?”

34 “My food,” said Jesus, “is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work. 35 Don’t you have a saying, ‘It’s still four months until harvest’? I tell you, open your eyes and look at the fields! They are ripe for harvest. 36 Even now the one who reaps draws a wage and harvests a crop for eternal life, so that the sower and the reaper may be glad together. 37 Thus the saying ‘One sows and another reaps’ is true. 38 I sent you to reap what you have not worked for. Others have done the hard work, and you have reaped the benefits of their labor.”

Many Samaritans Believe

39 Many of the Samaritans from that town believed in him because of the woman’s testimony, “He told me everything I ever did.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to him, they urged him to stay with them, and he stayed two days. 41 And because of his words many more became believers.

42 They said to the woman, “We no longer believe just because of what you said; now we have heard for ourselves, and we know that this man really is the Savior of the world.”

Details to the referenced numbers can be found HERE.

Stay

For some reason I am reminded of the 1980’s movie “Explorers”. There is a scene when they climb up to the top of this hill and experience the fruits of their experimentation.

Never the less, this is a mild and calming painting. It evokes images of love, care and family.

And apples.

In those days the women didn’t wear bras. They just criss-crossed straps across their chests; their bosoms, and called it a day.

The Scene at the Well

This is another sketch.

I wish that it would have been finished. It’s a remarkable work with great potential. I do think that it is lovely.

The Feast of Bacchus

September 3 was the date of the Bacchanalia, the Feast of Bacchus. Although this god had several other feast days dedicated to him, some of which fell on March 16 or 17, October 23, (perhaps) and November 24, the Bacchanalia festival of September 3 was the most important day held in his honor.

-September 3 – The Bacchanalia: The FeastofBacchus

Now here is a painting that I can really relate to. Food, fun, frolic, dance, pretty girls, and shirtless guys dancing around with grape leaves and laurels upon their heads. Why it sounds just like my life. Sort of. Heh. Heh.

“Today is a day to drink and dance! Let us rival the priests of Bacchus with feasts to deck the couches of the gods!” – Aristarchus of Athens, Greek orator, 1st Century BC

The quotation that you see above are the first two sentences of a grandiose speech which was delivered in the first episode of the 1976 BBC miniseries I, Claudius.

The speech was performed for Caesar Augustus and his companions during a dinner party commemorating the seventh anniversary of the Battle of Actium, fought on September 2, 31 BC, which is regarded as one of the most important battles of ancient history.

The person who delivered this speech was a certain Greek orator named Aristarchus of Athens, who, in the words of Augustus himself, was “the greatest orator of our time”.

In reality, almost everything about this is pure make-believe. There was no such orator named Aristarchus of Athens who lived during the 1st Century BC – the character is entirely fictional.

Likewise, too, is the speech that he makes commemorating Caesar Augustus’ victory over Antony and Cleopatra.

However, the above quote makes an interesting reference to the god Bacchus, the ancient Roman god of wine, and this is because the Battle of Actium was fought on the day before this god’s primary feast day.

And well…

Bacchus was my kind of guy.

Bacchanalia, also called Dionysia, in Greco-Roman religion, any of the several festivals of Bacchus (Dionysus), the wine god. They probably originated as rites of fertility gods. The most famous of the Greek Dionysia were in Attica and included the Little, or Rustic, Dionysia, characterized by simple, old-fashioned rites; the Lenaea, which included a festal procession and dramatic performances; the Anthesteria, essentially a drinking feast; the City, or Great, Dionysia, accompanied by dramatic performances in the theatre of Dionysus, which was the most famous of all; and the Oschophoria (“Carrying of the Grape Clusters”)

-Bacchanalia

Christ and Sinner

A detail from Christ and Sinner…

And…

The high resolution version of the entire painting is here…

I do hope that you all enjoyed this stroll though art as I have. Have a great and wonderful day.

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I have more posts in my Art Index here…

ART

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Some selected favorite works by Ivan Shishkin

It’s time for a nice relaxing stroll through some art. This fellow is one of my favorites, but he isn’t one that you would stand in front of one of his pieces and ponder. It’s (rather) the way your feel when you look at his works that matter.

The inspiration for this comes from HERE, and I have reprinted it herein. I hope that you all enjoy the art as much as I have.

As I have repeatedly stated, art is something that evokes and triggers thoughts, and memories. No easy feat when the world we live in is full of things that make us angry, hateful, spiteful, and envious. It is hard for a “thing”; a material object to evoke positive emotions. But that is what art actually is.

Art is a item, or object that causes the viewer or holder to evoke pleasant thoughts and / or emotions.

I have discussed this idea previously. Since psychopathic personalities (and sociopath personalities) are unable to emote, or transfer feelings and emotions from the world around them, they see no value in art. They only thing that they can see is it being used as a medium of currency exchange.

Thus when the rulers or leadership of a nation is comprised with a majority of these sick individuals the value of art becomes replaced with other things. And thus we have the situation that we see today. Art has become a joke, or a medium to exchange and transfer large amounts of money between rich oligarchs instead of being what it was intended to be; an item that stands alone for it’s unique beauty.

I further argue that the oligarchy took over the Western nations some time in the early last century. Say around 1910. Then, they remolded all their governments to become money-making enterprises.

These governments become the property of the 0.001% of the population and where the rest of the population would service them. You can see this in the legislation that they enacted at the time they rose to power. Such as the 16 amendment in the United States, and the creation of World Wars to thin out opposition to their efforts.

For after all, when large adjustments occur in populations, you MUST weed out the most dangerous elements of society. Those tend to be the patriotic, and the traditional elements. However, they are so easily corralled to go to war, that it becomes an easy task to slaughter huge swath’s of them.

But I digress.

When the artist died, the West started to flood the art world with replacement canvasses. Such as this…

Famous American painting. Worth millions of dollars. Took five minutes to make.
It was used not to express beauty, but rather used for financial gain.
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It’s all bullshit. Instead, let’s talk about real art.
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Russian artist Ivan Shishkin (1831-1898) was famous for his classic forest landscapes, to the extent that in his homeland he was even known as the lesnoy bogatyr (forest hero). But the Russian forest in the master artist’s hands is not dense and foreboding, fraught with danger, but warm and welcoming, strewn with sunlight.
 

1. Pine on a Rock, 1855

This sketch, which the artist made as a student of the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, was acquired by the Russian Museum, the main repository of Russian art in St. Petersburg. Inspired by his success, Shishkin moved to that city, the then capital, and continued his studies at the Imperial Academy of Arts.

2. View of Valaam Island (Cucco Area), 1859

As a student, he journeyed endlessly through the rocky, forested landscapes of Karelia and painted from nature. For this painting in 1860, he received a gold medal from the Academy and a stipend for a trip to Europe.

3. View in the Vicinity of Dusseldorf, 1865

Shishkin painted this picture in Germany on a commission from collector Nikolai Bykov. As a result of this work, his St. Petersburg alma mater awarded him the title of academician. Pining for his native landscapes, the artist soon returned to Russia.

4. Rye, 1878

On one of his sketches for this canvas, Shishkin wrote: “Expanse, spaciousness, agricultural lands. Rye. God’s grace. Russia’s wealth.” Indeed, it is hard to imagine a landscape more kindred to the Russian soul. Shishkin absorbed the nature around his hometown of Yelabuga (now in the Republic of Tatarstan). The painting was displayed at an exhibition of the Itinerants, where it was bought by Pavel Tretyakov.

5. Stream in a Birch Forest, 1883

Shishkin remained in close contact with the Itinerant artists, who championed realism and folk subjects, and he often took part in their traveling art exhibitions. His close friend Ivan Kramskoy, who painted several portraits of Shishkin, said of his colleague as a landscape painter, “…he is far above all others put together…”

6. Corner of an Overgrown Garden. Goutweed Grass, 1884

The Dusseldorf school of painting instilled in Shishkin a special love for the earthy, unadorned side of nature. His sketches resembling fragments of pictures are nevertheless highly detailed and count as standalone works.

7. Forest Distance, 1884

Shishkin was already a workaholic, but domestic tragedy plunged him ever deeper into his occupation. First, his wife, the mother of his children, passed away. Then, having married a second time, he experienced the same agonizing loss.

8. Oak Trees. Evening, 1887

Shishkin’s paintings of the 1880s show how his artistry was still developing. Although already recognized as a master painter, he never ceased his study of nature. “In artistic endeavor, in the study of nature, you can never close the book, you can never say that you have mastered it thoroughly and there is nothing more to learn,” he wrote.

9. Morning in a Pine Forest, 1889

By far his most famous painting. The work was cordially received by contemporaries, and the famous collector Pavel Tretyakov purchased it for his Moscow gallery. In the Soviet Union (and today), the picture was replicated on the wrapper of a favorite candy, so every Russian knows and loves it.

10. Winter, 1890

Shishkin rarely painted winter themes, preferring a riot of green. Even on this near monochrome canvas, which appears gloomy at first glance, one of the main details is the blue sky.

11. In the Wild North, 1891

This picture is the embodiment of Russian literary romanticism on canvas. It is named after a work by romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov, for which it served as an illustration: In the wild north, there stands alone / A pine tree atop a bare peak…

12. In the Forest of Countess Mordvinova. Peterhof, 1891

In 1892, the now Honorary Professor Shishkin was invited to give a landscape painting workshop at the Imperial Academy of Arts.

13. Ship Grove, 1898

Just six years later, he died right at his easel. In this, one of his last pictures, Shishkin deploys his favorite “treetop cropping” technique. Thus, the forest seems even more spacious, inviting the viewer to step inside.

Art evokes emotions

Normally, I’m not a landscape kind of guy. But every now and then a piece strikes my eye. Maybe it’s special, or has a unique technique or something else. It has some characteristic that “speaks” to me.

I find that many of Ivan’s works hold that characteristic. They all tend to “speak” to me in various ways. They awaken thoughts, memories, or feelings of things or situations that are meaningful to me.

Of course, a person who has never walked into a deep lush forest might find these images alien. The same is true for people who have never been outside on a dark, dark night int he middle of the Winter. For that is what he painted, and for those of us that experienced those things, that is what triggers our emotions.

For instance, the painting “Oak Trees” remind me of being a boy of around 14 years old collecting golf balls in the wood alongside the green-ways of the local golf course. It was like that. Lush crisp air. Clear sharp shadows. Brilliant fall colors. Very nice.

I do hope that you all enjoyed this stroll though art as I have. Have a great and wonderful day.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art Index, here…

ART

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.

 

 

 

 

.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art Index here…

ART

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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A curious collection of wonderfully beautiful Chinese girls – Collection 9 – oh La La with images of food and delicious pastimes

Here is part nine of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. This particular collection consists of a very average selection of attractive Chinese girls, and you all might just be “blown away” by the content. Indeed, there are some favorites in here.

I’ve been spending way too much time dealing with the rubble of Metallicman after the three detailed attacks on my system, my content and my subscriber base. Apparently the people who attacked MM were not so worried about what I had been posting, but they wanted to know who have been subscribing to it, and since they couldn’t extract the data they tried to brute-force crowbar their way into the databases.

They failed, but boy or boy did they leave a lot of wreckage behind.  I guess, I really don’t know, but I guess, that their normal loopholes that they normally exploit revolve around the profit ends and the collection of data in that venture. And since I don’t do that, they were left scrambling to find other means to enter. All of which failed.

I wrote up a great post, that has been up for hours and no one is reading it. So I wonder why. Well they also corrupted my URL assignment code. Jeeze! Don’t these guys have better things to do with their time?

Well, I corrected the messed up URL and released the latest post about the movie Push and the United States media control. Why the Coronavirus narrative about vaccines resembles the science fiction movie Push. And it got zero hits. I mean What the Fuck! people. You asked me a questions and I wrote up a detailed answer and no one is checking it out. Really?

It seems really strange to me. Most MM readers are rather congenial, don’t you know. So I figure it must be a problem on my end. Sigh. So I’ve been debugging it all evening. Jeeze part two. Can’t I ever get a break?

But something else curious has been happening.

More than just a few people have been writing to me through the ‘back channels” telling me of similar events that they are experiencing. Taken as a whole, it seems that something bigger than just a nefarious hacking attempt has occurred.

I am a regular reader of your site. I am living in France, so I guess I must be 7 hours behind you. In any case, I experienced the problems on June 2, given the time difference from where you're at. Anyway, I had a "taunting" kind of dream very early in the morning and my husband couldn't stop bugging me. I couldn't gather my thoughts. He only calmed down and went to sleep after I started thinking that some outside force was using him as a conduit to bother me.

It was a blatantly ridiculous dream where someone tries to haunt me by saying "we know what you did in the past", which I brushed off and thought, "well i'm not the only sinner here hypocrite, and even then I'm a fucking saint by comparison"... But still, this is not a typical dream. Usually my dreams are just nonsense. It felt like it was a deliberate attack. A bullshit attack to be sure, but definitely felt "deliberate". I can't explain except that's how I felt when I woke up. I have no "proof". Just a very strong feeling, so take that as you will. 

Anyway, I wake up to my morning routine, which includes visiting your site for new articles. I see that your site is loading very slowly or not at all. I tried several times, but no dice. Then I immediately get a rash of appointment cancellations. I told myself to stay steady and remember my "homing thoughts" and to not break my stride. I also thought that this attack would not come if the resistance was not on the correct path. 

The next day, your site is working fine again. I get some additional perfect reviews and new appointments. I'm not saying the events I experienced are connected to what happened to you, but I had a sense that something was going to go haywire in the early morning of my suspicious dream. I was surprised to find out that Zhuhai experienced a suspiciously prolonged electromagnetic storm during this time.

Maybe you had other readers who experienced something strange or "off" the day your site got attacked. If this occurred, then it's definitely something worth remembering and keeping in the back of the mind for future reference. 

In any case, I (and I'm sure many silent readers as well) are grateful for your work and the information you put out there. 

-Anonymous M

Well, yeah. How the heck does someone not connected with the operation of the site also have odd and unusual experiences happening to them as well? So I responded…

Thank you for that. You are not the only one. Something has occurred, and it's bigger than what we humans understand. There was a battle, or reset, or "something". Call it an adjustment, if you want. But something happened. Yeah, you are not crazy.

Anyways…

Speaking of a “break”…

I’ve discovered another fine “white wine” that I have “taken a shine to”. It’s very cheap, and tastes great. But it’s at 43% alcohol instead of 55%. Never the less, aside from that, it’s rippin’ good. So it charges me up and refreshes me at the same time. Perhaps I have become more like Bender Bending Rodríguez who needs alcohol to function properly. Heh heh.

Bender Bending Rodríguez

I’ve been so wrapped up in dealing with the carnage that I haven’t had the time to enjoy the little pleasures in life. Like good food, good drink and fine companionship. Now that’s a shame, eh?

Let’s get on to the girls of China, eh?

That’s why you are here, eh?

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people? And don’t you lie. It’s biologically encoded in all humans. (Bet you didn’t know that!)

Women look at other women with “different eyes” than men do. Of course, everyone knows this. Let’s look at this picture below.

Here’s my comments.

Her eyebrows are perfect. Just perfect. You can see the lines and details in them. very nice. Very sweet.

Nice robust chest with a very comfortable top, and the way that those jeans fit her is really awesome. This is the “go around town” outfit where you feel good and comfortable and wear the clothes like a second skin.

I like the necklace. But I wonder what is it’s significance. Does the letter “H” mean something, or is it just an accessory? Us guys usually haven’t a clue, but when we are out eating a noon meal with the woman in question, ti would probably come up as a conversation piece.

I have to say that her hair is distressed. It’s thin, and seems to be over processed. I think that she needs to seriously condition it. My guess is that she has been changing her hair color far too often than she should.

She looks to be in her 30’s. But this is China, she could easily be in her 40’s without any issue.

To Open the Files

Like my other posts.

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

Here is a younger lass. She’s in her 20’s. She have a very Asian face, and a very round face as opposed to an oval face. Like all Chinese, her eye color is brown. But with black hair and brown eyes, what’s not to love? I do love the way that he lips part, and the red color just matches her skin complexion. You will notice that the skin is pale. This is considered to be beautiful in China. Even in the Southern regions near Guangzhou.

She has a nice robust chest, and is wearing a cute top with a curious pattern. It seems to be embroidered, which (if you know me) is one of my loves. I just love embroidered work. Especially shirts and jackets.

Judging from the video, I would guess that she is in her middle 20’s and is healthy and fit. But I could be wrong. She might be 80 years old. It’s difficult to tell the age of a Chinese woman, don’t you know.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not.

For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

While I tend to prefer ladies with a more motherly and robust appearance, I find all of them to be very attractive. From the tall thin leggy beauties to the short cute little kitten like cuddle balls. But of course, most people from Arkansas think that my interest in these gals are because they look preadolescent. Really. Do you think that this beauty looks like a ten year old child?

This gal has everything that I find attractive in a woman. Big smile. Clean appearance. Longish hair that is clean, healthy and well maintained. Robust Chest, is playful.  Is wearing comfortable clothes that fit her well. And has hands that dance…

…do you know what I mean “that dance”…

…smooth articulated moments that move like water, and are graceful and calm. Peaceful and eloquent.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it.

This is true for the human sexes, as it is for animals, for flowers and for things such as building and art. Personally, I find art that massages the soul to be truly beautiful and inspirational. Which is why I have a complete index devoted to the subject.

But, what I consider to be beautiful might repel others. And likewise, what others find beautiful repels me.

Consider this work of “art”…

Is this “art”? Is this “beautiful”? Does this evoke the senses?

I argue that it’s a contemporaneous joke that is trying to capitalize on the current contentious political scene. Not any kind of work of value, no matter what your political persuasion is. Art evokes the senses and stirs the emotions. If it fails to do so, then it is not art.

But beauty comes in many forms and many shapes. While this particular post or article is about the beauty of Chinese ladies, I argue that beauty can be found everywhere. Look at cats for instance…

A beautiful cat.

And I have said this many, many times before.

If you had a choice, wouldn’t you prefer to surround yourselves with beautiful things, beautiful creatures, beautiful places, and beautiful relationships. It is up to us to attract and emit the same kinds of attractions. Whether it is beauty, kindness or happiness. We become what we emit.

Again. Nice eyebrows. Very Chinese eyes.

Short fingernails. She’s obviously a working or office girl. You try typing on a  keyboard with long fingernails. Oh, Lordly as if that’s going to happen. Not!

Nice chest. Very cuddly soft sweater. Personally I find the bright blue too garish for my personal tastes, but she looks good in it.

Now, when I was younger, my tastes in women were shaped by the images and magazines of the time such as Playboy, and Penthouse. That’s all I had to go on, and as a young man, with my hormones a raging, all I could do is tremble as I asked a girl out. Which most of the time was a failure.

But it’s all a growth phase that we all go through.

This chick has over processed her hair. I really don’t think that she should do this.  But in all fairness, she is going for a “look”. You can tell by her clothing and her lipstick color.

Notice the background. She is in a typical Chinese housing complex, and the view is very common throughout China.

Bing a man, eventually you reach a balance point where your hormones are under control and all you really want to do is get to know the girl, have a good time together, and enjoy the moments. And really as you get older this becomes more and more pronounced.

You savor the steaks you eat. You enjoy the perfume she wears, you listen to her talk and enjoy the night air after the dinner. You joke, you laugh, and maybe sing a song or two while walking on the jetty.

Women are magical.

I will bet that this girl (below) would be fun to be with. To go out, chat on in a mall, go window shopping with, and enjoy a nice meal. Maybe Thai or Viet food. Colorful, tasty, delicious and relaxing. I can easily picture sharing a steamed fish and some coconut / pineapple rice together.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see. It’s their choice of clothing, the area where the video was filmed, the selection of music, the way their hair is done up, and so much more.

Like the clothes that they chose to spend the evening in, and the choice of shoes that they wore. Guys, you all had best be more attentive. Don’t you know.

Each little video is like a window to the soul. Where you get a little glimpse of the girl behind the mask. That little presentation is just pure gold.

Some have personality.

And some really do. While others just have a strong softness. Some are calm and composed, some are happy and light. And some are stunning and serious while others remind you of Summer carnival rides, cotton candy and “bear claw” cakes to s’munch upon.

Like this girl below. I would love to ride on a merry-go-round with her, a roller-coaster, or just explore a fun house while snapping videos to post on Tictok.

Some have a great body.

They have long legs, or great dimples. Some have just long, long hair or dark, dark eyes. Some have a soft touch, while others have a careful composed prettiness.

Some have a wonderful smile.

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. Girls, ladies, women are like beautiful flowers that should be treasured and cherished. For they are all wonderful.

But do not mistake the cuteness of a tiger for the damage it could cause if you angered it. Chinese women are very, very capable people. You can take that “to the bank”. Never fail to understand that they are strong, knowledgeable and powerful in their own right.

This girl below has artistic hands. Much like I have. She’s really pretty typical, but this particular pose would be really nice to paint in oils. Just remove the damn camera phone so that I can get a decent look at her face. You do know girls that there is more to your being than just your hips and chest. Your entire face is what presents your image to the world. Omit that, and you are just a thing.

I get it. You are proud of your attractive body. And I, like most me, appreciate that body. But when I am with a chick it’s how I picture us interacting together that means more than just the appearance. From the simple morning hello, to the nighttime escapades. What makes a person special is how they carry themselves.

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more.

Some girls just make me melt, and some with pony tails are just adorable. Here is a girl in a country backyard garden. It’s pretty typical China with blue skies, bright green colors and warm temperatures.

Oh, I guess that I am a tad bit crazy. When I see an attractive girl all I want to do is be with them and talk. Hopefully over food. This idea that I would associate attractive girls with food is nothing that I would ever believe when I was younger. But here we are.

In those days, I was always in a hurry. Eat, run, work at a frantic pace. Get laid off. Hustle to find new work. Work at a frantic pace to learn the job. Hurry up. Do the task. Complete the task. Crash. layoff. Repeat.

Now I savor life.

I savor the time that I share with others, and I appreciate the time that they devote in getting ready to go out with me. I appreciate the clothes that they wear, and the behaviors that they have. I pay special attention to what they have to say and why.

Speaking of food…

Here’s a random selection of some of the food and meals that I had over the last few weeks. Just like in my prayer / affirmation campaigns; “I eat fine, delicious and healthy food in a calm and relaxed manner with friends and family”.

Sweet and sour pork. Authentic Chinese Guangzhou style.

Sweet and sour pork is one of my favorite Chinese dishes. There is a sort of pale-copy of it in Chinese American restaurants back in the United States, but the real deal is fresh. It’s not pre-packaged out of a bag and cooked up on the stove like it is in America.

And here’s what I talk about when I eat beef….

Vietnamese style ginger beef. Oh so tender and so very delicious.

As much as I love a fine steak ( Filet mignon is my favorite), I do love those really tender slices of beef that are cooked oh so very right. So yummy.

The next meal was taken in a Dim Sum restaurant and the lunch meal was extraordinary. Of course, the main meals are great and tasty but make for great conversation pieces, like these little tank crapes…

Battle Dim Sum meal.

I love food in all of it’s many incarnations. And being in the Guangzhou area we get a fine selection of South East Asian food. I must tell you’se guys that Singapore food is just awesome, as is Malaysian, Cambodian, Thai and Vietnamese. Many of them have ingredients that are unavailable in the United States part of it is because of price, but a lot of it is because they are banned.

For the children…

…don’t you know.

Check out this nice Thai shrimp…

Sweet curried prawns.

We have some favorite restaurants that we hold VIP membership with. These “memberships” are an on going thing all over China. You get 20% off the price, a waiver of the various fees for tea, napkins, seats and rice, and preferential treatment. To get it you must deposit a few thousand yuan in the establishment and then you pay your bill drawing from that account.

And here’s a nice meal that I had in one of our “family restaurants”…

Pork neck and curried chicken.

For some odd reason, I now associate women, girls and ladies with food. In fact, when I look at food I think of women. And when I look at women I think of food. I suppose that you all must think that I am completely bonkers in this regard. But that’s just the way it is.

When I think of women wearing comfortable casual clothes I imagine us in the house together. She’s cooking on the stove wearing an apron. I know, I’m such an old fashioned chauvinist guy, and us talking. I sit there sipping on a wine, and helping her, maybe doing some food prep and she’s busy talking about this or that. Nothing too serious, but fun, light conversation that is engaging and delightful.

Now, I know. I know. I mean it; I know that this is not what anyone really WANTS to hear.

They want to hear about sex, and porn. they want to hear about expensive clothing, makeup and beauty perfection. They want to hear about the salacious details on dates and relationships that have turned sour.

Not here.

(I’ve) been there. Done that.

I just want to have a good time and munch.

And that young girl going out with “her crew”, see the beauty of her age around and what they are doing. As I have said, beauty comes in all shapes, sizes, ages, and types. And just because I enjoy the more curvy robust girls, that doesn’t mean that I do not find other women just as attractive. Some of my favorite girls are short, thin and very petite. But that is just me.

I like them all.

Just like I like Pizza, cheeseburgers, steaks and fried chicken. Don’t force me to choose. I just cannot. I love them all. And that is the same with beauty. There is no set idea of perfection, but rather a wide and diverse spectrum of characteristics that all work together to create an “image”.

I just love how she parts open her lips. What a very nice image.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

Not every girl is a “ten”. But that rating scale is based upon appearance alone. When the actual characteristics of a person consists of a wide spectrum of attributes. From appearance to personal grooming. To manners, the way that they talk, their friends, and their interests. To kindness, dreams, and opinions on life. Everything combines to a whole. And you all will not get that in a static image.

When I look at something, or someone who is beautiful it first strikes my interest. This is a normal reaction and there is nothing evil, disgusting or slimy about it. People naturally gravitate towards the attractive. But you know, and I am certain that some dog owners know, that even the most ugly dogs have characteristics that make them very special and beautiful in our eyes.

And that’s one of the great things about life.

It’s to experience beauty in everything. To appreciate beauty in everything, and to contribute to that beauty in good, substantive, and helpful ways. To make the life better for friends and family; to improve society and to rid the world of the evil, the confused and the horrible.

What I like about this particular picture is this model (and she is a model. She models trousers) is how comfortable she appears. She has a nice chest, thin waist, but the pants fit like a very comfortable glove. Haven’t you’se guys ever had clothing that felt so good when you put them on, that you felt… regal? Well, that is the feeling that I get from this particular picture.

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

You all might wonder why I am posting these pictures on the internet. But you shouldn’t.

Try to find pictures of beautiful girls from China using Google, Bing or any American or Western search engine. What you will get are stock images, advertisements, pictures of children, and professional photos associated with some Western “journalism”.

Nonsense. This is what it’s like.

This is the real, honest to goodness deal.

The Videos

Oh, and don’t leave yet! Let’s talk about the girls for a spell….

Talking about the Girls

Smiles that can open up all sorts of doors.

Let’s talk a little about the girls.

These girls are mostly between the ages of 18 years and 45 years old. The vast bulk of them are in their late 20’s. In China, if you are a woman, the ages between 23 years old and 30 years old are the dating years where you look for a husband worthy to start a family with. In China, if a woman cannot find a man by the time she is 28, she is considered a Spinster.  And is considered unmarriageable.

Yikes!

The age to get married for a woman in China is between 25 and 28. If they do not get married their entire family will sponsor these date-a-thons where they will have these programmed courting-rituals where the girl and the boy (part of a long line of boys) will spend time together.

The family won’t tell the girl beforehand either. She’ll walk into the house, and before she knows it, she’s on the fast track to get married. In the USA we call this a “shotgun wedding”. Only in China it’s the other way around.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

I don’t know about you’se guys, but all these girls look pretty darn marriageable to me.  They would be on the “A” list in any man’s personal list.

And no, someone had best hit those morons in Arkansas on their idiotic moronic  heads. They do not look like pre-adolescent children do they?

What age do you think this lass is? Ten or twelve?

A special bonus

Now here is a very special bonus that I am including in this article.

You know that the United States is all upset that China is forging relationships with nations in Africa, and the tried and true methods of giving wads of money to African dictators no longer works. And the Chinese help, infrastructure and investment is changing the nations of Africa.

But you NEVER see or hear about it.

China is leading the world in Change. Look at these beauties. Gosh their hair is so wonderful. And look at those eyes, and lips. My goodness!

Not once did FOX “news”, CNN, Salon, the Huffington Post, or Free Republic ever mention how the good works that China is doing inside Africa is transforming the societies there. It’s “soft power”, don’t you know, and America hates that. You cannot make money on wars when everyone is happy.

Here’s a video showing the good things that are happening in Africa, and not this is not a propaganda flick. Like all the videos in this article, this is the real deal taken by people who are participating in it first hand. Notice how beautiful the African ladies are. Notice how happy everyone is. Notice that they are providing a stable source of income and a future.

This is Africa today.

This is because of China. And notice how they are all speaking Chinese in Africa. It makes a difference when you are not blowing up their houses, machine gunning down their cattle, and carpet bombing their cities.

You can download the video HERE.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A rather nice collection of pretty Chinese girls – Collection 8 – This is China.

Here is part eight of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. And this one is a collection where I try to offer a different selection of all sorts and sizes.

Today is a nice lazy Saturday.

I went out to pick up some packages at the local “box store”, and then went off to the MeiYeJia quick-mart that I have mentioned before. It’s all so mellow. I passed one of the neighborhood kitty cats. He is a young gun. Maybe a year old, and taking a nice nap in the front. Like this…

Life is hard. Then you nap.

I went in to get a coke.

I don’t drink sodas like I used to in the United States. It’s far too sugary, and actually in China beer is just about the same price. So I tend to drink beer. But I wanted to get a “Black Coke” with is a zero calorie coke. I don’t care whether it has sugar or not. It’s just not as sweet as the regular coke.

And as I got it, I saw both of the children studying.

They are in first and second grade. And here it is on a Saturday at 3 in the afternoon, and they are there, next to their parents in their franchised quickie-mart, studying. So I slyly took a serendipitous photo of her while she was engrossed in her studies.

People. This is what China is.

First grader studying next to her parents in the family store on a lazy Saturday afternoon.

You would never see this in the United States.

Anyways…

Let’s get on to the girls of China, eh?

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not.

For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

While I tend to prefer ladies with a more motherly and robust appearance, I find all of them to be very attractive. From the tall thin leggy beauties to the short cute little kitten like cuddle balls.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it.

And I have said this many, many times before.

Now, when I was younger, my tastes in women were shaped by the images and magazines of the time such as Playboy, and Penthouse. That’s all I had to go on, and as a young man, with my hormones a raging, all I could do is tremble as I asked a girl out. Which most of the time was a failure.

But it’s all a growth phase that we all go through.

And eventually you reach a balance point where your hormones are under control and all you really want to do is get to know the girl, have a good time together, and enjoy the moments. And really as you get older this becomes more and more pronounced.

You savor the steaks you eat. You enjoy the perfume she wears, you listen to her talk and enjoy the night air after the dinner. You joke, you laugh, and maybe sing a song or two while walking on the jetty.

Women are magical.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see. It’s their choice of clothing, the area where the video was filmed, the selection of music, the way their hair is done up, and so much more.

Each little video is like a window to the soul. Where you get a little glimpse of the girl behind the mask. That little presentation is just pure gold.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Some have personality.

And some really do. While others just have a strong softness. Some are calm and composed, some are happy and light. And some are stunning and serious while others remind you of Summer carnival rides, cotton candy and “bear claw” cakes to s’munch upon.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Some have a great body.

They have long legs, or great dimples. Some have just long, long hair or dark, dark eyes. Some have a soft touch, while others have a careful composed prettiness.

Some have a great body.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. Girls, ladies, women are like beautiful flowers that should be treasured and cherished. For they are all wonderful.

But do not mistake the cuteness of a tiger for the damage it could cause if you angered it. Chinese women are very, very capable people. You can take that “to the bank”. Never fail to understand that they are strong, knowledgeable and powerful in their own right.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more.

A beautiful girl of China. This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

That fat gal at the store that you see every day, she’s a kind, lovely beauty, who could use some TLC.

And that older woman wearing that elaborate outfit, just look at her, see how the light plays upon the details.

A beautiful girl of China. This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

And that young girl going out with “her crew”, see the beauty of her age around and what they are doing.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

The Videos

Let’s have a look at the videos shall we? I’ve got a bunch for certain.

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

  • Collection one HERE. 51MB.
  • Collection two HERE. 69MB.
  • Collection three HERE. 85MB.
  • Collection four. HERE. 78MB.
  • Collection five. HERE. 92MB.
  • Collection six. HERE. 95MB.
  • Collection seven. HERE. 123MB.
  • Collection eight HERE. 156MB.
  • Collection nine HERE. 147MB.
  • Collection ten. HERE. 149MB.

You all might wonder why I am posting these pictures on the internet. But you shouldn’t.

Try to find pictures of beautiful girls from China using Google, Bing or any American or Western search engine. What you will get are stock images, advertisements, pictures of children, and professional photos associated with some Western “journalism”.

Nonsense. This is what it’s like.

This is the real, honest to goodness deal.

Oh, and don’t leave yet! Let’s talk about the girls for a spell….

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

About the girls

These girls are mostly between the ages of 18 years and 45 years old. The vast bulk of them are in their late 20’s. In China, if you are a woman, the ages between 23 years old and 30 years old are the dating years where you look for a husband worthy to start a family with. In China, if a woman cannot find a man by the time she is 28, she is considered a Spinster.  And is considered unmarriageable.

The age to get married for a woman in China is between 25 and 28. If they do not get married their entire family will sponsor these date-a-thons where they will have these programmed courting-rituals where the girl and the boy (part of a long line of boys) will spend time together.

The family won’t tell the girl beforehand either. She’ll walk into the house, and before she knows it, she’s on the fast track to get married. In the USA we call this a “shotgun wedding”. Only in China it’s the other way around.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

I don’t know about you’se guys, but all these girls look pretty darn marriageable to me.  They would be on the “A” list in any man’s personal list.

This is an average, but beautiful girl from China.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A super duper treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (7) – All super, all duper. Whoa!!

Here is part seven of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. And this one is a “mother lode”.

Definition of motherload

“…a huge shipment, large in quantity.”

The idea here is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking.

Like, (hey!) guys, you have no… NO!… idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.

Some have personality.

Some have a great body.

Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment.

All are wonderful.

Such is the beauty of women. And for us, and for everyone, we need to appreciative the world around us more. That fat gal at the store that you see every day, she’s a kind, lovely beauty, who could use some TLC. And that older woman wearing that elaborate outfit, just look at her, see how the light plays upon the details. And that young girl going out with “her crew”, see the beauty of her age around and what they are doing.

We have to be more aware, and certainly more appreciative.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Group 1 (Sorry it got lost in the sorting. I blame a host of problems resulting in a “perfect-storm” of erasure, deletion, and loss.)

Group 2 HERE. 129MB.

Group 3 HERE. 108MB.

Group 4 HERE. 112MB.

Group 5 HERE. 98MB.

Group 6 HERE. 107MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (6) – Many amazing beauties

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

The archive starts out with a lot of cute butts, and a lot of shaking. I do love girls that are soft and cuddly. That’s one of the fundamental differences between the sexes. Mean tend to be lean with muscles everywhere. Women tend to be soft and nurturing.

You can download this file archive HERE. 56MB.

Video Set B

This grouping is a fine OMG archive. I hope that you like it.

You can download this file archive HERE. 48MB.

Video Set C

Look at these girls. You can control how your life will manifest. You do that by thoughts, and verbal affirmations in a prayer campaign. What’s stopping you from making the kind of life that you yearn from materialize? What is stopping you?

You can download this file archive HERE. 61MB.

Video Set D

All you need to do is show some compassion to animals, to others, and to the down and out, and you have won my heart. You can look good, and be super attractive, and you will be noticed, but it is what is inside of you that will act as the glue that will hold your life and your relationships together.

You can download this file archive HERE. 61 MB

Video Set E

Yes this is China, and some of the outfits would get you arrested in the United States. That’s a fact. Oh, but I do love China.

You can download this file archive HERE. 53MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

The Exiles by Ray Bradbury (Full text)

This is a nice story by Ray Bradbury.

Summary

The story begins with a scene the three witches from Macbeth brewing a potion and staring into a crystal, which reveals another scene that takes place on a rocket ship. Originating from Earth, the men on the rocket ship are panicking because they have recently experienced nightmares, confusing illnesses, and unexpected death. They are destined for Mars, and they are worried that these events may be warnings from Martians not to arrive.

As the crewmembers talk, it becomes clear that the Earth they are leaving has banned many books, some of which are considered some of the best authors of all time. The rocket ship has the last edition of many of these works, and their goal is to burn the books upon their arrival at Mars. Once they have burned the books, there will be no remaining evidence that these authors ever existed...

The Exiles

THEIR EYES were fire and the breath flamed out the witches’ mouths as they bent to probe the caldron with greasy stick and bony finger.
‘When shall we three meet again
In thunder, lightning, or in rain?’
They danced drunkenly on the shore of an empty sea, fouling the air with their
three tongues, and burning it with their cats’ eyes malevolently aglitter:

‘Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble!’

They paused and cast a glance about. ‘Where’s the crystal? Where the needles?’
‘Here!’
‘Good!’
‘Is the yellow wax thickened?’
‘Yes!’
‘Pour it in the iron mold!’
‘Is the wax figure done?’ They shaped it like molasses adrip on their green
hands.
‘Shove the needle through the heart!’
‘The crystal, the crystal; fetch it from the tarot bag. Dust it off; have a
look!’
They bent to the crystal, their faces white.
‘See, see, see . . .’

A rocket ship moved through space from the planet Earth to the planet Mars. On
the rocket ship men were dying.
The captain raised his head, tiredly. ‘We’ll have to use the morphine.’
‘But, Captain”
‘You see yourself this man’s condition.’ The captain lifted the wool blanket and
the man restrained beneath the wet sheet moved and groaned. The air was full of
sulphurous thunder.
‘I saw it’I saw it.’ The man opened his eyes and stared at the port where there
were only black spaces, reeling stars, Earth far removed, and the planet Mars
rising large and red. ‘I saw it’a bat, a huge thing, a bat with a man’s face,
spread over the front port. Fluttering and fluttering, fluttering and
fluttering.’
‘Pulse?’ asked the captain.
The orderly measured it. ‘One hundred and thirty.’
‘He can’t go on with that. Use the morphine. Come along, Smith.’
They moved away. Suddenly the floor plates were laced with bone and white skulls that screamed. The captain did not dare look down, and over the screaming he said, ‘Is this where Perse is?’ turning in at a hatch.
A white-smocked surgeon stepped away from a body. ‘I just don’t understand it.’
‘How did Perse die?’
‘We don’t know, Captain. It wasn’t his heart, his brain, or shock. He just’ died.’
The captain felt the doctor’s wrist, which changed to a hissing snake and bit
him. The captain did not flinch. ‘Take care of yourself. You’ve a pulse too.’
The doctor nodded. ‘Perse complained of pains’needles, he said’ in his wrists and
legs. Said he felt like wax, melting. He fell. I helped him up. He cried like a
child. Said he had a silver needle in his heart. He died. Here he is. We can
repeat the autopsy for you. Everything’s physically normal.’
‘That’s impossible! He died of something!’
The captain walked to a port. He smelled of menthol and iodine and green soap on his polished and manicured hands. His white teeth were dentifriced, and his ears scoured to a pinkness, as were his cheeks. His uniform was the color of new
salt, and his boots were black mirrors shining below him. His crisp crew-cut
hair smelled of sharp alcohol. Even his breath was sharp and new and clean.
There was no spot to him. He was a fresh instrument, honed and ready, still hot
from the surgeon’s oven.
The men with him were from the same mold. One expected huge brass keys spiraling
slowly from their backs. They were expensive, talented, well-oiled toys,
obedient and quick.
The captain watched the planet Mars grow very large in space. ‘We’ll be landing
in an hour on that damned place. Smith, did you see any bats, or have other
nightmares?’
‘Yes, sir. The month before our rocket took off from New York, sir. White rats
biting my neck, drinking my blood. I didn’t tell. I was afraid you wouldn’t let me come on this trip.’
‘Never mind,’ sighed the captain. ‘I had dreams too. In all of my fifty years I
never had a dream until that week before we took off from Earth. And then every night I dreamed I was a white wolf. Caught on a snowy hill. Shot with a silver bullet. Buried with a stake in my heart.’ He moved his head toward Mars. ‘Do you think, Smith, they know we’re coming?’
‘We don’t know if there are Martian people, sir.’
‘Don’t we? They began frightening us off eight weeks ago, before we started.
They’ve killed Perse and Reynolds now. Yesterday they made Crenville go blind.
How? I don’t know. Bats, needles, dreams, men dying for no reason. I’d call it
witchcraft in another day. But this is the year 2120, Smith. We’re rational men.
This all can’t be happening. But it is! Whoever they are, with their needles and
their bats, they’ll try to finish us all.’ He swung about. ‘Smith, fetch those books from my file. I want them when we land.’
Two hundred books were piled on the rocket deck.
‘Thank you, Smith. Have you glanced at them? Think I’m insane? Perhaps. It’s a
crazy hunch. At that last moment I ordered these books from the Historical
Museum. Because of my dreams. Twenty nights I was stabbed, butchered, a
screaming bat pinned to a surgical mat, a thing rotting underground in a black
box; bad, wicked dreams. Our whole crew dreamed of witch-things and were-things, vampires and phantoms, things they couldn’t know anything about. Why? Because books on such ghastly subjects were destroyed a century ago. By law. Forbidden for anyone to own the grisly volumes. These books you see here are the last copies, kept for historical purposes in the locked museum vaults.’
Smith bent to read the dusty titles:
‘Tales of Mystery and Imagination, by Edgar Allan Poe. Dracula, by Brain Stoker.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, by Washington Irving. Rappaccini’s Daughter, by Nathaniel Hawthorne. An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, by Ambrose Bierce. Alice in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll. The Willows, by Algernon Blackwood. The Wizard of Oz, by L. Frank Baum. The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth, by H. P. Lovecraft. And more! Books by Walter de la Mare, Wakefield, Harvey, Wells, Asquith, Huxley’all forbidden authors. All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned! But, sir, what good are these to us on the rocket?’
‘I don’t know,’ sighed the captain, ‘yet.’

 

The three bags lifted the crystal where the captain’s image flickered, his tiny
voice tinkling out of the glass:
‘I don’t know,’ sighed the captain, ‘yet.’
The three witches glared redly into one another’s faces.
‘We haven’t much time,’ said one.
‘Better warn Them in the City.’
‘They’ll want to know about the books. It doesn’t look good. That fool of a
captain!’
‘In an hour they’ll land their rocket.’
The three bags shuddered and blinked up at the Emerald City by the edge of the
dry Martian sea.

 

In its highest window a small man held a blood-red drape aside.
He watched the wastelands where the three witches fed their caldron and shaped the waxes. Farther along, ten thousand other blue fires and laurel incenses, black tobacco smokes and fir weeds, cinnamons and bone dusts rose soft as moths through the Martian night. The man counted the angry, magical fires. Then, as the three witches stared, he turned. The crimson drape, released, fell, causing the distant portal to wink, like a yellow eye.
Mr. Edgar Allan Poe stood in the tower window, a faint vapor of spirits upon his
breath. ‘Hecate’s friends are busy tonight,’ he said, seeing the witches, far
below.
A voice behind him said, ‘I saw Will Shakespeare at the shore, earlier, whipping
them on. All along the sea Shakespeare’s army alone, tonight, numbers thousands: the three witches, Oberon, Hamlet’s father, Puck’all, all of them’thousands!
Good lord, a regular sea of people.’
‘Good William.’ Poe turned. He let the crimson drape fall shut. He stood for a
moment to observe the raw stone room, the black-timbered table, the candle
flame, the other man, Mr. Ambrose Bierce, sitting very idly there, lighting
matches and watching them burn down, whistling under his breath, now and then laughing to himself.
‘We’ll have to tell Mr. Dickens now,’ said Mr. Poe. ‘We’ve put it off too long.
It’s a matter of hours. Will you go down to his home with me, Bierce?’
Bierce glanced up merrily. ‘I’ve just been thinking’what’ll happen to us?’
‘If we can’t kill the rocket men off, frighten them away, then we’ll have to
leave, of course. We’ll go on to Jupiter, and when they come to Jupiter, we’ll
go on to Saturn, and when they come to Saturn, we’ll go to Uranus, or Neptune,
and then on out to Pluto”’
‘Where then?’
Mr. Poe’s face was weary; there were fire coals remaining, fading, in his eyes,
and a sad wildness in the way he talked, and a uselessness of his hands and the
way his hair fell lankly over his amazing white brow. He was like a satan of
some lost dark cause, a general arrived from a derelict invasion. His silky,
soft, black mustache was worn away by his musing lips. He was so small his brow
seemed to float, vast and phosphorescent, by itself, in the dark room.
‘We have the advantages of superior forms of travel,’ he said. ‘We can always
hope for one of their atomic wars, dissolution, the dark ages come again. The
return of superstition. We could go back then to Earth, all of us, in one
night.’ Mr. Poe’s black eyes brooded under his round and luminant brow. He gazed
at the ceiling. ‘So they’re coming to ruin this world too? They won’t leave
anything undefiled, will they?’
‘Does a wolf pack stop until it’s killed its prey and eaten the guts? It should
be quite a war. I shall sit on the side lines and be the scorekeeper. So many
Earthmen boiled in oil, so many Mss. Found in Bottles burnt, so many Earthmen
stabbed with needles, so many Red Deaths put to flight by a battery of
hypodermic syringes’ha!’
Poe swayed angrily, faintly drunk with wine. ‘What did we do? Be with us,
Bierce, in the name of God! Did we have a fair trial before a company of
literary critics? No! Our books were plucked up by neat, sterile, surgeon’s
pliers, and flung into vats, to boil, to be killed of all their mortuary germs.
Damn them all!’
‘I find our situation amusing,’ said Bierce.
They were interrupted by a hysterical shout from the tower stair.
‘Mr. Poe! Mr. Bierce!’
‘Yes, yes, we’re coming!’ Poe and Bierce descended to find a man gasping against
the stone passage wall.
‘Have you heard the news?’ he cried immediately, clawing at them like a man
about to fall over a cliff. ‘In an hour they’ll land! They’re bringing books
with them’old books, the witches said! What’re you doing in the tower at a time
like this? Why aren’t you acting?’
Poe said: ‘We’re doing everything we can, Blackwood. You’re new to all this.
Come along, we’re going to Mr. Charles Dickens’ place”’
”to contemplate our doom, our black doom,’ said Mr. Bierce, with a wink.
They moved down the echoing throats of the castle, level after dim green level,
down into mustiness and decay and spiders and dreamlike webbing. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Poe, his brow like a huge white lamp before them, descending, sinking. ‘All along the dead sea tonight I’ve called the others. Your friends and mine, Blackwood’Bierce. They’re all there. The animals and the old women and the tall men with the sharp white teeth. The traps are waiting; the pits, yes, and the pendulums. The Red Death.’ Here he laughed quietly. ‘Yes, even the Red Death. I never thought’no, I never thought the time would come when a thing like the Red Death would actually be. But they asked for it, and they shall have it!’
‘But are we strong enough?’ wondered Blackwood.
‘How strong is strong? They won’t be prepared for us, at least. They haven’t the
imagination. Those clean young rocket men with their antiseptic bloomers and
fish-bowl helmets, with their new religion. About their necks, on gold chains,
scalpels. Upon their heads, a diadem of microscopes. In their holy fingers,
steaming incense urns which in reality are only germicidal ovens for steaming
out superstition. The names of Poe, Bierce, Hawthorne, Blackwood’blasphemy to
their clean lips.’
Outside the castle they advanced through a watery space, a tarn that was not a
tarn, which misted before them like the stuff of nightmares. The air filled with
wing sounds and a whirring, a motion of winds and blacknesses. Voices changed,
figures swayed at campfires. Mr. Poe watched the needles knitting, knitting,
knitting, in the firelight; knitting pain and misery, knitting wickedness into
wax marionettes, clay puppets. The caldron smells of wild garlic and cayenne and saffron hissed up to fill the night with evil pungency.
‘Get on with it!’ said Poe. ‘I’ll be back!’
All down the empty seashore black figures spindled and waned, grew up and blew into black smoke on the sky. Bells rang in mountain towers and licorice ravens spilled out with the bronze sounds and spun away to ashes.
Over a lonely moor and into a small valley Poe and Bierce hurried, and found
themselves quite suddenly on a cobbled street, in cold, bleak, biting weather,
with people stomping up and down stony courtyards to warm their feet; foggy
withal, and candles flaring in the windows of offices and shops where hung the
Yuletide turkeys. At a distance some boys, all bundled up, snorting their pale
breaths on the wintry air, were trilling, ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,’ while
the immense tones of a great clock continuously sounded midnight. Children
dashed by from the baker’s with dinners all asteam in their grubby fists, on
trays and under silver bowls.
At a sign which read SCROOGE, MARLEY AND DICKENS, Poe gave the Marley-faced knocker a rap, and from within, as the door popped open a few inches, a sudden gust of music almost swept them into a dance. And there, beyond the shoulder of the man who was sticking a him goatee and mustaches at them, was Mr. Fezziwig clapping his hands, and Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial smile, dancing and colliding with other merrymakers, while the fiddle chirped and laughter ran about a table like chandelier crystals given a sudden push of wind. The large table was heaped with brawn and turkey and holly and geese; with mince pies, suckling pigs, wreaths of sausages, oranges and apples; and there was Bob Cratchit and Little Dorrit and Tiny Tim and Mr. Fagin himself, and a man who looked as if he might be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato’who else but Mr. Marley, chains and all, while the wine poured and the brown turkeys did their excellent best to steam!
‘What do you want?’ demanded Mr. Charles Dickens.
‘We’ve come to plead with you again, Charles; we need your help,’ said Poe.
‘Help? Do you think I would help you fight against those good men coming in the
rocket? I don’t belong here, anyway. My books were burned by mistake. I’m no
supernaturalist, no writer of horrors and terrors like you, Poe; you, Bierce, or
the others. I’ll have nothing to do with you terrible people!’
‘You are a persuasive talker,’ reasoned Poe. ‘You could go to meet the rocket
men, lull them, lull their suspicions and then’then we would take care of them.’
Mr. Dickens eyed the folds of the black cape which hid Poe’s hands. From it,
smiling, Poe drew forth a black cat. ‘For one of our visitors.’
‘And for the others?’
Poe smiled again, well pleased. ‘The Premature Burial?’
‘You are a grim man, Mr. Poe.’
‘I am a frightened and an angry man. I am a god, Mr. Dickens, even as you are a
god, even as we all are gods, and our inventions’our people, if you wish’have
not only been threatened, but banished and burned, torn up and censored, ruined and done away with. The worlds we created are falling into ruin. Even gods must fight!’
‘So?’ Mr. Dickens tilted his head, impatient to return to the party, the music,
the food. ‘Perhaps you can explain why we are here? How did we come here?’
‘War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the
year 2020 they outlawed our books. Oh, what a horrible thing’to destroy our
literary creations that way! It summoned us out of’what? Death? The Beyond? I
don’t like abstract things. I don’t know. I only know that our worlds and our
creations called us and we tried to save them, and the only saving thing we
could do was wait out the century here on Mars, hoping Earth might overweight
itself with these scientists and their doubtings; but now they’re coming to
clean us out of here, us and our dark things, and all the alchemists, witches,
vampires, and were-things that, one by one, retreated across space as science
made inroads through every country on Earth and finally left no alternative at
all but exodus. You must help us. You have a good speaking manner. We need you.’
‘I repeat, I am not of you, I don’t approve of you and the others,’ cried
Dickens angrily. ‘I was no player with witches and vampires and midnight
things.’
‘What of A Christmas Carol?’
‘Ridiculous! One story. Oh, I wrote a few others about ghosts, perhaps, but what
of that? My basic works had none of that nonsense!’
‘Mistaken or not, they grouped you with us. They destroyed your books’your
worlds too. You must hate them, Mr. Dickens!’
‘I admit they are stupid and rude, but that is all. Good day!’
‘Let Mr. Marley come, at least!’
‘No!’
The door slammed. As Poe turned away, down the street, skimming over the frosty ground, the coachman playing a lively air on a bugle, came a great coach, out of which, cherry-red, laughing and singing, piled the Pickwickians, banging on the door, shouting Merry Christmas good and loud, when the door was opened by the fat boy.
Mr. Poe hurried along the midnight shore of the dry sea. By fires and smoke he
hesitated, to shout orders, to check the bubbling caldrons, the poisons and the
chalked pentagrams. ‘Good!’ he said, and ran on. ‘Fine!’ he shouted, and ran
again. People joined him and ran with him. Here were Mr. Coppard and Mr. Machen running with him now. And there were hating serpents and angry demons and fiery bronze dragons and spitting vipers and trembling witches like the barbs and nettles and thorns and all the vile flotsam and jetsam of the retreating sea of imagination, left on the melancholy shore, whining and frothing and spitting.
Mr. Machen stopped. He sat like a child on the cold sand. He began to sob. They
tried to soothe him, but he would not listen. ‘I just thought,’ he said. ‘What
happens to us on the day when the last copies of our books are destroyed?’
The air whirled.
‘Don’t speak of it!’
‘We must,’ wailed Mr. Machen. ‘Now, now, as the rocket comes down, you, Mr. Poe; you, Coppard; you, Bierce’all of you grow faint. Like wood smoke. Blowing away.
Your faces melt”
‘Death! Real death for all of us.’
‘We exist only through Earth’s sufferance. If a final edict tonight destroyed
our last few works we’d be like lights put out.’
Coppard brooded gently. ‘I wonder who I am. In what Earth mind tonight do I
exist? In some African hut? Some hermit, reading my tales? Is he the lonely
candle in the wind of time and science? The flickering orb sustaining me here in
rebellious exile? Is it him? Or some boy in a discarded attic, finding me, only
just in time! Oh, last night I felt ill, ill, ill to the marrows of me, for
there is a body of the soul as well as a body of the body, and this soul body
ached in all of its glowing parts, and last night I felt myself a candle,
guttering. When suddenly I sprang up, given new light! As some child, sneezing
with dust, in some yellow garret on Earth once more found a worn, time-specked
copy of me! And so I’m given a short respite!’
A door banged wide in a little hut by the shore. A thin short man, with flesh
hanging from him in folds, stepped out and, paying no attention to the others,
sat down and stared into his clenched fists.
‘There’s the one I’m sorry for,’ whispered Blackwood. ‘Look at him, dying away.
He was once more real than we, who were men. They took him, a skeleton thought,
and clothed him in centuries of pink flesh and snow beard and red velvet suit
and black boot; made him reindeers, tinsel, holly. And after centuries of
manufacturing him they drowned him in a vat of Lysol, you might say.’
The men were silent.
‘What must it be on Earth?’ wondered Poe. ‘Without Christmas? No hot chestnuts,
no tree, no ornaments or drums or candles’nothing; nothing but the snow and wind
and the lonely, factual people. . . .’
They all looked at the thin little old man with the scraggly beard and faded red
velvet suit.
‘Have you heard his story?’
‘I can imagine it. The glitter-eyed psychiatrist, the clever sociologist, the
resentful, froth-mouthed educationalist, the antiseptic parents”’
‘A regrettable situation,’ said fierce, smiling, ‘for the Yuletide merchants
who, toward the last there, as I recall, were beginning to put up holly and sing
Noel the day before Halloween. With any luck at all this year they might have
started on Labor Day!’
Bierce did not continue. He fell forward with a sigh. As he lay upon the ground
he had time to say only, ‘How interesting.’ And then, as they all watched,
horrified, his body burned into blue dust and charred bone, the ashes of which
fled through the air in black tatters.
‘Bierce, Berce!’
‘Gone!’
‘His last book gone. Someone on Earth just now burned it.’
‘God rest him. Nothing of him left now. For what are we but books, and when
those are gone, nothing’s to be seen.’
A rushing sound filled the sky.
They cried out, terrified, and looked up. In the sky, dazzling it with sizzling
fire clouds, was the rocket! Around the men on the seashore lanterns bobbed;
there was a squealing and a bubbling and an odor of cooked spells. Candle-eyed
pumpkins lifted into the cold clear air. Thin fingers clenched into fists and a
witch screamed from her withered mouth:
‘Ship, ship, break, fall!
Ship, ship, burn all!
Crack, flake, shake, melt!
Mummy dust, cat pelt!’
‘Time to go,’ murmured Blackwood. ‘On to Jupiter, on to Saturn or Pluto.’
‘Run away?’ shouted Poe in the wind. ‘Never!’
‘I’m a tired old man!’
Poe gazed into the old man’s face and believed him. He climbed atop a huge
boulder and faced the ten thousand gray shadows and green lights and yellow eyes
on the hissing wind.
‘The powders!’ he shouted.
A thick hot smell of bitter almond, civet, cumin, wormseed and orris!
The rocket came down’steadily down, with the shriek of a damned spirit! Poe
raged at it! He flung his fists up and the orchestra of heat and smell and
hatred answered in symphony! Like stripped tree fragments, bats flew upward!
Burning hearts, flung like missiles, burst in bloody fireworks on the singed
air. Down, down, relentlessly down, like a pendulum the rocket came. And Poe
howled, furiously, and shrank back with every sweep and sweep of the rocket
cutting and ravening the air! All the dead sea seemed a pit in which, trapped,
they waited the sinking of the dread machinery, the glistening ax; they were
people under the avalanche!
‘The snakes!’ screamed Poe.
And luminous serpentines of undulant green hurtled toward the rocket. But it
came down, a sweep, a fire, a motion, and it lay panting out exhaustions of red
plumage on the sand, a mile away.
‘At it!’ shrieked Poe. ‘The plan’s changed! Only one chance! Run! At it! At it!
Drown them with our bodies! Kill them!’
And as if he had commanded a violent sea to change its course, to suck itself
free from primeval beds, the whirls and savage gouts of fire spread and ran like
wind and rain and stark lightning over the sea sands, down empty river deltas,
shadowing and screaming, whistling and whining, sputtering and coalescing toward the rocket which, extinguished, lay like a clean metal torch in the farthest
hollow. As if a great charred caldron of sparkling lava had been overturned, the
boiling people and snapping animals churned down the dry fathoms.
‘Kill them!’ screamed Poe, running.
The rocket men leaped out of their ship, guns ready. They stalked about,
sniffing the air like hounds. They saw nothing. They relaxed.
The captain stepped forth last. He gave sharp commands. Wood was gathered,
kindled, and a fire leapt up in an instant. The captain beckoned his men into a
half circle about him.
‘A new world,’ he said, forcing himself to speak deliberately, though he glanced
nervously, now and again, over his shoulder at the empty sea. ‘The old world
left behind. A new start. What more symbolic than that we here dedicate
ourselves all the more firmly to science and progress.’ He nodded crisply to his
lieutenant. ‘The books.’
Firelight limned the faded gilt titles: The Willows, The Outsider, Behold, The
Dreamer, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Land of Oz, Pellucidar, The Land That Time
Forgot A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and the monstrous names of Machen and Edgar
Allan Poe and Cabell and Dunsany and Blackwood and Lewis Carroll; the names, the
old names, the evil names.
‘A new world. With a gesture, we burn the last of the old.’ The captain ripped
pages from the books. Leaf by seared leaf, he fed them into the fire.
A scream!
Leaping back, the men stared beyond the firelight at the edges of the
encroaching and uninhabited sea.
Another scream! A high and wailing thing, like the death of a dragon and the
thrashing of a bronzed whale left gasping when the waters of a leviathan’s sea
drain down the shingles and evaporate.
It was the sound of air rushing in to fill a vacuum, where, a moment before,
there had been something!

The captain neatly disposed of the last book by putting it into the fire.
The air stopped quivering. Silence!
The rocket men leaned and listened. ‘Captain, did you hear it?’
‘No.’
‘Like a wave, sir. On the sea bottom! I thought I saw something. Over there. A
black wave. Big. Running at us.’
‘You were mistaken.’
‘There, sir!’
‘What?’
‘See it? There! The city! Way over! That green city near the lake! It’s
splitting in half. It’s falling!’
The men squinted and shuffled forward.
Smith stood trembling among them. He put his hand to his head as if to find a
thought there. ‘I remember. Yes, now I do. A long time back. When I was a child.
A book I read. A story. Oz, I think it was. Yes, Oz. The Emerald City of Oz . .
.’
‘Oz? Never heard of it.’
‘Yes, Oz, that’s what it was. I saw it just now, like in the story. I saw it
fall.’
‘Smith!’
‘Yes, sir?’
‘Report for psychoanalysis tomorrow.’
‘Yes, sir!’ A brisk salute.
‘Be careful.’

The men tiptoed, guns alert, beyond the ship’s aseptic light to gaze at the long
sea and the low hills.

‘Why,’ whispered Smith, disappointed, ‘there’s no one here at all, is there? No
one here at all.’

The wind blew sand over his shoes, whining.

No

The End

A final MM note.

Our reality is one ruled by quantum physics. An within this reality is the idea that thoughts create and change our reality. So what happens when entire groups of people no longer have , or possess, certain thoughts? What will the resulting landscape look like?

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Ray Bradbury Index here…

Ray Bradbury

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (5) – What a batch of ladies.

This is collection five.

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

All these girls are lovely. There is one video that takes place in Vietnam; that’s the one with the girl on the arm of the Westerner. There is also a video of a hiding space inside one of the apartments. The Chinese have not forgotten their past. They have secret rooms and access areas no matter how safe the world appears at the moment.

You can download this file archive HERE. 56MB.

Video Set B

I threw in one American girl Tictok video for comparison purposes and one WTF video showing how the government monitors people via drones and gets you to help, safety or to correct bad behavior. I also threw in a Chinese translation app that is really handy to have around. Check them all out. The rest are all cute girls.

You can download this file archive HERE. 95MB.

Video Set C

Here’s an interesting group with one video of a guy in Vietnam trying to pick up some street girls on break, and some other pretty Chinese girls. I do like to show compare and contrast videos for the viewer and reader to see things in a different way that is not intuitively obvious.

You can download this file archive HERE. 46MB.

Video Set D

More beautiful Chinese girls, with one from Thailand. Can you determine which one?

You can download this file archive HERE. 57MB.

Video Set E

My favorite clothing model and a girl that has flesh colored tights but doesn’t want to be filmed. Ah. It’s all fun.

You can download this file archive HERE. 62MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (4) – More, more and more!

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

We start this set with an American girl. She’s not bad. Nice. Fun. Kind of cute. Then we follow up with the Chinese girls. Look, and see how they all present themselves. Some are elegant. Some a fun and playful. Some are nice, and others are exciting. All of this is what China is about.

You can download this file archive HERE. 56MB.

Video Set B

In this group I almost overdosed on cute. So many cute girls doing cute things. Why it just takes me back to a younger time, and an easier time. That’s magical. And that is what makes women so magical at times.

You can download this file archive HERE. 53MB.

Video Set C

Yes.  There are some beautiful girls here in this set. But the ones that I like the most are the girls being themselves in a normal situation, such as the girl in her college dorm room. You see, you don’t need to get all dressed up and made up to be attractive. You just need to be yourself. I find that amazingly refreshing.

That is not to say that I don’t like a woman to take care of herself. Because I really like it when she gets read, looks her best and goes out with me. But I really like the real girl. It’s the personality that makes the difference.

You can download this file archive HERE. 58MB.

Video Set D

Some girls are thin, some are beautiful. Some are cute, and some… well they just defy description. But each and everyone of them is appealing. It’s their dress, their actions and their choice of music that illustrate how they feel at the particular moment in time when they made that video. And they are all a treasure. A precious treasure that you just want to be near and appreciate.

You can download this file archive HERE. 44MB.

Video Set E

Some awfully wonderful girls here. Some would make great companions. But that’s just me, don’t you know.

You can download this file archive HERE. 51MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (3) – Lotta Lovelies.

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

Some very fine active chest action with these girls in this group. I also threw in (accidentally) a video depicting how this one particular crew of pick-pockets operated by crashing into people and stealing their belongings when no one was watching. Don’t worry, they were caught and are now in prison doing time, and organ harvesting. After all, they were really bad. But the girls here are nice, and I love the aggressive boob action. Hey! If you’ve got it, let it rip!

You can download this file archive HERE. 63MB.

Video Set B

Some of my personal favorites are here. Maybe you all would enjoy them as well. Huh?

You can download this file archive HERE. 61MB

Video Set C

This is a pretty good collection. The second video shows some KTV girls getting paid for their time at the club, and it’s a pretty interesting set up, eh? And there are some really cute girls thrown in the mix as well.

You can download this file archive HERE. 62MB.

Video Set D

This is a nice set. I sort of “polluted it” by throwing in two American Tictok videos into the mix. Can you figure out which ones? Take your time. It’s tricky as one girl is an Asian-American.

You can download this file archive HERE. 59MB.

Video Set E

There’s a video of an American and one of a Mexican lady in this mix. Can you tell who is who and which ones are not Chinese? It’s a fun game. I have personal favorites here, and I think that you all might appreciate them.

You can download this file archive HERE.  63MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

.

Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection (2)- Lots of beauties

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

You can download this file archive HERE. 13MB. Generally comparatively small.

Video Set B

Let’s play a game. I threw in one American girl from the American version of TicTok in the group can you find her? Look carefully. LOL. How would you describe her compared to the rest of the Chinese girls?

You can download this file archive HERE. 27MB.

Video Set C

Now the fun and games continue. I snuck in two (not one) American girls in this group. Can you find them? Can you identify them? Come on! It shouldn’t be so hard, eh?

Additionally, one of the videos, I think that it is the 9th one down shows an entire family. Note that the mother looks just a beautiful as her young 19 year old daughter. China is amazing.

You can download this file archive HERE. 76MB.

Video Set D

Here, we also have some girls from Vietnam thrown in to the mix. Can you identify which videos they are? Over all I strongly believe that there is a girl for every guy in this world and beauty only goes as far as to attact and get noticed, but it is the personality, the inner strength and their skills that maintain a relationship.

You can download this file archive HERE. 52MB.

Video Set E

Again, here there are many girls from China. They come in different sizes and shapes. Some are like beautiful flowers, while others are like cute little dolls, and still others are strong confident women. And for me, personally, all of them are attractive. I think that the beauty that a woman possess goes far deeper than what she displays to the world outside, and I hope that these little videos show that aspect.

You can download this file archive HERE. 53MB.

Video Set F

Again, some beautiful ladies that come in all sizes and in all shapes. This is why I have come to appreciate China. How many tattoos can you fin in this grouping? How many enormous asses, and how many are lifting their asses up high to wiggle for the world to see? Eh?

You can download this file archive HERE. 59MB

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

What it is like to live in a truly free society. No it’s not the USA, and no it’s not China either.

It’s actually Albania.

Life is better in a third world “shit hole” than in the fabled land of the free and home of the brave… 

-stevennonemaker88

I argue that America has become a totalitarian, oligarchy-run, military empire, that pretends to be a “democracy”.

Meanwhile, China has become a traditionalist, merit-driven, single-party, socialist republic.

Both nations have their benefits and liabilities. But the bottom line is always a simple one. How “free” do the people feel who live inside these nations?

Let’s look at the often overlooked nation of Albania, and see what kinds of “freedoms” that they enjoy.

Where it is located…

What it’s geography is like…

Physical map of Albania, shaded relief outside.

Here's a reprint of an article from UNZ, it's titled "The Freest and Most Open Country". It's written by  • April 28, 2021. All credit to the author, and please note that it was formatted to fit this venue.

The Freest and Most Open Country

People don’t have to pay extortionate taxes, or interest rates, to cater for their basic needs such as housing, farmland ownership, education or health. People earn little, but their relative purchasing power is higher and their lives certainly more secure and pleasant than ours in the West. 

-Iris

Girl walking past a billboard in Albania.

Is Albania, believe it or not, for here, you can walk around, sit inside cafes, bars or restaurants, worship at a packed church or mosque, and travel by crowded buses between cities, etc.

Though you’re supposed to wear a mask in public, most folks do so with their nose sticking out, because it’s hard to breathe otherwise, and unhealthy, too. That’s good enough for the easy-going cops.

All these people can enter Albania without a visa, vaccine passport or even a negative Covid test, and stay up to a year: European Union citizens, North Americans, most South and Central Americans, Turks, Kuwaitis, Israelis, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese, South Koreans, Malaysians, Singaporeans, Australians and New Zealanders, plus a few more.

After decades of Communist isolation, Albanians are happy to reclaim their Western heritage. A bookcase is painted on a downtown high-rise. Among the authors featured are Homer, Aeschylus, Cervantes, Dante, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Twains, Dickens, Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Kafka and the Brothers Grim. Albanian giants such as Kadare, Agolli, Fishta, Arapi and Poradeci are also honored. Unlike elsewhere, the Western canon is not assailed or canceled, but upheld and extolled.

Sidewalk book vendors are common, so Albanians are obviously reading, and not just junk either. I’ve seen volumes by Camus, Dostoevsky, Orwell and Hitler, etc. Albanian minds can still stay open.

Old man’s bar in Albania.

In an old man’s bar with plenty of character, there are five wine bottles with labels showing a portrait of Mussolini, JFK, Lenin, Hitler or Stalin. Sharing the same shelf are skull and penis shaped liquor containers, and a laughing buddha.

In a more Jew-screwed nation, this goofy display would undoubtedly trigger complaints, protests and maybe even a riot that burns up half the street, if not much of downtown. Luckily, I’m in Albania.

There’s a Frederic Chopin monument here. Born in Poland, Chopin spent nearly all of his adulthood in France, and had nothing to do with Albania. As an important cultural figure, however, and not just in the West, but globally, why shouldn’t Chopin be celebrated in Tirana?

Those who reject even the best of their heritage are lobotomizing themselves. Go for it!

In my building, I’m friendly with a man roughly my age. Introducing himself, he said, “Just remember me as the guy with the hat,” and sure enough, he always wears the same baseball cap.

Like many Albanians, he has emigrated, but returned after only a few years in Greece. Vaguely dreaming of America, he entered the immigration lottery, and actually won, but by then, he has changed his mind.

“I have a cousin in Illinois,” he said. “He told me Albania is better.”

“I agree,” I laughed.

“Really? I should tell people you said that.”

“In every American city, there are homeless people all over. If you go to San Francisco, for example, you’ll see homeless people all around City Hall, right in the center! Many of them have gone crazy. Many are on drugs. They shit in the streets!”

“Hmmm.”

“There are almost no homeless in Tirana.”

“We have family. We take care of each other.”

“There are beggars here, but not too many.”

“Most of them are Gypsies.”

“Is your cousin in Chicago?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe just Illinois. Every year, he comes to Albania and stays for six months. He wants to retire here.”

“Does he have children?”

“Three. Two boys, one girl. They are big.”

“Have they been back here?”

“No, they work, all the time. They have good jobs, but they can’t get married,” he chuckled.

Near us, there were half a dozen boys playing. Hearing English, they decided to join in, but their vocabulary was limited to just “hello!” and “hi!”

Walking down a side street, I heard “hello” repeatedly, but there was no one in front or behind me. Perplexed, I finally looked up to see two small boys inside a sixth-floor window. “Hello! Hello!” I returned their greetings, waves and smiles.

My North Macedonian friend, Alex, has a peculiar habit. As we wandered through the back streets of rarely visited towns like Veles and Shtip, little kids would sometimes get very excited to see me, so Alex had to answer their questions. When they asked Alex where he was from, however, he’d also say, “Америка!”

“Why did you say that?” I asked.

“It’s more exciting for them! If I told them I was North Macedonian, they’d think, Who cares? Now, they can go home and brag about seeing two Americans today!”

Inside a Chinese restaurant in Albania.

Though Albania is wide open, there are very few tourists here. In 2 ½ months, I’ve only seen eight Orientals on the streets, plus two Chinese cooks inside restaurants. I’ve chanced upon American English maybe ten times, but Italian just twice. Once, I ran into a group of Turks. I’ve never gone this long without seeing a single black.

It has been raining too much, but with more reliable sunshine, visitors will come. Ali, a taxi driver, certainly hopes so.

Impulsively one morning, I paid Ali $24 to take me to Durres, 24 miles away. It’s a pretty good deal, and Ali could surely use my business. Too often, I see him just standing around near the Swiss Embassy, his usual spot. This also gave us a chance to chatter.

Like the man with the hat, Ali has also gone abroad. He spent six years in Australia.

“Wow! How did you get a visa for that?”

“I paid,” meaning to the right people.

After sweating his ass off at various menial jobs, and saving almost nothing, Ali returned to Tirana, his hometown.

Here, Ali got a job driving trucks, then buses, before becoming a cabbie 15 years ago. Until the Covid mess, everything was going fine.

Ali also got married then, so his son is almost 14, and his daughter, 10. He showed me their photos.

“Nice kids! Are they good students?”

“No,” Ali laughed.

As his name indicates, Ali is Muslim, but only nominally.

“It’s Ramadan,” I noted, “but all the restaurants are busy. Nobody is fasting!”

“Some people are. My kids are fasting. I’m not.”

“They’re better Muslims than you are!”

Ali just shrugged.

After the collapse of Communism in 1991, thousands of Albanian boat people fled to Italy from Durres. This ugly, chaotic exodus lasted until the end of that decade.

Now, Durres is a very pleasant city with an elegant seaside promenade. Before Covid, ferries departed often for Bari, Ancona and even Trieste (where James Joyce spent nearly a decade). Soon, buses will resume their daily routes to Athens.

Normal family life in Albania with children on swing-sets, and normal shops in the background.

Basking in sea breeze-tempered sunshine, I watched parents pushing strollers, a stern boy bouncing a ball and three tots on swings. Busking, a beer bellied, middle-aged man tooted his clarinet. A stand briskly sold “Petulla te Gjyshi” [“Grandpa’s Fried Dough”].

As you’re tucked into your novel nightmare, Albanians have quite impressively exited theirs. How bad was it?

An escapee risked being shot or jailed for years, and if he manages to get out, a family member would be arrested instead. For trying to flee, poet Uran Kostreci was locked up for two decades.

Just getting into Albania was very difficult. Defining the border as “a checkpoint against foreign ideology,” Enver Hoxha declared that “The People’s Republic of Albania is closed to enemies, spies, hippie tourists and other vagabonds.”

First of, Albania was not a republic, much less a “people’s republic,” and there’s no ideology more foreign to Albania than Jewish Marxism, in any permutation. A fanatical us-against-them mindset is the Jewish core. A dictator, Hoxha ruled Albania for 40 years, until his death.

Of the hundreds of Hoxha statues that once dotted this poor land, only one remains that’s not damaged. A ten-foot bronze, it lies in the basement of the former museum in Labinot, a Communist stronghold.

In 1975, the Albanian government posted this guideline:

  1. The border authorities of the Ministry of Internal Affairs do not allow the entrance into the People’s Republic of Albania of all those foreigners who, with their appearance go against the norms of the socialist aesthetics, such as men with long hair like women, with exaggerated sideburns, with irregular beards and with inappropriate clothing, and women with mini and maxi skirts.
  2. Persons with extravagant clothing and irregular appearance […] may enter into the People’s Republic of Albania only if they choose to be adjusted (to cut their hair, to dress normally) […]

To facilitate such adjustments, a barbershop and a store with socialist-approved clothing were available at Albanian borders.

Even eight years ago, Albania was still a wreck, apparently, at least according to an unsolicited account I just received.

Reading about me being sick in Tirana, a reader emailed to say that he had come here in 2013, to be somewhere “as ugly as [he] felt”!

An American living in France, he had spent a year in “herpes hell,” which he had gotten from “an attractive empty vessel who worked in the Paris fashion scene.”

Bald, loveless, with “a ruined penis” and nearly broke, he thought about killing himself, then “had a better idea”:

I would identify the most miserable country on Earth and I would go there. Anything but suicide. I wanted to be somewhere as ugly as I felt. I wanted to see bleak, closed, hard faces. I wanted to see mute wifebeaters and battered women caked in whore makeup. So I went to Albania. I wandered around Tirana with sores on my dick for a few days, considering suicide. One day I found this weird field next to the train station, just a big garbage-strewn negative space at the heart of the city. There were fetid ponds, plastic bags everywhere, and little paths through the half-dead grass. An old Balkan crone squatted next to one of the paths with a few carrots and onions spread out on a scarf in front of her. Men in tracksuits with brutal pimp faces came and went. I went to the center of the field, squatted down, and dug through the trash a little. I found a broken teacup, an old domino, and a playing card. It was Christmas Day. I felt like I was at the negative center of the universe. Here I was, at ground zero of our ruined Jew world with pus coming out of sores on my dick surrounded by the most ugly and corrupted goyim on Earth, the despised and despicable Albanian race. 

That’s some beautiful writing about an ugly situation. Today’s Tirana, though, is nothing like that.

Albanian kiosk.

Though many of the buildings are drab, each Tirana street is lively with cafes, bars, restaurants and shops, and the people are very pleasant, mellow and lovely.

Most are slim and not misshapen. Children are well behaved and not agitated. Young men don’t sneer or bluster. Many women are confidently beautiful. The old are dignified.

Though Albania is one of Europe’s poorest countries, with an extremely high emigration rate, its social fabric is more intact than in more advanced nations. Its great men are justly revered. It’s also freer and more open, and as safe as any, with no mugging or riot around any corner.

Unlike in Philadelphia, I don’t wake up each morning to news of another murder or two. There were 499 in the City of Brotherly Love in 2020!

The United States will never catch up to Albania.

This is most interesting. Albania always seemed like a pit of drabness, repression, and despair during the Cold War. Not that I actually read anything about it, of course. Now here it is quite relaxed about life while the US slips ever deeper into unreason, minority hatred of whites, wars that are beyond stupid, open borders, multicultural delusion, corrupt courts, a lunatic legislature, contemptible corporate whores, a rotten FBI, a worthless press, malevolent central bank, Jewish control, feminist malevolence, and leftist thuggery. Did I leave anything out? 

-Ace

Conclusion

It is difficult for Americans to understand, and grasp this fact, but most of the world outside the United States is MUCH freer.

This is a fair and philosophical point, which contains a much large-ranging truth:

– Traditional societies favour the collective and protect the weakest among them but at the expense of some of the individuals’ freedoms. This is why there are less junkies and homeless in the streets of poorer countries, as they remain within the family fold, but individuals sometimes feel suffocated by social pressure.

– Modern Western societies, especially with the ascent of Anglo-Saxon “liberal” values, purport to favour the individual and individual freedoms. This should normally give great opportunities to the brightest and smartest to achieve and accomplish their professional and economic potential, at the expense of the less gifted who are let down. This is how it was supposed to work anyway, and maybe it did work like that up to the 80’s or 90’s.

But since globalisation took off, the individualist dream hyped in the West has remained just a dream. No matter how hard one works, it is obvious that the middle classes are disappearing to the benefit of an ever-more powerful plutocracy.

So Western working people are actually only getting the anxiety and precarity, without the economic security, the worst of two worlds. I can very well understand why the Albanians described by Mr Dinh have returned to Albania after initially emigrating to the West.

-Iris

Americans have 24-7 narratives about “American Exceptionalism” rammed into their mushy brains for decades. So much so that they believe it. And then, coupled with the non-stop fear-mongering about the rest of the world being a very dark and gloomy place, it’s  no wonder that Americans hide inside their homes and huddle in front of the flickering blue monitors for their entertainment.

Freedom is not a nice road, a fancy mall, a impressive government building, or being able to own guns. It’s nothing of the sort.

A large proportion of Americans today, think freedom is the right shop at Walmart, eat at Burger King and to get a quick Covid shot. How things have changed 

-Joe Paluka

Freedom is the ability to live your life, as you see fit, without interference by anyone for any reason.

Freedom

  • Never having to report any income, or financial information to the government.
  • Never having to ask your government for permission to do something.
  • Being allowed to eat, smoke, ingest anything your want to your own body.
  • Never worrying about the police.
  • Being able to redress your grievances with the government locally and get results in a timely manner.

Not Freedom

  • Asking permission to buy bullets, and then once granted, having to pay taxes on them, and enter onto a watch list.
  • Being forced to buy something simply because you are a citizen.
  • Having your ability to leave the nation prevented and subject to a tax audit.
  • Your taxes are used for other things that do not directly impact your quality of life.

When I say that my life in China is far freer than what it was in the United States, it’s not hyperbole. It’s truth. It’s on a very personal, and direct, visceral level.

And I have experiences that back this up. So it’s non-debatable.

People, if you are miserable with your life…

…instead of blaming yourselves, maybe you need to start looking at where you are living and what you put up with. Most Americans will discover an exceptional amount of personal freedom the moment they step outside the monstrous United States Military Empire.

And that’s a fact Jack.

The best case in point would be in New York City. 

Take the NYPD’s stop and frisk policy, for instance. Aside from the fact that the policy has proven to be vehemently racist, what kind of free society allows their police officers to search people without just cause?

Imagine casually walking home from work only to have a police officer stop you, ask for ID, question you and frisk you. All you’re guilty of is walking home. How is this any different than the Gestapo asking you to see your papers?

-The rise of the American Police State

You all won’t see that anywhere else in the world.

Only in America.

America is more and more like a contagious disease. It would be fine if the US contained their toxic culture and influence to their own border and left the rest of the world alone. But no… They want to make the whole world like them. Enough. 

-Dumbo

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Escape! Index here…

Escape!

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

A treasure trove of pretty Chinese girls – Collection – New Firsts

Here is part of my series on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. The idea is that you would look at the girl, and in the process concentrate on the background around her. Because these are the “real deals”. This is what China is. And while the girls want you to focus on them, their eyes, their faces, their bodies, the background tells us much about where they live.

Besides… who doesn’t like to look at attractive people?

After viewing this “treasure trove” of Chinese beauties, you too will have a better than average understanding about what Chinese ladies look like. Sure beats the stereotypical narrative by low-educated American sheeple…

"Chinese girls are all short, frail, little tiny women, that don't have chests and look like pre-adsolescent children."

To Open the Files

Just unzip to whatever folder you want and then just play the first video, the other videos will play immediately afterwards (if you follow the default settings on your OS). Most videos are between  one and a half to four minutes long. All told each zip file will give you about five to ten minutes of viewing.

I find the ladies lovely. But others might not. For you others, well, I really hope that you are not too bored.

Some key points

Beauty is up to the person who views it. What is attractive to one person might not be attractive to others. A case in point is a girl who I had a relationship with when I was in High School working in the coal mines. Everyone thought that she was ugly because she did not have a great face. But I liked her, and her body was absolutely rocking. Like, guys, you have no idea.

I think that the beauty of these videos is that in a few seconds you can see the “personality” of the ladies as they try to display their charms for the world to see.  Some have personality. Some have a great body. Some just look great in a particular outfit, while others just fit the particular environment. All are wonderful.

The Videos

In this particular post we will look at these groups of videos. I do hope that you enjoy them…

Video Set A

I have to apologize that I have four videos of the same girl in this particular collection, but she models those pants so well. And I am a sucker for bouncy chests on thin girls, don’t you know… (giggle).

You can download this file archive HERE. 59MB.

Video Set B

This group highlights eight (8x) videos of a more robust woman that I personally find quite alluring. But that’s just me. But I will tell you that even though I enjoy the women who wear the short cute little dresses, what I really love are all those traditional clothing, whether it is Han, or as shown in this collection the “Gone with the Wind” style. I think they are awesome.

Aside from my personal love of big smiles, big hair and big chests, you will note that all these girls are inside of China. Does China look dirty, filthy, stinky or disgusting to you? What about the buildings? Does it look like things are run down, work out, or that the infrastructure hasn’t been repaired in a long long time? No. Of course not.

You can download this file archive HERE. 54MB.

Video Set C

The featured girl in this collection of videos is so sweet that I could fall heads over heels over her and not realize what I am doing. This collection kind of shows that it’s not so much the appearance that a woman has, but rather how she acts and carries herself. Being feminine is surely very attractive.

You can download this file archive HERE. 58MB.

Video Set D

This is a pretty large archive at 128MB. But as large as it is, the length of time for the movies are comparatively long as well. So that’s a plus.

I threw in a video of some Middle Eastern girls in the mix. Can you pick it out? Is it easy or difficult to sort out. LOL. The last video is of the same girl that is the first video, and she is from Hunan. She’s a Hunan girl. And in the last video you can see her mother next to her.  My father always told me that to see what will happen to the girl that you marry, look at her mother. I would argue that it’s not always a direct correlation, but it has some merit worthy of thought, eh?

You can download this file archive HERE. 120MB. Pretty large, and might take a few minutes to download.

Video Set E

This collection is much smaller than the previous one, and would end up loading much faster. It’s a great way to look at some fine Chinese girls quickly.

You can download this file archive HERE. 29MB.

Video Set F

You can download this file archive HERE. 53MB.

Do you want more?

You can find many more videos in my “Learning about China by looking at pretty girls index” over here…

Pretty Girls

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Articles & Links

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

 

The tale of the three shepherds.

The following is my very own first attempt at a fictional story.

I have been told that I must be a great writer because all of my Metallicman writings are so fantastical and imaginative. I must have a great colorful and active mind to dream up such ideas. But that’s not really true. I only write what I have personally experienced, and talk about the life that I live and what I see and do.

There’s nothing fictional in this site whats so ever.

Never the less, I have tried to write fiction in the past, maybe the early 1990’s and it got no where. Maybe I could try again. Maybe I’ll be another Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke or Robert Heinlein. Who actually knows?

So with that introduction, let’s introduce my first internet published short story. And you’se guys are the first to read it. I do hope that you enjoy it.

The Three Shepherds

Once upon a time, in a rather pastoral land, were three shepherds. They were men of sheep.

All of them were tall, strong and carried about a long crooked cane. And as they went about their day to day life shepherding, doing sheep related things, and discussing sheep related current events, they would often gather together (as was their want) under this huge shady tree.

And there, under the great expanse of the mighty oaken limbs, they would discuss the latest in sheep husbandry, sheep technology, and sheep-related gossip.

The three shepherds went by the names of Tom, Dick and Harry.

Tom, the best shepherd of the trio had a massive and impressive flock of sheep. All of them were well cared for, happy and were the envy of the local village.

Dick, an average shepherd, had an average flock of sheep. There was nothing really that great about it. All of the sheep were solid “C” grade students in the local sheep academy, and it showed in their actions and behaviors.

And, Harry, well, Harry was the worst shepherd of the three. He tended to ignore his flock of sheep and left them to do their own bidding. Meanwhile he would cavort with a prized sheep or two off in the wilds behind the bushes in a most devilish manner.

And one day, on this fine and quiet pastoral land, they came to an argument.

It turns out that they were arguing just who was the best shepherd.

And the point was raised, that your actions are reflected in how the sheep behavior, and not whether or not you get ribbons at the local annual sheep parade, or are given the key to the city for the most amazing sheep.

Ai! And the argument went long and hard and well into the night. No one could decide who was the best shepherd.

By the crowing of the early bird, a cock named  “amorphous weasel” on account of his propensity to steal long bananas, with (two) well rounded kiwi fruit off kitchen window sills, the group tiredly came to a conclusion.

It was decided that each shepherds would go off, one by one, and gather their flock and bring it to the tree. And there in front of everyone the sheer beauty (or maybe it’s “shear” beauty) and magnificence of the flock would be obvious to all to behold.

So Dick, the average shepherd, went off to gather his flock.

And after what seemed to be day, but was really a mere two hours, he came back. (Let it be known that he stopped for a blueberry pie, and maybe a little kiss, from the baker Lady Ms. McSmunch-a-lot in the town.) And refreshed, wiping the blueberry stains off his lips, he led his flock to the rest of the trio to observe.

And there, came the flock.

They were clean and presentable. Their hooves were all trimmed and well manicured. Their eyes were also clear, and the wool was obviously of the finest quality. They came well behaved, and presented themselves are docile, but proud sheep; they were the kind of sheep that you would introduce to your son.

And as they arrived, they sang a little sheep marching song. It went a little like this…

  • Baa Baaaa, Baa Baaaa,
  • We’re the sheep of Baaa Dick.
  • Baa Baaa, Baa Baaa.

And then, after a short while, the filed to the tree, and then upon the proper signal (by Dick obviously), they settled down. All the time making tiny cooing sounds…

Baaa Baaa.

Of course both of the other two shepherds were impressed. For indeed this was a fine, fine flock of sheep. It was undeniable. And nothing would make this moment more noteworthy than when a shepherd talent-scout showed up and wanted to take a picture of young shepherd Dick with his fine, well tended flock.

There were rumors that he was going to be on the cover of “Sheep News and Pastoral Report”.

And it seemed to be his destiny, for shortly afterwards a gaggle of young attractive lasses, with hair in long pony-tails, wearing short skirts with low cut bodices were asking for Dicks autograph. They all wanted a piece of Dick, and were willing to do anything to get a taste of this Dick action.

Well, as impressive as all that was, Tom decided to go off and get his flock of sheep.

Now Tom went off and it wasn’t long before the clouds in the sky opened up. And bright blue “spring time” sky appeared with two enormous sheep blowing long golden trumpets appeared. And as they blew the ground and surroundings became calm. Everything went absolutely quiet. Even the worms and the snails stopped their crocheting, and stood by a listening.

Then, brighter than day and appearing in blinding, and stunning radiance appeared the flock. It approached the stunned spectators in organized cadence. And they hummed, and sang, and their voices resonated in brilliance and within spectacular fashion.

  • Ba Ba. Ba Ba.
  • Baaaaaa!
  • Ba, Ba, Baaaa, Baaaa, Ba!

They approached the group in groups of three. marching to the beat, and their hooves landed ever gently upon the grass at the feet of the shepherd.

There was no question that this flock was truly exceptional. Their wool was of the finest texture, and so white and clean that it hurt the eyes of any who beheld it. The faces of the sheep were impassioned with glee, happiness and empathy.  And when they finally gathered together they were polite about it.

They would say such things as “Excuse me, my fine fellow sheep, can you please pass me the Grey Poupon…. Baaahhh.”

Indeed, these sheep were exception. No one could deny it.

And when the shepherds started to talk, the sheep took the time to post insta-sheep photos for their followers, for after all, many of the sheep in this flock were famous influencers. And sheep all over the world would follow their postings. They would want to know what grass they were eating and why. They would want to see who they were hanging out with, and pictures of their latest meals, and pictorials of their latest pastoral settings.

It was absolutely clear that this flock was spectacular.

Well, the time came for Harry to show his flock. So he got up off the long he was sitting upon and ambled off to gather his flock. As he went he muttered something under his breath, but no one could make it out.

It sounded something like “truck fist” or something similar. He grumbled away saying things like “razzmatazz” and “hoodwink, and scurvy tweaky boondoggle”

Hours passed.

The sky got dark, and a wind started to blow.

Dark clouds appeared on the horizon and a cool chill started to cause everyone to gather their shawls and jackets around their shoulders.

And the ground started to rumble.

It was low at first but soon become enormously loud. It sounded like an air plane jet engine revving up, and the exploding and dying over and over as it’s internal parts bashed and clanged upon each other in the most terrible of grinding sounds. People started to cover their ears, and a light oily rain started to fall upon everyone in a brown oozy slimy mess.

And there, on the horizon were what appeared to be a herd of tiny tornadoes. These brown dusty and dirty nightmares approached the crew, the tree, and all the two flocks that were gathered there. The talent scout stopped talking and taking pictures, the Insta-sheep models stopped filming selfies, and everyone stood shaking where they stood. They remained rooted to the ground.

And as the group got close you could make out what was approaching.

For, in front of them was a small army of “Mad Max style” cobbled together quasi vehicles of all makes, models and unusual pedigrees.

Some looked like something the devil himself would weld together with nightmare steel, twisted metal, and chain link accoutrements.

Others looked like a maniac’s idea of a military vehicle if they had the budget of a used junk yard attendant.

And still others looked more like they belonged outside a meth-lab, a biker bar, or an abandoned kiddie circus prowled by nightmare clowns with chainsaws and blood lust in their eyes.

And they roared towards them.

It was like an avalanche or a tidal wave and they pulled up in front of  all the startled spectators. they all revved their motorcycle and various engines for effect.

  • Barroom! Barroom!
  • Braaaaam!

And black oily smoke blew out of their exhausts. And the sheep themselves looked like Frankenstein-sheep.

Many had patches of wool missing, obviously from a diet low in vitamin “D”, or perhaps suffering from mange. Many were missing eyes, limbs, teeth. They all wore vests emblazoned with the words…

“Satan’s orphan lamb”

And many had tattoos everywhere.

Some were of names of a certain loved one, a sheep from their past, but with the name crossed out, and another one written next to it. Others were tattoos of knives, skulls, and “low brow art”.

And then…

…just then…

… a big noisy, and particularly malodorous motorcycle-like vehicular contraption pulled up. It sprayed dust and gravel everywhere, and the lone dark sheep got off the bike.

He was an ugly brute, a big blustering monstrosity, that was foul, nasty, criminally dirty, and oily…

…an onerous sheep that went by the name of Beelzebub.

He was big, and nasty. His wool was black and grey with red and purple highlights. He wore lipstick, and ear rings, with seemed to point to some kind of LGBT sheep hybrid of sorts, he wore a big leather belt with an enormous belt buckle featuring the head of one of the missing sheep-dogs that used to help the shepherd, and emblazoned upon his chest was a big garish tattoo with the words…

“My shepherd doesn’t love me”

And he scanned the people gather there with his one lone bloodshot eye. As he got off his bike and hobbled towards them, his single leg ended up hitting the dust while his wooden peg-leg went thunk, thunk, thunk….

…and he stopped in front of all the shepherds, and their flocks. No one said a sound.

A moment passed and then another.

Finally, shepherd Tom cleared his throat, and said…

“You are by far, the absolutely worst flock of sheep that I have ever seen in my life!”.

And no one moved.

No one.

No one said a thing.

You could hear a pin drop.

Then the leader, the biggest, the baddest, the most foul, and slimy sheep went up to him. his foul sheep breath was stinky, oily, nasty and disgusting.

And he said…

“We might be the ugliest, the most disgusting, the most untamed sheep that you have ever laid your eyes upon. But I will tell you one thing…”

And he paused for effect, and gave everyone a good harsh look with his remaining blood-shot eye…

“…. we’re baaaaaaad!”

The End.

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The latest Jumanji movies are a respectful nod to Doc Savage; The Man of Bronze

When I was growing up, I had a complete collection of Doc Savage paperbacks and I devoured them completely, When it was time for me to grow out of them, my younger brother took over, and he too was hooked. And he, as well, read every single book.

As a long time reader of Doc Savage, I cannot help but compare the latest two Jumanji movies with the adventure pulps that I read as a boy. And to this end, I want to wax ecstatic about them.

Dr. Clark Savage Jr. was raised from birth to be a man of superhuman strength and protean genius! With his five scrappy aides -- the greatest brains ever assembled in one group -- and a vast Mayan wealth at his disposal, he has dedicated his life to the destruction of evil doers the world over!!

Doc Savage, the Man of Bronze is the hero of 181 novels which ran in his own pulp magazine from 1933 to 1949, and were reprinted as paperback books from 1964 to 1990. First time around, author Lester Dent practically invented the first “super” hero. The second time around Bantam Books invented the numbered men’s adventure series. These high adventures have spawned Doc Savage comic books, radio shows, a movie, new novels — even a biography.

My argument that while Jumanji is not a Doc Savage remake, it’s not a Jumanji remake either. I like to believe; or want to believe that the latest Jumanji movies take the best elements from both venues and create a completely wonderful new reality. A reality that we want to visit.

The Doc

Let’s consider Doc “smolder” Bravestone.

In many ways his character is derived from Doc (Clark) Savage, Jr.

Both have a “skull cap” style hair cut (what ever that actually is). Both like to walk around in torn or distressed khaki shirts. Both have bronze skin. Both are strong, brave and take the world on head-first. And both have their own peculiar traits.

Doc Bravestone has his “smoldering intensity”, and Doc Savage has his “animated “twinkle” in his eye”.

I know, I know. My premise has a lot of holes in it.

However, we do know that prior to the 2017 Jumanji; Welcome to the Jungle, that the lead character Dwayne Johnson (who played Spenser) was in negotiation regarding remakes of Doc Savage pulp stories.

“It’s OFFICIAL: For all comic book fans you already know the world’s first superhero (pre-dating Superman) is the “Man of Bronze” himself Clark “Doc” Savage.

Want to thank my bud director/writer Shane Black and his writing team Anthony Bagarozzi and Chuck Mondry for flying in from LA and sitting with me and our @sevenbucksprod’s producer @hhgarcia41 on this Memorial Day weekend to chop up creative and break story on this very cool project.

Comic book fans around the world know that the cool thing about “Doc” Savage is that he’s the inspiration for Superman. First name Clark, called “Man of Bronze”, retreats to his “Fortress of Solitude” in the Arctic etc etc.

Doc was physically and mentally trained from birth by his father and a team of scientists to become the perfect human specimen with a genius level intellect. His heightened senses are beyond comprehension. He can even identify a women’s perfume from half a mile away. He is literally the master of everything.

But here’s the #1 reason I’m excited to become Doc Savage.. HE’S A F*CKING HILARIOUS WEIRDO!

Confidently, yet innocently he has zero social graces whatsoever due to his upbringing so every interaction he has with someone is direct, odd, often uncomfortable and amazingly hilarious.

After speaking for hours w/ Shane Black I can see why the creator of Superman took only the best parts of Doc Savage and leaving the “weirdo” part behind. But to us, it’s that “weirdo” part that makes Clark “Doc” Savage dope! Can’t wait to sink my teeth into this one of a kind character. 

#ItsOfficial #WorldsFirstSuperhero #GeniusIntellect #PhysicalSpecimen #FnLoveableWeirdo #DocSavage”

So you have this “Doc Savage” character who has zero social graces and is like a child in a hero’s body. Isn’t that exactly like what is portrayed in the movie? Can we forget the kissing scene between Ruby Roundhouse; the Killer of Men, and Doc “Smolder” Bravestone?

Yeah. I want to forget it too. LOL.

Yeah. It’s a hoot.

Doc Savage is also a perfect role for Johnson as an actor. The character is not only an outlet for Johnson’s action hero bona fides, but also his comedic chops; raised by scientists, Savage has a world-class education but “no social skills,” as Johnson put it. A darling of action, fantasy and science fiction cinema, Johnson has been left wanting for a superhero role at a time when superhero movies are the genre of choice. And what better part could there be for a star of the Rock’s stature than what he himself has appropriately dubbed the #World’sFirstSuperhero?

-The Mary Sue

Anyways, I like to believe that the Doc Savage band of brothers has been reconstituted into the Jumanji characters.

Surprised how entertaining it was
19 December 2019 | by comps-784-38265See all my reviews

I took one look at the trailer and was certain it would be rubbish

Finally watched it on TV and was surprised that it's good solid family entertainment.

Not outstanding but a respectable 7 stars.

The Band of Brothers

Although Doc Savage appeared first and most often in prose novels, it’s fair to say that the character is best known by comic book fans. A brilliant scientist with super strength, Doc Savage was the blueprint for countless tropes that would become staples of superhero comics. The character has been eclipsed in the public memory by his pop cultural descendants, but Doc’s legacy is formidable. Time magazine called him not only “the natural father of Superman,” but of James Bond as well.

Not only was Doc known as “the Man of Bronze” and the owner of a “Fortress of Solitude” years before Superman’s debut, he also travelled the world in style and boasted an arsenal of high tech gadgets. That’s not even all of Savage’s most obvious contributions to pop culture: His entourage was even called “the Fabulous Five.”

Doc Savage had five companions that dedicated their lives, the same as Doc, to traveling around the world to do justice.

  • Lt. Colonel Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, who is better known as Monk to his friends. Monk is an industrial chemist.
  • Brigadier General Theodore Marley Brooks, Ham, is a lawyer, considered to be one of the best Harvard has ever turned out.
  • Colonel John Renwick, Renny, a construction engineer. He prided himself on his ability to knock down any door with his fists.
  • Major Thomas J. Roberts, Long Tom, the electrical wizard of the group.
  • William Harper Littlejohn, Johnny to his friends. He is an archaeologist and geologist of great renown.

These men made up the team of aides that Doc relied on throughout the series. Known as the “Fabulous Five” on the back cover of the Bantam Books editions, they were never called such in the actual series.

  • Doc’s cousin, Patricia Savage, introduced in the novel Brand of the Werewolf, frequently appeared in Doc Savage as well.

And no, these EXACT characters do not appear in the Jumanji movies. But aspects of their characters do.

Ah but enough of all that.

What does it matter, unless people enjoy the movie, and have a little escapist entertainment in the process, eh?

A Most Enjoyable Film Which Endlessly Pulls at the Corners of Your Face Her-Excellency7 April 2018

Who would have thought that the sequel to a much-loved classic would, in my opinion, turn into such a stand-alone powerhouse!?!

Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle, does just that. 

Not only is it a virtual non-stop ride of hilarity and laugh-out-loud moments, and it is, but the chemistry among the adult cast members is practically flawless and lends to the easy banter and overflowing, genius, COMEDIC DIALOGUE which just SHINES. Every look, every gesture, every note from The Rock, Kevin Hart and Jack Black are perfection in that at no time do you doubt they are who they are supposed to be. Karen Gillan is adorable and gorgeous at the same time. The obvious fun they are having, despite what I imagine to be uncomfortable filming locales, is palpable, and as an audience member, _if you allow yourself to be_, you WILL be swept up and transported by it.

So, why ANY low ratings?

While the first Jumanji was 'fun', underneath the fun, there were dark layers. There is none of that here and perhaps, this is where some of the disconnect from its detractors comes from. Unlike the original Jumanji, Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle is a fun, and funny, film throughout.

You're Going to Need a SEATBELT ThmellyAthole8 April 2018

I used to have an IMDB account when I was a teen - or at least thought I did, but couldn't log on. In any case, I think I've visited here maybe twice in the last five years. Today though, after just getting back from watching this with my almost-grown kids, I had to make an account just to leave this review.

To begin, I'll never understand people. I can't believe the negative reviews. How could anyone not have laughed like hell while watching this and still have a pulse? I didn't go in expecting much, but I came out with a smile on my face. The girl is hot, Jack Black "owns it", I've never been overly enthused about Kevin Hart, but he was fantastic. and The Rock just knocked it out of the park. 

I saw one review which reads: "not a wrestling fan ever so to see 'the rock' in movies, instantly puts me off!" Does anyone else want to vomit at the inanity, irony and ludicrousness of that statement? Then you have the user who out of 40+ titles he/she has reviewed in the past has only ever rated TWO above three stars. Seriously, if you don't enjoy films and find them so terrible, find a new hobby already. You've got one guy saying the shirt one of the kids wore was outdated. So, I'm guessing one can only wear clothing depicting the current year? Then you have the reviewers who maybe didn't understand the dialogue since they can barely communicate correctly themselves (such gems - I kid you not - as: 'averege'; 'what so ever'; 'family fair' (fare); 'are just wasn't'; 'due to it has'; 'all of there' {their); 'coz it is boring story'; 'no compare with'). Finally, you have the maybe half dozen reviewers who are so caught up in their bigotry that they can't relax and enjoy a film if it isn't whitewashed and who complain about the "Hollywood liberal agenda of diversity". Leave the politics at the door, man. In short, Jumanji Welcome to the Jungle was a fantastic hour or more of rip-riding fun and laughs.

Except for one very funny moment, Dwayne Johnson retires his wrestling persona for this film and instead, provides a smoldering and intense performance, riddled with good-natured hilarity as the lead in this film. Gillan was great in Doctor Who, and although I thought she was the weakest of both characters and actors in this film, she still held her own and looked fantastic doing so. She has one of those faces you can't help but love. Kevin Hart was fantastic as the diminutive valet and looking back, I think he was somehow involved in every funny moment in which I laughed the hardest. Finally, the master, the maestro (though I never really was a fan prior to this), Jack Black plays the teen beauty queen with 100% commitment and to perfection.

10/10 and definitely a film I will be purchasing right after I click "Submit". You can never have enough laughter in life, and Jumanji, Welcome to the Jungle delivers barrels-full.

Let’s talk a little about the characters in the old Doc Savage pulps.

Theodore Marley “Ham” Brooks

Theodore Marley “Ham” Brooks is an attorney and member of Doc Savage‘s Fabulous five.

Ham was considered one of the best-dressed men in the world, and as part of his attire, carried a sword cane whose blade is coated in a fast-acting anesthetic.

He first encountered Doc Savage while serving in the military, where he attained the rank of Brigadier General.

His nickname was acquired when Monk, in retaliation for his guardhouse incarceration, framed Brooks on a charge of stealing hams from the commissary. In the only case which Ham ever lost, he was convicted of stealing the hams. He acquired a pet ape which he named Chemistry.

In The Mystic Mullah he shows he is fluent in the Tibetan language.

Seriously, we don’t see anyone with these characteristics in either of the two Jumanji movies. But, we do see the aviator character who is looked upon as a knowledgeable resource for the game.

Jefferson “Seaplane” McDonough: Seaplane McGonough is a game character that plays a young pilot.

Alex Vreeke was the name of the human player who selected the avatar of Jefferson “Seaplane” McDonough and became trapped in the game for two decades. At the end of the movie, Alex is returned to his time and grows up to be an adult played by Colin Hanks.

All in all, it’s a fasinating twist of pulp fiction, Jumanji, and modern computer games.

The various plot lines are wide open. And this is very exciting.

No idea why it took me 2 years to watch it danielmanson23 November 2019

It's good. I had no idea what to expect in all honest. I am not huge fans of other movies by these actors, but this really worked. You could see the great chemistry between them all and it paid off.

What I liked: I enjoyed how it didn't dither about at the beginning and got right into the action. Jack Black especially was brilliant and hilarious! All the actors/actresses were great but Jack Black stood out. Good mix of action and comedy throughout. I was on the edge of my seat (metaphorically) wanting them to escape the game.

Let’s look at this next Doc Savage character…

Andrew Blodgett (Monk) Mayfair

Andrew Blodgett Mayfair, more commoly known as Monk Mayfair is among the principle members of the The Fabulous Five.

He received the name Monk because his long muscular arms and his low forehead make him resemble a monkey. Like several of Savage’s companions he served in the military, holding the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.

Monk currently works as an industrial chemist. He possesses incredible strength, rivaling Doc Savage and can effortlessly bend pennies between his fingers.

Monk personally trained his pet pig, Habeas Corpus, to help serve Doc on his missions.

Monk has a friendly rivalry with Ham, and the two often needle each other. A mutual affection has been shown between them, with one risking life to save the other.

In the Black, Black Witch he is capable of speaking flawless German without a trace of an accent.

He was played by Michael Miller in the film Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze

I will tell you that my personal opinion is that this role is Franklin “Mouse” Finbar. In the Jumanji movie he is one of the five selectable playable character in the video game version of “JUMANJI”.

In “Welcome to the Jungle”, he was the chosen avatar of Anthony “Fridge” Johnson.

In “The Next Level”, he was given to Milo Walker, instead of Fridge (who was forcefully given Shelly Oberon instead), but Finbar is later given back to Frdige.

Franklin “Mouse” Finbar.

Actually, there is a little bit of Monk in a number of characters.

But let’s not quibble with my nonsense. I’m just throwing out some thoughts that could be wildly wrong or (alternatively) right on track accurate.

 

John “Renny” Renwick

John “Renny” Renwick is a member of The Fabulous Five, Doc Savage’s main helpers and friends.

He is a Construction Engineer and a member of the military, holding the rank of Colonel.

Renny is notable for his gloomy personality and his physical stature. His fists are gigantic and he is known to like to punch his way through solid doors.

Thomas J. (Long Tom) Roberts

Thomas J. Roberts, or as hes more commonly referred, Long Tom Roberts, is one of Doc’s assistants and a member of “The Fabulous Five“.

In the 1975 movie, Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze, Long Tom is played by Paul Gleason.

The character is presented as an electrical engineer, holding the military rank of Major, and a pilot.

He and Doc Savage first met while he was serving in World War I. The explanation of his nickname is given as a result of an event during the war where he helped defend a small European village using an ancient cannon known as a “Long Tom“.

In The Man of Bronze he is described as “the physical weakling of the crowd, thin, not very tall, and with a none-too-healthy-appearing skin“.

Professor Sheldon “Shelly” Oberon is one of the five selectable playable character in the Video Game version of “JUMANJI”, that appears in “Welcome to the Jungle”, as the chosen avatar of Bethany Walker, and in “The Next Level” as the avatar of Anthony “Fridge” Johnson, but Bethany was later able to become Oberon again.

William Harper “Johnny” Littlejohn

William Harper “Johnny” Littlejohn is a member of The Fabulous Five, Doc Savage’s main helpers and friends.

Johnny is an archeologist and geologist, known for his exotic vocabulary with long words.

Johnny was initially blind of one eye, using a monocle that he kept even after going through corrective surgery that restored his vision. His military rank, if any, has never been revealed.

I cannot help but think that he was the inspiration for Professor Sheldon “Shelly” Oberon. 

Patricia Savage

She had a wealth of bronze hair–hair very closely akin in hue to that of Doc Savage.

She was tall; her form was molded along lines that left nothing to be desired. Her features were as perfect as though a magazine-cover artist had designed them.

She wore high-laced boots, breeches, and a serviceable gray shirt. from Brand of the Werewolf by Lester Dent writing as Kenneth Robeson.

Patricia “Pat” Savage, joins Doc Savage on many of his adventures beginning with her first appearance in “Brand of the Werewolf“. She is the daughter of Alex Savage, Doc’s uncle who lives in Canada.

Pat is described as being 18 years of age and shares many of Doc’s physical characteristics: bronze skin and hair, golden eyes. She also shares Doc’s sense of adventure, thus making her another of Doc’s companions.

Doc Savage makes attempts to restrain is young cousin in order to keep her out of harm’s way.

Pat typically carries a Pat’s SAA Revolver. It was handed down from her grandfather and is often carried in her purse.

Pat Savage appears in 39 Doc Savage adventures:

New Characters

It's all fun and games.

-Level up. Pjtaylor-96-1380448 December 2019

Even though its central concept seems ever-so-slightly more strained this time, ‘Jumanji: The Next Level (2019)’ is about as good as its predecessor. In fact, it’s sometimes even better.
Basically, the flick is just fun.
The crowd-pleasing body-swapping is amped up to eleven, shaking things up just enough so that they feel fresh. The main actors continue to properly impress in their chameleon-like roles, joined by a few extra treats that perform far better than you'd perhaps expect.

Indeed, these new players are probably its biggest asset; a couple of them thoroughly perforate the entire experience despite only having a rather small amount of screen-time.

The picture is often funny - though, never hilarious - and is oddly endearing, to boot. It isn't particularly deep or, even, memorable but it doesn't need to be. It's a good time at the movies; what more do you need?

Obviously some better theming and, perhaps, a tad of nuance wouldn't go amiss, but it's just not that kind of film really and that's perfectly fine. Even if it doesn't impact you as much as some of the year's best, it'll certainly make you smile and keep you entertained for a couple of hours.

Besides, its inciting incident is driven purely by character and it even manages to squeeze some genuine emotional connection, via a well-drawn dynamic between DeVito and Glover, into its otherwise otherworldly proceedings. Its acting is also deceptively simple but decidedly fantastic, fully immersing you in the idea that these major stars are actually four teenagers and two old men.

And nothing to take seriously.

But I do love the refreshing juxtaposition of the Jumanji franchise that Robin Williams stared in and started, along with the wonderful Doc Savage pulp fiction to create this 'new" and refreshingly vibrant world that is the perfect mixture of fun, laughs and adventure for the whole family.

If you all haven’t seen it yet, then please do so. It’s fun.

It’s great entertainment.

And at that, I’ll close.

This is a great movie to chill out with your friends and family. Drink some alcoholic beverages, have a good time. After the movie, you will all be in a good mood. It’s all great

And those are the best kind of movies.

Just a good old fashioned fun movie gluonpaul7 December 2019

There are not many franchises which have been renewed recently which I have actually thought turned out well. Most have been done badly but I have to say that Jumanji stands out as an exception.

This movie does not have a heavy deep story, doesnt try to be anything more than it is, this movie makes you laugh, keeps you entertained and ensures you leave the theater feeling happier than you went in.

It wont win oscars but it will win your heart, definitely a movie to go and enjoy at this time of year.

Oh and guess what?

And get ready because another movie is in the works; Jumanji 4. And this one will have some surprises.

  • One of the biggest twists in The Next Level involves the villain Jurgen the Brutal (Game of Thrones‘ Rory McCann), who’s revealed to have strengths and weaknesses much like the heroic avatars in the Jumanji video game. In a social media post from late last year, Johnson confirmed Jurgen is also a playable avatar and teased Jumanji 4 will reveal who’s been playing him in the real world.
  • Kasdan further alluded to the idea during his interview with Collider, saying he “would love to” reveal The Next Level’s hidden villain in the next installment.
  • In addition, The Next Level’s credits scene suggested Jumanji 4 will take place in the real world, much like the original Jumanji movie did. If so, it opens the door to all sorts of possibilities, not least of which is the Jumanji video game avatars and series’ young heroes meeting face to face.

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The Dragon by Ray Bradbury (Full Text)

Here's a nice short story to provide some brief moments of pleasure. I do hope that you enjoy it as much as I have. - MM

THE DRAGON
By Ray Bradbury

The night blew in the short grass on the moor; there was no other motion. It had been years since a single bird had flown by in the great blind shell of sky.

Long ago a few small stones had simulated life when they crumbled and fell into dust. Now only the night moved in the souls of the two men bent by their lonely fire in the wilderness; darkness pumped quietly in their veins and ticked silently in their temples and their wrists.

Firelight fled up and down their wild faces and welled in their eyes in orange tatters. They listened to each other’s faint, cool breathing and the lizard blink of their eyelids. At last, one man poked the fire with his sword.

“Don’t idiot; you’ll give us away!”

“No matter,” said the second man, “The dragon can smell us miles off anyway. God’s breath, it’s cold. I wish I was back at the castle.”

“It’s death, not sleep, we’re after…”

“Why? Why? The dragon never sets foot in the town!”

“Quiet, fool! He eats men traveling alone from our town to the next!”

“Let them be eaten and let us get home!”

“Wait now; listen!”

The two men froze.

They waited a long time, but there was only the shake of their horses’ nervous skin like black velvet tambourines jingling the silver stirrup buckles, softly, softly.
“Ah.” The second man sighed. “What a land of nightmares. Everything happens here. Someone blows out the sun; it’s night. And then, and then, oh, God, listen! This dragon, they say his eyes are fire. His breath a white gas; you can see him burn across the dark lands. He runs with sulfur and thunder and kindles the grass. Sheep panic and die insane. Women deliver forth monsters. The dragon’s fury is such that tower walls shake back to dust. His victims, at sunrise, are strewn hither thither on the hills. How many knights, I ask, have gone for this monster and failed, even as we shall fail?”

“Enough of that!”

“More than enough! Out here in this desolation I cannot tell what year this is!”

“Nine hundred years since the Nativity.”

“No, no,” whispered the second man, eyes shut, “On this moor is no Time, is only Forever. I feel if I ran back on the road the town would be gone, the people yet unborn, things changed, the castles unquarried from the rocks, the timbers still uncut from the forests; don’t ask how I know; the moor knows and tells me. And here we sit alone in the land of the fire dragon, God save us!”

“Be you afraid, then gird on your armor!”

“What use? The dragon runs from nowhere; we cannot guess its home. It vanishes in fog; we know not where it goes. Aye, on with our armor, we’ll die well dressed.”

Half into his silver corselet, the second man stopped again and turned his head.

Across the dim country, full of night and nothingness from the heart of the moor itself, the wind sprang full of dust from clocks that used dust for telling time. There were black suns burning in the heart of this new wind and a million burnt leaves shaken from some autumn tree be- yond the horizon. This wind melted landscapes, lengthened bones like white wax, made the blood roil and thicken to a muddy  deposit in the brain. The wind was a thousand souls dying and all time confused and in transit. It was a fog inside of a mist inside of a darkness, and this place was no man’s place and there was no year or hour at all, but only these men in a faceless emptiness of sudden frost, storm and white thunder which
moved behind the great falling pane of green glass that was the lightning. A squall of rain drenched the turf; all faded away until there was unbreathing hush and the two men waiting alone with their warmth in a cool season.

“There,” whispered the first man. “Oh, there…”

Miles off, rushing with a great chant and a roar – the dragon.

In silence the men buckled on their armor and mounted their horses. The midnight wilderness was split by a monstrous gushing as the dragon roared nearer, nearer; its flashing yellow glare spurted above a hill and then, fold on fold of dark body, distantly seen, therefore indistinct, flowed over that hill and plunged vanishing into a valley.

“Quick!”

They spurred their horses forward to a small hollow.

“This is where it passes!”

They seized their lances with mailed fists and blinded their horses by flipping the visors down over their eyes.

“Lord!”

“Yes, let us use His name.”

On the instant, the dragon rounded a hill. Its monstrous amber eye fed on them, fired their armor in red glints and glitters, With a terrible wailing cry and a grinding rush it flung itself forward.

“Mercy, God!”

The lance struck under the unlidded yellow eye, buckled, tossed the man through the air. The dragon hit, spilled him over, down, ground him under. Passing, the black brunt of its shoulder smashed the remaining horse and rider a hundred feet against the side of a boulder, wailing, wailing, the dragon shrieking, the fire all about, around, under it, a pink, yellow, orange sun-fire with great soft plumes of blinding smoke.

“Did you see it?” cried a voice. “Just like I told you!”

“The same! The same! A knight in armor, by the Lord Harry! We hit him!”

“You goin’ to stop?”

“Did once; found nothing. Don’t like to stop on this moor. I get the willies. Got a feel, it has.”

“But we hit something!”

“Gave him plenty of whistle; chap wouldn’t budge!”

A steaming blast cut the mist aside.

“We’ll make Stokely on time. More coal, eh, Fred?”

Another whistle shook dew from the empty sky. The night train, in fire and fury, shot through a gully, up a rise, and vanished away over cold earth toward the north, leaving black smoke and steam to dissolve in the numbed air minutes after it had passed and gone forever.

Do you want more?

I have more stories much like this one in my Ray Bradbury Index here…

Ray Bradbury

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Some fine examples of what Chinese ladies are like. All are in short video format.

This article is devoted to one of my more neglected sub-indexes. Which is the “learning about China by looking at Chinese girls” sub-index. Well, in this article we won’t be teaching you all all that much about China so much as we are showing you images of what the girls are like in China.

I know, I know… the American propaganda mills have been working over-time to make China look like an evil monster, dark, gloomy, sad and dirty. It’s nothing like that. But you know, the sheeple love to read things like that. It makes them feel good about their sorry lives.

So what I did was I got on my local internet and started collecting short videos made by gals here in China. They are in no particular order. I just went ahead and vacuumed them up as I found them. Over all, they are a great introduction to what the girls of China look like today.

I took the micro-videos and grouped them into batches of ten. Then I zipped up the file so that you can download all ten together. It’s much faster and easier for you to check out these ladies this way. I did make a point to put at least one “noticeable” worthy girl in each group. I’ll have you know.

But first…

Realize that just because the girls like to dance around on Chinese social media does not equate them to be the “standard, and normal” Chinese lass. They tend to stand apart in one way or the other as this video clearly indicates…

Video HERE.

What the American propaganda says…

But first, let’s see what kinds of images that you can find on American Internet and American websites that depict what Chinese girls must look like. OK.

This is a screen shot of a Bing Image Search…

Chinese girls according to Bing Search.

You know, there are ugly people all over, but seriously, the density of all these types of girls gives you the illusion that this is what all the Chinese girls look like. It’s not even remotely true.

Some Examples of Chinese Girls…

OK. Here’s some fun videos of come pretty Chinese girls.

  • Click on the link under the picture. It will download a ZIP file.
  • Unzip to a folder.
  • Then when you open the folder you will see the ten videos.
  • Click on the first one, and the computer will play all ten one after the other. You should be able to go through all the ten micro-videos in just over a minute.

Group 1

The ladies come in all shapes and sizes. Some are busty. Some are not. Some are short, and some are tall. All are lovely.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 2

Most of the Chinese girls like to wear tight fitting clothes. It’s the current fashion, I figure. I am not complaining. It’s like when I lived in California back in the early 1980’s, and all the girls wore these one-piece spandex suits that they rode bicycles in.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 3

All of these girls, no matter what size or shape, all have one or more attributes that are attractive to me personally. I think that it is their personality that comes out on these little videos.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 4

You will note that not all Chinese girls have long black hair. Many have brown or shades of brown hair. And while the predominant eye color is brown, there are other colors that manifest from time to time.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 5

When I look at these girls, a flood of thoughts assault me. And one of the dominant thoughts is, of course, sharing a bottle of wine with them and eating some fine delicious food.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 6

All of these gals have a story to tell. Wouldn’t you like to sit at a table, enjoy some fine food, play some games. Drink some wine and listen to their stories?

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 7

The gal on the bottom row in the middle is wearing some traditional Hunan clothing. I find the gals, the food, and the hilly countryside very appealing to me.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 8

The girl in the blue jeans is showing off her butt. It’s a pity that she doesn’t turn around so that we can see her face, and shape. But that’s the way life is. Sometimes people want to emphasize what they feel is their “best” physical attribute.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 9

Girl number two here is quite top heavy. I think that the outfit doesn’t do her justice. She might be better served with a long dress and a expansive top. But that’s just me, don’t you know.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 10

Having cleavage is a “thing” for girls in their 20’s in China, I guess. But you have to see them outside the work environment and in the clubs or KTV’s to appreciate it.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 11

The girl cutting up food is a real turn on. There are few things that get me more excited than a woman making and cooking dinner. It’s a fetish I suppose.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Group 12

This first gal in the golden spandex has a very nice butt. I could watch her a walking all day long, I’ll tell you what.

And you can access these young ladies by clicking HERE.

Some final thoughts

Now that I am older, when I look at a pretty and attractive lady, I think about going out together. I think about talking, eating fine delicious food, and drinking some nice alcohol. It makes me want to put on my “best side” also and just spend a lovely day or evening together. Engaging in free talk, and just having fun.

If something else happens, then great. If not, well, that’s fine too.

In every event, we would all have a great time. Talking, being our best and sharing our thoughts, our lives and fun together. It’s a precious thing.

One of the things that I really like about China is that you can speak freely to each other. You don’t have to worry about offending someone by your mannerisms, or your language or your subject matter. And this fact really becomes pronounced when I meet someone from the West who comes to China on a  visit and I immediately notice they stiffen up and get uncomfortable when I speak, or smoke or drink.

But what’s their problem. I offer them a cigarette. You know?

Jeeze! They are so imprisoned that they don’t know what freedom actually is.

Being afraid to say something, least the person gets offended is not freedom. Freedom is the ability to be yourself. So be it. Don’t try to please others. Please yourself. You’ll end up being a heck of a lot happier in return.

Throw in some fine delicious wine.

And some tasty food.

And some great conversation with some attractive ladies, and you have the makings of a wonderful time. I kid you not. You can believe  me on this. And that is really true if one of the ladies is an animal lover, a cook, a gardener, a history buff, a poet, an archivist, or a dancer. My experiences with these kinds of women has always been extraordinary.

And don’t even get me started on some of the prime MM subjects here. You’ll never get me to shut up!

Generally speaking in China, the more you can drink, the more respect you will earn. If you can drink excessive amounts of alcohol, still stand up, form relatively coherent sentences and follow proper Chinese drinking etiquette (see below), you’ll no doubt impress your table-mates and leave a good impression. If you fail, don’t worry! You probably won’t remember it anyway. Obviously never drink more than you can handle no matter what the pressure.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Pretty Girls of China Index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

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What’s It Like To Have Sex For 9 Hours Straight

Some people come to Metallicman for the articles on space, extraterrestrials and my experiences. Others come for glimpses and insight into China, while still other come to understand the MWI and world-line travel, and yet still others come to see pretty girls. This particular article is about observation, understanding and finding your place in a world full of situational adventures…

I once dated a woman who left me for a member of a motorcycle gang.

Her best friend was dating one of the gang, and soon she hooked up with a guy in that gang; another gang member. And, no, this wasn’t in my teenage years. I was in my 40’s at the time and my (former) girlfriend, and her friend were both in their late 30’s. Owned houses and successful businesses. The woman who was dating the (first) biker gang member owned a complete hotel with a restaurant, as well as other property. She also had a huge bank account from her ex-husband who had died earlier.They didn’t need to “go slumming”. They could have picked any guy they wanted.

And they wanted some fun and adventure, I suppose.

Anyways, they lived in a nice “bedroom community”; meaning a nice quiet town in central Pennsylvania. Not much going on. The town itself was beautiful, and calm and located in a nice part of the country.

I don’t know how they ended up getting tangled with this crew but the guys were also in their 30’s, and they looked the part of a motorcycle gang. Long hair, tattoos, and a really hash demeanor. They had a sort of a (young) Willie Nelson vibe.

Of course, they rode Harley Davidson motorcycles, and had the “colors” on their vests, and wore black leather boots. It’s not just stereotypical, it was the real way that they dressed and acted. It was like a scene from Bad Company, and The Cult. Chains dangling from their leather wallets, big massive belt buckles on leather belts. Pins on their vests, and elements of grey hair at their temples and on their beards.

They were also heavily involved in the meth trade. They manufactured it, and used it. And during the brief period of time when I was still dating my girlfriend, she would tell me about the absolutely insane levels of Animalistic sex her girlfriend would have with her gang-member boyfriend. She said all that they did was have near continuous sex, without sleeping or eating, for days.

I would imagine that it was something like what is described here…

What’s It Like To Have Sex For 9 Hours Straight

Reprint from HERE. All credit to the author and reprinted and edited to fit this venue.

It was with a girl I’d been dating over a year and it involved meth. Kids, don’t ever try meth, I am not kidding… but if you do make sure you have sex*, because – holy shit.

*with someone you trust

My girlfriend and I were already very familiar with each other’s bodies, and we were averaging at the sweet spot of about 45 minutes of intercourse a day, which is to say we were already trained for marathon humping. We’d had sex on meth once before (three hours that time), and it was so much fun we decided to set aside a Saturday night to try it again.

At 11pm, we start smoking, and put some porn on to set the mood.

By 11:15, we’re humping like frantic rabbits. Not your standard “I want you, you want me, let’s do this” sex, this is downright animalistic fucking. Fast, slow, vigorous, violent. Each sensation intensified five-fold. We’re inventing positions beyond the kama sutra, fucking at every conceivable angle to find the best ones. We are energizer bunnies running on unadulterated carnal lust, an unstoppable desire to push every limit of pleasure. This is what porn wishes it looked like.

At midnight, we’re both still horny as hell but I’m exhausted. She on the other hand has more energy now than when we started (this must be how succubus legends started) and spends the better part of the hour riding me. We go down on each other every once in a while for intermission.

1am, my orgasm is nowhere in sight, which is great because neither of us want to stop. We do slow down the rhythm and switch positions more frequently. Short break to smoke some more and change the 5-6 porno movies we have playing on loop.

2am, we are so dehydrated that we need to take an extended pause to chug several cups of water each. We’ve already passed our previous time record, but we’re just getting started. Everything is so goddamn sexy. She is so fucking hot, I’m so fucking hot, we’re just wild beasts succumbing to our deepest nature. Our passion is an unstoppable force. We just want to feel each other, as deep and intensely as possible.

3am, she’s no longer getting wet but we both want to keep going, so we chug more water and get the lube out. We go down on each other for about half an hour, slowly and oh so deliciously. She tastes better than she’s ever tasted before and I can’t get enough of her, 69 has never been so fun. We’re trying out new things that we’ve never done before. Any inhibitions about sex we’ve ever had in our lives are gone.

There is literally nothing we could do right now that would turn the other person off. We take advantage of this to ask each other to do things we’re usually too ashamed to ask for. We talk dirty like never before. Licking assholes, smacking each other, throwing her around the room, you fucking sexy slut this, give me your fucking dick that… It’s all so goddamn intense.

4am, I can’t even keep it up anymore. She goes down on me but it’s no use – my body is utterly depleted. I’m angry at myself because I don’t want to ever stop having this kind of sex, she tells me not to push myself too much. We cuddle for half an hour, softly massaging each other’s genitals with lube. The gentleness is a welcome change of pace for both of us and eventually I get it up again and slide back inside her, but now I’m alternating between hard and soft, all the while desperately willing my penis towards the former.

5am, we are so tired. We haven’t eaten in 12 hours and I haven’t done this much exercise in years. I’m not even inside her most the time anymore, we’re just rubbing each other and telling the other how turned on we are, how much we love each other, how hot this is, while our eyes are glued to the monitor that’s playing 6 porn movies simultaneously. We compare notes about which movies are our favorites, and it’s the sexiest conversation ever. We smoke a little bit more.

6am, it’s on again. Our second (or maybe 4th/5th) wind is here and we’re back at it full force. We’ve gone totally numb to the porn now, there’s been so much of it, so we turn it off, which strangely enough gets us more excited.

7am, we decide to record this on video because this is going to look amazing, but sadly we’ve missed most of the best stuff and now it’s a mix of me slow-thrusting and her trying to keep me hard with her mouth, with the occasional scene of enthusiastic passion. I spend more time watching the live recording than looking at her… I stop filming after 45 minutes so I won’t be distracted anymore. A bit more good and vigorous fucking.

8am, we can’t go on. I can’t go on. The passion is still every bit there, but the flesh is weak, so so weak. I am utterly and entirely done. I still haven’t come because of the meth, but there is literally zero energy left in my body. Every reserve has been tapped, just holding my body upright seems like a herculean task. She insists on finishing me off with her mouth. God bless her loving heart.

8:30, after a half hour blowjob, and nine hours of semi-continuous fucking, I finally come. It’s like a volcanic eruption, I almost black out from the release. I collapse hard, immobilized for a good twenty minutes.

My penis is so raw that the slightest touch is unbearably painful.

Of course I can’t sleep, because, the meth, but we both feel so amazing (and exhausted). There is lube and other fluids all over the place, but we don’t care. After a rest (and a huge spliff to ease the comedown) we pull ourselves up and go get some breakfast, which we have to force ourselves to eat.

It would be 36 hours before I got another erection.

We never replicated the events of that night after that. We decided to flush the little bit of remaining meth because it was just too powerful a force – that shit will get you addicted so hard and so fast. As amazing as we felt during the high, the sheer misery of the comedown was almost more intense, and even in our exhaustion we were desperate for another puff. Plus I was terrified that the drug-free sex would never be as good again in comparison.

But it remains a really great memory in my mind, and truth be told, our inhibition-free romp allowed us to discover even more about each other’s sexuality, and opened some gateways to more amazing (even drug-free) sex in the future.

– Jeremy Tschen

Some thoughts

I enjoy sex like most people. However, as an older man, I am more on the relaxed and laid back side of it all. Having wild and crazy sex like what is described herein is great for a younger man, but for me it might put me into a coma. Ugh!

I think that taking a drug occasionally to achieve a certain objective has it’s merits. If you have high blood pressure, you take a pill every day. If you have erectile dysfunction, you can take a little blue pill, and if you need a vacation, perhaps you can take a recreational drug to expand your frame of reference. But in all cases, I must advise against habitual use.

And this goes for sex as well. Too much sex can cause problems.

Though, you might die with a smile on your face.

I have a very good friend who was taking triple doses of Cialis every day for three years. (Why he did that, I will not get involved in.) But what I can say is that he eventually developed Esophageal cancer. Which is a very rare form of cancer, and he was in a terminal stage. Last I heard he was having a real rough time at it. It’s tough for him.

He’s only three years older than me.

Don’t get too dependent on chemistry to evoke enjoyment. It will not be good.

Anyways, I felt that this story was interesting. And it added a little bit of background and elaboration on what my girlfriend’s friend was saying. And at the time, really, I had no idea.I really didn’t. The wild sex was mentioned on more than one occasion to me, and I even wondered if she wanted me to be more active, but when I asked she’d always say “Lord, for goodness, No.” So I didn’t pay it any mind; I didn’t pay it any attention.

In hindsight, I imagine that my ex-girlfriend got to have a taste of this “forbidden fruit” and her life migrated in what ever direction that it would tend to carry her off to…

…probably not a good place.

After taking crystal meth, the desire to use more typically becomes very strong. 

This physical pull to keep taking more of a drug is called “dependence.” 

Becoming dependent on a drug is part of the addiction cycle. 

Crystal meth addicts are also likely to develop a strong “tolerance” to the drug, which means that, with continued use, more and more of the drug must be taken in order to achieve the same desired effect.

-History of Crystal Meth

I don’t believe she left me because of the promise of meth-induced marathon sex adventures. Instead I think that she left me because the allure of a big, dark, husky tough talking, rough around the corners, biker appealed to her base instincts. She, perhaps, found herself “under his spell”. And she enjoyed that.

Sometimes, it seems, that women go for either [1] the super-tough macho men, or [2] the sickly men that need nurturing and attention.

Women can’t explain it, there’s just something about a deep breathy voice that makes us weak in the knees. According to a British study, women prefer men with deeper voices because it’s subconsciously perceived as a sign of masculinity. The study asked 60 women to rate the sex appeal of 10 male recorded voices, with results showing that the deeper breather voices, which were voices both masculine and tender, win in overall popularity. "These results suggest that what makes the voice attractive are mostly properties that enhance the characteristics already in the averaged voice of the sex," explained the authors, the Daily Mail reported.

What is attractive?

Which brings up another subject that I covered elsewhere on what is attractive to me as a man. Here, let’s see what might be attractive to a woman who meets you for the first time. Or second time. Or, maybe third time.

Consider this list…

#1 Good grooming. Dress well and look good no matter where you are. You never know when you’d bump into the woman of your dreams. It’s a simple tip, but something almost all guys never focus on. Groom yourself well with quality man products and complex perfumes that smells great on you.

#2 Be assertive in your behavior. Women love a man who’s not fickle minded. Have an ego and believe in yourself and your decisions. As hard as this may seem, be the man who can put someone else in place when they overstep the line or misbehave with you.

#3 Charming personality. A charming personality is everything, but yet it’s not something most men have. In fact, meeting a man who knows to charm a girl is a hard task for any woman. Improve your body language around women and learn your manners around them.

#4 A good physique. Go build those biceps and those deltoids in your shoulders. When you work out, you look healthier and radiant, and clothes look oh-so-sexy on you. If you want to attract a girl at first sight, you have to remember that appearances do matter. A lot.

#5 Have a good sense of humor. It takes less than a minute for a girl to know if a guy has a good sense of humor while having a conversation with him. And that’s all you need to impress a girl. All girls know that a guy with a great sense of humor can be a lot of fun over dates or phone calls. Have a light hearted and fun approach towards life and try to look at the bright side all the time. You’ll draw women to you like moths to a flame.

#6 A man who’s not a pushover. A guy who’s a pushover is one of the worst kinds of men in the hierarchy of dating. A pushover is a guy who prefers to accept defeat just to avoid conflict with someone who’s dominating him. Don’t ever be taken for granted by anyone, be it your own friends or a colleague. Have a spine and principles in life. If you feel you’re being wronged, learn to voice your opinion instead of being implosive.

#7 A good job and a nice salary. Well, now we’re getting shallow. But it’s better to face the truth than pretend like money doesn’t matter. Of course it does! You like a sexy woman over an unattractive women. Women like a rich guy over a church mouse. Be rich and drive a great car and you’ll have a huge advantage already. Just a word though, it’s just an advantage, but it’s not enough.

#8 A man who’s respected by others. Women like to be respected by the man they like, but they also like being with a guy who’s respected by others. If someone doesn’t respect you, is it your own fault? If it is, try to get better. If it isn’t your own fault, walk away from them. Or stand up and claim the respect you deserve from them. It all comes down to this, if you genuinely respect yourself and have an ego, would you ever allow someone to throw you around for no fault of yours? Stand up and be a man.

#9 A confident man. Confidence is a great trait to have for any man. It’s an inner strength that’s seen and envied by anyone you meet. A confident man is more attractive to women because he believes in himself and his abilities, and he doesn’t tuck tail and run when he knows he’s right.

#10 A man who looks good. Good looks always make things easier when it comes to attracting the opposite sex. But when it comes to a man, thankfully for average looking men, there’s more than just a face carved by the gods that matters. Look your best, dress well and maintain a good posture. A straight back with an air of confidence can definitely impress the girl you like. Have a happy, cheerful face and a genuinely happy smile and you’ll do wonders.

#11 A good conversationalist. Just like a good sense of humor, knowing how to speak to a woman is a trait that all women look for in a man. Be pleasant, speak smoothly in a low tone and show genuine interest in the woman while speaking to her. Create conversations around her and make her have a nice time with you.

#12 Respectful behavior. Be respectful towards others when they deserve your respect. All good natured women like a well mannered and kind man who doesn’t treat others badly just because he can. Don’t be rude to waiters or your subordinates unless you have a reason to. Treat everyone with respect and you’ll be treated with respect. Women see kind men as good fathers, and it’s a trait that women instinctively like. Have good etiquette and treat women chivalrously, and you’ll notice them warming up to you almost instantly.

#13 An alpha male. The best women are always in the arms of the best men. No woman would want to date another guy’s man Friday if she’s desired by all men. If your friends don’t respect you, find new friends. You may have noticed this already, but there are always just one or two guys in a big group of guys who date the sexiest women while other guys sit wide eyed and hear their success stories in awe. They’re the alpha male. Be that guy.

#14 Make her feel comfortable in her skin. Women like a man who makes them feel at ease within the first few minutes of a conversation. Be the guy who can take away the air of nervousness in a first conversation while talking to a woman and she’ll like you for it. Indulge in a pleasant conversation and ensure that she feels involved and excited to talk to you.

#15 A compatible personality. Here’s a downer that you have to accept when it comes to understanding what women look for in a man. You may be a great guy, but at times both of you may just be way too incompatible for each other. She may like you, but she may not be willing to date you for her own reasons of compatibility. If you want to avoid this, be pleasant and genuine, and most of all, focus on her interests and learn about her likes and dislikes while talking to her so you know the right things to say at the right time. If she feels compatible with you and your personality, and thinks you’ll get along with her friends and family, she’ll definitely like you.

Conclusion

Personally, that when it comes to women’s preferences, it’s indeed complicated and depends on the situation. If there is one thing that I have learned is that everyone is different and what appeals to one person would repel another.

So my list above is just a guideline.

Seriously, if you take care of yourself. have self confidence, and can earn a buck or two, there’s no reason why a woman wouldn’t want to talk with you. And then from there… well, anything is possible.

Yet in most of my experiences, I can say that a hard, rough and “dark” man image appeals to most of the ladies that I have known. Of course, it doesn’t mean that they will just throw themselves into the sack with them, as other factors will mitigate the animal attraction, but it seems to be unmistakable. A strong man, a confident man, and a fun man are all positives when dealing with women.

Not that it matters to me. I’ve got a family, and they are a handful. In fact, more than just a handful. And yet, if I want some diversity, I go and get it. So it’s not really a big deal to me.

I want to believe that our lives and our experiences are PERSONAL matters. We can learn from the experiences of others, and apply the lessons to our own lives. But we should never want to relive the experiences of others. Simply because there are often unstated connections and conditions that complicate their relationships and situations.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Relationships Index here…

Relationships

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The Sentinel by Arthur C. Clarke (Full Text)

This is the science fiction short story that eventually was made into the famous movie 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) It’s a great read, and as much as I loved the movie, in many ways this short story was actually better. I hope that you all will enjoy it as much as I have.

THE SENTINEL

Arthur C. Clarke

1951 Avon Periodicals Inc.

The next time you see the full moon high in the south, look carefully at its right-hand edge and let your eye travel upward along the curve of the disk. Round about two o’clock you will notice a small, dark oval: anyone with normal eyesight can find it quite easily. It is the great walled plain,

one of the finest on the Moon, known as the Mare Crisium-the Sea of Crises. Three hundred miles in diameter, and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.

Our expedition was a large one. We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away. There were also three small rockets which were intended for short-range transport over regions which our surface vehicles couldn’t cross. Luckily, most of the Mare Crisiurn is very flat. There are none of the great crevasses so common and so dangerous elsewhere, and very few craters or mountains of any size. As far as we could tell, our powerful caterpillar tractors would have no difficulty in taking us wherever we wished to go.

I was geologist-or selenologist, if you want to be pedantic in charge of. the group exploring the southern region of the Mare. We had crossed a hundred miles of it in a week, skirting the foothills of the mountains along the shore of what was once the ancient sea, some thousand million years before. When life was beginning on Earth, it was already dying here. The waters were retreating down the flanks of those stupendous cliff s, retreating into the empty heart of the Moon. Over the land which we were crossing, the tideless ocean had once been half a mile deep, and now the only trace of moisture was the hoarfrost one could sometimes find in caves which the searing sunlight never penetrated.

We had begun our journey early in the slow lunar dawn, and still had almost a week of Earth-time before nightfall. Half a dozen times a day we would leave our vehicle and go outside in the spacesuits to hunt for interesting minerals, or to place markers for the guidance of future travelers. It was an uneventful routine. There is nothing hazardous or even particularly exciting about lunar exploration. We could live comfortably for a month in our pressurized tractors, and if we ran into trouble we could always radio for help and sit tight until one of the spaceships came to our rescue.

I said just now that there was nothing exciting about lunar exploration, but of course that isn’t true. One could never grow tired of those incredible mountains, so much more rugged than the gentle hills of Earth. We never knew, as we rounded the capes and promontories of that vanished sea, what new splendors would be revealed to us. The whole southern curve of the Mare Crisiurn is a vast delta where a score of rivers once found their way into the ocean, fed perhaps by the torrential rains that must have lashed the mountains in the brief volcanic age when the Moon was young.

Each of these ancient valleys was an invitation, challenging us to climb into the unknown uplands beyond. But we had a hundred miles still to cover, and could only look longingly at the heights which others must scale.

We kept Earth-time aboard the tractor, and precisely at 22.00 hours the final radio message would be sent out to Base and we would close down for the day. Outside, the rocks would still be burning beneath the almost vertical sun, but to us it was night until we awoke again eight hours later. Then one of us would prepare breakfast, there would be a great buzzing of electric razors, and someone would switch on the short-wave radio from Earth. Indeed, when the smell of frying sausages began to fill the cabin, it was sometimes hard to believe that we were not back on our own world – everything was so normal and homely, apart from the feeling of decreased weight and the unnatural slowness with which objects fell.

It was my turn to prepare breakfast in the corner of the main cabin that served as a galley. I can remember that moment quite vividly after all these years, for the radio had just played one of my favorite melodies, the old Welsh air, “David of the White, Rock.”

Our driver was already outside in his space-suit, inspecting our caterpillar treads. My assistant, Louis Garnett, was up forward in the control position, making some belated entries in yesterday’s log.

As I stood by the frying pan waiting, like any terrestrial housewife, for the sausages to brown, I let my gaze wander idly over the mountain walls which covered the whole of the southern horizon, marching out of sight to east and west below the curve of the Moon. They seemed only a mile or two from the tractor, but I knew that the nearest was twenty miles away. On the Moon, of course, there is no loss of detail with distance-none of that almost imperceptible haziness which softens and sometimes transfigures all far-off things on Earth.

Those mountains were ten thousand feet high, and they climbed steeply out of the plain as if ages ago some subterranean eruption had smashed them skyward through the molten crust. The base of even the nearest was hidden from sight by the steeply curving surface of the plain, for the Moon is a very little world, and from where I was standing the horizon was only two miles away.

I lifted my eyes toward the peaks which no man had ever climbed, the peaks which, before the coming of terrestrial life, had watched the retreating oceans sink sullenly into their graves, taking with them the hope and the morning promise of a world. The sunlight was beating against those ramparts with a glare that hurt the eyes, yet only a little way above them the stars were shining steadily in a sky blacker than a winter midnight on Earth.

I was turning away when my eye caught a metallic glitter high on the ridge of a great promontory thrusting out into the sea thirty miles to the west. It was a dimensionless point of light, as if a star had been clawed from the sky by one of those cruel peaks, and I imagined that some smooth rock surface was catching the sunlight and heliographing it straight into my eyes. Such things were not uncommon. When the Moon is in her second quarter, observers on Earth can sometimes see the great ranges in the Oceanus Procellarum burning with a blue-white iridescence as the sunlight flashes from their slopes and leaps again from world to world. But I was curious to know what kind of rock could be shining so brightly up there, and I climbed into the observation turret and swung our four inch telescope round to the west.

I could see just enough to tantalize me. Clear and sharp in the field of vision, the mountain peaks seemed only half a mile away, but whatever was catching the sunlight was still too small to be resolved. Yet it seemed to have an elusive symmetry, and the summit upon which it rested was curiously flat. I stared for a long time at that glittering enigma, straining my eyes into space, until presently a smell of burning from the galley told me that our breakfast sausages had made their quarter-million mile journey in vain. .

All that morning we argued our way across the Mare Crisium while the western mountains reared higher in the sky. Even when we were out prospecting in the space-suits, the discussion would continue over the radio. It was absolutely certain, my companions argued, that there had never been any form of intelligent life on the Moon. The only living things that had ever existed there were a few primitive plants and their slightly less degenerate ancestors. I knew that as well as anyone, but there are times when a scientist must not be afraid to make a fool of himself.

“Listen,” I said at last, “I’m going up there, if only for my own peace of mind. That mountain’s less than twelve thousand feet high -that’s only two thousand under Earth gravity-and I can make the trip in twenty hours at the outside. I’ve always wanted to go up into those hills, anyway, and this gives me an excellent excuse.”

“If you don’t break your neck,” said Garnett, “you’ll be the laughing-stock of the expedition when we get back to Base. That mountain will probably be called Wilson’s Folly from now on.”

“I won’t break my neck,” I said firmly. “Who was the first man to climb Pico and Helicon?” “But weren’t you rather younger in those days?” asked Louis gently.

“That,” I said with great dignity, “is as good a reason as any for going.”

We went to bed early that night, after driving the tractor to within half a mile of the promontory. Garnett was coming with me in the morning; he was a good climber, and had often been with me on such exploits before. Our driver was only too glad to be left in charge of the machine.

At first sight, those cliffs seemed completely unscalable, but to anyone with a good head for heights, climbing is easy on a world where all weights are only a sixth of their normal value. The real danger in lunar mountaineering lies in overconfidence; a six-hundred-foot drop on the Moon can kill you just as thoroughly as a. hundred-foot fall on Earth.

We made our first halt on a wide ledge about four thousand feet above the plain. Climbing had not been very difficult, but my limbs were stiff with the unaccustomed effort, and I was glad of the rest. We could still see the tractor as a tiny metal insect far down at the foot of the cliff, and we reported our progress to the driver before starting on the next ascent.

Inside our suits it was comfortably cool, for the refrigeration units were fighting the fierce sun and carrying away the body-heat of our exertions. We seldom spoke to each other, except to pass climbing instructions and to discuss our best plan of ascent. I do not know what Garnett was thinking, probably that this was the craziest goose-chase he had ever embarked upon. I more than half agreed with him, but the joy of climbing, the knowledge that no man had ever gone this way before and the exhilaration of the steadily widening landscape gave me all the reward I needed.

I don’t think I was particularly excited when I saw in front of us the wall of rock I had first inspected through the telescope from thirty miles away. It would level off about fifty feet above our heads, and there on the plateau would be the thing that had lured me over these barren wastes. It was, almost certainly, nothing more than a boulder splintered ages ago by a falling meteor, and with its cleavage planes still fresh and bright in this incorruptible, unchanging silence.

There were no hand-holds on the rock face, and we had to use a grapnel. My tired arms seemed to gain new strength as I swung the three-pronged metal anchor round my head and sent it sailing Lip toward the stars. The first time it broke loose and came falling slowly back when we pulled the rope. On the third attempt, the prongs gripped firmly and our combined weights could not shift it.

Garnett looked at me anxiously. I could tell that he wanted to go first, but I smiled back at him through the glass of my helmet and shook my head. Slowly, taking my time, I began the final ascent.

Even with my space-suit, I weighed only forty pounds here, so I pulled myself up hand over hand without bothering to use my feet. At the rim I paused and waved to my companion, then I scrambled over the edge and stood upright, staring ahead of me.

You must understand that until this very moment I had been almost completely convinced that there could be nothing strange or unusual for me to find here. Almost, but not quite; it was that haunting doubt that had driven me forward. Well, it was a doubt no longer, but the haunting had scarcely begun.

I was standing on a plateau perhaps a hundred feet across. It had once been smooth-too smooth to be natural-but falling meteors had pitted and scored its surface through immeasurable eons. It had been leveled to support a glittering, roughly pyramidal structure, twice as high as a man, that was set in the rock like a gigantic, many-faceted jewel.

Probably no emotion at all filled my mind in those first few seconds. Then I felt a great lifting of my heart, and a strange, inexpressible joy. For I loved the Moon, and now I knew that the creeping moss of Aristarchus and Eratosthenes was not the only life she had brought forth in her youth. The old, discredited dream of the first explorers was true. There had, after all, been a lunar civilization- and I was the first to find it. That I had come perhaps a hundred million years too late did not distress me; it was enough to have come at all.

My mind was beginning to function normally, to analyze and to ask questions. Was this a building, a shrine-or something for which my language had no name? If a building, then why was it erected in so uniquely inaccessible a spot? I wondered if it might be a temple, and I could picture the adepts of some strange priesthood calling on their gods to preserve them as the life of the Moon ebbed with the dying oceans, and calling on their gods in vain.

I took a dozen steps forward to examine the thing more closely, but some sense of caution kept me from going too near. I knew a little of archaeology, and tried to guess the cultural level of the civilization that must have smoothed this mountain and raised the glittering mirror surfaces that still dazzled my eyes.

The Egyptians could have done it, I thought, if their workmen had possessed whatever strange materials these far more ancient architects had used. Because of the thing’s smallness, it did not occur to me that I might be looking at the handiwork of a race more advanced than my own. The idea that the Moon had possessed intelligence at all was still almost too tremendous to grasp, and my pride would not let me take the final, humiliating plunge.

And then I noticed something that set the scalp crawling at the back of my neck-something so trivial and so innocent that many would never have noticed it at all. I have said that the plateau was scarred by meteors; it was also coated inches-deep with the cosmic dust that is always filtering down upon the surface of any world where there are no winds to disturb it. Yet the dust and the meteor scratches ended quite abruptly in a wide circle enclosing the little pyramid, as though an invisible wall was protecting it from the ravages of time and the slow but ceaseless bombardment from space.

There was someone shouting in my earphones, and I realized that Garnett had been calling me for some time. I walked unsteadily to the edge of the cliff and signaled him to join me, not trusting myself to speak. Then I went back toward that circle in the dust. I picked up a fragment of splintered rock and tossed it gently toward the shining enigma. If the pebble had vanished at that invisible barrier I should not have been surprised, but it seemed to hit a smooth, hemispherical surface and slide gently to the ground.

I knew then that I was looking at nothing that could be matched in the antiquity of my own race. This was not a building, but a machine, protecting itself with forces that had challenged Eternity. Those forces, whatever they might be, were still operating, and perhaps I had already come too close. I thought of all the radiations man had trapped and tamed in the past century. For all I knew, I might be as irrevocably doomed as if I had stepped into the deadly, silent aura of an unshielded atomic pile.

I remember turning then toward Garnett, who bad joined me and was now standing motionless at my side. He seemed quite oblivious to me, so I did not disturb him but walked to the edge of the cliff in an effort to marshal my thoughts. There below me lay the Mare Crisium-Sea of Crises, indeed-strange and weird to most men, but reassuringly familiar to me. I lifted my eyes toward the crescent Earth, lying in her cradle of stars, and I wondered what her clouds had covered when these unknown builders had finished their work. Was it the steaming jungle of the Carboniferous, the bleak shoreline over which the first amphibians must crawl to conquer the land-or, earlier still, the long loneliness before the coming of life?

Do not ask me why I did not guess the truth sooner-the truth, that seems so obvious now. In the first excitement of my discovery, I had assumed without question that this crystalline apparition had been built by some race belonging to the Moon’s remote past, but suddenly, and with overwhelming force, the belief came to me that it was as alien to the Moon as I myself.

In twenty years we had found no trace of life but a few degenerate plants. No lunar civilization, whatever its doom, could have left but a single token of its existence.

I looked at the shining pyramid again, and the more remote it seemed from anything that had to do with the Moon. And suddenly I felt myself shaking with a foolish, hysterical laughter, brought on by excitement and overexertion: for I had imagined that the little pyramid was speaking to me and was saying: “Sorry, I’m a stranger here myself.”

It has taken us twenty years to crack that invisible shield and to reach the machine inside those crystal walls. What we could not understand, we broke at last with the savage might of atomic power and now I have seen the fragments of the lovely, glittering thing I found up there on the mountain.

They are meaningless. The mechanisms-if indeed they are mechanisms-of the pyramid belong to a technology that lies far beyond our horizon, perhaps to the technology of para-physical forces.

The mystery haunts us all the more now that the other planets have been reached and we know that only Earth has ever been the home of intelligent life in our Universe. Nor could any lost civilization  of our own world have built that machine, for the thickness of the meteoric dust on the plateau has enabled us to measure its age. It was set there upon its mountain before life had emerged from the seas of Earth.

When our world was half its present age, something from the stars swept through the Solar System, left this token of its passage, and went again upon its way. Until we destroyed it, that machine was still fulfilling the purpose of its builders; and as to that purpose, here is my guess.

Nearly a hundred thousand million stars are turning in the circle of the Milky Way, and long ago other races on the worlds of other suns must have scaled and passed the heights that we have reached. Think of such civilizations, far back in time against the fading afterglow of Creation, masters of a universe so young that life as yet had come only to a handful of worlds. Theirs would have been a loneliness we cannot imagine, the loneliness of gods looking out across infinity and finding none to share their thoughts.

They must have searched the star-clusters as we have searched the planets. Everywhere there would be worlds, but they would be empty or peopled with crawling, mindless things. Such was our own Earth, the smoke of the great volcanoes still staining the skies, when that first ship of the peoples of the dawn came sliding in from the abyss beyond Pluto. It passed the frozen outer worlds, knowing that life could play no part in their destinies. It came to rest among the inner planets, warming themselves around the fire of the Sun and waiting for their stories to begin.

Those wanderers must have looked on Earth, circling safely in the narrow zone between fire and ice, and must have guessed that it was the favorite of the Sun’s children. Here, in the distant future, would be intelligence; but there were countless stars before -them still, and they might never come this way again.

So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered throughout the Universe, watching over all worlds with the promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it.

Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set upon the Moon instead of on the Earth. Its builders were not concerned with races still struggling up from savagery. They would be interested in our civilization only if we proved our fitness to survive -by crossing space and so escaping from the Earth, our cradle. That is the challenge that all intelligent races must meet, sooner or later. It is a double challenge, for it depends in turn upon the conquest of atomic energy and the last choice between life and death.

Once we had passed that crisis, it was only a matter of time before we found the pyramid and forced it open. Now its signals have ceased, and those whose duty it is will be turning their minds upon Earth. Perhaps they wish to help our infant civilization. But they must be very, very old, and the old are often insanely jealous of the young.

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait.

I do not think we will have to wait for long.

The End

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A comparison of news articles from America and China

I have a premise that you can gauge the relative health of a nation by looking at what it is being promoted as “news” day in, and day out. While there are elements of information, promotion, propaganda, and scandal, over all by comparing the two sources you can get a general idea of the “social climate” in each individual nation. And from this, you can gauge it’s overall health and the direction of the society.

America

Here’s the “news” from Drudge on 29APR21…

Any articles about China are highlighted in Red.

China

Here’s the news from CGTN on 29APR21…

Chinese articles about America are shown in blue.

Comparisons

There are many comparisons that one can make.

For starters, in the articles about the “other” nation, it is very interesting.

  • American “news” warns about the bad things about China.
  • Chinese news reports on the given situations inside of America.

Most of the other news discusses the events that “buy papers”, or in other words, that are of interest to the readership.

Today, a huge segment of media has been taken over by video. While article about certain subjects continue to sell, a huge percentage of media rely on videos to get their messages across. In fact, all “news” organizations have video elements as part of their articles.

I’d post some from America, but almost all of the videos come from organizations that are banned in China because they are associated with American “alphabet” agencies.

Here’s some from China…

Videos.

In regards to videos, China is all about the latest technologies, the new space station and well, you get the idea…

This is very cool. 5G, AI controlled location and positioning overlay upon the arm…

Here, we have the new space station…

Here’s a pretty girl. She has this “fish shape” that is considered to be very beautiful within China.

Here’s another gal. This is another girl that is selling her light and easy pants. I like her. She has good appeal.

Of course the news about what is going on in India with the COVID-19 and the new “India Strain” is heartbreaking. Judging from the pictures it seems to be almost as bad as the “B” strain that was unleashed on China on CNY 2020. I wonder why you aren’t seeing these images in America?

And here’s one thing that you see pretty irregularly. It’s applications of technology that are in use. In this case we see a guy using a hand sensor to map out an old village that is being torn down for new homes.

And finally a comparison of cities for fun.

Conclusions

If left alone, with no major “fire-hose of disinformation” drenching everyone with the propaganda of the day, Most media are the same. They concentrate on the things that interest their readership.

Obviously, the hate-China narrative from 2016 through 2020 had an impact.

Chinese readership want to know about technology, good things, and what’s going on in the world. More or less presented in a “neutral” fashion and manner. American readership seems to want (whether they want it or not) things that are alarming, salacious, interesting, fearful or worrisome.

America…

The “news” from America tend to fall into these kinds of categories…

Salacious
Scientists say space SEX will be challenging...

Worrisome
India virus surge breaks health system... Developing...

Fearful
Your tech devices want to read your brain. What could go wrong? 

Alarming
Virus Alters Genes, Explaining Mystery Behind 'Long Haulers'...

And China…

While the news content and the presentation of it are quite different…

Exciting
China launches core module of space station 

Happy
Infrared cameras recorded the growth of a family-of-3 snow leopards 

New Possibilities
Xi: No one would be left behind on the way to poverty alleviation 

Curiosities
Watch traditional Tibetan costumes in 30 seconds

I believe that these trends are indicative of the way that the people think. As well as how the entire society thinks.

Perhaps instead of thinking about controlling people to do this, or to do that via fear (the American way), maybe you should give them hope instead. Provide hope, provide help and throw in a dash of compassion.

Its the Chinese way.

And a direction, that I must add, that President Biden is attempting to do in his most recent speech. It’s a nice change of pace from what most Americans have seen or been exposed to.

Maybe there is some hope for Western society after all.

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The creature with a great rack; the Megaloceros

Did you know that some species of creatures view size of particular shapes or body forms as sexually stimulating.  It’s sort of like how birds are attracted to displays of plumage, and precise mating dances, or how bees and insects are attracted to scents and colors. Well, what is very interesting and what we are going to talk about here are the sexual “turn ons” for long extinct animals.
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Sounds like fun, huh?
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In particular we are going to amuse ourselves with the magnificent rack on the megaloceros.
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I mean, when you see this creature cross the street, or walk into a store, or get into a car, you will not be able to help yourself. You will be staring at that absolutely stunning enormous rack. I am not kidding, I will tell you what!
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Megaloceros

Quick Megaloceros Facts

  • Lived from the Pleistocene through the Modern Period
  • Lived on the plains of Eurasia
  • Was as long as an elk
  • Weighed as much as 10 white-tailed deer
  • Was an herbivore
  • Its antlers were longer than a car

About Megaloceros

Megaloceros, also known as the Irish Elk, was a genus of deer which lived approximately 2 million to 10,000 years ago – from the Pleistocene through the Modern Period. It was first discovered during the late 18th century and was named by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1799. Its name means “giant horn.”

The genus of Megaloceros covers 9 distinct species of this genus, but only one of them were as large as small dinosaurs. And that species is Megaloceros giganteus. It is also the one that we will be talking about today.

Megaloceros.

If you look at Megaloceros pictures, then you’ll quickly realize that this animal looks like an elk with an extremely large set of horns. However, that is not entirely accurate. These mammals had more in common with North American deer than it did with European elks. Another one of the interesting facts about Megaloceros is that it wasn’t exclusive to Ireland either.  This deer lived all over Eurasia.

This animal was approximately 8 feet long and weighed around 1,500 pounds. Which is about the length of a modern elk but nearly double the weight of one. Another feature that made it quite different from looking like a modern elk is its antlers. Its antlers were about 12 feet long and weighed around 100 pounds.

As impressive as that sounds, their antlers weren’t used for combat, however. They were almost certainly used by the male deer to attract females.

Megaloceros went extinct right at the cusp of the last Ice Age. And scientists aren’t exactly sure why.

Some paleontologists have speculated that overpopulation and inbreeding led to a population of Megaloceros’s that were unable to adapt when the climate changed. Other paleontologists believe that mankind hunted them into extinction. Most likely, it was a combination of these two facts which led to the inevitable demise of these majestic looking animals.

Speaking about some large racks…

Of course, I just couldn’t help myself. Heh heh.

Index of large racks.

Here’s the videos. Most are under thirty seconds. Very quick. To open them up, just click on the link below.

  • MOV1 – She’s from Hunan, and I love her in traditional clothes.
  • MOV2 – She’s a mighty big girl.
  • MOV3 – She’s a clothing model.
  • MOV4 – It’s hard to concentrate on her trousers.
  • MOV5 – I do like her top.
  • MOV6 – Demure, but impressive.
  • MOV7 – Damn!
  • MOV8 – This is a really nice girl.
  • MOV9 – One of my favorites.
  • MOV10 – She always puts a smile on my face.

And a second group…

Now wasn’t that fun? Yeah. I like looking at pretty girls.

And the point that I am trying to make is… um… well, big physical attributes tell us nothing about the person who displays them. But they DO tend to get our attention.

I posit that the Megaloceros evolved with these large enormous horns not because it offered it better ability to forage, to run, to camouflage or to survive, but rather to attract the attention of females that wouldn’t help but notice his enormous, gigantic presence.

Instead of survival, it was procreation of the species.

Which is a very important driving force for life. And while it might not be all that progressively popular to admit, it is true. Species that are not able to procreate to the point where it is able to live within it’s environment are doomed for extinction.

Perhaps we see that manifesting in humans as well. Eh?

It does make you wonder about the LGBT movement…

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A look at how oppressed the Chinese people are and what can be done to save them.

If you read the American (and Western) media today, you will discover that there are a number of long-running screeds regarding China, that play over and over, and over again.

For instance, China is filthy, the people are evil, they lie and cheat and steal, and they are oppressed by the evil communist regime. Etc, Etc. Well one of the narratives is exactly that; “the oppression” of the Chinese people.

You see it everywhere.

Here we are going to talk about this “oppression”.

Here’s a nice little video that works to dispel that illusion. Keep in mind that oppressed people do not smile, laugh, and have fun. They tend to hide inside their homes, and spend the evenings alone watching television or playing games in front of video monitors. They avoid groups. They talk about having to defend themselves, and they justify their stance of defense to be “freedom” from “tyranny”.

You don’t see that in China.

You do see that in the United States, though.

Shanghai, China.

Improving the lives of the citizens

All governments will say that their first order of business is to improve the lives of their citizens.

Most of them will actually mean it. Some of them will work hard at it. But only a few will succeed in doing it.

We know that GDP numbers cannot accurately capture the totality of life.

But certainly we can see that the trend of GDP per capita can offer strong clues about whether things are looking better, or worse, over time.

Harvard Business Review issued this very interesting report, that I would recommend for a read: https://lnkd.in/gY4F6DP

Check out this video

Here’s the video.

And NO, it’s not me. This is a video blogger that travels the world and speaks better Chinese than I do. He has a vblog called JaYoeNation. He’s pretty good. LOL.

Take a spell and let it download. If it is taking too much time, you can click on THIS LINK and down load a zipped-file and watch the video directly. It’s pretty good. Please enjoy.

You have got to see the pictures and this video…

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Some selected favorite works by John William Godward

It’s time for a nice relaxing stroll through some art. This fellow is one of my favorites, but he isn’t one that you would stand in front of one of his pieces and ponder. It’s (rather) the way your feel when you look at his works that matter.

John William Godward was a “English Victorian Neoclassical, Olympian Classical Revivalist artist”. He died in 1922 and has painted at least 203 separate artworks that we know of. He has a unique style, smooth and classical with a stylized form that is actually quite attractive. He is one of my favorite artists.

John William Godward (9 August 1861 – 13 December 1922) was an English painter from the end of the Neo-Classicistera. He was a protégé of Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, but his style of painting fell out of favour with the rise of modern art.

-Wikiart

You can see his entire collection of works here.

The Old, Old Story

I think that it doesn’t matter what culture you are in, what society your come from, or what time period you live in; we all fall in love. And this fact, and the pure beauty of it, is very significant. Which makes this painting adorable…

The Tigerskin

Back in the day, when this painting was made, the possession of tiger, lion and other sins of animals was a sign of your power and experience. It was equated with wealth. this, I like to believe, was a carry over from days centuries ago.

It pains me to think that people killed these magnificent animals for their skins, but humans have always been rather primitive beings. Anyways, Goddard does a nice job in painting the skins as well as the details on the marble surfaces.

A Priestess of Bacchus

Bacchus was the Roman god of agriculture, wine and fertility, equivalent to the Greek god Dionysus. Dionysius was said to be the last god to join the twelve Olympians. Supposedly, Hestia gave up her seat for him. His plants were vines and twirling ivy.

-Bacchus - Simple English Wikipedia

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She certainly looks comfortable. I’ll bet that the dress is remarkable, and you well imagine being on the coast… wearing fine relaxing comfortable clothes… and enjoying the day. It appeals to me.

A Fair Reflection

As an artist, I admire the softness and shading of the woman’s arms. I love the colors of the hair and the contrast between it and the marble wall behind her, as well as the details on the folds of the dress.

You will notice how the artist managed to show how the dress clung to her chest and how the textured and patterned belt gathered around her waist. It’s awfully lovely.

Waiting for an Answer

Women, girls… they can read men so very easily. And as such we are all like “putty in their hands”. But this is all timeless. It doesn’t matter if you are from Columbia, Israel, or ancient Greece. It’s all the same. Man courts woman, and she weighs her options.

Timeless.

Innocent Amusements

I love these calm and pleasant classical scenes.

There’s no serious or deep meanings behind them. Instead, they remind you of calmer and easier time. A time when the pace of life was easy.

The Engagement Ring

Likewise we can see and feel the emotion behind the story for the ring that the woman is admiring within this painting.

A Priestess

Lovely. As I have stated before, the details on the hand and the hair are just awesome.

The Betrothed

Another painting toying with a precious ring.

A Dilettante

A person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, especially in a desultory or superficial way; dabbler. a lover of an art or science, especially of a fine art.

-Dilettante | Definition of Dilettante at Dictionary.com

The Posy

It’s a simple painting and a simpler subject matter.

Dolce Far Niente

Dolce far niente is an Italian phrase for pleasantly doing nothing. An example of dolce far niente is what someone would say to describe that they are laying on a blanket gazing at trees in Florence. 

-Dolce far niente dictionary definition

Mischief and Repose

Reclining on a tiger skin draped over a marble ledge, a young woman, Repose, is disturbed from slumber by her companion, Mischief, who pesters her with a dress pin. They wear diaphanous robes fashioned after chitons worn by women in ancient Greece. Another dress pin and a hair ribbon lie scattered on the marble floor.

Following the excavations of Pompeii, which began in 1748, artists were fascinated with Greek and Roman life. John William Godward painted many scenes like this one of idealized beauties in calm, often sterile environments. In this painting, the figure of Repose is arranged seductively, with her breast and nipple showing through the thin material of her dress. But there is something distinctly untouchable about these women; they do not engage the viewer with an inviting gaze nor solicit personal contact. Like their antique setting, they possess a monumental, marmoreal quality, resembling Greek statues frozen in time.

 

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art Index, here…

ART

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Articles & Links

Master Index

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you.

 

 

 

 

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Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art Index here…

ART

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Some notes on night time bumping with new friends in China, hotels and QR codes

Well, this post is to be an elaboration on a few specific MM comments. The poster wanted some clarification on what is going on regarding [1] hotels (in China, obviously) and [2] “new friends” that you might make on your adventures inside of China, and I of course, was more than willing to help him out.

But before I begin, let me clarify a few things.

First Off, China has changed.

China is not the way it was ten years ago, or even later. The days of  going to a salon with wall to wall girls that can give you some manly pleasures are few and far-between today. Even in the remote communities. It’s all kind of dying off.

So your experience from ten years ago or longer are actually (sad to say) not really going to be replicated. Those days are over.

I do not see them returning.

The same goes with the ladies that walk the streets, and hang out on the corners. You used to see them everywhere and on certain streets. You can still go to those streets, but things are much more discreet these days. You need to know what you are doing, and have a local friend to help you navigate the local geography.

It’s all about change.

And change is good. Well, in this case it’s good.

Part of the reasons behind these changes it are due to laws, part of it is due to society, and part of it is due to technology.

Laws

China has implemented some harsh laws regarding morality. The Chinese government wishes to maintain a traditional culture, and thus many venues related to vice are discouraged. Prostitution has always existed, and still exists, but it is no longer so blatant and open as it used to be.

Raw, Western style, quick flings are a dying breed. Instead, they have been replaced with talented and beautiful courtesans. These are mighty women. Some youngish (in their 20's) and some older. All strong, capable and beautiful.

Not to mention... profit oriented.

Society

China is very prosperous. 

The Western "news" has been so God-Damn awful that no one outside of China realizes just how well off the Chinese are. They are not only far richer than their American equals, but they own multiple homes, have savings, and are generally far happier. 

A walk through any Chinese parking lot will produce a vast number of Mercedes, BMW's, Porches, and high-end local vehicles. Not to mention the occasional Ferrari, Lamborghini, and Bentley.

What this means is that even the poorest Chinese person is doing quite well. The need to go prostitute yourself out of drug addiction, poverty or some kind of forced-slavery is no longer on the table. People who prostitute themselves in China do so for additional money, or to improve their lives. Not out of necessity.

Technology

QR code in the skies of Shenzhen. All done by laser-mounted and LED mounted drones flying via 5G and AI.

Sure there are dating APPs, and payment APPS and QR codes and all sorts of technology that makes business transactions very easy, and free. 

Unlike the USA where every single thing you do comes with a fee, in China it's free. You want to transfer some money electronically, scan the QR. No cost. It's free. Try doing that in America. America is the land with a million tiny, tiny hands in your wallet taking very small bites out of everything that you do, so that at the end of the day your wallet is empty.

Not in China.

So it's much easier to network electronically, make your connections and associations and make some "new friends" in the process. Everyone has a smart phone, and unlike America where you need to pay a weeks salary for one, here in China they are cheap and easy to get. Everyone has them. Everyone uses them.

And if you want to make a few spare yuan on the side, it's ridiculously easy to meet new people, and make new friends.

China is far, far, FAR more advanced than anyone in the West has any idea about. All those electronics, and technologies that come from Germany, Japan, Switzerland and Korea are all developed and made inside of China.

That’s the reality.

And that is partially why the US government is so horrified about “China’s rise”. As if it just happened “over night”. It didn’t.

And don’t even get me started on the idea that America is going to invest 2 trillion dollars on infrastructure to catch up with China…

Catch up…

The second point…

I think that the world has become a very harsh place.

Some places like the Middle East, and America are very difficult places to live. People feel under all sorts of pressure and need a release. They want some fun, and some pleasure.

And while I like to talk about the sexual activity that may or may not be associated with this, I strongly believe that the companionship of some new friends, some good food, and great conversation is really … REALLY… very much in need today.

Seriously, the best conversationalists are women.

I am sorry guys. That’s a fact. And they can chat up a storm, and they are interesting to boot! Add to that the fact that they can read EQ and emote to you on a very deep and significant level. It’s calming to me, and seriously I need to relax before I am ready to perform any kind of sexual activity. I’m not a 16 year old boy. I need intellectual stimulation to relax.

The old days of being “ready to go” in a second and leap into bed are long, long gone. Those days are like a very distant memory to me.

Now from my point of view, as a older man, I need to have more stimulation aside from what you would just get sexually. I need to have some good food. Some great wine. And some great conversation with a woman that spends the time to look great and who is willing to chat up and have some fun with me. Other older men in the MM audience know what I am talking about.

For you’se other guys that don’t know, and don’t understand, you WILL find out.

Just popping a Viagra, or a Cialis just won’t cut it.

It’s no longer about getting “it up”, and “staying hard”. It’s also about wanting to have sex, being interested, and staying interested, and having the energy and stamina to engage in some physical romping.

Your little-MM won’t budge an inch unless you are relaxed and interested in your partner and what they have to say.

That’s just the way it is.

Believe me or not. I don’t care.

For me, you just aren’t gonna get that with a run-of-the-mill street walker. Instead, You get that (what you need) from friends, and from other people who are upwardly mobile looking to chat up with successful and interesting men.

Interesting men. People who can discuss things on a wide selection of topics, and who have some money to spend, and like to play around a little bit. And that’s … well… you all like MM don’t you?

Ok. Enough of that disclaimer.

I think you all know what I am trying to say. Stop thinking that everything is a black and white cartoon. It isn’t. the world is colorful, and the needs of humans are varied and complex. Our best experiences come from understanding and embracing this fact.

Drink some wine. Chat up on a subject that you love to talk about. Be a little goofy, or silly. Don’t be afraid to say things. Joke some, drink some and eat some delicious food. have a great time, and then… relaxed, and engaged, you can take your time alone with your new friends. At a nice, leisurely pace.

It’s a win – win.

The Comment

I think this comment was written on 19APR21.

Concerning “ding dong” girls.

IMO best to just go into the bar. My first experience was in a Zhuhai hotel. (Took ferry straight from Hong Kong airport). The bar folks will call somone to come talk to you if there is no one there.

However, found out the hard way that first Chinese trip that you need to be careful about the pebble trick (I believe that is what happened: someone put a stone in the door so it never fully closed and while showering someone came in and exchanged my real RMB with counterfeit RMB). First the taxi guy told me I had fake RMB (didn’t believe him since I had it exchanged in the bank the previous day) but accepted they were fake when I went for an incredible foot and back massage the next night.

Also, learned the scary way in Shanghai to never go to KTVs that are not connected to the hotels you are staying in, unless you are with a local.

If one had a “ding dong” girl (first time I heard the term), how does one pay them if currency is no longer exchanged? Or do you still need cash for stuff like that?

And this is my response, and note that I elaborated upon it substantially…

Payment

You pay the girls using QR scans via Ali-pay, WeChat, or in E-yuan.

The most common way to move money around to friends or make purchases within China is through QR code. Everyone has one, and depending on your situation, you might have a couple all directing to different backs or purposes that you have arranged beforehand. You can read about it HERE.

Sometimes you can use some paper currency. They are useful. No one is going to reject a couple of thousand RMB if you hand it to them.

But in general, you use e-pay. You just generate your personal QR to your bank account. It’s amazingly easy.

If she (or he) is reluctant to give you a QR to scan, you can easily pass the money to here electronically. (BTW, It’s never happened.) I know that there is a KTV club in Louhu, Shenzhen that has a nice troop of young attractive men (in white) that service the ladies. They have a QR code printed on a cloth that is sewn into their jacket. They just flop out the cloth QR and the lady (or guy) scans the code and everyone is good to go.

Male hosts tend to provide services to the ladies in fine, clean (and often white) attire.

It doesn’t sound very classy, but it is. It’s all in the presentation. You know, for a man who is providing services to a lady, the actions and the behaviors are all very scripted and precise. It’s not crude at all, but rather very refined, polite, and calming.

In general, the most common way of transferring money is through the exchange of wechat names, and then you can either do a direct transfer, or send a few red envelopes to her. As in the picture at the top of this article.

Sending a “red envelope” full of money to a friend is very easy using WeChat.

If that doesn’t work, then you can do a direct surface to surface transfer of cash.You use a direct transfer APP and put your two phones physically together and the transfer goes directly without using Wifi.

Finally, if she is associated with the hotel, you can tack her fees to your hotel bill, and the gal at the register will hand her cash or transfer via QR.

Most of the bars with the bar-girls available via ferry from HK to Shekou no longer exist. The entire area has been built up by overseas Chinese investors and is now one large sprawling mall with Western prices. Yikes!

As far as Zhuhai is concerned, the major hotels that were involved in the KTV girls pretty much were closed. The hotel in front of my home was busted in 2013 for having 600 KTV girls. It was a night of many sorrows, I can well imagine.

Vice raids on Chinese hotels that host KTV girls and boys occur all over China. Since 2013 the police has put a major clamp-down on these establishments and most have ended up operating in a stealth mode ever since.

Ding Dong girls are the girls on the colorful business cards that you see shoved under your hotel doors, or on the street. Usually if you see a trail of cards on the sidewalk, they are a trail of “bread crumbs” that you follow to a hotel lobby.

You can tell that “X” marks the spot with a bunch of cards lying on the cement in front of the lobby door.

So you look down, see all these business sized colorful cards with pictures of cute girls and then you look in the front lobby. There when you go in, you’ll see from three to seven girls all sitting around in the lobby looking bored and playing with their phones.

You can, of course, go up to them and chat.

But more commonly is that you turn on your wechat “scan for local members” and see if any of the girls near you are broadcasting.This feature will alert you to all the local people near you with a wechat on.  Which should be a couple thousand. But if you only look at those that are the closest to you, you will be fine. You should be able to pick out the girls really easily.

For instance, if you are in a lobby, the girls will be from 1 to 10 meters away. So you look over the closest girls and try to associate the girl with the wechat picture. The smartest girls will put their picture so that you can recognize them directly.

Chances are, that they are available. so you find the gal that you want, and you connect, and send her a message. The wechat function allows you to chat and translate at the same time. So you just say hi. Ask the amount, and the desired services,  and then you two can go up to the hotel and have some fun.

It’s super convenient.

Now the “shake” feature is something different. You can easily connect with someone. You both click on the shake feature , and then both phones will connect. It’s useful when you don’t have a local Wifi and you don’t want to use data. You just shake and broadcast.

I tend not to use it very much.

But it can get you to meet some interesting people…

About the “fun”

Well, I assume that most MM readers are adults, eh?

Fun means many things to many people. When I was a younger fellow, I would immediately get down to “business”. Get my rocks off and they see the lady out the door. But, you know, that’s a long, long time ago.

A long time ago.

Like Brian Ferry long time ago. “Both Ends Burning” long time ago.

So you see guys, as you get older, your testosterone drops dramatically, You just don’t have the interest in sex like you used to have when you are younger.

Now, the thing is that it’s not only the singular need to have enough blood pressure in the nether regions so you can pop up a nice erection, but rather it is the entire system.

It’s like a car that’s getting old…

Worn out car. This is what happens to hard-drivers when they get old.

When you get old, you are like a high-performance car that needs some really, really good tender loving and care.

You run out of gas…

…and out of oil,

…and out of windshield washer fluid,

…and out of brake fluid,

…and out of steering wheel fluid,

…and a loss of air pressure in the tires…

Yikes!

And along with that comes with the entire effort to “get it up” to engage in sexual activity.

Actually as bad as it sounds, it’s no big deal. We all (really) don’t care that much about it. The truth of the matter is that by the time you are in your mid-60’s you know how the world works and discover that your fears about relationships and sex are just nonsense.

And when you don’t have that testosterone screaming in your ear all day and night, you can take your time and savor what is in front of you. Things are not so urgent, and driven any longer.

Truth.

You no longer gobble down a hamburger and wash it down with a coke. Instead, you take the time to find a nice local restaurant, and call a friend to join you. You pick out the meal carefully, and you savor the smells, the environment, and the companionship. You appreciate things more. You are no longer in such a frantic rush to “obtain”, or to “get” what ever it is that you are being driven towards.

As you get older, you start to savor what is placed before you. And you start enjoying life.

What is going on…

There are three primary components to a male sex rive & ability. They are…

  • Ability to have (and maintain) an erection. [Blood pressure]
  • Interest and desire
  • Ability to make the milky goodness and release.

Of course, this is never spoken about. The closest you ever come to this kind of discussion is on a Viagra commercial. But it’s a real issue and you all should be made aware of it.

Guys, because after all, we all encounter these situations. One way or the other, and…

Women, to understand what is going on with the men in your life, you need to best understand a little bit about their biology.

Now…

I really don’t want to have this entire article degrade into a biologically based topic, but I do want to though out some quick notes that people can nod in agreements with or go “pshaw! You dat crazy!”.

[1] Ability to have (and maintain) an erection. [Blood pressure]

This is easy, more or less, to take care of. There are medicines (today) such as viagra, levitra and cialis. that can take care of this issue. The thing is about this is that you must be careful with drinking alcohol when you mix drugs. And when you are older, and you are taking other medicines for heart issues, blood pressure issues, and other issues, mixing medicines can come with consequences.

The thing is, and it's an important thing, just being hard and strong means nothing unless your other two issues are taken cared for.

[2] Interest and desire

The ability to have interest and desire is also complex. Much of that comes from Testosterone. and men tend to lose it as they get older. Which can be a real problem. You can end up having a lot of sex, but can never release. It can be a little frustrating. Don't you know.

Now there are natural ways to increase your production of this very important hormone. Good healthy food, and moderate exercise will work wonders. You can also take one of the different kinds of testosterone medications that are available.

Heck! You can even get some of the testosterone injection tablets that they inject into cattle (to make them big) and suck on it for a few minutes to improve your dose. (They are little white pills that look like  tip of a ball point pen, on shaped like a miniature barrel.) But like all medications, if you do that without compensation in other areas, you might cause other problems. Try to strive for balance.

[3] Ability to make the milky goodness and release.

And thus, with the two above systems working well, and you are interested and relaxed with your partner, you would be able to ejaculate. And this (of course) starts up and fires up those wonderful endorphins that make us all feel good and healthy. 

And the more times you do this a day (with a partner) the younger you become. Not just in mental attitude, but also in physical health.

Which leads me to…

Exercise

Never the less, having sex is a great way to get exercise, and we need exercise. If you don’t get your needed exercise you can be prone to illnesses, and those illnesses can actually kill you. So exercise is an important part of your daily regimen. So we engage in healthy pleasureful exercise every opportunity we get.

Did you know that men who have daily or sex often (during) a week  tend to live, act, and look ten times younger? Its true!

So every opportunity I get, I try to engage in sex… you know… for health reasons. It’s important for me (personally) and for my family. It’s a need that all men must take regardless of your age.

Now if you don’t believe me, that’s fine too. But I am going to stick with my theories. Thank you very much.

The need for fun & companionship

All this being said, even if you have near-zero levels of testosterone, and a low interest in sex, you do want and need to have companionship. And if you are out and about, on the road, working like crazy, far away from home you do get lonely.

It might be nice eating in a restaurant a few times a week, but it gets really old, really fast if you are forced to do it every single day.

Business Road Warrior.

The life of a “road warrior” is not all that it is cracked up to be. And so when you are out with your friend and are out and about,  it’s a real pleasure to have some close physical contact with an attractive member of the opposite sex who you want talk to and who is interesting.

And really…

Seriously…

Why be lonely when you could share it with other nice and interesting people. Not just women, of course, but men. And dogs. And cats. Is that fight, fight, fight for the “big money” worth taking away from some companionship, pleasures and fun?

I say NO!

Hotels

Now, we’ve talked about all sorts of things, but let’s get down to talking about hotels. And Lordy, I have seen my fair share. I have been in every kind of hotel imaginable inside China. From five star castles to one star flop-houses, to rural three-star “business” hotels, to Bordello Hotels. I’ve been to them all.

It’s always an adventure.

They are not the clones of hotels that you see in the USA. Whether it is a Marriott, Hilton or Hotel-6. Each hotel inside of China has it’s own very unique and interesting branding. It’s all a real pleasure.

Like before, this all began with a comment…

In reply to congjing yu.

Your integrity shows by not trying to dispel reality.

The criticism of public washrooms must include a caveat about Hotel rooms and their showers.

Spent over a hundred days in China over 20+ trips to China in early 2010’s. Being SuperElite on Air Canada had me upgraded on almost ever flight to First Class while paying almost always under USD$1,000 return. So I am smart cheap and have experiences in Chinese hotels. And was fortunate to hit 6 of 7 continents before 50 and hope to step on 7th before I die.

Chinese hotels are the BOMB! Spacious and Clean and everyone with King-sized beds. Now there are filthy hotels I am sure, but I always paid between USD$50-USD$100/night. Each room would have cost more than USD$300 in Western Europe, USD$250 in NYC, and over USD$150 everywhere else in Canada and the U.S. 

The Showers were the best in the World. All showers had room for 2 and many for 3. Rain showers with incredible shower heads were included in almost all rooms. Some had water jets from the sides. Funny things is that half were glass so you could see the rest of the room while showering (something I have never experienced outside China – maybe available in rest of southeast Asia, but I have not traveled there)! There was a shower curtain (shower privacy blind) on the side facing the room, so if you had a visitor in your room and didn’t want them to see you, you could pull down.

I suggest anyone wanting to see what I am raving about just watch a few of the many Chinese quarantine videos out there.

MM, question: You showed us your kit that you use to go on overnight stays. You included a toothbrush and toiletries. Have Chinese hotels gone the Rest of the World way and no longer provide these? 

Every hotel room I was in had complimentary combs, tooth brushes, and plenty of everything else. Many even had complimentary condoms.

-TorontoSamIAm

Great info on the hotels, I think that I am going to write an article on this subject int he future. Thanks for the alert!

Actually, I am so used to the Hotels inside of China that I have forgotten just how shoddy the ones in the United States are.

You are absolutely correct, and they all are nice. Or course, you were a foreigner so you probably stayed at the four and five star hotels, and of course they are the shit! I’ll tell you what, but you must know that I am used to sleeping all over the place in China, from five star hotels to one star hotels. So I have a pretty decent idea of what it is all about.

Most showers are glass. When I mean most, I mean 99.9999% are. I have NEVER seen a shower curtain in my life here. Most are very open, spacious and have these very nice shower heads. Most of the shower accessories are made in FoShan, and coincidentally, I happen to know most of the factory bosses for this particular line of products. And yeah… all over the world… they are all made in China.

Foshan is in the center of the Guangdong province. It is near the major city of Guangzhou.

As far as the kit goes, each hotel is different.

Most do have toiletries. They do, as well as complementary items for your use and a few free bottles of water, a tea kettle, and free tea. Also normal are disposable slippers, bathrobes, and condom access. Also normal is a gas mask (in a red box) in case there is a fire in the hotel.

Emergency fire-mask that can be found in all of the hotels inside of China.

What is not normal is ice. The only time where I have seen an ice machine is in the five star western hotels. Never in the local hotels.

Also a shaving kit tends to be hit or miss. I would say around 40% of the hotels don’t have them. Also missing is hand creme or lotion. This seems to be very common in the United States, but absolutely absent in China.

Now that all being said, on occasion, I have run into instances where there isn’t a toothbrush. It does happen, you know. So what I tend to do is pick up a spare brush or two and throw it in my kit just in case. I haven’t needed them for a while, but it’s better safe than sorry.

In the smaller cities, you can also get a lot of “ding dong” girl cars slid under your door. They tend to look good on the cards, but the real deal is rather hit or miss.

Ding Dong Cards

These are the cards that you find lying everywhere. They have a half-life and tend to expire, so if you find a fresh card around then you can probably pick it up if you want to meet someone new.

And…

While I am at it…

Let’s take a look at some of the advertisements that you can find inside the men’s bathrooms all over China. The following is a stamp that I think ended up being stamped everywhere in China. They must have used a couple tankers of red ink to advertise all this…

Manly advertisements.

Anyways…

This is pretty much how it is inside of China.

If you are at a Western hotel that caters to travelers from the West the beds will be extra soft, they will have complementary coffee packets, some hand lotion, and English-fluent staff. The rest of China will, however, have harder beds. Complementary tea bags, and instructions in Chinese.

It’s all good.

A final note…

We are not machines.

And the illusions that the media, and that the “news” provide to us tend to be lies. The gals in the pictures that you see might be all that perfect, and alluring and wonderful, but you know what?

It’s when their real personality comes out that I really get interested in them. It’s when I see what they are like. It’s when I see that behind that nice perfect appearance that they have “heart”, passion, and uniqueness.

It’s the PERSONALITY that makes my jizzle sizzle!

Do you want more?

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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A look at the Chinese “ghost cities” and what’s going on regarding them.

One of the often mentioned narratives regarding China can be found on the Alt-Right and Hard-Right websites in America. It’s the narrative that China builds these huge enormous “ghost cities”. That China builds these huge concrete cities that no one lives in, and that this is just another example about how “out of touch” China is with it’s people.

Well, of course, it’s a big bunch of misdirection, misunderstandings, lies, and intentional fabrications.

Yet, what is actually going on is far more interesting.

And if you study it, you see just how healthy the government of China is, and how proactive it is in caring for the Chinese people.

In this article we are going to take a look at one of these “ghost cities” and see what is actually going on. No. It’s not about how “out of touch” the Chinese government is, but rather how forward thinking it is. People in the West simply cannot imagine what is going on. This is simply because the size, the scope, the forward planning, and the belief that if everyone is “lifted up”, then everyone prospers.

It’s unheard of in the greedy West.

Here’s the video.

And NO, it’s not me. This is a video blogger that travels the world and speaks better Chinese than I do. He has a vblog called JaYoeNation. He’s pretty good. LOL.

Take a spell and let it download. If it is taking too much time, you can click on THIS LINK and down load a zipped-file and watch the video directly. It’s pretty good. Please enjoy.

You have got to see the pictures and this video…

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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When boys go out to play; a Metallicman mini vacation and insight into my life in China

Hey everyone, I’ve been busier than a dog in a forest going tree to tree pissing indiscriminately. And some of my activities enables me to mix a little bit of business with pleasure. And isn’t that the way we want to do things? We work a little bit, and we play a little bit too.

Anyways, I decided that I would give you all a taste of what my last few days were like. It’s nothing super fantastical. I’m not driving a Ferrari, and staying in five star hotels and all that. It’s all rather middle class and plebeian. Don’t you know. But it’s so gosh darn different from what things are like in the Untied States that perhaps you all might might a glimpse into what it’s like to be me.

Sounds ok?

Everyday carry

One of the themes in Western media is “everyday carry”.  People take pictures of the things that guys stuff in their pockets when they go out. And for most of America it’s a set of car keys, a wallet stuffed with cash, a multi-purpose tool, and a nice pocket knife or so.

I’m in China. My “everyday carry” is a cellphone and a couple of fobs. No one uses money anymore. We just scan to buy things, and some fobs for access to gates, or passes. These are only for the places that don’t have facial recognition yet.

But, I’ve kind of made up a picture of my gear bag for travel that you all might enjoy looking at.

First up is my bag. Nope, it’s not a designer bag with Gucci on the side of it. It’s just a basic functional bag that has stains and wear from use. that’s about it.

Typically, I keep it pre-loaded with basic gear and when I need to go overnight, I just top it off with whatever I need, and sling it over my shoulder and out the door I go.

Next up…

What I put inside it.

The last night was typical. I met a few new bosses, and we are out drinking and there we go again! They want to “bottoms’ up” me (Geng Bei) me until I can hardly stand. Now, my aide(s) are telling him, no. Please don’t try to drink me under. that I can drink anyone under the table. but he wouldn’t listen, and then one of my aides told them my age, and he about shit himself. He thought that I was in my late 30’s early forties. LOL.

Never the less, I did continue to drink And I did drink him almost under.  He cried “uncle” after the third bottle of Beijiu.

Anyways, also in my travel bag are these essentials…

Now, of course, I have other things. But I want to elaborate on what they are and the limitations involved in using them.

For starters, you will notice that there isn’t a lighter. But there is a pack of cigarettes. In my world, people fight for the honor to light my cigarette. And they prefer to offer me my own packs out of a case that they tend to buy for the occasion. So I rarely have the need to carry my own cigarettes or a lighter. Not to mention that if I am flying that I cannot bring it on board the plane.

Of course, to this mix, I would throw into the bag a change of underwear. Usually socks and underpants. And what ever medicine that I am taking at the time. Which currently is blood pressure medicine. (It’s pretty much what you all will have to deal with when you pass 60-years old.)

And that, pretty much is my carry bag.

Having Dinner

So after arriving at our destination, we visited a couple of bosses of various factories. All friends of mine. And we enjoyed “death by tea and cigarettes”. I tend to deal with the small to middle-sized factories. And that’s just fine with me. And after we took care of some business, we went out to eat.

Now, there are all sorts of great places to eat in China. But as far as I know, no one discusses the “on the farm” eating establishments. What this is, is a restaurant that is a farm. They have a pond where they raise their fish, and cages where they raise their chickens, geese, and pigs. And a nice garden where they raise their vegetables. When you order a meal, say a chicken with leeks, peppers and garlic, they will kill the chicken there, and get the vegetables right there. All very, very fresh.

So here we are going to the farm restaurant. You can eat in these little bungalows that sit over a pond where fish are raised and the ducks and geese swim. though right now, the pond is all dried up (this is the season).

And then, of course, we all get settled in and select some food, and open up the massive quantities of alcohol. In this case, we agreed to drink a combination of Rice Wine and Beijiu. That’s 53 degree poison and will peel the paint off your car if you spill a drop. Yikes!

You will notice that we brought the alcohol with us. Which is pretty much the norm in China. You can bring in alcohol or other food to eat in any restaurant as you desire. they don’t have laws or rules forbidding you from doing that like they have in the United States.

You will also note that there are these clear plastic bags of water handing from the ceiling. these little bags keep the flies and mosquitoes away. Somehow when the insects get near the pavilions the water gets them confused and they fly away. So you aren’t bothered by them.

We pretty much ate Guangzhou style. Which is one food that walks, one that flies and one that swims. It was delicious. Of course.

So we ate and drank and had a fine time. This is what friends do. And you can see how much it resembles my life growing up in Western Pennsylvania. This is how things used to be back in the 1960’s and 1970’s before the ultra-billionaires bought up the United States and turned it into a feudal society to service them.

One of the topics of conversation is the big drive by President Biden (in the United States) to invest one trillion dollars in infrastructure.

Over all, this was welcomed as a positive development, and many felt that America was on the right track trying to copy China, though most had their doubts that it would actually come to fruition.

One said that America would need to pull out of Afghanistan, and some of the other wars that it is fighting to get the money, while another pointed out that America should have done this much sooner, and that there needs to be strong serious changes in how the United States makes and authorizes plans like this. China it isn’t.  Most people came to the conclusion that it was just a bunch of “hot air” to appease the masses, and that the money would flow upwards to the wealthy oligarchy instead.

Then after dinner it’s a drunken drive to the hotel…

Now, of course, we had one of the workers or staff drive us to the hotel. We do not drive drunk. It’s too dangerous.

So we went off and went to the hotel. Now, this is a local small town hotel, not one in the big city and as such I ended up with a room with a tea table and a tea set and a large king size bed. My companions ended up with different rooms, one of which had a Majong table, and they decided to go play Majong until late in the night.

So to make a long story short, they were off getting drunk, playing Majong, and they sent me to my room with a few new friends to play with. It was a nice calm evening of delights for all of us.

It’s always fun to make new friends. I’ll tell you what.

Of course, everyone slept in, and where we got back on the road the first thing we wanted to do is go eat something warm and filling. So we ate Congee, and  noodles. Then off to meet some more bosses who then whisked us off into their cars and we went out to eat some beef hot pot.

I am sure that many readers already know that Hot Pot is. It’s sort of a Chinese fondue. Only instead of cheese, you deal with beef, and you dip it in flavored oil. Then once it’s cooked, you can go ahead and eat it in your own sauces. It’s like this…

It’s pretty delicious.

Now, you will notice that there is this brown mixture to the side where I panned the camera to.  This is a make-your-own dipping sauce. Mine is a mixture of garlic, sauces, some peanut sauce, and other goodies.

Here’s where you go to get the ingredients to make your own dipping sauce.

Doesn’t look like China is wracked with Famine like Townhall.com has claimed since 2017, or that people are dying everywhere and that the evil CCP is hiding the “true numbers” and the “truth about China”. LOL. You have to be a brain slug dumbed down imbecile to believe the nonsense out of the American media these days.

It’s all pretty tasty I’ll tell you what.

One of the things that I enjoy about China is the FREEDOM that you have that is impossible to have int he United States. And to underline this point, I made this little video to rub it in the faces of any “I’m free and China is a boot-stomping, totalitarian nation!” folk.

Here, I do something that you all in America CANNOT do, and would probably get you arrested for even trying it.

Freedom, you either have it, or you don’t.

Anyways, here’s how you cook the beef. You put it in this kind of basket ladle and then dip it inside the scorching hot oil for a spell, then you take it out and you eat it by dipping it int he sauce that you prepare.

Cool huh?

Like this…

I’ve got much more to say about China, and the adventures over the last few days, but this will suffice for now.

I do hope that you enjoyed this little insight into my life, and if you are from America (my old stomping ground) you will note that in many ways it is similar to the way things used to be in the Untied States, and often very different. Furthermore it doesn’t resemble anything like the nonsense spewing out of Townhall.com, Hall Turner, Rush Limbaugh or FOX “news”.

Like the “famine” in China that the CCP is “covering up” and hiding…

This is the real deal yo!

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Mars is Heaven! by Ray Bradbury (Full text)

Here is a nice story to get your mind off of whatever it might be on right now. Please relax, fix yourself a nice coffee, tea, or beer… get into your most comfortable chair, and relax.

MARS IS HEAVEN!

by Ray Bradbury

The ship came down from space. It came from the stars and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain.

The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket bad bloomed out great flowers of beat and cobs and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars!

Now it was decelerating with metal efficiency in the upper Martian atmospheres. It was still a thing of beauty and strength. It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan; it had passed the ancient moon and thrown itself onward into one nothingness following another. The men within it had been battered,, thrown about, sickened, made well again, each in his turn. One man had died, but now the remaining sixteen, with their eyes clear in their heads and their faces pressed to the thick glass ports, watched Mars swing up under them.

“Mars! Mars! Good old Mars, here we are!” cried Navigator Lustig.
“Good old Mars!” said Samuel Hinkston, archaeologist.
“Well,” said Captain John Black.

The ship landed softly. on a lawn of green grass. Outside, upon the lawn, stood an iron deer. Further up the lawn, a tall brown Victorian house sat in the quiet sunlight, all covered with scrolls and rococo, its windows made of blue and pink and yellow and green colored glass. Upon the porch were hairy geraniums and an old swing which was hooked into the porch ceiling and which now swung back and forth, back and forth, in a little breeze.

At the top of the house was a cupola with diamond, leaded-glass windows, and a dunce-cap roof! Through the front window you could see an ancient piano with yellow keys and a piece of music titled Beautiful Ohio sitting on the music rest.

Around the rocket in four directions spread the little town, green and motionless in the Martian spring, There were white houses and red brick ones, and tall elm trees blowing in the wind, and tall maples and horse chestnuts. And church steeples with golden bells silent in them.

The men in the rocket looked out and saw this. Then they looked at one another and then they looked out again. They held on~ to each other’s elbows, suddenly unable to breathe, it seemed. Their faces grew pale and they blinked constantly, running from glass port to glass port of the ship.

“I’ll be damned,” whispered Lustig, rubbing his face with his numb fingers, his eyes wet. “Ill be thinned, damned, damned.’~

“It can~t be, it just can’t be,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Lord,” said Captain John Black.
There was a call from the chemist. “Sir, the atmosphere is fine for
breathing, sir.” –

Black turned slowly. “Are you sure?’
“No doubt of it, sir.”
“Then we’ll go. out,” said Lustig.
“Lord, yes,” said Samuel Hinkston.
“Hold on,” said Captain John Black. “Just a moment, Nobody gave any orders.”
“But, sir-.-”
“Sir, nothing. How do we know what this is?”

“We know what it is, sir,” said the chemist. “It’s a small town with good air in it, sir.”
“And it’s a small town the like of Earth towns,” said Samuel Hinkston,
the archaeologist. “Incredible. it~ can’t be, but it is.”
Captain John Black looked at him, idly. “Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so, sir.”
Captain Black stood by the port. “Look out there. The geraniums. A specialized plant. That specific variety has only been known on Earth for fifty years. Think of the thousands of years of time it takes to evolve plants. Then tell me if it is logical that the Martians should have: one, leaded glass windows; two, cupolas; three, porch swings; four, an instrument that looks like, a . piano and probably is a piano; and, five, if you look closely, . if a Martian composer would have published a piece of music titled, strangely enough, Beautiful Ohio. All of which means that we have an Ohio River here on Marst”

“It is quite strange, sir.”
“Strange, hell, it’s absolutely impossible, and I suspect the whole bloody shooting setup. Something’s wrong here, and I’m not leaving the ship until I know what it is.”

“Oh, sir,” said Lustig.
“Dam it,” said Samuel Hinkston. “Sir, I want to investigate this at first hand. It may be that there are similar patterns of thought, movement, civilization on every planet in our system. We may be on the threshold of the great psychological and metaphysical discovery In our time, sir, don’t you think?”

“I’m willing to wait a moment,” said Captain. John Black. – “It may be, sir, that we are looking upon a phenomenon that, for the first time, would absolutely prove the existence of a God, sir.”
“There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr. Hinkston.”

“I’m one myself, sir. But certainly a thing like this, out there,” said Hinkston, “could not occur without divine intervention, sir. It fills me with such terror and elation I’ don’t know whether to laugh or cry, sir.”
“Do neither,. then, until we know what we’re up against.”

“Up against, sir?” inquired Lustig. “I see that we’re up against nothing.

It’s a good quiet, green town, much like the one I was born in, and I like the looks of It.”
“When were you born, Lustig?” –
– “In- 1910, sfr.”
“That makes you fifty years old, now, doesn’t it?”
“This being 1960, yes, sir.”
– “And you, Hinkston?”
“1920, sir. In Illinois. And this looks swell to me, sir.”

“This couldn’t be Heaven,” said the captain, ironically. “Though, I must admit, it looks peaceful and cool, and pretty much like Green Bluff, where I was born, in 1915.”
lie looked at the chemist. “The air’s all right, is it?”
“Yes, sir.”
‘Well, then, tell you what we’ll do. Lustig, you and Ilinkston and I will fetch ourselves out to look this town over. The other 14 men will stay aboard ship. If’ anything untoward happens, lift ‘the Ship ‘and get the hell out, do you bear what I say, Craner?”

“Yes, sir. The hell out we’ll go, sir. Leaving you?”,
“A loss of three men’s better than a whole ship. If something bad happens get back to Earth and warn the next Rocket, that’s Lingle’s Rocket, I think, which will be completed and ready to take off some time around next Christmas, what he has to meet up with. If there’s something hostile about Mars we certainly want the next expedition to be well armed.”

“So are we, sir. We’ve got a regular arsenal with us.”
“Tell the ‘men to stand by the guns, then, as. Lustig and Hinkston and I go out,”
“Right, sir.”
“Come along, Lustig, Hinkston.”
The three men walked together, down through the levels of the ship.

It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the apple tree, and the blossom smell drifted upon the air. Somewhere in the town, somebody was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was Beautiful Dreamer. Somewhere else, a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of Roamin’ In The Gloamin,’ sung by Harry Lapder.

The three men stood outside the ship. The port closed behind them. At every window, a face pressed, looking out. The large metal guns pointed this way and that, ready.
Now the phonograph record being played was:


“Oh give me a June night
The moonlight and you—”

Lustig began to tremble. Samuel Hinkston did likewise.
Hinkston’s voice was so feeble and uneven that the captain had to ask him to repeat what he had said. “I said, sir, that I think I have solved this, all of this, sir!”
“And what is the solution, Hinkston?”

The soft wind blew. The sky was serene and quiet and somewhere a stream of water ran through the cool caverns and tree-shadings of a ravine.

Somewhere a horse and wagon trotted and rolled by, bumping.

“Sir, it must be, it has to be, this is the only solution!
Rocket travel began to Mars in the years before the first’ World War, sir!” S
The captain stared at his archaeologist. “No!”

“But, yes, sir! You must admit, look at all of this! How else explain it, the houses, the lawns, the iron deer, the flowers, the pianos, the music!”

“Hinkston, Hinkston, oh,” and the captain put his hand to his face, shaking his head, his hand shaking no , his lips blue.

“Sir, listen to me.” Hinkston took his elbow persuasively and looked up into the captain’s face, pleading. “Say that there -were some people in the year 1905, perhaps, who hated wars and wanted to get away from Earth and they got together, some scientists, in secret, and built a rocket and came out here to Mars.”

“No, no, Hinkston.”
“Why not? The world was a different place in 1905, they could have kept
-it a secret much more easily.”

“But the work, Hinkston, the work of building a complex thing like a rocket, oh, no, no.” The captain looked at his shoes, looked -at his hands, looked at the houses, and then at Hinkston.

“And they caine up here, and haturally the houses they built were similar to Earth houses because they
brought the cultural -~architecture with them, and here it is!”

“And they’ve lived here all these years?” said the captain.
“In peace and quiet, sir, yes. Maybe they made a few trips, to bring enough people here for one small town, and then stopped, for fear of being discovered. That’s why the town seems so old-fashioned. I don’t see a thing,
myself, that is older than the year 1927, do you?”

“No, frankly, I don’t, Hinkston.”
“These are our people, sir. This is an American city; it’s definitely not
European!”
“That—that’s right, too, Hinkston.”
“Or maybe, just maybe, sir, rocket travel is older than we think. Perhaps it started in some part of the world hundreds of years ago, was discovered and kept secret by a small number of men, and they came to Mars, with only occasional visits to Earth over the centuries.”

“You make it sound almost reasonable.”
“it is, sir. It has to be. We have the proof here before us, all we have ‘to do now, is find some people and verify it!”

“You’re right- there, of course. We can’t just stand here and talk. Did’ you bring your gun?”
“Yes, but we won’t need it.”
“We’ll see about it. Come along, we’ll ring that doorbell and see if anyone is home.”

Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had  een in a small’ town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to the soul.

Hollow echoes sounded from under the boards as they walked across the porch and stood before the screen door. Inside, they could see a bead curtain hung across the hall entry, and a crystal chandelier and a Maxfleld Parrish painting framed on one wall over a comfortable Morris, Chair. The house smelled old, and of the attic, and infinitely comfortable. You could hear the tinkle of ice rattling in a lemonade pitcher~ In a distant kitchen, because of the day, someone was preparing a soft, lemon drieL – –

Captain’ John Black rang the bell.
Footsteps, dainty and thin, came along the hail and a kind-faced lady of some forty years, dressed in the sort of dress you might expect in the year 1909, peered out at them.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“Beg your pardon,” said Captain Black, uncertainly.
“But we’re looking for, that is, could you help us, I mean.” He stopped. She looked out at him with dark wondering eyes.
“If you’re selling something,” she said, “I’m much too busy and I haven’t time.” She turned to go.

“No, wail,” he cried bewilderingly. “What town is this?”
She looked him up and down as if he were crazy.
“What do you mean, what town is it? How could you be in a town and not know what town it was?”
The captain looked as if he wanted to go sit under a shady apple tree. “I beg your pardon,” he said, “But we’re strangers here. We’re from Earth, and we want to know how this town got here and you’ got here.”

“Are you census takers?” she asked.
“No,” be said. –
“What do you want then?” she demanded.
“Well,” said the captain.
“Well?” she asked. -‘
“How long has this town been here?” he wondered.
“It was built in 1868,” she snapped at them. “Is this a game?”
“No, not a game,” cried the captain. “Oh, God,” – be said. “Look here.
We’re from Earth”
“From where?” she said.

‘Prom Earth!” he said. –
“Where’s that?” she said.
“From Earth,” he cried. ‘ –
“Out of the ground, do you mean?”
“No, from the planet Earth!” he almost shouted.
“Here,” she insisted, “come out on the porch and I’ll show you.” , –
“No,” she said, “I won’t come out there, you are all evidently quite mad
from the sun.”

Lustig and Hinkston stood behind the captain. Hinkston now spoke up.

“Mrs.,” he said. ‘We came in a flying ship across space, among the stars. We came from the third planet from the sun, Earth, to tb-is planet, which is Mars.

Now do you understand, Mrs.?”
“Mad from the sun,” she said, taking hold of the door. “Go away now, before I call my husband who’s upstairs taking a nap, and he’ll beat you all with his fists.”
“But—” said Hinkston. “This is Mars, is it not?”

“This,” explained the woman, as if she were addressing a child, “is Green Lake, Wisconsin, on the continent of America, surrounded by the Pacific and ~Atlantic Oceans, on a place called the world, or sometimes, the Earth. Go away now. Good-bye!”
She slammed the door. –

-The three men stood before the door with their hands up in the air toward it, as if pleading with her to open it once more.

They looked at one another.
– “Let’s knock the door down,” said Lustig.
“We can’t,” sighed the captain.
“Why not?”

“She didn’t do anything bad, did she? We’re the strangers here. This is private property. Good God, Hinkstonl” He went and sat down on the porchstep.
“What, sir?”

Did it ever strike you, that maybe we got ourselves, somehow, some way, fouled up. And, by accident, came back and landed on Earth!”

“Oh, sir, oh, sir, oh oh, sir.” And Hinkston sat down numbly and thought about it.
Lustig stood up in the sunlight. “How could we have done that?”
“I don’t know, just let me think.”

}Iinkston said, “But we checked every mile of the way, and we saw Mars and our chronometers said so many miles ‘gone, and we went past the moon and out into space and here we are, on Mars. I’m sure we’re on Mars, ‘ sir.” Lustig said, “But, suppose that, by accident, in space, in time, or something, we landed on a planet in space, in another time.

Suppose this is Earth, thirty or fifty years ago? Maybe we got lost in the dimensions, do you think?”

“Oh, go away, Lustig.” -‘
“Are the men in the ship keeping an eye on us, Hink..

ston?” , –
“At their guns, sir.”

Lustig went to the door, rang the bell. When the door opened again, he asked, ‘What year is this?’ –
“1926, of, course!” cried the woman, furiously, and slammed the door again. “Did you bear that?” Lustig ran back to them, wildly, “She said 1926! We – have gone back in time. This is Earth!”

Lustig sat down and the three men let the wonder and terror of the thought afflict them. Their hands stirred fitfully on their knees. The wind blew, nodding the locks of hair on their heads.

The captain stood up, brushing off his pants. “I never thought it would be like this. It scares the hell out of me. How ‘can a thing like this happen?”

“Will anybody in the whole town believe us?” wondered Hinkston.
“Are we playing around with something dangerous? Time, I mean. Shouldn’t we just take off and go home?”
“No. We’ll try another house.”

They walked three houses down to a little white cottage under an oak tree. “I like to be as logical as I can’ get,” said the captain, He nodded at the town. “How does this sound to you, Hinkston? Suppose, as you- said  originally, that rocket travel occurred years ago. And when the Earth people had lived here a number of years they began to get homesick for Earth. First a mild neurosis about it, then a full-fledged psychosis. Then, threatened insanity. What would you do, as a psychiatrist, if fated with such a problem?”
– –
Hinkston thought. “Well, I think I’d re-arrange the civilization on Mars so it resembled Earth more and more each day. If there was any way of reproducing every plant, every road and every lake, and even an ocean, I would do so. Then I would, by some vast crowd hypnosis, theoretically anyway, convince  veryone in a town this size that this really was Earth, not Mars at all.”

“Good enough, Hinkston. I think we’re on the right track now. That woman in that house back there, just’ minks she’s living on Earth. It protects ‘her sanity. She and all the others in this town are the patients of the greatest experiment in migration and hypnosis you will ever lay your eyes on in your life.” –

“That’s it, sir!” cried Lustig.
“Well,” the captain sighed. “Now we’re getting some- – where. I feel better. It all sounds a bit more logical now. This talk about time and going back and forth and traveling in time turns my stomach upside
down. But, this way—”- He actually smiled for the first time in a month. “Well. It looks as if we’ll be fairly welcome here.”

“Or, will we, sir?” said Lustig. “After all, like the Pilgrims, these people came here to escape Earth. Maybe they won’t be too happy to see us, sir Maybe they’ll try to drive us ~out or kill us?”

‘We have superior weapons if that should happen. Anyway, all we can do is try. This next house now. Up we go.”

But they had hardly crossed the lawn when Lustig stopped and looked off across the town, down the quiet, dreaming afternoon street. “Sir,” he said.

“What is it, Lustig?” asked the captain.

“Oh, sir, sir, what I see, what I do see now before me, oh, oh—” said Lustig, and he began to cry. His fingers came up, twisting and trembling, and his face was all wonder and joy and incredulity. He sounded as if any moment he might go quite insane with happiness. He looked down the street and he began to run, stumbling awkwardly, falling, picking himself up, and running on. “Oh, God, God, thank you, God! Thank you!”

– “Don’t let him get away!” The captain broke into a run.
Now Lustig was running at full speed, shouting. He turned into a yard half way down the little shady side street and leaped up upon the porch of a large green house with an iron rooster on the roof

He was beating upon the door, shouting and hollering and crying when Hinkston and the captain ran up and stood in the yard, The door opened. Lustig yanked the screen wide and in a high wail of discovery and happiness, cried out, “Grandma! Grandpa!” –

Two old people stood in the doorway, their faces light. lug up.
“Albert!” Their voices piped and they rushed out to embrace and pat him on the back and move around him, “Albert, oh, Albert, it’s been so many years! How you’ve grown, boy, how big you ate, boy, oh,  lbert boy, how are you!”

“Grandma, Grandpa!” sobbed Albert Lustig. “Good to see you! You look fine, fine! Oh, fine.” He held them, turned them, kissed them, hugged them, cried on them, held them out again, blinked at the little old people.- The, sun was in the sky, the wind blew, the grass was green, the screen door stood
open.

“Come in, lad, come in, there’s lemonade for you,fresh, lots of- it!”

“Grandma, Grandpa, good to see you! I’ve got- friends down here!

Here!” Lustig turned and waved wildly at the captain and Hinkston, who, all during the adventure on the porch, had stood in’ the shade of a tree, holding onto each other. “Captain, captain, come up, come up, I want you to meet my grandfolks!”

“Howdy,” said the folks. “Any- friend of Albert’s is ours, too! Don’t stand there with your mouths open Come on!”

In the living room of the old house it was cool and a grandfather clock ticked high and long and bronzed in one corner. There were soft pillows on large couches and walls filled with books and a rug cut in a thick rose pattern and antimacassars pinned to furniture, and lemonade in the hand, sweating, and cool on the thirsty tongue. “Here’s to our health.” Grandma tipped her glass to her porcelain teeth. – –

“How long you been here, Grandma?” said Lustig.
“A good many years,” she said, tartly. “Ever since we died.”
“Ever since you what?” asked Captain John Black, putting his drink down. – –
“Oh, yes,” Lustig looked at his captain. “They’ve been dead thirty years.”

“And you sit there, calmly!” cried the captain.
“Tush,” said the old woman, and winked glitteringly – at John Black. “Who are we to question what happens?

Here we are. What’s life, anyways? Who does what for why and where? All we know is here we are, alive again, and no questions -asked. A second chance.”
She toddled over and held out her -thin wrist to Captain John Black.
“Feel” He felt.~ “Solid, ain’t I?” she ask~ed. He nodded.
“You hear my voice, don’t you?” she inquired. Yes, he did. “Well, then,” she said in triumph, “why go around questioning?”
“Well,” said the captain, “it’s simply that we never thought we’d find a
thing like this on Mars.”

“And now you’ve found it. I dare say there’s lots on every planet that’ll show you God’s infinite ways.”
is this Heaven?” asked Hinkston.
“Nonsense, no. It’s a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from. How do we know there wasn’t another before that one?”

“A good question,” said the captain.
The captain stood up and slapped his hand on his leg in an off-hand fashion. “We’ve got to be going. It’s been nice. Thank you for the drinks.”

He stopped. He turned and looked toward the door, startled. ‘ –
Far away, in the sunlight, there was a sound of voices, a crowd, a shouting and a great hello.

“What’s that?” asked Hinkston.
“We’ll soon find out!” And Captain John Black was out the front door abruptly, jolting across the green lawn and into the street of the Martian town.

He stood looking at the ship. The ports were open and his crew were streaming out, waving their hands. A crowd of people had gathered and in and through and among these people the members of the crew were running, talking, laughing, shaking hands. People did little dances. People swarmed. The rocket lay – empty and abandoned.

A brass band exploded in the sunlight, flinging off a gay tune from upraised tubas and trumpets. There was a bang of drums and a shrill of fifes. Little girls with golden hair jumped up and down. Little boys shouted, “Hoorayl” And fat men passed around ten-cent cigars. The mayor of the town made a speech. Then, each member of the crew with a mother on one -arm, a father or sister on the other, was spirited off down the street, into little cottages or big mansions and doors slammed shut.

The wind rose in the clear spring sky and all was silent. The brass band had banged off around a corner leaving the rocket to shine and dazzle alone in the sunlight.

“Abandoned!” cried the captain. “Abandoned the ship, they did! I’ll have their skins; by God! They had orders!”
“Sir,” said Lustig. “Don’t be too -hard on them. Those were all old relatives and friends.”

“That’s no excuse!” – –
“Think how they felt, captain, seeing familiar faces outside the ship!” –
“I would have obeyed orders! I would have~!’ The captain’s mouth
remained open.

Striding along the sidewalk – under the Martian sun, tall, smiling, eyes blue, face tan, came a young man of some twenty-six years. –
“John!” the man cried, and broke into a run.
“What?” said Captain .John Black. He swayed. –

“John, you old beggar, you!”
The man ran up and gripped his hand and slapped him
on the back. –
“It’s you,” said John Black.
“Of course, who’d you think it was!” –
“Edward!” The captain appealed now to Lustig and Hinkston, holding the stranger’s hand. “This is my brother – Edward. Ed, meet my men, Lustig, Hinkston My brother!” – – –
They tugged at each other’s hands and arms and then finally embraced.

“Ed!” “John, you old bum, you!” “You!re locking fine, Ed, but, Ed, what .is this? You haven’t ,changed over the years. You died, I remember, when you were twenty-six, and 1 was nineteen, oh God,
so many years ago, and here you are, and, Lord, what goes on, what goes on?”

Edward Black gave him a brotherly knock on the chin.
“Mom’s waiting,” he said.
“Mom?”
“And Dad, too.”
– “And Dad?” The- captain almost fell to earth as if hit upon the chest with a mighty weapon. He walked stiffly and awkwardly, out of coordination. He stuttered and whispered and talked only one or two  ords at a time.

“Mom alive? Dad? Where?”
“At the old house on Oak Knoll Avenue.” –
“The old house.” The captain stared in delighted amazement. “Did you hear that, Lustig, Hinkston?”
~‘I know it’s hard for you to believe.”

“But alive. Real.”
“Don’t I feel real?” The strong arm, the firm grip, the white smile. The light, curling hair.
Hinkaton was gone. He had seen his own house down the street and was running for it. Lustig was grinning.

“Now you understand, sir, what happened to everybody on the ship. They couldn’t help themselves.”
“Yes. Yes,” said the captain, eyes shut. “Yes.” He put out his hand.
“When I open my eyes, you’ll be gone.” He opened his eyes. “You’re still here.
God, Edward, you look fine!” – – –
“Come along, lunch is waiting for you. I told Mom.” Lustig said, “Sir, Ui
be with my grandfolks if you want me.” –

“What? Oh, fine, Lustig. Later, then.”
Edward grabbed his arm and marched him. “You need support.” –
“I do. My knees, all funny. My stomach, loose. God.”

“There’s the house. Remember it?” –
“Remember it? Hell! I bet I can beat you to the front porch!” –

They ran. The wind roared over Captain John Black’s ears. The earth roared -under his feet. He saw the golden figure of Edward Black pull ahead of him in the amazing dream of reality. He saw the house rush- forward, the door open, the screen swing back. “Beat you!” cried Edward, – bounding up the steps. “I’m an old man,” panted the captain, “and you’re still young. But, then, you always beat me, I remember!”

In the doorway, Mom, pink, and plump and bright. And behind her, pepper grey, Dad, with his pipe in his hand.

“Mom, Dad!”
He ran up -the steps like a child, to meet them.

It was a fine long afternoon. They finished lunch and they sat in the living room and he told them all about his rocket and his being captain and they nodded and smiled upon him and Mother was just the same, and Dad bit the end off a cigar and lighted it in his old fashion. Mom brought in some iced tea in the middle of the afternoon. Then, there was a big turkey dinner at night and time flowing oil. When the drumsticks were sucked clean and lay brittle upon the plates, the captain leaned back in his chair and exhaled his deep contentment. Dad poured him a small glass of dry sherry. It was seven thirty in the evening. Night was in all the trees and coloring the sky, and the lamps were halos of dim light in the gentle house. From all the other houses down the streets came sounds of music; pianos playing, laughter.

Mom put a record on the victrola and she and Captain John Black bad a – dance. She was wearing the same perfume he remembered from the summer when she and Dad had been killed in the train accident. She was very real in his arms as they danced lightly to the music. –

“I’ll wake in the morning,” said the captain. “And I’ll be in my rocket in space, and this will be gone.”
“No, no, don’t think that,” she cried, softly, pleadingly~ “We’re here.
Don’t question. God is good to- us. Let’s be happy.”

The record ended with a – hissing.
“You’re tired, son,” said Dad. He waved his pipe. “You and Ed go on
upstairs. Your old bedroom is waiting for you.” . – –
“The old one?”
“The brass bed and all,” laughed Edward.
“But I should report my men in.”
“Why?” Mother was logical
“Why? Well, I don’t know. No reason, I guess. No,. none at all. What’s the difference?” He shook his head.

“I’m not being very logical these days,” –
“Good night, son.” She kissed his cheek. “‘Night, Mom.”
“Sleep tight, son.” Dad shook his hand.
“Same to you, Pop.” – “It’s good to have you home.”

“It’s good to be home.”
He left the land of cigar smoke and perfume and books and gentle light and ascended the stairs, talking, talking with Edward. Edward pushed a door open and there was the yellow brass bed and the old semaphore banners from college days and a -very musty raccoon coat which he petted with strange, muted affection. “It’s too much,” he said faintly. “Like -being in a thunder- shower without an umbrella. Fm soaked to the skin with emotion. I’m numb. I’m tired.” –

“A night’s sleep between cool clean sheets for you, my bucko.” Edward slapped wide the snowy linens and flounced the pillows. Then he put up a window and let the night blooming jasmine float in. There was moonlight and the sound of distant dancing and whispering.

“So this is Mars,” said the captain undressing.
“So this is Mars.” Edward undressed in idle, leisurely moves, drawing his shirt off over his head, revealing golden shoulders and the good muscular neck. –

– The lights were out, they were into bed, side by side, as in the days, how many decades ago? The captain lolled and was nourished by the night wind pushing the lace curtains out upon the dark room air. Among the trees, upon a lawn, someone had cranked up a portable phonograph and now it was
playing softly, “I’ll be loving you, always,- with a love that’s true, always.”

The thought of Anna came to his mind. “Is Anna here?”
His brother, lying straight out in the moonlight from the window,waited and then said, “Yes. She’s out of town. But she’ll be here in the morning.” –
The captain shut his eyes. “I want to see Anna very much?’ –
The room was square and quiet except for their breathing. “Good night, Ed.”
A pause. “Good night, John.”

He lay peacefully, letting his thoughts float. For the — first time the stress of the day was -moved aside, all of the excitement was calmed. He could think logically now. It had all been emotion. The bands playing, the sight – of familiar faces, the sick pounding of your heart. But—

now… –

How? He thought. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose?

Out of the goodness of some kind God? Was God, then, really that fine and thoughtful of his children? -How and why and what for? –

He thought of the various theories advanced in the first heat of the afternoon by Hinkston and Lustig. He let all kinds of new theories drop in lazy pebbles down through his mind, as through a dark water, now, turning, throwing out dull flashes of white light. Mars. Earth. Mom. Dad Edward. Mars. Martians.
Who had – lived here a thousand years ago on Mars? Martians? Or had this always been like this? Martians. He repeated the word quietly, inwardly. –

He laughed out loud, – almost. He had the ridiculous theory, all of a sudden. It gave him a kind of chilled feeling. It was really nothing to think of, of course. Highly. improbable. Silly. Forget it. Ridiculous.

But, he thought, Just suppose. Just suppose now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and -saw us inside our ship and hated – us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and – they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken- off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earthmen with atom weapons? –

The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory and imagination. –
Suppose all these houses weren’t real at all, – this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis by the Martians.

Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, -by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions?

What better way to fool a man, by his own emotions.

And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and- father at all. But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with –the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all of the time?

And that brass band, today? What a clever plan it would be. First, fool Lustig, then fool Hinkston, then gather a crowd around -the rocket ship and wave. And- all the men in the ship, seeing mothers, aunts, uncles, sweethearts dead ten, twenty years ago, naturally, disregarding orders, would rush- out and abandon the ship. What more natural?- What more unsuspecting? What more simple? A man doesn’t ask too many questions when his mother is suddenly brought back to life; he’s much too happy. And – the brass band played and everybody was taken off to private homes. And here we all are, tonight, in various houses, in various beds, with no weapons to protect us, and the rocket lies in the moonlight, empty. And wouldn’t it be horrible and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some -great clever plan by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us. Some time during the night, perhaps, my brother here on this bed, wifi change form, melt, shift, and become a one eyed, green and yellow-toothed Martian. It would be very simple for him just – to -turn over in bed and put a- knife into my heart. And in all those other houses down the street a dozen other brothers or fathers suddenly melting away and taking out knives and doing things to the unsuspecting, sleeping men of Earth. –

His hands were shaking under the covers. His body was cold, -Suddenly it was not a theory. Suddenly he was very afraid. He lifted- himself in bed and listened. The night was very quiet. The music had stopped. The wind had died.

His brother (?) lay sleeping beside him.

Very carefully he lifted the sheets, rolled them back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his brother’s voice said, “Where are you going?”

“What?” –
His brother’s voice was quite cold. “I said, where do you think you’re going?”
“For a drink of water.”
“But you’re not thirsty.”
“Yes, yes, I am.” –
“No, you’re not.” –
Captain John Black broke and ran across the room.
He screamed. He screamed twice. – He never reached- the door.

In the morning, the brass band played a mournful dirge. From every house in the street came little solemn processions bearing long boxes and along the sun-filled street, weeping and changing, came the grandmas and grandfathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, walking -to the churchyard, where there were open holes – dug freshly and new- tombstones installed. Seventeen – holes in all, and seventeen tombstones. Three of the tombstones said, CAPTAIN JOHN BLACK, ALBERT LUSTIG, and SAMUEL HINKSTON. – – –

The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes looking like the
mayor, sometimes looking like something else. — – – –

Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward, and they ‘cried, their faces melting now – from a familiar face into something else. – –

Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping~ their faces. Also shifting- like wax, – shivering as a- thing does in waves of heat on a summer day. – –

The coffins were lowered. Somebody murmured –about “the unexpected and sudden deaths of seventeen fine men during the night—”. – – – –

Earth was shoveled in on the coffin tops. –

After the funeral the brass band slammed and banged into town and the crowd stood around and waved and shouted as the rocket was torn to pieces and strewn about and blown up. – –

The End

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Awesome Movies – Army of Darkness

Happy Easter everyone. I hope that you are spending time together with loved one, relaxing and chilling out. For the Metallic-family, we went out and visited a couple of new malls, and ate some fine delicious Thai food, and some mild Hunan food. With wine and beer. Of course.

Later on, it’s a nice long relaxing afternoon with some silly and easy to watch movies to chill to. Please let’s dust off this crazy movie and pop it in the VCR. Listen to the tape a whirl, and watch the movie with a bowl of chips and a chill out attitude.

The Background

The Evil Dead series, both in the cinematic and television forms, has a marvelously delirious history. An original film financed on a shoestring budget that plays its horror-centric tone mostly straight but with a few chuckle inducing moments, a sequel that is in essence a remake of the original and was originally supposed to follow the plot of the third film, said third film that goes off in a completely different direction, and now a TV series, 22 years later, that makes no reference to the third installment for legal reasons, therefore technically continuing the story of the first film but unquestionably borrowing the slapstick, overly comedic identity of the third movie. Few popular franchises can claim to having a developmental history has complicated and hard fought as Evil Dead, although one would struggle to consider that a virtue. All that being said, Army of Darkness, which premiered in 1992 but was only released wide in February of 1993, is arguably the most interesting, unique and important entry.

-popoptiq

The Characters

  • Ash – Our legendary demon-slaying, lady-killing, chainsaw-wielding, S-Mart employee. Oh, and he also accidentally invented breakdancing by slipping on milk curd.
  • Sheila – She knows that the best way to catch a man’s eye is to slap the snot out of him. She also knows that the best way to keep a man is to bear him male children, and not to have syphilis.
  • Arthur – Noble born leader of the blighted lands, a real goody-goody two-shoes.
  • Wiseman – One of the worst things about the dark ages is that the world was filled with all sorts of evil spirits, fantastic monsters, and eldritch magic. The Wiseman’s job was to know the weakness of every possible supernatural peril. “Silver weapons, running water, garlic, a charm made from the toe of a saint” – those sorts of things. Everybody else knew that the old freaks were just making it up as they went along, but nobody cared, so long as the wards worked.
  • Duke Henry – Red haired and bearded leader of the northern kingdoms.
  • Bad Ash – Created after Ash swallows a tiny version of himself, then grows two heads, then splits into two people…oh forget it, he’s an evil and rotting version of Ash. Turned into a firework.
  • Little Ash’s – These miniature menaces terrorize Ash for a while. Some get stomped, one gets eaten.
  • The Army of the Dead – Hundreds of skeletons that are chopped to bits, blown apart, or crushed.

The Plot

The Army of Darkness is a remarkably silly movie. And it is just perfect to watch on lazy Easter Afternoons.

The beginning of “Army of Darkness” makes a slight adjustment to the end of Evil Dead 2. Originally, Ash is sucked through the wormhole, gets dumped out somewhere in time south of the Renaissance, blasts a flying Deadite, and is immediately worshipped as a delivering saint by a group of medieval warriors. Here we have Ash mistaken as part of Duke Henry’s army, the force that Lord Arthur has just routed from the field of battle. Poor Ash finds himself a prisoner of Lord Arthur, locked in a stock and told to schlep it along.

Back in those days there were not any federally-funded maximum security prisons. Heck, there were not even any small continents or large islands so that a country of Queen-loving citizens could banish their criminals (and the criminals’ children, and their children, and so on) to lifelong incarceration upon the too-big-for-an-island / sort-of-small-to-be-a-continent. Lord Arthur’s solution to this conundrum is that the last of Duke Henry’s men are to be tossed into the Pit. Inside the Pit are Deadites. Obviously, Ash does not want to go into the Pit, but that is exactly where he gets pushed. Things look really bad for our hero, but the Wiseman tosses Ash his chainsaw as a Deadite closes in for the kill. Armed with his trusty chainsaw, Ash is more than a match for any demon. The Deadite quickly becomes just plain old dead.

After he climbs out of the pit, Ash recovers his sawed-off double-barreled shotgun, and then berates the unwashed masses of medieval citizenry (nobles, serfs, and vassals). The good Lord Arthur finds it difficult to say no to a man who carries a boomstick and who eats soul-eating Deadites for lunch. The nobleman can only glare as Ash takes up residence in the central keep, and sets about enjoying the service of the serving wenches. Even a surprise visit by a Deadite hag just further cements Ash in place as a royal thorn in Arthur’s royal side.

For his part, Ash effectively tells Arthur and the Wiseman that they can have the Middle Ages. All that Ash wants to do is go home. He does take a break from yearning for 1992 long enough to construct a mechanical iron hand to replace the one he lost in “Evil Dead 2.” He also puts aside his animosity towards Sheila (they had a rough start) and starts making it with the “Doth do maketh my heart warm with thy presence” sort of stuff.

I am not sure why Ash insists on returning to the present. Maybe he wants to avoid cholera, syphilis, and the Black Plague, but he will be doing that at the expense of a lot of quality time that could be spent eating grapes and wenching. Ah, wenching. Out of everything the Middle Ages stood for, I miss wenching the most. If you ever make it to 784 AD, make sure that you sample the wenches.

The Wiseman finally convinces Ash that the only way he can ever get back home is by undertaking a quest to recover the Necromonicon from a haunted graveyard. Now, Ash is an extremely groovy kind of guy, but he has a hard enough time staying out of Deadite-spawned trouble in his own living room. Mucking around in the land of the dead is going to have serious consequences. The first of those is that Ash gets chased around the haunted forest that is near the haunted graveyard by invisible motorcycles. The second issue created by Ash’s foray into the world of spirits, spells, and specters takes place inside an old windmill. A shattered mirror turns into a mob of tiny troublemaking Ash clones! They poke him with forks, drop things on his head, and generally make Ash wish that he had never had children of any sort. Once he gets the little hellions under control, Ash then has to deal with his alternate Deadite ego, Bad Ash.

One boomstick later, there is only one Ash standing. He is a bad-a**, but not Bad Ash.

Ash does finally reach the graveyard and recover the book (after dealing with two cursed imitation tomes). However, he does not correctly take possession of the Book of the Dead. Yep, Ash flubs “klaatu barada nikto.” As a result, the dead are woken from their endless sleep. Hundreds of skeletons assemble themselves into a massive army, with Bad Ash assuming command as the undead horde’s general. Now Lord Arthur has something worse than the proto-Scots and Deadite intrusions to deal with. Social Security was not created until the 20th Century; figuring out what to do about hundreds of the walking dead who refuse to stay in their graves is a big problem for a medieval noble.

Actually, Arthur and Ash decide to solve the problem the way that most problems were solved during the Middle Ages: they will have a battle!

To prepare for the battle, Ash and the other defenders of Arthur’s castle turn to the textbooks that were in the trunk of Ash’s car (the vehicle was also sucked back in time). I must say, Ash pursued some unusual subjects in college. How often does someone get to say, “That semester of ‘Steam Power 101’ really paid off!” in their life? Unfortunately, the hero has to make his preparations for Ragnarok without indulging in the time-honored tradition of pre-battle nookie, because Sheila is whisked away by a Deadite gargoyle. The next time that Ash sees his gentle lady, she is a Deadite witch and a real ball-breaker.

The Army of Darkness that attacks the castle finds itself on the receiving end of exploding arrows, catapult-lobbed bombs, and even a car that looks like the result of an Oldsmobile having sex with a windmill. Bones are crushed by the human defenders, but the walls are eventually breached, and Ash has a final skin-shedding reckoning with Bad Ash. The evil army is routed, and the only thing left for Ash to do is to go home to his own time. There are two different endings to this movie. In one, we see Ash back at S-Mart, defending the customers and employees from a surprise Deadite incursion. In the other, Ash hits the Rip Van Winkle bottle a little too much and sleeps well past doomsday.

I like “Evil Dead 2” more than “Army of Darkness.” Yet, this is an entertaining cult film. You could even call it a gruesomely groovy comedy. The movie is filled with Three Stooges-style slapstick, and the head-bangs and eye-pokes are so well done that I get nostalgic to watch some old Stooges’ shorts. Still, the reason that everybody loves Ash is that he has some great lines, the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Stallone and Schwarzenegger action films of the 1980s, and he delivers them with style.

Things I learned from this movie

Ash finds himself thrown back in time and must discover the modicum of generosity he never thought he had inside him by fending off hoards of skeleton soldiers and a hulking evil version of himself in order to protect a small but brave kingdom before returning back to present day.
  • In ye olde days “public transportation” meant being chained to the nobleman’s horse and dragged along behind him.
  • Knights often fall for the old “your shoelace is untied” trick.
  • Department store employees know how to construct robotic limbs.
  • The difference between an ear and a pancake is academic.
  • Stonehenge was a public library.
  • Never mumble the magic words.
  • Jay Leno’s chin is the product of an unfortunate childhood accident involving a vacuum.
  • No ex-girlfriend is worth wrecking your car over.
  • When wrestling a skeleton, always remember that they are vulnerable to the backbreaker.

Stuff To Watch For:

Army of Darkness.
  • 5 mins – You know, “The Gods Must Be Crazy” would have been more interesting if the main guy had found a chainsaw instead of that bottle.
  • 10 mins – That guy obviously suffered from high blood pressure.
  • 18 mins – Pretty cheap for a double-barreled shotgun. Hey, did the barrel length just change?
  • 21 mins – You sound like my grandmother.
  • 26 mins – Detroit?
  • 32 mins – We have gone from “The Amazing Colossal Man” to “Gulliver’s Travels” to “The Manster” and now we are on “The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant.” What is next, “The Birds?”
  • 38 mins – Oops, looks like you found the dreaded Hoovernomicon: The Book of the Suck.
  • 51 mins – For a moment there I was worried that a song was coming on.
  • 53 mins – Skeletal musicians: +1 combat result.
  • 65 mins – Amy Winehouse?

Conclusion

Army of Darkness.
It is, in a nutshell, a melding of two films: an Evil Dead film and a medieval fantasy action comedy. No one in their right mind would seriously consider the movie to be an outright horror film. Granted, it features some ingredients that would be right at home in a horror movie, but so much of what Raimi and company want to provide is far more along the lines of an action adventure story soaked in the sort of slapstick humour Raimi is known for being a humungous fan of. 

-popoptiq

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Forever War by Joe Haldeman (Full Text)

Everyone, I think that you are all going to enjoy this. It took me a while to find this classic work of 1970’s science fiction. It is a science fiction novel much like “Starship Troopers” only much better. I tried to clean up the scanning, and OCR, but there’s still errors here and ther. Never the less, it’s a great read, and it should enable you to get your minds off of… well, what ever your minds are on right now. Enjoy.

Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam veteran, wrote The Forever War in the seventies, and his novel soon became a classic of the so-called “military science fiction” genre, in keeping with (and way better than) Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. The book tells the story of an intergalactic war with an alien race, that spans well over a millennium, as seen from Private Mandella.

The Forever War

Joe Haldeman

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This is the definitive version of The Forever War. There are two other versions, and my publisher has been kind enough to allow inc to clarify things here.

The one you’re holding in your hand is the book as it was originally written. But it has a pretty tortuous history.

It’s ironic, since it later won the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and has won “Best Novel” awards in other countries, but The Forever War was not an easy book to sell back in the early seventies. It was rejected by eighteen publishers before St. Martin’s Press decided to take a chance on it. “Pretty good book,” was the usual reaction, “but nobody wants to read a science fiction novel about Vietnam”. ‘Seventy-Five years later, most young readers don’t even see the parallels between The Forever War and the seemingly endless one we were involved in at the time, and that’s okay. It’s about Vietnam because that’s the war the author was in. But it’s mainly about war, about soldiers, and about the reasons we think we need them.

While the book was being looked at by all those publishers, it was also being serialized piecemeal in Analog magazine. The editor, Ben Bova, was a tremendous help, not only in editing, but also for making the thing exist at all! He gave it a prominent place in the magazine, and it was also his endorsement that brought it to the attention of St. Martin’s Press, who took a chance on the hardcover, though they did not publish adult science fiction at that time.

But Ben rejected the middle section, a novella called “You Can Never Go Back.” He liked it as a piece of writing, he said, but thought that it was too downbeat for Analog’s audience. So I wrote him a more positive story and put “You Can Never Go Back” into the drawer; eventually Ted White published it in Amazing magazine, as a coda to The Forever War

At this late date, I’m not sure why I didn’t reinstate the original middle when the book was accepted. Perhaps I didn’t trust my own taste, or just didn’t want to make life more complicated. But that first book version is essentially the Analog version with “more adult language and situations”, as they say in Hollywood.

The paperback of that version stayed in print for about~ sixteen years. Then in 1991 I had the opportunity to reinstate my original version, which now appears in Britain for the first time. The dates in the book are now kind of funny; most people realize we didn’t get into an interstellar war in 1996. I originally set it in that year so it was barely possible that the officers and NCOs could be veterans of Vietnam, so we decided to leave it that way, in spite of the obvious anachronisms. Think of it as a parallel universe.

But maybe it’s the real one, and we’re in a dream.

Joe Haldeman

Cambridge, Massachusetts

 

THE

FOREVER WAR

PRIVATE MANDELLA

“Tonight we’re going to show you eight silent ways to kill a man.” The guy who said that was a sergeant who didn’t look five years older than me. So if he’d ever killed a man in combat, silently or otherwise, he’d done it as an infant.

I already knew eighty ways to. kill people, but most of them were pretty noisy. I sat up straight in my chair and assumed a look of polite attention and fell asleep with my eyes open. So did most everybody else. We’d learned that they never scheduled anything important for these after-chop classes.

The projector woke me up and I sat through a short tape showing the “eight silent ways.” Some of the actors must have been brainwipes, since they were actually killed.

After the tape a girl in the front row raised her hand. The sergeant nodded at her and she rose to parade rest. Not bad looking, but kind of chunky about the neck and shoulders. Everybody gets that way after carrying a heavy pack around for a couple of months.

“Sir”-we had to call sergeants “sir” until graduation- “most of those methods, really, they looked. . . kind of silly.”

“For instance?”

“Like killing a man with a blow to the kidneys, from an entrenching tool. I mean, when would you actualiy have only an entrenching tool, and no gun or knife? And why not just bash him over the head with it?”

“He might have a helmet on,” he said reasonably.

“Besides, Taurans probably don’t even have kidneys!” He shrugged. “Probably they don’t.” This was 1997, and nobody had ever seen a Tauran; hadn’t even found any pieces of Taurans bigger than a scorched chromosome.

“But their body chemistry is similar to ours, and we have to assume they’re similarly complex creatures. They must have weaknesses, vulnerable spots. You have to find out where they are.

“That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. “Those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit  because  you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a megawatt laser or an emery board.”

She sat back down, not looking too convinced. “Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.

“OK. Tench-hut!” We staggered upright and be looked at us expectantly. “Fuck you, sir,” came the familiar tired chorus.

“Louder!”

“FUCK YOU, SIR!” One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.

“That’s better. Don’t forget. pie-dawn maneuvers tomorrow. Chop at 0330, first formation, 0400. Anybody sacked after 0340 owes one stripe. Dismissed.”

I zipped up my coverall and went across the snow to the lounge for a cup of soya and a joint. I’d always been able to get by on five or six hours of sleep, and this was the only time I could be by myself, out of the army for a while. Looked at the newsfax for a few minutes. Another ship got caulked, out by Aldebaran sector. That was four years ago.

~ They were mounting a reprisal fleet, but it’ll take four years more for them to get out there. By then, the Taurans would have every portal planet sewed up tight.

Back at the billet, everybody else was sacked and the main lights were out. The whole company’d been dragging ever since we got back from the two-week lunar training.

I dumped my clothes in the locker, checked the roster and found out I was in bunk 31. Goddammit, right under the heater.

I slipped through the curtain as quietly as possible so as not to wake up the person next to me. Couldn’t see who it was, but I couldn’t have cared less. I slipped under the blanket.

“You’re late, Mandella,” a voice yawned. It was Rogers. “Sorry I woke you up,” I whispered.

”saliright.” She snuggled over and clasped me spoon-fashion. She was warm and reasonably soft.

I patted her hip in what I hoped was a brotherly fashion. “Night, Rogers.” “G’night, Stallion.” She returned the gesture more pointedly.

Why do you always get the tired ones when you’re ready and the randy ones when you’re tired? I bowed to the inevitable.

2

“Awright, let’s get some goddamn back inta that! Stringer team! Move it up-move your ass up!”

A warm front had come in about midnight and the snow had turned to sleet. The permaplast stringer weighed five hundred pounds and was a bitch to handle, even when it wasn’t covered with ice. There were four of us, two at each end, carrying the plastic girder with frozen fingertips. Rogers was my partner.

“Steel!” the guy behind me yelled, meaning that he was losing his hold. It wasn’t steel, but it was heavy enough to break your foot. Everybody let go and hopped away. It splashed slush and mud all over us.

“Goddammit, Petrov,” Rogers said, “why didn’t you go out for the Red Cross or something? This fucken thing’s not that fucken heavy.” Most of the girls were a little more circumspect in their speech. Rogers was a little butch.

“Awright, get a fucken move on, stringers-epoxy team! Dog’em! Dog’em!”

Our two epoxy people ran up, swinging their buckets. “Let’s go, Mandella. I’m freezin’ my balls off.”

“Me, too,” the girl said with more feeling than logic.

“One-two–heave!” We got the thing up again and staggered toward the bridge. It was about three-quarters completed. Looked as if the second platoon was going to beat us. I wouldn’t give a damn, but the platoon that got their bridge built first got to fly home. Four miles of muck for the rest of us, and no rest before chop.

We got the stringer in place, dropped it with a clank, and fitted the static clamps that held it to the rise-beams. The female half of the epoxy team started slopping glue on it before we even had it secured. Her partner was waiting for the stringer on the other side. The floor team was waiting at the foot of the bridge, each one holding a piece of the light, stressed permaplast over his head like an umbrella. They were dry and clean. I wondered aloud what they had done to deserve it, and Rogers suggested a couple of colorful, but unlikely, possibilities.

We were going back to stand by the next stringer when the field first (name of Dougeistein, but we called him “Awright”) blew a whistle and bellowed, “Awright, soldier boys and girls, ten minutes. Smoke’em if you got ’em.” He reached into his pocket and turned on the control that heated our coveralls.

Rogers and I sat down on our end of the stringer and I took out my weed box. I had lots of joints, but we were ordered not to smoke them until after night-chop. The only tobacco I had was a cigarro butt about three inches long. I lit it on the side of the box; it wasn’t too bad after the first couple of puffs. Rogers took a puff, just to be sociable, but made a face and gave it back.

“Were you in school when you got drafted?” she asked.

“Yeah. Just got a degree in physics. Was going after a teacher’s certificate.” She nodded soberly. “I was in biology . . .”

“Figures.” I ducked a handful of slush. “How far?”

“Six years, bachelor’s and technicaL” She slid her boot along the ground, turning up a ridge of mud and slush the consistency of freezing ice milk. “Why the fuck did this have to happen?”

I shrugged. It didn’t call for an answer, least of all the answer that the UNEF kept giving us. Intellectual and physical elite of the planet, going out to guard humanity against the Tairan menace. Soyashit It was all just a big experiment See whether we could goad the Taurans into ground

Awright blew the whistle two minutes early, as expected, but Rogers and I and the other two stringers got to sit for a minute while the epoxy and floor teams finished covering our stringer. It got cold fast, sitting there with our suits turned off, but we remained inactive on principle.

There really wasn’t any sense in having us train in the cold. Typical army half- logic. Sure, it was going to be cold where we were going, but not ice-cold or snow- cold. Almost by definition, a portal planet remained within a degree or two of absolute zero all the tune-since collapsars don’t shine-and the first chill you felt would mean that you were a dead man.

Twelve years before, when I was ten years old, they had discovered the collapsar jump. Just fling an object at a collapsar with sufficient speed, and out it pops in some other part of the galaxy. It didn’t take long to figure out the formula that predicted where it would come out: it travels along the same “line” (actually an Einsteinian geodesic) it would have followed if the collapsar hadn’t been in the way- until it reaches another collapsar field, whereupon it reappears, repelled with the same speed at which it approached the original collapsar. Travel time between the two collapsars.. . exactly zero.

It made a lot of work for mathematical physicists, who had to redefine simultaneity, then tear down general relativity and build it back up again. And it made the politicians very happy, because now they could send a shipload of colonists to Fomaihaut for less than it had once cost to put a brace of men on the moon. There were a lot of people the politicians would love to see on Fomalbaut, implementing a glorious adventure rather than stirring up trouble at home.

The ships were always accompanied by an automated probe that followed a couple of million miles behind. We knew about the portal planets, little bits of flotsam that whirled around the collapsars; the purpose of the drone was to come back and tell us in the event that a ship had smacked into a portal planet at .999 of the speed of light.

That particular catastrophe never happened, but one day a drone limped back alone. Its data were analyzed, and it turned out that the colonists’ ship had been pursued by another vessel and destroyed. This happened near Aldebaran, in the constellation Taurus, but since “Aldebaranian” is a little hard to handle, they named the enemy “Tauran.”

Colonizing vessels thenceforth went out protected by an armed guard. Often the armed guard went out alone, and finally the Colonization Group got shortened to UNEF, United Nations Exploratory Force. Emphasis on the

 

Then some bright lad in the General Assembly decided that we ought to field an army of footsoldiers to guard the portal planets of the nearer collapsars. This led to the Elite Conscription Act of 1996 and the most cutely conscripted army in the history of warfare.

So here we were, fifty men and fifty women, with IQs over 150 and bodies of unusual health and strength, slogging cutely through the mud and slush of central Missouri, reflecting on the usefulness of our skill in building bridges on worlds where the only fluid is an occasional standing pool of liquid helium.

3

About a month later, we left for our final training exercise, maneuvers on the planet Charon. Though nearing perihelion, it was still more than twice as far from the sun as Pluto.

The troopship was a converted “cattlewagon” made to carry two hundred colonists and assorted bushes and beasts. Don’t think it was roomy, though, just because there were half that many of us. Most of the excess space was taken up with extra reaction mass and ordnance.

The whole trip took three weeks, accelerating at two gees halfway, decelerating the other half. Our top  speed, as we  roared by the orbit of Pluto, was around one- twentieth of the speed of light-not quite enough for relativity to rear its complicated head.

Three weeks of carrying around twice as much weight as normal.. . it’s no picnic. We did some cautious exercises three times a day and remained horizontal as much as possible. Still, we got several broken bones and serious dislocations. The men had to wear special supporters to keep from littering the floor with loose organs. It was almost impossible to sleep; nightmares of choking and being crushed, rolling over periodically to prevent blood pooling and bedsores. One girl got so fatigued that she almost slept through the experience of having a rib push out into the open air.

I’d been in space several times before, so when we finally stopped decelerating and went into free fall, it was nothing but relief. But some people had never been out, except for our training on the moon, and succumbed to the sudden vertigo and disorientation. The rest of us cleaned up after them, floating through the quarters with sponges and inspirators to suck up the globules of partly-digested

“Concentrate, High-protein, Low-residue, Beef Flavor (Soya).”

We had a good view of Charon, coming down from orbit. There wasn’t much to see, though. It was just a dim, off-white sphere with a few smudges on it. We landed about two hundred meters from the base. A pressurized crawler came out and mated with the ferry, so we didn’t have to suit up. We clanked and squeaked up to the main building, a featureless box of grayish plastic.

Inside, the walls were the same drab color. The rest of the company was sitting at desks, chattering away. There was a seat next to Freeland.

“Jeff-feeling better?” He still looked a little pale.

“If the gods had meant for man to survive in free fall, they would have given him a cast iron glottis.” He sighed heavily. “A little better. Dying for a smoke.”

 

“You seemed to take it all right. Went up in school, didn’t you?”

 

“Senior thesis in vacuum welding, yeah. Three weeks in Earth orbit.” I sat back and reached for my weed box for the thousandth time. It still wasn’t there. The Life Support Unit didn’t want to handle nicotine and mc.

“Training was bad enough,” Jeff groused, “but this shit-”

“Tench-hut!” We stood up in a raggedy-ass fashion, by twos and threes. The door opened and a full major came in. I stiffened a little. He was the highest-ranking officer I’d ever seen. He had a row of ribbons stitched into his coveralls, including a purple strip meaning he’d been wounded in combat, fighting in the old American army. Must have been that Indochina thing, but it had fizzled out beforelwasborn.Hedidn’tlookthatold.

“Sit, sit.” He made a patting motion with his hand. Then he put his hands on his hips and scanned the company, a small smile on his face. “Welcome to Charon. You picked a lovely day to land, the temperature outside is a summery eight point one fIve degrees Absolute. We expect little thange for the next two centuries or so.” Some of them laughed haltbeartedly.

Joe Haldeman 12

“Best you enjoy the tropical climate here at Miami Base; enjoy it while you can. We’re on the center of sunside here, and most of your training will be on darkside. Over there, the temperature stays a chilly two point zero eight.

“You might as well regard all the training you got on Earth and the moon as just an elementary exercise, designed to give you a fair chance of surviving Charon. You’ll have to go through your whole repertory here: tools, weapons, maneuvers. And you’ll find that, at these temperatures, tools don’t work the way they should; weapons don’t want to fire. And people move v-e-r-y cautiously.”

He studied the clipboard in his hand. “Right now, you have forty-nine women and forty-eight men. Two deaths on Earth, one psychiatric release. Having read an outline of your training program, I’m frankly surprised that so many of you pulled through.

“But you might as well know that I won’t be displeased if as few as fifty of you, half, graduate from this final phase. And the only way not to graduate is to die. Here. The only way anybody gets back to Earth-including me-is after a combat tour.

“You will complete your training in one month. From here you go to Stargate collapsar, half a light year away. You will stay at the settlement on Stargate 1, the largest portal planet, until replacements arrive. Hopefully, that will be no more than a month; another group is due here as soon as you leave.

“When you leave Stargate, you will go to some strategically important collapsar, set up a military base there, and fight the enemy, if attacked. Otherwise, you will maintain the base until further orders.

“The last two weeks of your training will consist of constructing exactly that kind of a base, on darkside. There you will be totally isolated from Miami Base: no communication, no medical evacuation, no resupply. Sometime before the two weeks are up, your defense facilities will be evaluated in an attack by guided drones. They will be armed.”

They had spent all that money on us just to kill us in training? ‘[HE FOREVER WAR

13

“All of the permanent personnel here on Charon are combat veterans. Thus, all of us are forty to fifty years of age. Butlthinkwecankeepupwithyou. Twoofuswill be with you at all times and will accompany you at least as far as Stargate. They are Captain

Sherman Stott, your company commander, and Sergeant Octavio Corte~ your first sergeant. Gentlemen?”

Two men in the front row stood easily and turned to face us. Captain Stott was a little smaller than the major, but cut from the same mold: face hard and smooth as porcelain, cynical half-smile, a precise centimeter of beard framing a large chin, looking thirty at the most. He wore a large, gunpowder-type pistol on his hip.

Sergeant Cortez was another story, a horror story. His head was shaved and the wrong shape, flattened out on one side, where a large piece of skull had obviously been taken out. His face was very dark and seamed with wrinkles and scars. Half his left ear was missing, and his eyes were as expressive as buttons on a machine. He had a moustache-and-beard combination that looked like a skinny white caterpillar taking a lap around his mouth. On anybody else, his schoolboy smile might look pleasant, but he was about the ugliest, meanest-looking creature I’d ever seen. Still, if you didn’t look at his head and considered the lower six feet or so, he could have posed as the “after” advertisement for a body-building spa. Neither Stott nor Cortez wore any ribbons. Cortez had a small pocket-laser suspended in a magnetic rig, sideways, under his left armpit. It had wooden grips that were worn smooth.

“Now, before I turn you over to the tender mercies of these two gentlemen, let me caution you again:

“Two months ago there was not a living soul on this planet, just some leftover equipment from the expedition of 1991. A working force of forty-five men struggled for a month to erect this base. Twenty-four of them, more than half, died in the construction of it. This is the most dangerous planet men have ever tried to live on, but the places you’ll be going will be this bad and worse. Your cadre will try to keep you alive for the next month. Listen to them and follow their example; all of them have survived here much longer than you’ll have to. Captain?” The captain stood up as the major went out the door.

“Tench-hut!” The last syllable was like an explosion and we all jerked to our feet. “Now I’m only gonna say this once so you better listen,” he growled. “We are in a

combat situation here, and in a combat situation there is only one penalty for disobedience or insubordination.” He jerked the pistol from his hip and held it by the barrel, like a club. “This is an Army model 1911 automatic pistol, caliber .45, and it is a primitive but effective weapon. The Sergeant and I are authorized to use our weapons to kill to enforce discipline. Don’t make us do it because we will. We will.” He put the pistol back. The holster snap made a loud crack in the dead quiet.

“Sergeant Cortez and I between us have killed more people than are sitting in this room. Both of us fought in Vietnam on the American side and both of us joined the United Nations International Guard more than ten years ago. I took a break in grade from major for the privilege of commanding this company, and First Sergeant Cortez took a break from sub-major, because we are both combat soldiers and this is the first combat situation since 1987.

“Keep in mind what I’ve said while the First Sergeant instructs you mote specifically in what your duties will be under this command. Take over, Sergeant” He turned on his heel and strode out of the room. The expression on his face hadn’t changed one millimeter during the whole harangue.

The First Sergeant moved like a heavy machine with lots of ball bearings. When the door hissed shut, he swiveled ponderously to face us and said, “At ease, siddown,” in a surprisingly gentle voice. He sat on a table in the front of the room. It creaked, but held.

“Now the captain talks scaly and I look scary, but we both mean well. You’ll be working pretty closely with me, so you better get used to this thing I’ve got hanging in front of my brain. You probably won’t see the captain much, except on maneuvers.”

He touched the flat part of his head. “And speaking of brains, I still have Just about all of mine, in spite of Chinese efforts to the contrary. All of us old vets who mustered into UNEF had to pass the same criteria that got you drafted by the Elite Conscription Act So I suspect all of you are smart and tough-but just keep in mind that the captain and I are smart and tough and experienced.”

He flipped through the roster without really looking at it. “Now, as the captain said, there’ll be only one kind of disciplinary action on maneuvers. Capital punishment But normally we won’t have to kill you for disobeying; Charon’ll save us the trouble.

“Back in the billeting area, it’ll be another story. We don’t much care what you do inside. Grab ass all day and fuck all night, makes no difference… . But once you suit up and go outside, you’ve gotta have discipline that would shame a Centurian. There will be situations where one stupid act could kill us all.

“Anyhow, the first thing we’ve gotta do is get you fitted to your fighting suits. The armorer’s waiting at your billet; he’ll take you one at a time. Let’s go.”

4

“Now I know you got lectured back on Earth on what a fighting suit can do.” The armorer was a small man, partially bald, with no insignia of rank on his coveralls. Sergeant Cortez had told us to call him “sir,” since he was a lieutenant.

“But I’d like to reinforce a couple of points, maybe add some things your instructors Earthside weren’t clear about or couldn’t know. Your First Sergeant was kind enough to consent to being my visual aid. Sergeant?”

Coitez slipped out of his coveralls and came up to the little raised platform where a fighting suit was standing, popped open like a man-shaped clam. He backed into it and slipped his arms into the rigid sleeves. There was a click and the thing swung shut with a sigh. It was bright green with CORTEZ stenciled in white letters on the helmet.

“Camouflage, Sergeant.” The green faded to white, then dirty gray. “This is good camouflage for Charon and most of your portal planets,” said Cortez, as if from a deep well. “But there are several other combinations available.” The gray dappled and brightened to a combination of greens and browns: “Jungle.” Then smoothed out to a hard light ochre: “Desert.” Dark brown, darker, to a deep flat black:

“Night or space.”

“Very good, Sergeant To my knowledge, this is the only feature of the suit that was perfected after your trainin& The control is around your left wrist and is admittedly awkward. But once you find the right combination, it’s easy to lock in.

“Now, you didn’t get much in-suit training Earthside. We didn’t want you to get used to using the thing in a friendly environment. The fighting suit is the deadliest personal weapon ever built, and with no weapon is it easier for the user to kill himself through carelessness. Turn around, Sergeant.

“Case in point.” He tapped a large square protuberance between the shoulders. “Exhaust fins. As you know, the suit tries to keep you at a comfortable temperature no matter what the weather’s like outside. The material of the suit is as near to a perfect insulator as we could get, consistent with mechanical demands. Therefore, these fins get hot- especially hot, compared to darkside temperatures-as they bleed off the body’s heat.

“All you have to do is lean up against a boulder of

frozen gas; there’s lots of it around. The gas will sublime off faster than it can escape from the fins; in escaping, it will push against the surrounding ‘ice’ and fracture it… and in about one-hundredth of a second, you have the equivalent of a hand grenade going off right below your neck. You’ll never feel a thing.

“Variations on this theme have killed eleven people in the past two months. And they were just building a bunch of huts.

“I assume you know how easily the waldo capabilities can kill you or your companions. Anybody want to shake hands with the sergeant?” He paused, then stepped over and clasped his glove. “He’s had lots of practice. Until you have, be extremely careful. You might scratch an itch and wind up breaking your back. Remember, semi-logarithmic response: two pounds’ pressure exerts five pounds’ force; three pounds’ gives ten; four pounds’, twenty-three; five pounds’, forty-seven. Most of you can muster up a grip of well over a hundred pounds. Theoretically, you could rip a steel girder in two with that, amplified. Actually, you’d destroy the material of your gloves and, at least on Charon, die very quickly. It’d be a race between decompression and flash-freezing. You’d die no matter which won.

“The leg waldos are also dangerous, even though the amplification is less extreme. Until you’re really skilled, don’t try to run, or jump. You’re likely to trip, and that means you’re likely to die.”

“Charon’ s gravity is three-fourths of Earth normal, so it’s not too bad. But on a really small world, like Luna, you could take a running jump and not come down for twenty minutes, just keep sailing over the horizon. Maybe bash into a mountain at eighty meters per second. On a small asteroid, it’d be no trick at all to run up to escape velocity and be off on an informal tour of intergalactic space. It’s a slow way to travel.

“Tomorrow morning, we’ll start teaching you how to stay alive inside this infernal machine. The rest of the afternoon and evening, I’ll call you one at a time to be fitted. That’s all, Sergeant.”

Cortez went to the door and turned the stopcock that let air into the airlock. A bank of infrared lamps went on to keep air from freezing inside it. When the pressures were equalized, he shut the stopcock, unclainped the door and stepped in, clamping it shut behind him. A pump hummed for about a minute, evacuating the airlock; then he stepped out and sealed the outside door.

It was pretty much like the ones on Luna.

“First I want Private Omar Ahnizar. The rest of you can go find your bunks. I’ll call you over the squawker.”

“Alphabetical order, sir?”

“Yep. About ten minutes apiece. If your name begins with Z, you might as well get sacked.”

That was Rogers. She probably was thinking about get- ting sacked.

5

The sun was a hard white point directly overhead. It was a lot brighter than I had expected it to be; since we were eighty AUs out, it was only one 6400th as bright as it is on Earth. Still, it was putting out about as much light as a powerful streetlamp.

“This is considerably more light than you’ll have on a portal planet.” Captain Stott’s voice crackled in our collective ear. “Be glad that you’ll be able to watch your step.”

We were lined up, single-file, on the permaplast sidewalk that connected the billet and the supply hut. We’d practiced walking inside, all morning, and this wasn’t any different except for the exotic scenery. Though the light was rather dim, you could see all the way to the horizon quite clearly, with no atmosphere in the way. A black cliff that looked too regular to be natural stretched from one horizon to the other, passing within a kilometer of us. The ground was obsidian-black, mottled with patches of white or bluish ice. Next to the supply hut was a small mountain of snow in a bin marked oxya~ri.

The suit was fairly comfortable, but it gave you the odd feeling of simultaneously being a marionette and a puppeteer. You apply the impulse to move your leg and the suit picks it up and magnifies it and moves your leg for you.

“Today we’re only going to walk around the company area, and nobody will leave the company area.” The captain wasn’t wearing his .45-unless he carried it as a good luck charm, under his suit-but he had a laser-finger like the rest of us. And his was probably hooked up.

Keeping an interval of at least two meters between each person, we stepped off the permaplast and followed  the captain over smooth rock. We walked carefully for about an hour, spiraling out, and finally stopped at the far edge of the perimeter.

“Now everybody pay close attention. I’m going out to that blue slab of ice”-it was a big one, about twenty meters away-‘ ‘and show you something that you’d better know if you want to stay alive.”

He walked out in a dozen confident steps. “First I have to heat up a rock-filters down.” I squeezed the stud under my armpit and the filter slid into place over my image converter. The captain pointed his finger at a black rock the size of a basketball, and gave it a short burst. The glare rolled a long shadow of the captain over us and beyond. The rock shattered into a pile of hazy splinters.

“It doesn’t take long for these to cool down.” He stopped and picked up a piece. “This one is probably twenty or twenty-five degrees. Watch.” He tossed the “warm” rock onto the ice slab. It skittered around in a crazy pattern and shot off the side. He tossed another one, and it did the same.

“As you know, you are not quite pe,fecrly insulated. These rocks are about the temperature of the soles of your boots. If you try to stand on a slab of hydrogen, the same thing will happen to you. Except that the rock is already dead.

“The reason for this behavior is that the rock makes a slick interface with the ice-a little puddle of liquid hydrogen-and rides a few molecules above the liquid on a cushion of hydrogen vapor. This makes the rock or you a frictionless bearing as far as the ice is concerned, and you can’t stand up without any friction under your boots.

“After you have lived in your suit for a month or so you should be able to survive falling down, but right now you just don’t know enough. Watch.”

The captain flexed and hopped up onto the slab. His feet shot out from under him and he twisted around in midair, landing on hands and knees. He slipped off and stood on the ground.

“The idea is to keep your exhaust tins from making contact with the frozen gas. Compared to the ice they are as hot as a blast furnace, and contact with any weight behind it will result in an explosion.”

After that demonstration, we walked around for another hour or so and returned to the billet. Once through the airlock~ we had to mill around for a while, letting the suits get up to something like room temperature. Somebody came up and touched helmets with me.

“William?” She had MCCOY stenciled above her faceplate. “Hi, Sean. Anything special?”

“I just wondered if you had anyone to sleep with tonight.”

That’s right; I’d forgotten. There wasn’t any sleeping roster here. Everybody chose his own partner. “Sure, I mean, uh, no. . . no, I haven’t asked anybody. Sure, if you want to. . . .”

“Thanks, William. See you later.” I watched her walk away and thought that if anybody could make a fighting suit look sexy, it’d be Sean. But even she couldn’t.

Cortez decided we were warm enough and led us to the suit room, where we backed the things into place and hooked them up to the charging plates. (Each suit had a little chunk of plutonium that would power it for several years, but we were supposed to run on fuel cells as much as possible.) After a lot of shuffling around, everybody finally got plugged in and we were allowed to unsuit- ninety-seven naked chickens squirming out of bright green eggs. It was cold-the air, the floor and especially the suits-and we made a pretty disorderly exit toward the lockers.

I slipped on tunic, trousers and sandals and was still cold. I took my cup and joined the line for soya. Everybody was jumping up and down to keep warm.

“How c-cold, do you think, it is, M-Mandella?” That was McCoy.

“I don’t, even want, to think, about it.” I stopped jumping and rubbed myself as briskly as possible, while holding a cup in one hand. “At least as cold as MiSSOUrI was.”

“Ung.. . wish they’d, get some, fucken, h~ai in, this place.” It always affects the small women more than any-body else. McCoy was the littlest one in the company, a waspwaist doll barely five feet high.

“They’ve got the airco going. It can’t be long now.”

“I wish I, was a big, slab of, meat like, you.” I was glad she wasn’t. 6

We had our first casualty on the third day, learning how to dig holes.

With such large amounts of energy stored in a soldier’s weapons, it wouldn’t be practical for him to hack out a hole in the frozen ground with the conventional pick and

shovel. Still, you can launch grenades all day and get nothing but shallow depressions-so the usual method is to bore a hole in the ground with the hand laser, drop a timed charge in after it’s cooled down and, ideally, fill the hole with stuff. Of course, there’s not much loose rock on Charon, unless you’ve already blown a hole nearby.

The only difficult thing about the procedure is in getting away. To be safe, we were told, you’ve got to either be behind something really solid, or be at least a hundred meters away. You’ve got about three minutes after setting the charge, but you can’t just sprint away. Not safely, not on Charon.

The accident happened when we were making a really deep hole, the kind you want for a large underground bunker. For this, we had to blow a hole, then climb down to the bottom of the crater and repeat the procedure again and again until the hole was deep enough. Inside the crater we used charges with a five-minute delay, but it hardly seemed enough time-you really had to go it slow, picking your way up the crater’s edge.

Just about  everybody had  blown a double hole; everybody  but me and three others. I guess we were the only ones paying really close attention when Bovanovitch got into trouble. All of us were a good two hundred meters away. With my image converter turned up to about foily power, I watched her disappear over the rim of the crater. After that, I could only listen in on her conversation with Cortez.

23

joe narneman

“I’m on the bottom, Sergeant.” Normal radio procedure was suspended for maneuvers like this; nobody but the trainee and Cortez was allowed to broadcast

“Okay, move to the center and clear out the rubble. Take your time. No rush until you pull the pin.”

“Sure, Sergeant.” We could hear small echoes of rocks clattering, sound conduction through her boots. She didn’t say anything for several minutes.

“Found bottom.” She sounded a little out of breath. “Ice or rock?”

“Oh, it’s rock, Sergeant The greenish stuff.”

“Use a low setting, then. One point two, dispersion four.” “God dam it, Sergeant, that’ll take forever.”

“Yeah, but that stuff’s got hydrated crystals in it-heat it up too fast and you might make it fracture. And we’d Just have to leave you there, girl. Dead and bloody.”

“Okay, one point two dee four.” The inside edge of the crater flickered red with reflected laser light.

“When you get about half a meter deep, squeeze it up to dee two.”

“Roger.” It took her exactly seventeen minutes, three of them at dispersion two. I could imagine how tired her shooting arm was.

“Now rest for a few minutes. When the bottom of the hole stops glowing, arm the charge and drop it in. Then walk out, understand? You’ll have plenty of time.”

“I understand, Sergeant. Walk out.” She sounded nervous. Well, you don’t often have to tiptoe away from a twenty-microton tachyon bomb.  We listened to her reathing for a few minutes.

“Here goes.” Faint slithering sound, the bomb sliding ~Iown. “Slow and easy now. You’ve got five minutes.”

“Y-yeah. Five.” Her footsteps started out slow and regLilar. Then, after she started climbing the side, the sounds were less regular, maybe a little frantic. And with four minutes to go- “Shit” A loud scraping noise, then clatters and bumps.

“What’s wrong, private?” “Oh, shit.” Silence. “Shit!”

“Private, you don’t wanna get shot, you tell me what’s wrong!”

“I. . . shit, I’m stuck. Fucken rockslide. . . shit. . . . DO SOMETHiNG! I can’t move, shit I can’t move I, I-”

“Shut up! How deep?”

“Can’t move my, shit, my fucken legs. HELP ME-”

“Then goddainmit use your arms-push! You can move a ton with each hand.” Three minutes.

She stopped cussing and started to mumble, in Russian, I guess, a low monotone. She was panting, and you could hear rocks tumbling away.

“I’m free.” Two minutes.

“Go as fast as you can.” Cortez’s voice was fiat, emotionless. At ninety seconds she appeared, crawling over the rim. “Run, girl. . . . You better run.” She ran five or six steps and fell, skidded a few meters and got back up, running; fell again, got up again- It looked as though she was going pretty fast, but she had only covered about thirty meters when Cortez said, “All tight, Bovanovitch, get down on your stomach and lie still.” Ten seconds, but she didn’t hear or she wanted to get just a little more distance, and she kept running, careless leaping strides, and at the high point of one leap there was a flash and a rumble, and something big hit her below the neck, and her headless body spun off end over end through space, trailing a red-black spiral of flash-frozen blood that settled gracefully to the ground, a path of crystal powder that nobody disturbed while we gathered rocks to cover the juiceless thing at the end of it.

That night Cortez didn’t lecture us, didn’t even show up for night-chop. We were all very polite to each other and nobody was afraid to talk about it..

I sacked with Rogers-everybody sacked with a good friend-but all she wanted to do was cry, and she cried so long and so hard that she got me doing it, too.

7

“Fire team A-move out!” The twelve of us advanced in a ragged line toward the simulated bunker. It was about a kilometer away, across a carefully prepared obstacle course. We could move pretty fast, since all of the ice had been cleared from the field, but even with ten days’ experience we weren’t ready to do more than an easy jog.

I carried a grenade launcher loaded with tenth-microton practice grenades. Everybody had their laser-fingers set at a point oh eight dee one, not much more than a flashlight. This was a simulated attack-the bunker and its robot defender cost too much to use once and be thrown away.

“Team B, follow. Team leaders, take over.”

We approached a clump of boulders at about the halfway mark, and Potter, my team leader, said, “Stop and cover.” We clustered behind the rocks and waited for Team B.

Barely visible in their blackened suits, the dozen men find women whispered by us. As soon as they were clear, they jogged left, out of our line of sight.

“Fire!” Red circles of light danced a half-klick downrange, where the bunker was just visible. Five hundred meters was the limit for these practice grenades; but I might luck out, so I lined the launcher up on the image of the bunker, held it at a forty-five degree angle and popped off a salvo of three.

Return fire from the bunker started before my grenades even landed. Its automatic lasers were no more powerful than the ones we were using, but a direct hit would deactivate your image converter, leaving you blind. It was setting down a random field of fire, not even coming close to the boulders we were hiding behind.

Three magnesi urn-bright flashes blinked simultaneously about thirty meters Short of the bunker. “Mandella! I thought you were supposed to he good with that thing.”

“Damn it, Potter-it only throws half a klick. Once we get closer, I’ll lay ’em right on top, every time.”

“Sure you will.” I didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t be team leader forever. Besides, she hadn’t been such a bad girl before the power went to her head.

Since the grenadier is the assistant team leader, I was slaved into Potter’s radio and could hear B team talk to her.

“Potter, this is Freeman. Losses?”

“Potter here-no, looks like they were concentrating on you.”

“Yeah, we lost three. Right now we’re in a depression about eighty, a hundred meters down from you. We can give cover whenever you’re ready.”

“Okay, start.” Soft click: “A team, follow me.” She slid out from behind the rock and turned on the faint pink beacon beneath her powerpack. I turned on mine and moved out to run alongside of her, and the rest of the team fanned out in a trailing wedge. Nobody fired while A team laid down a cover for us.

All I could hear was Potter’s breathing and the soft crunch-crunch of my boots. Couldn’t see much of anything, SO I tongued the image converter up to a log two intensification. That made the image kind of blurry but adequately bright. Looked like the bunker had  B team pretty well pinned down; they were getting quite a roasting. All of their return fire was laser. They must have lost their grenadier.

“Potter, this is Mandella. Shouldn’t we take some of the heat off B team?”

“Soon as I can find us good enough cover. Is that all right with you? Private?” She’d been promoted to corporal for the duration of the exercise.

We angled to the right and lay down behind a slab of rock. Most of the others found cover nearby, but a few had to hug the ground.

“Freeman, this is Potter.”

“Potter, this is Smithy. Freeman’s out; Samuels is out. We only have five men left. Give us some cover so we can get-”

“Roger, Smithy.” Click. “Open up, A team. The B’s are really hurtin’.” Joe tialdeman

I peeked out over the edge of the rock. My rangefinder said that the bunker was about three hundred fifty meters away, still pretty far. I aimed a smidgeon high and popped three, then down a couple of degrees, three more. The first ones overshot by about twenty meters; then the second salvo flared up directly in front of the bunker. I tried to hold on that angle and popped fifteen, the rest of the magazine, in the same direction.

I should have ducked down behind the rock to reload, but I wanted to see where the fifteen would land, so I kept my eyes on the bunker while I reached back to unclip another magazine- When the laser hit my image converter, there was a red glare so intense it seemed to go right through my eyes and bounce off the back of my skull. It must have been only a few milliseconds before the converter overloaded and went blind, but the bright green afterimage hurt my eyes for several minutes.

Since I was officially “dead,” my radio automatically cut off, and I had to remain where I was until the mock battle was over. With no sensory input besides the feel of my own skin (and it ached where the image converter had shone on it) and the ringing in my ears, it seemed like an awfully long time. Finally, a helmet clanked against mine.

“You okay, Mandella?” Potter’s voice.

“Sorry, I died of boredom twenty minutes ago.”

“Stand up and take my hand.” I did so and we shuffled back to the billet. It must have taken over an hour. She didn’t say anything more, all the way back-it’s a pretty awkward way to communicate-but after we’d cycled through the airlock and warmed up, she helped me undo my suit. I got ready for a mild tongue-lashing, but when the suit popped open, before I could even get my eyes adjusted to the light, she grabbed me around the neck and planted a wet kiss on my mouth.

“Nice shooting, Mandella.” “Huh?”

“Didn’t you see? Of course not.. . . The last salvo before you got hit-four direct hits. The bunker decided it was

knocked out, and all we bad todo was walk the rest of the way.”

“Great.” I scratched my face under the eyes, and some dry skin flaked off. She giggled.

“You should see yourself. You look like-”

“All personnel, report to the assembly area.” That was the captain’s voice. Bad news, usually.

She handed me a tunic and sandals. “Let’s go.” The

assembly area-chop hail was just down the corridor. There was a row of roll-call buttons at the door, I pressed the one beside my name. Four of the names were covered with black tape. That was good, only four. We hadn’t lost anybody during today’s maneuvers.

The captain was sitting on the raised dais, which at least meant we didn’t have to go through the tench-hut bulishit. The place filled up in less than a minute; a soft chime indicated the roll was complete.

Captain Stott didn’t stand up. “You did fairly well today. Nobody killed, and I expected some to be. In that respect you exceeded my expectations but in every other respect you did a poor job.

“I am glad you’re taking good care of yourselves, because each of you represents an investment of over a million dollars and one-fourth of a human life.

“But in this simulated battle against a very stupid robot enemy, thirty-seven of you managed to walk into laser fire and be killed in a simulated way, and since dead people require no food you will require no food, for the next three Jays. Each person who was a casualty in this baffle will be allowed only two liters of water and a vitamin ration each Jay.”

We knew enough not to groan or anything, but there were some pretty disgusted looks, especially  on the  faces  that had  singed eyebrows  and  a pink  rectangle of sunburn framing their eyes.

“Mandella.” “Sir?”

“You are far and away the worst-burned casualty. Was your image converter set on normal?”

Oh, shit. “No, sir. Log two.”

~su

Joe Ilaftieman

“I see. Who was your team leader for the exercises?” “Acting Corporal Potter, sir.”

“Private Potter, did you order him to use image intensification?” “Sir, I. . . I don’t remember.”

“You don’t Well, as a memory exercise you may join the dead people. Is that satisfactory?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Dead people get one last meal tonight and go on no rations starting tomorrow. Are there any questions?” He must have been kidding. “All right Dismissed.”

I selected the meal that looked as if it had the most calories and took my tray over to sit by Potter.

“That was a quixotic damn thing to do. But thanks.”

“Nothing. I’ve been wanting to lose a few pounds anyway.” I couldn’t see where she was carrying any extra.

“I know a good exercise,” I said. She smiled without looking up from her tray. “Have anybody for tonight?”

“Kind of thought I’d ask Jeff.. . .”

“Better hurry, then. He’s lusting after Macjima.” Well, that was mostly true. Everybody did.

“I don’t know. Maybe we ought to save our strength. That third day . .

“Come on.” I scratched the back of her hand lightly with a fingernail. “We haven’t sacked since Missouri. Maybe I’ve learned something new.”

“Maybe you have.” She tilted her head up at me in a sly way. “Okay.”

Actually, she was the one with the new trick. The French corkscrew, she called it. She wouldn’t tell me who taught it to her though. I’d like to shake his hand. Once I got my strength back.

8

The two weeks’ training around Miami Base eventually cost us eleven lives. Twelve, if you count Dahiquist. I guess having to spend the rest of your life on Charon with a hand and both legs missing is close enough to dying.

Foster was crushed in a landslide and Freeland had a suit malfunction that froze him solid before we could carry him inside. Most of the other deaders were people I didn’t know all that well. But they all hurt. And they seemed to make us more scared rather than more cautious.

Now darkside. A flyer brought us over in groups of twenty and set us down beside a pile of building materials thoughtfully immersed in a pool of helium H.

We used grapples to haul the stuff out of the pool. It’s not safe to go wading, since the stuff crawls all over you and it’s hard to tell what’s underneath; you could walk out onto a slab of hydrogen and be out of luck.

I’d suggested that we try to boil away the pool with our lasers, but ten minutes of concentrated fire  didn’t  drop  the  helium  level appreciably. It didn’t  boil, either;

helium II is a “superfluid,” so what evaporation there was had to take place evenly, all over the surface. No hot spots, so no bubbling.

We weren’t supposed to use lights, to “avoid detection.” There was plenty of starlight with your image converter cranked up to log three or four, but each stage of amplification meant some loss of detail. By log four the landscape looked like a crude monochrome painting, and you couldn’t read the names on people’s helmets unless they were right in front of you.

The landscape wasn’t all that interesting, anyhow. There were half a dozen medium-sized meteor craters (all with exactly the same level of helium II in them) and the suggestion of some puny mountains just over the horizon. The

31

32

Joe Haldeman

uneven ground was the consistency of frozen spiderwebs; every time you put your foot down, you’d sink half an inch with a squeaking crunch. It could get on your nerves.

It took most of a day to pull all the stuff out of the pool. We took shifts napping, which you could do either standing ap, sitting or lying on your stomach. I didn’t do well in ~ny of those positions, so I was anxious to get the bunker built and pressurized.

We couldn’t build the thing underground—it’d just fill up with helium 11-so the first thing to do was to build an tnsulating platform, a permaplast-vacuum sandwich three layers thick.

I was an acting corporal, with a crew of ten people. We were carrying the permaplast layers to the building site- two people can carry one easily-when one of “my” men slipped and fell on his back.

“Damn it, Singer, watch your step.” We’d had a couple of deaders that way. “Sony, Corporal. I’m bushed. Just got my feet tangled up.,’

“Yeah, just watch it.” He got back up all right, and he and his partner placed the sheet and went back to get another.

I kept my eye on Singer. In a few minutes he was practically staggering, not easy to do in that suit of cybernetic armor.

“Singer! After you set the plank, I want to see you.”

“OK.” He labored through the task and mooched over. “Let me check your readout.” I opened the door on his chest to expose the medical monitor. His temperature was two degrees high; blood pressure and heart rate both elevated. Not up to the red line, though.

“You sick or something?”

“Hell, Mandella, I feel OK, just tired. Since I fell I been a little dizzy.”

I chinned the medic’s combination. “Doc, this is Man-della. You wanna come over here for a minute?”

“Sure, where are you?” I waved and he walked over from poolside. “What’s the problem?” I showed him Singer’s readout.

irir. r’.iiir.vr.n witn

He knew what all the other little dials and things meant, so it took him a while. “As far as I can tell, Mandella… he’s just hot.”

“Hell, I coulda told you that,” said Singer.

“Maybe you better have the armorer take a look at his suit.” We had two people who’d taken a crash course in suit maintenance; they were our “armorers.”

I chinned Sanchez and asked him to come over with his tool kit.

“Be a couple of minutes, Corporal. Carryin’ a plank.”

“Well, put it down and get on over here.” I was getting an uneasy feeling. Waiting for him, the medic and I looked over Singer’s suit.

“Uh-oh,” Doc Jones said. “Look at this.” I went around to the back and looked where he was pointing. Two of the fins on the heat exchanger were bent out of shape.

“What’s wrong?” Singer asked.

“You fell on your heat exchanger, right?”

“Sure, Corporal-that’s it. It must not be working right.”

“I don’t think it’s working at all,” said Doc. Sanchez came over with his diagnostic kit and we told him what had happened. He looked at the heat exchanger, then plugged a couple of jacks into it and got a digital readout from a little monitor in his kit. I didn’t know what it was measuring, but it came out zero to eight decimal places.

Heard a soft click, Sanchez chinning my private frequency. “Corporal, this guy’s a deader.”

“What? Can’t you fix the goddamn thing?”

“Maybe.. . maybe I could, if I could take it apart. But there’s no way-”

“Hey! Sanchez?” Singer was talking on the general freak. “Find out what’s wrong?” He was panting.

Click. “Keep your pants on, man, we’re working on it.” Click. “He won’t last long enough for us to get the bunker pressurized. And I can’t work on the heat exchanger from outside of the suit.”

“You’ve got a spare suit, haven’t you?” 34

Joe Haldeman

“Two of ’em, the fit-anybody kind. But there’s no place …say…”

“Right. Go get one of the suits warmed up.” I chinned the general freak. “Listen, Singer, we’ve gona get you out of that thing. Sanchez has a spare suit, but to make the switch, we’re gonna have to build a house around you. Understand?”

“Huh-uh.”

“Look, we’ll make a box with you inside, and hook it up to the life-support unit. That way you can breathe while you make the switch.”

“Soun’s pretty compis. . . compil. . . cated t’me.” “Look, just come along-”

“I’ll be all right, man, jus’ lemme res’. . .

I grabbed his arm and led him to the building site. He was really weaving. Doc took his other arm, and between us, we kept him from falling over.

“Corporal Ho, this is Corporal Mandella.” Ho was in charge of the life-support unit.

“Go away, Mandella, I’m, busy.”

“You’re going to be busier.” I outlined the problem to her. While her  group hurried to adapt the LSU-for this purpose, it need only be an air hose and heater-I got my crew to bring around six slabs of permaplast, so we could build a big box around Singer and the extra suit. It would look like a huge coffin, a meter square and six meters long.

We set the suit down on the slab that would be the floor of the coffin. “OK, Singer, let’s go.”

No answer. “Singer, let’s go.”

No answer.

“Singer!” He was just standing there. Doc Jones checked his readout. “He’s out, man, unconscious.”

My mind raced. There might just be room for another person in the box. “Give me a hand here.” I took Singer’s shoulders and Doc took his feet, and we carefully laid him out at the feet of the empty suit.

Then I lay down myself, above the suit. “OK, close’er up.,,

THE FOREVER WAR 35

“Look, Mandella, if anybody goes in there, it oughta be me.”

“Fuck you, Doc. My job. My man.” That sounded all wrong. William Mandella, boy hero.

They stood a slab up on edge-it had two openings for the LSU input and exhaust- and proceeded to weld it to the bottom plank with a narrow laser beam. On Earth, we’d just use glue, but here the only fluid was helium, which has lots of interesting properties, but is definitely not sticky.

After about ten minutes we were completely walled up. I could feel the LSU humming. I switched on my suit light-the first time since we landed on darkside-and the glare made purple blotches dance in front of my eyes.

“Mandella, this is Ho. Stay  in your suit at least two or three minutes. We’re putting hot air in, but it’s coming back just this side of liquid.” I watched the purple fade for a while.

“OK, it’s still cold, but you can make it.” I popped my suit. It wouldn’t open all the way, but I didn’t have too much trouble getting out. The suit was still cold enough to take some skin off my fingers and butt as I wiggled out.

I had to crawl feet-first down the coffin to get to Singer. It got darker fast, moving away from my light. When I popped his suit a rush of hot stink hit me in the face. In the dim light his skin was dark red and splotchy. His breathing was very shallow and I could see his heart palpitating.

First I unhooked the relief tubes-an unpleasant business-then the biosensors; and then I had the problem of getting his arms out of their sleeves.

It’s pretty easy to do for yourself. You twist this way and turn that way and the arm pops out. Doing it from the outside is a different matter: I had to twist his arm and then reach under and move the suit’s arm to match-it takes muscle to move a suit around from the outside.

Once I had one arm out it was pretty easy; I just crawled forward, putting my feet on the suit’s shoulders, and pulled on his free ann. He slid out of the suit like an oyster slipping out of its shell.

I popped the spare suit and after a lot of pulling and 36

Joe Haldeman

pushing, managed to get his legs in. Hooked up the biosensors and the front relief tube. He’d have to do the other one himself; it’s too complicated. For the nth time I was glad not to have been born female; they have to have two of those damned plumber’s friends, instead of just one and a simple hose.

I left his arms out of the sleeves. The suit would be useless for any kind of work, anyhow; waldos have to be tailored to the individual.

His eyelids fluttered. “Man. . . della. Where. . . the fuck..

I explained, slowly, and he seemed to get most of it. “Now I’m gonna close you up and go get into my suit. I’ll have the crew cut the epd off this thing and I’ll haul you out. Got it?”

He nodded. Strange to see that-when you nod or shrug inside a suit, it doesn’t communicate anything.

I crawled into my suit, hooked up the attachments and chinned the general freak. “Doc, I think he’s gonna be OK. Get us out of here now.”

“Will do.” Ho’s voice. The LSU hum was replaced by a chatter, then a throb. Evacuating the box to prevent an explosion.

One corner of the seam grew red, then white, and a bright crimson beam lanced through, not a foot away from my head. I scrunched back as far as I could. The beam slid up the seam and around three corners, back to where it started.

The end of the box fell away slowly, trailing filaments of melted ‘plast.

“Walt for the stuff to harden, Mandella.” “Sanchez, I’m not that stupid.”

“Here you go.” Somebody tossed a line to me. That would be smarter than dragging him out by myself. I threaded a long bight under his arms and tied it behind his neck. Then I scrambled out to help them pull, which was silly-they had a dozen people already lined up to haul.

Singer got out all right and was actually sitting up while Doc Jones checked his readout. People were asking me

THE FOREVER WAR         37

 

about it and congratulating me, when suddenly Ho said “Look!” and pointed toward the horizon.

It was a black ship, coming in fast. I just had time to think it wasn’t fair, they weren’t supposed to attack until the last few days, and then the ship was right on top of us.

9

We all flopped to the ground instinctively, but the ship didn’t attack. It blasted braking rockets and dropped to land on skids. Then it skied around to come to a iest beside the building site.

Everybody had it figured out and was standing around sheepishly when the two suited figures stepped out of the ship.

A familiar voice crackled over the general freak. “Every one of you saw us coming in and not one of you responded with laser fire. It wouldn’t have done any good but it would have indicated a certain amount of fighting spirit. You have a week or less before the real thing and since the sergeant and I will be here I will insist that you show a little more will to live. Acting Sergeant Potter.”

“Here, sir.”

“Get me a detail of twelve people to unload cargo. We brought a hundred small robot drones for target practice so that you might have at least a fighting chance when a live target comes over.

“Move now. We only have thiity minutes before the ship returns to Miami.” I checked, and it was actually more like forty minutes.

Having the captain and sergeant there didn’t really make much difference. We were still on our own; they were just observing.

Once we got the floor down, it only took one day to complete the bunker. It was a gray oblong, featureless except for the airlock blister and four windows. On top was a

swivel-mounted gigawatt laser. The operator-you couldn’t call him a “gunner”-sat in a chair holding deadman switches in both hands. The laser wouldn’t fire as long as he was holding one of those switches. If he let go, it would automatically aim for any moving aerial object and

38

fire at will. Primary detection and aiming was by means of a kilometer-high antenna mounted beside the bunker.

It was the only arrangement that could really be expected to work, with the horizon so close and human reflexes  so slow. You couldn’t have the thing fully automatic, because in theory, friendly ships might also approach.

The aiming computer could choose among up to twelve targets appearing simultaneously (firing at the largest ones first). And it would get all twelve in the space of half a

second.

The installation was partly protected from enemy fire by an efficient ablative layer that covered everything except the human operator. But then, they were dead-man switches. One man above guarding eighty inside. The army’s good at that kind of arithmetic.

Once the bunker was finished, half of us stayed inside at all times-feeling very much like targets-taking turns operating the laser, while the other half went on maneuvers.

About four klicks from the base was a large “lake” of frozen hydrogen; one of our most important maneuvers was to learn how to get around on the treacherous stuff.

It wasn’t too difficult You couldn’t stand up on it, so you had to belly down and sled.

If you had somebody to push you from the edge, getting started was no problem. Otherwise, you had to scrabble with your hands and feet, pushing down as hard as was practical, until you started moving, in a series of little jumps. Once started, you’d keep going until you ran out of ice. You could steer a little bit by digging in, hand and foot, on the appropriate side, but you couldn’t slow to a stop that way. So it was a good idea not to go too fast and wind up positioned in such a way that your helmet didn’t absorb the shock of stopping.

We went through all the things we’d done on the Miami side: weapons practice, demolition, attack patterns. We also launched drones at irregular intervals, toward the bunker. Thus, ten or fifteen times a day, the operators got to demonstrate their skill in letting go of the handles as soon as the proximity light went on.

I had four hours of that, like everybody else. I was ner Joe tialneman

vous until the first “attack,” when I saw how little there was to it. The light went on, I let go, the gun aimed, and when the drone peeped over the horizon-zzt! Nice touch of color, the molten metal spraying through space. Otherwise not too exciting.

So none of us were worried about the upcoming “graduation exercise,” thinking it would be just more of the same.

Miami Base attacked on the thirteenth day with two Simultaneous missiles streaking over opposite sides of the horizon at some forty kilometers per second. The laser vaporized the first one with no trouble, but the second got within eight klicks of the bunker before it was hit.

We were coming back from maneuvers, about a klick away from the bunker. I wouldn’t have seen it happen if I hadn’t been looking directly at the bunker the moment of the attack.

The second missile sent a shower of molten debris straight toward the bunker. Eleven pieces hit, and, as we later reconstructed it, this is what happened:

The first casualty was Macjima. so well-loved Macjima, inside the bunker, who was hit in the back and the head and died instantly. With the drop in pressure, the LSU went into high gear. Friedman was standing in front of the main airco outlet and was blown into the opposite wall hard enough to knock him unconscious; he died of decompression before the others could get him to his suit.

Everybody else managed to stagger through the gale and get into their suits, but Garcia’s suit had been holed and didn’t do him any good.

By the time we got there, they had turned off the LSU and were welding up the holes in the wall. One man was trying to scrape up the unrecognizable mess that had been Macjima. I could hear him sobbing  and retching. They had already taken Garcia and Friedman outside for burial. The captain took over the repair detail from Potter. Sergeant Cortez led the sobbing man over to a corner and came back to work on cleaning up Macjima’s  remains, alone. He didn’t order anybody to help  and nobody volunteered.

10

As a graduation exercise, we were unceremoniously stuffed

into a ship-Earth’s Hope, the same one we rode to Charon-and bundled off to Stargate at a little more than one gee.

The trip seemed endless, about six months subjective time, and boring, but not as hard on the carcass as going to Charon had been. Captain Stott made us review our training orally, day by day, and we did exercises every day until we were worn to a collective frazzle.

Stargate 1 was like Charon’s darkside, only more so. The base on Stargate 1 was smaller than Miami Base-only a little bigger than the one we constructed on darkside-and we were due to lay over a week to help expand the facilities. The crew there was very glad to see us, especially the two females, who looked a little worn around the edges.

We all crowded into the small dining hail, where Sub-major Williamson, the man in charge of Stargate 1, gave us some disconcerting news:

“Everybody get comfortable. Get off the tables, though, there’s plenty of floor.

“I have some idea of what you just went through, training on Charon. I won’t say it’s all been wasted. But where you’re headed, things will be quite different. Warmer.”

He paused to let that soak in.

“Aleph Aurigae, the first collapsar ever detected, revolves around the normal star Epsilon Aurigae in a twenty-seven year orbit. The enemy has a base of operations, not on a regular portal planet of Aleph, but on a planet in orbit around Epsilon. We don’t know much about the planet, just that it goes around Epsilon once every 745 days, is about three-fourths the size of Earth, and has an albedo of 0.8, meaning it’s probably covered with clouds. We can’t say precisely how hot it will be, but judging from its distance

41

42

from Epsilon, it’s probably rather hotter than Earth. Of course, we don’t know whether you’ll be working. . . fighting on lightside or darkside, equator or poles. It’s highly unlikely that the atmosphere will be breathable-at any rate, you’ll stay inside your suits.

“Now you know exactly as much about where you’re going as I do. Questions?” “Sir,” Stein drawled, “now we know where we’re goin’

anybody know what we’re goin’ to do when we get there?”

Williamson shrugged. “That’s up to your captain-and your sergeant, and the captain of Earth’s Hope, and Hope’s logistic computer~ We just don’t have enough data yet to project a course of action for you. It may be a long and bloody battle; it may be just a case of walking in to pick up the pieces. Conceivably, the Taurans might want to make a peace offer,’ ‘-Cortez snorted-“in which case you would simply be part of our muscle, our bargaining power.” He looked at Cortez mildly. “No one can say for sure.”

The orgy that night was amusing, but it was like trying to sleep in the middle of a raucous beach party. The only area big enough to sleep all of us was the dining hail; they draped a few bedsheets here and there for privacy, then unleashed Stargate’s eighteen sex-starved men on our women, compliant and promiscuous by military custom (and law), but desiring nothing so much as sleep on solid ground.

The eighteen men acted as if they were compelled to try as many permutations as possible, and their performance was impressive (in a strictly quantitative sense, that is). Those of us who were keeping count led a cheering section for some of the more gifted members. I think that’s the right word.

The next morning-and every other morning we were on Stargate 1-we staggered out of bed and into our suits, to go outside and work on the “new wing.” Eventually, Stargate would be tactical and logistic headquarters for the war, with thousands of permanent personnel, guarded by half-a-dozen heavy cruisers in Hope’s class. When we

started, it was two shacks and twenty people; when we left, it was four shacks and twenty people. The work was hardly work at all, compared to darkside, since we had plenty of light and got sixteen hours inside for every eight hours’

work. And no drone attack for a final exam.

When we shuttled back up to the Hope, nobody was too happy about leaving (though some of the more popular females declared it’d be good to get some rest). Stargate was the last easy, safe assignment we’d have before taking up arms against the Taurans. And as Williamson had pointed out the first day, there was no way of predicting what that would be like.

Most of us didn’t feel too enthusiastic about making a collapsar jump, either. We’d been assured that we wouldn’t even feel it happen, just free fall all the way.

I wasn’t convinced. As a physics student, I’d had the usual courses in general relativity and theories of gravitation. We only had a little direct data at that time- Stargate was discovered when I was in grade school-but the mathematical model seemed clear enough.

The collapsar Stargate was a perfect sphere about three kilometers in radius. It was suspended forever in a state of gravitational collapse that should have meant its surface was dropping toward its center at nearly the speed of light.

Relativity propped it up, at least gave it the illusion of being there. . . the way all reality becomes illusory and observer-oriented when you study general relativity. Or Buddhism. Or get drafted.
At any rate, there would be a theoretical point in space-time when one end of our ship was just above the surface of the collapsar, and the other end was a kilometer away (in our frame of reference). In any sane universe, this would set up tidal stresses and tear the ship apart, and we would be just another million kilograms of degenerate matter on the theoretical surface, rushing headlong to nowhere for the rest of eternity or dropping to the center in the next trillionth of a second. You pays your money and you takes your frame of reference.

But they were right. We blasted away from Stargate 1,

44       Joe tialdeman

 

made a few course corrections and then just dropped, for about an hour.

Then a bell rang and we sank into our cushions under a steady two gravities of deceleration. We were in enemy territory.

11

We’d been decelerating at two gravities for almost nine days when the battle began. Lying on our couches being miserable, all we felt were two soft bumps, missiles being released. Some eight hours later, the squawkbox crackled:

“Attention, all crew. This is the captain.” Quinsana, the pilot, was only a lieutenant, but was allowed to call himself captain aboard the vessel, where he outranked all of us, even Captain Stott. “You grunts in the cargo hold can listen, too.

“We just engaged the enemy with two fifty-gigaton tachyon missiles and have destroyed both the enemy vessel and another object which it had launched approximately three microseconds before.

“The enemy has been trying to overtake us for the past 179 hours, ship time. At the time of the engagement, the enemy was moving at a little over half the speed of light, relative to Aleph, and was only about thirty AU’s from Earth’s Hope. It was moving at .47c relative to us, and thus we would have been coincident in space- time”- rammed!-‘ ‘in a little more than nine hours. The missiles were launched at 0719 ship’s time, and destroyed the enemy at 1540, both tachyon bombs detonating within a thousand klicks of the enemy objects.”

The two missiles were a type whose propulsion system was itself only a barely- controlled tachyon bomb. They accelerated at a constant rate of 100 gees, and were traveling at a relativistic speed by the time the nearby mass of the enemy ship detonated them.

“We expect no further interference from enemy vessels. Our velocity with respect to Aleph will be zero in another five hours; we will then begin the journey back. The return will take twenty-seven days.” General moans and dejected cussing. Everybody knew all that already, of course; but we didn’t care to be reminded of it.

 

So after another month of logy calisthenics and drill, at a constant two gravities, we got our first look at the planet we were going to attack. Invaders from outer space, yes sir.

It was a blinding white crescent waiting for us two AU’s out from Epsilon. The captain had pinned down the location of the enemy base from fifty AU’s out, and we had jockeyed in on a wide arc, keeping the bulk of the planet between them and us. That didn’t mean we were sneaking up on them-quite the contrary; they launched

three abortive attacks-but it put us in a stronger defensive position. Until we had to go to the surface, that is. Then  only  the ship  and its  Star Fleet crew would be reasonably safe.

Since the planet rotated rather slowly-once every ten and one-half days-a “stationary” orbit for the ship had to be 150,000 klicks out. This made the people in the ship feel quite secure, with 6,000 miles of rock and 90,000 miles of space between them and the enemy. But it meant a whole second’s time lag in communication between us on the ground and the ship’s battle computer. A person could get awful dead while that neutrino pulse crawled up and back.

Our vague orders were to attack the base and gain control, while damaging a minimum of enemy equipment. We were to take at least one enemy alive. We were under no ~ircumstances to allow ourselves to be taken alive, however. And the decision wasn’t up to us; one special pulse from the battle computer, and that speck of plutonium in your power plant would fiss with all of .01% efficiency, md you’d be nothing but a rapidly expanding, very hot plasma.

They strapped us into six scoutships-one platoon of twelve people in each-and we blasted away from Earth’s Fiope at eight gees. Each scoutship was supposed to follow its own carefully random path to our rendezvous point, 108 klicks from the base. Fourteen drone ships were launched it the same time, to confound the enemy’s anti-spacecraft ;ystem.

The landing went off almost perfectly. One ship suffered THE FOREVER WAR

47

minor damage, a near miss boiling away some of the ablative material on one side of the hull, but it’d still be able to make it and return, keeping its speed down while in the atmosphere.

We zigged and zagged and wound up first ship at the rendezvous point. There was only one trouble. It was under four kilometers of water.

I could almost hear that machine, 90,000 miles away, grinding its mental gears, adding this new bit of data. We proceeded just as if we were landing on solid ground: braking rockets, falling, skids out, hit the water, skip, hit the water, skip, hit the water, sink.

It would have made sense to go ahead and land on the bottom-we were streamlined, after all, and water just another fluid-but the hull wasn’t strong enough to hold up a four kilometer column of water. Sergeant Cortez was in the scoutship with us.

“Sarge, tell that computer to do something! We’re gonna get-”

“Oh, shut up, Mandella. Trust in th’ lord.” “Lord” was definitely lower-case when Cortez said it.

There was a loud bubbly sigh, then another, and a slight increase in pressure on my back that meant the ship was rising. “Flotation bags?” Cortez didn’t deign to answer, or didn’t know.

That was it. We rose to within ten or fifteen meters of the surface and stopped, suspended there. Through the port I could see the surface above, shimmering like a mirror of hammered silver. I wondered what it would be like to be a fish and have a definite roof over your world.

I watched another ship splash in. It made a great cloud of bubbles and turbulence, then fell-slightly tail-first-for a short distance before large bags popped out under each delta wing. Then it bobbed up to about our level and stayed.

“This is Captain Stott. Now listen carefully. There is a beach some twenty-eight klicks from your present position, in the direction of the enemy. You will be proceeding to this beach by scoutship and from there will mount your assault on the Tauran position.” That was some improvement; we’d only have to walk eighty klicks.

48

Joe Haldeman

We deflated the bags, blasted to the surface and flew in a slow, spread-out formation to the beach. It took several minutes. As the ship scraped to a halt, I could hear pumps humming, making the cabin pressure equal to the air pressure outside. Before it had quite stopped moving, the escape slot beside my couch slid open. I rolled out onto the wing of the craft and jumped to the ground. Ten seconds to find cover-I sprinted across loose gravel to the “treeline,” a twisty bramble of tall sparse bluish-green shrubs. I dove into the briar patch and turned to watch the ships leave. The drones that were left rose slowly to about a hundred meters, then took off in all directions with a bone-jarring roar. The real scoutships slid slowly back into the water. Maybe that was a good idea.

It wasn’t a terribly attractive world but certainly would be easier to get around in than the cryogenic nightmare we were trained for. The sky was a uniform dull silver brightness that merged with the mist over the ocean so completely it was impossible to tell where water ended and air began. Small wavelets licked at the black gravel shore, much too slow and graceful in the three-quarters Earth-normal gravity. Even from fifty meters away, the rattle of billions of pebbles rolling with the tide was loud in my ears.

The air temperature was 79 degrees Centigrade, not quite hot enough for the sea to boil, even though the air pressure was low compared to Earth’s. Wisps of steam drifted quickly upward from the line where water met land. I wondered how a lone man would survive exposed here without a suit. Would the heat or the low oxygen (partial pressure one-eighth Earth normal) kill him first? Or was there some deadly microorganism that would beat them both…?

“This is Cortez. Everybody come over and assemble on me.” He was standing on the beach a little to the left of me, waving his hand in a circle over his head. I walked toward him through the shrubs. They were brittle, unsubstantial, seemed paradoxically dried-out in the steamy air.

They wouldn’t offer much in the way of cover.

“We’ll be advancing on a heading .05 radians east of north. I want Platoon One to take point. Two and Three follow about twenty meters behind, to the left and right.

mr.. rultLvLiI wi~n LW

Seven, command platoon, is in the middle, twenty meters behind Two and Three. Five and Six, bring up the rear, in a semicircular closed flank. Everybody straight?” Sure, we could do that “arrowhead” maneuver in our sleep. “OK, let’s move out.”

I was in Platoon Seven, the “command group.” Captain Stott put me there not because I was expected to give any commands, but because of my training in physics.

The command group was supposedly the safest pl~e, buffered by six platoons: people were assigned to it because there was some tactical reason for them to survive at least a little longer than the rest. Cortez was there to give orders.

Chavez was there to correct suit malfunctions. The senior medic, Doe Wilson (the only medic who actually had an M.D.), was there, and so was Theodopolis, the radio engineer, our link with the captain, who had elected to stay in orbit.

The rest of us were assigned to the command group by dint of special training or aptitude that wouldn’t normally be considered of a “tactical” nature. Facing a totally unknown enemy, there was no way of telling what might prove important. Thus I was there because I was the closest the company had to a physicist. Rogers was biology. Tate was chemistry. Ho could crank out a perfect score on the Rhine extrasensory perception test, every time. Bohrs was a polyglot, able to speak twenty- one languages fluently, idiomatically. Petrov’s talent was that he had tested out to have not one molecule of xenophobia in his psyche. Keating was a skilled acrobat. Debby Hoffister-“Lucky” Ho!lister-showed a remarkable aptitude for making money, and also had a consistently high Rhine potential.

12

 

When we first set out, we were using the “jungle” camouflage combination on our suits. But what passed for jungle in these anemic tropics was too sparse; we looked like

a band of conspicuous harlequins trooping through the

woods. Cortez had us switch to black, but that was just as bad, as the light of Epsilon came evenly from all parts of

the sky, and there were no shadows except ours. We finally settled on the dun- colored desert camouflage.

The nature of the countryside changed slowly as we walked north, away from the sea. The thorned stalks-I guess you could call them trees-came in fewer numbers but were bigger around and less brittle; at the base of each was a tangled mass of vine with the same bluegreen color, which spread out in a flattened cone some ten meters in diameter. There was a delicate green flower the size of a man’s head near the top of each tree.

Grass began to grow some five klicks from the sea. It seemed to respect the trees’ “property rights,” leaving a strip of bare earth around each cone of vine. At the edge of such a clearing, it would grow as timid bluegreen stubble, then, moving away from the tree, would get thicker and taller until it reached shoulderhigh in some places, where the separation between two trees was unusually large. The grass was a lighter, greener shade than the trees and vines. We changed the color of our suits to the bright green we had used for maximum visibility on Charon.

Keeping to the thickest part of the grass, we were fairly inconspicuous.

We covered over twenty klicks each day, buoyant after months under two gees. Until the second day, the only form of animal life we saw was a kind of black worm, fingersized, with hundreds of cilium legs like the bristles of a brush. Rogers said that there obviously had to be some

50

THE FOREVER WAR 51

larger creature around, or there would be no reason for the trees to have thorns. So we were doubly  on guard, expecting trouble both from the Taurans  and the unidentified “large creature.”

Potter’s second platoon was on point; the general freak was reserved for her, since her platoon would likely be the first to spot any trouble.

“Sarge, this is Potter,” we all heard. “Movement ahead.” “Get down, then!”

“We are. Don’t think they see us.”

“First platoon, go up to the right of point. Keep down. Fourth, get up to the left. Tell me when you get in position. Sixth platoon, stay back and guard the rear. Fifth and third, close with the command group.”

Two dozen people whispered out of the grass to join us. Cortez must have heard from the fourth platoon.

“Good. How about you, first?. . . OK, fine. How many are there?” “Eight we can see.” Potter’s voice.

“Good. When I give the word, open fire. Shoot to kill.” “Sarge,.. . they’re just animals.”

“Potter-if you’ve known all this time what a Tauran looks like, you should’ve told us. Shoot to kill.”

“But we need . . .”

“We need a prisoner, but we don’t need to escort him forty klicks to his home base and keep an eye on him while we fight. Clear?”

“Yes. Sergeant.”

“OK. Seventh, all you brains and weirds, we’re going up and watch. Fifth and third, come along to guard.”

We crawled through the meter-high grass to where the second platoon had stretched out in a firing line.

“I don’t see anything,” Cortez said. “Ahead and just to the left. Dark green.”

They were only a shade darker than the grass. But after you saw the first one, you could see them all, moving slowly around some thirty meters ahead.

“Fire!” Cortez tired tirst; then twelve streaks of crimson leaped out and the grass wilted black, disappeared, and the

52

Joe Haldeman

creatures convulsed and died trying to scatter.

“Hold fire, hold it!” Cortez stood up. “We want to have something left-second platoon, follow me.” He strode out toward the smoldering corpses, laser-finger pointed out front, obscene divining rod pulling him toward the carnage

I felt my gorge rising and knew that all the lurid training tapes, all the horrible deaths in training accidents, hadn’t prepared me for this sudden reality. . . that I had a magic wand that I could point at a life and make it a smoking piece of half-raw meat; I wasn’t a soldier nor ever wanted to be one nor ever would want- “OK, seventh, come on up.” While we were walking

toward them, one of the creatures moved, a tiny shudder, and Cortez flicked the beam of his laser over it with an almost negligent gesture. It made a hand-deep gash across the creature’s middle. It died, like the others, without emitting a sound.

They were not quite as tall as humans, but wider in girth. They were covered with dark green, almost black, fur- white curls where the laser had singed. They appeared to have three legs and an arm. The only ornament to their shaggy heads was a mouth, wet black orifice filled with flat black teeth. They were thoroughly repulsive, but their worst feature was not a difference from human beings, but a similarity. . . . Whenever the laser had opened a body cavity, milk-white glistening veined globes and coils of organs spilled out, and their blood was dark clotting red.

“Rogers, take a look. Taurans or not?”

Rogers knelt by one of the disemboweled creatures and opened a flat plastic box, filled with glittering dissecting tools. She selected a scalpel. “One way we might be

able to find out.” Doc Wilson watched over her shoulder as she methodically slit the membrane covering several organs.

“Here.” She held up a blackish fibrous mass between two fingers, a parody of daintiness through all that armor.

“So?”

“It’s grass, Sergeant. If the Taurans eat the grass and breathe the air, they certainly found a planet remarkably like their home.” She tossed it away. “They’re animals, Sergeant, just fucken animals.”

II1L I’URLVLD. WJiR

“I don’t know,” Doc Wilson said. “Just because they walk around on all fours, threes maybe, and eat grass. .

“Well, let’s check out the brain.” She found one that had been hit in the head and scraped the superficial black char from the wound. “Look at that.”

It was almost solid bone. She tugged and ruffled the hair all over the head of another one. “What the hell does it use for sensory organs? No eyes, or ears, or. . .” She stood up.

“Nothing in that fucken head but a mouth and ten centimeters of skull. To protect nothing, not a fucken thing.”

“If I could shrug, I’d shrug,” the doctor said. “It doesn’t prove anything-a brain doesn’t have to look like a mushy walnut and it doesn’t have to be in the head. Maybe that skull isn’t bone, maybe that’s the brain, some crystal lattice. .

“Yeah, but the fucken stomach’s in the right place, and if those aren’t intestines I’ll eat-”

“Look,” Cortez said, “this is real interesting, but all we need to know is whether that thing’s dangerous, then we’ve gotta move on; we don’t have all-”

“They aren’t dangerous,” Rogers began. “They don’t-”

“Medic! DOC!” Somebody back at the firing line was waving his arms. Dcc sprinted back to him, the rest of us following.

“What’s wrong?” He had reached back and unclipped his medical kit on the run. “It’s Ho. She’s out.”

Doc swung open the door on Ho’s biomedical monitor. He didn’t have to look far. “She’s dead.”

“Dead?” Cortez said. “What the hell-”

“Just a minute.” Doc plugged a jack into the monitor and fiddled with some dials on his kit. “Everybody’s biomed readout is stored for twelve hours. I’m running it backwards, should be able to-there!”

“What?”

“Four and a half minutes ago-must have been when you opened fire-Jesus!” “Well?”

“Massive cerebral hemorrhage. No. . .” He watched the ’54

Joe Haldeman

dials. “No. . . warning, no indication of anything out of the

ordinary; blood pressure up, pulse up, but normal under the circumstances. . . nothing to. . . indicate-” He reached down and popped her suit. Her fine oriental features were distorted in a horrible grimace, both gums showing. Sticky fluid ran from under her collapsed eyelids, and a trickle of blood still dripped from each ear. Doc Wilson closed the suit back up.

“I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s as if a bomb went off in her skull.” “Oh flick,” Rogers said, “she was Rhine-sensitive, wasn’t she.”

“That’s right,” Cortez sounded thoughtful. “All right, everybody listen up. Platoon leaders, check your platoons and see if anybody’s missing, or hurt. Anybody else in seventh?”

“I. . . I’ve got a splitting headache, Sarge,” Lucky said.

Four others had bad headaches. One of them affirmed that he was slightly Rhine- sensitive. The others didn’t know.

“Cortez, I think it’s obvious,” Doc Wilson said, “that we should give these. . . monsters wide berth, especially shouldn’t harm any more of them. Not with five people susceptible to whatever apparently killed Ho.”

“Of course, God damn it, I don’t need anybody to tell me that. We’d better get moving. I just filled the captain in on what happened; he agrees that we’d better get as far away from here as we can, before we stop for the night.

“Let’s get back in formation and continue on the same bearing. Fifth platoon, take over point; second, come back to the rear. Everybody else, same as before.”

“What about Ho?” Lucky asked.

“She’ll be taken care of. From the ship.”

After we’d gone half a klick, there was a flash and rolling thunder. Where Ho had been came a wispy luminous mushroom cloud boiling up to disappear against the gray sky.

13

 

We stopped for the “night”-actually, the sun wouldn’t set for another seventy hours-atop a slight rise some ten klicks from where we had killed the aliens. But they weren’t aliens, I bad to remind myself-we were.

Two platoons deployed in a ring around the rest of us, and we flopped down exhausted. Everybody was allowed four hours’ sleep and had two hours’ guard duty.

Potter came over and sat next to me. I chinned her frequency. “Hi, Marygay.”

“Oh, William,” her voice over the radio was hoarse and cracking. “God, it’s so horrible.”

“It’s over now-”

“I killed one of them, the first instant, I shot it right in the, in the . . .”

1 put my hand on her knee. The contact had a plastic click and I jerked it back, visions of machines embracing, copulating. “Don’t feel singled out, Marygay; whatever guilt there is, is. . . belongs evenly to all of us,. . . but a triple portion for Cor-”

“You privates quit jawin’ and get some sleep. You both pull guard in two hours.” “OK, Sarge.” Her voice was so sad and tired I couldn’t bear it. I felt if I could only

touch her, I could drain off the sadness like ground wire draining current, but we were each

trapped in our own plastic world- ”G’night, William.”

“Night.” It’s almost impossible to get sexually excited inside a suit, with the relief tube and all the silver chloride sensors poking you, but somehow this was my body’s response to the emotional impotence, maybe remembering more pleasant sleeps with Marygay, maybe feeling that in the midst of all this death, personal death could be very soon, cranking up the procreative derrick for one last try

lovely thoughts like this. I fell asleep and dreamed that I was a machine, mimicking the functions of life, creaking and clanking my clumsy way through a world, people too polite to say anything but giggling behind my back, and the little man who sat inside my head pulling the levers and clutches and watching the dials, he was hopelessly mad and was storing up hurts for the day- “Mandella-wake up, goddammit, your shift!”

I shuffled over to my place on the perimeter to watch for god knows what. . . but I was so weary I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Finally I tongued a stimtab, knowing I’d pay for it later.

For over an hour I sat there, scanning my sector left, right, near, far, the scene never changing, not even a breath of wind to stir the grass.

Then suddenly the grass parted and one of the three-legged creatures was right in front of me. I raised my finger but didn’t squeeze.

“Movement!” “Movement!”

“Jesus Chri-there’s one right-”

“HOLD YOUR FIRE! F’ shit’s sake don’t shoot!” “Movement.”

“Movement.” I looked left and right, and as far as I could see, every perimeter guard had one of the blind, dumb creatures standing right in front of him.

Maybe the drug I’d taken to stay awake made me more sensitive to whatever they did. My scalp crawled and I felt a formless thing in my mind, the feeling you get when somebody has said something and you didn’t quite hear it, want to respond, but the opportunity to ask him to repeat it is gone.

The creature sat back on its haunches, leaning forward on the one front Leg. Big green bear with a withered arm. Its power threaded through my mind, spiderwebs, echo of night terrors, trying to communicate, trying to destroy me, I couldn’t know.

“All right, everybody on the perimeter, fall back, slow. THE FOREVER WAR

57

Don’t make any quick gestures. .. . Anybody got a headache or anything?” “Sergeant, this is Hollister.” Lucky.

“They’re trying to say something. . . I can almost… no, just.. .” “All I can get is that they think we’re, think we’re…

well, fimny. They’re not afraid.”

“You mean the one in front of you isn’t-”

“No, the feeling comes from all of them., they’re all thinking the same thing. Don’t ask me how I know, I just do.”

“Maybe they thought it was funny, what they did to Ho.” “Maybe. I don’t feel they’re dangerous. Just curious about us.” “Sergeant, this is Bohrs.”

 

“The Taurans’ve been here at least a year-maybe they’ve learned how to communicate with these.. . overgrown teddy bears. They might be spying on us, might be sending back-”

“I don’t think they’d show themselves if that were the case,” Lucky said. “They can obviously hide from us pretty well when they-want to.”

“Anyhow,” Cortez said, “if they’re spies, the damage has been done. Don’t think it’d be smart to take any action against them. I know you’d all like to see ’em dead for what they did to Ho, so would I, but we’d better be carefliL”

I didn’t want to see them dead, but I’d just as soon not have seen them in any condition. I was walking backwards slowly, toward the middle of camp. The creature didn’t seem disposed to follow. Maybe he just knew we were surrounded. He was pulling up grass with his arm and munching.

“OK, all of you platoon leaders, wake everybody up, get a roll count. Let me know if anybody’s been hurt. Tell your people we’re moving out in one minute.”

I don’t know what Cortez had expected, but of course the creatures followed right along. They didn’t keep us sur

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rounded; just had twenty or thirty following us all the time. Not the same ones, either. Individuals would saunter away, and new ones would join the parade. It was pretty obvious that they weren’t going to tire out.

We were each allowed one stimtab. Without it, no one could have marched an hour. A second pill would have been welcome after the edge started to wear off, but the mathematics of the situation  forbade it; we were still thirty klicks from the enemy base, fifteen hours’ marching at the least. And though you could stay awake and energetic for a hundred hours on the tabs, aberrations of judgment and perception snowballed after the second one, until in extremis the most bizarre hallucinations would be taken at face value, and a person could fidget for hours deciding whether to have breakfast.

Under artificial stimulation, the company traveled with great energy for the first six hours, was slowing by the seventh, and ground to an exhausted halt after nine hours and nineteen kilometers. The teddy bears had never lost sight of us and, according to Lucky, had never stopped “broadcasting.” Cortez’s decision was that we would stop for seven hours, each platoon taking one hour of perimeter guard. I was never so glad to have been in the seventh platoon, as we stood guard the last shift and thus were able to get six hours of uninterrupted sleep.

In the few moments I lay awake after finally lying down, the thought came to me that the next time I closed my eyes could well be the last. And partly because of the drug hangover, mostly because of the past day’s horrors, I found that I really didn’t give a shit.

14

 

Our first contact with the Taurans came during my shift.

The teddy bears were still there when I woke up and replaced Doc Jones on guard. They’d gone back to their original formation, one in front of each guard position. The one who was waiting for me seemed a little larger than normal, but otherwise looked just like all the others. All the grass had been cropped where he was sitting, so he occasionally made forays to the left or right. But he always returned to sit right in front of me, you would say staring if he had had anything to stare with.

We had been facing each other for about fifteen minutes when Cortez’s voice rumbled:

“Awright everybody, wake up and get hid!”

I followed instinct and flopped to the ground and rolled into a tall stand of grass. “Enemy vessel overhead.” His voice was almost laconic.

Strictly speaking, it wasn’t really overhead, but rather passing somewhat east of us. It was moving slowly, maybe a hundred klicks per hour, and looked like a broomstick surrounded by a dirty soap bubble. The creature riding it was a little

more human-looking than the teddy bears, but still no prize. I cranked my image amplifier up to forty log two for a closer look.

He had two arms and two legs, but his waist was so small you could encompass it with both hands. Under the tiny waist was a large horseshoe-shaped pelvic structure nearly a meter wide, from which dangled two long skinny legs with no apparent knee joint. Above that waist his body swelled out again, to a chest no smaller than the huge pelvis. His arms looked surprisingly human, except that they were too long and undermuscied. There were too many fingers on his hands. Shoulderless, neckless. His head was a

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nightmarish growth that swelled like a goiter from his massive chest. Two eyes that looked like clusters of fish eggs, a bundle of tassles instead of a nose, and a rigidly open hole that might have been a mouth sitting low down where his adam’s apple should have been. Evidently the soap bubble contained an amenable environment, as he  was wearing absolutely  nothing except his ridged hide, that looked like skin submerged too long in hot water, then dyed a pale orange. “He” had no external genitalia, but nothing that might hint of mammary glands. So we opted for the male pronoun by default.

Obviously, he either didn’t see us or thought we were part of the herd of teddy bears. He never looked back at us, but just continued in the same direction we were headed, .05 rad east of north.

“Might as well go back to sleep now, if you can sleep after looking at that thing. We move out at 0435.” Forty minutes.

Because of the planet’s opaque cloud cover, there had been no way to tell, from space, what the enemy base looked like or how big it was. We only knew its position, the same way we knew the position the scoutships were supposed to land on. So it too could easily have been underwater, or underground.

But some of the drones were reconnaissance ships as well as decoys: and in their mock attacks on the base, one managed to get close enough to take a picture. Captain Stott beamed down a diagram of the place to Cortez-the only one with a visor in his suit-when we were five klicks from the base’s “radio” position. We stopped and he called all the platoon leaders in with the seventh platoon to confer. Two teddy bears loped in, too. We tried to ignore them.

“OK, the captain sent down some pictures of our objective. I’m going to draw a map; you platoon leaders copy.” They took pads and styli out of their leg pockets, while Cortez unrolled a large plastic mat. He gave it a shake to randomize any residual charge, and turned on his stylus.

“Now, we’re coming from this direction.” He put an arrow at the bottom of the sheet. “First thing we’ll hit is this row of huts, probably billets or bunkers, but who the

THE FOREVER WAR 61

hell knows. . . . Our initial objective is to destroy these buildings-the whole base is on a flat plain; there’s no way we could really sneak by them.”

“Potter here. Why can’t we jump over them?”

“Yeah, we could do that, and wind up completely surrounded, cut to ribbons. We take the buildings.

“After we do that. . . all I can say is that we’ll have to think on our feet. From the aerial reconnaissance, we can figure out the function of only a couple of buildings- and that stinks. We might wind up wasting a lot of time demolishing the equivalent of an enlisted-men’s bar, ignoring a huge logistic computer because it looks like. . . a garbage dump or something.”

“Mandella here,” I said. “Isn’t there a spaceport of some kind-seems to me we ought to. .

“I’ll get to that, damn it. There’s a ring of these huts all around the camp, so we’ve got to break through somewhere. This place’ll be closest, less chance of giving away our position before we attack.

“There’s nothing in the whole place that actually looks like a weapon. That doesn’t mean anything, though; you could hide a gigawatt laser in each of those huts.

“Now, about five hundred meters from the huts, in the middle of the base, we’ll come to this big flower-shaped structure.” Cortez drew a large symmetrical shape that looked like the outline of a flower with seven petals. “What the hell this is, your guess is as good as mine. There’s only one of them, though, so we don’t damage it any more than we have to. Which means.. . we blast it to splinters if I think it’s dangerous.

“Now, as far as your spaceport, Mandella, is concerned-there just isn’t one. Nothing.

“That cruiser the Hope caulked had probably been left in orbit, like ours has to be. If they have any equivalent of a scoutship, or drone missiles, they’re either not kept here or they’re well hidden.”

“Bohrs here. Then what did they attack with, while we were coming down from orbit?”

“I wish we knew, Private.

“Obviously, we don’t have any way of estimating their 62

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numbers, not directly. Recon pictures failed to show a single Tauran on the grounds of the base. Meaning nothing, because it is an alien environment. Indirectly, though… we count the number of broomsticks, those flying things.

“There are fifty-one huts, and each has at most one broomstick. Four don’t have any parked outside, but we located three at various other parts of the base. Maybe this indicates that there are fifty-one Taurans, one of whom was outside the base when the picture was taken.”

“Keating here. Or fifty-one officers.”

“That’s right-maybe fifty thousand infantrymen stacked in one of these buildings. No way to tell. Maybe ten Taurans, each with five broomsticks, to use according to his mood.

“We’ve got one thing in our favor, and that’s communications. They evidently use a frequency modulation of megahertz electromagnetic radiation.”

“Radio!”

“That’s right, whoever you are. Identify yourself when you speak. So it’s quite possible that they can’t detect our phased-neutrino communications. Also, just prior to the attack, the Hope is going to deliver a nice dirty fission bomb; detonate it in the upper atmosphere right over the base. That’ll restrict them to line-of-sight communications for some time; even those will be full of static.”

“Why don’t.. . Tate here. . . why don’t they just drop the bomb right in their laps. Save us a lot of-”

“That doesn’t even deserve an answer, Private. But the answer is, they might. And you better hope they don’t. If they caulk the base, it’ll be for the safety of the Hope. After we’ve attacked, and probably before we’re far enough away for it to make much difference.

“We keep that from happening by doing a good job. We have to reduce the base to where it can no longer function; at the same time, leave as much intact as possible. And take one prisoner.”

“Potter here. You mean, at least one prisoner.”

“I mean what I say. One only. Potter.. . you’re relieved of your platoon. Send Chavez up.”

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“All right, Sergeant.” The relief in her voice was unmistakable.

 

Cortez continued with his map and instructions. There was one other building whose function was pretty obvious; it had a large steerable dish antenna on top. We were to destroy it as soon as the grenadiers got in range.

The attack plan was very loose. Our signal to begin would be the flash of the fission bomb. At the same time, several drones would converge on the base, so we could see what their antispacecraft defenses were. We would try to reduce the effectiveness of those defenses without destroying them completely.

Immediately after the bomb and the drones, the grenadiers would vaporize a line of seven huts. Everybody would break through the hole into the base. . . and what would happen after that was anybody’s guess.

Ideally, we’d sweep from that end of the base to the other, destroying certain targets, caulking all but one Tauran. But that was unlikely to happen, as it depended on the Taurans’ offering very little resistance.

On the other hand, if the Taurans showed obvious superiority from the beginning, Cortez would give the order to scatter. Everybody had a different compass bearing for retreat-we’d blossom out in all directions, the survivors to rendezvous in a valley some forty klicks east of the base. Then we’d see about a return engagement, after the Hope softened the base up a bit.

“One last thing,” Cortez rasped. “Maybe some of you feel the way Potter evidently does, maybe some of your men feel that way.. . that we ought to go easy, not make this so much of a bloodbath. Mercy is a luxury, a weakness we can’t afford to indulge in at this stage of the war. All we know about the enemy is that they have killed seven hundred and ninety-eight humans. They haven’t shown any restraint in attacking our cruisers, and it’d be foolish to expect any this time, this first ground action.

“They are responsible for the lives of all of your comrades who died in training, and for Ho, and for all the others who are surely going to die today. I can’t understand any-

Joe Haldeman

 

body who wants to spare them. But that doesn’t make any difference. You have your orders and, what the hell, you might as well know, all of you have a post- hypnotic suggestion that I will trigger by a phrase, just before the battle. It will make your job easier.”

“Sergeant..

“Shut up. We’re short on time; get back to your platoons and brief them. We move out in five minutes.”

The platoon leaders returned to their men, leaving Cortez and ten of us-plus three teddy bears, milling around, getting in the way.

15

We took the last five klicks very carefully, sticking to the highest grass, running across occasional clearings. When we were 500 meters from where the base was supposed to be, Cortez took the third platoon forward to scout, while the rest of us laid low.

Cortez’s voice came over the general freak: “Looks pretty much like we expected. Advance in a file, crawling. When you get to the third platoon, follow your squad leader to the left or right.”

We did that and wound up with a string of eighty-three people in a line roughly perpendicular to the direction of attack. We were pretty well hidden, except for the dozen or so teddy bears that mooched along the line, munching grass.

There was no sign of life inside the base. All of the buildings were windowless and a uniform shiny white. The huts that were our first objective were large featureless half-buried eggs some sixty meters apart. Cortez assigned one to each grenadier.

We were broken into three fire teams: team A consisted of platoons two, four, and six; team B was one, three, and five; the command platoon was team C.

“Less than a minute now-filters down!-when I say ‘fire,’ grenadiers, take out your targets. God help you if you miss.”

There was a sound like a giant’s belch, and a stream of five or six iridescent bubbles floated up from the flower-shaped building. They rose with increasing speed until they were almost out of sight, then shot olf to the south, over our heads. The ground was suddenly bright, and for the first time in a long time, I saw my shadow, a long one pointed north. The bomb had gone off prematurely. I just had time to think that it didn’t make too much difference;

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it’d still make alphabet soup out of their communications- “Drones!” A ship came screaming in just about tree

level, and a bubble was in the air to meet it. When they contacted, the bubble popped and the drone exploded into a million tiny fragments. Another one came from the opposite side and suffered the same fate.

“FIRE!” Seven bright glares of 500-microton grenades and a sustained concussion that surely would have killed an unprotected man.

“Filters up.” Gray haze of smoke and dust. Clods of dirt falling with a sound like heavy raindrops.

“Listen up:

 

‘Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled; Scots, wham Bruce has aften led, Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory!’

 

I hardly heard him for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just post-hypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories:

shaggy hulks that were Taurans (not at all what we now knew they looked like) boarding a colonists’ vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror (the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration), then

raping the women to death with huge veined purple members (ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans), holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it (as if they could assimilate the alien protein).. . a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd. But while my conscioUs mind was rejecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping animal where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien hlood, secure in the Conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters.

Ikth FUIthVMt WAlt b7

I knew it was all purest soyashit, and I hated the men  who had taken  such obscene liberties with my mind, but I could even hear my teeth grinding, feel my cheeks frozen in a spastic grin, blood-Lust. . . A teddy bear walked in front of me, looking dazed. I started to raise my laser-finger, but somebody beat me to it and the creature’s head exploded in a cloud of gray splinters and blood.

Lucky groaned, half-whining, “Dirty. .. filthy fucken bastards.” Lasers flared and crisscrossed, and all of the teddy bears fell dead.

“Watch it, goddaminit,” Cortez screamed. “Aim those fuckin things-they aren’t toys!

“Team A, move out-into the craters to cover B.”

Somebody was laughing and sobbing. “What the fuck is wrong with you, Petrov?” Strange to hear Cortez cussing.

I twisted around and saw Petrov, behind and to my left, lying in a shallow hole, digging frantically with both hands, crying and gurgling.

“Fuck,” Cortez said. “Team B! Ten meters past the craters, get down in a line. Team C-into the craters with A.”

I scrambled up and covered the hundred meters in twelve amplified strides. The craters were practically large enough to hide a scoutship, some ten meters in diameter. I jumped to the opposite side of the hole and landed next to a fellow named Chin. He didn’t even look around when I landed, just kept scanning the base for signs of life.

“Team A-ten meters, past team B, down in line.” Just as he finished, the building in front of us burped, and a salvo of the bubbles fanned out toward our lines. Most people saw it coming and got down, but Chin was just getting up to make his rush and stepped right into one.

It grazed the top of his helmet and disappeared with a faint pop. He took one step backwards and toppled over the edge of the crater, trailing an arc of blood and brains. Lifeless, spreadeagled, he slid halfway to the bottom, shoveling dirt into the perfectly symmetrical hole where the bubble had chewed indiscriminately through plastic, hair, skin, bone, and brain.

“Everybody hold it. Platoon leaders, casualty report… check.. . check, check .. . check, check, check.. . check.

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We have three deaders. Wouldn’t be any if you’d have kept low. So everybody grab dirt when you hear that thing go off. Team A, complete the rush.”

They completed the maneuver without incident. “OK. Team C, rush to where B. . . hold it! Down!”

Everybody was already hugging the ground. The bubbles slid by in a smooth arc about two meters off the ground. They went serenely over our heads and, except for one that made toothpicks out of a tree, disappeared in the distance.

“B, rush past A ten meters. C, take over B’s place. You B grenadiers, see if you can reach the Flower.”

Two grenades tore up the ground thirty or forty meters from the structure. In a good imitation of panic, it started belching out a continuous stream of bubbles-still, none coming lower than two meters off the ground. We kept hunched down and continued to advance.

Suddenly, a seam appeared in the building and widened to the size of a large door. Taurans came swarming out.

“Grenadiers, hold your fire. B team, laser fire to the left and right-keep’m bunched up. A and C, rush down the center.”

One Tauran died trying to run through a laser beam. The others stayed where they were.

In a suit, it’s pretty awkward to run and keep your head down at the same time. You have to go from side to side, like a skater getting started; otherwise you’ll be airborne. At least one person, somebody in A team, bounced too high and suffered the same fate as Chin.

I was feeling pretty fenced-in and trapped, with a wall of laser fire on each side and a low ceiling that meant death to touch. But in spite of myself, I felt happy, euphoric, finally getting the chance to kill some of those villainous baby-eaters. Knowing it was soyashit.

They weren’t fighting back, except for the rather ineffective bubbles (obviously not designed as an anti-personnel weapon), and they didn’t retreat back into the building, either. They milled around, about a hundred of them, and watched us get closer. A couple of grenades would caulk them all, but I guess Cortez was thinking about the pris

oner.

“OK, when I say ‘go,’ we’re going to flank ’em. B team will hold fire.. . Second and fourth platoons to the right, sixth and seventh to the left. B team will move forward in line to box them in.

“Go!” We peeled off to the left As soon as the lasers stopped, the Taurans bolted, running in a group on a collision course with our flank.

“A team, down and fire! Don’t shoot until you’re sure of your aim-if you miss you might hit a friendly. ~And fer Chris’ sake save me one!”

It was a horrifying sight, that herd of monsters bearing down on us. They were running in great leaps-the bubbles avoiding them-and they all looked like the one we saw earlier, riding the broomstick; naked except for an almost transparent sphere around their whole bodies, that moved along with them. The right flank started firing, picking off individuals in the rear of the pack.

Suddenly a laser flared through the Taurans from the other side, somebody missing his mark. There was a horrible scream, and I looked down the line to see someone-I think it was Perry-writhing on the ground, right hand over the smoldering stump of his arm, seared off just below the elbow. Blood sprayed through his fingers, and the suit, its camouflage circuits scrambled, flickered black-white- jungle-desert-green-gray. I don’t know how long I stared- long enough for the medic

to run over and start giving aid-but when I looked up the Taurans were almost on top of me.

My first shot was wild and high, but it grazed the top of the leading Tauran’s protective bubble. The bubble disappeared and the monster stumbled and fell to the ground, jerking spasmodically. Foam gushed out of his mouth-hole, first white, then streaked red. With one last jerk he became rigid and twisted backwards, almost to the shape of a horseshoe. His long scream, a high-pitched whistle, stopped just as his comrades trampled over him. 1 hated myself for smiling.

It was slaughter, even though our flank was outnumbered five to one. They kept coming without faltering, even when they had to climb over the drift of bodies and parts of

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joe tlaiAleman

bodies that piled up high, parallel to our flank~ The ground between us was slick red with Tauran blood-all God’s children got hemoglobin-and like the teddy bears, their guts looked pretty much like guts to my untrained eye. My helmet reverberated with hysterical laughter while we slashed them to gory chunks, and I almost didn’t hear Cortez:

“Hold your fire-I said HOLD iT, goddammit! Catch a couple of the bastards, they won’t hurt you.”

I stopped shooting and eventually so did everybody else. When the next Tauran jumped over the smoking pile of meat in front of me, I dove to try to tackle him around those spindly legs.

It was like hugging a big, slippery balloon. When I tried to drag him down, he popped out of my arms and kept running.

We managed to stop one of them by the simple expedient of piling half-a-dozen people on top of him. By that time the others had run through our line and were headed for the row of large cylindrical tanks that Cortez had said were probably for storage. A little door had opened in the base of each one.

“We’ve got our prisoner,” Cortez shouted. “Kill!”

They were fifty meters away and running hard, difficult targets. Lasers slashed around them, bobbing high and low. One fell, sliced in two, but the others, about ten of them, kept going and were almost to the doors when the grenadiers started firing.

They were still loaded with 500-mike bombs, but a near miss wasn’t enough-the concussion would just send them flying, unhurt in their bubbles.

“The buildings! Get the fucken buildings!” The grenadiers raised their aim and let fly, but the bombs only seemed to scorch the white outside of the structures until, by chance, one landed in a door. That split the building just as if it had a seam; the two halves popped away and a cloud of machinery flew into the air, accompanied by a huge pale flame that rolled up and disappeared in an instant. Then the others all concentrated on the doors, except for potshots at some of the Taurans, not so much to get them as to blow

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them away before they could get inside. They seemed awfully eager.

All this time, we were trying to get the Taurans with laser fire, while they weaved and bounced around trying to get into the structures. We moved in as close to them as we could without putting ourselves in danger from the grenade blasts, yet too far away for good aim.

Still, we were getting them one by one and managed to destroy four of the seven buildings. Then, when there were only two aliens left, a nearby grenade blast flung one of them to within a few meters of a door. He dove in and several grenadiers fired salvos after him, but they all fell short or detonated harmlessly on the side. Bombs were falling all around, making an awful racket, but the sound was suddenly drowned out by a great sigh, like a giant’s intake of breath, and where the building had been was a thick cylindrical cloud of smoke, solid-looking, dwindling away into the stratosphere, straight as if laid down by a ruler. The other Tauran had been right at the base of the cylinder I could see pieces of him flying. A second later, a shock wave hit us and I rolled helplessly, pinwheeling, to smash into the pile of Tauran bodies and roll beyond.

1 picked myself up and panicked for a second when I saw there was blood all over my suit-when I realized it was only alien blood, I relaxed but felt unclean.

‘4Catch the bastard! Catch him!” In the confusion, the Tauran had gotten free and was running for the grass. One platoon was chasing after him, losing ground, but then all of B team ran over and cut him off. I jogged over to join in the fun.

There were four people on top of him, and a ring around them of about fifty people, watching the struggle.

“Spread out, dammit! There might be a thousand more of them waiting to get us in one place.” We dispersed, grumbling. By unspoken agreement we were all sure that there were no more live Taurans on the face of the planet.

Cortez was walking toward the prisoner while I backed away. Suddenly the four men collapsed in a pile on top of the creature. . . Even from my distance I could see the foam spouting from his mouth-hole. His bubble had popped. Suicide.

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“Damn!” Co,tez was right there. “Get off that bastard.” The four men got off and Cortez used his laser In slice the monster into a dozen quivering chunks. Heart- warming sight.

“That’s all right, though, we’ll find another one-everybody! Back in the arrowhead formation. Combat assault, on the Flower.”

Well, we assaulted the Flower, which had evidently run out of ammunition (it was still belching, but no bubbles), and it was empty. We scurried up ramps and through corridors, fingers at the ready, like kids playing soldier. There was nobody home.

The same lack of response at the antenna installation, the

“Salami,” and twenty other major buildings, as well as the forty-four perimeter huts still intact. So we had “captured” dozens of buildings, mostly of incomprehensible purpose, but failed in our main mission, capturing a Tauran for the xenologists to experiment with. Oh well, they could have all the bits and pieces they’d ever want. That was something.

After we’d combed every last square centimeter of the base, a scoutship came in with the real exploration ciew, the scientists. Cortez said, “All right, snap out of it,” and the hypnotic compulsion fell away.

At first it was pretty grim. Alot of the people, like Lucky and Marygay, almost went crazy with the memories of bloody murder multiplied a hundred times.  Cortez ordered everybody to take a sed-tab, two for the ones most upset. I took two without being specifically ordered to do so.

Because it was murder, unadorned butchery-once we had the anti-spacecraft weapon doped out, we hadn’t been in any danger. The Taurans hadn’t seemed to

have any conception of person-to-person fighting. We had just herded them up and slaughtered them, the first encounter between mankind and another intelligent species. Maybe it was the second encounter, counting the teddy bears. What might have happened if we had sat down and tried to communicate? But they got the same treatment.

I spent a long time after that telling myself over and over THE FOREVER WAR

73

that it hadn’t been me who so gleefully carved up those frightened, stampeding creatures. Back in the twentieth centuly, they had established to everybody’s satisfaction that “I was just following orders” was an inadequate excuse for inhuman conduct. . . but what can you do when the orders come from deep down in that puppet master of the unconscious?

Worst of all was the feeling that perhaps my actions weren’t all that inhuman. Ancestors only a few generations back would have done the same thing, even to their fellow men, without any hypnotic conditioning.

I was disgusted with the human race, disgusted with the army and honified at the prospect of living with myself for another century or so. . . . Well, there was always brain-wipe.

A ship with a lone Tauran survivor had escaped and had gotten away clean, the bulk of the planet shielding it from Earth’s Hope  while it dropped into Aleph’s collapsar field.

Escaped home, I guessed, wherever that was, to report what twenty men with hand-weapons could do to a hundred fleeing on foot, unarmed.

I suspected that the next time humans met Taurans in ground combat, we would be more evenly matched. And I was right.

SERG EANT MANDELLA 2007-2024 A.D.

1

 

I was scared enough.

Sub-major Stott was pacing back and forth behind the small podium in the assembly room/chop hall/gymnasium of the Anniversary. We had just made our final collapsar jump, from Tet-38 to Yod-4. We were decelerating at 11/2 gravities and our velocity relative to that collapsar was a respectable .9(k. We were being chased.

“I wish you people would relax for a while and just trust the ship’s computer. The Tauran vessel at any rate will not be within strike range for another two weeks. Mandella!”

He was always very careful to call me “Sergeant” Mandella in front of the company. But everybody at this particular briefing was either a sergeant or a corporal: squad leaders. “Yes, sit”

“You’re responsible for the psychological as well as the physical well-being of the men and women in your squad. Assuming that you are aware that there is a morale problem aboard this vessel, what have you done about it?”

“AS far as my squad is concerned, sir?” “Of course.”

“We talk it out, sir.”

“And have you arrived at any cogent conclusion?”

“Meaning no disrespect, sir, I think the major problem is obvious. My people have been cooped up in this ship for fourteen-”

“Ridiculous! Every one of us has been adequately conditioned against the pressures of living in close quarters and the enlisted people have the privilege of confraternity.” That was a delicate way of putting it. “Officers must remain celibate, and yet we have no morale problem.”

if he thought his officers were celibate, he should sit down and have a long talk with Lieutenant Harmony. Maybe he just meant line officers, though. That would be

77

78

Joe Haldeman

just him and Cortez. Probably 50 percent right. Cortez was awfully friendly with Corporal Kamehameha.

“Sir, perhaps it was the detoxification back at Stargate; maybe-”

“No. The therapists only worked to erase the hate conditiomng-everybody knows how I feel about that-and they may be misguided but they are skilled.

“Corporal Potter.” He always called her by her rank to remind her why she hadn’t been promoted as high as the rest of us. Too soft. “Have you ‘talked it out’ with your people, too?”

“We’ve discussed it, sir.”

The sub-major could “glare mildly” at people. He glared mildly at Marygay until she elaborated.

“I don’t believe it’s the fault of the conditioning. My

people are impatient, just tired of doing the same thing day after day.” “They’re anxious for combat, then?” No sarcasm in his voice.

“They want to get off the ship, sir.”

“They will get off the ship,” he said, allowing himself a microscopic smile. “And then they’ll probably be just as impatient to get back on.”

It went back and forth like that for a long while. Nobody wanted to come right out and say that their squad was scared: scared of the Tauran cruiser closing on us, scared of the landing on the portal planet. Sub-major Stott had a bad record of dealing with people who admitted fear.

I fingered the fresh T/Othey had given us. It looked like tills: THE FOREVER WAR

I knew most of the people from the raid on Aleph, the first face-to-face contact between humans and Taurans. The only new people in my platoon were Luthuli and Heyrovsky. In the company as a whole (excuse me, the “strike force”), we had twenty replacements for the nineteen people we lost from the Aleph raid: one amputation, four dead-era, fourteen psychotics.

I couldn’t get over the “20 Mar 2007” at the bottom of the 1/0. I’d been in the anny ten years, though it felt like less than two. Time dilation, of course; even with the collapsar jumps, traveling from star to star eats up the calendar.

After this raid, I would probably be eligible for retirement, with full pay. If I lived through the raid, and if they didn’t change the rules on us. Me a twenty-year man, and only twenty-five years old.

Stott was summing up when there was a knock on the door, a single loud rap. “Enter,” he said.

An ensign I knew vaguely walked in casually and handed Stott a slip of paper, without saying a word. He stood there while Stoit read it, slumping with just the

right  degree  of  insolence.  Technically,  Stou  was  out  of  his  chain  of  command; everybody in the navy disliked him anyhow.

Stott handed the paper back to the ensign and looked through him.

“You will alert your squads that preliminary evasive maneuvers will commence at 2010, fifty-eight minutes from now.” He hadn’t looked at his watch. “All personnel will be in acceleration shells by 2000. Tench . . . hut!”

We rose and, without enthusiasm, chorused, “Fuck you, sir.” Idiotic custom. Stott strode out of the room and the ensign followed, smirking.

I turned my ring to my assistant squad leader’s position and talked into it: “Tate, this is Mandella.” Everyone else in the mom was doing the same.

A tinny voice came out of the ring. “Tate here. What’s up?”

“Get ahold of the men and tell them we have to be in the shells by 2000. Evasive maneuvers.”

THE FOREVER WAR 81

“Crap. They told us it would be days.”

“I guess something new came up. Or maybe the Commodore has a bright idea.” “The Commodore can stuff it. You up in the lounge?”

 

“Bring me back a cup when you come, okay? Little sugar?” “Roger. Be down in about half an hour.”

“Thanks. I’ll get on it.”

There was a general movement toward the coffee machine. I got in line behind Corporal Potter.

“What do you think, Marygay?”

“Maybe the Commodore just wants us to try out the shells once more.” “Before the real thing.”

“Maybe.” She picked up a cup and blew into it. She looked worried. “Or maybe the Taurans had a ship way out, waiting for us. I’ve wondered why they don’t do it.

We do, at Stargate.”

“Stargate’s a different thing. It takes seven cruisers, moving all the time, to cover all the possible exit angles. We can’t afford to do it for more than one collapsar, and neither could they.”

She didn’t say anything while she filled her cup. “Maybe we’ve stumbled on their version of Stargate. Or maybe they have more ships than we do by now.”

I filled and sugared two cups, sealed one. “No way to tell.” We walked back to a table, careful with the cups in the high gravity.

“Maybe Singhe knows something,” she said. “Maybe he does. But I’d have to get him through Rogers and Cortez. Cortez would jump down my throat if I tried to bother him now.”

“Oh, I can get him directly. We. . .” She dimpled a little bit. “We’ve been friends.”

I sipped some scalding coffee and tried to sound nonchalant. “So that’s where you’ve been disappearing to.”

“You disapprove?” she said, looking innocent. “Well. . . damn it, no, of course not. But-but he’s an officer! A navy officer!”

82        Joe Haldeman

 

“He’s attached to us and that makes him part army.” She twisted her ring and said, “Directory.” To me: “What about you and Little Miss Harmony?”

“That’s not the same thing.” She was whispering a directory code into the ring.

“Yes, it is. You just wanted to do it with an officer. Pervert.” The ring bleated twice. Busy. “How was she?”

“Adequate.” I was recovering.

“Besides, Ensign Singhe is a perfect gentleman. And not the least bit jealous.” “Neither am I,” I said. “If he ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break his ass.”

She looked at me across her cup. “If Lieutenant Harmony ever hurts you, tell me and I’ll break her ass.”

“It’s a deal.” We shook on it solemnly. 2

The acceleration shells were something new, installed while we rested and resupplied at Stargate. They enabled us to use the ship at closer to its theoretical efficiency, the tachyon drive boosting it to as much as 25 gravities.

Tate was  waiting for me in  the shell area. The rest of the squad was milling around, talking. I gave him his coffee.

“Thanks. Find out anything?”

“Afraid not. Except the swabbies don’t seem to be scared, and it’s their show. Probably just another practice run.”

He slurped some coffee. “What the hell. It’s all the same to us, anyhow. Just sit there and get squeezed half to death. God, I hate those things.”

“Maybe they’ll eventually make us obsolete, and we can go home.”

“Sure thing.” The medic came by and gave me my shot. I waited until 1950 and hollered to the squad, “Let’s go. Strip down and zip up.”

The shell is like a flexible spacesuit; at least the fittings on the inside are pretty similar. But instead of a life support package, there’s a hose going into the top of the helmet and two coming out of the heels, as well as two relief tubes per suit. They’re crammed in shoulder-to-shoulder on light acceleration couches; getting to your shell is like picking your way through a giant plate of olive drab spaghetti.

When the lights in my helmet showed that everybody was suited up, I pushed the button that flooded the room. No way to see, of course, but I could imagine the pale blue solution-ethylene glycol and something else-foaming up around and over us. The suit material, cool and dry, collapsed in to touch my skin at every point. I knew that my internal body pressure was increasing rapidly to match the increasing fluid pressure outside. That’s what the shot was

83

for; keep your cells from getting squished between the devil and the deep blue sea. You could still feel it, though. By the time my meter said “2” (external pressure equivalent to a column of water two nautical miles deep), I felt that I was at the same time being crushed and bloated. By 2005 it was at 2.7 and holding steady. When the maneuvers began at 2010, you couldn’t feel the difference. I thought I saw the needle fluctuate a tiny bit, though.

The major drawback to the system is that, of course, anybody caught outside of his shell when the Anniversary hit 25 G’S would be just so much strawberry jam. So the guiding and the fighting have to be done by the ship’s tactical computer-which does most of it anyway, but it’s nice to have a human overseer.

Another small problem is that if the ship gets damaged and the pressure drops, you’ll explode like a dropped melon. If it’s the internal pressure, you get crushed to death in a microsecond.

And it takes ten minutes, more or less, to get depressurized and another two or three to get untangled and dressed. So it’s not exactly something you can hop out of and come up fighting.

The accelerating was over at 2038. A green light went on and I chinned the button to depressurize.

Marygay and I were getting dressed outside.

“How’d that happen?” I pointed to an angry purple welt that ran from the bottom of her right breast to her hipbone.

“That’s the second time,” she said, mad. “The first one was on my back-I think that shell doesn’t fit right, gets creases.”

“Maybe you’ve lost weight.”

“Wise guy.” Our caloric intake had been rigorously monitored ever since we left Stargate the first time. You can’t use a fighting suit unless it fits you like a second skin.

A wall speaker drowned out the rest of her comment. “Attention all personnel. Attention. All army personnel echelon six and above and all navy personnel echelon four and above will report to the briefing room at 2130.”

It repeated the message twice. I went off to lie down for a few minutes while Marygay showed her bruise to the medic and the armorer. I didn’t feel a bit jealous.

 

The Commodore began the briefing. “There’s not much to tell, and what there is is not good news.

“Six days ago, the Tauran vessel that is pursuing us released a drone missile. Its initial acceleration was on the order of 80 gravities.

“After blasting for approximately a day, its acceleration suddenly jumped to 148 gravities.” Collective gasp.

“Yesterday, it jumped to 203 gravities. I shouldn’t need to remind anyone here that this is twice the accelerative capability of the enemy’s drones in our last encounter.

“We launched a salvo of drones, four of them, intersecting what the computer predicted to be the four most probable future trajectories of the enemy drone. One of them paid off, while we were doing evasive maneuvers. We contacted and destroyed the Tauran weapon about ten million kilometers from here.”

That was practically next door. “The only encouraging thing we learned from the encounter was from spectral analysis of the blast. It was no more powerful an explosion than  ones  we  have observed  in  the  past, so  at least their progress in propulsion hasn’t been matched by progress in explosives.

“This is the first manifestation of a very important effect that has heretofore been of interest only to theorists. Tell me, soldier.” He pointed at Negulesco. “How long has it been since we first fought the Taurans, at Aleph?”

“That depends on your frame of reference, Commodore,” she answered dutifully. “To me, it’s been about eight months.”

“Exactly. You’ve lost about nine years, though, to time dilation, while we maneuvered between collapsar jumps. In an engineering sense, as we haven’t done any important research and development aboard ship.. . that enemy vessel comes from our future!” He paused to let that sink in.

“As the war progresses, this can only become more and more pronounced. The Taurans don’t have any cure for relativity, of course, so it will be to our benefit as often as to theirs.

“For the present, though, it is we who are operating with a handicap. As the Tauran pursuit vessel draws closer, this handicap will become more severe. They can simply outshoot us.

“We’re going to have to do some fancy dodging. When we get within five hundred million kilometers of the enemy ship, everybody gets in his shell and we just have to trust the logistic computer. It will put us through a rapid series of random changes in direction and velocity.

“I’ll be blunt. As long as they have one more drone than we, they can finish us off. They haven’t launched any more since that first one. Perhaps they are holding their fire… or maybe they only had one. In that case, it’s we who have them.

“At any rate, all personnel will be required to be in their shells with no more than ten minutes’ notice. When we get within a thousand million kilometers of the enemy, you are to stand by your shells. By the time we are within five hundred million kilometers, you will be in them, and all shell compounds flooded and pressurized. We cannot wait for anyone.

“That’s all I have to say. Sub-major?”

“I’ll speak to my people later, Commodore. Thank you.”

“Dismissed.” And none of this “fuck you, sir” nonsense. The navy thought that was just a little beneath their dignity. We stood at attention-all except Stott-until he had left the room. Then some other swabbie said “dismissed” again, and we left.

My squad had clean-up detail, so I told everybody who was to do what, put Tate in charge, and left. Went up to the NCO room for some company and maybe some information.

There wasn’t much happening but idle speculation, so I took Rogers and went off to bed. Marygay had disappeared again, hopefully trying to wheedle something out of Singhe.

3

We had our promised get-together with the sub-major the next morning, when he more or less repeated what the commodore had said, in infantry terms and in his staccato monotone.  He emphasized the  fact  that  all we  knew  about  the  Tauran ground forces was that if their naval capability was improved, it was likely they would be able to handle us better than last time.

But that brings up an interesting point. Eight months or nine years before, we’d had a tremendous advantage: they had seemed not quite to understand what was going on. As belligerent as they had been in space, we’d expected them to be real Huns on the ground. Instead, they practically lined themselves up for slaughter. One escaped and presumably described the idea of old-fashioned in-fighting to his fellows.

But that, of course, didn’t mean that the word had necessarily gotten to this particular bunch, the Taurans guarding Yod-4. The only way we know of to communicate faster than the speed of light is to physically carry a message through successive collapsar jumps. And there was no way of telling how many jumps there were between Yod4 and the Tauran home base-so these might be just as passive as the last bunch, or might have been practicing infantry tactics for most of a decade. We would find out when we got there.

The armorer and I were helping my squad pull maintenance on their fighting suits when we passed the thousand million kilometer mark and had to go up to the shells.

We had about five hours to kill before we had to get into our cocoons. I played a game of chess with Rabi and lost. Then Rogers led the platoon in some vigorous calisthenics, probably for no other reason than to get their minds off the prospect of having to lie half-crushed in the shells for at least four hours. The longest we’d gone before was half that.

Ten minutes before the five hundred million kilometer mark, we squad leaders took over and supervised buttoning everybody up. In eight minutes we were zipped and flooded and at the mercy of-or safe in the arms of-the logistic computer.

While I was lying there being squeezed, a silly thought took hold of my brain and went round and round like a charge in a superconductor: according to military formalism, the conduct of war divides neatly into two categories, tactics and logistics. Logistics has to do with moving troops and feeding them and just about everything except the actual fighting, which is tactics. And now we’re fighting, but we don’t have a tactical computer to guide us through attack and defense, just a huge, super-efficient pacifistic cybernetic grocery clerk of a logistic, mark that word, logistic computer.

The other side of my brain, perhaps not quite as pinched, would argue that it doesn’t matter what name you give to a computer, it’s a pile of memory crystals, logic banks, nuts and bolts. . . If you  program it to be Ghengis Khan, it is a tactical computer, even if its usual function is to monitor the stock market or control sewage conversion.

But the other voice was obdurate and said by that kind of reasoning, a man is only a hank of hair and a piece of bone and some stringy meat; and no matter what kind of a man he is, if you teach him well, you can take a Zen monk and turn him into a slavermg bloodthirsty warrior.

Then what the hell are you, we, am I, answered the other side. A peace-loving, vacuum-welding specialist cum physics teacher snatched up by the Elite Conscription Act and reprogrammed to be a killing machine. You, I have killed and liked it.

But that was hypnotism, motivational conditioning, I argued back at myself. They don’t do that anymore.

And the only reason, I said, they don’t do it is that they think you’ll kill better without it. That’s logic.

Speaking of logic, the original question was, why do they THE FOREVER WAR                                       89

 

send a logistic computer to do a man’s job? Or something like that. . . and we were off again.

The light blinked green and I chinned the switch automatically. The pressure was down to 1.3 before I realized that it meant we were alive, we had won the first skirmish.

I was only partly right.

I was belting on my tunic when my ring tingled and I held it up to listen. It was Rogers.

“Mandella, go check squad bay 3. Something went wrong; Dalton had to depressurize it from Control.”

Bay 3-that was Marygay’s squad! I rushed down the corridor in bare feet and got there just as they opened the door from inside the pressure chamber and began straggling out.

The first out was Bergman. I grabbed his ann. “What the hell is going on, Bergman?”

“Huh?” He peered at me, still dazed, as everyone is when they come out of the chamber. “Oh, s’you. Mandella. I dunno. Whad’ya mean?”

I squinted in through the door, still holding on to him. “You were late, man, you depressurized late. What happened?”

He shook his head, trying to clear it. “Late? Whad’ late. Uh, how late?”

1 looked at my watch for the first time. “Not too-” Jesus Christ. “Uh, we zipped in at 0520, didn’t we?”

“Yeah, I think that’s it.”

Still no Marygay among the dim figures picking their way through the ranked couches and jumbled tubing. “Urn, you were only a couple of minutes late. . . but we were only supposed to be under for four hours, maybe less. It’s

1050.”

“Um.” He shook his head again. I let go of him and stood back to let Stiller and Demy through the door.

“Everybody’s late, then,” Bergman said. “So we aren’t in any trouble.” “Uh-” Non sequiturs. “Right, right-Hey, Stiller!

You seen-”

From inside: “Medic! MEDIC!”

Somebody who wasn’t Marygay was coining out. I pushed her roughly out of my way and dove through the door, landed on somebody else and clambered over to where Struve, Marygay’s assistant, was standing over a pod and talking very loud and fast into his ring.

“-and blood God yes we need-”

It was Marygay still lying in her suit she was “-got the word from Dalton-”

covered every square inch of her with a uniform bright sheen of blood “-when she didn’t come out-”

it started as an angry welt up by her collarbone and was just a welt as it traveled between her breasts until it passed the sternum’s support

“-I came over and popped the-”

and opened up into a cut that got deeper as it ran down over her belly and where it stopped

“-yeah, she’s still-”

a few centimeters above the pubis a membraned loop of gut was protruding… “-OK, left hip. Mandella-”

She was still alive, her heart palpitating, but her blood-streaked head lolled limply, eyes rolled back to white slits, bubbles of red froth appearing and popping at the corner of her mouth each time she exhaled shallowly.

“-tattooed on her left hip. Mandella! Snap out of it! Reach under her and find out what her blood-”

“TYPE 0 RH NEGATIVE GOD damn. . . it. Sony- Oh negative.” Hadn’t I seen that tattoo ten thousand times?

Struve passed this information on and I suddenly remembered the first-aid kit on my belt, snapped it off and fumbled through it.

Stop the bleeding-protect the wound-treat for shock, that’s what the book said. Forgot one, forgot one. . . clear air passages.

She was breathing, if that’s what they meant. How do you stop the bleeding or protect the wound with one measly pressure bandage when the wound is nearly a meter long? Treat for shock, that I could do. I fished out the green ampoule, laid it against her arm and pushed the button.

Then I laid the sterile side of the bandage gently on top of the exposed intestine and passed the elastic strip under the small of her back, adjusted it for nearly zero tension and fastened it.

“Anything else you can do?” Struve asked.

I stood back and felt helpless. “I don’t know. Can you think of anything?”

“I’m no more of a medic than you are.” Looking up at the door, he kneaded a fist, biceps straining. “Where the hell are they? You have morph-plex in that kit?”

“Yeah, but somebody told me not to use it for internal-” “William?”

Her eyes were open and she was trying to lift her head. I rushed over and held her. “It’ll be all right, Marygay. The medic’s coming.”

“What. . . all right? I’m thirsty. Water.”

“No, honey, you can’t have any water. Not for a while, anyhow.” Not if she was headed for surgery.

“Why is all the blood?” she said in a small voice. Her head rolled back. “Been a bad girl.”

“It must have been the suit,” I said rapidly. “Remember earlier, the creases?”

She shook her head. “Suit?” She turned suddenly paler and retched weakly. “Water. . . William, please.”

Authoritative voice behind me: “Get a sponge or a cloth soaked in water.” I looked around and saw Doe Wilson with two stretcher bearers.

“First half-liter femoral,” he said to no one in particular as he carefully peeked under the pressure bandage. “Follow that relief tube down a couple of meters and pinch it off. Find out if she’s passed any blood.”

One of the medics ran a ten-centimeter needle into Mary-gay’s thigh and started giving her whole blood from a plastic bag.

“Sorry I’m late,” Doe Wilson said tiredly. “Business is booming. What’d you say about the suit?”

“She had two minor injuries before. Suit doesn’t fit quite right, creases up under pressure.”

He nodded absently, checking her blood pressure. “You, anybody, give-” Somebody handed him a paper towel

dripping water. “Uh, give her any medication?” “One ampoule of No-shock.”

He wadded the paper towel up loosely and put it in Marygay’s hand. “What’s her name?” I told him.

“Marygay, we can’t give you a drink of water but you can suck on this. Now I’m going to shine a bright light in your eye.” While he was looking through her pupil with a metal tube, he said, “Temperature?” and one of the medics read a number from a digital readout box and withdrew a probe. “Passed blood?”

“Yes. Some.”

He put his hand lightly on the pressure bandage. “Mary-gay, can you roll over a little on your right side?”

“Yes,” she said slowly, and put her elbow down for leverage. “No,” she said and started crying.

“Now, now,” he said absently and pushed up on her hip just enough to be able to see her back. “Only the one wound,” he muttered. “Hell of a lot of blood.”

He pressed the side of his ring twice and shook it by his ear. “Anybody up in the shop?”

“Harrison, unless he’s on a call.”

A woman walked up, and at first I didn’t recognize her, pale and disheveled, bloodstained tunic. It was Estelle Harmony.

Doe Wilson looked up. “Any new customers, Doctor Harmony?”

“No,” she said dully. “The maintenance man was a double traumatic amputation. Only lived a few minutes. We’re keeping him running for transplants.”

“All those others?”

“Explosive decompression.” She sniffed. “Anything I can do here?”

“Yeah., just a minute.” He tried his ring again. “God damn it. You don’t know where Harrison is?”

“No.. . well, maybe, he might be in Surgery B if there was trouble with the cadaver maintenance. Think I set it up all right, though.”

“Yeah, well, hell you know how..

“Mark!” said the medic with the blood bag.

“One more hilf-liter femoral,” Doe Wilson said. “Estelle,  you  mind  taking  over  for  one  of  the  medics  here,  prepare  this  gal  for surgery?”

“No, keep me busy.”

“Good-Hopkins, go up to the shop and bring down a roller and a liter, uh, two liters isotonic fluorocarb with the primary spectrum. If they’re Merck they’ll say ‘abdominal spectrum.'” He found a part of his sleeve with no blood on it and wiped his forehead. “If you find Harrison, send him over to surgery A and have him set up the anesthetic sequence for abdominal.”

“And bring her up to A?”

“Right. If you can’t find Harrison, get somebody-” he stabbed a finger in my direction, “-this guy, to roll the patient up to A; you run ahead and start the sequence.”

He picked up his bag and looked through it. “We could start the sequence here,” he muttered. “But hell, not with paramethadone-Marygay? How do you feel?”

She was still crying. “I’m. . . hurt.”

“I know,” he said gently. He thought for a second and said to Estelle, “No way to tell really how much blood she lost. She may have been passing it under pressure.

Also there’s some pooling in the abdominal cavity. Since she’s still alive I don’t think she could’ve bled under pressure for very long. Hope no brain damage yet.”

He touched the digital readout attached to Marygay’s arm. “Monitor the blood pressure, and if you think it’s indicated, give her five cc’s vasoconstrictor. I’ve gotta go scrub down.”

He closed his bag. “You have any vasoconstrictor besides the pneumatic ampoule?”

Estelle checked her own bag. “No, just the emergency pneumatic.. . uh. . . yes, I’ve got controlled dosage on the ‘dilator, though.”

“OK, if you have to use the ‘constrictor and her pressure goes up too fast-” “I’ll give her vasodilator two cc’s at a time.”

“Check. Hell of a way to run things, but. . . well. If you’re not too tired, I’d like you to stand by me upstairs.”

“Sure.” Doe Wilson nodded and left.

Estelle began sponging Marygay’s belly with isopropyl alcohol. It smelled cold and clean. “Somebody gave her No-shock?” “Yes,” I said, “about ten minutes ago.”

“Ah. That’s why the Doe was worried-no, you did the right thing. But No-shock’s got some vasoconstrictor. Five cc’s more might run up an overdose.” She continued silently scrubbing, her eyes coming up every few seconds to check the blood pressure monitor.

“William?” It was the first time she’d shown any sign of knowing me. “This worn-, uh, Marygay, she’s your lover? Your regular lover?”

“That’s right.”

“She’s very pretty.” A remarkable observation,  her body torn and caked with crusting blood, her face smeared where I had tried to wipe away the tears. I suppose a doctor or a woman or a lover can look beneath that and see beauty.

“Yes, she is.” She had stopped crying and had her eyes squeezed shut, sucking the last bit of moisture from the paper wad.

“Can she have some more water?” “OK, same as before. Not too much.”

I went out to the locker alcove and into the head for a paper towel. Now that the fumes from the pressurizing fluid had cleared, I could smell the air. It smelled wrong. Light machine oil and burnt metal, like the smell of a metalworking shop. I wondered whether they had overloaded the airco. That had happened once before, after the first time we’d used the acceleration chambers.

Marygay took the water without opening her eyes.

“Do you plan to stay together when you get back to Earth?” “Probably,” I said. “If we get back to Earth. Still one more battle.”

“There won’t be any more battles,” she said flatly. “You mean you haven’t heard?” “What?”

“Don’t you know the ship was hit?”  “Hit!” Then how could any of us be alive?

“That’s right.” She went back to her scrubbing. “Four squad bays. Also the armor bay. There isn’t a fighting suit left on the ship.. . and we can’t fight in our underwear.”

“What-squad bays, what happened to the people?” “No survivors.”

Thirty people. “Who was it?”

“All of the third platoon. First squad of the second platoon.” Al-Sadat, Busia, Maxwell, Negulesco. “My God.”

“Thirty deaders, and they don’t have the slightest notion of what caused it. Don’t know but that it may happen again any minute.”

“It wasn’t a drone?”

“No, we got all of their drones. Got the enemy vessel, too. Nothing showed up on any of the sensors, just blam! and a third of We ship was torn to hell. We were lucky it wasn’t the drive or the life support system.” I was hardly hearing her. Penworth, LaBatt, Smithers. Christine and Frida. All dead. I was numb.

She took a blade-type razor and a tube of gel out of her bag. “Be a gentleman and look the other way,” she said. “Oh, here.” She soaked a square of gauze in alcohol and handed it to me. “Be useful. Do her face.”

I started and, without opening her eyes, Maiygay said, “That feels good. What are you doing?”

“Being a gentleman. And useful, too-”

“All personnel, attention, all personnel.” There wasn’t a squawk-box in the pressure chamber, but I could hear it clearly through the door to the locker alcove. “All personnel echelon 6 and above, unless directly involved in medical or maintenance emergencies, report immediately to the assembly area.”

“I’ve got to go, Marygay.”

She didn’t say anything. I didn’t know whether she bad heard the announcement. “Estelle,” I addressed her directly, gentleman be damned. “Will you-”

“Yes. I’ll let you know as soon as we can tell.” ”Well.”

“It’s going to be all right.” But her expression was grim THE FOREVER WAR                                       97

 

and worried. “Now get going,” she said, softly.

By the time I picked my way out into the corridor, the ‘box was repeating the message for the fourth time. There was a new smell in the air, that I didn’t want to identify.

5

Halfway to the assembly area I realized what a mess I was, and ducked into the head by the NCO lounge. Corporal Kamehameha was hurnedly brushing her hair.

“William! What happened to you?”

“Nothing.” I turned on a tap and looked at myself in the mirror. Dried blood smeared all over my face and tunic. “It was Marygay, Corporal Potter, her suit.. . well, evidently it got a crease, ub.. .”

“Dead?”

“No, just badly, uh, she’s going into surgery-” “Don’t use hot water. You’ll just set the stain.”

“Oh. Right.” I used the hot to wash my face and hand, dabbed at the tunic with cold. “Your squad’s just two bays down from Al’s isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Did you see what happened?”

“No. Yes. Not when it happened.” For the first time I noticed that she was crying, big tears rolling down her cheeks and off her chin. Her voice was even, controlled. She pulled at her hair savagely. “It’s a mess.”

I stepped over and put my hand on her shoulder. “DON’T touch me!” she flared and knocked my hand off with the brush. “Sorry. Let’s go.”

At the door to the head she touched me lightly on the arm. “William. . .” She looked at me defiantly. “I’m just glad it wasn’t me. You understand? That’s the only way you can look at it.”

I understood, but I didn’t know that I believed her.

“I can sum it up very briefly,” the commodore said in a tight voice, “if only because we know so little.

“Some ten seconds after we destroyed the enemy vessel, two objects, very small objects, struck the Anniversary amidships. By inference, since they were not detected and we know the limits of our detection apparatus, we know that they were moving in excess of nine-tenths of the speed of light. That is to say, more precisely, their velocity vector normal to the axis of the Anniversary was greater than nine-tenths of the speed of light. They slipped in behind the repeller fields.”

When the Anniversary is moving at relativistic speeds, it is designed to generate two powerful electromagnetic fields, one centered about five thousand kilometers from the ship and the other about ten thousand klicks away, both in line with the direction of motion of the ship. These fields are maintained by a “ramjet” effect, energy picked up from interstellar gas as we mosey along.

Anything big enough to worry about hitting (that is, anything big enough to see with a strong magnifying glass) goes through the first field and comes out with a very strong negative charge all over its surface. As it enters the second field, it’s repelled away from the path of the ship. If the object is too big to be pushed around this way, we can sense it at a greater distance and maneuver out of its way.

“I shouldn’t have to emphasize ~ow formidable a weapon this is. When the Anniversary was struck, our rate of speed with respect to the enemy was such that we traveled our own length every ten-thousandth of a second. Further, we were jerking around erratically with a constantly changing and purely random lateral acceleration. Thus the objects that struck us must have been guided, not aimed.

And the guidance system was self-contained, since there were no Taurans alive at the time they struck us. All of this in a package no larger than a small pebble.

“Most of you are too young to remember the term future shock. Back in the seventies, some people felt that technological progress was so rapid that people, normal people, couldn’t cope with it; that they wouldn’t have time to get used to the present before the future was upon them. A man named Toffier coined the term future shock to describe this situation.” The commodore could get pretty academic.

“We’re caught up in a physical situation that resembles this scholarly concept. The result has been disaster. Tragedy. And, as we discussed in our last meeting, there is no way to counter it. Relativity traps us in the enemy’s past; relativity brings them from our future. We can only hope that next time, the situation will be reversed. And all we can do to help

bring that about is try to get back to Stargate, and then to Earth, where specialists may be able to deduce something, some sort of counterweapon, from the nature of the damage.

“Now we could attack the Tauran’s portal planet from space and perhaps destroy the base without using you infantry.Butlthinktherewouldbeaverygreatriskinvolved. We might be. . . shot down by whatever hit us today, and never return to Stargate with what I consider to be vital information. We could send a drone with a message detailing our assumptions about this new enemy weapon but that might be inadequate. And the Force would be that much further behind., technologically.

“Accordingly, we have set a course that will take us around Yod-4, keeping the collapsar as much as possible between us and the Tauran base. We will avoid contact with the enemy and return to Stargate as quickly as possible.”

Incredibly, the commodore sat down and kneaded his temples. “All of you are at least squad or section leaders. Most of you have good combat records. And I hope that some of you will be rejoining the Force after your two years are up. Those of you who do will probably be made lieutenants, and face your first real command.

“It is to these people I would like to speak for a few moments, not as your. . . as one of your commanders, but just as a senior officer and advisor.

“One cannot make command decisions simply by assessing the tactical situation and going ahead with whatever course of action will do the most harm to the enemy with a minimum of death and damage to your own men and materiel. Modern warfare has become very complex, especially during the last century. Wars are won not by a simple series of battles won, but by a complex interrelationship among military victory, economic pressures, logistic maneuvering, access to the enemy’s information, political postures-dozens, literally dozens of factors.”

I was hearing this, but the only thing that was getting through to my brain was that a third of our Mends’ lives had been snuffed out less than an hour before, and he was sitting up there giving us a lecture on military theory.

“So sometimes you have to throw away a battle in order to help win the war. This is exactly what we are going to do.

“This was not an easy decision. In fact, it was probably the hardest decision of my military career. Because, on the surface at least, it may. look like cowardice.

“The logistic computer calculates that we have about a 62 percent chance of success, should we attempt to destroy the enemy base. Unfortunately, we would have only a 30 percent chance of survival-as some of the scenarios leading to success involve ramming the portal planet with the Anniversary at light speed.” Jesus Christ.

“I hope none of you ever has to face such a decision.

When we get back to Stargate, I will in all probability be court-martialed for cowardice under fire. But I honestly believe that the information that may be gained from analysis of the damage to the Anniversary is more important than the destruction of this one Tauran base.” He sat up straight.

“More important than one soldier’s career.”

I had to stifle an impulse to laugh. Surely “cowardice”

had nothing to do with his decision. Surely he had nothing so primitive and unnulitary as a will to live.

The maintenance crew managed to patch up the huge rip in the side of the Anniversary and to repressurize that section. We spent the rest of the day cleaning up the area; without, of course, disturbing any of the precious evidence for which the commodore was wiffing to sacrifice his Career.

The hardest part was jettisoning the bodies. It wasn’t so bad except for the ones whose suits had burst.

 

I went to Estelle’s cabin the next day, as soon as she was off duty.

“It wouldn’t serve any good purpose for you to see her now.” Estelle sipped her drink, a mixture of ethyl alcohol, citric acid and water, with a drop of some ester that approximated the aroma of orange rind.

“Is she out of danger?”

“Not for a couple of weeks. Let me explain.” She set down her drink and rested her chin on interlaced fingers. “This sort of injury would be fairly routine under normal circumstances. Having replaced the lost blood, we’d simply sprinkle some magic powder into her abdominal cavity and paste her back up. Have her hobbling around in a couple of days.

“But there are complications. Nobody’s ever been injured in a pressure suit before. So far, nothing really unusual has cropped up. But we want to monitor her innards very closely for the next few days.

“Also, we were very concerned about peritonitis. You know what peritonitis is?” “Yes.” Well, vaguely.

“Because a part of her intestine had ruptured under pressure. We didn’t want to settle for normal prophylaxis be-cause a lot of the, uh, contamination had impacted on the peritoneum under pressure. To play it safe, we completely sterilized the whole shebang, the abdominal cavity and her entire digestive system from the duodenum south. Then, of course, we had to replace all of her normal intestinal flora, now dead, with a commercially prepared culture. Still standard procedure, but not normally called for unless the damage is more severe.”

“I see.” And it was making me a little queasy. Doctors don’t seem to realize that most of us are perfectly content not having to visualize ourselves as animated bags of skin filled with obscene glop.

“This in itself is enough reason not to see her for a couple of days. The changeover of intestinal flora has a pretty violent effect on the digestive system-not dangerous, since she’s under constant observation. But tiring and, well, embarrassing.

“With all of this, she would be completely out of danger if this were a normal clinical situation. But we’re decelerating at a constant l-1/2 gees, and her internal organs have gone through a lot of jumbling around. You might as well

THE FOREVER WAR 103

know that if we do any blasting, anything over about two gees, she’s going to die.” “But. . . but we’re bound to go over two on the final approach! What-”

“I know, I know. But that won’t be for a couple of weeks. Hopefully, she will have mended by then.

“William, face it. It’s a miracle she survived to get into surgery. So there’s a big chance she won’t make it back to Earth. It’s sad; she’s a special person, the special

person to you, maybe. But we’ve had so much death.. . you ought to be getting used to it, come to terms with it.”

I took a long pull at my drink, identical to hers except for the citric acid. “You’re getting pretty hard-boiled.”

“Maybe. . . no. Just realistic. I have a feeling we’re headed for a lot more death and sorrow.”

“Not me. As soon as we get to Stargate, I’m a civilian.”

“Don’t be so sure.” The old familiar argument. “Those clowns who signed us up for two years can just as easily make it four or-”

“Or six or twenty or the duration. But they won’t. It would be mutiny.”

“I don’t know. If they could condition us to kill on cue, they can condition us to do almost anything. Re-enlist.”

That was a chiller.

Later on we tried to make love, but both of us had too much to think about.

 

I got to see Marygay for the first time about a week later. She was wan, had lost a lot of weight and seemed very confused. Doc Wilson assured me that it was just the medication; they hadn’t seen any evidence of brain damage.

She was still in bed, still being fed through a tube. I began to get very nervous about the calendar. Every day there seemed to be some improvement, but if she was still in bed when we hit that collapsar push, she wouldn’t have a chance. I couldn’t get any encouragement from Doc Wilson or Estelle; they said it depended on Marygay’s resilience.

The day before the push, they transferred her from bed to Estelle’s acceleration couch in the infirmary. She was lucid and was taking food orally, but she still couldn’t move under her own power, not at I-1/2 gees.

I went to see her. “Heard about the course change? We have to go through Aleph- 9 to get back to Tet-38. Four more months on this damn hulk. But another six years’ combat pay when we get back to Earth.”

“That’s good.”

“Ah, just think of the great things we’ll-” “William.”

I let it trail off. Never could lie.

“Don’t try to jolly me. Tell me about vacuum welding, about your childhood, anything. Just don’t bulishit me about getting back to Earth.” She turned her face to the wall.

“I heard the doctors talking out in the corridor, one morning when they thought I was asleep. But it just confirmed what I already knew, the way everybody’d been moping around.

“So tell me, you were born in New Mexico in 1975. What then? Did you stay in New Mexico? Were you bright in school? Have any friends, or were you too bright like me? How old were you when you first got sacked?”

We talked in this vein for a while, uncomfortable. An idea came to me while we were rambling, and when I left Marygay I went straight to Dr. Wilson.

 

“We’re giving her  a fifty-fifty chance, but that’s pretty arbitrary. None of the published data on this sort of thing really fits.”

“But it is safe to say that her chances of survival are better, the less acceleration she has to endure.”

“Certainly. For what it’s worth. The commodore’s going to take it as gently as possible, but that’ll still be four or five gees. Three might even be too much; we won’t know until it’s over.”

I nodded impatiently. “Yes, but I think there’s a way to expose her to less acceleration than the rest of us.”

“If you’ve developed an acceleration shield,” he said smiling, “you better hurry and file a patent. You could sell it for a considerable-”

“No, Doc, it wouldn’t be worth much under normal conditions; our shells work better and they evolved from the same principles.”

“Explain away.”

“We put Marygay into a shell and flood-”

“Wait, wait. Absolutely not. A poorly-fitting shell was what caused this in the first place. And this time, she’d have to use somebody else’s.”

“I know, Doc, let me explain. It doesn’t have to fit her exactly as long as the life support hookups can function.

The shell won’t be pressurized on the inside; it won’t have to be because she won’t be subjected to those thousands of kilograms-per-square-centimeter pressure from the fluid outside.”

“I’m not sure I follow.”

“It’s just an adaptation of-you’ve studied physics, haven’t you?” “A little bit, in medical school. My worst courses, after Latin.” “Do you remember the principle of equivalence?”

“I remember there was something by that name. Something to do with relativity, right?”

“Uh-huh. It means that.. . there’s no difference being in a gravitational field and being in an equivalent accelerated frame of-it means that when the Anniversary is blasting five gees, the effect on us is the same as if it were sitting on its tail on a big planet, on one with five gees’ surface gravity.”

“Seems obvious.”

“Maybe it is. It means that there’s no experiment you could perform on the ship that could tell you whether you were blasting or just sitting on a big planet.”

“Sure there is. You could turn off the engines, and if-”

“Or you could look outside, sure; I mean isolated, physics-lab type experiments.” “All right. I’ll accept that. So?”

“You know Archimedes’ Law?”

“Sure, the fake crown-that’s what always got me about physics, they make a big to-do about obvious things, and when it gets to the rough parts-”

“Archimedes’ Law says that when you immerse something in a fluid, it’s buoyed up by a force equal to the weight of the fluid it displaces.”

“That’s reasonable.”

“And that holds, no matter what kind of gravitation or acceleration you’re in-In a ship blasting at five gees, the water displaced, if it’s water, weighs five times as much as regular water, at one gee.”

“Sure.”

“So if you float somebody in the middle of a tank of water, so that she’s weightless, she’ll still be weightless when the ship is doing five gees.”

“Hold on, son. You had me going there, but it won’t work.”

“Why not?” I was tempted to tell him to stick to his pills and stethoscopes and let me handle the physics, but it was a good thing I didn’t.

“What happens when you drop a wrench in a submarine?” “Submarine?”

“That’s right. They work by Archimedes’-”

“Ouch! You’re right. Jesus. Hadn’t thought it through.”

“That wrench fails right to the floor just as if the submarine weren’t weightless.” He looked off into space, tapping a pencil on the desk. “What you describe is similar to the way we treat patients with severe skin damage, like burns, on Earth. But it doesn’t give any support to the internal organs, the way the acceleration shells do, so it wouldn’t do Marygay any good.. . .”

I stood up to go. “Sorry I wasted-”

“Hold on there, though, just a minute. We might be able to use your idea part- way.”

“How do you mean?”

“I wasn’t thinking it through, either. The way we normally use the shells is out of the question for Marygay, of course.” I didn’t like to think about it. Takes a lot of hypno-conditioning to lie there and have oxygenated fluorocarbon forced into every natural body orifice and one artificial one. I fingered the valve fitting imbedded above my hipbone.

THE FOREVER WAR 107

“Yeah, that’s obvious, it’d tear her-say.. . you mean, low pressure-”

“That’s right. We wouldn’t need thousands of atmospheres to protect her against five gees’ straight-line acceleration; that’s only for all the swerving and dodging-I’m going to call Maintenance. Get down to your squad bay; that’s the one we’ll use. Dalton’ll meet you there.”

 

Five minutes before injection into the collapsar field, and  I started the flooding sequence. Marygay and I were the only ones in shells; my presence wasn’t really vital since the flooding and emptying could be done by Control. But it was safer to have redundancy in the system and besides, I wanted to be there.

It wasn’t nearly as bad as the nonnal routine; none of the crushing-bloating sensation. You were just suddenly filled with the plastic-smelling stuff (you never perceived the first moments, when it rushed in to replace the air in your lungs), and then there was a slight acceleration, and then you were breathing air again, waiting for the shell to pop; then unplugging and unzipping and climbing out- Marygay’s shell was empty. I walked over to it and saw

blood.

“She hemorrhaged.” Doc Wilson’s voice echoed sepulchrally. I turned, eyes stinging, and saw him leaning in the door to the locker alcove. He was unaccountably, horribly, smiling.

“Which was expected. Doctor Harmony’s taking care of it.           She’ll be just fine.”

Marygay was walking in another week, “Confratermzing” in two, and pronounced completely healed in six.

Ten long months in space and it was army, army, army all the way. Calisthenics, meaningless work details, compulsory lectures-there was even talk that they were going to reinstate the sleeping roster we’d had in basic, but they never did, probably out of fear of mutiny. A random partner every night wouldn’t have set too well with those of us who’d established more-or-less permanent pairs.

All this crap, this insistence on military discipline, bothered me mainly because I was afraid it meant they weren’t going to let us out. Marygay said I was being paranoid; they only did it because there was no other way to maintain order for ten months.

Most of the talk, besides the usual bitching about the army, was speculation about how much Earth would have changed and what we would do when we got out. We’d be fairly rich: twenty-six years’ salary all at once. Compound interest, too; the $500 we’d been paid for our first month in the army had grown to over $1500.

We arrived at Stargate in late 2023, Greenwich date.

 

The base had grown astonishingly in the nearly seventeen years we had been on the Yod-4 campaign. It was one building the size of Tycho City, housing nearly ten thousand. There were seventy-eight cruisers, the size of Anniversary or larger, involved in raids on Tauran-held portal planets. Another ten guarded Stargate itself, and two were in orbit waiting for their infantry and crew to be outprocessed. One other ship, the Earth’s Hope II, had returned from fighting and had been waiting at Stargate for another cruiser to return.

 

They had lost two-thirds of their crew, and it was just not economical to send a cruiser back to Earth with only thirty-nine people aboard. Thirty-nine confirmed civilians.

We went planetside in two scoutships. 7

General Botsford (who had only been a full major the first time we met him, when Stargate was two huts and twenty-four graves) received us in an elegantly appointed seminar room. He was pacing back and forth at the end of the room, in front of a huge holographic operations chart.

“You know,” he said, too loud, and then, more conversationally, “you know that we could disperse you into other strike forces and send you right out again. The Elite Conscription Act has been changed now, five years’ subjective in service instead of two.

“And I don’t see why some of you don’t want to stay in! Another couple of years and compound interest would make you independently wealthy for life. Sure, you took heavy losses-but that was inevitable, you were the first. Things are going to be easier now. The fighting suits have been improved, we know more about the Taurans’ tactics, our weapons are more effective. . . there’s no need to be afraid.”

He sat down at the head of the table and looked at nobody in particular.

“My own memories of combat are over a half-century old. To me it was exhilarating, strengthening. I must be a different kind of person than all of you.”

Or have a very selective memory, I thought.

“But that’s neither here nor there. I have one alternative to offer you, one that doesn’t involve direct combat.

“We’re very short of qualified instructors. The Force will offer any one of you a lieutenancy if you will accept a training position. It can be on Earth; on the Moon at double pay; on Charon at triple pay; or here at Stargate for quadruple pay. Furthermore, you don’t have to make up your mind now. You’re all getting a free trip back to Earth-I envy you, I haven’t been back in fifteen years,

THE FOREVER WAR 111

will probably never go back-and you can get the feel of being a civilian again. If you don’t like it, just walk into any UNEF installation and you’ll walk out an officer. Your choice of assignment.

“Some of you are smiling. I think you ought to reserve judgment. Earth is not the same place you left.”

He pulled a little card out of his tunic and looked at it, smiling. “Most of you have something on the order of four hundred thousand dollars coming to you, accumulated pay and interest. But Earth is on a war footing and, of course, it is the citizens of Earth who are supporting the war. Your income puts you in a ninety-two- percent income-tax bracket: thirty-two thousand might last you about three years if you’re careful.

“Eventually you’re going to have to get a job, and this is one job for which you are uniquely trained. There are not that many jobs available. The population of Earth is nearly nine billion, with five or six billion unemployed.

“Also keep in mind that your friends and sweethearts of two years ago are now going to be twenty-one years older than you. Many of your relatives will have passed away. I think you’ll find it a very lonely world.

“But to tell you something about this world, I’m going to turn you over to Captain Sin, who just arrived from Earth. Captain?”

“Thank you, General.” It looked as if there was something wrong with his skin, his face; and then I realized he was wearing powder and lipstick. His nails were smooth white almonds.

“I don’t know where to begin.” He sucked in his upper lip and looked at us, frowning. “Things have changed so very much since I was a boy.

“I’m twenty-three, so I was still in diapers when you people left for Aleph. . . to begin with, how many of you are homosexual?” Nobody. “That doesn’t really surprise me. I am, of course. I guess about a third of everybody in Europe and America is.

“Most governments encourage homosexuality-the United Nations is neutral, leaves it up to the individual

countries-they encourage homolife mainly because it’s the one sure method of birth control.”

That seemed specious to me. Our method of birth control in the army is pretty foolproof: all men making a deposit

in the sperm bank, and then vasectomy.

“As the General said, the population of the world is nine billion. It’s more than doubled since you were drafted. And nearly two-thirds of those people get out of school only to go on relief.

“Speaking of school, how many years of public schooling did the government give you?”

He was looking at me, so I answered. “Fourteen.”

He nodded. “It’s eighteen now. More, if you don’t pass your examinations. And you’re required by law to pass your exams before you’re eligible for any job or Class One relief. And brother-boy, anything besides Class One is hard to live on. Yes?” Hofstadter had his hand up.

“Sir, is it eighteen years public school in every country? Where do they find enough schools?”

“Oh, most people take the last five or six years at home or in a community center, via holoscreen. The UN has forty or fifty information channels, giving instruction twenty-four hours a day.

“But most of you won’t have to concern yourselves with that. If you’re in the Force, you’re already too smart by half.”

He brushed hair from his eyes in a thoroughly feminine gesture, pouting a little. “Let me do some history to you.

I guess the first really important thing that happened after you left was the Ration War.

“That was 2007. A lot of things happened at once. Locust plague in North America, rice blight from Burma to the South China Sea, red tides all along the west coast of South America: suddenly there just wasn’t enough food to go around. The UN stepped in and took over food distribution. Every man, woman, and child got a ration booklet, allowing thim to consume so many calories per month. If tha went over ther monthly allotment, tha just went hungry until the first of the next month.”

Some of the new people we’d picked up after Aleph used THE FOREVER WAR

113

“tha, ther, thini” instead of “he, his, him,” for the collective pronoun. I wondered whether it had become universal

“Of course, an illegal market developed, and soon there was great inequality in the amount of food people in various strata of society consumed. A vengeance group in Ecuador, the Imparciales, systematically began to assassinate people who appeared to be well-fed. The idea caught on pretty quickly, and in a few months there was a full-scale, undeclared class war going on all over the world. The United Nations managed to get things back under control in a year or so, by which time the population was down to four billion, crops were more or less recovered, and the food crisis was over. They kept the rationing, but it’s never been really severe again.

“Incidentally, the General translated the money coming to you into dollars just for your own convenience. The world has only one currency now, calories. Your thirty- two thousand dollars comes to about three thousand million calories. Or three million K’S, kilocalories.

“Ever since the Ration War, the UN has encouraged subsistence farming wherever it’s practical. Food you grow yourself, of course, isn’t rationed… . It got people out of the cities, onto UN farming reservations, which helped alleviate some urban problems. But subsistence farming seems to encourage large families, so the population of the world has more than doubled since the Ration War.

“Also, we no longer have the abundance of electrical power I remember from boyhood. . . probably a good deal less than you remember. There are only a few places in the world where you can have power all day and night. They keep saying it’s a temporary situation, but it’s been going on for over a decade.”

He went on like that for a long time. Well, bell, it wasn’t really surprising, much of it. We’d probably spent more time in the past two years talking about what home was

going to be like than about anything else. Unfortunately, most of the bad things we’d prognosticated seemed to have come true, and not many of the good things.

The worst thing for me, I guess, was that they’d taken over most of the good parkiand and subdivided it into little

farms. If you wanted to find some wilderness, you had to go someplace where they couldn’t possibly make a plant grow.

He said that the relations between people who chose homolife and the ones he called “breeders” were quite smooth, but I wondered. I never had much trouble accepting homosexuals myself, but then I’d never had to cope with such an abundance of them.

He also said, in answer to an impolite question, that his powder and paint had nothing to do with his sexual orientation. It was just stylish. I decided I’d be an anachronism and just wear my face.

I don’t guess it should have surprised me that language had changed considerably in twenty years. My parents were always saying things were “cool,” joints  were “grass,” and so on.

We had to wait several weeks before we could get a ride back to Earth. We’d be going back on the Anniversary, but first she had to be taken apart and put back together again.

Meanwhile, we were put in cozy little two-man billets and released from all military responsibilities. Most of us spent our days down at the library, trying to catch up on twenty-two years of current events. Evenings, we’d get to-.

gether at the Flowing Bowl, an NCO club. The privates, of course, weren’t supposed to be there, but we found that nobody argues with a person who has two of the fluorescent battle ribbons.

I was surprised that they served heroin fixes at the bar. The waiter said that you get a compensating shot to keep you from getting addicted to it. I got really stoned and tried one. Never again.

Sub-major Stott stayed at Stargate, where they were assembling a new Strike Force Alpha. The rest of us boarded the Anniversary and had a fairly pleasant six- month journey. Cortez didn’t insist on everything being capital-M military, so it was a lot better than the trip from Yod-4.

8

I hadn’t given it too much thought, but of course we were celebrities on Earth: the first vets home from the war. The Secretary General greeted us at Kennedy and we had a week-long whirl of banquets, receptions, interviews, and all that. It was enjoyable enough, and profitable-I made a million K’s from Time-Life/Fax-but we really saw little of Earth until after the novelty wore off and we were more or less allowed to go our own way.

I picked up the Washington monorail at Grand Central Station and headed home. My mother had met me at Kennedy, suddenly and sadly old, and told me my father was dead. Flyer accident. I was going to stay with her until I could get a job.

She was living in Columbia, a satellite of Washington. She had moved back into the city after the Ration War- having moved out in 1980-and then failing services and rising crime had forced her out again.

She was waiting for me at the monorail station. Beside her stood a blond giant in a heavy black vinyl unifonn, with a big gunpowder pistol on his hip and spiked brass knuckles on his right hand.

“William, this is Carl, my bodyguard and very dear friend.” Carl slipped off the knuckles long enough to shake hands with surprising gentleness. “Pleasameecha Misser Mandella.”

We got into a groundcar that had “Jefferson” written on it in bright orange letters. I thought that was an odd thing to name a car, but then found out that it was the name of the high-rise Mother and Carl lived in. The groundcar was one of several that belonged to the community, and she paid lOOK per kilometer for the use of it.

I had to admit that Columbia was rather pretty: formal gardens and lots of trees and grass. Even the high-rises,

roughly conical jumbles of granite with trees growing out at odd places, looked more like mountains than buildings.

We drove into the base of one of these mountains, down a well-lit corridor to where a number of other cars were parked. Carl carried my solitary bag to the elevator and set it down.

“Miz Mandella, if is awright witcha, I gots to go pick up Miz Freeman in like five. She over West Branch.”

“Sure, Carl, William can take care of me. He’s a soldier, you know.” That’s right, I remember learning eight silent ways to kill a man. Maybe if things got really tight, I could get a job like Carl’s.

“Righty-oh, yeah, you tol’ me. Whassit like, man?”

“Mostly boring,” I said automatically. “When you aren’t bored, you’re scared.”

He nodded wisely. “Thass what I heard. Miz Mandella, I be ‘vailable anytime after six. Riglny-oh?”

“That’s fine, Carl.”

The elevator came and a tall skinny boy stepped out, an unlit joint dangling from his lips. Carl ran his fingers over the spikes on his knuckles, and the boy walked rapidly away.

“Gots ta watch out fer them riders. T’care a yerseif, Miz Mandella.” We got on the elevator and Mother punched 47. “What’s a rider?”

“Oh, they’re just young toughs who ride up and down the elevators looking for defenseless people without bodyguards. They aren’t too much of a problem here.”

The forty-seventh floor was a huge mall filled with shops and offices. We went to a food store.

“Have you gotten your ration book yet, William?” I told her I hadn’t, but the Force had given me travel tickets worth a hundred thousand “calories” and I’d used up only half of them.

It was a little confusing, but they’d explained it to us.

When the world went on a single currency, they’d tried to coordinate it with the food rationing in some way, hoping to eventually eliminate the ration hooks, so they’d made the new currency K’S, kilocalories, because that’s the unit

THE FOREVER WAR 117

for measuring the energy equivalent of food. But a person who eats 2,000 kilocalones of steak a day obviously has to pay more than a person eating the same amount of bread.

So they  instituted a sliding “ration factor,” so complicated that nobody could understand it. After a few weeks they were using the books again, but calling food kilocalories “calories” in an attempt to make things less confusing.

Seemed to me they’d save a lot of trouble all around if they’d just call money dollars again, or rubles or sisterces or whatever. . . anything but kilocalories.

Food prices were astonishing, except for grains and legumes. I insisted on splurging on some good red meat: 1500 calories worth of ground beef,  costing 1730K. The same amount of fakesteak, made from soy beans, would have cost 80K.

I also got a head of lettuce for 140K and a little bottle of olive oil for 175ic Mother said she had some vinegar.

Started to buy some mushrooms but she said she had a neighbor who grew them and could trade something from her balcony garden.

At her apartment on the ninety-second floor, she apologized for the smallness of the place. It didn’t seem so little to me, but then she’d never lived on a spaceship.

Even this high up, there were bars on the windows. The door had four separate locks, one of which didn’t work because somebody had used a crowbar on it.

Mother went off to turn the ground beef into a meatloaf and I settled down with the evening ‘fax. She pulled some carrots from her little garden and called the mushroom lady, whose son came over to make the trade. He had a riot gun slung under his ann.

“Mother, where’s the rest of the Star?” I called into the kitchen. “As far as I know, it’s all there. What were you looking for?” “Well .. . I found the classified section, but no ‘Help Wanted.'”

She laughed. “Son, there hasn’t been a ‘Help Wanted’ ad in ten years. The government takes care of jobs . . . well, most of them.”

“Everybody works for the government?”

“No, that’s not it.” She came in, wiping her hands on a frayed towel. “The government, they tell us, handles the distribution of all natural resources. And there aren’t many resources more valuable than empty jobs.”

“Well, I’ll go talk to them tomorrow.”

“Don’t bother, son. How much retirement pay you say you’re getting from the Force?”

“Twenty thousand K a month. Doesn’t look like it’ll go far.”

“No, it won’t. But your father’s pension gave me less than half that, and they wouldn’t give me a job. Jobs are assigned on a basis of need. And you’ve got to be living on rice and water before the Employment Board considers you needy.”

“Well, hell, it’s a bureaucracy-there must be somebody I can pay off, slip me into a good-”

“No. Sorry, that’s one part of the UN that’s absolutely incorruptible. The whole shebang is cybernetic, untouched by human souls. You can’t-”

“But you said you had a job!”

“I was getting to that. If you want a job badly enough, you can go to a dealer and sometimes get a hand-me-down.”

“Hand-me-down? Dealer?”

“Take my job as an example, son. A woman named Halley Williams has a job in a hospital, running a machine that analyzes blood, a chromatography machine. She works six nights a week, for 12,000K a week. She gets tired of working, so she contacts a dealer and lets him know that her job is available.

“Some time before this, I’d given the dealer his initial fee of 50,000K to get on his list. He comes by and describes the job to me and I say fine, I’ll take it. He knew I

would and already has fake identification and a uniform. He distributes small bribes to the various supervisors who might know Miss Williams by sight.

“Miss Williams shows me how to run the machine and quits. She still gets the weekly 12,000K credited to her account, but she pays me half. I pay the dealer ten percent and wind up with 5400K per week. This, added to the nine grand I get monthly from your father’s pension, makes me quite comfortable.

“Then it gets complicated. Finding myself with plenty of money and too little time, I contact the dealer again, offering to sublet half my job. The next day a girl shows up who also has ‘Halley Williams’ identification. I show her how to run the machine, and she takes over Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Half of my real salary is 2700K, so she gets half that, 1350K, and pays the dealer 135.”

She got a pad an4 a stylus and did some figuring. “So the real Hailey Williams gets 6000K weekly for doing nothing. I work three days a week for 4050K. My assistant works three days for 1115K. The dealer gets 100,000K in fees and 735K per week. Lopsided, isn’t it?”

“Hmm. . . I’ll say. Quite illegal, too, I suppose.”

“For the dealer. Everybody else might lose their job and have to start over, if the Employment Board finds out. But the dealer gets brainwiped.”

“Guess I better find a dealer, while I can still afford the fifty-grand bite.” Actually, I still had over three million, but planned to run through most of it in a short time. Hell, I’d earned it.

 

I was getting ready to go the next morning when Mother came in with a shoebox. Inside, there was a small pistol in a clip-on holster.

“This belonged to your father,” she explained. “Better wear it if you’re planning to go downtown without a bodyguard.”

It was a gunpowder pistol with ridiculously thin bullets. I hefted it in my hand. “Did Dad ever use it?”

“Several times. . . just to scare away riders and hitters, though. He never actually shot anybody.”

“You’re probably right that I need a gun,” I said, putting it back. “But I’d have to have something with more heft to it. Can I buy one legally?”

“Sure, there’s a gun store down in the Mall. As long as you don’t have a police record, you can buy anything that suits you.” Good, I’d get a little pocket laser. I could hardly hit the wall with a gunpowder pistol.

“But.. . William, I’d feel a lot better if you’d hire a bodyguard, at least until you know your way around.” We’d gone all around that last night. Being an official Trained Killer, I thought I was tougher than any clown I might hire for the job.

“I’ll check into it, Mother. Don’t worry-I’m not even going downtown today, just into Hyattsville.”

“That’s just as bad.”

When the elevator came, it was already occupied. He looked at me blandly as I got in, a man a little older than me, clean-shaven and well dressed. He stepped back to let me at the row of buttons. I punched 47 and then, realizing his motive might not

have been politeness, turned to see him struggling to get at a metal pipe stuck in his waistband. It had been hidden by his cape.

“Come  on, fella,”  I said, reaching for a  nonexistent  weapon. “You  wanna  get caulked?”

He had the pipe free but let it hang loosely at his side. “Caulked?”

“Killed. Anny term.” I took one step toward him, trying to remember. Kick just under the knee, then either groin or kidney. I decided on the groin.

“No.” He put the pipe back in his waistband. “I don’t want to get ‘caulked.'” The door opened at 47 and I backed out.

The gun shop was all bright white plastic and gleamy black metal. A little bald man bobbed over to wait on me. He had a pistol in a shoulder rig.

“And a fine morning to you, sir,” he said and giggled. “What will it be today?” “Lightweight pocket laser,” I said. “Carbon dioxide.”

He looked at me quizzically and then brightened. “Coming right up, sir.” Giggle. “Special today, I throw in a handful of tachyon grenades.”

“Fine.” They’d be handy.

He looked at me expectantly. “So? What’s the popper?” “Huh?”

“The punch, man; you set me up, now knock me down. Laser.” He giggled. I was beginning to understand. “You mean I can’t buy a laser.”

“Of course not, sweetie,” he said and sobered. “You didn’t know that?” “I’ve been out of the country for a long time.”

“The world, you mean. You’ve been out Of the world a long time.” He put his left hand on a chubby hip in a gesture that incidentally made his gun easier to get. He scratched the center of his chest.

I stood very still. “That’s right. I just got out of the Force.”

His  jaw  dropped.  “Hey,  no  bully-bull?  You  been  out  shootin’  ’em  up, out in space?”

“That’s right.”

“Hey, all that crap about you not gettin’ older, there’s nothin’ to that, is there?” “Oh, it’s true. I was born in 1975.”

“Well, god . . . damn. You’re almost as old as I am.”

He giggled. “I thought that was just something the government made up.” “Anyhow. . . you say I can’t buy a laser-”

“Oh, no. No no no. I run a legal shop here.” “What can I buy?”

“Oh, pistol, rifle, shotgun, knife, body armor. . . just no lasers or explosives or fully automatic weapons.”

“Let me see a pistol. The biggest you have.”

“Ah, I’ve got just the thing.” He motioned me over to a display case and opened the back, taking out a huge revolver.

“Four-ten-gauge six-shooter.” He cradled it in both hands. “Dinosaur-stopper. Authentic Old West styling. Slugs or flechettes.”

“Flechettes?”

“Sure-uh, they’re like a bunch of tiny darts. You shoot and they spread out in a pattern. Hard to miss that way.”

Sounded like my speed. “Anyplace I can try it out?”

“‘Course, of course, we have a range in back. Let me get my assistant.” He rang a bell and a boy caine out to

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watch the store while we went in back. He picked up a red-and-green box of shotgun shells on the way.

The range was in two sections, a little anteroom with a plastic transparent door and a long corridor on the other side of the door with a table at one end and targets at the other. Behind the targets was a sheet of metal that evidently deflected the bullets down into a pool of water.

He loaded the pistol and set it on the table. “Please don’t pick it up until the door’s closed.” He went into the anteroom, closed the door, and picked up a microphone. “Okay. First time, you better hold on to it with both hands.” I did so, raising it up in line with the center target, a square of paper looking about the size of your thumbnail at arm’s length. Doubted I’d even come near it. I pulled the trigger and it went back easily enough, but nothing happened.

“No, no,” he said over the microphone with a tinny giggle. “Authentic Old West styling. You’ve got to pull the hammer back.”

Sure, just like in the flicks. I hauled the hammer back, lined it up again, and squeezed the trigger.

The noise was so loud it made my face sting. The gun bucked up and almost hit me on the forehead. But the three center targets were gone: just tiny tatters of paper drifting in the air.

“I’ll take it.”

He sold me a hip holster, twenty shells, a chest-and-back shield, and a dagger in a boot sheath. I felt more heavily armed than I had in a fighting suit. But no waldos to help me cart it around.

The monorail had two guards for each car. I was beginning to feel that all my heavy artillery was superfluous, until I got off at the Hyattsville station.

Everyone who got off at Hyattsville was either heavily armed or had a bodyguard. The people loitering around the station were all armed. The police carried lasers.

I pushed a “cab call” button, and the readout told me mine would be No. 3856. I asked a policeman and he told me to wait for it down on the street; it would cruise around the block twice.

THE FOREVER WAR 123

During the five minutes I waited, I twice heard staccato arguments of gunfire, both of them rather far away. I was glad I’d bought the shield.

Eventually the cab came. It swerved to the curb when I waved at it, the door sliding open as it stopped. Looked as if it worked the same way as the autocabs I remembered. The door stayed open while it checked the thumbprint to verify that I was the one who had called, then slammed shut. It was thick steel. The view through the windows was dim and distorted; probably thick bulletproof plastic. Not quite the same as I remembered.

I had to leaf through a grimy book to find the code for the address of the bar in Hyattsville where I was supposed to meet the dealer. I punched it out and sat back to watch the city go by.

This part of town was mostly residential: grayed-brick warrens built around the middle of the last century competing for space with more modern modular setups and, occasionally, individual houses behind tall brick or concrete walls with jagged

broken glass and barbed wire at the top. A few people seemed to be going somewhere, walking very quickly down the sidewalks, hands on weapons. Most of the people I saw were either sitting in doorways, smoking, or loitering  around shopfronts in groups of no fewer than six. Everything was dirty and cluttered. The gutters were clotted with garbage, and shoals of waste paper drifted with the wind of the light traffic.

It was understandable, though; street-sweeping was probably a very high-risk profession.

The cab pulled up in front of Tom & Jerry’s Bar and Grill and let me out after I paid 430K. I stepped to the sidewalk with my hand on the shotgun-pistol, but there was nobody around. I hustled into the bar.

It was surprisingly clean on the inside, dimly lit and furnished in fake leather and fake pine. I went to the bar and got some fake bourbon and, presumably, real water for 120K. The water cost 20K. A waitress came over with a tray.

“Pop one, brother-boy?” The tray had a rack of oldfashioned hypodermic needles. Joe Haldeman

124

“Not today, thanks.” If I was going to “pop one,” I’d use an aerosol. The needles looked unsanitary and painful.

She set the dope down on the bar and eased onto the stool next to me. She sat with her chin cupped in her palm and stared at her reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

“God. Tuesdays.”

I mumbled something.

“You wanna go in back fer a quickie?”

I looked at her with what I hoped was a neutral expression. She was wearing only a short skirt of some gossamer material, and it plunged in a shallow V in the front, exposing her hipbones and a few bleached pubic hairs. I wondered what could possibly keep it up. She wasn’t bad looking, could have been anywhere from her late twenties to her early forties. No telling what they could do with cosmetic surgery and makeup nowadays, though. Maybe she was older than my mother.

“Thanks anyhow.” “Not today?” “That’s right.”

“I can get you a nice boy, if-” “No. No thanks.” What a world.

She pouted into the mirror, an expression that was probably older than Hoino sapiens. “You don’t like me.”

“I like you fine. That’s just not what I caine here for.”

“Well. . . different funs for different ones.” She shrugged. “Hey, Jerry. Get me a short beer.”

He brought it.

“Oh, damn, my purse is locked up. Mister, can you spare forty calories?” I had enough ration tickets to take care of a whole banquet. Tore off a fifty and gave it to the bartender.

“Jesus.” She stared. “How’d you get a full book at the end of the month?”

I told her in as few words as possible who I was and how I managed to have so many calories. There had been two months’ worth of books waiting in my mail, and I hadn’t even used up the ones the Force had given me. She offered to buy a book from me for ten grand, but I didn’t

want to get involved in more than one illegal enterprise at a time.

Two men came in, one unarmed and the other with both a pistol and a riot gun. The bodyguard sat by the door and the other came over to me.

“Mr. Mandella?” “That’s right.”

“Shall we take a booth?” He didn’t offer his name.

He had a cup of coffee, and I sipped a mug of beer. “I don’t keep any written records, but I have an excellent memory. Tell me what sort of a job you’re interested in, what your qualifications are, what salary you’ll accept, and so on.”

I told him I’d prefer to wait for a job where I could use my physics-teaching or research, even engineering. I wouldn’t need a job for two or three months, since I planned to travel and spend money for a while. Wanted at least 20,000K monthly, but how much I’d accept would depend on the nature of the job.

He didn’t say a word until I’d finished. “Righty-oh. Now, I’m afraid. . . you’d have a hard time, getting a job in physics. Teaching is out; I can’t supply jobs where the person is constantly exposed to the public. Research, well, your degree is almost a quarter of a century old. You’d have to go back to school, maybe five or six years.”

“Might do that,” I said.

“The one really marketable feature you have is your combat experience. I could probably place you in a supervisory job at a bodyguard agency for even more than twenty grand. You could make almost that much, being a bodyguard yourself.”

“Thanks, but I wouldn’t want to take chances for somebody else’s hide.”

“Righty-oh. Can’t say I blame you.” He finished his coffee in a long slurp. “Well, I’ve got to run, got a thousand things to do. I’ll keep you in mind and talk to some people.”

“Good. I’ll see you in a few months.”

“Righty-oh. Don’t need to make an appointment. I come

in here every day at eleven for coffee. Just show up.”

I finished my beer and called a cab to take me home. I wanted to walk around the city, but Mother was right. I’d get a bodyguard first.

9

I came home and the phone was blinking pale blue. Didn’t know what to do so I punched “Operator.”

A pretty young girl’s head materialized in the cube. “Jefferson operator,” she said. “May I help you?”

“Yes. . . what does it mean when the cube is blinking blue?” “Huh?”

“What does it mean when the phone-”

“Are you serious?” I was getting a little tired of this kind of thing. “It’s a long story. Honest, I don’t know.”

“When it blinks blue you’re supposed to call the operator.” “Okay, here I am.”

“No, not me, the real operator. Punch nine. Then punch zero.” I did that and an old harridan appeared. “Ob-a-ray-duh.”

“This is William Mandella at 301-52-574-3975. I was supposed to call you.”

“Juzza segun.” She reached outside the field of view and typed something. “You god.da call from 605-19-556-2027.”

I scribbled it down on the pad by the phone. “Where’s that?” “Juzza segun. South Dakota.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t know anybody in South Dakota.

A pleasant-looking old woman answered the phone. “Yes?” “I had a call from this number. . . uh… I’m-”

“Oh. Sergeant Mandella! Just a second.”

I watched the diagonal bar of the holding pattern for a second, then fifty or so more. Then a head came into focus.

Marygay. “William. I had a heck of a time finding you.” Lz~j

Joe Ilaldeman

“Darling, me too. What are you doing in South Dakota?”

“My parents live here, in a little commune. That’s why it took me so long to get to the phone.” She held up two grimy hands. “Digging potatoes.”

“But when I checked.. . the records said-the records in Tucson said your parents were both dead.”

“No, they’re just dropouts-you know about dropouts?- new name, new life. I got the word through a cousin.”

“Well-well, how’ve you been? Like the country life?”

“That’s one reason I’ve been wanting to get you. Willy, I’m bored. It’s all very healthy and nice, but I want to do something dissipated and wicked. Naturally I thought of you.,,

“I’m flattered. Pick you up at eight?”

She checked a clock above the phone. “No, look, let’s get a good night’s sleep. Besides, I’ve got to get in the rest of the potatoes. Meet me at. . . the Ellis Island jetport at ten tomorrow morning. Mmm. . . Trans-World information desk.”

“Okay. Make reservations for where?” She shrugged. “Pick a place.” “London used to be pretty wicked.”

“Sounds good. First class?”

“What else? I’ll get us a suite on one of the dirigibles.” “Good. Decadent. How long shall I pack for?”

“We’ll buy clothes along the way. Travel light. Just one stuffed wallet apiece.” She giggled. “Wonderful. Tomorrow at ten.”

“Fine-ub. . . Marygay, do you have a gun?” “It’s that bad?”

“Here around Washington it is.”

“Well, I’ll get one. Dad has a couple over the fireplace. Guess they’re left over from Tucson.”

“We’ll hope we won’t need them.”

“Willy, you know it’ll just be for decoration. I couldn’t even kill a Tauran.”

“Of course.” We just looked at each other for a second. “Tomorrow at ten, then.” “Right. Love you.”

”lJh . .

She giggled again and hung up.

That was just too many things to think about all at once.

I got us two round-the-world dirigible tickets; unlimited stops as long as you kept going east. It took me a little over two hours to get to Ellis by autocab and monorail. I was early, but so was Marygay.

She was talking to the girl at the desk and didn’t see me coming. Her outfit was really arresting, a tight coverall of plastic in a pattern of interlocking hands; as your angle of sight changed, various strategic hands became transparent. She had a ruddy sun-glow all over her body. I don’t know whether the feeling that rushed over me was simple honest lust or something more complicated. I hurried up behind her.

Whispering: “What are we going to do for three hours?” She turned and gave me a quick hug and thanked the girl at the desk, then grabbed my hand and pulled me along to a slidewalk.

“Um.. . where are we headed?”

“Don’t ask questions, Sergeant. Just follow me.”

We stepped onto a roundabout and transferred to an eastbound slidewalk. “Do you want something to eat or drink?” she asked innocently.

I tried to leer. “Any alternatives?”

She laughed gaily. Several people stared. “Just a second here!” We jumped off. It was a corridor marked

“Roomettes.” She handed me a key.

That damned plastic coverall was held on by static electricity. Since the roomette was nothing but a big waterbed, I almost broke my neck the first time it shocked me.

I recovered.

We were lying on our stomachs, looking through the one-way glass wall at the people rushing around down on the concourse. Marygay passed me a joint.

“William, have you used that thing yet?” “What thing?”

“That hawg-leg. The pistol.” 130

Joe Haldeman

“Only shot it once, in the store where I bought it.”

“Do you really think you could point it at someone and blow him apart?”

I took a shallow puff and passed it back. “Hadn’t given it much thought, really. Until we talked last night.”

“Well?”

“I. . . I don’t really know. The only time I’ve killed was on Aleph, under hypnotic compulsion. But I don’t think it would. . . bother me, not that much, not if the person was trying to kill me in the first place. Why should it?”

“Life,” she said plaintively, “life is. . .”

“Life is a bunch of cells walking around with a common purpose. If that common purpose is to get my ass-”

“Oh,William. You sound like old Cortez.” “Cortez kept us alive.”

“Not many of us,” she snapped.

I rolled over and studied the ceiling tiles. She traced little designs on my chest, pushing the sweat around with her fingertip. “I’m sorry, William. I guess we’re both just trying to adjust.”

“That’s okay. You’re right, anyhow.”

We talked for a long time. The only urban center Mary-gay had been to since our publicity rounds (which were very sheltered) was Sioux Falls. She had gone with her

parents and the commune bodyguard. It sounded like a scaled-down version of Washington: the same problems, but not as acute.

We ticked off the things that bothered us: violence, high cost of living, too many people everywhere. I’d have added homolife, but Marygay said I just didn’t appreciate the social dynamic that had led to it; it had been inevitable. The only thing she said she had against it was that it took so many of the prettiest men out of circulation.

And the main thing that was wrong was that everything seemed to have gotten just a little worse, or at best remained the same. You would have predicted that at least a few facets of everyday life would improve markedly in twenty-two years. Her father contended the War was behind it all: any person who showed a shred of talent was sucked

up by UNEF; the very best fell to the Elite Conscription Act and wound up being cannon fodder.

It was hard not to agree with him. Wars in the past often accelerated social reform, provided technological benefits, even sparked artistic activity. This one, however, seemed tailor-made to provide none of these positive by-products. Such improvements as had been made on late-twentieth-century technology were-like tachyon bombs and warships two kilometers long-at best, interesting developments of things that only required the synergy of money and existing engineering techniques. Social reform? The world was technically under martial law. As for art, I’m not sure I know good from bad. But artists to some extent have to reflect the temper of the times. Paintings and sculpture were full of torture and dark brooding; movies seemed static and plotless; music was dominated by nostalgic revivals of earlier forms; architecture was mainly concerned with finding someplace to put everybody; literature was damn near incomprehensible. Most people seemed to spend most of their time trying to find ways to outwit the government, trying to scrounge a few extra K’s or ration tickets without putting their lives in too much danger.

And in the past, people whose country was at war were constantly in contact with the war. The newspapers would be full of reports, veterans would return from the front sometimes the front would move right into town, invaders marching down Main Street or bombs whistling through the night air-but always the sense of either working toward victory or at least delaying defeat. The enemy was a tangible thing, a propagandist’s monster whom you could understand, whom you could hate.

But this war. . . the enemy was a curious organism only vaguely understood, more often the subject of cartoons than nightmares. The main effect of the war on the home front was economic, unemotional-more taxes but more jobs as well. After twenty-two years, only twenty-seven returned veterans; not enough to make a decent parade. The most important fact about the war to most people was that if it ended suddenly, Earth’s economy would collapse.

You approached the dirigible by means of a small propeller-driven aircraft that drifted up to match trajectories and docked alongside. A clerk took our baggage and we checked our weapons with the purser, then went outside.

Just about everybody on the flight was standing out on the promenade deck, watching Manhattan creep toward the horizon. It was an eerie sight. The day was very still, so the bottom thirty or forty stories of the buildings were buried in smog. It looked like a city built on a cloud, a thunderhead floating. We watched it for a while and then went inside to eat.

The meal was elegantly served and simple: filet of beef, two vegetables, wine. Cheese and fruit and more wine for dessert. No fiddling with ration tickets; a loophole in the rationing laws implied that they were not required for meals consumed en route, on intercontmental transport.

We spent a lazy, comfortable three days crossing the Atlantic. The dirigibles had been a new thing when we first left Earth, and now they had turned out to be one of the few successful new financial ventures of the late twentieth century.. . the company that built them had bought up a few obsolete nuclear weapons; one bomb- sized hunk of plutonium would keep the whole fleet in the air for years. And, once launched, they never did come down. Floating hotels, supplied and maintained by regular shuttles, they were one last vestige of luxury in a world where nine billion people had something to eat, and almost nobody had enough.

London was not as dismal from the air as New York City had been; the air was clean even if the Thames was poison. We packed our handbags, claimed our weapons, and landed on a VTO pad atop the London Hilton. We rented a couple of tricycles at the hotel and, maps in hand, set off for Regent Street, planning on dinner at the venerable Cafe Royal.

The tricycles were little armored vehicles, stabilized gyroscopically so they couldn’t be tipped over. Seemed overly cautious for the part of London we traveled through, but I

supposed there were probably sections as rough as Washington.

I got a dish of marinated venison and Marygay got salmon; both very good but astoundingly expensive. At first I was a bit overawed by the huge room, filled with plush and mirrors and faded gilding, very quiet even with a dozen tables occupied, and we talked in whispers until we realized that was foolish.

Over coffee I asked Marygay what the deal was with her parents.

“Oh, it happens often enough,” she said. “Dad got mixed up in some ration ticket thing. He’d gotten some black market tickets that turned out to be counterfeit. Cost him his job and he probably would have gone to jail, but while he was waiting for trial a bodysnatcher got him.”

“Bodysnatcher?”

“That’s right. All the commune organizations have them. They’ve got to get reliable farm labor, people who aren’t eligible for relief. . . people who can’t just lay down their tools and walk off when it gets rough. Almost everybody can get enough assistance to stay alive, though; everyone who isn’t on the government’s fecal roster.”

“So he skipped out before his trial came up?”

She nodded. “It was a case of choosing between commune life, which he knew wasn’t easy, and going on the dole after a few years’ working on a prison farm; exconvicts can’t get legitimate jobs. They had to forfeit their condominium, which

they’d put up for bail, but the government would’ve gotten that anyhow, once he was in jail.

“So the bodysnatcher offered him and Mother new identities, transportation to the commune, a cottage, and a plot of land. They took it.”

“Arid what did the bodysnatcher get?”

“He himself probably didn’t get anything. The commune got their ration tickets; they were allowed to keep their money, although they didn’t have very much-”

“What happens if they get caught?”

“Not a chance.” She laughed. “The communes provide over half the country’s produce-they’re really just an unofficial arm of the government. I’m sure the CBI knows

Joe Haldeman 134

exactly where they are.. . . Dad grumbles that it’s just a fancy way of being in jail anyhow.”

“What a weird setup.”

“Well, it keeps the land farmed.” She pushed her empty dessert plate a symbolic centimeter away from her. “And they’re eating better than most people, better than they ever had in the city. Mom knows a hundred ways to fix chicken and potatoes.”

After dinner we went to a musical show. The hotel had gotten us tickets to a “cultural translation” of the old rock opera Hair. The program explained that they had taken some liberties with the original choreography, because back in those days they didn’t allow actual coition on stage. The music was pleasantly old-fashioned, but neither of us was quite old enough to work up any bluriy-eyed nostalgia over

  1. it. Still, it was much more enjoyable than the movies I’d seen, and some of the physical feats perfonned were quite inspiring. We slept late the next morning.

 

We dutifully watched the changing of the guard at Buckingham Palace, walked through the British Museum, ate fish and chips, ran up to Stratford-on-Avon and caught the Old Vic doing an incomprehensible play about a mad king, and didn’t get into any trouble until the day before we were to leave for Lisbon.

It was about 2 A.M. and we were tooling our tricycles down a nearly deserted thoroughfare. Turned a corner and there was a gang of boys beating the hell out of someone. I screeched to the curb and leaped out of my vehicle, firing the shotgun- pistol over their heads.

It was a girl they were attacking; it was rape. Most of them scattered, but one pulled a pistol out of his coat and I shot him. I remember trying to aim for his arm. The blast hit his shoulder and ripped off his arm and what seemed to be half of his chest; it flung him two meters to the side of a building and he must have been dead before he hit the ground.

The others ran, one of them shooting at me with a little pistol as he went. I watched him trying to kill me for the longest time before it occurred to me to shoot back. I sent

‘l’HE FOREVER WAR 135

one blast way high and he dove into an alley and disappeared.

The girl looked dazedly around,  saw the mutilated body  of her attacker, and staggered to her feet and ran off screaming, naked from the waist down. I knew I should

have tried to stop her, but I couldn’t find my voice and my

feet seemed nailed to the sidewalk. A tricycle door slammed and Marygay was beside me.

“What hap-” She gasped, seeing the dead man. “Whwhat was he doing?”

I just stood there stupefied. I’d certainly seen enough death these past two years, but this was a different thing

  • . . there was nothing noble in being crushed to death by the failure of some electronic component, or in having your suit fail and freeze you solid; or even dying in a shoot-out with the incomprehensible enemy. . . but death seemed natural in that setting. Not on a quaint little street in old-fashioned London, not for trying to steal what most people would give

Marygay was pulling my arm. “We’ve got to get out of here. They’ll brainwipe you!”

She was tight. I turned and took one step and fell to the concrete. I looked down at the leg that had betrayed me and bright red blood was pulsing out of a small hole in my calf. Marygay tore a strip of cloth from her blouse  and started to bind it. I remember thinking it wasn’t a big enough wound to go into shock over, but my ears started to ring and I got lightheaded and everything went red and fuzzy. Before I went under, I heard a siren wailing in the distance.

 

Fortunately, the police also picked up the girl, who was wandering down the street a few blocks away. They compared her version of the thing with mine, both of us under hypnosis. They let me go with a stern admonition to leave law enforcement up to professional law enforcers.

I wanted to get out of the cities: just put a pack on my back and wander through the woods for a while, get my mind straightened out. So did Marygay. But we tried to make arrangements and found that the country was worse

than the cities. Farms were practically armed camps, the areas between ruled by nomad gangs who survived by making lightning raids into villages and farms, murdering and plundering for a few minutes, and then fading back into the forest, before help could arrive.

Still, Britishers called their island “the most civilized country in Europe.” From what we’d heard about France and Spain and Germany, especially Germany, they were probably right.

I talked it over with Marygay, and we decided to cut short our tour and go back to the States.~We could finish the tour after we’d become acclimated to the twenty-first century. It was just too much foreignness to take in one dose.

The dirigible line refunded most of our money and we took a conventional suborbital flight back home. The high altitude made my leg throb, though it was nearly healed.

They’d made great strides in the treatment of gunshot wounds, in the past twenty years. Lots of practice.

We split up at Ellis. Her description of commune life appealed to me more than the city; I made arrangements to join her after a week or so, and went back to Washington.

10

I rang the bell and a strange woman answered the door, opening it a couple of centimeters and peering through.

“Pardon me,” I said, “isn’t this Mrs. Mandella’s residence?”

“Oh, you must be William!” She closed the door and unfastened the chains and opened it wide. “Beth, look who’s here!”

My mother came into the living room from the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. “Willy.. . what are you doing back so soon?”

“Well, it’s-it’s a long story.”

“Sit down, sit down,” the other woman said. “Let me get you a drink, don’t start till I get back.”

“Wait,” my mother said. “I haven’t even introduced you two. William, this is Rhonda Wilder. Rhonda, William.”

“I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you,” she said. “Beth has told me all about you-one cold beer, right?”

“Right.” She was likable enough, a trim middle-aged woman. I wondered why I hadn’t met her before. I asked my mother whether she was a neighbor.

“Uh. . . really more than that, William. She’s been my roommate for a couple of years. That’s why I had an extra room when you came home-a single person isn’t allowed two bedrooms.”

“But why-”

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want you to feel that you were putting her out of her room while you stayed here. And you weren’t, actually; she has-”

“That’s right.” Rhonda came in with the beer. “I’ve got relatives in Pennsylvania, out in the country. I can stay with them any time.”

“Thanks.” I took the beer. “Actually, I won’t be here long. I’m kind of en route to South Dakota. I could find another place to flop.”

“Oh, no,” Rhonda said. “I can take the couch.” I was too old-fashioned male- chauv to allow that; we discussed it for a minute and I wound up with the couch.

I filled Rhonda in on who Marygay was and told them about our disturbing experiences in England, how we came back to get our bearings. I had expected my mother to be horrified that I had killed a man, but she accepted it without comment. Rhonda clucked a little bit about our being out in a city after midnight, especially without a bodyguard.

We talked on these and other topics until late at night, when Mother called her bodyguard and went off to work.

Something had been nagging at me all night, the way Mother and Rhonda acted toward each other. I decided to bring it out into the open, once Mother was gone.

“Rhonda-” I settled down in the chair across from her. I didn’t know exactly how to put it. “What, ub, what exactly is your relationship with my mother?”

She took a long drink. “Good friends.” She stared at me with a mixture of defiance and resignation. “Very good friends. Sometimes lovers.”

I felt very hollow and lost. My mother?

“Listen,” she continued. “You had better stop trying to live in the nineties. This may not be the best of all possible worlds, but you’re stuck with it.”

She crossed and took my hand, almost kneeling in front of me. Her voice was softer. “William. . . look, I’m only two years older than you are-that is, I was born two years before-what I mean is, I can understand how you feel. B-your mother understands too. It, our. . . relationship, wouldn’t be a secret to anybody else. It’s perfectly normal. A lot has changed, these twenty years. You’ve got to change too.”

I didn’t say anything.

She stood up and said firmly, “You think, because your mother is sixty, she’s outgrown her need for love? She needs it more than you do. Even now. Especially now.”

Accusation in her eyes. “Especially flOW with you com THE FOREVER WAR

139

ing back from the dead past. Reminding her of how old she is. How-old I am, twenty years younger.” Her voice quavered and cracked, and she ran to her room.

I wrote Mother a note saying that Marygay had called; an emergency had come up and I had to go immediately to South Dakota. I called a bodyguard and left.

 

A whining, ozone-leaking, battered old bus let me out at the intersection of a bad road and a worse one. It had taken me an hour to go the 2000 kilometers to Sioux Falls, two hours to get a chopper to Geddes, 150 kilometers away, and three hours waiting and jouncing on the dilapidated bus to go the last 12 kilometers to Freehold, an organization of communes where the Potters had their acreage. I wondered if the progression was going to continue and I would be four hours walking down this dirt road to the farm.

It was a half-hour before I even came to a building. My bag was getting intolerably heavy and the bulky pistol was chafing my hip. I walked up a stone path to the door of a simple plastic dome and pulled a string that caused a bell to tinkle inside. A peephole darkened.

“Who is it?” Voice muffled by thick wood. “Stranger asking directions.”

“Ask.” I couldn’t tell whether it was a woman or a child. “I’m looking for the Potters’ farm.”

“Just a second.” Footsteps went away and came back.

“Down the road one point nine klicks. Lots of potatoes and green beans on your right. You’ll probably smell the chickens.”

“Thanks.”

“If you want a drink we got a pump out back. Can’t let you in without my husband’s at home.”

“1 understand. Thank you.” The water was metallic-tasting but wonderfully cool.

I wouldn’t know a potato or green bean plant if it stood up and took a bite out of my ankle, but I knew how to walk a half-meter step. So I resolved to count to 3800 arid take a deep breath. I supposed I could tell the difference between the smell of chicken manure and the absence thereof.

At 3650 there was a rutted path leading to a complex of

plastic domes and rectangular buildings apparently made of sod. There was a pen enclosing a small population explosion of chickens. They had a smell but it wasn’t strong.

Halfway down the path, a door opened and Marygay came running out, wearing one tiny wisp of cloth. After a slippery but gratifying greeting, she asked what I was doing here so early.

“Oh, my mother had friends staying with her. I didn’t want to put them out. Suppose I should have called.”

“Indeed you should have. . . save you a long dusty walk-but we’ve got plenty of room, don’t worry about that.”

She took me inside to meet her parents, who greeted me warmly and made me feel definitely overdressed. Their faces showed their age but their bodies had no sag and few wrinkles.

Since dinner was an occasion, they let the chickens live and instead opened a can of beef, steaming it along with a cabbage and some potatoes. To my plain tastes it was equal to most of the gourmet fare we’d had on the dirigible and in London.

Over coffee and goat cheese (they apologized for not having wine; the commune would have a new vintage out in a couple of weeks), I asked what kind of work I could do.

“Will,” Mr. Potter said, “I don’t mind telling you that your coming here is a godsend. We’ve got five acres that are just sitting out there, fallow, because we don’t have enough hands to work them. You can take the plow tomorrow and start breaking up an acre at a time.”

“More potatoes, Daddy?” Marygay asked.

“No, no.. . not this season. Soybeans-cash crop and good for the soil. And Will, at night we all take turns standing guard. With four of us, we ought to be able to do a lot more sleeping.” He took a big slurp of coffee. “Now, what else. . .”

“Richard,” Mrs. Potter said, “tell him about the greenhouse.” “That’s right, yes, the greenhouse. The commune has a

two-acre greenhouse down about a click from here,  by the recreation center. Mostly grapes and tomatoes. Everybody spends one morning or one afternoon a week there.

“Why don’t you children go down there tonight.. show Will the night life in fabulous Freehold? Sometimes you can get a real exciting game of checkers going.”

“Oh, Daddy. It’s not that bad.”

“Actually, it isn’t. They’ve got a fair library and a coin-op terminal to the Library of Congress. Marygay tells me you’re a reader. That’s good.”

“Sounds fascinating.” It did. “But what about guard?”

“No problem. Mrs. Potter-April-and I’ll take the first four hours-oh,” he said, standing, “let me show you the setup.”

We went out back to “the tower,” a sandbag hut on stilts. Climbed up a rope ladder through a hole in the middle of the hut.

“A little crowded in here, with two,” Richard said.

“Have a seat.” There was an old piano stool beside the hole in the floor. I sat on it. “It’s handy to be able to see all the field without getting a crick in your neck. Just don’t keep turning in the same direction all the time.”

He opened a wooden crate and uncovered a sleek rifle, wrapped in oily rags. “Recognize this?”

“Sure.” I’d had to sleep with one in basic training.

“Army standard issue T-sixteen. Semi-automatic, twelve-caliber tumblers-where the hell did you get it?”

“Commune went to a government auction. It’s an antique now, son.” He handed it to me and I snapped it apart.

Clean, too clean.

“Has it ever been used?”

“Not in almost a year. Ammo costs too much for target practice. Take a couple of practice shots, though, convince yourself that it works.”

I turned on the scope and just got a washed-out bright green. Set for nighttime. Clicked it back to log zero, set the magnification at ten, reassembled it.

“Marygay didn’t want to try it out. Said she’d had her fill of that. I didn’t press her, but a person’s got to have confidence in ther tools.”

I clicked off the safety and found a clod of dirt that the range-finder said was between 100 and 120 meters away.

Set it at 110, rested the barrel of the rifle on the sandbags, centered the clod in the crosshairs, and squeezed. The round hissed out and kicked up dirt about five centimeters low.

“Fine.” I reset it for night use and safetied it and handed it back. “What happened a year ago?”

He wrapped it up carefully, keeping the rags away from the eyepiece. “Had some jumpers come in. Fired a few rounds and scared ’em away.”

“All right, what’s a jumper?”

“Yeah, you wouldn’t know.” He shook out a tobacco cigarette and passed me the box. “I don’t know why they don’t just call ’em thieves, that’s what they ar~’Murderers, too, sometimes.

“They know that a lot of the commune members are pretty well off. If you raise cash crops you get to keep half the cash; besides, a lot of our members were prosperous when they joined.

“Anyhow, the jumpers take advantage of our relative isolation. They come out from the city and try to sneak in, usually hit one place, and run. Most of the time, they don’t get this far in, but the farms closer to the road.. . we hear gunfire every couple of weeks. Usually just scaring off kids. If it keeps up, a siren goes off and the commune goes on alert.”

“Doesn’t sound fair to the people living close to the road.”

“There’re compensations. They only have to donate half as much of their crop as the rest of us do. And they’re issued heavier weapons.”

 

Marygay and I took the family’s two bicycles and pedaled down to the recreation center. I only fell off twice, negotiating the bumpy road in the dark.

It was a little livelier than Richard had described it. A young nude girl  was dancing sensuously to an assortment of homemade drums near the far side of the dome. Turned out she was still in school; it was a project for a “cultural relativity” class.

Most of the people there, in fact, were young and therefore still in school. They considered it a joke, though. After you had learned to read and write and could pass the Class I literacy test, you only had to take one course per year, and some of those you could pass just by signing up. So much for the “eighteen years’ compulsory education” they had startled us with at Stargate.

Other people were playing board games, reading, watching the girl gyrate, or just talking. There was a bar that served soya, coffee, or thin homemade beer. Not a ration ticket to be seen; all made by the commune or purchased outside with commune tickets.

We got into a discussion about the war, with a bunch of people who knew Marygay and I were veterans. It’s hard to describe their attitude, which was pretty

uniform. They were angry in an abstract way that it took so much tax money to support; they were convinced that the Taurans would never be any danger to Earth; but they all knew that nearly half the jobs in the world were associated with the war, and if it stopped, everything would fall apart.

I thought everything was in shambles already, but then I hadn’t grown up in this world. And they had never known “peacetime.”

We went home about midnight and Maiygay and 1 each stood two hours’ guard. By the middle of the next morning, I was wishing I had gotten a little more sleep.

The plow was a big blade on wheels with two handles for steering, atomic powered. Not very much power, though; enough to move it forward at a slow crawl if the blade was in soft earth. Needless to say, there was little soft earth in the unused five acres. The plow would go a few centimeters, get stuck, freewheel until I put some back into it, then move a few more centimeters. I finished a tenth of an acre the first day and eventually got it up to a fifth of an acre a day.

It was hard, hardening work, but pleasant. I had an ear-clip that piped music to me, old tapes from Richard’s collection, and the sun browned me all over. I was beginning to think I could live that way forever, when suddenly it was finished.

Marygay and I were reading up at the recreation center one evening when we heard faint gunfire down by the road. We decided it’d be smart to get back to the house. We were less than halfway there when firing broke out all along our left, on a line that seemed to extend from the road to far past the recreation center: a coordinated attack. We had to abandon the bikes and crawl on hands and knees in the drainage ditch by the side of the road, bullets hissing over our heads. A heavy vehicle rumbled by, shooting left and right. It took a good twenty minutes to crawl home. We passed two farmhouses that were burning brightly. I was glad ours didn’t have any wood.

I noticed there was no return fire coming from our tower, but didn’t say anything. There were two dead strangers in front of the house as we rushed inside.

April was lying on the floor, still alive but bleeding from a hundred tiny fragment wounds. The living room was rubble and dust; someone must have thrown a bomb through a door or window. I left Marygay with her mother and ran out back to the tower. The ladder was pulled up, so I had to shinny up one of the stilts.

Richard was sitting slumped over the rifle. In the pale green glow from the scope I could see a perfectly round bole above his left eye. A little blood had trickled down the bridge of his nose and dried.

I laid his body on the floor and covered his head with my shirt. I filled my pockets with clips and took the rifle back to the house.

Marygay had tried to make her mother comfortable. They were talking quietly. She was holding my shotgun-pistol and had another gun on the floor beside her. When I came in she looked up and nodded soberly, not crying.

April whispered something and Maiygay asked, “Mother wants to know whether..

. Daddy had a hard time of it She knows he’s dead.” “No. I’m sure he didn’t feel anything.”

“That’s good.”

“It’s something.” I should keep my mouth shut. “It is good, yes.” I checked the doors and windows for an effective vantage

point. I couldn’t find anyplace that wouldn’t allow a whole platoon to sneak up behind me.

“I’m going to go outside and get on top of the house.” Couldn’t go back to the tower. “Don’t you shoot unless somebody gets inside. . . maybe they’ll think the place is deserted.”

By the time I had clambered up to the sod roof, the heavy truck was coming back down the road. Through the scope I could see that there were five men on it, four in the cab and one who was on the open bed, cradling a machine gun, surrounded by loot. He was crouched between two refrigerators, but I had a clear shot at him. Held my fire, not wanting to draw attention. The truck stopped in front of the house, sat for a minute, and turned in. The window was probably bulletproof, but I sighted on the driver’s face and squeezed off a round. He jumped as it ricocheted, whining, leaving an opaque star on the plastic, and the man in back opened up. A steady stream of bullets hummed over my head; I could hear them thumping into the sandbags of the tower. He didn’t see me.

The truck wasn’t ten meters away when the shooting stopped. He was evidently reloading, hidden behind the refrigerator. I took careful aim and when he popped up to fire I shot him in the throat. The bullet being a tumbler, it exited through the top of his skull.

The driver pulled the truck around in a long arc so that, when it stopped, the door to the cab was flush with the door of the house. This protected them from the tower and also from me,though I doubted they yet knew where I was; a T-16 makes no flash and very little noise. I kicked off my shoes and stepped cautiously onto the top of the cab, hoping the driver would get out on his side. Once the door opened I could fill the cab with ricocheting bullets.

No good. The far door, hidden from me by the roof’s overhang, opened first. I waited for the driver and hoped that Marygay was well hidden. I shouldn’t have worried.

There was a deafening roar, then another and another. The heavy truck rocked with the impact of thousands of tiny fiechettes. One short scream that the second shot ended.

I jumped from the truck and ran around to the back door. Marygay had her mother’s head on her lap, and someone was crying softly. I went to them and Marygay’s cheeks were dry under my palms.

“Good work, dear.”

She didn’t say anything. There was a steady heavy dripping sound from the door and the air was acrid with smoke and the smell of fresh meat. We huddled together until dawn.

I had thought April was sleeping, but in the dim light her eyes were wide open and filmed. Her breath came in shallow rasps. Her skin was gray parchment and dried blood. She didn’t answer when we talked to her.

A vehicle was coming up the road, so I took the rifle and went outside. It was a dump truck with j white sheet draped over one side and a man standing in The back with a megaphone repeating, “Wounded. . . wounded.” I waved and the truck came in. They took April out on a makeshift litter and told us which hospital they were going to. We wanted to go along but there was simply no room; the bed of the truck was covered with people in various stages of disrepair.

Marygay didn’t want to go back inside because it was getting light enough to see the men she had killed so completely. I went back in to get some cigarettes and forced myself to look. It was messy enough, but just didn’t disturb me that much. That bothered me, to be confronted with a pile of human hamburger and mainly notice the flies and ants and smell. Death is so much neater in space.

We buried her father behind the house, and when the truck came back with April’s small body wrapped in a shroud, we buried her beside him. The commune’s sanitation truck came by a little later, and gas-masked men took care of the jumpers’ bodies.

We sat in the baking sun, and finally Marygay wept, for a long time, silently. 11

We got off the plane at Dulles and found a monorail to Columbia.

It was a pleasingly diverse jumble of various kinds of buildings, arranged around a lake, surrounded by trees. All of the buildings were connected by slidewalk to the largest place, a fullerdome with stores and schools and offices.

We could have taken the enclosed slidewalk to Mom’s place, but instead walked alongside it in the good cold air that smelled of fallen leaves. People slid by on the other side of the plastic, carefully not staring.

Mom didn’t answer her door, but she’d given me an entry card. Mom was asleep in the bedroom, so Marygay and I settled in the living room and read for a while.

We were startled suddenly by a loud fit of coughing from the bedroom. I raced over and knocked on the door.

“William? I didn’t-” coughing “-come in, I didn’t know you were…”

She was propped up in bed, the light on, surrounded by various nostrums. She looked ghastly, pale and lined.

She lit a joint and it seemed to quell the coughing. “When did you get in? I didn’t know…”

“Just a few minutes ago. .. . How long has this. . . have you been…”

“Oh, it’s just a bug I picked up after Rhonda went to see her kids. I’ll be fine in a couple of days.” She started coughing again, drank some thick red liquid from a bottle. All of her medicines seemed to be the commercial, patent variety.

“Have you seen a doctor?”

“Doctor? Heavens no, Willy. They don’t have.. . it’s not serious . . . don’t-” ”Not serious?” At eighty-four. “For Chrissake, mother.” I went to the phone in the kitchen and with some difficulty managed to get the hospital.

A plain girl in her twenties formed in the cube. “Nurse Donalson, general services.” She had a fixed smile, professional sincerity. But then everybody smiled.

“My mother needs to be looked at by a doctor. She has a-” “Name and number, please.”

“Beth Mandella.” I spelled it. “What number?” “Medical services number, of course,” she smiled.

I called into Mom and asked her what her number was. “She says she can’t remember.”

“That’s all right, sir, I’m sure I can find her records.”

She turned her smile to a keyboard beside her and punched out a code. “Beth Mandella?” she said, her smile wrning quizzical.

“You’re her son? She must be in her eighties.”

“Please. It’s a long story. She really has to see a doctor.” “Is this some kind of joke?”

“What do you mean?” Strangled coughing from the other room, the worst yet. “Really-this might be very serious, you’ve got to-”

“But sir, Mrs. Mandella got a zero priority rating way back in 2010.” “What the hell is that supposed to me”

“S-i-r…” The smile was hardening in place.

“Look. Pretend that I came from another planet. What is a ‘zero priority rating’?” “Another-oh! I know you!” She looked off to the left. “Sonya-come over here a

second. You’d never guess who…” Another face crowded the cube, a vapid blonde girl whose smile was twin to the other nurse’s. “Remember? On the stat this morning?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “One of the soldiers-hey, that’s really max, really max.” The head withdrew.

“Oh, Mr. Mandella,” she said, effusive. “No wonder you’re confused. It’s really very simple.”

“Well?”

“It’s part of the Universal Medical Security System. Everybody gets a rating on their seventieth birthday. It comes in automatically from Geneva.”

“What does it rate? What does it mean?” But the ugly truth was obvious.

“Well, it tells how important a person is and what level of treatment he’s allowed. Class three is the same as anybody else’s; class two is the same except for certain life- extending-”

“And class zero is no treatment at all.”

“That’s correct, Mr. Mandella.” And in her smile was not a glimmer of pity or understanding.

“Thank you.” I disconnected. Marygay was standing behind me, crying soundlessly with her mouth wide open.

 

I found mountaineer’s oxygen at a sporting goods store and even managed to get some black-market antibiotics through a character in a bar downtown in Washington. But Mom was beyond being able to respond to amateur treatment. She lived four days. The people from the crematonum had the same fixed smile.

I tried to get through to my brother, Mike, on the Moon, but the phone company wouldn’t let me place the call until I had signed a contract and posted a $25,000 bond. I had to get a credit transfer from Geneva. The paperwork took half a day.

I finally got through to him. Without preamble: “Mother’s dead.”

For a fraction of a second, the radio waves wandered up to the moon, and in another fraction,  came back. He started and then nodded his head slowly. “No surprise. Every  time I’ve come down to Earth the past ten years, I’ve wondered whether she’d still be there. Neither of us had enough money to keep in very close touch.” He had told us in Geneva that a letter from Luna to Earth cost $100 postage- plus $5,000 tax. It discouraged communication with what the UN considered to be a bunch of regrettably necessary anarchists.

We commiserated for a while and then Mike said,

“Willy, Earth is no place for you and Marygay; you know that by now. Come to Luna. Where you can still be an

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individual. Where we don’t throw people out the airlock on their seventieth birthday.”

“We’d have to rejoin UNEF.”

“True, but you wouldn’t have to fight. They say they need you more for training. You could study in your spare time, bring your physics up to date-maybe wind up eventually in research.”

We talked some more, a total of three minutes. I got $1000 back.

Marygay and I talked about it through the night. Maybe our decision would have been different if we hadn’t been staying there, surrounded by Mother’s life and death, but when the dawn came the proud, ambitious, careful beauty of Columbia had turned sinister and foreboding.

We packed our bags and had our money transferred to the Tycho Credit Union and took a monorail to the Cape.

 

“In case you’re interested, you aren’t the first combat veterans to come back.” The recruiting officer was a muscular lieutenant of indeterminate sex. I flipped a coin men-tally and it came up tails.

“Last I heard, there had been nine others,” she said in her husky tenor. “All of them opted for the moon… maybe you’ll find some of your friends there.” She slid two simple forms across the desk. “Sign these and you’re in again. Second lieutenants.”

The form was a simple request to be assigned to active duty; we had never really gotten out of the Force, since they extended the draft law, but had just been on inactive status. I scrutinized the paper.

“There’s nothing on this about the guarantees we were given at Stargate.” “That won’t be necessary. The Force will-”

“I think it is necessary, Lieutenant.” I handed back the form. So did Marygay.

“Let me check.” She left the desk and disappeared into an office. After a while we heard a printer rattle.

She brought back the same two sheets, with an addition typed under our names: GUARANTEED LOCATION OF CHOICE

[LUNA] AND ASSIGNMENT OF CHOICE [col~iaAT TRAINING SPECIALIST].

We got a thorough physical checkup and were fitted for new fighting suits, made our financial arrangements, and caught the next morning’s shuttle. We laid over at Earth-port, enjoying zero gravity for a few hours, and then caught a ride to Luna, setting down at the Grimaldi base.

On the door to the Transient Officers’ Billet, some wag had scraped “abandon hope all ye who enter.” We found our two-man cubicle and began changing for chow.

Two raps on the door. “Mail call, sirs.”

I opened the door and the sergeant standing there saluted. I just looked at him for a second and then remembered I was an officer and returned the salute. He handed me two identical faxes. I gave one to Marygay and we both gasped at the same time:

* *ORDERS* *ORDERS**ORDERS

 

THE FOLLOWING NAMED PERSONNEL:

Mandella, William 2LT [11 575 278] COCOMM D Co GRITRABN

AND

Potter, Marygay 2LT [17 386 907] COCOMM B Co GRITRABN ARE HEREBY REASSIGNED TO:

LT Mandella. PLCOMM 2 PL STFFHETA STARGATE Lr Potter: PLCOMM 3 PL STF~HETA STARGATE. DESCRIPTION OF DUTIES:

Command infantry platoon in Tet-2 Campaign.

THE ABOVE NAMED PERSONNEL WILL REPORT IMMEDIATELY

TO  GRIMALDI  TRANSPORTATION  BATTALION  TO  BE  MAN  IFESTED  TO STARGATE.

ISSUED STARGATE TACBD/l 298-8684-1450/20 Aug 2019 SO:

BY AUTHO STFCOM Commander.

 

**ORDERS* *ORDERS**ORDERS

 

“They didn’t waste any time, did they?” Marygay said bitterly.

“Must be a standing order. Strike Force Command’s light-weeks away; they can’t even know we’ve re-upped yet.”

“What about our. . .” She let it trail off.

“The   guarantee.   Well,   we   were   given   our   assignment   of   choice.   Nobody guaranteed we’d have the assignment for more than an hour.”

“It’s so dirty.”

I shrugged. “It’s so army.”

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that we were going home.

 

 

 

 

LIEUTENANT MANDELLA 2024-2389 A.D.

 

 

 

 

“Quick and dirty.” 1 was looking at my platoon sergeant, Santesteban, but talking to myself. And anybody else who was listening.

“Yeah,” he said. “Gotta do it in the first coupla minutes or we’re screwed tight.” He was matter-of-fact, laconic. Drugged.

Private Collins came up with Halliday. They were holding hands unself- consciously. “Lieutenant Mandella?” Her voice btoke a little. “Can we have just a minute?”

“One minute,” I said, too abruptly. “We have to leave in five, I’m sorry.”

Hard to watch those two together now. Neither one had any combat experience. But  they  knew  what  everybody  did;  how  slim  their chances  were of ever being

together again. They slumped in a corner and mumbled words and traded mechanical caresses, no passion or even comfort. Collins’s eyes shone but she wasn’t weeping. Halliday just looked grim, numb. She was normally by far the prettier of the two, but the sparkle had gone out of her and left a well-formed dull shell.

I’d gotten used to open female homosex in the months since we’d left Earth. Even stopped resenting the loss of potential partners. The men together still gave me a chill, though.

I stripped and backed into the clamshelled suit. The new ones were a hell of a lot more complicated, with all the new biometrics and trauma maintenance. But well worth the trouble of hooking up, in case you got blown apart just a little bit. Go home to a comfortable pension with heroic prosthesis. They were even talking about the possibility of regeneration, at least for missing arms and legs. Better get it soon, before Heaven filled up with fractional people. Heaven was the new hospital/rest- and-recreation planet.

I finished the set-up sequence and  the suit  closed by itself. Gritted my teeth against the pain that never came, when the internal sensors and fluid tubes poked into your body. Conditioned neural bypass, so you felt only a slight puzzling dislocation. Rather than the death of a thousand cuts.

Collins and Halliday were getting into their suits now and the other dozen were almost set, so I stepped over to the third platoon’s staging area. Say goodbye again to Marygay.

She was suited and heading my way. We touched helmets instead of using the radio. Privacy.

“Feeling OK, honey?”

“All right,” she said. “Took my pill.”

“Yeah, happy times.” I’d taken mine too, supposed to make you feel optimistic without interfering with your sense of judgment. I knew most of us would probably die, but I didn’t feel too bad about it. “Sack with me tonight?”

“If we’re both here,” she said neutrally. “Have to take a pill for that, too.” She tried to laugh. “Sleep, I mean. How’re the new people taking it? You have ten?”

“Ten, yeah, they’re OK. Doped up, quarter-dose.” “I did that, too; try to keep them loose.”

In fact, Santesteban was the only other combat veteran in my platoon; the four corporals had been in UNEF for a while but hadn’t ever fought.

The speaker in my cheekbone crackled and Commander Cortez said, “Two minutes. Get your people lined up.”

We had our goodbye and I went back to check my flock. Everybody seemed to have gotten suited up without any problems, so I put them on line. We waited for what seemed like a long time.

“All right, load ’em up.” With the word “up,” the bay door in front of me opened- the staging area having already been bled of air-and I led my men and women through to the assault ship.

These new ships were ugly as hell. Just an open framework with clamps to hold you in place, swiveled lasers fore and aft, small tachyon powerplants below the lasers. Everything automated; the machine would land us as quickly as

possible and then zip off to harass the enemy. It was a one-use, throwaway drone. The vehicle that would come pick us up if we survived was cradled next to it, much prettier.

We clamped in and the assault ship cast off from the Sangre y Victoria with twin spurts from the yaw jets. Then the voice of the machine gave us a short countdown and we sped off at four gees’ acceleration, straight down.

The planet, which we hadn’t bothered to name, was a chunk of black rock without any normal star close enough to give it heat. At first it was visible only by the absence of stars where its bulk cut off their light, but as we dropped closer we could see subtle variations in the blackness of its surface. We were coming down on the hemisphere opposite the Taurans’ outpost.

Our recon had shown that their camp sat in the middle of a flat lava plain several hundred kilometers in diameter. It was pretty primitive compared to other Tauran bases UNEF had encountered, but there wouldn’t be any sneaking up on it. We were going to careen over the horizon some fifteen klicks from the place, four ships converging simultaneously from different directions, all of us decelerating like mad, hopefully to drop right in their laps and come up shooting. There would be nothing to hide behind.

I wasn’t worried, of course. Abstractedly, I wished I hadn’t taken the pill.

We leveled off about a kilometer from the surface and sped along much faster than the rock’s escape velocity, constantly correcting to keep from flying away. The surface rolled below us in a dark gray blur; we shed a little light from the pseudo- cerenkov glow made by our tachyon exhaust, scooting away from our reality into its own.

The ungainly contraption skimmed and jumped along for some ten minutes; then suddenly the front jet glowed and we were snapped forward inside our suits, eyeballs trying to escape from their sockets in the rapid deceleration.

“Prepare for ejection,” the machine’s female-mechanical voice said. “Five, four. . .” The ship’s lasers started firing, millisecond flashes freezing the land below in jerky stroboscopic motion. It was a twisted, pock-marked jumble of fissures and random

black

rocks, a few meters below our feet. We were dropping, slowing.

“Three-” It never got any farther. There was a too-bright flash and I saw the horizon drop away as the ship’s tail pitched down-then clipped the ground, and we were rolling, horribly, pieces of people and ship scattering. Then we slid pinwheeling to a bumpy halt, and I tried to pull free but my leg was pinned under the ship’s bulk: excruciating pain and a dry crunch as the girder crushed my leg; shrill whistle of air escaping my breached suit; then the trauma maintenance turned on snick, more pain, then no pain and I was rolling free, short stump of a leg trailing blood that froze shiny black on the dull black rock. I tasted brass and a red haze closed everything out, then deepened to the brown of river clay, then loam and I passed out, with the pill thinking this is not so bad.

 

The suit is set up to save as much of your body as possible. If you lose part of an arm or a leg, one of sixteen razor-sharp irises closes around your limb with the force of a hydraulic press, snipping it off neatly and sealing the suit before you can die of explosive decompression. Then “trauma maintenance” cauterizes the stump, replaces lost blood, and fills you full of happy-juice and No-shock. So you will either

die happy or, if your comrades go on to win the battle, eventually be carried back up to the ship’s aid station.

We’d won that round, while I slept swaddled in dark cotton. I woke up in the infinnary. It was crowded. I was in the middle of a long row of cots, each one holding someone who had been three-fourths (or  less) saved by his suit’s trauma maintenance feature. We were being ignored by the ship’s two doctors, who stood in bright light at operating tables, absorbed in blood rituals. I watched them for a long time. Squinting into the bright light, the blood on their green tunics could have been grease, the swathed bodies, odd soft machines that they were fixing. But the machines would cry out in their sleep, and the mechanics muttered reassurances while they plied their greasy tools. I watched and slept and woke up in different places.

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Finally I woke up in a regular bay.I was strapped down and being fed through a tube, biosensor electrodes attached lere and there, but no medics around. The only other peron in the little room was Marygay, sleeping on the bunk next to me. Her right arm was amputated just above the elbow.

I didn’t wake her up, just looked at her for a long time and tried to sort out my feelings. Tried to filter out the effect of the mood drugs. Looking at her stump, I could feel neither empathy nor revulsion. I tried to force one reaction, and then the other, but nothing real happened. It was as if she had always been that way. Was it drugs, conditioning, love? Have to wait to see.

Her eyes opened suddenly and I knew she had been awake for some time, had been giving me time to think “Hello, broken toy,” she said.

“How-how do you feel?” Bright question.

She put a finger to her lips and kissed it, a familiar gesture, reflection. “Stupid, numb. Glad not to be a soldier anymore.” She smiled. “Did they tell you? We’re going to Heaven.”

“No. I knew it would be either there or Earth.”

“Heaven will be better.” Anything would. “I wish we were there now.” “How long?” I asked. “How long before we get there?”

She rolled over and looked at the ceiling. “No telling. You haven’t talked to anybody?”

“Just woke up.”

“There’s a new directive they didn’t bother to tell us about before. The Sangre y Victoria got orders for four missions. We have to keep on fighting until we’ve done all four. Or until we’ve sustained so many casualties that it wouldn’t be practical to go on.”

“How many is that?”

“I wonder. We lost a good third already. But we’re headed for Aleph-7. Panty raid.” New slang term for the type of operation whose main object was to gather Tauran artifacts, and prisoners if possible. I tried to find out where the term came from, but the one explanation I got was really idiotic.

One knock on the door and Dr. Foster barged in. He fluttered his hands. “Still in separate beds? Marygay, I thought you were more recovered than that.” Foster was all right A flaming mariposa, but he had an amused tolerance for heterosexuality.

He examined Marygay’s stump and then mine. He stuck thermometers in our mouths so we couldn’t talk. When he spoke, he was serious and blunt.

“I’m not going to sugarcoat anything for you. You’re both on happyjuice up to your ears, and the loss you’ve sustained isn’t going to bother you until I take you off the stuff. For my own convenience I’m keeping you drugged until you get to Heaven. I have twenty-one amputees to take care of. We can’t handle twenty-one psychiatric cases.

“Enjoy your peace of mind while you still have it. You two especially, since you’ll probably want to stay together. The prosthetics you get on Heaven will work just fine, but every time you look at his mechanical leg or you look at her arm, you’re going to think of how lucky  the other one is. You’re going to constantly trigger memories of pain and loss for each other… . You may be at each other’s throats in a week. Or you may share a sullen kind of love for the rest of your lives.

“Or you may be able to transcend it. Give each other strength. Just don’t kid yourselves if it doesn’t work out.”

He checked the readout on each thermometer and made a notation in his notebook. “Doctor knows best, even if he is a little weird by your own old-fashioned standards. Keep it in mind.” He took the thermometer out of my mouth and gave me a little pat on the shoulder. Impartially, he did the same to Marygay. At the door, he said, “We’ve got collapsar insertion in about six hours. One of the nurses will take you to the tanks.”

We went into the tanks-so much more comfortable and safer than the old individual acceleration shells-and dropped into the Tet-2 collapsar field already starting the crazy fifty-gee evasive maneuvers that would protect us from enemy cruisers when we popped out by Aleph-7, a microsecond later.

Predictably, the Aleph-7 campaign was a dismal failure, and we limped away from it with a two-campaign total of fifty-four dead and thirty-nine cripples bound for Heaven. Only twelve soldiers were still able to fight, but they weren’t exactly straining at the leash.

It took three collapsar jumps to get to Heaven. No ship ever went there directly from a battle, even though the delay sometimes cost extra lives. It was the one place besides Earth that the Taurans could not be allowed to find.

Heaven was a lovely, unspoiled Earth-like world; what Earth might have been like if men had treated her with compassion instead of lust. Virgin forests, white beaches, pristine deserts. The few dozen cities there either blended perfectly with the environment (one was totally underground) or were brazen statements of human ingenuity; Oceanus, in a coral reef with six fathoms of water over its transparent roof; Boreas, perched on a sheared-off mountaintop in the polar wasteland; and the fabulous Skye, a huge resort city that floated from continent to continent on the trade winds.

We landed, as everyone does, at the jungle city, Threshold. Three-fourths hospital, it’s by far the planet’s largest city, but you couldn’t tell that from the air, flying down from orbit. The only sign of civilization was a short runway that suddenly appeared, a small white patch dwarfed to insignificance by the stately rain forest that crowded in from the east and an immense ocean that dominated the other horizon.

Once under the arboreal cover, the city was very much in evidence. Low buildings of native stone and wood rested among ten-meter-thick tree trunks.  They were connected by unobtrusive stone paths, with one wide promenade meandering off to

the beach. Sunlight filtered down in patches, and the air held a mixture of forest sweetness and salt tang.

I later learned that the city sprawled out over 200 square kilometers, that you could take a subway to anyplace that was too far to walk. The ecology of Threshold was very carefully balanced and maintained so as to resemble the jungle outside, with all the dangerous and uncomfortable elements eliminated. A powerful pressor field kept out large

joe naweman

predators and such insect life as was not necessary for the health of the plants inside.

We walked, limped and rolled into the nearest building, which was the hospital’s reception area. The rest of the hospital was underneath, thirty subterranean stories. Each person was examined and assigned his own room; I tried to get a double with Marygay, but they weren’t set up for that

“Earth-year” was 2189. So I was 215 years  old, God, look at that old codger. Somebody pass the hat-no, not necessary. The doctor who examined me said that my accumulated pay would be transferred from Earth to Heaven. With compound interest, I was just shy of being a billionaire. He remarked that I’d find lots of ways to spend my billion on Heaven.

They took the most severely wounded first, so it was several days before I went into surgery. Afterwards, I woke up in my room and found that they had grafted a prosthesis onto my stump, an articulated structure of shiny metal that to my untrained eye looked exactly like the skeleton of a leg and foot. It looked creepy as hell, lying there in a transparent bag of fluid, wires running out of it to a machine at the end of the bed.

An aide came in. “How you feelin’, sir?” I almost told him to forget the “sir” bullshit, I was out of the army and staying out this time. But it might be nice for the guy to keep feeling that I outranked him.

“I don’t know. Hurts a little.”

“Gonna hurt like a sonuvabitch. Wait’ll the nerves start to grow.” “Nerves?”

“Sure.” He was fiddling with the machine, reading dials on the other side. “How you gonna have a leg without nerves? It’d just sit there.”

“Nerves? Like regular nerves? You mean I can just think ‘move’ and the thing moves?”

“‘Course you can.” He looked at  me quizzically, then went back to his adjustments.

What a wonder. “Prosthetics has sure come a long way.”

THE FOREVER WAR 163

“Pross-what-ics?” “You know, artificial-”

“Oh yeah, like in books. Wooden legs, hooks and stuff.” How’d he ever get a job? “Yeah, prosthetics. Like this thing on the end of my stump.”

“Look, sir.” He set down the clipboard he’d been scribbling on. “You’ve been away a long time. That’s gonna be a leg, just like the other leg except it can’t break.”

“They do it with arms, too?”

“Sure, any limb.” He went back to his writing. “Livers, kidneys, stomachs, all kinds of things. Still working on hearts and lungs, have to use mechanical substitutes.”

“Fantastic.” Marygay would be whole again, too.

He shrugged. “Guess so. They’ve been doing it since before I was born. How old are you, sir?”

I told him, and he whistled. “God damn. You musta been in it from the beginning.” His accent was very strange. All the words were right but all the sounds were wrong.

“Yeah. 1 was in the Epsilon attack. Aleph-null.” They’d started naming collapsars after letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order of discovery, then ran out of letters when the damn things started cropping up all over the place. So they added numbers after the letters; last I heard, they were up to Yod-42.

“Wow, ancient history. What was it like back then?”

“I don’t know. Less crowded, nicer. Went back to Earth a year ago-hell, a century ago. Depends on how you look at it. It was so bad I re-enlisted, you know? Bunch of zombies. No offense.”

He shrugged. “Never been there, myself. People who come from there seem to miss it. Maybe it got better.”

“What, you were born on another planet? Heaven?” No wonder I couldn’t place his accent.

“Born, raised and drafted.” He put the pen back in his pocket and folded the clipboard up to a wallet-sized package. “Yes, sir. Third-generation angel. Best damned planet in all UNEF.” He spelled it out, didn’t say “youneff” the way I’d always heard it.

“Look, I’ve gotta run, lieutenant. Two other monitors to check, this hour.” He backed out the door. “You need anything, there’s a buzzer on the table there.”

Third-generation angel. His grandparents came from Earth, probably when I was a young punk of a hundred. I wondered how many other worlds they’d colonized while my back was turned. Lose an arm, grow a new one?

It was going to be good to settle down and live a whole year for every year that went by.

The guy wasn’t kidding about the pain. And it wasn’t just the new leg, though that hurt like boiling oil. For the new tissues to “take,” they’d had to subvert my body’s resistance to alien cells; cancer broke out in a half-dozen places and had to be treated separately, painfully.

I was feeling pretty used up, but it was still kind of fas- cinating to watch the leg grow. White threads turned into blood vessels and nerves, first hanging a little slack, then moving into place as the musculature grew up around the metal bone.

I got used to seeing it grow, so the sight never repelled me. But when Marygay came to visit, it was a jolt-she was ambulatory before the skin on her new arm had started to grow; looked like a walking anatomy demonstration. I got over the shock, though, and she eventually came in for a few hours every day to play games or trade gossip or just sit and read, her arm slowly growing inside the plastic cast.

I’d had skin for a week before they uncased the new leg and trundled the machine away. It was ugly as hell, hairless and dead white, stiff as a metal rod. But it worked, after a fashion. I could stand up and shuffle along.

They transferred me to orthopedics, for “range and motion repatterning”-a fancy name for slow torture. They strap you into a machine that bends both the old and new legs simultaneously. The new one resists.

Marygay was in a nearby section, having her arm twisted methodically. It must have been even worse on her; she looked gray and haggard every afternoon, when we met to go upstairs and sunbathe in the broken shade.

As the days went by, the therapy became less like torture and more like strenuous exercise. We both began swimming for an hour or so every clear day, in the calm, pressor

THE FOREVER WAR 165

guarded water off the beach. I still limped on land, but in the water I could get around pretty well.

The only real excitement we had on Heaven-excitement to our combat-blunted sensibilities-was in that carefully guarded water.

They have to turn off the pressor field for a split second every time a ship lands; otherwise it would just ricochet off over the ocean. Every now and then an animal slips in, but the dangerous land animals are too slow to get through. Not so in the sea.

The undisputed master of Heaven’s oceans is an ugly customer that the angels, in a fit of originality, named the “shark.” It could eat a stack of earth sharks for breakfast, though.

The one that got in was an average-sized white shark who had been bumping around the edge of the pressor field for days, tormented by all that protein splashing around inside. Fortunately, there’s a warning siren two minutes before the pressor is shut down, so nobody was in the water when he came streaking through. And streak through he did, almost beaching himself in the fury of his fruitless attack.

He was twelve meters of flexible muscle with a razor-sharp tail at one end and a collection of arm-length fangs at the other. His eyes, big yellow globes, were set on stalks more than a meter out from his head. His mouth was so wide that, open, a man could comfortably stand in it. Make an impressive photo for his heirs.

They couldn’t just turn off the pressor field and wait for the thing to swim away. So the Recreation Committee organized a hunting party.

I wasn’t too enthusiastic about offering myself up as an hors d’oeuvre to a giant fish, but Marygay had spearfished a lot as a kid growing up in Florida and was really excited by the prospect. I went along with the gag when I found out how they were doing it; seemed safe enough.

These “sharks” supposedly never attack people in boats. Two people who had more faith in fishermen’s stories than I had gone out to the edge of the pressor field in a rowboat,

armed only with a side of beef. They kicked the meat overboard and the shark was there in a flash.

This was the cue for us to step in and have our fun. There were twenty-three of us fools waiting on the beach with flippers, masks, breathers and one spear each. The spears were pretty formidable, though, jet-propelled and with high-explosive heads.

We splashed in and swam in phalanx, underwater, toward the feeding creature. When it saw us at first, it didn’t attack. It tried to hide its meal, presumably so that some of us wouldn’t be able to sneak around and munch on it while the shark was

dealing with the others. But every time he tried for the deep water, he’d bump into the pressor field. He was obviously getting pissed off.

Finally, he just let go of the beef, whipped around and charged. Great sport. He was the size of your finger one second, way down there at the other end of the field, then suddenly as big as the guy next to you and closing fast.

Maybe ten of the spears hit him-mine didn’t-and they tore him to shreds. But even after an expert, or lucky, brain shot that took off the top of his head and one eye, even with half his flesh and entrails scattered in a bloody path behind him, he slammed into our line and clamped his jaws around a woman, grinding off both of her legs before it occurred to him to die.

We carried her, barely alive, back to the beach, where an ambulance was waiting. They poured her full of blood surrogate and No-shock and rushed her to the hospital, where she survived to eventually go through the agony of growing new legs. I decided that I would leave the hunting of fish to other fish.

Most of our stay at Threshold, once the therapy became bearable, was pleasant enough. No military discipline, lots of reading and things to potter around with. But there was a pall over it, since it was obvious that we weren’t out of the army; just pieces of broken equipment that they were fixing up to throw back into the fray. Marygay and I each had another three years to serve in our lieutenancies.

But we did have six months of rest and recreation coming once our new limbs were pronounced in good working

order. Marygay was released two days before I was but waited around for me.

My back pay came to $892,746,012. Not in the form of bales of currency, fortunately; on Heaven they used an electronic credit exchange, so I carried my fortune around in a little machine with a digital readout. To buy something you punched in the vendor’s credit number and the amount of purchase; the sum was automatically shuffled from your account to his. The machine was the size of a slender wallet and coded to your thumbprint.

Heaven’s economy was governed by the continual presence of thousands of resting, recreating millionaire soldiers. A modest snack would cost a hundred bucks, a room for a night at least ten times that. Since UNEF built and owned Heaven, this runaway inflation was pretty transparently a simple way of getting our accumulated pay back into the economic mainstream.

We had fun, desperate fun. We rented a flyer and camping gear and went off for weeks, exploring the planet. There were icy rivers to swim and lush jungles to crawl through; meadows and mountains and polar wastes and deserts.

We could be totally protected from the environment by adjusting our individual pressor fields-sleep naked in a blizzard-or we could take nature straight. At Marygay’s suggestion, the last thing we did before coming back to civilization was to climb a pinnacle in the desert, fasting for several days to heighten our sensibilities (or warp our perceptions, I’m still not sure), and sit back-to-back in the searing heat, contemplating the languid flux of life.

Then off to the fleshpots. We toured every city on the planet, and each had its own particular charm, but we finally returned to Skye to spend the rest of our leave time.

The rest of the planet was bargain-basement compared to Skye. In the four weeks we were using the airborne pleasure dome as our home base, Marygay and I each went through a good half-billion dollars. We gambled-sometimes losing a million dollars or more in a night-ate and drank the finest the planet had to offer, and

sampled every service and product that wasn’t too bizarre for our admittedly archaic tastes. We each had a personal servant whose

Ion

Joe tialcieman

salary was rather more than that of a major general.

Desperate fun, as I said. Unless the war changed radically, our chances of surviving the next three years were microscopic. We were remarkably healthy victims of a terminal disease, trying to cram a lifetime of sensation into a half of a year.

We did have the consolation, not small, that however

short the remainder of our lives would be, we would at least be together. For some reason it never occurred to me that even that could be taken from us.

 

We were enjoying a light lunch in the transparent “first floor” of Skye, watching the ocean glide by underneath us, when a messenger bustled in and gave us two envelopes:

our orders.

Marygay had been bumped to captain, and 1 to major, on the basis of our military records and tests we had taken at Threshold. I was a company commander and she was a company’s executive officer.

But they weren’t the same company.

She was going to muster with a new company being formed right here on Heaven. I was going back to Stargate for “indoctrination and education” before taking command.

For a long time we couldn’t say anything. “I’m going to protest,” I said finally, weakly. “They can’t make me a commander. Into a commander.”

She was still struck dumb. This was not just a separation. Even if the war was over and we left for Earth only a few minutes apart, in different ships, the geometry of the collapsar jump would pile up years between us. When the second one arrived on Earth, his partner would probably be a half-century older; more probably dead.

We sat there for some time, not touching the exquisite food, ignoring the beauty around us and beneath us, only conscious of each other and the two sheets of paper that separated us with a gulf as wide and real as death.

We went back to Threshold. I protested but my arguments were shrugged off. I tried to get Marygay assigned to my company, as my exec. They said my personnel had

all been allotted. I pointed out That most of them probably hadn’t even been born yet. Nevertheless, allotted, they said.

It would be almost a century, I said, before I even get to Stargate. They replied that Strike Force Command plans in terms of centuries.

Not in terms of people.

We had a day and a night together. The less said about that, the better. It wasn’t just losing a lover. Marygay and I were each other’s only link to real life, the Earth of the

1980s and 90s. Not the perverse grotesquerie we were supposedly fighting to preserve. When her shuttle took off it

was like a casket rattling down into a grave.

I commandeered computer time and found out the orbital elements of her ship and its departure time; found out I could watch her leave from “our” desert.

I landed on the pinnacle where we had starved together and, a few hours before dawn, watched a new star appear over the western horizon, flare to brilliance and fade as it moved away, becoming just another star, then a dim star, and then nothing. I walked to the edge and looked down the sheer rock face to the dim frozen rippling of dunes half a kilometer below. I sat with my feet dangling over the edge, thinking nothing, until the sun’s oblique rays illuminated the dunes in a soft, tempting chiaroscuro of low relief. Twice I shifted my weight as if to jump. When I didn’t, it was not for fear of pain or loss. The pain would be only a bright spark and the loss would be only the army’s. And it would be their ultimate victory over me- having ruled my life for so long, to force an end to it.

That much, I owed to the enemy. MAJOR

MANDELLA 2458-3143 A.D.

What was that old experiment they told us about in high school biology? Take a flatworm and teach it how to swim through a maze. Then mash it up and feed it to a stupid flatworm, and lo! the stupid flatworm would be able to swim the maze, too.

I had a bad taste of major general in my mouth. Actually, I supposed they had refined the techniques since my high school days. With time dilation, that was about 450 years for research and development.

At Stargate, my orders said, I was to undergo “indoctrination and education” prior to taking command of my very own Strike Force. Which was what they still called a company.

For my education on Stargate, they didn’t mince up major generals and serve them to me with hollandaise. They didn’t feed me anything except glucose for three weeks.

Glucose and electricity.

They shaved every hair off my body, gave me a shot that turned me into a dishrag, attached dozens of electrodes to my head and body, immersed me in a tank of oxygenated fluorocarbon, and hooked me up to an ALSC. That’s an “accelerated life situation computer.” It kept me busy.

I guess it took the machine about ten minutes to review

everything I had learned previously about the martial (excuse the expression) arts. Then it started in on the new stuff.

I learned the best way to use every weapon from a rock to a nova bomb. Not just intellectually; that’s what all those electrodes were for.  Cybernetically-controlled negative feedback kinesthesia; I felt the weapons in my hands and watched my performance with them. And did it over and over until I did it right. The illusion of reality was total. I used a spear-thrower with a band of Masai warriors on a village raid, and when I looked down at my body it was

long and black. I relearned epee from a cruel-looking man in foppish clothes, in an eighteenth-century French courtyard. I sat quietly in a tree with a Sharps rifle and

sniped at blue-uniformed men as they crawled across a muddy field toward Vicksburg. In three weeks I killed several regiments of electronic ghosts. It seemed more like a year to me, but the ALSC does strange things to your sense of time.

Learning to use useless exotic weapons was only a small part of the training. In fact, it was the relaxing part. Because when I wasn’t in kinesthesia, the machine kept my body totally inert and zapped my brain with four millennia’s worth of military facts and theories. And I couldn’t forget any of it! Not while I was in the tank.

Want to know who Scipio Aemilianus was? I don’t. Bright light of the Third Punic War. War is the province of danger and therefore courage above all things is the first quality of a warrior, von Clausewitz maintained. And I’ll never forget the poetry of “the advance party minus normally moves in a column formation with the platoon headquarters leading, followed by a laser squad, the heavy weapons squad, and the remaining laser squad; the column relies on observation for its flank security except when the terrain and visibility dictate the need for small security detachments to the flanks, in which case the advance party c~ommander will detail one platoon sergeant. . .” and so on.

That’s from Strike Force Command Small Unit Leader’s Handbook, as if you could call something a handbook when it takes up two whole microfiche cards, 2,000 pages.

If you want to become a thoroughly eclectic expert in a subject that repels you, join UNEF and sign up for officer training.

One hundred nineteen people, and I was responsible for 118 of them. Counting myself but not counting the Commodore, who could presumably take care of herself.

I hadn’t met any of my company during the two weeks of physical rehabilitation that followed the ALSC session. Before our first muster I was supposed to report to the Temporal Orientation Officer. I called for an appointment and his clerk said the Colonel would meet me at the Level Six Officers’ Club after dinner.

TABLE OF ORGANIZATION

Strike Force Gamma Sade-138 Campaign

IECHN:

MAJ Mondella

COMM Anwpol 2ECHN:

CAPT Moore

3ECHN:

ILT Hilleboe

4ECHN:

2LT Riland
2LT Rusk

2LT ALvever MD

5ECHN:

2LT Borgstedz
2LT Brill
2LT Gainor

2LT Heimoff 6ECHN:

SSgr Webster
SSgt Gillies
SSgr Abram:

SSgt Dole 7ECHN:

Sgt Dolins
Sgz Bell
Cpl Geller
Cpl Kahn
Sgt Anderson

Cpl Kalvm

Sgt Noyes
Cpl Spraggs

8ECHN:

Pvt Boas
CpJ Weiner
Pvt Lingeman
Pvt IkIe

Pvt Rosevear
Pvt Schon
Pvt Wolfe, R.
Pvt Shubik
Pvt Lin
Pvt Duhl

Pvt Simmons
Pvt Perloff
Pvt Winograd
Pvt Moynihan
Pvt Brown
Pvt Frank

Pvt Bloomquist
Pvt Graubard
Pvt Wong
Pvt Orlans

Pvt Louria
Pvt Mayr
Pvt Gross
Pvt Quarton
Pvt Asadi
Pvt Hin

Pvt Horman
Pvt Stendahi
Pvt Fox
Pvt Erikson
Pvt Born
Pvt Miller

Pvt Reisman
Pvt Coupling
Pvt Rosiow

Pvt Huntington
Pvt Dc Sola

Pvt Pool
Pvt Nepala
Pvt Schuba
Pvt Ulanov
Pvt Shelley
Pvt Lynn
Pvt Slaer
Pvt Schenk
Pvt Deelstre
Pvt Levy
Pvt Conroy
Pvt Yakata
Pvt Burns

Pvt Cohen Pvt Graham

Pvt Schoeliple Pvt Wolfe, E. Pvt Karkoshka Pvt Majer

Pvt Dioujova Pvt Armaing Pvt Baulez Pvt Johnson Pvt Oitrecht Pvt Kayibanth Pvt Tschudi

Supporting:  ILT Williams (NAy), 2LTs Jarvil (MED), Laasonen (MED), Wilber (PSY), Szydlowska (MAINT), Gaptchcnko (ORD), Gedo (COMM),

Gim (COMP); 1SGTs Evans (MED), Rodriguez (MED), Kostidinov (MED), Rwabwogo (PSY), Blazynski (MAINT), Turpin (ORD); SSGTS

Carreras (MED), Kousnetzov (MED), Waruinge (MED). Rojas (MED), Botos (MAINT), Orban (CK), Mbugua (COMP); SGTs Perez (MED), Seales

(MAINT), Anghelov (01W), Vugin (COMP); CPLs Daborg (MED), Correa (MED), Kajdi (SEX), Valdez (SEX), Muranga (01W); PVTs Kottysch (MAINT), Rudkoski (CK), Minter (ORE)).

 

APPROVED STFCOM STARGATE 12 Mar 2458. FOR ThE COMMANDER:

Olga Torischeva BGEN STFCOM I iO

I went down to Six early, thinking to eat dinner there, but they had nothing but snacks. Sol munched on a fungus thing that vaguely resembled escargots and took the rest of my calories in the form of alcohol.

“Major Mandeila?” I’d been busily engaged in my seventh beer and hadn’t seen the Colonel approach. I started to rise but he motioned for me to stay seated and dropped heavily into the chair opposite me.

“I’m in your debt,” he said. “You saved me from at least half of a boring evening.” He offered his hand. “Jack Kynock, at your service.”

“Colonel-”

“Don’t Colonel me and I won’t Major you. We old fossits have to. – – keep our perspective. William.”

“All right with me.”

He ordered a kind of drink I’d never heard of. “Where to start? Last time you were on Earth was 2007, according to the records.”

“That’s right.”

“Didn’t like it much, did you?” “No.” Zombies, happy robots.

“Well, it got better. Then it got worse, thank you.” A private brought his drink, a bubbling concoction that was green at the bottom of the glass and lightened to chartreuse at the top. He sipped. “Then they got better again, then worse, then. . . I don’t know. Cycles.”

“What’s it like now?”

“Well – . – I’m not really sure. Stacks of reports and such, but it’s hard to filter out the propaganda. I haven’t been back in almost two hundred years; it was pretty bad then. Depending on what you like.”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, let me see. There was lots of excitement. Ever hear of the Pacifist movement?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Hmn, the name’s deceptive. Actually, it was a war, a guerrilla war.”

“I thought I could give you name, rank and serial number of every war from Troy on up.” He smiled. “They must have missed one.”
“For good reason. It was run by veterans-survivors of Yod-38 and Aleph-40, I hear; they got discharged together and decided they could take on all of UNEF, Earthside. They got lots of support from the population.”

“But didn’t win.”

“We’re still here.” He swirled his drink and the colors shifted. “Actually, all I know is hearsay. Last time I got to Earth, the war was over, except for some sporadic sabotage. And it wasn’t exactly a safe topic of conversation.”

“It surprises me a little,” I said, “well, more than a little. That Earth’s population would do anything at all.. – against the government’s wishes.”

He made a noncommittal sound.

“Least of all, revolution. When we were there, you couldn’t get anybody to say a damned thing against the UNEF-or any of the local governments, for that matter. They were conditioned from ear to ear to accept things as they were.”

“Ah. That’s a cyclic thing, too.” He settled back in his chair. “It’s not a matter of technique. if they wanted to, Earth’s government could have total control over. . . every nontrivial thought and action of each citizen, from cradle to grave.

“They don’t do it because it would be fatal. Because there’s a war on. Take your own case: did you get any motivational conditioning while you were in the can?”

I thought for a moment. “if I did, I wouldn’t necessarily know about it.”

“That’s true. Partially true. But take my word for it, they left that part of your brain alone. Any change in your attitude toward UNEF or the war, or war in general, comes only from new knowledge. Nobody’s fiddled with your basic motivations. And you should know why.”

Names, dates, figures rattled down through the maze of new knowledge. “Tet-17,

Sed-2l, Aleph-14. The Lazlo

‘The Lazlo Emergency Commission Report.’ June, 2106.”

“Right. And by extension, your own experience on Aleph-l. Robots don’t make good soldiers.”

“They would,” I said. “Up to the twenty-first century. BehaViOral conditioning would have been the answer to a i to

Joe Ilauleman

general’s dream. Make up an army with all the best features of the SS, the Praetorian Guard, the Golden Horde. Mosby’s Raiders, the Green Berets.”

He laughed over his glass. “Then put that army up against a squad of men in modem fighting suits. It’d be over in a couple of minutes.”

“So long as each man in the squad kept his head about him. And just fought like hell to stay alive.” The generation of soldiers that had precipitated the Lazlo Reports

had been conditioned from birth to conform to somebody’s vision of the ideal fighting man. They worked beautifully as a team, totally bloodthirsty, placing no great importance on personal survival-and the Taurans cut them to ribbons.

The Taurans also fought with no regard for self. But they were better at it, and there were always more of them.

Kynock took a drink and watched the colors. “I’ve seen your psych profile,” he said. “Both before you got here and after your session in the can. It’s essentially the same, before and after.”

“That’s reassuring.” I signaled for another beer. “Maybe it shouldn’t be.”

“What, it says I won’t make a good officer? I told them that from the beginning. I’m no leader.”

“Right in a way, wrong in a way. Want to know what that profile says?” I shrugged. “Classified, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said. “But you’re a major now. You can pull the profile of anybody in your command.”

“I don’t suppose it has any big surprises.” But I was a little curious. What animal isn’t fascinated by a mirror?

“No. It says you’re a pacifist. A failed one at that, which gives you a mild neurosis. Which you handle by transferring the burden of guilt to the army.”

The fresh beer was so cold it hurt my teeth. “No surprises yet.”

“And as far as being a leader, you do have a certain potential. But it would be along the lines of a teacher or a minister; you would have to lead from empathy, compassion. You have the desire to impose your ideas on other people, but not your will. Which means, you’re right, you’ll make one hell of a bad officer unless you shape up.”

I had to laugh. “UNEF must have known all of this when they ordered me to officer training.”

“There are other parameters,” he said. “For instance, you’re adaptable, reasonably intelligent, analytical. And you’re one of the eleven people who’s lived through the whole war.”

“Surviving is a virtue in a private.” Couldn’t resist it.  “But an officer should provide gallant example. Go down with the ship. Stride the parapet as if unafraid.”

He harrumphed at that. “Not when you’re a thousand light years from your replacement.”

“It doesn’t add up, though. Why would they haul me all the way from Heaven to take a chance on my ‘shaping up,’ when probably a third of the people here on Stargate are better officer material? God, the military mind!”

“I suspect the bureaucratic mind, at least, had something to do with it. You have an embarrassing amount of seniority to be a footsoldier.”

“That’s all time dilation. I’ve only been in three campaigns.”

“Immaterial. Besides, that’s two-and-a-half more than the average soldier survives. The propaganda boys will probably make you into some kind of a folk hero.”

“Folk hero.” I sipped at the beer. “Where is John Wayne now that we really need him?”

“John Wayne?” He shook his head. “I never went in the can, you know. I’m no expert at military history.”

“Forget it.”

Kynock finished his drink and asked the private to get him-I swear to God-a “rum Antares.”

“Well, I’m supposed to be your Temporal Orientation Officer. What do you want to know about the present? What passes for the present.”

Still on my mind: “You’ve never been in the can?”

“No, combat officers only. The computer facilities and energy you go through in three weeks would keep the Earth running for several days. Too expensive for us deskwarmers.”

“Your decorations say you’re combat.”

“Honorary. I was.” The rum Antares was a tall slender glass with a little ice floating at the top, filled with pale amber liquid. At the bottom was a bright red globule about the size of a thumbnail; crimson filaments waved up from it.

“What’s that red stuff?”

“Cinnamon. Oh, some ester with cinnamon in it. Quite good. . . want a taste?” “No, I’ll stick to beer, thanks.”

“Down at level one, the library machine has a temporal orientation file, that my staff updates every day. You can go to it for specific questions. Mainly I want to.. . prepare you for meeting your Strike Force.”

“What, they’re all cyborgs? Clones?”

He laughed. “No, it’s illegal to clone humans. The main problem is with, uh, you’re heterosexual.”

“Oh, that’s no problem. I’m tolerant.”

“Yes, your profile shows that you.. . think you’re tolerant, but that’s not the problem, exactly.”

“Oh,” I knew what he was going to say. Not the details, but the substance. “Only emotionally stable people are drafted into UNEF.

I know this is hard for you to accept, but heterosexuality is considered an emotional dysfunction. Relatively easy to cure.”

“If they think they’re going to cure me-”

“Relax, you’re too old.” He took a delicate sip. “It won’t be as hard to get along with them as you might-”

“Wait. You mean nobody.. . everybody in my company is homosexual? But me?” “William,  everybody  on  Earth  is  homosexual.  Except  for  a  thousand  or  so;

veterans and incurables.”

“AK” What could I say? “Seems like a drastic way to solve the population problem.”

“Perhaps. It does work, though; Earth’s population is stable at just under a billion. When one person dies or goes offplanet, another is quickened.”

“Not ‘born.'”

“Born, yes, but not the old-fashioned way. Your old term for it was ‘test-tube babies,’ but of course they don’t use a test-tube.” “Well, that’s something.”

“Part of every creche is an artificial womb that takes care of a person the first eight or ten months after quickening. What you would call birth takes place over a period of days; it isn’t the sudden, drastic event that it used to be.”

O brave new world, I thought. “No birth trauma. A billion perfectly adjusted homosexuals.”

“Perfectly adjusted by present-day Earth standards. You and I might find them a little odd.”

“That’s an understatement.” I drank off the rest of my beer. “Yourself, you, uh.. . are you homosexual?”

“Oh, no,” he said. I relaxed. “Actually, though, I’m not hetero anymore, either.” He slapped his hip and it made an odd sound. “Got wounded and it turned out that I had a rare disorder of the lymphatic system, can’t regenerate. Nothing but metal and plastic from the waist down. To use your word, I’m a cyborg.”

Far out, as my mother used to say. “Oh, Private,” I called to the waiter, “bring me one of those Antares things.” Sitting here in a bar with an asexual cyborg who is probably the only other normal person on the whole goddamned planet.

“Make it a double, please.”

They looked normal enough, filing into the lecture hail where we held our first muster, the next day. Rather young and a little stiff.

Most of them had only been out of the creche for seven or eight years. The creche was a controlled, isolated environment to which only a few specialists-pediatricians and teachers, mostly-had access. When a person leaves the creche at age twelve or thirteen, he chooses a first name (his last name having been taken from the donor- parent with the higher genetic rating) and is legally a probationary adult, with schooling about equivalent to what I had after my first year of college. Most of them go on to more specialized education, but some are assigned a job and go right to work.

They’re observed very closely and anyone who shows any signs of sociopathy, such as heterosexual leanings, is sent away to a correctional facility. He’s either cured or kept there for the rest of his life.

Everyone is drafted into UNEF at the age of twenty. Most people work at a desk for five years and are discharged. A few lucky souls, about one in eight thousand, are invited to volunteer for combat training. Refusing is “sociopathic,” even though it means signing up for an extra five years. And your chance of surviving the ten years is so small as to be negligible; nobody ever had. Your best chance is to have the war end before your ten (subjective) years of service are up. Hope that time dilation puts many years between each of your battles.

Since you can figure on going into battle roughly once every subjective year, and since an average of 34 percent survive each battle, it’s easy to compute your chances of being able to fight it out for ten years. It comes to about ~wo one-thousandths of one percent. Or, to put it another way, get an old-fashioned six-shooter and play Russian Roulette with four of the six chambers loaded. If you can do it ten times in a row without decorating the opposite wall, congratulations! You’re a civilian.

There being some sixty thousand combat soldiers in UNEF, you  could expect about 1.2 of them to survive for ten years. I didn’t seriously plan on being the lucky one, even though I was halfway there.

How many of these young soldiers filing into the auditorium knew they were doomed? I tried to match faces up with the dossiers I’d been scanning all morning, but it was hard. They’d all been selected through the same battery of stringent parameters, and they looked remarkably alike: tall but not too tall, muscular but not heavy, intelligent but not in a brooding way. . . and Earth was much more racially homogenous than it had been in my century. Most of them looked vaguely Polynesian. Only two of them, Kayibanda and Lin, seemed pure representatives of racial types. I wondered whether the others gave them a hard time.

Most of the women were achingly  handsome, but I was in no position to be critical. I’d been celibate for over a year, ever since saying goodbye to Marygay, back on Heaven.

I wondered if one of them might have a trace of atavism, or might humor her commander’s eccentricity. It is absolately forbidden for an officer to form sexual liaison with his subordinates. Such a warm way of putting it. Violation of this regulation is punishable by attachment of all funds and reduction to the rank of private or, ~f the relationship iiue~feres with a unit’s combat efficiency, summary execution. If all of UNEF’s regulations could be broken SO Casually and consistently as that one was, it would be a very easygoing army.

But not one of the boys appealed to me. How they’d look after another year, I wasn’t sure.

“Tench-hut!” That was Lieutenant Hilleboe. It was a credit to my new reflexes that I didn’t jump to my feet. Everybody in the auditorium snapped to.

“My name is Lieutenant Hilleboe and I am your Second Field Officer.” That used to be “Field First Sergeant.” A good sign that an anny has been around too long is that it starts getting top-heavy with officers.

Hilleboe came on like a real hard-ass professional soldier. Probably shouted orders at the mirror every morning, while she was shaving. But I’d seen her profile and knew that she’d only been in action once, and only for a couple of minutes at that. Lost an arm and a leg and was commissioned, same as me, as a result of the tests they give at the regeneration clinic.

Hell, maybe she had been a very pleasant person before going through that trauma; it was bad enough just having one limb regrown.

She was giving them the usual first-sergeant peptalk, stern-but-fair: don’t waste my time with little things, use the chain of command, most problems can be solved at the fifth echelon.

It made me wish I’d had more time to talk with her earlier. Strike Force Command had really rushed us into this first muster-we were scheduled to board ship the next day-and I’d only had a few words with my officers.

Not enough, because it was becoming clear that Hilleboe and I had rather disparate philosophies about how to run a company. It was true that running it was her job; I only commanded. But she was setting up a potential “good guy-bad guy” situation, using the chain of command to so isolate herself from the men and women under her. I had planned not to be quite so aloof, setting aside an hour every other day when any soldier could come to me directly with grievances or suggestions, without permission from his superiors.

We had both been given the same information during our three weeks in the can. It was interesting that we’d arrived at such different conclusions about leadership. This Open Door policy, for instance, had shown good results in “modern” armies in Australia and America. And it seemed especially appropriate to our situation, in which everybody would be cooped up for months or even years at a time. We’d used the system on the Sangre y Victoria, the last starship to which I’d been attached, and it had seemed to keep tensions down.

She had them at ease while delivering this organizational harangue; pretty soon she’d call them to attention and introduce me. What would I talk about? I’d planned just to say a few predictable words and explain my Open Door policy, then turn them over to Commodore Antopol, who would say something about the Masaryk II. But I’d better put off my explanation until after I’d had a long talk with Hilleboe; in fact, it would be best if she were the one to introduce the policy to the men and women, so it wouldn’t look like the two of us were at loggerheads.

My executive officer, Captain Moore, saved me. He came rushing through a side door-he was always rushing, a pudgy meteor-threw a quick salute and handed me an envelope that contained our combat orders. I had a quick whispered conference with the Commodore, and she agreed that it wouldn’t do any harm to tell them where we were going, even though the rank and file technically didn’t have the “need to know.” One thing we didn’t have to worry about in this war was enemy agents. With a good coat of paint, a Tauran might be able to disguise himself as an ambulatory mushroom. Bound to raise suspicions.

Hilleboe had called them to attention and was dutifully telling them what a good commander I was going to be; that I’d been in the war from the beginning, and if they intended to survive through their enlistment they had better follow my example. She didn’t mention that I was a mediocre soldier with a talent for getting missed. Nor that I’d resigned from the army at the earliest opportunity and only got back in because conditions on Earth were so intolerable.

“Thank you, Lieutenant.” I took her place at the podium. “At ease.” I unfolded the single sheet that had our orders, and held it up. “I have some good news and some bad news.” What had been a joke five centuries before was now just a statement of fact.

“These are our combat orders for the Sade-138 campaign. The good news is that we probably won’t be fighting, not immediately. The bad news is that we’re going to be a target.”

They stirred a little bit at that, but nobody said anything Ion

or took his eyes off me. Good discipline. Or maybe just fatalism; I didn’t know how realistic a picture they had of their future. Their lack of a future, that is.

“What we are ordered to do.. . is to find the largest portal planet orbiting the Sade- 138 collapsar and build a base there. Then stay at the base until we are relieved. That will be two or three years, probably.

“During that time we will almost certainly be attacked. As most of you probably know, Strike Force Command has uncovered a pattern in the enemy’s movements from collapsar to collapsar. They hope eventually to trace this complex pattern back through tune and space and find the Taurans’ home planet. For the present, they can only send out intercepting forces, to hamper the enemy’s expansion.

“In a large perspective, this is what we’re ordered to do. We’ll be one of several dozen strike forces employed in these blocking maneuvers, on the enemy’s frontier. I won’t be able to stress often enough or hard enough how important this mission is-if UNEF can keep the enemy from expanding, we may be able to envelop him. And win the war.”

Preferably before we’re all dead meat. “One thing I want to be clear we may be attacked the day we land, or we may simply occupy the planet for ten years and come on home.” Fat chance. “Whatever happens, every one of us will stay in the best fighting trim all the time. In transit, we will maintain a regular program of calisthenics as well as a review of our training. Especially construction techniques- we have to set up the base and its defense facilities in the shortest possible time.”

God, I was beginning to sound like an officer. “Any questions?” There were none. “Then I’d like to introduce Commodore Antopol. Commodore?”

The commodore didn’t try to hide her boredom as she outlined, to this room full of ground-pounders, the characteristics and capabilities of Masaryk Ii. I had learned most of what she was saying through the can’s forcefeeding, but the last thing she said caught my attention.

“Sade-138 will be the most distant collapsar men have gone to. It isn’t even in the galaxy proper, hut rather is part

of the Large Magellanic Cloud, some 150,000 light years distant.

“Our voyage will require four collapsar jumps and will last some four months, subjective. Maneuvering into collapsar insertion will put us about three hundred years behind Stargate’s calendar by the time we reach Sade-138.”

And another seven hundred years gone, if I lived to return. Not that it would make that much difference; Marygay was as good as dead and there wasn’t another person alive who meant anything to me.

“As the major said, you mustn’t let these figures lull you into complacency. The enemy is also headed for Sade-138; we may all get there the same day. The mathematics of the situation is complicated, but take our word for it; it’s going to be a close race.

“Major, do you have anything more for them?” I started to rise. “Well. . .”

“Tench-hut!” Hilleboe shouted. Had to learn to expect that

“Only that I’d like to meet with my senior officers, echelon 4 and above, for a few minutes. Platoon sergeants, you’re responsible for getting your troops to Staging Area 67 at 0400 tomorrow morning. Your time’s your own until then. Dismissed.”

 

I invited the five officers up to my billet and brought out a bottle of real French brandy. It had cost two months’ pay, but what else could I do with the money? Invest it?

I passed around glasses but Alsever, the doctor, demurred. Instead she broke a little capsule under her nose and inhaled deeply. Then tried without too much success to mask her euphoric expression.

“First let’s get down to one basic personnel problem,” I said, pouring. “Do all of you know that I’m not homosexual?”

Mixed chorus of yes sirs and no sirs.

“Do you think this is going to. . . complicate my situation as commander? As far as the rank and tile?”

“Sir, I don’t-” Moore began.

“No need for honorifics,” I said, “not in this closed 100

joe naiueman

circle; I was a private four years ago, in my own time frame. When there aren’t any troops around, I’m just Man-della, or William.” I had a feeling that was a mistake even as I was saying it. “Go on.”

“Well, William,” he continued, “it might have been a problem a hundred years ago. You know how people felt then.”

“Actually, I don’t. All I know about the period from the twenty-first century to the present is military history.”

“Oh. Well, it was, uh, it was, how to say it?” His hands fluttered.

“It was a crime,” Alsever said laconically. “That was when the Eugenics Council was first getting people used to the idea of universal homosex.”

“Eugenics Council?”

“Part of UNEF. Only has authority on Earth.” She took a deep sniff at the empty capsule. “The idea was to keep people from making babies the biological way. Because, A, people showed a regrettable lack of sense in choosing their genetic partner. And B, the Council saw that racial differences had an unnecessarily divisive effect on humanity; with total control over births, they could make everybody the same race in a few generations.”

I didn’t know they had gone quite that far. But I suppose it was logical. “You approve? As a doctor.”

“As a doctor? I’m not sure.” She took another capsule from her pocket and rolled it between thumb and forefinger, staring at nothing. Or something the rest of us couldn’t see.

“In a way, it makes my job simpler. A lot of diseases simply no longer exist. But I don’t think they know as much about genetics as they think they do. It’s not an exact science; they could be doing something very wrong, and the results wouldn’t show up for centuries.”

She cracked the capsule under her nose and took two deep breaths. “As a woman, though, I’m all in favor of it.” Hilleboe and Rusk nodded vigorously.

“Not having to go through childbirth?”

“That’s part of it.” She crossed her eyes comically, looking at the capsule, gave it a final sniff. “Mostly,

though, it’s not.. . having to. . . have a man. Inside me. You understand. It’s disgusting.”

Moore laughed. “If you haven’t tried it, Diana, don’t-”

“Oh, shut up.” She threw the empty capsule at him playfully. “But it’s perfectly natural,” I protested.

“So is swinging through trees. Digging for roots with a blunt stick. Progress, my good major, progress.”

“Anyway,” Moore said, “it was only a crime for a short period. Then it was considered a, oh, curable.. .”

“Dysfunction,” Alsever said.

“Thank you. And now, well, it’s so rare. .. I doubt that any of the men and women have any strong feelings about it, one way or the other.”

“Just an eccentricity,” Diana said, magnanimously. “Not as if you ate babies.” “That’s right, Mandella,” Hilleboe said. “I don’t feel any differently toward you

because of it.”

“I-I’m glad.” That was just great. It was dawning on me that I had not the slightest idea of how to conduct myself socially. So much of my “normal” behavior was based

on a complex unspoken code of sexual etiquette. Was I suppose to treat the men like women, and vice versa? Or treat everybody like brothers and sisters? It was all very confusing.

I finished off my glass and set it down. “Well, thanks for your reassurances. That was mainly what I wanted to ask you about. . . I’m sure you all have things to do, goodbyes and such. Don’t let me hold you prisoner.”

They all wandered off except for Charlie Moore. He and

I decided to go on a monumental binge, trying to hit every bar and officer’s club in the sector. We managed twelve and probably could have hit them all, but I decided to get a few hours’ sleep before the next day’s muster.

The one time Charlie made a pass at me, he was very polite about it. I hoped my refusal was also polite-but figured I’d be getting lots of practice.

3

UNEF’s first starships had been possessed of a kind of spidery, delicate beauty. But with various technological improvements, structural strength became more important than conserving mass (one of the old ships would have folded up like an accordion if you’d tried a twenty-five-gee maneuver), and that was reflected in the design: stolid, heavy, functional-looking. The only decoration was the name MASARYK ii, stenciled in dull blue letters across the.

obsidian hull.

Our shuttle drifted over the name on its way to the loading bay, and there was a crew of tiny men and women doing maintenance on the hull.  With them as a reference, we could see that the letters were a good hundred meters tall. The ship was over a kilometer long (1036.5 meters, my latent memory said), and about a third that wide (319.4 meters).

That didn’t mean there was going to be plenty of elbowroom. In its belly, the ship held six large tachyondrive fighters and fifty robot drones. The infantry was tucked off in a corner. War is the province of friction, Chuck von Clausewitz said; I had a feeling we were going to put him to the test.

We had about six hours before going into the acceleration tank. I dropped my kit in the tiny billet that would be my home for the next twenty months and went off to explore.

Charlie had beaten me to the lounge and to the privilege of being first to evaluate the quality of Masaryk if’s coffee.

“Rhinoceros bile,” he said.

“At least  it  isn’t soya,” I said, taking a first cautious sip. Decided I might be longing for soya in a week.

The officers’ lounge was a cubicle about three meters by four, metal floor and walls, with a coffee machine and a

library readout. Six hard chairs and a table with a typer on it.

“Jolly place, isn’t it?” He idly punched up a general index on the library machine. “Lots of military theory.”

“That’s good. Refresh our memories.” “Sign up for officer training?”

“Me? No. Orders.”

“At least you have an excuse.” He slapped the on-off button and watched the green spot dwindle. “I signed up. They didn’t tell me it’d feel like this.”

“Yeah.” He wasn’t talking about any subtle problem:

burden of responsibility or anything. “They say it wears off, a little at a time.” All of that information they force into you; a constant silent whispering.

“Ah, there you are.” Hileboe came through the door and exchanged greetings with us. She gave the room a quick survey, and it was obvious that the Spartan arrangements met with her approval. “Will you be wanting to address the company before we go into the acceleration tanks?”

“No, I don’t see why that would be. . . necessary.” I almost said “desirable.” The art of chastising subordinates is a delicate art. I could see that I’d have to keep reminding Hilleboe that she wasn’t in charge.

Or I could just switch insignia with her. Let her experience the joys of command. “You  could, please, round  up  all  platoon  leaders  and  go  over the  immersion

sequence with them. Eventually we’ll be doing speed drills. But for now, I think the troops could use a few hours’ rest.” If they were as hungover as their commander.

“Yes, sir.” She turned and left. A little miffed, because what I’d asked her to do should properly have been a job for Riland or Rusk.

Charlie eased his pudgy self into one of the hard chairs and sighed. “Twenty months on this greasy machine. With her. Shit.”

“Well, if you’re nice to me, I won’t billet the two of you together.” “All right. I’m your slave forever. Starting, oh, next Fri

day.” He peered into his cup and decided against drinking the dregs. “Seriously, she’s going to be a problem. What are you going to do with her?”

“I don’t know.” Charlie was being insubordinate, too, of course. But he was my XO and out of the chain of command. Besides, I had to have one friend. “Maybe she’ll mellow, once we’re under weigh.”

“Sure.” Technically, we were already under weigh, crawling toward the Stargate collapsar at one gee. But that was only for the convenience of the crew; it’s hard to batten down the hatches in free fall. The trip wouldn’t really start until we were in the tanks.

The lounge was too depressing, so Charlie and I used the remaining hours of mobility to explore the ship.

The bridge looked like any other computer facility; they had dispensed with the luxury of viewscreens. We stood at a respectful distance while Antopol and her officers went through a last series of checks before climbing into the tanks and leaving our destiny to the machines.

Actually, there was a porthole, a thick plastic bubble, in the navigation room forward. Lieutenant Williams wasn’t busy, the pre-insertion part of his job being fully automated, so he was glad to show us around.

He tapped the porthole with a fingernail. “Hope we don’t have to use this, this trip.”

“How so?” Charlie said.

“We only use it if we get lost” If the insertion angle was off by a thousandth of a radian, we were liable to wind up on the other side of the galaxy. “We can get a rough idea of our position by analyzing the spectra of the brightest stars. Thumbprints. Identify three and we can triangulate.”

“Then find the nearest collapsar and get back on the rack,” I said.

“That’s the problem. Sade-l38 is the only collapsar we know of in the Magellanic Clouds. We know of it only because of captured enemy data. Even if we could find another collapsar, assuming we got lost in the cloud, we wouldn’t know how to insert.”

“That’s great.”

“It’s not as though we’d be actually lost,” he said with I’HI~ FOREVER WAR

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a rather wicked expression. “We could zip up in the tanks, aim for Earth and blast away at full power. We’d get there in about three months, ship time.”

“Sure,” I said. “But 150,000 years in the future.” At twenty-five gees, you get to nine-tenths the speed of light in less than a month. From then on, you’re in the arms of Saint Albert.

“Well, that is a drawback,” he said. “But at least we’d find out who’d won the war.” It made you wonder how many soldiers had gotten out of the war in just that way. There  were  forty-two  strike  forces  lost  somewhere  and  unaccounted  for.  It  was possible that all of them were crawling through normal space at near-lightspeed and

would show up at Earth or Stargate one-by-one over the centuries.

A convenient way to go AWOL, since once you were out of the chain of collapsar jumps you’d be practically impossible to track  down. Unfortunately,  your jump sequence was  pre-programmed by Strike Force Command; the human navigator only came into the picture if a miscalculation slipped you into the wrong “wormhole,” and you popped out in some random part of space.

Charlie and I went on to inspect the gym, which was big enough for about a dozen people at a time. I asked him to make up a roster so that everyone could work out for an hour each day when we were out of the tanks.

The mess area was only a little larger than the gym- even with four staggered shifts, the meals would be shoulder-to-shoulder affairs-and the enlisted men and women’s lounge was even more depressing than the officers’. I was going to have a real morale problem on my hands long before the twenty months were up.

The armorer’s bay was as large as the gym, mess hail and both lounges put together. It had to be, because of the great variety of infantry weapons that had evolved over the centuries. The basic weapon was still the fighting suit, though it was much more sophisticated than that first model I had been squeezed into, just before the Aleph-Null campaign.

Lieutenant Riland, the armory officer, was supervising

his four subordinates, one from each platoon, who were doing a last-minute check of weapons storage. Probably the most important job on the whole ship, when you contemplate what could happen to all those tons of explosives and radioactives under twenty-five gees.

I returned his perfunctory salute. “Everything going all right, Lieutenant?”

“Yessir, except for those damned swords.” For use in the stasis field. “No way we can orient them that they won’t be bent. Just hope they don’t break.”

I couldn’t begin to understand the principles behind the stasis field; the gap between present-day physics and my master’s degree in the same subject was as long as the time that separated Galileo and Einstein. But I knew the effects.

Nothing could move at greater than 16.3 meters per second inside the field, which was a hemispherical (in space, spherical) volume about fifty meters in radius. Inside, there was no such thing as electromagnetic radiation; no electricity, no magnetism, no light. From inside your suit, you could see your surroundings in ghostly monochrome- which phenomenon was glibly explained to me as being due to “phase transference of quasi-energy leaking through from an adjacent tachyon reality,” so much phlogiston to me.

The result of it, though, was to make all conventional weapons of warfare useless. Even a nova bomb was just an inert lump inside the field. And any creature, Terran or Tauran, caught inside the field without the proper insulation would die in a fraction of a second.

At first it looked as though we had come upon the ultimate weapon. There were five engagements where whole Tauran bases were wiped out without any human ground casualties. All you had to do was carry the field to the enemy (four husky soldiers could handle it in Earth-gravity) and watch them die as they slipped in through the field’s opaque wall. The people carrying the generator were invulnerable except for the short periods when they might have to turn the thing off to get their bearings.

The sixth time the field was used, though, the Taurans were ready for it. They wore protective suits and were armed with sharp spears, with which they could breach the

suits of the generator-carriers. From then on the carriers were armed.

Only three other such battles had been reported, although a dozen strike forces had gone out with the stasis field. The others were still fighting, or still en route, or had been totally defeated. There was no way to tell unless they caine back. And they weren’t encouraged to come back if Taurans were still in control of “their” real estate-supposedly that constituted “desertion under fire,” which meant execution for all officers (although rumor had it that they were simply brainwiped, imprinted and sent back into the fray).

“Will we be using the stasis field, sir?” Riland asked.

“Probably. Not at first, not unless the Taurans are already there. I don’t relish the thought of living in a suit, day in and day out.” Neither did I relish the thought of using sword, spear, throwing knife; no matter how many electronic illusions I’d sent to Valhalla with them.

Checked my watch. “Well, we’d better get on down to the tanks, Captain. Make sure everything’s squared away.” We had about two hours before the  insertion sequence would start.

The room the tanks were in resembled a huge chemical factory; the floor was a good hundred meters in diameter and jammed with bulky apparatus painted a uniform, dull gray. The eight tanks were arranged almost symmetrically around the central elevator, the symmetry spoiled by the fact that one of the tanks was twice the size of the others. That would be the command tank, for all the senior officers and supporting specialists.

Sergeant Blazynski stepped out from behind one of the tanks and saluted. I didn’t return his salute.

“What the hell is that?” In all that universe of gray, there was one spot of color. “It’s a cat, sir.”

“Do tell.” A big one, too, and bright calico. It looked ridiculous, draped over the sergeant’s shoulder. “Let me rephrase the question: what the hell is a cat doing here?”

“It’s the maintenance squad’s mascot, sir.” The cat raised its head enough to hiss half-heartedly at me, then returned to its flaccid repose.

I looked at Charlie and he shrugged back. “It seems kiAd of cruel,” he said. To the sergeant: “You won’t get much use of it. After twenty-five gees, it’ll be just so much fur and guts.”

“Oh no, sir! Sirs.” He ruffed back the fur between the

creature’s shoulders. It had a fluorocarbon fitting imbedded there, just like the one above my hipbone. “We bought it at a store on Stargate, already modified. Lots of ships have them now, sir. The Commodore signed the forms for us.”

Well, that was her right; maintenance was under both of us equally. And it was her ship. “You couldn’t have gotten a dog?” God, I hated cats. Always sneaking around.

“No, sir, they don’t adapt. Can’t take free fall.”

“Did you have to make any special adaptations? In the tank?” Charlie asked.

“No sir. We had an extra couch.” Great; that meant I’d be sharing a tank with the animal. “We only had to shorten the straps.

“It takes a different kind of drug for the cell-wall strengthening, but that was included in the price.”

Charlie scratched it behind an ear. It purred softly but didn’t move. “Seems kind of stupid. The animal, I mean.”

“We drugged him ahead of time.” No wonder it was so inert; the drug slows your metabolism down to a rate barely adequate to sustain life. “Makes it easier to strap him in.”

“Guess it’s all right,” I said. Maybe good for morale. “But if it starts getting in the way, I’ll personally recycle it.”

“Yes, sir!” he said, visibly relieved, thinking that I couldn’t really do anything like that to such a cute bundle of fur. Try me, buddy.

So we had seen it all. The only thing left, this side of

the engines, was the huge hold where the fighters and drones waited, clamped in their massive cradles against the coming acceleration. Charlie and I went down to take a look, but there were no windows on our side of the airlock. I knew there’d be one on the inside, but the chamber was evacuated, and it wasn’t worth going through the fill-andwarm cycle merely to satisfy our curiosity.

I was starting to feel really supernumerary. Called Hil THE FOREVER WAR

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leboe and she said everything was under control. With an

hour to kill, we went back to the lounge and had the computer mediate a game of Kriegspieler, which was just starting to get interesting when the ten-minute warning sounded.

The acceleration tanks had a “half-life-to-failure” of five weeks; there was a fifty- fifty chance that you could stay immersed for five weeks before some valve or tube popped and you were squashed like a bug underfoot. In practice, it had to be one hell of an emergency to justify using the tanks for more than two weeks’ acceleration. We were only going under for ten days, this first leg of our journey.

Five weeks or five hours, though, it was all the same as far as the tankee was concerned. Once the pressure got up to an operational level, you had no sense of the passage of time. Your body and brain were concrete. None of your senses provided any input, and you could amuse yourself for several hours just trying to spell your own name.

So I wasn’t really surprised  that no time seemed to have passed when I was suddenly dry, my body tingling with the return of sensation. The place sounded like an asthmatics’ convention in the middle of a hay field: thirty-nine people and one cat all coughing and sneezing to get rid of the last residues of fluorocarbon. While I was fumbling with my straps, the side door opened, flooding the tank with painfully bright light. The cat was the first one out, with a general scramble right behind him. For the sake of dignity, I waited until last.

Over a hundred people were milling around outside, stretching and massaging out cramps. Dignity! Surrounded by acres of young female flesh, I stared into their faces and desperately tried to solve a third-order differential equation

in my head, to circumvent the gallant reflex. A temporary expedient, but it got me to the elevator.

Hilleboe was shouting orders, getting people lined up, and as the doors closed I noticed that all of one platoon had a uniform light bruise, from head to foot. Twenty pairs of black eyes. I’d have to see both Maintenance and Medical about that.

After I got dressed. 4

We stayed at one gee for three weeks, with occasional pariods of free fall for navigation check, while the Masaiyk 11 made a long, narrow loop away from the collapsar Resh10, and back again. That period went all right, the people adjusting pretty well to ship routine. I gave them a minimum of busy-work and a maximum of training review and exercise-for their own good, though I wasn’t naive enough to think they’d see it that way.

After about a week of one gee, Private Rudkoski (the cook’s assistant) had a still, producing some eight liters a day of 95 percent ethyl alcohol. I didn’t want to stop him- life was cheerless enough; I didn’t mind as long as people showed up for duty sober-but I was damned curious both how he managed to divert the raw materials out of our sealed-tight ecology, and how the people paid for their booze. So I used the chain of conunand in reverse, asking Alsever to find out. She asked Jarvil, who asked Carreras, who sat down with Orban, the cook. Turned out that Sergeant Orban had set the whole thing up, letting Rudkoski do the dirty work, and was aching to brag about it to a trustworthy person.

If I had ever taken meals with the enlisted men and women, I might have figured out that something odd was going on. But the scheme didn’t extend up to officers’ country.

Through Rudkoski, Orban had juryrigged a ship-wide economy based on alcohol. It went like this:

Each meal was prepared with one very sugary dessert- jelly, custard or flan-which you were free to eat if you could stand the cloying taste. But if it was still on your tray when you presented it at the recycling window, Rudkoski would give you a Len-cent

chit and scrape the sugary stuff into a fermentation vat. He had two twenty-liter vats, one

“working” while the other was being filled.

The ten-cent chit was at the bottom of a system that allowed you to buy a half-liter of straight ethyl (with your choice of flavoring) for five dollars. A squad of five people who skipped all of their desserts could buy about a liter a week, enough for a party but not enough to constitute a public health problem.

When Diana brought me this information, she also brought a bottle of Rudkoski’s Worst-literally; it was a flavor that just hadn’t worked. It came up through the chain of command with only a few centimeters missing.

Its taste was a ghastly combination of strawberry and caraway seed. With a perversity not uncommon to people who rarely drink, Diana loved it. I had some ice water brought up, and she got totally blasted within an hour. For myself, I made one drink and didn’t finish it.

When she was more than halfway to oblivion, mumbling a reassuring soliloquy to her liver, she suddenly tilted her head up to stare at me with childlike directness.

“You have a real problem, Major William.”

“Not half the problem you’ll have in the morning, Lieutenant Doctor Diana.”

“Oh not really.” She waved a drunken hand in front of her face. “Some vitamins, some glu. . . cose, an eensy cc of adren. . . aline if all else fails. You.. . you. . . have… a real.. . problem.”

“Look, Diana, don’t you want me to-”

“What you need.. . is to get an appointment with that nice Corporal Valdez.” Valdez was the male sex counselor. “He has empathy. Itsiz job. He’d make you-”

“We talked about this before, remember? I want to stay the way I am.”

“Don’t we all.” She wiped away a tear that was probably one percent alcohol. “You know they call you the Old C’reer. No they don’t.”

She looked at the floor and then at the wall. “The 01′ Queer, that’s what.”

I had expected names worse than that. But not so soon. “I don’t care. The commander always gets names.”

“I know but.” She stood up suddenly and wobbled a “U’.,

little bit. “Too much t’ drink. Lie down.” She turned her back to me and stretched so hard that a joint popped. Then a seam whispered open and she shrugged off her tunic, stepped out of it and tiptoed to my bed. She sat down and patted the mattress. “Come on, William. Only chance.”

“For Christ’s sake, Diana. It wouldn’t be fair.”

“All’s fair,” she giggled. “And ‘sides, I’m a doctor. I can be cin’cal; won’t bother me a bit. Help me with this.” After five hundred years, they were still putting brassiere clasps in the back.

One kind of gentleman would have helped her get undressed and then made a quiet exit. Another kind of gentleman might have bolted for the door. Being neither kind, I closed in for the kill.

Perhaps fortunately, she passed out before we had made any headway. I admired the sight and touch of her for a long time before, feeling like a cad, I managed to gather everything up and dress her.

I lifted her out of the bed, sweet burden, and then realized that if anyone saw me canying her down to her billet, she’d be the butt of rumors for the rest of the campaign. I called up Charlie, told him we’d had some booze and Diana was rather the worse for it, and asked him whether he’d come up for a drink and help me haul the good doctor home.

By the time Charlie knocked, she was draped innocently in a chair, snoring softly.

He smiled at her. “Physician, heal thyself.” I off~red him the bottle, with a warning. He sniffed it and made a face.

“What is this, varnish?”

“Just something the cooks whipped up. Vacuum still.”

He set  it down carefully, as if it might explode if jarred. “I predict a coming shortage of customers. Epidemic of death by poisoning-she actually drank that vile stuff?”

“Well, the cooks admitted it was an experiment that didn’t pan out; their other flavors are evidently potable. Yeah, she loved it.”

“Well. . .” He laughed. “Damn! What, you take her legs and I take her arms?” THE FOREVER WAR

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“No, look, we each take an arm. Maybe we can get her to do part of the walking.” She moaned a little when we lifted her out of the chair, opened one eye and said,

“Hello, Charlee.” Then she closed the eye and let us drag her down to the billet. No one saw us on the way, but her bunkmate, Laasonen, was sitting up reading.

“She really drank the stuff, eh?” She regarded her friend with wry affection. “Here, let me help.”

The three of us wrestled her into bed. Laasonen smoothed the hair Out of her eyes. “She said it was in the nature of an experiment.”

“More devotion to science than I have,” Charlie said. “A stronger stomach, too.” We all wished he hadn’t said that.

 

Diana sheepishly admitted that she hadn’t remembered anything after the first drink, and talking to her, I deduced that she thought Charlie had been there all along. Which was all for the best, of course. But oh! Diana, my lovely latent heterosexual, let me buy you a bottle of good scotch the next time we come into port. Seven hundred years from now.

We got back into the tanks for the hop from Resh-lO to Kaph-35. That was two weeks at twenty-five gees; then we had another four weeks of routine at one gravity.

I had announced my open door policy, but practically no one ever took advantage of it. I saw very little of the troops and those occasions were almost always negative: testing them on their training review, handing out reprimands, and occasionally lecturing classes. And they rarely spoke intelligibly, except in response to a direct question.

Most of them either had English as their native tongue or as a second language, but it had changed so drastically over 450 years that I could barely understand it, not at all if it was spoken rapidly. Fortunately, they had all been taught early twenty-first century English during their basic training; that language, or dialect, served as a temporal un -gua franca through which a twenty-fifth century soldier could communicate with someone who had been a contemporary of his nineteen-times-great-grandparents. lf there had still been such a thing as grandparents.

I thought of my first combat commander, Captain Stott- whom I had hated just as cordially as the rest of the company did-and tried to imagine how I would have felt if he had been a sexual deviate and I’d been forced to learn a new language for his convenience.

So we had discipline problems, sure. But the wonder was that we had any discipline at all. Hilleboe was responsible for that; as little as I liked her personally, I had to give her credit for keeping the troops in line.

Most of the shipboard graffiti concerned improbable sexual geometries between the Second Field Officer and her commander.

 

From Kapb-35 we jumped to Samk-78, from there to Ayin-129 and finally to Sade-

  1. 138. Most of the jumps were no more than a few hundred light years, but the last one was 140,000-supposedly the longest collapsar jump ever made by a manned craf

The time spent scooting down the wormhole from one collapsar to the next was always the same, independent of the distance. When I’d studied physics, they thought the duration of a collapsar jump was exactly zero. But a couple of centuries later, they did a complicated wave-guide experiment that proved the jump actually lasted some small fraction of a nanosecond. Doesn’t seem like much, but they’d had to rebuild physics from the foundation up when the collapsar jump was first discovered; they had to rear the whole damned thing down again when they found out it took time to get from A to B. Physicists were still arguing about it.

But we had more pressing problems as we flashed out of Sade-1 38’s collapsar field at three-quarters of the speed of light. There was no way to tell immediately whether the Taurans had beat us there. We launched a pre-programmed drone that would decelerate at 300 gees and take a preliminary look around. It would warn us if it detected any other ships in the system, or evidence of Tauran activity on any of the collapsar’s planets.

The drone launched, we zipped up in the tanks and the computers put us through a three-week evasive maneuver while the ship slowed down. No problems except that three weeks is a hell of a long time to stay frozen in the tank; for a couple of days afterward everybody crept around like aged cripples.

if the drone had sent back word that the Taurans were already in the system, we would immediately have stepped down to one gee and started deploying fighters and drones armed with nova bombs. Or we might not have lived that long: sometimes the Taurans could get to a ship only hours after it entered the system. Dying in the tank might not be the most pleasant way to go.

It took us a month to get back to within a couple of AUs of Sade-138, where the drone had found a planet that met our requirements.

It was an odd planet, slightly smaller than Earth but more dense. It wasn’t quite the cryogenic deepfreeze that most portal planets were, both because of heat from its core and because S Doradus, the brightest star in the cloud, was only a third of a light year away.

The strangest feature of the planet was its lack of geography. From space it looked like a slightly damaged billiard ball. Our resident physicist, Lieutenant Gim, explained its relatively pristine condition by pointing out that its anomalous, almost cometary orbit probably meant that it had spent most of its life as a “rogue planet,” drifting alone through interstellar space. The chances were good that it had never been struck by a large meteor until it wandered into Sade-138’s bailiwick and was

captured-forced  to  share  space  with  all  the  other  flotsam  the  collapsar  dragged around with it.

We left the Masaryk Ii in orbit (it was capable of landing, but that would restrict its visibility and getaway time) and shuttled building materials down to the surface with the six fighters.

It was good to get out of the ship, even though the planet wasn’t exactly hospitable. The atmosphere was a thin cold wind of hydrogen and helium, it being too cold even at noon for any other substance to exist as a gas.

“Noon” was when S Doradus was overhead, a tiny, painfully bright spark. The temperature slowly dropped at night, going from twenty-five degrees Kelvin down to seventeen degrees-which caused problems, because just be-fore dawn the hydrogen would start to condense out of the air, making everything so slippery that it was useless to do anything other than sit down and wait it out. At dawn a faint pastel rainbow provided the only relief from the black-and-white monotony of the landscape.

The ground was treacherous, covered with little granular chunks of frozen gas that shifted slowly, incessantly in the anemic breeze. You had to walk in a slow waddle to stay on your feet; of the four people who would die during the base’s construction, three would be the victims of simple falls.

The troops weren’t happy with my decision to construct the anti-spacecraft and perimeter defenses before putting up living quarters. That was by the book, though, and they got two days of shipboard rest for every “day” planetside- which wasn’t overly generous, I admit, since ship days were 24 hours long, and a day on the planet was 38.5 hours from dawn to dawn.

The base was completed in just less than four weeks, and it was a formidable structure indeed. The perimeter, a circle one kilometer in diameter, was guarded by twenty-five gigawatt lasers that would automatically aim and fire within a thousandth of a second. They would react to the motion of any significantly large object between the perimeter and the horizon. Sometimes when the wind was right and the ground damp with hydrogen, the little ice granules would stick together into a loose snowball and begin to roll. They wouldn’t roll far.

For early protection, before the enemy came over our horizon, the base was in the center of a huge mine field. The buried mines would detonate upon sufficient distortion of their local gravitational fields: a single Tauran would set one off if he came within twenty meters of it; a small spacecraft a kilometer overhead would also detonate it. There were 2800 of them, mostly lOO-microton nuclear bombs. Fifty of them were devastatingly powerful tachyon devices.

They were all scattered at random in a ring that extended from the limit of the lasers’ effectiveness, out another five kilometers.

Inside the base, we relied on individual lasers, microton

grenades, and a tachyon-powered repeating rocket launcher that had never been tried in combat, one per platoon. As a

last resort, the stasis field was set up beside the living quarters. Inside its opaque gray dome, as well as enough paleolithic weaponry to hold off the Golden Horde, we’d stashed a small cruiser, just in case we managed to lose all our spacecraft in the process of winning a battle. Twelve people would be able to get back to Stargale.

It didn’t do to dwell on the fact that the other survivors would have to sit on their hands until relieved by reinforcements or death.

The living quarters and administration facilities were all underground, to protect them from line-of-sight weapons. It didn’t do too much for morale, though; there were waiting lists for every outside detail, no matter how strenuous or risky. I hadn’t wanted the troops to go up to the surface in their free time, both because of the danger involved and the administrative headache of constantly checking equipment in and out and keeping track of who was where.

Finally I had to relent and allow people to go up for a few hours every week. There was nothing to see except the featureless plain and the sky (which was dominated by S Doradus during the day, and the huge dim oval of the galaxy at night), but that was an improvement over staring at the melted-rock walls and ceiling.

A favorite sport was to walk out to the perimeter and throw snowballs in front of the laser; see how small a snowball you could throw and still set the weapon off. It seemed to me that the entertainment value of this pastime was about equal to watching a faucet drip, but there was no real harm in it, since the weapons would only fire outward and we had power to spare.

For five months things went pretty smoothly. Such administrative problems as we had were similar to those we’d encountered on the Masaryk II. And we were in less danger as passive troglodytes than we had been scooting from collapsar to collapsar, at least until the enemy showed up.

I looked the other way when Rudkoski reassembled his still. Anything that broke the monotony of garrison duty was welcome, and the chits not only provided booze for the troops but gave them something to gamble with. I only interfered in two ways: nobody could go outside unless they were totally sober, and nobody could sell sexual favors. Maybe that was the Puritan in me, but it was, again, by the book. The opinion of the supporting specialists was split. Lieutenant Wilber, the psychiatric officer, agreed with me; the sex counselors Kajdi and Valdez didn’t. But then, they were probably coining money, being the resident “professionals.”

Five months of comfortably boring routine, and then along came Private Graubard.

 

For obvious reasons, no weapons were allowed in the living quarters. The way these people were trained, even a fistfight could be a duel to the death, and tempers were short. A hundred merely normal people would probably have been at each other’s throats after a week in our caves, but these soldiers had been hand-picked for their ability to get along in close confinement.

Still there were fights. Graubard had almost killed his ex-lover Schon when that worthy made a face at him in the chow line. He had a week of solitary detention (so did Schon, for having precipitated it) and then psychiatric counseling and punitive details. Then I transferred him to the fourth platoon, so he wouldn’t be seeing Schon every day.

The first time they passed in the halls, Graubard greeted Schon with a karate kick to the throat. Diana had to build him a new trachea. Graubard got a more intensive round of detention, counseling and details-hell, I couldn’t transfer him to another company-and then he was a good boy for two weeks. I fiddled their work and chow schedules so the two would never be in the same room together. But they met in a

corridor again, and this time it came out more even: Schon got two broken ribs, but Graubard got a ruptured testicle and lost four teeth.

THE FOREVER WAR 207

If it kept up, I was going to have at least one less mouth to feed.

By the Universal Code of Military Justice I could have ordered Graubard executed, since we were technically in a state of combat. Perhaps I should have, then and there. But Charlie suggested a more humanitarian solution, and I accepted it.

We didn’t have enough room to keep Graubard in soiltaiy detention  forever, which seemed to be the only humane yet practical thing to do, but they had plenty of room aboard the Masaiyk II, hovering overhead in a stationary orbit. I called Antopol and she agreed to take care of him. I gave her permission to space the bastard if he gave her any trouble.

We called a general assembly to explain things, so that the lesson of Graubard wouldn’t be lost on anybody. I was just starting to talk, standing on the rock dais with the company sitting in front of me, and the officers and Graubard behind me- when the crazy fool decided to kill me.

Like everybody else, Graubard was assigned five hours per week of training inside the stasis field. Under close supervision, the soldiers would practice using their swords and spears and whatnot on dummy Taurans. Somehow Graubard had managed to smuggle out a weapon, an Indian chakra, which is a circle of metal with a razor-keen outer edge. It’s a tricky weapon, but once you know how to use it, it can be much more effective than a regular throwing knife. (3raubard was an expert.

All in a fraction of a second, Graubard disabled the peopie on either side of him- hitting Charlie in the temple with an elbow while he broke Hilleboe’s kneecap with a kick-and slid the chakra out of his tunic and spun it toward me in one smooth action. It had covered half the distance to my throat before I reacted.

Instinctively I slapped out to deflect it and came within a centimeter of losing four fingers. The razor edge slashed open the top of my palm, but I succeeded in knocking the thing off course. And Graubard was rushing me, teeth bared in an expression I hope I never see again.

Maybe he didn’t realize that the old queer was really

only five years older than he; that the old queer had combat reflexes and three weeks of negative feedback kinesthesia training. At any rate, it was so easy I almost felt sorry for him.

His right toe was turning in; I knew he would take one more step and go into a savat~ leap. I adjusted the distance between us with a short ballestra and, just as both his feet left the ground, gave him an ungentle side-kick to the solar plexus. He was unconscious before he hit the ground. But not dead.

If I’d merely killed him in self-defense, my troubles would have been over instead of suddenly being multiplied.

A simple psychotic troublemaker a commander can lock up and forget about. But not a failed assassin. And I didn’t have to take a poll to know that executing him was not going to improve my relationship with the troops.

I realized that Diana was on her knees beside me, trying to pry open my fingers. “Check Hilleboe and Moore,” I mumbled, and to the troops: “Dismissed.”

“Don’t be an ass,” Charlie said. He was holding a damp rag to the bruise on the side of his head.

“You don’t think I have to execute him?”

“Stop twitching!” Diana was trying to get the lips of my wound to line up together so she could paint them shut. From the wrist down, the hand felt like a lump of ice.

“Not by your own hand, you don’t. You can detail someone. At random.” “Charlie’s right,” Diana said. “Have everybody draw a slip of paper out of a bowl.” I was glad Hilleboe was sound asleep on the other cot.

I didn’t need her opinion. “And if the person so chosen refuses?”

“Punish him and get another,” Charlie said. “Didn’t you learn anything in the can? You can’t abrogate your authority by publicly doing a job.. . that obviously should be detailed.”

“Any other job, sure. But for this. . . nobody in the company has ever killed. It would look like I was getting somebody else to do my moral dirty work.”

“If it’s so damned complicated,” Diana said, “why not just get up in front of the troops and tell them how complicated it is. Then have them draw straws. They aren’t children.”

There had been an army in which that sort of thing was done, a strong quasi- memory told me. The Marxist POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War, early twentieth. You obeyed an order only after it had been explained in detail; you could refuse if it didn’t make sense. Officers and men got drunk together and never saluted or used titles. They lost the war. But the other side didn’t have any fun.

“Finished.” Diana set the limp hand in my lap. “Don’t

try to use it for a half-hour. When it starts to hurt, you can use it.”

I inspected the wound closely. “The lines don’t match up. Not that I’m complaining.”

“You shouldn’t. By all rights, you ought to have just a stump. And no regeneration facilities this side of Stargate.”

“Stump ought to be at the top of your neck,” Charlie said. “I don’t see why you have any qualms. You should have killed the bastard outright.”

“I know that, goddainmid” Both Charlie and Diana jumped at my outburst. “Sorry, shit. Look, just let me do the worrying.”

“Why don’t you both talk about something else for a while.” Diana got up and checked the contents of her medical bag. “I’ve got another patient to check. Try to keep from exciting each other.”

“Graubard?” Charlie asked.

“That’s right. To make sure he can mount the scaffold without assistance.” “What if Hilleboe-”

“She’ll be out for another half-hour. I’ll send Jarvil down, just in case.”  She hurried out the door.

“The scaffold.. .” I hadn’t given that any thought. “How the hell are we going to execute him? We can’t do it indoors: morale. Firing squad would be pretty grisly.”

“Chuck him out the airlock. You don’t owe him any ceremony.”

“You’re probably right. I wasn’t thinking about him.” I wondered whether Charlie had ever seen the body of a person who’d died that way. “Maybe we ought to just stuff him into the recycler. He’d wind up there eventually.”

Charlie laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

“We’d have to trim him up a little bit. Door’s not very wide.” Charlie had a few suggestions as to how to get around that. Jarvil came in and more-or-less ignored us.

Suddenly the inlmnnary door banged open. A patient on a cart; Diana rushing alongside pressing on the man’s chest, while a private pushed. Two other privates were following, but hung back at the door. “Over by the wall,” she ordered.

It was Graubard. “Tried to kill himself,” Diana said, but that was pretty obvious. “Heart stopped.” He’d made  a noose out of his belt; it  was still banging limply around his neck.

There were two big electrodes with rubber handles hanging on the wall. Diana snatched them with one hand while she ripped his tunic open with the other. “Get your hands off the cart!” She held the electrodes apart, kicked a switch, and pressed them down onto his chest. They made a low hum while his body trembled and flopped. Smell of burning flesh.

Diana was shaking her head. “Get ready to crack him,” she said to Jarvil. “Get Doris down here.” The body was gurgling, but it was a mechanical sound, like plumbing.

She kicked off the power and let the electrodes drop, pulled a ring off her finger and crossed to stick her arms in the sterilizer. Jarvil started to rub an evil-smelling fluid over the man’s chest.

There was a small red mark between the two electrode burns. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. Jarvil wiped it away. I stepped closer and checked Graubard’s neck.

“Get out of the way, William, you aren’t sterile.” Diana felt his collarbone, measured down a little ways and made an incision straight down to the bottom of his breastbone. Blood welled out and Jarvil handed her an instrument that looked like big chrome-plated bolt-cutters. I looked away but couldn’t help hearing the thing crunch through his ribs. She asked for retractors and sponges and so on while I wandered back to  where I’d been sitting.  With the  corner of my eye  I  saw her working away inside his thorax, massaging his heart directly.

Charlie looked the way I felt. He called out weakly, “Hey, don’t knock yourself out, Diana.” She didn’t answer. Jarvil had wheeled up the artificial heart and was holding out two tubes. Diana picked up a scalpel and I looked away again.

He was still dead a half-hour later. They turned off the machine and threw a sheet over him. Diana washed the
blood off her arms and said, “Got to change. Back in a minute.” I got up and walked to her billet, next door. Had to know.

I raised my hand to knock but it was suddenly hurting like there was a line of fire drawn across it. I rapped with my left and she opened the door immediately.

“What-oh, you want something for your hand.” She was half-dressed, unseif- conscious. “Ask Jarvil.”

“No, that’s not it. What happened, Diana?”

“Oh. Well,” she pulled a tunic over her head and her voice was muffled. “It was my fault, I guess. I left him alone for a minute.”

“And he tried to hang himself.”

“That’s right.” She sat on the bed and offered me the chair. “I went off to the head and he was dead by the time I got back. I’d already sent Jarvil away because I didn’t want Hilleboe to be unsupervised for too long.”

“But, Diana. . . there’s no mark on his neck. No bruise, nothing.” She shrugged. “The hanging didn’t kill him. He had a heart attack.” “Somebody gave him a shot. Right over his heart.”

She looked at me curiously. “I did that, William. Adrenaline. Standard procedure.” You get that red dot of expressed blood if you jerk away from the projector while you’re getting a shot. Otherwise the medicine goes right through the pores, doesn’t

leave a mark. “He was dead when you gave him the shot?”

“That would be my professional opinion.” Deadpan. “No heartbeat, pulse, respiration. Very few other disorders show these symptoms.”

“Yeah. I see.”

“Is something. . . what’s the matter, William?”

Either I’d been improbably lucky or Diana was a very good actress. “Nothing. Yeah, I better get something for this hand.” I opened the door. “Saved me a lot of trouble.”

She looked straight into my eyes. “That’s true.”

 

Actually, I’d traded one kind of trouble for another. Despite the fact that there were several disinterested witnesses

to Graubard’s demise, there was a persistent rumor that I’d had Doc Alsever simply exterminate him-since I’d botched the job myself and didn’t want to go through a troublesome court-martial.

The fact was that, under the Universal Code of Military “Justice,” Graubard hadn’t deserved any kind of trial at all. All 1 had to do was say “You, you and you. Take this man out and kill him, please.” And woe betide the private who refused to carry out the order.

My relationship with the troops did improve, in a sense. At least outwardly, they showed more deference to me. But I suspected it was at least partly the cheap kind of respect you might offer any ruffian who had proved himself to be dangerous and volatile.

So Killer was my new name. Just when I’d gotten used to Old Queer.

The base quickly settled back into its routine of training and waiting. I was almost impatient for the Taurans to show up, just to get it over with one way or the other.

The troops had adjusted to the situation much better than I had, for obvious reasons. They had specific duties to perform and ample free time for the usual soldierly anodynes to boredom. My duties were more varied but offered little satisfaction, since the problems that percolated up to me were of the “the buck stops here” type; those with pleasing, unambiguous solutions were taken care of in the lower echelons.

I’d never cared much for sports or games, but found myself turning to them more and more as a kind of safety valve. For the first time in my life, in these tense, claustrophobic surroundings, I couldn’t escape into reading or study. So I fenced, quarterstaff and saber, with the other officers, worked myself to exhaustion on the exercise machines and even kept a jump-rope in my office. Most of the other officers played chess, but they could usually beat me-whenever I won it gave me the feeling I was being humored. Word games were difficuit because my language was an archaic

dialect that they  had trouble manipulating. And I lacked the time and talent to master “modern” English.

Joe tialdeman hi’)

For a while I let Diana feed me mood-altering drugs, but the cumulative effect of them was frightening-I was getting addicted in a way that was at first too subtle to bother me-so I stopped short. Then 1 tried some systematic psychoanalysis with Lieutenant Wilber. It was impossible. Although he knew all about my problem in an academic kind of way, we didn’t speak the same cultural language; his counseling me about love and sex was like me telling a fourteenth-century serf how best to get along with his priest and landlord.

And that, after all, was the root of my problem. I was sure I could have handled the pressures and frustrations of command; of being cooped up in a cave with these people who at times  seemed scarcely less  alien than  the enemy; even the near- certainty that it could lead only to painful death in a worthless cause-if only I could have had Mary-gay with me. And the feeling got more intense as the months crept by.

He got very stern with me at this point and accused me of romanticizing my position. He knew what love was, he said; he had been in love himself. And the sexual polarity of the couple made no difference-all right, I could accept that; that idea had been a clichй in my parents’ generation (though it had run into some predictable resistance in my own). But love, he said, love was a fragile blossom; love was a delicate crystal; love was an unstable reaction with a half-life of about eight months. Bullshit, I said, and accused him of wearing cultural blinders; thirty centuries of prewar society taught that love was one thing that could last to the grave and even beyond and if he had been born instead of hatched he would know that without being told!

Whereupon he would assume a wry, tolerant expression and reiterate that I was merely a victim of self-imposed sexual frustration and romantic delusion.

In retrospect, I guess we had a good time arguing with each other. Cure me, he didn’t.

I did have a new friend who sat in my lap all the time. It was the cat, who had the usual talent for hiding from people who like cats and cleaving unto those who have sinus trouble or just don’t like sneaky little animals. We

did have something in common, though, since to my knowledge be was the only other heterosexual male mammal within any reasonable distance, He’d been castrated, of course, but that didn’t make much difference under the circumstances.

It was exactly 400 days since the day we had begun construction. I was sitting at my desk not checking out Hilleboe’s new duty roster. The cat was on my lap, purring loudly even though I refused to pet it. Charlie was stretched out in a chair reading something on the viewer. The phone buzzed and it was the Commodore.

“They’re here.”

 

“I said they’re here. A Tauran ship just exited the collapsar field. Velocity .80c. Deceleration thirty gees. Give or take.”

Charlie was leaning over my desk. “What?” I dumped the cat. “How long? Before you can pursue?” I asked.

“Soon as  you get off the phone.” I switched off and went over to the logistic computer, which was a twin to the one on Masaryk ii and had a direct data link to it. While I tried to get numbers out of the thing, Charlie fiddled with the visual display.

The display was a hologram about a meter square by half a meter thick and was programmed to show the positions of Sade-l38, our planet, and a few other chunks of rock in the system. There were green and red dots to show the positions of our vessels and the Taurans’.

The computer said that the minimum time it could take the Taurans to decelerate and get back to this planet would be a little over eleven days. Of course, that would be straight maximum acceleration and deceleration all the way; we could pick them off like flies on a wall. So, like us, they’d mix up their direction of flight and degree of acceleration in a random way. Based on several hundred past records of enemy behavior, the computer was able to give us a probability table:

Unless, of course, Antopol and her gang of merry pirates managed to make a kill. The chances of that I had learned in the can, were slightly less than fifty-fifty.

But whether it took 28.9554 days or two weeks, those of us on the ground had to just sit on our hands and watch.

If Antopol was successful, then we wouldn’t have to fight until the regular garrison troops replaced us here and we moved on to the next collapsar.

“Haven’t left yet.” Charlie had the display cranked down to minimum scale; the planet was a white ball the size of a large melon and Masaryk II was a green dot off to the right some eight melons away; you couldn’t get both on the screen at the same time.

While we were watching a small green dot popped out of the ship’s dot and drifted away from it. A ghostly number 2 drifted beside it, and a key projected on the display’s lower left-hand corner identified it as 2-Pursuit Drone. Other nunibers in the key identified the Masaryk II, a planetary defense fighter and fourteen planetary defense drones. Those sixteen ships were not yet far enough away from one another to have separate dots.

The cat was rubbing against my ankle; I picked it up and stroked it. “Tell Hilleboe to call a general assembly. Might as well break it to everyone at once.”

The men and women didn’t take it very well, and I couldn’t blame them. We had all expected the Taurans to

attack much sooner-and when they persisted in not coming, the feeling grew that Strike Force Command had made a mistake and that they’d never show up at all.

I wanted the company to start weapons training in earnest; they hadn’t used any high-powered weapons in almost two years. So I activated their laser-fingers and passed out the grenade and rocket launchers. We couldn’t practice inside the base for fear of damaging the external sensors and defensive laser ring. So we turned off half the circle of gigawatt lasers and went out about a klick beyond the parimeter, one platoon at a time, accompanied by either me or Charlie. Rusk kept a close watch on the early-warning screens. If anything approached, she would send up a flare, and the platoon would have to get back inside the ring before the unknown came over the horizon, at which time the defensive lasers would come on automatically. Besides knocking out the unknown, they would fry the platoon in less than .02 second.

We couldn’t spare anything from the base to use as a target, but that turned out to be no problem. The first tachyon rocket we fired scooped out a hole twenty meters long by ten wide by five deep; the rubble gave us a multitude of targets from twice- man-sized on down.

The soldiers were good, a lot better than they had been with the primitive weapons in the stasis field. The best laser practice turned out to be rather like skeetshooting: pair up the people and have one stand behind the other, throwing rocks at random intervals. The one who was shooting had to gauge the rock’s trajectory and zap it before  it hit the ground. Their eye-hand coordination was impressive (maybe the Eugenics Council had done something right).

Shooting at rocks down to pebble-size, most of them could do better than nine out of ten. Old non-bioengineered me could hit maybe seven out of ten, and I’d had a good deal more practice than they had.

They were equally facile at estimating trajectories with the grenade launcher, which was a more versatile weapon than it had been in the past. Instead of shooting one-

microton bombs with a standard propulsive charge, it had four different charges and a choice of one-, two-, three- or

four-microton bombs. And for really close in-fighting, where it was dangerous to use the lasers, the barrel of the launcher would unsnap, and you could load it with a magazine of “shotgun” rounds. Each shot would send out an expanding cloud of a thousand tiny fiechettes that were instant death out to five meters and turned to hanniess vapor

at six.

The tachyon- rocket launcher required no skill whatsoever. All you had to do was to be careful no one was standing behind you when you fired it; the backwash from the

rocket was dangerous for several meters behind the launching tube. Otherwise, you just lined your target up in the crosshairs and pushed the button. You didn’t have to worry about trajectory; the rocket traveled in a straight line for all practical purposes. It reached escape velocity in less than a second.

It improved the troops’ morale to get out and chew up the landscape with their new toys. But the landscape wasn’t fighting back. No matter how physically impressive the weapons were, their effectiveness would depend on what the Taurans could throw back. A Greek phalanx must have looked pretty impressive,  but it wouldn’t do too well against a single man with a flamethrower.

And as with any engagement, because of time dilation, there was no way to tell what sort of weaponry they would have. They might have never heard of the stasis field. Or they might be able to say a magic word and make us disappear.

I was out with the fourth platoon, burning rocks, when Charlie called and asked me to come back in, urgent. I left Heimoff in charge.

“Another one?” The scale of the holograph display was such that our planet was pea-sized, about five centimeters from the X that marked the position of Sade-138. There were forty-one red and green dots scattered around the field; the key identified number 41 as Tauran Cruiser (2).

“You called Antopol?”

“Yeah.” He anticipated the next question. “It’ll take

almost a day for the signal to get there and back.” “It’s never happened before,” but of course Charlie knew that

“Maybe this coliapsar is especially important to them.”

“Likely.” So it was almost certain we’d be fighting on the ground. Even if Antopol managed to get the first cruiser, she wouldn’t have a fifty-fifty chance on the second one. Low on drones and fighters. “I wouldn’t like to be Antopol now.”

“She’ll just get it earlier.”

“I don’t know. We’re in pretty good shape.”

“Save it for the troops, William.” He turned down the display’s scale to where it showed only two objects: Sade138 and the new red dot, slowly moving.

 

We spent the next two weeks watching dots blink out. And if you knew when and where to look, you could go outside and see the real thing happening, a hard bright speck of white light that faded in about a second.

In that second, a nova bomb had put out over a million times the power of a gigawatt laser. It made a miniature star half a klick in diameter and as hot as the interior of the sun. Anything it touched it would consume. The radiation from a near miss could botch up a ship’s electronics beyond repair-two fighters, one of ours and one of theirs, had evidently suffered that fate, silently drifting out of the system at a constant velocity, without power.

We had used more powerful nova bombs earlier in the war, but the degenerate matter used to fuel them was unstable in large quantities. The bombs had a tendency to explode while they were still inside the ship. Evidently the Taurans had the same problem-or they had copied the process from us in the first place-because they had also scaled down to nova bombs that used less than a hundred kilograms of degenerate matter. And they deployed them much the same way we did, the warhead separating into dozens of pieces as it approached the target, only one of which was the nova bomb.

They would probably have a few bombs left over after they finished off Masaryk II and her retinue of fighters and

drones. So it was likely that we were wasting time and energy in weapons practice. The thought did slip by my conscience that I could gather up eleven people and board the fighter we had hidden safe behind the stasis field. It was pre-programmed

to take us back to Stargate.

I even went to the extreme of making a mental list of the eleven, trying to think of eleven people who meant more to me than the rest. Turned out I’d be picking six at random.

I put the thought away, though. We did have a chance, maybe a damned good one, even against a fully-armed cruiser. It wouldn’t be easy to get a nova bomb close enough to include us inside its kill-radius.

Besides, they’d space me for desertion. So why bother?

 

Spirits rose when one of Antopol’s drones knocked out the first Tauran cruiser. Not counting the ships left behind for planetary defense, she still had eighteen drones and two fighters. They wheeled around to intercept the second cruiser, by then a few light-hours away, still being harassed by fifteen enemy drones.

One of the Tauran drones got her. Her ancillary crafts continued the attack, but it was a rout. One fighter and three drones fled the battle at maximum acceleration, looping up over the plane of the ecliptic, and were not pursued. We watched them with morbid interest while the enemy cruiser inched back to do battle with us. The fighter was headed back for Sade-l38, to escape. Nobody blamed them. In fact, we sent them a farewell-good luck message; they didn’t respond, naturally, being zipped up in the tanks. But it would be recorded.

It took the enemy five days to get back to the planet and be comfortably ensconced in a stationary orbit on the other side. We settled in for the inevitable first phase of the attack, which would be aerial and totally automated: their drones against our lasers. I put a force of fifty men and women inside the stasis field, in case one of the drones got through. An empty gesture, really; the enemy could just

Joe Haldeman

stand by and wait for them to turn off the field, fry them the second it flickered out.

Charlie had a weird idea that I almost went for. “We could boobytrap the place.”

“What do you mean?” I said. “This place is booby-trapped, out to twenty-five klicks.”

“No, not the mines and such. I mean the base itself, here, underground.” “Go on.”

“There are two nova bombs in that fighter.” He pointed at the stasis field through a couple of hundred meters of rock. “We can roll them down here, boobytrap them, then bide everybody in the stasis field and wait.”

In a way it was tempting. It would relieve me from any responsibility for decision- making, leave everything up to chance. “I don’t think it would work, Charlie.”

He seemed hurt. “Sure it would.”

“No, look. For it to work, you have to get every single Tauran inside the kill-radius before it goes off-but they wouldn’t all come charging in here once they breached our defenses. Least of all if the place seemed deserted. They’d suspect something, send in an advance party. And after the advance party set off the bombs-”

“We’d be back where we started, yeah. Minus the base.

Sorry.”

I shrugged. “It was an idea. Keep thinking, Charlie.” I turned my attention back to the display, where the lopsided space war was in progress. Logically enough, the enemy wanted to knock out that one fighter overhead before he started to work on us. About all we could do was watch the red dots crawl around the planet and try to score. So far the pilot had managed to knock out all the drones; the enemy hadn’t sent any fighters after him yet.

I’d given the pilot control over five of the lasers in our defensive ring. They couldn’t do much good, though. A gigawatt laser pumps out a billion kilowatts per second at a range of a hundred meters. A thousand klicks up, though, the beam was attenuated to ten kilowatts. Might do some damage if it hit an optical sensor. At least confuse things.

“We could use another fighter. Or six.”
“Use up the drones,” I said. We did have a fighter, of course, and a swabbie attached to us who could pilot it. It might turn out to be our only hope, if they got us cornered in the stasis field.

“How far away is the other guy?” Charlie asked, meaning the fighter pilot who had turned tail. I cranked down the scale, and the green dot appeared at the right of the display. “About six light-hours.” He had two drones left, too near to him to show as separate dots, having expended one in covering his getaway. “He’s not accelerating any more, but he’s doing point nine gee.”

“Couldn’t do us any good if he wanted to.” Need almost a month to slow down.

At that low point, the light that stood for our own defensive fighter faded out. “Shit.”

“Now the fun starts. Should I tell the troops to get ready, stand by to go topside?” “No . . . have them suit up, in case we lose air. But I expect it’ll be a little while

before we have a ground attack.” I turned the scale up again. Four red dots were already creeping around the globe toward us.

 

I got suited up and came back to Administration to watch the fireworks on the monitors.

The lasers worked perfectly. All four drones converged on us simultaneously; were targeted and destroyed. All but one of the nova bombs went off below our horizon (the visual horizon was about ten kilometers away, but the lasers were mounted high and could target something at twice that distance). The bomb that detonated on our horizon had melted out a semicircular chunk that glowed brilliantly white for several minutes. An hour later, it was still glowing dull orange, and the ground temperature outside had risen to fifty degrees Absolute, melting most of our snow, exposing an irregular dark gray surface.

The next attack was also over in a fraction of a second, but this time there had been eight drones, and four of them got within ten klicks. Radiation from the glowing craters raised the temperature to nearly 300 degrees. That was above the melting point of water, and I was starting to get

joe riaiaeman

worried. The fighting suits were good to over a thousand degrees, but the automatic lasers depended on low- temperature superconductors for their speed.

I asked the computer what the lasers’ temperature limit

was, and it printed out TR  398-734-009-265, “Some  Aspects Concerning the Adaptability of Cryogenic Ordnance to Use in Relatively High-Temperature Environments,”

which had lots of handy advice about how we could insulate the weapons if we had access to a fully-equipped armorer’s shop. It did note that the response time of

automatic-aiming devices increased as the temperature increased, and that above some “critical temperature,” the

weapons would not aim at all. But there was no way to

predict any individual weapon’s behavior, other than to note that the highest critical temperature recorded was 790 degrees and the lowest was 420 degrees.

Charlie was watching the display. His voice was flat over the suit’s radio. “Sixteen this time.”

“Surprised?” One of the few  things we knew about Tauran psychology  was a certain compulsiveness about numbers, especially primes and powers of two.

“Let’s just hope they don’t have 32 left.” I queried the computer on this; all it could say was that the cruiser had thus far launched a total of 44 drones and that some cruisers had been known to carry as many as 128.

We had more than a half-hour before the drones would strike. I could evacuate everybody to the stasis field, and they would be temporarily safe if one of the nova bombs got through. Safe, but trapped. How long would it take the crater to cool down, if three or four-let alone sixteen-of the bombs made it through? You couldn’t live forever in a fighting suit, even though it recycled everything with remorseless efficiency. One week was enough to make you thoroughly miserable. Two weeks, suicidal. Nobody had ever gone three weeks, under field conditions.

Besides, as a defensive position, the stasis field could be a death-trap. The enemy has all the options since the dome is opaque; the only way you can find out what they’re up to is to stick your head out. They didn’t have to wade in with primitive weapons unless they were impatient. They

could keep the dome saturated with laser fire and wait for you to turn off the generator. Meanwhile harassing you by throwing spears, rocks, arrows into the dome-.you could return fire, but it was pretty futile.

Of course, if one man stayed inside the base, the others could wait out the next half-hour in the stasis field. If he didn’t come get them, they’d know the outside was hot. I chinned the combination that would give me a frequency available to everybody echelon 5 and above.

“This is Major Mandella.” That still sounded like a bad joke.

I outlined the situation to them and asked them to tell their troops that everyone in the company was free to move into the stasis field. I would stay behind and come retrieve them if things went well-not out of nobility, of course; I preferred taking the chance of being vaporized in a nanosecond, rather than almost certain slow death under the gray dome.

I chinned Charlie’s frequency. “You can go, too. I’ll take care of things here.” “No, thanks,” be said slowly. “I’d just as soon. . . Hey, look at this.”

The cruiser had launched another red dot, a couple of minutes behind the others. The display’s key identified it as being another drone. “That’s curious.”

“Superstitious bastards,” he said without feeling.

It turned out that only eleven people chose to join the fifty who had been ordered into the dome. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

As the drones approached, Charlie and I stared at the monitors, carefully not looking at the holograph display, tacitly agreeing that it would be better not to know when they were one minute away, thirty seconds. . . And then, like the other times, it was over before we knew it had started. The screens glared white and there was a yowl of static, and we were still alive.

But this time there  were  fifteen new holes on  the horizon-or closer!-and the temperature was rising so fast that the last digit in the readout was an amorphous blur.

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The number peaked in the high 800s and began to slide back down.

We had never seen any of the drones, not during that tiny fraction of a second it took the lasers to aim and fire.

But then the seventeenth one flashed over the horizon, zigzagging crazily, and stopped directly overhead. For an instant it seemed to hover, and then it began to fall. Half the lasers had detected it, and they were firing steadily, but none of them could aim; they were all stuck in their last firing position.

It glittered as it droppecLthe mirror polish of its sleek hull reflecting the white glow from the craters and the eerie flickering of the constant, impotent laser fire. I beard Charlie take one deep breath, and the drone fell so close you could see spidery Tauran numerals etched on the hull and a transparent porthole near the tip-then its engne flared and it was suddenly gone.

“What the hell?” Charlie said, quietly. The porthole. “Maybe reconnaissance.”

“I guess. So we can’t touch them, and they know it.”

“Unless the lasers recover.” Didn’t seem likely. “We better get everybody under the dome. Us, too.”

He said a word whose vowel had changed over the centuries, but whose meaning was clear. “No hurry. Let’s see what they do.”

We waited for several hours. The temperature outside stabilized at 690 degrees- just under the melting point of zinc, I remembered to no purpose-and I tried the manual controls for the lasers, but they were still frozen.

“Here they come,” Charlie said. “Eight again.” I started for the display. “Guess we’ll-”

“Wait! They aren’t drones.” The key identified all eight with the legend Troop Carrier.

“Guess they want to take the base,” he said. “Intact.” That, and maybe try out new weapons and techniques.

“It’s not much of a risk for them. They can always retreat and drop a nova bomb in our laps.”

I called Brill and had her go get everybody who was in the stasis field, set them up with the remainder of her platoon as a defensive line circling around the northeast and

northwest quadrants. I’d put the rest of the people on the other half-circle.

“I wonder,” Charlie said. “Maybe we shouldn’t put everyone topside at once. Until we know how many Taurans there are.”

That was a point. Keep a reserve, let the enemy underestimate our strength. “It’s an idea. . . There might be just 64 of them in eight carriers.” Or 128 or 256. I wished

our spy satellites had a finer sense of discrimination. But you can only cram so much into a machine the size of a grape.

I decided to let Brill’s seventy people be our first line of defense and ordered them into a ring in the ditches we had made outside the base’s perimeter. Everybody else would stay downstairs until needed.

If it turned out that the Taurans, either through numbers or new technology, could field an unstoppable force, I’d order everyone into the stasis field. There was a tunnel from the living quarters to the dome, so the people underground could go straight there in safety. The ones in the ditches would have to fall back under fire. If any of them were still alive when I gave the order.

I called in Hilleboe and had her and Charlie keep watch over the lasers. If they came unstuck, I’d call Brill and her people back. Turn on the automatic aiming system again, then sit back and watch the show. But even stuck, the lasers could be useful. Charlie marked the monitors to show where the rays would go;  he and Hilleboe could fire them manually whenever something moved into a weapon’s line- of-sight.

We had about twenty minutes. Brill was walking around the perimeter with her men and women,  ordering  them into the ditches a squad at a time, setting up overlapping fields of fire. I broke in and asked her to setup the heavy weapons so that they could be used to channel the enemy’s advance into the path of the lasers.

There wasn’t much else to do but wait. I asked Charlie to measure the enemy’s progress and try to give us an accurate count-down, then sat at my desk and pulled out a pad, to diagram Brill’s arrangement and see whether I could improve on it.

The cat jumped up on my Lap, mewling piteously. He’d evidently been unable to tell one person from the other, suited up. But nobody else ever sat at this desk. 1 reached up to pet him and he jumped away.

The first line that I drew ripped through four sheets of paper. It had been some time since I’d done any delicate work in a suit. I remembered how in training, they’d made us practice controlling the strength-amplification circuits by passing eggs from person to person, messy business. I wondered if they still had eggs on Earth.

The diagram completed, I couldn’t see any way to add to it. All those reams of theory crammed in my brain; there was plenty of tactical advice about envelopment and encirclement, but from the wrong point of view. If you were the one who was being encircled, you didn’t have many options. Sit tight and fight. Respond quickly to enemy concentrations of force, but stay flexible so the enemy can’t employ a diversionary force to divert strength from some predictable section of your perimeter. Make full use of air and space support, always good advice. Keep your head down and your chin up and pray for the cavalry. Hold your position and don’t contemplate Dienbienphu, the Alamo, the Battle of Hastings.

“Eight more carriers out,” Charlie said. “Five minutes. Until the first eight get here.”

So they were going to attack in two waves. At least two. What would I do, in the Tauran commander’s position? That wasn’t too far-fetched; the Taurans lacked imagination in tactics and tended to copy human patterns.

The first wave could be a  throwaway, a kamikaze attack to soften us up and evaluate our defenses. Then the second would come in more methodically, and finish  the job.  Or vice  versa:  the first group would have twenty minutes to get

entrenched; then the second could skip over their heads and hit us hard at one spot- breach the perimeter and overrun the base.

Or maybe they sent out two forces simply because two was a magic number. Or they could launch only eight troop carriers at a time (that would be bad, implying that the carriers were large; in different situations they had used

carriers holding as few as 4 troops or as many as 128).

“Three minutes.” I stared at the cluster of monitors that showed various sectors of the mine field. If we were lucky, they’d land out there, Out of caution. Or maybe pass over it low enough to detonate mines.

I was feeling vaguely guilty. I was safe in my hole, doodling, ready to start calling out orders. How did those seventy sacrificial lambs feel about their absentee commander?

Then I remembered how I had felt about Captain Stott that first mission, when he’d elected  to stay safely in orbit while we fought on the ground. The rush of remembered hate was so strong I had to bite back nausea.

“Hilleboe, can you handle the lasers by yourself?” “I don’t see why not, sir.”

I tossed down the pen and stood up. “Charlie, you take over the unit coordination; you can do it as well as I could.

I’m going topside.”

“I wouldn’t advise that, sir.”

“Hell no, William. Don’t be an idiot.” “I’m nзt taking orders, I’m giv-”

“You wouldn’t last ten seconds up there,” Charlie said. “I’ll take the same chance as everybody else.”

“Don’t you hear what I’m saying. They’ll kill you!”

“The troops? Nonsense. I know they don’t like me especially, but-”

“You haven’t listened in on the squad frequencies?” No, they didn’t speak my brand of English when they talked among themselves. “They think you put them out on the line for punishment, for cowardice. After you’d told them anyone was free to go into the dome.”

“Didn’t you, sir?” Hilleboe said.

“To punish them? No, of course not.” Not consciously. “They were just up there when I needed. . . Hasn’t Lieutenant Brili said anything to them?”

“Not that I’ve heard,” Charlie said. “Maybe she’s been too busy to tune in.” Or she agreed with them. “I’d better get-”

“There!” Hilleboe shouted. The first enemy ship was visible in one of the mine field monitors; the others appeared in the next second. They came in from random directions and weren’t evenly distributed around the base.

Five in the northeast quadrant and only one in the southwest.  I relayed the information to Bnll.

But we had predicted their logic pretty well; all of them were coming down in the ring of mines. One came close enough to one of the tachyon devices to set it off. The blast caught the rear end of the oddly streamlined craft, causing it to make a complete flip and crash nose-first. Side ports opened up and Taurans came crawling

out. Twelve of them; probably four left inside. If all the others had sixteen as well, there were only slightly more of them than of us.

In the first wave.

The other seven had landed without incident, and yes, there were sixteen each. Brill shuffled a couple of squads to conform to the enemy’s troop concentration, and she waited.

They moved fast across the mine field, striding in unison like bowlegged, top- heavy robots, not even breaking stride when one of them was blown to bits by a mine, which happened eleven times.

When they came over the horizon, the reason for their apparently random distribution was obvious: they had analyzed beforehand which approaches would give them the most natural cover, from the rubble that the drones had kicked up. They would be able to get within a couple of kilometers of the base before we got any clear line-of-sight of them. And their suits had augmentation circuits similar to ours, so they could cover a kilometer in less than a minute.

Brill had her troops open fire immediately, probably more for morale than out of any hope of actually hitting the enemy. They probably were getting a few, though it was hard to tell. At least the tachyon rockets did an impressive job of turning boulders into gravel.

The Taurans returned fire with some weapon similar to the tachyon rocket, maybe exactly the same. They rarely found a mark, though; our people were at and below ground level, and if the rocket didn’t hit something, it would keep going on forever, amen. They did score a hit on one of the gigawatt lasers, though, and the concussion that filtered

down to us was strong enough to make me wish we had burrowed a little deeper than twenty meters.

The gigawaus weren’t doing us any good. The Taurans must have figured out the lines of sight ahead of tune, and gave them wide berth. That turned  out to be fortunate, because it caused Charlie to let his attention wander from the laser monitors for a moment.

“What the hell?”

“What’s that, Charlie?” I didn’t take my eyes off the monitors. Waiting for something to happen.

“The ship, the cruiser-it’s gone.” I looked at the holograph display. He was right; the only red lights were those that stood for the troop carriers.

“Where did it go?” I asked inanely.

“Let’s play it back.” He programmed the display to go back a couple of minutes and cranked out the scale to where both planet and collapsar showed on the cube. The cruiser showed up, and with it, three green dots. Our “coward,”

attacking the cruiser with only two drones.

But he had a little help from the laws of physics.

Instead of going into collapsar insertion, he had skimmed around the collapsar field in a slingshot orbit. He had come out going nine-tenths of the speed of light; the drones were going .99c, headed straight for the enemy cruiser. Our planet was about a thousand light-seconds from the collapsar, so the Tauran ship had only ten seconds to detect and stop both drones. And at that speed, it didn’t matter whether you’d been hit by a nova-bomb or a spitball.

The first drone disintegrated the cruiser, and the other one, .01 second behind, glided on down to impact on the planet. The fighter missed the planet by a couple of hundred kilometers and hurtled on into space, decelerating with the maximum twenty-five gees. He’d be back in a couple of months.

But the Taurans weren’t going to wait. They were getting close enough to our lines for both sides to start using lasers, but they were also within easy grenade range. A good-size rock could shield them from laser fire, but the grenades and rockets were slaughtering them.

At first, Brill’s troops had the overwhelming advantage; joe naiaeman

fighting from ditches, they could only be harmed by an occasional lucky shot or an extremely well-aimed grenade (which the Taurans threw by hand, with a range of several hundred meters). Brill had lost four, but it looked as if the Tauran force was down to less than half its original size.

Eventually, the landscape had been torn up enough so that the bulk of the Tauran force was able to fight from holes in the ground. The fighting slowed down to individual laser duels, punctuated occasionally by heavier weapons. But it wasn’t smart to use up a tachyon rocket against a single Tauran, not with another force of unknown size only a few minutes away.

Something had been bothering me about that holographic replay. Now, with the battle’s lull, I knew what it was.

When that second drone crashed at near-lightspeed, how much damage had it done to the planet? I stepped over to the computer and punched it up; found out how much energy had been released in the collision, and then compared it with geological information in the computer’s memory.

Twenty times as much energy as the most powerful earthquake ever recorded. On a planet three-quarters the size of Earth.

On the general frequency: “Everybody-topside! Right now!” I palmed the button that would cycle and open the airlock and tunnel that led from Administration to the surface.

“What the hell, Will-” “Earthquake!” How long? “Move!”

Hilleboc and Charlie were right behind me. The cat was sitting on my desk, licking himself unconcernedly. I had an irrational impulse to put him inside my suit, which was the way he’d been carried from the ship to the base, but knew he wouldn’t tolerate more than a few minutes of it. Then I had the more reasonable impulse to simply vaporize him with my laser-finger, but by then the door was closed and we were swarming up the ladder. All the way up, and for some time afterward, I was haunted by the image of that helpless animal, trapped under tons of rubble, dying slowly as the air hissed away.

“Safer in the ditches?” Charlie said

“I don’t know,” I said. “Never been in an earthquake.” Maybe the walls of the ditch would close up and crush us.

I was surprised at how dark it was on the surface. S Doradus had almost set; the monitors had compensated for the low light level.

An enemy laser raked across the clearing to our left, making a quick shower of sparks when it flicked by a gigawatt mounting. We hadn’t been seen yet. We all

decided yes, it would be safer in the ditches, and made it to the nearest one in three strides.

There were four men and women in the ditch, one of them badly wounded or dead. We scrambled down the ledge and I turned up my image amplifier to log two, to inspect our ditchmates. We were lucky; one was a grenadier and they also had a rocket launcher. I could just make out the names on their helmets. We were in Brill’s ditch, but she hadn’t noticed us yet. She was at the opposite end, cautiously peering over the edge, directing two squads in a flanking movement. When,they were safely in position, she ducked back down. “Is that you, Major?”

“That’s right,” I said cautiously. I wondered whether any of the people in the ditch were among the ones after my scalp.

“What’s this about an earthquake?”

She had been told about the cruiser being destroyed, but not about the other drone. I explained in as few words as possible.

“Nobody’s come out of the airlock,” she said. “Not yet. I guess they all went into the stasis field.”

“Yeah, they were just as close to one as the other.” Maybe some of them were still down below, hadn’t taken my warning seriously. I thinned the general frequency to check, and then all hell broke loose.

The ground dropped away and then flexed back up; slammed us so hard that we were airborne, tumbling out of the ditch. We flew several meters, going high enough to see the pattern of bright orange and yellow ovals, the craters where nova bombs had been stopped. I landed on my feet but the ground was shifting and slithering so much that it was impossible to stay upright.

With a basso grinding I could feel through my suit, the cleared area above our base crumbled and fell in. Part of the stasis field’s underside was exposed when the ground subsided; it settled to its new level with aloof grace.

Well, minus one cat. I hoped everybody else had time and sense enough to get under the dome.

A figure came staggering out of the ditch nearest to me and I realized with a start that it wasn’t human. At that range, my laser burned a hole straight through his helmet; he took two steps and fell over backward. Another helmet peered over the edge of the ditch. I sheared the top of it off before he could raise his weapon.

I couldn’t get my bearings. The only thing that hadn’t changed was the stasis dome, and it looked the same from any angle. The gigawatt lasers were all buried, but one of them had switched on, a brilliant flickering searchlight that illuminated a swirling cloud of vaporized rock.

Obviously, though, I was in enemy territory. I started across the trembling ground toward the dome.

I couldn’t raise any platoon leaders. All of them but Brill were probably inside the dome. I did get Hilleboe and Charlie; told Hilleboe to go inside the dome and roust everybody out. If the next wave also had 128, we were going to need everybody.

The tremors died down and I found my way into a

“friendly” ditch-the cooks’ ditch, in fact, since the only people there were Orban and Rudkoski.

“Looks like you’ll have to start from scratch again, Private.” “That’s all right, sir. Liver needed a rest.”

1 got a beep from Hilleboe and chinned her on. “Sir… there were only ten people there. The rest didn’t make it.”

“They stayed behind?” Seemed like they’d had plenty of time. “I don’t know, sir.”

“Never mind. Get me a count, how many people we have, all totalled.” I tried the platoon leaders’ frequency again and it was still silent.

The three of us watched for enemy laser fire for a couple of minutes, but there was none. Probably waiting for reinforcements. Hilleboe called back “I only get fifty-three, sir. Some may be unconscious.”

“All right. Have them sit tight until-” Then the second wave showed up, the troop carriers roaring over the horizon with their jets pointed our way, decelerating. “Get some rockers on those bastards!” Hilleboe yelled to everyone in particular.  But nobody had managed to stay attached to a rocket launcher while he was being tossed around. No grenade launchers, either, and the range was too far for the band lasers to do any damage.

These carriers were four or five times the size of the ones in the first wave. One of them grounded about a kilometer in front of us, barely stopping long enough to disgorge its troops. Of which there were over 50, probably 64-times 8 made 512. No way we could hold them back.

“Everybody listen, this is Major Mandella.” I tried to keep my voice even and quiet. “We’re going to retreat back into the dome, quickly but in an orderly way. I know we’re scattered all over hell. If you belong to the second or fourth platoon, stay put for  a minute and give covering  fire while the first and third platoons,  and support, fall back.

“First and third and support, fall back to about half your present distance from the dome, then take cover and defend the second and fourth as they come back. They’ll go to the edge of the dome and cover you while you come back the rest of the way.” I  shouldn’t have said “retreat”; that  word wasn’t in the  book. Retrograde action.

There was a lot more retrograde than action. Eight or nine people were firing, and all the rest were in full flight.

Rudkoski and Orban had vanished. I took a few carefully aimed shots, to no great effect, then ran down to the other end of the ditch, climbed out and headed for the dome.

The Taurans started firing rockets, but most of them seemed to be going too high. I saw two of us get blown away before I got to my halfway point; found a nice big rock and hid behind it. I peeked out and decided that only two or three of the Taurans were close enough to be even remotely possible laser targets, and the better part of valor

would be in not drawing unnecessary attention to myself. I ran the rest of the way to the edge of the field and stopped to return fire. After a couple of shots, I realized that I was just making myself a target; as far as I could see there was only one other person who was still running toward the dome.

A rocket zipped by, so close I could have touched it. I flexed my knees and kicked, and entered the dome in a rather undignified posture.

Inside, I could see the rocket that had missed me drifting lazily through the gloom, rising slightly as it passed through to the other side of the dome. It would vaporize the instant it came out the other side, since all of the kinetic energy it had lost in abruptly slowing down to 16.3 meters per second would come back in the form of heat.

Nine people were lying dead, facedown just inside of the field’s edge. It wasn’t unexpected, though it wasn’t the sort of thing you were supposed to tell the troops.

Their fighting suits were intact-otherwise they wouldn’t have made it this far-but sometime during the past few minutes’ rough-and-tumble, they had damaged the coaling of special insulation that protected them from the stasis field. So as soon as they entered the field, all electrical activity in their bodies ceased, which killed them instantly. Also, since no molecule in their bodies could move faster than 16.3 meters per second, they instantly froze solid, their body temperature stabilized at a cool

0.426 degrees Absolute.

I decided not to turn any of them over to find out their names, not yet. We had to get some sort of defensive position worked out before the Taurans came through the dome. If they decided to slug it out rather than wait

With elaborate gestures, I managed to get everybody collected in the center of the field, under the fighter’s tail, where the weapons were racked.

There were plenty of weapons, since we had been prepared to outfit three times this number of people. After giving each person a shield and short-sword, I traced a question in the snow: GOOD ARCHERS? RAISE HANDS. (got five volunteers, then picked out three more so that all the bows would be in use. Twenty arrows per bow. They were the most effective long-range weapons we had; the

arrows were almost invisible in their slow ifight, heavily weighted and tipped with a deadly sliver of diamond-hard C-.

I arranged the archers in a circle around the fighter (its landing fins would give them partial protection from missiles coming in from behind) and between each pair of archers put four other people: two spear-throwers, one quarterstaff, and a person armed with battleax and a dozen throwing knives. This arrangement would theoretically take care of the enemy at any range, from the edge of the field

to hand-to-hand combat.

Actually, at some 600-to-42 odds, they could probably walk in with a rock in each hand, no shields or special weapons, and still beat the shit out of us.

Assuming they knew what the stasis field was. Their technology seemed up to date in all other respects.

For several hours nothing happened. We got about as bored as anyone could, waiting to die. No one to talk to, nothing to see but the unchanging gray dome, gray snow, gray spaceship and a few identically gray soldiers. Nothing to hear, taste or smell but yourself.

Those of us who still had any interest in the battle were keeping watch on the bottom edge of the dome, waiting for the first Taurans to come through. So it took us a second to realize what was going on when the attack did stait It came from above, a cloud of catapulted darts swarming in through the dome some thiity meters above the ground, headed straight for the center of the hemisphere.

The shields were big enough that you could hide most of your body behind them by crouching slightly; the people who saw the darts coming could protect themselves

easily. The ones who had their backs to the action, or were just asleep at the switch, had to rely on dumb luck for survival; there was no way to shout a warning, and it took only three seconds for a missile to get from the edge of the dome to its center.

We were lucky, losing only five. One of them was an archer, Shubik. I took over her bow and we waited, expecting a ground attack immediately.

It didn’t come. After a half-hour, I went around the circle and explained with gestures that the first thing you were supposed to do, if anything happened, was to touch the

person on your right. He’d do the same, and so on down the line.

That might have saved my life. The second dart attack, a couple of hours later, came from behind me. I felt the nudge, slapped the person on my tight, turned around and saw the cloud descending. I got the shield over my head, and they hit a split-second later.

I set down my bow to pluck three darts from the shield and the ground attack started.

It was a weird, impressive sight Some three hundred of them stepped into the field simultaneously, almost shoulder-to-shoulder around the perimeter of the dome. They advanced in step, each one holding a round shield barely large enough to hide his massive chest. They were throwing darts similar to the ones we had been barraged with.

I set up the shield in front of me-it had little extensions on the bottom to keep it upright-and with the first arrow I shot, I knew we had a chance. It struck one of them in the center of his shield, went straight through and penetrated his suit.

It was a one-sided massacre. The darts weren’t very effective without the element of surprise-but when one came sailing over my head from behind, it did give me a crawly feeling between the shoulder blades.

With twenty arrows I got twenty Taurans. They closed ranks every time one dropped; you didn’t even have to aim. After running out of arrows, I tried throwing their darts back at them. But their light shields were quite adequate against the small missiles.

We’d killed more than half of them with arrows and spears, long before they got into range of the hand-to-hand weapons. I drew my sword and waited. They still outnumbered us by better than three to one.

When they got within ten meters, the people with the chakram throwing knives had their own field day. Although the spinning disc was easy enough to see and took more

than a half-second to get from thrower to target, most of the Taurans reacted in the same ineffective way, raising up the shield to ward it off. The razor-sharp, tempered heavy blade cut through the light shield like a buzz-saw through cardboard.

The first hand-to-hand contact was with the quarter-staffs, which were metal rods two meters long that tapered at the ends to a double-edged, serrated knife blade. The Taurans had a cold-blooded–or valiant, if your mind works that way-method for dealing with them. They would simply grab the blade and die. While the human was trying to extricate his weapon from the frozen death-grip, a Tauran swordsman, with a scimitar over a meter long, would step in and kill him.

Besides the swords, they had a bob-like thing that was a length of elastic cord that ended with about ten centimeters of something like barbed wire, and a small weight to propel it. It was a dangerous weapon for all concerned; if they missed their target it would come snapping back unpredictably. But they hit their target pretty often, going under the shields and wrapping the thorny wire around ankles.

I stood back-to-back with Private Erikson, and with our swords we managed to stay alive for the next few minutes.

When the Taurans were down to a couple of dozen survivors, they just turned around and started marching out. We threw some darts after them, getting three, but we didn’t warn to chase after them. They might turn around and start hacking again.

There were only twenty-eight of us left standing. Nearly ten times that number of dead Taurans littered the ground, but there was no satisfaction in it.

They could do the whole thing over, with a fresh 300. And this time it would work.

We moved from body to body, pulling out arrows and spears, then took up places around the fighter again. Nobody bothered to retrieve the quarterstaffs. I counted noses:

Charlie and Diana were still alive (Hilleboe had been one of the quarterstaff victims), as well as two supporting officers. Wilber and Szydlowska. Rudkoski was still alive but Orban had taken a dart.

After a day of waiting, it looked as though the enemy

had decided on a war of attrition rather than repeating the

ground attack. Darts came in constantly, not in swarms anymore, but in twos and threes and tens. And from all different angles. We couldn’t stay alert forever; they’d get somebody every three or four hours.

We took turns sleeping, two at a time, on top of the stasis field generator. Sitting directly under the bulk of the fighter, it was the safest place in the dome.

Every now and then, a Tauran would appear at the edge of the field, evidently to see whether any of us were left.

Sometimes we’d shoot an arrow at him, for practice.

The darts stopped falling after a couple of days. I supposed it was possible that they’d simply run out of them.

Or maybe they’d decided to stop when we were down to twenty survivors.

There was a more likely possibility. I took one of the quarterstaffs down to the edge of the field and poked it through, a centimeter or so. When I drew it back, the point was melted off. When 1 showed it to Charlie, he rocked back and forth (the only way you can nod in a suit); this sort of thing had happened before, one of the first times the stasis field hadn’t worked. They simply saturated it with laser fire and waited for us to go stir-crazy and turn off the generator. They were probably sitting in their ships playing the Tauran equivalent of pinochle.

I tried to think. It was hard to keep your mind on something for any length of time in that hostile environment, sense-deprived, looking over your shoulder every few seconds. Something Charlie had said. Only yesterday. I couldn’t track it down. It wouldn’t have worked then; that was all I could remember. Then finally it came to me.

I called everyone over and wrote in the snow:

GET NOVA BOMBS FROM SHIP. CARRY TO EDGE OF FIELD.

MOVE FIELD.

Joe Ilableman

Szydlowska knew where the proper tools would be aboard ship. Luckily, we had left all of the entrances open before turning on the stasis field; they were electronic and would have been frozen shut. We got an assortment of wrenches from the engine room and climbed up to the cockpit. He knew how to remove the access plate that exposed a crawl space into the bomb-bay. I followed him in through the meter-wide tube.

Normally, I supposed, it would have been pitch-black.

But the stasis field illuminated the bomb-bay with the same dim, shadowless light that prevailed outside. The bomb-bay was too small for both of us, so I stayed at the end of the crawl space and watched.

The bomb-bay doors had a “manual override” so they were easy; Szydlowska just turned a hand-crank and we were in business. Freeing the two nova bombs from their cradles was another thing. Finally, he went back down to the engine room and brought back a crowbar. He pried one loose and I got the other, and we rolled them out the bomb-bay.

Sergeant Anghebov was already working on them by the time we climbed back down. All you had to do to arm the bomb was to unscrew the fuse on the nose of it and poke something around in the fuse socket to wreck the delay mechanism and safety restraints.

We carried them quickly to the edge, six people per bomb, and set them down next to each other. Then we waved to the four people who were standing by at the field generator’s handles. They picked it up and walked ten paces in the opposite direction. The bombs disappeared as the edge of the field slid over them.

There was no doubt that the bombs went off. For a couple of seconds it was hot as the interior of a star outside, and even the stasis field took notice of the fact: about a third of the dome glowed a dull pink for a moment, then was gray again. There was a slight acceleration, like you would feel in a slow elevator. That meant we  were drifting down to the bottom of the crater. Would there be a solid bottom? Or would we sink down through molten rock to be trapped like a fly in amber-didn’t pay to even think about that. Perhaps if it happened, we could blast our way out with the fighter’s gigawatt laser. Twelve of us, anyhow.

HOW LONG? Charlie scraped in the snow at my feet.

That was a damned good question. About all I knew was the amount of energy two nova bombs released. I didn’t know how big a fireball they would make, which would determine the temperature at detonation and the size of the crater. I didn’t know the heat capacity of the surrounding rock, or its boiling point I wrote: ONE WEEK, SHRUG?

HAVE TO THINK.

The ship’s computer could have told me in a thousandth of a second, but it wasn’t talking. I started writing equations m the snow, trying to get a maximum and minimum figure for the length of time it would take for the outside to cool down to 500 degrees. Anghelov, whose physics was much more up-to-date, did his own calculations on the other side of the ship.

My answer said anywhere from six hours to six days (although for six hours, the surrounding rock would have to conduct heat like pure copper), and Anghelov got five hours to 41/2 days. I voted for six and nobody else got a vote.

We slept a lot. Charlie and Diana played chess by scraping symbols in the snow; I was never able to hold the shifting positions of the pieces in my mind. I checked my figures several times and kept coming up with six days. I checked Anghelov’s computations~ too, and they seemed all right, but I stuck to my guns. It wouldn’t hurt us to stay in the suits an extra day and a half. We argued good-naturedly in terse shorthand.

There had been nineteen of us left the day we tossed the bombs outside. There were still nineteen, six days later, when I paused with my hand over the generator’s cutoff switch. What was waiting for us out there? Surely we had killed all the Taurans within several klicks of the explosion.

But there might have been a reserve force farther away, now waiting patiently on the crater’s lip. At least you could push a quarterstaff through the field and have it come back whole.

I dispersed the people evenly around the area, so they night not get us with a single shot. Then, ready to turn it ,ack on immediately if anything went wrong, I pushed.

8

My radio was still tuned to the general frequency; after more than a week of silence my ears were suddenly assaulted with loud, happy babbling.

We stood in the center of a crater almost a kilometer wide and deep. Its sides were a shiny black crust shot through with red cracks, hot but no longer dangerous. The hemisphere of earth that we rested on had sunk a good forty meters into the floor of the crater, while it had still been molten, so now we stood on a kind of pedestal.

Not a Tauran in sight

We rushed to the ship, sealed it and filled it with cool air and popped our suits. I didn’t press seniority for the one shower; just sat back in an acceleration couch and took deep breaths of air that didn’t smell like recycled Mandella.

The ship was designed for a maximum crew of twelve, so we stayed outside in shifts of seven to keep from straining the life support systems. I sent a repeating message to the other fighter, which was still over six weeks away, that we were in good shape and waiting to be picked up. 1 was reasonably certain he would have seven free berths, since the normal crew for a combat mission was only three.

It was good to walk around and talk again. I officially suspended all things military for the duration of our stay on the planet. Some of the people were survivors of Brill’s mutinous bunch, but they didn’t show any hostility toward mc.

We played a kind of nostalgia game, comparing the various eras we’d experienced on Earth, wondering what it would be like in the 700-years-future we were going back to. Nobody mentioned the fact that we would at best go back to a few months’ furlough and then be assigned to another strike force, another turn of the wheel.

Wheels. One day Charlie asked me from what counhiy my name originated; it sounded weird to him. I told him it originated from the lack of a dictionary and that if it were spelled right, it would look even weirder.

I got to kill a good half-hour explaining all the peripheral details to that. Basically, though, my parents were “hippies” (a kind of subculture in the late-twentieth- century America, that rejected materialism and embraced a broad spectrum of odd ideas) who lived with a group of other hippies in a small agricultural community. When my mother got pregnant, they wouldn’t be so conventional as to get married: this entailed the woman taking the man’s name, and implied that she was his property. But they got all intoxicated and sentimental and decided they would both change their names to be the same. They rode into the nearest town, arguing all the way as to what name would be the best symbol for the love-bond between them-I narrowly missed having a much shorter name-and they settled on Mandala.

A mandala is a wheel-like design the hippies had borrowed from a foreign religion, that symbolized the cosmos, the cosmic mind, God, or whatever needed a symbol. Neither my mother nor my father knew how to spell the word, and the magistrate in town wrote it down the way it sounded to him.

They named me William in honor of a wealthy uncle, who unfortunately died penniless.

The six weeks passed rather pleasantly: talking, reading, resting. The other ship landed next to ours and did have nine free berths. We shuffled crews so that each ship had someone who could get it out of trouble if the preprogrammed jump sequence malfunctioned. I assigned myself to the other ship, in hopes it would have some new books. It didn’t.

We zipped up in the tanks and took off simultaneously.

We wound up spending a lot of time in the tanks, just to keep from Looking at the same faces all day long in the crowded ship. The added periods of acceleration got us back to Stargate in ten months, subjective. Of course, it was 340 years (minus seven months) to the hypothetical objective observer.

There were hundreds of cruisers in orbit around Stargate. Bad news: with that kind of backlog we probably wouldn’t get any furlough at all.

I supposed I was more likely to get a court-martial than a furlough, anyhow. Losing 88 percent of my company, many of them because they didn’t have enough confidence in me to obey the direct earthquake order. And we were back where we’d started on Sade-138; no Taurans there, but no base either.

We got landing instructions and went straight down, no shuttle. There was another surprise waiting at the spaceport Dozens of cruisers were standing around on the ground (they’d never done that before for fear that Stargate would be hit)-and two captured Tauran cruisers as well. We’d never managed to get one intact.

Seven centuries could have brought us a decisive advantage, of course. Maybe we were winning.

We went through an airlock under a “returnees” sign.

After the air cycled and we’d popped our suits, a beautiful young woman came in with a cartload of tunics and told us, in perfectly-accented English, to get dressed and go to the lecture hail at the end of the corridor to our left.

The tunic felt odd, light yet warm. It was the first thing I’d worn besides a fighting suit or bare skin in almost a year.

The lecture hall was about a hundred times too big for the twenty-two of us. The same woman was there and asked us to move down to the front. That was unsettling; I could have sworn she had gone down the corridor the other way-I knew she had; I’d been captivated by the sight of her clothed behind.

Hell, maybe they had matter transmitters. Or teleportation. Wanted to save herself a few steps.

We sat for a minute and a man, clothed in the same kind of unadorned tunic the woman and we were wearing, walked across the stage with a stack of thick notebooks under each arm.

The woman followed him on, also carrying notebooks.
I looked behind me and she was still standing in the aisle.

To make things even more odd, the man was virtually a twin to both of them.

The man riffled through one of the notebooks and cleared his throat. “These books are for your convenience,” he said, also with perfect accent, “and you don’t have to read them if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, because.. . you’re free men and women. The war is over.”

Disbelieving silence.

“As you will read in this book, the war ended 221 years ago. Accordingly, this is the year 220. Old style, of course, it is 3138 A.D.

“You are the last group of soldiers to return. When you leave here, I will leave as well. And destroy Stargate. It exists only as a rendezvous point for returnees and as a monument to human stupidity. And shame. As you will read. Destroying it will be a cleansing.”

He stopped speaking and the woman started without a pause. “I am sorry for what you’ve been through and wish I could say that it was for good cause, but as you will read, it was not.

“Even the wealth you have accumulated, back salary and compound interest, is worthless, as I no longer use money or credit. Nor is  there such a thing as  an economy, in which to use these . .. things.”

“As you must have guessed by now,” the man took over, “I am, we are, clones of a single individual. Some two hundred and fifty years ago, my name was Kahn. Now it is Man.

“I had a direct ancestor in your company, a Corporal Larry Kahn. It saddens me that he didn’t come back.”

“I am over ten billion individuals but only one consciousness,” she said. “After you read, I will try to clarify this. I know that it will be difficult to understand.

“No other humans are quickened, since I am the perfect pattern. Individuals who die are replaced.

“There are some planets, however, on which humans are born in the normal, mammalian way. If my society is too alien for you, you may go to one of these planets. If you wish to take part in procreation, I will not discourage it.

Many veterans ask me to change their polarity to heterosexual so that they can more easily fit into these other societies. This I can do very easily.”

Don’t worry about that, Man, just make out my ticket.

“You will be my guest here at Stargate for ten days, after which you will be taken wherever you want to go,” he said. “Please read this book in the meantime. Feel free to ask any questions, or request any service.” They both stood and walked off the stage.

Charlie was sitting next to me. “Incredible,” he said. “They let.. . they encourage. . . men and women to do the again? Together?”

The female aisle-Man was sitting behind us, and she answered before I could frame a reasonably sympathetic, hypocritical reply. “It isn’t a judgment on your society,” she said, probably not seeing that he took it a little more personally than that. ‘1 only feel that it’s necessary as a eugenic safety device. I have no evidence that there is anything wrong with cloning only one ideal individual, but if it turns out to have been a mistake, there will be a large genetic pool with which to start again.”

She patted him on the shoulder. “Of course, you don’t have to go to these breeder planets. You can stay on one of my planets. I make no distinction between heterosexual play and homosexual.”

She went up on the stage to give a long spiel about where we were going to stay and eat and so forth while we were on Stargate, “Never been seduced by a computer before,”

Charlie muttered.

The 1143-year-long war had been begun on false pretenses and only continued because the two races were unable to communicate.

Once they could talk, the first question was “Why did you start this thing?” and the answer was “Me?”

The Taurans hadn’t known war for millennia, and toward the beginning of the twenty-first century it looked as though mankind was ready to outgrow the institution as well. But the old soldiers were still around, and many of them were in positions of power. They virtually ran the United Nations Exploratory and Colonization Group, that was taking advantage of the newly-discovered collapsar jump to explore interstellar space.

Many of the early ships met with accidents and disappeared. The ex-military men were suspicious. They armed the colonizing vessels, and the first time they met a Tauran ship, they blasted it.

They dusted off their medals and the rest was going to be history.

You couldn’t blame it all on the military, though. The evidence they presented for the Taurans’ having been responsible for the earlier casualties was laughably thin. The few people who pointed this out were ignored.

The fact was, Earth’s economy needed a war, and this one was ideal. It gave a nice hole to throw buckets of money into, but would unify humanity rather than dividing it.

The Taurans relearned war, after a fashion. They never got really good at it, and would eventually have lost.

The Taurans, the book explained, couldn’t communicate with humans because they had no concept of the individual; they had been natural clones for millions of years. Eventually, Earth’s cruisers were manned by Man, Kahn-clones, and they were for the first time able to get through to each other.

The book stated this as a bald fact. lasked a Man to explain what it meant, what was special about clone-to-clone communication, and he said that I a priori couldn’t understand it. There were no words for it. and my brain wouldn’t be able to accommodate the concepts even if there were words.

All right. It sounded a little fishy, but I was willing to accept it. I’d accept that up was down if it meant the war was over.

Man was a pretty considerate entity. Just for us twentytwo, he went to the trouble of rejuvenating a little restaurant-tavern and staffing it at all hours (I never saw a Man eat or drink-guess they’d discovered a way around it). I was sitting in there one evening, drinking beer and reading their book, when Charlie came in and sat down next to me. Without preamble, he said, “I’m going to give it a try.” “Give what a try?”

“Women. Hetero.” He shuddered. “No offense. .. it’s not really very appealing.” He patted my hand, looking distracted. “But the alternative.. . have you tried it?”

“Well. . . no, I haven’t.” Female Man was a visual treat, but only in the same sense as a painting or a piece of sculpture. I just couldn’t see them as human beings.

“Don’t.” He didn’t elaborate. “Besides, they say-he says, she says, it says-that they can change me back just as easily. If I don’t like it.”

“You’ll like it, Charlie.”

“Sure that’s what they say.”  He ordered a stiff drink. “Just  seems unnatural. Anyway, since, uh, I’m going to make the switch, do you mind if. . . why don’t we plan on going to the same planet?”

“Sure, Charlie, that’d be great.” I meant it. “You know where you’re going?” “Hell, I don’t care. Just away from here.”

“I wonder if Heaven’s still as nice-”

“No.” Charlie jerked a thumb at the bartender. “He lives there.” “I don’t know. I guess there’s a list.”

A man came into the tavern, pushing a cart piled high with folders. “Major Mandella? Captain Moore?”

“That’s us,” Charlie said.

“These are your military records. I hope you find them of interest. They were transferred to paper when your strike force was the only one outstanding, because it would have been impractical to keep the normal data retrieval networks running to preserve so few data.”

They always anticipated your questions, even when you didn’t have any.

My folder was easily live times as thick as Charlie’s. Probably thicker than any other, since I  seemed to be the only trooper  who’d made it through the whole duration. Poor Marygay. “Wonder what kind of report old Stott filed about me.” I flipped to the front of the folder.

Stapled to the front page was a small square of paper.

All the other pages were pristine white, but this one was tan with age and crumbling around the edges.

The handwriting was familiar, too familiar even after so long. The date was over 250 years old.

I winced and was blinded by sudden tears. I’d had no reason to suspect that she might be alive. But I hadn’t really known she was dead, not until I saw that date.

“William? What’s-”

“Leave me be, Charlie. Just for a minute.” I wiped my eyes and closed the folder. I shouldn’t even read the damned note. Going to a new life, I should leave the old ghosts behind.

But even a message from the grave was contact of a sort. I opened the folder again.

11 Oct 2878

William- All this is in your personnel file. But knowing you, you might just chuck it. So 1 made sure you’d get this note.

Obviously, I Live. Maybe you will, too. Join me.

I know from the records that you’re out at Sade138 and won’t be back for a couple of centuries. No problem.

I’m going to a planet they call Middle Finger, the fifth plane: out from Mizar. It’s two collapsar jumps, ten months subjective. Middle Finger is a kind of Coventry for heterosexuals. They call it a “eugenic control baseline.”

No matter. it took all of my money, and all the money of five other old-timers, but we bought a cruiser from UNEF. And we’re using it as a time machine.

So i’m on a relativistic shuttle, waiting for you. All it does is go out five light years and come back to Middle Finger, very fast. Every ten years I age about a month. So if you ‘re on schedule and still alive, I’ll only be twenty-eight when you get here. Hurry!

I never found anybody else and I don’t want anybody else. I don’t care whether you’re ninety years old or thirty. if I can’t be your lover, I’ll be your nurse.

-Marygay.

“Say, bartender.” “Yes, Major?”

“Do you know of a place called Middle Finger? Is it still there?”

“Of course it is. Where else would it be?” Reasonable question. “A very nice place. Garden planet. Some people don’t think it’s exciting enough.”

“What’s this all about?” Charlie said.

I handed the bartender my empty glass. “I just found out where we’re going.”

EPILOGUE

From The New Voice, Paxton, Middle Finger 24-6 14/2/3143

OLD-TIMER HAS FIRST BOY

Mazygay Potter-Mandella (24 Post Road, Paxton) gave birth Friday to a  fine baby boy, 3.1 kilos.

Maiygay lays claim to being the seoond-“oldeet” resident of Middle Finger, having been born In 1977. She fought through most of the Forever War and then waited for her mate on the time shuttle, 261 years.

The baby, not yet iwned, was delivered at home with the help of a friend of the family, Dr. Diana Aleever-Moore.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Joe Haldeman was born in the USA ifl 1943. At college he studied physics and astronomy He then served as a combat engineer in Vietnam from 1967 to 1969. He was severely wounded during the war and received a Purple Heart. Haldeman’s first SF story was ‘Out of Phase’, published in 1969. The Forever War was published in 1974 and became a huge success, winning both a Nebula award in 1975 and a Hugo in 1976. He wrote two other novels in the 1970s, Mindbridge and All My Sins Remembered, before starting the Worlds sequence in 1981. A novella version of The Hemingway Hoax (1990) won both Nebula and Hugo awards ifl ’90 and ‘9! respectively More recent titles include J’fone So Blind and 1968. Haldeman now combines his writing career with a position as adjunct professor teaching writing at MIT His latest novel, Forever Peace, won the igg8 Hugo award, and will be published in ~ by Millennium. He is presently working on a sequel to The Forever War, entitled Forever Free.

The End

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Going through one of the poorer fifth tier cities in China, a video exposé.

Yeah. This is what it is like. I’ve got a video that you’ll all will want to see. It’s pretty good. Almost as good as being here. It’s a pretty much grass-roots view of China in one of the “back water” towns in the “hinterland”. LOL. I think that you will all enjoy it.

But first…

… let’s talk about things that aren’t so serious. I mean, why not? Right? Like Pistachios. And Jarts. And blueberry pop-tarts, and big breakfasts with baked beans, easy over eggs, and lots and lots of bacon. And coffee. Percolated coffee. Thick.

The postman always drinks twice.

Not so serious things.

Or, maybe serious.

And right off the bat I want to discuss some of the odd things that make me scratch my head in thought. Well, actually pet my beard, up and down, and go hummmm.It’s some thoughts that aren’t big enough for a post of their own, but curious enough not to omit.

And the first up is this little critter. Kinda cute. You know.

Cute little creature. I think that he is a really good candidate for an actual dragon. Don’t you?

I always thought that dragons were a creature from fantasy, and the legends of dragons might be from remote memories of dinosaurs in our common shared humanity. But here, it pretty much seems definitive. Here be an actual dragon.

So here I am, minding my own business and I come across this little picture. I look at it, scroll past it. Pause. Stop. Think about the little guy, and go back to him.

He’s sort of cute, eh?

And here’s a group of guys from “Trailer Park Boys”. Not so cute. They remind me of my friends from Arkansas. In fact, their stereotype can pretty much be found all over America.  Not that it’s bad mind you, but that it is not the narrative, its the way people interact with each other at different levels of financial success or distress.

Here’ to “the crew”!

Trailer Park Boys chilling out.

I know that it is supposed to be a comedy, but really I actually know a lot of people like this. It’s the human experience, don’t you know.

The human experience.

You all have a front-row-seat. Don’t you know.

And speaking about the human experience, look at this little tool. It’s advertised to massage the gums. But come on! You aren’t  going to tell me that that’s the real purpose of this little gizmo. Are you?

Designed to massage the gums.

No. The real reason and the real purpose of this little device is to make it easier to pick your nose. Now with this vibrating finger your nose can be really get all clean and worked up.

Next up is a nostalgic picture.

When a government is working, and efficient, and has crime under control, inflation doesn’t exist. All inflation can be traced back to government mismanagement at some level. And sure there are all kinds of excuses justifying it’s existence, I like to believe that it is a measure of government mismanagement.

With that in mind, look at this picture please…

The good old days.

…and then, boom!

We are back to serious things.

Where has Americans’ income gone?

By Ding Gang 

Ten years ago, I went to New York City with the correspondent group of then Chinese premier Wen Jiabao's delegation. After we arrived, the Chinese side invited some former US senior officials and entrepreneurs to hold a symposium. At that time, the trade imbalance between China and the US was already prominent.

Wen gave the example of an iPod player, whose price was about $290 in the US at the time, but a Chinese manufacturer can only get $6 from each sale. I remember there was a heated discussion in China at that time - we would exchange 800 million shirts for a Boeing plane.

Do Americans earn more because they make more money? From what I have learned during my visits to the US these years, prices of commodities did not change much, or even become cheaper as production bases have been moved to China and other countries. But wages for middle- and low-income Americans have not risen much, or none at all. Reports show that in a 2015 contract between the United Automobile Workers and the Detroit automakers, senior workers received just a 2 percent annual pay increase, after suffering a 10-year pay freeze.

Where has Americans' income gone?

To answer this question, we need to look at the earnings of the biggest companies in the stock market. Apple, for example, was number one, with a net income of $57.4 billion in 2020, up from $14 billion in 2010. Of course, the growth of income of the senior executives at big companies and the big investors is even more startling. In January, The New York Times reported that "America's richest 10 percent, who own more than 80 percent of US stocks, have seen their wealth more than triple in 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent, relying on their day jobs in real markets to survive, had zero gains." 

Economist Jonathan Rothwell listed an example in his book A Republic of Equals: A Manifesto for a Just Society: In Spain, Sweden and Iceland, doctors earn twice as much as the average worker, but in the US, physicians and surgeons earn nearly five times as much.

Such a huge gap between the rich and poor will bring at least two troubles for the future reforms in the US. First, the large-scale relief measures which aim at helping relieve the pressure of middle- and low-income Americans will actually help big enterprises, the rich and the upper class. In other words, the measures won't address the problem of the rich-poor gap.

Second, the US design of system is based on the principle of "profits first." But the increase of profits for big companies comes more and more at the cost of unemployment of the middle and lower classes. As New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman wrote, "We're in the middle of a pandemic that has crushed jobs and small businesses - but the stock market is soaring. That's not right. That's elephants flying. I always get worried watching elephants fly. It usually doesn't end well."

Both of these issues touch upon the old issue of raising taxes from big companies and from the rich. This will inevitably touch the foundation on which the US is built - competition in the free market economy which aims at improving efficiency. Moreover, getting vested interests to concede benefits is not an easy task.

If money can't be obtained from taxes, there is only one way to go: printing more money. When things get to this point, it is no longer just a question of whether the social divisions can be healed, whether people can be united to move forward.

US economist Stephen Roach recently pointed out that last year, the combined COVID-19 relief packages in the US hit a total of $5 trillion, or 24 percent of GDP in 2020. This far exceeds all records. On March 6, US Senate passed President Joe Biden's $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill. 

Will this destroy the world's confidence in the dollar? After all, green note is the foundation of US hegemony.

Will all this destroy the world’s confidence in the United States dollar? Heck! You bet. It’s already destroyed, and most nations welcome alternatives. Leading the pack is China with Gold Backed digital yuan. And trading directly and electronically.

Which brings up this most timely article from the Economic Collapse Blog;

Brace Yourselves For The Most Dramatic Shift In The Standard Of Living In All Of U.S. History

They are assuring us that we don’t have to be concerned about “inflation” because they have everything under control.  Do you believe them?  The value of the U.S. dollar has been steadily declining for a long time, and most Americans have grown accustomed to having the cost of living rise at a faster pace than their paychecks do.  But over the past 12 months an enormous paradigm shift has begun.  Instead of devaluing our currency a little bit at a time, now our leaders are going “full Weimar”.

Our money supply is growing at an exponential rate, and this is becoming a major national crisis.  As I pointed out yesterday, it took from the founding of our county all the way to 2020 for M1 to reach 4 trillion dollars.  But then from the start of the pandemic to today, M1 has gone from 4 trillion dollars to 18 trillion dollars.  To call that “economic malpractice” would be way too kind.

The truth is that it is complete and utter lunacy, and we are all going to literally pay the price for such madness. Sadly, inflation is already starting to show up in a major way all throughout our economy.

For example, most Americans have noticed that the price of gasoline has really started to shoot up over the last several weeks

Gas prices have been increasing at the pump for the past few weeks, reaching a national average of $2.77 a gallon as of Monday, which is 39 cents higher than the same time in 2020, according to AAA.

A lot of people are alarmed by this, but the Federal Reserve insists that this is completely normal.

Meanwhile, the price of agricultural commodities has risen by 50 percent over the past year…

The price of agricultural commodities traded on the global stage has shot up by 50 percent since the middle of 2020, according to economists at Rabobank.
In a new report, the bank pins the lift in the price of wheat, corn, soy, sugar, and a range of other commodities on the northern La Niña, a weakening US currency, market speculators, and rising demand from importing nations.

As those prices are passed along to the consumer, you will be paying more for groceries at your local supermarket, but authorities assure us that prices will stabilize once the economy returns to “normal”.

The good news is that at least the price of food is not rising as fast as the price of lumber is

Lumber prices have increased more than 180 percent since last spring, and this price spike has caused the price of an average new single-family home to increase by $24,386 since April 17, 2020, according to the NAHB standard estimates of lumber used to build the average home.

Now that is some serious inflation!

There are so many people that have had to put their plans to build a home on hold in recent months because the price of lumber has gotten so ridiculously high.

But the experts at the Fed insist that those that are warning of hyperinflation just have wild imaginations. Over the course of the past year, our leaders have pumped trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars into the system, and all of that money has to go somewhere.

In such a highly inflationary environment, this sort of a thing can happen

A digital collage by American artist Beeple which exists only as a JPG file sold Thursday for a record $69.3 million at Christie’s, fetching more money than physical works by many better-known artists.
‘Everydays: The First 5,000 Days’ became the most expensive ever ‘non-fungible token’ (NFT) – a collectible digital asset that uses blockchain technology to turn virtual work into a unique item – after being listed at the start of the two-week auction for only $100.

The U.S. dollar is being transformed into “toilet paper money”, and we are rapidly approaching the point of no return.

At least if our paychecks were rising as fast as the cost of living was, American families would be able to keep up with the escalating prices. But of course that is not happening, and more Americans are falling out of the middle class with each passing day.

In fact, vast numbers of formerly middle class Americans no longer have jobs at all.  Last week another 712,000 Americans filed new claims for unemployment benefits, and the number of claims continues to hover around “four times the typical pre-crisis level”

Weekly jobless claims have remained stubbornly high for months, hovering around four times the typical pre-crisis level, although it’s well below the peak of almost 7 million that was reached when stay-at-home orders were first issued a year ago in March.
There are roughly 10 million fewer jobs than there were last year in February before the crisis began.

This is not what an “economic recovery” looks like.

The truth is that the U.S. economy is broken, and the only solution our leaders have is to print, borrow and spend even more money.  Now Biden and his minions are about to pump another 1.9 trillion dollars into the system. Do you think that will make the inflation crisis better or do you think that it will make it worse?

You don’t need to answer, because the answer is self-evident.

As prices soar into the stratosphere, life is going to become increasingly difficult for most Americans.

If your income does not rise as fast as prices are going up, your standard of living will go down. Of course you will be far from alone.  The vast majority of Americans are about to experience a dramatic shift in the standard of living, and most of the population doesn’t even realize what is happening.

All they know is that more government checks are on the way, and most of them are absolutely thrilled about that. But all of this printing, borrowing and spending has put us on a path to national financial suicide. As we continue to recklessly destroy the value of our currency, other nations will begin to realize that a move to a different reserve currency is needed.

And once the U.S. dollar is no longer the reserve currency of the world, there will never be any going back to the “good old days”.

We are so close to the economic endgame, and the word “collapse” is not nearly strong enough to describe what is eventually going to happen to the United States.

Yikes!

It makes me yearn for the good old days.

Well for all the good stuff that I have to say about China, now I am going to vent on some of the bad stuff. It’s not that I want to, but sometimes it’s just so frustrating. You want to eat some olives, and some slices of cheese, maybe Swiss or a fine Lorraine, and the only think that you can find is the pseudo cheese slices. Ugh!

It is difficult to truly enjoy cheese.

Ah. The Chinese enjoy everything, but cheese seems to elude them. Sigh.

Oh sure, you can find it here, but it’s not common and it’s not enjoyed the same way. It is sprinkled on items like you would sprinkle salt and pepper. Not layered and melted into a smooth creamy consistency. Like on Pizza.

It’s treated like a spice. Not as a major food group.

Which brings me to the delicious subject of Fondue. Now, I know it’s not all that popular in America these days, but at least there’s a few Americans get to try it at least once a year or so. And at that, when you pair it with a fine wine, it becomes a wonderful occasion.

Oh, and do not mistakenly believe that you need to buy any expensive fondue pots, pans or utensils to make it. You don’t. All you need is a pan, and the ingredients, and some long stemmed forks. That’s it. So what is stopping you?

Eh?

From HERE

Fondue is a traditional Swiss dish that is prepared from pieces of cheese, thermally melted with white wine in a special fondue pot – “caquelon”, to a creamy consistency, flavored with cherry rakia or cherry brandy. It’s tasted by dipping hard bread cubes, rolled in the melted cheese with special fondue forks.

 Fondue is a warm dish that can contain one or more types of cheese, usually Gruyere and Vacherine Fribourgeois. It is the main national dish of Switzerland together with с raclette. It is also known in the Eastern French regions Savoie and Franch-Comte since the 1950s where it is prepared with Beaufort cheese or Comte cheese.

Now, maybe the “officially correct” way of making fondue uses the dish, the forks, and the special cheeses. But we are just simple people wanting to have simple pleasures with our friends… RIGHT NOW.

Here’s a hint, you make use of what you have. And you call up your friends, and you add some wine. Some nice music, and you all work together to make that delicious cheesy fondue happen.

Delicious fondue.

And he continues on the narrative…

At the table, the fondue of melted cheeses is served in the so-called “caquelon” (a type of enameled, cast iron or ceramic pot) in which pieces of bread are dipped with a special fork with three prongs (there are also forks with two prongs, but they are mainly associated with the meat fondue – the Bourguignon or the Chinese type). The fondue pot (caquelon) is located on a metal pad (usually made of wrought iron) at the base of which is located the heat source (a heater or candles) that keeps the fondue at the desired temperature throughout the meal.

Fondue forks are long-stemmed with a round handle. A piece of bread or rarely potato slices (traditionally consumed with Fondue fribourgeoise) are dipped into the melted cheese stirring in a circular or a figure-eight motion of the fork. 

When removing the fork from the fondue, it should be rotated continuously in a circle so that the melted cheese doesn’t drip outside the pot. The soaked mouthful is served towards the mouth when the cheese is already cooled to a suitable temperature for consumption and thus a full taste is achieved.

It is a common rule for cheese producers to sell ready-made cheese mixes, especially for fondue preparation, which makes it possible to avoid the difficult choice of the cheese combination. In Switzerland, these cheese mixes can be found in supermarkets.

They are not generally found in the United States, and most certainly not in China.

But that’s the price you pay when you live in different areas. If I lived in Switzerland, I would be in “seventh Heaven” smunching on all that delicious food. I’ll tell you what.

There are many and varied Fondue recipes. For example, before beginning the fondue preparation, several cloves of garlic can be crushed at the bottom of the caquelon, then add the grated or sliced cheese and finally pour the wine.

The specific thin in the Fribourgeoise fondue recipe is that the wine is replaced with water. The fondue set is turned on on a slow fire while stirring periodically until the cheese is completely melted. Then pepper and other supplements are added according to the desired recipe, such as sliced in cubes shallots, morel mushroom, mustard, etc. Corn starch dissolved in a little bit of cherry brandy can be used to thicken and improve consistency in cases where more wine is added, for example, or when the fondue is more liquid.

Sometimes, a little bit of cardamom powder (which improves digestion) or other spices can be poured directly into the plate, where the cheese dipped bite is rolled right before consumption.

Finally, when the fondue is over, it is possible to have dregs or crust of toasted cheese, called “religieuse”, which is removed with a fork, sometimes it is quite difficult.

Also, at the end of the fondue you can add and prepare scrambled eggs.

Main varieties of Swiss cheese fondues

FONDUE CHEESE CONTENT
Moitié–Moitié 50% Gruyére and 50% Vacherin
Fribourgeoise 100% Vacherin Fribourgeois
Appenzelloise 100% Appenzeller
Neuchateloise 50% Gruyére and 50% Emmental
Central Switzerland 1/3 Gruyére, 1/3 Emmental, 1/3 Sbrinz
Savoyard 50% Emmental of Savoy and 50% Beaufort or Comté
Franc-Comtois 100% Comté

Now my deep secret…

I love cheese. Oh I really do. And you know you don’t appreciate things until you live without them. And that is so very true about cheese and China.

Like on hamburgers turning them magically into cheeseburgers. (It’s magical how it works.) You put the cheese on top of the burger after you cooked one side, and then you let the heat from inside the burger melt the cheese on to the paddy. You don’t rely on the heat around the burger to do it. Then you watch the cheese melt. It gets soft at the edges and then starts to wrap around the burger and starts to clutch it like a firm loving embrace.

Ahhh.

Turning hamburgers into cheeseburgers.

And…

As much as the delicious improvements to hamburgers come from cheese, so do improvements in just about anything else. You know like this…

Delicious cheeseburger.

Do you know what is better than thick gooey cheese on top of a cheeseburger? It’s thick gooey cheese inside of a cheeseburger. That’s what.

You know, it’s been years, but I used to make the “pizza burgers”. I would mix pizza sauce with the hamburger meat. Then put a chunk of mozzarella cheese in the middle of the patty and cook it that way. My only problem was that the meat would tend to crumble and resemble a “sloppy Joe” more than a burger. But it tasted oh so good. I’ll tell you what.

What a pizza burger is not…

There are many ideas of what a pizza-burger is. I’m gonna tell you all what it is not…

  • It is not a burger with pizza sauce instead of ketchup.
  • It is not an open bun burger (the top missing) with pepperoni slices.
  • It is not a mini-pizza the size of a hamburger.

And if you try to do an image search on Bing that is what you are going to find.  Sad. So very, very sad.

Not real pizza-burgers.

Nope. A real pizza burger has the burger consisting of meat and pizza sauce, and lots and lots of gooey melted cheese. That’s a pizza burger!

Smunching on a burger, and then enjoying life.

Maybe it’s time to go out and do some shopping. Eh?

Going shopping with Mom.

Moving on

You know that there is one very special thing that would really improve the taste of cheese. Aside from friends, and your favorite pets, and some nice tunes (music). Can you guess what I am thinking about?

Yes. You are right.

Alcohol.

Or, more specifically… wine.

Wine and a cheeseburger. So very delicious.

While I have my thoughts, other people are far better versed in explaining the nuances between the different kinds of wines.

A good hamburger is an indulgence. It is also pretty much always a little decadent, rich and hearty, which makes it a natural match for red wine. Sure, some white wines could work, and lots of sparkling wines too. But come on, let’s drink some red wine with our red meat.

  • A Red wine goes best with a hamburger / cheeseburger. You can tell if it is a red wine by it’s color. Red wine has a red color.

Below are some classic wine styles (and bottle recommendations) that pair with burgers, plus a couple of not-so-classic picks that worked well recently with a variety of burger styles — from a simple Swiss cheeseburger with all-American condiments, to a black-truffle-mayo-and-fried-egg stunner, to a bison burger with cheddar, caramelized onions and wasabi mayo.

I would never suggest a ho-hum wine just because burgers are, at the end of the night, just hot sandwiches with toppings.  With that in mind, only one of these 10 bottles rings up higher than $20. (140 RMB for those of you in China.)

Zinfandel

Not a “white Zinfandel” which is everywhere, but rather a “red Zinfandel”. A red Zinfandel wine is both fruity and spicy. Some fruit aromas such as raspberries, blackberries, cherries, cranberries. And there is a generous sprinkling of cinnamon and black pepper. Depending on the winemaking and ageing methods it undergoes Zinfandel can display a range of secondary and tertiary aromas.

Red Zinfandel Wine Information
The color of a zinfandel wine is deep red, bordering on black. Zinfandel is a spicy, peppery wine, with a hint of fruity flavor – berries or dark cherries are often the taste range. Zinfandel goes well with “typical American” food – pizza, burgers, and steaks. It’s hearty enough to match up with thick red sauces.

Zinfandel is one of the all-time classic burger wines. Big, jammy, juicy and spicy, it’s almost as if it were invented for this most-American of sandwiches.

Cabernet

A Taste of Cabernet Sauvignon | wine.co.za
https://wine.co.za/wine/wine.aspx?WINEID=41057

2021-2-16 · Cabernet Sauvignon is a noble variety red grape - and is usually deep red in colour, full-bodied, with dark fruit flavours. It arose out of an accidental breeding between a red Cabernet Franc and a white Sauvignon Blanc grape plant - which subsequently has become one of the most planted and popular varieties in the red wine world.

There used to be an old television commercial. I forget what was being sold. Maybe it was a Heinz product for “57 Steak Sauce”. Encouraging people to shake a particular steak sauce onto their hamburgers instead of ketchup, the TV advertising campaign went something like this:

"...Is a hamburger made of ground ham? No — it's made of ground steak."

As long as it is not a tannic powerhouse, a California cabernet sauvignon, best friend of the juicy steak, is probably going to be a good match for your burger. It’s got a rich flavor, and when you drink it after a bite of a fine thick, cheesy burger the taste really excels.

Oh, I get goosebumps thinking about it.

A nice Cabernet is my favorite, as well as a fine sweet Shiraz.

Malbec

Taste and Flavor Profile Malbec wines are dry, full-bodied, and exhibit rich, dark fruit nose and flavors like blackberry and red plum. They're juicy and jammy, with notes of vanilla, tobacco, dark chocolate, and oak. With medium acid and moderate levels of tannins, they pair well with food.

What Is Malbec Wine? - The Spruce Eats
www.thespruceeats.com/what-are-malbec-wines-3511186

Argentines love their beef, and they wouldn’t dream of eating one of their famous steaks without a glass of malbec. Naturally, malbec is also a great burger wine, with its velvety plum, blackberry, chocolate and earth.

Rhone varieties

The Rhône, a major river in France, rises in the Alps and flows south to the Mediterranean Sea. This river lends its name to the southern French wine region on its banks, the Rhône Valley, as well as its major AOC, Côtes du Rhône.

The indigenous grape varieties that grow in the region, like Syrah, Grenache, Mourvèdre, Viognier and Roussanne, are often referred to as Rhône grapes. So, regardless of their place of origin, wines made from these grapes are said to be Rhône-style wines the world over.

Rhone Blend
https://www.tastemonterey.com/rhone=blend
Definition: The Rhone region of France has a delightful selection of red varieties. There are 22 grapes allowed in the Rhone AOC, about half of them red. Most of these varieties are used as secondary blending partners, often comprising less than 10% of the blend. The primary red players of Rhone blends are Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre.

Can you imagine not seasoning a hamburger patty with a little bit of salt and black pepper? This is where the Rhone grape varieties come into play, especially the powerful and legendary syrah, which can range from floral to leathery, often with a bite of pepper.

Merlot

Most Merlot wines are thick and full-bodies. It’s sort of the “milkshake” of the wine world. It’s considered to be “heavy”, and if you are not used to it, it will get you drunk faster than the lighter wines. Because of this, you will need to drink it slowly and eat it with some fine beef or mutton.

A Taste of Merlot - wine.co.za
https://cellardirect.co.za/a-taste-of-merlot
The Eikendal Merlot 2017 has an attractive nose that reminds one of forest floor, violets, plums, black berries, cherries and peppery spices. On the palate the wine and full and rounded, with soft tannins and a rich taste of black berries and plums.

With richness and a silky mouthfeel, merlot is sort of the wine equivalent of a milkshake in this pairing scenario — if you consider that some people like the fizz and tang of soda with a burger, and others opt for a mouth-coating chocolate shake.

Here’s a picture where someone went into a White Castle fast-food franchise and got some sliders with their wine.

What a better moment than to think of Harold and Kumar…

Harold and Kumar go to White Castle.

So, here I am enjoying a home made cheese burger. (And no, I did not skimp on the tomatoes, and yes, I do enjoy a nice onion with my burger) and drinking it with a fine local wine; Great Wall. It’s a very reasonably priced good real wine. Basic. Just the way I like it.

And I thought that I would cruse the internet, like I used to back in the mid 1990’s during the Bill Clinton years. Back then I actually believed the “news”. Now I know better.

The state of American “news”

Let me say a few words about the state of “news” in America today…

It sucks.

Yup, that’s pretty much it.

Tell ’em George.

For Shits and Giggles

So, for shits and giggles I visited Free Republic to check out what narratives are being promoted these days.

I used to frequent it excessively. But it’s become the mouthpiece of the hard-right, and no longer stands for anything resembling free discourse. And my being perma-banned pretty much validated that belief. After all, what is more hypicritical than to promote the idea of a “Free Republic” where you can freely experss ideas, and then perma-ban a member because “your ideas and thoughts are not welcome here.”

No longer searching for truth and providing a medium for free exchange of ideas it has become a money making venue which now maintains a niche market that caters to a mixture of old-world-conservatives, war-mongering neocons, and the religious right.

One of the first things you learn once you've been out of the United States for six months or longer is just how absolutely bad the American "news" actually is. It's horrible. They lie, and they distort and they do everything in their power to make you afraid.

I check up on the American media enclaves from time to time so that I don’t go too far off the deep end. (It’s easy to do.) Hard right. Hard left. Mainstream. I mostly just scan the headlines. It tells me all that I need to know.

I try to give equal time to all the “news” venues. They all have soemthing to say. They all are visited by people who are searching. It’s just that they all manipulate to push their own agendas.

I am NOT saying bad things about liberals or conservatives, or moderates or any other flavor. I am saying that there are some seriously ill people with some very little minds, and very big mouths. If not properly corralled they will end up causing all the rest of us to endure some real pain.

Contemporaneous news…

BUCS Sign Brady To 4-Year Contract... 

Michelle Obama considers 'retiring' from public life... 

Rubio sides with Alabama workers in AMAZON union battle...

Bezos invited by Sanders to hearing on income, wealth inequality... 

Congress Leaning Towards Big Tech Breakup...

What the AT&T Split Teaches About Antitrust... 

GOOGLE Faces 'Very Large' EU Advertising Probe, Vestager Says...

Claims MICROSOFT's Stance on News Is Effort to Distract from Hack... 

'NEWSROOM' actress appears to have plagiarized NYTIMES essay... 

Spring forward forever? Push to keep daylight saving time year-round grows... 

UPDATE: 'Historic' snowstorm to pummel Wyoming, Colorado...

'6 FEET'...

'Impossible travel conditions'... 

USA had coldest February in 30 years... 

ISIS creates 'elite new cell of jihadis to carry out attacks on West'... 

Rioters Set Fire to Federal Courthouse in Portland 1 Day after Fencing Removed... 

MYSTERY: Number of twins being born at 'all-time high', researchers say... 

Two-Thirds of Italians Set For Lockdown as Pandemic Worsens... 

Germany declares 'third wave' has begun... 

LA primed for disaster, but virus took it to another level! 

HALF adults infected with virus have symptoms of depression... 

Mexico czar got infected -- then walked through Mexico City... 

EU Governments Push to Relax Ban on Travel From Rest of World... 

Maskless, boozing JETBLUE passenger faces $14,500 FAA fine... 

Latest hotel amenity: Free test... 

And yeah, Free Republic hasn’t changed, it’s still the anti-China crusade running hard and hot, plus the usual fearful articles, and a bunch of shit about anti-vax, anti-5G, anti-social reform, and anti-huawei. It’s anti-everything. Except for guns, walls, and war.

The only thing positive that I can say about it is that the culprits are pretty well brazen. They aren’t hiding their disgust about the rest of the world at all. It’s all pretty open, and well-aired. I’ve got to give them credit for that.

Yeah…

So I went through the first three pages and pulled out a slew of anti-China articles. And guess what? They are all from the same source. I wonder why they are spamming FR so aggressively?

Theyare all from the hard-religious-Right publication The Epoch Times.

What is The Epoch Times?. Dangerous Propaganda ...
https://medium.com/politically-speaking/what-is-the-epoch-times-e8f80d152a6f 

May 15, 2020 · The Epoch Times was started by John Tang in the year 2000 as a Chinese language newspaper. John Tang is a graduate of Georgia Tech who publicly supports the Fulan Gong...

All of the articles came from this singular source.

All of the anti-China articles are from this publication that advocates world war III to bring about global social change. Yeah, not all that different from other dooms-day-cults. Like Heaven’s Gate. Or the Jonestown Massacre in 1978. It’s curious to know that so many American conservatives are willing to listen, follow and fund a lunatic that follows in the same footsteps as the Jim Jones when he lead more than 900  followers to their deaths.

People do not drink the Kool-Aide that is being offered by The Epoch Times. It can lead you down a very dark, and scary, path.

Check out their religious-justified Anti-China war-mongering…

Let’s start here with this one. This one is simple. This article is just a rewording of a Reuters piece to bang-on China. Now the Reuters piece pretty much reports that the FCC is following the already in-place policies of the former Trump Administration. This republishing keeps the narrative alive. Giving the FR readership the idea that the Biden Administration is “keeping the heat on China”.

My comments:

It’s all fun and games for now. Just wait in ten years. When China and Russia tire of all this and the American electronic industry and software industry is under a graduated state of collapse. (Just like every other industry in America over the last few decades.) And then when it is tottering before the big fall, China, Russia and all of Europe pulls the rug out, and performs a “tit for tat” payback.

Oh, you all think that cannot happen?

How about this next article…

This one is a laugh. It’s implying and making statements that the Chinese people are fearful of what is going on and how the government is handing things. At a 93% Chinese approval rating the narrative doesn’t make sense. While I am sure that the local government is very active in Beijing, just as they are here, no one, and I do mean NOBODY is concerned. But the American readership knows none of that.

So they believe these LIES.

  • Beijing Pushes for Door-to-Door COVID-19 Vaccinations, Citizens Worry
    3/13/2021, 9:38:12 AM · by SeekAndFind · 11 replies
    Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Alex Wu
    
    Chinese authorities recently launched a door-to-door COVID-19 vaccination program in Chaoyang District, in the capital city of Beijing. Some residents shared their concerns with The Epoch Times over their distrust of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its propaganda about COVID-19 vaccines and the pandemic. Mainland Chinese media reported on March 10 that Beijing’s Chaoyang District began a new door-to-door vaccination program in residential communities and villages. The program is also carried out in five types of places such as government offices, the Central Business District (CBD), industrial parks, business offices, and school campuses. Chaoyang is where international companies, foreign...
    Now of course, all this anti-China narrative makes you think certain things about China. And since there are NO NAMES, and there are NO PICTURES, and there are NO VIDEOS, and no one is willing to provide links to the ACTUAL CHINESE DOCUMENTS, you all just believe what is being told. Yet the actual validity of what you read has as much worth as the ten year old riding the bike down the street.

And this one… it really cracks me up!

  • Nearly Half of Trump Supporters Won’t Take the CCP Virus Vaccine: NPR, PBS, Marist Poll
    3/13/2021, 9:35:04 AM · by SeekAndFind · 94 replies
    Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Samuel Allegri
    
    Almost half of former President Trump’s supporters don’t plan to take a CCP virus vaccine according to a poll by NPR, PBS, and Marist. The poll indicates that 47 percent of people who identified themselves as Trump supporters would not want to be vaccinated when the doses became available to them. Upon widening the demographics, the survey found that 41 percent of Republicans would not take the vaccine, compared to only 11 percent of Democrats saying they wouldn’t take it. In total, about two-thirds of Americans polled said that they’ve already taken a vaccine or would take one when they...
    Do you want something funny? Half the Trump supporters won’t take ANY vaccine, let alone one from China. But it’ll be hard for them to get the Chinese vaccine inside of America because it is not being shipped to America.

Uh Duh!

I’ll tell ya, you’ve got to be a fucking brainless morn to actually believe the bullshit that is being peddled in America today.

Here’s another…

  • 3 Deaths in 9 Days After Hongkongers Get China’s Sinovac Vaccine
    3/13/2021, 5:21:07 AM · by SeekAndFind · 12 replies
    Epoch Times ^ | 03/12/2021 | Emma Yu
    
    Since Hong Kong began vaccinating the public with the China’s domestically-produced Sinovac COVID-19 vaccine, CoronaVac, on Feb. 26, three deaths in nine days have increased anxiety about the vaccine’s safety. On March 8, a 71-year-old man in Hong Kong died four days after receiving his vaccine shot. The patient was reported to be in good health before the vaccination. This was the third death in nine days in Hong Kong following a CoronaVac injection. It’s unclear whether the vaccine contributed to the deaths. Authorities have said they are investigating the causes of death. The first known death in Hong Kong...
    This one is simple. This article is just a rewording of a Jimmy Lai piece to bang-on China. He might be behind bars, and probably getting ready for organ harvesting, but his papers and media empire lives on…

…for now.

Hate. Hate. Hate.

And you all wonder why these sources and editors, and writers are being banned off the min platforms?

And here’s a hate spewing nonsense trying to associate the COVID-19 lite with China. You all want to know what these people look like to me…

  • Florida Gov. DeSantis Cancels All CCP Virus Fines Issued by Local Officials
    3/13/2021, 3:15:54 AM · by lightman · 36 replies
    epoch times ^ | 12 March A.D. 2021 | Lorenz Duchamps
    
    Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an executive order that will eliminate all fines issued by local government officials over the past year to people and businesses in the state who violated restrictions related to the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) virus. The order (pdf) was signed after the Board of Executive Clemency approved DeSantis’s proposal on March 10 to categorically remit all fines related to local government CCP virus restrictions. “I hereby remit any fines imposed between March 1, 2020, and March 10, 2021, by any political subdivision of Florida related to local government COVID-19 restrictions,” DeSantis confirmed in the order,...

It’s all war-mongering antagonistic bullshit. And if left unchecked it will lead to war. And people are gonna die!

Listen to me.

These NEOCONS are Dangerous.

The History of the Neocon Takeover of the USA

Copied as found with editing to fit this venue. It’s a good read and worth your time. All credit to the author.

This is the interview I just did with authors, Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, who have written a definitive 4-part article on the origins and the  history of the Neocon movement. The influence of the Neoconservatives has been catastrophic to the American government – and to much of the world, yet as they point out, it never seems to end. The authors describe it as an elitist cult; a rabid ideology which doesn’t rely on facts to justify itself.

This is the interview I just did with authors, Elizabeth Gould and Paul Fitzgerald, who have written a definitive 4-part article on the origins and the  history of the Neocon movement. The influence of the Neoconservatives has been catastrophic to the American government – and to much of the world, yet as they point out, it never seems to end. The authors describe it as an elitist cult; a rabid ideology which doesn’t rely on facts to justify itself.

Senator J. William Fulbright identified the Neocons’ irrational system for making endless war in Vietnam 45 years ago, in a New Yorker article titled Reflections in Thrall to Fear: “Cold War psychology is the totally illogical transfer of the burden of proof from those who make charges to those who question them”, leading to “The ultimate illogic: war is the course of prudence and sobriety until the case for peace is proved under impossible rules of evidence [or never] – or until the enemy surrenders. Rational men cannot deal with each other on this basis…But these were not rational men and their need to further their irrational quest only increased with the loss of the Vietnam War.”

This same ideology drove the failed War in Iraq – and now, they’re at it again, with their foolhardy saber-rattling towards Russia.

The birth of the Neocon movement grew out of what had previously been known within the Eastern Establishment as “Team B”, in which official policies were tested by “competitive analysis”. The first Team B was created by George H. W. Bush, while he was Director of the CIA. This brought together very unlikely bedfellows, such as the ex-Trotskyite, James Burnham and Right Wing business interests, both of whom lobbied heavily for big military budgets, advanced weapons systems and aggressive action to confront Soviet Communism.

This Team B/Neocon doomsday cult managed to weather the defeat of the Vietnam War and their non-fact-based analyses continue to maintain a stranglehold on US policy.

James Burnham’s nihilist, elitist vision was criticized by George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Second Thoughts on James Burnham, in which he wrote, “What Burnham is mainly concerned to show [in the latter’s book, The Machiavellians] is that a democratic society has never existed and, so far as we can see, never will exist. Society is of its nature oligarchical, and the power of the oligarchy always rests upon force and fraud… Power can sometimes be won and maintained without violence, but never without fraud.” In fact, George Orwell’s classic book, 1984 was based on Burnham’s vision of the coming totalitarian state, which he described as “A new kind of society, neither Capitalist nor Socialist, and probably based upon slavery.”

There are many well-known godfathers of the Neoconservative agenda of “Endless War”, the guiding principle of America’s foreign policymakers today but Gould and Fitzgerald identify James Burnham as by far its most important figure, although he is little-known today.

Burnham was born in Chicago, the son of an English immigrant father. He attended Princeton University and later Oxford University’s Balliol College. He briefly became a close advisor to Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, from whom he learned the tactics and strategies of infiltration, political subversion and dirty tricks. Gould and Fitzgerald note that the Right Wing Neocon cult of “Endless War” is ironically rooted in Trotsky’s permanent “Communist Revolution” and they describe how James Burnham helped to turn this into the permanent battle plan for a global Anglo-American empire. They write, “All that was needed to complete Burnham’s dialectic was a permanent enemy and that would require a sophisticated psychological campaign to keep the hatred of Russia alive for generations.”

In 1941, Burnham renounced his allegiance to Trotsky and Marxist idealism and he moved towards a cruel realism, with his belief in the inevitable failure of democracy and the rise of the oligarch. During the following years, he wrote several books and memos, predicting the rise of a technocratic elite. By 1947, Burnham’s transformation from Communist radical to New World Order American Conservative was complete, landing him smack into the loving arms of America’s Right Wing defense establishment during and after World War II.

In my own writings, I’ve noted that the use of the word “Freedom” by the US Government, whether it be “Freedom Fries”, “Operation Iraqi Freedom” or “They hate us for our freedom,” has completely mangled the significance of this F-word, certainly from a Constitutional perspective. Gould and Fitzgerald trace the bastardization of this word to James Burnham:

“Burnham’s Freedom only applied to those intellectuals (the Machiavellians) willing to tell people the hard truth about the unpopular political realities they faced. These were the realities that would usher in a brave new world of the managerial class who would set about denying Americans the very Democracy they thought they already owned. As Orwell observed about Burnham’s Machiavellian beliefs, in his 1946 Second Thoughts, ‘Power can sometimes be won or maintained without violence, but never without fraud, because it is necessary to use the masses.’”

With the CIA’s 1950 founding of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), Gould and Fitzgerald write, “By its own admission, the CIA’s strategy of promoting the non-Communist Left would become the theoretical foundation of the Agency’s political operations against Communism over the next two decades.”

Today, it appears that this strategy has been a smashing success, where we see the so-called Left in the US playing the role of fulminating, pro-Establishment Statists, a behavior formerly relegated to the Right. Never, in my wildest dreams would I have imagined the “tolerant Left” behaving like an army of Phyllis Schlaflys!

Prior to the catastrophe that was the Vietnam War, the Right was the establishment. The factual defeat of the ideals which drove this war was instrumental to the rise of the 1960s Counterculture movement, which was an even bigger disaster for the Neocons than losing the war. The Counterculture needed to be co-opted by any means necessary and I believe this has been successfully achieved.

Gould and Fitzgerald write that, “CIA’s control over the non-Communist Left and the West’s ‘free’ intellectuals [enabled] the CIA to secretly disenfranchise Europeans and Americans from their own political culture in such a way they would never really know it.”

Gould and Fitzgerald cite historian Christopher Lasch, who wrote in 1969 of the CIA’s co-optation of the American Left: “The modern state… is an engine of propaganda, alternately manufacturing crises and claiming to be the only instrument that can effectively deal with them. This propaganda, in order to be successful, demands the cooperation of writers, teachers, and artists, not as paid propagandists or state-censored time-servers but as ‘free’ intellectuals capable of policing their own jurisdictions and of enforcing acceptable standards of responsibility within the various intellectual professions.”

We see this very much today, in the Late Night comedy of Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah and SNL, the staff writers of which are largely hand-picked from the Harvard Lampoon, where young comedians are trained in a particular brand of comedy that deftly implants a fascist philosophy of extreme elitism and which fuses the ideals of the old Trotskyist left together with those of the right-wing Anglo-American elite, aka the Deep State.

The product of this fusion is called “Neoconservatism” – or its sneaky twin, “Neoliberalism”. The overt mission of this ideology is to roll back Russian influence everywhere. The covert mission is to reassert British cultural dominance over the Anglo-American Empire, maintained through propaganda. Traditionally, comedy has been used as a form of social and political criticism. Today, it cows the hapless consumer into submission to the hegemony.

Gould and Fitzgerald then inform us about the secret Information Research Department of the British and Commonwealth Foreign Office known as the IRD, which was funded by the CIA and served as a covert anti-Communist propaganda unit from 1946 until 1977. Gould and Fitzgerald cite Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, authors of Britain’s Secret Propaganda War, which describes how the IRD spread ceaseless disinformational propaganda (a mixture of lies and distorted facts) among top-ranking journalists working for major news agencies, including Reuters and the BBC and all other available channels. This was but one of many similar initiatives launched by the CIA’s Psychological Strategy Board, including Project Mockingbird and the abovementioned Congress for Cultural Freedom.

The mind is the ultimate battlefield. In my next talk with Gould and Fitzgerald, we will go into how the Deep State has designs on our dream life, in such figures as Robert Moss, a former assassin who now gives New Age workshops on “Active Dreaming.” (Incidentally, the New Age Movement was a CIA subproject of MK Ultra mind control programs). The soon-to-be-released 5G network will enable Virtual Reality, as predicted by Gould and Fitzgerald’s book, ‘The Voice: An Encrypted Monologue’, which takes the reader through the process of reclaiming one’s own narrative from the “noize” of unrelenting psychological warfare that saturates our environment.

Check out their book, ‘The Voice’ here:
https://www.forbiddenmedia.com/product/the-voice/

All this neocon “firehose” of disinformation from the hard-right seriously give me a headache. It’s like this…

(Since we are talking about 1994, and the Bill Clinton years of surfing the “web”.)

Oh, and where was I, oh yeah…

Video on the fifth tier cities in China

Let’s move away from the American “news” and let’s see a taste of what real reality actually is.

Here we just provide a video that is making the rounds in China. A fellow from the UK, who lives in China, has been making various You-tube videos of his experiences in China. And you can come across these kinds of videos all over the internet. But what makes this particular video so special is that it isn’t a first or second tier city. He’s making videos in the smaller “back woods” communities within China. It’s the real deal.

You see, most you-tube videos are of expats exploring Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Cool and big cities most certainly. But they are first-tier enormous urban landscapes.  But those of us, like myself, live in the smaller communities.

Here he is visiting some of the “smaller communities”. To an American, or Brit, it looks like a city. To a Chinese person, it is considered a small village. It’s not big and it doesn’t qualify for high speed rail, or subway access. But it is still vibrant and alive as all of China is these days.

Here’s the video. Click on the picture for the video to open up in a new tab. It’s around 12 minutes or so long, and is narrated by a British expat. Please excuse his accent, and his “squirly” appearance. He’s a typical. Don’t you know.

I do hope that you enjoy it. It’s pretty much what it is like when you enter the Chinese version of “Fly over country”, and a “Red State”.

Now, go and get some cheese, a bottle of wine, some music and call up some friends. Time is too short to waste!

Do you want more?

I have more articles in my China experience section. Go here…

China Experience

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Rescue Party by Arthur C. Clarke (Full Text)

This is a nice rainy-day read. It’s a classic science fiction story about a “rescue party” that encounters the remains of a civilization. It’s a nice read, and will keep your mind occupied. It is reprinted in full, with no registration, need to provide your credit card (oh, to check to see if you are human; LOL) or CAPTCHA bullshit. If English is not your native language, you can translate it using the buttons on the side. Enjoy.

Rescue Party

by Arthur C. Clarke

Preface by Eric Flint

I'm certain this wasn't the first science fiction story I ever read, because I still remember those vividly. Three novels, all read when I was twelve years old and living in the small town of Shaver Lake (pop. 500) in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California: Robert Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy, Tom Godwin's The Survivors and Andre Norton's Star Rangers.

I must have started reading Arthur C. Clarke soon thereafter, though. The two stories that introduced me to him as I remember, anyway were this one and "Jupiter V," and those two stories fixed Clarke permanently as one of the central triad in my own personal pantheon of SF's great writers. (The other two being Robert Heinlein and Andre Norton.)

We chose this one, rather than "Jupiter V," at my request. I wanted this one because, of all the stories ever written in science fiction, this is the one which first demonstrated to me that science fiction could be inspirational as well as fascinating. So I thought at the age of twelve or possibly thirteen. More than four decades have now gone by, and I haven't changed my mind at all.

Who was to blame? For three days Alveron’s thoughts had come back to that question, and still he had found no answer. A creature of a less civilized or a less sensitive race would never have let it torture his mind, and would have satisfied himself with the assurance that no one could be responsible for the working of fate. But Alveron and his kind had been lords of the Universe since the dawn of history, since that far distant age when the Time Barrier had been folded round the cosmos by the unknown powers that lay beyond the Beginning. To them had been given all knowledge and with infinite knowledge went infinite responsibility. If there were mistakes and errors in the administration of the galaxy, the fault lay on the heads of Alveron and his people. And this was no mere mistake: it was one of the greatest tragedies in history.

The crew still knew nothing. Even Rugon, his closest friend and the ship’s deputy captain, had been told only part of the truth. But now the doomed worlds lay less than a billion miles ahead. In a few hours, they would be landing on the third planet.

Once again Alveron read the message from Base; then, with a flick of a tentacle that no human eye could have followed, he pressed the “General Attention” button. Throughout the mile-long cylinder that was the Galactic Survey Ship S9000, creatures of many races laid down their work to listen to the words of their captain.

“I know you have all been wondering,” began Alveron, “why we were ordered to abandon our survey and to proceed at such an acceleration to this region of space. Some of you may realize what this acceleration means. Our ship is on its last voyage: the generators have already been running for sixty hours at Ultimate Overload. We will be very lucky if we return to Base under our own power.

“We are approaching a sun which is about to become a Nova. Detonation will occur in seven hours, with an uncertainty of one hour, leaving us a maximum of only four hours for exploration. There are ten planets in the system about to be destroyed and there is a civilization on the third. That fact was discovered only a few days ago. It is our tragic mission to contact that doomed race and if possible to save some of its members. I know that there is little we can do in so short a time with this single ship. No other machine can possibly reach the system before detonation occurs.”

There was a long pause during which there could have been no sound or movement in the whole of the mighty ship as it sped silently toward the worlds ahead. Alveron knew what his companions were thinking and he tried to answer their unspoken question.

“You will wonder how such a disaster, the greatest of which we have any record, has been allowed to occur. On one point I can reassure you. The fault does not lie with the Survey.

“As you know, with our present fleet of under twelve thousand ships, it is possible to re-examine each of the eight thousand million solar systems in the Galaxy at intervals of about a million years. Most worlds change very little in so short a time as that.

“Less than four hundred thousand years ago, the survey ship S5060 examined the planets of the system we are approaching. It found intelligence on none of them, though the third planet was teeming with animal life and two other worlds had once been inhabited. The usual report was submitted and the system is due for its next examination in six hundred thousand years.

“It now appears that in the incredibly short period since the last survey, intelligent life has appeared in the system. The first intimation of this occurred when unknown radio signals were detected on the planet Kulath in the system X29.35, Y34.76, Z27.93. Bearings were taken on them; they were coming from the system ahead.

“Kulath is two hundred light-years from here, so those radio waves had been on their way for two centuries. Thus for at least that period of time a civilization has existed on one of these worlds a civilization that can generate electromagnetic waves and all that that implies.

“An immediate telescopic examination of the system was made and it was then found that the sun was in the unstable pre-nova stage. Detonation might occur at any moment, and indeed might have done so while the light waves were on their way to Kulath.

“There was a slight delay while the supervelocity scanners on Kulath II were focused on to the system. They showed that the explosion had not yet occurred but was only a few hours away. If Kulath had been a fraction of a light-year further from this sun, we should never have known of its civilization until it had ceased to exist.

“The Administrator of Kulath contacted the Sector Base immediately, and I was ordered to proceed to the system at once. Our object is to save what members we can of the doomed race, if indeed there are any left. But we have assumed that a civilization possessing radio could have protected itself against any rise of temperature that may have already occurred.

“This ship and the two tenders will each explore a section of the planet. Commander Torkalee will take Number One, Commander Orostron Number Two. They will have just under four hours in which to explore this world. At the end of that time, they must be back in the ship. It will be leaving then, with or without them. I will give the two commanders detailed instructions in the control room immediately.

“That is all. We enter atmosphere in two hours.” * * *

On the world once known as Earth the fires were dying out: there was nothing left to burn. The great forests that had swept across the planet like a tidal wave with the passing of the cities were now no more than glowing charcoal and the smoke of their funeral pyres still stained the sky. But the last hours were still to come, for the surface rocks had not yet begun to flow. The continents were dimly visible through the haze, but their outlines meant nothing to the watchers in the approaching ship. The charts they possessed were out of date by a dozen Ice Ages and more deluges than one.

The S9000 had driven past Jupiter and seen at once that no life could exist in those half-gaseous oceans of compressed hydrocarbons, now erupting furiously under the sun’s abnormal heat. Mars and the outer planets they had missed, and Alveron realized that the worlds nearer the sun than Earth would be already melting. It was more than likely, he thought sadly, that the tragedy of this unknown race was already finished. Deep in his heart, he thought it might be better so. The ship could only have carried a few hundred survivors, and the problem of selection had been haunting his mind.

Rugon, Chief of Communications and Deputy Captain, came into the control room. For the last hour he had been striving to detect radiation from Earth, but in vain.

“We’re too late,” he announced gloomily. “I’ve monitored the whole spectrum and the ether’s dead except for our own stations and some two-hundred-year-old programs from Kulath. Nothing in this system is radiating any more.”

He moved toward the giant vision screen with a graceful flowing motion that no mere biped could ever hope to imitate. Alveron said nothing; he had been expecting this news.

One entire wall of the control room was taken up by the screen, a great black rectangle that gave an impression of almost infinite depth. Three of Rugon’s slender control tentacles, useless for heavy work but incredibly swift at all manipulation, flickered over the selector dials and the screen lit up with a thousand points of light. The star field flowed swiftly past as Rugon adjusted the controls, bringing the projector to bear upon the sun itself.

No man of Earth would have recognized the monstrous shape that filled the screen. The sun’s light was white no longer: great violet-blue clouds covered half its surface and from them long streamers of flame were erupting into space. At one point an enormous prominence had reared itself out of the photosphere, far out even into the flickering veils of the corona. It was as though a tree of fire had taken root in the surface of the sun a tree that stood half a million miles high and whose branches were rivers of flame sweeping through space at hundreds of miles a second.

“I suppose,” said Rugon presently, “that you are quite satisfied about the astronomers’ calculations. After all “

“Oh, we’re perfectly safe,” said Alveron confidently. “I’ve spoken to Kulath Observatory and they have been making some additional checks through our own instruments. That uncertainty of an hour includes a private safety margin which they won’t tell me in case I feel tempted to stay any longer.”

He glanced at the instrument board.

“The pilot should have brought us to the atmosphere now. Switch the screen back to the planet, please. Ah, there they go!”

There was a sudden tremor underfoot and a raucous clanging of alarms, instantly stilled. Across the vision screen two slim projectiles dived toward the looming mass of Earth. For a few miles they traveled together, then they separated, one vanishing abruptly as it entered the shadow of the planet.

Slowly the huge mother ship, with its thousand times greater mass, descended after them into the raging storms that already were tearing down the deserted cities of Man. * * *

It was night in the hemisphere over which Orostron drove his tiny command. Like Torkalee, his mission was to photograph and record, and to report progress to the mother ship. The little scout had no room for specimens or passengers. If contact was made with the inhabitants of this world, the S9000 would come at once. There would be no time for parleying. If there was any trouble the rescue would be by force and the explanations could come later.

The ruined land beneath was bathed with an eerie, flickering light, for a great auroral display was raging over half the world. But the image on the vision screen was independent of external light, and it showed clearly a waste of barren rock that seemed never to have known any form of life. Presumably this desert land must come to an end somewhere. Orostron increased his speed to the highest value he dared risk in so dense an atmosphere.

The machine fled on through the storm, and presently the desert of rock began to climb toward the sky. A great mountain range lay ahead, its peaks lost in the smoke-laden clouds. Orostron directed the scanners toward the horizon, and on the vision screen the line of mountains seemed suddenly very close and menacing. He started to climb rapidly. It was difficult to imagine a more unpromising land in which to find civilization and he wondered if it would be wise to change course. He decided against it. Five minutes later, he had his reward.

Miles below lay a decapitated mountain, the whole of its summit sheared away by some tremendous feat of engineering. Rising out of the rock and straddling the artificial plateau was an intricate structure of metal girders, supporting masses of machinery. Orostron brought his ship to a halt and spiraled down toward the mountain.

The slight Doppler blur had now vanished, and the picture on the screen was clear-cut. The latticework was supporting some scores of great metal mirrors, pointing skyward at an angle of forty-five degrees to the horizontal. They were slightly concave, and each had some complicated mechanism at its focus. There seemed something impressive and purposeful about the great array; every mirror was aimed at precisely the same spot in the sky or beyond.

Orostron turned to his colleagues.

“It looks like some kind of observatory to me,” he said. “Have you ever seen anything like it before?”

Klarten, a multitentacled, tripedal creature from a globular cluster at the edge of the Milky Way, had a different theory.

“That’s communication equipment. Those reflectors are for focusing electromagnetic beams. I’ve seen the same kind of installation on a hundred worlds before. It may even be the station that Kulath picked up though that’s rather unlikely, for the beams would be very narrow from mirrors that size.”

“That would explain why Rugon could detect no radiation before we landed,” added Hansur II, one of the twin beings from the planet Thargon.

Orostron did not agree at all.

“If that is a radio station, it must be built for interplanetary communication. Look at the way the mirrors are pointed. I don’t believe that a race which has only had radio for two centuries can have crossed space. It took my people six thousand years to do it.”

“We managed it in three,” said Hansur II mildly, speaking a few seconds ahead of his twin. Before the inevitable argument could develop, Klarten began to wave his tentacles with excitement. While the others had been talking, he had started the automatic monitor.

“Here it is! Listen!”

He threw a switch, and the little room was filled with a raucous whining sound, continually changing in pitch but nevertheless retaining certain characteristics that were difficult to define.

The four explorers listened intently for a minute; then Orostron said, “Surely that can’t be any form of speech! No creature could produce sounds as quickly as that!”

Hansur I had come to the same conclusion. “That’s a television program. Don’t you think so, Klarten?”

The other agreed.

“Yes, and each of those mirrors seems to be radiating a different program. I wonder where they’re going? If I’m correct, one of the other planets in the system must lie along those beams. We can soon check that.”

Orostron called the S9000 and reported the discovery. Both Rugon and Alveron were greatly excited, and made a quick check of the astronomical records.

The result was surprising and disappointing. None of the other nine planets lay anywhere near the line of transmission. The great mirrors appeared to be pointing blindly into space.

There seemed only one conclusion to be drawn, and Klarten was the first to voice it.

“They had interplanetary communication,” he said. “But the station must be deserted now, and the transmitters no longer controlled. They haven’t been switched off, and are just pointing where they were left.”

“Well, we’ll soon find out,” said Orostron. “I’m going to land.”

He brought the machine slowly down to the level of the great metal mirrors, and past them until it came to rest on the mountain rock. A hundred yards away, a white stone building crouched beneath the maze of steel girders. It was windowless, but there were several doors in the wall facing them.

Orostron watched his companions climb into their protective suits and wished he could follow. But someone had to stay in the machine to keep in touch with the mother ship. Those were Alveron’s instructions, and they were very wise. One never knew what would happen on a world that was being explored for the first time, especially under conditions such as these.

Very cautiously, the three explorers stepped out of the airlock and adjusted the antigravity field of their suits. Then, each with the mode of locomotion peculiar to his race, the little party went toward the building, the Hansur twins leading and Klarten following close behind. His gravity control was apparently giving trouble, for he suddenly fell to the ground, rather to the amusement of his colleagues. Orostron saw them pause for a moment at the nearest door then it opened slowly and they disappeared from sight.

So Orostron waited, with what patience he could, while the storm rose around him and the light of the aurora grew even brighter in the sky. At the agreed times he called the mother ship and received brief acknowledgments from Rugon. He wondered how Torkalee was faring, halfway round the planet, but he could not contact him through the crash and thunder of solar interference.

It did not take Klarten and the Hansurs long to discover that their theories were largely correct. The building was a radio station, and it was utterly deserted. It consisted of one tremendous room with a few small offices leading from it. In the main chamber, row after row of electrical equipment stretched into the distance; lights flickered and winked on hundreds of control panels, and a dull glow came from the elements in a great avenue of vacuum tubes.

But Klarten was not impressed. The first radio sets his race had built were now fossilized in strata a thousand million years old. Man, who had possessed electrical machines for only a few centuries, could not compete with those who had known them for half the lifetime of the Earth.

Nevertheless, the party kept their recorders running as they explored the building. There was still one problem to be solved. The deserted station was broadcasting programs, but where were they coming from? The central switchboard had been quickly located. It was designed to handle scores of programs simultaneously, but the source of those programs was lost in a maze of cables that vanished underground. Back in the S9000, Rugon was trying to analyze the broadcasts and perhaps his researches would reveal their origin. It was impossible to trace cables that might lead across continents.

The party wasted little time at the deserted station. There was nothing they could learn from it, and they were seeking life rather than scientific information. A few minutes later the little ship rose swiftly from the plateau and headed toward the plains that must lie beyond the mountains. Less than three hours were still left to them.

As the array of enigmatic mirrors dropped out of sight, Orostron was struck by a sudden thought. Was it imagination, or had they all moved through a small angle while he had been waiting, as if they were still compensating for the rotation of the Earth? He could not be sure, and he dismissed the matter as unimportant. It would only mean that the directing mechanism was still working, after a fashion.

They discovered the city fifteen minutes later. It was a great, sprawling metropolis, built around a river that had disappeared leaving an ugly scar winding its way among the great buildings and beneath bridges that looked very incongruous now.

Even from the air, the city looked deserted. But only two and a half hours were left there was no time for further exploration. Orostron made his decision, and landed near the largest structure he could see. It seemed reasonable to suppose that some creatures would have sought shelter in the strongest buildings, where they would be safe until the very end.

The deepest caves in the heart of the planet itself would give no protection when the final cataclysm came. Even if this race had reached the outer planets, its doom would only be delayed by the few hours it would take for the ravening wavefronts to cross the Solar System.

Orostron could not know that the city had been deserted not for a few days or weeks, but for over a century. For the culture of cities, which had outlasted so many civilizations had been doomed at last when the helicopter brought universal transportation. Within a few generations the great masses of mankind, knowing that they could reach any part of the globe in a matter of hours, had gone back to the fields and forests for which they had always longed. The new civilization had machines and resources of which earlier ages had never dreamed, but it was essentially rural and no longer bound to the steel and concrete warrens that had dominated the centuries before. Such cities as still remained were specialized centers of research, administration or entertainment; the others had been allowed to decay, where it was too much trouble to destroy them. The dozen or so greatest of all cities, and the ancient university towns, had scarcely changed and would have lasted for many generations to come. But the cities that had been founded on steam and iron and surface transportation had passed with the industries that had nourished them.

And so while Orostron waited in the tender, his colleagues raced through endless empty corridors and deserted halls, taking -innumerable photographs but learning nothing of the creatures who had used these buildings. There were libraries, meeting places, council rooms, thousands of offices all were empty and deep with dust. If they had not seen the radio station on its mountain eyrie, the explorers could well have believed that this world had known no life for centuries.

Through the long minutes of waiting, Orostron tried to imagine where this race could have vanished. Perhaps they had killed themselves knowing that escape was impossible; perhaps they had built great shelters in the bowels of the planet, and even now were cowering in their millions beneath his feet, waiting for the end. He began to fear that he would never know.

It was almost a relief when at last he had to give the order for the return. Soon he would know if Torkalee’s party had been more fortunate. And he was anxious to get back to the mother ship, for as the minutes passed the suspense had become more and more acute. There had always been the thought in his mind: What if the astronomers of Kulath have made a mistake? He would begin to feel happy when the walls of the S9000 were around him. He would be happier still when they were out in space and this ominous sun was shrinking far astern.

As soon as his colleagues had entered the airlock, Orostron hurled his tiny machine into the sky and set the controls to home on the S9000. Then he turned to his friends.

“Well, what have you found?” he asked.

Klarten produced a large roll of canvas and spread it out on the floor.

“This is what they were like,” he said quietly. “Bipeds, with only two arms. They seem to have managed well, in spite of that handicap. Only two eyes as well, unless there are others in the back. We were lucky to find this; it’s about the only thing they left behind.”

The ancient oil painting stared stonily back at the three creatures regarding it so intently. By the irony of fate, its complete worthlessness had saved it from oblivion. When the city had been evacuated, no one had bothered to move Alderman John Richards, 1909-1974. For a century and a half he had been gathering dust while far away from the old cities the new civilization had been rising to heights no earlier culture had ever known.

“That was almost all we found,” said Klarten. “The city must have been deserted for years. I’m afraid our expedition has been a failure. If there are any living beings on this world, they’ve hidden themselves too well for us to find them.”

His commander was forced to agree.

“It was an almost impossible task,” he said. “If we’d had weeks instead of hours we might have succeeded. For all we know, they may even have built shelters under the sea. No one seems to have thought of that.”

He glanced quickly at the indicators and corrected the course.

“We’ll be there in five minutes. Alveron seems to be moving rather quickly. I wonder if Torkalee has found anything.”

The S9000 was hanging a few miles above the seaboard of a blazing continent when Orostron homed upon it. The danger line was thirty minutes away and there was no time to lose. Skillfully, he maneuvered the little ship into its launching tube and the party stepped out of the airlock.

There was a small crowd waiting for them. That was to be expected, but Orostron could see at once that something more than curiosity had brought his friends here. Even before a word was spoken, he knew that something was wrong.

“Torkalee hasn’t returned. He’s lost his party and we’re going to the rescue. Come along to the control room at once.” * * *

From the beginning, Torkalee had been luckier than Orostron. He had followed the zone of twilight, keeping away from the intolerable glare of the sun, until he came to the shores of an inland sea. It was a very recent sea, one of the latest of Man’s works, for the land it covered had been desert less than a century before. In a few hours it would be desert again, for the water was boiling and clouds of steam were rising to the skies. But they could not veil the loveliness of the great white city that overlooked the tideless sea.

Flying machines were still parked neatly round the square in which Torkalee landed. They were disappointingly primitive, though beautifully finished, and depended on rotating airfoils for support. Nowhere was there any sign of life, but the place gave the impression that its inhabitants were not very far away. Lights were still shining from some of the windows.

Torkalee’s three companions lost no time in leaving the machine. Leader of the party, by seniority of rank and race was T’sinadree, who like Alveron himself had been born on one of the ancient planets of the Central Suns. Next came Alarkane, from a race which was one of the youngest in the Universe and took a perverse pride in the fact. Last came one of the strange beings from the system of Palador. It was nameless, like all its kind, for it possessed no identity of its own, being merely a mobile but still dependent cell in the consciousness of its race. Though it and its fellows had long been scattered over the galaxy in the exploration of countless worlds, some unknown link still bound them together as inexorably as the living cells in a human body.

When a creature of Palador spoke, the pronoun it used was always “We.” There was not, nor could there ever be, any first person singular in the language of Palador.

The great doors of the splendid building baffled the explorers, though any human child would have known their secret. T’sinadree wasted no time on them but called Torkalee on his personal transmitter. Then the three hurried aside while their commander maneuvered his machine into the best position. There was a brief burst of intolerable flame; the massive steelwork flickered once at the edge of the visible spectrum and was gone. The stones were still glowing when the eager party hurried into the building, the beams of their light projectors fanning before them.

The torches were not needed. Before them lay a great hall, glowing with light from lines of tubes along the ceiling. On either side, the hall opened out into long corridors, while straight ahead a massive stairway swept majestically toward the upper floors.

For a moment T’sinadree hesitated. Then, since one way was as good as another, he led his companions down the first corridor.

The feeling that life was near had now become very strong. At any moment, it seemed, they might be confronted by the creatures of this world. If they showed hostility and they could scarcely be blamed if they did the paralyzers would be used at once.

The tension was very great as the party entered the first room, and only relaxed when they saw that it held nothing but machines row after row of them, now stilled and silent. Lining the enormous room were thousands of metal filing cabinets, forming a continuous wall as far as the eye could reach. And that was all; there was no furniture, nothing but the cabinets and the mysterious machines.

Alarkane, always the quickest of the three, was already examining the cabinets. Each held many thousand sheets of tough, thin material, perforated with innumerable holes and slots. The Paladorian appropriated one of the cards and Alarkane recorded the scene together with some close-ups of the machines. Then they left. The great room, which had been one of the marvels of the world, meant nothing to them. No living eye would ever again see that wonderful battery of almost human Hollerith analyzers and the five thousand million punched cards holding all that could be recorded on each man, woman and child on the planet.

It was clear that this building had been used very recently. With growing excitement, the explorers hurried on to the next room. This they found to be an enormous library, for millions of books lay all around them on miles and miles of shelving. Here, though the explorers could not know it, were the records of all the laws that Man had ever passed, and all the speeches that had ever been made in his council chambers.

T’sinadree was deciding his plan of action, when Alarkane drew his attention to one of the racks a hundred yards away. It was half empty, unlike all the others. Around it books lay in a tumbled heap on the floor, as if knocked down by someone in frantic haste. The signs were unmistakable. Not long ago, other creatures had been this way. Faint wheel marks were clearly visible on the floor to the acute sense of Alarkane, though the others could see nothing. Alarkane could even detect footprints, but knowing nothing of the creatures that had formed them he could not say which way they led.

The sense of nearness was stronger than ever now, but it was nearness in time, not in space. Alarkane voiced the thoughts of the party.

“Those books must have been valuable, and someone has come to rescue them rather as an afterthought, I should say. That means there must be a place of refuge, possibly not very far away. Perhaps we may be able to find some other clues that will lead us to it.”

T’sinadree agreed; the Paladorian wasn’t enthusiastic.

“That may be so,” it said, “but the refuge may be anywhere on the planet, and we have just two hours left. Let us waste no more time if we hope to rescue these people.”

The party hurried forward once more, pausing only to collect a few books that might be useful to the scientists at Base though it was doubtful if they could ever be translated. They soon found that the great building was composed largely of small rooms, all showing signs of recent occupation. Most of them were in a neat and tidy condition, but one or two were very much the reverse. The explorers were particularly puzzled by one room clearly an office of some kind that appeared to have been completely wrecked. The floor was littered with papers, the furniture had been smashed, and smoke was pouring through the broken windows from the fires outside.

T’sinadree was rather alarmed.

“Surely no dangerous animal could have got into a place like this!” he exclaimed, fingering his paralyzer nervously.

Alarkane did not answer. He began to make that annoying sound which his race called “laughter.” It was several minutes before he would explain what had amused him.

“I don’t think any animal has done it,” he said. “In fact, the explanation is very simple. Suppose you had been working all your life in this room, dealing with endless papers, year after year. And suddenly, you are told that you will never see it again, that your work is finished, and that you can leave it forever. More than that no one will come after you. Everything is finished. How would you make your exit, T’sinadree?”

The other thought for a moment.

“Well, I suppose I’d just tidy things up and leave. That’s what seems to have happened in all the other rooms.”

Alarkane laughed again.

“I’m quite sure you would. But some individuals have a different psychology. I think I should have liked the creature that used this room.”

He did not explain himself further, and his two colleagues puzzled over his words for quite a while before they gave it up.

It came as something of a shock when Torkalee gave the order to return. They had gathered a great deal of information, but had found no clue that might lead them to the missing inhabitants of this world. That problem was as baffling as ever, and now it seemed that it would never be solved. There were only forty minutes left before the S9000 would be departing.

They were halfway back to the tender when they saw the semicircular passage leading down into the depths of the building. Its architectural style was quite different from that used elsewhere, and the gently sloping floor was an irresistible attraction to creatures whose many legs had grown weary of the marble staircases which only bipeds could have built in such profusion. T’sinadree had been the worst sufferer, for he normally employed twelve legs and could use twenty when he was in a hurry, though no one had ever seen him perform this feat.

The party stopped dead and looked down the passageway with a single thought. A tunnel, leading down into the depths of Earth! At its end, they might yet find the people of this world and rescue some of them from their fate. For there was still time to call the mother ship if the need arose.

T’sinadree signaled to his commander and Torkalee brought the little machine immediately overhead. There might not be time for the party to retrace its footsteps through the maze of passages, so meticulously recorded in the Paladorian mind that there was no possibility of going astray. If speed was necessary, Torkalee could blast his way through the dozen floors above their head. In any case, it should not take long to find what lay at the end of the passage.

It took only thirty seconds. The tunnel ended quite abruptly in a very curious cylindrical room with magnificently padded seats along the walls. There was no way out save that by which they had come and it was several seconds before the purpose of the chamber dawned on Alarkane’s mind. It was a pity, he thought, that they would never have time to use this. The thought was suddenly interrupted by a cry from T’sinadree. Alarkane wheeled around, and saw that the entrance had closed silently behind them.

Even in that first moment of panic, Alarkane found himself thinking with some admiration: Whoever they were, they knew how to build automatic machinery!

The Paladorian was the first to speak. It waved one of its tentacles toward the seats.

“We think it would be best to be seated,” it said. The multiplex mind of Palador had already analyzed the situation and knew what was coming.

They did not have long to wait before a low-pitched hum came from a grill overhead, and for the very last time in history a human, even if lifeless, voice was heard on Earth. The words were meaningless, though the trapped explorers could guess their message clearly enough.

“Choose your stations, please, and be seated.”

Simultaneously, a wall panel at one end of the compartment glowed with light. On it was a simple map, consisting of a series of a dozen circles connected by a line. Each of the circles had writing alongside it, and beside the writing were two buttons of different colors.

Alarkane looked questioningly at his leader.

“Don’t touch them,” said T’sinadree. “If we leave the controls alone, the doors may open again.”

He was wrong. The engineers who had designed the automatic subway had assumed that anyone who entered it would naturally wish to go somewhere. If they selected no intermediate station, their destination could only be the end of the line.

There was another pause while the relays and thyratrons waited for their orders. In those thirty seconds, if they had known what to do, the party could have opened the doors and left the subway. But they did not know, and the machines geared to a human psychology acted for them.

The surge of acceleration was not very great; the lavish upholstery was a luxury, not a necessity. Only an almost imperceptible vibration told of the speed at which they were traveling through the bowels of the earth, on a journey the duration of which they could not even guess. And in thirty minutes, the S9000 would be leaving the Solar System.

There was a long silence in the speeding machine. T’sinadree and Alarkane were thinking rapidly. So was the Paladorian, though in a different fashion. The conception of personal death was meaningless to it, for the destruction of a single unit meant no more to the group mind than the loss of a nail-paring to a man. But it could, though with great difficulty, appreciate the plight of individual intelligences such as Alarkane and T’sinadree, and it was anxious to help them if it could.

Alarkane had managed to contact Torkalee with his personal transmitter, though the signal was very weak and seemed to be fading quickly. Rapidly he explained the situation, and almost at once the signals became clearer. Torkalee was following the path of the machine, flying above the ground under which they were speeding to their unknown destination. That was the first indication they had of the fact that they were traveling at nearly a thousand miles an hour, and very soon after that Torkalee was able to give the still more disturbing news that they were rapidly approaching the sea. While they were beneath the land, there was a hope, though a slender one, that they might stop the machine and escape. But under the ocean not all the brains and the machinery in the great mother ship could save them. No one could have devised a more perfect trap.

T’sinadree had been examining the wall map with great attention. Its meaning was obvious, and along the line connecting the circles a tiny spot of light was crawling. It was already halfway to the first of the stations marked.

“I’m going to press one of those buttons,” said T’sinadree at last. “It won’t do any harm, and we may learn something.”

“I agree. Which will you try first?”

“There are only two kinds, and it won’t matter if we try the wrong one first. I suppose one is to start the machine and the other is to stop it.”

Alarkane was not very hopeful.

“It started without any button pressing,” he said. “I think it’s completely automatic and we can’t control it from here at all.”

T’sinadree could not agree.

“These buttons are clearly associated with the stations, and there’s no point in having them unless you can use them to stop yourself. The only question is, which is the right one?”

His analysis was perfectly correct. The machine could be stopped at any intermediate station. They had only been on their way ten minutes, and if they could leave now, no harm would have been done. It was just bad luck that T’sinadree’s first choice was the wrong button.

The little light on the map crawled slowly through the illuminated circle without checking its speed. And at the same time Torkalee called from the ship overhead.

“You have just passed underneath a city and are heading out to sea. There cannot be another stop for nearly a thousand miles.” * * *

Alveron had given up all hope of finding life on this world. The S9000 had roamed over half the planet, never staying long in one place, descending ever and again in an effort to attract attention. There had been no response; Earth seemed utterly dead. If any of its inhabitants were still alive, thought Alveron, they must have hidden themselves in its depths where no help could reach them, though their doom would be nonetheless certain.

Rugon brought news of the disaster. The great ship ceased its fruitless searching and fled back through the storm to the ocean above which Torkalee’s little tender was still following the track of the buried machine.

The scene was truly terrifying. Not since the days when Earth was born had there been such seas as this. Mountains of water were racing before the storm which had now reached velocities of many hundred miles an hour. Even at this distance from the mainland the air was full of flying debris trees, fragments of houses, sheets of metal, anything that had not been anchored to the ground. No airborne machine could have lived for a moment in such a gale. And ever and again even the roar of the wind was drowned as the vast water-mountains met head-on with a crash that seemed to shake the sky.

Fortunately, there had been no serious earthquakes yet. Far beneath the bed of the ocean, the wonderful piece of engineering which had been the World President’s private vacuum-subway was still working perfectly, unaffected by the tumult and destruction above. It would continue to work until the last minute of the Earth’s existence, which, if the astronomers were right, was not much more than fifteen minutes away though precisely how much more Alveron would have given a great deal to know. It would be nearly an hour before the trapped party could reach land and even the slightest hope of rescue.

Alveron’s instructions had been precise, though even without them he would never have dreamed of taking any risks with the great machine that had been entrusted to his care. Had he been human, the decision to abandon the trapped members of his crew would have been desperately hard to make. But he came of a race far more sensitive than Man, a race that so loved the things of the spirit that long ago, and with infinite reluctance, it had taken over control of the Universe since only thus could it be sure that justice was being done. Alveron would need all his superhuman gifts to carry him through the next few hours.

Meanwhile, a mile below the bed of the ocean Alarkane and T’sinadree were very busy indeed with their private communicators. Fifteen minutes is not a long time in which to wind up the affairs of a lifetime. It is indeed, scarcely long enough to dictate more than a few of those farewell messages which at such moments are so much more important than all other matters.

All the while the Paladorian had remained silent and motionless, saying not a word. The other two, resigned to their fate and engrossed in their personal affairs, had given it no thought. They were startled when suddenly it began to address them in its peculiarly passionless voice.

“We perceive that you are making certain arrangements concerning your anticipated destruction. That will probably be unnecessary. Captain Alveron hopes to rescue us if we can stop this machine when we reach land again.”

Both T’sinadree and Alarkane were too surprised to say anything for a moment. Then the latter gasped, “How do you know?”

It was a foolish question, for he remembered at once that there were several Paladorians if one could use the phrase in the S9000, and consequently their companion knew everything that was happening in the mother ship. So he did not wait for an answer but continued, “Alveron can’t do that! He daren’t take such a risk!”

“There will be no risk,” said the Paladorian. “We have told him what to do. It is really very simple.”

Alarkane and T’sinadree looked at their companion with something approaching awe, realizing now what must have happened. In moments of crisis, the single units comprising the Paladorian mind could link together in an organization no less close than that of any physical brain. At such moments they formed an intellect more powerful than any other in the Universe. All ordinary problems could be solved by a few hundred or thousand units. Very rarely, millions would be needed, and on two historic occasions the billions of cells of the entire Paladorian consciousness had been welded together to deal with emergencies that threatened the race. The mind of Palador was one of the greatest mental resources of the Universe; its full force was seldom required, but the knowledge that it was available was supremely comforting to other races. Alarkane wondered how many cells had coordinated to deal with this particular emergency. He also wondered how so trivial an incident had ever come to its attention.

To that question he was never to know the answer, though he might have guessed it had he known that the chillingly remote Paladorian mind possessed an almost human streak of vanity. Long ago, Alarkane had written a book trying to prove that eventually all intelligent races would sacrifice individual consciousness and that one day only group-minds would remain in the Universe. Palador, he had said, was the first of those ultimate intellects, and the vast, dispersed mind had not been displeased.

They had no time to ask any further questions before Alveron himself began to speak through their communicators.

“Alveron calling! We’re staying on this planet until the detonation waves reach it, so we may be able to rescue you. You’re heading toward a city on the coast which you’ll reach in forty minutes at your present speed. If you cannot stop yourselves then, we’re going to blast the tunnel behind and ahead of you to cut off your power. Then we’ll sink a shaft to get you out the chief engineer says he can do it in five minutes with the main projectors. So you should be safe within an hour, unless the sun blows up before.”

“And if that happens, you’ll be destroyed as well! You mustn’t take such a risk!”

“Don’t let that worry you; we’re perfectly safe. When the sun detonates, the explosion wave will take several minutes to rise to its maximum. But apart from that, we’re on the night side of the planet, behind an eight-thousand-mile screen of rock. When the first warning of the explosion comes, we will accelerate out of the Solar System, keeping in the shadow of the planet. Under our maximum drive, we will reach the velocity of light before leaving the cone of shadow, and the sun cannot harm us then.”

T’sinadree was still afraid to hope. Another objection came at once into his mind.

“Yes, but how will you get any warning, here on the night side of the planet?”

“Very easily,” replied Alveron. “This world has a moon which is now visible from this hemisphere. We have telescopes trained on it. If it shows any sudden increase in brilliance, our main drive goes on automatically and we’ll be thrown out of the system.”

The logic was flawless. Alveron, cautious as ever, was taking no chances. It would be many minutes before the eight-thousand-mile shield of rock and metal could be destroyed by the fires of the exploding sun. In that time, the S9000 could have reached the safety of the velocity of light.

Alarkane pressed the second button when they were still several miles from the coast. He did not expect anything to happen then, assuming that the machine could not stop between stations. It seemed too good to be true when, a few minutes later, the machine’s slight vibration died away and they came to a halt.

The doors slid silently apart. Even before they were fully open, the three had left the compartment. They were taking no more chances. Before them a long tunnel stretched into the distance, rising slowly out of sight. They were starting along it when suddenly Alveron’s voice called from the communicators.

“Stay where you are! We’re going to blast!”

The ground shuddered once, and far ahead there came the rumble of falling rock. Again the earth shook and a hundred yards ahead the passageway vanished abruptly. A tremendous vertical shaft had been cut clean through it.

The party hurried forward again until they came to the end of the corridor and stood waiting on its lip. The shaft in which it ended was a full thousand feet across and descended into the earth as far as the torches could throw their beams. Overhead, the storm clouds fled beneath a moon that no man would have recognized, so luridly brilliant was its disk. And, most glorious of all sights, the S9000 floated high above, the great projectors that had drilled this enormous pit still glowing cherry red.

A dark shape detached itself from the mother ship and dropped swiftly toward the ground. Torkalee was returning to collect his friends. A little later, Alveron greeted them in the control room. He waved to the great vision screen and said quietly, “See, we were barely in time.”

The continent below them was slowly settling beneath the mile-high waves that were attacking its coasts. The last that anyone was ever to see of Earth was a great plain, bathed with the silver light of the abnormally brilliant moon. Across its face the waters were pouring in a glittering flood toward a distant range of mountains. The sea had won its final victory, but its triumph would be short-lived for soon sea and land would be no more. Even as the silent party in the control room watched the destruction below, the infinitely greater catastrophe to which this was only the prelude came swiftly upon them.

It was as though dawn had broken suddenly over this moonlit landscape. But it was not dawn: it was only the moon, shining with the brilliance of a second sun. For perhaps thirty seconds that awesome, unnatural light burnt fiercely on the doomed land beneath. Then there came a sudden flashing of indicator lights across the control board. The main drive was on. For a second Alveron glanced at the indicators and checked their information. When he looked again at the screen, Earth was gone.

The magnificent, desperately overstrained generators quietly died when the S9000 was passing the orbit of Persephone. It did not matter, the sun could never harm them now, and although the ship was speeding helplessly out into the lonely night of interstellar space, it would only be a matter of days before rescue came.

There was irony in that. A day ago, they had been the rescuers, going to the aid of a race that now no longer existed. Not for the first time Alveron wondered about the world that had just perished. He tried, in vain, to picture it as it had been in its glory, the streets of its cities thronged with life. Primitive though its people had been, they might have offered much to the Universe. If only they could have made contact! Regret was useless; long before their coming, the people of this world must have buried themselves in its iron heart. And now they and their civilization would remain a mystery for the rest of time.

Alveron was glad when his thoughts were interrupted by Rugon’s entrance. The chief of communications had been very busy ever since the take-off, trying to analyze the programs radiated by the transmitter Orostron had discovered. The problem was not a difficult one, but it demanded the construction of special equipment, and that had taken time.

“Well, what have you found?” asked Alveron.

“Quite a lot,” replied his friend. “There’s something mysterious here, and I don’t understand it.

“It didn’t take long to find how the vision transmissions were built up, and we’ve been able to convert them to suit our own equipment. It seems that there were cameras all over the planet, surveying points of interest. Some of them were apparently in cities, on the tops of very high buildings. The cameras were rotating continuously to give panoramic views. In the programs we’ve recorded there are about twenty different scenes.

“In addition, there are a number of transmissions of a different kind, neither sound nor vision. They seem to be purely scientific possibly instrument readings or something of that sort. All these programs were going out simultaneously on different frequency bands.

“Now there must be a reason for all this. Orostron still thinks that the station simply wasn’t switched off when it was deserted. But these aren’t the sort of programs such a station would normally radiate at all. It was certainly used for interplanetary -relaying Klarten was quite right there. So these people must have crossed space, since none of the other planets had any life at the time of the last survey. Don’t you agree?”

Alveron was following intently.

“Yes, that seems reasonable enough. But it’s also certain that the beam was pointing to none of the other planets. I checked that myself.”

“I know,” said Rugon. “What I want to discover is why a giant interplanetary relay station is busily transmitting pictures of a world about to be destroyed pictures that would be of immense interest to scientists and astronomers. Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to arrange all those panoramic cameras. I am convinced that those beams were going somewhere.”

Alveron started up.

“Do you imagine that there might be an outer planet that hasn’t been reported?” he asked. “If so, your theory’s certainly wrong. The beam wasn’t even pointing in the plane of the Solar System. And even if it were just look at this.”

He switched on the vision screen and adjusted the controls. Against the velvet curtain of space was hanging a blue-white sphere, apparently composed of many concentric shells of incandescent gas. Even though its immense distance made all movement invisible, it was clearly expanding at an enormous rate. At its center was a blinding point of light the white dwarf star that the sun had now become.

“You probably don’t realize just how big that sphere is,” said Alveron. “Look at this.”

He increased the magnification until only the center portion of the nova was visible. Close to its heart were two minute condensations, one on either side of the nucleus.

“Those are the two giant planets of the system. They have still managed to retain their existence after a fashion. And they were several hundred million miles from the sun. The nova is still expanding but it’s already twice the size of the Solar System.”

Rugon was silent for a moment.

“Perhaps you’re right,” he said, rather grudgingly. “You’ve disposed of my first theory. But you still haven’t satisfied me.”

He made several swift circuits of the room before speaking again. Alveron waited patiently. He knew the almost intuitive powers of his friend, who could often solve a problem when mere logic seemed insufficient.

Then, rather slowly, Rugon began to speak again.

“What do you think of this?” he said. “Suppose we’ve completely underestimated this people? Orostron did it once he thought they could never have crossed space, since they’d only known radio for two centuries. Hansur II told me that. Well, Orostron was quite wrong. Perhaps we’re all wrong. I’ve had a look at the material that Klarten brought back from the transmitter. He wasn’t impressed by what he found, but it’s a marvelous achievement for so short a time. There were devices in that station that belonged to civilizations thousands of years older. Alveron, can we follow that beam to see where it leads?”

Alveron said nothing for a full minute. He had been more than half expecting the question, but it was not an easy one to answer. The main generators had gone completely. There was no point in trying to repair them. But there was still power available, and while there was power, anything could be done in time. It would mean a lot of improvisation, and some difficult maneuvers, for the ship still had its enormous initial velocity. Yes, it could be done, and the activity would keep the crew from becoming further depressed, now that the reaction caused by the mission’s failure had started to set in. The news that the nearest heavy repair ship could not reach them for three weeks had also caused a slump in morale.

The engineers, as usual, made a tremendous fuss. Again as usual, they did the job in half the time they had dismissed as being absolutely impossible. Very slowly, over many hours, the great ship began to discard the speed its main drive had given it in as many minutes. In a tremendous curve, millions of miles in radius, the S9000 changed its course and the star fields shifted round it.

The maneuver took three days, but at the end of that time the ship was limping along a course parallel to the beam that had once come from Earth. They were heading out into emptiness, the blazing sphere that had been the sun dwindling slowly behind them. By the standards of interstellar flight, they were almost stationary.

For hours Rugon strained over his instruments, driving his detector beams far ahead into space. There were certainly no planets within many light-years; there was no doubt of that. From time to time Alveron came to see him and always he had to give the same reply: “Nothing to report.” About a fifth of the time Rugon’s intuition let him down badly; he began to wonder if this was such an occasion.

Not until a week later did the needles of the mass-detectors quiver feebly at the ends of their scales. But Rugon said nothing, not even to his captain. He waited until he was sure, and he went on waiting until even the short-range scanners began to react, and to build up the first faint pictures on the vision screen. Still he waited patiently until he could interpret the images. Then, when he knew that his wildest fancy was even less than the truth, he called his colleagues into the control room.

The picture on the vision screen was the familiar one of endless star fields, sun beyond sun to the very limits of the Universe. Near the center of the screen a distant nebula made a patch of haze that was difficult for the eye to grasp.

Rugon increased the magnification. The stars flowed out of the field; the little nebula expanded until it filled the screen and then it was a nebula no longer. A simultaneous gasp of amazement came from all the company at the sight that lay before them.

Lying across league after league of space, ranged in a vast three-dimensional array of rows and columns with the precision of a marching army, were thousands of tiny pencils of light. They were moving swiftly; the whole immense lattice holding its shape as a single unit. Even as Alveron and his comrades watched, the formation began to drift off the screen and Rugon had to recenter the controls.

After a long pause, Rugon started to speak.

“This is the race,” he said softly, “that has known radio for only two centuries the race that we believed had crept to die in the heart of its planet. I have examined those images under the highest possible magnification.

“That is the greatest fleet of which there has ever been a record. Each of those points of light represents a ship larger than our own. Of course, they are very primitive what you see on the screen are the jets of their rockets. Yes, they dared to use rockets to bridge interstellar space! You realize what that means. It would take them centuries to reach the nearest star. The whole race must have embarked on this journey in the hope that its descendants would complete it, generations later.

“To measure the extent of their accomplishment, think of the ages it took us to conquer space, and the longer ages still before we attempted to reach the stars. Even if we were threatened with annihilation, could we have done so much in so short a time? Remember, this is the youngest civilization in the Universe. Four hundred thousand years ago it did not even exist. What will it be a million years from now?”

An hour later, Orostron left the crippled mother ship to make contact with the great fleet ahead. As the little torpedo disappeared among the stars, Alveron turned to his friend and made a remark that Rugon was often to remember in the years ahead.

“I wonder what they’ll be like?” he mused. “Will they be nothing but wonderful engineers, with no art or philosophy? They’re going to have such a surprise when Orostron reaches them I expect it will be rather a blow to their pride. It’s funny how all isolated races think they’re the only people in the Universe. But they should be grateful to us; we’re going to save them a good many hundred years of travel.”

Alveron glanced at the Milky Way, lying like a veil of silver mist across the vision screen. He waved toward it with a sweep of a tentacle that embraced the whole circle of the galaxy, from the Central Planets to the lonely suns of the Rim.

“You know,” he said to Rugon, “I feel rather afraid of these people. Suppose they don’t like our little Federation?” He waved once more toward the star-clouds that lay massed across the screen, glowing with the light of their countless suns.

“Something tells me they’ll be very determined people,” he added. “We had better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one.”

Rugon laughed at his captain’s little joke.

Twenty years afterward, the remark didn’t seem funny.

The End

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The Wandering Earth and other Chinese entertainment that can stun and make you scratch your head with a WTF question mark.

When I was very young, I would go with my father as he would run errands, take care of errands, and visit friends. These distant memories are from the early 1960’s at a time when America was competent, growing, healthy and full of promise. At that time, the only threats that faced America were the Beatles and the Soviet Union. It was a time when a single nickel (a coin) could buy you a long necked soda, and a dollar bill could purchase  a full hamburger platter at the local diner.

In those days my father would periodically  visit friends and drag me along with him.  Of course, I was always happy to go. In those days it was all very casual, and not formal at all. He would maybe tell them that he was going to stop by in a day or two, and then a few days later we would visit. Depending on the friend it might be us sitting in a dim living room while a show was playing, and my dad and his friend drank a beer or two. At other times it might be the two sipping coffee while soft jazz or classical music played in the background.

Father taking his sons out fishing.

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I well remember one visit. I was given these sweet cookies to smuch on while the television set was on. The show had these dancing chicks moving and grooving inside these hanging cages. They wore long white boots that went up to their knees. They wore these scandalous dresses that exposed their legs, and had these large hairdoos. The would clutch on the bars of the cage and swing and sway to the music. Their super colorful outfits would be stunning, and they seemed to really be enjoying themselves.

There would be this small crowd of folk dancing under the girls. The walls would be a constant cascade of flashing colors and these bright colored blobs that would change shape like honey or syrup on the walls. The guys and gals were always so fashionable. Even I could see that. Yes. Even at that early age. They were all in their twenties, more or less. Ancient in my eyes, but my father said that he really liked watching them dance.

Go-go Girls.

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I guess that time changes. Duh! But you don’t realize it because most of the time the change is rather slow. For instance, at that time, the big scandal was the Beatles and their insane haircuts. They had bangs and the hair even touched the tops of their ears! Scandalous! And people started wearing patterned shirts. Then when I was attending middle school in the 1970’s we “graduated” to FM music. And an entire world opened up to us. No longer would we endure the static of the AM radio as we drove on a bridge, or when a big truck passed us on the road.

University years consisted of high-end stereo’s and these big ass speakers that inhabited our poster encapsulated cinder-block rooms. Depending on the friends that I was hanging out with we listened to either progressive rock, country and western, or The Grateful Dead which always seemed to lie in a class by itself. It wasn’t until the last few days of my final year that I was exposed to MTV. And when exposed to it, the girl that I was seeing at the time, and I spent hours in front of the televisions (in her parent’s rented hotel room) watching it.

Life is a cubicle. Heh heh. A taste of things to come. Yikes!

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Working life as an adult was pretty much a completely different  situation. I only listened to the music going to or from work. And given that most of the radio (the radio stations during the 1990’s were all pretty much gobbled up by enormous radio syndicates) presented a very bland and uninspired mix of “classic” tunes, I ended up escaping to talk radio.

Today, with the internet, you can watch videos, and encounter all sorts of music. All you dare need do is explore and use various applications that you might favor. Whether this is Trance, Disco, Country and Western, Soul, Reggie, Classic, or anything in between.

But in America, I’ve noticed the same-old, same-old reoccurring all over again. Big, powerful forces, are monopolizing the internet narratives. Whether it is the “news” or the applications that we use, everything in the United States eventually migrates to one or two “big guy” corporations that squeeze out everyone else. And they end up with a monopoly on whatever venue that they control. This is true, whether it is the “news” or music.

Big companies gobble up the little guys. The Myth of Capitalism tells the story of how America has gone from an open, competitive marketplace to an economy where a few very powerful companies dominate key industries that affect our daily lives. Digital monopolies like Google, Facebook and Amazon act as gatekeepers to the digital world. Amazon is capturing almost all online shopping dollars.

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But I am not in the United States. I am in China. And the music and “news” environment is quite different here.

Here, in this article we are going to chat a little bit about some of the more popular contemporaneous music that is floating around in China these days. And so, yes you are right, this is a China Music post.

The Wandering Earth

As the sun is dying out, people all around the world build giant planet thrusters to move Earth out of its orbit and sail Earth to a new star system. Yet the 2500-year journey comes with unexpected dangers, and in order to save humanity, a group of young people in this age of a wandering Earth fight hard for the survival of humankind. -IMDB

Here in this post. We’re going to talk a little bit about contemporaneous Chinese videos, music videos and movies. Life is too colorful and interesting to assume that the only worthwhile entertainment comes from the United States. It’s silly, and it’s false.  The world is filled with all sorts of interesting and provocative entertainment; you all just have to be aware of it.

So you give it a try and look about and see what is presented to you.

The very first video is a music video that was released in association with the Chinese movie titled “The Wandering Earth”. It’s actually a very very good movie.  It has a lot of borrowed elements obtained out of Hollywood.

(Which is for the most case, obtained through purchasing the Hollywood companies directly. As well as hiring the workers, hiring the actors, and the organizations and businesses that made the elements of Hollywood that we see today.)

Minus of course, the progressive “improvements” that you see in the latest Hollywood movies.

In a sense, the problem with “Ghostbusters” is similar to the ongoing problems with strong female characters in general. From the parts I saw, the approach to that movie was shallow and crass in that it painted nearly every male supporting character a bumbling idiot in need of female guidance. This was especially true of Kevin, the dim-witted secretary played by Chris Hemsworth.

I get that some of that approach was an effort to inject the kind of humor that made the original Ghostbusters so funny and memorable, but it really fell flat, almost to an insulting degree. It reinforced the notion men somehow need to be denigrated or taken down a peg for female characters to be strong.While it didn’t offend me, personally, it certainly undermined the story. 

A world full of idiot men isn’t that bad. That’s a huge part of the appeal for shows like “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy.” However, that kind of appeal doesn’t fit with that of Ghostbusters.

-The Mixed (And Misguided) Messages Of All-Female Movie Remakes

The Wandering Earth.

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Anyways back the “The Wandering Earth”…

This movie depicts a scenario that is quite cataclysmic and rather upsetting. It’s sort of a Chinese version of the American staple starring Bruce Willis.  You know which one… ”Armageddon”.  In fact I would even go as far as to say that it’s a cross between “Mad Max at thunder dome” and the “end of the world opus “Armageddon”.

It has everything. It has heroes, a greater purpose to save the world for humanity, people working together, interpersonal relationships, a Love story, technology, Fear and horror. All wrapped up in an exciting package.

Plus there isn’t any of that social revisionist nonsense that seems to drive American Hollywood movies these days.

This movie was released in early 2019 during the CNY holiday. And, it made a big splash all throughout China and the world with one major exception; The United States. The fact is that hardly anybody in the United States heard of the movie.

Here’s a Bing Search for Science Fiction movies in 2019…

Screen capture of a Bing search for science fiction movies made in 2019. The Wandering Earth is nowhere to be found.

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Oh, don’t misunderstand me. There were theater releases… a few. And some token showings. Here and…

…there.

But that’s it.

It’s not that the movie itself was banned, it’s just that all promotional activities for the movie itself was suppressed. You won’t find any promotional activities or promotions for this movie in the United States and there’s a reason for that.

And of course the reason is no longer in office.

Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo.

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Anyways it’s an enjoyable science-fiction movie. And, um, it’s touching on many levels. It differs from American movies that were also made in the same year at the same time. And because of that you’ll notice that there are no gay people, lesbians or transgenders in the script.

It’s refreshing.

Now, it’s not that I have a problem with people of alternative lifestyles, it’s just that I don’t enjoy watching them. It’s the same way I feel when I watch two dogs having sex. It’s not repulsive, but it’s also not entertaining for me.

OK.

Don’t believe me. Check out this review…

“The Wandering Earth” cured my winter depression. 

Seriously: on opening night, I happily joined a packed Times Square auditorium-full of moviegoers watching this science-fiction adventure, which stars a talented ensemble of of Mandarin-speaking actors trying to stop the Earth from crashing into Jupiter. I left the theater hoping that “The Wandering Earth” would be one of this year’s Chinese New Year’s hits. It grossed $300 million in China during its opening week alone, a hopeful sign that we’ll see more entertainment as assured as this.

The setup might seem familiar at first. Two teams of astronauts fight to save the Earth years after its leaders transformed it into a planet-sized spaceship to escape destruction by an overactive sun. The first team is a two-man skeleton crew: the square-jawed Peiqiang Liu (Jing Wu) and his Russian cosmonaut buddy Makarov (Arkady Sharogradsky). The other is a small exploratory group led by Peiqiang’s feisty twentysomething son Qi Liu (Chuxio Qu) and his upbeat partner Duoduo Han (Jinmai Zhao). These factions respectively spend most of their time battling MOSS, an unhelpful computer in a remote space station; and exploring an ice-covered Earth in stolen all-terrain vehicles (some of which bring to mind “Total Recall,” specifically the tank-sized drill-cars).

But while director Frant Gwo and his writing team blend Cixin Liu’s source novel with elements from American-made sci-fi disaster films—including “Armageddon,” “The Day After Tomorrow,” and “Sunshine”—they synthesize them in a visually dynamic, emotionally engaging way that sets the project apart from its Western cousins, and marks it as a great and uniquely Chinese science fiction film.

For one thing, rather than build the tale around a lone hero ringed by supporting players, “The Wandering Earth” distributes bravery generously amid an ensemble that includes action hero Wu; rising stars Qu and Zhao; and comedy institution Man-Tat Ng, who plays a grey-bearded spaceman named Zi’ang Ha. The script, credited to a team of six, never valorizes a singular chest-puffing hero, nor does it scapegoat a mustache-twirling antagonist (not even MOSS, the sentient, HAL-9000-style computer program in the space station). 

The teamwork theme is cross-generational, too. Both Peiqiang and Ng (formerly the straight man to film comedy superstar Stephen Chow) are treated with reverence because they’re older, and are therefore presumed to have more experience and stronger moral fiber. The veterans work well with the film’s younger astronauts, whose optimism makes them as brazen as they are idealistic. 

This apolitical blockbuster about a post-climate-change disaster extends its belief in teamwork to the rest of the international community. The movie is filled with narrative diversions that reassure viewers that no single country’s leaders are smarter, more responsible, or more capable than the rest—except, of course, for the Chinese.

Second, “The Wandering Earth” looks better than most American special-effects spectaculars because it gives you breathing space to admire landscape shots of a dystopian Earth that suggest old fashioned matte-paintings on steroids. Although Gwo and his team realized their expensive-looking vision with the help of a handful of visual effects studios, including the Weta Workshop, they have somehow blended their many influences in bold, stylish ways that only Hollywood filmmakers like James Cameron and Steven Spielberg have previously managed.  

Third, the film’s creators breathe new life into hackneyed tropes. Gwo and his team take a little extra time to show off the laser beams, steering wheels, and hydraulic joints on their space cars and exoskeleton suits, to make the gear seem unique. And the storytelling goes extra mile to show viewers the emotional stress and natural obstacles that the characters must overcome while solving scientifically credible dilemmas (all vetted by the Chinese Academy of Sciences). This movie may not be the next “2001: A Space Odyssey,” but it’s everything “2010: The Year We Make Contact” should have been (and I like “2010,” a lot).

A week after seeing “The Wandering Earth,” I’m still marveling at how good it is. I can’t think of another recent computer-graphics-driven blockbuster that left me feeling this giddy because of its creators’ can-do spirit and consummate attention to detail. The future is here, and it is nerve-wracking, gorgeous, and Chinese. – Simon Abrams

The movie itself has a very interesting back-story.

For starters, no one wanted to make it…

Chinese movie industry had contacted some famous directors: James Cameron, Luc Besson, Alfonso... to name a few. All rejected the proposal. 

The job eventually landed on a not-so-famous director Frant Gwo, who was most passionate about the original story. 

Gwo and his colleagues wrote an outline of 25,000 words, which was way above normal. They spent 6 months together, working day and night, writing then rewriting the draft. In the end the draft alone has one million words. 

Each character you see in the film has detail background and stories.

And the funding for the film dried up. It was abandoned in mid-stride and left swinging in the wind for a spell.

Wanda Media originally invested heavily in this film, but later pulled out the fund for another romantic film. 

This move almost halt the film production, but luckily the team persuaded the actor Wu Jing to forfeit his pay, even made him investing in the film. Wu jing had one condition, that they must make it a "good film", which they faithfully achieved. 

The movie became a smashing hit in Chinese market, and Wu Jing will get his money back and much more. 

Interestingly, Wanda Group's other subsidiary, AMC theaters, is the major distributor of the film in the US. However, you will watch the film in subtitles without English voice dubbing.

A large portion of the story was removed from the movie. Leaving some head-scratchers as to what was actually going on…

Many scenes didn't make the final cut which made the story a bit confusing at times. 

For example, the original novel mentioned there's a growing distrust towards the United Earth Government among people as a conspiracy theory spreads stating that the Sun is not going to die any time soon and the whole Wandering Earth project is just a cover for elites to have total control over the population. 

This explains why those rescue teams carry weapons. And it also explains why Li Yiyi (the nerd) was very aggressive (swinging a wrench) when the main protagonists entered his truck as the truck was probably sacked by rebel forces. 

Also in the final scenes protesters are seen walking on streets of underground Beijing. This also explains why the "Firing Rock" (Lighter Core) is not stored near the earth engines. As earth engines are fusion cores and to start a fusion reaction it takes a lot of energy. 

It can be assumed that the "Firing Rock" (Lighter Core) is similar to a nuclear bomb and can't be lost to rebel's hands.

And there were some “nods” to actual events and international “tie-ins”…

The order in which the various international crews turned around to help push in the firing pin is the same order in which the various nations arrived to help China in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.

When reading the American reviews, you will find that many of them are actually negative. Many were upset at the idea of people working together for the greater good. They wanted to see movies about singular heroes working alone and over coming odds.

Yeah.

The American way.

"While it might seem like it’s common sense to give up your seat on the bus for a pregnant person, it turns out some people don’t understand this concept and are so entitled, they think this world is entirely every person for themselves. 

Someone on Reddit asked if they were in the wrong for not giving up their seat on a public bus for a pregnant person after they had worked a long shift and had tired feet..."

-An unrelated discussion about giving up your seat to a pregnant woman.

They were also upset in the idea that the earth would pull together to save humanity.

In 2019, just about EVERY SINGLE REVIEWER believed that there would never be a threat or catastrophe that would end up pulling people together to fight a common cause…

…One year later the Coronavirus COVID-19 hit.

And the American audience was quite right.

In America it was every man (or women) for themselves. It was the rest of the world that pulled together to fight the common threat. Not America. Meanwhile a large segment of the population refused to work together and that proved to be an absolute fiasco with over a half a million deaths as of this writing.

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Incidentally, an ex-girlfriend's sister's husband just died by the Coronavirus. It started as a light shallow itch in the back of his throat. He thought nothing about it. Two weeks later it hit him like a ton of bricks. He was hospitalized, and died in the hospital.

Anyways, many of the movie reviews were terribly negative. In fact, the reviews were SO ABSOLUTELY NEGATIVE, and the lack of MOVIE PROMOTION within the United States points to suppression.

And so, yeah the American movie reviews were negative.

But that’s actually meaningless, because many of the reviews were from “bots”. And you can spot them easily. Most movie reviews on IMDB are either one sentence comments, or three or more juicy paragraphs with great details and comments about specific scenes. These reviews all fit the following profile…

  • One paragraph long.
  • Two groups. A low rating between 1 and 3, and a “high” rating between 4 and 6.
  • No specific scenes, or characters mentioned.
"The Wandering Earth is an overly ambitious, laughably implausible, thoroughly confusing, clumsily edited mess. The plot runs amok with too many hollow characters making stupid decisions without reason. Action sequences were so badly shot and edited it was hard to figure out what was going on. The CGI varied from passable to worse than a 90's video game. Acting was stilted and expressionless. Dialog was rambling and inefficient with an overuse of weird computer voices to explain what was going on. By the end I couldn't care less about the characters and fell sleep." 3/10

-Overly ambitious, laughably implausible, clumsily edited mess 

Thus, the movie drops to the bottom of all Science Fiction listings. It falls like a stone.

Shadow Blocking

Which is why you can’t find it in general searches.

I’ll tell you, this nonsense about trying to influence what others do by swarming ‘bots on comment sections is irritating. I can take it on Amazon, and other product venues, but in the entertainment world, it’s just irritating.

Anyways…

The movie was released with a number of songs. In this case, the song was有种 by孟美岐 . It’s a catchy tune, and is a great listen. It has all sorts of scenes from the movie, that many Americans (apparently) think are “stale”, “boring”, and “uninspired” according to the internet.

Check out the video it opens up in a separate tab.

Here’s the Music Video (it is in a zipped file) so that it will not take forever to download…

I think that one of the biggest problems that Americans have about this movie is that it is culturally too different from the American culture. This movie is about people coming together to fight a disaster. Whereas, in most American Hollywood far, it’s a single lone person who takes a lead to fight an enemy single-handedly.

  • Die hard
  • Armageddon
  • Commando
  • Predator
  • Terminator
  • Dirty harry
  • Death Wish

But as much fun as it is to imagine yourself in the hero role fighting impossible odds, the truth is that the reality is something far different. We all need to grow up a little bit and come to this conclusion.

Commando

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If the human species is to advance, it will be by group participation. Not by a handful of extraordinary people.

Don’t believe me?

How do you think a star basketball player would fare against an entire basketball team that trains and works together as one?

Plot Elements

The Wandering Earth.

The first plot element to go viral was an automatic “warm reminder” recited repeatedly by the giant carrier vehicles in the film, becoming somewhat of a catchphrase:

道路千万条,安全第一条;行车不规范,亲人两行泪。”
“Routes are countless. Safety is foremost. Unregulated driving, loved ones end up in tears.”

Not long after the film’s opening day, this robotic voice message could be heard both on Alibaba-owned navigation app Amap and Tencent-owned QQ Map, with variations also to be found on ride-hailing app Didi Chuxing.

People who had driven to reunite with family for the Spring Festival could also see these lines on public LED screens lining highways around Chongqing, Suzhou, and Shanghai:

On the way to Shanghai.

Anyways, long story short.

I personally believe (all internet manipulation aside) the movie “The Wandering Earth” appeals (resonates) to Chinese people because it…

  • Shows people working together for the common good.
  • Shows that governments can create huge constructions.
  • That by shared sacrifice, by both young and old, a future can manifest.

As such, these points are the opposite of what contemporaneous America stands for. In America…

  • The lone individual is far better than any group of people.
  • Governments cannot create huge constructions. Only private industry can.
  • No one need sacrifice anything. It’s a human Right to do your own thing.

No need to type away and aggressively tell me how wrong I am. I could be right or I could be wrong. It’s all a matter of opinion. Nothing more. Don’t get too caught up in it.

When I was a boy

Although news coverage brought increasingly disturbing reports as the decade progressed, prime-time programming presented an entirely different picture. The escapist fictional fare of prime time made little reference to what was being reported on the news. That began to change in the late 1960s and early ’70s, but the transition was an awkward one; some shows began to reflect the new cultural landscape, but most continued to ignore it. 

That Girl (ABC, 1966–71), an old-fashioned show about a single woman living and working in the big city—with the help of her boyfriend and her “daddy”—aired on the same schedule as The Mary Tyler Moore Show (CBS, 1970–77), a new-fashioned comedy about a single woman making it on her own. In the same week, one could watch The Lawrence Welk Show (ABC, 1955–71), a 15-year-old musical variety program that featured a legendary polka band, and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In (NBC, 1968–73), an irreverent new comedy-variety show plugged into the 1960s counterculture. 

The 1970–71 season was the last season for a number of series that had defined the old television landscape, including The Ed Sullivan Show, The Lawrence Welk Show, The Red Skelton Show, The Andy Williams Show, and Lassie, all of which had been on the air since the 1950s or earlier. Such traditional sitcoms as That Girl and Hogan’s Heroes also left the air at the end of that season, as did a number of lingering variety programs.

CBS was the first of the three networks to radically overhaul its program schedule, eliminating several shows that were still delivering very high ratings. Such CBS hits as The Jim Nabors Hour (CBS, 1969–71), Mayberry R.F.D., and Hee-Haw were all in the top 30 the year they were canceled by the network. The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres were also eliminated at the end of the 1970–71 season, and not a single rural comedy was left on CBS, the network that had based much of its competitive dominance in the 1960s on that genre.

Even before 1971, however, more-diverse programming had gradually been introduced to network TV, most notably on NBC. The Bill Cosby Show (1969–71), Julia (1968–71), and The Flip Wilson Show (1970–74) were among the first programs to feature African Americans in starring roles since the stereotyped presentations of Amos ’n’ Andy and Beulah (ABC, 1950–53). Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was proving, as had The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour (CBS, 1967–69) a few seasons earlier, that even the soon-to-be-moribund variety-show format could deliver new and contemporary messages. Dramatic series such as The Mod Squad (ABC, 1968–73), The Bold Ones (NBC, 1969–73), and The Young Lawyers (ABC, 1970–71) injected timely social issues into traditional genres featuring doctors, lawyers, and the police. In another development, 60 Minutes (CBS, begun 1968) fashioned the modern newsmagazine into a prime-time feature.

-The late 1960s and early ’70s: the relevance movement

When I was a young boy, I watched televisions shows such as “The Lone Ranger” and “Superman”. And even “Diver Dan”, and the “Man from U.N.C.L.E.”. Whether it was “The Rat patrol”, or “Mr. Ed”, the stories all revolved around a singular person and their adventures. You couldn’t help but believe that one person can become great, do great things, and make a difference in the world… all by themselves.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

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Not to mention that this singular person can become filthy rich and successful and have everything. All they needed to do was follow the dream offered to them by “democracy” and the promise of “freedom” and “Liberty” out of Washington DC.

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Perhaps I am not the only one affected by all this programming. Perhaps entire generations have been programmed in such a way as to believe that all is well and good as long as they stay separate and don’t form into groups or organize themselves.

It’s an interesting thought.

Why would the government not want people to form associations? It seems really odd you know. But with the television programming in the 1960’s and 1970’s came a direct drop-off and collapse of independent clubs and fraternal organizations. Organizations such as the Polish Falcons, the ELK’s Lodge, the MOOSE lodges, and the Good-fellas Clubs all were restructured. And this restructuring was NOT organic, as many of us are expected to believe…

I’ll have to revisit this thought over some beer and (with) some pretty girls.

Or…

Maybe something really different.

It’s been a while since I ate some Greek food, or at least the Americanized versions. Maybe I should smunch on some delicious lamb and drink some frosty ones instead…

Delicious Greek food.

Let’s talk about other music videos associated with Chinese movies.

The Great Wall

Starring global superstar Matt Damon and directed by one of the most breathtaking visual stylists of our time, Zhang Yimou (Hero, House of Flying Daggers), The Great Wall tells the story of an elite force making a valiant stand for humanity on the world's most iconic structure.

-Amazon.com: The Great Wall [Blu-ray]

The Great Wall movie.

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Again, more mixed reviews. Most Americans hated it.

Why is this, one must wonder. Perhaps Simon Abrams can give us a clue.

Chinese/American co-produced action-fantasy “The Great Wall” doesn’t feel like a McDonald’s-ified version of a Chinese film. True, when square-jawed Matt Damon fights alien monsters side-by-side with Chinese soldiers, the film sometimes feels like a spectacular big-budget action epic with a golden-age western-style hero. But the makers of “The Great Wall” succeed where many westerns fear to tread, namely by un-ironically valorizing the selfless collectivism that has become a cultural touchstone of modern Chinese cinema. “The Great Wall” has significant problems—namely with Damon and sidekick Pedro Pascal’s lack of bromantic chemistry—but chief among its rewards is its ability to marry its Eastern and Western sensibilities.

Damon and Pascal play William and Tovar, respectively, wandering European mercenaries who are captured by the Chinese army of the Nameless Order shortly after they slay a mysterious green monster. The monster, they are told, is a “Tei Tao,” one of a horde of creatures that attacks the now-famous Great Wall of China once every 60 years. William and Tovar are initially unmoved by the Nameless Order’s considerable plight; they want to make their fortunes by stealing gunpowder from their hosts, and selling it to European traders. But eventually, William and Tovar’s agendas drift apart after William becomes seduced by the formal control and selfless zeal that defines the Nameless Order.

And who wouldn’t be impressed? The Nameless Order marches around in colorful suits of armor that come in hues of indigo, crimson and cerulean. They launch themselves at their enemies using pulleys, bungee cords, hot-air balloons, boulder-spewing catapults, and many, many arrows. Each crowd shot in this film is remarkable, but not because director Zhang Yimou (“Hero,” “House of Flying Daggers“) and his assistant directors know how to direct extras. On the contrary, the impassive faces of the Nameless Order’s soldiers remind us that all of these people, together, are remarkable. In that sense, the scene where William admits that he killed a Tei Tao “alone,” without the aid of Tovar or his slain mercenary colleagues, is a significant reminder of the film’s communal ideology: William, as an undisciplined loner, must prove that he’s worth just as much as a selfless Chinese soldier. 

The film’s action scenes also exemplify a sense of precise, shared responsibility that one rarely sees in action-spectaculars. The army works together as a unit, just as the Tei Tao do. You can imagine how hard that philosophy might be to enforce given that it demands a big enough budget to focus on two warring armies’ clashing maneuvers. But no, the film’s action set pieces are not only thrillingly large-scale, but visually rapturous, despite a preponderance of computer-generated imagery. There are a handful of well-choreographed and well-directed, Damon-centric action sequences, but it’s very easy to be seduced by scenes that focus on impersonal warfare. In the latter scenes, the art department flexes their collective muscles with every lionhead-shaped helmet and barbed offensive weapon. Who could remain unmoved after watching a group of individuals dangle, thrust, and throw everything they’ve got at a legion of deranged-looking creatures?

Unfortunately, the film slows down whenever it becomes a buddy comedy starring William and Tovar. If I had to guess, I’d say that screenwriter Tony Gilroy (“Duplicity,” “The Bourne Legacy“) was brought on to the film to punch up Damon and Pascal’s wobbly scenes of light banter. But there’s no spark between the two actors. In these scenes, Damon and Pascal perform time-honored roles that you’ll find in many Asian films: the Caucasian performers who look like they wandered onto the wrong set and are unsure of what acting is. Damon orates through clenched teeth, which suits his fight scenes, but makes him sound constipated. Combine that with a weird Irish-inflected accent that presumably is meant to be generically European—his character boasts about fighting in various European conflicts—and you’ve got a crucial black hole where your leading man should be.

Thankfully, “The Great Wall” isn’t really about Damon’s character. In fact, it works best when he’s part of a group, though he does predictably drift into a leadership role eventually. William’s story is an assimilation narrative, after all, one where the hero sees the error of his past and tries to fit into a society that values utilitarian goals over individual needs. “The Great Wall” is unlike any American blockbuster you’ve seen, a conservative movie with action set pieces that are actually inventive and thrilling enough to be worthwhile. See it on as big a screen as you can.

The point is that in China, it is the group working together for the group that defines what China is. While in America it is the individual doing his “own thing” under the watchful eyes of his approved overseer. No wonder there is a clash in cultures.

  • China – The group works together as one.
  • America – The individual is supreme and does his “own thing” alone.

And no wonder why many Americans despise this move with it’s pretense that the group can accomplish great things for all, as opposed to a lone hero that accomplishes amazing feats, basks in endless glory, climbs to the top of a mountain of gold and gets the girl in the end.

Never the less, America withstanding, the reviews from the rest of the world were interesting…

I just saw it in Romania in a good 3d cinema. The movie tells a legend. And it tells it so beautifully! The cinematography is breathtaking and for all the duration I was more than a movie spectator, I felt part of that legend, a character from that story, present among the troops defending the wall. If a movie succeeds in delivering such an experience, the rest is not important anymore.

In this point, I don t care anymore about plot holes or historical inaccuracies, because I came to cinema to see a fantasy, a Chinese legend with monsters and heroes. And there I was, in a war story, set in a different world, filled with amazing elements of the old Chinese culture, surrounded by exceptional warriors, beautiful landscapes and bloodthirsty monsters. I am very saddened to see the negativity among critics and public surrounding this movie. Complaining about historical inaccuracies or being racist about the mix of races is so misplaced. I hope people will go see it and ignore the bad criticism and prejudices about it.

-There are many legends about The Great Wall, this is one of them

And here’s one from China…

I'm Chinese and I don't think to have Matt Damon as the main character is a white-washing or anything racist. 

Some foreigners are needed to show foreigner's perspective of the magnificent China : the Great Wall, the weapons, the army, etc.While the CGI, costume designers and production staffs are whites, 90%+ of the casts are Chinese. Even the directors are Chinese. The director Zhang Yimou pick Damon by his artistic choice. 

This is not a Chinese film, nor a Western film, this is definitely a collaboration, which prove that if we human, from East, and West, if we trust each other and to work together, we could achieved great things. 

If even Chinese are not offended, why white people called this film racist?

-The Opposite of White-washing

Scene from the Great Wall.

Some Americans enjoyed the movie…

I'll be honest, I thought that this movie will be very bad. 

Came out in the month where movies expected to be blessed with negative reviews, it was no surprise that I thought it would be one of those ill-fated movies.

In the end, I've underestimated it.

"The Great Wall" follows William (Matt Damon), a mercenary who tries to obtain the "Black Powder", a deadly explosive, only to get caught in a battle against monsters that awakens every 60 years. 

For those who doubt that it will be good, mark my words: Don't underestimate this movie. 

The movie was a surprise all the way to finish. 

The acting was great, The visuals were amazing, the cinematography was breathtaking, and the action were incredible. 

Matt Damon as always gives a fine performance as the hero (Heck, even his Mandarin, although only a word, is very good). 

Andy Lau were also great as Strategist Wang in his first Hollywood movie. 

The biggest surprise was the female lead played by Jing Tian, she's really good and surprisingly, pretty fluent in English. William Dafoe (I not expect him to be in this movie) is also very great. 

Lu Han (Yes EXO-L's! It's EXO's Luhan!) is a scene stealer. 

Although he has a small role, He's very good at acting and truly one of my favorite characters in the movie. 

My criticism was it's plot. 

It's basic idea is like Independence Day with Chinese culture mix. Although it actually worked very well, but *SPOILER ALERT!!!* Kill the queen or we all die?", come on writers, you can do better than this. 

Another one is the length. 

A 100 minute movie isn't enough for a story with this kind of scale. If only the studio made it like 2 hours, it would be better for more character development and understanding the story.

Additionally, I don't understand all the negative reviews, especially from Chinese audiences. 

I'm a Chinese-Indonesian, and I absolutely love this movie. 

I saw criticism about the main lead being American. 

I'm telling you, there are 5 main leads in the movie, and *SPOILER ALERT!!!* 3 of them are Chinese, Plus most of the focus IMO are directed to the Chinese main characters. 

Another one is that the movie isn't based on the legend of The Great Wall. 

This is a fantasy movie, so of course it's not! 

The film even mentioned it in the beginning!!! 

To me, these negative reviews are purely hate for this movie. I think that most of them haven't seen the movie and simply hate it for no reason.

Overall it was a surprisingly good movie, and arguably one of the greater movies in January. If you want to see a fantasy movie, this is a perfect movie for you.

-I've never thought it would be THIS good.

 

Yes. Those that did enjoy the movie were much like this fella…

I can't stand these unfair and unreliable reviews.

So, this is my first review for a Chinese film. I would say I felt the same feeling of excitement when I watched Lord of the rings (LOTR). 

I even like The Great Wall more than the hobbit.

We've watch hundreds of movies with bad reviews and we knew that as long a film has at least one 10/10 fair review, don't hesitate to watch a movie. 

Ignore the noise of negative people. 

Let them get sick with their views.This is great movie that combines history and fiction. Enjoy it! Just like what the actors said.. "TRUST"!!!

-I enjoy it a lot. Ignore the critics.

Maybe it’s just misunderstood…

I love the movie. If you haven't decided yet whether to watch it or not, well, it is a very entertaining popcorn flick with a LOT of monsters. Enjoyable to look at and pleasant to listen to.Here I just want to point out a few facts about the movie that many people might get wrong, mostly because of their preconceptions.

Spoilers ahead.

First, there are apparently some "white savior" moments in the movie, but there are also a lot of "Chinese savior" moments. So who saves whom doesn't really matter. The wall was miles long and there were hundreds of thousands of monsters, so Matt Damon shooting down three of them doesn't really make that much difference. 

The true contribution that he made in the movie was that he helped capture a monster alive with his whaling experience in Spain, which makes perfect sense because the other characters, living in inland areas, probably hadn't seen a whale in their life. People simply have different experiences and helping out each other is great.

Second, the relationship between the male and female protagonists was not a romantic one. In the end, they became two soldiers who understood, admired and trusted each other. It is not a clichéd love story. So, the white guy did not get the Asian girl -- and there is nothing wrong if they did love each other.Third, the movie is very fast paced and full of details. Reserve your judgment when you think there is a plot hole or something like that. Have a happy discussion with others before rushing to an angry or condescending conclusion. 

For example, I noticed someone mentioned in his or her review, as an example to show how stupid the movie is, that the catapults could not move and yet could hit the target at different spots. The fact is the catapults could move and the movie spent one second showing you exactly that. 

Also, the Crane Corp, which I heard many people claimed to be useless, was actually practical and powerful in killing and distracting the monsters in that the only weak spots of the monsters were the eyes, which were difficult to aim at from far away, and the monsters were much more dangerous horizontally than vertically.

Last but not least, I'd like to talk about the message of the movie. Some people think the movie just wants to make money. Some think it is China's propaganda tool. While I believe there is some truth in both arguments, the movie can be interpreted from a much brighter perspective and is by no means meaningless. 

Actually the movie has so many meanings that it struggles a little bit to deliver all of them. Trust, greed, courage, sacrifice, and so on. Too many for the movie to have a definite and strong theme. One interesting interpretation I read is that the movie intends to convey that the US and China should work together to defeat terrorism, the core of which is an ideology whose iconic color is also green (like the queen of the monsters). 

My own understanding though is one simple message: what truly differentiates us is not race or culture, but what we believe and how we act. Not a wholly fresh idea but definitely a peaceful one, especially from a U.S.-China co-production.

To put it in a nutshell, the movie is much smarter and much more considerate than many people think. I hope there will be sequels or prequels that can be even better.

-An easily misunderstood movie 

Personally, I thought the movie was pretty epic, but swords and monsters isn’t really my thing. So I gave it a “6”. But the negative review are wholly out of line. If you want a story about magic, barbarians, and conflict on a grand scale this movie does deliver. But it’s made in China, so that is going to automatically turn off the American sheeple. There’s no denying that fact.

Sheeple hate the Chinese. It’s what’s bread into them after four sustained and aggressive anti-China propaganda years. It’s a fact of life. It’s what it is. No more and no less.

And, here’s the video that was released in association with this movie. It’s pretty good, and was on the tops in China for a couple of years. I have it zipped up, and presented when you click on the link. As I stated earlier, this is the music video that came out along with the movie. It’s how Chinese Cinema seems to release movies these days…

And then there is this movie…

Passengers

But this movie was well received in America.

The spaceship, Starship Avalon, in its 120-year voyage to a distant colony planet known as the "Homestead Colony" and transporting 5,258 people has a malfunction in one of its sleep chambers. As a result one hibernation pod opens prematurely and the one person that awakes, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) is stranded on the spaceship, still 90 years from his destination.

“Passengers is a truly brilliant movie, it’s hard to place it into a genre, but it is very much a sci fi love story. The concept is a great one, and it poses a fabulous question, could you force someone to spend their life with you, or live a solitary life. The idea is very original and very clever, the special effects are breathtaking, and the cinematography is first class. The main trio of actors do a superb job, but it’s the dazzling Jennifer Lawrence that stood out for me.”

Here’s the zipped music video that was released in China along with the movie. The song itself was a long-duration hit as well. I don’t think that it did so well in the USA. It seems that there wasn’t enough “booty wagging” and transgenders LGBT activity to render it of interest to Americans.

And what this is all about…

The next video is not associated with a movie. It is just a simple Chinese music video. Note that it is about the future and the dreams that we all have.

Indeed this is what it’s all about…

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And seriously folks, I do wish and hope that your “Tomorrow 9” occurs for you. You have my wishes and good will. – Metallicman.

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Life is always about balance. Here we talk about the money vs freedom balance. Because that is the big tradeoff in America today.

After I exited the US Navy and “hit the road” looking for work (at a time when there were no jobs to be found anywhere) I discovered a number of “life truths” that have reshaped my life since. One of these truths is about personal labor. Where is that “sweet spot”? The point where you work just enough to provide for your family and have a good comfortable life, and yet live a happy unstressful life.
Because…I strongly discovered, as many of you too have as well, that in America it is either all-of-nothing. You either work in a corporate environment, devote a life to a career and obey the dictates of Human Resources in dress, behavior and life, or…
…Or you starve.
There is no “middle ground”.
Now, this is not true for everyone. Over time many people have discovered ways to enable them to somehow skirt the two extremes. While other’s like myself had to learn the “hard way” and didn’t reach that point until retirement.
The American culture is one where it is “every man for himself”, and you are a “success” if you climb to the top of a mountain of money and lord your life over all the rest. It’s the “King of the Jungle” attitude and exemplifies such people as Bill Clinton and Donald Trump.

Today, the base pay of those at the top is commonly 400 times that of their salaried staff, with many earning orders of magnitude more in stock options and perks. The elite one percent of Americans control $30 trillion of assets, while the bottom half have more debt than assets. The three richest Americans have more money than the poorest 160 million of their countrymen. Fully a fifth of American households have zero or negative net worth, a figure that rises to 37 percent for black families. The median wealth of black households is a tenth that of whites. The vast majority of Americans — white, black, and brown — are two paychecks removed from bankruptcy. 

Though living in a nation that celebrates itself as the wealthiest in history, most Americans live on a high wire, with no safety net to brace a fall.

With the COVID crisis, 40 million Americans lost their jobs, and 3.3 million businesses shut down, including 41 percent of all black-owned enterprises. Black Americans, who significantly outnumber whites in federal prisons despite being but 13 percent of the population, are suffering shockingly high rates of morbidity and mortality, dying at nearly three times the rate of white Americans. The cardinal rule of American social policy — don’t let any ethnic group get below the blacks, or allow anyone to suffer more indignities — rang true even in a pandemic, as if the virus was taking its cues from American history.

COVID-19 didn’t lay America low; it simply revealed what had long been forsaken. As the crisis unfolded, with another American dying every minute of every day, a country that once turned out fighter planes by the hour could not manage to produce the paper masks or cotton swabs essential for tracking the disease. The nation that defeated smallpox and polio, and led the world for generations in medical innovation and discovery, was reduced to a laughing stock as a buffoon of a president advocated the use of household disinfectants as a treatment for a disease that intellectually he could not begin to understand.

As a number of countries moved expeditiously to contain the virus, the United States stumbled along in denial, as if willfully blind. With less than four percent of the global population, the U.S. soon accounted for more than a fifth of COVID deaths. The percentage of American victims of the disease who died was six times the global average. Achieving the world’s highest rate of morbidity and mortality provoked not shame, but only further lies, scapegoating, and boasts of miracle cures as dubious as the claims of a carnival barker, a grifter on the make.

...

Odious as he may be, Trump is less the cause of America’s decline than a product of its descent. As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country. The republic that defined the free flow of information as the life blood of democracy, today ranks 45th among nations when it comes to press freedom. In a land that once welcomed the huddled masses of the world, more people today favor building a wall along the southern border than supporting health care and protection for the undocumented mothers and children arriving in desperation at its doors. In a complete abandonment of the collective good, U.S. laws define freedom as an individual’s inalienable right to own a personal arsenal of weaponry, a natural entitlement that trumps even the safety of children; in the past decade alone 346 American students and teachers have been shot on school grounds.

The American cult of the individual denies not just community but the very idea of society. No one owes anything to anyone. All must be prepared to fight for everything: education, shelter, food, medical care. What every prosperous and successful democracy deems to be fundamental rights — universal health care, equal access to quality public education, a social safety net for the weak, elderly, and infirmed — America dismisses as socialist indulgences, as if so many signs of weakness.

How can the rest of the world expect America to lead on global threats — climate change, the extinction crisis, pandemics — when the country no longer has a sense of benign purpose, or collective well-being, even within its own national community? 

Flag-wrapped patriotism is no substitute for compassion; anger and hostility no match for love. Those who flock to beaches, bars, and political rallies, putting their fellow citizens at risk, are not exercising freedom; they are displaying, as one commentator has noted, the weakness of a people who lack both the stoicism to endure the pandemic and the fortitude to defeat it. 

Leading their charge is Donald Trump, a bone spur warrior, a liar and a fraud, a grotesque caricature of a strong man, with the backbone of a bully.Over the last months, a quip has circulated on the internet suggesting that to live in Canada today is like owning an apartment above a meth lab. 

Canada is no perfect place, but it has handled the COVID crisis well, notably in British Columbia, where I live. Vancouver is just three hours by road north of Seattle, where the U.S. outbreak began. Half of Vancouver’s population is Asian, and typically dozens of flights arrive each day from China and East Asia. Logically, it should have been hit very hard, but the health care system performed exceedingly well. 

Throughout the crisis, testing rates across Canada have been consistently five times that of the U.S. On a per capita basis, Canada has suffered half the morbidity and mortality. For every person who has died in British Columbia, 44 have perished in Massachusetts, a state with a comparable population that has reported more COVID cases than all of Canada. As of July 30th, even as rates of COVID infection and death soared across much of the United States, with 59,629 new cases reported on that day alone, hospitals in British Columbia registered a total of just five COVID patients.

-Rolling Stone

Which pretty makes it difficult for the “little guy”. You know the one. Like you and I. Where all we want is just to be left alone, do our best to provide for our families, and have a little bit of fun on the side.

And the purpose of a nation, any nation, is to support and protect a society of “little guys” who all are trying to “live life in the pursuit of liberty”.

But you and I both know, that that is not what America is today. It’s a multi-tiered concentration camp. With the strongest mob bosses at top and he rest of us toiling for some scraps that they toss below from their stratospheric heights.

So, is America so corrupted, so out-of-wack that a average, normal, decent guy can’t have a family, a life without working himself to an early grave?

Yes. That’s the way it is.

In the United States, as of 19FEB21. Life expectancy is how long a baby born today can expect to live, on average. For males it was 75.1 years and for females, 80.5 years. The current life expectancy for China in 2021 is 77.13 years, a 0.22% increase from 2020.

No kidding.

The American Military Emprie

Have you ever wondered what it was like to live within a Global Military Empire like Nazi Germany, The British Empire in the 1800’s, and Ancient Babylon? Well, it’s pretty much like the way Americans live today.

There’s always an external threat that needs a war to fight. There’s always an increase , ever rising, in the prices for goods and services, and there’s always a feeling like society is slipping and going down hill. David Copperfield describes the life during the British military empire. And if you add cell-phones, trailer parks, and food-stamps you have America today.

.

And while I can discuss about how one “Hellfire Missile” can build a ton-load of hospitals, rebuild bridges, and feed entire families for a year, consider what other nations are using their treasury dollars on.

I am inside of China, and they are using their monies to build roads, bridges, hospitals. They are upgrading all infrastructure, and building parks. They are updating ferries, and there is a the construction of a new Mag-Lev rocket-train, even faster than the high-speed trains (already criss-crossing the nation), that will go from Shenzhen to Shanghai in three hours. Faster than a direct flight!

Chinese HST
Chinese high speed rail is commonplace all over China.

Local clinics are getting state-of-the art blood analysis equipment and patient diagnostic equipment. Clinics! Not like the USA where you need to get a doctors appointment to get you a hospital appointment, to get an analysis appointment to have anything done.

Blood work for my child, yesterday, occurred in 15 minutes. On site at a clinic. The entire cost was free. Because we are residents of the community. How much would it cost for us int he USA? How long would it take?

That is the difference between a nation that is investing in it’s people, and a Military Empire.

Sent to me by an influencer…

Back to the subject – Work & Life

I argue that when you live in a bad environment, whether it is a military empire, or a concentration camp, you are unable to find a work/life balance. It is just simply not possible. You have either one thing or the other thing. There is no balance.

So people find work-arounds.

If they do not, then they spend their entire life working and them when they reach retirement, they make do with what ever systems the government has in place for their retirement. And for Americans, it’s not good at all.

OK. Here’s a good article about this subject.

All credit to the author, reposted as found. No editing except to fit within this venue.

How to Come to Terms With Working For the Rest of Your Life

This is a question every man has to answer,

How did you come to terms with working full-time for the rest of your life?

I graduated from college this past May and just started my full-time job three weeks ago. I am a salaried employee with a required minimum of 50 working hours per week.

I’m grateful to have a job, but how the hell did you accept the fact that you’ve essentially been born to work? I see very few routes outside of working what feels like endless hours until I’m 60 (optimistic!) and can retire… to just sit around all day because I’m too old to do much of anything else

My friend, 60 is VERY optimistic if you just got out of college because the chances Social Security will be around in its current form by then is basically nil. That means most people that age are likely to work until they die.

All that said, there are a lot of options for what you can do on the working front. In fact, it gets back to my all-time favorite quote.

“There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs.” — Thomas Sowell

The best jobs require a lot of hours. You want to be a CEO, run a successful small business, or be a doctor, you are going to put in some serious hours to do that. You want the big house, the money, the prestige, you are going to have to work for it. You want to live somewhere expensive like NYC or San Francisco, then you should be prepared to work like a dog to make it happen.

If you are willing to forego that and make some lifestyle trade-offs, you may be surprised at what you can do.

For example, if you are outside of the big cities, you can live pretty well working 40 hours a week. Over time, especially if you get married to a woman that works, you can get yourself a house and have a vacation a year, a big-screen TV, and generally live comfortably. If you’re frugal, you can even save up some money doing that. Unfortunately, most people in that position aren’t frugal and they struggle when they get an unexpected bill, but that doesn’t have to be you.

You can take it even further if you like. Back in the day, I once had a roommate who has a fantastic salesman. He worked half the year selling and took the other half of the year off. If you want to live with roommates and keep it cheap, you may be able to squeak by working part-time. If you want to live out in the boonies with a little garden out back and some convenient land nearby for hunting and fishing, you may not have to work forty hours per week to do it.

 

What all this means is that you have real options in life. It just depends on which trade-off you want to make and guess what? The one with the most hours probably isn’t the best for everyone. There are guys who wake up one day in their forties with lots of money, but bad health and no one that cares about them because they have been working 70 hours a week from the time they were young until now. Are they better off than the guy who worked 20 hours a week his whole life, but took care of himself, had friends, and had a happier life? That’s a question you have to ask yourself.

It begins by asking what motivates you, what you want to have in your life and how much of your life you are willing to trade to make that happen.

And isn’t that the case?

What are you going to do? Work like a crazy madman on the quest to become another Donald Trump, Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs? So that you can sit upon billions and billions of dollars, while the nice day beckons outside, the fish are biting, and the cute girls would dearly wish that you would ask her out for a stroll on the beach and a cup of coffee.

Where are your friends? Where are your family in all this? Is that all there is to life? Work as some kind of corporate drone, and then retire as a starving old man?

Maybe there is another way… or, not.

We really need to take a good hard look at what the work environment is inside of America today. And compare it to the work environment in the rest of the world. And let me tell you… it is not pretty.

The following article is reprinted in it’s entirety, and edited to fit this venue. All credit to the authors.

“I’m gonna need you to come in on Saturday”: How “Office Space” got the modern workplace just right

Cubicles, layoffs, TPS report, flair — “Office Space” bombed at the box office, but endures because it was right

By Nikil Saval
The office could be any office. Cove fluorescents on a dimmer, modular shelving, the desk practically an abstraction. The whisper of sourceless ventilation. You are a trained observer and there is nothing to observe.

—David Foster Wallace, "The Pale King"

After the stock market crash, which emptied out the lofts and warehouses of San Francisco, eroding in an instant the frictionless, cloud-kicking fantasies of the dot-commers, another white-collar recession slung into place, and the office seemed to resume its role as the workplace everyone loved to hate.

Few cultural objects expressed this miasma of ill will better than the film “Office Space,” which appeared in 1999 at the very peak of the boom. Its theatrical run was a modest failure, but in retrospect it’s no surprise that a film so relentlessly dark and nasty would be overpowered by the delirium that gripped the end of the millennium.

This picture describes American workers all over America.

(From a reporter visiting a Microsoft annual meeting in 1997: “‘Why  are we at Microsoft? ’ bellowed billionaire Steve Ballmer, then the company’s executive vice president, to a crowd of nine thousand employees packed into the Kingdome, Seattle’s indoor stadium. ‘For  the money! ’ he screamed. ‘Show me the money! ’ The crowd responded with a roar: ‘Show me the money! ’ ”)

Running gags about staplers, misplaced memos, “Hawaiian Shirt Day,” and the specter of working lives wasted in dead-end, purposeless jobs for a gray tech company: no one appeared ready for that sort of humor in an era of raging exuberance—and anyway, the cubicle was dead, right?

Then the bubble burst; people woke up the following morning with their stock options erased; the beanbag chairs were gone, and they were in a cubicle again or unemployed  and desperately searching for a cubicle. “Office Space” found new life on the small screen, a medium that suited the office worker existence depicted in the film: long days huddled in front of a computer, followed by short nights exhausted on the couch, staring at a television.

What is good for the company?

In 1999 it barely recovered its $10 million budget in box office receipts; by 2003, it had become a cult classic, with more than two and a half million copies sold on video. (It screens on Comedy Central with the sort of mindless regularity that suggests a bored television office staff behind  it all. “What  do we fill the 2 to 5 p.m. slot with? ” “Fuck it, let’s just put on ‘Office Space’ again.”)

Everyone knows very happy white-collar people who can quote “Office Space” with as much fervor and accuracy as a pastor does the Gospels, and it’s a plausible  and routine  assumption that  repeated watchings of the film might offer a kind of therapy for stressed office workers:  a vent for an inarticulate rage that helps keep them humming away at bad jobs.

But anecdotally,  at least, it’s led to people quitting their jobs, and one Portland, Oregon, webmaster started a site, Bullshit Job, that doubled  as both a tribute  to the film and a page where workers could post all the insulting memos and e-mails their bosses sent out.

In other words, “Office Space,” and subsequent works in the general fraternity  of office satire, helped office workers recognize themselves as belonging to a particular kind of group—a recognition  that  the office always seemed to deny, since no matter where you were in the office, you were always presumed to be on your  way up. (Think of that line from the Stanwyck  film: “Baby Face is moving out of your class.”) And part of the brilliance of the film was its insistence that the jobs weren’t bad simply because the office workers were oppressed: they were intrinsically bad jobs, in a bad environment.

Promotion for years of dedication to the new office in the basement.
Promotion for years of dedication to the new office in the basement.

The setup for “Office Space” represents a larger shift in the understanding of office life. The paradigmatic narrative had been the entry of the rural woman into urban white-collar life, with its attendant sexual terrors; by mid-century, it was the travails of the middle manager attempting to avoid the conformist spirit of organizational life. But the plot of “Office Space”—reflecting the larger changes in the American economy—is about people being forced to leave an environment they hate, through layoffs; the same is true of the British show “The Office” (called, in an even more insulting euphemism, “redundancies”) and  of the  recent American novels of office life “Then We Came to the End” and “Personal Days.”

The prospect of losing one’s job forces the personal crisis: you come to know who your friends are, what your loyalties are worth, and what your job really is.

In “Office Space,” consultants come to examine the company’s structure  to give it a leaner  form; though their method  is unjust, they really do find people working useless jobs:

BOB SLYDELL ( JOHN C. McGINLEY) : What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customers, and you bring them down to the software engineers.

TOM SMYKOWSKI (RICHARD RIEHLE) : Yes, yes, that’s right.

BOB PORTER (PAUL WILLSON) : Well, then, I have to ask—why couldn’t the customers just take them directly to the software people?

TOM: I’ll tell you why. Because engineers are not good at dealing with customers.

SLYDELL: So you physically take the specs from the customer?

TOM : Well . . . no, my secretary does that. Or the fax.

PORTER : So then you must physically bring them to the software people?

TOM : Well, no. I mean, sometimes.

SLYDELL: What would you say you do here?TOM : Well, look, I already told you. I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don’t have to. (Screaming.) I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can’t you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?

Tom Smykowski is defensive about his job, even though he can’t explain what it is he does. Peter Gibbons (Ron Livingston), the main protagonist, knows that his job—updating software for the Y2K switch—sucks, and he knows that it’s meaningless; from the vantage point of the new millennium, it seems especially useless.

Struggling to explain it to a waitress, Joanna (Jennifer Aniston), he says, “I sit in a cubicle, and I update bank software for the 2000 switch. Well, see they wrote all this bank software, and to save space they used two digits instead of four, so like 98 instead of 1998, uh, so I go through these thousands of lines of code and uh . . . It doesn’t really matter. I don’t like my job.”

Later Peter confesses to the consultants that his average workday consists of coming in fifteen minutes late and “just sort of spac[ing] out for about an hour . . . I do that for about another hour after lunch too. I’d say in a given week, I only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual work.”

The twist is that this honesty is exactly what the consultants prize—a kind of ironized version of the “truth-telling” organization man of “The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Though Peter stops showing up to work and wrecks his work space by dismantling his cubicle walls, the consultants offer him a promotion. “[He’s] just a straight shooter with upper management written all over him,” one consultant says to Peter’s boss.

In return, however, they fire two engineers with actual experience, who happen to be Peter’s friends. This sets in motion the increasingly madcap (and implausible) third act, when Peter and his laid-off friends try to program a virus that would scam the company they despise out of thousands of dollars. At the end of the film, one of the company’s disgruntled employees, the sublime mutterer Milton Waddams (Stephen Root), sets the building on fire.

Peter’s engineer friends have moved from Initech to its competitor Initrode; Peter himself takes a blue-collar job in construction—preferring the outdoor life to his stationary warren of cubicles.

“Office Space” occupies such a tremendous place in the American office worker’s imaginary about his workplace it’s a shame that its effect—or the effect of the larger discourse it’s a part of—has tended to be shallow and focused on the cubicle and dumb bosses.

The “space” in “Office Space” was largely a symbol—of an uncaring, even ruthless organization.

Its real targets were the unholy expectations of the modern workplace, which asked for dedication and commitment, offering none in return.

What do you say you do here?

It doubled the force of its condemnation by extending it to other kinds of workplaces. The waitress Joanna works in a chain diner called Chotchkie’s, whose absurd expectations closely resemble those of the office. Part of her job involves donning wacky buttons with slogans and symbols on them, called “flair.” At one point, her boss takes her aside to chastise her about her flair.

STAN (MIKE JUDGE) : Joanna! . . . We need to talk about your flair.

JOANNA : Really? I have fifteen pieces on (demonstrating).

STAN : Fifteen is the minimum, mmkay. It’s up to you whether you want to just do the bare minimum. Brian for example has thirty-seven pieces of flair—and a terrific smile.

JOANNA : Okay, so you want me to wear more?

STAN : (Sighing.) Look, Joanna,  people can get a cheeseburger anywhere, they come to Chotchkie’s for the atmosphere  and the attitude. That’s what the flair’s about. It’s about fun.

JOANNA : So . . . more, then.

STAN : Look, we want you to express yourself. Mmkay? Now, if you feel the bare minimum is enough, well, okay, but some people choose to wear more, and we encourage that. You do want to express yourself, don’t you?

Joanna’s boss occupies the same place as the office consultants: looking for intangible, personality-based outward expressions as signs of being a “straight  shooter”—rather than establishing obvious benchmarks that one meets simply to garner a paycheck.

Her suspenders laden with flair suggest nothing  so much as cubicle walls, decked out to show one’s “individuality.” The human attachments in “Office Space” were so strange and obsessive—Milton and his now infamous need to keep his red Swingline stapler—that it was hard to believe there was anything still left to express.

Those  still immune  to the satire  of flair, however,  are encouraged  to check out  the catalogs of the office supplier  Baudville, which offers, among other  choice items, rhinestone-encrusted lanyards as well as T-shirts  for appreciation weeks with slogans like “Smells like Team Spirit” and “I Put the ‘Zing’ in Amazing.”

After such knowledge as “Office Space” offered, what  orgiveness? How could one acknowledge the essential failure of the office to deliver on its promised utopia—and go on as if nothing had happened?

For many, the question was merely rhetorical:  they were out of work and stringing together temporary gigs as best they could. But for others, the dream of a better office lived on in different ways: some saw technology  as still offering a way of moving office work out of the office, into a broader  sphere of public life; others saw that the office needed to be made vastly more humane and responsive to its increasingly apathetic denizens.

These two paths were united by a single goal: the desire to make work enjoyable, to return it to an innocence that generations of workplace mistakes had rendered corrupt.

In an arresting and bleak phrase, the sociologist Max Weber had described the progress of rationality and scientific demystification as leading to a gradual “disenchantment of the world.” Something like that had happened  to office work: the rosy image of the office as a distinct,  and  distinctly  middle-class, alternative  to the travails  of factory  work  and other  manual  labor  had suffered too many jolts to survive. The office would have to be re-enchanted.

Excerpted from “Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace” by Nikil Saval.

Nothing new, right?

Ah. You all know about this, and have watched the movie.

And maybe things are changing… at a glacial pace. For those of you who have planned a life independent of the corporate treadmill, you are truly fortunate. You own your own businesses and define your hours to your own liking and your very own familial needs.

But for the rest of us…

…those that were taught in our public schools that the key for success was working hard, getting good grades and working for a company that would take care of us… (and provide us with a great pension)…

…what of us?

The way that white collar workers do their work didn’t just happen that way, but it was a result of deliberate choices – from the architecture of the buildings that the work is done in to the furniture that the workers sit on. I hadn’t thought too deeply about it, thinking that the way things are was just a bit like the way things were, only with computers. I was wrong, and Saval tracks the changes, focused on the United States from the industrial revolution on. The white-collar worker has not been devoid of the standardization and alienation that the blue-collar worker had and rebelled against. The white-collar worker just never saw their white-collar chains; instead, they looked up, hoping to move up the ladder (no matter how false that metaphor is or was).

The potential for striving has, writ large, been the barrier to class to recognition of the white-collar worker for generations. The lack of upward mobility except for into the white-collar ranks is what led to unionism and workers improving their lots. The myth of upward mobility in white-collar terms is a form of social control that is not readily seen.

Saval tracks this, and it makes me think if this has been a deliberate move. As production has been mechanized, there are fewer production workers and more support staff in ancillary roles to production. As more workers move out of production and the workforce is more and more professionalized, white-collar membership is the mass of workers. It is the cube that keeps them apart and alienated. Maybe it is a prison of sorts.

-A Novel History of the Place of Work

What of us?

Where is our “life balance”?

American Work-Life Balance

  • According to the Center for American PROGRESS on the topic of work and family life balance, “in 1960, only 20 percent of mothers worked. Today, 70 percent of American children live in households where all adults are employed.”. U.S. Department of Labor statistics back up this data, and notes that 75% of those women working full time. I don’t care who stays home and who works in terms of gender (work opportunity equality for all – it’s a family choice). Either way, when all adults are working (single or with a partner), that’s a huge hit to the American family and free-time in the American household.
  • The U.S. is the ONLY country in the Americas without a national paid parental leave benefit. The average is over 12 weeks of paid leave anywhere other than Europe and over 20 weeks in Europe.
  • Zero industrialized nations are without a mandatory option for new parents to take parental leave. That is, except for the United States.

American Average Work Hours:

  • At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not.
  • In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.
  • According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”
  • Using data by the U.S. BLS, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not. Someone is profiting, it’s just not the average American worker.

American Paid Vacation Time & Sick Time:

The Impact of Too Much Work

I’m not telling you to work less hours. If you genuinely love what you do and are doing it for the right reasons, you are more than entitled to spend all of your waking hours plugging away.

But for many of us, more work leads to more stress and a lower quality of life. Without time to unwind, take care of your home, spend time with loved ones, enjoy our hobbies, connect with friends, and generally live a more balanced life. Stress is the #1 cause of health problems – mentally and physically. And there are few things that stress us out on a consistent basis like work does, especially when it takes away from all of the other things that life has to offer.

Americans are the Outliers

And if all of this data tells anything, it’s that we are the outliers, not the norm. Why are we the outliers?

  • Our companies fairly ruthlessly let people go. We want to keep our jobs and not be a ‘low performer’ compared to others.
  • The decline of the union has led to less paid time off and other leave benefits.
  • Cultural value of money over everything else. We love money, we want more of it, and we think money can buy happiness. And the more we work, the more we get paid.
  • It’s been drilled in our heads that we are lazy compared to emerging market counterpart workers in India, Mexico, China, and other parts of Asia. Who isn’t? And what is our mental image of the work environments in those locales? To validate those fears, our jobs are being outsourced to the cheap labor in those countries. In reality, the U.S. trails only Norway and Luxembourg (2 tiny countries) productivity per person.
  • Our legislative branch of the government (on both sides of the aisle) has been bought and as a result has shied away from passing laws that protect workers that every other industrialized nation has passed.
  • We generally don’t fight for our working rights. We take what is given to us.

What we All Need to Remember

What we all need to remind ourselves is that it doesn’t have to be this way.

  • It’s OK to ask to move to fewer hours at work.
  • It’s OK to take a week-long vacation if we need to.
  • It’s OK to ask to work from home.
  • It’s OK to take a month of unpaid leave while you raise a child.
  • It’s OK… you get the idea.

Don’t let life pass you by in the name of fear, circumstance, greed, or misguided hopes. Sometimes you just need to draw a line in the sand and say “enough is enough”.

And yeah.

I can hear it now…

If you don't like America so much, then leave. 'Merica is the best! Rah Rah Rah.

U.S. Americans’ Work-Life Balance Is Exceedingly Imbalanced

Research shows many Americans who receive paid time off are afraid to take it because of workplace pressures. But it turns out the European vacation mindset could actually help boost productivity.

The European Union’s Working Time Directive guarantees EU workers at least 20 paid vacation days per year, contrary to the United States, which does not have a statutory minimum annual leave requirement. Some European countries mandate additional time off; the UK, France, Austria, Denmark, Finland, Luxembourg, and Sweden all require 25 or more paid annual leave days. OECD data shows more time off doesn’t have to translate to lower productivity. On the contrary, some of the most productive countries, measured by GDP per hour worked, were in Europe.

The United States ranks far lower.

And don’t tell me that there are worst places in the world. Sure there are. But that is not the issue. The issue is [1] what is going wrong, and [2] how to fix it.

Belgium
Workers here enjoy an average of 8.6 hours of leisure per day—which trumps their 7.4-hour work days. Locals really value quality family time, getting home in time for dinner each night, and taking a full month-long vacation over the summer to coincide with school breaks.

Austria

Many offices in Austria have an 8–5 workday—except for Fridays, when employees are encouraged to go home at 3 p.m. Never ending “summer Fridays” aside, the country is also one of the best in the world for people looking to relocate; 80% of expats in Austria said their work-life balance improved since moving there (compared to the 53% global average).

Germany

The German government has several regulations in place to make sure its citizens don’t overwork themselves. And the work-hour regulations (Arbeitszeitgesetz) state that workers cannot put in more than 48 hours a week—or work Sundays or national holidays.

Luxembourg

Working on Sundays is outlawed in Luxembourg (though exceptions include maintenance and security jobs). The country also scores well in the sleep and vacation departments, with citizens getting an average of 7.2 hours of sleep per night and a minimum of five weeks paid annual leave—in addition to national holidays.

Spain

Although many employees do not take advantage of early afternoon siestas there is still an annual vacation allowance of 30 days.

France

French workers spend the most time—9.3 hours per day—devoted to leisure and relaxation. In 2017, France also introduced a law that allows workers the “right to disconnect” from afterhours work emails.

The French work hard, but the OECD thinks that gender inequality in the workplace is holding it back. While 78 percent of women work full-time, they say, “access to the labour [sic] market of mothers of young or large families could be improved but would likely require a more equal share of caring activities between parents.” In other words, women could be having a better work-life balance in France if their partners stepped up their childcare and were given longer paternity leave, and other support structures from their employers. That’s also a factor that affects U.S. families, where paid paternal and maternal leave aren’t mandated by national law.

Finland

At first glance, work hours in Finland look pretty similar to those in the United States: Monday through Friday, 8–5. However, their lunch breaks are one to two hours long. A great advocate of healthy living and rejuvenation, the government gave its citizens four “Nature Days” to celebrate its 100th birthday outdoors.

The Netherlands

Although the Netherlands only gives workers nine bank holidays per year, they compensate with the shortest work week of all the countries surveyed (averaging at 30.3 hours). Add to that 20 to 25 annual vacation days and extremely generous parental leave policies, this makes the Netherlands one of the highest-ranking countries for employees to enjoy a good work-life balance.

According to the OECD, the Netherlands had the best work-life balance in 2018, with Denmark, last year’s winner, losing out narrowly. In every area, the Dutch came out on top.

One of the big factors for the Dutch, says the OECD, is hours worked. “In the Netherlands, less than 0.5 percent of employees work very long hours, the lowest rate in the OECD where the average is one percent,” they write. About one percent of men work very long hours, compared with almost no women.” They define “long hours” as over 50 hours per week.

In the U.S., by comparison, the OECD says that 11 percent of employees put in long slogs, including 16 percent of men and 7 percent of women. The Netherlands has strict working week laws to prevent people working over 60 hours. Dutch culture doesn’t put as much emphasis on working till you’re exhausted, writes Business Culture, and encourages leaving leisure time. “They have clearly defined working hours and they respect them,” Business Culture writes.

You can take sick leave for up to two years and still receive 70 percent of your salary, according to a survey by the employment site Glassdoor. It’s the most generous sick-leave policy in Europe. Compared to the U.S., where there is no policy, it frankly boggles the mind.

Sweden
Sweden enjoys 25 annual vacation days, along with 16 months of paid family leave and 14 bank holidays per year, making it one of the more generous countries in terms of in Europe for employees.

Prisons in Sweden are meant to rehabilitate criminals, which helps explain why the country’s recidivism rate—how frequently people return to prison—is so low. In 2014, it was 40 percent, about half that of the U.S. And Swedish penitentiaries more closely resemble American offices or college dorm rooms than they do prisons, according to The Guardian.

Denmark
Denmark balances salary against cost of living well, and average daily leisure hours (8.8 per day) way outnumber work hours (6.6 per day). According to U.S. News & World Report, this is also the 2nd best country in the world to raise children. Both mothers and fathers are entitled to 23 weeks of parental leave, plus mothers get an extra four weeks of leave before their expected due date.

Unemployed workers in Denmark get 90 percent of previous earnings for up to 104 weeks, the most generous unemployment benefits in the EU, the Glassdoor survey said. This far outpaces the U.S., where unemployment pays 40 to 50 percent of earnings for up to 26 weeks.

Only 0.5% of Dutch employees regularly work very long hours, which is the lowest rate in the OECD, where the average is 13%. Instead, they devote around 16 hours per day to eating, sleeping and leisurely pursuits.

The Netherlands also boasts very low rates of youth unemployment, high literacy levels, below average levels of child income poverty and high levels of life satisfaction in childhood – over 93% of 11-15-year-old children report above average life satisfaction, for instance.

Work responsibilities are also shared among Dutch families, with the number of women in employment doubling from 35% in the early 1980s to 69.9% today, which is well above the OECD average of 57.5%.

There is also a strong sense of community in the Netherlands, where 90% of people say they know a friend or family member they could count on in times of trouble. This is slightly better than the 89% reported across other OECD countries.

Australia

The OECD reports that “when asked to rate their general satisfaction with life on a scale from 0 to 10, Australians gave it a 7.3 grade on average, higher than the OECD average of 6.5.” In the U.S., the grade is 6.9. Comparatively, though, Australia isn’t actually that good at work-life balance.

“Full-time workers devote 60 percent of their day on average, or 14.4 hours, to personal care (eating, sleeping, etc.) and leisure (socialising [sic] with friends and family, hobbies, games, computer and television use, etc.) — less than the OECD average of 15 hours,” says the OECD. It’s only just behind the U.S. in work-life rankings, ranking 32nd to the U.S.’s 31st. Less time for leisure and fun means a less balanced, more stressed country.

Brazil

In Brazil, work-life balance goes in a different direction: while only 7 percent of workers work long hours, the average income is significantly lower than the OECD average, and 64 percent of people have a paid job, compared to 69 percent in the U.S. The Brazilian economy is recovering from a slump, which is why working hours are currently a bit lower than other countries.

Ugh!

The average American works a staggering 1,836 hours a year, which is a good deal more than most of the world. Something something, the American Dream, blah blah blah. But with all that time put in at the office, Americans surely get loads of vacation days to keep them productive and not just freebasing K-cups on a day-to-day basis, right? Wrong. They’re definitely freebasing K-cups.

Compared to other developed nations, Americans get very little — if any — paid vacation time. As a small consolation, they do get approximately 10 days a year off for holidays.

Well, officially, that is.

GM required that you could only take the vacation during the plant shut downs, you had no ability to determine when you could take your vacation. And at that, you were required to keep your phone with you at all times to keep connected to the middle management in case you are needed.

So that’s a big issue.

It results in “burnout”.

Hey! Did you know that “burnout” is an American thing. yeah. Russians, French, and Chinese don’t get it. Just Americans do.

Dear BS Job, three months ago my boss told us that we would produce a draft without discussing the project requirements with the VP first, in our boss’ words to “show we’re innovative”. Then we’d share the project with upper management, “wow them” and “invite feedback”. [Ed: I love how ‘feedback’ basically means ‘harsh criticism’ these days.] We did so, delivered on-time no less, and it sat on the veep’s desk for nearly a month. A week before product launch, VP looks at our draft, tells us it’s all wrong, and we have to redo EVERYTHING! Of course the veep blames our boss and the boss blames us, even though we did everything we were told.

A recent report has found that the United States is the only advanced economy that does not require employers to provide paid vacation time. Almost 1-in-4 Americans do not receive any paid vacation or paid holidays, trailing far behind most of the rest of the world’s rich nations, according to the report.

“No-Vacation Nation Revisited,” released earlier this year by the Center for Economic and Policy Research reviewed the international labor laws impacting paid vacation and holidays in 21 rich nations. The countries included 16 European countries, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States, all major economies that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Some highlights of the report:

For the United States:

  •   Workers have no statutory right to paid vacations.
  • The sum of the average paid vacation and paid holidays provided to workers in the private sector ― 16 in total ― would not meet even the minimum required by law in 19 other rich countries, the report notes.
  • The lack of paid vacation and paid holidays is particularly acute for low-wage workers, part-time workers, and for employees of small businesses. (Workers in  small businesses are less likely to have any paid vacation (69 percent) than those in medium and large establishments (86 percent); only 49 percent of low-wage workers have paid vacation, compared to 90 percent of high-wage workers; part-time workers are far less likely to have paid vacations (35 percent) than full-time workers (91 percent).
  • The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of the world is even larger when legal holidays are included. U.S. law does not guarantee any paid holidays, but most rich countries provide between 5 and 13 per year, in addition to paid vacation days.

But Americans are so proud of the USA…

For other rich countries:

  •   Workers in the European Union are legally guaranteed at least 20 paid vacation days per year, with 25 and even 30 or more days in some countries.
  •   Canada and Japan guarantee at least 10 days of paid vacation per year.
  • Five countries even mandate that employers pay vacationing workers a small premium above their standard pay in order to help with vacation-related expenses.
  •   Most other rich countries have also established legal rights to paid holidays over and above paid vacation days.
  •   Several foreign countries offer additional time off for younger and older workers, shift workers, and those engaged in community service including jury duty and for activities like union duties, getting married, or moving.
“The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation days and paid holidays,” John Schmitt, senior economist and co-author of the report, said in a statement. “Relying on businesses to voluntarily provide paid leave just hasn’t worked.”

Rebecca Ray and Milla Sanes were co-authors of the study.

The center studied this topic initially in 2007, but since then, little progress has been made, the researchers noted.

“It is striking that six years after we first looked at this topic absolutely nothing has changed. U.S. law and U.S. employer behavior still lags far behind the rest of the rich countries in the world,” Schmitt added.

So let’s get back to “brass tacks”

People need to have a plan to manage their lives within a crazy, ever-changing society. One that is very fast, and proceeding ahead faster and faster with technological advances. You cannot count on work, society, or your government to help you out. You need to plan on how to survive within the confines of what is at your reach.

We need a plan. And it has to be better than fighting over every single penny, and grasping for every little thing.

You have skills. Improve them. Advertise them. Use them.

You are part of community. Embrace your role. Be helpful and supportive of others in your community.

Realize that no one can help you. You are on your own. And as such, strengthen your bonds with others in your local community and make sure that you and your family have a great work/life balance. It is critical for your happiness and critical for your health.

And while other nations, other peoples and other societies have it better than you Americans do, do not get all upset about that. That’s not your problem. Getting to have the same kind of happiness and life balance that they have, is.

It starts with you.

As American culture, society, and industry has become isolated from PEOPLE and their families, so has the American government. This “double tap” has caused a deep impression on the combined American psyche. And it’s not a good one. In fact, I can argue that this effect has been so horrible that it has created a downward spiral with the United States seems to be entrapped within.

Click

There was an Adam Sandler movie made in 2006 titled “Click“.  And this movie take a good comedic look at the Work/life balance that exists within the United States today.

Michael Newman (Sandler) is a hard working family man, who must please his boss (Hasselhoff), in order to get promoted. Problem is he gets less time with his family, and wishes for a remote in which he can control his life. This soon comes true for Newman, when he meets Morty (Walken), a crazy sales clerk, who has the ultimate remote. A remote in which he can do anything, including muting, skipping and dubbing his life. He finds this to be the opportunity in which he can not only skip every argument, but also skip to his promotion. He sees this as a good idea, until the remote goes horribly wrong. 

-Written by Film_Fan

It was Adam Sandler’s most underrated movie.His role was that of a ordinary workaholic of that time trying to put up a better living for his family but he misunderstood his priorities and try to make the family happy but instead went on avoiding their company. It a fine piece of art and a wonderful chemistry of husband and wife.

It’s a comedy, but it’s also a drama. It is something that maybe all of us need to take a good long look at.

Scrooge was granted visions of Christmas Past and Christmas Future, and reformed his life. What happens to Adam Sandler in “Click” is like what happened to Scrooge, except with a lot more Christmases. He needs more than one lesson and he gets more than one lesson. Way more.In “Being There,” the hero Chance has spent all of his life watching television. When he wanders out to freedom and is threatened on the street, he clicks a TV remote control to get another channel.
In “Click,” Sandler plays Michael, an architect who is given a universal remote that’s truly Universal. With it, he can take control of his life: freeze a scene, fast-forward, reverse, mute the sound, select the chapters of his choice and even witness his parents at the moment of his conception (that’s, of course, in the “Making of” documentary).Of course.

 

The movie is being sold as a comedy, but you know what? This isn’t funny. Yes, there are some laughs, as when he finds he can turn the dog’s barking up and down, or play around with the settings for hue and contrast, or when he discovers the picture-in-picture feature that allows him to watch the ballgame no matter what else is going on around him. But the movie essentially involves a workaholic who uses the universal remote to skip over all the bad stuff in his life and discovers in the process that he is missing life itself.

Take away the gimmick of the universal remote, and this is what a lot of us do, and it’s sad.

Yes.

That’s me…

…and yes. That’s you.

It’s not just sad, it’s brutal.

There’s an undercurrent of cold, detached cruelty in the way Michael uses the magical device. He turns off the volume during an argument with his wife. He fast-forwards through a boring family dinner, and later through foreplay. He skips ahead to avoid a bad cold. He jumps to the chapter where he gets a promotion. Eventually, he realizes the family dog has died and been replaced by another, his kids have grown up, his wife is married to someone else, and he weighs 400 pounds. It happened while he wasn’t paying attention.

Surprisingly good 
25 June 2006I walked into the movie theater expecting to see Adam Sandler make a complete buffoon of himself. However, when I came out I was impressed. There was a depth to this movie I did not see coming, and it took me completely off guard. "Click" proved to be a powerful, emotional, and humorous piece of work. There was a certain philosophical message in this movie, in which I think, we all take for granted. Adam Sandler did a great job in playing a work-aholic.

Like many other Sandler movies, this one lingers studiously over bodily functions. After losing enormous amount of weight, for example, Michael plays with a big flap of loose skin around his stomach, plopping it up and down long after any possible audience curiosity has been satisfied. During an argument with his boss (David Hasselhoff), he freeze-frames the boss, jumps on his desk and farts. When he puts his boss back on “play,” the boss inexplicably decides his secretary has put feces in his salad. Anyone who can’t tell poop from lettuce doesn’t deserve to be a senior partner.

They teach you that in business school.

Maybe that’s why she decided to have a sex change.

But I digress…

Michael is surrounded by patient and saintly people. His wife, Donna (Kate Beckinsale), loves him but despairs of reaching him. She has that standard wifely role of complaining when he has to work late and can’t be at the swimming meet/Fourth of July party, etc. Michael’s parents (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner) are sweet and loving but kvetch too much and talk too slowly, so Michael zaps right through the time he has remaining with them.

Like many of us do.

And then, before we realize it, they are all out of our lives forever.

We went ahead and chased that ‘almighty dollar”. We followed our careers, and we chased after the money to “make a better life for ourselves”, but you all know… it really wasn’t necessary.

As long as you can balance your TIME with your MONEY you will be fine. It is when you mistakenly believe that you need certain “essentials” instead of time with family and friends that things end up going wrong.

Here is the handy-dandy Metallicman cheat-sheet chart to help you all plan out your life…

And where are you on it right now?

It’s a valid question.

Now, let’s compare the work/life balance of Americans to the rest of the world, and let’s include the modern contemporaneous HR limitations about actions and behaviors on employees when they are not at work. Compare the USA work/life balance to the rest of the world…

America is truly the leader …

…in making a lot of money. But how about having a decent life to go along with that money that we all earn? I mean do we all have to end up becoming a mega-billionaire in order to be able to take a day off to watch our sons play a softball game? Do we need to work long, long days all the time, jsut to be able to afford one night out a week in a restaurant?

Think about it people!

The automobile

People now drive these amazingly expensive vehicles. They have all sorts of things. Such as heated seats, power windows, power seat adjustments, wifi, super-charged engines, custom colors and interiors, and all sorts of enhancements. And yeah. That is why they are all so expensive.

And to drive these cars, we all take out loans. Because the cars are so expensive.

But really, if you can get by without a car, you could save an enormous amount of money every month. And then use that money on the down payment on a house that you could rent out instead…

…or not.

The point is that you don’t really need an expensive car. If you have a great life, with great family and fantastic friends, do you REALLY need to have the most expensive car on the block, a ski boat, a pool in the backyard, and a five bedroom, three bath, McMansion?

I argue that you do not.

My co-workers got me a birthday cake, celebration at 3pm in the breakroom. Little did they know (nor did I) that the purpose of my prior meeting at 2pm with my manager was to lay me off. I was escorted out, I am in the parking lot, one of them just texted me now, photo of cake, saying they are “eating it in my memory”. hahaha I even requested that they all wear Hawaiian shirts, including me, so I got fired wearing my f___ing flowery Hawaiian shirt. Needless to say, I got no cake either.

And with that keep in mind that this need for making more and more money is a sickness. It is ingrained in our American culture and it is resulting in some very disturbing trends. Obesity, death rates, addictions, crime, and a general collapse of society. And any one who thinks that this all… this status quo needs to be preserved needs their head examined. It needs to change.

It needs to change.

Change starts with you.

I see cracks in the society that embraces this sickness, and while it all appears worrisome, it shouldn’t be. It should be welcomed. Because change is long, long overdue. America has to change. It’s citizens are dying in the society that the government has constructed for it.

Change starts with you.

Make your life a good one.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my life and happiness index, here…

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The Hammer of God by Arthur C. Clarke (Full Text)

In short, The Hammer of God is a disaster novel, telling of  the impending arrival of an asteroid named Kali (the Hindu god of death)  to Earth, threatening apocalyptic destruction.

What makes this  different from other disaster novels, of course, is that this is a novel  told with Clarke’s unique voice. The plot is told in about fifty short  chapters, each rarely more than a couple of pages long. The story is  mainly focussed around Robert Singh, who is the captain of the  expedition to hopefully stop Kali before it reaches Earth. Named  Goliath, the plan is to gently nudge Kali using a pile driver so that it  misses Earth.

If this sounds like another Earth-in-peril story,  well, it is. What makes this a little different is that along the way we  get a story filled with Clarke’s ideas, many of which are unusual,  though suffused with Sir Arthur’s gentle humour. He suggests that in  this future the religions of Christianity and Islam have combined to  create ‘Chrislam’, sharing their central beliefs for the good of all.  Computers are now part of everyday life, although as written from the  perspective of 1993 perhaps not as much as social media would  predominate today. Goliath is partly run by an AI, unsurprisingly called  David, who has developed some quite human mannerisms. David is a much  more personable version of his famous predecessor, HAL 9000.

All in all, it's a nice read for a stormy, rainy day.

The Hammer of God

by Sir Arthur C. Clarke

Published in Dec. 2011 (Issue 19) | 4502 words

It came in vertically, punching a hole ten km wide through the atmosphere, generating temperatures so high that the air itself started to burn. When it hit the ground near the Gulf of Mexico, rock turned to liquid and spread outward in mountainous waves, not freezing until it had formed a crater two hundred km across.

That was only the beginning of disaster: Now the real tragedy began. Nitric oxides rained from the air, turning the sea to acid. Clouds of soot from incinerated forests darkened the sky, hiding the sun for months. Worldwide, the temperature dropped precipitously, killing off most of the plants and animals that had survived the initial cataclysm. Though some species would linger on for millenniums, the reign of the great reptiles was finally over.

The clock of evolution had been reset; the countdown to Man had begun. The date was, very approximately, 65 million B.C.

***

Captain Robert Singh never tired of walking in the forest with his little son Toby. It was, of course, a tamed and gentle forest, guaranteed to be free of dangerous animals, but it made an exciting contrast to the rolling sand dunes of their last environment in the Saudi desert—and the one before that, on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. But when the Skylift Service had moved the house this time, something had gone wrong with the food-recycling system. Though the electronic menus had fail-safe backups, there had been a curious metallic taste to some of the items coming out of the synthesizer recently.

“What’s that, Daddy?” asked the four-year-old, pointing to a small hairy face peering at them through a screen of leaves.

“Er, some kind of monkey. We’ll ask the Brain when we get home.”

“Can I play with it?”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. It could bite. And it probably has fleas. Your robotoys are much nicer.”

“But …”

Captain Singh knew what would happen next: He had run this sequence a dozen times. Toby would begin to cry, the monkey would disappear, he would comfort the child as he carried him back to the house …

But that had been twenty years ago and a quarter-billion kilometers away. The playback came to an end; sound, vision, the scent of unknown flowers and the gentle touch of the wind slowly faded. Suddenly, he was back in this cabin aboard the orbital tug Goliath, commanding the 100-person team of Operation ATLAS, the most critical mission in the history of space exploration. Toby, and the stepmothers and stepfathers of his extended family, remained behind on a distant world which Singh could never revisit. Decades in space—and neglect of the mandatory zero-G exercises—had so weakened him that he could now walk only on the Moon and Mars. Gravity had exiled him from the planet of his birth.

“One hour to rendezvous, captain,” said the quiet but insistent voice of David, as Goliath’s central computer had been inevitably named. “Active mode, as requested. Time to come back to the real world.”

Goliath’s human commander felt a wave of sadness sweep over him as the final image from his lost past dissolved into a featureless, simmering mist of white noise. Too swift a transition from one reality to another was a good recipe for schizophrenia, and Captain Singh always eased the shock with the most soothing sound he knew: waves falling gently on a beach, with sea gulls crying in the distance. It was yet another memory of a life he had lost, and of a peaceful past that had now been replaced by a fearful present.

For a few more moments, he delayed facing his awesome responsibility. Then he sighed and removed the neural-input cap that fitted snugly over his skull and had enabled him to call up his distant past. Like all spacers, Captain Singh belonged to the “Bald Is Beautiful” school, if only because wigs were a nuisance in zero gravity. The social historians were still staggered by the fact that one invention, the portable “Brainman,” could make bare heads the norm within a single decade. Not even quick-change skin coloring, or the lens-corrective laser shaping which had abolished eyeglasses, had made such an impact upon style and fashion.

“Captain,” said David. “I know you’re there. Or do you want me to take over?”

It was an old joke, inspired by all the insane computers in the fiction and movies of the early electronic age. David had a surprisingly good sense of humor: He was, after all, a Legal Person (Nonhuman) under the famous Hundredth Amendment, and shared—or surpassed—almost all the attributes of his creators. But there were whole sensory and emotional areas which he could not enter. It had been felt unnecessary to equip him with smell or taste, though it would have been easy to do so. And all his attempts at telling dirty stories were such disastrous failures that he had abandoned the genre.

“All right, David,” replied the captain. “I’m still in charge.” He removed the mask from his eyes, and turned reluctantly toward the viewport. There, hanging in space before him, was Kali.

It looked harmless enough: just another small asteroid, shaped so exactly like a peanut that the resemblance was almost comical. A few large impact craters, and hundreds of tiny ones, were scattered at random over its charcoal-gray surface. There were no visual clues to give any sense of scale, but Singh knew its dimensions by heart: 1,295 m maximum length, 456 m minimum width. Kali would fit easily into many city parks.

No wonder that, even now, most of humankind could still not believe that this modest asteroid was the instrument of doom. Or, as the Chrislamic Fundamentalists were calling it, “the Hammer of God.”

***

The sudden rise of Chrislam had been traumatic equally to Rome and Mecca. Christianity was already reeling from John Paul XXV’s eloquent but belated plea for contraception and the irrefutable proof in the New Dead Sea Scrolls that the Jesus of the Gospels was a composite of at least three persons. Meanwhile the Muslim world had lost much of its economic power when the Cold Fusion breakthrough, after the fiasco of its premature announce­ment, had brought the Oil Age to a sudden end. The time had been ripe for a new religion embodying, as even its severest critics admitted, the best elements of two ancient ones.

The Prophet Fatima Magdalene (née Ruby Goldenburg) had attracted almost 100 million adherents before her spectacular—and, some maintained, self-contrived—martyrdom. Thanks to the brilliant use of neural programming to give previews of Paradise during its ceremonies, Chrislam had grown explosively, though it was still far outnumbered by its parent religions.

Inevitably, after the Prophet’s death the movement split into rival factions, each upholding the True Faith. The most fanatical was a fundamentalist group calling itself “the Reborn,” which claimed to be in direct contact with God (or at least Her Archangels) via the listening post they had established in the silent zone on the far side of the Moon, shielded from the radio racket of Earth by 3,000 km of solid rock.

***

Now Kali filled the main viewscreen. No magnification was needed, for Goliath was hovering only 200 m above its ancient, battered surface. Two crew members had already landed, with the traditional “One small step for a man”—even though walking was impossible on this almost zero-gravity worldlet.

“Deploying radio beacon. We’ve got it anchored securely. Now Kali won’t be able to hide from us.”

It was a feeble joke, not meriting the laughter it aroused from the dozen officers on the bridge. Ever since rendezvous, there had been a subtle change in the crew’s morale, with unpredictable swings between gloom and juvenile humor. The ship’s physician had already prescribed tranquilizers for one mild case of manic-depressive symptoms. It would grow worse in the long weeks ahead, when there would be little to do but wait.

The first waiting period had already begun. Back on Earth, giant radio telescopes were tuned to receive the pulses from the beacon. Although Kali’s orbit had already been calculated with the greatest possible accuracy, there was still a slim chance that the asteroid might pass harmlessly by. The radio measuring rod would settle the matter, for better or worse.

It was a long two hours before the verdict came, and David relayed it to the crew.

“Spaceguard reports that the probability of impact on Earth is 99.9%. Operation ATLAS will begin immediately.”

The task of the mythological Atlas was to hold up the heavens and prevent them from crashing down upon Earth. The ATLAS booster that Goliath carried as an external payload had a more modest goal: keeping at bay only a small piece of the sky.

***

It was the size of a small house, weighed 9,000 tons and was moving at 50,000 km/ h. As it passed over the Grand Teton National Park, one alert tourist photographed the incandescent fireball and its long vapor trail. In less than two minutes, it had sliced through the Earth’s atmosphere and returned to space.

The slightest change of orbit during the billions of years it had been circling the sun might have sent the asteroid crashing upon any of the world’s great cities with an explosive force five times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

The date was Aug. 10, 1972.

***

Spaceguard had been one of the last projects of the legendary NASA, at the close of the 20th century. Its initial objective had been modest enough: to make as complete a survey as possible of the asteroids and comets that crossed the orbit of Earth—and to determine if any were a potential threat.

With a total budget seldom exceeding $10 million a year, a worldwide network of telescopes, most of them operated by skilled amateurs, had been established by the year 2000. Sixty-one years later, the spectacular return of Halley’s Comet encouraged more funding, and the great 2079 fireball, luckily impacting in mid-Atlantic, gave Spaceguard additional prestige. By the end of the century, it had located more than one million asteroids, and the survey was believed to be 90% complete. However, it would have to be continued indefinitely: There was always a chance that some intruder might come rush­ing in from the uncharted outer reaches of the solar system.

As had Kali, which had been detected in late 2212 as it fell sunward past the orbit of Jupiter. Fortunately humankind had not been wholly unprepared, thanks to the fact that Senator George Ledstone (Independent, West America) had chaired an influential finance committee almost a generation earlier.

The Senator had one public eccentricity and, he cheerfully admitted, one secret vice. He always wore massive horn-rimmed eyeglasses (nonfunctional, of course) because they had an intimidating effect on uncooperative witnesses, few of whom had ever encountered such a novelty. His “secret vice,” perfectly well known to everyone, was rifle shooting on a standard Olympic range, set up in the tunnels of a long-abandoned missile silo near Mount Cheyenne. Ever since the demilitarization of Planet Earth (much accelerated by the famous slogan “Guns Are the Crutches of the Impotent”), such activities had been frowned upon, though not actively discouraged.

There was no doubt that Senator Ledstone was an original; it seemed to run in the family. His grandmother had been a colonel in the dreaded Beverly Hills Militia, whose skirmishes with the L.A. Irregulars had spawned endless psychodramas in every medium, from old-fashioned ballet to direct brain stimulation. And his grandfather had been one of the most notorious bootleg­gers of the 21st century. Before he was killed in a shoot-out with the Canadian Medicops during an ingenious attempt to smuggle a kiloton of tobacco up Niagara Falls, it was estimated that “Smokey” had been responsible for at least 20 million deaths.

Ledstone was quite unrepentant about his grandfather, whose sensational demise had triggered the repeal of the late U.S.’s third, and most disastrous, attempt at Prohibition. He argued that responsible adults should be allowed to commit suicide in any way they pleased—by alcohol, cocaine or even tobacco—as long as they did not kill innocent bystanders during the process.

When the proposed budget for Spaceguard Phase 2 was first presented to him, Senator Ledstone had been outraged by the idea of throwing billions of dollars into space. It was true that the global economy was in good shape; since the almost simultaneous collapse of communism and capitalism, the skillful application of chaos theory by World Bank mathematicians had broken the old cycle of booms and busts and averted (so far) the Final Depression predicted by many pessimists. Nonetheless, the Senator argued that the money could be much better spent on Earth—especially on his favorite project, reconstructing what was left of California after the Su­perquake.

When Ledstone had twice vetoed Spaceguard Phase 2, everyone agreed that no one on Earth would make him change his mind. They had reckoned without someone from Mars.

The Red Planet was no longer quite so red, though the process of greening it had barely begun. Concentrating on the problems of survival, the colonists (they hated the word and were already saying proudly “we Martians”) had little energy left over for art or science. But the lightning flash of genius strikes where it will, and the greatest theoretical physicist of the century was born under the bubble domes of Port Lowell.

Like Einstein, to whom he was often compared, Carlos Mendoza was an excellent musician; he owned the only saxophone on Mars and was a skilled performer on that antique instrument. He could have received his Nobel Prize on Mars, as everyone expected, but he loved surprises and practical jokes. Thus he appeared in Stockholm looking like a knight in high-tech armor, wearing one of the powered exoskeletons developed for paraplegics. With this mechanical assistance, he could function almost unhandicapped in an environment that would otherwise have quickly killed him.

Needless to say, when the ceremony was over, Carlos was bombarded with invitations to scientific and social functions. Among the few he was able to accept was an appearance before the World Budget Committee, where Sena­tor Ledstone closely questioned him about his opinion of Project Spaceguard.

“I live on a world which still bears the scars of a thousand meteor impacts, some of them hundreds of kilometers across,” said Professor Mendoza. “Once they were equally common on Earth, but wind and rain—something we don’t have yet on Mars, though we’re working on it!—have worn them away.”

Senator Ledstone: “The Spaceguarders are always pointing to signs of asteroid impacts on Earth. How seriously should we take their warnings?”

Professor Mendoza: “Very seriously, Mr. Chairman. Sooner or later, there’s bound to be another major impact.”

Senator Ledstone was impressed, and indeed charmed, by the young scientist, but not yet convinced. What changed his mind was not a matter of logic but of emotion. On his way to London, Carlos Mendoza was killed in a bizarre accident when the control system of his exoskeleton malfunctioned. Deeply moved, Ledstone immediately dropped his opposition to Spaceguard, approving construction of two powerful orbiting tugs, Goliath and Titan, to be kept permanently patrolling on opposite sides of the sun. And when he was a very old man, he said to one of his aides, “They tell me we’ll soon be able to take Mendoza’s brain out of that tank of liquid nitrogen, and talk to it through a computer interface. I wonder what he’s been thinking about, all these years …”

***

Assembled on Phobos, the inner satellite of Mars, ATLAS was little more than a set of rocket engines attached to propellant tanks holding 100,000 tons of hydrogen. Though its fusion drive could generate far less thrust than the primitive missile that had carried Yuri Gagarin into space, it could run continuously not merely for minutes but for weeks. Even so, the effect on the asteroid would be trivial, a velocity change of a few centimeters per second. Yet that might be sufficient to deflect Kali from its fatal orbit during the months while it was still falling earthward.

***

Now that ATLAS’s propellant tanks, control systems and thrusters had been securely mounted on Kali, it looked as if some lunatic had built an oil refinery on an asteroid. Captain Singh was exhausted, as were all the crew members, after days of assembly and checking. Yet he felt a warm glow of achievement: They had done everything that was expected of them, the countdown was going smoothly, and the rest was up to ATLAS.

He would have been far less relaxed had he known of the ABSOLUTE PRIORITY message racing toward him by tight infrared beam from ASTROPOL headquarters in Geneva. It would not reach Goliath for another 30 minutes. And by then it would be much too late.

***

At about T minus 30 minutes, Goliath had drawn away from Kali to stand well clear of the jet with which ATLAS would try to nudge it from its present course. “Like a mouse pushing an elephant,” one media person had described the operation. But in the frictionless vacuum of space, where momentum could never be lost, even one mousepower would be enough if applied early and over a sufficient length of time.

The group of officers waiting quietly on the bridge did not expect to see anything spectacular: The plasma jet of the ATLAS drive would be far too hot to produce much visible radiation. Only the telemetry would confirm that ignition had started and that Kali was no longer an implacable juggernaut, wholly beyond the control of humanity.

There was a brief round of cheering and a gentle patter of applause as the string of zeros on the accelerometer display began to change. The feeling on the bridge was one of relief rather than exultation. Though Kali was stirring, it would be days and weeks before victory was assured.

And then, unbelievably, the numbers dropped back to zero. Seconds later, three simultaneous audio alarms sounded. All eyes were suddenly fixed on Kali and the ATLAS booster which should be nudging it from its present course. The sight was heartbreaking: The great propellant tanks were opening up like flowers in a time-lapse movie, spilling out the thousands of tons of reaction mass that might have saved the Earth. Wisps of vapor drifted across the face of the asteroid, veiling its cratered surface with an evanescent atmosphere.

Then Kali continued along its path, heading inexorably toward a fiery collision with the Earth.

***

Captain Singh was alone in the large, well-appointed cabin that had been his home for longer than any other place in the solar system. He was still dazed but was trying to make his peace with the universe.

He had lost, finally and forever, all that he loved on Earth. With the decline of the nuclear family, he had known many deep attachments, and it had been hard to decide who should be the mothers of the two children he was permitted. A phrase from an old American novel (he had forgotten the author) kept coming into his mind: “Remember them as they were—and write them off.” The fact that he himself was perfectly safe somehow made him feel worse; Goliath was in no danger whatsoever, and still had all the propellant it needed to rejoin the shaken survivors of humanity on the Moon or Mars.

Well, he had many friendships—and one that was much more than that—on Mars; this was where his future must lie. He was only 102, with decades of active life ahead of him. But some of the crew had loved ones on the Moon; he would have to put Goliath’s destination to the vote.

Ship’s Orders had never covered a situation like this.

***

“I still don’t understand,” said the chief engineer, “why that explosive cord wasn’t detected on the preflight check-out.”

“Because that Reborn fanatic could have hidden it easily—and no one would have dreamed of looking for such a thing. Pity ASTROPOL didn’t catch him while he was still on Phobos.”

“But why did they do it? I can’t believe that even Chrislamic crazies would want to destroy the Earth.”

“You can’t argue with their logic—if you accept their premises. God, Allah, is testing us, and we mustn’t interfere. If Kali misses, fine. If it doesn’t, well, that’s part of Her bigger plan. Maybe we’ve messed up Earth so badly that it’s time to start over. Remember that old saying of Tsiolkovski’s: ‘Earth is the cradle of humankind, but you cannot live in the cradle forever.’ Kali could be a sign that it’s time to leave.”

The captain held up his hand for silence.

“The only important question now is, Moon or Mars? They’ll both need us. I don’t want to influence you” (that was hardly true; everyone knew where he wanted to go), “so I’d like your views first.”

The first ballot was Mars 6, Moon 6, Don’t know 1, captain abstaining.

Each side was trying to convert the single “Don’t know” when David spoke.

“There is an alternative.”

“What do you mean?” Captain Singh demanded, rather brusquely.

“It seems obvious. Even though ATLAS is destroyed, we still have a chance of saving the Earth. According to my calculations, Goliath has just enough propellant to deflect Kali—if we start thrusting against it immediately. But the longer we wait, the less the probability of success.”

There was a moment of stunned silence on the bridge as everyone asked the question, “Why didn’t I think of that?” and quickly arrived at the answer.

David had kept his head, if one could use so inappropriate a phrase, while all the humans around him were in a state of shock. There were some compensations in being a Legal Person (Nonhuman). Though David could not know love, neither could he know fear. He would continue to think logically, even to the edge of doom.

***

With any luck, thought Captain Singh, this is my last broadcast to Earth. I’m tired of being a hero, and a slightly premature one at that. Many things could still go wrong, as indeed they already have …

“This is Captain Singh, space tug Goliath. First of all, let me say how glad we are that the Elders of Chrislam have identified the saboteurs and handed them over to ASTROPOL.

“We are now fifty days from Earth, and we have a slight problem. This one, I hasten to add, will not affect our new attempt to deflect Kali into a safe orbit. I note that the news media are calling this deflection Operation Deliverance. We like the name, and hope to live up to it, but we still cannot be absolutely certain of success. David, who appreciates all the goodwill messages he has received, estimates that the probability of Kali impacting Earth is still 10% …

“We had intended to keep just enough propellant reserve to leave Kali shortly before encounter and go into a safer orbit, where our sister ship Titan could rendezvous with us. But that option is now closed. While Goliath was pushing against Kali at maximum drive, we broke through a weak point in the crust. The ship wasn’t damaged, but we’re stuck! All attempts to break away have failed.

“We’re not worried, and it may even be a blessing in disguise. Now we’ll use the whole of our remaining propellant to give one final nudge. Perhaps that will be the last drop that’s needed to do the job.

“So we’ll ride Kali past Earth, and wave to you from a comfortable distance, in just fifty days.”

It would be the longest fifty days in the history of the world.

***

Now the huge crescent of the moon spanned the sky, the jagged mountain peaks along the terminator burning with the fierce light of the lunar dawn. But the dusty plains still untouched by the sun were not completely dark; they were glowing faintly in the light reflected from Earth’s clouds and continents. And scattered here and there across that once dead landscape were the glowing fireflies that marked the first permanent settlements hu­mankind had built beyond the home planet. Captain Singh could easily locate Clavius Base, Port Armstrong, Plato City. He could even see the necklace of faint lights along the Translunar Railroad, bringing its precious cargo of water from the ice mines at the South Pole.

Earth was now only five hours away.

***

Kali entered Earth’s atmosphere soon after local midnight, 200 km above Hawaii. Instantly, the gigantic fireball brought a false dawn to the Pacific, awakening the wildlife on its myriad islands. But few humans had been asleep this night of nights, except those who had sought the oblivion of drugs.

Over New Zealand, the heat of the orbiting furnace ignited forests and melted the snow on mountaintops, triggering avalanches into the valleys beneath. But the human race had been very, very lucky: The main thermal impact as Kali passed the Earth was on the Antarctic, the continent that could best absorb it. Even Kali could not strip away all the kilometers of polar ice, but it set in motion the Great Thaw that would change coastlines all around the world.

No one who survived hearing it could ever describe the sound of Kali’s passage; none of the recordings were more than feeble echoes. The video coverage, of course, was superb, and would be watched in awe for generations to come. But nothing could ever compare with the fearsome reality.

Two minutes after it had sliced into the atmosphere, Kali reentered space. Its closest approach to Earth had been 60 km. In that two minutes, it took 100,000 lives and did $1 trillion worth of damage.

***

Goliath had been protected from the fireball by the massive shield of Kali itself; the sheets of incandescent plasma streamed harmlessly overhead. But when the asteroid smashed into Earth’s blanket of air at more than one hundred times the speed of sound, the colossal drag forces mounted swiftly to five, ten, twenty gravities—and peaked at a level far beyond anything that machines or flesh could withstand.

Now indeed Kali’s orbit had been drastically changed; never again would it come near Earth. On its next return to the inner solar system, the swifter spacecraft of a later age would visit the crumpled wreckage of Goliath and bear reverently homeward the bodies of those who had saved the world.

Until the next encounter.

Do you want more?

I have more posts and stories like this in my fictional index here…

Fictional Stories

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Contemporaneous China through the eyes of NZBZ. Lets spend some time for humanity. MM is tired of hit and run fellows of ill intent.

You only see a handful of comments on MM. But in truth, I average many more comments than what I allow to present itself on the site.

Just because you don’t read the disparaging comments, doesn’t mean that they don’t exist. I get a “shit load”. I just don’t print them. It’s all pretty much what you would expect. It’s nonsense like this…

I regret having read your articles. At least you had the decency to quote Alexandyr Solsenetzyn. Frankly I would rather perish than live in China, if I had to choose. 

You’ve turned your back on the land of your fathers. 

It’s all pretty irritating.

Here’s another asshole.

Moreover, there was NO HOLOCAUST of 6 million Jews, and in fact this not only an egregious lie, but a truth inversion. 

It was the Germans who were holocausted at the end of and after the war in far greater numbers than the great 6 million Jew hoax

Which is why I don’t post any comments automatically and why I pre-screen everything. If someone wants to get on a “soapbox” to repeat the narratives from the Alt-Right, or mainstream they can do so. Just not on this forum.

You’ve lost the plot, clearly. All I have to do is go to LiveLeak and search for “China accident compilation” to know that everything you’re saying about China is false. 

“False”, eh?

Why would I even want to check anything on Google or “LiveLeak” when all I need to do is open up my window and look outside?

Um. Maybe it’s because I live here.

I do not have to check with the Google department of propaganda to see what China is like. I just look out my window. I just walk out my front door. I just pull out my cell-phone and take a picture. Like this one.

.

Here at MM we have ZERO tolerance for this nonsense. Whether it is a hard-Right racist, or some idiot trying to troll me…

You did not answer my claim that in “many parts of China, people still live in huts and heat/cook with yak dung.” Your picture is meaningless. 

Are there, or are there not, millions of people in China still living in huts and heating/cooking with yak dung? 

How many of them would you guesstimate? 

1M? 10M? 100M? 300M?

This is not a “freedom of speech” (anything goes) website. Before you try to comment, you should read my commenting guidelines. I have them in two locations. [1] Main Index, and [2] The Grey Web. Commenting is a privilege.

This is my place.

I am God here.

I really do not need the bullshit that seems to saturate everything about the United States today. The United States is completely going to shit, with many people just wailing in near-insanity. The American government is out of control. The American companies are out of control, and everyone is trying to grab whatever they can before the entire house of cards collapses.

Everything is being kept propped up with lies and a manipulative media.

Do you think that this kind of “news” is a sign of a healthy society? A healthy population? A healthy government?

...have a little fun and whatever you do - turn off the news! I have been killing off my social media accounts and you would be amazed how much more peaceful life is without them! Why try to impress people you don't like or even know? 

-prepper365

Meanwhile, I live in China. With my family.

I just want to be left alone, though there are elements back in the USA that want to drag me, kicking and screaming, back into the maelstrom and inferno.

It's the usual malevolent players. You know which ones. The same folk that China has perma-banned from ever setting foot near China.

My life is good.

My friends are kind. My food is delicious. My happiness is special.

I just report on what I experience. This is quite different from what you will find elsewhere on the internet. There, most people report and repeat what they have read about on other internet websites.

.

So please bear with me as I take my time to pre-screen each and every one of your comments. And I know that it is frustrating for you. You ask “Did my comment get posted? Why the wait?” Then, maybe you check back a couple of time throughout the day to see what is going on. Maybe you reload your browser. Eh?

But I need to do this.

These “hit and run” jackasses don’t even bother reading the posting guidelines in the top index. They just assume that this site is just another website like all the rest, and they act accordingly.

And so MM gets flooded with nonsense like this…

This is not correct. You are spouting nonsense!

Hitler DID rebuild Germany, after taking the reigns of power back from the genocidal and parasitic Rothschild Jewish bankers, who had already spread Jewish communism into Russia and Eastern Europe, when he cancelled the undeserved & unwarranted post WW1 Treaty of Versailles land grabs and crushing debt payments and backing the German Deutschmark by German Labor, and outlawing usury (Jewish economic tyranny/terrorism via debt and interest). He also setup fair and equal trade deals w other countries like Mexico & other South American countries. Once the parasitic Jew was rightly removed from power, the economy took off like a rocket. All because of Hitler.

Typically, I am not reporting what others said (well, there are exceptions), but when it comes to China and MAJestic I report my own personal experiences. And those things are what seemingly gets everyone so darn upset.

No one cares about my posts on food, the nature of the universe, souls and consciousness, KTV’s, cats, art and literature. Which are the posts and articles that I am most proud about. But boy oh boy, do they get “hot and bothered” when I dare talk about China.

How dare I say anything good about those “Godless Communists!”

Jeeze!

If you don’t like it, or feel that it makes America look bad, well that’s just too terrible. If you want to see what China is like you don’t read the American “news” with opinions and articles on Reddit about what others think. You get an airplane ticket and you fly on over.

it’s not difficult.

All in all, it’s pretty simple.

The life that manifests around you in the world; in this reality, is not due to popular opinion. It’s generated by thoughts. Primarily YOUR thoughts. Not the thoughts of those around you. As THIS post most clearly explains.

Here’s what I wake up to. Every day.

View from my living room.

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Well, it’s time for some humanity.

Webster Dictionary 
Humanity (noun) the quality of being human; the peculiar nature of man, by which he is distinguished from other beings. Etymology: [L. humanitas: cf. F. humanit. See Human.] Humanity (noun) mankind collectively; the human race.
What does humanity mean?

www.definitions.net/definition/humanity

As time moves forward I see how culturally, socially and intellectually isolated Americans are getting. As the American government, the American companies, the American oligarchy clamps down harder and harder against the average person they become more and more isolated, and….

…well neurotic.

neurotic. ( njʊˈrɒtɪk) adj. 
(Psychiatry) of, relating to, or afflicted by neurosis. n. (Psychiatry) a person who is afflicted with a neurosis or who tends to be emotionally unstable or unusually anxious.
Neurotic - definition of neurotic by The Free Dictionary

www.thefreedictionary.com/neurotic

The rest of the world is growing. They are moving forward. They are moving away from the old ways of doing things, and working on providing a far more prosperous life for their citizens.

Typical China.
Typical China.

America is unaware of this. instead, Americans cover in fear. “They” are “going to steal our democracy!” they chant.

It is sad and (I suppose) alarming. But it’s not my problem.

It’s YOURS.

Typical America.
Typical America.

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Meanwhile inside of China, everyone is starting to close up shop. The CNY is fast approaching and everyone is gearing up for the month long holiday. And this week is full of business dinners and celebrations. Like this one from one of my friends.

They are having fun.

It’s been a difficult year for everyone, but that hasn’t stopped them from getting together and celebrating.

CNY party inside of China.
Company CNY party in China.

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Some things that I want to point out;

Everyone is holding up these red bags and red envelopes. Those are monetary gifts from the company. Typical bonuses are one to three months salary in CASH. Thus the bag. Three months in $100 bills are too thick to put into a red (colored) envelope. Plus, who knows what other surprises are placed in those red bags, eh? How big were your bonuses from your company this year?

Notice that there are children there. Yes, China is very family-friendly. You can bring your children to company parties, and get togethers. You don’t need to worry that some American “alphabet” government agency will not fine or arrest you for “child labor”, or “change your insurance” because of the addition of minors to an adult venue. What was your company end-of-the-year party like? Did it include children and families?

Stuffed bulls. 2021 is the Year of the Bull. So it is rather commonplace to give stuffed animals and display picture of the year’s animal. 2020 was the year of the rat. Not very many people retained their stuffed rat plushies, though. Did your company hand out presents or gifts aside from a ball-pint pen that had the company logo? What were the most popular gifts that your company handed out and gave to you?

Year of the rat.
Stuffed rat doll.

Drinking alcohol. There are glasses of red wine and of course white wine. All Chinese business and social affairs include alcohol. It’s a cultural norm, and the idea that children will watch the adults drink is culturally normal. Doesn’t it feel good to relax with your coworkers and down a few drinks? Perhaps you might have a few humorous stories that you might want to share, eh?

Happy CNY you all!

American “news” reports on CNY…

Tell me please, how the American “news” is reporting all these events. It’s a huge event. Half of the world are celebrating it. Nothing in America. It’s not “important”. So what is “important”?

So, let’s check out the American “news” and see what they are reporting. First up, Yahoo!

Yahoo! Screen capture 4FEB21 at 9:47am China Time.

.

Nope. No reporting what so ever.

Next up is MSN…

MSN news.
MSN screen capture 4FEB21 at 9:55am China time.

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Nope. No reporting what so ever.

All in all pretty much all stable. Both Yahoo! and MSN seem to have a good mixture of light stuff and heavy stuff, and seems to put the political stuff off to the side. In other words all the DOOM and GLOOM doesn’t really dominate.

So where are all these maniacs coming from that are invading MM? Where do they get all their ideas about “Jews” and “China”?

Next up… FOX “news”…

FOX news.
FOX “news” screen capture 4FEB21 at 9:59am.

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You know guys, it’s kind of a mystery to me.

None of the big American “news” outlets seem to be all that bad. They seem to post a mixture of “news”. I just am unable to point any kind of finger towards why some people would get these kinds of radical ideas that they try to bombard my comment section with.

So I checked out FOX world “news”.

Look what I discovered…

Hey! Did you know that China is trying to infiltrate American politics? I didn’t. Most Chinese, and that includes the government, just DOESN’T GIVE A RAT’S ASS about American politics. Everyone here (in China) thinks it’s just one big loony bin.

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America…

loony bin
Insane asylum. The word “lunatic” comes from the word for “moon”; madness was associated in many cultures with the effect of the phases of the moon on the human mind. From lunatic came loony, and loony bin was where insane people were incarcerated. The phrase is now considered insulting in the extreme, as are “booby hatch” (originally a covered passageway down a ship deck), “funny farm,” “drool academy,” and “foam rubber city” (a reference to padded cells).

Posting about humanity.

Ok. Enough of my rant-a-thon.

rant ( plural rants ) A criticism done by ranting.  A wild, emotional, and sometimes incoherent articulation. A type of  dance step usually performed in clogs, and particularly (but not  exclusively) associated with the English North West Morris tradition.

rant - Wiktionary

Just bear with me when I check your comments. I have other things going on in my life and I am not tethered to my PC 24-7. I try to check at least two times a day, and often much more than that. I’ve found that I must guard against spamming, track-back assaults, commenting barrages, and other such nonsense. And please forgive me if you want to hijack MM to become a soapbox for your anger and pent-up angst.

Let’s get to what this post is all about.

It’s about humanity.

This post is about some videos by NZBZ. They are a Pop / RAP group of of China. They are pretty representative, and their videos show scenes and life about what modern China is all about. As well as contemporaneous Chinese pop lifestyle. So when I read the pure hatred and bullshit that spews forth from the “five eyes” out of America, I just shake my head, and get back to my real life.

Five Eyes Alliance: Everything You Need to Know | Business ...
https://www.businessleader.co.uk/five-eyes-alliance-everything-you-need-to-know/73523

2019-9-20 · Before 2003, very little about the five eyes alliance  was known to the public. Things got clearer in 2013 when a former NSA  contractor, Edward Snowden, leaked some documents connected to the Five Eyes alliance. These documents brought to light the widespread surveillance on the public’s online activities by this alliance.

A life not unlike what is portrayed in these videos. If you want to see what China is, then check out these videos. They will help paint a picture of Chinese culture and society. It’s one (at least for now) that is inclusive, traditional, respects diversity, is helpful, positive and rewards people based on merit.

What. Is. Wrong. With. That?

I put the videos here on MM, but just have a link instead of a photo to access them. I think that the page would load faster that way, and easier for you all to enjoy.

南征北战NZBZ – 二十多岁

“Twenty Years Old”.

What kind of difference are you going to make in the world? You are twenty years old, and the entire world awaits to see what you are going to do. Do not be shy. Make a difference.

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You can view the video HERE on MM. Comes up in a different window.

南征北战NZBZ – 冠军

“Champion”.

To become great and realize your full potential, you must get down deep and reach down. Strive. Push, and be the best you can be. Nothing is impossible.

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You can view the video HERE on MM. Comes up in a different window.

南征北战NZBZ – 骄傲的少年

“Proud teenager”.

The Chinese society has gone through oh so much. The Chinese people have had to deal with so much. The individuals all had to put themselves aside for the better good, and now after decades, and centuries of strife, striving and pushing, they have achieved so much. And more is coming…

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You can view the video HERE on MM. Comes up in a different window.

南征北战NZBZ – 生来倔强

“Born stubborn”.

Face up to history and face the future bravely. Perseverance of the heart and footsteps… No one can stop it… I don’t care if people laugh at me…

.

You can view the video HERE on MM. Comes up in a different window.

南征北战NZBZ – 搓搓

“It’s a slug”.

We can all change. Maybe we come from a humble background, but we can change. Maybe it takes ten years. But we will change. Keep your feet on the ground, and follow that road before you. Believe.

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You can view the video HERE on MM. Comes up in a different window.

南征北战NZBZ – 我的天空

“My Sky”.

This song is perhaps the Anthem of Chinese youth today.

Goodby to the old, and hello – hello to the new. To the new life, and to the new beginnings. It’s all possible… and watch what I can do.

.

You can view the video HERE on MM. Comes up in a different window.

南征北战NZBZ – 哈尼宝贝

“Hani baby”. Ha Ni Bao Bei 哈尼宝贝.

It’s a love song about a girl. It’s also very popular in China. Kind of catchy. Upbeat.

.

You can view the video HERE on MM. Comes up in a different window.

南征北战NZBZ – 别无他求

“There’s no other desire”.

Some Great Reviews;

Listener 1: “A particularly meaningful song dedicated to left-behind children. In fact, from the early songs such as “My Sky” and “Proud Boy”, it is nothing new for us to speak up for left-behind children today. It is also inspiring and full of positive energy, and it also proves our uniqueness with songs. The realistic lyrics plus the melodic euphemism lyric, let listen to people unconsciously fall into it. “

Listener 2: “It is really rare for The Southern Campaign to personally produce the lyrics and music creation of the new song ‘Nothing Else’. The whole song is melodious and melodious, and under the deep and vigorous voice of the three, it expresses the yearning of the left-behind children for their parents on the other end of the phone, as long as you are there. “

Listener 3: “the song” has no other desire “inspired a public welfare activities, last year, fighting NZBZ led volunteers to the countryside, all the way to see a lot of left-behind children, not their parents around them, helpless and lonely desolation in their world, and they have sprung up in thinking inspiration, record the miss and thinking of leaving. “

Listener 4: “To love someone is to love them until seven points are enough, but there are still three points left to love yourself. Love is too full, for him is not happiness, but a burden. The truth of the world, originally is so simple, whether love things, or lovers, to be temperate. Full moon is deficient, full water is overflowing, sometimes, too much love is not love, but great harm. “

.

You can view the video HERE on MM. Comes up in a different window.

Hot Tub Time Machine

You all know that we can find inspiration in the strangest things. And in this post, I used the Chinese music group NZBZ to help describe China as what it is today. It is inspirational. And only a fool, a real goodness-to-gracious fool, would think otherwise.

China is taking the world and society seriously. The people, the musicians, the workers, the society are all working together. The entire nation came together and worked as one during the 2020 pandemic. This was not an accident. People realize that when they work together, there is a synergy.

1 + 1 = 5

We become greater though collaborative effort.

And you know what, we all can work together to make the world a better place. Not by being the “lone wolf” struggling to climb to the top of that pile of money. But working together with others to make the world a better place to live in.

China is showing us the way.

Don’t like what you hear on the “news”? Well, you can do something about it.

Yes, you.

No, I’m not talking about building a school, investing billions of dollars in one social program or the other. I am taking about a million people each doing one small thing. Be kind. Pick up the trash on the road. Help that dog or cat that needs a home. Be nicer to the cashier who had a bad day.

Show some humanity.

In the American comedy “Hot Tub Time Machine” the characters go into a Hot Tub and go back in time. They end up reliving one of the pivotal moments in their lives. And then realizing, with the eyes of experience placed in their young bodies, that they can make a difference. That they can change things. That they can have a good life, and make the world a better place.

Hot Tub Time Machine. You can make a difference.
Hot Tub Time Machine.

And you know what?

You don’t need a “time machine” to do it.

You can do it right now.

Say “hi” to the person next to you. Buy a co-worker a cup of tea or coffee. Open the door for the old man, or help the girl on the bike who dropped a package. And if there is nothing you can do… then just smile.

That’s all you need to do.

Just smile.

The world today that you see on the “news” is in many ways the direct result of bad actions by bad people. That are magnified a million, billion times by electronic amplification. When you have a jackass typing bad things on the computer in the basement of his rented house, those words of hate and disgust is then transmitted to a million others who then have to feel his words manifest into disgusting influences.

Stop it.

The Deer Hunter

Robbie never made it.

It was hard growing up in Western PA. The steel mills were all shutting down. The coal mines were closing as well. Most of my friends couldn’t find steady work. At best they did gig jobs or landed part-time work at minimum wage. When they weren’t working, they drank. They did drugs. They watched television or played games, or stared into the glowing blue monitor of their computer.

The deer hunter.
Western Pennsylvania. Scene from the movie “The Deer Hunter”. It was filmed near the house where I grew up.

Meanwhile entire towns and communities fell apart.

Robbie became a statistic.

But not to me.

We used to talk, and drink. We would go out fishing, take walks in the woods or just ride in his International Harvester Scout (a Jeep like vehicle) where we would talk. He was a kind person who wanted to do good, but there just wasn’t any positive outlets for him.

There was nothing there.

He tried to make walking paths in the wood so that people could enjoy nature. But that got him arrested for trespassing, and destruction of “Pennsylvania game lands”. He tried to take in lost dogs, but all that ended up was flooding his mobile home house with nine ravenously hungry German Shepard’s. He was always talking big, and hustling for a buck or two.

But gainful employment always eluded him.

Western PA.
Western Pennsylvania. My heritage.

He would try to get work. He was personable. He was kind and likable. But the America where he lived did not have a role in society for him. In America you either make money or you are useless. And he, as hard as he tried, couldn’t break through the limits.

He died alone. He died with a needle in his arm in darkness with the television on, and him lying cold on his brown plaid, distressed, living room couch. A can of beer on the coffee table. And a job application under the ash tray.

It’s not his fault.

It’s the society that permitted this to occur.

What are YOU doing to make the world a better place?

No, I’m not talking about writing a letter to the editor demanding that taxes be raised “for the children”. Nor am I talking about censoring anyone.

I am talking about you volunteering. I am talking about you contributing. I am talking about you stop allowing those with negative, hateful, or damaging language from affecting society. I am talking about you doing something physically that helps your community.

In our world, you must give to receive. In Pennsylvania and in America, so many have taken, taken, and taken for so long that those that are left behind are left to rot and die. Not just figuratively. They are dying literally.

When you go out today, just be more aware of how you affect the world around you. Your thoughts, your actions, and your participation are required to make the world a better, safer, and more desirable place to live.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my China Music Index here…

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index
  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Just some artwork that I painted that is now lost forever.

I have discussed in previous posts that I had a studio and that I painted in oils. I like to think that I was “good”, but not great. Never the less, it was a love of mine, and when I was “retired”, I lost everything. Here in this post / article, I preserve for eternity (well, at least for a while) some photos of my life prior to my “retirement”. Just some photos of my studio, and some of my paintings in various stages of creation. Sorry, but I really do not have any completed and finished paintings that I can show.

I dredged up these photos from an old email account.

I was surprised that they still existed. And in them I saw photos of family members now dead, and friends now dead, and my beloved pets as well. Now all dead. I saw pictures of my furniture, my homes, my cars, and my belongings. Now all long gone. I saw pictures of my art. Important to me. Now, forever discarded or sold off to others somewhere.

Please enjoy.

Good Time Charlie’s Got the Blues.

This first photo is of my den / office.

Most of these pictures come from my life in Erie Pennsylvania rather than my house in Arkansas. I wasn't in Arkansas long enough to acquire enough photographs. I was only there for a few months.

The strange thing about my entire retirement was that I had lived in Pennsylvania for years, then met a girl. Got a job in Arkansas. Moved there, and then six months later, I was arrested, imprisoned, lost everything and retired in the ADC Pine Bluff Diagnostic facility by some MAJestic staff out of Washington DC. It all happened in a short period of time. Months really.

But that's how it works. The "retirement" happens in an incarceration-friendly state. It was critical to get me out of the "mid-West" or East, and down to the hard "Bible Belt" where they could do what they wished without thought or opposition.
My study.
My study. Yes. It was horribly cluttered with books. All gone now. Sold off to used book sellers at pennies by the ton. At that time in my life, prior to my “retirement”, I had a rather well comfortable nest of sorts, with books, art, and brick a brack that appealed to me.

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Of course, today, my life is much more minimalist. Spartan, actually. I don’t have any books really. Just what I read on the internet.

But in those days, I had amassed an enormous volume of books. I had books upon books, upon books. And I loved every single one of them.

Books and books.
I had book, and books, and books. I’ll tell you what. I literally wall-papered my house in books. I had read every single one of them too. Some, especially the fictional ones, over and over and then over again.

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Here’s a picture of one of my last works prior to my arrest and incarceration. I really liked it, and I planned to leave this under-paining and then begin with the glazes. Adding color and depth to the painting. Typically this period would take months. The first thing I would do is make up a sketch.

This could be in a book, or more often than not using pencil or charcoal on the canvas. Then I might experiment with some oils. Kind of roughing out the image that was developing on the canvas. I called this a pre- pre-under-painting. Then from that, I would lay out the under-painting.

This next picture is a of a under-painting before I began the real painting.

My studio and a under painting.
My studio was just as cluttered as my study. I had a big ol’ easel that dominated the well-lit room, and my pallet. It smelled like turpentine, linseed oil and all sorts of the joys that an artist studio would smell like. Here is an under painting. Under-painting were doing in black and white and shades of grey. Then you apply thin transparent lays of paint over the images that you lay out.

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You can see my pallet on the lower edge of the image, and my brushes and oils.

I really wish that I could have been allowed to finish this painting before it was destroyed. It spoke to me.

Here’s a clearer view…

Bobble head hello kitty.
It’s funny the things that you miss. On the far right is my bobble-head hello kitty. When the light would hit the photo sensor the head would start to gently move side by side. A nice slow relaxing pace. On the wall is one of my first nudes. So very amateurish. But was meaningful to me.

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It’s not that I want to relive the past, but I have gotten some emails from jack-asses that think that I make up everything that I write about. They say things like “no one can be doing all the things that you claim to have done”, and other nonsensical insults along those lines.

Life is what you make of it.

My love was art, literature and poetry. My background has always been technology and the sciences. And my dream has always been directed to space and working with extraterrestrials. I lived that reality.

What’s so hard to believe about that?

Sadly few of my art work survives. All I have are a precious few photos. Here’s another one. Also an under painting. As most of my surviving photos just (by coincidence) are of my under painting efforts.

Unfortunately I have no photos of any of my finished paintings.

Painting 2
Not so good. I just wish that I was able to complete this. There was so much that I wanted to do with the folds on the bed, and the layout of the cats and the gal really appealed to me. I think that this work had some great potential. I intended to have them looking out of a window and i was going to paint a nice guardian scene there.

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Life is funny. My life now does not resemble anything at all like what it used to be. Still… but still, I do really miss painting.

Here is another under-painting. Yes. I did paint in color. It’s only that all my photos are of the under paintings.

The distressed woman.
One of my nude figurative works. it’s paintings like these that ended up getting me labeled as a sex predator, and an “evil threat to society”. When I discussed this issue with my attorney he told me that the DA would “roast me alive”. the folk of Arkansas would not give me a “fair shake”, it wasn’t like Boston, or Chicago or California. They would “hang me”, maybe even literally. He strongly, most strongly suggested that I accept the plea deal offered by the DA.

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When I remember the police telling me that “you could paint houses”, not seeing that my strength was in the figurative forms, it just showed a callous disregard to my inclinations and talents. But they didn’t care. Their job was to get a conviction, and who cared what happened to me. Right?

A long as the world is safe from people like me.

People, you see my life, and what I did. Where in God’s name could I possibly squeeze in the time to be a sick predatory fuck like I was accused of being?

My hobbies took time. They were all consuming. They were my life.

Another view of the painting from an angle. That easel cost about $2000 when I got it. Solid oak. You all might be interested to know that it was torn down and used to make a dog house for one of the neighbors’ pit bull dogs that was chained outside.

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Life. You know. Life.

I look at my life today, and I am happy. I eat well, I have a generally low stress life (aside from the HATE CHINA bullshit that saturates the American “news” media) and what I do and how I live my life. Going through my old photos was a glance into what I was and in many cases, I no longer can relate to it. I look much different. In fact, I look older than I am today. I more resemble photos taken thirty years ago than those taken twenty. The life in the USA was not good to me.

It really wasn’t. And when I tried to live a quiet and unassuming life, sure as shit, someone or something would have to do something about it. An artist! A Painter! A rocket scientist! Nope. Not on my watch!

American "leadership".
American Leadership today.

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The PTB, or the oligarchy have constructed a massive concentration camp. Everything is all about money, and if you are not contributing to make THEM richer, then you are threat to them. This is a top-down leadership.

Look around you.

Really look.

If you compare your life inside the United States with the life outside it, you can see. You can really see, just how “wonderful” you life actually is. Today, we have Federal, State, and Local governments that Americans must deal with. In addition there are County government, and an enormous number of Federal agencies, from ABC to ZZZ that you must deal with. Billions of dollars fund these minions whose sole purpose is to squeeze every last cent from you.

As one commenter stated so clearly, it’s all top driven. While the wealthy run off with handfuls of cash and bales of money, those under them end grab every iota of power and money…

…the crumbs that remain. Soon, it will be the lowest janitors and street sweepers taking the pencils, and paperclips out of the offices. It’s every man for himself.

It’s a free-for-all.

That is America today.

Evening.
Off the bedroom leading towards the study. You can see my bust of the upper male torso, one of my two lava lamps, a vase full of coins and change, and my umbrella rack with my large umbrella. The large oval mirror was my favorite, and when the sun set, and twilight would start to bathe the land in coolness, I would go out to the porch and drink an evening tea, coffee, or beer.

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These photos are just old dusty memories of a time that was seized from me. It’s like a room that I lived in before I walked down the hallway to another room. If I get the inclination, I will once again, pick up a brush and start painting again. Just as long as I am not accused of being an “evil predator” for my depictions of “devil worship“.

The following is a conceptual sketch.

I used to make up conceptional sketches before I would work out my under-paintings. Then I would flush out the painting using layers of semi-transparent glaze. This work (for reasons that I am unable to fathom) was considered to be a “classic example of the manifestation of the devil and his demons”.

I think (personally that it is a stretch, and I wasn’t thinking anything about demons or Satan when I was painting it. Instead I was thinking of higher callings, relationships, and the spiritual side of our beings.

Conceptional sketch.
A conceptional sketch. This is pre under painting. You can tell that at that time in my life I wasn’t really eating well. As in the foreground is a bowl of noodles, and an empty glass of wine. (I’m not a Sophisticated person. I drank out of normal glasses when I drink wine. That way they won’t tip over when I move about.)

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I only wish that I could provide pictures of fully completed paintings. But let it be known that I am a so-so artist, but not an expert or a professional at it. Each painting would take perhaps 400 hours of work. And it was an enjoyment and a pastime that I loved.

When I dug up these pictures I found long lost images of my dad right before he died, and my mother right before she died. I also found pictures of my cat Coco before he died.

When I was seized and hauled off to Jail to wait until my trial (it took two years), “friends” took care of my belongings. My father tried his best, but he made many mistakes. Friends took care of the rest. And after I exited Prison, nothing was found of my belongings except a WTF suitcase full of WTF items.

Anyways, I found some pictures of my cat.

When I was seized and taken to jail, a friend took care of him. He did well, and he told me that Coco was “concerned” for me.

Four months after I was arrested, my friend was taken to the hospital with a brain tumor and died within a week. Coco disappeared. I assumed that he died. If he’s still alive, he would be a very ancient kitty indeed.

My cat Coco.
Coco chilling out after a heavy busy day of catting about.

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He was a little different cat compared to all the other kitties that I had. Instead of cuddling up with me, he thought he was a dog. He liked to play, He would play fetch, and those stop and action games you play with dogs. He would also roll over and let me rub his belly. He like to hang out on the porch and laze about.

Being a black cat and all, of course the Police and DA associated him with Witchcraft. When in truth I could care less what color he was. It wasn’t his fault that he was black.

He used to go out and go out bird hunting. he would always come back with birds and mice that he would put on the porch for us to be proud of. He was one heck of a hunting-cat. he was a great mouser. That’s for certain. He was a warrior kitty. Maybe I should have gotten him a suit of armor.

What do you think?

Suit of armor 1
A Genghis Khan themed Mongol suit of armor for a kitty cat.

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Or maybe this…

Suit of armor 2
A more European Suit of Armor for a kitty cat.

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But alas that never materialized. Coco went off, I believe to Kitty Heaven, and my dog Buddy…

Well, he was carted off to the doggie slammer.

He was sent to the local shelter; kennel because my friend(s) didn’t have any room for him. (!) I guess I can sort of understand if you are renting a place and it is against your lease to have pets, or if you are so poor that a bag of Puppy-Crunchies might cause you to go into bankruptcy.

Buddy
Buddy

Anyways I don’t know what became of the dog. Maybe he ended up as some kind of Frankenstein’s Monster like a frankenpuppy.

I have been told by others, often well-meaning, that I should not get all caught up and concerned about my pets. “They are only animals” I am told. That I am better off with out them. That I don’t need their problems, their expense, and their hassles. Instead I should devote all my energies to rebuilding my life (at 60!) and making money.

Don’t you know…

So I think that they are wrong. These little guys were just great and a significant part of my life. And I just wish that nothing bad came of them. And when I was in Prison and I mentioned my concerns about them, most people understood. But there were some… some really sick fucks… who took my weakness and remorse to poke at me and fill my mind with “what if” horrors that they could have gone through…

…frankenpuppy.

Frankenpuppy.
Frankenpuppy.

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Of course, I really doubt that anything bad or unusual happened to them. There is about a 50/50 chance that Buddy was readopted. He was a real charmer. And Coco, well, he probably expired on one of his hunting expeditions.

Anyways, one of the last paintings that I was working on prior to my arrest and jailing was this paining of this gal in a tub. When I started this under painting, I felt that I was finally “entering my stride”. I had already some great ideas about how I was going to pattern the drapes, and the glazes that I would use on the skin for tones and shading.

Of course, you can argue that my work was still very amateurish, but I think that I was on the verge of creating some very nice works.

My last painting.
My last in-process painting prior to my arrest and incarceration. Still it’s an under-painting, and very simplistic. The fabric needs to be worked on and completed and the surroundings need work. But as simplistic and amateurish as it appears, I enjoyed painting and the thought that this was used as part of the neighbors dog house is repugnant to me.

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Anyways, this a photographic record of the few remaining photographs of my life prior to my retirement.

I believe that we all have stories to tell. And while it might seem interesting or boring to you, you have to realize that everyone has a story to tell. That everyone has adventures in their lives and that if we find out the real and true story; the whole story, then we would have a much better understanding about how our world works and what powers this reality of ours.

I wish that I spent time with my grandparents and sat down and listened to their stories. I did manage to listen to some family stories from my parents, and they were interesting object lessons and curious adventures of what can happen in certain situations. I think we owe it to each other to listen. Just listen to others. And learn.

Learn.

Things are not that simplistic black and white narrative that we read about on the internet. It’s actually very complex and multi-faceted. It is up to us to learn the whole and entire story before we make judgements on others. Listen to others.

Learn from them.

Do you want more?

I have more interesting articles in my Art Index here…

ART

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Some selected favorite artworks by William Adolphe Bouguereau with a slight detour towards the crazed religious Right in charge of the American government

This is going to be a (far too abbreviated) article about the great paintings of a man that the world has seemingly forgotten. Which is a shame. But it is also something else as well. For I am going to get really, and absolutely personal about art and what it means to me, and about the United States as well.

You see, and must understand, art is a creation that massages our emotions. If that art generates good thoughts, or treasured memories within us, it becomes priceless and valuable. But consider what would happen if somehow an evil person is able to take that treasured moment away from you. What then?

Thus this post.

The artist that we shall discuss is one of my all-time favorites. His name was William Adolphe Bouguereau, and I had the opportunity to see his works up front and close up in the Carnegie Mellon museum of art in Oakland, Pennsylvania (It’s an upscale suburb of Pittsburgh.)

And while he is no longer popular or appreciated in Art History class, his works and the emotions that they generate lives on through MM.

Carnegie Mellon museum of art in Oakland, Pennsylvania
Carnegie Mellon museum of art in Oakland, Pennsylvania

Indeed, he is not forgotten here.

Fundamentally, William Adolphe Bouguereau was a most amazing painter. And while his paintings inspire and astound, when you look at his works up close, you wonder just how in the world was he able to do what he did. Up close, everything just seems to be dabs and drabs of paint here and there.

You can well imagine him put a drop here, and then a drop there, and then somehow, by some miracle it all comes together in an amazing work of art.

He is considered to be a “French Academic Classical painter, teacher, frescoist and draftsman”. He died in 1905 after 432 amazing works of art.

To see a complete collection of his works you can visit the Art Renewal Center here. Prepare to be stunned and amazed. (Pssst. You can also order prints of his works there to put up in your house or favored spot. - Just a thought. Don't you know.)

What I really want to say about this is that beauty surrounds us everywhere.

And if you have an opportunity, take an afternoon with friends or family and visit an Art museum, and then have a nice lunch. Go out. Have fun. Enjoy life. And if by chance you ever get the chance to see any Academic Classic paintings, by all means go forth and enjoy.

Check out his amazing works.

Inside the art museum.
Having a fun time with the family inside the Carnegie Mellon art museum.

Sigh.

And now the sad part of the story.

I strongly love art for the emotions, the memories and the images that they represent to me on a very personal and visceral basis. While I have never been able to match the mastery of the oils as these Masters have, they have inspired me. And I have taken on my own efforts to pain figurative and allegorical works of my own design. And I like to think of myself as “pretty good”, I would only rate a “7” compared to the Master that is listed herein. Who is, in every way, a “10+”.

Up until my arrest (as part of my “retirement” from the MAJestic organization) I had a nice little studio. I had studios in Kittanning, and Erie Pennsylvania, and in Arkansas. My little studio in Arkansas occupied the garage. And so it was a “partial” studio. One side was bicycle storage, boxes, and a workbench. The other side was a canvas tarp covered floor, natural lighting via light-bulb and my massive painting easel.

The tale of how I was arrested, and how my life was dissembled step by methodical step is a very painful one for me. At that time, I had no idea that I would actually be “retired” as a MAJestic operator. I figured that I was somehow “special” and that my program participation would consist of a debriefing at a government office of some type. But, that did not happen.

I wasn’t important.

At least the (government) powers that be didn’t think that I was. And so, one day, out of the blue I was arrested. And I watched my life fall apart right before my eyes. I watched the entire force of an enormous and all-powerful government peel my life apart, layer by layer until I was raw, nude and helpless.

This story is still painful for me to relate.

Sorry you seem so butt-hurt about the IRS and the USA, etc. Obviously you have a seething rage and hatred for the USA for whatever (unexplained) reason . That’s OK. Stay in China and hate us all you want. Works for me.

-A quote from a jack-ass who was trolling me.

As it is indeed still very painful, I am not going to relate it at this time. But, (unfortunately) in order to know about one of my favorite artists, you will need to know a little bit about HOW I was arrested in Arkansas…

…and how it has affected my love of classical art.

Connecting art with sexual deviance

It’s simple, really.

I had a collection of books on art. many were on techniques, but others were these huge “coffee table” books that people would place on the living room coffee table for casual enjoyment. I had quite a collection of them. And most of my books were of the classics. All full of art by true and real masters.

And, on that fateful day when I was arrested in Arkansas, my large picture book of William Adolphe Bouguereau was used as evidence of my “satanic nature”, and “lust for little children“.

I well remember sitting on the lone chair in the middle of my empty living room…

All of my belongings except for my books, and a mysterious box full of CD ROMS were gone. My home was completely empty including the light bulbs and the light switch covers. Even the fake fireplace had the fake logs gone. As was the built-in microwave, and refrigerator.

On that fateful day, I had just gotten back from a three week trip to China. When I returned I discovered that my car was disabled with four flat tires, my power was turned off, and my home was completely empty except for two chairs, and a pile of books and a big (taped up) box displayed predominantly in the middle of the living room floor.

They raided me in full SWAT gear at 6am as I was leaving the house to go to work. Their black painted armored cars ran over my rose bushes, and two other squad cars blocked up the driveway to my house - a downscale McMansion in a nice section of Maumelle Arkansas.
Maumelle Arkansas house.
My house at the time looked a little something like this, only a tad bigger and my grass much much greener. LOL.

…I sat there, in that lone chair in the middle of the empty living room …

…while the detective in charge of the “investigation” grilled me on sexual matters and my interests. I’ll never forget her holding up my coffee table book of William Adolphe Bouguereau, and making points about all the nudes, the “Satanic nature of my interests” and why I was so fixated on “the dark side of history“.

It has wounded me terribly, and I still smart from their fucking smirks and ignorance. I know, I know…

…it’s Arkansas.

But still. It came as a surprise. You see. While I have read about these things happening, I never thought that it would happen to me.

And since (from now on and forever hence) I will always have those memories associated with certain artists and works of art, I will use that venue to provide the bitter-sweet love of art that I maintain after I was dissembled and “processed” by the jackasses in Arkansas.

I discuss this fact, and my experiences in this article.

Good ol’ boys decided my fate.

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Let’s begin with one of my all-time favorite paintings…

Nymphes et Satyre

Four nymphs tease and play with a satyr by trying to pull him into a lake. One nymph waves behind to three other nymphs in the distance, perhaps beckoning them to come and play with the satyr as well. The satyr half heartedly tries to resist the nymph’s wiles, entranced by their beauty.

Nymphes et Satyre Nymphs and Satyr 260 x 180 cms | 102 1/4 x 70 3/4 ins Oil on canvas Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute Williamstown | United States

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You don’t really need to know what nymphs are, or what satyrs are to appreciate this work. But knowing the story behind them adds a three-dimensional understanding of the art and what is being portrayed.

Nymphs are from Greek mythology. 

They are considered to be minor female deities, and have a duty to protect different elements of nature such as streams, mountains and meadows (pantheon). 

The male counterpart for a nymph is a satyr. A satyr is a creature also from Greek mythology having the torso and face of a man, ears and tail of a horse, and feet of a goat. They are known for being lustful and fertile creatures. 

I can’t help but respond that Bouguereau captures an incredible sense of motion in this piece.

One can feel the struggle for the satyr to keep his ground, and the nymphs’ joyous struggle to pull him in. You can just feel the easy going, caviler attitude and peace in the pastoral scene. You can hear the water nymph’s jovial joking and feel their tugging towards the placid pond.

It’s like puppies playing. Or like kittens running around. It’s like small boys and girls playing in the yard on a nice sunny blue-sky day. It’s like Fresca and orange soda, peanut butter sandwiches and very-berry Cool-Aide. It’s water out of a green water-hose on a hot summer day, climbing trees, and riding your banana-seat, high-handle-bars bike all around town.

Childhood in the 1960s.
When I look at this work of art, I am transported back to another time. It makes me forget my current life, and re-experience the feelings and emotions and sensations of another time and another place.

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Why I love this picture is actually unknown. Somehow, and in some deep way it stirs my soul. But I really cannot vocalize what that special something is. It speaks to me in a deep visceral manner.

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And that’s the way life is. Not everyone can appreciate how you might feel about a “thing”, or an “object”, or a “piece of art”, or a “bauble”. So you just don’t try.

Consider the Movie “The Object of Beauty“.

It’s pretty much a forgotten movie. Not well appreciated. Just something from the early 1990’s. But it makes a point about what art and beauty and appreciation is… all in terms of the early 1990’s – the decades of greed, swindles and anything / everything for a buck.

And that movie revolves around a small figurine statue. One that is worth money. But is coveted by the owners as a medium of exchange, but stolen by a housekeeper who appreciates it’s intangible beauty…

*sigh*

rare gem overlooked as much as statue                                  nuntukamen18 December 2004             
                              
It is difficult for  me to comprehend why there is only one viewer comment for this film, or  why it is rated under a six. 

If an excellent film is about  entertainment, intelligence, great acting and a terrific story with a  treasury of clever humor that expounds the deeper meaning of a good  relationship between a man and a woman over wealth and selfishly egotistical success, then this is a standout film that achieves a  richness of artistic accomplishment that very few films do. 

No one truly sees the beauty of the bronze statue except the lowly and weathered housekeeper, a financially struggling mute, unable to express the  profound feelings that are moving within her in words, but Rudi Davies  sure gets it across with her expression and eyes. 

I had to drive 30  miles to the Cedar Lee Theater, Cleveland's only real art house, during it's original release, but after the film was over I realized it would have been worthwhile if I would have had to walk...

...some films are just that special.
"The Object of Beauty"
The Object of Beauty

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But back to the painting…

When I was a young boy, I actually saw this painting. It sat there predominantly on the wall facing the stairs as you walked up and into the museum proper. My parents went it, and took the right at the top of the stairs and enters. But I didn’t.

And to be very truthful, I just stood there on the steps looking up at it in amazement. It was larger than life to me and spoke to me…

…though, as a boy, I didn’t understand the language.

This work of art is spellbinding.

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Art and the appreciation of it is a personal matter. And today, art is used as a medium to funnel large amounts of money back and forth between oligarchy members without concern. It’s a method of banking. Not an object of beauty, desire or of significance.

Today, ah, no one cares

As an aside, the DA in Arkansas used my collection of books on art and artists as exhibits as to how terribly “evil” I was. I cannot remember the entire spiel that he gave to my attorney, because frankly, I was taken back at his ignorance and assault on my sensibilities. But a couple phrases stood out…

  • “...a painting depicting Satan surrounded by nude women…”
  • (my) “...obsession with female nudes…”

What is art and beautiful to one observer is evil and a threat to another. Do not make my mistake and think that everyone else can see beauty as you can, or who can understand things as you do, or who appreciates the world in different ways.

And when I was arrested, it was not for the possession of these works of art, or associated books. It was for two images on my laptop computer.

  • A Japanese comic that had a octopus having sex with a cat-like-person.
  • A photo that a doctor said was a girl under the age of 18 showing her genitals.

In Arkansas both images are considered “child pornography”. And each image had up to 40 years imprisonment. So I was facing 80 years.

Pretty fucking weird for a state that allowed people to get married to 16 year old girls. Was a “dry country” where you had to drive into Tennessee to buy alcohol. And where the Church in Down Town Little Rock was larger than the State Capital Building.

You know, I shared a cell in Arkansas at the ADC Brickey’s unit who got two years for killing a guy. I got five years for having two pictures. I just shake my head in perplexing exasperation.

But I digress.

I guess, at heart, I’m just a “hippie”, a “60’s child”.

1960s van.
Hippies in the 1960’s.

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Can you imagine what America would have been like if the Bozos that run America today were in charge of America back in the 1960’s?

Shudder.

GOP lawmaker: God told me to remove rape exceptions from ...
https://deadstate.org/gop-lawmaker-god-told-me-to...

May 24, 2019 · Hill, who is an evangelical Christian, says that the initial exceptions were only there to ensure that the bill would pass. Even though it picked up 20 co-sponsors, it died without getting a hearing in any committee. Hill told the group in Pensacola that he plans to bring the bill back as God intended it, “without any exceptions.”

The point that I want to make is that the emotions that I now feel when I look at these great works of art are now polluted with the imagery of my memories when I dealt with the military police in Arkansas. And while my story seems to be unique, all of the rest of my MAJestic cell had similar stories. And yes, others now call me a real sick person for having those images on my computer. I get it. I understand.

And now, I live a life where I cannot enjoy art like I used to.

I’ll never forget the phrase “you can paint houses“.

And this gem; “no one wants to see paintings like this when all you need do is take a picture“.

And of course the standard narrative; “people like you need to be locked up and separated from society until your malfunction can be corrected“.

We must realize and recognize that there are others, often sick people, who are in positions of power and control and who can squash your life out like an insect. Sick people. Evil people. In positions of power.

Mike Pompeo

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Takes away from the beauty of that great painting, eh?

Yes.

That’s my point.

Pat Robertson says God told him Trump ‘is going to win ...
https://www.christianpost.com/news/pat-robertson...

Oct 21, 2020 · Christian Broadcasting Network chairman and televangelist Pat Robertson said Monday that he believes God told him President Donald Trump will be re-elected for a second term but great civil unrest will ensue. “I want to say without question, Trump is going to win the election,” Robertson said on “The 700 Club” Tuesday. “… The election that’s coming up in just a few weeks at which time, according to what I believe the Lord told …

Art is all about the emotions you have while looking at the artwork

I enjoy art because of the feelings and the thoughts and memories they generate.

But, you know…

Some people cannot emote.

They cannot feel emotions. They cannot “relate” to others they are unable to emote or understand how others feel. To them, they cannot see art as anything other than a “thing”, a commodity that you can trick others into buying. These people with this mental illness occupy a significant percentage of our society. Some say that it is even as high as 10%. But one thing is for certain, the ability to make money and accumulate fortunes are in the strong suit for these people.

Thus, in a nation that values money above all else, where capitalism reins supreme you will find these people in positions of power and control.

Key “Republican” members of Government during the Trump Administration.

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The American leadership; the American Oligarchy are are… are… unable to emote. They are unable to experience emotions or understand the emotions of others.

Why?

What are these people’s problem?

Perhaps this video might provide some insight to how the rest of the world views America at this point in time. A point in time, mind you, where the government does not care about the citizens. It only cares of about keeping them down, subservient, and compliant, while they run amok in their crazy delusions and obscene objectives.

Uh…

And one more thing, you will never see this kind of information on any of the Alt-Right, Alt-Left or Mainstream American media. They would rather die than face the truth.

America as viewed by the rest of the world.

Keep that thought in mind. A thought that says that the craziest and most evil people thrive within the American capitalist “democracy” as it exists today. And the most evil, the most selfish, and the most manipulative are able to rise to extreme levels of power and control within the American environment.

Ah.

It’s upsetting.

But let’s move one and look at some more Art. Let’s consider the fact that unlike the products that are churned out of America today, these works endure. They persist and they are established as a stable foundation for what the human species represents. Let’s look at some more of the great works by William Adolphe Bouguereau.

La Vierge aux Anges

Here we have a trio of angels playing music for baby Jesus and the Virgin Mother Mary. I love this picture, and it evokes in me the feelings of love caring, compassion and peace.

This painting can be seen elsewhere on the internet. It is embraced by religious websites and in the websites devoted to greeting and gift cards. I have even seen (I believe) this work reproduced on pictures, post cards, and such things as plates and clocks. A simple image search on Google will help you all find the great diversity of the for-profit avenues that people have used with this work.

The Virgin with Angels
The Virgin with Angels

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Usually, Mary is depicted in blue and white, which I haven’t a clue as to why. And the angels tend to be in shades of white, which is also something that I have no idea about either. Never the less, this is a beautiful painting and very calming.

The Virgin with Angels is a 1900 painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. The painting media is oil on canvas, and it measures 185 × 285 cm (72.8 × 112.2 in). It’s a large painting at 6 feet by 9 feet. I imagine that when he painted this, he intended to show the love of the Mother Mary with the baby Jesus and the beauty and support of the surrounding angels. I cannot imagine what he would think that this image was being used on plates and cheap products at Walmart to support a for-profit motive.

When my home was raided they said nothing about this picture. Except maybe a quick pause before they turned the page. It’s hard to find something fundamentally wrong with angels playing violins and other musical instruments. So they just glossed over this painting and went on to the next one..

It’s lovely. Don’t you agree?

Petites Maraudeuses

But they did stop at this painting in the book.

This is a typical work of his. His works that depict children and the life of play are great themes and I well remember some homes of both uncles and aunties that had these kinds of works in their living rooms. (Of course, with a “Great Supper” painting in the kitchen or dining room.)

It is so calming…

It is titled “Little Thieves”. And while the detective and the police didn’t stop to read the captions or text inside the coffee table book, they used the artwork to grill me and goad me to admit to something ignorant and evil.

Petites Maraudeuses

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I once worked with a fellow engineer in Boston. He was a plastics engineer from Pakistan. He saw that I had a miniature reproduction (of this painting) in my office and fell in love with the painting. He used to come into my office and we would chat. But he would always look up at the painting with this kind of far-away look in his eyes. It meant something to him. But his pride was such that he would never admit to it.

So I gave it to him when I was sacked by the company (Laid Off). When I gave it to him he was surprised and he wondered why I did so, and that yes (of course) he would accept it. He said that he secretly loved the painting. He said that it reminded him of his boyhood home. In Pakistan.

Lovely.

The techniques of Bouguereau

You have to admit that this artist had mastered his technique. Is there anything for us to learn?

From the Art Renewal Center

To fully appreciate the art of  Bouguereau  one must profess a deep respect for the discipline of drawing and the  craft of traditional picture-making; one must likewise submit to the  mystery of illusion as one of painting's most characteristic and sublime  powers. Bouguereau's vast repertory of playful and poetic images cannot  help but appeal to those who are fascinated with nature's appearances  and with the celebration of human sentiment frankly and unabashedly  expressed.         
                                           
But it remains to understand, given Bouguereau's in many  ways unique style, exactly what the artist was trying to represent.  Although Bouguereau has been classified by many writers as a Realist  painter, because of the apparent photographic nature of his illusions,  the painter otherwise has little in common with other artists belonging  to the Realist movement. Bouguereau himself regarded his tastes as  eclectic, and his work indeed exhibits characteristics peculiar to  Neo-Classicism, Romanticism, and Impressionism, as well as to Realism.  

Within these categories, the painter is perhaps best understood as a  Romantic Realist, but one would also be quite justified in this case in  devising an entirely new school of painting and labeling him the first,  the quintessential Photo-Idealist. The designation is apt in that,  although Bouguereau actively collected photographs and tempered his  observations of nature with a keen awareness of the qualities of light  inherent in the photographic image, he almost never worked from  photographs.1  

The rare exceptions are a few portraits, usually of posthumous  subjects, which are readily identifiable as photographic derivatives as  they exhibit an uncharacteristic flatness and pose.         
                      
Bouguereau and his fellow academicians practiced a method of  painting that had been developed and refined over the centuries in  order to bring to vivid life imagined scenes from history, literature,  and fantasy. The process of acquisition of the skills necessary to  produce a first-rate academic painting was a long and laborious one. 

...

             
The idealizations of Bouguereau's imaginary universe, which  have delighted some critics, have incurred the wrath of others. Although  some of the latter have loudly lamented the over-romanticized image of  the French peasant presented by the painter, few of them have bothered  to contemplate the heroic attention required to sustain such a vision of  perfection in a less than perfect age. Moreover, as Bouguereau's  contemporary Emile Bayard observed:         
                                   
It is good to note, in any case, that dirt and rags are not  exclusive to the underprivileged and that indigence is not always  clothed the same way. 4         
                      
A similar charge often leveled at Bouguereau is that his art  bears little or no relationship to the realities of political,  industrial, and urban life in nineteenth-century France. 

But if  Bouguereau's art ignores in its content the pressing issues of the day,  it may very well be because the artist, though well aware of them,  nevertheless prompts us to lift our eyes from the ground and focus upon  the lures of distant Arcadia; when misery is afoot, to exalt the more  pleasant possibilities of la vie champetre is not artistic falsehood.         
                      
If one pronounces Bouguereau to have been out of step with  his time, what must one then conclude about the many, many critics and  collectors and viewers who supported him and others of a similar  artistic persuasion? Could he really have achieved such prominence and  financial success by going against the grain of the "realities" of the  nineteenth century? 

Exactly what are those realities and exactly what  attitude was a visual artist obligated to take toward them? If the  accomplishments of Bouguereau are poorly understood today, that may have  something to do with the shifting of aesthetic expectations over time.  

As for Bouguereau's public, it was a public raised on  Raphael , a public that had not yet been conditioned to prefer abstract ideas to  the palpable images that give them utterance, a public that insisted  upon an obvious narrative content and that saw in Bouguereau someone  opposed to the trends it regarded as inimical to art. 

It may very well  be that a determining factor in Bouguereau's success as a painter, apart  from his talent, was that he allied himself to that sizeable,  conservative, and revisionist element of French Roman Catholicism which,  under the aegis of such men as Louis Veuillot , popular theologian and publisher of L'Univers, refused to yield to the attacks on traditional ideals that were current at the time. 

The craft of picture-making as practiced by Bouguereau basically followed the principles of academic theory as codified by the seventeenth-century aesthetician Roger de Piles.

The code embodied the fundamental idea whereby a painting could be judged logically and objectively by its conformity to ideals established for its divisible parts, which were determined to be: composition, drawing, color harmony, and expression.

The method Bouguereau used to execute his important paintings provided ample opportunity for the study and resolution of problems that might arise in each of these areas.

The separate steps leading to the genesis of a painting were:

  • Croquis and tracings
  • Oil sketch and/or grisaille study
  • Highly finished drawings for all the figures in the composition, as well as drapery studies and foliage studies
  • Detailed studies in oil for heads, hands, animals, etc.
  • Cartoon; and, only then
  • the finished painting.

Evidently Bouguereau was constantly making croquis or “thumb nail sketches.” Often these preliminary studies were done during meetings at the Institut or in the evenings after supper.

For the most part they were scribbled from the artist’s memory or imagination, others were sketched directly from nature.

These drawings, hitherto unknown to the public, constitute a very important element of Bouguereau’s work. For one thing, they yield a wealth of information about the artist’s method.

They also show in many cases how a particular composition evolved. Executed either in pencil or ink, they served as a means of determining the grandes lignes, the important linear flows and arabesques, within the entire composition and within individual figure groups as well. They were often refined by means of successive tracings.

The oil sketches, grisailles, and compositional studies in vine charcoal served as means for determining appropriate color harmonies and for the “spotting” of lights and darks.

Like the croquis, these were usually executed from imagination and yielded a fairly abstract pattern of colors and greys upon which the artist would later superimpose his observations from nature.

The figure drawings represented the first important contact with nature in the evolution of the work. Among the considerations of the artist at this point were anatomy, pose, foreshortening, perspective, proportion and, to some degree, modeling. Although Bouguereau was reputed to have the best models in Paris, some of them were not always the most cooperative; as one observer noted:

Bouguereau's Italian model-women are instructed to bring their infant offspring, their tiny sisters and brothers, and the progeny of their highly prolific quarter. 

Once in the studio, the little human frogs are undressed and allowed to roll around on the floor, to play, to quarrel, and to wail in lamentation. 

They dirty up the room a great deal — they bring in a great deal of dirt that they do not make. They are neither savory nor aristocratic nor angelic, these brats from the embryo-land of Virgil. 

But out of them the artist makes his capital. Sketchbook in hand, he records their movements as they tumble on the floor; he draws the curves and turns of their aldermanic bodies, and he counts the creases of fat on their plump thighs as Audobon counted the scales on the legs of his humming-birds. 7

At times Bouguereau was obliged to use sculptural sources. J. Carroll Beckwith wrote:

Entering Bouguereau's studio one morning, before he had come up from his breakfast, I was studying with interest a large canvas half completed, representing a group of laughing children with a donkey [see cat. no. 72]. 

A gaudily attired Italian woman was endeavoring to pacify a curly-headed cherub, the model for the morning, who was ruthlessly rubbing his dirty fingers over some exquisite pencil drawings which lay on the floor at the foot of the easel. 

I rescued the drawings, while the mother apologetically explained to me in Neapolitan French that M. Bouguereau spoiled all of her children so that she could do nothing with them at home or elsewhere. 

The drawings were beautiful reproductions of the Laughing Faun in the sculpture gallery of the Louvre. 

As Bouguereau entered the room, he began a series of frolics with the youngster which quite verified the words of the mother. [When be stopped] at last to set his palette, I asked him when he had made the drawings. "Oh, you see, that mauvais sujet is so wicked", said he, pointing to the curly-headed urchin turning somersaults on the floor, "that I can use him for nothing but color and was obliged to spend nearly all of yesterday afternoon at the Louvre, making these notes for the form. 8

If a particular figure was to be clothed, Bouguereau would also make drapery studies by posing a mannequin in place of the model and experimenting with the folds of cloth until a disposition was found that enhanced the underlying forms.

Sometimes, especially for small or single-figure paintings, Bouguereau drew the model already draped.

Most of the figure drawings were executed in pencil or charcoal (or a combination of the two) and were often heightened with white. The support for them is usually a heavyweight toned paper of medium grain; such a background allowed Bouguereau to dispense with the problem of rendering troublesome halftones which, in any event, were more easily and accurately realized in the painted studies.

To read more about his techniques, please go HERE. It goes into great detail and goes into the various mixes he used. Great stuff for certain.

Can you imagine trying to do this today? Man oh man, you’d be locked up for-ever.

Alma Parens L’âme parentale

Wow. Oh wow. This is an allegorical painting with a ton-load of meaning. It means “The Motherland”.

Of course, the folk in Arkansas found this work “disgusting“, “abhorrent to normal sensibilities” and further evidence of my “sick nature” and “outrageously dangerous desires”.

Sigh.

And yeah, I get it.

You all don’t want to hear what the nit-wits think in Arkansas. But you are gonna hear about it here. You can leave if you don’t like to face reality. The last four years in Washington was populated with these exact kind of people. And no, I am not going to “let by-gones be by-gones”

It’s a uni-party. There are no Republicans nor Democrats. There is just the 10% of psychopaths that run the nation, and the rest of us being treated like cattle in the process.

Is this too “salty” for ya?

The Motherland

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I know that I am supposed to accept the fact that anything even remotely suggestive of children or sex is a threat to my very existence as I am now branded with the scarlet letter of being a “Sex Offender”. And I know that somehow, having those two images on my computer; the cartoon and the photo of the chick without clothes on created “victims”. I cannot reconcile how the image of a mother tending to her brood is in any way representative of the horrors so massively promoted in American media. You have to be a moron to connect the two…

…but, you know, have you looked at America today?

Know who you are dealing with, and recognize that these people still are in various positions in government today. Look at this jackass. Look at this pencil neck.

Tom Cotton (R-AR) is in a position of power to tell you how to live your life.

.

Hey, check out the kinds of bills that he was working on in 2020. Keep in mind this one very important point. Which of his sponsored bills actually helps and supports normal, working people inside his district in Arkansas. Yeah. go over the list.

Which ones?

Go over the list. Where during 2020 has he sponsored any legislation to help his citizens aside from the emergency related to Coronavirus? Instead it seems like he’s got a real problem with sex, China, and making sure that the Untied States government is protected against the citizenry.

  • Colors in RED are all about China. Yeah, he most certainly has a real “hard on” about China.
  • Colors in Blue are all about sexual exploitation of children.
  • Colors in PURPLE are all about making the government immune from protests and legal actions by the citizenry.
  • Colors in GOLD are for dealing with the Coronavirus.
S.5016: A bill to combat forced organ harvesting and trafficking in persons for purposes of the removal of organs, and for other purposes.
S.4998: Child Support Works Act of 2020
S.4978: Israel CENTCOM Reclassification Act
S.RES.794: A resolution urging the European Parliament to exempt certain technologies used to detect child sexual exploitation from European Union ePrivacy directive.
S.4965: Public Servant Protection Act of 2020
S.4843: Chinese Communist Party Influence Transparency Act
S.RES.751: A resolution expressing support for the designation of October 23, 2020, as a national day of remembrance of the tragic terrorist bombing of the United States Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983.
S.4768: AIM Act
S.4661: A bill to authorize the President to posthumously award the Medal of Honor to Alwyn C. Cashe for acts of valor during Operation Iraqi Freedom.
S.4648: A bill to amend the Controlled Substances Act to list isotonitazene as a schedule I controlled substance.
S.4631: Hong Kong Refugee Protection Act
S.4609: China Trade Relations Act of 2020
S.4553: Support Peaceful Protest Act
S.4551: Rioting Restitution Act
S.4550: No Catch-and-Release for Rioters Act
S.4483: Campus Free Speech Restoration Act
S.4445: Protect Our Prosecutors and Judges Act of 2020
S.4292: Saving American History Act of 2020
S.4130: American Foundries Act of 2020
S.4105: Washington-Grant Historic Preservation Act
S.4056: Restore Integrity of Special Prosecutors Act
S.3968: Better Community Policing Recognition Act
S.RES.613: A resolution calling for justice for George Floyd and opposing calls to defund the police.
S.3920: SECURE CAMPUS Act of 2020
S.3796: No Bailouts for Illegal Aliens Act
S.3662: Holding the Chinese Communist Party Accountable for Infecting Americans Act of 2020
S.3641: A bill to designate the area between the intersections of International Drive, Northwest and Van Ness Street, Northwest and International Drive, Northwest and International Place, Northwest in Washington, District of Columbia, as “Li Wenliang Plaza”, and
S.3661: Danger Pay for U.S. Marshals Act
S.3635: Protecting Our Pharmaceutical Supply Chain from China Act of 2020
S.3600: Li Wenliang Global Public Health Accountability Act of 2020
S.3537: Protecting Our Pharmaceutical Supply Chain from China Act of 2020
S.3522: Coronavirus TANF Expansion Act
S.3524: Coronavirus Credit Expansion Act
S.3523: Coronavirus Unemployment Insurance Expansion Act
S.3521: Coronavirus Economic Stimulus Act
S.3469: NETWORKS Act
S.3386: Protecting America From Foreign Investors Compromised by the Chinese Communist Party Act of 2020
S.3342: Zero Tolerance for Deceptive Fentanyl Trafficking Act
S.3322: Prevention of Deceptive or Child-Targeted Advertising in Violation of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act
S.RES.497: A resolution commemorating the life of Dr. Li Wenliang and calling for transparency and cooperation from the Government of the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party of China.
S.3153: A bill to prohibit the sharing of United States intelligence with countries that permit the operation of Huawei fifth generation telecommunications technology within their borders.

He’s typical.

Do you really think he cares about people? Do you think that he cares about families? Do you think that he cares about anything other than money and hate?

Well… apparently God disagrees with me…

Evangelical Pastor Claims God Says, 'I'm Not Happy About ...
https://www.newsweek.com/evangelical-pastor-claims...

Nov 05, 2020 · Evangelical Pastor Claims God Says, 'I'm Not Happy About What You're Doing to My Man' Trump in Election. By Jason Lemon On 11/5/20 at 6:49 PM EST. U.S. Evangelicals Evangelical Christians Donald ...

These people… those that take the role in government… end up becoming a tool. They end up turning into something else. Something bad. And they allow terrible things to happen, because “they are just doing their job”...

Flagellation de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ

The Flagellation of Christ, 1880 is one of Bouguereau's masterpieces, and today hangs at the Baptistery of La Rochelle Cathedral, France. Christ, tied to a column, limply hangs, his feet dragging on the ground and head hung back, he submits to his fate.

-Flagellation de Notre Seigneur Jesus Christ
The Flagellation of Christ
The Flagellation of Christ, 1880 is  one of Bouguereau's masterpieces, and today hangs at the Baptistery of  La Rochelle Cathedral, France. Christ, tied to a column, limply hangs,  his feet dragging on the ground and head hung back, he submits to his  fate. 

Two men stand in mid swing with their whipping ropes, with a third  kneeling to the lower right fastening birch branches for the next stage  of the torture. Unlike the two men who are whipping or the forth man  standing behind with birch branches in the ready, the kneeling man tying  the branches appears to show some remorse for his actions as his hand  muscles loosen slightly with the pull of the string. 

The viewer can feel  the pain of Christ's torment, though his eyes are vacant of expression  as if his soul is in another place. The crowd surrounding this event is  filled with curious spectators. 

To the left, a young boy shelters his  eyes from the horrid sight by turning his back and pressing himself  against his mother. To the right, just above Christ's head, a baby looks  down at him sympathetically while hoisted up on his father's shoulders.  

Through the crowd, a bearded man looks directly at the viewer, thereby  pulling the audience into the scene as if they are too part of the  crowd. It is possible that this bearded man with furrowed brow is a self  portrait, so both Bouguereau and the viewer are witnessing this scene.  

This life size capa d'opera is every bit as magnificent as any religious  works done by Raphael, Caravaggio, or Velasquez. The harmonious  interplay of drawing, paint handling, composition, perspective and  emotional thrust are second to none in their expressive power.

-by Kara Lysandra Ross

Excerpt from the article: William Bouguereau and his Religious Works                         

And you know, the detective in charge of the entire raid and my case had some very piercing things to say about this work of art. And I have never forgotten her words…

“…this preoccupation with torture, young children, and nudes point to a serious mental illness that needs to be eradicated from our treasured citizenry…”

Yeah.

So you want to know what it was like for me being arrested and “investigated” in Arkansas…? Look at who the fuck is running that place, controlling the minds of the people there, and who are accumulating riches beyond compare. Look at them. For they ARE America.

Hard Right Religious Extremism and Law-Making makes for a dangerous situation.
Televangelist Pat Robertson says God told him Trump will ...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8862797

Oct 21, 2020 · A televangelist has claimed that God told him President Donald Trump will win the upcoming election but that five years later an asteroid will hit …

Yah!

Beware of asteroids you all.

It’s all coo-coo!

When I joined MAJestic, I was instructed that I would be in it for life, but that I was forbidden to have children during my active engagements. I agreed, not realizing what that meant. I was also told that I would be alone, with no support and that I would not ever be rich or famous as that was a danger to the organization.

Maybe I was stupid for taking on this role? But I gave up so very much for this, and then to have myself retired like I was, and then have these jokers prance around in Washington DC like they do really upsets me.

I think that this exposure to what the American government is has taught me quite a bit as to what America has become; what it is, and where it is going. Unlike most Americans who read about this, or who read about that. I’ve experienced it first hand. Up front and viscerally. Don’t get all that caught up on what the media promotes. It’s all lies. Pay attending to the first-hand reports by others who’s veracity you can trust.

Cut out the bullshit.

Coocoo nest 1
Americans mostly resemble the inmates in a mental asylum. And the American leadership is just as messed up and corrupted to a degree that is nearly unfathomable.

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Anyways, art, like music is really meaningful to me. I remember an old black and white movies from the 1940s or 1950s where there is this guy in prison who paints. It’s his only love. It’s his only hobby. Then one day the warden visits him and see that the painter painted the warden. Not good. Not bad. But realistic. But the warden responded by taking away his ability to paint. And thus destroyed his only and sole source of happiness…

This theme was repeated in the movie “One flew over the Cuckoos nest”. Where as soon as one of the inmates showed any inkling or ability to resist the shackles that were around his legs, the powers that be made sure to destroy him beyond repair.

Coocoo nest 2
Americans mostly resemble the inmates in a mental asylum. And the American leadership is just as messed up and corrupted to a degree that is nearly unfathomable.

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Le Repos

In the ADC in Arkansas we were not permitted to have any fruit. None. And one inmate who was in there for a long, long time told me that he missed bananas. He said that he could picture them. He could smell them. He could remember peeling them. But that he hadn’t held or tasted a banana in over twenty years…

… yet when I look at these paintings I see a window to a time that is long gone. A quieter time, a more peaceful time, and a time where you could only commit a crime if there was a victim. There was no such things as a victimless crime, and that the fifth amendment guaranteed that I could confront my accuser in court. Not have that entire fail-safe ignored by a plea bargain.

These paintings and this art carries me away…

I just love these relaxed paintings. Maybe this kind of life will return back to America. What do you think?

Rest.

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This image represents my ideal.

Looking at the boys’ trousers makes me want to buy a new set of oils and brushes. I really want to paint those folds and shaded legs.

La Charité

Another lovely painting.

And yes. Yet another example of how “evil and disgusting” that I am for even suggesting that it is beautiful.

La Charité

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Yes, you know these people “talk with God” personally. And they know what evil is, and that they are the representation of what is good in the world and that which must be destroyed.

Don’t you know.

Look at this great representation of “good”…

“I had a very close talk with Jesus Christ this morning and he told me…”
Trump Will Start the End of the World, Claim Evangelicals ...
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-will-bring-about...

"For his evangelical supporters, there's a sense that Trump's unlikely election to the presidency proves that he has been chosen by God," Young told Newsweek. "He shouldn't have won the election ...

Entre la richesse et l’amour

This is an age-old issue. When a young lass can choose the life before her. While it is shown as extremes in age and wealth, the story persists. How can a woman in her blossoming years decide her future life? the translation of this painting is “Between wealth and Love”. And it speaks volumes. Don’t you think?

Between wealth and love

.

My favorite part of this painting is the young lass’s hands. That’s just pure art.

Le Saintes Femmes au Tombeau

Le Saintes Femmes au Tombeau, 1890, translated to The Holy Women at the Tomb, depicts the three Marys, Mary the Mother of James, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Cleophas, at the tomb of the resurrection. The viewer, compositionally, is placed in a prostrated position and looking up first notices the expressions of bewilderment on the central Mary's face before looking past the three women and into the tomb.

-Le Saintes Femmes au Tombeau
Le Saintes Femmes au Tombeau painting.
Le Saintes Femmes au Tombeau

Compassion!

Compassion painting.
Compassion!
Donated by Bouguereau's descendents to the Musée D'Orsay, Paris, France, 2009 

When one looks at The Compassion,  1897, at first glance the viewer may interpret this painting be simply a  depiction of Christ on the Cross, with perhaps another saint, or  victim. 

A depiction not too different from thousands of other paintings  of the subject; but in fact, the subject of this painting is not simply  the event, but the conversion to Christianity through the compassion for  the sacrifice Jesus made. The man with his head on Jesus' chest is a  representation of every man and mankind as a whole. 

The man in the  painting shows the same empathy and bearing his own symbolic cross, has  found his way to Jesus and his own redemption. Many Christians wear  crosses around their necks to represent the same conviction, that they  too have been sacrificed with Christ. 

In the bible, when Jesus fell on  his way to Calvary, a man from the crowd, Simon of Cyrene, went to Jesus  and carried the cross for him, which was the inspiration for this  widely accepted symbol. 

The blood of Christ falls onto his hands,  reiterating the blood sacrifice that was made for his benefit. On top of  the cross a letter is posted which reads "Jesus of Nazareth, King of  the Jews" in three languages, Greek, Latin, and Aramaic. Although in  many depictions, Christ is crucified at the top of a mountain,  Bouguereau chooses to depict the savior on a barren wasteland, symbolic  of the man"s spiritual life before finding his way to Christ. 

Bouguereau  chose to keep this painting, which shows the importance his religion  played in his own life, and it remained in his studio until its recent  donation to the Musèe D'Orsay, Paris, France.

-by Kara Lysandra Ross

Excerpt from the article: William Bouguereau and his Religious Works

Berceuse

The painting, “Berceuse” is a delightful example of Bouguereau’s more domestic works. It shows a mother sitting in a rural landscape rocking her baby’s cradle as she works at spinning thread.

The title of the painting, “Berceuse” suggests that she is also singing a lullaby to her sleeping child at whom her calm, loving gaze is directed. The composition is strongly reminiscent of a Madonna and Child and the painting as a whole is beautifully executed.

Berceuse

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We can see from this painting that Bouguereau was a master of traditional academic painting and why he had wide appeal, in France and abroad, during his lifetime.

His approach to art, was however, heavily criticized by the rising impressionist painters, many of whom found much of their work rejected by the Salon. Instead they embraced more modern types and works of art. And we all know where that ended up…

White Dog
Georges Seurat/white-dog

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After his death his reputation fell steeply and his paintings were no longer admired but were seen as vacuous or overly sentimental. It is only in recent decades that his work has begun to be re-evaluated and his paintings, such as “Berceuse” appreciated once more for the skill, artistry and dedication that Bourguereau brought to his work.

The Proposal

What kind of proposal is it? Marriage?

Hardly.

Some kind of plan being hatched… curious. Very curious.

The motif of a young man at a window, wooing a woman at her spinning wheel, and the vaguely sixteenth-century German costumes and setting, led writers to associate this painting with the tragic story of Faust and Marguerite.

Johann Georg Faust was said to be an alchemist, astrologer, and magician who lived during the Renaissance period in Germany.
 
He was an aging scholar, but at the end of his life, he fell out of  love with his previously devoted scholastic endeavors in the  accumulation of human knowledge. He is said to have made a contract with  the devil, selling his soul to enjoy and partake in reckless earthly  pleasures. The one who lured Faust away from his scholarly endeavors was  said to be Méphistophélès, a malevolent devil.
 
The story of Faust has served as inspiration for numerous literary,  artistic, cinematographic and musical works throughout the ages. Even  the mere term ‘Faust’ has been used to refer to ambitious people who are  willing to exchange moral values for strength and success in certain  fields. 
 
La Damnation de Faust – Tragic destiny
 
‘La Damnation de Faust’ is often interpreted to describe a tragic  destiny resulting from a false wish, a trope that still holds relevance  in contemporary society.
 
In the classic play, Faust is presented as an aging scholar in  desperation. He has spent his whole life in search of wisdom just to  find that at the end of it all, he has gained nothing. Youth, happiness,  and achievement have all slipped away from him. Even the search for  wisdom can no longer inspire him. To set him free from sorrow and  depression, he decides to seek death. 

In a singular moment, the resounding sound of a church bell and hymn remind him of his youth, of the time when he still held faith in religion. But that fleeting moment does not last long before the appearance of Méphistophélès, a malevolent devil, is seen before him. Faust, desperate and depressed almost at the point of suicide, accepts the devil’s offer of returning to him his youth, knowledge, and the fulfillment of all of his deepest desires. In return, he must, however, follow the devil and fall under his command. 

Seemingly, the vague and fleeting religious memory Faust experienced  moments before the appearance of the devil was not enough to revive in  him a strong faith in religion, in a God that he once had.|
 
Naturally, Faust now has all that he was craving, yet, there was no way for him to know where the journey ahead would lead him.
 
After Méphistophélès fulfills his side of the bargain he encourages  Faust to seduce Marguerite, an innocent girl whom Faust had an  unrequited love for, and then abandon her, alone and pregnant. 
Faust and Marguerite in the Garden, by James Tissot (1861). (Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)
Faust and Marguerite in the Garden, by James Tissot (1861). (Wikimedia Commons/Public domain)
Her life falls into ruin and, so, in an effort to save his lover, Faust agrees to relinquish his soul to devil Méphistophélès. With this decision, he gives the devil every reason and ability to drag him to hell. Which he does, tragically and immediately. Perhaps his final destiny was predetermined from the very moment he accepted the offer of the devil Méphistophélès. 

It is a tale that resembles the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden  of Eden. The devil Méphistophélès plays a role not dissimilar to the  role of the serpent that tempted Eve to take a bite of the apple. Once  Adam and Eve succumbed to the serpent to eat the forbidden fruit, it was  determined that they would be expelled from the Garden of Eden.
 
In the case of Faust, he yields to lust and worldly desires and  culminates in hell. It is the inevitable fate for the one that chooses  to go against good and side with evil.
 
The story of Faust: An awakening bell
 
In the contemporary era of the robust development of science and  technology, in most cases, science and knowledge play a positive role in  society, but at times, it can assume a negative role, as well.  Especially when the scholars and scientists ignore moral and humanistic  values, and put their fame and interest on top, they would disregard any  adverse impact that their work might impose on humanity.
 
Don’t we catch the image of Faust in communist philosophers, in  surgeons involved in live organ harvesting from Falun Gong practitioners  and in the development of nuclear warfare, to name a few?
 
No matter what excuse they can make, the undermining effect on human society that they exert is irrefutable.
 
In this aspect, the story of Faust can still prove its relevance to  today’s society and serve as the awakening bell for those who choose to  go down that path.

-La Damnation de Faust

The seduction of the innocent heroine by the wicked Faust was a popular pictorial subject in the nineteenth century, inspired by Goethe’s dramatic poem and its operatic staging by Charles Gounod.

Regardless of the lovers’ identities, the lushly painted, romantic scene would have appealed to Bouguereau’s well-heeled clientele.

Admiration Maternelle – Le Bain

'M. Bouguereau is a true artist, one of the most accomplished in Paris.'

-Edmond About, 1866
Admiration Maternelle - Le Bain
Admiration Maternelle – Le Bain

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Beginning in 1865, Bouguereau became interested in themes of mothers and children and he began a series of paintings devoted to this subject matter. These classically-informed images were greatly influenced by his travels throughout Italy in the 1850s.

Trekking from Naples all the way to Venice over a two year period, Bouguereau was frequently confronted by religious imagery, and he was particularly impressed with the works of Raphael.

Raphael
A painting by Raphael.

These images of mothers and children may have been further reinforced by the birth of the artist’s fourth child in 1868, a son named Adolphe Paul. It was also in this year that the artist moved his family into the house on rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, with its large studio on the top floor of the house.

Admiration maternelle – le bain, most likely painted in the artist’s studio in 1869, depicts a young Roman mother holding her naked baby on her lap. The baby clasps an orange before him, while his older sister looks on adoringly, her hands folded together as if in prayer.

These three figures, clearly a secularized interpretation of a Holy Family or Madonna and Child with St. John, are bathed in a clear warm light which illuminates the freshly washed hair of the baby, creating a halo around his head and enhancing the association with the Christ Child.

The bowl and washcloth occupy the immediate center of the composition, bringing to mind the chalice and cloth of the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The room behind the figural group is softened by the shadows of the recesses of the interior, thereby heightening the importance of the figural group.

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There is a photograph in the Goupil Museum in Bordeaux and in Bouguereau’s own collection of what appears to be this work (Ross and Bartoli, 1869/02) without the linen towel and basin, a different bench and a slightly different background. 

It is possible that the initial purchaser of the painting asked for the changes to be made, as was the case with La Bohémienne, which also had two different backgrounds.

Admiration maternelle was in the collection of George Small of Baltimore by 1879, and remained in the Small family until 1984. George Small was the President of the Ashland Iron Company and a director of the Northern Central Railroad and the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad. He amassed a fortune, but he and his wife had no children, so the painting passed to his brother’s family upon his death in 1891.

Admiration Maternelle

He does capture the moment perfectly. Doesn’t he?

Maternal Admiration

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I love his work. I really do.

Conclusions

The artist was master of his medium and in control of his life in that time, and at that place…

In a corner of the garden measuring some two hundred square feet, he arranged his outdoor studio; and in the orangery he set up his interior studio. At six in the morning, rain or shine, drizzle or wind, escorted by his three dogs and a servant, he sets out for a two-hour walk through the fields or along the seashore. Once home, he has a cup of tea and settles down to work. At eleven, the family gathers for lunch; at one, he resumes work with his model and continues until six in the evening, with a few short breaks.
 
Then the painter picks up his rustic cane and his soft-felt hat and leaves, a cigarette between his lips, like any ordinary bourgeois, for a walk around the harbor, to watch the sun set on the sea.
 
When the town clocks chime seven, he goes back home for dinner; and at ten, it is curfew time. At dawn on Sundays, the master and his wife climb into a carriage to meet a childhood friend, an architect in a neighboring village, for an outing in the countryside or, during hunting season, to take a few pot shots, in his own words, "at hypothetical quails or the occasional rabbit."

When I look at these beautiful art works I still have stirrings of emotions. But that is now tainted with memories of the experiences that I had in Arkansas.

Memories that came into being by the actions of the government there; a government that employed people from both political parties… working in unison for their own self-worth and future fortunes. Greedy fucks. Ignorant of the true realities and consequences of their actions and their activities.

You take something that I enjoyed and you poison it with bad memories. It’s that the very fundamental nature of PTSD?

Memories that were and still are painful.

In fact, I often wonder if this was it’s intended purpose, by a some gleeful evil psychopaths to forever alter my love of art and to convert it and change it into something substantially different.

Into a ugly and foul thing…

Much like the premise in the movie A Clockwork Orange.

A controversial and offensive masterpiece.                                  tyson-hunsaker31 January 2017             
                              
Anyone looking to  watch A Clockwork Orange might be wanting to revisit some of Stanley  Kubrik's work and might be interested in studying this film. Those who  have already seen this film tend to already have strong opinions  regarding this dark sci-fi movie but for me, I approached this film  recently to obtain an opinion for myself and study one of the great  masters of cinema. 

The fact that this film was regarded as one  of the most controversial films ever made (rightfully so) sparked  genuine curiosity to give this flick a full viewing and while I have  large issues with the film, the experience as a whole was both  satisfying and a learning experience. 

This story centers on  "Alex" our main protagonist and his gang of hoodlums set in a not so  distant, dystopian Great Britain. The beginning portion unfolds Alex's  dark and twisted soul as we watch him and his gang fight, rape, and  kill. 

When he's eventually caught, he undergoes controversial  "treatment" to be cured of his dark soul.

I first appreciated the  inmate concepts of this story and the type of questions the story  attempted to raise to the audience. Furthermore, much of the  psychological ideologies surrounding freedom, choice, good vs evil, and  selfishness were extremely thought-provoking. It had a way of making me  feel self-exploratory despite the character's complete inability to  relate with (hopefully) any viewer. 

Performances were top notch;  especially from the lead: Malcom McDowell. His performance felt so  authentic there's never a single moment that feels fake or forced with  his dark character. As always, Stanley Kubrick directs the hell out of  this. His commanding and authoritative shooting style is apparent in  every frame of the picture and he does a wonderful job at sucking the  viewer into this terrible world to the point of enthrallment. 

While  all these positives make for a great movie-going experience and when  Kubrick is at the director's helm not much can go wrong, the film's  biggest downfall is indeed its controversy. Disturbing subject matter in  this piece is indeed vital to the essence of the story but taking off  the gloves when it comes to fighting, rape, and killing (especially the  rape) make this so incredibly disturbing that it's difficult to muscle  through. 

I found that A Clockwork Orange was not only offense because of  its disturbing content, it was personally offensive in so many ways.  Frankly, these extremely rare and offensive movie experiences are not  quite the reason I enjoy films in the first place; stories can still be  thought-provoking while not morally offend and damage the viewer  internally. In addition, a viewer looking to study the work of Stanley  Kubrick can still experience some of cinema's greatest and transcendent  experiences without feeling like their conscience has blackened.

It's  understandable that not everyone feels this way; just as stated before,  opinions about this film are all across the board. As time has passed  however, A Clockwork Orange has stood out has one of Kubrick's finest  and has been adored by die-hard fans so much its fan base has grown over  the years. 

The best advice to give is to see it for yourself.  Much like all other Kubrick films, relying on anyone's opinion won't  help one bit. Seeing it and deciding for yourself is the best course of  action. That being said, despite it's strong artistic merit, I wouldn't  recommend seeing it simply because of the morally offensive and  sickening content that most don't appreciate. Overall, it's been the  hardest one to review in a long time because it's not a simple: see it  or don't see it. There's much more to this picture than that. If you do  decide to see it though, be warned and well prepared. If not, that's  probably just fine too.

There is nothing different from my “reprogramming” by the Arkansas government, and what happened to Alex in the movie “A Clockwork Orange”.

A clockwork orange.

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Perhaps China is correct in preventing their nation any kind of access by these evil, evil people. People who have no compassion. People who cannot see beauty and purpose. People who look good, and say the right things, but are corrupted, and evil to their fundamental core.

Evil people.

In positions of extreme power…

…in a dying military empire.

Are inherently dangerous.

Six of the thirty that have been sanctioned by China in January 2021.

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Back in Rome

All this reminds me of the behaviors of the government of Rome when it was at the height of decay and corruption. Consider their idea for a “half time show” in the Arena…

The enormous arena was empty, save for the seesaws and the dozens of  condemned criminals who sat naked upon them, hands tied behind their  backs. Unfamiliar with the recently invented contraptions known as petaurua,  the men tested the seesaws uneasily. One criminal would push off the  ground and suddenly find himself 15 feet in the air while his partner on  the other side of the seesaw descended swiftly to the ground. How strange. 

In  the stands, tens of thousands of Roman citizens waited with half-bored  curiosity to see what would happen next and whether it would be  interesting enough to keep them in their seats until the next part of  the "big show" began. 

With a flourish, trapdoors in the floor of the arena were opened,  and lions, bears, wild boars and leopards rushed into the arena. The  starved animals bounded toward the terrified criminals, who attempted to  leap away from the beasts' snapping jaws. But as one helpless man flung  himself upward and out of harm's way, his partner on the other side of  the seesaw was sent crashing down into the seething mass of claws, teeth  and fur. 

The crowd of Romans began to laugh at the dark antics before them.  Soon, they were clapping and yelling, placing bets on which criminal  would die first, which one would last longest and which one would  ultimately be chosen by the largest lion, who was still prowling the  outskirts of the arena's pure white sand. [See Photos of the Combat Sports Played in Ancient Rome]

And with that, another "halftime show" of damnatio ad bestias  succeeded in serving its purpose: to keep the jaded Roman population  glued to their seats, to the delight of the event's scheming organizer. 

The Roman Games were the Super Bowl Sundays of their time. They gave their ever-changing sponsors and organizers (known as editors)  an enormously powerful platform to promote their views and philosophies  to the widest spectrum of Romans. All of Rome came to the Games: rich  and poor, men and women, children and the noble elite alike. They were  all eager to witness the unique spectacles each new game promised its  audience.

To the editors, the Games represented power,  money and opportunity. Politicians and aspiring noblemen spent  unthinkable sums on the Games they sponsored in the hopes of swaying  public opinion in their favor, courting votes, and/or disposing of any  person or warring faction they wanted out of the way. 

The more  extreme and fantastic the spectacles, the more popular the Games with  the general public, and the more popular the Games, the more influence  the editor could have. Because the Games could make or break the reputation of their organizers, editors planned every last detail meticulously. 

Thanks to films like "Ben-Hur" and "Gladiator," the two most popular elements of the Roman Games are well known even to this day: the chariot races and the gladiator fights.  Other elements of the Roman Games have also translated into modern  times without much change: theatrical plays put on by costumed actors,  concerts with trained musicians, and parades of much-cared-for exotic  animals from the city's private zoos. 

But much less discussed,  and indeed largely forgotten, is the spectacle that kept the Roman  audiences in their seats through the sweltering midafternoon heat: the  blood-spattered halftime show known as damnatio ad bestias — literally "condemnation by beasts" — orchestrated by men known as the bestiarii.

Super Bowl 242 B.C: How the Games Became So Brutal

The  cultural juggernaut known as the Roman Games began in 242 B.C., when  two sons decided to celebrate their father's life by ordering slaves to  battle each other to the death at his funeral. This new variation of  ancient munera (a tribute to the dead) struck a chord within  the developing republic. Soon, other members of the wealthy classes  began to incorporate this type of slave fighting into their own munera. The practice evolved over time — with new formats, rules, specialized weapons, etc. — until the Roman Games as we now know them were born. 

In  189 B.C., a consul named M. Fulvius Nobilior decided to do something  different. In addition to the gladiator duels that had become common, he  introduced an animal act that would see humans fight both lions and  panthers to the death. Big-game hunting was not a part of Roman culture;  Romans only attacked large animals to protect themselves, their  families or their crops. 

Nobilior realized that the spectacle of animals  fighting humans would add a cheap and unique flourish to this fantastic  new pastime. Nobilior aimed to make an impression, and he succeeded. [Photos: Gladiators of the Roman Empire]
With  the birth of the first "animal program," an uneasy milestone was  achieved in the evolution of the Roman Games: the point at which a human  being faced a snarling pack of starved beasts, and every laughing  spectator in the crowd chanted for the big cats to win, the point at  which the republic's obligation to make a man's death a fair or  honorable one began to be outweighed by the entertainment value of watching him die.

Twenty-two years later, in 167 B.C., Aemlilus Paullus would give Rome its first damnatio ad bestias when  he rounded up army deserters and had them crushed, one by one, under  the heavy feet of elephants. "The act was done publicly," historian  Alison Futrell noted in her book "Blood in the Arena," "a harsh object lesson for those challenging Roman authority."

The  "satisfaction and relief" Romans would feel watching someone considered  lower than themselves be thrown to the beasts would become, as  historian Garrett G. Fagan noted in his book "The Lure of the Arena,"  a "central … facet of the experience [of the Roman Games. … a feeling  of shared empowerment and validation … " In those moments, Rome began  the transition into the self-indulgent decadence that would come to  define all that we associate with the great society's demise.

The Role of Julius Caesar
General Julius  Caesar proved to be the first true maestro of the Games. He understood  how these events could be manipulated to inspire fear, loyalty and  patriotism, and began to stage the Games in new and ingenious ways. For  example, Caesar was the first to arrange fights between recently  captured armies, gaining firsthand knowledge of the fighting techniques  used by these conquered people and providing him with powerful insights  to aid future Roman conquests, all the while demonstrating the  republic's own superiority to the roaring crowd of Romans. After all,  what other city was powerful enough to command foreign armies to fight  each other to the death, solely for their viewing pleasure? 

Caesar  used exotic animals from newly conquered territories to educate Romans  about the empire's expansion. In one of his games, "Animals for Show and Pleasure in Ancient Rome"  author George Jennison notes that Caesar orchestrated "a hunt of four  hundred lions, fights between elephants and infantry … [and] bull  fighting by mounted Thessalians." Later, the first-ever giraffes seen in  Rome arrived — a gift to Caesar himself from a love-struck Cleopatra.

To execute his very specific visions, Caesar relied heavily on the bestiarii —  men who were paid to house, manage, breed, train and sometimes fight  the bizarre menagerie of animals collected for the Games. 

Managing and training this ever-changing influx of beasts was not an easy task for the bestiarii.  Wild animals are born with a natural hesitancy, and without training,  they would usually cower and hide when forced into the arena's center.  For example, it is not a natural instinct for a lion to attack and eat a human being,  let alone to do so in front of a crowd of 100,000 screaming Roman men,  women and children! And yet, in Rome's ever-more-violent culture,  disappointing an editor would spell certain death for the low-ranking bestiarii. 

To avoid being executed themselves, bestiarii  met the challenge. They developed detailed training regimens to ensure  their animals would act as requested, feeding arena-born animals a diet  compromised solely of human flesh, breeding their best animals, and  allowing their weaker and smaller stock to be killed in the arena. Bestiarii  even went so far as to instruct condemned men and women on how to  behave in the ring to guarantee a quick death for themselves — and a  better show. The bestiarii could leave nothing to chance. 

As their reputations grew, bestiarii were given the power to independently devise new and even more audacious spectacles for the ludi meridiani (midday executions). And by the time the Roman Games had grown popular enough to fill 250,000-seat arenas, the work of the bestiarii had become a twisted art form. 

As  the Roman Empire grew, so did the ambition and arrogance of its  leaders. And the more arrogant, egotistic and unhinged the leader in  power, the more spectacular the Games would become. Who better than the bestiarii to aid these despots in taking their version of the Roman Games to new, ever-more grotesque heights? 

Caligula Amplified the Cruelty
Animal spectacles became bigger, more elaborate, and more flamboyantly cruel.
 Damnatio ad bestias became the preferred method of executing criminals and enemies alike. So important where the bestiarii's  contribution, that when butcher meat became prohibitively expensive,  Emperor Caligula ordered that all of Rome's prisoners "be devoured" by  the bestiarii's packs of starving animals. In his masterwork De  Vita Caesarum, Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus (b. 69 A.D.)  tells of how Caligula sentenced the men to death "without examining the  charges" to see if death was a fitting punishment, but rather by  "merely taking his place in the middle of a colonnade, he bade them be  led away 'from baldhead to baldhead,'"(It should also be noted that  Caligula used the funds originally earmarked for feeding the animals and  the prisoners to construct temples he was building in his own honor!)

To meet this ever-growing pressure to keep the Roman crowds happy and engaged by bloodshed, bestiarii  were forced to consistently invent new ways to kill.
 They devised  elaborate contraptions and platforms to give prisoners the illusion they  could save themselves — only to have the structures collapse at the  worst possible moments, dropping the condemned into a waiting pack of  starved animals. Prisoners were tied to boxes, lashed to stakes, wheeled  out on dollies and nailed to crosses, and then, prior to the animals'  release, the action was paused so that bets could be made in the crowd  about which of the helpless men would be devoured first. 

Perhaps most popular — as well as the most difficult to pull off — were the re-creations of death scenes from famous myths and legends. A single bestiarius might spend months training an eagle in the art of removing a thrashing man's organs (a la the myth of Prometheus).

The halftime show of damnatio ad bestias  became so notorious that it was common for prisoners to attempt suicide  to avoid facing the horrors they knew awaited them. Roman philosopher  and statesmen Seneca recorded a story of a German prisoner who, rather than be killed in a bestiarius'  show, killed himself by forcing a communally used prison lavatory  sponge down his throat. One prisoner who refused to walk into the arena  was placed on a cart and wheeled in; the prisoner thrust his own head  between the spokes of its wheels, preferring to break his own neck than  to face whatever horrors the bestiarius had planned for him.

It is in this era that Rome saw the rise of its most famous bestiarius, Carpophorus, "The King of the Beasts." 

The Rise of a Beast Master
Carpophorus was  celebrated not only for training the animals that were set upon the  enemies, criminals and Christians of Rome, but also for famously taking  to the center of the arena to battle the most fearsome creatures  himself.

He triumphed in one match that pitted him against a bear,  a lion and a leopard, all of which were released to attack him at once.  Another time, he killed 20 separate animals in one battle, using only  his bare hands as weapons. His power over animals was so unmatched that the poet Martial wrote odes to Carpophorus.

"If  the ages of old, Caesar, in which a barbarous earth brought forth wild  monsters, had produced Carpophorus," he wrote in his best known work,  Epigrams. "Marathon would not have feared her bull, nor leafy Nemea her  lion, nor Arcadians the boar of Maenalus. When he armed his hands, the  Hydra would have met a single death; one stroke of his would have  sufficed for the entire Chimaera. He could yoke the fire-bearing bulls  without the Colchian; he could conquer both the beasts of Pasiphae. If  the ancient tale of the sea monster were recalled, he would release  Hesione and Andromeda single-handed. Let the glory of Hercules'  achievement be numbered: it is more to have subdued twice ten wild  beasts at one time."

To have his work compared so fawningly to  battles with some of Rome’s most notorious mythological beast sheds some  light on the astounding work Carpophorus was doing within the arena,  but he gained fame as well for his animal work behind the scenes.  Perhaps most shockingly, it was said that he was among the few bestiarii  who could command animals to rape human beings, including bulls,  zebras, stallions, wild boars and giraffes, among others. This  crowd-pleasing trick allowed his editors to create ludi meridiani  that could not only combine sex and death but also claim to be honoring  the god Jupiter. After all, in Roman mythology, Jupiter took many  animal forms to have his way with human women. 

Historians still  debate how common of an occurrence public bestiality was at the Roman  Games — and especially whether forced bestiality was used as a form of  execution — but poets and artists of the time wrote and painted about  the spectacle with a shocked awe. 

"Believe that Pasiphae coupled  with the Dictaean bull!" Martial wrote. "We've seen it! The Ancient Myth  has been confirmed! Hoary antiquity, Caesar, should not marvel at  itself: whatever Fame sings of, the arena presents to you."

The 'Gladiator' Commodus
The Roman Games and the work of the bestiarii  may have reached their apex during the reign of Emperor Commodus, which  began in 180 AD. By that time, the relationship between the emperors  and the Senate had disintegrated to a point of near-complete  dysfunction. The wealthy, powerful and spoiled emperors began acting out  in such debauched and deluded ways that even the working class "plebs"  of Rome were unnerved. But even in this heightened environment, Commodus  served as an extreme.

Having little interest in running the  empire, he left most of the day-to-day decisions to a prefect, while  Commodus himself indulged in living a very public life of debauchery.  His harem contained 300 girls and 300 boys (some of whom it was said had  so bewitched the emperor as he passed them on the street that he felt  compelled to order their kidnapping). But if there was one thing that  commanded Commodus' obsession above all else, it was the Roman Games. He  didn't just want to put on the greatest Games in the history of Rome;  he wanted to be the star of them, too. 

Commodus began to fight as a gladiator. Sometimes, he arrived dressed in lion pelts, to evoke Roman hero Hercules; other times, he entered the ring absolutely naked  to fight his opponents. To ensure a victory, Commodus only fought  amputees and wounded soldiers (all of whom were given only flimsy wooden  weapons to defend themselves). In one dramatic case recorded in  Scriptores Historiae Augustae, Commodus ordered that all people missing  their feet be gathered from the Roman streets and be brought to the  arena, where he commanded that they be tethered together in the rough  shape of a human body. Commodus then entered the arena's center ring,  and clubbed the entire group to death, before announcing proudly that he  had killed a giant. 

But being a gladiator wasn't enough for him.  Commodus wanted to rule the halftime show as well, so he set about  creating a spectacle that would feature him as a great bestiarius.  He not only killed numerous animals — including lions, elephants,  ostriches and giraffes, among others, all of which had to be tethered or  injured to ensure the emperor's success — but also killed bestiarii  whom he felt were rivals (including Julius Alexander, a bestiarius who  had grown beloved in Rome for his ability to kill an untethered lion  with a javelin from horseback). Commodus once made all of Rome sit and  watch in the blazing midday sun as he killed 100 bears in a row — and  then made the city pay him 1 millions esterces (ancient Roman coins) for the (unsolicited) favor.

By the time Commodus demanded the city of Rome be renamed Colonia Commodiana ("City of Commodus") — Scriptores Historiae Augustae,  noted that not only did the Senate "pass this resolution, but … at the  same time [gave] Commodus the name Hercules, and [called] him a god" — a  conspiracy was already afoot to kill the mad leader. A motley crew of  assassins — including his court chamberlain, Commodus' favorite  concubine, and "an athlete called Narcissus, who was employed as  Commodus' wrestling partner" — joined forces to kill him and end his  unhinged reign. His death was supposed to restore balance and  rationality to Rome — but it didn't. By then, Rome was broken — bloody,  chaotic and unable to stop its death spiral. 

In an ultimate irony, reformers who stood up to oppose the culture's  violent and debauched disorder were often punished by death at the hands  of the bestiarii, their deaths cheered on by the very same Romans whom they were trying to protect and save from destruction. 

The Death of the Games and the Rise of Christianity
As  the Roman Empire declined, so did the size, scope and brutality of its  Games. However, it seems fitting that one of the most powerful seeds of  the empire's downfall could be found within its ultimate sign of  contempt and power — the halftime show of damnatio ad bestias.
 
Early Christians were among the most popular victims in ludi meridiani.  The emperors who condemned these men, women and children to public  death by beasts did so with the obvious hope that the spectacle would be  so horrifying and humiliating that it would discourage any other Romans  from converting to Christianity.

Little did they realize that the tales of brave Christians facing certain death with grace, power and humility  made them some of the earliest martyr stories. Nor could they have  imagined that these oft-repeated narratives would then serve as  invaluable tools to drive more people toward the Christian faith for  centuries to come. 

In the end, who could have ever imagined that  these near-forgotten "halftime shows" might prove to have a more lasting  impact on the world than the gladiators and chariot races that had  overshadowed the bestiarii for their entire existence?

Read more from Aptowicz in her Expert Voices essay, "Surgery in a Time Before Anesthesia."

The argument about the comparisons between ancient Rome and America today is that the horrific tortures and debauchery just does not occur in America today.

I beg to differ.

I argue that the horrors committed by the national leadership and the techniques of manipulation of the people may have changed form, but they have not been eliminated. Rather, they exist in other ways, other means, and using other technology.

America today

Ah it’s time to return back to a simpler time when people like these would never ever get an opportunity to go anywhere next to the levers of power. A simpler time when people lived life in absolute freedom and never knew fear, 24-7 surveillance, and did not fear their government. A time much as was portrayed in the classical art venues.

And these evil men; these evil people? What got them there to the positions of power and absolute corruption that they currently enjoy?

A corrupt “democratic” process. That is what.

What ever happens in the United States, and no matter what changes will be implemented, any kind of democratic institution of any kind will revert to this exact same game-plan. Nothing will change. The founders of the Untied States were absolutely correct. A democracy turns into a corrupt oligarchy and unless countered, evolves into a dangerous military empire. And the citizens… well… they devolve into frightened sheep, ready for dinner.

Oh, and what happened to my own personal paintings?

You might want to know what happened to all my art that I created, my painting supplies, my painting easel, and my paints. You might want to know what happened to my loves, my dreams and my passions…

While I was incarcerated, my father handled my belongings. He held a yard sale and sold the painting for a $1 each. One man decided to buy them all up. He said that he really liked them, and they was going to use the paintings (all were oil on wood panel) to “wallpaper” his walls with. So …

… I well remember the beaming pride that my father had when he handed me a check for some $350 odd dollars. Not realizing that the materials alone were worth ten times that amount.

…and my other belongings…

The remaining belongings were put on the sidewalk and hauled away as trash. My books were collected and given to a friend to watch over. Who later suddenly dies, and his sister sold all of them in bulk to a used book seller.

He saved one suitcase and some articles of clothing, some things that were truly “WTF did he save this for”, and the screws (?) to my massive king-sized solid hardwood bed, that he simply threw away. (I paid over $3500 for that thick massive bed back in 1998. It was totally and completely awesome!) Everything else was destroyed, lost or sold off for pennies on the dollar.

My cars… he gave them away.

  • My Toyota Celica was driven to the dealership. He handed them the keys. Said I was in prison and didn’t want the car any longer.
  • My Cadillac Deville. was discovered with sliced tires, a engine (and transmission) filled with sugar and totally gummed up and useless. (It was towed away to a junk yard.)
  • My Ford T-Bird was left in the airport. I asked my father to get the car for me. I was in prison and was unable to get it out of the lot. But it was too much of a hassle. So he called the parking lot owner and told them “the situation”. Instead of being understanding they responded with “Sex Offender! Tough shit! That car is mine now!” and classified it as abandoned and started the necessary legal paperwork to claim it as their own.

His response to me was “you can go get new ones when you get out of prison.”

With what, Dad? My good looks and a spit shine? Not even McDonald’s would hire me.

But things do have a way of turning around.

Just today I read an interesting article;

The last four years of non-stop HATE CHINA! propaganda is ending. And those people who drove that narrative and forced the complete “fire hose” of disinformation, lies, distortions and insults are not only being axed and sent out the door, but they are being applauded by the working folk as they leave too. Good riddance…

One VOA journalist said Pack's resignation triggered "sighs of relief and cheers" among employees. She called Pack's resignation "a first step toward a return to normalcy."

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Humanity breaks out all over the world. Good signs are everywhere.

This post is about people. It’s about families. It’s about relationships. It’s about cultures, societies, and life. It’s about lifestyle. And I want to start the year with a good humane post that discusses these elements in our life.

Unlike previous years, there seems to be an increase in videos and movies about humanity. Sure there’s the action videos, and lots and lots of guns. There’s monsters and super heroes, but a new kind of video is emerging from the old. It’s a video about people and their humanity. And these videos are becoming more an more common.

This article, this post, highlights those videos.

Please kick on the picture to see the video. It will open up in another tab. Allow some time for it to load. Most videos are in the 20MB range, but one is 65MB. I do hope that you all will enjoy them as much as I have.

A Chinese video about a father and his daughter..

The night before my father died, he left me an email message. It was a stupid one-sentence email along the likes of “do you have the link for the website we talked about?” And I kept that message. It’s still there, sitting in a dusty file folder on my long disused Yahoo! account. And account I only refresh every year or so to keep my old archives and records intact.

The following is a video. It’s a Chinese video. It’s about a man, now an old man. He’s a man, a father, who likes to listen to the voice-mail message left by his (now dead) daughter. We don’t know how she died, or what their personal situation is. But we do know that they had a relationship, and hearing her voice was very important to him. So important that he has paid for her cell-phone account to stay active for years and years.

But then suddenly, her voice-message disappears. And a story ensues…

.

I hope that you all enjoyed this video as much as I have. You don’t need to understand Chinese. Just watch what is going on.

So what might the oligarchs think of Chinese people with their resounding support for the Communist Party of China? 

They will hate them  with every bone in their body, they will be furious that this country  resists and denies them a chance to plunder it - yet again. 

The  oligarchic death cult will be extremely angry that a single country  presents an excellent and achievable system of government and financial  management and community betterment to all the other nations on earth.
 
-Posted by: uncle tungsten | Jan  5 2021 20:48 utc | 14

Two strangers in Europe

This next video is about two strangers. It’s a European video. And they get stuck in an elevator. You know those places where you just stand and focus on the lighted numbers, the buttons or the advertisements on the walls. never communicating with the other people that you share that brief moment of time with.

Enjoy, it’s actually a little cute.

.

That was good. Right? A nice fun and kind of cute video. But the message is important.

How are you going to behave this month?

A sense of community.

In the next video we have a typical small family run business. These places are everywhere in China. You can get a breakfast for under $1. Usually some hot Jiu (which is a rice porridge soup), some Baozi (which is a small roll with meat or vegetables inside), some noodles, and some sweet bean drink. The business is thriving…

…but there is an emergency and the entire family must leave now. And all the people are stuck with no one to serve them, and the family devoid of income for the say. What is going to happen? As these establishments typically don’t have doors, are out in the open, with the family living in the back room watching the store.

What is going to happen?

It’s all about community.

.

It’s all about community and our role in it.

Lets look at what China plans to do over the next 5 years.  The article provides a very broad explanation then links to some  specifics at the bottom, the item about the Yangtze River Economic Belt  being most important. I found this bit of reporting highly important:
 
"More specifically, these days the government uses the five-year  plans to reinforce and complement the market dynamic by providing  regulation and guidance. That includes providing the legal and social  framework, such as issuing monetary and fiscal policies, providing  public goods and services, such as building high-speed rails, and  correcting for market failures like pollution."
 
There's a vast difference in focus between China and the West--China's sharply focused on its development in ways the West isn't  whatsoever, and it makes certain its citizenry knows that and everyone's  working as a team--every job has its own value and is important. 

The  best explanation I have is that China is doing while the West is watching and not doing; therefore, China continues to grow ahead of those standing watching with their jaws agape. 
 
China outnumbers the Outlaw US Empire by more than one billion people. That's a huge team working together to advance their nation and  themselves. 

Within the US Empire, at least 30% of the labor force is idle  and not even counted for unemployment purposes since they aren't  actively looking for non-existent jobs while about 24% of the active labor force is unemployed. That's 54% of your human capital that's not  being used at all to better themselves and their nation. Honestly, which  one has the better outlook? 
 
- Posted by: karlof1 | Jan  5 2021 22:57 utc | 28

Bravery, sacrifice and respect

The next movie consists of excerpts from a Chinese war drama.

Most Americans haven’t a clue to the fact that China has been embroiled in centuries of very, very bloody warfare. People have suffered well enough, and one of the great polices of modern Communist China is to avoid war and get off that “bandwagon” of exporting “communism”, or “democracy” to the rest of the world.

Instead, China has adopted a “live and let live” attitude, and all of China, from the laws, to the media play this narrative over and over.

Never the less, if you need to fight, you fight to the best of your ability. And you do your best. You fight for family, and your die for family. For in China your community is who you are.

Which is the opposite of what it is in America.

In America, it is “every man for himself“, it’s a “dog eat dog” world and you need to “carve out a life for yourself“, or you are a failure. So in America you don’t have teams. You don’t have families. Instead you have successful individuals.

Instead of Huawei’s leadership committee supported by the Huawei engineering group, you have Elon Musk.

You have Jeff Bezos, you have Hugh Hefner, you have Bill Gates, and you have Donald J. Trump.

In Chinese movies the emphasis is on being the best you can be as part of something bigger. While in American movies it is the individual that fights against all odds.

This next clip is a Chinese war drama. Notice the depictions of bravery for the community of friends. It’s all very Chinese, but maybe…

…just maybe…

…it’s that we are all part of something bigger, and we need to contribute to it.

.

War is not going to help humanity grow.

It’s working together, not fighting apart.

The tale of the thermos

In our culture, well in most cultures, it seems very odd to open up to strangers. It’s difficult to meet them, to talk to them without feeling a jerk. For in most societies the people that tend to come up to you are typically undesirable…

  • A policeman.
  • A beggar.
  • A mentally ill person.
  • A drunk asshole.
  • A mass murderer.
  • A religious zealot.

And so we avoid others. We stare at our shoes. We read our cell phones, we look at the scenery, we stare off into space. We do anything and everything possible to not engage into inter-personal contact with others. We self isolate. We go home to our dark home and there we stare into the flickering blue glow of the monitors until the next day, when we get up and drive alone to our destination.

This is undesirable.

Humans are social creatures. We need society. We need to communicate with each other. We need that inter-personal level of relationship.

The next story, is a cute one. It’s about a boy who wants to strike up a communication with a pretty girl, but there is nothing to “break the ice with”, just his thermos.

.

This is the central theme behind the first Howard and Kumar movie; Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (plus a heady dose of smoking that marijuana.)

Help others by active participation…

The next video is from the Middle East. And a man decides to help a beggar out. And maybe the point is clear. Rather than pass by, or rather than just give him a coin. Perhaps assisting in a more active way…

…even if it seems trivial…

…is important.

I personally believe that every action that we perform has meaning and substance. Everything that we do, and every thought that we have, all combine towards the reality that we create for ourselves. Maybe the fellow in the video cannot change this beggars life, nor does he want to. He just wants to help him out a little bit more.

The world would be a much nicer place to live in, if everyone stopped thinking about themselves and instead abandons the “for-profit” model embraced by the capitalist oligarchy out of Washington DC and starts going on the local level ….

…helping each other out.

.

And from Europe we have a similar themed movie. And in this one the same type of action is performed. The point should be clear, you all…

…all over the world…

…most especially in Asia…

…people are waking up to the realization that we all must contribute to the well being of each other, and that the greedy “mine, mine, mine…” oh, you are “bad and evil, we must destroy you“, and all the bans, the nonsense and the hate must end. It is a time that is long over due.

.

Funny thing about all these videos.

I pulled them off of DouXing which is the Chinese version of Tiktok. You know, the one that Donald Trump banned in the United States for “natural security reasons“.

Perhaps, if you are an American, you will need to destroy your computer now because you watched these dangerous videos with their dangerous ideas. You don’t want the American thought police to come banging in your door and arrest you.

Do you?

It always gets me when the American press says that there can't be peace without "democracy" and "liberalization."
 
Huh ...  try 20 million dead in America's wars since WW II. 
 
And as for "democracy," living in America I would love to see some of it. 
 
Posted by: Mike from Jersey | Jan  5 2021 20:41 utc | 12

Conclusion

I think the main problem are the two different approaches taken by  the US or Chinese, which are diametrically different.  The Chinese seem  to use a "Cumulative" approach, while the US is based on what I call "Winnowing" as a state. Take their respective attitudes towards the poor.

 First the Chinese; Cumulative, we are all in this together.  If everyone has a "job" be it ever-so lowly, selling food on a street  corner for example, then for the Chinese this is a "plus". The person is  more or less responsible for his own well being, is not a burden on the  State for handouts, and could be (potentially) taxable etc.  The object  being that ALL Chinese then become positive factors in the society.  They are also more motivated because they have a "place" in society. The  recent case of Jack Ma and an IPO is not the opposite, but he was  trying to get ahead by means that would have led to more unemployment -  on the back of the Chinese Government. He was not adding to the  cumulative good of the country. Only his own riches. (The Chinese do  have billionaires and riches - but are constrained by Corporate credit  ratings as explained on a previous - very interesting - thread. Thanks  to: psychohistorian | Jan 5 2021 2:08 utc | 162. The MoA Week In Review -  OT 2021-001)

 The US. The attitude is to beat out the chaff leaving only the "kernel". To "Winnow"  the population leaving only the top. ie the poor are sidelined, they  become a problem for the Government (needing support, food etc.). A net  negative value to US society. (The Rich also get handouts from the Fed.  as free money has become an habitude, but that is an another way of  winnowing out the chaff - as others do NOT get the trillion dollar  handouts) The poor have no "place" in a society that has rejected them  and so are less motivated. They must fend for themselves and are  expected to obey. If they do not there are always the police to enforce  obedience. 

 "Cumulative = win-win", and "Winnowing = Only the top win". 
 
 Posted by: Stonebird | Jan  5 2021 20:26 utc | 11

The world is changing, and it is a good thing. Awareness of it, and awareness of our role in the world is very important. And we do not need to subscribe to any service, pay any fee or provide any user login information to participate. All that matters is to smile, and be more open to the world around you.

Who knows what interesting people you might meet?

Do you want some more of this?

I have more posts along these lines in my Rufus index here…

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The Wishes We Make (full text) by E. Mayne Hull

A genie suddenly appears before a condemned man in his death cell and offers him not just one wish but six – what is the problem? you might ask. Well, avoiding one’s destiny is not as easy as it sounds, as this quite brilliant and very amusing golden-age tale with the most sombre of overtones, first published in the June 1943 issue of Unknown Worlds, shows us.

“The Wishes We Make” (1943) by E. Mayne Hull


THE WISHES WE MAKE

“I THEREFORE SENTENCE YOU, WILLIAM KENNIJAHN — two months from this date — to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. May God have mercy on your soul.”
For a month and three weeks now, Kennijahn had poured an almost unceasing stream of vituperation at the walls of the death cell, at any turnkeys who came near him, at the judge who had delivered the sentence, at the whole human race.
“You’ve run into one of those miserable periods,” his lawyer, Clissold, told him, “when the people are on a moral warpath. The bare suggestion of commutation made in the press the other day brought a thousand howling letters about a law for the rich and a law for the poor. It’s unfortunate that the State proved so conclusively that you murdered your partner, Harmsworth, when he threatened to expose that stock swindle.”
The lawyer shrugged helplessly. “I’ve been offering money right and left, vainly. And when a politician is cold to money, it’s like the end of the world. Frankly, Bill, you’re sunk. I’ll keep on trying to the last hour, but there’s an inevitability about it all now that’s final.” He stood up. “I don’t think I’ll come to see you again unless I have something to report. Good-bye.”
Kennijahn was only dimly aware of the tall, thin figure being escorted out. Nine days, he was thinking, nine short days! His mind twisted off into uncontrollable fury. When the passion final­ly wearied him, he looked up—the creature was standing before him.
The creature regarded him intently from its one gleaming red eve, its fantastic black body twisted curiously, as if that half-human shape was but a part of its form, the remaining portion being somehow out of sight.
Kennijahn blinked at it. He was not afraid, only astounded. He expected it to go away if he shut his eyes, then opened them rapidly. He thought of it as a mind distortion that had somehow synchronized into his vision. After a moment, however, it was still there. Amazingly, then, it said:
“Oh ! You didn’t call me purposely. You don’t know the method. Very well—have your wishes and release me.”
Kennijahn’s mind was away in the rear. “Call you!” he said. “Call you!” A spasm of horror jerked him erect on his bunk. “Get away from me,” he yelled. “What in hell’s name are you? What—” He stopped, horror fading before the matter-of-fact way the creature was regarding him.
“Certainly, you called me,” it said. “You shaped a thought pattern—apparently, you didn’t know what it was or how to do it again. But it created a strain in space, and plummetted me into your presence. By the ancient Hyernetic law, I must give you your wishes, whereupon I will be released to return whence I came.”
For a long second, Kennijahn’s mind held hard on the idea of the thought pattern that could have produced such a monstrosity. He shivered a little with the memory of his fury, but nothing came clear. He gave it up and, because his mind was basically quick on the uptake, his own black destiny receded fractionally from the forefront of his thoughts, and yielded to the tremendous meaning of one word.
“Wishes!” he said. “You mean, I can wish?”
“One is the principle,” said the monster, “two is the word. The monad is Bohas; the duad is Jakin. The triad is formed by union, which is doubled by ignorance to become a sesad.” The thing finished, “Six wishes.”

"One is the principle, two is the word. The monad is Bohas; the duad is Jakin. The triad is formed by union, which is doubled by ignorance to become a sesad. Six wishes."

“Six wishes?” Kennijahn echoed, his voice sounding crazily queer in his own ears. He almost whispered, “About—anything?”
“Within the limits set by the Fates, of course. So have your wishes and—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Kennijahn put up his hand as if he would ward off the words. “You’re not doing this because you want to do it. You have to.”
The thing nodded a little curtly. “Have to.”
“You’re a demon?” Kennijahn spoke with gathering interest.
“I’m a Drdr.”
“A what?” The thing only looked at him. Kennijahn went on, “You say, take my wishes. Do you mean I’ve got to take six wishes all at once?”
The Drdr looked almost sullen. “No.”
“It makes no difference how long I take?”
“No difference. But if you hurry, I can return from whence I came.”
“Thanks for the information.” Kennijahn spoke dryly. Then he frowned. He said sharply, “What do you mean, limits set by the Fates?”
“Your destiny cannot be changed.”
Some of the high hope trickled out of Kennijahn. “Destiny?” he echoed hollowly.
“Every man,” said the creature, “has his predestined fate. It is inexorable, and in your case the situation is that wishes will do you no good. You are doomed to die by hanging.”
Kennijahn took the tremendous shock of the words with scarcely more than a shudder. He said incredulously, “Suppose I were to wish myself in Buenos Aires, a prosperous-looking American busi­nessman from the States. You mean to tell me that I will hang here in this prison next week regardless?”
“Not necessarily here, or next week. Is that your first wish?”
“You can actually do it?”
The great, blazing eye stared at him unwinkingly; and suddenly the ultimate thrill of this opportunity came to Kennijahn, that this was real, no nightmare, no phantasmagoria, nothing but won­drous truth. Six wishes! Good God, six! Why with six wishes he could grab the whole earth. And what did it matter if a hun­dred years hence his destiny caught up with him? First of all, then, get out of this hell hole. And where else but Buenos Aires, where he had salted away money under the name of Peter Clare­mont? He had almost escaped there before after the ruinous fight with that fool, Harmsworth.
“Let’s go!” he cried wildly. “Get me out of here … out of here—”
There was blackness.

“The señor has his papers?”
The polite voice of the bank clerk sounded like a knell of doom. Kennijahn looked across the shiny desk at the dark, oily face of the clerk.
“Papers?” He attempted a smile. “Oh, you mean you want my signature so that you can compare it with the one I have on file?”
“No, señor.” The man was firm. “Your passport and documents relating to entry into the Argentine. The government regulations have become very strict.”
“Oh, yes, those papers !” In truth he had forgotten. Kennijahn explained clumsily, “I left them at the hotel, of course. I shall go and get them.”
“If you will be so kind, señor.”
It was hot out in the street, a dense, suffocating heat that grew as the morning lengthened. Kennijahn thought furiously: Damned if he’d waste a wish on getting out of this silly jam. After all, he had his false papers. Or rather, Nina had them. He’d cable her, and she could take a Pan-American plane, and be here in whatever short time it took. She had her papers ready, too. He thought about Nina with a rising excitement. Thank God, the police had never found out about her.
The cable was off before another thought occurred to him. He phoned the bank, and asked for the clerk who had served him.
“This is Peter Claremont speaking.”
“Si, Señor Claremont.”
“When I arrived back at my hotel, I found some urgent business awaiting my attention. I will come in to see you tomorrow, or the day after.”
“Si, Señor.”
Kennijahn hung up with a complacent smile. Nothing like gathering up all the threads.
The wire from Nina that came two hours later said:

ARRIVING THURSDAY. IF I DO NOT HEAR FROM YOU TO CONTRARY WILL EXPECT YOU TO MEET ME AT AIRPORT.

The only thing wrong with that was that he spent the next two nights in the main jailhouse. The officers who had come to the hotel to arrest him were polite and cold:
“You are to be held, señor, for the American police, who, it seems, intercepted a telegram from you to your señora.”
So that was that, Kennijahn thought grayly. It was all perfectly natural; and the mistake was in assuming the reason the police had never mentioned Nina was because they didn’t know about her. His impulse, the moment he was behind bars, was to call Drdr, but he decided against that. His next wish was going to be planned; and his best bet by far was to make a dramatic disappearance from the plane taking him back to America.
The roar of the big plane was a soft throb against the back­ground of Kennijahn’s thoughts. He could see dark splotches of forest below, dimly visible in the bright moonlight. At last, far ahead, a vast brightness showed. The ocean gleamed and sparkled. The moon made a path of dazzling light toward an horizon that, at this height, was so remote that it seemed an infinite distance away. Kennijahn said in a low tone:
“Drdr.”
He started in spite of himself as the black caricature of human shape jerked into sight beside him. The enormous single eye of the creature peered at him, a scant two feet from his own face. The thing said:
“Do not worry about your guards. They can neither see me, nor hear any conversation between us. You desire your second wish?”
Kennijahn nodded, a little numbly. The chill of that abrupt materialization was still upon him, and he felt amazed that even his pre-knowledge hadn’t helped him. There was something about the monstrous little devil-thing that did things to his insides; and knowledge that it was harmless made no difference. He shook himself finally and said:
“I want to find out the exact limitations of a wish. When I arrived in Buenos Aires, I found myself on the street with five hundred dollars in my pocket. Is that your idea of how much a prosperous business man would be carrying? But never mind that. What I want to know is this: Suppose I had said to you: Put me into Buenos Aires in a swanky hotel suite with all my papers for entry into the Argentine on me, and a million dollars in a trunk—would that all have been one wish?”
“I can only give you about seven hundred thousand dollars,” was the flat-voiced reply. “A set value was fixed by universal law long ago; I can only transpose it into your type of wealth.”
“All right, all right, seven hundred thousand dollars,” Kenni­jahn said testily. And then he stopped. “Good God!” he gasped. “Anything that I can think of at one time is one wish.”
The creature nodded. “Within the limits set by the Fates, as I have said. Is your second wish, then, to go back to Buenos Aires as you described?”
“To hell with that. I don’t want to live in no damned foreign country. I’m an American. And I’ve got a better idea. You said any wish—anything?”
“Within the limits—” began the Drdr, but Kennijahn inter­rupted roughly:
Can you put me back into the past before the murder took place?” He grinned at the jet-black monstrosity. “See what I’m getting at: No swindle, no murder, no destiny.”
“No one,” came the calm reply, “can escape his destiny.” Kennijahn made an impatient chut of sound with his tongue.
“But you can do what I want?”
The thing’s hideous mouth twisted sullenly. “I can, but would prefer not to. Because Drdr cannot go back to give you wishes in the past. Before you could have your third wish, you would have to return to the period after you called me. And if you should get into trouble—”
“Trouble!” Kennijahn echoed. “Listen, I’m going to live the life of an angel.” He paused, frowning. “But I see your point. It wouldn’t do to go too far back. And that’s all right. I didn’t really begin to get involved financially until five months ago, and it all happened so damned fast— Make it six months. There wasn’t a cloud on the horizon six months ago. So shoot me back into time—”

The next second he was in the death cell.
Kennijahn stared around him with a gathering horror. The gray walls seemed to close in on him. The bunk felt hard and uncomfortable underneath him. Beyond the door, electric lights glowed dimly, but the cell itself was in darkness. It took nearly a minute before he made out Drdr sitting on the floor in one corner. Simultaneously, the thing’s great, blazing eye, which must have been closed, opened and regarded him redly.
A black rage twisted through Kennijahn. “You scum,” he roared. “What the devil have you done?”
The red eye glowed at him expressionlessly out of the darkness, an unnatural sphere of light. The thing’s voice said unemotionally, “Gave you your second wish, naturally.”
“You liar!” Kennijahn shouted. And stopped. He had a sudden, horrible sinking sensation that he was the victim of some subtle, incomprehensible hoax. “I don’t remember a thing,” he finished weakly.
“You didn’t ask for memory,” the thing replied calmly. “Ac­cordingly, you went back into time, re-enacted the murder and the trial, and here you are, facing your inevitable destiny.”
Kennijahn burst out, “Why you miserable scoundrel. You knew I wanted memory.”
“I did not. You never mentioned it, or even thought of it.”
“But it was obvious.”
The monstrosity was staring at him. “I tell you and give you everything you ask for. Nothing more. And the sooner you have your wishes, the quicker I can return to the place from where I came.”
Kennijahn caught his fury into a tight, grim thought. So that was it. He had been so intent on his own problem that he had dismissed too readily the fact that the creature also had a purpose. He said, “Where did you come from, anyway, that you’re so anx­ious to get back?”
Drdr was placid. “Is that question a wish?”
“No, of course not.” Kennijahn spoke hastily. But his rage was cooling rapidly. With thoughtful eyes, he studied the shad­ow shape in the darkness on the floor. He’d have to watch out, plan more carefully, leave no loopholes.
“So I did it all over again a second time?” he said slowly. “In other words, my character got me into the same mess. That settles it. Change my character. Put me back six months, with memory, but in addition, make me more honest, strong, mind you, and—” He thought of Nina; he added, “No nonsense about women, of course. I want no change in my outlook there. Is that clear?”
“I don’t understand.” The creature sounded puzzled. “Change your character? You mean, give you a different body, perhaps better looking?”
“No, my character!” said Kennijahn. He paused helplessly. It struck him suddenly that this creature had marked limits of understanding. “You know—my character. Me!”
“You! Change the essence that is you. Why, that is impossible. You are you, a definite pattern in the universe, with an assigned role. You cannot be different. The Fates made you as you are.”
Kennijahn shrugged impatiently. “0. K. I get it. I am what I am. Perhaps it’s just as well. After all, I know my situation. If I were different I might develop some screwy religious notion about accepting my fate. I guess I can handle this best as myself. All right, then, put me back six months with complete memory of you. Get that—and wait! This is only my third wish. You didn’t put anything over on me that I can’t remember?”
“This is your third wish,” agreed the thing. “After this, you will have three more. But I warn you. I cannot help you in the past.”
“Let’s go!” said Kennijahn curtly.

He was sitting at his desk in his private office. A brilliant sun touched the edge of the great window behind him; but he was still too taut, too cold from his brief sojourn in the death cell. He went to the door leading to the outer office, opened it, and said to the nearest clerk, “What day is it … what date?”
“July 7th, Wednesday,” said the girl.
He was so intent that he forgot to thank her. He closed the door, his mind dark with calculation. Slowly, then, he bright­ened. It was true. Six months to the day. He sat down before his desk and picked up the cradle phone. A moment later, the familiar voice was sounding in his ear.
“’Lo, Nina,” he said; then, “Nina, will you marry me?”
“The devil!” Nina said, “Have you gone crazy?”
Kennijahn grinned. He pictured the lithe, svelte Nina stretched out slinkily on her living-room chesterfield, her eyes narrowed around the idea that he was trying to get a rise out of her. Trust Nina not to go out on a limb.
“I mean it,” he said. “I’m thinking of retiring to a country estate—within half an hour’s drive of town, of course,” he added hastily as swift memory came of Nina’s utter boredom the time he had taken her to a mountain resort. He went on, “We’ll raise a couple of kids, and live a merry life generally.”
Her laughter trilled on the phone. “Kids—you! Don’t make me laugh. Besides, I’m not the mother type.”
“O. K., we’ll skip the kids. How about it?”
The woman laughed again. “My dear,” she said, “tonight you bring around the most expensive engagement ring you can find, and I’ll begin to believe you.”
“It’s a deal,” said Kennijahn. “Good-bye, dear.”
He hung up, smiling. That was the first break from character. He stood up, opened the connecting door between his office and Harrnsworth’s. It was the sight of the man sitting there alive that did it. Kennijahn swayed. Then he licked dry lips. Finally, with a terrible effort, he caught himself and stood blinking at the man he had once murdered. God, he thought, this business was enough to give anybody the creeps. He managed to say finally:
“Hello, Andy.” And he was himself again. Swiftly, then, he made his demand.

“But you can’t draw out now,” Harmsworth gasped when Kenni­jahn had finished. The man’s thin face was flushed. He looked, Kennijahn thought in annoyance, on the verge of becoming vastly excited. He blazed on, “Why, if you pull out without apparent reason people will think it strange, think that you’re getting out from under before a crash. You’ve got a reputation for that, you know. Damn it, how did I ever get mixed up with a shyster like you.” He was beet red now. He fumbled at a drawer. His hand came out, holding a revolver. His voice shrilled, “I won’t let you do this. I won’t, do you hear?”
Kennijahn ignored the revolver. After all, he thought coolly, a man who was born to be hanged wasn’t going to be killed by a bullet from a chap who was scheduled to be murdered. With a vicious amazement, he cut the thought off. What the devil was he thinking, he whose whole present existence was based on the con­viction that destiny was not inevitable? Abruptly, he was startled by the rapid turn of events. He said hurriedly:
“Put away that gun, you fool, before you hurt somebody.”
“I want you to promise,” Harmsworth said wildly, “that you’ll give me at least six months to get our customers used to the idea of your leaving.”
Six months! Why, that would take him deep into the period where—formerly—the murder and the trial had taken place. ’Nothing doing,” Kennijahn said flatly. “I’m making a complete break now, this week.”
The first shot struck the door jamb behind Kennijahn. And then he had rushed in, grabbing at the gun, roaring in his bass voice:
“You idiot. I’ll—”
The second shot came as he twisted the gun free from the other’s fingers. Gun in hand, he stepped back. He felt a vague amazement and horror as Harmsworth fell like a log to the floor and lay there. Even more vaguely, he was aware that a door had burst open, and that a girl was standing there, her mouth opening and shutting, making sounds. Then the door slammed. He heard a frantic dialing, and a high-pitched girl’s voice screaming some­thing about police.
With a gasp, Kennijahn dropped the gun and sank into a chair. For a moment, he was taut and cold. Finally, the realization pene­trated that the police were due in minutes. Instantly, his mind cleared. He snatched the phone on Harmsworth’s desk, dialed Clissold’s number, and described tersely to the lawyer what had happened.
Clissold said in his barking voice, “Bill, frankly, I don’t think that’s such a good story. You retiring at thirty-eight. Who else knew about your decision?”
“For Heaven’s sake!” Kennijahn rasped. “Does anybody have to know? It’s a common enough decision, isn’t it?”
“Not for you, Bill. Don’t take this personal, but you have a reputation for grabbing all you can get. I repeat, did anybody know you had decided to retire?”
Kennijahn thought of Nina, and a bead of sweat trickled down his cheek. “Only Nina,” he said finally, heavily.
“Worthless,” said Clissold succinctly. “We’ll have to change that story, Bill.”
“Look here,” Kennijahn began. “Are you trying to tell me—”
“I’m not trying anything,” the lawyer barked. “But now, what about that stenographer who barged in while you were still strug­gling with Harmsworth—what did she see?”
“How the devil do I know?” Kennijahn groaned. He felt suddenly hopeless. It was the swiftness of it that brought the paralyzing realization of how this thing might be twisted against him He snapped, “Clissold, get over here and shut that girl up, and make her think she saw what we want.”
“Now, don’t get excited,” the lawyer’s voice soothed. “I’m just checking up all the angles. After all, the big thing in your favor is that it’s Harmsworth’s gun.”
“Eh!” said Kennijahn, and his brain seemed to twist crazily. He had a mind’s-eye picture of himself explaining why he had turned his gun over to Harmsworth more than a year before because the coward was an alarmist who was always seeing bandits stalking into the office. It was such a natural thing for a man of Kenni­jahn’s size and physical confidence to hand over a gun that—that no one would ever believe it. And six months would have to pass before he could get in touch with Drdr. Six months of warding off the rope, six months of—hell.
There were black days when he thought that it couldn’t be done. The trial court reached the point where it denied further stays, and rejected motions based on technicalities. And then the court of first appeal had a small agenda and took his appeal in four days straight within a month of his first conviction. Finally, the supreme court of the United States refused an application for a further appeal on the grounds that new evidence was not being offered. It found, in addition, that the lower courts had handled the trial in exemplary fashion.
The sentence was due to be carried out one month before the end of the six months. With a final, desperate cunning, Kennijahn applied through Clissold for a three-month stay of execution, using the full weight of four hundred thousand dollars in bribes, his entire liquid assets. Not even the governor could see why that much money couldn’t be gotten hold of, somehow, for the party, of course, especially when it was not an attempt to break the sen­tence. But they were all very moral about it. Three months was too long. The public wouldn’t like three months. They could make it—well, six weeks.
Six weeks it was.

In its proper time, the Drdr flashed darkly into his cell. Kenni­jahn stared at the thing wanly, said finally, wearily, “How could a miscarriage of justice like that happen? What is the matter with the world?”
The creature stood up easily on the shadowed cement floor, its flat face expressionless. “Nothing is the matter. Everything is taking place as fated. Innocent men have been hung before, and afterwards people wonder how it could have happened, how they could have supported the crime. But it was simply the victim’s destiny.” The thing shrugged. “No matter how you plan your wishes, it will always be like that. So have them please, and re­lease me.”
Kennijahn sat for a long, stolid moment, letting that sink in. Abruptly, his head throbbed with reaction, and he was afraid, desperately, horribly, ultimately afraid. He said shakily, “What kind of a hellish universe is this? Why should I be fated to hang? It’s not fair.”
“You don’t understand.” The black shape spoke calmly. “Your death is part of a pattern. No matter what you do, the pattern resumes its shape, new threads covering the places where you have tried to break through. It is all necessary to a cosmic balance of forces.”
Kennijahn swallowed hard, then he scowled. “O. K. If this body’s got to hang, that’s all right with me. I’ve had six month’s to think of wishes, and believe me, I’ve got a good one.” He paused to gather his thoughts, then:
“Listen, can you transfer me, with my thoughts, my memories—­me—into the body of Henry Pearsall, the millionaire ?”
“Yes.”
Kennijahn almost slobbered in his joy. His whole body shook with horrendous relief. He gasped at last, triumphantly, “Well, what do you think of it? My destiny is fulfilled. Kennijahn hangs at the appointed hour; and I, in the body of Pearsall, go on.” The red eye fixed on him unwinkingly. “Only one thing is wrong: Pearsall is not destined to hang.”
“But this way he won’t—don’t you see? Pearsall’s body goes on.”
The thing said simply, “This then is your fourth wish?”
It was the quietness of the question that got Kennijahn He thought in a stark dismay: Three wishes gone, and three to go. Three gone. And he had expected to be sitting on top of the world after his first. The fourth wish coming up, and he wasn’t even out of jail yet. Of course, there was that wretched business of a wasted wish. That wouldn’t happen again. Slowly, his mind steadied. Courage, the sheer physical courage that had en­abled him to smash his way ruthlessly to the top, came back. Three wishes left, and actually that was good. Surely, with all his facul­ties about him, and the experience he’d had, he should be able to hold off that damnable destiny for years.
“Yes,” he said, “that’s my fourth wish, but don’t rush me. I want to get everything straight. You know the Henry Pearsall I mean. He lives on Oriole Parkway Drive.”
“I know the one.”
Kennijahn persisted. “The one with that absolutely gorgeous wife; her name is Edith. She’s about twenty-eight. He’s thirty-four and worth about seventeen million. You’ve got that clear?”
The creature looked at him without speaking, and Kennijahn remembered that it had refused once before to answer a question the second time. He said:
“All right, all right, don’t get mad. You can’t blame me for checking up after what’s happened. One last question—” His hard, steel-gray eyes stared straight at the thing. “Have you any faintest idea of what could go wrong with my wish?”
“None. Something will, of course. Don’t know what.” Kennijahn smiled grimly. “I’ll take my chances. Let’s go.”

He had arrived home from the office rather late. Even with the memory of the real Henry Pearsall to help him, it was difficult to pick up the threads of another man’s life and work. But he would get it. A matter of time was involved. In the meantime, let people think him a little off par.
“The madam,” the butler had said, “has gone out for dinner. She left this note for you.”
Pearsall-Kennijahn read the note with a pleasant expansiveness. It was full of little affectionate phrases, and ended with:

… darling, going out tonight was a “must”. You know I’d rather be with you, particularly these last ten days since you’ve taken such a renewed interest in your loving but once sadly neglected wife. I feel as if we’re on a second honeymoon. All my heart.

Edith.

Kennijahn folded the note with a tolerant smile, and put it in his pocket. What a life, getting the pure, full-blossomed love of another man’s lovely wife without having to do any preliminary spadework. There had been a little worry in his mind that she would acquire one of those instinctive dislikes for him that you read about in stories. But that fear was past now.
It was while he was eating his dinner that thought of Nina came. He frowned. He’d have to get acquainted with her somehow, perhaps if necessary through his fifth wish. Nina would mourn him, he knew, but not for long. And if she was going to be faith­less to his memory, the lucky man might as well be Henry Pearsall. Funny, how the bare thought of Nina got him going.
From the dining room he went into the spacious study, with its hunting lodge, overhead-beam construction, and its shelf on shelf of books. Some day, he would read a few of those books just to see what were the springs that moved the real Pearsall’s being. He settled himself cozily under a reading lamp, picked up the evening paper and glanced idly at the headlines. The two-inch caption that topped the page was about a ship explosion. Under­neath, in smaller type was:

BROKER ESCAPES FROM DEATH HOUSE

“Huh!” gasped Pearsall-Kennijahn. And there was such a dizzy feeling all over him that he grasped at the arm of the chair. The wild sensation came that he was on the edge of an abyss. With a titanic effort, he slowed his whirling mind and read on:

William J Kennijahn, former stock broker, senten­ced to hang three days from today, made a daring escape from the death house late this afternoon. The ex-broker, who was recently convicted of murdering his partner, Andrew Harmsworth, is physically an enormously strong man, and, while authorities have as yet issued no statement as to the method of escape, it is believed that this strength enabled him to—

It was the sound of a door opening that tore Pearsall-Kennijahn’s gaze from the horrifying and fascinating account. The paper slipped from his grasp, and slid to the floor with a dull thump. It was the queerest, most terrible thing in the world to sit there staring at himself. Pearsall had somehow squeezed the larger body into one of—Pearsall’s—suits. It made a tight fit that looked unnatural.
“And now, you devil from hell,” the familiar bass voice lashed at him, “you’re going to get yours. I don’t know what in Satan’s name you’ve done to me, but you’re going to pay for it.”
Kennijahn opened his lips to scream for help, but the sound shattered to a gulp in his throat as his former two-hundred-pound body smashed at the hundred and sixty pounds of flesh and bone that was now his human form. It wasn’t even a fight. He strug­gled, breathing hoarsely, and then a fist of sledge-hammer potency connected with his jaw.
When he came to, there was a cruel gag in his mouth, and his hands were bound behind his back with cords so tight that he winced from the cutting pain. And then he saw what his captor was doing.
The man was chuckling under his breath; an inhuman sound. He had already flung the rope over one of the overhead beams, with the dangling noose neatly tied. Still chuckling, he came to the bound man.
“We mustn’t waste any time,” he giggled. “We’ll just fit your head into the rope, and then I’ll do the pulling. Come, come, now—no shrinking. Fixed it up myself while I was waiting for you. And I know your neck size. Fifteen inches, isn’t it? It’ll be a little tighter than that, actually, in the final issue, but—”
Kennijahn was thinking so hard, so piercingly of Drdr that, in addition to all his other pains, his head began to ache agonizingly from the appalling effort. But the seconds passed, and there was no Drdr. He thought despairingly: The gag, the damnable gag was preventing him from calling the creature.

He was under the rope when it happened. There was blackness, and then he was lying on his back. It took a long moment to grasp that he was stretched out on the hard bunk of a prison cell.
He lay there, and gradually grew conscious of an incongruous fact—the fact that he was sighing with relief at being in the death cell again. He was trembling. His fingers shook as he took a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and went to the “foolproof” electric lighter on the wall. The cigarette nearly fell to the floor. Abruptly, his knees felt so weak that he had to sit down. The creature said from the corner:
“I saved you just in time. It is important to me that you have all your wishes, so that I may return to my abode.”
So that was it. For its own selfish reasons, the Drdr had pulled him out of a nasty mess. Well, the reason didn’t matter. Here he was, four wishes gone, and his destiny still to beat. Destiny. The ague came back. For he believed. His body shook, and his face felt hot and feverish. He believed. The whole, hellish thing was true. He was born to be hanged, and each time now, each wish that had seemed so sure-fire, so normally bound to produce the desired results, had brought him closer to his black doom. The time for normal wishes was past.
“Look,” he said breathlessly, “isn’t there anybody who has ever escaped their destiny? Are there no exceptions? Does the pat­tern always run true?” He saw that the creature was hesitating, its eyes narrowed. With a roar, Kennijahn clutched at the straw.
“There is something. Tell me. Quick!”
“There are always exceptions,” came the slow answer. “It is not a good thing to talk about the failures, or even call them failures. Sooner or later, they fulfill their destiny. It is only a matter of time.”
“A matter of time,” Kennijahn shouted. “You fool, what do you think I’m fighting for? Time, time—anything to hold off the rope. What kind of people are these exceptions?”
“Usually wealthy men who have slid off into some bypath. Or who accidentally received money as the result of some involved plan that was not originally intended to include them.”
“Oh!” Kennijahn sat intent. His mind clenched; his voice sounded unnormal in his ears, as he said finally, “Is there any young, reasonably good-looking, wealthy man among them whose destiny is to die by hanging?”
“There is.”
Kennijahn sagged, so great was the reaction. He lay there on the bunk, breathing heavily, the black doubts raging through his mind. Slowly, he roused himself, and quavered:
“After all, I’ve still got wishes five and six. If anything should go wrong—but I can see now, this is the best bet: Taking the body of a man who is destined to hang but who has been missed in the shuffle. There won’t be any escaping from jail for him, the way Pearsall did.”
Thought of Pearsall sent a cold shiver down his spine. Then a wave of anger came. He snarled, “I’ve a good mind to wait until the night before the hanging, and try that wish again. After all, he couldn’t escape a second time.” Something in the creature’s gaze made him say sharply, “Or can he?”
The thing shrugged, said, “A man not fated to hang will not hang. Has it occurred to you to wonder how he succeeded in escaping from his cell in the first place?”
“What do you mean?”
“For a while he was simply stunned. Then he grew desperate and made his attempt—and no bars could hold him If they had tried to hang him, the rope would have slipped from his neck. It has happened, you know, several times.”
Kennijahn shuddered. He managed finally, “You know what I want. So put me into that body before the Fates grow impatient and send a mob to lynch me.”

There was a blinding, choking, terrible pain. A long moment of that sustained, racking agony, and then came the most awful realization that had ever pierced his brain: He was hanging by his neck.
He couldn’t see, he couldn’t breathe. Dimly, in a blaze of horror, he was conscious that his hands were tied behind him; and there was a stark memory, the other man’s memory, of a determina­tion that life was not worth living, and that suicide was the answer.
Drdr had put him in the body of a man in the act of committing suicide by hanging.
Drdr, you scum, you betrayer, what about the sixth wish? Get hands—free hands. Man must have tied his own hands—couldn’t do that perfectly.
His hands were free for long seconds before realization came that they were fumbling at the rope around his throat, fighting for easement. With a final, all-out effort, he grabbed the rope above his head, and hoisted himself like a man chinning a bar. The deadly, cutting, choking horror on his neck relaxed.
Desperately, then, he clung there, conscious of the utter physical weakness of this body, the inability of this man’s muscles to main­tain for any time his present position. But after a moment his vision came blurrily back. He saw distortedly a great room full of packing cases and, through a window, the top of a tree. An attic. He was in the attic of the millionaire would-be-suicide’s home. His voice came back. It was a harsh, raspy voice that kept catching, as if hooks were snagging it. But he managed to scream:
“Drdr!”
The sound of that scratchy voice echoed hollowly as he repeated the name shrilly; and then, there was the black, the loathsome, the treacherous beast. The demonlike thing stood on the floor below him and looked curiously up at him from its enormous red eye.
“Get me down from here,” Kennijahn croaked. “Get me down safely. My … sixth … wish. Hurry, hurry. .. , I can’t hold on much longer; and I haven’t … the strength … to climb up farther and … untie the rope. I—”
The enormous casualness of the other’s manner struck him mo­mentarily dumb. Then he raged:
“Hurry … my sixth wish. I tell you, you’ve got to … you can’t get out of it. You said so yourself.”
The little monster stared up at him with unblinking eye. “You’ve had your sixth wish,” it said coolly. “This is your sixth wish.”
Kennijahn had the curious feeling that his nerves were shatter­ing into a million pieces. There was something in the manner of the creature, a casual positivity that—
“Whaddaya mean?” he gasped. “You said I had two more. You said—”
“If you will remember,” came the precise reply, “it was you who said that you had two more. And as you did not actually ask if it were so, naturally I was not compelled to volunteer the infor­mation.
“Where you went astray was in assuming that I only answered wishes that were spoken. When I released you from Henry Peersall’s body, it was in response to the strongest wish that had ever been in your mind, but it was a thought-wish. I am not account­able for your assumptions, though I must satisfy you that I have fulfilled all your wishes. This is now done, and I am free.”
He whisked out of sight; and Kennijahn clung there with a queer, fascinated awareness that he could hold on for only seconds longer.

William J. Kennijahn was alone with his destiny.

The End

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Fictional Index here…

Fictional Stories

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index
  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Some Christmas videos out of China. I hope that you enjoy them.

This is a quick and simple post. It’s just some Christmas videos out of China. Contrary what what you might read, China celebrates Christmas robustly. It’s just celebrated differently. That’s all.

These are not the best videos, the most profound or the greatest. They are simply the top listed ones on the Chinese music application KouGuo. (Which means nothing, actually.)

First up is a rather old music video. This one was made in the 1990’s (my guess) but pretty much illustrates what the meaning of Christmas is for many people in China. I would say that it’s not so much about buying presents, and “spreading good cheer” as it is about people and relationships.

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The next up… an Enya Christmas. This video is not a music video from the 1990’s like the first one. Instead, this is contemporary views of China on Christmas day. My guess is that it is either Shenzhen or Guangzhou. But I don’t know for certain. It’s a pretty interesting take on what it is like in China. Music by Enya placed with snapshots of daily life inside of China on Christmas day.

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And here’s another music video. This one is again older. Why so many older videos? Well, think about it. Why does everyone still watch “It’s a Charlie Brown Christmas”? It’s the same thing. Nostalgia.

Here’s what they watch in China…

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Of course, the media is overflowing with all sorts of American -produced Christmas themed music videos and “specials”. But do you really want to hear another rendition of “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas” by Michael Bublé?

Here’s some typical Chinese Christmas fare…

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Of course all the television shows have a segment devoted to Christmas themed events and amusements. Much like they do in the United States. Here’s some typical fare…

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Another music video.

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I do hope that you enjoyed this post.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Music Of China Index here…

Chinese Pop Music

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index
  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

[wp_paypal_payment]

If you enjoy what you see, it would be helpful if you could assist in hosting this forum. A donation would be appreciated.

Some micro-videos of China showing elements of contemporaneous Chinese society along with notations and comments.

And that is what this is, don’t you know. It’s a collection of videos that I picked up out of Chinese media. I have highlighted certain parts of the videos for your attention and I comment on it. It’s not really a complete investigation into Chinese society, but rather snapshots of what exists today. And if you look carefully you will be far better served to see it for what it is, instead of the heavily promoted narrative that China is bad.

I like to think that these videos are fun. They are not made by the Chinese Government as part of a pro-propaganda campaign as the folk on Alex Jones claim. It’s just average folk posting videos. Much like average folk in America have been using Tiktok. Same thing, more or less.

Please click on the picture to watch the movie. It will open up in a separate tab.

Small Business Opportunities

When I was a young boy in Bridgeport, CT I had a “girlfriend: all of 5 years old. She was much older than the 4.5 years old boy-of-the-world that I was growing up to become. Anyways, in our neighborhood, it tended to be lower middle class and the time frame was the early 1960’s.

Everyone had a side business that they were running out of their basements. Our neighbor had rabbits in cages that they performed experiments upon for the United States government. And there were others who operated small stores out of their living rooms. My “girl friend” had a father that made rock sugar candy and other elements out of big 55 gallon drums in their basement.

We used to sneak down and get a string or two out of the big barrels and chew on them as we went off adventuring as part of our childhood.

You really don’t see that much any more. Few people try to operate their own businesses out of their residences for money. It is too expensive, not just in the regulations and OSHA requirements, but the IRS, the DHS, and just about everyone else will have a say at to what you are doing. And if you break one of the millions of unspecified laws, you can be guaranteed a trip to jail, if not prison.

Americans tend to no longer have self-employed businesses out of their homes any more.

But this is not the case in China.

For the ladies trying to get started in their own clothing line…

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To the guys who want to make things out of steel, and bars…

Most Westerners will probably relate to this story…

But the Chinese think small and then work their way up. Westerners like to think big and try to sustain it no matter what.

Here’s an interesting story about the “high life” that Westerners have become accustomed to within China, while the rest of the Chinese nation toils on a mere few dollars a day.

From Frans… (and NOTHING having to do with Metallicman)…

This is a story I have to share, it is sitting in my mind for too long.
In  this story, I do not mention the real names of the people involved.  Instead, I use either initials or an alias. People, familiar with this  story will obviously easily recognize who's who.  Please don’t share  this story with others.
  
From 2009 to 2012 I worked for a small WOFE, owned by a Canadian businessman; let's call him "Bill G."

We had a manufacturing plant in the Southern suburbs of Shanghai and a luxurious headquarter in Jingan district. 

Bill  and I were the only foreigners, working in that company, making medical  devices for clients in various European countries. We didn't had  Chinese or American clients. 

Bill had earned some money in Saudi Arabia and moved to China in 2005 to establish the new company. 

Bill  had the appearance, but not at all the personality of Leonard Cohen.  Bill was by all means a special guy. He was irascible and very  short-tempered. Several times per week, he was loudly scolding Vivien,  his private secretary or other Chinese people of the middle-management:  the purchase manager, finance manager, quality manager, production  manager and very often the HR manager. (She was loudly crying, each time  he scolded her)
 
I was the Engineering Manager, and to be  honest, Bill paid me very well. I was also often acting as the General  Manager when Bill "disappeared". That happened quite often and nobody,  not even his ex-wife or his son in Canada knew where he was or why he  was away. 
 
One day, after I submitted my expense note from  a business trip to Hong Kong, he blustered to my office and started an  abuse tirade to me. I shouldn't have booked a business class ticket and  stayed in 5 star hotels. "do you think you're working for MNC here ?" he  shouted. (Yes, I have worked 15 years for MNC before and I was used to  business class flight tickets and 5 star hotels). During his tirade, I  packed my laptop and other belongings and called a taxi to leave. When  he noted that, he asked what I was doing.  I explained him that I no  longer wanted to work for him. He returned to his office but when the  taxi was there, he came to me to excuse him. He promised never to do  that again and I stayed. 

That was only 3 weeks after I worked for Bill G.  We later had many other collisions. 

One  day, when we were traveling in the company car (both with our private  secretary) to potential new suppliers in Ningbo,  we got another  explosion. He wanted to buy an old fashioned, yet solid, cheap, but  highly unsafe cutting press, while I wanted a much more automatic,  modern machine with all kinds of safety protection screens and devices. I  threatened him, saying that in case he would buy the unsafe machine, I  would write an email to him with cc to the local police station,  explaining that he, not me, will go to jail in case of a work  accident.   After another abuse tirade, he agreed to buy the machine I  proposed. 
 
He was terribly envious on me because I could  speak Chinese with everybody in the company and he, in spite of all his  efforts, couldn't. He rented a private teacher to learn Chinese, but he  didn't had the perseverance to learn to speak some sentences. Every day,  at the back seat of the company car, he used his carton cards with  Chinese characters and their meaning. I told him he shouldn't learn  hànzì characters but instead learn pinyin and speak Chinese. But he  didn't accepted my recommendation because his Chinese private teacher  was full of the beauty and cultural significance of hànzì characters. 

One  day, he said to me (probably out of envy) that I shouldn't "lower  myself" by speaking Chinese to the people in the factory !  He also once  said to Mr. Zhao, the production manager: "I'm the company president, I  expect everybody to speak proper English with me". 
 
From  time to time, he blustered to the workshop, climbed on a pedestal (a  couple of palettes) and started shouting to the poor assembly workers,  almost all very young Chinese girls who came from the countryside to  Shanghai and who didn't understand one single word of his tirade in  English. 
 
One day, he came to my office and sat down in a  corner, silently.  When I asked him what was wrong, he explained that he  finally realized that there was something wrong with his attitude. He  had decided to go to Tibet for 3 weeks and convert to Buddhism there.  When he came back, he was indeed much calmer and controlled, but after a  while, his tantrums returned, albeit less often. So then he registered  for yoga classes. With a private teacher, every evening one hour. It  indeed helped a bit. 
 
At the end of 2011, his daughter  came over to Shanghai to study Chinese language at Shanghai Normal  University. She went back to Canada one year later. 
 
At  the Chinese New Year dinner (and the KTV afterwards), Bill didn't knew  well how to behave. Sometimes, I or Lina (the HR Manager) had to take  the lead. It was an act, not a spontaneous party. 

One day, Bill  invited a potential new customer from the USA for a factory visit. They  came over with 3 people; none of them had ever been to China before.  During the dinner in a famous, very Chinese restaurant, one of the three  pushed his chair away from the table and refused to touch the food. He  was "afraid to be poisoned". Really !
 
Bill was living in a  big luxury apartment in Huangpu district. With an attached small  apartment for his Ayi. When I told him that opposite to his compound,  there was the biggest escort service company of the globe, he acted as  if he didn't knew. There indeed were several thousands of girls (and  boys) working there and luxury cars were driving in and out the basement  day and night. But he didn’t knew it. 
 
He didn't trust  people, he was unable to build a stable relationship with Chinese  people.  "All Chinese are cheaters" he often said. No wonder he was in  constant conflict with staff, suppliers and our European customers.   Vivien, his Chinese private secretary, acted to the outside world as if  she supported Bill unconditionally.  

One day, when he once again  messed up the whole factory, the workers threatened to strike. I called  his brother (let's call him Rob G.) back in Canada in an attempt to  persuade Bill to be more reasonable. Some days later, Rob came over and  stayed in China for a while. He finally gave up his job as policeman to  act as a handyman and go-between between Bill and the production staff.  By the way: Rob was very different from Bill. He was a man of the world,  although he had a very particular language with a lot of spicy words.  He was living in a house in the famous Thames town in Songjiang, far  away from his brother. 
 
One day, we got an official letter  from the local government, announcing that, because of the hot weather  (and everybody in Shanghai switching on their air conditioners), the  whole industrial park would be switched off from the electricity grid  for two weeks. When Bill was in utter panic, preparing an email for our  clients to announce the shut down, I was able to calm him down. And went  to the other factory owners in the industrial area. In a meeting that  afternoon, we decided to send a  Chinese factory boss to someone of the  local government to persuade them to not switch us off. The hongbao  (small fee) that we collected from each of the 12 owners was very  convincing for the guy from the government. We were not switched off  from the grid. 
 
To release his stress, Bill decided to go  to a Jazz club every Saturday night. He paid for a private table, right  in front of the Jazz orchestra and invited Vivien, his Chinese private  secretary (she was happily married to a chief constable) and his  daughter (when she was in Shanghai). He didn't had real friends. I, as a  Jazz music addict, went to that same club for years, usually sitting in  a more dark corner in the back. Every time, he invited me  enthusiastically at his table but I often declined as I didn't wanted to  expose my friends to his behaviour. 
 
Because of a new EU  commission regulation, we got in trouble with the sales one of our core  products in Europe. And consequently Bill's company came in financial  trouble. Before, I had tirelessly tried to convince Bill to increase the  sales price of our products. As I had, much more than him, excellent  contacts with our clients, I knew that they would be prepared to pay a  bit more for our services. But he didn't listen to me. Instead, he  started to cheat both our suppliers and customers. He didn't pay  suppliers, some of them entirely dependent on our products. He borrowed  money from our main customer and never paid it back. 

I told him that he should fire me because the company could no longer bear the cost of my salary. But he didn't. 

Sometime  later, when I returned from a trip home (and to one of the customers),  he asked for a private meeting in a restaurant near to my home in  Shanghai. There, the high word came out. Right before, I told him I knew  why we were there. During my trip to Europe, the day before I returned,  he had secretly fired my tooling manager, quality engineer and my  private secretary.
 
I still today have excellent contacts  with all the former people of that company. Back in 2017, Mr. Zhao, the  production manager, who also had taken over my tasks, called me to  inform me that Bill once again disappeared. Two days later, when the  salaries to the (remaining) workers had to be paid, Bill had blocked all  bank accounts. I recommended Mr. Zhao to close the factory. 
Today,  Bill is still without a trace. Even his ex-wife, his son, daughter or  his brother don't know where he is. He's certainly not in China anymore.  Some people suspect that he is living in hiding in Venezuela.
 
When  I was living in Suzhou and went to that Jazz club in Shanghai, I met  there by big coincidence Vivien, Bill's ex private secretary. She was  drunk and hooking up with an older American guy, something I haven’t  seen her doing before. 

When I said to her "Hi Vivien, how are you  doing ?" she replied: "Hi Frans, you're looking well, but I'm no longer  Vivien, I’m Christine now".  I was speechless. 
 
Last  year, Mr Zhao started a brand new company in Songjiang from scratch. He  has gradually taken over the manufacturing of some of the products we  made before. He has the full confidence of our former clients and  suppliers. When I was there last year, he had only five people working  for him but the future of his new company looks bright.  

-Bill Brockenblock 

Ah.

But enough of that. China has changed. It’s a new world out there and the high powered days of living well inside of China are merging to a new reality.

Relationships

This world is filled with all sorts of people. But humans are humans, men are men and women are women. It’s how we interact with each other that is important.

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That’s the ol’ softie in me. Don’t you know.

Incidentally, the restaurant that they are both working in is a “Hot pot” restaurant. Basically it is a big pot of soup that you dip meats and vegetables into. Much like a Fondue. However, you also then dip it into sauces after you eat it, and you get to make your own sauces. It’s all very delicious. In the background we see a guy spinning what looks like pizza dough. Nope, that is how you make noodles in China. You make it by hand and that is what he is doing.

Now, you all might be confused, but this is taking place in a restaurant where they both apparently work, which is something that you can see by the aprons that they are wearing. My guess is that this is the very famous restaurant chain; Hai De Lao.

haidilao
https://www.haidilao.com/en/index/index.html

The Haidilao  brand was founded in 1994 in Jianyang, Sichuan. Since 1999, it has  gradually opened up markets in Xi'an, Zhengzhou and Beijing. In 2015,  our restaurant opened up in Taiwan was, and 10 stores have been opened in Taiwan by now. In 2017, our restaurant opened up in Hong Kong and opened two stores by now.

.

Yeah.

Hotpot. Great in the colder weather. As it tends to steam up my glasses. LOL.

Hai De Lao Hot Pot. The meats are a selection of beef, chicken, mutton, and pork. Note the meatballs and the various vegetables that you can add as well. Not shown are the noodles, fish, shrimp, and all the other things that you can fry inside the vats of tasty oils in front of you.

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A “Brick House”

In America we refer to a strong stout woman as being built well. Or as we say “built like a brick house”. You can find these women all over the world. Not just in the United States, but in China as well. Here is a woman that I would consider a “Brick House”.

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Speaking of relationships, here’s some more girls.

Girls that resemble friends of mine

Here are some girls that resemble some of my friends that I have inside of China. As you can well guess they are nice and really sweet. They are smart too, and really interesting. Each one is like a book… full of stories and adventures.

Many I have met in the KTV’s, but also others that I have met in my day-to-day activities. All are really nice, and they are absolutely great conversationalists.

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This next girl reminds me a lot of a friend that I met at my last KTV trip. She was a lot of fun, but unfortunately I was drinking fake VSOP and that really took away from the full enjoyment of the evening. Word to the wise, when the alcohol is in question, don’t drink it. Buy your own. Bring your own, or stick to beer.

Contemporary versions of Chinese pop

Here’s a couple of contemporaneous renditions of a very popular Chinese pop song by Jay Chou. The song itself is around ten years old, but the singers breathe new life into it, and it’s all very lovely. This is the kind of music that people sing when they go to KTV’s and get drunk and belt out a song or two.

The name of the song is 千里之外.

But the new versions will not make any sense, or give you an appreciation for what is going on unless you watch the original music video. And that is why I have embedded it here…

千里之外 the original MV

Please click and watch this cute four minute mini-drama.

It’s in *.mkv format.

MKV files are actually multimedia container formats. An MKV container can incorporate audio, video, and subtitles into a single file—even if those elements use different types of encoding. For example, you could have a MKV file that contains H.264 video and something like MP3 or AAC for audio.

-What Is an MKV File and How Do You Play Them?

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The video is in the MKV format, which should be read by both windows and Microsoft systems. However, if you are unable to view the video, you can access it here…

https://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMzgzMDIxNTUyMA==.html

The song is about life, relationships, and taking opportunity even at the cost of love. Ouch!

Oh. You have to let those your love move on with their lives…

Screen shot from the original MV.
Screen shot from the original MV.

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In the video is a story about a young boy and girl.

The boy is just a handyman, but the girl is a singer and she is destined for great things. She gets an opportunity to become a great singer, but she won’t leave the boy. She loves him, don’t you know. And she wants to day with him. No matter what.

Screen shot from the original MV.
Screen shot from the original MV.

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And then one day, her big break happens. A big important man comes to her and offer her an opportunity of a lifetime. It’s an opportunity that you just do not turn down. It is something you just don’t say no to.

And she says no.

But the boy loves her.

He can’t allow her to waste her life with him.

So he tells her to go. He forces her to go. He grabs the contract and says “yes” before she even knows what’s happening.

Screen shot from the original MV.
An opportunity of a lifetime.

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Yes, and she leaves. Three years later, she returns. Rich and famous. But the boy is there. Just the same old job, making ends meet. And the song has a refrain about your loved ones moving on to bigger and better things, while you are left behind…

Screen shot from the original MV.
I send you away beyond a thousand miles…

The Lyrics to 千里之外

Jay Chou – 千里之外 (Far Away)

Chinese Lyrics

"Far Away (千里之外)"
 (feat. Fei Yu-Ching)
 
 屋簷如懸崖風鈴如滄海我等燕歸來
 時間被安排演一場意外你悄然走開
 故事在城外濃霧散不開看不清對白
 你聽不出來風聲不存在是我在感慨
 夢醒來是誰在窗台把結局打開
 那薄如蟬翼的未來禁不起誰來拆
 
 我送你離開千里之外你無聲黑白
 沉默年代或許不該太遙遠的相愛
 我送你離開天涯之外你是否還在
 琴聲何來生死難猜用一生去等待
 
 聞淚聲入林尋梨花白直得一行青苔
 天在山之外雨落花台我兩鬢斑白
 聞淚聲入林尋梨花白直得一行青苔
 天在山之外雨落花台我等你來
 
 一身琉璃白透明著塵埃你無暇的愛
 你從雨中來詩化了悲哀我淋濕現在
 芙蓉水面採船行影猶在你卻不回來
 被歲月覆蓋你說的花開過去成空白
 夢醒來是誰在窗台把結局打開
 那薄如蟬翼的未來禁不起誰來拆
 
 我送你離開千里之外你無聲黑白
 沉默年代或許不該太遙遠的相愛
 我送你離開天涯之外你是否還在
 琴聲何來生死難猜用一生
 我送你離開千里之外你無聲黑白
 沉默年代或許不該太遙遠的相愛
 我送你離開天涯之外你是否還在
 琴聲何來生死難猜用一生去等待 

English Lyrics

Beyond A Thousand Miles (Faraway)
           
The roof is like a cliff ,the wind chimes are like the blue sea I wait for the swallow to return
 The time has been arranged to act out an accident you quietly leave
 The story is outside the city,the heavy fog won't disperse,can't see the dialogue clearly
 You cannot tell by listening the sound of the wind doesn't exist,it is me who is sighing with regret
 I waken from the dream ,Who is at the windowsill opening the ending?
 That future which is as thin as a cicada's wings cannot withstand being torn apart by whom
 
I send you away beyond a thousand miles,you are silent, black and white
 The silent era perhaps it shouldn't have been,the too distant love
 I send you away Beyond the end of the sky,are you still there?
 Where is the sound of the piano coming from? It's hard to predict life and death I use all my life To wait
 
I hear sounds of tears so I enter the woods searching for the white pear flower I only get a row of moss
 The sky is beyond the mountains,the rain falls down on the flower stands, I'm grey at the temples
 I hear sounds of tears so I enter the woods,searching for the white pear flower I only get a row of moss
 The sky is beyond the mountains,the rain falls down on the flower stands I wait for you to come
 
Glazed white all over you,transparent like dust your flawless love
 From the rain you come,the poem becomes sorrowful I'm drenched now
 
Pick up the lotus from the water surface,it's as if the shadows of the boat sailing are still there,yet you don't come back
 Covered by the years,the flower you spoke of blossomed,the past becomes blank
 
I waken from the dream,Who is at the windowsill opening the ending?
 That future which is as thin as a cicada's wings,
 cannot withstand being torn apart by whom
 
I send you away beyond a thousand miles,you are silent, black and  white,the silent era,perhaps it shouldn't have been,the too distant love
 
I send you away beyond the end of the sky,are you still there? Where is  the sound of the piano coming from? It's hard to predict life and death I  use all my life
 
I send you away,beyond a thousand miles,you are silent, black and  white,the silent era,perhaps it shouldn't have been,the too distant love
 
I send you away,beyond the end of the sky

 Are you still there?
 Where is the sound of the piano coming from?
 It's hard to predict life and death
 I use all my life To wait

https://lyricstranslate.com

The remakes of 千里之外 (Far Away)

The first “remake”…

In this, we have a British talent show. Very similar to “America’s Got Talent”. And it takes place in the UK as you can tell by the judges and the musicians. Of course, it is being judged by both British folk and by Chinese folk.

I think that this young Chinese lass has great potential and an outstanding voice. And when she hits those high notes, I just get goosebumps. It’s pretty exceptional, and a real surprise to the song. A real twist. I’ll tell you what.

The first remake… sung by a lady named 阿兰.

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And the “classic version”…

And the classic version that everyone and their grandmother sings to in the KTV. When you watch the other “judges” and the audience look up to the ceiling, open palm their hands, and have that “far away” look in their eyes, it is this guy that they are emulating…

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And it is indeed grand.

The song sung in Hong Kong

Here’s another fellow in Hong Kong. This guy really belts this song out. Check it out. It’s pretty much an attention grabber. It’s two singers 林峯、and 王祖蓝 and they both sing 千里之外.

Now for the BEST version

This is the BEST version, and I just love it. In fact, I think that I like it better than the original, or the KTV versions. It just stands on it’s own. I think that female singer just really makes this version so very, very special.

She is BREATHTAKING.

If you want to download the next file directly click on this button. It is one of my most favorite renditions.

If you don’t, then no problem. Just click on the picture below.

You will also notice the show and the audience. This is all China. And as stupid and crazy as the show appears, this is the normal kind of thing inside of China. With those strange cartoon sounds, the text bubbles that float in the air, and the really strange dressed television hosts. Yup. It’s all China.

Hey!

This gal is a stunner!

Yes. She is breathtaking. I rarely say this about a woman, but in this case, her beauty, her confidence, and her stance is just… well, astounding… and breathtaking.

I just love her strong confidence, and womanly charm.

As I have said, it’s my favorite version.

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Are you tired of this song yet?

I think that I have beaten this dead horse long enough. LOL. I guess that none of the neocons in the Military-Industrial Beltway in Washington DC has ever heard of this song, could care less about the Chinese people and their society, and just want to destroy things so that they can get a new addition to their third mansion.

But that is just my opinion.

Comparisons

We need to compare China with America for some real educational benefit. Let’s take a glimpse at some American Country and Western music…

…and some urban music.

One of my personal favorites… (*.mkv format) is Tim McGraw singing about his plans to get out of the rat-race and get down to a more stable and slower pace of life. I really enjoy this song and what it represents to me. (On a personal basis.)

Music of the American Countryside…

Jen, this video is for you. 

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Music of the American Urban Areas…

This is pretty typical. If not threatening to steal, kill, rape or murder, the gals sing about how tough and strong they are and how invincible their “booty” is.

“It’s a very sassy song, very kind of woman empowerment,” Lopez said in a behind-the-scenes video posted to her YouTube page. “[It’s] kind of giving you taste of what you give out, letting guys know that we’re not going to take any junk."

-Jennifer Lopez flashes her butt in risqué new music video

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I have my own opinions about all this. I guess that music represents the society that it originates from. But I am the outlier.

I am a minority opinion.

The Internet rages on and on about this last video…

Sometimes, a song is so steamy, the only logical next  step is a super-sexy music video. For that, we can thank trailblazers  like Prince and Madonna, who established the right to show a little skin  in music videos like "Kiss" and "Express Yourself." 

MTV deserves its  share of credit—can anybody ever forget their first time watching  t.A.T.u.'s music video for "All The Things She Said"?—but then YouTube  blew up, and suddenly you could watch any steamy music video any time you wanted.  

It became a sort of guilty pleasure, listening to a great song while  watching a hot person do hot-person things like make out with someone  equally good-looking, move their hips like no one was watching, and wear  an outfit so tight you  wonder how they got it on in the first place. 

You could spend hours  watching gorgeous celebrities pour suspiciously watery milk on their  Spandex-bound bodies (we still love you, Fergie!). And, if we're being  honest, we have spent hours watching that (and we still love you, Fergie). 

If I had a choice between the strong woman singing the Chinese song, or J-Lo singing about her empowered butt, I would choose the Chinese Lady (金志文 and 白雪). Not the American gutter trash.

But that is just me.

Chinese Gals

Now, after watching J-Lo promote her booty I have to ask myself if this is what America has become?

And maybe I’m a “little out of it” being inside of China.

Maybe the comment that I have become too distant from what America stands for. Maybe I am not “with it”. That I need to get more in tune with what America represents…

…”democracy”…

Just ask the “Doctor of Democracy” himself, El Bush-Bo’ Limbaugh.

But I don’t stand shoulder to shoulder with the evil psychopaths in Washington DC. I stand with the founders of the United States who believed that the United States must stay a Republic. And that once a “democracy” it will turn into an oligarchy, and in short order, a military empire.

They were right, by the way.

But to be honest, if America stand for people like Mike Pompeo and big booty, I don’t know if I really want to be part of that reality. It’s uh…”yucky” don’t you know.

Actually.

So anyways, here’s a sampling of the chicks that surround me in China. And no, they are not all big, black and stacked with enormous “booty”. They are just average and come in different sizes and shapes, just like they are supposed to. And I am just fine with that. Short, plump, big, thin, robust, or petite. I love them all.

For instance, here’s a tall thin skinny girl…

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I like her, she’s a cutie.

Next up is a “village girl”. We would call her “corn fed” back in rural Pennsylvania. We see her dancing about with her hat, and her arm protectors. Ah. It’s so China.

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Common Chicks

Moving on, let’s check out this chick. She is really a rather common archetype and is the kind of girl that you would meet time and time again in all the adult venues and establishments. She’s cheerful, fun and playful.

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I know, I know, you all want to see more than just pretty girls. Well, I’m going to get on to it. I promise.

This next girl is dancing in a restaurant.

Most restaurants in China have private dining rooms. You just book the room, and you close the door and you eat in peace. It’s everywhere, and depending on the establishment, you can have a bathroom, a television, a tea set up, and a Majong table. You just have to go to the right restaurant, and the cost for the room isn’t all that expensive either. So most people tend to use the rooms than to sit in a big open eating area like you have to endure in the United States.

Check it out…

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Now, I would like to continue with (yet) another girl.

I would say that she is pretty typical. And she really is. I can go to just about any public area and point out tens of girls that look just like her. And see, not all girls in China are all that busty. So don’t get confused. I think she is cute and having fun, and it is that sunny disposition that I just love and can eat up.

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Maybe I should have called this post learning about China by looking at pretty girls part 75, eh?

Parking Garages

I’ve covered this before, but the parking garages in China are beautiful, clean, well-lit, and attractive. And I have mentioned it before, it sure is a drastic contrast to the dungeon-like dark, dingy, dirty, cesspools that Americans use to part their cars in.

Here we have a typical chick dancing inside one of the parking garages that are everywhere.

At a train station

Have any of you guys gone to what constitutes American trains lately? Yeah. I’m talking about Amtrak. And yeah, it’s pretty awful. All the train-stations combine the worst elements of Detroit and the US Post Office. Well… not all of them are like this. Some are nice. Especially the ones near the large Urban Areas.

Amtrak Cincinnati Union Terminal
Amtrak Cincinnati Union Terminal

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Well, I think that American rail is under utilized because of the cultural differences between the USA and China. I have to ask the reader, just how often do you and your friends and family ride American rail?

Well, with the massive network of High Speed Trains in China, The rail is used extensively. It is cheap, clean, well taken cared for, and is often preferable to flying in aircraft. The Chinese rail network is vast.

Here is a cute chick inside a Chinese rail terminal. Yeah, they all (stations that is) kind of look like this, more or less…

In a grocery Store

Here we have a chick dancing inside a small town supermarket. I do like these places and the prices are truly affordable. But don’t expect to get high grade Western food there.

Road Construction

When I lived in PA, that’s Pennsylvania for all you’se guys who aren’t aware of the Pennsylvania slang, the local department of transportation was constantly “fixing” the roads. You would think that the roads would last more than a few months, but then again, the very next season, more millions of dollars needed to be dished out to pay for road construction.

The potholes in PA are a big long-time, on-going, joke.

They’ll never get fixed. It’s just a big ol’ slush fund for the wealthy to siphon money from Pennsylvania taxpayers. But, anyways, I well remember one summer when it too two entire seasons lay down a new bridge. That’s five to six months. A real slow pace, and the disruption of our lives in the local community was horrific.

That’s what happens when you have a nation run by corrupt bankers.

China is a nation of engineers, builders and designers. And it shows. It’s not just two complete 6000 bed, and 10,000 bed hospitals going up in two weeks like what happened in March 2020. It’s everything.

Here’s a bridge going up in one day.

China DOES NOT PLAY.

Chinese Idea of Beauty

It all has to do with the shape of the face. Sure there are numerous characteristics that might mitigate the value of a person’s beauty. However, for the most part, if you are clean, have a good complexion, are pleasant, and have an oval face with strong thick black hair, you will pretty much be considered attractive.

I would say that this next chick has a face that well-represents the Chinese idea of beauty.

Average Life

Here’s just two girls going for a walk in the city.

It’s very common, and this is what it is like. It shouldn’t matter one way or the other, but the Mike Pompeo narrative is that the XinJiang Muslims are terribly repressed within China. That the Chinese people are starving, and hungering for “freedomTM” and “democracyTM” and they can’t wait for the great American military to invade and rescue them!

And the lonely Muslim women are forced to sleep with government officials…!

China forces Uyghur Muslim women to sleep with govt …
https://www.opindia.com/2019/11/china-uyghur...

Nov 08, 2019 · Han Males are sleeping on the same bed as Uyghur Muslim women in China whose male family members, often husbands, are locked up in ‘reeducation camps’ in conformity with a diktat by the Chinese regime, Radio Free Asia (RFA) reported last week. The information comes from government officials who spoke to them on the condition of anonymity.

Really?

You must be brain dead to believe this propagandized bullshit.

.

Oh, by the way. These videos are from Tiktok and WeChat. Both of which was banned by Trump / Pompeo. So if you watch them you are risking a life in prison for …

…I don’t know.

The official reason is “national security”, but when the DOJ asked to prove it the administration came up empty handed. Never the less, if you are an American, you’d better slam your computer shut, and erase everything before a NSA or DHS SWAT team breaks down your door and takes you off for questioning….

Speaking of an average life, here’s two chicks running in Chinese park in the dead of winter.

Improvements to selfies

Many Chinese women like to improve their pictures by adding special effect and other colorful enhancements. I don’t really like them, but then again, I am from the “old school”. I guess to “each their own”…

.

Here’s an article out of the United States in Yahoo! that disagrees with me.

They say that the Chinese ideal is thin with big eyes. Yet they don’s provide any pictures of this ideal, and I can tell you that it is not something found in China. But you can read their opinions yourself here…

Nowhere is this difference more obvious than on Chinese social media, where you won’t find any of the contouring, lip-lining or thighbrows that fill Instagram feeds in the United States. In China, it’s all pale skin, big eyes and rosebud lips.

The fair-skinned standard: There are overlaps in how each  nationality shoots its self-portraits: Chinese girls take photos at an  angle to slim their faces, just like selfie queen Kim Kardashian West recommends.  Chinese women are also influenced not only by their own country’s  ideals but also those of neighboring East Asian countries like Japan and  South Korea, all of which favor slim figures and youthful,  innocent-looking beauty.

Combined with imported Western beauty  ideals like large breasts, these influences have fused to create a very  definite Chinese physical ideal with little wiggle room for women who  fail to meet the standard.

“Chinese beauty ideals basically come  from the media: TV shows, celebrities. A lot of Chinese beauty ideals  are quite Western,” Chinese culture expert Janny Chyn, who provides  cultural immersion tours through her company Shanghai Pathways, told Mic. “The main difference is that we like white skin.”

Many women in China strive to be baifumei: pale,  rich and beautiful (with a heavy emphasis on pale). The ultimate  baifumei is actress Fan Bingbing, adored and emulated for her  translucent white skin, large eyes and “melon seed” (oval-shaped) face.

“There is a strong standard of beauty in China, and it requires you to  be as white as possible, with big eyes,” Thibaud André, consultant at Daxue Consulting in Beijing, told Mic.

Cute wins out over sexy: Flick through Instagram in the U.S. and you’ll likely see a lot of flesh, especially in the summer. Everybody from Kardashian West to Drake  has been known to get a little thirsty on social media. Not so on  Chinese social networks like Weibo, where big eyes, bunny ears and cute  slogans abound. And it’s not just among teenagers.

“The big  difference is that we want to be cute. You will see women pretending to  be teenagers when they are grown-ups,” said Shanghai Pathways' Chyn. 
 
“Pretending to be cute is never offensive. It’s more controversial to be  sexy. If you’re cute, no one can disapprove.”

One Chinese guide to taking selfies says “innocent and cute”  photos will always prove the most popular and are also easy to take.  That means less vamping and less makeup aimed at overt sexiness. While  girls all over the Western world might have been sucking on bottle caps  last year to get Kylie Jenner’s lips, women in China are more likely to underplay this feature, using lighter or coral lipsticks.

This  desire to be cute also manifests itself in big, puffed-out hamster  cheeks, a sweeter alternative to the more overtly seductive “duckface.”

When skinny trumps curves: There’s no denying that Americans feel huge pressure to be skinny, what with 20 million American women  experiencing a clinically significant eating disorder at some time in  their lives. Social media plays its part in promoting skinniness,  glorifying thigh gaps and spreading "fitspo“ slogans. But the recent movement  to embrace plus sizes, along with the popularity of curvier celebrities  like Beyoncé, Nicki Minaj and the Kardashian crew, has brought a bit  more variety to social media that makes space for curves. (See: ”belfies.“)

Chinese  social media, on the other hand, sees the glorification of skinniness  above all else. This has led to a number of selfie trends, including one  challenge  to twist your arm behind your back to touch your belly button and  another to stack coins on your collarbone to demonstrate thinness.

”[Actress]  Angelababy represents the beauty standard right now, super slim,“ said  Daxue Consulting’s André. "All over Weibo, Chinese women are posting  pictures showing how slim and how white they are. That’s definitely a  trend.”
And while America isn’t perfect — a curvy body is still  more celebrated when it includes a slim waist — there is at least some  diversity in the types of bodies deemed attractive.

“Americans  prefer a fit body, a fit figure. It doesn’t need to be skinny, it  doesn’t need to be chubby but it needs to be fit and healthy looking… In  China I only hear, ‘Girls should have really thin bodies,’” said one  participant in an Asian Beauty Secrets video about American vs. Chinese beauty standards.

Who needs makeup when you can digitally edit your selfies? Selfie trends like contouring and strobing have changed what products many American women have in their makeup bags, as we prioritize looking “camera ready.”

Not  so in China. Although the cosmetics market is growing, women there  still wear far less makeup than girls in the states, according to André.  There’s little need for special selfie-ready makeup when you can use  apps to change what you look like instead.

“Our selfies are very  high-tech,” Chyn said. The functions on Photoshop-like apps lay users’  beauty desires bare: The most popular Chinese beauty app, Meitu Xiuxiu,  allows you to whiten your skin, slim your face and make your eyes  impossibly huge. By contrast, Facetune, an app used by Tyra Banks, focuses on whitening your teeth, smoothing out skin and applying more makeup.

Understanding  the pressures women elsewhere face might be just the thing to make us  examine where our own beauty ideals come from. Maybe we’ll even put down  the bronzer, delete the Photoshop app and face the world as we really  are. Just maybe.

Ahhhh

The “news” out of America is about 80% bullshit, 10% truth, and 10% out of the “outer limits”.

I have yet to find even ONE armpit selfie in China, and I have been looking!

This reminds me of an event while I was in university. Friday was designated as “wear jeans if you agree with LGBT rights” day. Well, since I and about 90% of everyone else in the university ONLY had jeans, we were left with two options; [1] wear the jeans or [2] stay home and miss class. Most, like myself, came to class wearing jeans.

It had nothing to do with anything else.

I think that most Chinese Goth folk are taking selfies because they are human, and it’s a thing that everyone is doing. Not that they are trying to “protest” the “evil communist tyrants”. Or whatever the Mike Pompeo narrative is today.

Gyms in China

Yup. China has gyms and the rates are pretty reasonable. The only thing that I do not like is that they tend not to be air conditioned. That is because the Chinese believe that you need to sweat to get rid of the bad chi (energy) inside of you.

While people are realizing the importance of sport for health and better  appearance, fitness industry is also booming in China in recent years.  More and more people become members of fitness studios  and the fitness apps are being used everywhere. 

With the technology  development and the changing lifestyle of consumers, the fitness  industry also needs to work on new concepts to adjust people’s needs for  fitness in the future. Fitness industry in China was facing transformation. 

Instead of working  out in gyms and fitness studios, nowadays fitness can take place  everywhere. Due to the high penetration rate of smartphones in China, fitness apps are well used  by fitness enthusiasts. People can easily get fitness tips, find  fitness studios and get connected with other fitness enthusiasts and  professional trainers with apps in their smartphones. 

According to rough estimation, there were nearly 100,000 fitness studios  in China. Most of them were opened in bigger cities.  Beijing and Shanghai are the Chinese cities with the biggest market for  fitness studios. 

Fitness studios with innovated concepts are also first  introduced to these two metropolises. 

To be noticed is that the numbers  of fitness studios in second-tier cities are growing faster.  Considering the brands and types of fitness studios, the Chinese market  has showed a great variety. 

While the big chains owning hundreds of  studios are still expanding, the smaller boutique studios which focus on  more individual personal training for certain groups are becoming  increasingly popular. And people are apparently willing to spend more in these boutique studios. 

With the growth of the fitness market, the consumption of high-tech  sportwear and wearable devices are also expected to grow. 

Fitness  studios with high-tech apparatus might also be more competitive in the  market, while the less qualified trainers are facing the pressure from  their customers who can get professional information from various  channels. The future of fitness industry should be a cooperative  competition of various industries and sectors with more highly  personalized and individual offers. 

-   Fitness industry in China - statistics & facts | Statista                                         

Chinese Beaches.

If you perform a google search about beaches, or swimming in China you will see these images of hordes of people all crammed together. It’s actually funny. that’s not the way it is at all. It is the narrative that the American government wants people to think. But not the way it really is.

The Chinese beach lie.
The American view of Chinese Beaches. Pretty crowded and impossible right?

.

So what is it really like?

Well, I have a house on the beach. And every day I see it, watch the sun rise and the sun set on it and watch the people come and go on it. And NOT ONCE did it ever resemble what you might find on the American websites, search engines or “news” articles.

Here’s some images of what Chinese beaches look like. It’s the real deal, you-all.

.

And here is another young lass… She’s a bit on the thin leggy side, but you know, isn’t she attractive though? Look at that smile. I love her confidence. Smile (check). Confidence (check). Beach (check). Small bikini (check, check, check).

Dance Class

Dancing is very popular in China. Perhaps the biggest “craze(s)” lies in the styles related to “Spanish Samba” and K-Pop. In my office building on my floor (were) two K-pop dance troops and one Samba studio. Making my floor about 50% devoted to dancing with pretty girls of all ages.

.

The girls above seem to be middle school age. My guess.

Forward Thinking

Global Times editorial celebrates moon mission and poverty elimination, a tandem neither the Outlaw US Empire nor any other nation has achieved. The key as ever is balance:
 
"For a long time, some people believe China has not done enough to  balance these developments. Voices have existed that China invested  excessive resources to fields such as aerospace. Despite difficulties,  compared to other countries, China has tried its best to reach a balance  and has achieved positive results.
 
"Since China implemented the reform and opening-up policy, the most  prominent and well-known national goal has been achieving a moderately  prosperous society. People's livelihood and fairness and justice have  always been the focus of attention in Chinese society. A  technology-centered national strategy and people-oriented economic  development have highly integrated. 
 
"In the past few decades, the Chinese people have been developing the  aerospace field, but their livelihood has also been improving. The  lunar exploration project is not a political vanity project - it is well  within the ability of Chinese society.
 
"The progress in high-tech areas such as aerospace has pushed up  China's strategic competitiveness overall. At the same time, people are  living better lives. Without the advancement in high-tech areas, China's  prosperity would lack the backbone and long-term guarantee....
 
"China has long implemented a market economy, but has maintained  the guiding role of the government. This prevents our market economy  from repeating and hovering at a low level, and also prevents us from  being satisfied with the low-end prosperity of the global value chain.  The Chinese nation's self-motivated spirit continues to release  momentum, successfully supported by the country's system. Thus, we can  move forward in a balanced manner and with a clear sense of direction."  [My Emphasis]
 
This same methodology can be seen in Putin's governance and also  glaringly absent from all Neoliberal driven nations, which partially  explains their problems. I'm going to single-out this one sentence from  the concluding paragraph for it admits a truth no Neoliberal nation has  even acknowledged:
 
"There are unlimited possibilities in space, and most resources that support the human being's future development must be outside the Earth." [My Emphasis] 
 
I know of no major nation that has admitted directly or through its  main media voice that the earth is finite with a limited amount of  resources that will govern the overall degree of potential development.  For me, that means China has admitted to itself that at some future  point there'll be a requirement to shift to a steady-state type of  political-economy for all nations and thus the world. 

That's a far more  advanced view of economics from the Neoliberal model that doesn't admit  to scarce resources or that there's a limit--a Junk, unrealistic model  to be sure. 

Classrooms

School is much more intense in China than it is in America. For starters, all the children must learn English AND Chinese. Their classes are very regimented, and success is mandated by culture. If they want to be an individual and “go their own way”, it is not permitted. they must work as a team, be a team player and do their best. Failure is not an option.

Final comments

What the American (and British) media presents as “China” has very little resemblance to what it actually is.

Pompeo unloads on US universities for China ties
https://apnews.com/article/technology-mike-pompeo...

Dec 09, 2020 · Pompeo took aim at universities across the U.S., claiming they refused to address the Trump administration’s concerns about China’s attempts to influence students and academics. He specifically called out the president of MIT, alleging he refused to host Pompeo’s speech, and a senior official at the University of Washington over a case ...

And…

Exclusive -- Mike Pompeo: China Infiltrating Our ...
https://www.breitbart.com/radio/2020/12/14/mike...

Dec 14, 2020 · In September, Pompeo  said he was “hopeful” that branches of the Confucius Institute — an  organization run by the Chinese government — across America’s colleges  and universities would be closed by the end of 2020. The Trump  administration designated the Confucius Institute’s programs as foreign  missions of the Chinese Communist Party.. China is a greater threat than Russia in the ...

And…

Pompeo vows tough U.S. stance on China but is open to talks
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/21/pompeo-vows-to...


Aug 21, 2020 · Pompeo said the Trump administration is open to talks with Beijing but the U.S. would maintain its tough stance. “President Trump is serious about protecting our information, our networks and ...

China is depicted as an evil, dirty, corrupt, tyrannical “regime”. When in reality it is a single-party, social democracy based on Confucian values and traditional culture. Over the last four decades the nation has worked hard to make China what it is today, and what it is…

…is really astounding. It is a middle class neighborhood populated with hard-working, intelligent people. They are fiercely patriotic, almost hysterically so, and all the nonsense from (former) President Trump and his side kick Mike Pompeo are all lies.

Pompeo blasts China for suppressing coronavirus ...
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/pompeo-blasts...

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo laid harsh blame on China on Sunday for engaging in what he called a “classic Communist disinformation effort” and for working “to make …

As a sanity check, here is a video of the the events in China during 2020.

As you watch the three minute video can you identify which items that you are aware of from the Western news media?

Go ahead, watch and count the number of events that the American and British “news” media reported on…

Do you want more?

I have more post like this in my China Index and all the sub-indexes.

China

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A very Metallicaman Merry Christmas!

I have written about Christmas before, don’t you know. I wrote about Christmas in China HERE. And you all might want to visit it and see what Christmas is like in China. And I have other Christmas themed posts as well. But this post will be about me offering you, the reader a very MERRY Christmas. And it won’t be much more than that.

When I grew up in the States, Christmas was a month-long event. It began after “black Friday” and continued to about one week past New Years. At that time the Christmas tree was taken down, and the decorations were removed, the food was all either eaten up or thrown out, and we all would settle in for the Winter months.

December was the month of long lunches with co-workers. Always involving alcohol. Also this was the time when frozen hams or turkeys were handed out. The company would buy them in bulk at bargain basement prices and hand them out to the employees as a token of “appreciation”.

This was also the time when the President would send out signed Christmas cards to every employee. But you know it really wasn’t his signature. My department was once told to sign a stack of 6000 cards for the President to mail out to all the workers. So we did, and over time our signatures got sloppier and sloppier. LOL.

December was quite the month for certain.

Typically, folk would leave for lunch around noon, and get back around four, pretty much sloshed. We would then try to pretend to work, while our bosses would close their office doors and take a nap. Obviously, work was only completed in the morning hours.

Merry Christmas. A vintage view.
Office Workers would take time off to shop in the afternoon before coming home to work.

.

All through the month of December, the “white collar” staff would take time off to go shopping during the normal working hours. It was pretty much a normal occurrence, and everyone did this. Just as long as you didn’t abuse this privilege, it was one of the “perks” of being an “office worker”.

So, if you all could imagine what it was like, imagine the afternoon with everyone sitting at their desks, sloshed. Smoking cigarettes in their company ashtrays and imbibing on some of the many, many home-make Christmas cookies donated (for the cause) and sampling the many kinds of dips and chips lying about. Heck! It was an often abused event, when people from one department would sneak into another department to grab some delicious dip and chips.

Fun times!

Typical Christmas dip.
Christmas was the time when many people would bring in “home made” snacking masterpieces. Some of my favorites were peanut-butter and marshmallow dips, wrapped bacon mini-hotdogs, and those jello molds with tiny orange slices.

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The Christmas Bonus

One of the big conversation pieces revolved around the size of the Christmas bonus that we would get. People would tell stories about what they did with the last year’s bonus. And what they planned to do with this years bonus. Typically the bonuses would either be given out during the Christmas Party, or at the end of the day right before Christmas.

Most people tended to spend it on something big an lavish. It might be a down payment on a new car, an addition to their house, a planned swimming pool, or a vacation to interesting and sunny locations. By the time I started working, the idea of Christmas bonuses were begin phased out all over America. But, instead, we were promised generous sick days, and lenient extended vacation days to make up for the shortfall.

So many fun, but terribly embarrassing moments befell the employees.
Christmas was always a “hoot” in the office.

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Bonuses tended to equal one months pay. Which is WHY most companies calculated salary based on a 13 month year. Bet that you didn’t know that, did you?

From the festive celebrations to the time away from the office, there’s plenty that your employees look forward to about the end of the calendar year.

But, the one thing that likely tops their lists? A year-end bonus.

Nearly 80% of employers hand out a bonus to employees at this time—making it something that most employees not only appreciate, but expect.

And, while your staff is sure to be all smiles when you present them with a year-end reward, making the effort to provide bonuses on top of the usual payroll has some benefits for you as well. Fifty-four percent of employees state that they prefer monetary bonuses, and they would be willing to change jobs in order to receive that benefit.

-Quickbooks

Anyways, everyone tended to chat about bonuses and television shows. Back in the 1970’s and 1980’s the big shows pretty much dominated the conversation. MASH was always a favorite, as was “The Golden Girls”. And yes, we would talk about these things while at work. It’s what real humans do.

Office parties during Christmas was always fun.
Office parties during Christmas was always fun.

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Most companies, back in the 1970’s and 1980’s, held two Christmas parties. There was one “big” party, that was usually held in a local banquet hall or hotel. And one was a local party for the staff in any given department. Those local department parties were the stuff of legends. I’ll tell you what.

Local Department Parties

These local department parties might be on a Friday evening, where the boss would bring in a case of hard alcohols, and the secretaries would bring in some snacks and munchies. All paid out of the department budget especially reserved for this occasion. Typically, a table would be set up for the foods, snacks, and booze. Sometimes people might wear some stupid party hats. But that seemed to disappear in the 1980’s.

Typically the primary function of the party was to start drinking early on, then have a meal buffet style, and rounded out with some stupid games or a “mystery Santa”, some puzzles or skits, and then closure with handing out the yearly Christmas bonuses. Everyone would be smoking and drinking. Chatting up a storm about sports, television or the work “war stories” and then everyone would pretty much break for home by 9 or 10 pm.

Company party.
Company party – “in the day”.

In all my recollections, while the ladies might limit the numbers of mixed cocktails that they drank, everyone drank alcohol. If you refused to drink, you would label yourself as an outcast.

The idea was to really get everyone “shit faced drunk”, lower your inhibitions, and have fun. In those days, before the mainsteaming of busy-bodies and their ideas of a perfectionist utopia mandated by law, it was considered important for people to bond free of social inhibitions.

Oh my friends we're older but no wiser. 
For in our hearts the dreams are still the same. 
Those were the days my friend. 
We thought they'd never end. 
We'd sing and dance forever and a day. 
We'd live the life we choose. 
We'd fight and never lose. 
For we were young and sure to have our way. La la la la la la.

-The 5th Dimension - Those Were The Days Lyrics | AZLyrics.com

The alcohol was all high quality, and expensive shit too. None of that “average” stuff. If you are going to a Company Christmas party, you can expect to drink the best, and the Department Managers would typically contribute to this from their own home stocks.

In those days we also had "free standing" ashtrays. They typically sat upon a metal stand and when you and your friends were smoking, you would move the piece next to you.
In those days we also had “free standing” ashtrays. They typically sat upon a metal stand and when you and your friends were smoking, you would move the piece next to you.

.

Of course music would be provided. Often it was just Christmas music, and played loud enough to provide atmosphere, but not so loud that you all couldn’t carry on a conversation with. The boss might hand out cigars, and there was always the obligatory visit from the President or the Vice President (the manager’s manager) who would stop by, have a drink and congratulate everyone and hand the manager the Christmas bonuses for him to distribute right then and there.

This was to prevent bad bosses from surreptitiously stealing the cash out of the employees bonus envelopes. 

Nope, the bonuses were not in the form of checks. It was in the form of cash. 

Indeed, it was usually in the form of hard cold cash. And i think part of this reason was to show gratitude and "special-ness". After-all, how often does a person get a stack of one hundred dollar bills?  

So yeah. It wasn't in the form of checks. It wasn't until the 1990's when everyone started to phase out hard cash bonuses.

Now, of course, once the bonuses were handed out, and all that, it pretty much signaled the time for everyone to leave. I would guess that about fifteen minutes to one hour afterwards, the staff would slowly leave in clumps and clusters. Everyone would help everyone else (being drunk and all) get into their cars. If someone was too drunk to drive, they would be driven home instead. And if, for some reason, someone or a couple of people needed to stay there, the company would provide them a hotel for the night.

Office Santa.
Often, a co-worker would dress up like Santa Claus and have the secretaries sit on his lap and tell him their deepest desires. LOL.

Arriving Home

We would leave the office, drive home (drunk) and arrive safely. I only know of one accident that ever happened after a party. She wasn’t killed, but her car was smashed up, and she spent a week in the hospital. Obviously the fears of HR do have some weight. But not at the expense of creating a sterile no-fun environment.

But we would tend to drive home. And we would arrive and greet our families. Many of whom were past their normal meal times and who were off studying, watching television, or doing their own personal hobbies and activities. Since this is Christmas, the tree would be lit up (as well as all the house decorations), creating a nice warm and cozy atmosphere for us to arrive home to. And of course, the first thing that the wife would ask was “how big was the bonus this year?”

Arriving home.
Often that man would come home from the Company Party and would be greeted by his adoring family and the warmth of their warm house and hearth.

Elsewhere…

Sometimes the men (or ladies) would break off and meet at another venue outside of work before going straight home. The argument of “the night is still young” probably comes from this kind of situation. Often they would leave the company parking lot, only to drive four or five blocks over to a favorite lounge or bar for a few “night toppers” don’t you know.

It’s difficult to find a decent lounge today. But back in the day it was more like an American version of a British pub. It would have an array of sofas, comfortable chairs, fine areas to converse, smoke cigarettes, play cards and just drink with your friends. And at this time, the lounge might be packed and filled with a low hanging cloud of cigarette smoke that would waft and hang there like a blue haze.

Cocktail lounge.
Cocktail Lounge.

.

These were always fine establishments to head out to and hang out at. Most people might close out and head home around midnight, but others would linger until the “wee hours” of the morning.

Where are these lounges today?

Why aren’t there any more Christmas parties (in the United States) any longer?

What is going on with the HR telling you that you cannot smoke, you cannot drink, and you cannot have fun on your off-hours? I mean, people!, WTF?

Where did things go “off the rails”…

Money

The United States has become a place where everything has been co-opted by a military run money-making machine. The citizens, all are reduced, to what is nothing more than medieval serfs working on subsistence wages to service an enormous military-industrial machine that supports global “police actions”. To keep the citizenry in check, a local military is used which is called the DHS (The Department of Homeland Security). If it does not serve the military-industrial machine, then it is liable to prosecution… anything outside of the “normal” is to be avoided least one get entangled in legal battles.

party harty.
It does not serve the “machine” for the serfs / working class to get out of control. The first thing that might happen is that they start to think for themselves, and then after that they might question their life, and their role in it.

.

Too harsh?

Religion

Ok, then try this angle. Society has changed. Fun is now outlawed. This is because the Bible says that people have to be of a high quality to “witness” to others. That means no vices, a near saint-like presence, and an active effort to spread the word of God. Whether that is door to door with a bible, or obliterating the nations that do not follow the word of God; like Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, and China.

For the children.
People (adults) drinking and smoking might be a bad influence on the children. Americans must be forever banned from smoking or drinking…for the children!

.

Still to harsh?

SEX

Try this angle. When you are with others celebrating the holidays people tend to relax. they lower their inhibitions. When people of the opposite sex lower their inhibitions, they tend to want to have sexual intercourse. By limiting all aspects of social interaction, the government (in this case, via businesses) can curtail the fun and freedom aspects of gender interaction.

Christmas surprise.
Christmas is a time to loosen up, have some fun, and spend time with those that you care about. Check out this Christmas surprise.

Remember boys and girls. The way for the 1%, the PTB, the oligarchy controls people is through “vices”. Vices are natural biological processes that are very popular. By limiting the access to these vices, governments control people. All you need to do is notice the government reactions to control popular pastimes, and systems in support of that.

Real Freedom is the ability to have fun.

Actually, it all boils down to sentience. Those with a service-to-self sentience end up collecting riches and with that comes power. They use that power to collect even more power, and as a result they lord over other sentience’s. Service-to-others sentience then is at a natural disadvantage. The two sentiences cannot co-exist.

What we are witnessing is the physical manifestation of the power projection between the two primary sentience’s on this earth and within this reality. And this story about the loss of freedom to have parties at work is one such manifestation.

Or…

To put it another way…

Your owners do not want you wasting your energies, thoughts, and creative abilities on anything that might “take away” from your labors from their interests.

And to that, I say…

Fooey!

Live life. You are in control of it. So live it and live it well. Do things you own way, with those that you care about, on your time schedule and in the way that matters to you. And if others don’t “get it” well, fuck them. That’s their problem.

Your life.
It’s YOUR life. Live it well!

.

And I know…

I know that many won’t understand. That hey might think… well, what would they think? And does it really matter? We are all living our own different realities and the ways that feel best for us personally. And so if someone doesn’t like what we are doing, or how we are doing it, I say FUCK them.

Life is far too short to care about others that lie outside your immediate circle of friends and family. Concentrate only on those that matter to you, and if you put your pets before say a cousin, that is your decision and it is ok. Why? It is because it is your life. Do what is important for you.

And start now.

Start at Christmas.

Spend time with your loved ones.
Spend time with those that you care about.

Yes, things have changed…

Yes. I know that things have changed. That you have to abide by all sorts of diversity quotas, behavioral shackles, rules and regulations from state and local requirements to insurance issues, to local law enforcement requirements. But even so…

WHO says that you need to obey them?

Really. Seriously. So what? What is the worst thing that is going to happen if you want to take your staff out to a bar after work hours for a few drinks? What if your department budget no longer allocates money for recreation or “team building”? What’s stopping you for doing it yourself, on your own time, with your own money?

What’s stopping you?

Fear?

Celebrate Christmas your style.
Don’t be afraid to celebrate Christmas in your own way, and in your own manner. Life is too short waiting for group approval. You just go ahead and do things your way and at your speed.

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Yes. I know everyone is different.

So what? Being different is good. No, I take that back. Being different is GREAT. It is what adds color to our lives, and passion to our experiences. It’s the wonderful aroma when bacon is cooking in the skillet, and the wonderful feeling when you take your first sip of icy cold beer after a really bad day at work.

So don’t hold back.

Be yourselves.

And embrace who you are and your own uniqueness. I mean that. I really, honestly do. And no matter what others might think of you, your lifestyle, your behaviors or your taste in music, in all events BE YOURSELF.

It’s an element of what Christmas is.

Celebrate Christmas your style.
Celebrate Christmas in your own personal style.

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Oh?

What?

You don’t think that I am serious. Oh Noooo! I am very, very serious. You MUST be who you are and you MUST share that reality with those that you care about. This remains true whether they accept that reality or not. And no it doesn’t necessarily mean that you will get drunk at a work party. It might mean anything.

But it means the freedom to be ourselves surrounded by those that we love and who loves us for EXACTLY WHO WE ARE right now.

Be who you are.
Be who you are.

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Strange posting from Metallicman

Yes. I get that a lot.

Why aren’t I railing about the “issues of the day”? Why aren’t I all that concerned about the Fourth Turning, and the SHTF, and the post-election shit-storm and all the myriad of issues that seem to intrude in my daily news feed? Why not?

  • The train is moving full speed to the end of the line. There’s nothing that I can do about it.
  • The Oligarchy, the PTB, the 1%, the Jews, or what ever enemy du Jour you want to assign this current world-line to, well it’s also out of my hands. You just recognize what is going on and step out of the way.
  • Work rules and regulations come and go with the human condition. What we have now is but a fleeting moment in time. Embrace it.
  • And if this world line is going to opt for the MAD level fiasco, well, I’ll perform a deep slide and get the fuck out of here. Maybe you all should consider that as well.

And if you don’t understand, well then, pour yourself a nice cocktail and forget about it. You need to relax. American have become so fucking uptight over the last few decade. When they arrive here in China they look bewildered and out of sorts. Like they are trying to find some kinds of stability or familiarity that they can hold on to.

Just celebrate Christmas.

Celebrate your way

Do it YOUR way.

Christmas Nativity Scene.
(Minimalist) Christmas Nativity Scene

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And if you don’t…

If you don’t take some friends, some co-workers, some family out to a meal, or a beer, or just a cup of coffee then you are a sorry, sorry excuse for a person. It’s the relationships with others that define our value. You have no relationships, then you have no value. Simple stuff. Easy to understand. Yet…

What the fuck is wrong with you all?

You don’t need to buy a lot of expensive presents. You don’t need to get shit faced drunk. You don’t need to ask permission. You don’t need to plan for a big event. You don’t need to order a cake.

You just need to be there.

Be unique.
Be unique.

.

Some ideas…

  • Stop over to your grandparents unexpectedly. Say hi. Tell them that you want to look over some old picture albums if they don’t mind. Or barring that, just have a cup of coffee, and maybe watch a television show with them.
  • Call your brother, or sister and tell them that you remembered about the time when XXXXXXX and you were thinking about that time and just wanted to say hi.
  • Call up a friend and say hi, and go out for a beer. You pay. It’s your treat.

It need not be extensive, expensive or exclusive. You just need to contribute your time. If you cannot. If you cannot give some of your time up for those that you care about, then what the fuck are you doing with your life? It’s those in our lives that make it worth while and who helps and stands by us when the times are low and we need to know that we are not alone, and that these people care about us.

Go crazy.
Christmas is the time to go wild. Let it all hang out.

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My friend Marcus didn’t know that. He thought that he was alone. He thought that people didn’t understand him. He thought that he was a failure. But that was all wrong-headed thinking. He wasn’t a loser. He wasn’t alone. And he wasn’t a failure.

He was just different.

And that difference made him special in our minds. And to this day, I greatly lament that he is no longer here. And yeah, even though I saw him rarely (being at the other end of the globe and all) I still wish that he could have said “MM I’m going through some shit right now, can I crash at your house for a month? I won’t be a bother. I just need some time”

And while my wife might have a fit, I would say “Yeah. I’d be happy to host you. We have an empty 2nd and third bedroom. Just come and we will sort out everything when you arrive.”

That’s what friends do.

That’s EXACTLY what friends do.

Expereince life.
Don’t let the world pass you by. Start enjoying the moment. Stop having your head buried in an APP, a game or social media. Experience life.

.

It’s a shit load better than the alternative. No shit. It’s better than the alternative; the reality of what actually happened. Instead of lying nude in his bed and blowing his brains out.

So now, it’s Christmas. Are you all gonna follow the herd? Or are you going to spend time with friends and family? Are you going to bond with co-workers? Are you going to be a substantive person? Are you going to make a difference in this world? Or are you going to continue to be a passenger?

Do things your way.

Define your life by your actions now.

Use Christmas as your springboard.

You are in control.
You are in control of your life. Act like it.

Final words

Merry Christmas. Don’t be afraid about being called into HR for saying it either. Be who you are. Be proud, and define life on YOUR TERMS. start now.

Merry Christmas!

And if HR gives you some shit over it, tell them that Christmas is a Chinese holiday and you are just celebrating it because you are part Chinese.

…And if they look at you like you are fucked in the head, show them THIS post.

Remind them that Federal law prevents and prohibits discrimination against your religion and speech. It’s first amendment, baby!

Tell them to stop being so niggardly.

niggardly
[ˈniɡərdlē]

ADJECTIVE
not generous; stingy.
"serving out the rations with a niggardly hand"

synonyms:
miserly · parsimonious · close-fisted · penny-pinching · cheeseparing · [more]
Merry Christmas.
Merry Christmas.

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Oh…

One last thing.

How is Metallicman celebrating Christmas this year 2020?

Like this, you all. Like this…

Merry Christmas.
Metallicman celebrates Christmas.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Life and Happiness Index here…

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To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

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A 1970’s nostalgia post. Good times, great memories, and some surprising remembrances. (part 1)

December 2020 is almost upon us. This entire year has been shit, and I want to gallop away from it as fast as my two legs can carry me. I tire of the SHTF stuff about the United States and all the Trade stuff regarding China and international Geo-political issues. Instead, I just want to munch, chill and cozy up with some wine and a loved one. (Rent-a-loved one, a much beloved pet, or a favorite family members are all acceptable.)

I have been musing about how different things are today than they were when I was a young ‘un. And indeed, it does seem that time has completely rewrote reality. Whether it is my experiences in hopping crazy world-lines, or that the world has indeed moved on, who actually knows? I don’t. Not really, and I really don’t wanna think about it any more. One thing for certain is that it sure is different.

Queen – Bohemian Rhapsody

Here, I want to chat about some of the things that I “miss” from my past. Well, nope “miss” isn’t exactly the right word. Say, “muse about”. You know change is a part of life, and good change is wonderful and bad change isn’t all that great. Truth this. And don’t tell me that you don’t agree.

Here’s one thing everybody who was alive during the 1970s can agree on: The entire decade still feels like it only happened yesterday. Seriously, how can the ’70s be five decades in the past? Really?

It’s just not possible that the era ruled by bell-bottom jeans and 8-track cassettes was half a century ago. For those of us who lived through it—and survived that groovy yet perilous time—it will forever be a part of our souls. That and the roach burns in our jeans, the stain of bong water on our shag carpets, and the earth shoes in our closets. Let go to the max! and realize that not everyone reading this is a space cadet. Some might be out to lunch, but you know, it’s all cool beans!

So take a chill pill, and I’ll give you the skinny on what’s going on. Who knows? Maybe I’ll catch you on the flip side.

Waiting for the phone

Having a phone full of APPs where you can call anyone, at any time, and share Social media did not exist and was unheard of. It was Science Fiction. For us, our telephones were hard-wired to the house. And that was that.

Answering the phone.
A scene from the televisions show “The Brady Bunch”. Having cords attached to the house when dealing with telephones was a normal event.

Everybody in the ’70s had just one phone in their house. It was a rotary phone that stayed in some central location, with a cord that could only be stretched so far. If someone was on that phone, you just had to sit and wait for them to finish. Family members hogging the phone were the cause of many sibling battles during this era. And I would have to say that the leading culprits were the young high school females in the household.

Telephones have come a long way from the ‘60s and ‘70s. Most homes back then only had one phone for the entire family whether there were three people or twelve people. That’s right… people had to get in line to get on the line! It wasn’t uncommon for the cord to be stretched out of shape since the user could only hope for privacy by getting as far away from the other family members as possible.

Pretending to be “bionic”

No body ever does this today. But, back in the day, it was a “thing”.

The Six Million Dollar Man.

If you truly are a ’70s kid, we don’t need to explain what’s involved in pretending you’re bionic. But for those who aren’t, you simply start running in slow motion, and then you make a sound with your tongue that sounds vaguely robotic. Decades after The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman were canceled, trying to imitate Steve Austin or Jaime Sommers still makes us feel powerful.

Today, if they tried to remake this series it would be called “The 6 Trillion Dollar Person”.

Playing Simon

This game came out as I was entering University. At that time I was heavily into beer, and girls. But my younger brothers and sisters were addicted to this little piece of electronic wizardry.

Simon.

So simple, and yet so addictive. When this electronic game came out in 1978, every kid had to have one. The gameplay wasn’t too involved—you just had to tap on the right series of four colored buttons to repeat a sound pattern—but we played it with the intensity and focus that kids play Fortnite today.

Gas station lines

At the time of the “Oil Crisis”, my father was commuting a three hour drive back and forth from our home to his new job. The petrol-political situation just made everything tougher. And I well remember having to ride to the gas station and collect all sorts of plastic containers of gas that I would fill up and then siphon back into my dads car.

Did you know that the thick PE containers would crack if you stored gasoline in them in sub-zero temperatures? Guess how I found out? Yeah. Let me tell youse guys icy below freezing gasoline at -20F is still liquid and freezes the cockles of your mouth.

Long car lines at a gas station.
Terrible national management brought this disaster to the door-steps of America.

The 1973 oil crisis (and the second oil crisis a few years thereafter) caused a nationwide panic resulting in around-the-block gas station lines that never seemed to move. Some stations even started posting color-coded flags: Green indicated they still had gas, while red alerted customers that they were out. Every car trip you took with your family in the ’70s felt like it might be your last.

Boogie life! Roller disco parties

Don’t laugh. Whether you lived in the city or in the country, there were always parties at the local roller rink. They installed flashing strobe lights, a DJ, some neon, and before you knew it, we were all boogieing on down!

Boogie boogie!
Party on! So very groovy!

All the fun of a discothèque with the extra awkwardness of having wheels on your feet. We might all remember these parties fondly, but it’s a miracle we didn’t break any bones trying to dance along to a Bee Gees song while skating at frightening speeds.

Love Train

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Teenagers at the time, just like now, couldn’t get enough of their favorite artists including Led Zeppelin, Kiss, Pink Floyd, The Rolling Stones and Aerosmith just to name a few. All bets were off though at the roller rink. When the lights went down low and the sparkling disco ball shined on the wooden floor, tacky organ music was just fine!

After getting inside the roller rink, the next thing to do was to go stand in another line to get a pair of skates. Of course, to use a pair of skates that belong to the rink, you had to turn your own shoes in as place holders for the borrowed skates. You got your street shoes back only when the skates were returned. I can still see the wooden wheels and smell the disinfectant spray used on the skates between sessions.

We roller-boogied everywhere. And when we did it on the street, we wore appropriate attire, don’t you know. Such as this…

Boogie life!
Ready to boogie!

Yikes!

“Free skate” time was awesome. Everyone would go around and around that floor. It was a time to show off your cool moves. The fancy skaters whizzed, by skating backwards, leaving you in their dust. The skaters with extraordinary skills would show off their abilities in the center of the rink. They were the ones that had their own skates and didn’t use the rented ones. Often, they would stroll into the rink with their skates hanging around their necks like a piece of jewelry.

Roller Skate Rentals

Ai! Now this is something you don’t see any more…

Boogie outside!
Rollerskate Rentals.

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By the end of the evening, the borrowed roller skates were sweaty and had caused at least one blister on the skater’s feet. That was just part of the deal. A person knew when they got there that they would get that blister. Hopefully, it would heal in time for the following weekend.

After taking off the roller skates and putting your own shoes back on, it took a few minutes to get your legs used to being off of the skates. It was a weird feeling being 2 inches shorter, although that’s how tall you were when you got there. It is something everyone should experience at least once.

The 70’s really were a time like no other.

Coveting an Atari video game console

 Atari console
Atari console

No, you may not have owned an Atari console during the ’70s, but at the very least you knew somebody who did and you made sure to do everything in your power to win their friendship. The very idea of playing video games in the comfort of our own homes without ever worrying if we had enough quarters seemed unfathomably futuristic.

Annoying (or being annoyed by) your sibling on road trips

I don’t know if this happens or not. In the days before electronic media, all that you could do when you were trapped inside an automobile is either listen to the AM radio or pester the heck of your siblings.

A Brady Bunch Living Room.

But that didn’t stop you from going on road trips! When a family piled into the station wagon for a long trek across the country in the ’70s, kids didn’t have the distractions they enjoy today.

There were no iPads or smartphones to keep us occupied. The only way to pass the time was to see how much we could torture our brother or sister sitting in the backseat with us. It was either annoy or be annoyed, the latter of which required constantly demanding justice from your oblivious parents trying to ignore you both in the front seat.

Waiting until Saturday for cartoons

Well, this isn’t exactly true. There were after-school cartoons that we would watch. Namely “The Flintstones”. But for a real marathon of cartoon gluttony, it’s Saturday Morning non-stop comic-thon.

The Flintstones.
All I can say is “Yabba Dabba Doo!”.

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If you wanted to watch Bugs Bunny or Fred Flintstone or any of your favorite cartoon characters, you had only one chance to catch them—Saturday morning. If you missed it, you missed it, and those precious few hours of animated bliss were gone forever (or at least until the next Saturday). It taught us important lessons about delayed gratification. It just wasn’t possible back then to see every cartoon ever made with the press of a button.

The Watergate hearings

It was a simpler time. President Nixon was impeached for erasing 18.5 minutes of personal tapes. Today, the government vacuums up every item of your life in 3D, indexes it, and sells it off to the highest bidder, and then bills you for it in the form of higher taxes.

President Nixon.
President Nixon, remember him?

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Even if you didn’t give a hoot about politics, everyone was at least vaguely aware that something bad was happening in Washington. It was the topic of every dinner party conversation, and the evening news reported each new detail like the Watergate scandal might very well be the downfall of democracy.

Seeing the disgraced Richard Nixon leave the White House forever (with his iconic two handed peace symbol hand wave) and get into a helicopter was one of the most unforgettably surreal moments of TV viewing for just about everybody in the country in the ’70s.

Living in a world without Darth Vader

Darth Vader.
Darth Vader.

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The ’70s was the last decade when a person could wake up one day having no idea who Darth Vader was—and by dinner that night their head would be spinning with thoughts of the Dark Side and black helmets and lightsabers. The world was suddenly divided between “before Star Wars” and “after Star Wars,” and nothing would be the same for us again.

Suddenly true and real “evil” stopped being Hitler and his evil Nazi horde, and it became a large Empire. One with tentacles in everyone’s business, in every corner of the known world, and one led by indescribably evil people.

Being oblivious to “stranger danger”

In the 1970’s we were innocents. We lived life, and while there were bad people about, we didn’t have them thrown into our faces 24-7. We didn’t see missing kids on milk cartons, Amber alerts, screeching television shows and exposes of predators. We were insulated from all that.

Kids were allowed to be kids.
Kids were allowed to be kids.

The world was no less dangerous for kids in the 1970s than it is today—our parents just weren’t as freaked out about it. Many of us weren’t warned that every unfamiliar face might mean us harm. So we made friends with just about everyone, even random adults that we didn’t recognize.

For me, it was cranking “The immigrant song” by Led Zeppelin at 100, and playing games with my buds. While “Pee Eck” or “Joe Piney” had an record album open and was using it to separate the stems and seeds out of a five dollar bag that we had bought. Heh heh.

Memorizing the lyrics to “Rubber Ducky”

LOL. How true is this?

Rubber Ducky…

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There was a limited amount of quality TV for kids in the ’70s, so when something came along that resonated with us, it burned into our subconscious. Sesame Street provided many of those pivotal memories.

Rubber Ducky

Rubber Ducky, you're the one,
You make bathtime lots of fun,
Rubber Ducky, I'm awfully fond of you;
(woh woh, bee doh!)

Rubber Ducky, joy of joys,
When I squeeze you, you make noise!
Rubber Ducky, you're my very best friend, it's true!
(doo doo doo doooo, doo doo)

Every day when I
Make my to the tubby
I find a little fella who's
Cute and yellow and chubby
(rub-a-dub-a-dubby!)

Rubber Ducky, you're so fine
And I'm lucky that you're mine
Rubber ducky, I'm awfully fond of you.
(repeat chorus)

Rubber Ducky, you're so fine
And I'm lucky that you're mine
Rubber ducky, I'm awfully fond of -
Rubber ducky, I'd like a whole pond of -
Rubber ducky I'm of -
Rubber ducky I'm awfully fond of you!
(doo doo, be doo.)

Even today, long past the age when we’re regularly taking baths with toys, we can recall Ernie’s ode to his rubber duckie in its entirety.

Bell bottoms

Cool bell bottom jeans.
Bell Bottom Jeans. (“Elephant bells” shown.)

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You cannot say “the 70’s” without mentioning the iconic “bell bottom jeans”. They were everywhere. And they were awesome! Most especially when worn with Rock-star platform boots, or earth-shoes.

A lot of completely groovy adults thought bell bottoms looked stylish in the ’70s, and they were right-on! And you know, it’ the cool kids have historically always been eager to imitate the best of adults’ instincts. So obviously, we all had these fantasticly stylish attire.

Short shorts and tube socks

Yes. And it does seem… obscene, now doesn’t it?

So much fashion!
Tube socks, bikes and skateboards.

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Rarely in the history of fashion has a clothing style been universally accepted by both men and women. But that was the case in the ’70s with short shorts and tube socks, even though nobody looked especially good in the getup. In hindsight, tube socks that stretched up to your knees and shorts that were way too tight wasn’t the most flattering combo. But at the time, we all thought we looked cool.

Tube socks.
The girls looked better in Tube Socks than the guys.

Do you feel like we do?

Perhaps nothing says 1970’s as the Peter Frampton (live) ode to that period in time. It’s… well, what if all felt like. And if you don’t understand… well… you needed to be there and live that lifestyle.

The 1970’s for us was like this kind of soft fog. Like walking in a fluffy pillow everywhere, and it was really, really surreal.

Peter Frampton live.
Do you feel like we do?

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The 1970’s for us was like this kind of soft fog. Like walking in a fluffy pillow everywhere, and it was really, really surreal.

Oh, did I say that? Oh.

Well. I mean that. You know. Like I REALLY mean that. Yeah.

Oh. What was I saying?

Oh yeah…

I’d give you the original song for free here, but apparently it’s all monetized right now. So I’ll just give you the link…

Hitchhiking

True hitchhiking is just as dangerous as it ever was, but we did it anyways. Back then, we were not a fearful as people are today. We are not blasted with stories of the gruesome things that can happen to young folk on the road. And even if that were to happen, many of us would probably try to fight back with our pocket knives or fists.

Cute girls.
Cute girls hitchhiking.

No car? No problem! Just stick out your thumb and wait for a kind stranger to pull over and offer you a ride. It seems unthinkable today, but for a ’70s free spirit who didn’t have the bread to buy their own car (or was too young for a license), hitchhiking seemed like the best option when your own two feet couldn’t get you there.

Freedom!
You could hitchhike anywhere, and the police wouldn’t bother you. You could even hitchhike down town!

Having a favorite Charlie’s Angel

We all did. Don’t be silly.

Which brings up a song from the 1970’s. I don’t know why I have this connection of the song to the TV show. I attribute it to me coming home from a long day of partying and listening to Manfred Mann, and then settling down and watching Charlie’s Angels on the tube. I guess that; that is as good as an explanation as anything else.

Manfred Mann’s earth band – Manfred Mann’s Earth Band Blinded By The Light..mp3

Oh, and here’s the gals…

The three angels.
Charlie’s Angels.

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Some kids were always rooting for Jaclyn Smith, and some only had eyes for Kate Jackson. The vast majority of us, however, were smitten with Farrah Fawcett, and not just because she had the most iconic poster of the ’70s (and, arguably, of all time). Whatever your preference, they were the coolest crime-fighting trio on TV, and proof that ladies could kick as much criminal butt as the boys.

Woo Woo!

Farrah Fawcett was everywhere.
Farrah Fawcett was everywhere.

Going outside without sunscreen

Oh. Of course we knew about sunscreen. We could go ahead and use it. “Tans don’t burn with a Coppertone tan”. It’s just that we didn’t care…

California, 1977
California, 1977

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These days, most health-conscious people won’t even leave the house on a winter day without slathering their exposed skin in sun protection. But in the ’70s, you could walk around shirtless on a blazing hot summer day and nobody would think to ask if you’d applied any sunscreen.

Wait, sorry, we mean suntan lotion.

There was limited sun protection in the ’70s, just lotion to help you get some color. And when you didn’t get a tan, you got a sunburn—which nobody took all that seriously. There’s a lot we didn’t know about the long-term consequences.

Building a sand castle.
We used suntan lotion to give our burns a bronze hue. Not to protect the skin.

Chase-lounges

This was just about the only way to hang out outside. You get a flimsy aluminum frame with the cheap nylon ribbing and plop down and pop a beer. That is what the 1970’s was all about.

Relaxing.
Relaxing outside with the family.

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Do you want to hear a story about a date where I was tripping balls, it was a hot and humid evening, I sat in a chase lounge chair that fit like a glove. My icy cold PBR was next to me, and Traffic, Robin Trower, and Led Zeppelin played all night. After the beer was quaffed, my date and I rode on the foggy river at 3am in a small speedboat. Oh, and her brother couldn’t speak. He was deaf and dumb. So the entire event was in slow motion, sign language.

The 70’s. Youse kids have no idea.

It’s how we rolled

No helmets, knee or elbow protection, and no one recording it to post on Social Media. It’s how we rolled.

It's how we rolled.
It’s how we rolled.

It’s how we rolled.

Then, when we were old enough to get our driver’s license, we started to terrorize the neighborhood righteously…

Scene from Dazed and Confused.
Scene from Dazed and Confused. Driven by Ben Affleck’s character Fred O’Bannion, this commanding Plymouth Duster was nicknamed the “Grey Ghost.” This beautiful car was driven by an unsavory character in the film, and thus the body paint was something resembling very opaque primer.

Wood Paneling

There isn’t anything that says 1970’s than a house with interior wood paneling. My own parents installed it in our television room around 1973. You simply cut it to size and then glue it to the walls.

Wood paneling inside the house.
Paneled den.

The metric system

The metric system.
Learn the metric system.

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Thanks to the Metric Conversion Act of 1975, we were all prepared to start measuring things in meters, liters, and grams rather than feet, pounds, and quarts. It’s hard to overstate how big a deal this was in the late ’70s, especially if you were a kid. In school, we were inundated with pro-metric system films, which tried to win us over with the adventures of the Metric Marvels. You couldn’t find a kid today stressed out about metric conversion, but in the ’70s, we all lived with the fear that we’d have to be metric-ready at a moment’s notice.

Drinking beer

It’s true that there were laws about drinking alcohol. But they weren’t really enforced. The min-age to drink was 18, and even 16 in some states. And in states where you could work (with parent’s permission) at 14, and drive as well, no one gave a rat’s ass about whether your were drinking alcohol or not. It wasn’t a big thing.

Not like today.

Drinking was not an issue.
Drinking was no big thing.

If the police caught you drinking underage, they would probably pour it out and tell you to drive home safely and go to bed.

Which happened on more than a few occasions.

Today… well, let’s be real. You’d spend the night in Jail and probably need to fork out a few thousand to a bail bondsman to get out so that you can go to work.

Some things never change

Ah. When going through some of these photos, I see things that could have very well been taken today…

Butt flash.
Drive-by “mooning”.

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Some things never change.

Though, you might get arrested for sexual indecency and become a “Sex Offender” for the rest of your life.

Brutal playground equipment

Playgrounds in the ’70s were about as user-friendly as modern-day adult obstacle endurance races. Sure, there wasn’t as much barbed wire, but the equipment was just as unforgiving and brutal.

1970s playground.
Two story slide was the norm in the 1970s.

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Monkey bars were made of cold steel that could break bones without mercy. Everything—from the slides to the seesaws, the swings to the merry-go-round—was built to withstand military strikes, and no ’70s kid would use them without anticipating at least the occasional bloody injury.

Safe playground.
Modern safe playground. No taller than one yard high.

Being terrified to go in the water

Not everyone was, but enough of my friends were that I thought that they were really too-caught-up. I strongly believed that they needed to “loosen up” a bit.

Jaws

When Steven Spielberg’s Jaws first hit the theaters in 1975, it’s hard to quantify exactly how big an impact it had on our collective psyche. We weren’t just scared of getting into the ocean—even lakes and ponds and wading pools seemed to disguise shark fins. We looked for sharks virtually everywhere, certain that their ferocious fangs were just waiting to bite down hard on our toes and pull us underwater.

Smallpox vaccine scars

It’s a sign of being a “Baby Boomer”.

Smallpox vaccine

Before most doctors stopped routinely giving smallpox vaccines in the early ’70s, every kid had the same familiar scar on their upper arm, caused by the two-pronged needle that punctured our skin with all the delicateness of a staple gun. Yeah, it was scary, but smallpox was eradicated. And the fact that we all had the same scars almost felt like a badge of honor.

Being tricked into learning by Schoolhouse Rock!

Schoolhouse Rock!
Schoolhouse Rock!

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Saturday morning is supposed to be about eating sugary cereals and vegging out in front of the TV, watching animated shows with no educational content whatsoever. But the Schoolhouse Rock! shorts tricked us, teaching us about multiplication, history, and the differences between conjunctions and interjections without our even realizing it.

Thanks to their catchy songs, we knew all about the different branches of government and what carbon footprints are without ever cracking open a book.

Having the Oscar Mayer commercial stuck in your head

Oscar Mayer

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That Oscar Mayer commercial with the cute kid fishing while eating bologna played so often—and was so catchy—we could hear the familiar melody reverberating around our brains over and over and over.

Oh, I’d love to be an Oscar Meyer weiner
That is what I’d truly like to be
‘Cause if i were an Oscar Meyer weiner
Everyone would be in love with me
Oh, I’m glad I’m not an Oscar meyer weiner.
That is what I’d never wanna be
‘Cause if i were an Oscar Meyer weiner
there would soon be nothing left of me

Another variation is:

I wish I were an Oscar Mayer Weiner
That is what I’d truly like to be
‘Cause if i were an Oscar Meyer weiner
Everyone would be in love with me
Oh, I’m glad I’m not an Oscar meyer weiner.
That is what I’d never wanna be
‘Cause if i were an oscar meyer weiner
Everyone would take a bite of me.

The only thing worse was when it got replaced by that “I’d like to teach the world to sing” Coca-Cola commercial! (We’re sorry.)

School assignments printed on ditto machines

And oh they smelled so good!

In 1960s and '70s-era classrooms, it was an olfactory treat whenever the teacher passed out fresh-off-the-machine purple print “ditto” sheets to the class. Virtually every student immediately held the page to his face and inhaled deeply.

-11 Smells That Are Slowly Disappearing | Mental Floss
The mimeograph became the most widely used system for mass-producing papers with print on them. The ink it used ended up looking deep blue or purple. The materials also made mimeographed paper have a unique smell. That fragrance came from the machine’s output; the duplicator fluid had methanol and isopropanol in it.
Personal anecdotes from family members tell of the time when teachers would ask a student to head down the hall. That student would walk on over to the room housing the mimeograph. From there, he or she could get the many copies of that day’s worksheet, printed in that unique, pretty purple ink.

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When I was in elementary school in the 1960s and into the early 1970s, teachers gave homework and classroom assignments, quizzes and tests on Ditto worksheets. We wrote on them so often that my classmates and I became intimately familiar with the aniline purple color of the Ditto—as well as the mesmerizing smell that emanated from the freshly printed sheets.

Making Dittos was a two-step process. The first step was to prepare the master, a two-ply form that had an easy-to-write-on paper sheet on top and a wax-coated sheet on the bottom. Our teachers would either hand write or typewrite the schoolwork onto one of these typically letter-size Ditto master forms. The pressure of the pen or the typewriter would transfer wax from the bottom sheet onto the back of the top sheet.
The second step—after discarding what was left of the bottom sheet—was to mount the master, bottom side up, onto the Ditto duplicating drum. The wrong-reading wax image contained the “ink” that was progressively broken down by the chemical spread across the drum as it was rotated—often by cranking the cylinder manually—and came into contact with the paper. Several dozen Ditto sheets could be easily produced within minutes.

Any worksheet or homework assignment passed out to students in a ’70s classroom was likely created using either a ditto or mimeograph machine. Who could forget the way they left purple ink on your fingers, or that unmistakable odor?

Using Silly Putty to preserve newspaper comics

Sillyputty
Sillyputty

We felt like geniuses for discovering that Silly Putty could be rolled over the comic section in a newspaper and perfectly reproduce our favorite Garfield strip. Today, most newspapers use non-transferable ink, so any kids wanting to try this experiment are out of luck. Sigh.

Slide Rules

Call me a nerd, but I loved my slide-rule. Unlike my fellow classmates, who embraced their new fangled calculators that were just coming out, I used mine for all sorts of engineering and science subjects.

Slide Rule

There is even an application for a slide rule for your Windows Computer. You can go ahead and get it HERE. Or better yet, check out these links…

Not at all useful, but a joy to behold and quite beautiful in it’s own way.

Pencil cases with attached slide rulers and sharpeners

Pencil box.
Pencil box. We all had one.

It was an essential school supply back in the ’70s, the epitome of high-tech pencil gadgetry. Pulling one of these out of your backpack meant you were serious about learning—or at least looking like the coolest student in your class. Pencil cases have become as extinct as… well, pencils. But the plastic pencil case in 1975 was the iPhone of its era.

Never consuming Pop Rocks and soda at the same time

Pop Rocks Candy

Every ’70s kid had heard that terrible rumor about Mikey, the picky eater in the Life cereal commercial. Apparently, despite the warnings of his friends, he had consumed the deadly combo of Coca-Cola and Pop Rocks, and the carbon dioxide had caused his stomach to inflate to a lethal degree. What happened next? Well, his stomach exploded, of course, and poor Mikey died on the spot! The rumors were, of course, completely false. But that didn’t stop us from believing them. In a world without Internet, we had no choice but to trust what the smartest kid on the playground was telling us.

Moving the TV antenna for better reception

We called them “rabbit ears”.

And we used them is “complete” systems like this…

1970s Audio-visual entertainment.

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TV reception in the ’70s was unreliable at best. If the picture was distorted with zig-zag lines—or, worse, the dreaded “snow,” where everything was fuzzy—the only way to fix the problem was to adjust the antenna, otherwise known as “rabbit ears.”

This involved twisting and turning until slowly, so slowly, you captured a better signal and the picture started to come into focus. But even then, just removing your hands might cause the picture to disappear yet again. It was a long and arduous process to get the kind of visual consistency that TV audiences today take for granted.

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But, on the other hand, television was FREE.

You didn’t need to subscribe to cable, to a television satellite service, or some kind of streaming internet service. And it is still free, too. It’s just one of those way-under-reported elements of life that exists today in a world full of gigantic multimillionaires ruling over a land where everything has a price tag.

...don't knock tv antennas. use them and you'll still get plenty of channels and save lots of money and not be a slave to the cable company. shame on saying it's something you're glad to get rid of

-x60hz11 RonaldFelder

Typewriters

Before Microsoft Word were Word Processors, and before them were typewriters.

Electric Typewriter.

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Decades before email or texting existed, if you were writing to a friend or family member, you either did it by hand—a long and excruciating process, especially if you had a lot to say—or you used a typewriter. The unmistakable metallic clang of typewriter keys pounding on paper is something that few of us who lived through the ’70s will ever forget.

Secondhand smoke everywhere 

And the freedom was glorious.

Smoking on an airplane.

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Smoking wasn’t just acceptable in the ’70s—it was ubiquitous. In offices, restaurants, airplanes, homes, and most public buildings, everybody was puffing away on their cigarettes without a care in the world. No busybody is going to tell you to go outside in the rain to smoke near the gutter or trashcan. No one even cared.

People smoked everywhere. Restaurants, parks, in taxi’s, on the train,at work and on airplanes.

Secretary smoking at work.
Secretary smoking at her desk in the office.

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People smoked. It was as natural as drinking Pepsi and eating a hamburger. The prices for cigarettes were very cheap, and no one had the nerve to tell you what to do with your own body. It was unheard of. And if you did, the response probably would be “Hey Man! What’s your fucking problem?”

Smoking in the kitchen.
Smoking in the kitchen of a tiny apartment at 7:35 PM. Notice the brown refrigerator, the rabbit ears for the television, the tumbler of beverage on a table on top of a napkin, and the enormous salt and pepper shakers.

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And those wooded crate that her books were in, those are crates for eggs. I used them for my record album collection. In those days they were real wood. Flimsy things, but they did the job all rightly.

Headsets for the Stereo

Well, we have headsets today, but they are used differently. Back in the 1970’s if you had a stereo, you also probably had a pair of headsets. And while your parents might have bought them for you so that they could have some peace and quiet, the chances are that you probably used them while the stereo was blasting through the speakers. You know, for the “full effect”.

Headsets.
Wearing headsets on your bed.

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This is what we pretty much did. Here’s a scene from the iconic movie “Dazed and Confused”.

Dazed and Confused.
Dazed and Confused.

Debating what “American Pie” was all about

American Pie.
Don McLean’s American Pie.

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What was going on in Don McLean’s 1971 hit? Nobody knew for sure, but plenty of kids had a lot of theories about who the jester was and why he was stealing the king’s thorny crown, and if “Jack” was supposed to be Mick Jagger or Bob Dylan or somebody else entirely. Was the whole song really about Buddy Holly dying in a plane crash and McLean feeling sad about it? In those pre-internet days, your guess was as good as anybody else’s.

Macramé home décor

Macramé home décor was especially popular in the ‘70s. A lot of different home decorations were macramé including curtains and plant hangers, but nothing was more popular than the macramé owl.

An ideal 1970’s home.

The groovy pop-culture era is a phenomenon that stands out among many others. Sometimes it seems like it was a million years ago and sometimes it seems like just yesterday. Check out this “far out”, very cool kitchen…

1970's kitchen.
1970’s kitchen.

Shaking “instant” Polaroid photos to help them develop faster

Polaroid.
Polaroid.

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As Outkast reminded the world with their 2003 hit “Hey Ya!,” the ’70s taught us how to “shake it like a Polaroid picture.” Or at least, that’s what we all believed. The moment a new picture slid out of a Polaroid instant camera, we pinched it between two fingers and shook it vigorously, as if air drying was the only way to get the clearest image. It wasn’t until 2004 when we finally learned it was all bogus. As Polaroid helpfully explained, “shaking or waving has no effect.”

Bicycle helmets not being required

It’s pretty silly that a government that doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the people, would require them to do all sorts of things “for their safety”. But that’s America for you.

Freedom.
Freedom is not having to wear a motorcycle helmet.

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If you wore a helmet while riding a bike during the ’70s, it meant either that you were recovering from a serious cranial injury or you were terrified of even the most minor of accidents. We just weren’t as safety-conscious back then.

In those days, freedom actually meant something. it wasn’t confused with “safety” or “cleanness”, like it is today.

Clackers

Everyone had these.

Clackers.

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So simple and yet so entertaining. Consisting of two heavy acrylic balls attached to a string, you basically knocked the two balls together as fast as you could… and that was it. Somehow it kept us entertained for hours, or at least until some kids started overdoing it with the clacker enthusiasm and the balls shattered and caused shrapnel-related injuries. Clackers were deemed weapons of mass destruction and officially pulled from stores.

Me. Well, I put them in an oven and baked them. LOL.

Aluminum can tabs

The 1960’s was known as the time where you needed a triangular “can opener” to open up your favorite can of beer. You would do so with the heavy gauge steel can, and make two triangular indentations. One large one to drink from, and one small one for the air to get in.

Then, in the 1970’s the pull-tab was invented, and life was forever changed.

Pull tab history.
Pull tab history.

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Opening a soda in the ’70s required pulling a ring that tore open a small wedge shape on the top of an aluminum can. Then the ring would be thrown away, usually on the ground where somebody would invariably step on it and hurt themselves. Injuries from those metallic tabs became a nationwide epidemic.

One 1976 New York Times report remarked that a large percentage of beach injuries “were due to cuts inflicted by discarded pop tabs,” Slate noted. Getting a tetanus shot was the only way to survive in a world littered with soda can tabs.

Fixing mistakes with Wite-Out

Correcting mistakes.
Correcting mistakes.

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The “delete” button of the ’70s came in a little jar full of white liquid, which could be painted across anything in a letter or school assignment that we wanted to make disappear. It wasn’t quite as magical as it sounds, since you had to wait for what felt like forever for Wite-Out to dry, and sometimes you had to blow on the paper, which just made you feel ridiculous. By the time it was ready to put back in the typewriter, you’d have completely lost your train of thought.

Sea-Monkeys

Sea Monkeys
Sea Monkeys

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Those ads in the back of comic books were too irresistible for most kids. Why would we not want to have our own anthropomorphic sea creatures, living in a tank and looking reverently out at our bedrooms like we were gods?

But when the Sea Monkeys arrived, we learned the hard lesson that you shouldn’t always believe advertising.

The creatures didn’t look anything like tiny humans at all, because they were actually a type of brine shrimp, the most boring aquarium pet a kid could ever ask for.

Station wagons with wood trim

Ohhhh baby!

Cool car with wood trim.
So very groovy.

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Why so many people were drawn to cars that looked as if they were made at least partly out of wood is anybody’s guess. Maybe they were responding to some residual hippie influence, and they couldn’t resist a car that was seemingly constructed from biodegradable materials harvested in pesticide-free gardens. It was all bunk, of course—the wood texture, more often than not, was just vinyl siding—but especially in the ’70s, appearance was more important than reality.

Thing Maker

Parents thought it was perfectly safe to let kids make their own artsy crafts by putting plastic in the oven. Totally cool. We were able to mix chemicals, and bake them in ovens and crate all sorts of wondrous dangers. Thingmaker came with it’s own oven. It was glorious!

It introduced me to molds, plastic injection molding and hardware design.

The concept of the Thingmaker was first introduced in 1963, as an extension of Mattel’s “Vac-U-Maker” line. Thingmaker Creepy Crawlers by Mattel was by far my absolute favorite toy as a kid and I got my first one in 1968. 

I spent hours in my room playing with this and spilling plastic goop on my carpet. I loved overfilling the metal molds just slightly so I could peel off the excess. I burned myself more than a few times and have the scars to show. I also had Creeple People and Incredible Edibles, but neither of these was as cool as the original Thingmaker. I cannot believe I played with this toy totally unsupervised starting at the age of 10!

There have been several revivals of the Thingmaker – the first in 1978 was called the Thingmaker II and employed safer technology. This toy used a totally different type of goop and plastic molds, into which the heated Plastigoop was poured. 

The reformulated Plastigoop did not work well, the bugs and insects were shoddy, and the process was painfully slow, so it went kaput fairly quickly. In 1992, ToyMax reintroduced the Thingmaker with much stricter safety regulations. This new version of the Creepy Crawlers set once again used metal molds and a goop similar to the original. 

ToyMax went out of business around 2002, and yet another company, Jakks Pacific started producing a similar toy starting in 2006.

The Vac-u-Form, also called Vac-u-Former, was a toy manufactured by Mattel in the 1960s. Using an industrial process called vacuum forming, a rectangular piece of plastic was clamped in a holder and heated over a metal plate. After the plastic softened, the holder was moved to the other side, over a mold of the object to be formed. Pressing a handle on the side of the unit created a vacuum, which caused the plastic to be sucked down over the mold and form a shape. When the plastic cooled it solidified, creating a little model of the item, such as a car, boat, or tiny log cabin

-Consumer Grouch

The Pacer

My first car after I wrecked my GTO. Sigh! I loved that car.

But the Pacer, or the Pacer-rooo as we liked to call it was perfect for the era. It was like riding in this big quiet glass bubble, and we would listen to tunes and watch the world go by…

…slowly. Very slowly.

The AMC Pacer.
My grandmother loved my Pacer. She thought it was a robust, well built car.

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Pink Floyd – Sheep

Drinking tons of Tang

My personal formula was 50% of the glass filled with Tang powder, and the remaining part water.

Tang advertisement.
Tang advertisement.

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The makers of Tang drove home the idea that their instant beverage, which tasted vaguely of oranges, was the nutrition of choice for astronauts everywhere. And that was enough for us to believe that just drinking Tang for breakfast put you in the same intellectual company as the brave astronauts of NASA. Even though Buzz Aldrin, the second man on the moon, once famously said he was not a fan of Tang, that wasn’t the popular opinion in the ’70s.

Relating to one of the Brady Bunch kids

The Brady Bunch.
The Brady Bunch.

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Whether it was ambitious ladykiller Greg or awkward middle child Jan or young dreamer Bobby, there was somebody among The Brady Bunch that resonated with just about every ’70s kid. The oversized family that was too perfect to exist in the real world somehow still managed to reflect our individual quirks and idiosyncrasies.

Metal lunch boxes

1970s Lunch Boxes
1970s Lunch Boxes

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A plastic lunch box? That would’ve seemed inconceivable to a ’70s kid, who proudly carried around a lunch box sturdy enough to protect bologna sandwiches from an air strike. The characters featured on the front of these lunch boxes, whether Evel Knievel or Strawberry Shortcake, said a lot about our personalities.

48 Hassocks

So very 1970's.
Round ottoman seats.

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These round ottoman seats became weirdly popular during the ’70s, and always in the most outrageous colors—like avocado green or neon orange. They were meant as foot stools but kids knew they were perfect for stretching out, or curling up on for cat naps, or even spreading out on stomach-first and pretending we were flying like Superman. Ah, those were the days.

Taping songs off the radio

Taping music off the radio.
Not every bedroom was so well equipped, but indeed, once we figured out that we could tape the music that we heard on the radio, it was only a matter of time before the high priced sales of record albums would crash.

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The music piracy of its day! When you had a new favorite song but there wasn’t enough in your piggy bank to buy the album or 45 rpm single, you would sit next to the radio with your portable cassette recorder and wait… and wait… and wait… until finally that song you loved so much started playing, and you immediately pressed down on the record button, capturing those beautiful sounds for free.

A chopper bike with a banana seat

Oh baby, I had a burnt orange bike. Tall handle-bars. White banana seat. Red reflectors, and drag-strip rear tire.

A chopper bike with a banana seat.
A chopper bike with a banana seat.

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You didn’t even have to pop a wheelie when you owned a chopper bike. All you had to do was sit there, tapping your fingers on the handlebars like you were revving a throttle, and you looked like Evel Knievel getting ready to jump over a canyon.

Stretch Armstrong

I didn’t have this, but my brother did, and the tortures that he put this poor toy through were the stuff of legends.

Stretch Armstrong.
Stretch Armstrong

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This elastic hero was like a stress ball for prepubescents. Just how much torture could Armstrong endure at your hands? Plenty of kids were willing to find out, pulling his limbs like they were trying to get a confession. The secret to Stretch’s durability—the goo inside his body that made him so elastic—was nothing but plain ol’ corn syrup.

Frisbee

Yeah. You can go on all the retro 1970s websites on the internet, and not one single one will mention the iconic Frisbee. This was the most prolific and versatile tools in used during the 1970’s.

Not only could you toss it about, but you could clean out your bag of weed with it. It was portable, convenient, light weight, and came in a wide selection of colors and designs. I well remember my glow in the dark scooby-doo Frisbee. What fun was that!

Frisbee
A fun game of Frisbee on the QUAD.

Shag Carpeting Throughout Your House

This was so 70’s.

I used the left over pieces to carpet my GTO, and then later, my Pacer, and even later than that, my Dodge Tradesman 400.

Shag carpeted home.
Shag carpeted home.

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Covering your floors wasn’t as simple as popping into Pottery Barn and picking up a rug in the 1970s. Your house—apart from the patterned linoleum in your kitchen—was covered in shag carpeting in a variety of earthy tones, from moss to pumpkin to, of course, leopard.

Not all homes had carpet during the groovy era. Some still preferred their hardwood floors, but you can be sure that any respectable modern and hip household that did have carpet had shag carpet. Some shag carpet was so shaggy that you could lose the family hamster in it for days.

Having Every Dish Served Out of Patterned Pyrex

Pyrex. An awesome invention and completely under appreciated.

Kitchen of the 70s.
Modern kitchen 1975.

Fancy china has its place, but as a ’70s kid, you know that the true height of sophistication is enjoying your mom’s tuna noodle casserole straight from the Pilgrim-patterned Pyrex it was baked in.

A tuna noodle casserole
A tuna noodle casserole

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But truthfully, you haven’t lived until you made a “swamp” pizza (Chicago style deep dish pizza) from a Pyrex dish.

Basement Den

Up until the late ‘60s/early ‘70s, basements were a place for the hot water heater, furnace/boiler, and washing machine. Basements were also a great storage area. Basements were stacked with boxes full of things that wouldn’t ever be used again but the owner couldn’t live without!

During the groovy era, “finishing” basements for living space became a popular craze. It wasn’t called a finished basement… it was called a club room; complete with the old TV set and fake wood paneling. It was a classic look.

Many a night would be spent quaffing beers, playing cards, darts, and chess while listening to Neil Young. I’ll tell you what.

Basement den.
Basement Den.

Water bed

This type of bed is pretty cool, and not at all what one would think. If you go on the internet, you might find someone who has never slept on one of these beds writing derogatory statements about them. (It’s a very common thing on the internet these days… you write about what you know nothing about for a hand full of change.)

These beds are really super comfortable. They are heated, and it is like sleeping inside the soft bosom of a giant woman. The sides envelope around you and you feel completely embraced.

Water bed.
Water Bed.

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All jokes aside, this is a super comfortable way to sleep. When I slept on my water bed, I was usually out within two minutes.

Now, for some important notes. Firstly, if the power goes off, in the dead of winter, you can rest assured that you will be sleeping on top of an icy pile of slush. And secondly, you need to constantly add anti-bacteria chemicals. Otherwise algae will grow and your water bed would spring about a zillion super tiny, impossible to locate, leaks.

Lava Lamps

Technically the oddly hypnotic lava lamp was made popular in the 60s, but it continued on strong through almost the end of the 1970s. I actually had two of them, and they really added a nice effect in my bed room.

Lava Lamp.
Lava Lamp.

TV Dinners

We had these little metal folding tables, and a place where we wold put them behind the door. When we were too busy to eat a “real” meal, out came the TV dinners, and we would eat in front of the television learning about the world on the “news”.

TV dinners.
TV Dinners.

Do you want more?

I have more posts that are similar to this in my Life and Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

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Orange GTO.
I miss my Orange GTO. In the movie “Dazed and confused”, This car was driven by Kevin Pickford, played by Shawn Andrews. Two vehicles were used for this film, and they were acquired from GTO collectors through the local classified ads. One of the GTOs in Dazed and Confused was powered by a 455 High Output (H.O.) V8, and the entire film crew and cast members were delighted at the car’s ease in burning rubber. Cinematographers love tire smoke, and the GTO in this film delivered plenty of it.

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Can you believe that this is only part one?

Articles & Links

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Master Index

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How to play the KTV (and bar) dice game in a cup when you are in China. The various rules and games, and some fun advisement’s

In this article we are going to look at some of the most common games that drunk adults play in China. It’s a fundamental part of Chinese culture. This is true whether you are in a bar, or a KTV, or just messing around eating BBQ outside at 4am. Playing with dice is a (seemingly) national pastime.

We are going to talk about two subjects primarily…

  • Drinking alcohol.
  • Playing games in the KTV.

I am covering it here as part of my business KTV section. You don’t need to go to a business KTV to play it. But knowing how to play the game is going to be really helpful to be able to control your drinking. Otherwise, you will be too drunk to do anything when it comes time to go to your hotel room.

You do NOT want that.

Oh, HELL no!

You need to control your alcohol intake, and part of being able to do that is to understand the drinking games that you will play with your companion.

So listen up.

Ok. So here you are….

You have had a very fulfilling meal. You impressed your hosts with your drinking ability, and you gave them great face by eating all sorts of delicious Chinese food. Now it is time to play. So, arrangements have been made, and your are driven into a non-descript building with a tiny-tiny sign that says KTV on it, and you depart the car in the basement. Your aide helps you into the elevator and you find yourself being led to the KTV room for the evenings festivities. You’ve already selected a companion and after you two clink glasses of beer together she picks up a big plastic cup with five dice inside of it. What now?

What now?

Here we are going to discuss some of the dice games that you can play. You only need to know one or two. Then just use that as a basic of getting drunk. Have fun, and don’t get too caught up on what you are doing. Just relax, and have fun.

It is part of the Chinese culture, especially among Chinese men, to drink beer or Baijiu when gathering with friends and family during hotpot dinner or KTV sessions. So be ready to 干杯gān bēi (drink up). It is part of Chinese culture to toast with people that are with you in order to make them feel that you consider them and care about them. If someone toasts with you ten times in ten minutes, just go with it and drink up ten times.

-6 Interesting facts about Chinese KTVs

The beauty of China‘s drinking games is that they cut down on the rules, leaving plenty of time for pure, unadulterated imbibing. Whether your preferred tipple is a beer or a cocktail, there’s a game to suit you.

Strong boss.
In China, a very successful boss is someone who can drink very strong alcohol and hold his own and maintain “face” while the rest of the world watches on.

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Realize that everything listed here is conducted with healthy quantities of alcohol. If you cannot or will not drink alcohol, I would advise you NOT to come to China.

Warning! Before going to China on business or for pleasure, make sure you understand the cultural implications of drinking, or not drinking, alcohol, or you will most likely suffer unwanted consequences. It’s not always lighthearted fun and games in China.

To boil down this complicated issue to one sentence: You can have friends, be rich and drink …. or don’t drink and be lonely and poor. 

While that might seem overly exaggerated to some, anyone familiar with drinking culture in China can tell you that at best, this is a slightly black and white, yet mostly accurate, description.

-China Educational Tours

Understand China well; If you cannot drink alcohol, they will take your money, but you will have ZERO respect.

Non-drinker.
In China, the ability to drink hard alcohol in large quantities is a measure of your worth. If you cannot do it, you will be judged as something undesirable. It is better to try to handle the alcohol and throw it all out in the privacy of the bathroom than lose face to your peers of business associates. This is a Fair Warning.

A Quick Review

The dice games usually occur at a KTV after a full night of eating and drinking in a restrurant.

It should come as no surprise that China has more of a collective culture and less of an individualistic one. Therefore, in social situations, things are done more as a group and less as an individual. Drinking is done no differently.

You’ll be at a restaurant, sitting at a round table with white table cloth, and 10-20 other people. Depending on the occasion, there could be multiple tables (for weddings, it’s of course the entire room). Snacks and then food will be served, along with copious amounts of alcohol.

However, usually everyone drinks together, at certain times (not necessarily whenever they feel like it) and rarely alone. Someone next to you may say “quànjiǔ” which means “let’s drink together” and is a way for them to propose a toast. Or, the most senior host may propose a toast for the table before the junior host does the same.

Throughout the evening, there will be many, many, truly many toasts – both small toasts between you and the person next to you or on the other side of the table, and large toasts for the whole table.

Drink alcohol.
If you cannot drink alcohol, don’t even bother coming to China…!

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If it’s a wedding or other multi-table event, people will gradually begin to just walk from table to table toasting almost everyone they see.

Note: for anyone not familiar with the custom of “toasting”, it means that drinking alcohol with the toaster is pretty much obligatory.

The drinks are usually in small shot glasses (sometimes only half the size of a regular shot glass) and will be beer or red wine if you’re lucky, baijiu if you’re not.

Toasts are little more than the word “Ganbei”, although they can be longer. For those curious minds asking,

“Would it be ok for someone to toast me with Ganbei and instead of downing the drink all at once, I just take a sip (as they down theirs)?” 

The answer – NO! Not really.

It is an action considered to be RUDE by the majority of people. No one is going to force you to shotgun your drink, but it leaves an awkward, slightly offended moment, as if someone goes to high-5, or fist-bump, another person and the other person just walks by. In the end though, it’s your choice.

If invited to an event – be it a business-type meeting, a wedding, a graduation, etc. – you will more than likely, be EXPECTED to drink.

And it IS expected.

And there will be pressure to do so (more pressure if you’re male, less pressure if you’re female).

Your glass will be filled (and refilled), and refilled yet again.

People will make toasts or raise their glass towards you, and … most importantly, it will be considered incredibly rude to refuse.

China does not give the same consideration to individual preference regarding drinking as is normally done in English-speaking countries (especially in Canada and the US). This is something that they have never of. It is something that is simply NOT done.

In other words, “No thanks, I’m good” is not usually considered acceptable and instead will likely be considered rude, insulting, and offensive.

To decline an offer of drinking is to insult your host.

To illustrate, imagine being invited to someone’s house for dinner and doing one of the following: 1) not eating or drinking anything, all while sitting at the table with a disgusted look; 2) going to someone’s house for dinner and telling the host their house is ugly, their furniture looks cheap, their decoration is in poor taste.

Refusing a drink in China is considered somewhere in between those two illustrations. It is a MAJOR Faux Pas.

Faux Pas
A faux pas is a socially awkward or tactless act, especially one that violates accepted social norms, standard customs, or the rules of etiquette. The expression faux pas comes from French, where it means "false step", "misstep". It has been used in English for over 300 years.

-Wikipedia
Drinking.
In China, you will discover that even tiny petite little girls will be able to drink very strong alcohol. If you cannot compete against them, how can you compete against hard steely company bosses? China is all about relationships and the competition building them.

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Rejecting the drink is felt as a rejection of the person offering the drink. It is not seen to have anything to do with a person’s personal taste preference, comfort level, tolerance, or previous drinking habits. Thus, the unintentional insult that a western may convey when turning down alcohol, will spill over into, and harm, business and social relationships.

Beware.

In between toasts, there will be lots of eating, joking, storytelling (probably all in Mandarin unless you’re in a bilingual, bicultural group), and some drinking games as the night progresses. All the while, people will be toasting one another faster than a swarm of bees hitting a flower parade.

Ten to fifty toasts per hour is a pretty reasonable expectation.

Once dinner is over, the party could continue into the wee hours of the morning at a KTV or massage parlor. If it’s a business dinner, and you want to sign a contract or close a deal, expect the night to go ‘til late. I’ve been out as late at 7am the next morning.

Check my other posts on this subject on how to control the timing and events.

Loser #2.
Non-alcohol drinkers are viewed within China as losers, thief’s, untrustworthy, dangerous, sly, and a big problem. It’s sort of the way that the homeless in San Francisco are viewed as they shit on the sidewalk.

Some advice

The following is from an article titled “Ganbei – Chinese Drinking Culture” . Reproduced as found, minus the pictures. Edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the original author(s) and all credit to the website at the link listed. I would suggest you visit this most excellent site.

Toasting culture and rules

It’s bad enough if you refuse a drink, don’t insult your hosts more by messing up the toasting rules too.

1) Toasts are not usually long, draw-out affairs that take minutes to complete. These types of toasts are saved for more ceremonious occasions. Often, a “toast” simply means someone turns in your direction or physically approaches you, lifts their full (shot) glass and says the magic word, “Ganbei!”. That’s it. You’ve now been toasted (or, colloquially speaking, ‘ganbeied’) and you’re now expected to grab your full (shot) glass and drink. Don’t have a full glass? No worries. The person doing the ganbeiing will gladly fill it for you before proposing the ganbei.

2) Toasts are somewhat of a power move in China. The person giving the toast is seen to have the power and the person accepting the toast is somewhat acknowledging that power. Therefore, the most senior host at a banquet will usually offer the first toast — accidentally stealing this opportunity from them is very bad form indeed. This ‘power’ issue is more the case early on in the evening than later after everyone is sloshed, but never forget what toasting truly represents in China.

Toasting.
If you cannot handle your alcohol, don’t bother coming to China.

3) Stand and raise your glass for formal toasts when others at the table do so.

"干杯"(Gānbēi)is the drinking toast equivalent of “cheers” in English. However, beware of the fact that “干杯” literally translates to “dry glass.” You WILL be expected to finish your drink after the toast. 

"我敬你一杯” (Wǒ jìng nǐ yībēi) is used to toast to a specific person. The person being toasted to is expected to at least take a sip of his/her drink. 

A more generous way of making a toast to someone is “我干了,你随意” (Wǒ gànle, nǐ suíyì), which means “I will finish my glass, but you can drink at your leisure.”

4) In general, it’s a good rule to follow those around you, especially the elders at the table.

5) Avoid taking a drink alone. Only drink with the group. Never singularly – Western style. You should wait until a toast is given and then drink with the group. Or, wait until someone decides to toast you. Or, if you’re thirsty and really want the drink, try to find someone who you think is probably on, or below, your ‘social level’ (for example, a similar or lower rank in the company or of similar age in a social circle) and toast them.

6) You’ll want to avoid, at first ,toasting people significantly higher in rank, or older, than you as this can be seen as disrespectful (see #2). Unlike in the West, toasting the senior, important members of a group is not necessarily taken as a token of respect from the toaster to the toastee, but instead a slightly disrespectful gesture that implies you feel you are more important than he/she is. If you’re brand new to the group and you have no idea who anyone’s position is and you accidentally toast the boss at the beginning of the evening, it will usually be seen as humorous and you’ll get a pass for being a foreigner who didn’t know better. As the night wears on, it will become more acceptable to toast those of higher rank and age if you choose to do so.

Bosses, and Leaders can initiate toasts.

Friends and colleagues can toast to each other.

Avoid toasting upwards. You toast on your own stratified level, and only toast upwards when invited.

7) Use your right hand to hold your glass when toasting and drinking. You can place your left hand under the glass to show greater respect while someone is giving a toast if you would like. It’s a two-handed toast, and very respectful.

8) When you clink glasses together, always lower yours and clink the top of your glass a bit lower than the person(s) you are toasting – this shows respect. You won’t be thrown out on your keister for accidentally clinking your glass higher than theirs, but you’ll get bonus points for properly following the cultural norms.

When clinking glasses, the junior people should always hold their glass lower than those of senior folks. This not only applies to business situations, but also to family dinners (i.e. son-in-law will hold his glass lower than father-in-law).

If you are late to the party, you are expected to punish yourself by drinking. Most latecomers actually enjoy the “punishment,” as it allows them to catch up to the rest of the people at the party.

Whoever proposes a toast is always expected to finish his or her glass. 

Lastly, it is considered extremely rude to refuse a drink after someone toasts you. The amount you drink after someone toasts you is tied to the amount of respect you are showing them. Of course, “drying your glass” is considered the utmost respect at the dinner table.

Getting down to business

In many western countries, people often do business sober, or mostly sober, and then get inebriated afterwards to celebrate.

China kind of does this in reverse.

Drinking, especially drinking to the point of getting drunk, is a way to establish trust between individuals or groups. Without it, most Chinese feel uncomfortable moving forward with people/a person who they don’t trust. It’s a big NO-NO when doing any kind of business, or having personal relationships inside of China.

So, a question many westerns have is, “When should I get down to business?” Well, don’t do it at the table. You do not do it there. And you don’t even start considering this issue until everyone is good and drunk and the boss (hosting the event) shows his opinion of you up-front. Usually that means buying you a girl or two, and going to a KTV.

Lonely and shunned.
Non-drinkers in China are shunned.

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The Chinese drinking table is not the same as a London or NYC lunch booth.

Think of the table as merely the interview. You’re being sized up. You’re being evaluated on a wide range of different aspects. Mostly, people are just wondering can they trust you.

Although you may hint or lightly touch on business issues at the table, the drinking session is mostly to form a human bond for doing business later — perhaps even at the late-night karaoke joint across the street. So, just relax, enjoy yourself, focus on making strong social connections, and remember that here, business can wait. Furthermore, for obvious reasons, the drinking table is not the place to sign contracts or make critical decisions.

Status symbol – there’s no such thing as “the cheap stuff”

With alcohol being such a status and power symbol, it’s not easy to find inexpensive bottles of wine and hard liquor (unless you want Baijiu).

Good stuff.
53% alcohol – the “good” stuff.

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A lot of the consumption is at the higher end of the scale with some parties resembling a club table of big name NBA or Hip-Hop stars. Some wines are proudly displayed and consumed that run tens of thousands of dollars per bottle.

This only occurs of course in the richest of social circles, but if you’re lucky, you may get an exclusive invite to one of these gatherings which means that one glass of something you’re drinking may cost more than your entire trip, and the whole bottle could easily be worth more than your car.

Baijiu 白酒 (bái jiǔ) – Also called sorghum wine, Baijiu is the drink of choice for business dinners in China. This clear liquor is as intoxicating as tequila, with the added burning stench of rubbing alcohol. The most popular brand of Baijiu is Maotai, which can be as strong as 60% alcohol-by-volume (compared to an average vodka at 40% ABV.)

Red Wine 红酒 (hóng jiǔ) – Red wine has increased in popularity at Chinese dinner tables in recent years along with the rising interest in luxury goods. Popular choices include top French wines such as Lafit or Latour.

Beer – 啤酒 (pí jiǔ)Popular Chinese beer brands include Tsingtao and Harbin Beer, which are crisp, refreshing lagers that can cool the burning sensations from drinking Baijiu.

(Some speciality alcohols may be consumed on certain holidays, such as huangjiu during DuanWu Festival. Chinese minorities also often have their own unique fermentation processes for different wines and spirits.)

Specific Alcohols

The Chinese have their own phonetically-similar versions of most English-named drinks, so make sure you know your drink names or you may end up with something that you did not order!

ChinesePinyinEnglish
威士忌wēishìjìWhiskey
伏特加fútèjiā Vodka
約翰走路yuēhànzǒulùJohnny Walker
香槟xiângbînChampagne
白兰地báilándìBrandy
贝利尼bèilìníBellini
玛格丽特mǎgélìtèMargarita
蓝色夏威夷lánsèxiàwēiyíBlue Hawaii
曼哈顿mànhādùnManhattan
黑色露西亚hēisèlòuxīyàBlack Russian
白俄罗斯báièluósīWhite Russian
马蒂尼mǎdìníMartini
金汤力jīntānglìGin and tonic
威士忌可乐wēishìjìkělèWhiskey coke
血腥玛丽xuèxīngmǎlìBloody Mary
莫吉托mòjítuōMojito

Other tips

1) There are no spouses at formal business dinners. Business may eventually be conducted at some point in the night and those talks alone may be uninteresting to your spouse.

2) The party doesn’t always end at the restaurant. It often continues to other places that are, let’s say, not exactly appropriate for taking a spouse. Many westerns would be surprised at how much business gets done in a sauna or while laying on your stomach getting a massage – neither place, in China, would be the type of place where most people would want to take their spouses.

Actually, I would say that about 90% of the time the after dinner is at a "Business KTV" with Long-time and short-time girls. The remaining 10% is a mixture of venues that can include a massage or sauna (with long-time and short-time girls).

3) No Tipping. Tipping is not the norm in China and your host will probably cover the check, so no need to leave a tip or offer to “chip in.”

Everyone drinks.
Everyone in China drinks alcohol. To reject the offer to drink alcohol is an insult to the person, their culture and to their way of life. DON’T DO IT!

Chui Niu, AKA Dice

A staple of bars and KTV joints across the country, Chui Niu, known to foreigners simply as Dice, is perhaps China’s favorite drinking game. Though the rules are simple, the results are dangerous, so make sure you know your limits when attempting this game.

Each player begins with a cup and five six-sided dice. When it is your turn, you shake your dice in the cup and look at the result surreptitiously. Then, you must say the total number of dice of a certain figure, for example “three threes,” that you believe are contained under the sum of everyone’s cups. This continues in a circle, with each subsequent player upping the ante – that is, you cannot guess twos after fives have already been spoken for. So you can say “two sixes” after someone has said “four fives,” but you cannot say “six twos” after someone has said “five fours.”

Drinking in China.
If you cannot drink alcohol in China, you will be considered a misfit and a loser.

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The game is about pushing your luck and calling people out on their bullshit. When you think someone has said an impossible figure, you can shout “bu xing,” meaning “not possible,” and everyone must show their dice. If the player who said the number guessed less than or exactly the correct number, the person who shouted “bu xing” must drink.

If the guesser was above the correct number, however, he or she is the one who must drink.

So you played some dice, what’s next?

If invited to KTV, you’re pretty much expected to sing, regardless of your ability (or lack of). If someone in the room has the voice of an angel – or is borderline blackout drunk – you can expect them to take the standing mic at the front of the room and throw a few shapes while they’re immersed in the moment.

The audience typically claps and cheers no matter how good or painful the entertainment, and this tends to magnify as the evening wears on and alcohol consumption peaks.

No one gives a rat’s ass if you can sing or not. If you want to give and maintain face you MUST appear to be enjoying the entire evening.

As the average KTV room is ridiculously loud, chatting is practically impossible. Therefore, expect personal distance to go out of the window as mouth-to-ear conversation becomes the norm.

Chinese version of a successful businessman.
Chinese version of a successful businessman.

How to KTV

1) Drink some booze and grow a pair

2) Think of a song/ an artist

3) Select the English interface unless your zhōngwén is hěn lìhài 

4) If it’s a song name you’re after, type the first letter of each word from the song title (e.g. ‘Don’t Look Back in Anger’ would be ‘d-l-b-i-a’). If it’s an artist or band, start typing their name and it should pop up

5) Select and queue the song

6) Choose to sing with either the original song playing, half-solo (faint lyrics) or solo

7) Put on a good show for your audience

Drinking at the table.
Why are you in China if you are not going to embrace the culture and experience life?

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Song Genres

The availability of English songs is reflected by the price and reputation of the KTV facility. Practically all KTVs stock some classic English hits, while upscale KTVs (such as 纯K) have plenty of modern tracks to choose from. Expect to see a plethora of English and American pop and rock songs from the likes of The Wanted, Linkin Park, Fall Out Boy, Coldplay, Jason Mraz, Black Eyed Peas and Lady Gaga.

Sing a song or two, then Genbei a round or two. Then back to your girl and pick up the plastic cup. You might want to play an American version of the dice…

The American Game with Five Dice

This is an American game, but seemingly adapts well to a Chinese KTV. The gals won’t understand what you are saying, but they will get the gist of the game and you all will have a rocking good time playing it.

I will honestly say that this is the most popular game in China that I have played and almost every gal understands how to play it.

To communicate that you want to play this game you simply take three dice. Show the four, the five, and the six in a lineup together. They almost always nod their heads in understanding.

Five dice game.
American style five dice game.

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Players take turns rolling all five dice.

Now it’s your turn.

What you are trying to do is get a 6-5-4 combination.

Three dice.
You are trying to get one (four) + one (five) + one (six)

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You are permitted three tries.

If, after three tries, you just cannot get a “4 + 5 + 6”, then you must drink. And the game proceeds to the next person. Who then starts his / her turn.

But more often than not, you will be successful in getting this roll.

So, if all three appear on the first roll, the player’s “point” is the sum of the remaining two dice. Here’s some examples…

Die 1Die 2Die 3Die 4Die 5Score
456111+1=2
456232+3=5
456444+4=8
456535+3=8
456666+6=12
Examples of play combinations

OK. So now, you have a score.

It’s the next person’s turn.

You compare the scores. The low score drinks.

So, how do you keep track of each other's score? You leave the score dice as they fell in place. Then you compare them. It's much easier that way.

But wait!

[1] You can try to get a better score by rolling again. You have up to three rolls, so theoretically, if you scored a 4+5+6 on the first roll, you can get as many as two other tries to better your score. But, you MUST take the score(s) from the earlier 4+5+6 rolls and include them in your latest score.

Example…

Die 1Die 2Die 3Die 4Die 5Score
125340
456111+1=[2]
45632[2]+3+2=7
Example of a play combination
[2] If a 6 or a 6 and a 5 appear on the first roll (but no 4), they are set aside. You can use them to get a better score on the next roll.

Example…

Die 1Die 2Die 3Die 4Die 5Score
561110
[5][6]1230
[5][6]4232+3=5
An example of carry-over play.

It is entirely possible for a player to roll three times and get no point because the 6-5-4 was never made. The player with the highest point wins.

The preferred choice of alcohol (in China) is baijiu. Baijiu is high proof, and because drinking in China has been categorized as masculine, most men tend to drink it. Though there are times when they tend to drink beer or wine, nothing shows your masculinity like baijiu. 

However, it’s not always about finishing your shot of baijiu before anyone else. There’s an etiquette to drinking when you find yourself sharing drinks with business associates, be mindful of how you behave.

When someone toasts, it is expected of you to finish your cup, or ganbei. When people do toast, be sure to clink your glass against everyone’s. If the person you’re toasting against is your superior, be sure to bring your glass lower than theirs when you clink glasses. 

But beware, if you clink glasses, it means you want to go bottoms up! If you’re not sure how to work yourself into the Chinese drinking culture, just be sure to use both hands when offering, receiving, or drinking your beverage.

-Idigculture

So, for the non-drinkers out there…

So you are reading this, and you say “Hey! I don’t drink alcohol, and I am a better person for it!” To which I reply “good for you!”. But don’t come to China.

That is like saying to an American,

"Hey! I like American and respect all Americans except... 

I hate pizza, hate hamburgers, and hotdogs. 

I do not like the American flag, and football, baseball, and cars. 

But aside from that, America is great. 

Just don't shoot off any fireworks, play rock music, and I despise country and western music. But yeah. I love America. Oh, and by the way, I hate cars! And your "news" sucks, and the idea that people love football is disgusting to me. I think all football fans belong in a mental hospital!

But, yeah, America is great!"

And if you are like that, well… we all know what kind of a person you actually are. Don’t we?

Alternative dice games

Back to the games.

If you are up to it, you might want to try, or be taught, some of the more popular dice games in China. I’m sure that the gals will be able to teach you. One of the most popular is Liar Dice.

Liar Dice – Chui Niu, 吹牛

Liar’s Dice is, as the name implies, is a game that encourages bluffing. Each player shakes a cup containing five dice. Without revealing their roll, each player in turn must call out their prediction for the total number of a certain face-value (such as 5 x 6s) for all the dice on the table, including their own. The next player must either up the bid or call the previous player a liar. The aim of the game is to avoid being called out on your bluff and losing, which inevitably leads to the downing whatever is in your glass. If you’ve never player before, don’t worry. It sounds way more complicated than it actually is.

-eChinaCities

Over time this game has gained a lot of popularity among the locals. It has stood the test of time as one of the best and most thrilling dice game that one can enjoy in China.

The rules are simple, two or more players seated at a table making bids and rolling the dice. Well, albeit you are wondering what the fun is in such a setting. Well, bluffing and wit are the primary attributes that you need to sit at this table. Bluffing and counter-bluffing are merely ways for the players to display courage and challenge each other to a duel of rolling the dice. If your opponents make a bid, you can raise the stakes even higher, or declare it to be a bluff.

There is a need for strategy and tact when playing the game.

When playing Liar dice, you have to be vigilant. It’s a good source for an adrenaline rush, not knowing what is coming your way keeps your senses heightened. At the end of it all, emerging as the winner is the best feeling anyone can have and you will quickly realize why the locals hold the game in such high regard.

It is not for the faint-hearted, but for the strong-spirited. That said when in China you cannot afford to sit out of a game of Liar dice. It is on such tables that you will make long lasting international friendships and get a glimpse of the fun side of China. In short popular dice games in China is a real glimpse into the Chinese culture.

Liar’s dice is by far the most popular dice game in almost all cultures. This game can be played with as many players as there are dice to go around and requires focus and strategy. Although the gambling aspect of this game can be stressful, it is also what makes it the most fun. (Warning: Do not begin playing this game without perfecting your poker face. The bluff is probably the only place where a language barrier comes in handy.)

Need: At Least 2 People, 5 die per person and 1 cup per person

Objective: You want to be the last person in the game with any amount of die in your cup.

Rules:

  • Everyone sits in a circle in order to have as much privacy as possible
  • Each round consists of a dice shake up and a cup flip.
  • When you flip your cup only open it up enough for yourself to see what kind of hand you rolled at first.
  • The first person to speak is whoever lost the last game first or whoever just lost the last round.
  • The number one is a wildcard and can count as any number.
  • When the first person speaks, they use the dice they have to estimate how many of a certain number there will be amongst all of the players dice.
For example the first player will start out by saying: There are eight threes amongst all of us (including the 1’s in their calculation, which would count as threes).
  • Then when it’s the next person’s turn they are allowed to do one of the following:

a. Call that person’s bluff

b. Up the ante by saying that they believe there are one or higher of that same number amongst all of them. For example: There are nine threes amongst all of us.

c. Up the ante by saying that they believe there are either the same amount or higher of a number that is higher than the original number being estimated about. For example: there are eight fours amongst all of us.

  • You cannot however, guess a lower amount of the original number or estimate a higher amount of a number lower than the original.
  • The estimations will carry on and increase in one number or another until eventually someone is forced to call someone’s bluff.
  • In the case of calling someone’s bluff, everyone must open their cups and put the dice that are relevant to the last guess on top of their upside down cup (so if the last call was eight fours, each player must put all their fours and ones on top of their upside down cup). If there are in fact less than what the player estimated of that certain number then they will lose a die. However, if they are equal to or more of the number (including ones) that the player estimated then the person calling the bluff would lose a die.
  • After someone loses a die a new round is begun and people must adjust their estimates based on the new odds with the lost die accounted for.
  • When one loses all of their die then they are out of the game.
  • The final two people in the game will battle it out until one of them is the only person left with any number of die in their cup.

To make this into a drinking game: Instead of making the person who guesses wrong lose a dice, have them take a drink.  By playing this way the odds will remain the same but the more drinking that occurs will only lead to a snowball effect of bad guesses and more drinking.

Strategy:

  • Always account for the number of dice left in the game, do not make estimations based on the original number because odds dwindle fast.
  • Attempt to make a guess that is high enough to force one of your competitors to call another competitor’s bluff before it is your turn to guess again. The later you guess in a round the more likely you will be to fail.
  • Don’t forget about the ones!! They can be your best friend and worst enemy in any round. Make sure they are accounted for!
  • Beware of dice flippers!
  • This game is particularly easy in loud clubs as you can just use your hands to show “eight fours”. Learning how to count to ten with one hand in Chinese is important here, so learn the hand signals here.

What if you are too drunk to play?

In Chinese culture, people show great respect to elders and authorities, and it may also be applied to the Chinese drinking culture, just hold the glass lower than them when clinking glasses. What’s more, you’d better finish your glass.

-TopChinaTravel

Bad move. You shoul be drinking beer in the KTV. This is like water. It’s often under 5% alcohol, and you should be able to handle it. But if you are unable, try this game, after you belt out another song or two…

大话 (big talk, bluff, boast)

Alcohol, being the bedrock of Chinese society that it is, is a very important social tool. But this tool itself is not just limited to just a beverage and container. It’s the mind.

The rules of 大话 (big talk, bluff, boast) can sound fairly complicated, but once you have played a couple of times, it is fairly simple and intuitive.

OVERVIEW

Each player has 5 dice and one cup with which they use to shake and cover the dice. The object of the game is to carefully predict the total number of dice with one particular face value rolled without going over. Oh, and “1” is a wild card.

Players take turns calling, with each call needing to have a higher value than the previous one.

Calls are made in the form of two numbers, for example “five 2s”. The first number indicates the quantity, the second indicates the face value of the dice. For the first call of each game, the minimum the first number in the pair can be is the number of players plus one. To increase the value for the next call, you simply treat it the pair of numbers as one number. For example, “five 4s” would be bigger than “five 2s” but smaller than “six 3s”.

EXAMPLE OF PLAY ADVANCEMENT

Take a game with two players. This means that the total number of dice in play will be 10. They both roll and take a look at their dice.

Player A has dice with face values of 1, 3, 3, 5, 6.

Player B has dice with face values of 2, 3, 5, 5, 5.

Player A starts the game by calling “three 3s”. This indicates that A estimates that there are at least three dice with a value of 3 on the table. A can complete this condition with just his own dice because 1s are wild.

Player B calls “three 5s”. B has to increase the value of the call, so to be safe B decides to call something that is certain to be correct—because B has three himself.

A calls “four 3s”.

B calls “four 5s”.

A calls “five 3s”.

B stops the game.

DECIDING THE WINNER

The winner is decided when one player no longer believes that the last call made is possible and actively stops the game. The players then show their dice and tally up the total. If the call is sufficient, then the one who made the last call is declared the winner. If the call is insufficient, the the one who ended the game is the winner.

In the above example, B would be the winner.

VARIATIONS

There are many variations that can be implemented. Adding more players means that the total number of dice in the game increases and with it the minimum call must be raised.

It is possible to call 1s. If this happens then 1s are no longer wild and they have the highest dice value (you can call them after 6s). This normally happens with the first call.

Some people may make a call followed by the word 斋 (zhāi). This also means that 1s are no longer wild. To put the wilds back into play, a player must increase the quantity of the next call (the first number) by two.

Hope that all made sense. If it didn’t then just try play a few times and you’ll master the strategy in no time.

Non-drinker.
Chinese concept of what a non-drinker is like.

Still too drunk?

How to survive from Chinese drinking frenzy? If you’re going to a Chinese meal, you can hardly get rid of drinking. By knowing some tips, you may enjoy the meal better.

Never be late. You will be “punished” for more glasses of wine if you’re the last one for the party.

Be aware that you may need a couple of hours until the end. Make sure you eat some food, and remember to take less Baijiu. If you really have to drink, you can choose beer instead.

Once you’re in, you’re in. If you don’t refuse at the beginning of the dinner, maybe you will be encouraged to drink more till the end. You can wisely pretend that you can’t drink and politely request a pot of tea, so that you could participate in the toasts and cheers.
 
Take it easy. Your Chinese friends won’t blame on you if you’re unable to drink, but you’d better let them know the fact at the very beginning. They care more about whether you enjoy the time with them.

-TopChinaTravel
Prepare to get sloshed.
Welcome to my world.

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Try this next game… It’s so simple that it is ridiculous!

One and Six (Yi Liu, 一六)

Although Liar Dice is a favorite game, there are other alternatives you explore. With two cups, ten dice and at least two players it is possible to participate in a game of One And Six. Unlike Liar Dice, the game is more laid-back. There is no need for strategy as it is merely won by luck and skill.

With One And Six it is easy to chat and socialize at the same time. The truth is if you are one of those people who loves a more subtle environment, a night out playing One And Six might simply be what you need. There may not be any need for strategy, but like with any game the winner is always the person who had the best plan. The beauty of this game lies in its simplicity.

Introduction: One & Six is a dice game that involves absolutely no strategy and at least two people with five die each. This game is the most simple to play in social situations because not only does it involve zero focus but it also clearly decides a winner.

Need: At least 2 players, 2 Cups & 10 Die (5 per cup)

Objective: Be the first person without any dice in your cup.

Rules:

  • Each round consists of a dice shake up and a cup flip.
  • When you flip your cup, flip it downwards and pry it open to reveal what numbers you rolled.
  • If you role a one, remove that die from your cup and put it out of bounds. That die has been lost from the game. Continue rolling with the remaining dice.
  • If you role a six, remove that die from your cup and give it to the person on your right.
  • If you role neither a six nor a one then wait to see what your opposition rolled and do nothing.
  • Continue shaking and flipping the remaining dice until one of you has no die left in your cup.

As a drinking game: Whoever runs out of dice last must drink for the number of seconds that there are dice left in their cup.

Strategy: None besides being Irish.

The Game with Three Dice

This game is played with three dice instead of five, and it is really simple. If you are really drunk, sick with simple.

The three dice game is called Cee-Lo. It is apparently derived from an ancient Chinese dice game. And it is well known in hip hop culture.

  • Any number can play but the game consists of a series of battles between two players.
  • Each player in the pair rolls all three dice until one of four recognized combinations appears. A 4-5-6 combination is the best combination.
  • A “trip” is all three dice the same and is the next best combination.
  • Next comes a pair with one die different. The different die becomes the “point.” The worst possible combination is 1-2-3, which always loses.

SZ’ ‘NG LUK

This is a game of gambling, and is a great way to lose money. Don’t gamble in a KTV, and keep focused on why you are there. But if you don’t want to heed my advice, then here are the rules…

This game is called sz’ ‘ng luk, ‘four, five, six’, commonly contracted to sing luk.

It is played with three dice…

The throws in it in the order of their rank are:

  • Any three alike, from three ‘sixes’ down, called wai5
  • ‘Four, five, six’ called sing luk, or ch‘un fa6
  • Two alike, the odd die counting, from six down to ace, the last throw being called yat fat, ‘ace negative’
  • ‘One, two, three’ called mò lung, ‘dancing dragon’ or shé tsai, ‘little snake’.

The first player is determined, on throwing around, to be the one who throws the highest number of red spots.

The first player throws until he makes one of the above mentioned casts.

If he throws sing luk (four, five, six); three alike; or two alike, six high, each of the players at once drink to him.

But if he throws mò lung or yat fat, he drinks instead.

If he throws two alike, five, four, three, or two high, the next player on his left throws.

If the latter makes a higher cast, the first player must drink to him, but if a lower cast, he must drink to the first player.

The third player throws in the same way, and the game is continued until the first player is out-thrown.

Another game similar to this is…

KON MÍN YÉUNG

Kon mín yéung, ‘pursuing sheep’, is played with six dice.

It is typically a game played for small stakes, usually for something to eat, and is seldom resorted to by professional gamblers. In it the player throws until he gets three alike, when the sum of the spots on the other dice is counted. The throws in the order of their rank are:

  • Six 6’s called tái mín yéung, ‘large sheep’
  • Six 5’s, 4’s, 3’s, 2’s, or 1’s called mín yéung kung, ‘rams’
  • Three alike and 6, 6, 5 called mín yéung ná, the ‘ewe’
  • Three alike, and the other throws than the above. These are designated by the number representing the sum of the throws with the three odd dice.

The throws, tái mín yéung and mín yéung kung, take all the stakes.

If mín yéung ná, or any other cast of three alike, is made, the next player throws until he gets three alike, when he pays if his throw is lower, or is paid if it is higher, as in sing luk.

The throw of three 4’s is called wong p‘ang fúi.

‘A boy and a girl were betrothed by their parents. The girl's father died, and the family having been reduced to poverty, her brother sold the girl to become a prostitute. 

This she resented, and anxious to find her betrothed, whose face she well remembered, she caused it to be advertised that she would yield herself to the man who could throw three 4’s with the dice. 

Many, attracted by her beauty, tried and failed, until her husband, Wong p‘ang fúi, who had obtained the rank of a senior wrangler at the provincial examination, presented himself. 

For him she substituted loaded dice, with which he threw three 4’s whereupon she disclosed herself, and they were happily united.’

How to survive a Chinese drinking frenzy

The following is from a CNN article titled ” How to survive a Chinese drinking frenzy” By Trista Baldwin 22 February, 2012. Posted as found with very little editing. All credit to the original author.

If you thought shotgunning a beer in under five seconds back in uni was the pinnacle of drinking prowess, you’ve probably never been properly ganbei’d.
China’s version of “down the hatch” is a bit like the Power Hour, which involves repeated and prolonged shooting of small amounts of alcohol -- red wine if you’re lucky, baijiu if you’re not.

Though observed in all social circles, ganbei is particularly prominent in China’s formal banquet culture, where business suits and government officials rub elbows, talk business and get completely sloshed.

Shanghai-based food and wine critic Lawrence Lo and a few seasoned ganbei-ers, shared the secrets of this thoroughly intoxicating custom. 

1. You’re in, or you’re out
While you’re not obliged to chug the night away, it is tacitly expected at a business banquet.

“There’s probably more pressure to drink than there is on your 21st birthday,” says a senior accountant who prefers the name Will Thomas. In his early 30s, Canadian Thomas attends regular company banquets with suppliers and other accountants in Shanghai.

If you are going to pass, “set your rule at the beginning,” advises Hong Kong-born Lawrence Lo, 39, who also runs LHY Etiquette Consultancy to gap the Chinese and Western drinking culture. “Because once you’re in, you’re in. There's no room for flip-flopping.”

Q: The question is -- how to get out?

A: Make an excuse

All is fair in love and ganbei, and a white lie might save everyone's face. The best excuses are religious or health reasons, though be prepared for jovial ridicule.

What’s the best get-out-of-jail-free card? Pregnancy.

Either being on medication to get your wife pregnant, or, for women, being or trying to get pregnant (though be prepared for questions six months down the line), will do the trick.

2. Women get a free pass
“One of the reasons I like China is that if you have the title and the position, you’re treated as an equal and get the same title respect,” says a British lady, who prefer to be addressed as Lucy Morgan. Morgan has lived and worked in China in both the government and private sectors for more than 30 years.

Ironically, while you’ll be invited to the banquets, you won’t be expected to drink. However, if you choose to partake, rule number one applies.

Q: What is Rule #1 - Props for the female ganbei

A: “Women get double points for ganbei’ing,” says Will Thomas.

Some men may offer to do a full ganbei while you do a quarter or half ganbei, but quite often you’ll be expected to keep pace with the crowd. For Morgan, it’s about proving that if you’re an equal, you’re an equal.

“I wasn’t going to be seen as the ‘little girlie’ back then or the ‘older woman’ now,” she says, referring to her experience 15 years ago when she out-ganbei’d the vice-mayor of Chengdu with 12 shots of baijiu.

Whoever draws the short straw gets to be the next ganbei rep.

3. Elect a representative
Believe it or not, “if you need to represent your company at a banquet, you can bring someone along and delegate them to drink for you,” says Lo.

Talk about authority.

In Morgan's experience, she has rarely seen a woman elect a drinking buddy (as women aren’t expected to drink anyway) -- it’s usually older or weak-livered businessmen.

Q: If you go this route your fellow diners may jeer, but it does serve a purpose.

A: Saving company face

Joining in the inebriated merriment is in many ways viewed as a sign of goodwill and hospitality on the part of the company or organization you represent. In fact, this is often a sneaky way to get your best hitter up to the plate.

“The elected drinker is usually someone you do not want to drink with, because they can drink a lot," says Thomas. "They will probably deny that they can drink -- it's a lie.”

We're betting Bill opted for red wine over baijiu when going head-to-head with former Chinese President Jiang Zemin.

4. Pace yourself
It’s a long ride once you’re on the ganbei train.

“At a banquet, there are usually eight to 10 courses, and there will be a ganbei with each,” says Lo.

In addition, the host will usually toast the group and the guest of honor.
The second most senior host will toast the second most senior guest, and so on and so forth. It’s also not uncommon for challenges to strike up between tables.

Q: So, how can you last the night without bringing the banquet back up?

A: Be sneaky

Over the course of 30 years, Morgan has picked up a trick or two. One way to lower the intensity is to downgrade your poison -- switch from baijiu to wine, or ganbei beer instead. Although the idea of shooting wine is less than palatable for many, it's the lesser of two evils.

While at informal occasions you can ganbei non-alcoholic beverages, Morgan says, it’s highly unusual at formal occasions. Beer is as non-alcoholic as it gets.

Another trick? “Pour a bit of water in your wine,” she suggests, “or switch to a half-ganbei -- banbei ganbei.”

And lastly, humor. “If you get people laughing, they won’t care how much you drink.”

5. Don’t bring the spouse
Chinese banquets are primarily business affairs -- spouses are seldom invited to join.

“You should always check first [before bringing a spouse along],” advises Lo.
There are several reasons for this, the most compelling being that deals may not get closed over the course of the banquet.

The KTV close

“It’s still a very macho culture,” explains Lo. “Sometimes business is done [or concluded] away from the dinner table at KTVs or massage parlors."

The retreat to more “nefarious” locales, as Morgan jokes, or playing liar dice with pretty young girls selected for the occasion, is not a scene that spouses can readily partake in (and may disapprove of).

But, as Thomas points out: “It depends on who you’re with. Often you just go to a genuine karaoke -- and more drinking.”

So you don’t want to drink…

Some advice on how for those who want to be “the Ugly American”

I do not recommend being a non-drinker in China, and it is impossible to conduct business or integrate into Chinese society without drinking. So forget about playing dice, once you insult your hosts by not drinking, you won’t ever be asked out again. And if you truly want to be the ostracized loner inside of China, then read these suggestions.

Chinese version of a successful businessman.
Chinese version of a successful businessman.

The following is from an article titled “Ganbei – Chinese Drinking Culture” . Reproduced as found, minus the pictures. Edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the original author(s) and all credit to the website at the link listed.

So, what can you do if you don’t like drinking and still want to do business or have friends in China? Don’t lose hope, there are a few things you can do to diminish the negative consequences and unintentional insult from not drinking.

1) Avoid at all costs – On a personal note, I’m no teetotaler, but drinking isn’t my favorite social activity. So, on one of the dozen occasions per year I have a drink, it’s rarely more than a beer or glass of wine, and I avoid hard liquor at all costs. After living for many years in China, it’s safe to say that avoiding a drinking bash wasn’t easy.

My solution to the issue was to simply avoid all occasions where I’d be pressured to drink.

Luckily, my job didn’t necessitate the infamous Chinese business dinners, so my career didn’t suffer from my abstinence, but my social life did.

If you don’t need to close contracts or don’t mind having fewer friends and missing out on weddings and other special celebrations, this is the best course of action. On the bright side, if you’re not a big drinker then once you make friends with other non-big drinkers, you’ll have friendships that are more likely to last and be enjoyable.

2) Be all in or all out, no middle – If you need successful business dinners for your job or want to experience all the fun of semi-formal and formal social dinners, then from the beginning, you need to decide to be all in or all out.

Don’t try the middle ground of, “Ok, I’ll just have one/a little.”

There is no such thing (generally) as “a little” in China and you’ll later find yourself in the unfortunate position of offending your host when you can’t drink anymore or are in the fast lane to drunk-as-a-skunk-ville.

The better option is to make up an excuse of why you can’t touch alcohol at all – no beer, wine, or liquor.

Excuses that are usually accepted are:

a) religious reasons (for example, “I’m not allowed to drink because of my religion”, which isn’t actually far fetched as Islam and some sects of Protestantism do ban alcohol consumption);

b) health reasons (for example, “I have an alcohol allergy that can kill me or make my stomach bleed”);

c) have a Chinese friend give a heartfelt, long explanation on your behalf (if you’re lucky enough to be friends with a well-respected member of the group, or the host him/herself, then they may be able to interject on your behalf and explain to the group your preference for not drinking).

d) I’m pregnant (think about this one carefully if you’ll be in the same company of people in the next 6-12 months).

Chinese version of a successful businessman.
Chinese version of a successful businessman.

Options that don’t work so well are:

a) I’m in AA/a recovering alcoholic – China does not have the same familiarity, knowledge, and acceptance regarding recovery programs as in the West and thus it may be taken as a lie. Even if you are in a program, it may not be the best excuse to give.

b) I have to work early/get up early – this usually doesn’t stop the pressure to drink and you’ll be faced with having to insult your host by flat-out refusing.

c) my spouse doesn’t like it/let me – the same as in B.

d) I’m not feeling well tonight – same as in B.

e) I drank too much last night – This would only encourage more pressure to throw ‘em back.

f) anything that mentions the police or driving – sorry, that just doesn’t cut it, and the police mention may get you a hearty laugh.

China is not a "police state like the USA is. The police just leave you alone, and the Chinese have no concept of "sobriety checks" or "sobriety roadblocks".

Whatever excuse you choose, make it ironclad and make sure to stick to it.

Keep in mind, even with an ironclad excuse, there may still be some obvious, lingering awkwardness. While your hosts/coworkers/friends may not have taken a full-throated offence to your rejection of their toasts, even the best sounding excuses will put a barrier between you and the rest. You may save some face and prevent the insult, but you’ll have done little to make friends or business partners.

3)Being a women kinda gets you a pass, just being a foreigner doesn’t – Women are not expected to drink as much as men, and they usually don’t get as much pressure to drink as men, especially in a purely business setting (the operative word here is “usually”, not “always”).

So, practically this means that women may be able to get away with more excuses than men and not still get an onslaught of pressure. Casual settings can span the gambit from less pressure than usual to actually more pressure as your date, or friends, try to get you to ‘loosen up a little’.

Chinese girls can hold their own.
Chinese women are tigers in a kitten’s body.

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Men, on the other hand, even foreign men, will still be pushed frequently to drink (unless you give one of those ironclad excuses listed in #2).

In fact, if you’re the sole foreigner at the table (or one of only a few), then you could easily be considered the de facto guest of honor and in such an honorable position, it’s an honor to get your glass filled – both for you and the person doing the filling.

The thought goes something like this: for the guest of honor, it’s “Look at me. I’m so popular, people can’t wait to fill my glass.”; and for the filler, it’s “Look at me.

This very important person is allowing me to fill their glass and then they’re drinking what I just gave them. I must be important if they’re accepting my gift because they wouldn’t accept this from just anyone.”

4) Pace yourself – if you decide to go for it and choose the “all in” option, make sure to pace yourself. These drinking affairs can easily go for +5 hours and occasionally turn into an all-night event (say 6pm to 6am).

Importantly, the drink of choice (as mentioned above) is the super strong, ultra fiery local spirit Baijiu.

It doesn’t take a Big Bang physicist to calculate how long you can last throwing back these puppies. Instead, you possibly can opt for something less strong – like beer or wine. While this may not always be an option, it’s usually acceptable and available (it’s a good idea to nonchalantly inquire about Baijiu alternatives before accepting an invitation.) It may feel awkward doing “shots” of wine, but it’s probably the lesser of two evils.

Another sneakier alternative is to water down your Baijiu shots. If you see other people doing this openly, then take it as the green light to follow suit. If you don’t, then you may have to break out your best James Bond skills.

Don't do this. I have NEVER seen this done. If you are caught doing it, your "face" will forever be ruined. You eaither act like a man and take it or decline. Don't be a coward and make matters worse by insulting your host.

-Metallicman

5) Food is your friend – Reaching deep into the bag of college drinking tricks, food can be your best friend. Full stomachs make alcohol take longer to be absorbed into the bloodstream, especially carbs and fat.

So, in preparation for your drinking adventure, fill up as close to the drinking hour as possible, on breads, noodles, rice, fatty meats, and skins (like chicken skin). If possible, try to keep eating as long as you’re drinking.

There is always plenty of food available at these dinners, but there will be a lot of vegetable dishes and seafood which do little to slow absorption and you may not really like the other food options. So, stuffing your backpack with granola or nut bars that you sneak into the bathroom isn’t a bad idea either.

6) Keep it light, Humor is a good friend too – If you’ve started down the drinking road and need to get off the highway, even if you’ve only taken a few sips or a few shots and just don’t want to drink anymore, keep in mind that humor can be a powerful friend.

Depending on your crowd, you may be able to deflect some pressure (and some extra shots) by being able to make jokes at your expense. Comments like, “Oh, I’m such a baby. I just can’t drink like you guys. Hahaha.” or “I’m _____ (clumsy, loud, etc.) enough when I’m not drinking, so I really can’t get drunk tonight.”

This may not completely stop the toasts and shots, but (again, depending on the crowd) it may decrease them and give you a moment to get your bearings.

7) A pinch … ‘drinker’ (borrowing from a baseball reference) – This one is a real “Are you serious??” moment.

If this is a business dinner and if you have some amount of authority within your company, you can actually assign a drinking rep to drink for you.

You should read that again and maybe pause before continuing, but it’s not a joke.

It’s a custom followed in China, as higher-level company authorities who don’t wish to get wasted but don’t want to offend their host, will attend the dinner and bring along a drinking rep to do all the drinking for them – and they of course assign some of the highest-tolerance people on the planet.

This option doesn’t really work though outside of a business-like setting.

Chinese version of a successful businessman.
Chinese version of a successful businessman.

Suggestions for a Fun KTV Evening

In my opinion, KTV is a really fun way to spend some hours doing something that is what millions of locals enjoy doing, so you can consider it an authentic cultural experience. I have many hours of KTV and karaoke under my belt so here are my suggestions for having a fun time, especially if you’re in a big group of people you might not know well.

  • Pick songs that are up-tempo. Nothing drags a KTV evening down like slow songs.
  • Find the “cancel” or “next” button on the song machine. Many songs have refrains that go on for-ev-er. Feel free to hit “next” to go to the next song (unless it’s your boss singing).
  • Choose songs that are fun to sing as a group.
  • Take some time to practice your own signature KTV song in the shower so you can really impress your friends with “Beat It!”. Include some key dance moves.
...for those who enjoy drinking, you can be very successful and happy in China. You’ll get bonus points for following along with the group and for making such a good effort at keeping up. In fact, anyone who at least tries hard to accept toasts, especially Baijiu toasts, will get some credit for doing so even if they have to bow out early and stop accepting every toast from every person.

You’ll also have a front row seat to a side of Chinese culture few get to experience and may end up having the time of your life. Afterall, the Chinese haven’t continued this tradition for 1000s of years because it’s dull and boring. For the more reluctant, maybe you can think of this using the age-old Las Vegas adage - what goes on in China, stays in China. 

For many adult travelers, a good ole Chinese drinking fest may be the perfect excuse to let loose and have some fun without your party antics necessarily ending up on someone’s Facebook feed (btw, Facebook is still banned in China).

For women, the bonus points multiply. A western woman who can keep up with everyone at the table, especially at a baijiu fest, and walk out on her own accord while many others are knocking glasses over and accidentally pulling tablecloths off, will usually win mad respect from literally everyone.

Also, these events don’t happen every weekend. As a visitor to China, you’ll be lucky to attend just one event like this. If you have to travel for extended periods on business or move to China on your own, these events may happen only once every couple of months.

-China Educational Tours

When I conduct business, I usually have business KTV’s and dinner events at least three to eight times a month when business is booming. During the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, hardly never. In fact, I only went out two time that entire year!!!!!

During the holiday, and of course, during Chinese New Year, for the three or four week long holiday, drinking and playing is just about every night.

Phew!

Don’t forget…!

Let’s do a quick review.

Drinking is very common inside of China.
Drinking in China is as common as eating a hamburger in America.

.

While in Western countries you simply clink and drink, in China there are a few more rules for drinking, whereby the most important rule is to give face.  If you want to toast an important host or guest, be sure to take note of some basic guidelines:

• The first toast:  If you are the guest, you shouldn’t initiate the very first toast as this is seen as impolite. It should always be made by the main host.

To clink or not to clink:  If the party is big and the table is wide, people usually prefer to clink glasses. But to show respect, make sure that the brink of your glass is lower than theirs. When the glasses clink, you’ll have to干杯 gānbēi, meaning literally ‘dry the cup’, or ‘bottoms up’. If your glasses don’t clink and only touch the other person’s cup with your fingers, you signal 随意 (suíyì), or ‘as you wish’, and you can drink whatever amount you want.

 • Respectful toastWhen you are offering to toast 敬酒 (jìngjiǔ), meaning respectful drink, you are putting yourself in an inferior position and so you might want to toast everyone who outranks you.

Eat a lot: To avoid getting too drunk, the key is to eat. Usually there will be plenty of foods at a Chinese banquet, so there should be nothing to worry about.  However keep in mind that with every course, there will of course be a ganbei with every guest!

non-drinker.
China is a nation where even the religious monks drink alcohol, as do the children. Not to drink automatically labels you as a societal outcast.

Conclusion

I well remember when I met my wife’s grandmother. She was a short, short little frail ball of a woman. She smiled at me with little strands of grey hair sticking up on her head. She stood up to my lower chest in height (and I think that she was wearing high loafers). He poured me a full glass of 53% Baijiu in a tall tumbler. Then she poured herself the same size and raised it to me in a salute.

She then raised the glass to me, clinked my glass and said Ganbei so loud that the entire city could hear. You could feel the ground rumble at our feet. I was a little taken back that her voice was so breathtakingly loud.

And it was like time stopped.

You could hear a pin drop. All eyes were on me.

I could feel all 400 people watching my every move. Goose-pimples crawling up my arm, and I could feel my spine tingling. I glanced over at my wife, who was fully expecting me to “do the right thing”. And I looked about the room, and I could see such a wide range of emotions.

We both raised the glasses to our lips in unison, and together we emptied those two glasses. Then when emptied, she raised it up high and I did the same.

Everyone cheered.

Then I began going table to table…

… drinking the same amount to each of them…

…to all of the 24 tables in the room. Ugh!

Alcohol.
This is not water. This is a full tumbler of 53% alcohol. Are you up to the challenge?
Drinking alcohol is a vital part of Chinese custom and culture.  Those from northern China actually consider drinking and friendship the same thing because during business dinners for example, drinking can lead to friendship, sealing deals and developing better work relationships. Every shot of baijiu brings the business partners a little closer and so drinking is seen as a supplementary part of the working life.

Drinking to cement relationships has a long history in china.  Famous poets like 李白 (Lǐbái), have also praised alcohol multiple times in his poems, with one famous saying: 酒逢知己千杯少 (jiǔ féng zhī jǐ qiān bēi shǎo); “When one drinks with a friend, a thousand cups are not enough”.  

Of course, LiBai is talking about the 盅 (zhōng), which are the small cups traditionally used when drinking in China, but it emphasizes the importance of alcohol and relationships!

-Hutong school

A KTV, especially a business KTV is a very important institution within China. Most Westerners, and non-businessmen inside of China are unaware of the significance of this venue and the importance of maintaining face. Here we discuss some dice games so that the businessmen can play with the girl that he selected out of the line up.

Maintain your face, and give respect. Have fun and show it. You all will be just fine.

Drink or not, your choice.
In China, “good guys” and “powerful businessmen” drink alcohol. Outcasts, social misfits, and losers do not.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Business KTV Index here…

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A handbook or preparation checklist for a business KTV trip.

Heh, heh. Make no mistake, you will need to be prepared. And this post / article is my notes that I use to make sure that I am a well-prepared “boy scout” when I go off to one of these venues next time.

So, here is a handbook or a check list that I have made of what you should and should not do when going to a business KTV in China. This is also part story. It is a narrative of my latest excursion and the mistakes that I made there. Maybe an astute reader might learn a thing or two in the process.

If you all don’t know what all this is about, then I would suggest that you first read my series of posts on Business KTV’s in China and Asia. You can click on this link and go there directly.

Business KTV's
Warning. This is adult stuff for adults. It can be offensive to people with softer personalities. Read at your own risk.

Introduction

Ohhh. I am so sore.

It’s been three days now, and my body is still not up to par. I attribute it to massive quantities of fake Hennessy VSOP, and my age, and the over all stress of the long trip to and from the factory and the clubs. But next time, I will be better prepared. I’ll tell you what.

It’s day three, and I am still sore…

  • My arms feel like an elephant is squashing them.
  • My joints are all gritty and sandy.
  • My shoulders and neck are puffy and sore.
  • My stomach is slowly healing.

You know, I’m really pretty good with these kinds of adventures, but the last year (the year of the dog) 2020 was terrible. On all fronts, and in all areas, and the pandemic and the world-wide industrial / economic collapse was horrible for business, as well as for business trips to the KTV venues.

Seriously, I hadn’t gone to any of these venues for a long time. Maybe twelve months. And as such, I was not really ready for my lack of conditioning.

Blame the pandemic.

But…

Yeah. I take full responsibly for my lack of preparation and conditioning.

It’s like body building, or sports. You have to maintain a certain degree of exercise and stamina. You need to practice and give your body warm-up exercises and exercises so that you will be fit for the game or the event. And that is so true about working, and business KTV’s.

But next time…

Next time…

I will be far better prepared. And while you all might think that I am an expert in these matters (well, I am), I also make mistakes and have issues. And you all need to prepare for what you will expect, and how you can handle them. Let’s talk about these things right now.

Your health

If you are younger, say under 40 years old, your health will not be that much of an issue. You can be wildly out of shape, but still be able to enjoy a business outing and KTV venue. The problem comes when you start getting older.

I am in my 60’s. You can say that I am 60-ish. Heh heh, and I am no longer that young 20-year old stud full of piss and vinegar. So, this article is written for us older folk. maybe 35 and up who actually go to these venues. (After all, and you need to keep in mind, that most men who go to these venues are over 35 years old.)

So, I am going to be blunt.

Long before you start going to any of these business venues, you will need to perform daily exercises. If you are not moderately healthy, then these venues and a dinner and drinking will absolutely wreck havoc on your body. As I well am experiencing now. You must be moderately healthy. Moderately.

Try to do daily exercise.

It doesn’t have to be anything overly strenuous, but it should be some sit-ups, some pushups or some arm curls. Alternatively try some walking, or bicycle riding. All very important. Don’t put if off. It’s not to work out hard, the purpose is to maintain a moderately healthy lifestyle. A “couch potato” will never be able to enjoy one of these venues.

On the good side is that older men who exercise will see results faster than when they were young. So instead of needing to do 100 pushups when I was in my early 20's, I now only need to do 20.

On the negative side, it's much harder to do those few pushups. Yikes!

In general, I do eat well, and I walk most every day. But still one bad batch of fake hard alcohol can put me down “surer than shit”. I’ll tell you what.

It’s not that the other bosses know that the alcohol is fake. They thought that they were honoring me by giving me Hennessy, but it was fake. I can tell. I do know my whiskey and my VSOP. They just didn’t know, and they would lose their “face” if I told them. So when offered such a drink, you need to be prepared.

And if offered, you need to drink it.

When offered alcohol

Now, I have covered this before, but I will revise it to these new “rules of engagement”.

Suggest that you drink White Wine. Or, bring your own alcohol with you.

53 degree white wine is powerful and potent stuff for certain. But it is real. REAL. The really expensive stuff is good, and will not give you any head or muscle aches. But it is really pricey. So knowing that everyone will intend to get drunk, make sure that you are drinking real, and genuine alcohol. Not some kind of locomotive degreaser mixed with flavorings to approximate an expensive Western beverage.

And all Chinese know the differences between “good” white wine and “cheap” shit.

I am not being facetious.

Hennessy cognac
They say that sales of Hennessy cognac in the whole world exceeds its production by 3-4 times. This means that only every 3-4 bottle Hennessy – original cognac, and the volume of counterfeit reaches 80%.

However, this information is not confirmed. But, most likely, not very far from the truth.

One of the leaders in the number of counterfeits of course, is the Hennessy XO cognac to distinguish a fake, you need to pay attention to the following signs:

1. Volume of 0.5 liters. Hennessy XO Cognac in 0.5l. is performed. Original cognac is bottled only in bottles of 0.35 and 0.7 liters.;

2. Sheath tube. Original plug and the shell made with special technology (including laser engraving and hologram Holosleeve), very snug to the glass bottle. Casing should be reminiscent of the inexpensive wines produced domestically.

A very large number of fake accounts for the lion’s share of Hennessy VSOP cognac counterfeit accounts, bottled in the form of a jar, 0.5 liter. Therefore, we recommend absolutely refuse to buy a bottle of Hennessy VSOP in this form and volume. Better buy regular round bottle.

If no reasonable alternatives not, and buy a bottle of brandy-flask is inevitable, then you should pay attention to the following (they are similar to symptoms for Hennessy XO):

1. Cap. It should not resemble the usual vodka. Hennessy cognac house a lot of attention to producing jams and their protection, discussed above.

2. Relief image of a hand with a halberd. It must be present in the upper part of the front side of the bottle.

-How to verify the authenticity of the alcohol (10 pictures)

The best time to suggest this is before the dinner. If your hosts don’t have any bottles on hand, you go out ad buy some real stuff from a supermarket.

So make sure that you do so way before anyone goes into their office storage closet and pulls out some XO, VSOP or Whiskey from one of the cases in their stash. Ask for either real white wine, or real red wine.

Other than that, you stick with beer.

In this instance, the factory paid 1000 RMB for this bottle of fake Hennessy at a restaurant in a small village town. Of course it was fake. By the time it was purchased, it was too late to say no. Ugh!

Have your aide specify either white wine, or red wine. No hard alcohol.

The red wine is usually hit or miss. It depends on the size of the company and a little bit about the owners experience with wine. In general, I would say that about 70% of the time that the red wine would be real. But it’s the remaining 30% of the time that you got to watch out for.

My preference is always for red wine. It’s healthier for you, and will help us older guys in the bedroom.

But white wine is a guarantee that the alcohol is genuine.

White wine.
Some “white wine”, 53 degree pure power from my personal stash.

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Make sure that you specify either red or white wine, and stay away from hard alcohol if you are going to have any romping and play in a business KTV.

Avoid Fake or potentially fake alcohol

It’s not just the terrible side effects, fake alcohol can really harm you. It can damage your body and trigger cancer. Do not fuck with it.

Drinking alcohol containing these chemicals can cause nausea and vomiting, abdominal pain, drowsiness and dizziness. It can also lead to kidney or liver problems and even coma. Methanol, a substance which can be used in fake vodka, may cause permanent blindness.

-The dangers of fake alcohol | Drinkaware

Some notes on the girls

This last trip I was offered three or even more girls to have fun with. They really wanted me to have a good time, and well, the more the merrier, right?

I was not thinking (all that fucking fake alcohol) and declined. I just settled on one chick.

What was I thinking? I told them my usual “I’m a man, not a machine”, but in hindsight, I was wrong.

This particular factory always offers me multiple girls to play with. Why did I decline? I don’t know. Maybe it’s my prudish side.

The first group(s) of girls were short-time girls. We told them to go away as we were only interested in long-time girls. Here we see the manager talking to the girls.

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Next time, I’ll ask for a basketball team sized entourage of chicks and see what happens. Maybe they will get a volume-discount from the manager. LOL.

Have your aide specify that if possible, you are fine with multiple long-time girls.

And that’s another thing.

Why the Hell didn’t I get the name card of the manager. I must always get her card. You know, for future referrals. Ugh!

Have your aide get the business card of the Girl’s manager for you.

All in all

Over all, this last business trip was the first one that I had in over twelve months due to the fucking coronavirus.

Only one in twelve months!

Unbelievable!

Keep in mind that these excursions used to be from one to three times a week.

I blame it solidly on the coronavirus, and the fucking asshole who unleashed it on CNY 2020, Donald Trump and his army of neocon assholes.

RANT – WARNING – RANT -WARNING – RANT – WARNING

So, and a nice big FUCK YOU to Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo. I hope that you get a taste of the turmoil that you unleashed on the rest of the world.

In my view it is like America has had a massive case of diarrhea for the last forty years, and Donald Trump was the orifice that enabled it to spew forth. It’s just that he painted a big old bulls eye on me, my business, my family and my friends. FUCK HIM.

Let’s keep all that shit in the United States, ok? Let it rot and fester and get resolved THERE. Stop trying to release it upon the rest of the world. OK? Am I clear about this?

Anyways, I know that my strong opinions on Trump and his anti-China crusade is going to rankle the hides of my of my American readership. Sorry. But you were (for the last four years) just spectators.

You were spectators of the “news”. You read this article or that article, and you clapped with glee as he terrorized this other nation and that other nation. It was fun, because you weren’t affected. “Look at us! Woo Woo”

So what? You only had to pay 30% more for your appliances, and goods. No biggie! In your mind anything was fine just as long Donald Trump was “sticking it to” those hyper progressive Marxists. No more social-reengineering! That’s worth it, right?

America was a republic for less than 20 years, and then became a democracy. Democracies always become oligarchy-ruled military empires. The only way off this “merry-go-round” is either a complete collapse of the government or an evolution to some other kind of government structure. And, judging from the 2020 election, it seems that most American want Marxism. I think it’s stupid, and crazy, but who am I to say? Whatever floats your boat, eh?

Yeah. So, Trump, yeah, he built a wall. Didn’t he? And he put Hillary Clinton in prison. Right? That’s what he did, right? He got America back to working, and more restaurants and stores are open than ever before! He’s a genius!

Americans are now proud to be called Americans. Why; a whole two other nations in the entire world now accepts Americans! You can travel to West Gianna, and East Bumfuck without problem. All thanks to the reincarnation of Jesus Christ himself! And the great new realignments in the Geo-Political area that Mike Pompeo has mapped out.

Yeah. I get it.

I was like youse guys.

This God damn fucking clown painted a big red bullseye on China. Then this fucking jackass carpet bombed China with FUCKING seven (S-E-V-E-N) bio-weapons. First to destroy all the food, and then to destroy the Chinese people. All these honking big assed viral agents are so enormous that it takes weeks for them to dissipate under normal H-UV.

Then he steamed five carriers comprising three separate assault armadas to the South China Sea. Yeah, and you all laughed and clapped so happy that Donald was going to finally “teach China a lesson”. Woo Hoo! Weeeee!

Except it didn’t work out that way. Did it? Nope. The USA (and British) navies were thoroughly tromped by the Chinese, and the navies slithered back home. It was a MASSIVE DEFEAT. And I am going to write about it… soon. It’s a very interesting story. And one that you won’t read about anywhere else.

The USA got it’s ass handed to them. Bet ya didn’t read about it on FOX, CNN or MSN, did you?

You see, America is crude and judges by appearances only. And China presents a nice pleasant face while holding some very strong and powerful capabilities. It’s an often over looked aspect of China. One that only idiots and fools make.

Only fools misjudge by appearance.

Only an idiot would judge a person by it’s appearance. You need to see the entire picture in great detail. You do not make a cardboard cut-out, and throw darts at it. Thinking that there won’t be any repercussions. Oh there will be. And Trump has sent in motion some very long-term negatives for the people of the United States.

So. No. I’m not going to give him a pass. And neither is anyone else.

RANT – WARNING – RANT -WARNING – RANT – WARNING

Anyways… Phew! I’ve got off the subject again.

All in all, I was prepared. More or less. The news about the trip and the resulting plans were given to me the day before the event. Normally this would be considered “short notice”, but I was ready. And super willing, let me tell you.

It is no accident that I was ready and willing to visit a factory and talk with colleagues. This is, and has been, an important part of my life. What is a restaurant without customers? What is a hospital without patients? What is a pet store without pets? Meeting and talking about product design, development and manufacture is my life. And it has been asleep ever since Donald Trump decided to unleash the pandemic upon the world.

So when the time came, I was up for it.

And it pretty much went well.

The drive to the factory

Most of the factories are far away from where I live and my offices. Typically they are at least a one hour drive, and this one was a four hour drive. We hit the road and drove out of the various third tier cities until we hit real countryside, and then it was just the winding band of the highway rolling in and out through tunnels and over these enormous bridges.

Driving to the factory.
Driving to the factory.

Urination and smoke breaks were every hour or so. And we made good time. The rest areas were pretty much the same, though the pandemic had really put a “damper” on the travel plans of many a Chinese citizen, and so some of the normally open venues in the various plazas were shut down, with rolled corrugated doors locking things silent.

I would say about 20% of the stores and “fast food” establishments were shut down.

But the driving was nice. We drove through the green hills, under a nice blue sky with the mandatory or obligatory white cumulus clouds. It was fine, if long.

And it was great to see my friends and associates. They looked good. And it was great to sit down and drink tea, smoke some cigarettes with them, and generally deal with the matters at hand. On the work scene, it was great to get back to a factory, and the smells and the feeling of the environment really energized me.

After doing our business at the factory, we de-camped for the night’s festivities. Left left the car at the factory and then from that moment on, we were under the full hospitality of the factory and our fellow boss friends.

Dinner

Of course, the factory was in the more rural areas, and so we drove for about twenty minutes to a larger town. You might refer to it as fifth-tier city. And there we sat down on the veranda while the table was being laid out, and the alcohol was being decanted.

First Mistake

From now on, I will always insist on either White Wine or Red Wine. No "hard alcohol". This was a fake VSOP, and they offered it as homage to me, but I know fake, and fake alcohol is very bad for one's health.

This is an issue that should have been brought up by my aide while at the factory. As they discussed the drinking libations in the office over tea. I need to step up my game, I'll tell you what.

We had some delicious food. As you all can well see. It was some local Guangzhou fare with (hairy) crab, shrimp, fish, turtle, shellfish, and more.

Endowed with criss-crossing waterways on the Pearl River Delta and a meandering coastline along the South China Sea, Guangdong Province is a paradise for seafood lovers. Archaeologists suggest that the history of Cantonese seafood diet can be traced back to as early as 10,000 years ago. Today, fresh seafood still plays a prominent role in Cantonese culinary culture.

Steamed fish.
Fresh fish. Steamed with light local seasoning.

Guangzhou is the capital city of Guangdong, which is famous in China and throughout the world as the home of Cantonese food, known here locally as Yuecai or 粤菜. Cantonese food is perhaps the most famous Chinese food around the world, mainly because the first and second wave Chinese immigrants came from the south of China; Guangdong, Fujian, and Hainan.

And it is a center of food. Well, we were in a small town of Gurandong, and the local regional tastes of the food were unique and special. Really special and very delicious.

Seafood in Cantonese cuisine is famous for its optimal preservation of authentic flavor and scintillating freshness. Steaming fish seasoned with light soy sauce, ginger and spring onions is one of the favorite dishes for Cantonese foodies. Only the freshest fish can be selected to cook in this fashion; otherwise, strong spices and juices are required to cover the repugnant odor. The time used to steam the fish also needs to be strictly controlled to ensure the perfect tenderness of the texture.

Fresh steamed river shrimp
Fresh steamed river shrimp.

Guangzhou, near the sea, is rich in seafood, offering many delicious dishes. Reputable seafood dishes cover Salt and Pepper Shrimp, Salmon Sashimi, Steamed Scallops with Minced Garlic, Curry Crabs, Cheese Lobster, etc.

Deep-fried garlic with rice noodles is a widely accepted dressing for steamed shellfish such as scallops, oysters or prawns. Springy scallops or prawns are boiled and garnished with garlic and rice noodles. Cantonese people prefer the light and delicate dressing that brings out the natural sweetness of seafood.

Shellfish with garlic, ginger and peppers.
Shellfish with garlic, ginger and peppers.

Historically, Cantonese foodies’ craving for seafood used to be largely constrained by poor storage conditions. But, you know, back in the 1980s, the seafood restaurants introduced fish tanks from which waiters would pull the still live animal, weigh it and send it to the chef to be cooked.

Today, such “cook-to-order” eateries are a popular and iconic practice in all Cantonese seafood restaurants.

Check out my hairy crab.

The hairy crab that I demolished. Delicious.
The hairy crab that I demolished. Delicious.

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You know, all food aside, it was this decision to accept the fake alcohol that was the big mistake that affected the rest of the night.

Now, I was well prepared otherwise.

I had taken four capsules of the anti-alcohol herbal remedy twenty minutes before dinner, and then again about one and a half hours into the meal. The stuff works. You will feel the effects of the alcohol, but it won’t be all that bad.

Always take the JinBao medicine when engaged in these adventures.

The problem is that it doesn’t work with fake alcohol (locomotive degreaser). It only works with real potable alcohol.

Anti-alcohol absorption medicine. You take four capsules at least 20 minutes before drinking. It will greatly retard the absorption of the alcohol into your blood system.
Anti-alcohol absorption medicine. You take four capsules at least 20 minutes before drinking. It will greatly retard the absorption of the alcohol into your blood system.

So…

Well, I did take the medicine and it did help somewhat.

But the problem was that this stuff was fake. You could take it the moment you took a sip. Hennessy is smooth. This was like drinking gravel. While it is possible that it was just locally distilled spirits with a name of a well-beloved Western alcohol on it, it is just equally possible that it has other “alterations” and substances included to make it more “delicious”.

How to distinguish a fake from Hennessey original

Cork - sits tightly and does not "go" from side to side with a slight effort. It has a company logo and brand name.

Bottle and container - no damage, scuffs, cracks and so on are allowed.

The original cognac is produced in a more pot-bellied bottle. In addition, the capacity has a large width in comparison with a fake.

Fake Hennessy has the color of weak tea with lemon. The original features a rich cognac color.

The absence of an excise stamp is the brightest sign of a Hennessey fake. If the excise stamp has blurry letters or text in a foreign language, then this is also the most obvious sign of non-original products.

The original cognac has excise stampin which in Russian (in the case of Russia) the volume of the container, the name of the beverage and the duration of exposure are indicated

The bottle of original cognac is engraved in the form of clusters and grape leaves.

The front side of the original bottle has a sticker, on the back side of which there is a Hennessy brand logo.

The bottom of the original bottle has a clear symmetrical pattern.

In Russia, you can not buy Hennessy cognac volume of 0.5 liters. If you see a container of such a volume, before you - fake products.

-How to detect real Hennessy from fake. Cognac "Hennessy …

What ever those other things were, they pretty much gutted out this ol’ body of mine.

Medicine bag

Every traveler to China for business needs to carry with them some medications. You might never need them, but if you are an “old fart” like myself, you probably will need to have them on hand.

Of course, you need to be able to slow down the absorption of alcohol into your system. If you are over 40, this is mandatory. Thus the picture above of the Jiu Bao.

And, being older, you will probably need some kind of antacid. I was prepared in this area as well. I carried two different types. Both are similar to the TUMS that you can buy in the United States. Antacid is very important. Whether it is just a ton load of good alcohol, or a few glasses of fake alcohol, or seafood, or spicy food, or the side effects of ED medication, you will need to have something to control your stomach upset. Here’s what I brought…

antacids.
Antacids used during the next day on the trip back home.

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Now you all shouldn’t misunderstand. The purpose of this business meeting and fun is to have and build a good and great relationship. This means that I must give the host the best face as possible. You do not, NOT, refuse anything.

In general, to avoid all these problems, you will need to really reduce your alcohol intake. Yet you must do so without losing face to the other bosses. The way to do this is to do something that I forgot to do. I needed to tell the other bosses that I have a “weak stomach” and that I couldn’t have anything spicy, or drink too much alcohol. And they would have honored me. I would tell them that I could drink jut a little bit, but if I drank too much, I might get really sick and then show them this bottle…

Do not drink too much.
My excuse to lower the amount of alcohol that I drink.

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Now, most people who have never been to China won’t understand, and teetotalers won’t get it. Just like Donald Trump and Mike Pompeo couldn’t “get it”. In China you are judged by how much you drink. If you do not drink, you are not trusted.

Which pretty much doomed Donald Trump’s meetings in China from day one.

So what I should have done was drink some, and then refrain from serious drinking. I could participate on a few “bottoms ups”. But no more than ten. And then just sip on some sudsy beers in the KTV.

Then shown them this bottle of medicine to that they wouldn’t lose face. (The medicine is for hard drinkers who are starting to get alcohol-related tears or problems int heir stomachs. It’s worked for me before, but it’s been so long since I’ve done this that I had forgot the most basic rules for an older man going to a KTV; seriously reduce your alcohol content.

After the dinner and off to the KTV

Now, I knew that this particular visit would include a KTV visit, and this KTV visit would include girls. Every other time it did, and I have had some remarkable times at these establishments with these folk.

So, right off the bat, on the day of the trip I took a Cialis in the morning.

It is advertised that the Cialis would take at least three hours before it could even be considered to work, so why so early? Let me tell you a little story…

Just like there is fake VSOP, there is fake Cialis. Mostly, the fake Cialis is a mixture of Viagra (Sildenafil). Now, this is NOT what we want. The purpose of the Cialis is to "lay forth a ground work foundation" where my old-man body starts to respond to sex like it was 40 years old. And Sildenafil doesn't do that. It is an ED that gives you an erection that lasts for about 40 minutes, and then it is gone.

So that is what happened to me once. I am ready to go, and am heading out to the countryside, away from a pharmacy, and I plopped in this drug only to find myself getting an erection 15 minutes later is the car on the way to the factory. And then absolutely NOTHING when I really needed it, later on in the night.

So by taking the Cialis early on in the morning, you can see if it is fake or not. If it is fake, then you can troop over to a pharmacy and get something else. But at least you will be ready.

And for me, yeah. It did kick in when I needed it, but the fake booze was too strong and far too fake.

The KTV

Look, I’ve talked about the KTV before. Big room, singing and dancing and all that. This KTV was a big place with tons of girls, but a little tiny sign pointing to a parking garage. It was nice, and big and had all the trappings. Maybe not as nice as other venues that I have played in, but this one had a great an diverse selection of girls and the prices were really reasonable.

Early on in the KTV.
My aide talking with the factory boss at the KTV. When we just sit down and arrive.

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The first group of girls being trooped out were short-time girls. And my aides made it clear that I wanted long-time girls for the night. So they trooped out and a new batch after batch, after batch came out. Our factory sponsor got a free girl to play with, I guess that she was new and “learning the ropes”. And I was told to pick out two or three girls, and I declined. (What was I thinking?) and I settled on the first girl, in the first line up. WTF?

A pretty lass, for certain, but I was not up to my game.

Next time will be different.

Long time girls.
The long time girls trooped in in squads of eight or so, there must have been about twenty or so groups before we were satisfied.

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And we played some dice, drank some beer, and then at 11:30 pm, my aide came and told me that it was “Cinderella time” and I and the chick were driven to our hotel for the night. This was not an accident. This is a SOP from now on. My aide stayed behind and got shitfaced drunk until 3am at the KTV with the other bosses and managers, while us top Bosses either went back home or went to the rooms with our gals.

Cinderella rules are in effect, and all arrangements must be pre-arranged.

Full time girls are multiple shots, but all I wanted to do was sleep. So we slept and got to play around at 7 in the morning the next day. And after she left for home, I started to compose some notes on what went right and what went wrong. And here they are…

What I did Right

Being myself, and having to wait for a long, long time for such an opportunity to be at a factory and to meet with other bosses was a great thing. And I made sure that I was ready. So I did many things right.

Brought and took the alcohol-reducing medicine. This helped a lot, but the medicine could not do anything about the fake booze. No matter what you take, the locomotive degreaser that you drink will mess up your body surer than shit.

I wore the appropriate clothing. I checked the weather reports for the regions we were going to. I dressed to fit my role and made sure that it was comfortable and appropriate for the venue.

I took Cialis in the morning. The only thing is that instead of three hours to work, it didn’t seem to do anything until 12 hours later. But it was “good” and “real” and it did it’s job. It’s just that I had to get a lot of the alcohol and locomotive degreaser out of my system first.

I brought Viagra and took it. But the timing was off. It did not start after 15 minutes. It is unknown why not. Maybe the fake alcohol. Instead, I couldn’t so anything. So we went to sleep. It took 3 hours to turn on. And we were both asleep, and by the time it finally did actually kick in, my chick didn’t want to have sex then. Now, I had taken the medicine at the right time, on the way to the hotel. But it did not actuate. In case anyone is aware, if you drink so heavily, and the Cialis is suppressed, a boost of Viagra will kick things in motion.

I brought extra condoms. Usually I rely on the girl to have the condoms. Don’t. If she runs out, then what? Always have some condoms on you. They are not expensive and you can select the size that you prefer. I didn’t need or use them in this instance, but I was a good boy-scout.

Left KTV early at 11:30pm. Me and the other boss went our own ways. This was pre-planned with my aide(s) and it makes life much simpler. In effect you box in the events of the day. You know when you will eat, party, and sleep. You have control over the timing, not your host.

Got a long-time girl, who was briefed in expectations. This was also pre-arranged. No short time girls. A long-time girl will spend the night and you will get the opportunity for multiple shots. You will also be able to rest. These meetings while there is a fun component to them are always stressful, as you can see by the medicines that I must take. What was she told? Multiple shots, all pre-paid, and not to bother me with tips or charges.

Brought antacid. Initially, I questioned myself, but figured better ready than sorry. And I was so very correct in bringing the medicine. I had terrible gas the next day, and my stomach was a gurgle all the next two days.

Brought stomach medicine to show as an excuse to control drinking. Yes I did, but I FORGOT to show it. WTF? So, even though I had it on me, with me, and ready to pull out my jacket pocket, I forgot all about it, and even when I saw them pull out the VSOP (which I knew was fake, from prior adventures) I still held back. Never again.

Brought a change of clothing. The days of an over-night business trip and returning home with the smoke-filled alcohol smelling clothing are over. I had brought a fresh change of comfortable clothing and it was really nice to put on the next day.

Selected a cheaper inexpensive hotel early on. I had previous adventures with this particular factory where the girls would select the hotel for us to stay at. Not us, and not the factory bosses. And the girls, well, they selected some really pricey ones, and the prices were so high, we suspected that they got a cut out of the rate. This time the factory boss selected the hotel based on our criteria and he handled all the details and got the room himself. So we did not need to deal with it.

What I did wrong

I did many things wrong, and they all detracted from my enjoyment, my health and my happiness. I tell you this that they will not be repeated. OMG! When I see a bottle of XO, VSOP or any other hard alcohol, the alarm bells should be ringing! “Do not touch that!”

I drank hard, fake alcohol. I should have shown the stomach medicine bottle and refrained from heavy drinking of hard, fake alcohol. I could, and should have drank only a sip. A sip as in a tea-spoon.

Moderation in smoking. I should have severely limited my cigarette intake. I needed to accept but only occasionally, and then only taken a few precious few puffs. Not more.

Tended to my ejaculation discipline. What is the point in getting a long-time girl if you cannot get multiple shots? Eh? My aide had specified 2 shot ejaculations. Before and after sleep. But I was not up for it. The fake alcohol tore me up. (And he was stunned that I did not take advantage of this opportunity.)

Brought a spare bottle of water. The two bottles in the hotel are never enough. After drinking you need water, and so you need to make sure that you bring an extra bottle with you to have on hand.

Brought some instant coffee. This is not a critical issue. But most hotels in China do not have coffee, or serve coffee, and if you get a breakfast (most of these kinds of establishments don’t offer that service) won’t have coffee. So you bring your own. I should of brought a few packets. Just keep them in my kit in case I needed them. It would have been nice.

Bring aspirin. What was I thinking? Always bring aspirin.

Bring / Use a cock-ring (even if it is homemade). A “cock ring” is a mechanical contrivance for older men, and for men with ED. Cock rings are rings that are worn around the base of the penis and sometimes the testicles to make erections harder, bigger, and longer-lasting. They come in different materials, from flexible silicone and rubber to leather and metal. A ring for ED works by slowing the blood flow back from the erect penis, allowing it to stay hard longer. It works best if you’re able to get a partial or full erection. The thing about this is that I have always considered this a sex toy, but now as an older man, I see it as a prosthetic to help me maintain an erection. Don’t be proud. If you need help in the bedroom, you need to get all the help you can. Make sure that the size fits you and make sure to wash the device afterwards.

Exercise (pushups, sit-ups and arm curls). For months prior to the trip, I had stopped exercising. When the time came for fun, I was out of the game. You need to make sure that you have a minimum level of physical exercise.

When offered multiple girls – accept. Uh. Duh! Do not let bad fake alcohol throw you for a loop. Keep with the plan. Be up to the task and make sure that you up your game.

Some final words

From a business point of view, the trip was a success. I had some gains, and I really enjoyed visiting the factory and meeting up with my friends and colleagues. It was really great. The food was outstanding, the friendships were strengthened, and I made some new friends in the process.

But, I made some mistakes. Mistakes that detracted from my enjoyment and pleasures, and possibly damaged my health. And I wasn’t the only one to notice this.

When I came home my wife was furious! “How stupid was I to let myself get so drunk that my weekend following the trip was so lame.? I should know better” And she was right. I do know better, and the Trump Pandemic interruption to my normal state of affairs is no excuse.

Don’t be like me.

  • Plan ahead.
  • Know what to expect.
  • Avoid fake and hard alcohol like your life depends on it.
  • Make sure your aide knows what arrangements to make.
  • Be healthy and maintain that health.
  • Remember that you have two tasks; conduct business, and maintain face.

Focus.

And hopefully you’ll all have a great time in your future adventures in a business KTV.

I’ve got another one coming up. Let’s see if I can handle it better. We will see.

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From then to now; how my unrelenting sequence of prayer & affirmation campaigns changed my life.

Oh boy! Buckle up!

One of my friends, in casual conversation, asked me (while talking about prayer campaigns and affirmations) what all the changes were like, for me, after over four decades of prayer / affirmation campaigns.

And I read what she asked of me, and I’ll tell you truthfully, I just leaned back in my chair and stared dumb-founded at the screen. Oh, yes. Things have really changed. They really, really, REALLY have changed. I just never really thought about it that way.

But… yeah.

And yeah…

It’s complicated.

Our experiences change us. My role in MAJestic changed me. My relationships with others changed me. The culture sand society changed me, and all kinds of influences shaped my life. And if you take one such influence out, I would be a completely different person.

Life changes you.

And, I’ll tell you what, four decades of life is gonna change you.

It’s one thing to live life, and sway in the wind, guideless and directionless. Like some clothing hung on a clothes line to dry. But it’s another thing to pilot an ocean steamer, blind in the dark, dark night trying to make it to paradise.

Since I left the Navy, and entered MAJestic, my entire life has been that of directed prayer / thought / affirmations and intention.

In fact, what I am trying to say is that without the prayer / affirmation campaigns I would not have had so many changes. Without my role in MAJestic, I wouldn’t have been exposed to so many things, ideas and changes. And all things taken together as a whole, I have to admit… life, and experiences are all intertwined with affirmation campaigns.

Do. Not. Assume.

That.

I. Would. Be.

What. I. Am. Today.

Without. Prayer. Campaigns.

Don’t make that assumption. It’s a foolish and stupid assumption. I attribute my material wealth, the quality and quantity of life, and my experiences are all a direct result of my personal prayer affirmations that I have conducted for over four decades.

My current life, and lifestyle is the direct result of my prayer affirmation campaigns.

For Starters

Let’s begin with answering the question.

What changes do I have in my life right now, compared to the life that I had in the 1980's?

Well, since I started the affirmation campaigns in the late 1980’s. We will begin there. Let’s use the starting point where it’s a few years after my calibration and training at China Lake NWC outside of Ridgecrest, California.

At that time, I had left the Navy and MAJestic told me to “make a living and live life”, and so I found work in an automotive electronics company in central Indiana.

So we will use that as the initial baseline. We will refer to that period of time, say middle to late 1980’s as the comparison subject. And on the other end, we will compare it to my life, right now today.

The differences are stark. And i have never really thought about things in that way. So it kind of took me back a little.

So thinking about all this, I ended up pausing. Contemplating.

At which point, I made this little picture…

.

Indeed, you just cannot assume that every single office dweeb that working in the monstrosity work environments of the 1980’s are now big powerful bosses. You just cannot say that this is what happens, that everyone follows a career and that they naturally rise up. It’s been my personal experience that I was the outlier.

My co-workers from those days pretty much “bailed out” of that environment after maybe four or five job layoffs. Many are now retired or wrapping up their own (much smaller) self-employed businesses, or are running consultancies, or teaching. Very, very few are as “successful” as I am.

As if “success” is a universally understood concept.

Everyone is different, and life has a way of grabbing you “by the balls” and give you “a few knocks in the head”, in order to “straighten you out”. And as a result, you end up changing. You become a different person.

I like to think that many of my former co-workers are doing well. They are certainly doing and living life different than I am. But one man’s ideal, might be another man’s nightmare.

Who’s to say that my life is “better” than theirs are?

You cannot.

Instead, you have to judge “success” on the basis of the individual. AND STOP COMPARING yourself to others. Instead, we will compare myself to myself. And if we do that, we can see the relationship that time, and intention has over my own personal life. And that, my friends, might be illustrative… and I hope… inspiring.

You should be able to see things…

You should be able to see that my overall attitude is quite different. The feelings of helplessness compared to the feelings of raw power that I hold today are beyond compare. But it is more than that. Much more.

There used to be a song (in the 1970’s), and while I have long since forgotten the name of the song and who sang it, the lyrics went something like this…

"Life is what you make it...
...if you can take it...
...you don't have to break it...
...life is what you make it."

Well…

Is my life “better” than it was four decades ago in the 1980’s working in the States? Am I living a fantastic life? How does my life compare now? Can it be attributed to intention prayer campaigns, or to something else? Like coincidence?

First off, let’s see if my life can be judged as a “success” compared to what it was four decades ago. But, we have a problem. What actually is “success”?

Judging by money and wealth

If you judge a man, or anyone, or me (even) by the amount of money that I have then I would be classified as a failure. I have restructured my life so that I do not have any money, nor savings accounts, nor credit accounts, nor any tangible means to equate personal value with my monetary wealth.

  • No bank accounts.
  • No legal ownership papers in my name.
  • No “paper trail” of employment.
  • No credit rating.

An investigator would find me a very boring subject. I don’t have anything. And that includes money. So under these terms, I would be classified as an abject failure. This is absolute, in those specific terms.

Of course, Heh heh, what do you all think an ex-spook would look like? You think that we would be on the grid, and monitored like some kind of common criminal, felon or hoodlum. 

Judging by number of children

Some people view success as the ability to father the most children as possible during their lifetime.

I have met many ethnic youth in America, and some SA’s that feel this way. They talk about their “baby mama” and how they have 12, 14, or 16 of them. This single unemployed African American man impregnating 16 women, but not being a father to any children. Some people define that as success.

I don’t.

But if you did, then the king of this effort would be Genghis Khan.

And yet again, I would be considered a failure by those lofty standards. There’s a very precious few metallic-babies walking round in this world today. And I for one, think of this as a good thing. I’m not a mass-production baby-making factory. Don’t you know.

I do not have a long train of children crying for their daddy, or a a zillion courts demanding the garnishment of my pay checks.

I think that it is a good thing, but other people might not consider this a “successful” life.

Judging by appearance

Some people, most especially those in the 20’s judge others by appearance. If you are attractive, or cart around an attractive wife (or two) on your arm, and drive a nice expensive car, and wear the most stylish and trendy clothes, you are considered to be successful.

I know how it works.

And then you have a kid, and your priorities change. Or you get locked into a career, and things change further. Or, that you start having obligations, and your children need braces, school books and they want a pony. Oh, it is amazing how these criteria change so rapidly.

Yah. Well, but these criteria I too would still be considered a failure.

I dress fine, and wear nice comfortable clothing, but I don’t own or drive a Ferrari. In fact, my days of driving a care are pretty much sunsetted. Let others deal with the headaches, and the hassles. Just take me where I need to be, and be done with it, Sir.

Truthfully, I happen to like being driven around by my driver, and I really don’t care what people think about the car that I am riding in. As long as it is big and roomy and fits my personality, I am fine with it. I like the door being opened for me, and the driver and my aides buckling me in. I like it when they say “you can take a nap, sir, it’s going to be a couple of hours”. And I like it when we arrive at the destination and they stand outside ready for my calling.

Now, it's true that a Maybach is certainly something that I would enjoy riding in, but the price tag is not something that I believe is worthy of consideration.

Yet, to others, judging by this kind of criteria, I do not appear to be a very successful and wealthy businessman. I don’t have fine expensive sports cars to flaunt and to rev up the engines with.

Judging by physical attribute

Many, many people judge others by their appearances. And while I just covered the appearance of wealthy people, here, we can talk about physical beauty and their attractiveness towards the opposite sex.

Physical appearance.

For women it might be big boobs, Big hair, Big ass, or long legs, long silky hair, clear complexion, or a naturally curvy backside. And, for men it might be a big dick, a full set of hair, impressive pecks or something else… like a enormous wallet.

All this is silly.

By these criteria, I’m just so-so. I am average. Pretty much.

A big cock.
Here’s a guy proudly showing his big cock for the whole world to see and be amazed by.

.

Now, truthfully, if I were to improve my appearance it would be to slim down my waist some, clean up some of my wrinkles and thicken my hair a tad. There are a precious few people who are completely satisfied with their appearances, and there are entire product segments that capitalize on this fact.

I wouldn’t touch my penis. It’s big enough, thank you. I want to be comfortable with myself. And when I am, I am naturally happy and light, and I radiate.

This is real and true attractiveness.

I strongly believe that if you take care of your body. Fill it with fine delicious food, smile and laugh a lot and ignore the sad, doom and gloom others that surround us, that you will do fine. Just be clean, and if that means taking three showers a day, then do it. A happy, scrubbed clean, cheerful person who is open and friendly is amazingly attractive to a wide range of people.

But, you know…

Since there are so many things that are desirous of improvement, you could also say that I am pretty much a failure in those areas. I am not the most handsome man in the world. I’m just an older man. And I pretty much live that role.

Judging by experience

Ah. Now this is something that I am proud to say that I am worthy of judgement. Few people have experienced the wide ranging and comprehensive diversity of experiences that I have had. Very few. Perhaps Sebastian has.

And there is so much more open to experience…!

And I argue that this is a good thing. As the more experiences that you have, the more quantum associations you make. And thus the more quantum bonds and entanglements, the more you grow.

Ah…

But it doesn’t make for “good television” or movies. Don’t you know.

So what’s the deal?

Indeed. So what is “the deal”?

Well, you are not in competition with anyone. So there is no need to be or become “the best”.

What you want is a suitable, and comfortable life that fits YOUR personality, not that which is provided to you via the American media.

And. That. Is. It.

  • Do not use the media as a yardstick for success.
  • Your goal should be to be the best you as possible, and live the life that you deem fit.

You need to find out what you like, and the kind of life that holds meaning for you, and then you need to set your prayer campaign in motion to obtain those goals and objectives. And for me, I am very sad to say, that this understanding and realization did not occur immediately. It developed over time.

Ugh. And what you see now is not the pristine result of four decades of planning and implementation, but rather the result of a back and forth, mish mash, of attempts and direction-seeking prayer / affirmation campaigns trying to discern the best fit lifestyle for myself to adopt.

But, all in all, I think that I’m pretty darn close.

Let’s look at the changes the affirmation campaigns have brought about.

Well, right off the bat, you have seen the differences in my work / career. It’s pretty dramatic, I’ll tell you what. I studied to become an astronaut, trained as a Naval Aviator, worked as an engineer, lived as a hobo, toiled in prison, and now am a Boss out of necessity.

Life can have many twists and turns, don’t you think?

Living Environment

Let’s start with the house and living environment.

Back in the late 1980’s, I was working as an engineer inside a massive electronics corporation, owned by GM, and modeled after the work environments in Silicon Valley. They constructed these facilities in the middle of nowhere; Kokomo, Indian and all the top tier of management snagged up all the housing. I ended up living in a mobile home in a flat (former) soybean field.

Think of a mobile home on the tundra wastes in Alaska. That is what it was like. Though in the Spring and Fall, it was pretty lovely.

Today, I live in a big house off the beach. I can watch the people walk their dogs and play on the beach from my living room window, and my neighborhood is nice, and friendly.

So you might want to say that in comparison, it is sort of like this… (I will not use actual pictures of my personal life in this post. I do hope that you all understand.)

.

Yeah, it’s a bit of a change.

Do you all think that it is luck? Or that I somehow managed to eventually save my way to my current lifestyle though scrimping and saving, or through the stock market, or a “big break”? Eh?

Let’s compare companions

Oh. Now, none of these pictures that I am using is of MM’s personal life. I don’t have any pictures of my life in the 1980’s, and I sure as Hell aren’t gonna provide pictures of my current home and personal shit.

But, for the most part the pictures are accurate and are designed to give the proper IMPRESSION of the changes that I have personally experienced as a result of my life and four decades of affirmation and prayer campaigns.

And now, let’s talk about my wife; my companion.

You know, the BIGGEST influence in your happiness, your success in life, and you ability to be happy is your spouse. It’s true and I do believe it.

To understand the differences between then and now, you need to understand the ladies that I was with. And while today, my current wife is beautiful, stacked, tough as nails, but sweet as a kitten, and a strong powerful mother, my wife from the 1980’s was almost the exact opposite.

At that time, in the 1980’s my wife ( a lovely and attractive lass when I married her ) was just starting to lose her mind. Literally, not figuratively. She had an inherited mental illness known as Schizophrenia. It’s a pretty horrible illness, and at that time it was just starting to manifest, and it hit her hard. Really, really hard.

She was incapable of normal life, and started to behave very strangely. She started to hear “messages” in the radio and the television. She started to obsess about events that took place when she was seven years old, and she started performing all sorts of odd and crazy rituals. Her mannerisms changed. Her actions changed. The way she spoke changed, and her interactions with others began a near immediate down-hill side. She was impossible to take around anyone.

And so for personal tranquility, we stayed at home most of the time.

Schizophrenia is a serious brain disorder that distorts the way a person thinks, acts, expresses emotions, perceives reality, and relates to others. People with schizophrenia -- the most chronic and disabling of the major mental illnesses -- often have problems functioning in society, at work, at school, and in relationships. Schizophrenia can leave its sufferer frightened and withdrawn. It is a life-long disease that cannot be cured but can be controlled with proper treatment.
Schizophrenia is a serious brain disorder that distorts the way a person thinks, acts, expresses emotions, perceives reality, and relates to others. People with schizophrenia — the most chronic and disabling of the major mental illnesses — often have problems functioning in society, at work, at school, and in relationships. Schizophrenia can leave its sufferer frightened and withdrawn. It is a life-long disease that cannot be cured but can be controlled with proper treatment.

.

At that time, she started to get counseling, and the doctors prescribed some medication for her to take.

The medicine worked, but ended up causing certain side effects. One of which was that she gained an enormous amount of weight, became very lethargic, and would just spend the entire day sitting around doing absolutely nothing. Then out of the blue, she would become enraged and passionate. And it was absolutely maddening.

After an entire night of dealing with this madness, I would have to drag myself to work and deal with a true-to-life scene from the movie “Office Space”. It was horrible, and absolutely not enjoyable.

  • Nightime = caretaker for a mentally ill person.
  • Daytime = Worker drone right out of the “Office Space” movie.

When I would return home, I would need to clean up her messes (she would destroy things, break things, and became completely incapable of normal activity. Like throwing the chicken bones from KTC on the living room rug when she was through eating, or never taking a shower or brushing her teeth.), then I would make dinner for both of us, and try to act as her counselor to help her sort out her near-constant distress and emotional turmoil.

Times change…

We divorced, she managed to control her illness somewhat, and last I heard she was doing fine.

And me, today I am happily married to a beautiful Chinese gal, and she is normal and healthy and wholly functional. Praise the Lord!

You know, the BIGGEST influence in your happiness, your success in life, and you ability to be happy is your spouse. It's true and I do believe it.

.

Time changes everything.

Where I am today is a direct result of my prayer affirmations. Listen to me. I tell you this two times. Where my life is today is the direct result of my various prayer affirmation campaigns.

Let’s compare automobiles

This is pretty easy, but it didn’t work out as planned. But it all manifested when I started to concentrate on the end result of my desire. Not so much on the details. And as a result, an amazing thing happened…

Today I do not drive.

I have contemplated buying a car, and it is on the family table as a discussion item, but we have held back. There are numerous reasons for that, but mostly its that the local public and private transportation avenues are so well established and cheap where we live in China, there just isn’t a serious need to get a car. Though, it would be nice to have one to go outside of the community, and we are contemplating it as a future option. But right now, nah.

Instead, right now, I employ private drivers. I have them on retainer that stand by for me and drive me here and there (as a chauffeur). When I am elsewhere on travel, and not with my driver, I will if necessary, use DD or ShaoJiu which are Chinese equivalents of Uber.

Back in the day, of course, I had my own car. And at that particular point of time in my life, I drove a distressed Mazda RX-7. It was a good little car, but every month I was out in the cold or the heat trying to fix one thing or the other. A few years later, I bought a brand new car to replace it and my life changed accordingly. But right now we are talking about then compared to now, and it looked a little something like this…

Let’s compare meals

You can really see the differences in what I ate then, compared to what I eat now. Back then I ate a lot of simple foods that were cheap and easy to prepare. Much of our budget went into paying medical bills, as my wife at that time was very prone to call 9-11 and have an ambulance take her to the hospital because “she didn’t feel right”.

Breakfasts were mostly cereals with milk, and a drive through coffee and breakfast sandwich. Lunches were a drive through burger meal. I would often mix it up between McDonald’s, Burger King, and Wendy’s.) And dinners were either spaghetti, hamburgers, hotdogs, a tuna salad, a can of Campbell’s tomato (or chicken noodle) soup or chicken wings. Simple and plain, easy to make, American meals. Often the sides would come from a can. Canned corn. Canned peas. Canned beans. Canned spinach. We would eat salads. But fruit were pretty rare in our household. We would buy bananas maybe once a month.

Like I said, my wife was sick. I did all the cooking, and I was exhausted after dealing with my career and work. Only to come home to a house that looked like an army of five year olds played in it, and an out-of-control wife that was raging about something or another that she watched on television.

Today, things are quite different.

I tend to eat really well.

My wife does all the cooking, and every meal is planned and cooked by her. We go out numerous times during the week for a much more extensive meal which tends to be steaks, seafood, or specialty Chinese dishes.

And of course, there are always exceptions. There are days where I need to get something outside, or make up something myself. It's called "reality".

Today, my typical breakfast is usually a bean porridge, rice congiee, toasted Italian baguette, eggs and sausage and, of course coffee. Lunch tends to be the biggest meal of the day and it is a multi-dish affair with meats and vegetables. Dinner (supper) is slightly smaller. The difference is that I have a few beers during lunches, and my wine or VSOP at dinner.

When I am on travel, of course, I eat like a real King.

Let’s compare weekend recreation

This is also a big change, and again, doesn’t look like anything that I could have ever planned for. Back in the 1980’s my weekends were so damn predictable. We would go out for a breakfast in a diner, the highlight of the weekend might be a hike in a state forest, and I would spend most of the weekend tending to the things around the house. I would mow the grass, repair things, like the porches or windows, and of course, fix the perpetually broken car.

Today, I have a very relaxed lifestyle. We go out, walk a lot and enjoy nature. We eat really well. It might be boring to others, but lazing by the beach and chilling with a glass of wine in my hand is what I like to do.

This is not instragram

No it isn’t. This is real life.

But if I show you the pictures of my real life, it will just look “normal” and “everyday”. My life doesn’t look anywhere near as exciting and glamorous as Hollywood and social media makes out an “ideal” life to be.

Do not compare yourself to the images that you find on line.

.

I could have easily enough pulled off some amazing photos from the internet, pointed at them and said “this is me, and this Lamborghini is my car, and this beautiful instragram beauty is my wife”. But I didn’t.

Do not ever be under the impression that I have an “ideal ” life (what ever the fuck that means).

I have plusses and minuses in my life, just like every other person in this world. Just like you (the reader) does. And yes, just like you, there are things that I want to change, and things that I want to improve upon. And yes, I do maintain active affirmation / prayer campaigns. And yes, I have just finished one a few days ago.

And yeah, I do get it. What I have presented as my life looks just fantastic. Well, that is because I am using stock images and selected pictures off the internet. I tried to carefully select the ones closest in appearance and general “feeling” that represents the point that I am trying to make…

But, let’s be real. OK?

As in… REAL.

My life might not be what you, the reader might desire. It is what fits me. And I am sure that there are elements in my life that you would find undesirable. Please do not compare yourself to others, and certainly do not compare yourself to me. It’s like comparing apples to green-beans.

The reality is a little bit (not that much, though) different.

So, for instance the picture of a delicious steak does not mean that every single meal that I eat has steak. It means that I eat quite well, all things considered. I eat a lot of fresh food, and far more sea food than I did when I lived in the States. And while I might of had 80% of my day to day meals as fast food, today, it is much less than 1%.

I eat well.

But it is difficult to quantify directly… I eat delicious, and healthy and tasty food in nice eating establishments, or cooked at home with a degree of special care and love. It is not a mass produced GMO-laden artificial-food-product dished out to drone-workers in a corporate grind-mill.

I eat well.

The real deal; Metallicman and family having "paper fish" at a restaurant. The fish is cooked in a paper wrap with all sorts of spices and tasty vegetables. It is so very super delicious! So yes, I eat far better now than then, but it's not always steaks, don't you know.
The real deal; Metallicman and family having “paper fish” at a restaurant. The fish is cooked in a paper wrap with all sorts of spices and tasty vegetables. It is so very super delicious! So yes, I eat far better now than then, but it’s not always steaks, don’t you know.

.

And you know that chick that I use to represent my wife, is not my actual wife, but (you know) she actually is a pretty darn good approximation. Asian, big smile, attractive, stacked, nice long hair, great personality, happy. She’s fine for me, and yeah she had a lot of suitors. But she ‘chose” me. Good and bad.

Here’s a more realistic picture of her, not showing anything, with our youngest. Looks so plain, un-glamorous, and so very uninspiring. Right? Real life is not all glamor. It is… real.

Don't compare yourself to others.
Mrs. Metallicman with our metallic baby in front of our old house on the bay. It’s not instragram. It’s real life. And the point of all this is NOT to compare yourself to what you THINK others live their lives. You need to compare it to yourself based on your prior experiences.

.

And the picture of the guy holding the wine glass and relaxing. That isn’t me, and that isn’t my glass of wine. (I tend to fill the glass up to 80% full, not the “oh so dainty” one fourth glass full.) Nor is the guy pushing the lawn mower. In fact, in the 1980’s I had a used lawn mower that continually broke down all the time, and I was constantly playing around with it.

And that guy holding open the door for me to get in is actually a stock image off the internet. Though they really do open the doors and close them for me in actual life when I get into the automobile.

And the picture of the boss isn’t me, but gosh darn it, it could well be. My reality is not that far off from what is depicted. Let me tell youse guys that for certain. I am a BOSS. And I portray that image and that feeling. I don’t wear a tie, and if my customers can’t handle that fact, well… too bad.

And that image of me as a beta cluck worker drone in corporate cubicle-ville in the 1980’s could very much have been me.

So you can see that my life has it’s plusses and minuses.

And it is about tradeoffs.

For instance, I love living near the ocean in a laid back area, with friendly folk around. But living on the beach in the tropics is quite different from living in a mountain top, with swirling snow while you are all cozy and snuggled inside of a toasty cabin.

It’s about trade-offs.

To live on the beach in the tropics means that I will not be able to experience the cabin in the snow squall. Tradeoffs.

it’s all about tradeoffs and what matters to you personally.

Life is about tradeoffs.

Conclusion

It is all good and bad, and areas that need improvement, but all accounts much better than what it was forty years ago, and it wasn’t by accident either. I worked and toiled and controlled my mental processes to make it all happen.

So…

If that is what I can do, what about you?

You have something that I didn’t have. You have guidance, direction and skills on how to conduct prayer campaigns. I had to learn as a consequence of my MAJestic role, and a lot of it was forced trial and forced error. And now you can greatly improve your life to an extent that would amaze. So make it be.

Do you all want some more?

You can see more in my writings about Prayer and Affirmation campaigns here…

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Various stories about prayer affirmation campaigns, and deviation lessons learned in the process.

Or, some history on how my knowledge about affirmation prayer campaigns developed and evolved over the years. With intentional omission of the the primary drivers – my MAJ involvement, and the need to maintain my sanity. This write-up provides some insight in to how they work, and involves a span of time going back four decades.

Here are just some stores about some of my experiences in conducting prayer affirmations campaigns. They are in no particular order, and have no other ranking aside from their personal illustrations. I think that I have learned lessons from them, and I have applied what I have learned to all my subsequent affirmation campaigns. I think that if I were to relate my stores, you too (dear reader) might learn a thing or two that you can use to put your efforts and your own affirmation campaigns into better focus.

We will begin with a campaign that I had almost completely forgotten about. As it was initiated a decade or more ago, and it was something that I did WHILE I was still within MAJestic. (Performing prayer and affirmations campaigns during my operational years greatly assisted in me keeping my sanity, and being able to have and hold some degree of control over my life.)

So let’s begin with…

Big house, one the beach, with a wine cellar.

Yup. That’s exactly what I asked for. I did so way back in the late 1980’s to middle 1990’s. And since it didn’t materialize within a few years, I thought that it would never materialize.

I was wrong.

It materialized in 2017.

And it was exactly as I specified. It was huge. I mean HUGE (by Chinese standards), perhaps six times larger than the typical middle class household, with an enormous yard (porch). Yes, it overlooked the ocean. Yes, it was roomy and airy, and the walls were white and off yellow-white exactly as I specified (back in the day). And, yes, it even had a wine cellar! In a land where cellars are a rarity, let alone a wine cellar, this one had it, and it too was enormous!

And I loved it when I got it, and I loved the location. I loved how the air moved about the house, the cool and calm location, and my neighbors.

But…

A number of things happened. (And that is life don’t you know.) Nothing bad, or good. Just “neutral”.

First off, let’s confront the “elephant in the room”…

Why did it take 20 to 30 years for this affirmation to manifest?

Best I can figure out is that my goals were way, way outside of my abilities and my lifestyle track. You can ask, wish and dream for all sorts of things, but if your current lifestyle cannot not support them, then you would have to go through some changes to get to that state, and at that time, I was happy with my life. 

I asked for all sorts of things, on the condition that my life would not change.

WTF?

Yes, you read that correct. To make and achieve your desires you will need to go through changes, and changes are always never comfortable. So what you need to do is come up with a staged set of affirmation objectives to get to that point. 

In my life, I had to...

[1] Change my relationships.
[2] Move to the coast.
[3] Change my occupation.
[4] Change my attitude about life.

An only once I had achieved these interim stages were my base line desires and objectives able to materialize. This is true. Don't think that you are going to suddenly have a "lifestyle of the rich and famous" without moving out of your mobile home first.

And then,

Why aren’t I living in this house now?

This is what is funny about life. You think you want one thing, and when you get it, you discover that there are other things that you do not like, or that does not appeal to you. 

For me, when I made the affirmation, I was living in and around Boston. It was a beautiful area, most certainly, but a ride to the beach was a two to three hour drive, and thus I could only go to it on the weekends, and for all practical purposes limited my beach excursions to maybe four times or so a year.

Truthfully, a beach-side home in Massachusetts, even the cheapest and most remote run down broken homes would have run me millions of dollars. It was way, way beyond my means at that time. (And true, it still is. Which is why I don't own a beach-side home in Massachusetts.) 

Now, once you get a beach-side home you learn a few things  about home ownership on a beach. Things, I dare say, that I was unaware of at that time.

Everything gets wet.

Everything.

Condensate collects on the walls. Art, paintings and pictures, warp and get ruined. Clothes never fully dry. Door knobs get sticky with clammy residue, and winter down jackets and clothing starts to deteriorate when stored in plastic bags.

Screws rust.

Mattresses get cold and clammy. Even on sunny warm days. Fog isn't just something that is outside, it is something that you find in the hallway and closets. Tools all rust out. And sand gets into everything.

And while I did enjoy my time in that house, after a while I decided that some place close to the ocean, but not on the beach was more desirable for me, and my family, personally.

So let’s look a little deeper into the drivers behind our desires, and what we want.

It wasn’t what I thought it was.

This is a theme that will come up time and time again when your dreams and wishes manifest. You have one image, one vision of what you want, and when it happens it just isn't the "same thing". Even though it might look and feel just absolutely identical to what you desired.

Somehow I absolutely pictured a cross between the images of Miami Vice, the homes in Cape Cod, and a Hodge-podge of "homes of the wealthy" on television and movies. If you were to quiz me back in 1998, what I wanted, you might see one of those Miami Beach-front homes that resemble a LA mansion overlooking a long stretch of white sand under a blue - blue sky.

Do not laugh.

The television show Miami Vice defined American culture in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

Miami Vice. 
No television series represented the style or dominant cultural aesthetic of the 1980s as fully or indelibly as Miami Vice. A popular one-hour police drama that aired on NBC from 1984 to 1989, Miami Vice was in one sense a conventional buddy-cop show—not unlike Dragnet, Adam 12, and Starsky and Hutch —featuring an interracial pair of narcotics detectives who wage a weekly ...

-Miami Vice | Encyclopedia.com
Television heavily influenced what I thought what I wanted.
Television heavily influenced what I thought what I wanted. Scene is a beach-front mansion (with a wine cellar) on the 1980’s hit television show “Miami Vice”.
Now, you all might think that I was crazy for wanting such a thing. I was doing fine. I had a nice home, cabin, in a small town outside of a state forest in Massachusetts, and it was cozy, nice and I loved Massachusetts.

And that's the way it is.

When you are bombarded with culture and contemporaneous television and movies, you start to see other things, and they are always portrayed in such a way that you can relate to the characters in those flicks. You end up saying "hey! I'm just as good as that guy. Why can't I live that kind of lifestyle, like him?"

Well?

Isn’t that the way it is?

Like all those Instragram Influencers that everyone is jealous of?

Scene from Miami Vice.
Would you believe that I actually owned a (red) convertible with a phone just like this and cruised around back and forth to work wearing a similar style of attire? Yeah. It’s strange, but it was on my affirmation campaign, and so it did actually happen! Just not at the same time as my beach house.
What we think we want, and what we actually (deep down inside) want is often polluted by the media, culture, society and popular culture.

It shapes our thoughts.

That's a DANGER.

For me, I was heavily influenced by the Miami Vice television show of the 1980's. As well as most of America. This influenced what I believed that I could be, aspire to, and what kind of lifestyle that I felt was deserving for me and my family at that time.

Instead of saving money, building a family like what was depicted in television shows of the 1960's...

Leave it to Beaver
The Brady Bunch
The Andy Griffith Show
My Three Sons.
Bewitched
The Dick Van Dyke Show
Mayberry R.F.D

A new kind of narrative took hold. It was one of bright blue skies, fast and expensive cars. Beach houses, attractive girls in bikinis and live fast. It's a narrative where you could like a billionaire while you were still in your 20's. After all, how did some detectives (Miami Vice) get to drive around in a Ferrari?

Anyways, you become what your environment influences you to be….

The 1980s were called the Reagan years, because he was president for eight of them. During his first term, the recession ended. Inflation was controlled. He reduced taxes. Americans felt hopeful that they could make money again.

Observers created several expressions to describe some groups of people at that time. One expression was “the ‘me’ generation”. This described Americans who were only concerned about themselves. Another expression was “yuppie”. It meant “young urban professional”. Both these groups seemed as if they lived just to make and spend money, money, and more money.

Entertainment in the 1980s showed the interest society placed on financial success. The characters in a number of television programs, for example, lived in costly homes, wore costly clothes, and drove costly automobiles. They were not at all like average Americans. They lived lives that required huge amounts of money.

Two of these television programs became extremely popular in the United States and in other countries. They were called “Dallas” and “Dynasty”.

At the movie theater, a very popular film was called “Wall Street”. It was about a young, wealthy, dishonest — powerful — man who traded on the New York Stock Exchange. Power was a popular program idea in action films, too.

And what did this all get me?

Yes…

It got me a corporate life that pretty much fit that image plastered and burned into the skull of just about everyone in the United States.

Scene from Miami Vice.
When television, the most popular television shows, portrayed a working environment with whites and greys, where the management lived inside these white rooms, and you sat facing computer screens, and had projects in big empty bare chambers… they begin to manifest all over America… as a REALITY.

It’s not just work.

It’s everything.

You see, our brains take what we see and watch and change our reality to fit those images. And this can be anything from a desire for a certain kind of house, to a way of dress, and an office space. But it can be anything. Like food for instance…

Other examples of reality deviance from expectation

This next example is a perfect example of how what you wish for might not match what you ask for.

Ah, we all like fine delicious food. And when we think of the wonderful food we have images of our “comfort” foods. Those foods that we grew up with, and that which gave us pleasure and enjoyment. For me, growing up in Western Pennsylvania, these images have always been of pizza, hamburgers, fine Polish – Italian food. Hot crusty buttered rolls.

And of course, being who I am, I wanted MORE!

  • More is better, right?
  • Bigger is better? Eh?
  • Lots is better than a few? Eh?

A few years back I added a simple line statement affirmation to my affirmation lists. I have kept this statement in over the years and I have watched it affect my life. The statement is very simple, but…

But…

… the results were unexpected.

Unexpected.

The statement is…

I eat fine, delicious and healthy food all the time.

Oh, what a change that it has made in my life. I am not at all kidding. It really changed my life. And since I added this statement the number of hamburgers that I would eat, the plates of spaghetti, and the other types of deep fired American food just about “dropped off the cliff” to a point where I rarely eat those items at all any longer.

What!

Is that what I wanted?

No. No. No.

Something else materialized, instead.

Instead, I find myself eating delicious Thai and Hunan food, with imported wine and beer. If I eat Western and American food, instead of it been greasy or fatty deep fried delicious goodness, it’s mostly steaks and fresh sea food.

Fine. Delicious. Healthy. Food.

I said it.

It materialized.

Delicious Thai food.
Since I added this singular affirmation to my various campaigns, my quality of eating has increased enormously, and the type of foods that I used to eat have become fewer and far between. I eat fresh fish, steaks and cooked vegetables. Not so much deep fried chicken and french fries.

Now, I will tell you, the reader, that I was NOT expecting this. Actually, I was expecting a nice run of delicious think subway sandwiches, large platters of delicious mac and cheese with tons of gooey cheese, and deep pan pizza. But that is not what happened. instead, I now find myself eating a higher quality of tasty food with enormous quantities of delicious vegetables, top and choice cuts of meat, and very little in the way of fats.

Funny how things work. Eh?

Remember… what your eyes see, what your thoughts create, and what those around you think about… becomes what you will experience.

From the movie My Cousin Vinny.
Typical small town Southern community. This is in Georgia.

Deviance is obvious when it involves material objects

The difference between what you ask for, and what you actually get is obvious when your affirmation revolves around material objects. This can be a car, a home, a location, a boat…

Here we look at how thoughts change your reality and generate new ones. And it's any thoughts, and any passions. Not just those associated with prayer campaigns.

This one is seemingly about boats. Ships. Sailing.

Seemingly.

When I lived in Indiana, I had this dream about sailing to the South Pacific and exploring the islands there. At that time in my life, I worked in the “corporate world” and it was every bit as real as the movie “Office Space”. It was the same. The same bland colors, the same irritating people, the same grayness.

And like “Joe”, in the movie “Joe vs the Volcano”, I longed to escape it.

Scene from the movie office space.
The movie “Office Space” has a cult following simply because it is more than just a comedy. It is a snapshot of what American corporate life was like for millions of us back in the 1980’s and 1990’s. It was awful, and the truth is that many of the “so called” humorous” elements in the movie actually occurred to us on a regular basis.

Ah, but sailing…

Now that was an adventure.

So, I read a ton load of books, on the subject and subscribed to all sorts of magazines related to sailing and the cruising lifestyle. And many a cold frosty day stuck in the icy sub-arctic weather of a horrific Indiana winter was spent thinking, reading, day dreaming and planning of traveling all over the world in a boat.

No. I did not devise an affirmation campaign to manifest this desire.

But I thought about it all the time. I talked about it all the time. It was not just my hobby at that time, it was my obsession.

Now, thoughts create your reality.

Right?

Thoughts create your reality. Whether they are planned and formalized as in a prayer campaign, or just seemingly “random” as in a passion or an obsession.

Scene from Office Space.
For millions of us “cubicle warriors” the type of lifestyle that was depicted in the movie “Office Space” was a reality. It was a harsh reality, and what made the money such a hit is that it gave us participants a chance to step back, and look at the lives that we were living from a third-person perspective.

And while I argue that you need to utilize formal affirmation prayer campaigns to focus your desires into a materialization of your desires in the reality, you can use many other techniques to make this happen. Often, you aren’t aware that you are manifesting and creating such realities.

Now, all this focus and all these thoughts had created various manifestations.

I ended up meeting people who were building and constructing their very own ocean-sailing yachts. yes! In rural Indiana of all places. They would be building these large metal vessels in their back yards, in barns and on flatbed trucks. Each time I met them, I felt closer to my dream, and felt that I could live a more rewarding life than what I was on track for…

…the clutching for the almighty dollar.

Scene from the movie "Joe vs the volcano".
Scene from the movie “Joe vs the Volcano”. Joe arrives at work. And deals with the stress at his job, his company and his life.

It was great seeing other people who were working on their “escape plan”. Many of them had formulated their dreams and desires over the years and had spent decades building their vessels from which they could change their lives and go onto adventures with.

So, naturally, something happened.

I bought a boat.

No, not an ocean sailing yacht. I was in Indiana, for goodness sakes! But I bought a power boat for the local lakes in Indiana. It was a 18 foot ski-boat, and it was beautiful. We (my wife and I) named it “Going Coconuts”, and we kept it at a large lake about an hour drive North of where we lived in Kokomo, Indiana.

And even though it was a small ski boat, it taught us things about the boating lifestyle that we were not thinking about all the times we read, and lived the dream of sailing. All sorts of things. And things that we were unaware of while we were sitting and reading those fine glossy magazines on sailing.

  • Boats require licensing just like cars do.
  • They require loan payments as well.
  • And insurance.
  • And you only get to ride in them a few precious times of the year…
  • But you need to store them somewhere, and that costs money.
  • They need more care and maintenance than a car requires.
  • And they are a lot of work to keep clean.

Somehow, all those articles kind of glossed over these points. And while they talked about doing this repair, and paying that cost, We were unprepared for the shear magnitude of time, effort and cost to maintain the boat. It was almost like a big hole that you ended up throwing your money into.

"A boat is a hole in the water into which you pour money” is a popular saying that has been printed on gift items, such as T-shirts and posters. “A yacht, they say, is a hole in the water surrounded by wood into which money is poured” has been cited in print since at least 1961 and is of unknown authorship.

-The Big Apple: “A boat is a hole in the water into which ...

After buying the boat, I was beginning to think that my thoughts and dreams were misplaced. That perhaps I was yearning for something that the purchase of THINGS cannot repair…

And then… came a movie.

Captain Ron

Captain Ron.
This screen splash says it all.
Caroline Harvey: Captain Ron, I was wondering. Are we going to be going to any more "human" type places?
Captain Ron: Well, you heard of St. Croix?
Caroline Harvey: Yeah.
Captain Ron: We're going to the island just to the left of it.
Caroline Harvey: What's it called?
Captain Ron: Ted's.

Let’s talk about the movie “Captain Ron”. You see at that time, in my life, I yearned for a life that was more adventuresome and exciting than living the “Office Space” existence that I had at Delco Electronics.

Delco Electronics designed and developed automobile electronics, computers and systems for GM. It was an enormous facility that was the absolute clone of the horror of (the movie) "Office Space". It had the worst aspects of the enormous General Motors culture in the nightmarish existence of Silicon Valley smack dab in the middle of the flat corn belt of Indiana.

And then the movie “Captain Ron” appeared.

This is wonderful movie, and one of my favorite movies of all time!

A family inherits a sailboat and decides to flee the urban rat race. They don’t realize that they will have to over come many hurdles, including aspects of them selves, Capt. Ron, the boat and the environment. It’s a movie about adventure, change, and a reappraisal of your values and why your work so hard for what you think is important to you.

Captain Ron.
Captain Ron discusses one issue or the other with the new owners of the schooner.

.

Captain Ron Rico is about as laid back as laid back can be.

[as Ben, who's 12, moves Captain Ron's beer]

Captain Ron: 
Hey. Get your hands off that.

Benjamin Harvey: 
I was just moving it. I wasn't gonna drink it.

Captain Ron: 
You bet your little booty, you wasn't. You want a beer, you get your own beer.

-- Captain Ron

He’s an ex Navy carrier driver whose been through one too many squalls, not to mention a stint in rehab.

A treasure chest of worldly knowledge, he’s never at a loss to relate his exploits even when it comes to his glass eye, “Won it in a crap game a few years back.”

Yah.

[Lost in a heavy storm]

Captain Ron: 
The boss is right. We should be okay. 'Cause I know we're near land.

Martin Harvey: 
Great, Cap. Great. Ya hear that? We're almost there. Explain to the kids how you know that, Captain Ron. Someone translate for General Armando.

Captain Ron: 
Alright, now stay with me: When we left, we had just enough fuel to make it to San Juan. And now... we are out of fuel!

At first glance he’s a man you wouldn’t trust to float an inner tube, but as he proves to Martin Short throughout the course of the movie, he’s “far more cunning than first suspected.” After all, you gotta love a guy who as he’s sipping beer with Short’s young son, he tells the young lad that he just caught his parents “Playing hide-the-salami in the shower.”

Martin Harvey: 
Slow down! There's boats all over the place!

Captain Ron: 
Don't worry. They'll get out of the way. I learned that driving the Saratoga.

The daughter plays a teenager that is simultaneously apathetic and nearly out of control. The son is a kid who hasn’t taken an interest in life until now. The father assumes that Capt. Ron can’t know anything while the family begins to believe that it’s the father who doesn’t know anything.

Captain Ron: 
[telling how he lost his eye] Yeah, it happened when I went down off the coast of Australia.

Katherine Harvey: 
Your boat sank?

Captain Ron: 
No, no, no, no. Not my boat. My boss's boat. Yeah, we hit this reef. Huge son-of-a-bitch. Ran the whole coast.

Katherine Harvey: 
Wait. The Great Barrier Reef?

Captain Ron: 
You've heard of it, huh? Smart lady.
The son in Captain Ron.
After a while the Influence of Captain Ron affects everyone, and even the son seems to have been influenced by the antics and behaviors of Captain Ron.
Captain Ron: 
[to Ben] Hey swab. C'mere. Listen up. Now, the way it works shipboard is, you do your job. You do it good, you get a better job. Maybe you get promoted from swab to mate.
[Ben nods]

Captain Ron: 
Alright. Get on it.

Captain Ron: 
[to Martin] Sort've an incentive kind of a deal, huh?

Martin Harvey: 
Ah. Good.

Captain Ron: 
Yeah, incentives are important. 
I learned that in rehab.

By the end of the movie, I actually found myself nostalgic for the sense of freedom and fun that only Captain Ron can steer you towards…

This movie was one of the triggers to me moving away…

…far, far away from the corporate life, and mindless pursuits of more and more money, and more and more things.

[Approaching Martin and Katherine in a holding cell on San Juan]

Bill Zachary: 
Mr. and Mrs. Harvey? I'm Bill Zachary from the U.S. State Department. I've got some good news for you.

Katherine Harvey: 
Oh. You found our children.

Bill Zachary: 
No. But you're not being charged with subversion.

What’s really going on?

Was it really that I wanted to build a boat, that I wanted to sail the world? That I wanted to partake in the adventure of skippers and the ocean breezes? Or was it something else?

Was it that I was so tired of the bland corporate life…

And the sterile sameness and pleasantries of Central Indiana…

… flat…

…bland …

Typical Indiana.
Typical Indiana.

… pleasant ….

…made “good” money….

…that my soul was screeching and screaming for some “LIFE” and some excitement! That maybe I just wanted some “color” in my life. Some fun. Something different. Something that would alert my senses…

…something “real”…

…anything, really…

…and without anyone to guide me…

…I reached out to things that appealed to me, but that weren’t really practical and in tune with my real and direct needs.

Long story short…

I conducted an affirmation prayer campaign, and within a very short period of time, say nine months…

…I moved.

And I moved to really interesting places. And my first stop was the very unique and colorful Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And let me tell you’se guys something serious. This is a great and unique and super dooper colorful area.

Doc Hollywood

We generally do not know where our affirmation campaigns will take us. That is, unless we are specific in our destinations. At that time, I knew in my heart and soul that a serous change was required and that I was unhappy where I was, and while I was eating and sleeping well, I was also miserable. It was not the life that I wanted. It was far too clean, far too boring, and far too bland.

So I wanted excitement.

Or, maybe, not “excitement. I wanted a change. I wanted a more colorful area, with more interesting people, more tasty choices in food instead of the McDonald’s, or other clone restaurants that had displaced all the family diners and changed them to Applebys, and Pantera Bread chains.

I was tired of manicured lawns. Cinder-block stores, with the same prices, the same canned music, the same types of cars, in the same colors and shapes. I was tired of every house having a red door, a General Motors made car, and a mail box that they bought from Lowe’s.

I was tired of McMansions.

I was tired of corporate life. Corporate radio (and at that time, big corporations bought all the radio stations in Central Indiana, and played a rotating 50 songs over, and over, and over…)

I was tired of Maggie May!

My soul was screaming for … change!

And what manifested was sort of unexpected. It was very much like a cross between Mayberry RFD (The television show.) and the movie Doc Hollywood.

Like I said.

Unexpected.

Doc Hollywood

Scene from Doc Hollywood.
Hattiesburg, MS resembled the scenes within the Movie Doc Hollywood. It was uncanny. What’s more, it wasn’t Mc-anything. Everything was authentic. Everything was “real” with substance, and a genuine nature that was the opposite of “corporate”.
I have to laugh! 
Thubanstar8 December 2004

I have to laugh at all the comments on this board which say this movie's plot or the characters are not "plausible".

I live near the town this movie was shot in, (I was an extra for one day, and a "stand in" for two days on this film. It was neat!) and believe me, the characters are not only believable, you can meet versions of them in small towns all through the south.

There is a big difference between city and deep country life. Maybe people in very urban areas and countries tend to forget that. Quite honestly, I know several people down here in the boonies who make the folk of "Grady" look downright sophisticated.

That criticism shot down, I just have to say it's a really sweet film. It has a lot of atmosphere and some good character development, even in the minor roles. It portrays small, small town America pretty accurately and with a great deal of charm.

Dr. Ben Stone is leaving DC for a job doing plastic surgery for celebs in LA when he runs into a picket fence in a small Southern town and has to do 3 days of community service at their clinic as penance.

His fancy sports car is totaled anyway and he has to get it fixed.

Miffed at being waylaid in such a hokey place, he tries to get through the next few days in time for his new job.

Scene from Doc Hollywood.
There’s a real charm in the deep South. And it was like a refreshing burst of fresh air compared to the stifling conformity of corporate life in Indiana.

.

He meets a wide cast of characters — and to their credit, not everyone in a small town is so gosh-friendly. Some are mean, some are troubled, some are nice — like any other array of people. Ben meets Lou, a single mother who drives the ambulance, as well as Nancy Lee Nicholson, a confused beauty who wants him to take her to LA.

In a town full of colorful characters, two ‘stars in the making’ stand out; Woody Harrelson, as ‘Lou’s’ suitor, Hank Gordon, a country variation of his bartending character from ‘Cheers’, talks dumb but has a knack for selling, only lacking a place to make big money at it; and Bridget Fonda, as Mayor Nicholson’s oversexed but ‘out of place’ daughter, hopes Stone will take her away to the bright lights of Hollywood.

For me, the movie was a representation of my life in Hattiesburgh.

Actually, if you all want to get "technical". I lived in Pervis. Which was a small town outside of Hattiesburg.
Scene from Doc Hollywood.
Yes. The citizens of Hattiesburg Mississippi pretty much resembled those portrayed in Grady in the movie “Doc Hollywood”.
I have watched Doc Hollywood umpteen times and like it more each time . macpherr20 October 1999

To most people this movie is about a small town in the South. To me that one small town street is the place where my husband and I used to day dreaming about buying antique furniture after he would finish graduate school at the University of Florida, in Gainesville, Florida. 

The movie location, the one street town of Micanopy, is just a few miles away from Gainesville. 

They show the entire downtown! 

As I have watched Doc Hollywood umpteen times, I love to see the corner store, which was a jewelry store called the Strawberry Bank specializing in antique jewelry about seventeen years ago. I would put stuff on lay-way as graduate students could not afford the luxury of buying something faster. 

Then we would drive around those back roads full of trees and Spanish moss and eat an early dinner: fried cat fish, fried okra, rice, and whatever fresh thing they had that our small stomachs could contain. 

It was such a great time in our lives! 

That area is surrounded by students. I guess we did not realize how little we had as graduate students, since we were even able to afford an off-campus apartment! Everybody else had about the same youth and enthusiasm and we were looking to our bright futures. 

I would go to the library and get books on antiques furniture, old lace and antique jewelry. I would audit French classes, take classes in jewelry making techniques: such as lost wax and casting. 

I learned so much about life in that town, and biked until I ended up tan without ever sitting in the sun.

Like Michael J. Fox (The American President) "Dr. Benjamin Stone," I was fascinated with the big city. Coming from one of the largest cities in the world, I just wondered what I was going to do after I finished my classes as a Visiting Student at the UF. 

Well after living there for about four years, I learned much more than what graduate school could ever teach. 

Like Dr. Stone, I fell in love with the place, I would not mind having a pig named Jasmine, I fell in love with the quilt making, the silence, the southern hospitality, and how "they all" thought I had an accent. 

I can even do a pretty good southern accent now myself! 

Every once in while a celebrity would come to town like Sally Fields (Forest Gump) raising support for a project that her brother a physics professor at UF was working on. Those college folk, they sure come up with strange ideas. That was so cool!

Julie Warner (Mr. Saturday Night) "Lou" was so adorable with her down to earth attitude. 
A catfish dinner.
A mainstay meal in Mississippi; the fried catfish dinner with chips, slaw, and pickled tomatoes with hush-puppies.
I loved to see the Mayor dressed like a squash. That is the South!

This is an excellent movie.

It has values. Ben Stone realized that being a Doctor in a small town might even mean having to read to your clients personal letters to them because they could not read.

He in the end realizes that being needed is far more important than money.

My favorite quotes: " Watch your language Doc, you are in the belt of the Bible belt."

Stone: "There were cows in the middle of the road! I told you my insurance company will be happy to pay for that fence."

Judge:"I built that fence myself. Neither you, nor, your insurance company can pay for a fence that I built myself."

My favorite scenes: the one street in Micanopy, the cute wooden cabin, the little old ladies quilting and arguing.

Ben Stone and Lou driving around on that old huge ambulance, and acting like real animals demarcating their territories by scent. They would urinate and distribute the liquid around to detract deer that would attract the hunters.

My husbands favorite scene is Julie Warner slowing rising from under water when she was skinny dipping. Not lewd, but enchanting.

Well we are going to "visit all " the relatives down south and eat fresh catfish in some back road "ma &pa restaurant." I guess " you all" have to go buy or rent this movie.

This movie is great because it is about many people deciding for themselves how they want to live — whether in a big city or in a small town — and why they value what they do. It is also about an epiphany for Ben Stone and changing of his ways internally.

And that’s pretty much what I moved to.

A super nice small community with it’s own unique (and very different) culture, society and food. And it was refreshing! Absolutely and positively refreshing!

The point here is that you need to leave your affirmation campaigns wide open so that things that you are not aware of, but that meet your deepest desires are able to manifest. If you are too specific, you might end up with a house like what you see on television, and not like one that your really want.

Here’s what Hattiesburg was sort of like…

Rural Mississippi. Very nice.
Rural Mississippi. Very nice.

Now…

There’s many things that I can say and lessons to be learned. But at this point we will park this conversation here for a spell.

And the rest of the story here…

Eventually, I had to leave my position in Hattiesburg. Which was really sad. It happened when there was a restructuring in the corporate office (in Chicago) and they input new management in (from Silicon Valley) who remade the entire working environment…

…wait for it…

…yet another clone of “Office Space”.

Ugh!

Office Space.
And suddenly, just like that (snaps fingers) I was living in corporate America all over again, as a “power” yellow-tie corporate executive remade my Mississippi company into a clone of Silicon Valley.

So…

Some trends are too large, and too invasive to escape from. It’s like trying to run away from sweat. It will form, and the only thing that you can do is try to get / make yourself comfortable.

Ugh.

Conclusion

My skills in regards to affirmation / prayer campaigns were honed over four decades out of necessity. It was like I was on this churning, bobbing, sea of turmoil that was frequently trying to push me under. And my only way to maintain sanity was to take control of my thoughts and actions. And over time, I realized just how critical the control of my thoughts were.

Indeed, if I were not careful others, and other things would change and alter my thoughts to something else, and something quite different. And I didn’t want anything to do with it.

Gosh and golly, there are so many lessons here, some of which I spelled out to you, the reader, and others that you might be able to see if you read between the lines. It is our thoughts, and the shadow thoughts of others which can make our lives great, or a Hellish experience. Our only recourse is to control the barrage of thoughts to something that we can manage.

Be careful of your affirmations. What you think you want, might not be what you earnestly truly want deep down inside. It’s like the guy who says that he want’s a “big dick”, when in reality, he just wants a lot of sex. Be real, and be truthful with yourself.

This was my story.

I am sure that you have your own stories that you can add to this. For life is a very interesting journey. And learning, and experiencing life is our duty.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Affirmation Index here…

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The effects of de-cluttering and purging on affirmation campaigns

I have been writing a bunch of articles (posts) on how to conduct prayer and affirmation campaigns that work. But I haven’t spent too much time on other things that you can do to increase the likelihood of accelerating or amplifying the campaign.

So, in this post we will look at de-cluttering as a way of clearing away the “trash” that often stands in the way between you and your desires.

Your past, and every one you met, every thing you touched, every thought you have are all being swept up and makes an impression upon you, your life, and your lifestyle. In order for you to free yourself from the influences of your past, you need to take proactive steps to clear away the bad (or stubborn) from influencing your future plans.

Declutter to remove inertial obstacles that prevent your intentions from manifesting.
Declutter to remove inertial obstacles that prevent your intentions from manifesting.

Summary

Thoughts and quanta form attachments with physical things. Thus good and bad thoughts, and their associated quanta can be absorbed by physical things, and thus affect the users and owners of those objects.

When you conduct a prayer / affirmation campaign, the thoughts and quanta of the physical surrounds can have an influence in the success of your campaign.

I suggest that you take the time to de-clutter your affirmation “runway”, so that when the time comes for your affirmations “to take off”, there will not be any hindrances, or obstacles in your way.

Step one

The very first thing that you need to do is get rid of any “hexed”, “bad luck”, “cursed” or problematic items in you possession. Maybe you don’t have any, that’s fine. But if there is something that you don’t feel comfortable with, maybe it’s something stuck in the attic or stored away in the garage, toss it out.

Cursed or entangled physical items surround us everywhere.
Christine is considered one of the great classic 80’s horror movies, based on Stephen King’s novel and directed by John Carpenter. It is the story about a cursed automobile.

Forget about who gave it to you. Forget about it’s potential monetary value. Forget about any sentimentality associated or attached with it. Just clear it out of your life.

It does not matter if it is “good”, “bad”, “cursed intentionally”, or just unlucky. Get rid of that fucker.

You see, there are no “good” or “bad” attachments. Aside from those relative to our comfort and our structured desires. Think of it as inertia.

If you want to run a race, you try to be all muscle. You cut away your body fat, you get lighter and you exercise. So you can well imagine this effort as a slimming down and streamlining of your affirmation campaign.

Cut off the fat.

Step two. Declutter clothing.

All those things that you don’t use, that occupy space in your closets and in your drawers, form an inertial mass. It is a big rock that makes it difficult for you to make any changes. This inertial mass is a continuity of the present, and if the articles include memories of the past, then the inertial effect is to tie you to that mass.

If you don’t need the items, don’t use the items, or have no attachments to the items aside from “one day I’ll”, or “it cost so much when I bought it”, then discard.

Here’s some general rules of thumb for clothing…

  • If you haven’t worn it for two years – discard.
  • If you like the clothing, but you no longer can wear that size – discard.
  • If you moved to the tropics, but you retain your winter clothing – discard.
  • Old socks, underwear (and bras) should be replaced yearly. (Do you hear me girls?)

From now on, starting now, come up with a strategy to wear fitting, and stylish clothes and discard your old wardrobe. Now, I am not talking about being a “Jim Dandy” of Town, but rather something quite different.

Replace your clothes and your wardrobe. Invest the thousand or so dollars to do so. Make sure that [1] everything fits, and fits well. [2] That the style is “you” and NOT the latest fashion. And that [3] you feel great, look great, wearing the clothes. Then discard everything else.

Do this by going through your current clothing and setting aside everything that you 1) have not worn for two years, 2) is noticeably stained, and 3) fits so poorly not even a master tailor could adjust it to fit. Package it all up and mark it for the Salvation Army or eBay.

-Building a Men's Wardrobe | The Art of Manliness

For men…

If you are a man, you should NEVER buy clothing yourself. You need a female that you trust to help you work on your look, and a good trustworthy tailor to work with. Tell them what you are trying to do. You will NOT regret this move.

For women, the same thing applies.

There is a significant difference in the spiritual, emotional and quantum “baggage” associated and attached to clothing between the two sexes. Men have a tendency to wear things over and over, and they tend to carry with them a lot of quantum debris and inertia. Women not so much. But women, also have a tendency to have large closets of items that just sit there waiting for the “right” moment to wear.

Both accumulate inertia and resistance to change. Both need to be purged to only what you you need and associate with the GOALS and DREAMS of your affirmation campaign.

Unless you use it, it is just wasted space. Further it is polluting your new efforts to change you life.

Think of it as a big block of frozen shit sitting inside a big tub of water. Slowly it is affected all the water in the tub. If you remove it, the water no longer needs to contend with the pollution. And you will notice that the water level in the tub is lower. You can fill it up with nice fresh, sparking clear water.

Discard what you haven’t used in two years. Don’t pause. Don’t think about it. Just do it.

And do not forget to gain the support of your spouse or the person who will be helping you to pay for all this. I find my clients’ wives are ecstatic and fully supportive of their husband’s efforts to dress better. If you keep your partner out of the decision, however, you could be met with unexpected resistance.

-

Step Three – Declutter things

Not everything is “haunted” or cursed. Often good memories are associated with things and objects. It’s just that we need to be sure that the object provides us a positive to neutral affect in our day to day lives.

All in all, I would hazard to pronounce that about 20% of the items might have some negative effects that would detract from your life. And another 60% might have a neutral effect. and another 20% might have a positive effect. It all depends on who you are, and what YOUR quantum associations are.

You need to remove all the items that you don't use or need from your life.
You need to remove all the items that you don’t use or need from your life.

So, I would advise that you make an inventory of the things in your house. And just like the clothing above, discard what is not needed. For they do hold and retain quantum connections. And while they might be neutral, the large mass of them will still work to keep you EXACTLY WHERE YOU ARE RIGHT NOW.

So get rid of the bad, and do not argue with your family about that. Discard the bad.

Weed out the neutral. Just keep what you like, want or need. (No one needs 6 mop buckets, 15 flashlights, and your great grandparents Christmas tree lights.) If you have a broken toaster, that you haven’t used, but will fix one of these days, toss it. If you have a throw rug from your old house, but have nowhere to put is, discard it. If you are still keeping the old bird cage from the bird that died five years ago, guess what, discard it.

It’s nice to know that that big serving bowl reminds you of your long lost grandmother. If it fills you with happy emotions and thoughts, well then keep it. If you have a nearly new broom, but years of storage has messed up the hairs in the bottom of the broom, and you just can’t get the nerve to discard it, then set that sucker on fire. Unless you are using it, a tool is junk.

I am NOT advising you all to take on a minimalist lifestyle. I am just simply saying that THINGS collect more than just dust. They collect quanta. And quanta, both good, bad or neutral can act like an anchor holding your and tying you to the current life that you are living.

Step Four – Bless your property

Just like evil, bad, or contrary ideas, thoughts and quanta can become attached to things, so can good will.

All, or most religions, will bless things and objects. I know that this is certainly true for the Catholic and the Buddhist religions.

I personally wear three items on me that are blessed. One [1] is a Catholic cross that I wear around my neck. It was blessed by Monseigneur Pete in Erie, PA when I lived at a monastery / retreat for men years ago. (Yeah. Bet you all didn’t know that, did ya?) And I also wear two bracelets. Both were blessed by Buddhists in the temples. One [2] (with large wooden beads) was blessed in TangXia, China, and the other [3] is a red rope bracelet blessed in Wenzhou, China.

That’s the extent of my blessed items for now.

Perhaps if Trump continues on his rampage of destruction and scorched earth, I might need to take a more proactive approach. In which case, I would certainly pay to have a priest bless my household. heck! I might even put in one of those Chinese mini-shrines near my front door.

Chinese mini household shrine.
Many older Chinese, as well as successful businessmen maintain these mini shrines in their homes and in their companies. They make sure that it is continually stocked with fresh fruit and flowers.

It’s interesting, really.

In the United States, I have uncles and aunties that would have their own religious shrines in their upstairs hallways. These small shrines are for their private purposes and for prayer and other blessings. As they are devout Catholics, they use the shrines to run through their “Hail Marys” and “Stations of the Cross” in their daily prayers.

Hail Mary full of Grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed are thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus. Holy Mary Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death Amen.

-Hail Mary - Prayers - Catholic Online

Now, I am not saying that I intend to put a small shrine in my home (I think my wife would kill me), but that having a priest come over and bless your home and apartment might be a good thing to do. Most especially if you have any questions why there seems to be a “big potato” or “dark cloud” or invisible wall that lies between you and your goals and objectives.

It won’t cost too much. Provide a meal and offer a monetary “red envelope” to make it worth their while.

Home shrine in a non-Catholic household.
Home alter in a non-Catholic household. Alters are personal affairs and you place upon them what you feel is right, and just in according to your own personal beliefs and feelings.

So…

Try to have items that you always wear blessed. This can be your stinking wrist-watch it you want, or a wedding ring. Or a pinky ring. Or a belt. Or a John Deere baseball cap.

If you feel the need, purify your residence in the ways and manner that your feel appropriate for you.

Part Six – Tattoos

A tattoo is like an anchor. It binds you to a stat of mind and a set of conditions. If you have the ability, I would suggest that you purge yourself of all tattoos.

Tattoos anchor you to a specific set of world-line conditions. Thus are undesirable for practical world-line navigation using affirmation campaigns.
Tattoos anchor you to a specific set of world-line conditions. Thus are undesirable for practical world-line navigation using affirmation campaigns.

Part Seven -Nature

Nature is neutral.

The best way to shed the inertial quanta that collects upon us or around us is to spend time in nature.

This can be a small flower garden, vegetable patch, or a small pond. This can be walks in the woods, or canoeing on a lake.

If, for whatever reason, you are unable to perform any of the suggestions herein to declutter your life and reduce the quantum inertia, then please spend more time in nature. It need not be something all that dramatic, but it does need to occur.

It could be something as simple as leaving the natural air to flow through your house more often.

Or, it could mean that you start putting potted plants all over your house.

It could be something as drastic as turning off all power to your house for a week, opening up all your windows and door, and just giving your old house a good ‘airing out”.

What ever you do…

…Just remember that affirmation campaigns alone often need little “nudges”, and pushes in certain areas to have your desires manifest. Do what you can to “freshen things up”, and provide “baggage free” opportunity.

Oh, and a nice slice of pie in a good old-fashioned diner wouldn’t hurt.

Delicious pies.
A fine delicious pie. Go out to a diner, and do so especially if it is something that you do not normally do. To enact change, you must change things, and that includes habits.

Conclusion

Thoughts and quanta form attachments with physical things. Thus good and bad thoughts, and their associated quanta can be absorbed by physical things, and thus affect the users and owners of those objects.

When you conduct a prayer / affirmation campaign, the thoughts and quanta of the physical surrounds can have an influence in the success of your campaign. It can be good, bad, or neutral, but it will have an effect.

I suggest that you take the time to de-clutter your affirmation “runway”, so that when the time comes for your affirmations “to take off”, there will not be any hindrances, or obstacles in your way.

Do you want more?

I have more articles along these lines in my Affirmation Campaign Index here…

Intention Campaigns

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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In praise of sculpted figurines

Here, we are going to take on some lighter fare. We are going to look at the world of scale figurines. And what a world it is!

Essentially, these are dolls in a certain precise scale that is accurately reflective of the person being depicted. As such they are really marvelous if there is a person or representation that appeals to your sensibilities.

“Rocket” from the movie “Guardians of the Galaxy”.

And since many of these figurines are of limited production builds (maybe less than a few thousand per model), they become collector items, that only get more valuable as time moves on.

These figurines run the range from pop cultural icons, to Hollywood characters, television characters, to historical figures, to fantasy presentations and to everything in between.

Scales

Action figures come in all shapes and sizes and although it’s easy to break out a ruler and simply measure one of your action figures, that’s not going to help you to understand the scale references often used by toy companies and long-time collectors. Besides, it’s way cooler to tell a fellow collector on an action figure forum that you picked up some nice 1:10 scale figures. It’s all part of the lingo.

The term scale refers to the size ratio to a normal-sized object. In this case, we’re talking about smaller representations of the human figure. For standardization purposes, toy companies refer to the usual ideal human figure as being 6 feet tall (we’re usually talking about heroic figures such as Batman or Darth Vader, hence the height). Therefore an action figure that is also six feet tall would have a 1:1 ratio. A three-foot-tall action figure would have a 1:2 ratio and so on.

Over the years, some standards scales have been used in the action figure world. Take a look at the most common, starting from largest to smallest.

1:4 Scale (approx. 18″)

This scale is one of the largest common scales for action figures and is technically reserved for dolls if we’re going by the doll/action figure definition, as they often have “real” hair or cloth clothing. Examples of this format can be found in Sideshow’s Premium Format figures and the superhero dolls made by Tonner.

These are very BIG. I just cannot imagine anyone having one of them personally unless you all have a ton of room in your house.

1:6 Scale (approx. 12″)

This scale holds a special place in action figure history as it was the original size of the very first figure to sport the “action figure” moniker, G.I. Joe. This is also the scale of all the figurines posted in this article.

This was the reigning scale for action figures during the first decade or so after G.I. Joe hit the market and many companies toyed with 12″ figures of their own, including the 12″ Star Wars dolls from Kenner in the late ’70s and Mego’s 12″ line of superhero dolls, featuring Batman, Superman and a TV tie-in version of Wonder Woman.

1:9 Scale (approx. 8″)

This scale is pretty much exclusive to the Mego toy company’s World’s Greatest Heroes line of eight-inch action figures that ruled the toy aisles in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Other toy companies were quick to follow, such as Ideal with their famous monsters and Evel Knievel lines. This size became so popular that G.I. Joe himself shrunk down to this size (although a petroleum shortage needed to make plastic didn’t help, either).

1:10 Scale (approx. 7″)

For today’s collectors, the 1:10 scale seems to be the king of the hill. Several action figure lines are being produced in this format from Mattel’s DC Universe to Marvel’s Legends line. Mattel has made an even bigger splash with their Masters of the Universe Classics line that re-imagines the old school fantasy figures in a newer seven-inch scale. This size tends to be more popular with adult collectors than with children looking for play value.

1:18 Scale (approx. 3.75-4″)

Mego started it with their Pocket Heroes line in the late ’70s, followed shortly thereafter by Fisher-Price with their Adventure People line, but it would be Kenner’s massively popular Star Wars collection that would set the unshakable standard for action figures of this scale for almost 20 years. Figures in this scale were less expensive, easier to fit into vehicles and loads of fun to collect. Toy lines such as G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero did extremely well in this size as did many movie figures, such as Indiana Jones and Tron and figures based on TV shows, like The Dukes of Hazzard and ChiPs.

Although 3.75″ was the standard in this scale, a proper 1:18 scale figure should be 4″, and a recent resurgence in popularity of this size has brought us several new figure lines from Marvel, DC Comics, G.I. Joe and Star Wars.

1:12 Scale (approx. 5-6″)

Chances are if the figure was based on a movie made during the ’90s (Last Action Hero, Congo, Jurassic Park, Super Mario Brothers) their action figures were this size. Throughout the 1990s, figures ranging between five and six inches took over the action figure world, pretty much killing the 3.75″ figures and setting a new standard. Although not very popular today, figures in this scale will never be forgotten.

1:48 Scale (approx. 2″)

It should be noted that with the rise in popularity and collectability of figures such as Lego “minifigs” and other miniature, yet fully articulated, figures from other building sets such as Mega Bloks, the two-inch-tall figure is starting to hold its own and is beginning to command respect in the collectibles world. These figures may very well one day be the reigning scale standard in the not too distant future, so they get an honorable mention here.

1/6 scale – the “GI Joe” scale

Here are figurines that are of the 1:6 scale. The (so called) GI Joe size. I think that they are awesome, but I really don’t have the kind of disposable money to indulge in collecting these figures. I just have to go to Hong Kong (Mong Kok) and look at the figures in display instead.

Gallery

All the following figurines are in 1:6 scale. And we will start with a historical figure.

And now for some fun…

Top Big Names

This world of action figures excites young and grown children for playing and collecting. It also excites me as I just really like to look at these things.

Of course, there are a number of fantastic online resources dedicated to action figures across the internet but it would be impossible to feature all of the great sites in one list. These are 10 of the more exhaustive sites in no particular order.

There is something for everyone on these sites, but do not limit your online experience to just these featured because there are many other online resources in the action figure collecting community.

First lets look at the big American companies that started this hobby…

Hasbro

Action figures simply wouldn’t exist as they do today if not for Hasbro’s influence on the creation of G.I. Joe in the 1960s. Their influence in the industry only grew in the ’80s with the re-envisioned G.I. Joe line and the introduction of Transformers.

On top of the lasting value of its own brands G.I. Joe and Transformers, Hasbro is possibly most recognized for its licensed brands, including Stars Wars and Marvel Comics. Because of these four brands, Hasbro’s action figures make up a huge portion of any modern action figure aisle, and this is all on top of their already dominant toy and board game presence.

Mattel

Mattel may be best-known for its doll phenomenon Barbie, but their presence in the action figure world has been a growing one. Mattel was primarily known among boys as the manufacturer of Hot Wheels until they stepped onto the action figure scene in a big way in the early 1980s with He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. He-Man was one of the single most popular figures of that era, and the line thrived for a number of years.

After He-Man’s fall into obscurity, Mattel’s influence in the collector action figure world was rather small until recently, with the revamped Masters of the Universe Classics line and the acquisition of the DC Comics, WWE Wrestling, and Ghostbusters licenses. Mattel is once again a major player in the collector action figure industry, taking up their own fair share of toy aisles.

Bandai

Bandai may be the biggest toy company of which you’ve never heard. Behind Mattel and Hasbro, Bandai is the world’s third-largest toy manufacturer and has a large presence in the action figure industry as well. The primary difference is that Bandai is a Japanese company, whose influence in the United States is enacted through Bandai America.

Bandai’s single biggest action figure line in the United States is the Power Rangers and its various incarnations. Many of the figures that most collectors ignore as they move through toy aisles are the cartoon and TV show based properties that Bandai thrives on. Despite many brands not taking off with collectors, Bandai’s authority has grown recently thanks to the newly acquired ThunderCats license and its star Lion-O.

From the great Chinese SF Epic; “The Wandering Earth”.

McFarlane Toys

Todd McFarlane’s popularity in the world of comics in the late 1980s and early ’90s helped him launch two major companies, one of which was McFarlane Toys. McFarlane Toys made an impact on the action figure industry which is still being felt in many ways. They were the first to truly make action figures look good. Sculpt and paint techniques were taken to new heights, and that changed the direction action figures took. They finally started to become serious and grown-up.

The one major criticism of McFarlane Toys’ products is that they lacked the standard articulation that kids had become used to. That problem has been remedied with McFarlane’s newest products, as can be seen with the widely-popular Halo line based on the hit video game. McFarlane Toys is not as prominent a company as it once was, though its impact is still felt across toy aisles.

NECA

Figures produced by NECA (National Entertainment Collectibles Association) may not be featured heavily in the average big box store’s toy section, but their strictly collector-directed figures feature heavily at toy stores and comic shops, as well as online. Despite NECA being a relative newcomer on the action figure scene, it has become a major player thanks to its video game and movie licensed figures.

The importance of NECA to the industry as a whole can’t be underestimated, as its products bring non-collectors into the action figure world. Video game or movie fans who have never purchased an action figure before are suddenly supporting the industry thanks to the fantastic quality and likenesses NECA’s figures offer.

Hot Toys

Hong Kong-based manufacturer Hot Toys makes this list for one very simple reason. They make the absolute best action figures in the world. Although extremely expensive and on a scale (1/6) many collectors don’t collect, the figures Hot Toys produces are the best looking and highest quality on the market.

A vast majority of their figures are based on movie properties, and result in eerily life-like representations of the major characters, down to the real cloth costumes they are wearing. If you have a lot of money to spend and want the very best, look no farther than Hot Toys.

Top 10 Action Figure Websites

01 of 10 Toy News International kirahoffman / Public Domain Toy News International gathers a staggering amount of news from the action figure industry, typically featuring multiple news entries every day. Also, there are tons of galleries and features to enjoy when not reading news updates. Toy News International’s best feature is probably its robust and active forum featuring thousands of collectors discussing various lines, companies, and figures.

02 of 10 Seibertron.com Many sites focus on a breadth of lines and brands, Seibertron.com focuses specifically on Transformers. The site features some of the most incredible, far-reaching, and expert opinions on the world of Transformers action figures. There are extensive galleries of every Transformers figure imaginable, a huge forum with an extensive number of collectors, and constant news on every single aspect of the brand. If you are a Transformers fan, there’s no better resource than Seibertron.

03 of 10 Online Action Figure Entertainment Online Action Figure Entertainment maintains a number of interesting features throughout the years, such as editorials, comics, and a strong forum. The reason collectors keep coming back to the site is the variety of reviews posted regularly. The group running the site is made up of long-time collectors with bold opinions on their figures, and they are not shy about sharing them. OAFE reviews are detailed and honest, and there are a lot of them to peruse.

04 of 10 Figures.com This website takes advantage of the constant stream of action figure news that some other sites might miss. Every piece of news seems to make its way to the slick homepage, giving buyers and collectors tons of fresh content. There are also active forums, a variety of reviews, and a network of great sites like Yo Joe! and ​One Sixth Warriors in the Figures.com pantheon.

05 of 10 MWCToys.com MWCToys.com goes by many names. It is Captain Toy, it is Michael’s Review of the Week, and it is MWCToys. No matter what you call it, it is the ultimate home of action figure reviews by expert action figure reviewer Michael Crawford. When it comes to reviewing toys, Crawford is an absolute expert in the industry. The ​photos are incredible, the reviews are well-written, and the number and ​breadth of toys reviewed are astounding. To top it all off, this is the home of the Poppies, one of the most widely-recognized annual action figure awards.​​​​

06 of 10 The Toyark The Toyark is a news site with one of the Internet’s most active action figure discussion forums with great photo galleries and related features. News from every genre and brand of action figures is gathered on the Toyark, but collectors seeking more specific sites can enjoy popular stops like HissTank and TransformerWorld2005, a part of the Toyark network.

07 of 10 Pixel-Dan.com The online shopping world for action figures has always been a little behind other hobbies. In particular, video reviews of action figures lagged behind, but Pixel Dan changed all that. This site is the most prominent and professional video reviewer of action figures, and the archive is well maintained. This resource includes news, editorials, and a number of other exciting features.

08 of 10 He-Man.org Everything He-Man and Masters of the Universe can be found here. This site rose up to meet collectors‘ needs. It features everything imaginable that is related to the He-Man universe, including but not limited to, dedicated discussion forums, a plethora of news and features, action figure archives, photo galleries, and a comprehensive encyclopedia.  Continue to 9 of 10 below.

09 of 10 Action Figure Insider Action Figure Insider is one of the most widely recognized and widely perused action figure sites on the internet. It features every conceivable piece of action figure news, has extremely active and vibrant forums, features well-written editorial pieces, includes a variety of checklists, and has wonderful event and convention photo galleries. Action Figure Insider has been around a while and will likely continue to be one of the best sites about the action figure industry for a long time to come.

10 of 10 The Fwoosh The Fwoosh has a good repository of news about action figures and maintains an active forum for discussion about figures, how to find other forums on a specific topic, and much more. The Fwoosh has its own line of super-poseable action figures and its own YouTube channel for recent action figure news and information.

Conclusion

Yeah, I think that they look awesome. And while fundamentally they are just really super-detailed dolls, the detail and the appearance is attractive to me. As I have stated earlier, I cannot afford these figurines (or to put it plainer and more accurately) I cannot prioritize these figurines over other items that I cherish. You know like cases of wine, frolics with chicks at KTV’s, and diapers for my youngest child.

So, what I do when I am tired of the “news”, I go out and explore the various sites on the internet. (This used to be known as surfing the net.) And some of the sites that I explore are those of figurines.

Over the years there have been some rather amazing figurines that have been (how can I convey the impact) spectacular in design, detail and appearance. And while I cannot (and it is not my intent) to convince people that these figurines are contemporaneous artistic renderings of popular culture, it is something that I earnestly believe is true.

If you find yourself with some extra time on your hands, a stroll or browse through one of the above websites might be of colorful interest.

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The sad story of American Women – Part I

The American society has devolved into a heartless “dog eat dog” world where it is every person for themselves. I have blamed the progressive “improvements” on this trend, but in truth there are many reasons, and many causes. And a simple black and white card-board cutout will not provide all the answers.

When I see American women today, I feel sad.

It’s almost like they are trying to perpetually trying to stay in their 20’s. In looks. In actions. In dating. In relationships. In everything.

They are not moving on. They are not considering families, generational growth. Growth as a person, and growth in spiritual, mental and emotional venues. They are somehow entranced in this idea of a perpetual “Springtime”, and not looking at the beauty of Summer, Fall and Winter.

There’s a lot that I can say on this level and on this subject, but as a man I am restricted in speaking about what I know. And what I know is this… As a man, you don’t actually start living life until you pass your 50’s. It is there when you really come into your own.

Now…

That’s for men.

For women, it’s different.

Women go through stages of growth. And I find that the woman in her 30’s and 40’s much more “rounded out” and healthier (emotionally and physically) when they were younger in their 20’s. And if they take care of themselves, maintain an active (face to face) social life, can extend this attribute (characteristic) up and into their very senior years.

But that is just me, and a 20-year old won’t have any understanding what I am talking about.

Sigh.

Anyways, there’s a bunch of articles out there about women who have foregone raising a family and having long term relationships in favor of a career or a life of eternal flings. These are sad people. They are lonely, shallow and fucked up in the head.

People, it’s our relationships with each other that enables us to grow.

You don’t have relationships…

…you don’t grow.

Here’s a good article titled “She needs more men!” and posted way back in November 18, 2012 by Dalrock. It is reprinted as found, but modified to fit this venue. I included the pictures of drag-lines for nostalgic purposes, but note that all credit to the original author.

She needs more men!

Badger writes about a woman at a dinner party who recently tried to enlist him in her friend’s quest to keep her dating hopper filled with new men:

“Do you have any normal friends for my friend to date?”

Vaguely confused by the hasty presumption that I was a dating sourcer, but detecting an opportunity for a silent manosphere laugh, I replied “you’d have to tell me more.”

“Well, she’s been dating guys from OKCupid and says she just can’t find any normal guys there.”

Now I was irked. It would have been one thing if she said her friend worked long hours with all women and just wasn’t meeting men, or had had trouble getting back on the carousel horse after a breakup. 

But she’s swimming in men and is striking out wildly. 

And I happen to know that a significant portion of the young men in my city are on OKCupid, so I know there’s a few good fish in that pond.

As Badger points out, the woman is presuming quite a lot in expecting a stranger to fix her friend’s dysfunctional dating strategy:

The fact that she saw me as a possible conduit for her issue of the day smacked of a combination of megalomania and an appeal to the male instinct for problem-solving – “maybe you can help me fix this!” 

Expecting me to leap into the coat closet and re-emerge in my Captain Save-A-Ho suit, ready to line up cannon fodder for her chica amiga who couldn’t generate her own romantic sales leads.

What strikes me even more is the widespread denial of the larger issue.  Once a woman sets out with a strategy other than one and done marriage, she all too often becomes a ravenous beast with a need to constantly fill her hopper with more men.

Most of these men will be either outright rejected or (worse) added to her stable of beta orbiters.

Strip mining for men.
Strip mining for men.

Strip mining machines are typically stuck for life in the very pits they create.  While younger prospectors are starting up in rich ground, as a strip miner for men ages she ends up forever reprocessing less and less promising tailings.

A drag-line.
Strip mining for men. A drag-line.

Eventually nearly all of the most promising ore has been lost forever in an unintended environmental impact or has been snapped up by more astute miners. 

Even if she does come across a promising nugget, the years and hard mining operations have taken their toll;  her battered sluice box can no longer even slow down most nuggets, let alone retain them.

This is why if you come across a site focused on single women (or single mothers), there is a never ending obsession with feeding the hopper.  More men.  More men.  Must find more men.  Anyone and everyone is enlisted in the obsessive task of devouring through mountains of men in an attempt to relive the glory days of their early mining experience.

To be fair, the constant need for new romantic prospects isn’t limited just to choice addicted women in today’s Sexual Marketplace (SMP). 

Those men who find themselves repeatedly in the first 2-3 stages of the strip mining operation have little choice but to look for new hoppers to throw themselves into. 

Some men have figured out the business of dealing with strip miners, and deliberately set out to play the role of hookup, fling, and (as part of a soft harem strategy) boyfriend.  A much larger group of men unwittingly end up playing the role of forever scraped aside top soil, beta orbiter, and the sucker who chivalrously pays for dates with the miner while she has sex with rockbanddrummer for free.

But either way there is a critical qualitative difference.  Those men who are setting out for a life of sexual variety are very honest about the moral and practical reality of their choice and the continuing need for new ore in the hopper. 

They aren’t pretending to be seeking the one, and therefore don’t need to lie to themselves and others about the nature of their operations. 

As a result, they are able to come up with effective strategies to keep operational costs down and efficiently retain as much of what they are seeking for as long as possible.

It is worth noting that the entire process is often mistaken for something more quaint due to the denial at the core of the operation.  Strip miners work hard to associate themselves with the romantic image of their grandmothers and even sisters who spent a few years in their late teens and early twenties carefully panning for a husband. 

Finding a proper husband is no small task, and many women still quietly take this seriously. 

They understand that devouring mountains is counterproductive, and instead work to locate rich areas to prospect and carefully sift to avoid discarding the prize or falling for the flash of fools gold. 

They don’t attract the attention of the much more visible strip miners because they aren’t devouring mountains, and when they think they have found a good prospect they aren’t about to tip their hand to other miners.

Wise prospectors also understand the vital importance of holding on to their gold once they find it.

Conclusion

It’s a cute story and great narrative about dating.

All men, who have endured a divorce and then were thrust back into the later-life dating scene, has experienced these kinds of gals. Oh not everyone is out there strip-mining for men. Maybe only one in ten. But they are out there.

And it is sad.

In certain ways it’s like the little kid that that uses up a box of tissue to clean his nose. One after the other. Pull out, wipe, and then discard. Over and over again. Not paying attention that the box is running out and the fresh clean tissues are all used up.

Nothing is better in the world than having relationships.

That is with men, with women, with associates, and with colleagues. Relationships are what adds color to our lives and depth to our souls.

I, for one, have a very large and healthy collection of friendships. It was one of the things that I set out to do when I moved to China. It turns out that most people like food, many like to drink and a large percentage love music and playing around. Sure beats staring into a blue glow of a computer monitor late at night.

Men, women, we all need each other.

Don’t be a lone-wolf. Be part of something bigger.

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How the Late Rock God Eddie Van Halen Hacked His Guitar

Well, this year has really been something. Hasn’t it? First the Coronavirus and then everything from killer zombie hornets to the death of Eddie Van Halen. Next thing on the list is Global Thermonuclear War. Well, that’s what the neocons in Washington DC, and Alex Jones are all pushing towards. Jeeze! Can’t we all get a break?

Yeah. Eddie Van Halen died.

I guess when you get older you start seeing your family and friends die off. It’s a sobering reality. And pretty unnerving. I have close friends who have cancer and some who survived it, and some that didn’t. I have friends that have died from AIDs / HIV, and friends that disappeared off the face of the map. I have friends that I no longer talk with regularly, but still consider them an important part of my life.

Change is normal. It is to be expected.

It’s just that some of this change is unexpected (it shouldn’t be) and is a shock when it happens.

Eddie is supposed to be the best guitarist in all of history. I don’t know about that. I would think that Rory Gallagher and Robin Trower would give him some serious competition for that role. But all that is like comparing XO with VSOP. Both are great beverages that you drink during good times. All is good, and everyone is equally great.

Now the thing that I really like about Eddie Van Halen is his tinkering with the mechanics of the guitar and the embrace of new techniques and styles. He used these new changes to change what the guitar is and how it is used. The world has been a better place ever since.

As this fine song illustrates.

Why Can’t This Be Love – Eddie Van Halen

Well, one of the things that I love about Eddie, aside from his fantastic music is his love of hacking mechanical things. It’s one of my pleasures, and I’m not referred to as a “mad scientist” for nothing. Here’s a great article on this subject.

Check it out!

The following is a complete 2020 reprint from a Popular Mechanics 2015 article in Popular Science titled “How the Late Rock God Eddie Van Halen Hacked His Guitar”. It is reprinted as found, and all credit to the author; Eddie Van Halen.

How the Late Rock God Eddie Van Halen Hacked His Guitar

The legend didn’t just transform the guitar forever—he even patented his game-changing innovations. Here’s how he redefined rock and roll, in his own words. By Eddie Van Halen Oct 6, 2020

Eddie Van Halen and his guitar.
Eddie Van Halen.

Eddie Van Halen, the legendary guitarist and leader of the pioneering metal band Van Halen, passed away on October 6, 2020 at age 65, after battling cancer. Widely considered to be the greatest guitarist of his generation—and maybe of all time—it isn’t a stretch to say the rock god influenced every modern player who came after him. Van Halen’s wildly inventive innovations, including tapping, or the act of playing the guitar using both left and right hands on the neck, redefined what musicians could do with the instrument—and what rock and roll music could sound like. Van Halen even patented some of his game-changing techniques.

Van Halen wrote this piece for Popular Mechanics in 2015, discussing his patents, rebuilding his guitars and amps, and searching for his signature sound. To honor him, Pop Mech is reprinting the article in its entirety. May he rest in peace.


I’ve always been a tinkerer. It comes from my dad. Growing up, we lived in a house in Pasadena that had no driveway. You used an alley that ran through the middle of the block, behind all the houses, to get to your backyard or the garage. Well, the neighbor behind us had a U-Haul trailer up on car jacks and loaded with cinder block.

One night my dad came home from a gig at three in the morning. He had a little heat going, he’d had a few drinks, so he says, “This thing is blocking me from getting in again.” So he got out of the car and tried to move it. As soon as he lifted the trailer, the jack fell over, and it chopped his finger off.

This was a problem. Besides the obvious reasons, he played clarinet and saxophone. On a sax, you don’t need to seal the hole with your finger. A valve closes over it. But with a clarinet, you have to seal the hole, so he took a saxophone valve cover and adapted it to work on his clarinet.

Another funny thing was later in his life, when he started losing his teeth. You need your bottom teeth to play a reed instrument. Instead of going to the dentist, he made himself a perfectly shaped prosthesis out of white Teflon that filled the gap where his teeth were missing. He slipped that in when he had to play. Watching him do that kind of stuff instilled a curiosity in me. If something doesn’t do what you want it to, there’s always a way to fix it.

Stock Guitars

My playing style really grew from the fact that I couldn’t afford a distortion pedal. I had to try to squeeze those sounds out of my guitar. The first real work I did was in my bedroom. I added pickups, because I didn’t like the sound of the originals.

I couldn’t afford a router—I didn’t even know what a router was—so I started hammering away with a screwdriver. That didn’t work at all. Chunks of wood flew off and there was sawdust flying all over the place. But I was on a mission. I knew what I wanted and I just kept at it until I finally got there.

I couldn't afford a distortion pedal. I had to try to squeeze those sounds out of my guitar.

Most guitar necks are too round on the back, so I took sandpaper and reshaped the neck to be very flat. I actually refretted a few guitars early on because I wanted to shave the fingerboard down and make the neck even flatter. The flatter it was, the farther I could bend a string without fretting out, or choking the sound when the string hits a fret higher on the neck.

The other issue, with Fenders, at least, was the clear lacquer they’d put on the neck. When you sweat, your fingers either slide all over the place or get sticky. I couldn’t stand that, so when I built my first guitar, I used natural wood. My own sweat and oil would soak in to make it smooth. It took a lot of playing to get it that way but, eventually, it just felt so much better than any synthetic product you could put on there. This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/z_lwocmL9dQ?v=z_lwocmL9dQ&start=0&enablejsapi=1&origin=https://www.popularmechanics.com

The Whammy Bar

Vibrato bars (also called whammy bars or tremolos) just didn’t stay in tune. The problem was the nut—the string guides at the end of the guitar neck. On the first album I used a standard, nonlocking Fender tremolo. The string is angled down from the nut to the tuning pegs, creating tension that, after the string slides back and forth when you use the whammy bar, keeps the string from returning to its original slot. I made my own nut with really smooth indentations—big and round like the bottom of a boat. I put a drop of 3-In-One oil in there, too, so the string would be extra slippery. Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

On top of that, instead of winding the string down on the tuning peg, creating an angle and causing that tension, I would wind it up so that, from the nut all the way back to the bridge, the string was level. Otherwise there could be hangups in the nut that would make the guitar go out of tune when you went crazy on the whammy bar.

The only problem this caused was when you hit an open string, where your fingers aren’t holding it down. Without that tension, the string would pop out of the nut slot, so I’d have to remember to put my finger on the far side of the nut to hold things together.

Eddie Van Halen working in his garage.

Amps

If it was movable, or turnable, or anything that resembled something that could go up or down, I would mess with it to make the amp run hotter. I opened the amp up and saw this thing. I found out later it was a bias control, which controls the power to the output tubes. I’m poking around, and all of a sudden I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson. My whole body flexed stiff, and it must have thrown me five feet. I’d touched a capacitor. I didn’t know they held voltage.

The Marshall amp I brought home from the store where I worked was only good if you turned it all the way up. Any lower and you’d lose the distortion. I needed that, but it was impossible to play anywhere with the volume that loud, so I tried everything, from leaving the thick plastic cover on it to facing it backwards to putting it face down. I’d blow a fuse twice an hour.

I touch this huge blue thing and my God, it was like being punched in the chest by Mike Tyson.

Luckily, I stumbled onto the Variac transformer soon after. I’d bought another Marshall amp, and I had no idea that it was actually a European model. I plugged it in, and I’m waiting for it to warm up and thinking, I got ripped off here, there’s no sound coming out! Pissed off, I came back an hour later to give it another shot.

I’d left the amp on the whole time. I didn’t know it was set on 220, so when I turn my guitar on it sounds like a full-blown Marshall, all the way up, except really, really quiet. That was when I realized there was something going on with the voltage. There were these cheesy light dimmers in the house, and I hooked it up to one of those.

Of course I wired it backwards and shorted out the whole house, so I went down to a place in Pasadena and asked if there was some kind of industrial-size variable transformer that would let me adjust voltage, and they introduced me to the Variac. It’s just a huge light dimmer. I plugged it into the amp and controlled the voltage from that. That became my volume knob. I would set the voltage depending on the size of the room we were playing, getting all that feedback at any volume.

Pickups

My first real guitar was a Les Paul Goldtop. I was a total Eric Clapton freak, and I saw old pictures of him playing a Les Paul. Except his had humbucking pickups, and mine had the soapbar, P-90 single coils. The first thing I did with that guitar was chisel it out in the back and put a humbucker in. When we were playing gigs, people kept saying, “How is he getting that sound out of single—coil soapbar pickups?” Since my hand was covering the humbucker, they never realized that I’d put it in.

When my guitar was black and white, I cut out my own pickguard so it would cover the holes from the pickup I’d removed. But when I painted red on top of the black and white, which is how it is now, it didn’t look cool with that black pickguard. It covered most of the paint job. I decided just to take the switch and cram it in the middle and put a nonworking pickup in the front because I didn’t use it. I wasn’t trying to trick anyone. Bottom line is, I didn’t know how to hook it back up. Advertisement – Continue Reading Below

The last real step for me was adding paraffin wax to my pickup. Pickups can have this really high-end squeal, like the annoying screech of feedback you sometimes hear when someone speaks into a microphone. I thought maybe what was causing that with a guitar was the coil windings vibrating. So what I did—and I have no idea where this idea came from—was buy a hot plate and bricks of paraffin, and borrow a Yuban coffee can from my mom to put the wax in.

Of course I ruined a lot of pickups, because the plastic frames would melt before I had a chance to yank the pickup out. But finally, when I had a chance to really keep an eye on it, as soon as I saw the pickup start to heat up and shrivel a little bit I’d yank it out.

Man, the first time I put that in—between the Variac, the beast that Marshall was, and now the pickup not having unwanted feedback—the combination was just ideal. That was heaven to me. When all those things came together, it was like, okay, I’m going crazy with the whammy bar, I got my Marshall with the Variac, there’s no stopping me.

🎸 The Patents of Eddie Van Halen

U.S. Patent #388117. Guitar peghead: Placing the tuning pegs on the opposite sides of the headstocks helps the strings hold tension. It also obviates the need for string trees, guides that clamp down on your strings and hinder string replacement.

U.S. ­Patent #4656917 ­Musical instrument support: A bracket that swings down from the back of the guitar, supporting it at a 90-degree angle from your body and letting you play the instrument like a lap guitar.

Eddie Van Halen Patent.

How to Play Like Eddie

(Or at least look a little more like him when you do play.)

Van Halen started manufacturing his own equipment in 2007 under the brand EVH Gear. His newest offering, the Wolfgang WG Standard, launched in the spring. Named for Van Halen’s son, the entry-level guitar is made from extremely lightweight and porous basswood, providing the perfect resonance for musicians who are heavy on the treble and fade. The neck is maple, with a deliberately minimal satin finish.

More Good Stuff

From Eddie Van Halen. Enjoy.

Panama (Live) – Eddie Van Halen & David Lee Roth (on vocals)

Conclusion

I first saw in in 1982, in a Miami concert starring Journey, Sammi Hagar (the Red Rocker), Aerosmith and David Lee Roth / Eddie Halen. At that time in my life, I had just left the Navy and was chilling out in Fort Pierce, Florida with a girl I was living with at the time. And the news of the concert came out and we bought tickets.

It was a glorious time.

Met my first Cuban girls at that concert. It lasted all day, and they turned the hoses on us to keep us all cool from the hot Southern Florida sun. He rocked. It was an amazing time.

Memories.

You know, you get old and the people that you can share your memories with get fewer and fewer. Pretty soon, I will be another old dinosaur. Already people are unaware of such things as…

  • Rex fast food restaurants.
  • They stand incredulous when I say that phones used to be on the wall connected with a wire.
  • That cameras took pictures with a limit of only 12 to 24 pictures possible.
  • Water used to be free.
  • A week’s worth of gasoline was under $5.

Ai!

This is my tribute to a great man, a fantastic guitarist, and a fellow tinkerer and inventor. I do believe that he lived his life well. And that’s it, isn’t it? To live life well, good, make a difference int he world around you and move on to even bigger and better things.

I cannot think of anything better to say than…

Mr. Eddie van Halen, I salute you, you God damn glorious bastard!

I salute you.

AC/DC – For those about to rock, we salute you (Live)

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The benefits of being able to fight

After 75 years of non-stop narrative that “fighting is the last resort of fools”, and that a “kinder and gentler nation” is at hand, what has America turned into? Instead of being a male-driven patriarchal society, what has the feminization movement brought America to? Is it actually a well-behaved, respectful and fair place?

No.

No it isn’t.

It’s a non-stop sequences of cat-fights, and verbal assaults with regulations on just about every action that you could think of.

It’s true. Have you ever wondered about Social Media? Doesn’t it more resemble two teenage girls fighting in eighth grade than two grown adults having a conversation?

Well. Guess what? It’s a Western phenomenon. It is something that has occurred in nations that have adopted a progressive social structure, the r/K society has developed and all discourse has degenerated to that level. While other nations, more traditional in nature, really doesn’t have this problem.

Guess what else this “improvement” on society has created?

The Karen.

My mom is a Karen whose name is actually Karen. Simply put, I haven’t seen her in over a year because I couldn’t take it anymore. Living with her was just an exhausting nightmare.

Karen’s world revolves around Karen. Nobody else’s issues matter. If you tell her that you had a bad day, she’ll give you 20 reasons why her day was worse. You worked 60 hours this week? Well, when she was your age, she would work 80. You’re in the hospital after having major surgery? She has a pinched nerve in her arm, which is somehow worse. Your boyfriend cheated on you? She couldn’t even begin to tell you about all the heartbreak she’s experienced in her life.

She complains left and right about anything and everything. If you’re taking a week break after just getting back from college, she’ll ask why you haven’t gotten a job yet and claim you’re lazy. If you’re out to eat at a restaurant the food is always too cold or too burnt or too salty. You can only ever go to the places SHE wants to go to, because everything else is crap. My entire graduation dinner she complained about how cold the food was.

She THRIVES in getting attention and constantly seeks it, but she has very few ACTUAL friends. Facebook is her lifeblood and she’s always looking to start something on there. She’s the queen of sharing uninformed, misguided, conservative propaganda, which always starts fights in her comments. Also, if a tragedy happens in the family (like the passing of my teenage cousin), she’ll make a big scene on Facebook and expect condolences from anyone and everyone, and makes note of the people who don’t give her what she wants.

Don’t even get me started on the blatant racism. I’ve heard everything from, “watch out for black people on the subway. They’ll try to take your purse” to “It should be illegal for those Muslims to cover their faces. You should be able to see someone’s face.” One of my best friends is black and she once told me, “He’s one of the good ones. They should all be like him.”

-12 People Reveal What’s It Like To Be Related To A ‘Karen’

So, in nations that have not adopted the progressive societal structure, they are able to have more or less pretty inoffensive comment sections on social media. The people tend to be more respectful and much more polite.

Like…

  • Poland.
  • Brazil.
  • Russia.
  • China.
  • Japan.

Ah. America. Home of the pussy-ants pansies beta clucks.

I argue that traditional management of society from the personal level through to the government level is a very important element of the success of that nation. When you try to “improve” it by implementing change, you need to set forth a sequence of trials, and monitor their results carefully. You just don’t set up some kind of movement and force the rest of the world to conform to your madness.

America changed.

And today everything that you see around you is a consequence of that change.

And I, for one, do not like it.

I like family units where everyone has a role. I like polite discussion and discourse. I like to be able to buy something and not pay hidden fees, taxes, or read down a long list of warnings and advisement. I like a world where I can shake someones hand, look him in the eye, and make a lasting contract. I like a world where mothers are respected, and grandparents live in your house with you. I like a world where you are respected as a person.

Sigh.

Ah. There is nothing wrong with human nature, and if you all want to be passive, beta clucks. Fine. But you all will be eaten alive by very vicious, hungry wolves.

This is a great article worth a read. It’s about one of the aspects of what a man is. He’s a person who is not afraid to kick up a little bit of dust from time to time.

The following is a complete reprint of “14 Indisputable Benefits of Learning How to Fight“. It was written on 7 October 2020. Edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the author.

14 Indisputable Benefits of Learning How to Fight

Scene from the television show the Sopranos.
Just some guys talking. Right? But you know, don’t you, you know not to cross them or mess with them. Why? Is is because they are going to say things that will hurt your feelings? Is that why you don’t want to mess with them.

Everybody knows the benefits of lifting weights but it isn’t the only game in town that can build your body and mind. Learning how to fight also has a place as one of the key things all men (and wo

men) should do to get the most out of their life experience. Sound like an exaggeration? It’s really not, especially when you consider learning how to fight has been a rite of passage since the beginning of time in many dominant cultures. It is only in recent times that the practice of channeled aggression has been given a bad rap.

The practice of fighting, or learning a martial art, is especially valuable for men, for whom the acting out of aggression, the desire to dominate, the ability to look after ones’ family or tribe, as well as having the camaraderie of like-minded males, is a huge factor in wellbeing and something that modern society constantly deprives them of.

The ability to challenge others, to endure pain, and the knowledge that you can look after yourself physically, are very underrated factors that contribute to high levels of functioning in other areas of life. Learning how to fight doesn’t mean you have to go around bashing heads in but, knowing you could if you had to, can make all the difference between a timid boy and a dominant man.

If you are still not sure how learning how to fight can benefit you, the 12 reasons below should clear up any confusion.

1) Learning how to fight builds unbreakable confidence

Have you ever seen a fighter who looks timid and scared of the world?

Didn’t think so.

The knowledge of knowing you can take anyone on and, in all probability, defeat them in a physical contest can do wonders for self-confidence. You may think this is crude or uncivilized. Nevertheless, we are fighting animals that have survived because of our ability to think and defeat enemies.

Most of the giant ancient civilizations that we know were masters of violence and war, and this is still true today.

Being able to fight gives us the assurance we can take care of ourselves and the people who are dear to us. It also ensures that our confidence is not based on anything external, like possessions or material goods.

Our confidence, therefore, cannot be taken away and is literally unbreakable.

2) Learning how to fight teaches persistence

If you hadn’t already guessed, learning how to fight is tough.

Training to get into fighting shape is brutal.

The actual fighting is dangerous and extremely violent.

Even sparring is rough if you underestimate what you are up against. All of this combines over time to build your mental and physical toughness.

As you go forward and resist the urge to quit, you learn persistence and why it is so valued as the secret of success. It takes persistence to get up when you keep getting your ass kicked. It takes persistence to throw another kick when it feels as though your leg is about to drop off.

Learning to take action anyway will deeply affect your success in other areas of life.

3) Learning how to fight teaches us how to control our emotions

When we are first learning how to fight, things are not going to be rosy.

Our bodies (and, quite possibly, our faces) are going to get beaten up.

We are going to be tired beyond our wildest dreams.

One thing that fighting does during this process is teach us how to control our emotions.

We will no doubt come up against a lot of fear, anger and frustration as we master techniques and get knocked down by more experienced challengers. We may encounter some negative emotions that we have stuffed down since childhood that fighting is finally allowing us to let go of. Though this process is bumpy at best, it is cathartic. Over time, we will learn to do what we have to do to achieve our goals, regardless of how we are feeling.

This mastery of thoughts and emotions is priceless, for lasting confidence and well being.

4) Learning how to fight is a great way to relieve stress

As we mentioned above, the process of learning how to fight can be physically exhausting. Keeping your mental edge during a fight so you don’t get knocked the hell out is exhausting.

There is natural satisfaction that comes from good, honest physical work – however violent – and when we are done for the day we will feel good.

After a few hours you will be soaked in sweat, with muscles shaking, and all you will want to do is eat something and go to sleep. Over time, this routine of hard work and pushing through the pain will eliminate a huge amount of stress from your life.

5) Learning how to fight takes you a long way from your comfort zone

There is nothing more uncomfortable than being thrown into our situation you are not familiar with.

Learning how to fight is no exception in this case.

It is unlikely, upon first entering the gym you wish to train in, you will be met by big smiles and fireworks. Instead, you are going to have to earn the respect of the more experienced people in there.

You will have to work hard and show you are not another person who is going to come for two weeks and then not show up again.

Voluntarily sailing away from you comfort zone like this is courageous act and, in overcoming what you were afraid of in the first place (new people, no experience etc.), you will be rewarded with a level of self-esteem that can never be taken away from you.

Experience stepping out of your comfort zone more and more often and it will rapidly start to expand.

6) Learning how to fight will get you in the best shape of your life

It doesn’t matter how much weight lifting you do or how many miles you run during the week – training to fight is another ballgame entirely.

For one, you will need to work for many hours before you are competent at certain skills, and even then you will be nowhere near mastering all of the nuances that come with real fighting.

The training fighters do to be able to withstand punishment and dish it back out is brutal and your conditioning is going to level up as a result. Sparring or grappling for 3-5 minute rounds is no joke, even for an elite athlete. One huge bonus of all this punishment? You will actually look as tough as you are for once, rather than looking hard but running scared like a lot of bodybuilders.

With the right set of rules governing your training and nutrition, you should be able to stay in shape all year with no extra effort needed.

7) Learning how to fight teaches you discipline

The skill and sport of fighting shares this with all other types of physical competition.

Its takes prolonged discipline to see the fruits of your labor.

This means getting up early to fit in a training session, eating right, living right, foregoing too much alcohol and getting a good night’s sleep.

Having the mental discipline to stick to this routine, despite all of the obvious temptations of instant gratification around you, will set you apart from others as time goes by.

Success is not an overnight thing but, with continuous discipline, it will come to you just as sure as the hands on the clock will continue going around.

8) Learning how to fight will force you to get out of your own head

Too many of us spend days feeling self-conscious and disempowered because we spend too long in our own heads.

From birth and childhood, we have been implanted with a lot of negative beliefs that don’t serve us, all of which are going around in a continual loop in our subconscious minds.

To sit and listen to them for too long is tantamount to throwing all of our hard-earned confidence and self-esteem out of the window.

Aside from consciously practicing positivity, we also need to spend time out of our heads, doing something physical. Hitting the gym can be good. Having sex is good. Learning how to fight is a great way to do this. We have no choice but to be totally present in our bodies and to reject intruding thoughts, or else we might catch a sharp right to the jaw.

Forcing ourselves to be in the moment – rather than withdrawing mentally and emotionally – is great practice for other pressure situations that may occur in our lives, including business meetings or family emergencies.

9) Learning how to fight allows you to express yourself physically

Despite what modern thinking will tell you, men are inherently physical and prone to violence.

According to Rodney King, in his essay How Martial Arts Can Supercharge Your Man Spirit, 90% of violent acts that happen today will be committed by men.

The great majority of the victims of this violence will be men. The physical expression of aggression and the thrill of war have long been swept under the rug as the dark side of the human psyche.

In today’s world, our violence is played out in movies, in computer games, in the board room, or in politics.

As entertaining as this, it leaves a lot of men feeling repressed and emasculated.

Learning how to fight remedies this need for challenge and violence completely. Through training and sparring you can express yourself physically in a relative safe, socially-condoned environment, which will make you finally feel like the dominant person that you are.

Don’t believe it?

Go and find out for yourself and report back.

10) Learning how to fight gives you the opportunity to compete for something

Just as men inherently crave confrontation and violence, they also crave competition for something.

In this day and age, most major competition is relegated to professional sports or business.

When you learn how to fight, and decide to fight against others in competition, you unleash that latent part of you. You will learn the reward of real competition and putting it all out there, willing and finding a way to win.

Make no mistake – we all want to win.

This is not ‘bad’ or to be punished.

It is just natural.

Fighting in proper environment can give us the buzz of competition without any unfavorable repercussions.

11) Learning how to fight forces us to take action and master ourselves

We aren’t all born with the action habit.

Some of us are never taught that no-hesitation killer instinct that sets the super-achievers apart from the crowds.

Many of us procrastinate and put things off, mostly because we fear being rejected by those who are close to us.

When we learn how to fight, we have to tackle this inability to take action head on. We have to learn to act, regardless of how we feel, otherwise we are going to get our lights turned out.

This ability to do things when we don’t feel like it is one of the secrets of really productive people that always seem to be achieving something.

Master yourself and cultivate the habit of taking action and you will see huge changes in the direction of your life. All of a sudden, you will be in control.

12) Learning how to fight puts us into contact with more dominant, like-minded individuals

There is a famous quote that states we are a combination of the 5 people we hang out with the most.

Whether this is true or not, the people we spend a lot of time have a huge influence on our thoughts and behavior. Prolonged interaction will make certain traits ‘rub off on you’, whether you are aware of it at the time or not.

Hanging out with others who are learning how to fight then, in an MMA gym or dojo or whatever, ensures you are interacting with like-minded individuals who are aware of who they are inside. Think about the people who fight – dominant, powerful, alpha individuals who set goals and get what they want.

Having that camaraderie, as well as that mindset rub off on you, is never going to hurt anything.

13) Learning how to fight makes you far more attractive

As much as women (and men) protest that they don’t like violence and hate people who fight, its mostly all lies fed by society.

The fact is, people (especially women) are attracted to those who can hold their own physically and win a fight.

This shows in many ways that they are a dominant individual who is more than capable of looking after a family – a very attractive trait.

Most fighters are also very at ease in their own skin and super-confident in themselves, which comes through in their body language and the way they interact with people. This is a far-cry from some weightlifters who compensate for their inner anxieties by building large muscles.

The fact is, women don’t care all that much about big muscles.

They want a strong, confident man who can take care of things and keep them safe.

Want to be more attractive?

Learn how to fight.

14) Learning how to fight supplies us with a powerful, positive philosophy of life that we can carry with us always

Acquiring the will, skill and attitude of the warrior is not all about physical ability.

Most fighting schools, and in particular martial arts, are brilliant for instilling a philosophy of respect, discipline and hard work upon their students.

These ancient philosophies help us keep things in perspective, keep our egos from running wild, and ensure we treat our newfound powers with great respect and responsibility.

This code of honor is not just applicable on the training mats, in the ring or in the octagon – it can be applied to all areas of life and absolutely should be.

Internalizing this philosophy gives us confidence and purpose – a mission that was perhaps not there before. This is the one thing that all mentally strong people have in common – without exception – and will serve you well for the rest of your life.

“Prize fighting is short. You get in, get rich and get out. But martial arts are for life. It’s for life.” 

– Conor McGregor

Conclusion

It’s an outstanding article and very true.

Men need to be able to fight. We need that feeling of control and power. We need to feel that we are in control of our life. And when we get that feeling, it reflects upon us, and as a result…

…big changes in our life takes place.

Be who you are. Fuck the rest of the world.
Tony Soprano Enjoying life.

We start to eat better, we find the house tidy at the end of the day, and people tend to respect us more. No. It’s not because we threaten everyone with a punched nose. It’s because we have a self-confidence that we carry with us everywhere.

Men are not women.

Yet we are the same.

I am immensely attracted to a self-confident woman. It’s something that I just cannot control myself about. It’s like Sharon Stone in the movie Casino. Self Confidence is addictive.

For men…

…we can get this through learning how to fight and the discipline that comes with it.

And maybe, just maybe, those “Karens” in our lives would be a tad more respectful to the rest of us.

My sister AND sister in law are both Karen’s. I will show up to restaurants 15 min early to warn them. I tell them if it’s not done to their liking they WILL hear about it and they will make your shift hell. I’m just there as a warning.

I used to work in restaurants and those people made life hell. I do what I can to help. Generally my drinks are better and we get a free appetizer as soon as those two tornados walk in all hell breaks loose. Not enough ice, table is too cold, it’s too loud, etc. I also tip really big because I DON’T want to be associated with the two tornados.

I live overseas so I only see them 2 weeks out of the year. So it’s manageable. I only put up with their attitude because they could take my nieces and nephews away from me. I pick my battles. I need my nieces and nephews to know I’m always here for them and they can talk to me about anything. I can’t risk our relationship being tampered with, especially since I only see them 2 weeks a year.

Remember, being able to fight is not the same thing as fighting. It is a simple thing really.

It makes for a polite society.

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Let’s talk about one of the little pleasures of life; a delicious pie.

Yeah, I get it. Donald Trump is running against Biden. It’s neck to neck,and coronavirus is ravishing America, and soon global warming (or is it cooling) is going to destroy the world as we know it. We must do something! Everyone screeches! And of course we have the underlying themes of “China is evil, bat eating, monsters”, and America must get involved in the Middle East, with Turkey and fight Iran, or some other such nonsense. And of course, a few billions of dollars in a train line that will connect Alaska with California is being considered as long as the right “palms are being greased”. Yawn.

Well, sit back.

“Pop a top” off your favorite ice cold beverage (if it’s wine it can be room temperature), and put on some easy tunes in the background.

We are going to discuss some really nice (and unappreciated) subjects right now. We are gonna talk about pies.

Pies.

Yup.

Pies.

Delicious, and tasty pies. You know, those things that are so delicious that most Americans now only get to sample a mere few times a month. Pies.

Wondrous.

Delicious.

Pies.

Almost every culture around the world has their own variation of a pie, whether it’s handheld or baked in a pan. Historically, pies have been favored not only for their delicious flavors but their ability to preserve their fillings for extended periods of time. This was especially useful not only during the winter but for long sea voyages as well.

In some places, pie underwent various transformations in public opinion, running the gamut from being praised to being considered deadly. But ultimately, pie has come out on top and is often brought out as a favorite treat during holidays.

The very first pies were primarily filled with meat, more often than not a type of bird. But before long, pies had conquered every flavor from savory to sweet. They now come in every imaginable shape and size and have transformed in every culture that they’ve come into contact with, creating a worldwide range of pies that is changing and coming up with new combinations of flavors every day. This is the long history of pie explained.

Memories…

An Australian or New Zealand meat pie is a hand-sized meat pie containing diced or minced meat and gravy, sometimes with onion, mushrooms, or cheese and often consumed as a takeaway food snack. The meat pie is considered iconic in Australia and New Zealand. It was described by former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr in 2003 as Australia's "national dish". New Zealanders regard the meat pie as a part of New Zealand cuisine, and it forms part of the New Zealand national identity.

-Wikipedia

The one thing that I will forever remember is the delicious “meat pie” that I used to get in Australia. There was this woman who would drive over an sell these “meat pies” to any one in the office. These were so delicious and she carried three different types and kinds that she manufactured at home in her kitchen.

Delicious home made Australian meat pie. One of the best things about Australia. You haven't lived until you had a fresh home-made Australian meat pie.
Delicious home made Australian meat pie. One of the best things about Australia. You haven’t lived until you had a fresh home-made Australian meat pie.

She was my “meat pie lady”. And Lordy, I was her meat pie man.

Australian meat pie.

If you have never tried one, then you are truly missing out of one of the great pleasures in life. How Australians can keep such a wondrous thing so secret is beyond me. It has to be one of my most favorite things about Australia, and believe you me, I have many, many things that I love about Australia.

Traditionally, Aussie Meat Pies are made with beef sirloin, minced quite small along with other vegetables such as onions, carrots and mushrooms. (Although some Aussie Meat Pie are just onions and beef.) For our recipe, we went with beef loin choice sirloin tips – keeping the beef in larger chunks for cooking.

-Aussie Meat Pies - A Family Feast

So why is this important?

Well, have you read the “news” lately? It’s all full of doom and gloom. The world is apparently falling apart at the seams, and “something must be done!”. But not to worry, there is a hero on the sidelines that will set everything right. Everyone must just obey him and the world will be good again.

Sure. What ever you say.

Does all this “news” make your life better in some way? Do you feel like you are happier, more energized, and in complete control of our world and the world around you?

Well, I will have to keep the last article in mind the next time that I have a heart attack. I’ll get the cute EMS chick and tell her to have sex with me right then on the spot. You know! For humanity!

Today, where I live, it’s raining.

The rain is falling down in a light drizzle.

The neighborhood kitty-cats are are chillin’ out and look at each other between the hedges, the shrubs and the bushes. maybe something along the lines of this…

Cats
Cats being cats.

And you know what?

Do you think that they care anything at all about all this “news” going on? Do you think that they give a damn, or care a “rat’s ass” about anything going on in Washington DC? Do you think they care what is going on with the NFL, or Donald Trump? Nope.

They do not.

Nor does the rest of the world either.

And the rain still gently falls…

It’s days and times like this that are perfect to go into a nice local diner and get yourself a nice cup of coffee. No. I am not talking about the Starbucks franchise where you pay just under $10 for a coffee. I am talking about sitting at a counter, getting a nice cup of ‘Joe and a slice of pie (with a scoop of ice cream) for half that amount.

Coffee gif.
Nothing goes better with coffee than a nice freshly baked pie.

So what defines a pie?

A pie is considered to be any sort of pastry shell that has a filling, either meat or sweet, and is covered with a top crust.

Simple, eh?

The top crust is an essential component in traditional pies, for according to Everything Pies, without the top crust, the pastry simply becomes a tart. (A tart is a pie without a top? Who would of known?)

A delicious American meat pie. It's not just Australians that get to enjoy this wonderful treat, don't you know.
A delicious American meat pie. It’s not just Australians that get to enjoy this wonderful treat, don’t you know.

While a tart may be considered a subset of a pie, most American pies would be considered tarts in England. This discrepancy emerged when pies transformed in their travels to America.

The word "pie" started being used in Medieval Latin around 1300. It's likely related to "pia," meaning "pastry," and is also believed to be connected with the word "pica," which refers to magpies. This connection is thought to be because of the birds' habit of collecting random objects, often like the ingredients that went into pies.

-Online Etymology Dictionary

While purists will maintain strict definitions of what counts as a pie or not, almost every culture has a version of a pie, especially ones that are handheld and portable.

Pies around the world

Rightly so, pies have proliferated around the world. While the form may vary across cultures, there seems to be a consistent urge across the globe to fill pastry shells with some sort of savory or sweet filling.

American delicious Blueberry pie.
American Blueberry pie.

Hand pies are especially prolific, because who wouldn’t want a pie that’s portable?

While most hand pies have a semilunar shape, they can be found in all shapes and sizes around the world. Most hand pies are smaller versions of traditional meat pies, but no two are entirely alike. 

Empanadas and Jamaican patties are arguably the most popular hand pies in the world, but spanakopitas and samosas come in at a close second.

-The Takeout

Bastilla, also known as pastilla, is an example of a Moroccan meat pie that brings together the two ends of the pie spectrum, sweet and savory, into a rich blend of poultry, cinnamon, almonds, and sugar.

Even pizza masquerades as a pie. But no matter where one travels, pies have surely gotten there first.

Hieroglyphic pie recipes

The earliest known dish resembling a pie comes from the Neolithic period in ancient Egypt, as far back as between roughly 9500 BCE and 2000 BCE.

I can well imagine some Ancient Egyptians chillin’ out under the trees, and smunching on a fine pie. (In those days, Egypt was not a desert. It was forested with woodlands, wet lands, and a great diversity of wildlife. All under a bright blue sky.)

According to the BBC, one example of an ancient Egyptian pie was made out of barley, oats, rye, or wheat and filled with honey. The crust is thought to have been rather dense, and since the crusts of some of the early pies weren’t meant to be eaten, it’s possible that this crust was meant to hold the filling rather than be eaten itself, similar to a bread bowl.

Well…

That’s what they think, eh?

According to What’s Cooking America, drawings of pies that used fruits and honey can also be found on the walls of the tomb of Ramses II, who ruled from 1304 to 1237 BCE. And who would of known that Ramses the Great was a pie lover?

I know it was a surprise to me.

How about for youse guys?

Phyllo Meat Pies (Egyptian Goulash).
Phyllo Meat Pies (Egyptian Goulash)

Ancient Egyptians also made classic meat pies as well, with a chicken pie recipe being found carved in hieroglyphs on a tablet. The first recorded use of yeast occurred around roughly 2600 BCE, so it’s likely that they were making bread-filled pastries around the same time.

Chicken and dumplings couldn’t have been far behind…

Anyways, ancient Egyptian pie evolved into modern-day feteer meshaltet, which translates to “cushion-like pie.”

Feteer meshaltet is thought to have appeared in a semilunar form at one point as well, and it’s believed that the semilunar feteer meshaltet traveled to France, where it transformed into the croissant. Probably brought over by some of those French Soldiers that were busily conquering Egypt for the Great French Empire.

You know, back then France had to conduct these “police actions” in the middle East, or else they might suffer the fate of… (well, no one really knows what they would suffer from…)… but they had to do it… for the children (don’t you know) and for other reasons that I just cannot say because of “national security”.

You know the drill.

Feteer meshaltet.
Feteer meshaltet

Pies for all of history

From ancient Egypt, pies made their way into ancient Greece by the fifth century BCE.

According to Visit Greece, pies were part of the everyday diet of ancient Greeks. They loved their pies. It was almost a national obsession. Greeks and pies were inseparable. You know, like olive oil and wine.

And every city and village, whether on the mainland or on an island, has their own version of a pie, with different fillings, sizes, and shapes.

According to Cycladia, the Northwestern region of Epirus is the most famous region for Greek pies, likely due to its high population of sheep, which produce a wide variety of cheese, and its plethora of herbs and vegetation. Spanakopita is likely the most famous Greek pie, known for its savory spinach and cheese layers.

Spanakopita a traditional Greek pie.
Spanakopita a traditional Greek pie.

The Greek poet Philoxenus writes in his poem “The Banquet” of the hosts of a party serving a pastry made with honey and milk that was baked like a pie. Pies are even mentioned in the plays of Aristophanes, with multiple descriptions of small pastries filled with fruit.

Party on! Dionysus dudes and dudettes!

Wine, and pies…

What could be finer?

Well, the Romans had some ideas. And they believed that debauchery is best served with delicious pies, members of the opposite sex, and lots and lots of wine. And maybe some surprises…

And so, the Romans took the concept from the Greeks and made their pastry shells specifically for encasing and preserving the taste of the filling, rather than to be eaten. It was this version of the pie that made its way through Europe and to Britain.

History and Pies

I know, I know. I get it.

Why would anyone give a care or concern about early pie design? Who care what the Egyptians, the Greeks or the Romans ate? Why does it matter now? After all, this is the “most important time in history” don’t you know. We have been told this over and over and over. How America is so wonderful, and if it wasn’t for the great works of America, China and Europe would be nothing.

Well…

Maybe. Maybe not.

The rest of the world aren’t some kind of pale shadow that sit in the dark recesses of the curtains and await for the latest news out of Washington DC. The rest of the world just doesn’t care. It just doesn’t care.

And you shouldn’t either.

So I am gonna illustrate why you should care more about what the ancient Greeks ate and drank than what the “news” out of Washington DC says…

Ohhh. So much strife. So much bad news. So much SHIT being piled up upon you all in big smouldering piles.

Is the news actually real?

The news media is full of bull shit.
See all these “reporters” who are monitoring and reporting on the horrible abuse of the poor defenseless freedom-loving pro-democracy protestors. You can see just how ugly and terrible the HK police is, now can’t you?

I argue that all “news” is fake and intentional manipulation.

I also argue that there is no longer any “alternative” sources for news and opinion. They are all controlled by the government. Yes, that mans not only the “mainstream press”, but also the Alt-Right and the Alt-Left press. To see just how insane this all is, you need to step out of your environment and look in. You know, like an outsider would.

Let’s try this exercise, shall we.

Let’s step out side and look in.

Let’s look at what the Indian Press is reporting on. As I have, for the longest time been preaching that the American CIA under Mike Pompeo controls the Indian press, and Indian “news”. So what is the Indian press reporting on…

Hum…

Yeah. The “war drums” are beating really loudly in India.

Bet you weren’t aware of that, were you? That’s because the news is for Indian consumption, not for American, Chinese, or Russian consumption. The Indian news is to direct the mood, and motivations of Indians for easy control by their government.

Just like it is for the American news media. It is for control of the American population. It is not the “truth”.

Makes me want to chill out and have a pie.

Delicious yam and pumpkin pie.
When the world seems out of control, it’s a sign that you all need to go ahead, sit down and have nice delicious pie.

And that is the truth.

You see…

The entire world is trying to twist you, turn you, manipulate you. It is trying to fleece you with a billion tiny hands on your wallet, and using your emotions to force you to do things and move in certain predetermined ways. The ruling oligarchy knows this, and they are not concerned. They know that it’s all bullshit.

So what happens when…

…when you are so caught up in the pains of “modern life” that you don’t know what to do? Well, the answer is simple.

You go out and get a pie.

When the world seems out of control, and everything is hard, harsh and gloomy, you can always count on a fine cup of coffee and a fresh pie.
When the world seems out of control, and everything is hard, harsh and gloomy, you can always count on a fine cup of coffee and a fresh pie.

And pies…

Well, it doesn’t need to be a pie. It can be a ice-cold butterscotch milkshake. It can be a few hours fishing. It can be a bicycle ride down the quiet residential streets of your community. It can be carving some wood. It can be a nice quiet ride in a canoe. It can be just chilling our with your dog under your tree in the back yard, with a ice cold frosty beer in your hand.

It can be anything.

And for me…

…on this rainy day, it’s pies.

Pies get medieval

In medieval Britain, pies were primarily filled with meat, and the pastry shells weren’t necessarily eaten, like in Rome. The biggest appeal of pies was their ability to conserve space and preserve food for a longer time, especially on long sea voyages. These pies also had significantly more crust than filling and were known as “pyes.”

According to Slate, the pie crust was solely functional and was intended to be a hard shell that had to be broken open to get at the delicious filling inside. The crust was made to be incredibly thick so that it was able to withstand being baked over a fire for several hours. And funnily enough, the pie crusts themselves were referred to as “cofyns,” which just means “box.” This especially emphasizes the pie’s ability to store food, since the thick crust also helped keep food fresh for longer.

Of course, the need to make an easy food that is portable remains to this day. In the more remote and mountainous areas of China, the food still has to be transported up the mountainsides and through inhospitable terrain. It is important that the food be easy to eat with one hand while the other hand holds the ladder… (Click for the movie to pop up in a different tab.)

During this time, the most common filling was crow, and it’s rumored that the feet were used as handles. Birds in general were often used as filling, and songbirds especially were considered a delicacy. But according to Pie: A Global History by Janet Clarkson, it’s not clear exactly what the recipes for medieval pie crusts were. Medieval cookbooks weren’t intended to be instruction manuals and were instead more for those who were tasked with provisioning the kitchen, rather than the cooks themselves. And since pies were so commonplace, almost every cook knew how to make the crust in their sleep.

Eating crow is a colloquial idiom, used in some English-speaking countries, that means humiliation by admitting having been proven wrong after taking a strong position.

The crow is a carrion-eater that is presumably repulsive to eat in the same way that being proven wrong might be emotionally hard to swallow . The exact origin of the idiom is unknown, but it probably began with an American story published around 1850 about a dim-witted New York farmer.

-Eating crow - Wikipedia

Breaking out of the pie shell

Medieval pies sometimes included dinner and a show. Known as animated pies, a large crust would be baked over a wooden scaffolding with a hole in the bottom, from which the cook would afterward seal in live birds and a cooked pie. This way, when the top crust was cut open, the live birds would fly out of the outer pie. This custom is still referenced today in the nursery rhyme “Sing a Song of Sixpence.” Live birds weren’t the only things that burst out of pies. According to What’s Cooking America, other small animals, such as turtles, rabbits, and frogs, were also frequently incorporated.

Never a dull moment, don’t ya know.

Sometimes, people would also pop out for entertainment. One such person was Jeffrey Hudson, who was known for his small stature, reportedly standing only 18 inches tall at age seven. According to The Vintage News, when Hudson was seven, he was presented to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria in London, bursting through the crust of a pie dressed in knight’s armor. Queen Henrietta was so amused by Hudson’s small stature that she took him on as her court dwarf.

What an honor! Wouldn’t you just love to be the royal court dwarf?

While there were some versions of sweet pies, in medieval Britain, they were distinguished from meat pies as tarts. And since sugar was expensive and rare, it wasn’t commonly used as an ingredient, so medieval sweet pies might not be considered sweet to a modern palette.

Personally, I would find them rather disgusting.

The queen always tries first

While Elizabeth I isn’t necessarily remembered for her role in the legacy of pie, she’s actually involved in the story of what’s thought to be the world’s first cherry pie. According to the BBC, the first cherry pie was reportedly baked for Elizabeth, although no one knows whether or not she enjoyed it.

When was the last time that you had a fine and delicious cherry pie? For me, it was far too long ago. Sigh.
When was the last time that you had a fine and delicious cherry pie? For me, it was far too long ago. Sigh.

During the 16th century, pies also continued the tradition of having appearances in plays. A pie plays a pivotal role in William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, becoming a literal coffin for Chiron and Demetrius after they brutalize Titus’ children. Titus not only kills Chiron and Demetrius and bakes them into a pie, but he goes on to serve that pie to their mother before murdering her as well.

Pies were also a popular snack for people in the upper classes to eat while watching the plays of Shakespeare. According to The Star, those who sat in the gallery often enjoyed meat pies in addition to crabs and dried figs. People in lower classes who watched from the yard snacked on oysters instead.

And, yes. No wonder there was a problem with over-population in the lower classes. heh heh.

Pies travel the Atlantic

As the British invaded and colonized North America, they brought pies along with them. I always envisioned that the reason that the British wore coats of red, was to cover up the pie stains that they would have from their massive intakes of delicious and wondrous pies.

With the different ingredients available across the Atlantic, American pies began to deviate from traditional British recipes.

While the popularity of pies wouldn’t explode until the 1800s, colonists often made pies in order to preserve the foods that were used for filling, which would keep during the winter months. According to Time Magazine, despite the fact that apple pie is considered to be quintessentially American, even that came over from England. And until sugar became included in the recipe, it was a far cry from the sweet treat known today.

Mark Twain, also known as Samuel Clemens, was reportedly a big fan of pies, and when he visited Europe, he apparently disparaged the food he encountered, longing instead for the many different kinds of pie to be found back home in the United States.

Mark twain on censorship.
Mark twain on censorship.

According to Slate, it was during their travel to America that the difference between tarts and pies became lost to the Americans. It was also around this time that sweet pies began to be more popular. With the establishment of sugar colonies in the Caribbean, sugar became much more common than it had previously been. And thus…

The rise of sweet pies

During their occupation and colonization of the Caribbean, the British established hundreds of sugar colonies that were kept running by the enslaved people kidnapped from Africa. On most of the islands, upwards of 80 percent of the population was enslaved. And you know why they needed to do it. It was “for the children”, and while the records are either missing or sealed, we know that it was because of “national security”.

The spread of sugar plantations led to the proliferation of sugar across Europe and North America, demonstrative in the rise of sweet pies. According to Pie: A Global History by Janet Clarkson, while fruit wasn’t entirely absent from pie recipes before the inclusion of sugar, it was rarely the primary ingredient. Most pies were made of a mixture of meats and the newly acquired sugar from the slave plantations.

America became a new world full of wondrous delights and fun and frolic.
America became a new world full of wondrous delights and fun and frolic.

By the Victorian era, mince pies, made of an assortment of dried fruits and spices, were also a common sugary treat, and soon, “mincemeat” didn’t even have to include meat. And recipe books began including meat-free versions alongside traditional meat pie recipes, allowing for the proliferation of hundreds of different types of pies. With the spread of dairy and eggs, cream pies also rose in popularity alongside fruit pies.

The criticism of pies

As pie became more popular, it also came under attack in the mid-1800s. According to the Los Angeles Times, Harper’s Magazine published an attack on pies in 1866, which hyperbolically claimed that, “Pie in countless varieties waits upon us through life. Pie kills us finally.” Claiming that the dough of pie crusts was indigestible, dietary reformers continually tried to steer people away from eating pies.

Why “there ought to be a law”…

According to The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, dietary reformers claimed to be interested in the science of nutrition, but a lot of their attacks seemed to be geared toward immigrants and low-income people. Claiming that if people changed what they ate, then the American spirit wouldn’t be weighed down by so much dough, people like Sarah Tyson Rore, food editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, made sure to frequently warn people about how pies took too much energy to digest. I am sure that she had the “best interests” of the people in mind.

Don’t you?

You all don’t want that insatiable “American spirit” to die and drown out under a gluttony of pies.

The Century Cookbook, published in 1895, decided to include the comment that, “The American pie is perhaps the most ridiculed of dishes. […] The mince pie, probably the most indigestible of all, is the one universally accepted as a treat, and seldom refused by the scoffer.”

According to Smithsonian Magazine, some even believed that eating pie was a cause of divorce, like alcoholism.

  • Eating a pie was the first step towards alcoholism.
  • Eating a pie was the first step to a divorce.
  • Eating a pie, and suddenly the women would want to smoke cigarettes.
  • Eating a pie, and before you know it, woman’s ankles will be exposed to the public!

But with the outbreak of World War I, eating pie became a patriotic activity. Pies became a symbol of that which soldiers missed while they were off fighting in foreign countries. This association with patriotism would continue.

  • Eat a pie and fight the evil German horde!
We are all under manipulation.
The easiest people to manipulate are those that believe that they are avoiding manipulation by reading “alternative media” like Alt-Right or Alt-Left publications.

The alternating popularity of pie

According to Slate, during the Great Depression, Ritz crackers began including recipes for “mock apple pie” on the backs of their boxes. Made with the times in mind, the recipe suggested soaking the crackers in vanilla, lemon, and cinnamon to be used instead of real apple filling, since apples were in short supply and too expensive to indulge in.

1936 advertisement for Ritz Crackers.
1936 advertisement for Ritz Crackers.

By the mid-20th century, however, the popularity of pies began to rise again as canned fruit and instant pudding mixes made it easier to make filling. Ready-made pie crusts also drastically simplified the pie-making process, and with the spread of home refrigeration, chilled pie recipes also became increasingly common.

But, according to The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, simultaneously, the amount of pies being made started to dip as a result of urbanization and industrialization. As more and more women joined the workforce, the act of making a pie every week was too laborious an activity, so it started to become more of an occasional undertaking for special occasions. Like Christmas and Thanksgiving.

All the same, pies continued to persevere as a symbol of America. According to Smithsonian Magazine, when Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev went to New York City in 1960, someone sent an apple pie to his Park Avenue address. The American pie was meant to represent all the layers that America had, while “the Communist pie is nothing but crust.”

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is OIP.ee-45iNe4kLMM01mEFZtJgHaE7.jpgCommunist China meat baozi. It's a small palm sized pie that is steam and served piping hot and full of delicious and tasty juices.
Communist China meat baozi. It’s a small palm sized pie that is steam and served piping hot and full of delicious and tasty juices.

Pies endure

Today, pies are considered a quintessential dessert for some holidays and remain a savory meal for any day of the year. Pies also continue to evolve as people come up with hundreds of types of crusts and fillings.

After being called “an American evil” and an “unmoral food [sic]” by Kate Masterson in The New York Times in 1902, pies have remained a classic of not only American cuisine but of cuisines around the world.

The pie-in-the-face joke even endures as physical comedy.

Having a pie thrown in your face used to be funny.
Back in the day, having a pie thrown in your face was considered the height of comedy.

Pies have even become punnily associated with Pi Day, celebrated on March 14 due to its resemblance to the mathematical number.

But it seems that the exact definition of a pie still eludes us. According to Slate, Emily Elsen, founder of the pie shop “Four and Twenty Blackbirds,” her European customers call her pies “cakes,” and the debate of pies vs. tarts seems endless.

According to Smithsonian Magazine, the phrase “as American as apple pie” didn’t appear until 1924, when it was used in an advertisement for men’s suits. But no one culture has a monopoly on pies. Pies have transformed in every culture they’ve engaged with, and even if no one can determine exactly what counts as a pie, few will pass up a free slice. 

And why this matters…

It seems like everyone, around the world, loves a good pie.

They are made everywhere, and if there is an argument between two people, the surest way to stop the argument is to offer them a free slice of pizza pie.

But you don’t have to do that, don’t you know.

You don’t have to wait until there is conflict or arguments or turmoil, or strife to take action. You can go out right now and get yourself a fine tasty pie. And what’s stopping you? When was the last time you went into a diner and got a slice of pie? Or is the only pie that you eat from McDonalds?

What is stopping you?

Start doing.
Stop waiting. Start doing.

And …

And…

Why eat it alone? Why not ask that cute chick out for a free slice of pie and a cup of coffee, or your friends, or maybe you next door neighbor? Why not? What’s stopping you from driving over to your grandmothers house, and telling her that you want to take her out to get a fresh hot pie and a cup of coffee. Why not?

No.

You are not going to do it, are you?

You like the pre-birth world-line template that you are on right now, and doing something like this is way out of your character. Isn’t it?

Admit it.

isn’t it?

Or…

Maybe you have something better to do. Maybe the grass needs to be mowed, or the “news” is on and there is some urgent breaking news about the President! Or maybe there will be a hurricane, a tornado, or global warming (or cooling) will come forth and crush your life. Ya gotta be prepared. Don’t you know.

Look out the window.

It’s beautiful out there.

Beautiful.

There's a beautiful world out there. Maybe you need to go forth and enjoy it some.
There’s a beautiful world out there. Maybe you need to go forth and enjoy it some.

And…

Well, for me the drizzle ended. It’s in the evening, and the sun is starting to dusk out. People are going out and relaxing. Some school kids are playing basketball out, and I can see a few couples strolling along the beach with their dog. I hear the school kids playing outside my building. It’s nice.

In fact, this time of the day is my favorite (well, one of my favorites). It’s when things start to get cooler and a nice breeze kicks up. The lights offer a rosy yellow gold glow to the deepening blue of the sky and the deep shades of the lush trees are soft, deep and dark.

At this time of the day, I usually toss the trash out.

Yeah, I know. Boring, eh?

Then we either go out to eat, or stay in. Not that I am hungry right now, but a fine glass of wine and some delicious food is always welcome. And that is what it is all about, isn’t it.

I can see some folk eating Shao Kao next door. This is the Chinese version of BBQ. You can smell the chicken cooking, and the hot peppers (yeah, it’s a thing. You put the hot peppers on a stick and you cook them. They lose about half of their hot spiciness, and get a little sweet.) The guys are starting to have a few beers with their meal. Nice.

You know.

All around the world we are the same.

The Chinese aren’t that evil bat-soup slurping group of evil heathen, and Americans are not pristine knights in white satin doing the good work of Jesus. We are just people. Living life. Having fun. Making friends. Enjoying the moments together.

I like to believe that there is a woman for every man, and many people that share the same interests that we all hold inside…

So…

What’s stopping YOU?

Is it that you don’t think that you want to meet other people, other gals, or do other things? Is it because you are so caught up in your own easy and comfortable routines? Is it because that that you are so addicted to the news media that you NEED to stay inside to “get your fix” on the latest “news” and pronouncements?

Well…

That’s all a lie. It’s a nice comfortable lie that sticks you all to the pre-birth world-line template like a fly stuck on fly-paper. If you all really want your dreams and wishes to manifest, you all will need to break off and out of that artificial environment that has entrapped you.

And this environment is complex. It involves many things…

  • Your habits, that prevent you from deviation off your world-line trajectory.
  • The “news” that constantly programs and reprograms your mind.
  • Your friends and associations that repeat the “news”.
  • The music you listen to and the movies you watch.

And these are the things that await you once you become self-actuated…

Pretty Girls

Whether you are in a relationship now or not, everyone deserves to have more friends. They add color and depth to our life. As well as maybe helping to point out the “door handles” that lie upon the “hallway of life”. Click to see the movie in a different tab.

And or , maybe someone like this…

Click on the picture (like the above) to see the movie in a different tab.

The thing about all this is that our universe is the most colorful, exciting and wonderful when we are interacting with others. With other people. Not with other things. So that illusion that you can conduct business from behind a computer monitor, or have a Zoom chat instead of a face-to-face meeting is pretty much a lie. Real people interact in time-honed interpersonal ways.

So self-actuate.

Go forth and interact with others.

And maybe you have “had it” with people! I am one person who absolutely understands. But what about our other friends, or pets; our dogs and cats in our lives. You know…. Like this…

Click to see the movie in a different tab.

Or maybe your life has become a little too predictable, too stale. Too boring. maybe you need to go to a KTV and liven things up. Maybe something like this… You know, more my speed. Heh. Heh.

(Taken outside one of the KTV rooms. Click to see the movie in a different tab.)

Or like this on the inside.

Here’s a chick singing Gee Gee Gee, LOL. Yeah. It’s all sort of like this.

Or perhaps you are not American, and your idea of social interaction and belonging is different. that is not a problem. No matter how you feel, and no matter how you express yourself, you all should do it and do it your way. Do things your way, and on your terms. Just do it.

Here’s from the Samoan Islands. Grand. Just Grand.

I do miss my friends there. I really do. There are some really fine, fine folk in American Samoa. I’ll tell you what.

I guess that the point that I am trying to make is that life is about experiencing the adventure of it. But by the nature of our consciousness and our reality, it is so very easy to get fixed and comfortable on a life-line vector that is fine and comfortable.

I think that the greatest amount of fun might happen when you do something different.

Not drastically different mind you, but different enough.

Like getting a pie and a cup of coffee in a diner or a local restaurant. Not a fast food “joint”.

It’s your life, and your choices. You choose. You flick the new “switches” and set your world-line vector to new directions and buckle up your seatbelt. Because the moment you start to deviate off of your comfort zone, you SLIDE to new realities, and then…

…it’s a new “ballgame”.

Do you want more?

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What being a boss is like. (A review of the movie The Freshman)

I am a boss.

Yeah, I keep quiet about it. And, you know, I have a retired lifestyle and have pretty much mellowed the fuck out, but I do own and run numerous companies, and I am the boss of them. I might be the CEO, the Executive Director, the Manager, the Owner… but first and foremost, I am the BOSS.

And yet, being a boss is not like what you would think it is.

And it is neither of the extremes that you might think it is from television, movies, or your personal experiences with the owners of companies elsewhere. It is something else entirely and at a complete an unique level as well. And since I am a foreigner as a Boss in China, that places the “awe level” quite high.

So…

Like my posts on other subjects…

  • Like what [1] the actual situation is about extraterrestrials,
  • And [2] what the actual situation is about prostitutes,
  • And [3] what the actual situation is about China,
  • And [4] the actual situation is about the Trade War… etc. etc.

This post is going to be what the actual situation is about being “A Boss”. What it is like, and how one qualities and what it is all about.

I’m gonna tell you all straight.

I’ll probably make a shit load of enemies in the process.

Keep in mind that this is true for a very select group of people. For less than 1% of American CEO’s are actually a “real Boss”. The rest are more or less, cogs in a big, vast, machine.

  • Supervisor
  • Manager
  • Team Leader
  • Vice something or other
  • C level someone

Etc. Etc. Etc.

I read many of the reviews and I concur with the positive ones. A wonderful blend of acting, direction and writing that improves with each viewing. I was surprised at the small number of quotes. The scene between Tina and Fleeber from when she enters the room to when she leaves is priceless. "My father thinks Clark is an A student", "I am Carmine Sabatini's only daughter", etc. So many excellent quotes. My wife and I bring them up often. "Rodolfo Lasparri of Palermo". Classic, subtle comic performances. I wonder if Brando saw the edited version? Plus, the cast call exits and the end add a wonderful touch, as they did in "The Quiet Man" and others.
The Boss is always busy working and talking with others, making arrangements and cutting deals.

The movie “The Freshman”

In this post I use images from the movie “The Freshman”. Which is an old 1980’s / 1990 comedy movie. And while it is a comedy, and it is all fun and games, I do want to use the situation(s) as depicted within the movie to make some points.

Charming points

A comedy no one can refuse ... ElMaruecan82
26 June 2012

How many actors could have parodied their most classic roles without falling into caricature? Think about it: while it takes a certain talent to make a performance that elevates a character to a legendary status, overplaying enough to make it comical but not over-the-top is the ultimate proof of acting genius. And only Marlon Brando could have got away with playing his most iconic character, the Godfather, and make it so damn believable. And it's this very seriousness in his performance that makes "The Freshman" so delightful and naturally, hilarious.

Although not revolutionary, what makes "The Freshman" such a classic on its own is that it accomplishes a real miracle by resuscitating Vito Corleone, his name is Carmine Sabatini but the movie can't fool us: the guy IS Vito Corleone. As explained in the film, Sabatini's the one who inspired Vito's character, in other words, "The Freshman" is so confident over its comical premise, and rightfully so, that it doesn't even hesitate to insert several references to "The Godfather". And these are not just gratuitous 'Godfather' references thrown away for the sake of it, it's important to know that it's not a parallel world where the movie isn't supposed to exist. 

On the contrary, not only it does, but whoever sees Carmine Sabatini has the most natural reaction by immediately thinking of Vito Corleone. The movie, in a way, asks the question, how any of us would react in front of a movie character. How would I if I met my favorite character? I guess, probably like Clark Kellog, Matthew Broderick as a film college student, the titular "Freshman".

And the deserved praises on Brando's performance shouldn't diminish Broderick's talent at all. With his awkward youngish look, Broderick is the perfect straight-man for a comical duo with Brando. Indeed, the comedic power of "The Freshman" relies on the extraordinary ability of Brando to play his character seriously in a non-serious film. Consequently, we don't laugh at Brando because he's too believable (we'd never treat him so disrespectfully), but at Broderick's disbelief. 

There's one part where Carmine offers a job to Clark, and gives him the hand of friendship as a solemn promise that no harm would happen to him. 'How can I say no?' replies Clark, to which Carmine dryly retorts 'that's not a yes, I want to hear yes', he takes a walnut and break it with his own hand, making a threatening sound. This improvisation, proving that Brando didn't lose his acting instinct and trademark use of props in movie scenes, provoked an even more genuine reaction from Broderick who didn't know the walnut had already been broken before the shooting.

Clark had no other choice than to say yes, after all, isn't Vito Corleone, the man who makes offers we can't refuse? The film's funniest moments are driven by Sabantini's aura and Clark's incapability to control the situation or to say 'no'. The script finds the perfect tone to show a guy screwed but in a way that inspires our sympathy without feeling antipathy toward Sabatini. And another triumph on the writing department is the way everything seems believable despite all the zany material it employs. 

Whether it's a picture of Mussolini in an Italian Social club, an espresso that takes three spoons of sugar, the Mona Lisa painting in Carmine's house, and a weird traffic involving a Komodo dragon, I wonder why I wanted to believe that the first time I saw it. Maybe I was just a 10-year old kid who just laughed at the gags without looking too much deeper into it. 

The irony is that after watching 'The Godfather' so many times, I believed in Sabatini even more.

That's not to say that it takes to be a 'Godfather' fan to enjoy the film, but it sure helps and not just for laughs. There is a heart in this film, and there is something very nostalgic, almost poignant to see Sabatini interacting with Clark. Sabatini is so sweet you'd forget he's a dangerous person. 

Brando finds the perfect note because he makes Sabatini lovable, while Vito was feared and respected, the way he treats Clark like the son he never had, his unexpected outburst of joy or sadness, his tender kisses or slaps in the face are all expression of a sincere love. 

Yes, we laugh when he never remembers Clark's hometown ("You're from Connecticut" he joyfully says as if it meant something), when he calls him "Kent" instead of "Clark", or casually tells him that he'll marry his beautiful daughter Tina (Penelop Ann Mirren), but we still take him seriously because we never see when he's acting and when he's serious. And it doesn't really matter since in both cases, it's funny.

But I make the film sound like the 'Brando' show, while it features a great cast of supporting characters, notably Bruno Kirby as Vic the streetwise nephew who emphasizes every word said by his Carmine. Maximilan Schells steals the show as a demented German chef. You would probably notice Frank Whaley, the 'what?' man from "Pulp Fiction" as Clark's slick roommate. The film makes many references to "The Godfather" series, an apparent favorite of Clark's teacher, the goofy monomaniacal Pr. Fleeber (Paul Benedict). Interestingly, the film was released the same year than the last opus of the trilogy, but I see it more as a coincidence, since the film is much more a reminder of how iconic the first two were.

"The Freshman" is still a delightful comedy, cleverly written, with the perfect dosage of verbal humor and slapstick, the journey featuring the Komodo dragon would be seen as an oddity considering the film's context, but it totally makes sense at the end. Everything brilliantly tie up at the end, even the weird affection between Sabatini and Kellon, the little spice that gives this film, its unique flavor ... with basil cream sauce.
In the movie "The Freshman", the Boss tells the young freshman that he is to wed his daughter. The girl that he just met yesterday, and that he cannot get out of the "business" as he is in it for life.
In the movie “The Freshman”, the Boss tells the young freshman that he is to wed his daughter. The girl that he just met yesterday, and that he cannot get out of the “business” as he is in it for life.

And another review…

Further Viewings rmax304823
11 June 2004

What a wacky plot. Broderick is hired to convey illegally imported endangered species by Brando, playing Carmine ("Jimmy the Toucan") Sabatini, in order to provide million-dollar-a-plate dinners for a bunch of international degenerates who revel in eating forbidden fruit, or in this instance lizards. It's the kind of plot you dream up while sitting around all night half-gassed with a couple of buddies who have a good sense of the absurd.

Broderick is Clark Kellog (whom Sabatini calls "Kent"), a naif just in from Vermont to attend film school at NYU. Sabatini is the "importer" he works for and a ringer for "The Godfather." (The original was almost a self parody.) Those are the principal roles and Broderick handles the role of straight man, being sucked into a Mafia-like existence, competently. Brando is unforgettable. He tried one or two comedies before and they tanked, but he's a winner here, cracking walnuts in his fist, weeping with emotion as he embraces his new employee.

But it's not just the relationship between Clark and Sabatini that's amusing. It's also just about everything in between, including what we see of the film school, where the professor assigns seven hundred dollars worth of his own books as required reading, and is working on a paper that will combine -- what was it? -- Plato, Marx, and semiotics in a deconstruction of "The Godfather", or something equally insane? Maximilian Schell is a much under-rated or unnoticed actor. 

He consistently turns in riveting performances but has never achieved major stardom. It doesn't matter whether it's drama ("Judgment at Nurenberg"), comedy thrillers ("Topkapi"), or, as in this case, comedy. He never fails to bring something extra to the role. 

His first entrance here knocks the whole situation askew. Clark has enlisted a fellow student to help him carry this giant lizard (Varanus komodoensis -- they pronounce the specific name wrong) and a bearded sunglassed Schell ambles into the scene during the delivery, fondling a ferret, looks up with a big smile, and says, "Sabatini said one boy.... Here are two!" Clark runs through his explanation while Schell listens politely before replying, "Sabatini said one boy.... Here are two!" He says it a third time before ambling off. That's ALL he says.

I've seen this about three times since I first commented on it and, although this is anything but a "deep" movie, I've continually found things, mostly jokes, that I'd missed earlier. I must give a few examples.

Never before had I noticed some particular details in the scene in which Brando cracks the walnuts. I had just seen him cracking walnuts. More recently I've noticed that in this scene Brando, apparently dead serious, tells Broderick that he wants him to accept the job offer. "I don't want to hear 'no', I want to hear 'yes.'" And that, immediately after these lines, while Broderick is pondering an answer, Brando picks up TWO walnuts, rolls them in his palm, and slowly but noisily CRACKS them.

And another of the many allusions to "The Godfather" finally registered on my interpretive apparatus. As the end credits begin to roll, Broderick and Brando are taking the monitor for a walk through the cornfields in long shot. And we can hear Brando's voice offering Broderick some career assistance. "Y'know, Clark, when you get out to Hollywood, maybe I can help you." "No, please." "It wouldn't take much. Just a few phone calls." "NO!" "I could kick open a few doors for you." The penny finally dropped and I could see Brando arranging to have a lopped-off horse head planted in some producer's bed.

Just a few other points. One is that the score owes something to "The Stunt Man." Another is that Brando seems so perfectly comfortable in this self parody. He seems to be genuinely enjoying himself. His body language is exquisite. He lolls around in his chair, sticks his tongue in his cheek (literally), waves his hands, shrugs, and does everything else flawlessly. Sometimes his whiskery voice gets away from the Don Corleone model. I don't think Vito Corleone would be so indignant when talking about Polaroid and IBM on the phone. "I told you before, Charlie, I don't LIKE it when they go DOWN. Listen. I had another stock broker once and he only called me with bad news. It got very UNPLEASANT, Charlie, y'unnerstand me?"

And anyone who thinks of the later Brando as a bloated hypocrite who has lost whatever acting chops he once had should take another look at the scene in which he visits Broderick in the college dorm room. Broderick, at Brando's own request, recites a poem written by his father, a rather elliptical one, and Brando's character picks it up immediately -- "Ah, the cat." And the discussion about Curious George. And Brando's momentary melancholy as he looks around the college dorm, an environment as alien to him as the planet Neptune, shrugs and comments, "Well, I didn't miss nuthin'." It isn't funny. It's touching.

I thought this movie was very funny and quite original, considering the stale material it was sending up, and I still think so. Two years' worth of additional viewings hasn't changed things. You must see it, if only to hear Bert Parks sing "I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more."

I am sure that most people reading this will have seen the movie, so we can move on. But if you haven’t you might want to rent it, buy it, or torrent it.

Managers vs Bosses

In the United States, we have what is called “bosses”, but you know, they really aren’t bosses. They are just managers. Manages with a “small m”. They perform a role, but are still, no matter what, employees. And you have “technical experts” and while they might have all kinds of certifications, and diplomas and documentation to their name, they too are only employees.

And yes, you have those “higher ups”. Those “Big Bosses” that have paneled offices, credenzas, and maybe their very own secretary or two. But then again, they are just still “manager employees”.

Rule number one;

#1 Rule; Only the owner of a company can be a Boss.

Everyone else is just a manager.

What is a Boss?

A boss is a person that owns, operates, runs, manages and controls a company.

When they make a statement, a policy, or a rule it is firm and never questioned. The decision has been made and it is final.

A scene from the 1980’s movie “The Freshman”. Here in this scene, the Boss describes to the young freshman that the boss cannot lose face. There are too many important things involved and that he just cannot risk a much younger person saying “no” to the Boss.

As such there are rules that they follow. But these rules of behavior are different than that for the rest of the company. They have a much greater degree of flexibility and latitude in what they can do and how they can behave.

  • Workers and staff follow one set of rules.
  • The boss follows a different set of rules.

They might have a business “empire” that spans the world and has hundreds of people, or they might have a small operation that only has three key people, and others that come and go as needed. Size does not matter. What matters is [1] attitude, [2] respect and [3] control that one has over their operations.

What does NOT matter is [1] how much money the company makes, [2] how much money the boss makes, or [3] what the rest of the world thinks about the boss or his company.

Respect

This is interesting and cultural. In China, far more respect and deference is given to the boss and managers than anything ever seen in the United States. To put this into perspective, let’s look at my handy dandy chart below…

A comparison between the respect given to a boss in China compared to that of a typical American boss, or leader.
A comparison between the respect given to a boss in China compared to that of a typical American boss, or leader.

Boss tales

Like me. I am a small-time boss.

You might call me a “mini-boss”, or a “boss” with a under-case “b”.

My operations are small, up front, in person, and direct.

It’s the nature of my life.

Long term Metallicman readers will recognize that I am talking about. You do not need a lot of fame, fortune, big fancy expensive cars, and multi-million dollar houses to live the life of your dreams. Truthfully guys, if I told you half about what my life is actually like, you all would think that I am just full of shit.
Scene from the 1980’s movie “The Freshman”. Here, a Boss is discussing employment opportunities with a young college student to wants to join “The Business”.

I have structured my life this way, and through the power of [1] affirmation campaigns, [2] experience, [3] thoughts, [4] relationships and friendships, and [5] opportunity, I am living a lifestyle that fits me personally.

There are many such people in the world.

  • The owner of a small garage that fixes and repairs cars.
  • The owner of a small ethnic operation that provides legal help, financial help, and other services to the local ethnic people in an area.
  • The owner of a small machine shop.
  • The owner of a local laundrymat.

And while the “news”, television and Hollywood just loves to talk about the trillions and billions of dollars that the handful of ultra-super-dooper-crazily-wealthy have, the vast bulk of real bosses (in the world) are really just “small time” operations.

Most “real” bosses, though not everyone, got to where they are now through hard blister-on-the-hands mind-dullingly boring work. It’s just that we kept up at it, time after time after time, after time. Sooner or later, eventually something happens, and some money starts to roll in, and believe you me, it’s not really a lot at first.

And it is the journey to that point…

…the trials, the pains, the anguish, the failures, and all the heartbreak…

…creates the boss that you see standing in front of you.

Scene from the movie The Freshman.
In the movie “The Freshman”, the Boss sees himself as a young man in the young freshman that wants to work for him.

And for me…

Well…

It has been a seemingly endless string of companies that worked me to the bone, and discarded me just as abruptly. Heartless, painful and relentless. It fucking sucked, and so I, out of necessity, had to create my very own company. (Companies, actually.)

Not to mention all the associated hassles with my MAJestic retirement and all that load of fucking crap.

What it takes

You know, talking about “one day” being a Boss is not the same as being one. And being a manager in a company working for someone else isn’t being a boss either. having an impressive title, or a business card doesn’t make you a boss. Nor does having a corner office, a potted plant, or a company cell phone.

A Boss does things his own way.

#2 Rule; A Boss does things HIS way.

To be a boss you control everything. If you want all the gals in the office to wear mini-skirts, you make it so, and if you want to smoke a cigar in your office, you do so. If you want to make a pot of chili and have it cook in the office all day, you do so, and if you want to come in early or late, you do you as you feel fit.

But it’s more than that.

It is the bosses that do their own thing…

…that strive anyways…

…that push and strive following their very own dream…

…while the rest of the world makes fun of them, attacks them, bemoans them, and pretty much abuses them…

It’s these bosses that end up making the world a better place to live.

First-year film student (Matthew Broderick) at New York University finds himself working for an apparent Mafia chieftain (Marlon Brando) with a surprisingly close resemblance to Don Corleone in The Godfather, in a delightful, imaginative screwball comedy written and directed by Andrew Bergman (So Fine). Though Bergman is more accomplished as a comic writer than as a director (his credits include Blazing Saddles, The In-Laws, and Big Trouble), his madcap ideas carry the picture, and Brando's wonderful low-key performance—less a parody of his Don Corleone than a revised-and-corrected life-size version—never falters. Sweet and warm as well as manic, this is full of loopy surprises, and the supporting cast (including Penelope Ann Miller, Bruno Kirby, Steve Bushak, Maximilian Schell, and Bert Parks, playing himself in his film debut) is uniformly fine (1990).
The Boss in the movie “The Freshman” adding a little bit of sugar to the young freshman’s coffee. It’s his way of showing kindness.

Have you ever wondered why real Bosses don’t just copy other people, and other successful companies? Have you ever wondered why they want, and insist on doing things their ways? Have you ever wondered why?

Why…?

Some other Bosses

People naturally succeed at what they love doing. They just plug away at it day in, and night long. It is what makes them happy, and what makes them “tick” (like a clock). And such, when others see them, they cannot help but to find them a positive influence.

Other well known bosses include…

Rob Ross

When you are doing something you love, on your terms, and you are the boss, your life transcends perfection. Consider some other (well known) bosses to not only owned their own company and “brand”, but also enjoyed what they did to a point where their life became transcendental.

Bob Ross passed away in 1995 at the age of 52. We were lucky enough to have him all those years, but obviously we still miss him. Luckily he lives on, thanks to his painting legacy, all over the internet now. If you are ever looking for something soothing to watch in the evening, I highly recommend it! And if you are feeling particularly crafty give it a try! He's a great teacher and you will surprise yourself with how well you can do!

-10 Amazing Facts About Bob Ross That Prove He Was Exactly As Wonderful As You Thought He Was
Probably one of the most soothing people who has ever appeared on TV is Bob Ross. The talented painter is capable of making every brush stroke into an incredible landscape that you couldn't even imagine, all the while speaking some of the most positively joyful words you will ever hear. We all have watched it on PBS at least once in our life, some of us have even attempted to follow along.
Robert Norman Ross was an American painter, art instructor and television host. He was the creator and host of The Joy of Painting, an instructional television program that aired from 1983 to 1994 on PBS in the United States and in Canada, Latin America and Europe. Ross subsequently became widely known via his internet presence.

Fred Rogers

Another Boss is the great Fred Rogers. He, like Bob Ross, owned his own production operation, and headed it and was the leading talent in it.

Here at Fred Rogers Productions, children come first, now and always. We connect with them through shows that are fun, relatable, and put their social and emotional learning front and center. That’s how we’ve earned the trust of parents, caregivers, and teachers.

-Fred Rogers Productions
Home
Fred Rogers was the creator of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as well as the host of all 895 episodes, the composer of its more than 200 songs, and the puppeteer who imagined 14 characters into being. More importantly, he changed the face of children’s television and transformed the way we think about the inner lives of young children.
Fred McFeely Rogers, also known as Mister Rogers, was an American television personality, musician, puppeteer, writer, producer, and Presbyterian minister. He was the creator, showrunner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001.

Jim Henson

Jim Henson (September 24, 1936 – May 16, 1990) was the creator of the Muppets, founder of The Jim Henson Company, and the performer behind many of his company’s most famous characters, including Kermit the Frog, Ernie, and Rowlf the Dog.

Jim Henson, the man behind the Muppets, began working as a puppeteer in college, creating characters like Kermit the Frog.
In February 2004, The Walt Disney Company purchased the Muppets and the Bear in the Big Blue House characters from The Jim Henson Company. The purchase did not include the Sesame Street characters, which are separately owned by Sesame Workshop , nor did it include Fraggle Rock and other franchises, which The Jim Henson Company retained.

Ben & Jerry

Here’s an ultra-liberal duo who made a fortune doing what they love; making ice cream. And being (joint) Bosses, they defined their life, their business and their product line. And while many Americans might find them a bit flamboyant and outrageous, they are Bosses in the truest sense of the word. They own their business and run it as they see fit. And if you don’t like it, you all can take a hike!

With a $5 correspondence course in ice cream-making from Penn State and a $12,000 investment ($4,000 of it borrowed), Ben and Jerry open their first ice cream scoop shop in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont.

-About Us
In 1951, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were born. Just four days apart in age, these childhood best friends decided to start a food company in 1978, and after considering bagels, they switched to ice cream.
Ben & Jerry’s produces a wide variety of super-premium ice cream and ice cream novelties, using high-quality ingredients including milk and cream from family farmers who do not treat their cows with the synthetic hormone rBGH.

There are many more examples…

Yah. There are many more examples, but most are not all that well known. Today, in the new government controlled narratives, fame and glory come attached to huge mega-corporations. Not to the smaller people like you (the reader, and myself). For the most part, most people don’t know we even exist.

Clark Kellogg: 
You promise?

Carmine Sabatini: 
Every word I say, by definition, is a promise.”

But, let me tell youse all…

As a Boss you define your image. You define what you do, and whether or not you want to be super rich and popular, or just very comfortable – doing what you love. (Which is what I chose.)

This is a very funny movie that casts Matthew Broderick as a new-to-the-city college kid who gets mixed up with a shady character named Vic right after he arrives. Through a series of events, he becomes involved with Vic's family, which include Uncle Carmine and his daughter Tina.

Everyone is perfectly suited to his role and even Brando appears to be having a lot of fun with his own image. The supporting cast is worth mentioning - especially Paul Benedict as an obnoxious college professor, and Maximillian Shell as a business associate of Carmine Sabatini.

This is ultimately a touching movie about loyalty and family, and it sure is fun.
And while a boss might be busily defined his life, maintaining his work and doing what ever his business is, he finds time to work with other people. To take them “under his wing”, and work with them, to help them, and help everyone around them to thrive.

Can anyone become a Boss?

Well, can anyone become a Boss?

The answer is yes. Yes, anyone can become a Boss. You just need to keep on doing what you love and follow your own dream, what ever it is.

Then you need to create your business, and that provides an income. And you as the Boss control it.

Maybe it’s collecting trash, or fixing cars, and reselling them. Maybe it’s buying up old rental properties, fixing them up and selling them, or maybe it’s making your very own brand of chewing gun. It’s all up to you.

Maybe it’s making your own home-made pistols, or growing ginseng and curing it to make ginseng cigarettes. Maybe it’s something else. The point is, not HOW MUCH MONEY that you are going to make. The point is rather YOU DOING WHAT YOU WANT TO DO, and doing it YOUR WAY.

How do you know that you are working for a Boss?

The primary characteristic of a Boss is that they own their own company, and that they define their rules. They go and do things their way.

But how do you know, if your “Boss” is actually, and really a real Boss?

It’s all about loyalty.

Clark Kellogg: 
You had a choice - not to turn me in.

Dwight Armstrong: 
If it was your son, you would have...

Clark Kellogg: 
If it was my son, I would have treated him like he was my son. If he was my step son, I would have treated him like my son.

If you, and the people around you have a strong feeling of loyalty towards your Boss, then he is, INDEED a real, honest to goodness Boss. Because a Boss, no matter what his exterior never, NEVER makes people feel like things. Real Bosses make people feel like family.

How anyone can say this is not a great film except for Marlon Brando's performance is beyond me. His performance is great, of course. But the whole movie is phenomenal, not just Brando. It is perfect -- a 10-plus -- from start to finish. The entire cast stands out -- not just Brando. How a reviewer can focus on Brando's piece of business with walnuts is beyond me -- his business with the espresso is even more effective. But why zoom in on one relatively insignificant piece of Brando schtick when you have his whole performance to salivate over, and the equally outstanding performances of the entire cast. There is not one false note or faltering moment in this fabulously clever and eminently watchable film. Yes, Bert Parks does stand out in his cameo performance, as does B.D. Wong, as does Bruno Kirby, and on and on and on. This underrated comedy made the American Film Institute's list of 100 funniest comedies -- I could hardly believe it. Despite that, it is one of the best American movies, certainly best American comedies, ever made.
A real Boss will make you feel like family, and you will have a natural loyalty to that person. Scene is from the movie “The Freshman”.

As I have repeatedly stated, in America today, the entire culture and society…

  • Loves things.
  • Uses people.

Instead of…

  • Loves people.
  • Uses things.

Being a Boss is your great escape valve off this “rat race”. For as a Boss you can define your own life your way. And if people don’t like it, too bad.

Conclusion – The Movie

Some reflections on my life, and a great movie that many have just discounted as a silly comedy. They didn’t “get it” because their understanding about life was just too shallow.

I must have seen this film twenty times. It's one of my absolute favorites. It's gentle, heartfelt, funny, subtle and delicate. It's also, of course, an absolute delight for movie buffs. 

I know it's an absurd thing to say, but in many ways this is my favorite Brando performance: he's having such a good time sending himself up. He does it with such obvious relish but, at the same time, he IS Marlon Brando, the greatest actor Hollywood ever produced, and his character has all the regal gravitas that he brought to bear so effectively in "The Godfather". 

For those of us who thought that the only thing wrong with "The Godfather" was that there wasn't enough of the old man, this film is an unheard of feast.

Of course the story is daft, so what? I LOVE the scenes with the giant lizard - especially the end with Brando walking it and talking to it. There are so many great lines - I suggest that your reviewer who couldn't understand a word Brando said throughout the film cleans his ears out so he can hear gems such as: "So this is college. I didn't miss nothing'", and, "When you get to Hollywood I want you to gimme a call. I could kick a few doors open for ya." 

And Maximilion Schell: superb as the mad chef. "Carmine said one boy, here are two." There are so few gentle Hollywood comedies, with genuine poignancy, where the "feelgood" factor isn't tacked on, where's there's no sentimental slop, just humanity and warmth. 

Cherish this beautiful little film and marvel that it even ever came to be made.

adamblake77
25 June 2006

The movie “The Freshman” is a touching and warm movie about being a Boss, and is ultimately about loyalty and family.

How anyone can say this is not a great film except for Marlon Brando's performance is beyond me. His performance is great, of course. But the whole movie is phenomenal, not just Brando. It is perfect -- a 10-plus -- from start to finish. The entire cast stands out -- not just Brando. How a reviewer can focus on Brando's piece of business with walnuts is beyond me -- his business with the espresso is even more effective. But why zoom in on one relatively insignificant piece of Brando schtick when you have his whole performance to salivate over, and the equally outstanding performances of the entire cast. There is not one false note or faltering moment in this fabulously clever and eminently watchable film. Yes, Bert Parks does stand out in his cameo performance, as does B.D. Wong, as does Bruno Kirby, and on and on and on. This underrated comedy made the American Film Institute's list of 100 funniest comedies -- I could hardly believe it. Despite that, it is one of the best American movies, certainly best American comedies, ever made.

Gosh, this is one of the very best comedies ever made, folks. 
negevoli-44
20 June 2000

Conclusion – On Bosses

Being a Boss is about taking your life in your own two hands. It’s about ejecting out of the realities created by others, and the chains and shackles others have put around you. You can be anything you want to be, and being a Boss is the legal avenue that will allow you to get there. It is the vehicle that you drive in to finish this stage in your life.

Being a Boss gives you freedom, and a chance and opportunity to mold your life to fit your desires. Don’t squander it.

And it is my sincerest wish that everyone reading this post, somehow finds the character inside them to carve out their life and become just this sort of Boss. You all can do it. I believe in you.

A small, delightful film, which let's Brando playfully deconstruct his Vito Corleone. Full of laughs and surprises, it accomplishes its goal of being a small, funny coming of age story as admirably as Godfather accomplishes its grander goals. The coincidences build on each other as in a Pynchon novel. And the scattered references to the Curious George books turn out to have a funny payoff as well.
I believe in you. You can accept this opportunity, And you too can join the ranks of the Bosses that own their own businesses.
Carmine Sabatini: 
I want you to take this opportunity. Totally legitimate work for $1,000 dollars a week. And I know that you're not gonna disappoint me.

Clark Kellogg: 
Well, I don't see how I could say no.

Carmine Sabatini: 
This is not a yes. I want to hear yes.”

Do you want more?

I have more articles and posts in my Movie Index here…

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Hollywood vs real life. A good reminder of the differences

As a child of the 1960’s I was brought up and raised by the illusions of Hollywood and television. I had grown up with the idea that Hollywood and television pretty much accurately showed us how other people lived their lives. And yes, I know that much were extreme characters, but that deep-down inside everyone was pretty much like what was portrayed.

  • Mafia Dons were like The Godfather.
  • All American soldiers were like Rambo.
  • Spanish-Americans were all members of a cartel.

And on and on…

Well, this post is a reminder that not only is Hollywood (and by extension, television) a big fiction, but it is a horrible distortion of the way things really are. If you were to get to know “rich people”, “Mafia Dons”, real “Kings and Queens” and others, you would find that they don’t even remotely resemble the cardboard cut-out that is so aptly promoted by the American (and Western) media.

And I know this.

And you should too.

I have written about [1] the big lie that is the “China Narrative” in America. I have also written about [2] the big lie about “prostitution”, as well as [3] the big lie about “the alien agenda”. All of these things are really horrible, horrible, just HORRIBLE distortions. So distorted in fact, that their resemblance to the real thing is not even close.

And if you are one of those people that is “drinking the electric Kool-aide” then you need to wake the fuck up. You are just peasants being programmed to behave in certain ways. The top controlling vectors are [1] fear, and [2] sex. Followed closely by [3] prescribed emotion-controlling drugs.

So let’s spend some time and look at this.

What is real and what is fake?

Bosses

I had worked for many supervisors, and managers and business owners over the years. Some good, many pretty darn bad. But it wasn’t until I moved to Pago Pago in American Samoa where I met a real (honest to goodness) “Boss”.

The Tony Soprano (crime) family / operation.

Yessur. He was an honest-to-goodness real-life boss. He was a consequence of the culture, the environment, and of marrying into the right family. He owned the biggest business on the island, was one of the richest people on the island, had a nice house, a following of people, a large staff of workers, and controlled everything. he even ran a Church where he gave sermons every Sunday.

He was, perhaps, a “legitimately legal” version of Tony Soprano.

I learned a lot from him. And yeah. He was younger than me, but he commanded respect. And I gave it. I actually liked this guy ALOT. And yes, I have modeled some of my life around some of the many, many, many lessons that I learned from him.

I would say that while he was involved in legitimate business, and he was a businessman, the situation and the deals that he would work out pretty much transcended what the law said. You see, once you “rise to the top” of the society structure you learn that laws are only for the peasants, the people, the “civilians”, the “average Joes”. They don’t apply to you.

He ran “back room” deals and conducted business using a kind of “good old boy” network.

If things went wrong, there would be a “sit down” with other elders on the island. And the issue would be negotiated fairly. (Does this remind you of anything?)

So…

In many ways he was very much like a “real live” Tony Soprano.

I attended his church and he was a Man Of God. That is for certain, and he took his role seriously. And you need to understand that you need to master both the spiritual side as well as the physical side of your life. And he had done so and that brought my immense admiration.

But you said…

Yes, I said that Hollywood does not resemble real life. Instead it is a distortion under the following guidelines…

  • It describes what we WANT to believe.
  • It mixes fact with fantasy.
  • It caters to the narrative that makes the most money.
  • It is designed to lure people away from truths.

Now, I will tell you that the televisions show “The Sopranos” is pretty darn close to the real thing. At least going by my personal experience. That is.

Tony Soprano and his small group of lieutenants.

Distortions of the truth are everywhere

Which is pretty much why I tell everyone in Metallicman Land that unless you experience it first hand, then what you reading is pretty much a fantasy. Today modern “news” is just a combination of “manipulations” and “opinion” packaged around a contemporaneous subject. That may or may not even be legitimate.

  • Well, is every American soldier like Rambo?

Ask anyone who has been in the service, or the National Guard.

They will tell you that indeed there are some, a few, that might be a kind of Rambo at some level, but that most of the people are just average people doing a job. And that’s about it. It’s just average people doing an average job.

  • What about those “White Hat” extraterrestrial aliens that want to have sex with human females?

Nope. Sometimes the narrative is so outlandish that it slides off the fiction plate and enters the trashcan of pure fantasy. In the case of extraterrestrials, and UFO’s and other things such as that, it’s just a bunch of horse manure. The truth is quite different from the colorful nonsense. Which, by the way, sells a lot of books. Because people want to read the nonsense. They don’t want to read about the truth. Because the truth is boring, and well… disturbing to people.

  • What about China?

Ah, I’ve covered it pretty extensively. Look, if you all want to think that the Chinese people are dirty and filthy. That they drink bat soup, eat dogs and cats, and spend their lives cheating others like greedy little slime-lords. Go ahead. It’s the current narrative being tossed about in America today.

But it’s not the truth. So why waste your time on it.

  • What about “White Privilege”?

I know nothing about that. It seems to me that the only people that are harping on about this are either African-American folk (Negroes) and spoiled rich kids. I was raised up in a household that was on the lower-middle-class end of the spectrum. My father studied hard during night school using the “GI Bill” (a system to compensate people who had served int eh military by giving them subsidized collage tuition), and that raised our lifestyle up to central middle-class.

I then worked hard in the coal mines and steel factories to save up money to get a college education. Our joint family goal was so that I would become part of the upper-middle class. Ah, but that was derailed by MAJestic. (Sigh)

I have been all over the world, and all over the United States. I pretty much see that social mobility depends on two factors. [1] Who you are (as there are some dirt poor people in Zambia making a real “killing” in profitable business opportunities), and [2] the social-economic structure where you live. (It’s hard to get ahead in modern America with so many “little hands” in your wallet and obstacles in your path.)

The “White Privilege” nonsense is just a narrative used to control others for political objectives.

So what?

And maybe that’s the point in all this.

What you see is often occluded. Most Americans (and people in the West) go from one bubble of reality into another. They don’t get an opportunity to experience life first hand up close and stark. They rely on the stories of others for their illusions. And indeed they are illusions.

And if you stay rooted in one illusion over a set period of time, it becomes an echo chamber. One that reinforces the illusions over and over.

If you get your information electronically…

If you get your information electronically, you can expect it to be 80% manipulation. It doesn’t matter if the news or information is believable or not. For the most dangerous propaganda is that which we want to believe.

It doesn’t matter if it is a televisions show, a movie, a “news” cast, or a blog. Anything electronic is subject to distortion. And thus I tell this to everyone…

If you do not experience it FIRST HAND, it's best that you don't believe it at all. For you are getting things second hand.

Why so much bullshit?

I have been asked why there is so much bullshit and nonsense in the American (and Western) media. And the answer to that is simple.

In a “democracy” you must rely on the thoughts and opinions of mass groups of people.

Thus, if you can control the thoughts of people, you can control what they do.

And if you can control what they can do, you can control their voting choices and their opinions in such a way that they approve or “rubber stamp” everything that you do. And that is why lying, distortions, and false narratives and “false flags” are so prevalent in the West and in America.

Unlike China.

China does not need to lie. They do not need to twist public opinion. They tell you the way things are and whether you like it or don’t has no bearing on anything. So if you don’t like what they do, or the figures in the documents, or what their actions are…. well, tough cookies!

So if 3400 people died by COVID-19 in China, you can rest assured that they died. But if the Washington DC reports that 200,000 Americans died by the COVID-19 you aren’t quite sure. It all depends on who is reporting that figure and why.

OK, back to the Boss

Anyways, let’s get back to the Boss.

The Boss in Pago Pago was just like the fictional character Tony Soprano.

Now being a boss isn’t for everyone. But the point is that he was pretty much an average guy. He was average. Not that smart or bright (I suppose) but was in the right place at the right time under the right conditions and he became boss. And like all bosses he reported to higher powers. In his world he reported to his wife, and to God. He also reported to the network of other bosses on the island.

He had a normal, but largish family. A lot of children. A lot. And they were everywhere. He definitely was fruitful and did multiply.

He led banquets with his supervisors, managers and other “lieutenants” (such as myself) would be invited and attend.

Tony Soprano with his lieutenants.

He was autocratic and would do and act in ways that might be repulsive or shocking in the United States. Such as demanding that I shave and cut my hair a certain way, gave me some money to buy myself a new shirt, or told me that my wife had to act a certain way and do certain things.

He ran a profitable business, a church, a school, and numerous other ventures.

We referred to him as “Boss”.

And he was the Boss. In the office, his desk was at the end of the huge office room raised up on a platform a few inches above the rest of the office. There he would sit back and every morning the local school children would vie for a role in bringing him plates of food and sundries. Others would take a run out to “Carl’s Junior” and pick a a selection of breakfast burgers. (He wouldn’t have more than one, and would hand the rest of the bag to other workers around 11am.).

And then…

It came to an end

For me at least.

My time on the island was up and I had to leave. It’s an interesting story about unwritten laws, society structure, and necessities of life. But, I left and opened up a new chapter in my life…

But, you know, this post isn’t really about my experience on the island with the Boss. It’s about impressions and thoughts that are generated prior to real and actual experiences.

And it doesn’t matter what the thoughts or impressions are either…

I had no idea what life would be like in Pago Pago. None what so ever. Somehow I imagined something similar to Florida or Hawaii. I imagined that the company would be like a state-side company, and run by a CEO with managers, and supervisors. I pretty much pictured a kind of scaled down USA, but located on a small island.

I had never watched the television show ‘The Sopranos” at that point, but even if I did, I wouldn’t be expecting that to manifest in the South Pacific Ocean.

I pictured (in my mind’s eye) something that did not exist.

That is because all that I had to go by was American media, American books, American stories, and my American friends.

My adventures in Pago Pago had it’s ups and downs, but overall it was a very positive experience, and one that has affected me deeply. The Boss was an amazing man, and I have incorporated many of the things that he did, acted, behaved and implemented in my very own life and actions. As well as part of my affirmation campaigns.

Exposure to him, his life, and that environment caused me to grow in so many, many ways.

Life is about experiencing things first hand. Not by reading about it on the internet. Or by watching a movie or a television show.

If I had experienced what I was expecting I would not have grown at all. I would just be moving towards a new environment which was much like the old environment that I was leaving. And I believe that this is a critical point. What is presented to you, the reader is always nonsense. Always. Unless you experience it first-hand, it hold no value or benefit to you.

The work-arounds

So how do you get around this? How do you get to experience the things that you read about?

Well…

Well… ?

Yah! You go out and forth and experience it yourself. That is what you do. Seriously, that is what you do. In my case, you find attractive situations, fun situations, interesting people that are all around you. You walk up to that situation and you embrace it. And if you like it, it becomes part of your life.

You cannot be shy about this.

There is a world of experience out there, just waiting for you to participate in it.

And if you situation is such that you cannot see how you will ever get a change to do so, and you have no physical ways to do so…

…then you generate a affirmation / intention / prayer campaign. And follow the techniques (exactly, to the letter) that I have laid out for you.

And you live life.

YOU

LIVE

LIFE.

Conclusion

The world today is heavily influenced by electronic manipulation. Most of which are lies if not distortions of reality…

And the war with China edges closer and closer. You all don’t think that this isn’t part of the neocon plan do you?

Sure. What ever you say.

To keep yourself happy, calm and content, please FOR THE LOVE OF GOD shut off that “news” nonsense. instead, buy a bottle of wine (something red. Or sweet if you don’t know wine … like a Zinfandel), grab a member of the opposite sex (doesn’t matter who) and go for a walk in a park or a nice place in the country (less than a ten minute drive). Can you do that?

Just say. “Let’s go out and do something silly.”

Enjoy life.

And do it your way, on your terms, with the people that you care about.

And if you do this enough, the influence that the “new” has in your life will become progressively less. And as such, you will start to question why those around you are so upset about certain things or “issues” of the day. You will start wondering “what drugs they are on”, when in reality it is actually “what nonsense is being pumped into their skulls”.

Live life.

Anything less than that is below you.

And take note.

I have created the life that I live now through conscious effort.

I used my skills, and intention campaigns to describe the life I want, and to guide me towards the realization of that life.

And part of it requires exposure to different ways of doing things, and different kinds of experiences. And the television or Hollywood narrative is not helpful in the least. You must be exposed to the “real thing” to benefit from it.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Master Index

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Life & Happiness

The big lie that everyone is equal

It’s really a pretty big lie that everyone is equal. No one is.

We are all different. We have different types of hair, different ways of thinking, different likes in food, different views of attractiveness, and different ways of handling things.

Conformity is a tool used to control groups of people.

When you need to handle unruly herds of people, or things (like herding kittens), you need to create rules and ways of handling things. Back in the days when organized schools first started popping up, the fierce independence of the children were bleached out of them to make room for order and control.

During this time, as the children grew up and became adults they began to consider that level of control and uniformity as necessary for “a great society”. And when the adults became politicians, they repeated that action and placed rule after rule, and law after law. One after the other. All in an effort to make a well-organized, well-run nation.

But it’s not really true.

Independent thought, differences in ability, thoughts, emotions and opinions are what makes the world an interesting and colorful place. You really don’t want to relive the old days of conformity under some kind of grand master plan do you?

We try to force people into boxes to make them equal. You know, sort of like the scene in the Movie Pink Floyd’s “The Wall”, where all the students are being repackaged into clones of each other.

You know.

Maybe something like this…

Is everyone equal in a court of law?

Is everyone equal in skills or ability?

Is everyone equal in beauty or attractiveness?

So WHY is America so obsessed with this notion of “equality”? No one is equal at anything. Instead, I argue that it is our DIFFERENCES that should be treasured. Not our similarities.

But…

That’s not how American schools operate…

In School, everyone is equal.

And that indoctrination in school has entered American society. Like it or not. And that has since spread (like a dangerous virus) throughout the world…

One of the big lies in America today is that everyone is equal. It’s a lie because no one is actually equal. Everyone is different.

Quite. Different.

And that is a good thing.

Now the progressive liberals in the audience would be confused with this. As they equate “equality” with “democracy”, and “uniqueness” with “diversity”. You can’t do that and make those comparisons. They are nonsensical.

And the traditional conservatives want to make everyone fit into some kind of pre-determined role within society. One with stratification, and one where “misfits” have no place. It’s an exclusionary vision. It’s the “lone wolf” concept, where everyone is part of a tribe, with roles and set behaviors. All following a great parent-figure; their “leader”. And the misfits…

…well, they can just go somewhere else to die. Put them in a hospital. Put them on some kind of social program. Move them away, far away from the rest of society. They don’t belong. They are too different.

Which makes me want to have a cup of coffee and write this rant…

Do we really want to be like everyone else?

We see this all over the place.

There is NO SUCH THING as true equality. Yet, there is a large contingent of people that believe in this myth.

And I see it in the comment sections of social media. Where an eleven year old is commenting with a forty year old construction worker. The social media’s comment section gives the appearance that they are equal, but in “real life” they are world’s apart in knowledge, experience, ability and perceptions.

In truth, and in a real-world situation, the construction worker really wouldn’t give his “time of day” to the young opinionated kid.

Which is why metallicman screens all comments. It’s a grey-web don’t ya know. No one is equal. But everyone get’s an equal shot at saying their piece.

Other Places

On the LinkedIN social network, you can actually see the qualifications, experiences and abilities of the people commenting. This gives you advantage. And you can easily separate the commenters into groups;

  • Knowledgeable, savvy, experienced.
  • Young, idealistic, inexperienced.

Which is really handy-dandy in deciding whether or not to comment, respond or get dragged into a debate. If you see that the person is probably a ‘bot, or a youngster, or maybe a CEO (in name only) with no substantive background, you can well decide to ignore their sparring.

We need to know with whom we are talking with.

In “real life” you discuss matters as equals, with others that you consider to be equal to you. Whether it is an a social environment or in a work environment. You all know this. You talk differently with your bosses, boss than you do with a co-worker. Don’t you.

But social media has taken those natural barriers away.

Now we don’t really know whom we are talking with. Is is a peer, an equal, or someone we respect, or is it a snot nosed kid, a paid-for troll, or a drunk 20-something in his mother’s basement?

I like to imagine them trying to debate me face-to-face.

More than likely they would be pissing in their pants long before they skedaddled out the door.

You have to know who you are dealing with.

Which is a handy thing to be able to do; you only comment when it adds something to the discourse. You try to keep it focused, positive and kind if you can.

Metallicman Comments

Most of the Metallicman comments are worthy.

Meaning that they provide something of value to the discourse, and it enhances the site. You don’t have to crawl through comment after comment of insults, or distractions, or nonsense that you might find on other venues. (You know, I screen everyone. Yes. Even you Rob. LOL.)

Have you ever seen that?

You are reading a great article, and you get to the comment section and find that it has been hijacked by others, and the dialog went “off the rails” and on to some other subject? Yeah. Most of that is intentional. As most Trolls are paid to be assholes.

Anyways.

I like to think that the MM comment section is one of the best on the web. There’s good “meaty” stuff there from all over the world. And while not everyone agrees with each other, or holds the same point of view, everyone contributes equally. Some of which are truly outstanding.

It’s not like you have a stream of one-word gibberish from “participants” like this…

Hey!

Did any of those comments have meaning for you? Did they make sense to you? Are they contributing to the dialog in any way?

I read them, and I get this image of a 1950’s style robot with beeping and flashing red eyes, and brushed steel skin.

Contemporaneous commenters on most American social media platforms.

This equal participation is quite different from being fractionally equal to each other. Because I value our differences as key contribution vectors.

Contributions. Discussion. Social interaction.

Adds value to our life.

VALUE.

Time to chill over coffee

Back in the 1960’s and 1970’s there used to be a big old tureen of coffee in the backroom of where we would work. It did not matter what kind of work that you were doing. All companies provided free, thick and ample coffee to their employees. And as such, employees were free to drink as much as they want, with as much sugar and cream as they would like. This was thick, syrup-like deep coffee, with lots of sugar and real whipped cream.

Coffee Time!

We would drink the coffee in what ever was provided. Often is was one of about twenty old reused (over and over) old coffee cups. Sometimes it was styrofoam cups that we would use and then discard. When I worked in the military it was a big white cup emblazoned with the name of a project that I might be working on. I had about twenty of such cups lying all over my office(s) at one point in time.

Typical mug for people involved in Military development systems.

Anyways…

Drinking coffee and chatting about work is a pastime that I have come to appreciate. You know, when you go to a trade-show and you meet others in your industry, and you all can relate “war stories” about the same kinds of issues or the same kinds of problems… well it’s a bonding experience.

Whether it is something like this…

...That style mill is NOT a Sieg product, many enjoy it or the Precision Mathews branded version of it. I think Brian Rupnow has the Busy Bee one which is painted in Canadian paint. I can't specifically tell you if it is good for those jobs. I would think so, as long as it is mild steel and nothing hardened.

Or maybe something like this…

...With a nightmare engine, you may have tolerances set "by the book" on the ring gap, the mains and rod bearings, but every time you torque the bolts, you have to use a 4 foot pipe wrench on the crank pulley to turn it over. How does a normal rebuild become a nightmare? You may know or have heard of the scenario. You waste three gasket sets putting it together… tearing it down… putting it together… tearing it down etc, each time waiting for the UPS truck and new parts that you should've put in right off or replacements for new parts you destroyed on your first attempt. (Note: there's nothing I dislike more than cleaning gasket surfaces that I cleaned the weekend before). What should have been a weekend project has taken months, much of the time spent trying to avoid the shop so you can forget this perplexing failure. Many times, you are not at fault for a rebuild working out this way. It can happen frequently with engines that seized up in a hurry. Fortunately most rebuilds are undertaken because the tractor was just getting tired and nothing catastrophic happened to force the rebuild. By catastrophic, I mean something happened that made the engine stick hard and stick fast… while it was spinning at 1500 RPM.

Or on a different kind of subject…

We started off buy purchasing 1×12” fir from a local guy who has a small saw mill for his vast amount of timber. It’s always fun to dream of new creations when we go there. One thing when going through a small saw mill is the price of lumber is so much cheaper than the local hardware store. But the boards all needed plained so we bought a plainer to get this job done. It took five times per board going through the plainer. It was a full days job...

Or maybe something like this…

...now we must use the new FinCEN reports, which are available only electronically through the BSA E-Filing System. FinCEN is no longer accepting legacy reports, and that is a real pain in the ass...

To something not work related…

...You wouldn't need an alarm clock if you lived in the barn. That's because horses have a clock in their heads. Ask anyone who has to explain daylight-saving time to their horses. The better you can stick to a routine, the happier the horses are. That's not just referring to time, either. Make any other changes gradually, too, such as feed, water and turnout times.

Horses need friends. They're happy in a group situation, and if you see a horse who's a loner, he probably has some problem. Perhaps he's ill or hurting, or he's been pushed out of the group. You'll know right off that he's not a happy camper. The buddy doesn't have to be another horse, though that's preferable...

So what?

So what? Why is the “coffee break” so friggin’ important?

It’s simple really.

We are humans. We are not machines. We don’t go into a cube, at a certain time, stare into a lighted monitor for a set period of time, and then leave. We are social creatures, and we need social stimulation. The Coffee Break does that.

We can talk freely about anything.

A coffee break allows you to be able to speak freely about things.

Ah.

The freedom of speech.

It actually means something, don’t you know.

Being able to speak freely, with friends, colleagues, family or business associates is the bedrock of society. It is important. We can share our hopes, dreams, lives and frustrations together. We don’t need to hide behind politically correct speech or be quiet because someone might be offended.

Being able to speak freely.

And…

so…

I think that many of us have substituted “social media” for face-to-face in-person chatting and dialogs. We have forgotten that there is a difference between chatting with a kid on the street is different than with a coworker, which is much different than chatting in “mixed company” in a church, or some other social venue.

Conformity and “free speech”

When you have those that openly talk about limiting speech or print for one reason or the other, what you are seeing is that they are forcing people to conform.

Their vision of Heaven is one in which everyone wears the same state-issue wings. And all wear the same white robes, and all say the same things, in the same way.

Yet…

If you have a “free for all” where they are no rules, it becomes colorful and interesting. But only for a while…

A short while.

That marvelous utopia tends to collapse because there will always be a percentage who would abuse it. Whether it is a company trying to profit from it by spam, a couple of bored teenagers, a crusty old ill-tempered senior citizen, or an enraged SJW type, all it takes is a few misfits to spoil the entire “pot of chili”.

Which is why you need a minimum of rules, and a very flexible police force.

Here, on MM for instance… the rules are simple.

  • Don’t Troll.
  • Don’t insult me.
  • Don’t spam.
  • Don’t derail the discussion.
  • Don’t try to advertise.
  • Don’t be an asshole.

Aside from that, it’s pretty much a free-for-all. It’s colorful, and interesting and fun.

  • It’s not white = only approved comments that fit within the expectations of the readership.
  • It’s not black = anything goes. It’s not policed in anyway what so ever.
  • It’s grey. Minor policing of a chaotic situation.

And when you think about it, isn’t that the way everything should operate? Instead of having a 56 page manual on how to dress, like they did in General Motors, just replace it with a simple sentence “Dress appropriately for the task, role and situation.”

I like to believe that this “grey area” of discourse works for 95% of the population. And the policing keeps the 5% at bay and under control. It’s a mix of what is wanted and desired as opposed to abuse by those whom have poor social skills.

Conclusion

We need to realize that the ideal situation (in anything) is complex, colorful, chaotic and curious. To maintain that condition, you need to police it. You need to control the elements that want to either [1] destroy the individual environment (for what ever reason), or those that [2] want to improve the situation (usually invoking some kind of conformity).

This is true whether it is here at Metallicman, or in you local community.

We need to be on the constant alert for the people who wish to change what exists into something else…

…be it a free-for-all with trolls, commercials, profanity and other distortions…

…or, someone’s idea of utopia. One that can only be obtained with a great deal of laws, regulations and rules of behavior.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Happiness Index here…

Life & Happiness

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Cool Story – The Oldest Known Wooden Structure

This is a really cool and interesting story. It’s not just that it’s old, but that the cutting, shaping and fitting of the wood was wonderful and precise. Indeed, the workers who made this structure would be just as comfortable making complex and detailed traditional wood homes in Japan as they would furniture and furnishings. Ok, in other words, this was no “log house”. The construction details show absolute precision. And it was all made with stone or bronze tools. All in all, it’s pretty darn amazing.

So…

Instead of thinking that Bronze Age man lived inside of crude stockades and rudimentary shelters, we need to revise our understanding of these people. We need to recognize that they had a degree of skill and appreciation of tools that we were absolutely unaware of.

Here’s a recreation of a wood stockade fort around one hundred years ago in America. It was used to defend against the American Indians who greatly resented settlers coming on to their land, taking their crops, burning their homes and raping and killing their people. Note how the logs are laid and the mere functionality of the arrangement…

Wood Stockade.
A reconstructed stockade wall at Fort Phil Kearny, in what is now Johnson County, Wyoming. The fort, along the Bozeman emigrant trail through the northern Rocky Mountains, was an outpost of the United States Army in the late 1860s.

And thus…

That is how we all think that the more primitive and ancient humans lived. We have associated them with the crude constructions that we see in our American History books. We associate them with “savages” and crude behaviors.

But, of course, that is not really true.

We know that wonder artistic furniture, homes and structures were the norm throughout history. What we were unaware of was just how long ago they came into being. For according to this structure, around 10,000 years ago our ancestors were building wooden structures like this…

Complex joinery.

All in all, I think that it is all darn cool, and super interesting.

The following is a reprint of an article titled” Oldest Known Wooden Structure ” By JDZ found at the Neveryetmelted site HERE. It is reprinted as found with very little editing. All credit to the author.

Oldest Known Wooden Structure

Old Wood Crate.

The old well doesn’t look like much – a wooden crate-like object, dilapidated, crumbling a little. But according to new research, it’s really special. A tree-ring dating technique has revealed that the oak wood used to make it was cut around 7,275 years ago.

This makes it the oldest known wooden structure in the world that’s been confirmed using this method, scientists say.

“According to our findings, based particularly on dendrochronological  data, we can say that the tree trunks for the wood used were felled in  the years 5255 and 5256 BCE,” 

…explained archaeologist Jaroslav Peška of the Archaeological Centre Olomouc in the Czech Republic in a press statement last year.

“The rings on the trunks enable us to give a precise estimate, give [or] take one year, as to when the trees were felled.”

The well was unearthed and discovered near the town of Ostrov in 2018 during construction on the D35 motorway in the Czech Republic. Ceramic fragments found inside the well dated the site to the early Neolithic, but no evidence of any settlement structures were found nearby, suggesting the well serviced several settlements at a bit of a distance away.

It was filled with dirt, so an archaeological team carefully excavated and extracted it. It consisted of four oak poles, one at each corner, with flat planks between them. The well was roughly square, measuring 80 by 80 centimetres (2.62 feet). It stood 140 centimetres tall (4.6 feet), with a shaft that extended below ground level and into the groundwater.

Even in waterlogged conditions, the state of preservation of the wood was exceptional, showing marks from the polished stone tools used to shape each piece.

“The construction of this well is unique,” 

Peška said.

“It bears marks of construction techniques used in the Bronze and  Iron ages and even the Roman Age. We had no idea that the first farmers,  who only had tools made of stone, bones, horns, or wood, were able to  process the surface of felled trunks with such precision.”

And that amazing state of preservation also allowed for dendrochronological (based on tree rings) and radiocarbon dating, based on radioactive isotopes of carbon.

According to these techniques, the trees that supplied wood to the flat planks on the sides of the well were felled around 7,275 years ago. That’s probably when the well was constructed. But two of the poles told a different story.

Both were felled earlier – one around 7,278 or 7,279 years ago; and the other around nine years before that. This, the researchers concluded, meant that the two posts must have been used previously, and repurposed into posts for the well.

One of the side planks also had a different age. It was quite a bit younger, felled between 7,261 and 7,244 years ago. This is likely because of a repair to the well at some point.

Conclusion

I suppose this wouldn’t matter to most folk. If you want a couch or a chair, you go to a store and you buy it. Little thought goes into the effort and talent in making the furniture. And with today’s mass produced products, and electric power tools, it seems and appears so very easy.

Uh. um.

Well, it’s not. You need to really understand and have a real feel for the wood that you are working with. Or else it will all come out wrong.

And that is one of the things that we seem to take for granted.

That everything seems so easy…

You are hungry, so you go hop in your truck and go through a drive through and in five minutes you have a piping hot burger with fries and a Coke.

You need a new mailbox, you hop in the truck and go to Big Lots and pick one out of a multitude of others.

You want a dormer installed on your roof, you buy a kit, and it is all pre-cut and packaged and you just bolt the entire thing together and boom! It’s all done. Fast, quick and easy.

Jimmie Crickets!

I shudder to think that would happen to civilization if we cannot build or construct things with manual labor, simple hand tools, and a complete dearth of time-saving conveniences. And maybe…

…you should too.

Do you think that you could make these parts out of wood?

Or this…

Another example.

Do you want more?

I have more posts along this line in my Happiness Index here…

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The Rocket Man (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

Here is a classic story from Ray Bradbury. It’s titled “The Rocket Man.” It’s one of the first groups (or clusters) of stories that he compiled. And it’s a real beauty. It was written at a time when everyone thought of space and science fiction as gorilla suits and deep sea diving helmets, that rode in flying silver saucers that came from Mars. Here, he talks about the dreams of the man of a household and the consequences of him following that dream on those left behind.

It’s wonderful. Enjoy.

Ray Bradbury. The Rocket Man

                The Rocket Man
                1951

     The  electrical  fireflies  were hovering above Mother’s dark hair to light
her  path.  She  stood  in her bedroom door looking out at me as I passed in the
silent hall. “You will help me keep him here this time, won’t you?” she asked.
     “I guess so,” I said.
     “Please.”  The fireflies cast moving bits of light on her white face. “This
time he mustn’t go away again.”
     “All  right,”  I  said, after standing there a moment. “But it won’t do any
good; it’s no use.”
     She  went  away,  and  the fireflies, on their electric circuits, fluttered
after  her  like an errant constellation, showing her how to walk in darkness. I
heard her say, faintly, “We’ve got to try, anyway.”
     Other  fireflies  followed  me to my room. When the weight of my body cut a
circuit in the bed, the fireflies winked out. It was midnight, and my mother and
I  waited, our rooms separated by darkness, in bed. The bed began to rock me and
sing  to  me. I touched a switch; the singing and rocking stopped. I didn’t want
to sleep. I didn’t want to sleep at all.
     This  night  was  no different from a thousand others in our time. We would
wake  nights  and  feel the cool air turn hot, feel the fire in the wind, or see
the  walls burned a bright color for an instant, and then we knew his rocket was
over  our house-his rocket, and the oak trees swaying from the concussion. And I
would  lie  there,  eyes  wide, panting, and Mother in her room. Her voice would
come to me over the interroom radio:
     “Did you feel it?”
     And I would answer, “That was him, all right.”
     That  was  my father’s ship passing over our town, a small town where space
rockets  never  came,  and  we would lie awake for the next two hours, thinking,
“Now  Dad’s  landed in Springfield, now he’s on the tarmac, now he’s signing the
papers,  now he’s in the helicopter, now he’s over the river, now the hills, now
he’s settling the helicopter in at the little airport at Green Village here….”
And  the  night would be half over when, in our separate cool beds, Mother and I
would  be  listening,  listening.  “Now he’s walking down Bell Street. He always
walks  …  never  takes a cab … now across the park, now turning the comer of
Oakhurst and now…”
     I  lifted  my  head  from my pillow. Far down the street, coming closer and
closer, smartly, quickly, briskly-footsteps. Now turning in at our house, up the
porch  steps.  And we were both smiling in the cool darkness. Mom and I, when we
heard  the  front  door  open in recognition, speak a quiet word of welcome, and
shut, downstairs….
     Three hours later I turned the brass knob to their room quietly, holding my
breath, balancing in a darkness as big as the space between the planets, my hand
out  to  reach  the  small  black  case at the foot of my parents’ sleeping bed.
Taking  it,  I  ran  silently to my room, thinking, He won’t tell me, he doesn’t
want me to know.
     And  from  the  opened case spilled his black uniform, like a black nebula,
stars  glittering  here or there, distantly, in the material. I kneaded the dark
stuff in my warm hands; I smelled the planet Mars, an iron smell, and the planet
Venus,  a  green ivy smell, and the planet Mercury, a scent of sulphur and fire;
and I could smell the milky moon and the hardness of stars. I pushed the uniform
into  a  centrifuge  machine  I’d built in my ninth-grade shop that year, set it
whirling.  Soon  a  fine  powder precipitated into a retort. This I slid under a
microscope.  And while my parents slept unaware, and while our house was asleep,
all  the automatic bakers and servers and robot cleaners in an electric slumber,
I stared down upon brilliant motes of meteor dust, comet tail, and loam from far
Jupiter  glistening like worlds themselves which drew me down the tube a billion
miles into space, at terrific accelerations.
     At dawn, exhausted with my journey and fearful of discovery, I returned the
boxed uniform to their sleeping room.
     Then  I  slept,  only to waken at the sound of the horn of the dry-cleaning
car  which stopped in the yard below. They took the black uniform box with them.
It’s  good  I  didn’t wait, I thought. For the uniform would be back in an hour,
clean of all its destiny and travel.
     I  slept  again,  with the little vial of magical dust in my pajama pocket,
over my beating heart.
     When  I  came downstairs, there was Dad at the breakfast table, biting into
his toast. “Sleep good, Doug?” he said, as if he had been here all the time, and
hadn’t been gone for three months.
     “All right,” I said.
     “Toast?”
     He  pressed  a  button  and the breakfast table made me four pieces, golden
brown.
     I  remember  my  father  that afternoon, digging and digging in the garden,
like  an animal after something, it seemed. There he was with his long dark arms
moving  swiftly,  planting,  tamping,  fixing,  cutting,  pruning, his dark face
always  down to the soil, his eyes always down to what he was doing, never up to
the  sky, never looking at me, or Mother, even, unless we knelt with him to feel
the  earth  soak up through the overalls at our knees, to put our hands into the
black dirt and not look at the bright, crazy sky. Then he would glance to either
side,  to  Mother  or  me, and give us a gentle wink, and go on, bent down, face
down, the sky staring at his back.
     That  night  we sat on the mechanical porch swing which swung us and blew a
wind  upon us and sang to us. It was summer and moonlight and we had lemonade to
drink,   and  we  held  the  cold  glasses  in  our  hands,  and  Dad  read  the
stereo-newspapers  inserted  into the special hat you put on your head and which
turned the microscopic page in front of the magnifying lens if you blinked three
times  in succession. Dad smoked cigarettes and told me about how it was when he
was  a  boy in the year 1997. After a while he said, as he had always said, “Why
aren’t you out playing kick-the-can, Doug?”
     I  didn’t  say  anything, but Mom said, “He does, on nights when you’re not
here.”
     Dad  looked at me and then, for the first time that day, at the sky. Mother
always watched him when he glanced at the stars. The first day and night when he
got  home  he  wouldn’t  look at the sky much. I thought about him gardening and
gardening  so  furiously,  his face almost driven into the earth. But the second
night  he  looked at the stars a little more. Mother wasn’t afraid of the sky in
the  day  so  much,  but it was the night stars that she wanted to turn off, and
sometimes  I  could  almost see her reaching for a switch in her mind, but never
finding  it.  And  by the third night maybe Dad’d be out here on the porch until
way  after  we were all ready for bed, and then I’d hear Mom call him in, almost
like  she  called me from the street at times. And then I would hear Dad fitting
the  electric-eye  door  lock  in  place,  with  a sigh. And the next morning at
breakfast  I’d  glance  down  and  see his little black case near his feet as he
buttered his toast and Mother slept late.
     “Well, be seeing you, Doug,” he’d say, and we’d shake hands.
     “In about three months?”
     “Right.”
     And  he’d  walk  away down the street, not taking a helicopter or beetle or
bus,  just walking with his uniform hidden in his small underarm case; he didn’t
want anyone to think he was vain about being a Rocket Man.
     Mother  would  come  out to eat breakfast, one piece of dry toast, about an
hour later.
     But  now  it  was  tonight,  the first night, the good night, and he wasn’t
looking at the stars much at all.
     “Let’s go to the television carnival,” I said.
     “Fine,” said Dad.
     Mother smiled at me.
     And  we  rushed off to town in a helicopter and took Dad through a thousand
exhibits,  to keep his face and head down with us and not looking anywhere else.
And  as we laughed at the funny things and looked serious at the serious ones, I
thought.  My father goes to Saturn and Neptune and Pluto, but he never brings me
presents.  Other  boys  whose  fathers go into space bring back bits of ore from
Callisto  and  hunks  of  black  meteor  or  blue sand. But I have to get my own
collection, trading from other boys, the Martian rocks and Mercurian sands which
filled my room, but about which Dad would never comment.
     On occasion, I remembered, he brought something for Mother. He planted some
Martian  sunflowers  once  in  our  yard,  but after he was gone a month and the
sunflowers grew large. Mom ran out one day and cut them all down.
     Without  thinking, as we paused at one of the three-dimensional exhibits, I
asked Dad the question I always asked:
     “What’s it like, out in space?”
     Mother shot me a frightened glance. It was too late.
     Dad  stood  there  for a full half minute trying to find an answer, then he
shrugged.
     “It’s the best thing in a lifetime of best things.” Then he caught himself.
“Oh,  it’s  really  nothing at all. Routine. You wouldn’t like it.” He looked at
me, apprehensively.
     “But you always go back.”
     “Habit.”
     “Where’re you going next?”
     “I haven’t decided yet. I’ll think it over.”
     He  always  thought  it  over. In those days rocket pilots were rare and he
could  pick  and choose work when he liked. On the third night of his homecoming
you could see him picking and choosing among the stars.
     “Come on,” said Mother, “let’s go home.”
     It  was still early when we got home. I wanted Dad to put on his uniform. I
shouldn’t  have asked-it always made Mother unhappy-but I could not help myself.
I kept at him, though he
     had  always  refused. I had never seen him in it, and at last he said, “Oh,
all right.”
     We  waited  in  the  parlor  while he went upstairs in the air flue. Mother
looked at me dully, as if she couldn’t believe that her own son could do this to
her. I glanced away. “I’m sorry,” I said.
     “You’re not helping at all,” she said. “At all.”
     There was a whisper in the air flue a moment later.
     “Here I am,” said Dad quietly.
     We looked at him in his uniform.
     It was glossy black with silver buttons and silver rims to the heels of the
black boots, and it looked as if someone had cut the arms and legs and body from
a  dark nebula, with little faint stars glowing through it. It fit as close as a
glove  fits  to  a slender long hand, and it smelled like cool air and metal and
space. It smelled of fire and time.
     Father stood, smiling awkwardly, in the center of the room.
     “Turn around,” said Mother.
     Her eyes were remote, looking at him.
     When  he  was  gone, she never talked of him. She never said anything about
anything but the weather or the condition of my neck and the need of a washcloth
for  it,  or  the fact that she didn’t sleep nights. Once she said the light was
too strong at night.
     “But there’s no moon this week,” I said.
     “There’s starlight,” she said.
     I went to the store and bought her some
     darker,  greener  shades.  As  I lay in bed at night, I could hear her pull
them down tight to the bottom of the windows. It made a long rustling noise.
     Once I tried to mow the lawn.
     “No.” Mom stood in the door. “Put the mower away.”
     So  the  grass went three months at a time without cutting. Dad cut it when
he came home.
     She  wouldn’t let me do anything else either, like repairing the electrical
breakfast  maker  or  the mechanical book reader. She saved everything up, as if
for  Christmas.  And  then  I  would  see Dad hammering or tinkering, and always
smiling at his work, and Mother smiling over him, happy.
     No,  she never talked of him when he was gone. And as for Dad, he never did
anything  to  make  a  contact across the millions of miles. He said once, “If I
called you, I’d want to be with you. I wouldn’t be happy.”
     Once  Dad  said  to  me, “Your mother treats me, sometimes, as if I weren’t
here-as if I were invisible.”
     I had seen her do it. She would look just beyond him, over his shoulder, at
his  chin  or  hands,  but never into his eyes. If she did look at his eyes, her
eyes  were  covered  with a film, like an animal going to sleep. She said yes at
the right times, and smiled, but always a half second later than expected.
     “I’m not there for her,” said Dad.
     But  other  days she would be there and he would be there for her, and they
would  hold  hands  and  walk  around  the block, or take rides, with Mom’s hair
flying  like  a  girl’s  behind  her,  and  she would cut off all the mechanical
devices  in  the  kitchen  and  bake  him incredible cakes and pies and cookies,
looking  deep into his face, her smile a real smile. But at the end of such days
when  he  was  there to her, she would always cry. And Dad would stand helpless,
gazing about the room as if to find the answer, but never finding it.
     Dad turned slowly, in his uniform, for us to see.
     “Turn around again,” said Mom.
     The  next morning Dad came rushing into the house with handfuls of tickets.
Pink rocket tickets for California, blue tickets for Mexico.
     “Come on!” he said. “We’ll buy disposable clothes and bum them when they’re
soiled.  Look,  we  take the noon rocket to L. A., the two-o’clock helicopter to
Santa Barbara, the nine-o’clock plane to Ensenada, sleep overnight!”
     And we went to California and up and down the Pacific Coast for a day and a
half,  settling at last on the sands of Malibu to cook wieners at night. Dad was
always listening or singing or watching things on all sides of him, holding onto
things as if the world were a centrifuge going so swiftly that he might be flung
off away from us at any instant.
     The  last  afternoon at Malibu Mom was up in the hotel room. Dad lay on the
sand beside me
     for  a  long  time  in the hot sun. “Ah,” he sighed, “this is it.” His eyes
were  gently  closed;  he lay on his back, drinking the sun. “You miss this,” he
said.
     He  meant  “on  the  rocket,”  of course. But he never said “the rocket” or
mentioned  the  rocket  and  all the things you couldn’t have on the rocket. You
couldn’t  have  a salt wind on the rocket or a blue sky or a yellow sun or Mom’s
cooking. You couldn’t talk to your fourteen-year-old boy on a rocket.
     “Let’s hear it,’ he said at last.
     And I knew that now we would talk, as we had always talked, for three hours
straight.  All afternoon we would murmur back and forth in the lazy sun about my
school grades, how high I could jump, how fast I could swim.
     Dad  nodded  each  time  I spoke and smiled and slapped my chest lightly in
approval.  We  talked.  We  did  not  talk of rockets or space, but we talked of
Mexico,  where  we  had driven once in an ancient car, and of the butterflies we
had  caught in the rain forests of green warm Mexico at noon, seeing the hundred
butterflies  sucked to our radiator, dying there, beating their blue and crimson
wings,  twitching,  beautiful,  and sad. We talked of such things instead of the
things I wanted to talk about. And he listened to me. That was the thing he did,
as  if  he  was  trying to fill himself up with all the sounds he could hear. He
listened  to  the  wind  and  the falling ocean and my voice, always with a rapt
attention,  a  concentration that almost excluded physical bodies themselves and
kept  only  the sounds. He shut his eyes to listen. I would see him listening to
the  lawn  mower as he cut the grass by hand instead of using the remote-control
device,  and  I  would  see  him  smelling the cut grass as it sprayed up at him
behind the mower in a green fount.
     “Doug,”  he  said,  about  five in the afternoon, as we were picking up our
towels and heading back along the beach near the surf, “I want you to promise me
something.”
     “What?”
     “Don’t ever be a Rocket Man.”
     I stopped.
     “I  mean  it,” he said. “Because when you’re out there you want to be here,
and  when  you’re  here you want to be out there. Don’t start that. Don’t let it
get hold of you.”
     “But-“
     “You don’t know what it is. Every time I’m out there I think, If I ever get
back  to  Earth  I’ll  stay  there; I’ll never go out again. But I go out, and I
guess I’ll always go out.”
     “I’ve thought about being a Rocket Man for a long time,” I said.
     He  didn’t  hear  me.  “I try to stay here. Last Saturday when I got home I
started trying so damned hard to stay here.”
     I  remembered  him in the garden, sweating, and all the traveling and doing
and  listening, and I knew that he did this to convince himself that the sea and
the  towns  and  the  land and his family were the only real things and the good
things.  But  I  knew where he would be tonight: looking at the jewelry in Orion
from our front porch.
     “Promise me you won’t be like me,” he said.
     I hesitated awhile. “Okay,” I said.
     He shook my hand. “Good boy,” he said.
     The dinner was fine that night. Mom had run about the kitchen with handfuls
of  cinnamon  and dough and pots and pans tinkling, and now a great turkey fumed
on the table, with dressing, cranberry sauce, peas, and pumpkin pie.
     “In the middle of August?” said Dad, amazed.
     “You won’t be here for Thanksgiving.”
     “So I won’t.”
     He sniffed it. He lifted each lid from each tureen and let the flavor steam
over  his  sunburned  face.  He said “Ah” to each. He looked at the room and his
hands. He gazed at the pictures on the wall, the chairs, the table, me, and Mom.
He cleared his throat. I saw him make up his mind. “Lilly?”
     “Yes?”  Mom  looked  across  her  table  which she had set like a wonderful
silver  trap,  a miraculous gravy pit into which, like a struggling beast of the
past  caught in a tar pool, her husband might at last be caught and held, gazing
out through a jail of wishbones, safe forever. Her eyes sparkled.
     “Lilly,” said Dad.
     Go  on,  I  thought crazily. Say it, quick; say you’ll stay home this time,
for good, and never go away; say it!
     Just  then  a  passing helicopter jarred the room and the window pane shook
with a crystal sound. Dad glanced at the window.
     The blue stars of evening were there, and the red planet Mars was rising in
the East.
     Dad  looked  at Mars a full minute. Then he put his hand out blindly toward
me. “May I have some peas,” he said.
     “Excuse me,” said Mother. “I’m going to get some bread.”
     She rushed out into the kitchen.
     “But there’s bread on the table,” I said.
     Dad didn’t look at me as he began his meal.
     I  couldn’t  sleep  that night. I came downstairs at one in the morning and
the  moonlight  was  like  ice on all the housetops, and dew glittered in a snow
field on our grass. I stood in the doorway in my pajamas, feeling the warm night
wind,  and  then  I  knew  that  Dad  was sitting in the mechanical porch swing,
gliding  gently.  I  could  see his profile tilted back, and he was watching the
stars  wheel  over  the  sky. His eyes were like gray crystal there, the moon in
each one.
     I went out and sat beside him.
     We glided awhile in the swing.
     At last I said, “How many ways are there to die in space?”
     “A million.”
     “Name some.”
     “The  meteors  hit you. The air goes out of your rocket. Or comets take you
along  with  them.  Concussion. Strangulation. Explosion. Centrifugal force. Too
much acceleration. Too little. The heat, the cold, the sun, the moon, the stars,
the planets, the asteroids, the planetoids, radiation….”
     “And do they bury you?”
     “They never find you.”
     “Where do you go?”
     “A  billion  miles  away.  Traveling  graves,  they call them. You become a
meteor or a planetoid traveling forever through space.”
     I said nothing.
     “One  thing,”  he  said  later, “it’s quick in space. Death. It’s over like
that. You don’t linger. Most of the time you don’t even know it. You’re dead and
that’s it.”
     We went up to bed.
     It was morning.
     Standing  in  the doorway, Dad listened to the yellow canary singing in its
golden cage.
     “Well, I’ve decided,” he said. “Next time I come home, I’m home to stay.”
     “Dad!” I said.
     “Tell your mother that when she gets up,” he said.
     “You mean it!”
     He nodded gravely. “See you in about three months.”
     And  there  he went off down the street, carrying his uniform in its secret
box,  whistling and looking at the tall green trees and picking chinaberries off
the  chinaberry  bush  as  he brushed by, tossing them ahead of him as he walked
away into the bright shade of early morning….
     I asked Mother about a few things that mom-ing after Father had been gone a
number  of  hours.  “Dad said that sometimes you don’t act as if you hear or see
him,” I said.
     And then she explained everything to me quietly.
     “When  he went off into space ten years ago, I said to myself, ‘He’s dead.’
Or  as good as dead. So think of him dead. And when he comes back, three or four
times  a  year,  it’s  not  him  at all, it’s only a pleasant little memory or a
dream.  And  if  a memory stops or a dream stops, it can’t hurt half as much. So
most of the time I think of him dead-“
     “But other times-“
     “Other  times  I can’t help myself. I bake pies and treat him as if he were
alive,  and  then it hurts. No, it’s better to think he hasn’t been here for ten
years and I’ll never see him again. It doesn’t hurt as much.”
     “Didn’t he say next time he’d settle down.”
     She shook her head slowly. “No, he’s dead. I’m very sure of that.”
     “He’ll  come  alive  again, then,” 1 said. “Ten years ago,” said Mother, “I
thought,  What if he dies on Venus? Then we’ll never be able to see Venus again.
What  if  he dies on Mars? We’ll never be able to look at Mars again, all red in
the  sky,  without  wanting  to  go  in and lock the door. Or what if he died on
Jupiter  or  Saturn  or Neptune? On those nights when those planets were high in
the sky, we wouldn’t want to have anything to do with the stars.” “I guess not,”
I said.
     The message came the next day.
     The  messenger  gave  it to me and I read it standing on the porch. The sun
was  setting.  Mom  stood  in  the  screen  door behind me, watching me fold the
message and put it in my pocket.
     “Mom,” I said.
     “Don’t tell me anything I don’t already know,” she said.
     She didn’t cry.
     Well,  it wasn’t Mars, and it wasn’t Venus, and it wasn’t Jupiter or Saturn
that  killed  him. We wouldn’t have to think of him every time Jupiter or Saturn
or Mars lit up the evening sky.
     This was different.
     His ship had fallen into the sun.
     And  the  sun was big and fiery and merciless, and it was always in the sky
and you couldn’t get away from it.
     So  for  a  long time after my father died my mother slept through the days
and  wouldn’t  go  out.  We  had breakfast at midnight and lunch at three in the
morning,  and  dinner at the cold dim hour of 6 A. M. We went to all-night shows
and went to bed at sunrise.
     And, for a long while, the only days we ever went out to walk were the days
when it was raining and there was no sun.

The End

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Thailand is a place where you have the “Right to bear arms”

Most Americans exist within a kind of bubble of isolation. It’s a secure and solid environment that only allows a specific type of information transfer to the citizens. As such Americans are constantly fed a rich and steady diet of propaganda. With is designed to [1] make them feels special and unique, while at the same time, [2] designed to make them fearful of the rest of the world. This propaganda machine is enormous and has completely absorbed just about every news outlet in America from the mainstream to all the outlying fringe sources.

There are so many aspects to this intense degree of control that it would take a couple of lifetimes of writing to even begin to touch the subject matter at hand. Instead, I’m just gonna take bites and chunks out of it as I deem fit. And in this post we are going to blow-up the notion that “America is exceptional because it has a Bill of Rights that includes the Right to bear arms“.

This is yet another fallacy that needs to be revisited. Being exceptional” has nothing to do with what ever “Rights” a government allows you to possess. And the idea that “The Bill of Rights” still exists is laughable. It doesn’t. But most importantly is the idea that ONLY in America can you own and possess guns and firearms. It’s a lie. You can live in numerous other nations and own firearms as well.

It’s just that they aren’t so worried about their government infringing on their ability to own guns. They don’t.

So we never hear about them. There are no news articles about them, and there isn’t billions of federal funds for “studies”, and “Blue Ribbon Panels” looking into the “Gun Control Issue”.

Let’s look at a nation that has more freedoms than what’s present in America. Let’s look at Thailand. The “Land of Smiles”. And let’s look at the ability for local citizens to buy, sell, possess and use guns; firearms, and weapons. Let’s look at what real freedom is like. Shall we?

No Gun Control

One of the things about stable nations is that they tend to let their people own firearms. Those nations that disarm their populace tend to do so for tyrannical reasons (yes, and this includes Australia and the UK).  Did I upset you, the reader’s sensibilities, well then… good!

Thailand trusts it’s people.  They are permitted to possess firearms.

Consider that in your calculus.

A country that loves pick-up trucks, 7-Eleven convenience stores, and has a special relationship with guns. No, not America. I’m talking about Thailand, a country better known for its beaches, warm weather, and friendly people. Turns out, it also has a thriving gun culture. Shooting is popular and primarily targeted at self-defense training. Guns are easily available, shooting ranges are commonplace, and gun regulations are lax.

Gun Ownership in Thailand

With a population of 67 million people and an estimated 10 million firearms, Thailand doesn’t come close to the number of guns owned in the United States, which has more guns than people.

Still, gun ownership is popular in Thailand.

Gun ownership is legal in Thailand, but the guns themselves are more expensive than in the United States.

In fact, of those 10 million firearms in Thailand only roughly 6 million guns are officially registered, meaning likely over 4 million guns are in illegal possession. Illegal firearms ownership is said to be particularly high in the southern border regions between Thailand and Malaysia, which has seen ongoing separatist insurgency and rebellion over the past ten years.

Gun Licensing & Regulations

In Thailand, the right to private gun ownership is not guaranteed by law. Neither is the right to hunt.

Thai citizens, as well as foreigners with a residency permit, can apply for a firearms license, which is granted if a person’s personal conduct, criminal record, living conditions and income don’t raise red flags during a background check by local authorities. A legitimate reason for a license being granted can be self-defense, property protection, hunting, or sport shooting.

Firearms safety classes are not required, and the license costs only 500-1000 Baht (15-30 USD) depending on the province in which the license is issued.

One license is required per firearm, and unlike US states with instant background checks, that license generally takes two weeks to issue and requires registration of the gun after the purchase no matter if it is a private sale or a gun shop sale.

Citizens are not allowed to carry guns in public unless they hold a carry license, which contrary to everybody’s claims doesn’t seem too difficult to attain, at least judging from newspaper headlines such as “man accidentally shot ex-wife with Uzi in restaurant”. State agencies keep a record of every firearms license and carry license issued as well as a record of every gun and whom it is registered to.

Guns on the Thai Market

Thailand doesn’t have its own small arms industry so gun shops sell mostly American imports. European models are less common because most European countries do not issue export licenses to Thailand due to the on-going separatist insurgency in the southern provinces.

Glock and Sig Sauer pistols available in Thailand have US markings rather than being Austrian or German made.

Used 1911 pistols for sale seem to be military excess.

Prices are typically 2-3 times the US retail price. This premium price is a result of the cost for the export permit in the country of origin, secure international shipping, and import fees into Thailand as well as high margins at the gun stores.

Civilian possession of automatic or semi-automatic rifles is illegal, but gun stores stock them since police and military frequent these stores.

Semi-automatic .22LR carbine are excluded from the ban because there is a loophole that allows semi-automatic small caliber rifles. Interestingly the possession of an air gun requires a firearms permit while airsoft BB guns can be bought anywhere.

The Black Market

There is a black market of military-issue guns that have somehow found their way into civilian hands. Some believe that the Thai government provided guns to the southern provinces to arm the counter-insurgents and “defense volunteers” fighting the separatists. Other illegal guns cross the border into Thailand from surrounding countries.

Thai Police Service Pistols

Police officers are not issued service pistols and have to buy a gun to use on-duty out of pocket. I have seen officers carry a mishmash of Glock 19, Sig Sauer P226, Colt 1911M1 as well as really old revolvers and .22LR pistols (yes, seriously) as their sidearm. I have also seen one police officer with an empty holster (Don’t bring an empty holster to a gun fight!).

If an officer can’t afford a gun when they are fresh on the force, they can apply for a loan from the police union and pay it back in monthly installments. Sig Sauer seems to try to penetrate the Thai law enforcement market in a similar way Glock did in the 90’s and continues to do in the US by offering the P320 at very low cost to police officers directly, bypassing the middlemen. These guns are being sold in Thailand close to US retail price.

Shooting Ranges in Thailand

Shooting ranges can be found all over the country not far from temples and bars, palm trees and beaches. Due to the warm climate, these are all outdoor ranges where paper targets, steel plates and IPSC courses are shot. Human silhouette shooting is permitted, as self-defense is a legitimate reason to own and shoot a gun in Thailand.

At the beaches of Ao Nang and in the mountains of Chiang Mai you can find typical shooting ranges.

There, 30 bullets cost 1700 Baht (45 USD) including the rental gun. Typical guns to select from include the Glock 34, Sig Sauer 226 Elite, 1911, Glock 34 IPSC open tuning, CZ 75 and Makarov or.22lr pistols and revolvers.

Shooting ranges are heavily frequented by tourists, posing with pistols held sideways, with shotguns and an ammunition belt wrapped around their neck, or hamming it up with a big revolver.

Guns are legal in Thailand, but if you plan to bring any inside the country, you must register them properly or expect to suffer legal consequences.

The Thai IPSC shooters were quietly practicing on a stage set up on the other end of the range, protected by thick concrete walls from stray bullets fired by tourists holding a .357 super-magnum, blowing the smoke from the burning oil off the tip of the barrel, pointed to the sky like Dirty Harry, while his friend was taking a picture of this experience of a lifetime on his phone.

Why bring this up…

When someone is trying to disarm you, you have a duty to question their motives.

Most Americans haven’t a clue as to how the rest of the world operates, and they in their ignorance, think that America is “best”. Well, sorry, it is not. Don’t go a knocking the way Thai’s or the Chinese live their lives.

Just remember, when an enormous government wants to disarm you, and your family “for your safety”, you have a duty to question their motives.

Ultimately, I can’t show cause and effect for events that occurred years ago. But here is some history that you can research for yourself. This is what CAN happen when the people are disarmed, regardless of how much time passes before it actually occurs. Ask yourself this: can events like this even happen if the people are armed?

1911, Turkey

Established gun control. From 1915 to 1917, 1.5 million Armenians, were rounded up and exterminated. Search Armenian Genocide.

1929, Soviet Union

Established gun control. In 1937, about 2million dissidents, including 30000 military officers, were rounded up and imprisoned or executed. Search The Great Purges

1935, China

Established gun control in 1935. From 1948 to 1952, 20 million political dissidents were rounded up and exterminated.

1938, Germany

Established gun control. From 1939 to 1945, leaving a populace unable to defend itself against the Gestapo and SS. Hundreds of thousands died as a result.

“The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed their subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. So let’s not have any native militia or native police. German troops alone will bear the sole responsibility for the maintenance of law and order throughout the occupied Russian territories, and a system of military strong-points must be evolved to cover the entire occupied country.”

- Adolf Hitler, dinner talk on April 11, 1942, quoted in Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-44: His Private Conversations, Second Edition, Pg. 425-426.

1956, Cambodia

Established gun control in 1956. From 1975 to 1977, 1-2 million ‘educated’ people, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. SPECIAL NOTE: The law was passed in 1956, but was not used for 20 years. But it WAS used.

1964, Guatemala

Established gun control. From 1964 to 1981, 100,000 Mayan Indians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated.

1970, Uganda

Established gun control in 1970. From 1971 to 1979, 300,000 Christians, unable to defend themselves, were rounded up and exterminated. The total dead are said to be 2-3 million.

Links

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Do you want to see similar posts?

I hope that you found this post curious. Please take care. You can view other similar posts in my SHTF Index, here…

SHTF Articles

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Inspirational Rufus-related micro-videos out of Thailand

I have gotten some grief by posting things about Thailand on Metallicman. But people don’t really understand. Thailand is a very spiritual and religious land, and they view sex as something natural and pure.

Not as something ugly, evil and perverted like they do in the United States.

Anyways, here are some treasures. These are micro-videos that were written, directed and take place in Thailand. If you want to have a good look at yourself, then watch these videos and note your reactions to them.

All of these videos are very short movies. Whether they are culled from actual movies or compiled on their own accord is actually unknown. But they are rather nice and exceptional in their own regard. They are about people, situations and relationships. All very Buddhist and all very Thai.

If you want to “feel the pulse” of a nation, you look at it’s society. And for Thailand, you look at the people, the families and the relationships there. I hope that these micro videos puts smiles on your faces and an appreciation for other realities and other cultures.

This is the Thailand that I know…

The is the Thailand that I know and that is hidden by all the bad press out in the West…

This is the Thailand that I know…

I really love this next movie…

And some surprises…

And for the father…

Conclusion

My father would call these movies “schmaltz” and tell me that I was wasting my time watching them. It means “excessive sentimentality, especially in music or movies.” He told me that it’s a “dog eat dog” world out there. That I have to “fight to survive” and that I must do it alone. A “Lone Wolf” style because that is what a Man does and that it is the “American Way”. And that no one is going to come to help me. That I must either succeed or fail. And everything else is just a “waste of my time”.

He was wrong.

We are all part of a community. And if everyone contributes within that community, then the entire community benefits. The lone wolf idea is a failed strategy. For it only results in the occasional lone wolf with the rest of the community struggling and destitute.

You can see this in America today. The nation that completely and absolutely embraces the “lone wolf” society is one with a mere handful of ultra-wealthy, and the rest of the nation is unhappy, destitute and not doing well at all.

And nations like China, that embraces the concept of community first is running “rings” around America. When people work together there is a synergy that transcends the individual contribution. Which has a better defensive mechanism, a lone bee, or a swarm of angry pissed-off bees?

Community. You all should be an ACTIVE participant in your respective communities.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Rufus Index here…

Hero Stories

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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The great danger; stopping your intention campaign when only a few objectives have materialized

Here we are going to talk about a very common theme with intention / prayer campaigns. It’s when you stop running a campaign because some of your objectives and goals have been realized and materialized.

  • Is it desirable?
  • What are the consequences?
  • What are the benefits?

Here, and let me be clear on this, there is a big difference between a pause between campaigns and the complete end of doing any kind of intention campaign.

Once you start working intention campaigns you need to continue to do so for the rest of your life. If you do not, all your gains will eventually evaporate away. And like dust, everything that you have worked towards will just blow away like dust in the wind.

Everything.

And you will regress back to the pre-birth world-line template “path” that you started out on.

Surprise!

I’ll bet that you weren’t expecting that.

Scene from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

It’s all about the pre-birth template world-line

The issue here, and what I want to emphasize, is that the pre-birth template is very important. It is more than just the world-line that you started out as. It is the box of the entire set of initial conditions that will control you for the rest of your life.

For those of you that believe in astrology, it is similar to how if you were born a Leo, or a Libra, or a Scorpio that you would continue to behave with those traits no matter where you move to, who you know, and what career you take. It is fundamentally encoded into your physical body.

As long as you conduct intention campaigns and prayer affirmations, you can navigate your ways and paths throughout your life. And when you pause between campaigns the affirmation campaign has a chance to run the program that you put into motion.

But when you stop, not pause, but come to a full and complete stop your world-lines will start to “drift” back to your initial conditions. This is not something that you want to happen.

And thus we have the term “drifting back”.

It’s easy enough to prevent, however. You just make sure that you continue conducting periodic “maintenance prayers” that provide good will and acknowledgement of the good things in your life that you want to keep and maintain.

“Maintenance Prayers”

If you ever decide to “hang up” and end your life of on and off prayer intention campaigns, you will find that your life will start (over a period of time) to drift back to the pre-birth initial conditions world-line that you began this embarkation upon.

Obviously you do not want that.

As most of your materialized desires will evaporate.

So what do you do? You don’t want to conduct any more prayer / intention campaigns, and you also don’t want your life to regress back to what it was when you started. How to reconcile these two attributes?

The thing to prevent, and the thing to do, is to conduct periodic “maintenance prayer” affirmations. These are nothing more than a set of unstructured verbal affirmations that you make from time to time. Something like this…

  • My current life is stable, safe and secure.
  • There are no major serious or adverse things that happen to me or my loved ones.

And that is it. You don’t need to do much more than that.

The ideal way to run long duration affirmation campaigns

To prevent “drift back” you need to conduct on and off intention prayer campaigns for the duration of your life. You run a campaign and then you pause. Then you run another campaign and so on and so forth.

These campaigns need not be long or large or have ambitious goals. But they should contain your prayers and desires so that you are able to navigate your life towards what you desire it to be or become.

You also need to include the aspects of your life that you have, and that you appreciate within your affirmation campaign. If you are happy in your life, then you must add an affirmation that says that you are happy and satisfied with your life. If you like having Saturday morning breakfasts with bacon and coffee and that is important to you, then please go ahead and make that part of your campaign.

The point is that if you do not maintain the things that you love about your life, they could just as easily evaporate away from your grasp.

The disappearing items

I once had an affirmation campaign for a “big luxury automobile”. This was years ago, back before 9-11. And in those days the way and means for me to control my crazy life from the jarring amount of slides and jiggling world-line realities was to focus on my affirmations. And, as a result, in a very short period of time I learned that I could pray for just about anything, and it would appear.

So a Cadillac DeVille appeared in my life. And I loved that sucker. It was big and roomy. It has a white / creme interior and a teal blue exterior. It was roomy. Roomy. When you got inside, all the noise of the outside world left and you were in a calm and nice relaxed bubble. And I loved to accelerate while going up a hill. That was great.

But, alas, once my goals were realized. I was living fine. And so I stopped my affirmation campaigns. I just went ahead and lived life. I was just happy “doing my thing”, and chilling out with what I had.

A Cadillac DeVille from the television series The Sopranos.

And then, just as suddenly as I obtained the car, I lost it.

And then (at that time) when I looked around me, I noticed that just about everything that I had materialized via my affirmation campaigns were all disappearing. One by one, they were all going away. And I found myself…

  • Living in the same county where I grew up in.
  • Driving a vehicle with the nearly identical set of problems that I had when I first started my campaigns.
  • Single (which was my marriage state when I first started my campaigns).
  • A near zero bank account balance. Just within a few dollars of what it was when I first started my campaign.

And I came to the conclusion that maybe I shouldn’t have stopped my affirmation campaigns.

The morphing of relationships

To really and truly understand what is going on here, you need to go back to the most fundamental premise. That thoughts create our reality.

Now, get go even deeper.

Thoughts ARE our reality.

And if you look at life in this far deeper and richer way, then you can actually see that everything you see around you is a physical manifestation of a thought. And while they might have a degree of “stickiness” to your world-lines (that you travel upon) the “stickiness” will go away as your thoughts start taking your situation for granted.

If you don’t water a flower, it will die.

If you have a skill and don’t use it, you will forget how to use it.

And if you have materialized realities and items, relationships and lifestyle, unless you maintain them within your affirmation campaigns, you will lose them. All things that exist in your reality are comprised of organized quanta.

And the organization is shaped by your thoughts.

If you do not materialize, and refresh those thoughts, they will be influenced by the thoughts associated with “shadow consciousnesses” and they will change and morph into something else. The only way that you can stop that is to …

  • Maintain periodic on / off intention prayer campaigns.
  • Include affirmation text and saying that reinforce that you want to keep the things you desire and discard those that you do not.

The “grow back” effect

So unless you “water your garden” periodically, and tend to it you will have all sorts of problems. You will have weeds start to grow. You will have cross-pollination of plants. You will have rabbits that came in and nibble at the leaves, and children that will come in and pick the green tomatoes. You will have insects chew up your bounty, and weird plant diseases that will devastate your entire crop.

You will need to be vigilant.

So you do not want that “old life” of yours to “grow back”. You want to be in control of your life and you don’t want all the old things that you have discarded to start to manifest back into your life again. You need to continuing to navigate through the MWI. And like a plane that is flying through a storm, you just don’t say “Well, I’m gonna stop of a while and see what happens”. Life does not work that way.

When you start to navigate your life on the world-lines, you will need to continue to do so until your life ends.

Affirmations that you can use

If you have no plans to terminate a lifestyle that includes rolling prayer/intention campaigns, you might want to add this affirmation to your campaign…

  • My affirmation campaigns continue with normal pauses and continuity.

And if you do not want to continue your campaigns and get back to a pre-affirmation life, then you might want to add this affirmation into your final campaign…

  • All of what I have manifested by any of my actions, thoughts or intention campaigns does not regress back to a previous level that existed prior to launching any of my campaigns.

Conclusions

Thoughts ARE our reality. Once you stop navigating the MWI, your old previously determined world-line path will begin to materialize all over again. And you will start out pretty much, where you left off.

The only way for you to prevent this is to constantly conduct periodic on and off prayer affirmation campaigns for the rest of your life.

And know that the IMAGES that you observe, and the IMAGES that others see you in are all contributors to the lifestyle that you will obtain. Be careful. Be good. Be kind, and above all else think good thoughts towards everyone.

Thoughts ARE our reality.

Do you want more?

I have more posts related to this in my Affirmation Campaign index here…

Intention Campaigns

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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A little discussion on how your consciousness is able to navigate the MWI world-lines accurately

You know, people want to know the "secrets of the universe", and when you present them the information, they go "what's this shit?" They said that they don't want "that". Oh no. They want something that already agrees with their erroneous world view...

Anyways…

The way the universe works is pretty straight forward.

Thoughts create our reality. What you think naturally causes your consciousness to migrate to those places conceived by your thoughts.

This pretty much agrees with what we understand about quantum physics.

But this post is going to step into this matter at a deeper level. We are going to get into [1] the fracturing of consciousness and [2] how the whole consciousness works (behind the scenes) to [3] generate very accurate and suitable world-line destinations. Destinations that fit both [4] pre-birth world-line templates, and [5] autonomous consciousness world-line roving ability.

So, this post is NOT going to be about the nuts and bolts of MWI navigation by an Affirmation Campaign. No, it will not be like the other posts. Instead, it is a discussion about [1] how the world-lines are manifested, and [2] what elements of a given conscious thought generation contribute to them.

It’s a very, very deep subject. And it is very, very advanced.

I’ll try to explain it in simple terms so that everyone can understand what is going on and the mechanism(s) involved.

Review

For those of who who are new to Metallicman, let’s let put it simply.

The world that surrounds you has not resemblance to what everyone thinks it is. It is something entirely different.

I have covered this in other posts, in other places. And I tire about repeating myself.

You have walked into an advanced discussion area, and you won’t be able to make out anything that is said herein unless you start with the basics. Therefore, for you newcomers, you need to start at the front and work your way up to this point.

Intro to a first time visitor;

MAJestic

If you want to know how to control your world though manifested thoughts and intentions, which is what this particular post is all about, go here…

Intention Campaigns

Start at the beginning and work your way down. It’s all there. It’s everything you ever need.

So to fully appreciate what is being stated here, you must recognize that the world is not a physical place where your body is born into.

Instead, it is a temporary construction. It changes moment to moment by the thoughts generated by your consciousness. And it is your consciousness that occupies the physical reality. Not your body.

These changes are known as “world-lines” and the physics involved is known as quantum physics, and the particular branch that this discussion centers upon is known as the MWI.

  • The primary world-line that you start out with at birth is known as your “pre-birth world-line template”.
  • Movement through the various world-lines is known as “time”.
  • Switching the pre-birth templates to completely different sets of initial conditions are known as “slides”.
  • Intentional navigation though the various world-lines is known as an “intention campaign”.
  • Planning and directing a navigation vector through the MWI is known as “mapping”.

Consciousness is the key to everything

So here you are.

You are not a physical body that thinks has emotions and walks about.

You are soul, that creates a “consciousness” that is placed within a (human) container that is fixed and tied to a pre-birth world-line template.

Your physical body, and the world surrounding your, as well as all the thoughts floating around and the spirits, and all that history, and the subway cars and everything else is all just a very elaborate construction.

Not your construction.

You, your consciousness, your soul did not create this reality.

You picked it out, and you selected it.

You (as soul), put part of you inside this “sandbox”, this “playground”, this world-line reality at birth to obtain experiences.

And with each experience…

New relationships (known as “entanglements”) were formed at the quantum level.

Good or bad. Right or wrong. Black or white. Love or hate. All defined what your consciousness experienced, and all defines who you are. For you are the sum total of your experiences.

Put a “part” of you inside the reality…

Yes.

Your soul created a “consciousness”.

It used quanta that it has, and organized it, and arranged it, and made a “consciousness”,

Most “consciousnesses” contain from 10% to 35% of the quanta of any given soul.

Which means that most of who you are is out in Heaven somewhere, doing “other things”.

And your “consciousness” is busy doing a number of tasks…

  • It is experiencing “life” within the “passage of time”.
  • The “life” is a non-stop sequence of experiences.
  • Each experience is the building, shaping, structuring, and arranging the relationships between different quanta, by your thoughts and your physical actions.
  • Thus it is making and creating memories.

All the time, the consciousness resides within a fixed physical body. One that has emotions, and feelings and other biological needs that drive it towards behaviors. These behaviors might be normal and bland, like eating and sleeping, or more complex like desiring to own a sports car, or having an interest in someone else, or very complex like emotions and relationship entanglements.

So the sum total of your “life” as a human, from birth to death, is actions and thoughts that result from experiences within the MWI. It is what the consciousness experiences. And since the consciousness is a part of the soul that created it…

That comprises from 10% to 35% of the activity of the soul.

What are these “other things” soul is doing…

So a big question that you might want to ask is what is the soul doing if a part of it is living life within the MWI?

Is it up there in Heaven “twiddling it’s thumbs”?

twiddle (one's) thumbs
To wait idly because one cannot take action or has nothing to do at the moment.

Although the phrase refers to an actual movement of the hand (in which one's fingers are interlaced and each thumb is brought over the other in succession), the phrase is usually used figuratively.
Twiddle one’s thumbs.

No.

The soul is actually busy doing other things in Heaven.

Most of which, are way beyond the scope of what the consciousness might understand. For the consciousness is in control of a physical mind, within a physical body, that is physically tied to the understandings of that world-line that it is part of.

Now, it it be well understood that I do not have privy to what is going on with soul, because (after all) I am like you. I am a consciousness trapped within a physical body. And all I know that might be different is limited in scope, and tied to my EBP and other “understandings”. Things which might or might not be correct.

Never the less, there are some things that we can infer are going on.

Namely what the soul is doing in regards to the consciousness that it created.

For, as we well know, the soul is intimately connected to the consciousness. And, as such, the consciousness (you) can have an “inkling” of what soul might be doing in it’s involvement with the consciousness.

Orders from Headquarters

When I was young, and I wanted my father to play with me, the would sometimes explain to me that he couldn’t. I would ask why, and he would say “orders from headquarters”. Which meant that there were powers stronger than him that were telling him what to do and how to do it.

  • Sometimes it would be his job, his career, and his schooling (night school).
  • Sometimes it would be my mother.
  • And sometimes it would be other commitments.

All of which were beyond my understanding as a young boy.

So, instead of getting involved with detailed explanations on why he could not play with me, instead he would use this “catch all” phrase. He did this knowing that he did not have the time to explain the various complicated relationships and issues involved. And even if he did, it would have been unlikely for me to understand the reasoning at that time, at that age, and at that stage in my personal development.

There is NO WAY that any human within the “reality” universe that comprises the MWI can understand what is going on within the “Heaven” universe. All we can relate is the flimsy and tenuous understandings associated with the link between our consciousness and soul. Because, after all, they are intimately tied together.

So, what we can say is that there is a “relationship” between soul and the consciousness that it creates.

We can further say that this “relationship” is involved in how the consciousness obtains experiences…

Because, after all, that is WHY the soul created the consciousness in the first place.

… and thus the soul is in charge of the degree of comfort or discomfort that the consciousness experiences.

This has some profound implications.

What this means

While the reader should be well versed in the idea that thoughts create our reality, we have to take into account that there might be other influences that might also bend and shape the realities that converge.

What other influences?

  • Strong, contrary thoughts that might inhabit the world-line(s) that you inhabit. These might inhibit your Intention Navigation Campaign.
  • Physical limitations of the world-line itself.
  • Modification of the intention desires by your soul, which might run contrary to the desires of your consciousness.
  • Other, non-physical entities or mechanisms that might work with your soul to mitigate your intention direction.

In other words, it is very probable that your soul is assisting in the manifestation of the new world-lines that you enter. The degree of this “assistance” will depend on all sorts of factors. But I guess that the point is that you (as consciousness) have support (from your soul) in the selection of the world-lines that you enter and move towards. And that it will not alloy you (as consciousness) to “get off the track” in regards to learning experiences that it desires.

Thus you can expect the resulting world-lines that materialize to be what you asked for (in a Intention Campaign) but with very specific “strings attached” (lessons for you to obtain and learn from).

"Strings attached" is an idiomatic expression we say in English. When you give something to anybody with strings attached, that means there are conditions or obligations to the recipient. 

For example, you give a friend a new car and he is obligated not to refuse you if you ask him for a favor.

-Strings Attached | WordReference Forum

Thus…

An Intention Campaign for (example) that might want a girlfriend that is a beautiful model in show business, might come with the “strings attached” that might have things from which you might learn some important lessons. And lessons are always uncomfortable. In this case, perhaps, she has a husband named Bluto, or that she has warts and will give them to you.

The soul, when working with the consciousness, will determine the level of severity and speed of the lessons that you will obtain within this MWI experience.

  • Some intention campaigns will be exactly what you desire. After all, if your intention campaigns will not work, then you would stop doing them.
  • Some intention campaigns would have resultant desires that would be exactly what you want, and it will come with a lesson that you will learn. If I were to ask other readers of Metallicman about whether they learned anything from their manifested desires, I might get hundreds of responses.
  • Some intention campaigns will result in things manifesting that will change the course of your desires in mid-stream. That is when you know that your soul has a hand in the manifestation of your desires.

So, do not mistakenly believe that 100% of what you intentionally campaign for will result in a 100% manifestation of your desires. The actual numbers are actually slightly less. It’s more like 95% and 95%. And it is your soul that has the ultimate say over what your consciousness manifests.

You (consciousness) is part of something much larger (your soul). And what you desire, and think of will manifest within your reality. Just realize that your soul has a say in that manifestation.

And it will come with a "price tag".

Conclusion

One thing about “false positives” is that every time they occur, you learn from them. That’s funny, isn’t it? Have you ever stopped and wondered why some manifested intentions have false positives while others don’t?

It’s all about the lessons that you as consciousness obtain.

Now, knowing this mechanism, you should be better equipped in using and manifesting your affirmation campaign. You can expect that what you yearn for will continue to manifest, and that the results will not do so by the laws of the physical universe, but rather will be “massaged” and manipulated by your soul to best manifest for your very own personal growth.

That is a good thing.

So, you need to keep all this in mind as you observe things manifesting before your very eyes. When they do, you need to review what lessons you are learning and whether or not you are growing as a person, as consciousness, and as soul in the process.

From the point of view of your soul, this is your learning center. Don’t squander it. Play with whatever “toys” you desire. Just know that their manifestation will be associated with the learning of something, at some time.

Just know that their manifestation will be associated with the learning of something, at some time.

Enjoy.

Life can be far more exciting, far more enjoyable, and far more wonderful than you could ever imagine.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Intention Campaign Index here…

Intention Campaigns

Articles & Links

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To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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Having Sex in Thailand while drinking beer, singing, dancing, playing and other worthwhile activities

This post is a newbie’s guide to having sex in Thailand. It’s a compilation of information that the interested reader can rely on to meet companions and have some fun with them. And by fun, I mean drinking alcohol, singing, dancing, exploring the local sights, eating the amazing food, and having sex with an attractive companion. You can find this information elsewhere on the internet, don’t you know, but here we are going to include it all in one place for your personal use.

Included herein for your personal use.

Please realize that I am not a “monger”. I am just a normal guy that likes pretty girls, exotic cultures, singing, dancing and drinking. And I believe that if you would rather sit in front of the boob-tube (television set) rather than have a pretty girl on your lap then you go ahead and do it. As they used to say in the United States “different strokes for different folks”.

Now, you can take this information and use it. Or you can read it and absorb it, and then forget it. Or, you can take what is provided herein and say “My! What an interesting place. I should go ahead and visit it. Yes, I think.”

Sex in Thailand

And so let’s talk about life in interesting places, with interesting people, doing interesting things.

The Sopranos GIF by Testing 1, 2, 3 - Find & Share on GIPHY

"People will always buy food, alcohol, drugs, coffee, and sex. A lot of men are stressed and want a release,"

-Loretta from Prostitutes tempt clients with deals. 
By KEITH LYNCH 13:34, Feb 27 2009

I like Thailand. It is everything that the USA isn’t.

“For me I live in Thailand and have done so for the past 3 and a half years and it remains the best decision of my life. 

But what is it really like to live in Thailand day in and day out is it like living anywhere else and does the attractions of what it was like as a tourist still alive or has it waned.

When you live here you don't do the elephant treks or the jet skis on the beach you work and live a life like you would anywhere else except for one difference for me at least you have a lot more sex!

For most of the guys that I know who live here their sex life improves 1000% and it doesn't matter how old you are in fact the older you are the more the improvement! (Good Site for Details)

And more than likely the majority of the guys reading this blog living in Thailand is about having as much sex as you can!”

-LivingThai

Ah, yes.  But it is true by all accounts.

Always uses a condom. Most younger men are not ethical in their whoring practices. This is very dangerous.  Listen to me; all it takes is to get the clap or gonorrhea just once, and spend a week in a hospital that will make you wear a condom for the rest of your life. (In addition, don’t try to look on the Internet for medicines and try to cure yourself.  No.  You go to a hospital.)

Getting an STD involves hospitalization if you get some of the more dangerous strains. Do not mess around. Wear a condom. 

Not only has Metallicman dealt with hospital stays for STD's, but also know more than a few fellow expats that caught HIV/AIDS while "having fun". Their stories are sad, sad, sad.

Wear a condom.

And while you are probably going to say that you have heard this all before, let me be the first to drive this point home to you, in the clearest and most forceful way that I can.

Wear a condom.

But with the proper precautions and attentions, you stay in Asia can be outstanding and just amazing.

The point being that Asian women have different cultural norms than American women have.  (Don’t believe me?  Read THIS.)

However, that does not mean that they aren’t female. They have needs, desires, feelings, and issues like any other normal person would. In all cases, if the man is 100% devoted to sexual pursuit, he will get it. However, he will live a shallow and lonely life.  It would be a life unfulfilled.

You do need some alcohol.

You do need some delicious and very tasty food.

You do need to have some fun activities.

The truth is that most men, aside from sex, NEEDS a companion.  This would be a person that they can share their life with. Indeed, some of my favorite times is just being at home with my family, drinking VSOP (or wine) and talking. Then comes the sex.  LOL!

Don’t drink too much – the biggest obstacle to knowing whether a bar girl really likes you or not is alcohol. Also when you get older, the booze inhibits the enjoyment of doing the deed. Finally, is it really fun to get shitfaced? (I don’t know, it doesn’t happen too much any more. The last time that happened to me was at a KTV in China where I drank an entire bottle of Hennesy by myself, and woke up with three nude girls.)

A man needs a companion…

Written by Steve Rosse. January 8th, 2014.

He sits at his desk and dreams about the girl with the French braid. It was the elaborate hair that caught his eye in the Safari Bar, but it was hearing her laugh that made him offer her a drink. It was two days in a room that contained nothing but a bed and a small refrigerator that has kept her at the front of his mind for a whole year.

She hangs onto the chrome pole and dreams about the man with the gap between his front teeth. He was more generous than most of the men who paid her for sex, but it was the fact that he was a little more clean, and a little more sober, that made her agree to go with him. It was two days in a room that contained nothing but a bed and a small refrigerator that has kept him at the front of her mind for a whole year.

His job is mundane and he does it without thinking about it. He shuffles the paper from one side of his desk to the other, makes the appropriate comments in meetings. His job is just what he does to pay the bills. His annual trips to Thailand are what he lives for. He’s had many women in Thailand (almost none at home) but when he’s daydreaming at his desk it’s always about the girl with the French braid.

Her job is mundane and she does it without thinking about it. Her job is just what she does to pay the bills. She shuffles her feet to the music and makes the appropriate comments to the men on their stools. Her annual trips home to Saphan Buri are what she lives for. She’s had many men in Bangkok (none at home) but when she’s daydreaming on the catwalk it’s always about the man with the gap between his front teeth.

He doesn’t really know why she stands out from the others in his memory. She was pretty enough, but other women were prettier. She was skilled in bed, but others were more skilled. There was just something about her, about the way she was so worried about messing up her braid. About how she folded her clothes so neatly before she got into bed. About how she actually seemed to mean it when she asked, “Was I good for you?”

She doesn’t really know why he stands out from the others in her memory. He was generous enough, but other men were more generous. His demands in bed were easy enough to satisfy, but other men’s were easier. There was just something about him, about the way he asked if he could do things before he did them. About how he discreetly tucked the money under her purse on the nightstand rather than just hand it to her. It was something about how he actually seemed to mean it when he asked “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

He shuffles his papers and jokes with the other guys in the break room. He pays his bills and does his shopping and watches TV. But he’s counting the days until his next trip to Thailand. He’s going for the whole month of April, when the air fares are cheapest. He’ll go back to the Safari bar and ask for the girl with the French braid. He wishes he could remember her name. She gave it to him once, at the bar when they met, but after that they were “Darling” to each other and he never thought to ask for it again.

She shuffles her feet and jokes with the other girls on the catwalk. She pays her bills and does her shopping and watches TV. But she’s counting the days until her next trip to Saphan Buri. She’s going for the whole month of April, for the Songkran holiday. She’ll sit on the bus and dream of the man with the gap between his teeth. She wishes she could remember his name.

It’s easy to love the “Land of Smiles”

Typical girl in Thailand.

Anyways, moving on…

“Some people have a hard time understanding relationships where the male is significantly older (decades),"what do they have in common" is a question you'll hear a lot and the answer is pretty simple. 

Not much at all.If a 45 year old wants to date a 19y/o Thai university girl then I see nothing wrong with that. 

In fact just a quick look on Thai Cupid and you'll find thousands of girls in their late teens with profile titles like "seeking Farang man 30-50". 

Most guys wet dream!

Do most guys care if they have anything in common? 

No. And that's fine because in most relationships whether they are close to each others age or not there's always compromise. 

If you want to have common interests then find a girl you work with.”

-Living Thai

Yes. 

To a young person, it seems all messed up. 

To an American, indeed, especially to an American woman it seems so disgusting.  Well, that is why you are still in America, and I am outside of it.

Anyways, here’s a nice rant directed at 20-something millennials who have strong opinions about what us “old farts” do with our life and time.

“Yeah, I'm supposed to sound like the jaded old guy I am.

But, OK pal...

... it's all great as you're a youthful stud who happens to be in Bangkok at the right time to meet Thai women...

...women, who've shed many of their cultural proscriptions against co-mingling with farang, and now have communication vectors making it convenient.

Let's hear from you in a decade or two.

After maybe, just maybe, you've been raked over the coals by an avaricious family and your former teeruk has her golden parachute, your DNA in her kids.

After you've grown weary of corruption / incompetence, built the house and learned you can't own the land.

(Where you've) seen your fortune dwindle and learned how merciless Thai courts can be when it comes to divorce proceedings.

Let's hope this doesn't happen – plenty of happy couples out there.

But in your mid-20s, you don't even know what the wringer looks like, let alone been through it. 

And yes, (you are correct) there are those whose chick magnet days are memories, who've been married / divorced / through the wringer yet we still want to enjoy life, intimacy, friendship and sex (OK, maybe not in that order).

We're not ready for the grave yet, we're just closer than you are. 

And we're not deluded that women in their 20s (or even 30s) will tumble all over us because we are shit-hot farang like you.

Guys in their 20s have no concept of life without mobile comms. 

The older guys will say, yeah, right on – the target audience will think, there's those old guys complaining about "the good old days" again. 

I've seen both ends.

Have you?”

-To the young’uns.

Ah Thailand.  A land of complex relationships, and are colorful and very interesting. There is all kinds of interesting things about relationships in Thailand.  Like this,

“If you just want to have sex with a bunch of Thai Girls then it's recommended you search for a farm girl. 

Maybe she works on a rubber plantation or rice plantation, maybe she works in an industrial area where everyone has a factory job. 

Sure these girls have no money but typically these kind of girls are easy to please eat 30 baht meals and know the only thing they have of value is their sex drive so they really turn it on.

This girl doesn't dress very well probably has bad looking toes but she's also 21y/o or younger and a super tight body. 

She doesn't use Tinder prefers Skout and has little English. 

She may even be a virgin or had very few partners. 

She was broken in by some Thai guy who left her shortly so if you're a white guy you're in because she's meeting you with a preconceived notion that if she has sex with you, you won't leave her.”

-LivingThai

Anyways, many (male) expats move to Thailand to “sow their wild oats”, and to enjoy the more wiley pleasures of the flesh.  That’s fine. Yet, Thailand has much to offer.  One of the benefits, or course, is that Thai girls are not American girls.

“What does Mr Bean have to do with getting more girls in Thailand?”

This is a great comment I found somewhere. It's interesting and worth a read.

I knew you’d ask what Mr Bean has to do with getting more girls in Thailand and it’s pretty simple. Thai’s love slapstick comedy.

Ever watched those boring Thai TV programs yeah they are a little funny but nothing compared to the Bean in fact I’m sure all those producers of Thai TV reels were first introduced to comedy through Mr Bean.

Mr Bean never says a word though which is yet another reason why you should learn the Bean way. He can be funny without using lines English or Thai, but they get the humor and they think he’s hilarious.

You know I’m from Australia and growing up in Australia meant either being or knowing the toughest people in the neighborhood, bully’s and thugs put a tight lid on anyone not conforming.

If you were gay you were teased, if your fat your teased, if you wore something like plastic fake pink bear claw flip flops with tight half jeans an orange tank top to the mall and walked into a mall shaving your tongue with a razor you’d be taken to the nearest hospital.

Here in Thailand however people would laugh with you and think your funny and cool.

And this is where Thai’s and Farang differ the most.

Farang will go up to one another and say “Fuck man you look like a total wanker” whereas Thais will go up to that person and say “Wow your funny and dressed different want to be my friend”.

Same reason why there are so many gays and lesbians in this country, in our country if you were gay at school you’d have a shit time because people who didn’t like that shit would tell you, however in Thailand they keep their difference in sex, dress, style to themselves, well mostly anyway.

I have no way of explaining the Thai reasoning behind this different as you can imagine trying to talk to a Thai about something in depth get’s you answers like “have you eaten yet?”. But it doesn’t really matter why but how to use Mr Bean to take advantage of this difference in cultures.

Mr Bean is the biggest playboy in Thailand

Be Stupid!

The more idiotic your actions the funnier it is to Thai’s, watch some re-runs of Mr Bean and get into his groove then go out and do repeat the same in public, people will come up to you.

Have you ever been to a mostly Thai nightclub in Thailand, everyone’s just kinda standing around waiting for something to do or look at.

Maybe it’s you they are waiting to look at, remember if it’s stupid funny and Thai people are looking at you that’s a good thing.

When my ex was working in Alcatraz Pattaya she comes home one night and tells me about this guy in her club. How he was doing all this stupid Mr Bean shit and the girls in the club were eating it up, all the girls were sitting around his table.

My next question is of course well how many drinks did he buy, she replies “none, but he so funny”.

He was doing shit like putting straws up his nose and walking around like a Walrus.

I’m sure if I did that with some mates around they walk away. But why were the girls all around. I decided to do some tests.

Test 1: I went to the “go go club” sat down, and bought a drink; didn’t smile

Test 2: Went to the club sat down bought a drink and smiled.

Test 3: Went to the club, sat down, bought a drink, and smiled, and waved some girls over.

Test 4: Went to the club, sat down, bought a drink, stuck two straws in my nose, and walked around like a chicken. When someone asked me where I’m from I turned into a kangaroo.

The results were surprising!

The first test was boring, I sat there drank the whole bloody drink and the only person who I spoke to was the waitress and that was very short.

The second test went a little better with getting more than short talk with the waitress and some girl come over and ask for a drink but still at 150 baht a beer and the crap show I still feel like I’d been ripped.

The third test which is what I normally do was much more fun had some drinks good time but was down about 1500 baht and really only touched one girl. I had fun but I wouldn’t do it every day.

The fourth test is something I would never normally do, in fact if you did this shit at the Doonside Pub in Western Sydney someone would come over and smack you in the head, and again don’t believe me go try that one yourself but I want video! So I walk into this GoGo club sit down get my drink put two straws in my nose and walk around like a chicken scratching my feet then sat back down. By the next hangover of girls on stage there were 5 girls around my table. Anytime they’d ask for a drink I’d just do something funny stupid from Mr Bean and they’d laugh after a while they stopped asking but wouldn’t go just wanted more stupid shit. I pretty much danced and felt up every one of those girls in the two hours and got two phone numbers I was there and left with a 240 baht check bin.

Sure this is only one test but it seems to work well in any nighttime entertainment venue in Thailand. The Mr Bean Playboy effect does have it’s use in Thailand and I’d imagine if the Bean himself came to Thailand he’d have more than all of us.

http://www.livingthai.org/why-mr-bean-is-the-biggest-playboy-in-thailand.html

No Sexual hangups

Ah, you’ve got to love Asia.

It’s not just Thailand. It’s China, Vietnam, Laos, the Phillippines. It’s everywhere.

“Love you long time” refers to overnight sex with multiple “shots”.
“Thai girls can go from 0-100 in a relationship very quickly. 

Typically there is no "will you be my boyfriend" it's pretty assumed that if you have sex that you are now in a relationship.

There should be at no point talking about how you're going to stick your cock down her throat. 

Instead if you want to know how randy she is after  a while of talking you can test the conversation by simply kidding with her like if she says "have you eaten yet?" reply "no, but I want to eat you 555". 

Unless she's a virgin she's going to fuck you anyway.95% of the girls that I meet up with have already decided they will have sex BEFORE they come to meet you. 

So really there is no need to discuss it, discussing it just makes her feel that that's all you're into.”

-Living Thai

Myths about Sex Workers

There are many myths about sex workers. 

Heck, if you believe the feminist social justice warriors around the world you would think that they are all uneducated, trapped, drugged and imprisoned young waifs. Ha! What a crock of bullshit.

Thailand’s sex tourism industry is polarizing and everyone from do-gooders and religious zealots with the most puritanical attitudes to sex tourists who travel the world looking for the cheapest bonk has an opinion.

These opinions are just that – opinions – often with no basis in fact, yet they are repeated to the point that many actually believe these myths to be facts.

Let’s go through these myths and tackle them one by one…

Myth #1 Thai bargirls are being forced against their will

Many believe that Thai bargirls are there against their will, are forced in to it / sex slaves / indentured and / or sold by their family.  Western sex tourists have long been aghast at the idea that working ladies may be there against their will and it is one reason why they tend to stick to the expat bar areas.

In the expat bar areas, girls are there of their own volition and can come and go as they please. 

They are free to leave the bar and spend the night with a customer. 

Contrast this with many Thai-style bars where everything happens on the premises. It may also be where the girls live. That creates doubt about whether she is free to come and go.

I don't think I can recall ever meeting a lady in an expat bar area who was there against her will, enslaved or sold to the bar by her family. Maybe it happened once upon a time, but I have never seen it with my own eyes. 

All the gals I know have a smartphone, and freely access their various social networks with it.

Note:

While I have had experiences with women for sex, the reader might feel uncomfortable with this idea.  After all, isn’t sex “dirty”? Well, it isn’t. And, people have been marketing sex for years.  

This can be for money by [1] one-on-one sexual romps or [2] being filmed engaging in sex for fun. 

Indeed, the reader might ask what it is like to be an actress in the porn industry. For a pretty decent article of what it is really like to work in the porn industry.  Hint – it’s all work. 

Go here; http://www.realclearlife.com/women/eva-lovia-what-it-takes-to-be-porn-star-today/
 

While it is a myth in terms of the bar areas for Western men, in the Thai bar areas, however, there may be some truth in it. Western Media “reports” suggest that this sort of thing was not uncommon in the past (note the use of the word suggest: many reporting on this issue have an agenda). Yes, there have been a few reports of families in the poorest regions of Thailand, often the rural north, selling their daughter to bar recruitment agents but how widespread it is, I just do not know.

Myth #2 There are 2 million prostitutes in Thailand.

The number of prostitutes in Thailand is high and no doubt runs in to 6 figures, but 2 million?

No chance!

2 million is roughly 6% of the total female population of Thailand. 2 million would be 17% of all females aged 18 – 40 (assuming most prostitutes are aged 18 – 40) – and there is no way that’s the case. (One in five females is a prostitute? Give me a break!)

The Thailand has 2 million prostitutes comment is often used by NGOs, religious groups and opponents of the industry to support their argument that prostitution is widespread in Thailand.

No,

It’s not that widespread.

Someone came up with this number a long time ago and it has been repeated ad nauseum by those with an anti-prostitution stance. Is it any wonder today that so many have become cynical about NGOs in the region working with underprivileged women when some are caught perpetrating these myths with outright lies.

Myth #3 The girls like what they do.

Comments that bargirls enjoy what they do is barstool banter and naughty boy forum talk. Outside of the naughty bars, no-one suggests the girls like it. 

A job is a job, is a job.

Little gets sex tourists more upset than being faced with the reality that the girls hate what they’re doing, and some come to hate themselves and turn to alcohol and / or drugs to deal with it.

The unusual thing about the myth that the girls like what they do – or at the very least that they don’t mind it – is that the girls themselves are at least partly responsible for this myth. They tell guys that they like their job – they can hardly tell a potential customer that they hate what they do, can they? That’s the last thing a guy with a conscience wants to hear!

Any Westerner who speaks Thai well or gets close to the girls soon learns that in apart from rare cases, the girls hate it. The girls like the money they make, but that’s all they like.

The money.

Myth #4 The girls like sleeping overnight in a customer’s hotel room.

Thais working in the bar industry often live with friends, colleagues or family.

For unmarried Thais, especially those from rural areas, communal living is the norm. It’s what they’re used to and how they are most comfortable. Half a dozen ladies may share a small room, a couple sharing the bed and the rest sleeping (quite happily) on the floor.

A customer staying in a nice hotel might reasonably believe that the lady he is with would prefer to stay in a swanky hotel room with a bathroom larger than her entire apartment, cool air-conditioning and a soft bed. That is seldom the case.

The reason bargirls may stay the night in a customer’s hotel room is simply because she can charge a higher fee if she stays all night.

Whether it is a 5-star hotel or Khao San Road flophouse, she is concerned about the cash in the morning, not the state of the room.

This myth would seem to be perpetrated by guys who appear to be trying to show they treat a lady well. What they don’t get is not only that most girls would rather stay in their own room with their friends (or boyfriend or husband), but that many girls are terrified of spending the night with a stranger, especially a foreigner who is bigger and stronger than she is, who might be a drinker and who could, if he so chose, do whatever he wanted to her.

Myth #5 The sex you pay for is cheaper than a regular date.

Some argue that sex with a prostitute is a sure thing and sex with a lady you date is not, and as such sex you don’t pay for can be costlier, both time-wise and in dollar terms. That may be the case in Farangland where it might take a few dates to hit a home run but most guys find they get to take her home much sooner in Thailand!

A few drinks in a bar for you and lady drink or two for her typically runs several hundred baht or more. Barfines average around 700 baht these days. A room in a short-time hotel is about 500 baht and most girls expect at least 2,000 baht. You’re looking at around 4,000 baht for a short-time with a Bangkok gogo girl. (Yes, it could be much cheaper but this would be about average.)

Compare that with a regular date in Bangkok. Dinner for two and drinks can be around 2,000 baht. You could do it for much less if you chose to. Starbucks seems to be the favorite and coffee followed by a movie is often followed by a romp.

The amount of money some guys report spending on a night out in a bar before taking a bargirl to the nearest short-time hotel far exceeds what I have ever spent on a first date. In Farangland you might get some action by the third date; in Bangkok she’s talking marriage by date #3!

Sex with bargirls in Thailand costs much more than sex with regular girls (and I bet sex with non-bar girls is much better too!)

Myth #6 Sex tourists are old, fat, bald dudes who can’t get laid in their homeland.

The old fat and bald stereotype has never held water. While not sex tourists per se, what we know as the expat bar industry today was born out of the Vietnam era when young, fit American soldiers were in Bangkok on R+R. A new sector of the Thai commercial sex industry was born.

These guys were anything but old, fat and bald!

Following the Vietnam War, sex tourists followed and no doubt some weren’t shining physical specimens, but photos from the bar industry in the early days show many looked slim and healthy.

These days the bar industry attracts the full gamut of men from young, fit and handsome guys to older, less healthy guys who may not be so easy on the eye.

Yes, the average age of sex tourists might be north of 50, but what surprises many mainstream visitors who check out Bangkok’s expat bar areas is that there are plenty of young, handsome guys in the bars – and they are participating!

The old, fat and bald myth usually comes from Western females…

… and Western is the critical word here because a Thai female would never say this.

Some Western women talk ill of sex tourists and use the only two weapons they have in the battle of the sexes – [1] guilt and [2] the withholding of sex. These women want to try and make men participating in the industry to feel guilty about what they are doing because they don’t want the guys to be getting easy sex as that greatly limits their own options.

Sex tourism has become a lifestyle choice for a wide cross-section of men, some of who simply find they prefer meeting women and attending to their manly needs that way.

Myth #8 Escorts are a higher class.

Think of “escort” and you probably think of a higher class of woman who is not just – perhaps even not necessarily – a sex partner, but someone you can take to business functions and someone who you can present to others.

If your work life is important to you, don’t make that mistake in Bangkok!

There has been an explosion of escort services in Thailand in recent years. Most come and go in very much the same vein as bars come and go – no surprise given that some of the escort service owners had previously tried and failed with a bar.

Most Bangkok escort services are not escort services in the traditional sense. Rather, most Bangkok escorts are simply sex workers you can book online. Rather than going to a gogo or other bar, you can simply get online, make a booking and an hour or two later you will get a knock on the door.

Many of the ladies working as escorts in Bangkok previously worked in other sectors of the industry. Many once (or even still) were on the freelance circuit, and some were gogo dancers.

Myth #9 The economy would fail if the farang bar areas closed.

When things don’t go the way that some sex tourists feel they should, such as drinks prices increasing, bars closing early and attitudes and service levels in the industry deteriorating, some say they may choose not to visit Thailand which would cause the industry to go in to decline and which in turn would see the tourism fail because visitor numbers plummeted. This would have a dire effect on the economy, they reckon.

The sector of the bar industry for foreigners is a very small part of the tourism industry and a tiny part of the greater economy. Granted, Pattaya might face challenges if its nightlife industry was to fail, but even in Sin City the tourism industry is greatly diversified from 10 years ago.

Sex tourism makes up a very small part of Thailand’s economy and a big chunk of it does not even show up in GDP numbers. If the entire sex tourism industry was to close down, it would barely register a blip economically. Real estate would be turned over and new businesses would be created – and they’d probably pull in more money than the bars do.

In terms of the Thai economy as a whole, sex tourism is infinitesimal.

Sex Prices

“’…We all know why men choose to live in Thailand – to satisfy their sexual appetites with women who are expected to behave in ways that appease the broken egos of men unable, or unwilling, to deal equally with empowered women, in societies that do not condone their sexual exploitation…’

I read a lot of comments like this on places like Reddit. 

That men only move to Asia for ‘submissive’ women, and / or because we can’t get high quality women in our home countries. Like I said maybe there’s some 10% truth to that, but some act like it’s 100%.

I’d just apply Occam’s razor and look for the simple reasons...

[1] girls here are more friendly,
[2] less fat, 
[3] they like men more 
[4] and want a relationship / family instead of chasing careers, 
[5] and you can live better for the same amount of money.”

-NomadPhilippines

 

Since this is the most commented upon section of this website …

Seriously! – not world-line travel, not my brief time in the US Navy, it’s questions about sex in Thailand.  Interesting stuff, certainly but not that overwhelmingly controversial.

let’s spend some time getting down into the “nitty gritty” regarding this fun pastime. 

I must remind the reader that sexual liasians in Thailand is a popular occupation for some, it is however representative of only a small part of what Thailand has to offer. What Thailand is really about is much more than just sex, food, family and fun.

It’s about freedom.

Woo! Woo!

+ + +

The following is from a Thailand blog called Livingthai. There are many different types of Thai prostitutes and then you’ve got “normal girls” which also have a price as well, here is the list:

Thai Go Go Girl

Current standard prices for short time with a go go girl is 2000 baht long time is 3000 baht.

Short Time = One sex usually under an hour with one ejaculation.

Long Time = Overnight sex sleepover. Multiple ejaculations.

This is on top of the cost of a few drinks you will have to buy her whilst in the club. The cost of Lady drinks differs from venue to venue, but an average is 130 baht.

Think of it is you paying for her time, and getting a priority spot in a lineup of guys waiting in line.

Buying a "lady drink" is different than a "barfine".

A go go bar has a number of Thai bar girls working who you can barfine and sleep with. You simply choose the girl, pay the barfine and leave with her. This means if a girl doesn’t like you, if you pay the barfine you can take her home.

A "barfine" is the "price of admission" to have sex with the girl you select.

(Granted if you do this you’ll most likely have a bad experience and terrible time, but nevertheless you can still take her home.) There are times when it was quite obvious the girl did not want to leave with a customer but had no choice because of the mamasan.

Thai Go-go girls.

In general, you should buy her a drink and get to know her a little more.

You’ll know within 15 minutes or so if she really likes you or not, if you’re still unsure you could just go ahead and ask:

“Do you like me, would you be okay if I barfined you?”

Don’t be shy, they’ve heard it a 100 times.

[1] You buy her a "lady drink" and get to know her. This is the price you pay for her wasting time with you.

[2] If you and her are fine, you can "barfine" her. This registers her as "your companion" and you have "dibs" on what you can do later on.

Although these are always negotiable depending on the feeling you get from the girl but these are standard prices. Bar Fines for the go go are going up though where is used to be 600 is now 800 and some places on Walking Street Pattaya are charging 1000 baht before midnight.

The good thing about pricing of Go Go girls is all the girls ask the same price in the same shop. So if you pick the best looking girl you’re actually getting a good deal.

“This is a lesson for anyone who bar fines a girl long time, even if you've agreed on everything your going to do you should always get a receipt. 

Anytime you bar fine a girl for more than one night you must get a receipt. 

Most go go bars are oblivious to this as well and think it's strange that you even want a receipt. 

But without a receipt you have no proof that you paid more than just the day for the girl! 

This happens more often than you'd think as the girls either change their mind or they have a better customer in town.”

It’s interesting stuff, for sure.  It’s a life that I am not part of.  I don’t know if I could be part of it. Never the less, it’s pretty interesting.

Here’s a story about dealing with a chick that they wanted to have a threesome with…

“I'm finding her reason for not staying kinda suspicious but getting a Thai girl to tell the truth is like trying to get water out of a rock. 

My girlfriend suspects the same thing and we demand to hear the truth but she continues to lie and my girl it outraged now and starts hitting this girl and while I break it up she grabs her phone and our suspicion is confirmed one of her customers is in Hua Hin and she wants to go meet up probably because he's paying more money than we will, whatever.

I tell her to get the hell out before my girl puts her in a coma and she asks to be paid in full. 

Hahaha geez the hide of these girls. 

Man my girl goes bat shit now and I try to calm her down and say that i'll pay for the 2 nights minus the bar fine of 2 nights which comes to a grand total of 1700 baht. 

Now she's angry cause she gets like 800 baht a night to come with us when she could have stayed another night can get the 6000 which she just won't have any part of it. 

So I have to pay the money now cause my girl refuses to and we kick her out.”

Interesting stuff. But, nothing that I personally experienced.

Coyote Girls

Go Go Girls are not “coyote dancers”.

The top of the tree for Pattaya is the Coyote girls, these are regarded as the crème de la crème of the working girls in Pattaya.

Although strictly speaking not all of these show girls are working, but the majority are willing to top up their incomes with extra activities.

Coyote’s are show girls, exceptionally beautiful and talented. They are hired into the Go Go bars on a nightly basis and are paid a lot more than your usual Go Go dancer. They perform set shows at designated times and are designed to entice the customers into the clubs.

A simple rule of thumb is that “coyote dancers” are supposed to perform best on the dance floor.

Gogo girls save their best performances for the bedroom.

Gogo girls dress skimpily and dance to promote themselves in the hope that someone will barfine them, take them away so they can make some money. Gogo dancers are primarily sex workers. They wear a bikini, or less.

Coyote dancers are entertainers who dance and are supposed to be able to really shake it on the dance floor. They typically wear short shorts and sexy tops – more than a bikini.

They are primarily dancers i.e. entertainers, but they may be available.

May.

It varies from bar to bar, girl to girl.

Coyote dancers are entertainers who dance and are supposed to be able to really shake it on the dance floor.

Coyote dancers are a relatively recent thing, first introduced around the middle of last decade. Prior to that they basically didn’t exist in gogo bars. Now they are a common sight and today perhaps 1/3 or more of gogo bars feature coyote dancers.

The reasons for bars hiring coyote girls are numerous; primarily it’s because bars just cannot find pretty girls to recruit these days. Recruiting used to be easy, but with Thailand’s economy now more diverse, more developed, with compulsory education increased from 6 to 9 years and the country experiencing full employment, girls have more options these days and don’t have to resort to bar work.

Being the top of the tree usually means these girls cost a lot more than your average.

They are extremely well paid by the clubs and can easily make more in a night, what most Thai girls make in a week. As such they can afford to be choosy with which customers they go with, if any at all.

The girls can afford to be choosy.

Expect the bar fine to be at least double that of any other Go Go dancer and a minimum of 3,000 baht. On top of that the fee negotiated between you and the girl depends on many factors, such as the chemistry between you, whether she fancies you, or even whether it is high season or not. Yes even Go Go dancers are subjects of the economic forces of supply and demand. It is not uncommon for these girls to want another 3000 baht for short time, or 5000 baht upwards for overnight.

Coyote girls are slim, young, attractive, can really dance and whose role it is to entertain. Right? So why is it that in bars from Walking Street to Patpong, Cowboy to Nana, and even Sukhumvit soi 33 there are coyote girls who are available?! 

Fake Coyotes

Now for some confusion…

A few farang bars term their dancers “coyotes”.

The girls are done up as you would expect a coyote to be done up – in cut-off shorts and tight top. But, and it’s a big but, they don’t dance any different to a gogo dancer. Secrets in Pattaya, a hostess bar, calls its dancers “coyotes” and charges a premium barfine for them, a concept that has been replicated in Pattaya. The barfine for a coyote girl is 1,000 baht, higher than for a hostess – a girl who is available but does not dance. So in Secrets, the coyote girls are the dancers, but they’re not professional or accomplished dancers and in other venues they would be considered gogo girls wearing a coyote’s outfit.

To confuse things further, there are venues with both gogo dancers and coyotes. Examples would be Club Electric Blue and The Arab’s bars in Soi Cowboy. In each of these bars, gogo dancers and coyotes are available.

And then there are bars which have both gogo girls and coyote girls, where the gogo girls are available, but the coyotes are not! Tilac in Soi Cowboy is a good example where the coyotes cannot be barfined.

So no need to be confused…

  • Real coyotes will look great and dance great.
  • Fake coyotes will just look great, but cannot dance.
  • They always make more than a stand-grade “go go” girl.

Showgirls

There are also showgirls. Showgirls are employed in gogo bars to perform choreographed and practiced shows in the likes of Angelwitch, Long Gun, Billboard and Las Vegas. The showgirls perform shows which are more elaborate. Showgirls may or may not be available and if they are, again, a premium barfine is placed on them.

Basically, gogo dancers, showgirls and coyote dancers are all different.

In Bangkok they are called coyotes, but in Pattaya the term you hear more often is “agency girls”. Because, after all, they work for an agency.

Bar girls trying to lure customers into the bar.

Lure away girls.  You can chat with me.  For one thing I’d tell you not to leave the sticker price on the bottom of your high-heels.  Especially when the sole of the shoe is red.  It really looks awful. Otherwise, I’d be happy to pay your bar fine.

Thai Bar Girl

Beer bars can be found all over the city, they are everywhere. The term pretty much refers to any open air bar anywhere in Pattaya. The girls here are not employed as dancers or show girls, but as waitresses. This doesn’t mean they are not available to bar fine, as pretty much all of them are.

The standard of girl really varies from bar to bar, but little diamonds can be found all over the city. When girls first arrive in Pattaya, most will start of working in a bar, before moving up to the Go Go’s or working as Coyote’s. Bars are also where the older ladies work when they have past their Go Go stage.

Bar girls are always a good choice for those on a budget but want to feel safer with going with a Thai bar girl instead of a Street Walker. Girls cost 1000 baht short time and 1500 long time again these prices are negotiable. An average bar fine will cost 300 baht and a lady drink will be around 100 baht.

“Working at a beer bar, the pay is very lousy. 

Typically a Thai bar girl would make only 6000 baht a month, and to make that they need to get customers to buy them at least two drinks, normally the first two drinks that the girl gets she doesn't get any money for, after that though she normally gets a very high percentage of the profit of the drink, they normally just get an orange juice this way they can get more money. 

The amount of money she gets working at a bar is very dismal, she may as well be working in a factory and could make more money than that. 

However as a factory worker she can't get someone to pay her 1000 baht for the night now can she? 

The bar fine you pay, usually she gets a small cut of that, and the money you negotiate with her she keeps 100% off it. If a Thai bar girl can go with a John every night (impossible because of periods) she can make a good amount of money, actually more money than any English teacher in Thailand could make. 

Overall the beer bar and Thai bar girl can make money handsomely if she is a hard working. But have you ever seen a hard working Bar Girl....no.”
Bar girl from Scooter’s Bar.

The reason why you pay more for a Go Go girl is because you get a better look at her body, watch out for Thai Bar girls you don’t know what you’re going to get…

Yikes!

Thai Bar Girls

Some interesting video links;

Thai Karaoke Girl (KTV girls)

Not every Karaoke has girls to take home and because of this scarcity and this contributes to the whole G-Club feel of Thai Karaoke .  Not only that, but the prices have increased considerably while only a few years ago it cost 1500 for a girl overnight prices are now around 3000 baht (all in).

The overall impression that I get is that KTV is just as popular in Thailand as it is in China, however it’s use as a venue for obtaining girls is not as popular. In China, Business KTV’s with 300 to 400 hostesses is common everywhere.  However, in Thailand, if you want a girl (for private sexual fun) you would try other venues.

Thai Street Hookers

It’s still possible to get the 500 baht Thai hooker off the street but like everything else prices are going up. Most street walkers now ask for at least 1000 baht off the bat if they are in OK condition, better looking girls might ask for more but the general cost is 700 baht short time.

Soapy Massage Girls

The cost of a Soapy Massage around the country is a standard 1600 baht for what they call Models. In most major cities around the country this is what they cost. But if you want a soapy massage in Bangkok as a Farang you’re going to pay more. But when you pay more you’re expected to get more and some of the Bangkok Soapy Massage Parlors you’ll pay more like 5000 baht. The best value for money soapy mass parlors are in Pattaya.

Colonze 2

Some of the most expensive soapy massage girls in all of Thailand can be found at the Colonze 2 soapy massage parlor in Bangkok with prices going up to 20,000 baht for a few hours! Why because they have the hottest girls of any place in Bangkok. This place is also Farang friendly and should be no surcharge.

Emmanuelle

If your looking for a Best Happy Endings Massage in Bangkok experience then the one place I suggest is Emmanuelle! There is now Casanova at the same place which is Thai style karaoke and coyote joint something I enjoy more than the actual massage, rooms here are awesome! Price range 2500-6000 baht.

Colonze 4

This is a very popular chain soapy house you won’t find any penthouse models at this bad boy but it does have good value for money and the girls are very capable, not looking for 5 star then this is the place to go! Prices start 1600 – 3000 baht makes this place good value for money.

Angelina

An older Thai style soapy massage parlor in the Bangkapi area of Bangkok prices are very reasonable starting at 1300 up to about 2600 for the sideline girls. Open from 1pm till midnight every day. There is no extra charge for Farang! There are some cute girls here but nothing outstanding.

La Belle

This is a soapy massage parlor that caters mostly to the Japanese clientele well so I’m told I’ve never been here before and their website doesn’t have much in the way of costs so I’m guessing that’s a sign that they have more than a 2 tier pricing structure which isn’t really fair especially for guys that live here.

Viva Palace

Another Thai style soapy massage with decent prices starting from 1900 up to 3000 baht. I don’t know how old this place is but the rooms are kinda warn in so don’t expect a 5 star room but then again your not paying 5 star prices either. Helps if you speak Thai here the girls don’t speak much English at all. But I will say this the girls here are young and good looking for the price.

ลีลาวดี

You won’t find this bad boy on any other Farang website actually this place has the same name as my favourite Karaoke in Chiang Mai! Pronouced Lee Lah Wadee also the name of a famous Thai Soap Opera they actually have Karaoke available here as well. Honestly the girls are a little country here but if you like that then this is your place!

Meree

The girls here are cheap but the room isn’t included you can ask for different rooms girls are 1300-200 baht but rooms start at 1000 baht but are definitely worth it, weired lounge area with band playing kinda like karaoke but it isn’t, still great place and some really good looking girls.

Catherine

Nice clean place this soapy massage parlor has a good reputation in the Thai community well run and fair prices starting from 1700 up to 3000 baht for sideline girls. The bathroom although it has granite tiles has a cheap ass jacuzzi that is well worn. I’d give this place a 7 out of 10.

Amsterdam

This place looks straight out of France and the prices might be as well starting at 2600 up to 6000 baht the place is brilliant and the girls are gorgeous! This is one of my must see recommendations for a soapy massage in Bangkok. You’d think this place would have a website but I couldn’t find one anyone know what it is?

Poseidon

Voted the Best Soapy Massage in Bangkok but most though I don’t like the place because they charge Farang an extra 1000 baht just for the services yet they still have some of the best girls in the businesses. Because of the extra charge I won’t go there but guys have told me half the girls there are just going through the motions and you’ll get a robot experience.

Caesars Entertainment complex

Located right near the Poseidon club and roughly the same prices is the Caesars entertainment complex and soapy / spa massage. Definitely take a model here if your coming if you want the cheaper girls you may as well go elsewhere you might find something better for the same deal.

La De’fense

Strangest name for a soapy massage that I ever did see. This place has a lounge area with girls as well as a traditional fish bowl. The girls in the lounge are hotter in my opinion but you can also ask the guy for an album and he’ll bring you out an album full of girls. The centre of the room is dim while two of the four walls are brightly lit. In these brightly lit areas sit the girls, in what is sometimes referred to as a fish bowl. Fish bowls often have tiered seating on which sit beautifully made-up Thai women in evening wear. Fish bowls are typically enclosed with glass separating customers outside from the ladies inside.

One final note about Soapy Massage parlours in Bangkok and Thailand in General is you have to think about how many guys go to these places and all the guys aren’t like you and I some are real freaks, some guys have some nasty diseases and some guys force the girls to not wear a condom! Make sure you protect yourself by wearing a condom and not going down on the girl. It’s still possible to catch something though so use these services at your own risk.

Soapy massages and nuru massages work by you choosing the girl from a list or fish bowl. The girl cannot reject you (usually). The good thing is that some of these shops allow you to drink a beer and even talk to the girls. In fish bowl situations girls that do like you will keep giving you smiles which is a good sign.

How a soapy massage works…

If you’ve never tried a soapy massage before then this is what it is all about;

Bath

For starters, typically a bath is run where they clean your entire body, of course they clean themselves as well, then it’s to the mattress where she lathers you down in soap suds and massages you with her naked body, sliding up and down you quickly and with a scary confidence.

Massage

Then you will head over to an air mattress where she will give you a sexy body to body massage rubbing her naked body all over yours. This is the type of thing that stands out in soapy massage porn videos. Pro tip: make sure you always ask if the Thai massage girl you choose will do body to body at any soapy massage parlor in Bangkok you visit. Some girls don’t do this part, if you are expecting it to happen make sure you choose on that does it. She will probably finish the body to body with a blowjob, then she will dry you off.

Sex

The best part is also the easiest to describe.  After the massage, they will clean you up and dry you off and head to the bed where you get to have sex.

Online Escort

Typical costs for an Escort off the internet in Bangkok and Chiang Mai is usually around 5000 baht for 2 hours and they will come to your hotel room. I recommend these good hotels in bangkok to take the girl to. The convenience of an escort online and the appeared anonymity is attractive. However most of these girls work out of the go go bars in Chiang Mai which is often just cheaper to go to. I recommend however you check out Smooci.com which has some of the best priced escorts in all of Thailand.

Other sites;

Thai Brothel Worker

Typically Thai brothels are aimed at those on a budget, real dirty mongers like these places  and I’m not sure why I don’t see more Indians in these places. The girls in these places are typically not of Thai origin they are usually Burmese, Laos, or Cambodian. Short time in these places means 40 minutes and for that you’ll typically pay 300-500 baht.

Short time girl

The current going rate for short time girls are 700 baht which typically includes the cost of the room.

Massage Girl

Massage girls are more known for getting blow jobs than they are for having sex but if you met one and wanted to go for it and she allows it then the fee is typically 1,000 to 1,500 baht per shot.

One of the best Massage in Bangkok and Nuru massage specialists is Club 102 near BTS Phrom Phong on Sukhumvit Soi 24. You can pretty much find happy ending massage joints anywhere but a 5 star massage where girls don’t look like granny with perfect surroundings you’d think you were back home in a 500 dollar joint without the 500 dollar price tag.

Thai Massage girls.

Bar Freelancer

As far as working girls go in Pattaya, freelancers are a mixed bunch. They range from the younger Thai girls who don’t want to work in a beer bar or Go Go, but instead punt themselves over internet apps such as Badoo. To the older or less attractive girls who can’t get jobs in the bars or clubs.  Even those Thai ladies who have regular jobs will often top up their incomes with a little freelance work.

Punting for freelance girls in Pattaya is a bit like playing the lottery, there is no set standard and you have no idea what you will end up with.

The best of the freelance girls are either generally those who are too shy to work in the bars and clubs, or those with normal 9-5 jobs looking to top up their income. The best place to find these is on the internet, there are now many apps such as Badoo and other Thai dating apps where they will have profiles.

Many of the nightclubs on Walking street will be packed with freelancers most evenings, looking to hook up for the evening. In the clubs you will generally meet the younger freelance girls. The best club to pick up great looking freelance girls is Insomnia on Walking street.

Pattaya beachroad is probably the most famous freelance hangout in all of Pattaya, and here you can find ladies and the odd ladyboy most evenings after sunset. Be warned Pattaya beach road generally attracts the lower end of the market, both punter and lady. Pattaya beach is also regularly raided by the police, and is also a well known place for tourists to be scammed. Our advise is steer well clear of the girls on beach road.

A bar Freelancer has the same price has a regular Bar Girl which is 300 baht bar fine and 1000 baht short time and 1500 baht long time. It is not uncommon for some of the girls, especially in the clubs to not want paying at all, but you would have to be extremely lucky for this to happen.

Links;

Sideline Girls

Sideline girls also known as Dek Thai Sideline Girls can be found everywhere in fact you may even be with one but you don’t even know it. There are reports that Sideline girls are considered to be more attractive than typical Thai girls because they have lighter skin color.  That means they are more white than tan in color. Sometimes Sideline girls will have sex for free in the hope that they will get something else out of it perhaps clothes and makeup or a new Iphone. Sideline girl prices are average 1000 baht short time.

Thai Sideline Girls

Internet Sideline Girls

Internet Sideline girls are ones that need money asap in order to pay for rent or schooling and/or family. They typically don’t do it full time only when they need money and they usually ask for 2000 baht but some of the better looking girls will ask for 3-4000 baht.

Club Slut

There are a lot of “club sluts” in Thailand and can be typically found around the tourist areas or clubs that tourists frequent.

Nightclubs are great hunting spots because girls come here after work on their own accord and have the power to say no. However, there are times when a mamasan will bring her girls to such clubs. You’ll usually know if the girl has a boss because when you discuss price she will pass the information on to the mamasan who makes the final choice, you’ll see a lot of ear whispering and the mamasan may even talk to you directly.

If you can read situations you’ll also be able to notice who the mamasan is in their group, she is usually the oldest one, isn’t drinking and happens to be fat more often than not… and yes may be able to sleep with her too.

Thai University Girls

Thai University girls don’t have a lot of money, you remember being a student you probably didn’t have much money either. There are many Thai University girls that are willing to be sponsored.

Sponsorship typically costs around 10,000 baht a month but can be as cheap as paying for her accommodation. Really good looking girls can cost as much as 30,000 baht a month to keep. But not all Thai University girls are about money, many if not most are open or trying different experiences and are happy to have sex without any monetized reward.

Thai  Mall Workers

Thai mall workers can be lots of fun and very down to earth, they are typically well behaved and diligent. There jobs are boring and they come alive if you show them the right attention. While most are willing to go for free they would love nothing better than to quit their jobs and move in with you. Cost 10,000 baht a month.

Thai Factory Workers

Factory workers are only a step down from the Mall Worker. She probably didn’t finish high school like the Mall girls did and lives way out of town with few opportunities. These girls are cheaper at 6,000 baht a month to move in permanently. At first you might not realize that you’ll have to pay because she’s a normal Thai girl. But they all change after they start thinking there is more to the relationship.

Thai Hiso Girl

Let’s be honest, you can’t afford a Thai Hiso Girl, real Hiso you’re really not going to touch but the Bangkok Upper middle Class girls are bored and want to try slumming it with a Farang. Hiso girls are then typically free if you’re looking at a one night stand, longer term relationships could also be free and she pays for you but at some point if you don’t have the money she will leave for a Hiso Thai guy.

Tom

There are a few Tom clubs in Bangkok and Pattaya catering to the Thai lipstick lesbians who like their men to be women. Typically the Bar Fine on at a Tom club is 500 baht and for the Tom is 1000 baht.

Gik

Gik sex is always the best sex, you don’t get to see each other often and you both know that the whole basis of the relationship is to fuck each other. Gik in English is difficult to translate but for our purposes it just means “Thai fuck buddy”.

Giks are almost exclusively Free but they expect their noodles and movies. If you live in Thailand you’ll probably have sex with a dozen different giks before settling down with a Mia Noi.

Mia Noi (Mistress or second wife)

If you get fully entrenched into Thai Life then you’ve probably already married and possibly have some kids. At this point if everything is going good and you have the money you get yourself a Mia Noi.

A Mia Noi will cost you anywhere from 15,000 baht a month to 100,000 baht, if you have a Mia Noi you probably have a few Giks as well.

Best places for sex in Thailand

The guide continues with suggestions on location.

Bangkok

Bangkok has the most sex going on in Thailand, it’s also home to the best gentlemen’s clubs[i] in all of Thailand and the best soapy massage parlors[ii] as well. But probably what most expats and even tourists on a month long holiday realize that the dating sites in Thailand are jam packed with Thai girls from Bangkok and when you sign up it makes you wonder why anyone wants to pay for it.

Pattaya

Pattaya bar street.

While Bangkok has more sex available those who come to Thailand and have visited both places still say that Pattaya is the sex Capital of Thailand. This is probably because of the huge number of beer bars and go go bars located along the 4km stretch of beach which are also lined with many Thai Hookers and Prostitutes.

Be careful while in Thailand.

However, the Thailand government has taken steps to change that image;

“The article in the UK Daily Mirror last month, which claimed without evidence that one in five women in Pattaya were prostitutes, has certainly ruffled some feathers in senior Thai bureaucracy.  Normally, criticism of Thailand in the foreign popular press is ignored, so what is different this time is not clear.  Perhaps it was the wide discussion of the article by Thais in the social media, commenting that the Daily Mirror was not telling them anything new.  Or maybe the military-appointed Pattaya City Hall management felt it had to act.”

Phuket

Phuket, Thailand. Looks a little bit like my home in Zhuhai, China.

Patong on Phuket Island in Thailand’s south has a unique feel that you don’t get anywhere else in Thailand. Maybe it’s the smell of the beach that makes the girls in Phuket so horny or the smell of opportunity and tourist dollars but the Sex scene in Phuket is wild. However, you had best take your credit card because this is one place where the sex is cheap, but living isn’t.

Chiang Mai

Chang Mai

People who pass through Chiang Mai on a few days expecting there to be a huge party scene that’s easy to follow and understand are going to be disappointing  Sex in Chiang Mai is not as in your face as elsewhere in the Thailand. But don’t be fooled, those living in Chiang Mai know that if you know how to chase Thai Tale and live there you can get all sorts of free sex especially with the huge University presence.

Conclusion

This is your Metallicman “how to / go to” guide for a good time in Thailand. It might be out of date, as I only visit the land of Smiles on occasion. The point here is that this world is quite different than your life in the States, isn’t it?

You bet.

Angry boss, crazy taxes, upsetting news, insane demands by the opposite sex. Well it doesn’t have to be that way. You can leave.

You.

Can.

Leave.

A real man defines his life on his terms.

Never, ever forget that. If your life is not on par with your desires, then change the script. While “Forrest Gump” might say “life is like a box of chocolates”, I am here to tell you that you can choose the box.

Choose the box you want to live in.

Tell the rest of the world to go fuck themselves.

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Expat stories of Thailand “The Land of Smiles”

After reading my post on "Snapshots of life in China. Surprise! It doesn't look anything like Alex Jones says it is.", Ohio Guy commented that he is falling in love with China, but he is trapped in that God-forsaken mess known as the United States. Well, that response got me to thinking.

People who have gone to other nations, and who have seen how other nations do things, they have pretty much concluded that the "Exceptional America - the Land of the Free" is all pretty much FUCKED UP. And they have written about their impressions and thoughts on this matter.

Here are some stories from expats who have lived in Thailand.

I have collected some of the more interesting stories and decided to post them here. Indeed, it’s a tough call on which to accept and which to discard. They are all so very good. As such, there are pages and pages of this.  I have just included this choice selection to “round off the corners” for the interested reader.

Beware of other expats

First off, whether you are in Thailand or in any other Asian nation, beware of other expats…

“The biggest "rip offs" I've seen and encountered have been perpetrated by expats on other expats. My best friend here is a 76-year-old Thai man and his family who have always shown me more generosity and kindness than I could ever possibly repay. On the dark side, one so-called expat "friend" actually had someone email me his fake obituary to avoid repaying loans I had made to him. I kid you not!”

-Stickman

I can certainly vouch for that.  Ouch!  In fact, I no longer meet other expats for a coffee or informal talk. It’s simply not worth my time of day. Most are sadly pathetic. Not all, mind you. Just a lot of them. What I mean is that quality of what one would expect is rather low. 

I just received a friend request on one of the expat forums.  This guy is going to visit China for a week and wants to sit down with me and talk about tax and investment strategies with me over coffee.  

LOL. 

I told him I didn’t have any money. None. 

He responded “how can that be, how are you going to help the poor people?”. 

Ugh!  

What planet is he on? 

He wants me to trust him, a total stranger, with my money. He expects me to let him fly in, buy him coffee, give him money, and let him fly away with it...

I have met more than my fair share of young bright-eyed teachers, interns, and students on travel for the “experience”.

Interspersed with this group are the grubby tattooed covered “carnies” who now go by the moniker of “backpacker”. 

Carny or carnie is a slang term used in North America for a carnival employee. It also refers to the language they use, particularly when the employee runs a "joint" (booth) (i.e. a "jointie), "grab joint" (food stand) , game, or ride (i.e. a "ride jock" or "ride operator") at a carnival, boardwalk or amusement park. The term "showie" is used synonymously in Australia.

Give me a break .  They are just nomadic beggars without a home.

The older expats, for the most part are better. 

They are typically trying to make a new life abroad, whether it is part of a retirement concept, or just out of raw need.  They tend to be a little desperate. It’s tough starting out on scratch in your 50’s or later. 

The problem is that within this mix of desperate “good guys” are a significant number of experienced fraudsters.  I’ve had more than my fair share of bad experiences, thank you.

British conman Tony Kenway, 39, was shot twice in the head as he climbed into his Porsche in Pattaya in January. Police believe the hit was arranged by a rival underworld figure. 

The Times reported that Kenway was one of ten shady UK mafia figures operating in Pattaya. 

At the time of his murder, he had been out on bail and was scheduled to front court the following month.

“Tony Kenway had a call center that employed foreign staff and made calls to Australia and Britain. He had two different companies that were involved in the scam,” an unnamed police source told The Sun. 

“The aim was to get people abroad to give their life savings. It was not small amounts. He was strong and pushed them for big investments. He promised them a big win. Like winning the lottery. The people who paid the money lost out. It was big amounts, millions and millions of Thai baht that many different people paid to him.”

The source said Kenway’s victims were foreigners because he “did not dare” target local Thais.

(https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2711874/british-businessman-tony-kenway-shot-thailand-boiler-room-scam/)

Luck comes your way…

When you live in an area for some time, opportunities come and go.  Some are quite noteworthy. For instance, here’s a “lucky guy” and his story;

“I went to a club on Soi 11 a few months ago and a mamasan who runs a massage shop I know well was there. 

She invites me to her table, buys me and my friend unlimited drinks for the next 3 hours and then tells me I can sleep with any of the girls on her table for free, oh and if I don’t like the girls that I can go visit her shop tomorrow and sleep with anyone who is there, again for free. 

The more I live in this social circle the more I realize how truly free I am. 

There are fewer hang-ups compared to other circles which have stupid ass logic and taboos.”

-Afarangabroad

As always, please have fun.

One of the things that I do happen to know is how to dance. In fact, I was involved in semi-professional ballroom dancing for over five years.  So I can dance a spell, and all women, no matter where they live can follow.  They really can. Even if they don’t know the dance moves, they can instinctively follow.  It’s truly amazing that women have this innate ability to follow in dance.

“Does sanuk (fun and the pursuit of fun) trump money in Thailand? 

You know, it just may. 

Talking with a friend who does not like to pay for lady drinks and considers them an unnecessary expense, he has found a way of keeping the girls with him when they're not up on stage yet not buying them a drink, or at the very most, buying just one. 

He dances with them right in the bar – and they love it – probably because he's a decent dancer. 

They forget all about the lady drinks because they are having so much fun – and the other girls in the bars seem envious. 

Yes, it would seem that sanuk really does trump money, even for the ladies of the night.”

-Stickman

What about visitors?

Ah.  You live in an interesting place.  Everyone wants (or at least say they want) to visit and stay a while. Oh, it sounds so nice.  But, is it really? What about when your friends actually come to visit?

“You didn’t mention, when a friend arrives in Bangkok with his GF, it’s a big pain in the ass for me too. 

I have to entertain him and his bird in a non-threatening environment, often for up to 3 nights in a row, even more when they return from the islands or up north.

So we sit in some artsy gaff in Ekkamai sipping overpriced cocktails and discussing the weather, I get flashes of us beering it up at some dive full of sexpots only he could dream of. 

Add to that the rules in most lap dance joints back home, you cannot touch. 

If you do you’d risk a team handed beating off the bouncers. 

In Bangkok he can touch and even get to sleep with these young vixens without any strings attached.Would most men be tempted to cheat under these circumstances?”

-Pat 26 January, 2017

Thailand Men…

What about the guys in Thailand?  Well, they are an interesting bunch for certain. Consider this story;

“One of my wife's aunts had been married to a Thai gent who had spent time in prison for murdering someone for a motorbike. 

He was not much of a husband as he regularly beat her and eventually left her with two teenage children. 

Child support? Dream on! 

To make a long story short, she met a well off man from Norway and he popped the question so they set a date to marry in the village. 

Two days before the wedding she received a call from the ex, "I am going to bomb the wedding and kill everyone." 

The police were contacted to supply security and the wedding went off as planned, but everyone was on edge the whole day. 

Around 10PM the ex called, "I am sorry but I started drinking whiskey this morning and could not come and bomb the wedding. I will kill you some other time." What a polite chap!”

-A Polite Killer

Thailand Girls…

What about the girls in Thailand? Some expats claim that they are all money-grubbing crooks, while others say they are all angels.  What are they?

“I have the following to contribute. I have lived in Bangkok 7 years and have dated every kind of Thai gal imaginable. In regard to your opening piece about Thai good girls, it is my opinion that one can break Thai gals into 4 categories:

1) Good girls – just as you stated, they are controlled by their families, are raised to always be conservative and do the right thing, and would make excellent wives in my opinion for those guys who want the gal “to be seen and not heard.” This is the type of gal 95% of Thai guys want to marry.

2) Nice girls – The largest group by far, these gals are raised to be good girls but are so only in front of their families. With their friends or boyfriend they are more outgoing, very interested in sex if they have one special guy, and a lot more fun and interesting than the good girls. They are usually polite, fun and sociable. This is my target group.

3) Party girls – They don’t work in naughty nightlife places, but these gals drink, sleep around and love the nightlife. They can be a lot of fun, but they are basically the female equivalent of us (all of us party guys who love booze and broads) so be careful with your heart.

4) Bad girls – the gals who work in the naughty nightlife or any other arena where the main goal is to trade sex for money. Any additional comment would be superfluous.

I think most Thai parents try to influence their daughters to be good girls, but would be more than happy if they became nice girls. Party girls most definitely hide their real persona from their families, and unfortunately bad girls are usually trained from birth to be so by their greedy families. Speaking only of Bangkok, I would estimate the breakdown by percentage to be the following: good girls – 10%, nice girls – 75%, party girls – 10%, bad girls – 5%.

Stickman contributor

Tales of Adventure.

Thailand can be full of adventure. The stories who have lived there are certainly interesting.

“…When Nok shows up she’s got a good body, nice face, white skin, she doesn’t like talking Thai but speaks Lanna to me which I hate but I roll with it. So I ask her if she wants to go get noodles, “sure” she says.

So she gets on the bike and I ask where she wants to go using those exact words. She says wherever I want. Not the best thing for a chick to say to me, so we drive off.

And I’m thinking “stuff it”.  I’ll just take her to the curtain hotel.

She I drive over to the Love Boat a short time hotel around Jed Yort and park in the parking space and walk inside. She’s standing outside looking a little confused (she really is from the mountains) and I said “it’s ok, come inside”.

When she is inside she’s looking around and asks me “so how long have you lived here for?” I can’t stop but laugh, this girl really doesn’t know anything.

If you’ve never been to a curtain hotel in Chiang Mai it’s basically a parking spot with a door, the door is unlocked you walk into the door there is a room and then they pull a curtain behind the car, you pay by the hour and you pay when you leave not when you arrive.

Inside the room and the curtain already pulled I tell her we are going to have sex. She tells me she doesn’t want to and thought we were just going to get noodles. I say we can get noodles after we have sex.

She doesn’t seem pleased but gets on the bed and goes along with it anyway, wasn’t that much fun honestly but since the room only cost me 160 baht for the hour I figure it was worth it. I ask her afterwards why she had sex with me and she said she had sex before so why not. No I didn’t force her either guys! We have a shower get dressed and I drive her home.

When we get to her place she asks me “are we not going to have noodles”?

I tell her next time.

A week later I call her up and tell her that I felt bad about last time and that I want to buy her noodles again. She seems hesitant and so I assure her that this time we really are going to eat noodles and that last time I was just bad and want to make it up to her.

So this time I pick her up at her apartment around 10pm at night she hops on and again I ask her where do you want to go. Again she says “Up to you”.

So without hesitation she jumps on and again I drive straight to the curtain hotel and have sex with her again. After cleaning up she asks me are we going to have noodles now, I tell her I’ve already eaten and I’ll drop her off back at home.

A few days later I call her up again and she picks up the phone, I say what are you doing? Nothing she replies, so I ask her “Do you want to go for noodles”.

She hangs up the phone.”

Living Thai

Just for American men…

Many men, most especially Americans have “had it” (Are tired of, or exhausted from…) with “the way life” is for men in the States. 

How a person lives their life. In the United States, this is work in a job where you give everything to a company who will fire you with no notice, taxed where most goes to the government and you don’t qualify for anything back, and where society limitations and the latest round of anti-Male…anti-white… anti-man… attitude is far too oppressive to live acceptably.

This is a typical response and is quite accurate in that it reflects the feelings of many of my fellow male Americans.

“Yeah because spending 40+ years sucking your boss ballz all day long to earn a medium salary and having a single monthly intercourse with your fat wife (that is going to divorce you and take about half your earnings after 10-15 years) is not being a loser. 

Call us loser as you please, making our own jobs, our own money (even if it’s little) and creampie tight pussy all year long isn’t that much of a bad life.

I need to go, it’s almost 2pm, time for my morning blow-job before I start my daily hour of work.”

-bkkyolo 17 April, 2017

Yes.  He is right and he is telling us all how he feels.  To all those readers who aren’t listening are not paying attention…  It is exactly how he feels.

Yet, it is more (much more) than that.  It is about betrayal on all levels. 

Not just by society. 

For society has turned him into an unappreciated moneymaking machine to his wife, but also the nature of business, which terminated the longevity of his career. No longer can he work and retire on a pension. 

In fact, more than likely he will be forced to start new from scratch in his 50’s after he has been stripped of all his possessions.  (Like myself.)

Yet, it is even more than that.  It is the absolutely criminal nature of the government that he must toil under as well.  The decision to escape all these conditions is a valid one, and he is absolutely justified in making it.

Want to know what I am referring to?

If you want to understand why the status quo is unraveling, start by examining the feudal structure of our society, politics and economy. 

Consider the revelations coming to light about Hollywood Oligarch Harvey Weinstein perfectly capture the true nature of our status quo: a rotten-to-the-core, predatory, exploitive oligarchy of dirty secrets and dirty lies protected by an army of self-serving sycophants, servile toadies on the make and well-paid legal mercenaries. 

Predators aren't an aberration of the Establishment; they are the perfection of the Establishment, which protects abusive, exploitive predator-oligarchs lest the feudal injustices of life in America be revealed for all to see.

The predators reckon their aristocratic status in Hollywood/D.C. grants them a feudal-era droit du seigneur (rights of the lord) to take whatever gratifications they desire from any female who has the grave misfortune to enter their malefic orbit. 

Indeed, anyone who protests or makes efforts to go public is threatened by the oligarch's thugs and discredited/smeared by the oligarch's take-no-prisoners legal mercenaries. 

The dirty secret is that the oh-so-hypocritical power elites of Hollywood and Washington D.C. circle the wagons to protect One of Their Own from being unmasked. 

The first weapons of choice in this defense are (as noted above) threats from thugs, discrediting the exploited via the oligarchy's paid goons and lackeys in the mainstream media and dirty lies about what a great and good fellow the oligarch predator is. 

The last line of defense is a hefty bribe to silence any peasant still standing after the oligarchs' onslaught of threats, smears and lies.

Should the worst happen and some sliver of the truth emerge despite the best efforts of the thugs, corporate media, legal mercenaries and PR handlers, then the playbook follows the script of any well-managed Communist dictatorship: the oligarch predator is thrown to the wolves to protect the oligarchs' systemic predation and exploitation of the peasantry/debt-serfs.

Just as in a one-party Communist dictatorship, an occasional sacrificial offering is made to support the propaganda that the predators are outliers. Rather than the only possible output of a predatory, exploitive feudal status quo comprised of a small elite of super-wealthy and powerful oligarchs at the top and all the powerless debt-serfs at the bottom who must do their bidding in bed, in the boardroom, in the corridors of political power, and in the private quarters of their yachts and island hideaways.

Media reports suggest that the real reason Mr. Weinstein has been fired is not his alleged conduct over the past 27 years but his loss of the golden touch in generating movie-magic loot for the oh-so-liberal and politically correct Hollywood gang that was pleased to protect Mr. Weinstein when he was busy enriching them.

What's truly noteworthy here is not the sordid allegations and history of payoffs--it's the 27 years of intense protection the Hollywood/ media /D.C. status quo provided, despite hundreds of insiders knowing the truth. 

Just as hundreds of insiders with top secret clearance knew about the contents of the Pentagon Papers, and thus knew the Vietnam War was little more than an accumulation of official lies designed to protect the self-serving elites at the top of the power pyramid, only one analyst had the courage to risk his career and liberty to release the truth to the American public: Daniel Ellsberg.

Why are we not surprised that Hollywood, the corporate media and Washington D.C. lack even one courageous insider? 

If you want to understand why the status quo is unraveling, start by examining the feudal structure of our society, politics and economy, and the endemic corruption, predation and exploitation of the privileged oligarchs at the top. 

Then count the armies of self-serving sycophants, toadies, lackeys, hacks, apologists, flunkies, careerists and legal-team mercenaries who toil ceaselessly to protect their oligarch overlords from exposure. 

Open your eyes, America: there are two systems of "justice": one for the wealthy and powerful oligarchs, and an overcrowded gulag of serfs forced to plea-bargain in the other. 

If John Q. Public had done the deeds Mr. Weinstein is alleged to have done, Mr. Public would have long been in prison. As Orwell observed about a totalitarian oligarchy, some are more equal than others.

Here’s another…

“Two reasons I come to Thailand, warm weather and sex! 

Although some times the birds are not quite as fit as I would like, too tight to pay more than 1500 baht for ST 555! 

I do like Thai beer and food though, so that’s four reasons, actually apartments are cheap, so that’s five.

I bought Harvie’s ebook on freelancing, I got bored of writing for clients, so instead I write about rustic decor and shabby chic, Well, it pays for trips for to BKK and being down right dirty…”

-The Bamboo Bazaar  26 April, 2017

Honeymoon Period

Ah, it’s all fun and games when you arrive. Yet, how long it is sustainable before it gets dry and old?

“I reckon the honeymoon period for the average new expat to Thailand, irrespective of financial position, age, nationality etc is around 2 years. 

During the honeymoon period everything is wonderful and the new arrival may feel like he is in paradise. 

Some new expats become quite defensive when long-timers make comments about the country or the expat lifestyle that aren't positive.

I often receive emails from new arrivals who feel the tone of this column and the site in general errs on the negative. I wouldn't say it's negative, rather that it's realistic.

As a regular Thai female reader of this site (yes, they DO exist) said to me recently, many of the criticisms simply reflect the harsh reality of life for foreigners in Thailand. 

Those were her words. 

Get through the honeymoon period – it lasts a different period for each of us, but figure it to be around a couple of years – and then let me know what you think. Ignorance is bliss.”

-Stickman.

Going back home…

What about when you return back to your home country?

“I have found it is now unacceptable to visit Thailand in the eyes of many westerners back home. 

I recently rode the train from the USA to Canada. 

Upon entering customs in Canada the cheeky immigration woman saw a 30-day entry stamp in my passport showing I had been to Thailand on a holiday two years previously.

She immediately grilled me with questions as to why I would ever go to Thailand and what I was doing there. 

She sent me to a private area where all my bags, camera and computer were thoroughly searched. 

Like most males returning to their home country from a visit to Thailand, this type of harassment by immigration officials has unfortunately become typical and expected. 

However, I have never heard of it happening when traveling solely within North America. 

I have been branded guilty and am being harassed simply because I took a holiday to Thailand!”

-Stickman Blog

Yeah, the social justice warrior types can make your life miserable…

“I met a man and his wife (she wanted to know about the Land of Smiles) in Cambridge (near Boston). 

Before the main course was served she was being rude in an ignorant feminist way. 

I just kept smiling. 

Did you know that all single men that go to Thailand are pigs?

I did not know that. I gotta tell ya. Life for me is just one learning moment after another.”

-Stickman

Do you want to move to Thailand?

What about advice for those who might want to move to Thailand?

 “I have some advice to any westerners out there contemplating moving to Thailand.

If you are rich and are sensible with money, then go ahead. If an international company or similar offers you a high salary job in Thailand then fine. If your are retired or have steady funds from aboard and want to live modestly on those funds, go ahead, but watch yourself. And if you're a young dude traveling around the world, and you want to spend some time in Thailand teaching or whatever for experience, then that's OK too.

If you don't fall into these categories then "don't" consider it for a moment. 

Many middle aged westerners in particular (including professionals) like the idea of living there, having a business or making some money and "enjoying life" in Thailand. But very few make it. (Forget about western restaurant or bar owners and alike you might meet in Thailand boasting about their good life there. It is common for faltering foreigners to keep up appearances). 

Mostly they end up broke or crazed, sometimes both, then they leave. 

Thai business, visa and residency laws get you in the end. 

The "Thai way" will get you in the end. Have a minor run-in with a wealthy or important Thai and your status and possibly your life will be at risk. Their whole culture is geared around making sure that foreigners pursuing individual efforts are not successful. 

It's ingrained in them from an early age to believe that they are the never-colonized master race of Asia (yes they really think that) and their mythology runs so deep you'll never budge it. 

Remember, in Thailand you'll never have any real business, legal or ownership rights. But Thais can go to your country (very possibly) and buy and own anything they can get their hands on (because of the more tolerant business laws). To Thais, this is just further evidence of how clever they are, and how foolish are the foreigners to go to Thailand.

Remember too, that Thailand is dominated by a comparatively small military-industrial elite. They have all the power and most of the wealth in the country. (Sounds like America, actually.  In America the ILLUSION of the ability to “move ahead” is promoted in the mainstream media, but the reality is something other than that.)

The idea of western foreigners living in the country and achieving wealth and status through individual entrepreneurial efforts is seen as a threat to the hegemony that they have over the Thai underclass – the bulk of the population. For this reason, it is never allowed to happen.

Think of Thailand, for westerners, as being a bit like a casino. A casino is a place with a touch of excitement, the lure of good fortune / the good life, and a place for fun, even with a bit of a risk. Go to a casino every now and then for fun and that's OK. Go there everyday all-day and you will ultimately lose, because the House Advantage will always get you. So it is in Thailand. The Thai "House Advantage" will get you. They make sure of it.

Of course, if going to Thailand with all your money and slowly losing it and ending up teaching English for a pittance (because that's about all you can do), either illegally or working legally but being treated like a serf by Thai institutions, appeals to you then go ahead. 

And running around the country several times a year getting visas, or always being at the mercy of authorities on visa matters might be your bag. If so, then go ahead, at least you'll be able to spend your nights at cheap restaurants sharing your impoverishment and frustration with other exploited western teachers. If not, think seriously.

In case you are thinking, let me say that I am not a former go-go bar owner gone bust, I have not lost my all doing business with Thais, no I haven't been cheated of everything by a bar-girl, no I haven't been reduced to the indignity of teaching English for a pittance. I have my own money, have spent a lot of time in Thailand, and have done some business there, have observed the experiences of a lot of foreigners, can see what goes on, and have enough concern to want to tell others about it.

If my words can prevent even one westerner of modest means from selling up and going to "enjoy life" in Thailand (and getting shafted in the end) then that will be something. Don't make the mistake of thinking that as a foreigner (even with professional skills) you can "make a contribution" to Thailand, no matter how good your intentions or needed your skills may be. Your contribution will *never* be welcomed, only your money. 

There is a saying in Thai that captures it well: "farang roo mark my dee" – foreigners who know too much [about Thailand] are no good. Gullible tourists, however, are great.

So, go to Thailand as a tourist if you like, enjoy what you enjoy there, but don't be taken in by the culture or people, as many westerners have, and don't under any circumstances give up anything back home to go and stay there unless you are financially secure for life, or know exactly what you are doing.

There is a tradition of resident foreigners in Thailand not telling you the truth about the country because they don't like to admit to themselves and to others about the mistake they have made in moving there. 

But especially now, with the financial mess Thailand has got itself into through a mixture of greed, incompetence, arrogance and corruption, and the prospect of difficult times ahead (to say the least) it is time for plain speaking.

A final comment to anyone who strongly disagrees with these comments. Unless you have lived, worked and conducted business in Thailand for many years, I'm not interested. The views of "oh how can you say that, Thailand is really great" 2 week tourists carry no weight with those of us who know Thailand and Thais well. “

- John Zachary Smith

Stickman says:
Controversial, and will no doubt get certain folks fuming. While I don't agree with it in its entirety, there are a lot of points that I do concur with. The points you make are food for thought and should NOT be dismissed immediately!

Ah, but other expats have totally different opinions. Here is a retort to the above article;

 “I have a feeling that I am in a position that frankly very few farang have ever been in. The odds seem to justify my opinion considering I work for a Thai company in Chonburi with 4,500 people and am the only farang here, let alone the only one that is not a teacher in the entire industrial estate.

I'm 33, have a work permit, do the same professional work I did back in my country, make a pretty damn good income and am treated extremely well both at work and in the town I live.

Based on everything I have seen, read and heard, I feel like I have won the lottery. I sense I am in an incredible position compared to how ruthless and xenophobic Thailand is portrayed.

I haven't met one Thai person who has been rude, derogatory or angry at me for being here. In fact I've only received the opposite. Adulation, even just for being a farang (which perplexes me).

Most of my friends (all Thai) have university degrees and are intelligent people. I asked a few of them why they love farangs and the answers I got back were (hell, I'll quote one verbatim) "I think farang people are just perfect".

I get drinks and food bought, given or offered to me all the time.

I've had more interest from beautiful women since arriving here 2 months ago than I had in 10 years back home. I don't get farang prices at shops or stalls and to top that all off I can barely speak Thai to save my life.

This isn't aimed as a gloat email. It's more a case that sometimes there are examples that differ from the norm, as per the Don't Move to Thailand post.

I feel like this country is one of the last bastions of optimism left in the world and I plan on trying to be as good and honest with the people here as they have been with me. I don't know if Thailand attracts fools who cannot make it or I lucked out. Either way, sometimes stereotypes can be broken.
I love this country and it's been incredible to me. “

- A happy camper.

Those who Returned Home

What do others have to say about Thailand?  You have got to be careful.

“Whenever I get depressed I feel like I just want to run away to Thailand. Rent a nice place, get on Tinder, join a gym and start a new adventure. 

But I have learnt from my mistakes and going to Thailand is not the answer. 

Whenever I go I always start off on the right path. I always say to myself, enjoy the sun, no hookers, go out and explore, join a gym. 

That usually lasts a week. 

Then I get lost down soi 4, I get drunk, I wake up late. 

I ignore Tinder dates and just bang hookers. 

I even ended up with a few ladyboys hanging out the back of me on occasions. Disgraceful. Life is about good company and staying away from trouble.
As I get older I have come to the conclusion that while one's freedom is important, too much freedom can send a man feral.”

-Stickman


[i] https://www.stickmanbangkok.com/weekly-column/2016/06/bangkokescortcom-revisited/
 

Living in another country can change you.

“After living in any Asian country for more than 10 years, one definitely does not fit into one's homeland. I've been back in my home country for nearly 10 months after living in Japan for almost 20 years, having extensively enjoyed the hypnotic allures of such cities as Tokyo, Bangkok, Beijing, and Shanghai along with numerous trips to the mystically appealing islands on Thailand.

Returning to the West can be a shock!

I now fully understand why many of the expats I met found it difficult to live in their native country and had to return to Asia. It reminds me of trying to fit a square block into round hole. No matter how you place it, it just does not fit!

To all of you foreign residents in Thailand and in Asia, enjoy your existence there, because when you return to your homeland, you will dream of those exciting days when you lived in Asia! 

Know well you can easily leave Asia, but it can never leave your heart! It's a stern price to pay for the sights, sounds, sensations, and pleasures one takes from Asia!”

-Stickman 

Not everything is perfect when you return home…

“I would have to disagree with one of your readers complaining that beer in a Bangkok a gogo is now more expensive than in a pub in England. In some cases it is (I assume he can't live in London), but you just can't compare having to wait 10 minutes to get served in an English chain pub by one of the 2 bar staff to the instant service you usually get in a Bangkok gogo whilst watching the dancing with a lovely in a thong sitting on your knee!”

-Comment on Stickman Blog

The reality of taking a Thai woman to America…

“Many American men bought in to the whole idea that Thai women were more marriage type than the angry American women we encounter all the time.  Sadly, for many of us that is not true.  

I work every day, come home dirty and earn my pay.  

I took good care of my family.  

The only way to keep a beautiful Thai woman happy here is the same as anywhere – you must have money to keep them in high status with their family back home and keep them entertained here.  

And if you live in small-town USA, you are wasting your time thinking they will be happy.  I know many will disagree with this, but wait about three years and then see.”

-Stickman (Having Two Homes)

Thailand is an adventure, but is it a “rest of your life” destination? Many argue against it.

“There is something very sad about an older man still being a slave to his desires and vices. It takes strength to stop lying to oneself. It's uncomfortable to consider we might be wrong or that we're really just a slave to some 45 kg girl. A photo you took of old guys sitting around waiting for their next fix was almost my future.

Thailand will never change, but it always changes us.

The venom some readers spit at you is jealousy. You are making many people reevaluate their lives in Thailand and that is scary for them. The truth is that they don't need Thailand as much as it needs them.

I've noticed quite a change with the men and women I work and come in to contact with lately here in Canada. They somehow smell something different about me, even when I say nothing. Maybe that I project no desires, I'm unapologetic, professional and not overly polite and stumbling over myself. I'm comfortable in my own skin, I don't need them and they respect that.

I can thank Thailand.

I would still suggest to any single man to go and check it out, but just don't get caught up in that black hole long-term. Go have some fun, boys, but remember, your coffin probably won't be buried in Thailand and eventually we all need to come home.”

-Stickman
 

Thailand will change you.  Just remember the four rules.  Living as an expat WILL change you. However, Thailand will change you in ways that are beyond my ability to convey.

"A man with a hard cock has a soft heart and a soft cock equals a cold heart".
  • Do NOT believe that Thais have the same values you may harbor.
  • Do NOT act on any impulse to come to the aid of another person being attacked – for any reason.
  • DO understand that your presence is tolerated ONLY because of the currency that accompanies you.
  • DO acknowledge that your well-being depends upon your strict adherence to the above.

You’ve been warned, farang. Otherwise, enjoy your stay!

Although all of this should, by now, be common knowledge to regular visitors and expats, it never hurts to reinforce the obvious. This was made even more obvious by the recent beating and knife attack on a Belgian male who came to the aid of a Thai woman being attacked in Satun by her husband. And no-one should be shocked that the husband first went to secure a knife and the help of his brother before launching his assault.

Thailand will expose you to realities and situations that will provide you with new perspectives.

“A few weeks back, I get a call from a distant cousin about his daughter coming to Bangkok with her boyfriend and was asked if I would mind showing them around. They are in their 20s and figured out their own way around, but they did meet me one evening for dinner. At the end of the evening, the 20-something daughter said to me, "I would like to get some new boobs. Can you recommend someone?"

I have a nurse in my network who works in one of the better clinics, a phone call was made and an appointment was set to meet the doctor the next evening. We show up at the clinic – the girl, the boyfriend, my girlfriend (translator) and me. She was very satisfied with the interview and we left. But there was a small issue….she wanted to see and feel what new boobs would be like. Could I arrange that too?

Like now, tonight, as they are off to Samui in the morning! Sure, no problem! 

You would like me to find a girl who has had them done, so you can feel them like right now? Yes! Off to Nana we go. In a ladyboy bar, a round of drinks later (double for the boyfriend who was freaking out), "There, pick the one you would like to be like!" She pointed to one very good looking "girl" and my girlfriend went on to explain the situation to her.

Off they went to the toilet: the candidate, the translator and the model. They came out after a while, all of them with a huge grin on their faces: the cousin because she got to feel and take pictures to show the doctor, the ladyboy who was now 500 baht richer, and my girlfriend who could no longer keep a straight face.

Just another typical evening in Bangkok!”

-Stickman

Perhaps here is one of the best descriptions of what it is like to live in Asia (for three years), and then return back to America. It’s honest, and harsh, and if the reader has no idea what the writer is talking about then I strongly suggest you leave the USA and experience life…

“I'm writing this from the West Coast of USA, in a very quiet, very peaceful duplex. I have returned to the US after 3+ years living in Bangkok. 

I'm still deciding what really happened out there. My decision to move to Thailand, back in 2010, was based on a lifelong dream of living out of the US for at least one year of my life. 

I had originally wanted to live in Europe, but during the time I was looking for the right place to land, European economics were in meltdown. So I started researching Asia. For work purposes I almost went to Singapore, but then decided Bangkok would be more fun.

I was right.

It wasn't just the sex. I never had trouble landing women in the States. I broke up with a very attractive Thai / Cambodian woman in the US before I left. She was fun, but a bit of a bitch at times. I know enough about women to understand that ratio changes the longer you're in a relationship. Married, she would have been a bitch that was a bit of fun at times. She wanted kids and I didn't. That was that. Before that I had two different 20-something girlfriends, great sex, lots of drama, not long-term but fun. I had learned stellar game skills and liked landing semi long-term relationships with pretty women. It was worth the pursuit, the hunt, the thrill of the conquest and of course, all the great sex. So I didn't go to Thailand for sex. I went to fulfill a lifetime goal of living out of my country for a year, and when I added up how I was supporting myself, what the costs of living were, and the fact that English teaching provided a safety net if things went wrong, Thailand just made sense.

I landed in Bangkok and fell in love with the place. I had lived most of my life in New York City, and spent time in Paris, Rome, London, LA, Berlin, Caracas and many other amazing places. But Bangkok blew my mind. The chaos, the sexiness, the otherness, and just how freaking different it was from the staid, plain US was like medicine. Even New York City – supposedly that wild town – is to me, a very processed and predictable place when compared to Bangkok.

So I loved it. I traveled Thailand for a month and returned to Bangkok.
 
I set up shop pursuing my dreams. I got lucky with real hard work, landed my business contacts back West, and managed to live for more than three years in Thailand. I had a nice condo, pool on the roof, and money to play with. There were a few rough patches for sure, but also some nice straight-aways. Basically, it turned out to be what I was looking for: the adventure of a lifetime.

That adventure meant broadening my horizons. 

I loved learning the language. I was a Thai language class nerd. I made a few Thai friends and played badminton religiously. I put a damn good pool game together. I travelled all over, made expat friends, and had a blast. I even finally got a local job offer in my industry, which is really tough to do, and held that for a while, living the Bangkok executive life although admittedly not on the high end of that scale. Still, it was all really remarkable.

However, when a job offer came up with an old employer in the West, I took it. After more than three years, I was ready to leave. They flew me back, settled me here, and I plugged in. I actually landed on the fourth of July, if you can believe that. And I was thrilled to be back. I hadn't been back in the US for even a holiday the whole time I was in SE Asia. 

Any time I had to travel, I had gone all over Thailand, Laos or Cambodia. I love SE Asia, but my reasons for repatting were professional. 

The jobs are better in the US. I stayed with mine for five months. It was a contract. When I was offered a full time job, I turned it down in order to start another business I had been planning. And that's where I am now.

I loved being back in the States when I landed. I loved being back in familiar settings, and hearing familiar speech. I loved catching up with friends. I fully intended to plug back in here, and resume life where I had left it when I had jetted to Thailand. 

Thailand had been working against me in the half year before I left. I was getting fed up with the visa issues, and the outsider status. I became depressed at how hard it was to positively affect the business world there, or even the fate of the country. I like to think I can make a difference where I am. Of course, there are charities, and I did a bit of work with those. But ultimately, Thailand is for Thais. 

God bless them for that, is my attitude.

In this One World homogenization that is happening, I have lots of respect for countries that retain national values and identities. Although I respect it, that doesn't mean I wasn't frustrated by it, and ultimately, living as a constant outsider was getting to me.

I had also come to the conclusion that marrying a Thai, or even having a serious Thai girlfriend wasn't what I liked, due to the many reasons cited in other posts here. I dated “civilians” who weren't in the leisure industry, but found the culture gap too huge to leap. Plus the adjustment I had to make in terms of being 3rd on the totem pole (Family, Career, Boyfriend) never did it for me. 

After that decision, I partied too much. I was drinking and balling and more than a bit adrift before I left. That's why I was really happy to be back in the US. It was just time to go. My hand had been played. I felt very lucky to leave when and how I did.

But here's the problem.

After the glow of happy returns wore off, I have to be honest with the fact that I just don't like the US lifestyle. 

I came back to give the west a full on fair shake. I even saw it with new eyes. And there's much I really love about US that I had to be away from before I could appreciate it. It truly is a tremendous land of amazing professional opportunity, as well as a place where self development is encouraged and valued.

Every system is crooked, but the corruption here is way toned down compared to SE Asia. The work place has some clowns, but is largely a meritocracy, where good workers are advanced, and losers get let go. People try hard. They want to make things better. The innovate. But what's really turning me off is how processed it all is.

How boring.

It feels like this grey machine. A conveyor belt. Relationships feel flimsy. Everybody works. Watches TV. Works more.

The amount of hostility towards men is repulsive, as it plays out in the workplace and in media. But the underground of MGTOW and Red Pill is filled with a tremendous amount of hostility as well.

I just really can't believe how unhappy and depressed most people in the west are.

It's like there is this War on Love, destroying relationships between lovers, friends, and communities. There's not much neighborhood or local cohesion. I feel everybody keeps busy busy busy all the time, working buying and watching, working buying and watching, to avoid admitting how bleak and punishing the average life is here. I don't want to support it. I don't want to fit in and be part of it.

I have no regrets I left Thailand, and in terms of timing, when I was pulled back here was really a blessing. 

But I can't deny the fact that I feel a huge void in my life out here. I believe what I miss most is the excitement and adventure and just fantastic thrill – with all the tribulations that went with it – which living abroad in SE Asia provides. 

I just had more fun there. 

I felt more alive there. And what's also really difficult is that all of the experiences I had in Thailand aren't really welcome out here.

Beyond the natural bias that women have of "men who go to Thailand", I'm just shocked that nobody really wants to know what life in another land is like. 

Maybe I'm a bad story teller. 

But maybe Americans are just living in their bubble. 

My countrymen have little frame of reference outside of their work and TV shows. It's heartbreaking, really. So much of the world, so much to see and hear about, and nobody wants to hear about it. I read a lot of columns on Stick that talk about how Thais don't really know much about the outside world. But in a way, the Americans don't either. So I'm left with this huge piece of living, and no place to process it. It's disheartening.

The place runs well.

The trains are on time, as they say, but psychologically, I feel the West is a very hostile and weird place these days. 

Especially when it comes to men / women relationships. 

I am shocked at the deterioration in relationships that I have seen, in just the past ten years. It's just so aggressively mercenary. The romance has been drained from the punch. There's very little charm in the process. I found dating pretty pointless, but still fun and sweet enough in Thailand. Even it if leads nowhere beyond walking around a mall and having some sex, it was lighter and more pleasant.

In America, dating is this grim operation to perform: shit tests, hoops, Social Market Value, and the flat-out rude bossiness that has become the modern American woman. Joyless. Probably that's what this entire post comes down to… that one word: Joyless.

America is not a life.

It's a job. The job is work. And work sucks.

Thais value fun. They like life light. Sanuk isn't just something in tour books. They have an art to daily living that has a pleasant ambience based on a healthy injection of “I don't give a damn”. All of us who have lived there have been on the maddening side of it. But from where I'm writing now, I see it now as a great way to resist the corporate take-over of every part of life.

Why the fxxk should we all have to work so hard?

Who's getting rich off our sweat? Just this morning I read that a new crisis on American college campuses is that many American university students are killing themselves or crowding counselor's crisis centers. Shouldn't higher learning be a better experience? They are probably feeling total dread at what the American system has laid out for them: joyless toil. It's like we're all fighting as hard as we can to jam our way into jobs that shred us.

Why?

Life shouldn't be so damn serious. Thais know that. I miss that. I miss them. I miss their land.

With luck I'll be back and honestly, probably bitching about lots of the things I just heralded in the previous paragraph. lol. Should fate decide otherwise, and slugging it out in the US is my path, I have my memories. They will remain a precious jewel for life. Either way, I am richer, wiser, and more the man I dreamed of being for having spent my time in LOS.

Enjoy it out there, gentlemen. Play smart and it's a brilliant part of the world to live life. Play dumb and it's still one hell of an adventure. My time there was a blend of both and I wouldn't trade it for anything. “

- “After 3+ Years in Thailand, Reflections From Home” by Rich Archer on the Stickman Blog. Reader submission.  May 2015

The Top 10 types of expat in Thailand

Let's talk about steriotypes. There are some particular sub-sets of Thai expat that you can spot a mile away. I knwo that it is bad to type-cast a typical expat, but it's boat-loads of fun, and it's a natural thing to do. Here are some sub-sets that you can use as a guide.  Jus tkeep in mind that there are plenty of other varieties of  expats floating around Thailand.

Here are just some major classifications of Thailand Expat that are pretty obvious. You can point them out with big splayed brushes, and will pretty much be right on target. Check them out…

1. The search of a wife
Finding looking for love in the West daunting? Or had a few failed marriages? Head to Asia and find a wife there instead. Right?!

  • Thailand is the place for sex.
  • Thailand is not the place for love.
  • If you indeed want to find true love in Thailand, then expect to change and adapt to the way that things are done in Thailand. Not the other way around.

These gentlemen come to Thailand for the sole purpose of finding love and maybe a wife. There seems to be some belief that Asian women are going to be more polite, obedient and submissive than the women in their own country.

Oh! Boy or boy are they going to get a shock.

Others are looking to ‘trade in’ their older, western model for a younger, prettier Asian version. And where are you going to find this source of Asian ladies? At an expat bar (or on the internet these days). And so the well-trodden path and litany of perilous adventures begins. We know how most of these relationships end.

Of course there are many western men, and women, who do find a Thai partner and live long, happy lives. But (please kindly be advised) they’re vastly out numbered by the stories of love-gone-wrong in the Land of Smiles.

Don’t take life too seriously
Read a couple of hundred stories on the internet before moving in with the Thai GF.  Realize that you must have deep pockets. As wll as a wallet that resembles Alladan's magic lamp. Oh, and one more thing; Guys, please keep in mid that the bar girls don’t actually love you.

2. The businessman
Many professional expats live, mostly in Bangkok, working for big international companies on salaries that would make them rich in any country. They can afford to, and do, live the high life.

  • Some are single but others bring their family along for the adventure.
  • They rent a big house.
  • They have a live-in maid.
  • They have a driver and live a great life indeed.

But, living their life in an artificial bubble in their working years, they rarely transition into a more mundane retired life in ‘normal’ Thailand.

3. Retiring in Thailand
The mantra used to be that you could move to Thailand and live off your pension (which would translate to lots and lots of baht), walking the Phuket beaches, shopping in Bangkok or living a quiet life in Chiang Mai.

Ah, yes. The perfect retirement lifestyle.

Other single, mostly, men would be lured by a carefree life of cheap beer, endless beaches and a seemingly endless supply of attractive young ladies in the many bars. (And who wouldn’t be lured by such wonderful attributes?)

A lot of this has changed in recent years.

The Thai economy has gained strength, along with the Thai Baht. With some international currencies have comparatively deflated. Which means that people hoping to live off their overseas pensions or savings are not getting the same bargain they once did.

This is especially living in tourist hubs like Bangkok, Phuket or Pattaya, the cost of living has been rising in recent years pricing them out of the retirement market.

If you’re contemplating a retired life in Thailand spend some time on the internet and come and spend a few months in selected locations. Try before you buy and don’t start packing the crockery until you’ve done your homework and your calculus.

4. Teaching English
The English teacher is found everywhere in the LOS (Land of Smiles) and is still a reasonably sure-fire way to extend your time living in Thailand.

These teachers usually break down into four categories….  

  • Some are career educators and love teaching English.
  • Others are backpackers trying to extend their stay and top up their travel budget.
  • There are some older guys who have spent their life savings and will do anything to stay in Thailand.
  • Finally, there’s the bored wives who want something useful and meaningful to fill their days whilst their husbands work for larger international companies.

There are numerous TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language) courses around the country. The pay’s not great and you’ll be living a local lifestyle rather than the lap of luxury. But many former teachers remember their time teaching English in Thailand fondly and say they’ll never forget the smiling Thai children.

5. The entrepreneurial spirit
Savvy business people often come to Thailand for some better weather and the chance to make their fortune. The joke used to be that if you wanted to start a small business in Thailand, just invest in a big business here and wait a few years.

But many actually make a go of it and end up doing well.

Like starting a business anywhere else in the world, do your homework and make sure you tick all the right boxes, including a business and marketing plan (in a foreign country).

The flashy, brash real estate hacks that sell one property a year and spend the other 364 days sitting at the beach bar spending their commission, are a local cliché and a dime a dozen. Same goes for the internet hacks, the blogger hacks, and the travel-lifestyle hacks. It’s all nonsense. Don’t buy into the lies.

Remember that the paperwork and administration requirements of a Thai company can be bewildering and you WILL need some good local advice before you open up shop. Take someone who’s already done it for a few years to dinner and ask lots of questions.

6. The bored wife
Many of the categories mentioned so far have a predominance of males. Life for a single foreign woman in Thailand can be a challenge. Kudos to those who cut through the cultural issues and make a go of it.

There’s also the wives and partners of the many, many men who get to work in Thailand and bring their families with them. The live-in maid, driver and shopping trips eventually get boring and they will often be looking for other things to do. In most cases their visas won’t allow them to legally work. So many do end up doing various charity and volunteer work (thought you should be very clear about what your visa will and won’t allow you to do).

There are numerous expat groups around the country to provide information, social outings and community for the many mums or spouses who find themselves at a loose end whilst the husband works in the office. Jump on your computer and do some homework and you’ll discover a whole new world of other woman out there.

Your next coffee or movie gal-pal is as far away as the internet.

7. The fresh-starter
For whatever reason, Thailand seems to attract its fair share of misfits, vagrants and social outcasts that can’t seem to get their act together in their home country. So they come to Thailand where the cheap booze, beaches and travel brochures have lured them.

Of course they find a very different culture and an entirely new list of reasons they can’t fit in and get their life established.

Some are just running away from …

  • Bad marriages
  • The law
  • Anything-they-don’t-want-to-confront.

The long term prognosis for many of these misfits isn’t good. We end up reading about them as over-stayers, drink driving road deaths or victims of balcony falls.

8. Sexpats
‘Sexpats’ are notorious and much-maligned.

They come to Thailand, lured by a slightly old-fashioned notions of the Kingdom as an easy place to find sex. And sometimes, in some locations the opportunities are still available, for a price. Sexpats usually hang around other expats who are less likely to frown on their indulgences. The three P’s – Patpong, Patong and Pattaya – sum up most of the popular sexpat locations.

In most cases they’re here for a good time, not a long time.

They will frequent the sleazier locations in Thailand pursuing their goals and, eventually, running out of money or getting bored. Or getting into trouble. Or contracting any number of available STDs.

9. The serial complainer
Nothing, absolutely nothing, will ever be as good in Thailand compared to where they come from. They will find fault in everything from the traffic to the food to the government to the medical system to the culture to the visa system to the corruption to the heat to the roads to the culture to the girls.

Surprise!

Thailand is a foreign country with a rich, frequently bewildering culture. The longer you spend here, the less it all makes sense. But that’s part of the glorious adventure of living in Thailand. Whilst many expats revel in the wonders and excesses of Thai life, some just wallow in their own self-righteousness.

Many of these haters and complainers have never been to Thailand but are happy to share their wisdom, often, in chat rooms and social media.

Blah, blah, blah.

Worse, there are plenty of haters living amongst us who bore us sideways with their whinging and complaining. They can be directed to the nearest international airport where they are invited to escape the country they so despise and return to their homeland or just go somewhere else, anywhere really.

10. The digital nomads
We see them tapping away on their keyboards at cafés and work spaces around the country. As long as they have wifi their business is open. They’re trading stocks and shares, selling property, gambling, posting stories, filing news reports, selling stuff on their Facebook pages – they’re working.

If you can run your business outside of a traditional office, hey, why not do it sitting next to a beach or high up in a mountain overlooking Chiang Rai. The digital nomads fall between the cracks in the Thai Immigration system and often have to run the gauntlet of dodgy visas and visa runs although a recently introduced Smart Visa helps some of them get a proper visa.

There is an increasing range of co-working spaces opening around the country and almost every café in Thailand will now have wifi – whether it’s working or not is another matter. Then again you can always tether your phone to your laptop and use your smartphone’s wifi.

However, as I have mentioned above, do NOT mistakenly believe that you can become a rich and successful person by banging around on your keyboard in a foreign land. If so, then Metallicman would have the wealth of George Soros. This is an option only for people who already have a successful online operation and they are able to port it over to Thailand without interruption.

Comparisons

For many Americans, Asia is Heaven. America has become the land of the heavily taxed serf, a land of the obese and argumentative, and the ugly. And when you leave the “wonderful shores of exceptionalism”, you discover that you wasted 50, 60 years of your life following a LIE. It’s an ideal that might at some time, long ago, existed for other people…

…but one that you never got a chance to participate within. So for you’se guys, like me. Asia is Heaven.

You go from this…

American girls tend to be on the chubby side.

To this…

This is what women are like all throughout Asia. They make fine wives, are fantastic, playful companions, and admire their man. They NEVER, ever belittle them in public.

This says it all, I would think;

“The expat rule is, you have found paradise and you don’t want to share it with anyone, especially those you believe to be unworthy.”

-Stephen365

And, with that I must add, do not debauch yourself to death… 

An interesting write up about judgemental people, mostly Americans, of the “ugly American" persuasion. 

It is a great read, and spot on;

The act of seeing a prostitute in Western countries has been demonized, sometimes even more so than the act of prostitution itself. 

In many states in the U.S., if you’re caught soliciting a prostitute, you’ll be arrested and charged, and your name will appear in the Newspaper and on the Newspaper’s website. Then when anyone Google’s your name, the first thing to come up will be the article about you trying to see a whore. 

Many feminists sympathize for the “poor working girls,” who are simply misguided, while vilifying the evil “Johns” who take advantage of the women by buying sex from them. 

You pay her $300 for her to tell you to “hurry up,” and yet you’re the one taking advantage of her - oh the irony!

Don’t be THIS guy…

An American male aged 55 just fell off the 27th floor landed right near the pool. 

He wrote a letter before jumped said that he ran out of money, his visa is expired and express a wish to live in Thailand longer. 

It’s a sad story indeed. You spend your entire life working inside the “American Dream”, only to be taxes, swindled, and squeezed out of everything. 

Then you take what little remains and go somewhere where you are appreciated. 

Yet, when the money dries up, everything is over.  

Sad.  Looks like he'll be here forever now.

http://www.livingthai.org/video-of-american-falls-to-his-death-in-pattaya.html

Or this fellow…

60 Year-old British Expat Found Dead in his Rented Room in Buriram Province. 

Upon entry of the rented room police found the body of James Track, 60 on the bed, surrounded by beer bottles, Deputy interrogation chief Pol Capt Decha Thongprapa said. 

Pol Capt Decha said the Briton might have died from consumption as it was revealed to him by other tenants that his wife had threatened to break up with him due to his drinking.

http://www.chiangraitimes.com/60-year-old-british-expat-found-dead-in-his-rented-room-in-buriram-province.html

Things are different in Thailand.

Things are different; prostitution is more accepted and you certainly don’t have to worry about getting arrested for bar-fining a girl.  We’re not usually judged for it in Asia, but we’re judged even more harshly by Western women than men who solicit prostitutes in their own country. 

Because now we’re not just taking advantage of a “misguided woman”, and now we’re actually taking advantage of a “very poor and uneducated, misguided third world woman”.  

Yeah. Right.

I’ll have to remember that the next time a bar girl begs me to spend the night with her.

I’ve been targeted numerous times by groups out there who try to shame me for “the proliferation of the prostitution scene.”  It’s as if I tell people that it’s wrong NOT to see prostitutes, or that it’s wrong to treat them well when you do see them. 

Some of these people act as if the prostitution scene in Thailand exists only because dirty old white men come here and throw their money around in ways that uneducated women simply can’t refuse.  

This implication is mean spirited and outright false.

1) I find that to be an insult to Thai women; they’re not robots and they are acting on their own free will.  To imply that they don’t know any better is another way of calling them stupid.  Most of them are much more calculated than feminists give them credit for being, usually saving hordes of cash by the time they’re done in the profession.

2) The prostitution scene in Thailand has a long history that has only recently included white men.  The facts are that most of the “Johns” throughout the country are Thai.  But feminists, and those quick to point the finger, live in some sort of vacuum where they think that Soi Cowboy and Walking Street are the only prostitution havens in Thailand.

Feminists, and basically all Western women, have always been on that side of the issue.  But lately, I’ve noticed a new group of people quick to throw stones at any man who would dare see a Thai prostitute: foreign men!   These guys fall into different categories, I’ll list them for you.

1) The dating guru who insists that it’s STUPID and PATHETIC to have to see prostitutes since it’s so easy to score here with an unlimited amount of non prostitutes.  In other words, “do as I do or you’re dumb and sad.”  I’ve had my successes in the dating scene here, but I don’t see what that has to do with the prostitution scene.

2) The man who takes care of his wife’s Thai daughter from a past marriage, as his own, and is repulsed by the thought of her selling her body to foreign guys when she becomes of age.  I don’t blame the guy for not wanting to see it happen to the girl, but it won’t happen if he does a decent job as a parental figure in her life.  If he fails as a parent, and she does become a prostitute, it’ll be his fault, not the fault of the “johns” she sells herself to.

3) The “fragile heart” guys, otherwise known as: walking contradictions.  These are the guys who fall in love with the first bar girl they buy sex from.  They become so consumed with their “love,” that they have to find a way to justify the fact that she was sexing and fucking 20-40 guys per month for the past year or two.  So, for whatever reason, some of these guys start to visualize the johns as being the villains.  It doesn’t sound like a particularly healthy way of handling the situation, but that doesn’t seem to stop them.  The craziest thing about it is that they themselves were a john when they first met the girl.  They find a way to separate that from the evil guys who did the same thing as them, just without the falling in love part.

4) The guys who are just “above it all.”  Most of these guys are outright liars, the rest of them are just judgmental assholes.   Finding guys who have never truly seen a prostitute in their entire lives, especially those who have been to or live in Thailand, is even more rare than finding a guy who never had an alcoholic beverage before.  I suppose there’s a few of them out there, but there’s a lot more guys out there who simply say they’ve never seen a prostitute, despite that being a lie.  And if a guy saw a prostitute even one time in his life, and vows that he never has and is repulsed by anyone who does or has, that is just a sick and twisted way to go about things.  Now, for those few guys who truly have never seen a prostitute, good for them.  I’m not going around saying that they’re prudes or pussies for not doing it; I actually don’t care.  I wouldn’t judge them either way.  But if they are going to judge me, simply because I don’t adhere to the same moral codes as they do, then they can go and fuck themselves!

5) The religious type.  If a guy’s religious code dictates that I’m a sinner, then so be it.  Prostitution is known as the “oldest profession in the world.”  It’s also pretty damn harmless compared to some more obvious “sins.”  I don’t judge anyone for being very religious, that’s their prerogative.  But I just wish some of them wouldn’t so often judge others that just don’t happen to follow the same religion with the same passion.  Some of these guys are quite the hypocrites, because they’ve seen hundreds of prostitutes, but since that was “before they were saved,” that doesn’t count anymore.

I’m not even going to discuss the group of people out there who makes it like any “john” is basically a rapist sex trafficker; obviously those people need more help than most prostitutes.  But that is basically the final end of the spectrum of people who hate on anyone who has ever been with a prostitute before.  We’ve gone through all of the groups, and they all have two things in common: they’re judgmental and intolerant people.

Conclusion

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion on the matter, and to follow through in the way they see fit.  Just as everyone can have their feelings on the topic, I have mine as well.  I don’t judge others who don’t see me eye to eye on it; it’s just my own personal code. 

This is true whether it is about China, or Thailand. About work, career, or pretty girls. It is the same regardless about how you live your life and what you do with your time. All men need a code; a code of behaviors.

And that is, that seeing prostitutes is like drinking alcohol – its fun sometimes, but it’s best to do it in moderation, and it’s important not to become completely addicted to it. 

Like alcohol, if you’re not somewhat cautious, there can be some downsides.  But if you can stick to the limits that you set, you’ll be fine.

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An introduction to Thailand by an occasional traveler, and a lover of great food, pretty girls and sunshine

Here, in this post, I am going to discuss the wonderful land of smiles; Thailand. It is an enchanting country. It is filled with happy, easy going people, cheap prices, lots of open fresh air, seas of beauty, mountains and hills, and lots and lots of great delicious food. I haven’t written about this place at all because the vast bulk of my time is spent within China. But this is a great place, as is the rest of South East Asia, and I have a few things to say about it.

Read this post. Then re-read this sentence. As far as a man is concerned, Thailand is really the land of the free.

“The Thais are proud to say their country has never been colonized and delighted to explain that translated in to English, Thailand means "land of the free". 

Many Thais genuinely believe their country is free and that regular citizens are afforded a level of freedom that doesn't exist outside the Kingdom's borders.

Given the way certain parts of Thailand's history are explained in the local education system, it's no surprise. 

But the way that some foreigners resident in Thailand also feel more free in Thailand than they do in Farangland (Oh, “farang”, or for those of you who hate that word, Caucasian) floors me.”

- Thailand, Land of the Free

One of the places that I would live at, from time to time, was Thailand. It’s a truly amazing place, with beautiful beaches, excellent delicious food, warm welcoming climate, a decent infrastructure, and hordes of sexy willing women. What’s not to like?

“hhahahhha  Pattaya! 

I ran into a few FAT and outraged American "chang nams"...

chang(elephant) 
nam(water)

...chang nam is a hippo and polite word for American (women) wildebeast that seem to stray into Pattaya now and again. (The great white water buffalo.)

There were three American chang nams that ganged up on me, asking me all sorts of "triggered questions.

"When their mouths stopped flapping, I ran my fingers across my lips, then launched into international sign language dialogue. 

One of the girls said ".....oh shit, he's deaf---and THEY APOLOGIZED."

My sign language is very good and I suggest all ZHers to at least learn a few phrases correctly in dealing with hostile, bat-shit crazy American women and their failed NGOs in Thailand and Cambodia. 

These American goody-two-shoes are the ones that demonize sex and then run around to the back room to boom Somchai.

PS...To call someone "Somchai" in Tai and Kampuchea, really you are saying "John Doe." "Somchai" is better than saying "....where's Woody?"

- buttmint (reply to) MaxThrust Aug 12, 2017 10:57 AM

I have visited Thailand with my Chinese wife numerous times.  We have stayed at everything from fancy hotels to cute residential home-stays. We have frequented the bars and clubs and sampled the night life there, we have even had an adventure where a taxi driver drove us out into the middle of the jungle and left us there to rot at 4:30 am! 

Thailand, since it is so close to China, is my 2nd home.

It’s a very cheap (from China) two hour flight and BOOM!, I am in a land where all the girls call me a “Handsome Man”.

"Hey! Handsome Man!"

Though, I have never sampled the female fun there, it’s enough to know that I could if I wanted to.

Personally, I find the girls there a little chubbier and shorter than my tastes allow.  (You can see for yourself in the pictures and videos herein.) However, that’s just me.

My ideal woman is a curvy and robust Chinese gal, with a handsome face, and a smile that last forever. Long black hair is an extra five points. Brown eyes improves the look another five points, and having an oval face tacks on another ten points.

(The taller “girls” tend to be ladyboys… yikes!)

In any event, Thailand is a beautiful place with cheap prices, delicious food, and nature everywhere.  It is paradise.

People come to visit and LIVE in Thailand for all sorts of reasons;

“There isn't one kind of person that comes to Thailand there are many. 

There's the sex starved older English gent that finds paradise in the Neon lights of Pattaya to the American couple who have figured out that they don't want to live there lives drowned in debt only to realize they've missed out on Living their lives. 

You'll find a lot of grumpy old men who are single and spend their time Farang bashing on Thai Visa and younger guys who party to the break of dawn every night. 

The English teacher who's looking for "world experience" I'm sure you've met all sorts of people in Thailand.”

-From here; http://www.livingthai.org/why-choose-to-live-in-thailand.html

And, for guys, often the reason is for sex…

“The problem with sex is that it’s a natural male instinct to fuck everything that moves, not just the hottest, but anything attractive – you’ll never stop looking, but you might stop chasing. God help you if you’re very good looking, getting ‘opportunities’ thrown at you wherever you live. You may never escape this vice – and it will cost you big time.”

-BobbyT

Thailand is a different place for certain. Different is Good.

“Frustrated foreign residents are known to have the odd rant about life in Thailand at times, but sometimes we need to take a look at the big picture and consider that things are not as bad as they may seem. 

A mate who gets around Bangkok by motorbike tells me that whenever he parks his motorbike, he leaves his helmet resting on the handlebars, attached by a simple clip. This is something he would never do in his native Belgium for it would likely not be there when he returned but in 10 years of riding in Bangkok no-one has ever taken his helmet. 

Still, I have never seen his helmet and maybe the shocking pink color and the slogan I love ladyboys in Thai on the front has something to do with it?”

-Stickman

Pattaya

“Never in my life did I imagine I would ever turn down a girlfriend of mine for sex until I got to Thailand; 

...there’s just only so much I can handle. 

American women (and I’m sure British and Australian women are very similar) use sex more as a tool in a relationship, and they’re usually willing to sacrifice the enjoyment from sex just to prove a point. 

I don’t find this too often in Thailand and that’s a beautiful thing.”

-LivingThai

I’ve been to Pattaya numerous times.

A famous Pattaya themed T-shirt, sold at many of the vendor’s stalls about town, sums up the divergent opinions about the place. “Good guys go to heaven, bad guys go to Pattaya”.

I can’t say the beach is all that great.  But it has (had) an amazing street devoted to bars and night life.  Both my wife and I felt like we had died and gone to heaven.

The first time we went there, we separated from the group (that we had been with) and went solo exploring this amazing area. Of course, you have the go-go girls, and the bar girls and all of that. However, what really struck me was the presence of old fat western guys who had plopped themselves down at a bar and who were nursing a beer.

What?

You call that fun and exciting?

We bar hopped each and every time we visited that town. 

First Impressions

My first experience was awesome. I must tell the reader that when you go into these bars, you will see (easily) 20 to 30 totally nude gals standing and dancing slowly in super high heels.

That has since changed, and as of 2016 they all seem to be wearing some kind of attire.

With a short old 70-year old grandmother walking around them with a meter long switch telling them to arch their backs, etc. The girls seemed fine.  (They were) all thin and in their 20’s. A patron might come in and pick a girl and pay the girl and get a blow-job on the spot.  (I’ve seen it done numerous times.)

You can even take the girls upstairs for a short-time (this is known as a “short time girl”). However, to be honest, you see 30 girls without a lick of clothing on it’s not really arousing.

Since then, the local government placed laws requiring the gals to wear clothing. I have mixed feelings about it.

It’s just a bunch of nude girls.

Old fat men (Bogan) nursing beers in Pattaya bar street.

Pattaya is known (outside of Thailand) for one place. 

Sex.

I think I can safely say that Patong Beach is now Bogan central for Thailand. 

A Bogan is a bit of a derogatory term for a person who hails from the western suburbs of Sydney, West Auckland or the working class areas of Melbourne. 

In Thailand they are normally identified as blokes, or sheilas, with minimal attire – a beer brand singlet, billabong shorts and flip flops – and whose main priorities in life are knocking back copious amounts of beer and watching their preferred style of footy. 

Take a stroll down Soi Bangla in the early evening and the sports bars lining each side of the street will be packed with Bogans getting their fixes of beer and footy. 

The thing is, though, if you hang around the place for long enough you’ll soon pick up on the idea there are Bogans from all over the world cruising the streets and crowding the shopping malls of Patong. 

Aside from your bog standard Aussie and Kiwi Bogans, there are also English, Russian, German, Scandinavian, Indian and even Thai Bogans to be seen.

That being said, let me be the first to point out that the Pattaya Police Chief say’s that there is no such thing as prostitution in Pattaya.  Apparently it doesn’t exist.

And it is true that sex can be obtained.

However, it is not as common and rampant as the British tabloids make it out to be. There’s only a precious few areas that you can get your “fix” for secual excitement. The rest of Pattaya is like the rest of Thailand, very conservative and very religious.

Pattaya City officials, local police units and administrative units of Chon Buri held a press conference on the new policy; Pattaya Happy Zone, which has been immediately implemented with the main purpose of keeping popular areas of Pattaya under control and crime-free. 

The Happy Zone is being enforced in the infamous Walking Street in order to control all illegal activities to make sure that the holiday experience in Pattaya is hassle-free for everyone.

Pol Col Apichai Krobpetch, the Pattaya police superintendent, told the magazine “Spectrum” that Pattaya is not a hub for the sex trade.

He was upset about the British media’s stories, insisting they were fabricated.British newspapers The Sun, Mirror and the Daily Star recently ran articles describing Pattaya as “the world’s sex capital” and as a “modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah”, sparking anger among government officials, especially PM Prayut, who vowed to crack down on illegal businesses and prostitution in Pattaya, viewing them as a major embarrassment for Thailand.

Offshore Bar – Pattaya, Thailand.

http://www.chiangraitimes.com/pattaya-police-chief-says-there-is-no-such-thing-as-prostitution-in-pattaya.html

“There is no such thing as prostitution in Pattaya,” says Col Apichai. “Where did they get the figure of 27,000 sex workers in Pattaya? Anyone can make up this information.

Ah.

But sex and booze. Well, that’s something that I happen to enjoy.

And I am not afraid to admit it. Many a fine night has been spent with a female companion drinking wine, singing and dancing, and chatting and eating delicious food, and then having some great sex. It’s a wonderful way to pass the time, make new friends, and just relax.

Which brings me to the most awesome bar street. 

(Drinking booze, rock music and sex everywhere.) When I went there with my wife, we were just floored over by the sheer size and awesomeness of it.  It put New Orleans French Quarter to shame.  It is amazing and awesome at the same time.

We first visited Pattaya during a Chinese organized tour for tasting all the food of Thailand. 

The reader should realize that I am (what is called) “a foodie”.

A foodie is someone who has a deep interest in food. In addition to being interested in food itself, foodies are also interested in the back story: the history, production, science, and industry of food. As a general rule, foodies are amateurs, rather than professionals working in some aspect of the food industry, and many of them are self-taught.

-What is a Foodie?

We were not disappointed.

After one of the many, many dinners we were taken to the “bar street” for a look around.  The tour guide would not let us go alone, so we had to sign a “safety waiver” and off we went.  We’ve been in love with the place ever since.

It is not like what is portrayed in the American movie “Hangover II”, that is unless you are a drinker. Never the less it is an awesome place.  I actually prefer it over New Orleans “French Quarter”, Reno, Los Vegas, Macao, and some of the more “interesting” places that I have explored.

Both myself and my wife think of it as an awesome place.

First meal I had in Pattaya was fresh crab and shellfish.

The servings are huge and the prices were cheaper than in China. This I’m super surprised about even looking at the western meals around Pattaya are much cheaper than China also. Must be something to do with the amount of competition here. One thing that is first noticeable about the food in Pattaya is it tastes way better than what you get in China. I don’t really know why. This is probably because it’s either Isaan food and central food and I’m in the right place for that.

Since I’m a big foody I fell in love with the place immediately. (Not to mention all the pretty girls calling me a “handsome man”!)

A fine Thai curry chicken dish.

Pattaya is a very small place, well it’s not exactly small but the truth is that really, it’s just not that big. Pattaya is more concentrated making it easier to get around. This is especially true in the center of all “the action”.

Traffic isn’t as bad as people say though there are way more of those little mini-bicycle-car-like things (hoons) here which is expected.

Most of the hoons are either motorbike taxis or tourists joyriding. I hate driving in Thailand but it’s a must if you want to cover more ground quickly and save money and hassles getting taxis.

A lot of people walk in Pattaya compared to Bangkok. Bangkok is a city. Pattaya is a small coastal town.

If you’re a first time visitor to Pattaya then get ready for a surprise. This is like nothing you’ll have ever experienced before. This has to be one of the greatest concentrations of night time venues anywhere in the world.

The famous walking street is the epicenter of the Pattaya’s party scene, stretching from Bali Hai pier in the south to beach road at the north. This neon lit street is closed to traffic from around 6pm until the early morning. This mile long strip of pure hedonism is a mecca for party goers from all over the world. Lined with a mix of Go Go bars, drinking bars, restaurants, world class nightclubs and live music venues anyone who visits Pattaya has to experience this party wonderland.

(Don’t be afraid of entering any of the bars, clubs or go go’s you won’t get bitten (unless you want). The workers are all super friendly and the bad old days of getting ripped off are long gone. So be brave, and go on in.)

Metallicman in a Northern Bangkok 7-11 during the “Water Festival” (Songkran). That white stuff on my face is some kind of talc mixed with water that they put on you after they soak you with water. I don’t understand it, but I’ll bet it has an interesting story behind it.

Water Festival

The reader can just simply forget about staying dry during the water festival.  Little children, and not so little adults man each and every corner with plastic water guns, water machine guns, and water bazookas. The wife ended up staying in the room for three days afraid to go out and get soaked.

The Water Festival is the New Year’s celebrations that take place in east and South-east Asian countries such as China, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar Taiwan and Thailand.

It is called the ‘Water Festival’ by Westerners because they notice people splashing or pouring water at one another as part of the cleansing ritual to welcome the New Year. Traditionally people gently sprinkled water on one another as a sign of respect, but as the new year falls during the hottest month in South East Asia, many people end up dousing strangers and passersby in vehicles in boisterous celebration.

The act of pouring water is also a show of blessings and good wishes. It is believed that on this Water Festival, everything old must be thrown away, or it will bring the owner bad luck.

Here’s what another expat has to say about this festival;

“Songkran in Pattaya is celebrated for 7 days from the 13th until 19th April. It's difficult to avoid getting wet.

No food carts or girls ordering food get attacked with high-powered water guns and buckets as the Thais respect food. The Thais also consider people walking the sois with their luggage on the way to check-in to hotels.

Even long after the sun has set, the Thais still playing with water don't target people who are dry and heading out for dinner.

You know where I'm going with this… 

Of course, some young Thais on bikes riding the sois and drinking too much end up having fights. From my week-long Songkran experience here, having played with water and sat and observed, it's the dickhead Farangs with high-powered water guns hitting people in the face, attacking people with food, people going out dressed for a night out etc.

Even drunk bargirls manage to recognise and respect people who want to avoid water later in the evening. While writing this email in a dry area on sois 7 with 45 baht beers, I have witnessed 2 altercations between Westerners with high-powered guns attacking people who are dry. Only 28 more hours left of this craziness then off to track Everest. I'm confident Everest will be less to endure.“

-https://www.stickmanbangkok.com/weekly-column/2016/04/sensational-soda/

Going for a visit

It’s not just about the sleazy side of Pattaya and thousands of people a night descend here to watch some great live music acts, eat fresh seafood over the water or watch one of the numerous street performers. Even organized tours of Chinese and Korean tourists regularly wander up and down the street to soak up the atmosphere. The smaller alleys are called “Soi”. Check out the map below.

As a man, I have to admit that Thailand has so much going for it.

The cost of living is very cheap.  In fact, it is even cheaper than China.  If you have enough money saved away (stashed from the clutches of your first or second wives) you can live quite comfortably. Further, it is beautiful. The weather is NOT SNOWY. The food is awesome, though you might need to learn the language or use a cute girl to translate to order.  The beaches, mountains, and history are amazing…And, the girls… the girls are all cute, beautiful and AVAILABLE. What’s not to love?

Pattaya bar street map. All credit to the amazing Mike Baird.

Hotels in Pattaya.

Here’s just some informationt that I collected from my files. As Asia, both China and Thailand is in a constant state of flux, probably the best thing that you can do is chat with a local and get the best deals for your particular situation. Never the less, you can consider this guide as a helpful venue to get you started.

More information can be found here;

Wave Hotel Pattaya

The wave hotel is by far the best combination of luxury, value, and location in Pattaya; this is where the smart ballers stay. The price is around 160 dollars a night, but when you see this place, you will feel like it is a bargain. The rooms are high class, and the location can’t be beat. They offer a nice sized pool and garden area, along with a par. They also have free wifi access. The staff here will treat you like royalty.

Hilton Hotel Pattaya

Located dead center of Walking street and on the beach… What more can you expect from the Hilton? They offer an amazing infinity pool and pool side bar “Shore Bar”, which offers stunning views. They also have many rooftop restaurants with incredible views as well. This is a great getaway no matter what kind of vacation you are having in Pattaya. Don’t forget, Central Pattaya Beach is located downstairs!

Dusit D2 Baraquda Pattaya Hotel

Dusit D2 Baraquda Pattaya Hotel is a little different from the first two 5 star hotels offered here, Dusit D2 Baraqude offers a nice fusion between Thai and Western architecture so you will get a little culture, it is also suited in an excellent location right on walking street and offers amazing views of the surrounding area and ocean.

Pattaya Marriott Resort and Spa

The Marriott name speaks for itself, especially here in Pattaya. The Marriott is one of only a few five star hotels located in Pattaya and it shines here as one of the best hotels. It offers an amazing swimming pool and outdoor lounge, fine dining inside, in an excellent location, and high-speed internet access in every room. The gardens here are also amazing. They also offer a breakfast buffet every morning for all guests until 10:30am… If you are not too hung over!!

Intimate Hotel by Tim Boutique Hotel

Intimate Hotel by Tim Boutique Hotel is easily my choice for a medium budget traveler. It offers free wifi, stunning views across the city, Jacuzzi tubs in some rooms, a great rooftop bar/restaurant. It also provides a small, but nice fitness center and a decent international buffet. From here, you are within walking distance to Pattaya Beach, and also some of the shopping malls in the city such as Central Festival Beach and Royal Garden Plaza.

The Scenery City Hotel

Traveling on a budget? The Scenery City Hotel is my favorite budget hotel in Pattaya. They offer very nice clean rooms with a balcony for under 1000 baht per night. Free wifi is offered in public areas (some rooms can grab access from the public areas if within reach). Located right in the center of Pattaya, the location can’t be beat. The rooms are extremely clean and held to a very high standard, the staff is also very friendly and informative. Basically, everything is within walking distance of here, including the beaches.

Areca Lodge Hotel

Another one of my favorite hotels in Pattaya on Walking Street is the Areca Lodge Hotel. This is one of the most popular hotels in Pattaya with good reason. The prices are borderline cheap/medium so it fits most people’s budgets. They offer free in room wifi, and the rooms are extremely clean. Areca offers two large pools with Jacuzzis and other amenities including a fitness center, sauna and on-site eateries, also all rooms have balconies.

Hard Rock Hotel

The Hard Rock Hotel name speaks for itself, not much explaining needed here. Geared for the active crowd who would rather have a fun time with activities rather than a quiet time. The rooms are all modern, hip, and cool with purple styling. Every room offers a sea view or city view, depending which side of the building you’re on. The pool is one of the best in Pattaya and they offer lots of activities in the pool/garden area. It also offers many restaurants, bars and lounges including the world’s popular signature Hard Rock Café.

Sooi-Tee Guest House

For those of you on a super budget, I highly recommend the Sooi-Tee Guest House. Rooms start around 500 or 600 baht a night and all offer free wifi. The location is perfect and each room has AirCon, which you won’t find in a lot of guest houses in this price range. The rooms are clean and offer a baloney. Staying at a place like this is is good because you get that nice homey feel and special attention from the staff.

View Talay 6 Pattaya Beach Condominium

View Talay 6 Pattaya Beach Condominium by Honey is one of the best medium priced hotels in Pattaya and also one of the most popular. Located on the beach, it offers great views of the ocean and city. There is a nice pool with a pool side bar and massage service on site. The location couldn’t be beat if you want to be on the beach AND close to Walking Street. This hotel also offers free wifi.

Bars and Nightclubs

There are many great nightclubs on the Pattaya walking street. Each has its own vibe and feel and most will be open until the sun comes up.

The clubs are extremely popular and are generally very busy every night of the week. Most don’t get going until after midnight. The clubs are a favorite of both younger tourist and locals. Here are some links to all the bars. (Up to date when I was last there, back in 2017.)

“Walking street really is one of a kind. Little could I have known, that all I had to do was jump on a plane and instantly be transformed into a ‘handsome man’ . It’s a blast. The vegas of the east. Minus gambling.”

-学习如何水肺潜水 JANUARY 5, 2017 AT 7:01 AM

Girls of the Toy Box.
69ers Beer Bar
Facebook Seite
Soi 7, Central Pattaya (umgezogen von der Soi 8)
A
Apple BarSoi Chaiyapruek, Jomtien Beach
Armageddon BarSoi LK Metro, um die Ecke von der Soi Buakhao
Atlantic BarPattaya Second Road
Aussie BarSoi 7, Central Pattaya
B
Barracuda Bar
Facebook Seite
Naklua Road, Nord-Pattaya
Billabong Bar & HotelSoi LK Metro, Central Pattaya
Booze Lounge
Facebook Seite
Soi Khao Talo, Ost-Pattaya (ca. 1,5 Kilometer hinter der Sukhumvit Road)
Borussia Park
Facebook Seite
Deutsches Gästehaus und Bar, Naklua Road
Brass Monkey BarSoi Nern Plub Wan, Soi 26, Ost-Pattaya
Buffalo Bar
Facebook Seite
Pattaya Third Road, Central Pattaya
Butcher’s Arms PubEnglischer Pub & Gästehaus, Soi Buakhao
C
Caddyshack
Facebook Seite
Pub & Gästehaus, Pattaya Third Road, Soi 17
Camel ToeGentleman Club, Soi Korpai 10
Candy LocaRompho Barkomplex, Jomtien Second Road
The Castle Fetish Club
Facebook Seite
Pattaya Third Road, Central Pattaya (neben der Buffalo Bar)
Champions Sports BarRompho Barkomplex, Jomtien Second Road
D
Devil’s Den
Facebook Seite
Soi LK Metro, Central Pattaya (vormalig Hell’s Club)
E
Easy R-Con Bar
Facebook Seite
Soi Buakhao, Central Pattaya
F
FLB BarWalking Street, Süd-Pattaya
G
The Golf ClubSports Bar, Soi LK Metro, Central Pattaya
Gulliver’s TavernPattaya Beach Road, Nord-Pattaya; Walking Street
I
I-Rovers Sports Bar
Facebook Seite
Bar, Restaurant & Gästehaus, Soi LK Metro, Central Pattaya
J
Jameson’s Irish PubSoi Sukrudee (Soi A.R.), Central Pattaya
Joy’s Paradise
Facebook Seite
Deutsche Bar und Gästehaus, Soi Welcome Jomtien
K
Kåres Party BarPattaya Second Road
Kawaii BarSoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
Kiss Kool BarSoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
KitCat Club Lounge410/8-10 Thappraya Road, Dongtan Beach, Jomtien
L
La La Land BarSoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
Legends Pool & Sports Bar
Facebook page
Pattaya Klang Soi 5, Central Pattaya
Lord Nelson Sports Bar
Facebook Seite
Pub, Restaurant & Gästehaus, Soi 6 (Soi Yodsak)
Lucky Love BarSoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
M
Mai Lu Si BarSoi Buakhao, gegenüber vom Pattaya City Hospital
Maxies BarSoi 16, Walking Street, Süd-Pattaya
M Club
Facebook Seite
Gentleman Club, Pattaya Third Road, Soi 14
Medusa Bar & RestaurantDeutsches Restaurant und Short Time Bar auf der Soi Wat Boon am Jomtien
Metro Bar & ApartmentsSoi LK Metro, Central Pattaya
Moonshine PlaceAmerikanische Bar and Gästehaus, Jomtien Soi 4
Murphy’s Law PubSoi LK Metro, Central Pattaya
N
Night Wish BarSoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
Nong Beer BarSoi Diana
O
O Bar
Facebook Seite
Soi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
One BarDeutsche Bar, Soi Night Out, Central Pattaya Road
P
Passion Gentleman’s ClubThappraya Road (Hanuman Statue), Jomtien
Pattaya Beer GardenPattaya Beach Road (Eingang zur Walking Street)
The Pig & Whistle Pub
Facebook Seite
Soi 7, Central Pattaya
PJ DJ Bar & Guesthouse
Facebook Seite
Soi 7, Central Pattaya (vormalig Anna Jet Bar)
The Pussy ClubSoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
Q
Queen Victoria Inn
Facebook Seite
Englischer Pub, Restaurant & Hotel, Soi 6
Quickie BarSoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
R
Retox Sports Bar
Facebook Seite
Soi Lengkee, zwischen Pattaya Third Road und Soi Buakhao
Retox Game On
Facebook Seite
Soi Honey, um die Ecke von der Pattaya Second Road
The Rock House
Facebook Seite
Bar & Gästehaus, Soi LK Metro
Ruby ClubSoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
Rum Dum BarRompho Barkomplex, Jomtien Second Road
Ryan’s BarNaklua Road, Nord-Pattaya (vor der Soi Wongamat)
S
Saigon Girl BarSoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
Sailor InnNorwegisches Restaurant & Gästehaus, Soi 13/2
Scandinavia Bar & RestaurantPattaya Beach Road, zwischen Soi 13 und Soi Yamato
Scandinavia Beach ClubPattaya Beach Road, zwischen Soi 5 and Soi 6
Scooters BarSoi Buakhao, Central Pattaya
Secrets Bar & Nightclub
Facebook Seite
Soi 14, Walking Street, Süd-Pattaya
Sexy In The CitySoi 6 (Soi Yodsak), Central Pattaya
Shooters Coyote Bar
Facebook Seite
Coyote Bar & Gästehaus, Soi 7, Central Pattaya
Siam CatsDeutsche Bar and Gästehaus, Jomtien Soi 5
Simple SimonEnglisches Restaurant & Bar, Jomtien Soi 5
Smurf BarDeutsche Bar, Soi Buakhao (Nähe Pattaya Klang)
The Sportsman Pub
Facebook Seite
Pattaya Soi 13
T
Telephone BarSoi Batman, Süd-Pattaya
Tim Bar BeerBar und A-GoGo, Pattaya Second Road, Süd-Pattaya
V
Valentines Bar
Facebook Seite
Soi Lengkee, zwischen Pattaya Third Road und Soi Buakhao
Viper Bar
Facebook Seite
Coyote Bar, Pratamnak Road Soi 4 (gegenüber vom Asia Hotel)
W
WhyNot BarDeutsche Aircon-Bar, 179/86 Naklua Road
Wombat BarBar, Restaurant & Gästehaus, Jomtien Beach Road

Some fun Links;

I would say that the number one advantage of visiting or living in Pattaya, is the “walking street” and the things that you can purchase there. As a man, I can see distinct advantages in living there.

“Last night we were in Gulliver's and one sight made me chuckle.

A large group of Brits walked in and took up about three tables. The women were obese but their boyfriends (how the hell did they get guys) were trim. 

The group was approached by four waitresses and two beer promotion girls. 

The waitresses were pretty with slim figures and you can guess how good the promotion girls looked. 

Needless to say the guys were enthralled by the display and had trouble ordering, much to the displeasure of the blobs sat around them.

I bet there were a few arguments back in the hotel rooms later. 

Welcome to Thailand, boys! I bet they are currently praying for their girlfriends to get food poisoning so they can go out unhindered and get some ‘cultural experiences’.”

- Praying for food poisoning!

Buying a Car in Thailand

Yes, the initial purchase of a car in Thailand will probably cost more than it would in the United States. A small-engined Japanese sedan such as a Toyota Corolla or Honda Civic runs from 800,000 baht up to 1,000,000 plus for a fully loaded, top model.  This is much more than you would pay in most Western countries. European or luxury cars can cost as much as 3 times what the exact same model would cost in the West.

Used Cars

The initial purchase price of a new (or second hand) car will also be greater than the West, but that is where the idea of car ownership in Thailand being expensive ends.

The good news is that cars devalue at a much, much slower rate in Thailand than they do elsewhere.  Indeed, Hondas and Toyotas will command a high resale price due to their perceived reliability.  You can pretty much expect vehicles from either of these manufacturers to devalue at not much more than 10% per year. A Honda Civic in good condition and with reasonable mileage that cost 800,000 in 2003 would go for around 400,000 baht now. A two-year old Toyota Vios that has travelled 30,000 km may sell for only 100,000 baht less than the exact same car brand new. If resale value is a concern choose carefully as not all cars from certain manufacturers maintain a great resale value.

Take note. European manufactured vehicles depreciate in value at a frightening high rate.

Pickup Trucks

If the price of a new car is beyond your budget, consider a pickup truck. Pickup trucks are subject to a different tax rate than sedans and as such are much cheaper. You can get a new pickup for as little as 500,000 baht or a fully featured model with a luxurious interior that gives it the feel of a well-speced sedan for around 700,000 baht. Pickup trucks sell very well in Thailand because they represent good value.

Other Costs

The cost of gasoline in Thailand is fairly low. Granted that it is a little bit more expensive than North America and about the same price as you would pay in Australia, but it is however much, much cheaper than what you’d pay in Europe.

Insurance is cheap and policies don’t seem to have an excess so if you have an accident you pay nothing (unless of course the police demands a donation!)

The cost of getting a vehicle serviced in Thailand is ridiculously low. For a small to medium sized Japanese vehicle you’re looking at around 1,000 baht per service at the franchised dealer. No, not a corner garage but a franchised dealer where they use the right oil, genuine parts and the workshop is so clean you could just about eat your rice off the floor.

Not that one should break the traffic laws, but fines for traffic infringements are ridiculously low. If you are miraculously issued with an official ticket, the odds are it will be in the range of 400 – 800 baht. Usually it won’t even cost that much however as the friendly police will invariably offer you a pay now discount.

Conclusion

This is just my introduction to Thailand, and as you might have guessed, I have a lot to say. So expect many more posts.

One of the things that I like about the world is how different other places are. As an American, I was programmed into believing that the “American way of life” was the best; that it was superior to all other forms of governance, and that so many people want to come to America to experience it.

Well, it’s not. Not by a long shot, and when you leave the “Exceptional American Experience” you realize just how much of your life that you have wasted pursuing that “American Dream”.

More to follow.

In the mean time appreciate what you have, and if you don’t have what you need to be happy, open up your horizons and go for it.

Nothing will put a smile on your face quicker than a “romp in the hay” with a beautiful and pretty girl after a day of quaffing beer and eating delicious food.

You can have some wonderful massages in Thailand.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my KTV Index here…

Business KTV's

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Some solid information about prostitution within China

People have asked me, shyly (of course) if I could tell them a few things about how sex works within China. Ai! It’s a big subject, for certain. But you know what? It isn’t all that different from sex anywhere else in the world. You have people who fall in love and have relationships and have sex as part of that relationship, and then you have people who do not. These people trade sex for money instead.

Since China has always been the subject of sensational lies so that others may profit, it’s difficult to find any reasonable and good information on the internet about these subjects short of going on a “monger” website.

Monger
Short for whoremonger, i.e., one who frequents whores and prostitutes.

-Urban Dictionary: monger

Most people who visit Metallicman aren’t really “mongers”. Most are just healthy normal folk with a pretty decent interest in the universe around them. And that means just about everything.

That’s a good thing.

This post is some old information that I had buried in one of my pages. Um. Pages are different than posts. And unless you are an expert in the layout of Metallicman, the chances of you finding some of my intentionally buried pages will be difficult. I resurrected this page, updated it with some information and am placing it here as a post. If you have never seen it before, then you are in for a treat. Enjoy.

I found this on Daspora-ChinaSmack.  It describes how an American got involved in the KTV scene and got tangled up with prostitutes in China. It’s a good read, even though the spelling is atrocious …

Also please take note, again, that this was not written by myself. It is the opinions of that author as he relates his experiences in regards to KTV’s, girls who charge for sexual services and how it works. He is responding to a long chain of discussion in which people are talking about prostitution inside of Asia, and China in particular. Here we pic-up his comments after a few pages of nonsense by basement millennials, holier-than-thou women, ignorant teenagers, and a few genuine people looking for answers…

Southernorthener

You guys actually have all the facts but kinda lose sight of reality..

Ive been in china for years.. i have a regular blog but its a rated since i have a normal life i lead that is quite in the spotlight so to speak..but i actually want to write this down desperately..

i have another life in the north of china.

Its hard to explain, and sort of unbelievable, even for me at times, but i'm going to go out on a ledge here since i cant change a whole nations opinion, but i can at least share my experiences with you folk and hope that someone listens…

Here it goes..
I'm basically like a pimp...

...a real nice pimp, and i work in the KTV and security industry when I'm not doing my day job..and I'm a foreigner.

It sounds so different than it actually is though…

First off…let me just correct some wrongs and wrong some writes..

[1] (The girls) They aren't forced into KTV...

[2] The money is certainly theirs, only some goes to the mommies, but the cash they get in their hands is theirs.

[3] Not all are what we call “chu tai de”, which means that go out, for sexs, The ones that do go out range from old and desperate with a pimp, or young and horny without a pimp and all the variations in between.

So remember..they are not all hookers...

...why would they be when there are saunas every other block with actual skilled sex workers?
What happened to me was that i started doing business with a guy that had a factory...

... but was actually a gangster...

... or not even a gangster, where I'm from, gangsters have guns and they are ruthless..

These guys are a bunch of semi successful middle aged men who have groups of young guys from anhui, henan, dongbei just buzzing around them with shaved heads gold chains and nike sneaks..

Thug life.
Photo is from a phone that was “found” by an interested person. On it were numerous photos of a mob boss and his crew. This is, we must assume, his crew. It is representative of the kind of people that this article talks about.
They get paid to protect them from...

I don't even know what...

...and they live in dorms like little goons working for the man, but hardly any of them can fight, and only if you have thirty of them with machetes to they actually become dangerous...

So this one guy I was doing business with is friends with a big KTV owner, another balding “gangsta”... who's got like fifty boys who all work security for the KTV...

... you'd be surprised about how much they get used...

So I became a relative lieutenant in the ranks of these boys, and the cheering and the free ciggies never stop flowing from the ranks upwards...
I happen to come from a quite violent upbringing and actually was a real little thug, petty shit though growing up in the ghettos of the states... 

But unthinkable for some of these so called gees...

...so for me fitting in with this crowd was natural...

...although I myself have changed my ways, and I stopped to steal cheat or...

...well lets leave it at that.

So I gets hooked up with a KTV girl, my family is in the South of course, Chinese wife, kids, the lot..

Shes super young and she doesn't fuck for money...

She takes the 400 rmb a night and spends it pretty fast but takes care of her drunken father and grandparents...

...the mom is in sechuan somewhere and doesn't give a flying fuck...

So since i was being taken to KTV every night by the Chinese bosses for like eight months, I basically would help her get paid...

...and help her to book the room, which they get perks for...

...she was damn hot, and everyone wanted to bang her, but no one knew she was actually just 17, standing taller than I, at 5’10.

Mob boss at the KTV.
Chinese mob boss with some of his staff and some KTV girls in a KTV. It’s a pretty typical scene in China. Photos apparently came off a phone that used to belong to a “Chinese Mob Boss”.
She was totally in love with her current boyfriend that had gone to Japan, and was actually supporting him by working at KTV...

...but he was there...

...I was here...

...basically though we hit it off because in this city I, was a foreigner , but I was doing business, and getting taken out by gangsters and business people every night...

...so ...

...basically she only started to like me because I wasn't just an English teacher...

... aka I had money, and I had friends that could help her if she got into trouble...
To make a long story short, I got an apartment, with four rooms, went back to the South, came back , and four of her girlfriends were staying in the house...

...all known prozzies (prostitutes)...

...even one that I possibly have done, I could never be sure if it was actually her, at any rate she never caused any grief with the lil missus...

...little wife...xiao lao pou..the new mamasan in town.

Mob Boss in the KTV with some friends.
Chinese triad gangster in a KTV with friends and some KTV hostesses. The drinks and the cigarettes flow easily.
Everyone in the city (in the game) started to hear that she was getting them business and shed get a cut...

...so in fact it was her who started the pimpstressing...

... but later when my big bro found out, he told me to be careful and gave me the numbers to a few boys that would come if anything went down and I kinda took over in the protection area...

...eventually things did go down ...

...when a guy didn't wanna pay and kept a girl in a hotel room...

...suffice to say the ending was not pretty...

...for him, and I started receiving extra income...

Going forward more, and back to the conversation at hand ...

...it's business...

...they all know what they are involved in and the cash is theirs to keep...

...the cut to the pimp is actually protection fee, and its not nearly as exorbitant as it is in the states...

its actually pretty legit...

...most the girls are all pulled from the hometowns and some go on to open clothes and make up shops...

...which my KTV girl eventually ended up doing...
The nasty part is there though...

...and there are clients that want the girls to do ice with them before sexs...

...huge cost though and usually there are boys nearby...

...but then again, there are girls who choose to do that since in one night you can make four nights money...

Its strange I know...

...and I don't know exactly how I got involved , but I did...

...then there's a whole world of DJ's! That actually make almost as much as the girl but they only clean up and pour drinks!

Those are great to date...

...also KTV's themselves range from nasty group-on sexs in the room to fucking 30000 rmb bottles of lafitte and all college educated girls...

...lafitte mixed with sprite...

You'd be surprised a lot of these places the girls go to school, work on and off...

...its up to them, they get multiple males all paying things for them, which in my opinion...

...more power to them...

...they are not all bimbos and hoes...

...that's were some of you are wrong...

...they are not all slaves...

...and the work can range from easy to difficult, sadly directly correlative with their appearances...

(At) some KTV's you can grab them anywhere you want and the mamasans scream at them to be more open...

...others, the boys will come in and beat the shit out of you if you touch the wrong girl...

...in this case my girl...

...its weird that people actually pay up and beyond a hundred USD just for the company but for their sake...

...that's their newfound cash culture...

...whether its right or not its too early to tell...

But then again look at our potato chip eating fatty couch surfing culture we have...

...that we basically got the same way. By being a developing nation that eventually has a bunch of people getting exactly what they want since they got the cash to spend...

You know the problem I see is that a lot of foreigners can't and will never be able to see the real truth...

One, because ...

...I'm talking a minimum expenditure of over ten thousand rmb a night at some of these places...

And two, because to actually know if shes smart or not, or if she knows what the hell shes doing...

... you have to be able to speak with her...

...and not conversational Chinese (either)...

Mob Boss and girls in KTV
Another photo of the mob boss inside yet another KTV. This is pretty typical for China.
I'm talking speaking in shanghainese for hours upon hours finding out what this person has up there...

...that's when you get the real picture...

...and sadly those foreigners are few and far between...

...I'm one of them, and funnily enough I never asked to be, but I have a nack for languages...

...and hustlin...

Just know that the KTV world is way more complex than it seems...

...and that with everything in life stereotypes exist for a reason, but there will always be exceptions to that rule..

...and in china...

...exceptions can be millions of girls who know exactly what they are doing and are taking advantage of rich men's horny tendencies and deserve a little more respect than most tend to give them...

I got a lot of respect for them gals.

Southernorthener

Oh and I forgot to say...

...I didn't know she was 17 either ! Hahahahah

Anyway...

...I know I'm no saint...

...and rereading this I'm wondering why the fuck I just said all that to a bunch of you-all strangers...

...but thing is I think I got a pretty unique outlook round these parts...

...and I read diaspora and china smack all day..

... (the) thing is I never comment, because I got funny grammar due to a lack of formal education...

...and I'm always a bit scared of being misunderstood or laughed at ...

...never found something I really wanted to comment about until now...

Diaspora is funny though...

Because I feel like backwards diaspora...

I've been here so long all my foreigner friends tell me I've become Chinese...

...and I came here so young and stupid, that I basically grew up here...

...plus I'm not even fully American, so I don't feel American, that's for sure...

...and to top it all off I live fully Chinese...

...to the point where people think I'm Chinese?!

They all think im xinjiangy...

...its kind of weird...

...in the end ...

...Chinese culture seems to go over the heads of the Chinese so much that I would find it fucking hard for most foreigners or ABC's or whatever to fully get it after a year or two or even five living here...

Also its so layered...

...there's cultures for every class...

...for every province for every city! There's languages for fuck sake between cities...

...you can expect huge culture differences as well...

...china reminds me a lot of America actually..,

...just more open about there Americaness than even Americans...

...cheating lying backstabbing bribery violence prostitution drugs...

Its what America was built on...

...yet know that we've kind of cleaned up certain aspects of our western lives we are here to point piss and shit in the general direction of the big red brother yeah? 

I don't know..its all fucked isn't it.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my Business KTV index, here…

Business KTV's

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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On a positive note; things to appreciate about both the United States and China.

Ever since last December 2019, the news out of America has been that of constant China demonization. There is nothing that China, or the Chinese could do right. That they are evil at a level unprecedented, and the only thing good about a Chinese person is if they were dead.

Ugh!

“Neocons” believe that the United States should not be ashamed to use its unrivaled power – forcefully if necessary – to promote its values around the world. Some even speak of the need to cultivate a US empire. Neoconservatives believe modern threats facing the US can no longer be reliably contained and therefore must be prevented, sometimes through preemptive military action.

Most neocons believe that the US has allowed dangers to gather by not spending enough on defense and not confronting threats aggressively enough. One such threat, they contend, was Saddam Hussein and his pursuit of weapons of mass destruction. Since the 1991 Gulf War, neocons relentlessly advocated Mr. Hussein’s ouster.

-Neocon 101: What do Neoconservatives Believe?

Extreme?

You bet.

But that narrative is intended to drum up support for a war against China. It is immaterial if it is true or not. It just… is all part and parcel of a propaganda campaign that is needed to get Americans on a “war footing”. And make no mistake. They want another full-on World War. They want to see it [1] unify the nation against a common enemy, [2] decimate and destroy China for personal plunder, and [3] renew America as the dominant nation in the world.

Ah. There’s nothing that I can do about that. If America is going to fight another war, there’s nothing that I can do about it. I have as much power in this matter as an ant does against a stampede of rampaging elephants.

All that I can do, is duck my head. Then scurry out of the line of fire. When people ask me what I am doing and why, I point out what I am seeing, and they immediately get their shackles up! “How dare I even think such a thing!” They demand.

Fine, I say.

  • Bio-weapon COVID-19. The United States would NEVER…
  • Micro Nuke on the BRI in Lebanon. The United States would NEVER…
  • Arrest of industry CEOS. The United States would never…
  • Drones spraying swine flu to destroy Chinese Pork. The US would never…
  • Ordering other nations to stop trading with China. The United States would never…
  • Banning 5G, all Chinese phones, Chinese Apps. The USA would never…
  • Cut trade, communication, and travel with China. The United States would never…

What ever.

Anyways. If you cannot see what the “end game” is with all the NEOCONS in the White House, you never will. It’s pretty blatant and “in your face”.

The only question is timing.

There is a shitload of domestic issues “on the table” right now, and the China events will figure into this calculus, for better or worse. I don’t know which, honestly. After all, it is an election year.

I talked to some close friends and relatives in the USA, all rabid Trump supporters, and they pretty much told me this…

Oh, Trump will get reelected. It's a certainty.

And China. Well, the USA will hurt China really bad, and they won't be able to do anything about it, because "we hold all the cards". Trump is playing 48 D chess. He's very smart, it's just that he has a really bad habit with social media. But, disregard that. He's really, actually a genius.

Biden is such a joke. He is actually physically living inside a closet. There is no friggin' way that he'll ever become President.

It WILL be world war III, and yes, I'm aware of that. But I'm ready, and so is the United States.

I think they are all delusional.

But, I still love them anyways.

OK. Well, I came across this article on my LinkedIN feed a ways back. I thought that it was pretty good. It comes up with other things, positive things to say about China. Which pretty much makes it completely unique. How many times have you read anything positive about China in any of the American press?

I think that the world needs to look at things in a positive way.

Don’t you?

What I Love About China

Published on March 4, 2020 by Jim Nelson, President, SHI Group Recruitment. Edited to fit this venue, and all credit to the original author.

Sentiment against China inside and out is pretty high these days. Some trends are concerning, but much endures for me. What I love about China is quite a bit. I am an American and have lived in China for over 20 years. I love America and cry when we sing “I am proud to be an American, where at least I know I am free.”

However, I have found things in China that I should mention. I know these comments are generalizations and there are exceptions, but these are things I have generally found to be true. Also, many things I find here I might also have found in other developing countries. I found them here. Finally, some of these lessons may have been things this Swedish American needed to learn more than some others from the US.

What I Love About China

1. Food.

China, Italy, and Mexico are the competitors for the American stomach for a reason. China is a food culture that I love and O, do not make them late for lunch.

2. Friends.

I never knew before I moved to China that most Americans are lonely and do not even know it. What I mean is that Americans like to talk about the weather and some highlights about our kids, but we do not go much deeper. 

I have an Afrikaner friend who lives in the States. He says that just when he feels the relationship is going deeper, the American will suddenly back off relationally.

Most Americans have an invisible wall that they do not recognize that no one or almost no one crosses. Remember the Simon & Garfunkel tune that says, “I am a Rock, I am an Island. I touch no one and no one touches me.”? That is America in so many ways.

We Americans do not get personal. 

For example, I can talk about religious faith or how much they earn with most anyone in China whereas you cannot touch that in America or you risk losing your friend. It seems I was open to something different when I came to China and discovered that in America we did not talk deep. 

I am glad to have become a deeper person here and less lonely. (Though I never knew I was lonely before I came)

3.  Be part of a group.

Americans are desperately independent. Freedom has come to mean that we do not rely on anyone emotionally or otherwise. This is related to 2 it seems.

Individualism has become extreme in America. In America, I pump my own gas and never talk to a teller at the bank.

I bought a house in China and borrowed US$60,000 from my Chinese friends and not a penny from my American friends.

Friendships have traction in China.

Americans would rather give me some money than loan any. When I first married my Chinese wife 14 years ago, I walked around the table to get a butter knife right behind my wife. She called me on it immediately. “Why are we married if you do not ask for anything?”

4. Relationship ties.

Americans give free gifts. We want no tie or outstanding debt as it were.

Chinese give gifts to create and buttress their relationships.

No one talks about a free gift here. 2, 3 and 4 are related here, and I am glad to accept this new thing. I think it has made me a better person.

5. The Chinese is a deeply emotional nation.

In 2001, the American Navy sunk a Japanese fishing boat and many Japanese school students died. No government angst was aired by Japan. The Americans apologized profusely and paid all costs for the losses. The families were upset and wanted apologies and got them. No one in Japan said we did it on purpose. It was a very sad rational event actually. 

In 1999, the US bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, it was all angst and blame and harsh words all across China, and no one in China even yet believes the Americans did this by accident. No students died, but three reporters did. China declared them maryters. No sense of that happened in Japan with the boat.

The Chinese people are an introverted deeply emotional people unlike the Japanese. Chinese mothers teach Tang dynasty poetry to their small children. China has a National Holiday to honor a poet who committed suicide. America honors the guy who made someone else die. 

The relation between America and China is a love-hate relationship and emotional from the top government to the bottom peasant. The relationship with Japan is not love-hate. It is more like business.

  • I would describe the Americans as being an extroverted audacious shallow emotional country. 
  • I would describe the Japanese as being a rational detailed private country. 
  • The US relationship with China is invariably emotional.

Being a naturally rational person, I gained a lot from the perspective of a deeply feeling country. I learned to live in China.

6. They study history.

The Chinese are backing into the future with their eyes firmly fixed on the past. I love history and yet my countrymen had little interest. Here everything might be seen with eyes fixed on the past. Chinese when I first arrived might approach me and say “Do you love China for her 5000 years of written history?”

I have often enjoyed talking and debating history here in a land where most people still believe the South Koreans started the Korean War. Further, so hard for China to crack the habits of its past in child raising, medical thoughts and on and on.

They seem to say “Surely China could not have been wrong all these 5000 years?” They challenged me to think more about what is true and what I believe about the past.

7. Pedestrian Friendly.

I can ride a bicycle here and never need a car.

In America we must have a car as our cities are spread out and our public transportation stinks as we are desperately independent (see 3 above).

By 2013 Chinese people had stopped riding bikes, but I still do. Then out of nostalgia they started riding rental bikes but that got old fast. I still bike everywhere and love it. China is so dense that biking and walking are practical and subways and buses can fill the rest well.

8. Appreciate everything. Now.

I have learned to not take things for granted, like clean roads, and blue skies with white clouds, and clear understandable win / win relationships.

9. Happiness is an attitude. Not a place.

Happiness cannot be bought. I have seen some of the happiest faces in some of the poorest places here.

I guess I should stop. God Bless America and God Bless China, May they each learn from the other.

Conclusions

It’s a nice article. Of course it is another person’s opinion and where you live will have a lot to do with your experience. I live in Zhuhai China and every day is fresh, clean air, and blue skies. But that came with planning and strong prayer affirmation campaigns. It did not occur out of the blue.

If you are in an industrial zone, expect dirtier and grimier surroundings and a white hazy sky. It comes with the territory.

Where we live will influence your life, and your relationships.

I spent six years in Indiana, in the United States. I had a good job there, and I was making a good salary. yet, something was missing. I didn’t realize what it was until I left Indiana and moved to Mississippi, and then to Boston. It’s the people.

Boston folk are really fine open and friendly, and they might seem a bit brash and harsh, but that’s just their way of getting to know you.

Hey! You'se got a problem with that?

I am sure that Vice President Mike Pence (from Indiana) is a very nice person, but he probably doesn’t drink, he attends church regularly, and has a nice house in an upscale neighborhood. You can probably smile at him and he probably would hold the door open for you in a store, but having a deep heart-to-heart conversation with him would probably be out of the question. It’s not the Hooser way.

It’s not that, that is bad, in itself. The point is that where you live and how you associate with people is what defines the quality of our life.

Be it blue skies, fresh air, nice people that would do anything for you (including give you the shirt off their back), and cultural and social activities.

Life is what we make it.

You do not need to be constrained to live in the same area that your parents choose, nor associate with the same friends that you made in elementary school. You do not need to be stuck in a job that you chose when you were in your early 20’s, and you certainly do not need to be stuck in a relationship that is devoid of love, care, and happiness.

If the USA provides all your needs, emotional, spiritual, cultural, social and monetary, then I say there there and prosper. If that is not acceptable, then try China. And if China is not acceptable, then try another nation. Maybe Iceland. The point is that you, and you alone, define what your happiness is.

And if others don’t understand, well…

…that’s their problem.

Do you want more?

I have more posts like this in my China Index here…

China

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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Snapshots of life in China. Surprise! It doesn’t look anything like Alex Jones says it is.

Here are some videos taken around China during the Summer of 2020. During this time, China has pretty much recovered from the Coronavirus, but remains guarded and cautious. The rest of the world is still fighting the virus, and the United States is a “basket case”. The videos are a collection of home movies that I took and Tictok videos from the original platform Douxing, which has always been banned in the United States.

Incidentally, all those laws being made in the United States about banning or changing Tictok or Wechat has absolutely ZERO effect in China. 

American laws end at the American shoreline, and as far as the influence that they will have, it will be minimal. The primary generation of income for all the Chinese companies come from within China itself.

So, as an example, Tictok revenue in the USA is less than 2% of what it makes in China.  

Here, I use Alex Jones as an example (in the title) as he is pushing the “China Bad” narrative (generated by the Pompeo CIA / State Department) very rigorously. He, like others of his market segment, (such as Rush Limbaugh and Hall Turner) use China as the scapegoat for all the problems that America is experiencing. It’s a convenient villain.

It’s also absolutely and completely false.

It's like a fight in a school yard between two bullies. The teacher comes out to break it up. And one of the bullies points to the teachers car and yells"Someone is trying to steal your car!"

China does not look anything like these multi-millionaire television and radio personalities say. And because they are so very, very, very far off the “deep end” in their speculative fantasies, those that listen to them, end up making decisions based on bad intel.

They make bad decisions based upon their illusions instead of based on reality.

Such as Donald Trump / Mike Pompeo when they decided to “institute a regime change” in Communist China “for the Chinese people”.

Not realizing that the Communist Government IS the people of China.

Not just in "flowery words" and "pithy sayings", but really in reality. Their entire society is structured as that of an individual having membership within something greater.

America, is set up the opposite. It is a nation of "lone wolves", or individuals who fight alone and reap all the benefits of their hard labors for themselves alone.

So the Pompeo speed and the Trump public positioning, is of course very silly, and absolutely insane that a (supposedly capable) government would even dare publicly announce such a strategy.


"Ah. I do not like their government. We will do everything to destroy that government. We will build a coalition to enable us to destroy it as a collective group.

We are doing it for democracy, and freedom, and for the people of China."

Now, for the record, I have listened to these television personalities for decades. For the longest time I believed every word that they said, as they provided me with a news and opinion outlet that was not (then) available on the “mainstream American press”. And in so believing everything, I became a rabid nationalist conservative.

Then life happened.

Uh oh.

I saw how “Justice” actually works, and how absolutely out of touch the mainstream conservative narrative actually is with the many facets of American society. Some things just did not add up. (How can a nation be a Republic with the election of Senators? If America is so great, why was I always “treading water” and desperately trying to play “catch up?)

I started to move to the left (politically) and for the longest time I oscillated back and forth between left and right trying to find a “middle ground”. I guess you might say that I was a Libertarian at heart. I just pretty much wanted to be left alone. I wasn’t hurting or harming anyone. I just wanted to be left alone.

If America was the land of the “lone wolf”, then let me take on that role. Leave me alone! As it is my right as an American!

No one in the USA would let me.

There was always something I was doing wrong. From not wearing a seat-belt, to smoking in a restaurant, to drinking beer on Sunday, to not reporting a sale (I made to a friend) to the IRS. It got so bad that I was afraid to do anything. When I was driving, I would always look at my speedometer if I saw a police car. I would only carry just “enough” money in my wallet so that I wouldn’t be questioned “why” I had so much money. It was NOT a life that I wanted to live.

Then I moved to China.

Whoa! Was it nothing like I expected!

I expected something out of a dystopian novel. I expected darkness, pale faces and dour expressions. I expected goose-stepping security guards everywhere. I expected sadness, grey skies and a bleak landscape. I expected third-world hovels, and a remote and impossible to reach ruling class. I expected filth, squalor, bad habits, nasty behaviors, and oppressive regulations and endless lines of bureaucracy.

I expected the “cardboard cut-out” illusion that has been drummed into my head for the last six decades.

I did not see it.

I saw something else.

I saw FREEDOM. Real, honest to goodness, freedom. I saw people who were living life without fear of the police. I saw people who were able to save money. I saw people smoking (gasp!) at their desks at work (gasp!) and pin-up of nude girls on the office walls (gasp!) and buying beer at lunch as if it was nothing. Nothing! I saw people that had hope and dreams and a strong belief that their government would stick by them, and help THEM when they needed it.

Oh….

Let me show you what I saw, and continue to see, in China to this day…

Each picture contains a movie. Please click on the picture to watch a movie that will open up in a new tab that will illustrate the story within the picture shown.

The videos

Here are some videos that I have collected and that provides some sort of “snapshot” of life in China. Good or bad, you can say that [1] it is different from that in the United States, and [2] that it doesn’t at all resemble anything like the news media (on all levels) say it is.

And that is the point.

These videos are a selection of videos that point to how life is within China in various aspects. They are a mix of some “home videos” that I took (like the first one) and videos that I have collected using various Chinese APPs. I suggest you check them all out.

Conclusion

One of the many things you learn when you leave the Untied States (or any of it’s satellite nations, like the UK or Canada) is that the world looks nothing like the American media says it is. In fact, it looks absolutely and stunningly different.

This goes as far as what other nations are like. As in the example of China. To, just how welcome all the Americans are when they are busy “spreading democracy and freedom” to the rest of the world. Like here…

.

Or, being an example for the rest of the world to emulate. Like how the United States has handled the Coronavirus. As shown clearly in this video…

.

The future belongs to people who will work together as a society for the benefit of all. Not to those who take, who demand, and who do not contribute. Their ideas no longer work in this small place that we call the earth. Being selfish is not going to help society as a whole. We will all need to work together.

The best example that I can give is this;

You can be the best basket-ball player in the world. But up against a team of other players, who are all well trained in working together, you will lose. You will fail spectacularly. 

Don’t be selfish. Work together to make the world a better place. That is what China is trying to do, and you can see it if you study the culture long enough. The opposite is the United States. Lead by a “self made” man who accumulated piles and piles of riches all by himself.

Be part of something greater. Work as part of a group.

Or die alone.

Do you want more?

I have many more posts along these lines in my China Index. You can see it here…

China

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Some selected favorite artworks by Lord Frederick Leighton

Lord Frederick Leighton was an amazing painter from the days of true classic art. He painted a total of 518 artworks. All told, he is considered to be “English Aesthetic, New Sculpture (19th Century British), Olympian Classical Revivalist painter, sculptor, illustrator and writer”. He was Born in 1830 and Died in 1896. He was only 66 years old.

You can see all of his works at the Art Renewal Center here.

Music Lesson

We will start with this very pleasant piece.

Pay attention to the kind and amazing details in this remarkable piece of work. It’s art like this that puts a smile on my face. And that is the truth. First, here is the painting. It’s hard to appreciate all the work and beauty that went into it…

Music Lesson

It’s a pretty amazing painting.

Please check out the details up close to really appreciate the art, and the form…

Music Lesson detail.

Elijah in the Wilderness

Next up is a story from the Bible.

Elijah (ēlī`jə) or Elias (ēlī`əs) [both: Heb.,=Yahweh is God], fl. c.875 B.C., Hebrew prophet in the reign of King Ahab. 

He is one of the outstanding figures of the Bible. Elijah's mission was to destroy the worship of foreign gods and to restore exclusive loyalty to God. His zeal brought about a temporary banishment of idolatry (see Jezebel). 

Incidents in his life include his raising the widow's son from the dead; his contest of faith with the priests of Baal, resulting in his triumph and their death; his being fed by ravens; his experience of the still, small voice on Mt. Horeb (Sinai); and his departure from earth in a chariot of fire enveloped in a whirlwind. His disciple was Elisha. 

Unlike other great prophets, Elijah and Elisha left no written records. In Jewish tradition, Elijah is the eschatological herald of the Messiah. John the Baptist and Jesus were asked if they were the incarnation of Elijah, who appeared at the Transfiguration. The prophet is prominent in the Qur'an. Mendelssohn composed an oratorio, Elijah.

-The Free Dictionary

Translated from Hebrew, the name Elijah means “My God.” The prophet was a devoted follower of the Christian religion in Israel. Using his preaches and working miracles, he faithfully fought for the elimination of idolatry and disgrace. In different religions, including Christianity and Judaism, it is believed that Elijah was taken to Heaven alive, conquering death.

The saint was among the first religious figures worshiped by Orthodox Christians in Russia. A few churches were built to honor his life path. Believers continue to regard Elijah as one of the most revered Biblical personalities.

Many religious people consider the “Elijah in the Wilderness” icon their most beloved miraculous painting.

Elijah in the Wilderness
Elijah in the Wilderness

Dante in Exile

Next up…

Poet and politician Dante Alighieri is exiled from Florence, where he served as one of six priors governing the city.

Normally, I don’t give a rat’s ass about politicians. But this fellow was a writer and a poet, and this guy was chased out of his home and “on the lam” while being hunted down by the rival political forces of the day.

And this painting is beautiful.

He wasn’t virginal. He did bad things too.

Dante’s political activities, including the banishing of several rivals, led to his own banishment. It was during this banishment that he wrote his masterpiece, The Divine Comedy, as a virtual wanderer, seeking protection for his family in town after town.

You might think of him as a “blue blood”; a member of the “elite”.

Dante was born to a family with noble ancestry that had fallen in fortunes.

He began writing poetry in his teens and received encouragement from established poets, to whom he sent sonnets as a young man.

He had fallen in love with another fine young lass, and the combination of poetry and love, infatuated forbidden love is a story in itself.

At the young age of nine, Dante first caught a glimpse of Beatrice Portinari, also nine, who would symbolize for him perfect female beauty and spiritual goodness in the coming decades. Despite his fervent devotion to Portinari, who did not seem to return his feelings, Dante became engaged to Gemma Donati in 1277, but the two did not marry until eight years later.

The couple had six sons and a daughter. I am sure that it was a lively household. Six boys! Lord have mercy!

He made his money from his poetry…

About 1293, Dante published a book of prose and poetry called The New Life, followed a few years later by another collection, The Banquet. It wasn’t until his banishment that he began work on his Divine Comedy.

In the poem’s first book, the poet takes a tour through Hell with the poet Virgil as a guide.

Virgil also guides the poet through Purgatory in the second book. The poet’s guide in Paradise, however, is named Beatrice.

The work was written and published in sections between 1308 and 1321. Although Dante called the work simply Comedy, the work became enormously popular, and a deluxe version published in 1555 in Venice bore the title The Divine Comedy.

Dante died of malaria in Ravenna in 1321.

Dante in Exile
Dante in Exile

The Painter’s Honeymoon

Another beautiful painting. I particularly love the tender embrace with the hands, and the way the two lovers cheeks press together. From a fellow painters point of view, I am really impressed with the details on the dress and the clothing folds. Just look at it all. Impressive!

The Painter's Honeymoon
The Painter’s Honeymoon

Mother and Child

Another stunning painting.

Take a look at the vase of flowers. What detail and what perfect shading. Look at the tapestry of a crane behind the mother, and the details on her hands. The folds in both of the dress are exquisite. This is a marvelous work. It is stunning and just wonderful.

Mother and Child

Hercules Wrestling with Death for the Body of Alcestis

Greek history can be very interesting, as long as you can adjust to the names, and the cultural differences. Here is a great write up about the story of Alcestis and our Hero Hercules…

The following is from the ancient network...

For the ancient Greeks, the quality of arete (personal excellence) and the concept of eusebia (social duty) were most important.

Aristotle discusses both of these at length in his Nichomachean Ethics and relates arete to eudaimonia – translated as “happiness” but actually meaning “to be possessed of a good spirit”.

To have arete, Aristotle claims, one must associate oneself with those striving for the same goal.

I really can agree with that. Can't you?

If one wanted to become an excellent musician, one should associate oneself with excellent musicians and the same if one wished to be a star athlete or carpenter or doctor.

The Greek concept of eusebia is often translated into English as “piety” (as, for example, in Plato’s dialogue of the Euthyphro), but the concept is actually much closer to “duty”, particularly social duty.

Eusebia dictated how one interacted with one’s husband, wife, parents, servants, and those of higher and lower classes. Eusebia also touched on how one understood the gods (though not on how one interacted with the gods, which would be the concept of housia, much closer to “piety”).

Detail 1.

The gods, and especially the all-powerful Fates, controlled and directed the lives of human beings and one needed to accept that fact and live one’s life accordingly. If one suffered some tragic loss or financial set-back,  it was the will of the gods, or the Fates whom not even the gods could sway, and by accepting this as the order of the universe, one could better accept such loss.

The stories the Greeks told – which today are referred to as their myths – played a part in understanding arete and eusebia in that they illustrated for the listeners these virtues of Greek civilization.

In hearing how heroes and kings and even gods behaved, one was provided with a model for one’s own behavior. Among the many myths the Greeks told, one that exemplifies the virtues of personal excellence and social duty is the story of Hercules and the Queen Alcestis. There are two versions of the myth, one in which Hercules plays no part at all, but thanks to the playwright Euripides (480-406 BCE), and his play Alcestis, the version featuring Hercules is the better known.

The Story of Alcestis & Admetus

Both versions begin the same way and emphasize the importance of loyalty, love, and kindness in informing one’s social duty.

Once upon a time, as the story goes, there lived a gentle king named Admetus who ruled over a small kingdom in Thessaly. He knew each of his subjects by name and so, one night when a stranger appeared at his door begging for food, he knew the man must be from a foreign land but welcomed him into his home anyway.

He fed and clothed the stranger and asked him his name but the man would give no answer other than to ask Admetus if he could be the king’s slave. Admetus had no need for another slave but, recognizing the man was in distress, took him on as shepherd for his flocks.

Apollo thanked Admetus for his kindness and offered him any gift he desired.

The stranger stayed with Admetus for a year and a day and then revealed himself as the god Apollo. He had been sent to earth by Zeus as punishment and could not return to the realm of the gods until he had served a mortal as a slave for a year.

Apollo thanked Admetus for his kindness and offered him any gift he desired; but Admetus said he had all he needed and required nothing for what he had done. Apollo told him he would return to help him whenever he needed anything in the future and then vanished.

Detail.

Not long after this, Admetus fell in love with the princess Alcestis of the neighboring city of Iolcus. Alcestis was kind and beautiful and had many suitors but only wanted to marry Admetus.

Her father Pelias, however, refused Admetus’ request for her hand and stipulated that the only way he would give his daughter to him would be if he rode into the city in a chariot pulled by a lion and a wild boar. Admetus was despondent over this situation until he remembered the promise of Apollo.

He called on the god who appeared, wrestled a lion and a boar into submission, and yoked them to a golden chariot. Admetus then drove the chariot to Iolcus and Pelias had no choice but to give him Alcestis in marriage.  

Apollo was among the wedding guests and gave Admetus an unusual gift: a kind of immortality. Apollo told them how he made a deal with the Fates who governed all so that, if ever Admetus became sick to the point of death, he might be well again if someone else would volunteer to die in his place.

The couple lived happily together for many years and their court was famous for their lavish parties but then, one day, Admetus fell ill and the doctors said he would not recover. The people of his court remembered the gift of Apollo and each felt that someone should give their life to save so kind and good a king; but no one wanted to do so themselves. Admetus’ parents were old and so it was thought that one of them would volunteer but, even though they had only a short time left on the earth, they refused to surrender it. None of the court, nor any of Admetus’ family, nor any of his subjects would take the king’s place on his death bed – but Alcestis did.

At this point the two stories diverge.

In the older version, Admetus wakes on his bed feeling better and runs to tell Alcestis he is cured – only to find it was she who took his place. He then sits by her body in mourning and refuses to eat or drink for days.  As this is going on, Alcestis’ spirit is led down into the underworld by Thanatos (death) and presented to Queen Persephone.

Persephone asks who this soul is who has come willingly to her realm and Thanatos explains to her the situation. Persephone is so moved by the story of Alcestis’ love and devotion to her husband that she orders Thanatos to return the queen to life. Alcestis and Admetus then live happily ever after.

Hercules & Alcestis

In the version popularized by Euripides in his play Alcestis (written c. 438 BCE), however, Hercules plays the pivotal role in bringing Alcestis back from the dead.

In this version, as in the first, no one will take Admetus’ place in death except for Alcestis.

Admetus is informed of this, accepts her sacrifice, and begins to recover as his queen grows weaker. The entire city falls into mourning for Alcestis as she hovers on the brink between life and death.

Admetus stays by her bedside and she requests that, in return for her sacrifice, he should never marry again and so keep her memory alive. Admetus agrees to this and also swears he will never throw another of their parties again nor allow any merrymaking in the palace once she has gone; after these promises are made, Alcestis dies.

Hercules was an old friend of the couple and he arrives at the court knowing nothing of Alcestis’ death.

Admetus, not wishing to spoil his friend’s arrival, instructs the servants to say nothing about what has transpired and to treat Hercules to the kind of party the court was known for. The servants, however, are still upset over the loss of the queen and Hercules notices that they are not serving him and his entourage properly.

After a number of drinks, he begins to insult them and ask for the king and queen to come remedy this poor performance on the servant’s part, when one of the maidservants breaks down and tells him what has recently happened.

Hercules is mortified by his behavior and so travels to the underworld where Thanatos is leading Alcestis’ spirit toward Persephone’s realm. He wrestles death and frees the queen, bringing her back up into the light of day.

Hercules then leads her to where Admetus is just returning from her funeral. He tells the king that he must depart on other business and asks him to take care of this lady while he is gone.

Admetus refuses because he promised Alcestis that he would never marry again, and it would be unseemly for this woman to reside at the court so soon after his wife’s death.

Hercules insists, however, and places Alcestis’ hand in Admetus’. Admetus lifts the woman’s veil and finds it is Alcestis returned from the dead. Hercules tells him that she will not be able to speak for three days, and will remain pale and shadow-like, until she is purified, after which time she will become as she always was.

Euripides’ play ends there while other versions of the myth continue the story further and conclude with everything then happening as Hercules has said, and Alcestis and Admetus living a long and happy life together until Thanatos returns and takes them both away together.

Personal Excellence & Social Duty in the Tales

The characters of Admetus, Alcestis, and Hercules, all at some point in the story exemplify – or fail to meet – the values of personal excellence and social duty.

Admetus exemplifies the value of hospitality (which would be considered part of social duty) in taking in the stranger at the beginning of the story and would fall short of that value when he allows festivities in his home directly after his wife’s death.

These two incidents are directly related to each other, however, in that, when Hercules arrives at his home, Admetus is under a social obligation to entertain his friend according to the custom he is used to.

Even though Hercules would have certainly understood the house being in mourning after Alcestis’ death and is embarrassed when he finds out he has been drinking and carrying on in the palace so soon after a death, Admetus values social obligation to such a degree that he fails to keep his promise to his wife – and so fails in arete and, because he neglected the promise he had made to Alcestis, eusebia as well.

Alcestis epitomizes the loyal, loving wife who is so devoted to her husband that she would literally die for him.

In this, she exemplifies both arete and eusebia.

A modern-day reader may feel uncomfortable with the version of the story in which Admetus accepts his wife’s sacrifice, but this would have been completely understandable to an ancient Greek audience.

The husband, especially the husband who was a king, was responsible for the well-being of more people than the wife or queen.

Alcestis’ virtue in taking Admetus’ place is admirable in that she not only sacrifices herself for the man she loves but also for the people who depended upon Admetus for their continued well-being.

Her personal excellence is illustrated in her willingness to die for the good of others and the value of eusebia through her understanding of the social order and how she could do her best to maintain it. In all ways, Alcestis stands as a model for proper behavior.

Hercules exemplifies the values of arete and eusebia and provides the story with its heroic climax.

In his drunken behavior in the house of mourning, he fails in both, of course, and yet he cannot be blamed for this in that he was not told of Alcestis’ death.

The more important – and interesting – breach in social conduct is his wrestling Thanatos for Alcestis’ soul.

The Fates were all powerful to the ancient Greeks, and Apollo had made a deal with them for Admetus’ continued life.

The Fates had kept their part of the deal and restored Admetus to life, once someone else agreed to take his place. By wrestling Alcestis’ soul away from death, Hercules was breaking the deal.

If one made a deal with the supernatural powers, one was expected to honor that deal. This can be most clearly seen in the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, where Orpheus makes the deal with Hades that he will not look back on his way up from the underworld but then breaks that deal, and so loses Eurydice.

Detail.

Unlike that story, at no point in any version of the Alcestis story is Hercules portrayed in any way but admirably for rescuing the queen from death. Further, by placing himself in danger by physically wrestling death, Hercules embodies the personal excellence of courage and heroism and, by doing so, he restores order to the kingdom by bringing the queen back to her king and rewarding the selflessness of Alcestis.

The story operates on many levels, of course, which is why it has resonated so strongly with audiences for over 2,000 years but, on the simplest level, it would have transmitted the values of the society to those who heard it sung or recited or watched it performed.

How one balances one’s personal excellence with one’s place in society and, further, in the universe, would have been illustrated through Hercules and his confrontation with Thanatos.  

In defeating death, Hercules is shown as the ultimate hero who defies even the will of the Fates in order to do what he feels is right.

In the version of the story where Persephone sends Alcestis back to life, it is eusebia which is emphasized through Alcestis’ selfless gesture while, in the Hercules’ version, it is arete through Hercules’ decision to fight with death, and yet both versions highlight the importance of both of these values to ancient Greek society.

The popularity of the Hercules’ version indicates that, while the ancient audience would have understood the value of social duty and conduct, they also valued personal achievement and, of course, heroism, which is the embodiment of personal excellence.

Scholars have long been divided on the Alcestis play by Euripides regarding why he wrote it and even what he was trying to say in it but, perhaps, it was as simple as promoting the concept that one should do what one feels one must to right a wrong no matter what societal rules may stand in the way and, in doing so, one can actually restore order instead of upsetting balance.

Cymon and Iphigenia

Iphigenia was the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra in Greek mythology.

While the Greek army was preparing to set sail for Troy during the Trojan War, Agamemnon caused the anger of the goddess Artemis, because he killed a sacred deer. So, she decided to stop all winds, and the ships would not be able to sail. The seer Calchas realised what the problem was, and informed Agamemnon that to appease the goddess, Agamemnon had to sacrifice Iphigenia to her. 

Reluctant at first, Agamemnon was forced to agree in the end. He lied to his daughter and his wife by saying that Iphigenia was to marry Achillles before they left. The mother and daughter happily went to the port of Aulis, only to find out the horrible truth.

 Achilles, unaware that his name was used in a lie, tried to prevent the sacrifice, but Iphigenia utterly decided to sacrifice herself in honour and of her own volition. The most popular version of what happened afterwards is that on the moment of the sacrifice, the goddess Artemis substituted Iphigenia for a deer, but Calchas who was the only witness remained silent. Iphigenia was then brought by Artemis to the city of Tauris where she became the goddess' priestess.

Years later, after Orestes, Iphigenia's brother, had killed his mother and her lover Aegisthus, he was hunted by the Erinyes for committing matricide. He was then advised to go to Tauris, take the carved wooden image of Artemis and bring it back to Athens. 

In Tauris, where he went with his friend Pylades, he was taken captive by the locals, and the two men were brought before Iphigenia. Although initially the two siblings did not recognise each other, they finally realised the truth and managed to escape the city. They then returned to Greece, where Iphigenia continued to serve Artemis as a priestess in her temple.

-Greek Mythology

According to a story published in 1897, Leighton spent six months searching throughout Europe for a model to match his imagined ideal of Iphigenia for his intended portrayal of Cymon and Iphigenia.

He saw a young actress, Dorothy Dene, in a theater in London and his search was over. Possessing a classical Greek style beauty, Dene had golden wavy hair with excellent skin texture and coloration on her face; she was taller than average with graceful arms and legs together with an “exquisitely molded bust”.

She appeared in several other of Leighton’s works, including Greek Girls Playing Ball and Summer Moon.

Lena, one of Dene’s younger sisters, appears in the painting as the child slave.

Other paintings by Leighton featuring Dene are: The Bath of Psyche, Clytie, Perseus and Andromeda, Solitude, The Return of Persephone and The Vestal.

The painting took eight months to complete; a succession of line drawings were done first as Leighton tried to capture the position he wanted for the central figure, around 56 – including several of foliage and other elements of the piece – of these are known to exist.

The English art critic Peter Nahum describes the painting as “central among Leighton’s later works”, an opinion Mrs Russell Barrington considered was shared by Leighton.

Leighton’s painting Idyll dating from a few years earlier has some similar elements but lacks the complexities of Cymon and Iphigenia. The two compositions each highlight the difference between the fair complexion of a female with a dark skinned male; both feature a full-length woman reclining beneath a tree and similar lighting techniques are used.

Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna

Lord Frederick Leighton would paint these amazing enormous paintings. In it would be crammed such detail that you could spend hours admiring every little morsel. Such as in this work.

This painting celebrates the Madonna painted by Cimabue. It is known as the “Madonna in Majesty.”

The picture originally stood on the high altar of Santa Trinità church in Florence. The iconography is frequent in medieval painting and represents the Madonna enthroned with Child and angels, a pattern commonly said Maestà as shows the Virgin as Queen of Paradise. In the lower part are four biblical figures, symbolizing foundations of Christ's kingdom: the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah under lateral arches, Abraham and King David under the chair of the throne.

This Madonna, which is similar in structure to the same artist's Madonna at the Louvre and Duccio's Ruccelai Madonna, still shows the influence of the Byzantine tradition. There is, however, an unprecedented tension in the profiles and in the attempt to create spatial depth, which is rendered by superimposing the figures and in the concave structure at the base of the throne behind the figures of the prophets. The architectural structure of the throne becomes a sort of robust spatial scheme which creates a three-dimensional effect, while the edges of the painting seem to compress and hold in the bodies. There is an intense vitality in the figures and the same dramatic force that characterizes all Cimabue's work.

-Web Gallery of Art

Here, we have Lord Frederick Leighton painting a celebration of that painting in public display for all to admire. The emotions on the people’s face and the scenes depicted are both fascinating and curious at the same time.

Cimabue's Celebrated Madonna
Cimabue’s Celebrated Madonna

Faticida

This is a lovely painting. I truly enjoy the art and the skill that went into painting it.

Faticida
Faticida

Others, not so enthralled, have used this image to profit from it, or to make some kind of contemporaneous statement. As an example, here is a work by Alexey Kondakov titled “Kyiv, bus station at “Nauki Ave.” , 2015″.

Nice and progressive…

Kyiv, bus station at “Nauki Ave.” , 2015
Kyiv, bus station at “Nauki Ave.” , 2015

The Spirit of the Summit

One of the things about art by “masters” is that they are able to convey emotions within certain specific scenarios. If you have had a very private event, one that evoked the same kind of emotions, then the art would resonate with your.

I love the woman’s hand, and the upturned face, and the details of the folds on the dress. But that is just me. This painting speaks to me…

Idyll

Another fine painting.

Idyll
Idyll.

A Condottiere

Condottiere, leader of a band of mercenaries engaged to fight in numerous wars among the Italian states from the mid-14th to the 16th century. The name was derived from the condotta, or “contract,” by which the condottieri put themselves in the service of a city or of a lord.

-Condottiere | Italian history | Britannica

I cannot help but think that this painting was part of an inspiration for a movie made in 1972…

He reminds me of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972).

Aguirre, The Wrath Of God (Werner Herzog, 1972) Full time force of nature and part time filmmaker Werner Herzog has a career filled with eerily atmospheric masterpieces of almost every style, genre, and form.

Yet, if ever we find ourselves in some sort of movie apocalypse and only one Herzog movie can be saved, that title must be Aguirre, The Wrath Of God.

Herzog’s career was up and running by the time he descended into the jungle to make this his first genuine masterpiece and when he emerged on a raft surrounded by monkeys he was a legend.

It’s an encapsulation of everything that the filmmaker does well (including a collection of insane and possibly fictionalized behind the scenes stories) and also boasts quite possibly the finest performance Klaus Kinski’s career.

Aguirre is a brutal, thoughtful, poetic, and terrifying work of art that never possibly could have existed unless Herzog decided to point a camera at his twisted imagination. The director might have equaled the remarkable achievement of Aguirre several times in his career, but he never topped it.

Aguirre is a brutal, thoughtful, poetic, and terrifying work of art .
Aguirre is a brutal, thoughtful, poetic, and terrifying work of art.

The story is deceptively simple.

It follows Kinski’s Spanish conquistador Aguirre who recently triumphed with his army in battle and has now been ordered to trek through the jungle in search of the mythical city of El Dorado and the untold riches therein.

The journey is treacherous from the start, with an unforgiving jungle offering little more than immense physical and philosophical difficulties challenging the journey.

Eventually a death toll mounts and Aguirre’s mind becomes as lost as his quest.

Forever caught between stoic silence and volcanic explosion, Kinski is a wild and unpredictable beast at the center of Werzog very deliberately paced and hypnotic film.
Forever caught between stoic silence and volcanic explosion, Kinski is a wild and unpredictable beast at the center of Werzog very deliberately paced and hypnotic film.

That’s pretty much it and yet the film is as complex thematically as it is simplistic in narrative.

Herzog was clearly influenced by Joseph Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and Aguirre would quickly inspire Francis Ford Coppola to make Apocalypse Now. It’s hard to say which work explores those shared themes better, but given that one of the major concepts of all three is an exploration of the cold brutality of nature, you can assume that Herzog nailed that one.

After all, give Herzog 30 seconds and a microphone and he’ll be sure to let you know how horrendous nature can be. 

Aguirre’s mind becomes as lost as his quest.
Aguirre’s mind becomes as lost as his quest.

Like Fitzcarraldo, the most immediately striking aspect of Aguirre, The Wrath Of God is the physical brutality of the production.

From the astounding opening shots of an army wiggling down the edge of a mountain, it’s clear that this production was as dangerous as the journey it staged. Filth, grit, pain, and exhaustion radiates from the screen and at times it blurs the lines between fiction and documentary.

The second most striking aspect is Klaus Kinski’s devastating performance.

Forever caught between stoic silence and volcanic explosion, Kinski is a wild and unpredictable beast at the center of Werzog very deliberately paced and hypnotic film. He’s a constant element of danger and a physical embodiment of insanity that’s impossible to take your eyes off of (which was important given that mood and spectacle easily could have dominated the picture).

Beyond the surface dangers and central performance, the movie is filled with layers of meaning and moments of visual poetry that Herzog never fully explains.

It’s a mystery of a movie to be experienced and interpreted in many different ways. At times it’s terrifyingly real, at other times is archly stylized. Some scenes are quietly contemplative, others viscerally thrilling.

The project was a bold announcement of a new filmmaking voice from Werner Herzog and has lost none of its power in the decades that followed. Love or loath it, Aguirre: Wrath Of God is one of those movies that everyone needs to see to even consider themselves a cinephile.

The rich colors of the jungle and filthy details of the period costumes pop off the screen like never before. The production might have been rough and tumble, but the beauty of Herzog’s images here have rarely been equaled.

Beyond the surface dangers and central performance, the movie is filled with layers of meaning and moments of visual poetry that Herzog never fully explains.
Beyond the surface dangers and central performance, the movie is filled with layers of meaning and moments of visual poetry that Herzog never fully explains.

The Hit

Most people have never heard of this man, and he is rarely mentioned in art schools. And that, is a shame. For all that most people can read about him is found in obscure Wikipedia listings.

Frederic Leighton, 1st Baron Leighton, (3 December 1830 – 25 January 1896), known as Sir Frederic Leighton between 1878 and 1896, was a British painter, draughtsman and sculptor. His works depicted historical, biblical, and classical subject matter in an academic style. His paintings were enormously popular, and expensive, during his lifetime, but fell out of critical favour for many decades in the early 20th century.

Leighton was the bearer of the shortest-lived peerage in history; after only one day his hereditary peerage became extinct upon his death.

-Frederic, Lord Leighton 1830–1896 | Tate
The Hit.

Modern Art

Most lovers of “modern art”, raise their noses to this kind of art. They say that it is old, tired, and out of date. That instead, one needs to be “progressive” and “enlightened” to see and appreciate the art with no form.

Something like this…

Onement Vi By Barnett Newman
Onement Vi By Barnett Newman

And…

Untitled (yellow and blue) by Mark Rothko sold for $46.5 million dollars.

And apparently this Mark Rothko is considered to be an acclaimed genus in the modern, progressive art world. Here’s another one of his “breathtaking” and “astounding” works of art.

Orange, red and Yellow by Mark Rothko sold for $86.9 million dollars.

Modern art is no longer about art for the sake of beauty and appreciation.

Modern art is just a convenient way to launder money, as it is difficult to put a price tag on art. Thus in the modern art world, money is the king, and emotions, passion and beauty have no place in the modern art world.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art Index here…

ART

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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More pretty girls and learning about China by looking at their videos.

This is a continuation of my posts on learning about China by looking at pretty girls. As with my most recent posts, just click on the picture to open up a short video of the girl. It’s all good fun. The idea behind this, is of course, to help expose people to what China is like, and by doing so while watching pretty girls. As the women within a nation are the best description that you can ever get of a nation and it’s society.

Do you want more?

I have more posts related to this in my Pretty Girls of China index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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MUGWUMP 4 (1959) by Robert Silverberg the complete text of this fine science fiction story

This is a nice tight little science fiction story. It’s pretty much about a normal guy who gets tangled up with forces way beyond his understanding. It’s a cute little comedy and fun recreational reading during these hot July afternoons.

Enjoy.

MUGWUMP FOUR

Al Miller was only trying to phone the Friendly Finance Corpo­ration to ask about an extension on his loan. It was a Murray Hill number, and he had dialed as far as MU-4 when the receiver clicked queerly and a voice said, “Come in, Operator Nine. Oper­ator Nine, do you read me?”

Al frowned. “I didn’t want the operator. There must be some­thing wrong with my phone if—”

“Just a minute. Who are you?”

“I ought to ask you that,” Al said. “What are you doing on the other end of my phone, anyway? I hadn’t even finished dialing. I got as far as MU-4 and—”

“Well? You dialed MUgwump 4 and you got us. What more do you want?” A suspicious pause. “Say, you aren’t Operator Nine!”
“No, I’m not Operator Nine, and I’m trying to dial a Murray Hill number, and how about getting off the line?”

“Hold it, friend. Are you a Normal?”
Al blinked “Yeah—yeah, I like to think so.”
“So how’d you know the Number?”

“Dammit, I didn’t know the number! I was trying to call some­one, and all of a sudden the phone cut out and I got you, whoever the blazes you are.”
“I’m the communications warden at MUgwump 4,” the other said crisply. “And you’re a suspicious individual. We’ll have to in­vestigate you.”

The telephone emitted a sudden burping sound. Al felt as if his feet had grown roots. He could not move at all. It was awkward to be standing there at his own telephone in the privacy of his own room, as unbending as the Apollo Belvedere. Time still moved, he saw. The hand on the big clock above the phone had just shifted from 3:30 to 3:31.

Sweat rivered down his back as he struggled to put down the phone. He fought to lift his left foot. He strained to twitch his right eyelid. No go on all counts; he was frozen, all but his chest mus­cles—thank goodness for that. He still could breathe.

A few minutes later matters became even more awkward when his front door, which had been locked, opened abruptly. Three strangers entered. They looked oddly alike: a trio of Tweedle­dums, no more than five feet high, each wide through the waist, jowly of face and balding of head, each wearing an inadequate sin­gle-breasted blue-serge suit.

Al discovered he could roll his eyes. He rolled them. He wanted to apologize because his unexpected paralysis kept him from act­ing the proper part of a host, but his tongue would not obey. And on second thought, it occurred that the little bald men might be connected in some way with that paralysis.

The reddest-faced of the three little men made an intricate ges­ture and the stasis ended. Al nearly folded up as the tension that gripped him broke. He said, “Just who the deuce—”

We will ask the questions. You are Al Miller?”
Al nodded.

“And obviously you are a Normal. So there has been a grave error. Mordecai, examine the telephone.”

The second little man picked up the phone and calmly disem­boweled it with three involved motions of his stubby hands. He frowned over the telephone’s innards for a moment; then, hum­ming tunelessly, he produced a wire-clipper and severed the tele­phone cord.

“Hold on here,” Al burst out. “You can’t just rip out my phone like that! You aren’t from the phone company!”

“Quiet,” said the spokesman nastily. “Well, Mordecai?”

The second little man said, “Probability one to a million. The cranch interval overlapped and his telephone matrix slipped. His call was piped into our wire by error, Waldemar.”

“So he isn’t a spy?” Waldemar asked.

“Doubtful. As you see, he’s of rudimentary intelligence. His dialing our number was a statistical fluke.”

“But now he knows about Us,” said the third little man in a surprisingly deep voice. “I vote for demolecularization.”

The other two whirled on their companion. “Always blood­thirsty, eh, Giovanni?” said Mordecai. “You’d violate the Code at the snap of a meson.”
“There won’t be any demolecularization while I’m in charge,” added Waldemar.

“What do we do with him, then?” Giovanni demanded. Mordecai said, “Freeze him and take him down to Head­quarters. He’s their problem.”
“I think this has gone about as far as it’s going to go,” Al ex­ploded at last. “However you three creeps got in here, you’d better get yourselves right out again, or—”

“Enough,” Waldemar said. He stamped his foot. Al felt his jaws stiffen. He realized bewilderedly that he was frozen again. And frozen, this time, with his mouth gaping foolishly open.

he trip took about five minutes, and so far as Al was con­cerned, it was one long blur. At the end of the journey the blur lifted for an instant, just enough to give Al one good glimpse of his surroundings—a residential street in what might have been Brook­lyn or Queens (or Cincinnati or Detroit, he thought morbidly)— before he was hustled into the basement of a two-family house. He found himself in a windowless, brightly lit chamber cluttered with complex-looking machinery and with a dozen or so alarmingly identical little bald-headed men.

The chubbiest of the bunch glared sourly at him and asked, “Are you a spy?”

“I’m just an innocent bystander. I picked up my phone and started to dial, and all of a sudden some guy asked me if I was Op­erator Nine. Honest, that’s all.”

“Overlapping of the cranch interval,” muttered Mordecai. “Slipped matrix.”
“Umm. Unfortunate,” the chubby one commented. “We’ll have to dispose of him.”

“Demolecularization is the best way,” Giovanni put in immedi­ately.

“Dispose of him humanely, I mean. It’s revolting to think of taking the life of an inferior being. But he simply can’t remain in this fourspace any longer, not if he Knows.”

“But I don’t know!” Al groaned. “I couldn’t be any more mixed-up if I tried! Won’t you please tell me—”

“Very well,” said the pudgiest one, who seemed to be the leader. “Waldemar, tell him about Us.”

Waldemar said, “You’re now in the local headquarters of a se­cret mutant group working for the overthrow of humanity as you know it. By some accident you happened to dial our private com­munication exchange, MUtant 4—”

“I thought it was MUgwump 4,” Al interjected.

“The code name, naturally,” said Waldemar smoothly. “To continue: You channeled into our communication network. You now know too much. Your presence in this space-time nexus jeop­ardizes the success of our entire movement. Therefore we are forced—”

“To demolecularize—” Giovanni began.

“Forced to dispose of you,” Waldemar continued sternly. “We’re humane beings—most of us—and we won’t do anything that would make you suffer. But you can’t stay in this area of space-time. You see our point of view, of course.”

Al shook his head dimly. These little potbellied men were mu­tants working for the overthrow of humanity? Well, he had no reason to think they were lying to him. The world was full of little potbellied men. Maybe they were all part of the secret organi­zation, Al thought.

“Look,” he said, “I didn’t want to dial your number, get me? It was all a big accident. But I’m a fair guy. Let me get out of here and I’ll keep mum about the whole thing. You can go ahead and overthrow humanity, if that’s what you want to do. I promise not to interfere in any way. If you’re mutants, you ought to be able to look into my mind and see that I’m sincere—”

“We have no telepathic powers,” declared the chubby leader curtly. “If we had, there would be no need for a communications network in the first place. In the second place, your sincerity is not the issue. We have enemies. If you were to fall into their hands—”

“I won’t say a word! Even if they stick splinters under my fingernails, I’ll keep quiet!”

“No. At this stage in our campaign we can take no risks. You’ll have to go. Prepare the temporal centrifuge.”

Four of the little men, led by Mordecai, unveiled a complicated-looking device of the general size and shape of a concrete mixer. Waldemar and Giovanni gently shoved Al toward the machine. It came rapidly to life: dials glowed, indicator needles teetered, loud buzzes and clicks implied readiness.

Al said nervously, “What are you going to do to me?”

Waldemar explained. “This machine will hurl you forward in time. Too bad we have to rip you right out of your temporal ma­trix, but we’ve no choice. You’ll be well taken care of up ahead, though. No doubt by the twenty-fifth century our kind will have taken over completely. You’ll be the last of the Normals. Practi­cally a living fossil. You’ll love it. You’ll be a walking museum piece.”

“Assuming the machine works,” Giovanni put in maliciously. “We don’t really know if it does, you see.”

Al gaped. They were busily strapping him to a cold copper slab in the heart of the machine. “You don’t even know if it works?

“Not really,” Waldemar admitted. “Present theory holds that time-travel works only one way—forward. So we haven’t been able to recover any of our test specimens and see how they reacted. Of course, they do vanish when the machine is turned on, so we know they must go somewhere.”

Oh,” Al said weakly.

He was trussed in thoroughly. Experimental wriggling of his right wrist showed him that. But even if he could get loose, these weird little men would only “freeze” him and put him into the ma­chine again.

His shoulders slumped resignedly. He wondered if anyone would miss him The Friendly Finance Corporation certainly would. But since, in a sense, it was their fault he was in this mess now, he couldn’t get very upset about that. They could always sue his estate for the three hundred dollars he owed them, if his estate was worth that much.

Nobody else was going to mind the disappearance of Albert Miller from the space-time continuum, he thought dourly. His par­ents were dead, he hadn’t seen his one sister in fifteen years, and the girl he used to know in Topeka was married and at last report had three kids.

Still and all, he rather liked 1969. He wasn’t sure how he would take to the twenty-fifth century—or the twenty-fifth century to him.

“Ready for temporal discharge,” Mordecai sang out.

The chubby leader peered up at Al. “We’re sorry about all this, you understand. But nothing and nobody can be allowed to stand in the way of the Cause.”
“Sure,” Al said. “I understand.”

The concrete-mixer part of the machine began to revolve, bear­ing Al with it as it built up tempokinetic potential. Momentum in­creased alarmingly. In the background Al heard an ominous dron­ing sound that grew louder and louder, until it drowned out everything else. His head reeled. The room and its fat little mu­tants went blurry. He heard a pop! like the sound of a breaking balloon.

It was the rupturing of the space-time continuum. Al Miller went hurtling forward along the fourspace track, head first. He shut his eyes and hoped for the best.

When the dizziness stopped, he found himself sitting in the mid­dle of an impeccably clean, faintly yielding roadway, staring up at the wheels of vehicles swishing by overhead at phenomenal speeds. After a moment or two more, he realized they were not airborne, but simply automobiles racing along an elevated roadway made of some practically invisible substance.

So the temporal centrifuge had worked! Al glanced around. A crowd was collecting. A couple of hundred people had formed a big circle. They were pointing and muttering. Nobody approached closer than fifty or sixty feet.
They weren’t potbellied mutants. Without exception they were all straight-backed six-footers with full heads of hair. The women were tall, too. Men and women alike were dressed in a sort of tunic-like garment made of iridescent material that constantly changed colors.

A gong began to ring, rapidly peaking in volume. Al scrambled to his feet and assayed a tentative smile.

“My name’s Miller. I come from 1969. Would somebody mind telling me what year this is, and—”

He was drowned out by two hundred voices screaming in terror. The crowd stampeded away, dashing madly in every direction, as if he were some ferocious monster. The gong continued to clang loudly. Cars hummed overhead. Suddenly Al saw a squat, beetle-shaped black vehicle coming toward him on the otherwise empty road. The car pulled up half a block away, the top sprang open, and a figure clad in what might have been a diver’s suit—or a spacesuit—stepped out and advanced toward Al.
“Dozzinon murrifar volan,” the armored figure called out.

“No speaka da lingo,” Al replied. “I’m a stranger here.”

To his dismay he saw the other draw something shaped like a weapon and point it at him. Al’s hands shot immediately into the air. A globe of bluish light exuded from the broad muzzle of the gun, hung suspended for a moment, and drifted toward Al. He dodged uneasily to one side, but the globe of light followed him, descended, and wrapped itself completely around him.

It was like being on the inside of a soap bubble. He could see out, though distortedly. He touched the curving side of the globe experimentally; it was resilient and springy to the touch, but his finger did not penetrate.

He noticed with some misgiving that his bubble cage was start­ing to drift off the ground. It trailed a rope-like extension, which the man in the spacesuit deftly grabbed and knotted to the rear bumper of his car. He drove quickly away—with Al, bobbing in his impenetrable bubble of light, tagging willy-nilly along like a caged tiger, or like a captured Gaul being dragged through the streets of Rome behind a chariot.

He got used to the irregular motion after a while, and relaxed enough to be able to study his surroundings. He was passing through a remarkably antiseptic-looking city, free from refuse and dust. Towering buildings, all bright and spankingly new-looking, shot up everywhere. People goggled at him from the safety of the pedestrian walkways as he jounced past.

After about ten minutes the car halted outside an imposing building whose facade bore the words ISTFAQ BARNOLL. Three men in spacesuits appeared from within to flank Al’s captor as a kind of honor guard. Al was borne within.

He was nudged gently into a small room on the ground floor. The door rolled shut behind him and seemed to join the rest of the wall; no division line was apparent. A moment later the balloon popped open, and just in time, too; the air had been getting quite stale inside it.

Al glanced around. A square window opened in the wall and three grim-faced men peered intently at him from an adjoining cu­bicle. A voice from a speaker grid above Al’s head said, “Murrifar althrosk?”

“Al Miller, from the twentieth century. And it wasn’t my idea to come here, believe me.”

“Durberal haznik? Quittimar? Dorbfenk?”

Al shrugged. “No parley-voo. Honest, I don’t savvy.”

is three interrogators conferred among themselves—taking what seemed to Al like the needless precaution of switching off the mike to prevent him from overhearing their deliberations. He saw one of the men leave the observation cubicle. When he returned, some five minutes later, he brought with him a tall, gloomy-look­ing man wearing an impressive spade-shaped beard.

The mike was turned on again. Spadebeard said rumblingly, “How be thou hight?”
“Eh?”

“An thou reck the King’s tongue. I conjure thee speak!”

Al grinned. No doubt they had fetched an expert in ancient lan­guages to talk to him. “Right language, but the wrong time. I’m from the twentieth century. Come forward a ways.”

Spadebeard paused to change mental gears. “A thousand par­dons—I mean, sorry. Wrong idiom. Dig me now?”

“I follow you. What year is this?”

“It is 2431. And from whence be you?”

“You don’t quite have it straight, yet. But I’m from 1969.”

“And how come you hither?”

“I wish I knew,” Al said. “I was just trying to phone the loan company, see. . . anyway, I got involved with these little fat guys who wanted to take over the world. Mutants, they said they were. And they decided they had to get rid of me, so they bundled me into their time machine and shot me forward. So I’m here.”
“A spy of the mutated ones, eh?”

“Spy? Who said anything about being a spy? Talk about jump­ing to conclusions! I’m—”

“You have been sent by Them to wreak mischief among us. No transparent story of yours will deceive us. You are not the first to come to our era, you know. And you will meet the same fate the others met.”

Al shook his head foggily. “Look here, you’re making some big mistake. I’m not a spy for anybody. And I don’t want to get in­volved in any war between you and the mutants—”

“The war is over. The last of the mutated ones was extermi­nated fifty years ago.”

“Okay, then. What can you fear from me? Honest, I don’t want to cause any trouble. If the mutants are wiped out, how could my spying help them?”
“No action in time and space is ever absolute. In our fourspace the mutants are eradicated—but they lurk elsewhere, waiting for their chance to enter and spread destruction.”

Al’s brain was swimming. “Okay, let that pass. But I’m not a spy. I just want to be left alone. Let me settle down here some­where—put me on probation—show me the ropes, stake me to a few credits, or whatever you use for money here. I won’t make any trouble.”

“Your body teems with microorganisms of disease long since extinct in this world. Only the fact that we were able to confine you in a force-bubble almost as soon as you arrived here saved us from a terrible epidemic of ancient diseases.”

“A couple of injections, that’s all, and you can kill any bacteria on me,” Al pleaded. “You’re advanced people. You ought to be able to do a simple thing like that.”

“And then there is the matter of your genetic structure,” Spade- beard continued inexorably. “You bear genes long since elimi­nated from humanity as undesirable. Permitting you to remain here, breeding uncontrollably, would introduce unutterable confu­sion. Perhaps you carry latently the same mutant strain that cost humanity so many centuries of bloodshed!”

“No,” Al protested. “Look at me. I’m six feet tall, no pot­belly, a full head of hair—”

“The gene is recessive. But it crops up unexpectedly.”

“I solemnly promise to control my breeding,” Al declared. “I won’t run around scattering my genes all over your shiny new world. That’s a promise.”

“Your appeal is rejected,” came the inflexible reply.

Al shrugged. He knew when he was beaten. “Okay,” he said wearily. “I didn’t want to live in your damn century anyway. When’s the execution?”
Execution?” Spadebeard looked stunned. “The twentieth-cen­tury referent—yes, it is! Dove’s whiskers, do you think we would— would actually—”

He couldn’t get the word out. Al supplied it.

“Put me to death?”

Spadebeard’s expression was sickly. He looked ready to retch. Al heard him mutter vehemently to his companions in the observa­tion cubicle: “Gomirn def larriraog! Egfar!”

“Murrifar althrosk,” suggested one of his companions.

Spadebeard, evidently reassured, nodded. He said to Al, “No doubt a barbarian like yourself would expect to be—to be made dead.” Gulping, he went gamely on. “We have no such vindictive intention.”
“Well, what are you going to do to me?”

“Send you across the timeline to a world where your friends the mutated ones reign supreme,” Spadebeard replied. “It’s the least we can do for you, spy.”

The hidden door of his cell puckered open. Another space-suited figure entered, pointed a gun, and discharged a blob of blue light that drifted toward Al and rapidly englobed him He was drawn by the trailing end out into a corridor.

It hadn’t been a very sociable reception, here in the twenty-fifth Century, he thought as he was tugged along the hallway. In a way, he couldn’t blame them. A time-traveler from the past was bound to be laden down with all sorts of germs. They couldn’t risk letting him run around breathing at everybody. No wonder that crowd of onlookers had panicked when he opened his mouth to speak to them.

The other business, though, that of his being a spy for the mu­tants—he couldn’t figure that out at all. If the mutants had been wiped out fifty years ago, why worry about spies now? At least his species had managed to defeat the underground organization of potbellied little men. That was comforting. He wished he could get back to 1969 if only to snap his fingers in their jowly faces and tell them that all their sinister scheming was going to come to nothing.

Where was he heading now? Spadebeard had said, Across the timeline to a world where the mutated ones reign supreme. What­ever across the timeline meant, Al thought.


He was ushered into an impressive laboratory room and, bubble and all, was thrust into the waiting clasps of something that looked depressingly like an electric chair. Brisk technicians bustled around, throwing switches and checking connections.

Al glanced appealingly at Spadebeard. “Will you tell me what’s going on?”
“It is very difficult to express it in medieval terms,” the linguist said. “The device makes use of dollibar force to transmit you through an inverse dormin vector—do I make myself clear?”
“Not very.”
“Unhelpable. But you understand the concept of parallel con­tinua at least, of course.”
“No.”

“Does it mean anything to you if I say that you’ll be shunted across the spokes of the time-wheel to a totality that is simulta­neously parallel and tangent to our fourspace?”

“I get the general idea,” Al said dubiously, though all he was really getting was a headache. “You might as well start shunting me, I suppose.”

Spadebeard nodded and turned to a technician. “Vorstrar althrosk,” he commanded.

“Murrifar.”

The technician grabbed an immense toggle switch with both hands and groaningly dragged it shut. Al heard a brief shine of closing relays. Then darkness surrounded him.

Once again he found himself on a city street. But the pavement was cracked and buckled, and grass blades shot up through the neglected concrete.

A dry voice said, “All right, you. Don’t sprawl there like a ninny. Get up and come along.”

Al peered doubtfully up into the snout of a fair-sized pistol of enormous caliber. It was held by a short, fat, bald-headed man. Four identical companions stood near him with arms folded. They all looked very much like Mordecai, Waldemar, Giovanni, and the rest, except that these mutants were decked out in futuristic-look­ing costumes bright with flashy gold trim and rocketship insignia.

Al put up his hands. “Where am I?” he asked hesitantly.

“Earth, of course. You’ve just come through a dimensional gateway from the continuum of the Normals. Come along, spy. Into the van.”

“But I’m not a spy,” Al mumbled protestingly, as the five little men bundled him into a blue-and-red car the size of a small yacht. “At least, I’m not spying on you. I mean—”

“Save the explanations for the Overlord,” was the curt instruc­tion.

Al huddled miserably cramped between two vigilant mutants, while the others sat behind him. The van moved seemingly of its own volition, and at an enormous rate. A mutant power, Al thought. After a while he said,

Could you at least tell me what year this is?”

“It is 2431,” snapped the mutant to his left.

“But that’s the same year it was over there.”

“Of course. What did you expect?”

The question floored Al. He was silent for perhaps half a mile more. Since the van had no windows, he stared morosely at his feet. Finally he asked, “How come you aren’t afraid of catching my germs, then? Over back of—ah—the dimensional gateway, they kept me cooped up in a force-field all the time so I wouldn’t con­taminate them. But you go right ahead breathing the same air I do.”

“Do you think we fear the germs of a Normal, spy?” sneered the mutant at Al’s right. “You forget that we’re a superior race.” Al nodded. “Yes. I forgot about that.”

The van halted suddenly and the mutant police hustled Al out, past a crowd of peering little fat men and women, and into a co­lossal dome of a building whose exterior was covered completely with faceted green glass. The effect was one of massive ugliness.

They ushered him into a sort of throne room presided over by a mutant fatter than the rest. The policeman gripping Al’s right arm hissed, “Bow when you enter the presence of the Overlord.”

Al wasn’t minded to argue. He dropped to his knees along with the others. A booming voice from above rang out, “What have you brought me today?”

“A spy, your nobility.”

“Another? Rise, spy.”

Al rose. “Begging your nobility’s pardon, I’d like to put in a word or two on my own behalf—”

“Silence!” the Overlord roared.

Al closed his mouth. The mutant drew himself up to his full height, about five feet one, and said, “The Normals have sent you across the dimensional gulf to spy on us.”

“No, your nobility. They were afraid I’d spy on them, so they tossed me over here. I’m from the year 1969, you see.” Briefly, he explained everything, beginning with the bollixed phone call and ending with his capture by the Overlord’s men a short while ago.

The Overlord looked skeptical. “It is well known that the Nor­mals plan to cross the dimensional gulf from their phantom world to this, the real one, and invade our civilization. You’re but the latest of their advance scouts.

Admit it!”

“Sorry, your nobility, but I’m not. On the other side they told me I was a spy from 1969, and now you say I’m a spy from the other dimension. But I tell you—”
“Enough!” the mutant leader thundered. “Take him away. Place him in custody. We shall decide his fate later!”

Someone else already occupied the cell into which Al was thrust. He was a lanky, sad-faced Normal who slouched forward to shake hands once the door had clanged shut.

“Thurizad manifosk,” he said.

“Sorry. I don’t speak that language,” said Al.

The other grinned. “I understand. All right: greetings. I’m Dar­ren Phelp. Are you a spy too?”

“No, dammit!” Al snapped. Then: “Sorry. Didn’t mean to take it out on you. My name’s Al Miller. Are you a native of this place?”

“Me? Dove’s whiskers, what a sense of humor! Of course I’m not a native! You know as well as I do that there aren’t any Nor­mals left in this fourspace continuum.”

“None at all?”

“Hasn’t been one born here in centuries,” Phelp said. “But you’re just joking, eh? You’re from Baileffod’s outfit, I suppose.”
“Who?”

“Baileffod. Baileflod! You mean you aren’t? Then you must be from Higher Up!” Phelp thrust his hands sideways in some kind of gesture of respect. “Penguin’s paws, Excellency, I apologize. I should have seen at once—”
“No, I’m not from your organization at all,” Al said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, really.”

Phelp smiled cunningly. “Of course, Excellency! I understand completely.”

“Cut that out! Why doesn’t anyone ever believe me? I’m not from Baileffod and I’m not from Higher Up. I come from 1969. Do you hear me, 1969? And that’s the truth.”

Phelp’s eyes went wide. “From the past?

Al nodded. “I stumbled into the mutants in 1969 and they threw me five centuries ahead to get rid of me. Only when I ar­rived, I wasn’t welcome, so I was shipped across the dimensional whatzis to here. Everyone thinks I’m a spy, wherever I go. What are you doing here?”

Phelp smiled. “Why, I am a spy.”

“From 2431?”

“Naturally. We have to keep tabs on the mutants somehow. I came through the gateway wearing an invisibility shield, but it popped an ultrone and I vizzed out. They jugged me last month, and I suppose I’m here for keeps.”

Al rubbed thumbs tiredly against his eyeballs. “Wait a minute— how come you speak my language? On the other side they had to get a linguistics expert to talk to me.”

“All spies are trained to talk English, stupid. That’s the lan­guage the mutants speak here. In the real world we speak Vorkish, naturally. It’s the language developed by Normals for com­munication during the Mutant Wars. Your ’linguistics expert’ was probably one of our top spies.”
“And over here the mutants have won?”

“Completely. Three hundred years ago, in this continuum, the mutants developed a two-way time machine that enabled them to go back and forth, eliminating Normal leaders before they were born. Whereas in our world, the real world, two-way time travel is impossible. That’s where the continuum split begins. We Normals fought a grim war of extermination against the mutants in our fourspace and finally wiped them out, despite their superior men­tal powers, in 2390. Clear?”

“More or less.” Rather less than more, Al added privately. “So there are only mutants in this world, and only Normals in your world.”
“Exactly.”

“And you’re a spy from the other side.”

“You’ve got it now! You see, even though strictly speaking this world is only a phantom, it’s got some pretty real characteristics. For instance, if the mutants killed you here, you’d be dead. Per­manently. So there’s a lot of rivalry across the gateway; the mu­tants are always scheming to invade us, and vice versa. Confiden­tially, I don’t think anything will ever come of all the scheming.”

“You don’t?”

“Nah,” Phelp said. “The way things stand now, each side has a perfectly good enemy just beyond reach. But actually going to war would be messy, while relaxing our guard and slipping into peace would foul up our economy. So we keep sending spies back and forth, and prepare for war. It’s a nice system, except when you happen to get caught, like me.”
“What’ll happen to you?”

Phelp shrugged. “They may let me rot here for a few decades. Or they might decide to condition me and send me back as a spy for them. Tiger tails, who knows?”

“Would you change sides like that?”

“I wouldn’t have any choice—not after I was conditioned,” Phelp said. “But I don’t worry much about it. It’s a risk I knew about when I signed on for spy duty.”

Al shuddered. It was beyond him how someone could volun­tarily let himself get involved in this game of dimension-shifting and mutant-battling. But it takes all sorts to make a continuum, he decided.

Half an hour later three rotund mutant police came to fetch him. They marched him downstairs and into a bare, ugly little room where a battery of interrogators quizzed him for better than an hour. He stuck to his story, throughout everything, until at last they indicated they were through with him. He spent the next two hours in a drafty cell, by himself, until finally a gaudily robed mu­tant unlocked the door and said, “The Overlord wishes to see you.”

The Overlord looked worried. He leaned forward on his throne, fist digging into his fleshy chin. In his booming voice—Al realized suddenly that it was artificially amplified—the Overlord rumbled, “Miller, you’re a problem.”
“I’m sorry your nobil—”

Quiet! I’ll do the talking.”

Al did not reply.

The Overlord went on, “We’ve checked your story inside and out, and confirmed it with one of our spies on the other side of the gate. You really are from 1969, or thereabouts. What can we do with you? Generally speaking, when we catch a Normal snooping around here, we psychocondition him and send him back across the gateway to spy for us. But we can’t do that to you, because you don’t belong on the other side, and they’ve already tossed you out once. On the other hand, we can’t keep you here, maintaining you forever at state expense. And it wouldn’t be civilized to kill you, would it?”

“No, your nobil—”

Silence!

Al gulped. The Overlord glowered at him and continued think­ing out loud. “I suppose we could perform experiments on you, though. You must be a walking laboratory of Normal microor­ganisms that we could synthesize and fire through the gateway when we invade their fourspace. Yes, by the Grome, then you’d be useful to our cause! Zechariah?”

“Yes, Nobility?” A ribbon-bedecked guardsman snapped to at­tention.

“Take this Normal to the Biological Laboratories for examina­tion. I’ll have further instructions as soon as—”

Al heard a peculiar whanging noise from the back of the throne room. The Overlord appeared to freeze on his throne. Turning, Al saw a band of determined-looking Normals come bursting in, led by Darren Phelp.
There you are!” Phelp cried. “I’ve been looking all over for you!” He was waving a peculiar needle-nozzled gun.
“What’s going on?” Al asked.

Phelp grinned. “The Invasion! It came, after all! Our troops are pouring through the gateway armed with these freezer guns. They immobilize any mutant who gets in the way of the field.”

“When—when did all this happen?”

“It started two hours ago. We’ve captured the entire city! Come on, will you? Whiskers, there’s no time to waste!”

“Where am I supposed to go?”

Phelp smiled. “To the nearest dimensional lab, of course. We’re going to send you back home.”

A dozen triumphant Normals stood in a tense knot around Al in the laboratory. From outside came the sound of jubilant singing. The Invasion was a howling success.

As Phelp had explained it, the victory was due to the recent in­vention of a kind of time-barrier projector. The projector had cut off all contact between the mutant world and its own future, pre­venting time-traveling mutant scouts from getting back to 2431 with news of the Invasion. Thus two-way travel, the great mutant advantage, was nullified, and the success of the surprise attack was made possible.

Al listened to this explanation with minimal interest. He barely understood every third word, and, in any event, his main concern was in getting home.
He was strapped into a streamlined and much modified version of the temporal centrifuge that had originally hurled him into 2431. Phelp explained things to him.

“You see here, we set the machine for 1969. What day was it when you left?”

“Ah—October ten. Around three thirty in the afternoon.”

“Make the setting, Frozz.” Phelp nodded. “You’ll be shunted back along the time-line. Of course, you’ll land in this continuum, since in our world there’s no such thing as pastward time travel. But once you reach your own time, all you do is activate this small transdimensional generator, and you’ll be hurled across safe and sound into the very day you left, in your own fourspace.”

“You can’t know how much I appreciate all this,” Al said warmly. He felt a pleasant glow of love for all mankind, for the first time since his unhappy phone call. At last someone was taking sympathetic interest in his plight.

At last, he was on his way home, back to the relative sanity of 1969, where he could start forget­ting this entire nightmarish jaunt. Mutants and Normals and spies and time machines—

“You’d better get going,” Phelp said. “We have to get the occu­pation under way here.”
“Sure,” Al agreed. “Don’t let me hold you up. I can’t wait to get going—no offense intended.”

“And remember—soon as your surroundings look familiar, jab the activator button on this generator. Otherwise you’ll slither into an interspace where we couldn’t answer for the consequences.”

Al nodded tensely. “I won’t forget.”

“I hope not. Ready?”

“Ready.”

Someone threw a switch. Al began to spin. He heard the pop­ping sound that was the rupturing of the temporal matrix. Like a cork shot from a champagne bottle, Al arched out backward through time, heading for 1969.

He woke in his own room on Twenty-third Street. His head hurt. His mind was full of phrases like temporal centrifuge and transdimensional generator.

He picked himself off the floor and rubbed his head.

Wow, he thought. It must have been a sudden fainting spell. And now his head was full of nonsense.

Going to the sideboard, he pulled out the half-empty bourbon bottle and measured off a few fingers’ worth. After the drink, his nerves felt steadier.

His mind was still cluttered with inexplicable thoughts and images.

inister little fat men and complex machines, gleaming roadways and men in fancy tunics.

A bad dream, he thought.

Then he remembered. It wasn’t any dream. He had actually taken the round trip into 2431, returning by way of some other continuum. He had pressed the generator button at the proper time, and now here he was, safe and sound. No longer the football of a bunch of different factions. Home in his own snug little fourspace, or whatever it was.

He frowned. He recalled that Mordecai had severed the tele­phone wire. But the phone looked intact now. Maybe it had been fixed while he was gone. He picked it up. Unless he got that loan extension today, he was cooked.

There was no need for him to look up the number of the Friendly Finance Corporation; he knew it well enough. He began to dial. MUrray Hill 4—
The receiver clicked queerly. A voice said, “Come in, Operator Nine.

perator Nine, do you read me?”

Al’s jaw sagged in horror. This is where I came in, he thought wildly.

He struggled to put down the phone.

ut his muscles would not respond. It would be easier to bend the sun in its orbit than to break the path of the continuum. He heard his own voice say, “I didn’t want the operator. There must be something wrong with my phone if—”

“Just a minute. Who are you?”

Al fought to break the contact. But he was hemmed away in a small corner of his mind while his voice went on, “I ought to ask you that. What are you doing on the other end of my phone, any­way? I hadn’t even finished dialing. I got as far as MU-4 and—”

Inwardly Al wanted to scream.

No scream would come. In this continuum the past (his future) was immutable. He was caught on the track, and there was no escape. None whatever. And, he real­ized glumly, there never would be.

Do you want more?

I have a ton load of science fiction stories for your enjoyment here in my Science Fiction Index…

Fictional Stories

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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More pretty girls within China (8) and why finding the right girl is important.

Here we continue, yet again, with more videos of Chinese beauties. In each case, the video is associated with a picture, and if you click on the picture, a video will open up in a new tab. These videos were all taken during the months of June and July 2020 within China, and posted by the respective girls on those dates. I find all of these ladies quite lovely and I hope that you, the reader will agree with me on this.

I suppose that I tend to post in clusters of related posts until I am tired of it, and the Metallicman audience grows tired of my articles. There’s much going on in the world today. With Pompeo saying that “new” techniques and methods must be used to “suppress China”, at the same time that two complete invasion carrier fleets are steaming towards China…

UGH.

Enjoy the pretty girls.

Do you want more?

I have more posts along these lines in my Pretty Girls Index, here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Learning about China by looking at exceptionally pretty and beautiful girls (7)

Here we continue with our exploration of China by focusing our attention on the ladies there. For the longest time, I have devoted my time to the Trump Trade Wars, DIY dimensional portal construction, the art that all ended with the progressive movement in 1913, and science fiction stories. Yet, I felt that if you don’t take the time to “smell the roses”; meaning look at pretty girls and enjoy good food, you are truly losing out on what life can provide. Thus this post.

Again, just click on the picture to see the video. It should open up in a new separate tab. Depending on the internet traffic at your location it could be either slow or fast. Enjoy.

Do you want more?

I have more videos in my Attractive Chinese Girls Index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Learning about China by looking at pretty girls (6)

In this post, I am going to get back to posting some information about China and living there. In particular, I will post using a new format, that maybe you readers might find easier to use and more interesting. Gosh, I hope that you all will like it! This post consists of videos, short videos, of Chinese women. They are indexed by a static photo with a brief paragraph description.

Simply click on the picture that you are interested in, and a new window will pop up that will have the video of the girl. Most videos are under 15 seconds, so it shouldn’t take long to download or to appear. Just allow the videos to load. If there is a lot of internet traffic, it might take some time.

The Girls of China.

Learning can be fun, as long as you are with a pretty girl to show you things.

Do you want more?

If so, you can have some fun in my China index here…

Pretty Chinese Girls
China

Some selected favorite artworks by Jean-Léon Gérôme

Jean-Léon Gérôme is a favorite painter of mine. in his amazing life, he painted at least 351 artworks. He is considered to be a “French , Orientalist painter, draftsman and sculptor” He is awesome.

You can see all of his artwork at the Art Renewal Center here.

Pollice Verso

When I first saw this painting, I was stunned. You have to see it in it’s entirety. It is a huge canvas with a very impression spectacle.

The Latin phrase pollice verso is used in the context of gladiatorial combat for a hand gesture used by Ancient Roman crowds to pass judgment on a defeated gladiator. In modern popular culture, it is assumed that "thumbs down" was the signal that a defeated gladiator should be condemned to death.

-Thumbs signal - Wikipedia

Consider the 2000 movie, Gladiator, in which Joaquin Phoenix is shown giving a defeated gladiator a thumbs down to signify that he wishes for him to be killed. According to director Ridley Scott, that scene was inspired by a painting from 1872 called “Pollice Verso“.

The painting depicts a victorious gladiator standing over the lifeless body of his opponent while a baying crowd jeers and delivers a tsunami of down-turned thumbs. Scott stated of the painting, “That image spoke to me of the Roman Empire in all its glory and wickedness. I knew right then and there I was hooked.”

That particular painting has been noted by historians as the catalyst for why the concept of pollice verso is so poorly understood today by the masses.

What makes this fact so surprising is that the painter behind the piece, Jean-Léon Gérôme, was a hugely respected historical artist who was internationally renowned for his “archaeologically correct history paintings”. Gérôme has been described as a “learned classicist” and was famous for extensively researching his pieces before putting brush to canvas.

For example, with “Pollice Verso” Gérôme studied actual pieces of armor from the ruins of Pompeii so that the gladiators in his paintings looked authentic. Gérôme’s legendary attention to detail is probably the reason that his interpretation of pollice verso was so widely accepted by academics.

The fights between gladiators in ancient Rome were brutal. It was not like a football game (American or otherwise) where it would be assumed that both sides would go home with just a couple of bruises. Death was a fairly common occurrence at a gladiatorial game, but that doesn’t mean it was inevitable. One gladiator might be lying prone in the blood-absorbing sand of the arena, with the other gladiator holding a sword (or whichever weapon he was assigned) at his throat. Instead of simply plunging in the weapon and consigning his opponent to death, the winning gladiator would look for a signal to tell him what to do.

The Editor Was in Charge of the Gladiator Fight

The winning gladiator would get his signal—not from the crowd as illustrated in the famous 19th century painting by Jean-Léon Gérôme (1824–1904)—but rather from the referee of the game, the editor (or editor muneris), who might also be a senator, emperor or another politico.

He was the one to make the final decisions about the fates of the gladiators in the arena. However, since the games were meant to curry public favor, the editor had to pay attention to the wishes of the audience. Much of the audience attended such brutal events for the single purpose of witnessing the bravery of a gladiator in the face of death.

By the way, gladiators never said "Morituri te salutant" ("Those who are about to die salute you"). That was said once to Emperor Claudius (10 BC–54 CE) on the occasion of a staged naval battle, not gladiatorial combat.

Ways to End a Fight Between Gladiators

Gladiatorial contests were dangerous and potentially fatal, but not as often fatal as Hollywood would have us believe: Gladiators were rented from their training school (ludus) and a good gladiator was expensive to replace, so most battles did not end in death.

There were only two ways that a gladiatorial battle could be ended—either one gladiator won or it was a draw—but it was the editor who had the final say on whether the loser died on the field or went on to fight another day. 

The editor had three established ways to make his decision. 

  1. He might have established rules (lex) in advance of the game. If the fight’s sponsors wanted a fight to the death, they had to be willing to compensate the lanista (trainer)who had rented out the dead gladiator. 
  2. He could accept the surrender of one of the gladiators. After having lost or cast aside his weapons, the losing gladiator would fall to his knees and raise his index finger (ad digitatum).  
  3. He could listen to the audience. When a gladiator went down, cries of Habet, Hoc habet! (He’s had it!), and shouts of Mitte! (Let him go!) or Lugula! (Kill him!) could be heard.

A game that ended in death was known as a sine remissione (without dismissal).  

Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, Thumbs Sideways

But the editor didn’t necessarily listen to any of them.

In the end it was always the editor who decided whether a gladiator would die that day. Traditionally, the editor would communicate his decision by turning his thumb up, down, or sideways (pollice verso)—although modes changed as did the rules of the gladiatorial arena over the length of the Roman empire. The problem is: the confusion over exactly what thumb direction meant what is one of a longstanding debate among modern classical and philological scholars.

Latin PhraseMeaning
Pollices premere or presso polliceThe “pressed thumb.” The thumb and fingers are squeezed together, meaning “mercy” for a downed gladiator.
Pollex infestusThe “hostile thumb.”  The signaler’s head is inclined to the right shoulder, their arm stretched out from the ear, and their hand extended with the hostile thumb. Scholars suggest the thumb pointed upward, but there is some debate; it meant death to the loser. 
Pollicem vertere or pollicem convertere“To turn the thumb.” The signaler turned his thumb towards his own throat or breast: scholars debate about whether it was pointed up or down, with most picking “up.” Death to the loser. 
Signals from the CrowdThe audience could use the ones traditionally used by the editor, or one of these.
Digitis mediusUp-stretched middle finger “of scorn” for the losing gladiator. 
Mappae Handkerchief or napkin, waved to request mercy.

When a Gladiator Died

Honor was crucial to the gladiatorial games and the audiences expected the loser to be valiant even in death. The honorable way to die was for the losing gladiator to grasp the thigh of the victor who would then hold the loser’s head or helmet and plunge a sword into his neck.

Gladiator matches, like much else in Roman life, were connected with Roman religion.

The gladiator component of Roman games (ludi) appears to have started at the start of the Punic Wars as part of a funeral celebration for an ex-consul. To make sure the loser wasn’t pretending to be dead, an attendant dressed as Mercury, the Roman god who led the newly dead to their afterlife, would touch the apparently-dead gladiator with his hot iron wand. Another attendant, dressed as Charon, another Roman god associated with the Underworld, would hit him with a mallet.

Diogenes

Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 BCE) was a Greek Cynic philosopher best known for holding a lantern (or candle) to the faces of the citizens of Athens claiming he was searching for an honest man.

He was most likely a student of the philosopher Antisthenes (445-365 BCE) and, in the words of Plato (allegedly), was “A Socrates gone mad.”

He was driven into exile from his native city of Sinope for defacing currency (though some sources say it was his father who committed the crime and Diogenes simply followed him into exile).

Diogenes’ Beliefs

Diogenes came to Athens where he met Antisthenes who at first refused him as a student but, eventually, was worn down by his persistence and accepted him. Like Antisthenes, Diogenes believed in self-control, the importance of personal excellence in one’s behavior (in Greek, arete, usually translated as `virtue’), and the rejection of all which was considered unnecessary in life such as personal possessions and social status.

He was so ardent in his beliefs that he lived them very publicly in the market place of Athens.

He took up residence in a large wine cask (some sources claim it was an abandoned bathtub), owned nothing, and seems to have lived off the charity of others. He owned a cup which served also has a bowl for food but threw it away when he saw a boy drinking water from his hands and realized one did not even need a cup to sustain oneself.

Duel After a Masquerade

The Duel After the Masquerade is a painting by the French artist Jean-Léon Gérôme, currently housed in the Musée Condé in Chantilly, France.

Duel: a prearranged combat between two persons, fought with deadly weapons according to an accepted code of procedure, especially to settle a private quarrel.

While dueling may seem barbaric to modern men, it was a ritual that made sense in a society in which the preservation of male honor was absolutely paramount. A man’s honor was the most central aspect of his identity, and thus its reputation had to be kept untarnished by any means necessary. Duels, which were sometimes attended by hundreds of people, were a way for men to publicly prove their courage and manliness. In such a society, the courts could offer a gentleman no real justice; the matter had to be resolved with the shedding of blood.

In the ancient tradition of single combat, each side would send out their “champion” as the representative of their respective armies, and the two men would fight to the death. This contest would sometimes settle the matter, or would serve only as a prelude to the ensuing battle, a sign to which side the gods favored.

“A coward, a man incapable either of defending or of revenging himself, wants one of the most essential parts of the character of a man.” 

-Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

Dueling began in ancient Europe as “trial by combat,” a form of “justice” in which two disputants battled it out; whoever lost was assumed to be the guilty party. In the Middle Ages, these contests left the judicial sphere and became spectator sports with chivalrous knights squaring off in tournaments for bragging rights and honor.

But dueling really became mainstream when two monarchs got into the act. When the treaty between France and Spain broke down in 1526, Frances I challenged Charles V to a duel. After a lot of back and forth arguing about the arrangements of the duel, their determination to go toe to toe dissipated. But the kings did succeed in making dueling all the rage across Europe. It was especially popular in France; 10,000 Frenchmen are thought to have died during a ten year period under Henry IV. The king issued an edict against the practice, and asked the nobles to submit their grievances to a tribunal of honor for redress instead.

Despite putting on a courageous front, no gentleman relished having to fight a duel and risk both killing and being killed (well, perhaps with the exception of Andrew “I fought at least 14 duels” Jackson). Thus duels were often not intended to be fights to the death, but to first blood. A duel fought with swords might end after one man simply scratched the arm of the other. In pistol duels, it was often the case that a single volley was fired, and assuming both men had survived unscathed, satisfaction was deemed to be achieved through their mutual willingness to risk death. Men sometimes aimed for their opponent’s leg or even deliberately missed, desiring only to satisfy the demands of honor. Only about 20% of duels ended in a fatality.

Duels founded on greater insults to a man’s honor, however, were often designated to go well beyond first blood. Some were carried out under the understanding that satisfaction was not gained until one man was incapacitated, while the gravest insults required a mortal blow.

The Serpent Charmer

I discovered that Bing censored this image from my sight. I guess that they felt that I couldn’t handle it, or that it would affect my notions about snakes and nudity. It’s a lovely example of Orientalist painting technique and thought.

Populating their paintings with snake charmers, veiled women, and courtesans, Orientalist artists created and disseminated fantasy portrayals of the exotic 'East' for European viewers. 

Although earlier examples exist, Orientalism primarily refers to Western (particularly English and French) painting, architecture and decorative arts of the 19th century that utilize scenes, settings, and motifs drawn from a range of countries including Turkey, Egypt, India, China, and Algeria. 

Although some artists strove for realism, many others subsumed the individual cultures and practices of these countries into a generic vision of the Orient and as historian Edward Said notes in his influential book, Orientalism (1978), 

"the Orient was almost a European invention...a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiments". 

Falling broadly under Academic Art, the Orientalist movement covered a range of subjects and genres from grand historical and biblical paintings to nudes and domestic interiors.

-The Art Story

This painting should not be confused with his other work with the exact same name;

Here’s some great links of his art style and how they all come together…

  • One of the keys genres of Orientalism was the harem picture. Denied access to actual seraglios, male artists relied on hearsay and imagination to depict opulent interiors and beautiful women, many of whom were Western in appearance. The genre also allowed artists to depict erotic nudes and highly sexual narratives outside of a mythological context as their exotic location distanced the Western viewer sufficiently to make them morally permissible.
  • Orientalism disseminated and reinforced a range of stereotypes associated with Eastern cultures most notably regarding a lack of ‘civilized’ behavior and perceived differences in morality, sexual practices, and character of the inhabitants. This often aligned with propaganda campaigns initiated by Britain and France as colonializing powers and images are best viewed within the context of Europe’s political and economic relationships with Eastern countries.
  • Many Orientalist images are infused with rich colors, particularly oranges, golds and reds (although blue tiles are also prevalent) as well as decorative details and these operated in conjunction with the use of light and shadow to create a sense of dusty heat that Westerners would associate with the prevailing view of the Orient.

Le Combat de Coqs

The Cock Fight

Did you know from whence the English slang for penis came from? Yes, I am talking about a “cock”. Well, listen up…

The following are excerpts from the article “The Cultural Poetics of the Greek Cockfight” by Eric Csapo, in The Australian Archaeological Institute at Athens Bulletin, Vol. 4 (2006/2007) pp. 20-37.

The Cultural Poetics of the Greek Cockfight

In antiquity, the cock, like the sphinx, was a liminal creature. Its habit of crowing at dawn made it a symbol of transition from night to day and darkness to light. As a marker of time and transitions, it is associated with birth, death and rebirth, and thus gains a close association with liminal deities such as Leto, Hermes, Demeter/Persephone and Asclepius. 

Adolescence was also closely connected to death and rebirth: Artemidorus, the dream interpreter, claims that dreams about adolescence signify marriage for the bachelor and death for the aged (1.54). [...]

In myth, the cock is closely connected with the war-god, Ares. Originally the cock was a human companion of Ares named Alectryon, which is simply the Greek word for ‘cock’. 

At first, however, there was nothing martial about Alectryon. Before becoming a cock, Alectryon is said by Lucian to have been ‘an adolescent boy, beloved of Ares, who kept company with the god at drinking parties, caroused with him, and was his companion in lovemaking’.[1] 

His only soldierly duty was to keep watch while Ares made adulterous love to Aphrodite, so as to prevent the rising sun from seeing them and from reporting the affair to Aphrodite’s husband Hephaestus. Alectryon failed to keep his post even in this lightest of all soldierly duties. 

He fell asleep and as a result Hephaestus learned of the affair and set the trap, so memorably described in the Odyssey 8, that led to the public exhibition and humiliation of Ares and Aphrodite caught by invisible bonds in the love embrace. As punishment Ares turned Alectryon into a cock, adding, as penance, an ineluctable impulse to crow at the approach of the sun in eternal compensation for his failure to cry warning on that fateful night. [...]

Cocks served as ready symbols for that supreme agon and most enduring theme of Greek art and poetry: WAR. In Aeschylus the expression ‘hearts of cocks’ stands metaphorically for the spirit of violent confrontation Eum. 861). 

For this reason, cocks are a favourite motif on shield blazons. Programmatic decoration on Attic vase-painting frequently draws similes between fighting cocks and mythological combatants or hoplites (see, e.g., fig. 8).[2] [...]

The cock, as we noted, belongs not only to the realm of Ares, but is also close to Aphrodite. The epigrammatist Meleager took the cock on a grave stele to signal the dead man’s devotion to Aphrodite.[3] 

Aristotle declares that chickens are ‘most given to Aphrodite’ (HA 488b4). Oppian thinks them sex-crazed beyond all known birds.[4] 

This is partly justified by observation: Aristotle notes that chickens are the only animals, besides humans, whose mating habits are not seasonal or limited. Indeed they are less limited than humans. [...]

Given the cock’s association with both sex and masculinity, it is not surprising that it was the preferred love gift given by mature men to beautiful youths (fig. 13).[5] 

In Margaret Visser’s words ‘the cock expressed the sheer maleness of the couple, their virile aggressivity and energy’.[6] [...]

In most parts of the world cockfighting is a sport practised exclusively by adult males, but in Greece the sport was ideally represented as a pastime for adolescent boys, and particularly young aristocrats. 

We have seen that in Greek art the human figures associated with fighting cocks are boys, and mostly adolescent boys. 

Language also encouraged a close identification between the adolescent and the cock. Cocks were, like their owners, ‘aristocrats’; fighting cocks were termed ‘noble’, those unfit for sport ‘ignoble’ or ‘vulgar’.[7] 

The harsh sounds made by an adolescent whose voice is breaking are referred to as crowing, kokkusmos (gallulare in Latin).[8] 

And while words for ‘cock’ and ‘penis’ are homonymous in the vernacular of a great many languages, the Greek equivalent, koko, is only ever used as a ‘pet name’ for the puerile member.[9] The close almost exclusive identification of fighting cocks with élite adolescents is hard to square with a tale about martial valour, an express concern of all Greek males. 

Rather, it reflects the particular configuration of male homosexuality in Classical Greece with its emphasis on pederasty and its predominantly aristocratic milieu.

Pygmalion and Galatea

Pygmalion
Classical Mythology. a sculptor and king of Cyprus who carved an ivory statue of a maiden and fell in love with it. It was brought to life, in response to his prayer, by Aphrodite.

The story of Pygmalion and Galatea is quite known and popular till, well… nowadays.

Pygmalion, a famous sculptor, falls in love with his own creation and wishes to give this creation life. This simple and imaginary concept is actually the basis from a psychological understanding of male behavior and wish. This nice myth is considered as the depiction of the masculine need to rule over a certain woman and to inanimate his ideas into a female living creature.

Galatea
n. Greek Mythology A maiden who was originally a statue carved by Pygmalion and who was brought to life by Aphrodite in answer to the sculptor's pleas.

The strange sculptor

Pygmalion was a sculptor par excellence, a man who gave to every one of his ivory a life-like appearance. His deep devotion to his art spared him no time to admire the beauty of women.

His sculptures were the only beauty he knew.

For reasons known only to him, Pygmalion despised and shunned women, finding solace only in his craft. In fact, he was so condemning to women that he had vowed never to marry.

Falling in love with his own creation

One fine day, Pygmalion carved the statue of a woman of unparalleled beauty. She looked so gentle and divine that he could not take his eyes off the statue. Enchanted with his own creation, he felt waves of joy and desire sweeping over his body and in a moment of inspiration he named the figurine, Galatea, meaning “she who is white like milk”.

He draped over her the finest of cloths and bedecked her with the most dazzling of ornaments, adorned her hair with the prettiest of flowers, gave to her the choicest of gifts and kissed her as a sign of adoration.

Pygmalion was obsessed and madly in love with his creation.

The spell the lifeless woman cast on him was too much to resist and he desired her for his wife. Countless were the nights and days he spent staring upon his creation.

The realization of his dream

In the meantime, the celebration of goddess Aphrodite was fast approaching and preparations were well under way.

On the day of the festival, while making offerings to goddess Aphrodite, Pygmalion prayed with all his heart and soul, beseeching the goddess that she turns his ivory figurine into a real woman.

Touched by his deep veneration, Aphrodite went to the workshop of Pygmalion to see this famous statue by herself. When he looked upon the statue of Galatea, she got amazed by its beauty and liveliness.

Looking better at it, Aphrodite found that Galatea looked like her in beauty and perfection, so, satisfied, she granted Pygmalion his wish.

Upon returning home the master-sculptor went straight to Galatea, full of hope. At first, he noticed a flush on the cheeks of the ivory figurine but slowly it dawned upon him that Aphrodite had heard his pleas.

Unable to restrain himself, he held Galatea in his arms and kept her strongly. What had been cold ivory turned soft and warm and Pygmalion stood back in amazement as his beloved figurine came into life, smiling at him and speaking words of admiration for her creator.

Their love blossomed over the days and before long, wedding vows were exchanged between the two lovers with Aphrodite blessing them with happiness and prosperity.

The happy couple had a son.

His name was Paphos, and he later founded the city of Paphos in Cyprus. Some say that Pygmalion and Galatea also had a daughter, Metharme.

The bottom line is that the couple lived happily ever after.

Black Bashi-Bazouk

Bashi-bazouk, Turkish Başibozuk, (“corrupted head,” or “leaderless”), mercenary soldier belonging to the skirmishing or irregular troops of the Ottoman Empire, notorious for their indiscipline, plundering, and brutality. 

Originally describing the homeless beggars who reached Istanbul from the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the term bashi-bazouk was later applied to all Muslim subjects who were not members of the armed forces. 

Finally it was applied to units of irregular volunteers (both infantry and cavalry) attached to the army but under independent officers and providing their own weapons and horses. 

These forces became notorious for their lawlessness. 

They appeared at the end of the 18th century and fought in Egypt against Napoleon. 

During the Crimean War the allied generals made fruitless attempts to discipline them. Their excesses during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 at last forced the Ottoman government to abandon their use.

-Bashi-bazouk | Ottoman soldier | Britannica

This arresting picture was made after Gérôme returned to Paris from a twelve-week journey to the Near East in early 1868.

He was at the height of his career when he dressed a model in his studio with textiles he had acquired during the expedition.

The artist’s Turkish title for this picture—which translates as “headless”—evokes the unpaid irregular soldiers who fought ferociously for plunder under Ottoman leadership, although it is difficult to imagine this man charging into battle wearing such an exquisite silk tunic.

Gérôme’s virtuosic treatment of textures provides a sumptuous counterpoint to the figure’s dignified bearing.

The Slave Market

Orientalism is, in a nutshell, “the way that the West perceives of — and thereby defines — the East”.

Imagine you are a 13th or 14th century European. The Silk Road has just recently established contact and trade with a distant land; a land so far away and so difficult to reach that it exists only in the imagination of the average European.

Earlier accounts of this land have been passed down by the Greeks from centuries ago, telling of an alien world inhabited by “dog-faced creatures”, or Phasians so yellow it was as if they “suffered from jaundice” (summarized by Gary Okihiro in “When and Where I Enter”).

Centuries after that, Egeria’s 4th century text Peregrinatio ad terram sanctam describes an exotic, fantastic Asia that “served to highlight the positive, the real, the substantial Europe”.

These tales are not just stories; for the West, they become synonymous with “what Asia is”.

In recounting Marco Polo’s travels, one historian wrote…

“[Polo’s] picture of the East is the picture which we all make in our minds when we repeat to ourselves those two strange words ‘the East’ and give ourselves up to the image which that symbol evokes”.

Thus, almost from the moment of first contact, the West established a unique and specific relationship with the East — one that still impacts and influences our conceptions of these regions today.

In this relationship (as defined by Edward Said), the West is the “Occident”: the norm, the standard, the center, the fixed point around which the rest of the world orbits.

The East is, by contrast, the “Orient”: the abnormal, the exotic, the foreign, the Other defined specifically by its deviancy from the Occidental, Western norm.

Importantly, this relationship — what Said terms “Orientalism” — draws upon exaggerations of both Occidental and Oriental traits in order to create an Orientalist fantasy that is a fictional recapitulation of both East and West.

Western men are re-imagined as universally Godly, good, moral, virile, and powerful — but ultimately innately human.

By contrast, those traits that best serve as a counter-point to the Occidental West are emphasized in the West’s imagined construct of the East: strange religions and martial arts, bright colors and barbaric practices, unusual foods and incomprehensible languages, mysticism and magic, ninjas and kung fu.

Asia becomes innately unusual, alien, and beastly.

In Orientalism, Asia is not defined by what Asia is; rather, Asia becomes an “Otherized” fiction of everything the West is not, and one that primarily serves to reinforce the West’s own moral conception of itself.

It is also important to note that Orientalism historically arose both from an attempt to “honor” Eastern cultures as well as to redefine them for the West.

Orientalism purports to be a faithful recreation of Eastern traditions and peoples, but actually draws upon real practices and traditions to create an Eastern construct that is largely exaggeration and myth.

Which leads us to this display of slaves in front of a store…

Ave Caesar, Morituri te Salutant

Hail Caesar, We Who Are About to Die Salute You!

This is another painting that depicted the gladiatorial battles and events of ancient Rome. I have read that this saying “we who are about to die salute you” was not all that common, and perhaps only occurred once. But who really knows? Eh?

It’s a nice painting, done in magnificent style.

Le Barde Noir

The Black Bard

Usually artists that paint Caucasian peoples have a difficult time painting other races. Not so in this painting. The colors and the skin tones are all right on and correct. This is a lovely painting and would be particularly impressive over a fireplace in a Victorian home.

Le Tigre et le Gardien

The Tiger and the Guardian

Another fine work. I love how hot it appears outside and how cool the inside of the building appears.

Harem Women Feeding Pigeons in a Courtyard

A fine example of his work. No explanation is required.

The Negro Master of the Hounds

This is a nicely done painting, with great “atmosphere” and a particularly excellent rendering of the dogs. Most figurative painters have spent decades working on their technique and skills with the human body. As a result, when they paint animals, the skill level is often incomplete. While horse and dogs are sometimes rendered perfectly, for the most part, cats and other creatures tend to suffer artistically.

No so in this painting.

Napoleon and His General Staff

In ordering an expedition to Egypt and creating an Army of the Orient in April 1798, under the command of the young General Bonaparte, France’s post-revolutionary Directory sought to do two things.

  • The first was to block Britain’s trade route to India and re-establish commerce with the Levant.
  • The second unstated objective was to remove the ambitious young Bonaparte, whose popularity following his success in the Italian Campaign of the previous year rendered him a threat in current volatile politics.

General Bonaparte famously addressed his troops on their arrival in Egypt with the words …

From the heights of the Pyramids, forty centuries look down on us”.

The reality of France’s Egyptian Campaign was less grandiose, and descriptions by surviving French Officers of Napoleon’s decision to trek his 37,000 troops across the desert rather than follow the Nile River from Alexandria, tell of appalling mismanagement, of thirst, discomfort, disease and death.

Nevertheless it was in the Battle of the Pyramids (more accurately the Battle of Embabeh in the Gaza plain where the battle actually took place) that Napoleon famously routed the Mameluke cavalry by putting into practice his innovative use of the massive so-called ‘divisional square’, a tactic first deployed in Antiquity.

The Mamelukes had effectively ruled Egypt since the thirteenth century and were legendary, apparently invincible, and fearless warriors. Their defeat at the hands of General Bonaparte further enhanced his reputation. 

The Battle of the Pyramids, between French troops led by Bonaparte and 21,000 Egyptian Mameluke soldiers was a resounding victory for the French.

In contrast, the French naval fleet, stationed in the Bay of Aboukir, was attacked by the newly arrived British fleet, under the command of Horatio Nelson, and was roundly defeated.

Following this naval defeat, Bonaparte’s Egyptian campaign remained land-based.

Having installed himself as master of Egypt by force, Bonaparte then set about installing in Egypt what he viewed as the benefits of western civilization. He established the Institut d’Egypte for French scholars, a library, a chemistry laboratory, a health service, a botanical garden, an observatory, an antiquities museum and a zoo.

Diane et Acteon

According to a Greek myth, Actaeon, the son of Aristaeus and Autonoe, surprises Diana, the Greek Artemis, while she was bathing with her nymphs. As a punishment she turned him into a stag and, no longer recognized by his pack of 50 hounds, she was torn to pieces by them.

Greek myths were not very accepting of voyeurism, I guess.

What I find interesting is that the myth takes place in ancient Greece, and that the women are bathing in the pool together, while suddenly a troop belonging to an English Fox Hunt comes barrelling in from the top of a Hill. This juxtaposition of different times and cultures is curious to say the least.

In Victorian painting, and Orientalism, the use of Greek and Roman histories and myths to elaborate upon “modern” life was all the rage. And, as I might add, helps sell the works to a hungry audience.

Harem Pool

Orientalism had a great deal of interesting subject matter to paint. Slaves, mercenaries, hot deserts, magnificent ruins, blue skies, steamy hot sands, and harems. Here is one such painting that depicts a harem and a bath pool.

I love so many things about this particular painting.

  • Look at the detail on the carpet!
  • Study the artwork of the blue tiles.
  • The drapery and clothing of the woman in blue.
  • The two nudes in the forefront.
  • The folds of the towel of the woman up front and how her hand lightly touches her leg.

Slave Auction

A slave being auctioned off in Rome.

This painting, and the next one after it are different views of the same scene. The auctioneer and the maiden being sold are in both paintings, but the view of each are different. The only thing that is different is the building in the background. The first is a brick circular structure with a corbelled ceiling, the second is a traditional Roman pillared motif.

Roman Slave Market

Slave markets were a big thing with Orientalism. Most non-artists would argue that this is because all Victorian men and artists were demented sexual perverts that beheld secret fantasies. This is really nonsensical. There are really three reasons why this was a great subject for Victorian Orientalism paintings.

  • You were able to paint a female body on display in all it’s nuanced form.
  • The subject matter makes for a great story, and has significant history behind it.
  • Paintings that depicted slavery in any form were a prized commodity and sold quickly.

Here we have a picture of slave being sold to the highest bidder in Rome…

King Candaules

Imagine you are the queen of Lydia.

It is late and you are about to disrobe before your king in the privacy of his royal bedchamber. The monarch is reposing on a sumptuous bed that is perfumed with myrrh, aloes, and cinnamon.

His eyes keep fixated on you as you move toward a chair situated near the doorway of the room. You stand motionless for a time, as is your custom, soaking in your exquisite surroundings through the flickering candlelight.

He clutches giddily at a plush cushion with trembling hands.

It is time.

You pull the ivory pin fastening your hair, shake out your dark-brown curls, and proceed to slip out from your finely embroidered robe and place it on the chair.

In captivating fashion you let drop your undergarments one after another around you. There you stand before your adoring husband with your youthful form revealed in all its beauty.

But just then, all of a sudden, a strange sense of being watched creeps over you.

You cast a furtive glance toward the doorway, instantly recognizing the voyeur peering back at you from the shadows. The interloper gasps. A panicky utterance from the king cannot mask the ensuing patter of feet followed by an awful clatter down the stairs.

As a succession of muted groans reverberate into the night, you are faced with the infuriating realization that the king was behind the entire plot.

In the awkward silence that follows you [1] confront the king, [2] cover yourself and scream for the royal guards, or [3] say it was probably just the cat and handle it in the morning.

If your name is Queen Nyssia, the voyeur is Gyges, and Candaules is king, then you will choose option [3] and handle it in the morning.

This at any rate is the story as it is related by Herodotus. That is apart from Gyges toppling headlong down the royal staircase, which is an elaboration on the series of events of my own invention.

Herodotus, in any case, writes in some detail on Candaules’ efforts to persuade Gyges to view his wife:

This Candaules, then, fell in love with his own wife, so much so that he believed her to be by far the most beautiful woman in the world; 

...and believing this, he praised her beauty beyond measure to Gyges son of Dascylus, who was his favorite among his bodyguard; 

...for it was to Gyges that he entrusted all his most important secrets. 

After a little while, Candaules, doomed to misfortune, spoke to Gyges thus: 

“Gyges, I do not think that you believe what I say about the beauty of my wife; men trust their ears less than their eyes: so you must see her naked.”

Gyges made every attempt to turn down Candaules’ request, but in the end the king’s will prevailed, and he consented to the proposal.

Nyssia, having surmised all of this, sent for Gyges at dawn the next morning and presented him with a choice:

  • Either commit suicide at once as retribution for his transgression.
  • Murder Candaules and usurp the throne with her as his wife.

Gyges pleaded with Nyssia to reconsider, but he soon found this to be a hopeless cause, and reluctantly agreed to kill his master. They murdered Candaules in his bed on the very next night.

After being named king, Gyges legitimised his hold on power, which was still precarious, by securing a favourable declaration from a Delphic oracle.

The wife of Candaules discovers the hidden Gyges by Dutch painter Eglon Hendrik van der Neer around 1675–80.
The wife of Candaules discovers the hidden Gyges by Dutch painter Eglon Hendrik van der Neer around 1675–80.

The oracle coupled a confirmation of Gyges’ right to rule over the Lydians with a prophesy that Candaules’ family – the Heraclids – would take revenge on the usurper in the fifth generation.

The prophecy proved true, but by that time Gyges was dead.

In recognition of the oracular endorsement, Gyges had a hoard of gold and silver sent to the shrine at Delphi.

The delivery included, we are told, six golden mixing-bowls that weighed nearly 800kg when taken all together.

Gyges reigned for a total of 38 years (from 716 BC to 678 BC according to tradition) and was succeeded by his son Ardys II. No further details on the life of Nyssia are recorded.

This is the Herodotean narrative of Gyges’ rise to power.

Modern scholarly opinion has Herodotus drawing on dramatic rather than historical sources, and it has been speculated that his story is based on a tragedy in five acts with three actors and a chorus.

Heads of the Rebel Beys at the Mosque of El Hasanein, Cairo

Bey, Turkish Bey, Old Turkish Beg, Arabic Bay, or Bey, title among Turkish peoples traditionally given to rulers of small tribal groups, to members of ruling families, and to important officials. 

Under the Ottoman Empire a bey was the governor of a province, distinguished by his own flag (sancak, liwa). 

In Tunis after 1705 the title become hereditary for the country’s sovereign. Later “bey” became a general title of respect in Turkish and Arab countries, added after a personal name and equivalent to “esquire” (or “sir” in conversation) in English. In the 20th-century Turkish republic, bey, though surviving in polite conversation, was replaced by bay before the name (equivalent to “Mr.”).

-Bey | Turkish title | Britannica

I would imagine that this is the display of the chopped off heads of rebels in Egypt. Little else is known about this work. Certainly one can let their imagination run wild and contemplate a group of rebels that want to wrest control of the government from the egyptian leadership..

And that is one of the beautiful things about Orientalism. You look at the beautiful images of far-away and distant lands and contemplate what the story might be behind those images…

Slave Market

Then as today, much of the Arab world engages in slave trading. Here we see an image that was sure to shock the Victorian sensibilities of Europe. Shocking; where a Caucasian woman is displayed as a slave for purchase.

Recently I found myself at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts, standing in front of an orientalist image. Together with a colleague I was looking at The Slave Market by Jean-Léon Gérôme, painted in 1866, only one year after the official abolition of slavery in the US. The caption of the painting said the following:

A young woman has been stripped by a slave trader and presented to a group of fully clothed men for examination. A prospective buyer probes her teeth. This disturbing scene is set in a courtyard market intended to suggest the Near East. The vague, distant location allowed nineteenth-century French viewers to censure the practice of slavery, which was outlawed in Europe, while enjoying a look at the female body.

My colleague repeated the words in a whisper: indeed, highly disturbing. I couldn’t respond, unsure whether I was really disturbed by the painting or rather by the official institutional rendering of my emotions. I had no courage to stand there longer and dwell on the scenery of the slave market, because the atmosphere created by the museum’s visitors seemed to force me away from what was supposed to be disturbing.

-e-flux

Un Bain Maure ­ Femme Turque au Bain, No.2

A Moorish Bath – Turkish Woman Bathing, No.2

I love this painting. It’s got mood, and “environment”. You can imagine a steamy bath with dim shadows, and piercing rays of incredibly bright sunlight piercing through the gloom.

Qui que tu sois, voici ton maitre

Whoever you are, here is your master

It looks to me that cupid has control over all animals of the world. I see lions, tigers and other cats… perhaps an panther. But nothing else. I wonder if this is a statement about love, or a statement about cats… It’s hard to tell which.

The Terrace of the Seraglio

I like to believe that Gerome was unaware of adding romanticism in his works. However, the classical rigorously composition, strong oriental flavor and exotic atmosphere made people feel his romantic trend.

In 1856 Gerome went to Egypt and the Near East and developed his keen interest in the oriental culture. Therefore he painted many works depicting the local customs of Egyptian and Near Eastern societies. After the exhibition at the Paris salon, his works created a great sensation.

In 1868, he followed the geologists through the Sinai desert and arrived in port Alexander in Cairo. Regardless of this very dangerous journey, the oriental culture gave the painter a very deep impression. The Arabia market, Turkey bathroom and bath of maids, Islamic religious ceremonies, and the chambers with the mysterious colors seemed to be mysterious, interesting, beautiful and amazing.

The Terrace of the Seraglio made by Gerome depicted the most secret imperial life of the Arabia palace. And this painting also portrayed the lives of the princesses and the maids.

Some were in the bath, some were chatting, and some were meditating…almost all showed a melancholy and vacant look.

The beautiful terrace was as cold as a cell suffering the oppression. Only the outside gazebo had the clear sky and the fresh air. Both the composition and color processing were left with the classical principle of preciseness, harmonious contrast and attention to detail, characters, clothing and building which were especially important to the performance of the texture and the exotic sense.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art Index here…

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What is so special and great about the human race from an extraterrestrial point of view (part 1)

I haven't been posting too many "extraterrestrial" things lately. But, I've got some followers that live for this kind of stuff. So, in the interests of balance, I'm gonna post this article. And it will most probably anger the rest of my readership in the process.

Ahem…

Here goes…

If you were to have an ongoing conversation with an extraterrestrial, and ask them what they thought about the human race, and the human species, what would they say? What do you think they would say?

Well, here I am going to tell you.

Well, actually, I’m going to tell you (in my way) what one particular species thinks, anyways. I just can’ speak for every species. Just those with whom I’m exposed to.

So…

Is it our culture? Is it our society? It is out spirituality? Is it our technology? Is it our attractiveness? It is our various religions? Is it our adaptability? Is it our kindness? What is it?

Nope.

None of the above.

It is our “human-ness”.

What?

There are many species out in our universe (though I am only referring to those in our immediate vincinity) and they all have their own societies, and their own technologies, and their own histories, and all of that. What makes the human species “special” is our unique “human-ness”.

What is “human-ness”?

A trait.

It’s a trait that is very difficult to put into words because it is a comparative measure. It is not something that is recognized by us as having. It’s something you see and appreciate when you compare humans to other species. We don’t know it exists because we can’t see it.

We are it.

If you compare species A, to species B, to species C, and then to humans, you will not help but to be amazed at our “human-ness”.

Well…

Maybe “amazed” is not the right word. Perhaps a better one woould be “pleased”, or “pleasantly amused”, or “comforted”.

Human-ness

Now I am going to upset some people, but do not shoot the messenger. OK?

Don’t shoot the messenger is an admonition to not blame the bearer of bad news. It is often used when someone reveals a difficult truth that the listener does not want to hear. It reminds the listener that the truth is not the fault of the person revealing the truth.

- grammarist.com

The best example that I know of that highlights and showcases our “human-ness” is the various shades of Japanese culture and society. I know this because of <redacted>.

And it occured to me that perhaps there are others who might want to know about what makes humans so “unique”.

Well, we are sort-of unique, because <redacted>.

It has been “thrown into my face” on numerous occasions by <redacted> that the Japanese have some really inherent attributes that highlight the human species. And while most of the world might think that the Japanese are bonkers crazy, they are not viewed as such by non-humans.

They are instead viewed as sublime.

Sublime;

"of such excellence, grandeur, or beauty as to inspire great admiration or awe."

In fact, the Japanese are probably (I am not too far out of line here) the most approachable culture of humans because of their saturation of human-ness qualities. This has been impressed to me numerous times, and on different occasions.

The Japanese culture and socity is infused with “human-ness”.

I know that it is going to upset many people, but Americans are not high on the list of being appreciated or even understood by the extraterrestrials that I know of.

The Japanese are.

And while you might snort, and laugh, you all have to realize that there are many things that we humans have but do not appreciate or understand. The Japanese culture and society highlights these characteristics and enlarges them. And, well… “showcases” our “human-ness”

A descriptive video

The following is a video that (I personally believe) is filled with examples of what “human-ness” is and now it is used. The group is “World Order”, and the song is “have a nice day”.

I could have picked out any number of other videos.

I chose this one because it seems to have the widest range of “human-ness” related events that I have found. (I am sure that there are better candidates, but I don’t have all day, don’t you know.)

And yeah. I know.

It’s bat-shit, off the wall, bonkers nuts.

But, it displays our “human-ness”.

Here is a few embeds of Videos of world order have a nice day. I hope that they are able to play. I have put a few embeds as I don't know which one will work in your region.

Try YouTube first…

You tube

If you cannot access the embed on YouTube, then try metatube…

Metatube

<iframe src='http://www.metatube.com/en/videos/229550/WORLD-ORDER-HAVE-A-NICE-DAY-OFFICIAL-MUSIC-VIDEO/embed/' width='750' height='390'></iframe>

Cat videos

You know how we like to watch “cat videos”?

Well, it’s sort of like that. When we watch cat videos we are admiring the cats being feline in all it’s glory. Well, it’s sort of like that. You might go as far as to say that the <redacted> like to watch Japanese Music Videos to enjoy our human-ness…

…except they do something different. But it’s like that. It really is.

Instead of videos, of course, they <redacted>.

The attributes

In the above video is at least 35 scenes or elements of “human-ness”. Can you identify what they are? Can you see why they would be appreciated by another species?

Or maybe you can’t.

If you think that the Japanese are too off the wall, and not “with the program” then I am not making myself clear. The qualities that make us human; our human-ness is our relationships with others and how we interface with the universe within our reality.

Watch the video again, if you still “don’t get it”.

Pay attention to the interactions between the individuals, both singular and in groups. Note the interaction of the groups of people with things and items. These characteristics define our human-ness.

Like anything… it is our relationships with others, and our actions and thoughts that define our sentience. That is what makes us attractive.

Do you want some more?

I have more posts about extraterrestrials in my extraterrestrial index here…

Extraterrestrials

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Some selected favorite artworks by John William Waterhouse

John William Waterhouse was an amazing artist that produced at least 180 artworks during his career. He is considered to be a “English , Victorian Romanticist painter and draftsman”. He was born in 1849 and Died on 2/10/1917.

You can see his entire collection on the Art Renewal Center here.

Like my post on Lawrence Alma-Tadema, you might want to consider this post to be an excurion into Greek mythology and Roman history through the artwork of renessance painters in Europe.

The Lady of Shalott

I have often admired this painting but really had little understanding about what was so appealing about it. To me, it was a sad woman in boat, alone and drifting off into the mists.

This painting depicted an event or circumstance that was described in a poem.

"The Lady of Shalott" is a lyrical ballad by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892). It tells the story of a young noble woman imprisoned in a tower on an island near Camelot.

-The Lady of Shalott - Wikipedia

This poem depicted a sad and forlorn woman who was locked up and who had little freedom. That lack of freeom and the imprisonment was not obvious to anyone but herself.

During the period of the 19th century in which “The Lady of Shalott” poem was written, women were not treated in the same way that they are today. History tells us the story of how women came to be “equal” to men, yet when reading this poem, we see that this was not the case for the Lady of Shalott.

The women during this period were seen more as a possession rather than a person or a partner to a male. They were kept in the house and were sometimes not allowed to go outside and socialize. We see this neglect of women demonstrated many times throughout Tennyson’s poem.

Kept as a sort of prisoner in a building, or castle, on the secluded island of Shalott, the Lady of Shalott is described as a “fairy” woman who has been cursed.

For me, I could see this situation. Not only for the woman, in that time and plce, but for anyone who is trapped in a situation that they cannot get out of easily…

Links…

Consulting the Oracle

An oracle is a priest or priestess acting as a medium through whom advice or prophecy was sought from the gods in classical antiquity.

-Dictionary.com

There were many other oracles in Greece, but the Oracle at Delphi was the most famous, and everyone who could afford to consult the Oracle at Delphi preferred to do so.

Of course, there was a long waiting period to consult the oracle (sometimes several months), and there were a number of expensive, preliminary sacrifices. Most of the people who consulted the Oracle at Delphi were wealthy individuals or even heads of state.

The long path leading up the mountain to Apollo’s temple, called the Sacred Way, was lined with treasure houses. These treasuries were filled with costly gifts that leaders and cities had given to Apollo. Some of these treasuries are still standing, and a very few of those precious gifts can still be seen in the museum at Delphi.

When someone came to ask a question of the Oracle, he would need to make a preliminary sacrifice of a goat, and then purify himself in the nearby Castilian Spring.

Then he would approach the adyton of Apollo’s temple.

The adyton is a room inside the temple that was off limits; no one could go in. It is unclear whether those who were consulting the oracle were allowed to go inside the adyton, or whether they had to remain outside.

The Pythia is usually conceived of as sitting on a tripod when she gave her prophecies.

A tripod (as its name implies) was a three-footed stand, usually made of metal. Tripods had a round, metal band around the top, and they were usually used to hold a cauldron over the fire for cooking. But in this case, the Pythia would sit on it, almost like she was sitting on a three-legged stool, to give her prophecies.

In the painting we see this tripod in use at the center of the room, but the oracle is not sitting on it.

The Oracle by Camillo Miola (1880) in the Getty Museum
The Oracle by Camillo Miola (1880) in the Getty Museum

After the person consulting the Oracle asked his question, the Pythia would go into a trance; it was believed that Apollo himself possessed her.

She would speak and a priest (or several priests) who were standing near-by would take down what she said and translate her words into a poem written in hexameters.

It is usually assumed that the Pythia’s original words were coherent, but not very clear. Of course, there is no way to know for sure what her words were really like, but perhaps we can get a good idea from Cassandra’s prophecies in Aeschylus’ play, the Agamemnon.

In that play, Cassandra gives several prophecies that make sense to the audience (because we know what is going to happen), but are so fragmented and confusing that the other characters in the drama do not understand them.

Once the Pythia’s words were translated into hexameter poetry, the poem was written down and given to the person who sought the advice; it was always the responsibility of the recipient to interpret the oracle correctly.

And the oracles, even in their final form, were always ambiguous. Frequently (though not always), the recipients did not interpret them correctly, and they suffered as a result.

Saint Cecilia

This is a true story that actually happened. As a result, the woman in the story became a Catholic Saint. As such, the story of St. Cecilia is not without beauty or merit. She is said to have been quite close to God and prayed often:

In the city of Rome there was a virgin named Cecilia, who came from an extremely rich family and was given in marriage to a youth named Valerian. She wore sackcloth next to her skin, fasted, and invoked the saints, angels, and virgins, beseeching them to guard her virginity

During her wedding ceremony she was said to have sung in her heart to God and before the consummation of her nuptials, she told her husband she had taken a vow of virginity and had an angel protecting her. Valerian asked to see the angel as proof, and Cecilia told him he would have eyes to see once he traveled to the third milestone on the Via Appia (Appian Way) and was baptized by Pope Urbanus.

Following his baptism, Valerian returned to his wife and found an angel at her side. The angel then crowned Cecilia with a chaplet of rose and lily and when Valerian’s brother, Tibertius, heard of the angel and his brother’s baptism, he also was baptized and together the brothers dedicated their lives to burying the saints who were murdered each day by the prefect of the city, Turcius Almachius.

Both brothers were eventually arrested and brought before the prefect where they were executed after they refused to offer a sacrifice to the gods.

As her husband and brother-in-law buried the dead, St. Cecilia spent her time preaching and in her lifetime was able to convert over four hundred people, most of whom were baptized by Pope Urban.

Cecilia was later arrested and condemned to be suffocated in the baths. She was shut in for one night and one day, as fires were heaped up and stoked to a terrifying heat – but Cecilia did not even sweat.

When Almachius heard this, he sent an executioner to cut off her head in the baths.

The executioner struck her three times but was unable to decapitate her so he left her bleeding and she lived for three days. Crowds came to her and collected her blood while she preached to them or prayed. On the third day she died and was buried by Pope Urban and his deacons.

St. Cecilia is regarded as the patroness of music, because she heard heavenly music in her heart when she was married, and is represented in art with an organ or organ-pipes in her hand.

Officials exhumed her body in 1599 and found her to be incorrupt, the first of all incurrupt saints. She was draped in a silk veil and wore a gold embroidered dress. Officials only looked through the veil in an act of holy reverence and made no further examinations. They also reported a “mysterious and delightful flower-like odor which proceeded from the coffin.”

The church viewed this as a measure of sanctity, and incorruptibles -- people whose bodies mysteriously thwart decay -- were canonized into the tenets of Catholic mysticism. Incorruptibility became a component of beatification -- the process of becoming sainted.

-How can a corpse be incorruptible? 

St. Cecilia’s remains were transferred to Cecilia’s titular church in Trastevere and placed under the high altar.

The Favourites of the Emperor Honorious

Flavius Honorius was born in the east in 384, the younger son of the emperor Theodosius I (379-395) and Aelia Flavia Flaccilla. In his youth he was named Most Noble Child (nobilissimus puer), and in 386 he held the consulate. He was summoned by his father to Rome when he was five, but in 391 he returned with him to Constantinople, where in 393 he was proclaimed emperor of Rome.

After the Visigothic invasion of Italy in 402, Honorius and the imperial court retired from Milan to the inaccessible and heavily defended city of Ravenna.

Only rarely did later emperors reside for any length of time elsewhere.

Meanwhile, palace intrigues resulted in Stilicho’s assassination in 408, and Honorius was left to deal with barbarians Alaric and the Visigoths.

The indecisive emperor, influenced first by one adviser and then by another, vacillated between resistance and conciliation. The end result was the sack of Rome in 410.

Here we see a painting of the emperior playing idily with pigeons while Rome collapses all around him.

As for the feckless and timid Honorius, he generally took little part in public affairs. He was generally passive in nature, except when he was motivated to act by fear. He left military operations to his generals, but he did become involved in a controversy over the choice of a bishop of Rome in 418. 

He eventually died of "dropsy" -- perhaps edema of the lungs -- in 423. 

He left no issue, which resulted in the proclamation of Johannes, the Chief Secretary, after his death. Not until 425 did his nephew Valentinian III, the son of Galla Placidia and Constantius, restore the legitimate dynasty. 

Even though the unity of the western empire was shakily maintained during Honorius' reign -- only Britain was lost for good (Honorius wrote to the Britons advising them to defend themselves) -- he left a legacy of fragmentation and feeble, lackluster leadership which eventually would result in the dissolution of the western empire.

-Roman Emperors - DIR Honorius

Flora and the Zephyrs

A nymph called Chloris was kissed by the West Wind, Zephyrus, and was turned into Flora. This story is the subject of Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera.

Flora, in Roman religion, the goddess of the flowering of plants. 

Titus Tatius (according to tradition, the Sabine king who ruled with Romulus) is said to have introduced her cult to Rome; her temple stood near the Circus Maximus. 

Her festival, called the Floralia, was instituted in 238 BC. A representation of Flora’s head, distinguished only by a floral crown, appeared on coins of the republic. 

Her name survives in the botanical term for vegetation of a particular environment.

-Britanna

Zephyrus or Zephyros (Gr: Ζεφυρος) is the god of the west wind and spring. He is the gentlest of the winds. He lived in a cave in Thrace.

Zephyr was the son of Astraeus and Eos, the goddess of the dawn and he was the father of the spring flowers. His mate was Podarge and together they created the two immortal horses of Achilles, Xanthus and Balius

For centuries, poets have eulogized Zephyrus, the Greek god of the west wind, and his "swete breeth" (in the words of Geoffrey Chaucer). Zephyrus, the personified west wind, eventually evolved into zephyr, a word for a breeze that is westerly or gentle, or both. Breezy zephyr may have blown into English with the help of William Shakespeare, who used the word in his 1611 play Cymbeline: "Thou divine Nature, thou thyself thou blazon'st / In these two princely boys! They are as gentle / As zephyrs blowing below the violet." Today, zephyr is also the sobriquet of a lightweight fabric and the clothing that is made from it.

-Dictionary

The painting by Waterhouse depicts Zephyrus kidnapping Chloris…

From whence he “kissed” her and turned her into a Flora.

Oh, those lustful Gods.

The Awakening of Adonis

Adonis was the mortal lover of the goddess Aphrodite in Greek mythology. 

In Ovid's first-century AD telling of the myth, he was conceived after Aphrodite cursed his mother Myrrha to lust after her own father, King Cinyras of Cyprus. 

Myrrha had sex with her father in complete darkness for nine nights, but he discovered her identity and chased her with a sword. 

The gods transformed her into a myrrh tree and, in the form of a tree, she gave birth to Adonis. 

Aphrodite found the infant and gave him to be raised by Persephone, the queen of the Underworld. 

Adonis grew into an astonishingly handsome young man, causing Aphrodite and Persephone to feud over him, with Zeus eventually decreeing that Adonis would spend one third of the year in the Underworld with Persephone, one third of the year with Aphrodite, and the final third of the year with whomever he chose. 

Adonis chose to spend his final third of the year with Aphrodite.

-Wikipedia

Those were lustful times back then.

Waterhouse’s great mythological subject The Awakening of Adonis (Collection of Lord Lloyd-Webber) was painted in 1899.

However, it was not finished in time to send to the Royal Academy that year, and was therefore held over to the summer exhibition of 1900. 

On that occasion it was recognised as one of the artist’s most powerful and characteristic works and one that aimed, in the words of one reviewer, ‘at representing the passionate emotions of an historic tragedy in a highly dramatic fashion’ (Athenaeum, 1900, p.568).  

The Awakening of Adonis takes its subject from the ancient fable, retold by Apollodorus, Hyginus and Ovid, which tells how Adonis was the child of Myrrha and her father Theias, the king of Syria. The goddess Venus had encouraged this incestuous union and, when Adonis was born from the trunk of the myrrh tree into which his mother had been transformed, it was she who took care of him, entrusting him to Persephone, goddess of the Underworld. 

The child grew up to be so beautiful that Persephone found that she could not bear to return him to Venus, leading to a dispute between the two. 

This was settled by Zeus, who decided that Adonis should spend four months of the year with Venus and another four with Persephone. 

The remaining third of the year he might spend with whichever of the two goddesses he preferred. 

Venus used the power of magic to cause him to want her rather than Persephone. 

In Waterhouse’ painting the beautiful boy is awakened with a kiss from Venus in her Elysian pleasure-garden. 

Cupid, the god of love, blows on a torch to rekindle a flame, and is accompanied by a band of putto holding flowers. White doves take to the air and the garden is fecund with roses (symbols of Venus) and anemone flowers that were said to grow from the blood of the dying Adonis. 

The mythological legend of Adonis, as represented in the present painting, is therefore symbolic of the renewal of life, vigour, and desire at the arrival of spring. 

– From Sotheby’s catalogue.

A Naiad

In Greek mythology, the Naiads are a type of female spirit, or nymph, presiding over fountains, wells, springs, streams, brooks and other bodies of fresh water.

-Wikipedia

Naiad, (from Greek naiein, “to flow”), in Greek mythology, one of the nymphs of flowing water—springs, rivers, fountains, lakes.

The Naiads, appropriately in their relation to freshwater, were represented as beautiful, lighthearted, and beneficent.

Like the other classes of nymphs, they were extremely long-lived, although not immortal.

...in Greek mythology, naiads supposedly drowned the young men with whom they became enamored.

-Naiad | Definition of Naiad by Merriam-Webster

Variations…

  • Nymph. Nymph, in Greek mythology, any of a large class of inferior female divinities. The nymphs were usually associated with fertile, growing things, such as trees, or with water. They were not immortal but were extremely long-lived and were on the whole kindly disposed toward men. They were distinguished according to the sphere of nature with which they were connected.
  • The Oceanids, were sea nymphs.
  • The Nereids inhabited both saltwater and freshwater; the Naiads presided over springs, rivers, and lakes.
  • The Oreads (oros, “mountain”) were nymphs of mountains and grottoes.
  • The Napaeae (nape, “dell”) and the Alseids (alsos, “grove”) were nymphs of glens and groves.
  • The Dryads or Hamadryads presided over forests and trees.
  • Myth. Myth, a symbolic narrative, usually of unknown origin and at least partly traditional, that ostensibly relates actual events and that is especially associated with religious belief. It is distinguished from symbolic behaviour (cult, ritual) and symbolic places or objects (temples, icons). Myths are specific accounts of gods or superhuman beings involved in extraordinary events or circumstances in a time that is unspecified but which is understood as existing apart from ordinary human experience.

Good Neighbours

I love this picure for it’s technique, attention to detail, and the timelessness of it. I think that it is a “treasure”.

Hylas and the Nymphs

Hylas, in ancient Greek legend, son of Theiodamas (king of the Dryopians in Thessaly), favourite and companion of Heracles on the Argonautic expedition. 

Having gone ashore at Cios in Mysia to fetch water, he was dragged down by the nymphs of the spring in which he dipped his pitcher.

-Hylas | Greek mythology | Britannica

The story isn’t long, but it does seem important. It has continued to be represented in art and in story (though there have DEFINITELY been some changes made to make it fit into the new cultures), but it was also super important in ancient Greece, where sacrifices were made in a festival in his honor. Rituals were done in his name.

This story is found slightly more fully in Book One of the Argonautica, and in that version, it is clarified that he walked off from the group hoping to get water to make a meal for his man.

His man, of course, was Herakles.

Now, we should sidenote here that Herakles definitely liked a sexy youth or two. Hylas is the most famous of his beloveds, but by no means the only one.

This does not mean that Heracles was gay. It does not even mean that he was bi. These terms did not even exist. Although I think this topic is fascinating, I will suffice it to say that the relationship between Hylas and Herakles was very normal and even celebrated in ancient Greek culture. 

So it would make sense that Hylas (the beloved and “passive” partner) would be getting water to make something nice before Herakles got back to camp.

But, unfortunately for him, he was deep in Pegae territory.

Now, most of them were away guarding the forest for a nymphaic jamboree they were planning on throwing for Artemis, but one chick was left to hold down the fort, I suppose and when she saw Hylas, standing there in the moonlight (moonlight is like mood lighting …) lookin’ all pretty and sexy, her heart just went pitter pat.

It didn’t help that Aphrodite was there aiding the whole process (didn’t help Hylas that is).

And if you have read about the nymphs, then you know, this is NOT a good situation our young man is walking into.

The authors have already established that he’s kinda delicate, that he’s relatively passive in his relationships, he’s young, and he’s mortal.

Said nymph may appear delicate, but she is super powerful compared to this dude, and no good can come from relationships where women hold more power than men – at least not in ancient Greek mythology.

You already know what happens next, but I’ll spin in out all poetic like.

Hylas, dipping like a dancer, kneels and drags his pitcher through the water. And as his arm went into the water, her arm came out and wrapped around his neck, pulling him closer for a kiss.

Truly, our source must have been a mouse watching from land, because the story ends there.

We do not even know if she got her kiss, because when Hylas tumbled into the water, it was the last anyone ever heard of him.

Sure, Herakles searched the island for a long time, but eventually, the crew of the Argo gave up and continued their quest without him.

The moral of the story?

Don’t be like Hylas.

Saint Eulalia

Eulalia was a Christian girl who had the cosmic misfortune of being born in Barcelona in the third century after Jesus, during the reign of Roman emperor Diocleciano.

Diocleciano was the kind of emperor who didn’t like Christians and wanted them all to recant their faith.

Unfortunately, Eulalia was of the mindset that she’s an independent girl who don’t need no emperor telling her who to worship.

Diocleciano didn’t like that.

So her ordered that Eulalia suffer 13 tortures, one for each of her years on earth. Yep, she was 13 when she was tortured to death and subsequently martyred. 

ST EULALIA 13 TORTURES

Her tortures were (because we’re a morbid bunch when fucked-up shit happened to ancient people):

  1. Imprisonment in a tiny prison,
  2. Being whipped,
  3. Tearing her skin in strips,
  4. Making her walk barefoot on burning embers,
  5. The cutting off of her breasts,
  6. Rubbing her wounds with rough stones,
  7. Branding her with cast iron,
  8. Throwing boiling oil and,
  9. Molten lead over her,
  10. Submerged in burning lime,
  11. Locked in a flea box,
  12. Rolled down a hill, naked, in a barrel full of knives, swords and glass, and finally,
  13. Crucified in the form of a cross.

After all that she was decapitated and apparently a white dove flew from her neck. This is why there are 13 geese in the Barcelonan cathedral of Saint Eulalia. (doves, geese, whatevers).

Holy smokes!

And now, after all of that, she gets a relatively crappy festival compared to Merce’s amazing one? How flaky are the Catalans? Poor Eulalia goes through all that and then they try and replace her because she maybe didn’t chase off some insects? Give us a break!

The Story and History of Saint Eulalia

The story and history of Saint Eulalia. Saint Eulalia was a native of Merida, in Spain. 

She was but twelve years old when the bloody edicts of Diocletian were issued. 

Eulalia presented herself before the cruel judge Dacianus, and reproached him for attempting to destroy souls by compelling them to renounce the only true God. 

The governor commanded her to be seized, and at first tried to win her over by flattery, but failing in this, he had recourse to threats, and caused the most dreadful instruments of torture to be placed before her eyes, saying to her: "All this you shall escape if you will but touch a little salt and frankincense with the tip of your finger." 

Provoked at these seducing flatteries, our Saint threw down the idol, and trampled upon the cake which was laid for the sacrifice. 

At the judge's order, two executioners tore her tender sides with iron hooks, so as to leave the very bones bare. 

Next lighted torches were applied to her breasts and sides; under which torment, instead of groans, nothing was heard from her mouth but thanksgivings. 

The fire at length catching her hair, surrounded her head and face, and the Saint was stifled by the smoke and flame.

-St. Eulalia of Merida - Saints & Angels - Catholic Online

Mariamne Leaving the Judgement Seat of Herod

Things were totally and completely fucked-up in the old days.

King Herod of Judea

Herod I ( c. 74/73 BCE – 4 BCE/1 CE), also known as Herod the Great, was the King of Judea from 37 to 4 BC. At the time Judea was a client state of Rome. During his 33 year reign, Herod was an excellent administrator. But he is most famous for the Bible account of his killing the boys of Bethlehem.

-Herod the Great

Herod was an Idumaenean, from the Land of Edom, a desert region of nomads to the south of Judaea. His father was Antipater, who became a trusted procurator of Judaea, and his mother was Kupros, a woman of Arab descent.

At that time the King of Judaea was Hyrcanus II.

He was from the family of Hasmoneans, a popular nationalist, Jewish family who had been priests and Kings of the area from about the second century BC.

Antipater was, in his new position and friendship with King Hyrcanus II able to secure good jobs for his sons.

One of them, Phasael was made prefect of Jerusalem and the other son, Herod, was given the job of military prefect of Galilee.

Herod, now moving in the royal circles, caught the eye of Mariamne, the granddaughter of Hyrcanus II and, after divorcing his wife Doris, they became engaged to be married.

However, in 40 BC things took a turn for the worse as the Parthians invaded the area and set up Antigonus, another Hasmonaean, as King.

As Jerusalem fell, Herod escaped with his family but Hyrcanus and Phasael were captured.

After making sure that his family were safe he set off for Rome where he persuaded the Roman senate to give him the title, ‘King of the Jews’, and to pledge himself to return and take Judaea back under Roman allegiance.

He returned to the Palestine region and starting from Galilee he slowly took control of his kingdom.

In just three years he succeeded in capturing Antigonus, and with his new bride Mariamne, the grandaughter of Hyrcanus, he began to rule his kingdom.

King Herod began to rebuild the temple.

He established new towns and harbours and brought neighbouring regions into his own kingdom and in alliance to Rome. However, this apparently successful story of how a member of an Idumaenean nomadic family became the ruler of a kingdom was unfortunately marred by Herod’s chronic insecurity.

This was partly because the Jews did not like him because he was an Idumaenean.

Although he practised Judaism, it was not thought that he gave it much priority.

In modern terms he was a multi-faith enthusiast, giving credence to other religious ideas which in Jewish eyes diluted his conviction to the faith .

Also against him was his overthrowing of Antigonus from the popular Hasmonean family.

He tried to overcome this by marrying Mariamne, King Hyrcanus II’s grandaughter, and therefore a Hasmonean princess.

He also curried favour with the people by placing Hasmoneans in important positions in his court.

This had the affect of making people tolerate his kingship but it also made him feel under even more threat from the very people he had promoted. and led to increasing insecurity.

Having reached the heights of Kingship, he never felt totally secure and he saw conspiracy and plotting from every quarter.

(uh oh…)

First to be killed on his orders was his brother-in-law and high priest, Aristobulus.

While answering the charge of his murder in Egypt he gave the order to his uncle Joseph that if he should die, then his wife and her mother were to be executed.

Herod managed to talk his way out of the murder charge, but on his return to Jerusalem found that his wife had learned his arrangement with Joseph.

Needless to say Mariamne was none too pleased to hear of this arrangement!

…!

Herod began to wonder why Joseph had told Mariamne, and came to the wrong conclusion they were having an affair.

In fact Joseph had told her of the plan in order to demonstrate Herod’s love for her.

However, despite the total lack of evidence Joseph was executed.

Herod was very much in love with Mariamne, but with jealous accusations from his other wives and Mariamne’s increasing coldness towards him, he eventually persuaded himself to have her executed too.

He regretted it straight away and became filled with guilt, making himself mentally and physically ill.

Thinking that Herod was about to die, Alexandra, Mariamne’s mother made arrangements to put Herod’s children by Mariamne, Alexander and Aristobulus, on the throne.

She too was then executed for her presumption!

Herod had 10 wives altogether and towards the end of Herod’s life, Antipater, the eldest son by his first wife began to realise that he was not favoured to take over from his father.

He was deeply jealous of the sons of Mariamne, and in order to discredit them he accused his two step brothers of treachery and, believing him, Herod had them both executed too.

Antipater must have thought he had got away with it, but just before Herod died, Antipater was executed as well, accused of trying to accelerate his death.

Signing Antipater’s death warrant, Augustus Caesar remarked that he would rather be Herod’s pig than Herod’s son!

Just before his death, Herod, realising that when he died there would be no great mourning, sent letters to the principle heads of every family in Judaism demanding their presence on pain of death.

Having got them to Jerusalem, Herod ordered them to be locked up in the horse-racing ground.

He then gave the orders to his sister that upon his death they were all to be executed.

Thus making sure that the whole nation would mourn when he died, albeit not for him.

(Talk about a fucked-up plan!)

Fortunately, when Herod died, his sister released the imprisoned Jews and allowed them to return home. Herod died 37 years after being declared ‘King of the Jews’, leaving four sons, to whom was given one quarter of his kingdom each. 

Diogenes

Diogenes of Sinope (c. 404-323 BCE) was a Greek Cynic philosopher best known for holding a lantern (or candle) to the faces of the citizens of Athens claiming he was searching for an honest man.

He was most likely a student of the philosopher Antisthenes (445-365 BCE) and, in the words of Plato (allegedly), was “A Socrates gone mad.” He was driven into exile from his native city of Sinope for defacing currency (though some sources say it was his father who committed the crime and Diogenes simply followed him into exile).

Diogenes came to Athens where he met Antisthenes who at first refused him as a student but, eventually, was worn down by his persistence and accepted him.

Like Antisthenes, Diogenes believed in self-control, the importance of personal excellence in one’s behavior (in Greek, arete, usually translated as `virtue’), and the rejection of all which was considered unnecessary in life such as personal possessions and social status.

He was so ardent in his beliefs that he lived them very publicly in the market place of Athens. He took up residence in a large wine cask (some sources claim it was an abandoned bathtub), owned nothing, and seems to have lived off the charity of others.

He owned a cup which served also has a bowl for food but threw it away when he saw a boy drinking water from his hands and realized one did not even need a cup to sustain oneself.

It seems clear that Diogenes believed what people called `manners’ were simply lies used to hide the true nature of the individual.

He was known for brutal honesty in conversation, paid no attention to any kind of etiquette regarding social class, and seems to have had no problem urinating or even masturbating in public and, when criticized, pointed out that such activities were normal and that everyone engaged in them but hid in private what he did openly.

Diogenes was a widely misunderstood man.

Pandora

In Greek mythology, Pandora was the first human woman created by Hephaestus on the instructions of Zeus. As Hesiod related it, each god co-operated by giving her unique gifts. Her other name—inscribed against her figure on a white-ground kylix in the British Museum—is Anesidora, "she who sends up gifts".

-Wikipedia

When Prometheus stole fire from the gods, Zeus created Pandora as a punishment for mankind. One would think Zeus had doled out enough punishment after sentencing Prometheus to spend an eternity chained to a rock while birds pecked at his liver, but it seemed the king of the gods had more in store.

Zeus commissioned the god Hephaestus to sculpt a beautiful woman out of clay, and she was given gifts from a few gods before she was sent down to fulfill her purpose. Pandora was sent to be the wife of Epimetheus (Prometheus’s brother), and only brought one thing with her: a container full of all the world’s evils. 

Of course, Zeus didn’t tell Pandora what was inside the box – instead, he told her to never open it, and then gave the key to her husband, because when you tell someone to not do something, you put temptation as close as possible. Can you blame her for sneaking a peek? 

Pandora's box is an artifact in Greek mythology connected with the myth of Pandora in Hesiod's Works and Days. In modern times an idiom has grown from it meaning "Any source of great and unexpected troubles", or alternatively "A present which seems valuable but which in reality is a curse". Later depictions of the fatal container have been varied, while some literary and artistic treatments have focused more on the contents of the idiomatic box than on Pandora herself. The container mentioned in the original story was actually a large storage jar but the word was later mistranslated as "box".

-Wikipedia

Like any rational creature, Pandora’s curiosity was piqued when she was given a secret container, told never to open it, and sent to earth to marry a stranger who held the key to this mystery vessel. Unfortunately, the temptation was just too much and it was this curiosity that unleashed all the world’s evils.

The list of items released from Pandora’s box are a handful: illness, worry, crime, hate, envy… basically any bad thing you could think of. They flew out of the box like little bugs, and Pandora tried to shut it back up as quickly as she could. She did, according to some of the versions of her myth, manage to trap one important thing inside: hope

It is disputed why Zeus would even put hope in a vessel of evils. One rationale is that Zeus wasn’t the worst, and snuck hope in there as some sort of nicety in the midst of all the other horrors. Another is that Zeus meant for hope to remain in the box, to make the people suffer even more, and make them understand why they should never cross him again.  

When Zeus sent Pandora to Earth, he married her off to Prometheus’s brother, Epimetheus. It seems odd that Zeus would gift a beautiful woman to the brother of someone he hated, but Pandora was supposed to be a punishment, so maybe it was part of his bigger plan. In fact, Prometheus warned his brother not to accept any gifts from the gods, but Epimetheus was too drawn in by Pandora’s beauty. She was crafted by the gods, after all.

Zeus entrusted Epimetheus with the key to Pandora’s box, which he refused to give to her no matter how hard she begged. So, eventually, Pandora snuck it away from him as he slept and unlocked the box herself (other versions of the myth also say Pandora simply broke the seal of the pithos). 

Nymphs finding the Head of Orpheus

Nymphs Finding The Head of Orpheus is one of his most dramatic. The painting depicts two curious nymphs sitting by a small waterfall watching the head of Orpheus as it floats in a pool of water among the lily pads. A beautiful gift for fans of John William Waterhouse, Mythological Paintings, Orpheus, and Fantasy art

-Nymphs Finding The Head of Orpheus

Orpheus is a figure from ancient Greek mythology, most famous for his virtuoso ability in playing the lyre or kithara.

His music could charm the wild animals of the forest, and even streams would pause and trees bend a little closer to hear his sublime singing. He was also a renowned poet, travelled with Jason and the Argonauts in search of the Golden Fleece, and even descended into the Underworld of Hades to recover his lost wife Eurydice.

Orpheus was seen as the head of a poetic tradition known as Orphism where, according to some scholars, adherents performed certain rituals and composed or read poems, texts, and hymns, which included an alternative view of humanity’s origins. Orpheus is widely referenced in all forms of ancient Greek art from pottery to sculpture.

He had quite an interesting life…

  • A member of Jason’s expedition to find the Golden Fleece.
  • Orpheus married Eurydice (aka Agriope).
  • Eurydice died, in some accounts, on her wedding night.
  • Orpheus followed his love down to Hades, the Greek Underworld.
  • He was able to rescue her, provided he would not glance behind.
  • He did, and lost her.
  • He never got over her and roamed the forests of Thrace.

Orpheus’ misery would soon end, though, when he was set upon by a group of frenzied Maenads (the female followers of Dionysos, the god of wine).

They stoned him to the ground and ripped him to pieces for his lack of merriment.

According to Plutarch (c. 45-50 – c. 120-125 CE), the Maenads were punished for their crime by being turned into trees. Other Thracian women had their bodies tattooed by their husbands as a warning not to repeat such a crime – a cultural practice in the region stretching from antiquity to modern times. 

And thus…

… in the forests of Thrace…

…Nymphs find the stoned head of Orpheus.

The Orange Gatherers

It’s just a nice painting. I love the technique and the composition.

At Capri

And finally, I’ll end this post with another nice printing. There might be a story abhind it, but I don’t really know what it is. I just love the colors and composition.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art Index here…

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Some selected Favorite artworks by Lawrence Alma-Tadema

This post is a selection of artworks by artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema. In his life, he produced at least 362 artworks. In the art world, he is classified as a “Netherlands Victorian Neoclassical, Olympian Classical Revivalist painter and draftsman”. He was born 1/8/1836 and died 6/28/1912. His works are awesome.

There is no other way to say this. His works, each and every single one of them, are masterpieces. These little tiny pictures just do not do them justice. You need to go and see the HD version and look at the details close up.

He is stunning and his works are wonderful. It has been said by “art experts” that they are “cold, sterile, and obsolete” and not deserving presentation in a museum. But I disagree with that perception. I find them intriguing, worthy of contemplation, and physically beautiful. I had the opportunity to see of his his works up from and close, and the level of detail astounded me.

Here is only a small tiny overview of some of my favorites. Since he painted in enormous canvases, the level of observed detail here is just pitiful. You all should see his works up close and in all it’s amazing and glorious detail.

Rather than discuss the emotions garnered by the expressions on the canvasses of James Jacques Joseph Tissot, instead I will emphasize the period histories behind the works. Here, once you know the history behind the illustrations of the art, will you really start to see and understand the 5-D beautify and complexity of the work.

You can go ahead and see all of his works at the Art Renewal Center here.

The Roses of Heliogabalus

We will start with this stunning work.

Elagabalus or Heliogabalus was the emperor of Rome from 218 to 222. Though his reign was a very short one, he is remembered in history for being one of the most eccentric and vulgar emperors of all time. He was related to the imperial Severan dynasty of Rome through his mother.

-Elagabalus Biography

Lust, Gluttony, and Sloth. Three of the Seven Deadly Sins are depicted in Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus.

Many other sins are depicted alongside these cardinal vices making this an extremely wicked painting.

Ah…

But what’s the story about all the flowers and the flower petals?

Listen up.

While the late Victorian world was morally prudish and clad in dark velvets, late Victorian paintings were often morally bankrupt and clad in light silks. Academic paintings were all the rage, and they frequently used juicy historical anecdotes for the basis of their subjects.

The Roses of Heliogabalus is no exception.

This painting depicts an infamous party scene hosted by Emperor Heliogabalus.

The Roman emperor lays nonchalantly, drinks his wine, and observes as his guests below are smothered to death by rose petals. This is the ultimate party prank. This is the ultimate Roman death.

What?

Death by flower petals!

Yes. That is exactly what happened.

The Roman emperor, after a day / night of eating, drinking and orgies had all the attendees die through suffocation of tiny flower petals.

No. I am not kidding.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema painted The Roses of Heliogabalus in 1888 when the British Empire was at its peak of power and influence. The Victorians were the undisputed rulers of one-fourth of the world’s land, and the phrase, “The sun never sets on the British Empire,” was penned to describe such a global domain that practically had territories in every time zone.

The British were proud of their international power, uniting vast regions under the British flag.

Because of their vast dominion and unrivaled prosperity, the Victorians viewed themselves as the inheritors of the former Roman Empire. They believed they brought civilization to the uncivilized, manners to the unmannered, and morality to the immoral.

Therefore, with a joyful backward glance, the Victorians reflected on Roman Imperial history with its peaks…

And with it’s pitfalls…

Emperor Heliogabalus was definitely a pitfall worthy of note.

Detail from The Roses of Heliogabalus.
Detail from The Roses of Heliogabalus.

Heliogabalus was a Roman Emperor who ruled from 218 to 222. In his short four-year reign he scarred Roman society and the annals of world history with his extremely debauched lifestyle.

Frequent scandals surrounded Heliogabalus due to his decadent lifestyle and his transgressions against sexual and religious norms.

He was an extremely unpopular emperor, and he eventually alienated everyone supporting his regime. His lifestyle must have been that ridiculously unacceptable because, after only four years of ruling, Emperor Heliogabalus was assassinated by his family, including his very own grandmother!

In The Roses of Heliogabalus, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema depicts one of the most infamous moments in the life of Emperor Heliogabalus.

It is recorded in the Historia Augusta that Heliogabalus invited guests to his palace one evening to partake in his drinking party and orgy.

After several hours of drinking heaving wine and swapping sexual partners, his guests were hopelessly intoxicated and tired. They lounged listlessly around the room. While they were so delightfully glowing from the heavy drinking and amusing entertainment, the ceiling above them opened and flutterings of flower petals began to fall.

At first, the gentle wafting of petals added to the dream-like prettiness of the party. It perfumed the atmosphere with a slight floral scent. It heightened the senses and added pleasure to the moment.

More petals fell, and more, and more. The petals became a cascade of flowers. More flowers fell, and more descended upon the sleepy guests. A waterfall of petals erupted upon the helpless guests.

They were showered, covered, and blanketed.

Puddles formed into lakes that formed into oceans of petals. Hills had become petal mountains, and the guests were smothered under the endlessly growing sea of flowers.

They breathed… in the tiny petals…

…and they choked…

… gasping for air.

The tiny petals entered their lungs, and they died covered in floral glory.

The quickening smell of death was masked by the smell of flowers. 

Floral perfume wafted from the human-infused mountains of flowers. Emperor Heliogabalus was amused by the floral carnage and continued to drink his wine.

Death was tonight’s real entertainment.

Detail from the roses of Heliogabalus.
Detail from the roses of Heliogabalus.

According to the original source, Historia Augusta, Emperor Heliogabalus used violets and other flowers to suffocate his dinner guests.

However, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema uses roses as his method of death.

During the late Victorian era, when Alma-Tadema painted The Roses of Heliogabalus, roses represented lust and desire in the Victorian language of flowers known as floriography.

In simple terms, floriography is the language of flowers. The language is spoken by selecting specific flower types with associated meanings to communicate feelings or wishes. Artists too have used floriography to communicate deeper messages in their work. Martin Johnson Heade (1819–1904), Victorian Vase with Flowers of Devotion.

-Floriography: The Secret Language of Victorian Florals

Roses were a more appropriate flower for Alma-Tadema to paint because violets represented faithfulness and modesty in the Victorian floriography.

Emperor Heliogabalus was many things, but he was certainly not faithful and modest. Therefore Alma-Tadema smothers the guests of Heliogabalus in roses and not violets, and adds a contemporary meaning his audience would have recognized.

When Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema displayed The Roses of Heliogabalus in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1888, it was warmly received by the public.

The public appreciated classical-inspired scenes especially if a moral story could be interpreted.

Remember, this is the Victorian era, and unpunished vice would not be tolerated!

The public easily interpreted Alma-Tadema’s symbolism and message: as the guests’ lust was smothered by the lustful rose, so does lust smother the virtuous soul. A contemporary message was conveyed using an ancient anecdote.

Detail from the roses of Heliogabalus.
Detail from the roses of Heliogabalus.

A contemporary message could command a contemporary price. When Sir John Aird, 1st Baronet, commissioned Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema to paint The Roses of Heliogabalus, he paid Alma-Tadema 4,000 GBP.

The price of 4,000 GBP in 1888 would approximately be 150,000 USD in 2020.

Alma-Tadema was an appreciated artist in his time, and the price reflects the four months it took Alma-Tadema to create this great work.  

What is sad is that shortly after Alma-Tadema’s death in 1912, his works and the Academic Style quickly fell out of favor with the public.

The social changes brought by WWI, the 1920s, and the Great Depression culminated in his works being quickly forgotten and ignored. It was not until the 1960s that his works and the Academic Style began to be reevaluated for their stylistic majesty and clarity.

The Academic Style is still being reevaluated today, and while it is not as popular as other styles of the same timeframe like Pre-Raphaelites, Impressionism, and Arts & Crafts, the Academic Style has its own masterpieces like Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s The Roses of Heliogabalus

The Roses of Heliogabalus
Detail from The Roses of Heliogabalus.

Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema fuses Victorian morality and symbolism with Roman Imperial history in The Roses of Heliogabalus.

  • It brings to life a moment from one of Rome’s most hated and reviled emperors.
  • It brings ancient history to a contemporary audience.
  • It makes it both entertaining and educational.
  • Who knew that a Roman Emperor literally smothered his dinner guests with flowers?

We have Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema to thank for capturing that humorous anecdote to enliven our next dinner party. The Roses of Heliogabalus is a history lesson on canvas. It is the ultimate party prank. It is the ultimate Roman death.

Antony and Cleopatra

Well, everyone knows about Antony and Cleopatra, right? There was a movie, or two, or three, or four… about the couple.

Well…

Forget the movie. Let’s consider history.

Regarded by the Romans as “fatale monstrum”- a fatal omen, Cleopatra is one of the ancient world’s most popular, though elusive figures.

The pregnant phrase fatale monstrum comes at a crucial point in the third and longest of the three sentences of the ‘Cleopatra Ode’. Before it Cleopatra is being hissed from the stage of history with cries of disapproval; after it she is recalled to receive plaudit after plaudit for her courage and resolution.

-Cleopatra as Fatale Monstrum (Horace, Carm. 1. 37. 21 ...

The Egyptian Queen has been immortalized by numerous writers and film-makers, most popularly by Shakespeare in Antony and Cleopatra, and by Hollywood in Cleopatra (1963) starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

The latter work features the memorable image of the enticing young Cleopatra emerging gracefully from an unfurled carpet in front of Roman general Julius Caesar.

But is Cleopatra to be regarded merely as the lover of Julius Caesar and Mark Antony? Or did she play an important role not only in the history of Egypt, but also in that of the mighty Roman Republic?

Cleopatra VII Philopator ('father-loving') was born in January 69 BCE in the city of Alexandria, Egypt, the daughter of Ptolemy XII Auletes (117 BCE –51 BCE) and possibly Cleopatra V Tryphaena (c. 95 BCE – c. 57 BCE). 

Cleopatra was to become the last monarch of the Ptolemaic Empire (established in 323 BCE after the death of Alexander the Great), ruling Egypt from 51 BCE to 30 BCE.

In 48 BCE Cleopatra had become an ally and lover of Julius Caesar and remained so until his assassination in Rome in March of 44 BCE.

The death of Caesar threw Rome into turmoil, with various factions competing for control, the most important of these being the armies of Mark Antony (83 BCE– 30 BCE) and Octavian (63 BCE – 14 CE), the former a supporter and loyal friend Caesar, the latter his adopted son.

In 41 BC Cleopatra was summoned to Tarsus (in modern southern Turkey) by Mark Antony. She is said to have entered the city by sailing up the Cydnus River in a decorated barge. It was a barge with purple sails, all the time while dressed in the robes of the Greek goddess Aphrodite.

Antony, who equated himself with the god Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, was instantly won over.

Much like the meeting between Cleopatra and Caesar, both sides saw something in the other which they needed. For Cleopatra it was another opportunity to achieve power both in Egypt and in Rome, for Anthony the support of Rome’s largest and wealthiest client states in his campaign against the might of the Parthians (Parthia was a region in modern north-eastern Iran) was highly desirable.

At the meeting Cleopatra allegedly requested that her half-sister Arsinoë, living in protection at the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, be executed to prevent any future attempts on her throne.

Anthony and Cleopatra soon became allies and lovers and he returned with her to Alexandria in 40 BCE.

In Alexandria Cleopatra and Antony formed a society of “inimitable livers”, which some historians have interpreted as an excuse to lead a life of debauchery, though it was more likely to have been a group dedicated to the cult of the mystical god Dionysus.

Detail

In that year Cleopatra bore Antony the twins Alexander Helios (the Sun) and Cleopatra Selene (the Moon).

The political situation in Rome compelled Antony to return to Italy where he was forced to conclude a temporary settlement with Octavian, part of which was that he married Octavian’s sister, Octavia.

It was to be three years before he and Cleopatra were to meet again, at the city of Antioch (near the modern Turkey / Syria border) under the shadow of the Octavian’s growing military power in the West.

Detail

One result of this meeting was that Cleopatra became pregnant with her third child by Antony (the future Ptolemy Philadelphus); another was that parts of Rome’s eastern possessions came under Cleopatra’s control.

Celebrations in Alexandria

In 34 BCE, despite the fact that Antony’s Parthian campaign had been an extravagant failure, Antony and Cleopatra celebrated a mock Roman Triumph in the streets of Alexandria.

Crowds flocked to the Gymnasium to see the couple seated on golden thrones surrounded by their children, and Antony made a proclamation known today as the ‘Donations of Alexandria’. In this declaration Antony distributed lands held by Rome and Parthia amongst Cleopatra and their children, and proclaimed Caesarion as Caesar’s legitimate son.

Detail

Not surprisingly, the ‘Donations of Alexandria’ caused outrage in Rome, where the rumour began to spread that Antony intended to transfer the empire’s capital from Rome to Alexandria.

In 32 BCE, Octavian had the Senate deprive Antony of his powers and declare war against Cleopatra, calling her a whore and a drunken Oriental.

To avoid another civil war, Antony was not mentioned in the declaration, but this was to no avail and Antony decided to join the war on Cleopatra’s side.

The Battle of Actium & the Invasion of Egypt

The culmination of the war came at the naval Battle of Actium, which took place near the town of Preveza in northwestern Greece, on September 2, 31 BCE.

Here Mark Antony and Cleopatra’s combined force of 230 vessels and 50,000 sailors were defeated by Octavian’s navy commanded by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, effectively handing control of the Roman world over to Octavian.

In 30 BCE Octavian invaded Egypt and laid siege to Alexandria. Hopelessly outnumbered, Anthony’s forces surrendered and, in the honourable Roman tradition, Antony committed suicide by falling on his sword.

The Death of Cleopatra

After Antony’s death Cleopatra’s was taken to Octavian who informed her that she would be brought to Rome and paraded in the streets as part of his Triumph. Perhaps unable to bear the thought of this humiliation, on August 12, 30 BCE Cleopatra dressed in her royal robes and lay upon a golden couch with a diadem on her brow.

According to tradition (found in ancient historian Plutarch, for example) she had an asp (an Egyptian cobra), brought to her concealed in a basket of figs, and died from the bite.

Two of her female servants also died with her.

Detail

The asp was a symbol of divine royalty to the Egyptians, so by allowing the asp to bite her, Cleopatra became immortal.

Other historians (including Joyce Tyldesley) believe that Cleopatra used either a poisonous ointment or a vial of poison to commit suicide.

Cleopatra had lived thirty nine years, for twenty-two of which she had reigned as queen, and for fourteen she had been Antony’s partner in his empire.

After her death her son Caesarion was declared pharaoh, but he was soon executed on Octavian’s orders. Her other children were sent to Rome to be raised by Antony’s wife, Octavia.

Cleopatra represented the last significant threat to Roman authority and her death also marks the end of the Ptolemaic Kingdom.

The vast treasures of Egypt were plundered by Octavian, and Egypt itself became a new Roman province. Within a few years the Senate named Octavian Augustus and he became the first Roman Emperor, consolidating the western and eastern halves of the Republic into a Roman Empire.

Octavian later published his biography in which he stripped Cleopatra of her political ability and portrayed her as an immoral foreigner, a temptress of upright Roman men.

A number of Roman historians and writers (the poets Horace and Lucan for example) reinforced the image of Cleopatra Empire an incestuous, adulterous whore who used sex to try and emasculate the Roman Empire.

Unfortunately, such Roman propaganda has had a profound influence on the image of Cleopatra that has been passed down into Western culture.

The real Cleopatra was highly skilled politically (though ruthless with her enemies), popular with her subjects, spoke seven languages, and was said to be the only Ptolemy to read and speak Egyptian.

It is also a sobering thought to remember how different the history of western civilization might have been if Cleopatra had managed to create an eastern empire to rival the increasing might of Rome, which she very nearly succeeded in doing.

Detail

Recent archaeological work has cast some interesting but controversial light on the possible location of Cleopatra’s tomb.

Greco-Roman historian Plutarch wrote that that Antony and Cleopatra were buried together. Then, in 2008 CE archaeologists from the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities and from the Dominican Republic, working at the Temple of Taposiris Magna, 28 miles west of Alexandria, reported that one of the chambers in the building probably contained the bodies of Cleopatra and Mark Antony.

The team have so far discovered 22 bronze coins inscribed with Cleopatra’s name and bearing her image, a bust of Cleopatra, and an alabaster mask believed to represent Mark Antony. Work at the site is ongoing, and only time will tell if the archaeologist are correct in their theory that the great couple were interred at such a distance from Alexandria.

Other works

You can see that the amount of artistic skill, creativity and history that goes into each of these paintings are not something that you can devote a one or two SEO friendly paragraph to. Art, real serious art, is about humans and our humanity. And when we see these spectacular images, we should also be advised o the history behind the images.

Or you can check out “modern art”. It is SEO friendly and doesn’t need explanation for discussion. Like this multi-million dollar piece…

Cy Twombly’s work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

If you want SEO friendly art, you can check out these links…

Ah…

Don’t get too hot and bothered about it. It’s a way that the ultra-rich can avoid government oversight in large money transfers. They assign a value to a “piece of art” and hand the money to the “artist”. He then gives a sizable portion back (a kick back scheme) and volia(!) money suddenly goes “off the books”.

Most nations are unable to tax, track and regulate works of art. So the very wealthy use it as a mechanism to “launder money” legally.

May 19, 2017 · I wake up in cold sweats because of that god damn stupid blue painting being sold for 44 million dollars. It’s garbage. It’s idiotic. It’s nothing better than a starvin Marvin could do with his toes with his last dying breath. But some asshole decided it’s “art” so it’s worth 44 million dollars. Fuck youuuuuuuuuuuu.

-Nothing Triggers Me As Much As God Damn Stupid Prices …

So, yeah.

It’s all a fraud.

Enough of the scams…

Here’s some other works by this great artist. Each one can have an entire chapter devoted to it….

The Colosseum

Colosseum, also called Flavian Amphitheatre, giant amphitheatre built in Rome under the Flavian emperors. Construction of the Colosseum was begun sometime between 70 and 72 ce during the reign of Vespasian. It is located just east of the Palatine Hill, on the grounds of what was Nero’s Golden House.

The artificial lake that was the centrepiece of that palace complex was drained, and the Colosseum was sited there, a decision that was as much symbolic as it was practical. Vespasian, whose path to the throne had relatively humble beginnings, chose to replace the tyrannical emperor’s private lake with a public amphitheatre that could host tens of thousands of Romans.

The structure was officially dedicated in 80 ce by Titus in a ceremony that included 100 days of games.

Later, in 82 ce, Domitian completed the work by adding the uppermost story.

Unlike earlier amphitheatres, which were nearly all dug into convenient hillsides for extra support, the Colosseum is a freestanding structure of stone and concrete, using a complex system of barrel vaults and groin vaults and measuring 620 by 513 feet (189 by 156 metres) overall.

Detail.

Three of the arena’s stories are encircled by arcades framed on the exterior by engaged columns in the Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian orders; the structure’s rising arrangement of columns became the basis of the Renaissance codification known as the assemblage of orders.

The main structural framework and facade are travertine, the secondary walls are volcanic tufa, and the inner bowl and the arcade vaults are concrete.

The amphitheatre seated some 50,000 spectators, who were shielded from the sun by a massive retractable velarium (awning).

Supporting masts extended from corbels built into the Colosseum’s top, or attic, story, and hundreds of Roman sailors were required to manipulate the rigging that extended and retracted the velarium.

Detail.

The Colosseum was the scene of thousands of hand-to-hand combats between gladiators, of contests between men and animals, and of many larger combats, including mock naval engagements. However, it is uncertain whether the arena was the site of the martyrdom of early Christians.

A Dedication to Bacchus

Bacchus was a Roman agricultural god who was associated with the harvest — particularly that of grapevines. The son of Jupiter by a human woman, Bacchus was said to wander the world educating people about the delightful wines that could be made from grapes.

The word bacchanalia comes from Bacchus, and the wild parties thrown in his honor.

According to legend, Bacchus traveled the earth teaching people how to make wine, and is credited with spreading grapevine cuttings around the world.

Secret rituals for women only were held in Bacchus' honor during the ancient Roman period.

Much like his Greek counterpart Dionysus, Bacchus earned the title of party god. In fact, a drunken orgy is still called a bacchanalia, and for good reason. Devotees of Bacchus whipped themselves into a frenzy of intoxication, and in the spring Roman women attended secret ceremonies in his name.

Bacchus was associated with fertility, wine and grapes, as well as sexual free-for-alls. Although Bacchus is often linked with Beltane and the greening of spring, because of his connection to wine and grapes he is also a deity of the harvest. A celebration is held in his honor each year at the beginning of October.

Bacchus is often portrayed crowed with vines or ivy. His chariot is drawn by lions, and he is followed by a group of nubile, frenzied priestesses known as Bacchae. Sacrifices to Bacchus included the goat and the swine, because both of these animals are destructive to the annual grape harvest — without grapes, there can be no wine.

Bacchus has a divine mission, and that is his role of liberator. During his drunken frenzies, Bacchus loosens the tongues of those who partake of wine and other beverages, and allows people the freedom to say and do what they wish.

In mid-March, secret rituals were held on Rome’s Aventine hill to worship him. These rites were attended by women only, and were part of a mystery religion built up around Bacchus.

In addition to being the patron of wine and drink, Bacchus is a god of the theatrical arts. In his earlier incarnation as the Greek Dionysus, he had a theater named for him in Athens. He is often portrayed as a slightly effeminate figure, prone to good humor and general bawdiness.

The Women of Amphissa

This painting was inspired by an historical event recorded by Plutarch, a Greek historian, biographer and essayist. This painting shows the morning after a celebration of Bacchus/Dionysus, the God of wine and ritual madness.

This celebration caused a group of women to wander into the city of Amphissa from Phocis.

Despite these two cities being at war, the women of Amphissa allowed the women from Phocis to fall asleep in their marketplace and stood guard throughout the night to ensure the men of the city caused them no harm.

As seen in this painting, the women of Amphissa also provided them with food and care the next morning.

While The Women of Amphissa is both ethereal and dream-like, it is also very realistic as the details created by Alma-Tadema make the painting come to life. From the hair and clothing of the women, to the flowers and sculptures in the wall, the details create the beauty of this painting.

Alma-Tadema also uses a lot of white and varying shades likely representative of the peace between these groups. It is reported that Alma-Tadema used his second wife, Laura, as a model for this painting.

Many interpret this painting as a lesson in charity and humanity for the Victorian people of Alma-Tadema’s time as this was an era with lots of poverty, child labour and morality standards. It has also come to represent the strength of femininity and the importance of protection because the women of the city would have stood up to soldiers if necessary.

After his death in 1912, Alma-Tadema’s work was held in low esteem by the public despite his success during his life.

In the 1960s, however, his body of work was re-examined and deemed very significant for art history and in particular English art of the nineteenth century. Today, The Women of Amphissa is part of the private collection of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute.

The Finding of Moses

Moses, Hebrew Moshe, (flourished 14th–13th century bce), Hebrew prophet, teacher, and leader who, in the 13th century bce (before the Common Era, or bc), delivered his people from Egyptian slavery. In the Covenant ceremony at Mt. Sinai, where the Ten Commandments were promulgated, he founded the religious community known as Israel. As the interpreter of these Covenant stipulations, he was the organizer of the community’s religious and civil traditions. In the Judaic tradition, he is revered as the greatest prophet and teacher, and Judaism has sometimes loosely been called Mosaism, or the Mosaic faith, in Western Christendom. His influence continues to be felt in the religious life, moral concerns, and social ethics of Western civilization, and therein lies his undying significance.

-Moses | Story, Summary, Significance, & Facts | Britannica

According to the biblical account, Moses’ parents were from the tribe of Levi, one of the groups in Egypt called Hebrews. Originally the term Hebrew had nothing to do with race or ethnic origin. It derived from Habiru, a variant spelling of Ḫapiru (Apiru), a designation of a class of people who made their living by hiring themselves out for various services.

The biblical Hebrews had been in Egypt for generations, but apparently they became a threat, so one of the pharaohs enslaved them.

Unfortunately, the personal name of the king is not given, and scholars have disagreed as to his identity and, hence, as to the date of the events of the narrative of Moses.

One of the measures taken by the Egyptians to restrict the growth of the Hebrews was to order the death of all newborn Hebrew males. According to tradition, Moses’ parents, Amram and Jochebed (whose other children were Aaron and Miriam), hid him for three months and then set him afloat on the Nile in a reed basket daubed with pitch.

Detail.

The child, found by the pharaoh’s daughter while bathing, was reared in the Egyptian court.

While many doubt the authenticity of this tradition, the name Moses (Hebrew Moshe) is derived from Egyptian mose (“is born”) and is found in such names as Thutmose ([The God] Thoth Is Born).

Originally, it is inferred, Moses’ name was longer, but the deity’s name was dropped. This could have happened when Moses returned to his people or possibly even earlier, because the shortened form Mose was very popular at that time.

Detail.

Moses’ years in the court are passed over in silence, but it is evident from his accomplishments later that he had instruction in religious, civil, and military matters.

Since Egypt controlled Canaan (Palestine) and part of Syria and had contacts with other nations of the Fertile Crescent, Moses undoubtedly had general knowledge of life in the ancient Near East. During his education he learned somehow that he was a Hebrew, and his sense of concern and curiosity impelled him to visit his people.

Detail.

According to the biblical narrative, Moses lived 120 years and was 80 when he confronted Pharaoh, but there is no indication how old he was when he went to see the Hebrews. Later Jewish and Christian tradition assumed 40-year periods for his stay in the Egyptian court, his sojourn in Midian, and his wilderness wanderings.

Most likely Moses was about 25 when he took the inspection tour among his people. There he saw the oppressive measures under which they laboured. When he found an Egyptian taskmaster beating a Hebrew, probably to death, he could control his sense of justice no longer. After checking to make sure that no one was in sight, he killed the tough Egyptian overlord.

Detail.

As a prince in the court, Moses was probably in excellent physical condition, and apparently he knew the latest methods of combat.

The flush of victory pulled Moses back the next day. …

Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends

The Parthenon frieze, which runs on a continuous line around the exterior wall of the cella, is 1 meter high and 160 meters long. The sculptures are executed in low relief and depict the people of Athens in two processions that begin at the southwest corner and parade in opposite directions until they converge over the door of the cella at the east end of the Parthenon. Almost certainly it represents the Panathenaic procession that was a central celebration in Athens during Classical times.

-The Parthenon Frieze - Ancient Greece

The full title of this startling painting is Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to His Friends, and it was painted by Lawrence Alma-Tadema in 1868. You can’t get much more Classical than this for inspiration.

In the painting, which takes place sometime in the 5th century BCE, the famous ancient Greek sculptor Phidias (ca. 480-430 BCE), the man in the dark robes at center, shows off the magnificent creation he’s made for Athens’s famous temple, the Parthenon.

The friends, obviously well-to-do citizens of Athens, admire his handiwork.

The frieze of the Parthenon is a long series of sculpted bas-reliefs, chiseled from marble, that adorned the top of the Parthenon beneath the eaves. The frieze, evidently depicting a ceremonial procession of the Athenians, was/is one of the great works of art of classical Greece.

Historians are unsure whether it was carved in place, or carved previously and somehow hoisted up toward the roof. The majority of the frieze was removed from the Parthenon about 1800 and now resides in the British Museum in London, where Alma-Tadema saw it. (I saw it there too in the year 2000).

Phidias was an Athenian sculptor, the son of Charmides, and is generally acknowledged as the greatest ancient Greek sculptor and instigator of the classical style of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Although few facts are known about his life, it is believed he lived from around 490 until 430 BC. No originals of his work exist, but his recognition as a renowned sculptor has been guaranteed due to the praise of ancient writers, as well as the influence his sculptures had on the development of the art. He gained most of his fame for his two enormous chryselephantine (gold and ivory) sculptures: One of Athena in the Parthenon, and the other of Zeus at Olympia. These statues had such a profound impact that they determined all subsequent conceptions of Athena and Zeus.

-Ancient Greece

This wonderful painting combines the best of 19th century Classical-themed art with a sort of romantic-tinged realism. The figures do appear realistic, though stylized in a way most of us would conceive of ancient Greece, looking back on it from several thousand years.

Note, however, the hairstyles on Phidias and the man on the far left, and Phidias’s beard curls. The tight kinky hair, a bit too perfect to look natural, is the way hair was often portrayed in ancient Greek art. The colors here are warm and rich, almost evocative of 19th century gaslight. I absolutely love paintings like this, for they bring to life the classical world in a very vivid and eye-catching way.

The sculpted marble depicts the Olympian gods seated while the citizens on Athens carved in low relief move stoically in the procession towards the central point around a scene depicting the folding of the peplos. The peplos was a central item in the Panathenaea and was woven by the virgins dedicated to the goddess Athena exclusively for use during the procession.

A large number of cavalry dominates the west end of the frieze, while a host of elders, musicians and people escorting sacrificial animals, fill the spaces towards the east end. The frieze over the door places the “peplos scene” at the center, while gods, and heroes, and women flank it on both sides. The gods are seated, making them twice as large as the rest of the figures who are standing or riding, and they appear in the typical realistic mortal form we are accustomed to seeing in Classical art.

The inclusion of a continuous Ionic freeze is not exclusive to the Doric Parthenon. What is unique however is the depiction of mere mortals as the subject in the decoration of a temple in Ancient Greece. If we accept that the frieze depicts the Panathenaic procession we are confronted with the fact that the line between the divine and the human has been deliberately blurred not only through the formal aesthetic conventions as with other sculptures, but via an intentional thematic narrative that places the gods among the mortals or the humans among the divine. Perhaps in the Parthenon frieze we finally glimpse the definitive formulation of Greek thought into concrete iconography: the natural world and the human being as a divine entity worthy of exploration and immortality through the arts.

In ancient times all the sculptures as well as the buildings were vividly painted and were complemented with metal attachments in the form of spears, swords, horse reins and other appropriate accessories. The result must have been a dazzling, (if not gaudy) array of three dimensional paintings, with a much different visual interpretation than the one we derive today trough the “sterilized” museum exhibits of white stone at eye level.

-The Parthenon Frieze - Ancient Greece

The painter, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, was obviously a brilliant artist, and he seems to have been an interesting person. He was born in Holland but moved to Britain in 1870 when the Franco-Prussian War broke out. A gregarious extrovert, he is said to have loved parties, wine and women. There’s a touch of melancholy about him; widowed twice, Alma-Tadema was thrown into deep depressions after the deaths of his two wives, Pauline in 1869 and Laura in 1909. Alma-Tadema died in Germany in 1912, and is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Art like this makes life worth living. Kudos to Lawrence Alma-Tadema. As I say often, I could run Metallicman for decades on nothing but Historic Paintings posts!

Spring

Spring is an 1894 oil painting by Lawrence Alma-Tadema, currently in the collection of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, California . Spring depicts the festival of Cerealia in a Roman street. One of Tadema's most famous and popular works, it took him four years to complete.

-Spring (painting) - Wikipedia

This is an enormous work. The painting is like two stories high and so filled with detail that it boggles the mind. To really appreciate it, you need to look at the various sections of it in detail.

Here is a small section…

Detail of the procession.

Alma Tadema finished painting “Spring” in 1894. The subject is the celebration parade marking the return of spring.

He had worked on it for four years, making at least one major alteration. It is a tall narrow painting, 178.4 × 80.3 cm, painted in oil on canvas, and also its original, hefty, classic-style frame was designed by the artist. The painting was first put on display at the Royal Academy in 1895 and enjoyed great success. The picture’s popularity continued over the next few years with prints very much in demand.

Detail of a pillar.

After a memorial exhibition in 1913, the painting disappeared from the art scene, and it was not until 1970 that it made a comeback. It joined the collection of a certain Mr. Funt, an American TV personality/art collector, and it was subsequently purchased at auction by the Getty Museum in 1972. It was thought at the time to represent the realities of ancient Rome and it took pride of place in the Getty “Roman Villa” in 1974. The apparent authentic “Romanism” of the painting had even inspired certain scenes in Cecil B. De Mille’s Hollywood production of “Cleopatra” of 1934. However, further research into the painting’s subject and significance suggests it is more an idealised Victorian representation of spring, rather than a specific Roman festival.

Detail of the audience.

The scene, with a procession of young people, flowers and musical instruments, is a joyful springtime celebration. It has been likened to the Roman spring festivals: Floralia, Cerealia or Ambarvalia.

The artist may have been inspired by descriptions of the spring festival in honour of Ceres or Flora as described by the Roman poet Ovid.

It also corresponds to Victorian Mayday festivities, where young girls went out into the countryside and collected flowers, then carried them back in blithesome procession.

Alma Tadema presents the scene as a parade in a festive jubilant setting, and it was something the people could relate to. Processions abounded in late Victorian England: receptions for visiting heads of state, royal weddings of Queen Victoria’s children/grandchildren, and particularly for the queen’s fifty, and then sixty, years of reign.

Detail of the flower bearers.

Here, the backdrop is ancient Rome and the procession winds through shining marble passageways.

Young girls carry pretty flowers or branches with buds or blossoms. Pipers are making music. Others follow carrying symbolic ritual items, including the bearers of a fine chalice, a casket and an ivory altar.

Excited onlookers line the way. These beautifully detailed groups of figures and the surrounding Roman architecture are the key to the painting. Lawrence Alma Tadema was known for his glorious details; it is said that Alma Tadema compositions are the sum of his details.

Detail of the wealthy up above.

Looking closely, we behold richly ornamented columns and partial columns, full statues that replicate authentic Roman statues in silver and bronze, finely detailed nature elements, and above all, a dazzling feast of delicate yet vibrant spring flowers.

The faithfully wrought architecture of this Tadema Rome has numerous columns, arches and balconies to seem almost like a stage set. Indeed, the artist had a background in creating grandiose stage sets for Shakespeare plays in the 1880s that amply satisfied the Victorian taste for spectacle.

Against this stage-like background of white marble, and the pale, pastel clothing of the people, the strong bright colors of the flowers and garlands really stand out. The eye goes from one spot of color to another, then, in the distance, to the red walls of the “royal box”, where the viewer pauses to absorb a myriad of refined details.

The impact of the picture is the contrast between vibrant colorful flowers and the stark white marble. It is the flowers that provide the most important detail, a detail that reflects the artist’s well-known fondness for flowers. However, the flowers in the picture are not all Mayday blossoms; many were selected for their colors and symbolism rather than appropriateness of season.

Detail from the heights.

One last detail gives us an insight into the Roman period that Alma Tadema wanted to represent in his celebration of spring: the inscription and relief on the archway at centre left of the picture.

The artist has reproduced the dedication sculpted on the Arch of Trajan in Benevento, near Rome, built to commemorate the opening of the Appian Way and completed during the reign of the Emperor Hadrian (reigned 117-138).

This leads us to presume that the setting for Lawrence Alma Tadema’s joyous “Spring” is Emperor Hadrian’s prosperous Rome.

Who says that art is a purely visual enjoyment?

Detail from the sidelines.

This gracious painting of “Spring” is full of fragrant air, you can almost smell the faint perfume of the darling buds of May, you can hear the light lilting music, you can feel the warming rays of the sun.

“As the sun colors flowers, so art colors life”.

This was the artist’s personal motto, and the idea is present in every Lawrence Alma Tadema composition. Originally from Holland, the young Lawrence, or Lourens as he was originally named, studied art at the Royal Academy of Antwerp. In 1870, he moved to England where he settled permanently in London. He adjusted his name to the more Britannic “Lawrence”, and his Dutch origins are often overlooked.

He had a passion for nature and for ancient, particularly Roman, history; both of these interests are evident in many of his paintings.

Detail.

“Spring” is the quintessence of the Lawrence Alma Tadema artistic style. He paid great attention to natural and historic details in his paintings, striving for authenticity.

He was an avid historical researcher and always strove to get historic details exactly right.

Where the setting is of Roman inspiration, as here, he made sure that architecture, dress and musical instruments were accurate.

He had a personal archive of photographs depicting Roman antiquities that enabled him to get true-to-life historical accuracy in his paintings. He possessed a tremendous curiosity about all things ancient and acquired a precious expertise which he poured into his art.

He created over 300 paintings in this vein, bringing antiquity vividly to life on the canvas.

The full painting.

The Vintage Festival

The ancient Romans loved celebrations. They especially enjoyed a holiday they celebrated around the 25th of December.

Remind you of any date, eh?

The Romans feasted, gave gifts, were merry, and decorated their homes with greenery. Roman Festivals were also held in ancient Rome in response to particular events, or for a particular purpose such as to assuage or to honor the gods.

Check out Ten Roman Festivals that were pretty cool…

Anna Parenna Festival

The Roman Festivals for Anna Parenna, “goddess of the returning year” was held each year on the first day of the ancient year. Traditionally, Romans would cross the Tiber and “go abroad” into Etruria and have picnics in flimsy tents or huts made of branches. Both men and women would drink as much alcohol as they could, for it was thought that one would live for as many years as cups of alcohol one could drink on this day.

Saturnalia

This one’s a classic, and it gives us the origins of Christmas. Held in late December, it involves general feasting and present-giving. Most notably, though, it was the night when masters and slaves exchanged places. Can you imagine how awkward that would be? Sure it sounds like it’s a bit of fun, letting the slaves have a night off, but they were back as slaves the next day, so I can’t think they would let themselves have too much fun… The most important thing about this festival, though, is that the blokes do the cooking.

Lupercalia

Opinions are divided on whether this February festival is a ritual of purification or fertility. What they do know is that it involved barely-clad young men running through the streets, striking people with a goat thong. No, I do not know what a goat thong was. Moving on…

Veneralia

On April 1, this was another festival involving topsy-turviness (technical term there). It was the one day in which women (aristocrats and plebs mingling together) were allowed to enter the men’s baths, wearing myrtle wreaths in honour of Venus Verticordia. They would take a statue of Fortuna Virilis (fortune of men) in with them, removing her jewellery (yep, statues wore jewellery) to wash her.

Parilia

A rural festival, this one involves shepherds jumping over bonfires. And, um, sheep. The sheep jump over the bonfires. I can’t even imagine how that works.

Fornacalia

I’m not even kidding. Don’t get too excited, though, this one’s just about the baking of the corn. Honest. Corn-baking. Festival of ovens.

Parentalia

This one has shades of Halloween in that it’s a festival of the dead. Held in February in honour of the deified ancestors, this is a week of sacrifices (flower garlands, wheat, salt, wine-soaked bread, violets) to the manes or shades of the dead. At the end of the week, on the Feralia, the paterfamilias (senior male of the family) exorcises the ghosts, and the following day on the Caristia, everyone has a nice lunch and says nice things about the ancestors who are now (we hope) thoroughly gone again until next year.

Lemuria

No, this isn’t the holy Roman festival celebrating lemurs (though, wouldn’t that be awesome??), it’s another day of making sure the dead lie down. Possibly instituted in honour of the death of Remus (killed by his ambitious twin brother Romulus), this May festival is about appeasing the restless dead with the creative application of beans. Also, the Vestals baked cake. Salt cake, not layer cake, which is a shame because you’d think after a hard day of spirit-appeasing, everyone could do with a bit of cake.

Floralia

Another nearly week-long festival, this one in April-May and revolving around flowers, flowers and more flowers. Also colourful clothes, milk and honey. It was dedicated to the springy goddess Flora, and was particularly popular with prostitutes, who claimed the festival as their own. This is the origins of the May Day celebration, of course, with its ribbons and morris dancers. The Romans also held the Ludi Florales or Games of the Flowers, which actually involved lots of theatre and performing arts as well as good old circus acts. Apparently at the end of the performing animal acts in the Circus Maximus, all the animals were set free, which sounds like a very bad idea indeed.

The October Horse

The famous racing festival of Rome (Melbourne Cup and Ascot, eat your heart out), this one took part on the Ides (full moon) of October, and involved a two-horse chariot race. This one is famous because the right-hand (outer) horse of the winning pair would be slaughtered, beheaded, chopped into little bits and burned as sacrifice. And the Vestals would keep some of the blood, for cake-making purposes. Oh yes they would. And everyone thinks they’re so sweet…

The Bona Dea.

This one’s my favorite. The first rule of Bona Dea is, you don’t talk about Bona Dea. The second rule of Bona Dea is, YOU DON’T TALK ABOUT BONA DEA. This was a women’s festival, no men allowed, and the rites were famously secret. This did not prevent male writers and artists from getting lasciviously excited about what actually happened at these ceremonies. There were rumors of snakes. Of drinking wine and calling it ‘milk.’ Did I mention the snakes? The important thing, though, is that no women have recorded what went on, because speaking of it was forbidden, leaving us with just the speculations of men. I’m suspecting that Lindsey Davis had it right with mint tea and finger sandwiches, sadly.

What we do know is that in 62 BCE it was being hosted by the wife and mother of Julius Caesar, and a tribune called Publius Clodius sneaked in, disguised as a flute girl, in the hope of seducing Caesar’s wife. Honestly, you can’t make this stuff up. He was put on trial for blasphemy, but the women all refused to testify against him, saying in essence: the goddess will get him. And indeed she did…

Well, okay, he died in a riot, but it was near the temple.

Fine, it was within sight of the temple.

The moral of the story is that you don’t mess with the gods, okay? Just keep killing the animals and baking the cakes and everything’s Going to be Fine.

Unconscious Rivals

I like this particular painting because of the great arching ceiling and the expressions on the faces of the two women. It’s a masterpiece for certain. Just look at the details on the flower bush.

After the Audience

Here’s another favorite. I enjoy the deference of the people to the emperor. The photo below does not give it justice. You have to see it close up and look at the details to fully appreciate it.

A Favorite Custom

Baths for bathing and relaxing were a common feature of Roman cities throughout the empire. The often huge bath complexes included a wide diversity of rooms offering different temperatures and facilities such as swimming pools and places to read, relax, and socialise.

Roman baths, with their need for large open spaces, were also important drivers in the evolution of architecture offering the first dome structures in Classical architecture. 

Public baths were a feature of ancient Greek towns but were usually limited to a series of hip-baths.

The Romans expanded the idea to incorporate a wide array of facilities and baths became common in even the smaller towns of the Roman world, where they were often located near the forum. In addition to public baths, wealthy citizens often had their own private baths constructed as a part of their villa and baths were even constructed for the legions of the Roman army when on campaign.

However, it was in the large cities that these complexes (balnea or thermae) took on monumental proportions with vast colonnades and wide-spanning arches and domes. Baths were built using millions of fireproof terracotta bricks and the finished buildings were usually sumptuous affairs with fine mosaic floors, marble-covered walls, and decorative statues.

Generally opening around lunchtime and open until dusk, baths were accessible to all.

Generally opening around lunchtime and open until dusk, baths were accessible to all, both rich and poor. In the reign of Diocletian, for example, the entrance fee was a mere two denarii – the smallest denomination of bronze coinage. Sometimes, on occasions such as public holidays, the baths were even free to enter.    

Typical features (listed in the probable order bathers went through) were:

  • apodyterium – changing rooms.
  • palaestrae – exercise rooms.
  • notatio – open-air swimming pool.
  • laconica and sudatoria – superheated dry and wet sweating-rooms.
  • calidarium – hot room, heated and with a hot-water pool and a separate basin on a stand (labrum)
  • tepidarium – warm room, indirectly heated and with a tepid pool.
  • frigidarium – cool room, unheated and with a cold-water basin, often monumental in size and domed, it was the heart of the baths complex.
  • rooms for massage and other health treatments.

Additional facilities could include cold-water plunge baths, private baths, toilets, libraries, lecture halls, fountains, and outdoor gardens.

Early baths were heated using braziers, but from the 1st century BCE more sophisticated heating systems were used such as under-floor (hypocaust) heating fuelled by wood-burning furnaces (prafurniae).

This was not a new idea as Greek baths also employed such a system but, as was typical of the Romans, they took an idea and improved upon it for maximum efficiency.

The huge fires from the furnaces sent warm air under the raised floor (suspensurae) which stood on narrow pillars (pilae) of solid stone, hollow cylinders, or polygonal or circular bricks. The floors were paved over with 60 cm square tiles (bipedales) which were then covered in decorative mosaics.

The vast amount of water needed for the larger baths was supplied by purpose built aqueducts and regulated by huge reservoirs in the baths complex. The reservoir of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, for example, could hold 20,000 m³ of water. Water was heated in large lead boilers fitted over the furnaces. The water could be added (via lead pipes) to the heated pools by using a bronze half-cylinder (testudo) connected to the boilers. Once released into the pool the hot water circulated by convection.

The Egyptian Widow

It wasn’t just Rome that the artist favored. He was interesting in ancient Greece, and Egypt as well. Here we see his marvelous attention to detail in his depiction of a grieving widow at the death of her husband. No one can depict the past like artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema could.

The Frigidarium

A frigidarium is a large cold pool at the Roman baths.When entering the bath house, one would go through the apodyterium, where they would store their clothes.After the caldarium and the tepidarium, which were used to open the pores of the skin, the frigidarium would be reached. The cold water would close the pores, however, hot water will open them.

-Frigidarium - Wikipedia

In this painting we see a woman dressing and attending to a bather of a Roman frigidarium. We can well imagine the attendants that would maintain this structure. As the cool water is pumped or flows from icy mountain springs, the area within the complex must have been cool and relaxing from the hot Italian Summer climate.

Another Opinion.

Not everyone sees value in fine art.

They consider it old, out-dated and obsolete.

It’s not “hip”, modern and “progressive”. So to add some balance and appreciation, here’s come work by one of the hottest artists in America today; Cy Twombly. His works easily reach millions of dollars each. And as a result he has become famous, and well regarded thorough out the art world.

Here’s one of his multi-million dollar masterpieces…

Cy Twombly 1

And, if that doesn’t evoke any emotions within you, perhaps this “piece” might… I am told that it evokes the childlike simplicity of complex undercurrents in modern contemporaneous thought…

Cy Twombly 2

Or this “ground breaking” and “stunning” work…

Cy Twombly “untitled”

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art Index here…

ART

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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Some selected favorite artworks by James Jacques Joseph Tissot

James Jacques Joseh Tissot was a painter of realistic scenes in allegorical settings. His and his style is considered to be “French Victorian Neoclassical artist”. Ah, whatever it is called, I would really love to have a reprint of one of his works in all it’s large glorious full-size spectacular substance.

To see a full view of all of his 237 artworks, please visit his profile on the Art Renewal Center.

These are some of my favorite works of his. Please allow the images to load. It’s worth it.

The Thames

He loved to paint sea and naval scenes regarding people and relationships. When you look at his work, doesn’t it take you away to another time and another place?

The man is sporting the fashion at the time with white slacks with cuff or rolled up trousers. Those shoes are prevalent throughout Tissot’s painting career. They were really popular in the day. He also wears a thick wool jacket and the beard with bushy mustache.

I wonder what he is thinking.

What about the ladies? What do you suppose is on their minds, if anything?

The Widower

A life alone without your wife. Caring for a young daughter. It is hard now, and it was hard back then. You can see the burdens of life on his shoulders. You can tell the pleasant joys of the child totally oblivious to the burdens of her father…

He looks at the beauty of the flower. What do you suppose is on his mind?

Hide and Seek

Oh, the furniture is different. The outfits are dated. And the news is via newspaper instead of social media on a smart hone. But this scene can be replicated anywhere in the world today. Be it China, or the USA. Be it Russia or Africa. It’s a story about domestic life and the carefree joys of children at play.

In the Sunshine

A family gathers in their backyard. You can see the rich colors and fabrics of that time period. The infant is under a colorful parasol to keep out of the sun, while the rest lie on the bearskin rug that covers the grass.

The mother to the left is wearing black. That means that she is in morning. Her husband is dead, maybe recently. No one is crying, but all are subdued. It’s almost like they are waiting for something…

Young Women Looking at Japanese Objects

I suppose that this is pre-Tic Tok. Young unmarried girls out for the afternoon doing some “window shopping”. They are looking at Japanese and Oriental objects for sale in a store. Personally, I find the outfit that the girl in red is wearing alluring. It’s a red velvet dress with a nice frilly bow in the back. They really had some cool and fun fashion back then.

Portsmouth Dockyard

I wonder what is going on here. Is that some interest I see in the eyes of the fair lass to the left? And what do you think that the man is thinking? What about the girl to the right. As the boat slowly and peacefully passes through the bay, I wonder what emotions grow and blossom on that short trip?

The Fireplace

From a technical point of view, the detail in this painting is exceptional. Look at the dress, and the shimmering reflections on the highlights.

I do love the period dresses and styles.

There used to be a KTV in Shenzhen where the women would wear these big elaborate fancy dresses like this. Oh, my God! They were so alluring. One would get in front and lead you while one girl on the left and one on the right would lead you arm in arm to the KTV room for your private party.

I wonder what the little pug is thinking…

The Captain and the Mate

Two couples on the boat. This is a farewell dinner. The ship will probably set off tomorrow morning. The emotions about what this means are on the faces of all involved. Though each one has different ideas and visions of what it is like.

It’s the night before loved ones leave.

Certainly you have all experienced this.

Look at the Captains face, and the the face of the woman in white.

The Bunch of Lilacs

I am stunned by the technical expertise on this work. Painting shades of white are difficult in itself, but the depth of shadowing and composition is just amazing. And look at the reflections on the floor. My God!

I think that the right kind of clothes enhances a person’s personal beauty and attractiveness. It is said that a man in a Tuxedo will increase his attractiveness to a woman by 20 points. I can say the same thing about clothing on a woman. You don’t need to show skin, or wear tight clothes to be attractive. It is what is not shown, and only hinted at that entices…

The Gallery of H.M.S. ‘Calcutta’ (Portsmouth)

But it is a wonderful work showing two young ladies on board a boat enjoying the view with a sailor trying to get their attention. Perhaps in the hope that he can win their affections. Oh, but we know that. The girls are laying it coy. With the one on the right hiding her face behind a hand fan.

The other girl has some pretty complex emotions, don’t you think? I wonder what she thinks of the young sailor and whether she wants him to leave or stay?

The Ball on Shipboard

Another technical masterpiece.

This picture can take you away to another time and another place. It’s a place where shipboard romances are made, relationships are forged and strengthened, and where memories; treasured memories are made.

Again, note the gents shoes, and the straw hat. Notice that most of the women are wearing white for a nice Sunday outing in the great afternoon. While down below the people are laughing, dancing and being merry. It’s the human condition.

The Prodigal Son in Modern Life: The Fatted Calf

The prodigal son, or lost son, was an abuser of grace. Grace is most often defined as unmerited or unearned favor. He had a loving father, a good home, provision, a future, and an inheritance, but he traded it all in for temporal pleasures.

-Who Was the Prodigal Son? The Meaning of this Parable

Here, the Prodigal son returns. He has made a life for himself and has come back to make amends with his father. While in no way as wealthy, he is part of a crew. Notice the impressions on the faces of everyone else at the table. Their disapproval is thick and present.

He approaches him humbly and with respect…

The Prodigal Son in Modern Life: The Return

Here, the Prodigal Son returns. Only his father was correct, and he asks for forgiveness and compassion. He returns wearing torn clothing, and without shoes. Life has not been good to him. It appears that he has lived a life as a beggar.

Look at the emotions on the faces of the couple in the background. Look at what is going on to the far left of the painting.

A Winter’s Walk

I find this painting extremely sexy. Look at that expression of calm confidence and strength. This is a woman who is in control of her life; a strong proud woman. She’s not just beautiful. She’s handsome.

The Hammock

Again, for the final image in this post we look at another great painting. Notice the picture composition, the balance of colors and the precision in the details on the leaves and the hammock. If this picture were to hand over my fireplace, it would certainly be a centerpiece of discussion, as well as set the mood for the entire household.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Art Index here…

ART

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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While the United States is busily celebrating their “freedom” on the fourth of July, this is what the rest of the world is doing.

Not knocking “freedom”, mind you. I think it’s very important. It’s just that what passes for “freedom” in the “Land of the Free” isn’t freedom at all. Freedom is the ability to own property. And… the property is inviolate. Meaning no one can tax it, regulate it, or put retainers on it in any way. And if you look at things that way, then you see that Americans have just about ZERO freedoms.

But you heard me freak out about this before, right?

A true and real measure of "freedom" is the cumulative amount of worth of everything that you own THAT IS NOT taxed, regulated, associated with fees, or subject to seizure. 

Under this definition the actual amount of “freedom” that most Americans have is ZERO. Everything in the United States is both regulated, and taxed (not to mention subject to seizure). That goes from your home (even after you pay off your mortgage, you still need to pay taxes on it), to your car (duh!), to every item you purchase with state and federal taxes associated with it.

Face it, Americans have zero freedom.

And no screeching at the screen is going to change that fact. Don’t yell at me. Don’t blame me. Don’t get all “hot and bothered” and shoot up an innocent school full of kids.

I am just pointing out the obvious.

Now, here we are going to watch videos of the rest of the world. A place where if you buy a house it is yours. You own it. You don’t pay taxes on it, or deal with regulations on it in any way. When you buy some cigarettes there are no taxes on it, or when you drive a car you don’t need to have it inspected or “approved” for road use.

Freedom. You either have it or you don’t.

Freedom can be measured; it is the cumulative monetary value of everything you own that is NOT subject to tax, regulation, fees, or seizure by any government.

Go ahead. Add it all up. See how free you are.

So watch these videos and see what the rest of the world looks like without that “great American freedom”. We are going to look at the “communist” China. You know, where if you own a house you NEVER need to pay any taxes, property, or school on it. Where you NEVER have to have it inspected or regulated by the central headquarters, and where you NEVER need to “show your papers” to the police when you are walking down the street.

Freedom is the ability to own things… real ownership… free of regulation… free of taxation… free of fees and reporting of any kind at any level.

Feel special yet?

And we are going to Segway from a discussion on freedom, and why it is important, to Rufus behaviors...

And then to sentience...

And then back to why "freedom" matters.

Video 1 – Having a home recording studio

So what’s so great about having a home recording studio? These have been common in the United States since the dawn of radio. What’s the big deal?

Well…

You are right.

These things have been in the United States for years. What began in the basements and garages of the 1950’s and 1960’s, migrated to churches in the 1970’s to keep out of the laws of intense regulation and scrutiny. Then after a brief period of relaxation under the Reagan administration, they all came back and most recording studios in the United States today are highly regulated, “for-profit” affairs.

The days of home recording studios in the United States are pretty much over.

Not so in the rest of the world.

Here we have a video of a home recording studio in China.

It’s not taxed. It’s not regulated. It’s not subject to workplace rules and IRS reporting procedures. It’s not subject to inspection by the various local and state and federal boards. It’s a private, personal space that is used for whatever a person wants it to be used as and the government (in this case Chinese) has absolutely ZERO say on how it is managed.

There are no lit up “exit signs”. You are permitted to smoke inside if you want and there are no fire extinguishers or “people capacity” stickers on the walls. The height of the recording desk is not specified. Nor is the temperature of the room, the decorations or sound isolation foam. It’s all up to the owner to determine. Not the government.

A life where you can own a home recording studio, free of taxation, regulation, fees or rules is far freer than one where everything you do is under the scrutiny of some kind of government organization.

Freedom. You either have it, or you don’t.

There are no grey areas in this issue.

But, but, but you NEED regulation to have a modern functioning society…

That’s the narrative isn’t it?

"Well, China is a developing country. It is a third-world shit-hole. It is where people eat dogs, and cats. Get coronavirus at filthy "wet-markets" and evil mean people riding bicycles try to pick your pocket every chance they get. It's no secret that they all yearn to move to America and be free!"

This narrative, that you NEED regulation to have freedom is an oxymoron. It is one of those never ending lies that are repeated over, and over, and over again, and the stupid ignorant people believe it. They don’t pause and think about what they are saying…

That you NEED to have all this regulation because that is how a modern society works.

"Regulation is a necessary evil. It is how America became great. It is because of regulation that we have trains, bridges, skyscrapers, and the post Office. Take away regulation and America would be back to the stone age."

Wrong!

Regulation serves one thing, and one thing only. Standardization of utility. That’s it.

The idea is that if you make everything one way, and that way is standard then the number of accidents and mishaps will decrease because you have centralized the rules and made a unified standard that everyone by abide to.

  • Like the sizes of steps on a stairway.
  • Like the minimum width in a doorway.
  • Like the minimum number of pages of paper in a pad of paper.

This next video is Nanshan. It’s a suburb of Shenzhen, China. This is the escalator up from the subway below. Now, Shenzhen is a “new” city. Just thirty years ago it was just a sleepy fishing village with some dirt roads and some fishing boats.

But China decided to take a “spin” with this new concept that Ronald Reagan was promoting (at the time) called “Reaganomics”. And Mr. Deng implemented capitalism to communist China.

China constructed a “economic bubble” and implemented every single element of Reaganomics into that bubble. From low taxes, to low to absent regulation, to every other aspect of it. China went full-speed ahead on this “experiment”.

And while President Bush put an end to the American experiment with Reaganomics, China plowed forward…

Shenzhen is the result…

Shenzhen is a pretty awesome place. Not because of Reaganomics so much as the freedom from government regulation.

Freedom. You either have it or you don’t.

Freedom has nothing to do about the economy

There is this unspoken myth in the United States that America is “exceptional” because of it’s “freedoms” and it’s “democracy”. And that the tremendous advantage that the American economy has globally, is proof of this.

That is false.

Let it be absolutely clear that the economy of a nation has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are free or not.

There are people in the poorest sections of Africa and South America that are far freer than Americans are.

Remember, boys and girls, a measure of how free you are is the cash value of the possessions that you have that is not taxed, regulated or has associated fees or can be seized from you.

So…

Here we have some poor kids in the heart of Africa. Their poor clothes had no fees, taxes or regulations when they bought them. Their homes are untaxed and unregulated. And yet, and yet, they are happy and living life.

Of course, I do get this. I do understand.

For many, many years Americans have been taught that being great is the accumulation of wealth, and America is thus great because it is a leading economic power.

But, people, the accumulation of things and paper scripts is not success. It is not happiness. It is not joyous abandon. It is not freedom.

If there is one thing that I have learned over my many, many years is that real freedom has a calming effect on your soul. You stop caring about others, worries about things, or getting all entangled and wrapped up in all sorts of drama.

There are so many things that Americans think are true that are not…

While I am discussing truths and reality here, let it be absolutely understood that we all (all over the world) have been fed a steady diet of lies and untruths and distortions all our lives.

It goes back thousands of years.

But we can point our fingers to just about every aspect of science and society.

  • When the emergence of science came about in Europe, suddenly all stories and tales of non-physical creatures became myths.
  • When money lenders (banks) can manufacture money though the invention of interest… the net trade off was a decrease in value of everything.
  • When the lie of “democracy” equals “freedom”…
  • Or that a strong national economy is a sign that God favors that nation.
  • Or that being smart, intelligent or getting good grade somehow equates to wealth.
  • Or that being popular is a desirable trait that with make a person happier.

Lies, lies, and more lies.

People(!) for the human society to survive this great period of change, we will need to readjust our perceptions on what is real and what isn’t,

In truth, much of what has been force fed (over the last 50 years) through the American media are half-truths and lies. They are designed to convert individual non-established sentience’s to follow a service-for-self or a service-for-another sentience. When in reality, pure and real freedom comes with the third sentience; service-to-others.

Be the Rufus.

Be the Rufus

Ah. But what does being a “Rufus” has to do with anything?

How is it connected to wealth? To fame” To “freedom”? To “democracy”? To science, to society…?

We have gotten so wrapped up on the trivial…

Society is the bedrock of our personal experiences. It is from personal experiences that our sentience manifests and fills in. And thus it is who we are and why we do things. It is our roles in society. It fills out and establishes our place… our experiences and whether or not our lives are fulfilling.

So, I urge everyone to stop listening to the bullshit narratives.

Be the Rufus.

Not only will you obtain better and more enjoyable experiences, but your soul growth and quanta entanglements will end up being of a far higher quality.

It all goes to this.

Taxes and regulations are said to be necessary for a “modern” well-functioning society. That is a lie. They are not. That is what the service-to-self people want you to believe.

Migrate towards a service-to-others sentience. Be helpful and make your life a worthwhile one.

Be the Rufus.

Be the Rufus

Conclusion

The ONLY way that the oligarchy PTB that continue to maintain their level of absolute control is to keep individuals separate. The most tyrannical governments in the world are those that praise the individual and not the group. It is when you praise the efforts of a singular lone person, that everyone else starts to believe that the entire universe is based upon the idea of “every man for himself”.

That is a service-for-self mentality.

But that is not how it works.

Service-for-others sentience is always unhappy in places where freedom is suppressed. And even though they are told over and over again 24-7 that they actually are "free" they know, in their bones, that this is not the case.

We are consciousness. And we inhabit a physical body that migrates though a long stream of world-lines to obtain experiences. These experiences are what causes our quanta to clump together and form associations.

We can be selfish. We can “master” our physical environment though greed, power and selfish exploits. And all of these experiences will also contribute to the creation of the soul consciousness.

But it is a dead-end. It is a trap.

Why?

Because humans ARE NOT singular “lone wolf” creatures. We are social animals. And thus the best sentience for us is one that the physical elements of our being match up with the spiritual elements of our being.

That is service-for-others sentience.

As social animals, we occupy a social role. We contribute to society. We help others. We make the world a better place. We do so in small ways, but we do so…

Street worker buying clothing for his young daughter. He only has so much money. So he has to count out the money carefully to buy some clothes so that she will not be laughed at during school.

The great sorting is upon us. How long this will last is unknown. It might last for a century in total. Though it might be over in as short as ten years. Most certainty there will be all sorts of elements of change here and there in different geographical areas over time.

You cannot control the world, but you can control your little part of it.

Be the Rufus.

Why does it matter?

A service-for-self person will do their intention affirmations over and over again, and still have trouble manifesting their desires. No matter what they get, they will still want more. Bigger, better, more and more. They will never be satisfied. So that when one reality manifestation occurs it is what makes them happy.

That is because their WANTS will always be a “want”.

A service-for-others person will find that their prayer affirmation intention campaigns will have a strong degree of permanency with it. When it happens, and their dreams manifest, they will be free to concentrate on other elements of their intention prayers / desires.

Like this…

How things manifest is subject to the sentience of the person making the intention campaign.

Be the Rufus.

Do you want more?

I have more posts in my Rufus Index, here…

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So you want to make your very own home-grown DIY dimensional world-line vehicle. Let’s talk about this. (Part 1)

Not everyone is satisfied in using intention / prayer to alter their reality. And, not everyone has the billions of dollars to manufacture their very own dimensional portal. And not everyone can work with our benefactors to have a piloted artifice slide their world-lines about. So what options are left?

Make your own.

Redaction's posted herein are mandatory. Please do not ask for clarification. There can be no exceptions. 

DIY Dimensional Portal Considerations

Our reality is one that our soul constructed for us to occupy and acquire experiences in. The influences of the thoughts of the “quantum shadows” that share our reality, color what we experience.

We, as humans, wish to “vacation” outside our reality to other realities where we can acquire new “adventures” and experiences.  It is part of our nature.

Thus, the desire to explore alternate world-lines.

It seems that a lot of people want to leave their own dimension and explore alternative worlds.  So instead of concentrating on their ability to control their thoughts… (thoughts steer the dimensional realities around us), they look outward for some kind of artifice or automaton to do all the “heavy lifting” for them.

Heavy Lifting; an American idiom that means to do the hard and difficult work.

It’s a lazy-man’s method.  It is equivalent to buying lottery tickets in that hope that you will become a millionaire.

People, we do not need to do that.  In fact, all we really need to do is control our thoughts, and then just sit back while our reality collapses in upon itself and a reality that fits our desires…

… manifests.

A very happy man.
A very happy man.

What if there are (more or less) natural events that can create the conditions necessary to facilitate “natural” world-line cross-over events. 

Afterall, if multiple world-lines are a de facto natural state, as I say... and time is our experience of moving though these stable world-lines, could not other techniques... 

...natural techniques... 

...be able to provide similar results of intense consciousness navigation?

What might they manifest as?

Indeed, over the years, I’ve read articles and heard stories that refer to unusual phenomena relating to experiments with high energy concentrations in a ‘constrained’ area. This energy can be in the form of high concentrations of sound, electricity, magnetism, etc..

At this point in time, my thinking is that a direct current (unmodulated – not alternating) produces a stress on the fabric of space in a local area. 

That if you create a vortex using various means, and then couple this with <redacted> (which is really the “key” to the entire process) that the stress on the world-line “bubble of reality” would be such that you could exit it and immediately transit to a different world-line.

The theory or idea behind this is that each spatial (and possibly TEMPORAL) location, no matter what dimension it resides in, has a specific coordinate (of some degree of complexity).

And as such, it can be referenced by a combination of frequencies that equate to the ‘signature’ for that location. (Perhaps, much like a “tuning fork”.)

Scene from the television show / Movie "Stargate".
Scene from the television show / Movie “Stargate”.

This concept of coordinates as a function of “frequencies” is not new. It’s almost a mantra of the “New Age” movement. But what is different here is that the various frequencies and the subtleties of the harmonics involved could be manipulated as coordinates for World-Line travel.

These are nested frequencies – like bubbles within bubbles – because they are all standing waves produced by 180 degree phase conjugation.

If a modulation – representing a specific ‘signature’/coordinate – is imposed on this stress field, then a portal is opened to that location.

My (personal) concept is that a resonance is established between these two locations (there can be more), i.e. the physical-spatial location and the artificially created target.

Who knows if this speculation has any validity. 

While I have been exposed to world-line travel using three techniques, I have never been officially educated on the mechanisms involved by MAJestic. 

All that I know is via our benefactors. 

Therefore, what is presented herein is not official MAJestic information, but rather my interpretations of what might be based upon what I know.

Still, at that, the redactions are fixed. Some opinions that I have are too "leading", if you know what I mean.

However, there are those who earnestly believe that it is worth the time, effort to pursue and investigate. 

Here are some curiosities for the more adventuresome reader. Personally, I do not know if they are worth the time to consider, but some do make for fun and interesting reading…

Alan Holt’s Field Resonance Concepts

While everyone is thinking in terms of one universe, with only one world-line and using advanced propulsion methods to get from point A to point B, the methods themselves can enable world-line crossovers.

Now, a “world-line crossover” can be called many things. It can be called “time” (if conducted naturally). It can be referred to as a “slide” if you use and extraterrestrial artifice, and it can be considered to be “resonant transfer” if you are a NASA scientist.

In line with this idea of resonant transfer are two excellent papers by Alan Holt of NASA. He has a new propulsion concept that has been developed based on a proposed resonance between coherent, pulsed electromagnetic wave forms and gravitational wave forms (or space-time metrics).

 http://keelynet.com/energy/holt1.htm

All the discussions of this tend to be “really out there”. Because they all involve things that have already been “disproved” by “experts”. So in order to read these papers and follow the train of thought, you need to suppress the idea that…

  • FTL travel.
  • Time travel.
  • Change in mass of objects.
  • Change in the gravity of objects.
  • Change in the inertia of objects.
  • Use of “crop circles” for guidance.
  • Tuning on frequencies.

…are all possible given the proper set of conditions.

Now, keep in mind that while this concept is based on the idea for propulsion techniques and technology for geographical movement within the universe, it’s (far) better application is for world-line travel.

World-line travel using Field Resonance Systems…

Space-Time/Field Relationships

The new model of space-time/field interactions (A. C. Holt, "Virtual/Space-Time Manifolds," being revised before publication) will be used in this paper to describe the potential characteristics of electromagnetic/ gravitational field interactions and the performance capabilities of two basic types of field-dependent propulsion systems. 

The model is currently undergoing revision which could alter the description of the interactions but which will not alter the expected effects of the interactions. 

The primary effects are as follows:

1.A decrease or an increase of the gravitational forces acting on a space-time mass or energy system (objects, planets, magnetic fields, etc.) by altering the basic space-time structure of the mass or energy systems energy pattern (can be accomplished by artificially generating a highly energetic spatially and temporally coherent energy pattern)

A decrease or an increase of the total energy in the mass or energy system by altering and fine-tuning its energy pattern to match or establish a resonance with the proposed "virtual" structure and patterns associated with a distant space-time point

The translocation of an object or space-time mass/energy pattern from one space-time point to another by altering the pattern to achieve a very precise resonance with a "virtual" pattern associated with a distant space—time point

While the author would prefer to wait until the model is complete and the results of initial experimental research are available before utilizing the model, he believes that the first steps toward the development of field-dependent propulsion systems must be taken in Fiscal Year 1981. 

The first steps are associated with the development of a field physics laboratory which can be used to investigate and quantify space-time/field interactions to achieve a breakthrough in our understanding of the relationships between gravitational and electromagnetic forces. 

Thus, the model is utilized in this paper to emphasize the point that a breakthrough in field physics can be achieved in the early 1980s if the required research is given a high priority in funding allocations and if a highly motivated well-qualified research team can be assembled.

Rather than develop another theory which would remain untested experimentally, the author developed a theoretical model which could be easily used in a field physics laboratory to investigate space-time/field interactions. 

If, as a result of the experimental testing, this qualitative model is basically confirmed, then a detailed mathematical description can hopefully be developed and the model will be upgraded to a mature theory. The nuclear physicists have used this type of experimental approach to make substantial progress towards the unification of the strong and weak nuclear forces (utilizing the experimental results of particle accelerators).

The model describes the gravitational force, electromagnetic forces, and mass (particles) as the variations of the characteristics of a continuous field of force. 

This field of force can be conceptually identified with Einsteins generalized tensor field which Einstein strived to develop to unify gravitational and electromagnetic forces in a single mathematical formalism. 

The field of force is defined by the interaction of space-time energy patterns (associated with particles, planets, stars, magnetic fields, etc.) and proposed virtual patterns which are associated with each space-time point and which form an underlying structure of space-time.

The virtual structure at each space-time point can be conceptually approximated by a series of virtual states or patterns. 

The virtual structure is actually a many-dimensional structure which transcends and permeates the four dimensions of space-time. A virtual pattern can be described if it is assumed that the pattern manifests as a space-time form. If these virtual patterns undergo a type of "energization" which results in a projection into space-time, patterns such as pulsating spheroids and ellipsoids and dipole, quadrupole, and octupole forms, etc., might result.

-PROSPECTS FOR A BREAKTHROUGH IN FIELD-DEPENDENT "PROPULSION" (PDF)

Now keep in mind that the idea of a “space-time” point is considered to be a geographical location that resides at a specific point in time, it is actually a coordinate related to a specific world-line within our reality universe.

Of course, we do not know what really happened regarding this.

Alan Holt retained his position at NASA and was on their payroll for many many years. An absolute flood of “black projects” came into being right after this paper was written. And simultaneously, a sorts of nonsense about the triviality of this concept hit the public narratives.

Plus the idea that genius was somehow connected with “crop circle” answers did not help…

Saturday, September 22, 2012
Crop Circles, Amazing Thoughts By NASA Project Manager
Some years ago during the summer of 2000, a NASA Project Manager by the name of Alan Holt visited Wiltshire, and decided to look at a few crop pictures. Humorously he “put out the thought in a crop picture, somewhat as a test but really a request, that he would like to see a crop pictogram appear, which could provide some insight into the direction he should pursue in his advanced transport / field physics research activities” Two days later, a spectacular diagram of the “magnetic field near a bar magnet” appeared at Avebury Trusloe:

This is Alan Holt's Story and it is pretty amazing! 
Richard
Saturday, September 22, 2012
Crop Circles, Amazing Thoughts By NASA Project Manager

Some years ago during the summer of 2000, a NASA Project Manager by the name of Alan Holt visited Wiltshire, and decided to look at a few crop pictures. Humorously he “put out the thought in a crop picture, somewhat as a test but really a request, that he would like to see a crop pictogram appear, which could provide some insight into the direction he should pursue in his advanced transport / field physics research activities” Two days later, a spectacular diagram of the “magnetic field near a bar magnet” appeared at Avebury Trusloe.

So we know that this paper and theory hit NASA, was part of a flood of “black projects” and was suppressed in the public domain.

So what it is?

The field resonance system artificially generates an energy pattern which precisely matches or resonates with a virtual pattern associated with a distant space-time point.

The field resonance system .
The field resonance system.

According to the model, if a fundamental or precise resonance is established, (using hydromagnetic wave fine-tuning techniques)…

… the spacecraft, vehicle, or person, will be very strongly and equally repelled by surrounding virtual patterns.

http://keelynet.com/energy/holt2.htm

Using this concept, a spacecraft “propulsion” system potentially capable of galactic and inter-galactic travel without prohibitive “travel times” has pretty much been designed. This goes further than just geographic travel, but includes travel through “time” as well.

And since “time” is just a long string of connected world-lines, this means that this technique can enable world-line travel.

Following a breakthrough in space-time/field interactions, two basic types of asymmetric propulsion systems will likely be developed. Type 1 is a "gravimagnetic" system which utilizes specific electromagnetic energy configurations to generate an artificial gravitational field (in effect). 

Type 2 is a "field resonance" system which relies on the use of electromagnetic energy configurations to establish precise resonances with virtual energy patterns at distant space-time points. These space-time "form resonances" result in "jumps" or translocations of the spacecraft/aircraft to the distant points....

...In a research study completed in 1979,9 it was determined that oscillations of magnetic field lines could enhance or inhibit magnetic field line reconnection. The effect of these hydromagnetic waves is dependent on the wave frequency, wave length, wave amplitude, and wave orientation with respect to the field lines. By varying the wave characteristics and the strength and duration of the magnetic field source pulses, and by sequencing these field pulses, a wide variety of energy patterns with a high degree of spatial and temporal coherence can be generated.

-PROSPECTS FOR A BREAKTHROUGH IN FIELD-DEPENDENT "PROPULSION" (PDF)

So what?

Well, aside from the obvious benefits related to physical movement, there is the relationship between electromagnetic wave forms and gravitational wave forms.  Which then, of course led me to this curiosity found HERE… That’s right; let’s talk about “crop circles”.

http://www.cropcircleconnector.com/anasazi/fringe2014y.html
Alan Holt is currently a Project Manager for NASA's International Space Station: This article does not necessarily reflect the views of NASA and are the sole views of Alan Holt

In July of (2000) I had the opportunity to visit the United Kingdom for a couple weeks. The primary purpose for my trip was to spend some time with my companion Hildi who lives in Glastonbury, England. Since I knew the timing of my visit would allow me to see and hopefully visit some "crop circles" I did a little exploration of web sites before I left.

I was absolutely amazed at the patterns which I saw, and was wondering why these developments hadn,t surfaced in the general press in the U.S. After my visit and discussions with various people in the UK, it is now clear to me that crop "circles" or pictograms have suffered the same fate that UFOs and other phenomena have which do not fit the current paradigm.

Upon arriving in London on July 20, I was picked up by my companion and a friend and on the way back to Glastonbury we stopped at the Barge Inn. The Barge Inn is located along one of the many canals crisscrossing England, and is a meeting place and informal headquarters for crop "circle" researchers and visitors. Photos of the latest crop "circles" are tacked up on a bulletin board.

Outside looking toward nearby hills a simple crop "circle" could be seen. After getting something to eat, we went up to the circle and entered it. The plants on the floor of the circle were woven into a basket like pattern. Unlike the few hoaxed or manmade "circles", the stalks of the plants were not broken but looked like they had suddenly decided to bend down and grow in a horizontal direction. My assessment after visiting several crop pictograms, is that the man-made "circles" are relatively few, which are composed of simple forms having very poor geometric precision compared to the amazing pictograms.

There are other factors which clearly delineate a man-made circle from the absolutely amazing pictograms, which can be learned from the web sites, and several books. I would recommend the book "Crop Circles: The Greatest Mystery of Modern Times" by Lucy Pringle,1999, Harper Collins Publishers, ISBN 07225 3855 3, $27.00. I had an opportunity to talk with Lucy at the Glastonbury Crop Circle Conference held in July 28 -30 during my visit. She personally flies out over the fields and takes photos.

Since I have for many years used enhanced intuitive capabilities to pick up additional information, I did sit in the crop circle near the Barge Inn and picked up some interesting impressions pertaining to the future. In addition, I put out the thought, somewhat as a test but really a request, that I would like to see a crop pictogram appear which could provide me some insight into the direction I should pursue in my advanced transport/field physics research activities.

We then went on to Glastonbury, to London, and then back to Glastonbury. Eight days later, we went back out into crop circle country and again visited the Barge Inn. On the bulletin board, was an astounding new pictogram

l The pictogram was shaped like a bar magnet, with magnetic field lines coming out of the north and south poles. The pictogram had appeared on July 22 two days after my arrival in the England (and my first visit to the Barge Inn). We determined its location, visited the pattern and spent a lot of time exploring it.

The precision and intricacy of the pattern was stunning. Even the farmer whose field the pattern had appeared in was overwhelmed by this pictogram. He indicated that there had been other patterns in his field before, but he had still harbored some doubts concerning who or what had made them. But with the appearance of this pictogram, he knows now that this is a true mystery. From his perspective there is NO possibility that this was made by humans or our technology, and I agree with him.

While in the pattern, I recalled the thought which I had sent out for a pictogram to appear which could provide some direction for my research activities. I have to conclude that whatever intelligence is responsible for these patterns, it has connections with or links with our human consciousness.

There is truly an astounding phenomena unfolding in England and elsewhere in the world. Its very unfortunate that the unscientific thinking, and perhaps deliberate disinformation, of a few individuals have been picked up and accepted by a naive press world-wide. As a result millions of people have been deprived of the opportunity to experience a consciousness expanding phenomena. It is our civilization,s loss; but fortunately the apparently successful attempt to ridicule or "debunk" crop circles will do nothing stop what may be a major transformation ahead for humanity.

From my perspective, there is also a warning or "be prepared" message coming through the crop pictograms as well. We have not been very good stewards of the planet on which we are living. We have recklessly depleted resources; contaminated water, air and Earth; threatened the foundation of Earth,s viability with the use and testing of nuclear weapons (and perhaps other exotic technology) and continue to waste at least one-half of what we produce (especially here in the U.S.). The Earth can compensate for some of our mistakes, but it too goes through transformations. If our care of our planet is not dramatically improved soon, we may not have many more years to enjoy the beauty and nurturing environment which even now the Earth still provides (the year 2012 could be a turning point).
What should we be learning from crop circles and are enough of us paying attention? It seems that there might be much knowledge passing through our fingertips. We should be harnessing this information for use on our planet now and for future generations.
What should we be learning from crop circles and are enough of us paying attention? It seems that there might be much knowledge passing through our fingertips. We should be harnessing this information for use on our planet now and for future generations.
The field resonance system artificially generates an energy pattern which precisely matches or resonates with a virtual pattern associated with a distant space-time point. According to the model, if a fundamental or precise resonance is established (using hydromagnetic wave fine-tuning techniques), the spacecraft will be very strongly and equally repelled by surrounding virtual patterns. At the same time, through the virtual many-dimensional structure of space-time, a very strong attraction with the virtual pattern of a distant space-time point will exist. The model predicts that this combination of very strong forces will result in the translocation of the spacecraft from its initial position through the many-dimensional virtual structure to the distant space-time point.

The mechanics of this resonance effect will be determined through extensive experimentation, which may also revise the basic resonance requirements. However, the result, a space-time "jump," already appears to be supported by astrophysical research. Several analogies can be used to clarify this effect. It can be described as the temporary formation of an Einstein-Rosen bridge, a tunnel through space-time which connects two different regions in space-time in a way similar to that which has been proposed for a black hole/white hole (quasar) connection. The resonance effect can be considered to be analogous to the nuclear particle tunneling phenomena. In this phenomenon, the wave nature of the particle enables it to tunnel through a potential barrier without having the energy required to go over the barrier. Following this analogy, the spacecrafts wave characteristics are increased dramatically by the artificially generated energy pattern, allowing it to tunnel through the space-time barrier without having the energy normally required to traverse the space between the two space-time points.

The travel times for such trips are expected to be short (seconds to weeks) and dependent on the pattern precision, the amount of energy in the pattern, the space-time distance, and the virtual structure entry point. Time does not have on independent existence in the General Theory of Relativity and it will be redefined in the model as a type of energy flow. However, since time will continue to be used to catalogue our experiences in daily life, its use is likely to continue in the description of this type of long-distance travel.

If the artificial energy pattern does not precisely match the virtual pattern at a distant space-time point, a secondary resonance effect may be observed. In this case, the repulsive and attractive forces are not strong enough to relocate the spacecraft, but the resonance is sufficient to connect the two points through the virtual structure, resulting in an energy flow to or from the distant space-time point. By the selection of appropriate pattern characteristics, the energy pattern can gain energy which can be simultaneously transferred to energy storage and supply systems. For field resonance spacecraft going outside the Earth/Moon system, this technique for maintaining the energy supply could be very useful.

The energy recharging process could be accomplished as a preparatory procedure prior to the initiation of the primary resonance. At a particular stage of the fine-tuning process, the energy pattern could be put into a hold, allowing the pattern to acquire additional energy and charge the energy storage device. At the same time or even preceding this stage, information in the form of the characteristics of energy decreases or increases (space-time energy spectral data) might be used by a sophisticated guidance and control system. The system could use this information to compute final fine-tuning requirements and to verify the location of the virtual patterns space-time association. While these ideas are quite speculative, they do point out that there are potential technical solutions to problems which might otherwise seem to prohibit such travel.

-PROSPECTS FOR A BREAKTHROUGH IN FIELD-DEPENDENT "PROPULSION" (PDF)
What should we be learning from crop circles and are enough of us paying attention? It seems that there might be much knowledge passing through our fingertips. We should be harnessing this information for use on our planet now and for future generations.
What should we be learning from crop circles and are enough of us paying attention? It seems that there might be much knowledge passing through our fingertips. We should be harnessing this information for use on our planet now and for future generations.

A lot here, and it’s all “out there”. I think I’m gonna grab a beer.

The Mandala/Mantra Connection

Incunabula Files / Ong’s Hat refers to a mandala/mantra coordinate system which is used to transport the subject to one of unlimited parallel, other reality Earths.

The principle applies to mass transfer from one set of coordinates to another set of coordinates.

http://www.textfiles.com/bbs/KEELYNET/UNCLASS/ongshat.asc

Sounds “cool” huh? It would refer to a coordinate system to transport a person to alternative world-lines.  Heck, I’d buy into it. For even with my probes, the ability for me to select and choose the target destination (that I’d desire) using manual world-line coordinates has always been <redacted>.

Now, this system has benefit, in that it is very similar <redacted>.

<redacted>

<redacted>

Now the story behind this use of “Magik” to create self-induced slides between realities is like a page out of the Heinlein Novel “Glory Road”. And as such, perhaps you the reader should hear the full story…

It all started with a road map of New Jersey. A little north of the Red Lion Circle, in the heart of the Burlington County Pine Barrens, the map depicted a tiny hamlet marked with the unusual name of “Ongs Hat.” In the early 1930s, Henry Charlton Beck, a reporter with the Camden Courier Post, became curious. After convincing his editor that a story could be found there, he and a photographer packed up a car and set off to investigate.[1] 

Little did he know that his explorations at Ongs Hat, and a succession of later voyages to mysterious places in the hinterlands of New Jersey, would inspire generations of other “lost town hunters” –pouring over ancient maps, exploring dismal cellar holes in the middle of nowhere, and sharing their discoveries with one another – first by telephone and letter and presently through online forums.

In Beck’s time, the best way to Ong’s Hat was the rough tarred road out of Pemberton. Little travelled, the long, slow road passed through miles of bleak forest, cranberry bogs, and forlorn cedars where scarce a human foot had trod. Only a dusty clearing betrayed the location of where the town once stood. Today, the road still follows the same route, but it is now well-maintained asphalt. 

Want to go? Just travel south from Pemberton, past the old Magnolia Road Tavern, until you come across a restaurant on your right hand side. You’ve arrived in Ong’s Hat – miles away from anywhere. Blink and you’ll miss it.

The story of Ong’s Hat begins long before the birth of our nation. On February 5, 1631 the ship Lyon arrived in Boston Harbor from Bristol, England. The settlers on board included Francis Ong, of Suffolk County, England; his wife Francis; and children Simon, Jacob, and Isaac.[2] Members of the Society of Friends, the Ongs left England seeking religious tolerance in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.[3] Isaac and his wife, Mary, moved to Burlington County around 1688, eventually settling on a plantation in Mansfield Township. 

They had five children: Jacob, Jeremiah, Isaac Jr., Sarah, and Elizabeth. On June 13, 1696 Jacob Sr. died, leaving his plantation and other property to his second wife, Sarah.[4]

Jacob Ong was born on his father’s plantation around 1672, and followed in his footsteps as a farmer. An early court case in 1698 tells of Jacob being accused of riding his horse at a gallop “in the fair time Betwixt the Market house and the water side” in Burlington City – charges that were eventually dropped when nobody appeared in court to prosecute.[5] Sometime after 1699 he left Mansfield, following his sister Sarah and her new husband, Edward Andrews, to Egg Harbor.[6]

The forlorn cedar swamps along the Stop the Jade Creek called to Jacob, and in 1700 he purchased 100 acres of land in Northampton Township, encompassing the area that would later be known as Ong’s Hat.[7] There is no evidence that he ever intended to build a home there. It’s more likely he realized that he could make good money harvesting the cedars on his land.

So what about the hat? The oldest maps simply show the location as “Ongs.” Thomas Gordon’s Gazetteer of 1834 seems to be the first published source in which the town gains its puzzling surname.
The Magnolia Road Tavern, just north of Ong's Hat.

Several theories abound explaining the unusual name. The most famous recounts Jacob Ong as a type of dandy, as best as the eighteenth century could produce, that regularly visited the local tavern. 

Jacob was quite the charmer and known for wearing a fine silk hat. One night he seems to have gotten on the wrong side of his dance partner who, in a fit of anger, snatched the hat from Jacob’s head and stomped on it in the middle of the dance floor. This story can be discounted, as a tavern was not located here until the early 1800s. Another story is that Ong’s Hat is a misspelling of Ong’s Hut, and that the Ong family built a hut or some other structure as a convenient stopping-over point between Egg Harbor and Burlington or Mansfield.

I find the most plausible theory to be one concerning the tavern at Ong’s Hat. Isaac Haines was one of the first recorded tavern keepers in the area, establishing his business circa 1800.[8] In the days where many people could not read, an identifying mark was more valuable than words. It doesn’t stretch the imagination to picture the tavern keeper painting a large hat on a crude pine board and hanging it from a pole to announce to passersby that they had reached the “Ong’s Hat Tavern.”

The town of Ong’s Hat soldiered on in relative anonymity until tragedy struck. About 1917, a pine hawker named John Zimbacke and his wife mysteriously disappeared from their small cabin. Nine years later, brothers Orville and Joseph Carpenter came across the skull of the woman while hunting for deer along the fringes of a cranberry bog north of Ong’s Hat. Arriving on the scene, Burlington County detectives, led by Ellis Parker, found the bones of John scattered by buzzards across nearly two miles. 

Suspicion fell to the couple’s son, who disappeared shortly before his parents went missing.[9] The trail led Parker to New York City where, unfortunately, it went cold. It has been said that Parker kept the skull of the woman in his office as a reminder of the case he was unable to solve.[10]

Eight years later, another crime brought Ong’s Hat back to the headlines. Farmer Ellwood Anderson was driving from Mount Holly to his home near Reed’s Bogs when he found the road blocked. It was shortly before 8 PM and the dim light of the moon illuminated the vehicle that had halted his progress. Anderson stopped his car and walked towards the vehicle, whose doors stood open. 

Inside, the bodies of two men slumped over to the side. Peering out into the dimly lit woods, he saw another body. Horrified, he ran back to his car and phoned the State Police barracks in Columbus.[11]

When the police arrived, they found that the men had all been shot at least twice at close range with a double-barrel shotgun. Once again, Ellis Parker made his way out to Ong’s Hat to investigate. Details on the victims came first – Edward Reihl, Stanley Zimmer, and William Schwar, all from Easton, Pennsylvania.[12] 

Prohibition had just started, and the three young men were known to be members of a gang that would follow molasses trucks to clandestine stills in Pennsylvania and Western Jersey. They would burst out after the truck had arrived and shake the owners of the still down for money with a threat to report their operations. The men frequently ran afoul of Pennsylvania mobsters, and it was reported that they had been “beaten up” several times prior. 

The detectives were tipped off that the trio had planned to raid a still in Trenton before the mobsters got to them. “They tried to burn somebody up once too often,” Detective Parker said to a Trenton Evening Times reporter, “and they got burned up themselves.” 

Parker surmised that the perpetrators rounded up the men and drove to a predetermined spot in the backwoods near Ong’s Hat. The men were removed from the car, lined up, executed, and haphazardly returned to the vehicle. Nearby residents reported hearing the retorts from the shotgun, but assumed that it was blasting being done nearby.[13]

When Henry Charlton Beck visited in the late 1920s, he found the hamlet to be little more than a clearing with bits of broken brick, pieces of roofing, cast-off shoes, and long, straggly Indian grass to mark where the town once stood. 

He found one last resident, Eli Freed, trying to make a living there. Freed, then seventy-nine years old, had moved there from Chicago. At Ong’s hat, Freed said, he had cleared twenty acres by hand and built a house with the help of a man called Amer. He was having a rough time of it – the deer and rabbits kept eating the produce he attempted to grow, despite the high fences constructed to keep them out.[14] By the time Beck came back to revisit, Freed had departed and Ongs Hat was deserted.

Ultimately, the strangest tale about Ong’s Hat has to be about the Incunabula Papers. In the papers, it’s claimed, Wali Fard, an American expatriate and follower of tantric and shamanistic magic, returned to America after the fall of Afghanistan to the Soviets. He laundered his savings by buying 200 acres of land near Ong’s Hat, including the former Ong’s Hat Rod and Gun Club. There, with several other people who had followed him from New York, he founded the Moorish Science Ashram.[16]

Ten years later, the ashram became a place of refuge for other Moors and outcasts. Among the new residents, by then living in a scattering of weather-gray shacks, Airstream trailers, recycled chicken coops, and mail-order yurts, were Frank and Althea Dobbs, siblings and scientists. Joseph Matheney, one of the authors of the Incunabula Papers, claims that the Dobbs were scientists who lost their positions at Princeton University when they attempted to submit a thesis based on “cognitive chaos” – a scientific and philosophical system that stated that patterns of thought could affect autonomic functions like tissue repair and aging, unlock the brains unused potential, or perhaps even control matter itself.[17]

At the ashram, the scientists resumed their aborted experiments. Through trial and error they found that by controlling thought patterns, especially with the use of sensory deprivation, that one might be able to cross over to another universe. 

They constructed a series of “vessels” they named “eggs” that would facilitate the journey. 

The legend continues that one night the compound was raided in a “black ops” operation and the buildings and experiments all destroyed. Elsewhere the papers say that groups of refugees left before the raid happened, settling in Ong’s Hat in a parallel universe – one just like our own but without human habitation.[18]

While the events that they claim happened at Ong’s Hat are certainly fictional – there was never any Ong’s Hat Rod and Gun Club, for example – the story itself once again thrusts the tiny backwoods hamlet back into the spotlight. Joseph Matheny and others created the Incunabula story as an experiment in “culture jamming” – creating a fictional, yet somewhat plausible, story and weaving it into the social consciousness. 

He was successful – years of photocopied pamphlets, text files uploaded to pirate and fringe internet bulletin board systems, websites, blogs, radio interviews, and books have cemented the infamy of Ong’s Hat.

Whether it’s a hat, a hut, or a tavern, Ong’s Hat is certainly one of the most infamous of the Pine Barrens ghost towns.

-A Hat, a Hut, or a Tavern: The Tale of Ong’s Hat

Ah, but I am afraid that every indication is that it is but a fictional urban legend. As it has been “proven” to be a hoax. From Wikipedia;

“The urban legend (or alternate history) states that a facility manned by renegade Princeton professors conducted quantum physics and chaos theory experiments, and according to conspiracy theories, discovered a new theory for dimensional travel using a device called The EGG.”

It is a pretty interesting concept. However, the back-story of this subject’s history is rather sketchy.  Also from Wikipedia;

“The threads of the story can be traced back as far as the 1980s on bulletin board systems, old xerox mail art networks and early zines. The aim was to create a fictional story line, and embed it in various media cultures to establish backstory. It may have started as an in-joke, or the first alternate reality game (ARG), a work of transmedia storytelling or as a memetic experiment, to see how far the meme could spread or a combination of all of the above.”

Well, truth or not, it’s certainly interesting stuff for certain. It’s got a little bit of small town lore mixed up with science fiction along with some exciting narratives. If you all want to really study this story or avenue of approach, here are some links to facilitate you on your journey…

The original interactive ebook: On Archive.org

PrintAmazon (exclusively)

DigitalKindle or Free

Audiobook: A professional version of The Incunabula Papers: Ong’s Hat and Other Gateways to New Dimensions is currently available for Audible.comAmazon.com and iTunes.com. Also, see the free version below, The Incunabula Papers- Platinum 20 Year Anniversary Audio Book Edition.

OtherFree versions and other ephemera

The Missouri Connection

The internet is filled with all sorts of stuff. It’s really difficult to sift through the truth through all the lies and disinformation. And yet when you do so, you come across things that just “crack you up”.

Thu Nov 28 2:27:39 AM PST 1996 Mike Marcum, the Missouri guy who made News of the Weird in 1995 after he stole six power company transformers. (Please, dear reader, do not take what you see on the Internet too seriously.)

What was pretty amazing was that he said they were necessary to make his time machine (so he could find out the winning lottery number and come back and buy a ticket). He called a radio show from Nevada in October 1996 and said he was only 30 days away from finishing his invention.

However, it is unknown if he ever completed his machine. Apparently, his Missouri property owner had evicted him for various electrical misadventures in his apartment.

220Kv Combined Power Transformer.
220Kv Combined Power Transformer.

Apparently he had stolen SIX of these enormous power transformers. LOL.

The Michigan Experiment

Speaking about absurd…

This is funny.  I think that it is a bunch of baloney!  It is provided as an example of the nonsense that abounds everywhere.

Date: Tue, 28 Jan 1997 22:37:19 - 0600
From: Barbara Flick
Via : forteana@lists.primenet.com
To: Jerry Decker

Dear Jerry,

Today on the telephone with a friend in Northern California, I was informed about a man in the State of Michigan who had invented a "time machine." This man had supposedly worked on the legendary Philadelphia Experiment and informed his friends and confidants that he "knew what he was doing."

He set up these five 300-pound magnets in a circle and had them super-energized with electric currents. He put a cat in the center of the circle, and the cat disappeared. Then he put a goat in the circle, and the goat also disappeared into the mists of time.

Finally, he got into the center of the circle himself, and he, too, disappeared into "another dimension," never to reappear again. Anybody else heard anything more about this? Or is it just another "old wives' tale"?

According to my California friend, this supposedly happened quite recently; and he is going to try to find out more information about it, such as the man's name and where this "experiment" is said to have taken place. I will post a follow-up of anything else of pertinence about this matter.

The Russian Experiment

Ugh. (In a thick Russian accent) “Send me money.  I send you a time machine.”

Date: Sat, 21 Dec 1996 20:26:16 -0 800
From: alex@frolov.spb.ru (Alex Frolov)
Subject: Re: June 1996 Proceedings "New Ideas in Natural Sciences", contents
From: Jerry Decker
Organization: KeelyNet

Hi Dr. Frolov!

Please reserve a copy of the book for me. Should the fund transfer be $60 in cashier check, international money order or what? The topic list was quite intriguing..

One other point, you mentioned a fellow who invented a time machine? Is this fact? How has he proven it and have others experimented with it or duplicated the research? Thank you for your time and assistance!

Dear Jerry W. Decker, Yes, I reserved a copy of Proceedings for you. Payment is possible by Western Union in St.-Petersburg, for Mr. Alexander V. Frolov. To get the money from Western Union office I must know the control number of your transfer. Other way is bank transfer in my account:

About the time machine: There is a Mr. Vadim Chernobrov in Moscow. He is a PhD and in his dissertation at the Moscow Aviation Institute he is considering the electromagnetic propulsion drive for flying system. He is working with UFO facts also.

He has collected a great database (over 1500 people) working with perpetuum mobiles, antigravitation devices and chronogenerators of different types. I am very honored to have a direct contact with him.

On December 10-11 he and other persons organized in the Russian Parlament the conference for ecological commission and their main topic was the real possibility for cleaning up of the enviroment by means of new alternative energy technologies.

Chernobrov's paper on his experiments to change the rate of time is published in our Proceedings. 

In several words: He used electromagnets installed so as to produce several spherical envelopes:one envelope is installed inside of another and the entire system is a multi-envelope structure like the russian toy called the "matrioshka". (nested dolls) The goal is to make a special type electromagnetic field that is moving from periphery to central point. The shift of rate of time in such a system is very small: several seconds per one hour of experiment
.
Alexander V. Frolov
P.O.Box 37,
St. Petersburg, 193024
Russia
Tel:7-812-2747877

The Dallas Connection

Another story. Maybe this is just another good yarn.

Reply-To: forteana@lists.primenet.com
Hi Juergen!

Yes, I have a hard time with it, but there are numerous correlations with free energy and antigrav experiments that indicate something deeper here. 

From the posts I've seen on Forteana, maybe one in 30 is worth any thought, but I thought I'd give it a shot since the Michigan story came from there. 

I plan to include the newspaper articles, the Forteana post and some other material on my website since many of our people are techies and quite open to such wild claims.

If no one ever investigates, we might miss the boat just because it looks too wild when considered from an orthodox science standpoint….so I don't mind bridging between the two….bottomline, it works or it doesn't. 

Now, where to get 5-300 pound magnets….

You know, from your posts that I've seen on Forteana, I did not think too highly, but I do appreciate you responding to me directly and to 'some' degree open to further investigation on the subject. Maybe it was just 'in kind' posts that portrayed you in this light…..

I have a friend who knew the owner of an electronics company. This man was very intrigued by high density magnetic fields. One day he built a transformer on a motorcycle type frame and installed a 'dead man switch' which would disable the power if the switch was released.

With his technicians running the machine, the owner sat on the frame and the power was applied. I have no idea if it was DC or a special freq AC. After about 3 minutes, the man began looking around the room as if he were seeing something different or new…shortly after, his body began to shimmer as if disappearing. It was at this point, he released the switch and the power went off.

He reported that the walls of the room began to melt away, showing a pristine, undeveloped landscape as if the city and this building had never been there. 

One of the fellow techs was chomping at the bit to ride this thing.

The owner finally agreed only after the tech signed a medical and legal release in the event anything bad happened to him. He sat on the frame, power was applied and nothing happened until about 3 minutes had elapsed. This guy began looking around, just like the owner had, and his body began to shimmer. He did not release the switch.

As more time elapsed, the mans' body disappeared from view, yet the dead man switch was STILL BEING PRESSED. After 5 minutes, the owner had the other techs turn off the power.

The rider reappeared, babbling and drooling, totally insane. The machine is supposed to be locked up in the owners garage and he has moved to Colorado. 

I know this sounds like so much BS, but there is more that I won't bother you with at this time.

Something is going on here that is beyond urban folklore. Thanks for your interest, perhaps when I get a file compiled for my website, we can collect other correlative information that might give further insight into an experiment.

Personally, I would NOT step into a zone that caused me to disappear…where do you go and can you get back? Currently, I believe it is possible that we could go to one of many alternate Earths, totally undeveloped and which followed a different timeline.

How cool, millions of other Earths', coexisting slightly out of phase with us, wonder if thats where Judge Crater, the Mayans and all those missing people and cultures disappear to? 

Seeya!

The Florida Connection – Mental Shifts

This stuff makes great reading for the inquisitive 12 year old.

Walter Rawls, who worked with the effects of monopolar magnetic fields on matter with the late Albert Roy Davis, told me in a telephone conversation of his experiments with a North pole magnet situated over the pineal gland.

A mask was made which held the North pole end of a long cylindrical magnet over the pineal gland. The purpose was to stimulate the gland and see if there was anything to this 'third eye' business. Exposure was in the range of 10-30 minutes per day over a period of about 4 weeks.

Within the first week, he was sitting at his desk reading documents when he noticed something move out of the corner of his eye. As he looked up, the ghostly figure of a man had walked through one wall, moved across the room and disappeared through another wall. The figure was totally unaware of Walter. Further exposures to this North pole field took place over a second and third week.

The second week, the same ghostly figure moved through the room and glanced toward Walter as he passed through. This time, the figure appeared to have slightly more detail, not quite so ghostly.
The third week, busy working on documents, Walter noticed a change in the room. When he looked up, the wall had dissolved away and he was looking at a small hill where a man and woman sat beneath a tree. It was the same ghostly male figure who he'd seen on the other occasions. He sat quite still, watching this pastoral scene for several minutes.

The man looked over toward Walter and appeared startled. It was as if he clearly SAW Walter this time and possibly recognized Walter as the ghost he had seen the previous week! The image faded away and the wall restored to its normal condition. From that moment on, Walter never used the pineal stimulator again.

In conversations about this, with Walter and other interested people, it was mentioned that there is a theory that we have multiple energy bodies, much like the KA and the BA of ancient Egypt. Each energy body lives in another reality, yet communicates with our consciousness here in this reality.

Another comment was that consciousness simply creates an energy body in whatever reality it VISITS. Prolonged presence in a given reality increases the density of the energy body, moving from a phantom, ghostly form that was at first not easily perceptible to the inhabitants of the other reality until the intruding energy body had become sufficiently dense to trigger their senses.

That could explain why repeated exposures would add density to Walter's other reality body, allowing its denizens to perceive him, thus the startled reaction from the male figure.

Montuk Project / The Philadelphia Experiment

Truth, lies, or something else. Who knows?

Based out of an abandoned Air Force radar station on the eastern end of Long Island, the Montauk Project was apparently (if you believe the narrative) a series of top secret United States government experiments following the Philadelphia Experiment, whose purpose was to create the technology to render ships invisible to radar detection.

Apparently, the 1943 project was almost too much of a success, as the USS Eldridge supposedly went literally invisible before being teleported into another dimension, eventually reappearing off the coast of Norfolk, Virginia.

http://www.weirdus.com/states/new_york/unexplained_phenomena/montauk_project/index.php

Because many of the crew died when the project went wrong and those who didn’t were driven to the brink of insanity, official funding for the Philadelphia Experiment was pulled.

However, scientists and military officials were fascinated with the experiment’s results and wanted to continue exploring the possibilities of teleportation and interdimensional travel, so the Montauk Project was launched in the 1960s.

http://www.tokenrock.com/explain-montauk-project-69.html

Headed by Dr. John von Neumann, the Montauk Project focused on examining the psychological changes of those who traveled through dimensions.

He was also tasked with determining why the Philadelphia Experiment was a disaster despite its achievements in teleportation.

They held numerous theories. Perhaps one of the most interesting is associated with a world-line reference point.

According to their theories, humans are born with a time reference point that is linked to the electromagnetic fields unique to this Earth and dimension.

This is why such a dramatic jump to another dimensional plane was detrimental to so many of the crew, causing insanity and death.

During the Montauk Project experiments, Von Neumann solved this problem by creating a computer-simulated Earth and altering the body’s time reference points.

http://surbrook.devermore.com/herosource/pulp_hero/montauk/the_montauk_project.pdf

According to documents on the Montauk Project, Von Neumann succeeded at sending people to other dimensions without consequence.

However, upon the experiment’s completion in 1967, a report was sent to Congress on their findings about mind control and interdimensional travel. Congress halted funding and terminated the project, fearing of mass mind control.

Pretty famous and most people know all this in one way or the other. Mostly from movies and other documentaries that play scary horror music in the background. 

But…

…How about looking at it as a Resonant Field Transfer Experiment.

http://keelynet.com/energy/philad1.htm

Speaking of this…

Al Bielek & his Claims

Nut case or is there something there? 

The Montauk project is actually a conspiracy theory. It alleges that there were a series of United States government projects which were conducted at Montauk Air Force Station on Montauk, Long Island. The secret projects dealt with an incredible research on time travel and in the development of its techniques. The legend of the Montauk Project finds its roots in the Montauk Project Series of books by Preston Nichols. The author claimed that he participated in the time travelling experiments under the project.

Al Bielek was one of the  Montauk Boys programmers. He handled the operations of the mind control program. During the project, he came in contact with Preston Nichols and Duncan Cameron (alleged time-traveller of the Montauk Project). In 1980’s the time travelling experiment became operational. Al Bielek himself participated in those time travel experiments.

Hum…

Important sections about clocking of mass to a planetary body to establish and lockin the ‘creation coordinate’ AND the ability to access any spatial (NOT TEMPORAL) location visited prior to the present.

http://keelynet.com/energy/bielek1.htm

Some key links…

The Resonant Gravity Field Coil

Or in other words, how to manipulate reality.

http://keelynet.com/gravity/gravity3.txt

Some links…

Kabbalistic idea of the MerKaBa

Also worthy of attention is the ancient Kabbalistic idea of the MerKaBa and the use of the Tree of Life as a map to these other realities.

From my limited understanding of the MerKaBa, it is claimed to be a mentally constructed vehicle that is used by the aspirant to carry (and protect) its occupant as it travels through the different worlds.

For info on the MerKaBa, check out

  • http://bbs.cruzio.com/~flower/1m m3.htm
  • http://bbs.cruzio.com/~flower/1m m2.htm

There are also indications that it is the RATIO of each frequency to another within a specific signature that is the ONLY important consideration, frequency is irrelevant since all frequencies relate to others through octaves and harmonics.

Temporal alterations with “free energy” Devices

It is also worthy of note that many of the reports of free energy devices, when in operation and drawing ‘negative energy’ also produce phenomena relating to weight loss and temporal alterations.

Years ago, Tom Bearden told me of an experiment he and an unnamed researcher had carried out using a scalar generated from interferometry. Two projectors were aimed to coincide at a fixed point in space. When power was applied and the frequency/phase was adjusted, there was no apparent change in the target area.

After some time had elapsed, the two went to get something to eat. When they came back a few hours later, it was observed that a black 'something' like a slit or opening had appeared at the target area.
Because they were working in a totally unknown area and for fear that 'something' might come through this slit once it opened up, they discontinued the experiment. A couple of years later, while visiting Peter Kelly at his lab in Georgia, he admitted he was the other researcher and verified Beardens report.

A couple of years later, after we both spoke at a conference in Denver and on the plane back to Dallas, I told Peter about an interesting experiment done by Walter Russell and recounted in his excellent book 'Atomic Suicide'. Two coils were wound on cones.
The apices of these conical coils were pointed towards each other and power was applied so that bucking fields were created by the collision of opposite magnetic fields. Very fine iron filings were dropped into the gap between the coils and a levitating sphere was produced.

When the coils were slowly pulled apart, an oval followed by a sphere surrounded by a disk appeared. When Peter arrived home, he tried this experiment and reported that when power was turned on, nearly everyone in the building complained of feeling nauseous or queasy. He explained that an experiment was going on so that everyone would understand what was happening.

After about an hour, the very clear and cloudless sky began to suddenly boil up and a major thunderstorm ensued. Power was removed from the coils and the storm dissipated as fast as it had arisen??? Weird stuff no doubt and subject to duplication by others if we all share our information…

Link pool for some further thought generation…

Conclusion

In a universe that consists of a multitude of world-lines, why couldn’t the manipulation of the inherent frequencies result in world-line slides?

Think about it.

Why wouldn’t it?

In this first part of a multi-part series, we discuss the DIY aspects of creating a machine that would be capable of generating forced world-line transitions. Fundamental to this is the necessity of being able to control the frequencies of vibration of our reality.

There are different ways to accomplish this.

In subsequent posts we will look at some of the mechanisms from which we can alter the frequencies of vibration within a region, or around yourself.

Do you want more?

I have more posts on this subject in my MAJestic Index here…

MAJestic

Articles & Links

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To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

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Robert A. Heinlein – Lazarus Long 1, Methuselahs Children (full text)

This is the full text of Robert Heinlein’s novel “Methuselahs Children”. It is the first of a series of novels that features the character of “Lazarus Long”. This is great escapist reading and as you read it, take a gander at the world around us. Check out the news. Who’s to say that the PTB aren’t some version of the elite that are described in this story…eh? Remember that this is an absolutely fictional work. Yet, we can see some interesting parallels with the super wealthy on this planet and the systems that they have co-opted for their own personal purposes.

Imagine a universe where selective breeding and carefully planned marriages (with subtle financial encouragement from a secretive group called the Howard Foundation) were carried out over the last 150 years.

Further, imagine that their selective breeding of humans have resulted in a group of humans that have the extraordinary trait of extreme longevity. Yeah. They live really, really, really long lives.

Enter Lazarus Long, the patriarch of the Family.

Lazarus, born Woodrow Wilson Smith, carries his two hundred plus years quite well! When pressed for his true age, he’s either not telling or he won’t admit that he truly doesn’t know himself!

In 2125, a series of events result in the global administration and the remainder of earth’s population discovering the Family’s existence.

A frenzy of enraged jealousy erupts as a maddened, frustrated world seeks to discover the secret fountain of youth they are convinced the Family is guarding for their own use. Hounded by the threat of murder, torture, brainwashing and ultimate extinction by their shorter lived neighbors, the Family flees earth on an untested starship.

In Methuselah’s Children, Heinlein has crafted an exciting novel, a message, a screenplay and the movie script all at once. Descriptive passages, while compelling and very cleverly written are sparse and infrequent and the plot is almost exclusively driven by razor-sharp dialogue.

Heinlein’s method of conveying the story through his characters’ mouths has got wit; it’s got dialect; it’s got humor and intelligence; it’s got sensible science; it’s got humanity and it’s got credibility.

Their expressions and manner of speaking firmly place the origins of the story in the 1940s USA but somehow Heinlein has managed to inject enough charm to leave it timeless.

Hard sci-fi runs rampant through every page …

Methuselahs Children

Methuselah’s Children

PART I

“MARYSPERLING, you’re a fool not to marry him!”

Mary Sperling added up her losses and wrote a check before answering, “There’s too much difference in age.” She passed over her credit voucher. “I shouldn’t gamble with you- sometimes I think you’re a sensitive.”

“Nonsense! You’re just trying to change the subject. You must be nearly thirty and you won’t be pretty forever.” Mary smiled wryly. “Don’t I know it!”

“Bork Vanning can’t be much over forty and he’s a plus citizen. You should jump at the chance.” “You jump at it. I must run now. Service, Ven.”

“Service,” Ven answered, then frowned at the door as it contracted after Mary Sperling. She itched to know why Mary would not marry a prime catch like the Honorable Bork Vanning and was almost as curious as to why and where Mary was going, but the custom of privacy stopped her.

Mary had no intention of letting anyone know where she was going. Outside her friend’s apartment she dropped down a bounce tube to the basement, claimed her car from the robopark, guided it up the ramp and set the controls for North Shore. The car waited for a break in the traffic, then dived into the high-speed stream and hurried north. Mary settled back for a nap.

When its setting was about to run out, the car beeped for instructions; Mary woke up and glanced out. Lake Michigan was a darker band of darkness on her right. She signaled traffic control to let her enter the local traffic lane; it sorted out her car and placed her there, then let her resume manual control. She fumbled in the glove compartment.

The license number which traffic control automatically photographed as she left the controlways was not the number the car had been wearing.

She followed a side road uncontrolled for several miles, turned into a narrow dirt road which led down to the shore, and stopped. There she waited, lights out, and listened. South of her the lights of Chicago glowed; a few hundred yards inland the controlways whined, but here there was nothing but the little timid noises of night creatures. She reached into the glove compartment, snapped a switch; the instrument panel glowed, uncovering other dials behind it. She studied these while making adjustments. Satisfied that no radar watched her and that nothing was moving near her, she snapped off the instruments, sealed the window by her and started up again.

What appeared to be a standard Camden speedster rose quietly up, moved out over the lake, skimming it-dropped into the water and sank. Mary waited until she was a quarter mile off shore in fifty feet of water, then called a station. “Answer,” said a voice.

“‘Life is short—’”

”’-but the years are long.’”

“‘Not,’” Mary responded, “‘while the evil days come not.’”

“I sometimes wonder,” the voice answered conversationally. “Okay, Mary. I’ve checked you.” “Tommy?”

“No-Cecil Hedrick. Are your controls cast loose?” “Yes. Take over.”

Seventeen minutes later the car surfaced in a pool which occupied much of an artificial cave. When the car was beached, Mary got out, said hello to the guards and went on through a tunnel into a large underground room where fifty or sixty men and women were seated. She chatted until a clock announced midnight, then she mounted a rostrum and faced them.

“I am,” she stated, “one hundred and eighty-three years old. Is there anyone here who is older?”

No one spoke. After a decent wait she went on, “Then in accordance with our customs I declare this meeting opened. Will you choose a moderator?”

Someone said, “Go ahead, Mary.” When no one else spoke up, she said, “Very well.” She seemed indifferent to the honor and the group seemed to share her casual attitude-an air of never any hurry, of freedom from the tension of modern life.

“We are met as usual,” she announced, “to discuss our welfare and that of our sisters and brothers. Does any Family representative have a message from his family? Or does anyone care to speak for himself?”

Aman caught her eye and spoke up. “Ira Weatheral, speaking for the Johnson Family. We’ve met nearly two months early. The trustees must have a reason. Let’s hear it.” She nodded and turned to a prim little man in the first row. “Justin … if you will, please.”

The prim little man stood up and bowed stiffly. Skinny legs stuck out below his badly-cut kilt. He looked and acted like an elderly, dusty civil servant, but his black hair and the firm, healthy tone of his skin said that he was a man in his prime. “Justin Foote,” he said precisely, “reporting for the trustees. It has been eleven years since the Families decided on the experiment  of letting the public know that there were, living among them, persons who possessed a probable, life expectancy far in excess of that anticipated by the average man, as well as other persons who had proved the scientific truth of such expectation by having lived more than twice the normal life span of human beings.”

Although he spoke without notes he sounded as if he were reading aloud a prepared report. What he was saying they all knew but no one hurried him; his audience had none of the febrile impatience so common elsewhere. “In deciding,” he droned on, “to reverse the previous long-standing policy of silence and concealment as to the peculiar aspect in which we differ from the balance of the human race, the Families were moved by several considerations. The reason for the original adoption of the policy of concealment should be noted:

“The first offspring resulting from unions assisted by the Howard Foundation were born in 1875. They aroused no comment, for they were in no way remarkable. The Foundation was an openly-chartered non-profit corporation—”

On March 17, 1874, Ira Johnson, medical student, sat in the law offices of Deems, Wingate, Alden, & Deems and listened to an unusual proposition. At last he interrupted the senior partner. “Just a moment! Do I understand that you are trying to hire me to marry one of these women?”

The lawyer looked shocked. “Please, Mr. Johnson. Not at all” “Well, it certainly sounded like it.”

“No, no, such a contract would be void, against public policy. We are simply informing you, as administrators of a trust, that should it come about that you do marry one of the young ladies on this list it would then be our pleasant duty to endow each child of such a union according to the scale here set forth. But there would be no Contract with us involved, nor is there any ‘proposition’ being made to you-and we certainly do not urge any course of action on you. We are simply informing you of certain facts.”

Ira Johnson scowled and shuffled his feet. “What’s it all about? Why?”

“That is the business of the Foundation. One might put it that we approve of your grandparents.” “Have you discussed me with them?” Johnson said sharply.

He felt no affection for his grandparents. Atight-fisted foursome-if any one of them had had the grace to die at a reasonable age he would not now be worried about money enough to finish medical school.

“We have talked with them, yes. But not about you.”

The lawyer shut off further discussion and young Johnson accepted gracelessly a list of young women, all strangers, with the intention of tearing it up the moment he was outside the office. Instead, that night he wrote seven drafts before he found the right words in which to start cooling off the relation between himself and his girl back home. He was glad that he had

never actually popped the question to her-it would have been deucedly awkward.

When he did marry (from the list) it seemed a curious but not too remarkable coincidence that his wife as well as himself had four living, healthy, active grandparents.

“-an openly chartered non-profit corporation,” Foote continued, “and its avowed purpose of encouraging births among persons of sound American stock was consonant with the customs  of that century. By the simple expedient of being closemouthed about the true purpose of the Foundation no unusual methods of concealment were necessary until late in that period during the World Wars sometimes loosely termed ‘The Crazy Years—’”

Selected headlines April to June 1969: BABYBILL BREAKS BANK

2-year toddler youngest winner $1,000,000 TVjackpot White House phones congrats

COURT ORDERS STATEHOUSE SOLD

Colorado Supreme Bench Rules State Old Age Pension Has First Lien All State Property

N.Y. YOUTH MEET DEMANDS UPPER LIMIT ON FRANCHISE “U.S. BIRTH RATE ‘TOP SECRET!’”-DEFENSE SEC CAROLINACONGRESSMAN  COPS  BEAUTYCROWN

“Available for draft for President” she announces while starting tour to show her qualifications

IOWARAISES VOTING AGE TO FORTY-ONE

Rioting on Des Moines Campus

EARTH-EATING FAD MOVES WEST: CHICAGO PARSON EATS CLAYSANDWICH IN PULPIT

“Back to simple things,” he advises flock.

LOS ANGELES HI-SCHOOL MOB DEFIES SCHOOL BOARD

“Higher Pay, Shorter hours, no Homework-We Demand Our Right to Elect Teachers, Coaches.”

SUICIDE RATE UP NINTH SUCCESSIVE YEAR

AEC Denies Fall-Out to Blame

”’-The Crazy Years.’ The trustees of that date decided-correctly, we now believe-that any minority during that period of semantic disorientation and mass hysteria was a probable target for persecution, discriminatory legislation, and even of mob violence. Furthermore the disturbed financial condition of the country and in particular the forced exchange of trust securities for government warrants threatened the solvency of the trust.

“Two courses of action were adopted: the assets of the Foundation were converted into real wealth and distributed widely among members of the Families to be held by them as owners-of-record; and the so-called ‘Masquerade’ was adopted as a permanent policy. Means were found to simulate the death of any member of the Families who lived to a socially embarrassing age and to provide him with a new identity in another part of the country.

“The wisdom of this later policy, though irksome to some, became evident at once during the Interregnum of the Prophets. The Families at the beginning of the reign of the First Prophet had ninety-seven per cent of their members with publicly avowed ages of less than fifty years. The close public registration enforced by the secret police of the Prophets made changes of public identity difficult, although a few were accomplished with the aid of the revolutionary Cabal.

“Thus, a combination of luck and foresight saved our Secret from public disclosure. This was well-we may be sure that things would have gone harshly at that time for any group possessing a prize beyond the power of the Prophet to confiscate.

“The Families took no part as such in the events leading up to the Second American Revolution, but many members participated and served with credit in the Cabal and in the fighting which preceded the fall of New Jerusalem. We took advantage of the period of disorganization which followed to readjust the ages of our kin who had grown conspicuously old. In this we were aided by certain members of the Families who, as members of the Cabal, held key posts in the Reconstruction.

“It was argued by many at the Families’ meeting of 2075, the year of the Covenant, that we should reveal ourselves, since civil liberty was firmly reestablished. The majority did not agree at that time … perhaps through long habits of secrecy and caution. But the renascence of culture in the ensuing fifty years, the steady growth of tolerance and good manners, the semantically sound orientation of education, the increased respect for the custom of privacy and for the dignity of the individual-all of these things led us to believe that the time had at last come when it was becoming safe to reveal ourselves and to take our rightful place as an odd but nonetheless respected minority in society.

“There were compelling reasons to do so. Increasing numbers of us were finding the ‘Masquerade’ socially intolerable in a new and better society. Not only was it upsetting to pull up roots and seek a new background every few years but also it grated to have to live a lie in a society where frank honesty and fair dealing were habitual with most people. Besides that, the Families as a group had learned many things through our researches in the bio-sciences, things which could be of great benefit to our poor shortlived brethren. We needed freedom to help them.

“These and similar reasons were subject to argument. But the resumption of the custom of positive physical identification made the ‘Masquerade’ almost untenable. Under the new orientation a sane and peaceful citizen welcomes positive identification under appropriate circumstances even though jealous of his right of privacy at all other times-so we dared not object; it would have aroused curiosity, marked us as an eccentric group, set apart, and thereby have defeated the whole purpose of the ‘Masquerade.’

“We necessarily submitted to personal identification. By the time of the meeting of 2125, eleven years ago, it had become extremely difficult to counterfeit new identities for the ever- increasing number of us holding public ages incompatible with personal appearance; we decided on the experiment of letting volunteers from this group up to ten per cent of the total membership of the Families reveal themselves for what they were and observe the consequences, while maintaining all other secrets of the Families’ organization.

“The results were regrettably different from our expectations.”

Justin Foote stopped talking. The silence had gone on for several moments when a solidly built man of medium height spoke up. His hair was slightly grizzled-unusual in that group-and his face looked space tanned. Mary Sperling had noticed him and had wondered who he was-his live face and gusty laugh had interested her. But any member was free to attend the conclaves of the Families’ council; she had thought no more of it.

He said, “Speak up, Bud. What’s your report?”

Foote made his answer to the chair. “Our senior psychometrician should give the balance of the report. My remarks were prefatory.”

“For the love o’—” the grizzled stranger exclaimed. “Bud, do you mean to stand there and admit that all you had to say were things we already knew?” “My remarks were a foundation … and my name is Justin Foote, not Bud.’”

Mary Sperling broke in firmly. “Brother,” she said to the stranger, “since you are addressing the Families, will you please name yourself? I am sorry to say that I do not recognize you.”

“Sorry, Sister. Lazarus Long, speaking for myself.”

Mary shook her head. “I still don’t place you.”

“Sorry again-that’s a ‘Masquerade’ name I took at the time of the First Prophet … it tickled me. My Family name is Smith … Woodrow Wilson Smith.” “‘Woodrow Wilson Sm—’ How old are you?”

“Eh? Why, I haven’t figured it lately. One hun … no, two hundred and-thirteen years. Yeah, that’s right, two hundred and thirteen.” There was a sudden, complete silence. Then Mary said quietly, “Did you hear me inquire for anyone older than myself?”

“Yes. But shucks, Sister, you were doing all right. I ain’t attended a meeting of the Families in over a century. Been some changes.” “I’ll ask you to carry on from here.” She started to leave the platform.

“Oh no!” he protested. But she paid no attention and found a seat. He looked around, shrugged and gave in. Sprawling one hip over a corner of the speaker’s table he announced, “All right, let’s get on with it. Who’s next?”

Ralph Schultz of the Schultz Family looked more like a banker than a psychometrician. He was neither shy nor absent-minded and he had a flat, underemphasized way of talking that carried authority. “I was part of the group that proposed ending the ‘Masquerade.’ I was wrong. I believed that the great majority of our fellow citizens, reared under modern educational methods, could evaluate any data without excessive emotional disturbance. I anticipated that a few abnormal people would dislike us, even hate us; I even predicted that most people would envy us-everybody who enjoys life would like to live a long time. But I did not anticipate any serious trouble. Modern attitudes have done away with interracial friction; any who still harbor race prejudice are ashamed to voice it. I believed that our society was so tolerant that we could live peacefully and openly with the shortlived.

“I was wrong.

“The Negro hated and envied the white man as long as the white man enjoyed privileges forbidden the Negro by reason of color. This was a sane, normal reaction. When discrimination was removed, the problem solved itself and cultural assimilation took place. There is a similar tendency on the part of the shortlived to envy the long-lived. We assumed that this expected reaction would be of no social importance in most people once it was made clear that we owe our peculiarity to our genes-no fault nor virtue of our own, just good luck in our ancestry.

“This was mere wishful thinking. By hindsight it is easy to see that correct application of mathematical analysis to the data would have given a different answer, would have spotlighted the false analogy. I do not defend the misjudgment, no defense is possible. We were led astray by our hopes.

“What actually happened was this: we showed our shortlived cousins the greatest boon it is possible for a man to imagine … then we told them it could never be theirs. This faced them with an unsolvable dilemma. They have rejected the unbearable facts, they refuse to believe us. Their envy now turns to hate, with an emotional conviction that we are depriving them of their rights … deliberately, maliciously.

“That rising hate has now swelled into a flood which threatens the welfare and even the lives of all our revealed brethren … and which is potentially as dangerous to the rest of us. The danger is very great and very pressing.” He sat down abruptly.

They took it calmly, with the unhurried habit of years. Presently a female delegate stood up. “Eve Barstow, for the Cooper Family. Ralph Schultz, I am a hundred and nineteen years old, older, I believe, than you are. I do not have your talent for mathematics or human behavior but I have known a lot of people. Human beings are inherently good and gentle and kind. Oh, they have their weaknesses but most of them are decent enough if you give them half a chance. I cannot believe that they would hate me and destroy me simply because I have lived a long time. What have you to go on? You admit one mistake-why not two?”

Schultz looked at her soberly and smoothed his kilt. “You’re right, Eve. I could easily be wrong again. That’s the trouble with psychology; it is a subject so terribly complex, so many unknowns, such involved relationships, that our best efforts sometimes look silly in the bleak light of later facts.” He stood up again, faced the others, and again spoke with flat authority. “But I am not making a long-range prediction this time; I am talking about facts, no guesses, not wishful thinking-and with those facts a prediction so short-range that it is like predicting that an egg will break when you see it already on its way to the floor. But Eve is right … as far as she went. Individuals are kind and decent … as individuals and to other individuals. Eve  is in no danger from her neighbors and friends, and I am in no danger from mine. But she is in danger from my neighbors and friends -and I from hers. Mass psychology is not simply a summation of individual psychologies; that

is a prime theorem of social psychodynamics -not just my opinion; no exception has ever been found to this theorem. It is the social massaction rule, the mob-hysteria law, known and used by military, political, and religious leaders, by advertising men and prophets and propagandists, by rabble rousers and actors and gang leaders, for generations before it was formulated in mathematical symbols. It works. It is working now.

“My colleagues and I began to suspect that a mob-hysteria trend was building up against us several years ago. We did not bring our suspicions to the council for action because we could not prove anything. What we observed then could have been simply the mutterings of the crackpot minority present in even the healthiest society. The trend was at first so minor that we could not be sure it existed, for all social trends are intermixed with other social trends, snarled together like a plate of spaghetti-worse than that, for it takes an abstract topological space of many dimensions (ten or twelve are not uncommon and hardly adequate) to describe mathematically the interplay of social forces. I cannot overemphasize the complexity of the problem.

“So we waited and worried and tried statistical sampling, setting up our statistical universes with great care.

“By the time we were sure, it was almost too late. Socio-psychological trends grow or die by a ‘yeast growth’ law, a complex power law. We continued to hope that other favorable factors would reverse the trend-Nelson’s work in symbiotics, our own contributions to geriatrics, the great public interest in the opening of the Jovian satellites to immigration. Any major break- through offering longer life, and greater hope to the shortlived could end the smouldering resentment against us.

“Instead the smouldering has burst into flame, into an uncontrolled forest fire. As nearly as we can measure it, the rate has doubled in the past thirty-seven days and the rate itself is accelerated. I can’t guess how far or how fast it will go-and that’s why we asked for this emergency session. Because we can expect trouble at any moment.” He sat down hard, looking tired.

Eve did not argue with him again and no one else argued with him at all; not only was Ralph Schultz considered expert in his own field but also every one of them, each from his own viewpoint, had seen the grosser aspects of the trend building up against their revealed kin. But, while the acceptance of the problem was unanimous, there were as many opinions about what to do about it as there were people present. Lazarus let the discussion muddle along for two hours before he held up a hand. “We aren’t getting anywhere,” he stated, “and it looks like we won’t get anywhere tonight. Let’s take an overall look at it, hitting just the high spots:

“We can—” He started ticking plans off on his fingers- “do nothing, sit tight, and see what happens. “We can junk the ‘Masquerade’ entirely, reveal our full numbers, and demand our rights politically.

“We can sit tight on the surface and use our organization and money to protect our revealed brethren, maybe haul ‘em back into the ‘Masquerade.’ “We can reveal ourselves and ask for a place to colonize where we can live by ourselves.

“Or we can do something else. I suggest that you sort yourselves out according to those four major points of view-say in the corners of the room, starting clockwise in that far right hand corner-each group hammer out a plan and get it ready to submit to the Families. And those of you who don’t favor any of those four things gather in the middle of the room and start scrappin’ over just what it is you do think. Now, if I hear no objection, I am going to declare this lodge recessed until midnight tomorrow night. How about it?”

No one spoke up. Lazarus Long’s streamlined version of parliamentary procedure had them somewhat startled; they were used to long, leisurely discussions until it became evident that one point of view had become unanimous. Doing things in a hurry was slightly shocking.

But the man’s personality was powerful, his years gave him prestige, and his slightly archaic way of speaking added to his patriarchal authority; nobody argued. “Okay,” Lazarus announced, clapping his hands once. “Church is out until tomorrow night.” He stepped down from the platform.

Mary Sperling came up to him. “I would like to know you better,” she said, looking him in the eyes. “Sure, Sis. Why not?”

“Are you staying for discussion?”

“Could you come home with me?”

“Like to. I’ve no pressing business elsewhere.”

“Come then.” She led him through the tunnel to the underground pool connecting with Lake Michigan. He widened his eyes at the pseudo-Camden but said nothing until they were submerged.

“Nice little car you’ve got.” “Yes.”

“Has some unusual features.”

She smiled. “Yes. Among other things, it blows up-quite thoroughly-if anyone tries to investigate it.” “Good.” He added, “You a designing engineer, Mary?”

“Me? Heavens, no! Not this past century, at least, and I no longer try to keep up with such things. But you can order a car modified the way this one is through the Families, if you want one. Talk to-“

“Never mind, I’ve no need for one. I just like gadgets that do what they were designed to do and do it quietly and efficiently. Some good skull sweat in this one.” “Yes.” She was busy then, surfacing, making a radar check, and getting them back ashore without attracting notice.

When they reached her apartment she put tobacco and drink close to him, then went to her retiring room, threw off her street clothes and put on a soft loose robe that made her look even smaller and younger than she had looked before. When she rejoined Lazarus, he stood up, struck a cigarette for her, then paused as he handed it to her and gave a gallant and indelicate whistle.

She smiled briefly, took the cigarette, and sat down in a large chair, pulling her feet under her. “Lazarus, you reassure me.” “Don’t you own a mirror, girl?”

“Not that,” she said impatiently. “You yourself. You know that I have passed the reasonable life expectancy of our people-I’ve been expecting to die, been resigned to it, for the past ten years. Yet there you sit … years and years o1der than I am. You give me hope.”

He sat up straight. “You expecting to die? Good grief, girl-you look good for another century.”

She made a tired gesture. “Don’t try to jolly me. You know that appearance has nothing to do with it. Lazarus, I don’t want to die!” Lazarus answered soberly, “I wasn’t trying to kid you, Sis. You simply don’t look like a candidate for corpse.”

She shrugged gracefully. “Amatter of biotechniques. I’m holding my appearance at the early thirties.”

“Or less, I’d say. I guess I’m not up on the latest dodges, Mary. You heard me say that I had not attended a get-together for more than a century. As a matter of fact I’ve been completely out of touch with the Families the whole time.”

“Really? May I ask why?”

“Along story and a dull one. What it amounts to is that I got bored with them. I used to be a delegate to the annual meetings. But they got stuffy and set in their ways-or so it seemed to me. So I wandered off. I spent the Interregnum on Venus, mostly. I came back for a while after the Covenant was signed but I don’t suppose I’ve spent two years on Earth since then. I like  to move around.”

Her eyes lit up. “Oh, tell me about it! I’ve never been out in-deep space. Just Luna City, once.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “Sometime. But I want to hear more about this matter of your appearance. Girl, you sure don’t look your age.”

“I suppose not. Or, rather, of course I don’t. As to how it’s done, I can’t tell you much. Hormones and symbiotics and gland therapy and some psychotherapy-things like that. What it adds up to is that, for members of the Families, senility is postponed and that senescence can be arrested at least cosmetically.” She brooded for a moment. “Once they thought they were on the track of the secret of immortality, the true Fountain of Youth. But it was a mistake. Senility is simply postponed … and shortened. About ninety days from the first clear warning-then death from old age.” She shivered. “Of course, most of our cousins don’t wait-a couple of weeks to make certain of the diagnosis, then euthanasia.”

“The hell you say! Well, I won’t go that way. When the Old Boy comes to get me, he’ll have to drag me-and I’ll be kicking and gouging eyes every step of the way!”

She smiled lopsidedly. “It does me good to hear you talk that way. Lazarus, I wouldn’t let my guards down this way with anyone younger than myself. But your example gives me courage.” “We’ll outlast the lot of ‘em, Mary, never you fear. But about the meeting tonight: I haven’t paid any attention to the news and I’ve only recently come earthside-does this chap Ralph Schultz

know what he is talking about?”

“I think he must. His grandfather was a brilliant man and so is his father.” “I take it you know Ralph.”

“Slightly. He is one of my grandchildren.” “That’s amusing. He looks older than you do.”

“Ralph found it suited him to arrest his appearance at about forty, that’s all. His father was my twenty-seventh child. Ralph must be-let me see-oh, eighty or ninety years younger than I am, at least. At that, he is older than some of my children.”

“You’ve done well by the Families, Mary.”

“I suppose so. But they’ve done well by me, too. I’ve enjoyed having children and the trust benefits for my thirty-odd come to quite a lot. I have every luxury one could want.” She shivered again. “I suppose that’s why I’m in such a funk-I enjoy life.”

“Stop it! I thought my sterling example and boyish grin had cured you of that nonsense.” “Well you’ve helped.”

“Mmm … look, Mary, why don’t you marry again and have some more squally brats? Keep you too busy to fret.” “What? At my age? Now, really, Lazarus!”

“Nothing wrong with your age. You’re younger than I am.” She studied him for a moment. “Lazarus, are you proposing a contract? If so, I wish you would speak more plainly.”

His mouth opened and he gulped. “Hey, wait a minute! Take it easy! I was speaking in general terms … I’m not the domestic type. Why, every time I’ve married my wife has grown sick of the sight of me inside of a few years. Not but what I-well, I mean you’re a very pretty girl and a man ought to-“

She shut him off by leaning forward and putting a hand over his mouth, while grinning impishly. “I didn’t mean to panic you, cousin. Or perhaps I did-men are so funny when they think they are about to be trapped.”

“Well-” he said glumly.

“Forget it, dear. Tell me, what plan do you think they will settle on?”

“That bunch tonight?’

“Yes.”

“None, of course. They won’t get anywhere. Mary, a committee is the only known form of life with a hundred bellies and no brain. But presently somebody with a mind of his own will bulldoze them into accepting his plan. I don’t know what it will be.”

“Well … what course of action do you favor?”

“Me? Why, none. Mary, if there is any one thing I have learned in the past couple of centuries, it’s this: These things pass. Wars and depressions and Prophets and Covenants-they pass. The trick is to stay alive through them.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I think you are right.”

“Sure I’m right. It takes a hundred years or so to realize just how good life is.” He stood up and stretched. “But right now this growing boy could use some sleep.” “Me, too.”

Mary’s flat was on the top floor, with a sky view. When she had come back to the lounge she had cut the inside lighting and let the ceiling shutters fold back; they had been sitting, save for an invisible sheet of plastic, under the stars. As Lazarus raised his head in stretching, his eye had rested on his favorite constellation. “Odd,” he commented. “Orion seems to have added a fourth star to his belt.”

She looked up. “That must be the big ship for the Second Centauri Expedition. See if you can see it move.” “Couldn’t tell without instruments.”

“I suppose not,” she agreed. “Clever of them to build it out in space, isn’t it?”

“No other way to do it. It’s too big to assemble on Earth. I can doss down right here, Mary. Or do you have a spare room?”

“Your room is the second door on the right. Shout if you can’t find everything you need.” She put her face up and kissed him goodnight, a quick peck. “‘Night.” Lazarus followed her and went into his own room.

Mary Sperling woke at her usual hour the next day. She got up quietly to keep from waking Lazarus, ducked into her ‘fresher, showered and massaged, swallowed a grain of sleep surrogate to make up for the short night, followed it almost as quickly with all the breakfast she permitted her waistline, then punched for the calls she had not bothered to take the night before. The phone played back several calls which she promptly forgot, then she recognized the voice of Bork Vanning. “‘Hello,’” the instrument said. “‘Mary, this is Bork, calling at twenty- one o’clock. I’ll be by at ten o’clock tomorrow morning, for a dip in the lake and lunch somewhere. Unless I hear from you it’s a date. ‘Bye, my dear. Service.’”

“Service,” she repeated automatically. Drat the man! Couldn’t he take no for an answer? Mary Sperling, you’re slipping!-a quarter your age and yet you can’t seem to handle him. Call him and leave word that-no, too late; he’d be here any minute. Bother!

Chapter 2

WHEN LAZARUS went to bed he stepped out of his kilt and chucked it toward a wardrobe which snagged it, shook it out, and hung it up neatly. “Nice catch,” he commented, then glanced down at his hairy thighs and smiled wryly; the kilt had concealed a blaster strapped to one thigh, a knife to the other. He was aware of the present gentle custom against personal weapons, but he felt naked without them. Such customs were nonsense anyhow, foolishment from old women-there was no such thing as a “dangerous weapon,” there were only dangerous men.

When he came out of the ‘fresher, he put his weapons where he could reach them before sprawling in sleep.

He came instantly wide awake with a weapon in each hand … then remembered where he was, relaxed, and looked around to see what had wakened him.

It was a murmur of voices through the air duct. Poor soundproofing he decided, and Mary must be entertaining callers-in which case he should not be slug-a-bed. He got up, refreshed himself, strapped his best friends back on his thighs, and went looking for his hostess.

As the door to the lounge dilated noiselessly in front of him the sound of voices became loud and very interesting. The lounge was el-shaped and he was out of sight; he hung back and listened shamelessly. Eavesdropping had saved his skin on several occasions; it worried him not at all-he enjoyed it. Aman was saying, “Mary, you’re completely unreasonable! You know you’re fond of me, you admit that marriage to me would be to your advantage. So why won’t you?”

“I told you, Bork. Age difference.”

“That’s foolish. What do you expect? Adolescent romance? Oh, I admit that I’m not as young as you are … but a woman needs an older man to look up to and keep her steady. I’m not too old for you; I’m just at my prime.”

Lazarus decided that he already knew this chap well enough to dislike him. Sulky voice.

Mary did not answer. The man went on: “Anyhow, I have a surprise for you on that point. I wish I could tell you now, but … well, it’s a state secret.” “Then don’t tell me. It can’t change my mind in any case, Bork.”

“Oh, but it would! Mmm … I will tell you-I know you can be trusted.” “Now, Bork, you shouldn’t assume that-“

“It doesn’t matter; it will be public knowledge in a few days anyhow. Mary … I’ll never grow old on you!” “What do you mean?” Lazarus decided that her tone was suddenly suspicious.

“Just what I said. Mary, they’ve found the secret of eternal youth!” “What? Who? How? When?”

“Oh, so now you’re interested, eh? Well, I won’t keep you waiting. You know these old Johnnies that call themselves the Howard Families?’ “Yes … I’ve heard of them, of course,” she admitted slowly. “But what of it? They’re fakes.”

“Not at all. I know. The Administration has been quietly investigating their claims. Some of them are unquestionably more than a hundred years old-and still young!” “That’s very hard to believe.”

“Nevertheless it’s true.” “Well … how do they do it?”

“Ah! That’s the point. They claim that it is a simple matter of heredity, that they live a long time because they come from long lived stock. But that’s preposterous, scientifically incompatible with the established facts. The Administration checked most carefully and the answer is certain: they have the secret of staying young.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Oh, come, Mary! You’re a dear girl but you’re questioning the expert opinion of the best scientific brains in the world. Never mind. Here’s the part that is confidential. We don’t have their secret yet-but we will have it shortly. Without any excitement or public notice, they are to be picked up and questioned. We’ll get the secret-and you and I will never grow old! What do you think of that? Eh?”

Mary answered very slowly, almost inaudibly, “It would be nice if everyone could live a long time.”

“Huh? Yes, I suppose it would. But in any case you and I will receive the treatment, whatever it is. Think about us, dear. Year after year after year of happy, youthful marriage. Not less than  a century. Maybe even—”

“Wait a moment, Bork. This ‘secret’ It wouldn’t be for everybody?”

“Well, now … that’s a matter of high policy. Population pressure is a pretty unwieldy problem even now. In practice it might be necessary to restrict it to essential personnel-and their wives. But don’t fret your lovely head about it; you and I will have it.”

“You mean I’ll have it if I marry you.”

“Mmm … that’s a nasty way to put it, Mary. I’d do anything in the world for you that I could-because I love you. But it would be utterly simple if you were married to me. So say you will.” “Let’s let that be for the moment. How do you propose to get this ‘secret’ out of them?”

Lazarus could almost hear his wise nod. “Oh, they’ll talk!”

“Do you mean to say you’d send them to Coventry if they didn’t?”

“Coventry? Hm! You don’t understand the situation at all, Mary; this isn’t any minor social offense. This is treason-treason against the whole human race. We’ll use means! Ways that the Prophets used … if they don’t cooperate willingly.”

“Do you mean that? Why, that’s against the Covenant!”

“Covenant be damned! This is a matter of life and death-do you think we’d let a scrap of paper stand in our way? You can’t bother with petty legalities in the fundamental things: men live by-not something they will fight to the death for. And that is precisely what this is. These … these dog-in-the-manger scoundrels are trying to keep life itself from us. Do you think we’ll bow to ‘custom’ in an emergency like this?”

Mary answered in a hushed and horrified voice: “Do you really think the Council will violate the Covenant?”

“Think so? The Action-in-Council was recorded last night. We authorized the Administrator to use ‘full expediency.’” Lazarus strained his ears through a long silence. At last Mary spoke. “Bork-“

“Yes, my dear?”

“You’ve got to do something about this. You must stop it.” “Stop it? You don’t know what you’re saying. I couldn’t and I would not if I could.”

“But you must. You must convince the Council. They’re making a mistake, a tragic mistake. There is nothing to be gained by trying to coerce those poor people. There is no secret!”

“What? You’re getting excited, my dear. You’re setting your judgment up against some of the best and wisest men on the planet. Believe me, we know what we are doing. We don’t relish using harsh methods any more than you do, but it’s for the general welfare. Look, I’m sorry I ever brought it up. Naturally you are soft and gentle and warmhearted and I love you for it. Why not marry me and not bother your head about matters of public policy?”

“Marry you? Never!”

“Aw, Mary-you’re upset. Give me just one good reason why not?”

“I’ll tell you why! Because I am one of those people you want to persecute!” There was another pause. “Mary … you’re not well.”

“Not well, am I? I am as well as a person can be at my age. Listen to me, you fool! I have grandsons twice your age. I was here when the First Prophet took over the country. I was here when Harriman launched the first Moon rocket. You weren’t even a squalling brat-your grandparents hadn’t even met, when I was a woman grown and married. And you stand there and glibly propose to push around, even to torture, me and my kind. Marry you? I’d rather marry one of my own grandchildren!”

Lazarus shifted his weight and slid his right hand inside the flap of his kilt; he expected trouble at once. You can depend on a woman, he reflected, to blow her top at the wrong moment. He waited. Bork’s answer was cool; the tones of the experienced man of authority replaced those of thwarted passion. “Take it easy, Mary. Sit down, I’ll look after you. First I want you to

take a sedative. Then I’ll get the best psychotherapist in the city-in the whole country. You’ll be all right.”

“Take your hands off me!” “Now, Mary …

Lazarus stepped out into the room and pointed at Vanning with his blaster. “This monkey giving you trouble, Sis?” Vanning jerked his head around. “Who are you?” he demanded indignantly. “What are you doing here?”

Lazarus still addressed Mary. “Say the word, Sis, and I’ll cut him into pieces small enough to hide.”

“No, Lazarus,” she answered with her voice now under control. “Thanks just the same. Please put your gun away. I wouldn’t want anything like that to happen.” “Okay.” Lazarus holstered the gun but let his hand rest on the grip.

“Who are you?” repeated Vanning. “What’s the meaning of this intrusion?”

“I was just about to ask you that, Bud,” Lazarus said mildly, “but we’ll let it ride. I’m another one of those old Johnnies you’re looking for … like Mary here.”

Vanning looked at him keenly. “I wonder-” he said. He looked back at Mary. “It can’t be, it’s preposterous. Still it won’t hurt to investigate your story. I’ve plenty to detain you on, in any event, I’ve never seen a clearer case of antisocial atavism.” He moved toward the videophone.

“Better get away from that phone, Bud,” Lazarus said quickly, then added to Mary, “I won’t touch my gun, Sis. I’ll use my knife.” Vanning stopped. “Very well,” he said in annoyed tones, “put away that vibroblade. I won’t call from here.”

“Look again, it ain’t a vibroblade. It’s steel. Messy.”

Vanning turned to Mary Sperling. “I’m leaving. If you are wise, you’ll come with me.” She shook her head. He looked annoyed, shrugged, and faced Lazarus Long. “As for you, sir, your primitive manners have led you into serious trouble. You will be arrested shortly.”

Lazarus glanced up at the ceiling shutters. “Reminds me of a patron in Venusburg who wanted to have me arrested.” “Well?”

“I’ve outlived him quite a piece.”

Vanning opened his mouth to answer-then turned suddenly and left so quickly that the outer door barely had time to clear the end of his nose. As the door snapped closed Lazarus said musingly, “Hardest man to reason with I’ve met in years. I’ll bet he never used an unsterilized spoon in his life.”

Mary looked startled, then giggled. He turned toward her. “Glad to see you sounding perky, Mary. Kinda thought you were upset.” “I was. I hadn’t known you were listening. I was forced to improvise as I went along.”

“Did I queer it?”

“No. I’m glad you came in-thanks. But we’ll have to hurry now.”

“I suppose so. I think he meant it-there’ll be a proctor looking for me soon. You, too, maybe.” “That’s what I meant. So let’s get out of here.”

Mary was ready to leave in scant minutes but when they stepped out into the public hall they met a man whose brassard and hypo kit marked him as a proctor. “Service,” he said. “I’m looking for a citizen in company with Citizen Mary Sperling. Could you direct me?”

“Sure,” agreed Lazarus. “She lives right down there.” He pointed at the far end of the corridor. As the peace officer looked in that direction, Lazarus tapped him carefully on the back of the head, a little to the left, with the butt of his blaster, and caught him as be slumped.

Mary helped Lazarus wrestle the awkward mass into her apartment. He knelt over the cop, pawed through his hypo kit, took a loaded injector and gave him a shot. “There,” he said, “that’ll keep him sleepy for a few hours.” Then he blinked thoughtfully at the hypo kit, detached it from the proctor’s belt. “This might come in handy again. Anyhow, it won’t hurt to take it.” As an afterthought he removed the proctor’s peace brassard and placed it, too, in his pouch.

They left the apartment again and dropped to the parking level. Lazarus noticed as they rolled up the ramp that Mary had set the North Shore combination. “Where are we going?” he asked.

“The Families’ Seat. No place else to go where we won’t be checked on. But we’ll have to hide somewhere in the country until dark.”

Once the car was on beamed control headed north Mary asked to be excused and caught a few minutes sleep. Lazarus watched a few miles of scenery, then nodded himself.

They were awakened by the jangle of the emergency alarm and by the speedster slowing to a stop. Mary reached up and shut off the alarm. “All cars resume local control,” intoned a voice. “Proceed at speed twenty to the nearest traffic control tower for inspection. All cars resume local control. Proceed at-“

She switched that off, too. “Well, that’s us,” Lazarus said cheerfully. “Got any ideas?”

Mary did not answer. She peered out and studied their surroundings. The steel fence separating the high-speed controlway they were on from the uncontrolled local-traffic strip lay about fifty yards to their right but no changeover ramp broke the fence for at least a mile ahead-where it did, there would be, of course, the control tower where they were ordered to undergo inspection. She started the car again, operating it manually, and wove through stopped or slowly moving traffic while speeding up. As they got close to the barrier Lazarus felt himself shoved into the cushions; the car surged and lifted, clearing the barrier by inches. She set it down rolling on the far side.

Acar was approaching from the north and they were slashing across his lane. The other car was moving no more than ninety but its driver was taken by surprise-he had no reason to expect another car to appear out of nowhere against him on a clear road: Mary was forced to duck left, then right, and left again; the car slewed and reared up on its hind wheel, writhing against the steel grip of its gyros. Mary fought it back into control to the accompaniment of a teeth-shivering grind of herculene against glass as the rear wheel fought for traction.

Lazarus let his jaw muscles relax and breathed out gustily. “Whew!” he sighed. “I hope we won’t have to do that again.”

Mary glanced at him, grinning. “Women drivers make you nervous?”

“Oh, no, no, not at all! I just wish you would warn me when something like that is about to happen.”

“I didn’t know myse1f,” she admitted, then went on worriedly, “I don’t know quite what to do now. I thought we could lie quiet out of town until dark … but I had to show my hand a Little when I took that fence. By now somebody will be reporting it to the tower. Mmm.

“Why wait until dark?” he asked. “Why not just bounce over to the lake in this Dick Dare contraption of yours and let it swim us home?”

“I don’t like to,” she fretted. “I’ve attracted too much attention already. Atrimobile faked up to look like a groundster is handy, but … well, if anyone sees us taking it under water and the proctors hear of it, somebody is going to guess the answer. Then they’ll start fishing-everything from seismo to sonar and Heaven knows what else.”

“But isn’t the Seat shielded?”

“Of course. But anything that big they can find-if they know what they’re looking for and keep looking.”

“You’re right, of course,” Lazarus admitted slowly. “Well, we certainly don’t want to lead any nosy proctors to the Families’ Seat. Mary, I think we had better ditch your car and get lost.” He frowned. “Anywhere but the Seat.”

“No, it has to be the Seat,” she answered sharply. “Why? If you chase a fox, he-“

“Quiet a moment! I want to try something.” Lazarus shut up; Mary drove with one hand while she fumbled in the glove compartment. “Answer,” a voice said.

“Life is short-” Mary replied.

They completed the formula. “Listen,” Mary went on hurriedly, “I’m in trouble-get a fix on me.” “Okay.”

“Is there a sub in the pool?” “Yes.”

“Good! Lock on me and home them in.” She explained hurriedly the details of what she wanted, stopping once to ask Lazarus if he could swim. “That’s all,” she said at last, “but move! We’re short on minutes.”

“Hold it, Mary!” the voice protested. “You know I can’t send a sub out in the daytime, certainly not on a calm day. It’s too easy to-“ “Will you, or won’t you!”

Athird voice cut in. “I was listening, Mary-Ira Barstow. We’ll pick you up.” “But-” objected the first voice.

“Stow it, Tommy. Just mind your burners and home me in. See you, Mary.” “Right, Ira!”

While she had been talking to the Seat, Mary had turned off from the local-traffic strip into the unpaved road she had followed the night before, without slowing and apparently without looking. Lazarus gritted his teeth and hung on. They passed a weathered sign reading CONTAMINATED AREA-PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK and graced with the conventional purple trefoil. Lazarus blinked at it and shrugged-he could not see how, at the moment, his hazard could be increased by a neutron or so.

Mary slammed the car to a stop in a clump of stunted trees near the abandoned road. The lake lay at their feet, just beyond a low bluff. She unfastened her safety belt, struck a cigarette, and relaxed. “Now we wait. It’ll take at least half an hour for them to reach us no matter how hard Ira herds it. Lazarus, do you think we were seen turning off into here?”

“To tell the truth, Mary, I was too busy to look.”

“Well nobody ever comes here, except a few reckless boys.”

(“-and girls,” Lazarus added to himself.) Then he went on aloud, “I noted a ‘hot’ sign back there. How high is the count?”

“That? -Oh, pooh. Nothing to worry about unless you decided to build a house here. We’re the ones who are hot. If we didn’t have to stay close to the communicator, we-“ The communicator spoke. “Okay, Mary. Right in front of you.”

She looked startled. “Ira?”

“This is Ira speaking but I’m still at the Seat. Pete Hardy was available in the Evanston pen, so we homed him in on you. Quicker.” “Okay-thanks!” She was turning to speak to Lazarus when he touched her arm.

“Look behind us.”

Ahelicopter was touching down less than a hundred yards from them. Three men burst out of it. They were dressed as proctors.

Mary jerked open the door of the car and threw off her gown in one unbroken motion. She turned and called, “Come on!” as she thrust a hand back inside and tore a stud loose from the instrument panel. She ran.

Lazarus unzipped the belt of his kilt and ran out of it as he followed her to the bluff. She went dancing down it; he came after with slightly more caution, swearing at sharp stones. The blast shook them as the car exploded, but the bluff saved them.

They hit the water together.

The lock in the little submarine was barely big enough for one at a time; Lazarus shoved Mary into it first and tried to slap her when she resisted, and discovered that slapping will not work under water. Then he spent an endless time, or so it seemed, wondering whether or not he could breathe water. “What’s a fish got that I ain’t got?” he was telling himself, when the outer latch moved under his hand and he was able to wiggle in.

Eleven dragging seconds to blow the lock clear of water and he had a chance to see what damage, if any, the water had done to his blaster.

Mary was speaking urgently to the skipper. “Listen, Pete-there are three proctors back up there with a whiny. My car blew up in their faces just as we hit the water. But if they aren’t all dead or injured, there will be a smart boy who will figure out that there was only one place for us to go-under water. We’ve got to be away from here before they take to the air to look for us.”

“It’s a losing race,” Pete Hardy complained, slapping his controls as he spoke. “Even if it’s only a visual search, I’ll have to get outside and stay outside the circle of total reflection faster than he can gain altitude-and I can’t.” But the little sub lunged forward reassuringly.

Mary worried about whether or not to call the Seat from the sub. She decided not to; it would just increase the hazard both to the sub and to the Seat itself. So she calmed herself and waited, huddled small in a passenger seat too cramped for two. Peter Hardy swung wide into deep water, hugging the bottom, picking up the Muskegon-Gary bottom beacons and conned himself in blind.

By the time they surfaced in the pool inside the Seat she had decided against any physical means of communication, even the carefully shielded equipment at the Seat. Instead she hoped to find a telepathic sensitive ready and available among the Families’ dependents cared for there. Sensitives were scarce among healthy members of the Howard Families as

they were in the rest of the population, but the very inbreeding which had conserved and reinforced their abnormal longevity had also conserved and reinforced bad genes as well as good; they had an unusually high percentage of physical and mental defectives. Their board of genetic control plugged away at the problem of getting rid of bad strains while conserving the longevity strain, but for many generations they would continue to pay for their long lives with an excess of defectives.

But almost five per cent of these defectives were telepathically sensitive.

Mary went straight to the sanctuary in the Seat where some of these dependents were cared for, with Lazarus Long at her heels. She braced the matron. “Where’s Little Stephen? I need him.”

“Keep your voice down,” the matron scolded. “Rest hour-you can’t.”

“Janice, I’ve got to see him,” Mary insisted. “This won’t wait. I’ve got to get a message out to all the Families-at once.”

The matron planted her hands on her hips. “Take it to the communication office. You can’t come here disturbing my children at all hours. I won’t have it.” “Janice, please! I don’t dare use anything but telepathy. You know I wouldn’t do this unnecessarily. Now take me to Stephen.”

“It wouldn’t do you any good if I did. Little Stephen has had one of his bad spells today.”

“Then take me to the strongest sensitive who can possibly work. Quickly, Janice! The safety of every member may depend on it.” “Did the trustees send you?”

“No, no! There wasn’t time!”

The matron still looked doubtful. While Lazarus was trying to recall how long it had been since he had socked a lady, she gave in. “All right-you can see Billy, though I shouldn’t let you. Mind you, don’t tire him out.” Still bristling, she led them along a corridor past a series of cheerful rooms and into one of them. Lazarus looked at the thing on the bed and looked away.

The matron went to a cupboard and returned with a hypodermic injector. “Does he work under a hypnotic?” Lazarus asked.

“No,” the matron answered coldly, “he has to have a stimulant to be aware of us at all.” She swabbed skin on the arm of the gross figure and made the injection. “Go ahead,” she said to Mary and lapsed into grim-mouthed silence.

The figure on the bed stirred, its eyes rolled loosely, then seemed to track. It grinned. “Aunt Mary!” it said. “Oooh! Did you bring Billy Boy something?’ “No,” she said gently. “Not this time, hon. Aunt Mary was in too much of a hurry. Next time? Asurprise? Will that do?’

“All right,” it said docilely.

“That’s a good boy.” She reached out and tousled its hair; Lazarus looked away again. “Now will Billy Boy do something for Aunt Mary? Abig, big favor?” “Sure.”

“Can you hear your friends?” “Oh, sure.”

“All of them?”

“Uh huh. Mostly they don’t say anything,” it added. “Call to them.”

There was a very short silence. “They heard me.”

“Fine! Now listen carefully, Billy Boy: All the Families-urgent warning! Elder Mary Sperling speaking. Under an Action-in-Council the Administrator is about to arrest every revealed member. The Council directed him to use ‘full expedience’-and it is my sober judgment that they are determined to use any means at all, regardless of the Covenant, to try to squeeze out of us the so-called secret of our long lives. They even intend to use the tortures developed by the inquisitors of the Prophets!” Her voice broke. She stopped and pulled herself together. “Now get busy! Find them, warn them, hide them! You may have only minutes left to save them!”

Lazarus touched her arm and whispered; she nodded and went on:

“If any cousin is arrested, rescue him by any means at all! Don’t try to appeal to the Covenant, don’t waste time arguing about justice rescue him! Now move!” She stopped and then spoke in a tired, gentle voice, “Did they hear us, Billy Boy?”

“Sure.”

“Are they telling their folks?”

“Uh huh. All but Jimmie-the-Horse. He’s mad at me,” it added confidentially. “‘Jimmie-the-Horse’? Where is he?”

“Oh, where he lives.”

“In Montreal,” put in the matron. “There are two other sensitives there-your message got through. Are you finished?” “Yes …” Mary said doubtfully. “But perhaps we had better have some other Seat relay it back.”

“No!” “But, Janice-“

“I won’t permit it. I suppose you had to send it but I want to give Billy the antidote now. So get out.”

Lazarus took her arm. “Come on, kid. It either got through or it didn’t; you’ve done your best. Agood job, girl.”

Mary went on to make a full report to the Resident Secretary; Lazarus left her on business of his own. He retraced his steps, looking for a man who was not too busy to help him; the guards at the pool entrance were the first he found. “Service-” be began.

“Service to you,” one of them answered. “Looking for someone?” He glanced curiously at Long’s almost complete nakedness, glanced away again-how anybody dressed, or did not dress, was a private matter.

“Sort of,” admitted Lazarus. “Say, Bud, do you know of anyone around here who would lend me a kilt?”

“You’re looking at one,” the guard answered pleasantly. “Take over, Dick-back in a minute.” He led Lazarus to bachelors’ quarters, outfitted him, helped him to dry his pouch and contents, and made no comment about the arsenal strapped to his hairy thighs. How elders behaved was no business of his and many of them were even touchier about their privacy than most people. He had seen Aunt Mary Sperling arrive stripped for swimming but had not been surprised as he had heard Ira Barstow briefing Pete for the underwater pickup; that the elder with her chose to take a dip in the lake weighed down by the hardware did surprise him but not enough to make him forget his manners.

“Anything else you need?’ he asked. “Do those shoes fit?

“Well enough. Thanks a lot, Bud.” Lazarus smoothed the borrowed kilt. It was a little too long for him but it comforted him. Aloin strap was okay, he supposed-if you were on Venus. But he had never cared much for Venus customs. Damn it, a man liked to be dressed. “I feel better,” he admitted. “Thanks again. By the way, what’s your name?”

“Edmund Hardy, of the Foote Family.”

“That so? What’s your line?”

“Charles Hardy and Evelyn Foote. Edward Hardy-Alice Johnson and Terence Briggs-Eleanor Weatheral. Oliver-“ “That’s enough. I sorta thought so. You’re one of my great-great-grandsons.”

“Why, that’s interesting,” commented Hardy agreeably. “Gives us a sixteenth of kinship, doesn’t it-not counting convergence. May I ask your name? “Lazarus Long.”

Hardy shook his head. “Some mistake. Not in my line.”

“Try Woodrow Wilson Smith instead. It was the one I started with.” “Oh, that one! Yes, surely. But I thought you were … uh—”

“Dead? Well, I ain’t.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that at all,” Hardy protested, blushing at the blunt Anglo-Saxon monosyllable. He hastily added, “I’m glad to have run across you, Gran’ther. I’ve always wanted to hear the straight of the story about the Families’ Meeting in 2012.”

“That was before you were born, Ed,” Lazarus said gruffly, “and don’t call me ‘Gran’ther.’” “Sorry, sir-I mean ‘Sorry, Lazarus.’ Is there any other service I can do for you?”

“I shouldn’t have gotten shirty. No-yes, there is, too. Where can I swipe a bite of breakfast? I was sort of rushed this morning.”

“Certainly.” Hardy took him to the bachelors’ pantry, operated the autochef for him, drew coffee for his watch mate and himself, and left. Lazarus consumed his “bite of breakfast”-about three thousand calories of sizzling sausages, eggs, jam, hot breads, coffee with cream, and ancillary items, for he worked on the assumption of always topping off his reserve tanks because you never knew how far you might have to lift before you had another chance to refuel. In due time he sat back, belched, gathered up his dishes and shoved them in the incinerator, then went looking for a newsbox.

He found one in the bachelors’ library, off their lounge. The room was empty save for one man who seemed to be about the same age as that suggested by Lazarus’ appearance. There the resemblance stopped; the stranger was slender, mild in feature, and was topped off by finespun carroty hair quite unlike the grizzled wiry bush topping Lazarus. The stranger was bending over the news receiver with his eyes pressed to the microviewer.

Lazarus cleared his throat loudly and said, “Howdy.”

The man jerked his head up and exclaimed, “Oh! Sorry-I was startled. Do y’ a service?” “I was looking for the newsbox. Mind if we throw it on the screen?”

“Not at all.” The smaller man stood up, pressed the rewind button, and set the controls for projection. “Any particular subject?” “I wanted to see,” said Lazarus, “if there was any news about us-the Families.”

“I’ve been watching for that myself. Perhaps we had better use the sound track and let it hunt.” “Okay,” agreed Lazarus, stepping up and changing the setting to audio. “What’s the code word?’ “‘Methuselah.’”

Lazarus punched in the setting; the machine chattered and whined as it scanned and rejected the track speeding through it, then it slowed with a triumphant click. “The DAILY DATA,” it announced. “The only midwest news service subscribing to every major grid. Leased videochannel to Luna City. Tri-S correspondents throughout the System. First, Fast, and Most! Lincoln, Nebraska-Savant Denounces Oldsters! Dr. Witweli Oscarsen, President Emeritus of Bryan Lyceum, calls for official reconsideration of the status of the kin group styling themselves the ‘Howard Families.’ ‘It is proved,’ he says. ‘that these people have solved the age-old problem of extending, perhaps indefinitely, the span of human life. For that they are  to be commended; it is a worthy and potentially fruitful research. But their claim that their solution is no more than hereditary predisposition defies both science and common sense. Our modern knowledge of the established laws of generics enables us to deduce with

certainty that they are withholding from the public some secret technique or techniques whereby they accomplish their results.

“‘It is contrary to our customs to permit scientific knowledge to be held as a monopoly for the few. When concealing such knowledge strikes at life itself, the action becomes treason to the race. As a citizen, I call on the Administration to act forcefully in this matter and I remind them that the situation is not one which could possibly have been foreseen by the wise men who drew up the Covenant and codified our basic customs. Any custom is man-made and is therefore a finite attempt to describe an infinity of relationships. It follows as the night from day that any custom necessarily has its exceptions. To be bound by them in the face of new—’”

Lazarus pressed the hold button. “Had enough of that guy?

“Yes, I had already heard it.” The stranger sighed. “I have rarely heard such complete lack of semantic rigor. It surprises me-Dr. Oscarsen has done sound work in the past.” “Reached his dotage,” Lazarus stated, as he told the machine to try again. “Wants what he wants when he wants it-and thinks that constitutes a natural law.”

The machine hummed and clicked and again spoke up. “The DAILYDATA, the only midwest news-“

“Can’t we scramble that commercial?” suggested Lazarus. His companion peered at the control panel. “Doesn’t seem to be equipped for it.”

“Ensenada, Baja California. Jeffers and Lucy Weatheral today asked for special proctor protection, alleging that a group of citizens had broken into their home, submitted them to personal indignity and committed other asocial acts. The Weatherals are, by their own admission, members of the notorious Howard Families and claim that the alleged incident could be traced to that supposed fact. The district provost points out that they have offered no proof and has taken the matter under advisement. Atown mass meeting has been announced for tonight which will air-“

The other man turned toward Lazarus. “Cousin, did we hear what I thought we heard? That is the first case of asocial group violence in more than twenty years … yet they reported it like a breakdown in a weather integrator.”

“Not quite,” Lazarus answered grimly. “The connotations of the words used in describing us were loaded.”

“Yes, true, but loaded cleverly. I doubt if there was a word in that dispatch with an emotional index, taken alone, higher than one point five. The newscasters are allowed two zero, you know.”

“You a psychometrician?”

“Uh, no. I should have introduced myself. I’m Andrew Jackson Libby.” “Lazarus Long.”

“I know. I was at the meeting last night.”

“‘Libby … Libby,” Lazarus mused. “Don’t seem to place it in the Families. Seems familiar, though.” “My case is a little like yours-“

“Changed it during the Interregnum, eh?”

“Yes and no. I was born after the Second Revolution. But my people had been converted to the New Crusade and had broken with the Families and changed their name. I was a grown

man before I knew I was a Member.”

“The deuce you say! That’s interesting-how did you come to be located … if you don’t mind my asking?” “Well, you see I was in the Navy and one of my superior officers-“

“Got it! Got it! I thought you were a spaceman. You’re Slipstick Libby, the Calculator.” Libby grinned sheepishly. “I have been called that.”

“Sure, sure. The last can I piloted was equipped with your paragravitic rectifier. And the control bank used your fractional differential on the steering jets. But I installed that myself-kinda borrowed your patent.”

Libby seemed undisturbed by the theft. His face lit up. “You are interested in symbolic logic?”

“Only pragmatically. But look, I put a modification on your gadget that derives from the rejected alternatives in your thirteenth equation. It helps like this: suppose you are cruising in a field of density ‘x’ with an n-order gradient normal to your course and you want to set your optimum course for a projected point of rendezvous capital ‘A’ at matching-in vector ‘rho’ using automatic selection the entire jump, then if-“

They drifted entirely away from Basic English as used by earthbound laymen. The newsbox beside them continued to hunt; three times it spoke up, each time Libby touched the rejection button without consciously hearing it.

“I see your point,” he said at last. “I had considered a somewhat similar modification but concluded that it was not commercially feasible, too expensive for anyone but enthusiasts such as yourself. But your solution is cheaper than mine.”

“How do you figure that?”

“Why, it’s obvious from the data. Your device contains sixty-two moving parts, which should require, if we assume standardized fabrication processes, a probable-” Libby hesitated momentarily as if he were programming the problem. “-a probable optimax of five thousand two hundred and eleven operation in manufacture assuming null-therblig automation, whereas mine-“

Lazarus butted in. “Andy,” he inquired solicitously, “does your head ever ache?”

Libby looked sheepish again. “There’s nothing abnormal about my talent,” he protested. “It is theoretically possible to develop it in any normal person.”

“Sure,” agreed Lazarus, “and you can teach a snake to tap dance once you get shoes on him. Never mind, I’m glad to have fallen in with you. I heard stories about you way back when you were a kid. You were in the Cosmic Construction Corps, weren’t you?”

Libby nodded. “Earth-Mars Spot Three.”

“Yeah, that was it-chap on Mars gimme the yarn. Trader at Drywater. I knew your maternal grandfather, too. Stiffnecked old coot.” “I suppose he was.”

“He was, all right. I had quite a set-to with him at the Meeting in 2012. He had a powerful vocabulary.” Lazarus frowned slightly. “Funny thing, Andy … I recall that vividly, I’ve always had a good memory-yet it seems to be getting harder for me to keep things straight. Especially this last century.”

“Inescapable mathematical necessity,” said Libby. “Huh? Why?”

“Life experience is linearly additive, but the correlation of memory impressions is an unlimited expansion. If mankind lived as long as a thousand years, it would be necessary to invent some totally different method of memory association in order to be eclectively time-binding. Aman would otherwise flounder helplessly in the wealth of his own knowledge, unable to evaluate. Insanity, or feeble-mindedness.”

“That so?” Lazarus suddenly looked worried. “Then we’d better get busy on it.” “Oh, it’s quite possible of solution.” “Let’s work on it. Let’s not get caught short.”

The newsbox again demanded attention, this time with the buzzer and flashing light of a spot bulletin: “Hearken to the DATA, flash! Nigh Council Suspends Covenant! Under the Emergency Situation clause of the Covenant an unprecedented Action-in-Council was announced today directing the Administrator to detain and question all members of the so-called Howard Families-by any means expedient! The Administrator authorized that the following statement be released by all licensed news outlets: (I quote) ‘The suspension of the Covenant’s civil guarantees applies only to the group known as the Howard Families except that government agents are empowered to act as circumstances require to apprehend speedily the persons affected by the Action-in-Council. Citizens are urged to tolerate cheerfully any minor inconvenience this may cause them; your right of privacy will be respected in every way possible; your right of free movement may be interrupted temporarily, but full economic

restitution will be made.”

“Now, Friends and Citizens, what does this mean?-to you and you and also you! The DAILYDATAbrings you now your popular commentator, Albert Reifsnider:

“Reifsnider reporting: Service, Citizens! There is no cause for alarm. To the average free citizen this emergency will be somewhat less troublesome than a low-pressure minimum too big for the weather machines. Take it easy! Relax! Help the proctors when requested and tend to your private affairs. If inconvenienced, don’t stand on custom-cooperate with Service!

“That’s what it means today. What does it mean tomorrow and the day after that? Next year? It means that your public servants have taken a forthright step to obtain for you the boon of a longer and happier life! Don’t get your hopes too high … but it looks like the dawn of a new day. Ah, indeed it does! The jealously guarded secret of a selfish few will soon—”

Long raised an eyebrow at Libby, then switched it off.

“I suppose that,” Libby said bitterly, “is an example of ‘factual detachment in news reporting.’”

Lazarus opened his pouch and struck a cigarette before replying. “Take it easy, Andy. There are bad times and good times. We’re overdue for bad times. The people are on the march again … this time at us.”

Chapter 3

THE BURROW KNOWN as the Families’ Seat became jammed as the day wore on. Members kept trickling in, arriving by tunnels from downstare and from Indiana. As soon as it was dark a traffic jam developed at the underground pool entrance-sporting subs, fake ground cars such as Mary’s, ostensible surface cruisers modified to dive, each craft loaded with refugees some half suffocated from lying in hiding on deep bottom most of the day while waiting for a chance to sneak in.

The usual meeting room was much too small to handle the crowd; the resident staff cleared the largest room, the refectory, and removed partitions separating it from the main lounge. There at midnight Lazarus climbed onto a temporary rostrum. “Okay,” he announced, “let’s pipe it down. You down in front sit on the floor so the rest can see. I was born in 1912. Anybody older?”

He paused, then added, “Nominations for chairman speak up.”

Three were proposed; before a fourth could be offered the last man nominated got to his feet. “Axel Johnson, of the Johnson Family. I want my name withdrawn and I suggest that the others do likewise. Lazarus cut through the fog last night; let him handle it. This is no time for Family politics.”

The other names were withdrawn; no more were offered. Lazarus said, “Okay if that’s the way you want it. Before we get down to arguing I want a report from the Chief Trustee. How about it, Zack? Any of our kinfolk get nabbed?’

Zaccur Barstow did not need to identify himself; he simply said, “Speaking for the Trustees: our report is not complete, but we do not as yet know that any Member has been arrested. Of the nine thousand two hundred and eighty-five revealed Members, nine thousand one hundred and six had been reported, when I left the communication office ten minutes ago, as having reached hiding, in other Family strongholds, or in the homes of unrevealed Members, or elsewhere. Mary Sperling’s warning was amazingly successful in view of how short the time was from the alarm to the public execution of the Action-in-Council-but we still have one hundred and seventy-nine revealed cousins unreported. Probably most of these will trickle in during the next few days. Others are probably safe but unable to get in touch with us.”

“Get to the point, Zack,” Lazarus insisted. “Any reasonable chance that all of them will make it home safe?” “Absolutelynone.”

“Why?”

“Because three of them are known to be in public conveyances between here and the Moon, traveling under their revealed identities. Others we don’t know about are almost certainly caught in similar predicaments.”

“Question!” Acocky little man near the front stood up and pointed his finger at the Chief Trustee. “Were all those Members now in jeopardy protected by hypnotic injunction?” “No. There was no—”

“I demand to know why not!”

“Shut up!” bellowed Lazarus. “You’re out of order. Nobody’s on trial here and we’ve got no time to waste on spilled milk. Go ahead, Zack.”

“Very well. But I will answer the question to this extent: everyone knows that a proposal to protect our secrets by hypnotic means was voted down at the Meeting which relaxed the ‘Masquerade.’ I seem to recall that the cousin now objecting helped then to vote it down.”

“That is not true! And I insist that—”

“PIPE DOWN!” Lazarus glared at the heckler, then looked him over carefully. “Bud, you strike me as a clear proof that the Foundation should ‘a’ bred for brains instead of age.” Lazarus looked around at the crowd. “Everybody will get his say, but in order as recognized by the chair. If he butts in again, I’m going to gag him with his own teeth-is my ruling sustained?”

There was a murmur of mixed shock and approval; no one objected. Zaccur Barstow went on, “On the advice of Ralph Schultz the trustees have been proceeding quietly for the past three months to persuade revealed Members to undergo hypnotic instruction. We were largely successful.” He paused.

“Make it march, Zack,” Lazarus urged. “Are we covered? Or not?”

“We are not. At least two of our cousins certain to be arrested are not so protected.”

Lazarus shrugged. “That tears it. Kinfolk, the game’s over. One shot in the arm of babble juice and the ‘Masquerade’ is over. It’s a new situation-or will be in a few hours. What do you propose to do about it?”

In the control room of the Antipodes Rocket Wallaby, South Flight, the telecom hummed, went spung! and stuck out a tab like an impudent tongue. The copilot rocked forward in his gymbals, pulled out the message and tore it off.

He read it, then reread it. “Skipper, brace yourself.” “Trouble?”

“Read it.”

The captain did so, and whistled. “Bloody! I’ve never arrested anybody. I don’t believe I’ve even seen anybody arrested. How do we start?” “I bow to your superior authority.”

“That so?” the captain said in nettled tones. “Now that you’re through bowing you can tool aft and make the arrest.” “Uh? That’s not what I meant. You’re the bloke with the authority. I’ll relieve you at the conn.”

“You didn’t read me. I’m delegating the authority. Carry out your orders.” “Just a moment, Al, I didn’t sign up for—”

“Carry out your orders!” “Aye aye, sir!”

The copilot went aft. The ship had completed its reentry, was in its long, flat, screaming approach-glide; he was able to walk-he wondered what an arrest in free-fall would be like? Snag him with a butterfly net? He located the passenger by seat check, touched his arm. “Service, sir. There’s been a clerical error. May I see your ticket?”

“Why, certainly.”

“Would you mind stepping back to the reserve stateroom? It’s quieter there and we can both sit down.” “Not at all.”

Once they were in the private compartment the chief officer asked the passenger to sit down, then looked annoyed. “Stupid of me!-I’ve left my lists in the control room.” He turned and left. As the door slid to behind him, the passenger heard an unexpected click. Suddenly suspicious, he tried the door. It was locked.

Two proctors came for him at Melbourne. As they escorted him through the skyport he could hear remarks from a curious and surprisingly unfriendly crowd: “There’s one of the laddies now!” “Him? My word, he doesn’t look old.” “What price ape glands?” “Don’t stare, Herbert.” “Why not? Not half bad enough for him.”

They took him to the office of the Chief Provost, who invited him to sit down with formal civility. “Now then, sir,” the Provost said with a slight local twang, “if you will help us by letting the orderly make a slight injection in your arm—”

“For what purpose?”

“You want to be socially cooperative, I’m sure. It won’t hurt you.”

“That’s beside the point. I insist on an explanation. I am a citizen of the United States.”

“So you are, but the Federation has concurrent jurisdiction in any member state-and I am acting under its authority. Now bare your arm, please.” “I refuse. I stand on my civil rights.”

“Grab him, lads.”

It took four men to do it. Even before the injector touched his skin, his jaw set and a look of sudden agony came into his face. He then sat quietly, listlessly, while the peace officers waited for the drug to take effect. Presently the Provost gently rolled back one of the prisoner’s eyelids and said, “I think he’s ready. He doesn’t weigh over ten stone; it has hit him rather fast. Where’s that list of questions?”

Adeputy handed it to him; he began, “Horace Foote, do you hear me?’

The man’s lips twitched, he seemed about to speak. His mouth opened and blood gushed down his chest.

The Provost bellowed and grabbed the prisoner’s head, made quick examination. “Surgeon! He’s bitten his tongue half out of his head!”

The captain of the Luna City Shuttle Moonbeam scowled at the message in his hand. “What child’s play is this?” He glared at his third officer. “Tell me that, Mister.”

The third officer studied the overhead. Fuming, the captain held the message at arm’s length, peered at it and read aloud: “-imperative that subject persons be prevented from doing themselves injury. You are directed to render them unconscious without warning them.” He shoved the flimsy away from him. “What do they think I’m running? Coventry? Who do they think they are?-telling me in my ship what I must do with my passengers! I won’t-so help me, I won’t! There’s no rule requiring me to … is there, Mister?”

The third officer went on silently studying the ship’s structure.

The captain stopped pacing. “Purser! Purser! Why is that man never around when I want him?” “I’m here, Captain.”

“About time!”

“I’ve been here all along, sir.”

“Don’t argue with me. Here-attend to this.” He handed the dispatch to the purser and left.

Ashipfitter, supervised by the purser, the hull officer, and the medical officer, made a slight change in the air-conditioning ducts to one cabin; two worried passengers sloughed off their cares under the influence of a nonlethal dose of sleeping gas.

“Another report, sir.”

“Leave it,” the Administrator said in a tired voice.

“And Councilor Bork Vanning presents his compliments and requests an interview.” “Tell him that I regret that I am too busy.”

“He insists on seeing you, sir.”

Administrator Ford answered snappishly, “Then you may tell the Honorable Mr. Vanning that be does not give orders in this office!” The aide said nothing; Administrator Ford pressed his fingertips wearily against his forehead and went on slowly, “Na, Gerry, don’t tell him that. Be diplomatic but don’t let him in.”

“Yes, sir.”

When he was alone, the Administrator picked up the report. His eye skipped over official heading, date line, and file number: “Synopsis of Interview with Conditionally Proscribed Citizen Arthur Sperling, full transcript attached. Conditions of Interview: Subject received normal dosage of neosco., having previously received unmeasured dosage of gaseous hypnotal. Antidote—”How the devil could you cure subordinates of wordiness? Was there something in the soul of a career civil servant that cherished red tape? His eye skipped on down:

“-stated that his name was Arthur Sperling of the Foote Family and gave his age as one hundred thirty-seven years. (Subject’s apparent age is forty-five plus-or-minus four: see bio report attached.) Subject admitted that he was a member of the Howard Families. He stated that the Families numbered slightly more than one hundred thousand members. He was asked to correct this and it was suggested to him that the correct number was nearer ten thousand. He persisted in his original statement.”

The Administrator stopped and reread this part.

He skipped on down, looking for the key part: “-insisted that his long life was the result of his ancestry and had no other cause. Admitted that artificial means had been used to preserve his youthful appearance but maintained firmly that his life expectancy was inherent, not acquired. It was suggested to him that his elder relatives had subjected him without his knowledge to treatment in his early youth to increase his life span. Subject admitted possibility. On being pressed for names of persons who might have performed, or might be performing, such treatments he returned to his original statement that no such treatments exist.

“He gave the names (surprise association procedure) and in some cases the addresses of nearly two hundred members of his kin group not previously identified as such in our records. (List attached) His strength ebbed under this arduous technique and he sank into full apathy from which he could not be roused by any stimuli within the limits of his estimated tolerance (see Bio Report).

“Conclusions under Expedited Analysis, Kelly-Holmes Approximation Method: Subject does not possess and does not believe in the Search Object. Does not remember experiencing Search Object but is mistaken. Knowledge of Search Object is limited to a small group, of the order of twenty. Amember of this star group will be located through not more than triple- concatenation elimination search. (Probability of unity, subject to assumptions: first, that topologic social space is continuous and is included in the physical space of the Western Federation and, second, that at least one concatenative path exists between apprehended subjects and star group. Neither assumption can be verified as of this writing, but the first assumption is strongly supported by statistical analysis of the list of names supplied by Subject of previously unsuspected members of Howard kin group, which analysis also supports Subject’s estimate of total size of group, and second assumption when taken negatively

postulates that star group holding Search Object has been able to apply it with no social-space of contact, an absurdity.)

“Estimated Time for Search: 71 hrs, plus-or-minus 20 hrs. Prediction but not time estimate vouched for by cognizant bureau. Time estimate will be re—”

Ford slapped the report on a stack cluttering his oldfashioned control desk. The dumb fools! Not to recognize a negative report when they saw one-yet they called themselves psychographers!

He buried his face in his hands in utter weariness and frustration.

Lazarus rapped on the table beside him, using the butt of his blaster as a gavel. “Don’t interrupt the speaker,” he boomed, then added, “Go ahead but cut it short.”

Bertram Hardy nodded curtly. “I say again, these mayflies we see around us have no rights that we of the Families are bound to respect. We should deal with them with stea1th, with cunning, with guile, and when we eventually consolidate our position … with force! We are no more obligated to respect their welfare than a hunter is obliged to shout a warning at his quarry. The—”

There was a catcall from the rear of the room. Lazarus again banged for order and tried to spot the source. Hardy ploughed steadily on. “The so-called human race has split in two; it is time we admitted it. On one side, Homo vivens, ourselves … on the other-Homo moriturus! With the great lizards, with the sabertooth tiger and the bison, their day is done. We would no more mix our living blood with theirs than we would attempt to breed with apes. I say temporize with them, tell them any tale, assure them that we will bathe them in the fountain of youth- gain time, so that when these two naturally antagonistic races join battle, as they inevitably must, the victory will be ours!”

There was no applause but Lazarus could see wavering uncertainty in many faces. Bertram Hardy’s ideas ran counter to thought patterns of many years of gentle living yet his words seemed to ring with destiny. Lazarus did not believe in destiny; he believed in … well, never mind-but he wondered how Brother Bertram would look with both arms broken.

Eve Barstow got up. “If that is what Bertram means by the survival of the fittest,” she said bitterly, “I’ll go live with the asocials in Coventry. However, he has offered a plan; I’ll have to offer another plan if I won’t take his. I won’t accept any plan which would have us live at the expense of our poor transient neighbors. Furthermore it is clear to me now that our mere presence, the simple fact of our rich heritage of life, is damaging to the spirit of our poor neighbor. Our longer years and richer opportunities make his best efforts seem futile to him-any effort save   a hopeless struggle against an appointed death. Our mere presence saps his strength, ruins his judgment, fills him with panic fear of death.

“So I propose a plan. Let’s disclose ourselves, tell all the truth, and ask for our share of the Earth, some little corner where we may live apart. If our poor friends wish to surround it with a great barrier like that around Coventry, so be it-it is better that we never meet face to face.”

Some expressions of doubt changed to approval. Ralph Schultz stood up. “Without prejudice to Eve’s basic plan, I must advise you that it is my professional opinion that the psychological insulation she proposes cannot be accomplished that easily. As long as we’re on this planet they won’t be able to put us out of their minds. Modern communications-“

“Then we must move to another planet!” she retorted.

“Where?” demanded Bertram Hardy. “Venus? I’d rather live in a steam bath. Mars? Worn-out and worthless.” “We will rebuild it,” she insisted.

“Not in your lifetime nor mine. No, my dear Eve, your tenderheartedness sounds well but it doesn’t make sense. There is only one planet in the System fit to live on-we’re standing on it.” Something in Bertram Hardy’s words set off a response in Lazarus Long’s brain, then the thought escaped him. Something … something that he had heard of said just a day or two ago

… or was it longer than? Somehow it seemed to be associated with his first trip out into space, too, well over a century ago. Thunderation! it was maddening to have his memory play tricks on him like that—

Then he had it-the starship! The interstellar ship they were putting the finishing touches on out there between Earth and Luna. “Folks,” he drawled, “before we table this idea of moving to another planet, let’s consider all the possibilities.” He waited until he had their full attention. “Did you ever stop to think that not all the planets swing around this one Sun?”

Zaccur Barstow broke the silence. “Lazarus … are you making a serious suggestion?” “Dead serious.”

“It does not sound so. Perhaps you had better explain.”

“I will.” Lazarus faced the crowd. “There’s a spaceship hanging out there in the sky, a roomy thing, built to make the long jumps between stars. Why don’t we take it and go looking for our own piece of real estate?”

Bertram Hardy was first to recover. “I don’t know whether our chairman is lightening the gloom with another of his wisecracks or not, but, assuming that he is serious, I’ll answer. My objection to Mars applies to this wild scheme ten times over. I understand that the reckless fools who are actually intending to man that ship expect to make the jump in about a century – then maybe their grandchildren will find something, or maybe they won’t. Either way, I’m not interested. I don’t care to spend a century locked up in a steel tank, nor do I expect to live that long. I won’t buy it.”

“Hold it,” Lazarus told him. “Where’s Andy Libby?” “Here,” Libby answered! standing up.

“Come on down front. Slipstick, did you have anything to do with designing the new Centarus ship?” “No. Neither this one nor the first one.”

Lazarus spoke to the crowd. “That settles it. If that ship didn’t have Slipstick’s finger in the drive design, then she’s not as fast as she could be, not by a good big coefficient. Slipstick, better get busy on the problem, son. We’re likely to need a solution.”

“But, Lazarus, you mustn’t assume that—” “Aren’t there theoretical possibilities?” “Well, you know there are, but—”

“Then get that carrot top of yours working on it.” “Well … all right.” Libby blushed as pink as his hair.

“Just a moment, Lazarus.” It was Zaccur Barstow. “I like this proposal and I think we should discuss it at length not let ourselves be frightened off by Brother Bertram’s distaste for it. Even  if Brother Libby fails to find a better means of propulsion-and frankly, I don’t think he will; I know a little something of field mechanics-even so, I shan’t let a century frighten me. By using cold-rest and manning the ship in shifts, most of us should be able to complete one hop. There is—”

“What makes you think,” demanded Bertram Hardy, “that they’ll let us man the ship anyhow?”

“Bert,” Lazarus said coldly, “address the chair when you want to sound off. You’re not even a Family delegate. Last warning.”

“As I was saying,” Barstow continued, “there is an appropriateness in the long-lived exploring the stars. Amystic might call it our true vocation.” He pondered. “As for the ship Lazarus suggested; perhaps they will not let us have that … but the Families are rich. If we need a starship-or ships-we can build them, we can pay for them. I think we had better hope that they will let us do this … for it may be that there is no way, not another way of any sort, out of our dilemma which does not include our own extermination.”

Barstow spoke these last words softly and slowly, with great sadness. They bit into the company like damp chill. To most of them the problem was so new as not yet to be real; no one had voiced the possible consequence of failing to find a solution satisfactory to the shortlived majority. For their senior trustee to speak soberly of his fear that the Families might be exterminated-hunted down and killed-stirred up in each one the ghost they never mentioned.

“Well,” Lazarus said briskly when the silence had grown painful, “before we work this idea over, let’s hear what other plan anyone has to offer. Speak up.”

Amessenger hurried in and spoke to Zaccur Barstow. He looked startled and seemed to ask to have the message repeated. He then hurried across the rostrum to Lazarus, whispered to him. Lazarus looked startled. Barstow hurried out.

Lazarus looked back at the crowd. “We’ll take a recess,” he announced. “Give you time to think about other plans and time for a stretch and a smoke.” He reached for his pouch. “What’s up?” someone called out.

Lazarus struck a cigarette, took a long drag, let it drift out. “We’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “I don’t know. But at least half a dozen of the plans put forward tonight we won’t have to bother to vote on. The situation has changed again-how much, I couldn’t say.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well,” Lazarus drawled, “it seems the Federation Administrator wanted to talk to Zack Barstow right away. He asked for him by name … and he called over our secret Families’ circuit.” “Huh? That’s impossible!”

“Yep. So is a baby, son.”

Chapter 4

ZACCUR BARSTOW TRIED to quiet himself down as he hurried into the phone booth.

At the other end of the same videophone circuit the Honorable Slayton Ford was doing the same thing-trying to calm his nerves. He did not underrate himself. Along and brilliant public career crowned by years as Administrator for the Council and under the Covenant of the Western Administration had made Ford aware of his own superior ability and unmatched experience; no ordinary man could possibly make him feel at a disadvantage in negotiation.

But this was different.

What would a man be like who had lived more than two ordinary lifetimes? Worse than that-a man who had had four or five times the adult experience that Ford himself had had? Slayton Ford knew that his own opinions had changed and changed again since his own boyhood; he knew that the boy he had been, or even the able young man he had been, would be no match for the mature man he had become. So what would this Barstow be like? Presumably he was the most able, the most astute, of a group all of whom had had much more experience than Ford could possibly have-how could he guess such a man’s evaluations, intentions, ways of thinking, his possible resources?

Ford was certain of only one thing: he did not intend to trade Manhattan Island for twenty-four dollars and a case of whisky, nor sell humanity’s birthright for a mess of pottage.

He studied Barstow’s face as the image appeared in his phone. Agood face and strong … it would be useless to try to bully this man. And the man looked young-why, he looked younger than Ford himself! The subconscious image of the Administrator’s own stern and implacable grandfather faded out of his mind and his tension eased off. He said quietly, “You are Citizen Zaccur Barstow?”

“Yes, Mister Administrator.”

“You are chief executive of the Howard Families?”

“I am the current speaker trustee of our Families’ Foundation. But I am responsible to my cousins rather than in authority over them.” Ford brushed it aside. “I assume that your position carries with it leadership. I can’t negotiate with a hundred thousand people.”

Barstow did not blink. He saw the power play in the sudden admission that the administration knew the true numbers of the Families and discounted it. He had already adjusted himself to the shock of learning that the Families’ secret headquarters was no longer secret and the still more upsetting fact that the Administrator knew how to tap into their private communication system; it simply proved that one or more Members had been caught and forced to talk.

So it was now almost certain that the authorities already knew every important fact about the Families.

Therefore it was useless to try to bluff-just the same, don’t volunteer any information; they might not have all the facts this soon. Barstow answered without noticeable pause. “What is it you wish to discuss with me, sir?”

“The policy of the Administration toward your kin group. The welfare of yourself and your relatives.”

Barstow shrugged. “What can we discuss? The Covenant has been tossed aside and you have been given power to do as you like with us-to squeeze a secret out of us that we don’t have. What can we do but pray for mercy?”

“Please!” The Administrator gestured his annoyance. “Why fence with me? We have a problem, you and I. Let’s discuss it openly and try to reach a solution. Yes?”

Barstow answered slowly, “I would like to … and I believe that you would like to, also. But the problem is based on a false assumption, that we, the Howard Families, know how to lengthen human life. We don’t.”

“Suppose I tell you that I know there is no such secret?”

“Mmm … I would like to believe you. But how can you reconcile that with the persecution of my people? You’ve been harrying us like rats.”

Ford made a wry face. “There is an old, old story about a theologian who was asked to reconcile the doctrine of Divine mercy with the doctrine of infant damnation. ‘The Almighty,’ he explained, ‘finds it necessary to do things in His official and public capacity which in His private and personal capacity He deplores.’”

Barstow smiled in spite of himself. “I see the analogy. Is it actually pertinent?” “I think it is.”

“So. You didn’t call me simply to make a headsman’s apology?”

“No. I hope not. You keep in touch with politics? I’m sure you must; your position would require it.” Barstow nodded; Ford explained at length:

Ford’s administration had been the longest since the signing of the Covenant; he had lasted through four Councils. Nevertheless his control was now so shaky that he could not risk forcing a vote of confidence-certainly not over the Howard Families. On that issue his nominal majority was already a minority. If he refused the present decision of the Council, forced it to   a vote of confidence, Ford would be out of office and the present minority leader would take over as administrator. “You follow me? I can either stay in office and try to cope with this problem while restricted by a Council directive with which I do not agree … or I can drop out and let my successor handle it.”

“Surely you’re not asking my advice?”

“No, no! Not on that. I’ve made my decision. The Action-in-Council would have been carried out in any case, either by me or by Mr. Vanning-so I decided to do it. The question is: will I have your help, or will I not?”

Barstow hesitated, while rapidly reviewing Ford’s political career in his mind. The earlier part of Ford’s long administration had been almost a golden age of statesmanship. Awise and practical man, Ford had shaped into workable rules the principles of human freedom set forth by Novak in the language of the Covenant. It had been a period of good will, of prosperous expansion, of civilizing processes which seemed to be permanent, irreversible.

Nevertheless a setback had come and Barstow understood the reasons at least as well as Ford did. Whenever the citizens fix their attention on one issue to the exclusion of others, the situation is ripe for scalawags, demagogues, ambitious men on horseback. The Howard Families, in all innocence, had created the crisis in public morals from which they now suffered, through their own action, taken years earlier, in letting the shortlived learn of their existence. It mattered not at all that the “secret” did not exist; the corrupting effect did exist. Ford at least understood the true situation- “We’ll help,” Barstow answered suddenly. “Good. What do you suggest?”

Barstow chewed his lip. “Isn’t there some way you can stall off this drastic action, this violation of the Covenant itself?” Ford shook his head. “It’s too late.”

“Even if you went before the public and told the citizens, face to face, that you knew that-“

Ford cut him short. “I wouldn’t last in office long enough to make the speech. Nor would I be believed. Besides that-understand me clearly, Zaccur Barstow-no matter what sympathy I may have personally for you and your people, I would not do so if I could. This whole matter is a cancer eating into vitals of our society; it must be settled. I have had my hand forced, true

… but there is no turning back. It must be pressed on to a solution.”

In at least one respect Barstow was a wise man; he knew that another man could oppose him and not be a villain. Nevertheless he protested, “My people are being persecuted.”

“Your people,” Ford said forcefully, “are a fraction of a tenth of one per cent of all the people … and I must find a solution for all! I’ve called on you to find out if you have any suggestions toward a solution for everyone. Do you?”

“I’m not sure,” Barstow answered slowly. “Suppose I concede that you must go ahead with this ugly business of arresting my people, of questioning them by unlawful means-I suppose I have no choice about that-“

“You have no choice. Neither have I.” Ford frowned. “It will be carried out as humanely as I can manage it-I am not a free agent.”

“Thank you. But, even though you tell me it would be useless for you yourself to go to the people, nevertheless you have enormous propaganda means at your disposal. Would it be possible, while we stall along, to build up a campaign to convince the people of the true facts? Prove to them that there is no secret?” Ford answered, “Ask yourself: will it work?”

Barstow sighed. “Probably not.”

“Nor would I consider it a solution even if it would! The people-even my trusted assistants-are clinging to their belief in a fountain of youth because the only alternative is too bitter to think about. Do you know what it would mean to them? For them to believe the bald truth?”

“Go on?’

“Death has been tolerable to me only because Death has been the Great Democrat, treating all alike. But now Death plays favorites. Zaccur Barstow, can you understand the bitter, bitter jealousy of the ordinary man of-oh, say ‘fifty’- who looks on one of your sort? Fifty years … twenty of them he is a child, he is well past thirty before he is skilled in his profession. He is forty before he is established and respected. For not more than the last ten years of his fifty he has really amounted to something.”

Ford leaned forward in the screen and spoke with sober emphasis: “And now, when he has reached his goal, what is his prize? His eyes are failing him, his bright young strength is gone, his heart and wind are ‘not what they used to be.’ He is not senile yet … but he feels the chill of the first frost. He knows what is in store for him. He knows-he knows!

“But it was inevitable and each man learned to be resigned to it.”

“Now you come along,” Ford went on bitterly. “You shame him in his weakness, you humble him before his children. He dares not plan for the future; you blithely undertake plans that will not mature for fifty years-for a hundred. No matter what success he has achieved, what excellence he has attained, you will catch up with him, pass him-outlive him. In his weakness you are kind to him.

“Is it any wonder that he hates you?”

Barstow raised his head wearily. “Do you hate me, Slayton Ford?”

“No. No, I cannot afford to hate anyone. But I can tell you this,” Ford added suddenly, “had there been a secret, I would have it out of you if I had to tear you to pieces!”

“Yes. I understand that.” Barstow paused to think. “There is little that we of the Howard Families can do. We did not plan it this way; it was planned for us. But there is one thing we can offer.”

“Yes?”

Barstow explained.

Ford shook his head. “Medically what you suggest is feasible and I have no doubt that a half interest in your heritage would lengthen the span of human life. But even if women were willing to accept the germ plasm of your men-I do not say that they would-it would be psychic death for all other men. There would be an outbreak of frustration and hatred that would split the human race to ruin. No, no matter what we wish, our customs are what they are. We can’t breed men like animals; they won’t stand for it.”

“I know it,” agreed Barstow, “but it is all we have to offer … a share in our fortune through artificial impregnation.”

“Yes. I suppose I should thank you but I feel no thanks and I shan’t. Now let’s be practical. Individually you old ones are doubtless honorable, lovable men. But as a group you are as dangerous as carriers of plague. So you must be quarantined.”

Barstow nodded. “My cousins and I had already reached that conclusion.” Ford looked relieved. “I’m glad you’re being sensible about it.”

“We can’t help ourselves. Well? Asegregated colony? Some remote place that would be a Coventry of our own? Madagascar, perhaps? Or we might take the British Isles, build them up again and spread from there into Europe as the radioactivity died down.”

Ford shook his head. “Impossible. That would simply leave the problem for my grandchildren to solve. By that time you and yours would have grown in strength; you might defeat us. No, Zaccur Barstow, you and your kin must leave this planet entirely!”

Barstow looked bleak. “I knew it would come to that. Well where shall we go?” “Take your choice of the Solar System. Anywhere you like.”

“But where? Venus is no prize, but even if we chose it, would they accept us? The Venerians won’t take orders from Earth; that was settled in 2020. Yes, they now accept screened immigrants under the Four Planets Convention but would they accept a hundred thousand whom Earth found too dangerous to keep? I doubt it.”

“So do I. Better pick another planet.”

“What planet? In the whole system there is not another body that will support human life as it is. It would take almost superhuman effort, even with unlimited money and the best of modern engineering, to make the most promising of them fit for habitation.”

“Make the effort. We will be generous with help.”

“I am sure you would. But is that any better solution in the long run than giving us a reservation on Earth? Are you going to put a stop to space travel?”

Ford sat up suddenly. “Oh! I see your thought. I had not followed it through, but let’s face it. Why not? Would it not be better to give up space travel than to let this situation degenerate into open war? It was given up once before.”

“Yes, when the Venerians threw off their absentee landlords. But it started up again and Luna City is rebuilt and ten times more tonnage moves through the sky than ever did before. Can you stop it? If you can, will it stay stopped?”

Ford turned it over and over in his mind. He could not stop space travel, no administration could. But could an interdict be placed on whatever planet these oldsters were shipped to? And would it help? One generation, two, three … what difference would it make? Ancient Japan had tried some solution like that; the foreign devils had come sailing in anyhow. Cultures could not be kept apart forever, and when they did come in contact, the hardier displaced the weaker; that was a natural law.

Apermanent and effective quarantine was impossible. That left only one answer-an ugly one. But Ford was toughminded; he could accept what was necessary. He started making plans, Barstow’s presence in the screen forgotten. Once he gave the Chief Provost the location of the Howard Families headquarters it should be reduced in an hour, two at the most unless they had extraordinary defenses-but anywise it was just a matter of time. From those who would be arrested at their headquarters it should be possible to locate and arrest every other member of their group. With luck he would have them all in twenty-four to forty-eight hours.

The only point left undecided in his mind was whether to liquidate them all, or simply to sterilize them. Either would be a final solution and there was no third solution. But which was the more humane?

Ford knew that this would end his career. He would leave office in disgrace, perhaps be sent to Coventry, but he gave it no thought; he was so constituted as to be unable to weigh his own welfare against his concept of his public duty.

Barstow could not read Ford’s mind but he did sense that Ford had reached a decision and he surmised correctly how bad that decision must be for himself and his kin. Now was the time, he decided, to risk his one lone trump.

“Mister Administrator-“

“Eh? Oh, sorry! I was preoccupied.” That was a vast understatement; he was shockingly embarrassed to find himself still facing a man he had just condemned to death. He gathered formality about him like a robe. “Thank you, Zaccur Barstow, for talking with me. I am sorry that-“

“Mister Administrator!”

“Yes?”

“I propose that you move us entirely out of the Solar System.” “What?” Ford blinked. “Are you speaking seriously?”

Barstow spoke rapidly, persuasively, explaining Lazarus Long’s half-conceived scheme, improvising details as he went along, skipping over obstacles and emphasizing advantages.

“It might work,” Ford at last said slowly. “There are difficulties you have not mentioned, political difficulties and a terrible hazard of time. Still, it might.” He stood up. “Go back to your people. Don’t spring this on them yet. I’ll talk with you later.”

Barstow walked back slowly while wondering what he could tell the Members. They would demand a full report; technically he had no right to refuse. But he was strongly inclined to cooperate with the Administrator as long as there was any chance of a favorable outcome. Suddenly making up his mind, he turned, went to his office, and sent for Lazarus.

“Howdy, Zack,” Long said as he came in. “How’d the palaver go?”

“Good and bad,” Barstow replied. “Listen-” He gave him a brief, accurate resume. “Can you go back in there and tell them something that will hold them?” “Mmm … reckon so.”

“Then do it and hurry back here.”

They did not like the stall Lazarus gave them. They did not want to keep quiet and they did not want to adjourn the meeting. “Where is Zaccur?”-“We demand a report!”-“Why all the mystification?”

Lazarus shut them up with a roar. “Listen to me, you damned idiots! Zack’ll talk when he’s ready-don’t joggle his elbow. He knows what he’s doing.” Aman near the back stood up. “I’m going home!”

“Do that,” Lazarus urged sweetly. “Give my love to the proctors.” The man looked startled and sat down.

“Anybody else want to go home?” demanded Lazarus. “Don’t let me stop you. But it’s time you bird-brained dopes realized that you have been outlawed. The only thing that stands between you and the proctors is Zack Barstow’s ability to talk sweet to the Administrator. So do as you like the meeting’s adjourned.”

“Look, Zack,” said Lazarus a few minutes later, “let’s get this straight. Ford is going to use his extraordinary powers to help us glom onto the big ship and make a getaway. Is that right?” “He’s practically committed to it.”

“Hmmm-He’ll have to do this while pretending to the Council that everything he does is just a necessary step in squeezing the ‘secret’ out of us-he’s going to double-cross ‘em. That right?”

“I hadn’t thought that far ahead. I-“ “But that’s true, isn’t it?”

“Well … yes, it must be true.”

“Okay. Now, is our boy Ford bright enough to realize what he is letting himself in for and tough enough to go through with it?”

Barstow reviewed what he knew of Ford and added his impressions from the interview. “Yes,” he decided, “he knows and he’s strong enough to face it.” “All right. Now how about you, pal? Are you up to it, too?” Lazarus’ voice was accusing.

“Me? What do you mean?”

“You’re planning on double-crossing your crowd, too, aren’t you? Have you got the guts to go through with it when the going gets tough?”  “I don’t understand you, Lazarus,” Barstow answered worriedly. “I’m not planning to deceive anyone-at least, no member of the Families.”

“Better look at your cards again,” Lazarus went on remorselessly. “Your part of the deal is to see to it that every man, woman and child takes part in this exodus. Do you expect to sell the idea to each one of them separately and get a hundred thousand people to agree? Unanimously? Shucks, you couldn’t get that many to whistle ‘Yankee Doodle’ unanimously.”

“But they will have to agree,” protested Barstow. “They have no choice. We either emigrate, or they hunt us down and kill us. I’m certain that is what Ford intends to do. And he will.” “Then why didn’t you walk into the meeting and tell ‘em that? Why did you send me in to give ‘em a stall?”

Barstow rubbed a hand across his eyes. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll tell you why,” continued Lazarus. “You think better with your hunches than most men do with the tops of their minds. You sent me in there to tell ‘em a tale because you knew damn well the truth wouldn’t serve. If you told ‘em it was get out or get killed, some would get panicky and some would get stubborn. And some old-woman-in-kilts would decide to go home and stand on his Covenant rights. Then he’d spill the scheme before it ever dawned on him that the government was playing for keeps. That’s right, isn’t it?”

Barstow shrugged and laughed unhappily. “You’re right. I didn’t have it figured out but you’re absolutely right.”

“But you did have it figured out,” Lazarus assured him. “You had the right answers. Zack, I like your hunches; that’s why I’m stringing along. All right, you and Ford are planning to pull a whizzer on every man jack on this globe-I’m asking you again: have you got the guts to see it through?”

Chapter 5

THE MEMBERS STOOD AROUND in groups, fretfully. “I can’t understand it,” the Resident Archivist was saying to a worried circle around her. “The Senior Trustee never interfered in my work before. But he came bursting into my office with that Lazarus Long behind him and ordered me out.”

“What did he say?” asked one of her listeners.

“Well, I said, ‘May I do you a service, Zaccur Barstow? and be said, ‘Yes, you may. Get out and take your girls with you.’ Not a word of ordinary courtesy!”

“Alot you’ve got to complain about,” another voice added gloomily. It was Cecil Hedrick, of the Johnson Family, chief communications engineer. “Lazarus Long paid a call on me, and he was a damned sight less polite.”

“What did he do?”

“He walks into the communication cell and tells me he is going to take over my board-Zaccur’s orders. I told him that nobody could touch my burners but me and my operators, and anyhow, where was his authority? You know what he did? You won’t believe it but he pulled a blaster on me.”

“You don’t mean it!”

“I certainly do. I tell you, that man is dangerous. He ought to go for psycho adjustment. He’s an atavism if I ever saw one.” Lazarus Long’s face stared out of the screen into that of the Administrator. “Got it all canned?” he demanded.

Ford cut the switch on the facsimulator on his desk. “Got it all,” he confirmed.

“Okay,” the image of Lazarus replied. “I’m clearing.” As the screen went blank Ford spoke into his interoffice circuit. “Have the High Chief Provost report to me at once-in corpus.”

The public safety boss showed up as ordered with an expression on his lined face in which annoyance struggled with discipline. He was having the busiest night of his career, yet the Old Man had sent orders to report in the flesh. What the devil were viewphones for, anyway, he thought angrily-and asked himself why he had ever taken up police work. He rebuked his boss by being coldly formal and saluting unnecessarily. “You sent for me, sir.”

Ford ignored it. “Yes, thank you. Here.” He pressed a stud a film spool popped out of the facsimulator. “This is a complete list of the Howard Families. Arrest them.”

“Yes, sir.” The Federation police chief stared at the spool and debated whether or not to ask how it had been obtained-it certainly hadn’t come through his office … did the Old Man have an intelligence service he didn’t even know about?

“It’s alphabetical, but keyed geographically,” the Administrator was saying. “After you put it through sorters, send the-no, bring the original back to me. You can stop the psycho interviews, too,” he added. “Just bring them in and hold them. I’ll give you more instructions later.”

The High Chief Provost decided that this was not a good time to show curiosity. “Yes, sir.” He saluted stiffly and left.

Ford turned back to his desk controls and sent word that he wanted to see the chiefs of the bureaus of land resources and of transportation control. On afterthought he added the chief of the bureau of consumption logistics.

Back in the Families’ Seat a rump session of the trustees was meeting; Barstow was absent. “I don’t like it,” Andrew Weatherall was saying. “I could understand Zaccur deciding to delay reporting to the Members but I had supposed that he simply wanted to talk to us first. I certainly did expect him to consult us. What do you make of it, Philip?”

Philip Hardy chewed his lip. “I don’t know. Zaccur’s got a head on his shoulders … but it certainly seems to me that he should have called us together and advised with us. Has he spoken with you, Justin?”

“No, he has not,” Justin Foote answered frigidly.

“Well, what should we do? We can’t very well call him in and demand an accounting unless we are prepared to oust him from office and if he refuses. I, for one, am reluctant to do that.” They were still discussing it when the proctors arrived.

Lazarus heard the commotion and correctly interpreted it-no feat, since he had information that his brethren lacked. He was aware that he should submit peacefully and conspicuously to arrest-set a good example. But old habits die hard; he postponed the inevitable by ducking into the nearest men’s ‘fresher.

It was a dead end. He glanced at the air duct-no, too small. While thinking he fumbled in his pouch for a cigarette; his hand found a strange object, he pulled it out. It was the brassard he bad “borrowed” from the proctor in Chicago.

When the proctor working point of the mop-squad covering that wing of the Seat stuck his head into that ‘fresher, he found another “proctor” already there. “Nobody in here,” announced Lazarus. “I’ve checked it.”

“How the devil did you get ahead of me?’

“Around your flank. Stoney Island Tunnel and through their air vents.” Lazarus trusted that the real cop would be unaware that there was no Stoney Island Tunnel “Got a cigarette on you?” “Huh? This is no time to catch a smoke.”

“Shucks,” said Lazarus, “my legate is a good mile away.” “Maybe so,” the proctor replied, “but mine is right behind us.”

“So? Well, skip it-I’ve got something to tell him anyhow.” Lazarus started to move past but the proctor did not get out of his way. He was glancing curiously at Lazarus’ kilt. Lazarus had turned it inside out and its blue lining made a fair imitation of a proctor’s service uniform-if not inspected closely.

“What station did you say you were from?” inquired the proctor.

“This one,” answered Lazarus and planted a short jab under the man’s breastbone. Lazarus’ coach in rough-and-tumble had explained to him that a solar plexus blow was harder to dodge than one to the jaw; the coach bad been dead since the roads strike of 1966, his skill lived on.

Lazarus felt more like a cop with a proper uniform kilt and a bandolier of paralysis bombs slung under his left arm. Besides, the proctor’s kilt was a better fit. To the right the passage outside led to the Sanctuary and a dead end; he went to the left by Hobson’s choice although he knew he would run into his unconscious benefactor’s legate. The passage gave into a hall which was crowded with Members herded into a group of proctors. Lazarus ignored his kin and sought out the harassed officer in charge. “Sir,” he reported, saluting smartly, “There’s sort of a hospital back there. You’ll need fifty or sixty stretchers.”

“Don’t bother me, tell your legate. We’ve got our hands full.”

Lazarus almost did not answer; he had caught Mary Sperling’s eye in the crowd-she stared at him and looked away. He caught himself and answered, “Can’t tell him, sir. Not available.” “Well, go on outside and tell the first-aid squad.”

“Yes, sir.” He moved away, swaggering a little, his thumbs hooked in the band of his kilt. He was far down the passage leading to the transbelt tunnel serving the Waukegan outlet when he heard shouts behind him. Two proctors were running to overtake him.

Lazarus stopped in the archway giving into the transbelt tunnel and waited for them. “What’s the trouble?’ he asked easily as they came up.

“The legate—”began one. He got no further; a paralysis bomb tinkled and popped at his feet. He looked surprised as the radiations wiped all expression from his face; his mate fell

across him.

Lazarus waited behind a shoulder of the arch, counted seconds up to fifteen: “Number one jet fire! Number two jet fire! Number three jet fire!”-added a couple to be sure the paralyzing effect had died away. He had cut it finer than he liked. He had not ducked quite fast enough and his left foot tingled from exposure.

He then checked. The two were unconscious, no one else was in sight. He mounted the transbelt. Perhaps they had not been looking for him in his proper person, perhaps no one had given him away. But he did not hang around to find out. One thing he was damn’ well certain of, he told himself, if anybody had squealed on him, it wasn’t Mary Sperling.

It took two more parabombs and a couple of hundred words of pure fiction to get him out into the open air. Once he was there and out of immediate observation the brassard and the remaining bombs went into his pouch and the bandolier ended up behind some bushes; he then looked up a clothing store in Waukegan.

He sat down in a sales booth and dialed the code for kilts. He let cloth designs flicker past in the screen while he ignored the persuasive voice of the catalogue until a pattern showed up which was distinctly unmilitary and not blue, whereupon he stopped the display and punched an order for his size. He noted the price, tore an open-credit voucher from his wallet, stuck it into the machine and pushed the switch. Then he enjoyed a smoke while the tailoring was done.

Ten minutes later he stuffed the proctor’s kilt into the refuse hopper of the sales booth and left, nattily and loudly attired. He had not been in Waukegan the past century but he found a middle-priced autel without drawing attention by asking questions, dialed its registration board for a standard suite and settled down for seven hours of sound sleep.

He breakfasted in his suite, listening with half an ear to the news box; he was interested, in a mild way, in hearing what might be reported concerning the raid on the Families. But it was   a detached interest; he had already detached himself from it in his own mind. It had been a mistake, he now realized, to get back in touch with the Families-a darn good thing he was clear of it all with his present public identity totally free of any connection with the whing-ding.

Aphrase caught his attention: “-including Zaccur Barstow, alleged to be their tribal chief.

“The prisoners are being shipped to a reservation in Oklahoma, near the ruins of the Okla-Orleans road city about twenty-five miles east of Harriman Memorial Park. The Chief Provost describes it as a ‘Little Coventry,’ and has ordered all aircraft to avoid it by ten miles laterally. The Administrator could not be reached for a statement but a usually reliable source inside the administration informs us that the mass arrest was accomplished in order to speed up the investigations whereby the administration expects to obtain the ‘Secret of the Howard Families’-their techniques for indefinitely prolonging life. This forthright action in arresting and transporting every member of the outlaw group is expected to have a salutary effect in breaking down the resistance of their leaders to the legitimate demands of society. It will bring home forcibly to them that the civil rights enjoyed by decent citizens must not be used as a cloak behind which to damage society as a whole.

“The chattels and holdings of the members of this criminal conspiracy have been declared subject to the Conservator General and will be administered by his agents during the imprisonment of-“

Lazarus switched it off. “Damnation!” he thought. “Don’t fret about things you can’t help.” Of course, he had expected to be arrested himself … but he had escaped. That was that. It wouldn’t do the Families any good for him to turn himself in-and besides, he owed the Families nothing, not a tarnation thing.

Anyhow, they were better off all arrested at once and quickly placed under guard. If they had been smelled out one at a time, anything could have happened-lynchings, even pogroms. Lazarus knew from hard experience how close under the skin lay lynch law and mob violence in the most sweetly civilized; that was why he had advised Zack to rig it-that and the fact that Zack and the Administrator had to have the Families in one compact group to stand a chance of carrying out their scheme. They were well off … and no skin off his nose.

But he wondered how Zack was getting along, and what he would think of Lazarus’ disappearance. And what Mary Sperling thought-it must have been a shock to her when he turned up making a noise like a proctor. He wished he could straighten that out with her.

Not that it mattered what any of them thought. They would all either be lightyears away very soon … or dead. Aclosed book.

He turned to the phone and called the post office. “Captain Aaron Sheffield,” he announced, and gave his postal number. “Last registered with Goddard Field post office. Will you please have my mail sent to-” He leaned closer and read the code number from the suite’s mail receptacle.

“Service,” assented the voice of the clerk. “Right away, Captain.” “Thank you.”

It would take a couple of hours, he reflected, for his mail to catch up with him-a half hour in trajectory, three times that in fiddle-faddle. Might as well wait here … no doubt the search for him had lost itself in the distance but there was nothing in Waukegan he wanted. Once the mail showed up he would hire a U-push-it and scoot down to—

To where? What was he going to do now?

He turned several possibilities over in his mind and came at last to the blank realization that there was nothing, from one end of the Solar System to the other, that he really wanted to do.   It scared him a little. He had once heard, and was inclined to credit, that a loss of interest in living marked the true turning point in the battle between anabolisim and catabolism-old age.

He suddenly envied normal shortlived people-at least they could go make nuisances of themselves to their children. Filial affection was not customary among Members of the Families; it

was not a feasible relationship to maintain for a century or more. And friendship, except between Members, was bound to be regarded as a passing and shallow matter. There was no

one whom Lazarus wanted to see.

Wait a minute … who was that planter on Venus? The one who knew so many folk songs and who was so funny when he was drunk? He’d go look him up. It would make a nice hop and  it would be fun, much as he disliked Venus.

Then he recalled with cold shock that he had not seen the man for-how long? In any case, he was certainly dead by now.

Libby had been right, he mused glumly, when he spoke of the necessity for a new type of memory association for the long-lived. He hoped the lad would push ahead with the necessary research and come up with an answer before Lazarus was reduced to counting on his fingers. He dwelt on the notion for a minute or two before recalling that he was most unlikely ever to see Libby again.

The mail arrived and contained nothing of importance. He was not surprised; he expected no personal letters. The spools of advertising went into the refuse chute; he read only one item,  a letter from Pan-Terra Docking Corp. telling him that his convertible cruiser I Spy had finished her overhaul and had been moved to a parking dock, rental to start forthwith. As instructed, they had not touched the ship’s astrogational controls-was that still the Captain’s pleasure?

He decided to pick her up later in the day and head out into space. Anything was better than sitting Earthbound and admitting that he was bored.

Paying his score and finding a jet for hire occupied less than twenty minutes. He took off and headed for Goddard Field, using the low local-traffic level to avoid entering the control pattern with a flight plan. He was not consciously avoiding the police because he had no reason to think that they could be looking for “Captain Sheffield”; it was simply habit, and it would get him to Goddard Field soon enough.

But long before he reached there, while over eastern Kansas, he decided to land and did so.

He picked the field of a town so small as to be unlikely to rate a full-time proctor and there he sought out a phone booth away from the field. Inside it, he hesitated. How did you go about calling up the head man of the entire Federation-and get him? If he simply called Novak Tower and asked for Administrator Ford, he not only would not be put through to him but his call would be switched to the Department of Public Safety for some unwelcome inquiries, sure as taxes.

Well, there was only one way to beat that, and that was to call the Department of Safety himself and, somehow, get the Chief Provost on the screen-after that he would play by ear. “Department of Civil Safety,” a voice answered. “What service, citizen?”

“Service to you,” he began in his best control-bridge voice. “I am Captain Sheffield. Give me the Chief.” He was not overbearing; his manner simply assumed obedience. Short silence— “What is it about, please?”

“I said I was Captain Sheffield.” This time Lazarus’ voice showed restrained annoyance. Another short pause— “I’ll connect you with Chief Deputy’s office,” the voice said doubtfully.

This time the screen came to life. “Yes?” asked the Chief Deputy, looking him over.

“Get me the Chief-hurry.” “What’s it about?”

“Good Lord, man-get me the Chief! I’m Captain Sheffield!”

The Chief Deputy must be excused for connecting him; he had had no sleep and more confusing things had happened in the last twenty-four hours than he had been able to assimilate. When the High Chief Provost appeared in the screen, Lazarus spoke first. “Oh, there you are! I’ve had the damnedest time cutting through your red tape. Get me the Old Man and move! Use your closed circuit.”

“What the devil do you mean? Who are you?”

“Listen, brother,” said Lazarus in tones of slow exasperation, “I would not have routed through your damned hidebound department if I hadn’t been in a jam. Cut me in to the Old Man. This is about the Howard Families.”

The police chief was instantly alert. “Make your report.”

“Look,” said Lazarus in tired tones, “I know you would like to look over the Old Man’s shoulder, but this isn’t a good time to try. If you obstruct me and force me to waste two hours by reporting in corpus, I will. But the Old Man will want to know why and you can bet your pretty parade kit, I’ll tell him.”

The Chief Provost decided to take a chance-cut this character in on a three-way; then, if the Old Man didn’t burn this joker off the screen in about three seconds, he’d know he had played safe and guessed lucky. If he did-well, you could always blame it on a cross-up in communications. He set the combo.

Administrator Ford looked flabbergasted when he recognized Lazarus in the screen. “You?’ he exclaimed. “How on Earth—Did Zaccur Barstow—” “Seal your circuit!” Lazarus cut in.

The Chief Provost blinked as his screen went dead and silent. So the Old Man did have secret agents outside the department … interesting-and not to be forgotten.

Lazarus gave Ford a quick and fairly honest account of how he happened to be at large, then added, “So you see, I could have gone to cover and escaped entirely. In fact I still can. But I want to know this: is the deal with Zaccur Barstow to let us emigrate still on?”

“Yes, it is.”

“Have you figured out how you are going to get a hundred thousand people inboard the New Frontiers without tipping your hand? You can’t trust your own people, you know that.”  “I know. The present situation is a temporary expedient while we work it out.”

“And I’m the man for the job. I’ve got to be, I’m the only agent on the loose that either one of you can afford to trust. Now listen-“

Eight minutes later Ford was nodding his head slowly and saying, “It might work. It might. Anyway, you start your preparations. I’ll have a letter of credit waiting for you at Goddard.” “Can you cover your tracks on that? I can’t flash a letter of credit from the Administrator; people would wonder.”

“Credit me with some intelligence. By the time it reaches you it will appear to be a routine banking transaction.” “Sorry. Now how can I get through to you when I need to?”

“Oh, yes-note this code combination.” Ford recited it slowly. “That puts you through to my desk without relay. No, don’t write it down; memorize it.” “And how can I talk to Zack Barstow?

“Call me and I’ll hook you in. You can’t call him directly unless you can arrange a sensitive circuit.” “Even if I could, I can’t cart a sensitive around with me. Well, cheerio-I’m clearing.”

“Good luck!”

Lazarus left the phone booth with restrained haste and hurried back to reclaim his hired ship. He did not know enough about current police practice to guess whether or not the High Chief Provost had traced the call to the Administrator; he simply took it for granted because he himself would have done so in the Provosts’ shoes. Therefore the nearest available proctor was probably stepping on his heels-time to move, time to mess up the trail a little.

He took off again and headed west, staying in the local, uncontrolled low level until he reached a cloud bank that walled the western horizon. He then swung back and cut air for Kansas City, staying carefully under the speed limit and flying as low as local traffic regulations permitted. At Kansas City he turned his ship in to the local U-push-it agency and flagged a ground taxi, which carried him down the controlway to Joplin. There he boarded a local jet bus from St. Louis without buying a ticket first, thereby insuring that his flight would not be recorded until the bus’s trip records were turned in on the west coast.

Instead of worrying he spent the time making plans.

One hundred thousand people with an average mass of a hundred and fifty-no, make it a hundred and sixty pounds, Lazarus reconsidered-a hundred and sixty each made a load of sixteen million pounds, eight thousand tons. The I Spy could boost such a load against one gravity but she would be as logy as baked beans, It was out of the question anyhow; people did not stow like cargo; the I Spy could lift that dead weight-but “dead” was the word, for that was what they would be.

He needed a transport.

Buying a passenger ship big enough to ferry the Families from Earth up to where the New Frontiers hung in her construction orbit was not difficult; Four Planets Passenger Service would gladly unload such a ship at a fair price. Passenger trade competition being what it was, they were anxious to cut their losses on older ships no longer popular with tourists. But a passenger ship would not do; not only would there be unhealthy curiosity in what he intended to do with such a ship, but-and this settled it-he could not pilot it single-handed. Under the Revised Space PrecautionaryAct, passenger ships were required to be built for human control throughout on the theory that no automatic safety device could replace human judgment in an emergency.

It would have to be a freighter.

Lazarus knew the best place to find one. Despite efforts to make the Moon colony ecologically self-sufficient, Luna City still imported vastly more tonnage than she exported. On Earth this would have resulted in “empties coming back”; in space transport it was sometimes cheaper to let empties accumulate, especially on Luna where an empty freighter was worth more as metal than it had cost originally as a ship back Earthside.

He left the bus when it landed at Goddard City, went to the space field, paid his bills, and took possession of the I Spy, filed a request for earliest available departure for Luna. The slot he was assigned was two days from then, but Lazarus did not let it worry him; he simply went back to the docking company and indicated that he was willing to pay liberally for a swap, in departure time. In twenty minutes he had oral assurance that he could boost for Luna that evening.

He spent the remaining several hours in the maddening red tape of interplanetary clearance. He first picked up the letter of credit Ford had promised him and converted it into cash. Lazarus would have been quite willing to use a chunk of the cash to speed up his processing just as he had paid (quite legally) for a swap in slot with another ship. But he found himself unable to do so. Two centuries of survival had taught him that a bribe must be offered as gently and as indirectly as a gallant suggestion is made to a proud lady; in a very few minutes he came to the glum conclusion that civic virtue and public honesty could be run into the ground-the functionaries at Goddard Field seemed utterly innocent of the very notion of cumshaw, squeeze, or the lubricating effect of money in routine transactions. He admired their incorruptibility; he did not have to like it-most especially when filling out useless forms cost him the time he had intended to devote to a gourmet’s feast in

the Skygate Room.

He even let himself be vaccinated again rather than go back to the I Spy and dig out the piece of paper that showed he had been vaccinated on arrival Earthside a few weeks earlier.

Nevertheless, twenty minutes before his revised slot time, he lay at the controls of the I Spy, his pouch bulging with stamped papers and his stomach not bulging with the sandwich he had managed to grab. He had worked out the “Hohmann’s-S” trajectory he would use; the results had been fed into the autopilot. All the lights on his board were green save the one which would blink green when field control started his count down. He waited in the warm happiness that always filled him when about to boost.

Athought hit him and he raised up against his straps. Then he loosened the chest strap and sat up, reached for his copy of the current Terra Pilot and Traffic Hazards Supplement. Mmm…

New Frontiers hung in a circular orbit of exactly twenty-four hours, keeping always over meridian 106 degrees west at declination zero at a distance from Earth center of approximately twenty-six thousand miles.

Why not pay her a call, scout out the lay of the land?

The I Spy, with tanks topped off and cargo spaces empty, had many mile-seconds of reserve boost. To be sure, the field had cleared him for Luna City, not for the interstellar ship … but, with the Moon in its present phase, the deviation from his approved flight pattern would hardly show on a screen, probably would not be noticed until the film record was analyzed at some later time-at which time Lazarus would receive a traffic citation, perhaps even have his license suspended. But traffic tickets had never worried him … and it was certainly worthwhile to reconnoitre.

He was already setting up the problem in his ballistic calculator. Aside from checking the orbit elements of the New Frontiers in the Terra Pilot Lazarus could have done it in his sleep; satellite-matching maneuvers were old hat for any pilot and a doubly-tangent trajectory for a twenty-four hour orbit was one any student pilot knew by heart.

He fed the answers into his autopilot during the count down, finished with three minutes to spare, strapped himself down again and relaxed as the acceleration hit him. When the ship went into free fall, he checked his position and vector via the field’s transponder. Satisfied, he locked his board, set the alarm for rendezvous, and went to sleep.

Chapter 6

ABOUT FOUR HOURS LATER the alarm woke him. He switched it off; it continued to ring-a glance at his screen showed him why. The Gargantuan cylindrical body of the New Frontiers lay close aboard. He switched off the radar alarm circuit as well and completed matching with her by the seat of his pants, not bothering with the ballistic calculator. Before he had completed the maneuver the communications alarm started beeping. He slapped a switch; the rig hunted frequencies and the vision screen came to life. Aman looked at him. “New Frontiers calling: what ship are you?”

“Private vessel I Spy, Captain Sheffield. My compliments to your commanding officer. May I come onboard to pay a call?”

They were pleased to have visitors. The ship was completed save for inspection, trials, and acceptance; the enormous gang which had constructed her had gone to Earth and there was no one aboard but the representatives of the Jordan Foundation and a half dozen engineers employed by the corporation which had been formed to build the ship for the foundation. These few were bored with inactivity, bored with each other, anxious to quit marking time and get back to the pleasures of Earth; a visitor was a welcome diversion.

When the I Spy’s airlock had been sealed to that of the big ship, Lazarus was met by the engineer in charge-technically “captain” since the New Frontiers was a ship under way even though not under power. He introduced himself and took Lazarus on a tour of the ship. They floated through miles of corridors, visited laboratories, storerooms, libraries containing hundreds of thousands of spools, acres of hydroponic tanks for growing food and replenishing oxygen, and comfortable, spacious, even luxurious quarters for a crew colony of ten thousand people. “We believe that the Vanguard expedition was somewhat undermanned,” the skipper-engineer explained. “The socio-dynamicists calculate that this colony will be able to maintain the basics of our present level of culture.”

“Doesn’t sound like enough,” Lazarus commented. “Aren’t there more than ten thousand types of specialization?”

“Oh, certainly! But the idea is to provide experts in all basic arts and indispensable branches of knowledge. Then, as the colony expands, additional specializations can be added through the aid of the reference libraries-anything from tap-dancing to tapestry weaving. That’s the general idea though it’s out of my line. Interesting subject, no doubt, for those who like it.”

“Are you anxious to get started?” asked Lazarus.

The man looked almost shocked. “Me? D’you mean to suggest that I would go in this thing? My dear sir, I’m an engineer, not a damn’ fool.” “Sorry.”

“Oh, I don’t mind a reasonable amount of spacing when there’s a reason for it-I’ve been to Luna City more times than I can count and I’ve even been to Venus. But you don’t think the man who built the Mayflower sailed in her, do you? For my money the only thing that will keep these people who signed up for it from going crazy before they get there is that it’s a dead cinch they’re all crazy before they start.”

Lazarus changed the subject. They did not dally in the main drive space, nor in the armored cell housing the giant atomic converter, once Lazarus learned that they were unmanned, fully- automatic types. The total absence of moving parts in each of these divisions, made possible by recent developments in parastatics, made their inner workings of intellectual interest only, which could wait. What Lazarus did want to see was the control room, and there he lingered, asking endless questions until his host was plainly bored and remaining only out of politeness.

Lazarus finally shut up, not because he minded imposing on his host but because he was confident that he had learned enough about the controls to be willing to chance conning the ship.

He picked up two other important data before he left the ship: in nine Earth days the skeleton crew was planning a weekend on Earth, following which the acceptance trials would be held. But for three days the big ship would be empty, save possibly for a communications operator-Lazarus was too wary to be inquisitive on this point. But there would be no guard left in her because no need for a guard could be imagined. One might as well guard the Mississippi River.

The other thing he learned was how to enter the ship from the outside without help from the inside; he picked that datum up through watching the mail rocket arrive just as he was about to leave the ship.

At Luna City, Joseph McFee, factor for Diana Terminal Corp., subsidiary of Diana Freight Lines, welcomed Lazarus warmly. “Well! Come in, Cap’n, and pull up a chair. What’ll you drink?” He was already pouring as he talked-tax-free paint remover from his own amateur vacuum still. “Haven’t seen you in … well, too long. Where d’you raise from last and what’s the gossip there? Heard any new ones?”

“From Goddard,” Lazarus answered and told him what the skipper had said to the V.I.P. McFee answered with the one about the old maid in free fall, which Lazarus pretended not to have heard. Stories led to politics, and McFee expounded his notion of the “only possible solution” to the European questions, a solution predicated on a complicated theory of McFee’s as to why the Covenant could not be extended to any culture below a certain level of industrialization. Lazarus did not give a hoot either way but he knew better than to hurry McFee; he nodded at the right places, accepted more of the condemned rocket juice when offered, and waited for the right moment to come to the point.

“Any company ships for sale now, Joe?”

“Are there? I should hope to shout. I’ve got more steel sitting out on that plain and cluttering my inventory than I’ve had in ten years. Looking for some? I can make you a sweet price.” “Maybe. Maybe not. Depends on whether you’ve got what I want.”

“You name it, I’ve got it. Never saw such a dull market. Some days you can’t turn an honest credit.” McFee frowned. “You know what the trouble is? Well, I’ll tell you-it’s this Howard Families commotion. Nobody wants to risk any money until he knows where he stands. How can a man make plans when he doesn’t know whether to plan for ten years or a hundred? You mark my words: if the administration manages to sweat the secret loose from those babies, you’ll see the biggest boom in long-term investments ever. But if not well, long-term holdings won’t be worth a peso a dozen and there will be an eat-drink-and-be-merry craze that will make the Reconstruction look like a tea party.”

He frowned again. “What kind of metal you looking for?” “I don’t want metal, I want a ship.”

McFee’s frown disappeared, his eyebrows shot up. “So? What sort?” “Can’t say exactly. Got time to look ‘em over with me?”

They suited up and left the dome by North Tunnel, then strolled around grounded ships in the long, easy strides of low gravity. Lazarus soon saw that just two ships had both the lift and the air space needed. One was a tanker and the better buy, but a mental calculation showed him that it lacked deck space, even including the floor plates of the tanks, to accommodate eight thousand tons of passengers. The other was an older ship with cranky piston-type injection meters, but she was fitted for general merchandise and had enough deck space. Her pay load was higher than necessary for the job, since passengers weigh little for the cubage they clutter-but that would make her lively, which might be critically important.

As for the injectors, he could baby them-he had herded worse junk than this.

Lazarus haggled with McFee over terms, not because he wanted to save money but because failure to do so would have been out of character. They finally reached a complicated three- cornered deal in which McFee bought the I Spy for himself, Lazarus delivered clear title to it unmortgaged and accepted McFee’s unsecured note in payment, then purchased the freighter by endorsing McFee’s note back to him and adding cash. McFee in turn would be able to mortgage the I Spy at the Commerce Clearance Bank in Luna City, use the proceeds plus cash or credit of his own to redeem his own paper-presumably before his accounts were audited, though Lazarus did not mention that.

It was not quite a bribe. Lazarus merely made use of the fact that McFee had long wanted a ship of his own and regarded the I Spy as the ideal bachelor’s go-buggy for business or pleasure; Lazarus simply held the price down to where McFee could swing the deal. But the arrangements made certain that McFee would not gossip about the deal, at least until he had had time to redeem his note. Lazarus further confused the issue by asking McFee to keep his eyes open for a good buy in trade tobacco … which made McFee sure that Captain Sheffield’s mysterious new venture involved Venus, that being the only major market for such goods. Lazarus got the freighter ready for space in only four days through lavish bonuses and overtime payments. At last he dropped Luna City behind him, owner and master of the City of Chillicothe. He shortened the name in his mind to Chili in honor of a favorite dish he had not tasted in a long time-fat red beans, plenty of chili powder, chunks of meat . .

. real meat, not the synthetic pap these youngsters called “meat.” He thought about it and his mouth watered. He had not a care in the world.

As he approached Earth, he called traffic control and asked for a parking orbit, as he did not wish to put the Chili down; it would waste fuel and attract attention. He had no scruples about orbiting without permission but there was a chance that the Chili might be spotted, charted, and investigated as a derelict during his absence; it was safer to be legal.

They gave him an orbit; he matched in and steadied down, then set the Chili’s identification beacon to his own combination, made sure that the radar of the ship’s gig could trip it, and took the gig down to the auxiliary small-craft field at Goddard. He was careful to have all necessary papers with him this time; by letting the gig be sealed in bond he avoided customs and was cleared through the space port quickly. He had no destination in mind other than to find a public phone and check in with Zack and Ford-then, if there was time, try to find some real chili. He had not called the Administrator from space because ship-to-ground required relay, and the custom of privacy certainly would not protect them if the mixer who handled the call overheard a mention of the Howard Families.

The Administrator answered his call at once, although it was late at night in the longitude of Novak Tower. From the puffy circles under Ford’s eyes Lazarus judged that he had been living at his desk. “Hi,” said Lazarus, “better get Zack Barstow on a three-way. I’ve got things to report.”

“So it’s you,” Ford said grimly. “I thought you had run out on us. Where have you been?” “Buying a ship,” Lazarus answered. “As you knew. Let’s get Barstow.”

Ford frowned, but turned to his desk. By split screen, Barstow joined them. He seemed surprised to see Lazarus and not altogether relieved. Lazarus spoke quickly: “What’s the matter, pal? Didn’t Ford tell you what I was up to?”

“Yes, he did,” admitted Barstow, “but we didn’t know where you were or what you were doing. Time dragged on and you didn’t check in … so we decided we had seen the last of you.”

“Shucks,” complained Lazarus, “you know I wouldn’t ever do anything like that. Anyhow, here I am and here’s what I’ve done so far-” He told them of the Chili and of his reconnaissance of the New Frontiers. “Now here’s how I see it: sometime this weekend, while the New Frontiers is sitting out there with nobody inboard her, I set the Chili down in the prison reservation, we load up in a hurry, rush out to the New Frontiers, grab her, and scoot. Mr. Administrator, that calls for a lot of help from you. Your proctors will have to look the other way while I land and load. Then we need to sort of slide past the traffic patrol. After that it would be a whole lot better if no naval craft was in a position to do anything drastic about the New Frontiers-if there is   a communication watch left in her, they may be able to holler for help before we can silence them.”

“Give me credit for some foresight,” Ford answered sourly. “I know you will have to have a diversion to stand any chance of getting away with it. The scheme is fantastic at the best.” “Not too fantastic,” Lazarus disagreed, “if you are willing to use your emergency powers to the limit at the last minute.”

“Possibly. But we can’t wait four days.” “Why not?’ “The situation won’t hold together that long.” “Neither will mine,” put in Barstow.

Lazarus looked from one to the other. “Huh? What’s the trouble? What’s up?” They explained:

Ford and Barstow were engaged in a preposterously improbable task, that of putting over a complex and subtle fraud; a triple fraud with a different face for the Families, for the public, and for the Federation Council. Each aspect presented unique and apparently insurmountable difficulties.

Ford had no one whom he dared take into his confidence, for even his most trusted personal staff member might be infected with the mania of the delusional Fountain of Youth … or might not be, but there was no way to know without compromising the conspiracy. Despite this, he had to convince the Council that the measures he was taking were the best for achieving the Council’s purpose.

Besides that, he had to hand out daily news releases to convince the citizens that their government was just about to gain for them the “secret” of living forever. Each day the statements had to be more detailed, the lies more tricky. The people were getting restless at the delay; they were sloughing off the coat of civilization, becoming mob.

The Council was feeling the pressure of the people. Twice Ford had been forced to a vote of confidence; the second he had won by only two votes. “I won’t win another one-we’ve got to move.”

Barstow’s troubles were different but just as sticky. He had to have confederates, because his job was to prepare all the hundred thousand members for the exodus. They had to know, before the time came to embark, if they were to leave quietly and quickly. Nevertheless he did not dare tell them the truth too soon because among so many people there were bound to be some who were stupid and stubborn … and it required just one fool to wreck the scheme by spilling it to the proctors guarding them.

Instead he was forced to try to find leaders who he could trust, convince them, and depend on them to convince others. He needed almost a thousand dependable “herdsmen” to be sure of getting his people to follow him when the time came. Yet the very number of confederates he needed was so great as to make certain that somebody would prove weak.

Worse than that, he needed other confederates for a still touchier purpose. Ford and he had agreed on a scheme, weak at best, for gaining time. They were doling out the techniques used by the Families in delaying the symptoms of senility under the pretense that the sum total of these techniques was the “secret.” To put over this fraud Barstow had to have the help  of the biochemists, gland therapists, specialists in symbiotics and in metabolism, and other experts among the Families, and these in turn had to be prepared for police interrogation by the Families’ most skilled psychotechnicians … because they had to be able to put over the fraud even under the influence of babble drugs. The hypnotic false indoctrination required for this was enormously more complex than that necessary for a simple block against talking. Thus far the swindle had worked … fairly well. But the discrepancies became more hard to explain each day.

Barstow could not keep these matters juggled much longer. The great mass of the Families, necessarily kept in ignorance, were getting out of hand even faster than the public outside. They were rightfully angry at what had been done to them; they expected anyone in authority to do something about it-and do it now!

Barstow’s influence over his kin was melting away as fast as that of Ford over the Council.

“It can’t be four days,” repeated Ford. “More like twelve hours … twenty-four at the outside. The Council meets again tomorrow afternoon.” Barstow looked worried. “I’m not sure I can prepare them in so short a time. I may have trouble getting them aboard.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Ford snapped. “Why not?”

“Because,” Ford said bluntly, “any who stay behind will be dead-if they’re lucky.”

Barstow said nothing and looked away. It was the first time that either one of them had admitted explicitly that this was no relatively harmless piece of political chicanery but a desperate and nearly hopeless attempt to avoid a massacre and that Ford himself was on both sides of the fence.

“Well,” Lazarus broke in briskly, “now that you boys have settled that, let’s get on with it. I can ground the Chili in-” He stopped and estimated quickly where she would be in orbit, how long  it would take him to rendezvous. “-well, by twenty-two Greenwich. Add an hour to play safe. How about seventeen o’clock Oklahoma time tomorrow afternoon? That’s today, actually.”

The other two seemed relieved. “Good enough,” agreed Barstow. “I’ll have them in the best shape I can manage.”

“All right,” agreed Ford, “if that’s the fastest it can be done.” He thought for a moment. “Barstow, I’ll withdraw at once all proctors and government personnel now inside the reservation barrier and shut you off. Once the gate contracts, you can tell them all.”

“Right. I’ll do my best.”

“Anything else before we clear?” asked Lazarus. “Oh, yes-Zack, we’d better pick a place for me to land, or I may shorten a lot of lives with my blast.” “Uh, yes. Make your approach from the west. I’ll rig a standard berth marker. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“Not okay,” denied Ford. “We’ll have to give him a pilot beam to come in on.”

“Nonsense,” objected Lazarus. “I could set her down on top of the Washington Monument.” “Not this time, you couldn’t. Don’t be surprised at the weather.”

As Lazarus approached his rendezvous with the Chili he signaled from the gig; the Chili’s transponder echoed, to his relief-he had little faith in gear he had not personally overhauled and a long search for the Chili at this point would have been disastrous.

He figured the relative vector, gunned the gig, flipped, and gunned to brake-homed-in three minutes off estimate, feeling smug. He cradled the gig, hurried inside, and took her down. Entering the stratosphere and circling two-thirds of the globe took no longer than he had estimated. He used part of the hour’s leeway he had allowed himself by being very stingy in his

maneuvers in order to spare the worn, obsolescent injection meters. Then he was down in the troposphere and making his approach, with skin temperatures high but not dangerously

so. Presently he realized what Ford had meant about the weather. Oklahoma and half of Texas were covered with deep, thick clouds. Lazarus was amazed and somehow pleased; it

reminded him of other days, when weather was something experienced rather than controlled. Life had lost some flavor, in his opinion, when the weather engineers had learned how to

harness the elements. He hoped that their planet-if they found one!-would have some nice, lively weather.

Then he was down in it and too busy to meditate. In spite of her size the freighter bucked and complained. Whew! Ford must have ordered this little charivari the minute the time was set- and, at that, the integrators must have had a big low-pressure area close at hand to build on.

Somewhere a pattern controlman was shouting at him; he switched it off and gave all his attention to his approach radar and the ghostly images in the infra-red rectifier while comparing what they told him with his inertial tracker. The ship passed over a miles-wide scar on the landscape-the ruins of the Okla-Orleans Road City. When Lazarus had last seen it, it had been noisy with life. Of all the mechanical monstrosities the human race had saddled themselves with, he mused, those dinosaurs easily took first prize.

Then the thought was cut short by a squeal from his board; the ship had picked up the pilot beam.

He wheeled her in, cut his last jet as she scraped, and slapped a series of switches; the great cargo ports rumbled open and rain beat in.

Eleanor Johnson huddled into herself, half crouching against the storm, and tried to draw her cloak more tightly about the baby in the crook of her left arm. When the storm had first hit, the child had cried endlessly, stretching her nerves taut. Now it was quiet, but that seemed only new cause for alarm.

She herself had wept, although she had tried not to show it. In all her twenty-seven years she had never been exposed to weather like this; it seemed symbolic of the storm that had overturned her life, swept her away from her cherished first home of her own with its homey oldfashioned fireplace, its shiny service cell, its thermostat which she could set to the temperature she liked without consulting others-a tempest which had swept her away between two grim proctors, arrested like some poor psychotic, and landed her after terrifying indignities here in the cold sticky red clay of this Oklahoma field.

Was it true? Could it possibly be true? Or had she not yet borne her baby at all and this was another of the strange dreams she had while carrying it?

But the rain was too wetly cold, the thunder too loud; she could never have slept through such a dream. Then what the Senior Trustee had told them must be true, too-it had to be true; she had seen the ship ground with her own eyes, its blast bright against the black of the storm. She could no longer see it but the crowd around her moved slowly forward; it must in front of her. She was close to the outskirts of the crowd she would be one of the last to get aboard.

It was very necessary to board the ship-Elder Zaccur Barstow had told them with deep solemnness what lay in store for them if they failed to board. She had believed earnestness; nevertheless she wondered how it could possibly be true-could anyone be so wicked, so deeply and terribly wicked as to want to kill anyone as harmless and helpless as herself and her baby?

She was struck by panic terror-suppose there was no room left by the time she got up to the ship? She clutched her baby more tightly; the child cried again at the pressure. Awoman in the crowd moved closer and spoke to her “You must be tired. May I carry the baby for a while?”

“No. No, thank you. I’m all right.” Aflash of lightning showed the woman’s face; Eleanor Johnson recognized her Elder Mary Sperling.

But the kindness of the offer steadied her. She knew now what she must do. If they were filled up and could take no more, she must pass her baby forward, hand to hand over the heads of the crowd. They could not refuse space to anything as little as her baby.

Something brushed her in the dark. The crowd was moving forward again.

When Barstow could see that loading would be finished in a few more minutes he left his post at one of the cargo doors and ran as fast as he could through the splashing sticky mud to the communications shack. Ford had warned him to give notice just before they raised ship; it was necessary to Ford’s plan for diversion. Barstow fumbled with an awkward un-powered door, swung it open and rushed up. He set the private combination which should connect him directly to Ford’s control desk and pushed the key.

He was answered at once but it was not Ford’s face on the screen. Barstow burst out with, “Where is the Administrator? I want to talk with him,” before he recognized the face in front of him.

It was a face well known to all the public-Bork Vanning, Leader of the Minority in the Council. “You’re talking to the Administrator,” Vanning said and grinned coldly. “The new Administrator. Now who the devil are you and why are you calling?”

Barstow thanked all gods, past and present, that recognition was onesided. He cut the connection with one unaimed blow and plunged out of the building.

Two cargo ports were already closed; stragglers were moving through the other two. Barstow hurried the last of them inside with curses and followed them, slammed pell-mell to the control room. “Raise ship!” he shouted to Lazarus. “Fast!”

“What’s all the shoutin’ fer?” asked Lazarus, but he was already closing and sealing the ports. He tripped the acceleration screamer, waited a scant ten seconds … and gave her power. “Well,” he said conversationally six minutes later, “I hope everybody was lying down. If not, we’ve got some broken bones on our hands. What’s that you were saying?”

Barstow told him about his attempt to report to Ford.

Lazarus blinked and whistled a few bars of Turkey in the Straw. “It looks like we’ve run out of minutes. It does look like it.” He shut up and gave his attention to his instruments, one eye on his ballistic track, one on radar-aft.

Chapter 7

LAZARUS HAD his hands full to jockey the Chili into just the right position against the side of the New Frontiers; the overstrained meters made the smaller craft skittish as a young horse. But he did it. The magnetic anchors clanged home; the gas-tight seals slapped into place; and their ears popped as the pressure in the Chili adjusted to that in the giant ship. Lazarus dived for the drop hole in the deck of the control room, pulled himself rapidly hand over hand to the port of contact, and reached the passenger lock of the New Frontiers to find himself facing the skipper-engineer.

The man looked at him and snorted. “You again, eh? Why the deuce didn’t you answer our challenge? You can’t lock onto us without permission; this is private property. What do you mean by it?”

“It means,” said Lazarus, “that you and your boys are going back to Earth a few days early-in this ship.” “Why, that’s ridiculous!”

“Brother,” Lazarus said gently, his blaster suddenly growing out his left fist, “I’d sure hate to hurt you after you were so nice to me … but I sure will, unless you knuckle under awful quick.”

The official simply stared unbelievingly. Several of his juniors had gathered behind him; one of them sunfished in the air, started to leave. Lazarus winged him in the leg, at low power; he jerked and clutched at nothing. “Now you’ll have to take care of him,” Lazarus observed.

That settled it. The skipper called together his men from the announcing system microphone at the passenger lock; Lazarus counted them as they arrived-twenty-nine, a figure he had been careful to learn on his first visit. He assigned two men to hold each of them. Then he took a look at the man he had shot.

“You aren’t really hurt, bub,” he decided shortly and turned to the skipper-engineer. “Soon as we transfer you, get some radiation salve on that burn. The Red Cross kit’s on the after bulkhead of the control room.”

“This is piracy! You can’t get away with this.”

“Probably not,” Lazarus agreed thoughtfully. “But I sort of hope we do.” He turned his attention back to his job. “Shake it up there! Don’t take all day.”

The Chili was slowly being emptied. Only the one exit could be used but the pressure of the half hysterical mob behind them forced along those in the bottleneck of the trunk joining the two ships; they came boiling out like bees from a disturbed hive.

Most of them had never been in free fall before this trip; they burst out into the larger space of the giant ship and drifted helplessly, completely disoriented. Lazarus tried to bring order into  it by grabbing anyone he could see who seemed to be able to handle himself in zero gravity, ordered him to speed things up by shoving along the helpless ones-shove them anywhere, on back into the big ship, get them out of the way, make room for the thousands more yet to come. When he had conscripted a dozen or so such herdsmen he spotted Barstow in the emerging throng, grabbed him and put him in charge. “Keep ‘em moving, just anyhow. I’ve got to get for’ard to the control room. If you spot Andy Libby, send him after me.”

Aman broke loose, from the stream and approached Barstow. “There’s a ship trying to lock onto ours. I saw it through a port.” “Where?” demanded Lazarus.

The man was handicapped by slight knowledge of ships and shipboard terms, but he managed to make himself understood. “I’ll be back,” Lazarus told Barstow. “Keep ‘em moving-and don’t let any of those babies get away-our guests there.” He holstered his blaster and fought his way back through the swirling mob in the bottleneck.

Number three port seemed to be the one the man had meant. Yes, there was something there. The port had an armor-glass bull’s-eye in it, but instead of stars beyond Lazarus saw a lighted space. Aship of some sort had locked against it.

Its occupants either had not tried to open the Chili’s port or just possibly did not know how. The port was not locked from the inside; there had been no reason to bother. It should have opened easily from either side once pressure was balanced … which the tell-tale, shining green by the latch, showed to be the case.

Lazarus was mystified.

Whether it was a traffic control vessel, a Naval craft, or something else, its presence was bad news. But why didn’t, they simply open the door and walk in? He was tempted to lock the port from the inside, hurry and lock all the others, finish loading and try to run for it.

But his monkey ancestry got the better of him; he could not leave alone something he did not understand. So he compromised by kicking the blind latch into place that would keep them from opening the port from outside, then slithered cautiously alongside the bull’s-eye and sneaked a peep with one eye.

He found himself staring at Slayton Ford.

He pulled himself to one side, kicked the blind latch open, pressed the switch to open the port. He waited there, a toe caught in a handihold, blaster in one hand, knife in the other.

One figure emerged. Lazarus saw that it was Ford, pressed the switch again to close the port, kicked the blind latch into place, while never taking his blaster off his visitor. “Now what the hell?” he demanded. “What are you doing here? And who else is here? Patrol?”

“I’m alone.”

“Huh?”

“I want to go with you … if you’ll have me.”

Lazarus looked at him and did not answer. Then he went back to the bull’s-eye and inspected all that he could see. Ford appeared to be telling the truth, for no one else was in sight. But that was not what held Lazarus’ eye.

Why the ship wasn’t a proper deep-space craft at all. It did not have an air1ock but merely a seal to let it fasten to a larger ship; Lazarus was staring right into the body of the craft. It looked like-yes, it was a “Joy-boat Junior,” a little private strato-yacht, suitable only for point-to-point trajectory, or at the most for rendezvous with a satellite provided the satellite could refuel it for the return leg.

There was no fuel for it here. Alightning pilot possibly could land that tin toy without power and still walk away from it provided he had the skill to play Skip-to-M’Lou in and out of the atmosphere while nursing his skin temperatures-but Lazarus wouldn’t want to try it. No, sir! He turned to Ford. “Suppose we turned you down. How did you figure on getting back?”

“I didn’t figure on it,” Ford answered simply.

“Mmm— Tell me about it, but make it march; we’re minus on minutes.”

Ford had burned all bridges. Turned out of office only hours earlier, he had known that, once all the facts came out, life-long imprisonment in Coventry was the best he could hope for-if he managed to avoid mob violence or mindshattering interrogation.

Arranging the diversion was the thing that finally lost him his thin margin of control. His explanations for his actions were not convincing to the Council. He had excused the storm and the withdrawing of proctors from the reservation as a drastic attempt to break the morale of the Families-a possible excuse but not too plausible. His orders to Naval craft, intended to keep them away from the New Frontiers, had apparently not been associated in anyone’s mind with the Howard Families affair; nevertheless the apparent lack of sound reason behind them had been seized on by the opposition as another weapon to bring him down. They were watching for anything to catch him out-one question asked in Council concerned certain monies from the Administrator’s discretionary fund which had been paid indirectly to one Captain Aaron Sheffield; were these monies in fact expended in the public interest?

Lazarus’ eyes widened. “You mean they were onto me?”

“Not quite. Or you wouldn’t be here. But they were close behind you. I think they must have had help from a lot of my people at the last.”

“Probably. But we made it, so let’s not fret. Come on. The minute everybody is out of this ship and into the big girl, we’ve got to boost.” Lazarus turned to leave.

“You’re going to let me go along?”

Lazarus checked his progress, twisted to face Ford. “How else?” He had intended at first to send Ford down in the Chili. It was not gratitude that changed his mind, but respect. Once he had lost office Ford had gone straight to Huxley Field north of Novak Tower, cleared for the vacation satellite Monte Carlo, and had jumped for the New Frontiers instead. Lazarus liked that. “Go for broke” took courage and character that most people didn’t have. Don’t grab a toothbrush, don’t wind the cat-just do it! “Of course you’re coming along,” he said easily: “You’re my kind of boy, Slayton.”

The Chili was more than half emptied now but the spaces near the interchange were still jammed with frantic mobs. Lazarus cuffed and shoved his way through, trying not to bruise women and children unnecessarily but not letting the possibility slow him up. He scrambled through the connecting trunk with Ford hanging onto his belt, pulled aside once they were through and paused in front of Barstow.

Barstow stared past him. “Yeah, it’s him,” Lazarus confirmed. “Don’t stare-it’s rude. He’s going with us. Have you seen Libby?”

“Here I am, Lazarus.” Libby separated himself from the throng and approached with the ease of a veteran long used to free fall. He had a small satchel strapped to one wrist. “Good. Stick around. Zack, how long till you’re all loaded?”

“God knows. I can’t count them. An hour, maybe.”

“Make it less. If you put some husky boys on each side of the hole, they can snatch them through faster than they are coming. We’ve got to shove out of here a little sooner than is humanly possible. I’m going to the control room. Phone me there the instant you have everybody in, our guests here out, and the Chili broken loose. Andy! Slayton! Let’s go.”

“Later, Andy. We’ll talk when we get there?’

Lazarus took Slayton Ford with him because he did not know what else to do with him and felt it would be better to keep him out of sight until some plausible excuse could be dreamed up for having him along. So far no one seemed to have looked at him twice, but once they quieted down, Ford’s well-known face would demand explanation.

The control room was about a half mile forward of where they had entered the ship. Lazarus knew that there was a passenger belt leading to it but he didn’t have time to look for it; he simply took the first passageway leading forward. As soon as they got away from the crowd they made good time even though Ford was not as skilled in the fishlike maneuvers of free fall as were the other two.

Once there, Lazarus spent the enforced wait in explaining to Libby the extremely ingenious but unorthodox controls of the starship. Libby was fascinated and soon was putting himself through dummy runs. Lazarus turned to Ford. “How about you, Slayton? Wouldn’t hurt to have a second relief pilot.”

Ford shook his head. “I’ve been listening but I could never learn it. I’m not a pilot” “Huh? How did you get here?”

“Oh. I do have a license, but I haven’t had time to keep in practice. My chauffeur always pilots me. I haven’t figured a trajectory in many years.” Lazarus looked him over. “And yet you plotted an orbit rendezvous? With no reserve fuel?”

“Oh, that. I had to.”

“I see. The way the cat learned to swim. Well, that’s one way.” He turned back to speak to Libby, was interrupted by Barstow’s voice over the announcing system: “Five minutes, Lazarus! Acknowledge.”

Lazarus found the microphone, covered the light under it with his hand and answered, “Okay, Zack! Five minutes.” Then he said, “Cripes, I haven’t even picked a course. What do you think, Andy? Straight out from Earth to shake the busies off our tail? Then pick a destination? How about it, Slayton? Does that fit with what you ordered Navy craft to do? “No, Lazarus, no!” protested Libby. “Huh? Why not?”

“You should head right straight down for the Sun.” “For the Sun? For Pete’s sake, why?”

“I tried to tell you when I first saw you. It’s because of the space drive you asked me to develop.” “But, Andy, we haven’t got it.”

“Yes, we have. Here.” Libby shoved the satchel he had been carrying toward Lazarus. Lazarus opened it.

Assembled from odd bits of other equipment, looking more like the product of a boy’s workshop than the output of a scientist’s laboratory, the gadget which Libby referred to as a “space drive” underwent Lazarus’ critical examination. Against the polished sophisticated perfection of the control room it looked uncouth, pathetic, ridiculously inadequate.

Lazarus poked at it tentatively. “What is it?’ he asked. “Your model?” “No, no. That’s it. That’s the space drive.”

Lazarus looked at the younger man not unsympathetically. “Son,” he asked slowly, “have you come unzipped?”

“No, no, no!” Libby sputtered. “I’m as sane as you are. This is a radically new notion. That’s why I want you to take us down near the Sun. If it works at all, it will work best where light pressure is strongest.”

“And if it doesn’t work,” inquired Lazarus, “what does that make us? Sunspots?”

“Not straight down into the Sun. But head for it now and as soon as I can work out the data, I’ll give you corrections to warp you into your proper trajectory. I want to pass the Sun in a very fiat hyperbola, well inside the orbit of Mercury, as close to the photosphere as this ship can stand. I don’t know how close that is, so I couldn’t work it out ahead of time. But the data will be here in the ship and there will be time to correlate them as we go.”

Lazarus looked again at the giddy little cat’s cradle of apparatus. “Andy … if you are sure that the gears in your head are still meshed, I’ll take a chance. Strap down, both of you.” He belted himself into the pilot’s couch and called Barstow. “How about it, Zack?” “Right now!”

“Hang on tight!” With one hand Lazarus covered a light in his leftside control panel; acceleration warning shrieked throughout the ship. With the other he covered another; the hemisphere in front of them was suddenly spangled with the starry firmament, and Ford gasped.

Lazarus studied it. Afull twenty degrees of it was blanked out by the dark circle of the nightside of Earth. “Got to duck around a corner, Andy. We’ll use a little Tennessee windage.” He started easily with a quarter gravity, just enough to shake up his passengers and make them cautious, while he started a slow operation of precessing the enormous ship to the direction he needed to shove her in order to get out of Earth’s shadow. He raised acceleration to a half gee, then to a gee.

Earth changed suddenly from a black silhouette to a slender silver crescent as the half-degree white disc of the Sun came out from behind her. “I want to clip her about a thousand miles out, Slipstick,” Lazarus said tensely, “at two gees. Gimme a temporary vector.” Libby hesitated only momentarily and gave it to him. Lazarus again sounded acceleration warning and boosted to twice Earth-normal gravity. Lazarus was tempted to raise the boost to emergency-full but he dared not do so with a shipload of groundlubbers; even two gees sustained for a long period might be too much of a strain for some of them. Any Naval pursuit craft ordered to intercept them could boost at much higher gee and their selected crews could stand it. But it was just a chance they would have to take … and anyhow, he reminded himself, a Navy ship could not maintain a high boost for long; her mile-seconds were strictly limited by her reaction-mass tanks.

The New Frontiers had no such oldfashioned limits, no tanks; her converter accepted any mass at all, turned it into pure radiant energy. Anything would serve-meteors, cosmic dust, stray atoms gathered in by her sweep field, or anything from the ship herself, such as garbage, dead bodies, deck sweepings, anything at all. Mass was energy. In dying, each tortured gram gave up nine hundred million trillion ergs of thrust. The crescent of Earth waxed and swelled and slid off toward the left edge of the hemispherical screen while the Sun remained dead

ahead. Alittle more than twenty minutes later, when they were at closest approach and the crescent, now at half phase, was sliding out of the bowl screen, the ship-to-ship circuit came to life. “New Frontiers!” a forceful voice sounded. “Maneuver to orbit and lay to! This is an official traffic control order.”

Lazarus shut it off. “Anyhow,” he said cheerfully, “if they try to catch us, they won’t like chasing us down into the Sun! Andy, it’s a clear road now and time we corrected, maybe; You want to compute it? Or will you feed me the data?”

“I’ll compute it,” Libby answered. He had already discovered that the ship’s characteristics pertinent to astrogation, including her “black body” behavior, were available at both piloting stations. Armed with this and with the running data from instruments he set out to calculate the hyperboloid by which he intended to pass the Sun. He made a half-hearted attempt to use the ship’s ballistic calculator but it baffled him; it was a design he was not used to, having no moving parts of any sort, even in the exterior controls. So he gave it up as a waste of time and fell back on the strange talent for figures lodged in his brain. His brain had no moving parts, either, but he was used to it.

Lazarus decided to check on their popularity rating. He switched on the ship-to-ship again, found that it was still angrily squawking, although a little more faintly. They knew his own name now-one of his names-which caused him to decide that the boys in the Chili must have called traffic control almost at once. He tut-tutted sadly when he learned that “Captain Sheffield’s” license to pilot had been suspended. He shut it off and tried the Naval frequencies … then shut them off also when he was able to raise nothing but code and scramble, except that the words “New Frontiers” came through once in clear.

He said something about “sticks and stones may break my bones-” and tried another line of investigation. Both by long-range radar and by paragravitic detector he could tell that there were ships in their neighborhood but this alone told him very little; there were bound to be ships this close to Earth and he had no easy way to distinguish, from these data alone, an unarmed liner or freighter about her lawful occasions from a Naval cruiser in angry pursuit.

But the New Frontiers had more resources for analyzing what was around her than had an ordinary ship; she had been specially equipped to cope unassisted with any imaginable strange conditions. The hemispherical control room in which they lay was an enormous multi-screened television receiver which could duplicate the starry heavens either in view-aft or view-forward at the selection of the pilot. But it also had other circuits, much more subtle; simultaneously or separately it could act as an enormous radar screen as well, displaying on it the blips of any body within radar range.

But that was just a starter. Its inhuman senses could apply differential analysis to doppler data and display the result in a visual analog. Lazarus studied his lefthand control bank, tried to remember everything be had been told about it, made a change in the set up.

The simulated stars and even the Sun faded to dimness; about a dozen lights shined brightly.

He ordered the board to check them for angular rate; the bright lights turned cherry red, became little comets trailing off to pink tails-all but one, which remained white and grew no tail. He studied the others for a moment, decided that their vectors were such that they would remain forever strangers, and ordered the board to check the line-of-sight doppler on the one with a steady bearing.

It faded to violet, ran halfway through the spectrum and held steady at blue-green. Lazarus thought a moment, subtracted from the inquiry their own two gees of boost; it turned white again. Satisfied he tried the same tests with view-aft.

“Lazarus-“ “Yeah, Lib?”

“Will it interfere with what you are doing if I give you the corrections now?”

“Not at all. I was just taking a look-see. If this magic lantern knows what it’s talking about, they didn’t manage to get a pursuit job on our tail in time.” “Good. Well, here are the figures …”

“Feed ‘em in yourself, will you? Take the conn for a while. I want to see about some coffee and sandwiches. How about you? Feel like some breakfast?”

Libby nodded absent-mindedly, already starting to revise the ship’s trajectory. Ford spoke up eagerly, the first word he had uttered in a long, time. “Let me get it. I’d be glad to.” He seemed pathetically anxious to be useful.

“Mmm … you might get into some kind of trouble, Slayton. No matter what sort of a selling job Zack did, your name is probably ‘Mud’ with most of the members. I’ll phone aft and raise somebody.”

“Probably nobody would recognize me under these circumstances,” Ford argued. “Anyway, it’s a legitimate errand-I can explain that.” Lazarus saw from his face that it was necessary to the man’s morale. “Okay … if you can handle yourself under two gees.”

Ford struggled heavily up out of the acceleration couch he was in. “I’ve got space legs. What kind of sandwiches?”

“I’d say corned beef, but it would probably be some damned substitute. Make mine cheese, with rye if they’ve got it, and use plenty of mustard. And a gallon of coffee. What are you having, Andy?”

“Me? Oh, anything that is convenient,”

Ford started to leave, bracing himself heavily against double weight, then he added, “Oh-it might save time if you could tell me where to go.” – “Brother,” said Lazarus, “if this ship isn’t pretty well crammed with food, we’ve all made a terrible mistake. Scout around. You’ll find some.”

Down, down, down toward the Sun, with speed increasing by sixty-four feet per second for every second elapsed. Down and still down for fifteen endless hours of double weight. During this time they traveled seventeen million miles and reached the inconceivable speed of six hundred and forty miles per second. The figures mean little-think instead of New York to Chicago, a half hour’s journey even by stratomail, done in a single heartbeat.

Barstow had a rough time during heavy weight. For all of the others it was a time to lie down, try hopelessly to sleep, breathe painfully and seek new positions in which to rest from the burdens of their own bodies. But Zaccur Barstow was driven by his sense of responsibility; he kept going though the Old Man of the Sea sat on his neck and raised his weight to three hundred and fifty pounds.

Not that he could do anything for them, except crawl wearily from one compartment to another and ask about their welfare. Nothing could be done, no organization to relieve their misery was possible, while high boost continued. They lay where they could, men, women, and children crowded together like cattle being shipped, without even room to stretch out, in spaces never intended for such extreme overcrowding.

The only good thing about it, Barstow reflected wearily, was that they were all too miserable to worry about anything but the dragging minutes. They were too beaten down to make trouble. Later on there would be doubts raised, he was sure, about the wisdom of fleeing; there would be embarrassing questions asked about Ford’s presence in the ship, about Lazarus’ peculiar and sometimes shady actions, about his own contradictory role. But not yet.

He really must, he decided reluctantly, organize a propaganda campaign before trouble could grow. If it did-and it surely would if he didn’t move to offset it, and … well, that would be the last straw. It would be.

He eyed a ladder in front of him, set his teeth, and struggled up to the next deck. Picking his way through the bodies there he almost stepped on a woman who was clutching a baby too tightly to her. Barstow noticed that the infant was wet and soiled and he thought of ordering its mother to take care of the matter, since she seemed to be awake. But he let it go-so far as he knew there was not a clean diaper in millions of miles. Or there might be ten thousand of them on the deck above … which seemed almost as far away.

He plodded on without speaking to her. Eleanor Johnson had not been aware of his concern. After the first great relief at realizing that she and her baby were safe inside the ship she had consigned all her worries to her elders and now felt nothing but the apathy of emotional reaction and of inescapable weight. Baby had cried when that awful weight had hit them, then had become quiet, too quiet. She had roused herself enough to listen for its heartbeat; then, sure that he was alive, she had sunk back into stupor.

Fifteen hours out, with the orbit of Venus only four hours away, Libby cut the boost. The ship plunged on, in free fall, her terrific speed still mounting under the steadily increasing pull of the Sun. Lazarus was awakened by no weight. He glanced at the copilot’s couch and said, “On the curve?”

“As plotted.”

Lazarus looked him over. “Okay, I’ve got it. Now get out of here and get some sleep. Boy, you look like a used towel.” “I’ll just stay here and rest.”

“You will like hell. You haven’t slept even when I had the com; if you stay here, you’ll be watching instruments and figuring. So beat it! Slayton, chuck him out.”

Libby smiled shyly and left. He found the spaces abaft the control room swarming with floating bodies but he managed to find an unused corner, passed his kilt belt through a handihold, and slept at once.

Free fall should have been as great a relief to everyone else; it was not, except to the fraction of one per cent who were salted spacemen. Free-fall nausea, likes seasickness, is a joke only to those not affected; it would take a Dante to describe a hundred thousand cases of it. There were anti-nausea drugs aboard, but they were not found at once; there were medical men among the Families, but they were sick, too. The misery went on.

Barstow, himself long since used to free flight, floated forward to the control room to pray relief for the less fortunate. “They’re in bad shape,” he told Lazarus. “Can’t you put spin on the ship and give them some let-up? It would help a lot.”

“And it would make maneuvering difficult, too. Sorry. Look, Zack, a lively ship will be more important to them in a pinch than just keeping their suppers down. Nobody dies from seasickness anyhow … they just wish they could.”

The ship plunged on down, still gaining speed as it fell toward the Sun. The few who felt able continued slowly to assist the enormous majority who were ill.

Libby continued to sleep, the luxurious return-to-the-womb sleep of those who have learned to enjoy free fall. He had had almost no sleep since the day the Families had been arrested; his overly active mind had spent all its time worrying the problem of a new space drive.

The big ship precessed around him; he stirred gently and did not awake. It steadied in a new attitude and the acceleration warning brought him instantly awake. He oriented himself, placed himself flat against the after bulkhead, and waited; weight hit him almost at once-three gees this time and he knew that something was badly wrong. He had gone almost a quarter mile aft before he found a hide-away; nevertheless he struggled to his feet and started the unlikely task of trying to climb that quarter mile-now straight up-at three times his proper weight, while blaming himself for having let Lazarus talk him into leaving the control room.

He managed only a portion of the trip … but an heroic portion, one about equal to climbing the stairs of a ten-story building while carrying a man on each shoulder … when resumption of free fall relieved him. He zipped the rest of the way like a salmon returning home and was in the control room quickly. “What happened?”

Lazarus said regretfully, “Had to vector, Andy.” Slayton Ford said nothing but looked worried.

“Yes, I know. But why?’ Libby was already strapping himself against the copilot’s couch while studying the astrogational situation. “Red lights on the screen.” Lazarus described the display, giving coordinates and relative vectors.

Libby nodded thoughtfully. “Naval craft. No commercial vessels would be in such trajectories. Aminelaying bracket.”

“That’s what I figured. I didn’t have time to consult you; I had to use enough mile-seconds to be sure they wouldn’t have boost enough to reposition on us.” “Yes, you had to.” Libby looked worried. “I thought we were free of any possible Naval interference.”

“They’re not ours,” put in Slayton Ford. “They can’t be ours no matter what orders have been given since I-uh, since I left. They must be Venerian craft.”

“Yeah,” agreed Lazarus, “they must be. Your pal, the new Administrator, hollered to Venus for help and they gave it to him-just a friendly gesture of interplanetary good will.” Libby was hardly listening. He was examining data and processing it through the calculator inside his skull. “Lazarus… this new orbit isn’t too good.”

“I know,” Lazarus agreed sadly. “I had to duck … so I ducked the only direction they left open to me-closer to the Sun.” “Too close, perhaps.”

The Sun is not a large star, nor is it very hot. But it is hot with reference to men, hot enough to strike them down dead if they are careless about tropic noonday ninety-two million miles away from it, hot enough that we who are reared under its rays nevertheless dare not look directly at it.

At a distance of two and a half million miles the Sun beats out with a flare fourteen hundred times as bright as the worst ever endured in Death Valley, the Sahara, or Aden. Such radiance would not be perceived as heat or light; it would be death more sudden than the full power of a blaster. The Sun is a hydrogen bomb, a naturally occurring one; the New Frontiers was skirting the limits of its circle of total destruction.

It was hot inside the ship. The Families were protected against instant radiant death by the armored walls but the air temperature continued to mount. They were relieved of the misery of free fall but they were doubly uncomfortable, both from heat and from the fact that the bulkheads slanted crazily; there was no level place to stand or lie, The ship was both spinning on its axis and accelerating now; it was never intended to do both at once and the addition of the two accelerations, angular and linear, met “down” the direction where outer and after bulkheads met. The ship was being spun through necessity to permit some of the impinging radiant energy to re-radiate on the “cold” side. The forward acceleration was equally from necessity, a forlorn-hope maneuver to pass the Sun as far out as possible and as fast as possible, in order to spend least time at perihelion, the point of closest approach.

It was hot in the control room. Even Lazarus had voluntarily shed his kilt and shucked down to Venus styles. Metal was hot to the touch. On the great stellarium screen an enormous circle of blackness marked where the Sun’s disc should have been; the receptors had cut out automatically at such a ridicubus demand.

Lazarus repeated Libby’s last words. “‘Thirty-seven minutes to perihelion.’ We can’t take it, Andy. The ship can’t take it.” “I know. I never intended us top this close.”

“Of course you didn’t. Maybe I shouldn’t have maneuvered. Maybe we would have missed the mines anyway. Oh, well-” Lazarus squared his shoulders and filed it with the might-have- beens. “It looks to me, son, about time to try out your gadget.” He poked a thumb at Libby’s uncouth-looking “space drive.” “You say that all you have to do is to hook up that one connection?”

“That is what is intended. Attach that one lead to any portion of the mass to be affected. Of course I don’t really know that it will work,” Libby admitted. “There is no way to test it.” “Suppose it doesn’t?’

“There are three possibilities.” Libby answered methodically. “In the first place, nothing may happen.” “In which case we fry.”

“In the second place, we and the ship may cease to exist as mattei as we know it.” “Dead, you mean. But probably a pleasanter way.”

“I suppose so. I don’t know what death is. In the third place, if my hypotheses are correct, we will recede from the Sun at a speed just under that of light.” Lazarus eyed the gadget and wiped sweat from his shoulders. “It’s getting hotter, Andy. Hook it up-and it has better be good!”

Andy hooked it up.

“Go ahead,” urged Lazarus. “Push the button, throw the switch, cut the beam. Make it march.” “I have,” Libby insisted. “Look at the Sun.”

“Huh? Oh!”

The great circle of blackness which had marked the position of the Sun on the star-speckled stellarium was shrinking rapidly. In a dozen heartbeats it lost half its diameter; twenty seconds later it had dwindled to a quarter of its original width.

“It worked,” Lazarus said softly. “Look at it, Slayton! Sign me up as a purple baboon-it worked!” “I rather thought it would,” Libby answered seriously. “It should, you know.”

“Hmm-That may be evident to you, Andy. It’s not to me. How fast are we going?” “Relative to what?”

“Uh, relative to the Sun.”

“I haven’t had opportunity to measure it, but it seems to be just under the speed of light. It can’t be greater.” “Why not? Aside from theoretical considerations.”

“We still see.” Libby pointed at the stellarium bowl.

“Yeah, so we do,” Lazarus mused. “Hey! We shouldn’t be able to. I ought to doppler out.”

Libby looked blank, then smiled. “But it dopplers right back in. Over on that side, toward the Sun, we’re seeing by short radiations stretched to visibility. On the opposite side we’re picking up something around radio wavelengths dopplered down to light.”

“And in between?”

“Quit pulling my leg, Lazarus. I’m sure you can work out relatively vector additions quite as well as I can.” “You work it out,” Lazarus said firmly. “I’m just going to sit here and admire it. Eh, Slayton?”

“Yes. Yes indeed.”

Libby smiled politely. “We might as well quit wasting mass on the main drive.” He sounded the warner, then cut the drive. “Now we can return to normal conditions.” He started to disconnect his gadget.

Lazarus said hastily, “Hold it, Andy! We aren’t even outside the orbit of Mercury yet. Why put on the brakes?” ‘Why, this won’t stop us. We have acquired velocity; we will keep it.”

Lazarus pulled at his cheek and stared. “Ordinarily I would agree with you. First Law of Motion. But with this pseudospeed I’m not so sure. We got it for nothing and we haven’t paid for it- in energy, I mean. You seem to have declared a holiday with respect to inertia; when the holiday is over, won’t all that free speed go back where it came from?”

“I don’t think so,” Libby answered. “Our velocity isn’t ‘pseudo’ anything; it’s as real as velocity can be. You are attempting to apply verbal anthropomorphic logic to a field in which it is not pertinent. You would not expect us to be transported instantaneously back to the lower gravitational potential from which we started, would you?”

“Back to where you hooked in your space drive? No, we’ve moved.”

“And we’ll keep on moving. Our newly acquired gravitational potential energy of greater height above the Sun is no more real than our present kinetic energy of velocity. They both exist.” Lazarus looked baffled. The expression did not suit him. ‘~I guess you’ve got me, Andy. No matter how I slice it, we seemed to have picked up energy from somewhere. But where? When

I went to school, they taught me to honor the Flag, vote the straight party ticket, and believe in the law of conservation of energy. Seems like you’ve violated it. How about it?”

“Don’t worry about it,” suggested Libby. “The so-called law of conservation of energy was merely a working hypothesis, unproved and unprovable, used to describe gross phenomena. Its terms apply only to the older, dynamic concept of the world. In a plenum conceived as a static grid of relationships, a ‘violation’ of that ‘law’ is nothing more startling than a discontinuous function, to be noted and described. That’s what I did. I saw a discontinuity in the mathematical model of the aspect of mass-energy called inertia. I applied it. The mathematical model turned out to be similar to the real world. That was the only hazard, really-one never knows that a mathematical model is similar to the real world until you try it.”

“Yeah, yeah, sure, you can’t tell the taste till you bite it-but, Andy, I still don’t see what caused it!” He turned toward Ford. “Do you, Slayton?” Ford shook his head. “No. I would like to know … but I doubt if I could understand it.”

“You and me both. Well, Andy?”

Now Libby looked baffled. ‘But, Lazarus, causality has nothing to do with the real plenum. A fact simply is. Causality is merely an oldfashioned-postulate of a pre-scientific philosophy.”

“I guess,” Lazarus said slowly, “I’m oldfashioned.” Libby said nothing. He disconnected his apparatus.

The disc of black continued to shrink. When it had shrunk to about one sixth its greatest diameter, it changed suddenly from black to shining white, as the ship’s distance from the Sun again was great enough to permit the receptors to manage the load.

Lazarus tried to work out in his head the kinetic energy of the ship-one half the square of the velocity of light (minus a pinch, he corrected) times the mighty tonnage of -the New Frontiers. The answer did not comfort him, whether he called it ergs or apples.

Chapter 8

“FIRST THINGS FIRST,” interrupted Barstow. “I’m as fascinated by the amazing scientific aspects of our present situation as any of you, but we’ve got work to do. We’ve got to plan a pattern for daily living at once. So let’s table mathematical physics and talk about organization.”

He was not speaking to the trustees but to his own personal lieutenants, the key people in helping him put over the complex maneuvers which had made their escape possible-Ralph Schultz, Eve Barstow, Mary Sperling, Justin Foote, Clive Johnson, about a dozen others.

Lazarus and Libby were there. Lazarus had left Slayton Ford to guard the control room, with orders to turn away all visitors and, above all, not to let anyone touch the controls. It was a make-work job, it being Lazarus’ notion of temporary occupational therapy. He bad sensed in Ford a mental condition that he did not like. Ford seemed to have withdrawn into himself. He answered when spoken to, but that was all. It worried Lazarus.

“We need an executive,” Barstow went on, “someone who, for the time being will have very broad powers to give orders and have them carried out. He’ll have to make decisions, organize us, assign duties and responsibilities, get the internal economy of the ship working. It’s a big job and I would like to have our brethren hold an election and do it democratically. That’ll have to wait; somebody has to give orders now. We’re wasting food and the ship is-well, I wish you could have seen the ***’fre$ier*** I tried to use today.”

“Zaccur … “Yes, Eve?”

“It seems to me that the thing to do is to put it up to the trustees. We haven’t any authority; we were just an emergency group for something that is finished now.”

“Ahrruniph-” It was Justin Foote, in tones as dry and formal as his face. “I differ somewhat from our sister. The trustees are not conversant with the full background; it would take time we can ill afford to put them into the picture, as it were, before they would be able to judge the matter. Furthermore, being one of the trustees myself, I am able to say without bias that the trustees, as an organized group, can have no jurisdiction because legally they no longer exist.”

Lazarus looked interested. “How do you figure that, Justin?”

“Thusly: the board of trustees were the custodians of a foundation which existed as a part of and in relation to a society. The trustees were never a government; their sole duties had to do with relations between the Families and the rest of that society. With the ending of relationship between the Families and terrestrial society, the board of trustees, ipso facto, ceases to exist. it is one with history. Now we in this ship are not yet a society, we are an anarchistic group. This present assemblage has as much-or as little-authority to initiate a society as has any part group.

Latarus cheered and clapped. “Justin,” he applauded, “that is the neatest piece of verbal juggling I’ve heard in a century. Let’s get together sometime and have a go at solipsism.” Justin Foote looked pained. “Obviously-” he began.

“Nope! Not another word! You’ve convinced me, don’t spoil it. If that’s how it is, let’s get busy and pick a bull moose. How about you, Zack? You look like the logical candidate.” Barstow shook his head. “I know my limitations. I’m an engineer, not a political executive; the Families were just a hobby with me. We need an expert in social administration.”

When Barstow had convinced them that he meant it, other names were proposed and their qualifications debated at length. In a group as large as the Families there were many who had specialized in political science, many who had served in public office with credit.

Lazarus listened; he knew four of the candidates. At last he got Eve Barstow aside and whispered with her. She looked startled, then thoughtful, finally nodded.

She asked for the floor. “I have a candidate to propose,” she began in her always gentle tones, “who might not ordinarily occur to you, but who is incomparably better fitted, by temperament, training, and experience, to do this job than is anyone as yet proposed. For civil administrator of the ship I nominate Slayton Ford.”

They were flabbergasted into silence, then everybody tried to talk at once. “Has Eve lost her mind? Ford is back on Earth!”-“No, no, he’s not. I’ve seen him-here-in the ship.”-“But it’s out of the question!”-“Him? The Families would never accept him!”-“Even so, he’s not one of us.”

Eve patiently kept the floor until they quieted. “I know my nomination sounds ridiculous and I admit the difficulties. But consider the advantages. We all know Slayton Ford by reputation and by performance. You know, every member of the Families knows, that Ford is a genius in his field. It is going to be hard enough to work out plans for living together in this badly overcrowded ship; the best talent we can draw on will be no more than enough.”

Her words impressed them because Ford was that rare thing in history, a statesman whose worth was almost universally acknowledged in his own lifetime. Contemporary historians credited him with having saved the Western Federation in at least two of its major development crises; it was his misfortune rather than his personal failure that his career was wrecked on a crisis not solvable by ordinary means.

“Eve,” said Zaccur Barstown “1 agree with your opinion of Ford and I myself would be glad to have him as our executive. But how about all of the others? To the Families-everyone except ourselves here present-Mr. Administrator Ford symbolizes the persecution they have suffered. I think that makes him an impossible candidate.”

Eve was gently stubborn. “I don’t think so. We’ve already agreed that we will have to work up a campaign to explain away a lot of embarrassing facts about the last few days. Why don’t we do it thoroughly and convince them that Ford is a martyr who sacrificed himself to save them? He is, you know.”

“Mmm … yes, he is. He didn’t sacrifice himself primarily on our account, but there is no doubt in my mind that his personal sacrifice saved us. But whether or not we can convince the others, convince them strongly enough that they will accept him and take orders from him … when he is now a sort of personal devil to them-well, I just don’t know. I think we need expert advice. How about it, Ralph? Could it be done?’

Ralph Schultz hesitated. “The truth of a proposition has little or nothing to do with its psychodynamics. The notion that ‘truth will prevail’ is merely a pious wish; history doesn’t show it. The fact that Ford really is a martyr to whom we owe gratitude is irrelevant to the purely technical question you put to me.” He stopped to think. “But the proposition per se has certain sentimentally dramatic aspects which lend it to propaganda manipulation, even in the face of the currently accepted strong counterproposition. Yes … yes, I think it could be sold.”

“How long would it take you to put it over?”

“Mmm … the social space involved is both ‘tight’ and ‘hot’ in the jargon we use; I should be able to get a high positive ‘k’ factor on the chain reaction-if it works at all. But it’s an unsurveyed field and I don’t know what spontaneous rumors are running around the ship. If you decide to do this, I’ll want to prepare some rumors before we adjourn, rumors to repair Ford’s reputation-then about twelve hours from now I can release another one that Ford is actually aboard . Because he intended from the first to throw his lot in with us.”

“Ub, I hardly think he did, Ralph.” – “Are you sure, Zaccur?”

“No, but-Well …

“You see? The truth about his original intentions is a secret between him – and his God. You don’t know and neither do I. But the dynamics of the proposition are a separate matter. Zaccur, by the time my rumor gets back to you three or four times, even you will begin to wonder.” The psychornetrician paused to stare at nothing while he consulted an intuition refined by almost a century of mathematical study of human behavior. “Yes, it will work. If you all want to do it, you will be able to make a public announcement inside of twenty-four hours.”

“I so move!” someone called out.

Afew minutes later Barstow had Lazarus fetch Ford to the meeting place. Lazarus did not explain to him why his presence was required; Ford entered the compartment like a man come to judgment, one with a bitter certainty that the outcome will be against him. His manner showed fortitude but not hope. His eyes were unhappy.

Lazarus had studied those eyes during the long hours they had been shut up together in the control room. They bore an expression Lazarus had seen many times before in his long life. The condemned man who has lost his final appeal, the fully resolved suicide, little furry things exhausted and defeated by struggle with the unrelenting steel of traps-the eyes of each of these hold a single expression, born of hopeless conviction that his time has run out.

Ford’s eyes had it.

Lazarus had seen it grow and had been puzzled by it. To be sure, they were all in a dangerous spot, but Ford no more I than the rest. Besides, awareness of danger brings a live expression; why should Ford’s eyes hold the signal of death? Lazarus finally decided that it could only be because Ford had reached the dead-end state of mind where suicide is necessary. But why? Lazarus mulled it over during the long watches in the control room and reconstructed the logic of it to his own satisfaction. Back on Earth, Ford had been important among his own kind, the shortlived. His paramount position had rendered him then almost immune to the feeling of defeated inferiority which the long-lived stirred up in normal men. But now he was the only ephemeral in a race of Methuselas.

Ford had neither the experience of the elders nor the expectations of the young; he felt inferior to them both, hopelessly outclassed. Correct or not, he felt himself to be a useless pensioner, an impotent object of charity.

To a person of Ford’s busy useful background the situation was intolerable. His very pride and strength of character were driving him to suicide. As he came into the conference room Ford’s glance sought out Zaccur Barstow. “You sent for me, sir?’

“Yes, Mr. Administrator.” Barstow explained briefly the situation and the responsibility thel wanted him to assume. “You are under no compulsion,” he concluded, “but we need your services if you are willing to serve. Will you?”

Lazarus’ heart felt light as he watched Ford’s expression change to amazement. “Do you really mean that?” Ford answered slowly. “You’re not joking with me?” “Most certainly we mean it!”

Ford did not answer at once and when he did, his answer seemed irrelevant. “May I sit down?”

Aplace was found for him; he settled heavily into the chair and covered his face with his hands. No one spoke. Presently he raised his head and said in a steady voice, “If that is your will,   I will do my best to carry out your wishes.”

The ship required a captain as well as a civil administrator. Lazarus had been, up to that time, her captain in a very practical, piratical sense but he balked when Barstow proposed that it be made a formal title. “Huh uh! Not me. I may just spend this trip playing checkers. Libby’s your man. Seriousminded, conscientious, former naval officer-just the type for the job.”

Libby blushed as eyes turned toward him. “Now, really,” he protested, “while it is true that I have had to command ships in the course of my duties, it has never suited me. I am a staff officer by temperament. I don’t feel like a commanding officer.”

“Don’t see how you can duck out of it,” Lazarus persisted. “You invented the go-fast gadget and you are the only one who understands how it works. You’ve got yourself a job, boy.”

“But that does not follow at all,” pleaded Libby. “1 am perfectly willing to be astrogator, for that is consonant with my talents. But I very much prefer to serve under a commanding officer.” Lazarus was smugly pleased then to see how Slayton Ford immediately moved in and took charge; the sick man was gone, here again was the executive. “It isn’t a matter of your

personal preference, Commander Libby; we each must do what we can. I have agreed to direct social and civil organization; that is consonant with my training. But I can’t command the

ship as a ship; I’m not trained for it. You are. You must do it.”

Libby blushed pinker and stammered. “I would if I were the only one. But there are hundreds of spacemen among the Families and dozens of them certainly have more experience; and talent for command than I have. If you’ll look for him, you’ll find the right man.”

Ford said, “What do you think, Lazarus?”

“Um. Andy’s got something. Acaptain puts spine into his ship … or doesn’t, as the case may be. If Libby doesn’t hanker to command, maybe we’d better look around.”

Justin Foote had a microed roster with him but there was no scanner at hand with which to sort it. Nevertheless the memories of the dozen and more present produced many candidates. They finally settled on Captain Rufus “Ruthless” King.

Libby was explaining the consequences of his lightpressure drive to his new commanding officer. “The loci of our attainable destinations is contained in a sheaf of paraboloids having their apices tangent to our present course. This assumes that acceleration by means of the ship’s normal drive will always be applied so that the magnitude our present vector, just under the speed of light, will be held constant. This will require that the ship be slowly precessed during the entire maneuvering acceleration. But it will not be too fussy because of the enormous difference in magnitude between our present vector and the maneuvering vectors being impressed on it. One may think of it roughly as accelerating at right angles to Our course.”

“Yes, yes, I see that,” Captain King cut in, “but why do you assume that the resultant vectors must always be equal to our present vector?”

“Why, it need not be if the Captain decides otherwise,” Libby answered, looking puzzled, “but to apply a component that would reduce the resultant vector below our present speed would simply be to cause us to backtrack a little without increasing the scope of our present loci of possible destinations. The effect would only increase our flight time, to generations, even to centuries, if the resultant-“

“Certainly, certainly! I understand basic ballistics, Mister. But why do you reject the other alternative? Why not increase our speed? Why can’t I accelerate directly along my present course  if I choose?”

Libby looked worried. “The Captain may, if he so orders. But it would be an attempt to exceed the speed of light. That has been assumed to be impossible-“ “That’s exactly what I was driving at: ‘Assumed.’ I’ve always wondered if that assumption was justified. Now seems like a good time to find out.”

Libby hesitated, his sense of duty struggling against the ecstatic temptations of scientific curiosity. “If this were a research ship, Captain, I would be anxious to try it. I can’t visualize what the conditions would be if we did pass the speed of light, but it seems to me that we would be cut off entirely from the electromagnetic spectrum insofar as other bodies are concerned. How could we see to astrogate?”

Libby had more than theory to worry him; they were “seeing” now only by electronic vision. To the human eye itself the hemisphere behind them along their track was a vasty black; the shortest radiations had dopplered to wavelengths too long for the eye. In the forward direction stars could still be seen but their visible “light” was made up of longest Hertzian waves crowded in by the ship’s incomprehensible speed. Dark “radio stars” shined at first magnitude; stars poor in radio wavelengths had faded to obscurity. The familiar constellations were changed beyond easy recognition. The fact that they were seeing by vision distorted by Doppler’s effect was confirmed by spectrum analysis; Fraunhofer’s lines had not merely shifted toward the violet end, they had passed beyond, out of sight, and previously unknown patterns replaced them.

“Hmm …” King replied. “I see what you mean. But I’d certainly like to try it, damn if I wouldn’t! But I admit it’s out of the question with passengers inboard. Very well, prepare for me roughed courses to type ‘0’ stars lying inside this trumpet-flower locus of yours and not too far away. Say ten lightyears for your first search.”

“Yes, sir. I have. I can’t offer anything in that range in the ‘0’ types.” “So? Lonely out here, isn’t it? Well?’

“We have Tau Ceti inside the locus at eleven lightyears.” – “A05, eh? Not too good.”

“No, sir. But we have a true Sol type, a 02-catalog ZD9817. But it’s more than twice as far away.”

Captain King chewed a knuckle. “I suppose I’ll have to put it up to the elders. How much subjective time advantage are we enjoying?” “I don’t know, sir.”

“Eh? Well work it out! Or give me the data and I will. I don’t claim to be the mathematician you are, but any cadet could solve that one. The equations are simple enough.” –

“So they are, sir. But I don’t have the data to substitute in the time-contraction equation . . -. because I have no way now to measure the ship’s speed. The violet shift is useless to use; we don’t know what the lines mean. I’m afraid we must wait until we have worked up a much longer baseline.”

King sighed. “Mister, I sometimes wonder why I got into this business. Well, are you willing to venture a best guess? Long time? Short time?”

“Uh … a long time, sir. Years.”

“So? Well, I’ve sweated it out in worse ships. Years, eh? Play any chess?”

“I have, sir.” Libby did not mention that he had given up the game long ago for lack of adequate competition. “Looks like we’d have plenty of time to play. King’s pawn;to king four.”

“King’s knight to bishop three.”

“An unorthodox player, eh? Well, I’ll answer you later. I suppose I’d better try to sell them the 02 eyen though it takes longer … and I suppose I’d better caution Ford to start some contests and things. Can’t have ‘em getting coffin fever.”

“Yes, sir. Did I mention deceleration time? It works out to just under one Earth year, subjective, at a negative one-gee, to slow us to stellar speeds.” “Eh? We’ll decelerate the same way we accelerated-with your lightpressure drive.”

Libby shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir. The drawback of the lightpressure drive is that it makes no difference what your previous course and speed may be; if you go inertialess in the near neighborhood of a star, its light pressure kicks you away from it like a cork hit by a stream of water. Your previous momentum is canceled out when you cancel your inertia.”

“Well,” King conceded, “let’s assume that we will follow your schedule. I can’t argue with you yet; there are still some things about that gadget of yours that I don’t understand.” “There are lots of things about it,” Libby answered seriously, “that I don’t understand either.”

The ship had flicked by Earth’s orbit less than ten minutes after Libby cut in his space drive. Lazarus and he had discussed the esoteric physical aspects of it all the way to the orbit of Mars-less than a quarter hour. Jupiter’s path was far distant when Barstow called the organization conference. But it killed an hour to find them all in the crowded ship; by the time he called them to order they were a billion miles out beyond the orbit of Saturn-elapsed time from “Go!” less than an hour and a half.

But the blocks get longer after Saturn. Uranus found them still in discussion. Nevertheless Ford’s name was agreed on and he had accepted before the ship was as far from the Sun as  is Neptune. King had been named captain, had toured his new command with Lazarus as guide, and was already in conference with his astrogator when the ship passed the orbit of Pluto nearly four billion miles deep into space, but still less than six hours after the Sun’s light had blasted them away.

Even then they were not outside the Solar System, but between them and the stars lay nothing but the winter homes of Sol’s comets and hiding places of hypothetical trans-Plutonian planets-space in which the Sun holds options but can hardly be said to own in fee simple. But even the nearest stars were still lightyears away. New Frontiers was headed for them at a pace which crowded the heels of light-weather cold, track fast.

Out, out, and still farther out … out to the lonely depths where world lines are almost straight, undistorted by gravitation. Each day, each month … each year … their headlong flight took them farther from all humanity.

PART TWO

The ship lunged on, alone in the desert of night, each lightyear as empty as the last. The Families built up a way of life in her.

The New Frontiers was approximately cylindrical. When not under acceleration, she was spun on her axis to give pseudo-weight to passengers near the outer skin of the ship; the outer or “lower” compartments were living quarters while the innermost or “upper” compartments were storerooms and so forth. Between compartments were shops, hydroponic farms and such. Along the axis, fore to aft, were the control room, the converter, and the main drive.

The design will be recognized as similar to that of the larger free-flight interplanetary ships in use today, but it is necessary to bear in mind her enormous size. She was a city, with ample room for a colony of twenty thousand, which would have allowed the planned complement of ten thousand to double their numbers during the long voyage to Proxima Centauri.

Thus, big as she was, the hundred thousand and more of the Families found themselves overcrowded fivefold.

They put up with it only long enough to rig for cold-sleep. By converting some recreation space on the lower levels to storage, room was squeezed out for the purpose. Somnolents require about one per cent the living room needed by active, functioning humans; in time the ship was roomy enough for those still awake. Volunteers for cold-sleep were not numerous  at first-these people were more than commonly aware of death because of their unique heritage; cold-sleep seemed too much like the Last Sleep. But the great discomfort of extreme overcrowding combined with the equally extreme monotony of the endless voyage changed their minds rapidly enough to provide a steady supply for the little death as fast as they could be accommodated.

Those who remained awake were kept humping simply to get the work done-the ship’s houskeeping, tending the hydroponic farms and the ship’s auxiliary machinery and, most especially, caring for the somnolents themselves. Biomechanicians have worked out complex empirical formulas describing body deterioration and the measures which must be taken  to offset it under various conditions of impressed acceleration, ambient temperature, the drugs used, and other factors such as metabolic age, body mass, sex, and so forth. By using the upper, low-weight compartments, deterioration caused by acceleration (that is to say, the simple weight of body tissues on themselves, the wear that leads to flat feet or bed sores) could be held to a minimum. But all the care of the somnolents had to be done by hand-turning them, massaging them, checking on blood sugar, testing the slow-motion heart actions, all the tests and services necessary to make sure that extremely reduced metabolism does not

slide over into death. Aside from a dozen stalls in the ship’s infirmary she had not been designed for cold-sleep passengers; no automatic machinery had been provided. All this tedious care of tens of thousands of somnolents had to be done by hand.

Eleanor Johnson ran across her friend, Nancy Weatheral, in Refectory 9-D—called “The Club” by its habitues, less flattering things by those who avoided it. Most of its frequenters were young and noisy. Lazarus was the only elder who ate there often. He did not mind noise, he enjoyed it.

Eleanor swooped down on her friend and kissed the back of her neck. “Nancy! So you are awake again! My, I’m glad to see you!” Nancy disentangled herself. “H’lo, b~e. Don’t spill my coffee.”

“Well! Aren’t you glad to see me?”

“Of course I am. But you forget that while it’s been a year to you, it’s only yesterday to me. And I’m still sleepy.” “How long have you been awake, Nancy?”

“Acouple of hours. How’s that kid of yours?”

“Oh, he’s fine!” Eleanor Johnson’s face brightened. “You wouldn’t know him-he’s shot up fast this past year. Almost up to my shoulder and looking more like his father every day.”

Nancy changed the subject. Eleanor’s friends made a point of keeping Eleanor’s deceased husband out of the conversation. “What have you been doing while I was snoozing? Still teaching primary?” –

“Yes. Or rather ‘No.’ I stay with the age group my Hubert is in. He’s in junior secondary now.”

“Why don’t you catch a few months’ sleep and skip some of that drudgery, Eleanor? You’ll make an old woman out of yourself if you keep it up;” – – “No,” Eleanor refused, “not until Hubert is old enough not to need me.”

“Don’t be sentimental. Half the female volunteers are women with young children. I don’t blame ‘em a bit. Look at me-from my point of view the trip so far has lasted only seven months. I could do the rest of it standing on my head.”

Eleanor looked stubborn. “No, thank you. That may be all right for you, but I am doing very nicely as I am.”

Lazarus had been sitting at the same counter doing drastic damage to a sirloin steak surrogate. “She’s afraid she’ll miss something,” he explained. “I don’t blame her. So am I.” Nancy changed her tack. “Then have another child, Eleanor. That’ll get you relieved from routine duties.”

“It takes two to arrange that,” Eleanor pointed out.

“That’s no hazard. Here’s Lazarus, for example. He’d make a Aplus father.”

Eleanor dimpled. Lazarus blushed under his permanent tan. “As a matter of fact,” Eleanor stated evenly, “I proposed to him and was turned down.” Nancy sputtered into her coffee and looked quickly from Lazarus to Eleanor. “Sorry. I didn’t know.”

“No harm,” answered Eleanor. “It’s simply because I am one of his granddaughters, four times removed.”

“But …” Nancy fought a losing fight with the custom of privacy. “Well, goodness me, that’s well within the limits of permissible consanguinity. What’s the hitch? Or should I shut up?” “You should,” Eleanor agreed.

Lazarus shifted uncomfortably. “I know I’m oldfashioned,” he admitted, “but I soaked up some of my ideas a long time ago. Genetics or no genetics, I just wouldn’t feel right marrying one of my own grandchildren.”

Nancy looked amazed. “I’ll say you’re oldfashioned!” She added, “Or maybe you’re just shy. I’m tempted to propose to you myself and find out.” Lazarus glared at her. “Go ahead and see what a surprise you get!”

Nancy looked him over coolly. “Mmn …” she meditated.

Lazarus tried to outstare her, finally dropped his eyes: “I’ll have to ask you ladies to excuse me,” he said nervously. “Work to do.” Eleanor laid a gentle hand on his arm. “Don’t go, Lazarus. Nancy is a cat and can’t help it. Tell her about the plans for landing.” “What’s that? Are we going to land? When? Where?”

Lazarus, willing to be mollified, told her. The type G2, or Sol-type star, toward which they had bent their course years earlier was now less than a lightyear away-a little over seven light- months-and it was now possible to infer by parainterferometric methods that the star (ZD9817, or simply “our” star) had planets of some sort.

In another month, when the star would be a half lightyear away, deceleration would commence. Spin would be taken off the ship and for one year she would boost backwards at one gravity, ending near the star at interplanetary rather than interstellar speed, and a search would be made for a planet fit to support human life. The search would be quick and easy as the only planets they were interested in would shine out brilliantly then, like Venus from Earth; they were not interested in elusive cold planets, like Neptune or Pluto, lurking in distant shadows, nor in scorched cinders ilke Mercury, hiding in the flaming skirts of the mother star.

If no Earthlike planet was to be had, then they must continue on down really close to the strange sun and again be kicked away by light pressure, to resume hunting for a home

elsewhere-with the difference that this time, not harassed by police, they could select a new course with care.

Lazarus explained that the New Frontiers would not actually land in either case; she was too big to land, her weight would wreck her. Instead, if they found a planet, she would be thrown into a parking orbit around her and exploring parties would be sent down in ship’s boats. – –

As soon as face permitted Lazarus left the two young women and went to the laboratory where the Families continued their researches in metabolism and gerontology. He expected to find Mary Sperling there; the brush with Nancy Weatheral had made him feel a need for her company. If he ever did marry again, he thought to himself, Mary was more his style. Not that he seriously considered it; he felt that a iiaison between Mary and himself would have a ridiculous flavor of lavender and old lace.

Mary Sperling, finding herself cooped up in the ship and not wishing to accept the symbolic death of cold-sleep, had turned her fear of death into constructive channels by volunteering to be a laboratory assistant in the continuing research into longevity. She was not a trained biologist but she had deft fingers and an agile mind; the patient years of the trip had shaped her into a valuable assistant to Dr. Gordon Hardy, chief of the research.

Lazarus found her servicing the deathless tissue of chicken heart known to the laboratory crew as “Mrs. ‘Avidus.” Mrs. ‘Avidus was older than any member of the Families save possibly Lazarus himself; she was a growing piece of the original tissue obtained by the Families from the Rockefeller Institute in the twentieth century, and the tissues had been alive since early  in the twentieth century even then. Dr. Hardy and his predecessors had kept their bit of it alive for more than two centuries now, using the Carrel-Lindbergh-O’Shaug techniques and still Mrs. ‘Avidus flourished.

Gordon Hardy had insisted on taking the tissue and the apparatus which cherished it with him to the reservation when he was arrested; he had been equally stubborn about taking the living tissue along during the escape in the Chili. Now Mrs. ‘Avidus still lived and grew in the New Frontiers, fifty or sixty pounds of her-blind, deaf, and brainless, but still alive.

Mary Sperling was reducing her size. “Hello, Lazarus,” she greeted him. “Stand back. I’ve got the tank open.” He watched her slice off excess tissue. “Mary,” he mused, “what keeps that silly thing alive?”

“You’ve got the question inverted,” she answered, not looking up; “the proper form is: why should it die? Why shouldn’t it go on forever?” – “I wish to the Devil it would die!” came the voice of Dr. Hardy from behind them. “Then we could observe and find out why.” – –

“You’ll never find out why from Mrs. ‘Avidus, boss,” Mary answered, hands and eyes still busy. “The key to the matter is in the gonads-she hasn’t any.” ‘Hummph! What do you know about it?”

“Awoman’s intuition. What do you know about it?”

“Nothing, -absolutely nothing!-which puts me ahead of you and your intuition.” “Maybe. At least,” Mary added slyly, “1 knew you before you were housebroken.”

“Atypical female argument. Mary, that lump of muscle cackled and laid eggs before either one of us was born, yet it doesn’t know anything.” He scowled at it. “Lazarus, I’d gladly trade it for one pair of carp. male and female.” –

“Why carp?” asked Lazarus.

“Because carp don’t seem to die. They get killed, or eaten, or starve to death, or succumb to infection, but so far as we know they don’t die.” “Why not?”

“That’s what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing.”

Mary said something inaudibly. Hardy said, “What are you muttering about? Another intuition?”

“I said, ‘Amoebas don’t die.’ You said yourself that every amoeba now alive has been alive for, oh, fifty million years or so. Yet they don’t grow indefinitely larger and they certainly can’t have intestinal flora.”

“No guts,” said Lazarus and blinked.

“What a terrible pun, Lazarus. But what I said is true. They don’t die. They just twin and keep on living.”

“Guts or no guts,” Hardy said impatiently, “there may be a structural parallel. But I’m frustrated for lack of experimental subjects. Which reminds me: Lazarus, I’m glad you dropped in. I want you to do me a favor.”

“Speak up. I might be feeling mellow.”

“You’re an interesting case yourself, you know. You didn’t follow our genetic pattern; you anticipated it. I don’t want your body to go into the converter; I want to examine it.”

Lazarus snorted. “‘Sail right with me, bud. But you’d better tell your successor what to look for-you may not live that long. And I’ll bet you anything that you like that nobody’ll find it by poking around in my cadaver!”

The planet they had hoped for was there when they looked for it, green, lush, and young, and looking as much like Earth as another planet could. Not only was it Earthlike but the rest of the system duplicated roughly the pattern of the Solar System-small terrestrial planets near this sun, large Jovian planets farther out. Cosmologists had never been able to account for the Solar System; they had alternated between theories of origin which had failed to stand up and sound mathematico-physical “proofs” that such a system could never have originated in the first place. Yet here was another enough like it to suggest that its paradoxes were not unique, might even be common.

But more startling and even more stimulating and certainly more disturbing was another fact brought out by telescopic observation as they got close to the planet. The planet held life . . , intelligent life … civilized life.

Their cities could be seen. Their engineering works, strange in form and purpose, were huge enough to be seen from space just as ours can be seen.

Nevertheless, though it might mean that they must again pursue their weary hegira, the dominant race did not appear to have crowded the available living space. There might be room for their little colony on those broad continents. If a colony was welcome…

“To tell the truth,” Captain King fretted, “I hadn’t expected anything like this. Primitive aborigines perhaps, and we certainly could expect dangerous animals, but I suppose I unconsciously assumed that man was the only really civilized race. We’re going to have to be very cautious.”

King made up a scouting party headed by Lazatus; he had come to have confidence in Lazarus’ practical sense and will to survive. King wanted to head the party himself, but his concept of his duty as a ship’s captain forced him to forego it. But Slayton Ford could go; Lazarus chose him and Ralph Schultz and his lieutenants. The rest of the party were specialists- biochemist, geologist, ecologist, stereographer, several sorts of psychologists and sociologists to study the natives including one authority in McKelvy’s structural theory of communication whose task would be to find some way to talk with the natives.

No weapons.

King flatly refused to arm them. “Your scouting party is expendable, he told Lazarus bluntly; “for we can not risk offending them by any sort of fighting for any reason, even in self-defense. You are ambassadors, not soldiers. Don’t forget it.”

Lazarus returned to his stateroom, came back and gravely delivered to King one blaster. He neglected to mention the one still strapped to his leg under his kilt.

As King was about to tell them to man the boat and carry out their orders they were interrupted by Janice Schmidt, chief nurse to the Families’ congenital defectives. She pushed her way past and demanded the Captain’s attention. –

Only a nurse could have obtained it at that moment; she had professional stubbornness to match his and half a century more practice at being balky. He glared at her. “What’s the meaning of this interruption?”

“Captain, I must speak with you about one of my children.”

“Nurse, you are decidedly out of order. Get out. See me in my office-after taking it up with the Chief Surgeon.”

She put her hands on her hips. “You’ll see me now. This is the landing party, isn’t it? I’ve got something you have to hear before they leave.” King started to speak, changed his mind, merely said, “Make it brief.”

She did so. Hans Weatheral, a youth of some ninety years and still adolescent in appearance through a hyper-active thymus gland, was one of her charges. He had inferior but not moronic mentality, a chronic apathy, and a neuro-muscular deficiency which made him too weak to feed himself-and an acute sensitivity to telepaths.

He had told Janice that he knew all about the planet around which they orbited. His friends on the planet had told him about it … and they were expecting him.

The departure of the landing boat was delayed while King and Lazarus investigated. Hans was matter of fact about his information and what little they could check of what he said was correct. But he was not too helpful about his “friends.” “Oh, just people,” he said, shrugging at their stupidity. “Much like back home. Nice people. Go to work, go to school, go to church. Have kids and enjoy themselves. You’ll like them.”

But he was quite clear about one point: his friends were expecting-him; therefore he must go along.

Against his wishes and his better judgment Lazarus saw added to his party Hans Weatheral, Janice Schmidt, and a stretcher for Hans.

When the party returned three days later Lazarus made a long private report to King while the specialist reports were being analyzed and combined. “It’s amazingly like Earth, Skipper, enough to make you homesick. But it’s also different enough to give you the willies-llke looking at your own face in the mirror and having it turn out to have three eyes and no nose. Unsettling.”

“But how about the natives?”

“Let me tell it. We made a quick swing of the day side, for a bare eyes look. Nothing you haven’t seen through the ‘scopes. Then I put her down where Hans told me to, in a clearing near the center of one of their cities. I wouldn’t have picked the place myself; I would have preferred to land in the bush and reconnoitre. But you told me to play Hans’ hunches.”

“You were free to use your judgment,” King reminded

“Yes, yes. Anyhow we did it. By the time the techs had sampled the air and checked for hazards there was quite a crowd around us. They-well, you’ve seen the stereographs.” “Yes. Incredibly android.”

“Android, hell! They’re men. Not humans, but men just the same.” Lazarus looked puzzled. “I don’t like it.”

King did not argue. The pictures had shown bipeds seven to eight feet tall, bilaterally symmetric, possessed of internal skeletal framework, distinct heads, lens-and-camera eyes. Those eyes were their most human and appealing features; they were large, limpid, and tragic, like those of a Saint Bernard dog.

It was well to concentrate on the eyes; their other features were not as tolerable. King looked away from the loose, toothless mouths, the bifurcated upper lips. He decided that it might take a long, long time to learn to be fond of these creatures. “Go ahead,” he told Lazarus.

“We opened up and I stepped out alone, with my hands empty and. trying to look friendly and peaceable. Three of them stepped forward-eagerly, I would say. But they lost interest in me at once; they seemed to be waiting for somebody else to come out. So I gave orders to carry Hans out.

“Skipper, you wouldn’t believe it. They fawned over Hans like a long lost brother. No, that doesn’t describe it. More like a king returning home in triumph. They were polite enough with the rest of us, in an offhand way, but they fairly slobbered over Hans.” Lazarus hesitated. “Skipper? Do you believe in reincarnation?”

“Not exactly. I’m open-minded about it. I’ve read the report of the Frawling Committee, of course.” –

“I’ve never had any use for the notion myself. But how else could you account for the reception they gave Hans?” “I don’t account for it. Get on with your report. Do you think it is going to be possible for us to colonize here?”

“Oh,” ‘ud Lazarus, “they left no doubt on that point. You see, Hans really can talk to them, telepathically. Hans tells us that – their gods have authorized us to live here-and the natives have already made plans to receive us.”

“That’s right. They want us.” – “Well! That’s a relief.”

“Is it?”

King studied Lazarus’ glum features. “You’ve made a report favorable on every point. Why the sour look?” “I don’t know. I’d just rather we found a planet of our own. Skipper, anything this easy has a hitch in it.”

Chapter 2

THE Jockaira (or Zhacheira, as some prefer) turned an entire city over to the colonists.

Such astounding cooperation, plus the sudden discovery by almost every member of the Howard Families that he was sick for the feel of dirt under foot and free air in his lungs, greatly speeded the removal from ship to ground. It had been anticipated that at least an Earth year would be needed for such transition and that somnolents would be waked only as fast as they could be accommodated dirtside, But the limiting factor now was the scanty ability of the ship’s boats to transfer a hundred thousand people as they were roused.

The Jockaira city was not designed to fit the needs of human beings. The Jockaira were not human beings, their physical requirements were somewhat different, and their cultural needs as expressed in engineering were vastly different. But a city, any city, is a machine to accomplish certain practical ends: shelter, food supply, sanitation, communication; the internal logic  of these prime requirements. as applied by diiferent creatures to different environments, will produce an unlimited number of answers. But, as applied by any race of warm-blooded, oxygen-breathing androidal creatures to a particular environment, the results, although strange, are necessarily such that Terran humans can use them. In some ways the Jockaira city looked as wild as a pararealist painting, but humans have lived in igloos, grass shacks, and even in the cybernautomated burrow under Antarctina; these humans could and did move into the Jockaira city-and of course at once set about reshaping it to suit

them better.

It was not difficult even though there was much to be done. There were buildings already standing-shelters with roofs on them, the artificial cave basic to all human shelter requirements.  It did not matter what the Jockaira had used such a structure for; humans could use it for almost anything: sleeping, recreation, eating, storage, production. There were actual “caves” as well, for the Jockaira dig in more than we do. But humans easily turn troglodyte on occasion, in New York as readily as in Antarctica.

There was fresh potable water piped in for drinking and for limited washing. Amajor lack lay in plumbing; the city had no overall drainage system. The “Jocks” did not waterbathe and their personal sanitation requirements differed from ours and were taken care of differently. Amajor effort had to be made to jury-rig equivalents of shipboard refreshers and adapt them   to hook in with Jockaira disposal arrangements. Minimum necessity ruled; baths would remain a rationed luxury until water supply and disposal could be increased at least tenfold. But baths are not a necessity.

But such efforts at modification were minor compared with the crash program to set up hydroponic farming, since most of the somnolents could not be waked until a food supply was assured. The do-it-now crowd wanted to tear out every bit of hydroponic equipment in the New Frontiers at once, ship it down dirtside, set it up and get going, while depending on stored supplies during the changeover; a more cautious minority wanted to move only a pilot plant while continuing to grow food in the ship; they pointed out that unsuspected fungus or virus on the strange planet could result in disaster …starvation.

The minority, strongly led by Ford and Barstow and supported by Captain King, prevailed; one of the ship’s hydroponic farms was drained and put out of service. Its machinery was broken down into parts small enough to load into ship’s boats.

But even this never reached dirtside. The planet’s native farm products turned out to be suitable for human food and the Jockaira seemed almost pantingly anxious to give them away. Instead, efforts were turned to establishing Earth crops in native soil in order to supplement Jockaira foodstuffs with sorts the humans were used to. The Jockaira moved in and almost took over that effort; they were superb “natural” farmers (they had no need for synthetics on their undepleted planet) and seemed delighted to attempt to raise anything their guests wanted.

Ford transferred his civil headquarters to the city as soon as a food supply for more than a pioneer group was assured, while King remained in the ship. Sleepers were awakened and ferried to the ground as fast as facilities were made ready for them and their services could be used. Despite assured food, shelter, and drinking water, much needed to be done to provide minimum comfort and decency. The two cultures were basicially different. The Jockaira seemed always anxious to be endlessly helpful but they were often obviously baffled at what the humans tried to do. The Jockaira culture did not seem to include the idea of privacy; the buildings of the city had no partitions in them which were not loadbearing-and few that were; they tended to use columns or posts. They could not understand why the humans would break up these lovely open spaces into cubicles and passageways; they simply could not comprehend why any individual would ever wish to be alone for any purpose whatsoever.

Apparently (this is not certain, for abstract communication with them never reached a subtle level) they decided eventually that being alone held a religious significance for Earth people. In any case they were again helpful; they provided thin sheets of material which could be shaped into partitions-with their tools and only with their tools. The stuff frustrated human engineers almost to nervous collapse. No corrosive known to our technology affected it; even the reactions that would break down the rugged fluorine plastics used in handling uranium compounds had no effect on it. Diamond saws went to pieces on it, heat did not melt it, cold did not make it brittle. It stopped light, sound, and all radiation they were equipped to try on it. Its tensile strength could not be defined because they could not break it. Yet Jockaira tools, even when handled by humans, could cut it, shape it, reweld it.

The human engineers simply had to get used to such frustrations. From the criterion of control over environment through technology the Jockaira were as civilized as humans. But their developments had been along other lines.

The important differences between the two cultures went much deeper than engineering technology. Although ubiquitously friendly and helpful the Jockaira were not human. They thought differently, they evaluated differently; their social structure and language structure reflected their unhuman quality and both were incomprehensible to human beings.

Oliver Johnson, the semantician who had charge of developing a common language, found his immediate task made absurdly easy by the channel of communication through Hans Weatheral. “Of course,” he explained to Slayton Ford and to Lazarus, “Hans isn’t exactly a genius; he just misses being a moron. That limits the words I can translate through him to ideas he can understand. But it does give me a basic vocabulary to build on.”

“Isn’t that enough?” asked Ford. “It seems to me that – I have heard that eight hundred words will do to convey any idea.”

“There’s some truth in that,” admitted Johnson. “Less than a thousand words will cover all ordinary situations. I have selected not quite seven hundred of their terms, operationals and substantives, to give us a working lingua franca. But subtle distinctions and fine discriminations will have to wait until we know them better and understand them. Ashort vocabulary cannot handle high abstractions.”

“Shucks,” said Lazarus, “seven hundred words ought to be enough. Me, I don’t intend to make love to ‘em, or try to discuss poetry.”

This opinion seemed to be justified; most of the members picked up basic Jockairan in two weeks to a month after being ferried down and chattered in it with their hosts as if they had talked it all their lives. All of the Earthmen had had the usual sound grounding in mnemonics and semantics; a short-vocabulary auxiliary language was quickly learned under the stimulus of need and the circumstance of plenty of chance to practice-except, of course, by the usual percentage of unshakable provincials who felt that it was up to “the natives” to learn English.

The Jockaira did not learn English. In the first place not one of them showed the slightest interest. Nor was it reasonable to expect their millions to learn the language of a few thousand. But in any case the split upper lip of a Jockaira could not cope with “m,” “p,” and “b,” whereas the gutturals, sibilants, dentals, and clicks they did use could be approximated by the human throat.

Lazarus was forced to revise his early bad impression of the Jockaira. It was impossible not to like them once the strangeness of their appearance had worn off. They were so hospitable, so generous, so friendly, so anxious to please. He became particularly attached to Kreei Sarloo, who acted as a sort of liaison officer between the Families and the Jockaira. Sarloo held a position among his own people which could be trans1ated roughly as “chief,” “father,” “priest,” or “leader” of the Kreel family or tribe. He invited Lazarus to visit him in the Jockaira city nearest the colony. “My people will like to see you and smell your skin,” he said. “It will be a happymaking thing. The gods will be pleased.”

Sarloo seemed almost unable to form a sentence without making reference to his gods. Lazarus did not mind; to another’s religion he was tolerantly indifferent. “I will come, Sarloo, old bean. It will be a happymaking thing for me, too.”

Sarloo took him in the common vehicle of the Jockaira, a wheelless wain shaped much like a soup bowl, which moved quietly and rapidly over the ground, skimming the surface in apparent contact. Lazarus squatted on the floor of the vessel while Sarloo caused it to speed along at a rate that made Lazarus’ eyes water.

“Sasloo,” Lazarus asked, shouting to make himself heard against the wind, “how does this thing work? What moves it?’ “The gods breathe on the-” Sarloo used a word not in their common language. “-and cause it to need to change its place.”

Lazarus started to ask for a fuller explanation, then shut up. There had been something familiar about that answer and he now placed it; he had once given a very similar answer to one of the water people of Venus when he was asked to explain the diesel engine used in an early type of swamp tractor. Lazarus had not meant to be mysterious; he had simply been

tongue-tied by inadequate common language. Well, there was a way to get around that- “Sarloo, I want to see pictures of what happens inside,” Lazarus persisted, pointing. “You have pictures?”

“Pictures are,” Sarloo acknowledged, “in the temple. You must not enter the temple.” His great eyes looked mournfully at Lazarus, giving him a strong feeling that the Jockaira chief grieved over his friend’s lack of grace. Lazarus hastily dropped the subject.

But the thought of Venerians brought another puzzler to mind. The water people, cut off from the outside world by the eternal clouds of Venus, simply did not believe in astronomy. The arrival of Earthmen had caused them to readjust their concept of the cosmos a little, but there was reason to believe that their revised explanation was no closer to the truth. Lazarus wondered what the Jackaira thought about visitors from space. They had shown no surprise—or had they? –

“Sarloo,” he asked, “do you know where my brothers and I come from?’

“I know,” Sarloo answered. “You come from a distant sun -so distant that many seasons would come and go while light traveled that long journey.” – Lazarus felt mildly astonished. “Who told you that?’

“The gods tell us. Your brother Libby spoke on it.”

Lazarus was willing to lay odds that the gods had not got around to mentioning it until after Libby explained it to Kreel Sarloo. But he held his peace. He still wanted to ask Sarloo if he had been surprised to have visitors arrive from the skies but he could think of no Jockairan term for surprise or wonder. He was still trying to phrase the question when Sarloo spoke again:

“The fathers of my people flew through the skies as you did, but that was before the coming of the gods. The gods, in their wisdom, bade us stop.”

And that, thought Lazarus, is one damn big lie, from pure panic. There was not the slightest indication that the Jockaira had ever been off the surface of their planet.

At Sarloo’s home that evening Lazarus sat through a long session of what he assumed was entertainment for the guest of honor, himself. He squatted beside Sarloo on a raised portion of the floor of the vast common room of the clan Kreel and listened to two hours of howling that might have been intended as singing. Lazarus felt that better music would result from stepping on the tails of fifty assorted dogs but he tried to take it in the spirit in which it seemed to be offered.

Libby, Lazarus recalled, insisted that this mass howling which the Jockaira were wont to indulge in was, in fact,he had to sdmit that Llbby the ***$ork*** ***$ttsr*** than he did in some ways~ Libby had been delighted to discover that the Jockaira were excellent and subtle mathematicians. In particular they had a grasp of number that ***pi 1/4$Ileled j~ own w~d- ‘ta1~,fl~r -arithmetics irene lnoredl~ pvved for ncnnal human***. Anumber, any number ***I*ip *** to them a unique entity, to be grasped in itself ***si net idIy as ft*** grouping of smaller numbers. In consequence they used any convenient positional or exponential notation with any base, rational irrational, or variable-~,***-~ st-a***. It was supreme luck, Lazarus mused, that Libby was available to act as mathematical interpreter between the Jockaira and the Families, else it would have been impossible to grasp a lot of the new technologies the Jockaira were showing them.

He wondered why the Jockaira showed no interest in learning human technologies they were offered in return?

The howling discord died away and Lazarus brought his thoughts back to the scene around him. Food was brought; the Kreel family tackled it with the same jostling enthusiasm with which Jockaira did everything. Dignity, thought Lazarus—lean idea which never caught on here. Alarge bowl, full two feet across and brimful of an amorpheous meal, was placed in front  of Kreel Sarloo. Adozen Kreels crowded atound it and started grabbing~giving no precedence to their senior. But Sadoo casually slapped a few of them out of the way and plunged a hand into the dish, brought forth a gob of the ration and rapidly kneaded it into a ball in the palm of his double-thumbed hand. Done, he shoved it towards Lazarus’ mouth.

Lmarus war not squeamish-but he had to remind bimself first, that food for Jockaira was food for men, and second that he could not catch anything from them anyhow, before he could bring himself to try the proffered morsel.

He took a large bite. Mmmm… not too bad-bland and sticky, no particular flavor. Not good eithet~but could be swallowed. Grimly determined to uphold the hon of his race, he ate on, while promising himself a proper meal in the near future. When lie’ (cit that to swallow another mouthful would be to invite physical and social diaaster.

***$~ed Up sl.~Ze h**dM st~ha m~ uite$bmsndc~d IttoSssfoo ,kWasIn.pired dljdmflitey For Ike zest of the mast Lazarus fe4 Sexton, fed bun until bin anne were tired until he m~ at ha hosts ability o tuck it away**

After eating they slept and Lazarus slept with the famiy *** lIte**ly*** They slept where they had eaten, without beds, disposed as casually as leaves on a path or puppies. To his aurprise, Lazarus slept well and did not awoke until false suns in the cavern roof glowed in ***mysse,~as s~rmpath~c to-***new dawn. Sarloo was still asleep near him and giving out most humanlike snores. Lazarus found that one infant Jockaira was cuddled spoon fashion against his own stomach. He felt a movement behind his back~ a rustle at his thigh. He turned cautiously and found that another Jockaira-a six-year-old in human equivalence-had extracted his blaster from its holster and was now gazing curiously into its muzzle.

With hasty caution Lazarus removed the deadly toy from the child’s unwilling fingers, noted with relief that the safety was still on and reholstered it. Lazarus received a reproach for look; the kid seemed about to cry. “Hush,” whispered Lazarus, “you’ll wake your o1d man. Here—”- He gathered the child into his left arm, and cradled it against his side. The little Jockaira snuggled up to him, laid a soft moist mouth against his side, and promptly went to sleep.

Lazarus looked down at him. “You’re a cute little devil,” he said softly. “I-could grow right fond of you if 1 could ever get used to your smell.”

Some of the incidents between the two races would bave been funny bad they not been charged with potential trouble: for example, the case of Eleanor Johnson’s son Hubert This gangling adolescent was a confirmed sidewalk-superintendent. One day he was watching two technicians, one human and one Jockaira, adapt a Jockaira power source to the feed of Earth-type machinery. Tbe Jockaira was apparently amused by the boy and, in an obviously friendly spirit, picked him up.

Hubert began to scream.

His mother, never far from him, joined battle. She lacked strength and skill to do the utter destruction she was bent on; the big nonhuman was unhurt, but it created a nasty situation. Administrator Ford and Oliver Johnson tried very hard to explain the incident to the amazed Jockaira. Fortunately, they seemed grieved rather than vengeful.

Ford then called in Eleanor Johnson. “You have endangered the entire colony by your stupidity-“ “But I-“

“Keep quiet! If you hadn’t spoiled the boy rotten, he would have behaved himself. If you weren’t a maudlin fool. you would have kept your hands to yourself. The boy goes to the regular development classes henceforth and you are to let him alone. At the lightest sign of animosity on your part toward any of the natives, I’ll have you subjected to a few years’ cold-rest. Now get out!”

Ford was forced to use almost as strong measures on Janice Schmidt. The interest shown in Hans Weatheral by the Jockaira extended to all the telepathic defectives. The natives seemed to be reduced to a state of quivering adoration by the mere fact that these could communicate with them directly. Kreel Sarloo informed Ford that he wanted the sensitives to be housed separately from the other defectives in the evacuated temple of the Earthmen’s city and that the Jockaira wished to wait on them personally. It was more of an order than a request.

Janice Schmidt submitted ungracefully to Ford’s insistence that the Jockaira be humored in the matter in return for all that they had done, and Jockaira nurses took over under her jealous eyes.

Every sensitive of intelligence level higher than the semimoronic Hans Weatheral promptly developed spontaneous and extreme psychoses while being attended by Jockaira.

So Ford had another headache to straighten out. Janice Schmidt was more powerfully and more intelligently vindictive than was Eleanor Johnson. Ford was s-tpr~d to bind Janice over to keep the peace under the threat of retiring her completely from the care of her beloved “children.” Kreel Sarloo, distressed and apparently shaken to his core, accepted a compromise whereby Janice and her junior nurses resumed care of the poor psychotics while Jockaira continued to minister to sensitives of moron level and below.

But the greatest difficulty arose over … surnames. Jockaira each had an individual name and a surname. Surnames were limited in number, much as they were in the Families. A native’s surname referrect equally to his tribe and to the temple in which he worshipped.

Kreel Sarloo took up the matter with Ford. “High Father of the Strange Brothers,” he said, “the time has come for you and your children to choose your surnames.” (The rendition of Sarloo’s speech into English necessarily contains inherent errors.)

Ford was used to difficulties in understanding the Jockaira. “Sarloo, brother and friend,” he answered, “I hear your words but I do not understand. Speak more fully.”

Sarloo began over. “Strange brother, the seasons come and the seasons go and there is a time of ripening. The gods tell us that you, the Strange Brothers, have reached the time in your education (?) when you must select your tribe and your temple. I have come to arrange with you the preparations (ceremonies?) by which each will choose his surname. I speak for the gods in this. But let me say for myself that it would make me happy if you, my brother Ford, were to choose the temple Kreel.”

Ford stalled while he tried to understand what was implied. “I am happy that you wish me to have your surname. But my people already have their own surnames.”

Sarloo dismissed that with a flip of his lips. “Their present surnames are words and nothing more. Now they must choose their real surnames, each the name of his temple and of the god whom he will worship. Children grow up and are no longer children.”

Ford decided that he needed advice. “Must this be done at once?” “Not today, but in the near future. The gods are patient.”

Ford called in Zaccur Barstow, Oliver Johnson, Lazarus Long, and Ralph Schultz, and described the interview. Johnson played back the recording of the conversation and strained to catch the sense of the words. He prepared several possible translations but failed to throw any new light on the matter.

“It looks,” said Lazarus, “like a case of join the church or get out.”

“Yes,” agreed Zaccur Barstow, “that much seems to come through plainly. Well, I think we can afford to go through the motions. Very few of our people have religious prejudices strong enough to forbid their paying lip service to the native gods in the interests of the general welfare.”

“I imagine you are correct,” Ford said. “I, for one, have no objection to adding Kreel to my name and taking part in their genuflections if it will help us to live in peace.” He frowned. “But I would not want to see our culture submerged in theirs.”

“You can forget that,” Ralph Schultz assured him. “No matter what we have to do to please them, there is absolutely no chance of any real cultural assimilation. Our brains are not like theirs-just how different I am only beginning to guess.”

“Yeah,” said Lazarus, ” ‘just how different.’”

Ford turned to Lazarus. “What do you mean by that? What’s troubling you?”  “Nothing. Only,” he added, “I never did share the general enthusiasm for this place.”

They agreed that one man should take the plunge first, then report back. Lazarus tried to grab the assignment on seniority, Schultz claimed it as a professional right; Ford overruled them and appointed himself, asserting that it was his duty as the responsible executive. –

Lazarus went with him to the doors of the temple where the induction was to take place. Ford was as bare of clothing as the Jockaira, but Lazarus, since he was not to enter the temple, was able to wear his kilt. Many of the colonists, sunstarved after years in the ship, went bare when it suited them, just as the Jockaira did. But Lazarus never did. Not only did his habits run counter to it, but a blaster is an extremely conspicuous object on a bare thigh.

Kreel Sarloo greeted them and escorted Ford inside. Lazarus called out after them, “Keep your chin up, pal!”

He waited. He struck a cigarette and smoked it. He walked up and down. He had no way to judge how long it would be; it seemed, in consequence, much longer than it was.

At last the doors slid back and natives crowded out through them. They seemed curiously worked up about something and none of them came near Lazarus. The press that still existed in the great doorway separated, formed an aisle, and a figure came running headlong through it and out into the open.

Lazarus recognized Ford.

Ford did not stop where Lazarus waited but plunged blindly on past. He tripped and fell down. Lazarus hurried to him.

Ford made no effort to get up. He lay sprawled face down, his shoulders heaving violently, his frame shaking with sobs. Lazarus knelt by him and shook him. “Slayton,” he demanded, “what’s happened? What’s wrong with you?” Ford turned wet and horror-stricken eyes to him, checking his sobs momentarily. He did not speak but he seemed to recognize Lazarus. He flung himself on Lazarus, clung to him, wept more violently than before.

Lazarus wrenched himself free and slapped Ford hard. “Snap out of it!” he ordered. “Tell me what’s the matter.”

Ford jerked his head at the slap and stopped his outcries but he said nothing. His eyes looked dazed. Ashadow fell across Lazarus’ line of sight; he spun around, covering with his blaster. Kreel Sarloo stood a few feet away and did not come closer-not because of the weapon; he had never seen one before.

“You!” said Lazarus. “For the-What did you do to him?”

He checked himself and switched to speech that Sarloo could understand. “What has happened to my brother Ford?” “Take him away,” said Sarloo, his lips twitching. “This is a bad thing. This is a very bad thing.”

“You’re telling me!” said Lazarus. He did not bother to translate.

Chapter 3

THE SAME CONFERENCE as before, minus its chairman, met as quickly as possible. Lazarus told his story, Shultz reported on Ford’s condition. “The medical staff can’t find anything wrong with him. All I can say with certainty is that the Administrator is suffering from an undiagnosed extreme psychosis. We can’t get into communication with him.”

“Won’t he talk at all?” asked Barstow.

“Aword or two, on subjects as simple as food or water. Any attempt to reach the cause of his trouble drives him into incoherent hysteria.” “No diagnosis?”

“Well, if you want an unprofessional guess in loose language, I’d say he was scared out of his wits. But,” Schultz added, “I’ve seen fear syndromes before. Never anything like this.”  “I have,” Lazarus said suddenly.

“You have? Where? What were the circumstances?’

“Once,” said Lazarus, “when I was a kid, a couple of hundred years back, I caught a grown coyote and penned him up. I had a notion I could train him to be a hunting dog. It didn’t work. “Ford acts just the way that coyote did.”

An unpleasant silence followed. Schultz broke it with, “I don’t quite see what you mean. What is the parallel?’

“Well,” Lazarus answered slowly, “this is just my guess. Slayton is the only one who knows the true answer and he can’t talk. But here’s my opinion: we’ve had these Jockaira doped out all wrong from scratch. We made the mistake of thinking that because they looked like us, in a general way, and were about as civilized as we are, that they were people. But they aren’t people at all. They are … domestic animals.

“Wait a minute now!” he added. “Don’t get in a rush. There are people on this planet, right enough. Real people. They lived in the temples and the Jockaira called them gods. They are gods!”

Lazarus pushed on before anyone could interrupt. “I know what you’re thinking. Forget it. I’m not going metaphysical on you; I’m just putting it the best I can. I mean that there is something living in those temples and whatever it is, it is such heap big medicine that it can pinch-hit for gods, so you might as well call ‘em that. Whatever they are, they are the true dominant race on this planet-its people! To them, the rest of us, Jocks or us, are just animals, wild or tame. We made the mistake of assuming that a local religion was merely superstition. It ain’t.”

Barstow said slowly, “And you think this accounts for what happened to Ford?’ “I do. He met one, the one called Kreel, and it drove him crazy.”

“I take it,” said Schultz, “that it is your theory that any man exposed to this … this presence … would become psychotic?” “Not exactly,” answered Lazarus. “What scares me a damn’ sight more is the fear that I might not go crazy!”

That same day the Jockaira withdrew all contact with the Earthmen. It was well that they did so, else there would have been violence. Fear hung over the city, fear of horror worse than death, fear of some terrible nameless thing, the mere knowledge of which would turn a man into a broken mindless animal. The Jockaira no longer seemed harmless friends, rather clownish despite their scientific attainments, but puppets, decoys, bait for the unseen potent beings who lurked in the “temples.”

There was no need to vote on it; with the single-mindedness of a crowd stampeding from a burning building the Earthmen wanted to leave this terrible place. Zaccur Barstow assumed command. “Get King on the screen. Tell him to send down every boat at once. We’ll get out of here as fast as we can.” He ran his fingers worriedly through his hair. “What’s the most we can load each trip, Lazarus? How long will the evacuation take?”

Lazarus muttered. “What did you say?

“I said, ‘It ain’t a case of how long; it’s a case of will we be let.’ Those things in the temples may want more domestic animals-us!”

Lazarus was needed as a boat pilot but he was needed more urgently for his ability to manage a crowd. Zaccur Barstow was telling him to conscript a group of emergency police when Lazarus looked past Zaccur’s shoulder and exclaimed, “Oh oh! Hold it, Zack-school’s out.”

Zaccur turned his head quickly an4 saw, approaching with stately dignity across the council hail, Kreel Sarloo. No one got in his way.

They soon found out why. Zaccur moved forward to greet him, found himself stopped about ten feet from the Jockaira. No clue to the cause; just that-stopped. “I greet you, unhappy brother,” Sarloo began.

“I greet you, Krecl Sarloo.”

“The gods have spoken. Your kind can never be civilized (?).You and your brothers are to leave this world.” Lazarus let out a deep sigh of relief. –

“We are leaving, Kreel Sarloo,” Zaccur answered soberly.

“The gods require that you leave. Send your bother Libby to me.”

Zaccur sent for Libby, then turned back to Sarloo. But the Jockaira had nothing more to say to them; he seemed indifferent to their presence. They waited.

Libby arrived. Sarloo held him in a long conversation. Barstow and Lazarus were both in easy earshot and could see their lips move, but heard nothing. Lazarus found the circumstance very disquieting. Damn my eyes, he thought, I could figure several ways to pull that trick with the right equipment but I’ll bet none of ‘em is the right answer-and I don’t see any equipment.

The silent discussion ended, Sarloo stalked off without farewell. Libby turned to the others and spoke; now his voice could be heard. “Sarloo tells me,” he began, brow wrinkled in puzzlement, “that we are to go to a planet, uh, over thirtytwo lightyears from here. The gods have decided it.” He stopped and bit his lip.

“Don’t fret about it,” advised Lazarus. “Just be glad they want us to leave. My guess is that they could have squashed us flat just as easily. Once we’re out in space we’ll pick our. own destination.”

“I suppose so. But the thing that puzzles me is that he mentioned a time about three hours~away as being our departure from this system.” “Why, that’s utterly unreasonable,” protested Barstow. “Impossible. We haven’t the boats to do it.”

Lazarus said nothing. He was ceasing to have opinions.

Zaccur changed his opinion quickly. Lazarus acquired one, born of experience. While urging his cousins toward the field where embarkation was proceeding, he found himself lifted up, free of the ground. He struggled, his arms and legs met no resistance but the ground dropped away. He closed his eyes, counted ten jets, opened them again. He was at least two miles  in the air.

Below him, boiling up from the city like bats from a cave, were uncountable numbers of dots and shapes, dark against the sunlit ground. Some were close enough for him to see that they were men, Earthmen, the Families.

The horizon dipped down, the planet became a sphere, the sky turned black. Yet his breathing seemed normal, his blood vessels did not burst.

They were sucked into clusters around the open ports of the New Frontiers like bees swarming around a queen. Once inside the ship Lazarus gave himself over to a case of the shakes. Whew! he sighed to himself, watch that first step-it’s a honey!

Libby sought out Captain King as soon as he was inboard and had recovered his nerve. He delivered Sarloo’s message.

King seemed undecided. “I don’t know,” he said. “You know more about the natives than I do, inasmuch as I have hardly put foot to ground. But between ourselves, Mister, the way they sent my passengers back has me talking to myself. That was the most remarkable evolution I have ever seen performed.”

“I might add that it was remarkable to experience, sir,” Libby answered unhumorously. “Personally I would prefer to take up ski jumping. I’m glad you had the ship’s access ports open.”  “I didn’t,” said King tersely. “They were opened for me.”

They went to the control room with the intention of getting the ship under boost and placing a long distance between it and the planet from which they had been evicted; thereafter they would consider destination and course. “This planet that Sarloo described to you,” said King, “does it belong to a G-type star?”

“Yes,” Libby confirmed, “an Earth-type planet accompanying a Sol-type star. I have its coordinates and could. identify from the catalogues. But we can forget it; it is too far away.’ “So …” King activated the vision system for the stellarium. Then neither of them said anything for several long moments. The images of the heavenly bodies told their own story. With no orders from King, with no hands at the controls, the New Frontiers was on her long way again, headed out, as if she had a mind of her own.

“I can’t tell you much,” admitted Libby some hours later to a group consisting of King, Zaccur Barstow, and Lazarus Long. “I was able to determine, before we passed the speed of light-or appeared to-that our course then was compatible with the idea that we have been headed toward the star named by Kreel Sarloo as the destination ordered for us by his gods. We continued to accelerate and the stars faded out. I no longer have any astrogational reference points and I am unable to say where we are or where we are going,”

“Loosen up, Andy,” suggested Lazarus. “Make a guess.”

“Well … if our world line is a smooth function-if it is, and I have no data-then we may arrive in the neighborhood of star PK3722, where Kreel Sarloo said we were going.” “Rummph!” Lazarus turned to King. “Have you tried slowing down?”

“Yes,” King said shortly. “The controls are dead.” “Mmmm … Andy, when do we get there?”

Libby shrugged helplessly. “I have no frame of reference. What is time without a space reference?”

Time and space, inseparable and one-Libby thought about it long after the others had left. To be sure, he had the space framework of the ship itself and therefore there necessarily was ship’s time. Clocks in the ship ticked or hummed or simply marched; people grew hungry, fed themselves, got tired, rested. Radioactives deteriorated, physio-chemical processes moved toward states of greater entropy, his own consciousness perceived duration.

But the background of the stars, against which every timed function in the history of man had been measured, was gone. So far as his eyes or any instrument in the ship could tell him, they had become unrelated to the rest of the universe.

What universe?

There was no universe. It was gone.

Did they move? Can there be motion when there is nothing to move past?

Yet the false weight achieved by the spin of the ship persisted. Spin with reference to what? thought Libby. Could it be that space held a true, absolute, nonrelational texture of its own, like that postulated for the long-discarded “ether” thatthe classic Michelson-Morley experiments had failed to detect? No, more than that-had denied the very possibility of its existence? -had for that matter denied the possibility of speed greater than light. Had the ship actually passed the speed of light? Was it not more likely that this was a coffin, with ghosts as passengers, going nowhere at no time?

But Libby itched between his shoulder blades and was forced to scratch; his left leg had gone to sleep; his stomach was beginning to speak insistently for food-if this was death, he decided, it did not seem materially different from life.

With renewed tranquility, he left the control room and headed for his favorite refectory, while starting to grapple with the problem of inventing a new mathematics which would include all the new phenomena. The mystery of how the hypothetical gods of the Jockaira had teleported the Families from ground to ship he discarded. There had been no opportunity to obtain significant data, measured data; the best that any honest scientist could do, with epistemological rigor, was to include a note that recorded the fact and stated that it was unexplained. It was a fact; here he was who shortly before had been on the planet; even now Schultz’s assistants were overworked trying to administer depressant drugs to the thousands who had gone to pieces emotionally under the outrageous experience. But Libby could not explain it and, lacking data, felt no urge to try. What he did want to do was to deal with world lines in a plenum, the basic problem of field physics.

Aside from his penchant for mathematics Libby was a simple person. He preferred the noisy atmosphere of the “Club,” refectory 9-D, for reasons different from those of Lazarus. The company of people younger than himself reassured him; Lazarus was the only elder he felt easy with.

Food, he learned, was not immediately available at the Club; the commissary was still adjusting to the sudden change. But Lazarus was there and others whom he knew; Nancy Weatheral scrunched over and made room for him. “You’re just the man I want to see,” she said. “Lazarus is being most helpful. Where are we going this time and when do we get there?” –

Libby explained the dilemma as well as he could. Nancy wrinkled her nose. “That’s a pretty prospect, I must say! Well, I guess that means back to the grind for little Nancy.” “What do you mean?”

“Have you ever taken care of a somnolent? No, of course you haven’t. It gets tiresome. Turn them over, bend their arms, twiddle their tootsies, move their heads, close the tank and move on to the next one. I get so sick of human bodies that I’m tempted to take a vow of chastity.”

“Don’t commit yourself too far,” advised Lazarus. “Why would you care, you old false alarm?” Eleanor Johnson spoke up. “Fm glad to be in the ship again. Those slimy Jockaira-ugh!”

Nancy shrugged. “You’re prejudiced, Eleanor. The Jocks are okay, in their way. Sure, they aren’t exactly like us, but neither are dogs. You don’t dislike dogs, do you?’ “That’s what they are,” Lazarus said soberly. “Dogs.”

“Huh?”

“I don’t mean that they are anything like dogs in most ways-they aren’t even vaguely canine and they certainly are our equals and possibly our superiors in some things … but they are dogs just the same. Those things they call their ‘gods’ are simply their masters, their owners. We couldn’t be domesticated, so the owners chucked us out.”

Libby was thinking of the inexplicable telekinesis the Jockaira-or their masters-had used. “I wonder what it would have been like,” he said thoughtfully, “if they had been able to domesticate us. They could have taught us a lot of wonderful things”

“Forget it,” Lazarus said sharply. “It’s not a man’s place to be property.” “What is a man’s place?”

“It’s a man’s business to be what he is … and be it in style!” Lazarus got up. “Got to go.”

Libby started to leave also, but Nancy stopped him. “Don’t go. I want to ask you some questions. What year is it back on~ Earth?”

Libby started to answer, closed his mouth. He started to answer a second time, finally said, “I don’t know how to answer that question. It’s like saying, ‘How high is up?”

“I know I probably phrased it wrong,” admitted Nancy. ‘1 didn’t do very well in basic physics, but I did gather the idea that time is relative and simultaneity is an idea which applies only to two points close together in the same framework. But just the same, I want to know something. We’ve traveled a lot faster and farther than anyone ever did before, haven’t we? Don’t our clocks slow down, or something?”

Libby got that completely baffled look which mathematical-physicists wear whenever laymen try to talk about physics in nonmathematical language. “You’re referring to the Lorentz-2 FitzGerald contraction. But, if you’ll pardon me, anything one says about it in words is necessarily nonsense.”

“Why?” she insisted.

“Because … well, because the language is inappropriate. The formulae used to describe the effect loosely called a contraction presuppose that the observer is part of the phenomenon. But verbal language contains the implicit assumption that we can stand outside the whole business and watch what goes on. The mathematical language denies the very possibility of any such outside viewpoint. Every observer has his own world line; he can’t get outside it for a detached viewpoint.”

“But suppose he did? Suppose we could see Earth right now?”

‘~There I go again,” Libby said miserably. “I tried to talk about it in words and all I did was to add to the confusion. There is no way to measure time in any absolute sense when two events are separated in a continuum. All you can measure is interval.”

“Well, what is interval? So much space and so much time.”

“No, no, no! It isn’t that at all. Interval is … well, it’s interval. I can write down formulae about it and show you how we use it, but it can’t be defined in words. Look, Nancy, can you write the score for a full orchestration of a symphony in words?” –

“No. Well, maybe you could but it wonld take thousands of times as long.”

“And musicians still could not play it until you put it back into musical notation. That’s what I meant,” Libby went on, “when I said that the language was inappropriate. I got into a difficulty like this once before in trying to describe the lightpressure drive. I was asked why, since the drive depends on loss of inertia, we people inside the ship had felt no loss of inertia. There was no answer, in words. Inertia isn’t a word; it is a mathematical concept used in mathematically certain aspects of a plenum. I was stuck.”

Nancy looked baffled but persisted doggedly. “My question still means something, even if I didn’t phrase it right. You can’t just tell me to run along and play. Suppose we turned around and went back the way we came, all the way to Earth, exactly the same trip but in reverse-just double the ship’s time it has been so far. All right, what year would it be on Earth when we got there?’

“It would be … let me see, now-” The almost automatic processes of Libby’s brain started running off the unbelievably huge and complex problem in accelerations, intervals, difform motion. He was approaching the answer in a warm glow of mathematical revery when the problem suddenly fell to pieces on him, became indeterminate. He abruptly realized that the problem had an unlimited number of equally valid answers.

But that was impossible. In the real world, not the fantasy world of mathematics, such a situation was absurd. Nancy’s question had to have just one answer, unique and real. Could the whole beautiful structure of relativity be an absurdity? Or did it mean that it was physically impossible ever to backtrack an interstellar distance?

“I’ll have to give some thought to that one,” Libby said hastily and left before Nancy could object.

But solitude and contemplation gave him no clue to the problem. It was not a failure of his mathematical ability; he was capable, he knew, of devising a mathematical description of any group of facts, whatever they might be. His difficulty lay in having too few facts. Until some observer traversed interstellar distances at speeds approximating the speed of light and returned to the planet from which he had started there could be no answer. Mathematics alone has no content, gives no answers.

Libby found himself wondering if the hills of his native Ozarks were still green, if the smell of wood smoke still clung to the trees in the autumn, then he recalled that the question lacked any meaning by any rules he knew of. He surrendered to an attack of homesickness such as he had not experienced since he was a youth in the Cosmic Construction Corps, making his first deep-space jump.

This feeling of doubt and uncertainty, the feeling of lostness and nostalgia, spread throughout the ship. On the first leg of their journey the Families had had the incentive that had kept the covered wagons crawling across the plains. But now they were going nowhere, one day led only to the next. Their long lives were become a meaningless burden.

Ira Howard, whose fortune established the Howard Foundation, was born in 1825 and died in 1873-of old age. He sold groceries to the Forty-niners in San Francisco, became a wholesale sutler in the American War of the Secession, multiplied his fortune during the tragic Reconstruction.

Howard was deathly afraid of dying. He hired the best doctors of his time to prolong his life. Nevertheless old age plucked him when most men are still young. But his will commanded that his money be used to lengthen human life. The administrators of the trust found no way to carry out his wishes other than by seeking out persons whose family trees showed congenital predispositions toward long life and then inducing them to reproduce in kind. Their method anticipated the work of Burbank; they may or may not have known of the illuminating researches of the Monk Gregor Mendel.

Mary Sperling put down the book she had been reading when Lazarus entered her stateeoom. He picked it up. “What are you reading, Sis? ‘Ecclesiastes.’ Hmm … I didn’t know you were religious.” He read aloud:

“‘Yea, though he live a thousand years twice told, yet hath he seen no good: do not all go to one place?’

“Pretty grim stuff, Mary. Can’t you find something more cheerful? Even in The Preacher?’ His eyes skipped on down. “How about this one? ‘For to him that is joined to all the living there is hope-‘ Or … mnunm, not too many cheerful spots. Try this: ‘Therefore remove sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh: for childhood and youth are vanity.’ That’s more my style; I wouldn’t be young again for overtime wages.”

“I would.”

“Mary, what’s eating you? I find you sitting here, reading the most depressing book in the Bible, nothing but death and funerals. Why?” She passed a hand wearily across her eyes. “Lazarus, I’m getting old. What else is there to think about?’

“You? Why, you’re fresh as a daisy!”

She looked at him. She knew that he lied; her mirror showed her the greying hair, the relaxed skin; she felt it in her bones. Yet Lazarus was older than she … although she knew, from what she had learned of biology during the years she had assisted in the longevity research, that Lazarus should never have lived to be as old as he was now. When he was born the program had reached only the third generation, too few generations to eliminate the less durable strains-except through some wildly unlikely chance shuffling of genes.

But there he stood. “Lazarus,” she asked, “how long do you expect to live?”

“Me? Now that’s an odd question. I mind a time when I asked a chap that very same question-about me, I mean, not about him. Ever hear of Dr. Hugo Pinero?” “‘Pinero… Pinero…’ Oh, yes, ‘Pinero the Charlatan.’”

“Mary, he was no charlatan. He could do it, no foolin’. He could predict accurately when a man would die.” “But-Go ahead. What did he tell you?”

“Just a minute. I want you to realize that he was no fake. His predictions checked out right on the button-if he hadn’t died, the life insurance companies would have been ruined. That was before you were born, but I was there and I know. Anyhow, Pinero took my reading and it seemed to bother him. So he took it again. Then he returned my money.”

“What did he say?”

“Couldn’t get a word out of him. He looked at me and he looked at his machine and he just frowned and clammed up. So I can’t rightly answer your question.” “But what do you think about it, Lazarus? Surely you don’t expect just to go on forever?”

“Mary,” he said softly, “Fm not planning on dying. I’m not giving it any thought at all.”

There was silence. At last she said, “Lazarus, I don’t want to die. But what is the purpose of our long lives? We don’t seem to grow wiser as we grow older. Are we simply hanging on after our tune has passed? Loitering in the kindergarten when we should be moving on? Must we die and be born again?”

“I don’t know,” said Lazarus, “and I don’t have any way to find out… and I’m damned if I see any sense in my worrying about it. Or you either. I propose to hang onto this life as long as I can and learn as much as I can. Maybe wishing and understanding are reserved for a later existence and maybe they aren’t for us at all, ever. Either way, I’m satisfied to be living and enjoying it. Mary my sweet, carpe that old diem! It’s the only game in town.”

The ship slipped back into the same monotonous routine that had obtained during the weary years of the first jump. Most of the Members went into cold-rest; the others tended them, tended the ship, tended the hydroponds. Among the somnolents was Slayton Ford; cold-rest was a common last resort therapy for functional psychoses.

The flight to star PK3722 took seventeen months and three days, ship’s time.

The ship’s officers had as little choice about the journey’s end as about its beginning. Afew hours before their arrival star images flashed back into being in the stellarium screens and the ship rapidly decelerated to interplanetary speeds. No feeling of slowing down was experienced; whatever mysterious forces were acting on them acted on all masses alike. The New Frontiers slipped into an orbit around a live green planet some hundred million miles from its sun; shortly Libby reported to Captain King that they were in a stable parking orbit.

Cautiously King tried the controls, dead since their departure. The ship surged; their ghostly pilot had left them.

Libby decided that the simile was incorrect; this trip had undoubtedly been planned for them but it was not necessary to assume that anyone or anything had shepherded them here. Libby suspected that the “gods” of the dog-people saw the plenum as static; their deportation was an accomplished fact to them before it happened-a concept regrettably studded with unknowns-but there were no appropriate words. Inadequately and incorrectly put into words, his concept was that of a “cosmic cam,” a world line shaped for them which ran out of normal space and back into it; when the ship reached the end of its “cam” it returned to normal operation.

He tried to explain his concept to Lazarus and to the Captain, but he did not do well. He lacked data and also had not had time to refine his mathematical description into elegance; it satisfied neither him nor them.

Neither King nor Lazarus had time to give the matter much thought. Barstow’s face appeared on an interstation viewscreen. “Captain!” he called out. “Can you come aft to lock seven? We have visitors!”

Barstow had exaggerated; there was only one. The creature reminded Lazarus of a child in fancy dress, masqueraded as a rabbit. The little thing was more android than were the Jockaira, though possibly not mammalian. It was unclothed but not naked, for its childlike body was beautifully clothed in short sleek golden fur. Its eyes were bright and seemed both merry and intelligent.

But King was too bemused to note such detail. Avoice, a thought, was ringing in his head: “… so you are the group leader …” it said. “… welcome to our world … we have been expecting you … the (blank.) told us of your coming…”

Controlled telepathy. Acreature, a race, so gentle, so civilized, so free from enemies, from all danger and strife that they could afford to share their thoughts with others-to share more than their thoughts; these creatures were so gentle and so generous that they were offering the humans a homestead on their planet. This was why this messenger had come: to make that offer.

To King’s mind this seemed remarkably like the prize package that had been offered by the Jockaira; he wondered what the boobytrap might be in this proposition.

The messenger seemed to read his thought”… look into our hearts… we hold no malice toward you … we share your love of life and we love the life in you … “We thank you,” King answered formally and aloud. “We will have to confer.” He turned to speak to Barstow, glanced back. The messenger was gone.

The Captain said to Lazarus, “Where did he go?” “Huh? Don’t ask me.”

“But you were in front of the lock.”

“I was checking the tell-tales. There’s no boat sealed on outside this lock-so they show. I was wondcring if they were working right. They are. How did he get into the ship? Where’s his rig?’

“How did he leaver’ “Not past me!”

“Zaccur, he came in through this lock, didn’t he? “I don’t know.”

“But he certainly went out through it”

“Nope,” denied Lazarus. “This lock hasn’t been opened. The deep-space seals are still in place. See for yourself.” King did. “You don’t suppose,” he said slowly, “that he can pass through-“

“Don’t look at me,” said Lazarus. “I’ve got no more prejudices in the matter than the Red Queen. Where does a phone image go when you cut the circuit?” He left, whistling softly to himself. King did not recognize the tune. Its words, which Lazarus did not sing, started with:

“Last night I saw upon the stair Alittle man who wasn’t there-“

Chapter 4

THERE WAS NO CATCH to the offer. The people of the planet-they had no name since they had no spoken language and the Earthmen simply called them “The Little People”-the little creatures really did welcome them and help them. They convinced the Families of this without difficulty for there was no trouble in communication such as there had been with the Jockaira. The Little People could make even subtle thoughts kndwn directly to the Earthmen and in turn could sense correctly any thought directed at them. They appeared either to ignore or not to be able to read any thought not directed at them; communicatibn with them was as controlled as spoken speech. Nor did the Earthmen acquire any telepathic powers among themselves.

Their planet was even more like Earth than was the planet of the Jockaira. It was a little larger than Earth but had a slightly lower surface gravitation, suggesting a lower average density- the Little People made slight use of metals in their culture, which may be indicative.

The planet rode upright in its orbit; it had not the rakish tilt of Earth’s axis. Its orbit was nearly circular; aphelion differed from perihelion by less than one per cent. There were no seasons. Nor was there a great heavy moon, such as Earth has, to wrestle its oceans about and to disturb the isostatic balance of its crust. Its hills were low, its winds were gentle, its seas were placid. To Lazarus’ disappointment, their new home, had no lively weather; it hardly had weather at all; it had climate, and that of the sort that California patriots would have the rest of the Earth believe exists in their part of the globe.

But on the planet of the Little People it really exists.

They indicated to the Earth people where they were to land, a wide sandy stretch of beach running down to the sea. Back of the low break of the bank lay mile on mile of lush meadowland, broken by irregular clumps of bushes and trees. The landscape had a careless neatness, as if it were a planned park, although there was no evidence of cultivation. It was here, a messenger told the first scouting party, that they were welcome to live.

There seemed always to be one of the Little People present when his help might be useful-not with the jostling inescapable overhelpfulness of the Jockaira, but with the unobtrusive readiness to hand of a phone or a pouch knife. The one who accompanied the first party of explorers confused Lazarus and Barstow by assuming casually that he had met them before, that he had visited them in the ship. Since his fur was rich mahogany rather than golden, Barstow attributed the error to misunderstanding, with a mental reservation that these people might possibly be capable of chameleonlike changes in color. Lazarus reserved his judgment.

Barstow asked their guide whether or not his people had any preferences as to where and how the Earthmen were to erect buildings. The question had been bothering him because a preliminary survey from the ship had disclosed no cities. It seemed likely that the natives lived underground-in which case he wanted to avoid getting off on the wrong foot by starting something which the local government might regard as a slum.

He spoke aloud in words directed at their guide, they having learned already that such was the best way to insure that the natives would pick up the thought.

In the answer that the little being flashed back Barstow caught the emotion of surprise. “… must you sully the sweet countryside with interruptions? … to what purpose do you need to form buildings? . .

“We need buildings for many purposes,” Barstow explained. “We need them as daily shelter, as places to sleep at night. We need them to grow our food and prepare it for eating.” He considered trying to explain the processes of hydroponic farming, of food processing, and of cooking, then dropped it, trusting to the subtle sense of telepathy to let his “listener” understand. “We need buildings for many other uses, for workshops and laboratories, to house the machines whereby we communicate, for almost everything we do in our everyday life.”

“Be patient with me …” the thought came, since I know so little of your ways … but tell me do you prefer to sleep in such as that? …” He gestured toward the ship’s boats they had come down in, where their bulges showed above the low bank. The thought he used for the boats was too strong to be bound by a word; to Lazarus’ mind came a thought of a dead, constricted space-a jail that had once harbored him, a smelly public phone booth.

“It is our custom.”

The creature leaned down and patted the turf. “… is this not a good place to sleep? …”

Lazarus admitted to himself that it was. The ground was covered with a soft spring turf, grasslike but finer than grass, softer, more even, and set more closely together. Lazarus took off his sandals and let his bare feet enjoy it, toes spread and working. It was, he decided, more like a heavy fur rug than a lawn. –

“As for food …”” their guide went on, “… why struggle for that which the good soil gives freely? . . come with me…”

He took them across a reach of meadow to where low bushy trees hung over aT meandering brook. The “leaves” were growths the size of a man’s hand, irregular in shape, and an inch or more in thickness. The little person broke off one and nibbled at it daintily.

Lazarus plucked one and examined it. It broke easily, like a well-baked cake. The inside was creamy yellow, spongy but crisp, and had a strong pleasant odor, reminiscent of mangoes. “Lazarus, don’t, eat that!” warned Barstow. “It hasn’t been analyzed~”

“… it is harmonious with your body . .

Lazarus sniffed it again. “I’m willing to be a test case, Zack.” “Oh, well-” Barstow shrugged. “I warned you. You will anyhow.”

Lazarus did. The stuff was oddly pleasing, firm enough to suit the teeth, piquant though elusive in flavor. It settled down happily in his stomach and made itself at home.

Barstow refused to let anyone else try the fruit until its effect on Lazarus was established. Lazarus took advantage of his exposed and privileged position to make a full meal-the best, he decided, that he had had in years.

“… will you tell me what you are in the habit of eating? …” inquired their little friend. Barstow started to reply but was checked by the creature’s thought: “… all of you think about it . .” no further thought message came from him for a few moments, then he flashed, “… that is enough . . -. my wives will take care of it …”

Lazarus was not sure the image meant “wives” but some similar close relationship was implied. It had not yet been established that the Little People were bisexual-or what.

Lazarus slept that night out under the stars and let their clean impersonal light rinse from him the claustrophobia of the ship. The constellations here were distorted out of easy recognition, although he could recognize, he decided, the cool blue of Vega and the orange glow of Antares. -The one certainty was the Milky Way, spilling its cloudy arch across the sky just as at home. The Sun, he knew, could not be visible to the naked eye even if he knew where to look for it; its low absolute magnitude would not show up across the lightyears. Have to get hold of Andy, he thought sleepily, work out its coordinates and pick it out with instruments. He fell asleep before it could occur to him to wonder why he should bother.

Since no shelter was needed at night they landed everyone as fast as boats could shuttle them down. The crowds were dumped on the friendly soil and allowed to rest, picnic fashion, until the colony could be organized. At first they ate supplies brought down from the ship, but Lazarus’ continued good health caused the rule against taking chances with natural native foods to be re1axed shortly. After that they ate mostly of the boundlein rai’gesse of the plants and used ship’s food only to vary their diets.

Several days after the last of them had been landed Lazarus was exploring alone some distance from the camp. He came across one of the Little People; the native greeted him with the same assumption of earlier acquaintance which all of them seemed to show and led Lazarus to a grove of low trees still farther from base. He indicated to Lazarus that he wanted him to eat.

Lazarus was not particularly hungry but he felt compelled to humor such friendliness, so he plucked and ate. He almost choked in his astonishment. Mashed potatoes and brown gravy!

“… didn’t we get it right? – . .” came an anxious thought.

“Bub,” Lazarus said solemnly, “I don’t know what you planned to do, but this is just fine!” Awarm burst of pleasure invaded his mind. “… try the next tree . .

Lazarus did so, with cautious eagerness. Fresh brown bread and sweet butter seemed to be the combination, though a dash of ice cream seemed to have crept in from somewhere.

He was hardly surprised when the third tree gave strong evidence of having both mushrooms and charcoal-broiled steak in its ancestry. “… we used your thought images almost entirely

…” explained his companion. “… they were much stronger than those of any of your wives …”

Lazarus did not bother to explain that he was not married. The little person added, “… there has not yet been time to simulate the appearances and colors your thoughts showed does it matter much to you? .

Lazarus gravely assured him that it mattered very little.

When he returned to the base, he had considerable difficulty in convincing others of the seriousness of his report.

One who benefited greatly from the easy, lotus-land quality of their new home was Slayton Ford. He had awakened from cold rest apparently recovered from his breakdown except in one respect: he had no recollection of whatever it was he had experienced in the temple of Kreel. Ralph Schultz considered this a healthy adjustment to an intolerable experience and dismissed him as a patient.

Ford seemed younger and happier than he had appeared before his breakdown. He no longer held formal office among the Members-indeed there was little government of any sort; the Families lived in cheerful easy-going anarchy on this favored planet-but he was still addressed by his title and continued to be treated as an elder, one whose advice was sought, whose judgment was deferred to, along with Zaccur Barstow, Lazarus, Captain King, and others. The Families paid little heed to calendar ages; close friends might differ by a century. For years they had benefited from his skilled administration; now they continued to treat him as an elder statesman, even though two-thirds of them were older than was he.

The endless picnic stretched into weeks, into months. After being long shut up in the ship, sleeping or working, the temptation to take a long vacation was too strong to resist and there was nothing to forbid it. Food in abundance, ready to eat and easy to handle, grew almost everywhere; the water in the numerous streams was clean and potable. As for clothing, they had plenty if they wanted to dress but the need was esthetic rather, than utilitarian; the Elysian climate made clothing for protection as silly as suits for swimming. Those who liked clothes wore them; bracelets and beads and flowers in the hair were quite enough for most of them and not nearly so much nuisance if one chose to take a dip in the sea.

Lazarus stuck to his kilt.

The culture and degree of enlightenment of the Little People was difficult to understand all at once, because their ways were subtle. Since they lacked outward signs, in Earth terms, of high scientific attainment-no great buildings, no complex mechanical transportation machines, no throbbing power plants-it was easy to mistake them for Mother Nature’s children, living in a Garden of Eden.

Only one-eighth of an iceberg shows above water.

Their knowledge of physical science was not inferior to that of the colonists; it was incredibly superior. They toured the ship’s boats with polite interest, but confounded their guides by inquiring why things were done this way rather than that?-and the way suggested invariably proved to be simpler and more efficient than Earth technique… when the astounded human technicians managed to understand what they were driving at.

The Little Pedple understood machinery and all that machinery implies, but they simply had little use for it. They obviously did not need it for communication and had little need for it for transportation (although the full reason for that was not at once evident), and they had very little need for machinery in any of their activities. But when they had a specific need for a mechanical device they were quite capable of inventing, building it, using it once, and destroying it, performing the whole process with a smooth cooperation quite foreign to that of men.

But in biology their preeminence was the most startling. The Little People were masters in the manipulation of life forms. Developing plants in a matter of days which bore fruit duplicating not only in flavor but in nutrition values the foods humans were used to was not a miracle to them but a routine task any of their biotechnicians could handle. They did it more easily than an Earth horticulturist breeds for a certain strain of color or shape in a flower.

But their methods were different from those of any human plant breeder. Be it said for them that they did try to explain their methods, but the explanations simply did not come through. In our terms, they claimed to “think” a plant into the shape and character they desired. Whatever they meant by that, it is certainly true that they could take a dormant seedling plant and, without touching it or operating on it in any way perceptible to their human students, cause it to bloom and burgeon into maturity in the space of a few hours-with new characteristics not found in the parent line . . and which bred true thereafter.

However the Little People differed from Earthmen only in degree with respect to scientific attainments. In an utterly basic sense they differed from humans in kind. They were not individuals.

No single body of a native housed a discrete individual. Their individuals were multi-bodied; they had group “souls.” The basic unit of their society was a telepathic rapport group of many parts. The number of bodies and brains housing one individual ran as high as ninety or more and was never less than thirty-odd.

The colonists began to understand much that had been utterly puzzling about the Little People only after they learned this fact. There is much reason to believe that the Little People found the Earthmen equally puzzling, that they, too, had assumed that their pattern of existence must be mirrored in others. The eventual discovery of the true facts on each side, brought about mutual misunderstandings over identity, seemed to arouse horror in the minds of the Little People. They withdrew themselves from the neighborhood of the Families’ settlement and remained away for several days.

At length a messenger entered the camp site and sought out Barstow. “…We are sorry we shunned you … in our haste we mistook your fortune for your fault … we wish to help you … we offer to teach you that you may become like ourselves …”

Barstow pondered how to answer this generous overture. “We thank you for your wish to help us,” he said at last, “but what you call our misfortune seems to be a necessary part of our makeup. Our ways are not your ways. I do not think we could understand your ways.”

The thought that came back to him was very troubled. “We have aided the beasts of the air and of the ground to cease their strife … but if~you do not wish our help we will not thrust it on you …”

The messenger went away, leaving Zaccur Barstow troubled in his mind. Perhaps, he thought, ha had been hasty in answering without taking time to consult the elders. Telepathy was certainly not a gift to be scorned; perhaps the Little People could train them in telepathy without any loss of human individualism. But what he knew of the sensitives among the Families did not encourage such hope; there was not a one of them who was emotionally healthy, many of them were mentally deficient as well-it did not seem like a safe path for humans.

It could be discussed later, he decided; no need to hurry. “No need to hurry” was the spirit throughout the settlement. There was no need to strive, little that had to be done and rarely any rush about that little. The sun was warm and pleasant, each day was much like the next, and there was always the day after that. The Members, predisposed by their inheritance to take a long view of things, began to take an eternal view. Time no longer mattered. Even the longevity research, which had continued throughout their memories, languished. Gordon Hardy tabled his current experimentation to pursue the vastly more fruitful occupation of learning what the Little People knew of the nature of life. He was forced to take it slowly, spending long hours in digesting new knowledge. As time trickled on, he was hardly aware that his hours of contemplation were becoming longer, his bursts of active study less frequent.

One thing he did learn, and its implications opened up whole new fields of thought: the Little People had, in one sense, conquered death.

Since each of their egos was shared among many bodies, the death of one body involved no death for the ego. All memory experiences of that body remained intact, the personality associated with it was not lost, and the physical loss could be made up by letting a young native “marry” into the group. But a group ego, one of the personalities which spoke to the Earthmen, could not die, save possibly by the destruotion of every body it lived in. They simply went on, apparently forever.

Their young, up to the time of “marriage” or group assimilation, seemed to have little personality and only rudimentary or possibly instinctive mental processes. Their elders expected no more of them in the way of intelligent behavior than a human expects of a child still in the womb. There were always many such uncompleted persons attached to any ego group; they were cared for like dearly beloved pets or helpless babies, although they were often as large and as apparently mature to Earth eyes as were their elders.

Lazarus grew bored with paradise more quickly than did the majority of his cousins. “It can’t always,” he complained to Libby, who was lying near him on the fine grass, “be time for tea.” “What’s fretting you, Lazarus?”

“Nothing in particular.” Lazarus set the point of his knife on his right elbow, flipped it with his other hand, watched it bury its point in the ground. “It’s just that -this place reminds me of a well-run zoo. It’s got about as much future.” He grunted scornfully. “It’s ‘Never-Never Land.”

“But what in particular is worrying you?”

“Nothing. That’s what worries me. Honest to goodness, Andy, don’t you see anything wrong in being turned out to pasture like this?”

Libby grinned sheepishly. “I guess it’s my hillbilly blood. ‘When it don’t rain, the roof don’t leak; when it rains, I cain’t fix it nohow,” he quoted. “Seems to me we’re doing tolerably well. What irks you?”

“Well-” Lazarus’ pale-blue eyes stared far away; he paused in his idle play with his knife. “When I was a young man a long time ago, I was beached in the South Seas-“ “Hawaii?’

“No. Farther south. Damned if I know what they call it today. I got hard up, mighty hard up, and sold my sextant. Pretty soon-or maybe quite a while-I could have passed for a native. I lived like one. It didn’t seem to matter. But one day I caught a look at myself in a mirror.” Lazarus sighed gustily. “I beat my way out of that place shipmate to a cargo of green hides, which may give you some idea how. scared and desperate I was!”

Libby did not comment. “What do you do with your time, Lib?” Lazarus persisted.

“Me? Same as always. Think about mathematics. Try to figure out a dodge for a space drive like’ the one that got us here.” “Any luck on that?” Lazarus was suddenly alert.

“Not yet. Gimme time. Or I just watch the clouds integrate. There are amusing mathematical relationships everywhere if you are on the lookout for them. In the ripples on the water, or the shapes of busts-elegant fifth-order functions.”

“Huh? You mean ‘fourth order.”

“Fifth order. You omitted the time variable. I like fifth-order equations,” Libby said dreamily. “You find ‘em in fish, too.” “Huinmph!” said Lazarus, and stood up suddenly. “That may be all right for you, but it’s not my pidgin.”

“Going some place?” “Goin’ to take a walk.”

Lazarus walked north. He walked the rest of that day, slept on the ground as usual that night, and was up and moving, still to the north, at dawn. The next day was followed by another like it, and still another. The going”was easy, much like strolling in a park … too easy, in Lazarus’ opinion. For the sight of a volcano, or a really worthwhile waterfall, he felt willing to pay four bits and throw in a jackknife.

The food plants were sometimes strange, but abundant and satisfactory. He occasionally met one or more of the Little People going about their mysterious affairs: they never bothered him nor asked why he was traveling but simply greeted him with the usual assumption of previous acquaintanceship. He began to long for one who would turn out to be a stranger; he felt watched.

Presently the nights grew colder, the days less balmy, and the Little People less numerous. When at last he had not seen one for an entire day, he camped for the night, remained there the next day-took out his soul and examined it.

He had to admit that he could find no reasonable fault with the planet nor its inhabitants. But just as definitely it was not to his taste. No philosophy that he had ever heard or read gave any reasonable purpose for man’s existence, nor any rational clue to his proper conduct. Basking in the sunshine might be as good a thing to do with one’s life as any other-but it was not for him and he knew it, even if he could not define how he knew it.

The hegira of the Families had been a mistake. It would have been a more human, a mqre mature and manly thing, to have stayed and fought for their rights, even if they had died insisting on them. Instead they had fled across half a universe (Lazarus was reckless about his magnitudes) looking for a place to light. They had found one, a good one-but already occupied by beings so superior as to make them intolerable for men… yet so supremely indifferent in their superiority to men that they had not even bothered to wipe them out, but had whisked them away to this-this -over-manicured country club.

And that in itself was the unbearable humiliation. The New Frontiers was the culmination of five hundred years of human scientific research, the best that men could do-but it had been flicked across the deeps of space as casually as a man might restore a baby bird to its nest.

The Little People did not seem to want to kick them out but the Little People, in their own way, were as demoralizing to men as were the gods of the Jockaira. One at a time they might be morons – but taken as groups each rapport group was a genius that threw the best minds that men could offer into the shade. Even Andy. Human beings could not hope to compete with that type of organization any more than a backroom shop could compete with an automated cybernated factory. Yet to form any such group identities, even if they could which he doubted, would be, Lazarus felt very sure, to give up whatever it was that made them men.

He admitted that he was prejudiced in favor of men. He was a man.

The uncounted days slid past while he argued with himself over the things that bothered him-problems that had made sad the soul of his breed since the first apeman had risen to self- awareness, questions never solved by full belly nor fine machinery. And the endless quiet days did no more to give him final answers than did all the soul searchings of his ancestors. Why? What shall it profit a man? No answer came back -save one: a firm unreasoned conviction that he was not intended for, or not ready for, this timeless snug harbor of ease.

His troubled reveries were interrupted by the appearance of one of the Little People. “… greetings, old friend your wife King wishes you to return to your home … he has need of your advice …”

“What’s the trouble?” Lazarus demanded.

But the little creature either could or would not tell him. Lazarus gave his belt a hitch and headed south. “… there is no need to go slowly …” a thought came after him.

Lazarus let himself be led to a clearing beyond a clump of trees. There he found an egg-shaped object about six feet long, featureless except for a door in the side. The native went in through the door, Lazarus squeezed his larger bulk in after him; the door closed.

It opened almost at once and Lazarus saw that they were on the beach just below the human settlement. He had to admit that it was a good trick.

Lazarus hurried to the ship’s boat parked on the beach in which Captain King shared with Barstow a semblance of community headquarters. “You sent for me, Skipper. What’s up?” King’s austere face was grave. “It’s about Mary Sperling.”

Lazarus felt a sudden cold tug at his heart. “Dead?”

“No. Not exactly. She’s gone over to the Little People. ‘Married’ into one of their groups.” “What? But that’s impossible!”

Lazarus was wrong. There was no faint possibility of interbreeding between Earthmen and natives but there was no barrier, if sympathy existed, to a human merging into one of their rapport groups, drowning his personality in the ego of the many.

Mary Sperling, moved by conviction of her own impending death, saw in the deathless group egos a way out. Faced with the eternal problem of life and death, she had escaped the problem by choosing neither … selflessness. She had found a group willing to receive her, she had crossed over.

“It raises a lot of new problems,” concluded King. “Slayton and Zaccur and I all felt that you had better be here.”

“Yes, yes, sure-but where is Mary?” Lazarus demanded and then ran out of the room without waiting for an answer. He charged through the settlement ignoring both greetings and attempts to stop him. Ashort distance oustide the camp he ran across a native He skidded to a stop. “Where is Mary Sperling?”

“… I am Mary Sperling . .

“For the love of-You can’t be.”

“I am Mary Sperling and Mary Sperling is myself do you not know me, Lazarus? … I know you.

Lazarus waved his hands. “No! I want to see Mary Sperling who looks like an Earthman-Iike me!” The native hesitated.”… follow me, then …

Lazarus found her a long way from the camp; it was obvious that she had been avoiding the other colonists. “Mary!”

She answered him mind to mind: “. . I am sorry to see you troubled … Mary Sperling is gone except in that she is part of us …” “Oh, come off it, Mary! Don’t give me that stuff! Don’t you know me?”

“… of course I know you, Lazarus … it is you who do not know me … do not trouble your soul or grieve your heart with the sight of this body in front of you … I am not one of your kind … I am native to this planet.

“Mary,” he insisted, “you’ve got to undo this. You’ve got to come out of there!”

She shook her head, an oddly human gesture, for the face no longer held any trace of human expression; it was a mask of otherness. “… that is impossible …Mary Sperling is gone … the one who speaks with you is inextricably myself and not of your kind.” The creature who had been Mary Sperling turned and walked away.

“Mary!” he cried. His heart leapt across the span of centuries to the night his mother had died. He covered his face with his hands and wept the unconsolable grief of a child,

Chapter S

LAZAIWS found both King and Barstow waiting for him when he returned. King looked at his face. “I could have told you,” he said soberly, “but you wouldn’t wait.” “Forget it,” Lazatus said harshly. “What now?”

“Lazarus, there is something else you have to see before we discuss anything,” Zaccur Barstow answered. “Okay. What?”

“Just come and, see.” They led him to a compartment in the ship’s boat which was used as a headquarters. Contrary to Families’ custom it was locked; King let them in. There was a woman inside, who, when she saw the three, quietly withdrew, locking the door again as she went out.

“Take a look at that,” directed Barstow.

It was a living creature in an incubator-a child, but no such child as had ever been seen before. Lazarus stared at it, then said angrily, “What the devil is it?” “See for yourself. Pick it up. You won’t hurt it.”

Lazarus did so, gingerly at first, then without shrinking from the contact as his curiosity increased. What it was, he could not say. It was not human; it was just as certainly not offspring of the Little People. Did this planet, like the last, contain some previously unsuspected race? It was manlike, yet certainly not a man child. It lacked even the button nose of a baby, nor were there evident external ears. There were organs in the usual locations of each but flush with the skull and protected with many ridges. Its hands had too many fingers and there was an extra large one near each wrist which ended in a cluster of pink worms.

There was something odd about the torso of the infant which Lazarus could not define. But two other gross facts were evident: the legs ended not in human feet but in horny, toeless pediments-hoofs. And the creature was hermaphroditic-not in deformity but in healthy development, an androgyne.

“What is it?” he repeated, his mind filled with lively suspicion. “That,” said Zaccur, “is Marion Schmidt, born three weeks ago.” “Huh? What do you mean?”

“It means that the Little People are just as clever in manipulating us as they are in manipulating plants.” “What? But they agreed to leave us alone!”

“Don’t blame them too quickly. We let ourselves in for it. The origihal idea was simply a few improvements.” “Improvements!’ That thing’s an obscenity.”

“Yes and no. My stomach turns whenever I have to took at it … but actually-well, it’s sort of a superman. Its body architecture has been redesigned for greater efficiency, our useless simian hangovers have been left out, and its organs have been rearranged in a more sensible fashion. You can’t say it’s not human, for it is . . – an improved model. Take that extra appendage at the wrist. That’s another hand, a miniature one . . – backed up by a microscopic eye. You can see how useful that would be, once you get used to the idea.” Barstow stared at it. “But it looks horrid, to me~’

“It’d look horrid to anybody,” Lazarus stated. “It may be an improvement, but damn it, I say it ain’t humans” “In any case it creates a problem.”

“I’ll say it does!” Lazarus looked at it again. “You say it has a second set of eyes in those tiny bands? That doesn’t seem possible.”

Barstow shrugged. “I’m no biologist. But every cell in the body contains a full bundle of chromosomes. I suppose that you could grow eyes, or bones, or anything you liked anywhere, if you knew how to manipulate the genes in the chromosomes. And they know.”

“I don’t want to be manipulated!” “Neither do I.”

Lazarus stood on the bank and stared out over the broad beach at a full meeting of-the Families. “I am-” he started formally, then looked puzzled. “Come here a moment, Andy.” He whispered to Libby; Libby looked pained and whispered back. Lazarus looked exasperated and whispered again. Finally he straightened up and started over.

“I am two hundred and forty-one years old-at least,” he stated. “Is there anyone here who is older?” It was empty formality; he knew that he was the eldest; he felt twice that old. “The meeting is opened,~’ he went on, his big voice rumbling on down the beach assisted by speaker systems from the ship’s boats. “Who is your chairman?”

“Get on with it,” someone called from the crowd. “Very well,” said Lazarus. “Zaccur Barstow!”

Behind Lazarus a technician aimed a directional pickup at Barstow. “Zaccur Barstow,” his voice boomed out, “speaking for myself. Some of us have come to believe that this planet, pleasant as it is, is not the place for us. You all know about Mary Sperling, you’ve seen stereos of Marion Schmidt; there have been other things and I won’t elaborate. But emigrating again poses another question, the question of where? Lazarus Long proposes that we return to Earth. In such a-” His words were drowned by noise from the crowd.

Lazarus shouted them down. “Nobody is going to be forced to leave. But if enough of us want to leave to justify taking the ship, then we can. I say go back to Earth. Some say look for another planet. That’ll have to be decided. But first-how many of you think as I do about leaving here?”

“I do!” The shout was echoed by many others. Lazarus peered toward the first man to answer, tried to spot him, glanced over his shoulder at the tech, then pointed. “Go ahead, bud,” he ruled. “The rest of you pipe down.”

“Name of Oliver Schmidt. I’ve been waiting for months for somebody to suggest this. I thought I was the only sorehead in the Families. I haven’t any real reason for leaving-I’m not scared out by the Mary Sperling matter, nor Marion Schmidt. Anybody who likes such things is welcome to them-live and let live. But I’ve got a deep down urge to see Cincinnati again. I’m fed up with this place. I’m tired of being a lotus eater. Damn it, I want to work for my living! According to the Families’ geneticists I ought to be good for another century at least. I can’t see spending that much time lying in the inn and daydreaming.”

When he shut up, at least a thousand more tried to get the floor. “Easy! Easy!” bellowed Lazarus. “If everybody wants to talk, I’m going to have to channel it through your Family representatives. But let’s get a sample here and there.” He picked out another man, told him to sound off.

“I won’t take long,” the new speaker said, “as I agree with Oliver Schmidt I just wanted to mention my own reason. Do any of you miss the Moon? Back home I used to sit out on my balcony on warm summer nights and smoke and look at the Moon. I didn’t know it was important to me, but it is. I want a planet with a moon.”

The next speaker said only, “This case of Mary Sperling has given me a case of nerves. I get nightmares that I’ve gone over myself.”

The arguments went on and on. Somebody pointed out that they had been chased off Earth; what made anybody think that they would be allowed to return? Lazarus answered that himself. “We learned a lot from the Jockaira and now we’ve learned a lot more from the Little People-things that put us way out ahead of anything scientists back on Earth had even dreamed of. We can go back to Earth loaded for bear. We’ll be in shape to demand our rights, strong enough to defend them.”

“Lazarus Long-” came another voice. “Yes,” acknowledged Lazarus.

“You over there, go ahead.”

“I am too old to make any more jumps from star to star and much too old to fight at the end of such a jump. Whatever the rest of you do, I’m staying.”

“In that case,” said Lazarus, “there is no need to discuss it, is there?” “I am entitled to speak.” –

“All right, you’ve spoken. Now give sotheone else a chance.”

The sun set and the stars came out and still the talk went on. Lazarus knew that it would never end unless he moved to end it. “All right,” he shouted, ignoring the many who still, wanted to speak. “Maybe we’ll have to turn this back to the Family councils, but let’s take a trial vote and see where we are. Everybody who wants to go back to Earth move way over to my right. Everybody who wants to stay here move down the beach to my left. Everybody who wants to go exploring for still another planet gather right here in front of me.” He dropped back and said to the sound tech, “Give them some music to speed ‘em up.”

The tech nodded and the homesick strains of Valse Triste sighed over the beach. It was followed by The Green Hills of Earth. Zaccur Barstow turned toward Lazarus. “You picked that music.”

“Me?” Lazarus answered with bland innocence. “You know I ain’t musical, Zack.”

Even with music the separation took a long time. The last movement of the immortal Fifth had died away long before they at last had sorted themselves into three crowds.

On the left about a tenth of the total number were gathered, showing thereby their intention of staying. They were mostly the old and the tired, whose sands had run low. With them were a few youngsters who had never seen Earth, plus a bare sprinkling of other ages.

In the center was a very small group, not over three hundred, mostly men and a few younger women, who voted thereby for still newer frontiers.

But the great mass was on Lazarus’ right. He looked at them and saw new animation in their faces; it lifted his heart, for he had been bitterly afraid that he was almost alone in his wish to leave.

He looked back at the small group nearest him. “It looks like you’re outvoted,” he said to them alone, his voice unamplifled. “But never mind, there always comes another day.” He waited. Slowly the group in the middle began to break up. By ones and twos and threes they moved away. Avery few drifted over to join those who were staying; most of them merged with the

group on the right.

When this secondary division was complete Lazarus spoke to the smaller group on his left. “All right,” he said very gently, “You … you old folks might as well go back up to the meadows and get your sleep. The rest of us have things to make.”

Lazarus then gave Libby the floor and let him explain to the majority crowd that the trip home would not be the weary journey the flight from Earth had been, nor even the tedious second jump. Libby placed all of the credit where most of it belonged, with the Little People. They had straightened him out with his difficulties in dealing with the problem of speeds which appeared to exceed the speed of light. If the Little People knew what they were talking about -and Libby was sure that they did-there appeared to be no limits to what Libby chose to call “para-acceleration”-“para-” because, like Libby’s own lightpressure drive, it acted on the whole mass uniformly and could no more be perceived by the senses than can gravitation, and “para-” also because the ship would not go “through” but rather around or “beside” normal space. “it is not so much a matter of driving the ship as it is a selection of appropriate potential level in an n-dimensional hyperplenum of n-plus-one

possible-“

Lazarus firmly cut him off. “That’s your department, son, and everybody trusts you in it. We ain’t qualified to discuss the fine points.” “I was only going to add-“

“I know. But you were already out of the world when I stopped you.”

Someone from the crowd shouted one more question. “When do we get there?”

“I don’t know,” Libby admitted, thinking of the question the way Nancy Weatheral had put it to him long ago. “I can’t say what year it will be … but it will seem like about three weeks from now.”

The preparations consumed days simply because many round trips of the ship’s boats were necessary to embark them. There was a marked lack of ceremonious farewell because those remaining behind tended to avoid those who were leaving. Coolness had sprung up between the two groups; the division on the beach had split friendships, had even broken up contemporary marriages, had caused many hurt feelings, unresolvable bitterness. Perhaps the only desirable aspect of the division was that the parents of the mutant Marion Schmidt had elected to remain behind.

Lazarus was in charge of the last boat to leave. Shortly before he planned to boost he felt a touch at his elbow. “Excuse me,” a young man said. “My name’s Hubert Johnson. 1 want to go along but I’ve had to stay back with the other crowd to keep my mother from throwing fits. If I show up at the last minute, can 1 still go along?”

Lazirus looked him over. “You look old enough to decide without asking me.”

“You don’t understand. I’m an only child and my mother tags me around. I’ve got to sneak back before she misses me. How much longer-“ “I’m not holding this boat for anybody. And you’ll never break away any younger. Get into the boat”

“But…”

“Oft!” The young man did so, with one worried backward glance at the bank. There was a lot, thought Lazarus, to be said for ectogenesis. Once inboard the New Frontiers Lazarus reported to Captain King in the control room. “All inboard?” asked King.

“Yeah. Some late deciders, pro and con, and one more passenger at the last possible split second-woman named Eleanor Johnson. Let’s go!” King turned to Libby. “Let’s go, Mister.”

The stars blinked out.

They flew blind, with only Libby’s unique talent to guide them. If he had doubts as to his ability to lead them through the featureless blackness of other space he kept them to himself. On the twenty-third ship’s day of the reach and the eleventh day of para-deceleration the stars reappeared, all in their old familiar ranges-the Big Dipper, giant Orion, lopsidecL Crux, the fairy Pleiades, and dead ahead of them, blazing against the frosty backdrop of the Milky Way, was a golden light that had to be the Sun.

Lazarus had tears in his eyes for the second time in a month.

They could not simply rendezvous with Earth, set a parking orbit, and disembark; they had-to throw their hats in first. Besides that, they needed first to know what time it was.

Libby was able to establish quickly, through proper motions of nearest stars, that it was not later than about 3700 A.D.; without precise observatory instruments he refused to commit himself further. But once they were close enough to see the Solar planets he had another clock to read; the planets themselves make a clock with nine hands.

For any date there is a unique configuration of those “hands” since no planetary period is exactly commensurate with another. Pluto marks off an “hour” of a quarter of a millennium; Jupiter’s clicks a cosmic minute of twelve years; Mercury whizzes a “second” of about ninety days. The other “hands” can refine these readings-Neptune’s period is so cantankerously different from that of Pluto that the two fall into approximately repeated configuration only once in seven hundred and fifty-eight years. The great clock can be read with any desired degree  of accuracy over any period-but it is not easy to read.

Libby started to read it as soon as any of the planets could be picked out. He muttered over the problem. “There’s not a chance that we’ll pick up Pluto,” he complained to Lazarus, “and I doubt if we’ll have Neptune. The inner planets give me an infinite series of approximations-you know as well as I do that “infinite” is a question-begging term. Annoying!”

“Aren’t you looking at it the hard way, son? You can get a practical answer. Or move over and I’ll get one.” –

“Of course I can get a practical answer,” Libby said petulantly, “if you’re satisfied with that But-“

“But me no ‘buts’-what year is it, man!”

“Eh? Let’s put it this way. The time rate in the ship and duration on Earth have been unrelated three times. But now they are effectively synchronous again, such that slightly over seventy- four years have passed since we 1eft.’

Lazarus heaved a sigh. “Why didn’t you say so?” He had been fretting that Earth might – not be recognizable … they might have torn down New York or something like that. “Shucks, Andy, you shouldn’t have scared me like that.”

“Mmm …” said Libby. It was one of no further interest to him. There remained only the delicious problem of inventing a mathematics which would describe elegantly two apparently irreconcilable groups of facts: the Michelson-Morley experiments and the log of the New Frontiers. He set happily about it. Mmm … what was the least number of pamdimensions indispeMably necessary to contain the augmented plenum using a sheaf of postulates affirming-It kept him contented for a considerable time-subjective time, of course.

The ship was placed in a temporary orbit half a billion miles from the Sun with a radius vector normal to the plane of the ecliptic. Parked thus at right angles to and far outside the flat pancake of the Solar System they were safe from any long chance of being discovered. Aship’s boat had been fitted with thc neo-Libby drive during the jump and a negotiating party was sent down.

Lazarus wanted to go along; King refused to let him, which sent Lazarus into sulks. King had said curtly, “This isn’t a raiding party, Lazarus; this is a diplomatic mission.” “Hell, man, I can be diplomatic when it pays!”

“No doubt But we’ll send a man who doesn’t go armed to the ‘fresher.”

Ralph Schultz headed the party, since psychodynamic factors back on Earth were of first importance, but he was aided by legal voluntary and technical specialists. If the Families were going to have to fight for living room it was necessary to know what sort of technology, what sort of weapons, they would have to meet-but it was even more necessary to find out whether or not a peaceful landing could be arranged.

Schultz had been authorized by the elders to offer a plan under which the Families would colonize the thinly settled and retrograded European continent. But it was possible, even likely, that this had already been done in their absence, in view of the radioactive half-lifes involved. Schultz would probably have to improvise some other compromise, depending on the conditions he found.

Again there was nothing to do but wait.

Lazarus endured it in nail-chewing uncertainty. He had claimed publicly that the Families had such great scientific advantage that they could meet and defeat the best that Earth could offer. Privately, he knew that this was sophistry and so did any other Member competent to judge the matter. Knowledge alone did not win wars. The ignorant fanatics of Europe’s Middle Ages had defeated the incomparably higher Islamic culture; Archimedes had been struck down by a common soldier; barbarians had sacked Rome. Libby, or some one, might devise an unbeatable, weapon from their mass of new knowledge-or might not and who knew what strides military art had made on earth in three quarters of a century?

King, trained in military art, was worried by the same thing and still more worried by the personnel he would have to work with. The Families were anything but trained legions; the prospect of trying to whip those cranky individualists into some semblance of a disciplined fighting machine ruined his sleep.

These doubts and fears King and Lazarus did not mention even to each other; each was afraid that to mention such things would be to spread a poison of fear through the ship. But they were not alone in their worries; half of the ship’s company realized the weaknesses of their position and kept silent only because a bitter resolve to go home, no matter what, made them willing to accept the dangers..

“Skipper,”. Lazarus said to King two weeks after Schultz’s party had headed Earthside, “have you wondered how they’re going to feel about the New Frontiers herself?” “Eh? What do you mean?’

“Well, we hijacked her. Piracy.”

King looked astounded. “Bless me, so we did! Do you know, it’s been so long ago that it is hard for me to realize that she was ever anything but my ship … or to recall that I first came into her through an act of piracy.” He looked thoughtful, then smiled grimly. “I wonder how conditions are in Coventry these days?”

“Pretty thin rations, I imagine,” said Lazarus. “But we’ll team up and make out. Never mind-they haven’t caught us yet.”

“Do you suppose that Slayton Ford will be connected with the matter? That would be hard lines after all he has gone through.”

“There may not be any trouble about it at all,” Lazarus answered soberly. “While the way we got this ship was kind of irregular, we have used it for the purpose for which it was built-to explore the stars. And we’re returning it intact, long before they could have expected any results, and with a slick new space drive to boot. It’s more for their money than they had any reason to expect-so they may just decide to forget it and trot out the fatted calf.”

“I hope so,” King answered doubtfully.

The scouting party was two days late. No signal was received from them until they emerged into normal spacetime, just before rendezvous, as no method had yet been devised for signalling from para-space to ortho-space. While they were maneuvering to rendezvous, King received Ralph Schultz’s face on the control-room screen. “Hello, Captain! We’ll be boarding shortly to report.”

“Give me a summary now!”

“I wouldn’t know where to start. But it’s all right-we can go home!” “Huh? How’s that? Repeat!”

“Everything’s all right. We are restored to the Covenant. You see, there isn’t any difference any more. Everybody is a member of the Families now.” “What do you mean?” King demanded.

“They’ve got it.” “Got what?”

“Got the secret of longevity.”

“Huh? Talk sense. There isn’t any secret. There never was any secret.” “We didn’t have any secret-but they thought we had. So they found it.” “Expiain yourself,” insisted Captain King.

“Captain, can’t this wait until we get back into the ship?’ Ralph Schultz protested. “I’m no biologist. We’ve brought along a government reptesentative-you can quiz him, instead?

KING RECEWED Terra’s representative in his cabin. He had notified Zaccur Barstow and Justin Foote to be present for the Families and had invited Doctor Gordon Hardy because the nature of the startling news was the biologist’s business. Libby was there as the ship’s chief officer; Slayton Ford was invited because of his unique status, although he had held no public office in the Families since his breakdown in the temple of Kreel.

Lazarus was there because Lazarus wanted to be there, in his own strictly private capacity. He had not been invited, but even Captain King was somewhat diffident about interfering with the assumed prerogatives of the eldest Member.

Ralph Schultz introduced Earth’s ambassador to the assembled company. “This is Captain King, our commanding officer and this is Miles Rodney, representing the Federation Council- minister plenipotentiary and ambassador extraordinary, I guess you would call him.”

“Hardly that,” said Rodney; “although I can agree to the ‘extraordinary’ part. This situation is quite without preccdent. it is an honor to know you, Captain.” “Glad to have you inboard, sir.”

“And this is Zaccur Barstow, representing the trustees of the Howard Families, and Justin Foote, secretary tO the trustees-“ “Service.”

“Service to you, gentlemen.”

“Andrew Jackson Libby, chief astrogational officer, Doctor Gordon Hardy, biologist in charge of our research into the causes of old age and death.”

“May I do you a service?” Hardy acknowledged formally.”Service to you, sir. So you are the chief biologist-there was a time when you could have done a service to the whole human race. Think of it, sir-think how different things could have been. But, happily, the human race was able to worry out the secret of extending life without the aid of the Howard Families.”

Hardy looked vexed. “What do you mean, sir? Do you mean to say that you are still laboring under the delusion that we had some miraculous secret to impart, if we chose?” Rodney shrugged and spread his hands. “Really, now, there is no need to keep up the pretense, is there? Your results have been duplicated, independently.”

Captain King cut in. “Just a moment-Ralph Schultz, is the Federation still under the impression that there is some ‘secret’ to our long lives? Didn’t you tell them?”

Schultz was looking bewildered. “Uh-this is ridiculous. The subject hardly came up. They themselves had achieved controlled longevity; they were no longer interested in us in that respect. It is true that there still existed a belief that our long lives derived from manipulation rather than from heredity, but I corrected that impression.”

“Apparently not very thoroughly, from what Miles Rodney has just said.”

“Apparently not. I did not spend much effort on it; it was beating a dead dog. The Howard Families add their long lives are no longer an issue on Earth. Interest, both public and official, is centered on the fact that we have accomplished a successful interstellar jump.”

“I can confirm that,” agreed Miles Rodney. “Every official, every news service, every citizen, every scientist in the system is waiting with utmost eagerness the arrival of the New Frontiers. It’s the greatest, most sensational thing that has happened since the first trip to the Moon. You are famous, gentlemen-all of you.”

Lazarus pulled Zaccur Barstow aside and whispered to him. Barstow looked perturbed, then nodded thoughtfully. “Captain-” Barstow said to King. “Yes, Zack?”

“I suggest that we ask our guest to excuse us while we receive Ralph Schultz’ report.” “Why?”

Barstow glanced at Rodney. “I think we will be better prepared to discuss matters if we are brief by our own representative.” King turned to Rodney. “Will you excuse us~~ sir?”

Lazarus broke in. “Never mind, Skipper. Zack means well but he’s too polite. Might as well let Comrade Rodney stick around and we’ll lay it on the line. Tell me this, Miles; what proof have you got that you and your pals have figured out a way to live as long as we do?’

“Proof?’ Rodney seemed dumbfounded. “Why do you ask – Whom am I addressing? Who are you, sir?”

Ralph Schultz intervened. “Sorry-I didn’t get a chance to finish the introductions. Miles Rodney, this is Lazarus Long, the Senior.” “Service. ‘The Senior’ what?’

“He just means ‘The Senior,’ period,” answered Lazarus. “I’m the-oldest Member. Otherwise I’m a private citizen.” “The oldest one of the Howard Families! Why-why, you must be the oldest man alive-think of that!”

“You think about it,” retorted Lazarus. “I quit worrying about it a couple of centuries ago. How about answering my question?’

“But I can’t help being impressed. You make me feel like an infant-and I’m not a young man myself; I’ll be a hundred and five this coming June.” “If you can prove that’s your age, you can answer my question. I’d say you were about forty. How about it?”

‘Well, – dear me, I hardly expected to be interrogated on this point. Do you wish to see my identity card?”

“Are you kidding? I’ve had fifty-odd identity cards in my time, all with phony birth dates. What else can you offer?’ “Just a minute, Lazarus,” put in Captain King. ‘What is the purpose of your question?”

Lazarus Long turned away from Rodney. “It’s like this, Skipper-we hightailed it out of the Solar System to save our necks, because the rest of the yokels thought we had invented some way to live forever and proposed to squeeze it out of us if they had to kill every one of us. Now everything is sweetness and light~-so they say. But it seems mighty funny that the bird they send up to smoke the pipe of peace with us should still be convinced that we have that so-called secret.

“It got me to wondering.

“Suppose they hadn’t figured out a way to keep from dying from old age but were still clinging to the idea that we had? What better way to keep us calmed down and unsuspicious than to tell us they had until they could get us where they wanted us in order to put the question to us again?”

Rodney snorted. “Apreposterous ideal Captain, I don’t think I’m called on to put up with this.”

Lazarus stared coldly. “It was preposterous the first time, but-but it happened. The burnt child is likely to be skittish.” “Just a moment, both of you,” ordered King. “Ralph, how about it? Could you have been taken in by a put-up job?”

Schultz thought about it, painfully. “I don’t think so.” He paused. “It’s rather difficult to say. I couldn’t tell from appearance of course, any more than our own Members could be picked out from a crowd of normal persons.”

“But you are a psychologist. Surely you could have detected indications of fraud, if there had been one.”

“I may be a psychologist, but I’m not a miracle man and I’m not telepathic. I wasn’t looking for fraud.” He grinned I sheepishly. “There was another factor. I was so excited over being home that I was not in the best emotional condition to note discrepancies, if there were any.”

“Then you aren’t sure?” -‘

“No. I am emotionally convinced that Miles Rodney is telling the truth-“ “Lam!”

“-and I believe that a few questions could clear the matter up. He claims to be one hundred and five years old. We can test that.” “I see,” agreed King. “Hmm … you put the questions, Ralph?”

“Very well. You will permit, Miles Rodney?” “Go ahead,” Rodney answered stiffly.

“You must have been about thirty years old when we left Earth, since we have been gone nearly seventy-five years, Earth time. Do you remember the event?” “Quite clearly. I was a clerk in Novak Tower at the time, I in the offices of the Administrator.”

Slayton Ford had remained in the background throughout the discussion, and had done nothing to call attention to himself. At Rodney’s answer he sat up. “Just a moment, Captain-“ “Eh? Yes?”

“Perhaps I can cut this short. You’ll pardon me, Ralph?” He turned to Terra’s representative. “Who am I?”

Rodney looked at him in some puzzlement. His expression changed from one of simple surprise at the odd question to complete and unbelieving bewilderment. “Why, you … you are Administrator Ford!”

“ONE AT ATIME! One at a time,” Captain King was saying. “Don’t everybody try to talk at once. Go on, Slayton; you have the floor. You know this man?” Ford looked Rodney over. “No, I can’t say that I do.”

“Then it is a frame up.” King turned to Rodney.”Suppose you recognized Ford from historical stereos-is that right?” –

Rodney seemed about to burst. “No! I recognized him. He’s changed but I knew him. Mr. Administrator-look at me, please! Don’t you know me? I worked for you!” “It seems fairly obvious that he doesn’t,” King said dryly.

Ford shook his head. “It doesn’t prove anything, one way or the other, Captain. There were over two thousand civil service employes in my office. Rodney might have been one of them. His face looks vaguely familiar, but so do most faces.”

“Captain-” Master Gordon Hardy was speaking. “If I can question Miles Rodney I might be able to give an opinion as to whether or not they actually have discovered anything new about the causes of old age and death.”

Rodney shook his head. “I am not a biologist. You could trip me up in no time. Captain King, I ask you to arrange my return to Earth as quickly as possible. I’ll not be subjected to any more of this. And let me add that I do not care a minim whether you and your-your pretty crew ever get back to civilization or not. I came here to help you, but I’m disgusted.” He stood up.

Slayton Ford went toward him. “Easy, Miles Rodney, please! Be patient. Put yourself in their place. You would be just as cautious if you had been through what they have been through.” Rodney hesitated. “Mr. Administrator, what are you doing here?”

“It’s a long and complicated story. I’ll tell you later.”

“You are a member of the Howard Families-you must be. That accounts for a lot of odd things.”

Ford shook his head. “No, Miles Rodney, I am not. Later, please-I’ll explain it. You -worked for me once-when?” “From 2109 until you, uh, disappeared.”

“What was your job?”

“At the time of the crisis of 2113 I was an assistant correlation clerk in the Division of Economic Statistics, Control Section.” “Who was your section chief?”

“Leslie Waldron.”

“Old Waldron, eh? What was the color of his hair?” “His hair? The Walrus was bald as an egg.”

Lazarus whispered to Zaccur Barstow, “Looks like I was off base, Zack.”

“Wait a moment,” Barstow whispered back. “It still could be thorough preparation-they may have known that Ford escaped with us.” Ford was continuing, “What was The Sacred Cow?’

“The Sacred-Chief, you weren’t even supposed to know that there was such a publication!”

“Give my intelligence staff credit for some activity, at least,” Ford said dryly. “I got my copy every week.” “But what was it?” demanded Lazarus.

Rodney answered, “An office comic and gossip sheet that was passed from hand to hand.”

“Devoted to ribbing the bosses,” Ford added, “especially me.” He put an arm around Rodney’s shoulders. “Friends, there is no doubt about it. Miles and I were fellow workers.”  “I still want to find out about the new rejuvenation process,” insisted Master Hardy some time later.

“I think we all do,” agreed King. He reached out and refilled their guest’s wine glass. “Will you tell us about it, sir?’

“I’ll try,” Miles Rodney answered, “though I must ask Master Hardy to bear with me. It’s not one process, but several-one basic process and several dozen others, some of them purely cosmetic, especially for women. Nor is the basic process truly a rejuvenation process. You can arrest the progress of old age, but you can’t reverse it to any significant degree-you can’t turn a senile old man into a boy.”

“Yes, yes,” agreed Hardy. “Naturally-but what is the basic process?”

“It consists largely in replacing the entire blood tissue in an old person with new, young blood. Old age, so they tell me, is primarily a matter of the progressive accumulation of the waste poisons of metabolism. The blood is supposed to carry them away, but presently the blood gets so clogged with the poisons that the scavenging process doesn’t take place properly. Is that right, Doctor Hardy?’

“That’s an odd way of putting it, but-“ “I told you I was no biotechnician.”

“-essentially correct. It’s a matter of diffusion pressure deficit-the d.p.d. on the blood side of a cell wall must be such as to maintain a fairly sharp gradient or there will occur progressive autointoxication of the individual cells. But I must say that I feel somewhat disappointed, Miles Rodney. The basic idea of holding off death by insuring proper scavenging of waste products is not new-I have a bit of chicken heart which has been alive for two and one half centuries through equivalent techniques. As to the use of young blood-yes, that will work. I’ve kept experimental animals alive by such blood donations to about twice their normal span-” He stopped and looked troubled.

“Yes, Doctor Hardy?”

Hardy chewed his lip. “I gave up that line of research. I found it necessary to have several young donors in order to keep one beneficiary from growing any older. There was a small, but measurable, unfavorable effect on each of the donors. Racially it was self-defeating; there would never be enough donors to go around. Am I to understand, sir that this method is thereby limited to a small, select part of the population?”

“Oh, no! I did not make myself clear, Master Hardy. There are no donors.” “Huh?’

“New blood, enough for everybody, grown outside the body-the Public Health and Longevity Service can provide any amount of it, any type.”

Hardy looked startled. “To think we came so close … so that’s it.” He paused, then went on. “We tried tissue culture of bone marrow in vitro. We should have persisted.”

“Don’t feel badly about it. Billions of credits and tens of thousands of technicians engaged in this project before there were any significant results. I’m told that the mass of accumulated art in this field represents more effort than even the techniques of atomic engineering.” Rodney smiled. “You see, they had to get some results; it was politically necessary-so there was an all-out effort.” Rodney turned to Ford. ‘When the news about the escape of the Howard Families reached the public, Chief, your precious successor had to be protected from the mobs.”

Hardy persisted with questions about subsidiary techniques -tooth budding, growth inhibiting, hormone therapy, many others-until King came to Rodney’s rescue by pointing out that the

prime purpose of the visit was to arrange details of the return of the Families to Earth.

Rodney nodded. “I think we should get down to business. As I understand it, Captain, a large proportion of your people are now in reduced-temperature somnolence?” (“Why can’t he say ‘cold-rest’?” Lazarus said to Libby.)

“Yes, that is so.”

“Then it would be no hardship on them to remain in that state for a time.” “Eh? Why do you say that, sir?”

Rodney spread his hands. “The administration finds itself in a somewhat embarrassing position. To put it bluntly, there is a housing shortage. Absorbing one hundred and ten thousand displaced persons can’t be done overnight.”

Again King had to hush them. He then nodded to Zaccur Barstow, who addressed himself to Rodney. “I fail to see the problem, sir. What is the present population of the North American continent?”

“Around seven hundred million.”

“And you can’t find room to tuck away one-seventieth of one per cent of that number? It sounds preposterous.”

“You don’t understand, sir,” Rodney protested. “Population pressure has become our major problem. Coincident with it, the right to remain undisturbed in the enjoyment of one’s own homestead, or one’s apartment, has become the most jealously guarded of all civil rights. Before we can find you adequate living room we must make over some stretch of desert, or make other major arrangements.”

“I get it,” said Lazarus. “Politics. You don’t dare disturb anybody for fear they will squawk.” “That’s hardly an adequate statement of the case.”

“It’s not, eh? could be you’ve got a general election coming up, maybe?’ “As a matter of fact we have, but that has nothing to do with the case.” Lazarus snorted.

Justin Foote spoke up. “It seems to me that the administration has looked at this problem in the most superficial light. It is not as if we were homeless immigrants. Most of the Members own their own homes. As you doubtless know, the Families were well-to-do; even wealthy, and for obvious reasons we built our homes to endure. I feel sure that most of those structures are still standing.”

“No doubt,” Rodney conceded, “but you will find them occupied.”

Justin Foote shrugged. “What has that to do with us? That is a problem for the government to settle with the persons it has allowed illegally to occupy our homes. As for myself, I shall land as soon as possible, obtain an eviction rrder from the nearest court, and repossess my home.”

“It’s not that easy. You can make omelet from eggs, but not eggs from omelet. You have been legally dead for many years; the present oacupant of your house holds a good title.”

Justin Foote stood up and glared at the Federation’s envoy, looking, as Lazarus thought, “like a cornered mouse.” “Legally dead! By whose act, sir, by whose act? Mine? I was a respected solicitor, quietly and honorably pursuing my profession, harming no one, when I was arrested without cause and forced to flee for my life. Now I am blandly told that my property is confiscated and my very legal existence as a person and as a citizen has been taken from ,me beckuse of that sequence of events. What manner of justice is this? Does the Covenant still stand?”

“You misunderstand me. I-“

“I misunderstood nothing. If justice is measured out only when it is convenient, then the Covenant is not worth the parchment it is written on. I shall make of myself a test case, sir, a test case for every Member of the Families. Unless my property is returned to me in full and at once I shall bring personal suit against every obstructing official. I will make of it a cause celebre. For many years I have suffered inconvenience and indignity and peril; I shall not be put off with words. I will shout it from the housetops.” He paused for breath.

“He’s right, Miles,” Slayton Ford put in quietly. “The government had better find some adequate way to handle this-and quickly.”

Lazarus caught Libby’s eye and silently motioned toward the door. The two slipped outside. “Justin’ll keep ‘em busy for the next hour,” he said. “Let’s slide down to the Club and grab some calories.”

“Do you really think we ought to leave?’ “Relax. If the skipper wants us, he can holler.”

LAZARUS TUCKED AWAYthree sandwiches, a double order of ice cream, and some cookies while Libby contented himself with somewhat less. Lazarus would have eaten more but he was forced to respond to a barrage of questions from the other habitues of the Club.

“The commissary department ain’t really back on its feet,” he complained, as he poured his third cup of coffee. “The Little People made life too easy for them. Andy, do you like chili con carne?”

“It’s all right.”

Lazarus wiped his mouth. “There used to be a restaurant in Tijuana that served the best chili I ever tasted. I wonder if it’s still there?” “Where’s Tijuana?” demanded Margaret Weatheral.

“You don’t remember Earth, do you, Peggy? Well, darling, it’s in Lower California. You know where that is?” “Don’t you think I studied geography? It’s in Los Angeles.”

“Near enough. Maybe you’re right-by now.” The ship’s announcing system blared out: “Chief Astrogator-report to the Captain in the Control Room!”

“That’s me!” said Libby, and hurriedly got up.

The call was repeated, then was followed by, “All hands prepare for acceleration! All hands prepare for acceleration!” “Here we go again, kids.” Lazarus stood up, brushed off his kilt, and followed Libby, whistling as he went

“California, here I come,

Right back where I started from-“

The ship was underway, the stars had faded out. Captain King had left the control room, taking with him his guest, the Earth’s envoy. Miles Rodney had been much impressed; it seemed likely that he would need a drink.

Lazarus and Libby remained in the control room. There was nothing to do; for approximately four hours, ship’s time, the ship would remain in para-space, before returning to normal space near Earth.

Lazarus struck a cigaret. ‘What d’you plan to do when you get back, Andy?” “Hadn’t thought about it.”

“Better start thinking. Been some changes.”

“I’ll probably head back home for a while. I can’t imagine the Ozarks having changed very much.” “The hills will look the same, I imagine. You may find the people changed.”

“How?”

“You remember I told you that I had gotten fed up with the Families and had kinda lost touch with them for a century? By and large, they had gotten so smug and soft in their ways that I couldn’t stand them. I’m afraid we’ll find most everybody that way, now that they expect to live forever. Long term investments, be sure to wear your rubbers when it rains . . that sort of thing.”

“It didn’t aifect you that way.”

“My approach is different. I never did have any real reason to last forever-after all, as Gordon Hardy has pointed out, I’m only a third generation result of the Howard plan. I just did my living as I went along and didn’t worry my head about it. But that’s not the usual attitude. Take Miles Rodney-scared to death to tackle a new situation with both hands for fear of upsetting precedent and stepping on established privileges.”

“I was glad to see Justin stand up to him.” Libby chuckled. “I didn’t think Justin had it in him.” “Ever see a little dog tell a big dog to get the hell out of the little dog’s yard?”

“Do you think Justin will win his point?” “Sure he will, with your help.”

“Mine?” –

“Who knows anything about the para-drive, aside from what you’ve taught me?” “I’ve dictated full notes into the records.”

“But you haven’t turned those records over to Miles Rodney. Earth needs your starship drive, Andy. You heard what Rodney said about population pressure. Ralph was telling me you have to get a government permit now before you can have a baby.”

“The hell you say!”

“Fact. You can count on it that there would be tremendous emigration if there were just some decent planets to emigrate to. And that’s where your drive comes in. With it, spreading out to the stars becomes really practical. They’ll have to dicker.”

“It’s not really my drive, of course. The Little People worked it out.”

“Don’t be so modest. You’ve got it. And you want to back up Justin, don’t you?” “Oh, sure.”

‘~Then we’ll use it to bargain with. Maybe I’ll do the bargaining, personally. But that’s beside the point. Somebody is going to have to do a little exploring before any large-scale emigration starts. Let’s go into the real estate business, Andy. We’ll stake out this corner of the Galaxy and see what it has to offer.”

Libby scratched his nose and thought about it. “Sounds all right, I guess after I pay a visit home.” “There’s no rush. I’ll find a nice, clean little yacht, about ten thousand tons and we’ll refit with your drive.” “What’ll we use for money?”

“We’ll have money. I’ll set up a parent corporation, while I’m about it, with a loose enough charter to let us do anything we want to do. There will be daughter corporations for various purposes and we’ll unload the minor interest in each.. Then-“

“You make it sound like work, Lazarus. I thought it was going to be fun.”

“Shucks, we won’t fuss with that stuff. I’ll collar somebody to run the home office and worry about the books and the legal end-somebody about like Justin. Maybe Justin himself.”

“Well, all right then.”

“You and I will rampage around and see what there is to be seen. It’ll be fun, all right.” They were both silent for a long time, with no need to talk. Presently Lazarus said, “Andy-“ “Yeah?”

“Are you going to look into this new-blood-for-old caper?” “I suppose so, eventually.”

“I’ve been thinking about it. Between ourselves, I’m not as fast with my fists as I was a century back. Maybe my natural span is wearing out. I do know this: I didn’t start planning our real estate venture till I head about this new process. It gave me a new perspective. I find myself thinking about thousands of years-and I never used to worry about anything further ahead than a week from next Wednesday.”

Libby chuckled again. “Looks like you’re growing up.”

“Some would say it was about time. Seriously, Andy, I think that’s just what I have been doing. The last two and a half centuries have just been my adolescence, so to speak. Long as I’ve hung around, I don’t know any more. about the final amwers, the important answers, than Peggy Weatheral does. Men-our kind of men-Earth men-never have had enough time to tackle the important questions. Lots of capacity and not time enough to use it properly. When it came to the important questions we might as well have still been monkeys.”

“How do you propose to tackle the important questions?”

“How should I know? Ask me again in about five hundred years.” “You think that will make a difference?”

“I do. Anyhow it’ll give me time to poke around and pick up some interesting facts. Take those Jockaira gods- “ “They weren’t gods, Lazarus. You shouldn’t call them that.”

“Of course they weren’t-I think. My guess is that they are creatures who have had time enough to do a little hard thinking. Someday, about a thousand years from now, I intend to march straight into the temple of Kreel, look him in the eye, and say, ‘Howdy, Bub-what do you know that 1 don’t know?’”

“It might not be healthy.”

‘We’ll have a showdown, anyway. I’ve never been satisfied with the outcome there. There ought not to be anything in the whole universe that man can’t poke his nose into-that’s the way we’re built and I assume that there’s some reason for it.”

“Maybe there aren’t any reasons.”

“Yes, maybe it’s just one colossal big joke, with no point to it.”’ Lazarus stood up and stretched and scratched his ribs. “But I can tell you this, Andy, whatever the answers are, here’s one monkey that’s going to keep on climbing, and locking around him to see what he can see, as long as the tree holds out.”

The End

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The man who sold the moon (full text) by Robert Heinlein

The primary story is based on a character who’s goal in life is to first visit the moon (being the first human) and then setting up a colony on the moon. Harriman (the character) uses is past business successes and his business savvy to convince his friends, his company, and complete nations of children to help back his venture, which is of the goal to fulfill a childhood fantasy instead of make money.

The Man Who Sold The Moon is one of Heinlein’s best works and that alone says a lot! Having been a Heinlein fan since Jr. High, I have to replace some of my favorites over the years because I reread them quite often. This I have replaced several times because paperbacks tend to wear out when they are read repeatedly. You don’t want to miss this story, whether you’re a fan or new to Heinlein, this book is great sci-fi! 

Heinlein uses his fiction to tell the reader things, not just a story, but to communicate political, social and technical ideas and to share his technological prognostications. The perspective is complex.

All of these stories have as their underlying themes the conflict between profit and social and technological progress and how morally-neutral or amoral economic interests can come into conflict with human-scale interests and a common understanding of right and wrong.

The Man Who Sold The Moon, is about a rich industrialist called D. D. Harriman. Harriman has a dream, which is to go to the Moon and found a colony there. To achieve this dream, he adopts a single-mindedness that leads him to compromise business ethics and even break the law.

Heinlein captures well here several themes about modern business, including its complexity: Harriman, as a successful industrialist of international note, must have a very expert grasp of law and corporate structures, finance and accounting, politics and international relations, and a degree of technical literacy in the enterprise itself. Heinlein also shows how there is often a thin line between a successful business and fraud, and the qualities required are virtually the same.

Harriman represents perfectly the morally-neutral capitalist who puts up or finds the money for a project and dominates and motivates those around him, even though he lacks detailed technical know-how himself. Harriman as a businessman is happy to abide by the letter of an agreement when this works in his favour, but not when it does not.

The price of success, therefore, can often be lapses of integrity and incidences of personal moral abasement. Eventually Harriman is outmanoeuvred by one of his investors, who makes clear he cannot go to the Moon until the venture is in profit and could be managed by somebody else in the event of his demise.

The Man who Sold the Moon

THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON

CHAPTER ONE

“YOU’VE GOT TO BE ABELIEVER!”

George Strong snorted at his partner’s declaration. “Delos, why don’t you give up? You’ve been singing this tune for years. Maybe someday men will get to the Moon, though I doubt it. In any case, you and I will never live to see it. The loss of the power satellite washes the matter up for our generation.”

D. D. Harriman grunted. “We won’t see it if we sit on our fat behinds and don’t do anything to make it happen. But we can make it happen.” “Question number one: how? Question number two: why?”

“‘Why?’ The man asks ‘why.’ George, isn’t there anything in your soul but discounts, and dividends? Didn’t you ever sit with a girl on a soft summer night and stare up at the Moon and wonder what was there?”

“Yeah, I did once. I caught a cold.”

Harriman asked the Almighty why he had been delivered into the hands of the Philistines. He then turned back to his partner. “I could tell you why, the real ‘why,’ but you wouldn’t understand me. You want to know why in terms of cash, don’t you? You want to know how Harriman & Strong and Harriman Enterprises can show a profit, don’t you?”

“Yes,” admitted Strong, “and don’t give me any guff about tourist trade and fabulous lunar jewels. I’ve had it.”

“You ask me to show figures on a brand-new type of enterprise, knowing I can’t. It’s like asking the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk to estimate how much money Curtiss-Wright Corporation would someday make out of building airplanes. I’ll put it another way, You didn’t want us to go into plastic houses, did you? If you had had your way we would still be back in Kansas City, subdividing cow pastures and showing rentals.”

Strong shrugged.

“How much has New World Homes made to date?”

Strong looked absent-minded while exercising the talent he brought to the partnership. “Uh … $172,946,004.62, after taxes, to the end of the last fiscal year. The running estimate to date is—”

“Never mind. What was our share in the take?”

“Well, uh, the partnership, exclusive of the piece you took personally and then sold to me later, has benefited from New World Homes during the same period by $1 3,010,437.20, ahead of personal taxes. Delos, this double taxation has got to stop. Penalizing thrift is a sure way to run this country straight into—”

“Forget it, forget it! How much have we made out of Skyblast Freight and Antipodes Transways?” Strong told him.

“And yet I had to threaten you with bodily harm to get you to put up a dime to buy control of the injector patent. You said rockets were a passing fad.”

“We were lucky,” objected Strong. “You had no way of knowing that there would be a big uranium strike in Australia. Without it, the Skyways group would have left us in the red. For that matter New World Homes would have failed, too, if the roadtowns hadn’t come along and given us a market out from under local building codes.”

“Nuts on both points. Fast transportation will pay; it always has. As for New World, when ten million families need new houses and we can sell ‘em cheap, they’ll buy. They won’t let building codes stop them, not permanently. We gambled on a certainty. Think back, George: what ventures have we lost money on and what ones have paid off? Everyone of my crack- brain ideas has made money, hasn’t it? And the only times we’ve lost our ante was on conservative, blue-chip investments.”

“But we’ve made money on some conservative deals, too,” protested Strong.

“Not enough to pay for your yacht. Be fair about it, George; the Andes Development Company, the integrating pantograph patent, every one of my wildcat schemes I’ve had to drag you into

—and every one of them paid.”

“I’ve had to sweat blood to make them pay,” Strong grumbled.

“That’s why we are partners. I get a wildcat by the tail; you harness him and put him to work. Now we go to the Moon—and you’ll make it pay.” “Speak for yourself. I’m not going to the Moon.”

“I am.”

“Hummph! Delos, granting that we have gotten rich by speculating on your hunches, it’s a steel-clad fact that if you keep on gambling you lose your shirt. There’s an old saw about the pitcher that went once too often to the well.”

“Damn it, George—I’m going to the Moon! If you won’t back me up, let’s liquidate and I’ll do it alone.” Strong drummed on his desk top. “Now, Delos, nobody said anything about not backing you up.”   “Fish or cut bait. Now is the opportunity and my mind’s made up. I’m going to be the Man in the Moon.” “Well … let’s get going. We’ll be late to the meeting.”

As they left their joint office, Strong, always penny conscious, was careful to switch off the light. Harriman had seen him do so a thousand times; this time he commented. “George, how about a light switch that turns off automatically when you leave a room?”

“Hmm—but suppose someone were left in the room?”

“Well… hitch it to stay on only when someone was in the room—key the switch to the human body’s heat radiation, maybe.” “Too expensive and too complicated.”

“Needn’t be. I’ll turn the idea over to Ferguson to fiddle with. It should be no larger than the present light switch and cheap enough so that the power saved in a year will pay for it.” “How would it work?” asked Strong.

“How should I know? I’m no engineer; that’s for Ferguson and the other educated laddies.”

Strong objected, “It’s no good commercially. Switching off a light when you leave a room is a matter of temperament. I’ve got it; you haven’t. If a man hasn’t got it, you can’t interest him in such a switch.”

“You can if power continues to be rationed. There is a power shortage now; and there will be a bigger one.” “Just temporary. This meeting will straighten it out.”

“George, there is nothing in this world so permanent as a temporary emergency. The switch will sell.” Strong took out a notebook and stylus. “I’ll call Ferguson in about it tomorrow.”

Harriman forgot the matter, never to think of it again. They had reached the roof; he waved to a taxi, then turned to Strong. “How much could we realize if we unloaded our holdings in

Roadways and in Belt Transport Corporation—yes, and in New World Homes?”

“Huh? Have you gone crazy?”

“Probably. But I’m going to need all the cash you can shake loose for me. Roadways and Belt Transport are no good anyhow; we should have unloaded earlier.” “You are crazy! It’s the one really conservative venture you’ve sponsored.”

“But it wasn’t conservative when I sponsored it. Believe me, George, roadtowns are on their way out. They are growing moribund, just as the railroads did. In a hundred years there won’t be a one left on the continent. What’s the formula for making money, George?”

“Buy low and sell high.”

“That’s only half of it… your half. We’ve got to guess which way things are moving, give them a boost, and see that we are cut in on the ground floor. Liquidate that stuff, George; I’ll need money to operate.” The taxi landed; they got in and took off.

The taxi delivered them to the roof of the Hemisphere Power Building they went to the power syndicate’s board room, as far below ground as the landing platform was above—in those days, despite years of peace, tycoons habitually came to rest at spots relatively immune to atom bombs. The room did not seem like a bomb shelter; it appeared to be a chamber in a luxurious penthouse, for a “view window” back of the chairman’s end of the table looked out high above the city, in convincing, live stereo, relayed from the roof.

The other directors were there before them. Dixon nodded as they came in, glanced at his watch finger and said, “Well, gentlemen, our bad boy is here, we may as well begin.” He took the chairman’s seat and rapped for order.

“The minutes of the last meeting are on your pads as usual. Signal when ready.” Harriman glanced at the summary before him and at once flipped a switch on the table top; a small green light flashed on at his place. Most of the directors did the same.

“Who’s holding up the procession?” inquired Harriman, looking around. “Oh—you, George. Get a move on.”

“I like to check the figures,” his partner answered testily, then flipped his own switch. Alarger green light showed in front of Chainnan Dixon, who then pressed a button; a transparency, sticking an inch or two above the table top in front of him lit up with the word RECORDING.

“Operations report,” said Dixon and touched another switch. Afemale voice came out from nowhere. Harriman followed the report from the next sheet of paper at his place. Thirteen Curie-type power piles were now in operation, up five from the last meeting. The Susquehanna and Charleston piles had taken over the load previously borrowed from Atlantic Roadcity and the roadways of that city were now up to normal speed. It was expected that the Chicago-Angeles road could be restored to speed during the next fortnight. Power would continue to be rationed but the crisis was over.

All very interesting but of no direct interest to Harriman. The power crisis that had been caused by the explosion of the power satellite was being satisfactorily met—very good, but Harriman’s interest in it lay in the fact that the cause of interplanetary travel had thereby received a setback from which it might not recover.

When the Harper-Erickson isotopic artificial fuels had been developed three years before it had seemed that, in addition to solving the dilemma of an impossibly dangerous power source which was also utterly necessary to the economic life of the continent, an easy means had been found to achieve interplanetary travel.

The Arizona power pile had been installed in one of the largest of the Antipodes rockets, the rocket powered with isotopic fuel created in the power pile itself, and the whole thing was placed in an orbit around the Earth. Amuch smaller rocket had shuttled between satellite and Earth, carrying supplies to the staff of the power pile, bringing back synthetic radioactive fuel for the power-hungry technology of Earth.

As a director of the power syndicate Harriman had backed the power satellite—with a private ax to grind: he expected to power a Moon ship with fuel manufactured in the power satellite and thus to achieve the first trip to the Moon almost at once. He had not even attempted to stir the Department of Defense out of its sleep; he wanted no government subsidy—the job was  a cinch; anybody could do it—and Harriman would do it. He had the ship; shortly he would have the fuel.

The ship had been a freighter of his own Antipodes line, her chem-fuel motors replaced, her wings removed. She still waited, ready for fuel—the recommissioned Santa Maria, nee City of Brisbane.

But the fuel was slow in coming. Fuel had to be eannarked for the shuttle rocket; the power needs of a rationed continent came next—and those needs grew faster than the power  satellite could turn out fuel. Far from being ready to supply him for a “useless” Moon trip, the syndicate had seized on the safe but less efficient low temperature uranium-salts and heavy water, Curie-type power piles as a means of using uranium directly to meet the ever growing need for power, rather than build and launch more satellites.

Unfortunately the Curie piles did not provide the fierce star-interior conditions necessary to breeding the isotopic fuels needed for an atomic-powered rocket. Harriman had reluctantly come around to the notion that he would have to use political pressure to squeeze the necessary priority for the fuels he wanted for the Santa Maria.

Then the power satellite had blown up.

Harriman was stirred out of his brown study by Dixon’s voice. “The operations report seems satisfactory, gentlemen. If there is no objection, it will be recorded as accepted. You will note that in the next ninety days we will be back up to the power level which existed before we were forced to close down the Arizona pile.”

“But with no provision for future needs,” pointed out Harriman. “There have been a lot of babies born while we have been sitting here.” “Is that an objection to accepting the report, D.D.?”

“No.”

“Very well. Now the public relations report—let me call attention to the first item, gentlemen. The vice-president in charge recommends a schedule of annuities, benefits, scholarships and so forth for dependents of the staff of the power satellite and of the pilot of the Charon: see appendix ‘C’.”

Adirector across from Harriman—Phineas Morgan, chairman of the food trust, Cuisine, Incorporated—protested, “What is this, Ed? Too bad they were killed of course, but we paid them skyhigh wages and carried their insurance to boot. Why the charity?”

Harriman grunted. “Pay it—I so move. It’s peanuts. ‘Do not bind the mouths of the kine who tread the grain.’” “I wouldn’t call better than nine hundred thousand ‘peanuts,’” protested Morgan.

“Just a minute, gentlemen—” It was the vice-president in charge of public relations, himself a director. “If you’ll look at the breakdown, Mr. Morgan, you will see that eighty-five percent of the appropriation will be used to publicize the gifts.”

Morgan squinted at the figures. “Oh—why didn’t you say so? Well, I suppose the gifts can be considered unavoidable overhead, but it’s a bad precedent.” “Without them we have nothing to publicize.”

“Yes, but—”

Dixon rapped smartly. “Mr. Harriman has moved acceptance. Please signal your desires.” The tally board glowed green; even Morgan, after hesitation, okayed the allotment. “We have a related item next,” said Dixon. “AMrs.—uh, Garfield, through her attorneys, alleges that we are responsible for the congenital crippled condition of her fourth child. The putative facts are that her child was being born just as the satellite exploded and that Mrs. Garfield was then on the meridian underneath the satellite. She wants the court to award her half a million.”

Morgan looked at Harriman. “Delos, I suppose that you will say to settle out of court.” “Don’t be silly. We fight it.”

Dixon looked around, surprised. “Why, D.D.? It’s my guess we could settle for ten or fifteen thousand—and that was what I was about to recommend. I’m surprised that the legal department referred it to publicity.”

“It’s obvious why; it’s loaded with high explosive. But we should fight, regardless of bad publicity. It’s not like the last case; Mrs. Garfield and her brat are not our people. And any dumb

fool knows you can’t mark a baby by radioactivity at birth; you have to get at the germ plasm of the previous generation at least. In the third place, if we let this get by, we’ll be sued for every double-yolked egg that’s laid from now on. This calls for an open allotment for defense and not one damned cent for compromise.”

“It might be very expensive,” observed Dixon.

“It’ll be more expensive not to fight. If we have to, we should buy the judge.”

The public relations chief whispered to Dixon, then announced, “I support Mr. Harriman’s view. That’s my department’s recommendation.”

It was approved. “The next item,” Dixon went on, “is a whole sheaf of suits arising out of slowing down the roadcities to divert power during the crisis. They alleged loss of business, loss of time, loss of this and that, but they are all based on the same issue. The most touchy, perhaps, is a stockholder’s suit which claims that Roadways and this company are so  interlocked that the decision to divert the power was not done in the interests of the stockholders of Roadways. Delos, this is your pidgin; want to speak on it?”

“Forget it.” “Why?”

“Those are shotgun suits. This corporation is not responsible; I saw to it that Roadways volunteered to sell the power because I anticipated this. And the directorates don’t interlock; not on paper, they don’t. That’s why dummies were born. Forget it—for every suit you’ve got there, Roadways has a dozen. We’ll beat them.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“Well—” Harriman lounged back and hung a knee over the arm of his chair. “—a good many years ago I was a Western Union messenger boy. While waiting around the office I read everything I could lay hands on, including the contract on the back of the telegram forms. Remember those? They used to come in big pads of yellow paper; by writing a message on the face of the form you accepted the contract in the fine print on the backT only most people didn’t realize that. Do you know what that contract obhgated the company to do?”

“Send a telegram, I suppose.”

“It didn’t promise a durn thing. The company offered to attempt to deliver the message, by camel caravan or snail back, or some equally streamlined method, if convenient, but in event of failure, the company was not responsible. I read that fine print until I knew it by heart. It was the loveliest piece of prose I had ever seen. Since then all my contracts have been worded on the same principle. Anybody who sues Roadways will find that Roadways can’t be sued on the element of time, because time is not of the essence. In the event of complete non- performance—which hasn’t happened yet— Roadways is financially responsible only for freight charges or the price of the personal transportation tickets. So forget it.”

Morgan sat up. “D.D., suppose I decided to run up to my country place tonight, by the roadway, and there was a failure of some sort so that I didn’t get there until tomorrow? You mean to say Roadways is not liable?”

Harriman grinned. “Roadways is not liable even if you starve to death on the trip. Better use your copter.” He turned back to Dixon. “I move that we stall these suits and let Roadways carry the ball for us.”

“The regular agenda being completed,” Dixon announced later, “time is allotted for our colleague, Mr. Harriman, to speak on a subject of his own choosing. He has not listed a subject in advance, but we will listen until it is your pleasure to adjourn.”

Morgan looked sourly at Harriman. “I move we adjourn.”

Harriman grinned. “For two cents I’d second that and let you die of curiosity.” The motion failed for want of a second. Harriman stood up. “Mr. Chairman, friends—” He then looked at Morgan. “—and associates. As you know, I am interested in space travel.”                     Dixon looked at him sharply. “Not that again, Delos! If I weren’t in the chair, I’d move to adjourn myself.”

“‘That again’,” agreed Harriman. “Now and forever. Hear me out. Three years ago, when we were crowded into moving the Arizona power pile out into space, it looked as if we had a bonus in the shape of interplanetary travel. Some of you here joined with me in forming Spaceways, Incorporated, for experimentation, exploration—and exploitation.

“Space was conquered; rockets that could establish orbits around the globe could be modified to get to the Moon—and from there, anywhere! It was just a matter of doing it. The problems remaining were financial—and political.

“In fact, the real engineering problems of space travel have been solved since World World II. Conquering space has long been a matter of money and politics. But it did seem that the Harper-Erickson process, with its concomitant of a round-the-globe rocket and a practical economical rocket fuel, had at last made it a very present thing, so close indeed that I did not object when the early allotments of fuel from the satellite were earmarked for industrial power.”

He looked around. “I shouldn’t have kept quiet. I should have squawked and brought pressure and made a hairy nuisance of myself until you allotted fuel to get rid of me. For now we have missed our best chance. The satellite is gone; the source of fuel is gone. Even the shuttle rocket is gone. We are back where we were in 19 50. Therefore—”

He paused again. “Therefore—I propose that we build a space ship and send it to the Moon!”                                                Dixon broke the silence. “Delos, have you come unzipped? You just said that it was no longer possible. Now you say to build one.”

“I didn’t say it was impossible; I said we had missed our best chance. The time is overripe for space travel. This globe grows more crowded every day. In spite of technical advances the daily food intake on this planet is lower than it was thirty years ago—and we get 46 new babies every minute, 6;,ooo every day, 25,ooo,ooo every year. Our race is about to burst forth to the planets; if we’ve got the initiative Cod promised an oyster we will help it along!

“Yes, we missed our best chance-but the engineering details can be solved. The real question is who’s going to foot the bill? That is why I address you gentlemen, for right here in this room is the financial capital of this planet.”

Morgan stood up. “Mr. Chairman, if all company business is finished, I ask to be excused.”

Dixon nodded. Harriman said, “So long, Phineas. Don’t let me keep you. Now, as I was saying, it’s a money problem and here is where the money is. I move we finance a trip to the Moon.”

The proposal produced no special excitement; these men knew Harriman. Presently Dixon said, “Is there a second to D.D.’s proposal?”

“Just a minute, Mr. Chairman—” It was Jack Entenza, president of Two-Continents Amusement Corporation. “I want to ask Delos some questions.” He turned to Harriman. “D.D., you know I strung along when you set up Spaceways. It seemed like a cheap venture and possibly profitable in educational and scientific values—I never did fall for space liners plying between planets; that’s fantastic. I don’t mind playing along with your dreams to a moderate extent, but how do you propose to get to the Moon? As you say, you are fresh out of fuel.”

Harriman was still grinning. “Don’t kid me, Jack, I know why you came along. You weren’t interested in science; you’ve never contributed a dime to science. You expected a monopoly on pix and television for your chain. Well, you’ll get ‘em, if you stick with me—otherwise I’ll sign up ‘Recreations, Unlimited’; they’ll pay just to have you in the eye.”

Entenza looked at him suspiciously. “What will it cost me?”                                                    

“Your other shirt, your eye teeth, and your wife’s wedding ring—unless ‘Recreations’ will pay more.” “Damn you, Delos, you’re crookeder than a dog’s hind leg.”

“From you, Jack, that’s a compliment. We’ll do business. Now as to how I’m going to get to the Moon, that’s a silly question. There’s not a man in here who can cope with anything more complicated in the way of machinery than a knife and fork. You can’t tell a left-handed monkey wrench from a reaction engine, yet you ask me for blue prints of a space ship.

“Well, I’ll tell you how I’ll get to the Moon. I’ll hire the proper brain boys, give them everything they want, see to it that they have all the money they can use, sweet talk them into long hours

—then stand back and watch them produce. I’ll run it like the Manhattan Project—most of you remember the A-bomb job; shucks, some of you can remember the Mississippi Bubble. The

chap that headed up the Manhattan Project didn’t know a neutron from Uncle George—but he got results. They solved that trick four ways. That’s why I’m not worried about fuel; we’ll get a fuel. We’ll get several fuels.”

Dixon said, “Suppose it works? Seems to me you’re asking us to bankrupt the company for an exploit with no real value, aside from pure science, and a one-shot entertainment exploitation. I’m not against you—I wouldn’t mind putting in ten, fifteen thousand to support a worthy venture—but I can’t see the thing as a business proposition.”

Harriman leaned on his fingertips and stared down the long table. “Ten or fifteen thousand gum drops! Dan, I mean to get into you for a couple of megabucks at least—and before we’re through you’ll be hollering for more stock. This is the greatest real estate venture since the Pope carved up the New World. Don’t ask me what we’ll make a profit on; I can’t itemize the assets—but I can lump them. The assets are a planet—a whole planet, Dan, that’s never been touched. And more planets beyond it. If we can’t figure out ways to swindle a few fast  bucks out of a sweet set-up like that then you and I had better both go on relief. It’s like having Manhattan Island offered to you for twenty-four dollars and a case of whiskey.”

Dixon grunted. “You make it sound like the chance of a lifetime.”

“Chance of a lifetime, nuts! This is’ the greatest chance in all history. It’s raining soup; grab yourself a bucket.”

Next to Entenza sat Gaston P. Jones, director of Trans-America and half a dozen other banks, one of the richest men in the room. He carefully removed two inches of cigar ash, then said dryly, “Mr. Harriman, I will sell you all of my interest in the Moon, present and future, for fifty cents.”

Harriman looked delighted. “Sold!”

Entenza had been pulling at his lower lip and listening with a brooding expression on his face. Now he spoke up. “Just a minute, Mr. Jones—I’ll give you a dollar for it.” “Dollar fifty,” answered Harriman.

“Two dollars,” Entenza answered slowly. “Five!”

They edged each other up. At ten dollars Entenza let Harriman have it and sat back, still looking thoughtful. Harriman looked happily around. “Which one of you thieves is a lawyer?” he demanded. The remark was rhetorical; out of seventeen directors the normal percentage—eleven, to be exact—were lawyers. “Hey, Tony,” he continued, “draw me up an instrument right now that will tie down this transaction so that it couldn’t be broken before the Throne of God. All of Mr. Jones’ interests, rights, title, natural interest, future interests, interests held directly   or through ownership of stock, presently held or to be acquired, and so forth and so forth. Put lots of Latin in it. The idea is that every interest in the Moon that Mr. Jones now has or may acquire is mine-for a ten spot, cash in hand paid.” Harriman slapped a bill down on the table. “That right, Mr. Jones?”

Jones smiled briefly. “That’s right, young fellow.” He pocketed the bill. “I’ll frame this for my grandchildren—to show them how easy it is to make money.” Entenza’s eyes darted from Jones to Harriman.

“Good!” said Harriman. “Gentlemen, Mr. Jones has set a market price for one human being’s interest in our satellite. With around three billion persons on this globe that sets a price on the Moon of thirty billion dollars.” He hauled out a wad of money. “Any more suckers? I’m buying every share that’s offered, ten bucks a copy.”

“I’ll pay twenty!” Entenza rapped out.

Harriman looked at him sorrowfully. “Jack—don’t do that! We’re on the same team. Let’s take the shares together, at ten.”                                   

Dixon pounded for order. “Gentlemen, please conduct such transactions after the meeting is adjourned. Is there a second to Mr. Harriman’s motion?” Gaston Jones said, “I owe it to Mr. Harriman to second his motion, without prejudice. Let’s get on with a vote.”

No one objected; the vote was taken. It went eleven to three against Harriman—Harriman, Strong, and Entenza for; all others against. Harriman popped up before anyone could move to adjourn and said, “I expected that. My real purpose is this: since the company is no longer interested in space travel, will it do me the courtesy of selling me what I may need of patents, processes, facilities, and so forth now held by the company but relating to space travel and not relating to the production of power on this planet? Our brief honeymoon with the power satellite built up a backlog; I want to use it. Nothing formal—just a vote that it is the policy of the company to assist me in any way not inconsistent with the primary interest of the company. How about it, gentlemen? It’ll get me out of your hair.”

Jones studied his cigar again. “I see no reason why we should not accommodate him, gentlemen … and I speak as the perfect disinterested party.”                                                       

“I think we can do it, Delos,” agreed Dixon, “only we won’t sell you anything, we’ll lend it to you. Then, if you happen to hit the jackpot, the company still retains an interest. Has anyone any objection?” he said to the room at large.

There was none; the matter was recorded as company policy and the meeting was adjourned. Harriman stopped to whisper with Entenza and, finally, to make an appointment. Gaston Jones stood near the door, speaking privately with Chairman Dixon. He beckoned to Strong, Harriman’s partner. “George, may I ask a personal question?”

“I don’t guarantee to answer. Go ahead.”

“You’ve always struck me as a level-headed man. Tell me-why do you string along with Harriman? Why, the man’s mad as a hatter.”                                                                  

Strong looked sheepish. “I ought to deny that, he’s my friend … but I can’t. But dawggone it! Every time Delos has a wild hunch, it turns out to be the real thing. I hate to string along—it

makes me nervous—but I’ve learned to trust his hunches rather than another man’s sworn financial report.”

Jones cocked one brow. “The Midas touch, eh?” “You could call it that.”

“Well, remember what happened to King Midas—in the long run. Good day, gentlemen.”    Harriman had left Entenza; Strong joined him. Dixon stood staring at them, his face very thoughtful.

CHAPTER TWO

HARRIMAN’S HOME had been built at the time when everyone who could was decentralizing and going underground. Above ground there was a perfect little Cape Cod cottage—the clapboards of which concealed armor plate— and most delightful, skillfully landscaped grounds; below ground there was four or five times as much floorspace, immune to anything but  a direct hit and possessing an independent air supply with reserves for one thousand hours. During the Crazy Years the conventional wall surrounding the grounds had been replaced  by a wall which looked the same but which would stop anything short of a broaching tank—nor were the gates weak points; their gadgets were as personally loyal as a well-trained dog.

Despite its fortress-like character the house was comfortable. It was also very expensive to keep up. Harriman did not mind the expense; Charlotte liked the house and it gave her something to do. When they were first married she had lived uncomplainingly in a cramped flat over a

grocery store; if Charlotte now liked to play house in a castle, Harriman did not mind.

But he was again starting a shoe-string venture; the few thousand per month of ready cash represented by the household expenses might, at some point in the game, mean the difference between success and the sheriff’s bailiffs. That night at dinner, after the servants fetched the coffee, and port, he took up the matter.

“My dear, I’ve been wondering how you would like a few months in Florida.”

His wife stared at him. “Florida? Delos, is your mind wandering? Florida is unbearable at this time of the year.” “Switzerland, then. Pick your own spot. Take a real vacation, as long as you like.”                                   

“Delos, you are up to something.”

Harriman sighed. Being “up to something” was the unnameable and unforgivable crime for which any American male could be indicted, tried, convicted, and sentenced in one breath. He wondered how things had gotten rigged so that the male half of the race must always behave to suit feminine rules and feminine logic, like a snotty-nosed school boy in front of a stern teacher.

“In a way, perhaps. We’ve both agreed that this house is a bit of a white elephant. I was thinking of closing it, possibly even of disposing of the land— it’s worth more now than when we bought it. Then, when we get around to it, we could build something more modern and a little less like a bombproof.”

Mrs. Harriman was temporarily diverted. “Well, I have thought it might be nice to build another place, Delos—say a little chalet tucked away in the mountains, nothing ostentatious, not more than two servants, or three. But we won’t close this place until it’s built, Delos—after all, one must live somewhere.”

“I was not thinking of building right away,” he answered cautiously. “Why not? We’re not getting any younger, Delos; if we are to enjoy the good things of life we had better not make delays. You needn’t worry about it; I’ll manage everything.”

Harriman turned over in his mind the possibility of letting her build to keep her busy. If he earmarked the cash for her “little chalet,” she would live in a hotel nearby wherever she decided to build it—and he could sell this monstrosity they were sitting in. With the nearest roadcity now less than ten miles away, the land should bring more than Charlotte’s new house would cost and he would be rid of the monthly drain on his pocketbook.

“Perhaps you are right,” he agreed. “But suppose you do build at once; you won’t be living here; you’ll be supervising every detail of the new place. I say we should unload this place; it’s eating its head off in taxes, upkeep, and running expenses.”

She shook her head. “Utterly out of the question, Delos. This is my home.” He ground out an almost unsmoked cigar. “I’m sorry, Charlotte, but you can’t have it both ways. If you build, you can’t stay here. If you stay here, we’ll close these below-ground catacombs, fire about a dozen of the parasites I keep stumbling over, and live in the cottage on the surface. I’m cutting expenses.”

“Discharge the servants? Delos, if you think that I will undertake to make a home for you without a proper staff, you can just—”

“Stop it.” He stood up and threw his napkin down. “It doesn’t take a squad of servants to make a home. When we were first married you had no servants—and you washed and ironed my shirts in the bargain. But we had a home then. This place is owned by that staff you speak of. Well, we’re getting rid of them, all but the cook and a handy man.”

She did not seem to hear. “Delos! sit down and behave yourself. Now what’s all this about cutting expenses? Are you in some sort of trouble? Are you? Answer me!” He sat down wearily and answered, “Does a man have to be in trouble to want to cut out unnecessary expenses?”

“In your case, yes. Now what is it? Don’t try to evade me.”

“Now see here, Charlotte, we agreed a long time ago that I would keep business matters in the office. As for the house, we simply don’t need a house this size. It isn’t as if we had a passel of kids to fill up—”

“Oh! Blaming me for that again!”

“Now see here, Charlotte,” he wearily began again, “I never did blame you and I’m not blaming you now. All I ever did was suggest that we both see a doctor and find out what the trouble was we didn’t have any kids. And for twenty years you’ve been making me pay for that one remark. But that’s all over and done with now; I was simply making the point that two people don’t fill up twenty-two rooms. I’ll pay a reasonable price for a new house, if you want it, and give you an ample household allowance.” He started to say how much, then decided not to.  “Or you can close this place and live in the cottage above. It’s just that we are going to quit squandering money—for a while.”

She grabbed the last phrase. “‘For a while.’ What’s going on, Delos? What are you going to squander money on?” When he did not answer she went on. “Very well, if you won’t tell me, I’ll call George. He will tell me.”

“Don’t do that, Charlotte. I’m warning you. I’ll—”

“You’ll what!” She studied his face. “I don’t need to talk to George; I can tell by looking at you. You’ve got the same look on your face you had when you came home and told me that you had sunk all our money in those crazy rockets.”

“Charlotte, that’s not fair. Skyways paid off. It’s made us a mint of money.”

“That’s beside the point. I know why you’re acting so strangely; you’ve got that old trip-to-the-Moon madness again. Well, I won’t stand for it, do you hear? I’ll stop you; I don’t bave to put up with it. I’m going right down in the morning and see Mr. Kamens and find out what has to be done to make you behave yourself.” The cords of her neck jerked as she spoke.

He waited, gathering his temper before going on. “Charlotte, you have no real cause for complaint. No matter what happens to me, your future is taken care of.” “Do you think I want to be a widow?”

He looked thoughtfully at her. “I wonder.”

“Why— Why, you heartless beast.” She stood up. “We’ll say no more about it; do you mind?” She left without waiting for an answer.

His “man” was waiting for him when he got to his room. Jenkins got up hastily and started drawing Harriman’s bath. “Beat it,” Harriman grunted. “I can undress myself.” “You require nothing more tonight, sir?”

“Nothing. But don’t go unless you feel like it. Sit down and pour yourself a drink. Ed, how long you been married?” “Don’t mind if I do.” The servant helped himself. “Twenty-three years, come May, sir.”

“How’s it been, if you don’t mind me asking?” –                                                   

“Not bad. Of course there have been times—”                                                        

“I know what you mean. Ed, if you weren’t working for me, what would you be doing?”

“Well, the wife and I have talked many times of opening a little restaurant, nothing pretentious, but good. Aplace where a gentleman could enjoy a quiet meal of good food.” “Stag, eh?”

“No, not entirely, sir—but there would be a parlor’ for gentlemen only. Not even waitresses, I’d tend that room myself.” “Better look around for locations, Ed. You’re practically in business.”

CHAPTER THREE

STRONG ENTERED THEIR JOINT OFFICES the next morning at a precise nine o’clock, as usual. He was startled to find Harriman there before him. For Harriman to fail to show up at all meant nothing; for him to beat the clerks in was significant.

Harriman was busy with a terrestrial globe and a book—the current Nautical Almanac, Strong observed. Harriman barely glanced up. “Morning, George. Say, who’ve we got a line to in Brazil?”

“Why?”

“I need some trained seals who speak Portuguese, that’s why. And some who speak Spanish, too. Not to mention three or four dozen scattered around in this country. I’ve come across something very, very interesting. Look here… according to these tables the Moon only swings about twentyeight, just short of twenty-nine degrees north and south of the equator.” He held  a pencil against the globe and spun it. “Like that. That suggest anything?”

“No. Except that you’re getting pencil marks on a sixty dollar globe.”

“And you an old real estate operator! What does a man own when he buys a parcel of land?” “That depends on the deed. Usually mineral rights and other subsurface rights are-“

“Never mind that. Suppose he buys the works, without splitting the rights: how far down does he own? How far up does he own?”

“Well, he owns a wedge down to the center of the Earth. That was settled in the slant-drilling and off-set oil lease cases. Theoretically he used to own the space above the land, too, out

indefinitely, but that was modified by a series of cases after the commercial airlines came in—and a good thing, for us, too, or we would have to pay tolls every time one of our rockets took off for Australia.”

“No, no, no, George! you didn’t read those cases right. Right of passage was established—but ownership of the space above the land remained unchanged. And even right of passage was not absolute; you can build a thousand-foot tower on your own land right where airplanes, or rockets, or whatever, have been in the habit of passing and the ships will thereafter have to go above it, with no kick back on you. Remember how we had to lease the air south of Hughes Field to insure that our approach wasn’t built up?”

Strong looked thoughtful. “Yes. I see your point. The ancient principle of land ownership remains undisturbed—down to the center of the Earth, up to infinity. But what of it? It’s a purely theoretical matter. You’re not planning to pay tolls to operate those spaceships you’re always talking about, are you?” He grudged a smile at his own wit.

“Not on your tintype. Another matter entirely. George-who owns the Moon?” Strong’s jaw dropped, literally. “Delos, you’re joking.”

“I am not. I’ll ask you again: if basic law says that a man owns the wedge of sky above his farm out to infinity, who owns the Moon? Take a look at this globe and tell me.” Strong looked. “But it can’t mean anything, Delos. Earth laws wouldn’t apply to the Moon.”

“They apply here and that’s where I am worrying about it. The Moon stays constantly over a slice of Earth bounded by latitude twenty-nine north and the same distance south; if one man owned all that belt of Earth—it’s roughly the tropical zone-then he’d own the Moon, too, wouldn’t he? By all the theories of real property ownership that our courts pay any attention to. And, by direct derivation, according to the sort of logic that lawyers like, the various owners of that belt of land have title-good vendable title—to the Moon somehow lodged collectively in them. The fact that the distribution of the title is a little vague wouldn’t bother a lawyer; they grow fat on just such distributed titles every time a will is probated.”

“It’s fantastic!”

“George, when are you going to learn that ‘fantastic’ is a notion that doesn’t bother a lawyer?” “You’re not planning to try to buy the entire tropical zone-that’s what you would have to do.”

“No,” Harriman said slowly, “but it might not be a bad idea to buy right, title and interest in the Moon, as it may appear, from each of the sovereign countries in that belt. If I thought I could keep it quiet and not run the market up, I might try it. You can buy a thing awful cheap from a man if he thinks it’s worthless and wants to sell before you regain your senses.

“But that’s not the plan,” he went on. “George, I want corporations— local corporations—in every one of those countries. I want the legislatures of each of those countries to grant franchises to its local corporation for lunar exploration, exploitation, et cetera, and the right to claim lunar soil on behalf of the country—with fee simple, naturally, being handed on a silver platter to the patriotic corporation that thought up the idea. And I want all this done quietly, so that the bribes won’t go too high. We’ll own the corporations, of course, which is why I need a flock of trained seals. There is going to be one hell of a fight one of these days over who owns the Moon; I want the deck stacked so that we win no matter how the cards are dealt.”

“It will be ridiculously expensive, Delos. And you don’t even know that you will ever get to the Moon, much less that it will be worth anything after you get there.”

“We’ll get there! It’ll be more expensive not to establish these claims. Anyhow it need not be very expensive; the proper use of bribe money is a homoeopathic art—you use it as a catalyst. Back in the middle of the last century four men went from California to Washington with $40,000; it was all they had. Afew weeks later they were broke-but Congress had awarded them a billion dollars’ worth of railroad right of way. The trick is not to run up the market.”

Strong shook his head. “Your title wouldn’t be any good anyhow. The Moon doesn’t stay in one place; it passes over owned land certainly—but so does a migrating goose.”                 

“And nobody has title to a migrating bird. I get your point—but the Moon always stays over that one belt. If you move a boulder in your garden, do you lose title to it? Is it still real estate? Do

the title laws still stand? This is like that group of real estate cases involving wandering islands in the Mississippi, George—the land moved as the river cut new channels, but somebody

always owned it. In this case I plan to see to it that we are the ‘somebody.’”

Strong puckered his brow. “I seem to recall that some of those island-andriparian cases were decided one way and some another.” “We’ll pick the decisions that suit us. That’s why lawyers’ wives have mink coats. Come on, George; let’s get busy.”

“On what?”   “Raising the money.”

“Oh.” Strong looked relieved. “I thought you were planning to use our money.”

“I am. But it won’t be nearly enough. We’ll use our money for the senior financing to get things moving; in the meantime we’ve got to work out ways to keep the money rolling in.” He pressed a switch at his desk; the face of Saul Kamens, their legal chief of staff, sprang out at him. “Hey, Saul, can you slide in for a p0w-wow?”

“WThatever it is, just tell them ‘no,’” answered the attorney. “I’ll fix it.”                        

“Good. Now come on in—they’re moving Hell and I’ve got an option on the first ten loads.”

Kamens showed up in his own good time. Some minutes later Harriman had explained his notion for claiming the Moon ahead of setting foot on it. “Besides those dummy corporations,” he went on, “we need an agency that can receive contributions without having to admit any financial interest on the part of the contributor—like the National Geographic Society.”

Kamens shook his head. “You can’t buy the National Geographic Society.” “Damn it, who said we were going to? We’ll set up our own.”

“That’s what I started to say.”

“Good. As I see it, we need at least one tax-free, non-profit corporation headed up by the right people-we’ll hang on to voting control, of course. We’ll probably need more than one; we’ll set them up as we need them. And we’ve got to have at least one new ordinary corporation, not tax-free— but it won’t show a profit until we are ready. The idea is to let the nonprofit corporations have all of the prestige and all of the publicity—and the other gets all of the profits, if and when. We swap assets around between corporations, always for perfectly valid reasons, so that the non-profit corporations pay the expenses as we go along. Come to think about it, we had better have at least two ordinary corporations, so that we can let one of them go through bankruptcy if we find it necessary to shake out the water. That’s the general sketch. Get busy and fix it up so that it’s legal, will you?”

Kamens said, “You know, Delos, it would be a lot more honest if you did it at the point of a gun.” “Alawyer talks to me of honesty! Never mind, Saul; I’m not actually going to cheat anyone-“ “Humph!”

“—and I’m just going to make a trip to the Moon. That’s what everybody will be paying for; that’s what they’ll get. Now fix it up so that it’s legal, that’s a good boy.”

“I’m reminded of something the elder Vanderbilt’s lawyer said to the old man under similar circumstances: ‘It’s beautiful the way it is; why spoil it by making it legal?’ Okeh, brother gonoph, I’ll rig your trap. Anything else?”

“Sure. Stick around, you might have some ideas. George, ask Montgomery to come in, will you?” Montgomery, Harriman’s publicity chief, had two virtues in his employer’s eyes: he was personally loyal to Harriman, and, secondly, he was quite capable of planning a campaign to convince the public that Lady Godiva wore a Caresse-brand girdle during her famous ride

or that Hercules attributed his strength to Crunchies for breakfast. He arrived with a large portfolio under his arm. “Glad you sent for me, Chief. Get a load of this—” He spread the folder open on Harriman’s desk and began displaying sketches and layouts. “Kinsky’s work—is that boy hot!” Harriman closed the portfolio. “What outfit is it for?”

“Huh? New World Homes.”

“I don’t want to see it; we’re dumping New World Homes. Wait a minute-don’t start to bawl. Have the boys go through with it; I want the price kept up while we unload. But open your ears to another matter.” He explained rapidly the new enterprise.

Presently Montgomery was nodding. “When do we start and how much do we spend?”

“Right away and spend what you need to. Don’t get chicken about expenses; this is the biggest thing we’ve ever tackled.” Strong flinched; Harriman went on, “Have insomnia over it tonight; see me tomorrow and we’ll kick it around.”

“Wait a see, Chief. How are you going to sew up all those franchises from the, uh—the Moon states, those countries the Moon passes over, while a big publicity campaign is going on about a trip to the Moon and how big a thing it is for everybody? Aren’t you about to paint yourself into a corner?”

“Do I look stupid? We’ll get the franchise before you hand out so much as a filler—you’ll get ‘em, you and Kamens. That’s your first job.” “Hmmm… .” Montgomery chewed a thumb nail. “Well, all right—I can see some angles. How soon do we have to sew it up?”                

“I give you six weeks. Otherwise just mail your resignation in, written on the skin off your back.”

“I’ll write it right now, if you’ll help me by holding a mirror.”

“Damn it, Monty, I know you can’t do it in six weeks. But make it fast; we can’t take a cent in to keep the thing going until you sew up those franchises. If you dilly-dally, we’ll all starve-and we won’t get to the Moon, either.”

Strong said, “D.D., why fiddle with those trick claims from a bunch of moth-eaten tropical countries? If you are dead set on going to the Moon, let’s call Ferguson in and get on with the matter.”

“I like your direct approach, George,” Harriman said, frowning. “Mmmm back about i 84; or ‘46 an eager-beaver American army officer captured California. You know what the State Department did?”

“They made him hand it back. Seems he hadn’t touched second base, or something. So they had to go to the trouble of capturing it all over again a few months later. Now I don’t want that to happen to us. It’s not enough just to set foot on the Moon and claim it; we’ve got to validate that claim in terrestrial courts—or we’re in for a peck of trouble. Eh, Saul?”

Kamens nodded. “Remember what happened to Columbus.”            “Exactly. We aren’t going to let ourselves be rooked the way Columbus was.”

Montgomery spat out some thumb nail. “But, Chief—you know damn well those banana-state claims won’t be worth two cents after I do tie them up. Why not get a franchise right from the

U.N. and settle the matter? I’d as lief tackle that as tackle two dozen cockeyed legislatures. In fact I’ve got an angle already—we work it through the Security Council and—”

“Keep working on that angle; we’ll use it later. You don’t appreciate the full mechanics of the scheme, Monty. Of course those claims are worth nothing—except nuisance value. But their nuisance value is all important. Listen: we get to the Moon, or appear about to. Every one of those countries puts up a squawk; we goose them into it through the dummy corporations   they have enfranchised. Where do they squawk? To the U.N., of course. Now the big countries on this globe, the rich and important ones, are all in the northern temperate zone. They see what the claims are based on and they take a frenzied look at the globe. Sure enough, the Moon does not pass over a one of them. The biggest country of all—Russia-doesn’t own a spadeful of dirt south of twenty-nine north. So they reject all the claims.

“Or do they?” Harriman went on. “The U.S. balks. The Moon passes over Florida and the southern part of Texas. Washington is in a tizzy. Should they back up the tropical countries and support the traditional theory of land title or should they throw their weight to the idea that the Moon belongs to everyone? Or should the United States try to claim the whole thing, seeing as how it was Americans who actually got there first?

“At this point we creep out from under cover. It seems that the Moon ship was owned and the expenses paid by a non-profit corporation chartered by the U.N. itself—” “Hold it,” interrupted Strong. “I didn’t know that the U.N. could create corporations?”

“You’ll find it can,” his partner answered. “How about it, Saul?” Kamens nodded. “Anyway,” Harriman continued, “I’ve already got the corporation. I had it set up several years ago. It can do most anything of an educational or scientific nature-and brother, that covers a lot of ground! Back to the point—this corporation, the creature of the U.N., asks its parent to declare the    lunar colony autonomous territory, under the protection of the U.N. We won’t ask for outright membership at first because we want to keep it simple—”

“Simple, he calls it!” said Montgomery.

“Simple. This new colony will be a de facto sovereign state, holding title to the entire Moon, and—listen closely!—capable of buying, selling, passing laws, issuing title to land, setting up monopolies, collecting tariffs, et cetera without end. And we own it.”

“The reason we get all this is because the major states in the U.N. can’t think up a claim that sounds as legal as the claim made by the tropical states, they can’t agree among themselves as to how to split up the swag if they were to attempt brute force and the other major states aren’t willing to see the United States claim the whole thing. They’ll take the easy way out of their dilemma by appearing to retain title in the U.N. itself. The real title, the title controlling all economic and legal matters, will revert to us. Now do you see my point, Monty?”

Montgomery grinned. “Damned if I know if it’s necessary, Chief, but I love it. It’s beautiful.”                                                                                                                                      “Well, I don’t think so,” Strong grumbled. “Delos, I’ve seen you rig some complicated deals—some of them so devious that they turned even my stomach—but this one is the worst yet. I

think you’ve been carried away by the pleasure you get out of cooking up involved deals in which somebody gets double-crossed.”

Harriman puffed hard on his cigar before answering, “I don’t give a damn, George. Call it chicanery, call it anything you want to. I’m going to the Moon! If I have to manipulate a million people to accomplish it, I’ll do it.”

“But it’s not necessary to do it this way.” “Well, how would you do it?”

“Me? I’d set up a straightforward corporation. I’d get a resolution in Congress making my corporation the chosen instrument of the United States—” “Bribery?”

“Not necessarily. Influence and pressure ought to be enough. Then I would set about raising the money and make the trip.” “And the United States would then own the Moon?”

“Naturally,” Strong answered a little stiffly.

Harriman got up and began pacing. “You don’t see it, George, you don’t see it. The Moon was not meant to be owned by a single country, even the United States.” “It was meant to be owned by you, I suppose.”

“Well, if I own it—for a short while—I won’t misuse it and I’ll take care that others don’t. Damnation, nationalism should stop at the stratosphere. Can you see what would happen if the United States lays claim to the Moon? The other nations won’t recognize the claim. It will become a permanent bone of contention in the Security Council—just when we were beginning   to get straightened out to the point where a man could do business planning without having his elbow jogged by a war every few years. The other nations—quite rightfully—will be scared to death of the United States. They will be able to look up in the sky any night and see the main atom-bomb rocket base of the United States staring down the backs of their necks. Are   they going to hold still for it? No, sirree—they are going to try to clip off a piece of the Moon for their own national use. The Moon is too big to hold, all at once. There will be other bases established there and presently there will be the worst war this planet has ever seen—and we’ll be to blame.

“No, it’s got to be an arrangement that everybody will hold still for—and that’s why we’ve got to plan it, think of all the angles, and be devious about it until we are in a position to make it work.

“Anyhow, George, if we claim it in the name of the United States, do you know where we will be, as business men?” “In the driver’s seat,” answered Strong.

“In a pig’s eye! We’ll be dealt right out of the game. The Department of National Defense will say, ‘Thank you, Mr. Harriman. Thank you, Mr. Strong. We are taking over in the interests of

national security; you can go home now.’ And that’s just what we would have to do—go home and wait for the next atom war.

“I’m not going to do it, George. I’m not going to let the brass hats muscle in. I’m going to set up a lunar colony and then nurse it along until it is big enough to stand on its own feet. I’m telling you—all of you!—this is the biggest thing for the human race since the discovery of fire. Handled right, it can mean a new and braver world. Handle it wrong and it’s a one-way ticket to Armageddon. It’s coming, it’s coming soon, whether we touch it or not. But I plan to be the Man in the Moon myself—and give it my personal attention to see that it’s handled right.”

He paused. Strong said, “Through with your sermon, Delos?”

“No, I’m not,” Harriman denied testily. “You don’t see this thing the right way. Do you know what we may find up there?” He swung his arm in an arc toward the ceiling. “People!” “On the Moon?” said Kamens.

“Why not on the Moon?” whispered Montgomery to Strong.

“No, not on the Moon—at least I’d be amazed if we dug down and found anybody under that airless shell. The Moon has had its day; I was speaking of the other planets—Mars and Venus and the satellites of Jupiter. Even maybe out at the stars themselves. Suppose we do find people? Think what it will mean to us. We’ve been alone, all alone, the only intelligent race in the only world we know. We haven’t even been able to talk with dogs or apes. Any answers we got we had to think up by ourselves, like deserted orphans. But suppose we find people, intelligent people, who have done some thinking in their own way. We wouldn’t be alone any more! We could look up at the stars and never be afraid again.”

He finished, seeming a little tired and even a little ashamed of his outburst, like a man surprised in a private act. He stood facing them, searching their faces. “Gee whiz, Chief,” said Montgomery, “I can use that. How about it?”

“Think you can remember it?”                

“Don’t need to—I flipped on your ‘silent steno.” “Well, damn your eyes!”

“We’ll put it on video—in a play I think.”                                                                     

Harriman smiled almost boyishly. “I’ve never acted, but if you think it’ll do any good, I’m game.”

“Oh, no, not you, Chief,” Montgomery answered in horrified tones. “You’re not the type. I’ll use Basil Wilkes-Booth, I think. With his organlike voice and that beautiful archangel face, he’ll really send ‘em.”

Harriman glanced down at his paunch and said gruffly, “O.K.—back to business. Now about money. In the first place we can go after straight donations to one of the non-profit corporations, just like endowments for colleges. Hit the upper brackets, where tax deductions really matter. How much do you think we can raise that way?”

“Very little,” Strong opined. “That cow is about milked dry.”

“It’s never milked dry, as long as there are rich men around who would rather make gifts than pay taxes. How much will a man pay to have a crater on the Moon named after him?”  “I thought they all had names?” remarked the lawyer.

“Lots of them don’t—and we have the whole back face that’s not touched yet. We won’t try to put down an estimate today; we’ll just list it. Monty, I want an angle to squeeze dimes out of the school kids, too. Forty million school kids ‘at a dime a head is $4,000,000.00—we can use that.”

“Why stop at a dime?” asked Monty. “If you get a kid really interested he’ll scrape together a dollar.”    “Yes, but what do we offer him for it? Aside from the honor of taking part in a noble venture and so forth?”

“Mmmm… .” Montgomery used up more thumb nail. “Suppose we go after both the dimes and the dollars. For a dime he gets a card saying that he’s a member of the Moonbeam club—” “No, the ‘Junior Spacemen’.”

“O.K., the Moonbeams will be girls—and don’t forget to rope the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts into it, too. We give each kid a card; when he kicks in another dime, we punch it. When he’s punched out a dollar, we give him a certificate, suitable for framing, with his name and some process engraving, and on the back a picture of the Moon.”

“On the front,” answered Harriman. “Do it in one print job; it’s cheaper and it’ll look better. We give him something else, too, a steelclad guarantee that his name will be on the rolls of the Junior Pioneers of the Moon, which same will be placed in a monument to be erected on the Moon at the landing site of the first Moon ship—in microfilm, of course; we have to watch weight.”

“Fine!” agreed Montgomery. “Want to swap jobs, Chief? V/hen he gets up to ten dollars we give him a genuine, solid gold-plated shooting star pin ~nd he’s a senior Pioneer, with the right to vote or something or other. And his name goes outside of the monument—microengraved on a platinum strip.”

Strong looked as if he had bitten a lemon. “What happens when he reaches a hundred dollars?” he asked.

“Why, then,” Montgomery answered happily, “we give him another card and he can start over. Don’t worry about it, Mr. Strong—if any kid goes that high, he’ll have his reward. Probably we will take him on an inspection tour of the ship before it takes off and give him, absolutely free, a picture of himself standing in front of it, with the pilot’s own signature signed across the bottom by some female clerk.”

“Chiseling from kids. Bah!”

“Not at all,” answered Montgomery in hurt tones. “Intangibles are the most honest merchandise anyone can sell. They are always worth whatever you are willing to pay for them and they never wear out. You can take them to your grave untarnished.”

“Hmmmph!”

Harriman listened to this, smiling and saying nothing. Kamens cleared his throat. “If you two ghouls are through cannibalizing the youth of the land, I’ve another idea.” “Spill it.”

“George, you collect stamps, don’t you?” “Yes.”

“How much would a cover be worth which had been to the Moon and been cancelled there?” “Huh? But you couldn’t, you know.”

“I think we could get our Moon ship declared a legal post office substation without too much trouble. What would it be worth?” “Uh, that depends on how rare they are.”

“There must be some optimum number which will fetch a maximum return. Can you estimate it?”

Strong got a faraway look in his eye, then took out an old-fashioned pencil and commenced to figure. Harriman went on, “Saul, my minor success in buying a share in the Moon from Jones went to my head. How about selling building lots on the Moon?”

“Let’s keep this serious, Delos. You can’t do that until you’ve landed there.”

“I am serious. I know you are thinking of that ruling back in the ‘forties that such land would have to be staked out and accurately described. I want to sell land on the Moon. You figure out  a way to make it legal. I’ll sell the whole Moon, if I can—surface rights, mineral rights, anything.”

“Suppose they want to occupy it?”

“Fine. The more the merrier. I’d like to point out, too, that we’ll be in a position to assess taxes on what we have sold. If they don’t use it and won’t pay taxes, it reverts to us. Now you figure out how to offer it, without going to jail. You may have to advertise it abroad, then plan to peddle it personally in this country, like Irish Sweepstakes tickets.”

Kamens looked thoughtful. “We could incorporate the land company in Panama and advertise by video and radio from Mexico. Do you really think you can sell the stuff?” “You can sell snowballs in Greenland,” put in Montgomery. “It’s a matter of promotion.”

Harriman added, “Did you ever read about the Florida land boom, Saul? People bought lots they had never seen and sold them at tripled prices without ever having laid eyes on them. Sometimes a parcel would change hands a dozen times before anyone got around to finding out that the stuff was ten-foot deep in water. We can offer bargains better than that—an acre,  a guaranteed dry acre with plenty of sunshine, for maybe ten dollars—or a thousand acres at a dollar an acre. Who’s going to turn down a bargain like that? Particularly after the rumor  gets around that the Moon is believed to be loaded with uranium?”

“Is it?”

“How should I know? When the boom sags a little we will announce the selected location of Luna City—and it will just happen to work out that the land around the site is still available for sale. Don’t worry, Saul, if it’s real estate, George and I can sell it. Why, down in the Ozarks, where the land stands on edge, we used to sell both sides of the same acre.” Harriman looked thoughtful. “I think we’ll reserve mineral rights—there just might actually be uranium there!”

Kamens chuckled. “Delos, you are a kid at heart. Just a great big, overgrown, lovable—juvenile delinquent.” Strong straightened up. “I make it half a million,” he said.

“Half a million what?” asked Harriman.

“For the cancelled philatelic covers, of course. That’s what we were talking about. Five thousand is my best estimate of the number that could be placed with serious collectors and with dealers. Even then we will have to discount them to a syndicate and hold back until the ship is built and the trip looks like a probability.”

“Okay,” agreed Harriman. “You handle it. I’ll just note that we can tap you for an extra half million toward the end.” “Don’t I get a commission?” asked Kamens. “I thought of it.”

“You get a rising vote of thanks—and ten acres on the Moon. Now what other sources of revenue can we hit?” “Don’t you plan to sell stock?” asked Kamens.

“I was coming to that. Of course-but no preferred stock; we don’t want to be forced through a reorganization. Participating common, non-voting—” “Sounds like another banana-state corporation to me.”

“Naturally—but I want some of it on the New York Exchange, and you’ll have to work that out with the Securities Exchange Commission somehow. Not too much of it—that’s our show case and we’ll have to keep it active and moving up.”

“Wouldn’t you rather I swam the Hellespont?”                      

“Don’t be like that, Saul. It beats chasing ambulances, doesn’t it?” “I’m not sure.”

“Well, that’s what I want you—wups!” The screen on Harriman’s desk had come to life. Agirl said, “Mr. Harriman, Mr. Dixon is here. He has no appointment but he says that you want to see him.”

“I thought I had that thing shut off,” muttered Harriman, then pressed his key and said, “O.K., show him in.” “Very well, sir—oh, Mr. Harriman, Mr. Entenza came in just this second.”

“Look who’s talking,” said Kamens.                                                                                                                                            Dixon came in with Entenza behind him. He sat down, looked around, started to speak, then checked himself. He looked around again, especially at Entenza. “Go ahead, Dan,” Harriman encouraged him. “‘Tain’t nobody here at all but just us chickens.”

Dixon made up his mind. “I’ve decided to come in with you, D.D.,” he announced. “As an act of faith I went to the trouble of getting this.” He took a formal-looking instrument from his pocket and displayed it. It was a sale of lunar rights, from Phineas Morgan to Dixon, phrased in exactly the same fashion as that which Jones had granted to Harriman.

Entenza looked startled, then dipped into his own inner coat pocket. Out came three more sales contracts of the same sort, each from a director of the power syndicate. Harriman cocked an eyebrow at them. “Jack sees you and raises you two, Dan. You want to call?”

Dixon smiled ruefully. “I can just see him.” He added two more to the pile, grinned and offered his hand to Entenza.

“Looks like a stand off.” Harriman decided to say nothing just yet about seven telestated contracts now locked in his desk—after going to bed the night before he had been quite busy on the phone almost till midnight. “Jack, how much did you pay for those things?”

“Standish held out for a thousand; the others were cheap.”                                     

“Damn it, I warned you not to run the price up. Standish will gossip. How about you, Dan?” “I got them at satisfactory prices.”

“So you won’t talk, eh? Never mind—gentlemen, how serious are you about this? How much money did you bring with you?” Entenza looked to Dixon, who answered, “How much does it take?”

“How much can you raise?” demanded Harriman.                                       Dixon shrugged. “We’re getting no place. Let’s use figures. Ahundred thousand.”

Harriman sniffed. “I take it what you really want is to reserve a seat on the first regularly scheduled Moon ship. I’ll sell it to you at that price.” “Let’s quit sparring, Delos. How much?”

Harriman’s face remained calm but he thought furiously. He was caught short, with too little information—he had not even talked figures with his chief engineer as yet. Confound it! Why had he left that phone hooked in? “Dan, as I warned you, it will cost you at least a million just to sit down in this game.”

“So I thought. How much will it take to stay in the game?” “All you’ve got.”                                                    

“Don’t be silly, Delos. I’ve got more than you have.”

Harriman lit a cigar, his only sign of agitation. “Suppose you match us, dollar for dollar.” “For which I get two shares?”

“Okay, okay, you chuck in a buck whenever each of us does—share and share alike. But I run things.”

“You run the operations,” agreed Dixon. “Very well, I’ll put up a million now and match you as necessary. You have no objection to me having my own auditor, of course.” “When have I ever cheated you, Dan?”

“Never and there is no need to start.”                                                                          

“Have it your own way—but be damned sure you send a man who can keep his mouth shut.” “He’ll keep quiet. I keep his heart in a jar in my safe.”

Harriman was thinking about the extent of Dixon’s assets. “We just might let you buy in with a second share later, Dan. This operation will be expensive.” Dixon fitted his finger tips carefully together. “We’ll meet that question when we come to it. I don’t believe in letting an enterprise fold up for lack of capital.” “Good.” Harriman turned to Entenza. “You heard what Dan had to say, Jack. Do you like the terms?”

Entenza’s forehead was covered with sweat. “I can’t raise a million that fast.”

“That’s all right, Jack. We don’t need it this morning. Your note is good; you can take your time liquidating.”

“But you said a million is just the beginning. I can’t match you indefinitely; you’ve got to place a limit on it. I’ve got my family to consider.” “No annuities, Jack? No monies transferred in an irrevocable trust?”

“That’s not the point. You’ll be able to squeeze me-freeze me out.”

Harriman waited for Dixon to say something. Dixon finally said, “We wouldn’t squeeze you, Jack—as long as you could prove you had converted every asset you hold. We would let you stay in on a pro rata basis.”

Harriman nodded. “That’s right, Jack.” He was thinking that any shrinkage in Entenza’s share would give himself and Strong a clear voting majority.           Strong had been thinking of something of the same nature, for he spoke up suddenly, “I don’t like this. Four equal partners—we can be deadlocked too easily.” Dixon shrugged. “I refuse to worry about it. I am in this because I am betting that Delos can manage to make it profitable.”

“We’ll get to the Moon, Dan!”

“I didn’t say that. I am betting that you will show a profit whether we get to the Moon or not. Yesterday evening I spent looking over the public records of several of your companies; they were very interesting. I suggest we resolve any possible deadlock by giving the Director—that’s you, Delos— the power to settle ties. Satisfactory, Entenza?”

“Oh, sure!”

Harriman was worried but tried not to show it. He did not trust Dixon, even bearing gifts. He stood up suddenly. “I’ve got to run, gentlemen. I leave you to Mr. Strong and Mr. Kamens.  Come along, Monty.” Kamens, he was sure, would not spill anything prematurely, even to nominal full partners. As for Strong—George, he knew, had not even let his left hand know how many fingers there were on his right.

He dismissed Montgomery outside the door of the partners’ personal office and went across the hall. Andrew Ferguson, chief engineer of Harriman Enterprises, looked up as he came in. “Howdy, Boss. Say, Mr. Strong gave me an interesting idea for a light switch this morning. It did not seem practical at first but—”

“Skip it. Let one of the boys have it and forget it. You know the line we are on now.” “There have been rumors,” Ferguson answered cautiously.

“Fire the man that brought you the rumor. No-send him on a special mission to Tibet and keep him there until we are through. Well, let’s get on with it. I want you to build a Moon ship as quickly as possible.”

Ferguson threw one leg over the arm of his chair, took out a pen knife and began grooming his nails. “You say that like it was an order to build a privy.”                                          

“Why not? There have been theoretically adequate fuels since way back in ‘49. You get together the team to design it and the gang to build it; you build it—I pay the bills. What could be

simpler?”

Ferguson stared at the ceiling. “‘Adequate fuels—’” he repeated dreamily.

“So I said. The figures show that hydrogen and oxygen are enough to get a step rocket to the Moon and back—it’s just a matter of proper design.”

“‘Proper design,’ he says,” Ferguson went on ifl the same gentle voice, then suddenly swung around, jabbed the knife into the scarred desk top and bellowed, “What do you know about proper design? Where do I get the steels? What do I use for a throat liner? How in the hell do I burn enough tons of your crazy mix per second to keep from wasting all my power breaking loose? How can I get a decent mass-ratio with a step rocket? Why in the hell didn’t you let me build a proper ship when we had the fuel?”

Harriman waited for him to quiet down, then said, “What do we do about it, Andy?”

“Hmmm… . I was thinking about it as I lay abed last night—and my old lady is sore as hell at you; I had to finish the night on the couch. In the first place, Mr. Harriman, the proper way to tackle this is to get a research appropriation from the Department of National Defense. Then you—”

“Damn it, Andy, you stick to engineering and let me handle the political and financial end of it. I don’t want your advice.”

“Damn it, Delos, don’t go off half-cocked. This is engineering I’m talking about. The government owns a whole mass of former art about rocketry—all classified. Without a government contract you can’t even get a peek at it.”

“It can’t amount to very much. What can a government rocket do that a Skyways rocket can’t do? You told me yourself that Federal rocketry no longer amounted to anything.” Ferguson looked supercilious. “I am afraid I can’t explain it in lay terms. You will have to take it for granted that we need those government research reports. There’s no sense in

spending thousands of dollars in doing work that has already been done.”

“Spend the thousands.” “Maybe millions.”

“Spend the millions. Don’t be afraid to spend money. Andy, I don’t want this to be a military job.” He considered elaborating to the engineer the involved politics back of his decision, thought better of it. “How bad do you actually need that government stuff? Can’t you get the same results by hiring engineers who used to work for the government? Or even hire them away from the government right now?”

Ferguson pursed his lips. “If you insist on hampering me, how can you expect me to get results?”

“I am not hampering you. I am telling you that this is not a government project. If you won’t attempt to cope with it on those terms, let me know now, so that I can find somebody who will.” Ferguson started playing mumblety-peg on his desk top. When he got to “noses”—and missed—he said quietly, “I mind a boy who used to work for the government at White Sands. He

was a very smart lad indeed-design chief of section.”

“You mean he might head up your team?” “That was the notion.”

“What’s his name? Where is he? Who’s he working for?”

“Well, as it happened, when the government closed down White Sands, it seemed a shame to me that a good boy should be out of a job, so I placed him with Skyways. He’s maintenance chief engineer out on the Coast.”

“Maintenance? What a hell of a job for a creative man! But you mean he’s working for us now? Get him on the screen. No—call the coast and have them send him here in a special rocket; we’ll all have lunch together.”

“As it happens,” Ferguson said quietly, “I got up last night and called him—that’s what annoyed the Missus. He’s waiting outside. Coster—Bob Coster.” Aslow grin spread over Harriman’s face. “Andy! You black-hearted old scoundrel, why did you pretend to balk?”

“I wasn’t pretending. I like it here, Mr. Harriman. Just as long as you don’t interfere, I’ll do my job. Now my notion is this: we’ll make young Coster chief engineer of the project and give him his head. I won’t joggle his elbow; I’ll just read the reports. Then you leave him alone, d’you hear me? Nothing makes a good technical man angrier than to have some incompetent nitwit with a check book telling him how to do his job.”

“Suits. And I don’t want a penny-pinching old fool slowing him down, either. Mind you don’t interfere with him, either, or I’ll jerk the rug out from under you. Do we understand each other?”  “I think we do.”

“Then get him in here.”

Apparently Ferguson’s concept of a “lad” was about age thirty-five, for such Harriman judged Coster to be. He was tall, lean, and quietly eager. Harriman braced him immediately after shaking hands with, “Bob, can you build a rocket that will go to the Moon?”

Coster took it without blinking. “Do you have a source of X-fuel?” he countered, giving the rocket man’s usual shorthand for the isotope fuel formerly produced by the power satellite. Coster remained perfectly quiet for several seconds, then answered, “I can put an unmanned messenger rocket on the face of the Moon.”                                                          

“Not good enough. I want it to go there, land, and come back. Whether it lands here under power or by atmosphere braking is unimportant.”                                                            

It appeared that Coster never answered promptly; Harriman had the fancy that he could hear wheels turning over in the man’s head. “That would be a very expensive job.”           “Who asked you how much it would cost? Can you do it?”

“I could try.”

“Try, hell. Do you think you can do it? Would you bet your shirt on it? Would you be willing to risk your neck in the attempt? If you don’t believe in yourself, man, you’ll always lose.” “How much will you risk, sir? I told you this would be expensive-and I doubt if you have any idea how expensive.”                                                                                           “And I told you not to worry about money. Spend what you need; it’s my job to pay the bills. Can you do it?”

“I can do it. I’ll let you know later how much it will cost and how long it will take.”

“Good. Start getting your team together. Where are we going to do this, Andy?” he added, turning to Ferguson. “Australia?” “No.” It was Coster who answered. “It can’t be Australia; I want a mountain catapult. That will save us one step-combination.” “How big a mountain?” asked Harriman~ “Will Pikes Peak do?”

“It ought to be in the Andes,” objected Ferguson. “The mountains are taller and closer to the equator. After all, we own facilities there—or the Andes Development Company does.”

“Do as you like, Bob,” Harriman told Coster. “I would prefer Pikes Peak, but it’s up to you.” He was thinking that there were tremendous business advantages to locating Earth’s space port ~ i inside the United States—and he could visualize the advertising advantage of having Moon ships blast off from the top of Pikes Peak, in plain view of everyone for hundreds of miles to the East.

“I’ll let you know.”

“Now about salary. Forget whatever it was we were paying you; how much do you want?” Coster actually gestured, waving the subject away. “I’ll work for coffee and cakes.”   “Don’t be silly.”

“Let me finish. Coffee and cakes and one other thing: I get to make the trip.

Harriman blinked. “Well, I can understand that,” he said slowly. “In the meantime I’ll put you on a drawing account.” He added, “Better calculate for a three-man ship, unless you are a pilot.”

“I’m not.”

“Three men, then. You see, I’m going along, too.”

CHAPTER FOUR

“AGOOD THING YOU DECIDED to come in, Dan,” Harriman was saying, “or you would find yourself out of a job. I’m going to put an awful crimp in the power company before I’m through with this.”

Dixon buttered a roll. “Really? How?”

“We’ll set up high-temperature piles, like the Arizona job, just like the one that blew up, around the corner on the far face of the Moon. We’ll remote-control them; if one explodes it won’t matter. And I’ll breed more X-fuel in a week than the company turned out in three months. Nothing personal about it; it’s just that I want a source of fuel for interplanetary liners. If we can’t get good stuff here, we’ll have to make it on the Moon.”

“Interesting. But where do you propose to get the uranium for six piles? The last I heard the Atomic Energy Commission had the prospective supply earmarked twenty years ahead.” “Uranium? Don’t be silly; we’ll get it on the Moon.”

“On the Moon? Is there uranium on the Moon?”                              

“Didn’t you know? I thought that was why you decided to join up with me?” “No, I didn’t know,” Dixon said deliberately. “What proof have you?”

“Me? I’m no scientist, but it’s a well-understood fact. Spectroscopy, or something. Catch one of the professors. But don’t go showing too much interest; we aren’t ready to show our hand.” Harriman stood up. “I’ve got to run, or I’ll miss the shuttle for Rotterdam. Thanks for the lunch.” He grabbed his hat and left.

Harriman stood up. “Suit yourself, Mynheer van der Velde. I’m giving you and your colleagues a chance to hedge your bets. Your geologists all agree that diamonds result from volcanic action. What do you think we will find there?” He dropped a large photograph of the Moon on the Hollander’s desk.

The diamond merchant looked impassively at the pictured planet, pockmarked by a thousand giant craters. “If you get there, Mr. Harriman.”

Harriman swept up the picture. “We’ll get there. And we’ll find diamonds—though I would be the first to admit that it may be twenty years or even forty before there is a big enough strike to matter. I’ve come to you because I believe that the worst villain in our social body is a man who introduces a major new economic factor without planning his innovation in such a way as  to permit peaceful adjustment. I don’t like panics. But all I can do is warn you. Good day.”

“Sit down, Mr. Harriman. I’m always confused when a man explains how he is going to do me good. Suppose you tell me instead how this is going to do you good? Then we can discuss

how to protect the world market against a sudden influx of diamonds from the Moon.”

Harriman sat down.

Harriman liked the Low Countries. He was delighted to locate a dog-drawn milk cart whose young master wore real wooden shoes; he happily took pictures and tipped the child heavily, unaware that the set-up was arranged for tourists. He visited several other diamond merchants but without speaking of the Moon. Among other purchases he found a brooch for Charlotte— a peace offering.

Then he took a taxi to London, planted a story with the representatives of the diamond syndicate there, arranged with his London solicitors to be insured by Lloyd’s of London through a dummy, against a successful Moon flight, and called his home office. He listened to numerous reports, especially those concerning Montgomery, and found that Montgomery was in New Delhi. He called him there, spoke with him at length, then hurried to the port just in time to catch his ship. He was in Colorado the next morning.

At Peterson Field, east of Colorado Springs, he had trouble getting through the gate, even though it was now his domain, under lease. Of course he could have called Coster and gotten it straightened out at once, but he wanted to look around before seeing Coster. Fortunately the head guard knew him by sight; he got in and wandered around for an hour or more, a tn- colored badge pinned to his coat to give him freedom.

The machine shop was moderately busy, so was the foundry … but most of the shops were almost deserted. Harriman left the shops, went into the main engineering building. The drafting room and the loft were fairly active, as was the computation section. But there were unoccupied desks in the structures group and a churchlike quiet in the metals group and in the adjoining metallurgical laboratory. He was about to cross over into the chemicals and materials annex when Coster suddenly showed up.

“Mr. Harriman! I just heard you were here.”

“Spies everywhere,” remarked Harriman. “I didn’t want to disturb you.” “Not at all. Let’s go up to my office.”

Settled there a few moments later Harriman asked, “Well—how’s it going?” Coster frowned. “All right, I guess.”

Harriman noted that the engineer’s desk baskets were piled high with papers which spilled over onto the desk. Before Harriman could answer, Coster’s desk phone lit up and a feminine voice said sweetly, “Mr. Coster— Mr. Morgenstern is calling.”

“Tell him I’m busy.”

After a short wait the girl answered in a troubled voice, “He says he’s just got to speak to you, sir.” Coster looked annoyed. “Excuse me a moment, Mr. Harriman—O.K., put him on.”

The girl was replaced by a man who said, “Oh there you are-what was the hold up? Look, Chief, we’re in a jam about these trucks. Every one of them that we leased needs an overhaul and now it turns out that the White Fleet company won’t do anything about it—they’re sticking to the fine print in the contract. Now the way I see it, we’d do better to cancel the contract and do business with Peak City Transport. They have a scheme that looks good to me. They guarantee to—”

“Take care of it,” snapped Coster. “You made the contract and you have authority to cancel. You know that.”          

“Yes, but Chief, I figured this would be something you would want to pass on personally. It involves policy and—” “Take care of it! I don’t give a damn what you do as long as we have transportation when we need it.” He switched off. “Who is that man?” inquired Harriman.

“Who? Oh, that’s Morgenstern, Claude Morgenstem.” “Not his name—what does he do?”

“He’s one of my assistants—buildings, grounds, and transportation.” “Fire him!”

Coster looked stubborn. Before he could answer a secretary came in and stood insistently at his elbow with a sheaf of papers. He frowned, initialed them, and sent her out. “Oh, I don’t mean that as an order,” Harriman added, “but I do mean it as serious advice. I won’t give orders in your backyard,—but will you listen to a few minutes of advice?” “Naturally,” Coster agreed stiffly.

“Mmm … this your first job as top boss?” Coster hesitated, then admitted it.

“I hired you on Ferguson’s belief that you were the engineer most likely to build a successful Moon ship. I’ve had no reason to change my mind. But top administration ain’t engineering, and maybe I can show you a few tricks there, if you’ll let me.” He waited. “I’m not criticizing,” he added. “Top bossing is like sex; until you’ve had it, you don’t know about it.” Harriman had the mental reservation that if the boy would not take advice, he would suddenly be out of a job, whether Ferguson liked it or not.

Coster drummed on his desk. “I don’t know what’s wrong and that’s a fact. It seems as if I can’t turn anything over to anybody and have it done properly. I feel as if I were swimming in quicksand.”

“Done much engineering lately?”                                                                  

“I try to.” Coster waved at another desk in the corner. “I work there, late at night.”

“That’s no good. I hired you as an engineer. Bob, this setup is all wrong. The joint ought to be jumping—and it’s not. Your office ought to be quiet as a grave. Instead your office is jumping and the plant looks like a graveyard.”

Coster buried his face in his hands, then looked up. “I know it. I know what needs to be done-but every time I try to tackle a technical problem some bloody fool wants me to make a decision about trucks—or telephones—or some damn thing. I’m sorry, Mr. Harriman. I thought I could do it.” Harriman said very gently, “Don’t let it throw you, Bob. You haven’t had much sleep lately, have you? Tell you what—we’ll put over a fast one on Ferguson. I’ll take that desk you’re at for a few days and build you a set-up to protect you against such things. I want that brain of yours thinking about reaction vectors and fuel efficiencies and design stresses, not about contracts for trucks.” Harriman stepped to the door, looked around the outer office and spotted a man who might or might not be the office’s chief clerk. “Hey, you! C’mere.”

The man looked startled, got up, came to the door and said, “Yes?”

“I want that desk in the corner and all the stuff that’s on it moved to an empty office on this floor, right away.” The clerk raised his eyebrows. “And who are you, if I may ask?”

“Damn it—”

“Do as he tells you, Weber,” Coster put in.

“I want it done inside of twenty minutes,” added Harriman. “Jump!” He turned back to Coster’s other desk, punched the phone, and presently was speaking to the main offices of Skyways. “Jim, is your boy Jock Berkeley around? Put him on leave and send him to me, at Peterson Field, right away, special trip. I want the ship he comes in to raise ground ten minutes after we sign off. Send his gear after him.” Harriman listened for a moment, then answered, “No, your organization won’t fall apart if you lose Jock— or, if it does, maybe we’ve been paying the wrong man the top salary .

“Okay, okay, you’re entitled to one swift kick at my tail the next time you catch up with me but send Jock. So long.”

He supervised getting Coster and his other desk moved into another office, saw to it that the phone in the new office was disconnected, and, as an afterthought, had a couch moved in there, too. “We’ll install a projector, and a drafting machine and bookcases and other junk like that tonight,” he told Coster. “Just make a list of anything you need—to work on engineering. And call me if you want anything.” He went back to the nominal chiefengineer’s office and got happily to work trying to figure where the organization stood and what was wrong with it.

Some four hours later he took Berkeley in to meet Coster. The chief engineer was asleep at his desk, head cradled on his arms. Harriman started to back out, but Coster roused. “Oh! Sorry,” he said, blushing, “I must have dozed off.”

“That’s why I brought you the couch,” said Harriman. “It’s more restful. Bob, meet Jock Berkeley. He’s your new slave. You remain chief engineer and top, undisputed boss. Jock is Lord High Everything Else. From now on you’ve got absolutely nothing to worry about—except for the little detail of building a Moon ship.”

They shook hands. “Just one thing I ask, Mr. Coster,” Berkeley said seriously, “bypass me all you want to-you’ll have to run the technical show—but for God’s sake record it so I’ll know what’s going on. I’m going to have a switch placed on your desk that will operate a sealed recorder at my desk.”

“Fine!” Coster was looking, Harriman thought, younger already.

“And if you want something that is not technical, don’t do it yourself. Just flip a switch and whistle; it’ll get done!” Berkeley glanced at Harriman. “The Boss says he wants to talk with you about the real job. I’ll leave you and get busy.” He left.

Harriman sat down; Coster followed suit and said, “Whew!” “Feel better?”

“I like the looks of that fellow Berkeley.”

“That’s good; he’s your twin brother from now on. Stop worrying; I’ve used him before. You’ll think you’re living in a well-run hospital. By the way, where do you live?” “At a boarding house in the Springs.”

“That’s ridiculous. And you don’t even have a place here to sleep?” Harriman reached over to Coster’s desk, got through to Berkeley. “Jock—get a suite for Mr. Coster at the Broadmoor, under a phony name.”

“Right.”

“And have this stretch along here adjacent to his office fitted out as an apartment.” “Right. Tonight.”

“Now, Bob, about the Moon ship. Where do we stand?”

They spent the next two hours contentedly running over the details of the problem, as Coster had laid them out. Admittedly very little work had been done since the field was leased but Coster had accomplished considerable theoretical work and computation before he had gotten swamped in administrative details. Harriman, though no engineer and certainly not a mathematician outside the primitive arithmetic of money, had for so long devoured everything he could find about space travel that he was able to follow most of what Coster showed him.

“I don’t see anything here about your mountain catapult,” he said presently. Coster looked vexed. “Oh, that! Mr. Harriman, I spoke too quickly.”

“Huh? How come? I’ve had Montgomery’s boys drawing up beautiful pictures of what things will look like when we are running regular trips. I intend to make Colorado Springs the spaceport capital of the world. We hold the franchise of the old cog railroad now; what’s the hitch?”

“Well, it’s both time and money.” “Forget money. That’s my pidgin.”

“Time then. I still think an electric gun is the best way to get the initial acceleration for a chem-powered ship. Like this—” He began to sketch rapidly. “It enables you to omit the first step- rocket stage, which is bigger than all the others put together and is terribly inefficient, as it has such a poor mass-ratio. But what do you have to do to get it? You can’t build a tower, not a tower a couple of miles high, strong enough to take the thrusts—not this year, anyway. So you have to use a mountain. Pikes Peak is as good as any; it’s accessible, at least.

“But what do you have to do to use it? First, a tunnel in through the side, from Manitou to just under the peak, and big enough to take the loaded ship—” “Lower it down from the top,” suggested Harriman.

Coster answered, “I thought of that. Elevators two miles high for loaded space ships aren’t exactly built out of string, in fact they aren’t built out of any available materials. It’s possible to gimmick the catapult itself so that the accelerating coils can be reversed and timed differently to do the job, but believe me, Mr. Harrima; it will throw you into other engineering problems quite as great … such as a giant railroad up to the top of the ship. And it still leaves you with the shaft of the catapult itself to be dug. It can’t be as small as the ship, not like a gun barrel for a bullet. It’s got to be considerably larger; you don’t compress a column of air two miles high with impunity. Oh, a mountain catapult could be built, but it might take ten years—or longer.”

“Then forget it. We’ll build it for the future but not for this flight. No, wait—how about a surface catapult. We scoot up the side of the mountain and curve it up at the end?”                 “Quite frankly, I think something like that is what will eventually be used. But, as of today, it just creates new problems. Even if we could devise an electric gun in which you could make

that last curve—we can’t, at present— the ship would have to be designed for terrific side stresses and all the additional weight would be parasitic so far as our main purpose is

concerned, the design of a rocket ship.”

“Well, Bob, what is your solution?”                                                    Coster frowned. “Go back to what we know how to do—build a step rocket.”

CHAPTER FIVE

“MONTY—”

“Yeah, Chief?”

“Have you ever heard this song?” Harriman hummed, “The Moon belongs to everyone; the best things in life are free—,” then sang it, badly off key. “Can’t say as I ever have.” “It was before your time. I want it dug out again. I want it revivcd, plugged until Hell wouldn’t have it, and on everybody’s lips.”

 “O.K.” Montgomery took out his memorandum pad. “When do you want it to reach its top?”                                      

Harriman considered. “In, say, about three months. Then I want the first phrase picked up and used in advertising slogans.” “Acinch.”

“How are things in Florida, Monty?”

“I thought we were going to have to buy the whole damned legislature until we got the rumor spread around that Los Angeles had contracted to have a City-Limits-of-Los-Angeles sign planted on the Moon for publicity pix. Then they came around.”

“Good.” Harriman pondered. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. How much do you think the Chamber of Commerce of Los Angeles would pay for such a picture?” Montgomery made another note. “I’ll look into it.”

“I suppose you are about ready to crank up Texas, now that Florida is loaded?” “Most any time now. We’re spreading a few snide rumors first.”

Headline from Dallas-Fort Worth Banner: “THE MOON BELONGS TO TEXAS!!!”

“—and that’s all for tonight, kiddies. Don’t forget to send in those box tops, or reasonable facsimiles. Remember—first prize is a thousand-acre ranch on the Moon itself, free and clear; the second prize is a six-foot scale model of the actual Moon ship, and there are fifty, count them, fifty third prizes, each a saddle-trained Shetland pony. Your hundred word composition ‘Why I want to go to the Moon’ will be judged for sincerity and originality, not on literary merit. Send those boxtops to Uncle Taffy, Box 214, Juarez, Old Mexico.”

Harriman was shown into the office of the president of the Moka-Coka Company (“Only a Moke is truly a coke”—~ “Drink the Cola drink with the Lift”). He paused at the door, some twenty feet from the president’s desk and quickly pinned a two-inch wide button to his lapel.

Patterson Griggs looked up. “Well, this is really an honor, D.D. Do come in and—” The soft-drink executive stopped suddenly, his expression changed. “What are you doing wearing that?” he snapped. “Trying to annoy me?”

“That” was the two-inch disc; Harriman unpinned it and put it in his pocket. It was a celluloid advertising pin, in plain yellow; printed on it in black, almost covering it, was a simple 6+, the trademark of Moka-Coka’s only serious rival.

“No,” answered Harriman, “though I don’t blame you for being irritated. I see half the school kids in the country wearing these silly buttons. But I came to give you a friendly tip, not to annoy you.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I paused at your door that pin on my lapel was just the size—to you, standing at your desk—as the full Moon looks when you are standing in your garden, looking up at it. You didn’t have any trouble reading what was on the pin, did you? I know you didn’t; you yelled at me before either one of us stirred.”

“What about it?”

“How would you feel—and what would the effect be on your sales—if there was ‘six-plus’ written across the face of the Moon instead of just on a school kid’s sweater?” Griggs thought about it, then said, “D.D., don’t make poor jokes. I’ve had a bad day.”

“I’m not joking. As you have probably heard around the St~reet, I’m behind this Moon trip venture. Between ourselves, Pat, it’s quite an expensive undertaking, even for me. Afew days ago  a man came to me—you’ll pardon me if I don’t mention names? You can figure it out. Anyhow, this man represented a client who wanted to buy the advertising concession for the Moon.  He knew we weren’t sure of success; but he said his client would take the risk.

“At first I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about; he set me straight. Then I thought he was kidding. Then I was shocked. Look at this—” Harriman took out a large sheet of paper  and spread it on Griggs’ desk. “You see the equipment is set up anywhere near the center of the Moon, as we see it. Eighteen pyrotechnics rockets shoot out in eighteen directions, like the spokes of a wheel, but to carefully calculated distances. They hit and the bombs they carry go off, spreading finely divided carbon black for calculated distances. There’s no air on the Moon, you know, Pat—a fine powder will throw just as easily as a javelin. Here’s your result.” He turned the paper over; on the back there was a picture of the Moon, printed lightly. Overlaying it, in black, heavy print was:

“So it is that outfit—those poisoners!”

“No, no, I didn’t say so! But it illustrates the point; six-plus is only two symbols; it can be spread large enough to be read on the face of the Moon.” Griggs stared at the horrid advertisement. “I don’t believe it will work!”

“Areliable pyrotechnics firm has guaranteed that it will—provided I can deliver their equipment to the spot. After all, Pat, it doesn’t take much of a pyrotechnics rocket to go a long distance on the Moon. Why, you could throw a baseball a couple of miles yourself—low gravity, you know.”

“People would never stand for it. It’s sacrilege!”                                                                

Harriman looked sad. “I wish you were right. But they stand for skywriting—and video commercials.”

Griggs chewed his lip. “Well, I don’t see why you come to me with it,” he exploded. “You know damn well the name of my product won’t go on the face of the Moon. The letters would be too small to read.”

Harriman nodded. “That’s exactly why I came to you. Pat, this isn’t just a business venture to me; it’s my heart and soul. It just made me sick to think of somebody actually wanting to use the face of the Moon for advertising. As you say, it’s sacrilege. But somehow, these jackals found out I was pressed for cash. They came to me when they knew I would have to listen.

“I put them off. I promised them an answer on Thursday. Then I went home and lay awake about it. After a while I thought of you.” “Me?”

“You. You and your company. After all, you’ve got a good product and you need legitimate advertising for it. It occurred to me that there are more ways to use the Moon in advertising than   by defacing it. Now just suppose that your company bought the same concession, but with the public-spirited promise of never letting it be used. Suppose you featured that fact in your ads? Suppose you ran pictures of a boy and girl, sitting out under the Moon, sharing a bottle of Moke? Suppose Moke was the only soft drink carried on the first trip to the Moon? But I   don’t have to tell you how to do it.” He glanced at his watch finger. “I’ve got to run and I don’t want to rush you. If you want to do business just leave word at my office by noon tomorrow and I’ll have our man Montgomery get in touch with your advertising chief.”

The head of the big newspaper chain kept him waiting the minimum time reserved for tycoons and cabinet members. Again Harriman stopped at the threshold of a large office and fixed  a disc to his lapel.

“Howdy, Delos,” the publisher said, “how’s the traffic in green cheese today?” He then caught sight of the button and frowned. “If that is a joke, it is in poor taste.” Harriman pocketed the disc; it displayed not 6+, but the hammer-and-sickle.

“No,” he said, “it’s not a joke; it’s a nightmare. Colonel, you and I are among the few people in this country who realize that communism is still a menace.”

Sometime later they were talking as chummily as if the Colonel’s chain had not obstructed the Moon venture since its inception. The publisher waved a cigar at his desk. “How did you come by those plans? Steal them?”

“They were copied,” Harriman answered with narrow truth. “But they aren’t important. The important thing is to get there first; we can’t risk having an enemy rocket base on the Moon. For years I’ve had a recurrent nightmare of waking up and seeing headlines that the Russians had landed on the Moon and declared the Lunar Soviet—say thirteen men and two female scientists—and had petitioned for entrance into the U.S.S.R.—and the petition had, of course, been graciously granted by the Supreme Soviet. I used to wake up and tremble. I don’t  know that they would actually go through with painting a hammer and sickle on the face of the Moon, but it’s consistent with their psychology. Look at those enormous posters they are always hanging up.”

The publisher bit down hard on his cigar. “We’ll see what we can work out. Is there any way you can speed up your take-off?”

CHAPTER SIX

“MR. HARRIMAN?”

“Yes?”

“That Mr. LeCroix is here again.” “Tell him I can’t see him.”

“Yes, sir—uh, Mr. Harriman, he did not mention it the other day but he says he is a rocket pilot.” “Send him around to Skyways. I don’t hire pilots.”

Aman’s face crowded into the screen, displacing Harriman’s reception secretary. “Mr. Harriman—I’m Leslie LeCroix, relief pilot of the Charon.” “I don’t care if you are the Angel Gab— Did you say Charon?”

“I said Charon. And I’ve got to talk to you.” “Come in.”

Harriman greeted his visitor, offered him tobacco, then looked him over with interest. The Charon, shuttle rocket to the lost power satellite, had been the nearest thing to a space ship the world had yet seen. Its pilot, lost in the same explosion that had destroyed the satellite and the Charon had been the first, in a way, of the coming breed of spacemen.

Harriman wondered how it had escaped his attention that the Charon had alternating pilots. He had known it, of course—but somehow he had forgotten to take the fact into account. He had written off the power satellite, its shuttle rocket and everything about it, ceased to think about them. He now looked at LeCroix with curiosity.

He saw a small, neat man with a thin, intelligent face, and the big, competent hands of a jockey. LeCroix returned his inspection without embarrassment. He seemed calm and utterly sure of himself.

“Well, Captain LeCroix?”    “You are building a Moon ship.” “Who says so?”

“AMoon ship is being built. The boys all say you are behind it.” “Yes?”

“I want to pilot it.” “Why should you?”

“I’m the best man for it.”                                                                                           Harriman paused to let out a cloud of tobacco smoke. “If you can prove that, the billet is yours.” “It’s a deal.” LeCroix stood up. “I’ll leave my nameand address outside.”

“Wait a minute. I said ‘if.’ Let’s talk. I’m going along on this trip myself; I want to know more about you before I trust my neck to you.”

They discussed Moon flight, interplanetary travel, rocketry, what they might find on the Moon. Gradually Harriman warmed up, as he found another spirit so like his own, so obsessed with the Wonderful Dream. Subconsciously he had already accepted LeCroix; the conversation began to assume that it would be a joint venture.

After a long time Harriman said, “This is fun, Les, but I’ve got to do a few chores yet today, or none of us will get to the Moon. You go on out to Peterson Field and get acquainted with Bob Coster—I’ll call him. If the pair of you can manage to get along, we’ll talk contract.” He scribbled a chit and handed it to LeCroix. “Give this to Miss Perkins as you go out and she’ll put you on the payroll.”

“That can wait.” “Man’s got to eat.”

LeCroix accepted it but did not leave. “There’s one thing I don’t understand, Mr. Harriman.” “Huh?”

“Why are you planning on a chemically powered ship? Not that I object; I’ll herd her. But why do it the hard way? I know you had the City of Brisbane refitted for X-fuel—”

Harriman stared at him. “Are you off your nut, Les? You’re asking why pigs don’t have wings—there isn’t any X-fuel and there won’t be any more until we make some ourselves—on the Moon.”

“Who told you that?” “What do you mean?”

“The way I heard it, the Atomic Energy Commission allocated X-fuel, under treaty, to several other countries—and some of them weren’t prepared to make use of it. But they got it just the same. What happened to it?”

“Oh, that! Sure, Les, several of the little outfits in Central America and South America were cut in for a slice of pie for political reasons, even though they had no way to eat it. Agood thing, too—we bought it back and used it to ease the immediate power shortage.” Harriman frowned. “You’re right, though. I should have grabbed some of the stuff then.”

“Are you sure it’s all gone?”

“Why, of course, I’m— No, I’m not. I’ll look into it. G’bye, Les.”

His contacts were able to account for every pound of X-fuel in short order—save for Costa Rica’s allotment. That nation had declined to sell back its supply because its power plant, suitable for X-fuel, had been almost finished at the time of the disaster. Another inquiry disclosed that the power plant had never been finished.

Montgomery was even then in Managua; Nicaragua had had a change in administration and Montgomery was making certain that the special position of the local Moon corporation was protected. Harriman sent him a coded message to proceed to San Jose, locate X-fuel, buy it and ship it back—at any cost. He then went to see the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission.

That official was apparently glad to see him and anxious to be affable. Harriman got around to explaining that he wanted a license to do experimental work in isotopes—X-fuel, to be precise.

“This should be brought up through the usual channels, Mr. Harriman.” “It will be. This is a preliminary inquiry. I want to know your reactions.”

“After all, I am not the only commissioner … and we almost always follow the recommendations of our technical branch.” “Don’t fence with me, Carl. You know dern well you control a working majority. Off the record, what do you say?”         “Well, D.D.—off the record—you can’t get any X-fuel, so why get a license?”

“Let me worry about that.”

“Mmmm . . we weren’t required by law to follow every millicurie of X-fuel, since it isn’t classed as potentially suitable for mass weapons. Just the same, we knew what happened to it. There’s none available.”

Harriman kept quiet.

“In the second place, you can have an X-fuel license, if you wish—for any purpose but rocket fuel.” “Why the restriction?”

“You are building a Moon ship, aren’t you?” “Me?”

“Don’t you fence with me, D.D. It’s my business to know things. You can’t use X-fuel for rockets, even if you can find it—which you can’t.” The chairman went to a vault back of his desk and returned with a quarto volume, which he laid in front of Harriman. It was titled: Theoretical Investigation into the Stability of Several Radioisotopic Fuels—With Notes on the Charon-Power- Satellite Disaster. The cover had a serial number and was stamped: SECRET.

Harriman pushed it away. “I’ve got no business looking at that—and I wouldn’t understand it if I did.”                                               

The chairman grinned. “Very well, I’ll tell you what’s in it. I’m deliberately tying your hands, D.D., by trusting you with a defense secret—” “I won’t have it, I tell you!”

“Don’t try to power a space ship with X-fuel, D.D. It’s a lovely fuel— but it may go off like a firecracker anywhere out in space. That report tells why.”

“Confound it, we ran the Charon for nearly three years!”

“You were lucky. It is the official—but utterly confidential—opinion of the government that the Charon set off the power satellite, rather than the satellite setting off the Charon. We had thought it was the other way around at first, and of course it could have been, but there was the disturbing matter of the radar records. It seemed as if the ship had gone up a split second before the satellite. So we made an intensive theoretical investigation. X-fuel is too dangerous for rockets.”

“That’s ridiculous! For every pound burned in the Charon there were at least a hundred pounds used in power plants on the surface. How come they didn’t explode?”

“It’s a matter of shielding. Arocket necessarily uses less shielding than a stationary plant, but the worst feature is that it operates out in space. The disaster is presumed to have been triggered by primary cosmic radiation. If you like, I’ll call in one of the mathematical physicists to elucidate.”

Harriman shook his head. “You know I don’t speak the language.” He considered. “I suppose that’s all there is to it?”

“I’m afraid so. I’m really sorry.” Harriman got up to leave. “Uh, one more thing, D.D.—you weren’t thinking of approaching any of my subordinate colleagues, were you?” “Of course not. Why should I?”

“I’m glad to hear it. You know, Mr. Harriman, some of our staff may not be the most brilliant scientists in the world—it’s very hard to keep a first-class scientist happy in the conditions of government service. But there is one thing I am sure of; all of them are utterly incorruptible. Knowing that, I would take it as a personal affront if anyone tried to influence one of my people

—a very personal affront.”

“So?”

“Yes. By the way, I used to box light-heavyweight in college. I’ve kept it up.”

“Hmmm … well, I never went to college. But I play a fair game of poker.” Harriman suddenly grinned. “I won’t tamper with your boys, Carl. It would be too much like offering a bribe to a starving man. Well, so long.”

When Harriman got back to his office he called in one of his confidential clerks. “Take another coded message to Mr. Montgomery. Tell him to ship the stuff to Panama City, rather than to the States.” He started to dictate another message to Coster, intending to tell him to stop work on the Pioneer, whose skeleton was already reaching skyward on the Colorado prairie,   and shift to the Santa Maria, formerly the City of Brisbane.

He thought better of it. Take-off would have to be outside the United States; with the Atomic Energy Commission acting stuffy, it would not do to try to move the Santa Maria: it would give the show away.

Nor could she be moved without refitting her for chem-powered flight. No, he would have another ship of the Brisbane class taken out of service and sent to Panama, and the power plant of the Santa Maria could be disassembled and shipped there, too. Coster could have the new ship ready in six weeks, maybe sooner … and he, Coster, and LeCroix would start for the Moon!

The devil with worries over primary cosmic rays! The Charon operated for three years, didn’t she? They would make the trip, they would prove it could be done, then, if safer fuels were needed, there would be the incentive to dig them out. The important thing was to do it, make the trip. If Columbus had waited for decent ships, we’d all still be in Europe. Aman had to take some chances or he never got anywhere.

Contentedly he started drafting the messages that would get the new scheme underway. He was intercupted by a secretary. “Mr. Harriman, Mr. Montgomery wants to speak to you.” “Eh? Has he gotten my code already?”

“I don’t know, sir.” “Well, put him on.”

Montgomery had not received the second message. But he had news for Harriman:Costa Rica had sold all its X-fuel to the English Ministry of Power, soon after the disaster. There was not an ounce of it left, neither in Costa Rica, nor in England.

Harriman sat and moped for several minutes after Montgomery had cleared the screen. Then he called Coster. “Bob? Is LeCroix there?” “Right here-we were about to go out to dinner together. Here he is, now.”

“Howdy, Les. Les, that was a good brain storm of yours, but it didn’t work. Somebody stole the baby.” “Eh? Oh, I get you. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t ever waste time being sorry. We’ll go ahead as originally planned. We’ll get there!” “Sure we will.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

FROM THE JUNE ISSUE of Popular Technics magazine: “URANIUM PROSPECTING ON THE MOON—A Fact Article about a soon-to-come Major Industry.” From HOLIDAY: “Honeymoon on the Moon—A Discussion of the Miracle Resort that your children will enjoy, as told to our travel editor.”

From the American Sunday Magazine: “DIAMONDS ON THE MOON?—AWorld Famous Scientist Shows Why Diamonds Must Be Common As Pebbles in the Lunar Craters.”

“Of course, Clem, I don’t know anything about electronics, but here is the way it was explained to me. You can hold the beam of a television broadcast down to a degree or so these days, can’t you?”

“Yes—if you use a big enough reflector.”

“You’ll have plenty of elbow room. Now Earth covers a space two degrees wide, as seen from the Moon. Sure, it’s quite a distance away, but you’d have no power losses and absolutely perfect and unchanging conditions for transmission. Once you made your set-up, it wouldn’t be any more expensive than broadcasting from the top of a mountain here, and a derned sight less expensive than keeping copters in the air from coast to coast, the way you’re having to do now.”

“It’s a fantastic scheme, Delos.”

“What’s fantastic about it? Getting to the Moon is my worry, not yours. Once we are there, there’s going to be television back to Earth, you can bet your shirt on that. It’s a natural set-up for line-of-sight transmission. If you aren’t interested, I’ll have to find someone who is.”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested.”

“Well, make up your mind. Here’s another thing, Clem—I don’t want to go sticking my nose into your business, but haven’t you had a certain amount of trouble since you lost the use of the power satellite as a relay station?”

“You know the answer; don’t needle me. Expenses have gone out of sight without any improvement in revenue.” “That wasn’t quite what I meant. How about censorship?”

The television executive threw up his hands. “Don’t say that word! How anybody expects a man to stay in business with every two-bit wowser in the country claiming a veto over wLhat we can say and can’t say and what we can show and what we can’t show—it’s enough to make you throw up. The whole principle is wrong; it’s like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can’t eat steak. If I were able to lay my hands on those confounded, prurient-minded, slimy—”

“Easy! Easy!” Harriman interrupted. “Did it ever occur to you that there is absolutely no way to interfere with a telecast from the Moon—and that boards of censorship on Earth won’t have

jurisdiction in any case?”

“What? Say that again.”

“LIFE goes to the Moon.’ LIFE-TIME Inc. is proud to announce that arrangements have been completed to bring LIFE’S readers a personally conducted tour of the first trip to our satellite. In place of the usual weekly feature ‘LIFE Goes to a Party’ there will commence, immediately after the return of the first successful—”

“ASSURANCE FOR THE NEW AGE”

(An excerpt from an advertisement of the North Atlantic Mutual Insurance and Liability Company)

“—the same looking-to-the-future that protected our policy-holders after the Chicago Fire, after the San Francisco Fire, after every disaster since the War of 1812, now reaches out to insure you from unexpected loss even on the Moon—”

“THE UNBOUNDED FRONTIERS OF TECHNOLOGY”

“When the Moon ship Pioneer climbs skyward on a ladder of flame, twenty-seven essential devices in her ‘innards’ will be powered by especiallyengineered DELTAbatteries—” “Mr. Harriman, could you come out to the field?”

“What’s up, Bob?”          

“Trouble,” Coster answered briefly. “What sort of trouble?”

Coster hesitated. “I’d rather not talk about it by screen. If you can’t come, maybe Les and I had better come there.” “I’ll be there this evening.”

When Harriman got there he saw that LeCroix’s impassive face concealed bitterness, Coster looked stubborn and defensive. He waited until the three were alone in Coster’s workroom before he spoke. “Let’s have it, boys.”

LeCroix looked at Coster. The engineer chewed his lip and said, “Mr. Harriman, you know the stages this design has been through.” “More or less.”

“We had to give up the catapult idea. Then we had this—” Coster rummaged on his desk, pulled out a perspective treatment of a four-step rocket, large but rather graceful.”Theoretically it was a possibility; practically it cut things too fine. By the time the stress group boys and the auxiliary group and the control group got through adding things we were forced to come to this

—” He hauled out another sketch; it was basically like the first, but squattier, almost pyramidal. “We added a fifth stage as a ring around the fourth stage. We even managed to save some weight by using most of the auxiliary and control equipment for the fourth stage to control the fifth stage. And it still had enough sectional density to punch through the atmosphere with no important drag, even if it was clumsy.”

Harriman nodded. “You know, Bob, we’re going to have to get away from the step rocket idea before we set up a schedule run to the Moon.” “I don’t see how you can avoid it with chem-powered rockets.”

“If you had a decent catapult you could put a single-stage chem-powered rocket into an orbit around the Earth, couldn’t you?” “Sure.”

“That’s what we’ll do. Then it will refuel in that orbit.”

“The old space-station set-up. I suppose that makes sense-in fact I know it does. Only the ship wouldn’t refuel and continue on to the Moon. The economical thing would be to have special ships that never landed anywhere make the jump from there to another fueling station around the Moon. Then—”

LeCroix displayed a most unusual impatience. “AJ1 that doesn’t mean anything now. Get on with the story, Bob.” “Right,” agreed Harriman.

“Well, this model should have done it. And, damn it, it still should do it.” Harriman looked puzzled. “But, Bob, that’s the approved design, isn’t it? That’s what you’ve got two-thirds built right out there on the field.”

“Yes.” Coster looked stricken. “But it won’t do it. It won’t work.” “Why not?”

“Because I’ve had to add in too much dead weight, that’s why. Mr. Harriman, you aren’t an engineer; you’ve no idea how fast the performance falls off when you have to clutter up a ship with anything but fuel and power plant. Take the landing arrangements for the fifth-stage power ring. You use that stage for a minute and a half, then you throw it away. But you don’t dare take a chance of it falling on Wichita or Kansas City. We have to include a parachute sequence. Even then we have to plan on tracking it by radar and cutting the shrouds by radio control when it’s over empty countryside and not too high. That means more weight, besides the parachute. By the time we are through, we don’t get a net addition of a mile a second out of that stage. It’s not enough.”

Harriman stirred in his chair. “Looks like we made a mistake in trying to launch it from the States. Suppose we took off from someplace unpopulated, say the Brazil coast, and let the booster stages fall in the Atlantic; how much would that save you?”

Coster looked off in the distance, then took out a slide rule. “Might work.” “How much of a chore will it be to move the ship, at this stage?”

“Well … it would have to be disassembled completely; nothing less would do. I can’t give you a cost estimate off hand, but it would be expensive.”    “How long would it take?”                                                                                                                                                                   “Hmm…shucks, Mr. Harriman, I can’t answer off hand. Two years— eighteen months, with luck. We’d have to prepare a site. We’d have to build shops.”

Harriman thought about it, although he knew the answer in his heart. His shoe string, big as it was, was stretched to the danger point. He couldn’t keep up the promotion, on talk alone, for another two years; he had to have a successful flight and soon—or the whole jerry-built financial structure would burst. “No good, Bob.”

“I was afraid of that. Well, I tried to add still a sixth stage.” He held up another sketch. “You see that monstrosity? I reached the point of diminishing returns. The final effective velocity is actually less with this abortion than with the five-step job.”

“Does that mean you are whipped, Bob? You can’t build a Moon ship?” “No, I—”

LeCroix said suddenly, “Clear out Kansas.” “Eh?” asked Harriman.

“Clear everybody out of Kansas and Eastern Colorado. Let the fifth and fourth sections fall anywhere in that area. The third section falls in the Atlantic; the second section goes into a permanent orbit—and the ship itself goes on to the Moon. You could do it if you didn’t have to waste weight on the parachuting of the fifth and fourth sections. Ask Bob.”

“So? How about it, Bob?”

“That’s what I said before. It was the parasitic penalties that whipped us. The basic design is all right.”

“Hmmm… somebody hand me an Atlas.” Harriman looked up Kansas and Colorado, did some rough figuring. He stared off into space, looking surprisingly, for the moment, as Coster did when the engineer was thinking about his own work. Finally he said, “It won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Money. I told you not to worry about money—for the ship. But it would cost upward of six or seven million dollars to evacuate that area even for a day. We’d have to settle nuisance suits out of hand; we couldn’t wait. And there would be a few diehards who just couldn’t move anyhow.”

LeCroix said savagely, “If the crazy fools won’t move, let them take their chances.”

“I know how you feel, Les. But this project is too big to hide and too big to move. Unless we protect the bystanders we’ll be shut down by court order and force. I can’t buy all the judges in two states. Some of them wouldn’t be for sale.”

“It was a nice try, Les,” consoled Coster.                                  

“I thought it might be an answer for all of us,” the pilot answered.

Harriman said, “You were starting to mention another solution, Bob?” Coster looked embarrassed. “You know the plans for the ship itself—a three-man job, space and supplies for three.”

“Yes. What are you driving at?”

“It doesn’t have to be three men. Split the first step into two parts, cut the ship down to the bare minimum for one man and jettison the remainder. That’s the only way I see to make this basic design work.” He got out another sketch. “See? One man and supplies for less than a week. No airlock— the pilot stays in his pressure suit. No galley. No bunks. The bare minimum to keep one man alive for a maximum of two hundred hours. It will work.”

“It will work,” repeated LeCroix, looking at Coster.

Harriman looked at the sketch with an odd, sick feeling at his stomach. Yes, no doubt it would work—and for the purposes of the promotion it did not matter whether one man or three  went to the Moon and returned. Just to do it was enough; he was dead certain that one successful flight would cause money to roll in so that there would be capital to develop to the point of practical, passenger-carrying ships.

The Wright brothers had started with less.

“If that is what I have to put up with, I suppose I have to,” he said slowly. Coster looked relieved. “Fine! But there is one more hitch. You know the conditions under which I agreed to tackle this job—I was to go along. Now Les here waves a contract under my nose and says he has to be the pilot.”

“It’s not just that,” LeCroix countered. “You’re no pilot, Bob. You’ll kill yourself and ruin the whole enterprise, just through bull-headed stubbornness.”

“I’ll learn to fly it. After all, I designed it. Look here, Mr. Harriman, I hate to let you in for a suit—Les says he will sue-but my contract antedates his. I intend to enforce it.” “Don’t listen to him, Mr. Harriman. Let him do the suing. I’ll fly that ship and bring her back. He’ll wreck it.”

“Either I go or I don’t build the ship,” Coster said flatly.

Harriman motioned both of them to keep quiet. “Easy, easy, both of you. You can both sue me if it gives you any pleasure. Bob, don’t talk nonsense; at this stage I can hire other engineers to finish the job. You tell me it has to be just one man.”

“That’s right.”     “You’re looking at him.” They both stared.

“Shut your jaws,” Harriman snapped. “What’s funny about that? You both knew I meant to go. You don’t think I went to all this trouble just to give you two a ride to the Moon, do you? I intend to go. What’s wrong with me as a pilot? I’m in good health, my eyesight is all right, I’m still smart enough to learn what I have to learn. If I have to drive my own buggy, I’ll do it. I won’t step aside for anybody, not anybody, d’you hear me?”

Coster got his breath first. “Boss, you don’t know what you are saying.” Two hours later they were still wrangling. Most of the time Harriman had stubbornly sat still, refusing to answer their arguments. At last he went out of the room for a few minutes, on the usual pretext. When he came back in he said, “Bob, what do you weigh?”

“Me? Alittle over two hundred.”                             

“Close to two twenty, I’d judge. Les, what do you weigh?” “One twenty-six.”

“Bob, design the ship for a net load of one hundred and twenty-six pounds.” “Huh? Now wait a minute, Mr. Harriman—”                                         

“Shut up! If I can’t learn to be a pilot in six weeks, neither can you.”          “But I’ve got the mathematics and the basic knowledge to—”

“Shut up I said! Les has spent as long learning his profession as you have learning yours. Can he become an engineer in six weeks? Then what gave you the conceit to think that you can learn his job in that time? I’m not going to have you wrecking my ship to satisfy your swollen ego. Anyhow, you gave out the real key to it when you were discussing the design. The real limiting factor is the actual weight of the passenger or passengers, isn’t it? Everything—everything works in proportion to that one mass. Right?”

“Yes, but—” “Right or wrong?”

“Well … yes, that’s right. I just wanted—”

“The smaller man can live on less water, he breathes less air, he occunies less space. Les goes.” Harriman walked over and put a hand on Coster’s shoulder. “Don’t take it hard, son. It can’t be any worse on you than it is on me. This trip has got to succeed—and that means you and I have got to give up the honor of being the first man on the Moon. But I promise you   this: we’ll go on the second trip, we’ll go with Les as our private chauffeur. It will be the first of a lot of passenger trips. Look, Bob-you can be a big man in this game, if you’ll play along  now. How would you like to be chief engineer of the first lunar colony?”

Coster managed to grin. “It might not be so bad.”

“You’d like it. Living on the Moon will be an engineering problem; you and I have talked about it. How’d you like to put your theories to work? Build the first city? Build the big observatory we’ll found there? Look around and know that you were the man who had done it?”

Coster was definitely adjusting himself to it. “You make it sound good. Say, what will you be doing?”

“Me? Well, maybe I’ll be the first mayor of Luna City.” It was a new thought to him; he savored it. “The Honorable Delos David Harriman, Mayor of Luna City. Say, I like that! You know, I’ve never held any sort of public office; I’ve just owned things.” He looked around. “Everything settled?”

“I guess so,” Coster said slowly. Suddenly he stuck his hand out at LeCroix. “You fly her, Les; I’ll build her.”

LeCroix grabbed his hand. “It’s a deal. And you and the Boss get busy and start making plans for the next job-big enough for all of us.”

“Right!”

Harriman put his hand on top of theirs. “That’s the way I like to hear you talk. We’ll stick together and we’ll found Luna City together.” “I think we ought to call it “Harriman,” LeCroix said seriously.

“Nope, I’ve thought of it as Luna City ever since I was a kid; Luna City it’s going to be. Maybe we’ll put Harriman Square in the middle of it,” he added. “I’ll mark it that way in the plans,” agreed Coster.

Harriman left at once. Despite the solution he was terribly depressed and did not want his two colleagues to see it. It had been a Pyrrhic victory; he had saved the enterprise but he felt like an animal who has gnawed off his own leg to escape a trap.

CHAPTER EIGHT

STRONG WAS ALONE in the offices of the partnership when he got a call from Dixon. “George, I was looking for D.D. Is he there?” “No, he’s back in Washington—something about clearances. I expect him back soon.”

“Hmmm… . Entenza and I want to see him. We’re coming over.” They arrived shortly. Entenza was quite evidently very much worked up over something; Dixon looked sleekly impassive as usual. After greetings Dixon waited a moment, then said, “Jack, you had some business to transact, didn’t you?”

Entenza jumped, then snatched a draft from his pocket.

“Oh, yes! George, I’m not going to have to pro-rate after all. Here’s my payment to bring my share up to full payment to date.” Strong accepted it. “I know that Delos will be pleased.” He tucked it in a drawer.                                                          “Well,” said Dixon sharply, “aren’t you going to receipt for it?”

“If Jack wants a receipt. The cancelled draft will serve.” However, Strong wrote out a receipt without further comment; Entenza accepted it. They waited a while. Presently Dixon said, “George, you’re in this pretty deep, aren’t you?”

“Possibly.”               

“Want to hedge your bets?”

“How?”

“Well, candidly, I want to protect myself. Want to sell one half of one. percent of your share?”

Strong thought about it. In fact he was worried—worried sick. The presence of Dixon’s auditor had forced them to keep on a cash basis—and only Strong knew how close to the line that had forced the partners. “Why do you want it?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t use it to interfere with Delos’s operations. He’s our man; we’re backing him. But I would feel a lot safer if I had the right to call a halt if he tried to commit us to something we couldn’t pay for. You know Delos; he’s an incurable optimist. We ought to have some sort of a brake on him.”

Strong thought about it. The thing that hurt him was that he agreed with everything Dixon said; he had stood by and watched while Delos dissipated two fortunes, painfully built up through the years. D.D. no longer seemed to care. Why, only this morning he had refused even to look at a report on the H & S automatic household switch—after dumping it on Strong.

Dixon leaned forward. “Name a price, George. I’ll be generous.” Strong squared his stooped shoulders. “I’ll sell—”

“Good!”

“—if Delos okays it. Not otherwise.”                                                                                                                                       Dixon muttered something. Enteuza snorted. The conversation might have gone acrimoniously further, had not Harriman walked in.

No one said anything about the proposal to Strong. Strong inquired about the trip; Harriman pressed a thumb and finger together. “All in the groove! But it gets more expensive to do business in Washington every day.” He turned to the others. “How’s tricks? Any special meaning to the assemblage? Are we in executive session?”

Dixon turned to Entenza. “Tell him, Jack.”                                     

Entenza faced Harriman. “What do you mean by selling television rights?” Harriman cocked a brow. “And why not?”

“Because you promised them to me, that’s why. That’s the original agreement; I’ve got it in writing.”

“Better take another look at the agreement, Jack. And don’t go off halfcocked. You have the exploitation rights for radio, television, and other amusement and special feature ventures in connection with the first trip to the Moon. You’ve still got ‘em. Including broadcasts from the ship, provided we are able to make any.” He decided that this was not a good time to mention that weight considerations had already made the latter impossible; the Pioneer would carry no electronic equipment of any sort not needed in astrogation. “What I sold was the franchise  to erect a-television station on the Moon, later. By the way, it wasn’t even an exclusive franchise, although Clem Haggerty thinks it is. If you want to buy one yourself, we can accommodate you.”

“Buy it! Why you—”                                                                                                                                                                 “Wups! Or you can have it free, if you can get Dixon and George to agree that you are entitled to it. I won’t be a tightwad. Anything else?” Dixon cut in. “Just where do we stand now, Delos?”

“Gentlemen, you can take it for granted that the Pioneer will leave on schedule—next Wednesday. And now, if you will excuse me, I’m on my way to Peterson Field.”

After he had left his three associates sat in silence for some time, Entenza muttering to himself, Dixon apparently thinking, and Strong just waiting. Presently Dixon said, “How about that fractional share, George?”

“You didn’t see fit to mention it to Delos.”

“I see.” Dixon carefully deposited an ash. “He’s a strange man, isn’t he?” Strong shifted around. “Yes.” “How long have you known him?”

“Let me see—he came to work for me in—” “He worked for you?”

“For several months. Then we set up our first company.” Strong thought back about it. “I suppose he had a power complex, even then.” “No,” Dixon said carefully. “No, I wouldn’t call it a power complex. It’s more of a Messiah complex.”

Entenza looked up. “He’s a crooked son of a bitch, that’s what he is!”

Strong looked at him mildly. “I’d rather you wouldn’t talk about him that way. I’d really rather you wouldn’t.”

“Stow it, Jack,” ordered Dixon. “You might force George to take a poke at you. One of the odd things about him,” went on Dixon, “is that he seems to be able to inspire an almost feudal loyalty. Take yourself. I know you are cleaned out, George-yet you won’t let me rescue you. That goes beyond logic; it’s personal.”

Strong nodded. “He’s an odd man. Sometimes I think he’s the last of the Robber Barons.”

Dixon shook his head. “Not the last. The last of them opened up the American West. He’s the first of the new Robber Barons—and you and I won’t see the end of it. Do you ever read Carlyle?”

Strong nodded again. “I see what you mean, the ‘Hero’ theory, but I don’t necessarily agree with it.”

“There’s something to it, though,” Dixon answered. “Truthfully, I don’t think Delos knows what he is doing. He’s setting up a new imperialism.

There’ll be the devil to pay before it’s cleaned up.” He stood up. “Maybe we should have waited. Maybe we should have balked him—if we could have. Well, it’s done. We’re on the merry- go-round and we can’t get off. I hope we enjoy the ride.. Come on, Jack.”

CHAPTER NINE

THE COLORADO p~ArRIE was growin’~ dusky. The Sun was behind the peak and the broad white face of Luna, full and round, was rising in the east. In the middle of Peterson Field the Pioneer thrust toward the sky. Abarbedwire fence, a thousand yards from its base in all directions, held back the crowds. Just inside the barrier guards patrolled restlessly. More guards circulated through the crowd. Inside the fence, close to it, trunks and trailers for camera, sound, and television equipment were parked and, at the far ends of cables, remote-control pick- ups were located both near and far from the ship on all sides. There were other trucks near the ship and a stir of organized activity.

Harriman waited in Coster’s office; Coster himself was out on the field, and Dixon and Entenza had a room to themselves. LeCroix, still in a drugged sleep, was in the bedroom of Coster’s on-the-job living quarters.

There was a stir and a challenge outside the door. Harriman opened it a crack. “If that’s another reporter, tell him ‘no.’ Send him to Mr. Montgomery across the way. Captain LeCroix will grant no unauthorized interviews.”

“Delos! Let me in.”                                                                         

“Oh—you, George. Come in. We’ve been hounded to death.”                 

Strong came in and handed Harriman a large and heavy handbag. “Here it is.” “Here is what?”

“The cancelled covers for the philatelic syndicate. You forgot them. That’s half a million dollars, Delos,” he complained. “If I hadn’t noticed them in your coat locker we’d have been in the soup.”

Harriman composed his features. “George, you’re a brick, that’s what you are.” “Shall I put them in the ship myself?” Strong said anxiously.

“Huh? No, no. Les will handle them.” He glanced at his watch. “We’re about to waken him. I’ll take charge of the covers.” He took the bag and added, “Don’t come in now. You’ll have a chance to say goodbye on the field.”

Harriman went next door, shut the door behind him, waited for the nurse to give the sleeping pilot a counteracting stimulant by injection, then chased her out. When he turned around the pilot was sitting up, rubbing his eyes. “How do you feel, Les?”

“Fine. So this is it.”

“Yup. And we’re all rooting for you, boy. Look, you’ve got to go out and face them in a couple of minutes. Everything is ready—but I’ve got a couple of things I’ve got to say to you.” “Yes?”

“See this bag?” Harriman rapidly explained what it was and what it signified.  LeCroix looked dismayed. “But I can’t take it, Delos; It’s all figured to the last ounce.”

“Who said you were going to take it? Of course you can’t; it must weigh sixty, seventy pounds. I just plain forgot it. Now here’s what we do: for the time being I’ll just hide it in here—” Harriman stuffed the bag far back into a clothes closet. “When you land, I’ll be right on your tail. Then we pull a sleight-of-hand trick and you fetch it out of the ship.”

LeCroix shook his head ruefully. “Delos, you beat me. Well, I’m in no mood to argue.”

“I’m glad you’re not; otherwise I’d go to jail for a measly half million dollars. We’ve already spent that money. Anyhow, it doesn’t matter,” he went on. “Nobody but you and me will know it— and the stamp collectors will get their money’s worth.” He looked at the younger man as if anxious for his approval.

“Okay, okay,” LeCroix answered. “Why should I care what happens to a stamp collector—tonight? Let’s get going.”

“One more thing,” said Harriman and took out a small cloth bag. “This you take with you—and the weight has been figured in. I saw to it. Now here is what you do with it.” He gave detailed and very earnest instructions.

LeCroix was puzzled. “Do I hear you straight? I let it be found—then I tell the exact truth about what happened?” “That’s right.”

“Okay.” LeCroix zipped the little bag into a pocket of his coveralls. “Let’s get out to the field. H-hour minus twenty-one minutes already.”

Strong joined Harriman in the control blockhouse after LeCroix had gone up inside the ship. “Did they get aboard?” he demanded anxiously. “LeCroix wasn’t carrying anything.” “Oh, sure,” said Harriman. “I sent them ahead. Better take your place. The ready flare has already gone up.”

Dixon, Entenza, the Governor of Colorado, the Vice-President of the United States, and a round dozen of V.I.P.’s were already seated at periscopes, mounted in slits, on a balcony above the control level. Strong and Harriman climbed a ladder and took the two remaining chairs.

Harriman began to sweat and realized he was trembling. Through his periscope out in front he could see the ship; from below he could hear Coster’s voice, nervously checking departure station reports. Muted through a speaker by him was a running commentary of one of the newscasters reporting the show. Harriman himself was the—well, the admiral, he decided—of the operation, but there was nothing more he could do, but wait, watch, and try to pray.

Asecond flare arched up in the sky, burst into red and green. Five minutes.

The seconds oozed away. At minus two minutes Harriman realized that he could not stand to watch through a tiny slit; he had to be outside, take part in it himself—he had to. He climbed down, hurried to the exit of the blockhouse. Coster glanced around, looked startled, but did not try to stop him; Coster could not leave his post no matter what happened. Harriman elbowed the guard aside and went outdoors.

To the east the ship towered skyward, her slender pyramid sharp black against the full Moon. He waited. And waited.

What had gone wrong? There had remained less than two minutes when he had come out; he was sure of that—yet there she stood, silent, dark, unmoving. There was not a sound, save the distant ululation of sirens warning the spectators behind the distant fence. Harriman felt his own heart stop, his breath dry up in his throat. Something had failed. Failure.

Asingle flare rocket burst from the top of the blockhouse; a flame licked at the base of the ship.

It spread, there was a pad of white fire around the base. Slowly, almost lumberingly, the Pioneer lifted, seemed to hover for a moment, balanced on a pillar of fire-then reached for the sky with acceleration so great that she was above him almost at once, overhead at the zenith, a dazzling circle of flame. So quickly was she above, rather than out in front, that it seemed as if she were arching back over him and must surely fall on him. Instinctively and futilely he threw a hand in front of his face.

The sound reached him.

Not as sound—it was a white noise, a roar in all frequencies, sonic, subsonic, supersonic, so incredibly loaded with energy that it struck him in the chest. He heard it with his teeth and with his bones as well as with his ears. He crouched his knees, bracing against it.

Following the sound at the snail’s pace of a hurricane came the backwash of the splash. It ripped at his clothing, tore his breath from his lips. He stumbled blindly back, trying to reach the lee of the concrete building, was knocked down.

He picked himself up coughing and strangling and remembered to look at the sky. Straight overhead was a dwindling star. Then it was gone. He went into the blockhouse.

The room was a babble of high-tension, purposeful confusion. Harriman’s ears, still ringing, heard a speaker blare, “Spot One! Spot One to blockhouse! Step five loose on schedule— ship and step five showing separate blips—” and Coster’s voice, high and angry, cutting in with, “Get Track One! Have they picked up step five yet? Are they tracking it?”

In the background the news commentator was still blowing his top. “Agreat day, folks, a great day! The mighty Pioneer, climbing like an angel of the Lord, flaming sword at hand, is even now on her glorious way to our sister planet. Most of you have seen her departure on your screens; I wish you could have seen it as I did, arching up into the evening sky, bearing her precious load of—”

“Shut that thing off!” ordered Coster, then to the visitors on the observation platform, “And pipe down up there! Quiet!”

The Vice-President of the United States jerked his head around, closed his mouth. He remembered to smile. The other V.I.P.’s shut up, then resumed again in muted whispers. Agirl’s voice cut through the silence, “Track One to Blockhouse—step five tracking high, plus two.” There was a stir in the corner. There a large canvas hood shielded a heavy sheet of Plexiglass from direct light. The sheet was mounted vertically and was edge-lighted; it displayed a coordinate map of Colorado and Kansas in fine white lines; the cities and towns glowed red. Unevacuated farms were tiny warning dots of red light.

Aman behind the transparent map touched it with a grease pencil; the reported location of step five shone out. In front of the map screen a youngish man sat quietly in a chair, a pear- shaped switch in his hand, his thumb lightly resting on the button. He was a bombardier, borrowed from the Air Forces; when he pressed the switch, a radio-controlled circuit in step five should cause the shrouds of step five’s landing ‘chute to be cut and let it plummet to Earth. He was working from radar reports aloi~e with no fancy computing bombsight to think for him. He was working almost by instinct— or, rather, by the accumulated subconscious knowledge of his trade, integrating in his brain the meager data spread before him, deciding where the tons of step five would land if he were to press his switch at any particular instant. He seemed unworried.

“Spot One to Blockhouse!” came a man’s voice again. “Step four free on schedule,” and almost immediately following, a deeper voice echoed, “Track Two, tracking step four, instantaneous altitude nine-five-one miles, predicted vector.”

No one paid any attention to Harriman.

Under the hood the observed trajectory of step five grew in shining dots of grease, near to, but not on, the dotted line of its predicted path. Reaching out from each location dot was drawn  a line at right angles, the reported altitude for that location.

The quiet man watching the display suddenly pressed down hard on his switch. He then stood up, stretched, and said, “Anybody got a cigaret?” “Track Two!” he was answered. “Step four

—first impact prediction—forty miles west of Charleston, South Carolina.”

“Repeat!” yelled Coster.                                                                                                          

The speaker blared out again without pause, “Correction, correction— forty miles east, repeat east.”

Coster sighed. The sigh was cut short by a report. “Spot One to Blockhouse—step three free, minus five seconds,” and a talker at Coster’s control desk called out, “Mr. Coster, Mister Coster—Palomar Observatory wants to talk to you.”

“Tell ‘em to go—no, tell ‘em to wait.” Immediately another voice cut in with, “Track One, auxiliary range Fox—Step one about to strike near Dodge City, Kansas~” “How near?”

There was no answer. Presently the voice of Track One proper said, “Impact reported approximately fifteen miles southwest of Dodge City.” “Casualties?”

Spot One broke in before Track One could answer, “Step two free, step two free-the ship is now on its own.” “Mr. Coster—please, Mr. Coster—”

And a totally new voice: “Spot Two to Blockhouse-we are now tracking the ship. Stand by for reported distances and bearings. Stand by—”

“Track Two to Blockhouse-step four will definitely land in Atlantic, estimated point of impact oh-five-seven miles east of Charleston bearing ohnine-three. I will repeat—” Coster looked around irritably. “Isn’t there any drinking water anywhere in this dump?”

“Mr. Coster, please-Palomar says they’ve just got to talk to you.”                                                                   

Harriman eased over to the door and stepped out. He suddenly felt very much let down, utterly weary, and depressed.

The field looked strange without the ship. He had watched it grow; now suddenly it was gone. The Moon, still rising, seemed oblivious—and space travel was as remote a dream as it had been in his boyhood.

There were several tiny figures prowling around, the flash apron where the ship had stood—souvenir hunters, he thought contemptuously. Someone came up to him in the gloom. “Mr. Harriman?”

“Eh?”

“Hopkins—with the A.P. How about a statement?” “Uh? No, no comment. I’m bushed.”

“Oh, now, just a word. How does it feel to have backed the first successful Moon flight—if it is successful.”

“It will be successful.” He thought a moment, then squared his tired shoulders and said, “Tell them that this is the beginning of the human race’s greatest era. Tell them that every one of them will have a chance to follow in Captain LeCroix’s footsteps, seek out new planets, wrest a home for themselves in new lands. Tell them that this means new frontiers, a shot in the arm for prosperity. It means—” He ran down. “That’s all tonight. I’m whipped, son. Leave me alone, will you?”

Presently Coster came out, followed by the V.I.P.’s. Harriman went up to Coster. “Everything all right?”                                                                

“Sure. Why shouldn’t it be? Track three followed him out to the limit of range-all in the groove.” Coster added, “Step five killed a cow when it grounded.”

“Forget it—we’ll have steak for breakfast.” Harriman then had to make conversation with the Governor and the Vice-President, had to escort them out to their ship. Dixon and Entenza left together, less formally; at last Coster and Harriman were alone save for subordinates too junior to constitute a strain and for guards to protect them from the crowds. “Where you headed, Bob?”

“Up to the Broadmoor and about a week’s sleep. How about you?”

“if you don’t mind, I’ll doss down in your apartment.” “Help yourself. Sleepy pills in the bathroom.”

“I won’t need them.” They had a drink together in Coster’s quarters, talked aimlessly, then Coster ordered a copter cab and went to the hotel. Harriman went to bed, got up, read a day-old copy of the Denver Post filled with pictures of the Pioneer, finally gave up and took two of Coster’s sleeping capsules.

CHAPTER TEN

SOMEONE WAS SHAKING HIM. “Mr. Harriman! Wake up—Mr. Caster is on the screen.”

“Huh? Wazza? Oh, all right.” He got up and padded to the phone. Caster was :ooking tousie-headea and excited. “Hey, Boss—he made it!” “Huh? What do you mean?”

“Palomar just called me. They saw the mark and now they’ve spotted the ship itself. He—”              

“Wait a minute, Bob. Slow up. He can’t be there yet. He just left last night.”                                    

Coster looked disconcerted. “What’s the matter, Mr. Harriman? Don’t you feel well? He left Wednesday.”

Vaguely, Harriman began to be oriented. No, the take-off had not been the night before—fuzzily he recalled a drive up into the mountains, a day spent dozing in the sun, some sort of a party at which he had drunk too much. What day was today? He didn’t know. If LeCroix had landed on the Moon, then—never mind. “It’s all right, Bob-I was half asleep. I guess I dreamed the take-off all over again. Now tell me the news, slowly.”

Coster started over. “LeCroix has landed, just west of Archimedes crater. They can see his ship, from Palomar. Say that was a great stunt you thought up, marking the spot with carbon black. Les must have covered two acres with it. They say it shines out like a billboard, through the Big Eye.”

“Maybe we ought to run down and have a look. No—later,” he amended. “We’ll be busy.”                                                                        

 “I don’t see what more we can do, Mr. Harriman. We’ve got twelve of our best ballistic computers calculating possible routes for you now.”

Harriman started to tell the man to put on another twelve, switched off the screen instead. He was still at Peterson Field, with one of Skyways’ best stratoships waiting for him outside, waiting to take him to whatever point on the globe LeCroix might ground. LeCroix was in the upper stratosphere, had been there for more than twenty-four hours. The pilot was slowly, cautiously wearing out his terminal velocity, dissipating the incredible kinetic energy as shock wave and radiant heat.

They had tracked him by radar around the globe and around again—and again … yet there was no way of knowing just where and what sort of landing the pilot would choose to risk. Harriman listened to the running radar reports and cursed the fact that they had elected to save the weight of radio equipment.

The radar figures started coming closer together. The voice broke off and started again: “He’s in his landing glide!”

“Tell the field to get ready!” shouted Harriman. He held his breath and waited. After endless seconds another voice cut in with, “The Moon ship is now landing. It will ground somewhere west of Chihuahua in Old Mexico.”

Harriman started for the door at a run.

Coached by radio en route, Harriman’s pilot spotted the Pioneer incredibly small against the desert sand. He put his own ship quite close to it, in a beautiful landing. Harriman was fumbling at the cabin door before the ship was fairly stopped.

LeCroix was sitting on the ground, resting his back against a skid of his ship and enjoying the shade of its stubby triangular wings. Apaisano sheepherder stood facing him, open- mouthed. As Harriman trotted out and lumbered toward him LeCroix stood up, flipped a cigaret butt away and said, “Hi, Boss!”

“Les!” The older man threw his arms around the younger. “It’s good to see you, boy.”

“It’s good to see you. Pedro here doesn’t speak my language.” LeCroix glanced around; there was no one else nearby but the pilot of Harriman’s ship. “Where’s the gang? Where’s Bob?”

“I didn’t wait. They’ll surely be along in a few minutes—hey, there they come now!” It was another stratoship, plunging in to a landing. Harriman turned to his pilot. “Bill—go over and meet them.”

“Huh? They’ll come, never fear.” “Do as I say.”

“You’re the doctor.” The pilot trudged through the sand, his back expressing disapproval. LeCroix looked puzzled. “Quick, Les—help me with this.”

“This” was the five thousand cancelled envelopes which were supposed to have been to the Moon. They got them out of Harriman’s stratoship and into the Moon ship, there to be stowed in an empty food locker, while their actions were still shielded from the later arrivals by the bulk of the strataship. “Whew!” said Harriman. “That was close. Half a million dollars. We need  it, Les.”

“Sure, but look, Mr. Harriman, the di—”

“Sssh! The others are coming. How about the other business? Ready with your act?” “Yes. But I was trying to tell you—”

“Quiet!”

It was not their colleagues; it was a shipload of reporters, camera men, mike men, commentators, technicians. They swarmed over them.

Harriman waved to them jauntily. “Help yourselves, boys. Get a lot of pictures. Climb through the ship. Make yourselves at home. Look at anything you want to. But go easy on Captain LeCroix—he’s tired.”

Another ship had landed, this time with Caster, Dixon and Strong. Entenza showed up in his own chartered ship and began bossing the TV, pix, and radio men, in the course of which he almost had a fight with an unauthorized camera crew. Alarge copter transport grounded and spilled out nearly a platoon of khaki-clad Mexican troops. Fom somewhere—out of the sand apparently—several dozen native peasants showed up. Harriman broke away from reporters, held a quick and expensive discussion with the captain of the local troops and a degree of order was restored in time to save the Pioneer from being picked to pieces.

“Just let that be!” It was LeCroix’s voice, from inside the Pioneer. Harriman waited and listened. “None of your business!” the pilot’s voice went on, rising higher, “and put them back!” Harriman pushed his way to the door of the ship. “What’s the trouble, Les?”                                                                                                                                                         Inside the cramped cabin, hardly large enough for a TVbooth, three men stood, LeCroix and two reporters. All three men looked angry. “What’s the trouble, Les?” Harriman repeated. LeCroix was holding a small cloth bag which appeared to be empty. Scattered on the pilot’s acceleration rest between him and the reporters were several small, dully brilliant stones. A

reporter held one such stone up to the light.

“These guys were poking their noses into things that didn’t concern them,” LeCroix said angrily.    The reporter looked at the stone said, “You told us to look at what we liked, didn’t you, Mr. Harriman?” “Yes.”

“Your pilot here-” He jerked a thumb at LeCroix. “—apparently didn’t expect us to find these. He had them hidden in the pads of his chair.”

“What of it?”             “They’re diamonds.”    “What makes you think so?” “They’re diamonds all right.”

Harriman stopped and unwrapped a cigar. Presently he said, “Those diamonds were where you found them because I put them there.” Aflashlight went off behind Harriman; a voice said, “Hold the rock up higher, Jeff.”                                                                            

The reporter called Jeff obliged, then said, “That seems an odd thing to do, Mr. Harriman.”

“I was interested in the effect of outer space radiations on raw diamonds. On my orders Captain LeCroix placed that sack of diamonds in the ship.”                                 

Jeff whistled thoughtfully. “You know, Mr. Harriman, if you did not have that explanation, I’d think LeCroix had found the rocks on the Moon and was trying to hold out on you.” “Print that and you will be sued for libel. I have every confidence in Captain LeCroix. Now give me the diamonds.”

Jeff’s eyebrows went up. “But not confidence enough in him to let him keep them,.maybe?” “Give me the stones. Then get out.”

Harriman got LeCroix away from the reporters as quickly as possible and into Harriman’s own ship. “That’s all for now,” he told the news and pictures people. “See us at Peterson Field.” Once the ship raised ground he turned to LeCroix. “You did a beautiful job, Les.”

“That reporter named Jeff must be sort of confused.”                                                     

“Eh? Oh, that. No, I mean the flight. You did it. You’re head man on this planet.”          

LeCroix shrugged it off. “Bob built a good ship. It was a cinch. Now about those diamonds—”

“Forget the diamonds. You’ve done your part. We placed those rocks in the ship; now we tell everybody we did—truthful as can be. It’s not our fault if they don’t believe us.” “But Mr. Harriman—”

“What?”

LeCroix unzipped a pocket in his coveralls, hauled out a soiled handkerchief, knotted into a bag. He untied it—and spilled into Harriman’s hands many more diamonds than had been displayed in the ship—larger, finer diamonds.

Harriman stared at them. He began to chuckle. Presently he shoved them back at LeCroix. “Keep them.” “I figure they belong to all of us.”

“Well, keep them for us, then. And keep your mouth shut about them. No, wait.” He picked out two large stones. “I’ll have rings made from these two, one for you, one for me. But keep your mouth shut, or they won’t be worth anything, except as curiosities.”

It was quite true, he thought. Long ago the diamond syndicate had realized that diamonds in plentiful supply were worth little more than glass, except for industrial uses. Earth had more than enough for that, more than enough for jewels. If Moon diamonds were literally “common as pebbles” then they were just that—pebbles.

Not worth the expense of bringing them to earth. But now take uranium. If that were plentiful— Harriman sat back and indulged in daydreaming. Presently LeCroix said softly, “You know, Boss, it’s wonderful there.”

“Eh? Where?”

“Why, on the Moon of course. I’m going back. I’m going back just as soon as I can. We’ve got to get busy on the new ship.” “Sure, sure! And this time we’ll build one big enough for all of us. This time I go, too!”

“You bet.”

“Les—” The older man spoke almost diffidently. “What does it look like when you look back and see the Earth?”

“Huh? It looks like— It looks—” LeCroix stopped. “Hell’s bells, Boss, there isn’t any way to tell you. It’s wonderful, that’s all. The sky is black and—well, wait until you see the pictures I took. Better .yet, wait and see it yourself.”

Harriman nodded. “But it’s hard to wait.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN                       “FIELDS OF DIAMONDS ON THE MOONU!”

“BILLIONAIRE BACKER DENIES DIAMOND STORY Says Jewels Taken Into Space for Science Reasons” “MOON DIAMONDS: HOAXOR FACT?”

“—but consider this, friends of the invisible audience: why would anyone take diamonds to the moon? Every ounce of that ship and its cargo was calculated; diamonds would not be   taken along without reason. Many scientific authorities have pronounced Mr. Harriman’s professed reason an absurdity. It is easy to guess that diamonds might be taken along for the purpose of ‘salting’ the Moon, so to speak, with earthly jewels, with the intention of convincing us that diamonds exist on the Moon—but Mr. Harriman, his pilot Captain LeCroix, and everyone connected with the enterprise have sworn from the beginning that the diamonds did not come from the Moon. But it is an absolute certainty that the diamonds were in the space ship when it landed. Cut it how you will; this reporter is going to try to buy some lunar diamond mining stock—”

Strong was, as usual, already in the office when Harriman came in. Before the partners could speak, the screen called out, “Mr. Harriman, Rotterdam calling.” “Tell them to go plant a tulip.”

“Mr. van der Velde is waiting, Mr. Harriman.” “Okay.”

Harriman let the Hollander talk, then said, “Mr. van der Velde, the statements attributed to me are absolutely correct. I put those diamonds the reporters saw into the ship before it took off. They were mined right here on Earth. In fact I bought them when I came over to see you; I can prove it.”

“But Mr. Harriman—”

“Suit yourself. There may be more diamonds on the Moon than you can run and jump over. I don’t guarantee it. But I do guarantee that those diamonds the newspapers are talking about came from Earth.”

“Mr. Harriman, why would you send diamonds to the Moon? Perhaps you intended to fool us, no?”

“Have it your own way. But I’ve said all along that those diamonds came from Earth. Now see here: you took an option—an option on an option, so to speak. If you want to make the second payment on that option and keep it in force, the deadline is nine o’clock Thursday, New York time, as specified in the contract. Make up your mind.”

He switched off and found his partner looking at him sourly. “What’s eating you?”                                               

“I wondered about those diamonds, too, Delos. So I’ve been looking through the weight schedule of the Pioneer.” “Didn’t know you were interested in engineering.”

“I can read figures.”

“Well, you found it, didn’t you? Schedule F-i 7-c, two ounces, allocated to me personally.” “I found it. It sticks out like a sore thumb. But I didn’t find something else.”         

Harriman felt a ‘cold chill in his stomach. “What?”                                                         

“I didn’t find a schedule for the cancelled covers.” Strong stared at him.                        

“It must be there. Let me see that weight schedule.”

“It’s not there, Delos. You know, I thought it was funny when you insisted on going to meet Captain LeCroix by yourself. What happened, Delos? Did you sneak them aboard?” He continued to stare while Harriman fidgeted. “We’ve put over some sharp business deals—but this will be the first time that anyone can say that the firm of Harriman and Strong has cheated.”

“George—I would cheat, lie, steal, beg, bribe—do anything to accomplish what we have accomplished.”                                                           

Harriman got up and paced the room. “We had to have that money, or the ship would never have taken off. We’re cleaned out. You know that, don’t you?” Strong nodded. “But those covers should have gone to the Moon. That’s what we contracted to do.”

“I just forgot it. Then it was too late to figure the weight in. But it doesn’t matter. I figured that if the trip was a failure, if LeCroix cracked up, nobody would know or care that the covers hadn’t gone. And I knew if he made it, it wouldn’t matter; we’d have plenty of money. And we will, George, we will!”

“We’ve got to pay the money back.”

“Now? Give me time, George. Everybody concerned is ‘happy the way it is. Wait until we recover our stake; then I’ll buy every one of those covers back—out of my own pocket. That’s a promise.”

Strong continued to sit. Harriman stopped in front of him. “I ask you, George, is it worth while to wreck an enterprise of this size for a purely theoretical point?” Strong sighed and said, “When the time comes, use the firm’s money.”

“That’s the spirit! But I’ll use my own, I promise you.”           

“No, the firm’s money. If we’re in it together, we’re in it together.” “O.K., if that’s the way you want it.”

Harriman turned back to his desk. Neither of the two partners had anything to say for a long while. Presently Dixon and Entenza were announced. “Well, Jack,” said Harriman. “Feel better now?”

“No thanks to you. I had to fight for what I did put on the air—and some of it was pirated as it was. Delos, there should have been a television pick-up in the ship.”     “Don’t fret about it. As I told you, we couldn’t spare the weight this time. But there will be the next trip, and the next. Your concession is going to be worth a pile of money.” Dixon cleared his throat. “That’s what we came to see you about, Delos. What are your plans?”

“Plans? We go right ahead. Les and Coster and I make the next trip. We set up a permanent base. Maybe Coster stays behind. The third trip we send a real colony—nuclear engineers, miners, hydroponics experts, communications engineers. We’ll found Luna City, first city on another planet.”

Dixon looked thoughtful. “And when does this begin to pay off?”

“What do you mean by ‘pay off’? Do you want your capital back, or do you want to begin to see some return on your investment? I can cut it either way.” Entenza was about to say that he wanted his investment back; Dixon cut in first, “Profits, naturally. The investment is already made.”

“Fine!”

“But I don’t see how you expect profits. Certainly, LeCroix made the trip and got back safely. There is honor for all of us. But where are the royalties?”           “Give the crop time to ripen, Dan. Do I look worried? What are our assets?” Harriman ticked them off on his fingers. “Royalties on pictures, television, radio—.” “Those things go to Jack.”

“Take a look at the agreement. He has the concession, but he pays the firm—that’s all of us—for them.”          

Dixon said, “Shut up, Jack!” before Entenza could speak, then added, “What else? That won’t pull us out of the red.”

“Endorsements galore. Monty’s boys are working on that. Royalties from the greatest best seller yet—I’ve got a ghost writer and a stenographer following LeCroix around this very minute. Afranchise for the first and only space line-“

“From whom?”

“We’ll get it. Kamens and Montgomery are in Paris now, working on it. I’m joining them this afternoon. And we’ll tie down that franchise with a franchise from the other end, just as soon   as we can get a permanent colony there, no matter how small. It will be the autonomous state of Luna, under the protection of the United Nations—and no ship will land or take off in its territory without its permission. Besides that we’ll have the right to franchise a dozen other companies for various purposes—and tax them, too—just as soon as we set up the Municipal Corporation of the City of Luna under the laws of the State of Luna. We’ll sell everything but vacuum— we’ll even sell vacuum, for experimental purposes. And don’t forgct—we’ll still have  a big chunk of real estate, sovereign title in us—as a state-and not yet sold. The Moon is big.”

“Your ideas are rather big, too, Delos,” Dixon said dryly. “But what actually happens next?”

“First we get title confirmed by the U.N. The Security Council is now in secret session; the Assembly meets tonight. Things will be popping; that’s why I’ve got to be there. When the United Nations decides—as it will!— that its own non-profit corporation has the only real claim to the Moon, then I get busy. The poor little weak non-profit corporation is going to grant a number   of things to some real honest-to-god corporations with hair on their chests—in return for help in setting up a physics research lab, an astronomical observatory, a lunography institute    and some other perfectly proper nonprofit enterprises. That’s our interim pitch until we get a permanent colony with its own laws. Then we-“

Dixon gestured impatiently. “Never mind the legal shenanigans, Delos. I’ve known you long enough to know that you can figure out such angles. What do we actually have to do next?” “Huh? We’ve got to build another ship, a bigger one. Not actually bigger, but effectively bigger. Coster has started the design of a surface catapult— it will reach from Manitou Springs to

the top of Pikes Peak. With it we can put a ship in free orbit around the Earth. Then we’ll use such a ship to fuel more ships—it amounts to a space station, like the power station. It adds

up to a way to get there on chemical power without having to throw away nine-tenths of your ship to do it.”

“Sounds expensive.”

“It will be. But don’t worry; we’ve got a couple of dozen piddling little things to keep the money coming in while we get set up on a commercial basis, then we sell stock. We- sold stock before; now we’ll sell a thousand dollars’ worth where we sold ten before.”

“And you think that will carry you through until the enterprise as a whole is on a paying basis? Face it, Delos, the thing as a whole doesn’t pay off until you have ships plying between here and the Moon on a paying basis, figured in freight and passenger charges. That means customers, with cash. What is there on the Moon to ship—and who pays for it?”

“Dan, don’t you believe there will be? If not, why are you here?”

“I believe in it, Delos—or I believe in you. But what’s your time schedule? What’s your budget? What’s your prospective commodity? And please don’t mention diamonds; I think I understand that caper.”

Harriman chewed his cigar for a few moments. “There’s one valuable commodity we’ll start shipping at once.” “What?”

“Knowledge.”

Entenza snorted. Strong looked puzzled. Dixon nodded. “I’ll buy that. Knowledge is always worth something—to the man who knows how to exploit it. And I’ll agree that the Moon is a place to find new knowledge. I’ll assume that you can make the next trip pay off. What’s your budget and your time table for that?”

Harriman did not answer. Strong searched his face closely. To him Harriman’s poker face was as revealing as large print—he decided that his partner had been crowded into a corner. He waited, nervous but ready to back Harriman’s play. Dixon went on, “From the way you describe it, Delos, I judge that you don’t have money enough for your next step—and you don’t know where you will get it. I believe in you, Delos—and I told you at the start that I did not believe in letting a new business die of anemia. I’m ready to buy in with a fifth share.”

Harriman stared. “Look,” he said bluntly, “you own Jack’s share now, don’t you?” “I wouldn’t say that.”

“You vote it. It sticks out all over.”                 

Entenza said, “That’s not true. I’m independent. I—”

“Jack, you’re a damn liar,” Harriman said dispassionately. “Dan, you’ve got fifty percent now. Under the present rules I decide deadlocks, which gives me control as long as George sticks by me. If we sell you another share, you vote three-fifths—and are boss. Is that the deal you are looking for?”

“Delos, as I told you, I have confidence in you.”

“But you’d feel happier with the whip hand. Well, I won’t do it. I’ll let space travel—real space travel, with established runs—wait another twenty years before I’ll turn loose. I’ll let us all go broke and let us live on glory before I’ll turn loose. You’ll have to think up another scheme.”

Dixon said nothing. Harriman got up and began to pace. He stopped in front of Dixon. “Dan, if you really understood what this is all about, I’d let you have control. But you don’t. You see   this is just another way to money and to power. I’m perfectly willing to let you vultures get rich—but I keep control. I’m going to see this thing developed, not milked. The human race is heading out to the stars—and this adventure is going to present new problems compared with which atomic power was a kid’s toy. Unless the whole matter is handled carefully, it will be fouled up. You’ll foul it up, Dan, if I let you have the deciding vote in it—because you don’t understand it.”

He caught his breath and went on, “Take safety for instance. Do you know why I let LeCroix take that ship out instead of taking it myself? Do you think I was afraid? No! I wanted it to come back—safely. I didn’t want space travel getting another set-back. Do you know why we have to have a monopoly, for a few years at least? Because every so-and-so and his brother is   going to want to build a Moon ship, now that they know it can be done. Remember the first days of ocean flying? After Lindbergh did it, every so-called pilot who could lay hands on a crate took off for some over-water point. Some of them even took their kids along. And most of them landed in the drink. Airplanes get a reputation for being dangerous. Afew years after that   the airlines got so hungry for quick money in a highly competitive field that you couldn’t pick up a paper without seeing headlines about another airliner crash.

“That’s not going to happen to space travel! I’m not going to let it happen.

Space ships are too big and too expensive; if they get a reputation for being unsafe as well, we might as well have stayed in bed. I run things.” He stopped. Dixon waited and then said, “I said I believed in you, Delos. How much money do you need?”

“Eh? On what terms?”       

“Your note.”                         

“My note? Did you say my note?”

“I’d want security, of course.”

Harriman swore. “I knew there was a hitch in it. Dan, you know everything I’ve got is tied up in this venture.” “You have insurance. You have quite a lot of insurance, I know.”

“Yes, but that’s all made out to my wife.”

“I seem to have heard you say something about that sort of thing to Jack Entenza,” Dixon said. “Come, now—if I know your tax-happy sort, you have at least one irrevocable trust, or paid- up annuities, or something, to keep Mrs. Harriman out of the poor house.”

Harriman thought fiercely about it. “When’s the call date on this note?” “In the sweet bye and bye. I want a no-bankruptcy clause, of course.” “Why? Such a clause has no legal validity.”                                     

“It would be valid with you, wouldn’t it?”

“Mmm … yes. Yes, it would.”

“Then get out your policies and see how big a note you can write.” Harriman looked at him, turned abruptly and went to his safe. He came back with quite a stack of long, stiff folders. They added them up together; it was an amazingly large sum—for those days. Dixon then consulted a memorandum taken from his pocket and said, “One seems to be missing— a rather  large one. ANorth Atlantic Mutual policy, I think.”

Harriman glared at him. “Am I going to have to fire every confidential clerk in my force?”

“No,” Dixon said mildly, “I don’t get my information from your staff. Harriman went back to the safe, got the policy and added it to the pile. Strong spoke up, “Do you want mine, Mr. Dixon?” “No,” answered Dixon, “that won’t be necessary.” He started stuffing the policies in his pocket. “I’ll keep these, Delos, and attend to keeping up the premiums. I’ll bill you of course. You

can send the note and the changeof-beneficiary forms to my office. Here’s your draft.” He took out another slip of paper; it was the draft—already made out in the amount of the policies.

Harriman looked at it. “Sometimes,” he said slowly, “I wonder who’s kidding who?” He tossed the draft over to Strong. “O.K., George, take care of it. I’m off to Paris, boys. Wish me luck.” He strode out as jauntily as a fox terrier.

Strong looked from the closed door to Dixon, then at the note. “I ought to tear this thing up!”                       

“Don’t do it,” advised Dixon. “You see, I really do believe in him.” He added, “Ever read Carl Sandburg, George?” “I’m not much of a reader.”

“Try him some time. He tells a story about a man who started a rumor that they had struck oil in hell. Pretty soon everybody has left for hell, to get in on the boom. The man who started the rumor watches them all go, then scratches his head and says to himself that there just might be something in it, after all. So he left for hell, too.”

Strong waited, finally said, “I don’t get the point.”

“The point is that I just want to be ready to protect myself if necessary, George—and so should you. Delos might begin believing his own rumors. Diamonds! Come, Jack.”

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE ENSUING MONTHS were as busy as the period before the flight of the Pioneer (now honorably retired to the Smithsonian Institution). One engineering staff and great gangs of men were working on the catapult, two more staffs were busy with two new ships; the Mayflower, and the Colonial; a third ship was on the drafting tables. Ferguson was chief engineer for all  of this; Coster, still buffered by Jock Berkeley, was engineering consultant, working where and as he chose. Colorado Springs was a boom town; the Denver-Trinidad roadcity  settlements spread out at the Springs until they surrounded Peterson Field.

Harriman was as busy as a cat with two tails. The constantly expanding exploitation and promotion took eight full days a week of his time, but, by working Kamens and Montgomery almost to ulcers and by doing without sleep himself, he created frequent opportunities to run out to Colorado and talk things over with Caster.

Luna City, it was decided, would be founded on the very next trip. The Mayflower was planned for a pay-load not only of seven passengers, but with air, water and food to carry four of them over to the next trip; they would live in an aluminum Quonset-type hut, sealed, pressurized, and buried under the loose soil of Luna until—and assuming—they were succored.

The choice of the four extra passengers gave rise to another contest, another publicity exploitation—and more sale of stock. Harriman insisted that they be two married couples, over the united objections of scientific organizations everywhere. He gave in only to the extent of agreeing that there was no objection to all four being scientists, providing they constituted two married couples. This gave rise to several hasty marriages—and some divorces, after the choices were announced.

The Mayflower was the maximum size that calculations showed would be capable of getting into a free orbit around the Earth from the boost of the catapult, plus the blast of her own engines. Before she took off, four other ships, quite as large, would precede her. But they were not space ships; they were mere tankers—nameless. The most finicky of ballistic calculations, the most precise of launchings, would place them in the same orbit at the same spot. There the Mayflower would rendezvous and accept their remaining fuel.

This was the trickiest part of the entire project. If the four tankers could be placed close enough together, LeCroix, using a tiny maneuvering reserve, could bring his new ship to them. If not—well, it gets very lonely out in Space.

Serious thought was given to placing pilots in the tankers and accepting as a penalty the use of enough fuel from one tanker to permit a get-away boat, a life boat with wings, to decelerate, reach the atmosphere and brake to a landing. Caster found a cheaper way.

Aradar pilot, whose ancestor was the proximity fuse and whose immediate parents could be found in the homing devices of guided missiles, was given the task of bringing the tankers together. The first tanker would not be so equipped, but th~ second tanker through its robot would smell out the first and home on it with a pint-sized rocket engine, using the smallest of vectors to bring them together. The third would home on the first two and the fourth on the group.

LeCroix shouid have no trouble-if the scheme worked. CHAPTER THIRTEEN

STRONG WANTED TO SHOW HARRIMAN the sales reports on the H & S automatic household switch; Harriman brushed them aside.

Strong shoved them back under his nose. “You’d better start taking an interest in such things, Delos. Somebody around this office had better start seeing to it that some money comes in

—some money that belongs to us, personally-or you’ll be selling apples on a street corner.”

Harriman leaned back and clasped his hands back of his head. “George, how can you talk that way on a day like this? Is there no poetry in your soul? Didn’t you hear what I said when I came in? The rendezvous worked. Tankers one and two are as close together as Siamese twins. We’ll be leaving within the week.”

“That’s as may be. Business has to go on.”                                      

“You keep it going; I’ve got a date. When did Dixon say he would be over?” “He’s due now.”

“Good!” Harriman bit the end off a cigar and went on, “You know, George, I’m not sorry I didn’t get to make the first trip. Now I’ve still got it t~ do. I’m as expectant as a bridegroom—and as happy.” He started to hum.

Dixon came in without Entenza, a situation that had obtained since the day Dixon had dropped the pretence that he controlled only one share. He shook hands. “You heard the news, Dan?”

“George told me.”

“This is it-or almost. Aweek from now, more or less, I’ll be on the Moon. I can hardly believe it.”                 

Dixon sat down silently. Harriman went on, “Aren’t you even going to congratulate me? Man, this is a great dayl” Dixon said, “D.D., why are you going?”

“Huh? Don’t ask foolish questions. This is what I ~have been working toward.”

“It’s not a foolish question. I asked why you were going. The four colonists have an obvious reason, and each is a selected specialist observer as well. LeCroix is the pilot. Coster is the man who is designing the permanent colony. But why are you going? What’s your function?”

“My function? Why, I’m the guy who runs things. Shucks, I’m going to run for mayor when I get there. Have a cigar, friend—the name’s Harriman. Don’t forget to vote.” He grinned. Dixon did not smile. “I did not know you planned on staying.”

Harriman looked sheepish. “Well, that’s still up in the air. If we get the shelter built in a hurry, we may save enough in the way of supplies to let me sort of lay over until the next trip. You wouldn’t begrudge me that, would you?”

Dixon looked him in the eye. “Delos, I can’t let you go at all.”

Harriman was too startled to talk at first. At last he managed to say, “Don’t joke, Dan. I’m going. You can’t stop me. Nothing on Earth can stop me.” Dixon shook his head. “I can’t permit it, Delos. I’ve got too much sunk in this. If you go and anything happens to you, I lose it all.”

“That’s silly. You and George would just carry on, that’s all.” “Ask George.”

Strong had nothing to say. He did not seem anxious to meet Harriman’s eyes. Dixon went on, “Don’t try to kid your way out of it, Delos. This venture is you and you are this venture. If you get killed, the whole thing folds up. I don’t say space travel folds up; I think you’ve already given that a boost that will carry it along even with lesser men in your shoes. But as for this venture—our company—it will fold up. George and I will have to liquidate at about half a cent on the dollar. It would take sale of patent rights to get that much. The tangible assets aren’t worth anything.”

“Damn it, it’s the intangibles we sell. You knew that all along.”

“You are the intangible asset, Delos. You are the goose that lays the golden eggs. I want you to stick around until you’ve laid them. You must not risk your neck in space flight until you  have this thing on a profit-making basis, so that any competent manager, such as George or myself, thereafter can keep it solvent. I mean it, Delos. I’ve got too much in it to see you risk it in a joy ride.”

Harriman stood up and pressed his fingers down on the edge of his desk. He was breathing hard. “You can’t stop me!” he said slowly and forcefully. “Not all the forces of heaven or hell can stop me.”

Dixon answered quietly, “I’m sorry, Delos. But I can stop you and I will. I can tie up that ship out there.” “Try it! I own as many lawyers as you do—and better ones!”

“I think you will find that you are not as popular in American courts as you once were-not since the United States found out it didn’t own the Moon after all.” “Try it, I tell you. I’ll break you and I’ll take your shares away from you, too.”

“Easy, Delos! I’ve no doubt you have some scheme whereby you could milk the basic company right away from George and me if you decided to. But it won’t be necessary. Nor will it be necessary to tie up the ship. I want the flight to take place as much as you do. But you won’t be on it, because you will decide not to go.”

“I will, eh? Do I look crazy from where you sit?” “No, on the contrary.”

“Then why won’t I go?”                                                

“Because of your note that I hold. I want to collect it.”         

“What? There’s no due date.”                                              

“No. But I want to be sure to collect it.”                                

“Why, you dumb fool, if I get killed you collect it sooner than ever.”

“Do I? You are mistaken, Delos. If you are killed-on a flight to the Moon—I collect nothing. I know; I’ve checked with every one of the companies underwriting you. Most of them have escape clauses covering experimental vehicles that date back to early aviation. In any case all of them will cancel and fight it out in court if you set foot inside that ship.”

“You put them up to this!”

“Calm down, Delos. You’ll be bursting a blood vessel. Certainly I queried them, but I was legitimately looking after my own interests. I don’t want to collect on that note-not now, not by your death. I want you to pay it back out of your own earnings, by staj’ing here and nursing this company through till it’s stable.”

Harriman chucked his cigar, almost unsmoked and badly chewed, at a waste basket. He missed. “I don’t give a hoot if you lose on it. If you hadn’t stirred them up, they’d have paid without a quiver.”

“But it did dig up a weak point in your plans, Delos. If space travel is to be a success, insurance will have to reach out and cover the insured anywhere.” “Confound it, one of them does now—N. A. Mutual.”

“I’ve seen their ad and I’ve looked over what they claim to offer. It’s just window dressing, with the usual escape clause. No, insurance will have to be revamped, all sorts of insurance.” Harriman looked thoughtful. “I’ll look into it. George, call Kamens. Maybe we’ll have to float our own company.”

“Never mind Kamens,” objected Dixon. “The point is you can’t go on this trip. You have too many details of that sort to watch and plan for and nurse along.”                                    Harriman looked back at him. “You haven’t gotten it through your head, Dan, that I’m going! Tie up the ship if you can. If you put sheriffs around it, I’ll have goons there to toss them aside.” Dixon looked pained. “I hate to mention this point, Delos, but I am afraid you will be stopped even if I drop dead.”

“How?” “Your wife.”

“What’s she got to do with it?”

“She’s ready to sue for separate maintenance right now—she’s found out about this insurance thing. When she hears about this present plan, she’ll force you into court and force an accounting of your assets.”

“You put her up to it!”

Dixon hesitated. He knew that Entenza had spilled the beans to Mrs. Harriman—maliciously. Yet there seemed no point in adding to a personal feud. “She’s bright enough to have done some investigating on her own account. I won’t deny I’ve talked to her—but she sent for me.”

“I’ll fight both of you!” Harriman stomped to a window, stood looking out—it was a real window; he liked to look at the sky.

Dixon came over and put a hand on his shoulder, saying softly, “Don’t take it this way, Delos. Nobody’s trying to keep you from your dream. But you can’t go just yet; you can’t let us down. We’ve stuck with you this far; you owe it to us to stick with us until it’s done.”

Harriman did not answer; Dixon went on, “If you don’t feel any loyalty toward me, how about George? He’s stuck with you against me, when it hurt him, when he thought you were ruining him—and you surely were, unless you finish this job. How about George, Delos? Are you going to let him down, too?”

Harriman swung around, ignoring Dixon and facing Strong. “What about it, George? Do you think I should stay behind?”  Strong rubbed his hands and chewed his lip. Finally he looked up. “It’s all right with me, Delos. You do what you think is best.”

Harriman stood looking at him for a long moment, his face working as if he were going to cry. Then he said huskily, “Okay, you rats. Okay. I’ll stay behind.”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IT WAS ONE OF THOSE GLORIOUS EVENINGS so common in the Pikes Peak region, after a day in which the sky has been well scrubbed by thunderstorms. The track of the catapult crawled in a straight line up the face of the mountain, whole shoulders having been carved away to permit it. At the temporary space port, still raw from construction, Harriman, in company with visiting notables, was saying good-bye to the passengers and crew of the Mayflower.

The crowds came right up to the rail of the catapult. There was no need to keep them back from the ship; the jets would not blast until she was high over the peak. Only the ship itself was guarded, the ship and the gleaming rails.

Dixon and Strong, together for company and mutual support, hung back at the edge of the area roped off for passengers and officials. They watched Harriman jollying those about to  leave: “Good-bye, Doctor. Keep an eye on him, Janet. Don’t let him go looking for Moon Maidens.” They saw him engage Coster in private conversation, then clap the younger man on the back.

“Keeps his chin up, doesn’t he?” whispered Dixon.                                “Maybe we should have let him go,” answered Strong.                               “Eh? Nonsense! We’ve got to have him. Anyway, his place in history is secure.”

“He doesn’t care about history,” Strong answered seriously, “he just wants to go to the Moon.”                    “Well, confound it—he can go to the Moon … as soon as he gets his job done. After all, it’s his job. He made it.” “I know.”

Harriman turned around, saw them, started toward them. They shut up. “Don’t duck,” he said jovially. “It’s all right. I’ll go on the next trip. By then I plan to have it running itself. You’ll see.” He turned back toward the Mayflower. “Quite a sight, isn’t she?”

The outer door was closed; ready lights winked along the track and from the control tower. Asiren sounded. Harriman moved a step or two closer.

“There she goes!”

It was a shout from the whole crowd. The great ship started slowly, softly up the track, gathered speed, and shot toward the distant peak. She was already tiny by the time she curved up the face and burst into the sky.

She hung there a split second, then a plume of light exploded from her tail. Her jets had fired.

Then she was a shining light in the sky, a ball of flame, then—nothing. She was gone, upward and outward, to her rendezvous with her tankers.                                                     The crowd had pushed to the west end of the platform as the ship swarmed up the mountain. Harriman had stayed where he was, nor had Dixon and Strong followed the crowd. The

three were alone, Harriman most alone for he did not seem aware that the others were near him. He was watching the sky.

Strong was watching him. Presently Strong barely whispered to Dixon, “Do you read the Bible?” “Some.”

“He looks as Moses must have looked, when he gazed out over the promised land.”

Harriman dropped his eyes from the sky and saw them. “You guys still here?” he said. “Come on—there’s work to be done.”

The End

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The joys of a good shoeshine.

Have you ever woke up, grabbed a cup of coffee, checked your feed… only to have some hysterical SJW shouting you in big capital letters about some issue or the other?

Yeah.

It’s upsetting and irritating.

It’s the reason why men like to golf.

Why men like to fish, and to just stare out in space…

Have you ever just sat in your truck....

I want to take a moment to discuss the little joys in life, and in particular those little joys that we take for granted, or just ignore out of habit. I want to talk about Summer afternoons, baseball, old men in barbershops, and getting donuts and coffee. I want to talk a little about life.

This post was inspired by Rush Limbaugh when he related a story from his childhood…

RUSH: Did you hear what the CEO of Chick-fil-A said? Maybe he’s the former CEO. Dan Cathy, is that his name? He said that white people should be shining the shoes of black people to learn what — yeah, he did. In fact, I have the sound bite. Let me find where it is. It’s toward the back of the list here, I think. That’s how I learned about it. Audio sound bite number 16. Yeah. This was Sunday in Atlanta at the Passion City Church during a roundtable discussion, Chick-fil-A CEO Dan Cathy said this about how to help improve race relations in America.

CATHY: We need to just go right on over and shine their shoes. And whether they got tennis shoes on or not — maybe they got sandals on — it really doesn’t matter. But, there’s a time in which we need to have some personal action here and maybe we need to give them a hug, too. I bought about 1,500 of these [shoeshine brushes] and I gave them to all our Chick-fil-A operators and staff a number of years ago. So any expressions of a contrite heart, of a sense of humility, a sense of shame, a sense of embarrassment begat with an apologetic heart.

RUSH: So the reason this appeals to me is not what you may think. I’ve been there, done that. This is a cutting edge of societal evolution moment. My first job, the first job I ever had outside of the house, you know, chores and that kind of thing, the first paying job I had was to shine shoes in a barbershop, 13 years old. I was fascinated with making shoes shine. I wanted to be the best at it. I wanted to figure out how to do it. And I had that job for three months. I earned $50 in three months. And it was such an educational experience in all kinds of ways.

I eventually had to give the job up because there was public pressure. I didn’t need the job. I had a relatively affluent family, and the job should have gone to a more needy person. And that was a partial factor in why, but also school starting. I did it during the summer. And school starting and having some after-school activities would have limited my ability to get to the barbershop. But one of the things, when I first got the gig, the shoeshine stand was as far back in the barbershop as you could go, and I’d sit back there and I’d wait for customers to show up, and nobody would show up.

And after the first four or five days, one of the barbers — the owners — said, “What are you gonna do to change this? You think they’re just gonna come to you back there?” I said, “Well, if I wanted a shoeshine…” He said, “Exactly. They don’t want a shoeshine. You gotta understand: Everybody’s shoes you’re gonna shine in here does not want one, so what you’re gonna have to do…” He gave me an idea.

He said, “Whenever we have somebody…” We had four barber chairs. “Whenever somebody’s in the chair, just go up and start buffin’ the shoes, and they’re gonna say to you, ‘Wait, wait, wait! Wait! I don’t want you to do that. I’m not paying for this,’ and you say, ‘I’m not charging you, sir. This is a service offered by me and the barbershop at no charge.'”

The barber said to me, “You watch how many of them will then ask you to go ahead and do it for real, ask you what you charge for it,” and that’s exactly what happened. So I gave ’em a free buff, and it led to — I’d say — over half of the customers wanting a shoeshine. Then when they saw how good I was at it and how I could pop that shoeshine buff rag, I learned something else.

You go to the barber supply store, and you have access to pieces of equipment and various types of shoeshine and other things that were never sold retail. It’s the same thing in the restaurant business. Restaurant supply stores have things that you’ll never find at even the biggest grocery store or Costco or what have you. So I would always use that.

“I’ve got stuff you can’t get at home. I’ve got stuff that will make your shoes shine like you can’t make your own shoes shine.” I said, “I have studied the spit-shine technique of the U.S. military. I’ve perfected it. You want to see how it works?” “Oh, yeah!” So, 50 bucks in three months at 50 cents a pop. I loved it — absolutely loved it — and now you’ve got the CEO of Chick-fil-A saying, “Yeah, that’s what we need to do. We need to start shining the shoes of…”

(interruption) “When is this embarrassing groveling gonna stop?” I don’t know, but it will at some point, because it’s all going to consume itself somehow. It will at some point. I can’t predict why because nobody can.

So…

Oh, so many things to say about this.

But…

When was the last time that you had a good ol’d spit shine?

December 1940. Brockton, Massachusetts. "Men and a woman reading headlines posted in window of Brockton Enterprise newspaper office on Christmas Eve." 35mm Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano.
December 1940. Brockton, Massachusetts. “Men and a woman reading headlines posted in window of Brockton Enterprise newspaper office on Christmas Eve.” 35mm Kodachrome transparency by Jack Delano.

I know most people now wear tennis shoes, short canvas uppers, maybe work boots, or sandals. But, certainly, you men out there, you have a nice set of shoes. So…

When was the last time that you went out and had a professional shoeshine for a buck or two?

Have you ever?

It’s more than just a shiny set of shoes, you know.

It’s a foot massage, it’s the joy of being pampered, and looking good. After you go ahead and get a well done shoeshine, you will walk a little straighter. You will feel a little bit better. Your head will be a little bit taller, and the day will look a little bit brighter.

Now…

If the misses is complaining, and yelling (screeching) why you’d waste money on that? And you have more “important” things to do, and all the rest of that rigmarole, you just tell her to move on. Then you, and your boys can sit down and experience one of those lost arts…

… a man getting a shoeshine.

A newspaper, cigar or pack or cigarettes are optional. I might suggest, however, you avoid turning on your smart-phone. And instead just “grok” the entire scene. Soak it up. Enjoy it.

Manly pleasures

Now, I can discuss other things that I like to lump together as “manly pleasures”. I do so because these are things that men enjoy but women tend to find it rather boring, consider unnecessary, or just don’t see the benefit of.

Yeah.

We men have a lot of “manly pleasures”.

Some of which involve the opposite sex, but many do not.

Some are surprising. Like riding a lawn mower with a colt-45 (it’s a brand of beer you all) between your legs, and a set of headphones on where you can listen to some fine, fine tunes.

Some seem boring to others. Like paddling on a quiet lake on a lake during a full moon all alone and listening to the sounds fo the forest as the water slides by on the sides of the boat.

Some are pleasures that seemingly everyone enjoys. Like dogs and cats, and (dare I say it) a weasel. Oh, how I do love to wrestle with my furry friends.

And some are often taken for granted. Like getting a trim at the local barber.

From Shorpy; "Dad ran a barbershop at our house. Two chairs and no appointment needed. I remember one customer who paid for his cuts in produce from his little farm.

Dad's partner in the shop ate dinner with us every night because he lived too far away to travel home to his wife and kids in time to eat.

And; we burned the hair that accumulated on the shop floor because back then, there was no trash service in rural communities. I can tell you the neighbors always knew when the hair was burning."
From Shorpy; “Dad ran a barbershop at our house. Two chairs and no appointment needed. I remember one customer who paid for his cuts in produce from his little farm. Dad’s partner in the shop ate dinner with us every night because he lived too far away to travel home to his wife and kids in time to eat.
And; we burned the hair that accumulated on the shop floor because back then, there was no trash service in rural communities. I can tell you the neighbors always knew when the hair was burning.”

The women argue that the wife of the house needs to go to the beauty salon to get her hair done because… well, she’s a woman and she needs to look good. But a man, a father. Nah. She can trim the hair at home. Save some money for the children, etc.

Nope.

Men need that little space in time to go down to the local barber. hang out with other men. Go through the old hunting magazines, and newspapers and talk about the latest local sports game, some politics or what’s going on at the local fair. A man needs some “guy time”.

Don’t you think?

Small Town America

You know, the longer I live away from the ‘States, the more I miss the simpler things. I know, I know, that the United States doesn’t resemble anything like I remember. Yet, still, I do hold fond memories of certain places, certain things, and a certain “feeling” that I had back then…

…at a time when I was a young boy growing up in the Summer of the 1960’s into the 1970’s.

My have times changed. Look at these prices. Also take note of the lunch menu. Many of the things on the menu are unobtainable today. Not actually unheard of, but try to a find a restaurant that will serve them today. Yikes!
My have times changed. Look at these prices. Also take note of the lunch menu. Many of the things on the menu are unobtainable today. Not actually unheard of, but try to a find a restaurant that will serve them today. Yikes!

I would like to talk a little bit about life…

… life in a small town.

I grew up in a small town in the hills of Western Pennsylvania on the banks of the Allegheny River. Most people never heard of it, until my classmate Jim Kelly became a star quarterback for the Buffalo Bills. Then it was famous for a spell. Old East Brady. Home of Jimmy Kelly.

Well…

Then…

…. it was all forgotten again.

August 1941. "The Connecticut River at Bellows Falls, Vermont, and on the far side of the river, North Walpole, New Hampshire." Car Heaven. Medium-format negative by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information.
August 1941. “The Connecticut River at Bellows Falls, Vermont, and on the far side of the river, North Walpole, New Hampshire.” Car Heaven. Medium-format negative by Jack Delano for the Office of War Information.

As a boy, we would ride our bikes along the streets and access-roads alongside the many rail spur-lines that criss-crossed the hills of Western PA. We would sing the pop songs of the day, much like they did in the movie “Stand by me” as they walked the tracks on their day hike.

  • Have You Ever Seen the Rain? – CCR
  • Draggin’ the Line – Tommy James & the Shondells
  • Family Affair – Sly & The Family Stone
  • Get it on – T Rex
  • Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves – Cher
  • Me & You & a Dog Named Boo – Lobo
  • The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down – Joan Baez
  • Don’t Pull Your Love – Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds
  • Immigrant Song – Led Zeppelin
  • Baby I’m a Want You – Bread
  • Mr Bojangles – Nitty Gritty Dirt Band
  • Sweet City Woman – The Stampeders

Indeed, my boyhood was very American, and very typical.

Like yours maybe…

In the treehouse with your buddies.
In the treehouse with your buddies.

We would go through sunny fields where the wheat would blow in waves with the wind against a bright riveting blue sky occupied with glorious white puffy clouds. And then delve deep into the cool gloom of the dark forest canopy. Where the cool moisture would refresh our bones, and where we would find an old spring or two to fill our canteens with.

The refreshing darkness of a deep forest far away from the town, and the sunny fields of corn, barley and wheat.
The refreshing darkness of a deep forest far away from the town, and the sunny fields of corn, barley and wheat.

So what is that all about?

The punchline

Earlier this morning, I woke up went to the kitchen… poured myself a coffee and opened up the laptop to check the news. Drudge is all… well the same old shit. (Projectile vomit.)

So I checked my LinkedIN feed.

Usually, the responses and information on the feed is more intelligent than other social networks as most people MUST be an adult to have a CV. Don't you know. 

So LinkedIN tends to be populated with adults who are either in possession of a career, a business or are networking towards some goal.

There are exceptions however. 

There are scammers who make a very tiny profile and try to scam you. Some are women looking to seduce you to get on Tinder. Some are trolling for my long lost uncle who they have a couple of billion dollars of pure bullion just waiting for me, as long as I give them just a few hundred dollars.

And some are "journalists" or NGO folk. They have a title (usually impressive) and some kind of funding (whether George Soros if they are liberal, or the CIA / NED / NID if they are conservative) and just post in all the comments sections with their "opinions". Which pretty much mirror the narratives of their NGO organization.

And here is this shrill demanding that I respond to her insane request for… XYZ.

It immediately set my mood from “neutral… shifting into start the day” to “insulted, angry, and go into attack mode”.

Luckily I did nothing.

I guess I’m too old for this bullshit.

Men, you all don't need to take shrilling anger off a SJW stranger who is making demands of you online.
Men, you all don’t need to take shrilling anger off a SJW stranger who is making demands of you online.

What stopped me?

Yeah.

What was the mechanism that stopped me?

Why didn’t I immediately pounce, and lash back? What stopped me?

I’ll tell you what.

It was an image that just popped into my head that very moment…

I keep on remembering what the older men in the barbershop would say if this shrill was in front of us personally.

I just could picture it so vividly

Can you?

When you are with a group of other men, often much older, will not be afraid to tell you what they think of female shrills and their insulting behaviors.
When you are with a group of other men, often much older, will not be afraid to tell you what they think of female shrills and their insulting behaviors.

And maybe that’s what is so important.

It’s a deconstruction of that modern progressive narrative that has been carefully constructed over the years. A narrative that says…

  • Everyone has an equal voice on the internet.
  • You need to respect others, even if they are insulting to you.
  • You must accept what they say, and accept the fact that it can make you angry, sad, upset or disturb you.
  • You need to be accepting of others, even if they are unreasonable and don’t agree with you.

Bull Fucking Shit.

I perma-banned her from my feed. I did not respond. I just completely cut her out of my life forever.

I can rest easy that she will no longer be permitted to remotely trigger my emotions in any way. For I have defanged her. I have declawed her and neutered her ability to interfere in my life.

And people…

It was my old fashioned memories of my “tribe” and my membership in a group of others who understood these kinds of things that made it happen. It comes from a time of shoeshines, barbershops, tree houses, railroad walks through deep forests, and brotherhood.

It comes from playing baseball with other boys in the empty football field down the street. It comes from late nights leaving the local bar and throwing the empty glass bottles into the woods while we peed at the side of the road. It comes from putting in a hard days of work in the mines, where you are covered head to toe with grease and black dust and you go to your home, pull out a TV dinner and pop it in the microwave while “Three’s Company” starts to come on.

It comes from history.

It has been my experience that those that come from a hard life; you know the type “hard scrabble”, hard working labor, and a life of “being disposable”… where you are considered to be “fly-over people” and “deplorable” and unimportant…

… just don’t pick fights with other people.

They just walk away to their pickup truck. Get inside. Check the glove box to make sure the 357 is still loaded. And slowly drive away. Playing some tunes. It’s not that we are going to do anything hurtful, it’s just comforting to know that we could really fuck someone up if we wanted to.

Sometimes, it’s that thin line of self-confidence that prevents us from making some pretty disastrous mistakes.

We can thank our friends, and our experiences for that.

And those that are not like this… well, they aren’t one of us.

It’s easy to hide behind the safety of the internet video screen. But the truth be told, this crappy assed bitch wouldn’t dare say that to my face. She just wouldn’t. She’d be just another old biddy that looks away in shame when I walk down the sidewalk.

So do not forget where you came from, and who you are. Never forget who you are.

Never allow anyone to interfere in your life, no matter what their excuse.

Live a good happy life.

Excise the bad out of it.

What a fucking beautiful day.
What a fucking beautiful day.

Do you want more?

I have other posts along these lines in my Happiness Index. You can see it here…

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Farmer in the Sky (full text) by Robert Heinlein

“Farmer in the Sky” is another one of Heinlein’s excellent novels. It is set in the “Heinlein solar system” which means Venus and Mars have life. It is about a family trying to be homesteaders on Ganymede as it orbits Jupiter. The descriptions of the sky from the surface of Ganymede are some of the best parts of this well written and engaging story.

Farmer in the sky

1.   Earth

Our troop had been up in the High Sierras that day and we were late getting back. We had taken off from the camp field on time but Traffic Control swung us ‘way east to avoid some weather. I didn’t like it; Dad usually won’t eat if I’m not home.

Besides that, I had had a new boy shoved off on me as co-pilot; my usual co-pilot and assistant patrol leader was sick, so our Scoutmaster, Mr. Kinski, gave me this twerp. Mr. Kinski rode in the other copter with the Cougar Patrol.

“Why don’t you put on some speed?” the twerp wanted to know.

“Ever hear of traffic regulations?” I asked him.

The copter was on slave-automatic, controlled from the ground, and was cruising slowly, down a freight lane they had stuck us in.

The twerp laughed. “You can always have an emergency. Here–I’ll show you.” He switched on the mike. “Dog Fox Eight Three, calling traffic–“

I switched it off, then switched on again when Traffic answered and told them that we had called by mistake. The twerp looked disgusted. “Mother’s good little boy!” he said in sticky sweet tones.

That was just the wrong thing to say to me. “Go aft,” I told him, “and tell Slats Keifer to come up here.” “Why? He’s not a pilot.”

“Neither are you, for my money. But he weighs what you do and I want to keep the crate trimmed.” He settled back in his seat. “Old Man Kinski assigned me as co-pilot; here I stay.”

I counted to ten and let it ride. The pilot compartment of a ship in the air is no place for a fight. We had nothing more to say to each other until I put her down on North Diego Platform and cut the tip jets.

I was last one out, of course. Mr, Kinski was waiting there for us but I didn’t see him; all I saw was the twerp. I grabbed him by the shoulder. “Want to repeat that crack now?” I asked him.

Mr. Kinski popped up out of nowhere, stepped between us and said, “Bill! Bill! What’s the meaning of this?” “I–” I started to say that I was going to slap the twerp loose from his teeth, but I thought better of it

Mr. Kinski turned to the twerp. “What happened, Jones?” “I didn’t do anything! Ask anybody.”

I was about to say that he could tell that to the Pilots’ Board. Insubordination in the air is a serious matter. But that “Ask anybody” stopped me. Nobody else had seen or heard anything.

Mr. Kinski looked at each of us, then said, “Muster your patrol and dismiss them, Bill.” So I did and went on home.

All in all, I was tired and jumpy by the time I got home. I had listened to the news on the way home; it wasn’t good. The ration had been cut another ten calories–which made me still hungrier and reminded me that I hadn’t been home to get Dad’s supper. The newscaster went on to say that the Spaceship Mayflower had finally been commissioned and that the rolls were now opened for emigrants. Pretty lucky for them, I thought. No short rations. No twerps like Jones.

And a brand new planet.

George–my father, that is–was sitting in the apartment, looking over some papers. “Howdy, George,” I said to him, “eaten yet?” “Hello, Bill. No.”

“I’ll have supper ready right away.” I went into the pantry and could see that he hadn’t eaten lunch, either. I decided to fix him a plus meal.

I grabbed two Syntho-Steaks out of the freezer and slapped them in quickthaw, added a big Idaho baked potato for Dad and a smaller one for me, then dug out a package of salad and let it warm naturally.

By the time I had poured boiling water over two soup cubes and over coffee powder the steaks were ready for the broiler. I transferred them, letting it cycle at medium rare, and stepped up the gain on the quickthaw so that the spuds would be ready when the steaks were–then back to the freezer for a couple of icekreem cake slices for dessert.

The spuds were ready. I took a quick look at my ration accounts, decided we could afford it, and set out a couple of pats of butterine for them. The

broiler was ringing; I removed the steaks, set everything out, and switched on the candles, just as Anne would have done.

“Come and get it!” I yelled and turned back to enter the calorie and point score on each item from the wrappers, then shoved the wrappers in the incinerator. That way you never get your accounts fouled up.

Dad sat down as I finished. Elapsed time from scratch, two minutes and twenty seconds–there’s nothing hard about cooking; I don’t see why women make such a fuss about it. No system, probably.

Dad sniffed the steaks and grinned. “Oh boy! Bill, you’ll bankrupt us.”

“You let me worry,” I said. I’m still plus for this quarter.” Then I frowned. “But I won’t be, next quarter, unless they quit cutting the ration.” Dad stopped with a piece of steak on its way to his mouth. “Again?”

“Again. Look, George, I don’t get it. This was a good crop year and they started operating the Montana yeast plant besides.” “You follow all the commissary news, don’t you, Bill?”

“Naturally.”

“Did you notice the results of the Chinese census as well? Try it on your slide rule.”

I knew what he meant–and the steak suddenly tasted like old rubber. What’s the use in being careful if somebody on the other side of the globe is going to spoil your try? “Those darned Chinese ought to quit raising babies and start raising food!”

“Share and share alike, Bill.”

“But–” I shut up. George was right, he usually is, but somehow it didn’t seem fair. “Did you hear about the Mayflower?” I asked to change the subject.

“What about the Mayflower?Dad’s voice was suddenly cautious, which surprised me. Since Anne died –Anne was my mother–George and I have been about as close as two people can be.

“Why, she was commissioned, that’s all. They’ve started picking emigrants.” “So?” There was that cautious tone again. “What did you do today?”

“Nothing much. We hiked about five miles north of camp and Mr. Kinski put some of the kids through tests. I saw a mountain lion.” “Really? I thought they were all gone.”

“Well, I thought I saw one.”

“Then you probably did. What else?”

I hesitated, then told him about this twerp Jones. “He’s not even a member of our troop. How does he get that way, interfering with my piloting?” “You did right, Bill. Sounds as if this twerp Jones, as you call him, was too young to be trusted with a pilot’s license.”

“Matter of fact, he’s a year older than I am.”

“In my day you had to be sixteen before you could even go up for your license.” “Times change, George.”

“So they do. So they do.”

Dad suddenly looked sad and I knew he was thinking about Anne. I hastily said, “Old enough or not, how does an insect like Jones get by the temperament-stability test?”

“Psycho tests aren’t perfect, Bill. Neither are people.” Dad sat back and lit his pipe. “Want me to clean up tonight?”

“No, thanks.” He always asked; I always turned him down. Dad is absent-minded; he lets ration points get into the incinerator. When I salvage, I really salvage. “Feel like a game of cribbage?”

“I’ll beat the pants off you.”

“You and who else?” I salvaged the garbage, burned the dishes, followed him into the living room. He was getting out the board and cards.

His mind wasn’t really on the game. I was around the corner and ready to peg out before he was really under way. Finally he put down his cards and looked square at me. “Son–“

“Huh? I mean, ‘Yes, George?'”

“I’ve decided to emigrate in the Mayflower.

I knocked over the cribbage board. I picked it up, eased my throttle, and tried to fly right. “That’s swell! When do we leave?” Dad puffed furiously on his pipe. “That’s the point, Bill. You’re not going.”

I couldn’t say anything. Dad had never done anything like this to me before. I sat there, working my mouth like a fish. Finally I managed, “Dad, you’re joking.”

“No, I’m not, Son.”

“But why? Answer me that one question: why?” “Now see here, Son–“

“Call me ‘Bill’.”

“Okay, Bill. It’s one thing for me to decide to take my chances with colonial life but I’ve got no right to get you off to a bad start. You’ve got to finish your education. There are no decent schools on Ganymede. You get your education, then when you’re grown, if you want to emigrate, that’s your business.”

“That’s the reason? That’s the only reason? To go to school?

“Yes. You stay here and take your degree. I’d like to see you take your doctor’s degree as well. Then, if you want to, you can join me. You won’t have missed your chance; applicants with close relatives there have priority.”

“No!”

Dad looked stubborn.

So did I, I guess. “George, I’m telling you, if you leave me behind, it won’t do any good. I won’t go to school. I can pass the exams for third class citizenship right now. Then I can get a work permit and–“

He cut me short. “You won’t need a work permit. I’m leaving you well provided for, Bill. You’ll–“

  • ‘Well provided for’! Do you think I’d touch a credit of yours if you go away and leave me? I’ll live on my student’s allowance until I pass the exams and get my work card.”

“Bring your voice down, Sonl” He went on, “You’re proud of being a Scout, aren’t you?”

“Well–yes.”

“I seem to remember that Scouts are supposed to be obedient. And courteous, too.” That one was pretty hot over the plate. I had to think about it. “George–“

“Yes, Bill?”

“If I was rude, I’m sorry. But the Scout Law wasn’t thought up to make it easy to push a Scout around. As long as I’m living in your home I’ll do what you say. But if you walk out on me, you don’t have any more claim on me. Isn’t that fair?”

“Be reasonable, Son. I’m doing it for your own good.”

“Don’t change the subject, George. Is that fair or isn’t it? If you go hundreds of millions of miles away, how can you expect to run my life after you’re gone? I’ll be on my own.”

“I’ll still be your father.”

“Fathers and sons should stick together. As I recall, the fathers that came over in the original Mayflower brought their kids with them.” “This is different.”

“How?”

“It’s further, incredibly further–and dangerous.”

“So was that move dangerous–half the Plymouth Rock colony died the first winter; everybody knows that. And distance doesn’t mean anything; what matters is how long it takes. If I had had to walk back this afternoon, I’d still be hiking next month. It took the Pilgrims sixty-three days to cross the Atlantic or so they taught me in school–but this afternoon the caster said that the Mayflower–will reach Ganymede in sixty days. That makes Ganymede closer than London was to Plymouth Rock.”

Dad stood up and knocked out his pipe. “I’m not going to argue, Son.”

“And I’m not, either.” I took a deep breath. I shouldn’t have said the next thing I did say, but I was mad. I’d never been treated this way before and I guess I wanted to hurt back. “But I can tell you this: you’re not the only one who is sick of short rations. If you think I’m going to stay here while you’re eating high on the hog out in the colonies, then you had better think about it again. I thought we were partners.”

That last was the meanest part of it and I should have been ashamed. That was what he had said to me the day after Anne died, and that was the way it had always been.

The minute I said it I knew why George had to emigrate and I knew it didn’t have anything to do with ration points. But I didn’t know how to unsay it. Dad stared. Then he said slowly, “You think that’s how it is? That I want to go away so I can quit skipping lunch to save ration points?”

“What else?” I answered. I was stuck in a groove; I didn’t know what to say. “Hmm … well, if you believe that, Bill, there is nothing I can say. I think I’ll turn in.”

I went to my room, feeling all mixed up inside. I wanted Mother around so bad I could taste it and I knew that George felt the same way. She would never have let us reach the point where we were actually shouting at each other–at least I had shouted. Besides that, the partnership was busted up, it would never be the same.

I felt better after a shower and a long massage. I knew that the partnership couldn’t really be busted up. In the long run, when George saw that I had to go, he wouldn’t let college stand in the way. I was sure of that–well, pretty sure at least.

I began to think about Ganymede.

Ganymede!

Why, I had never even been out to the Moon!

There was a boy in my class who had been born on the Moon. His parents were still there; he had been sent home for schooling. He gave himself airs as a deep-space man. But Luna was less than a quarter of a million miles away; you could practically throw rocks at it. It wasn’t self-supporting; Moon Colony had the same rations as Earth. It was really part of Earth. But Ganymede!

Let’s see–Jupiter was half a billion miles away, more or less, depending on the time of year. What was the tiny distance to the Moon compared with a jump like that?

Suddenly I couldn’t remember whether Ganymede was Jupiter’s third moon or fourth. And I just had to know. There was a book out in the living room that would tell and more besides–Ellsworth Smith’s A Tour of Earth’s Colonies. I went out to get it.

Dad hadn’t gone to bed. He was sitting up, reading. I said, “Oh–hello,” and went to look for the book. He nodded and went on reading. The book wasn’t where it should have been. I looked around and Dad said, “What are you looking for, Bill?”

Then I saw that he was reading it. I said, “Oh, nothing. I didn’t know you were using it.” “This?” He held it up.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll find something else.” “Take it. I’m through with it.”

“Well … All right-thanks.” I took it and turned away. “Just a minute, Bill.”

I waited. “I’ve come to a decision, Bill. I’m not going.”

“Huh?”

“You were right about us being partners. My place is here.”

“Yes, but– Look, George, I’m sorry I said what I did about rations. I know that’s not the reason. The reason is–well, you’ve got to go.” I wanted to tell him I knew the reason was Anne, but if I said Anne’s name out loud I was afraid I’d bawl.

“You mean that you are willing to stay behind–and go to school?”

“Uh–” I wasn’t quite ready to say that; I was dead set on going myself. “I didn’t quite mean that. I meant that I know why you want to go, why you’ve

got to go.”

“Hmm …” He lit his pipe, making a long business of it. “I see. Or maybe I don’t” Then he added, “Let’s put it this way, Bill. The partnership stands. Either we both go, or we both stay–unless you decide of your own volition that you will stay to get your degree and join me out there later. Is that fair?”

“Huh? Oh, yes!”

“So let’s talk about it later.”

I said goodnight and ducked into my room quick. William, my boy, I told myself, it’s practically in the bag–if you can just keep from getting soft- hearted and agreeing to a split up. I crawled into bed and opened the book.

Ganymede was Jupiter-III; I should have remembered that. It was bigger than Mercury, much bigger than the Moon, a respectable planet, even if it was a moon. The surface gravity was one third of Earth-normal; I would weigh about forty-five pounds there. First contacted in 1985–which I knew– and its atmosphere project started in 1998 and had been running ever since.

There was a stereo in the book of Jupiter as seen from Ganymede–round as an apple, ruddy orange, and squashed on both poles. And big as all outdoors. Beautiful. I fell asleep staring at it.

Dad and I didn’t get a chance to talk for the next three days as my geography class spent that time in Antarctica. I came back with a frostbitten nose and some swell pix of penguins–and some revised ideas. I had had time to think.

Dad had fouled up the account book as usual but he had remembered to save the wrappers and it didn’t take me long to straighten things out. After dinner I let him beat me two games, then said, “Look, George–“

“Yes?”

“You know what we were talking about?” “Well, yes.”

“It’s this way. I’m under age; I can’t go if you won’t let me. Seems to me you ought to, but if you don’t, I won’t quit school. In any case, you ought to go– you need to go–you know why. I’m asking you to think it over and take me along, but I’m not going to be a baby about it.”

Dad almost looked embarrassed. “That’s quite a speech, Son. You mean you’re willing to let me go, you stay here and go to school, and not make a fuss about it?”

“Well, not ‘willing’-but I’d put up with it.”

“Thanks.” Dad fumbled in his pouch and pulled out a flat photo. “Take a look at this.” “What is it?”

“Your file copy of your application for emigration. I submitted it two days ago.”

2.   The Green-Eyed Monster

I wasn’t much good in school for the next few days. Dad cautioned me not to get worked up over it; they hadn’t approved our applications as yet. “You know, Bill, ten times as many people apply as can possibly go.”

“But most of them want to go to Venus or Mars. Ganymede is too far away; that scares the sissies out.”

“I wasn’t talking about applications for all the colonies; I meant applications for Ganymede, specifically for this first trip of the Mayflower

“Even so, you can’t scare me. Only about one in ten can qualify. That’s the way it’s always been.”

Dad agreed. He said that this was the first time in history that some effort was being made to select the best stock for colonization instead of using colonies as dumping grounds for misfits and criminals and failures. Then he added, “But look, Bill, what gives you the notion that you and I can necessarily qualify? Neither one of us is a superman,”

That rocked me back on my heels. The idea that we might not be good enough hadn’t occurred to me. “George, they couldn’t turn us down!

“They could and they might.”

“But how? They need engineers out there and you’re tops. Me–I’m not a genius but I do all right in school. We’re both healthy and we don’t have any

bad mutations; we aren’t color blind or bleeders or anything like that.”

“No bad mutations that we know of,” Dad answered. “However, I agree that we seem to have done a fair job in picking our grandparents. I wasn’t thinking of anything as obvious as that.”

“Well, what, then? What could they possibly get us on?”

He fiddled with his pipe the way he always does when he doesn’t want to answer right away. “Bill, when I pick a steel alloy for a job, it’s not enough to say, ‘Well, it’s a nice shiny piece of metal; let’s use it.’ No, I take into account a list of tests as long as your arm that tells me all about that alloy, what it’s good for and just what I can expect it to do in the particular circumstances I intend to use it. Now if you had to pick people for a tough job of colonizing, what would you look for?”

“Uh … I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. I’m not a social psychometrician. But to say that they want healthy people with fair educations is like saying that I want steel rather than wood for a job. It doesn’t tell what sort of steel. Or it might not be steel that was needed; it might be titanium alloy. So don’t get your hopes too high.”

“But–well, look, what can we do about it?”

“Nothing. If we don’t get picked, then tell yourself that you are a darn good grade of steel and that it’s no fault of yours that they wanted magnesium.”  It was all very well to look at it that way, but it worried me. I didn’t let it show at school, though. I had already let everybody know that we had put in for

Ganymede; if we missed–well, it would be sort of embarrassing.

My best friend, Duck Miller, was all excited about it and was determined to go, too. “But how can you?” I asked. “Do your folks want to go?”

“I already looked into that,” Duck answered. “All I have to have is a grown person as a sponsor, a guardian. Now if you can tease your old man into signing for me, it’s in the bag.”

“But what will your father say?”

“He won’t care. He’s always telling me that when he was my age he was earning his own living. He says a boy should be self reliant. Now how about it? Will you speak to your old man about it–tonight?”

I said I would and I did. Dad didn’t say anything for a moment, then he asked: “You really want Duck with you?” “Sure I do. He’s my best friend.”

“What does his father say?”

“He hasn’t asked him yet,” and then I explained how Mr. Miller felt about it “So?” said Dad. “Then let’s wait and see what Mr. Miller says.”

“Well–look, George, does that mean that you’ll sign for Duck if his father says it’s okay?” “I meant what I said, Bill. Let’s wait. The problem may solve itself.”

I said, “Oh well, maybe Mr. and Mrs. Miller will decide to put in for it, too, after Duck gets them stirred up.”

Dad just cocked an eyebrow at me. “Mr. Miller has, shall we say, numerous business interests here. I think it would be easier to jack up one corner of Boulder Dam than to get him to give them up.”

“You’re giving up your business.”

“Not my business, my professional practice. But I’m not giving up my profession; I’m taking it with me.” I saw Duck at school the next day and asked him what his father had said.

“Forget it,” he told me. “The deal is off.” “Huh?”

“My old man says that nobody but an utter idiot would even think of going out to Ganymede. He says that Earth is the only planet in the system fit to live on and that if the government wasn’t loaded up with a bunch of starry-eyed dreamers we would quit pouring money down a rat hole trying to turn a bunch of bare rocks in the sky into green pastures. He says the whole enterprise is doomed.”

“You didn’t think so yesterday.”

“That was before I got the straight dope. You know what? My old man is going to take me into partnership. Just as soon as I’m through college he’s going to start breaking me into the management end. He says he didn’t tell me before because he wanted me to learn self reliance and initiative, but he thought it was time I knew about it. What do you think of that?”

“Why, that’s pretty nice, I suppose. But what’s this about the ‘enterprise being doomed’?”

  • ‘Nice’, he calls it! Well, my old man says that it is an absolute impossibility to keep a permanent colony on Ganymede. It’s a perilous toehold, artificially maintained–those were his exact words–and someday the gadgets will bust and the whole colony will be wiped out, every man jack, and then we will quit trying to go against nature.”

We didn’t talk any more then as we had to go to class. I told Dad about it that night. “What do you think, George?” “Well, there is something in what he says–“

“Huh?”

“Don’t jump the gun. If everything went sour on Ganymede at once and we didn’t have the means to fix it, it would revert to the state we found it in. But that’s not the whole answer. People have a funny habit of taking as ‘natural’ whatever they are used to–but there hasn’t been any ‘natural’ environment, the way they mean it, since men climbed down out of trees. Bill, how many people are there in California?”

“Fifty-five, sixty million.”

“Did you know that the first four colonies here starved to death? ‘S truthl How is it that fifty-odd million can live here and not starve? Barring short rations, of course.”

He answered it himself. “We’ve got four atomic power plants along the coast just to turn sea water into fresh water. We use every drop of the Colorado River and every foot of snow that falls on the Sierras. And we use a million other gadgets.

If those gadgets went bad–say a really big earthquake knocked out all four atomic plants–the country would go back to desert. I doubt if we could evacuate that many people before most of them died from thirst. Yet I don’t think Mr. Miller is lying awake nights worrying about it. He regards Southern California as a good ‘natural’ environment.

“Depend on it, Bill. Wherever Man has mass and energy to work with and enough savvy to know how to manipulate them, he can create any environment he needs.”

I didn’t see much of Duck after that. About then we got our preliminary notices to take tests for eligibility for the Ganymede colony and that had us pretty busy. Besides, Duck seemed different–or maybe it was me. I had the trip on my mind and he didn’t want to talk about it. Or if he did, he’d make some crack that rubbed me the wrong way.

Dad wouldn’t let me quit school while it was still uncertain as to whether or not we would qualify, but I was out a lot, taking tests. There was the usual physical examination, of course, with some added wrinkles. A g test, for example–I could take up to eight gravities before I blacked out, the test showed. And a test for low-pressure tolerance and hemorrhaging–they didn’t want people who ran to red noses and varicose veins. There were lots more.

But we passed them. Then came the psycho tests which were a lot worse because you never knew what was expected of you and half the time you

didn’t even know you were being tested. It started off with hypno-analysis, which really puts a fellow at a disadvantage. How do you know what you’ve blabbed while they’ve got you asleep?

Once I sat around endlessly waiting for a psychiatrist to get around to seeing me. There were a couple of clerks there; when I came in one of them dug my medical and psycho record out of file and laid it on a desk. Then the other one, a red-headed guy with a permanent sneer, said, “Okay, Shorty, sit down on that bench and wait.”

After quite a while the redhead picked up my folder and started to read it. Presently he snickered and turned to the other clerk and said, “Hey, Ned– get a load of this!”

The other one read what he was pointing to and seemed to think it was funny, too. I could see they were watching me and I pretended not to pay any attention.

The second clerk went back to his desk, but presently the redhead went over to him, carrying my folder, and read aloud to him, but in such a low voice that I couldn’t catch many of the words. What I did catch made me squirm.

When he had finished the redhead looked right at me and laughed. I stood up and said, “What’s so funny?” He said, “None of your business, Shorty. Sit down.”

I walked over and said, “Let me see that.”

The second clerk stuffed it into a drawer of his desk. The redhead said, “Mamma’s boy wants to see it, Ned. Why don’t you give it to him?” “He doesn’t really want to see it,” the other one said.

“No, I guess not.” The redhead laughed again and added, “And to think he wants to be a big bold colonist.”

The other one looked at me while chewing a thumbnail and said, “I don’t think that’s so funny. They could take him along to cook.” This seemed to convulse the redhead. “I’ll bet he looks cute in an apron.”

A year earlier I would have poked him, even though he outweighed me and outreached me. That “Mamma’s boy” remark made me forget all about wanting to go to Ganymede; I just wanted to wipe the silly smirk off his face.

But I didn’t do anything. I don’t know why; maybe it was from riding herd on that wild bunch of galoots, the Yucca Patrol–Mr. Kinski says that anybody who can’t keep order without using his fists can’t be a patrol leader under him.

Anyhow I just walked around the end of the desk and tried to open the drawer. It was locked. I looked at them; they were both grinning, but I wasn’t. “I had an appointment for thirteen o’clock,” I said. “Since the doctor isn’t here, you can tell him I’ll phone for another appointment.” And I turned on my heel and left.

I went home and told George about it. He just said he hoped I hadn’t hurt my chances.

I never did get another appointment. You know what? They weren’t clerks at all; they were psycho-metricians and there was a camera and a mike on me the whole time.

Finally George and I got notices saying that we were qualified and had been posted for the Mayflower, “subject to compliance with all requirements.”

That night I didn’t worry about ration points; I really set us out a feast.

There was a booklet of the requirements mentioned. “Satisfy all debts”–that didn’t worry me; aside from a half credit I owed Slats Keifer I didn’t have any. “Post an appearance bond”–George would take care of that “Conclude any action before any court of superior jurisdiction”–I had never been in court except the Court of Honor. There were a flock of other things, but George would handle them.

I found some fine print that worried me. “George,” I said, “It says here that emigration is limited to families with children.”

He looked up. “Well, aren’t we such a family? If you don’t mind being classified as a child.” “Oh. I suppose so. I thought it meant a married couple and kids.”

“Don’t give it a thought.”

Privately I wondered if Dad knew what he was talking about.

We were busy with innoculations and blood typing and immunizations and I hardly got to school at all. When I wasn’t being stuck or being bled, I was sick with the last thing they had done to me. Finally we had to have our whole medical history tattooed on us–identity number, Rh factor, blood type, coag time, diseases you had had, natural immunities and inoculations. The girls and the women usually had it done in invisible ink that showed up only under infra-red light, or else they put it on the soles of their feet.

They asked me where I wanted it, the soles of my feet? I said no, I don’t want to be crippled up; I had too much to do. We compromised on putting it where I sit down and then I ate standing up for a couple of days. It seemed a good place, private anyhow. But I had to use a mirror to see it.

Time was getting short; we were supposed to be at Mojave Space Port on 26 June, just two weeks away. It was high time I was picking out what to take. The allowance was fifty-seven and six-tenths pounds per person and had not been announced until all our body weights had been taken.

The booklet had said, “Close your terrestrial affairs as if you were dying.” That’s easy to say. But when you die, you can’t take it with you, while here we could– fifty-seven-odd pounds of it.

The question was: what fifty-seven pounds?

My silkworms I turned over to the school biology lab and the same for the snakes. Duck wanted my aquarium but I wouldn’t let him; twice he’s had fish and twice he’s let them die. I split them between two fellows in the troop who already had fish. The birds I gave to Mrs. Fishbein on our deck. I didn’t have a cat or a dog; George says ninety floors up is no place to keep junior citizens–that’s what he calls them.

I was cleaning up the mess when George came in. “Well,” he says, “first time I’ve been able to come into your room without a gas mask.” I skipped it; George talks like that. “I still don’t know what to do,” I said, pointing at the heap on my bed.

“Microfilmed everything you can?”

“Yes, everything but this picture.” It was a cabinet stereo of Anne, weighing about a pound and nine ounces. “Keep that, of course. Face it, Bill, you’ve got to travel light. We’re pioneers.”

“I don’t know what to throw out.”

I guess I looked glum for he said, “Quit feeling sorry for yourself. Me, I’ve got to give up thisand that’s tough, believe me.” He held out his pipe. “Why?” I asked. “A pipe doesn’t weigh much.”

“Because they aren’t raising tobacco on Ganymede and they aren’t importing any.”

“Oh. Look, George, I could just about make it if it weren’t for my accordion. But it licks me.” “Hmm … Have you considered listing it as a cultural item?”

“Huh?”

“Read the fine print. Approved cultural items are not covered by the personal weight schedule. They are charged to the colony.” It had never occurred to me that I might have anything that would qualify. “They wouldn’t let me get away with it, George!”

“Can’t rule you out for trying. Don’t be a defeatist.”

So two days later I was up before the cultural and scientific board, trying to prove that I was an asset. I knocked out Turkey in the Straw, Nehru’s Opus 81, and the introduction to Morgenstern’s Dawn of the 22nd Century, as arranged for squeeze boxes. I gave them The Green Hills of Earth for an encore.

They asked me if I liked to play for other people and told me politely that I would be informed as to the decision of the board … and about a week later I got a letter directing me to turn my accordion over to the Supply Office, Hayward Field. I was in, I was a “cultural asset”!

Four days before blast-off Dad came home early – he had been closing his office–and asked me if we could have something special for dinner; we were having guests. I said I supposed so; my accounts showed that we would have rations to turn back.

He seemed embarrassed. “Son–” “Huh? Yes, George?”

“You know that item in the rules about families?” “Uh, yes.”

“Well, you were right about it, but I was holding out on you and now I’ve got to confess. I’m getting married tomorrow.” There was a sort of roaring in my ears. Dad couldn’t have surprised me more if he had slapped me.

I couldn’t say anything. I just stood there, looking at him. Finally I managed to get out, “But, George, you can’t do that!” “Why not, Son?”

“How about Anne?” “Anne is dead.”

“But– But–” I couldn’t say anything more; I ducked into my room and locked myself in. I lay on the bed, trying to think. Presently I heard Dad trying the latch. Then he tapped on the door and said, “Bill?”

I didn’t answer. After a while he went away. I lay there a while longer. I guess I bawled, but I wasn’t bawling over the trouble with Dad. It seemed the way it did the day Anne died, when I couldn’t get it through my head that I wouldn’t ever see her again. Wouldn’t ever see her smile at me again and hear her say, “Stand tall, Billy.”

And I would stand tall and she would look proud and pat my arm.

How could George do it? How could he bring some other woman into Anne’s home?

I got up and had a look at myself in the mirror and then went in and set my ‘fresher for a needle shower and a hard massage. I felt better afterwards, except that I still had a sick feeling in my stomach. The ‘fresher blew me off and dusted me and sighed to a stop. Through the sound it seemed to me I could hear Anne speaking to me, but that must have been in my head.

She was saying, “Stand tall, Son.” I got dressed again and went out.

Dad was messing around with dinner and I do mean messing. He had burned his thumb on the shortwave, don’t ask me how. I had to throw out what he had been fiddling with, all except the salad. I picked out more stuff and started them cycling. Neither of us said anything.

I set the table for three and Dad finally spoke. “Better set it for four, Bill. Molly has a daughter, you know.”

I dropped a fork. “Molly? You mean Mrs. Kenyon?”

“Yes. Didn’t I tell you? No, you didn’t give me a chance to.”

I knew her all right. She was Dad’s draftsman. I knew her daughter, too–a twelve-year-old brat. Somehow, it being Mrs. Kenyon made it worse, indecent. Why, she had even come to Anne’s Farewell and had had the nerve to cry.

I knew now why she had always been so chummy with me whenever I was down at Dad’s office. She had had her eye on George. I didn’t say anything. What was there to say?

I said “How do you do?” politely when they came in, then went out and pretended to fiddle with dinner. Dinner was sort of odd. Dad and Mrs. Kenyon talked and I answered when spoken to. I didn’t listen. I was still trying to figure out how he could do it. The brat spoke to me a couple of times but I soon put her in her place.

After dinner Dad said how about all of us going to a show? I begged off, saying that I still had sorting to do. They went. I thought and thought about it. Any way I looked at it, it seemed like a bad deal.

At first I decided that I wouldn’t go to Ganymede after all, not if they were going. Dad would forfeit my bond, but I would work hard and pay it back–I wasn’t going to owe them anything!

Then I finally figured out why Dad was doing it and I felt some better, but not much. It was too high a price.

Dad got home late, by himself, and tapped on my door. It wasn’t locked and he came in. “Well, Son?” he said. “‘Well’ what?”

“Bill, I know that this business comes as a surprise to you, but you’ll get over it.”

I laughed, though I didn’t feel funny. Get over it! Maybe he could forget Anne, but I never would.

“In the meantime,” he went on, “I want you to behave yourself. I suppose you know you were as rude as you could be without actually spitting in their faces?”

“Me rude?”I objected. “Didn’t I fix dinner for them? Wasn’t I polite?”

“You were as polite as a judge passing sentence. And as friendly. You needed a swift kick to make you remember your manners.”

I guess I looked stubborn. George went on, “That’s done; let’s forget it. See here, Bill–in time you are going to see that this was a good idea. All I ask you to do is to behave yourself in the meantime. I don’t ask you to fall on their necks; I do insist that you be your own normal, reasonably polite and friendly self. Will you try?”

“Uh, I suppose so.” Then I went on with, “See here, Dad, why did you have to spring it on me as a surprise?”

He looked embarrassed. “That was a mistake. I suppose I did it because I knew you would raise Cain about it and I wanted to put it off.” “But I would have understood if you had only told me. I know why you want to marry her–“

“Eh?”

“I should have known when you mentioned that business about rules. You have to get married so that we can go to Ganymede–“

“What?”

I was startled. I said, “Huh? That’s right, isn’t it? You told me so yourself. You said–“

“I said nothing of the sort!” Dad stopped, took a deep breath, then went on slowly, “Bill, I suppose you possibly could have gathered that impression–though I am not flattered that you could have entertained it. Now I’ll spell out the true situation: Molly and I are not getting married in order to emigrate. We are emigrating because we are getting married. You may be too young to understand it, but I love Molly and Molly loves me. If I wanted to stay here, she’d stay. Since I want to go, she wants to go. She’s wise enough to understand that I need to make a complete break with my old background. Do you follow me?”

I said I guessed so.

“I’ll say goodnight, then.”

I answered, “Goodnight.” He turned away, but I added, “George–” He stopped. I blurted out. “You don’t love Anne any more, do you?”

Dad turned white. He started back in and then stopped. “Bill,” he said slowly, “it has been some years since I’ve laid a hand on you–but this is the first time I ever wanted to give you a thrashing.”

I thought he was going to do it. I waited and I had made up my mind that if he touched me he was going to get die surprise of his life. But he didn’t come any nearer; he just closed the door between us.

After a while I took another shower that I didn’t need and went to bed. I must have lain there an hour or more, thinking that Dad had wanted to hit me and wishing that Anne were around to tell me what to do. Finally I switched on the dancing lights and stared at them until they knocked me out.

Neither one of us said anything until breakfast was over and neither of us ate much, either. Finally Dad said, “Bill, I want to beg your pardon for what I said last night. You hadn’t done or said anything to justify raising a hand to you and I had no business thinking it or saying it.”

I said, “Oh, that’s all right.” I thought about it and added, “I guess I shouldn’t have said what I did.”

“It was all right to say it What makes me sad is that you could have thought it. Bill, I’ve never stopped loving Anne and I’ll never love her any less.” “But you said–” I stopped and finished, “I just don’t get it.”

“I guess there is no reason to expect you to.” George stood up. “Bill, the ceremony is at fifteen o’clock. Will you be dressed and ready about an hour before that time?”

I hesitated and said, “I won’t be able to, George. I’ve got a pretty full day.”

His face didn’t have any expression at all and neither did his voice. He said, “I see,” and left the room. A bit later he left the apartment. A while later

I. tried to call him at his office, but the autosecretary ground out the old stall about “Would you like to record a message?” I didn’t. I figured that George would be home some time before fifteen hundred and I got dressed in my best. I even used some of Dad’s beard cream.

He didn’t show up. I tried the office again, and again, got the “Would-you-like-to-record-a-message?” routine. Then I braced myself and looked up the code on Mrs. Kenyon.

He wasn’t there. Nobody was there.

The time crawled past and there was nothing I could do about it. After a while it was fifteen o’clock and I knew that my father was off somewhere getting married but I didn’t know where. About fifteen-thirty I went out and went to a show.

When I got back the red light was shining on the phone. I dialed playback and it was Dad: “Bill I tried to reach you but you weren’t in and I can’t wait. Molly and I are leaving on a short trip. If you need to reach me, call Follow Up Service, Limited, in Chicago–we’ll be somewhere in Canada. We’ll be back Thursday night. Goodbye.” That was the end of the recording.

Thursday night–blast-off was Friday morning.

3.   Space Ship Bifrost

Dad called me from Mrs. Kenyon’s–I mean from Molly’s–apartment Thursday night. We were both polite but uneasy. I said yes, I was all ready and I hoped they had had a nice time. He said they had and would I come over and we would all leave from there in the morning.

I said I hadn’t known what his plans were, so I had bought a ticket to Mojave port and had reserved a room at Hotel Lancaster. What did he want me to do?

He thought about it and said, “It looks like you can take care of yourself, Bill.” “Of course I can.”

“All right. We’ll see you at the port. Want to speak to Molly?” “Uh, no, just tell her hello for me.”

“Thanks, I will.” He switched off.

I went to my room and got my kit–fifty-seven and fifty-nine hundredths pounds; I couldn’t have added a clipped frog’s hair. My room was bare, except for my Scout uniform. I couldn’t afford to take it, but I hadn’t thrown it away yet.

I picked it up, intending to take it to the incinerator, then stopped. At the physical exam I had been listed at one hundred thirty-one and two tenths pounds mass in the clothes I would wear for blast off.

But I hadn’t eaten much the last few days.

I stepped into the ‘fresher and onto the scales–one hundred twenty-nine and eight tenths. I picked up the uniform and stepped back on the scales– one hundred thirty-two and five tenths.

William, I said, you get no dinner, you get no breakfast, and you drink no water tomorrow morning. I bundled up my uniform and took it along.

The apartment was stripped. As a surprise for the next tenant I left in the freezer the stuff I had meant to eat for supper, then switched all the gadgets to zero except the freezer, and locked the door behind me. It felt funny; Anne and George and I had lived there as far back as I could remember.

I went down to subsurface, across town, and caught the In-Coast tube for Mojave. Twenty minutes later I was at Hotel Lancaster in the Mojave Desert.

I soon found out that the “room” I had reserved was a cot in the billiard room. I trotted down to find out what had happened.

I showed the room clerk the ‘stat that said I had a room coming to me. He looked at it and said, “Young man, have you ever tried to bed down six thousand people at once?”

I said no, I hadn’t.

“Then be glad you’ve got a cot. The room you reserved is occupied by a family with nine children.” I went.

The hotel was a madhouse. I couldn’t have gotten anything to eat even if I hadn’t promised myself not to eat; you couldn’t get within twenty yards of the dining room. There were children underfoot everywhere and squalling brats galore. There were emigrant families squatting in the ball room. I looked them over and wondered how they had picked them; out of a grab bag?

Finally I went to bed. I was hungry and got hungrier. I began to wonder why I was going to all this trouble to hang on to a Scout uniform I obviously wasn’t going to use.

If I had had my ration book I would have gotten up and stood in line at the dining room–but Dad and I had turned ours in. I still had some money and

thought about trying to find a free-dealers; they say you can find them around a hotel. But Dad says that “free-dealer” is a fake word; they are black

marketeers and no gentleman will buy from them.

Besides that I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to go about finding one.

I got up and got a drink and went back to bed and went through the relaxing routine. Finally I got to sleep and dreamed about strawberry shortcake with real cream, the kind that comes from cows.

I woke up hungry but I suddenly remembered that this was it!–my last day on Earth. Then I was too excited to be hungry. I got up, put on my Scout uniform and my ship suit over it.

I thought we would go right on board. I was wrong.

First we had to assemble under awnings spread out in front of the hotel near the embarking tubes. It wasn’t air conditioned outside, of course, but it was early and the desert wasn’t really hot yet. I found the letter “L” and sat down under it, sitting on my baggage. Dad and his new family weren’t around yet; I began to wonder if I was going to Ganymede by myself. I didn’t much care.

Out past the gates about five miles away, you could see the ships standing on the field, the Daedalus and the Icarus, pulled off the Earth-Moon run for this one trip, and the old Bifrost that had been the shuttle rocket to Supra-New-York space station as far back as I could remember.

The Daedalus and the Icarus were bigger but I hoped I would get the Bifrost; she was the first ship I ever saw blast off.

A family put their baggage down by mine. The mother looked out across the field and said, “Joseph, which one is the Mayflower?

Her husband tried to explain to her, but she still was puzzled. I nearly burst, trying to keep from laughing. Here she was, all set to go to Ganymede and yet she was so dumb she didn’t even know that the ship she was going in had been built out in space and couldn’t land anywhere.

The place was getting crowded with emigrants and relatives coming to see them off, but I still didn’t see anything of Dad. I heard my name called and turned around and there was Duck Miller. “Gee, Bill,” he said, “I thought I’d missed you.”

“Hi, Duck. No, I’m still here.”

“I tried to call you last night but your phone answered ‘service discontinued,’ so I hooked school and came up.” “Aw, you shouldn’t have done that.”

“But I wanted to bring you this.” He handed me a package, a whole pound of chocolates. I didn’t know what to say. I thanked him and then said, “Duck, I appreciate it, I really do. But I’ll have to give them back to you.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Weight Mass, I mean. I can’t get by with another ounce.” “You can carry it.”

“That won’t help. It counts just the same.”

He thought about it and said, “Then let’s open it.”

I said, “Fine,” and did so and offered him a piece. I looked at them myself and my stomach was practically sitting up and begging. I don’t know when I’ve been so hungry.

I gave in and ate one. I figured I would sweat it off anyhow; it was getting hot and I had my Scout uniform on under my ship suit–and that’s no way to dress for the Mojave Desert in June! Then I was thirstier than ever, of course; one thing leads to another.

I went over to a drinking fountain and took a very small drink. When I came back I closed the candy box and handed it back to Duck and told him to

pass it around at next Scout meeting and tell the fellows I wished they were going along. He said he would and added, “You know, Bill, I wish I was

going. I really do.”

I said I wished he was, too, but when did he change his mind? He looked embarrassed but about then Mr. Kinski showed up and then Dad showed up, with Molly and the brat–Peggy–and Molly’s sister, Mrs. van Metre. Everybody shook hands all around and Mrs. van Metre started to cry and the brat wanted to know what made my clothes so bunchy and what was I sweating about?

George was eyeing me, but about then our names were called and we started moving through the gate.

George and Molly and Peggy were weighed through and then it was my turn. My baggage was right on the nose, of course, and then I stepped on the scales. They read one hundred and thirty-one and one tenth pounds–I could have eaten another chocolate.

“Check!” said the weightmaster, then he looked up and said, “What in the world have you got on, son?”

The left sleeve of my uniform had started to unroll and was sticking out below the half sleeve of my ship suit. The merit badges were shining out like signal lights.

I didn’t say anything. He started feeling the lumps the uniform sleeves made. “Boy,” he said, “you’re dressed like an arctic explorer; no wonder you’re sweating. Didn’t you know you weren’t supposed to wear anything but the gear you were listed in?”

Dad came back and asked what the trouble was? I just stood there with my ears burning. The assistant weightmaster got into the huddle and they argued what should be done. The weightmaster phoned somebody and finally he said, “He’s inside his weight limit; if he wants to call that monkey suit part of his skin, we’ll allow it. Next customer, please!”

I trailed along, feeling foolish. We went down inside and climbed on the slide strip, it was cool down there, thank goodness. A few minutes later we got off at the loading room down under the rocket ship. Sure enough, it was the Bifrost, as I found out when the loading elevator poked above ground and stopped at the passenger port. We filed in.

They had it all organized. Our baggage had been taken from us in the loading room; each passenger had a place assigned by his weight. That split us up again; I was on the deck immediately under the control room. I found my place, couch 14-D, then went to a view port where I could see the Daedalus and the Icarus.

A brisk little stewardess, about knee high to a grasshopper, checked my name off a list and offered me an injection against dropsickness. I said no, thanks.

She said, “You’ve been out before?”

I admitted I hadn’t; she said, “Better take it.”

I said I was a licensed air pilot; I wouldn’t get sick I didn’t tell her that my license was just for copters. She shrugged and turned away. A loudspeaker said, “The Daedalus is cleared for blasting.” I moved up to get a good view.

The Daedalus was about a quarter of a mile away and stood up higher than we did. She had fine lines and was a mighty pretty sight, gleaming in the morning sunshine. Beyond her and to the right, clear out at the edge of the field, a light shone green at the traffic control blockhouse.

She canted slowly over to the south, just a few degrees.

Fire burst out of her base, orange, and then blinding white. It splashed down into the ground baffles and curled back up through the ground vents. She lifted.

She hung there for a breath and you could see the hills shimmer through her jet. And she was gone.

Just like that–she was gone. She went up out of there like a scared bird, just a pencil of white fire in the sky, and was gone while we could still hear and feel the thunder of her jets inside the compartment.

My ears were ringing. I heard someone behind me say, “But I haven’t had breakfast. The Captain will just have to wait. Tell him, Joseph.”

It was the woman who hadn’t known that the Mayflower was a space-to-space ship. Her husband tried to hush her up, but he didn’t have any luck.

She called over the stewardess. I heard her answer, “But, madam, you can’t speak to the Captain now. He’s preparing for blast-off.”

Apparently that didn’t make any difference. The stewardess finally got her quiet by solemnly promising that she could have breakfast after blast-off. I bent my ears at that and I decided to put in a bid for breakfast, too.

The Icarus took off twenty minutes later and then the speaker said, “All hands! Acceleration stations-prepare to blast off.” I went back to my couch and the stewardess made sure that we were all strapped down. She cautioned us not to unstrap until she said we could. She went down to the deck below.

I felt my ears pop and there was a soft sighing in the ship. I swallowed and kept swallowing. I knew what they were doing: blowing the natural air out and replacing it with the standard helium-oxygen mix at half sea-level pressure. But the woman–the same one–didn’t like it. She said, “Joseph, my head aches. Joseph, I can’t breathe. Do something!”

Then she clawed at her straps and sat up. Her husband sat up, too, and forced her back down. The Bifrost tilted over a little and the speaker said, “Minus three minutes!”

After a long time it said, “Minus two minutes!”

And then “Minus one minutel” and another voice took up the count: “Fifty-nine! Fifty-eight! Fifty-seven!”

My heart started to pound so hard I could hardly hear it. But it went on: “-thirty-five! Thirty-four! Thirty-three! Thirty-two! Thirty-one! Half! Twenty-nine! Twenty-eight!”

And it got to be: “Ten!”

And “Nine!” “Eight! “Seven! “And six! “And five! “And four! “And three! “And two–“

I never did hear them say “one” or “fire” or whatever they said. About then something fell on me and I thought I was licked. Once, exploring a cave with the fellows, a bank collapsed on me and I had to be dug out. It was like that–but nobody dug me out.

My chest hurt. My ribs seemed about to break. I couldn’t lift a finger. I gulped and couldn’t get my breath.

I wasn’t scared, not really, because I knew we would take off with a high g, but I was awfully uncomfortable. I managed to turn my head a little and saw that the sky was already purple. While I watched, it turned black and the stars came out, millions of stars. And yet the Sun was still streaming in through the port

The roar of the jets was unbelievable but the noise started to die out almost at once and soon you couldn’t hear it at all. They say the old ships used to be noisy even after you passed the speed of sound; the Bifrost was not. It got as quiet as the inside of a bag of feathers.

There was nothing to do but lie there, stare out at that black sky, try to breathe, and try not to think about the weight sitting on you.

And then, so suddenly that it made your stomach turn flip-flops, you didn’t weigh anything at all.

4.   Captain DeLongPre

Let me tell you that the first time you fall is no fun. Sure, you get over it. If you didn’t you would starve. Old space hands even get so they like it– weightlessness, I mean. They say that two hours of weightless sleep is equal to a full night on Earth. I got used to it, but I never got to like it.

The Bifrost had blasted for a little more than three minutes. It seemed lots longer because of the high acceleration; we had blasted at nearly six g. Then she was in free orbit for better than three hours and we fell the whole time, until the Captain started to maneuver to match orbits with the Mayflower.

In other words we fell straight up for more than twenty thousand miles.

Put that way, it sounds silly. Everybody knows that things don’t fall up; they fall down.

Everybody knew the world was flat, too. We fell up.

Like everybody, I had had the elements of space ballistics in grammar school physics, and goodness knows there have been enough stories about how you float around in a spaceship when it’s in a free orbit. But, take it from me, you don’t really believe it until you’ve tried it.

Take Mrs. Tarbutton–the woman who wanted breakfast. I suppose she went to school like everybody else. But she kept insisting that the Captain had to do something about it. What he could do I don’t know; find her a small asteroid, maybe.

Not that I didn’t sympathize with her–or with myself, I guess. Ever been in an earthquake? You know how everything you ever depended on suddenly goes back on you and terra firma isn’t firma any longer? It’s like that, only much worse. This is no place to review grammar school physics but when a spaceship is in a free trajectory, straight up or any direction, the ship and everything in it moves along together and you fall, endlessly–and your stomach darn near falls out of you.

That was the first thing I noticed. I was strapped down so that I didn’t float away, but I felt weak and shaky and dizzy and as if I had been kicked in the stomach. Then my mouth filled with saliva and I gulped and I was awfully sorry I had eaten that chocolate.

But it didn’t come up, not quite.

The only thing that saved me was no breakfast. Some of the others were not so lucky. I tried not to look at them. I had intended to unstrap as soon as we went free and go to a port so I could look at Earth, but I lost interest in that project entirely. I stayed strapped down, and concentrated on being miserable.

The stewardess came floating out the hatch from the next deck, shoved herself along with a toe, checked herself with a hand at the center stanchion, and hovered in the air in a swan dive, looking us over. It was very pretty to watch if I’d been in shape to appreciate it.

“Is everybody comfy?” she said cheerfully.

It was a silly remark but I suppose nurses get that way. Somebody groaned and a baby on the other side of the compartment started to cry. The stewardess moved over to Mrs. Tarbutton and said, “You may have breakfast now. What would you like? Scrambled eggs?”

I clamped my jaw and turned my head away, wishing she would shut up. Then I looked back. She had paid for that silly remark–and she had to clean it up.

When she was through with Mrs. Tarbutton I said, “Uh-oh, Miss–” “Andrews.”

“Miss Andrews, could I change my mind about that drop-sick injection?”

“Righto, chum,” she agreed, smiling, and whipped out an injector from a little kit she had at her belt. She gave me the shot. It burned and for a moment I thought I was going to lose the chocolate after all. But then things quieted down and I was almost happy in a miserable sort of way.

She left me and gave shots to some others who had kidded themselves the same way I had. Mrs. Tarbutton she gave another sort of shot to knock her out entirely. One or two of the hardier souls unstrapped themselves and went to the ports; I decided I was well enough to try it.

It’s not as easy as it looks, this swimming around in free fall. I undid the safety belts and sat up; that’s all I meant to do. Then I was scrambling in the air, out of control, trying frantically to grasp at anything.

I turned over in the air and cracked the back of my head against the underside of the control room deck and saw stars, not the ones out the ports– some of my own. Then the deck with the couches on it was approaching me slowly.

I managed to grab a safety belt and came to anchor. The couch it belonged to was occupied by a little plump man. I said, “Excuse me.”

He said, “Don’t mention it,” and turned his face away, looking as if he hated me. I couldn’t stay there and I couldn’t even get back to my own couch without grabbing handholds on other couches that were occupied, too, so I pushed off again, very gently this time, and managed to grab hold when I bumped against the other deck.

It had handholds and grab lines all over it. I didn’t let go again, but pulled myself along, monkey fashion, to one of the ports. And there I got my first view of Earth from space.

I don’t know what I expected, but it wasn’t what I expected. There it was, looking just like it does in the geography books, or maybe more the way it does in the station announcements of Super-New-York TV station. And yet it was different. I guess I would say it was like the difference between being told about a good hard kick in the rear and actually being kicked.

Not a transcription. Alive.

For one thing it wasn’t prettily centered in a television screen; it was shouldering into one side of the frame of the port, and the aft end of the ship cut a big chunk out of the Pacific Ocean. And it was moving, shrinking. While I hung there it shrunk to about half the size it was when I first got there and got rounder and rounder. Columbus was right.

From where I was it was turned sideways; the end of Siberia, then North America, and finally the north half of South America ran across from left to right. There were clouds over Canada and the eastern part of the rest of North America; they were the whitest white I ever saw–whiter than the north pole cap. Right opposite us was the reflection of the Sun on the ocean; it hurt my eyes. The rest of the ocean was almost purple where there weren’t clouds.

It was so beautiful my throat ached and I wanted to reach out and touch it.

And back of it were stars, even brighter and bigger and more of them than the way they look from Little America.

Pretty soon there were more people crowding around, trying to see, and kids shoving and their mothers saying, “Now, now, darling!” and making silly remarks themselves. I gave up. I pulled myself back to my couch and put one belt around me so I wouldn’t float away and thought about it.

It makes you proud to know that you come from a big, fancy planet like that. I got to thinking that I hadn’t seen all of it, not by a long sight, in spite of all the geography trips I had made and going to one Scout round-up in Switzerland and the time George and Anne and I went to Siam.

And now I wasn’t going to see any more of it. It made me feel pretty solemn.

I looked up; there was a boy standing in front of me. He said, “What’s the trouble, William, my boy? Dropsick?”

It was that twerp Jones. You could have knocked me out with a feather. If I had known he was going to emigrate, I would have thought twice about it. I asked him where in the world he had come from.

“The same place you did, naturally. I asked you a question.”

I informed him that I was not dropsick and asked him whatever gave him that silly notion. He reached out and grabbed my arm and turned it so that the red spot the injection had made showed. He laughed and I jerked my arm away.

He laughed again and showed me his arm; it had a red spot on it, too. “Happens to the best of us,” he said. “Don’t be shy about it.” Then he said, “Come on. Let’s look around the joint before they make us strap down again.”

I went along. He wasn’t what I would pick for a buddy but he was a familiar face. We worked our way over to the hatch to the next deck. I started to go through but Jones stopped me. “Let’s go into the control room,” he suggested.

“Huh? Oh, they wouldn’t let us!”

“Is it a crime to try? Come on.” We went back the other way and through a short passage. It ended in a door that was marked: CONTROL ROOM- STAY OUT! Somebody had written under it: This means you!!! and somebody else had added: Who? Me?

Jones tried it; it was locked. There was a button beside it; he pushed it.

It opened and we found ourselves staring into the face of a man with two stripes on his collar. Behind him was an older man with four stripes on his; he called out, “Who is it, Sam? Tell ’em we’re not in the market.”

The first man said, “What do you kids want?”

Jones said, “Please, sir, we’re interested in astrogation. Could we have permission to visit the control room?”

I could see he was going to chuck us out and I had started to turn away when the older man called out, “Oh, shucks, Sam, bring ’em in!” The younger fellow shrugged and said, “As you say, Skipper.”

We went in and the Captain said, “Grab on to something; don’t float around. And don’t touch anything, or I’ll cut your ears off. Now who are you?”

We told him; he said, “Glad to know you, Hank-same to you, Bill. Welcome aboard.” Then he reached out and touched the sleeve of my uniform–it had come loose again. “Son, your underwear is showing.”

I blushed and told him how I happened to be wearing it. He laughed and said, “So you swindled us into lifting it anyway. That’s rich–eh, Sam? Have a cup of coffee.”

They were eating sandwiches and drinking coffee– not from cups, of course, but from little plastic bags like they use for babies. The bags even had nipples on them. I said no, thanks. While the shot Miss Andrews gave me had made me feel better, it hadn’t made me feel that much better. Hank Jones turned it down, too.

The control room didn’t have a port in it of any sort. There was a big television screen forward on the bulkhead leading to the nose, but it wasn’t turned on. I wondered what Mrs. Tarbutton would think if she knew that the Captain couldn’t see where we were going and didn’t seem to care.

I asked him about the ports. He said ports were strictly for tourists. “What would you do with a port if you had one?” he asked. “Stick your head out the window and look for road signs? We can see anything we need to see. Sam, heat up the video and show the kids.”

“Aye aye, Skipper.” The other chap swam over to his couch and started turning switches. He left his sandwich hanging in the air while he did so.

I looked around. The control room was circular and the end we came in was bigger than the other end; it was practically up in the nose of the ship and the sides sloped in. There were two couches, one for the pilot and one for the co-pilot, flat against the wall that separated the control room from the passenger compartments. Most of the space between the couches was taken up by the computer.

The couches were fancier than the ones the passengers had; they were shaped to the body and they lifted the knees and the head and back, like a hospital bed, and there were arm rests to support their hands over the ship’s controls. An instrument board arched over each couch at the middle, where the man in the couch could see the dials and stuff even when his head was pushed back into the cushions by high g.

The TV screen lighted up and we could see Earth; it filled most of the screen. “That’s ‘View Aft’,” the copilot said, “from a TV camera in the tail.

We’ve got ’em pointing in all directions. Now we’ll try ‘View Forward’.” He did, but it didn’t amount to anything, just a few tiny little dots that might have been stars. Hank said you could see more stars out a port.

“You don’t use it to look at stars,” he answered. “When you need to take a star sight, you use the coelostats. Like this.” He lay back on the couch and reached behind his head, pulling an eye piece arrangement over his face until the rubber guard fitted over one eye without lifting his head off the couch.

“Coelostat” is just a trick name for a telescope with a periscope built into it. He didn’t offer to let us look through it, so I looked back at the instrument board. It had a couple of radar presentations, much like you’ll find in any atmosphere ship, even in a copter, and a lot of other instruments, most of which I didn’t understand, though some of them were pretty obvious, like approach rate and throat temperature and mass ratio and ejection speed and such.

“Watch this,” said the co-pilot. He did something at his controls; one of the tiny blips on the TV screen lit up very brightly, blinked a few times, then died away. “That was Supra-New-York; I triggered her radar beacon. You are not seeing it by television; it’s radar brought on to the same screen.” He fiddled with the controls again and another light blinked, two longs and a short. “That’s where they’re building the Star Rover.”

“Where’s the Mayflower?Hank asked.

“Want to see where you’re going, eh?” He touched his controls again; another light came on, way off to one side, flashing in groups of three.

I said it didn’t look much like we were going there. The Captain spoke up. “We’re taking the long way round, past the fair grounds. That’s enough, Sam. Lock your board.”

We all went back where the Captain was still eating. “You an Eagle Scout?” he asked me. I said yes and Hank said he was too.

“How old were you when you made it?” he wanted to know. I said I had been thirteen, so Hank said twelve, whereupon the Captain claimed he had made it at eleven. Personally I didn’t believe either one of them.

The Captain said so now we were going out to Ganymede; he envied both of us. The co-pilot said what was there to envy about that? The Captain said, “Sam, you’ve got no romance in your soul. You’ll live and die running a ferry boat.”

“Maybe so,” the co-pilot answered, “but I sleep home a lot of nights.”

The Captain said pilots should not marry. “Take me,” he said, “I always wanted to be a deep-space man. I was all set for it, too, when I was captured by pirates and missed my chance. By the time I had the chance again, I was married.”

“You and your pirates,” said the co-pilot.

I kept my face straight. Adults always think anybody younger will swallow anything; I try not to disillusion them.

“Well, all that’s as may be,” said the Captain. “You two young gentlemen run along now. Mr. Mayes and I have got to fake up a few figures, or we’ll be landing this bucket in South Brooklyn.”

So we thanked him and left.

I found Dad and Molly and the Brat in the deck aft of my own. Dad said, “Where have you been, Bill? I’ve been looking all over the ship for you.” I told them, “Up in the control room with the Captain.”

Dad looked surprised and the Brat made a face at me and said, “Smarty, you have not. Nobody can go up there.”

I think girls should be raised in the bottom of a deep, dark sack until they are old enough to know better. Then when it came time, you could either let them out or close the sack and throw them away, whichever was the best idea.

Molly said, “Hush, Peggy.”

I said, “You can just ask Hank. He was with me. We–” I looked around but Hank was gone. So I told them what had happened, all but the part about pirates.

When I finished the Brat said, “I want to go into the control room, too.”

Dad said he didn’t think it could be arranged. The Brat said, “Why not? Bill went.”

Molly said hush again. “Bill is a boy and older than you are.” The Brat said it wasn’t fair.

I guess she had something there–but things hardly ever are. Dad went on, “You should feel flattered, Bill, being entertained by the famous Captain DeLongPre.”

“Huh?”

“Maybe you are too young to remember it. He let himself be sealed into one of the robot freighters used to jump thorium ore from the lunar mines– and busted up a ring of hijackers, a gang the newscasters called the ‘Ore Pirates.'”

I didn’t say anything.

I wanted to see the Mayflower from space, but they made us strap down before I could locate it. I got a pretty good view of Supra-New-York though; the Mayflower was in the 24-hour orbit the space station rides in and we were closing almost directly on it when the word came to strap down.

Captain DeLongPre was quite some pilot. He didn’t fiddle around with jockeying his ship into the new groove; he gave one long blast on the jet, the right time, the right amount, and the right direction. As it says in the physics book, “every one-plane correction-of-orbit problem which can be solved at all, can be solved with a single application of acceleration”–provided the pilot is good enough.

He was good enough. When we went weightless again, I looked over my shoulder out a port and there was the Mayflower, with the Sun gleaming on her, large as life and not very far away. There was the softest sort of a correction bump and the loudspeaker sang out, “Contact completed. You may unstrap.”

I did and went to the port from which we could see the Mayflower. It was easy to see why she could never land; she had no airfoils of any sort, not even fins, and she was the wrong shape–almost spherical except that one side came out to a conical point.

She looked much too small–then I realized that a little bulge that was sticking out past her edge at one point was actually the bow of the Icarus,

unloading on the far side. Then suddenly she was enormous and the little flies on her were men in space suits.

One of them shot something at us and a line came snaking across. Before the knob on the end of it quite reached us there was a bright purple brush discharge from the end of it and every hair on my head stood straight up and my skin prickled.

A couple of the women in the compartment squealed and I heard Miss Andrews soothing them down and telling them that it was just the electrical potential adjusting between the two ships. If she had told them it was a bolt of lightning she would have been just as correct, but I don’t suppose that would have soothed them.

I wasn’t scared; any kid who had fooled around with radio or any sort of electronics would have expected it.

The knob on the line clunked against the side of the ship and after a bit the little line was followed by a heavier line and then they warped us together, slowly. The Mayflower came up until she filled the port.

After a bit my ears popped and the loudspeaker said, “All hands–prepare to disembark.”

Miss Andrews made us wait quite a while, then it was our deck’s turn and we pulled ourselves along to the deck we had come in by. Mrs. Tarbutton didn’t come along; she and her husband were having some sort of a discussion with Miss Andrews.

We went right straight out of our ship, through a jointed steel drum about ten feet long, and into the Mayflower.

5.   Captain Harkness

Do you know the worst thing about spaceships? They smell bad.

Even the Mayflower smelled bad and she was brand new. She smelled of oil and welding and solvents and dirty, sweaty smells of all the workmen who had lived in her so long. Then we came, three shiploads of us, most of us pretty whiff with that bad odor people get when they’re scared or very nervous. My stomach still wasn’t happy and it almost got me.

The worst of it is that there can’t be very good ‘freshers in a ship; a bath is a luxury. After the ship got organized we were issued tickets for two baths a week, but how far does that go, especially when a bath means two gallons of water to sponge yourself off with?

If you felt you just had to have a bath, you could ask around and maybe buy a ticket from somebody who was willing to skip one. There was one boy in my bunk room who sold his tickets for four weeks running until we all got sick of it and gave him an unscheduled bath with a very stiff brush. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

And you couldn’t burn your clothes either; you had to wash them.

When we first got into the Mayflower it took them maybe half an hour to get us all sorted out and into our acceleration couches. The people from the Daedalus and the Icarus were supposed to be stowed away by the time we got there, but they weren’t and the passageways were traffic jams. A traffic jam when everybody is floating, and you don’t know which end is up, is about eight times as confusing as an ordinary one.

There weren’t any stewardesses to get us straight, either; there were emigrants instead, with signs on their chests reading SHIP’S AIDE-but a lot of them needed aid themselves; they were just as lost as anybody else. It was like amateur theatricals where the ushers don’t know how to find the reserved seats.

By the time I was in the bunk room I was assigned to and strapped down there were bells ringing all over the place and loudspeakers shouting: “Prepare for acceleration! Ten minutes!”

Then we waited.

It seemed more like half an hour. Presently the count-off started. I said to myself, William, if the blast-off from Earth was rugged, this is going to knock the teeth right out of your head. I knew what we were going to build up to–better than ninety-three miles per second. That’s a third of a million miles an hour! Frankly I was scared.

The seconds ticked away; there was a soft push that forced me down against the cushions–and that was all. I just lay there; the ceiling was the ceiling again and the floor was under me, but I didn’t feel extra heavy, I felt fine.

I decided that was just the first step; the next one would be a dilly.

Up overhead in the bunk room was a display screen; it lighted up and I was looking into the face of a man with four collar stripes; he was younger than Captain DeLongPre. He smiled and said, “This is your Captain speaking, friends–Captain Harkness. The ship will remain at one gravity for a little more than four hours. I think it is time to serve lunch, don’t you?”

He grinned again and I realized that my stomach wasn’t bothering me at all–except that I was terribly hungry. I guess he knew that all of us ground hogs would be starving to death as soon as we were back to normal weight. He went on:

“We’ll try to serve you just as quickly as possible. It is all right for you to unstrap now, sit up, and relax, but I must ask you to be very careful about one thing:

“This ship is precisely balanced so that the thrust of our drive passes exactly through our center of gravity. If that were not so, we would tend to spin instead of moving in a straight line–and we might fetch up in the heart of the Sun instead of at Ganymede.

“None of us wants to become an impromptu barbecue, so I will ask each of you not to move unnecessarily from the neighborhood of your couch. The ship has an automatic compensator for a limited amount of movement, but we must not overload it–so get permission from your ship’s aide before moving as much as six inches from your present positions.”

He grinned again and it was suddenly a most unpleasant grin. “Any one violating this rule will be strapped down by force–and the Captain will assign punishment to fit the crime after we are no longer under drive.”

There wasn’t any ship’s aide in our compartment; all we could do was wait. I got acquainted with the boys in the bunkroom, some older, some

younger. There was a big, sandy-haired boy about seventeen, by the name of Edwards–“Noisy” Edwards. He got tired of waiting.

I didn’t blame him; it seemed like hours went past and still nothing to eat. I thought we had been forgotten.

Edwards had been hanging around the door, peering out. Finally he said, “This is ridiculous! We can’t sit here all day. I’m for finding out what’s the hold up. Who’s with me?”

One of the fellows objected, “The Captain said to sit tight.”

“What if he did? And what can he do if we don’t? We aren’t part of the crew.”

I pointed out that the Captain had authority over the whole ship, but he brushed me off. “Tommyrot! We got a right to know what’s going on–and a right to be fed. Who’s coming along?”

Another boy said, “You’re looking for trouble, Noisy.”

Edwards stopped; I think he was worried by the remark but he couldn’t back down. Finally he said, “Look, we’re supposed to have a ship’s aide and we haven’t got one. You guys elect me ship’s aide and I’ll go bring back chow. How’s that?”

Nobody objected out loud. Noisy said, “Okay, here I go.”

He couldn’t have been gone more than a few seconds when a ship’s aide showed up carrying a big box of packaged rations. He dealt them out and had one left over. Then he counted the bunks. “Weren’t there twenty boys in here?” he asked.

We looked at each other but nobody said anything. He pulled out a list and called our names. Edwards didn’t answer, of course, and he left, taking Noisy’s ration with him.

Then Noisy showed up and saw us eating and wanted to know where his lunch was. We told him; he said, “For the love of Mike! Why didn’t you guys save it for me? A fine bunch you turned out to be.” And he left again.

He came back shortly, looking mad. A ship’s aide followed him and strapped him down.

We had about reached the teeth-picking stage when the screen on the ceiling lit up again and there was the Moon. It looked as if we were headed right toward it and coming up fast. I began to wonder if Captain Harkness had dropped a decimal point.

I lay back on my couch and watched it grow. After a while it looked worse. When it had grown until it filled the screen and more and it seemed as if we couldn’t possibly miss, I saw that the mountains were moving past on the screen from right to left. I breathed a sigh of relief; maybe the Old Man knew what he was doing after all.

A voice came over the speaker: “We are now passing the Moon and tacking slightly in so doing. Our relative speed at point of closest approach is more than fifty miles per second, producing a somewhat spectacular effect.”

I’ll say it was spectacular! We zipped across the face of the Moon in about half a minute, then it faded behind us. I suppose they simply kept a TV camera trained on it, but it looked as if we had dived in, turned sharply, and raced out again. Only you don’t make sharp turns at that speed.

About two hours later they stopped gunning her. I had fallen asleep and I dreamed I was making a parachute jump and the chute failed to open. I woke up with a yell, weightless, with my stomach dropping out of me again. It took me a moment to figure out where I was.

The loudspeaker said: “End of acceleration. Spin will be placed on the ship at once.”

But it did not happen all at once; it happened very slowly. We drifted toward one wall and slid down it toward the outer wall of the ship. That made what had been the outer wall the floor; we stood on it– and the side with the bunks on it was now a wall and the side with the TV screen on it, which had been the ceiling, was now the opposite wall. Gradually we got heavier.

Noisy was still strapped to his couch; the ship’s aide had moved the buckles so that he could not reach them himself. Now he was up against the wall, hanging on the straps like a papoose. He began to yell for us to help him down.

He was not in any danger and he could not have been too uncomfortable, for we weren’t up to a full gravity, not by a whole lot. It turned out later that

the Captain had brought the spin up to one-third g and held it there, because Ganymede has one-third g. So there wasn’t any urgent need to turn Noisy loose.

Nor was there any rush to do so. We were still discussing it and some of the fellows were making comical remarks which Noisy did not appreciate when the same ship’s aide came in, unstrapped Noisy, and told all of us to follow him.

That’s how I happened to attend Captain’s mast.

“Captain’s mast” is a sort of court, like when in ancient times the lord of the countryside would sit and dispense the high and middle justice. We followed the aide, whose name was Dr. Archibald, to Captain Harkness’s cabin. There were a lot of other people waiting there in the passage outside the cabin. Presently Captain Harkness came out and Noisy was the first case.

We were all witnesses but the Captain didn’t question but a few of us; I wasn’t questioned. Dr. Archibald told about finding Noisy wandering around the ship while we were under acceleration and the Captain asked Noisy if he had heard the order to stay at his bunk?

Noisy beat around the bush a good deal and tried to spread the blame on all of us, but when the Captain pinned him down he had to admit that he had heard the order.

Captain Harkness said, “Son, you are an undisciplined lunk. I don’t know what sort of trouble you’ll run into as a colonist, but so far as my ship is concerned, you’ve had it.”

He mused for a moment, than added, “You say you did this because you were hungry?” Noisy said yes, he hadn’t had anything since breakfast and he still hadn’t had his lunch. “Ten days bread and water,” said the Captain. “Next case.”

Noisy looked as if he couldn’t believe his ears.

The next case was the same thing, but a woman-one of those large, impressive ones who run things. She had had a row with her ship’s aide and had stomped off to tell the Captain about it personally– while we were under acceleration.

Captain Harkness soon cut through the fog. “Madam,” he said, with icy dignity, “by your bull-headed stupidity you have endangered the lives of all of us. Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

She started a tirade about how “rude” the aide had been to her and how she never heard of anything so preposterous in her life as this kangaroo court, and so forth, and so forth. The Captain cut her short.

“Have you ever washed dishes?” he asked. “Why, no!”

“Well, you are going to wash dishes–for the next four hundred million miles.”

6.   E = MC 2

I looked up dad after they let us go. It was like finding a needle in a haystack but I kept asking and presently I found him. Molly and he had a room to themselves. Peggy was there and I thought she was rooming with them, which annoyed me some, until I saw that there were only two couches and realized that Peggy must be in a dormitory. It turned out that all the kids over eight were in dormitories.

Dad was busy unclamping their couches and moving them to what was the floor, now that the ship was spinning. He stopped when I came in and we sat around and talked. I told him about Captain’s mast. He nodded. “We saw it in the screen. I didn’t notice your shining face, however.”

I said I hadn’t been called on.

“Why not?” Peggy wanted to know.

“How should I know?” I thought about mast for a bit and said, “Say, George, the skipper of a ship in space is just about the last of the absolute monarchs, isn’t he?”

Dad considered it and said, “Mmm … no, he’s a constitutional monarch. But he’s a monarch all right.” “You mean we have to bow down to him and say ‘Your Majesty?” Peggy wanted to know.

Molly said, “I don’t think that would be advisable, Peg.” “Why not? I think it would be fun.”

Molly smiled. “Well, let me know how you make out. I suspect that he will just turn you over his knee and paddle you.” “Oh, he wouldn’t dare! I’d scream.”

I wasn’t so sure. I remembered those four hundred million miles of dirty dishes. I decided that, if the Captain said “Frog,” I’d hop.

If Captain Harkness was a monarch, he didn’t seem anxious to rule; the first thing he had us do was to hold an election and set up a ship’s council. After that we hardly laid eyes on him.

Everybody over eighteen could vote. The rest of us got to vote, too; we were told to set up a junior council–not that it was ever good for anything.

But the senior council, the real council, ran the ship from then on. It even acted as a court and the Captain never handed out punishments again. Dad told me that the Captain reviewed everything that the council did, that he had to, to make it legal–but I never heard of him over-ruling their decisions.

And you know what the first thing was that that council did–after setting up meal hours and simple things like that? They decided we had to go to school!

The junior council promptly held a meeting and passed a resolution against it, but it didn’t mean anything. We had school, just the same.

Peggy was on the junior council. I asked her why she didn’t resign if she wasn’t going to do anything. I was just teasing–as a matter of fact she put up quite a battle for us.

School wasn’t so bad, though. There is very little to do in space and when you’ve seen one star you’ve seen ’em all. And the first thing we had in school was a tour of the ship, which was all right.

We went in groups of twenty and it took all day – “day” by ship’s time, I mean. The Mayflower was shaped like a ball with a cone on one side–top shaped. The point of the cone was her jet–although Chief Engineer Ortega, who showed us around, called it her “torch.”

If you count the torch end as her stern, then the round end, her bow, was where the control room was located; around it were the Captain’s cabin and the staterooms of the officers. The torch and the whole power plant space were cut off from the rest of the ship by a radiation shield that ran right through the ship. From the shield forward to the control room was a big cargo space.

It was a cylinder more than a hundred feet in diameter and was split up into holds. We were carrying all sorts of things out to the colony –earth moving machinery, concentrated soil cultures, instruments, I don’t know what all.

Wrapped around this central cylinder were the decks for living, “A” deck just inside the skin of the ship, “B” deck under it, and “C” deck just inside that, with “D” deck’s ceiling being the outer wall of the cargo space. “D” deck was the mess rooms and galley and recreation rooms and sick bay and such; the three outer decks were bunk rooms and staterooms. “A” deck had steps in it every ten or fifteen feet because it was fitted into the outer curve of the ship; this made the ceilings in it of various heights.

The furthest forward and furthest aft on “A” deck were only about six feet between floor and ceiling and some of the smaller kids lived in them, while at the greatest width of the ship the ceilings in “A” deck must have been twelve or thirteen feet high.

From inside the ship it was hard to see how it all fitted together. Not only was it all chopped up, but the artificial gravity we had from spinning the ship made directions confusing–anywhere you stood on a deck it seemed level, but it curved sharply up behind you and in front of you. But you never came to the curved part; if you walked forward it was still level. If you walked far enough you looped the loop and came back to where you started, having walked clear around the ship.

I never would have figured it out if Mr. Ortega hadn’t drawn a sketch for us.

Mr. Ortega told us that the ship was spinning three and six-tenths revolutions per minute or two hundred and sixteen complete turns an hour, which was enough to give “B” deck a centrifugal force of one-third g. “B” deck was seventy-five feet out from the axis of the Mayflower; “A” deck where I lived was further out and you weighed maybe a tenth more there, while “C” deck caught about a tenth less. “D” deck was quite a lot less and you could make yourself dizzy if you stood up suddenly in the mess room.

The control room was right on the axis; you could float in it even when the ship was spinning–or so they told me; I never was allowed inside.  Spinning the ship had another odd effect: all around us was “down.” I mean to say that the only place you could put a view port was in the floor

plates of “A” deck and that’s where they were, four of them–big ones, each in its own compartment.

Mr. Ortega took us into one of these view galleries. The view port was a big round quartz plate in the floor, with a guard rail around it.

The first ones into the room went up to the guard rail and then backed away from it quick and two of the girls squealed. I pushed forward and got to the rail and looked down . . and I was staring straight into the very bottom of the universe, a million trillion miles away and all of it down.

I didn’t shy away–George says I’m more acrobat than acrophobe–but I did sort of grip the railing. Nobody wants to fall that far.

The quartz was surface-treated so that it didn’t give off reflections and it looked as if there were nothing at all between you and Kingdom Come.

The stars were reeling across the hole from the ship spinning, which made it worse. The Big Dipper came swinging in from the left, passed almost under me, and slid away to the right–and a few seconds later it was back again. I said, “This is where I came in,” and gave up my place so that someone else could have a look, but nobody seemed anxious to.

Then we went through the hydroponics plant, but there wasn’t anything fancy about that–just enough plants growing to replace the oxygen we used up breathing. Eel grass, it was mostly, but there was a vegetable garden as well. I wondered how they had gotten it going before they had the passengers aboard? Mr. Ortega pointed to a CO2 fitting in the wall. “We had to subsidize them, of course.”

I guess I should have known it; it was simple arithmetic.

The Chief led us back into one of the mess rooms, we sat down, and he told us about the power plant.

He said that there had been three stages in the development of space ships: first was the chemical fuel rocket ship that wasn’t very different from the big German war rockets used in the Second World War, except that they were step rockets. “You kids are too young to have seen such rockets,” he said, “but they were the biggest space ships ever built. They had to be big because they were terribly inefficient. As you all know, the first rocket to reach the Moon was a four-stage rocket. Its final stage was almost as long as the Mayflower–yet its pay load was less than a ton.

“It is characteristic of space ship development that the ships have gotten smaller instead of bigger. The next development was the atom-powered rocket. It was a great improvement; steps were no longer necessary. That meant that a ship like the Daedalus could take off from Earth without even a catapult, much less step rockets, and cruise to the Moon or even to Mars.

But such ships still had the shortcomings of rockets; they depended on an atomic power plant to heat up reaction mass and push it out a jet, just as their predecessors depended on chemical fuel for the same purpose.

“The latest development is the mass-conversion ship, such as the Mayflower, and it may be the final development–a mass-conversion ship is theoretically capable of approaching the speed of light. Take this trip: we accelerated at one gravity for about four hours and twenty minutes which brought us up to more than ninety miles a second. If we had held that drive for a trifle less than a year, we would approach the speed of light.

“A mass-conversion ship has plenty of power to do just that. At one hundred per cent efficiency, it would use up about one per cent of her mass as energy and another one per cent as reaction mass. That’s what the Star Rover is going to do when it is finished.”

One of the younger kids was waving his hand. “Mister Chief Engineer?”

“Yes, son?”

“Suppose it goes on a few weeks longer and passes the speed of light?” Mr. Ortega shook his head. “It can’t.”

“Why not, sir?”

“Eh, how far have you gone in mathematics, sonny?”

“Just through grammer school calculus,” the kid answered.

‘Tm afraid there is no use in trying to explain it, then. Just take it from me that the big brains are sure it can’t be done.”

I had worried about that very point more than once. Why can’t you go faster than light? I know all that old double-talk about how the Einstein equations show that a speed faster than light is a meaningless quantity, like the weight of a song or the color of a sound, because it involves the square root of minus one–but all of that is just theory and if the course we had in history of science means anything at all, it means that scientists change their theories about as often as a snake changes his skin. I stuck up my hand.

“Okay,” he says. “You with the cowlick. Speak up.”

“Mr. Ortega, admitting that you can’t pass the speed of light, what would happen if the Star Rover got up close to the speed of light–and then the Captain suddenly stepped the drive up to about six g and held it there?”

“Why, it would– No, let’s put it this way–” He broke off and grinned; it made him look real young. “See here, kid, don’t ask me questions like that. I’m an engineer with hairy ears, not a mathematical physicist.” He looked thoughtful and added, “Truthfully, I don’t know what would happen, but I would sure give a pretty to find out. Maybe we would find out what the square root of minus one looks like– from the inside.”

He went on briskly, “Let’s go on about the Mayflower. You probably know that when the original Star Rover failed to come back, the Mayflower was designed to be the Star Rover II, but the design was obsolete before they ever started putting her together.

So they shifted the name over to the new intersteller ship, the Star Rover III, renamed this one the Mayflower and grabbed her for the colonial service.

“You kids should consider how lucky you are. Up to now, emigrants to Ganymede have had to spend two years and nine months in space, just to get there. You’re making it in two months.”

“Couldn’t we go faster?” somebody wanted to know.

“We could,” he told us. “But we don’t need to and it runs up the astrogation and control difficulties. In these new ships the power plant has gotten way ahead of the instrumentation. Be patient; your grandchildren will make the trip in a week, blasting at one g all the way. There’ll be so many ships they’ll have to have traffic cops and maybe we can come close to shipping out as many people as there are extras born each year.

“Enough about that,” he went on. “Who here can tell me what ‘E equals M C squared’ means?”

I could have answered but I had already spoken up once and it doesn’t do to get a reputation for apple polishing. Finally one of the older kids said, “It means that mass can be converted into energy.”

“Right!” Mr. Ortega agreed. “The first real demonstration of that was the atom bomb they set off ‘way back in 1945 at Alamogordo, New Mexico. That was a special case; they still didn’t know how to control it; all they could do was to make one whale of a big bang.

Then came the uranium power plants, but that still didn’t amount to much because it was a very special case and only a microscopic percentage of the mass was converted into energy. It wasn’t until Kilgore’s energy transformation equations–don’t worry about them; you’ll study them when you are older if you are interested–it wasn’t until Kilgore showed how it could be done that we had any idea of howto do what Dr. Einstein’s energy- mass equation said, clear back in 1905.

“And we still didn’t know how to control it. If we were going to turn mass into energy, we needed more mass with which to surround the reaction, a very special sort of mass that would not turn into energy when we didn’t want it to and would hold the reaction where we wanted it. Ordinary metal

wouldn’t do; one might as well use soft butter.

“But the Kilgore equations showed how to do that, too, when they were read correctly. Now has anyone here any notion of how much energy you get when you convert a chunk of mass into raw energy?”

Nobody knew. “It’s all in that one equation,” he said, “good old Doc Einstein’s ‘E equals M C squared.’ It comes out that one gram of mass gives nine times ten to the twentieth power ergs.” He wrote it down for us: 1 gm. = 9 x l020 ergs.

“Doesn’t look like much, does it?” he said. “Now try it this way:” He wrote down 900,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs.

“Read it off. Nine hundred thousand million billion ergs. It still doesn’t mean much, does it? Figures like that are impossible to comprehend. The nuclear physicists keep a barrel of zeroes around handy the way a carpenter does a keg of nails.

“I’ll try once more,” he went on. “A pound of mass, any old mass, say a pound of feathers, when converted into energy equals fifteen billion

horsepower-hours. Does that give anyone a notion of why the Mayflower was assembled out in an orbit and will never ever land anywhere?”

“Too hot,” somebody said.

“‘Too hot’ is an understatement. If the Mayftower had blasted off from Mojave space port the whole Los Angeles Borough of the City of Southern California would have been reduced to a puddle of lava and people would have been killed by radiation and heat from Bay City to Baja California. And that will give you an idea of why the shielding runs right through the ship between here and the power plant, with no way at all to get at the torch.”

We had the misfortune to have Noisy Edwards along, simply because he was from the same bunk room. Now he spoke up and said, “Suppose you have to make a repair?”

“There is nothing to go wrong,” explained Mr. Ortega. “The power plant has no moving parts of any sort” Noisy wasn’t satisfied. “But suppose something did go wrong, how would you fix it if you can’t get at it?”

Noisy has an irritating manner at best; Mr. Ortega sounded a little impatient when he answered. “Believe me, son, even if you could get at it, you wouldn’t want to. No indeed!”

“Humph!” said Noisy. “All I’ve got to say is, if there isn’t any way to make a repair when a repair is needed, what’s the use in sending engineer officers along?”

You could have heard a pin drop. Mr. Ortega turned red, but all he said was, “Why, to answer foolish questions from youngsters like yourself, I suppose.” He turned to the rest of us. “Any more questions?”

Naturally nobody wanted to ask any then. He added, “I think that’s enough for one session. School’s out.”

I told Dad about it later. He looked grim and said, “I’m afraid Chief Engineer Ortega didn’t tell you the whole truth.” “Huh?”

“In the first place there is plenty for him to do in taking care of the auxiliary machinery on this side of the shield. But it is possible to get at the torch, if necessary.”

“Huh? How?”

“There are certain adjustments which could conceivably have to be made in extreme emergency. In which case it would be Mr. Ortega’s proud privilege to climb into a space suit, go outside and back aft, and make them.”

“You mean–“

“I mean that the assistant chief engineer would succeed to the position of chief a few minutes later. Chief engineers are very carefully chosen, Bill, and not just for their technical knowledge.”

It made me feel chilly inside; I didn’t like to think about it.

1.   Scouting in Space

Making a trip in a space ship is about the dullest way to spend time in the world, once the excitement wears off. There’s no scenery, nothing to do, and no room to do it in. There were nearly six thousand of us crowded into the Mayflower and that doesn’t leave room to swing a cat.

Take “B” deck–there were two thousand passengers sleeping in it. It was 150 feet across–fore and aft, that is–and not quite 500 feet around, cylinder fashion. That gives about forty square feet per passenger, on the average, but a lot was soaked up in stairs, passageways, walls, and such. It worked out that each one had about room enough for his bunk and about that much left over to stand on when he wasn’t sleeping.

You can’t give a rodeo in that kind of space; you can’t even get up a game of ring-around-the-rosy.

“A” deck was larger and “C” deck was smaller, being nearer the axis, but they averaged out the same. The council set up a staggered system to get the best use out of the galley and the mess rooms and to keep us from falling over each other in the ‘freshers. “A” deck was on Greenwich time; “B” deck was left on zone plus-eight time, or Pacific West Coast time; and “C” deck drew zone minus-eight time, Philippine time.

That would have put us on different days, of course, but the day was always figured officially on Greenwich time; the dodge was just to ease the pressure on eating facilities.

That was really all we had to worry about. You would wake up early, not tired but bored, and wait for breakfast Once breakfast was over, the idea was to kill time until lunch. All afternoon you could look forward to the terrific excitement of having dinner.

I have to admit that making us go to school was a good plan; it meant that two and a half hours every morning and every afternoon was taken care of. Some of the grown ups complained that the mess rooms and all the spare space was always crowded with classes, but what did they expect us to do? Go hang on sky hooks? We used up less space in class than if we had been under foot.

Still, it was a mighty odd sort of school. There were some study machines in the cargo but we couldn’t get at them and there wouldn’t have been enough to go around. Each class consisted of about two dozen kids and some adult who knew something about something. (You’d be surprised how many adults don’t know anything about anything!) The grown up would talk about what he knew best and the kids would listen, then we would ask questions and he would ask questions. No real examinations, no experiments, no demonstrations, no stereos.

Dad says this is the best kind of a school, that a university consists of a log with a teacher on one end and a pupil on the other. But Dad is a sort of romantic.

Things got so dull that it was hardly worth while to keep up my diary, even if I had been able to get microfilm, which I wasn’t.

Dad and I played an occasional game of cribbage in the evening–somehow Dad had managed to squeeze the board and a pack of cards into his weight allowance. Then he got too busy with technical planning he was doing for the council and didn’t have time. Molly suggested that I teach her to play, so I did.

After that I taught Peggy to play and she pegged a pretty sharp game, for a girl. It worried me a little that I wasn’t being loyal to Anne in getting chummy with Peg and her mother, but I decided that Anne would want me to do just what I did. Anne was always friendly with everybody.

It still left me with time on my hands. What with only one-third gravity and no exercise I couldn’t sleep more than six hours a night. The lights were out eight hours but they didn’t make us go to bed, not after the trouble they had with it the first week. I used to fool around the corridors after lights out, usually with Hank Jones, until we both would get sleepy. We talked a lot. Hank turned out not to be such a bad guy as long as you kept him trimmed down to size.

I still had my Scout suit with me and kept it folded up in my bunk. Hank came in one morning while I was making up my bunk and noticed it. “See here, William,” he said, “why do you hang on to that? Let the dead past bury its dead.”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Maybe there will be Scouting on Ganymede.”

“Not that I ever heard of.”

“Why not? There is Scouting on the Moon.” “Proves nothing,” he answered.

But it got us to talking about it and Hank got a brilliant idea. Why not start up Scouting right now, in the Mayflower?

We called a meeting. Peggy spread the word around for us, through the junior council, and we set it for fifteen-thirty that same afternoon, right after school. Fifteen-thirty Greenwich, or “A” deck time, that is. That made it seven-thirty in the morning for the “B” deck boys and a half hour before midnight for the fellows on “C” deck. It was the best we could do. “B” deck could hurry through breakfast and get to the meeting if they wanted to and we figured that those who were really interested from “C” would stay up for the meeting.

I played my accordion while they were drifting in because Hank’s father said that you needed music to warm up a meeting before it got down to work. The call had read “all Scouts and former Scouts;” by fifteen-forty we had them packed in and spilling into the corridors, even though we had the use of the biggest mess room. Hank called them to order and I put away my accordion and acted as Scribe pro tem, having borrowed a wire recorder from the Communications Officer for the purpose.

Hank made a little speech. I figure him for politics when he grows up. He said that all of us had enjoyed the benefits, the comradeship, and the honorable traditions of Scouting on Earth and it seemed a shame to lose them. He said that the Scouting tradition was the tradition of the explorer and pioneer and there could be no more fitting place and time for it than in the settlement of a new planet. In fact the spirit of Daniel Boone demanded that we continue as Scouts.

I didn’t know he had it in him. It sounded good.

He stopped and slipped me the wink. I got up and said that I wanted to propose a resolution. Then I read it–it had been a lot longer but we cut it down. It read: “Be it resolved–we the undersigned, Scouts and former Scouts of many jurisdictions and now passengers in the good ship Mayflower, having as our purpose to continue the Scouting tradition and to extend the Scouting trail out to the stars, do organize ourselves as the Boy Scouts of Ganymede in accordance with the principles and purpose of Scouting and in so doing do reaffirm the Scout Law.”

Maybe it was flowery but it sounded impressive; nobody laughed. Hank said, “You have heard the resolution; what is your pleasure? Do I hear a second?”

He surely did; there were seconds all over the place. Then he asked for debate.

Somebody objected that we couldn’t call ourselves the Boy Scouts of Ganymede because we weren’t on Ganymede yet. He got a chilly reception and shut up. Then somebody else pointed out that Ganymede wasn’t a star, which made that part about “Carrying the Scouting trail out to the stars” nonsense.

Hank told him that was poetic license and anyhow going out to Ganymede was a step in the right direction and that there would be more steps; what about the Star Rover III? That shut him up.

The worst objection was from “Millimetre” Muntz, a weary little squirt too big for his britches. He said, “Mr. Chairman, this is an outlaw meeting. You haven’t any authority to set up a new Scouting jurisdiction. As a member in good standing of Troop -Ninety-Six, New Jersey, I object to the whole proceeding.”

Hank asked him just what authority he thought Troop Ninety-Six, New Jersey, had out around the orbit of Mars? Somebody yelled, “Throw him out!” Hank banged on the mess table. “It isn’t necessary to throw him out–but, since Brother Millimetre thinks this is not a proper meeting, then it isn’t

proper for him to take part in it. He is excused and the chair will recognize him no further. Are you ready to vote?”

It was passed unanimously and then Hank was elected organizational chairman. He appointed a flock of committees, for organization and for plans and programs and for credentials and tests and for liaison, and such. That last was to dig out the men in the ship who had been troop masters and commissioners and things and get a Court of Honor set up. There were maybe a dozen of the men passengers at the meeting, listening. One of them, a Dr. Archibald who was an aide on “A” deck, spoke up.

“Mr. Chairman, I was a Scoutmaster in Nebraska. I’d like to volunteer my services to this new organization.” Hank looked him straight in the eye. “Thank you, sir. Your application will be considered.”

Dr. Archibald looked startled, but Hank went smoothly on, “We want and need and will appreciate the help of all you older Scouts. The liaison committee is instructed to get the names of any who are willing to serve.”

It was decided that we would have to have three troops, one for each deck, since it wasn’t convenient to try to meet all at the same time. Hank asked all the Explorer Scouts to stand up. There were too many of them, so he asked those who were Eagles to remain standing. There were about a dozen of us.

Hank separated us Eagles by decks and told us to get busy and organize our troops and to start by picking an acting senior patrol leader. “A” deck had only three Eagles, me, Hank, and a kid from another bunk room whom I hadn’t met before, Douglas MacArthur Okajima. Doug and Hank combined on me and I found myself tagged with the job.

Hank and I had planned to finish the meeting with setting up exercises, but there just wasn’t room, so I got out my accordion again and we sang The Scouting Trail and followed it with The Green Hills of Earth. Then we took the oath together again:

“Upon my honor I will do my best to do my duty to God and my planet, and to keep myself physically fit, mentally alert, and morally straight.” After that the meeting busted up.

For a while we held meetings every day. Between troop meetings and committee meetings and Explorer meetings and patrol leader meetings we didn’t have time to get bored. At first the troops were just “A” troop, “B” troop, and “C” troop, after the decks, but we wanted names to give them some personality. Anyhow I wanted a name for my troop; we were about to start a membership drive and I wanted something with more oomph to it than “‘A'” deck troop.”

Somebody suggested “The Space Rats” but that was voted down, and somebody else suggested “The Mayflowers”; they didn’t bother to vote on that; they simply sat on him.

After that we turned down “The Pilgrims,” “Deep Space Troop,” “Star Rovers,” and “Sky High.” A kid named John Edward Forbes-Smith got up. “Look,” he said, “we’re divided into three troops on the basis of the time zones we use, aren’t we? “B” deck has California time; Cdeck has Philippine time; and we have Greenwich or English time. Why don’t we pick names that will show that fact? We could call ourselves the Saint George Troop.”

Bud Kelly said it was a good idea as far as it went but make it Saint Patrick instead of Saint George; after all, Dublin was on Greenwich time, too, and Saint Patrick was a more important saint.

Forbes-Smith said, “Since when?”

Bud said, “Since always, you limey–” So we sat on both of them, too, and it was decided not to use saints. But Johnny Edwards had a good idea, just the same; we settled on the Baden-Powell Troop, Boy Scouts of Ganymede, which tied in with the English time zone and didn’t offend anybody.

The idea took hold; “C” deck picked Aguinaldo as a name and “B” deck called themselves the Junipero Serra Troop. When I heard that last I was kind of sorry our deck didn’t have California time so that we could have used it. But I got over it; after all “Baden-Powell” is a mighty proud name, too.

For that matter they were all good names–scouts and explorers and brave men, all three of them. Two of them never had a chance to be Scouts in the narrow, organized meaning, but they were all Scouts in the wider sense–like Daniel Boone.

Dad says there is a lot in a name.

As soon as they heard about what we were doing the girls set up Girl Scouting, too, and Peggy was a member of the Florence Nightingale Troop. I suppose there was no harm in it, but why do girls copy what the boys do? We were too busy to worry about them, though; we had to revamp Scouting activities to fit new conditions.

We decided to confirm whatever ranks and badges a boy had held in his former organization–permanent rankings, I mean, not offices. Having been a patrol leader or a scribe didn’t mean anything, but if you were an Eagle on Earth, you stayed one in the B.S.G.; if you were a Cub, then you were still a Cub. If a boy didn’t have records–and about half of them didn’t– we took his Scout oath statement as official.

That was simple; working over the tests and the badges was complicated. After all you can’t expect a boy to pass beekeeping when you haven’t any bees.

(It turned out that there were several swarms of bees sleep-frozen in the cargo, but we didn’t have the use of them.)

But we could set up a merit badge in hydroponics and give tests right there in the ship. And Mr. Ortega set up a test for us in spaceship engineering and Captain Harkness did the same for ballistics and astrogation. By the end of the trip we had enough new tests to let a boy go up for Eagle Scout, once we had a Court of Honor.

That came last. For some reason I couldn’t figure Hank had kept putting off the final report of the liaison committee, the committee which had as its job getting Scout Masters and Commissioners and such. I asked him about it, but he just looked mysterious and said that I would see.

I did see, eventually. At last we had a joint meeting of all three troops to install Scout Masters and dedicate the Court of Honor and such. And from then on the adults ran things and we went back to being patrol leaders at the most. Oh well–it was fun while it lasted.

2.   Trouble

When we were fifty-three days out and about a week to go to reach Ganymede, Captain Harkness used the flywheel to precess the ship so that we could see where we were going–so that the passengers could see, that is; it didn’t make any difference to his astrogation.

You see, the axis of the Mayflower had been pointed pretty much toward Jupiter and the torch had been pointed back at the Sun. Since the view ports were spaced every ninety degrees around the sides, while we had been able to see most of the sky, we hadn’t been able to see ahead to Jupiter nor behind to the Sun. Now he tilted the ship over ninety degrees and we were rolling, so to speak, along our line of flight. That way, you could see Jupiter and the Sun both, from any view port, though not both at the same time.

Jupiter was already a tiny, ruddy-orange disc. Some of the boys claimed they could make out the moons. Frankly, I couldn’t, not for the first three days after the Captain precessed the ship. But it was mighty fine to be able to see Jupiter.

We hadn’t seen Mars on the way out, because Mars happened to be on the far side of the Sun, three hundred million miles away. We hadn’t seen anything but the same old stars you can see from Earth. We didn’t even see any asteroids.

There was a reason for that. When we took off from the orbit of Supra-New-York, Captain Harkness had not aimed the Mayflower straight for where Jupiter was going to be when we got there; instead he had lifted her north of the ecliptic high enough to give the asteroid belt a wide berth. Now anybody knows that meteors are no real hazard in space.

Unless a pilot does deliberately foolish things like driving his ship through the head of a comet it is almost impossible to get yourself hit by a meteor. They are too far between.

On the other hand the asteroid belt has more than its fair share of sky junk. The older power-pile ships used to drive straight through the belt, taking their chances, and none of them was ever hit to amount to anything. But Captain Harkness, having literally all the power in the world, preferred to go around and play it safe. By avoiding the belt there wasn’t a chance in a blue moon that the Mayflower would be hit.

Well, it must have been a blue moon. We were hit.

It was just after reveille, “A” deck time, and I was standing by my bunk, making it up. I had my Scout uniform in my hands and was about to fold it up and put it under my pillow. I still didn’t wear it. None of the others had uniforms to wear to Scout meetings so I didn’t wear mine. But I still kept it tucked away in my bunk.

Suddenly I heard the goldarnest noise I ever heard in my life. It sounded like a rifle going off right by my ear, it sounded like a steel door being slammed, and it sounded like a giant tearing yards and yards of cloth, all at once.

Then I couldn’t hear anything but a ringing in my ears and I was dazed. I shook my head and looked down and I was staring at a raw hole in the ship, almost between my feet and nearly as big as my fist.

There was scorched insulation around it and in the middle of the hole I could see blackness–then a star whipped past and I realized that I was staring right out into space.

There was a hissing noise.

I don’t remember thinking at all. I just wadded up my uniform, squatted down, and stuffed it in the hole. For a moment it seemed as if the suction would pull it on through the hole, then it jammed and stuck and didn’t go any further. But we were still losing air. I think that was the point at which I first realized that we were losing air and that we might be suffocated in vacuum.

There was somebody yelling and screaming behind me that he was killed and alarm bells were going off all over the place. You couldn’t hear yourself think. The air-tight door to our bunk room slid across automatically and settled into its gaskets and we were locked in.

That scared me to death.

I know it has to be done. I know that it is better to seal off one compartment and kill the people who are in it than to let a whole ship die–but, you see, I was in that compartment, personally. I guess I’m just not the hero type.

I could feel the pressure sucking away at the plug my uniform made. With one part of my mind I was recalling that it had been advertised as “tropical weave, self ventilating” and wishing that it had been a solid plastic rain coat instead. I was afraid to stuff it in any harder, for fear it would go all the way through and leave us sitting there, chewing vacuum. I would have passed up desserts for the next ten years for just one rubber patch, the size of my hand.

The screaming had stopped; now it started up again. It was Noisy Edwards, beating on the air-tight door and yelling, “Let me out of here! Get me out of here!”

On top of that I could hear Captain Harkness’s voice coming through the bull horn. He was saying, “H-twelve! Report! H-twelve! Can you hear me?”

On top of that everybody was talking at once.

I yelled: “Quiet!” at the top of my voice–and for a second or so there was quiet.

Peewee Brunn, one of my Cubs, was standing in front of me, looking big-eyed. “What happened, Billy?” he said. I said, “Grab me a pillow off one of the bunks. Jump!”

He gulped and did it. I said, “Peel off the cover, quick!”

He did, making quite a mess of it, and handed it to me–but I didn’t have a hand free. I said, “Put it down on top of my hands.”

It was the ordinary sort of pillow, soft foam rubber. I snatched one hand out and then the other, and then I was kneeling on it and pressing down with the heels of my hands. It dimpled a little in the middle and I was scared we were going to have a blowout right through the pillow.

But it held. Noisy was screaming again and Captain Harkness was still asking for somebody, anybody, in compartment H-12 to tell him what was going on. I yelled “Quiet!” again, and added, “Somebody slug Noisy and shut him up.”

That was a popular idea. About three of them jumped to it. Noisy got clipped in the side of the neck, then somebody poked him in the pit of his stomach and they swarmed over him. “Now everybody keep quiet,” I said, “and keep on keeping quiet. If Noisy lets out a peep, slug him again,” I gasped and tried to take a deep breath and said, “H-twelve, reporting!”

The Captain’s voice answered, “What is the situation there?” “There is a hole in the ship, Captain, but we got it corked up.” “How? And how big a hole?”

I told him and that is about all there was to it. They took a while to get to us because–I found this out afterward–they isolated that stretch of corridor first, with the air-tight doors, and that meant they had to get everybody out of the rooms on each side of us and across the passageway. But presently two men in space suits opened the door and chased all the kids out, all but me. Then they came back. One of them was Mr. Ortega.

“You can get up now, kid,” he said, his voice sounding strange and far away through his helmet. The other man squatted down and took over holding the pillow in place.

Mr. Ortega had a big metal patch under one arm. It had sticky padding on one side. I wanted to stay and watch him put it on but he chased me out and closed the door. The corridor outside was empty but I banged on the air-tight door and they let me through to where the rest were waiting. They wanted to know what was happening but I didn’t have any news for them because I had been chased out.

After a while we started feeling light and Captain Harkness announced that spin would be off the ship for a short time. Mr. Ortega and the other man came back and went on up to the control room. Spin was off entirely soon after that and I got very sick.

Captain Harkness kept the ship’s speaker circuits cut in on his conversations with the men who had gone outside to repair the hole, but I didn’t listen. I defy anybody to be interested in anything when he is drop sick

Then spin came back on and everything was all right and we were allowed to go back into our bunk-room. It looked just the same except that there was a plate welded over the place where the meteorite had come in.

Breakfast was two hours late and we didn’t have school that morning.

That was how I happened to go up to Captain’s mast for the second time. George was there and Molly and Peggy and Dr. Archibald, the Scoutmaster of our deck, and all the fellows from my bunk room and all the ship’s officers. The rest of the ship was cut in by visiplate. I wanted to wear my uniform but it was a mess–torn and covered with sticky stuff. I finally cut off the merit badges and put it in the ship’s incinerator.

The First Officer shouted, “Captain’s Mast for punishments and rewards!” Everybody sort of straightened up and Captain Harkness walked out and faced us. Dad shoved me forward.

The Captain looked at me. “William Lermer?” he said. I said, “Yessir.”

He said, “I will read from yesterday’s log: ‘On twenty-one August at oh-seven-oh-four system standard, while cruising in free fall according to plan, the ship was broached by a small meteorite. Safety interlocks worked satisfactorily and the punctured volume, compartment H-twelve, was isolated with no serious drop in pressure elsewhere in the ship.

  • ‘Compartment H-twelve is a bunk room and was occupied at the time of the emergency by twenty passengers. One of the passengers, William J. Lermer, contrived a makeshift patch with materials at hand and succeeded in holding sufficient pressure for breathing until a repair party could take over.
  • ‘His quick thinking and immediate action unquestionably saved the lives of all persons in compartment H-twelve.’ “

The Captain looked up from the log and went on, “A certified copy of this entry, along with depositions of witnesses, will be sent to Interplanetary Red Cross with recommendation for appropriate action. Another copy will be furnished you. I have no way to reward you except to say that you have my heart-felt gratitude. I know that I speak not only for the officers but for all the passengers and most especially for the parents of your bunk mates.”

He paused and waggled a finger for me to come closer. He went on in a low voice, to me alone, “That really was a slick piece of work. You were on your toes. You have a right to feel proud.”

I said I guessed I had been lucky.

He said, “Maybe. But that sort of luck comes to the man who is prepared for it.”

He waited a moment, then said, “Lermer, have you ever thought of putting in for space training?”

I said I suppose I had but I hadn’t thought about it very seriously. He said, “Well, Lermer, if you ever do decide to, let me know. You can reach me care of the Pilots’ Association, Luna City.”

With that, mast was over and we went away, George and I together and Molly and Peggy following along. I heard Peggy saying, “That’s my brother.” Molly said, “Hush, Peggy. And don’t point.”

Peggy said, “Why not? He is my brother–well, isn’t he?”

Molly said, “Yes, but there’s no need to embarrass him.” But I wasn’t embarrassed.

Mr. Ortega looked me up later and handed me a little, black, twisted piece of metal, about as big as a button. “That’s all there was left of it,” he said, “but I thought you would like to have it–pay you for messing up your Scout suit, so to speak.”

I thanked him and said I didn’t mind losing the uniform; after all, it had saved my neck, too. I looked at the meteorite. “Mr. Ortega, is there any way to tell where this came from?”

“Not really,” he told me, “though you can get the scientific johnnies to cut it up and then express an opinion–if you don’t mind them destroying it.”

I said no, I’d rather .keep it–and I have; I’ve still got it as a pocket piece. He went on, “It’s either a bit of a comet or a piece of the Ruined Planet. We can’t tell which because where we were, there shouldn’t have been either one.”

“Only there was,” I said. “As you say, there was.”

“Uh, Mr. Ortega, why don’t they put enough armor on a ship to stop a little bitty thing like this?” I remembered what the skin of the ship looked like where it had been busted; it seemed awful thin.

“Well, now, in the first place, this meteor is a real giant, as meteors go. In the second place–do you know anything about cosmic rays, Bill?” “Uh, not much, I guess.”

“You undoubtedly know that the human body is transparent to primary cosmic radiation and isn’t harmed by it. That is what we encounter out here in space. But metal is not completely transparent to it and when it passes through metal it kicks up all sorts of fuss–secondary and tertiary and quaternary cosmic radiation.

The stuff cascades and it is not harmless, not by a darn sight. It can cause mutations and do you and your descendants a lot of harm. It adds up to this: a man is safest in space when he has just enough ship around him to keep the air in and ultraviolet out.”

Noisy didn’t have much to say around the compartment for the next couple of days and I thought maybe he had learned his lesson. I was wrong. I ran into him in one of the lower passageways when there was nobody else around. I started to go around him but he stepped in my way. “I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Okay,” I answered. “What’s on your mind?” “You think you’re pretty smart, don’t you?”

I didn’t like the way he said it, nor what he said. I said, “I don’t think I’m smart; I am smart.” He made me tired.

“Pretty cocky, aren’t you? You think I ought to be kissing your hand and telling you how grateful I am for saving my life, don’t you?” I said, “Oh, yeah? If that’s what is worrying you, you can just skip it; I didn’t do it for you.

“I know that,” he answered,” and I’m not grateful, see?”

“That’s fine with me,” I told him. “I wouldn’t want a guy like you being grateful to me.”

He was breathing hard. “I’ve had just about enough of you,” he said slowly. And the next thing I knew I had a mouthful of knuckles and I was down.

I got up cautiously, trying to surprise him. But it was no good; he knocked me down again. I tried to kick him while I was down, but he danced out of my way.

The third time he hit me I stayed down. When I quit seeing stars he was gone–and I hadn’t managed to lay a finger on him. I never was any good in a fight; I’m still talking when I ought to be slugging.

I went to a scuttlebutt and bathed my face. Hank ran across me there and asked me what in the world I had been doing. I told him I had run into a door. I told Dad the same thing.

Noisy didn’t bother me any more and we never had anything to say to each other again. I lay awake a long time that night, trying to figure it out. I didn’t get it. The chap who thought up that malarkey about “my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure” certainly had never met Noisy Edwards.

For my taste Noisy was a no good so-and-so and I wished I had been able to use his face to stuff the hole the meteor made. I thought about a number of ways to fix him, but none of them was any good. As Dad says, sometimes there just isn’t any cure for a situation.

3.   The Moons of Jupiter

Nothing much happened until it was time to make our approach to Jupiter, except that a four-year-old kid turned up missing. The kid’s parents searched all around and they passed the word from the control room for everybody to keep an eye open but they still couldn’t find him.

So we had a chance to try out the Scouts’ emergency organization. The ship’s officers couldn’t search the ship, since there was just the Captain and two watch officers and Mr. Ortega and his assistant chief. Captain Harkness supplied plans to each of the Scoutmasters and we went through that ship like a kid searching his clothes for a half credit. We turned the kid up, all right, in about twenty minutes. Seems the little devil had snuck into the hydroponics room while it was being serviced and had got himself locked in.

While he was in there he had got thirsty and had tried to drink the solutions they raise the plants in – had drunk some, in fact. The result was just about what you would expect. It didn’t do him any real harm but, boy, was that place a mess!

I was talking to Dad about it that night over a game. Peggy had a Girl Scout meeting and Molly was off somewhere; we were alone for once. The baby’s mother had raised particular Ned, just as if there had really been something wrong–I mean, what can happen in a space ship? The kid couldn’t fall overboard.

Dad said her reaction was perfectly natural.

I said, “See, here, George, does it seem to you that some of the emigrants don’t have what it takes to be colonists?” “Mmmm… possibly.”

I was thinking of Noisy but the ones I mentioned were Mrs. Tarbutton, who gave up and didn’t even come along, and that female–Mrs. Grigsby–who got in trouble and had to wash dishes. And another fellow named Saunders who was continually in trouble with the council for trying to live his own life, wild and free, no matter what it did to the rest of us. “George, how did those characters get past the psycho tests?”

George stopped to peg fifteen-four, then said, “Bill, haven’t you ever heard of political influence?” All I said was, “Huh?”

“It’s a shocking thought I know, but you are old enough to get used to the world as it is, instead of the way it ought to be. Take a hypothetical case: I don’t suppose that a niece of a state councilor would be very likely to fail the psycho tests. Oh, she might fail the first tests, but a review board might find differently – if the councilor really wanted her to pass.”

I chewed this over a while. It did not sound like George; he isn’t the cynical type. Me, I’m cynical, but George is usually naive. “In that case, George, there is no use in having psycho tests at all, not if people like that can sneak past.”

“Contrariwise. The tests are usually honest. As for those who sneak past, it doesn’t matter. Old Mother Nature will take care of them in the long run. Survivors survive.” He finished dealing and said, “Wait till you see what I’m going to do to you this hand. You haven’t a chance.”

He always says that. I said, “Anybody who would use public office like that ought to be impeached!”

George said mildly, “Yep. But don’t bum out your jets, son; we’ve got human beings, not angels, to work with.”

On the twenty-fourth of August Captain Harkness took spin off and started bringing us in. We decelerated for better than four hours and then went into free fall about six hundred thousand miles out from Jupiter and on the opposite side from where Ganymede was then. Weightlessness still wasn’t any fun but this time we were ready and everyone got shots for it who wanted them. I took mine and no nonsense.

Theoretically the Mayflower could have made it in one compound maneuver, ending up at the end of deceleration in a tight circular orbit around Ganymede. Practically it was much better to sneak in easy and avoid any more trouble with meteorites–with the “false rings,” that is.

Of course Jupiter doesn’t have rings like Saturn, but it does have quite a lot of sky junk traveling around in the same plane as its moons. If there were enough of it, it would show up like Saturn’s rings. There isn’t that much, but there is enough to make a pilot walk on eggs coming in. This slow approach gave us a fine front seat for a tour of Jupiter and its satellites.

Most of this stuff we were trying to avoid is in the same plane as Jupiter’s equator, just the way Saturn’s rings are–so Captain Harkness brought us in over the top of Jupiter, right across Jupiter’s north pole. That way, we never did get in the danger zone until we had curved down on the other side to reach Ganymede–and by then we were going fairly slow.

But we weren’t going slow when we passed over Jupiter’s north pole, no indeedy! We were making better than thirty miles a second and we were close in, about thirty thousand miles. It was quite a sight.

Jupiter is ninety thousand miles thick; thirty thousand miles is close–too close for comfort.

I got one good look at it for about two minutes from one of the view ports, then had to give up my place to somebody who hadn’t had a turn yet and go back to the bunk room and watch through the vision screen. It was an odd sight; you always think of Jupiter with equatorial bands running parallel across it. But now we were looking at it end on and the bands were circles. It looked like a giant archery target, painted in orange and brick red and brown– except that half of it was chewed away. We saw it in half moon, of course.

There was a dark spot right at the pole. They said that was a zone of permanent clear weather and calm and that you could see clear down to the surface there. I looked but I couldn’t see anything; it just looked dark.

As we came over the top, Io–that’s satellite number one–suddenly came out of eclipse. Io is about as big as the Moon and was about as far away from us at the time as the Moon is from the Earth, so it looked about Moon size. There was just black sky and then there was a dark, blood red disc and in less than five minutes it was brilliant orange, about the color of Jupiter itself. It simply popped up, like magic.

I looked for Barnard’s satellite while we were close in, but missed it. It’s the little one that is less than one diameter from the surface of Jupiter–so close that it whirls around Jupiter in twelve hours. I was interested in it because I knew that the Jovian observatory was on it and also the base for Project Jove.

I probably didn’t miss anything; Barnard’s satellite is only about a hundred and fifty miles in diameter. They say a man can come pretty close to jumping right off it. I asked George about it and he said, no, the escape speed was about five hundred feet per second and who had been filling me up with nonsense?

I looked it up later; he was right. Dad is an absolute mine of useless information. He says a fact should be loved for itself alone.

Callisto was behind us; we had passed her on the way in, but not very close. Europa was off to the right of our course nearly ninety degrees; we saw her in half moon. She was more than four hundred thousand miles away and was not as pretty a sight as the Moon is from Earth.

Ganymede was straight ahead, almost, and growing all the time–and here was a funny thing; Callisto was silvery, like the Moon, but not as bright; Io and Europa were bright orange, as bright as Jupiter itself. Ganymede was downright dull!

I asked George about it; he came through, as usual “Ganymede used to be about as bright as Io and Europa,” he told me. “It’s the greenhouse effect–the heat trap. Otherwise we wouldn’t be able to live on it.”

I knew about that, of course; the greenhouse effect is the most important part of the atmosphere project When the 1985 expedition landed Ganymede had a surface temperature a couple of hundred degrees below zero–that’s cold enough to freeze the milk of human kindness! “But look, George,” I objected, “sure, I know about the heat trap, but why is it so dark? It looks like the inside of a sack.”

“Light is heat; heat is light,” he answered. “What’s the difference? It’s not dark on the ground; it goes in and doesn’t come out–and a good thing, too.”

I shut up. It was something new to me and I didn’t understand it, so I decided to wait and not pound my teeth about it.

Captain Harkness slowed her down again as we came up to Ganymede and we got in one good meal while she was under drive. I never did get so I could eat at free fall, even with injections. He leveled her off in a tight circular orbit about a thousand miles up from Ganymede. We had arrived–just as soon as we could get somebody to come and get us.

It was on the trip down to Ganymede’s surface that I began to suspect that being a colonist wasn’t as glamorous and romantic as it had seemed back on Earth. Instead of three ships to carry us all at once, there was just one ship, the Jitterbug, and she would have fitted into one of the Bifrosts compartments. She could carry only ninety of us at a time and that meant a lot of trips.

I was lucky; I had to wait only three days in free fall. But I lost ten pounds.

While I waited, I worked, helping to stow the freight that the Jitterbug brought up each trip. At last it came our turn and we piled into the Jitterbug. She was terrible; she had shelves rather than decks–they weren’t four feet apart. The air was stale and she hadn’t been half way cleaned up since the last trip. There weren’t individual acceleration couches; there were just pads covering the deck space and we covered the pads, shoulder to shoulder–and foot in your eye, for that matter.

The skipper was a loud-mouthed old female they called “Captain Hattie” and she kept bawling us out and telling us to hurry. She didn’t even wait to make sure that we were all strapped down.

Fortunately it didn’t take very long. She drove away so hard that for the first time except in tests I blacked out, then we dropped for about twenty minutes; she gunned her again, and we landed with a terrible bump. And Captain Hattie was shouting, “Out you come, you ground hogsl This is it.”

The Jitterbug carried oxygen, rather than the helium-oxygen mix of the Mayflower. We had come down at ten pounds pressure; now Captain Hattie spilled the pressure and let it adjust to Ganymede normal, three pounds. Sure, three pounds of oxygen is enough to live on; that’s all Earth has–the other twelve pounds are nitrogen. But a sudden drop in pressure like that is enough to make you gasp anyhow. You aren’t suffocating but you feel as if you were.

We were miserable by the time we got out and Peggy had a nose bleed. There weren’t any elevators; we had to climb down a rope ladder. And it was cold!

It was snowing; the wind was howling around us and shaking the ladder–the smallest kids they had to lower with a line. There was about eight inches of snow on the ground except where the splash of the Jitterbugs jet had melted it. I could hardly see, the wind was whipping the snow into my face so, but a man grabbed me by the shoulder, swung me around, and shouted, “Keep moving! Keep moving! Over that way.”

I headed the way he pointed. There was another man at the edge of the blast clearing, singing the same song, and there was a path through the snow, trampled to slush. I could see some other people disappearing in the snow ahead and I took out after them, dogtrotting to keep warm.

It must have been half a mile to the shelter and cold all the way. We weren’t dressed for it. I was chilled through and my feet were soaking wet by the time we got inside.

The shelter was a big hangarlike building and it was not much warmer, the door was open so much, but it was out of the weather and it felt good to be inside. It was jammed with people, some of them in ship suits and some of them Ganymedeans–you couldn’t miss the colonial men; they were bearded and some of them wore their hair long as well. I decided that was one style I was not going to copy; I’d be smooth shaven, like George.

I went scouting around, trying to find George & Co. I finally did. He had found a bale of something for Molly to sit on and she was holding Peggy on her lap. Peg’s nose had stopped bleeding. I was glad to see, but there were dried tears and blood and dirt on her face. She was a sight.

George was looking gloomy, the way he did the first few days without his pipe. I came up and said, “Hi, folks!” George looked around and smiled and said, “Well, Bill, fancy meeting you here! How is it going?”

“Now that you ask me,” I answered, “it looks like a shambles.”

He looked gloomy again and said, “Oh, I suppose they will get things straightened out presently.”

We didn’t get a chance to discuss it. A colonist with snow on his boots and hair on his face stopped near us, put his little fingers to his lips, and whistled. “Pipe down!” he shouted. “I want twelve able-bodied men and boys for the baggage party.” He looked around and started pointing. “You– and you–and you–“

George was the ninth “You”; I was the tenth.

Molly started to protest. I think George might have balked if she had not. Instead he said, “No, Molly, I guess it has to be done. Come on, Bill.” So we went back out into the cold.

There was a tractor truck outside and we were loaded in it standing up, then we lumbered back to the rocket site. Dad saw to it that I was sent up into the Jitterbug to get me out of the weather and I was treated to another dose of Captain Hattie’s tongue; we couldn’t work fast enough to suit her. But we got our baggage lowered finally; it was in the truck by the time I was down out of the ship. The trip back was cold, too.

Molly and Peggy were not where we had left them. The big room was almost empty and we were told to go on into another building through a connecting door. George was upset, I could see, from finding Molly gone.

In the next building there were big signs with arrows: MEN & BOYS-TO THE RIGHT and WOMEN & GIRLS-TO THE LEFT. George promptly turned to the left. He got about ten yards and was stopped by a stem-faced woman dressed like a colonial, in a coverall. “Back the other way,” she said firmly. “This is the way to the ladies’ dormitory.”

“Yes, I know,” agreed Dad, “but I want to find my wife.” “You can look for her at supper.”

“I want to see her now.

“I haven’t any facilities for seeking out any one person at this time. You’ll have to wait.”

“But–” There were several women crowding past us and going on inside. Dad spotted one from our deck in the Mayflower. “Mrs. Archibald!” She turned around. “Oh–Mr. Lermer. How do you do?”

“Mrs. Archibald,” Dad said intently, “could you find Molly and let her know that I’m waiting here?” “Why, I’d be glad to try, Mr. Lermer.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Archibald, a thousand thanks!”

“Not at all.” She went away and we waited, ignoring the stern-faced guard. Presently Molly showed up without Peggy. You would have thought Dad hadn’t seen her for a month.

“I didn’t know what to do, dear,” she said. “They said we had to come and it seemed better to get Peggy settled down. I knew you would find us.” “Where is Peggy now?”

“I put her to bed.”

We went back to the main hall. There was a desk there with a man behind it; over his head was a sign: IMMIGRATION SERVICE-INFORMATION. There was quite a line up at it; we took our place in the queue.

“How is Peggy?” Dad asked.

“I’m afraid she is catching a cold.”

“I hope-” Dad said. “Ah, I HOPEAtchoo! “And so are you,” Molly said accusingly.

“I don’t catch cold,” Dad said, wiping his eyes. “That was just a reflex.”

“Hmm–” said Molly.

The line up took us past a low balcony. Two boys, my age or older, were leaning on the rail and looking us over. They were colonials and one was trying to grow a beard, but it was pretty crummy.

One turned to the other and said, “Rafe, will you look at what they are sending us these days?” The other said, “It’s sad.”

The first one pointed a thumb at me and went on, “Take that one, now–the artistic type, no doubt.” The second one stared at me thoughtfully. “Is it alive?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” the first one answered.

I turned my back on them, whereupon they both laughed. I hate self-panickers.

4.        The Promised Land

Mr. Saunders was ahead of us in line. He was crabbing about the weather. He said it was an outrage to expose people the way we had been. He had been with us on the working party, but he had not worked much.

The man at the desk shrugged. “The Colonial Commission set your arrival date; we had nothing to say about it. You can’t expect us to postpone winter to suit your convenience.”

“Somebody’s going to hear about this!”

“By all means.” The man at the desk handed him a form, “Next, please!” He looked at Dad and said, “What may I do for you, citizen?” Dad explained quietly that he wanted to have his family with him. The man shook his head. “Sorry. Next case, please.”

Dad didn’t give up his place. “You can’t separate a man and wife. We aren’t slaves, nor criminals, nor animals. The Immigration Service surely has some responsibilities toward us.”

The man looked bored. “This is the largest shipload we’ve ever had to handle. We’ve made the best arrangements we could. This is a frontier town, not the Astor.”

“All I’m asking for is a minimum family space, as described in the Commission’s literature about Ganymede.” “Citizen, those descriptions are written back on Earth. Be patient and you will be taken care of.”

“Tomorrow?”

“No, not tomorrow. A few days–or a few weeks.”

Dad exploded. “Weeks, indeed! Confound it, I’ll build an igloo out on the field before I’ll put up with this.”

“That’s your privilege.” The man handed Dad a sheet of paper. “If you wish to lodge a complaint, write it out on this.”

Dad took it and I glanced at it. It was a printed form–and it was addressed to the Colonial Commission back on Earth! The man went on, “Turn it in to me any time this phase and it will be ultramicro-filmed in time to go back with the mail in the Mayflower.

Dad looked at it, snorted, crumpled it up, and stomped away. Molly followed him and said, “George! Georgel Don’t be upset. We’ll live through it.”

Dad grinned sheepishly. “Sure we will, honey. It’s the beauty of the system that gets me. Refer all complaints to the head office–half a billion miles away!”

The next day George’s reflexes were making his nose run. Peggy was worse and Molly was worried about her and Dad was desperate. He went off somewhere to raise a stink about the way things were being handled.

Frankly, I didn’t have it too bad. Sleeping in a dormitory is no hardship to me; I could sleep through the crack of doom. And the food was everything they had promised.

Listen to this: For breakfast we had corn cakes with syrup and real butter, little sausages, real ham, strawberries with cream so thick I didn’t know what it was, tea, all the milk you could drink, tomato juice, honey-dew melon, eggs–as many eggs as you wanted.

There was an open sugar bowl, too, but the salt shaker had a little sign on it; DON’T WASTE THE SALT.

There wasn’t any coffee, which I wouldn’t have noticed if George had not asked for it. There were other things missing, too, although I certainly didn’t notice it at the time. No tree fruits, for example–no apples, no pears, no oranges. But who cares when you can get strawberries and watermelon and pineapples and such? There were no tree nuts, too, but there were peanuts to burn.

Anything made out of wheat flour was a luxury, but you don’t miss it at first.

Lunch was choice of corn chowder or jellied consomme, cheese souffle, fried chicken, corned beef and cabbage, hominy grits with syrup, egg plant au gratin, little pearl onions scalloped with cucumbers, baked stuffed tomatoes, sweet potato surprise, German-fried Irish potatoes, tossed endive, coleslaw with sour cream, pineapple and cottage cheese with lettuce.

Then there was peppermint ice cream, angel berry pie, frozen egg nog, raspberry ice, and three kinds of pudding–but I didn’t do too well on the desserts. I had tried to try everything, taking a little of this and a dab of that, and by the time desserts came along I was short on space. I guess I ate too much.

The cooking wasn’t fancy, about like Scout camp, but the food was so good you couldn’t ruin it. The service reminded me of camp, too–queueing up for servings, no table cloths, no napkins. And the dishes had to be washed; you couldn’t throw them away or burn them–they were imported from Earth and worth their weight in uranium.

The first day they took the first fifty kids in the chow line and the last fifty lads to leave the mess hall and made them wash dishes. The next day they changed pace on us and took the middle group. I got stuck both times.

The first supper was mushroom soup, baked ham, roast turkey, hot corn bread with butter, jellied cold meats, creamed asparagus, mashed potatoes and giblet gravy, spinach with hard boiled egg and grated cheese, corn pudding, creamed peas and carrots, smothered lettuce and three kinds of salad. Then there was frozen custard and raisin pudding with hard sauce and Malaga and Thompson grapes and more strawberries with powdered sugar.

Besides that you could drop around to the kitchen and get a snack any time you felt like it.

I didn’t go outside much the first three days. It snowed and although we were in Sun phase when we got there it was so murky that you couldn’t see the Sun, much less Jupiter. Besides, we were in eclipse part of the time. It was as cold as Billy-be-switched and we still didn’t have any cold weather clothes.

I was sent along with the commissary tractor once to get supplies over in town. Not that I saw much of the town–and not that Leda is much of a town, anyhow, to a person who has lived in Diego Borough–but I did see the hydroponics farms.

There were three of them, big multiple sheds, named for what they grew in them, “Oahu,” “Imperial Valley,” and “Iowa.” Nothing special about them, just the usual sort of soiless gardening. I didn’t hang around because the flicker lighting they use to force the plants makes my eyes burn.

But I was interested in the tropical plants they grew in “Oahu”–I had never seen a lot of them before. I noticed that most of the plants were marked “M-G” while a few were tagged “N. T.” I asked one of the gardeners; he said that “M-G” meant “mutation-Ganymede” and the other meant “normal terrestrial.”

I found out later that almost everything grown on Ganymede was a special mutation adapted to Ganymede conditions.

Beyond there was another of the big multiple sheds named “Texas”; it had real cows in it and was very interesting. Did you know a cow moves its lower jaw from side to side? And no matter what you’ve heard, there is not one teat that is especially for cream.

I hated to leave, but “Texas” shed smelled too much like a space ship. It was only a short dash through the snow to the Exchange where all of Leda’s retail buying and selling takes place–big and little shops all under one roof.

I looked around, thinking I might take a present back to Peggy, seeing that she was sick. I got the shock of my life. The prices!

If I had had to buy in the Exchange the measly fifty-eight pounds of stuff they had let me bring with me, it would have cost–I’m telling the truth!– several thousand credits. Everything that was imported from Earth cost that kind of money. A tube of beard cream was two hundred and eighty credits.

There were items for sale made on Ganymede, hand work mostly, and they were expensive, too, though not nearly as expensive as the stuff brought up from Earth.

I crept out of that place in a hurry. As nearly as I could figure the only thing cheap on Ganymede was food.

The driver of the commissary tractor wanted to know where I had been when there was loading to do? “I should have left you behind to walk back,” he groused. I didn’t have a good answer so I didn’t say anything.

They shut off winter soon after that. The heat trap was turned on full force, the skies cleared and it was lovely. The first view I got of the Ganymede sky was a little after dawn next Sun phase. The heat trap made the sky a pale green but Jupiter shone right through it, ruddy orange, and big. Big and beautiful–I’ve never gotten tired of looking at Jupiter!

A harvest moon looks big, doesn’t it? Well, Jupiter from Ganymede is sixteen or seventeen times as wide as the Moon looks and it covers better than two hundred and fifty times as much sky. It hangs there in the sky, never rising, never setting, and you wonder what holds it up.

I saw it first in half-moon phase and I didn’t see how it could be any more beautiful than it was. But the Sun crept across the sky and a day later Jupiter was a crescent and better than ever. At the middle of Sun phase we went into eclipse, of course, and Jupiter was a great red, glowing ring in the sky, brightest where the Sun had just passed behind it.

But the best of all is during dark phase.

Maybe I ought to explain how the phases work; I know I didn’t understand it until I came to Ganymede. Ganymede is such a small planet and so close to its primary that it is tide-locked, just the way the Moon is; it keeps one face always toward Jupiter and therefore Jupiter does not move in the sky. The sun moves, the other Jovian moons move, the stars move–but not good old Jove; it just hangs there.

Ganymede takes just over an Earth week to revolve around Jupiter, so we have three and a half days of sunlight and then three and a half days of darkness. By Ganymede time the period of rotation is exactly one week; twenty-four Ganymede hours is one seventh of the period. This arrangement makes a Ganymede minute about a standard second longer than an Earth minute, but who cares? Except scientists, of course, and they have clocks that keep both sorts of time.

So here is the way a week goes on Ganymede: the Sun rises at Sunday midnight every week; when you get up Monday morning it’s a little above the eastern horizon and Jupiter is in half-moon phase.

The Sun keeps climbing higher and about suppertime on Tuesday it slides behind Jupiter and Ganymede is in eclipse; eclipse can last an hour or so up to a maximum of about three hours and a half. The stars come out and Jupiter shows that beautiful red ring effect because of its thick atmosphere. Then it’s light again by bedtime Tuesday.

At noon on Thursday the Sun goes down and we start the dark phase; that’s best of all. Jupiter’s colors really show and the other moons are easier to see. They can be almost anywhere and in almost any combination.

Jupiter and its satellites is sort of a miniature solar system; from Ganymede you have a front seat for the show. There is always something new in the sky. Besides the eleven “historical” satellites ranging in size from Ganymede down to Jay-ten or Nicholson-Alpha, which is a ball of rock and ice only fifteen miles thick, there are maybe a dozen more a few miles or less in diameter but big enough to be called moons and heaven knows how many smaller than that.

Sometimes these little ones come close enough to Ganymede to show discs; they mostly have very eccentric orbits. Any time there will be several

that are conspicuous lights in the sky, like the planets are from Earth.

Io, and Europa, and Callisto are always discs. When Europa passes between Jupiter and Ganymede it is as big in the sky as the Moon is from Earth. It actually is as big as the Moon and at that time it is only about a quarter of a million miles away.

Then it swings around to the far side and is very much smaller–more than a million miles away and less than a quarter as wide. Io goes through the same sorts of changes, but it never gets as big.

When Io and Europa pass between Ganymede and Jupiter you can see them move with your naked eye, chasing their shadows or running ahead of them, depending on the phase. Io and Europa, being inside Ganymede’s orbit, never get very far away from Jupiter, Io sticks within a couple of diameters of the big boy; Europa can get about sixty degrees away from it. Callisto is further out than Ganymede and goes all around the sky.

It’s a show you never get tired of. Earth’s sky is dull.

By six o’clock Saturday morning Jupiter would be in full phase and it was worthwhile to get up to see it. Not only was it the most gorgeous thing I had ever seen, but there was always the reverse eclipse, too, and you could see Ganymede’s shadow, a little round black dot, crawling across old Jupiter’s face. It gave you an idea of just how colossally big Jupiter was– there was the shadow of your whole planet on it and it wasn’t anything more than a big freckle.

Jupiter is ninety thousand miles across the equator, eighty-four thousand from pole to pole. Ganymede is only a little better than three thousand.

For the next couple of days after full phase Jupiter would wane and at Sunday midnight it would be in half phase again, the Sun would rise and a new light phase would start. One thing I expected but didn’t find was dim sunlight. Jupiter is a long way out; it gets only one twenty-seventh the sunlight that Earth does. I expected that we would always be in a sort of twilight.

It didn’t work out that way. It seemed to me that the sunlight was just as bright as on Earth.

George says that this is an optical illusion and that it has to do with the way the human eye works, because the iris of the eye simply shuts out light it doesn’t need. Bright desert sunlight back on Earth is maybe ten thousand foot-candles; the same thing on Ganymede is only four hundred foot- candles. But really good bright artificial light is only twentyfive foot candles and a “well-lighted” room is seldom that bright.

If you’ve got only a two-gallon bucket does it make any difference whether you fill it from the ocean or from a small pond? Sunlight on Ganymede was still more than the eye could accept, so it looked just as bright as sunlight on Earth.

I did notice, however, that it was almost impossible to get a sunburn.

5.        “Share Croppers”

George got us a place to live when we had been there about a week, which was a lot better than most of the other immigrants did, but it didn’t suit him and it didn’t suit Molly and it didn’t really suit me.

The trouble was he had to take a job as a staff engineer with the colonial government to get quarters for us–and that meant he would be too tied down to prove a piece of land for homestead. But it did carry private family quarters with it, if you could call two rooms twelve feet square a home.

It was like this: the colony was made up of homesteaders and townies. The townies worked for the government and lived in government-owned buildings –except for a very few who were in private trade.

The townies included the Colonial Commission representative, Captain Hattie the pilot, the hydroponics engineers, the hospital staff, the engineers who ran the power plant and the heat trap, the staff of the local office of Project Jove, and everybody else who worked at anything but land farming.

But most of the colonials were homesteaders and that’s what George had meant us to be. Like most everybody, we had come out there on the promise of free land and a chance to raise our own food.

There was free land, all right, a whole planet of it. Putting up a house and proving a farm was another matter.

Here is the way it was supposed to work: A colonist comes out from Earth with his family and lands at Leda. The Colonial Commission gives him an apartment in town on arrival, helps him pick out a piece of land to improve and helps him get a house up on it. The Commission will feed him and his family for one Earth year–that is, two Ganymede years–while he gets a couple of acres under cultivation.

Then he has ten G-years in which to pay back the Commission by processing at least twenty acres for the Commission– and he is allowed to process as much land for himself as for the Commission during the time he is paying what he owes. At the end of five Earth years he owns a tidy little farm, free and clear. After that, he can spread out and acquire more land, get into trade, anything he likes. He has his toehold and has paid off his debt.

The Colonial Commission had a big expensive investment in having started the atmosphere project and made the planet fit to live on in the first place. The land processed by the colonists was its return on the investment; the day would come when the Colonial Commission would own thousands of acres of prime farmland on Ganymede which it could then sell Earthside to later settlers … if you wanted to emigrate from Earth you would have to pay for the privilege and pay high. People like us would not be able to afford it.

By that time, although Ganymede would be closed to free immigration, Callisto would have an atmosphere and pioneers could move in there and do it all over again. It was what the bankers call “Self-liquidating,” with the original investment coming from Earth.

But here is the way it actually did work out: when we landed there were only about thirty thousand people on Ganymede and they were geared to accept about five hundred immigrants an Earth year, which was about all the old-type ships could bring out. Remember, those power-pile ships took over five years for the round trip; it took a fleet of them to bring in that many a year.

Then the Star Rover II was renamed the Mayflower and turned over to the Colonial Commission, whereupon six thousand people were dumped on them all at once. We were about as welcome as unexpected overnight guests when there is sickness in the family.

The colonists had known, for a full Earth year, that we were coming, but they had not been able to protest. While Earth Sender can punch a message through to Ganymede anytime except when the Sun is smack in the way, at that time the best radio the colony could boast had to relay via Mars to reach Earth–and then only when Mars was at its closest approach to Jupiter– which it wasn’t.

I’ve got to admit that they did what they could for us. There was plenty to eat and they had managed to fix up places for us to sleep. The Immigrants’ Receiving Station had formerly been split up into family apartments; they had torn out the partitions and used the partitions to build bunks for the big dormitories we were stacked in. They had moved their town hall and made it over into a mess hall and kitchen for us. We were in out of the weather and well fed, even if we were about as crowded as we had been in the Mayflower.

You may ask why, with a year to get ready, they had not built new buildings for us? Well, we asked the same thing, only we weren’t asking, we were demanding, and we were sore about it!

They hadn’t built new buildings because they could not. Before the Earthmen moved in, Ganymede was bare rock and ice. Sure, everybody knows that–but does everybody know what that means? I’m sure I didn’t.

No lumber. No sheet metal. No insulation. No wires, No glass. No pipe. The settlers in North America built log cabins–no logs.

The big hydroponics sheds, the Receiving Station and a few other public buildings had been built with materials lifted a half a billion miles from Earth. The rest of Leda and every homesteader’s farm house had been built the hard way, from country rock. They had done their best for us, with what they had.

Only we didn’t appreciate it.

Of course we should not have complained. After all, as George pointed out, the first California settlers starved, nobody knows what happened to the Roanoke Colony, and the first two expeditions to Venus died to the last man. We were safe.

Anyhow, even if we had to put up with barracks for a while, there was all that free land, waiting for us.

On close inspection, it looked as if it would have to wait quite a while. That was why George had given in and taken a staff engineering job. The closest land to town open to homesteading was nine miles away. To find enough land for six thousand people meant that most of them would have to go about eighteen to twenty miles away.

“What’s twenty miles? A few minutes by tube, an up-and-down hop for a copter–brother, have you ever walked twenty miles? And then walked back again?

It wasn’t impossible to settle six thousand people that far from town; it was just difficult–and slow. The pioneer explorer used to set out with his gun

and an axe; the settler followed by hitching his oxen to a wagonload of furniture and farm tools. Twenty miles meant nothing to them.

They weren’t on Ganymede.

The colony had two tractor trucks; another had come in the Mayflower. That’s all the transportation there was on the whole planet–not just to settle six thousand people but for the daily needs of thirty thousand people who were there ahead of us.

They explained it all to us at a big meeting of heads of families. I wasn’t supposed to be there but it was held outdoors and there was nothing to stop me. The chief ecologist and the chief engineer of the planet were there and the chairman of the colony council presided. Here was the proposition:

What Ganymede really needed was not more farmers, but manufacturing. They needed prospectors and mines and mills and machine shops. They needed all the things you can make out of metal and which they simply could not afford to import from Earth. That’s what they wanted us to work on and they would feed any of us who accepted, not just for a year, but indefinitely.

As for any who insisted on homesteading–well, the land was there; help ourselves. There wasn’t enough processing machinery to go around, so it might be two or three years before any particular immigrant got a chance to process his first acre of ground.

Somebody stood up near the front of the crowd and yelled, “We’ve been swindled!”

It took Mr. Tolley, the chairman, quite a while to calm them down. When they let him talk again, he said, “Maybe you have been swindled, maybe you haven’t. That’s a matter of opinion. I’m quite willing to concede that conditions here are not the way they were represented to you when you left Earth. In fact–“

Somebody yelled. “That’s mighty nice of you!” only the tone was sarcastic.

Mr. Tolley looked vexed. “You folks can either keep order, or I’ll adjourn this meeting.”

They shut up again and he went on. Most of the present homesteaders had processed more land than they could cultivate. They could use hired hands to raise more crops. There was a job waiting for every man, a job that would keep him busy and teach him Ganymede farming–and feed his wife and family-while he was waiting his turn to homestead.

You could feel a chill rolling over the crowd when the meaning of Mr. Tolley’s words sunk in. They felt the way Jacob did when he had labored seven years and then was told he would have to labor another seven years to get the girl he really wanted. I felt it myself, even though George had already decided on the staff job.

A man spoke up. “Mr. Chairman!” “Yes? Your name, please.”

“Name of Saunders. I don’t know how the rest of them feel, but I’m a farmer. Always have been. But I said ‘farmer,’ not sharecropper. I didn’t come here to hire out to no boss. You can take your job and do what you see fit with it. I stand on my rights!”

There was scattered applause and the crowd began to perk up. Mr. Tolley looked at him and said, “That’s your privilege, Mr. Saunders.”

“Huh? Well, I’m glad you feel that way, Mr. Chairman. Now let’s cut out the nonsense. I want to know two things: what piece of land am I going to get and when do I lay hands on some machinery to start putting it into condition?”

Mr. Tolley said, “You can consult the land office about your first question. As to the second, you heard the chief engineer say that he estimates the average wait for processing machinery will be around twenty-one months.”

“That’s too long.”

“So it is, Mr. Saunders.”

“Well, what do you propose to do about it?” Mr. Tolley shrugged and spread his hands. “I’m not a magician. We’ve asked the Colonial Commission by urgent message going back on the Mayflower not to send us any more colonists on the next trip, but to send us machinery. If they agree, there may be some relief from the situation by next winter. But you have seen–all of you have already seen–that the Colonial Commission makes

decisions without consulting us. The first trip of the Mayflower should have been all cargo; you folks should have waited.”

Saunders thought about it. “Next winter, eh? That’s five months away. I guess I can wait–I’m a reasonable man. But no sharecropping; that’s outl” “I didn’t say you could start homesteading in five months, Mr. Saunders. It may be twenty-one months or longer.”

“No, indeedy!”

“Suit yourself. But you are confronted with a fact, not a theory. If you do have to wait and you won’t work for another farmer, how do you propose to feed yourself and your family in the mean time?”

Mr. Saunders looked around and grinned, “Why, in that case, Mr. Chairman, I guess the government will just have to feed us until the government can come through on its end of the deal. I know my rights.”

Mr. Tolley looked at him as if he had just bitten into an apple and found Saunders inside. “We won’t let your children starve,” he said slowly, “but as for you, you can go chew rocks. If you won’t work, you won’t eat.”

Saunders tried to bluster. “You can’t get away with it! I’ll sue the government and I’ll sue you as the responsible government official You can’t–“

“Shut up!” Mr. Tolley went on more quietly, speaking to all of us. “We might as well get this point straight. You people have been enticed into coming out here by rosy promises and you are understandably disappointed. But your contract is with the Colonial Commission back on Earth.

But you have no contract with the common council of Ganymede, of which I am chairman, and the citizens of Ganymede owe you nothing. We are trying to take care of you out of common decency.

“If you don’t like what we offer you, don’t start throwing your weight around with me; I won’t stand for it. Take it up with the representative of the Immigration Service. That’s what he is here for. Meeting’s adjourned!”

But the immigration representative wasn’t there; he had stayed away from the meeting.

6.        Bees and Zeroes

We had been swindled all right. It was equally clear that there was no help for it. Some of the immigrants did see the Colonial Commission representative, but they got no comfort out of him. He had resigned, he said, fed up with trying to carry out impossible instructions five hundred million miles from the home office. He was going home as soon as his relief arrived.

That set them off again; if he could go home so could they. The Mayflower was still in orbit over us, taking on cargo. A lot of people demanded to go back in her.

Captain Harkness said no, he had no authority to let them deadhead half way across the system. So they landed back on the Commission representative, squawking louder than ever.

Mr. Tolley and the council finally settled it. Ganymede wanted no soreheads, no weak sisters. If the Commission refused to ship back those who claimed they were gypped and didn’t want to stay, then the next shipload wouldn’t even be allowed to land. The representative gave in and wrote Captain Harkness out a warrant for their passage.

We held a family pow-wow over the matter, in Peggy’s room in the hospital–it had to be there because the doctors were keeping her in a room pressurized to Earth normal

Did we stay, or did we go back? Dad was stuck in a rut. Back Earthside he at least had been working for himself; here he was just an employee. If he quit his job and elected to homestead, it meant working two or three G-years as a field hand before we could expect to start homesteading.

But the real rub was Peggy. In spite of having passed her physical examination Earthside she hadn’t adjusted to Ganymede’s low pressure. “We might as well face it,” George said to Molly. “We’ve got to get Peg back to the conditions she’s used to.”

Molly looked at him; his face was as long as my arm. “George, you don’t want to go back, do you?”

“That’s not the point, Molly. The welfare of the kids comes first.” He turned to me and added, “You’re not bound by this, Bill. You are big enough to make up your own mind. If you want to stay, I am sure it can be arranged.”

I didn’t answer right away. I had come into the family get-together pretty disgusted myself, not only because of the run-around we had gotten, but also because of a run-in I had had with a couple of the Colonial kids. But you know what it was that swung me around? That pressurized room. I had gotten used to low pressure and I liked it. Peggy’s room, pressurized to Earth normal, felt like swimming in warm soup. I could hardly breath. “I don’t think I want to go back,” I said.

Peggy had been sitting up in bed, following the talk with big eyes, like a little lemur. Now she said, “I don’t want to go back, eitherl”

Molly patted her hand and did not answer her, “George,” she said, “I’ve given this a lot of thought You don’t want to go back, I know. Neither does Bill But we don’t all have to go back. We can–“

“That’s out, Molly,” Dad answered firmly. “I didn’t marry you to split up. If you have to go back, I go back.”

“I didn’t mean that. Peggy can go back with the O’Farrells and my sister will meet her and take care of her at the other end. She wanted me to leave Peggy with her when she found I was determined to go. It will work out all right.” She didn’t look at Peggy as she said it.

“But, Molly!” Dad said.

“No George,” she answered, “I’ve thought this all out. My first duty is to you. It’s not as if Peggy wouldn’t be well taken care of; Phoebe will be a mother to her and–“

By now Peggy had caught her breath. “I don’t want to go live with Aunt Phoebe!” she yelled and started to bawl. George said, “It won’t work, Molly.”

Molly said, “George, not five minutes ago you were talking about leaving Bill behind, on his own.” “But Bill is practically a man!”

“He’s not too old to be lonesome. And I’m not talking about leaving Peggy alone; Phoebe will give her loving care. No, George, if the womenfolk ran home at the first sign of trouble there never would be any pioneers. Peggy has to go back, but I stay.”

Peggy stopped her blubbering long enough to say, “I wont go back! I’m a pioneer, too–ain’t I, Bill?” I said, “Sure kid, sure!” and went over and patted her hand. She grabbed onto mine.

I don’t know what made me say what I did then. Goodness knows the brat had never been anything but a headache, with her endless questions and her insistence that she be allowed to do anything I did. But I heard myself saying, “Don’t worry, Peggy. If you go. back, I’ll go with you.”

Dad looked at me sharply, then turned to Peggy. “Bill spoke hastily, Baby. You mustn’t hold him to that.” Peggy said, “You did so mean it, didn’t you, Bill?”

I was regretting it already. But I said, “Sure, Peggy.”

Peggy turned back to Dad. “See? But it doesn’t matter; we’re not going back, not any of us. Please Daddy –I’ll get well, I promise you I will. I’m getting better every day.”

Sure, she was–in a pressurized room. I sat there, sweating, and wishing I had kept my big mouth shut. Molly said, “It defeats me, George. What do you think?”

“Mmmm–“

“Well?”

“Uh, I was thinking we could pressurize one room in our quarters. I could rig some sort of an impeller in the machine shop.” Peggy was suddenly all over her tears. “You mean I can get out of the hospital?”

“That’s the idea, Sugar, if Daddy can work it.”

Molly looked dubious. “That’s no answer to our problems, George.”

“Maybe not.” Dad stood up and squared his shoulders. “But I have decided one thing; we all go, or we’ll all stay. The Lermers stand together. That’s settled.”

Homesteading wasn’t the only thing we had been mistaken about. There was Scouting on Ganymede even if the news hadn’t gotten back to Earth. There hadn’t been any meetings of the Mayflower troops after we landed; everybody had been just too busy to think about it. Organized Scouting is fun, but sometimes there just isn’t time for it.

There hadn’t been any meetings of the Leda Troop, either. They used to meet in their town hall; now we had their town hall as a mess hall, leaving them out in the cold. I guess that didn’t tend to make them fee! chummy towards us.

I ran into this boy over in the Exchange. Just as he was passing me I noticed a little embroidered patch on his chest. It was a homemade job and not very good, but I spotted it. “Hey!” I said.

He stopped. ” ‘Hey’ yourself! Were you yelling at me?” “Uh, yes. You’re a Scout, aren’t you?”

“Certainly.”

“So am I. My name’s Bill Lermer. Shake.” I slipped him the Scout grip.

He returned it. “Mine’s Sergei Roskov.” He looked me over. “You’re one of the Johnny-Come-Latelies, aren’t you?” “I came over in the MayflowerI admitted.

“That’s what I meant. No offense– I was born Earth-side, myself. So you used to be a Scout, back home. That’s good. Come around to meeting and

we’ll sign you up again.”

“I’m still a Scout,” I objected.

“Huh? Oh, I get you–‘Once a Scout, always a Scout.’ Well, come around and we’ll make it official.”

That was a very good time for me to keep my lip zipped. But not me–oh, no! When comes the Tromp of Doom, I’ll still be talking instead of listening. I said, “It’s as official as it can be. I’m senior patrol leader, Baden-Powell Troop.”

“Huh? You’re kind of far away from your troop, aren’t you?”

So I told him all about it. He listened until I was through, then said quietly, “And you laddie bucks had the nerve to call yourselves the ‘Boy Scouts of Ganymede.’ Anything else you would like to grab? You already have our meeting hall; maybe you’d like to sleep in our beds?”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing.” He seemed to be thinking it over. “Just a friendly warning, Bill–” “Huh?”

“There is only one senior patrol leader around here-and you’re looking right at him. Don’t make any mistake about it. But come on around to

meeting anyhow,” he added. “You’ll be welcome. We’re always glad to sign up a new tenderfoot.”

I went back to the Receiving Station and looked up Hank Jones and told him all about it. He looked at me admiringly. “William, old son,” he said, “I’ve got to hand it to you. It takes real talent to louse things up that thoroughly. It’s not easy.”

“You think I’ve messed things up?”

“I hope not. Well, let’s look up Doc Archibald and see what can be done.”

Our troop master was holding clinic; we waited until the patients were out of the way, then went in. He said, “Are you two sick, or just looking for a ticket to gold brick?”

“Doc,” I said, “we were wrong. There are so Scouts on Ganymede.” “So I know,” he answered.

I said, “Huh?”

“Mr. Ginsberg and Mr. Bruhn and I have been negotiating with the senior Scout officials here to determine just how our troops will be taken into the parent organization. It’s a bit complicated as there are actually more Mayflower Scouts than there are in the local troop. But they have jurisdiction, of course.”

I said, “Oh.”

“Well have a joint meeting in a few days, after we get the rules ironed out.”

I thought it over and decided I had better tell him what had happened, so I did.

He listened, not saying anything. Finally I said, “Hank seems to think I’ve messed things up. What do you think, Doc?” “Mmmm–” he said. “Well, I hope he’s wrong. But I think I may say you haven’t helped the situation any.”

I didn’t know what to say. “Don’t look so tragic about it,” he urged. “You’ll get well. Now run along and forget it. It may not make any difference.”

But it did make a difference. Doc and the others had been pitching for our troops to be recognized as properly constituted troops, with all ratings acknowledged. But after Sergei spread the word around, the regular Ganymede Scouts all squawked that we were nothing but a bunch of tenderfeet, no matter what we had been back on Earth. The place for us to start was the bottom; if we were any good, we could prove it– by tests.

It was compromised; George says things like that are always compromised. Ratings were confirmed on probation, with one G-year to make up any tests that were different. Our troops were kept intact But there was one major change:

All patrol leaders had to be from the original Ganymede Scouts; they were transferred from the Leda troop. I had to admit the justice of it. How could I be a patrol leader on Ganymede when I was still so green that I didn’t know northwest from next week? But it didn’t set well with the other fellows who had been patrol leaders when the word got around that I was responsible for the flies in the soup.

Hank talked it over with me. “Billy my boy,” he told me, “I suppose you realize that you are about as popular as ants at a picnic?” “Who cares?” I objected.

“You care. Now is the time for all good men to perform an auto da fe”

“What in great blazing moons is an auto da fe?”

“In this case it means for you to transfer to the Leda Troop.”

“Have you gone crazy? You know what those guys think of us, especially me. I’d be lucky to get away with my life.”

“Which just goes to show how little you know about human nature. Sure, it would be a little rough for a while, but it’s the quickest way to gain back some respect.”

“Hank, you really are nuts. In that troop I really would be a tenderfoot–and how!”

“That’s just the point,” Hank went on quietly, “We’re all tenderfeet–only here in our own troop it doesn’t show. If we stay here, we’ll keep on being tenderfeet for a long time. But if we transfer, we’ll be with a bunch who really know their way around–and some of it will rub off on us.”

“Did you say ‘we’?”

“I said ‘we’.”

“I catch on. You want to transfer, so you worked tip this gag about how I ought to do so, so you would have company. A fine chum you are!”

He just grinned, completely unembarrassed. “Good old Bill! Hit him in the head eight or nine times and he can latch on to any idea. It won’t be so bad, Bill. In precisely four months and nine days we won’t be tenderfeet; we’ll be old timers.”

“Why the exact date?”

“Because that is the due date of the Mayflower on her next trip–as soon as they arrive theyll be the Johnny-Come-Latelies.” “Oh!”

Anyhow, we did it–and it was rough at first, especially on me … like the night they insisted that I tell them how to be a hero. Some twerp had gotten hold of the meteorite story. But the hazing wasn’t too bad and Sergei put a stop to it whenever he caught them at it. After a while they got tired of it.

Sergei was so confounded noble about the whole thing that I wanted to kick him.

The only two merit badges to amount to anything that stood in the way of my getting off probation and back up to my old rating of Eagle Scout were agronomy and planetary ecology, Ganymede style. They were both tough subjects but well worth studying. On Ganymede you had to know them to stay alive, so I dug in.

Ecology is the most involved subject I ever tackled. I told George so and he said possibly politics was worse–and on second thought maybe politics was just one aspect of ecology. The dictionary says ecology is “the science of the interrelations of living organisms and their environment.” That doesn’t get you much, does it? It’s like defining a hurricane as a movement of air.

The trouble with ecology is that you never know where to start because everything affects everything else. An unseasonal freeze in Texas can affect the price of breakfast in Alaska and that can affect the salmon catch and that can affect something else.

Or take the old history book case: the English colonies took England’s young bachelors and that meant old maids at home and old maids keep cats and the cats catch field mice and the field mice destroy the bumble bee nests and bumble bees are necessary to clover and cattle eat clover and cattle furnish the roast beef of old England to feed the soldiers to protect the colonies that the bachelors emigrated to, which caused the old maids.

Not very scientific, is it? I mean you have too many variables and you can’t put figures to them. George says that if you can’t take a measurement and write it down in figures you don’t know enough about a thing to call what you are doing with it “science” and, as for him, hell stick to straight engineering, thank you.

But there were some clear cut things about applied ecology on Ganymede which you could get your teeth into. Insects, for instance–on Ganymede, under no circumstances do you step on an insect. There were no insects on Ganymede when men first landed there. Any insects there now are there because the bionomics board planned it that way and the chief ecologist okayed the invasion. He wants that insect to stay right where it is, doing whatever it is that insects do; he wants it to wax and grow fat and raise lots of little insects.

Of course a Scout doesn’t go out of his way to step on anything but black widow spiders and the like, anyhow–but it really brings it up to the top of your mind to know that stepping on an insect carries with it a stiff fine if you are caught, as well as a very pointed lecture telling you that the colony can get along very nicely without you but the insects are necessary.

Or take earthworms. I knowthey are worth their weight in uranium because I was buying them before I was through. A farmer can’t get along without

earthworms.

Introducing insects to a planet isn’t as easy as it sounds. Noah had less trouble with his animals, two by two, because when the waters went away he still had a planet that was suited to his load. Ganymede isn’t Earth.

Take bees–we brought bees in the Mayflower but we didn’t turn them loose; they were all in the shed called “Oahu” and likely to stay there for a smart spell. Bees need clover, or a reasonable facsimile. Clover would grow on Ganymede but our real use for clover was to fix nitrogen in the soil and thereby refresh a worn out field. We weren’t planting clover yet because there wasn’t any nitrogen in the air to fix–or not much.

But I am ahead of my story. This takes us into the engineering side of ecology. Ganymede was bare rock and ice before we came along, cold as could be, and no atmosphere to speak of–just traces of ammonia and methane. So the first thing to do was to give it an atmosphere men could breathe.

The material was there–ice. Apply enough power, bust up the water molecule into hydrogen and oxygen. The hydrogen goes up–naturally–and the oxygen sits on the surface where you can breathe it. That went on for more than fifty years.

Any idea how much power it takes to give a planet the size of Ganymede three pressure-pounds of oxygen all over its surface?

Three pressure-pounds per square inch means nine mass pounds, because Ganymede has only one third the surface gravitation of Earth. That means you have to start with nine pounds of ice for every square inch of Ganymede–and that ice is cold to start with, better than two hundred degrees below zero Fahrenheit.

First you warm it to the freezing point, then you melt it, then you dissociate the water molecule into oxygen and hydrogen–not in the ordinary laboratory way by electrolysis, but by extreme heat in a mass converter. The result is three pressure pounds of oxygen and hydrogen mix for that square inch. It’s not an explosive mixture, because the hydrogen, being light, sits on top and the boundary layer is too near to being a vacuum to maintain burning.

But to carry out this breakdown takes power and plenty of it–65,000 BTUs for each square inch of surface, or for each nine pounds of ice, whichever way you like it. That adds up; Ganymede may be a small planet but it has 135,000,000,000,000,000 square inches of surface. Multiply that by 65,000 BTUs for each square inch, then convert British Thermal Units to ergs and you get:

92,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ergs.

Ninety-two-and-a-half million billon quadrillion ergs! That figure is such a beauty that I wrote it down in my diary and showed it to George.

He wasn’t impressed. George said that all figures were the same size and nobody but a dimwit is impressed by strings of zeroes. He made me work out what the figure meant in terms of mass-energy, by the good old E = MC2 formula, since mass-energy converters were used to give Ganymede its atmosphere.

By Einstein’s law, one gram mass equals 9×1020 ergs, so that fancy long figure works out to be 1.03×1011 grams of energy, or 113,200 tons. It was ice, mostly, that they converted into energy, some of the same ice that was being turned into atmosphere–though probably some country rock crept in along with the ice. A mass converter will eat anything.

Let’s say it was all ice; that amounts to a cube of ice a hundred and sixty feet on an edge. That was a number I felt I could understand.

I showed my answer to George and he still was not impressed. He said I ought to be able to understand one figure just as easily as the other, that both meant the same thing, and both figures were the same size.

Don’t get the idea that Ganymede’s atmosphere was made from a cube of ice 160 feet on a side; that was just the mass which had to be converted to energy to turn the trick. The mass of ice which was changed to oxygen and hydrogen would, if converted back into ice, cover the entire planet more than twenty feet deep —like the ice cap that used to cover Greenland.

George says all that proves is that there was a lot of ice on Ganymede to start with and that if we hadn’t had mass converters we could never have colonized it. Sometimes I think engineers get so matter of fact that they miss a lot of the juice in life.

With three pressure-pounds of oxygen on Ganymede and the heat trap in place and the place warmed up so that blood wouldn’t freeze in your veins, colonists could move in and move around without wearing space suits and without living in pressure chambers.

The atmosphere project didn’t stop, however. In the first place, since Ganymede has a low escape speed, only 1.8 miles per second compared with

Earth’s 7 m/s, the new atmosphere would gradually bleed off to outer space, especially the hydrogen, and would be lost– in a million years or so. In

the second place, nitrogen was needed.

We don’t need nitrogen to breathe and ordinarily we don’t think much about it. But it takes nitrogen to make protein–muscle. Most plants take it out of the ground; some plants, like clover and alfalfa and beans, take it out of the air as well and put it back into the ground. Ganymede’s soil was rich in nitrogen; the original scanty atmosphere was partly ammonia–but the day would come when we would have to put the nitrogen back in that we were taking out. So the atmosphere project was now turned to making nitrogen.

This wasn’t as simple as breaking up water; it called for converting stable isotope oxygen-16 into stable isotope nitrogen-14, an energy consuming reaction probably impossible in nature–or so the book said–and long considered theoretically impossible.

I hadn’t had any nucleonics beyond high school physics, so I skipped the equations. The real point was, it could be done, in the proper sort of a mass-energy converter, and Ganymede would have nitrogen in her atmosphere by the time her fields were exhausted and had to be replenished.

Carbon dioxide was no problem; there was dry ice as well as water ice on Ganymede and it had evaporated into the atmosphere long before the first homesteader staked out a claim.

Not that you can start farming with oxygen, carbon dioxide, and a stretch of land. That land was dead. Dead as Christopher Columbus. Bare rock, sterile, no life of any sort–and there never had been any life in it. It’s a far piece from dead rock to rich, warm, black soil crawling with bacteria and earthworms, the sort of soil you have to have to make a crop.

It was the job of the homesteaders to make the soil.

See how involved it gets? Clover, bees, nitrogen, escape speed, power, plant-animal balance, gas laws, compound interest laws, meteorology–a mathematical ecologist has to think of everything and think of it ahead of time. Ecology is explosive; what seems like a minor and harmless invasion can change the whole balance. Everybody has heard of the English sparrow.

There was the Australian jack rabbit, too, that darn near ate a continent out of house and home. And the Caribbean mongoose that killed the chickens it was supposed to protect. And the African snail that almost ruined the Pacific west coast before they found a parasite to kill it.

You take a harmless, useful insect, plant, or animal to Ganymede and neglect to bring along its natural enemies and after a couple of seasons you’ll wish you had imported bubonic plague instead.

But that was the chief ecologist’s worry; a farmer’s job was engineering agronomy–making the soil and then growing things in it.

That meant taking whatever you came to–granite boulders melted out of the ice, frozen lava flows, pumice, sand, ancient hardrock–and busting it up into little pieces, grinding the top layers to sand, pulverizing the top few inches to flour, and finally infecting the topmost part with a bit of Mother Earth herself-then nursing what you had to keep it alive and make it spread. It wasn’t easy.

But it was interesting. I forgot all about my original notion of boning up on the subject just to pass a merit badge test. I asked around and found out where I could see the various stages going on and went out and had a look for myself. I spent most of one light phase just looking.

When I got back to town I found that George had been looking for me. “Where in blazes have you been?” he wanted to know. “Oh, just out and around,” I told him, “seeing how the ‘steaders do things.”

He wanted to know where I had slept and how I had managed to eat? “Bill, it’s all very well to study for your merit badges but that’s no reason to turn into a tramp,” he objected. “I guess I have neglected you lately–I’m sorry.” He stopped and thought for a moment, then went on, “I think you had better enter school here. It’s true they haven’t much for you, but it would be better than running around at loose ends.”

“George?”

“Yes, that’s probably the best-huh?”

“Have you completely given up the idea of home-steading?”

Dad looked worried. “That’s a hard question, Bill. I still want us to, but with Peggy sick–it’s difficult to say. But our name is still in the hat. I’ll have to make up my mind before the drawing.”

“Dad, I’ll prove it.” “Eh?”

“You keep your job and take care of Peggy and Molly. I’ll make us a farm.”

7.        Johnny Appleseed

The drawing of our division took place three weeks later; the next day George and I walked out to see what we had gotten. It was west of town out through Kneiper’s Ridge, new country to me; I had done my exploring east of town, over toward the power plant, where most of the proved land was located.

We passed a number of farms and some of them looked good, several acres in cultivation, green and lush, and many more acres already chewed level. It put me in mind of Illinois, but there was something missing. I finally figured out what it was–no trees.

Even without trees it was beautiful country. On the right, north of us, were the foothills of the Big Rock Candy Mountains. Snow-covered peaks thrust up beyond them, twenty or thirty miles away. On the left, curving in from the south and closer than it came to Leda, was Laguna Serenidad. We were a couple of hundred feet higher than the lake. It was a clear day and I tried to see the far shore, but I couldn’t be sure.

It was a mighty cheerful scene. Dad felt it, too. He strode along, whistling “Beulah Land” off key. I get my musical talent from Anne. He broke off and said, “Bill, I envy you.”

I said, “We’ll all be together yet, George. I’m the advance guard.” I thought a bit and said, “George, do you know what the first thing I raise is going to be-after I get some food crops in?”

“What?”

“I’m going to import some seed and raise you some tobacco.” “Oh, no, Son!”

“Why not?” I knew he was touched by it, because he called me ‘Son’. “I could do it, as well as not.”

“It’s a kind thought, but we’ll have to stick to the main chance. By the time we can afford that, I will have forgotten how to light a pipe. Honest, I don’t miss it.”

We slogged along a bit further, not saying anything but feeling close together and good. Presently the road played out. Dad stopped and took his sketch map out of his pouch. “This must be about it.”

The sketch showed where the road stopped, with just a dotted line to show where it would be, some day. Our farm was outlined on it, with the nearest comer about half a mile further along where the road ought to be and wasn’t. By the map, the edge of our property–or what would be ours if we proved it–ran along the north side of the road about a quarter of a mile and from there back toward the foothills. It was marked “Plot 117-H-2” and had the chief engineer’s stamp on it.

Dad was staring at where the road ended. There was a lava flow right across it, high as my head and rough as a hard winter in Maine. “Bill,” he said, “How good an Indian are you?”

“Fair, I guess.”

“We’ll have to try to pace it off and hold a straight line due west.”

But it was almost impossible to do it. We struggled and slipped on the lava and made detours. Lava looks soft and it isn’t. Dad slipped and skinned his shin and I discovered that I had lost track of how many paces we had come. But presently we were across the flow and in a boulder field. It was loose rubble, from pieces the size of a house down to stuff no bigger than your fist–stuff dropped by the ice when it melted and formed Laguna

Serenidad.

George says that Ganymede must have had a boisterous youth, covered with steam and volcanoes.

The boulder field was somewhat easier going but it was even harder to hold a straight line. After a bit Dad stopped. “Bill,” he said, “do you know where we are?”

“No,” I admitted, “but we aren’t really lost. If we head back east we are bound to come to proved ground.” “Perhaps we had better.”

“Wait a minute.” There was a particularly big boulder ahead of us. I picked a way and managed to scramble to the top with nothing worse than a cut on my hand. I stood up. “I can see the road,” I told Dad. “We’re north of where we ought to be. And I think maybe we’ve come too far.” I marked a spot with my eye and came down.

We worked south the amount I thought was right and then headed east again. After a bit I said, “I guess we missed it, George. I’m not much of an In- He said, “So? What’s this?” He was a little ahead of me and had stopped.

It was a cairn with a flat rock on top. Painted on it was: “117-H-2, SE corner.”

We had been on our farm for the past half hour; the big boulder I had climbed up on was on it.

We sat down on a fairly flat rock and looked around. Neither of us said anything for a while; we were both thinking the same thing: if this was a farm, I was my own great uncle.

After a bit Dad muttered something. I said, “What did you say?”

“Golgotha,” he said out loud. “Golgotha, the place of skulls.” He was staring straight ahead.

I looked where he was looking; there was a boulder sitting on top of another and the way the sun caught it, it did look like a skull. It leered at us.

It was so darn quiet you could hear your hair grow. The place was depressing me. I would have given anything to hear something or see something move. Anything–just a lizard darting out from behind a rock, and I could have kissed it.

But there were no lizards here and never had been.

Presently Dad said, “Bill, are you sure you want to tackle this?” “Sure I’m sure.”

“You don’t have to, you know. If you want to go back to Earth and go to M.I.T., I could arrange it for the next trip.”

Maybe he was thinking that if I went back, I could take Peggy with, me and she would be willing to go. Maybe I should have said something about it. But didn’t; I said, “Are you going back?”

“No.”

“Neither am I.” At the moment is was mostly stubbornness. I had to admit that our “farm” wasn’t flowing with milk and honey; in fact it looked grim. Nobody but a crazy hermit would want to settle down in such a spot.

“Think it over, Bill.” “I’ve thought it over.”

We sat there a while longer, not saying anything, just thinking long thoughts. Suddenly we were almost startled out of our boots by somebody

yodelling at us. A moment before I had been wishing to hear just anything, but when it came it was like unexpectedly encountering a clammy hand in

the dark.

We both jumped and Dad said, “What in the–?” I looked around. There was a large man coming toward us. In spite of his size he skipped through the rocks like a mountain goat, almost floating in the low gravity. As he got closer I knew I had seen him before; he was on the Court of Honor, a Mr. Schultz.

Dad waved to him and pretty soon he reached us. He stood half a head taller than Dad and would have made the pair of us, he was so big. His chest was as thick as my shoulders were broad and his belly was thicker than that. He had bushy, curly red hair and his beard spread out over his chest like a tangle of copper springs. “Greetings, citizens,” he boomed at us, “my name is Johann Schultz.”

Dad introduced us and he shook hands and I almost lost mine in his. He fixed his eyes on me and said, “I’ve seen you before, Bill.” I said I guessed he had, at Scout meetings. He nodded and added, “A patrol leader, no?”

I admitted that I used to be. He said, “And soon again,” as if the matter were all settled. He turned to Dad. “One of the kinder saw you going past on the road, so Mama sent me to find you and bring you back to the house for tea and some of her good coffee cake.”

Dad said that was very kind but that we didn’t want to impose. Mr. Schultz didn’t seem to hear him. Dad explained what we were there for and showed him the map and pointed out the cairn. Mr. Schultz nodded four or five times and said, “So we are to be neighbors. Good, good!” He added to Dad “My neighbors call me John, or sometimes ‘Johnny’.” Dad said his name was George and from then on they were old friends.

Mr. Schultz stood by the cairn and sighted off to the west and then north to the mountains. Then he scrambled up on a big boulder where he could see better and looked again. We went up after him.

He pointed to a rise west of us. “You put your house so, not too far from the road, but not on it. And first you work this piece in here and next season you work back further toward the hills.” He looked at me and added. “No?”

I said I guessed so. He said, “It is good land, Bill. You will make a fine farm.” He reached down and picked up a piece of rock and rubbed it between his fingers. “Good land,” he repeated.

He laid it down carefully, straightened up, and said, “Mama will be waiting for us.”

Mama was waiting for us, all right, and her idea of a piece of coffee cake was roughly what they used to welcome back the Prodigal Son. But before we got into the house we had to stop and admire the Tree.

It was a real tree, an apple tree, growing in a fine bluegrass lawn out in front of his house. Furthermore it was bearing fruit on two of its limbs. I stopped and stared at it.

“A beauty, eh, Bill?” Mr. Schultz said, and I agreed. “Yes,” he went on, “it’s the most beautiful tree on Ganymede–you know why? Because it’s the

only tree on Ganymede.” He laughed uproariously and dug me in the ribs as if he had said something funny. My ribs were sore for a week.

He explained to Dad all the things he had had to do to persuade it to grow and how deep down he had had to go to prepare for it and how he had had to channel out to drain it. Dad asked why it was bearing only on one side. “Next year we pollenate the other side,” he answered, “and then we have Stark’s Delicious. And Rome Beauties. This year, Rhode Island Greenings and Winesaps.” He reached up and picked one. “A Winesap for you, Bill.”

I said thanks and bit into it. I don’t know when I’ve tasted anything so good.

We went inside and met Mama Schultz and four or five other Schultzes of assorted sizes, from a baby crawling around in the sand on the floor up to a girl as old as I was and nearly as big. Her name was Gretchen and her hair was red like her father’s, only it was straight and she wore it in long braids. The boys were mostly blond, including the ones I met later.

The house was mainly a big living room, with a big table down the middle of it. It was a solid slab of rock, maybe four feet wide and twelve or thirteen feet long, supported by three rock pillars. A good thing it was rock, the way Mama Schultz loaded it down.

There were rock slab benches down the long sides and two real chairs, one at each end, made out of oil drums and padded with stuffed leather cushions.

Mama Schultz wiped her face and hands on her apron and shook hands and insisted that Dad sit down in her chair; she wouldn’t be sitting down

much, she explained. Then she turned back to her cooking while Gretchen poured tea for us.

The end of the room was the kitchen and was centered around a big stone fireplace. It had all the earmarks of being a practical fireplace–and it was, as I found out later, though of course nothing had ever been burned in it. It was really just a ventilation hole. But Papa Schultz had wanted a fireplace so he had a fireplace. Mama Schultz’s oven was set in the side of it.

It was faced with what appeared to be Dutch tile, though I couldn’t believe it. I mean, who is going to import anything as useless as Ornamental tile all the way from Earth? Papa Schultz saw me looking at them and said, “My little girl Kathy paints good, huh?” One of the medium-sized girls blushed and giggled and left the room.

I had the apple down to a very skinny core and was wondering what to do with it in that spotless room when Papa Schultz stuck out his hand. “Give it to me, Bill.”

I did. He took out his knife and very gently separated out the seeds. One of the kids left the room and fetched him a tiny paper envelope in which he placed the seeds and then sealed it. He handed it to me. “There, Bill,” he said. “I have only one apple tree, but you have eight!”

I was sort of surprised, but I thanked him. He went on, “That place just this side of where you will build your house–if you will fill that gully from the bottom, layer by layer, building your soil as you go, with only a very little ‘pay dirt’ you will have a place that will support a whole row of trees. When your seedlings are big, we’ll bud from my tree.”

I put them very carefully in my pouch.

Some of the boys drifted in and washed up and soon we were all sitting around the table and digging into fried chicken and mashed potatoes and tomato preserves and things. Mama Schultz sat beside me and kept pressing food on me and insisting that I wasn’t eating enough to keep body and soul together which wasn’t true.

Afterwards I got acquainted with the kids while George and Papa Schultz talked. Four of the boys I knew; they were Scouts. The fifth boy, Johann Junior –they called him “Yo”–was older than I, almost twenty, and worked in town for the chief engineer. The others were Hugo and Peter, both Cubs, then Sam, and then Vic, who was an Explorer Scout, same as I was. The girls were the baby, Kathy and Anna, who seemed to be twins but weren’t, and Gretchen. They all talked at once.

Presently Dad called me over. “Bill, you know we don’t rate a chance at a rock crusher for several months.” “Yes,” I said, somewhat mystified.

“What are your plans in the meantime?”

“Uh, well, I don’t know exactly. Study up on what I’ll have to do.”

“Mmrn … Mr. Schultz has very kindly offered to take you on as a farm hand in the meantime. What do you think of the idea?”

8.        Land of My Own

Papa Schultz needed a field hand about as much as I need four ears, but that didn’t keep me from moving in. In that family everybody worked but the baby and you could count on it that she would be washing dishes as soon as she was up off the floor. Everybody worked all the time and seemed to enjoy it. When the kids weren’t working they were doing lessons and the boys were punished when they weren’t up on their lessons by being required to stay in from the fields.

Mama would listen to them recite while she cooked. Sometimes she listened to lessons in things I’m pretty sure she never had studied herself, but Papa Schultz checked up on them, too, so it didn’t matter.

Me, I learned about pigs. And cows. And chickens. And how you breed pay dirt to make more pay dirt. “Pay dirt” is the stuff that is actually imported from Earth, concentrated soil cultures with the bacteria and so forth in it you have to have to get a field alive.

There was an awful lot to learn. Take cows, now-half the people you meet can’t tell their left hands from their right so who would think that a cow

would care about such things? But they do, as I found out when I tried to milk one from the left.

Everything was stoop labor around the place, as primitive as a Chinese farm. The standard means of transportation was a wheelbarrow. I learned not to sneer at a wheelbarrow after I priced one at the Exchange.

The total lack of power machinery wasn’t through lack of power; the antenna on the farm house roof could pick up as much power as necessary–but there wasn’t any machinery. The only power machinery in the colony belonged to the whole colony and was the sort of thing the colony absolutely couldn’t get along without, like rock chewers and the equipment for the heat trap and the power plant itself.

George explained it this way: every load that was sent up from Earth was a compromise between people and cargo. The colonists were always yapping for more machinery and fewer immigrants; the Colonial Commission always insisted on sending as many people as possible and holding the imports down to a minimum.

“The Commission is right, of course,” he went on. “If we have people, we’ll get machinery–we’ll make it ourselves. By the time you have a family of your own, Bill, immigrants will arrive here bare-handed, no cargo at all, and we’ll be able to outfit a man with everything from plastic dishes for his cupboard to power cultivators for his fields.”

I said, “If they wait until I have a family, they’ll have a long wait. I figure a bachelor travels faster and further.”

Dad just grinned, as if he knew something I didn’t know and wouldn’t tell. I had walked into town to have dinner with him and Molly and the kid. I hadn’t seen much of them since I went to work for Papa Schultz. Molly was teaching school, Peggy couldn’t come out to the farm, of course, and Dad was very busy and very excited over a strike of aluminum oxides twenty miles east of town. He was in the project up to his ears and talking about having sheet aluminum on sale in another G-year.

As a matter or fact, cultivating a farm by stoop labor wasn’t too bad, not on Ganymede. Low gravity was a big help; you didn’t wear yourself out just dragging your own carcass around. I grossed a hundred and forty-two mass pounds, what with the way Mama Schultz stuffed me; that meant I weighed less than fifty pounds, field boots and all. A wheelbarrow was similarly light when loaded.

But the real advantage that made the work easy was something you might not guess. No weeds.

No weeds at all; we had very carefully not imported any. Once the land was built, making a crop was darn near a case of poking a seed into the ground and then stepping back quick before the stalk shot up and hit you in the eye.

Not that we didn’t work. There is plenty of work around a farm even with no weeds to worry about. And a light wheelbarrow load simply meant that we piled three times as much on. But we had fun, too; I never met a family that laughed so much.

I brought my squeeze box out from town and used to play it after supper. We would all sing, with Papa Schultz booming away on his own and leaving it up to the rest of us to find the key he was singing in. We had fun.

It turned out that Gretchen was an awful tease when she got over being shy. But I could always get her goat by pretending that her head was on fire and either warming my hands over her hair or threatening to pour water on her before she burned the place down.

The day finally came when it was my turn to have the colony’s crushers work on my land and I was almost sorry to see it arrive; I had had such a nice time at the Schultz’s. But by then I could caponize a rooster or plant a row of corn; I still had a lot to learn, but there wasn’t any good reason why I shouldn’t start making my own farm.

Dad and I had had to prepare our farm for the crusher by dynamiting the biggest boulders. A crusher will choke on anything much bigger than a barrel but it will handle up to that size very nicely. Dynamite is cheap, thank goodness, and we used plenty of it. The raw material is nitroglycerine which we didn’t have to import from Earth, the glycerine being refined from animal fats and the nitric acid being a synthetic byproduct of the atmosphere project.

Dad spent two weekends with me, making medium-sized ones out of big ones, then decided it was safe to trust me to set powder by myself and I finished the job. There was a little stream of melted snow water coming down from the hills at the far side of our property; we blew out a new bed for it to lead it close to the place where the house would go.

We left it dry for the time being, with a natural rock dam to blow up later. One fair-sized hill we moved entirely and blew it into a gully on the lake side of the land. Big charges that took and I almost got fitted for a halo through underestimating how far some of the stuff would throw.

It was easy work and lots of fun. I had a vibro-drill, borrowed from the engineer’s office; you could sink a charge hole with it twenty feet into rock as easily as you could sink a hot knife into butter. Then drop in the powder, fill the rest of the hole with rock dust, light the fuse, and run like the dickens!

But the most fun was blowing up that rock that looked like a grinning skull. I fixed it properly, it and its leer!

We had a visitor while we were dynamiting the land. Dad and I had just knocked off for lunch one day when Saunders, “The One-Man Lobby”–that’s George’s name for him–showed up. We invited him to share what we had; he had brought nothing but his appetite.

He complained about this and that. Dad tried to change the subject by asking him how he was getting along with his blasting. Saunders said it was slow work. Dad said, “You have the crusher the day after us, don’t you?”

Saunders admitted it and said he wanted to borrow some powder; he was running short of time. Dad let him have it, though it meant another trip out from town, after work, for him the next day. Saunders went on, “I’ve been looking this situation over, Mr. Lermer. We’re tackling it all wrong.”

George said, “So?”

Saunders said, “Yes, indeedy! Now in the first place this blasting ought not to be done by the homesteader; it should be done by trained crews, sent out by the government. It’s really part of the contract anyway; we’re supposed to receive processed land.”

Dad said mildly that, while that might be a nice idea, he didn’t know where they would find enough trained crews to do the work for fifteen hundred new farms.

“Let the government hire them!” Mr. Saunders answered. “Bring them in from Earth for that purpose. Now, see here, Mr. Lermer, you are in the chief engineer’s office. You ought to put in a word for the rest of us.”

George picked up the vibro and got ready to set a charge. Presently he answered, “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong party. I’m in an entirely different department.”

I guess Mr. Saunders saw he was off on the wrong tack for he went on, “In the second place, I have been looking into the matter of the soil, or what they call ‘soil’–again they are off on the wrong foot.” He kicked a rock. “This stuff isn’t good for anything. You can’t grow anything in stuff like that.”

“Naturally not,” agreed Dad. “You have to make soil first.”

“That’s just what I’m getting at,” Saunders went on. “You have to have soil–good, black, rich soil. So they tell us to breed it, a square foot at a time. Plough garbage into it, raise earthworms–I don’t know how many tomfool stunts.”

“Do you know of a better way?”

“You bet you I do! That’s just what I’m getting at. Here we are, piddling along, doing things the way a bunch of bureaucrats who never made a crop tell us to, all for a few inches of second-rate soil–when there are millions of cubic feet of the richest sort of black soil going begging.”

Dad looked up sharply. “Where?”

“In the Mississippi Delta, that’s where! Black soil goes down there for hundreds of feet.”

We both looked at him, but he was quite serious about it. “Now here’s what you’ve got to have–Level the ground off, yes. But after that spread real Earth soil over the rock to a depth of at least two feet; then it will be worth while to farm. As it is, we are just wasting our time.”

Dad waited a bit before answering, “Have you figured out what this would cost?”

Mr. Saunders brushed that aside. “That’s not the point; the point is, that’s what we’ve got to have. The government wants us to settle here, doesn’t it? Well, then, if we all stick together and insist on it, we’ll get it.” He jerked his chin triumphantly.

George started to say something, then stopped. He patted rock dust in on top of his charge, then straightened up and wiped the sweat off his beard. “Listen, citizen,” he said, “can’t you see that we are busy? I’m about to light this fuse; I suggest that you back away out of danger.”

“Huh?” said Saunders. “How big a charge is it? How far?”

If he had kept his eyes open, he would have seen how big a charge it was and known how far to give back. Dad said, “Oh, say a mile and a half–or even two miles. And keep backing.”

Saunders looked at him, snorted disgustedly, and stalked away. We backed out of range and let her blow.

While we were setting the next charge I could see George’s lips moving. After a while he said, “Figuring gumbo mud conservatively at a hundred pounds per cubic foot it would take one full load of the Mayflower to give Mr. Saunders alone the kind of a farm he would like to have handed to him. At that rate it would take just an even thousand G-years–five hundred Earth years–for the Mayflower to truck in top-soil for farms for our entire party.”

“You forgot the Covered Wagon,” I said brightly.

George grinned. “Oh, yes! When the Covered Wagon is commissioned and in service we could cut it down to two hundred and fifty years–provided no new immigrants came in and there was a ban on having babies!” He frowned and added, “Bill, why is it that some apparently-grown men never learn to do simple arithmetic?” I didn’t know the answer, so he said, “Come on, Bill, let’s get on with our blasting. I’m afraid we’ll just have to piddle along in our inefficient way, even if it doesn’t suit our friend Saunders.”

The morning the crusher was scheduled to show up I was waiting for it at the end of the road. It came breezing down the road at twenty miles an hour, filling it from side to side. When it came to the wall of lava, it stopped. I waved to the operator; he waved back, then the machine grunted a couple of times, inched forward, and took a bite out of the lava.

Lava didn’t bother it; it treated it like peanut brittle. A vibro-cutter built into its under carriage would slice under the flow like a housewife separating biscuit from a pan, the big steel spade on the front of the thing would pry under and crack the bite off, and the conveyor would carry the chunk up into the jaws.

The driver had a choice of dropping the chewed up material under the rear rollers or throwing it off to the side. Just now he was throwing it away, leaving the clean slice made by the vibro-cutter as a road bed –a good road, a little dusty but a few rains would fix that.

It was terrifically noisy but the driver didn’t seem to mind. He seemed to enjoy it; there was a good breeze taking the dust away from him and he had his anti-silicosis mask pushed up on his forehead, showing the grin on his face.

By noon he was down to our place and had turned in. We had a bite to eat together, then he started in levelling a farm for me–five acres, the rest would have to wait. At that I was lucky for I was to get land to work months ahead of the original schedule.

The second trip of the Mayflower had brought in three more crushers and very few immigrants, just enough to replace those who had given up and gone back out of our party, that being the compromise the town council had worked out with the Colonial Commission.

The racket was still worse when the crusher bit into hard rock, instead of lava, but it was music to me and I didn’t get tired of watching. Every bite was a piece of land to me. At suppertime the second-shift driver showed up with Dad. We watched together for a while, then Dad went back to town. I stayed. About midnight I went over into a stretch that was not to be processed now, found a big rock to keep the Sun out of my eyes and lay down for a quick nap.

Then the relief driver was shaking me and saying, “Wake up, kid–you got a farm.”

I stood up and rubbed my eyes and looked around. Five acres, with just enough contour for drainage and a low hummock in the middle where the house would sit. I had a farm.

The next logical thing to do would have been to get the house up, but, under the schedule, I rated the use of a cud-chewer for the following week. A cud-chewer is a baby rock crusher. It uses a power pack instead of an antenna, it is almost fool proof and anybody can run one, and it finishes up what the crusher starts. It is small and low-powered compared with a crusher. The colony had about forty of them.

The crusher left loose rubble several feet deep in pieces as big as my fist. The cud-chewer had a fork spade on the front of it, several sizes of spade forks, in fact. The coarse fork went down into the loose rocks about eighteen inches and picked up the big ones. These drifted back into the hopper as the machine moved forward and were busted into stuff about the size of walnuts.

When you had been over the ground once with the coarse fork, you unshipped it and put on the medium fork and reset the chewing rollers. This time you went down only ten inches and the result was gravel. Then you did it again for medium-fine and then fine and when you were done the upper six inches or so was rock flour, fine as the best loam–still dead, but ready to be bred into life.

Round and round and round, moving forward an inch at a time. To get real use out of your time allotment the cud-chewer had to be moving twenty- four hours a day until they took it away from you. I stayed at it all through the first day, eating my lunch in the saddle. Dad spelled me after supper and Hank came out from town and we alternated through the night-light phase it was, actually, it being Monday night.

Papa Schultz found me asleep with my head on the controls late next afternoon and sent me back to his house to get some real sleep. Thereafter one of the Schultzes always showed up when I had been at it alone for four or five hours. Without the Schultzes I don’t know how Dad and I would have gotten through the dark phase of that week.

But they did help and by the time I had to pass the cud-chewer along I had nearly three and a half acres ready to be seeded with pay dirt.

Winter was coming on and I had my heart set on getting my house up and living in it during the winter month, but to do so I really had to hump. I had to get some sort of a holding crop in or the spring thaw would wash my top soil away. The short Ganymede year is a good idea and I’m glad they run it that way; Earth’s winters are longer than necessary. But it keeps you on the jump.

Papa Schultz advised grass; the mutated grass would grow in sterile soil much like growing things in hydroponic solutions. The mat of rootlets would hold my soil even if the winter killed it and the roots would furnish something through which the infection could spread from the “pay dirt.”

Pay dirt is fundamentally just good black soil from Earth, crawling with bacteria and fungi and microscopic worms–everything you need but the big fishing worms; you have to add those. However, it wouldn’t do simply to ship Earth dirt to Ganymede by the car load. In any shovelful of loam there are hundreds of things, plant and animal, you need for growing soil–but there are hundreds of other things you don’t want. Tetanus germs. Plant disease viruses. Cut worms. Spores. Weed seeds. Most of them are too small to be seen with the naked eye and some of them can’t even be filtered out

So to make pay dirt the laboratory people back on Earth would make pure cultures of everything they wanted to keep in the way of bacteria, raise the little worms under laboratory conditions, do the same for fungi and everything else they wanted to save–and take the soil itself and kill it deader than Luna, irradiate it, bake it, test it for utter sterility.

Then they would take what they had saved in the way of life forms and put it back into the dead soil That was “pay dirt,” the original pay dirt. Once on Ganymede the original stuff would be cut six ways, encouraged to grow, then cut again. A hundred weight of pay dirt supplied to a ‘steader might contain a pound of Terra’s own soil.

Every possible effort was made to “limit the invasion,” as the ecologists say, to what was wanted. One thing that I may not have mentioned about the trip out was the fact that our clothes and our baggage were sterilized during the trip and that we ourselves were required to take a special scrub before we put our clothes back on. It was the only good bath I got the whole two months, but it left me smelling like a hospital.

The colony’s tractor trucks delivered the pay dirt I was entitled to in order to seed my farm; I left the Schultz place early that morning to meet them. There is difference of opinion as to the best way to plant pay dirt; some ‘steaders spread it all over and take a chance on it dying; some build up little pockets six or eight feet apart, checker board style … safe but slow. I was studying the matter, my mind not made up, when I saw something moving down the road.

It was a line of men, pushing wheelbarrows, six of them. They got closer and I could see that it was all the male Schultzes. I went out to meet them. Every one of those wheelbarrows was loaded with garbage and all for me!

Papa Schultz had been saving it as a surprise for me. I didn’t know what to say. Finally I blurted out, “Gee, Papa Schultz, I don’t know when I’ll be able to pay you back!”

He looked fierce and said, “Who is speaking of paying back when we have compost running out of our ears yet?” Then he had the boys dump their loads down on top of my pay dirt, took a fork and began mixing it as gently as Mama Schultz folding in beaten egg white.

He took charge and I didn’t have to worry about the best way to use it. In his opinion–and you can’t bet that I didn’t buck itl–what we had was good for about an acre and his method was to spread it through the soil. But he did not select one compact acre; he laid out strips, seven of them, a couple of hundred yards long each and stretching across my chewed soil thirty-five or forty feet apart. Each of us took a wheelbarrow–their six and my one–and distributed the mix along each line.

When that was done and cairns had been set to show where the strips ran, we raked the stuff into the rock dust five or six feet on each side of each line. Around noon Mama and Gretchen showed up, loaded down, and we stopped and had a picnic.

After lunch Yo had to go back to town but he had almost finished his strip. Papa had finished his and proceeded to help Hugo and Peter who were

too small to swing a good rake. I dug in and finished mine soon enough to be able to finish what Yo had left.

Dad showed up at the end of the day, expecting to help me all evening–it was light phase and you could work as late as you could stand up under it-

– but there was nothing left to do. And he didn’t know how to thank them either.

I like to think that we would have gotten the farm made anyhow, without the Schultzes, and maybe we would have–but I’m sure not sure. Pioneers need good neighbors.

The following week I spent working artificial nitrates from the colony’s power pile into the spaces between the strips–not as good as pay dirt from Earth, but not as expensive, either.

Then I tackled sowing the grass, by hand, just like in the Bible, and then raking it gently in. That old pest Saunders showed up. He still did so every now and then, but never when Dad was around. I guess he was lonely. His family was still in town and he was camping out in a ten-foot rock shed he had built. He wasn’t really making a farm, not properly; I couldn’t figure out what he was up to. It didn’t make sense.

I said, “Howdy,” and went on with my work.

He watched me, looking sour, and finally said, “You still bent on breaking your heart on this stuff, aren’t you, youngster?” I told him I hadn’t noticed any wear and tear on my pump, and anyhow, wasn’t he making a farm, too?

He snorted. “Not likely!” “Then what are you doing?”

“Buying my ticket, that’s what.”

“Huh?”

“The only thing you can sell around this place is improved land. I’m beating them at their own game, that’s what. I’ll get that land in shape to unload it on some other sucker and then me and mine are heading straight back for that ever-lovin’ Earth. And that’s just what you’ll be doing if you aren’t an utter fool. You’ll never make a farm here. It can’t be done.”

I was getting very tired of him but I’m short on the sort of point-blank guts it takes to be flatly rude. “Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “Look at Mr. Schultz– he’s got a good farm.”

Saunders snorted again. “You mean ‘Johnny Apple-seed?” “I mean Mr. Johann Schultz.”

“Sure, sure–Johnny Appleseed. That’s what everybody calls him in town. He’s nuts. You know what he did? He gave me a handful of apple seeds and acted like he had handed me the riches of Solomon.”

I stopped raking. “Well, hadn’t he?”

Saunders spat on the ground between us. “He’s a clown.”

I lifted up the head of the rake. I said, “Mr. Saunders, you are standing on my land, my property. I’ll give you just two shakes to get off it and never set foot on it again!”

He backed away and said, “Hey! You stop that! Watch what you are doing with that rake!” I said, “Git!”

He got.

The house was a problem. Ganymede has little quakes all the time. It has to do with “isostasy” which doesn’t mean a thing but “equal-pressure”

when you get right down to it, but it’s the science of how the mountains balance the seas and the gravitation of a planet all comes out even.

It has to do with tidal strains, too, which is odd, since Ganymede doesn’t have any tides; the Sun is too far away to matter and Ganymede always keeps the same face toward Jupiter. Oh, you can detect a little tide on Laguna Serenidad when Europa is closest to Ganymede and even a trifle from Callisto and lo, but what I mean is it doesn’t have tidesnot like the Pacific Ocean.

What it does have is a frozen tidal strain. The way Mr. Hooker, the chief meteorologist, explains it is that Ganymede was closer to Jupiter when it cooled off and lost its rotation, so that there is a tidal bulge in the planet itself–sort of a fossil tidal bulge. The Moon has one, you know.

Then we came along and melted off the ice cap and gave Ganymede an atmosphere. That rearranged the pressures everywhere and the isostatic balance is readjusting. Result: little quakes all the time.

I’m a California boy; I wanted a quakeproof house. Schultzes had a quakeproof house and it seemed like a good idea, even though there had never been a quake heavy enough to knock a man down, much less knock a house down. On the other hand most of the colonists didn’t bother; it is hard to make a rock house really quakeproof.

Worse than that, it’s expensive. The basic list of equipment that a ‘steader is promised in his emigration contract reads all right, a hoe, a spade, a shovel, a wheelbarrow, a hand cultivator, a bucket, and so forth down the list–but when you start to farming you find that is only the beginning and you’ve got to go to the Exchange and buy a lot of other stuff. I was already in debt a proved acre and a half, nearly, before the house ever went up.

As usual we compromised. One room had to be quake proof because it had to be air tight–Peggy’s room. She was getting better all the time, but she still couldn’t take low pressure for any length of time. If the family was going to move out to the farm, her bedroom had to be sealed, it had to have an air lock on it, and we had to have an impeller. All that runs into money.

Before I was through I had to pledge two more acres. Dad tried to sign for it but they told him bluntly that while a ‘steader’s credit was good, his wasn’t. That settled the matter. We planned on one reinforced room and hoped to build on to it later. In the mean time the house would be a living room, ten by twelve, where I would sleep, a separate bedroom too small to swing a cat for George and Molly, and Peggy’s room. All but Peggy’s room would be dry wall rock with a patent roof.

Pretty small, eh? Well, what’s wrong with that? Abe Lincoln started with less.

I started in cutting the stone as soon as the seed was in. A vibro-saw is like a vibro-drill, except that it cuts a hair line instead of drilling a hole. When the power is on you have to be durned careful not to get your fingers or anything into the field, but it makes easy work of stone cutting. By the contract you got the use of one for forty-eight hours free and another forty-eight hours, if you wanted it, at a reduced rate.

I got my work lined up and managed to squeeze it into the two free days. I didn’t want to run up any more debt, because there was another thing I was hankering for, come not later than the second spring away–flicker flood lights. Papa Schultz had them for his fields and they just about doubled his crops. Earth plants aren’t used to three and half days of darkness, but, if you can tickle them during the dark phase with flicker lights, the old photosynthesis really gets in and humps itself.

But that would have to wait.

The patrol got the house up–the patrol I was in, I mean, the Auslanders. It was a surprise to me and yet it wasn’t, because everybody has a house raising; you can’t do it alone. I had already taken part in six myself–not just big-heartedness, don’t get me wrong. I had to learn how it was done.

But the patrol showed up before I had even passed the word around that I was ready to hold a house raising. They came swinging down our road; Sergei marched them up to where the house was to be, halted them, and said to me, “Bill, are your Scout dues paid up?” He sounded fierce. I said, “You know they are.”

“Then you can help. But don’t get in our way.” Suddenly he grinned and I knew I had been framed. He turned to the patrol and shouted, “House raising drill! Fall out and fall to.”

Suddenly it looked like one of those TV comedies where everything has been speeded up. I never saw anybody work the way they did. Let me tell you it doesn’t take Scout uniforms to make Scouts. None of us ever had uniforms; we couldn’t afford special clothes just for Scouting.

Besides the Auslanders there was Vic Schultz and Hank Jones, both from the Hard Rock patrol and Doug Okajima, who wasn’t even of our troop but still with the Baden-Powell. It did my heart good. I hadn’t seen much of the fellows lately; during light phase I always worked too late to get in to meetings; during dark phase a cold nine miles into town after supper is something to think twice about.

I felt sheepish to realize that while I might have forgotten them, they hadn’t forgotten me, and I resolved to get to meetings, no matter how tired I was.

And take the tests for those two merit badges, too–the very first chance I got.

That reminded me of another item of unfinished business, too–Noisy Edwards. But you can’t take a day off just to hunt somebody up and poke him in the snoot, not when you are making a farm. Besides it wouldn’t hurt anything for me to put on another ten pounds; I didn’t want it to be a repetition of the last time.

Dad showed up almost immediately with two men from his office and he took charge of bracing and sealing Peggy’s room. The fact that he showed up at all let me know that he was in on it–which he admitted. It had been Sergei’s idea and that was why Dad had put me off when I said it was about time to invite the neighbors in.

I got Dad aside. “Look, George,” I said, “how in tarnation are we going to feed ’em?” “Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“But I do worry about it!” Everybody knows it’s the obligation of the ‘steader whose house is being raised to provide the victuals and I had been taken by surprise.

“I said not to,” he repeated. And presently I knew why; Molly showed up with Mama Schultz, Gretchen, Sergei’s sister Marushka, and two girls who were friends of Peggy–and what they were carrying they couldn’t have carried on Earth. It was a number one picnic and Sergei had trouble getting them back to work after lunch.

Theoretically, Molly had done the cooking over at the Schultz’s but I know Mama Schultz–anyhow, let’s face it, Molly wasn’t much of a cook.

Molly had a note for me from Peggy. It read: “Dearest Billy, Please come into town tonight and tell me all about it. Pretty please!” I told Molly I would. By eighteen o’clock that afternoon the roof was on and we had a house. The door wasn’t hung; it was still down at the ‘Change. And the power unit

wasn’t in and might not be for a week. But we had a house that would keep off the rain, and a pint-sized cow barn as well, even if I didn’t own a cow.

9.        Why Did We Come?

According to my diary we moved into the house on the first day of spring.

Gretchen came over and helped me get ready for them. I suggested that we ask Marushka as well, since there would be lots of work to do. Gretchen said, “Suit yourself!” and seemed annoyed, so I didn’t. Women are funny. Anyhow Gretchen is a right good worker.

I had been sleeping in the house ever since the raising and even before the technicians from the engineer’s office had come and installed the antenna on the roof and rigged the lights and heat–but that was done before winter was started and I passed a comfortable month, fixing up the inside of the place and getting in a crop of ice for the summer. I stored the ice, several tons of it, in the gully at the side of the house, where I meant to plant apple trees just as soon as I could get fixed for it. The ice would keep there until I could build a proper cold cellar.

The first few months after the folks moved out are the happiest I can remember. We were together again and it was good. Dad still spent most of each dark phase in town, working on a part time basis, but that was quite as much because he was interested in the manufacturing project as it was to help pay off our debts. During light phase we worked almost around the clock, side by side or at least within earshot.

Molly seemed to like being a housewife. I taught her how to cook and she caught on real fast. Ganymede cooking is an art. Most things have to be cooked under pressure, even baked things, for water boils at just a little over a hundred and forty degrees. You can stir boiling water with your finger if you don’t leave it in too long. Then Molly started learning from Mama Schultz but I didn’t mind that; Mama Schultz was an artist. Molly got to be a really good cook.

Peg had to live in her room, of course, but we had hopes that she would be out soon. We had the pressure down to eight pounds, half oxygen and half nitrogen, and we usually all ate in her room. I still hated the thick stuff but it was worth while putting up with it so that the family could eat together. After a while I got so that I could change pressure without even an earache.

Peggy could come outside, too. We had brought her from town in a bubble stretcher–another thing bought on credit!–and Dad had fitted it with the gas apparatus from an old space suit he had salvaged from the Project Jove people. Peggy could get into the stretcher and shut herself in and we could bleed off the pressure in her room and take her outside where she could get some sunshine and look at the mountains and the lake and watch Dad and me work in the fields. The clear plastic of the bubble did not stop ultraviolet and it was good for her.

She was a skinny little runt and it was no trouble to move her around, even in the stretcher. Light phase, she spent a lot of time outdoors.

We had started with a broody hen and fifteen fertile eggs, and a pair of rabbits. Pretty soon we had meat of our own. We always let Peggy think that the fryers we ate came from the Schultzes and I don’t think she ever caught on. At first I used to go to the Schultz farm every day for fresh milk for Peggy, but I got a chance, midsummer, to get a fresh two-year-old cow on tick at a reasonable price. Peggy named her Mabel and was much irked that she couldn’t get at her to pet her.

We were on the move all the time. I still hadn’t managed to take my merit badge tests and I hadn’t done much better about getting in to Scout meetings. There was just too much to do. Building a pond, for example–Laguna Serenidad was being infected with plankton and algae but there weren’t fish in it yet and it would be a long time, even after the fish were stocked, before fishing would be allowed. So we did fish-pond gardening, Chinese style, after I got the pond built.

And there were always crops to work on. My cover grass had taken hold all right and shortly after we moved in the soil seemed ready to take angle worms. Dad was about to send a sample into town for analysis when Papa Schultz stopped by. Hearing what we were about he took up a handful of the worked soil, crumbled it, smelled it, tasted it, and told me to go ahead and plant my worms. I did and they did all right; we encountered them from time to time in working the fields thereafter.

You could see the stripes on the fields which had been planted with pay dirt by the way the grass came up. You could see that the infection was spreading, too, but not much. I had a lot of hard work ahead before the stripes would meet and blend together and then we could think about renting a cud-chewer and finishing off the other acre and a half, using our own field loam and our own compost heap to infect the new soil. After that we could see about crushing some more acres, but that was a long way away.

We put in carrots and lettuce and beets and cabbage and brussels sprouts and potatoes and broccoli. We planted corn between the rows. I would like to have put in an acre of wheat but it didn’t make sense when we had so little land. There was one special little patch close to the house where we put in tomatoes and Hubbard squash and some peas and beans.

Those were “bee” plants and Molly would come out and pollenate them by hand, a very tedious business. We hoped to have a hive of bees some day and the entomologists on the bionomics staff were practically busting their hearts trying to breed a strain of bees which would prosper out doors. You see, among other things, while our gravity was only a third Earth-normal, our air pressure was only a little better than a fifth Earth-normal and the bees resented it; it made flying hard work for them. Or maybe bees are just naturally conservative.

I guess I was happy, or too tired and too busy to be unhappy, right up to the following winter.

At first winter seemed like a good rest. Aside from getting the ice crop in and taking care of the cow and the rabbits and the chickens there wasn’t too much to do. I was tired out and cranky and didn’t know it; Molly, I think, was just quietly, patiently exhausted. She wasn’t used to farm life and she wasn’t handy at it, the way Mama Schultz was.

Besides that, she wanted inside plumbing and it just wasn’t in the cards for her to have it any time soon. I carried water for her, of course, usually having to crack ice in the stream to get it, but that didn’t cover everything, not with snow on the ground. Not that she complained.

Dad didn’t complain, either, but there were deep lines forming from his nose down to his mouth which his beard didn’t cover entirely. But it was mostly Peggy.

When we first moved her out to the farm she perked up a lot. We gradually reduced the pressure in her room and she kept insisting that she was fine and teasing for a chance to go out without the bubble stretcher. We even tried it once, on Dr. Archibald’s advice, and she didn’t have a nose bleed but she was willing to get back in after about ten minutes.

The fact was she wasn’t adjusting. It wasn’t just the pressure; something else was wrong. She didn’t belong here and she wouldn’t growhere. Have you ever had a plant that refused to be happy where you planted it? It was like that.

She belonged back on Earth.

I suppose we weren’t bad off, but there is a whale of a difference between being a rich farmer, like Papa Schultz, with heaps of cow manure in your barn yard and hams hanging in your cold cellar and every modern convenience you could want, even running water in your house, and being poor farmers, like us, scratching for a toe hold in new soil and in debt to the Commission. It told on us and that winter we had time to brood about it.

We were all gathered in Peggy’s room after lunch one Thursday. Dark phase had just started and Dad was due to go back into town; we always gave him a send off. Molly was darning and Peg and George were playing cribbage. I got out my squeeze box and started knocking out some tunes. I guess we all felt cheerful enough for a while. I don’t know how I happened to drift into it, but after a bit I found I was playing The Green Hills of Earth. I hadn’t played it in a long time.

I brayed through that fortissimo part about “Out ride the sons of Terra; Far drives the thundering jet–” and was thinking to myself that jets didn’t thunder any more. I was still thinking about it when I went on into the last chorus, the one you play very softly: “We pray for one last landing on the globe that gave us birth–“

I looked up and there were tears running down Molly’s cheeks.

I could have kicked myself. I put my accordion down with a squawk, not even finishing, and got up. Dad said, “What’s the matter, Bill?”, I muttered something about having to go take a look at Mabel.

I went out into the living room and put on my heavy clothes and actually did go outside, though I didn’t go near the barn. It had been snowing and it was already almost pitch dark, though the Sun hadn’t been down more than a couple of hours. The snow had stopped but there were clouds overhead and you couldn’t see Jupiter.

The clouds had broken due west and let the sunset glow come through a bit. After my eyes adjusted, by that tiny amount of light I could see around me–the mountains, snow to their bases, disappearing in the clouds, the lake, just a sheet of snow-covered ice, and the boulders beyond our fields, making weird shapes in the snow. It was a scene to match the way I felt; it looked like the place where you might be sent for having lived a long and sinful life.

I tried to figure out what I was doing in such a place.

The clouds in the west shifted a little and I saw a single bright green star, low down toward the horizon, just above where the Sun had set. It was Earth.

I don’t know how long I stood there. Presently somebody put a hand on my shoulder and I jumped. It was Dad, all bundled up for a nine-mile tramp through the dark and the snow.

“What’s the matter, Son?” he said.

I started to speak, but I was all choked up and couldn’t. Finally I managed to say, “Dad, why did we come here?” “Mmmm … you wanted to come. Remember?”

“I know,” I admitted.

“Still, the real reason, the basic reason, for coming here was to keep your grandchildren from starving. Earth is overcrowded, Bill.”

I looked back at Earth again. Finally I said, “Dad, I’ve made a discovery. There’s more to life than three square meals a day. Sure, we can make crops here– this land would grow hair on a billiard ball. But I don’t think you had better plan on any grandchildren here; it would be no favor to them. I know when I’ve made a mistake.”

“You’re wrong, Bill, Your kids will like this place, just the way Eskimos like where they live.” “I doubt it like the mischief.”

“Remember, the ancestors of Eskimos weren’t Eskimos; they were immigrants, too. If you send your kids back to Earth, for school, say, they’ll be homesick for Ganymede. They’ll hate Earth. They’ll weigh too much, they won’t like the air, they won’t like the climate, they won’t like the people.”

“Hmm–look, George, do you like it here? Are you glad we came?”

Dad was silent for a long time. At last he said, “I’m worried about Peggy, Bill.” “Yeah, I know. But how about yourself–and Molly?”

“I’m not worried about Molly. Women have their ups and downs. You’ll learn to expect that.” He shook himself and said, “I’m late. You go on inside

and have Molly fix you a cup of tea. Then take a look at the rabbits. I think the doe is about to drop again; we don’t want to lose the young ‘uns.” He

hunched his shoulders and set off down toward the road. I watched him out of sight and then went back inside.

1.        Line Up

Then suddenly it was spring and everything was all right.

Even winter seemed like a good idea when it was gone. We had to have winter; the freezing and thawing was necessary to develop the ground, not to mention the fact that many crops won’t come to fruit without cold weather. Anyway, anybody can live through four weeks of bad weather.

Dad laid off his job when spring came and we pitched in together and got our fields planted. I rented a power barrow and worked across my strips to spread the living soil. Then there was the back-breaking job of preparing the gully for the apple trees. I had started the seeds soon after Papa Schultz had given them to me, forcing them indoors, first at the Schultz’s, then at our place. Six of them had germinated and now they were nearly two feet tall.

I wanted to try them outdoors. Maybe I would have to take them in again next winter, but it was worth a try.

Dad was interested in the venture, too, not just for fruit trees, but for lumber. Wood seems like an obsolete material, but try getting along without it. I think George had visions of the Big Rock Candy Mountains covered with tall straight pines … someday, someday.

So we went deep and built it to drain and built it wide and used a lot of our winter compost and some of our precious topsoil. There was room enough for twenty trees when we got through, where we planted our six little babies. Papa Schultz came over and pronounced a benediction over them.

Then he went inside to say hello to Peggy, almost filling her little room. George used to say that when Papa inhaled the pressure in the room dropped.

A bit later Papa and Dad were talking in the living room; Dad stopped me as I was passing through. “Bill,” he asked, “how would you like to have a window about here?” He indicated a blank wall.

I stared. “Huh? How would we keep the place warm?” “I mean a real window, with glass.”

“Oh.” I thought about it. I had never lived in a place with windows in my life; we had always been apartment dwellers. I had seen windows, of course, in country houses back Earthside, but there wasn’t a window on Ganymede and it hadn’t occurred to me that there ever would be.

“Papa Schultz plans to put one in his house. I thought it might be nice to sit inside and look out over the lake, light phase evenings,” Dad went on. “To make a home you need windows and fireplaces,” Papa said placidly. “Now that we glass make, I mean to have a view.”

Dad nodded. “For three hundred years the race had glazed windows. Then they shut themselves up in little air-conditioned boxes and stared at silly television pictures instead. One might as well be on Luna.”

It was a startling idea, but it seemed like a good one. I knew they were making glass in town. George says that glassmaking is one of the oldest manufacturing arts, if not the oldest, and certainly one of the simplest. But I had thought about it for bottles and dishes, not for window glass. They already had glass buckets on sale at the ‘Change, for about a tenth the cost of the imported article.

A view window–it was a nice idea. We could put one on the south and see the lake and another on the north and see the mountains. Why, I could even put in a skylight and lie on my bunk and see old Jupiter.

Stow it, William, I said to myself; you’ll be building a whole house out of glass next. After Papa Schultz left I spoke to George about it. “Look,” I said, “about this view window idea. It’s a good notion, especially for Peggy’s room, but the question is: can we afford it?”

“I think we can,” he answered.

“I mean can we afford it without your going back to work in town? You’ve been working yourself to death –and there’s no need to. The farm can support us now.”

He nodded. “I had been meaning to speak about that. I’ve about decided to give up the town work, Bill–except for a class I’ll teach on Saturdays.” “Do you have to do that?”

“Happens that I like to teach engineering, Bill And don’t worry about the price of the glass; well get it free–a spot of cumshaw coining to your old man for designing the glass works. “The kine who tread the grain,'” he quoted. “Now you and I had better get busy; there is a rain scheduled for fifteen o’clock.’

It was maybe three weeks later that the moons lined up. This is an event that almost never happens, Ganymede, Callisto, Io, and Europa, all perfectly lined up and all on the same side of Jupiter. They come close to lining up every seven hundred and two days, but they don’t quite make it ordinarily. You see, their periods are all different, from less than two days for Io to more than two weeks for Callisto and the fractions don’t work out evenly. Besides that they have different eccentricities to their orbits and their orbits aren’t exactly in the same plane.

As you can see, a real line up hardly ever happens.

Besides that, this line up was a line up with the Sun, too; it would occur at Jupiter full phase. Mr. Hooker, the chief meteorologist, announced that it had been calculated that such a perfect line up would not occur again for more than two hundred thousand years. You can bet we were all waiting to see it. The Project Jove scientists were excited about it, too, and special arrangements had been made to observe it.

Having it occur at Jupiter full phase meant not only that a sixth heavenly body–the Sun–would be in the line up, but that we would be able to see it. The shadows of Ganymede and Callisto would be centered on Jupiter just as Io and Europa reached mid transit.

Full phase is at six o’clock Saturday morning; we all got up about four-thirty and were outside by five. George and I carried Peggy out in her bubble stretcher. We were just in time.

It was a fine, clear summer night, light as could be, with old Jupiter blazing overhead like a balloon on fire. Io had just barely kissed the eastern edge of Jupiter–“first contact” they call it. Europa was already a bit inside the eastern edge and I had to look sharp to see it.

When a moon is not in full phase it is no trouble to pick it out while it’s making its transit, but at full phase it tends to blend into the background. However, both Ioand Europa are just a hair brighter than Jupiter. Besides that, they break up the pattern of Jupiter’s bands and that lets you see them, too.

Well inside, but still in the eastern half–say about half way to Jupiter’s center point–were the shadows of Ganymede and Callisto. I could not have told them apart, if I hadn’t known that the one further east had to be Ganymede’s. They were just little round black dots; three thousand miles or so isn’t anything when it’s plastered against Jupiter’s eighty-nine thousand mile width.

Io looked a bit bigger than the shadows; Europa looked more than half again as big, about the way the Moon looks from Earth.

We felt a slight quake but it wasn’t even enough to make us nervous; we were used to quakes. Besides that, about then Io”kissed” Europa. From then on, throughout the rest of the show, Io gradually slid underneath, or behind, Europa.

They crawled across the face of Jupiter; the moons fairly fast, the shadows in a slow creep. When we had been outside a little less than half an hour the two shadows kissed and started to merge. Io had slid halfway under Europa and looked like a big tumor on its side. They were almost halfway to center and the shadows were even closer.

Just before six o’clock Europa–you could no longer see Io; Europa covered it–as I was saying, Europa kissed the shadow, which by now was round, just one shadow.

Four or five minutes later the shadow had crawled up on top of Europa; they were all lined up–and I knew I was seeing the most extraordinary sight I would ever see in my life, Sun, Jupiter, and the four biggest moons all perfectly lined up.

I let out a deep breath: I don’t know how long I had been holding it. “Gee whiz!” was all I could think of to say.

“I agree in general with your sentiments, Bill,” Dad answered. “Molly, hadn’t we better get Peggy inside? I’m afraid she is getting cold.”

“Yes,” agreed Molly. “I know I am, for one.”

“I’m going down to the lake now,” I said. The biggest tide of record was expected, of course. While the lake was too small to show much tide, I had made a mark the day before and I hoped to be able to measure it.

“Don’t get lost in the dark,” Dad called out. I didn’t answer him. A silly remark doesn’t require an answer. I had gotten past the road and maybe a quarter of a mile beyond when it hit.

It knocked me flat on my face, the heaviest shake I had ever felt in my life. I’ve felt heavy quakes in California; they weren’t a patch on this one. I lay face down for a long moment, digging into the rock with my finger nails and trying to get it to hold still.

The seasick roll kept up and kept up and kept up, and with it the noise–a deep bass rumble, deeper than thunder and more terrifying.

A rock rolled up against me and nipped my side. I got to my feet and managed to stay there. The ground was still swaying and the rumble kept on. I headed for the house, running–like dancing over shifting ice. I fell down twice and got up again.

The front end of the house was all caved in. The roof slanted down at a crazy angle. “George!” I yelled. “Molly! Where are you?”

George heard me and straightened up. He was on the other side of the house and now I saw him over the collapsed roof. He didn’t say anything. I rushed around to where he stood. “Are you all right?” I demanded.

“Help me get Molly out–” he gasped.

I found out later that George had gone inside with Molly and Peggy, had helped get Peg out of the stretcher and back into her room, and then had gone outside, leaving Molly to get breakfast. The quake had hit while he was returning from the barn. But we didn’t have time then to talk it over; we dug–moving slabs with our bare hands that had taken four Scouts, working together, to lay. George kept crying, “Molly! Molly! Where are you?”

She was lying on the floor beside the stone work bench that was penned in by the roof. We heaved it off her; George scrambled over the rubble and reached her. “Molly! Molly darling!”

She opened her eyes. “George!” “Are you all right?”

“What happened?”

“Quake. Are you all right? Are you hurt?”

She sat up, made a face as if something hurt her, and said, “I think I– George! Where’s Peggy? Get Peggy!”

Peggy’s room was still upright; the reinforcements had held while the rest of the house had gone down around it. George insisted on moving Molly out into the open first, then we tackled the slabs that kept us from getting at the air lock to Peggy’s room.

The outer door of the air lock was burst out of its gaskets and stood open, the wrong way. It was black inside the lock; Jupiter light didn’t reach inside. I couldn’t see what I was doing but when I pushed on the inner door it wouldn’t give. “Can’t budge it,” I told Dad. “Get a light.”

“Probably still held by air pressure. Call out to Peggy to get in the stretcher and we’ll bleed it.” “I need a light,” I repeated.

“I haven’t got a light.”

“Didn’t you have one with you?” I had had one; we always carried torches, outdoors in dark phase, but I had dropped mine when the quake hit. I didn’t know where it was.

Dad thought about it, then climbed over the slabs. He was back in a moment. “I found it between here and the barn. I must have dropped it.” He shined it on the inner door and we looked over the situation.

“It looks bad,” Dad said softly. “Explosive decompression.” There was a gap you could poke your fingers through between the top of the door and the frame; the door wasn’t pressure held, it was jammed.

Dad called out, “Peggy! Oh, Peggy, darling–can you hear me?”

No answer. “Take the light, Bill–and stand aside.” He reared back and then hit the door hard with his shoulder. It gave a bit but didn’t open. He hit it again and it flew open, spilling him on his hands and knees. He scrambled up as I shined the light in past him.

Peggy lay half in and half out of bed, as if she had been trying to get up when she passed out. Her head hung down and a trickle of blood was dripping from her mouth on to the floor.

Molly had come in right behind us; she and Dad got Peggy into the stretcher and Dad brought the pressure up. She was alive; she gasped and choked and sprayed blood over us while we were trying to help her. Then she cried. She seemed to quiet down and go to sleep –or maybe fainted again–after we got her into the bubble.

Molly was crying but not making any fuss about it. Dad straightened up, wiped his face and said, “Grab on, Bill. We’ve got to get her into town.”

I said, “Yes,” and picked up one end. With Molly holding the light and us carrying, we picked our way over the heap of rock that used to be our house and got out into the open. We put the stretcher down for a moment and I looked around.

I glanced up at Jupiter; the shadows were still on his face and Io and Europa had not yet reached the western edge. The whole thing had taken less than an hour. But that wasn’t what held my attention; the sky looked funny.

The stars were too bright and there were too many of them. “George,” I said, “what’s happened to the sky?” “No time now–” he started to say. Then he stopped and said very slowly, “Great Scott!”

“What?” asked Molly. “What’s the matter?”

“Back to the house, all of you! We’ve got to dig out all the clothes we can get at. And blanketsl” “What? Why?”

“The heat trap! The heat trap is gone–the quake must have gotten the power house.”

So we dug again, until we found what we had to have. It didn’t take long; we knew where things had to be. It was just a case of getting the rocks off. The blankets were for the stretcher; Dad wrapped them around like a cocoon and tied them in place. “Okay, Bill,” he said. “Quick march, nowl”

It was then that I heard Mabel bawl. I stopped and looked at Dad. He stopped too, with an agony of indecision on his face. “Oh, damn!” he said, the first time I had ever heard him really swear. “We can’t just leave her to freeze; she’s a member of the family. Come, Bill.”

We put the stretcher down again and ran to the bam. It was a junk heap but we could tell by Mabel’s complaints where she was. We dragged the roof off her and she got to her feet. She didn’t seem to be hurt but I guess she had been knocked silly. She looked at us indignantly.

We had a time of it getting her over the slabs, with Dad pulling and me pushing. Dad handed the halter to Molly. “How about the chickens?” I asked, “And the rabbits?” Some of them had been crushed; the rest were loose around the place. I felt one–a rabbit –scurry between my feet

“No time!” snapped Dad. “We can’t take them; all we could do for them would be to cut their throats. Come!” We headed for the road.

Molly led the way, leading and dragging Mabel and carrying the light. We needed the light. The night, too bright and too clear a few minutes before, was now suddenly overcast. Shortly we couldn’t see Jupiter at all, and then you couldn’t count your fingers in front of your face.

The road was wet underfoot, not rain, but sudden dew; it was getting steadily colder.

Then it did rain, steadily and coldly. Presently it changed to wet snow. Molly dropped back. “George,” she wanted to know, “have we come as far as the turn off to the Schultz’s?”

“That’s no good,” he answered. “We’ve got to get the baby into the hospital.” That isn’t what I meant. Oughtn’t I to warn them?”

They’ll be all right. Their house is sound.”

“But the cold?”

“Oh.” He saw what she meant and so did I, when I thought about it. With the heat trap gone and the power house gone, every house in the colony was going to be like an ice box. What good is a power receiver on your roof with no power to receive? It was going to get colder and colder and colder ….

And then it would get colder again. And colder….

“Keep moving,” Dad said suddenly. “We’ll figure it out when we get there.”

But we didn’t figure it out, because we never found the turn off. The snow was driving into our faces by then and we must have walked on past it. It was a dry snow now, little sharp needles that burned when they hit.

Without saying anything about it, I had started counting paces when we left the walls of lava that marked the place where the new road led to our place and out to the new farms beyond. As near as I could make it we had come about five miles when Molly stopped. “What’s the matter?” yelled Dad.

“Dear,” she said, “I can’t find the road. I think I’ve lost it.”

I kicked the snow away underfoot. It was made ground, all right–soft. Dad took the torch and looked at his watch. “We must have come about six miles,” he announced.

“Five,” I corrected him. “Or five and a half at the outside,” I told him I had been counting.

He considered it. “We’ve come just about to that stretch where the road is flush with the field,” he said. “It can’t be more than a half mile or a mile to the cut through Kneiper’s Ridge. After that we can’t lose it. Bill, take the light and cast off to the right for a hundred paces, then back to the left. If that doesn’t do it, well go further. And for heaven’s sakes retrace your steps–it’s the only way you’ll find us in this storm.”

I took the light and set out. To the right was no good, though I went a hundred and fifty paces instead of a hundred, I got back to them, and reported, and started out again. Dad just grunted; he was busy with something about the stretcher.

On the twenty-third step to the left I found the road –by stepping down about a foot, falling flat on my face, and nearly losing the light. I picked myself up and went back.

“Good!” said Dad. “Slip your neck through this.”

“This” was a sort of yoke he had devised by retying the blankets around the stretcher so as to get some free line. With my neck through it I could carry the weight on my shoulders and just steady my end with my hands. Not that it was heavy, but our hands were getting stiff with cold. “Good enough!” I said, “But, look, George–let Molly take your end.”

“Nonsense!”

“It isn’t nonsense. Molly can do it–can’t you, Molly? And you know this road better than we do; you’ve tramped it enough times in the dark.” “Bill is right, dear,” Molly said at once. “Here–take Mabel.”

Dad gave in, took the light and the halter. Mabel didn’t want to go any further; she wanted to sit down, I guess. Dad kicked her in the rear and jerked

on her neck. Her feelings were hurt; she wasn’t used to that sort of treatment–particularly not from Dad. But there was no time to humor her; it was getting colder.

We went on. I don’t know how Dad kept to the road but he did. We had been at it another hour, I suppose, and had left Kneiper’s slot well behind, when Molly stumbled, then her knees just seemed to cave in and she knelt down in the snow.

I stopped and sat down, too; I needed the rest. I just wanted to stay there and let it snow.

Dad came back and put his arms around her and comforted her and told her to lead Mabel now; she couldn’t get lost on this stretch. She insisted that she could still carry. Dad ignored her, just lifted the yoke business off her shoulders. Then he came back and peeled a bit of blanket off the bubble and shined the torch inside. He put it back into place. Molly said, “How is she?’

Dad said, “She’s still breathing. She opened her eyes when the light hit them. Let’s go.” He got the yoke on and Molly took the light and the halter. Molly couldn’t have seen what I saw; the plastic of the bubble was frosted over on the inside. Dad hadn’t seen Peggy breathe; he hadn’t seen

anything.

I thought about it for a long while and wondered how you would classify that sort of a lie. Dad wasn’t a liar, that was certain–and yet it seemed to me that such a lie, right then, was better than the truth. It was complicated.

Pretty soon I forgot it; I was too busy putting one foot in front of the other and counting the steps. I couldn’t feel my feet any longer. Dad stopped and I bumped into the end of the stretcher. “Listen!” he said.

I listened and heard a dull rumble. “Quake?”

“No. Keep quiet.” Then he added, “It’s down the road. Off the road, everybody! Off to the right.”

The rumble got louder and presently I made out a light through the snow, back the way we had come. Dad saw it, too, and stepped out on the road and started waving our torch.

The rumble stopped almost on top of him; it was a rock crusher and it was loaded down with people, people clinging to it all over and even riding the spade. The driver yelled, “Climb on! And hurry!”

Then he saw the cow and added, “No live stock.”

“We’ve got a stretcher with my little girl in it,” Dad shouted back to him. “We need help.”

There was a short commotion, while the driver ordered a couple of men down to help us. In the mix up Dad disappeared. One moment Molly was holding Mabel’s halter, then Dad was gone and so was the cow.

We got the stretcher up onto the spade and some of the men braced it with their backs. I was wondering what to do about Dad and thinking maybe I ought to jump off and look for him, when he appeared out of the darkness and scrambled up beside me. “Where’s Molly?” he asked.

“Up on top. But where is Mabel? What did you do with her?”

“Mabel is all right.” He folded his knife and put it in his pocket. I didn’t ask any more questions.

2.        Disaster

We passed several more people after that, but the driver wouldn’t stop. We were fairly close into town and he insisted that they could make it on their own. His emergency power pack was running low, he said; he had come all the way from the bend in the lake, ten miles beyond our place.

Besides, I don’t know where he would have put them. We were about three deep and Dad had to keep warning people not to lean on the bubble of

the stretcher.

Then the power pack did quit and the driver shouted, “Everybody off! Get on in on your own.” But by now we were actually in town, the outskirts, and it would have been no trouble if it hadn’t been blowing a blizzard. The driver insisted on helping Dad with the stretcher. He was a good Joe and turned out to be–when I saw him in the light–the same man who had crushed our acreage.

At long, long last we were inside the hospital and Peggy was turned over to the hospital people and put in a pressurized room. More than that, she was alive. In bad shape, but alive.

Molly stayed with her. I would like to have stayed, too–it was fairly warm in the hospital; it had its own emergency power pack. But they wouldn’t let me.

Dad told Molly that he was reporting to the chief engineer for duty. I was told to go to the Immigration Receiving Station. I did so and it was just like the day we landed, only worse–and colder. I found myself right back in the very room which was the first I had ever been in on Ganymede.

The place was packed and getting more packed every minute as more refugees kept pouring in from the surrounding country. It was cold, though not so bitterly cold as outside. The lights were off, of course; light and heat all came from the power plant for everything.

Hand lights had been set up here and there and you could sort of grope your way around. There were the usual complaints, too, though maybe not as bad as you hear from immigrants. I paid no attention to any of them; I was happy in a dead beat sort of way just to be inside and fairly warm and feel the blood start to go back into my feet.

We stayed there for thirty-seven hours. It was twenty-four hours before we got anything to eat.

Here was the way it went: the metal buildings, such as the Receiving Station, stood up. Very few of the stone buildings had, which we knew by then from the reports of all of us. The Power Station was out, and with it, the heat trap. They wouldn’t tell us anything about it except to say that it was being fixed.

In the mean time we were packed in tight as they could put us, keeping the place warm mainly by the heat from our bodies, sheep style. There were, they say, several power packs being used to heat the place, too, one being turned on every time the temperature in the room dropped below freezing. If so, I never got close to one and I don’t think it ever did get up to freezing where I was.

I would sit down and grab my knees and fall into a dopey sleep. Then a nightmare would wake me up and I’d get up and pound myself and walk around. After a while I’d sit down on the floor and freeze my fanny again.

I seem to remember encountering Noisy Edwards in the crowd and waving my finger under his nose and telling him I had an appointment to knock his block off. I seem to remember him staring back at me as if he couldn’t place me. But I don’t know; I may have dreamed it. I thought I ran across Hank, too, and had a long talk with him, but Hank told me afterwards that he never laid eyes on me the whole time.

After a long time–it seemed a week but the records show it was eight o’clock Sunday morning–they passed us out some lukewarm soup. It was wonderful. After that I wanted to leave the building to go to the hospital. I wanted to find Molly and see how Peggy was doing.

They wouldn’t let me. It was seventy below outside and still dropping. About twenty-two o’clock the lights came on and the worst was over.

We had a decent meal soon after that, sandwiches and soup, and when the Sun came up at midnight they announced that anybody could go outside who cared to risk it. I waited until noon Monday. By then it was up to twenty below and I made a dash for it to the hospital.

Peggy was doing as well as could be expected. Molly had stayed with her and had spent the time in bed with her, huddling up to her to keep her warm. While the hospital had emergency heat, it didn’t have the capacity to cope with any such disaster as had struck us; it was darn near as cold as the Receiving Station. But Peggy had come through it, sleeping most of the time. She even perked up enough to smile and say hello.

Molly’s left arm was in a sling and splinted. I asked how that happened–and then I felt foolish. It had happened in the quake itself but I hadn’t known it and George still didn t know about it; none of the engineers were back.

It didn’t seem possible that she could have done what she did, until I recalled that she carried the stretcher only after Dad had rigged the rope yokes. Molly is all right.

They chased me out and I high-tailed it back to the Receiving Station and ran into Sergei almost at once. He hailed me and I went over to him. He

had a pencil and a list and a number of the older fellows were gathered around him. “What’s up?” I said.

“Just the guy I’m looking for,” he said. “I had you down for dead. Disaster party–are you in?”

I was in, all right. The parties were made up of older Scouts, sixteen and up, and the younger men, We were sent out on the town’s tractors, one to each road, and we worked in teams of two. I spotted Hank Jones as we were loading and they let us make up a team.

It was grim work. For equipment we had shovels and lists–lists of who lived on which farm. Sometimes a name would have a notation “known to be alive,” but more often not. A team would be dropped off with the lists for three or four farms and the tractor would go on, to pick them up on the return trip.

Our job was to settle the doubt about those other names and–theoretically–to rescue anyone still alive. We didn’t find anyone alive.

The lucky ones had been killed in the quake; the unlucky ones had waited too long and didn’t make it into town. Some we found on the road; they had tried to make it but had started too late. The worst of all were those whose houses hadn’t fallen and had tried to stick it out. Hank and I found one couple just sitting, arms around each other. They were hard as rock.

When we found one, we would try to identify it on the list, then cover it up with snow, several feet deep, so it would keep for a while after it started to thaw.

When we settled with the people at a farm, we rummaged around and found all the livestock we could and carried or dragged their carcasses down to the road, to be toted into town on the tractor and slapped into deep freeze. It seemed a dirty job to do, robbing the dead, but, as Hank pointed out, we would all be getting a little hungry by and by.

Hank bothered me a little; he was merry about the whole thing. I guess it was better to laugh about it, in the long run, and after a while he had me doing it. It was just too big to soak up all at once and you didn’t dare let it get you.

But I should have caught on when we came to his own place. “We can skip it,” he said, and checked off the list. “Hadn’t we better check for livestock?” I said.

“Nope. We’re running short of time. Let’s move on to the Millers’ place.” “Did they get out?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see any of them in town.”

The Millers hadn’t gotten out; we barely had time to take care of them before the tractor picked us up. It was a week later that I found out that both of Hank’s parents had been killed in the quake. He had taken time to drag them out and put them into their ice cellar before he had headed for town.

Like myself, Hank had been outside when it hit, still looking at the line up. The fact that the big shock had occurred right after the line up had kept a lot of people from being killed in their beds–but they say that the line up caused the quake, triggered it, that is, with tidal strains, so I guess it sort of evens up. Of course, the line up didn’t actually make the quake; it had been building up to it ever since the beginning of the atmosphere project. Gravity’s books have got to balance.

The colony had had thirty-seven thousand people when the quake hit. The census when we finished it showed less than thirteen thousand. Besides that we had lost every crop, all or almost all the livestock. As Hank said, we’d all be a little hungry by and by.

They dumped us back at the Receiving Station and a second group of parties got ready to leave. I looked for a quiet spot to try to get some sleep. I was just dozing off, it seemed to me, when somebody shook me. It was Dad. “Are you all right, Bill?”

I rubbed my eyes. “I’m okay. Have you seen Molly and Peggy?”

“Just left them. I’m off duty for a few hours. Bill, have you seen anything of the Schultzes?”

I sat up, wide awake. “No. Have you?” “No.”

I told him what I had been doing and he nodded. “Go back to sleep, Bill. I’ll see if there has been a report on them.”

I didn’t go to sleep. He was back after a bit to say that he hadn’t been able to find out anything one way or another. “I’m worried, Bill.” “So am I.”

“I’m going out and check up.” “Let’s go.”

Dad shook his head. “No need for us both. You get some sleep.” I went along, just the same.

We were lucky. A disaster party was just heading down our road and we hitched a ride. Our own farm and the Schultz’s place were among those to be covered on this trip; Dad told the driver that we would check both places and report when we got back to town. That was all right with him.

They dropped us at the turn off and we trudged up toward the Schultz’s house. I began to get the horrors as we went. It’s one thing to pile snow over comparative strangers; it’s another thing entirely to expect to find Mama Schultz or Gretchen with their faces blue and stiff.

I didn’t visualize Papa as dead; people like Papa Schultz don’t die-they just go on forever. Or it feels like that. But I still wasn’t prepared for what we did find.

We had just come around a little hummock that conceals their house from the road. George stopped and said, “Well, the house is still standing. His quake-proofing held.”

I looked at it, then I stared–and then I yelled. “Hey, George! The Tree is gone!”

The house was there, but the apple tree–“the most beautiful tree on Ganymede”–was missing. Just gone. I began to run. We were almost to the house when the door opened. There stood Papa Schultz.

They were all safe, every one of them. What remained of the tree was ashes in the fireplace. Papa had cut it down as soon as the power went off and the temperature started to drop–and then had fed it, little by little, into the flames.

Papa, telling us about it, gestured at the blackened firebox. “Johann’s folly, they called it. I guess they will not think old Appleseed Johnny quite so foolish now, eh?” He roared and slapped Dad on the shoulders.

“But your tree,” I said stupidly.

“I will plant another, many others.” He stopped and was suddenly serious. “But your trees, William, your brave little baby trees–they are dead, not?” I said I hadn’t seen them yet. He nodded solemnly. “They are dead of the cold. Hugo!”

“Yes, Papa.”

“Fetch me an apple.” Hugo did so and Papa presented it to me. “You will plant again.” I nodded and stuck it in my pocket.

They were glad to hear that we were all right, though Mama clucked over Molly’s broken arm. Yo had fought his way over to our place during the first part of the storm, found that we were gone and returned, two frost bitten ears for his efforts. He was in town now to look for us.

But they were all right, every one of them. Even their livestock they had saved–cows, pigs, chickens, people, all huddled together throughout the

cold and kept from freezing by the fire from their tree.

The animals were back in the barn, now that power was on again, but the place still showed that they had been there–and smelled of it, too. I think Mama was more upset by the shambles of her immaculate living room than she was by the magnitude of the disaster. I don’t think she realized that most of her neighbors were dead. It hadn’t hit her yet.

Dad turned down Papa Schultz’s offer to come with us to look over our farm. Then Papa said he would see us on the tractor truck, as he intended to go into town and find out what he could do. We had mugs of Mama’s strong tea and some corn bread and left.

I was thinking about the Schultzes and how good it was to find them alive, as we trudged over to our place. I told Dad that it was a miracle. He shook his head. “Not a miracle. They are survivor types.”

“What type is a survivor type?” I asked.

He took a long time to answer that one. Finally he said, “Survivors survive. I guess that is the only way to tell the survivor type for certain.” I said. “We’re survivor types, too, in that case.”

“Could be,” he admitted. “At least we’ve come through this one.”

When I had left, the house was down. In the mean time I had seen dozens of houses down, yet it was a shock to me when we topped the rise and I saw that it really was down. I suppose I expected that after a while I would wake up safe and warm in bed and everything would be all right.

The fields were there, that was all that you could say for it. I scraped the snow off a stretch I knew was beginning to crop. The plants were dead of course and the ground was hard. I was fairly sure that even the earth worms were dead; they had had nothing to warn them to burrow below the frost line.

My little saplings were dead, of course.

We found two of the rabbits, huddled together and stiff, under a drift against what was left of the barn. We didn’t find any of the chickens except one, the first old hen we ever had. She had been setting and her nest wasn’t crushed and had been covered by a piece of the fallen roof of the barn. She was still on it, hadn’t moved and the eggs under her were frozen. I think that was what got me.

I was just a chap who used to have a farm.

Dad had been poking around the house. He came back to the barn and spoke to me. “Well, Bill?” I stood up. “George, I’ve had it.”

“Then let’s go back to town. The truck will be along shortly.” “I mean I’ve really had it!”

“Yes, I know.”

I took a look in Peggy’s room first, but Dad’s salvage had been thorough. My accordion was in there, however, with snow from the broken door drifted over the case. I brushed it off and picked it up. “Leave it,” Dad said. “It’s safe here and you’ve no place to put it.”

“I don’t expect to be back,” I said. “Very well.”

We made a bundle of what Dad had gotten together, added the accordion, the two rabbits and the hen, and carried it all down to the road. The tractor showed up presently, we got aboard and Dad chucked the rabbits and chicken on the pile of such that they had salvaged. Papa Schultz was waiting at his turnoff.

Dad and I tried to spot Mabel by the road on the trip back, but we didn’t find her. Probably she had been picked up by an earlier trip, seeing that she

was close to town. I was just as well pleased. All right, she had to be salvaged–but I didn’t want the job. I’m not a cannibal.

I managed to get some sleep and a bite to eat and was sent out on another disaster party. The colony began to settle down into some sort of routine. Those whose houses had stood up moved back into them and the rest of us were taken care of in the Receiving Station, much as we had been when our party landed. Food was short, of course, and Ganymede had rationing for the first time since the first colonials really got started.

Not that we were going to starve. In the first place there weren’t too many of us to feed and there had been quite a lot of food on hand. The real pinch would come later. It was decided to set winter back by three months, that is, start all over again with spring–which messed up the calendar from then on. But it would give us a new crop as quickly as possible to make up for the one that we had lost.

Dad stayed on duty with the engineer’s office. Plans called for setting up two more power plants, spaced around the equator, and each of them capable of holding the heat trap alone. The disaster wasn’t going to be allowed to happen again. Of course the installations would have to come from Earth, but we had been lucky on one score; Mars was in a position to relay for us. The report had gone into Earth at once and, instead of another load of immigrants, we were to get what we needed on the next trip.

Not that I cared. I had stayed in town, too, although the Schultzes had invited me to stay with them. I was earning my keep helping to rebuild and quakeproof the houses of the survivors. It had been agreed that we would all go back, George, Molly, Peggy, and me, on the first trip, if we could get space. It had been unanimous except that Peggy hadn’t been consulted; it just had to be.

We weren’t the only ones who were going back. The Colonial Commission had put up a squawk of course, but under the circumstances they had to give in. After it had been made official and the lists were opened Dad and I went over to the Commission agent’s office to put in our applications. We were about the last to apply; Dad had been out of town on duty and I had waited until he got back.

The office was closed with a “Back in a half hour” sign stuck on the door. We waited. There were bulletin boards outside the office; on them were posted the names of those who had applied for repatriation. I started reading them to kill time and so did Dad.

I found Saunders’ name there and pointed it out to George. He grunted and said, “No loss.” Noisy Edwards’ name was there, too; maybe I had seen him in the Receiving Station, although I hadn’t seen him since. It occurred to me that I could probably corner him in the ship and pay him back his lumps, but I wasn’t really interested in the project. I read on down.

I expected to find Hank Jones’ name there, but I couldn’t find it. I started reading the list carefully, paying attention to every name I recognized. I began to see a pattern.

Presently the agent got back and opened the door. Dad touched my arm. “Come on, Bill.” I said, “Wait a minute, George. You read all the names?”

“Yes, I did.”

“I’ve been thinking. You know, George, I don’t like being classed with these lugs.” He chewed his lip. “I know exactly what you mean.”

I took the plunge. “You can do as you like, George, but I’m not going home, if I ever do, until I’ve licked this joint.”

Dad looked as unhappy as he could look. He was silent for a long time, then he said, “I’ve got to take Peggy back, Bill. She won’t go unless Molly and I go along. And she’s got to go.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You understand how it is, Bill?”

“Yes, Dad, I understand.” He went on in to make out his application, whistling a little tune he used to whistle just after Anne died. I don’t think he knew he was whistling it.

I waited for him and after a bit we went away together.

I moved back out to the farm the next day. Not to the Schultzes–to the farm. I slept in Peggy’s room and got busy fixing the place up and getting

ready to plant my emergency allowance of seed.

Then, about two weeks before they were to leave in the Covered Wagon, Peggy died, and there wasn’t any reason for any of us to go back to Earth.

Yo Schultz had been in town and Dad sent word back by him. Yo came over and woke me up and told me about it. I thanked him.

He wanted to know if I wanted to come back to the house with him. I said, no, thanks, that I would rather be alone. He made me promise to come over the next day and went away.

I lay back down on Peggy’s bed.

She was dead and there was nothing more I could do about it She was dead and it was all my fault … if I hadn’t encouraged her, they would have been able to get her to go back before it was too late. She would be back Earthside, going to school and growing up healthy and happy–right back in California, not here in this damned place where she couldn’t live, where human beings were never meant to live.

I bit the pillow and blubbered. I said, “Oh, Anne, Anne! Take care of her, Anne–She’s so little; she won’t know what to do.” And then I stopped bawling and listened, half way expecting Anne to answer me and tell me she would,

But I couldn’t hear anything, not at first … and what I did hear was only, “Stand tall, Billy,” . .. very faint and far away, “Stand tall, son.” After a while I got up and washed my face and started hoofing it back into town.

3.        Pioneer Party

We all lived in Peggy’s room until Dad and I had the seeds in, then we built on to it, quake proof this time and with a big view window facing the lake and another facing the mountains. We knocked a window in Peggy’s room, too; it made it seem like a different place.

We built on still another room presently, as it seemed as if we might be needing it. All the rooms had windows and the living room had a fireplace. Dad and I were terribly busy the second season after the quake. Enough seed could be had by then and we farmed the empty farm across the road

from us. Then some newcomers, the Ellises, moved in and paid us for the crop. It was just what they call a “book transaction,” but it reduced our

debt with the Commission.

Two G-years after the line up you would never have known that anything had happened. There wasn’t a wrecked building in the community, there were better than forty-five thousand people, and the town was booming. New people were coming in so fast that you could even sell some produce to the Commission in lieu of land.

We weren’t doing so badly, ourselves. We had a hive of bees. We had Mabel II, and Margie and Mamie, and I was sending the spare milk into town by the city transport truck that passed down our road once a day. I had broken Marge and Mamie to the yoke and used them for ploughing as well– we had crushed five more acres–and we were even talking about getting a horse.

Some people had horses already, the Schultzes for instance. The council had wrangled about it before okaying the “invasion,” with conservatives holding out for tractors. But we weren’t equipped to manufacture tractors yet and the policy was to make the planet self-sufficient–the hay burners won out. Horses can manufacture more horses and that is one trick that tractors have never learned.

Furthermore, though I would have turned my nose up at the idea when I was a ground hog back in Diego Borough, horse steak is very tasty.

It turned out we did need the extra room. Twins– both boys. New babies don’t look as if they were worth keeping, but they get over it–slowly. I bought a crib as a present for them, made right here on Ganymede, out of glass fabric stuck together with synthetic resin. It was getting possible to buy quite a number of home products.

I told Molly I would initiate the brats into the Cubs when they were old enough. I was getting in to meetings oftener now, for I had a patrol again–the Daniel Boone patrol, mostly new kids. I still hadn’t taken my own tests but you can’t do everything at once. Once I was scheduled to take them and a

litter of pigs picked that day to arrive. But I planned to take them; I wanted to be an Eagle Scout again, even if I was getting a little old to worry about badges in themselves.

It may sound as if the survivors didn’t give a hoot about those who had died in the disaster. But that isn’t the truth. It was just that you work from day to day and that keeps your mind busy. In any case, we weren’t the first colony to be two-thirds wiped out– and we wouldn’t be the last. You can grieve only so much; after that it’s self pity. So George says.

George still wanted me to go back to Earth to finish my education and I had been toying with the idea myself. I was beginning to realize that there were a few things I hadn’t learned. The idea was attractive; it would not be like going back right after the quake, tail between my legs. I’d be a property owner, paying my own way. The fare was considerable–five acres–and would about clean me out, my half, and put a load on George and Molly. But they were both for it.

Besides, Dad owned blocked assets back Earthside which would pay my way through school. They were no use to him otherwise; the only thing the Commission will accept as pay for imports is proved land. There was even a possibility, if the council won a suit pending back Earthside, that his blocked assets could be used for my fare as well and not cost us a square foot of improved soil. All in all, it was nothing to turn down idly.

We were talking about me leaving on the NewArk when another matter came up–the planetary survey.

Ganymede had to have settlements other than Leda; that was evident even when we landed. The Commission planned to set up two more ports-of- entry near the two new power stations and let the place grow from three centers. The present colonists were to build the new towns–receiving stations, hydroponics sheds, infirmaries, and so forth–and be paid for it in imports. Immigration would be stepped up accordingly, something that the Commission was very anxious to do, now that they had the ships to dump them in on us in quantity.

The old Jitterbug was about to take pioneer parties out to select sites and make plans–and both Hank and Sergei were going.

I wanted to go so bad I could taste it In the whole time I had been here I had never gotten fifty miles from Leda. Suppose somebody asked me what it was like on Ganymede when I got back on Earth? Truthfully, I wouldn’t be able to tell them; I hadn’t been any place.

I had had a chance, once, to make a trip to Barnard’s Moon, as a temporary employee of Project Jove–and that hadn’t worked out either. The twins. I stayed back and took care of the farm.

I talked it over with Dad.

“I hate to see you delay it any longer,” he said seriously. I pointed out that it would be only two months. “Hmmm–” he said. “Have you taken your merit badge tests yet?”

He knew I hadn’t; I changed the subject by pointing out that Sergei and Hank were going. “But they are both older than you are,” he answered.

“Not by very much!”

“But I think they are each over the age limit they were looking for–and you are just under.”

“Look, George,” I protested, “rules were made to be broken. I’ve heard you say that There must be some spot I can fill–cook, maybe.” And that’s just the job I got–cook.

I always have been a pretty fair cook–not in Mama Schultz’s class, but good. The party had nothing to complain about on that score.

Captain Hattie put us down at a selected spot nine degrees north of the equator and longitude 113 west–that is to say, just out of sight of Jupiter on the far side and about thirty-one hundred miles from Leda.

Mr. Hooker says that the average temperature of Ganymede will rise about nine degrees over the next century as more and more of the ancient ice melts–at which time Leda will be semi-tropical and the planet will be habitable half way to the poles. In the meantime colonies would be planted only at or near the equator.

I was sorry we had Captain Hattie as pilot; she is such an insufferable old scold. She thinks rocket pilots are a special race apart–supermen. At

least she acts like it.

Recently the Commission had forced her to take a relief pilot; there was just too much for one pilot to do. They had tried to force a check pilot on her, too–an indirect way to lead up to retiring her, but she was too tough for them. She threatened to take the Jitterbug up and crash it … and they didn’t dare call her bluff. At that time they were absolutely dependent on the Jitterbug.

Originally the Jitterbugs only purpose was for supply and passengers between Leda and the Project Jove station on Barnard’s Moon–but that was back in the days when ships from Earth actually landed at Leda. Then the Mayflower came along and the Jitterbug was pressed into service as a shuttle.

There was talk of another shuttle rocket but we didn’t have it yet, which is why Captain Hattie had them where it hurt. The Commission had visions of a loaded ship circling Ganymede, just going round and round and round again, with no way to get down, like a kitten stuck up in a tree.

I’ll say this for Hattie; she could handle her ship. I think she had nerve ends out in the skin of it. In clear weather she could even make a glide landing, in spite of our thin air. But I think she preferred to shake up her passengers with a jet landing.

She put us down, the Jitterbug took on more water mass, and away it bounced. She had three more parties to land. All in all the Jitterbug was servicing eight other pioneer parties. It would be back to pick us up in about three weeks.

The leader of our party was Paul du Maurier, who was the new assistant Scoutmaster of the Auslander troop and the chap who had gotten me taken on as cookie. He was younger than some of those working for him; furthermore, he shaved, which made him stand out like a white leghorn in a hog pen and made him look even younger. That is, he did shave, but he started letting his beard grow on this trip. “Better trim that grass,” I advised him.

He said, “Don’t you like my beard, Doctor Slop?” –that was a nickname he had awarded me for “Omnibus stew,” my own invention. He didn’t mean any harm by it.

I said, “Well, it covers your face, which is some help–but you might be mistaken for one of us colonial roughnecks. That wouldn’t do for one of you high-toned Commission boys.”

He smiled mysteriously and said, “Maybe that’s what I want.”

I said, “Maybe. But they’ll lock you up in a zoo if you wear it back to Earth.” He was due to go back for Earthside duty by the same trip I expected to make, via the Covered Wagon, two weeks after the end of the survey.

He smiled again and said, “Ah, yes, so they would,” and changed the subject. Paul was one of the most thoroughly good guys I have ever met and smart as a whip as well. He was a graduate of South Africa University with Post Grad on top of that at the System Institute on Venus–an ecologist, specializing in planetary engineering.

He handled that gang of rugged individualists without raising his voice. There is something about a real leader that makes it unnecessary for him to get tough.

But back to the survey–I didn’t see much of it as I was up to my elbows in pots and pans, but I knew what was going on. The valley we were in had been picked from photographs taken from the Jitterbug; it was now up to Paul to decide whether or not it was ideally suited to easy colonization.

It had the advantage of being in direct line-of-sight with power station number two, but that was not essential. Line-of-sight power relays could be placed anywhere on the mountains (no name, as yet) just south of us.

Most of the new villages would have to have power relayed anyhow. Aside from a safety factor for the heat trap there was no point in setting up extra power stations when the whole planet couldn’t use the potential of one mass-conversion plant.

So they got busy–an engineering team working on drainage and probable annual water resources, topographers getting a contour, a chemistry- agronomy team checking on what the various rock formations would make as soil, and a community architect laying out a town and farm and rocket port plot. There were several other specialists, too, like the mineralogist, Mr. Villa, who was doodlebugging the place for ores.

Paul was the “general specialist” who balanced all the data in his mind, fiddled with his slip stick, stared off into the sky, and came up with the over all answer. The over all answer for that valley was “nix”–and we moved on to the next one on the list, packing the stuff on our backs.

That was one of the few chances I got to look around. You see, we had landed at sunrise–about five o’clock Wednesday morning sunrise was, in

that longitude–and the object was to get as much done as possible during each light phase.

Jupiter light is all right for working in your own fields, but no good for surveying strange territory–and here we didn’t even have Jupiter light–just Callisto, every other dark phase, every twelve-and-half days, to be exact. Consequently we worked straight through light phase, on pep pills.

Now a man who is on the pills will eat more than twice as much as a man who is sleeping regularly. You know, the Eskimos have a saying, “Food is sleep.” I had to produce hot meals every four hours, around the clock. I had no time for sightseeing.

We got to camp number two, pitched our tents, I served a scratch meal, and Paul passed out sleeping pills. By then the Sun was down and we really died for about twenty hours. We were comfortable enough –spun glass pads under us and resin sealed glass canvas over us.

I fed them again, Paul passed out more sleepy pills, and back we went to sleep. Paul woke me Monday afternoon. This time I fixed them a light breakfast, then really spread myself to turn them out a feast. Everybody was well rested by now, and not disposed to want to go right back to bed. So I stuffed them.

After that we sat around for a few hours and talked. I got out my squeeze box–brought along by popular demand, that is to say, Paul suggested it– and gave ’em a few tunes. Then we talked some more.

They got to arguing about where life started and somebody brought up the old theory that the Sun had once been much brighter–Jock Montague, it was, the chemist. “Mark my words,” he said, “When we get around to exploring Pluto, you’ll find that life was there before us. Life is persistent, like mass-energy.”

“Nuts,” answered Mr. Villa, very politely. “Pluto isn’t even a proper planet; it used to be a satellite of Neptune.”

“Well, Neptune, then,” Jock persisted. “Life is all through the universe. Mark my words–when the Jove Project straightens out the bugs and gets going, they’ll even find life on the surface of Jupiter.”

“On Jupiter?” Mr. Villa exploded. “Please, Jock! Methane and ammonia and cold as a mother-in-law’s kiss. Don’t joke with us. Why, there’s not even light down under on the surface of Jupiter; it’s pitch dark.”

I said it and I’ll say it again,” Montague answered. “Life is persistent. Wherever there is mass and energy with conditions that permit the formation of large and stable molecules, there you will find life. Look at Mars. Look at Venus. Look at Earth–the most dangerous planet of the lot. Look at the Ruined Planet.”

I said, “What do you think about it, Paul?”

The boss smiled gently. “I don’t. I haven’t enough data.”

“There!” said Mr. Villa. “There speaks a wise man. Tell me, Jock, how did you get to be an authority on this subject?”

“I have the advantage,” Jock answered grandly, “of not knowing too much about the subject. Facts are always a handicap in philosophical debate.” That ended that phase of it, for Mr. Seymour, the boss agronomist, said, “I’m not so much worried about where life came from as where it is going–

here.”

“How?” I wanted to know. “In what way?”

“What are we going to make of this planet? We can make it anything we want. Mars and Venus–they had native cultures. We dare not change them much and we’ll never populate them very heavily. These Jovian moons are another matter; it’s up to us. They say man is endlessly adaptable. I say on the contrary that man doesn’t adapt himself as much as he adapts his environment. Certainly we are doing so here. But how?”

“I thought that was pretty well worked out,” I said. “We set up these new centers, more people come in and we spread out, same as at Leda.”

“Ah, but where does it stop? We have three ships making regular trips now. Shortly there will be a ship in every three weeks, then it will be every week, then every day. Unless we are almighty careful there will be food rationing here, same as on Earth. Bill, do you know how fast the population is increasing, back Earthside?”

I admitted that I didn’t

“More than one hundred thousand more persons each day than there were the day before. Figure that up.”

I did. “That would be, uh, maybe fifteen, twenty shiploads a day. Still, I imagine they could build ships to carry them.”

“Yes, but where would we put them? Each day, more than twice as many people landing as there are now on this whole globe. And not just on Monday, but on Tuesday, and Wednesday, and Thursday–and the week and the month and the year after that, just to keep Earth’s population stable. I tell you, it won’t work. The day will come when we will have to stop immigration entirely.” He looked around aggressively, like a man who expects to be contradicted.

He wasn’t disappointed. Somebody said, “Oh, Seymour, come off it! Do you think you own this place just because you got here first? You snuck in while the rules were lax.”

“You can’t argue with mathematics,” Seymour insisted. “Ganymede has got to be made self-sufficient as soon as possible–and then we’ve got to slam the door!”

Paul was shaking his head. “It won’t be necessary.”

“Huh?” said Seymour. “Why not? Answer me that. You represent the Commission: what fancy answer has the Commission got?”

“None,” Paul told him. “And your figures are right but your conclusions are wrong. Oh, Ganymede has to be made self-sufficient, true enough, but your bogeyman about a dozen or more shiploads of immigrants a day you can forget.”

“Why, if I may be so bold?”

Paul looked around the tent and grinned apologetically. “Can you stand a short dissertation on population dynamics? I’m afraid I don’t have Jock’s advantage; this is a subject I am supposed to know something about.”

Somebody said, “Stand back. Give him air.”

“Okay,” Paul went on, “you brought it on yourselves. A lot of people have had the idea that colonization is carried on with the end purpose of relieving the pressure of people and hunger back on Earth. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

I said. “Huh?”

“Bear with me. Not only is it physically impossible for a little planet to absorb the increase of a big planet, as Seymour pointed out, but there is another reason why well never get any such flood of people as a hundred thousand people a day–a psychological reason. There are never as many people willing to emigrate (even if you didn’t pick them over) as there are new people born. Most people simply will not leave home. Most of them won’t even leave their native villages, much less go to a far planet.”

Mr. Villa nodded. “I go along with you on that The willing emigrant is an odd breed of cat. He’s scarce.”

“Right,” Paul agreed. “But let’s suppose for a moment that a hundred thousand people were willing to emigrate every day and Ganymede and the other colonies could take them. Would that relieve the situation back home–I mean “back Earthside’? The answer is, ‘No, it wouldn’t’.”

He appeared to have finished. I finally said, “Excuse my blank look, Paul, but why wouldn’t it?” “Studied any bionomics, Bill?”

“Some.”

“Mathematical population bionomics?” “Well-no.”

“But you do know that in the greatest wars the Earth ever had there were always more people after the war than before, no matter how many were killed. Life is not merely persistent, as Jock puts it; life is explosive.

The basic theorem of population mathematics to which there has never been found an exception is that population increases always, not merely up to extent of the food supply, but beyond it, to the minimum diet that will sustain life–the ragged edge of starvation.

In other words, if we bled off a hundred thousand people a day, the Earth’s population would then grow until the increase was around two hundred thousand a day, or the bionomical maximum for Earth’s new ecological dynamic.”

Nobody said anything for a moment; there wasn’t anything to say. Presently Sergei spoke up with, “You paint a grim picture, boss. What’s the answer?”

Paul said, “There isn’t any!”

Sergei said, “I didn’t mean it that way. I mean, what is the outcome?”

When Paul did answer it was just one word, one monosyllable, spoken so softly that it would not have been heard if there had not been dead silence. What he said was:

“War.”

There was a shuffle and a stir; it was an unthinkable idea. Seymour said, “Come now, Mr. du Maurier–I may be a pessimist, but I’m not that much of one. Wars are no longer possible.”

Paul said, “So?”

Seymour answered almost belligerently, “Are you trying to suggest that the Space Patrol would let us down? Because that is the only way a war could happen.”

Paul shook his head. “The Patrol won’t let us down. But they won’t be able to stop it. A police force is all right for stopping individual disturbances; it’s fine for nipping things in the bud. But when the disturbances are planet wide, no police force is big enough, or strong enough, or wise enough. They’ll try–they’ll try bravely. They won’t succeed.”

“You really believe that?”

“It’s my considered opinion. And not only my opinion, but the opinion of the Commission. Oh, I don’t mean the political board; I mean the career scientists.”

“Then what in tarnation is the Commission up to?”

“Building colonies. We think that is worthwhile in itself. The colonies need not be affected by the War. In fact, I don’t think they will be, not much. It will be like America was up to the end of the nineteenth century; European troubles passed her by.

I rather expect that the War, when it comes, will be of such size and duration that interplanetary travel will cease to be for a considerable period. That is why I said this planet has got to be self-sufficient. It takes a high technical culture to maintain interplanetary travel and Earth may not have it– after a bit.”

I think Paul’s ideas were a surprise to everyone present; I know they were to me. Seymour jabbed a finger at him, “If you believe this, then why are you going back to Earth? Tell me that.”

Again Paul spoke softly. “I’m not. I’m going to stay here and become a ‘steader.” Suddenly I knew why he was letting his beard grow.

Seymour answered, “Then you expect it soon.” It was not a question; it was a statement.

“Having gone this far,” Paul said hesitantly, “I’ll give you a direct answer. War is not less than forty Earth years away, not more than seventy.”

You could feel a sigh of relief all around the place. Seymour continued to speak for us, “Forty to seventy, you say. But that’s no reason to

homestead; you probably wouldn’t live to see it. Not but what you’d make a good neighbor.”

“I see this War,” Paul insisted. “I know it’s coming. Should I leave it up to my hypothetical children and grandchildren to outguess it? No. Here I rest. If I marry, I’ll marry here. I’m not raising any kids to be radioactive dust.”

It must have been about here that Hank stuck his head in the tent, for I don’t remember anyone answering Paul. Hank had been outside on business of his own; now he opened the flap and called out, “Hey gents! Europa is up!”

We all trooped out to see. We went partly through embarrassment, I think; Paul had been too nakedly honest. But we probably would have gone anyhow. Sure, we saw Europa every day of our lives at home, but not the way we were seeing it now.

Since Europa goes around Jupiter inside Ganymede’s orbit, it never gets very far away from Jupiter, if you call 39 degrees “not very far.” Since we were 113 west longitude, Jupiter was 23 degrees below our eastern horizon–which meant that Europa, when it was furthest west of Jupiter, would be a maximum of 16 degrees above the true horizon.

Excuse the arithmetic. Since we had a row of high hills practically sitting on us to the east, what all this means is that, once a week, Europa would rise above the hills, just peeking over, hang there for about a day–then turn around and set in the east, right where it had risen. Up and down like an elevator.

If you’ve never been off Earth, don’t tell me it’s impossible. That’s how it is–Jupiter and its moons do some funny things.

It was the first time it had happened this trip, so we watched it–a little silver boat, riding the hills like waves, with its horns turned up. There was argument about whether or not it was still rising, or starting to set again, and much comparing of watches. Some claimed to be able to detect motion but they weren’t agreed on which way. After a while I got cold and went back in.

But I was glad of the interruption. I had a feeling that Paul had said considerably more than he had intended to and more than he would be happy to recall, come light phase. I blamed it on the sleeping pills. Sleeping pills are all right when necessary, but they tend to make you babble and tell your right name-treacherous things.

4.        The Other People

By the end of the second light phase it was clear-to Paul, anyhow–that this second valley would do. It wasn’t the perfect valley and maybe there was a better one just over the ridge–but life is too short. Paul assigned it a score of 92% by some complicated system thought up by the Commission, which was seven points higher than passing. The perfect valley could wait for the colonials to find it … which they would, some day.

We named the valley Happy Valley, Just for luck, and named the mountains south of it the Pauline Peaks, over Paul’s protests. He said it wasn’t official anyway; we said we would see to it that it was made so–and the boss topographer, Abie Finkelstein, marked it so on the map and we all intialed it

We spent the third light phase rounding up the details. We could have gone back then, if there had been any way to get back. There wasn’t, so we had to dope through another dark phase.

Some of them preferred to go back on a more normal schedule instead; there was a round-the-clock poker game, which I stayed out of, having nothing I could afford to lose and no talent for filling straights. There were more dark phase bull sessions but they never got as grave as the first one and nobody ever again asked Paul what he thought about the future prospects of things.

By the end of the third dark phase I was getting more than a little tired of seeing nothing but the inside of our portable range. I asked Paul for some time off.

Hank had been helping me since the start of the third dark phase. He had been working as a topographical assistant; flash contour pictures were on the program at the start of that dark phase. He was supposed to get an open-lens shot across the valley from an elevation on the south just as a sunburst flash was let off from an elevation to the west.

Hank had a camera of his own, just acquired, and he was shutter happy, always pointing it at things. This time he had tried to get a picture of his own as well as the official picture. He had goofed off, missed the official picture entirely, and to top it off had failed to protect his eyes when the sunburst went off. Which put him on the sick list and I got him as kitchen police.

He was all right shortly, but Finkelstein didn’t want him back. So I asked for relief for both of us, so we could take a hike together and do a little

exploring. Paul let us go.

There had been high excitement at the end of the second light phase when lichen had been discovered near the west end of the valley. For a while it looked as if native life had been found on Ganymede. It was a false alarm–careful examination showed that it was not only an Earth type, but a type authorized by the bionomics board.

But it did show one thing–life was spreading, taking hold, at a point thirty-one hundred miles from the original invasion. There was much argument as to whether the spores had been air borne, or had been brought in on the clothing of the crew who had set up the power plant. It didn’t matter, really.

But Hank and I decided to explore off that way and see if we could find more of it. Besides it was away from the way we had come from camp number one. We didn’t tell Paul we were going after lichen because we were afraid he would veto it; the stuff had been found quite some distance from camp. He had warned us not to go too far and to be back by six o’clock Thursday morning, in time to break camp and head back to our landing point, where the Jitterbug was to meet us.

I agreed as I didn’t mean to go far in any case. I didn’t much care whether we found lichen or not; I wasn’t feeling well. But I kept that fact to myself; I wasn’t going to be done out of my one and only chance to see some of the country.

We didn’t find any more lichen. We did find the crystals.

We were trudging along, me as happy as a kid let out of school despite an ache in my side and Hank taking useless photographs of odd rocks and lava flows. Hank had been saying that he thought he would sell out his place and homestead here in Happy Valley. He said, “You know, Bill, they are going to need a few real Ganymede farmers here to give the greenhorns the straight dope. And who knows more about Ganymede-style farming than I do?”

“Almost everybody,” I assured him.

He ignored it. “This place has really got it,” he went on, gazing around at a stretch of country that looked like Armageddon after a hard battle. “Much better than around Leda.”

I admitted that it had possibilities. “But I don’t think it’s for me,” I went on. “I don’t think I’d care to settle anywhere where you can’t see Jupiter.” “Nonsense!” he answered. “Did you come here to stare at the sights or to make a farm?”

“That’s a moot point,” I admitted. “Sometimes I think one thing, sometimes the other. Sometimes I don’t have the foggiest idea.” He wasn’t listening. “See that slot up there?”

“Sure. What about it?”

“If we crossed that little glacier, we could get up to it.” “Why?”

“I think it leads into another valley–which might be even better. Nobody has been up there. I know–I was in the topo gang.”

“I’ve been trying to help you forget that,” I told him. “But why look at all? There must be a hundred thousand valleys on Ganymede that nobody has looked at. Are you in the real estate business?” It didn’t appeal to me. There is something that gets you about virgin soil on Ganymede; I wanted to stay in sight of camp. It was quiet as a library–quieter. On Earth there is always some sound, even in the desert. After a while the stillness and the bare rocks and the ice and the craters get on my nerves.

“Come on! Don’t be a sissyl” he answered, and started climbing.

The slot did not lead to another valley; it led into a sort of corridor in the hills. One wall was curiously flat, as if it had been built that way on purpose. We went along it a way, and I was ready to turn back and had stopped to call to Hank, who had climbed the loose rock on the other side to get a picture. As I turned, my eye caught some color and I moved up to see what it was. It was the crystals.

I stared at them and they seemed to stare back. I called, “Hey! Hank! Come here on the bounce!”

“What’s up?”

“Come here! Here’s something worth taking a picture of.”

He scrambled down and joined me. After a bit he let out his breath and whispered, “Well, I’ll be fried on Friday!”

Hank got busy with his camera. I never saw such crystals, not even stalactites in caves. They were six-sided, except a few that were three-sided and some that were twelve-sided. They came anywhere from little squatty fellows no bigger than a button mushroom up to tall, slender stalks, knee high. Later on and further up we found some chest high.

They were not simple prisms; they branched and budded. But the thing that got you was the colors.

They were all colors and they changed color as you looked at them. We finally decided that they didn’t have any color at all; it was just refraction of light. At least Hank thought so.

He shot a full cartridge of pictures then said, “Come on. Let’s see where they come from.”

I didn’t want to. I was shaky from the climb and my right side was giving me fits every step I took. I guess I was dizzy, too; when I looked at the crystals they seemed to writhe around and I would have to blink my eyes to steady them.

But Hank had already started so I followed. The crystals seemed to keep to what would have been the water bed of the canyon, had it been spring. They seemed to need water. We came to a place where there was a drift of ice across the floor of the corridor –ancient ice, with a thin layer of last winter’s snow on top of it. The crystals had carved a passage right through it, a natural bridge of ice, and had cleared a space of several feet on each side of where they were growing, as well.

Hank lost his footing as we scrambled through and snatched at one of the crystals. It broke off with a sharp, clear note, like a silver bell. Hank straightened up and stood looking at his hand. There were parallel cuts across his palm and fingers. He stared at them stupidly. “That’ll teach you,” I said, and then got out a first-lid kit and bandaged it for him. When I had finished I said, “Now let’s go back.” “Shucks,” he said. “What’s a few little cuts? Come

I said, “Look, Hank, I want to go back. I don’t feel good.” “What’s the matter?”

“Stomach ache.”

“You eat too much; that’s your trouble. The exercise will do you good.” “No, Hank. I’ve got to go back.”

He stared up the ravine and looked fretful. Finally he said, “Bill, I think I see where the crystals come from, not very far up. You wait here and let me take a look. Then I’ll come back and well head for camp. I won’t be gone long; honest I won’t.”

“Okay,” I agreed. He started up; shortly I followed him. I had had it pounded into my head as a Cub not to get separated in a strange country. After a bit I heard him shout. I looked up and saw him standing, facing a great dark hole in the cliff. I called out, “What’s the matter?”

He answered:

“GREAT JUMPING HOLY SMOKE!!!”-like that.

“What’s the matter?” I repeated irritably and hurried along until I was standing beside him.

The crystals continued up the place where we were. They came right to the cave mouth, but did not go in; they formed a solid dense thicket across the threshold. Lying across the floor of the ravine, as if it had been tumbled there by an upheaval like the big quake, was a flat rock, a monolith, Stonehenge size. You could see where it had broken off the cliff, uncovering the hole. The plane of cleavage was as sharp and smooth as anything done by the ancient Egyptians.

But that wasn’t what we were looking at; we were looking into the hole.

It was dark inside, but diffused light, reflected off the canyon floor and the far wall, filtered inside. My eyes began to adjust and I could see what Hank was staring at, what he had exploded about.

There were things in there and they weren’t natural

I couldn’t have told you what sort of things because they were like nothing I had ever seen before in my life, or seen pictures of–or heard of. How can you describe what you’ve never seen before and have no words for? Shucks, you can’t even see a thing properly the first time you see it; your eye doesn’t take in the pattern.

But I could see this: they weren’t rocks, they weren’t plants, they weren’t animals. They were made things, man made–well, maybe not “man” made, but not things that just happen, either.

I wanted very badly to get up close to them and see what they were. For the moment, I forgot I was sick. So did Hank. As usual he said, “Come onl Let’s go!”

But I said, “How?”

“Why, we just–” He stopped and took another look. “Well, let’s see, we go around– No. Hmm … Bill, we will have to bust up some of those crystals and go right through the middle. There’s no other way to get in.”

I said, “Isn’t one chopped up hand enough for you?”

“I’ll bust ’em with a rock. It seems a shame; they are so pretty, but that’s what I’ll have to do.”

“I don’t think you can bust those big ones. Besides that, I’ll give you two to one that they are sharp enough to cut through your boots.”

“I’ll chance it.” He found a chunk of rock and made an experiment; I was right on both counts. Hank stopped and looked the situation over, whistling softly. “Bill–“

“Yeah?”

“See that little ledge over the opening?” “What about it?”

“It comes out to the left further than the crystals do. I’m going to pile rock up high enough for us to reach it, then we can go along it and drop down right in front of the cave mouth. The crystals don’t come that close.”

I looked it over and decided it would work. “But how do we get back?”

“We can pile up some of that stuff we can see inside and shinny up again. At the very worst I can boost you up on my shoulders and then you can reach down your belt to me, or something.”

If I had my wits about me, maybe I would have protested. But we tried it and it worked–worked right up to the point where I was hanging by my fingers from the ledge over the cave mouth.

I felt a stabbing pain in my side and let go.

I came to with Hank shaking me. “Let me alone!” I growled.

“You knocked yourself out,” he said. “I didn’t know you were so clumsy.” I didn’t answer. I just gathered my knees up to my stomach and closed my eyes.

Hank shook me again. “Don’t you want to see what’s in here?”

I kicked at him. “I don’t want to see the Queen of Sheba! Can’t you see I’m sick?” I closed my eyes again.

I must have passed out. When I woke up, Hank was sitting Turk fashion in front of me, with my torch in his hand. “You’ve been asleep a long time, fellow,” he said gently. “Feel any better?”

“Not much.”

‘Try to pull yourself together and come along with me. You’ve got to see this, Bill. You won’t believe it. This is the greatest discovery since–well, since– Never mind; Columbus was a piker. We’re famous, Bill.”

“You may be famous,” I said. “I’m sick.” “Where does it hurt?”

“All over. My stomach is hard as a rock–a rock with a toothache.” “Bill,” he said seriously, “have you ever had your appendix out?” “No.”

“Hmmm … maybe you should have had it out.” “Well, this is a fine time to tell me!”

“Take it easy.”

“Take it easy, my foot!” I got up on one elbow, my head swimming. “Hank, listen to me. You’ve got to get back to camp and tell them. Have them send a tractor for me.”

“Look, Bill,” he said gently, “you know there isn’t anything like a tractor at camp.”

I tried to struggle with the problem but it was too much for me. My brain was fuzzy. “Well, have them bring a stretcher, at least,” I said peevishly and lay down again.

Some time later I felt him fumbling around with my clothes. I tried to push him away, then I felt something very cold on me. I took a wild swing at him; it didn’t connect.

“Steady,” he said. “I have found some ice. Don’t squirm around or you’ll knock off the pack.” “I don’t want it.”

“You’ve got to have it. You keep that ice pack in place until we get out of here and you may live to be hanged, yet.”

I was too feeble to resist. I lay back down and closed my eyes again. When I opened my eyes again, I was amazed to feel better. Instead of feeling ready to die, I merely felt awful. Hank wasn’t around; I called to him. When he didn’t answer at once I felt panicky.

Then he came trotting up, waving the torch. “I thought you had gone,” I said.

“No. To tell the truth, I can’t get out of here. I can’t get back up to the ledge and I can’t get over the crystals. I tried it.” He held up one boot; it was in

shreds and there was blood on it.

“Hurt yourself?” “I’ll live.”

“I wonder,” I answered. “Nobody knows we are here–and you say we can’t get out. Looks like we starve. Not that I give a hoot.” ‘Speaking of that,” he said. “I saved you some of our lunch. I’m afraid I didn’t leave much; you were asleep a long, long time.” “Don’t mention food!” I retched and grabbed at my side.

“Sorry. But look–I didn’t say we couldn’t get out” “But you did.”

“No, I said I couldn’t get out.” “What’s the difference?”

“Uh, never mind. But I think we’ll get out. It was what you said about getting a tractor–” “Tractor? Are you out of your head?”

“Skip it,” Bill answered. “There is a sort of tractor thing back there–or more like a scaffolding, maybe.” “Make up your mind.”

“Call it a wagon. I think I can get it out, at least across the crystals. We could use it as a bridge.” “Well, roll it out.”

“It doesn’t roll. It, uh-well, it walks.”

I tried to get up. “This I got to see.”

“Just move over out of the way of the door.”

I managed to get to my feet, with Hank helping me. “I’m coming along.” “Want the ice pack changed?”

“Later, maybe.” Hank took me back and showed me. I don’t know how to describe the walker wagon-maybe you’ve seen pictures since. If a centipede were a dinosaur and made of metal to boot, it would be a walker wagon. The body of it was a sort of trough and it was supported by thirty-eight legs, nineteen on a side.

“That,” I said, “is the craziest contraption I ever laid eyes on. You’ll never shove it out the door.”

“Wait until you see,” he advised. “And if you think this is crazy, you should see the other things in here.” “Such as?”

“Bill, you know what I think this place is? I think it’s a hangar for a space ship.”

“Huh? Don’t be silly; space ships don’t have hangars.”

“This one has.”

“You mean you sawa space ship in here?”

“Well, I don’t know. It’s not like any I ever saw before, but if it’s not a space ship, I don’t know what it is good for.” I wanted to go see, but Hank objected. “Another time, Bill; we’ve got to get back to camp. We’re late as it is.”

I didn’t put up any fight. My side was paining me again, from the walk. “Okay, what happens next?”

“Like this.” He led me around to the end of the contraption; the trough came nearly down to the floor in back. Hank helped me get inside, told me to lie down, and went up to the other end. ‘The guy that built this,” he said, “must have been a hump-backed midget with four arms. Hang on.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” I asked.

“I moved it about six feet before; then I lost my nerve. Abracadabra! Hold onto your hat!” He poked a finger deep into a hole.

The thing began to move, silently, gently, without any fuss. When we came out into the sunshine, Hank pulled his finger out of the hole. I sat up. The thing was two thirds out of the cave and the front end was beyond the crystals.

I sighed. “You made it, Hank, Let’s get going. If I had some more ice on my side I think I could walk.” “Wait a second,” he said. “I want to try something. There are holes here I haven’t stuck a finger in yet.” “Leave well enough alone.”

Instead of answering he tried another hole. The machine backed up suddenly. “Woopsl” he said, jerked his finger out, and jabbed it back where it had been before. He left it there until he regained what we had lost.

He tried other holes more cautiously. At last he found one which caused the machine to rear up its front end slightly and swing it to the left, like a caterpillar. “Now we are in business,” he said happily. “I can steer it.” We started down the canyon.

Hank was not entirely correct in thinking he could guide it. It was more like guiding a horse than a machine–or perhaps more like guiding one of those new groundmobiles with the semi-automatic steering.

The walker wagon came to the little natural bridge of ice through which the crystals passed and stopped of itself. Hank tried to get it to go through the opening, which was large enough; it would have none of it. The front end cast around like a dog sniffing, then eased gradually up hill and around the ice.

It stayed level; apparently it could adjust its legs, like the fabulous hillside snee.

When Hank came to the ice flow we had crossed on the way up to the notch, he stopped it and gave me a fresh ice pack. Apparently it did not object to ice in itself, but simply refused to go through holes, for when we started up again, it crossed the little glacier, slowly and cautiously, but steadily.

We headed on toward camp. “This,” Hank announced happily, “is the greatest cross-country, rough-terrain vehicle ever built. I wish I knew what makes it go. If I had the patent on this thing, I’d be rich.”

“It’s yours; you found it.”

“It doesn’t really belong to me.”

“Hank,” I answered, “you don’t really think the owner is going to come back looking for it, do you?”

He got a very odd look. “No, I don’t, Bill. Say, Bill, uh, how long ago do you think this thing was put in there?”

“I wouldn’t even want to guess.”

There was only one tent at the camp site. As we came up to it, somebody came out and waited for us. It was Sergei. “Where have you guys been?” he asked. “And where in Kingdom Come did you steal that?

“And what is it?” he added.

We did our best to bring him up to date, and presently he did the same for us. They had searched for us as long as they could, then Paul had been forced to move back to camp number one to keep the date with the Jitterbug. He had left Sergei behind to fetch us when we showed up. “He left a note for you,” Sergei added, digging it out

It read:

“Dear Pen Pals,

I am sorry to go off and leave you crazy galoots but you know the schedule as well as I do. I would stay behind myself to herd you home, but your pal Sergei insists that it is his privilege. Every time I try to reason with him he crawls further back into his hole, bares his teeth, and growls.

As soon as you get this, get your chubby little legs to moving in the direction of camp number one. Run, do not walk. We’ll hold the Jitterbug, but you knowhowdear old Aunt Hattie feels about keeping her schedule. She isn’t going to like it if you are late.

When I see you, I intend to beat your ears down around your shoulders. Good luck,

P. du M.

P. S. to Doctor Slop: I took care of your accordion.”

When we had finished reading it Sergei said, “I want to hear more about what you found–about eight times more. But not now; we’ve got to tear over to camp number one. Hank, you think Bill can’t walk it?”

I answered for myself, an emphatic “no.” The excitement was wearing off and I was feeling worse again. “Hmm–Hank, do you think that mobile junk yard will carry us over there?”

“I think it will carry us any place.” Hank patted it. “How fast? The Jitterbug has already grounded.” “Are you sure?” asked Hank.

“I saw its trail in the sky at least three hours ago.” “Let’s get going!”

I don’t remember much about the trip. They stopped once in the pass, and packed me with ice again. The next thing I knew I was awakened by hearing Sergei shout, “There’s the Jitterbug! I can see it.”

“Jitterbug, here we come,” answered Hank. I sat up and looked, too.

We were coming down the slope, not five miles from it, when flame burst from its tail and it climbed for the sky. Hank groaned. I lay back down and closed my eyes.

I woke up again when the contraption stopped. Paul was there, hands on his hips, staring at us. “About time you birds got home,” he announced. “But where did you find that?

“Paul,” Hank said urgently, “Bill is very sick.”

“Oh, oh!” Paul swung up and into the walker and made no more questions then. A moment later he had my belly bared and was shoving a thumb into that spot between the belly button and the hip bone. “Does that hurt?” he asked.

I was too weak to slug him. He gave me a pill.

I took no further part in events for a while, but what had happened was this: Captain Hattie had waited, at Paul’s urgent insistence, for a couple of hours, and then had announced that she had to blast. She had a schedule to keep with the Covered Wagon and she had no intention, she said, of keeping eight thousand people waiting for the benefit of two. Hank and I could play Indian if we liked; we couldn’t play hob with her schedule.

There was nothing Paul could do, so he sent the rest back and waited for us.

But I didn’t hear this at the time. I was vaguely aware that we were in the walker wagon, travelling, and I woke up twice when I was repacked with ice, but the whole episode is foggy. They travelled east, with Hank driving and Paul navigating–by the seat of his pants. Some long dreamy time later they reached a pioneer camp surveying a site over a hundred miles away–and from there Paul radioed for help.

Whereupon the Jitterbug came and got us. I remember the landing back at Leda–that is, I remember somebody saying, “Hurry, there! We’ve got a boy with a burst appendix.”

5.        Home

There was considerable excitement over what we had found–and there still is–but I didn’t see any of it. I was busy playing games with the Pearly Gates. I guess I have Dr. Archibald to thank for still being here. And Hank. And Sergei. And Paul. And Captain Hattie. And some nameless party, who lived somewhere, a long time ago, whose shape and race I still don’t know, but who designed the perfect machine for traveling overland through rough country.

I thanked everybody but him. They all came to see me in the hospital, even Captain Hattie, who growled at me, then leaned over and kissed me on the cheek as she left. I was so surprised I almost bit her.

The Schultzes came, of course, and Mama cried over me and Papa gave me an apple and Gretchen could hardly talk, which isn’t like her. And Molly brought the twins down to see me and vice versa.

The Leda daily Planet interviewed me. They wanted to know whether or not we thought the things we found were made by men? Now that is a hard question to answer and smarter people than myself have worked on it since.

What is a man?

The things Hank and I–and the Project Jove scientists who went later–found in that cave couldn’t have been made by men–not men like us. The walker wagon was the simplest thing they found. Most of the things they still haven’t found out the use for. Nor have they figured out what the creatures looked like–no pictures.

That seems surprising, but the scientists concluded they didn’t have eyes–not eyes like ours, anyhow. So they didn’t use pictures.

The very notion of a “picture” seems pretty esoteric when you think it over. The Venetians don’t use pictures, nor the Martians. Maybe we are the only race in the universe that thought up that way of recording things.

So they weren’t “men”–not like us.

But they were men in the real sense of the word, even though I don’t doubt that I would run screaming away if I met one in a dark alley. The important thing, as Mr. Seymour would say, they had–they controlled their environment. They weren’t animals, pushed around and forced to accept what

nature handed them; they took nature and bent it to their will.

I guess they were men.

The crystals were one of the oddest things about it and I didn’t have any opinions on that. Somehow, those crystals were connected with that cave– or space ship hangar, or whatever it was. Yet they couldn’t or wouldn’t go inside the cave.

Here was another point that the follow-up party from Project Jove recorded: that big unwieldly walker wagon came all the way down that narrow canyon-yet it did not step on a single crystal. Hank must be a pretty good driver. He says he’s not that good.

Don’t ask me. I don’t understand everything that goes on in the universe. It’s a big place.

I had lots of time to think before they let me out of the hospital–and lots to think about. I thought about my coming trip to Earth, to go back to school I had missed the Covered Wagon, of course, but that didn’t mean anything; I could take the Mayflower three weeks later. But did I want to go? It was a close thing to decide.

One thing I was sure of: I was going to take those merit badge tests as soon as I was out of bed. I had put it off too long. A close brush with the hereafter reminds you that you don’t have forever to get things done.

But going back to school? That was another matter. For one thing, as Dad told me, the council had lost its suit with the Commission; Dad couldn’t use his Earthside assets.

And there was the matter that Paul had talked about the night he had to let his hair down–the coming war.

Did Paul know what he was talking about? If so, was I letting it scare me out? I honestly didn’t think so; Paul had said that it was not less than forty years away. I wouldn’t be Earthside more than four or five years–and, besides, how could you get scared of anything that far in the future?

I had been through the Quake and the reconstruction; I didn’t really think I’d ever be scared of anything again.

I had a private suspicion that, supposing there was a war, I’d go join up; I wouldn’t be running away from it. Silly, maybe.

No, I wasn’t afraid of the War, but it was on my mind. Why? I finally doped it out. When Paul called I asked him about it. “See here, Paul–this war you were talking about: when Ganymede reaches the state that Earth has gotten into, does that mean war here, too? Not now–a few centuries from now.”

He smiled rather sadly. “By then we may know enough to keep from getting into that shape. At least we can hope.” He got a far-away look and added, “A new colony is always a new hope.”

I liked that way of putting it. “A new hope–” Once I heard somebody call a new baby that.

I still didn’t have the answer about going back when Dad called on me one Sunday night. I put it up to him about the cost of the fare. “I know the land is technically mine, George–but it’s too much of a drain on you two.”

“Contrariwise,” said George, “well get by and that’s what savings are for. Molly is for it. We will be sending the twins back for school, you know.” “Even so, I don’t feel right about it. And what real use is there in it, George? I don’t need a fancy education. I’ve been thinking about Callisto: there’s

a brand new planet not touched yet with great opportunities for a man in on the ground floor. I could get a job with the atmosphere expedition–Paul

would put in a word for me–and grow up with the project. I might be chief engineer of the whole planet some day.”

“Not unless you learn more about thermodynamics than you do now, you won’t be!” “Huh?”

“Engineers don’t just ‘grow up’; they study. They go to school.”

“Don’t I study? Ain’t I attending two of your classes right now? I can get to be an engineer here; I don’t have to drag back half a billion miles for it.”

“Fiddlesticks! It takes discipline to study. You haven’t even taken your merit badge tests. You’ve let your Eagle Scoutship lapse.”

I wanted to explain that taking tests and studying for tests were two different things–that I had studied. But I couldn’t seem to phrase it right.

George stood up. “See here, Son, I’m going to put it to you straight. Never mind about being chief engineer of a planet; these days even a farmer needs the best education he can get. Without it he’s just a country bumpkin, a stumbling peasant, poking seeds into the ground and hoping a miracle will make them grow.

I want you to go back to Earth and get the best that Earth has to offer. I want you to have a degree with prestige behind it–M.I.T., Harvard, the Sorbonne. Some place noted for scholarship. Take the time to do that and then do anything you want to do. Believe me, it will pay.”

I thought about it and answered, “I guess you are right, George.”

Dad stood up. “Well, make up your mind. I’ll have to hurry now for the bus, or I’ll be hoofing it back to the farm. See you tomorrow.” “Good night, George.”

I lay awake and thought about it. After a while, Mrs. Dinsmore, the wing nurse, came in, turned out my light, and said goodnight. But I didn’t go to sleep.

Dad was right, I knew. I didn’t want to be an ignoramus. Furthermore, I had seen the advantage held by men with fancy degrees–first crack at the jobs, fast promotion. Okay, I’d get me one of those sheepskins, then come back and–well, go to Callisto, maybe, or perhaps prove a new parcel of land. I’d go and I’d come back.

Nevertheless I couldn’t get to sleep. After a while I glanced at my new watch and saw that it was nearly midnight–dawn in a few minutes. I decided that I wanted to see it It might be the last time I’d be up and around at midnight Sunday for a long, long time.

I scouted the corridor; Old Lady Dinsmore wasn’t in sight. I ducked outside.

The Sun was just barely below the horizon; north of me I could see its first rays touching the topmost antenna of the power station, miles away on Pride Peak. It was very still and very beautiful. Overhead old Jupiter was in half phase, bulging and orange and grand. To the west of it Io was just coming out of shadow; it passed from black to cherry red to orange as I watched.

I wondered how I would feel to be back on Earth? How would it feel to weigh three times as much as I did now? I didn’t feel heavy; I felt just right. How would it feel to swim in that thick dirty soup they use for air?

How would it feel to have nobody but ground hogs to talk to? How could I talk to a girl who wasn’t a colonial, who had never been off Earth higher than a copter hop? Sissies. Take Gretchen, now–there was a girl who could kill a chicken and have it in the pot while an Earthside girl would still be squealing.

The top of the Sun broke above the horizon and caught the snow on the peaks of the Big Rock Candy Mountains, tinting it rosy against a pale green sky. I began to be able to see the country around me. It was a new, hard, clean place–not like California with its fifty, sixty million people falling over each other. It was my kind’ of a place–it was my place.

The deuce with Caltech and Cambridge and those fancy schools! I’d show Dad it didn’t take ivied halls to get an education. Yes, and I’d pass those tests and be an Eagle again, first thing.

Hadn’t Andrew Johnson, that American President, learned to read while he was working? Even after he was married? Give us time; we’d have as good scientists and scholars here as anywhere.

The long slow dawn went on and the light caught Kneiper’s cut west of me, outlining it. I was reminded of the night we had struggled through it in the storm. As Hank put it, there was one good thing about colonial life–it sorted out the men from the boys.

“I have lived and worked with men.” The phrase rang through my head. Rhysling? Kipling, maybe. I had lived and worked with men!

The Sun was beginning to reach the roof tops. It spread across Laguna Serenidad, turning it from black to purple to blue. This was my planet, this

was my home and I knew that I would never leave it

Mrs. Dinsmore came bustling out to the door and spotted me. “Why, the very idea!” she scolded. “You get back where you belong!” I smiled at her. “I am where I belong. And I’m going to stay!”

The End

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Have spacesuit – will travel (full text) by Robert Heinlein

“Have Spacesuit – Will Travel” is a great story that is in the same class as “Farmer in the Sky”. Which are both fictional stories that are perhaps some of his best. All have a great sense of awe and adventure and excitement about space and exploration that existed back in the 1950’s and 1960’s.

Have Spacesuit – Will Travel

Chapter 1

You see, I had this space suit. How it happened was this way:

“Dad,” I said, “I want to go to the Moon.”

“Certainly,” he answered and looked back at his book. It was Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat, which he must know by heart.  I said, “Dad, please! I’m serious.”

This time he closed the book on a finger and said gently, “I said it was all right. Go ahead.” “Yes … but how?”

“Eh?” He looked mildly surprised. “Why, that’s your problem, Clifford.”

Dad was like that. The time I told him I wanted to buy a bicycle he said, “Go right ahead,” without even glancing up-so I had gone to the money basket in the dining room, intending to take enough for a bicycle. But there had been only eleven dollars and forty-three cents in it, so about a thousand miles of mowed lawns later I bought a bicycle. I hadn’t said anymore to Dad because if money wasn’t in the basket, it wasn’t anywhere; Dad didn’t bother with banks-just the money basket and one next to it marked “UNCLE SAM,” the contents of which he bundled up and mailed to the government once a year. This caused the Internal Revenue Service considerable headache and once they sent a man to remonstrate with him.

First the man demanded, then he pleaded. “But, Dr. Russell, we know your background. You’ve no excuse for not keeping proper records.” “But I do,” Dad told him. “Up here.” He tapped his forehead.

“The law requires written records.”

“Look again,” Dad advised him. “The law can’t even require a man to read and write. More coffee?”

The man tried to get Dad to pay by check or money order. Dad read him the fine print on a dollar bill, the part about “legal tender for all debts, public and private.” In a despairing effort to get something out of the trip he asked Dad please not to fill in the space marked “occupation” with “Spy.”

“Why not?”

“What? Why, because you aren’t-and it upsets people.” “Have you checked with the F.B.I.?”

“Eh? No.”

“They probably wouldn’t answer. But you’ve been very polite. I’ll mark it ‘Unemployed Spy.’ Okay?”

The tax man almost forgot his brief case. Nothing fazed Dad, he meant what he said, he wouldn’t argue and he never gave in. So when he told me I could go to the Moon but the means were up to me, he meant just that. I could go tomorrow-provided I could wangle a billet in a space ship.

But he added meditatively, “There must be a number of ways to get to the Moon, son. Better check ‘em all. Reminds me of this passage I’m reading. They’re trying to open a tin of pineapple and Harris has left the can opener back in London. They try several ways.” He started to read aloud and I sneaked out-I had heard that passage five hundred times. Well, three hundred.

I went to my workshop in the barn and thought about ways. One way was to go to the Air Academy at Colorado Springs-if I got an appointment, if I graduated, if I managed to get picked for the Federation Space Corps, there was a chance that someday I would be ordered to Lunar Base, or at least one of the satellite stations.

Another way was to study engineering, get a job in jet propulsion, and buck for a spot that would get me sent to the Moon. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of engineers had been to the Moon, or were still there-for all sorts of work: electronics, cryogenics, metallurgy, ceramics, air conditioning, as well as rocket engineering.

Oh, yes! Out of a million engineers a handful got picked for the Moon. Shucks, I rarely got picked even playing post office.

Or a man could be an M.D., or a lawyer, or geologist, or toolmaker, and wind up on the Moon at a fat salary-provided they wanted him and nobody else. I didn’t care about salary-but how do you arrange to be number one in your specialty?

And there was the straightforward way: trundle in a wheelbarrow of money and buy a ticket.

This I would never manage-I had eighty-seven cents at that moment -but it had caused me to think about it steadily. Of the boys in our school half admitted that they wanted to space, half pretended not to care, knowing how feeble the chances were-plus a handful of creeps who wouldn’t leave Earth for any reason. But we talked about it and some of us were determined to go. I didn’t break into a rash until American Express and Thos. Cook & Son announced tourist excursions.

I saw their ads in National Geographic while waiting to have my teeth cleaned. After that I never was the same.

The idea that any rich man could simply lay cash on the line and go was more than I could stand. I just had to go. I would never be able to pay for it-or, at least, that was so far in the future there was no use thinking about it. So what could I do to be sent?

You see stories about boys, poor-but-honest, who go to the top because they’re smarter than anyone in the county, maybe the state. But they’re not talking about me. I was in the top quarter of my graduating class but they do not give scholarships to M.I.T. for that-not from Centerville High. I am stating a fact; our high school isn’t very good. It’s great to go to-we’re league champions in basketball and our square-dance team is state runner-up and we have a swell sock hop every Wednesday. Lots of school spirit.

But not much studying.

The emphasis is on what our principal, Mr. Hanley, calls “preparation for life” rather than on trigonometry. Maybe it does prepare you for life; it certainly doesn’t prepare you for CalTech.   I didn’t find this out myself. Sophomore year I brought home a questionnaire cooked up by our group project in “Family Living” in social studies. One question read: “How is your family

council organized?”

At dinner I said, “Dad, how is our family council organized?” Mother said, “Don’t disturb your father, dear.”

Dad said, “Eh? Let me see that.”

He read it, then told me to fetch my textbooks. I had not brought them home, so he sent me to school to get them. Fortunately the building was open-rehearsals for the Fall Blow-Out. Dad rarely gave orders but when he did he expected results.

I had a swell course that semester-social study, commercial arithmetic, applied English (the class had picked “slogan writing” which was fun), handicrafts (we were building sets for the Blow-Out), and gym-which was basketball practice for me; I wasn’t tall enough for first team but a reliable substitute gets his varsity letter his senior year. All in all, I was doing well in school and knew it.

Dad read all my textbooks that night; he is a fast reader. In social study I reported that our family was an informal democracy; it got by-the class was arguing whether the chairmanship of  a council should rotate or be elective, and whether a grandparent living in the home was eligible. We decided that a grandparent was a member but should not be chairman, then we formed committees to draw up a constitution for an ideal family organization, which we would present to our families as the project’s findings.

Dad was around school a good bit the next few days, which worried me -when parents get overactive they are always up to something.

The following Saturday evening Dad called me into his study. He had a stack of textbooks on his desk and a chart of Centerville High School’s curriculum, from American Folk Dancing to Life Sciences. Marked on it was my course, not only for that semester but for junior and senior years the way my faculty advisor and I had planned it.

Dad stared at me like a gentle grasshopper and said mildly, “Kip, do you intend to go to college?” “Huh? Why, certainly, Dad!”

“With what?”

I hesitated. I knew it cost money. While there had been times when dollar bills spilled out of the basket onto the floor, usually it wouldn’t take long to count what was in it. “Uh, maybe I’ll get a scholarship. Or I could work my way.”

He nodded. “No doubt … if you want to. Money problems can always be solved by a man not frightened by them. But when I said, ‘With what?’ I was talking about up here.” He tapped his skull.

I simply stared. “Why, I’ll graduate from high school, Dad. That’ll get me into college.”

“So it will. Into our State University, or the State Aggie, or State Normal. But, Kip, do you know that they are flunking out 40 per cent of each freshman class?” “I wouldn’t flunk!”

“Perhaps not. But you will if you tackle any serious subject-engineering, or science, or pre-med. You would, that is to say, if your preparation were based on this.” He waved a hand at the curriculum.

I felt shocked. “Why, Dad, Center is a swell school.” I remembered things they had told us in P.T.A. Auxiliary. “It’s run along the latest, most scientific lines, approved by psychologists, and-“

“-and paying excellent salaries,” he interrupted, “for a staff highly trained in modern pedagogy. Study projects emphasize practical human problems to orient the child in democratic social living, to fit him for the vital, meaningful tests of adult life in our complex modern culture. Excuse me, son; I’ve talked with Mr. Hanley. Mr. Hanley is sincere-and to achieve these noble purposes we are spending more per student than is any other state save California and New York.”

“Well … what’s wrong with that?” “What’s a dangling participle?”

I didn’t answer. He went on, “Why did Van Buren fail of re-election? How do you extract the cube root of eighty-seven?”

Van Buren had been a president; that was all I remembered. But I could answer the other one. “If you want a cube root, you look in a table in the back of the book.”

Dad sighed. “Kip, do you think that table was brought down from on high by an archangel?” He shook his head sadly. “It’s my fault, not yours. I should have looked into this years ago-but I had assumed, simply because you liked to read and were quick at figures and clever with your hands, that you were getting an education.”

“You think I’m not?”

“I know you are not. Son, Centerville High is a delightful place, well equipped, smoothly administered, beautifully kept. Not a ‘blackboard jungle,’ oh, no!-I think you kids love the place. You should. But this-” Dad slapped the curriculum chart angrily. “Twaddle! Beetle tracking! Occupational therapy for morons!”

I didn’t know what to say. Dad sat and brooded. At last he said, “The law declares that you must attend school until you are eighteen or have graduated from high school.” “Yes, sir.”

“The school you are in is a waste of time. The toughest course we can pick won’t stretch your mind. But it’s either this school, or send you away.”  I said, “Doesn’t that cost a lot of money?”

He ignored my question. “I don’t favor boarding schools, a teen-ager belongs with his family. Oh, a tough prep school back east can drill you so that you can enter Stanford, or Yale, or any of the best-but you can pick up false standards, too-nutty ideas about money and social position and the right tailor. It took me years to get rid of ones I acquired that way. Your mother

and I did not pick a small town for your boyhood unpurposefully. So you’ll stay in Centerville High.”

I looked relieved.

“Nevertheless you intend to go to college. Do you intend to become a professional man? Or will you look for snap courses in more elaborate ways to make bayberry candles? Son, your life is yours, to do with as you wish. But if you have any thought of going to a good university and studying anything of importance, then we must consider how to make best use of your next three years.”

“Why, gosh, Dad, of course I want to go to a good-“ “See me when you’ve thought it over. Good night.”

I did for a week. And, you know, I began to see that Dad was right. Our project in “Family Living” was twaddle. What did those kids know about running a family? Or Miss Finchley?- unmarried and no kids. The class decided unanimously that every child should have a room of his own, and be given an allowance “to teach him to handle money.” Great stuff … but how about the Quinlan family, nine kids in a five-room house? Let’s not be foolish.

Commercial arithmetic wasn’t silly but it was a waste of time. I read the book through the first week; after that I was bored.

Dad switched me to algebra, Spanish, general science, English grammar and composition; the only thing unchanged was gym. I didn’t have it too tough catching up; even those courses were watered down. Nevertheless, I started to learn, for Dad threw a lot of books at me and said, “Clifford, you would be studying these if you were not in overgrown kindergarten. If you soak up what is in them, you should be able to pass College Entrance Board Examinations. Possibly.”

After that he left me alone; he meant it when he said that it was my choice. I almost bogged down-those books were hard, not the predigested pap I got in school. Anybody who thinks that studying Latin by himself is a snap should try it.

I got discouraged and nearly quit-then I got mad and leaned into it. After a while I found that Latin was making Spanish easier and vice versa. When Miss Hernandez, my Spanish teacher, found out I was studying Latin, she began tutoring me. I not only worked my way through Virgil, I learned to speak Spanish like a Mexicano.

Algebra and plane geometry were all the math our school offered; I went ahead on my own with advanced algebra and solid geometry and trigonometry and might have stopped so far as College Boards were concerned-but math is worse than peanuts. Analytical geometry seems pure Greek until you see what they’re driving at-then, if you know algebra, it bursts on you  and you race through the rest of the book. Glorious!

I had to sample calculus and when I got interested in electronics I needed vector analysis. General science was the only science course the school had and pretty general it was, too- about Sunday supplement level. But when you read about chemistry and physics you want to do it, too. The barn was mine and I had a chem lab and a darkroom and an electronics bench and, for a while, a ham station. Mother was perturbed when I blew out the windows and set fire to the barn-just a small fire-but Dad was not. He simply suggested that I not manufacture explosives in a frame building.

When I took the College Boards my senior year I passed them.

It was early March my senior year that I told Dad I wanted to go to the Moon. The idea had been made acute by the announcement of commercial flights but I had been “space happy” ever since the day they announced that the Federation Space Corps had established a lunar base. Or earlier. I told Dad about my decision because I felt that he would know the answer. You see. Dad always found ways to do anything he decided to do.

When I was little we lived lots of places-Washington, New York/Los Angeles, I don’t know where-usually in hotel apartments. Dad was always flying somewhere and when he was home

there were visitors; I never saw him much. Then we moved to Centerville and he was always home, his nose in a book or working at his desk. When people wanted to see him they had  to come to him. I remember once, when the money basket was empty, Dad told Mother that “a royalty was due.” I hung around that day because I had never seen a king (I was eight) and when a visitor showed up I was disappointed because he didn’t wear a crown. There was money in the basket the next day so I decided that he had been incognito (I was reading The Little Lame Prince) and had tossed Dad a purse of gold-it was at least a year before I found out that a “royalty” could be money from a patent or a book or business stock, and some of  the glamour went out of life. But this visitor, though not king, thought he could make Dad do what he wanted rather than what Dad wanted:

“Dr. Russell, I concede that Washington has an atrocious climate. But you will have air-conditioned offices.” “With clocks, no doubt. And secretaries. And soundproofing.”

“Anything you want. Doctor.”

“The point is, Mr. Secretary, I don’t want them. This household has no clocks. Nor calendars. Once I had a large income and a larger ulcer; I now have a small income and no ulcer. I stay here.”

“But the job needs you.”

“The need is not mutual. Do have some more meat loaf.”

Since Dad did not want to go to the Moon, the problem was mine. I got down college catalogs I had collected and started listing engineering schools. I had no idea how I could pay tuition or even eat-but the first thing was to get myself accepted by a tough school with a reputation.

If not, I could enlist in the Air Force and try for an appointment. If I missed, I could become an enlisted specialist in electronics; Lunar Base used radar and astrar techs. One way or another, I was going.

Next morning at breakfast Dad was hidden behind the New York Times while Mother read the Herald-Trib. I had the Centerville Clarion but it’s fit only for wrapping salami. Dad looked over his paper at me. “Clifford, here’s something in your line.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t grunt; that is an uncouth privilege of seniors. This.” He handed it to me. It was a soap ad.

It announced that tired old gimmick, a gigantic super-colossal prize contest. This one promised a thousand prizes down to a last hundred, each of which was a year’s supply of Skyway Soap.

Then I spilled cornflakes in my lap. The first prize was- “-AN ALL-EXPENSE TRIP TO THE MOON!!!”

That’s the way it read, with three exclamation points-only to me there were a dozen, with bursting bombs and a heavenly choir.

Just complete this sentence in twenty-five words or less: “I use Skyway Soap because …” (And send in the usual soap wrapper or reasonable facsimile.)

There was more about”-joint management of American Express and Thos. Cook-” and “-with the cooperation of the United States Air Force-” and a list of lesser prizes. But all I saw, while milk and soggy cereal soaked my pants, was: “-TRIP TO THE MOON!!!”

First I went sky-high with excitement … then as far down with depression. I didn’t win contests-why, if I bought a box of Cracker Jack, I’d get one they forgot to put a prize in. I had been cured of matching pennies. If I ever-

“Stop it,” said Dad. I shut up.

“There is no such thing as luck; there is only adequate or inadequate preparation to cope with a statistical universe. Do you intend to enter this?” “Do I!”

“I assume that to be affirmative. Very well, make a systematic effort.”

I did and Dad was helpful-he didn’t just offer me more meat loaf. But he saw to it I didn’t go to pieces; I finished school and sent off applications for college and kept my job-I was working after school that semester at Charton’s Pharmacy-soda jerk, but also learning about pharmacy. Mr. Charton was too conscientious to let me touch anything but packaged items, but I learned-materia medica and nomenclature and what various antibiotics were for and why you had to be careful. That led into organic chemistry and biochemistry and he lent me Walker, Boyd and Asimov- biochemistry makes atomic physics look simple, but presently it begins to make sense.

Mr. Charton was an old widower and pharmacology was his life. He hinted that someone would have to carry on the pharmacy someday- some young fellow with a degree in pharmacy and devotion to the profession. He said that he might be able to help such a person get through school. If he had suggested that I could someday run the dispensary at Lunar Base, I might have taken the bait. I explained that I was dead set on spacing, and engineering looked like my one chance.

He didn’t laugh. He said I was probably right-but that I shouldn’t forget that wherever Man went, to the Moon, on Mars, or the farthest stars, pharmacists and dispensaries would go along. Then he dug out books for me on space medicine-Strughold and Haber and Stapp and others. “I once had ideas along that line. Kip,” he said quietly, “but now it’s too late.”

Even though Mr. Charton was not really interested in anything but drugs, we sold everything that drugstores sell, from bicycle tires to home permanent kits. Including soap, of course.

We were selling darned little Skyway Soap; Centerville is conservative about new brands-I’ll bet some of them made their own soap. But when I showed up for work that day I had to tell Mr. Charton about it. He dug out two dust-covered boxes and put them on the counter. Then he phoned his jobber in Springfield.

He really did right by me. He marked Skyway Soap down almost to cost and pushed it-and he almost always got the wrappers before he let the customer go. Me, I stacked a pyramid of Skyway Soap on each end of the fountain and every coke was accompanied by a spiel for good old Skyway, the soap that washes cleaner, is packed with vitamins, and improves your chances of Heaven, not to mention its rich creamy lather, finer ingredients, and refusal to take the Fifth Amendment. Oh, I was shameless! Anybody who got away without buying was deaf or fast on his feet.

If he bought soap without leaving the wrappers with me he was a magician. Adults I talked out of it; kids, if I had to, I paid a penny for each wrapper. If they brought in wrappers from around town, I paid a dime a dozen and threw in a cone. The rules permitted a contestant to submit any number of entries as long as each was written on a Skyway Soap wrapper or reasonable facsimile.

I considered photographing one and turning out facsimiles by the gross, but Dad advised me not to. “It is within the rules, Kip, but I’ve never yet known a skunk to be welcome at a picnic.” So I used soap. And I sent in wrappers with slogans:

“I use Skyway Soap because- it makes me feel so clean.”

highway or byway, there’s no soap like Skyway!” its quality is sky-high.”

it is pure as the Milky Way.”

it is pure as Interstellar Space.”

it leaves me fresh as a rain-swept sky.”

And so on endlessly, until I tasted soap in my dreams. Not just my own slogans either; Dad thought them up, and so did Mother and Mr. Charton. I kept a notebook and wrote them down in school or at work or in the middle of the night. I came home one evening and found that Dad had set up a card file for me and after that I kept them alphabetically to avoid repeating. A good thing, too, for toward the last I sent in as many as a hundred a day. Postage mounted, not to mention having to buy some wrappers.

Other kids in town were in the contest and probably some adults, but they didn’t have the production line I had. I’d leave work at ten o’clock, hurry home with the day’s slogans and wrappers, pick up more slogans from Dad and Mother, then use a rubber stamp on the inside of each wrapper: “I use Skyway Soap because-” with my name and address. As I typed, Dad filled out file cards. Each morning I mailed the bunch on my way to school.

I got laughed at but the adults most inclined to kid me were quickest to let me have their wrappers.

All but one, an oaf called “Ace” Quiggle. I shouldn’t class Ace as an adult; he was an over-age juvenile delinquent. I guess every town has at least one Ace. He hadn’t finished Centerville High, a distinction since Mr. Hanley believed in promoting everybody “to keep age groups together.” As far back as I remember Ace hung around Main Street, sometimes working, mostly not.

He specialized in “wit.” He was at our fountain one day, using up two dollars’ worth of space and time for one thirty-five-cent malt. I had just persuaded old Mrs. Jenkins to buy a dozen cakes and had relieved her of the wrappers. As she left, Ace picked one off my counter display and said, “You’re selling these. Space Cadet?”

“That’s right, Ace. You’ll never find such a bargain again.”

“You expect to go to the Moon, just selling soap, Captain? Or should I say ‘Commodore’? Yuk yuk yukkity yuk!” That’s how Ace laughed, like a comic strip. “I’m trying,” I said politely. “How about some?”

“You’re sure it’s good soap?” “Positive.”

“Well, I’ll tell you. Just to help you out-I’ll buy one bar.”

Aplunger. But this might be the winning wrapper. “Sure thing, Ace. Thanks a lot.” I took his money, he slipped the cake into his pocket and started to leave. “Just a second, Ace. The wrapper. Please?”

He stopped. “Oh, yes.” He took out the bar, peeled it, held up the wrapper. “You want this?” “Yes, Ace. Thanks.”

“Well, I’ll show you how to get the best use of it.” He reached across to the cigar lighter on the tobacco counter and set fire to it, lit a cigarette with it, let the wrapper bum almost to his fingers, dropped it and stepped on it.

Mr. Charton watched from the window of the dispensary.

Ace grinned. “Okay, Space Cadet?”

I was gripping the ice-cream scoop. But I answered, “Perfectly okay, Ace. It’s your soap.” Mr. Charton came out and said, “I’ll take the fountain, Kip. There’s a package to deliver.”

That was almost the only wrapper I missed. The contest ended May 1 and both Dad and Mr. Charton decided to stock up and cleaned out the last case in the store. It was almost eleven before I had them written up, then Mr. Charton drove me to Springfield to get them postmarked before midnight.

I had sent in five thousand seven hundred and eighty-two slogans. I doubt if Centerville was ever so scrubbed.

The results were announced on the Fourth of July. I chewed my nails to the elbows in those nine weeks. Oh, other things happened. I graduated and Dad and Mother gave me a watch and we paraded past Mr. Hanley and got our diplomas. It felt good, even though what Dad had persuaded me to learn beat what I learned at dear old Center six ways from zero. Before  that was Sneak Day and Class Honeymoon and Senior Prom and the Class Play and the Junior-Senior Picnic and all the things they do to keep the animals quiet. Mr. Charton let me off early if I asked, but I didn’t ask often as my mind wasn’t on it and I wasn’t going steady anyhow. I had been earlier in the year, but she-Elaine McMurty-wanted to talk boys and clothes and   I wanted to talk space and engineering so she put me back into circulation.

After graduation I worked for Mr. Charton full time. I still didn’t know how I was going to college. I didn’t think about it; I just dished sundaes and held my breath until the Fourth of July.

It was to be on television at 8 P.M. We had a TV-a black and white flatimage job-but it hadn’t been turned on in months; after I built it I lost interest. I dug it out, set it up in the living room and tested the picture. I killed a couple of hours adjusting it, then spent the rest of the day chewing nails. I couldn’t eat dinner. By seven-thirty I was in front of the set, not-watching a comedy team and fiddling with my file cards. Dad came in, looked sharply at me, and said, “Take a grip on yourself, Kip. Let me remind you again that the chances are against you.”

I gulped. “I know, Dad.”

“Furthermore, in the long run it won’t matter. Aman almost always gets what he wants badly enough. I am sure you will get to the Moon someday, one way or another.” “Yes, sir. I just wish they would get it over with.”

“They will. Coming, Emma?”

“Right away, dearest,” Mother called back. She came in, patted my hand and sat down. Dad settled back. “Reminds me of election nights.”

Mother said, “I’m glad you’re no longer up to your ears in that.” “Oh, come now, sweetheart, you enjoyed every campaign.” Mother sniffed.

The comics went back where comics go, cigarettes did a cancan, then dived into their packs while a soothing voice assured us that carcinogenous factors were unknown in Coronets, the safe, Safe, SAFE smoke with the true tobacco flavor. The program cut to the local station; we were treated to a thrilling view of Center Lumber & Hardware and I started pulling hairs out of the back of my hand.

The screen filled with soap bubbles; a quartet sang that this was the Skyway Hour, as if we didn’t know. Then the screen went blank and sound cut off and I swallowed my stomach. The screen lighted up with: “Network Difficulty-Do Not Adjust Your Sets.”

I yelped, “Oh, they can’t do that! They can’t!” Dad said, “Stop it, Clifford.”

I shut up. Mother said, “Now, dearest, he’s just a boy.”

Dad said, “He is not a boy; he is a man. Kip, how do you expect to face a firing squad calmly if this upsets you?” I mumbled; he said, “Speak up.” I said I hadn’t really planned on facing one.

“You may need to, someday. This is good practice. Try the Springfield channel; you may get a skip image.” I tried, but all I got was snow and the sound was like two cats in a sack. I jumped back to our local station.

“-jor General Bryce Gilmore, United States Air Force, our guest tonight, who will explain to us, later in this program, some hitherto unreleased pictures of Federation Lunar Base and the infant Luna City, the fastest growing little city on the Moon. Immediately after announcing the winners we will attempt a television linkage with Lunar Base, through the cooperation of the Space Corps of the-“

I took a deep breath and tried to slow my heartbeat, the way you steady down for a free-throw in a tie game. The gabble dragged on while celebrities were introduced, the contest rules were explained, an improbably sweet young couple explained to each other why they always used Skyway Soap. My own sales talks were better.

At last they got to it. Eight girls paraded out; each held a big card over her head. The M.C. said in an awestruck voice: “And now … and now -the winning Skyway slogan for the … FREE TRIP TO THE MOON!”

I couldn’t breathe.

The girls sang, “I like Skyway Soap because-” and went on, each turning her card as a word reached her: “-it … is … as … pure … as … the … sky … itself!”

I was fumbling cards. I thought I recognized it but couldn’t be sure- not after more than five thousand slogans. Then I found it-and checked the cards the girls were holding. “Dad! Mother! I’ve won, I’ve won!”

“Hold it, Kip!” Dad snapped. “Stop it.” Mother said, “Oh, dear!”

I heard the M.C. saying, “-present the lucky winner, Mrs. Xenia Donahue, of Great Falls, Montana… . Mrs. Donahue!”

To a fanfare a little dumpy woman teetered out. I read the cards again. They still matched the one in my hand. I said, “Dad, what happened? That’s my slogan.” “You didn’t listen.”

“They’ve cheated me!” “Be quiet and listen,”

“-as we explained earlier, in the event of duplicate entries, priority goes to the one postmarked first. Any remaining tie is settled by time of arrival at the contest office. Our winning slogan was submitted by eleven contestants. To them go the first eleven prizes. Tonight we have with us the six top winners-for the trip to the Moon, the weekend in a satellite space station, the jet flight around the world, the flight to Antarctica, the-“

“Beaten by a postmark. Apostmark!”

“-sorry we can’t have every one of the winners with us tonight. To the rest this comes as a surprise.” The M.C. looked at his watch. “Right this minute, in a thousand homes across the land … right this second- there is a lucky knock on a lucky door of some loyal friend of Skyway-“

There was a knock on our door.

I fell over my feet. Dad answered. There were three men, an enormous crate, and a Western Union messenger singing about Skyway Soap. Somebody said, “Is this where Clifford Russell lives?”

Dad said, “Yes.”

“Will you sign for this?” “What is it?”

“It just says ‘This Side Up.’ Where do you want it?”

Dad passed the receipt to me and I signed, somehow. Dad said, “Will you put it in the living room, please?” They did and left and I got a hammer and sidecutters. It looked like a coffin and I could have used one.

I got the top off. Alot of packing got all over Mother’s rugs. At last we were down to it. It was a space suit.

Not much, as space suits go these days. It was an obsolete model that Skyway Soap had bought as surplus material-the tenth-to-hundredth prizes were all space suits. But it was a real one, made by Goodyear, with air conditioning by York and auxiliary equipment by General Electric. Its instruction manual and maintenance-and-service log were with it and it had racked  up more than eight hundred hours in rigging the second satellite station.

I felt better. This was no phony, this was no toy. It had been out in space, even if I had not. But would!-someday. I’d learn to use it and someday I’d wear it on the naked face of the Moon. Dad said, “Maybe we’d better carry this to your workshop. Eh, Kip?”

Mother said, “There’s no rush, dearest. Don’t you want to try it on, Clifford?”

I certainly did. Dad and I compromised by toting the crate and packing out to the barn. When we came back, a reporter from the Clarion was there with a photographer-the paper had known I was a winner before I did, which didn’t seem right.

They wanted pictures and I didn’t mind.

I had an awful time getting into it-dressing in an upper berth is a cinch by comparison. The photographer said, “Just a minute, kid. I’ve seen ‘em do it at Wright Field. Mind some advice?” “Uh? No. I mean, yes, tell me.”

“You slide in like an Eskimo climbing into a kayak. Then wiggle your right arm in-“

It was fairly easy that way, opening front gaskets wide and sitting down in it, though I almost dislocated a shoulder. There were straps to adjust for size but we didn’t bother; he stuffed me into it, zippered the gaskets, helped me to my feet and shut the helmet.

It didn’t have air bottles and I had to live on the air inside while he got three shots. By then I knew that the suit had seen service; it smelled like dirty socks. I was glad to get the helmet off. Just the same, it made me feel good to wear it. Like a spacer.

They left and presently we went to bed, leaving the suit in the living room. About midnight I cat-footed down and tried it on again.

The next morning I moved it out to my shop before I went to work. Mr. Charton was diplomatic; he just said he’d like to see my space suit when I had time. Everybody knew about it-my picture was on the front page of the Clarion along with the Pikes Peak Hill Climb and the holiday fatalities. The story had been played for laughs, but I didn’t mind. I had never really believed I would win-and I had an honest-to-goodness space suit, which was more than my classmates had.

That afternoon Dad brought me a special delivery letter from Skyway Soap. It enclosed a property title to one suit, pressure, serial number so-and-so, ex-US-AF. The letter started with congratulations and thanks but the last paragraphs meant something:

Skyway Soap realizes that your prize may not be of immediate use to you. Therefore, as mentioned in paragraph 4 (a) of the rules. Skyway offers to redeem it for a cash premium of five hundred dollars ($500.00). To avail yourself of this privilege you should return the pressure suit via express collect to Goodyear Corporation (Special Appliances Division, attn: Salvage), Akron, Ohio, on or before the 15th of September.

Skyway Soap hopes that you have enjoyed our Grand Contest as much as we have enjoyed having you and hopes that you will retain your prize long enough to appear with it on your local television station in a special Skyway Jubilee program. Afee of fifty dollars ($50.00) will be paid for this appearance. Your station manager will be in touch with you. We hope that you will  be our guest.

All good wishes from Skyway, the Soap as Pure as the Sky Itself. I handed it to Dad. He read it and handed it back.

I said, “I suppose I should.”

He said, “I see no harm. Television leaves no external scars.”

“Oh, that. Sure, it’s easy money. But I meant I really ought to sell the suit back to them.” I should have felt happy since I needed money, while I needed a space suit the way a pig needs a

pipe organ. But I didn’t, even though I had never had five hundred dollars in my life.

“Son, any statement that starts ‘I really ought to-‘ is suspect. It means you haven’t analyzed your motives.” “But five hundred dollars is tuition for a semester, almost.”

“Which has nothing to do with the case. Find out what you want to do, then do it. Never talk yourself into doing something you don’t want. Think it over.” He said good-bye and left.

I decided it was foolish to burn my bridges before I crossed them. The space suit was mine until the middle of September even if I did the sensible thing-by then I might be tired of it.

But I didn’t get tired of it; a space suit is a marvelous piece of machinery-a little space station with everything miniaturized. Mine was a chrome-plated helmet and shoulder yoke which merged into a body of silicone, asbestos, and glass-fiber cloth. This hide was stiff except at the joints. They were the same rugged material but were “constant volume” -when you bent a knee a bellows arrangement increased the volume over the knee cap as much as the space back of the knee was squeezed. Without this a man wouldn’t be able to move; the pressure inside, which can add up to several tons, would hold him rigid as a statue. These volume compensators were covered with dural armor; even the finger joints had little dural plates over the knuckles.

It had a heavy glass-fiber belt with clips for tools, and there were the straps to adjust for height and weight. There was a back pack, now empty, for air bottles, and zippered pockets inside and out, for batteries and such.

The helmet swung back, taking a bib out of the yoke with it, and the front opened with two gasketed zippers; this left a door you could wiggle into. With helmet clamped and zippers closed  it was impossible to open the suit with pressure inside.

Switches were mounted on the shoulder yoke and on the helmet; the helmet was monstrous. It contained a drinking tank, pill dispensers six on each side, a chin plate on the right to switch radio from “receive” to “send,” another on the left to increase or decrease flow of air, an automatic polarizer for the face lens, microphone and earphones, space for radio circuits in  a bulge back of the head, and an instrument board arched over the head. The instrument dials read backwards because they were reflected in an inside mirror in front of the wearer’s forehead at an effective fourteen inches from the eyes.

Above the lens or window there were twin headlights. On top were two antennas, a spike for broadcast and a horn that squirted microwaves like a gun-you aimed it by facing the receiving station. The horn antenna was armored except for its open end.

This sounds as crowded as a lady’s purse but everything was beautifully compact; your head didn’t touch anything when you looked out the lens. But you could tip your head back and  see reflected instruments, or tilt it down and turn it to work chin controls, or simply turn your neck for water nipple or pills. In all remaining space sponge-rubber padding kept you from banging your head no matter what. My suit was like a fine car, its helmet like a Swiss watch. But its air bottles were missing; so was radio gear except for built-in antennas; radar beacon and emergency radar target were gone, pockets inside and out were empty, and there were no tools on the belt. The manual told what it ought to have-it was like a stripped car.

I decided I just had to make it work right.

First I swabbed it out with Clorox to kill the locker-room odor. Then I got to work on the air system.

It’s a good thing they included that manual; most of what I thought I knew about space suits was wrong.

Aman uses around three pounds of oxygen a day-pounds mass, not pounds per square inch. You’d think a man could carry oxygen for a month, especially out in space where mass has no weight, or on the Moon where three pounds weigh only half a pound. Well, that’s okay for space stations or ships or frogmen; they run air through soda lime to take out carbon dioxide, and breathe it again. But not space suits.

Even today people talk about “the bitter cold of outer space”-but space is vacuum and if vacuum were cold, how could a Thermos jug keep hot coffee hot? Vacuum is nothing-it has no temperature, it just insulates.

Three-fourths of your food turns into heat-a lot of heat, enough each day to melt fifty pounds of ice and more. Sounds preposterous, doesn’t it? But when you have a roaring fire in the furnace, you are cooling your body; even in the winter you keep a room about thirty degrees cooler than your body. When you turn up a furnace’s thermostat, you are picking a more comfortable rate for cooling. Your body makes so much heat you have to get rid of it, exactly as you have to cool a car’s engine.

Of course, if you do it too fast, say in a sub-zero wind, you can freeze- but the usual problem in a space suit is to keep from being boiled like a lobster. You’ve got vacuum all around you and it’s hard to get rid of heat.

Some radiates away but not enough, and if you are in sunlight, you pick up still more-this is why space ships are polished like mirrors. So what can you do?

Well, you can’t carry fifty-pound blocks of ice. You get rid of heat the way you do on Earth, by convection and evaporation-you keep air moving over you to evaporate sweat and cool you off. Oh, they’ll learn to build space suits that recycle like a space ship but today the practical way is to let used air escape from the suit, flushing away sweat and carbon dioxide and excess heat-while wasting most of the oxygen.

There are other problems. The fifteen pounds per square inch around you includes three pounds of oxygen pressure. Your lungs can get along on less than half that, but only an Indian from the high Andes is likely to he comfortable on less than two pounds oxygen pressure. Nine-tenths of a pound is the limit. Any less than nine-tenths of a pound won’t force oxygen into blood-this is about the pressure at the top of Mount Everest.

Most people suffer from hypoxia (oxygen shortage) long before this, so better use two p.s.i. of oxygen. Mix an inert gas with it, because pure oxygen can cause a sore throat or make you drunk or even cause terrible cramps. Don’t use nitrogen (which you’ve breathed all your life) because it will bubble in your blood if pressure drops and cripple you with “bends.” Use helium which doesn’t. It gives you a squeaky voice, but who cares?

You can die from oxygen shortage, be poisoned by too much oxygen, be crippled by nitrogen, drown in or be acid-poisoned by carbon dioxide, or dehydrate and run a killing fever. When I finished reading that manual I didn’t see how anybody could stay alive anywhere, much less in a space suit.

But a space suit was in front of me that had protected a man for hundreds of hours in empty space.

Here is how you beat those dangers. Carry steel bottles on your back; they hold “air” (oxygen and helium) at a hundred and fifty atmospheres, over 2000 pounds per square inch; you   draw from them through a reduction valve down to 150 p.s.i. and through still another reduction valve, a “demand” type which keeps pressure in your helmet at three to five pounds per square inch-two pounds of it oxygen. Put a silicone-rubber collar around your neck and put tiny holes in it, so that the pressure in the body of your suit is less, the air movement still faster; then evaporation and cooling will be increased while the effort of bending is decreased. Add exhaust valves, one at each wrist and ankle-these have to pass water as well as gas   because you may be ankle deep in sweat.

The bottles are big and clumsy, weighing around sixty pounds apiece, and each holds only about five mass pounds of air even at that enormous pressure; instead of a month’s supply you will have only a few hours-my suit was rated at eight hours for the bottles it used to have. But you will be okay for those hours-if everything works right. You can stretch time, for you don’t die from overheating very fast and can stand too much carbon dioxide even longer-but let your oxygen run out and you die in about seven minutes. Which gets us back where we started-it takes oxygen to stay alive.

To make darn sure that you’re getting enough (your nose can’t tell) you clip a little photoelectric cell to your ear and let it see the color of your blood; the redness of the blood measures the oxygen it carries. Hook this to a galvanometer. If its needle gets into the danger zone, start saying your prayers.

I went to Springfield on my day off, taking the suit’s hose fittings, and shopped. I picked up, second hand, two thirty-inch steel bottles from a welding shop-and got myself disliked by insisting on a pressure test. I took them home on the bus, stopped at Pring’s Garage and arranged to buy air at fifty atmospheres. Higher pressures, or oxygen or helium, I could get from the Springfield airport, but I didn’t need them yet.

When I got home I closed the suit, empty, and pumped it with a bicycle pump to two atmospheres absolute, or one relative, which gave me a test load of almost four to one compared with space conditions. Then I tackled the bottles. They needed to be mirror bright, since you can’t afford to let them pick up heat from the Sun. I stripped and scraped and wire-brushed, and buffed and polished, preparatory to nickel-plating.

Next morning, Oscar the Mechanical Man was limp as a pair of long johns.

Getting that old suit not just airtight but helium-tight was the worst headache. Air isn’t bad but the helium molecule is so small and agile that it migrates right through ordinary rubber-and   I wanted this job to be right, not just good enough to perform at home but okay for space. The gaskets were shot and there were slow leaks almost impossible to find.

I had to get new silicone-rubber gaskets and patching compound and tissue from Goodyear; small-town hardware stores don’t handle such things. I wrote a letter explaining what I wanted and why-and they didn’t even charge me. They sent me some mimeographed sheets elaborating on the manual.

It still wasn’t easy. But there came a day when I pumped Oscar full of pure helium at two atmospheres absolute. Aweek later he was still tight as a six-ply tire.

That day I wore Oscar as a self-contained environment. I had already worn him many hours without the helmet, working around the shop, handling tools while hampered by his gauntlets, getting height and size adjustments right. It was like breaking in new ice skates and after a while I was hardly aware I had it on-once I came to supper in it. Dad said nothing and Mother has the social restraint of an ambassador; I discovered my mistake when I picked up my napkin.

Now I wasted helium to the air, mounted bottles charged with air, and suited them. Then I clamped the helmet and dogged the safety catches.

Air sighed softly into the helmet, its flow through the demand valve regulated by the rise and fall of my chest-I could reset it to speed up or slow down by the chin control. I did so, watching the gauge in the mirror and letting it mount until I had twenty pounds absolute inside. That gave me five pounds more than the pressure around me, which was as near as I could come   to space conditions without being in space.

I could feel the suit swell and the joints no longer felt loose and easy. I balanced the cycle at five pounds differential and tried to move- And almost fell over. I had to grab the workbench. Suited up, with bottles on my back, I weighed more than twice what I do stripped. Besides that, although the joints were constant-volume, the suit didn’t work as freely under pressure.

Dress yourself in heavy fishing waders, put on an overcoat and boxing gloves and a bucket over your head, then have somebody strap two sacks of cement across your shoulders and

you will know what a space suit feels like under one gravity.

But ten minutes later I was handling myself fairly well and in half an hour I felt as if I had worn one all my life. The distributed weight wasn’t too great (and I knew it wouldn’t amount to much on the Moon). The joints were just a case of getting used to more effort. I had had more trouble learning to swim.

It was a blistering day: I went outside and looked at the Sun. The polarizer cut the glare and I was able to look at it. I looked away; polarizing eased off and I could see around me.

I stayed cool. The air, cooled by semi-adiabatic expansion (it said in the manual), cooled my head and flowed on through the suit, washing away body heat and used air through the exhaust valves. The manual said that heating elements rarely cut in, since the usual problem was to get rid of heat; I decided to get dry ice and force a test of thermostat and heater.

I tried everything I could think of. Acreek runs back of our place and beyond is a pasture. I sloshed through the stream, lost my footing and fell -the worst trouble was that I could never see where I was putting my feet. Once I was down I lay there a while, half floating but mostly covered. I didn’t get wet, I didn’t get hot, I didn’t get cold, and my breathing was as easy as ever even though water shimmered over my helmet.

I scrambled heavily up the bank and fell again, striking my helmet against a rock. No damage, Oscar was built to take it. I pulled my knees under me, got up, and crossed the pasture, stumbling on rough ground but not falling. There was a haystack there and I dug into it until I was buried.

Cool fresh air … no trouble, no sweat.

After three hours I took it off. The suit had relief arrangements like any pilot’s outfit but I hadn’t rigged it yet, so I had come out before my air was gone. When I hung it in the rack I had built,   I patted the shoulder yoke. “Oscar, you’re all right,” I told it. “You and I are partners. We’re going places.” I would have sneered at five thousand dollars for Oscar.

While Oscar was taking his pressure tests I worked on his electrical and electronic gear. I didn’t bother with a radar target or beacon; the first is childishly simple, the second is fiendishly expensive. But I did want radio for the space-operations band of the spectrum-the antennas suited only those wavelengths. I could have built an ordinary walkie-talkie and hung it

outside-but I would have been kidding myself with a wrong frequency and gear that might not stand vacuum. Changes in pressure and temperature and humidity do funny things to electronic circuits; that is why the radio was housed inside the helmet.

The manual gave circuit diagrams, so I got busy. The audio and modulating circuits were no problem, just battery-operated transistor circuitry which I could make plenty small enough.   But the microwave part- It was a two-headed calf, each with transmitter and receiver-one centimeter wavelength for the horn and three octaves lower at eight centimeters for the spike in a harmonic relationship, one crystal controlling both. This gave more signal on broadcast and better aiming when squirting out the horn and also meant that only part of the rig had to be switched in changing antennas. The output of a variable-frequency oscillator was added to the crystal frequency in tuning the receiver. The circuitry was simple-on paper.

But microwave circuitry is never easy; it takes precision machining and a slip of a tool can foul up the impedance and ruin a mathematically calculated resonance.

Well, I tried. Synthetic precision crystals are cheap from surplus houses and some transistors and other components I could vandalize from my own gear. And I made it work, after the fussiest pray-and-try-again I have ever done. But the consarned thing simply would not fit into the helmet.

Call it a moral victory-I’ve never done better work.

I finally bought one, precision made and embedded in plastic, from the same firm that sold me the crystal. Like the suit it was made for, it was obsolete and I paid a price so low that I merely screamed. By then I would have mortgaged my soul-I wanted that suit to work.

The only thing that complicated the rest of the electrical gear was that everything had to be either “fail-safe” or “no-fail”; a man in a space suit can’t pull into the next garage if something goes wrong-the stuff has to keep on working or he becomes a vital statistic. That was why the helmet had twin headlights; the second cut in if the first failed-even the peanut lights for the dials over my head were twins. I didn’t take short cuts; every duplicate circuit I kept duplicate and tested to make sure that automatic changeover always worked.

Mr. Charton insisted on filling the manual’s list on those items a drugstore stocks-maltose and dextrose and amino tablets, vitamins, dexedrine, dramamine, aspirin, antibiotics, antihistamines, codeine, almost any pill a man can take to help him past a hump that might kill him. He got Doc Kennedy to write prescriptions so that I could stock Oscar without breaking laws.

When I got through Oscar was in as good shape as he had ever been in Satellite Two. It had been more fun than the time I helped Jake Bixby turn his heap into a hotrod.

But summer was ending and it was time I pulled out of my daydream. I still did not know where I was going to school, or how-or if. I had saved money but it wasn’t nearly enough. I had spent a little on postage and soap wrappers but I got that back and more by one fifteen-minute appearance on television and I hadn’t spent a dime on girls since March- too busy. Oscar cost surprisingly little; repairing Oscar had been mostly sweat and screwdriver. Seven dollars out of every ten I had earned was sitting in the money basket.

But it wasn’t enough.

I realized glumly that I was going to have to sell Oscar to get through the first semester. But how would I get through the rest of the year? Joe Valiant the all-American boy always shows up on the campus with fifty cents and a heart of gold, then in the last Chapter is tapped for Skull-and-Bones and has money in the bank. But I wasn’t Joe Valiant, not by eight decimal places. Did it make sense to start if I was going to have to drop out about Christmas? Wouldn’t it be smarter to stay out a year and get acquainted with a pick and shovel?

Did I have a choice? The only school I was sure of was State U. -and there was a row about professors being fired and talk that State U. might lose its accredited standing. Wouldn’t it be comical to spend years slaving for a degree and then have it be worthless because your school wasn’t recognized?

State U. wasn’t better than a “B” school in engineering even before this fracas.

Rensselaer and CalTech turned me down the same day-one with a printed form, the other with a polite letter saying it was impossible to accept all qualified applicants.

Little things were getting my goat, too. The only virtue of that television show was the fifty bucks. Aperson looks foolish wearing a space suit in a television studio and our announcer milked it for laughs, rapping the helmet and asking me if I was still in there. Very funny. He asked me what I wanted with a space suit and when I tried to answer he switched off the mike in my suit and patched in a tape with nonsense about space pirates and flying saucers. Half the people in town thought it was my voice.

It wouldn’t have been hard to live down if Ace Quiggle hadn’t turned up. He had been missing all summer, in jail maybe, but the day after the show he took a seat at the fountain, stared at me and said in a loud whisper, “Say, ain’t you the famous space pirate and television star?”

I said, “What’ll you have, Ace?”

“Gosh! Could I have your autograph? I ain’t never seen a real live space pirate before!” “Give me your order, Ace. Or let someone else use that stool.”

“Achoc malt. Commodore-and leave out the soap.”

Ace’s “wit” went on every time he showed up. It was a dreadfully hot summer and easy to get tempery. The Friday before Labor Day weekend the store’s cooling system went sour, we couldn’t get a repairman and I spent three bad hours fixing it, ruining my second-best pants and getting myself reeking. I was back at the fountain and wishing I could go home for a bath when Ace swaggered in, greeting me loudly with “Why, if it isn’t Commander Comet, the Scourge of the Spaceways! Where’s your blaster gun, Commander? Ain’t you afraid the Galactic Emperor will make you stay in after school for running around bare-nekkid? Yuk yuk yukkity yuk!”

Acouple of girls at the fountain giggled. “Lay off, Ace,” I said wearily. “It’s a hot day.”

“That’s why you’re not wearing your rubber underwear?” The girls giggled again.

Ace smirked. He went on: “Junior, seein’ you got that clown suit, why don’t you put it to work? Run an ad in the Clarion: ‘Have Space Suit-Will Travel.’ Yukkity yuk! Or you could hire out as a scarecrow.”

The girls snickered. I counted ten, then again in Spanish, and in Latin, and said tensely, “Ace, just tell me what you’ll have.” “My usual. And snap it up-I’ve got a date on Mars.”

Mr. Charton came out from behind his counter, sat down and asked me to mix him a lime cooler, so I served him first. It stopped the flow of wit and probably saved Ace’s life. The boss and I were alone shortly after. He said quietly, “Kip, a reverence for life does not require a man to respect Nature’s obvious mistakes.”

“Sir?”

“You need not serve Quiggle again. I don’t want his trade.” “Oh, I don’t mind. He’s harmless.”

“I wonder how harmless such people are? To what extent civilization is retarded by the laughing jackasses, the empty-minded belittlers? Go home; you’ll want to make an early start tomorrow.”

I had been invited to the Lake of the Forest for the long Labor Day weekend by Jake Bixby’s parents. I wanted to go, not only to get away from the heat but also to chew things over with Jake. But I answered, “Shucks, Mr. Charton, I ought not to leave you stuck.”

“The town will be deserted over the holiday; I may not open the fountain. Enjoy yourself. This summer has worn you a bit fine. Kip.”  I let myself be persuaded but I stayed until closing and swept up. Then I walked home, doing some hard thinking.

The party was over and it was time to put away my toys. Even the village half-wit knew that I had no sensible excuse to have a space suit. Not that I cared what Ace thought … but I did   have no use for it-and I needed money. Even if Stanford and M.I.T. and Carnegie and the rest turned me down, I was going to start this semester. State U. wasn’t the best-but neither was   I and I had learned that more depended on the student than on the school.

Mother had gone to bed and Dad was reading. I said hello and went to the barn, intending to strip my gear off Oscar, pack him into his case, address it, and in the morning phone the express office to pick it up. He’d be gone before I was back from the Lake of the Forest. Quick and clean.

He was hanging on his rack and it seemed to me that he grinned hello. Nonsense, of course. I went over and patted his shoulder. “Well, old fellow, you’ve been a real chum and it’s been nice knowing you. See you on the Moon-I hope.”

But Oscar wasn’t going to the Moon. Oscar was going to Akron, Ohio, to “Salvage.” They were going to unscrew parts they could use and throw the rest of him on the junk pile. My mouth felt dry.

(“It’s okay, pal,” Oscar answered.)

See that? Out of my silly head! Oscar didn’t really speak; I had let my imagination run wild too long. So I quit patting him, hauled the crate out and took a wrench from his belt to remove the gas bottles.

I stopped.

Both bottles were charged, one with oxygen, one with oxy-helium. I had wasted money to do so because I wanted, just once, to try a spaceman’s mix. The batteries were fresh and power packs were charged.

“Oscar,” I said softly, “we’re going to take a last walk together. Okay?” (“Swell!”)

I made it a dress rehearsal-water in the drinking tank, pill dispensers loaded, first-aid kit inside, vacuum-proof duplicate (I hoped it was vacuum-proof) in an outside pocket. All tools on belt, all lanyards tied so that tools wouldn’t float away in free fall. Everything.

Then I heated up a circuit that the F.C.C. would have squelched had they noticed, a radio link I had salvaged out of my effort to build a radio for Oscar, and had modified as a test rig for Oscar’s ears and to let me check the aiming of the directional antenna. It was hooked in with an echo circuit that would answer back if I called it-a thing I had bread hoarded out of an old Webcor wire recorder, vintage 1950.

Then I climbed into Oscar and buttoned up. “Tight?” (“Tight!”)

I glanced at the reflected dials, noticed the blood-color reading, reduced pressure until Oscar almost collapsed. At nearly sea-level pressure I was in no danger from hypoxia; the trick was to avoid too much oxygen.

We started to leave when I remembered something. “Just a second, Oscar.” I wrote a note to my folks, telling them that I was going to get up early and catch the first bus to the lake. I could write while suited up now, I could even thread a needle. I stuck the note under the kitchen door.

Then we crossed the creek into the pasture. I didn’t stumble in wading; I was used to Oscar now, sure-footed as a goat.

Out in the field I keyed my talkie and said, “Junebug, calling Peewee. Come in, Peewee.” Seconds later my recorded voice came back: ” ‘Junebug, calling Peewee. Come in, Peewee.’”

I shifted to the horn antenna and tried again. It wasn’t easy to aim in the dark but it was okay. Then I shifted back to spike antenna and went on calling Peewee while moving across the pasture and pretending that I was on Venus and had to stay in touch with base because it was unknown terrain and unbreathable atmosphere. Everything worked perfectly and if it had been Venus, I would have been all right.

Two lights moved across the southern sky, planes I thought, or maybe helis. Just the sort of thing yokels like to report as “flying saucers.” I watched them, then moved behind a little rise that would tend to spoil reception and called Peewee. Peewee answered and I shut up; it gets dull talking to an idiot circuit which can only echo what you say to it.

Then I heard: “Peewee to Junebug! Answer!”

I thought I had been monitored and was in trouble-then decided that some ham had picked me up. “Junebug here. I read you. Who are you?” The test rig echoed my words.

Then the new voice shrilled, “Peewee here! Home me in!”

This was silly. But I found myself saying, “Junebug to Peewee, shift to directional frequency at one centimeter—and keep talking, keep talking!” I shifted to the horn antenna. “Junebug, I read you. Fix me. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven—”

“You’re due south of me, about forty degrees. Who are you?” It must be one of those lights. It had to be.

But I didn’t have time to figure it out. Aspace ship almost landed on me.

Chapter 4

I said “space ship,” not “rocket ship.” It made no noise but a whoosh and there weren’t any flaming jets-it seemed to move by clean living and righteous thoughts.

I was too busy keeping from being squashed to worry about details. Aspace suit in one gravity is no track suit; it’s a good thing I had practiced. The ship sat down where I had just been, occupying more than its share of pasture, a big black shape.

The other one whooshed down, too, just as a door opened in the first. Light poured through the door; two figures spilled out and started to run. One moved like a cat; the other moved clumsily and slowly-handicapped by a space suit. S’help me, a person in a space suit does look silly. This one was less than five feet tall and looked like the Gingerbread Man.

Abig trouble with a suit is your limited angle of vision. I was trying to watch both of them and did not see the second ship open. The first figure stopped, waiting for the one in the space suit to catch up, then suddenly collapsed-just a gasping sound, “Eeeah!”-and clunk.

You can tell the sound of pain. I ran to the spot at a lumbering dogtrot, leaned over and tried to see what was wrong, tilting my helmet to bring the beam of my headlight onto the ground. Abug-eyed monster-

That’s not fair but it was my first thought. I couldn’t believe it and would have pinched myself except that it isn’t practical when suited up.

An unprejudiced mind (which mine wasn’t) would have said that this monster was rather pretty. It was small, not more than half my size, and its curves were graceful, not as a girl is but more like a leopard, although it wasn’t shaped like either one. I couldn’t grasp its shape-I didn’t have any pattern to fit it to; it wouldn’t add up.

But I could see that it was hurt. Its body was quivering like a frightened rabbit. It had enormous eyes, open but milky and featureless, as if nictitating membranes were across them. What appeared to be its mouth-

That’s as far as I got. Something hit me in the spine, right between the gas bottles.

I woke up on a bare floor, staring at a ceiling. It took several moments to recall what had happened and then I shied away because it was so darn silly. I had been out for a walk in Oscar

… and then a space ship had landed … and a bug-eyed-

I sat up suddenly as I realized that Oscar was gone. Alight cheerful voice said, “Hi, there!”

I snapped my head around. Akid about ten years old was seated on the floor, leaning against a wall. He-I corrected myself. Boys don’t usually clutch rag dolls. This kid was the age when the difference doesn’t show much and was dressed in shirt, shorts and dirty tennis shoes, and had short hair, so I didn’t have much to go on but the rag dolly.

“Hi, yourself,” I answered. “What are we doing here?” “I’m surviving. I don’t know about you.”

“Huh?”

“Surviving. Pushing my breath in and out. Conserving my strength. There’s nothing else to do at the moment; they’ve got us locked in.”

I looked around. The room was about ten feet across, four-sided but wedge-shaped, and nothing in it but us. I couldn’t see a door; if we weren’t locked, we might as well be. “Who locked us in?”

“Them. Space pirates. And him.” “Space pirates? Don’t be silly!”

The kid shrugged. “Just my name for them. But better not think they’re silly if you want to keep on surviving. Are you ‘Junebug’?”

“Huh? You sound like a junebug yourself. Space pirates, my aunt!” I was worried and very confused and this nonsense didn’t help. Where was Oscar? And where was I? “No, no, not a junebug but ‘Junebug’-a radio call. You see, I’m Peewee.”

I said to myself, Kip old pal, walk slowly to the nearest hospital and give yourself up. When a radio rig you wired yourself starts looking like a skinny little girl with a rag doll, you’ve flipped. It’s going to be wet packs and tranquilizers and no excitement for you-you’ve blown every fuse.

“You’re ‘Peewee’?”

“That’s what I’m called-I’m relaxed about it. You see, I heard, ‘Junebug, calling Peewee,’ and decided that Daddy had found out about the spot I was in and had alerted people to help me land. But if you aren’t ‘Junebug,’ you wouldn’t know about that. Who are you?”

“Wait a minute, I am ‘Junebug.’ I mean I was using that call. But I’m Clifford Russell-‘Kip’ they call me.” “How do you do. Kip?” she said politely.

“And howdy to you, Peewee. Uh, are you a boy or a girl?”

Peewee looked disgusted. “I’ll make you regret that remark. I realize I am undersized for my age but I’m actually eleven, going on twelve. There’s no need to be rude. In another five years   I expect to be quite a dish-you’ll probably beg me for every dance.”

At the moment I would as soon have danced with a kitchen stool, but I had things on my mind and didn’t want a useless argument. “Sorry, Peewee. I’m still groggy. You mean you were in that first ship?”

Again she looked miffed. “I was piloting it.”

Sedation every night and a long course of psychoanalysis. At my age. “You were-piloting?”

“You surely don’t think the Mother Thing could? She wouldn’t fit their controls. She curled up beside me and coached. But if you think it’s easy, when you’ve never piloted anything but a Cessna with your Daddy at your elbow and never made any kind of landing, then think again. I did very well!-and your landing instructions weren’t too specific. What have they done with the Mother Thing?”

“The what?”

“You don’t know? Oh, dear!”

“Wait a minute, Peewee. Let’s get on the same frequency. I’m ‘Junebug’ all right and I homed you in-and if you think that’s easy, to have a voice out of nowhere demand emergency landing instructions, you better think again, too. Anyhow, a ship landed and another ship landed right after it and a door opened in the first ship and a guy in a space suit jumped out-“

“That was I.”

“-and something else jumped out-“ “The Mother Thing.”

“Only she didn’t get far. She gave a screech and flopped. I went to see what the trouble was and something hit me. The next thing I know you’re saying, ‘Hi, there.’ ” I wondered if I ought to tell her that the rest, including her, was likely a morphine dream because I was probably lying in a hospital with my spine in a cast.

Peewee nodded thoughtfully. “They must have blasted you at low power, or you wouldn’t be here. Well, they caught you and they caught me, so they almost certainly caught her. Oh, dear!   I do hope they didn’t hurt her.”

“She looked like she was dying.”

“As if she were dying,” Peewee corrected me. “Subjunctive. I rather doubt it; she’s awfully hard to kill-and they wouldn’t kill her except to keep her from escaping; they need her alive.” “Why? And why do you call her ‘the Mother Thing’?”

“One at a time, Kip. She’s the Mother Thing because … well, because she is, that’s all. You’ll know, when you meet her. As to why they wouldn’t kill her, it’s because she’s worth more as  a hostage than as a corpse-the same reason the kept me alive. Although she’s worth incredibly more than I am-they’d write me off without a blink if I became inconvenient. Or you. But since she was alive when you saw her, then it’s logical that she’s a prisoner again. Maybe right next door. That makes me feel much better.”

It didn’t make me feel better. “Yes, but where’s here?”

Peewee glanced at a Mickey Mouse watch, frowned and said, “Almost halfway to the Moon, I’d say.” “What?!”

“Of course I don’t know. But it makes sense that they would go back to their nearest base; that’s where the Mother Thing and I scrammed from.” “You’re telling me we’re in that ship?”

“Either the one I swiped or the other one. Where did you think you were, Kip? Where else could you be?” “Amental hospital.”

She looked big-eyed and then grinned. “Why, Kip, surely your grip on reality is not that weak?” “I’m not sure about anything. Space pirates-Mother Things.”

She frowned and bit her thumb. “I suppose it must be confusing. But trust your ears and eyes. My grip on reality is quite strong, I assure you- you see, I’m a genius.” She made it a statement, not a boast, and somehow I was not inclined to doubt the claim, even though it came from a skinny-shanked kid with a rag doll in her arms.

But I didn’t see how it was going to help.

Peewee went on: ” ‘Space pirates’ … mmm. Call them what you wish. Their actions are piratical and they operate in space-you name them. As for the Mother Thing … wait until you meet her.”

“What’s she doing in this hullabaloo?”

“Well, it’s complicated. She had better explain it. She’s a cop and she was after them-“ “Acop?”

“I’m afraid that is another semantic inadequacy. The Mother Thing knows what we mean by cop and I think she finds the idea bewildering if not impossible. But what would you call a person who hunts down miscreants? Acop, no?”

“Acop, yes, I guess.”

“So would I.” She looked again at her watch. “But right now I think we had better hang on. We ought to be at halfway point in a few minutes- and a skew-flip is disconcerting even if you are strapped down.”

I had read about skew-flip turn-overs, but only as a theoretical maneuver; I had never heard of a ship that could do one. If this was a ship. The floor felt as solid as concrete and as motionless. “I don’t see anything to hang on to.”

“Not much, I’m afraid. But if we sit down in the narrowest part and push against each other, I think we can brace enough not to slide around. But let’s hurry; my watch might be slow.” We sat on the floor in the narrow part where the angled walls were about five feet apart. We faced each other and pushed our shoes against each other, each of us bracing like an

Alpinist inching his way up a rock chimney-my socks against her tennis shoes, rather, for my shoes were still on my workbench, so far as I knew. I wondered if they had simply dumped

Oscar in the pasture and if Dad would find him.

“Push hard, Kip, and brace your hands against the deck.”

I did so. “How do you know when they’ll turn over, Peewee?”

“I haven’t been unconscious-they just tripped me and carried me inside-so I know when we took off. If we assume that the Moon is their destination, as it probably is, and if we assume one gravity the whole jump -which can’t be far off; my weight feels normal. Doesn’t yours?”

I considered it. “I think so.”

“Then it probably is, even though my own sense of weight may be distorted from being on the Moon. If those assumptions are correct, then it is almost exactly a three-and-a-half-hour trip and-” Peewee looked at her watch. “-E.T.A. should be nine-thirty in the morning and turn-over at seven-forty-five. Any moment now.”

“Is it that late?” I looked at my watch. “Why, I’ve got a quarter of two.”

“You’re on your zone time. I’m on Moon time-Greenwich time, that is. Oh, oh! Here we go!”

The floor tilted, swerved, and swooped like a roller coaster, and my semicircular canals did a samba. Things steadied down as I pulled out of acute dizziness. “You all right?” asked Peewee.

I managed to focus my eyes. “Uh, I think so. It felt like a one-and-a-half gainer into a dry pool.”

“This pilot does it faster than I dared to. It doesn’t really hurt, after your eyes uncross. But that settles it. We’re headed for the Moon. We’ll be there in an hour and three quarters.”

I still couldn’t believe it. “Peewee? What kind of a ship can gun at one gee all the way to the Moon? They been keeping it secret? And what were you doing on the Moon anyhow? And why were you stealing a ship?”

She sighed and spoke to her doll. “He’s a quiz kid, Madame Pompadour. Kip, how can I answer three questions at once? This is a flying saucer, and-“ “Flying saucer! Now I’ve heard everything.”

“It’s rude to interrupt. Call it anything you like; there’s nothing official about the term. Actually it’s shaped more like a loaf of pumpernickel, an oblate spheroid. That’s a shape defined-“

“I know what an oblate spheroid is,” I snapped. I was tired and upset from too many things, from a cranky air conditioner that had ruined a good pair of pants to being knocked out while on an errand of mercy. Not to mention Ace Quiggle. I was beginning to think that little girls who were geniuses ought to have the grace not to show it.

“No need to be brisk,” she said reprovingly. “I am aware that people have called everything from weather balloons to street lights ‘flying saucers.’ But it is my considered opinion-by Occam’s Razor-that-“

“Whose razor?”

“Occam’s. Least hypothesis. Don’t you know anything about logic?” “Not much.”

“Well … I suspected that about every five-hundredth ‘saucer sighting’ was a ship like this. It adds up. As for what I was doing on the Moon-” She stopped and grinned. “I’m a pest.”

I didn’t argue it.

“Along time ago when my Daddy was a boy, the Hayden Planetarium took reservations for trips to the Moon. It was just a publicity gag, like that silly soap contest recently, but Daddy got his name on the list. Now, years and years later, they are letting people go to the Moon-and sure enough, the Hayden people turned the list over to American Express- and American Express notified the applicants they could locate that they would be given preference.”

“So your father took you to the Moon?”

“Oh, heavens, no! Daddy filled out that form when he was only a boy. Now he is just about the biggest man at the Institute for Advanced Study and hasn’t time for such pleasures. And Mama wouldn’t go if you paid her. So I said I would. Daddy said ‘No!’ and Mama said Good gracious, no!’ … and so I went. I can be an awful nuisance when I put my mind on it,” she said proudly. “I have talent for it. Daddy says I’m an amoral little wretch.”

“Uh, do you suppose he might be right?”

“Oh, I’m sure he is. He understands me, whereas Mama throws up her hands and says she can’t cope. I was perfectly beastly and unbearable for two whole weeks and at last Daddy said ‘For Blank’s sake let her go! -maybe we’ll collect her insurance!’ So I did.”

“Mmmmm … that still doesn’t explain why you are here.”

“Oh, that. I was poking around where I shouldn’t, doing things they told us not to. I always get around; it’s very educational. So they grabbed me. They would rather have Daddy but they hope to swap me for him. I couldn’t let that happen, so I had to escape.”

I muttered, ” The butler did it.’ “ “What?”

“Your story has as many holes as the last Chapter of most whodunits.” “Oh. But I assure you it is the simple-oh, oh! here we go again!”

All that happened was that the lighting changed from white to blue. There weren’t any light fixtures; the whole ceiling glowed. We were still sprawled on the floor. I started to get up-and found I couldn’t.

I felt as if I had just finished a cross-country race, too weak to do anything but breathe. Blue light can’t do that; it’s merely wavelengths 4300 to 5100 angstroms and sunlight is loaded with it. But whatever they used with the blue light made us as limp as wet string.

Peewee was struggling to tell me something. “If … they’re coming for us … don’t resist … and … above all-“ The blue light changed to white. The narrow wall started to slide aside.

Peewee looked scared and made a great effort. “-above all … don’t antagonize … him.”

Two men came in, shoved Peewee aside, strapped my wrists and ankles and ran another strap around my middle, binding my arms. I started to come out of it-not like flipping a switch, as I still didn’t have energy enough to lick a stamp. I wanted to bash their heads but I stood as much chance as a butterfly has of hefting a bar bell.

They carried me out. I started to protest. “Say, where are you guys taking me? What do you think you’re doing? I’ll have you arrested. I’ll—”

“Shaddap,” said one. He was a skinny runt, fifty or older, and looked as if he never smiled. The other was fat and younger, with a petulant babyish mouth and a dimple in his chin; he looked as if he could laugh if he weren’t worried. He was worrying now.

“Tim, this can get us in trouble. We ought to space him-we ought to space both of ‘em-and tell him it was an accident. We can say they got out and tried to escape through the lock. He won’t know the dif-“

“Shaddap,” answered Tim with no inflection. He added, “You want trouble with him? You want to chew space?” “But-“

“Shaddap.”

They carried me around a curved corridor, into an inner room and dumped me on the floor.

I was face up but it took time to realize this must be the control room. It didn’t look like anything any human would design as a control room, which wasn’t surprising as no human had. Then I saw him.

Peewee needn’t have warned me; I didn’t want to antagonize him.

The little guy was tough and dangerous, the fat guy was mean and murderous; they were cherubs compared with him. If I had had my strength I would have fought those two any way they liked; I don’t think I’m too afraid of any human as long as the odds aren’t impossible.

But not him.

He wasn’t human but that wasn’t what hurt. Elephants aren’t human but they are very nice people. He was built more like a human than an elephant is but that was no help-I mean he stood erect and had feet at one end and a head at the other. He was no more than five feet tall but that didn’t help either; he dominated us the way a man dominates a horse. The torso part was as long as mine; his shortness came from very squat legs, with feet (I guess you would call them feet) which bulged out, almost disc-like. They made squashy, sucking sounds when he moved. When he stood still a tail, or third leg, extruded and turned him into a tripod-he didn’t need to sit down and I doubt if he could.

Short legs did not make him slow. His movements were blurringly fast, like a striking snake. Does this mean a better nervous system and more efficient muscles? Or a native planet with higher gravity?

His arms looked like snakes-they had more joints than ours. He had two sets, one pair where his waist should have been and another set under his head. No shoulders. I couldn’t count his fingers, or digit tendrils; they never held still. He wasn’t dressed except for a belt below and above the middle arms which carried whatever such a thing carries in place of money and keys. His skin was purplish brown and looked oily.

Whatever he was, he was not the same race as the Mother Thing.

He had a faint sweetish musky odor. Any crowded room smells worse on a hot day, but if I ever whiff that odor again, my skin will crawl and I’ll be tongue-tied with fright.

I didn’t take in these details instantly; at first all I could see was his face. A“face” is all I can call it. I haven’t described it yet because I’m afraid I’ll get the shakes. But I will, so that if you ever see one, you’ll shoot first, before your bones turn to jelly.

No nose. He was an oxygen breather but where the air went in and out I couldn’t say-some of it through the mouth, for he could talk. The mouth was the second worst part of him; in place of jawbone and chin he had mandibles that opened sideways as well as down, gaping in three irregular sides. There were rows of tiny teeth but no tongue that I could see; instead the mouth was rimmed with cilia as long as angleworms. They never stopped squirming.

I said the mouth was “second worst”; he had eyes. They were big and bulging and protected by horny ridges, two on the front of his head, set wide apart. They scanned. They scanned like radar, swinging up and down and back and forth. He never looked at you and yet was always looking at you.

When he turned around, I saw a third eye in back. I think he scanned his whole surroundings at all times, like a radar warning system.

What kind of brain can put together everything in all directions at once? I doubt if a human brain could, even if there were any way to feed in the data. He didn’t seem to have room in his head to stack much of a brain, but maybe he didn’t keep it there. Come to think of it, humans wear their brains in an exposed position; there may be better ways.

But he certainly had a brain. He pinned me down like a beetle and squeezed out what he wanted. He didn’t have to stop to brainwash me; he questioned and I gave, for an endless time-  it seemed more like days than hours. He spoke English badly but understandably. His labials were all alike-“buy” and “pie” and “vie” sounded the same. His gutturals were harsh and   his dentals had a clucking quality. But I could usually understand and when I didn’t, he didn’t threaten or punish; he just tried again. He had no expression in his speech.

He kept at it until he had found out who I was and what I did and as much of what I knew as interested him. He asked questions about how I happened to be where I was and dressed the way I was when I was picked up. I couldn’t tell whether he liked the answers or not.

He had trouble understanding what a “soda jerk” was and, while he learned about the Skyway Soap contest, he never seemed to understand why it took place. But I found that there were  a lot of things I didn’t know either-such as how many people there are on Earth and how many tons of protein we produce each year.

After endless time he had all he wanted and said, “Take it out.” The stooges had been waiting. The fat boy gulped and said, “Space him?”

He acted as if killing me or not were like saving a piece of string. “No. It is ignorant and untrained, but I may have use for it later. Put it back in the pen.” “Yes, boss.”

They dragged me out. In the corridor Fatty said, “Let’s untie his feet and make him walk.” Skinny said, “Shaddap.”

Peewee was just inside the entrance panel but didn’t move, so I guess she had had another dose of that blue-light effect. They stepped over her and dumped me. Skinny chopped me on the side of the neck to stun me. When I came to, they were gone, I was unstrapped, and Peewee was sitting by me. She said anxiously, “Pretty bad?”

“Uh, yeah,” I agreed, and shivered. “I feel ninety years old.”

“It helps if you don’t look at him-especially his eyes. Rest a while and you’ll feel better.” She glanced at her watch. “It’s only forty-five minutes till we land. You probably won’t be disturbed before then.”

“Huh?” I sat up. “I was in there only an hour?” “Alittle less. But it seems forever. I know.”

“I feel like a squeezed orange.” I frowned, remembering something. “Peewee, I wasn’t too scared when they came for me. I was going to demand to be turned loose and insist on explanations. But I never asked him a question, not one.”

“You never will. I tried. But your will just drains out. Like a rabbit in front of a snake.” “Yes.”

“Kip, do you see why I had to take just any chance to get away? You didn’t seem to believe my story-do you believe it now?” “Uh, yes. I believe it.”

“Thanks. I always say I’m too proud to care what people think, but I’m not, really. I had to get back to Daddy and tell him … because he’s the only one in the entire world who would simply believe me, no matter how crazy it sounded.”

“I see. I guess I see. But how did you happen to wind up in Centerville?” “Centerville?”

“Where I live. Where ‘Junebug’ called ‘Peewee.’ “

“Oh. I never meant to go there. I meant to land in New Jersey, in Princeton if possible, because I had to find Daddy.” “Well, you sure missed your aim.”

“Can you do better? I would have done all right but I had my elbow joggled. Those things aren’t hard to fly; you just aim and push for where you want to go, not like the complicated things they do about rocket ships. And I had the Mother Thing to coach me. But I had to slow down going into the atmosphere and compensate for Earth’s spin and I didn’t know quite how. I found myself too far west and they were chasing me and I didn’t know what to do … and then I heard you on the space-operations band and thought everything was all right-and there I was.” She spread her hands. “I’m sorry, Kip.”

“Well, you landed it. They say any landing you walk away from is a good one.” “But I’m sorry I got you mixed up in it.”

“Uh … don’t worry about that. It looks like somebody has to get mixed up in it. Peewee … what’s he up to?” “They, you mean.”

“Huh? I don’t think the other two amount to anything. He is the one.”

“I didn’t mean Tim and Jock-they’re just people gone bad. I meant them-him and others like him.”

I wasn’t at my sharpest-I had been knocked out three times and was shy a night’s sleep and more confusing things had happened than in all my life. but until Peewee pointed it out I hadn’t considered that there could be more than one like him-one seemed more than enough.

But if there was one, then there were thousands-maybe millions or billions. I felt my stomach twist and wanted to hide. “You’ve seen others?” “No. Just him. But the Mother Thing told me.”

“Ugh! Peewee … what are they up to?”

“Haven’t you guessed? They’re moving in on us.” My collar felt tight, even though it was open. “How?” “I don’t know.”

“You mean they’re going to kill us off and take over Earth?” She hesitated. “It might not be anything that nice.”

“Uh … make slaves of us?”

“You’re getting warmer. Kip-I think they eat meat.”

I swallowed. “You have the jolliest ideas, for a little girl.” “You think I like it? That’s why I had to tell Daddy.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say. It was an old, old fear for human beings. Dad had told me about an invasion-from-Mars radio broadcast when he was a kid-pure fiction but it had scared people silly. But people didn’t believe in it now; ever since we got to the Moon and circled Mars and Venus everybody seemed to agree that we weren’t going to find life anywhere.

Now here it was, in our laps. “Peewee? Are these things Martians? Or from Venus?”

She shook her head. “They’re not from anywhere close. The Mother Thing tried to tell me, but we ran into a difficulty of understanding.”

“Inside the Solar System?”

“That was part of the difficulty. Both yes and no.” “It can’t be both.”

“You ask her.”

“I’d like to.” I hesitated, then blurted, “I don’t care where they’re from -we can shoot them down … if we don’t have to look at them!” “Oh, I hope so!”

“It figures. You say these are flying saucers … real saucer sightings, I mean; not weather balloons. If so, they have been scouting us for years. Therefore they aren’t sure of themselves, even if they do look horrible enough to curdle milk. Otherwise they would have moved in at once the way we would on a bunch of animals. But they haven’t. That means we can kill them-if we go about it right.”

She nodded eagerly. “I hope so. I hoped Daddy would see a way. But-” She frowned. “-we don’t know much about them … and Daddy always warned me not to be cocksure when data was incomplete. ‘Don’t make so much stew from one oyster, Peewee,’ he always says.”

“But I’ll bet we’re right. Say, who is your Daddy? And what’s your full name?”

“Why, Daddy is Professor Reisfeld. And my name is Patricia Wynant Reisfeld. Isn’t that awful? Better call me Peewee.” “Professor Reisfeld- What does he teach?”

“Huh? You don’t know? You don’t know about Daddy’s Nobel Prize? Or anything?” “I’m just a country boy, Peewee. Sorry.”

“You must be. Daddy doesn’t teach anything. He thinks. He thinks better than anybody … except me, possibly. He’s the synthesist. Everybody else specializes. Daddy knows everything and puts the pieces together.”

Maybe so, but I hadn’t heard of him. It sounded like a good idea … but it would take an awfully smart man-if I had found out anything, it was that they could print it faster than I could study it. Professor Reisfeld must have three heads. Five.

“Wait till you meet him,” she added, glancing at her watch. “Kip, I think we had better get braced. We’ll be landing in a few minutes … and he won’t care how he shakes up passengers.” So we crowded into the narrow end and braced each other. We waited. After a bit the ship shook itself and the floor tilted. There was a slight bump and things got steady and suddenly I

felt very light. Peewee pulled her feet under her and stood up. “Well, we’re on the Moon.”

Chapter 5

When I was a kid, we used to pretend we were making the first landing on the Moon. Then I gave up romantic notions and realized that I would have to go about it another way. But I never thought I would get there penned up, unable to see out, like a mouse in a shoe box.

The only thing that proved I was on the Moon was my weight. High gravity can be managed anywhere, with centrifuges. Low gravity is another matter; on Earth the most you can squeeze out is a few seconds going off a high board, or by parachute delay, or stunts in a plane.

If low gravity goes on and on, then wherever you are, you are not on Earth. Well, I wasn’t on Mars; it had to be the Moon.

On the Moon I should weigh a little over twenty-five pounds. It felt about so-I felt light enough to walk on a lawn and not bend the grass.

For a few minutes I simply exulted in it, forgetting him and the trouble we were in, just heel-and-toe around the room, getting the wonderful feel of it, bouncing a little and bumping my head against the ceiling and feeling how slowly, slowly, slowly I settled back to the floor. Peewee sat down, shrugged her shoulders and gave a little smile, an annoyingly patronizing one. The “Old Moon-Hand”-all of two weeks more of it than I had had.

Low gravity has its disconcerting tricks. Your feet have hardly any traction and they fly out from under you. I had to learn with muscles and reflexes what I had known only intellectually: that when weight goes down, mass and inertia do not. To change direction, even in walking, you have to lean the way you would to round a turn on a board track- and even then if you don’t have traction (which I didn’t in socks on a smooth floor) your feet go out from under you.

Afall doesn’t hurt much in one-sixth gravity but Peewee giggled. I sat up and said, “Go and laugh, smartie. You can afford to-you’ve got tennis shoes.” “I’m sorry. But you looked silly, hanging there like a slow-motion picture and grabbing air.”

“No doubt. Very funny.”

“I said I was sorry. Look, you can borrow my shoes.”

I looked at her feet, then at mine, and snorted. “Gee, thanks!”

“Well … you could cut the heels out, or something. It wouldn’t bother me. Nothing ever does. Where are your shoes. Kip?” “Uh, about a quarter-million miles away-unless we got off at the wrong stop.”

“Oh. Well, you won’t need them much, here.”

“Yeah.” I chewed my lip, thinking about “here” and no longer interested in games with gravity. “Peewee? What do we do now?” “About what?”

“About him.”

“Nothing. What can we do?” “Then what do we do?” “Sleep.”

“Huh?”

“Sleep. ‘Sleep, that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care.’ ‘Tired Nature’s sweet restorer, balmy sleep.’ ‘Blessings on him who invented sleep, the mantle that covers all human thoughts.’ “ “Quit showing off and talk sense!”

“I am talking sense. At the moment we’re as helpless as goldfish. We’re simply trying to survive-and the first principle of survival is not to worry about the impossible and concentrate on what’s possible. I’m hungry and thirsty and uncomfortable and very, very tired … and all I can do about it is sleep. So if you will kindly keep quiet, that’s what I’ll do.”

“I can take a hint. No need to snap at me.”

“I’m sorry. But I get cross as two sticks when I’m tired and Daddy says I’m simply frightful before breakfast.” She curled up in a little ball and tucked that filthy rag doll under her chin. “G’night, Kip.”

“Good night, Peewee.”

I thought of something and started to speak … and saw that she was asleep. She was breathing softly and her face had smoothed out and no longer looked alert and smart-alecky. Her upper lip pooched out in a baby pout and she looked like a dirty-faced cherub. There were streaks where she had apparently cried and not wiped it away. But she had never let me see her crying.

Kip, I said to myself, you get yourself into the darndest things; this is much worse than bringing home a stray pup or a kitten. But I had to take care of her … or die trying.

Well, maybe I would. Die trying, I mean. It didn’t look as if I were any great shakes even taking care of myself.

I yawned, then yawned again. Maybe the shrimp had more sense than I had, at that. I was more tired than I had ever been, and hungry and thirsty and not comfortable other ways. I thought about banging on the door panel and trying to attract the fat one or his skinny partner. But that would wake Peewee-and it might antagonize him.

So I sprawled on my back the way I nap on the living-room rug at home. I found that a hard floor does not require any one sleeping position on the Moon; one-sixth gravity is a better mattress than all the foam rubber ever made-that fussy princess in Hans Christian Andersen’s story would have had no complaints.

I want to sleep at once.

It was the wildest space opera I had ever seen, loaded with dragons and Arcturian maidens and knights in shining space armor and shuttling between King Arthur’s Court and the Dead Sea Bottoms of Barsoom. I didn’t mind that but I did mind the announcer. He had the voice of Ace Quiggle and the face of him. He leaned out of the screen and leered, those wormy cilia writhing. “Will Beowulf conquer the Dragon? Will Tristan return to Iseult? Will Peewee find her dolly? Tune in this channel tomorrow night and in the meantime, wake up and hurry to your neighborhood druggist for a cake of Skyway’s Kwikbrite Armor Polish, the better polish used by the better knights sans peur et sans reproche. Wake up!” He shoved a snaky arm out of  the screen and grabbed my shoulder.

I woke up.

“Wake up,” Peewee was saying, shaking my shoulder. “Please wake up, Kip.” “Lea’ me alone!”

“You were having a nightmare.”

The Arcturian princess had been in a bad spot. “Now I’ll never know how it came out. Wha’ did y’ want to wake me for? I thought the idea was to sleep?” “You’ve slept for hours-and now perhaps there is something we can do.”

“Breakfast, maybe?”

She ignored that. “I think we should try to escape.”

I sat up suddenly, bounced off the floor, settled back. “Wups! How?”

“I don’t know exactly. But I think they have gone away and left us. If so, we’ll never have a better chance.” “They have? What makes you think so?”

“Listen. Listen hard.”

I listened. I could hear my heart beat, I could hear Peewee breathing, and presently I could hear her heart beating. I’ve never heard deeper silence in a cave.

I took my knife, held it in my teeth for bone conduction and pushed it against a wall. Nothing. I tried the floor and the other walls. Still nothing. The ship ached with silence-no throb, no thump, not even those vibrations you can sense but not hear. “You’re right, Peewee.”

“I noticed it when the air circulation stopped.” I sniffed. “Are we running out of air?”

“Not right away. But the air stopped-it comes out of those tiny holes up there. You don’t notice it but I missed something when it stopped.”  I thought hard. “I don’t see where this gets us. We’re still locked up.”

“I’m not sure.”

I tried the blade of my knife on a wall. It wasn’t metal or anything I knew as plastic, but it didn’t mind a knife. Maybe the Comte de Monte Cristo could have dug a hole in it-but he had more time. “How do you figure?”

“Every time they’ve opened or closed that door panel, I’ve heard a click. So after they took you out I stuck a wad of bubble gum where the panel meets the wall, high up where they might not notice.”

“You’ve got some gum?”

“Yes. It helps, when you can’t get a drink of water. I-“

“Got any more?” I asked eagerly. I wasn’t fresh in any way but thirst was the worst-I’d never been so thirsty.

Peewee looked upset. “Oh, poor Kip! I haven’t any more … just an old wad I kept parked on my belt buckle and chewed when I felt driest.” She frowned. “But you can have it. You’re welcome.”

“Uh, thanks, Peewee. Thanks a lot. But I guess not.”

She looked insulted. “I assure you, Mr. Russell, that I do not have anything contagious. I was merely trying to-“ “Yes, yes,” I said hastily. “I’m sure you were. But-“

“I assumed that these were emergency conditions. It is surely no more unsanitary than kissing a girl-but then I don’t suppose you’ve ever kissed a girl!”

“Not lately,” I evaded. “But what I want is a drink of clear cold water- or murky warm water. Besides, you used up your gum on the door panel. What did you expect to accomplish?” “Oh. I told you about that click. Daddy says that, in a dilemma, it is helpful to change any variable, then reexamine the problem. I tried to introduce a change with my bubble gum.” “Well?”

“When they brought you back, then closed the door, I didn’t hear a click.”

“What? Then you thought you had bamboozled their lock hours and hour ago-and you didn’t tell me?” “That is correct.”

“Why, I ought to spank you!”

“I don’t advise it,” she said frostily. “I bite.”

I believed her. And scratch. And other things. None of them pleasant. I changed the subject. “Why didn’t you tell me, Peewee?” “I was afraid you might try to get out.”

“Huh? I certainly would have!”

“Precisely. But I wanted that panel closed … as long as he was out there.”

Maybe she was a genius. Compared with me. “I see your point. All right, let’s see if we can get it open.” I examined the panel. The wad of gum was there, up high as she could reach, and from the way it was mashed it did seem possible that it had fouled the groove the panel slid into, but I couldn’t see any crack down the edge.

I tried the point of my big blade on it. The panel seemed to creep to the right an eighth of an inch-then the blade broke.  I closed the stub and put the knife away. “Any ideas?”

“Maybe if we put our hands flat against it and tried to drag it?”

“Okay.” I wiped sweat from my hands on my shirt. “Now … easy does it. Just enough pressure for friction.” The panel slid to the right almost an inch-and stopped firmly.

But there was a hairline crack from floor to ceiling.

I broke off the stub of the big blade this time. The crack was no wider. Peewee said, “Oh, dear!” “We aren’t licked.” I backed off and ran toward the door.

“Toward,” not “to”-my feet skidded, I leveled off and did a leisurely bellywhopper. Peewee didn’t laugh.

I picked myself up, got against the far wall, braced one foot against it and tried a swimming racing start.

I got as far as the door panel before losing my footing. I didn’t hit it very hard, but I felt it spring. It bulged a little, then sprang back. “Wait a sec, Kip,” said Peewee. “Take your socks off. I’ll get behind you and push-my tennis shoes don’t slip.”

She was right. On the Moon, if you can’t get rubber-soled shoes, you’re better off barefooted. We backed against the far wall, Peewee behind me with her hands on my hips. “One … two

… three … Go!” We advanced with the grace of a hippopotamus.

I hurt my shoulder. But the panel sprung out of its track, leaving a space four inches wide at the bottom and tapering to the top.

I left skin on the door frame and tore my shirt and was hampered in language by the presence of a girl. But the opening widened. When it was wide enough for my head, I got down flat and peered out. There was nobody in sight-a foregone conclusion, with the noise I had made, unless they were playing cat-and-mouse. Which I wouldn’t put past them. Especially him.

Peewee started to wiggle through; I dragged her back. “Naughty, naughty! I go first.” Two more heaves and it was wide enough for me. I opened the small blade of my knife and handed it

to Peewee. “With your shield or on it, soldier.”

“You take it.”

“I won’t need it. ‘Two-Fisted Death,’ they call me around dark alleys.” This was propaganda, but why worry her? Sans pew et sans reproche- maiden-rescuing done cheaply, special rates for parties.

I eased out on elbows and knees, stood up and looked around. “Come on out,” I said quietly.

She started to, then backed up suddenly. She reappeared clutching that bedraggled dolly. “I almost forgot Madame Pompadour,” she said breathlessly.  I didn’t even smile.

“Well,” she said defensively, “I have to have her to get to sleep at night. It’s my one neurotic quirk-but Daddy says I’ll outgrow it.” “Sure, sure.”

“Well, don’t look so smug! It’s not fetishism, not even primitive animism; it’s merely a conditioned reflex. I’m aware that it’s just a doll-I’ve understood the pathetic fallacy for … oh, years and years!”

“Look, Peewee,” I said earnestly, “I don’t care how you get to sleep. Personally I hit myself over the head with a hammer. But quit yakking. Do you know the layout of these ships?” She looked around. “I think this is the ship that chased me. But it looks the same as the one I piloted.”

“All right. Should we head for the control room?” “Huh?”

“You flew the other heap. Can you fly this one?” “Unh … I guess so. Yes, I can.”

“Then let’s go.” I started in the direction they had lugged me.

“But the other time I had the Mother Thing to tell me what to do! Let’s find her.” I stopped. “Can you get it off the ground?”

“Well … yes.”

“We’ll look for her after we’re in the air-‘in space,’ I mean. If she’s aboard we’ll find her. If she’s not, there’s not a thing we can do.” “Well … all right. I see your logic; I don’t have to like it.” She tagged along. “Kip? How many gravities can you stand?”

“Huh? I haven’t the slightest idea. Why?”

“Because these things can go lots faster than I dared try when I escaped before. That was my mistake.” “Your mistake was in heading for New Jersey.”

“But I had to find Daddy!”

“Sure, sure, eventually. But you should have ducked over to Lunar Base and yelled for the Federation Space Corps. This is no job for a popgun; we need help. Any idea where we are?” “Mmm … I think so. If he took us back to their base. I’ll know when I look at the sky.”

“All right. If you can figure out where Lunar Base is from here, that’s where we’ll go. If not- Well, we’ll head for New Jersey at all the push it has.”

The control-room door latched and I could not figure out how to open it. Peewee did what she said should work-which was to tuck her little finger into a hole mine would not enter-and told me it must be locked. So I looked around.

I found a metal bar racked in the corridor, a thing about five feet long, pointed on one end and with four handles like brass knucks on the other. I didn’t know what it was-the hobgoblin equivalent of a fire ax, possibly -but it was a fine wrecking bar.

I made a shambles of that door in three minutes. We went in.

My first feeling was gooseflesh because here was where I had been grilled by him. I tried not to show it. If he turned up, I was going to let him have his wrecking bar right between his  grisly eyes. I looked around, really seeing the place for the first time. There was sort of a nest in the middle surrounded by what could have been a very fancy coffee maker or a velocipede for an octopus; I was glad Peewee knew which button to push. “How do you see out?”

“Like this.” Peewee squeezed past and put a finger into a hole I hadn’t noticed.

The ceiling was hemispherical like a planetarium. Which was what it was, for it lighted up. I gasped.

It was suddenly not a floor we were on, but a platform, apparently out in the open and maybe thirty feet in the air. Over me were star images, thousands of them, in a black “sky”-and facing toward me, big as a dozen full moons and green and lovely and beautiful, was Earth!

Peewee touched my elbow. “Snap out of it, Kip.”

I said in a choked voice, “Peewee, don’t you have any poetry in your soul?”

“Surely I have. Oodles. But we haven’t time. I know where we are, Kip -back where I started from. Their base. See those rocks with long jagged shadows? Some of them are ships, camouflaged. And over to the left- that high peak, with the saddle?-a little farther left, almost due west, is Tombaugh Station, forty miles away. About two hundred miles farther is Lunar Base and beyond is Luna City.”

“How long will it take?”

“Two hundred, nearly two hundred and fifty miles? Uh, I’ve never tried a point-to-point on the Moon-but it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes.” “Let’s go! They might come back any minute.”

“Yes, Kip.” She crawled into that jackdaw’s nest and bent over a sector.

Presently she looked up. Her face was white and thin and very little-girlish. “Kip … we aren’t going anywhere. I’m sorry.”  I let out a yelp. “What! What’s the matter? Have you forgotten how to run it?”

“No. The ‘brain’ is gone.” “The which?”

“The ‘brain.’ Little black dingus about the size of a walnut that fits in this cavity.” She showed me. “We got away before because the Mother Thing managed to steal one. We were locked  in an empty ship, just as you and I are now. But she had one and we got away.” Peewee looked bleak and very lost. “I should have known that he wouldn’t leave one in the control room-I guess I did and didn’t want to admit it. I’m sorry.”

“Uh … look, Peewee, we won’t give up that easily. Maybe I can make something to fit that socket.”

“Like jumping wires in a car?” She shook her head. “It’s not that simple. Kip. If you put a wooden model in place of the generator in a car, would it run? I don’t know quite what it does, but   I called it the ‘brain’ because it’s very complex.”

“But-” I shut up. If a Borneo savage had a brand-new car, complete except for spark plugs, would he get it running? Echo answers mournfully. “Peewee, what’s the next best thing? Any ideas? Because if you haven’t, I want you to show me the air lock. I’ll take this-” I shook my wrecking bar “-and bash anything that comes through.”

“I’m stumped,” she admitted. “I want to look for the Mother Thing. If she’s shut up in this ship, she may know what to do.”

“All right. But first show me the air lock. You can look for her while I stand guard.” I felt the reckless anger of desperation. I didn’t see how we were ever going to get out and I was   beginning to believe that we weren’t -but there was still a reckoning due. He was going to learn that it wasn’t safe to push people around. I was sure-I was fairly sure-that I could sock him before my spine turned to jelly. Splash that repulsive head.

If I didn’t look at his eyes.

Peewee said slowly, “There’s one other thing-“ “What?”

“I hate to suggest it. You might think I was running out on you.” “Don’t be silly. If you’ve got an idea, spill it.”

“Well … there’s Tombaugh Station, over that way about forty miles. If my space suit is in the ship-“

I suddenly quit feeling like Bowie at the Alamo. Maybe the game would go an extra period- “We can walk it!”

She shook her head. “No, Kip. That’s why I hesitated to mention it. I can walk it … if we find my suit. But you couldn’t wear my suit even if you squatted.” “I don’t need your suit,” I said impatiently.

“Kip, Kip! This is the Moon, remember? No air.”

“Yes, yes, sure! Think I’m an idiot? But if they locked up your suit, they probably put mine right beside it and-“ “You’ve got a space suit?” she said incredulously.

Our next remarks were too confused to repeat but finally Peewee was convinced that I really did own a space suit, that in fact the only reason I was sending on the space-operations band twelve hours and a quarter of a million miles back was that I was wearing it when they grabbed me.

“Let’s tear the joint apart!” I said. “No-show me that air lock, then you take it apart.” “All right.”

She showed me the lock, a room much like the one we had been cooped in, but smaller and with an inner door built to take a pressure load. It was not locked. We opened it cautiously. It was empty, and its outer door was closed or we would never been able to open the inner. I said, “If Wormface had been a suspenders-and-belt man, he would have left the outer door open, even though he had us locked up. Then- Wait a second! Is there a way to latch the inner door open?”

“I don’t know.”

“We’ll see.” There was, a simple hook. But to make sure that it couldn’t be unlatched by button-pushing from outside I wedged it with my knife. “You’re sure this is the only air lock?” “The other ship had only one and I’m pretty certain they are alike.”

“We’ll keep our eyes open. Nobody can get at us through this one. Even old Wormface has to use an air lock.” “But suppose he opens the outer door anyhow?” Peewee said nervously. “We’d pop like balloons.”

I looked at her and grinned. “Who is a genius? Sure we would … if he did. But he won’t. Not with twenty, twenty-five tons of pressure holding it closed. As you reminded me, this is the Moon. No air outside, remember?”

“Oh.” Peewee looked sheepish.

So we searched. I enjoyed wrecking doors; Wormface wasn’t going to like me. One of the first things we found was a smelly little hole that Fatty and Skinny lived in. The door was not locked, which was a shame. That room told me a lot about that pair. It showed that they were pigs, with habits as unattractive as their morals. The room also told me that they were not casual prisoners; it had been refitted for humans. Their relationship with Wormface, whatever it was, had gone on for some time and was continuing. There were two empty racks for space suits, several dozen canned rations of the sort sold in military-surplus stores, and best of all, there was drinking water and a washroom of sorts-and something more precious than fine gold or frankincense if we found our suits: two charged bottles of oxy-helium.

I took a drink, opened a can of food for Peewee-it opened with a key; we weren’t in the predicament of the Three Men in a Boat with their tin of pineapple-told her to grab a bite, then search that room. I went on with my giant toad sticker; those charged air bottles had given me an unbearable itch to find our suits-and get out!-before Wormface returned.

I smashed a dozen doors as fast as the Walrus and the Carpenter opened oysters and found all sorts of things, including what must have been living quarters for wormfaces. But I didn’t stop to look-the Space Corps could do that, if and when-I simply made sure that there was not a space suit in any of them.

And found them!-in a compartment next to the one we had been prisoners in.

I was so glad to see Oscar that I could have kissed him. I shouted, “Hi, Pal! Mirabile visu!” and ran to get Peewee. My feet went out from under me again but I didn’t care. Peewee looked up as I rushed in. “I was just going to look for you.”

“Got it! Got it!”

“You found the Mother Thing?” she said eagerly.

“Huh? No, no! The space suits-yours and mine! Let’s go!”

“Oh.” She looked disappointed and I felt hurt. “That’s good … but we have to find the Mother Thing first.”

I felt tried beyond endurance. Here we had a chance, slim but real, to escape a fate-worse-than-death (I’m not using a figure of speech) and she wanted to hang around to search for a bug-eyed monster. For any human being, even a stranger with halitosis, I would have done it. For a dog or cat I would, although reluctantly.

But what was a bug-eyed monster to me? All this one had done was to get me into the worst jam I had ever been in.  I considered socking Peewee and stuffing her into her suit. But I said, “Are you crazy? We’re leaving-right now!”

“We can’t go till we find her.”

“Now I know you’re crazy. We don’t even know she’s here … and if we do find her, we can’t take her with us.” “Oh, but we will!”

“How? This is the Moon, remember? No air. Got a space suit for her?”

“But-” That stonkered her. But not for long. She had been sitting on the floor, holding the ration can between her knees. She stood up suddenly, bouncing a little, and said, “Do as you like; I’m going to find her. Here.” She shoved the can at me.

I should have used force. But I am handicapped by training from early childhood never to strike a female, no matter how richly she deserves it. So the opportunity and Peewee both slid past while I was torn between common sense and upbringing. I simply groaned helplessly.

Then I became aware of an unbearably attractive odor. I was holding that can. It contained boiled shoe leather and gray gravy and smelled ambrosial.

Peewee had eaten half; I ate the rest while looking at what she had found. There was a coil of nylon rope which I happily put with the air bottles; Oscar had fifty feet of clothesline clipped to his belt but that had been a penny-saving expedient. There was a prospector’s hammer which I salvaged, and two batteries which would do for headlamps and things.

The only other items of interest were a Government Printing Office publication titled Preliminary Report on Selenology, a pamphlet on uranium prospecting, and an expired Utah driver’s license for “Timothy Johnson”-I recognized the older man’s mean face. The pamphlets interested me but this was no time for excess baggage.

The main furniture was two beds, curved like contour chairs and deeply padded; they told me that Skinny and Fatty had ridden this ship at high acceleration.

When I had mopped the last of the gravy with a finger, I took a big drink, washed my hands-using water lavishly because I didn’t care if that pair died of thirst-grabbed my plunder and headed for the room where the space suits were.

As I got there I ran into Peewee. She was carrying the crowbar and looking overjoyed. “I found her!” “Where?”

“Come on! I can’t get it open, I’m not strong enough.”

I put the stuff with our suits and followed her. She stopped at a door panel farther along the corridor than my vandalism had taken me. “In there!”  I looked and I listened. “What makes you think so?”

“I know! Open it!”

I shrugged and got to work with the nutpick. The panel went sprung! and that was that. Curled up in the middle of the floor was a creature.

So far as I could tell, it might or might not have been the one I had seen in the pasture the night before. The light had been poor, the conditions very different, and my examination had ended abruptly. But Peewee was in no doubt. She launched herself through the air with a squeal of joy and the two rolled over and over like kittens play-fighting.

Peewee was making sounds of joy, more or less in English. So was the Mother Thing, but not in English. I would not have been surprised if she had spoken English, since Wormface did and since Peewee had mentioned things the Mother Thing had told her. But she didn’t.

Did you ever listen to a mockingbird? Sometimes singing melodies, sometimes just sending up a joyous noise unto the Lord? The endlessly varied songs of a mockingbird are nearest to the speech of the Mother Thing.

At last they held still, more or less, and Peewee said, “Oh, Mother Thing, I’m so happy!”

The creature sang to her. Peewee answered, “Oh. I’m forgetting my manners. Mother Thing, this is my dear friend Kip.” The Mother Thing sang to me-and I understood.

What she said was: “I am very happy to know you, Kip.” It didn’t come out in words. But it might as well have been English. Nor was this half-kidding self-deception, such as my conversations with Oscar or Peewee’s with Madame Pompadour-when I talk with Oscar I am both sides of the conversation; it’s just my conscious talking to my subconscious, or some such. This was not that.

The Mother Thing sang to me and I understood.

I was startled but not unbelieving. When you see a rainbow you don’t stop to argue the laws of optics. There it is, in the sky.

I would have been an idiot not to know that the Mother Thing was speaking to me because I did understand and understood her every time. If she directed a remark at Peewee alone, it was usually just birdsongs to me-but if it was meant for me, I got it.

Call it telepathy if you like, although it doesn’t seem to be what they do at Duke University. I never read her mind and I don’t think she read mine. We just talked.

But while I was startled, I minded my manners. I felt the way I do when Mother introduces me to one of her older grande-dame friends. So I bowed and said, “We’re very happy that we’ve found you, Mother Thing.”

It was simple, humble truth. I knew, without explanation, what it was that had made Peewee stubbornly determined to risk recapture rather than give up looking for her-the quality that made her “the Mother Thing.”

Peewee has this habit of slapping names on things and her choices aren’t always apt, for my taste. But I’ll never question this one. The Mother Thing was the Mother Thing because she was. Around her you felt happy and safe and warm. You knew that if you skinned your knee and came bawling into the house, she would kiss it well and paint it with merthiolate and everything would be all right. Some nurses have it and some teachers … and, sadly, some mothers don’t.

But the Mother Thing had it so strongly that I wasn’t even worried by Wormface. We had her with us so everything was going to be all right. I logically I knew that she was as vulnerable as we were-I had seen them strike her down. She didn’t have my size and strength, she couldn’t pilot the ship as Peewee had been able to. It didn’t matter.

I wanted to crawl into her lap. Since she was too small and didn’t have a lap, I would gratefully hold her in mine, anytime.

I have talked more about my father but that doesn’t mean that Mother is less important-just different. Dad is active, Mother is passive; Dad talks, Mother doesn’t. But if she died, Dad would wither like an uprooted tree. She makes our world.

The Mother Thing had the effect on me that Mother has, only I’m used to it from Mother. Now I was getting it unexpectedly, far from home, when I needed it. Peewee said excitedly, “Now we can go. Kip. Let’s hurry!”

The Mother Thing sang (“Where are we going, children?”) “To Tombaugh Station, Mother Thing. They’ll help us.”

The Mother Thing blinked her eyes and looked serenely sad. She had great, soft, compassionate eyes-she looked more like a lemur than anything else but she was not a primate-she wasn’t even in our sequence, unearthly. But she had these wonderful eyes and a soft, defenseless mouth out of which music poured. She wasn’t as big as Peewee and her hands were tinier still-six fingers, any one of which could oppose the others the way our thumbs can. Her body-well, it never stayed the same shape so it’s hard to describe, but it was right for her.

She didn’t wear clothes but she wasn’t naked; she had soft, creamy fur, sleek and fine as chinchilla. I thought at first she didn’t wear anything, but presently I noticed a piece of jewelry, a shiny triangle with a double spiral in each corner. I don’t know what made it stick on.

I didn’t take all this in at once. At that instant the expression in the Mother Thing’s eyes brought a crash of sorrow into the happiness I had been feeling. Her answer made me realize that she didn’t have a miracle ready (“How are we to fly the ship? They have guarded me most carefully this time.”)

Peewee explained eagerly about the space suits and I stood there like a fool, with a lump of ice in my stomach. What had been just a question of using my greater strength to force Peewee to behave was now an unsolvable dilemma. I could no more abandon the Mother Thing than I could have abandoned Peewee … and there were only two space suits.

Even if she could wear our sort, which looked as practical as roller skates on a snake.

The Mother Thing gently pointed out that her own vacuum gear had been destroyed. (I’m going to quit writing down all her songs; I don’t remember them exactly anyhow.)

And so the fight began. It was an odd fight, with the Mother Thing gentle and loving and sensible and utterly firm, and Peewee throwing a tearful, bad-little-girl tantrum-and me standing miserably by, not even refereeing.

When the Mother Thing understood the situation, she analyzed it at once to the inevitable answer. Since she had no way to go (and probably couldn’t have walked that far anyhow, even if she had had her sort of space suit) the only answer was for us two to leave at once. If we reached safety, then we would, if possible, convince our people of the danger from Wormface & Co.-in which case she might be saved as well … which would be nice but was not indispensable.

Peewee utterly, flatly, and absolutely refused to listen to any plan which called for leaving the Mother Thing behind. If the Mother Thing couldn’t go, she wouldn’t budge. “Kip! You go get help! Hurry! I’ll stay here.”

I stared at her. “Peewee, you know I can’t do that.”

“You must. You will so! You’ve got to. If you don’t, I’ll … I’ll never speak to you again!”

“If I did, I’d never speak to myself again. Look, Peewee, it won’t wash. You’ll have to go-“ “No!”

“Oh, shut up for a change. You go and I stay and guard the door with the shillelagh. I’ll hold ‘em off while you round up the troops. But tell them to hurry!” “I-” She stopped and looked very sober and utterly baffled. Then she threw herself on the Mother Thing, sobbing: “Oh, you don’t love me any more!”

Which shows how far her logic had gone to pot. The Mother Thing sang softly to her while I worried the thought that our last chance was t trickling away while we argued. Wormface might come back any second- and while I hoped to slug him a final one if he got in, more likely he had resources to outmaneuver me. Either way, we would not escape.

At last I said, “Look we’ll all go.”

Peewee stopped sobbing and looked startled. “You know we can’t.” The Mother Thing sang (“How, Kip?”)

“Uh, I’ll have to show you. Up on your feet, Peewee.” We went where the suits were, while Peewee carried Madame Pompadour and half carried the Mother Thing. Lars Eklund, the rigger who had first worn Oscar according to his log, must have weighed about two hundred pounds; in order to wear Oscar I had to strap him tight to keep from bulging. I hadn’t considered retailoring him to my size as I was afraid I would never get him gas-tight again. Arm and leg lengths were okay; it was girth that was too big.

There was room inside for both the Mother Thing and me.

I explained, while Peewee looked big-eyed and the Mother Thing sang queries and approvals. Yes, she could hang on piggy-back-and she couldn’t fall off, once we were sealed up and the straps cinched.

“All right. Peewee, get into your suit.” I went to get my socks while she started to suit up. When I came back I checked her helmet gauges, reading them backwards through her lens. “We had better give you some air. You’re only about half full.”

I ran into a snag. The spare bottles I had filched from those ghouls had screw-thread fittings like mine-but Peewee’s bottles had bayonet-and-snap joints. Okay, I guess, for tourists, chaperoned and nursed and who might get panicky while bottles were changed unless it was done fast-but not so good for serious work. In my workshop I would have rigged an adapter in twenty minutes. Here, with no real tools-well, that spare air might as well be on Earth for all the good it did Peewee.

For the first time, I thought seriously of leaving them behind while I made a fast forced march for help. But I didn’t mention it. I thought that Peewee would rather die on the way than fall back into his hands-and I was inclined to agree.

“Kid,” I said slowly, “that isn’t much air. Not for forty miles.” Her gauge was scaled in time as well as pressure; it read just under five hours. Could Peewee move as fast as a trotting horse? Even at lunar gravity? Not likely.

She looked at me soberly. “That’s calibrated for full-size people. I’m little-I don’t use much air.” “Uh … don’t use it faster than you have to.”

“I won’t. Let’s go.”

I started to close her gaskets. “Hey!” she objected. “What’s the matter?”

“Madame Pompadour! Hand her to me-please. On the floor by my feet.”

I picked up that ridiculous dolly and gave it to her. “How much air does she take?”

Peewee suddenly dimpled. “I’ll caution her not to inhale.” She stuffed it inside her shirt, I sealed her up. I sat down in my open suit, the Mother Thing crept up my back, singing reassuringly, and cuddled close. She felt good and I felt that I could hike a hundred miles, to get them both safe.

Getting me sealed in was cumbersome, as the straps had to be let out and then tightened to allow for the Mother Thing, and neither Peewee nor I had bare hands. We managed.

I made a sling from my clothesline for the spare bottles. With them around my neck, with Oscar’s weight and the Mother Thing as well, I scaled perhaps fifty pounds at the Moon’s one- sixth gee. It just made me fairly sure-footed for the first time.

I retrieved my knife from the air-lock latch and snapped it to Oscar’s belt beside the nylon rope and the prospector’s hammer. Then we went inside the air lock and closed its inner door. I didn’t know how to waste its air to the outside but Peewee did. It started to hiss out.

“You all right, Mother Thing?”

(“Yes, Kip.”) She hugged me reassuringly.

“Peewee to Junebug,” I heard in my phones: “radio check. Alfa, Bravo, Coca, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot-“ “Junebug to Peewee: I read you. Golf, Hotel, India, Juliette, Kilo-“

“I read you, Kip.” “Roger.”

“Mind your pressure. Kip. You’re swelling up too fast.” I kicked the chin valve while watching the gauge-and kicking myself for letting a little girl catch me in a greenhorn trick. But she had used a space suit before, while I had merely pretended to.

I decided this was no time to be proud. “Peewee? Give me all the tips you can. I’m new to his.” “I will, Kip.”

The outer door popped silently and swung inward-and I looked out over the bleak bright surface of a lunar plain. For a homesick moment I remembered the trip-to-the-Moon games I had played as a kid and wished I were back in Centerville. Then Peewee touched her helmet to mine. “See anyone?”

“No.”

“We’re lucky, the door faces away from the other ships. Listen carefully. We won’t use radio until we are over the horizon-unless it’s a desperate emergency. They listen on our frequencies. I know that for sure. Now see that mountain with the saddle in it? Kip, pay attention!”

“Yes.” I had been staring at Earth. She was beautiful even in that shadow show in the control room-but I just hadn’t realized. There she was, so close I could almost touch her … and so far away that we might never get home. You can’t believe what a lovely planet we have, until you see her from outside … with clouds girdling her waist and polar cap set jauntily, like a spring hat. “Yes. I see the saddle.”

“We head left of there, where you see a pass. Tim and Jock brought me through it in a crawler. Once we pick up its tracks it will be easy. But first we head for those near hills just left of that-that ought to keep this ship between us and the other ships while we get out of sight. I hope.”

It was twelve feet or so to the ground and I was prepared to jump, since it would be nothing much in that gravity. Peewee insisted on lowering me by rope. “You’ll fall over your feet. Look, Kip, listen to old Aunt Peewee. You don’t have Moon legs yet. It’s going to be like your first time on a bicycle.”

So I let her lower me and the Mother Thing while she snubbed the nylon rope around the side of the lock. Then she jumped with no trouble. I started to loop up the line but she stopped me and snapped the other end to her belt, then touched helmets. “I’ll lead. If I go too fast or you need me, tug on the rope. I won’t be able to see you.”

“Aye aye, Cap’n!”

“Don’t make fun of me, Kip. This is serious.” “I wasn’t making fun, Peewee. You’re boss.”

“Let’s go. Don’t look back, it won’t do any good and you might fall. I’m heading for those hills.”

Chapter 6

I should have relished the weird, romantic experience, but I was as busy as Eliza crossing the ice and the things snapping at my heels were worse than bloodhounds. I wanted to look back but I was too busy trying to stay on my feet. I couldn’t see my feet; I had to watch ahead and try to pick my footing-it kept me as busy as a lumberjack in a logrolling contest. I didn’t skid as the ground was rough-dust or fine sand over raw rock- and fifty pounds weight was enough for footing. But I had three hundred pounds mass not a whit reduced by lowered weight; this does things to lifelong reflex habits. I had to lean heavily for the slightest turn, lean back and dig in to slow down, lean far forward to speed up.

I could have drawn a force diagram, but doing it is another matter. How long does it take a baby to learn to walk? This newborn Moon-baby was having to learn while making a forced march, half blind, at the greatest speed he could manage.

So I didn’t have time to dwell on the wonder of it all.

Peewee moved into a brisk pace and kept stepping it up. Every little while my leash tightened and I tried still harder to speed up and not fall down. The Mother Thing warbled at my spine: (“Are you all right. Kip? You seem worried.”)

“I’m … all right! How … about … you?”

(“I’m very comfortable. Don’t wear yourself out, dear.”) “Okay!”

Oscar was doing his job. I began to sweat from exertion and naked Sun, but I didn’t kick the chin valve until I saw from my blood-color gauge that I was short on air. The system worked perfectly and the joints, under a four-pound pressure, gave no trouble; hours of practice in the pasture was paying off. Presently my one worry was to keep a sharp eye for rocks and ruts. We were into those low hills maybe twenty minutes after H-hour. Peewee’s first swerve as we reached rougher ground took me by surprise; I almost fell.

She slowed down and crept forward into a gulch. Afew moments later she stopped; I joined her and she touched helmets with me. “How are you doing?” “Okay.”

“Mother Thing, can you hear me?” (“Yes, dear.”)

“Are you comfortable? Can you breathe all right?” (“Yes, indeed. Our Kip is taking good care of me.”) “Good. You behave yourself, Mother Thing. Hear me?”

(“I will, dear.”) Somehow she put an indulgent chuckle into a birdsong.

“Speaking of breathing,” I said to Peewee, “let’s check your air.” I tried to look into her helmet. She pulled away, then touched again. “I’m all right!”

“So you say.” I held her helmet with both hands, found I couldn’t see the dials-with sunlight around us, trying to see in was like peering into a well. “What does it read-and don’t fib.” “Don’t be nosy!”

I turned her around and read her bottle gauges. One read zero; the other was almost full. I touched helmets. “Peewee,” I said slowly, “how many miles have we come?”

“About three, I think. Why?”

“Then we’ve got more than thirty to go?”

“At least thirty-five. Kip, quit fretting. I know I’ve got one empty bottle; I shifted to the full one before we stopped.” “One bottle won’t take you thirty-five miles.”

“Yes, it will … because it’s got to.”

“Look, we’ve got plenty of air. I’ll figure a way to get it to you.” My mind was trotting in circles, thinking what tools were on my belt, what else I had. “Kip, you know you can’t hook those spare bottles to my suit-so shut up!”

(“What’s the trouble, darlings? Why are you quarreling?”) “We aren’t fighting, Mother Thing. Kip is a worry wart.” (“Now, children-“)

I said, “Peewee, I admit I can’t hook the spares into your suit … but I’ll jigger a way to recharge your bottle.” “But How, Kip?”

“Leave it to me. I’ll touch only the empty; if it doesn’t work, we’re no worse off. If it does, we’ve got it made.” “How long will it take?”

“Ten minutes with luck. Thirty without.” “No,” she decided.

“Now, Peewee, don’t be sil-“

“I’m not being silly! We aren’t safe until we get into the mountains. I can get that far. Then, when we no longer show up like a bug on a plate, we can rest and recharge my empty bottle.”  It made sense. “All right.”

“Can you go faster? If we reach the mountains before they miss us, I don’t think they’ll ever find us. If we don’t-“ “I can go faster. Except for these pesky bottles.”

“Oh.” She hesitated. “Do you want to throw one away?”

“Huh? Oh, no, no! But they throw me off balance. I’ve just missed a tumble a dozen times. Peewee, can you retie them so they don’t swing?” “Oh. Sure.”

I had them hung around my neck and down my front-not smart but I had been hurried. Now Peewee lashed them firmly, still in front as my own bottles and the Mother Thing were on my back-no doubt she was finding it as crowded as Dollar Day. Peewee passed clothesline under my belt and around the yoke. She touched helmets. “I hope that’s okay.”

“Did you tie a square knot?”

She pulled her helmet away. Aminute later she touched helmets again. “It was a granny,” she admitted in a small voice, “but it’s a square knot now.” “Good. Tuck the ends in my belt so that I can’t trip, then we’ll mush. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” she said slowly. “I just wish I had salvaged my gum, old and tired as it was. My throat’s awful dry.” “Drink some water. Not too much.”

“Kip! It’s not a nice joke.”

I stared. “Peewee-your suit hasn’t any water?” “What? Don’t be silly.”

My jaw dropped. “But, baby,” I said helplessly, “why didn’t you fill your tank before we left?” “What are you talking about? Does your suit have a water tank?”

I couldn’t answer. Peewee’s suit was for tourists-for those “scenic walks amidst incomparable grandeur on the ancient face of the Moon” that the ads promised. Guided walks, of course, not over a half-hour at a time-they wouldn’t put in a water tank; some tourist might choke, or bite the nipple off and half drown in his helmet, or some silly thing. Besides, it was cheaper.

I began to worry about other shortcomings that cheap-jack equipment might have-with Peewee’s life depending on it. “I’m sorry,” I said humbly. “Look, I’ll try to figure out some way to get water to you.”

“I doubt if you can. I can’t die of thirst in the time it’ll take us to get there, so quit worrying. I’m all right. I just wish I had my bubble gum. Ready?” “Uh … ready.”

The hills were hardly more than giant folds in lava; we were soon through them, even though we had to take it cautiously over the very rough ground. Beyond them the ground looked natter than western Kansas, stretching out to a close horizon, with mountains sticking up beyond, glaring in the Sun and silhouetted against a black sky like cardboard cutouts. I tried to figure how far the horizon was, on a thousand-mile radius and a height of eye of six feet-and couldn’t do it in my head and wished for my slipstick. But it was awfully close, less than a mile.

Peewee let me overtake her, touched helmets. “Okay, Kip? All right, Mother Thing?” “Sure.”

(“All right, dear.”)

“Kip, the course from the pass when they fetched me here was east eight degrees north. I heard them arguing and sneaked a peek at their map. So we go back west eight degrees south-that doesn’t count the jog to these hills but it’s close enough to find the pass. Okay?”

“Sounds swell.” I was impressed. “Peewee, were you an Indian scout once? Or Davy Crockett?”

“Pooh! Anybody can read a map”-she sounded pleased. “I want to check compasses. What bearing do you have on Earth?”  I said silently: Oscar, you’ve let me down. I’ve been cussing her suit for not having water-and you don’t have a compass.

(Oscar protested: “Hey, pal, that’s unfair! Why would I need a compass at Space Station Two? Nobody told me I was going to the Moon.”) I said, “Peewee, this suit is for space station work. What use is a compass in space? Nobody told me I was going to the Moon.”

“But- Well, don’t stop to cry about it. You can get your directions by Earth.” “Why can’t I use your compass?”

“Don’t be silly; it’s built into my helmet. Now just a moment-” She faced Earth, moved her helmet back and forth. Then she touched helmets again. “Earth is smacko on northwest … that makes the course fifty three degrees left of there. Try to pick it out. Earth is two degrees wide, you know.”

“I knew that before you were born.”

“No doubt. Some people require a head start.” “Smart aleck!”

“You were rude first!”

“But- Sorry, Peewee. Let’s save the fights for later. I’ll spot you the first two bites.” “I won’t need them! You don’t know how nasty I can-“

“I have some idea.” (“Children! Children!”) “I’m sorry, Peewee.”

“So am I. I’m edgy. I wish we were there.”

“So do I. Let me figure the course.” I counted degrees using Earth as a yardstick. I marked a place by eye, then tried again judging fifty-three degrees as a proportion of ninety. The results didn’t agree, so I tried to spot some stars to help me. They say you can see stars from the Moon even when the Sun is in the sky. Well, you can-but not easily. I had the Sun over my shoulder but was facing Earth, almost three-quarters full, and had the dazzling ground glare as well. The polarizer cut down the glare-and cut out the stars, too.

So I split my guesses and marked the spot. “Peewee? See that sharp peak with sort of a chin on its left profile? That ought to be the course, pretty near.” “Let me check.” She tried it by compass, then touched helmets. “Nice going, Kip. Three degrees to the right and you’ve got it.”

I felt smug. “Shall we get moving?”

“Right. We go through the pass, then Tombaugh Station is due west.”

It was about ten miles to the mountains; we made short work of it. You can make time on the Moon-if it is flat and if you can keep your balance. Peewee kept stepping it up until we were almost flying, long low strides that covered ground like an ostrich-and, do you know, it’s easier fast than slow. The only hazard, after I got the hang of it, was landing on a rock or hole or something and tripping. But that was hazard enough because I couldn’t pick my footing at that speed. I wasn’t afraid of falling; I felt certain that Oscar could take the punishment. But suppose I landed on my back? Probably smash the Mother Thing to jelly.

I was worried about Peewee, too. That cut-rate tourist suit wasn’t as rugged as Oscar. I’ve read about explosive decompression-I never want to see it. Especially not a little girl. But I didn’t dare use radio to warn her even though we were probably shielded from Wormface-and if I tugged on my leash I might make her fall.

The plain started to rise and Peewee let it slow us down. Presently we were walking, then we were climbing a scree slope. I stumbled but landed on my hands and got up-one-sixth gravity has advantages as well as hazards. We reached the top and Peewee led us into a pocket in the rocks. She stopped and touched helmets. “Anybody home? You two all right?”

(“All right, dear.”)

“Sure,” I agreed. “Alittle winded, maybe.” That was an understatement but if Peewee could take it, I could.

“We can rest,” she answered, “and take it easy from here on. I wanted to get us out of the open as fast as possible. They’ll never find us here.”

I thought she was right. Awormface ship flying over might spot us, if they could see down as well as up-probably just a matter of touching a control. But our chances were better now. “This is the time to recharge your empty bottle.”

“Okay.”

None too soon-the bottle which had been almost full had dropped by a third, more like half. She couldn’t make it to Tombaugh Station on that -simple arithmetic. So I crossed my fingers and got to work. “Partner, will you untie this cat’s cradle?”

While Peewee fumbled at knots, I started to take a drink-then stopped, ashamed of myself. Peewee must be chewing her tongue to work up saliva by now-and I hadn’t been able to think of any way to get water to her. The tank was inside my helmet and there was no way to reach it without making me-and Mother Thing-dead in the process.

If I ever lived to be an engineer I’d correct that!

I decided that it was idiotic not to drink because she couldn’t; the lives of all of us might depend on my staying in the best condition I could manage. So I drank and ate three malted milk tablets and a salt tablet, then had another drink. It helped a lot but I hoped Peewee hadn’t noticed. She was busy unwinding clothesline-anyhow it was hard to see into a helmet.

I took Peewee’s empty bottle off her back, making darn sure to close her outside stop valve first-there’s supposed to be a one-way valve where an air hose enters a helmet but I no longer trusted her suit; it might have more cost-saving shortcomings. I laid the empty on the ground by a full one, looked at it, straightened up and touched helmets. “Peewee, disconnect the  bottle on the left side of my back.”

“Why, Kip?”

“Who’s doing this job?” I had a reason but was afraid she might argue. My lefthand bottle held pure oxygen; the others were oxy-helium. It was full, except for a few minutes of fiddling last night in Centerville. Since I couldn’t possibly give her bottle a full charge, the next best thing was to give her a half-charge of straight oxygen.

She shut up and removed it.

I set about trying to transfer pressure between bottles whose connections didn’t match. There was no way to do it properly, short of tools a quarter of a million miles away-or over in Tombaugh Station which was just as bad. But I did have adhesive tape.

Oscar’s manual called for two first-aid kits. I didn’t know what was supposed to be in them; the manual had simply given USAF stock numbers. I hadn’t been able to guess what would  be useful in an outside kit-a hypodermic needle, maybe, sharp enough to stab through and give a man morphine when he needed it terribly. But since I didn’t know, I had stocked inside and outside with bandage, dressings, and a spool of surgical tape.

I was betting on the tape.

I butted the mismatched hose connections together, tore off a scrap of bandage and wrapped it around the junction-I didn’t want sticky stuff on the joint; it could foul the operation on a suit. Then I taped the junction, wrapping tightly, working very painstakingly and taping three inches on each side as well as around the joint-if tape could restrain that pressure a few moments, there would still be one deuce of a force trying to drag that joint apart. I didn’t want it to pull apart at the first jolt. I used the entire roll.

I motioned Peewee to touch helmets. “I’m about to open the full bottle. The valve on the empty is already open. When you see me start to close the valve on the full one, you close the other one-fast! Got it?”

“Close the valve when you do, quickly. Roger.”

“Stand by. Get your hand on the valve.” I grabbed that lump of bandaged joint in one fist, squeezed as hard as I could, and put my other hand on the valve. If that joint let go, maybe my hand would go with it- but if the stunt failed, little Peewee didn’t have long to live. So I really gripped.

Watching both gauges, I barely cracked the valve. The hose quivered; the needle gauge that read “empty” twitched. I opened the valve wide. One needle swung left, the other right. Quickly they approached half-charge. “Now!” I yelled uselessly and started closing the valve.

And felt that patchwork joint start to give.

The hoses squeezed out of my fist but we lost only a fraction of gas. I found that I was trying to close a valve that was closed tight. Peewee had hers closed. The gauges each showed just short of half full-there was air for Peewee.

I sighed and found I had been holding my breath.

Peewee put her helmet against mine and said very soberly, “Thanks, Kip.”

“Charton Drugs service, ma’am-no tip necessary. Let me tidy this mess, you can tie me and we’ll go.” “You won’t have to carry but one extra bottle now.”

“Wrong, Peewee. We may do this stunt five or six times until there’s only a whisper left”-or until the tape wears out, I added to myself. The first thing I did was to rewrap the tape on its spool-and if you think that is easy, wearing gloves and with the adhesive drying out as fast as you wind it, try it.

In spite of the bandage, sticky stuff had smeared the connections when the hoses parted. But it dried so hard that it chipped off the bayonet-and-snap joint easily. I didn’t worry about the screw-thread joint; I didn’t expect to use it on a suit. We mounted Peewee’s recharged bottle and I warned her that it was straight oxygen. “Cut your pressure and feed from both bottles. What’s your blood color reading?”

“I’ve been carrying it low on purpose.”

“Idiot! You want to keel over? Kick your chin valve! Get into normal range!”

We mounted one bottle I had swiped on my back, tied the other and the oxy bottle on my front, and were on our way.

Earth mountains are predictable; lunar mountains aren’t, they’ve never been shaped by water. We came to a hole too steep to go down other than by rope and a wall beyond I wasn’t sure we could climb. With pitons and snap rings and no space suits it wouldn’t have been hard in the Rockies- but not the way we were. Peewee reluctantly led us back. The scree slope was worse going down-I backed down on hands and knees, with Peewee belaying the line above me. I wanted to be a hero and belay for her-we had a brisk argument. “Oh, quit being big

and male and gallantly stupid, Kip! You’ve got four big bottles and the Mother Thing and you’re top heavy and I climb like a goat.”

I shut up.

At the bottom she touched helmets. “Kip,” she said worriedly, “I don’t know what to do.” “What’s the trouble?”

“I kept a little south of where the crawler came through. I wanted to avoid crossing right where the crawler crossed. But I’m beginning to think there isn’t any other way.”  “I wish you had told me before.”

“But I didn’t want them to find us! The way the crawler came is the first place they’ll look.”

“Mmm … yes.” I looked up at the range that blocked us. In pictures, the mountains of the Moon look high and sharp and rugged; framed by the lens of a space suit they look simply impossible.

I touched helmets again. “We might find another way-if we had time and air and the resources of a major expedition. We’ve got to take the route the crawler did. Which way?”

“Alittle way north … I think.”

We tried to work north along the foothills but it was slow and difficult. Finally we backed off to the edge of the plain. It made us jumpy but it was a chance we had to take. We walked, briskly but not running, for we didn’t dare miss the crawler’s tracks. I counted paces and when I reached a thousand I tugged the line; Peewee stopped and we touched helmets. “We’ve come half a mile. How much farther do you think it is? Or could it possibly be behind us?”

Peewee looked up at the mountains. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “Everything looks different.” “We’re lost?”

“Uh … it ought to be ahead somewhere. But we’ve come pretty far. Do you want to turn around?” “Peewee, I don’t even know the way to the post office.”

“But what should we do?”

“I think we ought to keep going until you are absolutely certain the pass can’t be any farther. You watch for the pass and I’ll watch for crawler tracks. Then, when you’re certain that we’ve come too far, we’ll turn back. We can’t afford to make short casts like a dog trying to pick up a rabbit’s scent.”

“All right.”

I had counted two thousand more paces, another mile, when Peewee stopped. “Kip? It can’t be ahead of us. The mountains are higher and solider than ever.” “You’re sure? Think hard. Better to go another five miles than to stop too short.”

She hesitated. She had her face pushed up close to her lens while we touched helmets and I could see her frown. Finally she said, “It’s not up ahead. Kip.” “That settles it. To the rear, march! ‘Lay on, Macduff, and curs’d be him who first cries, “Hold, enough!” ‘ “

“King Lear.”

“Macbeth. Want to bet?”

Those tracks were only half a mile behind us-I had missed them. They were on bare rock with only the lightest covering of dust; the Sun had been over my shoulder when we first crossed them, and the caterpillar tread marks hardly showed-I almost missed them going back. They led off the plain and straight up into the mountains.

We couldn’t possibly have crossed those mountains without following the crawler’s trail; Peewee had had the optimism of a child. It wasn’t a road; it was just something a crawler on caterpillar treads could travel. We saw places that even a crawler hadn’t been able to go until whoever pioneered it set a whopping big blast, backed off and waited for a chunk of mountain to get out of the way. I doubt if Skinny and Fatty carved that goat’s path; they didn’t look fond of hard work. Probably one of the exploration parties. If Peewee and I had attempted to break a new trail, we’d be there yet, relics for tourists of future generations.

But where a tread vehicle can go, a man can climb. It was no picnic; it was trudge, trudge, trudge, up and up and up-watch for loose rock and mind where you put your feet. Sometimes we belayed with the line. Nevertheless it was mostly just tedious.

When Peewee had used that half-charge of oxygen, we stopped and I equalized pressure again, this time being able to give her only a quarter charge-like Achilles and the tortoise. I   could go on indefinitely giving her half of what was left-if the tape held out. It was in bad shape but the pressure was only half as great and I managed to keep the hoses together until we closed valves.

I should say that I had it fairly easy. I had water, food, pills, dexedrine. The last was enormous help; any time I felt fagged I borrowed energy with a pep-pill. Poor Peewee had nothing but air and courage.

She didn’t even have the cooling I had. Since she was on a richer mix, one bottle being pure oxygen, it did not take as much flow to keep up her blood-color index-and I warned her not to use a bit more than necessary; she could not afford air for cooling, she had to save it to breathe.

“I know, Kip,” she answered pettishly. “I’ve got the needle jiggling the red light right now. Think I’m a fool?” “I just want to keep you alive.”

“All right, but quit treating me as a child. You put one foot in front of the other. I’ll make it.” “Sure you will!”

As for the Mother Thing she always said she was all right and she was breathing the air I had (a trifle used), but I didn’t know what was hard-ship to her. Hanging by his heels all day would kill a man; to a bat it is a nice rest-yet bats are our cousins.

I talked with her as we climbed. It didn’t matter what; her songs had the effect on me that it has to have your own gang cheering. Poor Peewee didn’t even have that comfort, except when we stopped and touched helmets-we still weren’t using radio; even in the mountains we were fearful of attracting attention.

We stopped again and I gave Peewee one-eighth of a charge. The tape was in very poor shape afterwards; I doubted if it would serve again. I said, “Peewee, why don’t you run your oxy- helium bottle dry while I carry this one? It’ll save your strength.”

“I’m all right.”

“Well, you won’t use air so fast with a lighter load.” “You have to have your arms free. Suppose you slip?”

“Peewee, I won’t carry it in my arms, My righthand backpack bottle is empty; I’ll chuck it. Help me make the change and I’ll still be carrying only four-just balanced evenly.”    “Sure, I’ll help. But I’ll carry two bottles. Honest, Kip, the weight isn’t anything. But if I run the oxy-helium bottle dry, what would I breathe while you’re giving me my next charge?”   I didn’t want to tell her that I had doubts about another charge, even in those ever smaller amounts. “Okay, Peewee.”

She changed bottles for me; we threw the dead one down a black hole and went on. I don’t know how far we climbed nor how long; I know that it seemed like days-though it couldn’t have been, not on that much air. During mile after mile of trail we climbed at least eight thousand feet. Heights are hard to guess-but I’ve seen mountains I knew the heights of. Look it up yourself-the first range east of Tombaugh Station.

There’s a lot of climbing, even at one-sixth gee.

It seemed endless because I didn’t know how far it was nor how long it had been. We both had watches-under our suits. Ahelmet ought to have a built-in watch. I should have read Greenwich time from the face of Earth. But I had no experience and most of the time I couldn’t see Earth because we were deep in mountains-anyhow I didn’t know what time it had been when we left the ship.

Another thing space suits should have is rear-view mirrors. While you are at it, add a window at the chin so that you can see where you step. But of the two, I would take a rear-view mirror. You can’t glance behind you; you have to turn your entire body. Every few seconds I wanted to see if they were following us-and I couldn’t spare the effort. All that nightmare trek I kept imagining them on my heels, expecting a wormy hand on my shoulder. I listened for footsteps which couldn’t be heard in vacuum anyhow.

When you buy a space suit, make them equip it with a rear-view mirror. You won’t have Wormface on your trail but it’s upsetting to have even your best friend sneak up behind you. Yes,  and if you are coming to the Moon, bring a sunshade. Oscar was doing his best and York had done an honest job on the air conditioning-but the untempered Sun is hotter than you would believe and I didn’t dare use air just for cooling, any more than Peewee could.

It got hot and stayed hot and sweat ran down and I itched all over and couldn’t scratch and sweat got into my eyes and burned. Peewee must have been parboiled. Even when the trail wound through deep gorges lighted only by reflection off the far wall, so dark that we turned on headlamps, I still was hot-and when we curved back into naked sunshine, it was almost

unbearable. The temptation to kick the chin valve, let air pour in and cool me, was almost too much. The desire to be cool seemed more important than the need to breathe an hour hence.

If I had been alone, I might have done it and died. But Peewee was worse off than I was. If she could stand it, I had to.

I had wondered how we could be so lost so close to human habitation -and how crawly monsters could hide a base only forty miles from Tombaugh Station. Well, I had time to think and could figure it out because I could see the Moon around me.

Compared with the Moon the Arctic is swarming with people. The Moon’s area is about equal to Asia-with fewer people than Centerville. It might be a century before anyone explored that plain where Wormface was based. Arocket ship passing over wouldn’t notice anything even if camouflage hadn’t been used; a man in a space suit would never go there; a man in a crawler would find their base only by accident even if he took the pass we were in and ranged around that plain. The lunar mapping satellite could photograph it and rephotograph, then a technician in London might note a tiny difference on two films. Maybe. Years later somebody might check up-if there wasn’t something more urgent to do in a pioneer outpost where everything is new and urgent.

As for radar sightings-there were unexplained radar sightings before I was born.

Wormface could sit there, as close to Tombaugh Station as Dallas is to Fort Worth, and not fret, snug as a snake under house. Too many square miles, not enough people. Too incredibly many square miles… . Our whole world was harsh bright cliffs and dark shadows and black sky, and endless putting one foot in front of the other.

But eventually we were going downhill oftener than up and at weary last we came to a turn where we could see out over a hot bright plain.

I There were mountains awfully far away; even from our height, up a thousand feet or so, they were beyond the horizon. I looked out over that plain, too dead beat to feel triumphant, then glanced at Earth and tried to estimate due west.

Peewee touched her helmet to mine. “There it is, Kip.” “Where?” She pointed and I caught a glint on a silvery dome. The Mother Thing trilled at my spine (“What is it, children?”) “Tombaugh Station, Mother Thing.”

Her answer was wordless assurance that we were good children and that she had known that we could do it.

The station may have been ten miles away. Distances were hard to judge, what with that funny horizon and never anything for comparison- I didn’t even know how big the dome was. “Peewee, do we dare use radio?”

She turned and looked back. I did also; we were about as alone as could be. “Let’s risk it.” “What frequency?”

“Same as before. Space operations. I think.”

So I tried. “Tombaugh Station. Come in, Tombaugh Station. Do you read me?” Then Peewee tried. I listened up and down the band I was equipped for. No luck.  I shifted to horn antenna, aiming at the glint of light. No answer.

“We’re wasting time, Peewee. Let’s start slogging.”

She turned slowly away. I could feel her disappointment-I had trembled with eagerness myself. I caught up with her and touched helmets. Don’t let it throw you, Peewee. They can’t listen all day for us to call. We see it, now we’ll walk it.”

“I know,” she said dully.

As we started down we lost sight of Tombaugh Station, not only from twists and turns but because we dropped it below the horizon. I kept calling as long as there seemed any hope, then shut it off to save breath and battery.

We were about halfway down the outer slope when Peewee slowed and stopped-sank to the ground and sat still. I hurried to her. “Peewee!”

“Kip,” she said faintly, “could you go get somebody? Please? You know the way now. I’ll wait here. Please, Kip?” “Peewee!” I said sharply. “Get up! You’ve got to keep moving.”

“I c- c- can’t!” She began to cry. “I’m so thirsty … and my legs-” She passed out. “Peewee!” I shook her shoulder. “You can’t quit now! Mother Thing! -you tell her!”

Her eyelids fluttered. “Keep telling her, Mother Thing!” I flopped Peewee over and got to work. Hypoxia hits as fast as a jab on the button. I didn’t need to see her blood-color index to know  it read DANGER; the gauges on her bottles told me. The oxygen bottles showed empty, the oxy-helium tank was practically so. I closed her exhaust valves, overrode her chin valve with    the outside valve and let what was left in the oxy-helium bottle flow into her suit. When it started to swell I cut back the flow and barely cracked one exhaust valve. Not until then did I close stop valves and remove the empty bottle.

I found myself balked by a ridiculous thing.

Peewee had tied me too well; I couldn’t reach the knot! I could feel it with my left hand but couldn’t get my right hand around; the bottle on my front was in the way-and I couldn’t work the knot loose with one hand.

I made myself stop panicking. My knife-of course, my knife! It was an old scout knife with a loop to hang it from a belt, which was where it was. But the map hooks on Oscar’s belt were large for it and I had had to force it on. I twisted it until the loop broke.

Then I couldn’t get the little blade open. Space-suit gauntlets don’t have thumb nails.

I said to myself: Kip, quit running in circles. This is easy. All you have to do is open a knife-and you’ve got to … because Peewee is suffocating. I looked around for a sliver of rock, anything that could pinch-hit for a thumb nail. Then I checked my belt.

The prospector’s hammer did it, the chisel end of the head was sharp enough to open the blade. I cut the clothesline away.

I was still blocked. I wanted very badly to get at a bottle on my back. When I had thrown away that empty and put the last fresh one on my back, I had started feeding from it and saved the almost-half-charge in the other one. I meant to save it for a rainy day and split it with Peewee. Now was the time-she was out of air, I was practically so in one bottle but still had that half- charge in the other-plus an eighth of a charge or less in the bottle that contained straight oxygen (the best I could hope for in equalizing pressures), I had planned to surprise her with a one-quarter charge of oxy-helium, which would last longer and give more cooling. Areal knight-errant plan, I thought. I didn’t waste two seconds discarding it.

I couldn’t get that bottle off my back!

Maybe if I hadn’t modified the backpack for nonregulation bottles I could have done it. The manual says: “Reach over your shoulder with the opposite arm, close stop valves at bottle and helmet, disconnect the shackle-” My pack didn’t have shackles; I had substituted straps. But I still don’t think you can reach over your shoulder in a pressurized suit and do anything effective. I think that was written by a man at a desk. Maybe he had seen it done under favorable conditions. Maybe he had done it, but was one of those freaks who can dislocate both shoulders. But I’ll bet a full charge of oxygen that the riggers around Space Station Two did it for each other as Peewee and I had, or went inside and deflated.

If I ever get a chance, I’ll change that. Everything you have to do in a space suit should be arranged to do in front-valves, shackles, everything, even if it is to affect something in back. We aren’t like Wormface, with eyes all around and arms that bend in a dozen places; we’re built to work in front of us-that goes triple in a space suit.

You need a chin window to let you see what you’re doing, too! Athing can look fine on paper and be utterly crumby in the field. But I didn’t waste time moaning; I had a one-eighth charge of oxygen I could reach. I grabbed it.

That poor, overworked adhesive tape was a sorry mess. I didn’t bother with bandage; if I could get the tape to stick at all I’d be happy. I handled it as carefully as gold leaf, trying to get it tight, and stopped in the middle to close Peewee’s exhaust entirely when it looked as if her suit was collapsing. I finished with trembling fingers.

I didn’t have Peewee to close a valve. I simply gripped that haywired joint in one hand, opened Peewee’s empty bottle with the other, swung over fast and opened the oxygen bottle wide- jerked my hand across and grabbed the valve of Peewee’s bottle and watched those gauges.

The two needles moved toward each other. When they slowed down I started closing her bottle-and the taped joint blew out.

I got that valve closed in a hurry; I didn’t lose much gas from Peewee’s bottle. But what was left on the supply side leaked away. I didn’t stop to worry; I peeled away a scrap of adhesive, made sure the bayonet-and-snap joint was clean, got that slightly recharged bottle back on Peewee’s suit, opened stop valves.

Her suit started to distend. I opened one exhaust valve a crack and touched helmets. “Peewee! Peewee! Can you hear me? Wake up, baby! Mother Thing!-make her wake up!” “Peewee!”

“Yes, Kip?”

“Wake up! On your feet, Champ! Get up! Honey, please get up.” “Huh? Help me get my helmet off … I can’t breathe.”

“Yes, you can. Kick your chin valve-feel it, taste it. Fresh air!”

She tried, feebly; I gave her a quick strong shot, overriding her chin valve from outside. “Oh!” “See? You’ve got air. You’ve got lots of air. Now get up.”

“Oh, please, just let me lie here.”

“No, you don’t! You’re a nasty, mean, spoiled little brat-and if you don’t get up, nobody will love you. The Mother Thing won’t love you. Mother Thing!-tell her!” (“Stand up, daughter!”)

Peewee tried. I helped her, once she was trying. She trembled and clung to me and I kept her from falling. “Mother Thing?” she said faintly. “I did it. You … still love me?” (“Yes, darling!”)

“I’m dizzy … and I don’t think I … can walk.”

“You don’t have to, honey,” I said gently and picked her up in my arms. “You don’t have to walk any farther.” She didn’t weigh anything.

The trail disappeared when we were down out of the foothills but the crawler’s tracks were sharp in the dust and led due west. I had my air trimmed down until the needle of the blood- color indicator hung at the edge of the danger sector. I held it there, kicking my chin valve only when it swung past into DANGER. I figured that the designer must have left some leeway,   the way they do with gasoline gauges. I had long since warned Peewee never to take her eyes off her own indicator and hold it at the danger limit. She promised and I kept reminding her.   I pressed her helmet against the yoke of mine, so that we could talk.

I counted paces and every half-mile I told Peewee to call Tombaugh Station. It was over the horizon but they might have a high mast that could “see” a long way. The Mother Thing talked to her, too-anything to keep her from slipping away again. It saved my strength to have the Mother Thing talk and was good for all of us.

After a while I noticed that my needle had drifted into the red again. I kicked the valve and waited. Nothing happened. I kicked it again and the needle drifted slowly toward the white. “How you fixed for air, Peewee?”

“Just fine. Kip, just fine.”

Oscar was yelling at me. I blinked and noticed that my shadow had disappeared. It had been stretched out ahead at an angle to the tracks, the tracks were there but my shadow was not. That made me sore, so I turned around and looked for it. It was behind me.

The darn thing had been hiding. Games! (“That better!” said Oscar.)

“It’s hot in here, Oscar.”

(“You think it’s cool out here? Keep your eye on that shadow, bud-and on those tracks.”)

“All right, all right! Quit pestering me.” I made up my mind that I wouldn’t let that shadow get away again. Games it wanted to play, huh? “There’s darn little air in here, Oscar.”

(“Breathe shallow, chum. We can make it.”) “I’m breathing my socks, now.”

(“So breathe your shirt.”)

“Did I see a ship pass over?”

(“How should I know? You’re the one with the blinkers.”) “Don’t get smart. I’m in no mood to joke.”

I was sitting on the ground with Peewee across my knees and Oscar was really shouting-and so was the Mother Thing. (“Get up, you big ape! Get up and try.”) (“Get up, Kip dear! Only a little way now.”)

“I just want to get my wind.”

(“All right, you’ve got it. Call Tombaugh Station.”) I said, “Peewee, call Tombaugh Station.”

She didn’t answer. That scared me and I snapped out of it. “Tombaugh Station,, come in! Come in!” I got to my knees and then to my feet. Tombaugh Station, do you read me? Help! Help!”

Avoice answered, “I read you.”

“Help! M’aidez! I’ve got a little girl dying! Help!”

Suddenly it sprang up in front of my eyes-great shiny domes, tall towers, radio telescopes, a giant Schmidt camera. I staggered toward it. “May Day!”

An enormous lock opened and a crawler came toward me. Avoice in my phones said, “We’re coming. Stay where you are. Over and out.”

Acrawler stopped near me. Aman got out, came over and touched helmets. I gasped: “Help me get her inside.”

I got back: “You’ve given me trouble, bub. I don’t like people who give me trouble.” Abigger, fatter man got out behind him. The smaller man raised a thing like a camera and aimed it at me. That was the last I knew.

Chapter 7

I don’t know if they took us all that weary way back in the crawler, or if Wormface sent a ship. I woke up being slapped and was inside, lying down. The skinny one was slapping me-the man the fat one called “Tim.” I tried to fight back and found that I couldn’t. I was in a straitjacket thing that held me as snugly as a wrapped mummy. I let out a yelp.

Skinny grabbed my hair, jerked my head up, tried to put a big capsule into my mouth. I tried to bite him.

He slapped me harder and offered me the capsule again. His expression didn’t change-it stayed mean.

I heard: “Take it, boy,” and turned my eyes. The fat one was on the other side. “Better swallow it,” he said. “You got five bad days ahead.”

I took it. Not because of the advice but because a hand held my nose and another popped the pill into my mouth when I gasped. Fatty held a cup of water for me to wash it down; I didn’t resist that, I needed it.

Skinny stuck a hypodermic needle big enough for a horse into my shoulder. I told him what I thought of him, using words I hardly ever use. The skinny one could have been deaf; the fat one chuckled. I rolled my eyes at him. “You, too,” I added weakly. “Squared.”

Fatty clucked reprovingly. “You ought to be glad we saved your life.” He added, “Though it wasn’t my idea, you strike me as a sorry team. He wanted you alive.” “Shaddap,” Skinny said. “Strap his head.”

“Let him break his neck. We better fix our ourselves. He won’t wait.” But he started to obey. Skinny glanced at his watch. “Four minutes.”

The fat one hastily tightened a strap across my forehead, then both moved very fast, swallowing capsules, giving each other hypos. I watched as best I could.

I was back in the ship. The ceiling glowed the same way, the walls looked the same. It was the room the two men used; their beds were on each side and I was strapped to a soft couch between them.

Each hurriedly got on his bed, began zipping up a tight wrapping like a sleeping bag. Each strapped his head in place before completing the process. I was not interested in them. “Hey! What did you do with Peewee?”

The fat man chuckled. “Hear that, Tim? That’s a good one.” “Shaddap.”

“You-” I was about to sum up Fatty’s character but my thoughts got fuzzy and my tongue was thick. Besides, I wanted to ask about the Mother Thing, too.  I did not get out another word. Suddenly I was incredibly heavy and the couch was rock hard.

For a long, long time I wasn’t awake or truly asleep. At first I couldn’t feel anything but that terrible weight, then I hurt all over and wanted to scream. I didn’t have the strength for it.

Slowly the pain went away and I stopped feeling anything. I wasn’t a body-just me, no attachments. I dreamed a lot and none of it made sense; I seemed to be stuck in a comic book, the sort P.T.A. meetings pass resolutions against, and the baddies were way ahead no matter what I did.

Once the couch gave a twisting lurch and suddenly I had a body, one that was dizzy. After a few ages I realized vaguely that I had gone through a skew-flip turn-over. I had known, during lucid moments, that I was going somewhere, very fast, at terribly high acceleration. I decided solemnly that we must be halfway and tried to figure out how long two times eternity was. It kept coming out eighty-five cents plus sales tax; the cash register rang “NO SALE” and I would start over.

Fats was undoing my head strap. It stuck and skin came away. “Rise and shine, bub. Time’s awastin’.” Acroak was all I managed. The skinny one was unwrapping me. My legs sagged apart and hurt. “Get up!” I tried and didn’t make it. Skinny grabbed one of my legs and started to knead it.

I screamed.

“Here, lemme do that,” said Fatty. “I used to be a trainer.”

Fats did know something about it. I gasped when his thumbs dug into my calves and he stopped. “Too rough?” I couldn’t answer. He went on massaging me and said almost jovially, “Five days at eight gravities ain’t no joy ride. But you’ll be okay. Got the needle, Tim?”

The skinny one jabbed me in my left thigh. I hardly felt it. Fats pulled me to a sitting position and handed me a cup. I thought it was water; it wasn’t and I choked and sprayed. Fats waited, then gave it to me again. “Drink some, this time.” I did.

“Okay, up on your feet. Vacation is over.”

The floor swayed and I had to grab him until it stopped. “Where are we?” I said hoarsely.

Fats grinned, as if he knew an enormously funny joke. “Pluto, of course. Lovely place, Pluto. Asummer resort.” “Shaddap. Get him moving.”

“Shake it up, kid. You don’t want to keep him waiting.”

Pluto! It couldn’t be; nobody could get that far. Why, they hadn’t even attempted Jupiter’s moons yet. Pluto was so much farther that.

My brain wasn’t working. The experience just past had shaken me so badly that I couldn’t accept the fact that the experience itself proved that I was wrong. But Pluto!

I wasn’t given time to wonder; we got into space suits. Although I hadn’t known, Oscar was there, and I was so glad to see him that I forgot everything else. He hadn’t been racked, just tossed on the floor. I bent down (discovering charley horses in every muscle) and checked him. He didn’t seem hurt.

“Get in it,” Fats ordered. “Quit fiddlin’.”

“All right,” I answered almost cheerfully. Then I hesitated. “Say-I haven’t any air.”

“Take another look,” said Fats. I looked. Charged oxy-helium bottles were on the backpack. “Although,” he continued, “if we didn’t have orders from him, I wouldn’t give you a whiff of Limburger. You made us for two bottles-and a rock hammer-and a line that cost four ninety-five, earthside. Sometime,” he stated without rancor, “I’m gonna take it out of your hide.”

“Shaddap,” said Skinny. “Get going.”

I spread Oscar open, wriggled in, clipped on the blood-color reader, and zipped the gaskets. Then I stood up, clamped my helmet, and felt better just to be inside. “Tight?” (“Tight!” Oscar agreed.)

“We’re a long way from home.”

(“But we got air! Chin up, pal.”)

Which reminded me to check the chin valve. Everything was working. My knife was gone and so were the hammer and line, but those were incidentals. We were tight.

I followed Skinny out with Fats behind me. We passed Wormface in the corridor-or a wormface-but while I shuddered, I had Oscar around me and felt that he couldn’t get at me. Another creature joined us in the air lock and I had to look twice to realize that it was a wormface in a space suit. The material was smooth and did not bulge the way ours did. It looked like a   dead tree trunk with bare branches and heavy roots, but the supreme improvement was its “helmet”-a glassy smooth dome. One-way glass, I suppose; I couldn’t see in. Cased that way,  a wormface was grotesquely ridiculous rather than terrifying. But I stood no closer than I had to.

Pressure was dropping and I was busy wasting air to keep from swelling up. It reminded me of what I wanted most to know: what had happened to Peewee and the Mother Thing. So I keyed my radio and announced: “Radio check. Alfa, Bravo, Coca-“

“Shaddap that nonsense. We want you, we’ll tell you.” The outer door opened and I had my first view of Pluto.

I don’t know what I expected. Pluto is so far out that they can’t get decent photographs even at Luna Observatory. I had read articles in the Scientific American and seen pictures in LIFE, bonestelled to look like photographs, and remembered that it was approaching its summer-if “summer” is the word for warm enough to melt air. I recalled that because they had announced that Pluto was showing an atmosphere as it got closer to the Sun.

But I had never been much interested in Pluto-too few facts and too much speculation, too far away and not desirable real estate. By comparison the Moon was a choice residential  suburb. Professor Tombaugh (the one the station was named for) was working on a giant electronic telescope to photograph it, under a Guggenheim grant, but he had a special interest; he discovered Pluto years before I was born.

The first thing I noticed as the door was opening was click … click … click-and a fourth click, in my helmet, as Oscar’s heating units all cut in.

The Sun was in front of me-I didn’t realize what it was at first; it looked no bigger than Venus or Jupiter does from Earth (although much brighter). With no disc you could be sure of, it looked like an electric arc.

Fats jabbed me in the ribs. “Snap out of your hop.”

Adrawbridge joined the door to an elevated roadway that led into the side of a mountain about two hundred yards away. The road was supported on spidery legs two or three feet high up to ten or twelve, depending on the lay of the land. The ground was covered with snow, glaringly white even under that pinpoint Sun. Where the stilts were longest, about halfway, the   viaduct crossed a brook.

What sort of “water” was that? Methane? What was the “snow”? Solid ammonia? I didn’t have tables to tell me what was solid, what was liquid, and what was gas at whatever hellish cold Pluto enjoyed in the “summer.” All I knew was that it got so cold in its winter that it didn’t have any gas or liquid-just vacuum, like the Moon.

I was glad to hurry. Awind blew from our left and was not only freezing that side of me in spite of Oscar’s best efforts, it made the footing hazardous-I decided it would be far safer to do that forced march on the Moon again than to fall into that “snow.” Would a man struggle before he shattered himself and his suit, or would he die as he hit?

Adding to hazard of wind and no guard rail was traffic, space-suited wormfaces. They moved at twice our speed and shared the road the way a dog does a bone. Even Skinny resorted to fancy footwork and I had three narrow squeaks.

The way continued into a tunnel; ten feet inside a panel snapped out of the way as we got near it. Twenty feet beyond was another; it did the same and closed behind us. There were about two dozen panels, each behaving like fast-acting gate valves, and the pressure was a little higher after each. I couldn’t see what operated them although it was light in the tunnel from glowing ceilings. Finally we passed through a heavy-duty air lock, but the pressure was already taken care of and its doors stood open. It led into a large room.

Wormface was inside. The Wormface, I think, because he spoke in English: “Come!” I heard it through my helmet. But I couldn’t be sure it was he as there were others around and I would have less trouble telling wart hogs apart.

Wormface hurried away. He was not wearing a space suit and I was relieved when he turned because I could no longer see his squirming mouth; but it was only a slight improvement as  it brought into sight his rearview eye.

We were hard put to keep up. He led us down a corridor, to the right through another open double set of doors, and finally stopped suddenly just short of a hole in the floor about like a sewer manhole. “Undress it!” he commanded.

Fats and Skinny had their helmets open, so I knew it was safe, in one way. But in every other way I wanted to stay inside Oscar-as long as Wormface was around. Fats undamped my helmet. “Out of that skin, bub. Snap it up!” Skinny loosened my belt and they quickly had the suit off even though I hindered.

Wormface waited. As soon as I was out of Oscar he pointed at the hole. “Down!” I gulped. That hole looked as deep as a well and less inviting.

“Down,” he repeated. “Now.”

“Do it, bub,” Fats advised. “Jump or be pushed. Get down that hole before he gets annoyed.” I tried to run.

Wormface was around me and chivvying me back before I was well started. I slammed on the brakes and backed up-glanced behind just in time to turn a fall into a clumsy jump.

It was a long way to the bottom. Landing did not hurt the way it would have on Earth, but I turned an ankle. That didn’t matter; I wasn’t going anywhere; the hole in the ceiling was the only exit.

My cell was about twenty feet square. It was, I suppose, carved out of solid rock, although there was no way to tell as the walls and floor and ceiling were the same elephant hide used in the ship. Alighting panel covered half the ceiling and I could have read if I’d had anything to read. The only other detail was a jet of water that splashed out of a hole in the wall, landed in a depression the size of a washtub, and departed for parts unknown.

The place was warm, which was well as there was nothing resembling bed or bedclothes. I had already concluded that I might be here quite a while and was wondering about eating and sleeping.

I decided I was tired of this nonsense. I had been minding my own business, out back of my own house. Everything else was Wormface’s fault! I sat down on the floor and thought about slow ways to kill him.

I finally gave up that foolishness and wondered about Peewee and the Mother Thing. Were they here? Or were they dead somewhere between the mountains and Tombaugh Station? Thinking it over glumly, I decided that poor little Peewee was best off if she had never wakened from that second coma. I wasn’t sure about the Mother Thing because I didn’t know enough about her-but in Peewee’s case I was sure.

Well, there was a certain appropriateness to the fix I was in; a knight-errant usually lands in a dungeon at some point. But by rights, the maiden fair ought to be imprisoned in a tower in the same castle. Sorry, Peewee; as a knight-errant, I’m a good soda jerk. Or jerk. “His strength is as the strength of ten because his heart is pure.”

It wasn’t funny.

I got tired of punishing myself and looked to see what time it was-not that it mattered. But a prisoner is traditionally expected to scratch marks on the wall, tallying the days he’s been in, so I thought I might as well start. My watch was on my wrist but not running and I couldn’t start it. Maybe eight gees was too much for it, even though it was supposed to be shockproof, waterproof, magnetism-proof, and immune to un-American influences.

After a while I lay down and went to sleep. I was awakened by a clatter.

It was a ration can hitting the floor and the fall hadn’t helped it, but the key was on it and I got it open-corned beef hash and very good, too. I used the empty can to drink from-the water

might be poisoned, but did I have a choice?-and then washed the can so that it wouldn’t smell.

The water was warm. I took a bath.

I doubt if many American citizens during the past twenty years have ever needed a bath as much as I did. Then I washed my clothes. My shirt, shorts, and socks were wash-and-wear synthetics; my slacks were denim and took longer to dry, but I didn’t mind; I just wished that I had one of the two hundred bars of Skyway Soap that were home on the floor of my closet. If I had known I was coming to Pluto, I would have brought one.

Washing clothes caused me to take inventory. I had a handkerchief, sixty-seven cents in change, a dollar bill so sweat-soaked and worn that it was hard to make out Washington’s  picture, a mechanical pencil stamped “Jay’s Drive-In-the thickest malts in town!”-Acanard; I make the thickest-and a grocery list I should have taken care of for Mother but hadn’t because of that silly air conditioner in Charton’s Drugstore. It wasn’t as bedraggled as the dollar bill because it had been in my shirt pocket.

I lined up my assets and looked at them. They did not look like a collection that could be reworked into a miracle weapon with which I would blast my way out, steal a ship, teach myself to pilot it, and return triumphantly to warn the President and save the country. I rearranged them and they still didn’t.

I was correct. They weren’t.

I woke up from a terrible nightmare, remembered where I was, and wished I were back in the nightmare. I lay there feeling sorry for myself and presently tears started welling out of my eyes while my chin trembled. I had never been badgered “not to be a crybaby”; Dad says there is nothing wrong with tears; it’s just that they are socially not acceptable- he says that in some cultures weeping is a social grace. But in Horace Mann Grammar School being a crybaby was no asset; I gave it up years ago. Besides, it’s exhausting and gets you nowhere. I shut off the rain and took stock.

My action list ran like this:

  1. Escape from this cell.
  2. Find Oscar, suit up.
  3. Go outdoors, steal a ship, head home-if I could figure out how to gun it.
  • Figure out a weapon or stratagem to fight off the wormfaces or keep them busy while I sneaked out and grabbed a ship. Nothing to it. Any superman capable of teleportation and other assorted psionic tricks could do it. Just be sure the plan is foolproof and that your insurance is paid up.
  • Crash priority: make sure, before bidding farewell to the romantic shores of exotic Pluto and its friendly colorful natives, that neither Peewee nor the Mother Thing is here-if they are,  take them along-because, contrary to some opinions, it is better to be a dead hero than a live louse. Dying is messy and inconvenient but even a louse dies someday no matter what he will do to stay alive and he is forever having to explain his choice. The gummed-up spell that I had had at the hero business had shown that it was undesirable work but the alternative was still less attractive.

The fact that Peewee knew how to gun those ships, or that the Mother Thing could coach me, did not figure. I can’t prove that, but I know.

Footnote: after I learned to run one of their ships, could I do so at eight gravities? That may simply call for arch supports for a wormface but I knew what eight gees did to me. Automatic pilot? If so, would it have directions on it, in English? (Don’t be silly, Clifford!)

Subordinate footnote: how long would it take to get home at one gravity? The rest of the century? Or just long enough to starve to death?

  • Occupational therapy for the lulls when I went stale on the problems. This was important in order to avoid coming apart at the seams. 0. Henry wrote stories in prison, St. Paul turned  out his strongest epistles incarcerated in Rome, Hitler wrote Mein Kampf in jail-next time I would bring a typewriter and paper. This time I could work out magic squares and invent chess problems. Anything was better than feeling sorry for myself. Lions put up with zoos and wasn’t I smarter than a lion? Some, anyhow?

And so to work- One: how to get out of this hole? I came up with a straight-forward answer: there wasn’t any way. The cell was twenty feet on a side with a ceiling twelve feet high; the    walls were as smooth as a baby’s cheek and as impervious as a bill collector. The other features were the hole in the ceiling, which ran about six feet still higher, the stream of water and its catch basin, and a glowing area in the ceiling. For tools I had the stuff previously listed (a few ounces of nothing much, nothing sharp, nor explosive, nor corrosive), my clothes, and an empty tin can.

I tested how high I could jump. Even a substitute guard needs springs in his legs-I touched the ceiling. That meant a gravity around one-half gee-I hadn’t been able to guess, as I had spent an endless time under one-sixth gravity followed by a few eons at eight gees; my reflexes had been mistreated.

But, although I could touch the ceiling, I could neither walk on it nor levitate. I could get that high, but there was nothing a mouse could cling to.

Well, I could rip my clothes and braid a rope. Was there anything near the hole on which to catch it? All I could recall was smooth floor. But suppose it did catch? What next? Paddle around in my skin until Wormface spotted me and herded me back down, this time with no clothes? I decided to postpone the rope trick until I worked out that next step which would confound Wormface and his tribe.

I sighed and looked around. All that was left was that jet of water and the floor basin that caught it.

There is a story about two frogs trapped in a crock of cream. One sees how hopeless it is, gives up and drowns. The other is too stupid to know he’s licked; he keeps on paddling. In a few hours he has churned so much butter that it forms an island, on which he floats, cool and comfortable, until the milkmaid comes and chucks him out.

That water spilled in and ran out. Suppose it didn’t run out?

I explored the bottom of the catch basin. The drain was large by our standards, but I thought I could plug it. Could I stay afloat while the room filled up, filled the hole above, and pushed me out the spout? Well, I could find out, I had a can.

The can looked like a pint and a “pint’s a pound the world ‘round” and a cubic foot of water weighs (on Earth) a little over sixty pounds. But I had to be sure. My feet are eleven inches long; they’ve been that size since I was ten-I took a lot of ribbing until I grew up to them. I marked eleven inches on the floor with two pennies. It turns out that a dollar bill is two and a half   inches wide and quarter is a smidgeon under an inch. Shortly I knew the dimensions of room and can pretty accurately.

I held the can under the stream, letting it fill and dumping it fast, while I ticked off cans of water on my left hand and counted seconds. Eventually I calculated how long it would take to fill the room. I didn’t like the answer, so I did it over.

It would take fourteen hours to fill the room and the hole above, plus an hour to allow for crude methods. Could I stay afloat that long? You’re darn tootin’ I could!-if I had to. And I had to. There isn’t any limit to how long a man can float if he doesn’t panic.

I balled my slacks and stuffed them in the drain. I almost lost them, so I wrapped them around the can and used the bundle as a cork. It stayed put and I used the rest of my clothes to caulk it. Then I waited, feeling cocky. Maybe the flood would create the diversion I needed for the rest of the caper. Slowly the basin filled.

The water got about an inch below floor level and stopped.

Apressure switch, I suppose. I should have known that creatures who could build eight-gee, constant-boost ships would design plumbing to “fail-safe.” I wish we could.   I recovered my clothes, all but one sock, and spread them to dry. I hoped the sock would foul a pump or something but I doubted it; they were good engineers.

I never really believed that story about the frogs.

Another can was tossed down-roast beef and soggy potatoes. It was filling but I began to long for peaches. The can was stenciled “Available for subsidized resale on Luna” which made  it possible that Skinny and Fatty had come by this food honestly. I wondered how they liked sharing their supplies? No doubt they did so only because Wormface had twisted their arms. Which made me wonder why Wormface wanted me alive? I was in favor of it but couldn’t see why he was. I decided to call each can a “day” and let the empties be my calendar.

Which reminded me that I had not worked out how long it would take to get home on a one-gee boost, if it turned out that I could not arrange automatic piloting at eight gees. I was stymied on getting out of the cell, I hadn’t even nibbled at what I would do if I did get out (correction: when I got out), but I could work ballistics.

I didn’t need books. I’ve met people, even in this day and age, who can’t tell a star from a planet and who think of astronomical distances simply as “big.” They remind me of those primitives who have just four numbers: one, two, three, and “many.” But any tenderfoot Scout knows the basic facts and a fellow bitten by the space bug (such as myself) usually knows a number of figures.

“Mother very thoughtfully made a jelly sandwich under no protest.” Could you forget that after saying it a few times? Okay, lay it out so: Mother  MERCURY$.39

Very VENUS $.72 Thoughtfully TERRA$1.00 Made MARS $1.50

AASTEROIDS (assorted prices, unimportant) Jelly JUPITER $5.20

Sandwich SATURN $9.50 Under URANUS $19.00 No NEPTUNE $30.00

Protest PLUTO $39.50

The “prices” are distances from the Sun in astronomical units. An A.U. is the mean distance of Earth from Sun, 93,000,000 miles. It is easier to remember one figure that everybody knows and some little figures than it is to remember figures in millions and billions. I use dollar signs because a figure has more flavor if I think of it as money-which Dad considers deplorable. Some way you must remember them, or you don’t know your own neighborhood.

Now we come to a joker. The list says that Pluto’s distance is thirty-nine and a half times Earth’s distance. But Pluto and Mercury have very eccentric orbits and Pluto’s is a dilly; its distance varies almost two billion miles, more than the distance from the Sun to Uranus. Pluto creeps to the orbit of Neptune and a hair inside, then swings way out and stays there a couple of centuries-it makes only four round trips in a thousand years.

But I had seen that article about how Pluto was coming into its “summer.” So I knew it was close to the orbit of Neptune now, and would be for the rest of my life-my life expectancy in Centerville; I didn’t look like a preferred risk here. That gave an easy figure-30 astronomical units.

Acceleration problems are simple s=1/2 at2; distance equals half the acceleration times the square of elapsed time. If astrogation were that simple any sophomore could pilot a rocket ship-the complications come from gravitational fields and the fact that everything moves fourteen directions at once. But I could disregard gravitational fields and planetary motions; at the speeds a wormface ship makes neither factor matters until you are very close. I wanted a rough answer.

I missed my slipstick. Dad says that anyone who can’t use a slide rule is a cultural illiterate and should not be allowed to vote. Mine is a beauty- a K&E 20” Log-log Duplex Decitrig. Dad surprised me with it after I mastered a ten-inch polyphase. We ate potato soup that week-but Dad says you should always budget luxuries first. I knew where it was. Home on my desk.

No matter. I had figures, formula, pencil and paper.

First a check problem. Fats had said “Pluto,” “five days,” and “eight gravities.”

It’s a two-piece problem; accelerate for half time (and half distance); do a skew-flip and decelerate the other half time (and distance). You can’t use the whole distance in the equation, as “time” appears as a square-it’s a parabolic. Was Pluto in opposition? Or quadrature? Or conjunction? Nobody looks at Pluto-so why remember where it is on the ecliptic? Oh, well, the average distance was 30 A.U.s-that would give a close-enough answer. Half that distance, in feet, is: 1/2 x 30 x 93,000,000 x 5280. Eight gravities is: 8 x 32.2 ft./sec./sec.-speed increases by 258 feet per second every second up to skew-flip and decreases just as fast thereafter.

So- 1/2 x 30 x 93,000,000 x 5280 = 1/2 x 8 x 32.2 x t2 -and you wind up with the time for half the trip, in seconds. Double that for full trip. Divide by 3600 to get hours; divide by 24 and you have days. On a slide rule such a problem takes forty seconds, most of it to get your decimal point correct. It’s as easy as computing sales tax.

It took me at least an hour and almost as long to prove it, using a different sequence-and a third time, because the answers didn’t match (I had forgotten to multiply by 5280, and had “miles” on one side and “feet” on the other-a no-good way to do arithmetic)-then a fourth time because my confidence was shaken. I tell you, the slide rule is the greatest invention since girls.

But I got a proved answer. Five and a half days. I was on Pluto. Or maybe Neptune-

No, on Neptune I would not be able to jump to a twelve-foot ceiling; Pluto alone matched all facts. So I erased and computed the trip at one gravity, with turnover. Fifteen days.

It seemed to me that it ought to take at least eight times as long at one gee as at eight-more likely sixty-four. Then I was glad I had bulled my way through analytical geometry, for I made a rough plot and saw the trouble. Squared time cut down the advantage-because the more boost, the shorter the trip, and the shorter the trip the less time in which to use the built-up   speed. To cut time in half, you need four times as much boost; to cut it to a quarter, you need sixteen times the boost, and so on. This way lies bankruptcy.

To learn that I could get home in about two weeks at one gravity cheered me. I couldn’t starve in two weeks. If I could steal a ship. If I could run it. If I could climb out of this hole. If- Not “if,” but “when!” I was too late for college this year; fifteen more days wouldn’t matter.

I had noticed, in the first problem, the speed we had been making at skew-flip. More than eleven thousand miles per second. That’s a nice speed, even in space. It made me think. Consider the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, four and three-tenths light-years away, the distance you hear so often on quiz shows. How long at eight gees?

The problem was the same sort but I had to be careful about decimal points; the figures mount up. Alightyear is-I had forgotten. So multiply 186,000 miles per second (the speed of light) by the seconds in a year (365.25 x 24 x 3600) and get-5,880,000,000,000 miles -multiply that by 4.3 and get- 25,284,000,000,000 Call it twenty-five trillion miles. Whew!

It works out to a year and five months-not as long as a trip around the Horn only last century. Why, these monsters had star travel!

I don’t know why I was surprised; it had been staring me in the face. I had assumed that Wormface had taken me to his home planet, that he was a Plutonian, or Plutocrat, or whatever the word is. But he couldn’t be.

He breathed air. He kept his ship warm enough for me. When he wasn’t in a hurry, he cruised at one gee, near enough. He used lighting that suited my eyes. Therefore he came from the sort of planet I came from.

Proxima Centauri is a double star, as you know if you do crossword puzzles, and one is a twin for our own Sun-size, temperature, special pattern. Is it a fair guess that it has a planet like Earth? I had a dirty hunch that I knew Wormface’s home address.

I knew where he didn’t come from. Not from a planet that runs a couple of centuries in utter airlessness with temperatures pushing absolute zero, followed by a “summer” in which some gases melt but water is solid rock and even Wormface has to wear a space suit. Nor from anywhere in our system, for I was sure as taxes that Wormface felt at home only on a planet    like ours. Never mind the way he looked; spiders don’t look like us but they like the things we like-there must be a thousand spiders in our houses for every one of us.

Wormface and his kin would like Earth. My fear was that they liked it too much.

I looked at that Proxima Centauri problem and saw something else. The turn-over speed read 1,110,000 miles per second, six times the speed of light. Relativity theory says that’s impossible.

I wanted to talk to Dad about it. Dad reads everything from The Anatomy of Melancholy to Acta Mathematica and Paris-Match and will sit on a curbstone separating damp newspapers wrapped around garbage in order to see continued-on-page-eight. Dad would haul down a book and we’d look it up. Then he would try four or five more with other opinions. Dad doesn’t hold with the idea that it-must-be-true-or-they-wouldn’t-have-printed-it; he doesn’t consider any opinion sacred-it shocked me the first time he took out a pen and changed something in one of my math books.

Still, even if speed-of-light was a limit, four or five years wasn’t impossible, or even impractical. We’ve been told for so long that star trips, even to the nearest stars, would take generations that we may have a wrong slant. Amile of lunar mountains is a long way but a trillion miles in empty space may not be.

But what was Wormface doing on Pluto?

If you were invading another solar system, how would you start? I’m not joking; a dungeon on Pluto is no joke and I never laughed at Wormface. Would you just barge in, or toss your hat   in first? They seemed far ahead of us in engineering but they couldn’t have known that ahead of time. Wouldn’t it be smart to build a supply base in that system in some spot nobody ever visited?

Then you could set up advance bases, say on an airless satellite of a likely-looking planet, from which you could scout the surface of the target planet. If you lost your scouting base, you would pull back to main base and work out a new attack.

Remember that while Pluto is a long way off to us, it was only five days from Luna for Wormface. Think about World War II, back when speeds were slow. Main Base is safely out of reach (U.S.A./Pluto) but only about five days from advance base (England/The Moon) which is three hours from theater-of-operations (France-Germany/Earth). That’s a slow way to operate but it worked for the Allies in World War II.

I just hoped it would not work for Wormface’s gang. Though I didn’t see anything to prevent it.

Somebody chucked down another can-spaghetti and meat balls. If it had been canned peaches, I might not have had the fortitude to do what I did next, which was to use it for a hammer before I opened it. I beat an empty can into a flat narrow shape and beat a point on it, which I sharpened on the edge of the catch basin. When I was through, I had a dagger -not a good one, but it made me feel less helpless.

Then I ate. I felt sleepy and went to sleep in a warm glow. I was still a prisoner but I had a weapon of sorts and I believed that I had figured out what I was up against. Getting a problem analyzed is two-thirds of solving it. I didn’t have nightmares.

The next thing tossed down the hole was Fats.

Skinny landed on him seconds later. I backed off and held my dagger ready. Skinny ignored me, picked himself up, looked around, went to the water spout and got a drink. Fats was in no shape to do anything; his breath was knocked out.

I looked at him and thought what a nasty parcel he was. Then I thought, oh, what the deuce!-he had massaged me when I needed it. I heaved him onto his stomach and began artificial respiration. In four or five pushes his motor caught and he was able to breathe. He gasped, “That’s enough!”

I backed off, got my knife out. Skinny was sitting against a wall, ignoring us. Fats looked at my feeble weapon and said, “Put that away, kid. We’re bosom buddies now.” “We are?”

“Yeah. Us human types had better stick together.” He sighed wretchedly. “After all we done for him! That’s gratitude.” “What do you mean?” I demanded.

“Huh?” said Fats. “Just what I said. He decided he could do without us. So Annie doesn’t live here any more.” “Shaddap,” the skinny one said flatly.

Fats screwed his face into a pout. “You shaddap,” he said peevishly. “I’m tired of that. It’s shaddap here, shaddap there, all day long-and look where we are.” “Shaddap, I said.”

Fats shut up. I never did find out what had happened, because Fats seldom gave the same explanation twice. The older man never spoke except for that tiresome order to shut up, or in monosyllables even less helpful. But one thing was clear: they had lost their jobs as assistant gangsters, or fifth columnists, or whatever you call a human being who would stooge against his own race. Once Fats said, “Matter of fact, it’s your fault.”

“Mine?” I dropped my hand to my tin-can knife.

“Yours. If you hadn’t butted in, he wouldn’t have got sore.” “I didn’t do anything.”

“Says you. You swiped his two best prizes, that’s all, and held him up when he planned to high-tail it back here.” “Oh. But that wasn’t your fault.” “So I told him. You try telling him. Take your hand away from that silly nail file.” Fats shrugged. “Like I always say, let bygones be bygones.”

I finally learned the thing I wanted most to know. About the fifth time I brought up the matter of Peewee, Fats said, “What d’you want to know about the brat for?” “I just want to know whether she’s alive or dead.”

“Oh, she’s alive. Leastwise she was last time I seen her.” “When was that?”

“You ask too many questions. Right here.” “She’s here?” I said eagerly.

“That’s what I said, wasn’t it? Around everywhere and always underfoot. Living like a princess, if you ask me.” Fats picked his teeth and frowned. “Why he should make a pet out of her and treat us the way he did, beats me. It ain’t right.”

I didn’t think so, either, but for another reason. The idea that gallant little Peewee was the spoiled darling of Wormface I found impossible to believe. There was some explanation-or Fats was lying. “You mean he doesn’t have her locked up?”

“What’s it get him? Where’s she gonna go?”

I pondered that myself. Where could you go?-when to step outdoors was suicide. Even if Peewee had her space suit (and that, at least, was probably locked up), even if a ship was at hand and empty when she got outside, even if she could get into it, she still wouldn’t have a “ship’s brain,” the little gadget that served as a lock. “What happened to the Mother Thing?”

“The what?”

“The-” I hesitated. “Uh, the non-human who was in my space suit with me. You must know, you were there. Is she alive? Is she here?” But Fats was brooding. “Them bugs don’t interest me none,” he said sourly and I could get no more out of him.

But Peewee was alive (and a hard lump in me was suddenly gone). She was here! Her chances, even as a prisoner, had been enormously better on the Moon; nevertheless I felt almost ecstatic to know that she was near. I began thinking about ways to get a message to her.

As for Fats’ insinuation that she was playing footy with Wormface, it bothered me not at all. Peewee was unpredictable and sometimes a brat and often exasperating, as well as conceited, supercilious, and downright childish. But she would be burned alive rather than turn traitor. Joan of Arc had not been made of sterner stuff.

We three kept uneasy truce. I avoided them, slept with one eye open, and tried not to sleep unless they were asleep first, and I always kept my dagger at hand. I did not bathe after they joined me; it would have put me at a disadvantage. The older one ignored me, Fats was almost friendly. I pretended not to be afraid of my puny weapon, but I think he was. The reason I think so comes from the first time we were fed. Three cans dropped from the ceiling; Skinny picked up one, Fats got one, but when I circled around to take the third, Fats snatched it.

I said, “Give me that, please.”

Fats grinned. “What makes you think this is for you, sonny boy?” “Uh, three cans, three people.”

“So what? I’m feeling a mite hungry. I don’t hardly think I can spare it.” “I’m hungry, too. Be reasonable.”

“Mmmm-” He seemed to consider it. “Tell you what. I’ll sell it to you.”

I hesitated. It had a shifty logic; Wormface couldn’t walk into Lunar Base commissary and buy these rations; probably Fats or his partner had bought them. I wouldn’t mind signing I.O.U.s-a hundred dollars a meal, a thousand, or a million; money no longer meant anything. Why not humor him?

No! If I gave in, if I admitted I had to dicker with him for my prison rations, he would own me. I’d wait on him hand and foot, do anything he told me, just to eat.  I let him see my tin dagger. “I’ll fight you for it.”

Fats glanced at my hand and grinned broadly. “Can’t you take a joke?”

He tossed me the can. There was no trouble at feeding times after that, We lived like that “Happy Family” you sometimes see in traveling zoos: a lion caged with a lamb. It is a startling exhibit but the lamb has to be replaced frequently. Fats liked to talk and I learned things from him, when I could sort out truth from lies. His name-so he said-was Jacques de Barre de Vigny (“Call me ‘Jock.’ “) and the older man was Timothy Johnson-but I had a hunch that their real names could be learned only by inspecting post office bulletin boards. Despite Jock’s pretense of knowing everything, I soon decided that he knew nothing about Wormface’s origin and little about his plans and purposes. Wormface did not seem the sort to discuss things with “lower animals”; he would simply make use of them, as we use horses.

Jock admitted one thing readily. “Yeah, we put the snatch on the brat. There’s no uranium on the Moon; those stories are just to get suckers. We were wasting our time-and a man’s got to eat, don’t he?”

I didn’t make the obvious retort; I wanted information. Tim said, “Shaddap!”

“Aw, what of it, Tim? You worried about the F.B.I.? You think the Man can put the arm on you-here?” “Shaddap, I said.”

“Happens I feel like talking. So blow it.” Jock went on, “It was easy. The brat’s got more curiosity than seven cats. He knew she was coming and when.” Jock looked thoughtful. “He  always knows-he’s got lots of people working for him, some high up. All I had to do was be in Luna City and get acquainted-I made the contact because Tim here ain’t the fatherly type,  the way I am. I get to talking with her, I buy her a coke, I tell her about the romance of hunting uranium on the Moon and similar hogwash. Then I sigh and say it’s too bad I can’t show her the mine of my partner and I. That’s all it took. When the tourist party visited Tombaugh Station, she got away and sneaked out the lock-she worked that part out her ownself. She’s sly,  that one. All we had to do was wait where I told her -didn’t even have to be rough with her until she got worried about taking longer for the crawler to get to our mine than I told her.” Jock grinned. “She fights pretty well for her weight. Scratched me some.”

Poor little Peewee! Too bad she hadn’t drawn and quartered him! But the story sounded true, for it was the way Peewee would behave-sure of herself, afraid of no one, unable to resist any “educational” experience.

Jock went on, “It wasn’t the brat he wanted. He wanted her old man. Had some swindle to get him to the Moon, didn’t work.” Jock grinned sourly. “That was a bad time, things ain’t good when he don’t have his own way. But he had to settle for the brat. Tim here pointed out to him he could trade.”

Tim chucked in one word which I took as a general denial. Jock raised his eyebrows. “Listen to vinegar puss. Nice manners, ain’t he?”

Maybe I should have kept quiet since I was digging for facts, not philosophy. But I’ve got Peewee’s failing myself; when I don’t understand, I have an unbearable itch to know why. I didn’t (and don’t) understand what made Jock tick. “Jock? Why did you do it?”

“Huh?”

“Look, you’re a human being.” (At least he looked like one.) “As you pointed out, we humans had better stick together. How could you bring yourself to kidnap a little girl-and turn her over to him?”

“Are you crazy, boy?” “I don’t think so.”

“You talk crazy. Have you ever tried not doing something he wanted? Try it some time.”

I saw his point. Refusing Wormface would be like a rabbit spitting in a snake’s eye-as I knew too well. Jock went on, “You got to understand the other man’s viewpoint. Live and let live, I always say. We got grabbed while we were messin’ around, lookin’ for carnotite-and after that, we never stood no chance. You can’t fight City Hall, that gets you nowhere. So we made a dicker-we run his errands, he pays us in uranium.”

My faint sympathy vanished. I wanted to throw up. “And you got paid?” “Well … you might say we got time on the books.”

I looked around our cell. “You made a bad deal.”

Jock grimaced, looking like a sulky baby. “Maybe so. But be reasonable, kid. You got to cooperate with the inevitable. These boys are moving in-they got what it takes. You seen that yourself. Well, a man’s got to look out for number one, don’t he? It’s a cinch nobody else will. Now I seen a case like this when I was no older than you and it taught me a lesson. Our town had run quietly for years, but the Big Fellow was getting old and losing his grip … whereupon some boys from St. Louis moved in. Things were confused for a while. Aman had to know which way to jump-else he woke up wearing a wooden overcoat, like as not. Those that seen the handwriting made out; those that didn’t … well, it don’t do no good to buck the current, I always say. That makes sense, don’t it?”

I could follow his “logic”-provided you accepted his “live louse” standard. But he had left out a key point. “Even so. Jock, I don’t see how you could do that to a little girl.” “Huh? I just explained how we couldn’t help it.”

“But you could. Even allowing how hard it is to face up to him and refuse orders, you had a perfect chance to duck out.” “Wha’ d’you mean?”

“He sent you to Luna City to find her, you said so. You’ve got a return-fare benefit-I know you have, I know the rules. All you had to do was sit tight, where he couldn’t reach you-and take the next ship back to Earth. You didn’t have to do his dirty work.”

“But-“

I cut him off. “Maybe you couldn’t help yourself, out in a lunar desert. Maybe you wouldn’t feel safe even inside Tombaugh Station. But when he sent you into Luna City, you had your chance. You didn’t have to steal a little girl and turn her over to a-a bug-eyed monster!”

He looked baffled, then answered quickly. “Kip, I like you. You’re a good boy. But you ain’t smart. You don’t understand.”

“I think I do!”

“No, you don’t.” He leaned toward me, started to put a hand on my knee; I drew back. He went on, “There’s something I didn’t tell you … for fear you’d think I was a-well, a zombie, or something. They operated on us.”

“Huh?”

“They operated on us,” he went on glibly. “They planted bombs in our heads. Remote control, like a missile. Aman gets out of line … he punches a button-blooie! Brains all over the ceiling.” He fumbled at the nape of his neck. “See the scar? My hair’s getting kind o’ long … but if you look close I’m sure you’ll see it; it can’t ‘ave disappeared entirely. See it?”

I started to look. I might even have been sold on it-I had been forced to believe less probable things lately. Tim cut short my suspended judgment with one explosive word. Jock flinched, then braced himself and said, “Don’t pay any attention to him!”

I shrugged and moved away. Jock didn’t talk the rest of that “day.” That suited me.

The next “morning” I was roused by Jock’s hand on my shoulder. “Wake up, Kip! Wake up!”

I groped for my toy weapon. “It’s over there by the wall,” Jock said, “but it ain’t ever goin’ to do you any good now.”  I grabbed it. “What do you mean? Where’s Tim?”

“You didn’t wake up?” “Huh?”

“This is what I’ve been scared of. Cripes, boy! I just had to talk to somebody. You slept through it?” “Through what? And where’s Tim?”

Jock was shivering and sweating. “They blue-lighted us, that’s what. They took Tim.” He shuddered. “I’m glad it was him. I thought-well, maybe you’ve noticed I’m a little stout … they like fat.”

“What do you mean? What have they done with him?”

“Poor old Tim. He had his faults, like anybody, but-He’s soup, by now … that’s what.” He shuddered again. “They like soup-bones and all.” “I don’t believe it. You’re trying to scare me.”

“So?” He looked me up and down. “They’ll probably take you next. Son, if you’re smart, you’ll take that letter opener of yours over to that horse trough and open your veins. It’s better that way.”

I said, “Why don’t you? Here, I’ll lend it to you.” He shook his head and shivered. “I ain’t smart.”

I don’t know what became of Tim. I don’t know whether the wormfaces ate people, or not. (You can’t say “cannibal.” We may be mutton, to them.) I wasn’t especially scared because I had long since blown all fuses in my “scare” circuits.

What happens to my body after I’m through with it doesn’t matter to me. But it did to Jock; he had a phobia about it. I don’t think Jock was a coward; cowards don’t even try to become prospectors on the Moon. He believed his theory and it shook him. He halfway admitted that he had more reason to believe it than I had known. He had been to Pluto once before, so he said, and other men who had come along, or been dragged, on that trip hadn’t come back.

When feeding time came-two cans-he said he wasn’t hungry and offered me his rations. That “night” he sat up and kept himself awake. Finally I just had to go to sleep before he did.   I awoke from one of those dreams where you can’t move. The dream was correct; sometime not long before, I had surely been blue-lighted.

Jock was gone.

I never saw either of them again.

Somehow I missed them … Jock at least. It was a relief not to have to watch all the time, it was luxurious to bathe. But it gets mighty boring, pacing your cage alone.  I have no illusions about them. There must be well over three billion people I would rather be locked up with. But they were people.

Tim didn’t have anything else to recommend him; he was as coldly vicious as a guillotine. But Jock had some slight awareness of right and wrong, or he wouldn’t have tried to justify himself. You might say he was just weak.

But I don’t hold with the idea that to understand all is to forgive all; you follow that and first thing you know you’re sentimental over murderers and rapists and kidnappers and forgetting their victims. That’s wrong. I’ll weep over the likes of Peewee, not over criminals whose victims they are. I missed Jock’s talk but if there were some way to drown such creatures at birth, I’d take my turn as executioner. That goes double for Tim.

If they ended up as soup for hobgoblins, I couldn’t honestly be sorry- even though it might be my turn tomorrow. As soup, they probably had their finest hour.

Chapter 8

I was jarred out of useless brain-cudgeling by an explosion, a sharp crack -a bass rumble-then a whoosh! of reduced pressure. I bounced to my feet-anyone who has ever depended on  a space suit is never again indifferent to a drop in pressure.

I gasped, “What the deuce!”

Then I added, “Whoever is on watch had better get on the ball-or we’ll all be breathing thin cold stuff.” No oxygen outside, I was sure-or rather the astronomers were and I didn’t want to test it.

Then I said, “Somebody bombing us? I hope. “Or was it an earthquake?”

This was not an idle remark. That Scientific American article concerning “summer” on Pluto had predicted “sharp isostatic readjustments” as the temperature rose-which is a polite way of saying, “Hold your hats! Here comes the chimney!”

I was in an earthquake once, in Santa Barbara; I didn’t need a booster shot to remember what every Californian knows and others learn in one lesson: when the ground does a jig, get outdoors!

Only I couldn’t.

I spent two minutes checking whether adrenalin had given me the strength to jump eighteen feet instead of twelve. It hadn’t. That was all I did for a half-hour, if you don’t count nail biting. Then I heard my name! “Kip! Oh, Kip!”

“Peewee!” I screamed. “Here! Peewee!”

Silence for an eternity of three heartbeats- “Kip?” “Down HERE!”

“Kip? Are you down this hole?”

“Yes! Can’t you see me?” I saw her head against the light above. “Uh, I can now. Oh, Kip, I’m so glad!”

“Then why are you crying? So am I!”

“I’m not crying,” she blubbered. “Oh Kip … Kip.” “Can you get me out?”

“Uh-” She surveyed that drop. “Stay where you are.” “Don’t go ‘way!” She already had.

She wasn’t gone two minutes; it merely seemed like a week. Then she was back and the darling had a nylon rope! “Grab on!” she shrilled.

“Wait a sec. How is it fastened?” “I’ll pull you up.”

“No, you won’t-or we’ll both be down here. Find somewhere to belay it.” “I can lift you.”

“Belay it! Hurry!”

She left again, leaving an end in my hands. Shortly I heard very faintly: “On belay!”

I shouted, “Testing!” and took up the slack. I put my weight on it-it held. “Climbing!” I yelled, and followed the final “g” up the hole and caught it.

She flung herself on me, an arm around my neck, one around Madame Pompadour, and both of mine around her. She was even smaller and skinnier than I remembered. “Oh, Kip, it’s been just awful.”

I patted her bony shoulder blades. “Yeah, I know. What do we do now? Where’s W-“ I started to say, “Where’s Wormface?” but she burst into tears.

“Kip-I think she’s dead!”

My mind skidded-I was a bit stir-crazy anyhow. “Huh? Who?”

She looked as amazed as I was confused. “Why, the Mother Thing.”

“Oh.” I felt a flood of sorrow. “But, honey, are you sure? She was talking to me all right up to the last-and I didn’t die.” “What in the world are you talk- Oh. I don’t mean then. Kip; I mean now.”

“Huh? She was here?” “Of course. Where else?”

Now that’s a silly question, it’s a big universe. I had decided long ago that the Mother Thing couldn’t be here-because Jock had brushed off the subject. I reasoned that Jock would either have said that she was here or have invented an elaborate lie, for the pleasure of lying. Therefore she wasn’t on his list-perhaps he had never seen her save as a bulge under my suit.

I was so sure of my “logic” that it took a long moment to throw off prejudice and accept fact. “Peewee,” I said, gulping, “I feel like I’d lost my own mother. Are you sure?”  ” ‘Feel as if,’ ” she said automatically. “I’m not sure sure … but she’s outside-so she must be dead.”

“Wait a minute. If she’s outside, she’s wearing a space suit? Isn’t she?” “No, no! She hasn’t had one-not since they destroyed her ship.”

I was getting more confused. “How did they bring her in here?”

“They just sacked her and sealed her and carried her in. Kip-what do we do now?”

I knew several answers, all of them wrong-I had already considered them during my stretch in jail. “Where is Wormface? Where are all the wormfaces?”

“Oh. All dead. I think.”

“I hope you’re right.” I looked around for a weapon and never saw a hallway so bare. My toy dagger was only eighteen feet away but I didn’t feel like going back down for it. “What makes you think so?”

Peewee had reason to think so. The Mother Thing didn’t look strong enough to tear paper but what she lacked in beef she made up in brains. She had done what I had tried to do: reasoned out a way to take them all on. She had not been able to hurry because her plan had many factors all of which had to mesh at once and many of them she could not influence; she had to wait for the breaks.

First, she needed a time when there were few wormfaces around. The base was indeed a large supply dump and space port and transfer point, but it did not need a large staff. It had been unusually crowded the few moments I had seen it, because our ship was in.

Second, it also had to be when no ships were in because she couldn’t cope with a ship-she couldn’t get at it.

Third, H-Hour had to be while the wormfaces were feeding. They all ate together when there were few enough not to have to use their mess hall in relays-crowded around one big tub and sopping it up, I gathered -a scene out of Dante. That would place all her enemies on one target, except possibly one or two on engineering or communication watches.

“Wait a minute!” I interrupted. “You said they were all dead?” “Well … I don’t know. I haven’t seen any.”

“Hold everything until I find something to fight with.” “But-“

“First things first, Peewee.”

Saying that I was going to find a weapon wasn’t finding one. That corridor had nothing but more holes like the one I had been down- which was why Peewee had looked for me there; it was one of the few places where she had not been allowed to wander at will. Jock had been correct on one point: Peewee-and the Mother Thing-had been star prisoners, allowed all privileges except freedom … whereas Jock and Tim and myself had been third-class prisoners and/or soup bones. It fitted the theory that Peewee and the Mother Thing were hostages rather than ordinary P.W.s.

I didn’t explore those holes after I looked down one and saw a human skeleton-maybe they got tired of tossing food to him. When I straightened up Peewee said, “What are you shaking about?”

“Nothing. Come on.” “I want to see.”

“Peewee, every second counts and we’ve done nothing but yak. Come on. Stay behind me.”

I kept her from seeing the skeleton, a major triumph over that little curiosity box-although it probably would not have affected her much; Peewee was sentimental only when it suited her. “Stay behind me” had the correct gallant sound but it was not based on reason. I forgot that attack could come from the rear-I should have said:

“Follow me and watch behind us.”

She did anyway. I heard a squeal and whirled around to see a wormface with one of those camera-like things aimed at me. Even though Tim had used one on me I didn’t realize what it was; for a moment I froze.

But not Peewee. She launched herself through the air, attacking with both hands and both feet in the gallant audacity and utter recklessness of a kitten.

That saved me. Her attack would not have hurt anything but another kitten but it mixed him up so that he didn’t finish what he was doing, namely paralyzing or killing me; he tripped over her and went down.

And I stomped him. With my bare feet I stomped him, landing on that lobster-horror head with both feet. His head crunched. It felt awful.

It was like jumping on a strawberry box. It splintered and crunched and went to pieces. I cringed at the feel, even though I was in an agony to fight, to kill. I trampled worms and hopped away, feeling sick. I scooped up Peewee and pulled her back, as anxious to get clear as I had been to Join battle seconds before.

I hadn’t killed it. For an awful moment I thought I was going to have to wade back in. Then I saw that while it was alive, it did not seem aware of us. It flopped like a chicken freshly chopped, then quieted and began to move purposefully.

But it couldn’t see. I had smashed its eyes and maybe its ears-but certainly those terrible eyes.

It felt around the floor carefully, then got to its feet, still undamaged except that its head was a crushed ruin. It stood still, braced tripod-style by that third appendage, and felt the air. I pulled us back farther.

It began to walk. Not toward us or I would have screamed. It moved away, ricocheted off a wall, straightened out, and went back the way we had come. t reached one of those holes they used for prisoners, walked into it and dropped. I sighed, and realized that I had been holding Peewee too tightly to breathe. I put her down.

“There’s your weapon,” she said. “Huh?”

“On the floor. Just beyond where I dropped Madame Pompadour. The gadget.” She went over, picked up her dolly, brushed away bits of ruined wormface, then took the camera-like thing and handed it to me. “Be careful. Don’t point it toward you. Or me.”

“Peewee,” I said faintly, “don’t you ever have an attack of nerves?”

“Sure I do. When I have leisure for it. Which isn’t now. Do you know how to work it?” “No. Do you?”

“I think so. I’ve seen them and the Mother Thing told me about them.” She took it, handling it casually but not pointing it at either of us. “These holes on top-uncover one of them, it stuns. If you uncover them all, it kills. To make it work you push it here.” She did and a bright blue light shot out, splashed against the wall. “The light doesn’t do anything,” she added. “It’s for aiming. I hope there wasn’t anybody on the other side of that wall. No, I hope there was. You know what I mean.”

It looked like a cockeyed 35 mm. camera, with a lead lens-one built from an oral description. I took it, being very cautious where I pointed it, and looked at it. Then I tried it-full power, by mistake.

The blue light was a shaft in the air and the wall where it hit glowed and began to smoke. I shut it off. “You wasted power,” Peewee chided. “You may need it later.”

“Well, I had to try it. Come on, let’s go.”

Peewee glanced at her Mickey Mouse watch-and I felt irked that it had apparently stood up when my fancy one had not. “There’s very little time. Kip. Can’t we assume that only this one escaped?”

“What? We certainly cannot! Until we’re sure that all of them are dead, we can’t do anything else. Come on.”

“But- Well, I’ll lead. I know my way around, you don’t.” “No.”

“Yes!”

So we did it her way; she led and carried the blue-light projector while I covered the rear and wished for a third eye, like a wormface. I couldn’t argue that my reflexes were faster when they weren’t, and she knew more than I did about our weapon.

But it’s graveling, just the same.

The base was huge; half that mountain must have been honeycombed. We did it at a fast trot, ignoring things as complicated as museum exhibits and twice as interesting, simply making sure that no wormface was anywhere. Peewee ran with the weapon at the ready, talking twenty to the dozen and urging me on.

Besides an almost empty base, no ships in, and the wormfaces feeding, the Mother Thing’s plan required that all this happen shortly before a particular hour of the Plutonian night. “Why?” I panted.

“So she could signal her people, of course.”

“But-” I shut up. I had wondered about the Mother Thing’s people but didn’t even know as much about her as I did about Wormface- except that she was everything that made her the Mother Thing. Now she was dead-Peewee said that she was outside without a space suit, so she was surely dead; that little soft warm thing wouldn’t last two seconds in that ultra-arctic weather. Not to mention suffocation and lung hemorrhage. I choked up.

Of course, Peewee might be wrong. I had to admit that she rarely was- but this might be one of the times … in which case we would find her. But if we didn’t find her, she was outside and- “Peewee, do you know where my space suit is?”

“Huh? Of course. Right next to where I got this.” She patted the nylon rope, which she had coiled around her waist and tied with a bow. “Then the second we are sure that we’ve cleaned out the wormfaces I’m going outside and look for her!”

“Yes, yes! But we’ve got to find my suit, too. I’m going with you.”

No doubt she would. Maybe I could persuade her to wait in the tunnel out of that bone-freezing wind. “Peewee, why did she have to send her message at night? To a ship in a rotation- period orbit? Or is there-“

My words were chopped off by a rumble. The floor shook in that loose-bearing vibration that frightens people and animals alike. We stopped dead. “What was that?” Peewee whispered.   I swallowed. “Unless it’s part of this rumpus the Mother Thing planned-“

“It isn’t. I think.” “It’s a quake.”

“An earthquake?”

“APluto quake. Peewee, we’ve got to get out of here!”

I wasn’t thinking about where-you don’t in a quake. Peewee gulped. “We can’t bother with earthquakes; we haven’t time. Hurry, Kip, hurry!” She started to run and I followed, gritting my teeth. If Peewee could ignore a quake, so could I-though it’s like ignoring a rattlesnake in bed.

“Peewee … Mother Thing’s people … is their ship in orbit around Pluto?” “What? Oh, no, no! They’re not in a ship.”

“Then why at night? Something about the Heavyside layers here? How far away is their base?” I was wondering how far a man could walk here. We had done almost forty miles on the Moon. Could we do forty blocks here? Or even forty yards? You could insulate your feet, probably. But that wind- “Peewee, they don’t live here, do they?”

“What? Don’t be silly! They have a nice planet of their own. Kip, if you keep asking foolish questions, we’ll be too late. Shut up and listen.”

I shut up. What follows I got in snatches as we ran, and some of it later. When the Mother Thing had been captured, she had lost ship, space clothing, communicator, everything; Wormface had destroyed it all. There had been treachery, capture through violation of truce while parleying. “He grabbed her when they were supposed to be under a King’s ‘X’ ” was Peewee’s indignant description, “and that’s not fair! He had promised.”

Treachery would be as natural in Wormface as venom in a Gila monster; I was surprised that the Mother Thing had risked a palaver with him. It left her a prisoner of ruthless monsters equipped with ships that made ours look like horseless carriages, weapons which started with a “death ray” and ended heaven knows where, plus bases, organization, supplies.

She had only her brain and her tiny soft hands.

Before she could use the rare combination of circumstances necessary to have any chance at all she had to replace her communicator (I think of it as her “radio” but it was more than that) and she had to have weapons. The only way she could get them was to build them.

She had nothing, not a bobby pin-only that triangular ornament with spirals engraved on it. To build anything she had to gain access to a series of rooms which I would describe as electronics labs-not that they looked like the bench where I jiggered with electronics, but electron-pushing has its built-in logic. If electrons are to do what you want them to, components have to look pretty much a certain way, whether built by humans, wormfaces, or the Mother Thing. Awave guide gets its shape from the laws of nature, an inductance has its necessary geometry, no matter who the technician is.

So it looked like an electronics lab-a very good one. It had gear I did not recognize, but which I felt I could understand if I had time. I got only a glimpse.

The Mother Thing spent many, many hours there. She would not have been permitted there, even though she was a prisoner-at-large with freedom in most ways and anything she wanted, including private quarters with Peewee. I think that Wormface was afraid of her, even though she was a prisoner-he did not want to offend her unnecessarily.

She got the run of their shops by baiting their cupidity. Her people had many things that wormfaces had not-gadgets, inventions, conveniences. She began by inquiring why they did a thing this way rather than another way which was so much more efficient? Atradition? Or religious reasons?

When asked what she meant she looked helpless and protested that she couldn’t explain-which was a shame because it was simple and so easy to build, too.

Under close chaperonage she built something. The gadget worked. Then something else. Presently she was in the labs daily, making things for her captors, things that delighted them. She always delivered; the privilege depended on it.

But each gadget involved parts she needed herself.

“She sneaked bits and pieces into her pouch,” Peewee told me. “They never knew exactly what she was doing. She would use five of a thing and the sixth would go into her pouch.” “Her pouch?”

“Of course. That’s where she hid the ‘brain’ the time she and I swiped the ship. Didn’t you know?” “I didn’t know she had a pouch.”

“Well, neither did they. They watched to see she didn’t carry anything out of the shop-and she never did. Not where it showed.”

“Uh, Peewee, is the Mother Thing a marsupial?”

“Huh? Like possums? You don’t have to be a marsupial to have a pouch. Look at squirrels, they have pouches in their cheeks.” “Mmm, yes.”

“She sneaked a bit now and a bit then, and I swiped things, too. During rest time she worked on them in our room.”

The Mother Thing had not slept all the time we had been on Pluto. She worked long hours publicly, making things for wormfaces-a stereo-telephone no bigger than a pack of cigarettes, a tiny beetle-like arrangement that crawled all over anything it was placed on and integrated the volume, many other things. But during hours set apart for rest she worked for herself,   usually in darkness, those tiny fingers busy as a blind watch-maker’s.

She made two bombs and a long-distance communicator-and-beacon.

I didn’t get all this tossed over Peewee’s shoulder while we raced through the base; she simply told me that the Mother Thing had managed to build a radio-beacon and had been responsible for the explosion I had felt. And that we must hurry, hurry, hurry!

“Peewee,” I said, panting. “What’s the rush? If the Mother Thing is outside, I want to bring her in-her body, I mean. But you act as if we had a deadline.” “We do!”

The communicator-beacon had to be placed outside at a particular local time (the Plutonian day is about a week-the astronomers were right again) so that the planet itself would not blanket the beam. But the Mother Thing had no space suit. They had discussed having Peewee suit up, go outside, and set the beacon-it had been so designed that Peewee need only trigger it. But that depended on locating Peewee’s space suit, then breaking in and getting it after the wormfaces were disposed of.

They had never located it. The Mother Thing had said serenely, singing confident notes that I could almost hear ringing in my head: (“Never mind, dear. I can go out and set it myself.”) “Mother Thing! You can’t!” Peewee had protested. “It’s cold out there.”

(“I shan’t be long.”)

“You won’t be able to breathe.”

(“It won’t be necessary, for so short a time.”)

That settled it. In her own way, the Mother Thing was as hard to argue with as Wormface.

The bombs were built, the beacon was built, a time approached when all factors would match-no ship expected, few wormfaces, Pluto faced the right way, feeding time for the staff-and they still did not know where Peewee’s suit was-if it had not been destroyed. The Mother Thing resolved to go ahead.

“But she told me, just a few hours ago when she let me know that today was the day, that if she did not come back in ten minutes or so, that she hoped I could find my suit and trigger the beacon-if she hadn’t been able to.” Peewee started to cry. “That was the f- f- first time she admitted that she wasn’t sure she could do it!”

“Peewee! Stop it! Then what?”

“I waited for the explosions-they came, right together-and I started to search, places I hadn’t been allowed to go. But I couldn’t find my suit!

Then I found you and-oh, Kip, she’s been out there almost an hour!” She looked at her watch. “There’s only about twenty minutes left. If the beacon isn’t triggered by then, she’s had all her trouble and died for n- n- nothing! She wouldn’t like that.” “Where’s my suit!”

We found no more wormfaces-apparently there was only one on duty while the others fed. Peewee showed me a door, air-lock type, behind which was the feeding chamber-the bomb may have cracked that section for gas-tight doors had closed themselves when the owners were blown to bits. We hurried past.

Logical as usual, Peewee ended our search at my space suit. It was one of more than a dozen human-type suits-I wondered how much soup those ghouls ate. Well, they wouldn’t eat again! I wasted no time; I simply shouted, “Hi, Oscar!” and started to suit up.

(“Where you been, chum?”)

Oscar seemed in perfect shape. Fats’ suit was next to mine and Tim’s next to it; I glanced at them as I stretched Oscar out, wondering whether they had equipment I could use. Peewee was looking at Tim’s suit. “Maybe I can wear this.”

It was much smaller than Oscar, which made it only nine sizes too big for Peewee. “Don’t be silly! It’d fit you like socks on a rooster. Help me. Take off that rope, coil it and clip it to my belt.”

“You won’t need it. The Mother Thing planned to take the beacon out the walkway about a hundred yards and sit it down. If she didn’t manage it, that’s all you do. Then twist the stud on top.”

“Don’t argue! How much time?” “Yes, Kip. Eighteen minutes.”

“Those winds are strong,” I added. “I may need the line.” The Mother Thing didn’t weigh much. If she had been swept off, I might need a rope to recover her body. “Hand me that hammer off Fats’ suit.”

“Right away!”

I stood up. It felt good to have Oscar around me. Then I remembered how cold my feet got, walking in from the ship. “I wish I had asbestos boots.”

Peewee looked startled. “Wait right here!” She was gone before I could stop her. I went on sealing up while I worried-she hadn’t even stopped to pick up the projector weapon. Shortly I said, “Tight, Oscar?”

(“Tight, boy!”)

Chin valve okay, blood-color okay, radio-I wouldn’t need it-water- The tank was dry. No matter, I wouldn’t have time to grow thirsty. I worked the chin valve, making the pressure low because I knew that pressure outdoors was quite low.

Peewee returned with what looked like ballet slippers for a baby elephant. She leaned close to my face plate and shouted, “They wear these. Can you get them on?” It seemed unlikely, but I forced them over my feet like badly fitting socks. I stood up and found that they improved traction; they were clumsy but not hard to walk in.

Aminute later we were standing at the exit of the big room I had first seen. Its air-lock doors were closed now as a result of the Mother Thing’s other bomb, which she had placed to blow out the gate-valve panels in the tunnel beyond. The bomb in the feeding chamber had been planted by Peewee who had then ducked back to their room. I don’t know whether the Mother Thing timed the two bombs to go off together, or triggered them by remote-control-nor did it matter; they had made a shambles of Wormface’s fancy base.

Peewee knew how to waste air through the air lock. When the inner door opened I shouted, “Time?” “Fourteen minutes.” She held up her watch.

“Remember what I said, just stay here. If anything moves, blue-light it first and ask questions afterwards.” “I remember.”

I stepped in and closed the inner door, found the valve in the outer door, waited for pressure to equalize.

The two or three minutes it took that big lock to bleed off I spent in glum thought. I didn’t like leaving Peewee alone. I thought all wormfaces were dead, but I wasn’t sure. We had searched hastily; one could have zigged when we zagged-they were so fast.

Besides that, Peewee had said, “I remember,” when she should have said, “Okay, Kip, I will.” Aslip of the tongue? That flea-hopping mind made “slips” only when it wanted to. There is a world of difference between “Roger” and “Wilco.”

Besides I was doing this for foolish motives. Mostly I was going out to recover the Mother Thing’s body-folly, because after I brought her in, she would spoil. It would be kinder to leave her in natural deep-freeze.

But I couldn’t bear that-it was cold out there and I couldn’t leave her out in the cold. She had been so little and warm … so alive. I had to bring her in where she could get warm. You’re in bad shape when your emotions force you into acts which you know are foolish.

Worse still, I was doing this in a reckless rush because the Mother Thing had wanted that beacon set before a certain second, now only twelve minutes away, maybe ten. Well, I’d do it, but what sense was it? Say her home star is close by-oh, say it’s Proxima Centauri and the wormfaces came from somewhere farther. Even if her beacon works-it still takes over four years for her S.O.S. to reach her friends!

This might have been okay for the Mother Thing. I had an impression that she lived a very long time; waiting a few years for rescue might not bother her. But Peewee and I were not creatures of her sort. We’d be dead before that speed-of-light message crawled to Proxima Centauri. I was glad that I had seen Peewee again, but I knew what was in store for us.    Death, in days, weeks, or months at most, from running out of air, or water, or food-or a wormface ship might land before we died-which meant one unholy sabbat of a fight in which, if we were lucky, we would die quickly.

No matter how you figured, planting that beacon was merely “carrying out the deceased’s last wishes”-words you hear at funerals. Sentimental folly. The outer door started to open. Ave, Mother Thing! Nos morituri.

It was cold out there, biting cold, even though I was not yet in the wind. The glow panels were still working and I could see that the tunnel was a mess; the two dozen fractional-pressure stops had ruptured like eardrums. I wondered what sort of bomb could be haywired from stolen parts, kept small enough to conceal two in a body pouch along with some sort of radio rig, and nevertheless have force enough to blow out those panels. The blast had rattled my teeth, several hundred feet away in solid rock.

The first dozen panels were blown inwards. Had she set it off in the middle of the tunnel? Ablast that big would fling her away like a feather! She must have planted it there, then come inside and triggered it-then gone back through the lock just as I had. That was the only way I could see it.

It got colder every step. My feet weren’t too cold yet, those clumsy mukluks were okay; the wormfaces understood insulation. “Oscar, you got the fires burning?” (“Roaring, chum. It’s a cold night.”)

“You’re telling me!”

Just beyond the outermost burst panel, I found her.

She had sunk forward, as if too tired to go on. Her arms stretched in front of her and, on the floor of the tunnel not quite touched by her tiny fingers, was a small round box about the size ladies keep powder in on dressing tables.

Her face was composed and her eyes were open except that nictitating membranes were drawn across as they had been when I had first seen her in the pasture back of our house, a few days or weeks or a thousand years ago. But she had been hurt then and looked it; now I half expected her to draw back those inner lids and sing a welcome.

I touched her.

She was hard as ice and much colder.

I blinked back tears and wasted not a moment. She wanted that little box placed a hundred yards out on the causeway and the bump on top twisted-and she wanted it done in the next six or seven minutes. I scooped it up. “Righto, Mother Thing! On my way!”

(“Get cracking, chum!”) (“Thank you, dear Kip… .”)

I don’t believe in ghosts. I had heard her sing thank-you so many times that the notes echoed in my head.

Afew feet away at the mouth of the tunnel, I stopped. The wind hit me and was so cold that the deathly chill in the tunnel seemed summery. I closed my eyes and counted thirty seconds   to give time to adjust to starlight while I fumbled on the windward side of the tunnel at a slanting strut that anchored the causeway to the mountain, tied my safety line by passing it around the strut and snapping it back on itself. I had known that it was night outside and I expected the causeway to stand out as a black ribbon against the white “snow” glittering under a skyful  of stars. I thought I would be safer on that windswept way if I could see its edges-which I couldn’t by headlamp unless I kept swinging my shoulders back and forth-clumsy and likely to throw me off balance or slow me down.

I had figured this carefully; I didn’t regard this as a stroll in the garden -not at night, not on Pluto! So I counted thirty seconds and tied my line while waiting for eyes to adjust to starlight. I opened them.

And I couldn’t see a darned thing!

Not a star. Not even the difference between sky and ground. My back was to the tunnel and the helmet shaded my face like a sunbonnet; I should have been able to see the walkway. Nothing.

I turned the helmet and saw something that accounted both for black sky and the quake we had felt-an active volcano. It may have been five miles away or fifty, but I could not doubt what it was-a jagged, angry red scar low in the sky.

But I didn’t stop to stare. I switched on the headlamp, splashed it on the righthand windward edge, and started a clumsy trot, keeping close to that side, so that if I stumbled I would have the entire road to recover in before the wind could sweep me off. That wind scared me. I kept the line coiled in my left hand and paid it out as I went, keeping it fairly taut. The coil felt stiff in my fingers.

The wind not only frightened me, it hurt. It was a cold so intense that it felt like flame. It burned and blasted, then numbed. My right side, getting the brunt of it, began to go and then my left side hurt more than the right.

I could no longer feel the line. I stopped, leaned forward and got the coil in the light from the headlamp-that’s another thing that needs fixing! the headlamp should swivel.

The coil was half gone, I had come a good fifty yards. I was depending on the rope to tell me; it was a hundred-meter climbing line, so when I neared its end I would be as far out as the Mother Thing had wanted. Hurry, Kip!

(“Get cracking, boy! It’s cold out here.”) I stopped again. Did I have the box?

I couldn’t feel it. But the headlamp showed my right hand clutched around it. Stay there, fingers! I hurried on, counting steps. One! Two! Three! Four! …

When I reached forty I stopped and glanced over the edge, saw that I was at the highest part where the road crossed the brook and remembered that it was about midway. That brook- methane, was it?-was frozen solid, and I knew that the night was cold.

There were a few loops of line on my left arm-close enough. I dropped the line, moved cautiously to the middle of the way, eased to my knees and left hand, and started to put the box down.

My fingers wouldn’t unbend.

I forced them with my left hand, got the box out of my fist. That diabolical wind caught it and I barely saved it from rolling away. With both hands I set it carefully upright. (“Work your fingers, bud. Pound your hands together!”)

I did so. I could tighten the muscles of my forearms, though it was tearing agony to flex fingers. Clumsily steadying the box with my left hand, I groped for the little knob on top.   I couldn’t feel it but it turned easily once I managed to close my fingers on it; I could see it turn.

It seemed to come to life, to purr. Perhaps I heard vibration, through gloves and up my suit; I certainly couldn’t have felt it, not the shape my fingers were in. I hastily let go, got awkwardly to my feet and backed up, so that I could splash the headlamp on it without leaning over.

I was through, the Mother Thing’s job was done, and (I hoped) before deadline. If I had had as much sense as the ordinary doorknob, I would have turned and hurried into the tunnel faster than I had come out. But I was fascinated by what it was doing.

It seemed to shake itself and three spidery little legs grew out the bottom. It raised up until it was standing on its own little tripod, about a foot high. It shook itself again and I thought the wind would blow it over. But the spidery legs splayed out, seemed to bite into the road surface and it was rock firm.

Something lifted and unfolded out the top.

It opened like a flower, until it was about eight inches across. Afinger lifted (an antenna?), swung as if hunting, steadied and pointed at the sky.

Then the beacon switched on. I’m sure that is what happened although all I saw was a flash of light-parasitic it must have been, for light alone would not have served even without that volcanic overcast. It was probably some harmless side effect of switching on an enormous pulse of power, something the Mother Thing hadn’t had time, or perhaps equipment or materials, to eliminate or shield. It was about as bright as a peanut photoflash.

But I was looking at it. Polarizers can’t work that fast. It blinded me.

I thought my headlamp had gone out, then I realized that I simply couldn’t see through a big greenish-purple disc of dazzle. (“Take it easy, boy. It’s just an after-image. Wait and it’ll go away.”)

“I can’t wait! I’m freezing to death!”

(“Hook the line with your forearm, where it’s clipped to your belt. Pull on it.”)

I did as Oscar told me, found the line, turned around, started to wind it on both forearms. It shattered.

It did not break as you expect rope to break; it shattered like glass. I suppose that is what it was by then-glass, I mean. Nylon and glass are super-cooled liquids. Now I know what “super-cooled” means.

But all I knew then was that my last link with life had gone. I couldn’t see, I couldn’t hear, I was all alone on a bare platform, billions of miles from home, and a wind out of the depths of a frozen hell was bleeding the last life out of a body I could barely feel-and where I could feel, it hurt like fire.

“Oscar!”

(“I’m here, bud. You can make it. Now-can you see anything?”) “No!”

(“Look for the mouth of the tunnel. It’s got light in it. Switch off your headlamp. Sure, you can-it’s just a toggle switch. Drag your hand back across the right side of our helmet.”)   I did.

(“See anything?”) “Not yet.”

(“Move your head. Try to catch it in the corner of your eye-the dazzle stays in front, you know. Well?”) “I caught something that time!”

(“Reddish, wasn’t it? Jagged, too. The volcano. Now we know which way we’re facing. Turn slowly and catch the mouth of the tunnel as it goes by.”) Slowly was the only way I could turn. “There it is!”

(“Okay, you’re headed home. Get down on your hands and knees and crab slowly to your left. Don’t turn-because you want to hang onto that edge and crawl. Crawl toward the tunnel.”)

I got down. I couldn’t feel the surface with my hands but I felt pressure on my limbs, as if all four were artificial. I found the edge when my left hand slipped over it and I almost fell off. But I recovered. “Am I headed right?”

(“Sure you are. You haven’t turned. You’ve just moved sideways. Can you lift your head to see the tunnel?”) “Uh, not without standing up.”

(“Don’t do that! Try the headlamp again. Maybe your eyes are okay now.”)

I dragged my hand forward against the right side of the helmet. I must have hit the switch, for suddenly I saw a circle of light, blurred and cloudy in the middle. The edge of the walkway sliced it on the left.

(“Good boy! No, don’t get up; you’re weak and dizzy and likely to fall. Start crawling. Count ‘em. Three hundred ought to do it.”)  I started crawling, counting.

“It’s a long way, Oscar. You think we can make it?”

(“Of course we can! You think I want to be left out here?”) “I’d be with you.”

(“Knock off the chatter. You’ll make me lose count. Thirty-six … thirty-seven … thirty-eight-“) We crawled.

(“That’s a hundred. Now we double it. Hundred one … hundred two … hundred three-“) “I’m feeling better, Oscar. I think it’s getting warmer.”

(“WHAT!”)

“I said I’m feeling a little warmer.”

(“You’re not warmer, you blistering idiot! That’s freeze-to-death you’re feeling! Crawl faster! Work your chin valve. Get more air. Le’ me hear that chin valve click!”)   I was too tired to argue; I chinned the valve three or four times, felt a blast blistering my face.

(“I’m stepping up the stroke. Warmer indeed! Hund’d nine … hund’d ten … hun’leven … hun’twelve-pick it up!”)

At two hundred I said I would just have to rest.

(“No, you don’t!”)

“But I’ve got to. Just a little while.”

(“Like that, uh? You know what happens. What’s Peewee goin’ to do? She’s in there, waiting. She’s already scared because you’re late. What’s she goin’ to do? Answer me!”) “Uh … she’s going to try to wear Tim’s suit.”

(“Right! In case of duplicate answers the prize goes to the one postmarked first. How far will she get? You tell me.”) “Uh … to the mouth of the tunnel, I guess. Then the wind will get her.”

(“My opinion exactly. Then we’ll have the whole family together. You, me, the Mother Thing, Peewee. Cozy. Afamily of stiffs.”) “But-“

(“So start slugging, brother. Slug … slug … slug … slug … tw’und’d five … two’und’d six … tw’und’d sev’n’-“)

I don’t remember falling off. I don’t even know what the “snow” felt like. I just remember being glad that the dreadful counting was over and I could rest. But Oscar wouldn’t let me. (“Kip! Kip! Get up! Climb back on the straight and narrow.”)

“Go ‘way.”

(“I can’t go away. I wish I could. Right in front of you. Grab the edge and scramble up. It’s only a little farther now.”)

I managed to raise my head, saw the edge of the walkway in the light of my headlamp about two feet above my head. I sank back. “It’s too high,” I said listlessly. “Oscar, I think we’ve had it.”

He snorted. (“So? Who was it, just the other day, cussed out a little bitty girl who was too tired to get up? ‘Commander Comet,’ wasn’t it? Did I get the name right? The ‘Scourge of the Spaceways’ … the no- good lazy sky tramp. ‘Have Space Suit-Will Travel.’ Before you go to sleep, Commander, can I have your autograph! I’ve never met a real live space pirate before … one that goes around hijacking ships and kidnapping little girls.”)

“That’s not fair!”

(“Okay, okay, I know when I’m not wanted. But just one thing before I leave: she’s got more guts in her little finger than you have in your whole body-you lying, fat, lazy swine! Good-bye. Don’t wait up.”)

“Oscar! Don’t leave me!” (“Eh? You want help?”) “Yes!”

(“Well, if it’s too high to reach, grab your hammer and hook it over the edge. Pull yourself up.”)

I blinked. Maybe it would work. I reached down, decided I had the hammer even though I couldn’t feel it, got it loose. Using both hands I hooked it over the edge above me. I pulled. That silly hammer broke just like the line. Tool steel-and it went to pieces as if it had been cast out of type slugs.

That made me mad. I heaved myself to a sitting position, got both elbows on the edge, and struggled and groaned and burst into fiery sweat -and rolled over onto the road surface. (“That’s my boy! Never mind counting, just crawl toward the light!”)

The tunnel wavered in front of me. I couldn’t get my breath, so I kicked the chin valve. Nothing happened.

“Oscar! The chin valve is stuck!” I tried again.

Oscar was very slow in answering. (“No, pal, the valve isn’t stuck. Your air hoses have frozen up. I guess that last batch wasn’t as dry as it could have been.”) “I haven’t any air!”

Again he was slow. But he answered firmly, (“Yes, you have. You’ve got a whole suit full. Plenty for the few feet left.”) “I’ll never make it.”

(“Afew feet, only. There’s the Mother Thing, right ahead of you. Keep moving.”)

I raised my head and, sure enough, there she was. I kept crawling, while she got bigger and bigger. Finally I said, “Oscar … this is as far as I go.” (“I’m afraid it is. I’ve let you down … but thanks for not leaving me outside there.”)

“You didn’t let me down … you were swell. I just didn’t quite make it.”

(“I guess we both didn’t quite make it … but we sure let ‘em know that we tried! So long, partner.”)

“So long. ‘Hasta la vista, amigo!” I managed to crawl two short steps and collapsed with my head near the Mother Thing’s head. She was smiling. (“Hello, Kip my son.”)

“I didn’t … quite make it, Mother Thing. I’m sorry.” (“Oh, but you did make it!”)

“Huh?”

(“Between us, we’ve both made it.”)

I thought about that for a long time. “And Oscar.” (“And Oscar, of course.”)

“And Peewee.”

(“And always Peewee. We’ve all made it. Now we can rest, dear.”) “G’night … Mother Thing.”

It was a darn short rest. I was just closing my eyes, feeling warm and happy that the Mother Thing thought that I had done all right-when Peewee started shaking my shoulder. She touched helmets. “Kip! Kip! Get up. Please get up.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because I can’t carry you! I tried, but I can’t do it. You’re just too big!”

I considered it. Of course she couldn’t carry me-where did she get the silly notion that she could? I was twice her size. I’d carry her … just as soon as I caught my breath.

“Kip! Please get up.” She was crying now, blubbering.

“Why, sure, honey,” I said gently, “if that’s what you want.” I tried and had a clumsy bad time of it. She almost picked me up, she helped a lot. Once up, she steadied me. “Turn around. Walk.”

She almost did carry me. She got her shoulders under my right arm and kept pushing. Every time we came to one of those blown-out panels she either helped me step over, or simply pushed me through and helped me up again.

At last we were in the lock and she was bleeding air from inside to fill it. She had to let go of me and I sank down. She turned when the inner door opened, started to say something-then got my helmet off in a hurry.

I took a deep breath and got very dizzy and the lights dimmed. She was looking at me. “You all right now?”

“Me? Sure! Why shouldn’t I be?” “Let me help you inside.”

I couldn’t see why, but she did help and I needed it. She sat me on the floor near the door with my back to the wall-I didn’t want to lie down. “Kip, I was so scared!” “Why?” I couldn’t see what she was worried about. Hadn’t the Mother Thing said that we had all done all right?

“Well, I was. I shouldn’t have let you go out.” “But the beacon had to be set.”

“Oh, but- You set it?”

“Of course. The Mother Thing was pleased.”

“I’m sure she would have been,” she said gravely. “She was.”

“Can I do anything? Can I help you out of your suit?” “Uh … no, not yet. Could you find me a drink of water?” “Right away!”

She came back and held it for me-I wasn’t as thirsty as I had thought; it made me a bit ill. She watched me for some time, then said, “Do you mind if I’m gone a little while? Will you be all right?”

“Me? Certainly.” I didn’t feel well, I was beginning to hurt, but there wasn’t anything she could do.

“I won’t be long.” She began clamping her helmet and I noticed with detached interest that she was wearing her own suit-somehow I had had the impression that she had been wearing Tim’s.

I saw her head for the lock and realized where she was going and why. I wanted to tell her that the Mother Thing would rather not be inside here, where she might … where she might-I didn’t want to say “spoil” even to myself.

But Peewee was gone.

I don’t think she was away more than five minutes. I had closed my eyes and I am not sure. I noticed the inner door open. Through it stepped Peewee, carrying the Mother Thing in her arms like a long piece of firewood. She didn’t bend at all.

Peewee put the Mother Thing on the floor in the same position I had last seen her, then undamped her helmet and bawled.  I couldn’t get up. My legs hurt too much. And my arms. “Peewee … please, honey. It doesn’t do any good.”

She raised her head. “I’m all through. I won’t cry any more.” And she didn’t.

We sat there a long time. Peewee again offered to help me out of my suit, but when we tried it, I hurt so terribly, especially my hands and my feet, that I had to ask her to stop. She looked worried. “Kip … I’m afraid you froze them.”

“Maybe. But there’s nothing to do about it now.” I winced and changed the subject. “Where did you find your suit?” “Oh!” She looked indignant, then almost gay. “You’d never guess. Inside Jock’s suit.”

“No, I guess I wouldn’t. The Purloined Letter.’ “ “The what?”

“Nothing. I hadn’t realized that old Wormface had a sense of humor.”

Shortly after that we had another quake, a bad one. Chandeliers would have jounced if the place had had any and the floor heaved. Peewee squealed. “Oh! That was almost as bad as the last one.”

“Alot worse, I’d say. That first little one wasn’t anything.” “No, I mean the one while you were outside.”

“Was there one then?” “Didn’t you feel it?”

“No.” I tried to remember. “Maybe that was when I fell off in the snow.” “You fell off? Kip!”

“It was all right. Oscar helped me.”

There was another ground shock. I wouldn’t have minded, only it shook me up and made me hurt worse. I finally came out of the fog enough to realize that I didn’t have to hurt. Let’s see, medicine pills were on the right and the codeine dispenser was farthest back- “Peewee? Could I trouble you for some water again?”

“Of course!”

“I’m going to take codeine. It may make me sleep. Do you mind?” “You ought to sleep if you can. You need it.”

“I suppose so. What time is it?”

She told me and I couldn’t believe it. “You mean it’s been more than twelve hours?” “Huh? Since what?”

“Since this started.”

“I don’t understand, Kip.” She stared at her watch. “It has been exactly an hour and a half since I found you-not quite two hours since the Mother Thing set off the bombs.”   I couldn’t believe that, either. But Peewee insisted that she was right.

The codeine made me feel much better and I was beginning to be drowsy, when Peewee said, “Kip, do you smell anything?”  I sniffed. “Something like kitchen matches?”

“That’s what I mean. I think the pressure is dropping, too. Kip … I think I had better close your helmet-if you’re going to sleep.” “All right. You close yours, too?”

“Yes. Uh, I don’t think this place is tight any longer.”

“You may be right.” Between explosions and quakes, I didn’t see how it could be. But, while I knew what that meant, I was too weary and sick- and getting too dreamy from the drug-to worry. Now, or a month from now-what did it matter? The Mother Thing had said everything was okay.

Peewee clamped us in, we checked radios, and she sat down facing me and the Mother Thing. She didn’t say anything for a long time. Then I heard: “Peewee to Junebug-“ “I read you, Peewee.”

“Kip? It’s been fun, mostly. Hasn’t it?”

“Huh?” I glanced up, saw that the dial said I had about four hours of air left. I had had to reduce pressure twice, since we closed up, to match falling pressure in the room. “Yes, Peewee, it’s been swell. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

She sighed. “I just wanted to be sure you weren’t blaming me. Now go to sleep.”

I did almost go to sleep, when I saw Peewee jump up and my phones came to life. “Kip! Something’s coming in the door!”

I came wide awake, realized what it meant. Why couldn’t they have let us be? Afew hours, anyhow? “Peewee. Don’t panic. Move to the far side of the door. You’ve got your blue-light gadget?”

“Yes.”

“Pick them off as they come in.”

“You’ve got to move, Kip. You’re right where they will come!”

“I can’t get up.” I hadn’t been able to move, not even my arms, for quite a while. “Use low power, then if you brush me, it won’t matter. Do what I say! Fast!” “Yes, Kip.” She got where she could snipe at them sideways, raised her projector and waited.

The inner door opened, a figure came in. I saw Peewee start to nail it- and I called into my radio: “Don’t shoot!” But she was dropping the projector and running forward even as I shouted.

They were “mother thing” people.

It took six of them to carry me, only two to carry the Mother Thing. They sang to me soothingly all the time they were rigging a litter. I swallowed another codeine tablet before they lifted me, as even with their gentleness any movement hurt. It didn’t take long to get me into their ship, for they had landed almost at the tunnel mouth, no doubt crushing the walkway-I hoped so.

Once I was safely inside Peewee opened my helmet and unzipped the front of my suit. “Kip! Aren’t they wonderful?” “Yes.” I was getting dizzier from the drug but was feeling better. “When do we raise ship?”

“We’ve already started.”

“They’re taking us home?” I’d have to tell Mr. Charton what a big help the codeine was. “Huh? Oh, my, no! We’re headed for Vega.”

I fainted.

Chapter 9

I had been dreaming that I was home; this awoke me with a jerk. “Mother Thing!” (“Good morning, my son. I am happy to see that you are feeling better.”)

“Oh, I feel fine. I’ve had a good night’s rest-” I stared, then blurted: “-you’re dead!” I couldn’t stop it.

Her answer sounded warmly, gently humorous, the way you correct a child who has made a natural mistake. (“No, dear, I was merely frozen. I am not as frail as you seem to think me.”)   I blinked and looked again. “Then it wasn’t a dream?”

(“No, it was not a dream.”)

“I thought I was home and-” I tried to sit up, managed only to raise my head. “I am home!” My room! Clothes closet on the left-hall door behind the Mother Thing-my desk on the right, piled with books and with a Centerville High pennant over it-window beyond it, with the old elm almost filling it-sun-speckled leaves stirring in a breeze.

My slipstick was where I had left it.

Things started to wobble, then I figured it out. I had dreamed only the silly part at the end. Vega-I had been groggy with codeine. “You brought me home.” (“We brought you home … to your other home. My home.”)

The bed started to sway. I clutched at it but my arms didn’t move. The Mother Thing was still singing. (“You needed your own nest. So we prepared it.”) “Mother Thing, I’m confused.”

(“We know that a bird grows well faster in its own nest. So we built yours.”) “Bird” and “nest” weren’t what she sang, but an Unabridged won’t give anything closer.

I took a deep breath to steady down. I understood her-that’s what she was best at, making you understand. This wasn’t my room and I wasn’t home; it simply looked like it. But I was still terribly confused.

I looked around and wondered how I could have been mistaken.

The light slanted in the window from a wrong direction. The ceiling didn’t have the patch in it from the time I built a hide-out in the attic and knocked plaster down by hammering. It wasn’t the right shade, either.

The books were too neat and clean; they had that candy-box look. I couldn’t recognize the bindings. The over-all effect was mighty close, but details were not right. (“I like this room,”) the Mother Thing was singing. (“It looks like you, Kip.”)

“Mother Thing,” I said weakly, “how did you do it?” (“We asked you. And Peewee helped.”)

I thought, “But Peewee has never seen my room either,” then decided that Peewee had seen enough American homes to be a consulting expert. “Peewee is here?” (“She’ll be in shortly.”)

With Peewee and the Mother Thing around things couldn’t be too bad. Except- “Mother Thing, I can’t move my arms and legs.”

She put a tiny, warm hand on my forehead and leaned over me until her enormous, lemur-like eyes blanked out everything else. (“You have been damaged. Now you are growing well. Do not worry.”)

When the Mother Thing tells you not to worry, you don’t. I didn’t want to do handstands anyhow; I was satisfied to look into her eyes. You could sink into them, you could have dived in and swum around. “All right, Mother Thing.” I remembered something else. “Say … you were frozen? Weren’t you?”

(“Yes.”)

“But- Look, when water freezes it ruptures living cells. Or so they say.” She answered primly, (“My body would never permit that!”).

“Well-” I thought about it. “Just don’t dunk me in liquid air! I’m not built for it.”

Again her song held roguish, indulgent humor. (“We shall endeavor not to hurt you.”) She straightened up and grew a little, swaying like a willow. (“I sense Peewee.”)

There was a knock-another discrepancy; it didn’t sound like a knock on a light-weight interior door-and Peewee called out, “May I come in?” She didn’t wait (I wondered if she ever did) but came on in. The bit I could see past her looked like our upper hall; they’d done a thorough job.

(“Come in, dear.”)

“Sure, Peewee. You are in.” “Don’t be captious.”

“Look who’s talking. Hi, kid!” “Hi yourself.”

The Mother Thing glided away. (“Don’t stay long, Peewee. You are not to tire him.”) “I won’t, Mother Thing.”

(” ‘Bye, dears.”)

I said, “What are the visiting hours in this ward?”

“When she says, of course.” Peewee stood facing me, fists on hips. She was really clean for the first time in our acquaintance-cheeks pink with scrubbing, hair fluffy-maybe she would be pretty, in about ten years. She was dressed as always but her clothes were fresh, all buttons present, and tears invisibly mended.

“Well,” she said, letting out her breath, “I guess you’re going to be worth keeping, after all.” “Me? I’m in the pink. How about yourself?”

She wrinkled her nose. “Alittle frost nip. Nothing. But you were a mess.” “I was?”

“I can’t use adequate language without being what Mama calls ‘unladylike.’ “ “Oh, we wouldn’t want you to be that.”

“Don’t be sarcastic. You don’t do it well.”

“You won’t let me practice on you?”

She started to make a Peewee retort, stopped suddenly, smiled and came close. For a nervous second I thought she was going to kiss me. But she just patted the bedclothes and said solemnly, “You bet you can, Kip. You can be sarcastic, or nasty, or mean, or scold me, or anything, and I won’t let out a peep. Why, I’ll bet you could even talk back to the Mother Thing.”

I couldn’t imagine wanting to. I said, “Take it easy, Peewee. Your halo is showing.” “I’d have one if it weren’t for you. Or flunked my test for it, more likely.”

“So? I seem to remember somebody about your size lugging me indoors almost piggy-back. How about that?” She wriggled. “That wasn’t anything. You set the beacon. That was everything.”

“Uh, each to his own opinion. It was cold out there.” I changed the subject; it was embarrassing us. Mention of the beacon reminded me of something else. “Peewee? Where are we?” “Huh? In the Mother Thing’s home, of course.” She looked around and said, “Oh, I forgot. Kip, this isn’t really your-“

“I know,” I said impatiently. “It’s a fake. Anybody can see that.”

“They can?” She looked crestfallen. “I thought we had done a perfect job.” “It’s an incredibly good job. I don’t see how you did it.”

“Oh, your memory is most detailed. You must have a camera eye.” -and I must have spilled my guts, too! I added to myself. I wondered what else I had said-with Peewee listening. I was afraid to ask; a fellow ought to have privacy.

“But it’s still a fake,” I went on. “I know we’re in the Mother Thing’s home. But where’s that?” “Oh.” She looked round-eyed. “I told you. Maybe you don’t remember -you were sleepy.”

“I remember,” I said slowly, “something. But it didn’t make sense. I thought you said we were going to Vega.”

“Well, I suppose the catalogs will list it as Vega Five. But they call it-” She threw back her head and vocalized; it recalled to me the cockcrow theme in Le Coq d’Or. “-but I couldn’t say that. So I told you Vega, which is close enough.”

I tried again to sit up, failed. “You mean to stand there and tell me we’re on Vega? I mean, a ‘Vegan planet’?” “Well, you haven’t asked me to sit down.”

I ignored the Peeweeism. I looked at “sunlight” pouring through the window. “That light is from Vega?”

“That stuff? That’s artificial sunlight. If they had used real, bright, Vega light, it would look ghastly. Like a bare arc light. Vega is ‘way up the Russell diagram, you know.” “It is?” I didn’t know the spectrum of Vega; I had never expected to need to know it.

“Oh, yes! You be careful, Kip-when you’re up, I mean. In ten seconds you can get more burn than all winter in Key West-and ten minutes would kill you.”

I seemed to have a gift for winding up in difficult climates. What star class was Vega? “A,” maybe? Probably “B.” All I knew was that it was big and bright, bigger than the Sun, and looked pretty set in Lyra.

But where was it? How in the name of Einstein did we get here? “Peewee? How far is Vega? No, I mean, ‘How far is the Sun?’ You wouldn’t happen to know?” “Of course,” she said scornfully. “Twenty-seven light-years.”

Great Galloping Gorillas! “Peewee-get that slide rule. You know how to push one? I don’t seem to have the use of my hands.” She looked uneasy. “Uh, what do you want it for?”

“I want to see what that comes to in miles.” “Oh. I’ll figure it. No need for a slide rule.”

“Aslipstick is faster and more accurate. Look, if you don’t know how to use one, don’t be ashamed-I didn’t, at your age. I’ll show you.”

“Of course I can use one!” she said indignantly. “You think I’m a stupe? But I’ll work it out.” Her lips moved silently. “One point five nine times ten to the fourteenth miles.”

I had done that Proxima Centauri problem recently; I remembered the miles in a light-year and did a rough check in my head-uh, call it six times twenty-five makes a hundred and fifty-and where was the decimal point? “Your answer sounds about right.” 159,000,000,000,000 weary miles! Too many zeroes for comfort.

“Of course I’m right!” she retorted. “I’m always right.” “Goodness me! The handy-dandy pocket encyclopedia.” She blushed. “I can’t help being a genius.”

Which left her wide open and I was about to rub her nose in it-when I saw how unhappy she looked.

I remembered hearing Dad say: “Some people insist that ‘mediocre’ is better than ‘best.’ They delight in clipping wings because they themselves can’t fly. They despise brains because they have none. Pfah!”

“I’m sorry, Peewee,” I said humbly. “I know you can’t. And I can’t help not being one … any more than you can help being little, or I can help being big.”   She relaxed and looked solemn. “I guess I was being a show-off again.” She twisted a button. “Or maybe I assumed that you understand me-like Daddy.” “I feel complimented. I doubt if I do-but from now on I’ll try.” She went on worrying the button. “You’re pretty smart yourself, Kip. You know that, don’t you?”

I grinned. “If I were smart, would I be here? All thumbs and my ears rub together. Look, honey, would you mind if we checked you on the slide rule? I’m really interested.” Twenty-seven light-years-why, you wouldn’t be able to see the Sun, It isn’t any great shakes as a star.

But I had made her uneasy again. “Uh, Kip, that isn’t much of a slide rule.” “What? Why, that’s the best that money can-”

“Kip, please! It’s part of the desk. It’s not a slide rule.”

“Huh?” I looked sheepish. “I forgot. Uh, I suppose that hall out there doesn’t go very far?”

“Just what you can see. Kip, the slide rule would have been real-if we had had time enough. They understand logarithms. Oh, indeed they do!”

That was bothering me-“time enough” I mean. “Peewee, how long did it take us to get here?” Twenty-seven light-years! Even at speed-of-light-well, maybe the Einstein business would make it seem like a quick trip to me-but not to Centerville. Dad could be dead! Dad was older than Mother, old enough to be my grandfather, really. Another twenty-seven years back- Why, that would make him well over a hundred. Even Mother might be dead.

“Time to get here? Why, it didn’t take any.”

“No, no. I know it feels that way. You’re not any older, I’m still laid up by frostbite. But it took at least twenty-seven years. Didn’t it?”

“What are you talking about, Kip?”

“The relativity equations, of course. You’ve heard of them?”

“Oh, those! Certainly. But they don’t apply. It didn’t take time. Oh, fifteen minutes to get out of Pluto’s atmosphere, about the same to cope with the atmosphere here. But otherwise, pht! Zero.”

“At the speed of light you would think so.”

“No, Kip.” She frowned, then her face lighted up. “How long was it from the time you set the beacon till they rescued us?” “Huh?” It hit me. Dad wasn’t dead! Mother wouldn’t even have gray hair. “Maybe an hour.”

“Alittle over. It would have been less if they had had a ship ready … then they might have found you in the tunnel instead of me. No time for the message to reach here. Half an hour frittered away getting a ship ready-the Mother Thing was vexed. I hadn’t known she could be. You see, a ship is supposed to be ready.”

“Any time she wants one?”

“Any and all the time-the Mother Thing is important. Another half-hour in atmosphere maneuvering-and that’s all. Real time. None of those funny contractions.”

I tried to soak it up. They take an hour to go twenty-seven light-years and get bawled out for dallying. Dr. Einstein must be known as “Whirligig Albert” among his cemetery neighbors. “But how?”

“Kip, do you know any geometry? I don’t mean Euclid-I mean geometry.”

“Mmm … I’ve fiddled with open and closed curved spaces-and I’ve read Dr. Bell’s popular books. But you couldn’t say I know any geometry.”

“At least you won’t boggle at the idea that a straight line is not necessarily the shortest distance between two points.” She made motions as if squeezing a grapefruit in both hands. “Because it’s not. Kip-it all touches. You could put it in a bucket. In a thimble if you folded it so that spins matched.”

I had a dizzying picture of a universe compressed into a teacup, nucleons and electrons packed solidly-really solid and not the thin mathematical ghost that even the uranium nucleus is said to be. Something like the “primal atom” that some cosmogonists use to explain the expanding universe. Well, maybe it’s both packed and expanding. Like the “wavicle” paradox. A particle isn’t a wave and a wave can’t be a particle- yet everything is both. If you believe in wavicles, you can believe in anything-and if you don’t, then don’t bother to believe at all. Not even in yourself, because that’s what you are-wavicles. “How many dimensions?” I said weakly.

“How many would you like?”

“Me? Uh, twenty, maybe. Four more for each of the first four, to give some looseness on the corners.”       “Twenty isn’t a starter. I don’t know, Kip; I don’t know geometry, either-I just thought I did. So I’ve pestered them.” “The Mother Thing?”

“Her? Oh, heavens, no! She doesn’t know geometry. Just enough to pilot a ship in and out of the folds.”

“Only that much?” I should have stuck to advanced finger-painting and never let Dad lure me into trying for an education. There isn’t any end- the more you learn, the more you need to learn. “Peewee, you knew what that beacon was for, didn’t you?”

“Me?” She looked innocent. “Well … yes.” “You knew we were going to Vega.”

“Well … if the beacon worked. If it was set in time.” “Now the prize question. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Well-” Peewee was going to twist that button off. “I wasn’t sure how much math you knew and-you might have gone all masculine and common-sensical and father-knows-best. Would you have believed me?”

(“I told Orville and I told Wilbur and now I’m telling you-that contraption will never work!”) “Maybe not, Peewee. But next time you’re tempted not to tell me something ‘for my own good,’ will you take a chance that I’m not wedded to my own ignorance? I know I’m not a genius but I’ll try to keep my mind open-and I might be able to help, if I knew what you were up to. Quit twisting that button.”

She let go hastily. “Yes, Kip. I’ll remember.”

“Thanks. Another thing is fretting me. I was pretty sick?” “Huh? You certainly were!”

“All right. They’ve got these, uh, ‘fold ships’ that go anywhere in no time. Why didn’t you ask them to bounce me home and pop me into a hospital?” She hesitated. “How do you feel?”

“Huh? I feel fine. Except that I seem to be under spinal anesthesia, or something.” “Or something,” she agreed. “But you feel as if you are getting well?”

“Shucks, I feel well.”

“You aren’t. But you’re going to be.” She looked at me closely. “Shall I put it bluntly, Kip?” “Go ahead.”

“If they had taken you to Earth to the best hospital we have, you’d be a ‘basket case.’ Understand me? No arms, no legs. As it is, you are getting completely well. No amputations, not even a toe.”

I think the Mother Thing had prepared me. I simply said, “You’re sure?”

“Sure. Sure both. You’re going to be all right.” Suddenly her face screwed up. “Oh, you were a mess! I saw.” “Pretty bad?”

“Awful. I have nightmares.”              “They shouldn’t have let you look.”   “They couldn’t stop me. I was next of kin.”

“Huh? You told them you were my sister or something?” “What? I am your next of kin.”

I was about to say she was cockeyed when I tripped over my tongue. We were the only humans for a hundred and sixty trillion miles. As usual, Peewee was right. “So I had to grant permission,” she went on.

“For what? What did they do to me?”

“Uh, first they popped you into liquid helium. They left you there and the past month they have been using me as a guinea pig. Then, three days ago-three of ours-they thawed you out and got to work. You’ve been getting well ever since.”

“What shape am I in now?”

“Uh … well, you’re growing back. Kip, this isn’t a bed. It just looks like it.” “What is it, then?”

“We don’t have a name for it and the tune is pitched too high for me. But everything from here on down-” She patted the spread. “-on into the room below, does things for you. You’re wired like a hi-fi nut’s basement.”

“I’d like to see it.”

“I’m afraid you can’t. You don’t know, Kip. They had to cut your space suit off.”

I felt more emotion at that than I had at hearing what a mess I had been. “Huh? Where is Oscar? Did they ruin him? My space suit, I mean.” “I know what you mean. Every time you’re delirious you talk to ‘Oscar’ -and you answer back, too. Sometimes I think you’re schizoid, Kip.” “You’ve mixed your terms, runt-that’ud make me a split personality. All right, but you’re a paranoid yourself.”

“Oh, I’ve known that for a long time. But I’m a very well adjusted one. You want to see Oscar? The Mother Thing said that you would want him near when you woke up.” She opened the closet.

“Hey! You said he was all cut up!”

“Oh, they repaired him. Good as new. Alittle better than new.” (“Time, dear! Remember what I said.”)

“Coming, Mother Thing! ‘Bye, Kip. I’ll be back soon, and real often.” “Okay. Leave the closet open so I can see Oscar.”

Peewee did come back, but not “real often.” I wasn’t offended, not much. She had a thousand interesting and “educational” things to poke her ubiquitous nose into, all new and fascinating-she was as busy as a pup chewing slippers. She ran our hosts ragged. But I wasn’t bored. I was getting well, a full-time job and not boring if you are happy-which I was.

I didn’t see the Mother Thing often. I began to realize that she had work of her own to do-even though she came to see me if I asked for her, with never more than an hour’s delay, and never seemed in a hurry to leave.

She wasn’t my doctor, nor my nurse. Instead I had a staff of veterinarians who were alert to supervise every heartbeat. They didn’t come in unless I asked them to (a whisper was as good as a shout) but I soon realized that “my” room was bugged and telemetered like a ship in flight test-and my “bed” was a mass of machinery, gear that bore the relation to our own “mechanical hearts” and “mechanical lungs” and “mechanical kidneys” that a Lockheed ultrasonic courier does to a baby buggy.

I never saw that gear (they never lifted the spread, unless it was while I slept), but I know what they were doing. They were encouraging my body to repair itself-not scar tissue but the way  it had been. Any lobster can do this and starfish do it so well that you can chop them to bits and wind up with a thousand brand-new starfish.

This is a trick any animal should do, since its gene pattern is in every cell. But a few million years ago we lost it. Everybody knows that science is trying to recapture it; you see articles- optimistic ones in Reader’s Digest, discouraged ones in The Scientific Monthly, wildly wrong ones in magazines whose “science editors” seem to have received their training writing horror movies. But we’re working on it. Someday, if anybody dies an accidental death, it will be because he bled to death on the way to the hospital.

Here I was with a perfect chance to find out about it-and I didn’t.

I tried. Although I was unworried by what they were doing (the Mother Thing had told me not to worry and every time she visited me she looked in my eyes and repeated the injunction), nevertheless like Peewee, I like to know.

Pick a savage so far back in the jungle that they don’t even have installment-plan buying. Say he has an I.Q. of 190 and Peewee’s yen to understand. Dump him into Brookhaven Atomic Laboratories. How much will he learn? With all possible help?

He’ll learn which corridors lead to what rooms and he’ll learn that a purple trefoil means: “Danger!”

That’s all. Not because he can’t; remember he’s a supergenius-but he needs twenty years schooling before he can ask the right questions and understand the answers.

I asked questions and always got answers and formed notions. But I’m not going to record them; they are as confused and contradictory as the notions a savage would form about design and operation of atomic equipment. As they say in radio, when noise level reaches a certain value, no information is transmitted. All I got was “noise.”

Some of it was literally “noise.” I’d ask a question and one of the therapists would answer. I would understand part, then as it reached the key point, I would hear nothing but birdsongs. Even with the Mother Thing as an interpreter, the parts I had no background for would turn out to be a canary’s cheerful prattle.

Hold onto your seats; I’m going to explain something I don’t understand: how Peewee and I could talk with the Mother Thing even though her mouth could not shape English and we couldn’t sing the way she did and had not studied her language. The Vegans-(I’ll call them “Vegans” the way we might be called “Solarians”; their real name sounds like a wind chime in  a breeze. The Mother Thing had a real name, too, but I’m not a coloratura soprano. Peewee used it when she wanted to wheedle her -fat lot of good it did her.) The Vegans have a supreme talent to understand, to put themselves in the other person’s shoes. I don’t think it was telepathy, or I wouldn’t have gotten so many wrong numbers. Call it empathy.

But they have it in various degrees, just as all of us drive cars but only a few are fit to be racing drivers. The Mother Thing had it the way Novaes understands a piano. I once read about an actress who could use Italian so effectively to a person who did not understand Italian that she always made herself understood. Her name was “Duce.” No, a “duce” is a dictator. Something like that. She must have had what the Mother Thing had.

The first words I had with the Mother Thing were things like “hello” and “good-bye” and “thank you” and “where are we going?” She could project her meaning with those-shucks, you can talk to a strange dog that much. Later I began to understand her speech as speech. She picked up meanings of English words even faster; she had this great talent, and she and Peewee had talked for days while they were prisoners.

But while this is easy for “you’re welcome” and “I’m hungry” and “let’s hurry,” it gets harder for ideas like “heterodyning” and “amino acid” even when both are familiar with the concept. When one party doesn’t even have the concept, it breaks down. That’s the trouble I had understanding those veterinarians. If we had all spoken English I still would not have understood.

An oscillating circuit sending out a radio signal produces dead silence unless there is another circuit capable of oscillating in the same way to receive it. I wasn’t on the right frequency. Nevertheless I understood them when the talk was not highbrow. They were nice people; they talked and laughed a lot and seemed to like each other. I had trouble telling them apart,

except the Mother Thing. (I learned that the only marked difference to them between Peewee and myself was that I was ill and she wasn’t.) They had no trouble telling each other apart;

their conversations were interlarded with musical names, until you felt that you were caught in Peter and the Wolf or a Wagnerian opera. They even had a leit-motif for me. Their talk was

cheerful and gay, like the sounds of a bright summer dawn.

The next time I meet a canary I’ll know what he is saying even if he doesn’t.

I picked up some of this from Peewee-a hospital bed is not a good place from which to study a planet. Vega Five has Earth-surface gravity, near enough, with an oxygen, carbon dioxide, and water life cycle. The planet would not suit humans, not only because the noonday “sun” would strike you dead with its jolt of ultraviolet but also the air has poisonous amounts of ozone-a trace of ozone is stimulating but a trifle more-well, you might as well sniff prussic acid. There was something else, too, nitrous oxide I think, which was ungood for humans if breathed too long. My quarters were air-conditioned; the Vegans could breathe what I used but they considered it tasteless.

I learned a bit as a by-product of something else; the Mother Thing asked me to dictate how I got mixed up in these things. When I finished, she asked me to dictate everything I knew about Earth, its history, and how we work and live together. This is a tall order-I’m not still dictating because I found out I don’t know much. Take ancient Babylonia-how is it related to early Egyptian civilizations? I had only vague notions.

Maybe Peewee did better, since she remembers everything she has heard or read or seen the way Dad does. But they probably didn’t get her to hold still long, whereas I had to. The Mother Thing wanted this for the reasons we study Australian aborigines and also as a record of our language. There was another reason, too.

The job wasn’t easy but there was a Vegan to help me whenever I felt like it, willing to stop if I tired. Call him Professor Josephus Egghead; “Professor” is close enough and his name can’t be spelled. I called him Joe and he called me the leitmotif that meant “Clifford Russell, the monster with the frostbite.” Joe had almost as much gift for understanding as the Mother Thing. But how do you put over ideas like “tariffs” and “kings” to a person whose people have never had either? The English words were just noise.

But Joe knew histories of many peoples and planets and could call up scenes, in moving stereo and color, until we agreed on what I meant. We jogged along, with me dictating to a silvery ball floating near my mouth and with Joe curled up like a cat on a platform raised to my level, while he dictated to another microphone, making running notes on what I said. His mike had a gimmick that made it a hush-phone; I did not hear him unless he spoke to me.

Then we would stumble. Joe would stop and throw me a sample scene, his best guess of what I meant. The pictures appeared in the air, positioned for my comfort-if I turned my head, the picture moved to accommodate me. The pix were color-stereo-television with perfect life and sharpness-well, give us another twenty years and we’ll have them as realistic. It was a good trick to have the projector concealed and to force images to appear as if they were hanging in air, but those are just gimmicks of stereo optics; we can do them anytime we really want to-after all, you can pack a lifelike view of the Grand Canyon into a viewer you hold in your hand.

The thing that did impress me was the organization behind it. I asked Joe about it. He sang to his microphone and we went on a galloping tour of their “Congressional Library.”

Dad claims that library science is the foundation of all sciences just as math is the key-and that we will survive or founder, depending on how well the librarians do their jobs. Librarians didn’t look glamorous to me but maybe Dad had hit on a not very obvious truth.

This “library” had hundreds, maybe thousands, of Vegans viewing pictures and listening to sound tracks, each with a silvery sphere in front of him. Joe said they were “telling the  memory.” This was equivalent to typing a card for a library’s catalog, except that the result was more like a memory path in brain cells-nine-tenths of that building was an electronic brain.

I spotted a triangular sign like the costume jewelry worn by the Mother Thing, but the picture jumped quickly to something else. Joe also wore one (and others did not) but I did not get around to asking about it, as the sight of that incredible “library” brought up the word “cybernetics” and we went on a detour. I decided later that it might be a lodge pin, or like a Phi Beta Kappa key-the Mother Thing was smart even for a Vegan and Joe was not far behind.

Whenever Joe was sure that he understood some English word, he would wriggle with delight like a puppy being tickled. He was very dignified, but this is not undignified for a Vegan. Their bodies are so fluid and mobile that they smile and frown with the whole works. AVegan holding perfectly still is either displeased or extremely worried.

The sessions with Joe let me tour places from my bed. The difference between “primary school” and “university” caused me to be shown examples. A“kindergarten” looked like an adult Vegan being overwhelmed by babies; it had the innocent rowdiness of a collie pup stepping on his brother’s face to reach the milk dish. But the “university” was a place of quiet beauty, strange-looking trees and plants and flowers among buildings of surrealistic charm unlike any architecture I have ever seen-I suppose I would have been flabbergasted if they had  looked familiar. Parabolas were used a lot and I think all the “straight” lines had that swelling the Greeks called “entasis”-delicate grace with strength.

Joe showed up one day simply undulating with pleasure. He had another silvery ball, larger than the other two. He placed it in front of me, then sang to his own. (“I want you to hear this, Kip!”)

As soon as he ceased the larger sphere spoke in English: “I want you to hear this. Kip!” Squirming with delight, Joe swapped spheres and told me to say something.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked.

(“What do you want me to say?”) the larger sphere sang in Vegan. That was my last session with Prof Joe.

Despite unstinting help, despite the Mother Thing’s ability to make herself understood, I was like the Army mule at West Point: an honorary member of the student body but not prepared for the curriculum. I never did understand their government. Oh, they had government, but it wasn’t any system I’ve heard of. Joe knew about democracies and representation and voting and courts of law; he could fish up examples from many planets. He felt that democracy was “a very good system, for beginners.” It would have sounded patronizing, except that is not  one of their faults.

I never met one of their young. Joe explained that children should not see “strange creatures” until they had learned to feel understanding sympathy. That would have offended me if I hadn’t been learning some “understanding sympathy” myself. Matter of fact, if a human ten-year-old saw a Vegan, he would either run, or poke it with a stick.

I tried to learn about their government from the Mother Thing, in particular how they kept the peace-laws, crimes, punishments, traffic regulations, etc.

It was as near to flat failure as I ever had with her. She pondered a long time, then answered: (“How could one possibly act against one’s own nature?”)  I guess their worst vice was that they didn’t have any. This can be tiresome.

The medical staff were interested in the drugs in Oscar’s helmet-like our interest in a witch doctor’s herbs, but that is not idle interest; remember digitalis and curare.

I told them what each drug did and in most cases I knew the Geneva name as well as the commercial one. I knew that codeine was derived from opium, and opium from poppies. I knew that dexedrine was a sulphate but that was all. Organic chemistry and biochemistry are not easy even with no language trouble. We got together on what a benzene ring was, Peewee drawing it and sticking in her two dollars’ worth, and we managed to agree on “element,” “isotope,” “half life,” and the periodic table. I should have drawn structural formulas, using Peewee’s hands- but neither of us had the slightest idea of the structural formula for codeine and couldn’t do it even when supplied with kindergarten toys which stuck together only in    the valences of the elements they represented.

Peewee had fun, though. They may not have learned much from her; she learned a lot from them.

I don’t know when I became aware that the Mother Thing was not, or wasn’t quite, a female. But it didn’t matter; being a mother is an attitude, not a biological relation.

If Noah launched his ark on Vega Five, the animals would come in by twelves. That makes things complicated. But a “mother thing” is one who takes care of others. I am not sure that all mother things were the same gender; it may have been a matter of temperament.

I met one “father thing.” You might call him “governor” or “mayor,” but “parish priest” or “scoutmaster” is closer, except that his prestige dominated a continent. He breezed in during a session with Joe, stayed five minutes, urged Joe to do a good job, told me to be a good boy and get well, and left, all without hurrying. He filled me with the warm self-reliance that Dad does-I didn’t need to be told that he was a “father thing.” His visit had a flavor of “royalty visiting the wounded” without being condescending-no doubt it was hard to work me into a busy schedule.

Joe neither mothered nor fathered me; he taught me and studied me- “a professor thing.”

Peewee showed up one day full of bubbles. She posed like a mannequin. “Do you like my new spring outfit?”

She was wearing silvery tights, plus a little hump like a knapsack. She looked cute but not glamorous, for she was built like two sticks and this get-up emphasized it. “Very fancy,” I said. “Are you learning to be an acrobat?”

“Don’t be silly, Kip; it’s my new space suit-a real one.”

I glanced at Oscar, big and bulky and filling the closet and said privately, “Hear that, chum?” (“It takes all kinds to make a world.”)

“Your helmet won’t fit it, will it?”

She giggled. “I’m wearing it.”

“You are? ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’?”

“Pretty close. Kip, disconnect your prejudices and listen. This is like the Mother Thing’s suit except that it’s tailored for me. My old suit wasn’t much good-and that cold cold about finished it. But you’ll be amazed at this one. Take the helmet. It’s there, only you can’t see it. It’s a field. Gas can’t go in or out.” She came close. “Slap me.”

“With what?”

“Oh. I forgot. Kip, you’ve got to get well and up off that bed. I want to take you for a walk.” “I’m in favor. They tell me it won’t be long now.”

“It had better not be. Here, I’ll show you.” She hauled off and slapped herself. Her hand smacked into something inches from her face. “Now watch,” she went on. She moved her hand very slowly; it sank through the barrier, she thumbed her nose at me and giggled.

This impressed me-a space suit you could reach into! Why, I would have been able to give Peewee water and dexedrine and sugar pills when she needed them. “I’ll be darned! What does it?”

“Apower pack on my back, under the air tank. The tank is good for a week, too, and hoses can’t give trouble because there aren’t any.” “Uh, suppose you blow a fuse. There you are, with a lungful of vacuum.”

“The Mother Thing says that can’t happen.”

Hmm-I had never known the Mother Thing to be wrong when she made a flat statement.

“That’s not all,” Peewee went on. “It feels like skin, the joints aren’t clumsy, and you’re never hot or cold. It’s like street clothes.” “Uh, you risk a bad sunburn, don’t you? Unhealthy, you tell me. Unhealthy even on the Moon.”

“Oh, no! The field polarizes. That’s what the field is, sort of. Kip, get them to make you one-we’ll go places!”  I glanced at Oscar. (“Please yourself, pal,” he said distantly. “I’m not the jealous type.”)

“Uh, Peewee, I’ll stick to one I understand. But I’d like to examine that monkey suit of yours.” “Monkey suit indeed!”

I woke up one morning, turned over, and realized that I was hungry. Then I sat up with a jerk. I had turned over in bed.

I had been warned to expect it. The “bed” was a bed and my body was back under my control. Furthermore, I was hungry and I hadn’t been hungry the whole time I had been on Vega Five. Whatever that machinery was, it included a way to nourish me without eating.

But I didn’t stop to enjoy the luxury of hunger; it was too wonderful to be a body again, not just a head. I got out of bed, was suddenly dizzy, recovered and grinned. Hands! Feet!   I examined those wonderful things. They were unchanged and unhurt.

Then I looked more closely. No, not quite unchanged.

I had had a scar on my left shin where I had been spiked in a close play at second; it was gone. I once had “Mother” tattooed on my left forearm at a carnival. Mother had been distressed and Dad disgusted, but he had said to leave it as a reminder not to be a witling. It was gone. There was not a callus on hand or foot.

I used to bite my nails. My nails were a bit long but perfect. I had lost the nail from my right little toe years ago through a slip with a hatchet. It was back.  I looked hastily for my appendectomy scar-found it and felt relieved. If it had been missing, I would have wondered if I was me.

There was a mirror over the chest of drawers. It showed me with enough hair to warrant a guitar (I wear a crew cut) but somebody had shaved me.

On the chest was a dollar and sixty-seven cents, a mechanical pencil, a sheet of paper, my watch, and a handkerchief. The watch was running. The dollar bill, the paper, and the handkerchief had been laundered.

My clothes, spandy clean and invisibly repaired, were on the desk. The socks weren’t mine; the material was more like felt, if you will imagine felted material no thicker than Kleenex which stretches instead of tearing. On the floor were tennis shoes, like Peewee’s even to a “U.S. Rubber” trademark, but in my size. The uppers were heavier felted material. I got dressed.

I was wearing the result when Peewee kicked the door. “Anybody home?” She came in, bearing a tray. “Want breakfast?” “Peewee! Look at me!”

She did. “Not bad,” she admitted, “for an ape. You need a haircut.” “Yes, but isn’t it wonderful! I’m all together again!”

“You never were apart,” she answered, “except in spots-I’ve had daily reports. Where do you want this?” She put the tray on the desk. “Peewee,” I asked, rather hurt, “don’t you care that I’m well?”

“Of course I do. Why do you think I made ‘em let me carry in your breakfast? But I knew last night that they were going to uncork you. Who do you think cut your nails and shaved you? That’ll be a dollar, please. Shaves have gone up.” I got that tired dollar and handed it to her. She didn’t take it. “Aw, can’t you take a joke?” “‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’”

“Polonius. He was a stupid old bore. Honest, Kip, I wouldn’t take your last dollar.” “Now who can’t take a joke?”

“Oh, eat your breakfast. That purple juice,” she said, “tastes like orange juice-it’s very nice. The stuff that looks like scrambled eggs is a fair substitute and I had ‘em color it yellow-the eggs here are dreadful, which wouldn’t surprise you if you knew where they get them. The buttery stuff is vegetable fat and I had them color it, too. The bread is bread, I toasted it myself. The salt is salt and it surprises them that we eat it-they think it’s poison. Go ahead; I’ve guinea-pigged everything. No coffee.”

“I won’t miss it.”

“I never touch the stuff-I’m trying to grow. Eat. Your sugar count has been allowed to drop so that you will enjoy it.” The aroma was wonderful. “Where’s your breakfast, Peewee?”

“I ate hours ago. I’ll watch and swallow when you do.”

The tastes were odd but it was just what the doctor ordered-literally, I suppose. I’ve never enjoyed a meal so much. Presently I slowed down to say, “Knife and fork? Spoons?”

“The only ones on-” She vocalized the planet’s name. “I got tired of fingers and I play hob using what they use. So I drew pictures. This set is mine but we’ll order more.”

There was even a napkin, more felted stuff. The water tasted distilled and not aerated. I didn’t mind. “Peewee, how did you shave me? Not even a nick.”

“Little gismo that beats a razor all hollow. I don’t know what they use it for, but if you could patent it, you’d make a fortune. Aren’t you going to finish that toast?” “Uh-” I had thought that I could eat the tray. “No, I’m full.”

“Then I will.” She used it to mop up the “butter,” then announced, “I’m off!” “Where?”

“To suit up. I’m going to take you for a walk!” She was gone.

The hall outside did not imitate ours where it could not be seen from the bed, but a door to the left was a bathroom, just where it should have been. No attempt had been made to make it look like the one at home, and valving and lighting and such were typically Vegan. But everything worked.

Peewee returned while I was checking Oscar. If they had cut him off me, they had done a marvelous job of repairing; even the places I had patched no longer showed. He had been cleaned so thoroughly that there was no odor inside. He had three hours of air and seemed okay in every way. “You’re in good shape, partner.”

(“In the pink! The service is excellent here.”)

“So I’ve noticed.” I looked up and saw Peewee; she was already in her “spring outfit.” “Peewee, do we need space suits just for a walk?”

“No. You could get by with a respirator, sun glasses, and a sun shade.”

“You’ve convinced me. Say, where’s Madame Pompadour? How do you get her inside that suit?” “No trouble at all, she just bulges a little. But I left her in my room and told her to behave herself.” “Will she?”

“Probably not. She takes after me.” “Where is your room?”

“Next door. This is the only part of the house which is Earth-conditioned.” I started to suit up. “Say, has that fancy suit got a radio?”

“All that yours has and then some. Did you notice the change in Oscar?”

“Huh? What? I saw that he was repaired and cleaned up. What else have they done?”

“Just a little thing. One more click on the switch that changes antennas and you can talk to people around you who aren’t wearing radios without shouting.” “I didn’t see a speaker.”

“They don’t believe in making everything big and bulky.”

As we passed Peewee’s room I glanced in. It was not decorated Vegan style; I had seen Vegan interiors through stereo. Nor was it a copy of her own room-not if her parents were sensible. I don’t know what to call it -“Moorish harem” style, perhaps, as conceived by Mad King Ludwig, with a dash of Disneyland.

I did not comment. I had a hunch that Peewee had been given a room “just like her own” because I had one; that fitted the Mother Thing’s behavior-but Peewee had seen a golden chance to let her overfertile imagination run wild. I doubt if she fooled the Mother Thing one split second. She had probably let that indulgent overtone come into her song and had given Peewee what she wanted.

The Mother Thing’s home was smaller than our state capitol but not much; her family seemed to run to dozens, or hundreds-“family” has a wide meaning under their complex interlinkage. We didn’t see any young ones on our floor and I knew that they were being kept away from the “monsters.” The adults all greeted me, inquired as to my health, and congratulated me on my recovery; I was kept busy saying “Fine, thank you! Couldn’t be better.”

They all knew Peewee and she could sing their names.

I thought I recognized one of my therapists, but the Mother Thing, Prof Joe and the boss veterinarian were the only Vegans I was sure of and we did not meet them.

We hurried on. The Mother Thing’s home was typical-many soft round cushions about a foot thick and four in diameter, used as beds or chairs, floor bare, slick and springy, most furniture on the walls where it could be reached by climbing, convenient rods and poles and brackets a person could drape himself on while using the furniture, plants growing unexpectedly here and there as if the jungle were moving in-delightful, and as useful to me as a corset.

Through a series of parabolic arches we reached a balcony. It was not railed and the drop to a terrace below was about seventy-five feet; I stayed back and regretted again that Oscar had no chin window. Peewee went to the edge, put an arm around a slim pillar and leaned out. In the bright outdoor light her “helmet” became an opalescent sphere. “Come see!”

“And break my neck? Maybe you’d like to belay me?” “Oh, pooh! Who’s afraid of heights?”

“I am when I can’t see what I’m doing.”

“Well, for goodness’ sakes, take my hand and grab a post.” I let her lead me to a pillar, then looked out.

It was a city in a jungle. Thick dark green, so tangled that I could not tell trees from vine and bush, spread out all around but was broken repeatedly by buildings as large and larger than  the one we were in. There were no roads; their roads are underground in cities and sometimes outside the cities. But there was air traffic-individual fliers supported by contrivances even less substantial than our own one-man ‘copter harnesses or flying carpets. Like birds they launched themselves from and landed in balconies such as the one we stood in.

There were real birds, too, long and slender and brilliantly colored, with two sets of wings in tandem-which looked aerodynamically unsound but seemed to suit them. The sky was blue and fair but broken by three towering cumulous anvils, blinding white in the distance.

“Let’s go on the roof,” said Peewee. “How?”

“Over here.”

It was a scuttle hole reached by staggered slender brackets the Vegans use as stairs. “Isn’t there a ramp?” “Around on the far side, yes.”

“I don’t think those things will hold me. And that hole looks small for Oscar.” “Oh, don’t be a sissy,” Peewee went up like a monkey.

I followed like a tired bear. The brackets were sturdy despite their grace; the hole was a snug fit.

Vega was high in the sky. It appeared to be the angular size of our Sun, which fitted since we were much farther out than Terra is from the Sun, but it was too bright even with full polarization. I looked away and presently eyes and polarizers adjusted until I could see again. Peewee’s head was concealed by what appeared to be a polished chrome basketball. I said, “Hey, are you still there?”

“Sure,” she answered. “I can see out all right. It’s a grand view. Doesn’t it remind you of Paris from the top of the Arc de Triomphe?” “I don’t know, I’ve never done any traveling.”

“Except no boulevards, of course. Somebody is about to land here.”

I turned the way she was pointing-she could see in all directions while I was hampered by the built-in tunnel vision of my helmet. By the time I was turned around the Vegan was coming in beside us.

(“Hello, children!”)

“Hi, Mother Thing!” Peewee threw her arms around her, picking her up.

(“Not so hasty, dear. Let me shed this.”) The Mother Thing stepped out of her harness, shook herself in ripples, folded the flying gear like an umbrella and hung it over an arm. (“You’re looking fit, Kip.”)

“I feel fine, Mother Thing! Gee, it’s nice to have you back.”

(“I wished to be back when you got out of bed. However, your therapists have kept me advised every minute.”) She put a little hand against my chest, growing a bit to do so, and placed her eyes almost against my face plate. (“You are well?”)

“I couldn’t be better.”

“He really is, Mother Thing!”

(“Good. You agree that you are well, I sense that you are, Peewee is sure that you are and, most important, your leader therapist assures me that you are. We’ll leave at once.”) “What?” I asked. “Where, Mother Thing?”

She turned to Peewee. (“Haven’t you told him, dear?”) “Gee, Mother Thing, I haven’t had a chance.”

(“Very well.”) She turned to me. (“Dear Kip, we must now attend a gathering. Questions will be asked and answered, decisions will be made.”) She spoke to us both. (“Are you ready to leave?”)

“Now?” said Peewee. “Why, I guess so-except that I’ve got to get Madame Pompadour.” (“Fetch her, then. And you, Kip?”)

“Uh-” I couldn’t remember whether I had put my watch back on after I washed and I couldn’t tell because I can’t feel it through Oscar’s thick hide. I told her so. (“Very well. You children run to your rooms while I have a ship fetched. Meet me here and don’t stop to admire flowers.”)

We went down by ramp. I said, “Peewee, you’ve been holding out on me again.” “Why, I have not!”

“What do you call it?”

“Kip-please listen! I was told not to tell you while you were ill. The Mother Thing was very firm about it. You were not to be disturbed-that’s what she said!-while you were growing well.” “Why should I feel disturbed? What is all this? What gathering? What questions?”

“Well … the gathering is sort of a court. Acriminal court, you might say.”

“Huh?” I took a quick look at my conscience. But I hadn’t had any chance to do anything wrong-I had been helpless as a baby up to two hours ago. That left Peewee. “Runt,” I said sternly, “what have you done now?”

“Me? Nothing.” “Think hard.”

“No, Kip. Oh, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you at breakfast! But Daddy says never to break any news until after his second cup of coffee and I thought how nice it would be to take a little walk before we had any worries and I was going to tell you”

“Make it march.”

“-as soon as we came down. I haven’t done anything. But there’s old Wormface.” “What? I thought he was dead.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. But, as the Mother Thing says, there are still questions to be asked, decisions to be made. He’s up for the limit, is my guess.”

I thought about it as we wound our way through strange apartments toward the air lock that led to our Earth-conditioned rooms. High crimes and misdemeanors … skulduggery in the spaceways-yes, Wormface was probably in for it. If the Vegans could catch him. “Had caught him” apparently, since they were going to try him. “But where do we come in? As witnesses?”

“I suppose you could call it that.”

What happened to Wormface was no skin off my nose-and it would be a chance to find out more about the Vegans. Especially if the court was some distance away, so that we would travel and see the country.

“But that isn’t all,” Peewee went on worriedly. “What else?”

She sighed. “This is why I wanted us to have a nice sight-see first. Uh …” “Don’t chew on it. Spit it out.”

“Well … we have to be tried, too.” “What?”

“Maybe ‘examined’ is the word. I don’t know. But I know this: we can’t go home until we’ve been judged.” “But what have we done?” I burst out.

“I don’t know!”

My thoughts were boiling. “Are you sure they’ll let us go home then?”

“The Mother Thing refuses to talk about it.”

I stopped and took her arm. “What it amounts to,” I said bitterly, “is that we are under arrest. Aren’t we?” “Yes-” She added almost in a sob, “But, Kip, I told you she was a cop!”

“Great stuff. We pull her chestnuts out of the fire-and now we’re arrested-and going to be tried-and we don’t even know why! Nice place, Vega Five. ‘The natives are friendly.’ ” They had nursed me-as we nurse a gangster in order to hang him.

“But, Kip-” Peewee was crying openly now. “I’m sure it’ll be all right. She may be a cop-but she’s still the Mother Thing.” “Is she? I wonder.” Peewee’s manner contradicted her words. She was not one to worry over nothing. Quite the contrary.

My watch was on the washstand. I ungasketed to put it in an inside pocket. When I came out, Peewee was doing the same with Madame Pompadour. “Here,” I said, “I’ll take her with me. I’ve got more room.”

“No, thank you,” Peewee answered bleakly. “I need her with me. Especially now.” “Uh, Peewee, where is this court? This city? Or another one?”

“Didn’t I tell you? No, I guess I didn’t. It’s not on this planet.” “I thought this was the only inhabited-“

“It’s not a planet around Vega. Another star. Not even in the Galaxy.” “Say that again?”

“It’s somewhere in the Lesser Magellanic Cloud.”

Chapter 10

I didn’t put up a fight-a hundred and sixty trillion miles from nowhere, I mean. But I didn’t speak to the Mother Thing as I got into her ship.

It was shaped like an old-fashioned beehive and it looked barely big enough to jump us to the space port. Peewee and I crowded together on the floor, the Mother Thing curled up in front and twiddled a shiny rack like an abacus; we took off, straight up.

In a few minutes my anger grew from sullenness to a reckless need to settle it. “Mother Thing!”

(“One moment, dear. Let me get us out of the atmosphere.”) She pushed something, the ship quivered and steadied. “Mother Thing,” I repeated.

(“Wait until I lower us, Kip.”)

I had to wait. It’s as silly to disturb a pilot as it is to snatch the wheel of a car. The little ship took a buffeting; the upper winds must have been dillies. But she could pilot.

Presently there was a gentle bump and I figured we must be at the space port. The Mother Thing turned her head. (“All right, Kip. I sense your fear and resentment. Will it help to say that you two are in no danger? That I would protect you with my body? As you protected mine?”)

“Yes, but-“

(“Then let be. It is easier to show than it is to explain. Don’t clamp your helmet. This planet’s air is like your own.”) “Huh? You mean we’re there?”

“I told you,” Peewee said at my elbow. “Just poof! and you’re there.” I didn’t answer. I was trying to guess how far we were from home. (“Come, children.”)

It was midday when we left; it was night as we disembarked. The ship rested on a platform that stretched out of sight. Stars in front of me were in unfamiliar constellations; slaunchwise down the sky was a thin curdling which I spotted as the Milky Way. So Peewee had her wires crossed-we were far from home but still in the Galaxy-perhaps we had simply switched to  the night side of Vega Five.

I heard Peewee gasp and turned around. I didn’t have strength to gasp.

Dominating that whole side of the sky was a great whirlpool of millions, maybe billions, of stars.

You’ve seen pictures of the Great Nebula in Andromeda?-a giant spiral of two curving arms, seen at an angle. Of all the lovely things in the sky it is the most beautiful. This was like that. Only we weren’t seeing a photograph nor even by telescope; we were so close (if “close” is the word) that it stretched across the sky twice as long as the Big Dipper as seen from home-

so close that I saw the thickening at the center, two great branches coiling around and overtaking each other. We saw it from an angle so that it appeared elliptical, just as M31 in

Andromeda does; you could feel its depth, you could see its shape.

Then I knew I was a long way from home. That was home, up there, lost in billions of crowded stars.

It was some time before I noticed another double spiral on my right, almost as wide-flung but rather lopsided and not nearly as brilliant-a pale ghost of our own gorgeous Galaxy. It slowly penetrated that this second one must be the Greater Magellanic Cloud-if we were in the Lesser and if that fiery whirlpool was our own Galaxy. What I had thought was “The Milky Way”

was simply a milky way, the Lesser Cloud from inside.

I turned and looked at it again. It had the right shape, a roadway around the sky, but it was pale skim milk compared with our own, about as our Milky Way looks on a murky night. I don’t know how it should look, since I’d never seen the Magellanic Clouds; I’ve never been south of the Rio Grande. But I did know that each cloud is a galaxy in its own right, but smaller than ours and grouped with us.

I looked again at our blazing spiral and was homesick in a way I hadn’t been since I was six.

Peewee was huddling to the Mother Thing for comfort. She made herself taller and put an arm around Peewee. (“There, there, dear! I felt the same way when I was very young and saw it for the first time.”)

“Mother Thing?” Peewee said timidly. “Where is home?”

(“See the right half of it, dear, where the outer arm trails into nothingness? We came from a point two-thirds the way out from the center.” “No, no! Not Vega. I want to know where the Sun is!”

(“Oh, your star. But, dear, at this distance it is the same.”)

We learned how far it is from the Sun to the planet Lanador 167,000 light-years. The Mother Thing couldn’t tell us directly as she did not know how much time we meant by a “year”-how long it takes Terra to go around the Sun (a figure she might have used once or not at all and as worth remembering as the price of peanuts in Perth). But she did know the distance from Vega to the Sun and told us the distance from Lanador to Vega with that as a yardstick-six thousand one hundred and ninety times as great. 6190 times 27 light-years gives 167,000 light-years. She courteously gave it in powers of ten the way we figure, instead of using factorial five (1x2x3x4x5 equals 120) which is how Vegans figure. 167,000 light-years is 9.82 x 1017 miles. Round off 9.82 and call it ten. Then -1,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles -is the distance from Vega to Lanador (or from the Sun to Lanador; Vega and the Sun are back-fence neighbors on this scale.)

Athousand million billion miles.

I refuse to have anything to do with such a preposterous figure. It may be “short” as cosmic distances go, but there comes a time when the circuit breakers in your skull trip out from overload.

The platform we were on was the roof of an enormous triangular building, miles on a side. We saw that triangle repeated in many places and always with a two-armed spiral in each corner. It was the design the Mother Thing wore as jewelry.

It is the symbol for “Three Galaxies, One Law.”

I’ll lump here things I learned in driblets: The Three Galaxies are like our Federated Free Nations, or the United Nations before that, or the League of Nations still earlier; Lanador houses their offices and courts and files-the League’s capital, the way the FFN is in New York and the League of Nations used to be in Switzerland. The cause is historical; the people of Lanador are the Old Race; that’s where civilization began.

The Three Galaxies are an island group, like Hawaii State, they haven’t any other close neighbors. Civilization spread through the Lesser Cloud, then through the Greater Cloud and is seeping slowly through our own Galaxy-that is taking longer; there are fifteen or twenty times as many stars in our Galaxy as in the other two.

When I began to get these things straight I wasn’t quite as sore. The Mother Thing was a very important person at home but here she was a minor official-all she could do was bring us in. Still, I wasn’t more than coolly polite for a while-she might have looked the other way while we beat it for home.

They housed us in that enormous building in a part you could call a “transients” hotel,” although “detention barracks” or “jail” is closer. I can’t complain about accommodations but I was getting confoundedly tired of being locked up every time I arrived in a new place. Arobot met us and took us down inside-there are robots wherever you turn on Lanador. I don’t mean

things looking like the Tin Woodman; I mean machines that do things for you, such as this one which led us to our rooms, then hung around like a bellhop expecting a tip. It was a three- wheeled cart with a big basket on top, for luggage if we had any. It met us, whistled to the Mother Thing in Vegan and led us away, down a lift and through a wide and endlessly long corridor.

I was given “my” room again-a fake of a fake, with all errors left in and new ones added. The sight of it was not reassuring; it shrieked that they planned to keep us there as long as-well, as long as they chose.

But the room was complete even to a rack for Oscar and a bathroom outside. Just beyond “my” room was a fake of another kind-a copy of that Arabian Nights horror Peewee had occupied on Vega Five. Peewee seemed delighted, so I didn’t point out the implications.

The Mother Thing hovered around while we got out of space suits. (“Do you think you will be comfortable?”) “Oh, sure,” I agreed unenthusiastically.

(“If you want food or anything, just say so. It will come.”) “So? Is there a telephone somewhere?”           (“Simply speak your wishes. You will be heard.”)

I didn’t doubt her-but I was almost as tired of rooms that were bugged as of being locked up; a person ought to have privacy. “I’m hungry now,” Peewee commented. “I had an early breakfast.”

We were in her room. Apurple drapery drew back, a light glowed in the wall. In about two minutes a section of wall disappeared; a slab at table height stuck out like a tongue. On it were dishes and silverware, cold cuts, fruit, bread, butter,, and a mug of steaming cocoa. Peewee clapped and squealed. I looked at it with less enthusiasm.

(“You see?”) the Mother Thing went on with a smile in her voice. (“Ask for what you need. If you need me, I’ll come. But I must go now.”) “Oh, please don’t go, Mother Thing.”

(“I must, Peewee dear. But I will see you soon. By the bye, there are two more of your people here.”) “Huh?” I put in. “Who? Where?”

(“Next door.”) She was gone with gliding swiftness; the bellhop speeded up to stay ahead of her. I spun around. “Did you hear that?”

“I certainly did!”

“Well-you eat if you want to; I’m going to look for those other humans.” “Hey! Wait for me!”

“I thought you wanted to eat.”

“Well …” Peewee looked at the food. “Just a sec.” She hastily buttered two slices of bread and handed one to me. I was not in that much of a hurry; I ate it. Peewee gobbled hers, took a gulp from the mug and offered it to me. “Want some?”

It wasn’t quite cocoa; there was a meaty flavor, too. But it was good. I handed it back and she finished it. “Now I can fight wildcats. Let’s go, Kip.”

“Next door” was through the foyer of our three-room suite and fifteen yards down the corridor, where we came to a door arch. I kept Peewee back and glanced in cautiously.  It was a diorama, a fake scene.

This one was better than you see in museums. I was looking through a bush at a small clearing in wild country. It ended in a limestone bank. I could see overcast sky and a cave mouth in the rocks. The ground was wet, as if from rain.

Acave man hunkered down close to the cave. He was gnawing the carcass of a small animal, possibly a squirrel.

Peewee tried to shove past me; I stopped her. The cave man did not appear to notice us which struck me as a good idea. His legs looked short but I think he weighed twice what I do and he was muscled like a weight lifter, with short, hairy forearms and knotty biceps and calves. His head was huge, bigger than mine and longer, but his forehead and chin weren’t much.   His teeth were large and yellow and a front one was broken. I heard bones crunching.

In a museum I would have expected a card reading “Neanderthal Man -circa Last Ice Age.” But wax dummies of extinct breeds don’t crack bones. Peewee protested, “Hey, let me look.”

He heard. Peewee stared at him, he stared toward us. Peewee squealed; he whirled and ran into the cave, waddling but making time.  I grabbed Peewee. “Let’s get out of here!”

“Wait a minute,” she said calmly. “He won’t come out in a hurry.” She tried to push the bush aside. “Peewee!”

“Try this,” she suggested. Her hand was shoving air. “They’ve got him penned.”

I tried it. Something transparent blocked the arch. I could push it a little but not more than an inch. “Plastic?” I suggested. “Like Lucite but springier?” “Mmm …” said Peewee. “More like the helmet of my suit. Tougher, though-and I’ll bet light passes only one way. I don’t think he saw us.”

“Okay, let’s get back to our rooms. Maybe we can lock them.”

She went on feeling that barrier. “Peewee!” I said sharply. “You’re not listening.” “What were you doing talking,” she answered reasonably, “when I wasn’t listening?” “Peewee! This is no time to be difficult.”

“You sound like Daddy. He dropped that rat he was eating-he might come back.”

“If he does, you won’t be here, because I’m about to drag you-and if you bite, I’ll bite back. I warn you.”

She looked around with a trace of animosity. “I wouldn’t bite you. Kip, no matter what you did. But if you’re going to be stuffy-oh, well, I doubt if he’ll come out for an hour or so. We’ll come back.”

“Okay.” I pulled her away.

But we did not leave. I heard a loud whistle and a shout: “Hey, buster! Over here!”

The words were not English, but I understood-well enough. The yell came from an archway across the corridor and a little farther on. I hesitated, then moved toward it because Peewee did so.

Aman about forty-five was loafing in this doorway. He was no Neanderthal; he was civilized-or somewhat so. He wore a long heavy woolen tunic, belted in at the waist, forming a sort of

kilt. His legs below that were wrapped in wool and he was shod in heavy short boots, much worn. At the belt and supported by a shoulder sling was a short, heavy sword; there was a dagger on the other side of the belt. His hair was short and he was clean-shaven save for a few days’ gray stubble. His expression was neither friendly nor unfriendly; it was sharply watchful.

“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “Are you the jailer?” Peewee gasped. “Why, that’s Latin!”

What do you do when you meet a Legionary? Right after a cave man? I answered: “No, I am a prisoner myself.” I said it in Spanish and repeated it in pretty fair classical Latin. I used Spanish because Peewee hadn’t been quite correct. It was not Latin he spoke, not the Latin of Ovid and Gaius Julius Caesar. Nor was it Spanish. It was in between, with an atrocious accent and other differences. But I could worry out the meaning.

He sucked his lip and answered, “That’s bad. I’ve been trying for three days to attract attention and all I get is another prisoner. But that’s how the die rolls. Say, that’s a funny accent you have.”

“Sorry, amigo, but I have trouble understanding you, too.” I repeated it in Latin, then split the difference. I added, in improvised lingua franca, “Speak slowly, will you?” “I’ll speak as I please. And don’t call me ‘amico’; I’m a Roman citizen -so don’t get gay.”

That’s a free translation. His advice was more vulgar-I think. It was close to a Spanish phrase which certainly is vulgar. “What’s he saying?” demanded Peewee. “It is Latin, isn’t it? Translate!”

I was glad she hadn’t caught it. “Why, Peewee, don’t you know ‘the language of poetry and science’?” “Oh, don’t be a smartie! Tell me.”

“Don’t crowd me, hon. I’ll tell you later. I’m having trouble following it.”

“What is that barbarian grunting?” the Roman said pleasantly. “Talk language, boy. Or will you have ten with the flat of the sword?”

He seemed to be leaning on nothing-so I felt the air. It was solid; I decided not to worry about his threat. “I’m talking as best I can. We spoke to each other in our own language.”  “Pig grunts. Talk Latin. If you can.” He looked at Peewee as if just noticing her. “Your daughter? Want to sell her? If she had meat on her bones, she might be worth a half denario.” Peewee clouded up. “I understood that!” she said fiercely. “Come out here and fight!”

“Try it in Latin,” I advised her. “If he understands you, he’ll probably spank you.” She looked uneasy. “You wouldn’t let him?”

“You know I wouldn’t.” “Let’s go back.”

“That’s what I said earlier.” I escorted her past the cave man’s lair to our suite. “Peewee, I’m going back and see what our noble Roman has to say. Do you mind?” “I certainly do!”

“Be reasonable, hon. If we could be hurt by them, the Mother Thing would know it. After all, she told us they were here.” “I’ll go with you.”

“What for? I’ll tell you everything I learn. This may be a chance to find out what this silliness means. What’s he doing here? Have they kept him in deep-freeze a couple of thousand years? How long has he been awake? What does he know that we don’t? We’re in a bad spot; all the data I can dig up we need. You can help by keeping out. If you’re scared, send for the

Mother Thing.”

She pouted. “I’m not scared. All right-if that’s the way you want it.” “I do. Eat your dinner.”

Jo-Jo the dogface boy was not in sight; I gave his door a wide berth. If a ship can go anywhere in no time, could it skip a dimension and go anywhere to any time? How would the math work out? The soldier was still lounging at his door. He looked up. “Didn’t you hear me say to stick around?”

“I heard you,” I admitted, “but we’re not going to get anywhere if you take that attitude. I’m not one of your privates.” “Lucky for you!”

“Do we talk peacefully? Or do I leave?”

He looked me over. “Peace. But don’t get smart with me, barbarian.”

He called himself “Iunio.” He had served in Spain and Gaul, then transferred to the VIth Legion, the “Victrix”-which he felt that even a barbarian should know of. His legion’s garrison was Eboracum, north of Londinium in Britain, but he had been on advance duty as a brevet centurion (he pronounced it “centurio”)-his permanent rank was about like top sergeant. He was smaller than I am but I would not want to meet him in an alley. Nor at the palisades of a castra.

He had a low opinion of Britons and all barbarians including me (“nothing personal-some of my best friends are barbarians”), women, the British climate, high brass, and priests; he thought well of Caesar, Rome, the gods, and his own professional ability. The army wasn’t what it used to be and the slump came from treating auxiliaries like Roman citizens.

He had been guarding the building of a wall to hold back barbarians-a nasty lot who would sneak up and slit your throat and eat you-which no doubt had happened to him, since he was now in the nether regions.

I thought he was talking about Hadrian’s Wall, but it was three days’ march north of there, where the seas were closest together. The climate there was terrible and the natives were bloodthirsty beasts who dyed their bodies and didn’t appreciate civilization-you’d think the Eagles were trying to steal their dinky island. Provincial … like me. No offense meant.

Nevertheless he had bought a little barbarian to wife and had been looking forward to garrison duty at Eboracum-when this happened. Iunio shrugged. “Perhaps if I had been careful with lustrations and sacrifices, my luck wouldn’t have run out. But I figure that if a man does his duty and keeps himself and his weapons clean, the rest is the C.O.’s worry. Careful of that doorway; it’s witched.”

The longer he talked the easier it was to understand him. The “-us” endings turned to “-o” and his vocabulary was not that of De Bello Gallico -“horse” wasn’t “equus”; it was “caballo.” His idioms bothered me, plus the fact that his Latin was diluted by a dozen barbarian tongues. But you can blank out every third word in a newspaper and still catch the gist.

I learned a lot about the daily life and petty politics of the Victrix and nothing that I wanted to know. Iunio did not know how he had gotten where he was nor why-except that he was dead and awaiting disposition in a receiving barracks somewhere in the nether world-a theory which I was not yet prepared to accept.

He knew the year of his “death”-Year Eight of the Emperor and Eight Hundred and Ninety-Nine of Rome. I wrote out the dates in Roman numerals to make sure. But I did not remember when Rome was founded nor could I identify the “Caesar” even by his full name-there have been so many Caesars. But Hadrian’s Wall had been built and Britain was still occupied; that placed lunio close to the third century.

He wasn’t interested in the cave man across the way-it embodied to him the worst vice of a barbarian: cowardice. I didn’t argue but I would be timid, too, if I had saber-toothed tigers yowling at my door. (Did they have sabertooths then? Make it “cave bears.”)

Iunio went back and returned with hard dark bread, cheese, and a cup. He did not offer me any and I don’t think it was the barrier. He poured a little of his drink on the floor and started to chomp. It was a mud floor; the walls were rough stone and the ceiling was supported by wooden beams. It may have been a copy of dwellings during the occupation of Britain, but I’m no

expert.

I didn’t stay much longer. Not only did bread and cheese remind me that I was hungry, but I offended lunio. I don’t know what set him off, but he discussed me with cold thoroughness,   my eating habits, ancestry, appearance, conduct, and method of earning a living. Iunio was pleasant as long as you agreed with him, ignored insults, and deferred to him. Many older people demand this, even in buying a thirty-nine-cent can of talcum; you learn to give it without thinking-otherwise you get a reputation as a fresh kid and potential juvenile delinquent. The less respect an older person deserves the more certain he is to demand it from anyone younger. So I left, as lunio didn’t know anything helpful anyhow. As I went back I saw the cave   man peering out his cave. I said, “Take it easy, Jo-Jo,” and went on.

I bumped into another invisible barrier blocking our archway. I felt it, then said quietly, “I want to go in.” The barrier melted away and I walked in-then found that it was back in place.  My rubber soles made no noise and I didn’t call out because Peewee might be asleep. Her door was open and I peeped in. She was sitting tailor-fashion on that incredible Oriental

divan, rocking Madame Pompadour and crying.

I backed away, then returned whistling, making a racket, and calling to her. She popped out of her door, with smiling face and no trace of tears. “Hi, Kip! It took you long enough.” “That guy talks too much. What’s new?”

“Nothing. I ate and you didn’t come back, so I took a nap. You woke me. What did you find out?” “Let me order dinner and I’ll tell you while I eat.”

I was chasing the last bit of gravy when a bellhop robot came for us. It was like the other one except that it had in glowing gold on its front that triangle with three spirals. “Follow me,” it said in English.

I looked at Peewee. “Didn’t the Mother Thing say she was coming back?” “Why, I thought so.”

The machine repeated, “Follow me. Your presence is required.”

I laid my ears back. I have taken lots of orders, some of which I shouldn’t have, but I had never yet taken orders from a piece of machinery. “Go climb a rope!” I said. “You’ll have to drag me.”

This is not what to say to a robot. It did.

Peewee yelled, “Mother Thing! Where are you? Help us!”

Her birdsong came out of the machine. (“It’s all right, dears. The servant will lead you to me.”)

I quit struggling and started to walk. That refugee from an appliance dealer took us into another lift, then into a corridor whose walls whizzed past as soon as we entered. It nudged us through an enormous archway topped by the triangle and spirals and herded us into a pen near one wall. The pen was not apparent until we moved-more of that annoying solid air.

It was the biggest room I have ever been in, triangular, unbroken by post or pillar, with ceiling so high and walls so distant that I half expected local thunderstorms. An enormous room makes me feel like an ant; I was glad to be near a wall. The room was not empty-hundreds in it-but it looked empty because they were all near the walls; the giant floor was bare.

But there were three wormfaces out in the center-Wormface’s trial was in progress.

I don’t know if our own Wormface was there. I would not have known even if they had not been a long way off as the difference between two wormfaces is the difference between having your throat cut and being beheaded. But, as we learned, the presence or absence of the individual offender was the least important part of a trial. Wormface was being tried, present or not-alive or dead.

The Mother Thing was speaking. I could see her tiny figure, also far out on the floor but apart from the wormfaces. Her birdsong voice reached me faintly but I heard her words clearly-in English; from somewhere near us her translated words were piped to us. The feel of her was in the English translation just as it was in her bird tones.

She was telling what she knew of wormface conduct, as dispassionately as if describing something under a microscope, like a traffic officer testifying: “At 9:17 on the fifth, while on duty at-” etc. The facts. The Mother Thing was finishing her account of events on Pluto. She chopped it off at the point of explosion.

Another voice spoke, in English. It was flat with a nasal twang and reminded me of a Vermont grocer we had dealt with one summer when I was a kid. He was a man who never smiled nor frowned and what little he said was all in the same tone, whether it was, “She is a good woman,” or, “That man would cheat his own son,” or, “Eggs are fifty-nine cents,” cold as a cash register. This voice was that sort.

It said to the Mother Thing: “Have you finished?” “I have finished.”

“The other witnesses will be heard. Clifford Russell-“

I jumped, as if that grocer had caught me in the candy jar. The voice went on: “-listen carefully.” Another voice started.

My own-it was the account I had dictated, flat on my back on Vega Five.

But it wasn’t all of it; it was just that which concerned wormfaces. Adjectives and whole sentences had been cut-as if someone had taken scissors to a tape recording. The facts were there; what I thought about them was missing.

It started with ships landing in the pasture back of our house; it ended with that last wormface stumbling blindly down a hole. It wasn’t long, as so much had been left out-our hike across the Moon, for example. My description of Wormface was left in but had been trimmed so much that I could have been talking about Venus de Milo instead of the ugliest thing in creation.

My recorded voice ended and the Yankee-grocer voice said, “Were those your words?” “Huh? Yes.”

“Is the account correct?” “Yes, but-“

“Is it correct?” “Yes.”

“Is it complete?”

I wanted to say that it certainly was not-but I was beginning to understand the system. “Yes.” “Patricia Wynant Reisfeld-“

Peewee’s story started earlier and covered all those days when she had been in contact with wormfaces while I was not. But it was not much longer, for, while Peewee has a sharp eye and a sharper memory, she is loaded with opinions. Opinions were left out.

When Peewee had agreed that her evidence was correct and complete the Yankee voice stated, “All witnesses have been heard, all known facts have been integrated. The three individuals may speak for themselves.”

I think the wormfaces picked a spokesman, perhaps the Wormface, if he was alive and there. Their answer, as translated into English, did not have the guttural accent with which

Wormface spoke English; nevertheless it was a wormface speaking. That bone-chilling yet highly intelligent viciousness, as unmistakable as a punch in the teeth, was in every syllable.

Their spokesman was so far away that I was not upset by his looks and after the first stomach-twisting shock of that voice I was able to listen more or less judicially. He started by denying that this court had jurisdiction over his sort. He was responsible only to his mother-queen and she only to their queen-groups-that’s how the English came out.

That defense, he claimed, was sufficient. However, if the “Three Galaxies” confederation existed-which he had no reason to believe other than that he was now being detained unlawfully before this hiveful of creatures met as a kangaroo court-if it existed, it still had no jurisdiction over the Only People, first, because the organization did not extend to his part of space; second, because even if it were there, the Only People had never joined and therefore its rules (if it had rules) could not apply; and third, it was inconceivable that their queen-group would associate itself with this improbable “Three Galaxies” because people do not contract with animals.

This defense was also sufficient.

But disregarding for the sake of argument these complete and sufficient defenses, this trial was a mockery because no offense existed even under the so-called rules of the alleged “Three Galaxies.” They (the wormfaces) had been operating in their own part of space engaged in occupying a useful but empty planet, Earth. No possible crime could lie in colonizing land inhabited merely by animals. As for the agent of Three Galaxies, she had butted in; she had not been harmed; she had merely been kept from interfering and had been detained only for the purpose of returning her where she belonged.

He should have stopped. Any of these defenses might have stood up, especially the last one. I used to think of the human race as “lords of creation”-but things had happened to me since. I was not sure that this assemblage would think that humans had rights compared with wormfaces. Certainly the wormfaces were ahead of us in many ways. When we clear jungle to make farms, do we worry if baboons are there first?

But he discarded these defenses, explained that they were intellectual exercises to show how foolish the whole thing was under any rules, from any point of view. He would now make his defense.

It was an attack.

The viciousness in his voice rose to a crescendo of hatred that made every word slam like a blow. How dared they do this? They were mice voting to bell the cat! (I know-but that’s how it came out in translation.) They were animals to be eaten, or merely vermin to be exterminated. Their mercy would be rejected if offered, no negotiation was possible, their crimes would never be forgotten, the Only People would destroy them!

I looked around to see how the jury was taking it. This almost-empty hall had hundreds of creatures around the three sides and many were close to us. I had been too busy with the trial to do more than glance at them. Now I looked, for the wormface’s blast was so disturbing that I welcomed a distraction.

They were all sorts and I’m not sure that any two were alike. There was one twenty feet from me who was as horrible as Wormface and amazingly like him-except that this creature’s   grisly appearance did not inspire disgust. There were others almost human in appearance, although they were greatly in the minority. There was one really likely-looking chick as human as I am-except for iridescent skin and odd and skimpy notions of dress. She was so pretty that I would have sworn that the iridescence was just make-up-but I probably would have been wrong. I wondered in what language the diatribe was reaching her? Certainly not English.

Perhaps she felt my stare, for she looked around and unsmilingly examined me, as I might a chimpanzee in a cage. I guess the attraction wasn’t mutual.

There was every gradation from pseudo-wormface to the iridescent girl -not only the range between, but also way out in left field; some had their own private aquaria.

I could not tell how the invective affected them. The girl creature was taking it quietly, but what can you say about a walrus thing with octopus arms? If he twitches, is he angry? Or laughing? Or itches where the twitch is?

The Yankee-voiced spokesman let the wormface rave on.

Peewee was holding my hand. Now she grabbed my ear, tilted her face and whispered, “He talks nasty.” She sounded awed.

The wormface ended with a blast of hate that must have overtaxed the translator for instead of English we heard a wordless scream. The Yankee voice said flatly, “But do you have anything to say in your defense?”

The scream was repeated, then the wormface became coherent. “I have made my defense-that no defense is necessary.” The emotionless voice went on, to the Mother Thing. “Do you speak for them?”

She answered reluctantly, “My lord peers … I am forced to say … that I found them to be quite naughty.” She sounded grieved. “You find against them?”

“I do.”

“Then you may not be heard. Such is the Law.” ” ‘Three Galaxies, One Law.’ I may not speak.”

The flat voice went on, “Will any witness speak favorably?” There was silence.

That was my chance to be noble. We humans were their victims; we were in a position to speak up, point out that from their standpoint they hadn’t done anything wrong, and ask mercy-if they would promise to behave in the future.

Well, I didn’t. I’ve heard all the usual Sweetness and Light that kids get pushed at them-how they should always forgive, how there’s some good in the worst of us, etc. But when I see a black widow, I step on it; I don’t plead with it to be a good little spider and please stop poisoning people. Ablack widow spider can’t help it-but that’s the point.

The voice said to the wormfaces: “Is there any race anywhere which might speak for you? If so, it will be summoned.” The spokesman wormface spat at the idea. That another race might be character witnesses for them disgusted him. “So be it,” answered the Yankee voice. “Are the facts sufficient to permit a decision?”

Almost immediately the voice answered itself: “Yes.” “What is the decision?”

Again it answered itself: “Their planet shall be rotated.”

It didn’t sound like much-shucks, all planets rotate-and the flat voice held no expression. But the verdict scared me. The whole room seemed to shudder.

The Mother Thing turned and came toward us. It was a long way but she reached us quickly. Peewee flung herself on her; the solid air that penned us solidified still more until we three were in a private room, a silvery hemisphere.

Peewee was trembling and gasping and the Mother Thing comforted her. When Peewee had control of herself, I said nervously, “Mother Thing? What did he mean? ‘Their planet shall be rotated.’ “

She looked at me without letting go of Peewee and her great soft eyes were sternly sad. (“It means that their planet is tilted ninety degrees out of the space-time of your senses and mine.”)

Her voice sounded like a funeral dirge played softly on a flute. Yet the verdict did not seem tragic to me. I knew what she meant; her meaning was even clearer in Vegan than in English. If you rotate a plane figure about an axis in its plane-it disappears. It is no longer in a plane and Mr. A. Square of Flatland is permanently out of touch with it.

But it doesn’t cease to exist; it just is no longer where it was. It struck me that the wormfaces were getting off easy. I had halfway expected their planet to be blown up (and I didn’t doubt

that Three Galaxies could do so), or something equally drastic. As it was, the wormfaces were to be run out of town and would never find their way back-there are so many, many dimensions-but they wouldn’t be hurt; they were just being placed in Coventry.

But the Mother Thing sounded as if she had taken unwilling part in a hanging. So I asked her.

(“You do not understand, dear gentle Kip-they do not take their star with them.”) “Oh-” was all I could say.

Peewee turned white.

Stars are the source of life-planets are merely life’s containers. Chop off the star … and the planet gets colder … and colder … and colder-then still colder. How long until the very air freezes? How many hours or days to absolute zero? I shivered and got goose pimples. Worse than Pluto-

“Mother Thing? How long before they do this?” I had a queasy misgiving that I should have spoken, that even wormfaces did not deserve this. Blow them up, shoot them down-but don’t freeze them.

(“It is done,”) she sang in that same dirgelike way. “What?”

(“The agent charged with executing the decision waits for the word … the message goes out the instant we hear it. They were rotated out of our world even before I turned to join you. It is better so.”)

I gulped and heard an echo in my mind: “-‘twere well it were done quickly.”

But the Mother Thing was saying rapidly, (“Think no more on ‘t, for now you must be brave!”) “Huh? What, Mother Thing? What happens now?”

(“You’ll be summoned any moment-for your own trial.”)

I simply stared, I could not speak-I had thought it was all over. Peewee looked still thinner and whiter but did not cry. She wet her lips and said quietly, “You’ll come with us, Mother Thing?”

(“Oh, my children! I cannot. You must face this alone.”)

I found my voice. “But what are we being tried for? We haven’t hurt anybody. We haven’t done a thing.” (“Not you personally. Your race is on trial. Through you.”)

Peewee turned away from her and looked at me-and I felt a thrill of tragic pride that in our moment of extremity she had turned, not to the Mother Thing, but to me, another human being.

I knew that she was thinking of the same thing I was: a ship, a ship hanging close to Earth, only an instant away and yet perhaps uncounted trillion miles in some pocket of folded space, where no DEW line gives warning, where no radar can reach.

The Earth, green and gold and lovely, turning lazily in the warm light of the Sun- Aflat voice- No more Sun.

No stars.

The orphaned Moon would bobble once, then continue around the Sun, a gravestone to the hopes of men. The few at Lunar Base and Luna City and Tombaugh Station would last weeks or even months, the only human beings left alive. Then they would go-if not of suffocation, then of grief and loneliness.

Peewee said shrilly, “Kip, she’s not serious! Tell me she’s not!”

I said hoarsely, “Mother Thing-are the executioners already waiting?”

She did not answer. She said to Peewee, (“It is very serious, my daughter. But do not be afraid. I exacted a promise before I surrendered you. If things go against your race, you two will return with me and be suffered to live out your little lives in my home. So stand up and tell the truth … and do not be afraid.”)

The flat voice entered the closed space: “The human beings are summoned.”

Chapter 11

We walked out onto that vast floor. The farther we went the more I felt like a fly on a plate. Having Peewee with me was a help; nevertheless it was that nightmare where you find yourself not decently dressed in a public place. Peewee clutched my hand and held Madame Pompadour pressed tightly to her. I wished that I had suited-up in Oscar-I wouldn’t have felt quite so under a microscope with Oscar around me.

Just before we left, the Mother Thing placed her hand against my forehead and started to hold me with her eyes. I pushed her hand aside and looked away. “No,” I told her. “No treatments! I’m not going to-oh, I know you mean well but I won’t take an anesthetic. Thanks.”

She did not insist; she simply turned to Peewee. Peewee looked uncertain, then shook her head. “We’re ready,” she piped.

The farther out we got on that great bare floor the more I regretted that I had not let the Mother Thing do whatever it was that kept one from worrying. At least I should have insisted that Peewee take it.

Coming at us from the other walls were two other flies; as they got closer I recognized them: the Neanderthal and the Legionary. The cave man was being dragged invisibly; the Roman covered ground in a long, slow, easy lope. We all arrived at the center at the same time and were stopped about twenty feet apart, Peewee and I at one point of a triangle, the Roman and the cave man each at another.

I called out, “Hail, Iunio!”

“Silence, barbarian.” He looked around him, his eyes estimating the crowd at the walls.

He was no longer in casual dress. The untidy leggings were gone; strapped to his right shin was armor. Over the tunic he wore full cuirass and his head was brave with plumed helmet. All metal was burnished, all leather was clean.

He had approached with his shield on his back, route-march style. But even as we were stopped he unslung it and raised it on his left arm. He did not draw his sword as his right hand held his javelin at the ready carried easily while his wary eyes assessed the foe.

To his left the cave man hunkered himself small, as an animal crouches who has no place to hide.

“Iunio!” I called out. “Listen!” The sight of those two had me still more worried. The cave man I could not talk to but perhaps I could reason with the Roman. “Do you know why we are here?”

“I know,” he tossed over his shoulder. “Today the Gods try us in their arena. This is work for a soldier and a Roman citizen. You’re no help so keep out. No-watch behind me and shout. Caesar will reward you.”

I started to try to talk sense but was cut off by a giant voice from everywhere: “YOU ARE NOW BEING JUDGED!”

Peewee shivered and got closer. I twisted my left hand out of her clutch, substituted my right, and put my left arm around her shoulders. “Head up, partner,” I said softly. “Don’t let them scare you.”

“I’m not scared,” she whispered as she trembled. “Kip? You do the talking.” “Is that the way you want it?”

“Yes. You don’t get mad as fast as I do-and if I lost my temper … well, that’d be awful.” “Okay.”

We were interrupted by that flat, nasal twang. As before, it seemed close by. “This case derives from the one preceding it. The three temporal samples are from a small Lanador-type planet around a star in an out-center part of the Third Galaxy. It is a very primitive area having no civilized races. This race, as you see from the samples, is barbaric. It has been examined twice before and would not yet be up for routine examination had not new facts about it come out in the case which preceded it.”

The voice asked itself: “When was the last examination made?”

It answered itself: “Approximately one half-death of Thorium-230 ago.” It added, apparently to us only: “About eighty thousand of your years.”

Iunio jerked his head and looked around, as if trying to locate the voice. I concluded that he had heard the same figure in his corrupt Latin. Well, I was startled too-but I was numb to that sort of shock.

“Is it necessary again so soon?”

“It is. There has been a discontinuity. They are developing with unexpected speed.” The flat voice went on, speaking to us: “I am your judge. Many of the civilized beings you see around you are part of me. Others are spectators, some are students, and a few are here because they hope to catch me in a mistake.” The voice added, “This they have not managed to do in more than a million of your years.”

I blurted out, “You are more than a million years old?” I did not add that I didn’t believe it.

The voice answered, “I am older than that, but no part of me is that old. I am partly machine, which part can be repaired, replaced, recopied; I am partly alive, these parts die and are replaced. My living parts are more than a dozen dozens of dozens of civilized beings from throughout Three Galaxies, any dozen dozens of which may join with my non-living part to act. Today I am two hundred and nine qualified beings, who have at their instant disposal all knowledge accumulated in my non-living part and all its ability to analyze and integrate.”

I said sharply, “Are your decisions made unanimously?” I thought I saw a loophole-I never had much luck mixing up Dad and Mother but there had been times as a kid when I had managed to confuse issues by getting one to answer one way and the other to answer another.

The voice added evenly, “Decisions are always unanimous. It may help you to think of me as one person.” It addressed everyone: “Standard sampling has been followed. The contemporary sample is the double one; the intermediate sample for curve check is the clothed single sample and was taken by standard random at a spacing of approximately one half-death of Radium-226-” The voice supplemented: “-call it sixteen hundred of your years. The remote curve-check sample, by standard procedure, was taken at two dozen times that distance.”

The voice asked itself: “Why is curve-check spacing so short? Why not at least a dozen times that?” “Because this organism’s generations are very short. It mutates rapidly.”

The explanation appeared to satisfy for it went on, “The youngest sample will witness first.”

I thought he meant Peewee and so did she; she cringed. But the voice barked and the cave man jerked. He did not answer; he simply crouched more deeply into himself. The voice barked again.

It then said to itself, “I observe something.” “Speak.”

“This creature is not ancestor to those others.”

The voice of the machine almost seemed to betray emotion, as if my dour grocer had found salt in his sugar bin. “The sample was properly taken.” “Nevertheless,” it answered, “it is not a correct sample. You must review all pertinent data.”

For a long five seconds was silence. Then the voice spoke: “This poor creature is not ancestor to these others; he is cousin only. He has no future of his own. Let him be returned at once to the space-time whence he came.”

The Neanderthal was dragged rapidly away. I watched him out of sight with a feeling of loss. I had been afraid of him at first. Then I had despised him and was ashamed of him. He was  a coward, be was filthy, he stank. Adog was more civilized. But in the past five minutes I had decided that I had better love him, see his good points-for, unsavory as he was, he was human. Maybe he wasn’t my remote grandfather, but I was in no mood to disown even my sorriest relation.

The voice argued with itself, deciding whether the trial could proceed. Finally it stated: “Examination will continue. If enough facts are not developed, another remote sample of correct lineage will be summoned. Iunio.”

The Roman raised his javelin higher. “Who calls Iunio?” “Stand forth and bear witness.”

Just as I feared, lunio told the voice where to go and what to do. There was no protecting Peewee from his language; it echoed back in English-not that it mattered now whether Peewee was protected from “unladylike” influences.

The flat voice went on imperturbably: “Is this your voice? Is this your witnessing?” Immediately another voice started up which I recognized as that of the Roman, answering questions, giving accounts of battle, speaking of treatment of prisoners. This we got only in English but the translation held the arrogant timbre of Iunio’s voice.

Iunio shouted “Witchcraft!” and made horns at them.

The recording cut off. “The voice matches,” the machine said dryly. “The recording will be integrated.”

But it continued to peck at lunio, asking him details about who he was, why he was in Britain, what he had done there, and why it was necessary to serve Caesar. lunio gave short answers, then blew his top and gave none. He let out a rebel yell that bounced around that mammoth room, drew back and let fly his javelin.

It fell short. But I think he broke the Olympic record. I found myself cheering.

Iunio drew his sword while the javelin was still rising. He flung it up in a gladiatorial challenge, shouting, “Hail, Caesar!” and dropped into guard. He reviled them. He told them what he thought of vermin who were not citizens, not even barbarians!

I said to myself, “Oh, oh! There goes the game. Human race, you’ve had it.”

Iunio went on and on, calling on his gods to help him, each way worse than the last, threatening them with Caesar’s vengeance in gruesome detail. I hoped that, even though it was translated, Peewee would not understand much of it. But she probably did; she understood entirely too much.

I began to grow proud of him. That wormface, in diatribe, was evil; Iunio was not. Under bad grammar, worse language, and rough manner, that tough old sergeant had courage, human dignity, and a basic gallantry. He might be an old scoundrel-but he was my kind of scoundrel.

He finished by demanding that they come at him, one at a time-or let them form a turtle and he would take them all on at once. “I’ll make a funeral pyre of you! I’ll temper my blade in your guts! I, who am about to die, will show you a Roman’s grave-piled high with Caesar’s enemies!”

He had to catch his breath. I cheered again and Peewee joined in. He looked over his shoulder and grinned. “Slit their throats as I bring them down, boy! There’s work to do!” The cold voice said: “Let him now be returned to the space-time whence he came.”

Iunio looked startled as invisible hands pulled him along. He called on Mars and Jove and laid about him. The sword clattered to the floor-picked itself up and returned itself to his scabbard. lunio was moving rapidly away; I cupped my hands and yelled, “Good-bye, lunio!”

“Farewell, boy! They’re cowards!” He shook himself. “Nothing but filthy witchcraft!” Then he was gone. “Clifford Russell-“

“Huh? I’m here.” Peewee squeezed my hand. “Is this your voice?”

I said, “Wait a minute-“ “Yes? Speak.”

I took a breath. Peewee pushed closer and whispered, “Make it good, Kip. They mean it.”

“I’ll try, kid,” I whispered, then went on, “What is this? I was told you intend to judge the human race.” “That is correct.”

“But you can’t. You haven’t enough to go on. No better than witchcraft, just as lunio said. You brought in a cave man-then decided he was a mistake. That isn’t your only mistake. You had lunio here. Whatever he was-and I’m not ashamed of him; I’m proud of him-he’s got nothing to do with now. He’s been dead two thousand years, pretty near-if you’ve sent him back, I mean-and all that he was is dead with him. Good or bad, he’s not what the human race is now.”

“I know that. You two are the test sample of your race now.”

“Yes-but you can’t judge from us. Peewee and I are about as far from average as any specimens can be. We don’t claim to be angels, either one of us. If you condemn our race on what we have done, you do a great injustice. Judge us-or judge me, at least-“

“Me, too!”

“-on whatever I’ve done. But don’t hold my people responsible. That’s not scientific. That’s not valid mathematics.” “It is valid.”

“It is not. Human beings aren’t molecules; they’re all different.” I decided not to argue about jurisdiction; the wormfaces had ruined that approach. “Agreed, human beings are not molecules. But they are not individuals, either.”

“Yes, they are!”

“They are not independent individuals; they are parts of a single organism. Each cell in your body contains your whole pattern. From three samples of the organism you call the human race I can predict the future potentialities and limits of that race.”

“We have no limits! There’s no telling what our future will be.”

“It may be that you have no limits,” the voice agreed. “That is to be determined. But, if true, it is not a point in your favor. For we have limits.” “Huh?”

“You have misunderstood the purpose of this examination. You speak of ‘justice.’ I know what you think you mean. But no two races have ever agreed on the meaning of that term, no matter how they say it. It is not a concept I deal with here. This is not a court of justice.”

“Then what is it?”

“You would call it a ‘Security Council.’ Or you might call it a committee of vigilantes. It does not matter what you call it; my sole purpose is to examine your race and see if you threaten our survival. If you do, I will now dispose of you. The only certain way to avert a grave danger is to remove it while it is small. Things that I have learned about you suggest a possibility that you may someday threaten the security of Three Galaxies. I will now determine the facts.”

“But you said that you have to have at least three samples. The cave man was no good.”

“We have three samples, you two and the Roman. But the facts could be determined from one sample. The use of three is a custom from earlier times, a cautious habit of checking and rechecking. I cannot dispense ‘justice’; I can make sure not to produce error.”

I was about to say that he was wrong, even if he was a million years old. But the voice went on, “I continue the examination. Clifford Russell, is this your voice?”

My voice sounded then-and again it was my own dictated account, but this time everything was left in-purple adjectives, personal opinions, comments about other matters, every word and stutter.

I listened to enough of it, held up my hand. “All right, all right, I said it.” The recording stopped. “Do you now confirm it?”

“Eh? Yes.”

“Do you wish to add, subtract, or change?”

I thought hard. Aside from a few wisecracks that I had tucked in later it was a straight-forward account. “No. I stand on it.” “And is this also your voice?”

This one fooled me. It was that endless recording I had made for Prof Joe about-well, everything on Earth … history, customs, peoples, the works. Suddenly I knew why Prof Joe had worn the same badge the Mother Thing wore. What did they call that?-“Planting a stool pigeon.” Good Old Prof Joe, the no-good, had been a stoolie.

I felt sick.

“Let me hear more of it.”

They accommodated me. I didn’t really listen; I was trying to remember, not what I was hearing, but what else I might have said-what I had admitted that could be used against the human race. The Crusades? Slavery? The gas chambers at Dachau? How much had I said?

The recording droned on. Why, that thing had taken weeks to record; we could stand here until our feet went flat. “It’s my voice.”

“Do you stand on this, too? Or do you wish to correct, revise, or extend?” I said cautiously, “Can I do the whole thing over?”

“If you so choose.”

I started to say that I would, that they should wipe the tape and start over. But would they? Or would they keep both and compare them? I had no compunction about lying-“tell the truth and shame the devil” is no virtue when your family and friends and your whole race are at stake.

But could they tell if I lied?

“The Mother Thing said to tell the truth and not to be afraid.” “But she’s not on our side!”

“Oh, yes, she is.”

I had to answer. I was so confused that I couldn’t think. I had tried to tell the truth to Prof Joe … oh, maybe I had shaded things, not included every horrid thing that makes a headline. But it was essentially true.

Could I do better under pressure? Would they let me start fresh and accept any propaganda I cooked up? Or would the fact that I changed stories be used to condemn our race?  “I stand on it!”

“Let it be integrated. Patricia Wynant Reisfeld-“

Peewee took only moments to identify and allow to be integrated her recordings; she simply followed my example.

The machine voice said: “The facts have been integrated. By their own testimony, these are a savage and brutal people, given to all manner of atrocities. They eat each other, they starve each other, they kill each other. They have no art and only the most primitive of science, yet such is their violent nature that even with so little knowledge they are now energetically using it to exterminate each other, tribe against tribe. Their driving will is such that they may succeed. But if by some unlucky chance they fail, they will inevitably, in time, reach other stars. It is this possibility which must be calculated: how soon they will reach us, if they live, and what their potentialities will be then.”

The voice continued to us: “This is the indictment against you-your own savagery, combined with superior intelligence. What have you to say in your defense?”  I took a breath and tried to steady down. I knew that we had lost-yet I had to try.

I remembered how the Mother Thing had spoken. “My lord peers-“

“Correction. We are not your ‘lords,’ nor has it been established that you are our equals. If you wish to address someone, you may call me the ‘Moderator.’”

“Yes, Mr. Moderator-” I tried to remember what Socrates had said to his judges. He knew ahead of time that he was condemned just as we knew-but somehow, though he had been forced to drink hemlock, he had won and they had lost.

No! I couldn’t use his Apologia-all he had lost was his own life. This was everybody. “-you say we have no art. Have you seen the Parthenon?”

“Blown up in one of your wars.”

“Better see it before you rotate us-or you’ll be missing something. Have you read our poetry? ‘Our revels now are ended: these our actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits, and are   melted into air, into thin air: And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself … itself-yea-all which it

… inherit-shall dissolve-“

I broke down. I heard Peewee sobbing beside me. I don’t know why I picked that one-but they say the subconscious mind never does things “accidentally.” I guess it had to be that one. “As it well may,” commented the merciless voice.

“I don’t think it’s any of your business what we do-as long as we leave you alone-” My stammer was back and I was almost sobbing. “We have made it our business.”

“We aren’t under your government and-“

“Correction. Three Galaxies is not a government; conditions for government cannot obtain in so vast a space, such varied cultures. We have simply formed police districts for mutual protection.”

“But-even so, we haven’t troubled your cops. We were in our own backyards-I was in my own backyard!-when these wormface things came along and started troubling us. We haven’t hurt you.”

I stopped, wondering where to turn. I couldn’t guarantee good behavior, not for the whole human race-the machine knew it and I knew it.

“Inquiry.” It was talking to itself again. “These creatures appear to be identical with the Old Race, allowing for mutation. What part of the Third Galaxy are they from?”  It answered itself, naming co-ordinates that meant nothing to me. “But they are not of the Old Race; they are ephemerals. That is the danger; they change too fast.” “Didn’t the Old Race lose a ship out that way a few half-deaths of Thorium-230 ago? Could that account for the fact that the youngest sample failed to match?”

It answered firmly, “It is immaterial whether or not they may be descended from the Old Race. An examination is in progress; a decision must be made.” “The decision must be sure.”

“It will be.” The bodyless voice went on, to us: “Have either of you anything to add in your defense?”

I had been thinking of what had been said about the miserable state of our science. I wanted to point out that we had gone from muscle power to atomic power in only two centuries-but I was afraid that fact would be used against us. “Peewee, can you think of anything?”

She suddenly stepped forward and shrilled to the air, “Doesn’t it count that Kip saved the Mother Thing?” “No,” the cold voice answered. “It is irrelevant.”

“Well, it ought to count!” She was crying again. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves! Bullies! Cowards! Oh, you’re worse than wormfaces!”

I pulled her back. She hid her head against my shoulder and shook. Then she whispered, “I’m sorry, Kip. I didn’t mean to. I guess I’ve ruined it.” “It was ruined anyhow, honey.”

“Have you anything more to say?” old no-face went on relentlessly.

I looked around at the hall. -the cloud-capped towers … the great globe itself- “Just this!” I said savagely. “It’s not a defense, you don’t want a defense. All right, take away our star- You will if you can and I guess you can. Go ahead! We’ll make a star! Then, someday, we’ll come back and hunt you down-all of you!”

“That’s telling ‘em. Kip! That’s telling them!”

Nobody bawled me out. I suddenly felt like a kid who has made a horrible mistake at a party and doesn’t know how to cover it up. But I meant it. Oh, I didn’t think we could do it. Not yet. But we’d try. “Die trying” is the proudest human thing.

“It is possible that you will,” that infuriating voice went on. “Are you through?” “I’m through.” We all were through … every one of us.

“Does anyone speak for them? Humans, will any race speak for you?” We didn’t know any other races. Dogs- Maybe dogs would.

“I speak for them!”

Peewee raised her head with a jerk. “Mother Thing!”

Suddenly she was in front of us. Peewee tried to run to her, bounced off that invisible barrier. I grabbed her. “Easy, hon. She isn’t there-it’s some sort of television.”

“My lord peers … you have the advantage of many minds and much knowledge-” It was odd to see her singing, hear her in English; the translation still held that singing quality.

“-but I know them. It is true that they are violent-especially the smaller one-but they are not more violent than is appropriate to their ages. Can we expect mature restraint in a race whose members all must die in early childhood? And are not we ourselves violent? Have we not this day killed our billions? Can any race survive without a willingness to fight? It is true that these creatures are often more violent than is necessary or wise. But, my peers, they all are so very young. Give them time to learn.”

“That is exactly what there is to fear, that they may learn. Your race is overly sentimental; it distorts your judgment.”

“Not true! We are compassionate, we are not foolish. I myself have been the proximate cause of how many, many adverse decisions? You know; it is in your records-I prefer not to remember. And I shall be again. When a branch is diseased beyond healing, it must be pruned. We are not sentimental; we are the best watchers you have ever found, for we do it without anger. Toward evil we have no mercy. But the mistakes of a child we treat with loving forbearance.”

“Have you finished?”

“I say that this branch need not be pruned! I have finished.”

The Mother Thing’s image vanished. The voice went on, “Does any other race speak for them?”

“I do.” Where she had been now stood a large green monkey. He stared at us and shook his head, then suddenly did a somersault and finished looking at us between his legs. “I’m no friend of theirs but I am a lover of ‘justice’-in which I differ from my colleagues in this Council.” He twirled rapidly several times. “As our sister has said, this race is young. The infants of   my own noble race bite and scratch each other-some even die from it. Even I behaved so, at one time.” He jumped into the air, landed on his hands, did a flip from that position. “Yet does anyone here deny that I am civilized?” He stopped, looked at us thoughtfully while scratching. “These are brutal savages and I don’t see how anyone could ever like them-but I say: give them their chance!”

His image disappeared.

The voice said, “Have you anything to add before a decision is reached?”

I started to say: No, get it over with-when Peewee grabbed my ear and whispered. I listened, nodded, and spoke. “Mr. Moderator-if the verdict is against us-can you hold off your hangmen long enough to let us go home? We know that you can send us home in only a few minutes.”

The voice did not answer quickly. “Why do you wish this? As I have explained, you are not personally on trial. It has been arranged to let you live.” “We know. We’d rather be home, that’s all-with our people.”

Again a tiny hesitation. “It shall be done.”

“Are the facts sufficient to permit a decision?” “Yes.”

“What is the decision?”

“This race will be re-examined in a dozen half-deaths of radium. Meanwhile there is danger to it from itself. Against this mischance it will be given assistance. During the probationary period it will be watched closely by Guardian Mother-” the machine trilled the true Vegan name of the Mother Thing “-the cop on that beat, who will report at once any ominous change. In the meantime we wish this race good progress in its long journey upward.

“Let them now be returned forthwith to the space-time whence they came.”

Chapter 12

I didn’t think it was safe to make our atmosphere descent in New Jersey without filing a flight plan. Princeton is near important targets; we might be homed-on by everything up to A- missiles. The Mother Thing got that indulgent chuckle in her song: (“I fancy we can avoid that.”)

She did. She put us down in a side street, sang good-bye and was gone. It’s not illegal to be out at night in space suits, even carrying a rag dolly. But it’s unusual-cops hauled us in. They phoned Peewee’s father and in twenty minutes we were in his study, drinking cocoa and talking and eating shredded wheat.

Peewee’s mother almost had a fit. While we told our story she kept gasping, “I can’t believe it!” until Professor Reisfeld said, “Stop it, Janice. Or go to bed.” I don’t blame her. Her   daughter disappears on the Moon and is given up for dead-then miraculously reappears on Earth. But Professor Reisfeld believed us. The way the Mother Thing had “understanding” he had “acceptance.” When a fact came along, he junked theories that failed to match.

He examined Peewee’s suit, had her switch on the helmet, shined a light to turn it opaque, all with a little smile. Then he reached for the phone. “Dario must see this.” “At midnight. Curt?”

“Please, Janice. Armageddon won’t wait for office hours.” “Professor Reisfeld?”

“Yes, Kip?”

“Uh, you may want to see other things first.” “That’s possible.”

I took things from Oscar’s pockets-two beacons, one for each of us, some metal “paper” covered with equations, two “happy things,” and two silvery spheres. We had stopped on Vega Five, spending most of the time under what I suppose was hypnosis while Prof Joe and another professor thing pumped us for what we knew of human mathematics. They hadn’t been learning math from us-oh, no! They wanted the language we use in mathematics, from radicals and vectors to those weird symbols in higher physics, so that they could teach us; the results were on the metal paper. First I showed Professor Reisfeld the beacons. “The Mother Thing’s beat now includes us. She says to use these if we need her. She’ll usually be close by-a thousand light-years at most. But even if she is far away, she’ll come.”

“Oh.” He looked at mine. It was neater and smaller than the one she haywired on Pluto. “Do we dare take it apart?” “Well, it’s got a lot of power tucked in it. It might explode.”

“Yes, it might.” He handed it back, looking wistful.

A“happy thing” can’t be explained. They look like those little abstract sculptures you feel as well as look at. Mine was like obsidian but warm and not hard; Peewee’s was more like jade. The surprise comes when you touch one to your head. I had Professor Reisfeld do so and he looked awed-the Mother Thing is all around you and you feel warm and safe and understood.

He said, “She loves you. The message wasn’t for me. Excuse me.” “Oh, she loves you, too.”

“Eh?”

“She loves everything small and young and fuzzy and helpless. That’s why she’s a ‘mother thing.’ “ I didn’t realize how it sounded. But he didn’t mind. “You say she is a police officer?”

“Well, she’s more of a juvenile welfare officer-this is a slum neighborhood we’re in, backward and pretty tough. Sometimes she has to do things she doesn’t like. But she’s a good cop and somebody has to do nasty jobs. She doesn’t shirk them.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t.” “Would you like to try it again?” “Do you mind?”

“Oh, no, it doesn’t wear out.”

He did and got that warm happy look. He glanced at Peewee, asleep with her face in her cereal. “I need not have worried about my daughter, between the Mother Thing-and you.” “It was a team,” I explained. “We couldn’t have made it without Peewee. The kid’s got guts.”

“Too much, sometimes.”

“Other times you need that extra. These spheres are recorders. Do you have a tape recorder, Professor?”

“Certainly, sir.” We set it up and let a sphere talk to it. I wanted a tape because the spheres are one-shot-the molecules go random again. Then I showed him the metal paper. I had tried to read it, got maybe two inches into it, then just recognized a sign here and there. Professor Reisfeld got halfway down the first page, stopped. “I had better make those phone calls.”

At dawn a sliver of old Moon came up and I tried to judge where Tombaugh Station was. Peewee was asleep on her Daddy’s couch, wrapped in his bathrobe and clutching Madame Pompadour. He had tried to carry her to bed but she had wakened and become very, very difficult, so he put her down. Professor Reisfeld chewed an empty pipe and listened to my sphere whispering softly to his recorder. Occasionally he darted a question at me and I’d snap out of it.

Professor Giomi and Dr. Bruck were at the other end of the study, filling a blackboard, erasing and filling it again, while they argued over that metal paper. Geniuses are common at the Institute for Advanced Study but these two wouldn’t be noticed anywhere; Bruck looked like a truckdriver and Giomi like an excited Iunio. They both had that Okay-I-get-you that Professor Reisfeld had. They were excited but Dr. Bruck showed it only by a tic in his face-which Peewee’s Daddy told me was a guarantee of nervous breakdowns-not for Bruck, for other physicists.

Two mornings later we were still there. Professor Reisfeld had shaved; the others hadn’t. I napped and once I took a shower. Peewee’s Daddy listened to recordings-he was now replaying Peewee’s tape. Now and then Bruck and Giomi called him over, Giomi almost hysterical and Bruck stolid. Professor Reisfeld always asked a question or two, nodded and came back to his chair. I don’t think he could work that math-but he could soak up results and fit them with other pieces.

I wanted to go home once they were through with me but Professor Reisfeld said please stay; the Secretary General of the Federated Free Nations was coming.

I stayed. I didn’t call home because what was the use in upsetting them? I would rather have gone to New York City to meet the Secretary General, but Professor Reisfeld had invited him here-I began to realize that anybody really important would come if Professor Reisfeld asked him.

Mr. van Duivendijk was slender and tall. He shook hands and said, “I understand that you are Dr. Samuel C. Russell’s son.” “You know my father, sir?”

“I met him years ago, at the Hague.”

Dr. Bruck turned-he had barely nodded at the Secretary General. “You’re Sam Russell’s boy?” “Uh, you know him, too?”

“Of course. On the Statistical Interpretation of Imperfect Data. Brilliant.” He turned back and got more chalk on his sleeve. I hadn’t known that Dad had written such a thing, nor suspected that he knew the top man in the Federation. Sometimes I think Dad is eccentric.

Mr. van D. waited until the double domes came up for air, then said, “You have something, gentlemen?” “Yeah,” said Bruck.

“Superb!” agreed Giomi. “Such as?”

“Well-” Dr. Bruck pointed at a line of chalk. “That says you can damp out a nuclear reaction at a distance.” “What distance?”

“How about ten thousand miles? Or must you do it from the Moon?” “Oh, ten thousand miles is sufficient, I imagine.”

“You could do it from the Moon,” Giomi interrupted, “if you had enough power. Magnificent!” “It is,” agreed van Duivendijk. “Anything else?”

“What do you want?” demanded Bruck. “Egg in your suds?” “Well?”

“See that seventeenth line? It may mean anti-gravity, I ain’t promising. Or, if you rotate ninety degrees, this unstable Latin thinks it’s time travel.” “It is!”

“If he’s right, the power needed is a fair-sized star-so forget it.” Bruck stared at hen’s tracks. “Anew approach to matter conversion-possibly. How about a power pack for your vest pocket that turns out more ergs than the Brisbane reactors?”

“This can be done?”

“Ask your grandson. It won’t be soon.” Bruck scowled. “Dr. Bruck, why are you unhappy?” asked Mr. van D.

Bruck scowled harder. “Are you goin’ to make this Top Secret’? I don’t like classifying mathematics. It’s shameful.”

I batted my ears. I had explained to the Mother Thing about “classified” and I think I shocked her. I said that the FFN had to have secrets for survival, just like Three Galaxies. She couldn’t see it. Finally she had said that it wouldn’t make any difference in the long run. But I had worried because while I don’t like science being “secret,” I don’t want to be reckless, either.

Mr. van D. answered, “I don’t like secrecy. But I have to put up with it.” “I knew you would say that!”

“Please. Is this a U.S. government project?” “Eh? Of course not.”

“Nor a Federation one. Very well, you’ve shown me some equations. I can’t tell you not to publish them. They’re yours.” Bruck shook his head. “Not ours.” He pointed at me. “His.”

“I see.” The Secretary General looked at me. “I am a lawyer, young man. If you wish to publish, I see no way to stop you.” “Me? It’s not mine-I was just-well, a messenger.”

“You seem to have the only claim. Do you wish this published? Perhaps with all your names?” I got the impression that he wanted it published. “Well, sure. But the third name shouldn’t be mine; it should be-” I hesitated. You can’t put a birdsong down as author. “-uh, make it ‘Dr. M. Thing.’” “Who is he?”

“She’s a Vegan. But we could pretend it’s a Chinese name.”

The Secretary General stayed on, asking questions, listening to tapes. Then he made a phone call-to the Moon. I knew it could be done, I never expected to see it. “Van Duivendijk here … yes, the Secretary General. Get the Commanding General … Jim? … This connection is terrible … Jim, you sometimes order practice maneuvers … My call is unofficial but you might check a valley-” He turned to me; I answered quickly. “-a valley just past the mountains east of Tombaugh Station. I haven’t consulted the Security Council; this is between friends. But if   you go into that valley I very strongly suggest that it be done in force, with all weapons. It may have snakes in it. The snakes will be camouflaged. Call it a hunch. Yes, the kids are fine and so is Beatrix. I’ll phone Mary and tell her I talked with you.”

The Secretary General wanted my address. I couldn’t say when I would be home because I didn’t know how I would get there-I meant to hitchhike but didn’t say so. Mr. van D.’s eyebrows went up. “I think we owe you a ride home. Eh, Professor?”

“That would not be overdoing it.”

“Russell, I heard on your tape that you plan to study engineering-with a view to space.” “Yes, sir. I mean, ‘Yes, Mr. Secretary.’ “

“Have you considered studying law? Many young engineers want to space-not many lawyers. But the Law goes everywhere. Aman skilled in space law and meta-law would be in a strong position.”

“Why not both?” suggested Peewee’s Daddy. “I deplore this modern overspecialization.” “That’s an idea,” agreed Mr. van Duivendijk. “He could then write his own terms.”

I was about to say I should stick to electronics-when suddenly I knew what I wanted to do. “Uh, I don’t think I could handle both.” “Nonsense!” Professor Reisfeld said severely.

“Yes, sir. But I want to make space suits that work better. I’ve got some ideas.”

“Mmm, that’s mechanical engineering. And many other things, I imagine. But you’ll need an M.E. degree.” Professor Reisfeld frowned. “As I recall your tape, you passed College Boards but hadn’t been accepted by a good school.” He drummed his desk. “Isn’t that silly, Mr. Secretary? The lad goes to the Magellanic Clouds but can’t go to the school he wants.”

“Well, Professor? You pull while I push?”

“Yes. But wait.” Professor Reisfeld picked up his phone. “Susie, get me the President of M.I.T. I know it’s a holiday; I don’t care if he’s in Bombay or in bed; get him. Good girl.” He put down the phone. “She’s been with the Institute five years and on the University switchboard before that. She’ll get him.”

I felt embarrassed and excited. M.I.T.-anybody would jump at the chance. But tuition alone would stun you. I tried to explain that I didn’t have the money. “I’ll work the rest of this school and

next summer-I’ll save it.”

The phone rang. “Reisfeld here. Hi, Oppie. At the class reunion you made me promise to tell you if Bruck’s tic started bothering him. Hold onto your chair; I timed it at twenty-one to the minute. That’s a record… . Slow down; you won’t send anybody, unless I get my pound of flesh. If you start your lecture on academic freedom and ‘the right to know,’ I’ll hang up and call Berkeley. I can do business there-and I know I can here, over on the campus… . Not much, just a four-year scholarship, tuition and fees… . Don’t scream at me; use your discretionary fund-or make it a wash deal in bookkeeping. You’re over twenty-one; you can do arithmetic… . Nope, no hints. Buy a pig in a poke or your radiation lab won’t be in on it. Did I say ‘radiation lab’? I meant the entire physical science department. You can flee to South America, don’t let me sway you… . What? I’m an embezzler, too. Hold it.” Professor Reisfeld said to me, “You applied for M.I.T.?”

“Yes, sir, but-“

“He’s in your application files, ‘Clifford C. Russell.’ Send the letter to his home and have the head of your team fetch my copy… . Oh, a broad team, headed by a mathematical physicist- Farley, probably; he’s got imagination. This is the biggest thing since the apple konked Sir Isaac… . Sure, I’m a blackmailer, and you are a chair warmer and a luncheon speaker. When are you returning to the academic life? … Best to Beulah. ‘Bye.”

He hung up. “That’s settled. Kip, the one thing that confuses me is why those worm-faced monsters wanted me.”

I didn’t know how to say it. He had told me only the day before that he had been correlating odd data-unidentified sightings, unexpected opposition to space travel, many things that did not fit. Such a man is likely to get answers-and be listened to. If he had a weakness, it was modesty-which he hadn’t passed on to Peewee. If I told him that invaders from outer space had grown nervous over his intellectual curiosity, he would have pooh-poohed it. So I said, “They never told us, sir. But they thought you were important enough to grab.”

Mr. van Duivendijk stood up. “Curt, I won’t waste time listening to nonsense. Russell, I’m glad your schooling is arranged. If you need me, call me.” When he was gone, I tried to thank Professor Reisfeld. “I meant to pay my way, sir. I would have earned the money before school opens again.”

“In less than three weeks? Come now. Kip.” “I mean the rest of this year and-“

“Waste a year? No.”

“But I already-” I looked past his head at green leaves in their garden. “Professor … what date is it?” “Why, Labor Day, of course.”

(“-forthwith to the space-time whence they came.”)

Professor Reisfeld flipped water in my face. “Feeling better?” “I-I guess so. We were gone for weeks.”

“Kip, you’ve been through too much to let this shake you. You can talk it over with the stratosphere twins-” He gestured at Giomi and Bruck. “-but you won’t understand it. At least I didn’t. Why not assume that a hundred and sixty-seven thousand light-years leaves room for Tennessee windage amounting to only a hair’s breadth of a fraction of one per cent? Especially when the method doesn’t properly use space-time at all?”

When I left, Mrs. Reisfeld kissed me and Peewee blubbered and had Madame Pompadour say good-bye to Oscar, who was in the back seat because the Professor was driving me to the airport.

On the way he remarked, “Peewee is fond of you.” “Uh, I hope so.”

“And you? Or am I impertinent?”

“Am I fond of Peewee? I certainly am! She saved my life four or five times.” Peewee could drive you nuts. But she was gallant and loyal and smart-and had guts. “You won a life-saving medal or two yourself.”

I thought about it. “Seems to me I fumbled everything I tried. But I had help and an awful lot of luck.” I shivered at how luck alone had kept me out of the soup-real soup.  ” ‘Luck’ is a question-begging word,” he answered. “You spoke of the ‘amazing luck’ that you were listening when my daughter called for help. That wasn’t luck.”

“Huh? I mean, ‘Sir’?”

“Why were you on that frequency? Because you were wearing a space suit. Why were you wearing it? Because you were determined to space. When a space ship called, you answered.    If that is luck, then it is luck every time a batter hits a ball. Kip, ‘good luck’ follows careful preparation; ‘bad luck’ comes from sloppiness. You convinced a court older than Man himself that you and your kind were worth saving. Was that mere chance?”

“Uh … fact is, I got mad and almost ruined things. I was tired of being shoved around.”

“The best things in history are accomplished by people who get ‘tired of being shoved around.’ ” He frowned. “I’m glad you like Peewee. She is about twenty years old intellectually and six emotionally; she usually antagonizes people. So I’m glad she has gained a friend who is smarter than she is.”

My jaw dropped. “But, Professor, Peewee is much smarter than I am. She runs me ragged.”

He glanced at me. “She’s run me ragged for years-and I’m not stupid. Don’t downgrade yourself, Kip.” “It’s the truth.”

“So? The greatest mathematical psychologist of our time, a man who always wrote his own ticket even to retiring when it suited him-very difficult, when a man is in demand-this man married his star pupil. I doubt if their offspring is less bright than my own child.”

I had to untangle this to realize that he meant me. Then I didn’t know what to Say. How many kids really know their parents? Apparently I didn’t.

He went on, “Peewee is a handful, even for me. Here’s the airport. When you return for school, please plan on visiting us. Thanksgiving, too, if you will-no doubt you’ll go home Christmas.”

“Uh, thank you, sir. I’ll be back.” “Good.”

“Uh, about Peewee-if she gets too difficult, well, you’ve got the beacon. The Mother Thing can handle her.” “Mmm, that’s a thought.”

“Peewee tries to get around her but she never does. Oh-I almost forgot. Whom may I tell? Not about Peewee. About the whole thing.” “Isn’t that obvious?”

“Sir?”

“Tell anybody anything. You won’t very often. Almost no one will believe you.”

I rode home in a courier jet-those things go fast. Professor Reisfeld had insisted on lending me ten dollars when he found out that I had only a dollar sixty-seven, so I got a haircut at the bus station and bought two tickets to Centerville to keep Oscar out of the luggage compartment; he might have been damaged. The best thing about that scholarship was that now I

needn’t ever sell him-not that I would.

Centerville looked mighty good, from elms overhead to the chuckholes under foot. The driver stopped near our house because of Oscar; he’s clumsy to carry. I went to the barn and racked Oscar, told him I’d see him later, and went in the back door.

Mother wasn’t around. Dad was in his study. He looked up from reading. “Hi, Kip.” “Hi, Dad.”

“Nice trip?”

“Uh, I didn’t go to the lake.”

“I know. Dr. Reisfeld phoned-he briefed me thoroughly.”

“Oh. It was a nice trip-on the whole.” I saw that he was holding a volume of the Britannica, open to “Magellanic Clouds.”

He followed my glance. “I’ve never seen them,” he said regretfully. “I had a chance once, but I was busy except one cloudy night.” “When was that. Dad?”

“In South America, before you were born.” “I didn’t know you had been there.”

“It was a cloak-and-daggerish government job-not one to talk about. Are they beautiful?”

“Uh, not exactly.” I got another volume, turned to “Nebulae” and found the Great Nebula of Andromeda. “Here is beauty. That’s the way we look.” Dad sighed. “It must be lovely.”

“It is. I’ll tell you all about it. I’ve got a tape, too.”

“No hurry. You’ve had quite a trip. Three hundred and thirty-three thousand light-years-is that right?” “Oh, no, just half that.”

“I meant the round trip.”

“Oh. But we didn’t come back the same way.” “Eh?”

“I don’t know how to put it, but in these ships, if you make a jump, any jump, the short way back is the long way ‘round. You go straight ahead until you’re back where you started. Well, not ‘straight’ since space is curved-but straight as can be. That returns everything to zero.”

“Acosmic great-circle?”

“That’s the idea. All the way around in a straight line.”

“Mmm-” He frowned thoughtfully. “Kip, how far is it, around the Universe? The red-shift limit?”

I hesitated. “Dad, I asked-but the answer didn’t mean anything.” (The Mother Thing had said, “How can there be ‘distance’ where there is nothing?”) “It’s not a distance; it’s more of a condition. I didn’t travel it; I just went. You don’t go through, you slide past.”

Dad looked pensive. “I should know not to ask a mathematical question in words.”

I was about to suggest that Dr. Bruck could help when Mother sang out: “Hello, my darlings!” For a split second I thought I was hearing the Mother Thing.

She kissed Dad, she kissed me. “I’m glad you’re home, dear.” “Uh-” I turned to Dad.

“She knows.”

“Yes,” Mother agreed in a warm indulgent tone, “and I don’t mind where my big boy goes as long as he comes home safely. I know you’ll go as far as you want to.” She patted my cheek. “And I’ll always be proud of you. Myself, I’ve just been down to the corner for another chop.”

Next morning was Tuesday, I went to work early. As I expected, the fountain was a mess. I put on my white jacket and got cracking. Mr. Charton was on the phone; he hung up and came over. “Nice trip. Kip?”

“Very nice, Mr. Charton.”

“Kip, there’s something I’ve been meaning to say. Are you still anxious to go to the Moon?” I was startled. Then I decided that he couldn’t know.

Well, I hadn’t seen the Moon, hardly, I was still eager-though not as much in a hurry. “Yes, sir. But I’m going to college first.” “That’s what I mean. I- Well, I have no children. If you need money, say so.”

He had hinted at pharmacy school-but never this. And only last night Dad had told me that he had bought an education policy for me the day I was born-he had been waiting to see what I would do on my own. “Gee, Mr. Charton, that’s mighty nice of you!”

“I approve of your wanting an education.”

“Uh, I’ve got things lined up, sir. But I might need a loan someday.” “Or not a loan. Let me know.” He bustled away, plainly fussed.

I worked in a warm glow, sometimes touching the happy thing, tucked away in a pocket. Last night I had let Mother and Dad put it to their foreheads. Mother had cried; Dad said solemnly,  “I begin to understand, Kip.” I decided to let Mr. Charton try it when I could work around to it. I got the fountain shining and checked the air conditioner. It was okay.

About midafternoon Ace Quiggle came in, plunked himself down. “Hi, Space Pirate! What do you hear from the Galactic Overlords? Yuk yuk yukkity yuk!” What would he have said to a straight answer? I touched the happy thing and said, “What’ll it be. Ace?”

“My usual, of course, and snap it up!” “Achoc malt?”

“You know that. Look alive. Junior! Wake up and get hep to the world around you.”

“Sure thing, Ace.” There was no use fretting about Ace; his world was as narrow as the hole between his ears, no deeper than his own hog wallow. Two girls came in; I served them   cokes while Ace’s malt was in the mixer. He leered at them. “Ladies, do you know Commander Comet here?” One of them tittered; Ace smirked and went on: “I’m his manager. You want

heroing done, see me. Commander, I’ve been thinking about that ad you’re goin’ to run.”

“Huh?”

“Keep your ears open. ‘Have Space Suit-Will Travel,’ that doesn’t say enough. To make money out of that silly clown suit, we got to have oomph. So we add: “Bug-Eyed Monsters Exterminated-World Saving a Specialty-Rates on Request.’ Right?”

I shook my head. “No, Ace.”

“S’matter with you? No head for business?”

“Let’s stick to the facts. I don’t charge for world saving and don’t do it to order; it just happens. I’m not sure I’d do it on purpose-with you in it.” Both girls tittered. Ace scowled. “Smart guy, eh? Don’t you know that the customer is always right?”

“Always?”

“He certainly is. See that you remember it. Hurry up that malt!”

“Yes, Ace.” I reached for it; he shoved thirty-five cents at me; I pushed it back. “This is on the house.” I threw it in his face.

The End

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Tunnel in the Sky (full text) by Robert Heinlein

Here is the full text of the wonderful Robert Heinlein science fiction story titled “Tunnel in the Sky”. In it, he describes the use of a dimensional portal from which students can use to travel to another planet. In this fictional story, the students enter the portal, but something happens. They get stranded on this strange planet and need to learn how to survive from scratch. It’s a great fun read and easy escapist adventure reading.

Tunnel in the Sky

1. The Marching Hordes

The bulletin board outside lecture hall 1712-Aof Patrick Henry High School showed a flashing red light. Rod Walker pushed his way into a knot of students and tried to see what the special notice had to say. He received an elbow in the stomach, accompanied by: “Hey! Quit shoving!”

“Sorry. Take it easy, Jimmy.” Rod locked the elbow in a bone breaker but put no pressure on, craned his neck to look over Jimmy Throxton’s head. “What’s on the board?” “No class today.”

“Why not?”

Avoice near the board answered him. “Because tomorrow it’s ‘Hail, Caesar, we who are about to die-’”

“So?” Rod felt his stomach tighten as it always did before an examination. Someone moved aside and he managed to read the notice: PATRICK HENRYHIGH SCHOOL

Department of Social Studies

SPECIAL NOTICE to all students Course 410 (elective senior seminar) Advanced Survival, instr. Dr. Matson, 1712-AMWF

  1. There will be no class Friday the 14th.
  • Twenty-Four Hour Notice is hereby given of final examination in Solo Survival. Students will present themselves for physical check at 0900 Saturday in the dispensary of Templeton Gate and will start passing through the gate at 1000, using three-minute intervals by lot.
  • TEST CONDITIONS:
  • ANYplanet, ANYclimate, ANYterrain;
  • NO rules, ALL weapons, ANYequipment;
  • TEAMING IS PERMITTED but teams will not be allowed to pass through the gate in company;
  • TEST DURATION is not less than forty-eight hours, not more than ten days.
  • Dr. Matson will be available for advice and consultation until 1700 Friday.
  • Test may be postponed Only on recommendation of examining physician, but any student may withdraw from the course without administrative penalty up until 1000 Saturday.
  • Good luck and long life to you all!

(s) B. P. Matson, Sc.D. Approved:

J. R. ROERICH, for the Board

Rod Walker reread the notice slowly, while trying to quiet the quiver in his nerves. He checked off the test conditions-why, those were not “conditions” but a total lack of conditions, no limits of any sort! They could dump you through the gate and the next instant you might be facing a polar bear at forty below-or wrestling an Octopus deep in warm salt water.

Or, he added, faced up to some three-headed horror on a planet you had never heard of.

He heard a soprano voice complaining, “‘Twenty-four hour notice!’ Why, it’s less than twenty hours now. That’s not fair.” Another girl answered, “What’s the difference? I wish we were starting this minute. I won’t get a wink of sleep tonight.”  “If we are supposed to have twenty-four hours to get ready, then we ought to have them. Fair is fair.”

Another student, a tall, husky Zulu girl, chuckled softly. “Go on in. Tell the Deacon that.”

Rod backed out of the press, taking Jimmy Throxton with him. He felt that he knew what “Deacon” Matson would say … something about the irrelevancy of fairness to survival. He chewed over the bait in paragraph five; nobody would say boo if he dropped the course. After all, “Advanced Survival’ was properly a college. course; he would graduate without it.

But he knew down deep that if he lost his nerve now, he would never take the course later. Jimmy said nervously, “What d’you think of it, Rod?”

“All right, I guess. But I’d like to know whether or not to wear my long-handled underwear. Do you suppose the Deacon would give us a hint?” “Him? Not him! He thinks a broken leg is the height of humor. That man would eat his own grandmother- without salt.”

“Oh, come now! He’d use salt. Say, Jim? You saw what it said about teaming.”

“Yeah… what about it?” Jimmy’s eyes shifted away. Rod felt a moment’s irritation. He was making a suggestion as delicate as a proposal of marriage, an offer to put his own life in the same basket with Jimmy’s. The greatest risk in a solo test was that a fellow just had to sleep sometime … but a team could split it up and stand watch over each other.

Jimmy must know that Rod was better than he was, with any weapon or bare hands; the proposition was to his advantage. Yet here he was hesitating as if he thought Rod might handicap him. “What’s the matter, Jim?” Rod said bleakly. “Figure you’re safer going it alone?”

“Uh, no, not exactly.”

“You mean you’d rather not team with me?” “No, no, I didn’t mean that!”

“Then what did you mean?”

“I meant- Look, Rod, I surely do thank you. I won’t forget it. But that notice said something else, too.” “What?”

“It said we could dump this durned course and still graduate. And I just happened to remember that I don’t need it for the retail clothing business.” “Huh? I thought you had ambitions to become a wideangled lawyer?’

“So exotic jurisprudence loses its brightest jewel… so what do I care? It will make my old man very happy to learn that I’ve decided to stick with the family business.” “You mean you’re scared.”

“Well, that’s one way of putting it. Aren’t you?”

Rod took a deep breath. “Yes. I’m scared.”

“Good! Now let’s both give a classic demonstration of how to survive and stay alive by marching down to the Registrar’s office and bravely signing our names to withdrawal slips.” “Uh, no. You go ahead.”

“You mean you’re sticking?” “I guess so.”

“Look, Rod, have you looked over the statistics on last year’s classes?”

“No. And I don’t want to. So long.” Rod turned sharply and headed for the classroom door, leaving Jimmy to stare after him with a troubled look.

The lecture room was occupied by a dozen or so of the seminar’s students. Doctor Matson, the “Deacon,” was squatting tailor-fashion on one corner of his desk and holding forth informally. He was a small man and spare, with a leathery face, a patch over one eye, and most of three fingers missing from his left hand. On his chest were miniature ribbons, marking service in three famous first expeditions; one carried a tiny diamond cluster that showed him to be the last living member of that group.

Rod slipped into the second row. The Deacon’s eye flicked at him as he went on talking. “I don’t understand the complaints,” he said jovially. “The test conditions say ‘all weapons’ so you can protect yourself any way you like… from a slingshot to a cobalt bomb. I think final examination should be bare hands, not so much as a nail file. But the Board of Education doesn’t agree, so we do it this sissy way instead.” He shrugged and grinned.

“Uh, Doctor, I take it then that the Board knows that we are going to run into dangerous animals?” “Eh? You surely will! The most dangerous animal known.”

“Doctor, if you mean that literally-“ “Oh, I do, I do!”

“Then I take it that we are either being sent to Mithra and will have to watch out for snow apes, or we are going to stay on Terra and be dumped where we can expect leopards. Am I right?” The Deacon shook his head despairingly. “My boy, you had better cancel and take this course over. Those dumb brutes aren’t dangerous.”

“But Jasper says, in Predators and Prey, that the two trickiest, most dangerous-“

“Jasper’s maiden aunt! I’m talking about the real King of the Beasts, the only animal that is always dangerous, even when not hungry. The two-legged brute. Take a look around you!”  The instructor leaned forward. “I’ve said this nineteen dozen times but you still don’t believe it. Man is the one animal that can’t be tamed. He goes along for years as peaceful as a cow,

when it suits him. Then when it suits him not to be, he makes a leopard look like a tabby cat. Which goes double for the female of the species. Take another look around you. All friends.

We’ve been on group-survival field tests together; we can depend on each other. So? Read about the Donner Party, or the First Venus Expedition. Anyhow, the test area will have several

other classes in it, all strangers to you.” Doctor Matson fixed his eye on Rod. “I hate to see some of you take this test, I really do. Some of you are city dwellers by nature; I’m afraid I have

not managed to get it through your heads that there are no policemen where you are going. Nor will I be around to give you a hand if you make some silly mistake.”

His eye moved on; Rod wondered if the Deacon meant him. Sometimes he felt that the Deacon took delight in rawhiding him. But Rod knew that it was serious; the course was required for all the Outlands professions for the good reason that the Outlands were places where you were smart – or you were dead. Rod had chosen to take this course before entering college because he hoped that it would help him to get a scholarship – but that did not mean that he thought it was just a formality. He looked around, wondering who would be willing to team  with him now that Jimmy had dropped out. There was a couple in front of him, Bob Baxter and Carmen Garcia. He checked them off, as they undoubtedly would team together; they planned to become medical missionaries and intended to marry as soon as they could.

How about Johann Braun? He would make a real partner, all right-strong, fast on his feet, and smart. But Rod did not trust him, nor did he think that Braun would want him. He began to see that he might have made a mistake in not cultivating other friends in the class besides Jimmy.

That big Zulu girl, Caroline something-unpronounceable. Strong as an ox and absolutely fearless. But it would not do to team with a girl; girls were likely to mistake a cold business deal for a romantic gambit. His eyes moved on until at last he was forced to conclude that there was no one there to whom he wished to suggest partnership.

“Prof, how about a hint? Should we take suntan oil? Or chilblain lotion?”

Matson grinned and drawled, “Son, I’ll tell you every bit that I know. This test area was picked by a teacher in Europe… and I picked one for his class. But I don’t know what it is any more than you do. Send me a post card.”

“But-” The boy who had spoken stopped. Then he suddenly stood up. “Prof, this isn’t a fair test. I’m checking out.” “What’s unfair about it? Not that we meant to make it fair.”

“Well, you could dump us any place-“ “That’s right.”

“-the back side of the Moon, in vacuum up to our chins. Or onto a chlorine planet. Or the middle of an ocean. I don’t know whether to take a space suit, or a canoe. So the deuce with it. Real life isn’t like that.”

“It isn’t, eh?” Matson said softly. “That’s what Jonah said when the whale swallowed him.” He added, “But I will give you some hints. We mean this test to be passed by anyone bright enough to deserve it. So we won’t let you walk into a poisonous atmosphere, or a vacuum, without a mask. If you are dumped into water, land won’t be too far to swim. And so on. While I don’t know where you are going, I did see the list of test areas for this year’s classes. Asmart man can survive in any of them. You ought to realize, son, that the Board of Education would have nothing to gain by killing off all its candidates for the key professions.”

The student sat down again as suddenly as he had stood up. The instructor said, “Change your mind again?” “Uh, yes, sir. If it’s a fair test, I’ll take it.”

Matson shook his head. “You’ve already flunked it. You’re excused. Don’t bother the Registrar; I’ll notify him.”

The boy started to protest; Matson inclined his head toward the door. “Out!” There was an embarrassed silence while he left the room, then Matson said briskly, “This is a class in applied philosophy and I am sole judge of who is ready and who is not. Anybody who thinks of the world in terms of what it ‘ought’ to be, rather than what it is, isn’t ready for final examination. You’ve got to relax and roll with the punch … not get yourself all worn out with adrenalin exhaustion at the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Any more questions?”

There were a few more but it became evident that Matson either truthfully did not know the nature of the test area, or was guarding the knowledge; his answers gained them nothing. He refused to advise as to weapons, saying simply that the school armorer would be at the gate ready to issue all usual weapons, while any unusual ones were up to the individual. “Remember, though, your best weapon is between your ears and under your scalp – provided it’s loaded.”

The group started to drift away; Rod got up to leave.

Matson caught his eye and said, “Walker, are you planning to take the test?” “Why, yes, of course, sir.”

“Come here a moment.” He led him into his office, closed the door and sat down. He looked up at Rod, fiddled with a paperweight on his desk and said slowly, “Rod, you’re a good boy

… but sometimes that isn’t enough.”

Rod said nothing.

“Tell me,” Matson continued, “why you want to take this test?”

“Sir?”

“‘Sir’ yourself,” Matson answered grumpily. “Answer my question.”

Rod stared, knowing that he had gone over this with Matson before he was accepted for the course. But he explained again his ambition to study for an Outlands profession. “So I have to qualify in survival. I couldn’t even get a degree in colonial administration without it, much less any of the planetography or planetology specialities.”

“Want to be an explorer, huh?” “Yes, sir.”

“Like me.”

“Yes, Sir. Like you.”

“Hmm… would you believe me if I told you that it was the worst mistake I ever made?” “Huh? No, sir!”

“I didn’t think you would. Son, the cutest trick of all is how to know then what you know now. No way to, of course. But I’m telling you straight: I think you’ve been born into the wrong age. “Sir?”

“I think you are a romantic. Now this is a very romantic age, so there is no room in it for romantics; it calls for practical men. Ahundred years ago you would have made a banker or lawyer or professor and you could have worked out your romanticism by reading fanciful tales and dreaming about what you might have been if you hadn’t had the misfortune to be born into a humdrum period. But this happens to be a period when adventure and romance are a part of daily existence. Naturally it takes very practical people to cope with it.”

Rod was beginning to get annoyed. “What’s the matter with me?”

“Nothing. I like you. I don’t want to see you get hurt. But you are ‘way too emotional, too sentimental to be a real survivor type.”

Matson pushed a hand toward him. “Now keep your shirt on. I know you can make fire by rubbing a couple of dry words together. I’m well aware that you won merit badges in practically everything. I’m sure you can devise a water filter with your bare hands and know which side of the tree the moss grows on. But I’m not sure that you can beware of the Truce of the Bear.”

“‘The Truce of the Bear?’”

“Never mind. Son, I think you ought to cancel this course. If you must, you can repeat it in college.” Rod looked stubborn. Matson sighed. “I could drop you. Perhaps I should.”

“But why, sir?”

“That’s the point. I couldn’t give a reason. On the record, you’re as promising a student as I have ever had.” He stood up and put out his hand. “Good luck. And remember- when it gets down to fundamentals, do what you have to do and shed no tears.”

Rod should have gone straight home. His family lived in an out-county of Greater New York City, located on the Grand Canyon plateau through Hoboken Gate. But his commuting route required him to change at Emigrants’ Gap and he found himself unable to resist stopping to rubberneck.

When he stepped out of the tube from school he should have turned right, taken the rotary lift to the level above, and stepped through to Arizona Strip. But he was thinking about supplies, equipment, and weapons for tomorrow’s examination; his steps automatically bore left, he got on the slideway leading to the great hall of the planetary gates.

He told himself that he would watch for only ten minutes; he would not be late for dinner. He picked his way through the crowd and entered the great hall- not Onto the emigration floor itself, but onto the spectator’s balcony facing the gates. This was the new gate househe was in, the one opened for traffic in ‘68; the original Emigrants’ Gap, now used for Terran traffic and trade with Luna, stood on the Jersey Flats a few kilometers east alongside the pile that powered it.

The balcony faced the six gates. It could seat eighty-six hundred people but was half filled and crowded only in the center. It was here, of course, that Rod wished to

sit so that he might see through all six gates. He wormed his way down the middle aisle, squatted by the railing, then spotted someone leaving a front row seat. Rod grabbed it, earning  a dirty look from a man who had started for it from the other aisle.

Rod fed coins into the arm of the seat; it opened out, he sat down and looked around. He was opposite the replica Statue of Liberty, twin to the one that had stood for a century where now was Bedloe Crater. Her torch reached to the distant ceiling; on both her right and her left three great gates let emigrants into the outer worlds.

Rod did not glance at the statue; he looked at the gates. It was late afternoon and heavily overcast at east coast North America, but gate one was open to some planetary spot having glaring noonday sun; Rod could catch glimpses through it of men dressed in shorts and sun hats and nothing else. Gate number two had a pressure lock rigged over it; it carried a big skull & crossbones sign and the symbol for chlorine. Ared light burned over it. While he watched, the red light flickered out and a blue light replaced it; the door slowly opened and a traveling capsule for a chlorine-breather crawled out. Waiting to meet it were eight humans in diplomatic full dress. One carried a gold baton.

Rod considered spending another half pluton to find out who the important visitor was, but his attention was diverted to gate five. An auxiliary gate had been set up on the floor, facing gate five a nd almost under the balcony. Two high steel fences joined the two gates, forming with them an alley as wide as the gates and as long as the space between, about fifteen meters   by seventy-five. This pen was packed with humanity moving from the temporary gate toward and through gate five-and onto some planet light-years away. They poured out of nowhere, for the floor back of the auxiliary gate was bare, hurried like cattle between the two fences, spilled through gate five and were gone. Asquad of brawny Mongol policemen, each armed with a staff as tall ashimself, was spread out along each fence. They were using their staves to hurry the emigrants and they were not being gentle. Almost underneath Rod one of them    prodded an old coolie so hard that he stumbled and fell. The man had been carrying his belongings, his equipment for a new world, in two bundles supported from a pole balanced on   his right shoulder.

The old coolie fell to his skinny knees, tried to get up, fell flat. Rod thought sure he would be trampled, but

somehow he was on his feet again- minus his baggage. He tried to hold his place in the torrent and recover his possessions, but the guard prodded him again and he was forced to move on barehanded. Rod lost sight of him before he had moved five meters.

There were local police outside the fence but they did not interfere. This narrow stretch between the two gates was, for the time, extraterritory; the local police had no jurisdiction. But one of them did seem annoyed at the brutality shown the old man; he put his face to the steel mesh and called out something in lingua terra. The

Mongol cop answered savagely in the same simple language, telling the North American what he could do about it, then went back to shoving and shouting and prodding still more briskly.

The crowd streaming through the pen were Asiatics- Japanese, Indonesians, Siamese, some East Indians, a few Eurasians, but predominantly South Chinese. To Rod they all looked much alike- tiny women with babies on hip or back, or often one on back and one in arms, endless runny-nosed and shaven-headed children, fathers with household goods ill enormous back packs or pushed ahead on barrows. There were a few dispirited ponies dragging two-wheeled carts much too big for them but most of the torrent had only that which they could carry.

Rod had heard an old story which asserted that if all the Chinese on Terra were marched four abreast past a given point the column would never pass that point, as more Chinese would be born fast enough to replace those who had marched past. Rod had taken his slide rule and applied arithmetic to check it- to find, of course, that the story was nonsense; even if one ignored deaths, while counting all births, the last Chinese would pass the reviewing stand in less than four years. Nevertheless, while watching this mob being herded like brutes into a slaughterhouse, Rod felt that the old canard was true even though its mathematics was faulty. There seemed to be no end to them.

He decided to risk that half pluton to find out what was going on. He slid the coin into a slot in the chair’s speaker; the voice of the commentator reached his ears:

“-the visiting minister. The prince royal was met by officials of the Terran Corporation including the Director General himself and now is being escorted to the locks of the Ratoonian enclave. After the television reception tonight staff level conversations will start. Aspokesman close to the Director General has pointed out that, in view of the impossibility of conflict of

interest between oxygen types such as ourselves and the Ratoonians, any outcome of the conference must be to our advantage, the question being to what extent.

“If you will turn your attention again to gate five, we will repeat what we said earlier: gate five is on fortyeight hour loan to the Australasian Republic. The temporary gate you see erected below is hyperfolded to a point in central Australia in the Arunta Desert, where this emigration has been mounting in a great encampment for the past several weeks. His Serene Majesty Chairman Fung Chee Mu of the Australasian Republic has informed the Corporation that his government intends to move in excess of two million people in forty-eight hours, a truly impressive figure, more than forty thousand each hour. The target figure for this year for all planetary emigration gates taken together – Emigrants’ Gap, Peter the Great, and   Witwatersrand Gates – is only seventy million emigrants or an average of eight thousand per hour. This movement proposes a rate live times as great using only one gate!”

The commentator continued: “Yet when we watch the speed, efficiency and the, uh- forthrightness with which they are carrying out this evolution it seems likely that they will achieve their goal. Our own figures show them to be slightly ahead of quota for the first nine hours. During those same nine hours there have been one hundred seven births and eighty-two deaths among the emigrants, the high death rate, of course, being incident to the temporary hazards of the emigration.

“The planet of destination, GO-8703-IV, to be called henceforth ‘Heavenly Mountains’ according to Chairman Fung, is classed as a bounty planet and no attempt had been made to colonize it. The Corporation has been assured that the colonists are volunteers.” It seemed to Rod that the announcer’s tone was ironical. “This is understandable when one considers the phenomenal population pressure of the Australasian Republic. Abrief historical rundown may be in order. After the removal of the remnants of the former Australian population to New Zealand, pursuant to the Peiping Peace Treaty, the first amazing effort of the new government was the creation of the great inland sea

Rod muted the speaker and looked back at the floor below. He did not care to hear school-book figures on how the Australian Desert had been made to blossom like the rose … and nevertheless haa been converted into a slum with more people in it than all of North America. Something new was happening at gate four-Gate four had been occupied by a moving cargo belt when he had come in; now the belt had crawled away and lost itself in the bowels of the terminal and an emigration party was lining up to go through.

This was no poverty-stricken band of refugees chivvied along by police; here each family had its own wagon… long, sweeping, boat-tight Conestogas drawn by three-pair teams and housed in sturdy glass canvas square and businesslike Studebakers with steel bodies, high mudcutter wheels, and pulled by one or two-pair teams. The draft animals were Morgans and lordly Clydesdales and jug-headed Missouri mules with strong shoulders and shrewd, suspicious eyes. Dogs trotted between wheels, wagons were piled high with household goods and implements and children, poultry protested the indignities of fate in cages tied on behind, and a little Shetland pony, riderless but carrying his saddle and just a bit too tall to run underneath with the dogs, stayed close to the tailgate of one family’s rig.

Rod wondered at the absence of cattle and stepped up the speaker again. But the announcer was still droning about the fertility of Australasians; he muted it again and watched.  Wagons had moved onto the floor and taken up tight echelon position close to the gate, ready to move, with the tail of the train somewhere out of sight below. The gate was not yet ready and drivers were getting down and gathering at the Salvation Army booth under the skirts ot the Goddess of Liberty, for a cup of coffee and some banter. It occurred to Rod that there probably was no coffee where they were going and might not be for years, since Terra never exported food – on the contrary, food and fissionable metals were almost the only  permissible imports; until an Outland colony produced a surplus of one or the other it could expect precious little help from Terra.

It was extremely expensive in terms of uranium to keep an interstellar gate open and the people in this wagon train could expect to be out of commercial touch with Earth until such a time as they had developed surpluses valuable enough in trade to warrant reopening the gate at regular intervals. Until that time they were on their own and must make do with what they   could take with them … which made horses more practical than helicopters, picks and shovels more useful than bulldozers. Machinery gets out of order and requires a complex technology to keep it going- but good old “hayburners” keep right on breeding, cropping grass, and pulling loads.

Deacon Matson had told the survival class that the real hardships of primitive Outlands were not the lack of plumbing, heating, power, light, nor weather conditioning, but the shortage of simple things like coffee and tobacco.

Rod did not smoke and coffee he could take or let alone; he could not imagine getting fretful over its absence. He scrunched down in his seat, trying to see through the gate to guess the cause of the hold up. He could not see well, as the arching canvas of a prairie schooner blocked his view, but it did seem that the gate operator had a phase error; it looked as if the sky was where the ground ought to be. The extradimensional distortions necessary to match places on two planets many light-years apart were not simply a matter of expenditure of enormous quantities of energy; they were precision problems fussy beyond belief, involving high mathematics and high art-the math was done by machine but the gate operator always had to adjust the last couple of decimal places by prayer and intuition.

In addition to the dozen-odd proper motions of each of the planets involved, motions which could usually be added and canceled out, there was also the rotation of each planet. The problem was to make the last hyperfold so that the two planets were internally tangent at the points selected as gates, with their axes parallel and their rotations in the same direction. Theoretically it was possible to match two points in contra-rotation, twisting the insubstantial fabric of space-time in exact step with “real’ motions; practically such a solution was not only terribly wasteful of energy but almost unworkable- the ground surface beyond the gate tended to skid away like a slidewalk and tilt at odd angles.

Rod did not have the mathematics to appreciate the difficulties. Being only about to finish high school his training had gone no farther than tensor calculus, statistical mechanics, simple transfinities, generalized geometries of six dimensions, and, on the practical side, analysis for electronics, primary cybernetics and robotics, and basic design of analog computers; he had had no advanced mathematics as yet. He was not aware of his ignorance and simply concluded that the gate operator must be thumb-fingered. He looked back at the emigrant   party.

The drivers were still gathered at the booth, drinking coffee and munching doughnuts. Most of the men were growing beards; Rod concluded from the beavers that the party had been training for several months. The captain of the party sported a little goatee, mustaches, and rather long hair, but it seemed to Rod that he could not be many years older than Rod himself. He was a professional, of course, required to hold a degree in Outlands arts- hunting, scouting, jackleg mechanics, gunsmithing, farming, first aid, group psychology, survival group tactics, law, and a dozen other things the race has found indispensable when stripped for action.

This captain’s mount was a Palomino mare, lovely as a sunrise, and the captain was dressed as a California don of an earlier century-possibly as a compliment to his horse. Awarning light flashed at the gate’s annunciator panel and he swung into saddle, still eating a doughnut, and cantered down the wagons for a final inspection, riding toward Rod. His back was straight, his seat deep and easy, his bearing confident. Carried low on a fancy belt he wore two razor guns, each in a silver-chased holster that matched the ornate silver of his bridle and saddle.

Rod held his breath until the captain passed out of sight under the balcony, then sighed and considered studying to be like him, rather than for one of the more intellectual Outlands professions. He did not know just what he did want to be … except that he meant to get off Earth as soon as he possibly could and get out there where things were going on!

Which reminded him that the first hurdle was tomorrow; in a few days he would either be eligible to matriculate for whatever it was he decided on, or he would be-but no use worrying about that. He remembered uneasily that it was getting late and he had not even decided on equipment, nor picked his weapons. This party captain carried razor guns; should he carry one? No, this party would fight as a unit, if it had to fight. Its leader carried that type of weapon to enforce his authority-not for solo survival. Well, what should he take?

Asiren sounded and the drivers returned to their wagons. The captain came back at a brisk trot. “Reins up!” he called out. “Reeeeeeiiiins up!” He took station by the gate, facing the head of the train; the mare stood quivering and tending to dance.

The Salvation Army lassie came out from behind her counter carrying a baby girl. She called to the party captain but her voice did not carry to the balcony.

The captain’s voice did carry. “Number four! Doyle! Come get your child!” Ared-headed man with a spade beard climbed down from the fourth wagon and sheepishly reclaimed the youngster to a chorus of cheers and cat calls. He passed the baby up to his wife, who upped its skirt and commenced paddling its bottom. Doyle climbed to his seat and took his reins.

“Call off!” the captain sang out. “One.”

“Tuh!”

“Three!”

“Foah!”

“Five!”

The count passed under the balcony, passed down the chute out of hearing. In a few moments it came back, running down this time, ending with a shouted “ONE!” The captain held up his right arm and watched the lights of the order panel.

Alight turned green. He brought his arm down smartly with a shout of “Roll ‘em! Ho!” The Palomino took off like a race horse, cut under the nose of the nigh lead horse of the first team,

and shot through the gate.

Whips cracked. Rod could hear shouts of “Git, Molly! Git, Ned!” and “No, no, you jugheads!” The train began to roll. By the time the last one on the floor was through the gate and the much larger number which had been in the chute below had begun to show it was rolling at a gallop, with the drivers bracing their feet wide and their wives riding the brakes. Rod tried to count them, made it possibly sixty-three wagons as the last one rumbled through the gate… and was gone, already half a galaxy away.

He sighed and sat back with a warm feeling sharpened with undefined sorrow. Then he stepped up the speaker volume: “-onto New Canaan, the premium planet described by the great Langford as ‘The rose without thorns.’ These colonists have paid a premium of sixteen thousand four hundred per person-not counting exempt or co-opted members-for the privilege of seeking their fortunes and protecting their posterity by moving to New Canaan. The machines predict that the premium will increase for another twenty-eight years; therefore, if you are considering giving your children the priceless boon of citizenship on New Canaan, the time to act is now. For a beautiful projection reel showing this planet send one pluton to ‘Information, Box One, Emigrants’ Gap, New Jersey County, Greater New York.’ For a complete descriptive listing of all planets now open plus a speclal list of those to be opened in the near future add another half pluton. Those seeing this broadcast in person may obtain these items at the information booth in the foyer outside the great hall.”

Rod did not listen. He had long since sent for every free item and most of the non-free ones issued by the Commission for Emigration and Trade. Just now he was wondering why the gate to New Canaan had not relaxed.

He found out at once. Stock barricades rose up out of the floor, forming a fenced passage from gate four to the chute under him. Then a herd of cattle filled the gate and came flooding toward him, bawling and snorting. They were prime Hereford steers, destined to become tender steaks and delicious roasts for a rich but slightly hungry Earth. After them and among them rode New Canaan cowpunchers armed with long goads with which they urged the beasts to greater speed- the undesirability of running weight off the animals was offset by the extreme cost of keeping the gate open, a cost which had to be charged against the cattle.

Rod discovered that the speaker had shut itself off; the half hour he had paid for was finished. He sat up with sudden guilt, realizing that he would have to hurry or he would be late for supper. He rushed out, stepping on feet and mumbling apologies, and caught the slide-way to Hoboken Gate.

This gate, being merdy for Terra-surface commuting, was permanently dilated and required no operator, since the two points brought into coincidence were joined by a rigid frame, the solid Earth. Rod showed his commuter’s ticket to the electronic monitor and stepped through to Arizona, in company with a crowd of neighbors.

“The (almost) solid Earth-” The gate robot took into account tidal distortions but could not anticipate minor seismic variables. As Rod stepped through he felt his feet quiver as if to a

small earthquake, then the terra was again firma. But he was still in an airlock at sea-level pressure. The radiation from massed bodies triggered the mechanism, the lock closed and air

pressure dropped. Rod yawned heavily to adjust to the pressure of Grand Canyon plateau, North Rim, less than three quarters that of New Jersey. But despite the fact that he made the

change twice a day he found himself rubbing his right ear to get rid of an ear ache.

The lock opened, he stepped out. Having come two thousand miles in a split second he now had ten minutes by slide tube and a fifteen minute walk to get home. He decided to dogtrot and be on time after all. He might have made it if there had not been several thousand other people trying to use the same facilities.

2.      The Fifth Way

Rocket ships did not conquer space; they merely challenged it. Arocket leaving Earth at seven miles per second is terribly slow for the vast reaches beyond. Only the Moon is reasonably near-four days, more or less. Mars is thirty-seven weeks away, Saturn a dreary six years, Pluto an impossible half century, by the elliptical orbits possible to rockets.

Ortega’s torch ships brought the Solar System within reach. Based on mass conversion, Einstein’s deathless e= Mc2, they could boost for the entire trip at any acceleration the pilot could stand. At an easy one gravity the inner planets were only hours from Earth, far Pluto only eighteen days. It was a change like that from horseback to jet plane.

The shortcoming of this brave new toy was that there was not much anywhere to go. The Solar system, from a human standpoint, is made up of remarkably unattractive real estate-save for lovely Terra herself, lush and green and beautiful. The steel-limbed Jovians enjoy gravity 2.5 times ours and their poisonous air at inhuman pressure keeps them in health. Martians prosper in near vacuum, the rock lizards of Luna do not breathe at all. But these planets are not for men.

Men prosper on an oxygen planet close enough to a G-type star for the weather to cycle around the freezing point of water… that is to say, on Earth.

When you are already there why go anywhere? The reason was babies, too many babies. Malthus pointed it out long ago; food increases by arithmetical progression, people increase by geometrical progression. By World War I half the world lived on the edge of starvation; by World War II Earth’s population was increasing by 55,000 people every day; before World War III, as early as 1954, the increase had jumped to 100,000 mouths and stomachs per day, 35,000,000 additional people each year … and the population of Terra had climbed well beyond   that which its farm lands could support.

The hydrogen, germ, and nerve gas horrors that followed were not truly political. The true meaning was more that of beggars fighting over a crust of bread.

The author of Gulliver’s Travels sardonically proposed that Irish babies be fattened for English tables; other students urged less drastic ways of curbing population – none of which made the slightest difference. Life, all life, has the twin drives to survive and to reproduce. Intelligence is an aimless byproduct except as it serves these basic drives.

But intelligence can be made to serve the mindless demands of life. Our Galaxy contains in excess of one hundred thousand Earth-type planets, each as warm and motherly to men as sweet Terra. Ortega’s torch ships could reach the stars. Mankind could colonize, even as the hungry millions of Europe had crossed the Atlantic and raised more babies in the New World.

Some did … hundreds of thousands. But the entire race, working as a team, cannot build and launch a hundred ships a day, each fit for a thousand colonists, and keep it up day after day, year after year, time without end. Even with the hands and the will (which the race never had) there is not that much steel, aluminum, and uranium in Earth’s crust. There is not one hundredth of the necessary amount.

But intelligence can find solutions where there are none. Psychologists once locked an ape in a room, for which they had arranged only four ways of escaping. Then they spied on him to see which of the four he would find.

The ape escaped a fifth way.

Dr. Jesse Evelyn Ramsbotham had not been trying to solve the baby problem; he had been trying to build a time machine. He had two reasons: first, because time machines are an impossibility; second, because his hands would sweat and he would stammer whenever in the presence of a nubile female. He was not aware that the first reason was compensation for the second, in fact he was not aware of the second reason – it was a subject his conscious mind avoided.

It is useless to speculate as to the course of history had Jesse Evelyn Ramsbotham’s parents had the good sense to name their son Bill instead of loading him with two girlish names. He might have become an All-American halfback and ended up selling bonds and adding his quota of babies to a sum already disastrous. Instead he became a mathematical physicist.

Progress in physics is achieved by denying the obvious and accepting the impossible. Any nineteenth century physicist could have given unassailable reasons why atom bombs were impossible if his reason were not affronted at the question; any twentieth century physicist could explain why time travel was incompatible with the real world of space-time. But Ramsbotham began fiddling with the three greatest Einsteinian equations, the two relativity equations for distance and duration and the mass-conversion equation; each contained the velocity of light. “Velocity” is first derivative, the differential of distance with respect to time; he converted those equations into differential equations, then played games with them. He would feed the results to the Rakitiac computer, remote successor to Univac, Eniac and Maniac. While he was doing these things his hands never sweated nor did he stammer, except when he was forced to deal with the young lady who was chief programmer for the giant computer.

His first model produced a time-stasis or low-entropy field no bigger than a football-but a lighted cigarette placed inside with full power setting was still burning a week later. Ramsbotham picked up the cigarette, resumed smoking and thought about it.

Next he tried a day-old chick, with colleagues to witness. Three months later the chick was unaged and no hungrier than chicks usually are. He reversed the phase relation and cut in power for the shortest time he could manage with his bread-boarded hook-up.

In less than a second the newly-hatched chick was long dead, starved and decayed.

He was aware that he had simply changed the slope of a curve, but he was convinced that he was on the track of true time travel. He never did find it, although once he thought that he had-he repeated by request his demonstration with a chick for some of his colleagues; that night two of them picked the lock on his lab, let the

little thing out and replaced it with an egg. Ramsbotham might have been permanently convinced that he had found time travel and then spent the rest of his life in a blind alley had they not cracked the egg and showed him that it was hard-boiled.

But he did not give up. He made a larger model and tried to arrange a dilation, or anomaly (he did not call it a “Gate”) which would let him get in and out of the field himself.

When he threw on power, the space between the curving magnetodes of his rig no longer showed the wall beyond, but a steaming jungle. He jumped to the conclusion that this must be  a forest of the Carboniferous Period. It had often occurred to him that the difference between space and time might simply be human prejudice, but this was not one of the times; he believed what he wanted to believe.

He hurriedly got a pistol and with much bravery and no sense crawled between the magnetodes.

Ten minutes later he was arrested for waving firearms around in Rio de Janeiro’s civic botanical gardens. Alack of the Portuguese language increased both his difficulties and the length of time he spent in a tropical pokey, but three days later through the help of the North American consul he was on his way home. He thought and filled notebooks with equations and question marks on the whole trip.

The short cut to the stars had been found.

Ramsbotham’s discoveries eliminated the basic cause of war and solved the problem of what to do with all those dimpled babies. Ahundred thousand planets were no farther away  than the other side of the street. Virgin continents, raw wildernesses, fecund jungles, killing deserts, frozen tundras, and implacable mountains lay just beyond the city gates, and the human race was again going out where the street lights do not shine, out where there was no friendly cop on the corner nor indeed a corner, out where there were no well-hung, tender steaks, no boneless hams, no packaged, processed foods suitable for delicate minds and pampered bodies. The biped omnivore again had need of his biting, tearing, animal teeth, for the race was spilling out (as it had so often before) to kill or be killed, eat or be eaten.

But the human race’s one great talent is survival. The race, as always, adjusted to conditions, and the most urbanized, mechanized, and civilized, most upholstered and luxurious culture in all history trained its best children, its potential leaders, in primitive pioneer survival-man naked against nature.

Rod Walker knew about Dr. J. E. Ramsbotham, just as he knew about Einstein, Newton, and Columbus, but he thought about Ramsbotham no oftener than he thought about Columbus. These were figures in books, each larger than life and stuffed with straw, not real. He used the Ramsbotham Gate between Jersey and the Arizona Strip without thinking of its inventor the same way his ancestors used elevators without thinking of the name “Otis.” If he thought about the miracle at all, it was a half-formed irritation that the Arizona side of Hoboken Gate was  so far from his parents’ home. It was known as Kaibab Gate on this side and was seven miles north of the Walker residence.

At the time the house had been built the location was at the extreme limit of tube delivery and other city utilities. Being an old house, its living room was above ground, with only bedrooms, pantry, and bombproof buried. The living room had formerly stuck nakedly above ground, an ellipsoid monocoque shell, but, as Greater New York spread, the neighborhood had been zoned for underground apartments and construction above ground which would interfere with semblance of virgin forest had been forbidden.

The Walkers had gone along to the extent of covering the living room with soil and planting it with casual native foliage, but they had refused to cover up their view window. It was the chief charm of the house, as it looked out at the great canyon. The community corporation had tried to coerce them into covering it up and had offered to replace it with a simulacrum window such as the underground apartments used, with a relayed view of the canyon. But Rod’s father was a stubborn man and maintained that with weather, women, and wine there was  nothing “just as good.” His window was still intact.

Rod found the family sitting in front of the window, watching a storm work its way up the canyon-his mother, his father, and, to his great surprise, his sister. Helen was ten years older than he and an assault captain in the Amazons; she was seldom home.

The warmth of his greeting was not influenced by his realization that her arrival would probably cause his own lateness to pass with little comment. “Sis! Hey, this is swell- I thought you were on Thule.”

“I was … until a few hours ago.” Rod tried to shake hands; his sister gathered him in a bear hug and bussed him on the mouth, squeezing him against the raised ornaments of her chrome corselet. She was still in uniform, a fact that caused him to think that she had just arrived-on her rare visits home she usually went slopping around in an old bathrobe and go- ahead slippers, her hair caught up in a knot. Now she was still in dress

armor and kilt and had dumped her side arms, gauntlets, and pluined helmet on the floor. She looked him over proudly. “My, but you’ve grown! You’re almost as tall as I am.”

“I’m taller.”

“Want to bet? No, don’t try to wiggle away from me; I’ll twist your arm. Slip off your shoes and stand back to back.” “Sit down, children,” their father said mildly. “Rod, why were you late?”

“Uh …” He had worked out a diversion involving telling about the examination coming up, but he did not use it as his sister intervened. “Don’t heckle him, Pater. Ask for excuses and you’ll get them. I learned that when I was a sublieutenant.”

“Quiet, daughter. I can raise him without your help.” Rod was surprised by his father’s edgy answer, was more surprised by Helen’s answer: “So? Really?” Her tone was odd.

Rod saw his mother raise a hand, seem about to speak, then close her mouth. She looked upset. His sister and father looked at each other; neither spoke. Rod looked from one to the other, said slowly, “Say, what’s all this?”

His father glanced at him. “Nothing. We’ll say no more about it. Dinner is waiting. Coming, dear?” He turned to his wife, handed her up from her chair, offered her his arm. “Just a minute,” Rod said insistently. “I was late because I was hanging around the Gap.”

“Very well. You know better, but I said we would say no more about it.” He turned toward the lift. “But I wanted to tell you something else, Dad. I won’t be home for the next week or so.”      “Very well- eh? What did you say?”

“I’ll be away for a while, sir. Maybe ten days or a bit longer.”

His father looked perplexed, then shook his head. “Whatever your plans are, you will have to change them. I can’t let you go away at this time.” “But, Dad-“

“I’m sorry, but that is definite.” “But, Dad, I have to!”

“No.”

Rod looked frustrated. His sister said suddenly, “Pater, wouldn’t it be well to find out why he wants to be away?” “Now, daughter-“

“Dad, I’m taking my solo survival, starting tomorrow morning!”

Mrs. Walker gasped, then began to weep. Her husband said, “There, there, my dear!” then turned to his son and said harshly, “You’ve upset your mother.”

“But, Dad, I…” Rod shut up, thinking bitterly that no one seemed to give a hoot about his end of it. Mter all, he was the one who was going to have to sink or swim. Alot they knew or- “You see, Pater,” his sister was saying. “He does have to be away. He has no choice, because-“

“I see nothing of the sort! Rod, I meant to speak about this earlier, but I had not realized that your test would take place so soon. When I signed permission for you to take that course, I had, I must admit, a mental reservation. I felt that the experience would be valuable later when and if you took the course in college. But I never intended to let you come up against the final test while still in high school. You are too young.

Rod was shocked speechless. But his sister again spoke for him. “Fiddlesticks!” “Eh? Now, daughter, please remember that-“

“Repeat fiddlesticks! Any girl in my company has been up against things as rough and many of them are not much older than Buddy. What are you trying to do, Pater? Break his nerve?” “You have no reason to… I think we had best discuss this later.”

“I think that is a good idea.” Captain Walker took her brother’s arm and they followed their parents down to the refectory. Dinner was on the table, still warm in its delivery containers; they took their places, standing, and Mr. Walker solemnly lighted the Peace Lamp. The family was evangelical Monist by inheritance, each of Rod’s grandfathers having been converted in the second great wave of proselyting that swept out of Persia in the last decade of the previous century, and Rod’s father took seriously his duties as family priest.

As the ritual proceeded Rod made his responses automatically, his mind on this new problem. His sister chimed in heartily but his mother’s answers could hardly be heard. Nevertheless the warm symbolism had its effect; Rod felt himself calming down. By the time his father intoned the last “-one Principle, one family, one flesh!” he felt like eating. He sat

down and took the cover off his plate.

Ayeast cutlet, molded to look like a chop and stripped with real bacon, a big baked potato, and a grilled green lobia garnished with baby’s buttons … Rod’s mouth watered as he reached for the catsup.

He noticed that Mother was not eating much, which surprised him. Dad was not eating much either but Dad often just picked at his food … he became aware with sudden warm pity that Dad was thinner and greyer than ever. How old was Dad?

His attention was diverted by a story his sister was telling: “-and so the Commandant told me I would have to clamp down. And I said to her, ‘Ma’am, girls will be girls. It I have to bust a petty officer everytime one of them does something like that, pretty soon I won’t have anything but privates. And Sergeant Dvorak is the best gunner I have.”’

“Just a second,” her father interrupted. “I thought you said ‘Kelly,’ not ‘Dvorak.’”

“I did and she did. Pretending to misunderstand which sergeant she meant was my secret weapon-for I had Dvorak cold for the same offense, and Tiny Dvorak (she’s bigger than I am) is the Squadron’s white hope for the annual corps-wide competition for best trooper. Of course, losing her stripes would put her, and us, out of the running.

“So I straightened out the ‘mix up’ in my best wide-eyed, thick-headed manner, let the old gal sit for a moment trying not to bite her nails, then told her that I had both women confined to barracks until that gang of college boys was through installing the new ‘scope, and sang her a song about how the quality of mercy is not strained, it droppeth as the gentle rain from

heaven, and made myself responsible for seeing to it that she was not again embarrassed by scandalous-her word, not mine-scandalous incidents … especially when she was showing quadrant commanders around.

“So she grumpily allowed as how the company commander was responsible for her company and she would hold me to it and now would I get out and let her work on the quarterly training report in peace? So I threw her my best parade ground salute and got out so fast I left a hole in the air.”

“I wonder,” Mr. Walker said judicially, “if you should oppose your commanding officer in such matters? After all, she is older and presumably wiser than you are.”

Helen made a little pile of the last of her baby’s buttons, scooped them up and swallowed them. “Fiddlesticks squared and cubed. Pardon me, Pater, but if you had any military service   you would know better. I am as tough as blazes to my girls myself… and it just makes them boast about how they’ve got the worst fire-eater in twenty planets. But if they’re in trouble   higher up, I’ve got to take care of my kids. There always comes a day when there is something sticky up ahead and I have to stand up and walk toward it. And it will be all right because I’ll have Kelly on my right flank and Dvorak on my left and each of them trying to take care of Maw Walker all by her ownself. I know what I’m doing. ‘Walker’s Werewolves’ are a team.”

Mrs. Walker shivered. “Gracious, darling, I wish you had never taken up a calling so … well, so dangerous.”

Helen shrugged. “The death rate is the same for us as for anybody … one person, one death, sooner or later. What would you want, Mum? With eighteen million more women than men on this continent did you want me to sit and knit until my knight comes riding? Out where I operate, there are more men than women; I’ll wing one yet, old and ugly as I am.

Rod asked curiously, “Sis, would you really give up your commission to get married?”

“Would I! I won’t even count his arms and legs. If he is still warm and can nod his head, he’s had it. My target is six babies and a farm.” Rod looked her over. “I’d say your chances are good. You’re quite pretty even if your ankles are thick.”

“Thanks, pardner. Thank you too much. What’s for dessert, Mum?” “I didn’t look. Will you open it, dear?”

Dessert turned out to be iced mangorines, which pleased Rod. His sister went on talking. “The Service isn’t a bad shake, on active duty. It’s garrison duty that wears. My kids get fat and sloppy and restless and start fighting with each other from sheer boredom. For my choice, barracks casualties are more to be dreaded than combat. I’m hoping that our squadron will be tagged to take part in the pacification of Byer’s Planet.”

Mr. Walker looked at his wife, then at his daughter. “You have upset your mother again, my dear. Quite a bit of this talk has hardly been appropriate under the Light of Peace.”  “I was asked questions, I answered.”

“Well, perhaps so.”

Helen glanced up. “Isn’t it time to turn it out, anyway? We all seem to have finished eating.” “Why, if you like. Though it is hardly reverent to hurry.”

“The Principle knows we haven’t all eternity.” She turned to Rod. “How about making yourself scarce, mate? I want to make palaver with the folks.” “Gee, Sis, you act as if I was-“

“Get lost, Buddy. I’ll see you later.”

Rod left, feeling affronted. He saw Helen blow out the pax lamp as he did so. He was still making lists when his sister came to his room. “Hi, kid.”

“Oh. Hello, Sis.”

“What are you doing? Figuring what to take on your solo?” “Sort of.”

“Mind if I get comfortable?” She brushed articles from his bed and sprawled on it. “We’ll go into that later.” Rod thought it over. “Does that mean Dad won’t object?”

“Yes. I pounded his head until he saw the light. But,

as I said, well go into that later. I’ve got something to tell you, youngster.” “Such as?”

“The first thing is this. Our parents are not as stupid as you probably think they are. Fact is, they are pretty bright.” “I never said they were stupid!” Rod answered, comfortably aware of what his thoughts had been.

“No. But I heard what went on before dinner and so did you. Dad was throwing his weight around and not listening. But, Buddy, it has probably never occurred to you that it is hard work to be a parent, maybe the hardest job of all- particularly when you have no talent for it, which Dad hasn’t. He knows it and works hard at it and is conscientious. Mostly he does mighty well. Sometimes he slips, like tonight. But, what you did not know is this: Dad is going to die.”

“What?” Rod looked stricken. “I didn’t know he was ill!”

“You weren’t meant to know. Now climb down off the ceiling; there is a way out. Dad is terribly ill, and he would die in a few weeks at the most- unless something drastic is done. But something is going to be. So relax.”

She explained the situation bluntly: Mr. Walker was suffering from a degenerative disease under which he was slowly starving to death. His condition was incurable by current medical art; he might linger on, growing weaker each day, for weeks or months- but he would certainly die soon.

Rod leaned his head on his hands and chastised himself. Dad dying … and he hadn’t even noticed. They had kept it from him, like a baby, and he had been too stupid to see it.

His sister touched his shoulder. “Cut it out. If there is anything stupider than flogging yourself over something you can’t help, I’ve yet to meet it. Anyhow, we are doing something about it.” “What? I thought you said nothing could be done?”

“Shut up and let your mind coast. The folks are going to make a Ramsbotham jump, five hundred to one, twenty years for two weeks. They’ve already signed a contract with Entropy, Incorporated. Dad has resigned from General Synthetics and is closing up his affairs; they’ll kiss the world good-by this coming Wednesday- which is why he was being sterh about your plans to be away at that time. You’re the apple of his eye- Heaven knows why.”

Rod tried to sort out too many new ideas at once. Atime jump … of course! It would let Dad stay alive another twenty years. But- “Say, Sis, this doesn’t get them anything! Sure, it’s twenty years but it will be just two weeks to them … and Dad will be as sick as ever. I know what I’m talking about; they did the same thing for Hank Robbin’s great grandfather and he died anyhow, right after they took him out of the stasis. Hank told me.”

Captain Walker shrugged. “Probably a hopeless case to start with. But Dad’s specialist, Dr. Hensley, says that he is morally certain that Dad’s case is not hopeless twenty years from now. I don’t know anything about metabolic medicine, but Hensley says that they are on the verge and that twenty years from now they ought to be able to patch Dad up as easily they can graft on a new leg today.”

“You really think so?”

“How should I know? In things like this you hire the best expert you can, then follow his advice. The point is, if we don’t do it, Dad is finished. So we do it.”

“Yeah. Sure, sure, we’ve got to.”

She eyed him closely and added, “All right. Now do you want to talk with them about it?” “Huh?” He was startled by the shift. “Why? Are they waiting for me?”

“No. I persuaded them that it was best to keep it from you until it happened. Then I came straight in and told you. Now you can do as you please- pretend you don’t know, or go have Mum cry over you, and listen to a lot of last-minute, man-to-man advice from Dad that you will never take. About midnight, with your nerves frazzled, you can get back to your preparations for   your survival test. Play it your own way- but I’ve rigged it so you can avoid that, if you want to. Easier on everybody. Myself, I like a cat’s way of saying good-by.”

Rod’s mind was in a turmoil. Not to say good-by seemed unnatural, ungrateful, untrue to family sentiment- but the prospect of saying good-by seemed almost unbearably embarrassing. “What’s that about a cat?”

“When a cat greets you, he makes a big operation of it, humping, stropping your legs, buzzing like mischief. But when he leaves, he just walks off and never looks back. Cats are smart.” “Well . .”

“I suggest,” she added, “that you remember that they are doing this for their convenience, not yours. “But Dad has to-“

“Surely, Dad must, if he is to get well.” She considered pointing out that the enormous expense of the time jump would leave Rod practically penniless; she decided that this was better left undiscussed. “But Mum does not have to.”

“But she has to go with Dad!”

“So? Use arithmetic. She prefers leaving you alone for twenty years in order to be with Dad for two weeks. Or turn it around: she prefers having you orphaned to having herself widowed for the same length of time.”

“I don’t think that’s quite fair to Mum,” Rod answered slowly.

“I wasn’t criticizing. She’s making the right decision. Nevertheless, they both have a strong feeling of guilt about you and-“ “About me?”

“About you. I don’t figure into it. If you insist on saying good-by, their guilt will come out as self-justification and self-righteousness and they will find ways to take it out on you and everybody will have a bad time. I don’t want that. You are all my family.”

“Uh, maybe you know best.”

“I didn’t get straight A’s in emotional logic and military leadership for nothing. Man is not a rational animal; he is a rationalizing animal. Now let’s see what you plan to take with you.”   She looked over his lists and equipment, then whistled softly. “Whew! Rod, I never saw so much plunder. You won’t be able to move. Who are you? Tweedledum preparing for battle, or

the White Knight?”

“Well, I was going to thin it down,” he answered uncomfortably. “I should think so!”

“Uh, Sis, what sort of gun should I carry?” “Huh? Why the deuce do you want a gun?”

“Why, for what I might run into, of course. Wild animals and things. Deacon Matson practically said that we could expect dangerous animals.”

“I doubt if he advised you to carry a gun. From his teputation, Dr. Matson is a practical man. See here, infant, on this tour you are the rabbit, trying to escape the fox. You aren’t the fox.” “What do you mean?”

“Your only purpose is to stay alive. Not to be brave, not to fight, not to dominate the wilds- but just stay breathing. One time in a hundred a gnn might save your life; the other ninety-nine it will just tempt you into folly. Oh, no doubt Matson would take one, and I would, too. But we are salted; we know when not to use one. But consider this. That test area is going to be crawling with trigger-happy young squirts. If one shoots you, it won’t matter that you have a gun, too- because you will be dead. But if you carry a gun, it makes you feel cocky; you won’t take proper cover. If you don’t have one, then you’ll know that you are the rabbit. You’ll be careful.”

“Did you take a gun on your solo test?”

“I did. And I lost it the first day. Which saved my life.” “How?”

“Because when I was caught without one I ran away from a Bessmer’s griffin instead of trying to shoot it. You savvy Bessmer’s griffin?” “Uh, Spica V?”

“Spica IV. I don’t know how much outer zoology they are teaching you kids these days-from the ignoramuses we get for recruits I’ve reached the conclusion that this new-fangled ‘functional education’ has abolished studying in favor of developing their cute little personalities.

“Why I had one girl who wanted to- never mind; the thing about the griffin is that it does not really have vital organs. Its nervous system is decentralized, even its assimilation system. To   kill it quickly you would have to grind it into hamburger. Shooting merely tickles it. But not know that; if I had had my gun I would have found out the hard way. As it was, it treed me for three days, which did my figure good and gave me time to think over the philosophy, ethics, and pragmatics of self-preservation.”

Rod did not argue, but he still had a conviction that a gun was a handy thing to have around. It made him feel good, taller, stronger and more confident, to have one slapping against his thigh. He didn’t have to use it- not unless he just had to. And he knew enough to take cover; nobody in the class could do a silent sneak the way he could. While Sis was a good soldier, still she didn’t know everything and-

But Sis was still talking. “I know how good a gun feels. It makes you bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, three meters tall and covered with hair. You’re ready for anything and kind of hoping   you’ll find it. Which is exactly what is dangerous about it-because you aren’t anything of the sort. You are a feeble, hairless embryo, remarkably easy to kill. You could carry an assault gun with two thousand meters precision range and isotope charges that will blow up a hill, but you still would not have eyes in the back of your head like a janus bird, nor be able to see in the dark like the Thetis pygmies. Death can cuddle up behind you while you are drawing a bead on something in front.”

“But, Sis, your own company carries guns.

“Guns, radar, bombs, black scopes, gas, warpers, and some things which we light-heartedly hope are secret. What of it? You aren’t going to storm a city. Buddy, sometimes I send a girl out on an infiltration patrol, object: information-go out, find out, come back alive. How do you suppose I equip her?”

“Never mind. In the first place I don’t pick an eager young recruit; I send some unkillable old-timer. She peels down to her underwear, darkens her skin if it is not dark, and goes out bare- handed and bare-footed, without so much as a fly swatter. I have yet to lose a scout that way. Helpless and unprotected you do grow eye’s in the back of your head, and your nerve ends reach out and feel everything around you. I learned that when I was a brash young j.o., from a salty trooper old enough to be my mother.”

Impressed, Rod said slowly, “Deacon Matson told us he would make us take this test bare-handed, if he could.” “Dr. Matson is a man of sense.

“Well, what would you take?”

“Test conditions again?”

Rod stated them. Captain Walker frowned. “Mmm … not much to go on. Two to ten days probably means about five. The climate won’t be hopelessly extreme. I suppose you own a Baby Bunting?”

“No, but I’ve got a combat parka suit. I thought I would carry it, then if the test area turned out not to be cold, I’d leave it at the gate. I’d hate to lose it; it weighs only half a kilo and cost quite  a bit.”

“Don’t worry about that. There is no point in being the best dressed ghost in Limbo. Okay, besides your parka I would make it four kilos of rations, five of water, two kilos of sundries like pills and matches, all in a vest pack … and a knife.”

“‘That isn’t much for five days, much less ten.”

“It is all you can carry and still be light on your feet. “Let’s see your knife, dear.”

Rod had several knives, but one was “his” knife, a lovely all-purpose one with a 21-cm. molysteel blade and a fine balance. He handed it to his sister, who cradled it lightly. “Nice!” she said, and glanced around the room.

“Over there by the outflow.”

“I see.” She whipped it past her ear, let fly, and the blade sank into the target, sung and quivered. She reached down and drew another from her boot top. “This is a good one, too.” She threw and it bit into the target a blade’s width from the first.

She retrieved both knives, stood balancing them, one on each hand. She flipped her own so that the grip was toward Rod. “This is my pet, ‘Lady Macbeth.’ I carried her on my own solo, Buddy. I want you to carry her on yours.

“You want to trade knives? All right.” Rod felt a sharp twinge at parting with “Colonel Bowie” and a feeling of dismay that some other knife might let him down. But it was not an offer that he could refuse, not from Sis.

“My very dear! I wouldn’t deprive you of your own knife, not on your solo. I want you to carry both, Buddy. You won’t starve nor die of thirst, but a spare knife may be worth its weight in thorium.”

“Gee, Sis! But I shouldn’t take your knife, either- you said you were expecting active duty. I can carry a spare of my own”

“I won’t need it. My girls haven’t let me use a knife in years. I want you to have Lady Macbeth on your test.” She removed the scabbard from her boot top, sheathed the blade; and handed it to him. “Wear it in good health, brother.”

3.      Through the Tunnel

Rod arrived at templeton gate the next morning feeling not his best. He had intended to get a good night’s sleep in preparation for his ordeal, but his sister’s arrival in conjunction with overwhelming changes in his family had defeated his intention. As with most children Rod had taken his family and home for granted; he had not thought about them much, nor placed a conscious value on them, any more than a fish treasures water. They simply were.

Now suddenly they were not.

Helen and he had talked late. She had begun to have stron~ misgivings about her decision to let him know of the c ange on the eve of his test. She had weighed it, decided. that it was the “right” thing to do, then had learned the ages-old sour truth that right and wrong can sometimes be determined only through hindsight. It had not been fair, she later concluded, to load anything else on his mind just before his test; But it had not seemed fair, either, to let him leave without knowing… to return to an empty house.

The decision was necessarily hers; she had been his guardian since earlier that same day. The papers had been signed and sealed; the court had given approval. Now she found with  a sigh that being a “parent” was not unalloyed pleasure; it was more like the soul-searching that had gone into her first duty as member of a court martial.

When she saw that her “baby” was not quieting, she had insisted that he go to bed anyhow, then had given him a long back rub, combining it with hypnotic instructions to sleep, then had gone quietly away when he seemed asleep.

But Rod had not been asleep; he had simply wanted to be alone. His mind raced like an engine with no load for the best part of an hour, niggling uselessly at the matter of his father’s illness, wondering what it was going to be like to greet them again after twenty years- why, he would be almost as old as Mum! – switching over to useless mental preparations for unknown test conditions.

At last he realized that he had to sleep- forced himself to run through mental relaxing exercises, emptying his mind and hypnotizing himself. It took longer than ever before but finally he entered a great, golden, warm cloud and was asleep.

His bed mechanism had to call him twice. He woke bleary-eyed and was still so after a needle shower. He looked in a mirror, decided that shaving did not matter where he was going and anyhow he was late-then decided to shave after all … being painfully shy about his sparse young growth.

Mum was not up, but she hardly ever got up as early as that. Dad rarely ate breakfast these days … Rod recalled why with a twinge. But he had expected Sis to show up. Glumly he opened his tray and discovered that Mum had forgotten to dial an order, something that had not happened twice in his memory. He placed his order and waited for service- another ten minutes lost.

Helen showed up as he was leaving, dressed surprisingly in a dress. “Good morning.”

“Hi, Sis. Say, you’ll have to order your own tucker. Mother didn’t and I didn’t know what you wanted.” “Oh, I had breakfast hours ago. I was waiting to see you off.”

“Oh. Well, so long. I’ve got to run, I’m late.”

“I won’t hold you up.” She came over and embraced him. “Take it easy, mate. That’s the important thing. More people have died from worry than ever bled to death. And if you do have to strike, strike low.”

“Uh, I’ll remember.”

“See that you do. I’m going to get my leave extended today so that I’ll be here when you come back.” She kissed him. “Now run.”

Dr. Matson was sitting at a desk outside the dispensary at Templeton Gate, checking names on his roll. He looked up as Rod arrived. “Why, hello, Walker. I thought maybe you had decided to be smart.”

‘I’m sorry I’m late, sir. Things happened.”

“Don’t fret about it. Knew a man once who didn’t get shot at sunrise because he overslept the appointment.” “Really? Who was he?”

“Young fellow I used to know. Myself.”

“Hunh? You really did, sir? You mean you were-“

“Not a word of truth in it. Good stories are rarely true. Get on in there and take your physical, before you get the docs irritated.”

They thumped him and x-rayed him and made a wavy pattern from his brain and did all the indignities that examining physicians do. The senior examiner listened to his heart and felt his moist hand. “Scared, son?”

“Of course I am!” Rod blurted.

“Of course you are. If you weren’t, I wouldn’t pass you. What’s that bandage on your leg?”

“Uh-” The bandage concealed Helen’s knife “Lady Macbeth.” Rod sheepishly admitted the fact. “Take it off.”

“Sir?”

“I’ve known candidates to pull dodges like that to cover up a disqualification. So let’s have a look.”

Rod started removing it; the physician let him continue until he was sure that it was a cache for a weapon and not a wound dressing. “Get your clothes on. Report to your instructor.

Rod put on his vest pack of rations and sundries, fastened his canteen under it. It was a belt canteen of flexible synthetic divided into half-litre pockets. The weight was taken by shoulder straps and a tube ran up the left suspender, ending in a nipple near his mouth, so that he might drink wit out taking it off. He planned, if possible, to stretch his meager supply through the whole test, avoiding the hazards of contaminated water and the greater hazards of the water hole- assuming that fresh water could be found at all.

He wrapped twenty meters of line, light, strong, and thin, around his waist. Shorts, overshirt, trousers, and boot moccasins completed his costume; he belted “Colonel Bowie” on outside. Dressed, he looked fleshier than he was; only his knife showed. He carried his parka suit over his left arm. It was an efficient garment, hooded, with built-in boots and gloves, and with pressure seams to let him use bare hands when necessary, but it was much too warm to wear until he needed it. Rod had learned early in the game that Eskimos don’t dare to sweat.

Dr. Matson was outside the dispensary door. “The

late Mr. Walker,” he commented, then glanced at the bulkiness of Rod’s torso. “Body armor, son?” “No, sir. Just a vest pack.” “How much penalty you carrying?”

“Eleven kilograms. Mostly water and rations.”

“Mmm . . well, it will get heavier before it gets lighter. No Handy-Dandy Young Pioneer’s Kit? No collapsible patent wigwam?” Rod blushed. “No, sir.”

“You can leave that snow suit. Ill mail it to your home.”

“Uh, thank you, sir.” Rod passed it over, adding, wasn’t sure I’d need it, but I brought it along, just in case.

“You did need it.” “Sir?”

“I’ve already flunked five for showing up without their snuggies… and four for showing up with vacuum suits. Both ways for being stupid. They ought to know that the Board would not dump them into vacuum or chlorine or such without specifying space suits in the test notice. We’re looking for graduates, not casualties. On the other hand, cold weather is within the limits of useful test conditions.”

Rod glanced at the suit he had passed over. “You’re sure I won’t need it, sir?”

“Quite. Except that you would have flunked if you hadn’t fetched it. Now bear a hand and draw whatever pig shooter you favor; the armorer is anxious to close up shop. What gun have you picked?”

Rod gulped. “Uh, I was thinking about not taking one, Deacon- I mean ‘Doctor.’”

“You can call me ‘Deacon’ to my face- ten days from now. But this notion of yours interests me. How did you reach that conclusion?” “Uh, why, you see, sir… well, my sister suggested it.”

“So? I must meet your sister. What’s her name?”

“Assault Captain Helen Walker,” Rod said proudly, “Corps of Amazons.” Matson wrote it down. “Get on in there. They are ready for the drawing.

Rod hesitated. “Sir,” he said with sudden misgiving, “if I did carry a gun, what sort would you advise?”

Matson looked disgusted. “I spend a year trying to spoonfeed you kids with stuff I learned the hard way. Comes examination and you ask me to slip you the answers. I can no more answer that than I would have been justified yesterday in telling you to bring a snow suit.”

“Sorry, sir.

“No reason why you shouldn’t ask; it’s just that I won’t answer. Let’s change the subject. This sister of yours she must be quite a girl.” “Oh, she is, sir.”

“Mmm … maybe if I had met a girl like that I wouldn’t be a cranky old bachelor now. Get in there and draw your number. Number one goes through in six minutes.”

“Yes, Doctor.” His way led him past the school armorer, who had set up a booth outside the door. The old chap was wiping off a noiseless Summerfield. Rod caught his eye. “Howdy, Guns.”

“Hi, Jack. Kind of late, aren’t you? What’ll it be?”

Rod’s eye ran over the rows of beautiful weapons. Maybe just a little needle gun with poisoned pellets . He wouldn’t have to use it .

Then he realized that Dr. Matson had answered his question, with a very broad hint. “Uh, I’m already heeled, Guns. Thanks.” “Okay. Well, good luck, and hurry back.”

“Thanks a lot.” He went into the gate room.

The seminar had numbered more than fifty students; there were about twenty waiting to take the examination. He started to look around, was stopped by a gate attendant who called out, “Over here! Draw your number.”

The lots were capsules in a bowl. Rod reached in, drew one out, and broke it open. “Number seven.” “Lucky seven! Congratulations. Your name, please.”

Rod gave his name and turned away, looking for a seat, since it appeared that he had twenty minutes or so to wait. He walked back, staring with interest at what his schoolmates deemed appropriate for survival, any and all conditions.

Johann Braun was seated with empty seats on each side of him. The reason for the empty seats crouched at his feet- a big, lean, heavily-muscled boxer dog with unfriendly eyes. Slung over Braun’s shoulder was a General Electric Thunderbolt, a shoulder model with telescopic sights and cone-of-fire control; its power pack Braun wore as a back pack. At his belt were binoculars, knife, first aid kit, and three pouches.

Rod stopped and admired the gun, wondering how much the lovely thing had cost. The dog raised his head and growled. Braun put a hand on the dog’s head. “Keep your distance,” he warned. “Thor is a one-man dog.”

Rod gave back a pace. “Yo, you are certainly equipped.”

The big blond youth gave a satisfied smile. “Thor and I are going to live off the country.” “You don’t need him, with that cannon.

“Oh, yes, I do. Thor’s my burglar alarm. With him at my side I can sleep sound. You’d be surprised at the things he can do. Thor’s smarter than most people.” “Shouldn’t wonder.”

“The Deacon gave me some guff that the two of us made a team and should go through separately. I explained to him that Thor would tear the joint apart if they tried to separate us.” Braun caressed the dog’s ears. “I’d rather team with Thor than with a platoon of Combat Pioneers.”

“Say, Yo, how about letting me try that stinger? After we come out, I mean.

“I don’t mind. It really is a honey. You can pick off a sparrow in the air as easily as you can drop a moose at a thousand meters. Say, you’re making Thor nervous. See you later.”

Rod took the hint, moved on and sat down. He looked around, having in mind that he might still arrange a survival team. Near the shuttered arch of the gateway there was a priest with a boy kneeling in front of him, with four others waiting.

The boy who had been receiving the blessing stood up- and Rod stood up hastily. “Hey! Jimmy!”

Jimmy Throxton looked around, caught his eye and grinned, hurried over. “Rod!” he said, “I thought you had ducked out on me. Look, you haven’t teamed?” “Still want to?”

“Huh? Sure.”

“Swell! I can declare the team as I go through as long as you don’t have number two. You don’t, do you?” “No”

“Good! Because I’m-“

“NUMBER ONE!” the gate attendant called out. “‘Throxton, James.’”

Jimmy Throxton looked startled. “Oh, gee!” He hitched at his gun belt and turned quickly away, then called over his shoulder, “See you on the other side!” He trotted toward the gate, now unshuttered.

Rod called out, “Hey, Jimmy! How are we going to find-” But it was too late. Well, if Jimmy had sense enough to drive nails, he would keep an eye on the exit.

“Number two! Mshiyeni, Caroline.” Across the room the big Zulu girl who had occurred to Rod as a possible team mate got up and headed for the gate. She was dressed simply in shirt and shorts, with her feet and legs and hands bare. She did not appear to be armed but she was carrying an overnight bag.

Someone called out, “Hey, Carol! What you got in the trunk?” She threw him a grin. “Rocks.”

“Ham sandwiches, I’ll bet. Save me one. “I’ll save you a rock, sweetheart.”

Too soon the attendant called out, “Number seven- Walker, Roderick L.”

Rod went quickly to the gate. The attendant shoved a paper into his hand, then shook hands. “Good luck, kid. Keep your eyes open.” He gave Rod a slap on the back that urged him through the opening, dilated to man size.

Rod found himself on the other side and, to his surprise, still indoors. But that shock was not as great as immediate unsteadiness and nausea; the gravity acceleration was much less than earth-normal.

He fought to keep from throwing up and tried to figure things out. Where was he? On Luna? On one of Jupiter’s moons? Or somewhere ‘way out there?

The Moon, most likely- Luna. Many of the longer jumps were relayed through Luna because of the danger of mixing with a primary, particularly with binaries. But surely they weren’t going to leave him here; Matson had promised them no airless test areas.

On the floor lay an open valise; he recognized it absent-mindedly as the one Caroline had been carrying. At last he remembered to look at the paper he had been handed.  It read:

SOLO SURVIVAL TEST-Recall Instructions

  1. You must pass through the door ahead in the three minutes allowed you before another candidate is started through. An overlapping delay will disqualify you.
  2. Recall will be by standard visual and sound signals. You are warned that the area remains hazardous even after recall is sounded.
  3. The exit gate will not be the entrance gate. Exit may be as much as twenty kilometers in the direction of sunrise.
  4. There is no truce zone outside the gate. Test starts at once. Watch out for stobor. Good luck!

-B. P.M.

Rod was still gulping at low gravity and staring at the paper when a door opened at the far end of the long, narrow room he was in. Aman shouted, “Hurry up! You’ll lose your place.”

Rod tried to hurry, staggered and then recovered too much and almost fell. He had experienced low gravity on field trips and his family had once vacationed on Luna, but he was not used to it; with difficulty he managed to skate toward the far door.

Beyond the door was another gate room. The attendant glanced at the timer over the gate and said, “Twenty seconds. Give me that instruction sheet.”

Rod hung onto it. “I’ll use the twenty seconds.”-as much as twenty kilometers in the direction of sunrise. Anominal eastward direction-call it “east.” But what the deuce was, or were, “stobor”?

“Time! Through you go.” The attendant snatched the paper, shutters rolled back, and Rod was shoved through a dilated gate.

He fell to his hands and knees; the gravity beyond was something close to earth-normal and the change had caught him unprepared. But he stayed down, held perfectly still and made no sound while he quickly looked around him. He was in a wide clearing covered with high grass and containing scattered trees and bushes; beyond was dense forest.

He twisted his neck in a hasty survey. Earth-type planet, near normal acceleration, probably a G-type sun in the sky … heavy vegetation, no fauna in sight- but that didn’t mean anything; there might be hundreds within hearing. Even a stobor, whatever that was.

The gate was behind him, tall dark-green shutters which were in reality a long way off. They stood unsupported in the tall grass, an anomalism unrelated to the primitive scene. Rod considered wriggling around behind the gate, knowing that the tangency was one-sided and that he would be able to see through the locus from the other side, see anyone who came out without himself being seen.

Which reminded him that he himself could be seen from that exceptional point; he decided to move.

Where was Jimmy? Jimmy ought to be behind the gate, watching for him to come out… or watching from some other spy point. The only certain method of rendezvous was for Jimmy to have waited for Rod’s appearance; Rod had no way to find him now.

Rod looked around more slowly and tried to spot anything that might give a hint as to Jimmy’s whereabouts. Nothing … but when his scanning came back to the gate, the gate was no longer there.

Rod felt cold ripple of adrenalin shock trickle down his back and out his finger tips. He forced himself to quiet down and told himself that it was better this way. He had a theory to account for the disappearance of the gate; they were, he decided, refocusing it between each pair of students, scattering them possibly kilometers apart.

No, that could not be true- “twenty kilometers toward sunrise” had to relate to a small area.

Or did it? He reminded himself that the orientation given in the sheet handed him might not be that which appeared in some other student’s instruction sheet. He relaxed to the fact that he did not really know anything… he did not know where he was, nor where Jimmy was, nor any other member of the class, he did not know what he might find here, save that it was a place where a man might stay alive if he were smart- and lucky.

Just now his business was to stay alive, for a period that he might as well figure as ten Earth days. He wiped Jimmy Throxton out of his mind, wiped out everything but the necessity of remaining unceasingly alert to all of his surroundings. He noted wind direction as shown by grass plumes and started crawling cautiously down wind.

The decision to go down wind had been difficult. To go up wind had been his first thought, that being the natural direction for a stalk. But his sister’s advice had already paid off; he felt naked and helpless without a gun and it had reminded him that he was not the hunter. His scent would carry in any case; if he went down wind he stood a chance of seeing what might be stalking him, while his unguarded rear would be comparatively safe.

Something ahead in the grass!

He froze and watched. It had been the tiniest movement; he waited. There it was again, moving slowly from right to left across his front. It looked like a dark spike with a tuft of hair on the tip, a tail possibly, carried aloft.

He never saw what manner of creature owned the tail, if it was a tail. It stopped suddenly at a point Rod judged to be directly down wind, then moved off rapidly and he lost Sight of it. He waited a few minutes, then resumed crawling.

It was extremely hot work and sweat poured down him and soaked his overshirt and trousers. He began to want a drink very badly but reminded himself that five litres of water would not last long if he started drinking the first hour of the test. The sky was overcast with high cirrus haze, but the primary or “sun”- he decided to call it the Sun- seemed to burn through fiercely. It was low in the sky behind him; he wondered what it would be like overhead? Kill a man, maybe. Oh, well, it would be cooler in that forest ahead, or at least not be the same chance of sunstroke.

There was lower ground ahead of him and hawklike birds were circling above the spot, round and round. He held still and watched. Brothers, he said softly, if you are behaving like vultures back home, there is something dead ahead of me and you are waiting to make sure it stays dead before you drop in for lunch. If so, I had better swing wide, for it is bound to attract other things… some of which I might not want to meet.

He started easing to the right, quartering the light breeze. It took him onto higher ground and close to a rock outcropping. Rod decided to spy out what was in the lower place below, making use of cover to let him reach an overhanging rock.

It looked mightily like a man on the ground and a child near him. Rod reached, fumbled in his vest pack, got out a tiny 8-power monocular, took a better look. The man was Johann Braun, the “child” was his boxer dog. There was no doubt but that they were dead, for Braun was lying like a tossed rag doll, with his head twisted around and one leg bent under. His throat and the side of his head were a dark red stain.

While Rod watched, a doglike creature trotted out, sniffed at the boxer, and began tearing at it … then the first of the buzzard creatures landed to join the feast. Rod took the glass from his eye, feeling queasy. Old Yo had not lasted long- jumped by a “stobor” maybe- and his smart dog had not saved him. Too bad! But it did prove that there were carnivores around and it behooved him to be careful if he did not want to have jackals and vultures arguing over the leavings!

He remembered something and put the glass back to his eye. Yo’s proud Thunderbolt gun was nowhere in sight and the corpse was not wearing the power pack that energized it. Rod gave a low whistle in his mind and thought. The only animal who would bother to steal a gun ran around on two legs. Rod reminded himself that a Thunderbolt could kill at almost any line-of-sight range- and now somebody had it who obviously took advantage of the absence of law and order in a survival test area.

Well, the only thing to do was not to be in line of sight. He backed off the rock and slid into the bushes.

The forest had appeared to be two kilometers away, or less, when he had started. He was close to it when he became uncomfortably aware that sunset was almost upon him. He  became less cautious, more hurried, as he planned to spend the night in a tree. This called for light to climb by, since he relished a night on the ground inside the forest still less than he liked the idea of crouching helpless in the grass.

It had not taken all day to crawl this far. Although it had been morning when he had left Templeton Gate the time of day there had nothing to do with the time of day here. He had been shoved through into late afternoon; it was dusk when he reached the tall trees.

So dusky that he decided that he must accept a calculated risk for what he must do. He stopped at the edge of the forest, still in the high grass, and dug into his pack for his climbers. His sister had caused him to leave behind most of the gadgets, gimmicks, and special-purpose devices that he had considered bringing; she had not argued at these. They were climbing spikes of a style basically old, but refined, made small and light-the pair weighed less than a tenth of a kilogram- and made foldable and compact, from a titanium alloy, hard and strong.

He unfolded them, snapped them under his arches and around his shins, and locked them in place. Then he eyed the tree he had picked, a tall giant deep enough in the mass to allow the possibility of crossing to another tree if the odds made a back-door departure safer and having a trunk which, in spite of its height, he felt sure he could get his arms around.

Having picked his route, he straightened up and at a fast dogtrot headed for the nearest tree. He went past it, cut left for another tree, passed it and cut right toward the tree he wanted. He was about fifteen meters from it when something charged him.

He closed the gap with instantaneous apportation which would have done credit to a Ramsbotham hyperfold. He reached the first branch, ten meters above ground, in what amounted to levitation. From there on he climbed more conventionally, digging the spurs into the tree’s smooth bark and setting his feet more comfortably on branches when they began to be close enough together to form a ladder.

About twenty meters above ground he stopped and looked down. The branches interfered and it was darker under the trees than it had been out in the open; nevertheless he could see, prowling around the tree, the denizen that had favored him with attention.

Rod tried to get a better view, but the light was failing rapidly. But it looked like… well, if he had not been certain that he was on some uncolonized planet ‘way out behind and beyond, he would have said that it was a lion.

Except that it looked eight times as big as any lion ought to look.

He hoped that, whatever it was, it could not climb trees. Oh, quit fretting, Rod!- if it had been able to climb you would have been lunch meat five minutes ago. Get busy and rig a place to sleep before it gets pitch dark. He moved up the tree, keeping an eye out for the spot he needed.

He found it presently, just as he was beginning to think that he would have to go farther down. He needed two stout branches far enough apart and near enough the same level to let him stretch a hammock. Having found such, he worked quickly to beat the failing light. From a pocket of his vest pack he took out his hammock, a web strong as spider silk and almost as   thin and light. Using the line around his waist he stretched it, made sure his lashings would hold and then started to get into it.

Adouble-jointed acrobat with prehensile toes might have found it easy; a slack-wire artist would simply have walked into it and sat down. But Rod found that he needed sky hooks. He almost fell out of the tree.

The hammock was a practical piece of equipment and Rod had slept in it before. His sister had approved it, remarking that it was a better model than the field hammock they gave her girls. “Just don’t sit up in your sleep.”

“I won’t,” Rod had assured her. “Anyway, I always fasten the chest belt.”

But he had never slung it in this fashion. There was nothing to stand on under the hammock, no tree limb above it close enough to let him chin himself into it. After several awkward and breath-catching attempts he began to wonder whether he should perch like a bird the rest of the night, or drape himself in the notch of a limb. He did not consider spending the night on the ground- not with that thing prowling around.

There was another limb higher up almost directly over the hammock. Maybe if he tossed the end of his line over it and used it to steady himself …

He tried it. But it was almost pitch dark now; the only reason he did not lose his line was that one end was bent to the hammock. At last he gave up and made one more attempt to crawl into the hammock by main force and extreme care. Bracing both hands wide on each side of the head rope he scooted his feet out slowly and cautiously. Presently he had his legs inside the hammock, then his buttocks. From there on it was a matter of keeping his center of gravity low and making no sudden moves while he insinuated his body farther down into the  cocoon.

At last he could feel himself fully and firmly supported. He took a deep breath, sighed, and let himself relax. It was the first time he had felt either safe or comfortable since passing through the gate.

After a few minutes of delicious rest Rod located the nipple of his canteen and allowed himself two swallows of water, after which he prepared supper. This consisted in digging out a quarter-kilo brick of field ration, eleven hundred calories of yeast protein, fat, starch, and glucose, plus trace requirements. The label on it, invisible in the dark, certified that it was “tasty, tempting and pleasing in texture,” whereas chewing an old shoe would have attracted a gourmet quite as much.

But real hunger gave Rod the best of sauces. He did not let any crumb escape and ended by licking the wrapper. He thought about opening another one, quelled the longing, allowed himself one more mouthful of water, then pulled the insect hood of the hammock down over his face and fastened it under the chest belt. He was immune to most insect-carried Terran diseases and was comfortably aware that humans were not subject to most Outlands diseases, but he did not want the night fliers to use his face as a drinking fountain, nor even as a parade ground.

He was too hot even in his light clothing. He considered shucking down to his shorts; this planet, or this part of this planet, seemed quite tropical. But it was awkward; tonight he must stay as he was, even if it meant wasting a day’s ration of water in sweat. He wondered what planet this was, then tried to peer through the roof of the forest to see if he could recognize stars. But either the trees were impenetrable or the sky was overcast; he could see nothing. He attempted to draw everything out of his mind and sleep.

Ten minutes later he was wider awake than ever. Busy with his hammock, busy with his dinner, he had not paid attention to distant sounds; now he became aware of all the voices of the night. Insects buzzed and sang and strummed, foliage rustled and whispered, something coughed below him. The cough was answered by insane laughter that ran raggedly up, then down, and died in asthmatic choking.

Rod hoped that it was a bird.

He found himself straining to hear every sound, near and far, holding his breath. He told himself angrily to stop it; he was safe from at least nine-tenths of potential enemies. Even a

snake, if this place ran to such, would be unlikely to crawl out to the hammock, still less likely to attack- if he held still. Snakes, button-brained as they were, showed little interest in anything too big to swalow. The chances of anything big enough to hurt him-and interested in hurting him- being in this treetop were slim. So forget those funny noises, pal, and go to sleep. After all, they’re no more important than traffic noises in a city.

He reminded himself of the Deacon’s lecture on alarm reaction, the thesis that most forms of death could be traced to the body’s coming too urgently to battle stations, remaining too long at full alert. Or, as his sister had put it, more people worry themselves to death than bleed to death. He set himself conscientiously to running through the mental routines intended to produce sleep.

He almost made it. The sound that pulled him out of warm drowsiness came from far away; involuntarily he roused himself to hear it. It sounded almost human… no, it was human-the terrible sound of a grown man crying with heartbreak, the deep, retching, bass sobs that tear the chest.

Rod wondered what he ought to do. It was none of his business and everyone there was on his own-but it went against the grain to hear such agony from a fellow human and ignore it. Should he climb down and feel his way through the dark to wherever the poor wretch was? Stumbling into tree roots, he reminded himself, and falling into holes and maybe walking straight into the jaws of something hungry and big.

Well, should he? Did he have any right not to?

It was solved for him by the sobs being answered by more sobs, this time closer and much louder. This new voice did not sound human, much as it was like the first, and it scared him almost out of his hammock. The chest strap saved him.

The second voice was joined by a third, farther away. In a few moments the peace of the night had changed to sobbing, howling ululation of mass fear and agony and defeat unbearable. Rod knew now that this was nothing human, nor anything he had ever heard, or heard of, before. He suddenly had a deep conviction that these were the stobor he had been warned to avoid.

But what were they? How was he to avoid them? The one closest seemed to be higher up than he was and no farther than the next tree … good grief, it might even be this tree! When you meet a stobor in the dark what do you do? Spit in its face? Or ask it to waltz?

One thing was certain: anything that made that much noise in the jungle was not afraid of anything; therefore it behooved him to be afraid of it. But, there being nothing he could do, Rod lay quiet, his fear evidenced only by tense muscles, gooseflesh, and cold sweat. The hellish concert continued with the “stobor” closest to him sounding almost in his pocket. It seemed to have moved closer.

With just a bit more prodding Rod would have been ready to sprout wings and fly. Only at home on the North American continent of Terra had he ever spent a night alone in the wilderness. There the hazards were known and minor … a few predictable bears, an occasional lazy rattlesnake, dangers easily avoided.

But how could he guard against the utterly unknown? That stobor- he decided that he might as well call it that- that stobor might be moving toward him now, sizing him up with night eyes, deciding whether to drag him home, or eat him where it killed him.

Should he move? And maybe move right into the fangs of the stobor? Or should he wait, helpless, for the stobor to pounce? It was possible that the stobor could not attack him in the tree. But it was equally possible that stobor were completely arboreal and his one chance lay in climbing down quickly and spending the night on the ground.

What was a stobor? How did it fight? Where and when was it dangerous? The Deacon evidently expected the class to know what to do about them. Maybe they had studied the stobor those days he was out of school right after New Year’s? Or maybe he had just plain forgotten… and would pay for it with his skin. Rod was good at Outlands zoology-but there was just too much to learn it all. Why, the zoology of Terra alone used to give oldstyle zoologists more than they could handle; how could they expect him to soak up all there was to learn about dozens of planets?

It wasn’t fair!

When Rod heard himself think that ancient and useless protest he had a sudden vision of the Deacon’s kindly, cynical smile. He heard his dry drawl: Fair? You expected this to be fair, son? This is not a game. I tried to tell you that you were a city boy, too soft and stupid for this. You would not listen.

He felt a gust of anger at his instructor; it drove fear out of his mind. Jimmy was right; the Deacon would eat his own grandmother! Acold, heartless fish! All right, what would the Deacon do?

Again he heard his teacher’s voice inside his head, an answer Matson had once given to a question put by another classmate: “There wasn’t anything I could do, so I took a nap.

Rod squirmed around, rested his hand on “Colonel Bowie” and tried to take a nap. The unholy chorus made it almost impossible, but he did decide that the stobor in his tree- or was it the next tree?- did not seem to be coming closer. Not that it could come much closer without breathing on his neck, but at least it did not seem disposed to attack.

After a long time he fell into restless sleep, sleep that was no improvement, for he dreamed that he had a ring of sobbing, ululating stobor around him, staring at him, waiting for him to move. But he was trussed up tight and could not move.

The worst of it was that every time he turned his head to see what a stobor looked like it would fade back into the dark, giving him just a hint of red eyes, long teeth. He woke with an icy shock, tried to sit up, found himself restrained by his chest strap, forced himself to lie back. What was it? What had happened?

In his suddenly-awakened state it took time to realize what had happened: the noise had stopped. He could not hear the cry of a single stobor, near or far. Rod found it more disturbing than their clamor, since a noisy stobor advertised its location whereas a silent one could be anywhere- why, the nearest one could now be sitting on the branch behind his head. He twisted his head around, pulled the insect netting off his face to see better. But it was too dark; stobor might be queued up three abreast for all he could tell.

Nevertheless the silence was a great relief. Rod felt himself relax as he listened to the other night sounds, noises that seemed almost friendly after that devils’ choir. He decided that it must be almost morning and that he would do well to stay awake.

Presently he was asleep.

He awoke with the certainty that someone was looking at him. When he realized where he was and that it was still dark, he decided that it was a dream. He stirred, looked around, and tried to go back to sleep.

Something was looking at him!

His eyes, made sensitive by darkness, saw the thing as a vague shape on the branch at his foot. Black on black, he could not make out its outline- but two faintly luminous eyes stared unwinkingly back into his.

“-nothing I could do, so I took a nap.” Rod did not take a nap. For a time measured in eons he and the thing in the tree locked eyes. Rod tightened his grip on his knife and held still, tried to quell the noise of his pounding heart, tried to figure out how he could fight back from a hammock. The beast did not move, made no sound; it simply stared and seemed prepared to  do it all night.

When the ordeal had gone on so long that Rod felt a mounting impulse to shout and get it over, the creature moved with light scratching sounds toward the trunk and was gone. Rod could feel the branch shift; he judged that the beast must weigh as much as he did.

Again he resolved to stay awake. Wasn’t it getting less dark? He tried to tell himself so, but he still could not see his own fingers. He decided to count to ten thousand and bring on the dawn.

Something large went down the tree very fast, followed at once by another, and still a third. They did not stop at Rod’s bedroom but went straight down the trunk. Rod put his knife back and muttered, “Noisy neighbors! You’d think this was Emigrants’ Gap.” He waited but the frantic procession never came back.

He was awakened by sunlight in his face. It made him sneeze; he tried to sit up, was caught by his safety belt, became wide awake and regretted it. His nose was stopped up, his eyes burned, his mouth tasted like a ditch, his teeth were slimy, and his back ached. When he moved to ease it he found that his legs ached, too- and his arms- and his head. His neck refused to turn to the right.

Nevertheless he felt happy that the long night was gone. His surroundings were no longer terrifying, but almost idyllic. So high up that he could not see the ground he was still well below the roof of the jungle and could not see sky; he floated in a leafly cloud. The morning ray that brushed his face was alone, so thoroughly did trees shut out the sky.

This reminded him that he had to mark the direction of sunrise. Hmm … not too simple. Would he be able to see the sun from the floor of the jungle? Maybe he should climb down quickly, get out in the open, and mark the direction while the sun was still Jow. But he noticed that the shaft which had wakened him was framed by a limb notch of another forest giant about fifteen meters away. Very well, that tree was “east” of his tree; he could line them up again when he reached the ground.

Getting out of his hammock was almost as hard as getting in; sore muscles resented the effort. At last he was balanced precariously on one limb. He crawled to the trunk, pulled himself painfully erect and, steadied by the trunk, took half-hearted setting-up exercises to work the knots out. Everything loosened up but his neck, which still had a crick like a toothache.

He ate and drank sitting on the limb with his back to the trunk. He kept no special lookout, rationalizing that night feeders would be bedded down and day feeders would hardly be prowling the tree tops-not big ones, anyway; they would be on the ground, stalking herbivores. The truth was that his green hide-away looked too peaceful to be dangerous.

He continued to sit after he finished eating, considered drinking more of his precious water, even considered crawling back into his hammock. Despite the longest night he had ever had he was bone tired and the day was already hot and sleepy and humid; why not stretch out? His only purpose was to survive; how better than by sleeping and thereby saving food and water?

He might have done so had he known what time it was. His watch told him that it was five minutes before twelve, but he could not make up his mind whether that was noon on Sunday or midnight coming into Monday. He was sure that this planet spun much more slowly than did Mother Earth; the night before had been at least as long as a full Earth day.

Therefore the test had been going on at least twentysix hours and possibly thirty-eight- and recall could be any time after forty-eight hours. Why, it might be today, before sunset, and here he was in fine shape, still alive, still with food and water he could trust.

He felt good about it. What did a stobor have that a man did not have more of and better? Aside from a loud voice, he added.

But the exit gate might be as much as twenty kilometers “east” of where he had come in; therefore it behooved him to reach quickly a point ten kilometers east of where he had come in; he would lay money that that would land him within a kilometer or two of the exit. Move along, hole up, and wait- why, he might sleep at home tonight, after a hot bath!

He started unlashing his hammock while reminding himself that he must keep track of hours between sunrise and sunset today in order to estimate the length of the local day. Then he thought no more about it as he had trouble folding the hammock. It had to be packed carefully to fit into a pocket of his vest pack. The filmy stuff should have been spread on a table, but where he was the largest, flattest area was the palm of his hand.

But he got it done, lumpy but packed, and started down. He paused on the lowest branch, looked around. The oversized and hungry thing that had chased him up the tree did not seem to be around, but the undergrowth was too dense for him to be sure. He made a note that he must, all day long and every day, keep a climbable tree in mind not too far away; a few seconds woolgathering might use up his luck.

Okay, now for orientation- Let’s see, there was the tree he had used to mark “east.” Or was it? Could it be that one over there? He realized that he did not know and swore at himself for not checking it by compass. The truth was that he had forgotten that he was carrying a compass. He got it out now, but it told him nothing,

Since east by compass bore no necessary relation to direction of sunrise on this planet. The rays of the primary did not penetrate where he was; the forest was bathed by a dim religious light unmarked by shadows.

Well, the clearing could not be far away. He would just have to check. He descended by climbing spurs, dropped to spongy ground, and headed the way it should be. He counted his paces while keeping an eye peeled for hostiles.

One hundred paces later he turned back, retracing his own spoor. He found “his” tree; this time he examined it. There was where he had come down; he could see his prints. Which side had he gone up? There should be spur marks.

He found them … and was amazed at his own feat; they started high as his head. “I must have hit that trunk like a cat!” But it showed the direction from which he had come; five minutes later he was at the edge of the open country he had crossed the day before.

The sun made shadows here, which straightened him out and he checked by compass. By luck, east was “east” and he need only follow his compass. It took him back into the forest. He traveled standing up. The belly sneak which he had used the day before was not needed here; he depended on moving noiselessly, using cover, and keeping an eye out behind as

well as in front. He zigzagged in order to stay close to trees neither too big ilor too small but corrected his course frequently by compass.

One part of his mind counted paces. At fifteen hundred broken-country steps to a kilometer Rod figured that fifteen thousand should bring him to his best-guess location for the exit gate, where he planned to set up housekeeping until recall.

But, even with part of his mind counting paces and watching a compass and a much larger part watching for carnivores, snakes, and other hazards, Rod still could enjoy the day and place. He was over his jitters of the night before, feeling good and rather cocky. Even though he tried to be fully alert, the place did not feel dangerous now-stobor or no stobor.

It was, he decided, jungle of semi-rainforest type, not dense enough to require chopping one’s way. It was interlaced with game paths but he avoided these on the assumption that carnivores might lie waiting for lunch to come down the path-Rod had no wish to volunteer.

The place seemed thick with game, mostly of antelope type in many sizes and shapes. They were hard to spot; they faded into the bush with natural camouflage, but the glimpses he got convinced him that they were plentiful. He avoided them as he was not hunting and was aware that even a vegetarian could be dangerous with hooves and horns in self or herd defense.

The world above was inhabited, too, with birds and climbers. He spotted families of what looked like monkeys and speculated that this world would probably have developed its own race of humanoids. He wondered again what planet it was? Terrestrial to several decimal places it certainly seemed to be-except for the inconveniently long day- and probably one just   opened, or it would be swarming with colonists. It would be a premium planet certainly; that clearing he had come through yesterday would make good farm land once it was burned off. Maybe he would come back some day and help clean out the stobor.

In the meantime he watched where he put his hands and feet, never walked under a low branch without checking it, and tried to make his eyes and ears as efficient as a rabbit’s. He understood now what his sister had meant about how being unarmed makes a person careful, and realized also how little chance he would have to use a gun if he let himself be surprised.

It was this hyperacuteness that made him decide that he was being stalked.

At first it was just uneasiness, then it became a conviction. Several times he waited by a tree, stood frozen and listened; twice he did a sneak through bushes and doubled back on his tracks. But whatever it was seemed as good as he was at silent movement and taking cover and (he had to admit) a notch better.

He thought about taking to the trees and outwaiting it. But his wish to reach his objective outweighed his caution; he convinced himself that he would be safer if he pushed on. He continued to pay special attention to his rear, but after a while he decided that he was no longer being followed.

When he had covered, by his estimate, four kilometers, he began to smell water. He came to a ravine which sliced across his route. Game tracks led him to think it might lead down to a watering place, just the sort of danger area he wished to avoid, so Rod crossed quickly and went down the shoulder of the ravine instead. It led to a bank overlooking water; he could hear the stream before he reached it.

He took to the bushes and moved on his belly to a point where he could peer out from cover. He was about ten meters higher than the water. The ground dropped off on his right as well  as in front; there the ravine joined the stream and an eddy pool formed the watering place he had expected. No animals were in sight but there was plenty of sign; a mud flat was chewed with hoof marks.

But he had no intention of drinking where it was easy; would be too easy to die there. What troubled him was that he must cross the stream to reach the probable recall area. It was a small river or wide brook, not too wide to swim, probably not too deep to wade if he picked his spot. But he would not do either one unless forced- and not then without testing the water by chucking a lure into it … a freshly killed animal. The streams near his home were safe, but a tropical stream must be assumed to have local versions of alligator, pirahna, or even worse.

The stream was too wide to cross through the tree tops. He lay still and considered the problem, then decided that he would work his way upstream and hope that it would narrow, or split into two smaller streams which he could tackle one at a time.

It was the last thing he thought about for some time.

When Rod regained consciousness it was quickly; a jackal-like creature was sniffing at him. Rod lashed out with one hand and reached for his knife with the other. The dog brute backed away, snarling, then disappeared in the leaves.

His knife was gone! The realization brought him groggily alert; he sat up. It made his head swim and hurt. He felt it and his fingers came away bloody. Further gingerly investigation showed a big and very tender swelling on the back of his skull, hair matted with blood, and failed to tell him whether or not his skull was fractured. He gave no thanks that he had been left alive; he was sure that the blow had been intended to kill.

But not only his knife was gone. He was naked, save for his shorts. Gone were his precious water, his vest pack with rations and a dozen other invaluable articles- his antibiotics, his salt, his compass, his climbers, his matches, his hammock … everything.

His first feeling of sick dismay was replaced by anger. Losing food and gear was no more than to be expected, since he had been such a fool as to forget his rear while he looked at the stream- but taking the watch his father had given him, that was stealing; he would make somebody pay for that!

His anger made him feel better. It was not until then that he noticed that the bandage on his left shin was undisturbed.

He felt it. Sure enough! Whoever it was who had hijacked him had not considered a bandage worth stealing; Rod unwrapped it and cradled Lady Macbeth in his hand. Somebody was going to be sorry.

4.      Savage

Rod Walker was crouching on a tree limb. He had not moved for two hours, he might not move for as long a time. In a clearing near him a small herd of yearling bachelor buck were cropping grass; if one came close enough Rod intended to dine on buck. He was very hungry.

He was thirsty, too, not having drunk that day. Besides that, he was slightly feverish. Three long, imperfectly healed scratches on his left arm accounted for the fever, but Rod paid fever and scratches no attention – he was alive; he planned to stay alive.

Abuck moved closer to him; Rod became quiveringly alert. But the little buck tossed his head, looked at the branch, and moved away. He did not appear to see Rod; perhaps his mother had taught him to be careful of overhanging branches-or perhaps a hundred thousand generations of harsh survival had printed it in his genes.

Rod swore under his breath and lay still. One of them was bound to make a mistake eventually; then he would eat. It had been days since he had thought about anything but food … food and how to keep his skin intact, how to drink without laying himself open to ambush, how to sleep without waking up in a fellow-denizen’s belly.

The healing wounds on his arm marked how expensive his tuition had been. He had let himself get too far from a tree once too often, had not even had time to draw his knife. Instead he had made an impossible leap and had chinned himself with the wounded arm. The thing that had clawed him he believed to be the same sort as the creature that had treed him the day of his arrival; furthermore he believed it to be a lion. He had a theory about that, but had not yet been able to act on it.

He was gaunt almost to emaciation and had lost track of time. He realized that the time limit of the survival test had probably- almost certainly- passed, but he did not know how long he had lain in the crotch of a tree, waiting for his arm to heal, nor exactly how long it had been since he had come down, forced by thirst and hunger. He supposed that the recall signal had probably been given during one of his unconscious periods, but he did not worry nor even think about it. He was no longer interested in survival tests; he was interested in survival.

Despite his weakened condition his chances were better now than when he had arrived. He was becoming sophisticated, no longer afraid of things he had been afraid of, most acutely wary of others which had seemed harrnless. The creatures with the ungodly voices which he had dubbed “stobor” no longer fretted him; he had seen one, had disturbed it by accident in daylight and it had given voice. It was not as big as his hand, and reminded him of a horned lizard except that it had the habits of a tree toad. Its one talent was its voice; it could blow up a bladder at its neck to three times its own size, then give out with that amazing, frightening sob.

But that was all it could do.

Rod had guessed that it was a love call, then had filed the matter. He still called them “stobor.”

He had learned about a forest vine much like a morning glory, but its leaves carried a sting worse than that of a nettle, toxic and producing numbness. Another vine had large grape-like fruits, deliciously tempting and pleasant to the palate; Rod had learned the hard way that they were a powerful purgative.

He knew, from his own narrow brushes and from kills left half-eaten on the ground, that there were carnivores around even though he had never had a good look at one. So far as he knew there were no carnivorous tree-climbers large enough to tackle a man, but he could not be certain; he slept with one eye open.

The behavior of this herd caused him to suspect that there must be carnivores that hunted as he was now hunting, even though he had had the good fortune not to tangle with one. The little buck had wandered all over the clearing, passed close by lesser trees, yet no one of them had grazed under the tree Rod was in.

Steady, boy … here comes one. Rod felt the grip of “Lady Macbeth,” got ready to drop onto the graceful little creature as it passed under. But five meters away it hesitated, seemed to realize that it was straying from its mates, and started to turn.

Rod let fly.

He could hear the meaty tunk! as blade bit into muscle; he could see the hilt firm against the shoulder of the buck. He dropped to the ground, hit running and moved in to finish the kill. The buck whipped its head up, turned and fled. Rod dived, did not touch it. When he rolled to his feet the clearing was empty. His mind was filled with bitter thoughts; he had promised

himself never to throw his knife when there was any possibility of not being able to recover it, but he did not let regrets slow him; he got to work on the tracking problem.

Rod had been taught the first law of hunting sportsmanship, that a wounded animal must always be tracked down and finished, not left to suffer and die slowly. But there was no trace of “sportsmanship” in his present conduct; he undertook to track the buck because he intended to eat it, and-much more urgently- because he had to recover that knife in order to stay alive.

The buck had not bled at once and its tracks were mixed up with hundreds of other tracks. Rod returned three times to the clearing and started over before he picked up the first blood spoor. After that it was easier but he was far behind now and the stampeded buck moved much faster than he could track. His quarry stayed with the herd until it stopped in a new pasture a half kilometer away. Rod stopped still in cover and looked them over. His quarry did not seem to be among them.

But blood sign led in among them; he followed it and they stampeded again. He had trouble picking it up; when he did he found that it led into brush instead of following the herd. This made it easier and harder- easier because he no longer had to sort one spoor from many, harder because pushing through the brush was hard in itself and much more dangerous, since he must never forget that he himself was hunted as well as hunter, and lastly because the signs were so much harder to spot there. But it cheered him up, knowing that only a weakened animal would leave the herd and try to hide. He expected to find it down before long.

But the beast did not drop; it seemed to have a will to live as strong as his own. He followed it endlessly and was beginning to wonder what he would do if it grew dark before the buck gave up. He had to have that knife.

He suddenly saw that there were two spoors.

Something had stepped beside a fresh, split-hooved track of the little antelope; something had stepped on a drop of blood. Quivering, his subconscious “bush radar” at full power, Rod moved silently forward. He found new marks again … a man!

The print of a shod human foot- and so wild had he become that it gave him no feeling of relief; it made him more wary than ever.

Twenty minutes later he found them, the human and the buck. The buck was down, having died or perhaps been finished off by the second stalker. The human, whom Rod judged to be  a boy somewhat younger and smaller than himself, was kneeling over it, slicing its belly open. Rod faded back into the bush. From there he watched and thought. The other hunter seemed much preoccupied with the kill … and that tree hung over the place where the butchering was going on-

Afew minutes later Rod was again on a branch, without a knife but with a long thorn held in his teeth. He looked down, saw that his rival was almost under him, and transferred the thorn to his right hand. Then he waited.

The hunter below him laid the knife aside and bent to turn the carcass. Rod dropped.

He felt body armor which had been concealed by his victim’s shirt. Instantly he transferred his attention to the bare neck, pushing the thorn firmly against vertebrae. “Hold still or you’ve had it!”

The body under him suddenly quit struggling. “That’s better,” Rod said approvingly. “Cry pax?”

No answer. Rod jabbed the thorn again. “I’m not playing games, he said harshly. “I’m giving you one chance stay alive. Cry pax and mean it, and well both eat. Give me any trouble and you’ll never eat again. It doesn’t make the least difference.”

There was a moments hesitation, then a muffled voice said, “Pax.”

Keeping the thorn pressed against his prisoner’s neck, Rod reached out for the knife which had been used to gut the buck. It was, he saw, his own Lady Macbeth. He sheathed it, felt around under the body he rested on, found another where he expected it, pulled it and kept in his hand. He chucked away the thorn and stood up. “You can get up.”

The youngster got up and faced him sullenly. “Give me my knife.” “Later … if you are a good boy.”

“I said ‘Pax.’”

“So you did. Turn around, I want to make sure you don’t have a gun on you.” “I left- I’ve nothing but my knife. Give it to me.”

“Left it where?”

The kid did not answer. Rod said, “Okay, turn around,” and threatened with the borrowed knife. He was obeyed. Rod quickly patted all the likely hiding places, confirmed that the youngster was wearing armor under clothes and over the entire torso. Rod himself was dressed only in tan, scratches, torn and filthy shorts, and a few scars. “Don’t you find that junk pretty hot this weather?” he asked cheerfully. “Okay, you can turn around. Keep your distance.”

The youngster turned around, still with a very sour expression. “What’s your name, bud?” “Uh, Jack.”

“Jack what? Mine’s Rod Walker.” “Jack Daudet.”

“What school, Jack?” “Ponce de Leon Institute.”

“Mine’s Patrick Henry High School.” “Matson’s class?”

“The Deacon himself.”

“I’ve heard of him.” Jack seemed impressed.

“Who hasn’t? Look, let’s quit jawing; we’ll have the whole county around our ears. Let’s eat. You keep watch that way; I’ll keep watch behind you.” “Then give me my knife. I need it to eat.”

“Not so fast. I’ll cut you off a hunk or two. Special Waldorf service.

Rod continued the incision Jack had started, carried it on up and laid the hide back from the right shoulder, hacked off a couple of large chunks of lean. He tossed one to Jack, hunkered down and gnawed his own piece while keeping sharp lookout. “You keeping your eyes peeled?” he asked.

“Sure.”

Rod tore off a rubbery mouthful of warm meat. “Jack, how did they let a runt like you take the test? You aren’t old enough.” “I’ll bet I’m as old as you are!”

“I doubt it.”

“Well … I’m qualified.” “You don’t look it.”

“I’m here, I’m alive.”

Rod grinned. “You’ve made your point. I’ll shut up. Once his portion was resting comfortably inside, Rod got up, split the skull and dug out the brains. “Want a handful?” “Sure.”

Rod passed over a fair division of the dessert. Jack accepted it, hesitated, then blurted out, “Want some salt?” “Salt!” You’ve got salt?”

Jack appeared to regret the indiscretion. “Some. Go easy on it.” Rod held out his handful. “Put some on. Whatever you can spare.”

Jack produced a pocket shaker from between shirt and armor, sprinkled a little on Rod’s portion, then shrugged and made it liberal. “Didn’t you bring salt along?”

“Me?” Rod answered, tearing his eyes from the mouthwatering sight. “Oh, sure! But- Well, I had an accident.” He decided that there was no use admitting that he had been caught off guard.

Jack put the shaker firmly out of sight. They munched quietly, each watching half their surroundings. After a while Rod said softly, “Jackal behind you, Jack.” “Nothing else?”

“No. But it’s time we whacked up the meat and got Out of here; we’re attracting attention. How much can you use?” “Uh, a haunch and a chunk of liver. I can’t carry any more.”

“And you can’t eat more before it spoils, anyway.” Rod started butchering the hind quarters. He cut a slice of hide from the belly, used it to sling his share around his neck. “Well, so long, kid. Here’s your knife. Thanks for the salt.”

“Oh, that’s all right.”

“Tasted mighty good. Well, keep your eyes open.” “Same to you. Good luck.”

Rod stood still. Then he said almost reluctantly, “Uh, Jack, you wouldn’t want to team up, would you?” He regretted it as soon as he said it, remembering how easily he had surprised the kid.

Jack chewed a lip. “Well … I don’t know.”

Rod felt affronted. “What’s the matter? Afraid of me?” Didn’t the kid see that Rod was doing him a favor? “Oh, no! You’re all right, I guess.”

Rod had an unpleasant suspicion. “You think I’m trymg to get a share of your salt, don’t you?” “Huh? Not at all. Look, I’ll divvy some salt with you.”

“I wouldn’t touch it! I just thought-” Rod stopped. He had been thinking that they had both missed recall; it looked like a long pull. “I didn’t mean to make you mad, Rod. You’re right. We ought to team.”

“Don’t put yourself out! I can get along.”

“I’ll bet you can. But let’s team up. Is it a deal?”

“Well … Shake.”

Once the contract was made Rod assumed leadership. There was no discussion; he simply did so and Jack let it stand. “You lead off,” Rod ordered, “and I’ll cover our rear.” “Okay. Where are we heading?”

“That high ground downstream. There are good trees there, better for all night than around here. I want us to have time to settle in before dark-so a quick sneak and no talking.” Jack hesitated. “Okay. Are you dead set on spending the night in a tree?”

Rod curled his lip. “Want to spend it on the ground? How did you stay alive this long?”

“I spent a couple of nights in trees,” Jack answered mildly. “But I’ve got a better place now, maybe.” “Huh? What sort?”

“Asort of a cave.”

Rod thought about it. Caves could be death traps. But the prospect of being able to stretch out swayed him. “Won’t hurt to look, if it’s not too far.” “It’s not far.”

5.      The Nova

Jack’s hideaway was in a bluff overlooking the stream by which Rod had been robbed. At this point the bluffs walled a pocket valley and the stream meandered between low banks cut in an alluvial field between the bluffs. The cave was formed by an overhang of limestone which roofed a room water-carved from shale in one bluff. The wall below it was too sheer to climb; the overhanging limestone protected it above and the stream curved in sharply ahnost to the foot of the bluff. The only way to reach it was to descend the bluff farther upstream to the field edging the creek, then make a climbing traverse of the shale bank where it was somewhat less steep just upstream of the cave.

They slanted cautiously up the shale, squeezed under an overhang at the top, and stepped out on a hard slaty floor. The room was open on one side and fairly long and deep, but it squeezed in to a waist-high crawl space; only at the edge was there room to stand up. Jack grabbed some gravel, threw it into the dark hole, waited with knife ready. “Nobody home, I guess.” They dropped to hands and knees, crawled inside. “How do you like it?”

“It’s swell … provided we stand watches. Something could come up the way we did. You’ve been lucky.”

“Maybe.” Jack felt around in the gloom, dragged out dry branches of thorn bush, blocked the pathway, jamming them under the overhang. “That’s my alarm.” “It wouldn’t stop anything that got a whiff of you and really wanted to come in.”

“No. But I would wake up and let it have some rocks in the face. I keep a stack over there. I’ve got a couple of scare-flares, too.” “I thought- Didn’t you say you had a gun?”

“I didn’t say, but I do. But I don’t believe in shooting when you can’t see.”

“It looks all right. In fact it looks good, I guess I did myself a favor when I teamed with you.” Rod looked around. “You’ve had a fire!” “I’ve risked it a couple of times, in daylight. I get so tired of raw meat.”

Rod sighed deeply. “I know. Say, do you suppose?”

“It’s almost dark. I’ve never lighted one when it could show. How about roast liver for breakfast, instead? With salt?”

Rod’s mouth watered. “You’re right, Jack. I do want to get a drink before it is too dark, though. How about coming along and we cover each other?” “No need. There’s a skin back there. Help yourself.”

Rod congratulated himself on having teamed with a perfect housekeeper. The skin was of a small animal, not identifiable when distended with water. Jack had scraped the hide but it was uncured and decidedly unsavory. Rod was not aware that the water tasted bad; he drank deeply, wiped his mouth with his hand and delt at peace.

They did not sleep at once, but sat in the dark and compared notes. Jack’s class had come through one day earlier, but with the same instructions. Jack agreed that recall was long overdue.

“I suppose I missed it while I was off my head,” Rod commented. “I don’t know how long I was foggy… I guess I didn’t miss dying by much.” “That’s not it, Rod.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve been okay and keeping track of the time. There never was any recall.” “You’re sure?”

“How could I miss? The siren can be heard for twenty kilometers, they use a smoke flare by day and a searchlight at night, and the law says they have to keep it up at least a week unless everybody returns… which certainly did not happen this time.”

“Maybe we are out of range. Matter of fact- well, I don’t know about you, but I’m lost. I admit it”

“I’m not. I’m about four kilometers from where they let my class through; I could show you the spot. Rod, let’s face it; something has gone wrong. There is no way of telling how long we are going to be here.” Jack added quiefly, “That’s why I thought it was a good idea to team.”

Rod chewed it over, decided it was time to haul out his theory. “Me, too.”

“Yes. Solo is actually safer, for a few days. But if we are stuck here indefinitely, then-“ “Not what I meant, Jack.”

“Huh?”

“Do you know what planet this is?”

“No. I’ve thought about it, of course. It has to be one of the new list and it is compatible with-“ “I know what one it is.”

“Huh? Which one?”

“It’s Earth. Terra herself.”

There was a long silence. At last Jack said, “Rod, are you all right? Are you still feverish?”

“I’m fine, now that I’ve got a full belly and a big drink of water. Look, Jack, I know it sounds silly, but you just listen and I’ll add it up. We’re on Earth and I think I know about where, too. I don’t think they meant to sound recall; they meant us to figure out where we are and walk out. It’s a twist Deacon Matson would love.”

“But-“

“Keep quiet, can’t you? Yapping like a girl. Terrestrial planet, right?” “Yes, but-“

“Stow it and let me talk. G-type star. Planetary rotation same as Earth.” “But it’s not!”

“I made the same mistake. The first night I thought was a week long. But the truth was I was scared out of my skin and that made it seem endless. Now I know better. The rotation matches.”

“No, it doesn’t. My watch shows it to be about twenty-six hours.”

“You had better have your watch fixed when we get back. You banged it against a tree or something.” “But- Oh, go ahead. Keep talking; it’s your tape.

“You’ll see. Flora compatible. Fauna compatible. I know how they did it and why and where they put us. It’s an economy measure.”

“Awhat?”

“Economy. Too many people complaining about school taxes being too high. Of course, keeping an interstellar gate open is expensive and uranium doesn’t grow on trees. I see their  point. But Deacon Matson says it is false economy. He says, sure, it’s expensive- but that the only thing more expensive than a properly trained explorer or pioneer leader is an improperly trained dead one.

“He told us after class one day,” Rod went on, “that the penny-pinchers wanted to run the practices and tests in selected areas on Earth, but the Deacon claims that the essence of survival in the Outlands is the skill to cope with the unknown. He said that if tests were held on Earth, the candidates would just study up on terrestrial environments. He said any Boy Scout could learn the six basic Earth environments and how to beat them out of books … but that it was criminal to call that survival training and then dump a man in an unEarthly environment on his first professional assigninent. He said that it was as ridiculous as just teaching a kid to play chess and then send him out to fight a duel.”

“He’s right,” Jack answered. “Commander Benboe talks the same way.”

“Sure he’s right. He swore that if they went ahead with this policy this would be the last year he would teach. But they pulled a gimmick on him.” “How?”

“It’s a good one. What the Deacon forgot is that any environment is as unknown as any other if you don’t have the slightest idea where you are. So they rigged it so that we could not know. First they shot us to Luna; the Moon gates are always open and that doesn’t cost anything extra. Of course that made us think we were in for a long jump. Besides, it confused us; we wouldn’t know we were being dumped back into the gravity field we had left- for that was what they did next; they shoved us back on Earth. Where? Africa, I’d say. I think they used the

Luna Link to jump us to Witwatersrand Gate outside Johannesburg and there they were all set with a matched-in temporary link to drop us into the bush. Tshaka Memorial Park or some other primitive preserve, on a guess. Everything matches. Awide variety of antelope-type game, carnivores to feed on them- I’ve seen a couple of lions and-“

“You have?”

“Well, they will do for lions until I get a chance to skin one. But they threw in other dodges to confuse us, too. The sky would give the show away, particularly if we got a look at Luna. So they’ve hung an overcast over us. You can bet there are cloud generators not far away. Then they threw us one more curve. Were you warned against ‘stobor’?”

“Yes”

“See any?”

“Well, I’m not sure what stobor are.”

“Neither am I. Nor any of us, I’ll bet. ‘Stobor’ is the bogeyman, chucked in to keep our pretty little heads busy. There aren’t any ‘stobor’ on Terra so naturally we must be somewhere else. Even a suspicious character like me would be misled by that. In fact, I was. I even picked out something I didn’t recognize and called it that, just as they meant me to do.”

“You make it sound logical, Rod.”

“Because it is logical. Once you realize that this is Earth-” He patted the floor of the cave. “-but that they have been trying to keep us from knowing it, everything falls into place. Now here is what we do. I was going to tackle it alone, as soon as I could- I haven’t been able to move around much on account of this bad arm- but I decided to take you along, before you got hurt. Here’s my plan. I think this is Africa, but it might be South America, or anywhere in the tropics. It does not matter, because we simply follow this creek downstream, keeping our eyes    open because there really are hazards; you can get just as dead here as in the Outlands. It may take a week, or a month, but one day well come to a bridge. We’ll follow the road it serves until somebody happens along. Once in town we’ll check in with the authorities and get them to flip us home … and we get our solo test certificates. Simple.”

“You make it sound too simple,” Jack said slowly.

“Oh, we’ll have our troubles. But we can do it, now that we know what to do. I didn’t want to bring this up before, but do you have salt enough to cure a few kilos of meat? If we did not have to hunt every day, we could travel faster. Or maybe you brought some Kwik-Kure?”

“I did, but-“

“Good!”

“Wait a minute, Rod. That won’t do.” “Huh? We’re a team, aren’t we?”

“Take it easy. Look, Rod, everything you said is logical, but-“ “No ‘buts’ about it.”

“It’s logical … but it’s all wrong!” “Huh? Now, listen, Jack-“

“You listen. You’ve done all the talking so far.” “But- Well, all right, say your say.”

“You said that the sky would give it away, so they threw an overcast over the area.

“Yes. That’s what they must have done, nights at least. They wouldn’t risk natural weather; it might give the show away.

“What I’m trying to tell you is that it did give the show away. It hasn’t been overcast every night, though maybe you were in deep forest and missed the few times it has been clear. But I’ve seen the night sky, Rod. I’ve seen stars.

“So? Well?”

“They aren’t our stars, Rod. I’m sorry.”

Rod chewed his lip. “You probably don’t know southern constellations very well?” he suggested.

“I knew the Southern Cross before I could read. These aren’t our stars, Rod; I know. There is a pentagon of bright stars above where the sun sets; there is nothing like that to be seen from Earth. And besides, anybody would recognise Luna, if it was there.”

Rod tried to remember what phase the Moon should be in. He gave up, as he had only a vague notion of elapsed time. “Maybe the Moon was down?” “Not a chance. I didn’t see our Moon, Rod, but I saw moons . . two of them, little ones and moving fast, like the moons of Mars.”

“You don’t mean this is Mars?” Rod said scornfully.

“Think I’m crazy? Anyhow, the stars from Mars are exactly like the stars from Earth. Rod, what are we jawing about? It was beginning to clear when the sun went down; let’s crawl out and have a look. Maybe you’ll believe your eyes.

Rod shut up and followed Jack. From inside nothing was visible but dark trees across the stream, but from the edge of the shelf part of the sky could be seen. Rod lookedup and blinked. “Mind the edge,” Jack warned softly.

Rod did not answer. Framed by the ledge above him and by tree tops across the stream was a pattern of six stars, a lopsided pentagon with a star in its center. The six stars were as bright and unmistakable as the seven stars of Earth’s Big Dipper … nor did it take a degree in astrography to know that this constellation had never been seen from Terra.

Rod stared while the hard convictions he had formed fell in ruins. He felt lost and alone. The trees across the way seemed frightening. He turned to Jack, his cocky sophistication gone. “You’ve convinced me,” he said dully. “What do we do now?”

Jack did not answer.

“Well?” Rod insisted. “No good standing here.”

“Rod,” Jack answered, “that star in the middle of the Pentagon-it wasn’t there before.” “Huh? You probably don’t remember.”

“No, no, I’m sure! Rod, you know what? We’re seeing a nova.”

Rod was unable to arouse the pure joy of scientific discovery; his mind was muddled with reorganizing his personal universe. Amere stellar explosion meant nothing. “Probably one of your moonlets.”

“Not a chance. The moons are big enough to show disks. It’s a nova; it has to be. What amazing luck to see one!”

“I don’t see anything lucky about it,” Rod answered moodily. “It doesn’t mean anything to us. It’s probably a hundred light-years away, maybe more.” “Yes, but doesn’t it thrill you?”

“No.” He stooped down and went inside. Jack took another look, then followed. There was silence, moody on Rod’s part. At last Jack said, “Think I’ll turn in.”

“I just can’t see,” Rod answered irrelevantly, “how I could be so wrong. It was a logical certainty.”

“Forget it,” Jack advised. “My analytics instructor says that all logic is mere tautology. She says it is impossible to learn anything through logic that you did not already know.” “Then what use is logic?” Rod demanded.

“Ask me an easy one. Look, partner, I’m dead for sleep; I want to turn in.”

“All right. But, Jack, if this isn’t Africa- and I’ve got to admit it isn’t- what do we do? They’ve gone off and left us.”

“Do? We do what we’ve been doing. Eat, sleep, stay alive. This is a listed planet; if we just keep breathing, someday somebody will show up. It might be just a power breakdown; they may pick us tomorrow.”

“In that case, then-“

“In that case, let’s shut up and go to sleep.”

6.      “I Think He Is Dead”

Rod was awakened by heavenly odors. he rolled over, blinked at light streaming under the overhang, managed by great effort to put himself back into the matrix of the day before. Jack, he saw, was squatting by a tiny fire on the edge of the shelf; the wonderful fragrance came from toasting liver.

Rod got to his knees, discovering that he was slightly stiff from having fought dream stobor in his sleep. These nightmare stobor were bug-eyed monsters fit for a planet suddenly strange and threatening. Nevertheless he had had a fine night’s sleep and his spirits could not be daunted in the presence of the tantalizing aroma drifting in.

Jack looked up. “I thought you were going to sleep all day. Brush your teeth, comb your hair, take a quick shower, and get on out here. Breakfast is ready.” Jack looked him over again. “Better shave, too.”

Rod grinned and ran his hand over his chin. “You’re jealous of my manly beard, youngster. Wait a year or two and you’ll find out what a nuisance it is. Shaving, the common cold, and taxes … my old man says those are the three eternal problems the race is never going to lick.” Rod felt a twinge at the thought of his parents, a stirring of conscience that he had not thought of them in he could not remember how long. “Can I help, pal?”

“Sit down and grab the salt. This piece is for you.” “Let’s split it.”

“Eat and don’t argue. I’ll fix me some.” Rod accepted the charred and smoky chunk, tossed it in his hands and blew on it. He looked around for salt. Jack Was slicing a second piece; Rod’s eyes passed over the operation then whipped back.

The knife Jack was using was “Colonel Bowie.”

The realization was accompanied by action; Rod’s hand darted out and caught Jack’s wrist in an anger-hard grip. “You stole my knife!” Jack did not move. “Rod… have you gone crazy?”

“You slugged me and stole my knife.”

Jack made no attempt to fight, nor even to struggle. “You aren’t awake yet, Rod. Your knife is on your belt. This is another knife … mine. Rod did not bother to look down. “The one I’m wearing is Lady Macbeth. I mean the knife you’re using, Colonel Bowie- my knife.”

“Let go my wrist.” “Drop it!”

“Rod… you can probably make me drop this knife. You’re bigger and you’ve got the jump on me. But yesterday you teamed with me. You’re busting that team right now. If you don’t let go right away, the team is broken. Then you’ll have to kill me … because if you don’t, I’ll trail you. I’ll keep on trailing you until I find you asleep. Then you’ve had it.”

They faced each other across the little fire, eyes locked. Rod breathed hard and tried to think. The evidence was against Jack. But had this little runt tracked him, slugged him, stolen everything he had? It looked like it.

Yet it did not feel like it. He told himself that he could handle the kid if his story did not ring true. He let go Jack’s wrist. “All right,” he said angrily, “tell me how you got my knife.”

Jack went on slicing liver. “It’s not much of a story and I don’t know that it is your knife. But it was not mine to start with- you’ve seen mine. I use this one as a kitchen knife. Its balance is wrong.

“Colonel Bowie! Balanced wrong? That’s the best throwing knife you ever saw!”

“Do you want to hear this? I ran across this hombre in the bush, just as the jackals were getting to him. I don’t know what got him-stobor, maybe; he was pretty well clawed and half eaten. He wasn’t one of my class, for his face wasn’t marked and I could tell. He was carrying a Thunderbolt and-“

“Wait a minute. AThunderbolt gun?”

“I said so, didn’t I? I guess he tried to use it and had no luck. Anyhow, I took what I could use- this knife and a couple of other things; I’ll show you. I left the Thunderbolt; the power pack was exhausted and it was junk.”

“Jack, look at me. You’re not lying?”

Jack shrugged. “I can take you to the spot. There might not be anything left of him, but the Thunderbolt ought to be there.” Rod stuck out his hand. “I’m sorry. I jumped to conclusions.”

Jack looked at his hand, did not shake it. “I don’t think you are much of a team mate. We had better call it quits.” The knife flipped over, landed at Rod’s toes. “Take your toadsticker and be on your way.”

Rod did not pick up the knife. “Don’t get sore, Jack. I made an honest mistake.”

“It was a mistake, all right. You didn’t trust me and I’m not likely to trust you again. You can’t build a team on that.” Jack hesitated. “Finish your breakfast and shove off. It’s better that way.” “Jack, I truly am sorry. I apologize. But it was a mistake anybody could make- you haven’t heard my side of the story.”

“You didn’t wait to hear my story!”

“So I was wrong, I said I was wrong.” Rod hurriedly told how he had been stripped of his survival gear. “-so naturally, when I saw Colonel Bowie, I assumed that you must have jumped me. That’s logical, isn’t it?” Jack did not answer; Rod persisted: “Well? Isn’t it?”

Jack said slowly, “You used ‘logic’ again. What you call ‘logic.’ Rod, you use the stuff the way some people use dope. Why don’t you use your head, instead?” Rod flushed and kept still. Jack went on, “If I had swiped your knife, would I have let you see it? For that matter, would I have teamed with you?”

“No, I guess not. Jack, I jumped at a conclusion and lost my temper.”

“Commander Benboe says,” Jack answered bleakly, “that losing your temper and jumping at conclusions is a one-way ticket to the cemetery.” Rod looked sheepish. ”Deacon Matson talks the same way.”

“Maybe they’re right. So let’s not do it again, huh? Every dog gets one bite, but only one.” Rod looked up, saw Jack’s dirty paw stuck out at him. “You mean we’re partners again?”

“Shake. I think we had better be; we don’t have much choice.” They solemnly shook hands. Then Rod picked up Colonel Bowie, looked at it longingly, and handed it hilt first to Jack.  “I guess it’s yours, after all.”

“Huh? Oh, no. I’m glad you’ve got it back.”

“No,” Rod insisted. “You came by it fair and square.

“Don’t be silly, Rod. I’ve got ‘Bluebeard’; that’s the knife for me.”

“It’s yours. I’ve got Lady Macbeth.”

Jack frowned. “We’re partners, right?” “Huh? Sure.”

“So We share everything. Bluebeard belongs just as much to you as to me. And Colonel Bowie belongs to both of us. But you are used to it, so it’s best for the team for you to wear it. Does that appeal to your lopsided sense of logic?”

“Well…”

“So shut up and eat your breakfast. Shall I toast you another slice? That one is cold.”

Rod picked up the scorched chunk of liver, brushed dirt and ashes from it. “This is all right.” “Throw it in the stream and have a hot piece. Liver won’t keep anyhow.”

Comfortably stuffed, and warmed by companionship, Rod stretched out on the shelf after breakfast and stared at the sky. Jack put out the fire and tossed the remnants of their meal downstream. Something broke water and snapped at the liver even as it struck. Jack turned to Rod. “Well, what do we do today?”

“Mmm… what we’ve got on hand ought to be fit to eat tomorrow morning. We don’t need to make a kill today.”

“I hunt every second day, usually, since I found this place. Second-day meat is better than first, but by the third … phewy!” “Sure. Well, what do you want to do?”

“Well, let’s see. First I’d like to buy a tall, thick chocolate malted milk- or maybe a fruit salad. Both. I’d eat those-“ “Stop it, you’re breaking my heart!”

“Then I’d have a hot bath and get all dressed up and flip out to Hollywood and see a couple of good shows. That superspectacle that Dirk Manleigh is starring in and then a good adventure show. After that I’d have another malted milk … strawberry, this time, and then-“

“Shut up!’

“You asked me what I wanted to do.”

“Yes, but I expected you to stick to possibilities.”

“Then why didn’t you say so? Is that ‘logical’? I thought you always used logic?” “Say, lay off, will you? I apologized.”

“Yeah, you apologized,” Jack admitted darkly. “But I’ve got some mad I haven’t used up yet.” “Well! Are you the sort of pal who keeps raking up the past?”

“Only when you least expect it. Seriously, Rod, I think we ought to hunt today.”

“But you agreed we didn’t need to. It’s wrong, and dangerous besides, to make a kill you don’t need.” “I think we ought to hunt people.”

Rod pulled his ear. “Say that again.”

“We ought to spend the day hunting people.”

“Huh? Well, anything for fun I always say. What do we do when we find them? Scalp them, or just shout ‘Beaver!’?” “Scalping is more definite. Rod, how long will we be here?”

“Huh? All we know is that something has gone seriously cockeyed with the recall schedule. You say we’ve been here three weeks. I would say it was longer but you have kept a notch calendar and I haven’t. Therefore …” He stopped.

“Therefore what?”

“Therefore nothing. They might have had some technical trouble, which they may clear up and recall us this morning. Deacon Matson and his fun-loving colleagues might have thought it was cute to double the period and not mention it. The Dalai Lama might have bombed the whiskers off the rest of the World and the Gates may be radioactive ruins. Or maybe the three- headed serpent men of the Lesser Magellanic Cloud have landed and have the situation well in hand- for them. When you haven’t data, guessing is illogical. We might be here forever.”

Jack nodded. “That’s my point.”

“Which point? We know we may be marooned; that’s obvious.”

“Rod, a two-man team is just right for a few weeks. But suppose this runs into months? Suppose one of us breaks a leg? Or even if we don’t, how long is that thorn-bush alarm going to work? We ought to wall off that path and make this spot accessible only by rope ladder, With somebody here all the time to let the ladder down. We ought to locate a salt lick and think about curing hides and things like that- that water skin I made is getting high already. For a long pull we ought to have at least four people.”

Rod scratched his gaunt ribs thoughtfully. “I know. I thought about it last night, after you jerked the rug out from under my optimistic theory. But I was waiting for you to bring it up.” “Why?”

“This is your cave. You’ve got all the fancy equipment, a gun and pills and other stuff I haven’t seen. You’ve got salt. All I’ve got is a knife- two knives now, thanks to you. I’d look sweet suggesting that you share four ways.”

“We’re a team, Rod.’

“Mmm… yes. And we both figure the team would be strengthened with a couple of recruits. Well, how many people are there out there?” He gestured at the wall of green across the creek.

“My class put through seventeen boys and eleven girls. Commander Benboe told us there would be four classes in the same test area. “That’s more than the Deacon bothered to tell us. However, my class put through about twenty.”

Jack looked thoughtful. “Around a hundred people, probably.” “Not counting casualties.”

“Not counting casualties. Maybe two-thirds boys, one-third girls. Plenty of choice, if we can find them.” “No girls on this team, Jack.”

“What have you got against girls?”

“Me? Nothing at all. Girls are swell on picnics, they are just right on long winter evenings. I’m one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the female race. But for a hitch like this, they are pure poison.”

Jack did not say anything. Rod went on, “Use your head, brother. You get some pretty little darling on this team and we’ll have more grief inside than stobor, or such, can give us from outside. Quarrels and petty jealousies and maybe a couple of boys knifing each other. It will be tough enough without that trouble.”

“Well,” Jack answered thoughifully, “suppose the first one we locate is a girl? What are you going to do? Tip your hat and say, ‘It’s a fine day, ma’am. Now drop dead and don’t bother me.’?”

Rod drew a pentagon in the ashes, put a star in the middle, then rubbed it out. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Let’s hope we get our team working before we meet any. And let’s hope they set up their own teams.”

“I think we ought to have a policy.”

“I’m clean out of policies. You would just accuse me of trying to be logical. Got any ideas about how to find anybody?” “Maybe. Somebody has been hunting upstream from here.”

“So? Know who it is?”

“I’ve seen him only at a distance. Nobody from my class. Half a head shorter than you are, light hair, pink skin- and a bad sunburn. Sound familiar?” “Could be anybody,” Rod answered, thinking fretfully that the description did sound familiar. “Shall we see if we can pick up some sign of him?”

“I can put him in your lap. But I’m not sure we want him.” “Why not? If he’s lasted this long, he must be competent.”

 “Frankly, I don’t see how he has. He’s noisy when he moves and he has been living in one tree for the past week.” “Not necessarily bad technique.”

“It is when you drop your bones and leavings out of the tree. It was jackals sniffing around that tipped me off to where he was living.” “Hmm… well, if we don’t like him, we don’t have to invite him.”

“True.”

Before they set out Jack dug around in the gloomy cave and produced a climbing line. “Rod, could this be yours?” Rod looked it over. “It’s just like the one I had. Why?”

“I got it the way I got Colonel Bowie, off the casualty. If it is not yours, at least it is a replacement.” Jack got another, wrapped it around and over body armor. Rod suspected that Jack had slept in the armor, but he said nothing. If Jack considered such marginal protection more important than agility, that was Jack’s business- each to his own methods, as the Deacon would say.

The tree stood in a semi-clearing but Jack brought Rod to it through bushes which came close to the trunk and made the final approach as a belly sneak. Jack pulled Rod’s head over and whispered in his ear, “If we lie still for three or four hours, I’m betting that he will either come down or go up.

“Okay. You watch our rear.”

For an hour nothing happened. Rod tried to ignore tiny flies that seemed to be all bite. Silently he shifted position to ward off stiffness and once had to kill a sneeze. At last he said, “Pssst!”

“Yeah, Rod?”

“Where those two big branches meet the trunk, could that be his nest?” “Maybe.”

“You see a hand sticking out?”

“Where? Uh, I think I see what you see. It might just be leaves.”

“I think it’s a hand and I think he is dead; it hasn’t moved since we got here.” “Asleep?”

“Person asleep ordinarily doesn’t hold still that long. I’m going up. Cover me. If that hand moves, yell.” “You ought not to risk it, Rod.”

“You keep your eyes peeled.” He crept forward..

The owner of the hand was Jimmy Throxton, as Rod had suspected since hearing the description. Jimmy was not dead, but he was unconscious and Rod could not rouse him.

Jim lay in an aerie half natural, half artificial; Rod could see that Jim had cut small branches and improved the triple crotch formed by two limbs and trunk. He lay cradled in this eagle’s nest, one hand trailing out.

Getting him down was awkward; he weighed as much as Rod did. Rod put a sling under Jim’s armpits and took a turn around a branch, checking the line by friction to lower him- but the hard part was getting Jim out of his musty bed without dropping him.

Halfway down the burden fouled and Jack had to climb and free it. But with much sweat all three reached the ground and Jim was still breathing.

Rod had to carry him. Jack offered to take turns but the disparity in sizes was obvious; Rod said angrily for Jack to cover them, front, rear, all sides; Rod would be helpless if they had the luck to be surprised by one of the pseudo-lions.

The worst part was the climbing traverse over loose shale up to the cave. Rod was fagged from carrying the limp and heavy load more than a kilometer over rough ground; he had to rest before he could tackle it. When he did, Jack said anxiously, “Don’t drop him in the drink! It won’t be worthwhile fishing him out- I know.”

“So do I. Don’t give silly advice.” “Sorry.”

Rod started up, as much worried for his own hide as for Jim’s. He did not know what it was that lived in that stream; he did know that it was hungry. There was a bad time when he reached the spot where the jutting limestone made it necessary to stoop to reach the shelf. He got down as low as possible, attempted it, felt the burden on his back catch on the rock, started to slip.

Jack’s hand steadied him and shoved him from behind. Then they were sprawled safe on the shelf and Rod gasped and tried to stop the trembling of his abused muscles. They bedded Jimmy down and Jack took his pulse. “Fast and thready. I don’t think he’s going to make it.”

“What medicines do you have?”

“Two of the neosulfas and verdomycin. But I don’t know what to give him.” “Give him all three and pray.

“He might be allergic to one of them.”

“He’ll be more allergic to dying. I’ll bet he’s running six degrees of fever. Come on.”

Rod supported Jim’s shoulders, pinched his ear lobe, brought him partly out of coma. Between them they managed to get the capsules into Jim’s mouth, got him to drink and wash them down. After that there was nothing they could do but let him rest.

They took turns watching him through the night. About dawn his fever broke, he roused and asked for water. Rod held him while Jack handled the waterskin. Jim drank deeply, then went back to sleep.

They never left him alone. Jack did the nursing and Rod hunted each day, trying to find items young and tender and suited to an invalid’s palate. By the second day Jim, although weak and helpless, was able to talk without drifting off to sleep in the middle. Rod returned in the afternoon with the carcass of a small animal which seemed to be a clumsy cross between a cat and a rabbit. He encountered Jack heading down to fill the water skin. “Hi.”

‘Hi. I see you had luck. Say, Rod, go easy when you skin it. We need a new water bag. Is it cut much?” “Not at all. I knocked it over with a rock.”

“Good!”

“How’s the patient?”

“Healthier by the minute. I’ll be up shortly.” “Want me to cover you while you fill the skin?” “I’ll be careful. Go up to Jim.”

Rod went up, laid his kill on the shelf, crawled inside. “Feeling better?” “Swell. I’ll wrestle you two falls out of three.”

“Next week. Jack taking good care of you?”

“You bet. Say, Rod, I don’t know how to thank you two. If it hadn’t been for-“

“Then don’t try. You don’t owe me anything, ever. And Jack’s my partner, so it’s right with Jack.” “Jack is swell.”

“Jack is a good boy. They don’t come better. He and I really hit it off.”

Jim looked surprised, opened his mouth, closed it suddenly. “What’s the matter?” Rod asked. “Something bite you? Or are you feeling bad again?” “What,” Jim said slowly, “did you say about Jack?”

“Huh? I said they don’t come any better. He and I team up like bacon and eggs. Anumber-one kid, that boy.” Jimmy Throxton looked at him. “Rod … were you born that stupid? Or did you have to study?”

“Huh?”

“Jack is a girl.”

4.      ‘I Should Have Baked a Cake”

There followed a long silence. “Well,” said Jim, “close your mouth before something flies in.” “Jimmy, you’re still out of your head.”

“I may be out of my head, but not so I can’t tell a girl from a boy. When that day comes, I won’t be sick; I’ll be dead.” “But …”

Jim shrugged. “Ask her.”

Ashadow fell across the opening; Rod turned and saw Jack scrambling up to the shelf. “Fresh water, Jimmy!” “Thanks, kid.” Jim added to Rod, “Go on, dopy!”

Jack looked from one to the other. “Why the tableau? What are you staring for, Rod?” “Jack,” he said slowly, “what is your name?”

“Huh? Jack Daudet. I told you that.”

“No, no! What’s your full name, your legal name?” Jack looked from Rod to Jimmy’s grinning face and back again. “My full name is… Jacqueline Marie Daudet- if it’s any business of yours. Want to make something of it?”

Rod took a deep breath. “Jacqueline,” he said carefully, “I didn’t know. I-“ “You weren’t supposed to.”

“Look, if I’ve said anything to offend you, I surely didn’t mean to.”

“You haven’t said anything to offend me, you big stupid dear. Except about your knife.” “I didn’t mean that.”

“You mean about girls being poison? Well, did it ever occur to you that maybe boys are pure poison, too? Under these circumstances? No, of course it didn’t. But I don’t mind your knowing now… now that there are three of us.”

“But, Jacqueline-“

“Call me ‘Jack,’ please.” She twisted her shoulders uncomfortably. “Now that you know, I won’t have to wear this beetle case any longer. Turn your backs, both of you. “Uh …” Rod turned his back. Jimmy rolled over, eyes to the wall.

In a few moments Jacqueline said, “Okay.” Rod turned around. In shirt and trousers, without torso armor, her shoulders seemed narrower and she herself was slender now and pleasantly curved. She was scratching her ribs. “I haven’t been able to scratch properly since I met you, Rod Walker,” she said accusingly. “Sometimes I almost died.”

“I didn’t make you wear it.”

“Suppose I hadn’t? Would you have teamed with me?” “Uh… well, it’s like this. I …” He stopped.

“You see?” She suddenly looked worried. “We’re still partners?” “Huh? Oh, sure, sure!”

“Then shake on it again. This time we shake with Jimmy, too. Right, Jim?” “You bet, Jack.”

They made a three-cornered handshake. Jack pressed her left hand over the combined fists and said solemnly, “All for one!” Rod drew Colonel Bowie with his left hand, laid the flat of the blade on the stacked hands. “And one for all!”

“Plus sales tax,” Jimmy added. “Do we get it notarized?”

Jacqueline’s eyes were swimming with tears. “Jimmy Throxton,” she said fiercely, “someday I am going to make you take life seriously!”  “I take life seriously,” he objected. “I just don’t want life to take me seriously. When you’re on borrowed time, you can’t afford not to laugh.” “We’re all on borrowed time,” Rod answered him. “Shut up, Jimmy. You talk too much.”

“Look who’s preaching! The Decibel Kid himself.”

“Well… you ought not to make fun of Jacqueiine. She’s done a lot for you. “She has indeed!”

“Then-“

“‘Then’ nothing!” Jacqueline said sharply. “My name is ‘Jack.’ Rod. Forget ‘Jacqueline.’ If either of you starts treating me with gallantry we’ll have all those troubles you warned me about. ‘Pure poison’ was the expression you used, as I recall.”

“But you can reasonably expect-“

“Are you going to be ‘logical’ again? Let’s be practical instead. Help me skin this beast and make a new water bag.”

The following day Jimmy took over housekeeping and Jack and Rod started hunting together. Jim wanted to come along; he ran into a double veto. There was little advantage in hunting as a threesome whereas Jack and Rod paired off so well that a hunt was never hours of waiting, but merely a matter of finding game. Jack would drive and Rod would kill; they would  pick their quarry from the fringe of a herd, Jack would sneak around and panic the animals, usually driving one into Rod’s arms.

They still hunted with the knife, even though Jack’s gun was a good choice for primitive survival, being an air gun that threw poisoned darts. Since the darts could be recovered and re- envenomed, it was a gun which would last almost indefinitely; she had chosen it for this reason over cartridge or energy guns.

Rod had admired it but decided against hunting with it. “The air pressure might bleed off and let you down.” “It never has. And you can pump it up again awfully fast.”

“Mmm… yes. But if we use it, someday the last dart will be lost no matter how careful we are … and that might be the day we would need it bad. We may be here a long time, what do you say we save it?”

“You’re the boss, Rod.”

“No, I’m not. We all have equal say.”

“Yes, you are. Jimmy and I agreed on that. Somebody has to boss.”

Hunting took an hour or so every second day; they spent most of daylight hours searching for another team mate, quartering the area and doing it systematically. Once they drove scavengers from a kill which seemed to have been butchered by knife; they followed a spoor from that and determined that it was a human spoor, but were forced by darkness to return to the cave. They tried to pick it up the next day, but it had rained hard in the night; they never found it.

Another time they found ashes of a fire, but Rod judged them to be at least two weeks old.

After a week of fruitless searching they returned one

late afternoon. Jimmy looked up from the fire he had started. “How goes the census?” ‘Don’t ask,” Rod answered, throwing himself down wearily. “What’s for dinner?”

“Raw buck, roast buck, and burned buck. I tried baking some of it in wet clay. It didn’t work out too well, but I’ve got some awfully good baked clay for dessert.” ‘Thanks. If that is the word.”

“Jim,” Jack said, “we ought to try to bake pots with that clay.”

“I did. Big crack in my first effort. But I’ll get the hang it. Look, children,” he went on, “has it ever occurred to your bright little minds that you might be going about this the wrong way?” “What’s wrong with it?” Rod demanded.

“Nothing … if it is exercise you are after. You are and scurrying over the countryside, getting in and nowhere else. Maybe it would be better to sit back and let them come to you.” “How?”

“Send up a smoke signal.”

“We’ve discussed that We don’t want just anybody and we don’t want to advertise where we live. We want people who will strengthen the team.”

“That is what the engineers call a self-defeating criterion. The superior woodsman you want is just the laddy you will never find by hunting for him. He may find you, as you go tramping noisily through the brush, kicking rocks and stepping on twigs and scaring the birds. He may shadow you to see what you are up to. But you won’t find him.”

“Rod, there is something to that,” Jack said.

“We found you easily enough,” Rod said to Jim. “Maybe you aren’t the high type we need.”

“I wasn’t myself at the time,” Jimmy answered blandly. “Wait till I get my strength back and my true nature will show. Ugh-Ugh, the ape man, that’s me. Half Neanderthal and half sleek black leopard.” He beat his chest and coughed.

“Are those the proportions? The Neanderthal strain seems dominant.” “Don’t be disrespectful. Remember, you are my debtor.”

“I think you read the backs of those cards. They are getting to be like waffles.” When rescued, Jimmy had had on him a pack of playing cards, and had later explained that they were survival equipment.

“In the first place,” he had said, “if I got lost I could sit down and play solitaire. Pretty soon somebody would come along and-“ “Tell you to play the black ten on the red jack. We’ve heard that one.”

“Quiet, Rod. In the second place, Jack, I expected to team with old Stoneface here. I can always beat him at cribbage but he doesn’t believe it. I figured that during the test I could win all his next year’s allowance. Survival tactics.”

Whatever his reasoning, Jimmy had had the cards. The three played a family game each evening at a million plutons a point. Jacqueline stayed more or less even but Rod owed Jimmy several hundred millions. They continued the discussion that evening over their game. Rod was still wary of advertising their hide-out.

“We might burn a smoke signal somewhere, though,” he said thoughtfully. “Then keep watch from a safe spot. Cut ‘em, Jim.”

“Consider the relative risks- a five, just what I needed! If you put the fire far enough away to keep this place secret, then it means a trek back and forth at least twice a day. With all that running around you’ll use up your luck; one day you won’t come back. It’s not that I’m fond you, but it would bust up the game. Whose crib?”

“Jack’s. But if we burn it close by and in sight, then we sit up here safe and snug. I’ll have my back to the wall facing the path, with Jack’s phht gun in my lap. If an unfriendly face sticks up- blooie! Long pig for dinner. But if we like them, we cut them into the game.

“Your count.”

“Fifteen-six, fifteen-twelve, a pair, six for jacks and the right jack. That’s going to cost you another million, my friend.” “One of those jacks is a queen,” Rod said darkly.

“Sure enough? You know, it’s getting too dark to play. Want to concede?”

They adopted Jim’s scheme. It gave more time for cribbage and ran Rod’s debt up into billions. The signal fire was kept burning on the shelf at the downstream end, the prevailing wind being such that smoke usually did not blow back into the cave- when the wind did shift was unbearable; they were forced to flee, eyes streaming.

This happened three times in four days. Their advertising had roused no customers and they were all get’ting tired of dragging up dead wood for fuel and green branches for smoke. The third time they fled from smoke Jimmy said, “Rod, I give up. You win. This is not the way to do it.”

“No!”

“Huh? Have a heart, chum. I can’t live on smoke- no vitamins. Let’s run up a flag instead. I’ll contribute my shirt.” Rod thought about it. “We’ll do that.”

“Hey, wait a minute. I was speaking rhetorically. I’m the delicate type. I sunburn easily.”

“You can take it easy and work up a tan. We’ll use your shirt as a signal flag. But we’ll keep the fire going, too. Not up on the shelf, but down there- on that mud flat, maybe.” “And have the smoke blow right back into our summer cottage.”

“Well, farther downstream. We’ll make a bigger fire and a column of smoke that can be seen a long way. The flag we will put up right over the cave.” “Thereby inviting eviction proceedings from large, hairy individuals with no feeling for property rights.”

“We took that chance when we decided to use a smoke signal. Let’s get busy.”

Rod picked a tall tree on the bluff above. He climbed to where the trunk had thinned down so much that it would hardly take his weight, then spent a tedious hour topping it with his knife.  He tied the sleeves of Jim’s shirt to it, then worked down, cutting foliage away as he went. Presently the branches became too large to handle with his knife, but the stripped main stem stuck up for several meters; the shirt could be seen for a long distance up and down stream. The shirt caught the wind and billowed; Rod eyed it, tired but satisfied- it was unquestionably  a signal flag.

Jimmy and Jacqueline had built a new smudge farther downstream, carrying fire from the shelf for the purpose. Jacqueline still had a few matches and Jim had a pocket torch almost   fully charged but the realization that they were marooned caused them to be miserly. Rod went down and joined them. The smoke was enormously greater now that they were not limited in space, and fuel was easier to fetch.

Rod looked them over. Jacqueline’s face, sweaty and none too clean to start with, was now black with smoke, while Jimmy’s pink skin showed the soot even more. “Acouple of pyromaniacs.”

“You ordered smoke,” Jimmy told him. “I plan to make the burning of Rome look like a bonfire. Fetch me a violin and a toga.” “Violins weren’t invented then. Nero played a lyre.”

“Let’s not be small. We’re getting a nice mushroom cloud effect, don’t you think?’

“Come on, Rod,” Jacqueline urged, Wiping her face without improving it. “It’s fun!” She dipped a green branch in the stream, threw it on the pyre. Athick cloud of smoke and steam concealed her. “More dry wood, Jimmy.”

“Coming!”

Rod joined in, soon was as dirty and scorched as the other two and having more fun than he had had since the test started. When the sun dropped below the tree tops they at last quit trying to make the fire bigger and better and smokier and reluctantly headed up to their cave. Only then did Rod realize that he had forgotten to remain alert.

Oh well, he assured himself, dangerous animals would avoid a fire.

While they ate they could see the dying fire still sending up smoke. After dinner Jimmy got out his cards, tried to riffle the limp mass. “Anyone interested in a friendly game? The customary small stakes.”

“I’m too tired,” Rod answered. “Just chalk up my usual losses.”

“That’s not a sporting attitude. Why, you won a game just last week. How about you, Jack?” Jacqueline started to answer; Rod suddenly motioned for silence. “Sssh! I heard something.”

The other two froze and silently got out their knives. Rod put Colonel Bowie in his teeth and crawled out to the edge. The pathway was clear and the thorn barricade was undisturbed. He leaned out and looked around, trying to locate the sound.

“Ahoy below!” a voice called out, not loudly. Rod felt himself tense. He glanced back, saw Jimmy moving diagonally over to cover the pathway. Jacqueline had her dart gun and was hurriedly pumping it up.

Rod answered, “Who’s there?”

There was a short silence. Then the voice answered, “Bob Baxter and Carmen Garcia. Who are you?” Rod sighed with relief. “Rod Walker, Jimmy Throxton. And one other, not our class . . Jack Daudet.” Baxter seemed to think this over. “Uh, can we join you? For tonight, at least?”

“Sure!”

“How can we get down there? Carmen can’t climb very well; she’s got a bad foot.” “You’re right above us?”

“I think so. I can’t see you.”

“Stay there. I’ll come up.” Rod turned, grinned at the others. “Company for dinner! Get a fire going, Jim.” Jimmy clucked mournfully. “And hardly a thing in the house. I should have baked a cake.”

By the time they returned Jimmy had roast meat waitmg. Carmen’s semi-crippled condition had delayed them. It was just a sprained ankle but it caused her to crawl up the traverse on her hands, and progress to that point had been slow and painful.

When she realized that the stranger in the party was another woman she burst into tears. Jackie glared at the males, for no cause that Rod could see, then led her into the remote corner of the cave where she herself slept.

There they whispered while Bob Baxter compared notes with Rod and Jim.

Bob and Carmen had had no unusual trouble until Carmen had hurt her ankle two days earlier… except for the obvious fact that something had gone wrong and they were stranded. “I lost my grip,” he admitted, “when I realized that they weren’t picking us up. But Carmen snapped me out of it. Carmen is a very practical kid.”

‘Girls are always the practical ones,” Jimmy agreed. Now take me- I’m the poetical type.” ‘Blank verse, I’d say,” Rod suggested.

“Jealousy ill becomes you, Rod. Bob, old bean, can I interest you in another slice? Rare, or well carbonized?” “Either way. We haven’t had much to eat the last couple of days. Boy, does this taste good!”

“My own sauce,” Jimmy said modestly. “I raise my own herbs, you know. First you melt a lump of butter slowly in a pan, then you-“

“Shut up, Jimmy. Bob, do you and Carmen want to team with us? As I see it, we can’t count on ever getting back. Therefore we ought to make plans for the future.’ “I think you are right.”

“Rod is always right,” Jimmy agreed. “‘Plans for the future-‘ Hmm, yes… Bob, do you and Carmen play cribbage?” “No”

“Never mind. I’ll teach you.”

5.      “Fish, or Cut Bait”

The decision to keep on burning the smoke signal and thereby to call in as many recruits as possible was never voted on; it formed itself. The next morning Rod intended to bring the matter up but Jimmy and Bob rebuilt the smoke fire from its embers while down to fetch fresh water. Rod let the accomplished fact stand; two girls drifted in separately that day.

Nor was there any formal contract to team nor any selection of a team captain; Rod continued to direct operations and Bob Baxter accepted the arrangement. Rod did not think about it as he was too busy. The problems of food, shelter, and safety for their growing population left him no time to worry about it

The arrival of Bob and Carmen cleaned out the larder; it was necessary to hunt the next day. Bob Baxter offered to go, but Rod decided to take Jackie as usual. “You rest today. Don’t let Carmen put her weight on that bad ankle and don’t let Jimmy go down alone to tend the fire. He thinks he is well again but he is not.”

“I see that.”

Jack and Rod went out, made their kill quickly. But Rod failed to kill clean and when Jacqueline moved in to help finish the thrashing, wounded buck she was kicked in the ribs. She insisted that she was not hurt; nevertheless her side was sore the following morning and Bob Baxter expressed the opinion that she had cracked a rib.

In the meantime two new mouths to feed had been added, just as Rod found himself with three on the sick list. But one of the new mouths was a big, grinning one belonging to Caroline Mshiyeni; Rod picked her as his hunting partner.

Jackie looked sour. She got Rod aside and whispered, ‘You haven’t any reason to do this to me. I can hunt. My side is all right, just a little stiff.” “It is, huh? So it slows you down when I need you. I can’t chance it, Jack.”

She glanced at Caroline, stuck out her lip and looked stubborn. Rod said urgently, “Jack, remember what I said about petty jealousies? So help me, you make trouble and I’ll paddle you.” “You aren’t big enough!”

“I’ll get help. Now, look- are we partners?” “Well, I thought so.”

“Then be one and don’t cause trouble.”

She shrugged. “All right. Don’t rub it in- I’ll stay home.”

“I want you to do more than that. Take that old bandage of mine- it’s around somewhere- and let Bob Baxter strap your ribs.” “No!”

“Then let Carmen do it. They’re both quack doctors, sort of.” He raised his voice. “Ready, Carol?” “Quiverin’ and bristlin’.”

Rod told Caroline how he and Jacqueline hunted, explained what he expected of her. They located, and avoided, two family herds; old bulls were tough and poor eating and attempting to kill anything but the bull was foolishly dangerous. About noon they found a yearling herd upwind; they split and placed themselves cross wind for the kill. Rod waited for Caroline to flush the game, drive it to him.

He continued to wait. He was getting fidgets when Caroline showed up, moving silently. She motioned for him to follow. He did so, hard put to keep up with her and still move quietly. Presently she stopped; he caught up and saw that she had already made a kill. He looked at it and fought down the anger he felt.

Caroline spoke. “Nice tender one, I think. Suit you, Rod?” He nodded. “Couldn’t be better. Aclean kill, too. Carol?” “Huh?”

“I think you are better at this than I am.

“Oh, shucks, it was just luck.” She grinned and looked sheepish.

“I don’t believe in luck. Any time you want to lead the hunt, let me know. But be darn sure you let me know.” She looked at his unsmiling face, said slowly, “By any chance are you bawling me out?”

“You could call it that. I’m saying that any time you want to lead the hunt, you tell me. Don’t switch in the middle. Don’t ever. I mean it.” “What’s the matter with you, Rod? Getting your feelings hurt just because I got there first- that’s silly!”

Rod sighed. “Maybe that’s it. Or maybe I don’t like having a girl take the kill away from me. But I’m dead sure about one thing: I don’t like having a partner on a hunt who can’t be depended on. Too many ways to get hurt. I’d rather hunt alone.”

“Maybe I’d rather hunt alone! I don’t need any help.”

“I’m sure you don’t. Let’s forget it, huh, and get this carcass back to camp.”

Caroline did not say anything while they butchered. When they had the waste trimmed away and were ready to pack as much as possible back to the others Rod said, “You lead off. I’ll watch behind.”

“Rod?”

“Huh?” “I’m sorry”

“What? Oh, forget it.”

“I won’t ever do it again. Look, I’ll tell everybody you made the kill.”

He stopped and put a hand on her arm. “Why tell anybody anything? It’s nobody’s business how we organize our hunt as long as we bring home the meat.” “You’re still angry with me.”

“I never was angry,” he lied. “I just don’t want us to get each other crossed up.” “Roddie, I’ll never cross you up again! Promise.”

Girls stayed in the majority to the end of the week. The cave, comfortable for three, adequate for twice that number, was crowded for the number that was daily accumulating. Rod decided to make it a girls’ dormitory and moved the males out into the open on the field at the foot of the path up the shale. The spot was unprotected against weather and animals but it did guard the only access to the cave. Weather was no problem; protection against animals was set up as well as could be managed by organizing a night watch whose duty it was to keep fires burning between the bluff and the creek on the upstream side and in the bottleneck downstream. Rod did not like the arrangements, but they were the best he could do at the time. He  sent Bob Baxter and Roy Kilroy downstream to scout for caves and Caroline and Margery Chung upstream for the same purpose. Neither party was successful in the one-day limit he

had imposed; the two girls brought back another straggler.

Agroup of four boys came in a week after Jim’s shirt had been requisitioned; it brought the number up to twenty-five and shifted the balance to more boys than girls. The four newcomers could have been classed as men rather than boys, since they were two or three years older than the average. Three of the four classes in this survival-test area had been about to graduate from secondary schools; the fourth class, which included these four, came from Outlands Arts College of Teller University.

“Adult” is a slippery term. Some cultures have placed adult age as low as eleven years, others as high as thirty-five-and some have not recognized any such age as long as an ancestor remamed alive. Rod did not think of these new arrivals as senior to him. There were already a few from Teller U. in the group, but Rod was only vaguely aware Which ones they were- they fitted in. He was too busy with the snowballing problems of his growing colony to worry about their backgrounds on remote Terra.

The four were Jock McGowan, a brawny youth who seemed all hands and feet, his younger brother Bruce, and Chad Ames and Dick Burke. They had arrived late in the day and Rod had not had time to get acquainted, nor was there time the following morning, as a group of four girls and five boys poured in on them unexpectedly. This had increased his administrative problems almost to the breaking point; the cave would hardly sleep four more females. It was necessary to find, or build, more shelter.

Rod went over to the four young men lounging near the cooking fire. He squatted on his heels and asked, “Any of you know anything about building?” He addressed them all, but the others waited for Jock McGowan to speak. “Some,” Jock admitted. “I reckon I could build anything I wanted to.” “Nothing hard,” Rod explained. “Just stone walls. Ever tried your hand at masonry?”

“Sure. What of it?”

“Well, here’s the idea. We’ve got to have better living arrangements right away- we’ve got people pouring out of our ears. The first thing we are going to do is to throw a wall from the bluff to the creek across this flat area. After that we will build huts, but the first thing is a kraal to stop dangerous animals.”

McGowan laughed. “That will be some wall. Have you seen this dingus that looks like an elongated cougar? One of those babies would go over your wall before you could say ‘scat.’”

“I know about them,” Rod admitted, “and I don’t like them.” He rubbed the long white scars on his left arm. “They probably could go over any wall we could build. So we’ll rig a surprise for them.” He picked up a twig and started drawing in the dirt. “We build the wall and bring it around to here. Then, inside for about six meters, we set up sharpened poles. Anything comes over the wall splits its gut on the poles.”

Jock McGowan looked at the diagram. “Futile.” “Silly,” agreed his brother.

Rod flushed but answered, “Got a better idea?” “That’s beside the point.”

“Well,” Rod answered slowly, “unless somebody comes down with a better scheme, or unless we find really good caves, we’ve got to fortify this spot the best we can … so we’ll do this. I’m going to set the girls to cutting and sharpening stakes. The rest of us will start on the wall. If we tear into it we ought to have a lot of it built before dark. Do you four want to work together? There will be one party collecting rock and another digging clay and making clay mortar. Take your choice.”

Again three of them waited. Jock McGowan lay back and laced his hands under his head. “Sorry. I’ve got a date to hunt today.” Rod felt himself turning red. “We don’t need a kill today,” he said carefully.

“Nobody asked you, youngster.”

Rod felt the cold tenseness he always felt in a hunt He was uncomfortably aware that an audience had gathered. He tried to keep his voice steady and said, “Maybe I’ve made a mistake. I-“

“You have.”

“I thought you four had teamed with the rest of us. Well?” “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“You’ll have to fish or cut bait. If you join, you work like anybody else. If not- well, you’re welcome to breakfast and stop in again some time. But be on your way. I won’t have you lounging around while everybody else, is working.”

Jock McGowan sucked his teeth, dug at a crevice with his tongue. His hands were still locked back of his head. “What you don’t understand, sonny boy, is that nobody gives the McGowans orders. Nobody. Right, Bruce?”

“Right, Jock.”

“Right, Chad? Dick?”

The other two grunted approval. McGowan continued to stare up at the sky. “So,” he said softly, “I go where I want to go and stay as long as I like. The question is not whether we are going to join up with you, but what ones am going to let team with us. But not you, sonny boy; you are still wet behind your ears.

“Get up and get Qut of here!” Rod started to stand up. He was wearing Colonel Bowie, as always, but he did not reach for it. He began to straighten up from squatting.

Jock McGowan’s eyes flicked toward his brother. Rod was hit low… and found himself flat on his face with his breath knocked out. He felt the sharp kiss of a knife against his ribs; he held still. Bruce called out, “How about it, Jock?”

Rod could not see Jock McGowan. But he heard him answer, “Just keep him there.” “Right, Jock.”

Jock McGowan was wearing both gun and knife. Rod now heard him say, “Anybody want to dance? Any trouble out of the rest of you lugs?”

Rod still could not see Jock, but he could figure from the naked, startled expressions of a dozen others that McGowan must have rolled to his feet and covered them with his gun. Everybody in camp carried knives; most had guns as well and Rod could see that Roy Kilroy was wearing his- although most guns were kept when not in use in the cave in a little arsenal which Carmen superintended.

But neither guns nor knives were of use; it had happened too fast, shifting from wordy wrangling to violence with no warning. Rod could see none of his special friends from where he was; those whom he could see did not seem disposed to risk death to rescue him.

Jock McGowan said briskly, “Chad- Dick- got ‘em all covered?” “Right, Skipper.”

“Keep ‘em that way while I take care of this cholo.” His hairy legs appeared in front of Rod’s face. “Pulled his teeth, Bruce?” “Not yet.”

“I’ll do it. Roll over, sonny boy, and let me at your knife. Let him turn over, Bruce.”

Bruce McGowan eased up on Rod and Jock bent down. As he reached for Rod’s knife a tiny steel flower blossomed in Jock’s side below his ribs. Rod heard nothing, not even the small sound it must have made when it struck. Jock straightened up with a shriek, clutched at his side.

Bruce yelled, Jock! What’s the matter?”

“They got me.” He crumpled to the ground like loose clothing.

Rod still had a man with a knife on his back but the moment was enough; he rolled and grabbed in one violent movement and the situation was reversed, with Bruce’s right wrist locked in Rod’s fist, with Colonel Bowie threatening Bruce’s face.

Aloud contralto voice sang out, “Take it easy down there! We got you covered.”

Rod glanced up. Caroline stood on the shelf at the top of the path to the cave, with a rifle at her shoulder. At the downstream end of the shelf Jacqueline sat with her little dart gun in her lap; she was frantically pumping up again. She raised it, drew a bead on some one past Rod’s shoulder.

Rod called out, “Don’t shoot!” He looked around. “Drop it, you two!”

Chad Ames and Dick Burke dropped their guns. Rod added, “Roy! Grant Cowper! Gather up their toys. Get their knives, too.” He turned back to Bruce McGowan, pricked him under the chin. “Let’s have your knife.” Bruce turned it loose; Rod took it and got to his feet.

Everyone who had been up in the cave was swarming down, Caroline in the lead. Jock McGowan was writhing on the ground, face turned blue and gasping in the sort of paralysis induced by the poison used on darts. Bob Baxter hurried up, glanced at him, then said to Rod, “I’ll take care of that cut in your ribs in a moment.” He bent over Jock McGowan.

Caroline said indignantly, “You aren’t going to try to save him?” “Of course.”

“Why? Let’s chuck him in the stream.”

Baxter glanced at Rod. Rod felt a strong urge to order Caroline’s suggestion carried out. But he answered, “Do what you can for him, Bob. Where’s Jack? Jack- you’ve got antidote for your darts, haven’t you? Get it.”

Jacqueline looked scornfully at the figure on the ground. “What for? He’s not hurt.” “Huh?”

“Just a pin prick. Apractice dart- that’s all I keep in Betsey. My hunting darts are put away so that nobody can hurt themselves- and I didn’t have time to get them.” She prodded Jock with a toe. “He’s not poisoned. He’s scaring himself to death.”

Caroline chortled and waved the rifle she carried. “And this one is empty. Not even a good club.” Baxter said to Jackie, “Are you sure? The reactions look typical.”

“Sure I’m sure! See the mark on the end sticking out? Atarget dart.”

Baxter leaned over his patient, started slapping his face. “Snap out of it, McGowan! Stand up. I want to get that dart out of you.”

McGowan groaned and managed to stand. Baxter took the dart between thumb and forefinger, jerked it free; Jock yelled. Baxter slapped him again. “Don’t you faint on me,” he growled. ‘you’re lucky. Let it drain and you’ll be all right.” He turned to Rod. “You’re next.”

“Huh? There’s nothing the matter with me.”

“That stuff on your ribs is paint, I suppose.” He looked around. “Carmen, get my kit.” “I brought it down.”

“Good. Rod, sit down and lean forward. This is going to hurt a little.”

It did hurt. Rod tried to chat to avoid showing that he minded it. “Carol,” he asked, “I don’t see how you and Jackie worked out a plan so fast. That was smooth.”

“Huh? We didn’t work out a plan; we both just did what we could and did it fast.” She turned to Jacqueline and gave her a clap on the shoulder that nearly knocked her over. “This kid is solid, Roddie, solid!”

Jacqueline recovered, looked pleased and tried not to show it. “Aw, Carol!” “Anyway I thank you both.”

“Apleasure. I wish that pea shooter had been loaded. Rod, what are you going to do with them?” “Well … ummph!”

“Whoops!” said Baxter, behind him. “I said it was going to hurt. I had better put one more clip in. I’d like to put a dressing on that, but we can’t, so you lay off heavy work for a while and sleep on your stomach.”

“Unh!” said Rod.

“That’s the last. You can get up now. Take it easy and give it a chance to scab.”

“I still think,” Caroline insisted, “that we ought to make them swim the creek. We could make bets on whether or not any of ‘em make it across.” “Carol, you’re uncivilized.”

“I never claimed to be civilized. But I know which end wags and which end bites.”

Rod ignored her and went to look at the prisoners. Roy Kilroy had caused them to lie down one on top of the other; it rendered them undignified and helpless. “Let them sit up.” Kilroy and Grant Cowper had been guarding them. Cowper said, “You heard the Captain. Sit up.” They unsnarled and sat up, looking glum.

Rod looked at Jock McGowan. “What do you think we ought to do with you?”

McGowan said nothing. The puncture in his side was oozing blood and he was pale. Rod said slowly, “Some think we ought to chuck you in the stream. That’s the same as condemning you to death- but if we are going to, we ought to shoot you or hang you. I don’t favor letting anybody be eaten alive. Should we hang you?”

Bruce McGowan blurted out, “We haven’t done anything.”

“No. But you sure tried. You aren’t safe to have around other people.”

Somebody called out, “Oh, let’s shoot them and get it over with!” Rod ignored it. Grant Cowper came close to Rod and said, “We ought to vote on this. They ought to have a trial.” Rod shook his head. “No.” He went on to the prisoners,

I don’t favor punishing you- this is personal. But we can’t risk having you around either.” He turned to Cowper. “Give them their knives.” “Rod? You’re not going to fight them?”

“Of course not.” He turned back. “You can have your knives; we’re keeping your guns. When we turn you loose, head downstream and keep going. Keep going for at least a week. If you ever show your faces again, you won’t get a chance to explain. Understand me?’

Jock McGowan nodded. Dick Burke gulped and said, “But turning us out with just knives is the same as killing us.

“Nonsense! No guns. And remember, if you turn back this way, even to hunt, it’s once too many. There may be somebody trailing you- with a gun.

“Loaded this time!” added Caroline. “Hey, Roddie, I want that job. Can I? Please?” “Shut up, Carol. Roy, you and Grant start them on their way.”

As exiles and guards, plus sightseers, moved off they ran into Jimmy Throxton coming back into camp. He stopped and stared. “What’s the procession? Rod what have you done to your ribs, boy? Scratching yourself again?”

Several people tried to tell him at once. He got the gist of it and shook his head mournfully. “And there I was, good as gold, looking for pretty rocks for our garden wall. Every time there’s a party people forget to ask me. Discrimination.”

“Stow it, Jim. It’s not funny.”

“That’s what I said. It’s discrimination.”

Rod got the group started on the wall with an hour or more of daylight wasted. He tried to work on the wall despite Bob Baxter’s medical orders, but found that he was not up to it; not only was his wound painful but also he felt shaky with reaction.

Grant Cowper looked him up during the noon break. “Skipper, can I talk with you? Privately?” Rod moved aside with him. “What’s on your mind?”

“Mmm … Rod, you were lucky this morning. You know that, don’t you? No offense intended.” “Sure, I know. What about it?”

“Uh, do you know why you had trouble?”

“What? Of course I know- now. I trusted somebody when I should not have.”

Cowper shook his head. “Not at all. Rod, what do you know about theory of government?” Rod looked surprised. “I’ve had the usual civics courses. Why?”

“I doubt if I’ve mentioned it, but the course I’m majoring in at Teller U. is colonial administration. One thing we study is how authority comes about in human society and how it is maintained. I’m not criticizing but to be blunt, you almost lost your life because you’ve never studied such things.”

Rod felt annoyed. “What are you driving at?”

“Take it easy. But the fact remains that you didn’t have any authority. McGowan knew it and wouldn’t take orders. Everybody else knew it, too. When it came to a showdown, nobody knew whether to back you up or not. Because you don’t have a milligram of real authority.”

“Just a moment! Are you saying I’m not leader of this team?”

“You are de facto leader, no doubt about it. But you’ve never been elected to the job. That’s your weakness.” Rod chewed this over. “I know,” he said slowly. “It’s just that we have been so confounded busy.”

“Sure, I know. I’d be the last person to criticize. But a captain ought to be properly elected.”

Rod sighed. “I meant to hold an election but I thought getting the wall built was more urgent. All right, let’s call them together.” “Oh, you don’t need to do it this minute.”

“Why not? The sooner the better, apparently.” “Tonight, when it’s too dark to work, is soon enough.” “Well … okay.”

When they stopped for supper Rod announced that there would be an organization and planning meeting. No one seemed surprised, although he himself had mentioned it to no one.

He felt annoyed and had to remind himself that there was nothing secret about it; Grant had been under no obligation to keep it quiet. He set guards and fire tenders, then came back into

the circle of firelight and called out, “Quiet, everybody! Let’s get started. If you guys on watch can’t hear, be sure to speak up” He hesitated. “We’re going to hold an election. Somebody

pointed out that I never have been elected captain of this survival team. Well, if any of you have your noses out of joint, I’m sorry. I was doing the best I could. But you are entitled to elect a

captain. All right, any nominations?”

Jiminy Throxton shouted, “I nominate Rod Walker!” Caroline’s voice answered, “I second it! Move the nominations be closed.” Rod said hastily, “Carol, your motion is out of order.”

“Why?”

Before he could answer Roy Kilroy spoke up. “Rod, can I have the floor a moment? Privileged question.” Rod turned, saw that Roy was squatting beside Grant Cowper. “Sure. State your question.”

“Matter of procedure. The first thing is to elect a temporary chairman.”

Rod thought quickly. “I guess you’re right. Jimmy, your nomination is thrown out. Nominations for temporary chairman are in order.” “Rod Walker for temporary chairman!”

“Oh, shut up, Jimmy! I don’t want to be temporary chairman.”

Roy Kilroy was elected. He took the imaginary gavel and announced, “The chair recognizes Brother Cowper for a statement of aims and purposes of this meeting.” Jimmy Throxton called out, “What do we want any speeches for? Let’s elect Rod and go to bed. I’m tired- and I’ve got a two-hour watch coming up.”

“Out of order. The chair recognizes Grant Cowper.” Cowper stood up. The firelight caught his handsome features and curly, short beard. Rod rubbed the scraggly growth on his own chin and wished that he looked like Cowper. The young man was dressed only in walking shorts and soft bush shoes but he carried himself with the easy dignity of a distinguished speaker before some important body. “Friends,” he said, “brothers and sisters, we are gathered here tonight not to elect a survival-team captain, but to found a new nation.”

He paused to let the idea sink in. “You know the situation we are in. We fervently hope to be rescued, none more so than I. I will even go so far as to say that I think we will be rescued … eventually. But we have no way of knowing, we have no data on which to base an intelligent guess, as to when we will be rescued.

“It might be tomorrow … it might be our descendants a thousand years from now.” He said the last very solemnly.

“But when the main body of our great race re-establishes contact with us, it is up to us, this little group here tonight, whether they find a civilized society or flea-bitten animals without language, without arts, with the light of reason grown dim … or no survivors at all, nothing but bones picked clean.”

“Not mine!” called out Caroline. Kilroy gave her a dirty look and called for order.

“Not yours, Caroline,” Cowper agreed gravely. “Nor mine. Not any of us. Because tonight we will take the step that will keep this colony alive. We are poor in things; we will make what we need. We are rich in knowledge; among us we hold the basic knowledge of our great race. We must preserve it … we will!”

Caroline cut through Cowper’s dramatic pause with a stage whisper. “Talks pretty, doesn’t he? Maybe I’ll marry him.”

He did not try to fit this heckling into his speech. “What is the prime knowledge acquired by our race? That without which the rest is useless? What flame must we guard like vestal virgins?”

Some one called out, “Fire.” Cowper shook his head. “Writing!”

“The decimal system.” “Atomics!”

“The wheel, of course.

“No, none of those. They are all important, but they are not the keystone. The greatest invention of mankind is government. It is also the hardest of all. More individualistic than cats, nevertheless we have learned to cooperate more efficiently than ants or bees or termites. Wilder, bloodier, and more deadly than sharks, we have learned to live together as peacefully  as lambs. But these things are not easy. That is why that which we do tonight will decide our future … and perhaps the future of our children, our children’s children, our descendants far

into the womb of time. We are not picking a temporary survival leader; we are setting up a government. We must do it with care. We must pick a chief executive for our new nation, a mayor of our city-state. But we must draw up a constitution, sign articles binding us together. We must organize and plan.”

“Hear, hear!”

“Bravo!”

“We must establish law, appoint judges, arrange for orderly administration of our code. Take for example, this morning-” Cowper turned to Rod and gave him a friendly smile. “Nothing personal, Rod, you understand that. I think you acted with wisdom and I was happy that you tempered justice with mercy. Yet no one could have criticized if you had yielded to your  impulse and killed all four of those, uh … anti-social individuals. But justice should not be subject to the whims of a dictator. We can’t stake our lives on your temper … good or bad. You see that, don’t you?”

Rod did not answer He felt that he was being accused of bad temper, of being a tyrant and dictator, of being a danger to the group. But he could not put his finger on it. Grant Cowper’s remarks had been friendly … yet they felt intensely personal and critical.

Cowper insisted on an answer. “You do see that, Rod? Don’t you? You don’t want to continue to have absolute power over the lives and persons of our community? You don’t want that? Do you?” He waited.

“Huh? Oh, yeah, sure! I mean, I agree with you.”

“Good! I was sure you would understand. And I must ay that I think you have done a very good job in getting us together. I don’t agree with any who have criticized you. You were doing your best and we should let bygones be bygones.” Cowper grinned that friendly grin and Rod felt as if he were being smothered with kisses.

Cowper turned to Kilroy. “That’s all I have to say, Mr. Chairman.” He flashed his grin and added as he sat down, “Sorry I talked so long, folks. I had to get it off my chest.” Kilroy clapped his hands once. “The chair will entertam nominations for- Hey, Grant, if we don’t call it ‘captain,’ then what should we call it?”

“Mmm …” Cowper said judicially. “‘President’ seems a little pompous. I think ‘mayor’ would be about right-mayor of our city-state, our village.” “The chair will entertain nominations for mayor.

“Hey!” demanded Jimmy Throxton. “Doesn’t anybody else get to shoot off his face?” “Out of order.”

“No,” Cowper objected, “I don’t think you should rule Jimmy out of order, Roy. Anyone who has something to contribute should be encouraged to speak. We mustn’t act hastily.” “Okay, Throxton, speak your piece.”

“Oh, I didn’t want to sound off. I just didn’t like the squeeze play.”

“All right, the chair stands corrected. Anybody else? If not, we will entertain-“ “One moment, Mr. Chairman!”

Rod saw that it was Arthur Nielsen, one of the Teller University group. He managed to look neat even in these circumstances but he had strayed into camp bereft of all equipment, without even a knife. He had been quite hungry.

Kilroy looked at him. “You want to talk, Waxie?” “Nielsen is the name. Or Arthur. As you know. Yes.” “Okay. Keep it short.”

“I shall keep it as short as circumstances permit. Fellow associates, we have here a unique opportunity, probably one which has not occurred before in history. As Cowper pointed out, we must proceed with care. But, already we have set out on the wrong foot. Our object should be to found the first truly scientific community. Yet what do I find? You are proposing to

select an executive by counting noses! Leaders should not be chosen by popular whim; they should be determined by rigorous scientific criteria. Once selected, those leaders must have full scientific freedom to direct the bio-group in accordance with natural law, unhampered by such artificial anachronisms as statutes, constitutions, and courts of law. We have here an adequate supply of healthy females; we have the means to breed scientifically a new race, a super race, a race which, if I may say so-“

Ahandful of mud struck Nielsen in the chest; he stopped suddenly. “I saw who did that!” he said angrily. Just the sort of nincompoop who always-“ “Order, order, please!” Kilroy shouted. “No mudsling or I’ll appoint a squad of sergeants-at-arms. Are you through, Waxie?”

“I was just getting started.”

“Just a moment,” put in Cowper. “Point of order Mr. Chairman. Arthur has a right to be heard. But I think he speaking before the wrong body. We’re going to have a constitutional committee, I’m sure. He should present his arguments to them. Then, if we like them, we can adopt his ideas.”

“You’re right, Grant. Sit down, Waxie.” “Huh? I appeal!”

Roy Kilroy said briskly, “The chair has ruled this out of order at this time and the speaker has appealed to the house, a priority motion not debatable. All in favor of supporting the chair’s ruling, which is for Waxie to shut up, make it known by saying ‘Aye.’”

There was a shouted chorus of assent. “Opposed: ‘No.’ Sit down, Waxie.” Kilroy looked around. “Anybody else?”

“Yes”

“I can’t see. Who is it?”

“Bill Kennedy, Ponce de Leon class. I don’t agree with Nielsen except on one point: we are fiddling around with the wrong things. Sure, we need a group captain but, aside from whatever  it takes to eat, we shouldn’t think about anything but how to get back. I don’t want a scientific society; I’d settle for a hot bath and decent food.”

There was scattered applause. The chairman said, “I’d like a bath, too … and I’d fight anybody for a dish of cornflakes. But, Bill, how do you suggest that we go about it?”

“Huh? We set up a crash-priority project and build a gate. Everybody works on it.”

There was silence, then several talked at once: “Crazy! No uranium.” – “We might find uranium.” – “Where do we get the tools? Shucks, I don’t even have a screwdriver.” – “But where are we?” – “It is just a matter of-“

“Quiet!” yelled Kilroy. “Bill, do you know how to build a gate?” “No”

“I doubt if anybody does.”

“That’s a defeatist attitude. Surely some of you educated blokes from Teller have studied the subject. You should get together, pool what you know, and put us to work. Sure, it may take a long time. But that’s what we ought to do.”

Cowper said, just a minute, Roy. Bill, I don’t dispute what you say; every idea should be explored. We’re bound to set up a planning committee. Maybe we had better elect a mayor, or a captain, or whatever you want to call him-and then dig into your scheme when we can discuss it in detail. I think it has merit and should be discussed at length. What do you think?”

“Why, sure, Grant. Let’s get on with the election. I just didn’t want that silly stuff about breeding a superman to be the last word.” “Mr. Chairman! I protest-“

“Shut up, Waxie. Are you ready with nominations for mayor? If there is no objection, the chair rules debate closed and will entertain nominations.” “I nominate Grant Cowper!”

“Second!”

“I second the nomination.” “Okay, I third it!”

“Let’s make it unanimous! Question, question!”

Jimmy Throxton’s voice cut through the shouting, “I NOMINATE ROD WALKER!” Bob Baxter stood up. “Mr. Chairman?”

“Quiet, everybody. Mr. Baxter.” “I second Rod Walker.”

“Okay. Two nominations, Grant Cowper and Rod Walker. Are there any more?”

There was a brief silence. Then Rod spoke up. “Just a second, Roy.” He found that his voice was trembling and he took two deep breaths before he went on. “I don’t want it. I’ve had all the grief I want for a while and I’d like a rest. Thanks anyhow, Bob. Thanks, Jimmy.”

“Any further nominations?”

“Just a sec, Roy … point of personal privilege.” Grant Cowper stood up. “Rod, I know how you feel. Nobody in his right mind seeks public office … except as a duty, willingness to serve. If you withdraw, I’m going to exercise the same privilege; I don’t want the headaches any more than you do.”

“Now wait a minute, Grant. You-“

“You wait a minute. I don’t think either one of us should withdraw; we ought to perform any duty that is handed to us, just as we stand a night watch when it’s our turn. But I think we ought to have more nominations.” He looked around. “Since that mix-up this morning we have as many girls as men . . yet both of the candidates are male. That’s not right. Uh, Mr. Chairman, I nominate Caroline Mshiyeni.”

“Huh? Hey, Grant, don’t be silly. I’d look good as a lady mayoress, wouldn’t I? Anyhow, I’m for Roddie.”

“That’s your privilege, Caroline. But you ought to let yourself be placed before the body, just like Rod and myself.” “Nobody’s going to vote for me!”

“That’s where you’re wrong. I’m going to vote for you. But we still ought to have more candidates.” “Three nominations before the house,” Kilroy announced. “Any more? If not, I declare the-“

“Mr. Chairman!”

“Huh? Okay, Waxie, you want to nominate somebody?” “Yes.”

“Who?” “Me”

“You want to nominate yourself?”

“I certainly do. What’s funny about that? I am running on a platform of strict scientific government. I want the rational minds in this group to have someone to vote for.” Kilroy looked puzzled. “I’m not sure that is correct parliamentary procedure. I’m afraid I’ll have to over-“

“Never mind, never mind!” Caroline chortled. “I nominate him. But I’m going to vote for Roddie,” she added.          Kilroy sighed. “Okay, four candidates. I guess we’ll have to have a show of hands. We don’t have anything for ballots.” Bob Baxter stood up. “Objection, Mr. Chairman. I call for a secret ballot. We can find some way to do it.”

Away was found. Pebbles would signify Rod, a bare twig was a note for Cowper, a green leaf meant Caroline, while one of Jimmy’s ceramic attempts was offered as a ballot box. “How about Nielsen?” Kilroy asked.

Jimmy spoke up. “Uh, maybe this would do: I made another pot the same time I made this one, only it busted. Ill get chunks of it and all the crackpots are votes for Waxie.” “Mr. Chairman, I resent the insinua-“

“Save it, Waxie. Pieces of baked clay for you, pebbles for Walker, twigs for Grant, leaves for Carol. Get your votes, folks, then file past and drop them in the ballot box. Shorty, you and Margery act as tellers.”

The tellers solemnly counted the ballots by firelight. There were five votes for Rod, one for Nielsen, none for Caroline, and twenty-two for Cowper. Rod shook hands with Cowper and faded back into the darkness so that no one would see his face. Caroline looked at the results and said, “Hey, Grant! You promised to vote for me. What happened? Did you vote for yourself? Huh? How about that?”

Rod said nothing. He had voted for Cowper and was certain that the new mayor had not returned the compliment … he was sure who his five friends were. Dog take it!-he had seen it coming; why hadn’t Grant let him bow out?

Grant ignored Caroline’s comment. He briskly assumed the chair and said, “Thank you. Thank you all. know you want to get to sleep, so I will limit myself tonight to appointing a few committees-“

Rod did not get to sleep at once. He told himself that there was no disgrace in losing an election- shucks, hadn’t his old man lost the time he had run for community corporation board? He told himself, too, that trying to ride herd on those apes was enough to drive a man crazy and he was well out of it- he had never wanted the job! Nevertheless there was a lump in his middle and a deep sense of personal failure.

It seemed that he had just gone to sleep … his father was looking at him saying, “You know we are proud of you, son. Still, if you had had the foresight to-” when someone touched his arm.

He was awake, alert, and had Colonel Bowie out at once.

“Put away that toothpick,” Jimmy whispered, “before you hurt somebody. Me, I mean.” “What’s up?”

“I’m up, I’ve. got the fire watch. You’re about to be, because we are holding a session of the inner sanctum.” “Huh?”

“Shut up and come along. Keep quiet, people are asleep.”

The inner sanctum turned out to be Jimmy, Caroline, Jacqueline, Bob Baxter, and Carmen Garcia. They gathered inside the ring of fire but as far from the sleepers as possible. Rod looked around at his friends.

“What’s this all about?”

“It’s about this,” Jimmy said seriously. “You’re our Captain. And we like that election as much as I like a crooked deck of cards.” “That’s right,” agreed Caroline. “All that fancy talk!”

“Huh? Everybody got to talk. Everybody got to vote.” “Yes,” agreed Baxter. “Yes … and no.”

“It was all proper. I have no kick.”

“I didn’t expect you to kick, Rod. Nevertheless well, I don’t know how much politicking you’ve seen, Rod. I haven’t seen much myself, except in church matters and we Quakers don’t do things that way; we wait until the Spirit moves. But, despite all the rigamarole, that was a slick piece of railroading. This morning you would have been elected overwhelmingly; tonight you did not stand a chance.”

“The point is,” Jimmy put in, “do we stand for it?” “What can we do?”

“What can we do? We don’t have to stay here. We’ve still got our own group; we can walk out and find another place … a bigger cave maybe.” ‘Yes, sir!” agreed Caroline. “Right tonight.”

Rod thought about it. The idea was tempting; they didn’t need the others … guys like Nielsen- and Cowper. The discovery that his friends were loyal to him, loyal to the extent that they would consider exile rather than let him down choked him up. He turned to Jacqueline. “How about you, Jackie?”

“We’re partners, Rod. Always.”

“Bob- do you want to do this? You and Carmen?” “Yes. Well . .

“‘Well’ what?”

“Rod, we’re sticking with you. This election is all very well- but you took us in when we needed it and teamed with us. We’ll never forget it. Furthermore I think that you make a sounder team captain than Cowper is likely to make. But there is one thing.”

“Yes.”

“If you decide that we leave, Carmen and I will appreciate it if you put it off a day.” “Why?” demanded Caroline. “Now is the time.”

“Well- they’ve set this up as a formal colony, a village with a mayor. Everybody knows that a regularly elected mayor can perform weddings.” “Oh!” said Caroline. “Pardon my big mouth.”

“Carmen and I can take care of the religious end- it’s not very complicated in our church. But, just in case we ever are rescued, we would like it better and our folks would like it if the civil requirements were all perfectly regular and legal. You see?”

Rod nodded. “I see.”

“But if you say to leave tonight …”

“I don’t,” Rod answered with sudden decision. “We’ll stay and get you two properly married. Then-“ “Then we all shove off in a shower of rice,” Caroline finished.

“Then we’ll see. Cowper may turn out to be a good mayor. We won’t leave just because I lost an election.” He looked around at their faces. “But … but I certainly do thank you. I-“ He could not go on. Carmen stepped forward and kissed him quickly. “Goodnight, Rod. Thanks.”

4.      “A Joyful Omen”

Mayor Cowper got off to a good start. He approved, took over, and embellished a suggestion that Carmen and Bob should have their own quarters. He suspended work on the wall and set the whole village to constructing a honeymoon cottage. Not until his deputy, Roy Kilroy, reminded him did he send out hunting parties.

He worked hard himself, having set the wedding for that evening and having decreed that the building must be finished by sundown. Finished it was by vandalizing part of the wall to  supply building stone when the supply ran short Construction was necessarily simple since they had no tools, no mortar but clay mud, no way to cut timbers. It was a stone box as tall as   a man and a couple of meters square, with a hole for a door. The roof was laid up from the heaviest poles that could be cut from a growth upstream of giant grass much like bamboo- the colonists simply called it “bamboo.” This was thatched and plastered with mud; it sagged badly.

But it was a house and even had a door which could be closed- a woven grass mat stiffened with bamboo. It neither hinged nor locked but it filled the hole and could be held in place with  a stone and a pole. The floor was clean sand covered with fresh broad leaves.

As a doghouse for a St. Bernard it would have been about right; as a dwelling for humans it was not much. But it was better than that which most human beings had enjoyed through the history and prehistory of the race. Bob and Carmen did not look at it critically.

When work was knocked off for lunch Rod selfconsciously sat down near a group around Cowper. He had wrestled with his conscience for a long time in the night and had decided that the only thing to do was to eat sour grapes and pretend to like them. He could start by not avoiding Cowper.

Margery Chung was cook for the day; she cut Rod a chunk of scorched meat. He thanked her and started to gnaw it. Cowper was talking. Rod was not trying to overhear but there seemed to be no reason not to listen.

“-which is the only way we will get the necessary discipline into the group. I’m sure you agree. Cowper glanced up, caught Rod’s eye, looked annoyed, then grinned. “Hello, Rod.” “Hi, Grant.”

“Look, old man, we’re having an executive committee meeting. Would you mind finding somewhere else to eat lunch?” Rod stood up blushing. “Oh! Sure.”

Cowper seemed to consider it. “Nothing private, of course- just getting things done. On second thought maybe you should sit in and give us your advice.” “Huh? Oh, no! I didn’t know anything was going on.” Rod started to move away.

Cowper did not insist. “Got to keep working, lots to do. See you later, then. Any time.” He grinned and turned away.

Rod wandered off, feeling conspicuous. He heard himself hailed and turned gratefully, joined Jimmy Throxton. “Come outside the wall,” Jimmy said quietly. “The Secret Six are having a picnic. Seen the happy couple?”

“You mean Carmen and Bob?”

“Know any other happy couples? Oh, there they are- staring hungrily at their future mansion. See you outside.”

Rod went beyond the wall, found Jacqueline and Caroline sitting near the water and eating. From habit he glanced around, sizing up possible cover for carnivores and figuring escape routes back into the kraal, but his alertness was not conscious as there seemed no danger in the open so near other people. He joined the girls and sat down on a rock. “Hi, kids.”

“Hello, Rod.”

“H’lo, Roddie,” Caroline seconded. “‘What news on the Rialto?’”

“None, I guess. Say, did Grant appoint an executive committee last night?”

“He appointed about a thousand committees but no executive committee unless he did it after we adjourned. Why an executive committee? This gang needs one the way I need a bicycle.”

“Who is on it, Rod?” asked Jacqueline.

Rod thought back and named the faces he had seen around Cowper. She looked thoughtful. “Those are his own special buddies from Teller U.” “Yes, I guess so.

“I don’t like it,” she answered. “What’s the harm?”

“Maybe none … maybe. It is about what we could expect. But I’d feel better if all the classes were on it, not just that older bunch. You know.” “Shucks, Jack, you’ve got to give him some leeway.”

“I don’t see why, put in Caroline. “That bunch you named are the same ones Hizzonor appointed as chairmen of the other committees. It’s a tight little clique. You notice none of us unsavory characters got named to any important cominittee- I’m on waste disposal and camp sanitation, Jackie is on food preparation, and you aren’t on any. You should have been on the constitution, codification, and organization committee, but he made himself chairman and left you out. Add it up.”

Rod did not answer. Caroline went on, “I’ll add it if you won’t. First thing you know there will be a nominating committee. Then we’ll find that only those of a certain age, say twenty-one, can hold office. Pretty soon that executive committee will turn into a senate (called something else, probably) with a veto that can be upset only by a three-quarters majority that we will never get. That’s the way my Uncle Phil would have rigged it.”

“Your Uncle Phil?”

“Boy, there was a politician! I never liked him- he had kissed so many babies his lips were puckered. I used to hide when he came into our house. But I’d like to put him up against Hizzonor. It’ud be a battle of dinosaurs. Look, Rod, they’ve got us roped and tied; I say we should fade out right after the wedding.” She turned to Jacqueline. “Right… pardner?”

“Sure … if Rod says so.”

“Well, I don’t say so. Look, Carol, I don’t like the situation. To tell the truth … well, I was pretty sour at being kicked out of the captaincy. But I can’t let the rest of you pull out on that account. There aren’t enough of us to form another colony, not safely.”

“Why, Roddie, there are three times as many people still back in those trees as there are here in camp. This time we’ll build up slowly and be choosy about whom we take. Six is a good start. We’ll get by.”

“Not six, Carol. Four.”

“Huh? Six! We shook on it last night before Jimmy woke you.”

Rod shook his head. “Carol, how can we expect Bob and Carmen to walk out … right after the rest have made them a wedding present of a house of their own?” “Well … darn it, we’d build them another house!”

“They would go with us, Carol- but it’s too much to ask.”

“I think,” Jacqueline said grudgingly, “that Rod has something, Carol.”

The argument was ended by the appearance of Bob, Carmen, and Jimmy. They had been delayed, explained Jimmy, by the necessity of inspecting the house. “As if I didn’t know every rock in it. Oh, my back!”

“I appreciate it, Jim,” Carmen said softly. “I’ll rub your back.” “Sold!” Jimmy lay face down.

“Hey!” protested Caroline. “I carried more rocks than he did. Mostly he stood aromid and bossed.” “Supervisory work is exceptionally tiring,” Jimmy said smugly. “You get Bob to rub your back.”

Neither got a back rub as Roy Kilroy called to them from the wall. “Hey! You down there- lunch hour is over. Let’s get back to work.” “Sorry, Jimmy. Later.” Carmen turned away.

Jimmy scrambled to his feet. “Bob, Carmen- don’t go ‘way yet. I want to say something.” They stopped. Rod waved to Kilroy. “With you in a moment!” He turned back to the others.

Jimmy seemed to have difficulty in choosing words. “Uh, Carmen … Bob. The future Baxters. You know we think a lot of you. We think it’s swell that you are going to get married- every family ought to have a marriage. But … well, shopping isn’t what it might be around here and we didn’t know what to get you. So we talked it over and decided to give you this. It’s from all of us. Awedding present.” Jimmy jammed a hand in his pocket, hauled out his dirty, dog-eared playing cards and handed them to Carmen.

Bob Baxter looked startled. “Gosh, Jimmy, we can’t take your cards-your only cards.” “I- we want you to have them.”

“But-“

“Be quiet, Bob!” Carmen said and took the cards. “Thank you, Jimmy. Thank you very much. Thank you all.” She looked around. “Our getting married isn’t going to make any difference, you know. It’s still one family. We’ll expect you all … to come play cards … at our house just as-” She stopped suddenly and started to cry, buried her head on Bob’s shoulder. He patted it. Jimmy looked as if he wanted to cry and Rod felt nakedly embarrassed.

They started back, Carmen with an arm around Jimmy and the other around her bethrothed. Rod hung back with the other two. “Did Jimmy,” he whispered, “say anything to either of you about this?”

“No,” Jacqueline answered.

“Not me,” Caroline agreed. “I was going to give ‘em my stew pan, but now I’ll wait a day or two.” Caroline’s “bag of rocks” had turned out to contain an odd assortment for survival- among other things, a thin-page diary, a tiny mouth organ, and a half-litre sauce pan. She produced other unlikely but useful items from time to time. Why she had picked them and how she had managed to hang on to them after she discarded the bag were minor mysteries, but, as Deacon Matson had often told the class: “Each to his own methods. Survival is an art, not a science.” It was undeniable that she had appeared at the cave healthy, well fed, and with her clothing surprisingly neat and clean in view of the month she had been on the land.

“They won’t expect you to give up your stew pan, Caroline.”

“I can’t use it now that the crowd is so big, and they can set up housekeeping with it. Anyhow, I want to.”

“I’m going to give her two needles and some thread. Bob made her leave her sewing kit behind in favor of medical supplies. But I’ll wait a while, too.” “I haven’t anything I can give them,” Rod said miserably.

Jacqueline turned gentle eyes on him. “You can make them a water skin for their house, Rod,” she said softly. “They would like that. We can use some of my KwikKure so that it will last.” Rod cheered up at once. “Say, that’s a swell idea!”

“We are gathered here,” Grant Cowper said cheerfully, “to join these two people in the holy bonds of matrimony. I won’t give the usual warning because we all know that no impediment exists to this union. In fact it is the finest thing that could happen to our little community, a joyful omen of things to come, a promise for the future, a guarantee that we are firmly resolved to keep the torch of civilization, now freshly lighted on this planet, forever burning in the future. It means that-“

Rod stopped listening. He was standing at the groom’s right as best man. His duties had not been onerous but now he found that he had an overwhelming desire to sneeze. He worked his features around, then in desperation rubbed his upper lip violently and overcame it. He sighed silently and was glad for the first time that Grant Cowper had this responsibility. Grant seemed to know the right words and he did not.

The bride was attended by Caroline Mshiyeni. Both girls carried bouquets of a flame-colored wild bloom. Caroline was in shorts and shirt as usual and the bride was dressed in the conventional blue denim trousers and overshirt. Her hair was arranged en brosse; her scrubbed face shone in the firelight and she was radiantly beautiful.

“Who giveth this woman?”

Jimmy Throxton stepped forward and said hoarsely, “I do!” “The ring, please.”

Rod had it on his little finger; with considerable fumbling he got it off. It was a Ponce de Leon senior-class ring, borrowed from Bill Kennedy. He handed it to Cowper. “Carmen Eleanora, do you take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband, to have and to hold, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health, till death do you part?”  “I do.”

“Robert Edward, do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife? Will you keep her and cherish her, cleaving unto her only, until death do you part?” “I do. I mean, I will. Both.”

“Take her hand in yours. Place the ring on her finger. Repeat after me- Rod’s sneeze was coming back again; he missed part of it.

“-so, by authority vested in me as duly elected Chief Magistrate of this sovereign community, I pronounce you man and wife! Kiss her, chum, before I beat you to it.”

Carol and Jackie both were crying; Rod wondered what had gone wrong. He missed his turn at kissing the bride, but she turned to him presently, put an arm around his neck and kissed him. He found himself shaking hands with Bob very solemnly. “Well, I guess that does it. Don’t forget you are supposed to carry her through the door.”

“I won’t forget.”

“Well, you told me to remind you. Uh, may the Principle bless you both.”

5.               “I So Move”

There was no more talk of leaving. Even Caroline dropped the subject.

But on other subjects talk was endless. Cowper held a town meeting every evening. These started with committee reports- the committee on food resources and natural conservation, the committees on artifacts and inventory, on waste disposal and camp sanitation, on exterior security, on human resources and labor allotment, on recruitment and immigration, on conservation of arts and sciences, on constitution, codification, and justice, on food preparation, on housing and city planning- Cowper seemed to enjoy the endless talk and Rod was forced to admit that the others appeared to have a good time, too- he surprised himself by discovering that he too looked forward to the evenings. It was the village’s social life, the only recreation. Each session produced wordy battles, personal remarks and caustic criticisms; what was lacking in the gentlemanly formality found in older congresses was made up in spice. Rod liked to sprawl on the ground with his ear near Jimmy Throxton and listen to Jimmy’s slanderous asides about the intelligence, motives, and ancestry of each speaker. He waited for Caroline’s disorderly heckling.

But Caroline was less inclined to heckle now; Cowper had appointed her Historian on discovering that she owned a diary and could take shorthand. “It is extremely important,” he informed her in the presence of the village, “that we have a full record of these pioneer days for posterity. You’ve been writing in your diary every day?”

“Sure. That’s what it’s for.”

“Good! From here on it will be an official account. I want you to record the important events of each day.” “All right. It doesn’t make the tiniest bit of difference, I do anyhow.”

“Yes, yes, but in greater detail. I want you to record our proceedings, too. Historians will treasure this document, Carol.” “I’ll bet!”

Cowper seemed lost in thought. “How many blank leaves left in your diary?” “Couple of hundred, maybe.”

“Good! That solves a problem I had been wondering about. Uh, we will have to requisition half of that supply for official use- public notices, committee transactions, and the like. You know.”

Caroline looked wide-eyed. “That’s a lot of paper, isn’t it? You had better send two or three big husky boys to carry it.” Cowper looked puzzled. “You’re joking.”

“Better make it four big huskies. I could probably manage three … and somebody is likely to get hurt.”

“Now, see here, Caroline, it is just a temporary requisition, in the public interest. Long before you need all of your diary we will devise other writing materials.” “Go ahead and devise! That’s my diary.”

Caroline sat near Cowper, diary in her lap and style in her hand, taking notes. Each evening she opened proceedings by reading the minutes of the previous meeting. Rod asked her if she took down the endless debates.

“Goodness no!”

“I wondered. It seemed to me that you would run out of paper. Your minutes are certainly complete.” She chuckled. “Roddie, want to know what I really write down? Promise not to tell.”

“Of course I won’t.”

“When I ‘read the minutes’ I just reach back in my mind and recall what the gabble was the night before-I’ve got an awfully good memory. But what I actually dirty the paper with … well, here-” She took her diary from a pocket. “Here’s last night: ‘Hizzoner called us to disorder at half-past burping time. The committee on cats and dogs reported. No cats, no dogs. The shortage was discussed. We adjourned and went to sleep, those who weren’t already.’”

Rod grinned. “Agood thing Grant doesn’t know shorthand.”

“Of course, if anything real happens, I put it down. But not the talk, talk, talk.”

Caroline was not adamant about not sharing her supply of paper when needed. Amarriage certificate, drawn up in officialese by Howard Goldstein, a Teller law student, was prepared for the Baxters and signed by Cowper, the couple themselves, and Rod and Caroline as witnesses. Caroline decorated it with flowers and turtle doves before delivering it.

There were others who seemed to feel that the new government was long on talk and short on results. Among them was Bob Baxter, but the Quaker couple did not attend most of the meetings. But when Cowper had been in office a week, Shorty Dumont took the floor after the endless committee reports:

“Mr. Chairman!”

“Can you hold it, Shorty? I have announcements to make before we get on to new business.” “This is still about committee reports. When does the committee on our constitution report?” “Why, I made the report myself.”

“You said that a revised draft was being prepared and the report would be delayed. That’s no report. What I want to know is: when do we get a permanent set-up? When do we stop floating in air, getting along from day to day on ‘temporary executive notices’?”

Cowper flushed. “Do you object to my executive decisions?”

“Won’t say that I do, won’t say that I don’t. But Rod was let out and you were put in on the argument that we needed constitutional governinent, not a dictatorship. That’s why I voted for you. All right, where’s our laws? When do we vote on them?”

“You must understand,” Cowper answered carefully, “that drawing up a constitution is not done overnight. Many considerations are involved.”

“Sure, sure- but it’s time we had some notion of what sort of a constitution you are cooking up. How about a bill of rights? Have you drawn up one?” “All in due time.”

“Why wait? For a starter let’s adopt the Virginia Bill of Rights as article one. I so move. “You’re out of order. Anyhow we don’t even have a copy of it.”

“Don’t let that bother you; I know it by heart. You ready, Carol? Take this down . “Never mind,” Caroline answered. “I know it, too. I’m writing it.”

“You see? These things aren’t any mystery, Grant; most of us could quote it. So let’s quit stalling.” Somebody yelled, “Whoopee! That’s telling him, Shorty. I second the motion.”

Cowper shouted for order. He went on, “This is not the time nor the place. When the committee reports, you will find that all proper democratic freedoms and safeguards have been included- modified only by the stern necessities of our hazardous position.” He flashed his smile. “Now let’s get on with business. I have an announcement about hunting parties.

Hereafter each hunting party will be expected to-“

Dumont was still standing. “I said no more stalling, Grant. You argued that what we needed was laws, not a captain’s whim. You’ve been throwing your weight around quite a while now and I don’t see any laws. What are your duties? How much authority do you have? Are you both the high and the low justice? Or do the rest of us have rights?”

“Shut up and sit down!”

“How long is your term of office?”

Cowper made an effort to control himself. “Shorty, if you have suggestions or, such things, you must take them up with the committee. “Oh, slush! Give me a straight answer.”

“You are out of order.”

“I am not out of order. I’m insisting that the committee on drawing up a constitution tell us what they are doing. I won’t surrender the floor until I get an answer. This is a town meeting and   I have as much right to talk as anybody.”

Cowper turned red. “I wouldn’t be too sure,” he said ominously. just how old are you, Shorty?”

Dumont stared at him. “Oh, so that’s it? And the cat is out of the bag!” He glanced around. “I see quite a few here who are younger than I am. See what he’s driving at, folks? Second- class citizens. He’s going to stick an age limit in that so-called constitution. Aren’t you, Grant? Look me in the eye and deny it.”

“Roy! Dave! Grab him and bring him to order.”

Rod had been listening closely; the show was better than usual. Jimmy had been adding his usual flippant commentary. Now Jimmy whispered, “That tears it. Do we choose up sides or do we fade back and watch the fun?”

Before he could answer Shorty made it clear that he needed no immediate help. He set his feet wide and snapped, “Touch me and somebody gets hurt!” He did not reach for any weapon but his attitude showed that he was willing to fight.

He went on, “Grant, I’ve got one thing to say, then I’ll shut up.” He turned and spoke to all. “You can see that we don’t have any rights and we don’t know where we stand- but we are already organized like a straitjacket. Committees for this, committees for that- and what good has it done? Are we better off than we were before all these half-baked committees were appointed? The wall is still unfinished, the camp is dirtier than ever, and nobody knows what he is supposed to do. Why, we even let the signal fire go out yesterday. When a roof leaks, you don’t appoint a committee; you fix the leak. I say give the job back to Rod, get rid of these silly committees, and get on with fixing the leaks. Anybody with me? Make some noise!”

They made plenty of noise. The shouts may have come from less than half but Cowper could see that he was losing his grip on them. Roy Kilroy dropped behind Shorty Dumont and looked questioningly at Cowper; Jiminy jabbed Rod in the ribs and whispered, “Get set, boy.”

But Cowper shook his head at Roy. “Shorty,” he said quietly, “are you through making your speech?” “That wasn’t a speech, that was a motion. And you had better not tell me it’s out of order.”

“I did not understand your motion. State it.”

“You understood it. I’m moving that we get rid of you and put Rod back in.” Kilroy interrupted. “Hey, Grant, he can’t do that. That’s not according to-“ “Hold it, Roy. Shorty, your motion is not in order.”

“I thought you would say that!”

“And it is really two motions. But I m not going to bother with trifles. You say people don’t like the way I’m doing things, so we’ll find out.” He went on briskly, “Is there a second to the motion?”

“Second!”

“I second it.”

“Moved and seconded. The motion is to recall me and put Rod in office. Any remarks?”

Adozen people tried to speak. Rod got the floor by outshouting the others. “Mr. Chairman, Mr. Chairman! Privileged question!” “The chair recognizes Rod Walker.”

“Point of personal privilege. I have a statement to make.” “Well? Go ahead.”

“Look, Grant, I didn’t know Shorty planned to do this. Tell him, Shorty.” “That’s right.”

“Okay, okay,” Cowper said sourly. “Any other remarks? Don’t yell, just stick up your hands.” “I’m not through,” insisted Rod.

“Well?”

“I not only did not know, I’m not for it. Shorty, I want you to withdraw your motion.” “No!”

“I think you should. Grant has only had a week; you can’t expect miracles in that time- I know; I’ve had grief enough with this bunch of wild men. You may not like the things he’s done- I don’t myself, a lot of them. That’s to be expected. But if you let that be an excuse to run him out of office, then sure as daylight this gang will break up.”

“I’m not busting it up- he is! He may be older than I am but if he thinks that makes the least difference when it comes to having a say- well… he’d better think twice. I’m warning him. You hear that, Grant?”

“I heard it. You misunderstood me.” “Like fun I did!”

“Shorty,” Rod persisted, “will you drop this idea? I’m asking you please.”

Shorty Dumont looked stubborn. Rod looked helplessly at Cowper, shrugged and sat down. Cowper turned away and growled, “Any more debate? You back there… Agnes? You’ve got the floor.”

Jimmy whispered, “Why did you pull a stunt like that, Rod? Nobility doesn’t suit you.” “I wasn’t being noble. I knew what I was doing,” Rod answered in low tones.

“You messed up your chances to be re-elected.”

“Stow it.” Rod listened; it appeared that Agnes Fries had more than one grievance. Jim?”

“Huh?”

“Jump to your feet and move to adjourn.”

“What? Ruin this when it’s getting good? There is going to be some hair pulled … I hope.” “Don’t argue; do it!- or I’ll bang your heads together.”

“Oh, all right. Spoilsport.” Jimmy got reluctantly to his feet, took a breath and shouted, “I move we adjourn!” Rod bounced to his feet. “SECOND THE MOTION!” Cowper barely glanced at them. “Out of order. Sit down.”

“It is not out of order,” Rod said loudly. “Amotion to adjourn is always in order, it takes precedence, and it cannot be debated. I call for the question.”

“I never recognized you. This recall motion is going to be voted on it it is the last thing I do.” Cowper’s face was tense with anger. “Are you through, Agnes? Or do you want to discuss my table manners, too?”

“You can’t refuse a motion to adjourn,” Rod insisted. “Question! Put the question.”

Several took up the shout, drowning out Agnes Fries, preventing Cowper from recognizing another speaker. Boos and catcalls rounded out the tumult. Cowper held up both hands for silence, then called out, “It has been moved and seconded that we adjourn. Those in favor say, ‘Aye.’”

“AYE!!”

“Opposed?”

“No,” said Jimmy.

“The meeting is adjourned.” Cowper strode out of the circle of firelight.

Shorty Dumont came over, planted himself in front of Rod and looked up. “Afine sort of a pal you turned out to be!” He spat on the ground and stomped off.

“Yeah,” agreed Jimmy, “what gives? Schizophrenia? Your nurse drop you on your head? That noble stuff in the right doses might have put us back in business. But you didn’t know when to stop.”

Jacqueline had approached while Jimmy was speaking. “I wasn’t pulling any tricks,” Rod insisted. “I meant what I said. Kick a captain out when he’s had only a few days to show himself and you’ll bust us up into a dozen little groups. I wouldn’t be able to hold them together. Nobody could.”

“Bosh! Jackie, tell the man.”

She frowned. “Jimmy, you’re sweet, but you’re not bright.” “Et tu, Jackie?”

“Never mind, Jackie will take care of you. Agood job, Rod. By tomorrow everybody will realize it. Some of them are a little stirred up tonight.” “What I don’t see,” Rod said thoughtfully, “is what got Shorty stirred up in the first place?”

“Hadn’t you heard? Maybe it was while you were out hunting. I didn’t see it, but he got into a row with Roy, then Grant bawled him out in front of everybody. I think Shorty is self-conscious about his height,” she said seriously. “He doesn’t like to take orders.”

“Does anybody?”

The next day Grant Cowper acted as if nothing had happened. But his manner had more of King Log and less of King Stork. Late in the afternoon he looked up Rod. “Walker? Can you spare me a few minutes?”

“Let’s go where we can talk.” Grant led him to a spot out of earshot. They sat on the ground and Rod waited. Cowper seemed to have difficulty in finding words. Finally he said, “Rod, I think I can depend on you.” He threw in his grin, but it looked forced.

“Why?” asked Rod.

“Well… the way you behaved last night.”

“So? Don’t bank on it, I didn’t do it for you.” Rod paused, then added, “Let’s get this straight. I don’t like you.”

For once Cowper did not grin. “That makes it mutual. I don’t like you a little bit. But we’ve got to get along and I think I can trust you. “Maybe.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“I agree with every one of Shorty’s gripes. I just didn’t agree with his soltition.”

Cowper gave a wry smile unlike his usual expression. For an instant Rod found himself almost liking him. “The sad part is that I agree with his gripes myself.” “Huh?”

“Rod, you probably think I’m a stupid jerk but the fact is I do know quite a bit about theory of government. The hard part is to apply it in a… a transitional period like this. We’ve got fifty  people here and not a one with any practical experience in government- not even myself. But every single one considers himself an expert. Take that bill-of-rights motion; I couldn’t let that stand. I know enough about such things to know that the rights and duties needed for a co-operative colony like this can’t be taken over word for word from an agrarian democracy, and they are still different from those necessary for an industrial republic.” He looked worried. “It is true that we had considered limiting the franchise.”

“You do and they’ll toss you in the creek!”

“I know. That’s one reason why the law committee hasn’t made a report. Another reason is- well, confound it, how can you work out things like a constitution when you practically haven’t any writing paper? Ifs exasperating. But about the franchise: the oldest one of us is around twenty-two and the youngest is about sixteen. The worst of it is that the youngest are the most precocious, geniuses or near-geniuses.” Cowper looked up. “I don’t mean you.

“Oh, no,” Rod said hastily. “I’m no genius!”

“You’re not sixteen, either. These brilliant brats worry me. ‘Bush lawyers,’ every blessed one, with always a smart answer and no sense. We thought with an age limit- a reasonable one- the older heads could act as ballast while they grow up. But it won’t work.”

“No. It won’t.”

“But what am I to do? That order about hunting teams not being mixed- that wasn’t aimed at teams like you and Carol, but she thought it was and gave me the very deuce. I was just trying to take care of these kids. Confound it, I wish they were all old enough to marry and settle down- the Baxters don’t give me trouble.”

“I wouldn’t worry. In a year or so ninety per cent of the colony will be married.” “I hope so! Say … are you thinking about it?”

“Me?” Rod was startled. “Farthest thing from my mind.”

“Um? I thought- Never mind; I didn’t get you out here to ask about your private affairs. What Shorty had to say was hard to swallow- but I’m going to make some changes. I’m abolishing most of the committees.”

“So?”

“Yes. Blast them, they don’t do anything; they just produce reports. I’m going to make one girl boss cook- and one man boss hunter. I want you to be chief of police.” “Huh? Why in Ned do you want a chief of police?”

“Well … somebody has to see that orders are carried out. You know, camp sanitation and such. Somebody has to keep the signal smoking- we haven’t accounted for thirty-seven people, aside from known dead. Somebody has to assign the night watch and check on it. The kids run hog wild if you don’t watch them. You are the one to do it.”

“Why?”

“Well … let’s be practical, Rod. I’ve got a following and so have you. We’ll have less trouble if everybody sees that we two stand together. It’s for the good of the community.”

Rod realized, as clearly as Grant did, that the group had to pull together. But Cowper was asking him to shore up his shaky administration, and Rod not only resented him but thought that Cowper was all talk and no results.

It was not just the unfinished wall, he told himself, but a dozen things. Somebody ought to search for a salt lick, every day. There ought to be a steady hunt for edible roots and berries and things, too- he, for one, was tired of an all-meat diet. Sure, you could stay healthy if you didn’t stick just to lean meat, but who wanted to eat nothing but meat, maybe for a life time? And there were those stinking hides … Grant had ordered every kill skinned, brought back for use.

“What are you going to do with those green hides?” he asked suddenly. “Huh? Why?”

“They stink. If you put me in charge, I’m going to chuck them in the creek.” “But we’re going to need them. Half of us are in rags now.

“But we’re not short on hides; tanning is what we need. Those hides won’t sun-cure this weather.” “We haven’t got tannin. Don’t be silly, Rod.”

“Then send somebody out to chew bark till they find some. You can’t mistake the puckery taste. And get rid of those hides!” “If I do, will you take the job?”

“Maybe. You said, ‘See that orders are carried out.’ Whose orders? Yours? Or Kilroy’s?” “Well, both. Roy is my deputy.”

Rod shook his head. “No, thanks. You’ve got him, so you don’t need me. Too many generals, not enough privates.” “But, Rod, I do need you. Roy doesn’t get along with the younger kids. He rubs them the wrong way.”

“He rubs me the wrong way, too. Nothing doing, Grant. Besides, I don’t like the title anyhow. It’s silly.”

“Pick your own. Captain of the Guard… City Manager. I don’t care what you call it; I want you to take over the night guard and see that things run smoothly around camp- and keep an eye on the younger kids. You can do it and it’s your duty.”

“What will you be doing?”

“I’ve got to whip this code of laws into shape. I’ve got to think about long-range planning. Heavens, Rod, I ve got a thousand things on my mind. I can’t stop to settle a quarrel just because some kid has been teasing the cook. Shorty was right; we can’t wait. When I give an order I want a law to back it and not have to take lip from some young snotty. But I can’t do it all, I need help.”

Cowper put it on grounds impossible to refuse, nevertheless … “What about Kilroy?”

“Eh? Confound it, Rod, you can’t ask me to kick out somebody else to make room for you.”

“I’m not asking for the job!” Rod hesitated. He needed to say that it was a matter of stubborn pride to him to back up the man who had beaten him, it was that more than any public- spiritedness. He could not phrase it, but he did know that Cowper and Kilroy were not the same case.

“I won’t pull Kilroy’s chestnuts out of the fire. Grant, I’ll stooge for you; you were elected. But I won’t stooge for a stooge.” “Rod, be reasonable! If you got an order from Roy, it would be my order. He would simply be carrying it out.”

Rod stood up. “No deal.”

Cowper got angrily to his feet and strode away.

There was no meeting that night, for the first time. Rod was about to visit the Baxters when Cowper called him aside. “You win. I’ve made Roy chief hunter.” “Huh?”

“You take over as City Manager, or Queen of the May, or whatever you like. Nobody has set the night watch. So get busy.” “Wait a minute! I never said I would take the job.”

“You made it plain that the only thing in your way was Roy. Okay, you get your orders directly from me.

Rod hesitated. Cowper looked at him scornfully and said, “So you can’t co-operate even when you have it all your own way?” “Not that, but-“

“No ‘buts.’ Do you take the job? Astraight answer: yes, or no. “Uh… yes.

“Okay.” Cowper frowned and added, “I almost wish you had turned it down.” “That makes two of us.”

Rod started to set the guard and found that every boy he approached was convinced that he had had more than his share of watches. Since the exterior security committee had kept no records- indeed, had had no way to- it was impossible to find out who was right and who was shirking. “Stow it!” he told one. “Starting tomorrow we’ll have an alphabetical list, straight rotation. I’ll post it even if we have to scratch it on a rock.” He began to realize that there was truth in what Grant had said about the difficulty of getting along without writing paper.

“Why don’t you put your pal Baxter on watch?”

“Because the Mayor gave him two weeks honeymoon, as you know. Shut up the guff. Charlie will be your relief; make sure you know where he sleeps.” “I think I’ll get married. I could use two weeks of loafing.”

“I’ll give you five to one you can’t find a girl that far out of her mind. You’re on from midnight to two.”

Most of them accepted the inevitable once they were assured of a square deal in the future, but Peewee Schneider, barely sixteen and youngest in the community, stood on his “rights”- he had stood a watch the night before, he did not rate another for at least three nights, and nobody could most colorfully make him.

Rod told Peewee that he would either stand his watch, or Rod would slap his ears loose- and then he would still stand his watch. To which he added that if he heard Peewee use that sort of language around camp again he would wash Peewee’s mouth out with soap.

Schneider shifted the argument. “Yah! Where are you going to find soap?”

“Until we get some, I’ll use sand. You spread that word, Peewee: no more rough language around camp. We’re going to be civilized if it kills us. Four to six, then, and show Kenny where you sleep.” As he left Rod made a mental note that they should collect wood ashes and fat; while he had only a vague idea of how to make soap probably someone knew how… and soap was needed for other purposes than curbing foul-mouthed pip squeaks. He had felt a yearning lately to be able to stand upwind of himself … he had long ago thrown away his socks.

Rod got little sleep. Everytime he woke he got up and inspected the guard, and twice he was awakened by watchmen who thought they saw something prowling outside the circle of firelight. Rod was not sure, although it did seem once that he could make out a large, long shape drifting past in the darkness. He stayed up a while each time, another gun in case the prowler risked the wall or the fires in the gap. He felt great temptation to shoot at the prowling shadows, but suppressed it. To carry the attack to the enemy would be to squander their scanty ammunition without making a dent in the dangerous beasts around them. There were prowlers every night; they had to live with it.

He was tired and cranky the next morning and wanted to slip away after breakfast and grab a nap in the cave. He had not slept after four in the morning, but had checked on Peewee Schneider at frequent intervals. But there was too much to do; he promised himself a nap later and sought out Cowper instead. “Two or three things on my mind, Grant.”

“Spill it.”

“Any reason not to put girls on watch?” “Eh? I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

“Why not? These girls don’t scream at a mouse. Everyone of them stayed alive by her own efforts at least a month before she joined up here. Ever seen Caroline in action?” “Mmm … no.

“You should. It’s a treat. Sudden death in both hands, and eyes in the back of her head. If she were on watch, I would sleep easy. How many men do we have now?” “Uh, twenty-seven, with the three that came in yesterday.”

“All right, out of twenty-seven who doesn’t stand watch?” “Why, everybody takes his turn.”

“You?”

“Eh? Isn’t that carrying it pretty far? I don’t expect you to take a watch; you run it and check on the others.” “That’s two off. Roy Kilroy?”

“Uh, look, Rod, you had better figure that he is a department head as chief hunter and therefore exempt. You know why- no use looking for trouble.” “I know, all right. Bob Baxter is off duty, too.”

“Until next week.”

“But this is this week. The committee cut the watch down to one at a time; I’m going to boost it to two again. Besides that I want a sergeant of the guard each night. He will be on all night and sleep all next day … then I don’t want to put him on for a couple of days. You see where that leaves me? I need twelve watchstanders every night; I have less than twenty to draw from.”

Cowper looked worried. “The committee didn’t think we had to have more than one guard at a time.”

“Committee be hanged!” Rod scratched his scars and thought about shapes in the dark. “Do you want me to run this the way I think it has to be run? Or shall I just go through the motions?”

“Well . .

“One man alone either gets jittery and starts seeing shadows- or he dopes off and is useless. I had to wake one last night- I won’t tell you who; I scared him out of his pants; he won’t do  it again. I say we need a real guard, strong enough in case of trouble to handle things while the camp has time to wake up. But if you want it your way, why not relieve me and put somebody else in?”

“No, no, you keep it. Do what you think necessary.”

“Okay, I’m putting the girls on. Bob and Carmen, too, And you.” “Huh?”

“And me. And Roy Kilroy. Everybody. That’s the only way you will get people to serve without griping; that way you will convince them that it is serious, a first obligation, even ahead of hunting.”

Cowper picked at a hangnail, “Do you honestly think I should stand watch? And you?”

“I do. It would boost morale seven hundred percent. Besides that, it would be a good thing, uh, politically.” Cowper glanced up, did not smile. “You’ve convinced me. Let me know when it’s my turn.”

“Another thing. Last night there was barely wood to keep two fires going.” “Your problem. Use anybody not on the day’s hunting or cooking details.”

“I will. You’ll hear some beefs. Boss, those were minor items; now I come to the major one. Last night I took a fresh look at this spot. I don’t like it, not as a permanent camp. We’ve been lucky.”

“Eh? Why?”

“This place is almost undefendable. We’ve got a stretch over fifty meters long between shale and water on the upstream side. Downstream isn’t bad, because we build a fire in the bottleneck. But upstream we have walled off less than half and we need a lot more stakes behind the wall. Look,” Rod added, pointing, “you could drive an army through there- and last night I had only two little bitty fires. We ought to finish that wall.”

“We will.”

“But we ought to make a real drive to find a better place. This is makeshift at best. Before you took over I as trying to find more caves- but I didn’t have time to explore very far. Ever been to Mesa Verde?”

“In Colorado? No.”

“Cliff dwellings, you’ve seen pictures. Maybe somewhere up or down stream-more likely down- we will find pockets like those at Mesa Verde where we can build homes for the whole colony. You ought to send a team out for two weeks or more, searching. I volunteer for it.”

“Maybe. But you can’t go; I need you.”

“In a week I’ll have this guard duty lined up so that it will run itself. Bob Baxter can relieve me; they respect him… .. .” He thought for a moment. Jackie? Jimmy? “I’ll team with Carol.” “Rod, I told you I want you here. But are you and Caroline planning to marry?”

“Huh? What gave you that notion?”

“Then you can’t team with her in any case. We are trying to re-introduce amenities around here.” “Now see here, Cowper!”

“Forget it.”

“Unh … all right. But the first thing- the very first- is to finish that wall. I want to put everybody to work nght away.” “Mmm …” Cowper said. “I’m sorry. You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because we are going to build a house today. Bill Kennedy and Sue Briggs are getting married tonight.” “Huh? I hadn’t heard.”

“I guess you are the first to hear. They told me about it privately, at breakfast.”

Rod was not surprised, as Bill and Sue preferred each other’s company. “Look, do they have to get married to-night? That wall is urgent, Grant; I’m telling you.” “Don’t be so intense, Rod. You can get along a night or two with bigger fires. Remember, there are human values more important than material values.”

6.               The Beach of Bones

“July 29- Bill and Sue got married tonight. Hizzoner never looked lovelier. He made a mighty pretty service out of it- I cried and so did the other girls. If that boy could do the way he can talk!   I played Mendelssohn’s Wedding March on my harmonica with tears running down my nose and gumming up the reeds- that’s a touch I wanted to put into darling Carmen’s wedding but   I couldn’t resist being bridesmaid. The groom got stuck carrying his lady fair over the threshold of their ‘house’- if I may call it that- and had to put her down and shove her in ahead of him. The ceiling is lower than it ought to be which is why he got stuck, because we ran out of rock and Roddie raised Cain when we started to use part of the wall. Hizzoner was leading the assault on the wall and both of them got red in the face and shouted at each other. But Hizzoner backed down after Roddie got him aside and said something- Bill was pretty sore at Roddie but Bob sweet-talked him and offered to swap houses and Roddie promised Bill that we would take the roof off and bring the walls up higher as soon as the wall is finished. That might not be as soon as he thinks, though- usable rock is getting hard to find. I’ve broken all my nails trying to pry out pieces we could use. But I agree with Roddie that we ought to finish that wall and I sleep a lot sounder now that he is running the watch and I’ll sleep sounder yet when that wall is tight and the pincushion back of it finished. Of course we girls sleep down   at the safe end but who wants to wake up and find a couple of our boys missing? It is not as if we had them to spare, bless their silly little hearts. Nothing like a man around the house, Mother always said, to give a home that lived-in look.

“July 30- I’m not going to write in this unless something happens. Hizzoner talks about making papyrus like the Egyptians but I’ll believe it when I see it.

“Aug 5- I was sergeant of the guard last night and Roddie was awake practically all night. I turned in after breakfast and slept until late afternoon- when I woke up there was Roddie, red- eyed and cross, yelling for more rocks and more firewood. Sometimes Roddie is a little hard to take.

“Aug 9- the salt lick Alice found is closer than the one Shorty found last week, but not as good.

“Aug 14- Jackie finally made up her mind to marry Jim and I think Roddie is flabbergasted- but I could have told him a month ago. Roddie is stupid about such things. I see another house & wall crisis coming and Roddie will get a split personality because he will want Jimmy and Jacqueline to have a house right away and the only decent stone within reach is built into the wall.

“Aug 15- Jimmy and Jackie, Agnes and Curt, were married today in a beautiful double ceremony. The Throxtons have the Baxter house temporarily and the Pulvermachers have the Kennedy’s doll house while we partition the cave into two sets of married quarters and a storeroom.

“Sep 1- the roots I dug up didn’t poison me, so I served a mess of them tonight. The shield from power pack of that Thunderbolt gun we salvaged- Johann’s, it must have been- made a big enough boiler to cook a little helping for everybody. The taste was odd, maybe because Agnes had been making soap in it- it wasn’t very good soap, either. I’m going to call these things yams because they look like yams although they taste more like parsnips. There are a lot of them around. Tomorrow I m going to try boiling them with greens, a strip of side ineat, and plenty of salt. Yum, yum! I’m going to bake them in ashes, too.

“Sep 16- Chad Ames and Dick Burke showed up with their tails tucked in; Hizzoner got soft-hearted and let em stay. They say Jock McGowan is crazy. I can believe it.

“Sep 28- Philip Schneider died today, hunting. Roy carried him in, but he was badly clawed and lost a lot of blood and was D.O.A. Roy resigned as boss hunter and Hizzoner appointed Cliff. Roy is broken up about it but nobody blames him. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be the Name of the Lord.

“Oct 7- I’ve decided to marry M.

“Oct 10- seems I was mistaken- M. is going to marry Margery Chung. Well, they are nice kids and if we ever get out of this I’ll be glad I’m single since I want to buck for a commission in the Amazons. Note: be a little more standoffish, Caroline. Well, try!

“Oct 20- Carmen???? “Oct 21- Yes.

“Nov 1- well Glory be! I’m the new City Manager. Little Carol, the girl with two left feet Just a couple of weeks, temporary and acting while Roddie is away, but say ‘sir’ when you speak to me. Hizzoner finally let Roddie make the down-river survey he has been yipping about, accompanying it with a slough of advice and injunctions that Roddie will pay no attention to once he is out of sight-if I know Roddie. It’s a two-man team and Roddie picked Roy as his teamer. They left this morning.

“Nov 5- being City Manager is not all marshmallow sundae. I wish Roddie would get back.

“Nov 11 – Hizzoner wants me to copy off in here the ‘report of the artifacts committee’! Mick Mahmud has been keeping it in his head which strikes me as a good place. But Hizzoner has been very jumpy since Roddie and Roy left, so I guess I will humor him- here it is:

“12 spare knives (besides one each for everybody)

“53 firearms and guns of other sorts- but only about half of them with even one charge left. “6 Testaments

“2 Peace of the Flame “1 Koran

“1 Book of Mormon

“1 Oxford Book of English Verse, Centennial Edition “1 steel bow and 3 hunting arrows

“1 boiler made from a wave shield and quite a bit of metal and plastic junk (worth its weight in uranium, I admit) from the Thunderbolt Jackie salvaged. “1 stew pan (Carmen’s)

“1 pack playing cards with the nine of hearts missing

“13 matches, any number of pocket flamers no longer working, and 27 burning glasses “1 small hand ax

“565 meters climbing line, some of it chopped up for other uses “91 fishhooks (and no fish fit to eat!)

“61 pocket compasses, some of them broken

“19 watches that still run (4 of them adjusted to our day) “2 bars of scented soap that Theo has been hoarding “2 boxes Kwik-Kure and part of a box of Tan-Fast

“Several kilos of oddments that I suppose we will find a use for but I won’t list. Mick has a mind like a pack rat.

“Lots of things we have made and can make more of- pots, bows and arrows, hide scrapers, a stone-age mortar & pestle we can grind seeds on if you don’t mind grit in your teeth, etc. Hizzoner says the Oxford Verse is the most valuable thing we have and I agree, but not for his reasons. He wants me to cover all the margins with shorthand, recording all special knowledge that any of us have- everything from math to pig-raising. Cliff says go ahead as long as we don’t deface the verses. I don’t see when I’m going to find time. I’ve hardly been out of the settlement since Roddie left and sleep is something I just hear about.

“Nov 13- only two more days. ‘For this relief, much thanks…’

“Nov 16- I didn’t think they would be on time.

“Nov 21- We finally adopted our constitution and basic code today, the first town meeting we’ve had in weeks. It covers the flyleaves of two Testaments, Bob’s and Georgia’s. If anybody wants to refer to it, which I doubt, that’s where to look.

“Nov 29- Jimmy says old Rod is too tough to kill. I hope he’s right. Why, oh, why didn’t I twist Hizzoner’s arm and make him let me go? “Dec 15- there’s no use kidding ourselves any longer.

“Dec 21- The Throxtons and Baxters and myself and Grant gathered privately in the Baxter house tonight and Grant recited the service for the dead. Bob said a prayer for both of them and then we sat quietly for a long time, Quaker fashion. Roddie always reminded me of my brother Rickie, so I privately asked Mother to take care of him, and Roy, too- Mother had a lap big enough for three, any time.

“Grant hasn’t made a public announcement; officially they are just ‘overdue.’ “Dec 25- Christmas”

Rod and Roy traveled light and fast downstream, taking turns leading and covering. Each carried a few kilos of salt meat but they expected to eat off the land. In addition to game they now knew of many edible fruits and berries and nuts; the forest was a free cafeteria to those who knew it. They carried no water since they expected to follow the stream. But they continued to treat the water with respect; in addition to ichthyosaurs that sometimes pulled down a drinking buck there were bloodthirsty little fish that took very small bites- but they traveled in schools and could strip an animal to bones in minutes.”

Rod carried both Lady Macbeth and Colonel Bowie; Roy Kilroy carried his Occam’s Razor and a knife borrowed from Carmen Baxter. Roy had a climbing rope wrapped around his waist. Each had a hand gun strapped to his hip but these were for extremity; one gun had only three charges. But Roy carried Jacqueline Throxton’s air pistol, with freshly envenomed darts;  they expected it to save hours of hunting, save time for travel.

Three days downstream they found a small cave, found living in it a forlorn colony of five girls. They powwowed, then headed on down as the girls started upstream to find the settlement. The girls had told them of a place farther down where the creek could be crossed. They found it, a wide rocky shallows with natural stepping stones … then wasted two days on the far side before crossing back.

By the seventh morning they had found no cave other than one the girls had occupied. Rod said to Roy, “Today makes a week. Grant said to be back in two weeks.” “That’s what the man said. Yes, sir!”

“No results.” “Nope. None.”

“We ought to start back.”

Roy did not answer. Rod said querulously, “Well, what do you think?”

Kilroy was lying down, watching the local equivalent of an ant. He seemed in no hurry to do anything else. Finally he answered, “Rod, you are bossing this party. Upstream, downstream- just tell me.”

“Oh, go soak your head.”

“On the other hand, a bush lawyer like Shorty might question Grant’s authority to tell us to return at a given time. He might use words like ‘free citizen’ and ‘sovereign autonomy.’ Maybe he’s got something- this neighborhood looks awfully far ‘West of the Pecos.’”

“Well… we could stretch it a day, at least?. We won’t be taking that side trip going back.” “Obviously. Now, if I were leading the party- but I’m not.”

“Cut the double talk! I asked for advice.”

“Well, I say we are here to find caves, not to keep a schedule.” Rod quit frowning. “Up off your belly. Let’s go.”

They headed downstream.

The terrain changed from forest valley to canyon country as the stream cut through a plateau. Game became harder to find and they used some of their salt meat. Two days later they came to the first of a series of bluffs carved eons earlier into convolutions, pockets, blank dark eyes. “This looks like it.”

“Yes,” agreed Roy. He looked around. “It might be even better farther down.” “It might be.”

They went on.

In time the stream widened out, there were no more caves, and the canyons gave way to a broad savannah, treeless except along the banks of the river. Rod sniffed. “I smell salt.” “You ought to. There’s ocean over there somewhere.”

“I don’t think so.” They went on.

They avoided the high grass, kept always near the trees. The colonists had listed more than a dozen predators large enough to endanger a man, from a leonine creature twice as long as the biggest African lion down to a vicious little scaly thing which was dangerous if cornered. It was generally agreed that the leonine monster was the “stobor” they had been warned against, although a minority favored a smaller carnivore which was faster, trickier, and more likely to attack a man.

One carnivore was not considered for the honor. It was no larger than a jack rabbit, had an oversize head, a big jaw, front legs larger than hind, and no tail. It was known as “dopy joe” from the silly golliwog expression it had and its clumsy, slow movements when disturbed. It was believed to live by waiting at burrows of field rodents for supper to come out. Its skin cured readily and made a good water bag. Grassy fields such as this savannah often were thick with them.

They camped in a grove of trees by the water. Rod said, “Shall I waste a match, or do it the hard way?” “Suit yourself. I’ll knock over something for dinner.”

“Watch yourself. Don’t go into the grass.

“I’ll work the edges. Cautious Kilroy they call me, around the insurance companies.

Rod counted his three matches, hoping there would be four, then started making fire by friction. He had just succeeded, delayed by moss that was not as dry as it should have been, when Roy returned and dropped a small carcass. “The durnedest thing happened.”

The kill was a dopy joe; Rod looked at it with distaste. “Was that the best you could do? They taste like kerosene.” “Wait till I tell you. I wasn’t hunting him; he was hunting me.”

“Don’t kid me!”

“Truth. I had to kill him to keep him from snapping my ankles. So I brought him in.

Rod looked at the small creature. “Never heard the like. Must be insanity in his family.”

“Probably.” Roy started skinning it.

Next morning they reached the sea, a glassy body untouched by tide, unruffled by wind. It was extremely briny and its shore was crusted with salt They concluded that it was probably a dead sea, not a true ocean. But their attention was not held by the body of water. Stretching away along the shore apparently to the horizon were millions on heaping millions of whitened bones. Rod stared. “Where did they all come from?”

Roy whistled softly. “Search me. But if we could sell them at five pence a metric ton, we’d be millionaires.” “Billionaires, you mean.

“Let’s not be fussy.” They walked out along the beach, forgetting to be cautious, held by the amazing sight. There were ancient bones, cracked by sun and sea, new bones with gristle clinging, big bones of the giant antelope the colonists never hunted, tiny bones of little buck no larger than terriers, bones without number of all sorts. But there were no carcasses.

They inspected the shore for a couple of kilometers, awed by the mystery. When they turned they knew that they were turning back not just to camp but to head home. This was as far as they could go.

On the trip out they had not explored the caves. On their way back Rod decided that they should try to pick the best place for the colony, figuring game, water supply, and most importantly, shelter and ease of defense.

They were searching a series of arched galleries water-carved in sandstone cliff. The shelf of the lowest gallery was six or seven meters above the sloping stand of soil below. The canyon dropped rapidly here; Rod could visualize a flume from upstream, bringing running water right to the caves… not right away, but when they had time to devise tools and cope with the problems. Someday, someday- but in the meantime here was plenty of room for the colony in a spot which almost defended itself. Not to mention, he added, being in out of the rain. Roy was the better Alpinist; he inched up, flat to the rock, reached the shelf and threw down his line to Rod- snaked him up quickly. Rod got an arm over the edge, scrambled to his  knees, stood up- and gasped, “What the deuce!”

“That,” said Roy, “is why I kept quiet. I thought you would think I was crazy.

“I think we both are.” Rod stared around. Filling the depth of the gallery, not seen from below, was terrace on terrace of cliff dwellings.

They were not inhabited, nor had they ever been by men. Openings which must have been doors were no higher than a man’s knee, not wide enough for shoulders. But it was clear that they were dwellings, not merely formations carved by water. There were series of rooms arranged in half a dozen low stories from floor to ceiling of the gallery. The material was a concrete of dried mud, an adobe, used with wood.

But there was nothing to suggest what had built them.

Roy started to stick his head into an opening; Rod shouted, “Hey! Don’t do that!” “Why not? It’s abandoned.”

“You don’t know what might be inside. Snakes, maybe.” “There are no snakes. Nobody’s ever seen one.

“No … but take it easy.”

“I wish I had a torch light.”

“I wish I had eight beautiful dancing girls and a Cadillac copter. Be careful. I don’t want to walk back alone.”

They lunched in the gallery and considered the matter. “Of course they were intelligent,” Roy declared. “We may find them elsewhere. Maybe really civilized now- these look like ancient ruins.”

“Not necessarily intelligent,” Rod argued. “Bees make more complicated homes.” “Bees don’t combine mud and wood the way these people did. Look at that lintel.” “Birds do. I’ll concede that they were bird-brained, no more.

“Rod, you won’t look at the evidence.”

“Where are their artifacts? Show me one ash tray marked ‘Made in Jersey City.’” “I might find some if you weren’t so jumpy.”

“All in time. Anyhow, the fact that they found it safe shows that we can live here.” “Maybe. What killed them? Or why did they go away?”

They searched two galleries after lunch, found more dwellings. The dwellers had apparently formed a very large community. The fourth gallery they explored was almost empty, containing a beginning of a hive in one corner. Rod looked it over. “We can use this. If may not

be the best, but we can move the gang in and then find the best at our leisure.” “We’re heading back?”

“Uh, in the morning. This is a good place to sleep and tomorrow we’ll travel from ‘can’ to ‘can’t’- I wonder what’s up there?” Rod was looking at a secondary shelf inside the main arch. Roy eyed it. “Ill let you know in a moment.”

“Don’t bother. It’s almost straight up. We’ll build ladders for spots like that.” “My mother was a human fly, my father was a mountain goat. Watch me.

The shelf was not much higher than his head. Roy had a hand over- when a piece of rock crumbled away. He did not fall far. Rod ran to him. “You all right, boy?”

Roy grunted, “I guess so,” then started to get up. He yelped. “What’s the matter?”

“My right leg. I think… ow! I think it’s broken.” Rod examined the break, then went down to cut splints. With a piece of the line Roy carried, used economically, for he needed most of it as a ladder, he bound the leg, padding it with leaves. It was a simple break of the tibia, with no danger of infection.

They argued the whole time. “Of course you will,” Roy was saying. “Leave me a fresh kill and what salt meat there is. You can figure some way to leave water.” “Come back and find your chawed bones!”

“Not at all. Nothing can get at me. If you hustle, you can make it in three days.”

“Four, or five more likely. Six days to lead a party back. Then you want to go back in a stretcher? How would you like to be helpless when a stobor jumps us?” “But I wouldn’t go back. The gang would be moving down here.”

“Suppose they do? Eleven days, more likely twelve- Roy, you didn’t just bang your shin; you banged your head, too.”

The stay in the gallery while Roy’s leg repaired was not difficult nor dangerous; it was merely tedious. Rod would have liked to explore all the caves, but the first time he was away longer than Roy thought necessary to make a kill Rod returned to find his patient almost hysterical. He had let his imagination run away, visioning Rod as dead and thinking about his own death, helpless, while he starved or died of thirst. After that Rod left him only to gather food and water. The gallery was safe from all dangers; no watch was necessary, fire was needed only for cooking. The weather was getting warmer and the daily rains dropped off.

They discussed everything from girls to what the colony needed, what could have caused the disaster that had stranded them, what they would have to eat if they could have what they wanted, and back to girls again. They did not discuss the possibility of rescue; they took it for granted that they were there to stay. They slept much of the time and often did nothing, in animal-like torpor.

Roy wanted to start back as soon as Rod removed the splints, but it took him only seconds to discover that he no longer knew how to walk. He exercised for days, then grew sulky when Rod still insisted that he was not able to travel; the accumulated irritations of invalidism spewed out in the only quarrel they had on the trip.

Rod grew as angry as he was, threw Roy’s climbing

rope at him and shouted, “Go ahead! See how far you get on that gimp leg!”

Five minutes later Rod was arranging a sling, half dragging Roy, white and trembling and thoroughly subdued, back up onto the shelf. Thereafter they spent ten days getting Roy’s muscles into shape, then started back.

Shorty Dumont was the first one they ran into as they approached the settlement. His jaw dropped and he looked scared, then he ran to greet them, ran back to alert those in camp. “Hey, everybody! They’re back!”

Caroline heard the shout, outdistanced the others in great flying leaps, kissed and hugged them both. “Hi, Carol,” Rod said. “What are you bawling about?” “Oh, Roddie, you bad, bad boy!”

7.               “It Won’t Work, Rod”

In the midst of jubilation Rod had time to notice many changes. There were more than a dozen new buildings, including two long shedlike affairs of bamboo and mud. One new hut was of sunbaked brick; it had windows. Where the cooking fire had been was a barbecue pit and by it a Dutch oven. Near it a stream of water spilled out of bamboo pipe, splashed through a rawhide net, fell into a rock bowl, and was led away to the creek … he hardly knew whether to be pleased or irked at this anticipation of his own notion.

He caught impressions piecemeal, as their triumphal entry was interrupted by hugs, kisses; and bone-jarring slaps on the back, combined with questions piled on questions. “No, no trouble- except that Roy got mad and busted his leg … yeah, sure, we found what we went after; wait till you see … no … yes … Jackie! … Hi, Bob!- it’s good to see you, too, boy! Where’s Carmen… Hi, Grant!”

Cowper was grinning widely, white teeth splitting his beard. Rod noticed with great surprise that the man looked old- why, shucks, Grant wasn’t more than twenty-two, twenty-three at the most. Where did he pick up those lines?

“Rod, old boy! I don’t know whether to have you two thrown in the hoosegow or decorate your brows with laurel.” “We got held up.”

“So it seems. Well, there is more rejoicing for the strayed lamb than for the ninety and nine. Come on up to the city hall.” “The what?”

Cowper looked sheepish. “They call it that, so I do. Better than ‘Number Ten, Downing Street’ which it started off with. It’s just the hut where I sleep- it doesn’t belong to me,” he added. “When they elect somebody else, I’ll sleep in bachelor hall.” Grant led them toward a little building apart from the others and facing the cooking area.

The wall was gone.

Rod suddenly realized what looked strange about the upstream end of the settlement; the wall was gone completely and in its place was a thornbush barricade. He opened his mouth to make a savage comment- then realized that it really did not matter. Why kick up a row when the colony would be moving to the canyon of the Dwellers? They would never need walls  again; they would be up high at night, with their ladders pulled up after them. He picked another subject.

“Grant, how in the world did you guys get the inner partitions out of those bamboo pipes?”

“Eh? Nothing to it. You tie a knife with rawhide to a thinner bamboo pole, then reach in and whittle. All it takes is patience. Waxie worked it out. But you haven’t seen anything yet. We’re going to have iron.

“Huh?”

“We’ve got ore; now we are experimenting. But I do wish we could locate a seam of coal. Say, you didn’t spot any, did you?”

Dinner was a feast, a luau, a celebration to make the weddings look pale. Rod was given a real plate to eat on- unglazed, lopsided, ungraceful, but a plate. As he took out Colonel Bowie, Margery Chung Kinksi put a wooden spoon in his hand. “We don’t have enough to go around, but the guests of honor rate them tonight.” Rod looked at it curiously. It felt odd in his hand.

Dinner consisted of boiled greens, some root vegetables new to him, and a properly baked haunch served in thin slices. Roy and Rod were served little unleavened cakes like tortillas. No one else had them, but Rod decided that it was polite not to comment on that. Instead he made a fuss over eating bread again.

Margery dimpled. “We’ll have plenty of bread some day. Maybe next year.

There were tart little fruits for dessert, plus a bland, tasteless sort which resembled a dwarf banana with seeds. Rod ate too much.

Grant called them to order and announced that he was going to ask the travelers to tell what they had experienced. “Let them get it all told- then they won’t have to tell it seventy times over. Come on, Rod. Let’s see your ugly face.”

“Aw, let Roy. He talks better than I do.”

“Take turns. When your voice wears out, Roy can take over.

Between them they told it all, interrupting and supplementing each other. The colonists were awed by the beach of a billion bones, still more interested in the ruins of the Dwellers. “Rod and I are still arguing,” Roy told them. “I say that it was a civilization. He says that it could be just instinct. He’s crazy with the heat; the Dwellers were people. Not humans, of course, but people.”

“Then where are they now?”

Roy shrugged. “Where are the Selenites, Dora? What became of the Mithrans?”

“Roy is a romanticist,” Rod objected. “But you’ll be able to form your own opinions when we get there.” “That’s right, Rod,” Roy agreed.

“That covers everything,” Rod went on. “The rest was just waiting while Roy’s leg healed. But it brings up the main subject. How quickly can we move? Grant, is there any reason not to start at once? Shouldn’t we break camp tomorrow and start trekking? I’ve been studying it- how to make the move, I mean- and I would say to send out an advance party at daybreak. Roy or I can lead it. We go downstream an easy day’s journey, pick a spot, make a kill, and have fire and food ready when the rest arrive. We do it again the next day. I think we can be safe   and snug in the caves in five days.”

“Dibs on the advance party!” “Me, too!”

There were other shouts but Rod could not help but realize that the response was not what he had expected. Jimmy did not volunteer and Caroline merely looked thoughtful. The Baxters he could not see; they were in shadow.

He turned to Cowper. “Well, Grant? Do you have a better idea?”

“Rod,” Grant said slowly, “your plan is okay … but you’ve missed a point.” “Why do you assume that we are going to move?”

“Huh? Why, that’s what we were sent for! To find a better place to live. We found it- you could hold those caves against an army. What’s the hitch? Of course we move!”

Cowper examined his nails. “Rod, don’t get sore. I don’t see it and I doubt if other people do. I’m not saying the spot you and Roy found is not good. It may be better than here- the way this place used to be. But we are doing all right here- and we’ve got a lot of time and effort invested. Why move?”

“Why, I told you. The caves are safe, completely safe. This spot is exposed … it’s dangerous.”

“Maybe. Rod, in the whole time we’ve been here, nobody has been hurt inside camp. We’ll put it to a vote, but you can’t expect us to abandon our houses and everything we have worked for to avoid a danger that may be imaginary.”

“Imaginary? Do you think that a stobor couldn’t jump that crummy barricade?” Rod demanded, pointing.

“I think a stobor would get a chest full of pointed stakes if he tried it,” Grant answered soberly. “That crummy barricade’ is a highly efficient defense. Take a better look in the morning.” “Where we were you wouldn’t need it. You wouldn’t need a night watch. Shucks, you wouldn’t need houses. Those caves are better than the best house here!”

“Probably. But, Rod, you haven’t seen all we’ve done, how much we would have to abandon. Let’s look it over in the daylight, fellow, and then talk.”

“Well … no, Grant, there is only one issue: the caves are safe; this place isn’t. I call for a vote.” “Easy now. This isn’t a town meeting. It’s a party in your honor. Let’s not spoil it.”

“Well … I’m sorry. But we’re all here; let’s vote.”

“No.” Cowper stood up. “There will be a town meeting on Friday as usual. Goodnight, Rod. Goodnight, Roy. We’re awfully glad you’re back. Goodnight all.”

The party gradually fell apart. Only a few of the younger boys seemed to want to discuss the proposed move. Bob Baxter came over, put a hand on Rod and said, “See you in the morning, Rod. Bless you.” He left before Rod could get away from a boy who was talking to him.

Jimmy Throxton stayed, as did Caroline. When he got the chance Rod said, Jimmy? Where do you stand?”

“Me? You know me, pal. Look, I sent Jackie to bed; she wasn’t feeling well. But she told me to tell you that we were back of you a hundred percent, always.” “Thanks. I feel better.”

“See you in the morning? I want to check on Jackie.” “Sure. Sleep tight.”

He was finally left with Caroline. “Roddie? Want to inspect the guard with me? You’ll do it after tonight, but we figured you could use a night with no worries. “Wait a minute. Carol… you’ve been acting funny.”

“Me? Why, Roddie!”

“Well, maybe not. What do you think of the move? I didn’t hear you pitching in.”

She looked away. “Roddie,” she said, “if it was just me, I’d say start tomorrow. I’d be on the advance party.”

“Good! What’s got into these people? Grant has them buffaloed but I can’t see why.” He scratched his head. “I’m tempted to make up my own party- you, me, Jimmy and Jack, the Baxters, Roy, the few who were rarin’ to go tonight, and anybody else with sense enough to pound sand.”

She sighed. “It won’t work, Roddie.” “Huh? Why not?”

“I’ll go. Some of the youngsters would go for the fun of it. Jimmy and Jack would go if you insisted… but they would beg off if you made it easy for them. The Baxters should not and I doubt  if Bob would consent. Carmen isn’t really up to such a trip.”

8.               Unkillable

The matter never came to a vote. Long before Friday Rod knew how a vote would go- about fifty against him, less than half that for him, with his friends voting with him through loyalty rather than conviction or possibly against him in a showdown.

He made an appeal in private to Cowper. “Grant, you’ve got me licked. Even Roy is sticking with you now. But you could swing them around.”

“I doubt it. What you don’t see, Rod, is that we have taken root. You may have found a better place … but it’s too late to change. After all, you picked this spot.” “Not exactly, it … well, it just sort of happened.”

“Lots of things in life just sort of happen. You make the best of them.”

“That’s what I’m trying to do! Grant, admitted that the move is hard; we could manage it. Set up way stations with easy jumps, send our biggest huskies back for what we don’t want to abandon. Shucks, we could move a person on a litter if we had to- using enough guards.”

“If the town votes it, I’ll be for it. But I won’t try to argue them into it. Look, Rod, you’ve got this fixed idea that this spot is dangerously exposed. The facts don’t support you. On the other hand see what we have. Running water from upstream, waste disposal downstream, quarters comfortable and adequate for the climate. Salt- do you have salt there?”

“We didn’t look for it-but it would be easy to bring it from the seashore.”

“We’ve got it closer here. We’ve got prospects of metal. You haven’t seen that ore outcropping yet, have you? We’re better equipped every day; our standard of living is going up. We have  a colony nobody need be ashamed of and we did it with bare hands; we were never meant to be a colony. Why throw up what we have gained to squat in caves like savages?”

Rod sighed. “Grant, this bank may be flooded in the rainy season- aside from its poor protection now.”

“It doesn’t look it to me, but if so, we’ll see it in time. Right now we are going into the dry season. So let’s talk it over a few months from now.

Rod gave up. He refused to resume as “City Manager” nor would Caroline keep it when Rod turned it down. Bill Kennedy was appointed and Rod went to work under Cliff as a hunter, slept in the big shed upstream with the bachelors, and took his turn at night watch. The watch had been reduced to one man, whose duty was simply to tend fires. There was talk of cutting out the night fires, as fuel was no longer easy to find nearby and many seemed satisfied that the thorn barrier was enough.

Rod kept his mouth shut and stayed alert at night.

Game continued to be plentiful but became skittish. Buck did not come out of cover the way they had in rainy weather; it was necessary to search and drive them out. Carnivores seemed to have become scarcer. But the first real indication of peculiar seasonal habits of native fauna came from a very minor carnivore. Mick Mahmud returned to camp with a badly chewed  foot; Bob Baxter patched him up and asked about it.

“You wouldn’t believe it.” “Try me.”

“Well, it was just a dopy joe. I paid no attention to it, of course. Next thing I knew I was flat on my back and trying to shake it loose. He did all that to me before I got a knife into him. Then I had to cut his jaws loose.”

“Lucky you didn’t bleed to death.”

When Rod heard Mick’s story, he told Roy. Having had one experience with a dopy joe turned aggressive, Roy took it seriously and had Cliff warn all hands to watch out; they seemed to have turned nasty.

Three days later the migration of animals started.

At first it was just a drifting which appeared aimless except that it was always downstream. Animals had long since ceased to use the watering place above the settlement and buck rarely appeared in the little valley; now they began drifting into it, would find themselves baffled by the thorn fence, and would scramble out. Nor was it confined to antelope types;  wingless birds with great “false faces,” rodents, rooters, types nameless to humans, all joined the migration. One of the monstrous leonine predators they called stobor approached the barricade in broad daylight, looked at it, lashed his tail, then clawed his way up the bluff and headed downstream again.

Cliff called off his hunting parties; there was no need to hunt when game walked into camp.

Rod found himself more edgy than usual that night as it grew dark. He left his seat near the barbecue pit and went over to Jimmy and Jacqueline. “What’s the matter with this place? It’s spooky.”

Jimmy twitched his shoulders. “I feel it. Maybe it’s the funny way the animals are acting. Say, did you hear they killed a joe inside camp?” “I know what it is,” Jacqueline said suddenly. “No ‘Grand Opera.’”

“Grand Opera” was Jimmy’s name for the creatures with the awful noises, the ones which had turned Rod’s first night into a siege of terror. They serenaded every evening for the first hour of darkness. Rod’s mind had long since blanked them out, heeded them no more than chorusing cicadas. He had not consciously heard them for weeks.

Now they failed to wail on time; it upset him.

He grinned sheepishly. “That’s it, Jack. Funny how you get used to a thing. Do you suppose they are on strike?” “More likely a death in the family,” Jimmy answered. “They’ll be back in voice tomorrow.”

Rod had trouble getting to sleep. When the night watch gave an alarm he was up and out of bachelors’ barracks at once, Colonel Bowie in hand. “What’s up?”

Arthur Nielsen had the watch. “It’s all right now,” he answered nervously. “Abig buffalo buck crashed the fence. And this got through.” He indicated the carcass of a dopy joe. “You’re bleeding.”

“Just a nip.”

Others gathered around. Cowper pushed through, sized the situation and said, “Waxie, get that cut attended to. Bill … where’s Bill? Bill, put somebody else on watch. And let’s get that gap fixed as soon as it’s light.”

It was greying in the east. Margery suggested, “We might as well stay up and have breakfast. I’ll get the fire going.” She left to borrow flame from a watch fire.

Rod peered through the damaged barricade. Abig buck was down on the far side and seemed to have at least six dopy joes clinging to it. Cliff was there and said quietly, “See a way to get at them?”

“Only with a gun.”

“We can’t waste ammo on that.”

“No.” Rod thought about it, then went to a pile of bamboo poles, cut for building. He selected a stout one a head shorter than himself, sat down and began to bind Lady Macbeth to it with rawhide, forming a crude pike spear.

Caroline came over and squatted down. “What are you doing?” “Making a joe-killer.”

She watched him. “I’m going to make me one,” she said suddenly and jumped up.

By daylight the animals were in full flight downstream as if chased by forest fire. As the creek had shrunk with the dry season a miniature beach, from a meter to a couple of meters wide, had been exposed below the bank on which the town had grown. The thorn kraal had been extended to cover the gap, but the excited animals crushed through this weak point and now streamed along the water past the camp.

After a futile effort no attempt was made to turn them back. They were pouring into the valley; they had to go somewhere, and the route between water and bank made a safety valve. It kept them from shoving the barricade aside by sheer mass. The smallest animals came through it anyhow, kept going, paid no attention to humans.

Rod stayed at the barricade, ate breakfast standing up. He had killed six joes since dawn while Caroline’s score was still higher. Others were making knives into spears and joining them. The dopy joes were not coming through in great numbers; most of them continued to chase buck along the lower route past camp. Those who did seep through were speared; meeting them with a knife gave away too much advantage.

Cowper and Kennedy, inspecting defenses, stopped by Rod; they looked worried. “Rod,” said Grant “how long is this going to last?”

“How should I know? When we run out of animals. It looks like- get him, Shorty! It looks as if the joes were driving the others, but I don’t think they are. I think they’ve all gone crazy.”   “But what would cause that?” demanded Kennedy. “Don’t ask me. But I think I know where all those bones on that beach came from. But don’t ask why. Why does a chicken cross the

road? Why do lemmings do what they do? What makes a plague of locusts? Behind you! Jump!”

Kennedy jumped, Rod finished off a joe, and they went on talking. “Better detail somebody to chuck these into the water, Bill, before they stink. Look, Grant, we’re okay now, but I know what I would do.”

“What? Move to your caves? Rod, you were right-but it’s too late.”

“No, no! That’s spilt milk; forget it. The thing that scares me are these mean little devils. They are no longer dopy; they are fast as can be and nasty … and they can slide through the fence. We can handle them now-but how about when it gets dark? We’ve got to have a solid line of fire inside the fence and along the bank. Fire is one thing they can’t go through … I hope.”

“That’ll take a lot of wood.” Grant looked through the barricade and frowned.

“You bet it will. But it will get us through the night. See here, give me the ax and six men with spears. I’ll lead the party.” Kennedy shook his head. “It’s my job.”

“No, Bill,” Cowper said firmly. “I’ll lead it. You stay here and take care of the town.”

Before the day was over Cowper took two parties out and Bill and Rod led one each. They tried to pick lulls in the spate of animals but Bill’s party was caught on the bluff above, where it had been cutting wood and throwing it down past the cave. They were treed for two hours. The little valley had been cleaned out of dead wood months since; it was necessary to go into the forest above to find wood that would burn.

Cliff Pawley, hunter-in-chief, led a fifth party in the late afternoon, immediately broke the handle of the little ax. They returned with what they could gather with knives. While they were away one of the giant buck they called buffalo stampeded off the bluff, fell into camp, broke its neck. Four dopy joes were clinging to it. They were easy to kill as they would not let go.

Jimmy and Rod were on pike duty at the barricade. Jimmy glanced back at where a couple of girls were disposing of the carcasses. “Rod,” he said thoughtfully, we got it wrong. Those are stobor … the real stobor.”

“Huh?”

“The big babies we’ve been calling that aren’t ‘stobor.’ These things are what the Deacon warned us against.” “Well … I don’t care what you call them as long as they’re dead. On your toes, boy; here they come again.”

Cowper ordered fires laid just before dark and was studying how to arrange one stretch so as not to endanger the flume when the matter was settled; the structure quivered and water ceased to flow. Upstream something had crashed into it and broken the flimsy pipe line.

The town had long since abandoned waterskins. Now they were caught with only a few liters in a pot used by the cooks, but it was a hardship rather than a danger; the urgent need was  to get a ring of fire around’ them. There had already been half a dozen casualties- no deaths but bites and slashings, almost all from the little carnivores contemptuously known as dopy joes. The community’s pool of antiseptics, depleted by months of use and utterly irreplaceable, had sunk so low that Bob Baxter used it only on major wounds.

When fuel had been stretched ready to burn in a long arc inside the barricade and down the bank to where it curved back under the cave, the results of a hard day’s work looked small; the stockpile was not much greater than the amount already spread out. Bill Kennedy looked at it. “It won’t last the night, Grant.”

“It’s got to, Bill. Light it.”

 “If we pulled back from the fence and the bank, then cut over to the bluff- what do you think?”

Cowper tried to figure what might be saved by the change. “It’s not much shorter. Uh, don’t light the downstream end unless they start curving back in on us. But let’s move; it’s getting dark.” He hurried to the cooking fire, got a brand and started setting the chain of fire. Kennedy helped and soon the townsite was surrounded on the exposed sides by blaze. Cowper chucked his torch into the fire and said, “Bill, better split the men into two watches and get the women up into the cave- they can crowd in somehow.”

“You’ll have trouble getting thirty-odd women in there, Grant.”

“They can sit up all night. But send them up. Yes, and the wounded men, too.”

“Can do.” Kennedy started passing the word. Caroline came storming up, spear in hand

“Grant, what’s this nonsense about the girls having to go up to the cave? If you think you’re going to cut me out of the fun you had better think again!” Cowper looked at her wearily. “Carol, I haven’t time to monkey. Shut your face and do as you are told.”

Caroline opened her mouth, closed it, and did as she was told. Bob Baxter claimed Cowper’s attention; Rod noticed that he looked very upset. “Grant? You ordered all the women up to the cave?”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry but Carmen can’t.”

“You’ll have to carry her. She is the one I had most on my mind when I decided on the move.

“But-” Baxter stopped and urged Grant away from the others. He spoke insistently but quietly. Grant shook his head. “It’s not safe, Grant,” Baxter went on, raising his voice. “I don’t dare risk it. The interval is nineteen minutes now. “Well… all right. Leave a couple of women with her. Use Caroline, will you? That’ll keep her out of my hair.”

“Okay.” Baxter hurried away.

Kennedy took the first watch with a dozen men spread out along the fire line; Rod was on the second watch commanded by Cliff Pawley. He went to the Baxter house to find out how Carmen was doing, was told to beat it by Agnes. He then went to the bachelors’ shed and tried to sleep.

He was awakened by yells, in time to see one of the leonine monsters at least five meters long go bounding through the camp and disappear downstream. It had jumped the barrier, the stakes behind it, and the fire behind that, all in one leap.

Rod called out, “Anybody hurt?”

Shorty Dumont answered. “No. It didn’t even stop to wave.” Shorty was bleeding from a slash in his left calf; he seemed unaware of it. Rod crawled back inside tried again to sleep. He was awakened again by the building shaking. He hurried out. “What’s up?”

“That you, Rod? I didn’t know anybody was inside. Give me a hand; we’re going to burn it.” The voice was Baxter’s; he was prying at a corner post and cutting rawhide strips that held it.

Rod put his spear where it would not be stepped on, resheathed Colonel Bowie, and started to help. The building was bamboo and leaves, with a mud-and-thatch roof; most of it would burn. “How’s Carmen?”

“Okay. Normal progress. I can do more good here. Besides they don’t want me.” Baxter brought the corner of the shed down with a crash, gathered a double armful of wreckage and hurried away. Rod picked up a load and followed him.

The reserve wood pile was gone; somebody was tearing the roof off the “city hall” and banging pieces on the ground to shake clay loose. The walls were sunbaked bricks, but the roof would burn. Rod came closer, saw that it was Cowper who was destroying this symbol of the sovereign community. He worked with the fury of anger. “Let me do that, Grant. Have you had any rest?”

“Huh? No.”

“Better get some. It’s going to be a long night. What time is it?”

“I don’t know. Midnight, maybe.” Fire blazed up and Cowper faced it, wiping his face with his hand. “Rod, take charge of the second watch and relieve Bill. Cliff got clawed and I sent him up.”

“Okay. Burn everything that will burn-right?”

“Everything but the roof of the Baxter house. But don’t use it up too fast; it’s got to last till morning.”

“Got it.” Rod hurried to the fire line, found Kennedy. Okay, Bill, I’ll take over- Grant’s orders. Get some sleep. Anything getting through?”

‘Not much. And not far.” Kennedy’s spear was dark with blood in the firelight. “I’m not going to sleep, Rod. Find yourself a spot and help out.” Rod shook his head. “You’re groggy. Beat it. Grant’s orders.”

“No!”

“Well… look, take your gang and tear down the old maids’ shack. That’ll give you a change, at least.”

“Uh- all right.” Kennedy left, almost staggering. There was a lull in the onrush of animals; Rod could see none beyond the barricade. It gave him time to sort out his crew, send away those who had been on duty since sunset, send for stragglers. He delegated Doug Sanders and Mick Mahmud as firetenders, passed the word that no one else was to put fuel on the fires.

He returned from his inspection to find Bob Baxter, spear in hand, holding his place at the center of the line. Rod put a hand on his shoulder. “The medical officer doesn’t need to fight. We aren’t that bad off.”

Baxter shrugged. “I’ve got my kit, what there is left of it. This is where I use it.” “Haven’t you enough worries?”

Baxter grinned wanly. “Better than walking the floor. Rod, they’re stirring again. Hadn’t we better build up the fires?” “Mmm … not if we’re going to make it last. I don’t think they can come through that.”

Baxter did not answer, as a joe came through at that instant. It ploughed through the smouldering fire and Baxter speared it. Rod cupped his hands and shouted, “Build up the fires! But go easy.

“Behind you, Rod!”

Rod jumped and whirled, got the little devil. “Where did that one come from? I didn’t see it.”

Before Bob could answer Caroline came running out of darkness. “Bob! Bob Baxter! rve got to find Bob Baxter!” “Over here!” Rod called.

Baxter was hardly able to speak. “Is she- is she?” His face screwed up in anguish. “No, no!” yelled Caroline. “She’s all right, she’s fine. It’s a girl!”

Baxter quietly fainted, his spear falling to the ground. Caroline grabbed him and kept him from falling into the fire. He opened his eyes and said, “Sorry. You scared me. You’re sure Carmen is all right?”

“Right as rain. The baby, too. About three kilos. Here, give me that sticker- Carmen wants you.”

Baxter stumbled away and Caroline took his place. She grinned at Rod. “I feel swell! How’s business, Roddie? Brisk? I feel like getting me eight or nine of these vermin. Cowper came up a few minutes later. Caroline called out, “Grant, did you hear the good news?”

“Yes. I just came from there.” He ignored Caroline’s presence at the guard line but said to Rod, “We’re making a stretcher out of pieces of the flume and they’re going to haul Carmen up. Then they’ll throw the stretcher down and you can burn it.”

“Good.”

“Agnes is taking the baby up. Rod, what’s the very most we can crowd into the cave?” “Gee!” Rod glanced up at the shelf. “They must be spilling off the edge now.

“I’m afraid so. But we’ve just got to pack them in. I want to send up all married men and the youngest boys. The bachelors will hold on here.”

“I’m a bachelor!” Caroline interrupted. Cowper ignored her. “As soon as Carmen is safe we do it- we can’t keep fires going much longer.” He turned away, headed up to the cave. Caroline whistled softly. “Roddie, we’re going to have fun.”

“Not my idea of fun. Hold the fort, Carol. I’ve got to line things up.” He moved down the line, telling each one to go or to stay. Jimmy scowled at him. “I won’t go, not as long as anybody stays. I couldn’t look Jackie in the face.”

“You’ll button your lip and do as Grant says- or I’ll give you a mouthful of teeth. Hear me?” “I hear you. I don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to like it, just do it. Seen Jackie? How is she?”

“I snuck up a while ago. She’s all right, just queasy. But the news about Carmen makes her feel so good she doesn’t care.”

Rod used no age limit to determine who was expendable. With the elimination of married men, wounded, and all women he had little choice; he simply told those whom he considered

too young or not too skilled that they were to leave when word was passed. It left him with half a dozen, plus himself, Cowper, and- possibly- Caroline. Trying to persuade Caroline was a task he had postponed.

He returned and found Cowper. “Carmen’s gone up,” Cowper told him. “You can send the others up now. “Then we can burn the roof of the Baxter house.”

“I tore it down while they were hoisting her.” Cowper looked around. “Carol! Get on up. She set her feet. “I won’t!”

Rod said softly, “Carol, you heard him. Go up- right now!”

She scowled, stuck out her lip, then said, “All right for you, Roddie Walker!”- turned and fled up the path. Rod cupped his hands and shouted, “All right, everybody! All hands up but those I told to stay. Hurry!”

About half of those leaving had started up when Agnes called down, “Hey! Take it slow! Somebody will get pushed over the edge if you don’t quit shoving.” The queue stopped. Jimmy called out, “Everybody exhale. That’ll do it.”

Somebody called back, “Throw Jimmy off… that will do it.” The line moved again, slowly. In ten minutes they accomplished the sardine-packing problem of fitting nearly seventy people into a space comfortable for not more than a dozen. It could not even be standing room since a man could stand erect only on the outer shelf. The girls were shoved inside, sitting or squatting, jammed so that they hardly had air to breathe. The men farthest out could stand but were in danger of stepping off the edge in the dark, or of being elbowed off.

Grant said, “Watch things, Rod, while I have a look.” He disappeared up the path, came back in a few minutes. “Crowded as the bottom of a sack,” he said. “Here’s the plan. They can scrunch back farther if they have to. It will be uncomfortable for the wounded and Carmen may have to sit up- she’s lying down- but it can be done. When the fires die out, we’ll shoehorn the rest in. With spears poking out under the overhang at the top of the path we ought to be able to hold out until daylight. Check me?”

“Sounds as good as can be managed.”

“All right. When the time comes, you go up next to last, I go up last.” “Unh … I’ll match you.”

Cowper answered with surprising vulgarity and added, “I’m boss; I go last. We’ll make the rounds and pile anything left on the fires, then gather them all here. You take the bank, I take the fence.”

It did not take long to put the remnants on the fires, then they gathered around the path and waited- Roy, Kenny, Doug, Dick, Charlie, Howard, and Rod and Grant. Another wave of senseless migration was rolling but the fires held it, bypassed it around by the water.

Rod grew stiff and shifted his spear to his left hand. The dying fires were only glowing coals in spots. He looked for signs of daylight in the east. Howard Goldstein said, “One broke through at the far end.”

“Hold it, Goldie,” Cowper said. “We won’t bother it unless it comes here.” Rod shifted his spear back to his right hand.

The wall of fire was now broken in many places. Not only could joes get through, but worse, it was hard to see them, so little light did the embers give off. Cowper turned to Rod and said, “All right, everybody up. You tally them.” Then he shouted, “Bill! Agnes! Make room, I’m sending them up.”

Rod threw a glance at the fence, then turned. “Okay, Kenny first. Doug next, don’t crowd. Goldie and then Dick. Who’s left? Roy-” He turned, uneasily aware that something had changed. Grant was no longer behind him. Rod spotted him bending over a dying fire. “Hey, Grant!”

“Be right with you.” Co’wper selected a stick from the embers, waved it into flame. He hopped over the coals, picked his way through sharpened stakes, reached the thornbush barrier, shoved his torch into it. The dry branches flared up. He moved slowly away, picking his way through the stake trap.

“I’ll help you!” Rod shouted. “I’ll fire the other end.” Cowper turned and light from the burning thorn showed his stern, bearded face. “Stay back. Get the others up. That’s an order!” f The movement upward had stopped. Rod snarled, “Get on up, you lunkheads! Move!” He jabbed with the butt of his spear, then turned around.

Cowper had set the fire in a new place. He straightened up, about to move farther down, suddenly turned and jumped over the dying line of fire. He stopped and jabbed at something in the darkness … then screamed.

“Grant!” Rod jumped down, ran toward him. But Grant was down before he reached him, down with a joe worrying each leg and more coming. Rod thrnst at one, jerked his spear out, and jabbed at the other, trying not to stab Grant. He felt one grab his leg and wondered that it did not hurt.

Then it did hurt, terribly, and he realized that he was down and his spear was not in his hand. But his hand found his knife without asking; Colonel Bowie finished off the beast clamped to his ankle.

Everything seemed geared to nightmare slowness. Other figures were thrusting leisurely at shapes that hardly crawled. The thornbush, flaming high, gave him light to see and stab a dopy joe creeping toward him. He got it, rolled over and tried to get up.

He woke with daylight in his eyes, tried to move and discovered that his left leg hurt. He looked down and saw a compress of leaves wrapped with a neat hide bandage. He was in the cave and there were others lying parallel to him. He got to one elbow. “Say, what-“

“Sssh!” Sue Kennedy crawled over and knelt by him. “The baby is asleep.” “Oh…”

“I’m on nurse duty. Want anything?”

“I guess not. Uh, what did they name her?”

“Hope. Hope Roberta Baxter. Apretty name. I’ll tell Caroline you are awake.” She turned away.

Caroline came in, squatted and looked scornfully at his ankle. “That’ll teach you to have a party and not invite me. “I guess so. Carol, what’s the situation?”

“Six on the sick list. About twice that many walking wounded. Those not hurt are gathering wood and cutting thorn. We fixed the ax.” “Yes, but… we’re not having to fight them off?”

“Didn’t Sue tell you? Afew buck walking around as if they were dazed. That’s all.” “They may start again.”

“If they do, we’ll be ready.”

“Good.” He tried to raise up. “Where’s Grant? How bad was he hurt?” She shook her head. “Grant didn’t make it, Roddie.”

“Huh?”

“Bob took off both legs at the knee and would have taken off one arm, but he died while he was operating.” She made a very final gesture. “In the creek.”

Rod started to speak, turned his head and buried his face. Caroline put a hand on him. “Don’t take it hard, Roddie. Bob shouldn’t have tried to save him. Grant is better off.” Rod decided that Carol was right- no frozen limb banks on this planet. But it did not make him feel better. “We didn’t appreciate him,” he muttered.

“Stow it!” Caroline whispered fiercely. “He was a fool.” “Huh? Carol, I’m ashamed of you.”

He was surprised to see tears rolling down her cheeks. “You know he was a fool, Roddie Walker. Most of us knew… but we loved him anyhow. I would ‘uv married him, but he never asked me.” She wiped at tears. “Have you seen the baby?”

“No.”

Her face lit up. “I’ll fetch her. She’s beautiful.” “Sue said she was asleep.”

“Well … all right. But what I came up for is this: what do you want us to do?” “Huh?” He tried to think. Grant was dead. “Bill was his deputy. Is Bill laid up?” “Didn’t Sue tell you?”

“Tell me what?”

“You’re the mayor. We elected you this morning. Bill and Roy and I are just trying to hold things together.” Rod felt dizzy. Caroline’s face kept drawing back, then swooping in; he wondered if he were going to faint..

“-plenty of wood,” she was saying, “and we’ll have the kraal built by sundown. We don’t need meat; Margery is butchering that big fellow that fell off the bluff and busted his neck. We can’t trek out until you and Carmen and the others can walk, so we’re trying to get the place back into shape temporarily. Is there anything you want us to do now?”

He considered it. “No. Not now.

“Okay. You’re supposed to rest.” She backed out, stood up. “I’ll look in later.” Rod eased his leg and turned over. After a while he quieted and went to sleep.

Sue brought broth in a bowl, held his head while he drank, then fetched Hope Baxter and held her for him to see. Rod said the usual inanities, wondering if all new babies looked that way.

Then he thought for a long time.

Caroline showed up with Roy. “How’s it going, Chief?” Roy said. “Ready to bite a rattlesnake.”

“That’s a nasty foot, but it ought to heal. We boiled the leaves and Bob used sulfa.” “Feels all right. I don’t seem feverish.”

“Jimmy always said you were too mean to die,” added Caroline. “Want anything, Roddie? Or to tell us anything?” “Yes.”

“What?”

“Get me out of here. Help me down the path.” Roy said hastily, “Hey, you can’t do that. You’re not in shape.” “Can’t I? Either help, or get out of my way. And get everybody together. We’re going to have a town meeting.”

They looked at each other and walked out on him. He had made it to the squeeze at the top when Baxter showed up. “Now, Rod! Get back and lie down.” “Out of my way.”

“Listen, boy, I don’t like to get rough with a sick man. But I will if you make me.” “Bob… how bad is my ankle?”

“It’s going to be all right … if you behave. If you don’t- well, have you ever seen gangrene? When it turns black and has that sweetish odor?” “Quit trying to scare me. Is there any reason not to put a line under my arms and lower me?”

“Well…”

They used two lines and a third to keep his injured leg free, with Baxter supervising. They caught him at the bottom and carried him to the cooking space, laid him down. “Thanks,” he grunted. “Everybody here who can get here?”

“I think so, Roddie. Shall I count?”

“Never mind. I understand you folks elected me cap- I mean ‘mayor’- this morning?” “That’s right,” agreed Kennedy.

“Uh, who else was up? How many votes did I get?” “Huh? It was unanimous.

Rod sighed. “Thanks. I’m not sure I would have held still for it if I’d been here. I gathered something else. Do I understand that you expect me to take you down to the caves Roy and I found? Caroline said something…”

Roy looked surprised. “We didn’t vote it, Rod, but that was the idea. After last night everybody knows we can’t stay here.”

Rod nodded. “I see. Are you all where I can see you? I’ve got something to say. I hear you adopted a constitution and things while Roy and I were away. I’ve never read them, so I don’t know whether this is legal or not. But if I’m stuck with the job, I expect to run things. If somebody doesn’t like what I do and we’re both stubborn enough for a showdown, then you will vote. You back me up, or you turn me down and elect somebody else. Will that work? How about it, Goldie? You were on the law committee, weren’t you?”

Howard Goldstein frowned. “You don’t express it very well, Rod.” “Probably not. Well?”

“But what you have described is the parliamentary vote-of-confidence. That’s the backbone of our constitution. We did it that way to keep it simple and still democratic. It was Grant’s notion.”

“I’m glad,” Rod said soberly. “I’d hate to think that I had torn up Grant’s laws after he worked so hard on them. I’ll study them, I promise, first chance I get. But about moving to the caves- we’ll have a vote of confidence right now.”

Goldstein smiled. “I can tell you how it will come out. We’re convinced.”

Rod slapped the ground. “You don’t understand! If you want to move, move … but get somebody else to lead you. Roy can do it. Or Cliff, or Bill. But if you leave it to me, no dirty little   beasts, all teeth and no brains, are going to drive us out. We’re men… and men don’t have to be driven out, not by the likes of those. Grant paid for this land- and I say stay here and keep  it for him!”

4.               Civilization

The Honorable Roderick L. Walker, Mayor of Cowpertown, Chief of State of the sovereign planet GO-7390 1-Il (Lima Catalog), Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, Chief Justice,  and Defender of Freedoms, was taking his ease in front of the Mayor’s Palace. He was also scratching and wondering if he should ask somebody to cut his hair again-he suspected lice only this planet did not have lice.

His Chief of Government, Miss Caroline Beatrice Mshiyeni, squatted in front of him. “Roddie, I’ve told them and told them and told them … and it does no good. That family makes more filth than everybody else put together. You should have seen it this morning. Garbage in front of their door … flies!”

“I saw it.”

“Well, what do I do? If you would let me rough him up a little. But you’re too soft”

“I guess I am.” Rod looked thoughtfully at a slab of slate erected in the village square. It read: To the Memory Of

ULYSSES GRANT COWPER,

First Mayor

– who died for his city

The carving was not good; Rod had done it.

“Grant told me once,” he added, “that government was the art of getting along with people you don’t like.” “Well, I sure don’t like Bruce and Theo!”

“Neither do I. But Grant would have figured out a way to keep them in line without getting rough.”

“You figure it out, I can’t. Roddie, you should never have let Bruce come back. That was bad enough. But when he married that little … well!” “They were made for each other,” Rod answered. “Nobody else would have married either of them.”

“It’s no joke. It’s almost- Hope! Quit teasing Grantie!” She bounced up.

Miss Hope Roberta Baxter, sixteen months, and Master Grant Roderick Throxton, thirteen months, stopped what they were doing, which was, respectively, slapping and crying. Both were naked and very dirty. It was “clean” dirt; each child had been bathed by Caroline an hour earlier, and both were fat and healthy.

Hope turned up a beaming face. “‘Ood babee!” she asserted.

“I saw you.” Caroline upended her, gave her a spat that would not squash a fly, then picked up Grant Throxton. “Give her to me,” Rod said.

“You’re welcome to her,” Caroline said. She sat down with the boy in her lap and rocked him. “Poor baby! Show Auntie Carol where it hurts.” “You shouldn’t talk like that. You’ll make a sissy of him.”

“Look who’s talking! Wishy-Washy Walker.”

Hope threw her arms around Rod, part way, and cooed, “Woddie!” adding a muddy kiss. He returned it. He considered her deplorably spoiled; nevertheless he contributed more than his share of spoiling.

“Sure,” agreed Carol. “Everybody loves Uncle Roddie. He hands out the medals and Aunt Carol does the dirty work.” “Carol, I’ve been thinking.”

“Warm day. Don’t strain any delicate parts.” “About Bruce and Theo. I’ll talk to them.” “Talk!”

“The only real punishment is one we never use- and I hope we never have to. Kicking people out, I mean. The McGowans do as they please because they don’t think we would. But I would love to give them the old heave-ho… and if it comes to it, I’ll make an issue of it before the town- either kick them out or I quit.”

“They’d back you. Why, I bet he hasn’t taken a bath this week!”

“I don’t care whether they back me or not. I’ve ridden out seven confidence votes; someday I’ll be lucky and retire. But the problem is to convince Bruce that I am willing to face the issue, for then I won’t have to. Nobody is going to chance being turned out in the woods, not when they’ve got it soft here. But he’s got to be convinced.”

“Uh, maybe if he thought you were carrying a grudge about that slice in the ribs he gave you?” “And maybe I am. But I can’t let it be personal, Carol; I’m too stinkin’ proud.”

“Uh … Turn it around. Convince him that the town is chompin’ at the bit- which isn’t far wrong- and you are trying to restrain them.” “Um, that’s closer. Yes, I think Grant would have gone for that. I’ll think it over.”

“Do that.” She stood up. “I’m going to give these children another bath. I declare I don’t know where they find so much dirt.”

She swung away with a child on each hip, heading for the shower sheds. Rod watched her lazily. She was wearing a leather bandeau and a Maori grass skirt, long leaves scraped in a pattern, curled, and dried. It was a style much favored and Caroline wore it around town, although when she treated herself to a day’s hunting she wore a leather breechclout such as the men wore.

The same leaf fibre could be retted and crushed, combed and spun, but the cloth as yet possessed by the colony was not even enough for baby clothes. Bill Kennedy had whittled a loom for Sue and it worked, but neither well nor fast and the width of cloth was under a half meter. Still, Rod mused, it was progress, it was civilization. They had come a long way.

The town was stobor-tight now. An adobe wall too high and sheer for any but the giant lions covered the upstream side and the bank, and any lion silly enough to jump it landed on a bed of stakes too wide now for even their mighty leaps-the awning under which Rod lolled was the hide of one that had made that mistake. The wall was pierced by stobor traps, narrow tunnels just big enough for the vicious little beasts and which gave into deep pits, where they could chew on each other like Kilkenny cats- which they did.

It might have been easier to divert them around the town, but Rod wanted to kill them; he would not be content until their planet was rid of those vermin.

In the meantime the town was safe. Stobor continued to deserve the nickname “dopy joe” except during the dry season and then they did not become dangerous until the annual berserk migration- the last of which had passed without loss of blood; the colony’s defenses worked, now that they understood what to defend against. Rod had required mothers and children to sit out the stampede in the cave; the rest sat up two nights and stayed on guard… but no blade was wet.

Rod thought sleepily that the next thing they needed was paper; Grant had been right… even a village was hard to run without writing paper. Besides, they must avoid losing the habit of writing. He wanted to follow up Grant’s notion of recording every bit of knowledge the gang possessed. Take logarithms- logarithms might not be used for generations, but when it came time to log a couple of rhythms, then… he went to sleep.

“You busy, Chief?”

Rod looked up at Arthur Nielsen. “Just sleeping a practice I heartily recommend on a warm Sabbath afternoon. What’s up, Art? Are Shorty and Doug pushing the bellows alone?”

“No. Confounded plug came out and we lost our fire. The furnace is ruined.” Nielsen sat down wearily. He was hot, very red in the face, and looked discouraged. He had a bad burn on a forearm but did not seem to know it. “Rod, what are we doing wrong? Riddle me that.”

“Talk to one of the brains. If you didn’t know more about it than I do, we’d swap jobs.”

“I wasn’t really asking. I know two things that are wrong. We can’t build a big enough installation and we don’t have coal. Rod, we’ve got to have coal; for cast iron or steel we need coal. Charcoal won’t do for anything but spongy wrought iron.”

“What do you expect to accomplish overnight, Art? Miracles? You are years ahead of what anybody could ask. You’ve turned out metal, whether it’s wrought iron or uranium. Since you made that spit for the barbecue pit, Margery thinks you are a genius.”

“Yes, yes, we’ve made iron-but it ought to be lots better and more of it. This ore is wonderful … the real Lake Superior hematite. Nobody’s seen such ore in commercial quantity on Terra in centuries. You ought to be able to breathe on it and make steel. And I could, too, if I had coal. We’ve got clay, we’ve got limestone, we’ve got this lovely ore- but I can’t get a hot enough fire.”

Rod was not fretted; the colony was getting metal as fast as needed. But Waxie was upset. “Want to knock off and search for coal?” “Uh … no, I don’t. I want to rebuild that furnace.” Nielsen gave a bitter description of the furnace’s origin, habits, and destination. “Who knows most about geology?”

“Uh, I suppose I do.” “Who knows next most?” “Why, Doug I guess.

“Let’s send him out with a couple of boys to find coal. You can have Mick in his place on the bellows- no, wait a minute. How about Bruce?” “Bruce? He won’t work.”

“Work him. If you work him so hard he runs away and forgets to come back, we won’t miss him. Take him, Art, as a favor to me. “Well … . okay, if you say so.

“Good. You get one bonus out of losing your batch. You won’t miss the dance tonight. Art, you shouldn’t start a melt so late in the week; you need your day of rest … and so do Shorty and Doug.”

“I know. But when it’s ready to go I want to fire it off.

Working the way we do is discouraging; before you can make anything you have to make the thing that makes it- and usually you have to make something else to make that. Futile!” “You don’t know what ‘futile’ means. Ask our ‘Department of Agriculture.’ Did you take a look at the farm before you came over the wall?”

“Well, we walked through it.”

“Better not let Cliff catch you, or he’ll scalp you. I might hold you for him.” “Humph! Alot of silly grass! Thousands of hectares around just like it.”

“That’s right. Some grass and a few rows of weeds. The pity is that Cliff will never live to see it anything else. Nor little Cliff. Nevertheless our great grandchildren will eat white bread, Art. But you yourself will live to build precision machinery- you know it can be done, which, as Bob Baxter says, is two-thirds of the battle. Cliff can’t live long enough to eat a slice of light, tasty bread. It doesn’t stop him.”

“You should have been a preacher, Rod.” Art stood up and sniffed himself. “I’d better get a bath, or the girls won’t dance with me.” “I was just quoting. You’ve heard it before. Save me some soap.”

Caroline hit two bars of Arkansas Traveler, Jimmy slapped his drum, and Roy called, “Square ‘em up, folks!” He waited, then started in high, nasal tones: “Honor y’r partners!

“Honor y’r corners!

“Now all jump up and when y’ come down-“

Rod was not dancing; the alternate set would be his turn. The colony formed eight squares, too many for a caller, a mouth organ, and a primitive drum all unassisted by amplifying equipment. So half of them babysat and gossiped while the other half danced. The caller and the orchestra were relieved at each intermission to dance the other sets.

Most of them had not known how to square-dance. Agnes Pulvermacher had put it over almost single-handed, in the face of kidding and resistance- training callers, training dancers, humming tunes to Caroline, cajoling Jimmy to carve and shrink a jungle drum. Now she had nine out of ten dancing.

Rod had not appreciated it at first (he was not familiar with the history of the Mormon pioneers) and had regarded it as a nuisance which interfered with work. Then he saw the colony, which had experienced a bad letdown after the loss in one night of all they had built, an apathy he had not been able to lift- he saw this same colony begin to smile and joke and work hard simply from being exposed to music and dancing.

He decided to encourage it. He had trouble keeping time and could not carry a tune, but the bug caught him, too; he danced not well but with great enthusiasm.

The village eventually limited dances to Sabbath nights, weddings, and holidays- and made them “formal” … which meant that women wore grass skirts. Leather shorts, breechclouts, and slacks (those not long since cut up for rags) were not acceptable. Sue talked about making a real square dance dress as soon as she got far enough ahead in her weaving, and a cowboy shirt for her husband … but the needs of the colony made this a distant dream.

Music stopped, principals changed, Caroline tossed her mouth organ to Shorty, and came over. “Come on, Roddie, let’s kick some dust.”

“I asked Sue,” he said hastily and truthfully. He was careful not to ask the same girl twice, never to pay marked attention to any female; he had promised himself long ago that the day he decided to marry should be the day he resigned and he was not finding it hard to stay married to his job. He liked to dance with Caroline; she was a popular partner- except for a tendency to swing her partner instead of letting him swing her- but he was careful not to spend much social time with her because she was his right hand, his alter ego.

Rod went over and offered his arm to Sue. He did not think about it; the stylized amenities of civilization were returning and the formal politenesses of the dance made them seem natural. He led her out and assisted in making a botch of Texas Star.

Later, tired, happy, and convinced that the others in his square had made the mistakes and he had straightened them out, Rod returned Sue to Bill, bowed and thanked him, and went back to the place that was always left for him. Margery and her assistants were passing out little brown somethings on wooden skewers. He accepted one. “Smells good, Marge. What are they?”

“Mock Nile birds. Smoked baby-buck bacon wrapped around hamburger. Salt and native sage, pan broiled. You’d better like it; it took us hours.” “Mmmm! I do! How about another?”

“Wait and see. Greedy.”

“But I need more. I work hardest. I have to keep up my strength.”

“That was work I saw you doing this afternoon?” She handed him another. “I was planning. The old brain was buzzing away.

“I heard the buzzing. Pretty loud, when you lie on your back.”

He snagged a third as she turned away, looked up to catch Jacqueline smiling; he winked and grinned. “Happy, Rod?”

“Yes indeedy. How about you, Jackie?”

“I’ve never been happier,” she said seriously.

Her husband put an arm around her. “See what the love of a good man can do, Rod?” Jimmy said. “When I found this poor child she was beaten, bedraggled, doing your cooking and afraid to admit her name. Now look at her!- fat and sassy.”

“I’m not that fat!” “Pleasingly plump.”

Rod glanced up at the cave. “Jackie, remember the night I showed up?” “I’m not likely to forget.”

“And the silly notion I had that this was Africa? Tell me- if you had it to do over, would you rather I had been right?” “I never thought about it. I knew it was not.”

“Yes, but ‘if’? You would have been home long ago.”

Her hand took her husband’s. “I would not have met James.”

“Oh, yes, you would. You had already met me. You could not have avoided it- my best friend.” “Possibly. But I would not change it. I have no yearning to go ‘home,’ Rod. This is home.”

“Me neither,” asserted Jimmy. “You. know what? This colony gets a little bigger- and it’s getting bigger fast- Goldie and I are going to open a law office. We won’t have any competition and can pick our clients. He’ll handle the criminal end, I’ll specialize in divorce, and we’ll collaborate on corporate skulduggery. We’ll make millions. I’ll drive a big limousine drawn by eight spanking buck, smoking a big cigar and sneering at the peasants.” He called out, “Right, Goldie?”

“Precisely, colleague. I’m making us a shingle: ‘Goldstein & Throxton-Get bailed, not jailed!’” “Keerect. But make that: ‘Throxton & Goldstein.’”

“I’m senior. I’ve got two more years of law.”

“Aquibble. Rod, are you going to let this Teller U. character insult an old Patrick Henry man?”

“Probably. Jimmy, I don’t see how you are going to work this. I don’t think we have a divorce law. Let’s ask Caroline.” “Atrifle. You perform the marriages, Rod; I’ll take care of the divorces.”

“Ask Caroline what?” asked Caroline. “Do we have a divorce law?”

“Huh? We don’t even have a getting-married law.”

“Unnecessary,” explained Goldstein. “Indigenous in the culture. Besides, we ran out of paper. “Correct, Counselor,” agreed Jimmy.

“Why ask?” Caroline demanded. “Nobody is thinking about divorce or I would know before they would.”

“We weren’t talking about that,” Rod explained. “Jackie said that she had no wish to go back to Terra and Jimmy was elaborating. Uselessly, as usual.” Caroline stared. “Why would anybody want to go back?”

“Sure,” agreed Jimmy. “This is the place. No income tax. No traffic, no crowds, no commercials, no telephones. Seriously, Rod, every one here was aiming for the Outlands or we  wouldn’t have been taking a survival test. So what difference does it make? Except that we’ve got everything sooner.” He squeezed his wife’s hand. “I was fooling about that big cigar; I’m rich now, boy, rich!”

Agnes and Curt had drawn into the circle, listening. Agnes nodded and said, “For once you aren’t joking, Jimmy. The first months we were here I cried myself to sleep every night, wondering if they would ever find us. Now I know they never will- and I don’t care! I wouldn’t go back if I could; the only thing I miss is lipstick.”

Her husband’s laugh boomed out. “There you have the truth, Rod. The fleshpots of Egypt … put a cosmetics counter across this creek and every woman here will walk on water.” “That’s not fair, Curt! Anyhow, you promised to make lipstick.”

“Give me time.”

Bob Baxter came up and sat down by Rod. “Missed you at the meeting this morning, Rod.” “Tied up. I’ll make it next week.”

“Good.” Bob, being of a sect which did not require ordination, had made himself chaplain as well as medical officer simply by starting to hold meetings. His undogmatic ways were such that Christian, Jew, Monist, or Moslem felt at ease; his meetings were well attended.

“Bob, would you go back?” “Go where, Caroline?” “Back to Terra.”

“Yes”

Jimmy looked horrified. “Boil me for breakfast! Why?”

“Oh, I’d want to come back! But I need to graduate from medical school.” He smiled shyly. “I may be the best surgeon in the neighborhood, but that isn’t saying much.” “Well…” admitted Jimmy, “I see your point. But you already suit us. Eh, Jackie?”

“Yes, Jimmy.”

“It’s my only regret,” Bob went on. “I’ve lost ones I

should have saved. But it’s a hypothetical question. ‘Here we rest.’”

The question spread. Jimmy’s attitude was overwhelmingly popular, even though Bob’s motives were respected. Rod said goodnight; he heard them still batting it around after he had gone to bed; it caused him to discuss it with himself.

He had decided long ago that they would never be in touch with Earth; he had not thought of it for- how long?- over a year. At first it had been mental hygiene, protection of his morale.   Later it was logic: a delay in recall of a week might be a power failure, a few weeks could be a technical difficulty- but months on months was cosmic disaster; each day added a cipher to the infinitesimal probability that they would ever be in touch again.

He was now able to ask himself: was this what he wanted?

Jackie was right; this was home. Then he admitted that he liked being big frog in a small puddle, he loved his job. He was not meant to be a scientist, nor a scholar, he had never wanted to be a businessman- but what he was doing suited him … and he seemed to do it well enough to get by.

“‘Here we rest!’”

He went to sleep in a warm glow.

Cliff wanted help with the experimental crops. Rod did not take it too seriously; Cliff always wanted something; given his head he would have everybody working dawn to dark on his farm. But it was well to find out what he wanted- Rod did not underrate the importance of domesticating plants; that was basic for all colonies and triply so for them. It was simply that he did not know much about it.

Cliff stuck his head into the mayor’s hut. “Ready?”

“Sure.” Rod got his spear. It was no longer improvised but bore a point patiently sharpened from steel salvaged from Braun’s Thunderbolt. Rod had tried wrought iron but could not get it to hold an edge. “Let’s pick up a couple of boys and get a few stobor.”

“Okay”

Rod looked around. Jimmy was at his potter’s wheel, kicking the treadle and shaping clay with his thumb. Jim! Quit that and grab your pike. We’re going to have some fun.” Throxton wiped at sweat. “You’ve talked me into it.” They added Kenny and Mick, then Cliff led them upstream. “I want you to look at the animals.”

“All right,” agreed Rod. “Cliff, I had been meaning to speak to you. If you are going to raise those brutes inside the wall, you’ll have to be careful about their droppings. Carol has been muttering.”

“Rod, I can’t do everything! And you can’t put them outside, not if you expect them to live.” “Sure, sure! Well, we’ll get you more help, that’s the only- Just a second!”

They were about to pass the last hut; Bruce McGowan was stretched in front of it, apparently asleep. Rod did not speak at once; he was fighting down rage. He wrestIed with himself, aware that the next moment could change his future, damage the entire colony. But his rational self was struggling in a torrent of anger, bitter and self-righteous. He wanted to do away with this parasite, destroy it. He took a deep breath and tried to keep his mouth from trembling.

“Bruce!” he called softly.

McGowan opened his eyes. “Huh?” “Isn’t Art working his plant today?” “Could be,” Bruce admitted.

“Well?”

“‘Well’ what? I’ve had a week and it’s not my dish. Get somebody else.”

Bruce wore his knife, as did each of them; a colonist was more likely to be caught naked than without his knife. It was the all-purpose tool, for cutting leather, preparing food, eating, whittling, building, basketmaking, and as make-do for a thousand other tools; their wealth came from knives, arrows were now used to hunt- but knives shaped the bows and arrows.

But a knife had not been used by one colonist against another since that disastrous day when Bruce’s brother had defied Rod. Over the same issue, Rod recalled; the wheel had turned full circle. But today he would have immediate backing if Bruce reached for his knife.

But he knew that this must not be settled by five against one; he alone must make this dog come to heel, or his days as leader were numbered.

It did not occur to Rod to challenge Bruce to settle it with bare hands. Rod had read many a historical romance in which the hero invited someone to settle it man to man, in a stylized imitation fighting called “boxing.” Rod had enjoyed such stories but did not apply them to himself any more than he considered personally the sword play of The Three Musketeers; nevertheless, he knew what “boxing” meant- they folded their hands and struck certain restricted blows with fists. Usually no one was hurt.

The fighting that Rod was trained in was not simply strenuous athletics. It did not matter whether they were armed; if he and Bruce fought bare hands or otherwise, someone would be killed or badly hurt. The only dangerous weapon was man himself.

Bruce stared sullenly. “Bruce,” Rod said, striving to keep his voice steady, “a long time ago I told you that people worked around here or got out. You and your brother didn’t believe me so we had to chuck you out. Then you crawled back with a tale about how Jock had been killed and could you please join up? You were a sorry sight. Remember?”

McGowan scowled. “You promised to be a little angel,” Rod went on. “People thought I was foolish- and I was. But I thought you might behave.” Bruce pulled a blade of grass, bit it. “Bub, you remind me of Jock. He was always throwing his weight around, too.

“Bruce, get up and get out of town! I don’t care where, but if you are smart, you will shag over and tell Art you’ve made a mistake- then start pumping that bellows. I’ll stop by later. If sweat isn’t pouring off you when I arrive … then you’ll never come back. You’ll be banished for life.”

McGowan looked uncertain. He glanced past Rod, and Rod wondered what expressions the others wore. But Rod kept his eyes on Bruce. “Get moving. Get to work, or don’t come back.” Bruce got a sly look. “You can’t order me kicked out. It takes a majority vote.”

Jimmy spoke up. “Aw, quit taking his guff, Rod. Kick him out now.

Rod shook his head. “No. Bruce, if that is your answer, I’ll call them together and we’ll put you in exile before lunch- and I’ll bet my best knife that you won’t get three votes to let you stay. Want to bet?”

Bruce sat up and looked at the others, sizing his chances. He looked back at Rod. “Runt,” he said slowly, you aren’t worth a hoot without stooges… or a couple of girls to do your fighting.” Jimmy whispered, “Watch it, Rod!” Rod licked dry lips, knowing that it was too late for reason, too late for talk. He would have to try to take him … he was not sure he could.

“I’ll fight you,” he said hoarsely. “Right now!” Cliff said urgently, “Don’t, Rod. We’ll manage him.” “No. Come on, McGowan.” Rod added one unforgivable word. McGowan did not move. “Get rid of that joe sticker”

Rod said, “Hold my spear, Cliff.”

Cliff snapped, “Now wait! I’m not going to stand by and watch this. He might get lucky and kill you, Rod.” “Get out of the way, Cliff.”

“No.” Cliff hesitated, then added, “Bruce, throw your knife away. Go ahead- or so help me I’ll poke a joe- sticker in your belly myself. Give me your knife, Rod.”

Rod looked at Bruce, then drew Colonel Bowie and handed it to Cliff. Bruce straightened up and flipped his knife at Cliff’s feet. Cliff rasped, “I still say not to, Rod. Say the word and we’ll take him apart.”

“Back off. Give us room.

“Well- no bone breakers. You hear me, Bruce? Make a mistake and you’ll never make another.”

“‘No bone breakers,’” Rod repeated, and knew dismally that the rule would work against him; Bruce had him on height and reach and weight. “Okay,” McGowan agreed. “Just cat clawing. I am going to show this rube that one McGowan is worth two of him.”

Cliff sighed. “Back off, everybody. Okay- get going!” Crouched, they sashayed around, not touching. Only the preliminaries could use up much time; the textbook used in most high  schools and colleges listed twenty-seven ways to destroy or disable a man hand to hand; none of the methods took as long as three seconds once contact was made. They chopped at each other, feinting with their hands, too wary to close.

Rod was confused by the injunction not to let the fight go to conclusion. Bruce grinned at him. “What’s the matter? Scared? I’ve been waiting for this, you loudmouthed pimple- now you’re going to get it!” He rushed him.

Rod gave back, ready to turn Bruce’s rush into his undoing. But Bruce did not carry it through; it had been a feint and Rod had reacted too strongly. Bruce laughed. “Scared silly, huh? You had better be.”

Rod realized that he was scared, more scared than he had ever been. The conviction flooded over him that Bruce intended to kill him … the agreement about bonebreakers meant nothing; this ape meant to finish him.

He backed away, more confused than ever… knowing that he must forget rules if he was to live through it … but knowing, too, that he had to abide by the silly restriction even if it meant the end of him. Panic shook him; he wanted to run.

He did not quite do so. From despair itself he got a cold feeling of nothing to lose and decided to finish it. He exposed his groin to a savate attack.

He saw Bruce’s foot come up in the expected kick; with fierce joy he reached in the proper shinobi counter. He showed the merest of hesitation, knowing that a full twist would break Bruce’s ankle.

Then he was flying through air; his hands had never touched Bruce. He had time for sick realization that Bruce had seen the gambit, countered with another- when he struck ground and Bruce was on him.

* * * * *

“Can you move your arm, Rod?”

He tried to focus his eyes, and saw Bob Baxter’s face floating over him. “I licked him?”

Baxter did not answer. An angry voice answered, “Cripes, no! He almost chewed you to pieces.” Rod stirred and said thickly, “Where is he? I’ve got to whip him.”

Baxter said sharply, “Lie still!” Cliff added, “Don’t worry, Rod. We fixed him.” Baxter insisted, “Shut up. See if you can move your left arm.”

Rod moved the arm, felt pain shoot through it, jerked and felt pain everywhere. “It’s not broken,” Baxter decided. “Maybe a green-stick break. We’ll put it in sling. Can you sit up? I’ll help.”  “I want to stand.” He made it with help, stood swaying. Most of the villagers seemed to be there; they moved jerkily. It made him dizzy and he blinked.

“Take it easy, boy,” he heard Jimmy say. “Bruce pretty near ruined you. You were crazy to give him the chance.” “I’m all right,” Rod answered and winced. “Where is he?”

“Behind you. Don’t worry, we fixed him.”

“Yes,” agreed Cliff. “We worked him over. Who does he think he is? Trying to shove the Mayor around!” He spat angrily. Bruce was face down, features hidden in one arm; he was sobbing. “How bad is he hurt?” Rod asked.

“Him?” Jimmy said scornfully. “He’s not hurt. I mean, he hurts all right- but he’s not hurt. Carol wouldn’t let us.

Caroline squatted beside Bruce, guarding him. She got up. “I should have let ‘em,” she said angrily. “But I knew you would be mad at me if I did.” She put hands on hips. “Roddie Walker, when are you going to get sense enough to yell for me when you’re in trouble? These four dopes stood around and let it happen.”

“Wait a minute, Carol,” Cliff protested. “I tried to stop it. We all tried, but-“ “But I wouldn’t listen,” Rod interrupted. “Never mind, Carol, I flubbed it.” “If you would listen to me-

“Never mind!” Rod went to McGowan, prodded him. “Turn over.”

Bruce slowly rolled over. Rod wondered if he himself looked as bad. Bruce’s body was dirt and blood and bruises; his face looked as if someone had tried to file the features off. “Stand up.

Bruce started to speak, then got painfully to his feet. Rod said, “I told you to report to Art, Bruce. Get over the wall and get moving.” McGowan looked startled. “Huh?”

“You heard me. I can’t waste time playing games. Check in with Art and get to work. Or keep moving and don’t come back. Now move!”

Bruce stared, then hobbled toward the wall. Rod turned and said, “Get back to work, folks. The fun is over. Cliff, you were going to show me the animals.” “Huh? Look Rod, it’ll keep.”

“Yes, Rod,” Baxter agreed. “I want to put a sling on that arm. Then you should rest.”

Rod moved his arm gingerly. “I’ll try to get along without it. Come on, Cliff. Just you and me- we’ll skip the stobor hunt.”

He had trouble concentrating on what Cliff talked about … something about gelding a pair of fawns and getting them used to harness. What use was harness when they had no wagons? His head ached, his arm hurt and his brain felt fuzzy. What would Grant have done?

He had failed … but what should he have said, or not said? Some days it wasn’t worth it. “-so we’ve got to. You see, Rod?”

“Huh? Sure, Cliff.” He made a great effort to recall what Cliff had been saying. “Maybe wooden axles would do. I’ll see if Bill thinks he can build a cart” “But besides a cart, we need-“

Rod stopped him. “Cliff, if you say so, we’ll try it. I think I’ll take a shower. Uh, we’ll look at the field tomorrow.

Ashower made him feel better and much cleaner, although the water spilling milk-warm from the flume seemed too hot, then icy cold. He stumbled back to his hut and lay down. When he woke he found Shorty guarding his door to keep him from being disturbed.

It was three days before he felt up to inspecting the farm. Neilsen reported that McGowan was working, although sullenly. Caroline reported that Theo was obeying sanitary regulations and wearing a black eye. Rod was self-conscious about appearing in public, had even considered one restless night the advisability of resigning and letting someone who had not lost face take over the responsibility. But to his surprise his position seemed firmer than ever. Aminority from Teller University, which he had thought of wryly as “loyal opposition,” now no longer seemed disposed to be critical. Curt Pulvermacher, their unofficial leader, looked Rod up and offered help. “Bruce is a bad apple, Rod. Don’t let him get down wind again. Let me know instead.”

“Thanks, Curt.”

“I mean it. It’s hard enough to get anywhere around here if we all pull together. We can’t have him riding roughshod over us. But don’t stick your chin out. We’ll teach him.”

Rod slept well that night. Perhaps he had not handled it as Grant would have, but it had worked out. Cowper-town was safe. Oh, there would be more troubles but the colony would sweat through them. Someday there would be a city here and this would be Cowper Square. Upstream would be the Nielsen Steel Works. There might even be a Walker Avenue…

He felt up to looking over the farm the next day. He told Cliff so and gathered the same party, Jimmy, Kent, and Mick. Spears in hand they climbed the stile at the wall and descended the ladder on the far side. Cliff gathered up a handful of dirt, tasted it. “The soil is all right. Alittle acid, maybe. We won’t know until we can run soil chemistry tests. But the structure is good. If you tell that dumb Swede that the next thing he has to make is a plough …

“Waxie isn’t dumb. Give him time. Hell make you ploughs and tractors, too.”

“I’ll settle for a hand plough, drawn by a team of buck. Rod, my notion is this. We weed and it’s an invitation to the buck to eat the crops. If we built another wall, all around and just as high-“

“Awall! Any idea how many man-hours that would take, Cliff?” “That’s not the point.”

Rod looked around the alluvial flat, several times as large as the land enclosed in the city walls. Athorn fence, possibly, but not a wall, not yet … Cliff’s ambitions were too big. “Look, let’s comb the field for stobor, then send the others back. You and I can figure out afterwards what can be done.”

“All right. But tell them to watch where they put their big feet.”

Rod spread them in skirmish line with himself in the

center. “Keep dressed up,” he warned, “and don’t let any get past you. Remember, every one we kill now means six less on S-Day.”

They moved forward. Kenny made a kill, Jimmy immediately made two more. The stobor hardly tried to escape, being in the “dopy joe” phase of their cycle. Rod paused to spear one and looked up to speak to the man on his right. But there was no one there. “Hold it! Where’s Mick?”

“Huh? Why, he was right here a second ago.”

Rod looked back. Aside from a shimmer over the hot field, there was nothing where Mick should have been. Something must have sneaked up in the grass, pulled him down- “Watch it, everybody! Something’s wrong. Close in … and keep your eyes peeled.” He turned back, moved diagonally toward where Mick had disappeared.

Suddenly two figures appeared in front of his eyes- Mick and a stranger.

Astranger in coveralls and shoes… The man looked around, called over his shoulder, “Okay, Jake! Put her on automatic and clamp it.” He glanced toward Rod but did not seem to see him, walked toward him, and disappeared.

With heart pounding Rod began to run. He turned and found himself facing into an open gate… and down a long, closed corridor.

The man in the coveralls stepped into the frame. “Everybody back off,” he ordered. “We’re going to match in with the Gap. There may be local disturbance.”

5.               In Achilles’ Tent

It had been a half hour since Mick had stumbled through the gate as it had focused, fallen flat in the low gravity of Luna. Rod was trying to bring order out of confusion, trying to piece together his own wits. Most of the villagers were out on the field, or sitting on top of the wall, watching technicians set up apparatus to turn the locus into a permanent gate, with controls and communications on both sides. Rod tried to tell one that they were exposed, that they should not run around unarmed; without looking up the man had said, “Speak to Mr. Johnson.”

He found Mr. Johnson, tried again, was interrupted. Will you kids please let us work? We’re glad to see you but we’ve got to get a power fence around this area. No telling what might be in that tall grass.”

Oh,” Rod answered. “Look, I’ll set guards. We know what to expect. I’m in ch-“ ‘Beat it, will you? You kids mustn’t be impatient.”

So Rod went back inside his city, hurt and angry. Several strangers came in, poked around as if they owned the place, spoke to the excited villagers, went out again. One stopped to look at Jimmy’s drum, rapped it and laughed. Rod wanted to strangle him.

“Rod?”

“Uh?” He whirled around. “Yes, Margery?”

“Do I cook lunch, or don’t I? All my girls have left and Mel says its silly because we’ll all be gone by lunch time- and I don’t know what to do.” “Huh? Nobody’s leaving … that I know of.”

“Well, maybe not but that’s the talk.”

He was not given time to consider this as one of the ubiquitous strangers came up and said briskly, “Can you tell me where to find a lad named Roderick Welker?” “Walker,” Rod corrected. “I’m Rod Walker. What do you want?”

“My name is Sansom, Clyde B. Sansom- Administrative Officer in the Emigration Control Service. Now, Welker, I understand you are group leader for these students. You can-“  “I am Mayor of Cowpertown,” Rod said stonily. “What do you want?”

“Yes, yes, that’s what the youngster called you. ‘Mayor.’” Sansom smiled briefly and went on. “Now, Walker, we want to keep things orderly. I know you are anxious to get out of your predicament as quickly as possible- but we must do things systematically. We are going to make it easy- just delousing and physical examination, followed by psychological tests and a relocation interview. Then you will all be free to return to your homes- after signing a waiver-of-liability form, but the legal officer will take care of that. If you will have your little band line up alphabetically- uh, here in this open space, I think, then I will-” He fumbled with his briefcase.

“Who the deuce are you to give orders around here?”

Sansom looked surprised. “Eh? I told you. If you want to be technical, I embody the authority of the Terran Corporation. I put it as a request- but under field conditions I can compel co- operation, you know.”

Rod felt himself turn red. “I don’t know anything of the sort! You may be a squad of angels back on Terra but you are in Cowpertown.” Mr. Sansom looked interested but not impressed. “And what, may I ask, is Cowpertown?”

“Huh? This is Cowpertown, a Sovereign nation, with its own constitution, its own laws- and its own territory.” Rod took a breath. “If the Terran Corporation wants anything, they can send somebody and arrange it. But don’t tell us to line up alphabetically!”

“Atta boy, Roddie!”

Rod said, “Stick around, Carol,” then added to Sansom, “Understand me?”

“Do I understand,” Sansom said slowly, “that you are suggesting that the Corporation should appoint an ambassador to your group?” “Well … that’s the general idea.”

“Mmmm … an interesting theory, Welker.”

“‘Walker.’ And until you do, you can darn well clear the sightseers out- and get out yourself. We aren’t a zoo.”

Sansom looked at Rod’s ribs, glanced at his dirty, calloused feet and smiled. Rod said, “Show him out, Carol. Put him out, if you have to.” “Yes, sirr’ She advanced on Sansom, grinning.

“Oh, I’m leaving,” Sansom said quickly. “Better a delay than a mistake in protocol. An ingenious theory, young man. Good-by. We shall see each other later. Uh … a word of advice? May I?”

Huh? All right.”

“Don’t take yourself too seriously. Ready, young lady?”

Rod stayed in his hut. He wanted badly to see what was going on beyond the wall, but he did not want to run into Sansom. So he sat and gnawed his thumb and thought. Apparently   some weak sisters were going back -wave a dish of ice cream under their noses and off they would trot, abandoning their land, throwing away all they had built up. Well, he wouldn’t! This was home, his place, he had earned it; he wasn’t going back and maybe wait half a lifetime for a chance to move to some other planet probably not as good.

Let them go! Cowpertown would be better and stronger without them.

Maybe some just wanted to make a visit, show off grandchildren to grandparents, then come back. Probably . . in which case they had better make sure that Sansom or somebody gave them written clearance to come back. Maybe he ought to warn them.

But he didn’t have anyone to visit. Except Sis- and Sis might be anywhere- unlikely that she was on Terra.

Bob and Carmen, carrying Hope, came in to say good-by. Rod shook hands solemnly. “You’re coming back, Bob, when you get your degree … aren’t you?” “Well, we hope so, if possible. If we are permitted to.”

“Who’s going to stop you? It’s your right. And when you do, you’ll find us here. In the meantime we’ll try not to break legs.” Baxter hesitated. “Have you been to the gate lately, Rod?”

“No. Why?”

“Uh, don’t plan too far ahead. I believe some have already gone back.” “How many?”

“Quite a number.” Bob would not commit himself further. He gave Rod the addresses of his parents and Carmen’s, soberly wished him a blessing, and left.

Margery did not come back and the fire pit remained cold. Rod did not care, he was not hungry. Jimmy came in at what should have been shortly after lunch, nodded and sat down. Presently he said, “I’ve been out at the gate.”

“So?”

“Yup. You know, Rod, a lot of people wondered why you weren’t there to say good-by.” “They could come here to say good-by!”

“Yes, so they could. But the word got around that you didn’t approve. Maybe they were embarrassed.”

“Me?” Rod laughed without mirth. “I don’t care how many city boys run home to mama. It’s a free country.” He glanced at Jim. “How many are sticking?” “Uh, I don’t know.”

“I’ve been thinking. If the group gets small, we might move back to the cave just to sleep, I mean. Until we get more colonists.” “Maybe.”

“Don’t be so glum! Even if it got down to just you and me and Jackie and Carol, we’d be no worse off than we once were. And it would just be temporary. There’d be the baby, of course- I almost forgot to mention my god-son.

“There’s the baby,” Jimmy agreed.

“What are you pulling a long face about? Jim . you’re not thinking of leaving?”

Jimmy stood up. Jackie said to tell you that we would stick by whatever you thought was best.” Rod thought over what Jimmy had not said. “You mean she wants to go back? Both of you do.” “Now, Rod, we’re partners. But I’ve got the kid to think about. You see that?”

“Yes. I see.”

“Well-“

Rod stuck out his hand. “Good luck, Jim. Tell Jackie good-by for me. “Oh, she’s waiting to say good-by herself. With the kid.”

“Uh, tell her not to. Somebody once told me that saying good-by was a mistake. Be seeing you.” “Well-so long, Rod. Take care of yourself.”

“You, too. If you see Caroline, tell her to come in. Caroline was slow appearing; he guessed that she had been at the gate. He said bluntly, “How many are left?” “Not many,” she admitted.

“How many?”

“You and me- and a bunch of gawkers.” “Nobody else?”

“I checked them off the list. Roddie, what do we do now?” “Huh? It doesn’t matter. Do you want to go back?”

“You’re boss, Roddie. You’re the Mayor.”

“Mayor of what? Carol, do you want to go back?” “Roddie, I never thought about it. I was happy here. But-“ “But what?”

“The town is gone, the kids are gone- and I’ve got only a year if I’m ever going to be a cadet Amazon.” She blurted out the last, then added, “But I’ll stick if you do.” “No.”

“I will so!”

“No. But I want you to do something when you go back.” “What?”

“Get in touch with my sister Helen. Find out where she is stationed. Assault Captain Helen Walker- got it? Tell her I’m okay … and tell her I said to help you get into the Corps.” “Uh … Roddie, I don’t want to go!”

“Beat it. They might relax the gate and leave you behind.” “You come, too.”

“No. I’ve got things to do. But you hurry. Don’t say good-by. Just go.” “You’re mad at me, Roddie?”

“Of course not. But go, please, or you’ll have me bawling, too.”

She gave a choked cry, grabbed his head and smacked his cheek, then galloped away, her sturdy legs pounding. Rod went into his shack and lay face down. After a while he got up and began to tidy Cowpertown. It was littered, dirtier than it had been since the morning of Grant’s death.

It was late afternoon before anyone else came into the village. Rod heard and saw them long before they saw him-two men and a woman. The men were dressed in city garb; she was wearing shorts, shirt, and smart sandals. Rod stepped out and said, “What do you want?” He was carrying his spear.

The woman squealed, then looked and added, “Wonderful!”

One man was carrying a pack and tripod which Rod recognized as multi-recorder of the all-purpose sightsmell-sound-touch sort used by news services and expeditions. He said nothing, set his tripod down, plugged in cables and started fiddling with dials. The other man, smaller, ginger haired, and with a terrier mustache, said, “You’re Walker? The one the others call ‘the Mayor’?”

“Yes.”

“Kosmic hasn’t been in here?” “Cosmic what?”

“Kosmic Keynotes, of course. Or anybody? LIFETIME-SPACE? Galaxy Features?”

“I don’t know what you mean. There hasn’t been anybody here since morning.”

The stranger twitched his mustache and sighed. “That’s all I want to know. Go into your trance, Ellie. Start your box, Mac.” “Wait a minute,” Rod demanded. “Who are you and what do you want?”

“Eh? I’m Evans of Empire … Empire Enterprises.” “Pulitzer Prize,” the other man said and went on working;

“With Mac’s help,” Evans added quickly. “The lady is Ellie Ellens herself.”

Rod looked puzzled. Evans said, “You don’t know? Son, where have you-never mind. She’s the highest paid emotional writer in the system. Shell interpret you so that every woman reader from the Outlands Overseer to the London Times will cry over you and want to comfort you. She’s a great artist.”

Miss Ellens did not seem to hear the tribute. She wandered around with a blank face, stopping occasionally to look or touch. She turned and said to Rod, “Is this where you held your primitive dances?”

“What? We held square dances here, once a week.”

“‘Square dances’ … Well, we can change that.” She went back into her private world.

“The point is, brother,” Evans went on, “we don’t want just an interview. Plenty of that as they came through. That’s how we found out you were here- and dropped everything to see you. I’m not going to dicker; name your own price- but it’s got to be exclusive, news, features, commercial rights, everything. Uh …” Evans looked around. “Advisory service, too, when the actors arrive.

“Actors?!”

“Of course. If the Control Service had the sense to sneeze, they would have held you all here until a record was shot. But we can do it better with actors. I want you at my elbow every minute- we’ll have somebody play your part. Besides that-“

“Wait a minute!” Rod butted in. “Either I’m crazy or you are. In the first place I don’t want your money. “Huh? You signed with somebody? That guard let another outfit in ahead of us?”

“What guard? I haven’t seen anybody.”

Evans looked relieved. “We’ll work it out. The guard they’ve got to keep anybody from crossing your wall- I thought he might have both hands out. But don’t say you don’t need money; that’s immoral.”

“Well, I don’t. We don’t use money here.”

“Sure, sure … but you’ve got a family, haven’t you? Families always need money. Look, let’s not fuss. We’ll treat you right and you can let it pile up in the bank. I just want you to get signed up.”

“I don’t see why I should.” “Binder,” said Mac.

“Mmm … yes, Mac. See here, brother, think it over. Just let us have a binder that you won’t sign with anybody else. You can still stick us for anything your conscience will let you. Just a binder, with a thousand plutons on the side.”

“I’m not going to sign with anybody else.” “Got that, Mac?”

“Canned.”

Evans turned to Rod. “You don’t object to answering questions in the meantime, do you? And maybe a few pictures?” “Uh, I don’t care.” Rod was finding them puzzling and a little annoying, but they were company and he was bitterly lonely.

“Fine!” Evans drew him out with speed and great skill. Rod found himself telling more than he realized he knew. At one point Evans asked about dangerous animals. “I understand they are pretty rough here. Much trouble?”

“Why, no,” Rod answered with sincerity. “We never had real trouble with animals. What trouble we had was with people … and not much of that.” “You figure this will be a premium colony?”

“Of course. The others were fools to leave. This place is like Terra, only safer and richer and plenty of land. In a few years- say!” “Say what?”

“How did it happen that they left us here? We were only supposed to be here ten days.” “Didn’t they tell you?”

“Well … maybe the others were told. I never heard.” “It was the supernova, of course. Delta, uh-“

“Delta Gamma one thirteen,” supplied Mac.

“That’s it. Space-time distortion, but I’m no mathematician.” “Fluxion,” said Mac.

“Whatever that is. They’ve been fishing for you ever since. As I understand it, the wave front messed up their figures for this whole region. Incidentally, brother, when you go back-“ ”I’m not going back.”

“Well, even on a visit. Don’t sign a waiver. The Board is trying to call it an ‘Act of God’ and duck responsibility. So let me put a bug in your ear: don’t sign away your rights. Afriendly hint, huh?”

“Thanks. I won’t- well, thanks anyhow.”

“Now how about action pix for the lead stories?” “Well … okay.”

“Spear,” said Mac.

“Yeah, I believe you had some sort of spear. Mind holding it?”

Rod got it as the great Ellie joined them. “Wonderful!” she breathed. “I can feel it. It shows how thin the line is between man and beast. Ahundred cultured boys and girls slipping back to illiteracy, back to the stone age, the veneer sloughing away … reverting to savagery. Glorious!”

“Look here!” Rod said angrily. “Cowpertown wasn’t that way at all! We had laws, we had a constitution, we kept clean. We-” He stopped; Miss Ellens wasn’t listening.

“Savage ceremonies,” she said dreamily. “Avillage witch doctor pitting ignorance and superstition against nature. Primitive fertility rites-” She stopped and said to Mac in a businesslike voice, “We’ll shoot the dances three times. Cover ‘em a little for ‘A’ list; cover ‘em up a lot for the family list-and peel them down for the ‘B’ list. Got it?”

“Got it,” agreed Mac.

“I’ll do three commentaries she added. “It will be worth the trouble.” She reverted to her trance. “Wait a minute!” Rod protested. “If she means what

I think she means, there won’t be any pictures, with or without actors.”

“Take it easy,” Evans advised. “I said you would be technical supervisor, didn’t I? Or would you rather we did it without you? Ellie is all right, brother. What you don’t know- and she does- is that you have to shade the truth to get at the real truth, the underlying truth. You’ll see.

“But-“

Mac stepped up to him. “Hold still.”

Rod did so, as Mac raised his hand. Rod felt the cool touch of an air brush. “Hey! What are you doing?”

“Make up.” Mac returned to his gear.

“Just a little war paint,” Evans explained. “The pic needs color. It will wash off.”

Rod opened his mouth and eyes in utter indignation; without knowing it he raised his spear. “Get it, Mac!” Evans ordered. “Got it,” Mac answered calmly.

Rod fought to bring his anger down to where he could talk. “Take that tape out,” he said softly. “Throw it on the ground. Then get out.” “Slow down,” Evans advised. “You’ll like that pic. We’ll send you one.

“Take it out. Or I’ll bust the box and anybody who gets in my way!” He aimed his spear at the multiple lens. Mac slipped in front, protected it with his body. Evans called out, “Better look at this.”

Evans had him covered with a small but businesslike gun. “We go a lot of funny places, brother, but we go prepared. You damage that recorder, or hurt one of us, and you’ll be sued from here to breakfast. It’s a serious matter to interfere with a news service, brother. The public has rights, you know.” He raised his voice. “Ellie! We’re leaving.”

“Not yet,” she answered dreamily. “I must steep my-self in-“ “Right now! It’s an ‘eight-six’ with the Reuben Steuben!” “Okay!” she snapped in her other voice.

Rod let them go. Once they were over the wall he went;back to the city hall, sat down, held his knees and shook.

Later he climbed the stile and looked around. Aguard was on duty below him; the guard looked up but said nothing. The gate was relaxed to a mere control hole but a loading platform had been set up and a power fence surrounded it and joined the wall. Someone was working at a control board set up on a flatbed truck; Rod decided that they must be getting ready for major immigration. He went back and prepared a solitary meal, the poorest he had eaten in more than a year. Then he went to bed and listened to the jungle “Grand Opera” until he went to sleep.

“Anybody home?”

Rod came awake instant!y, realized that it was morning- and that not all nightmares were dreams. “Who’s there?” “Friend of yours.” B. P. Matson stuck his head in the door. “Put that whittler away. I’m harmless.”

Rod bounced up. “Deacon! I mean ‘Doctor.’”

“‘Deacon,’” Matson corrected. “I’ve got a visitor for you.” He stepped aside and Rod saw his sister.

Some moments later Matson said mildly, “If you two can unwind and blow your noses, we might get this on a coherent basis.”

Rod backed off and looked at his sister. “My, you look wondeful, Helen.” She was in mufti, dressed in a gay tabard and briefs. “You’ve lost weight.” “Not much. Better distributed, maybe. You’ve gained, Rod. My baby brother is a man.”

“How did you-” Rod stopped, struck by suspicion. “You didn’t come here to talk me into going back? If you did, you can save your breath.”

Matson answered hastily. “No, no, no! Farthest thought from our minds. But we heard about your decision and we wanted to see you-s o I did a little politickmg and got us a pass.” He added, “Nominally I’m a temporary field agent for the service.

“Oh. Well, I’m certainly glad to see you … as long as that is understood.”

“Sure, sure!” Matson took out a pipe, stoked and fired it. “I admire your choice, Rod. First time I’ve been on Tangaroa.” “On what?”

“Huh? Oh. Tangaroa. Polynesian goddess, I believe. Did you folks give it another name?” Rod considered it. “To tell the truth, we never got around to it. It … well, it just was.”

Matson nodded. “Takes two of anything before you need names. But it’s lovely, Rod. I can see you made a lot of progress. “We would have done all right,” Rod said bitterly, “if they hadn’t jerked the rug out.” He shrugged. “Like to look around?”

“I surely would.”

“All right. Come on, Sis. Wait a minute- I haven’t had breakfast; how about you?”  “Well, when we left the Gap is was pushing lunch time. I could do with a bite. Helen?” “Yes, indeed.”

Rod scrounged in Margery’s supplies. The haunch on which he had supped was not at its best. He passed it to Matson. “Too high?” Matson sniffed it. “Pretty gamy. I can eat it if you can.

“We should have hunted yesterday, but … things happened.” He frowned. “Sit tight. I’ll get cured meat.” He ran up to the cave, found a smoked side and some salted strips. When he got back Matson had a fire going. There was nothing else to serve; no fruit had been gathered the day before. Rod was uneasily aware that their breakfasts must have been very different.

But he got over it in showing off how much they had done- potter’s wheel, Sue’s loom with a piece half finished, the flume with the village fountain and the showers that ran continuously,

iron artifacts that Art and Doug had hammered out. “I’d like to take you up to Art’s iron works but there is no telling what we might run into.”

“Come now, Rod, I’m not a city boy. Nor is your sister helpless.”

Rod shook his head. “I know this country; you don’t. I can go up there at a trot. But the only way for you would be a slow sneak, because I can’t cover you both.” Matson nodded. “You’re right. It seems odd to have one of my students solicitous over my health. But you are right. We don’t know this set up.

Rod showed them the stobor traps and described the annual berserk migration. “Stobor pour through those holes and fall in the pits. The other animals swarm past, as solid as city traffic for hours.”

“Catastrophic adjustment,” Matson remarked.

“Huh? Oh, yes, we figured that out. Cyclic catastrophic balance, just like human beings. If we had facilities, we could ship thousands of carcasses back to Earth every dry season. He considered it. “Maybe we will, now.

“Probably.”

“But up to now it has been just a troublesome nuisance. These stobor especially- I’ll show you one out in the field when- say!” Rod looked thoughtful. “These are stobor, aren’t they? Little carnivores heavy in front, about the size of a tom cat and eight times as nasty?”

“Why ask me?”

“Well, you warned us against stobor. All the classes were warned.”

“I suppose these must be stobor,” Matson admitted, “but I did not know what they looked like.” “Huh?”

“Rod, every planet has its ‘stobor’ … all different. Sometimes more than one sort.” He stopped to tap his pipe. “You remember me telling the class that every planet has unique dangers, different from every other planet in the Galaxy?”

“Yes…”

“Sure, and it meant nothing, a mere intellectual concept. But you have to be afraid of the thing behind the concept, if you are to stay alive. So we personify it … but we don’t tell you what it is. We do it differently each year. It is to warn you that the unknown and deadly can lurk anywhere … and to plant it deep in your guts instead of in your head.”

“Well, I’ll be a- Then there weren’t any stobor! There never were!” “Sure there were. You built these traps for them, didn’t you?”

* * * * *

When they returned, Matson sat on the ground and said, “We can’t stay long, you know.

“I realize that. Wait a moment.” Rod went into his hut, dug out Lady Macbeth, rejoined them. “Here’s your knife, Sis. It saved my skin more than once. Thanks.”

She took the knife and caressed it, then cradled it and looked past Rod’s head. It flashed by him, went tuckspong! in a corner post. She recovered it, came back and handed it to Rod. “Keep it, dear, wear it always in safety and health.”

“Gee, Sis, I shouldn’t. I’ve had it too long now.”

“Please. I’d like to know that Lady Macbeth is watching over you, wherever you are. And I don’t need a knife much now.” “Huh? Why not?”

“Because I married her,” Matson answered.

Rod was caught speechless. His sister looked at him and said, “What’s the matter, Buddy? Don’t you approve?”

“Huh? Oh, sure! It’s …” He dug into his memory, fell back on quoted ritual: “‘May the Principle make you one. May your union be fruitful.’” “Then come here and kiss me.”

Rod did so, remembered to shake hands with the Deacon. It was all right, he guessed, but- well, how old were they? Sis must be thirtyish and the Deacon … why the Deacon was old- probably past forty. It did not seem quite decent.

But he did his best to make them feel that he approved. After he thought it over he decided that if two people, with their lives behind them, wanted company in their old age, why, it was probably a good thing.

“So you see,” Matson went on, “I had a double reason to look you up. In the first place, though I am no longer teaching, it is vexing to mislay an entire class. In the second place, when one of them is your brother-in-law it is downright embarrassing.”

“You’ve quit teaching?”

“Yes. The Board and I don’t see eye to eye on policy. Secondly, I’m leading a party out … and this time your sister and I are going to settle down and prove a farm.” Matson looked at him. “Wouldn’t be interested, would you? I need a salted lieutenant.”

“Huh? Thanks, but as I told you, this is my place. Uh, where are you going?” “Territa, out toward the Hyades. Nice place- they are charging a stiff premium.” Rod shrugged. “Then I couldn’t afford it.”

“As my lieutenant, you’d be exempt. But I wasn’t twisting your arm; I just thought you ought to have a chance to turn it down. I have to get along with your sister, you know.” Rod glanced at Helen. “Sorry, Sis.”

“It’s all right, Buddy. We’re not trying to live your life.”

“Mmm … no. Matson puffed hard; then went on. “However, as your putative brother and former teacher I feel obligated to mention a couple of things. I’m not trying to sell you anything, but I’ll appreciate it if you’ll listen. Okay?”

“Well … go ahead.”

“This is a good spot. but you might go back to school, you know. Acquire recognized professional status. If you refuse recall, here you stay … forever. You won’t see the rest of the Outlands. They won’t give you free passage back later. But a professional gets around, he sees the world. Your sister and I have been on some fifty planets. School does not look attractive now- you’re a man and it will be hard to wear boy’s shoes. But-” Matson swept an arm, encompassed all of Cowpertown, “-this counts. You can skip courses, get field credit. I have some drag with the Chancellor of Central Tech. Hmmm?”

Rod sat with stony face, then shook his head. “Okay,” said Matson briskly. “No harm done.”

“Wait. Let me tell you.” Rod tried to think how to explain how he felt … “Nothing, I guess,” he said gruffly. Matson smoked in silence. “You were leader here,” he said at last.

“Mayor,” Rod corrected. “Mayor of Cowpertown. I was the Mayor, I mean.”

“You are the Mayor. Population one, but you are still boss. And even those bureaucrats in the control service wouldn’t dispute that you’ve proved the land. Technically you are an autonomous colony- I hear you told Sansom that.” Matson grinned. “You’re alone, however. You can’t live alone, Rod … not and stay human.”

“Well, yes- but aren’t they going to settle this planet?”

“Sure. Probably fifty thousand this year, four times that many in two years. But, Rod, you would be part of the mob. Theyll bring their own leaders.” “I don’t have to be boss! I just- well, I don’t want to give up Cowpertown.”

“Rod, Cowpertown is safe in history, along with Plymouth Rock, Botany Bay, and Dakin’s Colony. The citizens of Tangaroa will undoubtedly preserve it as a historical shrine. Whether you stay is another matter. Nor am I trying to persuade you. I was simply pointing out alternatives.” He stood up. “About time we started, Helen.”

“Yes, dear.” She accepted his hand and stood up.

“Wait a minute!” insisted Rod. “Deacon … Sis! I know I sound like a fool. I know this is gone … the town, and the kids, and everything. But I can’t go back.” He added, “It’s not that I don’t want to.”

Matson nodded. “I understand you.” “I don’t see how. I don’t.”

“Maybe I’ve been there. Rod, everyone of us is beset by two things: a need to go home, and the impossibility of doing it. You are at the age when these hurt worst. You’ve been thrown into  a situation that makes the crisis doubly acute. You- don’t interrupt me- you’ve been a man here, the old man of the tribe, the bull of the herd. That is why the others could go back but you can’t. Wait, please! I suggested that you might find it well to go back and be an adolescent for a while … and it seems unbearable. I’m not surprised. It would be easier to be a small   child. Children are another race and adults deal with them as such. But adolescents are neither adult nor child. They have the impossible, unsolvable, tragic problems of all fringe  cultures. They don’t belong, they are second-class citizens, economically and socially insecure. It is a difficult period and I don’t blame you for not wanting to return to it. I simply think it might pay. But you have been king of a whole world; I imagine that term papers and being told to wipe your feet and such are out of the question. So good luck. Coming, dear?”

“Deacon,” his wife said, “Aren’t you going to tell him?”

“It has no bearing. It would be an unfair way to influence his judgment.” “You men! I’m glad I’m not male!”

“So am I,” Matson agreed pleasantly.

“I didn’t mean that. Men behave as if logic were stepping on crack in a sidewalk. I’m going to tell him.” “On your head be it.”

“Tell me what?” demanded Rod.

“She means,” said Matson, “that your parents are back.” “What?”

“Yes, Buddy. They left stasis a week ago and Daddy came out of the hospital today. He’s well. But we haven’t told him all about you- we haven’t known what to say.”

The facts were simple, although Rod found them hard to soak up. Medical techniques had developed in two years, not a pessimistic twenty; it had been possible to relax the stasis, operate, and restore Mr. Walker to the world. Helen had known for months that such outcome was likely, but their father’s physician had not approved until he was sure. It had been mere coincidence that Tangaroa had been located at almost the same time. To Rod one event was as startling as the other; his parents had been dead to him for a long time.

“My dear,” Matson said sternly, “now that you have thrown him into a whingding, shall we go?”

“Yes. But I had to tell him.” Helen kissed Rod quickly, turned to her husband. They started to walk away. Rod watched them, his face contorted in an agony of indecision.

Suddenly he called out, “Wait! I’m coming with you.”

“All right,” Matson answered. He turned his good eye toward his wife and drooped the lid in a look of satisfaction that was not quite a wink. “If you are sure that is what you want to do, I’ll help you get your gear together.”

“Oh, I haven’t any baggage. Let’s go.”

Rod stopped only long enough to free the penned animals.

4.               The Endless Road

Matson chaperoned him through Emigrants’ Gap, saved from possible injury a functionary who wanted to give Rod psychological tests, and saw to it that he signed no waivers. He had him bathed, shaved, and barbered, then fetched him clothes, before he let him be exposed to the Terran world. Matson accompanied them only to Kaibab Gate. “I’m supposed to have a lodge dinner, or something, so that you four can be alone as a family. About nine, dear. See you, Rod.” He kissed his wife and left.

“Sis? Dad doesn’t know I’m coming?”

Helen hesitated. “He knows. I screened him while Deacon was primping you.” She added, “Remember, Rod, Dad has been ill … and the time has been only a couple of weeks to him.” “Oh, that’s so, isn’t it?” Used all his life to Ramsbotham anomalies, Rod nevertheless found those concerned with time confusing- planet-hopping via the gates did not seem odd.

Besides, he was extremely edgy without knowing why, the truth being that he was having an attack of fear of crowds. The Matsons had anticipated it but had not warned him lest they

make him worse.

The walk through tall trees just before reaching home calmed him. The necessity for checking all cover for dangerous animals and keeping a tree near him always in mind gave his subconscious something familiar to chew on. He arrived home almost cheerful without being aware either that he had been frightened by crowds or soothed by non-existent dangers of an urban forest.

His father looked browned and healthy- but shorter and smaller. He embraced his son and his mother kissed him and wept. “It’s good to have you home, son. I understand you had quite  a trip.”

“It’s good to be home, Dad.”

“I think these tests are much too strenuous, I really do.”

Rod started to explain that it really had not been a test, that it had not been strenuous, and that Cowpertown- Tangaroa, rather- had been a soft touch. But he got mixed up and was disturbed by the presence of “Aunt” Nora Peascoat- no relation but a childhood friend of his mother. Besides, his father was not listening.

But Mrs. Peascoat was listening, and looking-peering with little eyes through folds of flesh. “Why, Roderick Walker, I knew that couldn’t have been a picture of you.” “Eh?” asked his father. “What picture?”

“Why, that wild-man picture that had Roddie’s name on it. You must have seen it; it was on facsimile and Empire Hour both. I knew it wasn’t him. I said to Joseph, ‘Joseph,’ I said, ‘that’s not a picture of Rod Walker-its a fake.’”

“I must have missed it. As you know, I-“

“I’ll send it to you; I clipped it. I knew it was a fake. It’s a horrible thing, a great naked savage with pointed teeth and a fiendish grin and a long spear and war paint all over its ugly face. I said to Joseph-“

“As you know, I returned from hospital just this morning, Nora. Rod, there was no picture of you on the news services, surely?” “Uh, yes and no. Maybe.”

“I don’t follow you. Why should there be a picture of you?” “There wasn’t any reason. This bloke just took it.”

“Then there was a picture?”

“Yes.” Rod saw that “Aunt” Nora was eyeing him avidly: “But it was a fake- sort of.” “I still don’t follow you.

“Please, Pater,” Helen intervened. “Rod had a tiring trip. This can wait.” “Oh, surely. I don’t see how a picture can be ‘a sort of a fake.’”

“Well, Dad, this man painted my face when I wasn’t looking. I-” Rod stopped, realizing that it sounded ridiculous. “Then it was your picture?” “Aunt” Nora insisted.

“I’m not going to say any more.

Mr. Walker blinked. “Perhaps that is best.”

“Aunt” Nora looked ruffled. “Well, I suppose anything can happen ‘way off in those odd places. From the teaser on Empire Hour I understand some very strange things did happen … not all of them nice.”

She looked as if daring Rod to deny it. Rod said nothing. She went on, “I don’t know what you were thinking of, letting a boy do such things. My father always said that if the Almighty had intended us to use those gate things instead of rocket ships He would have provided His own holes in the sky.”

Helen said sharply, “Mrs. Peascoat, in what way is a rocket ship more natural than a gate?” “Why, Helen Walker! I’ve been ‘Aunt Nora’ all your life. ‘Mrs. Peascoat’ indeed!”

Helen shrugged. “And my name is Matson, not Walker- as you know.”

Mrs. Walker, distressed and quite innocent, broke in to ask Mrs. Peascoat to stay for dinner. Mr. Walker added, “Yes, Nora, join us Under the Lamp.” Rod counted to ten. But Mrs. Peascoat said she was sure they wanted to be alone, they had so much to talk about … and his father did not insist.

Rod quieted during ritual, although he stumbled in responses and once left an awkward silence. Dinner was wonderfully good, but he was astonished by the small portions; Terra must be under severe rationing. But everyone seemed happy and so he was.

“I’m sorry about this mix-up,” his father told him. “I suppose it means that you will have to repeat a semester at Patrick Henry.” “On the contrary, Pater,” Helen answered, “Deacon is sure that Rod can enter Central Tech with advanced standing.”

“Really? They were more strict in my day.”

“All of that group will get special credit. What they learned cannot be learned in classrooms.”

Seeing that his father was inclined to argue Rod changed the subject. “Sis, that reminds me. I gave one of the girls your name, thinking you were still in the Corps- she wants to be appointed cadet, you see. You can still help her, can’t you?”

“I can advise her and perhaps coach her for the exams. Is this important to you, Buddy?”

“Well, yes. And she is number-one officer material. She’s a big girl, even bigger than you are- and she looks

a bit like you. She is smart like you, too, around genius, and always good-natured and willing- but strong and fast and incredibly violent when you need it … sudden death in all directions.”

“Roderick.” His father glanced at the lamp.

“Uh, sorry, Dad. I was just describing her.”

“Very well. Son … when did you start picking up your meat with your fingers?” Rod dropped the tidbit and blushed. “Excuse me. We didn’t have forks.”

Helen chuckled. “Never mind, Rod. Pater, it’s perfectly natural. Whenever we paid off any of our girls we always put them through reorientation to prepare them for the perils of civil life. And fingers were made before forks.”

“Mmm . . no doubt. Speaking of reorientation, there is something we must do, daughter, before this family will be organized again.” “So?”

“Yes. I mean the transfer of guardianship. Now that I am well, by a miracle, I must reassume my responsibilities.”

Rod’s mind slipped several cogs before it penetrated that Dad was talking about him. Guardian? Oh … Sis was his guardian, wasn’t she? But it didn’t mean anything. Helen hesitated. “I suppose so, Pater,” she said, her eyes on Rod, “if Buddy wants to.”

“Eh? That is not a factor, daughter. Your husband won’t want the responsibility of supervising a young boy- and it is my obligation … and privilege.” Helen looked annoyed. Rod said, “I can’t see that it matters, Dad. I’ll be away at college-and after all I am nearly old enough to vote.”

His mother looked startled. “Why, Roddie dear!”

“Yes,” agreed his father. “I’m afraid I can’t regard a gap of three years as negligible.” “What do you mean, Dad? I’ll be of age in January.”

Mrs. Walker clasped a hand to her mouth. “Jerome we’ve forgotten the time lag again. Oh, my baby boy!”

Mr. Walker looked astonished, muttered something about “-very difficult” and gave attention to his plate. Presently he looked up. “You’ll pardon me, Rod. Nevertheless, until you are of age   I must do what I can; I hardly think I want you to live away from home while at college.”

“Sir? Why not?”

“Well- I feel that we have drifted apart, and not all for the best. Take this girl you spoke of in such surprising terms. Am I correct in implying that she was, eh a close chum?” Rod felt himself getting warm. “She was my city manager,” he said flatly.

“Your what?”

“My executive officer. She was captain of the guard, chief of police, anything you want to call her. She did everything. She hunted, too, but that was just because she liked to. Carol is, uh- well, Carol is swell.”

“Roderick, are you involved with this girl?”

“Me? Gosh, no! She was more like a big sister. Oh, Carol was sweet on half a dozen fellows, one time or another, but it never lasted.” “I am very glad to hear that you are not serously interested in her. She does not sound like desirable companionship for a young boy.” “Dad- you don’t know what you are saying!”

“Perhaps. I intend to find out. But what is this other matter? ‘City Manager!’ What were you?” “I,” Rod said proudly, “was Mayor of Cowpertown.”

His father looked at him, then shook his head. “We’ll speak of this later. Possibly you need, eh- medical help.” He looked at Helen. “We’ll attend to the change in guardianship tomorrow. I can see that there is much I must take care of.”

Helen met his eyes. “Not unless Buddy consents.” “Daughter!”

“The transfer was irrevocable. He will have to agree or I won’t do it!”

Mr. Walker looked shocked, Mrs. Walker looked stricken. Rod got up and left the room … the first time anyone had ever done so while the Lamp of Peace was burning. He heard his father call after him but he did not turn back.

He found Matson in his room, smoking and reading. “I grabbed a bite and let myself in quietly,” Matson explained. He inspected Rod’s face. “I told you,” he said slowly, “that it would be rough. Well, sweat it out, son, sweat it out.”

“I can’t stand it!” “Yes, you can.

In Emigrants’ Gap the sturdy cross-country wagons were drawn up in echelon, as they had been so often before and would be so many times again. The gate was not ready; drivers gathered at the booth under Liberty’s skirts, drinking coffee and joking through the nervous wait. Their professional captain was with them, a lean, homely young man with deep lines in   his face, from sun and laughing and perhaps some from worry. But he did not seem to be worrying now; he was grinning and drinking coffee and sharing a doughnut with a boy child. He was dressed in fringed buckskin, in imitation of a very old style; he wore a Bill Cody beard and rather long hair. His mount was a little pinto, standing patiently by with reins hanging. There was a boot scabbard holding a hunting rifle on the nigh side of the saddle, but the captain carried no guns on his person; instead he wore two knives, one on each side.

Asiren sounded and a speaker above the Salvation Army booth uttered: “Captain Walker, ready with gate four.”

Rod waved at the control booth and shouted, “Call off!” then turned back to Jim and Jacqueline. “Tell Carol I’m sorry she couldn’t get leave. I’ll be seeing you.” “Might be sooner than you think,” asserted Jim. “My firm is going to bid this contract.”

“Your firm? Where do you get that noise? Have they made him a partner, Jackie?”

“No,” she answered serenely, “but I’m sure they will as soon as he is admitted to the Outlands bar. Kiss Uncle Rod good-by, Grant.” “No,” the youngster answered firmly.

“Just like his father,” Jimmy said proudly. “Kisses women only.”

The count was running back down; Rod heard it and swung into saddle. “Take it easy, kids.” The count passed him, finished with a shouted, “ONE!”

“Reins up! Reeeiins UP!” He waited with arm raised and glanced through the fully-dilated gate past rolling prairie at snow-touched peaks beyond. His nostrils widened.

The control light turned green. He brought his arm down hard and shouted, “Roll ‘em! Ho!” as he squeezed and released the little horse with his knees. The pinto sprang forward, cut in front of the lead wagon, and Captain Walker headed out on his long road.

The End

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The Door into Summer (full text) by Robert Heinlein

Here is the full text of the wonderful Robert Heinlein science fiction story titled “The door into summer”.

The novel begins in 1970 with Daniel, an engineer and inventor, in a bit of a slump. He has been scammed by his business partner, Miles Gentry, and his fiancée, Belle Darkin, so that he has lost his company, Hired Girl, Inc. Dan’s only friend in the world is his cat, Petronius the Arbiter or “Pete”, who hates going outdoors in the snow.

Left with a large financial settlement, and his remaining Hired Girl stock, he elects to take “cold sleep”, hoping to wake up thirty years later to a brighter future. First he mails his Hired Girl stock certificate to the one person he trusts, Miles’ stepdaughter Frederica “Ricky” Virginia Gentry. However when Dan confronts Miles and Belle, they inject him with an illegal “zombie” drug, and have him committed to cold sleep.

Dan wakes up in the year 2000, with no money to his name, and no idea how to find the people he once knew. He has lost Pete the cat, who fled Miles’ house after Dan was drugged, and has no idea how to find a now middle-aged Ricky.

Nevertheless, Dan begins rebuilding his life… 

In the hot Summer months, take a moment and enjoy this great science fiction read.

The Door Into Summer

ONE WINTER shortly before the Six Weeks War my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut. I doubt if it is there any longer, as it was near the edge of the blast area of the Manhattan near-miss, and those old frame buildings burn like tissue paper. Even if it is still standing it would not be a desirable rental because of the fallout, but we liked it then, Pete and I. The lack of plumbing made the rent low and what had been the dining room had a good north light for my drafting board.

The drawback was that the place had eleven doors to the outside.

Twelve, if you counted Pete’s door. I always tried to arrange a door of his own for Pete—in this case a board fitted into a window in an unused bedroom and in which I had cut a cat strainer just wide enough for Pete’s whiskers. I have spent too much of my life opening doors for cats—I once calculated that, since the dawn of civilization, nine hundred and seventy-eight man-centuries have been used up that way. I could show you figures.

Pete usually used his own door except when he could bully me into opening a people door for him, which he preferred. But he would not use his door when there was snow on the ground.

While still a kitten, all fluff and buzzes, Pete had worked out a simple philosophy. I was in charge of quarters, rations, and weather; he was in charge of everything else. But he held me especially responsible for weather. Connecticut winters are good only for Christmas cards; regularly that winter Pete would check his own door, refuse to go out it because of that unpleasant white stuff beyond it (he was no fool), then badger me to open a people door.

He had a fixed conviction that at least one of them must lead into summer weather. Each time this meant that I had to go around with him to each of eleven doors, hold it open while he satisfied himself that it was winter out that way, too, then go on to the next door, while his criticisms of my mismanagement grew more bitter with each disappointment.

Then he would stay indoors until hydraulic pressure utterly forced him outside. When he returned the ice in his pads would sound like little clogs on the wooden floor and he would glare at me and refuse to purr until he had chewed it all out…whereupon he would forgive me until the next time.

But he never gave up his search for the Door into Summer. On 3 December 1970, I was looking for it too.

My quest was about as hopeless as Pete’s had been in a Connecticut January. What little snow there was in southern California was kept on mountains for skiers, not in downtown Los Angeles—the stuff probably couldn’t have pushed through the smog anyway. But the winter weather was in my heart.

I was not in bad health (aside from a cumulative hangover), I was still on the right side of thirty by a few days, and I was far from being broke. No police were looking for me, nor any husbands, nor any process servers; there was nothing wrong that a slight case of amnesia would not have cured. But there was winter in my heart and I was looking for the door to summer.

If I sound like a man with an acute case of self-pity, you are correct. There must have been well over two billion people on this planet in worse shape than I was. Nevertheless, I was looking for the Door into Summer.

Most of the ones I had checked lately had been swinging doors, like the pair in front of me then—the SANS SOUCI Bar Grill, the sign said. I went in, picked a booth halfway back, placed the overnight bag I was carrying carefully on the seat, slid in by it, and waited for the waiter.

The overnight bag said, “Waarrrh?” I said, “Take it easy, Pete.” “Naaow!”

“Nonsense, you just went. Pipe down, the waiter is coming.”

Pete shut up. I looked up as the waiter leaned over the table, and said to him, “A double shot of your bar Scotch, a glass of plain water, and a split of ginger ale.”

The waiter looked upset. “Ginger ale, sir? With Scotch?” “Do you have it or don’t you?”

“Why, yes, of course. But—”

“Then fetch it. I’m not going to drink it; I just want to sneer at it. And bring a saucer too.”

“As you say, sir.” He polished the tabletop. “How about a small steak, sir? Or the scallops are very good today.”

“Look, mate, I’ll tip you for the scallops if you’ll promise not to serve them. All I need is what I ordered…and don’t forget the saucer.”

He shut up and went away. I told Pete again to take it easy, the Marines had landed. The waiter returned, his pride appeased by carrying the split of ginger ale on the saucer. I had him open it while I mixed the Scotch with the water. “Would you like another glass for the ginger ale, sir?”

“I’m a real buckaroo; I drink it out of the bottle.”

He shut up and let me pay him and tip him, not forgetting a tip for the scallops. When he had gone I poured ginger ale into the saucer and tapped on the top of the overnight bag. “Soup’s on, Pete.”

It was unzipped; I never zipped it with him inside. He spread it with his paws, poked his head out, looked around quickly, then levitated his forequarters and placed his front feet on the edge of the table. I raised my glass and we looked at each other. “Here’s to the female race, Pete— find ’em and forget ’em!”

He nodded; it matched his own philosophy perfectly. He bent his head daintily and started lapping up ginger ale. “If you can, that is,” I added, and took a deep swig. Pete did not answer. Forgetting a female was no effort to him; he was the natural-born bachelor type.

Facing me through the window of the bar was a sign that kept changing. First it would read: WORK WHILE YOU SLEEP. Then it would say: AND DREAM YOUR TROUBLES AWAY. Then it would flash in letters twice as big:

MUTUAL ASSURANCE COMPANY

I read all three several times without thinking about them. I knew as much and as little about suspended animation as everybody else did. I had read a popular article or so when it was first announced and two or three times a week I’d get an insurance-company ad about it in the morning mail; I usually chucked them without looking at them since they didn’t seem to apply to me any more than lipstick ads did.

In the first place, until shortly before then, I could not have paid for cold sleep; it’s expensive. In the second place, why should a man who was enjoying his work, was making money, expected to make more, was in love and about to be married, commit semi-suicide?

If a man had an incurable disease and expected to die anyhow but thought the doctors a generation later might be able to cure him—and he could afford to pay for suspended animation while medical science caught up with what was wrong with him—then cold sleep was a logical bet. Or if his ambition was to make a trip to Mars and he thought that clipping one generation out of his personal movie film would enable him to buy a

ticket, I supposed that was logical too—there had been a news story about a café- society couple who got married and went right straight from city

hall to the sleep sanctuary of Western World Insurance Company with an announcement that they had left instructions not to be called until they could spend their honeymoon on an interplanetary liner…although I had suspected that it was a publicity gag rigged by the insurance company and that they had ducked out the back door under assumed names. Spending your wedding night cold as a frozen mackerel does not have the ring of truth in it.

And there was the usual straightforward financial appeal, the one the insurance companies bore down on: “Work while you sleep.” Just hold still and let whatever you have saved grow into a fortune. If you are fifty-five and your retirement fund pays you two hundred a month, why not sleep away the years, wake up still fifty-five, and have it pay you a thousand a month? To say nothing of waking up in a bright new world which would probably promise you a much longer and healthier old age in which to enjoy the thousand a month? That one they really went to town on, each company proving with incontrovertible figures that its selection of stocks for its trust fund made more money faster than any of the others. “Work while you sleep!”

It had never appealed to me. I wasn’t fifty-five, I didn’t want to retire, and I hadn’t seen anything wrong with 1970.

Until recently, that is to say. Now I was retired whether I liked it or not (I didn’t); instead of being on my honeymoon I was sitting in a second-rate bar drinking Scotch purely for anesthesia; instead of a wife I had one much-scarred tomcat with a neurotic taste for ginger ale; and as for liking right now, I would have swapped it for a case of gin and then busted every bottle.

But I wasn’t broke.

I reached into my coat and took out an envelope, opened it. It had two items in it. One was a certified check for more money than I had ever had before at one time; the other was a stock certificate in Hired Girl, Inc. They were both getting a little mussed; I had been carrying them ever since they were handed to me.

Why not?

Why not duck out and sleep my troubles away? Pleasanter than joining the Foreign Legion, less messy than suicide, and it would divorce me completely from the events and the people who had made my life go sour. So why not?

I wasn’t terribly interested in the chance to get rich. Oh, I had read H. G. Wells’ The Sleeper Awakes, not only when the insurance companies started giving away free copies, but before that, when it was just another classic novel; I knew what compound interest and stock appreciation could do. But I was not sure that I had enough money both to buy the Long Sleep and to set up a trust large enough to be worthwhile. The other argument appealed to me more: go beddy-bye and wake up in a different world. Maybe a lot better world, the way the insurance companies would have you believe…or maybe worse. But certainly different.

I could make sure of one important difference: I could doze long enough to be certain that it was a world without Belle Darkin—or Miles Gentry, either, but Belle especially. If Belle was dead and buried I could forget her, forget what she had done to me, cancel her out…instead of gnawing my heart with the knowledge that she was only a few miles away.

Let’s see, how long would that have to be? Belle was twenty-three—or claimed to be (I recalled that once she had seemed to let slip that she remembered Roosevelt as president). Well, in her twenties anyhow. If I slept seventy years, she’d be an obituary. Make it seventy-five and be safe.

Then I remembered the strides they were making in geriatrics; they were talking about a hundred and twenty years as an attainable “normal” life span. Maybe I would have to sleep a hundred years. I wasn’t certain that any insurance company offered that much.

Then I had a gently fiendish idea, inspired by the warm glow of Scotch. It wasn’t necessary to sleep until Belle was dead; it was enough, more

than enough, and just the fitting revenge on a female to be young when she was old. Just enough younger to rub her nose in it—say about thirty years.

I felt a paw, gentle as a snowflake, on my arm. “Mooorrre!” announced Pete.

“Greedy gut,” I told him, and poured him another saucer of ginger ale. He thanked me with a polite wait, then started lapping it. But he had interrupted my pleasantly nasty chain of thought. What the devil could I do about Pete?

You can’t give away a cat the way you can a dog; they won’t stand for it. Sometimes they go with the house, but not in Pete’s case; to him I had been the one stable thing in a changing world ever since he was taken from his mother nine years earlier…I had even managed to keep him near me in the Army and that takes real wangling.

He was in good health and likely to stay that way even though he was held together with scar tissue. If he could just correct a tendency to lead with his right he would be winning battles and siring kittens for another five years at least.

I could pay to have him kept in a kennel until he died (unthinkable!) or I could have him chloroformed (equally unthinkable)—or I could abandon him. That is what it boils down to with a cat: You either carry out the Chinese obligation you have assumed—or you abandon the poor thing, let it go wild, destroy its faith in the eternal rightness.

The way Belle had destroyed mine.

So, Danny boy, you might as well forget it. Your own life may have gone as sour as dill pickles; that did not excuse you in the slightest from your obligation to carry out your contract to this super-spoiled cat.

Just as I reached that philosophical truth Pete sneezed; the bubbles had gone up his nose. “Gesundheit,” I answered, “and quit trying to drink it so fast.”

Pete ignored me. His table manners averaged better than mine and he knew it. Our waiter had been hanging around the cash register, talking with the cashier. It was the after-lunch slump and the only other customers were at the bar. The waiter looked up when I said “Gesundheit,” and spoke to the cashier. They both looked our way, then the cashier lifted the flap gate in the bar and headed toward us.

I said quietly, “MPs, Pete.”

He glanced around and ducked down into the bag; I pushed the top together. The cashier came over and leaned on my table, giving the seats on both sides of the booth a quick double-O. “Sorry, friend,” he said flatly, “but you’ll have to get that cat out of here.”

“What cat?”

“The one you were feeding out of that saucer.” “I don’t see any cat.”

This time he bent down and looked under the table. “You’ve got him in that bag,” he accused.

“Bag? Cat?” I said wonderingly. “My friend, I think you’ve come down with an acute figure of speech.” “Huh? Don’t give me any fancy language. You’ve got a cat in that bag. Open it up.”

“Do you have a search warrant?” “What? Don’t be silly.”

“You’re the one talking silly, demanding to see the inside of my bag without a search warrant. Fourth Amendment—and the war has been over for years. Now that we’ve settled that, please tell my waiter to make it the same all around—or fetch it yourself.”

He looked pained. “Brother, this isn’t anything personal, but I’ve got a license to consider. ‘No dogs, no cats’—it says so right up there on the

wall. We aim to run a sanitary establishment.”

“Then your aim is poor.” I picked up my glass. “See the lipstick marks? You ought to be checking your dishwasher, not searching your customers.”

“I don’t see no lipstick.”

“I wiped most of it off. But let’s take it down to the Board of Health and get the bacteria count checked.” He sighed. “You got a badge?”

“No.”

“Then we’re even. I don’t search your bag and you don’t take me down to the Board of Health. Now if you want another drink, step up to the bar and have it…on the house. But not here.” He turned and headed up front.

I shrugged. “We were just leaving anyhow.”

As I started to pass the cashier’s desk on my way out he looked up. “No hard feelings?” “Nope. But I was planning to bring my horse in here for a drink later. Now I won’t.”

“Suit yourself. The ordinance doesn’t say a word about horses. But just one more thing—does that cat really drink ginger ale?” “Fourth Amendment, remember?”

“I don’t want to see the animal; I just want to know.”

“Well,” I admitted, “he prefers it with a dash of bitters, but he’ll drink it straight if he has to.” “It’ll ruin his kidneys. Look here a moment, friend.”

“At what?”

“Lean back so that your head is close to where mine is. Now look up at the ceiling over each booth…the mirrors up in the decorations. I knew there was a cat there—because I saw it.”

I leaned back and looked. The ceiling of the joint had a lot of junky decoration, including many mirrors; I saw now that a number of them, camouflaged by the design, were so angled as to permit the cashier to use them as periscopes without leaving his station. “We need that,” he said apologetically. “You’d be shocked at what goes on in those booths…if we didn’t keep an eye on ’em. It’s a sad world.”

“Amen, brother.” I went on out.

Once outside, I opened the bag and carried it by one handle; Pete stuck his head out. “You heard what the man said, Pete. ‘It’s a sad world.’ Worse than sad when two friends can’t have a quiet drink together without being spied on. That settles it.”

“Now?” asked Pete.

“If you say so. If we’re going to do it, there’s no point in stalling.” “Now!” Pete answered emphatically.

“Unanimous. It’s right across the street.”

The receptionist at the Mutual Assurance Company was a fine example of the beauty of functional design. In spite of being streamlined for about Mach Four, she displayed frontal-mounted radar housings and everything else needed for her basic mission. I reminded myself that she would be Whistler’s Mother by the time I was out and told her that I wanted to see a salesman.

“Please be seated. I will see if one of our client executives is free.” Before I could sit down she added, “Our Mr. Powell will see you. This way, please.”

Our Mr. Powell occupied an office which made me think that Mutual did pretty well for itself. He shook hands moistly, sat me down, offered me a cigarette, and attempted to take my bag. I hung onto it. “Now, sir, how can we serve you?”

“I want the Long Sleep.”

His eyebrows went up and his manner became more respectful. No doubt Mutual would write you a camera floater for seven bucks, but the Long Sleep let them get their patty-paws on all of a client’s assets. “A very wise decision,” he said reverently. “I wish I were free to take it myself. But…family responsibilities, you know.” He reached out and picked up a form. “Sleep clients are usually in a hurry. Let me save you time and bother by filling this out for you…and we’ll arrange for your physical examination at once.”

“Just a moment.” “Eh?”

“One question. Are you set up to arrange cold sleep for a cat?” He looked surprised, then pained. “You’re jesting.”

I opened the top of the bag; Pete stuck his head out. “Meet my sidekick. Just answer the question, please. If the answer is ‘no,’ I want to sashay up to Central Valley Liability. Their offices are in this same building, aren’t they?”

This time he looked horrified. “Mister— Uh, I didn’t get your name?” “Dan Davis.”

“Mr. Davis, once a man enters our door he is under the benevolent protection of Mutual Assurance. I couldnt let you go to Central Valley.” “How do you plan to stop me? Judo?”

“Please!” He glanced around and looked upset. “Our company is an ethical company.” “Meaning that Central Valley is not?”

“I didn’t say that; you did. Mr. Davis, don’t let me sway you—” “You won’t.”

“—but get sample contracts from each company. Get a lawyer, better yet, get a licensed semanticist. Find out what we offer—and actually deliver

—and compare it with what Central Valley claims to offer.” He glanced around again and leaned toward me. “I shouldn’t say this—and I do hope you won’t quote me—but they don’t even use the standard actuarial tables.”

“Maybe they give the customer a break instead.”

“What? My dear Mr. Davis, we distribute every accrued benefit. Our charter requires it…while Central Valley is a stock company.”

“Maybe I should buy some of their— Look, Mr. Powell, we’re wasting time. Will Mutual accept my pal here? Or not? If not, I’ve been here too long already.”

“You mean you want to pay to have that creature preserved alive in hypothermia?”

“I mean I want both of us to take the Long Sleep. And don’t call him ‘that creature’; his name is Petronius.”

“Sorry. I’ll rephrase my question. You are prepared to pay two custodial fees to have both of you, you and, uh, Petronius committed to our sanctuary?”

“Yes. But not two standard fees. Something extra, of course, but you can stuff us both in the same coffin; you can’t honestly charge as much for

Pete as you charge for a man.”

“This is most unusual.”

“Of course it is. But we’ll dicker over the price later…or I’ll dicker with Central Valley. Right now I want to find out if you can do it.”

“Uh…” He drummed on his desktop. “Just a moment.” He picked up his phone and said, “Opal, get me Dr. Berquist.” I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation, for he switched on the privacy guard. But after a while he put down the instrument and smiled as if a rich uncle had died. “Good news, sir! I had overlooked momentarily the fact that the first successful experiments were made on cats. The techniques and critical factors for cats are fully established. In fact there is a cat at the Naval Research Laboratory in Annapolis which is and has been for more than twenty years alive in hypothermia.”

“I thought NRL was wiped out when they got Washington?”

“Just the surface buildings, sir, not the deep vaults. Which is a tribute to the perfection of the technique; the animal was unattended save by automatic machinery for more than two years…yet it still lives, unchanged, unaged. As you will live, sir, for whatever period you elect to entrust yourself to Mutual.”

I thought he was going to cross himself. “Okay, okay, now let’s get on with the dicker.”

There were four factors involved: first, how to pay for our care while we were hibernating; second, how long I wanted us to sleep; third, how I wanted my money invested while I was in the freezer; and last, what happened if I conked out and never woke up.

I finally settled on the year 2000, a nice round number and only thirty years away. I was afraid that if I made it any longer I would be completely out of touch. The changes in the last thirty years (my own lifetime) had been enough to bug a man’s eyes out—two big wars and a dozen little ones, the downfall of communism, the Great Panic, the artificial satellites, the change to atomic power—why, when I was a kid they didn’t even have multimorphs.

I might find 2000 A.D. pretty confusing. But if I didn’t jump that far Belle would not have time to work up a fancy set of wrinkles.

When it came to how to invest my dough I did not consider government bonds and other conservative investments; our fiscal system has inflation built into it. I decided to hang onto my Hired Girl stock and put the cash into other common stocks, with a special eye to some trends I thought would grow. Automation was bound to get bigger. I picked a San Francisco fertilizer firm too; it had been experimenting with yeasts and edible algae— there were more people every year and steak wasn’t going to get any cheaper. The balance of the money I told him to put into the company’s managed trust fund.

But the real choice lay in what to do if I died in hibernation. The company claimed that the odds were better than seven out of ten that I would live through thirty years of cold sleep…and the company would take either end of the bet. The odds weren’t reciprocal and I didn’t expect them to be; in any honest gambling there is a breakage to the house. Only crooked gamblers claim to give the sucker the best of it, and insurance is legalized gambling. The oldest and most reputable insurance firm in the world, Lloyd’s of London, makes no bones about it—Lloyd’s associates will take either end of any bet. But don’t expect better-than-track odds; somebody has to pay for Our Mr. Powell’s tailor-made suits.

I chose to have every cent go to the company trust fund in case I died…which made Mr. Powell want to kiss me and made me wonder just how optimistic those seven-out-of-ten odds were. But I stuck with it because it made me an heir (if I lived) of everyone else with the same option (if they died), Russian roulette with the survivors picking up the chips…and with the company, as usual, raking in the house percentage.

I picked every alternative for the highest possible return and no hedging if I guessed wrong; Mr. Powell loved me, the way a croupier loves a sucker who keeps playing the zero. By the time we had settled my estate he was anxious to be reasonable about Pete; we settled for 15 percent of the human fee to pay for Pete’s hibernation and drew up a separate contract for him.

There remained consent of court and the physical examination. The physical I didn’t worry about; I had a hunch that, once I elected to have the company bet that I would die, they would accept me even in the last stages of the Black Death. But I thought that getting a judge to okay it might be lengthy. It had to be done, because a client in cold sleep was legally in chancery, alive but helpless.

I needn’t have worried. Our Mr. Powell had quadruplicate originals made of nineteen different papers. I signed till I got finger cramps, and a messenger rushed away with them while I went to my physical examination; I never even saw the judge.

The physical was the usual tiresome routine except for one thing. Toward the end the examining physician looked me sternly in the eye and said, “Son, how long have you been on this binge?”

“Binge?”

“Binge.”

“What makes you think that, Doctor? I’m as sober as you are. ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled—’ ” “Knock it off and answer me.”

“Mmm…I’d say about two weeks. A little over.”

“Compulsive drinker? How many times have you pulled this stunt in the past?”

“Well, as a matter of fact, I haven’t. You see—” I started to tell him what Belle and Miles had done to me, why I felt the way I did.

He shoved a palm at me. “Please. I’ve got troubles of my own and I’m not a psychiatrist. Really, all I’m interested in is finding out whether or not your heart will stand up under the ordeal of putting you down to four degrees centigrade. Which it will. And I ordinarily don’t care why anyone is nutty enough to crawl into a hole and pull it in after him; I just figure it is one less damn fool underfoot. But some residual tinge of professional conscience prevents me from letting any man, no matter how sorry a specimen, climb into one of those coffins while his brain is sodden with alcohol. Turn around.”

“Huh?”

“Turn around; I’m going to inject you in your left buttock.” I did and he did. While I was rubbing it he went on, “Now drink this. In about twenty minutes you will be more sober than you’ve been in a month. Then, if you have any sense—which I doubt—you can review your position and decide whether to run away from your troubles…or stand up to them like a man.”

I drank it.

“That’s all; you can get dressed. I’m signing your papers, but I’m warning you that I can veto it right up to the last minute. No more alcohol for you at all, a light supper and no breakfast. Be here at noon tomorrow for final check.”

He turned away and didn’t even say good-bye. I dressed and went out of there, sore as a boil. Powell had all my papers ready. When I picked them up he said, “You can leave them here if you wish and pick them up at noon tomorrow…the set that goes in the vault with you, that is.”

“What happens to the others?”

“We keep one set ourselves, then after you are committed we file one set with the court and one in the Carlsbad Archives. Uh, did the doctor caution you about diet?”

“He certainly did.” I glanced at the papers to cover my annoyance. Powell reached for them. “I’ll keep them safe overnight.”

I pulled them back. “I can keep them safe. I might want to change some of these stock selections.”

“Uh, it’s rather late for that, my dear Mr. Davis.”

“Don’t rush me. If I do make any changes I’ll come in early.” I opened the overnight bag and stuck the papers down in a side flap beside Pete. I had kept valuable papers there before; while it might not be as safe as the public archives in the Carlsbad Caverns, they were safer than you might think. A sneak thief had tried to take something out of that flap on another occasion; he must still have the scars of Pete’s teeth and claws.

II

MY CAR WAS parked under Pershing Square where I had left it earlier in the day. I dropped money into the parking attendant, set the bug on arterial-west, got Pete out and put him on the seat, and relaxed.

Or tried to relax. Los Angeles traffic was too fast and too slashingly murderous for me to be really happy under automatic control; I wanted to redesign their whole installation—it was not a really modern “fail safe.” By the time we were west of Western Avenue and could go back on manual control I was edgy and wanted a drink. “There’s an oasis, Pete.”

“Blurrrt?” “Right ahead.”

But while I was looking for a place to park—Los Angeles was safe from invasion; the invaders wouldn’t find a place to park—I recalled the doctor’s order not to touch alcohol.

So I told him emphatically what he could do with his orders.

Then I wondered if he could tell, almost a day later, whether or not I had taken a drink. I seemed to recall some technical article, but it had not been in my line and I had just skimmed it.

Damnation, he was quite capable of refusing to let me cold-sleep. I’d better play it cagey and lay off the stuff. “Now?” inquired Pete.

1  

“Later. We’re going to find a drive-in instead.” I suddenly realized that I didn’t really want a drink; I wanted food and a night’s sleep. Doc was correct; I was more sober and felt better than I had in weeks. Maybe that shot in the fanny had been nothing but B ; if so, it was jet-propelled. So we

found a drive-in restaurant. I ordered chicken in the rough for me and a half pound of hamburger and some milk for Pete and took him out for a short walk while it was coming. Pete and I ate in drive-ins a lot because I didn’t have to sneak him in and out.

A half hour later I let the car drift back out of the busy circle, stopped it, lit a cigarette, scratched Pete under the chin, and thought.

Dan, my boy, the doc was right; you’ve been trying to dive down the neck of a bottle. That’s okay for your pointy head but it’s too narrow for your shoulders. Now you’re cold sober, you’ve got your belly crammed with food and it’s resting comfortably for the first time in days. You feel better.

What else? Was the doc right about the rest of it? Are you a spoiled infant? Do you lack the guts to stand up to a setback? Why are you taking this step? Is it the spirit of adventure? Or are you simply hiding from yourself, like a Section Eight trying to crawl back into his mother’s womb?

But I do want to do it, I told myself—the year 2000. Boy!

Okay, so you want to. But do you have to run off without settling the beefs you have right here?

All right, all right!—but howcan I settle them? I don’t want Belle back, not after what she’s done. And what else can I do? Sue them? Don’t be silly, I’ve got no evidence—and anyhow, nobody ever wins a lawsuit but the lawyers.

Pete said, “Wellll? Y’know!”

I looked down at his waffle-scarred head. Pete wouldn’t sue anybody; if he didn’t like the cut of another cat’s whiskers, he simply invited him to come out and fight like a cat. “I believe you’re right, Pete. I’m going to look up Miles, tear his arm off, and beat him over the head with it until he talks. We can take the Long Sleep afterward. But we’ve got to know just what it was they did to us and who rigged it.”

There was a phone booth back of the stand. I called Miles, found him at home, and told him to stay there; I’d be out.

MY OLD MAN named me Daniel Boone Davis, which was his way of declaring for personal liberty and self-reliance. I was born in 1940, a year when everybody was saying that the individual was on the skids and the future belonged to mass man. Dad refused to believe it; naming me was a note of defiance. He died under brainwashing in North Korea, trying to the last to prove his thesis.

When the Six Weeks War came along I had a degree in mechanical engineering and was in the Army. I had not used my degree to try for a commission because the one thing Dad had left me was an overpowering yen to be on my own, giving no orders, taking no orders, keeping no schedules—I simply wanted to serve my hitch and get out. When the Cold War boiled over, I was a sergeant-technician at Sandia Weapons Center in New Mexico, stuffing atoms in atom bombs and planning what I would do when my time was up. The day Sandia disappeared I was down in Dallas drawing a fresh supply of Schrecklichkeit. The fallout on that was toward Oklahoma City, so I lived to draw my GI benefits.

Pete lived through it for a similar reason. I had a buddy, Miles Gentry, a veteran called back to duty. He had married a widow with one daughter, but his wife had died about the time he was called back. He lived off post with a family in Albuquerque so as to have a home for his stepchild Frederica. Little Ricky (we never called her “Frederica”) took care of Pete for me. Thanks to the cat-goddess Bubastis, Miles and Ricky and Pete were away on a seventy-two that awful weekend—Ricky took Pete with them because I could not take him to Dallas.

I was as surprised as anyone when it turned out we had divisions stashed away at Thule and other places that no one suspected. It had been known since the ’30s that the human body could be chilled until it slowed down to almost nothing. But it had been a laboratory trick, or a last-resort therapy, until the Six Weeks War. I’ll say this for military research: If money and men can do it, it gets results. Print another billion, hire another thousand scientists and engineers, then in some incredible, left-handed, inefficient fashion the answers come up. Stasis, cold sleep, hibernation, hypothermia, reduced metabolism, call it what you will—the logistics-medicine research teams had found a way to stack people like cordwood and use them when needed. First you drug the subject, then hypnotize him, then cool him down and hold him precisely at four degrees centigrade; that is to say, at the maximum density of water with no ice crystals. If you need him in a hurry he can be brought up by diathermy and posthypnotic command in ten minutes (they did it in seven at Nome), but such speed tends to age the tissues and may make him a little stupid from then on. If you aren’t in a hurry two hours minimum is better. The quick method is what professional soldiers call a “calculated risk.”

The whole thing was a risk the enemy had not calculated, so when the war was over I was paid off instead of being liquidated or sent to a slave camp, and Miles and I went into business together about the time the insurance companies started selling cold sleep.

We went to the Mojave Desert, set up a small factory in an Air Force surplus building, and started making Hired Girl, my engineering and Miles’ law and business experience. Yes, I invented Hired Girl and all her kinfolk—Window Willie and the rest—even though you won’t find my name on them. While I was in the service I had thought hard about what one engineer can do. Go to work for Standard, or du Pont, or General Motors? Thirty years later they give you a testimonial dinner and a pension. You haven’t missed any meals, you’ve had a lot of rides in company airplanes. But you are never your own boss. The other big market for engineers is civil service—good starting pay, good pensions, no worries, thirty days’ annual leave, liberal benefits. But I had just had a long government vacation and wanted to be my own boss.

What was there small enough for one engineer and not requiring six million man-hours before the first model was on the market? Bicycle-shop engineering with peanuts for capital, the way Ford and the Wright brothers had started—people said those days were gone forever; I didn’t believe it.

Automation was booming—chemical-engineering plants that required only two gauge-watchers and a guard, machines that printed tickets in one

city and marked the space “sold” in six other cities, steel moles that mined coal while the UMW boys sat back and watched. So while I was on Uncle Sam’s payroll I soaked up all the electronics, linkages, and cybernetics that a “Q” clearance would permit.

What was the last thing to go automatic? Answer: any housewife’s house. I didn’t attempt to figure out a sensible scientific house; women didn’t want one; they simply wanted a better-upholstered cave. But housewives were still complaining about the Servant Problem long after servants had

gone the way of the mastodon. I had rarely met a housewife who did not have a touch of slaveholder in her; they seemed to think there really ought to be strapping peasant girls grateful for a chance to scrub floors fourteen hours a day and eat table scraps at wages a plumber’s helper would scorn.

That’s why we called the monster Hired Girl—it brought back thoughts of the semi-slave immigrant girl whom Grandma used to bully. Basically it was just a better vacuum cleaner and we planned to market it at a price competitive with ordinary suck brooms.

What Hired Girl would do (the first model, not the semi-intelligent robot I developed it into) was to clean floors…any floor, all day long and without supervision. And there never was a floor that didn’t need cleaning.

It swept, or mopped, or vacuum-cleaned, or polished, consulting tapes in its idiot memory to decide which. Anything larger than a BB shot it picked up and placed in a tray on its upper surface, for someone brighter to decide whether to keep or throw away. It went quietly looking for dirt all day long, in search curves that could miss nothing, passing over clean floors in its endless search for dirty floors. It would get out of a room with people in it, like a well-trained maid, unless its mistress caught up with it and flipped a switch to tell the poor thing it was welcome. Around dinnertime it would go to its stall and soak up a quick charge—this was before we installed the everlasting power pack.

There was not too much difference between Hired Girl, Mark One, and a vacuum cleaner. But the difference—that it would clean without supervision—was enough; it sold.

I swiped the basic prowl pattern from the “Electric Turtles” that were written up in Scientific American in the late forties, lifted a memory circuit out of the brain of a guided missile (that’s the nice thing about top-secret gimmicks; they don’t get patented), and I took the cleaning devices and linkages out of a dozen things, including a floor polisher used in army hospitals, a soft-drink dispenser, and those “hands” they use in atomics plants to handle anything “hot.” There wasn’t anything really new in it; it was just the way I put it together. The “spark of genius” required by our laws lay in getting a good patent lawyer.

The real genius was in the production engineering; the whole thing could be built with standard parts ordered out of Sweet’s Catalogue, with the exception of two three-dimensional cams and one printed circuit. The circuit we subcontracted; the cams I made myself in the shed we called our “factory,” using war-surplus automated tools. At first Miles and I were the whole assembly line—bash to fit, file to hide, paint to cover. The pilot model cost $4,317.09; the first hundred cost just over $39 each—and we passed them on to a Los Angeles discount house at $60 and they sold them for $85. We had to let them go on consignment to unload them at all, since we could not afford sales promotion, and we darn near starved before receipts started coming in. Then Life ran a two-page on Hired Girl…and it was a case of having enough help to assemble the monster.

Belle Darkin joined us soon after that. Miles and I had been pecking out letters on a 1908 Underwood; we hired her as a typewriter jockey and bookkeeper and rented an electric machine with executive typeface and carbon ribbon and I designed a letterhead. We were plowing it all back into the business and Pete and I were sleeping in the shop while Miles and Ricky had a nearby shack. We incorporated in self-defense. It takes three to incorporate; we gave Belle a share of stock and designated her secretary-treasurer. Miles was president and general manager; I was chief engineer and chairman of the board…with 51 percent of the stock.

I want to make clear why I kept control. I wasn’t a hog; I simply wanted to be my own boss. Miles worked like a trouper, I give him credit. But better than 60 percent of the savings that got us started were mine and 100 percent of the inventiveness and engineering were mine. Miles could not possibly have built Hired Girl, whereas I could have built it with any of a dozen partners, or possibly without one—although I might have flopped in trying to make money out of it; Miles was a businessman while I am not.

But I wanted to be certain that I retained control of the shop—and I granted Miles equal freedom in the business end…too much freedom, it turned out.

Hired Girl, Mark One, was selling like beer at a ball game and I was kept busy for a while improving it and setting up a real assembly line and putting a shop master in charge, then I happily turned to thinking up more household gadgets. Amazingly little real thought had been given to housework, even though it is at least 50 percent of all work in the world. The women’s magazines talked about “labor saving in the home” and “functional kitchens,” but it was just prattle; their pretty pictures showed living-working arrangements essentially no better than those in Shakespeare’s day; the horse-to-jet-plane revolution had not reached the home.

I stuck to my conviction that housewives were reactionaries. No “machines for living”—just gadgets to replace the extinct domestic servant, that is, for cleaning and cooking and baby tending.

I got to thinking about dirty windows and that ring around the bathtub that is so hard to scrub, as you have to bend double to get at it. It turned out

that an electrostatic device could make dirt go spung! off any polished silica surface, window glass, bathtubs, toilet bowls—anything of that sort. That was Window Willie and it’s a wonder that somebody hadn’t thought of him sooner. I held him back until I had him down to a price that people could not refuse. Do you know what window washing used to cost by the hour?

I held Willie out of production much longer than suited Miles. He wanted to sell it as soon as it was cheap enough, but I insisted on one more thing: Willie had to be easy to repair. The great shortcoming of most household gadgets was that the better they were and the more they did, the more certain they were to get out of order when you needed them most—and then require an expert at five dollars an hour to make them move again. Then the same thing will happen the following week, if not to the dishwasher, then to the air conditioner…usually late Saturday night during a snowstorm.

I wanted my gadgets to work and keep on working and not to cause ulcers in their owners.

But gadgets do get out of order, even mine. Until that great day when all gadgets are designed with no moving parts, machinery will continue to go sour. If you stuff a house with gadgets some of them will always be out of order.

But military research does get results and the military had licked this problem years earlier. You simply can’t lose a battle, lose thousands or millions of lives, maybe the war itself, just because some gadget the size of your thumb breaks down. For military purposes they used a lot of dodges—“fail safe,” stand-by circuits, “tell me three times,” and so forth. But one they used that made sense for household equipment was the plug- in component principle.

It is a moronically simple idea: don’t repair, replace. I wanted to make every part of Window Willie which could go wrong a plug-in unit, then include a set of replacements with each Willie. Some components would be thrown away, some would be sent out for repair, but Willie himself would never break down longer than necessary to plug in the replacement part.

Miles and I had our first row. I said the decision as to when to go from pilot model to production was an engineering one; he claimed that it was a business decision. If I hadn’t retained control Willie would have gone on the market just as maddeningly subject to acute appendicitis as all other

sickly, half-engineered “labor-saving” gadgets.

Belle Darkin smoothed over the row. If she had turned on the pressure I might have let Miles start selling Willie before I thought it was ready, for I was as goofed up about Belle as is possible for a man to be.

Belle was not only a perfect secretary and office manager, she also had personal specs which would have delighted Praxiteles and a fragrance which affected me the way catnip does Pete. With top-notch office girls as scarce as they were, when one of the best turns out to be willing to work for a shoestring company at a below-standard salary, one really ought to ask “why?”—but we didn’t even ask where she had worked last, so happy were we to have her dig us out of the flood of paperwork that marketing Hired Girl had caused.

Later on I would have indignantly rejected any suggestion that we should have checked on Belle, for by then her bust measurement had seriously warped my judgment. She let me explain how lonely my life had been until she came along and she answered gently that she would have to know me better but that she was inclined to feel the same way.

Shortly after she smoothed out the quarrel between Miles and myself she agreed to share my fortunes. “Dan darling, you have it in you to be a great man…and I have hopes that I am the sort of woman who can help you.”

“You certainly are!”

“Shush, darling. But I am not going to marry you right now and burden you with kids and worry you to death. I’m going to work with you and build up the business first. Then we’ll get married.”

I objected, but she was firm. “No, darling. We are going a long way, you and I. Hired Girl will be as great a name as General Electric. But when we marry I want to forget business and just devote myself to making you happy. But first I must devote myself to your welfare and your future. Trust me, dear.”

So I did. She wouldn’t let me buy her the expensive engagement ring I wanted to buy; instead I signed over to her some of my stock as a betrothal present. I went on voting it, of course. Thinking back, I’m not sure who thought of that present.

I worked harder than ever after that, thinking about wastebaskets that would empty themselves and a linkage to put dishes away after the dishwasher was through. Everybody was happy…everybody but Pete and Ricky, that is. Pete ignored Belle, as he did anything he disapproved of but could not change, but Ricky was really unhappy.

My fault. Ricky had been “my girl” since she was a six-year-old at Sandia, with hair ribbons and big solemn dark eyes. I was “going to marry her” when she grew up and we would both take care of Pete. I thought it was a game we were playing, and perhaps it was, with little Ricky serious only to the extent that it offered her eventual full custody of our cat. But how can you tell what goes on in a child’s mind?

I am not sentimental about kids. Little monsters, most of them, who don’t civilize until they are grown and sometimes not then. But little Frederica reminded me of my own sister at that age, and besides, she liked Pete and treated him properly. I think she liked me because I never talked down (I had resented that myself as a child) and took her Brownie activities seriously. Ricky was okay; she had quiet dignity and was not a banger, not a squealer, not a lap climber. We were friends, sharing the responsibility for Pete, and, so far as I knew, her being “my girl” was just a sophisticated game we were playing.

I quit playing it after my sister and mother got it the day they bombed us. No conscious decision—I just didn’t feel like joking and never went back to it. Ricky was seven then; she was ten by the time Belle joined us and possibly eleven when Belle and I became engaged. She hated Belle with an intensity that I think only I was aware of, since it was expressed only by reluctance to talk to her—Belle called it “shyness” and I think Miles thought it was too.

But I knew better and tried to talk Ricky out of it. Did you ever try to discuss with a subadolescent something the child does not want to talk about? You’ll get more satisfaction shouting in Echo Canyon. I told myself it would wear off as Ricky learned how very lovable Belle was.

Pete was another matter, and if I had not been in love I would have seen it as a clear sign that Belle and I would never understand each other. Belle “liked” my cat—oh, sure, sure! She adored cats and she loved my incipient bald spot and admired my choice in restaurants and she liked everything about me.

But liking cats is hard to fake to a cat person. There are cat people and there are others, more than a majority probably, who “cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat.” If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don’t understand how to treat cats—and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.

It is based on self-respect and mutual respect and it has the same flavor as the dignidad de hombre of Latin America which you may offend only at risk to your life.

Cats have no sense of humor, they have terribly inflated egos, and they are very touchy. If somebody asked me why it was worth anyone’s time to cater to them I would be forced to answer that there is no logical reason. I would rather explain to someone who detests sharp cheeses why he “ought to like” Limburger. Nevertheless, I fully sympathize with the mandarin who cut off a priceless embroidered sleeve because a kitten was sleeping on it.

Belle tried to show that she “liked” Pete by treating him like a dog… so she got scratched. Then, being a sensible cat, he got out in a hurry and stayed out a long time—which was well, as I would have smacked him, and Pete has never been smacked, not by me. Hitting a cat is worse than useless; a cat can be disciplined only by patience, never by blows.

So I put iodine on Belle’s scratches, then tried to explain what she had done wrong. “I’m sorry it happened—I’m terribly sorry! But it will happen again if you do that again.”

“But I was just petting him!”

“Uh, yes…but you weren’t cat-petting him; you were dog-petting him. You must never pat a cat, you stroke it. You must never make sudden movements in range of its claws. You must never touch it without giving it a chance to see that you are about to…and you must always watch to see that it likes it. If it doesn’t want to be petted, it will put up with a little out of politeness—cats are very polite—but you can tell if it is merely enduring it and stop before its patience is exhausted.” I hesitated. “You don’t like cats, do you?”

“What? Why, how silly! Of course I like cats.” But she added, “I haven’t been around them much, I suppose. She’s pretty touchy, isn’t she?”

“ ‘He.’ Pete is a he-male cat. No, actually he’s not touchy, since he’s always been well treated. But you do have to learn how to behave with cats. Uh, you must never laugh at them.”

“What? Forevermore, why?

“Not because they aren’t funny; they’re extremely comical. But they have no sense of humor and it offends them. Oh, a cat won’t scratch you for

laughing; he’ll simply stalk off and you’ll have trouble making friends with him. But it’s not too important. Knowing how to pick up a cat is much more important. When Pete comes back in I’ll show you how.”

But Pete didn’t come back in, not then, and I never showed her. Belle didn’t touch him after that. She spoke to him and acted as if she liked him, but she kept her distance and he kept his. I put it out of my mind; I couldn’t let so trivial a thing make me doubt the woman who was more to me than anything in life.

But the subject of Pete almost reached a crisis later. Belle and I were discussing where we were going to live. She still wouldn’t set the date, but

we spent a lot of time on such details. I wanted a ranchette near the plant; she favored a flat in town until we could afford a Bel-Air estate. I said, “Darling, it’s not practical; I’ve got to be near the plant. Besides, did you ever try to take care of a tomcat in a city apartment?”

“Oh, that! Look, darling, I’m glad you mentioned it. I’ve been studying up on cats, I really have. We’ll have him altered. Then he’ll be much gentler and perfectly happy in a flat.”

I stared at her, unable to believe my ears. Make a eunuch of that old warrior? Change him into a fireside decoration? “Belle, you don’t know what you’re saying!”

She tut-tutted me with the old familiar “Mother knows best,” giving the stock arguments of people who mistake cats for property…how it wouldn’t hurt him, that it was really for his own good, how she knew how much I valued him and she would never think of depriving me of him, how it was really very simple and quite safe and better for everybody.

I cut in on her. “Why don’t you arrange it for both of us?” “What, dear?”

“Me, too. I’d be much more docile and I’d stay home nights and I’d never argue with you. As you pointed out, it doesn’t hurt and I’d probably be a lot happier.”

She turned red. “You’re being preposterous.” “So are you!”

She never mentioned it again. Belle never let a difference of opinion degenerate into a row; she shut up and bided her time. But she never gave up, either. In some ways she had a lot of cat in her…which may have been why I couldn’t resist her.

I was glad to drop the matter. I was up to here in Flexible Frank. Willie and Hired Girl were bound to make us lots of money, but I had a bee in my bonnet about the perfect, all-work household automaton, the general-purpose servant. All right, call it a robot, though that is a much- abused word and I had no notion of building a mechanical man.

I wanted a gadget which could do anything inside the home—cleaning and cooking, of course, but also really hard jobs, like changing a baby’s diaper or replacing a typewriter ribbon. Instead of a stable of Hired Girls and Window Willies and Nursemaid Nans and Houseboy Harrys and Gardener Guses I wanted a man and wife to be able to buy one machine for, oh, say about the price of a good automobile, which would be the equal of the Chinese servant you read about but no one in my generation had ever seen.

If I could do that it would be the Second Emancipation Proclamation, freeing women from their age-old slavery. I wanted to abolish the old saw about how “women’s work is never done.” Housekeeping is repetitious and unnecessary drudgery; as an engineer it offended me.

For the problem to be within the scope of one engineer, almost all of Flexible Frank had to be standard parts and must not involve any new principles. Basic research is no job for one man alone; this had to be development from former art or I couldn’t do it.

Fortunately there was an awful lot of former art in engineering and I had not wasted my time while under a “Q” clearance. What I wanted wasn’t as complicated as the things a guided missile was required to do.

Just what did I want Flexible Frank to do? Answer: any work a human being does around a house. He didn’t have to play cards, make love, eat, or sleep, but he did have to clean up after the card game, cook, make beds, and tend babies—at least he had to keep track of a baby’s breathing and call someone if it changed. I decided he did not have to answer telephone calls, as AT&T was already renting a gadget for that. There was no need for him to answer the door either, as most new houses were being equipped with door answerers.

But to do the multitude of things I wanted him to do, he had to have hands, eyes, ears, and a brain…a good enough brain.

Hands I could order from the atomics-engineering equipment companies who supplied Hired Girl’s hands, only this time I would want the best, with wide-range servos and with the delicate feedback required for microanalysis manipulations and for weighing radioactive isotopes. The same companies could supply eyes—only they could be simpler, since Frank would not have to see and manipulate from behind yards of concrete shielding the way they do in a reactor plant.

The ears I could buy from any of a dozen radio-TV houses—though I might have to do some circuit designing to have his hands controlled simultaneously by sight, sound, and touch feedback the way the human hand is controlled.

But you can do an awful lot in a small space with transistors and printed circuits.

Frank wouldn’t have to use stepladders. I would make his neck stretch like an ostrich and his arms extend like lazy tongs. Should I make him able to go up and down stairs?

Well, there was a powered wheelchair that could. Maybe I should buy one and use it for the chassis, limiting the pilot model to a space no bigger than a wheelchair and no heavier than such a chair could carry— that would give me a set of parameters. I’d tie its power and steering into Frank’s brain.

The brain was the real hitch. You can build a gadget linked like a man’s skeleton or even much better. You can give it a feedback-control system good enough to drive nails, scrub floors, crack eggs—or not crack eggs. But unless it has that stuff between the ears that a man has, it is not a man, it’s not even a corpse.

Fortunately I didn’t need a human brain; I just wanted a docile moron, capable of largely repetitive household jobs.

Here is where the Thorsen memory tubes came in. The intercontinental missiles we had struck back with “thought” with Thorsen tubes, and traffic- control systems in places like Los Angeles used an idiot form of them. No need to go into theory of an electronic tube that even Bell Labs doesn’t understand too well, the point is that you can hook a Thorsen tube into a control circuit, direct the machine through an operation by manual control,

and the tube will “remember” what was done and can direct the operation without a human supervisor a second time, or any number of times. For an automated machine tool this is enough; for guided missiles and for Flexible Frank you add side circuits that give the machine “judgment.” Actually it isn’t judgment (in my opinion a machine can never have judgment); the side circuit is a hunting circuit, the pro- gramming of which says “look for so-and-so within such-and-such limits; when you find it, carry out your basic instruction.” The basic instruction can be as complicated as you can crowd into one Thorsen memory tube—which is a very wide limit indeed!—and you can program so that your “judgment” circuits (moronic back-seat drivers, they are) can interrupt the basic instructions anytime the cycle does not match that originally impressed into the Thorsen tube.

This meant that you need cause Flexible Frank to clear the table and scrape the dishes and load them into the dishwasher only once, and from then on he could cope with any dirty dishes he ever encountered. Better still, he could have an electronically duplicated Thorsen tube stuck into his head and could handle dirty dishes the first time he ever encountered them…and never break a dish.

Stick another “memorized” tube alongside the first one and he could change a wet baby first time, and never, never, never stick a pin in the baby. Frank’s square head could easily hold a hundred Thorsen tubes, each with an electronic “memory” of a different household task. Then throw a guard circuit around all the “judgment” circuits, a circuit which required him to hold still and squawl for help if he ran into something not covered by

his instructions—that way you wouldn’t use up babies or dishes.

So I did build Frank on the framework of a powered wheelchair. He looked like a hat rack making love to an octopus…but, boy, how he could

polish silverware!

MILES LOOKED OVER the first Frank, watched him mix a martini and serve it, then go around emptying and polishing ashtrays (never touching ones that were clean), open a window and fasten it open, then go to my bookcase and dust and tidy the books in it. Miles took a sip of his martini and said, “Too much vermouth.”

“It’s the way I like them. But we can tell him to fix yours one way and mine another; he’s got plenty of blank tubes in him. Flexible.” Miles took another sip. “How soon can he be engineered for production?”

“Uh, I’d like to fiddle with him for about ten years.” Before he could groan I added, “But we ought to be able to put a limited model into production in five.”

“Nonsense! We’ll get you plenty of help and have a Model-T job ready in six months.”

“The devil you will. This is my magnum opus. I’m not going to turn him loose until he is a work of art…about a third that size, everything plug-in replaceable but the Thorsens, and so all-out flexible that he’ll not only wind the cat and wash the baby, he’ll even play ping-pong if the buyer wants to pay for the extra programming.” I looked at him; Frank was quietly dusting my desk and putting every paper back exactly where he found it. “But ping-pong with him wouldn’t be much fun; he’d never miss. No, I suppose we could teach him to miss with a random-choice circuit. Mmm…yes, we could. We will, it would make a nice selling demonstration.”

“One year, Dan, and not a day over. I’m going to hire somebody away from Loewy to help you with the styling.”

I said, “Miles, when are you going to learn that I boss the engineering? Once I turn him over to you, he’s yours…but not a split second before.” Miles answered, “It’s still too much vermouth.”

I PIDDLED ALONG with the help of the shop mechanics until I had Frank looking less like a three-car crash and more like something you might want to brag about to the neighbors. In the meantime I smoothed a lot of bugs out of his control system. I even taught him to stroke Pete and scratch him under his chin in such a fashion that Pete liked it—and, believe me, that takes negative feedback as exact as anything used in atomics labs. Miles didn’t crowd me, although he came in from time to time and watched the progress. I did most of my work at night, coming back after dinner with Belle and taking her home. Then I would sleep most of the day, arrive late in the afternoon, sign whatever papers Belle had for me, see what the shop had done during the day, then take Belle out to dinner again. I didn’t try to do much before then, because creative work makes a man stink like a goat. After a hard night in the lab shop nobody could stand me but Pete.

Just as we were finishing dinner one day Belle said to me, “Going back to the shop, dear?” “Sure. Why not?”

“Good. Because Miles is going to meet us there.” “Huh?”

“He wants a stockholders’ meeting.” “A stockholders’ meeting? Why?”

“It won’t take long. Actually, dear, you haven’t been paying much attention to the firm’s business lately. Miles wants to gather up loose ends and settle some policies.”

“I’ve been sticking close to the engineering. What else am I supposed to do for the firm?” “Nothing, dear. Miles says it won’t take long.”

“What’s the trouble? Can’t Jake handle the assembly line?” “Please, dear. Miles didn’t tell me why. Finish your coffee.”

Miles was waiting for us at the plant and shook hands as solemnly as if we had not met in a month. I said, “Miles, what’s this all about?”

He turned to Belle. “Get the agenda, will you?” This alone should have told me that Belle had been lying when she claimed that Miles had not told her what he had in mind. But I did not think of it—hell, I trusted Belle!—and my attention was distracted by something else, for Belle went to the safe, spun the knob, and opened it.

I said, “By the way, dear, I tried to open that last night and couldn’t. Have you changed the combination?”

She was hauling papers out and did not turn. “Didn’t I tell you? The patrol asked me to change it after that burglar scare last week.” “Oh. You’d better give me the new numbers or some night I’ll have to phone one of you at a ghastly hour.”

“Certainly.” She closed the safe and put a folder on the table we used for conferences. Miles cleared his throat and said, “Let’s get started.”

I answered, “Okay. Darling, if this is a formal meeting, I guess you had better make pothooks…Uh, Wednesday, November eighteenth, 1970, 9:20 P.M., all stockholders present—put our names down—D. B. Davis, chairman of the board and presiding. Any old business?”

There wasn’t any. “Okay, Miles, it’s your show. Any new business?”

Miles cleared his throat. “I want to review the firm’s policies, present a program for the future, and have the board consider a financing proposal.” “Financing? Don’t be silly. We’re in the black and doing better every month. What’s the matter, Miles? Dissatisfied with your drawing account?

We could boost it.”

“We wouldn’t stay in the black under the new program. We need a broader capital structure.” “What new program?”

“Please, Dan. I’ve gone to the trouble of writing it up in detail. Let Belle read it to us.” “Well…okay.”

Skipping the gobbledygook—like all lawyers, Miles was fond of polysyllables—Miles wanted to do three things: (a) take Flexible Frank away from me, hand it over to a production-engineering team, and get it on the market without delay; (b)—but I stopped it at that point. “No!”

“Wait a minute, Dan. As president and general manager, I’m certainly entitled to present my ideas in an orderly manner. Save your comments. Let Belle finish reading.”

“Well…all right. But the answer is still ‘no.’ ”

Point (b) was in effect that we should quit frittering around as a one-horse outfit. We had a big thing, as big as the automobile had been, and we were in at the start; therefore we should at once expand and set up organization for nationwide and worldwide selling and distribution, with production to match.

I started drumming on the table. I could just see myself as chief engineer of an outfit like that. They probably wouldn’t even let me have a drafting table and if I picked up a soldering gun, the union would pull a strike. I might as well have stayed in the Army and tried to make general.

But I didn’t interrupt. Point (c) was that we couldn’t do this on pennies; it would take millions. Mannix Enterprises would put up the dough—what it

amounted to was that we would sell out to Mannix, lock, stock, and Flexible Frank, and become a daughter corporation. Miles would stay on as division manager and I would stay on as chief research engineer, but the free old days would be gone; we’d both be hired hands.

“Is that all?” I said.

“Mmm…yes. Let’s discuss it and take a vote.”

“There ought to be something in there granting us the right to sit in front of the cabin at night and sing spirituals.” “This is no joke, Dan. This is how it’s got to be.”

“I wasn’t joking. A slave needs privileges to keep him quiet. Okay, is it my turn?” “Go ahead.”

I put up a counterproposal, one that had been growing in my mind. I wanted us to get out of production. Jake Schmidt, our production shop master, was a good man; nevertheless I was forever being jerked out of a warm creative fog to straighten out bugs in production—which is like being dumped out of a warm bed into ice water. This was the real reason why I had been doing so much nightwork and staying away from the shop in the daytime. With more war-surplus buildings being moved in and a night shift contemplated I could see the time coming when I would get no peace to create, even though we turned down this utterly unpalatable plan to rub shoulders with General Motors and Consolidated. I certainly was not twins; I couldn’t be both inventor and production manager.

So I proposed that we get smaller instead of bigger—license Hired Girl and Window Willie, let someone else build and sell them while we raked in the royalties. When Flexible Frank was ready we would license him too. If Mannix wanted the licenses and would outbid the market, swell! Meantime, we’d change our name to Davis & Gentry Research Corporation and hold it down to just the three of us, with a machinist or two to help me jackleg new gadgets. Miles and Belle could sit back and count the money as it rolled in.

Miles shook his head slowly. “No, Dan. Licensing would make us some money, granted. But not nearly the money we would make if we did it ourselves.”

“Confound it, Miles, we wouldn’t be doing it ourselves; that’s just the point. We’d be selling our souls to the Mannix people. As for money, how much do you want? You can use only one yacht or one swimming pool at a time…and you’ll have both before the year is out if you want them.”

“I don’t want them.” “What do you want?”

He looked up. “Dan, you want to invent things. This plan lets you do so, with all the facilities and all the help and all the expense money in the world. Me, I want to run a big business. A big business. I’ve got the talent for it.” He glanced at Belle. “I don’t want to spend my life sitting out here in the middle of the Mojave Desert acting as business manager to one lonely inventor.”

I stared at him. “You didn’t talk that way at Sandia. You want out, Pappy? Belle and I would hate to see you go…but if that is the way you feel, I guess I could mortgage the place or something and buy you out. I wouldn’t want any man to feel tied down.” I was shocked to my heels, but if old Miles was restless I had no right to hold him to my pattern.

“No, I don’t want out; I want us to grow. You heard my proposal. It’s a formal motion for action by the corporation. I so move.”

I guess I looked puzzled. “You insist on doing it the hard way? Okay, Belle, the vote is ‘no.’ Record it. But I won’t put up my counterproposal tonight. We’ll talk it over and exchange views. I want you to be happy, Miles.”

Miles said stubbornly, “Let’s do this properly. Roll call, Belle.”

“Very well, sir. Miles Gentry, voting stock shares number—” She read off the serial numbers. “How say you?” “Aye.”

She wrote in her book.

“Daniel B. Davis, voting stock shares number—” She read off a string of telephone numbers again; I didn’t listen to the formality. “How say you?” “No. And that settles it. I’m sorry, Miles.”

“Belle S. Darkin,” she went on, “voting shares number—” She recited figures again. “I vote ‘aye.’ ”

My mouth dropped open, then I managed to stop gasping and say, “But, baby, you can’t do that! Those are your shares, sure, but you know perfectly well that—”

“Announce the tally,” Miles growled.

“The ‘ayes’ have it. The proposal is carried.” “Record it.”

“Yes, sir.”

The next few minutes were confused. First I yelled at her, then I reasoned with her, then I snarled and told her that what she had done was not honest—true, I had assigned the stock to her but she knew as well as I did that I always voted it, that I had had no intention of parting with control of the company, that it was an engagement present, pure and simple. Hell, I had even paid the income tax on it last April. If she could pull a stunt like this when we were engaged, what was our marriage going to be like?

She looked right at me and her face was utterly strange to me. “Dan Davis, if you think we are still engaged after the way you have talked to me, you are even stupider than I’ve always known you were.” She turned to Gentry. “Will you take me home, Miles?”

“Certainly, my dear.”

I started to say something, then shut up and stalked out of there without my hat. It was high time to leave, or I would probably have killed Miles, since I couldn’t touch Belle.

I didn’t sleep, of course. About 4 A.M. I got out of bed, made phone calls, agreed to pay more than it was worth, and by five-thirty was in front of the plant with a pickup truck. I went to the gate, intending to unlock it and drive the truck to the loading dock so that I could run Flexible Frank over the tailgate—Frank weighed four hundred pounds.

There was a new padlock on the gate.

I shinnied over, cutting myself on barbed wire. Once inside, the gate would give me no trouble, as there were a hundred tools in the shop capable of coping with a padlock.

But the lock on the front door had been changed too.

I was looking at it, deciding whether it was easier to break a window with a tire iron, or get the jack out of the truck and brace it between the doorframe and the knob, when somebody shouted, “Hey, you! Hands up!”

I didn’t put my hands up but I turned around. A middle-aged man was pointing a hogleg at me big enough to bombard a city. “Who the devil are you?”

“Who are you?

“I’m Dan Davis, chief engineer of this outfit.”

“Oh.” He relaxed a little but still aimed the field mortar at me. “Yeah, you match the description. But if you have any identification on you, better let

me see it.”

“Why should I? I asked who you are?”

“Me? Nobody you’d know. Name of Joe Todd, with the Desert Protective & Patrol Company. Private license. You ought to know who we are;

we’ve had you folks as clients for the night patrol for months. But tonight I’m on as special guard.”

“You are? Then if they gave you a key to the place, use it. I want to get in. And quit pointing that blunderbuss at me.”

He still kept it leveled at me. “I couldn’t rightly do that, Mr. Davis. First place, I don’t have a key. Second place, I had particular orders about you. You aren’t to go in. I’ll let you out the gate.”

“I want the gate opened, all right, but I’m going in.” I looked around for a rock to break a window. “Please, Mr. Davis…”

“Huh?”

“I’d hate to see you insist, I really would. Because I couldn’t chance shooting you in the legs; I ain’t a very good shot. I’d have to shoot you in the belly. I’ve got soft-nosed bullets in this iron; it’ud be pretty messy.”

I suppose that was what changed my mind, though I would like to think it was something else; i.e., when I looked again through the window I saw that Flexible Frank was not where I had left him.

As he let me out the gate Todd handed me an envelope. “They said to give this to you if you showed up.” I read it in the cab of the truck. It said:

Dear Mr. Davis,

18 November 1970

At a regular meeting of the board of directors, held this date, it was voted to terminate all your connection (other than as stockholder) with the corporation, as permitted under paragraph three of your contract. It is requested that you stay off company property. Your personal papers and belongings will be forwarded to you by safe means.

The board wishes to thank you for your services and regrets the differences in policy opinion which have forced this step on us.

Sincerely yours, Miles Gentry

Chairman of the Board and General Manager by B. S. Darkin, Sec’y-Treasurer

I read it twice before I recalled that I had never had any contract with the corporation under which to invoke paragraph three or any other paragraph.

Later that day a bonded messenger delivered a package to the motel where I kept my clean underwear. It contained my hat, my desk pen, my other slide rule, a lot of books and personal correspondence, and a number of documents. But it did not contain my notes and drawings for Flexible Frank.

Some of the documents were very interesting. My “contract,” for example—sure enough, paragraph three let them fire me without notice subject to three months’ salary. But paragraph seven was even more interesting. It was the latest form of the yellow-dog clause, one in which the employee agrees to refrain from engaging in a competing occupation for five years by letting his former employers pay him cash to option his services on a first-refusal basis; i.e., I could go back to work any time I wanted to just by going, hat in hand, and asking Miles and Belle for a job—maybe that was why they sent the hat back.

But for five long years I could not work on household appliances without asking them first. I would rather have cut my throat.

There were copies of assignments of all patents, duly registered, from me to Hired Girl, Inc., for Hired Girl and Window Willie and a couple of

minor things. (Flexible Frank, of course, had never been patented—well, I didn’t think he had been patented; I found out the truth later.)

But I had never assigned any patents, I hadn’t even formally licensed their use to Hired Girl, Inc.; the corporation was my own creature and there

hadn’t seemed to be any hurry about it.

The last three items were my stock-shares certificate (those I had not given to Belle), a certified check, and a letter explaining each item of the check—accumulated “salary” less drawing-account disbursements, three months’ extra salary in lieu of notice, option money to invoke “paragraph seven”…and a thousand-dollar bonus to express “appreciation of services rendered.” That last was real sweet of them.

While I reread that amazing collection I had time to realize that I had probably not been too bright to sign everything that Belle put in front of me. There was no possible doubt that the signatures were mine.

I steadied down enough the next day to talk it over with a lawyer, a very smart and money-hungry lawyer, one who didn’t mind kicking and clapper-clawing and biting in the clinches. At first he was anxious to take it on a contingent-fee basis. But after he finished looking over my exhibits and listening to the details he sat back and laced his fingers over his belly and looked sour. “Dan, I’m going to give you some advice and it’s not going to cost you anything.”

“Well?”

“Do nothing. You haven’t got a prayer.” “But you said—”

“I know what I said. They rooked you. But how can you prove it? They were too smart to steal your stock or cut you off without a penny. They gave you exactly the deal you could have reasonably expected if everything had been kosher and you had quit, or had been fired over—as they express it

— a difference of policy opinion. They gave you everything you had coming to you…and a measly thousand to boot, just to show there are no hard feelings.”

“But I didn’t have a contract! And I never assigned those patents!”

“These papers say you did. You admit that’s your signature. Can you prove what you say by anyone else?”

I thought about it. I certainly could not. Not even Jake Schmidt knew anything that went on in the front office. The only witnesses I had were …Miles and Belle.

“Now about that stock assignment,” he went on, “that’s the one chance to break the logjam. If you—”

“But that is the only transaction in the whole stack that really is legitimate. I signed over that stock to her.”

“Yes, but why? You say that you gave it to her as an engagement present in expectation of marriage. Never mind how she voted it; that’s beside

the point. If you can prove that it was given as a betrothal gift in full expectation of marriage, and that she knew it when she accepted it, you can

force her either to marry you or to disgorge. McNulty vs. Rhodes. Then you’re in control again and you kick them out. Can you prove it?” “Damn it, I don’t want to marry her now. I wouldn’t have her.”

“That’s your problem. But one thing at a time. Have you any witnesses or any evidence, letters or anything, which would tend to show that she accepted it, understanding that you were giving it to her as your future wife?”

I thought. Sure, I had witnesses…the same old two, Miles and Belle.

“You see? With nothing but your word against both of theirs, plus a pile of written evidence, you not only won’t get anywhere, but you might wind up committed to a Napoleon factory with a diagnosis of paranoia. My advice to you is to get a job in some other line…or at the very most go ahead and buck their yellow-dog contract by setting up a competitive business—I’d like to see that phraseology tested, as long as I didn’t have to fight it myself. But don’t charge them with conspiracy. They’ll win, then they’ll sue you and clean you out of what they let you keep.” He stood up.

I took only part of his advice. There was a bar on the ground floor of the same building; I went in and had a couple or nine drinks.

I HAD PLENTY of time to recall all this while I was driving out to see Miles. Once we had started making money, he had moved Ricky and himself to a nice little rental in San Fernando Valley to get out of the murderous Mojave heat and had started commuting via the Air Force Slot. Ricky wasn’t there now, I was happy to recall; she was up at Big Bear Lake at Girl Scout camp—I didn’t want to chance Ricky’s being witness to a row between me and her stepdaddy.

I was bumper to bumper in Sepulveda Tunnel when it occurred to me that it would be smart to get the certificate for my Hired Girl stock off my person before going to see Miles. I did not expect any rough stuff (unless I started it), but it just seemed a good idea…like a cat who has had his tail caught in the screen door once, I was permanently suspicious.

Leave it in the car? Suppose I was hauled in for assault and battery; it wouldn’t be smart to have it in the car when the car was towed in and impounded.

I could mail it to myself, but I had been getting my mail lately from general delivery at the GPO, while shifting from hotel to hotel as often as they found out I was keeping a cat.

I had better mail it to someone I could trust. But that was a mighty short list.

Then I remembered someone I could trust. Ricky.

I may seem a glutton for punishment to decide to trust one female just after I had been clipped by another. But the cases are not parallel. I had known Ricky half her life and if there ever was a human being honest as a Jo block, Ricky was she…and Pete thought so too. Besides, Ricky didn’t have physical specifications capable of warping a man’s judgment. Her femininity was only in her face; it hadn’t affected her figure yet.

When I managed to escape from the logjam in Sepulveda Tunnel I got off the throughway and found a drugstore; there I bought stamps and a big and a little envelope and some note paper. I wrote to her:

Dear Rikki-tikki-tavi,

I hope to see you soon but until I do, I want you to

keep this inside envelope for me. It’s a secret, just between you and me.

I stopped and thought. Doggone it, if anything happened to me…oh, even a car crash, or anything that can stop breathing…while Ricky had this, eventually it would wind up with Miles and Belle. Unless I rigged things to prevent it. I realized as I thought about it that I had subconsciously reached a decision about the cold-sleep deal; I wasn’t going to take it. Sobering up and the lecture the doc had read me had stiffened my spine; I wasn’t going to run away, I was going to stay and fight—and this stock certificate was my best weapon. It gave me the right to examine the books; it entitled me to poke my nose into any and all affairs of the company. If they tried again simply to keep me out with a hired guard I could go back next time with a lawyer and a deputy sheriff and a court order.

I could drag them into court with it too. Maybe I couldn’t win but I could make a stink and perhaps cause the Mannix people to shy off from buying them out.

Maybe I shouldn’t send it to Ricky at all.

No, if anything happened to me I wanted her to have it. Ricky and Pete were all the “family” I had. I went on writing:

If by any chance I don’t see you for a year, you’ll know something has happened to me. If that happens, take care of Pete, if you can find him— and without telling anybody take the inside envelope to a branch of the Bank of America, give it to the trust officer and tell him to open it.

Love and kisses, Uncle Danny

Then I took another sheet and wrote: “3 December 1970, Los Angeles, California—For one dollar in hand received and other valuable considerations I assign”—here I listed legal descriptions and serial numbers of my Hired Girl, Inc., stock shares—“to the Bank of America in trust for Frederica Virginia Gentry and to be reassigned to her on her twenty-first birthday,” and signed it. The intent was clear and it was the best I could do on a drugstore counter with a jukebox blaring in my ear. It should make sure that Ricky got the stock if anything happened to me, while making darn sure that Miles and Belle could not grab it away from her.

But if all went well, I would just ask Ricky to give the envelope back to me when I got around to it. By not using the assignment form printed on the back of the certificate, I avoided all the red tape of having a minor assign it back to me; I could just tear up the separate sheet of paper.

I sealed the stock certificate with the note assigning it into the smaller envelope, placed it and the letter to Ricky in the larger envelope, addressed it to Ricky at the Girl Scout camp, stamped it, and dropped it in the box outside the drugstore. I noted that it would be picked up in about forty minutes and climbed back into my car feeling positively lighthearted…not because I had safeguarded the stock but because I had solved my greater problems.

Well, not “solved” them, perhaps, but had decided to face them, not run off and crawl in a hole to play Rip van Winkle…nor try to blot them out again with ethanol in various flavors. Sure, I wanted to see the year 2000, but just by sitting tight I would see it…when I was sixty, and still young enough, probably, to whistle at the girls. No hurry. Jumping to the next century in one long nap wouldn’t be satisfactory to a normal man anyhow—

about like seeing the end of a movie without having seen what goes before. The thing to do with the next thirty years was to enjoy them while they

unfolded; then when I came to the year 2000 I would understand it.

In the meantime I was going to have one lulu of a fight with Miles and Belle. Maybe I wouldn’t win, but I would sure let them know they had been in a scrap—like the times Pete had come home bleeding in six directions but insisting loudly, “You ought to see the other cat!”

I didn’t expect much out of this interview tonight. All it would amount to was a formal declaration of war. I planned to ruin Miles’ sleep… and he could phone Belle and ruin hers.

III

BY THE TIME I got to Miles’ house I was whistling. I had quit worrying about that precious pair and had worked out in my head, in the last fifteen miles, two brand-new gadgets, either one of which could make me rich. One was a drafting machine, to be operated like an electric typewriter. I guessed that there must be easily fifty thousand engineers in the U.S. alone bending over drafting boards every day and hating it, because it gets you in your kidneys and ruins your eyes. Not that they didn’t want to design—they did want to—but physically it was much too hard work.

This gismo would let them sit down in a big easy chair and tap keys and have the picture unfold on an easel above the keyboard. Depress three keys simultaneously and have a horizontal line appear just where you want it; depress another key and you fillet it in with a vertical line; depress two keys and then two more in succession and draw a line at an exact slant.

Cripes, for a small additional cost as an accessory, I could add a second easel, let an architect design in isometric (the only easy way to design), and have the second picture come out in perfect perspective rendering without his even looking at it. Why, I could even set the thing to pull floor plans and elevations right out of the isometric.

The beauty of it was that it could be made almost entirely with standard parts, most of them available at radio shops and camera stores. All but the control board, that is, and I was sure I could breadboard a rig for that by buying an electric typewriter, tearing its guts out, and hooking the keys to operate these other circuits. A month to make a primitive model, six weeks more to chase bugs…

But that one I just tucked away in the back of my mind, certain that I could do it and that it would have a market. The thing that really delighted me was that I had figured out a way to outflex poor old Flexible Frank. I knew more about Frank than anyone else could learn, even if they studied him a year. What they could not know, what even my notes did not show, was that there was at least one workable alternative for every choice I had made

—and that my choices had been constrained by thinking of him as a household servant. To start with, I could throw away the restriction that he had to live in a powered wheelchair. From there on I could do anything, except that I would need the Thorsen memory tubes—and Miles could not keep me from using those; they were on the market for anyone who wanted to design a cybernetic sequence.

The drafting machine could wait; I’d get busy on the unlimited all-purpose automaton, capable of being programmed for anything a man could do, just as long as it did not require true human judgment.

No, I’d rig a drafting machine first, then use it to design Protean Pete. “How about that, Pete? We’re going to name the world’s first real robot after you.”

“Mrrrrarr?”

“Don’t be so suspicious; it’s an honor.” After breaking in on Frank, I could design Pete right at my drafting machine, really refine it, and quickly. I’d make it a killer, a triple-threat demon that would displace Frank before they ever got him into production. With any luck I’d run them broke and have them begging me to come back. Kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, would they?

There were lights on in Miles’ house and his car was at the curb. I parked in front of Miles’ car, said to Pete, “You’d better stay here, fellow, and protect the car. Holler ‘halt’ three times fast, then shoot to kill.”

“Nooo!”

“If you go inside you’ll have to stay in the bag.” “Bleerrrt?”

“Don’t argue. If you want to come in, get in your bag.” Pete jumped into the bag.

Miles let me in. Neither of us offered to shake hands. He led me into his living room and gestured at a chair.

Belle was there. I had not expected her, but I suppose it was not surprising. I looked at her and grinned. “Fancy meeting you here! Don’t tell me you came all the way from Mojave just to talk to little old me?” Oh, I’m a gallus-snapper when I get started; you should see me wear women’s hats at parties.

Belle frowned. “Don’t be funny, Dan. Say what you have to say, if anything, and get out.”

“Don’t hurry me. I think this is cozy… my former partner… my former fiancée. All we lack is my former business.”

Miles said placatingly, “Now, Dan, don’t take that attitude. We did it for your own good…and you can come back to work any time you want to. I’d be glad to have you back.”

“For my own good, eh? That sounds like what they told the horse thief when they hanged him. As for coming back—how about it, Belle? Can I come back?”

She bit her lip. “If Miles says so, of course.”

“It seems like only yesterday that it used to be: ‘If Dan says so, of course.’ But everything changes; that’s life. And I’m not coming back, kids; you can stop fretting. I just came here tonight to find out some things.”

Miles glanced at Belle. She answered, “Such as?”

“Well, first, which one of you cooked up the swindle? Or did you plan it together?” Miles said slowly, “That’s an ugly word, Dan. I don’t like it.”

“Oh, come, come, let’s not be mealymouthed. If the word is ugly, the deed is ten times as ugly. I mean faking a yellow-dog contract, faking patent assignments—that one is a Federal offense, Miles; I think they pipe sunlight to you on alternate Wednesdays. I’m not sure, but no doubt the FBI can tell me. Tomorrow,” I added, seeing him flinch.

“Dan, you’re not going to be silly enough to try to make trouble about this?”

“Trouble? I’m going to hit you in all directions, civil and criminal, on all counts. You’ll be too busy to scratch…unless you agree to do one thing. But I didn’t mention your third peccadillo—theft of my notes and drawings of Flexible Frank…and the working model, too, although you may be able to make me pay for the materials for that, since I did bill them to the company.”

“Theft, nonsense!” snapped Belle. “You were working for the company.”

“Was I? I did most of it at night. And I never was an employee, Belle, as you both know. I simply drew living expenses against profits earned by my shares. What is the Mannix outfit going to say when I file a criminal complaint, charging that the things they were interested in buying—Hired Girl, Willie, and Frank—never did belong to the company but were stolen from me?”

“Nonsense,” Belle repeated grimly. “You were working for the company. You had a contract.”

I leaned back and laughed. “Look, kids, you don’t have to lie now; save it for the witness stand. There ain’t nobody here but just us chickens. What I really want to know is this: Who thought it up? I know how it was done. Belle, you used to bring in papers for me to sign. If more than one copy had to be signed, you would paper-clip the other copies to the first—for my convenience, of course; you were always the perfect secretary—and all I would see of the copies underneath would be the place to sign my name. Now I know that you slipped some jokers into some of those neat piles.

So I know that you were the one who conducted the mechanics of the swindle; Miles could not have done it. Shucks, Miles can’t even type very well.

But who worded those documents you horsed me into signing? You? I don’t think so…unless you’ve had legal training you never mentioned. How about it, Miles? Could a mere stenographer phrase that wonderful clause seven so perfectly? Or did it take a lawyer? You, I mean.”

Miles’ cigar had long since gone out. He took it from his mouth, looked at it, and said carefully, “Dan, old friend, if you think you’ll trap us into admissions, you’re crazy.”

“Oh, come off it; we’re alone. You’re both guilty either way. But I’d like to think that Delilah over there came to you with the whole thing wrapped up, complete, and then tempted you into a moment of weakness. But I know it’s not true. Unless Belle is a lawyer herself, you were both in it, accomplices before and after. You wrote the double talk; she typed it and tricked me into signing. Right?”

“Don’t answer, Miles!”

“Of course I won’t answer,” Miles agreed. “He may have a recorder hidden in that bag.”

“I should have had,” I agreed, “but I don’t.” I spread the top of the bag and Pete stuck his head out. “You getting it all, Pete? Careful what you say, folks; Pete has an elephant’s memory. No, I didn’t bring a recorder—I’m just good old lunkheaded Dan Davis who never thinks ahead. I go stumbling along, trusting my friends…the way I trusted you two. Is Belle a lawyer, Miles? Or did you yourself sit down in cold blood and plan how you could hog-tie me and rob me and make it look legal?”

“Miles!” interrupted Belle. “With his skill, he could make a recorder the size of a pack of cigarettes. It may not be in the bag. It may be on him.” “That’s a good idea, Belle. Next time I’ll have one.”

“I’m aware of that, my dear,” Miles answered. “If he has, you are talking very loosely. Mind your tongue.”

Belle answered with a word I didn’t know she used. My eyebrows went up. “Snapping at each other? Trouble between thieves already?” Miles’ temper was stretching thin, I was happy to see. He answered, “Mind your tongue, Dan…if you want to stay healthy.”

“Tsk, tsk! I’m younger than you are and I’ve had the judo course a lot more recently. And you wouldn’t shoot a man; you’d frame him with some sort of fake legal document. ‘Thieves,’ I said, and ‘thieves’ I meant. Thieves and liars, both of you.” I turned to Belle. “My old man taught me never to call a lady a liar, sugar face, but you aren’t a lady. You’re a liar…and a thief…and a tramp.”

Belle turned red and gave me a look in which all her beauty vanished and the underlying predatory animal was all that remained. “Miles!” she said shrilly. “Are you going to sit there and let him—”

“Quiet!” Miles ordered. “His rudeness is calculated. It’s intended to make us get excited and say things we’ll regret. Which you are almost doing. So keep quiet.” Belle shut up, but her face was still feral. Miles turned to me. “Dan, I’m a practical man always, I hope. I tried to make you see reason before you walked out of the firm. In the settlement I tried to make it such that you would take the inevitable gracefully.”

“Be raped quietly, you mean.”

“As you will. I still want a peaceful settlement. You couldn’t win any sort of suit, but as a lawyer I know that it is always better to stay out of court than to win. If possible. You mentioned a while ago that there was some one thing I could do that would placate you. Tell me what it is; perhaps we can reach terms.”

“Oh, that. I was coming to it. You can’t do it, but perhaps you can arrange it. It’s simple. Get Belle to assign back to me the stock I assigned to her as an engagement present.”

“No!” said Belle. Miles said, “I told you to keep quiet.”

I looked at her and said, “Why not, my former dear? I’ve taken advice on this point, as the lawyers put it, and, since it was given in consideration of the fact that you promised to marry me, you are not only morally but legally bound to return it. It was not a ‘free gift,’ as I believe the expression is, but something handed over for an expected and contracted consideration which I never received, to wit, your somewhat lovely self. So how about coughing up, huh? Or have you changed your mind again and are now willing to marry me?”

She told me where and how I could expect to marry her.

Miles said tiredly, “Belle, you’re only making things worse. Don’t you understand that he is trying to get our goats?” He turned back to me. “Dan, if that is what you came over for, you may as well leave. I stipulate that if the circumstances had been as you alleged, you might have a point. But they were not. You transferred that stock to Belle for value received.”

“Huh? What value? Where’s the canceled check?”

“There didn’t need be any. For services to the company beyond her duties.”

I stared. “What a lovely theory! Look, Miles old boy, if it was for service to the company and not to me personally, then you must have known about it and would have been anxious to pay her the same amount—after all, we split the profits fifty-fifty even if I had…or thought I had…retained control. Don’t tell me you gave Belle a block of stock of the same size?”

Then I saw them glance at each other and I got a wild hunch. “Maybe you did! I’ll bet my little dumpling made you do it, or she wouldn’t play. Is that right? If so, you can bet your life she registered the transfer at once…and the dates will show that I transferred stock to her at the very time we got

engaged—shucks, the engagement was in the Desert Herald—while you transferred stock to her when you put the skids under me and she jilted me—and it’s all a matter of record! Maybe a judge will believe me, Miles? What do you think?”

I had cracked them, I had cracked them! I could tell from the way their faces went blank that I had stumbled on the one circumstance they could

never explain and one I was never meant to know. So I crowded them…and had another wild guess. Wild? No, logical. “How much stock, Belle? As much as you got out of me, just for being ‘engaged’? You did more for him; you should have gotten more.” I stopped suddenly. “Say… I thought it was odd that Belle came all the way over here just to talk to me, seeing how she hates that trip. Maybe you didn’t come all that way; maybe you were here all along. Are you two shacked up? Or should I say ‘engaged’? Or…are you already married?” I thought about it. “I’ll bet you are. Miles, you aren’t as starry-eyed as I am; I’ll bet my other shirt that you would never, never transfer stock to Belle simply on promise of marriage. But you might for a wedding present—provided you got back voting control of it. Don’t bother to answer; tomorrow I’m going to start digging for the facts. They’ll be on record too.”

Miles glanced at Belle and said, “Don’t waste your time. Meet Mrs. Gentry.”

“So? Congratulations, both of you. You deserve each other. Now about my stock. Since Mrs. Gentry obviously can’t marry me, then—”

“Don’t be silly, Dan. I’ve already offset your ridiculous theory. I did make a stock transfer to Belle just as you did. For the same reason, services to the firm. As you say, these things are matters of record. Belle and I were married just a week ago…but you will find the stock registered to her quite some time ago if you care to look it up. You can’t connect them. No, she received stock from both of us, because of her great value to the firm. Then after you jilted her and after you left the employ of the firm, we were married.”

It set me back. Miles was too smart to tell a lie I could check on so easily. But there was something about it that was not true, something more than I had as yet found out.

“When and where were you married?”

“Santa Barbara courthouse, last Thursday. Not that it is your business.”

“Perhaps not. When was the stock transfer?”

“I don’t know exactly. Look it up if you want to know.”

Damn it, it just did not ring true that he had handed stock over to Belle before he had her committed to him. That was the sort of sloppy stunt I pulled; it wasn’t in character for him. “I’m wondering something, Miles. If I put a detective to work on it, might I find that the two of you got married once before a little earlier than that? Maybe in Yuma? Or Las Vegas? Or maybe you ducked over to Reno that time you both went north for the tax hearings? Maybe it would turn out that there was such a marriage recorded, and maybe the date of the stock transfer and the dates my patents were assigned to the firm all made a pretty pattern. Huh?”

Miles did not crack; he did not even look at Belle. As for Belle, the hate in her face could not have been increased even by a lucky stab in the dark. Yet it seemed to fit and I decided to ride the hunch to the limit.

Miles simply said, “Dan, I’ve been patient with you and have tried to be conciliatory. All it’s got me is abuse. So I think it’s time you left. Or I’ll bloody well make a stab at throwing you out—you and your flea-bitten cat!”

“Olé!” I answered. “That’s the first manly thing you’ve said tonight. But don’t call Pete ‘flea-bitten.’ He understands English and he is likely to take a chunk out of you. Okay, ex-pal, I’ll get out…but I want to make a short curtain speech, very short. It’s probably the last word I’ll ever have to say to you. Okay?”

“Well…okay. Make it short.”

Belle said urgently, “Miles, I want to talk to you.”

He motioned her to be quiet without looking at her. “Go ahead. Be brief.”

I turned to Belle. “You probably won’t want to hear this, Belle. I suggest that you leave.”

She stayed, of course. I wanted to be sure she would. I looked back at him. “Miles, I’m not too angry with you. The things a man will do for a larcenous woman are beyond belief. If Samson and Mark Antony were vulnerable, why should I expect you to be immune? By rights, instead of being angry I should be grateful to you. I guess I am, a little. I do know I’m sorry for you.” I looked over at Belle. “You’ve got her now and she’s all your

problem…and all it has cost me is a little money and temporarily my peace of mind. But what will she cost you? She cheated me, she even managed to persuade you, my trusted friend, to cheat me…what day will she team up with a new cat’s-paw and start cheating you? Next week? Next month? As long as next year? As surely as a dog returns to its vomit—”

“Miles!” Belle shrilled.

Miles said dangerously, “Get out!” and I knew he meant it. So I stood up.

“We were just going. I’m sorry for you, old fellow. Both of us made just one mistake originally, and it was as much my fault as yours. But you’ve got to pay for it alone. And that’s too bad…because it was such an innocent mistake.”

His curiosity got him. “What do you mean?”

“We should have wondered why a woman so smart and beautiful and competent and all-around high-powered was willing to come to work for us at clerk-typist’s wages. If we had taken her fingerprints the way the big firms do, and run a routine check, we might not have hired her…and you and I would still be partners.”

Pay dirt again! Miles looked suddenly at his wife and she looked—well, “cornered rat” is wrong; rats aren’t shaped like Belle.

And I couldn’t leave well enough alone; I just had to pick at it. I walked toward her, saying, “Well, Belle? If I took that highball glass sitting beside you and had the fingerprints on it checked, what would I find? Pictures in post offices? The big con? Or bigamy? Marrying suckers for their money, maybe? Is Miles legally your husband?” I reached down and picked up the glass.

Belle slapped it out of my hand. And Miles shouted at me.

And I had finally pushed my luck too far. I had been stupid to go into a cage of dangerous animals with no weapons, then I forgot the first tenet of the animal tamer; I turned my back. Miles shouted and I turned toward him. Belle reached for her purse…and I remember thinking that it was a hell of a time for her to be reaching for a cigarette.

Then I felt the stab of the needle.

I remember feeling just one thing as my knees got weak and I started slipping toward the carpet: utter astonishment that Belle would do such a thing to me. When it came right down to it, I still trusted her.

IV

I NEVER WAS completely unconscious. I got dizzy and vague as the drug hit me—it hits even quicker than morphine. But that was all. Miles yelled something at Belle and grabbed me around the chest as my knees folded. As he dragged me over and let me collapse into a chair, even the dizziness passed.

But while I was awake, part of me was dead. I know now what they used on me: the “zombie” drug, Uncle Sam’s answer to brainwashing. So far as I know, we never used it on a prisoner, but the boys whipped it up in the investigation of brainwashing and there it was, illegal but very effective. It’s the same stuff they now use in one-day psychoanalysis, but I believe it takes a court order to permit even a psychiatrist to use it.

God knows where Belle laid hands on it. But then God alone knows what other suckers she had on the string.

But I wasn’t wondering about that then; I wasn’t wondering about anything. I just lay slumped there, passive as a vegetable, hearing what went on, seeing anything in front of my eyes—but if Lady Godiva had strolled through without her horse I would not have shifted my eyes as she passed out of my vision.

Unless I was told to.

Pete jumped out of his bag, trotted over to where I slouched, and asked what was wrong. When I didn’t answer he started stropping my shins vigorously back and forth while still demanding an explanation. When still I did not respond he levitated to my knees, put his forepaws on my chest, looked me right in the face, and demanded to know what was wrong, right now and no nonsense.

I didn’t answer and he began to wail.

That caused Miles and Belle to pay attention to him. Once Miles had me in the chair he had turned to Belle and had said bitterly, “Now you’ve done it! Have you gone crazy?”

Belle answered, “Keep your nerve, Chubby. We’re going to settle him once and for all.”

“What? If you think I’m going to help in a murder—”

“Stuff it! That would be the logical thing to do…but you don’t have the guts for it. Fortunately it’s not necessary with that stuff in him.”

“What do you mean?”

“He’s our boy now. He’ll do what I tell him to. He won’t make any more trouble.” “But…good God, Belle, you can’t keep him doped up forever. Once he comes out of it—”

“Quit talking like a lawyer. I know what this stuff will do; you don’t. When he comes out of it he’ll do whatever I’ve told him to do. I’ll tell him never to sue us; he’ll never sue us. I tell him to quit sticking his nose into our business; okay, he’ll leave us alone. I tell him to go to Timbuktu; he’ll go there. I tell him to forget all this; he’ll forget…but he’ll do it just the same.”

I listened, understanding her but not in the least interested. If somebody had shouted, “The house is on fire!” I would have understood that, too, and I still would not have been interested.

“I don’t believe it.”

“You don’t, eh?” She looked at him oddly. “You ought to.” “Huh? What do you mean?”

“Skip it, skip it. This stuff works, Chubby. But first we’ve got to—”

It was then that Pete started wailing. You don’t hear a cat wail very often; you could go a lifetime and not hear it. They don’t do it when fighting, no matter how badly they are hurt; they never do it out of simple displeasure. A cat does it only in ultimate distress, when the situation is utterly unbearable but beyond its capacity and there is nothing left to do but keen.

It puts one in mind of a banshee. Also it is hardly to be endured; it hits a nerve-racking frequency. Miles turned and said, “That confounded cat! We’ve got to get it out of here.”

Belle said, “Kill it.”

“Huh? You’re always too drastic, Belle. Why, Dan would raise more Cain about that worthless animal than he would if we had stripped him completely. Here—” He turned and picked up Pete’s travel bag.

Ill kill it!” Belle said savagely. “I’ve wanted to kill that damned cat for months.” She looked around for a weapon and found one, a poker from the fireplace set; she ran over and grabbed it.

Miles picked up Pete and tried to put him into the bag.

“Tried” is the word. Pete isn’t anxious to be picked up by anyone but me or Ricky, and even I would not pick him up while he was wailing, without very careful negotiation; an emotionally disturbed cat is as touchy as mercury fulminate. But even if he were not upset, Pete certainly would never permit himself without protest to be picked up by the scruff of the neck.

Pete got him with claws in the forearm and teeth in the fleshy part of Miles’ left thumb. Miles yelped and dropped him. Belle shrilled, “Stand clear, Chubby!” and swung at him with the poker.

Belle’s intentions were sufficiently forthright and she had the strength and the weapon. But she wasn’t skilled with her weapon, whereas Pete is very skilled with his. He ducked under that roundhouse swipe and hit her four ways, two paws for each of her legs.

Belle screamed and dropped the poker.

I didn’t see much of the rest of it. I was still looking straight ahead and could see most of the living room, but I couldn’t see anything outside that angle because no one told me to look in any other direction. So I followed the rest of it mostly by sound, except once when they doubled back across my cone of vision, two people chasing a cat—then with unbelievable suddenness, two people being chased by a cat. Aside from that one short scene I was aware of the battle by the sounds of crashes, running, shouts, curses, and screams.

But I don’t think they ever laid a glove on him.

The worst thing that happened to me that night was that in Pete’s finest hour, his greatest battle and greatest victory, I not only did not see all the details, but I was totally unable to appreciate any of it. I saw and I heard but I had no feeling about it; at his supreme Moment of Truth I was numb.

I recall it now and conjure up emotion I could not feel then. But it’s not the same thing; I’m forever deprived, like a narcolept on a honeymoon.

The crashes and curses ceased abruptly, and shortly Miles and Belle came back into the living room. Belle said between gasps, “Who left that censorable screen door unhooked?”

“You did. Shut up about it. It’s gone now.” Miles had blood on his face as well as his hands; he dabbed at the fresh scratches on his face and did them no good. At some point he must have tripped and gone down, for his clothes looked it and his coat was split up the back.

“I will like hell shut up. Have you got a gun in the house?” “Huh?”

“I’m going to shoot that damned cat.” Belle was in even worse shape than Miles; she had more skin where Pete could get at it—legs, bare arms

and shoulders. It was clear that she would not be wearing strapless dresses again soon, and unless she got expert attention promptly she was likely

to have scars. She looked like a harpy after a no-holds-barred row with her sisters. Miles said, “Sit down!”

She answered him briefly and, by implication, negatively. “I’m going to kill that cat.”

“Then don’t sit down. Go wash yourself. I’ll help you with iodine and stuff and you can help me. But forget that cat; we’re well rid of it.”

Belle answered rather incoherently, but Miles understood her. “You too,” he answered, “in spades. Look here, Belle, if I did have a gun—I’m not saying that I have—and you went out there and started shooting, whether you got the cat or not you would have the police here inside of ten minutes, snooping around and asking questions. Do you want that with him on our hands?” He jerked a thumb in my direction. “And if you go outside the house tonight without a gun that beast will probably kill you.” He scowled even more deeply. “There ought to be a law against keeping an animal like

that. He’s a public danger. Listen to him.”

We could all hear Pete prowling around the house. He was not wailing now; he was voicing his war cry—inviting them to choose weapons and come outside, singly or in bunches.

Belle listened to it and shuddered. Miles said, “Don’t worry; he can’t get in. I not only hooked the screen you left open, I locked the door.” “I did not leave it open!”

“Have it your own way.” Miles went around checking the window fastenings. Presently Belle left the room and so did he. Sometime while they were gone Pete shut up. I don’t know how long they were gone; time didn’t mean anything to me.

Belle came back first. Her makeup and hairdo were perfect; she had put on a long-sleeved, high-necked dress and had replaced the ruined stockings. Except for Band-Aid strips on her face, the results of battle did not show. Had it not been for the grim look on her phiz I would have considered her, under other circumstances, a delectable sight.

She came straight toward me and told me to stand up, so I did. She went through me quickly and expertly, not forgetting watch pocket, shirt pockets, and the diagonal one on the left inside of the jacket which most suits do not have. The take was not much—my wallet with a small amount of cash, ID cards, driver’s license, and such, keys, small change, a nasal inhaler against the smog, minor miscellaneous junk, and the envelope containing the certified check which she herself had bought and had sent to me. She turned it over, read the closed endorsement I had made on it, and looked puzzled.

“What’s this, Dan? Buying a slug of insurance?”

“No.” I would have told her the rest, but answering the last question asked of me was the best I could do.

She frowned and put it with the rest of the contents of my pockets. Then she caught sight of Pete’s bag and apparently recalled the flap in it I used for a briefcase, for she picked it up and opened the flap.

At once she found the quadruplicate sets of the dozen and a half forms I had signed for Mutual Assurance Company. She sat down and started to read them. I stood where she had left me, a tailor’s dummy waiting to be put away.

Presently Miles came in wearing bathrobe and slippers and quite a large amount of gauze and adhesive tape. He looked like a fourth-rate middleweight whose manager has let him be outmatched. He was wearing one bandage like a scalp lock, fore and aft on his bald head; Pete must have got to him while he was down.

Belle glanced up, waved him to silence, and indicated the stack of papers she was through with. He sat down and started to read. He caught up with her and finished the last one reading over her shoulder.

She said, “This puts a different complexion on things.”

“An understatement. This commitment order is for December fourth—that’s tomorrow. Belle, he’s as hot as noon in Mojave; we’ve got to get him out of here!” He glanced at a clock. “They’ll be looking for him in the morning.”

“Miles, you always get chicken when the pressure is on. This is a break, maybe the best break we could hope for.” “How do you figure?”

“This zombie soup, good as it is, has one shortcoming. Suppose you dose somebody with it and load him up with what you want him to do. Okay, so he does it. He carries out your orders; he has to. Know anything about hypnosis?”

“Not much.”

“Do you know anything but law, Chubby? You haven’t any curiosity. A posthypnotic command—which is what this amounts to—may conflict, in fact it’s almost certain to conflict, with what the subject really wants to do. Eventually that may land him in the hands of a psychiatrist. If the psychiatrist is any good, he’s likely to find out what the trouble is. It is just possible that Dan here might go to one and get unstuck from whatever orders I give him. If he did, he could make plenty of trouble.”

“Damn it, you told me this drug was sure-fire.”

“Good God, Chubby, you have to take chances with everything in life. That’s what makes it fun. Let me think.”

After a bit she said, “The simplest thing and the safest is to let him go ahead with this sleep jump he is all set to take. He wouldn’t be any more out of our hair if he was dead—and we don’t have to take any risk. Instead of having to give him a bunch of complicated orders and then praying that he won’t come unstuck, all we have to do is order him to go ahead with the cold sleep, then sober him up and get him out of here…or get him out of here and then sober him.” She turned to me. “Dan, when are you going to take the Sleep?”

“I’m not.”

“Huh? What’s all this?” She gestured at the papers from my bag. “Papers for cold sleep. Contracts with Mutual Assurance.”

“He’s nutty,” Miles commented. “Mmm…of course he is. I keep forgetting that they can’t really think when they’re under it. They can hear and talk and answer questions…but it has to be just the right questions. They can’t think.” She came up close and looked me in the eyes. “Dan, I want you to tell me all about this cold-sleep deal. Start at the beginning and tell it all the way through. You’ve got all the papers here to do it; apparently you signed them just today. Now you say you aren’t going to do it. Tell me all about it, because I want to know why you were going to do it and now you say you aren’t.”

So I told her. Put that way, I could answer. It took a long time to tell as I did just what she said and told it all the way through in detail. “So you sat there in that drive-in and decided not to? You decided to come out here and make trouble for us instead?”

“Yes.” I was about to go on, tell about the trip out, tell her what I had said to Pete and what he had said to me, tell her how I had stopped at a drugstore and taken care of my Hired Girl stock, how I had driven then to Miles’ house, how Pete had not wanted to wait in the car, how—

But she did not give me a chance. She said, “You’ve changed your mind again, Dan. You want to take the cold sleep. You’re going to take the cold sleep. You won’t let anything in the world stand in the way of your taking the cold sleep. Understand me? What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to take the cold sleep. I want to take…” I started to sway. I had been standing like a flagpole for more than an hour, I would guess, without moving any muscle, because no one had told me to. I started collapsing slowly toward her.

She jumped back and said sharply, “Sit down!”

So I sat down.

Belle turned to Miles. “That does it. I’ll hammer away at it until I’m sure he can’t miss.” Miles looked at the clock. “He said that doctor wanted him there at noon.”

“Plenty of time. But we had better drive him there ourselves, just to be—No, damn it!” “What’s the trouble?”

“The time is too short. I gave him enough soup for a horse, because I wanted it to hit him fast—before he hit me. By noon he’d be sober enough to convince most people. But not a doctor.”

“Maybe it’ll just be perfunctory. His physical examination is already here and signed.”

“You heard what he said the doctor told him. The doctor’s going to check him to see if he’s had anything to drink. That means he’ll test his reflexes and take his reaction time and peer in his eyes and—oh, all the things we don’t want done. The things we don’t dare let a doctor do. Miles, it won’t work.”

“How about the next day? Call ’em up and tell them there has been a slight delay?” “Shut up and let me think.”

Presently she started looking over the papers I had brought with me. Then she left the room, returned immediately with a jeweler’s loupe, which she screwed into her right eye like a monocle, and proceeded to examine each paper with great care. Miles asked her what she was doing, but she brushed his question aside.

Presently she took the loupe out of her eye and said, “Thank goodness they all have to use the same government forms. Chubby, get me the yellow-pages phone book.”

“What for?”

“Get it, get it. I want to check the exact phrasing of a firm name—oh, I know what it is but I want to be sure.”

Grumbling, Miles fetched it. She thumbed through it, then said, “Yes, ‘Master Insurance Company of California’…and there’s room enough on each of them. I wish it could be ‘Motors’ instead of ‘Master’; that would be a cinch—but I don’t have any connections at ‘Motors Insurance,’ and besides, I’m not sure they even handle hibernation; I think they’re just autos and trucks.” She looked up. “Chubby, you’re going to have to drive me out to the plant right away.”

“Huh?”

“Unless you know of some quicker way to get an electric typewriter with executive typeface and carbon ribbon. No, you go out by yourself and fetch it back; I’ve got telephoning to do.”

He frowned. “I’m beginning to see what you plan to do. But, Belle, this is crazy. This is fantastically dangerous.”

She laughed. “That’s what you think. I told you I had good connections before we ever teamed up. Could you have swung the Mannix deal alone?” “Well…I don’t know.”

I know. And maybe you don’t know that Master Insurance is part of the Mannix group.” “Well, no, I didn’t. And I don’t see what difference it makes.”

“It means my connections are still good. See here, Chubby, the firm I used to work for used to help Mannix Enterprises with their tax losses …until my boss left the country. How do you think we got such a good deal without being able to guarantee that Danny boy went with the deal? I know all about Mannix. Now hurry up and get that typewriter and I’ll let you watch an artist at work. Watch out for that cat.”

Miles grumbled but started to leave, then returned. “Belle? Didn’t Dan park right in front of the house?” “Why?”

“His car isn’t there now.” He looked worried.

“Well, he probably parked around the corner. It’s unimportant. Go get that typewriter. Hurry!”

He left again. I could have told them where I had parked but, since they did not ask me, I did not think about it. I did not think at all.

Belle went elsewhere in the house and left me alone. Sometime around daylight Miles got back, looking haggard and carrying our heavy typewriter. Then I was left alone again.

Once Belle came back in and said, “Dan, you’ve got a paper there telling the insurance company to take care of your Hired Girl stock. You don’t want to do that; you want to give it to me.”

I didn’t answer. She looked annoyed and said, “Let’s put it this way. You do want to give it to me. You know you want to give it to me. You know that, don’t you?”

“Yes. I want to give it to you.”

“Good. You want to give it to me. You have to give it to me. You won’t be happy until you do give it to me. Now where is it? Is it in your car?” “No.”

“Then where is it?” “I mailed it.”

What?She grew shrill. “When did you mail it? Who did you mail it to? Why did you do it?”

If she had asked the second question last I would have answered it. But I answered the last question, that being all I could handle. “I assigned it.”

Miles came in. “Where did he put it?”

“He says he’s mailed it…because he has assigned it! You had better find his car and search it—he may just think he actually mailed it. He certainly had it with him at the insurance company.”

“Assigned it!” repeated Miles. “Good Lord! To whom?” “I’ll ask him. Dan, to whom did you assign your stock?”

“To the Bank of America.” She didn’t ask me why or I would have told her about Ricky.

All she did was slump her shoulders and sigh. “There goes the ball game, Chubby. We can forget about the stock. It’ll take more than a nail file to get it away from a bank.” She straightened up suddenly. “Unless he hasn’t really mailed it yet. If he hasn’t I’ll clean that assignment off the back so pretty you’ll think it’s been to the laundry. Then he’ll assign it again…to me.”

“To us,” corrected Miles.

“That’s just a detail. Go find his car.”

Miles returned later and announced, “It’s not anywhere within six blocks of here. I cruised around all the streets, and the alleys too. He must have used a cab.”

“You heard him say he drove his own car.”

“Well, it’s not out there. Ask him when and where he mailed the stock.”

So Belle did and I told them. “Just before I came here. I mailed it at the postbox at the corner of Sepulveda and Ventura Boulevard.”

“Do you suppose he’s lying?” asked Miles.

“He can’t lie, not in the shape he’s in. And he’s too definite about it to be mixed up. Forget it, Miles. Maybe after he’s put away it will turn out that his assignment is no good because he had already sold it to us…at least I’ll get his signature on some blank sheets and be ready to try it.”

She did try to get my signature and I tried to oblige. But in the shape I was in I could not write well enough to satisfy her. Finally she snatched a sheet out of my hand and said viciously, “You make me sick! I can sign your name better than that.” Then she leaned over me and said tensely, “I wish I had killed your cat.”

They did not bother me again until later in the day. Then Belle came in and said, “Danny boy, I’m going to give you a hypo and then you’ll feel a lot better. You’ll feel able to get up and move around and act just like you always have acted. You won’t be angry at anybody, especially not at Miles and me. We’re your best friends. We are, aren’t we? Who are your best friends?”

“You are. You and Miles.”

“But I’m more than that. I’m your sister. Say it.” “You’re my sister.”

“Good. Now we’re going for a ride and then you are going for a long sleep. You’ve been sick and when you wake up you’ll be well. Understand me?”

“Yes.”

“Who am I?”

“You’re my best friend. You’re my sister.” “Good boy. Push your sleeve back.”

I didn’t feel the hypo go in, but it stung after she pulled it out. I sat up and shrugged and said, “Gee, Sis, that stung. What was it?” “Something to make you feel better. You’ve been sick.”

“Yeah, I’m sick. Where’s Miles?”

“He’ll be here in a moment. Now let’s have your other arm. Push back the sleeve.”

I said, “What for?” but I pushed back the sleeve and let her shoot me again. I jumped. She smiled. “That didn’t really hurt, did it?”

“Huh? No, it didn’t hurt. What’s it for?”

“It will make you sleepy on the ride. Then when we get there you’ll wake up.”

“Okay. I’d like to sleep. I want to take a long sleep.” Then I felt puzzled and looked around. “Where’s Pete? Pete was going to sleep with me.” “Pete?” Belle said. “Why, dear, don’t you remember? You sent Pete to stay with Ricky. She’s going to take care of him.”

“Oh yes!” I grinned with relief. I had sent Pete to Ricky; I remembered mailing him. That was good. Ricky loved Pete and she would take good care of him while I was asleep.

They drove me out to the Consolidated Sanctuary at Sawtelle, one that many of the smaller insurance companies used—those that didn’t have their own. I slept all the way but came awake at once when Belle spoke to me. Miles stayed in his car and she took me in. The girl at the desk looked up and said, “Davis?”

“Yes,” agreed Belle. “I’m his sister. Is the representative for Master Insurance here?”

“You’ll find him down in Treatment Room Nine—they’re ready and waiting. You can give the papers to the man from Master.” She looked at me with interest. “He’s had his physical examination?”

“Oh yes!” Belle assured her. “Brother is a therapy-delay case, you know. He’s under an opiate…for the pain.” The receptionist clucked sympathetically. “Well, hurry on in then. Through that door and turn left.”

In Room Nine there was a man in street clothes and one in white coveralls and a woman in a nurse’s uniform. They helped me get undressed and treated me like an idiot child while Belle explained again that I was under a sedative for the pain. Once he had me stripped and up on the table, the man in white massaged my belly, digging his fingers in deeply. “No trouble with this one,” he announced. “He’s empty.”

“He hasn’t had anything to eat or drink since yesterday evening,” agreed Belle.

“That’s fine. Sometimes they come in here stuffed like a Christmas turkey. Some people have no sense.” “True. Very true.”

“Uh-huh. Okay, son, clench your fist tight while I get this needle in.”

I did and things began to get really hazy. Suddenly I remembered something and tried to sit up. “Where’s Pete? I want to see Pete.”

Belle took my head and kissed me. “There, there, Buddy! Pete couldn’t come, remember? Pete had to stay with Ricky.” I quieted down and she said gently to the others, “Our brother Peter has a sick little girl at home.”

I dropped off to sleep. Presently I felt very cold. But I couldn’t move to reach the covers.

V

I WAS COMPLAINING to the bartender about the air conditioning—it was turned too high and we were all going to catch cold. “No matter,” he assured me. “You won’t feel it when you’re asleep. Sleep…sleep… soup of the evening, beautiful sleep.” He had Belle’s face.

“How about a warm drink then?” I wanted to know. “A Tom and Jerry? Or a hot buttered bum?” “You’re a bum!” the doctor answered. “Sleeping’s too good for him; throw the bum out!”

I tried to hook my feet around the brass rail to stop them. But this bar had no brass rail, which seemed funny, and I was flat on my back, which seemed funnier still, unless they had installed bedside service for people with no feet. I didn’t have feet, so how could I hook them under a brass rail? No hands, either. “Look, Maw, no hands!” Pete sat on my chest and wailed.

I was back in basic training…advanced basic, it must have been, for I was at Camp Hale at one of those silly exercises where they throw snow down your neck to make a man of you. I was having to climb the damnedest biggest mountain in all Colorado and it was all ice and I had no feet. Nevertheless, I was carrying the biggest pack anybody ever saw—I remembered that they were trying to find out if GIs could be used instead of pack mules and I had been picked because I was expendable. I wouldn’t have made it at all if little Ricky hadn’t got behind me and pushed.

The top sergeant turned and he had a face just like Belle’s and he was livid with rage. “Come on, you! I can’t afford to wait for you. I don’t care whether you make it or not…but you can’t sleep until you get there.”

My no-feet wouldn’t take me any farther and I fell down in the snow and it was icy warm and I did fall asleep while little Ricky wailed and begged me not to. But I had to sleep.

I woke up in bed with Belle. She was shaking me and saying, “Wake up, Dan! I can’t wait thirty years for you; a girl has to think of her future.” I tried to get up and hand her the bags of gold I had under the bed, but she was gone…and anyhow a Hired Girl with her face had picked all the gold up and put it in its tray on top and scurried out of the room. I tried to run after it but I had no feet, no body at all, I discovered. “I ain’t got no body, and nobody cares for me…” The world consisted of top sergeants and work…so what difference did it make where you worked or how? I let them put the harness back on me and I went back to climbing that icy mountain. It was all white and beautifully rounded and if I could just climb to the rosy tip they would let me sleep, which was what I needed. But I never made it…no hands, no feet, no nothing.

There was a forest fire on the mountain. The snow did not melt, but I could feel the heat in waves beating against me while I kept on struggling. The top sergeant was leaning over me and saying, “Wake up…wake up…wake up.”

HE NO MORE than got me awake before he wanted me to sleep again. I’m vague about what happened then for a while. Part of the time I was on a table which vibrated under me and there were lights and snaky-looking equipment and lots of people. But when I was fully awake I was in a hospital bed and I felt all right except for that listless half-floating feeling you have after a Turkish bath. I had hands and feet again. But nobody would talk to me and every time I tried to ask a question a nurse would pop something into my mouth. I was massaged quite a lot.

Then one morning I felt fine and got out of bed as soon as I woke up. I felt a little dizzy but that was all. I knew who I was, I knew how I had got there, and I knew that all that other stuff had been dreams.

I knew who had put me there. If Belle had given me orders while I was drugged to forget her shenanigans, either the orders had not taken or thirty years of cold sleep had washed out the hypnotic effect. I was blurry about some details but I knew how they had shanghaied me.

I wasn’t especially angry about it. True, it had happened just “yesterday,” since yesterday is the day just one sleep behind you—but the sleep had been thirty years long. The feeling cannot be precisely defined, since it is entirely subjective, but, while my memory was sharp for the events of “yesterday,” nevertheless my feelings about those events were to things far away. You have seen double images in television of a pitcher making his windup while his picture sits as a ghost on top of a long shot of the whole baseball diamond? Something like that…my conscious recollection was a close-up; my emotional reaction was to something long ago and far away.

I fully intended to look up Belle and Miles and chop them into cat meat, but there was no hurry. Next year would do—right now I was eager to have a look at the year 2000.

But speaking of cat meat, where was Pete? He ought to be around somewhere…unless the poor little beggar hadn’t lived through the Sleep. Then—and not until then—did I remember that my careful plans to bring Pete along had been wrecked.

I took Belle and Miles out of the “Hold” basket and moved them over to “Urgent.” Try to kill my cat, would they?

They had done worse than kill Pete; they had turned him out to go wild…to wear out his days wandering back alleys in search of scraps, while his ribs grew thin and his sweet pixie nature warped into distrust of all two-legged beasts.

They had let him die—for he was surely dead by now—let him die thinking that I had deserted him.

For this they would pay…if they were still alive. Oh, how I hoped they were still alive—unspeakable!

I FOUND THAT I was standing by the foot of my bed, grasping the rail to steady myself and dressed only in pajamas. I looked around for some way to call someone. Hospital rooms had not changed much. There was no window and I could not see where the light came from; the bed was high and narrow, as hospital beds had always been in my recollection, but it showed signs of having been engineered into something more than a place to sleep—among other things, it seemed to have some sort of plumbing under it which I suspected was a mechanized bedpan, and the side table was part of the bed structure itself. But, while I ordinarily would have been intensely interested in such gadgetry, right now I simply wanted to find the pear-shaped switch which summons the nurse—I wanted my clothes.

It was missing, but I found what it had been transformed into: a pressure switch on the side of the table that was not quite a table. My hand struck it in trying to find it, and a transparency opposite where my head would have been had I been in bed shone out with: SERVICE CALL. Almost immediately it blinked out and was replaced with: ONE MOMENT, PLEASE.

Very quickly the door silently rolled aside and a nurse came in. Nurses had not changed much. This one was reasonably cute, had the familiar firm manners of a drill sergeant, wore a perky little white hat perched on short orchid-colored hair, and was dressed in a white uniform. It was strangely cut and covered her here and uncovered her there in a fashion different from 1970—but women’s clothes, even work uniforms, were always doing that. She would still have been a nurse in any year, just by her unmistakable manner.

“You get back in that bed!” “Where are my clothes?” “Get back in that bed. Now!”

I answered reasonably, “Look, nurse, I’m a free citizen, over twenty-one, and not a criminal. I don’t have to get back into that bed and I’m not

going to. Now are you going to show me where my clothes are or shall I go out the way I am and start looking?”

She looked at me, then turned suddenly and went out; the door ducked out of her way.

But it would not duck out of my way. I was still trying to study out the gimmick, being fairly sure that if one engineer could dream it up, another could figure it out, when it opened again and a man came in.

“Good morning,” he said. “I’m Dr. Albrecht.”

His clothes looked like a cross between a Harlem Sunday and a picnic to me, but his brisk manner and his tired eyes were convincingly professional; I believed him. “Good morning, Doctor. I’d like to have my clothes.”

He stepped just far enough inside to let the door slide into place behind him, then reached inside his clothes and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. He got one out, waved it briskly in the air, placed it in his mouth and puffed on it; it was lighted. He offered me the pack. “Have one?”

“Uh, no, thanks.”

“Go ahead. It won’t hurt you.”

I shook my head. I had always worked with a cigarette smoldering beside me; the progress of a job could be judged by the overflowing ashtrays and the burns on the drafting board. Now I felt a little faint at the sight of smoke and wondered if I had dropped the nicotine habit somewhere in the slept-away years. “Thanks just the same.”

“Okay. Mr. Davis, I’ve been here six years. I’m a specialist in hypnology, resuscitation, and like subjects. Here and elsewhere I’ve helped eight thousand and seventy-three patients make the comeback from hypothermia to normal life—you’re number eight thousand and seventy-four. I’ve seen them do all sorts of odd things when they came out—odd to laymen; not to me. Some of them want to go right back to sleep again and

scream at me when I try to keep them awake. Some of them do go back to sleep and we have to ship them off to another sort of institution. Some of them start weeping endlessly when they realize that it is a one-way ticket and it’s too late to go home to whatever year they started from. And some of them, like you, demand their clothes and want to run out into the street.”

“Well? Why not? Am I a prisoner?”

“No. You can have your clothes. I imagine you’ll find them out of style, but that is your problem. However, while I send for them, would you mind telling me what it is that is so terribly urgent that you must attend to it right this minute…after it has waited thirty years? That’s how long you’ve been at subtemperature—thirty years. Is it really urgent? Or would later today do as well? Or even tomorrow?”

I started to blurt out that it damn well was urgent, then stopped and looked sheepish. “Maybe not that urgent.”

“Then as a favor to me, will you get back into bed, let me check you over, have your breakfast, and perhaps talk with me before you go galloping off in all directions? I might even be able to tell you which way to gallop.”

“Uh, okay, Doctor. Sorry to have caused trouble.” I climbed into bed. It felt good—I was suddenly tired and shaky.

“No trouble. You should see some that we get. We have to pull them down off the ceiling.” He straightened the covers around my shoulders, then leaned over the table built into the bed. “Dr. Albrecht in Seventeen. Send a room orderly with breakfast, uh…menu four-minus.”

He turned to me and said, “Roll over and pull up your jacket; I want to get at your ribs. While I’m checking you, you can ask questions. If you want to.”

I tried to think while he prodded my ribs. I suppose it was a stethoscope he used although it looked like a miniaturized hearing aid. But they had not improved one thing about it; the pickup he pushed against me was as cold and hard as ever.

What do you ask after thirty years? Have they reached the stars yet? Who’s cooking up “The War to End War” this time? Do babies come out of test tubes? “Doc, do they still have popcorn machines in the lobbies of movie theaters?”

“They did the last time I looked. I don’t get much time for such things. By the way, the word is ‘grabbie’ now, not ‘movie.’ ” “So? Why?”

“Try one. You’ll find out. But be sure to fasten your seat belt; they null the whole theater on some shots. See here, Mr. Davis, we’re faced with this same problem every day and we’ve got it down to a routine. We’ve got adjustment vocabularies for each entrance year, and historical and cultural summaries. It’s quite necessary, for malorientation can be extreme no matter how much we lackweight the shock.”

“Uh, I suppose so.”

“Decidedly. Especially in an extreme lapse like yours. Thirty years.” “Is thirty years the maximum?”

 “Yes and no. Thirty-five years is the very longest we’ve had experience with, since the first commercial client was placed in subtemperature in December 1965. You are the longest Sleeper I have revived. But we have clients in here now with contract times up to a century and a half. They should never have accepted you for as long as thirty years; they didn’t know enough then. They were taking a great chance with your life. You were lucky.”

“Really?”

“Really. Turn over.” He went on examining me and added, “But with what we’ve learned now I’d be willing to prepare a man for a thousand-year jump if there were any way to finance it…hold him at the temperature you were at for a year just to check, then crash him to minus two hundred in a millisecond. He’d live. I think. Let’s try your reflexes.”

That “crash” business didn’t sound good to me. Dr. Albrecht went on: “Sit up and cross your knees. You won’t find the language problem difficult. Of course I’ve been careful to talk in 1970 vocabulary—I rather pride myself on being able to talk selectively in the entrance speech of any of my patients; I’ve made a hypnostudy of it. But you’ll be speaking contemporary idiom perfectly in a week; it’s really just added vocabulary.”

I thought of telling him that at least four times he had used words not used in 1970, or at least not that way, but I decided it wouldn’t be polite. “That’s all for now,” he said presently. “By the way, Mrs. Schultz has been trying to reach you.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t you know her? She insisted that she was an old friend of yours.”

“ ‘Schultz,’ ” I repeated. “I suppose I’ve known several ‘Mrs. Schultzes’ at one time and another, but the only one I can place was my fourth-grade teacher. But she’d be dead by now.”

“Maybe she took the Sleep. Well, you can accept the message when you feel like it. I’m going to sign a release on you. But if you’re smart, you’ll stay here for a few days and soak up reorientation. I’ll look in on you later. So ‘twenty-three, skiddoo!’ as they used to say in your day. Here comes the orderly with your breakfast.”

I decided that he was a better doctor than a linguist. But I stopped thinking about it when I saw the orderly. It rolled in, carefully avoiding Dr. Albrecht, who walked straight out, paying no attention to it and making no effort himself to avoid it.

It came over, adjusted the built-in bed table, swung it over me, opened it out, and arranged my breakfast on it. “Shall I pour your coffee?” “Yes, please.” I did not really want it poured, as I would rather have it stay hot until I’ve finished everything else. But I wanted to see it poured. For I was in a delighted daze…it was Flexible Frank!

Not the jackleg, breadboarded, jury-rigged first model Miles and Belle had stolen from me, of course not. This one resembled the first Frank the

way a turbospeedster resembles the first horseless carriages. But a man knows his own work. I had set the basic pattern and this was the necessary evolution…Frank’s great-grandson, improved, slicked up, made more efficient—but the same bloodline.

“Will that be all?” “Wait a minute.”

Apparently I had said the wrong thing, for the automaton reached inside itself and pulled out a stiff plastic sheet and handed it to me. The sheet remained fastened to him by a slim steel chain. I looked at it and found printed on it:

The motto appeared on their trademark showing Aladdin rubbing his lamp and a genie appearing.

Below this was a long list of simple orders—STOP, GO, YES, NO, SLOWER, FASTER, COME HERE, FETCH A NURSE, etc. Then there was a shorter list of tasks common in hospitals, such as back rubs, and including some that I had never heard of. The list closed abruptly with the statement: “Routines 87 through 242 may be ordered only by hospital staff members and the order phrases are therefore not listed here.”

I had not voice-coded the first Flexible Frank; you had to punch buttons on his control board. It was not because I had not thought of it, but because the analyzer and telephone exchange for the purpose would have weighed and bulked and cost more than all the rest of Frank, Sr., net. I decided that I would have to learn some new wrinkles in miniaturization and simplification before I would be ready to practice engineering here. But I was anxious to get started on it, as I could see from Eager Beaver that it was going to be more fun than ever—lots of new possibilities. Engineering is the art of the practical and depends more on the total state of the art than it does on the individual engineer. When railroading time comes you can railroad—but not before. Look at poor Professor Langley, breaking his heart on a flying machine that should have flown—he had put the necessary genius in it— but he was just a few years too early to enjoy the benefit of collateral art he needed and did not have. Or take the great Leonardo da Vinci, so far out of his time that his most brilliant concepts were utterly unbuildable.

I was going to have fun here—I mean “now.”

I handed back the instruction card, then got out of bed and looked for the data plate. I had halfway expected to see “Hired Girl, Inc.” at the bottom of the notice and I wondered if “Aladdin” was a daughter corporation of the Mannix group. The data plate did not tell me much other than model, serial number, factory, and such, but it did list the patents, about forty of them—and the earliest, I was very interested to see, was in 1970…almost certainly based on my original model and drawings.

I found a pencil and memo pad on the table and jotted down the number of that first patent, but my interest was purely intellectual. Even if it had been stolen from me (I was sure it had been), it had expired in 1987—unless they had changed the patent laws—and only those granted later than 1983 would still be valid. But I wanted to know.

A light glowed on the automaton and he announced: “I am being called. May I leave?” “Huh? Sure. Run along.” It started to reach for the phrase list; I hastily said, “Go!” “Thank you. Good-bye.” It detoured around me.

“Thank you.

“You are welcome.”

Whoever had dictated the gadget’s sound responses had a very pleasant baritone voice. I got back into bed and ate the breakfast I had let get cold—only it turned out not to be cold. Breakfast four-minus was about enough for a medium-sized bird, but I found that it was enough, even though I had been very hungry. I suppose my stomach had shrunk. It wasn’t until I had finished that I remembered that this was the first food I had eaten in a generation. I noticed it then because they had included a menu—what I had taken for bacon was listed as “grilled yeast strips, country style.”

But in spite of a thirty-year fast, my mind was not on food; they had sent a newspaper in with breakfast: the Great Los Angeles Times, for Wednesday, 13 December 2000.

Newspapers had not changed much, not in format. This one was tabloid size, the paper was glazed instead of rough pulp and the illustrations were either full color, or black-and-white stereo—I couldn’t puzzle out the gimmick on that last. There had been stereo pictures you could look at without a viewer since I was a small child; as a kid I had been fascinated by ones used to advertise frozen foods in the ’50s. But those had required

fairly thick transparent plastic for a grid of tiny prisms; these were simply on thin paper. Yet they had depth.

I gave it up and looked at the rest of the paper. Eager Beaver had arranged it on a reading rack and for a while it seemed as if the front page was all I was going to read, for I could not find out how to open the durned thing. The sheets seemed to have frozen solid.

Finally I accidentally touched the lower right-hand corner of the first sheet; it curled up and out of the way…some surface-charge phenomenon, triggered at that point. The other pages got neatly out of the way in succession whenever I touched that spot.

At least half of the paper was so familiar as to make me homesick— “Your Horoscope Today, Mayor Dedicates New Reservoir, Security Restrictions Undermining Freedom of Press Says N.Y. Solon, Giants Take Double-Header, Unseasonable Warmth Perils Winter Sports, Pakistan Warns India”—et cetera, ad tedium. This is where I came in.

Some of the other items were new but explained themselves: LUNA SHUTTLE STILL SUSPENDED FOR GEMINIDS— TwentyFour-Hour Station Suffers Two Punctures, No Casualties; FOUR WHITES LYNCHED IN CAPE TOWN—U.N. Action Demanded; HOST-MOTHERS ORGANIZE FOR HIGHER FEES—Demand “Amateurs” Be Outlawed; MISSISSIPPI PLANTER INDICTED UNDER ANTI-ZOMBIE LAW— His

Defense: “Them Boys Hain’t Drugged, They’re Just Stupid!”

I was fairly sure that I knew what that last one meant…from experience.

But some of the news items missed me completely. The “wogglies” were still spreading and three more French towns had been evacuated; the King was considering ordering the area dusted. King? Oh well, French politics might turn up anything, but what was this “Poudre Sanitaire” they were considering using on the “wogglies”?—whatever they were. Radioactive, maybe? I hoped they picked a dead calm day…preferably the thirtieth of February. I had had a radiation overdose myself once, through a mistake by a damn-fool WAC technician at Sandia. I had not reached the point-of-no-return vomiting stage, but I don’t recommend a diet of curies.

The Laguna Beach division of the Los Angeles police had been equipped with Leycoils and the division chief warned all Teddies to get out of town. “My men have orders to nark first and subspeck afterward. This has got to stop!”

I made a mental note to keep clear of Laguna Beach until I found out what the score was. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be subspecked, or subspected, even afterward.

Those are just samples. There were any number of news stories that started out trippingly, then foundered in what was, to me, double talk.

I started to breeze on past the vital statistics when my eye caught some new subheads. There were the old familiar ones of births, deaths, marriages, and divorces, but now there were “commitments” and “withdrawals” as well, listed by sanctuaries. I looked up “Sawtelle Cons. Sanc.” and found my own name. It gave me a warm feeling of “belonging.”

But the most intensely interesting things in the paper were the ads. One of the personals stuck in my mind: “Attractive still-young widow with yen to travel wishes to meet mature man similarly inclined. Object: two-year marriage contract.” But it was the display advertising that got me.

Hired Girl and her sisters and her cousins and her aunts were all over the place—and they were still using the trademark, a husky girl with a broom, that I had designed originally for our letterhead. I felt a twinge of regret that I had been in such a jumping hurry to get rid of my stock in Hired Girl, Inc.; it looked as if it was worth more than all the rest of my portfolio. No, that was wrong; if I had kept it with me at the time, that pair of thieves would have lifted it and faked an assignment to themselves. As it was, Ricky had gotten it—and if it had made Ricky rich, well, it couldn’t happen to a nicer person.

I made a note to track down Ricky first thing, top priority. She was all that was left to me of the world I had known and she loomed very large in my mind. Dear little Ricky! If she had been ten years older I would never have looked at Belle…and wouldn’t have got my fingers burned.

Let’s see, how old would she be now? Forty—no, forty-one. It was hard to think of Ricky as forty-one. Still, that wouldn’t be old in a woman these days—or even those days. From forty feet you frequently couldn’t tell forty-one from eighteen.

If she was rich I’d let her buy me a drink and we would drink to Pete’s dear departed funny little soul.

And if something had slipped and she was poor in spite of the stock I had assigned her, then—by damn, I’d marry her! Yes, I would. It didn’t matter that she was ten years or so older than I was; in view of my established record for flubbing the dub I needed somebody older to look out for me and tell me no—and Ricky was just the girl who could do it. She had run Miles and Miles’ house with serious little-girl efficiency when she was less than ten; at forty she would be just the same, only mellowed.

I felt really warm and no longer lost in a strange land for the first time since I had wakened. Ricky was the answer to everything.

Then deep inside me I heard a voice: “Look, stupid, you can’t marry Ricky, because a girl as sweet as she was going to be would now have been married for at least twenty years. She’ll have four kids…maybe a son bigger than you are…and certainly a husband who won’t be amused by you in the role of good old Uncle Danny.”

I listened and my jaw sagged. Then I said feebly, “All right, all right—so I’ve missed the boat again. But I’m still going to look her up. They can’t do more than shoot me. And, after all, she’s the only other person who really understood Pete.”

I turned another page, suddenly very glum at the thought of having lost both Ricky and Pete. After a while I fell asleep over the paper and slept until Eager Beaver or his twin fetched lunch.

While I was asleep I dreamed that Ricky was holding me on her lap and saying, “It’s all right, Danny. I found Pete and now we’re both here to stay. Isn’t that so, Pete?”

“ Yeeeow!”

THE ADDED VOCABULARIES were a cinch; I spent much more time on the historical summaries. Quite a lot can happen in thirty years, but why put it down when everybody else knows it better than I do? I wasn’t surprised that the Great Asia Republic was crowding us out of the South American trade; that had been in the cards since the Formosan treaty. Nor was I surprised to find India more Balkanized than ever. The notion of England being a province of Canada stopped me for a moment. Which was the tail and which was the dog? I skipped over the panic of ’87; gold was a wonderful engineering material for some uses; I could not regard it as a tragedy to find that it was now cheap and no longer a basis for money, no matter how many people lost their shirts in the change-over.

I stopped reading and thought about the things you could do with cheap gold, with its high density, good conductivity, extreme ductility…and stopped when I realized I would have to read the technical literature first. Shucks, in atomics alone it would be invaluable. The way the stuff could be worked, far better than any other metal, if you could use it in miniaturizing—again I stopped, morally certain that Eager Beaver had had his “head” crammed full of gold. I would just have to get busy and find out what the boys had been doing in the “small back rooms” while I had been away.

The Sawtelle Sanctuary wasn’t equipped to let me read up on engineering, so I told Doc Albrecht I was ready to check out. He shrugged, told me I was an idiot, and agreed. But I did stay one more night; I found that I was fagged just from lying back and watching words chase past in a book scanner.

They brought me modern clothes right after breakfast the next morning …and I had to have help in dressing. They were not so odd in themselves

(although I had never worn cerise trousers with bell bottoms before) but I could not manage the fastenings without coaching. I suppose my

grandfather might have had the same trouble with zippers if he had not been led into them gradually. It was the Sticktite closure seams, of course—I thought I was going to have to hire a little boy to help me go to the bathroom before I got it through my head that the pressure-sensitive adhesion was axially polarized.

Then I almost lost my pants when I tried to ease the waistband. No one laughed at me. Dr. Albrecht asked, “What are you going to do?”

“Me? First I’m going to get a map of the city. Then I’m going to find a place to sleep. Then I’m going to do nothing but professional reading for quite a while…maybe a year. Doc, I’m an obsolete engineer. I don’t aim to stay that way.”

“Mmmm. Well, good luck. Don’t hesitate to call if I can help.”

I stuck out my hand. “Thanks, Doc. You’ve been swell. Uh, maybe I shouldn’t mention this until I talk to the accounting office of my insurance company and see just how well off I am—but I don’t intend to let it go with words. Thanks for the sort of thing you’ve done for me should be more substantial. Understand me?”

He shook his head. “I appreciate the thought. But my fees are covered by my contract with the sanctuary.” “But—”

“No. I can’t take it, so please let’s not discuss it.” He shook hands and said, “Good-bye. If you’ll stay on this slide it will take you to the main offices.” He hesitated. “If you find things a bit tiring at first, you’re entitled to four more days’ recuperation and reorientation here without additional charge under the custodial contract. It’s paid for. Might as well use it. You can come and go as you like.”

I grinned. “Thanks, Doc. But you can bet that I won’t be back—other than to say hello someday.”

I stepped off at the main office and told the receptionist there who I was. It handed me an envelope, which I saw was another phone message from Mrs. Schultz. I still had not called her, because I did not know who she was, and the sanctuary did not permit visits nor phone calls to a revivified client until he wanted to accept them. I simply glanced at it and tucked it in my blouse, while thinking that I might have made a mistake in making Flexible Frank too flexible. Receptionists used to be pretty girls, not machines.

The receptionist said, “Step this way, please. Our treasurer would like to see you.”

Well, I wanted to see him, too, so I stepped that way. I was wondering how much money I had made and was congratulating myself on having plunged in common stocks rather than playing it “safe.” No doubt my stocks had dropped in the Panic of ’87, but they ought to be back up now—in

fact I knew that at least two of them were worth a lot of dough now; I had been reading the financial section of the Times. I still had the paper with me, figuring I might want to look up some others.

The treasurer was a human being, even though he looked like a treasurer. He gave me a quick handshake. “How do you do, Mr. Davis. I’m Mr. Doughty. Sit down, please.”

I said, “Howdy, Mr. Doughty. I probably don’t need to take that much of your time. Just tell me this: Does my insurance company handle its settlements through your office? Or should I go to their home offices?”

“Do please sit down. I have several things to explain to you.”

So I sat. His office assistant (good old Frank again) fetched a file folder for him and he said, “These are your original contracts. Would you like to see them?”

I wanted very much to see them, as I had kept my fingers crossed ever since I was fully awake, wondering if Belle had figured out some way to bite the end off that certified check. A certified check is much harder to play hanky-panky with than is a personal check, but Belle was a clever gal.

I was much relieved to see that she had left my commitments unchanged, except of course that the side contract for Pete was missing and also the one concerning my Hired Girl stock. I supposed that she had just burned those, to keep from raising questions. I examined with care the dozen or more places where she had changed “Mutual Assurance Company” to “Master Insurance Company of California.”

The gal was a real artist, no question. I suppose a scientific criminologist armed with microscope and comparison stereo and chemical tests and so forth could have proved that each of those documents had been altered, but I could not. I wondered how she had coped with the closed endorsement on the back of the certified check, since certified checks are always on paper guaranteed non-erasable. Well, she probably had not used an eraser—what one person can dream up another person can outsmart…and Belle was very smart.

Mr. Doughty cleared his throat. I looked up. “Do we settle my account here?” “Yes.”

“Then I can put it in two words. How much?”

“Mmm…Mr. Davis, before we go into that question, I would like to invite your attention to one additional document…and to one circumstance. This is the contract between this sanctuary and Master Insurance Company of California for your hypothermia, custody, and revivification. You will note that the entire fee is paid in advance. This is both for our protection and for yours, since it guarantees your safe-being while you are helpless. The funds—all such funds—are placed in escrow with the superior-court division handling chancery matters and are paid quarterly to us as earned.”

“Okay. Sounds like a good arrangement.”

“It is. It protects the helpless. Now you must understand clearly that this sanctuary is a separate corporation from your insurance company; the custodial contract with us was a contract entirely separate from the one for the management of your estate.”

“Mr. Doughty, what are you getting at?”

“Do you have any assets other than those you entrusted to Master Insurance Company?”

I thought it over. I had owned a car once…but God alone knew what had become of it. I had closed out my checking account in Mojave early in the binge, and on that busy day when I ended up at Miles’ place—and in the soup—I had started with maybe thirty or forty dollars in cash. Books, clothes, slide rule—I had never been a pack rat—and that minor junk was gone anyhow. “Not even a bus transfer, Mr. Doughty.”

“Then—I am very sorry to have to tell you this—you have no assets of any sort.”

I held still while my head circled the field and came in for a crash landing. “What do you mean? Why, some of the stocks I invested in are in fine shape. I knowthey are. It says so right here.” I held up my breakfast copy of the Times.

He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Davis, but you don’t own any stocks. Master Insurance went broke.” I was glad he had made me sit down; I felt weak. “How did this happen? The Panic?”

“No, no. It was part of the collapse of the Mannix Group…but of course you don’t know about that. It happened after the Panic, and I suppose you could say that it started from the Panic. But Master Insurance would not have gone under if it had not been systematically looted… gutted—‘milked’ is the vulgar word. If it had been an ordinary receiver-ship, something at least would have been salvaged. But it was not. By the time it was discovered there was nothing left of the company but a hollow shell…and the men who had done it were beyond extradition. Uh, if it is any consolation to you, it could not happen under our present laws.”

No, it was no consolation, and besides, I didn’t believe it. My old man claimed that the more complicated the law the more opportunity for

scoundrels.

But he also used to say that a wise man should be prepared to abandon his baggage at any time. I wondered how often I was going to have to do it to qualify as “wise.” “Uh, Mr. Doughty, just out of curiosity, how did Mutual Assurance make out?”

“Mutual Assurance Company? A fine firm. Oh, they took their licking during the Panic along with everybody else. But they weathered it. You have a policy with them, perhaps?”

“No.” I did not offer explanation; there was no use. I couldn’t look to Mutual; I had never executed my contract with them. I couldn’t sue Master Insurance; there is no point in suing a bankrupt corpse.

I could sue Belle and Miles if they were still around—but why be silly? No proof, none.

Besides, I did not want to sue Belle. It would be better to tattoo her all over with “Null and Void”…using a dull needle. Then I’d take up the matter of what she had done to Pete. I hadn’t figured out a punishment to suit the crime for that one yet.

I suddenly remembered that it was the Mannix group that Miles and Belle had been about to sell Hired Girl, Inc., to when they had booted me out. “Mr. Doughty? Are you sure that the Mannix people haven’t any assets? Don’t they own Hired Girl?”

“ ‘Hired Girl?’ Do you mean the domestic autoappliance firm?” “Yes, of course.”

“It hardly seems possible. In fact, it is not possible, since the Mannix empire, as such, no longer exists. Of course I can’t say that there never was any connection between Hired Girl Corporation and the Mannix people. But I don’t believe it could have been much, if any, or I think I would have heard of it.”

I dropped the matter. If Miles and Belle had been caught in the collapse of Mannix, that suited me fine. But, on the other hand, if Mannix had owned and milked Hired Girl, Inc., it would have hit Ricky as hard as it hit them. I didn’t want Ricky hurt, no matter what the side issues were.

I stood up. “Well, thanks for breaking it gently, Mr. Doughty. I’ll be on my way.”

“Don’t go yet. Mr. Davis…we of this institution feel a responsibility toward our people beyond the mere letter of the contract. You understand that yours is by no means the first case of this sort. Now our board of directors has placed a small discretionary fund at my disposal to ease such hardships. It—”

“No charity, Mr. Doughty. Thanks anyhow.”

“Not charity, Mr. Davis. A loan. A character loan, you might call it. Believe me, our losses have been negligible on such loans…and we don’t want you to walk out of here with your pockets empty.”

I thought that one over twice. I didn’t even have the price of a haircut. On the other hand, borrowing money is like trying to swim with a brick in each hand…and a small loan is tougher to pay back than a million. “Mr. Doughty,” I said slowly, “Dr. Albrecht said that I was entitled to four more days of beans and bed here.”

“I believe that is right—I’d have to consult your card. Not that we throw people out even when their contract time is up if they are not ready.” “I didn’t suppose that you did. But what are the rates on that room I had, as hospital room and board?”

“Eh? But our rooms are not for rent in that way. We aren’t a hospital; we simply maintain a recovery infirmary for our clients.” “Yes, surely. But you must figure it, at least for cost accounting purposes.”

“Mmm…yes and no. The figures aren’t allocated on that basis. The subheads are depreciation, overhead, operation, reserves, diet kitchen, personnel, and so forth. I suppose I could make an estimate.”

“Uh, don’t bother. What would equivalent room and board in a hospital come to?”

“That’s a little out of my line. Still…well, you could call it about one hundred dollars per day, I suppose.” “I had four days coming. Will you lend me four hundred dollars?”

He did not answer but spoke in a number code to his mechanical assistant. Then eight fifty-dollar bills were being counted into my hand. “Thanks,” I said sincerely as I tucked it away. “I’ll do my damnedest to see that this does not stay on the books too long. Six percent? Or is money tight?”

He shook his head. “It’s not a loan. Since you put it as you did, I canceled it against your unused time.” “Huh? Now, see here, Mr. Doughty, I didn’t intend to twist your arm. Of course, I’m going to—”

“Please. I told my assistant to enter the charge when I directed it to pay you. Do you want to give our auditors headaches all for a fiddling four hundred dollars? I was prepared to loan you much more than that.”

“Well—I can’t argue it now. Say, Mr. Doughty, how much money is this? How are price levels now?” “Mmm…that is a complex question.”

“Just give me an idea? What does it cost to eat?”

“Food is quite reasonable. For ten dollars you can get a very satisfactory dinner…if you are careful to select moderate-priced restaurants.”

I thanked him and left with a really warm feeling. Mr. Doughty reminded me of a paymaster I used to have in the Army. Paymasters come in only two sizes: One sort shows you where the book says that you can’t have what you’ve got coming to you; the second sort digs through the book until he finds a paragraph that lets you have what you need even if you don’t rate it.

Doughty was the second sort.

The sanctuary faced on the Wilshire Ways. There were benches in front of it and bushes and flowers. I sat down on a bench to take stock and to decide whether to go east or west. I had kept a stiff lip with Mr. Doughty but, honestly, I was badly shaken, even though I had the price of a week’s meals in my jeans.

But the sun was warm and the drone of the Ways was pleasant and I was young (biologically at least) and I had two hands and my brain.

Whistling “Hallelujah, I’m a bum,” I opened the Times to the “Help Wanted” columns.

I resisted the impulse to look through “Professional—Engineers” and turned at once to “Unskilled.”

That classification was darned short. I almost couldn’t find it.

VI

I GOT A JOB the second day, Friday, the fifteenth of December. I also had a mild run-in with the law and had repeated tangles with new ways of doing things, saying things, feeling about things. I discovered that “reorientation” by reading about it is like reading about sex—not the same thing.

I suppose I would have had less trouble if I had been set down in Omsk, or Santiago, or Djakarta. In going to a strange city in a strange land you

know that the customs are going to be different, but in Great Los Angeles I subconsciously expected things to be unchanged even though I could see that they were changed. Of course thirty years is nothing; anybody takes that much change and more in a lifetime. But it makes a difference to take it in one bite.

Take one word I used all in innocence. A lady present was offended and only the fact that I was a Sleeper—which I hastily explained—kept her husband from giving me a mouthful of knuckles. I won’t use the word here—oh yes, I will; why shouldn’t I? I’m using it to explain something. Don’t take my word for it that the word was in good usage when I was a kid; look it up in an old dictionary. Nobody scrawled it in chalk on sidewalks when I was a kid.

The word was “kink.”

There were other words which I still do not use properly without stopping to think. Not taboo words necessarily, just ones with changed meanings. “Host” for example—“host” used to mean the man who took your coat and put it in the bedroom; it had nothing to do with the birth rate.

But I got along. The job I found was crushing new ground limousines so that they could be shipped back to Pittsburgh as scrap. Cadillacs, Chryslers, Eisenhowers, Lincolns—all sorts of great, big, new powerful turbobuggies without a kilometer on their clocks. Drive ’em between the

jaws, then crunch! smash! crash!—scrap iron for blast furnaces.

It hurt me at first, since I was riding the Ways to work and didn’t own so much as a gravJumper. I expressed my opinion of it and almost lost my

job…until the shift boss remembered that I was a Sleeper and really didn’t understand.

“It’s a simple matter of economics, son. These are surplus cars the government has accepted as security against price-support loans. They’re two years old now and they can never be sold…so the government junks them and sells them back to the steel industry. You can’t run a blast furnace just on ore; you have to have scrap iron as well. You ought to know that even if you are a Sleeper. Matter of fact, with high-grade ore so scarce, there’s more and more demand for scrap. The steel industry needs these cars.”

“But why build them in the first place if they can’t be sold? It seems wasteful.”

“It just seems wasteful. You want to throw people out of work? You want to run down the standard of living?”

“Well, why not ship them abroad? It seems to me they could get more for them on the open market abroad than they are worth as scrap.”

“What!—and ruin the export market? Besides, if we started dumping cars abroad we’d get everybody sore at us—Japan, France, Germany, Great Asia, everybody. What are you aiming to do? Start a war?” He sighed and went on in a fatherly tone. “You go down to the public library and draw out some books. You don’t have any right to opinions on these things until you know something about them.”

So I shut up. I didn’t tell him that I was spending all my off time at the public library or at UCLA’s library; I had avoided admitting that I was, or used to be, an engineer—to claim that I was now an engineer would be too much like walking up to du Pont’s and saying, “Sirrah, I am an alchymiste. Hast need of art such as mine?”

I raised the subject just once more because I noticed that very few of the price-support cars were really ready to run. The workmanship was sloppy and they often lacked essentials like instrument dials or air conditioners. But when one day I noticed from the way the teeth of the crusher came down on one that it lacked even a power plant, I spoke up about it.

The shift boss just stared at me. “Great jumping Jupiter, son, surely you don’t expect them to put their best workmanship into cars that are just surplus? These cars had price-support loans against them before they ever came off the assembly line.”

So that time I shut up and stayed shut. I had better stick to engineering; economics is too esoteric for me.

But I had plenty of time to think. The job I had was not really a “job” at all in my book; all the work was done by Flexible Frank in his various disguises. Frank and his brothers ran the crusher, moved the cars into place, hauled away the scrap, kept count, and weighed the loads; my job was to stand on a little platform (I wasn’t allowed to sit) and hang onto a switch that could stop the whole operation if something went wrong. Nothing ever did, but I soon found that I was expected to spot at least one failure in automation each shift, stop the job, and send for a trouble crew.

Well, it paid twenty-one dollars a day and it kept me eating. First things first.

After social security, guild dues, income tax, defense tax, medical plan, and the welfare mutual fund I took home about sixteen of it. Mr. Doughty was wrong about a dinner costing ten dollars; you could get a very decent plate dinner for three if you did not insist on real meat, and I would defy anyone to tell whether a hamburger steak started life in a tank or out on the open range. With the stories going around about bootleg meat that might give you radiation poisoning I was perfectly happy with surrogates.

Where to live had been somewhat of a problem. Since Los Angeles had not been treated to the one-second slum-clearance plan in the Six Weeks War, an amazing number of refugees had gone there (I suppose I was one of them, although I hadn’t thought of myself as such at the time) and apparently none of them had ever gone home, even those that had homes left to go back to. The city—if you can call Great Los Angeles a city; it is more of a condition—had been choked when I went to sleep; now it was as jammed as a lady’s purse. It may have been a mistake to get rid of the smog; back in the ’60s a few people used to leave each year because of sinusitis.

Now apparently nobody left, ever.

The day I checked out of the sanctuary I had had several things on my mind, principally (1) find a job, (2) find a place to sleep, (3) catch up in engineering, (4) find Ricky, (5) get back into engineering—on my own if humanly possible, (6) find Belle and Miles and settle their hash—without going to jail for it, and (7) a slug of things, like looking up the original patent on Eager Beaver and checking my strong hunch that it was really Flexible Frank (not that it mattered now, just curiosity), and looking up the corporate history of Hired Girl, Inc., etc., etc.

I have listed the above in order of priority, as I had found out years ago (through almost flunking my freshman year in engineering) that if you didn’t use priorities, when the music stopped you were left standing. Some of these priorities ran concurrently, of course; I expected to search out Ricky and probably Belle & Co. as well, while I was boning engineering. But first things first and second things second; finding a job came even ahead of hunting for a sack because dollars are the key to everything else …when you haven’t got them.

After getting turned down six times in town I had chased an ad clear out to San Bernardino Borough, only to get there ten minutes too late. I should have rented a flop at once; instead I played it real smart and went back downtown, intending to find a room, then get up very early and be first in line for some job listed in the early edition.

How was I to know? I got my name on four rooming-house waiting lists and wound up in the park. I stayed there, walking to keep warm, until almost midnight, then gave up—Great Los Angeles winters are subtropical only if you accent the “sub.” I then took refuge in a station of Wilshire Ways…and about two in the morning they rounded me up with the rest of the vagrants.

Jails have improved. This one was warm and I think they required the cockroaches to wipe their feet.

I was charged with barracking. The judge was a young fellow who didn’t even look up from his newspaper but simply said, “These all first offenders?”

“Yes, your honor.”

“Thirty days, or take a labor-company parole. Next.” They started to march us out but I didn’t budge. “Just a minute, Judge.” “Eh? Something troubling you? Are you guilty or not guilty?”

“Uh, I really don’t know because I don’t know what it is I have done. You see—”

“Do you want a public defender? If you do you can be locked up until one can handle your case. I understand they are running about six days late right now…but it’s your privilege.”

“Uh, I still don’t know. Maybe what I want is a labor-company parole, though I’m not sure what it is. What I really want is some advice from the Court, if the Court pleases.”

The judge said to the bailiff, “Take the others out.” He turned back to me. “Spill it. But I’ll warrant you won’t like my advice. I’ve been on this job long enough to have heard every phony story and to have acquired a deep disgust toward most of them.”

“Yes, sir. Mine isn’t phony; it’s easily checked. You see, I just got out of the Long Sleep yesterday and—”

But he did look disgusted. “One of those, eh? I’ve often wondered what made our grandparents think they could dump their riffraff on us. The last thing on earth this city needs is more people…especially ones who couldn’t get along in their own time. I wish I could boot you back to whatever year you came from with a message to everybody there that the future they’re dreaming about is not, repeat not, paved with gold.” He sighed. “But it wouldn’t do any good, I’m sure. Well, what do you expect me to do? Give you another chance? Then have you pop up here again a week from

now?”

“Judge, I don’t think I’m likely to. I’ve got enough money to live until I find a job and—” “Eh? If you’ve got money, what were you doing barracking?”

“Judge, I don’t even know what that word means.” This time he let me explain. When I came to how I had been swindled by Master Insurance Company his whole manner changed.

“Those swine! My mother got taken by them after she had paid premiums for twenty years. Why didn’t you tell me this in the first place?” He took out a card, wrote something on it, and said, “Take this to the hiring office at the Surplus & Salvage Authority. If you don’t get a job come back and see me this afternoon. But no more barracking. Not only does it breed crime and vice, but you yourself are running a terrible risk of meeting up with a zombie recruiter.”

That’s how I got a job smashing up brand-new ground cars. But I still think I made no mistake in logic in deciding to job-hunt first. Anywhere is home to the man with a fat bank account—the cops leave him alone.

I found a decent room, too, within my budget, in a part of West Los Angeles which had not yet been changed over to New Plan. I think it had formerly been a coat closet.

I WOULD NOT want anyone to think I disliked the year 2000, as compared with 1970. I liked it and I liked 2001 when it rolled around a couple of weeks after they wakened me. In spite of recurrent spasms of almost unbearable homesickness, I thought that Great Los Angeles at the dawn of the Third Millennium was odds-on the most wonderful place I had ever seen. It was fast and clean and very exciting, even if it was too crowded…and even that was being coped with on a mammoth, venturesome scale. The New Plan parts of town were a joy to an engineer’s heart. If the city government had had the sovereign power to stop immigration for ten years, they could have licked the housing problem. Since they did not have that power, they just had to do their best with the swarms that kept rolling over the Sierras—and their best was spectacular beyond belief and even the failures were colossal.

It was worth sleeping thirty years just to wake up in a time when they had licked the common cold and nobody had a postnasal drip. That meant more to me than the research colony on Venus.

Two things impressed me most, one big, one little. The big one was NullGrav, of course. Back in 1970 I had known about the Babson Institute gravitation research but I had not expected anything to come of it—and nothing had; the basic field theory on which NullGrav is based was developed at the University of Edinburgh. But I had been taught in school that gravitation was something that nobody could ever do anything about, because it was inherent in the very shape of space.

So they changed the shape of space, naturally. Only temporarily and locally, to be sure, but that’s all that’s needed in moving a heavy object. It still has to stay in field relation with Mother Terra, so it’s useless for spaceships—or it is in 2001; I’ve quit making bets about the future. I learned that to make a lift it was still necessary to expend power to overcome the gravity potential, and conversely, to lower something you had to have a power

pack to store all those foot-pounds in, or something would go Phzzt!-Spung! But just to transport something horizontally, say from San Francisco to Great Los Angeles, just lift it once, then float along, no power at all, like an ice skater riding a long edge.

Lovely!

I tried to study the theory of it, but the math starts in where tensor calculus leaves off; it’s not for me. But an engineer is rarely a mathematical physicist and he does not have to be; he simply has to savvy the skinny of a thing well enough to know what it can do in practical applications— know the working parameters. I could learn those.

The “little thing” I mentioned was the changes in female styles made possible by the Sticktite fabrics. I was not startled by mere skin on bathing beaches; you could see that coming in 1970. But the weird things that the ladies could do with Sticktite made my jaw sag.

My grandpappy was born in 1890; I suppose that some of the sights in 1970 would have affected him the same way.

But I liked the fast new world and would have been happy in it if I had not been so bitterly lonely so much of the time. I was out of joint. There were times (in the middle of the night, usually) when I would gladly have swapped it all for one beat-up tomcat, or for a chance to spend an afternoon taking little Ricky to the zoo…or for the comradeship Miles and I had shared when all we had was hard work and hope.

It was still early in 2001 and I wasn’t halfway caught up on my homework, when I began to itch to leave my featherbedded job and get back to the old drawing board. There were so many, many things possible under current art which had been impossible in 1970; I wanted to get busy and design a few dozen.

For example I had expected that there would be automatic secretaries in use—I mean a machine you could dictate to and get back a business letter, spelling, punctuation, and format all perfect, without a human being in the sequence. But there weren’t any. Oh, somebody had invented a machine which could type, but it was suited only to a phonetic language like Esperanto and was useless in a language in which you could say: “Though the tough cough and hiccough plough him through.”

People won’t give up the illogicalities of English to suit the convenience of an inventor. Mohammed must go to the mountain.

If a high-school girl could sort out the cockeyed spelling of English and usually type the right word, how could a machine be taught to do it?

“Impossible” was the usual answer. It was supposed to require human judgment and understanding. But an invention is something that was “impossible” up to then—that’s why governments grant patents.

With memory tubes and the miniaturization now possible—I had been right about the importance of gold as an engineering material—with those two things it would be easy to pack a hundred thousand sound codes into a cubic foot…in other words, to sound-key every word in a Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. But that was unnecessary; ten thousand would be ample. Who expects a stenographer to field a word like “kourbash” or “pyrophyllite”? You spell such words for her if you must use them. Okay, we code the machine to accept spelling when necessary. We sound-code for punctuation…and for various formats…and to look up addresses in a file…and for how many copies…and routing…and provide at least a thousand blank word-codings for special vocabulary used in a business or profession—and make it so that the owner-client could put those special words in himself, spell a word like “stenobenthic” with the memory key depressed and never have to spell it again.

All simple. Just a matter of hooking together gadgets already on the market, then smoothing it into a production model.

The real hitch was homonyms. Dictation Daisy wouldn’t even slow up over that “tough cough and hiccough” sentence because each of those words carries a different sound. But choices like “they’re” and “their,” “right” and “write” would give her trouble.

Did the L. A. Public Library have a dictionary of English homonyms? It did…and I began counting the unavoidable homonym pairs and trying to figure how many of these could be handled by information theory through context statistics and how many would require special coding.

I began to get jittery with frustration. Not only was I wasting thirty hours a week on an utterly useless job, but also I could not do real engineering in a public library. I needed a drafting room, a shop where I could smooth out the bugs, trade catalogues, professional journals, calculating machines, and all the rest.

I decided that I would just have to get at least a subprofessional job. I wasn’t silly enough to think that I was an engineer again; there was too much art I had not yet soaked up—repeatedly I had thought of ways to do something, using something new that I had learned, only to find out at the library that somebody had solved the same problem, neater, better, and cheaper than my own first stab at it and ten or fifteen years earlier.

I needed to get into an engineering office and let these new things soak in through my skin. I had hopes that I could land a job as a junior draftsman.

I knew that they were using powered semiautomatic drafting machines now; I had seen pictures of them even though I had not had one under my hands. But I had a hunch that I could learn to play one in twenty minutes, given the chance, for they were remarkably like an idea I had once had myself: a machine that bore the same relation to the old-fashioned drawing-board-and-T-square method that a typewriter did to writing in longhand.  I had worked it all out in my head, how you could put straight lines or curves anywhere on an easel just by punching keys.

However, in this case I was just as sure that my idea had not been stolen as I was certain that Flexible Frank had been stolen, because my drafting machine had never existed except in my head. Somebody had had the same idea and had developed it logically the same way. When it’s time to railroad, people start railroading.

The Aladdin people, the same firm that made Eager Beaver, made one of the best drawing machines, Drafting Dan. I dipped into my savings, bought a better suit of clothes and a second-hand briefcase, stuffed the latter with newspapers, and presented myself at the Aladdin salesrooms with a view to “buying” one. I asked for a demonstration.

Then, when I got close to a model of Drafting Dan, I had a most upsetting experience. Déjà vu, the psychologists call it—“I have been here before.” The damned thing had been developed in precisely the fashion in which I would have developed it, had I had time to do so…instead of being kidnapped into the Long Sleep.

Don’t ask me exactly why I felt that way. A man knows his own style of work. An art critic will say that a painting is a Rubens or a Rembrandt by the brushwork, the treatment of light, the composition, the choice of pigment, a dozen things. Engineering is not science, it is an art, and there is always a wide range of choices in how to solve engineering problems. An engineering designer “signs” his work by those choices just as surely as a painter does.

Drafting Dan had the flavor of my own technique so strongly that I was quite disturbed by it. I began to wonder if there wasn’t something to telepathy after all.

I was careful to get the number of its first patent. In the state I was in I wasn’t surprised to see that the date on the first one was 1970. I resolved to find out who had invented it. It might have been one of my own teachers, from whom I had picked up some of my style. Or it might be an engineer with whom I had once worked.

The inventor might still be alive. If so, I’d look him up someday…get acquainted with this man whose mind worked just like mine.

But I managed to pull myself together and let the salesman show me how to work it. He hardly need have bothered; Drafting Dan and I were made for each other. In ten minutes I could play it better than he could. At last I reluctantly quit making pretty pictures with it, got list price, discounts, service arrangements, and so forth, then left saying that I would call him, just as he was ready to get my signature on the dotted line. It was a dirty trick, but all I cost him was an hour’s time.

From there I went to the Hired Girl main factory and applied for a job.

I knew that Belle and Miles were no longer with Hired Girl, Inc. In what time I could spare between my job and the compelling necessity to catch up in engineering I had been searching for Belle and Miles and most especially for Ricky. None of the three was listed in the Great Los Angeles telephone system, nor for that matter anywhere in the United States, for I had paid to have an “information” search made at the national office in Cleveland. A quadruple fee, it was, as I had had Belle searched for under both “Gentry” and “Darkin.”

I had the same luck with the Register of Voters for Los Angeles County.

Hired Girl, Inc., in a letter from a seventeenth vice-president in charge of foolish questions, admitted cautiously that they had once had officers by those names thirty years ago but they were unable to help me now.

Picking up a trail thirty years cold is no job for an amateur with little time and less money. I did not have their fingerprints, or I might have tried the FBI. I didn’t know their social-security numbers. My Country ’Tis of Thee had never succumbed to police-state nonsense, so there was no bureau certain to have a dossier on each citizen, nor was I in a position to tap such a file even if there had been.

Perhaps a detective agency, lavishly subsidized, could have dug through utilities records, newspaper files, and God knows what, and traced them down. But I didn’t have the lavish subsidy, nor the talent and time to do it myself.

I finally gave up on Miles and Belle while promising myself that I would, as quickly as I could afford it, put professionals to tracing Ricky. I had already determined that she held no Hired Girl stock and I had written to the Bank of America to see if they held, or ever had held, a trust for her. I got back a form letter informing me that such things were confidential, so I had written again, saying that I was a Sleeper and she was my only surviving relative. That time I got a nice letter, signed by one of the trust officers and saying that he regretted that information concerning trust beneficiaries could not be divulged even to one in my exceptional circumstances, but he felt justified in giving me the negative information that the bank had not at any time through any of its branches held a trust in favor of one Frederica Virginia Gentry.

That seemed to settle one thing. Somehow those birds had managed to get the stock away from little Ricky. My assignment of the stock would

have had to go through the Bank of America, the way I had written it. But it had not. Poor Ricky! We had both been robbed.

I made one more stab at it. The records office of the Superintendent of Instruction in Mojave did have record of a grade-school pupil named Frederica Virginia Gentry…but the named pupil had taken a withdrawal transcript in 1971. Further deponent sayeth not.

It was some consolation to know that somebody somewhere admitted that Ricky had ever existed. But she might have taken that transcript to any of many, many thousand public schools in the United States. How long would it take to write to each of them? And were their records so arranged as to permit them to answer, even supposing they were willing?

In a quarter of a billion people one little girl can drop out of sight like a pebble in the ocean.

BUT THE FAILURE of my search did leave me free to seek a job with Hired Girl, Inc., now that I knew Miles and Belle were not running it. I could have tried any of a hundred automation firms, but Hired Girl and Aladdin were the big names in appliance automatons, as important in their own field as Ford and General Motors had been in the heyday of the ground automobile. I picked Hired Girl partly for sentimental reasons; I wanted to see what my old outfit had grown into.

On Monday, 5 March 2001, I went to their employment office, got into the line for white-collar help, filled out a dozen forms having nothing to do with engineering and one that did…and was told don’t-call-us- we’ll-call-you.

I hung around and managed to bull myself in to see an assistant hiring flunky. He reluctantly looked over the one form that meant anything and told me that my engineering degree meant nothing, since there had been a thirty-year lapse when I had not used my skill.

I pointed out that I had been a Sleeper.

“That makes it even worse. In any case, we don’t hire people over forty-five.”

“But I’m not forty-five. I’m only thirty.” “You were born in 1940. Sorry.”

“What am I supposed to do? Shoot myself ?”

He shrugged. “If I were you, I’d apply for an old-age pension.”

I got out quickly before I gave him some advice. Then I walked three quarters of a mile around to the front entrance and went in. The general manager’s name was Curtis; I asked for him.

I got past the first two layers simply by insisting that I had business with him. Hired Girl, Inc., did not use their own automatons as receptionists; they used real flesh and blood. Eventually I reached a place several stories up and (I judged) about two doors from the boss, and here I encountered a firm pass-gauge type who insisted on knowing my business.

I looked around. It was a largish office with about forty real people in it, as well as a lot of machines. She said sharply, “Well? State your business and I’ll check with Mr. Curtis’ appointment secretary.”

I said loudly, making sure that everybody heard it, “I want to know what he’s going to do about my wife!” Sixty seconds later I was in his private office. He looked up. “Well? What the devil is this nonsense?”

It took half an hour and some old records to convince him that I did not have a wife and that I actually was the founder of the firm. Then things got chummy over drinks and cigars and I met the sales manager and the chief engineer and other heads of departments. “We thought you were dead,” Curtis told me. “In fact, the company’s official history says that you are.”

“Just a rumor. Some other D. B. Davis.”

The sales manager, Jack Galloway, said suddenly, “What are you doing now, Mr. Davis?” “Not much. I’ve, uh, been in the automobile business. But I’m resigning. Why?”

“ ‘Why?’ Isn’t it obvious?” He swung around toward the chief engineer, Mr. McBee. “Hear that, Mac? All you engineers are alike; you wouldn’t know a sales angle if it came up and kissed you. ‘Why?’ Mr. Davis. Because you’re sales copy, that’s why! Because you’re romance. Founder of Firm Comes Back from Grave to Visit Brain Child. Inventor of the First Robot Servant Views Fruits of His Genius.”

I said hastily, “Now wait a minute—I’m not an advertising model nor a grabbie star. I like my privacy. I didn’t come here for that; I came here for a job…in engineering.”

Mr. McBee’s eyebrows went up but he said nothing.

We wrangled for a while. Galloway tried to tell me that it was my simple duty to the firm I had founded. McBee said little, but it was obvious that he did not think I would be any addition to his department—at one point he asked me what I knew about designing solid circuits. I had to admit that my only knowledge of them was from a little reading of nonclassified publications.

Curtis finally suggested a compromise. “See here, Mr. Davis, you obviously occupy a very special position. One might say that you founded not merely this firm but the whole industry. Nevertheless, as Mr. McBee has hinted, the industry has moved on since the year you took the Long Sleep. Suppose we put you on the staff with the title of…uh, ‘Research Engineer Emeritus.’ ”

I hesitated. “What would that mean?”

“Whatever you made it mean. However, I tell you frankly that you would be expected to cooperate with Mr. Galloway. We not only make these things, we have to sell them.”

“Uh, would I have a chance to do any engineering?”

“That’s up to you. You’d have facilities and you could do what you wished.” “Shop facilities?”

Curtis looked at McBee. The chief engineer answered, “Certainly, certainly…within reason, of course.” He had slipped so far into Glasgow speech that I could hardly understand him.

Galloway said briskly, “That’s settled. May I be excused, B.J.? Don’t go away, Mr. Davis—we’re going to get a picture of you with the very first model of Hired Girl.”

And he did. I was glad to see her…the very model I had put together with my own pinkies and lots of sweat. I wanted to see if she still worked, but McBee wouldn’t let me start her up—I don’t think he really believed that I knew how she worked.

I HAD A GOOD time at Hired Girl all through March and April. I had all the professional tools I could want, technical journals, the indispensable trade catalogues, a practical library, a Drafting Dan (Hired Girl did not make a drafting machine themselves, so they used the best on the market, which was Aladdin’s), and the shoptalk of professionals…music to my ears!

I got acquainted especially with Chuck Freudenberg, components assistant chief engineer. For my money Chuck was the only real engineer

there; the rest were overeducated slipstick mechanics…including McBee, for the chief engineer was, I thought, a clear proof that it took more than a

degree and a Scottish accent to make an engineer. After we got better acquainted Chuck admitted that he felt the same way. “Mac doesn’t really like anything new; he would rather do things the way his grandpa did on the bonnie banks of the Clyde.”

“What’s he doing in this job?”

Freudenberg did not know the details, but it seemed that the present firm had been a manufacturing company which had simply rented the patents (my patents) from Hired Girl, Inc. Then about twenty years ago there had been one of those tax-saving mergers, with Hired Girl stock swapped for stock in the manufacturing firm and the new firm taking the name of the one I had founded. Chuck thought that McBee had been hired at that time. “He’s got a piece of it, I think.”

Chuck and I used to sit over beers in the evening and discuss engineering, what the company needed, and the whichness of what. His original interest in me had been that I was a Sleeper. Too many people, I had found, had a queezy interest in Sleepers (as if we were freaks) and I avoided letting people know that I was one. But Chuck was fascinated by the time jump itself and his interest was a healthy one in what the world had been like before he was born, as recalled by a man who literally remembered it as “only yesterday.”

In return he was willing to criticize the new gadgets that were always boiling up in my head, and set me straight when I (as I did repeatedly) would rough out something that was old hat…in 2001 A.D. Under his friendly guidance I was becoming a modern engineer, catching up fast.

But when I outlined to him one April evening my autosecretary idea he said slowly, “Dan, have you done work on this on company time?” “Huh? No, not really. Why?”

“How does your contract read?”

“What? I don’t have one.” Curtis had put me on the payroll and Galloway had taken pictures of me and had a ghost writer asking me silly questions; that was all.

“Mmm…pal, I wouldn’t do anything about this until you are sure where you stand. This is really new. And I think you can make it work.” “I hadn’t worried about that angle.”

“Put it away for a while. You know the shape the company is in. It’s making money and we put out good products. But the only new items we’ve brought out in five years are ones we’ve acquired by license. I can’t get anything new past Mac. But you can bypass Mac and take this to the big boss. So don’t…unless you want to hand it over to the company just for your salary check.”

I took his advice. I continued to design but I burned any drawings I thought were good—I didn’t need them once I had them in my head. I didn’t feel guilty about it; they hadn’t hired me as an engineer, they were paying me to be a show-window dummy for Galloway. When my advertising value was sucked dry, they would give me a month’s pay and a vote of thanks and let me go.

But by then I’d be a real engineer again and able to open my own office. If Chuck wanted to take a flyer I’d take him with me.

Instead of handing my story to the newspapers Jack Galloway played it slow for the national magazines; he wanted Life to do a spread, tying it in with the one they had done a third of a century earlier on the first production model of Hired Girl. Life did not rise to the bait but he did manage to plant it several other places that spring, tying it in with display advertising.

I thought of growing a beard. Then I realized that no one recognized me and would not have cared if they had.

I got a certain amount of crank mail, including one letter from a man who promised me that I would burn eternally in hell for defying God’s plan for my life. I chucked it, while thinking that if God had really opposed what had happened to me, He should never have made cold sleep possible. Otherwise I wasn’t bothered.

But I did get a phone call, on Thursday, 3 May 2001. “Mrs. Schultz is on the line, sir. Will you take the call?”

Schultz? Damnation, I had promised Doughty the last time I had called him that I would take care of that. But I had put it off because I did not want to; I was almost sure it was one of those screwballs who pursued Sleepers and asked them personal questions.

But she had called several times, Doughty had told me, since I had checked out in December. In accordance with the policy of the sanctuary they had refused to give her my address, agreeing merely to pass along messages.

Well, I owed it to Doughty to shut her up. “Put her on.”

“Is this Danny Davis?” My office phone had no screen; she could not see me. “Speaking. Your name is Schultz?”

“Oh, Danny darling, it’s so good to hear your voice!”

I didn’t answer right away. She went on, “Don’t you knowme?” I knew her, all right. It was Belle Gentry.

I MADE A DATE with her.

My first impulse had been to tell her to go to hell and switch off. I had long since realized that revenge was childish; revenge would not bring Pete back and fitting revenge would simply land me in jail. I had hardly thought about Belle and Miles since I had quit looking for them.

But Belle almost certainly knew where Ricky was. So I made a date.

She wanted me to take her to dinner, but I would not do that. I’m not fussy about fine points of etiquette. But eating is something you do only with friends; I would see her but I had no intention of eating or drinking with her. I got her address and told her I would be there that evening at eight.

It was a cheap rental, a walk-up flat in a part of town (lower La Brea) not yet converted to New Plan. Before I buzzed her door I knew that she had not hung onto what she had bilked me out of, or she would not have been living there.

And when I saw her I realized that revenge was much too late; she and the years had managed it for me.

Belle was not less than fifty-three by the age she had claimed, and probably closer to sixty in fact. Between geriatrics and endocrinology a woman who cared to take the trouble could stay looking thirty for at least thirty extra years, and lots of them did. There were grabbie stars who boasted of being grandmothers while still playing ingénue leads.

Belle had not taken the trouble.

She was fat and shrill and kittenish. It was evident that she still considered her body her principal asset, for she was dressed in a Sticktite negligee which, while showing much too much of her, also showed that she was female, mammalian, overfed, and underexercised.

She was not aware of it. That once-keen brain was fuzzy; all that was left was her conceit and her overpowering confidence in herself. She threw herself on me with squeals of joy and came close to kissing me before I could unwind her.

I pushed her wrists back. “Take it easy, Belle.”

“But, darling! I’m so happy—so excited—and so thrilled to see you!”

“I’ll bet.” I had gone there resolved to keep my temper…just find out what I wanted to know and get out. But I was finding it difficult. “Remember

how you saw me last? Drugged to my eyebrows so that you could stuff me into cold sleep.”

She looked puzzled and hurt. “But, sweetheart, we only did it for your own good! You were so ill.” I think she believed it. “Okay, okay. Where’s Miles? You’re Mrs. Schultz now?”

Her eyes grew wide. “Didn’t you know?

“Know what?”

“Poor Miles…poor, dear Miles. He lived less than two years, Danny boy, after you left us.” Her expression changed suddenly. “The frallup cheated me!”

“That’s too bad.” I wondered how he had died. Did he fall or was he pushed? Arsenic soup? I decided to stick to the main issue before she jumped the track completely. “What became of Ricky?”

“Ricky?”

“Miles’ little girl. Frederica.”

“Oh, that horrible little brat! How should I know? She went to live with her grandmother.” “Where? And what was her grandmother’s name?”

“Where? Tucson—or Yuma—or some place dull like that. It might have been Indio. Darling, I don’t want to talk about that impossible child— I want

to talk about us.”

“In a moment. What was her grandmother’s name?”

“Danny boy, you’re being very tiresome. Why in the world should I remember something like that?” “What was it?”

“Oh, Hanolon…or Haney…or Heinz. Or it might have been Hinckley. Don’t be dull, dear. Let’s have a drink. Let’s drink a toast to our happy reunion.”

I shook my head. “I don’t use the stuff.” This was almost true. Having discovered that it was an unreliable friend in a crisis, I usually limited myself to a beer with Chuck Freudenberg.

“How very dull, dearest. You won’t mind if I have one.” She was already pouring it—straight gin, the lonely girl’s friend. But before she downed it she picked up a plastic pill bottle and rolled two capsules into her palm. “Have one?”

I recognized the striped casing—euphorion. It was supposed to be nontoxic and non-habit-forming, but opinions differed. There was agitation to class it with morphine and the barbiturates. “Thanks. I’m happy now.”

“How nice.” She took both of them, chased them with gin. I decided if I was to learn anything at all I had better talk fast; soon she would be nothing but giggles.

I took her arm and sat her down on her couch, then sat down across from her. “Belle, tell me about yourself. Bring me up to date. How did you and Miles make out with the Mannix people?”

“Uh? But we didn’t.” She suddenly flared up. “That was your fault!” “Huh? My fault? I wasn’t even there.”

“Of course it was your fault. That monstrous thing you built out of an old wheelchair…that was what they wanted. And then it was gone.” “Gone? Where was it?”

She peered at me with piggy, suspicious eyes. “You ought to know. You took it.”

“Me? Belle, are you crazy? I couldn’t take anything. I was frozen stiff, in cold sleep. Where was it? And when did it disappear?” It fitted in with my own notions that somebody must have swiped Flexible Frank, if Belle and Miles had not made use of him. But out of all the billions on the globe, I was the one who certainly had not. I had not seen Frank since that disastrous night when they had outvoted me. “Tell me about it, Belle. Where was

it? And what made you think I took it?”

“It had to be you. Nobody else knew it was important. That pile of junk! I told Miles not to put it in the garage.”

“But if somebody did swipe it, I doubt if they could make it work. You still had all the notes and instructions and drawings.”

“No, we didn’t either. Miles, the fool, had stuffed them all inside it the night we had to move it to protect it.”

I did not fuss about the word “protect.” Instead I was about to say that he couldn’t possibly have stuffed several pounds of paper into Flexible Frank; he was already stuffed like a goose—when I remembered that I had built a temporary shelf across the bottom of his wheelchair base to hold tools while I worked on him. A man in a hurry might very well have emptied my working files into that space.

No matter. The crime, or crimes, had been committed thirty years ago. I wanted to find out how Hired Girl, Inc., had slipped away from them.

“After the Mannix deal fell through what did you do with the company?”

“We ran it, of course. Then when Jake quit us Miles said we had to shut down. Miles was a weakling…and I never liked that Jake Schmidt. Sneaky. Always asking why you had quit…as if we could have stopped you! I wanted us to hire a good foreman and keep going. The company would have been worth more. But Miles insisted.”

“What happened then?”

“Why, then we licensed to Geary Manufacturing, of course. You know that; you’re working there now.”

I did know that; the full corporate name of Hired Girl was now “Hired Girl Appliances and Geary Manufacturing, Inc.”—even though the signs read simply “Hired Girl.” I seemed to have found out all I needed to know that this flabby old wreck could tell me.

But I was curious on another point. “You two sold your stock after you licensed to Geary?”

“Huh? Whatever put that silly notion in your head?” Her expression broke and she began to blubber, pawing feebly for a handkerchief, then giving up and letting the tears go. “He cheated me! He cheated me! The dirty shiker cheated me…he kinked me out of it.” She snuffled and added meditatively, “You all cheated me…and you were the worst of the lot, Danny boy. After I had been so good to you.” She started to bawl again.

I decided that euphorion wasn’t worth whatever it cost. Or maybe she enjoyed crying. “How did he cheat you, Belle?”

“What? Why, you know. He left it all to that dirty brat of his…after all that he had promised me…after I nursed him when he hurt so. And she wasnt even his own daughter. That proves it.”

It was the first good news I had had all evening. Apparently Ricky had received one good break, even if they had grabbed my stock away from

her earlier. So I got back to the main point. “Belle, what was Ricky’s grandmother’s name? And where did they live?” “Where did who live?”

“Ricky’s grandmother.” “Who’s Ricky?”

“Miles’ daughter. Try to think, Belle. It’s important.” That set her off. She pointed a finger at me and shrilled, “I know you. You were in love with her, that’s what. That dirty little sneak…her and that horrible cat.”

I felt a burst of anger at the mention of Pete. But I tried to suppress it. I simply grabbed her shoulders and shook her a little. “Brace up, Belle. I want to know just one thing. Where did they live? How did Miles address letters when he wrote to them?”

She kicked at me. “I won’t even talk to you! You’ve been perfectly stinking ever since you got here.” Then she appeared to sober almost instantly and said quietly, “I don’t know. The grandmother’s name was Haneker, or something like that. I only saw her once, in court, when they came to see about the will.”

“When was that?”

“Right after Miles died, of course.” “When did Miles die, Belle?”

She switched again. “You want to know too much. You’re as bad as the sheriffs…questions, questions, questions!” Then she looked up and said pleadingly, “Let’s forget everything and just be ourselves. There’s just you and me now, dear…and we still have our lives ahead of us. A woman isn’t old at thirty-nine…Schultzie said I was the youngest thing he ever saw—and that old goat had seen plenty, let me tell you! We could be so happy, dear. We—”

I had had all I could stand, even to play detective. “I’ve got to go, Belle.” “What, dear? Why, it’s early…and we’ve got all night ahead of us. I thought—” “I don’t care what you thought. I’ve got to leave right now.”

“Oh dear! Such a pity. When will I see you again? Tomorrow? I’m terribly busy but I’ll break my engagements and—” “I won’t be seeing you again, Belle.” I left.

I never did see her again.

As soon as I was home I took a hot bath, scrubbing hard. Then I sat down and tried to add up what I had found out, if anything. Belle seemed to think that Ricky’s grandmother’s name began with an “H”—if Belle’s maunderings meant anything at all, a matter highly doubtful—and that they had lived in one of the desert towns in Arizona, or possibly California. Well, perhaps professional skip-tracers could make something of that.

Or maybe not. In any case it would be tedious and expensive; I’d have to wait until I could afford it. Did I know anything else that signified?

Miles had died (so Belle said) around 1972. If he had died in this county I ought to be able to find the date in a couple of hours of searching, and after that I ought to be able to track down the hearing on his will…if there had been one, as Belle had implied. Through that I might be able to find out where Ricky had lived then. If courts kept such records. (I didn’t know.) If I had gained anything by cutting the lapse down to twenty-eight years and locating the town she had lived in that long ago.

If there was any point in looking for a woman now forty-one and almost certainly married and with a family. The jumbled ruin that had once been Belle Darkin had shaken me; I was beginning to realize what thirty years could mean. Not that I feared that Ricky grown up would be anything but gracious and good…but would she even remember me? Oh, I did not think she would have forgotten me entirely, but wasn’t it likely that I would be just a faceless person, the man she had sometimes called “Uncle Danny” and who had that nice cat?

Wasn’t I, in my own way, living in a fantasy of the past quite as much as Belle was?

Oh well, it couldn’t hurt to try again to find her. At the least, we could exchange Christmas cards each year. Her husband could not very well object to that.

THE NEXT MORNING was Friday, the fourth of May. Instead of going into the office I went down to the county Hall of Records. They were moving everything and told me to come back next month, so I went to the office of the Times and got a crick in my neck from a microscanner. But I did find out that if Miles had died any date between twelve and thirty-six months after I had been tucked in the freezer, he had not done so in Los Angeles County—if the death notices were correct.

Of course there was no law requiring him to die in L. A. County. You can die anyplace. They’ve never managed to regulate that.

Perhaps Sacramento had consolidated state records. I decided I would have to check someday, thanked the Times librarian, went out to lunch, and eventually got back to Hired Girl, Inc.

There were two phone calls and a note waiting, all from Belle. I got as far in the note as “Dearest Dan,” tore it up and told the desk not to accept any calls for me from Mrs. Schultz. Then I went over to the accounting office and asked the chief accountant if there was any way to check up on past ownership of a retired stock issue. He said he would try and I gave him the numbers, from memory, of the original Hired Girl stock I had once held. It took no feat of memory; we had issued exactly one thousand shares to start with and I had held the first five hundred and ten, and Belle’s “engagement present” had come off the front end.

I went back to my cubbyhole and found McBee waiting for me. “Where have you been?” he wanted to know.

“Out and around. Why?”

“That’s hardly a sufficient answer. Mr. Galloway was in twice today looking for you. I was forced to tell him I did not know where you were.”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! If Galloway wants me he’ll find me eventually. If he spent half the time peddling the merchandise on its merits that he does trying to think up cute new angles, the firm would be better off.” Galloway was beginning to annoy me. He was supposed to be in charge of selling, but it seemed to me that he concentrated on kibitzing the advertising agency that handled our account. But I’m prejudiced; engineering is the only part that interests me. All the rest strikes me as paper shuffling, mere overhead.

I knew what Galloway wanted me for and, to tell the truth, I had been dragging my feet. He wanted to dress me up in 1900 costumes and take pictures. I had told him that he could take all the pix he wanted of me in 1970 costumes, but that 1900 was twelve years before my father was born. He said nobody would know the difference, so I told him what the fortuneteller told the cop. He said I didn’t have the right attitude.

These people who deal in fancification to fool the public think nobody can read and write but themselves. McBee said, “You don’t have the right attitude, Mr. Davis.”

“So? I’m sorry.”

“You’re in an odd position. You are charged to my department, but I’m supposed to make you available to advertising and sales when they need you. From here on I think you had better use the time clock like everyone else…and you had better check with me whenever you leave the office during working hours. Please see to it.”

I counted to ten slowly, using binary notation. “Mac, do you use the time clock?” “Eh? Of course not. I’m the chief engineer.”

“So you are. It says so right over on that door. But see here, Mac, I was chief engineer of this bolt bin before you started to shave. Do you really think that I am going to knuckle under to a time clock?”

He turned red. “Possibly not. But I can tell you this: If you don’t, you won’t draw your check.” “So? You didn’t hire me; you can’t fire me.”

“Mmm…we’ll see. I can at least transfer you out of my department and over to advertising where you belong. If you belong anywhere.” He glanced at my drafting machine. “You certainly aren’t producing anything here. I don’t fancy having that expensive machine tied up any longer.” He nodded briskly. “Good day.”

I followed him out. An Office Boy rolled in and placed a large envelope in my basket, but I did not wait to see what it was; I went down to the staff coffee bar and fumed. Like a lot of other triple-ought-gauge minds, Mac thought creative work could be done by the numbers. No wonder the old firm hadn’t produced anything new for years.

Well, to hell with him. I hadn’t planned to stick around much longer anyway.

An hour or so later I wandered back up and found an interoffice mail envelope in my basket. I opened it, thinking that Mac had decided to throw the switch on me at once.

But it was from accounting; it read:

Dear Mr. Davis:

Re: the stock you inquired about.

Dividends on the larger block were paid from first quarter 1971 to second quarter 1980 on the original shares, to a trust held in favor of a party named Heinicke. Our reorganization took place in 1980 and the abstract at hand is somewhat obscure, but it appears that the equivalent shares (after reorganization) were sold to Cosmopolitan Insurance Group, which still holds them. Regarding the smaller block of stock, it was held (as you suggested) by Belle D. Gentry until 1972, when it was assigned to Sierra Acceptances Corporation, who broke it up and sold it piecemeal “over the counter.” The exact subsequent history of each share and its equivalent after reorganization could be traced if needed, but more time would be required.

If this department can be of any further assistance to you, please feel free to call on us.

Y. E. Reuther, Ch. Acct. I called Reuther and thanked him and told him that I had all I wanted. I knew now that my assignment to Ricky had never been effective. Since the

transfer of my stock that did show in the record was clearly fraudulent, the deal whiffed of Belle; this third party could have been either another of her stooges or possibly a fictitious person—she was probably already planning on swindling Miles by then.

Apparently she had been short of cash after Miles’ death and had sold off the smaller block. But I did not care what had happened to any of the stock once it passed out of Belle’s control. I had forgotten to ask Reuther to trace Miles’ stock…that might give a lead to Ricky even though she no longer held it. But it was late Friday already; I’d ask him Monday. Right now I wanted to open the large envelope still waiting for me, for I had spotted the return address.

I had written to the patent office early in March about the original patents on both Eager Beaver and Drafting Dan. My conviction that the original

Eager Beaver was just another name for Flexible Frank had been somewhat shaken by my first upsetting experience with Drafting Dan; I had considered the possibility that the same unknown genius who had conceived Dan so nearly as I had imagined him might also have developed a parallel equivalent of Flexible Frank. The theory was bulwarked by the fact that both patents had been taken out the same year and both patents were held (or had been held until they expired) by the same company, Aladdin.

But I had to know. And if this inventor was still alive I wanted to meet him. He could teach me a thing or four.

I had written first to the patent office, only to get a form letter back that all records of expired patents were now kept in the National Archives in Carlsbad Caverns. So I wrote the Archives and got another form letter with a schedule of fees. So I wrote a third time, sending a postal order (no personal checks, please) for prints of the whole works on both patents—descriptions, claims, drawings, histories.

This fat envelope looked like my answer.

The one on top was 4,307,909, the basic for Eager Beaver. I turned to the drawings, ignoring for the moment both description and claims. Claims aren’t important anyway except in court; the basic notion in writing up claims on an application for patent is to claim the whole wide world in the broadest possible terms, then let the patent examiners chew you down—this is why patent attorneys are born. The descriptions, on the other hand, have to be factual, but I can read drawings faster than I can read descriptions.

I had to admit that it did not look too much like Flexible Frank. It was better than Flexible Frank; it could do more and some of the linkages were simpler. The basic notion was the same—but that had to be true, as a machine controlled by Thorsen tubes and ancestral to Eager Beaver had to be based on the same principles I had used in Flexible Frank.

I could almost see myself developing just such a device…sort of a second-stage model of Frank. I had once had something of the sort in mind— Frank without Frank’s household limitations.

I finally got around to looking up the inventor’s name on the claims and description sheets. I recognized it all right. It was D. B. Davis.

I looked at it while whistling “Time on My Hands” slowly and off key. So Belle had lied again. I wondered if there was any truth at all in that spate of drivel she had fed me. Of course Belle was a pathological liar, but I had read somewhere that pathological liars usually have a pattern, starting from the truth and embellishing it, rather than indulging in complete fancy. Quite evidently my model of Frank had never been “stolen” but had been turned over to some other engineer to smooth up, then the application had been made in my name.

But the Mannix deal had never gone through; that one fact was certain, since I knew it from company records. But Belle had said that their failure to produce Flexible Frank as contracted had soured the Mannix deal.

Had Miles grabbed Frank for himself, letting Belle think that it had been stolen? Or restolen, rather.

In that case…I dropped guessing at it, as hopeless, more hopeless than the search for Ricky. I might have to take a job with Aladdin before I would be able to ferret out where they had gotten the basic patent and who had benefited by the deal. It probably was not worth it, since the patent was expired, Miles was dead, and Belle, if she had gained a dime out of it, had long since thrown it away. I had satisfied myself on the one point important to me, the thing I had set out to prove; i.e., that I myself was the original inventor. My professional pride was salved and who cares about money when three meals a day are taken care of ? Not me.

So I turned to 4,307,910, the first Drafting Dan.

The drawings were a delight. I couldn’t have planned it better myself; this boy really had it. I admired the economy of the linkages and the clever way the circuits had been used to reduce the moving parts to a minimum. Moving parts are like the vermiform appendix; a source of trouble to be done away with whenever possible.

He had even used an electric typewriter for his keyboard chassis, giving credit on the drawing to an IBM patent series. That was smart, that was engineering: never reinvent something that you can buy down the street.

I had to know who this brainy boy was, so I turned to the papers. It was D. B. Davis.

AFTER QUITE A LONG time I phoned Dr. Albrecht. They rounded him up and I told him who I was, since my office phone had no visual. “I recognized your voice,” he answered. “Hi there, son. How are you getting along with your new job?”

“Well enough. They haven’t offered me a partnership yet.”

“Give them time. Happy otherwise? Find yourself fitting back in?”

“Oh, sure! If I had known what a great place here and now is I’d have taken the Sleep earlier. You couldn’t hire me to go back to 1970.”

“Oh, come now! I remember that year pretty well. I was a kid then on a farm in Nebraska. I used to hunt and fish. I had fun. More than I have now.” “Well, to each his own. I like it now. But look, Doc, I didn’t call up just to talk philosophy; I’ve got a little problem.”

“Well, let’s have it. It ought to be a relief; most people have big problems.” “Doc? Is it at all possible for the Long Sleep to cause amnesia?”

He hesitated before replying. “It is conceivably possible. I can’t say that I’ve ever seen a case, as such. I mean unconnected with other causes.” “What are the things that cause amnesia?”

“Any number of things. The commonest, perhaps, is the patient’s own subconscious wish. He forgets a sequence of events, or rearranges them, because the facts are unbearable to him. That’s a functional amnesia in the raw. Then there is the old-fashioned knock on the head— amnesia from trauma. Or it might be amnesia through suggestion… under drugs or hypnosis. What’s the matter, bub? Can’t you find your checkbook?”

“It’s not that. So far as I know, I’m getting along just fine now. But I can’t get some things straight that happened before I took the Sleep…and it’s got me worried.”

“Mmm…any possibility of any of the causes I mentioned?”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “Uh, all of them, except maybe the bump on the head…and even that might have happened while I was drunk.”

“I neglected to mention,” he said dryly, “the commonest temporary amnesia—pulling a blank while under the affluence of incohol. See here, son, why don’t you come see me and we’ll talk it over in detail? If I can’t tag what is biting you—I’m not a psychiatrist, you know—I can turn you over to a hypno-analyst who will peel back your memory like an onion and tell you why you were late to school on the fourth of February your second-grade year. But he’s pretty expensive, so why not give me a whirl first?”

I said, “Cripes, Doc, I’ve bothered you too much already…and you are pretty stuffy about taking money.” “Son, I’m always interested in my people; they’re all the family I have.”

So I put him off by saying that I would call him the first of the week if I wasn’t straightened out. I wanted to think about it anyhow.

Most of the lights went out except in my office; a Hired Girl, scrub-woman type, looked in, twigged that the room was still occupied, and rolled silently away. I still sat there.

Presently Chuck Freudenberg stuck his head in and said, “I thought you left long ago. Wake up and finish your sleep at home.”

I looked up. “Chuck, I’ve got a wonderful idea. Let’s buy a barrel of beer and two straws.”

He considered it carefully. “Well, it’s Friday…and I always like to have a head on Monday; it lets me know what day it is.” “Carried and so ordered. Wait a second while I stuff some things in this briefcase.”

We had some beers, then we had some food, then we had more beers at a place where the music was good, then we moved on to another place where there was no music and the booths had hush linings and they didn’t disturb you as long as you ordered something about once an hour. We talked. I showed him the patent records.

Chuck looked over the Eager Beaver prototype. “That’s a real nice job, Dan. I’m proud of you, boy. I’d like your autograph.” “But look at this one.” I gave him the drafting-machine patent papers.

“Some ways this one is even nicer. Dan, do you realize that you have probably had more influence on the present state of the art than, well, than Edison had in his period? You know that, boy?”

“Cut it out, Chuck; this is serious.” I gestured abruptly at the pile of photostats. “Okay, so I’m responsible for one of them. But I cant be responsible for the other one. I didn’t do it…unless I’m completely mixed up about my own life before I took the Sleep. Unless I’ve got amnesia.”

“You’ve been saying that for the past twenty minutes. But you don’t seem to have any open circuits. You’re no crazier than is normal in an engineer.”

I banged the table, making the steins dance. “I’ve got to know!” “Steady there. So what are you going to do?”

“Huh?” I pondered it. “I’m going to pay a psychiatrist to dig it out of me.”

He sighed. “I thought you might say that. Now look, Dan, let’s suppose you pay this brain mechanic to do this and he reports that nothing is wrong, your memory is in fine shape, and all your relays are closed. What then?”

“That’s impossible.”

“That’s what they told Columbus. You haven’t even mentioned the most likely explanation.” “Huh? What?”

Without answering he signaled the waiter and told it to bring back the big phone book, extended area. I said, “What’s the matter? You calling the wagon for me?”

“Not yet.” He thumbed through the enormous book, then stopped and said, “Dan, scan this.”

I looked. He had his finger on “Davis.” There were columns of Davises. But where he had his finger there were a dozen “D. B. Davises” —from “Dabney” to “Duncan.”

There were three “Daniel B. Davises.” One of them was me.

 “That’s from less than seven million people,” he pointed out. “Want to try your luck on more than two hundred and fifty million?” “It doesn’t prove anything,” I said feebly.

“No,” he agreed, “it doesn’t. It would be quite a coincidence, I readily agree, if two engineers with such similar talents happened to be working on the same sort of thing at the same time and just happened to have the same last name and the same initials. By the laws of statistics we could probably approximate just how unlikely it is that it would happen. But people forget—especially those who ought to know better, such as yourself—

that while the laws of statistics tell you how unlikely a particular coincidence is, they state just as firmly that coincidences do happen. This looks like one. I like that a lot better than I like the theory that my beer buddy has slipped his cams. Good beer buddies are hard to come by.”

“What do you think I ought to do?”

“The first thing to do is not to waste your time and money on a psychiatrist until you try the second thing. The second thing is to find out the first name of this ‘D. B. Davis’ who filed this patent. There will be some easy way to do that. Likely as not his first name will be ‘Dexter.’ Or even ‘Dorothy.’ But don’t trip a breaker if it is ‘Daniel,’ because the middle name might be ‘Berzowski’ with a social-security number different from yours. And the third thing to do, which is really the first, is to forget it for now and order another round.”

So we did, and talked of other things, particularly women. Chuck had a theory that women were closely related to machinery, both utterly unpredictable by logic. He drew graphs on the tabletop in beer to prove his thesis.

Sometime later I said suddenly, “If there were real time travel, I know what I would do.” “Huh? What are you talking about?”

“About my problem. Look, Chuck, I got here—got to ‘now’ I mean— by a sort of half-baked, horse-and-buggy time travel. But the trouble is I can’t go back. All the things that are worrying me happened thirty years ago. I’d go back and dig out the truth…if there were such a thing as real time travel.”

He stared at me. “But there is.What?

He suddenly sobered. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

I said, “Maybe not, but you already have said it. Now you’d better tell me what you meant before I empty this here stein over your head.” “Forget it, Dan. I made a slip.”

“Talk!”

“That’s just what I can’t do.” He glanced around. No one was near us. “It’s classified.”

“Time travel classified? Good God, why?

“Hell, boy, didn’t you ever work for the government? They’d classify sex if they could. There doesn’t have to be a reason; it’s just their policy. But it

is classified and I’m bound by it. So lay off.”

“But—Quit fooling around about it, Chuck; this is important to me. Terribly important.” When he didn’t answer and looked stubborn I said, “You

can tell me. Shucks, I used to have a ‘Q’ clearance myself. Never suspended, either. It’s just that I’m no longer with the government.” “What’s a ‘Q’ clearance?”

I explained and presently he nodded. You mean an ‘Alpha’ status. You must have been hot stuff, boy; I only rated a ‘Beta.’ ” “Then why can’t you tell me?”

“Huh? You know why. Regardless of your rated status, you don’t have the necessary ‘Need to Know’ qualification.” “The hell I don’t! ‘Need to Know’ is what I’ve got most of.”

But he wouldn’t budge, so finally I said in disgust, “I don’t think there is such a thing. I think you just had a belch back up on you.” He stared at me solemnly for a while, then he said, “Danny.”

“Huh?”

“I’m going to tell you. Just remember your ‘Alpha’ status, boy. I’m going to tell you because it can’t hurt anything and I want you to realize that it

couldn’t possibly be of use to you in your problem. It’s time travel, all right, but it’s not practical. You can’t use it.” “Why not?”

“Give me a chance, will you? They never smoothed the bugs out of it and it’s not even theoretically possible that they ever will. It’s of no practical value whatsoever, even for research. It’s a mere by-product of NullGrav— that’s why they classified it.”

“But, hell, NullGrav is declassified.”

“What’s that got to do with it? If this was commercial, too, maybe they’d unwrap it. But shut up.”

I’m afraid I didn’t, but I’d better tell this as if I had. During Chuck’s senior year at the University of Colorado—Boulder, that is—he had earned extra money as a lab assistant. They had a big cryogenics lab there and at first he had worked in that. But the school had a juicy defense contract concerned with the Edinburgh field theory and they had built a big new physics laboratory in the mountains out of town. Chuck was reassigned there to Professor Twitchell—Dr. Hubert Twitchell, the man who just missed the Nobel Prize and got nasty about it.

“Twitch got the notion that if he polarized around another axis he could reverse the gravitational field instead of leveling it off. Nothing happened. So he fed what he had done back into the computer and got wild-eyed at the results. He never showed them to me, of course. He put two silver dollars into the test cage—they still used hard money around those parts then—after making me mark them. He punched the solenoid button and they disappeared.

“Now that is not much of a trick,” Chuck went on. “Properly, he should have followed up by making them reappear out of the nose of a little boy who volunteers to come up on the stage. But he seemed satisfied, so I was—I was paid by the hour.

“A week later one of those cartwheels reappeared. Just one. But before that, one afternoon while I was cleaning up after he had gone home, a guinea pig showed up in the cage. It didn’t belong in the lab and I hadn’t seen it around before, so I took it over to the bio lab on my way home. They counted and weren’t short any pigs, although it’s hard to be certain with guinea pigs, so I took it home and made a pet out of it.

“After that single silver dollar came back Twitch got so worked up he quit shaving. Next time he used two guinea pigs from the bio lab. One of them looked awfully familiar to me, but I didn’t see it long because he pushed the panic button and they both disappeared.

“When one of them came back about ten days later—the one that didn’t look like mine—Twitch knew for sure that he had it. Then the resident O- in-C for the department of defense came around—a chair-type colonel who used to be a professor himself, of botany. Very military type… Twitch had no use for him. This colonel swore us both to double-dyed secrecy, over and above our ‘status’ oaths. He seemed to think that he had the greatest thing in military logistics since Caesar invented the carbon copy. His idea was that you could send divisions forward or back to a battle you had lost, or were going to lose, and save the day. The enemy would never figure out what had happened. He was crazy in hearts and spades, of course…and he didn’t get the star he was bucking for. But the ‘Critically Secret’ classification he stuck on it stayed, so far as I know, right up to the present. I’ve never seen a disclosure on it.”

“It might have some military use,” I argued, “it seems to me, if you could engineer it to take a division of soldiers at a time. No, wait a minute, I see the hitch. You always had ’em paired. It would take two divisions, one to go forward, one to go back. One division you would lose entirely… I suppose it would be more practical to have a division at the right place at the right time in the first place.”

“You’re right, but your reasons are wrong. You don’t have to use two divisions or two guinea pigs or two anything. You simply have to match the masses. You could use a division of men and a pile of rocks that weighed as much. It’s an action-reaction situation, corollary with Newton’s Third

Law.” He started drawing in the beer drippings again. “MV equals mv…the basic rocket-ship formula. The cognate time-travel formula is MT equals

mt.”

“I still don’t see the hitch. Rocks are cheap.”

“Use your head, Danny. With a rocket ship you can aim the kinkin’ thing. But which direction is last week? Point to it. Just try. You haven’t the slightest idea which mass is going back and which one is going forward. There’s no way to orient the equipment.”

I shut up. It would be embarrassing to a general to expect a division of fresh shock troops and get nothing but a pile of gravel. No wonder the ex- prof never made brigadier. But Chuck was still talking:

“You treat the two masses like the plates of a condenser, bringing them up to the same temporal potential. Then you discharge them on a

damping curve that is effectively vertical. Smacko!—one of them heads for the middle of next year, the other one is history. But you never know which one. But that’s not the worst of it; you can’t come back.”

“Huh? Who wants to come back?”

“Look, what use is it for research if you can’t come back? Or for commerce? Either way you jump, your money is no good and you can’t possibly get in touch with where you started. No equipment—and believe me it takes equipment and power. We took power from the Arco reactors. Expensive…that’s another drawback.”

“You could get back,” I pointed out, “with cold sleep.”

“Huh? If you went to the past. You might go the other way; you never know. If you went a short enough time back so that they had cold sleep…no farther back than the war. But what’s the point of that? You want to know something about 1980, say, you ask somebody or you look it up in old newspapers. Now if there was some way to photograph the Crucifixion…but there isn’t. Not possible. Not only couldn’t you get back, but there isn’t that much power on the globe. There’s an inverse-square law tied up in it too.”

“Nevertheless, some people would try it just for the hell of it. Didn’t anybody ever ride it?” Chuck glanced around again. “I’ve talked too much already.”

“A little more won’t hurt.”

“I think three people tried it. I think. One of them was an instructor. I was in the lab when Twitch and this bird, Leo Vincent, came in; Twitch told me I could go home. I hung around outside. After a while Twitch came out and Vincent didn’t. So far as I know, he’s still in there. He certainly wasn’t teaching at Boulder after that.”

“How about the other two?”

“Students. They all three went in together; only Twitch came out. But one of them was in class the next day, whereas the other one was missing for a week. Figure it out yourself.”

“Weren’t you ever tempted?”

“Me? Does my head look flat? Twitch suggested that it was almost my duty, in the interests of science, to volunteer. I said no, thanks; I’d take a short beer instead…but that I would gladly throw the switch for him. He didn’t take me up on it.”

“I’d take a chance on it. I could check up on what’s worrying me…and then come back again by cold sleep. It would be worth it.”

Chuck sighed deeply. “No more beer for you, my friend; you’re drunk. You didn’t listen to me. One,”—he started making tallies on the tabletop

—“you have no way of knowing that you’d go back; you might go forward instead.”

“I’d risk that. I like now a lot better than I liked then; I might like thirty years from now still better.”

“Okay, so take the Long Sleep again; it’s safer. Or just sit tight and wait for it to roll around; that’s what I’m going to do. But quit interrupting me.

Two, even if you did go back, you might miss 1970 by quite a margin. So far as I know, Twitch was shooting in the dark; I don’t think he had it calibrated. But of course I was just the flunky. Three, that lab was in a stand of pine trees and it was built in 1980. Suppose you come out ten years before it was built in the middle of a western yellow pine? Ought to make quite an explosion, about like a cobalt bomb, huh? Only you wouldn’t know it.”

“But—As a matter of fact, I don’t see why you would come out anywhere near the lab. Why not to the spot in outer space corresponding to where the lab used to be—I mean where it was…or rather—”

“You don’t mean anything. You stay on the world line you were on. Don’t worry about the math; just remember what that guinea pig did. But if you go back before the lab was built, maybe you wind up in a tree. Four, how could you get back to now even with cold sleep, even if you did go the right way, arrive at the right time, and live through it?”

“Huh? I did once, why not twice?”

“Sure. But what are you going to use for money?”

I opened my mouth and closed it. That one made me feel foolish. I had had the money once; I had it no longer. Even what I had saved (not nearly enough) I could not take with me—shucks, even if I robbed a bank (an art I knew nothing about) and took a million of the best back with me, I couldn’t spend it in 1970. I’d simply wind up in jail for trying to shove funny money. They had even changed the shape, not to mention serial numbers, dates, colors, and designs. “Maybe I’d just have to save it up.”

“Good boy. And while you were saving it, you’d probably wind up here and now again without half trying…but minus your hair and your teeth.” “Okay, okay. But let’s go back to that last point. Was there ever a big explosion on that spot? Where the lab was?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Then I wouldnt wind up in a tree—because I didnt. Follow me?”

“I’m three jumps ahead of you. The old time paradox again, only I won’t buy it. I’ve thought about theory of time, too, maybe more than you have.

You’ve got it just backward. There wasn’t any explosion and you aren’t going to wind up in a tree…because you aren’t ever going to make the jump. Do you follow me?

“But suppose I did?”

“You won’t. Because of my fifth point. It’s the killer, so listen closely. You ain’t about to make any such jump because the whole thing is classified and you cant. They won’t let you. So let’s forget it, Danny. It’s been a very interesting intellectual evening and the FBI will be looking for me in the morning. So let’s have one more round and Monday morning if I’m still out of jail I’ll phone the chief engineer over at Aladdin and find out the first name of this other ‘D. B. Davis’ character and who he was or is. He might even be working there and, if so, we’ll have lunch with him and talk shop. I

want you to meet Springer, the chief over at Aladdin, anyway; he’s a good boy. And forget this time-travel nonsense; they’ll never get the bugs out of it. I should never have mentioned it…and if you ever say I did I’ll look you square in the eye and call you a liar. I might need my classified status again someday.”

So we had another beer. By the time I was home and had taken a shower and had washed some of the beer out of my system I knew he was right. Time travel was about as practical a solution to my difficulties as cutting your throat to cure a headache. More important, Chuck would find out what I wanted to know from Mr. Springer just over chops and a salad, no sweat, no expense, no risk. And I liked the year I was living in.

When I climbed into bed I reached out and got the week’s stack of papers. The Times came to me by tube each morning, now that I was a solid citizen. I didn’t read it very much, because whenever I got my head soaked full of some engineering problem, which was usually, the daily fripperies you find in the news merely annoyed me, either by boring me or, worse still, by being interesting enough to distract my mind from its proper work.

Nevertheless, I never threw out a newspaper until I had at least glanced at the headlines and checked the vital-statistics column, the latter not for births, deaths, and marriages, but simply for “withdrawals,” people coming out of cold sleep. I had a notion that someday I would see the name of someone I had known back then, and then I would go around and say hello, bid him welcome, and see if I could give him a hand. The chances were against it, of course, but I kept on doing it and it always gave me a feeling of satisfaction.

I think that subconsciously I thought of all other Sleepers as my “kinfolk,” the way anybody who once served in the same outfit is your buddy, at least to the extent of a drink.

There wasn’t much in the papers, except the ship that was still missing between here and Mars, and that was not news but a sad lack of it. Nor did I spot any old friends among the newly awakened Sleepers. So I lay back and waited for the light to go out.

ABOUT THREE IN the morning I sat up very suddenly, wide awake. The light came on and I blinked at it. I had had a very odd dream, not quite a nightmare but nearly, of having failed to notice little Ricky in the vital statistics.

I knew I hadn’t. But just the same when I looked over and saw the week’s stack of newspapers still sitting there I was greatly relieved; it had been possible that I had stuffed them down the chute before going to sleep, as I sometimes did.

I dragged them back onto the bed and started reading the vital statistics again. This time I read all categories, births, deaths, marriages, divorces, adoptions, changes of name, commitments, and withdrawals, for it had occurred to me that my eye might have caught Ricky’s name without consciously realizing it, while glancing down the column to the only subhead I was interested in—Ricky might have got married or had a baby or something.

I almost missed what must have caused the distressing dream. It was in the Times for 2 May 2001, Tuesday’s withdrawals listed in Wednesday’s paper: “Riverside Sanctuary…F. V. Heinicke.”

F. V. Heinicke!

“Heinicke” was Ricky’s grandmother’s name…I knew it, I was certain of it! I didn’t know why I knew it. But I felt that it had been buried in my head and had not popped up until I read it again. I had probably seen it or heard it at some time from Ricky or Miles, or it was even possible that I had

met the old gal at Sandia. No matter, the name, seen in the Times, had fitted a forgotten piece of information in my brain and then I knew. Only I still had to prove it. I had to make sure that “F. V. Heinicke” stood for “Frederica Virginia Heinicke.”

I was shaking with excitement, anticipation, and fear. In spite of well-established new habits I tried to zip my clothes instead of sticking the seams together and made a botch of getting dressed. But a few minutes later I was down in the hall where the phone booth was—I didn’t have an instrument in my room or I would have used it; I was simply a supplementary listing for the house phone. Then I had to run back up again when I found that I had forgotten my phone-credit ID card—I was really disorganized.

Then, when I had it, I was trembling so that I could hardly fit it into the slot. But I did and signaled “Service.” “Circuit desired?”

“Uh, I want the Riverside Sanctuary. That’s in Riverside Borough.”

“Searching…holding…circuit free. We are signaling.”

The screen lighted up at last and a man looked grumpily at me. “You must have the wrong phasing. This is the sanctuary. We’re closed for the night.”

I said, “Hang on, please. If this is the Riverside Sanctuary, you’re just who I want.” “Well, what do you want? At this hour?”

“You have a client there, F. V. Heinicke, a new withdrawal. I want to know—”

He shook his head. “We don’t give out information about clients over the phone. And certainly not in the middle of the night. You’d better call after ten o’clock. Better yet, come here.”

“I will, I will. But I want to know just one thing. What do the initials ‘F. V.’ stand for?” “I told you that—”

“Will you listen, please? I’m not just butting in; I’m a Sleeper myself. Sawtelle. Withdrawn just lately. So I know all about the ‘confidential relationship’ and what’s proper. Now you’ve already published this client’s name in the paper. You and I both know that the sanctuaries always give the papers the full names of clients withdrawn and committed…but the papers trim the given names to initials to save space. Isn’t that true?”

He thought about it. “Could be.”

“Then what possible harm is there in telling me what the initials ‘F. V.’ stand for?”

He hesitated still longer. “None, I guess, if that’s all you want. It’s all you’re going to get. Hold on.”

He passed out of the screen, was gone for what seemed like an hour, came back holding a card. “The light’s poor,” he said, peering at it. “ ‘Frances’ —no, ‘Frederica.’ ‘Frederica Virginia.’ ”

My ears roared and I almost fainted. “Thank God!” “You all right?”

“Yes. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Yes, I’m all right.”

“Hmm. I guess there’s no harm in telling you one more thing. It might save you a trip. She’s already checked out.”

IX

I COULD HAVE saved time by hiring a cab to jump me to Riverside, but I was handicapped by lack of cash. I was living in West Hollywood; the nearest twenty-four-hour bank was downtown at the Grand Circle of the Ways. So first I rode the Ways downtown and went to the bank for cash. One real improvement I had not appreciated up to then was the universal checkbook system; with a single cybernet as clearinghouse for the whole city and radioactive coding on my checkbook, I got cash laid in my palm as quickly there as I could have gotten it at my home bank across from Hired Girl, Inc.

Then I caught the express Way for Riverside. When I reached the sanctuary it was just daylight.

There was nobody there but the night technician I had talked to and his wife, the night nurse. I’m afraid I didn’t make a good impression. I had a day’s beard, I was wild-eyed, I probably had a beer breath, and I had not worked out a consistent framework of lies.

Nevertheless, Mrs. Larrigan, the night nurse, was sympathetic and helpful. She got a photograph out of file and said, “Is this your cousin, Mr. Davis?”

It was Ricky. There was no doubt about it, it was Ricky! Oh, not the Ricky I had known, for this was not a little girl but a mature young woman, twentyish or older, with a grown-up hairdo and a grown-up and very beautiful face. She was smiling.

But her eyes were unchanged and the ageless pixie quality of her face that had made her so delightful a child was still there. It was the same face, matured, filled out, grown beautiful, but unmistakable.

The stereo blurred, my eyes had filled with tears. “Yes,” I managed to choke. “Yes. That’s Ricky.” Mr. Larrigan said, “Nancy, you shouldn’t have showed him that.”

“Pooh, Hank, what harm is there in showing a photograph?”

“You know the rules.” He turned to me. “Mister, as I told you on the phone, we don’t give out information about clients. You come back here at ten o’clock when the administration office opens.”

“Or you could come back at eight,” his wife added. “Dr. Bernstein will be here then.”

“Now, Nancy, you just keep quiet. If he wants information, the man to see is the director. Bernstein hasn’t any more business answering questions than we have. Besides, she wasn’t even Bernstein’s patient.”

“Hank, you’re being fussy. You men like rules just for the sake of rules. If he’s in a hurry to see her, he could be in Brawley by ten o’clock.” She turned to me. “You come back at eight. That’s best. My husband and I can’t really tell you anything anyhow.”

“What’s this about Brawley? Did she go to Brawley?”

If her husband had not been there I think she would have told me more. She hesitated and he looked stern. She answered, “You see Dr. Bernstein. If you haven’t had breakfast, there’s a real nice place just down the street.”

So I went to the “real nice place” (it was) and ate and used their wash-room and bought a tube of Beardgo from a dispenser in the washroom and a shirt from another dispenser and threw away the one I had been wearing. By the time I returned I was fairly respectable.

But Larrigan must have bent Dr. Bernstein’s ear about me. He was a young man, resident in training, and he took a very stiff line. “Mr. Davis, you claim to be a Sleeper yourself. You must certainly know that there are criminals who make a regular business of preying on the gullibility and lack of orientation of a newly awakened Sleeper. Most Sleepers have considerable assets, all of them are unworldly in the world in which they find themselves, they are usually lonely and a bit scared—a perfect setup for confidence men.”

“But all I want to know is where she went! I’m her cousin. But I took the Sleep before she did, so I didn’t know she was going to.” “They usually claim to be relatives.” He looked at me closely. “Haven’t I seen you before?”

“I strongly doubt it. Unless you just happened to pass me on the Ways, downtown.” People are always thinking they’ve seen me before; I’ve got one of the Twelve Standard Faces, as lacking in uniqueness as one peanut in a sackful. “Doctor, how about phoning Dr. Albrecht at Sawtelle Sanctuary and checking on me?”

He looked judicial. “You come back and see the director. He can call the Sawtelle Sanctuary…or the police, whichever he sees fit.”

So I left. Then I may have made a mistake. Instead of coming back to see the director and very possibly getting the exact information I needed (with the aid of Albrecht’s vouching for me), I hired a jumpcab and went straight to Brawley.

It took three days to pick up her trail in Brawley. Oh, she had lived there and so had her grandmother; I found that out quickly. But the grandmother had died twenty years earlier and Ricky had taken the Sleep. Brawley is a mere hundred thousand compared with the seven million of Great Los Angeles; the twenty-year-old records were not hard to find. It was the trail less than a week old that I had trouble with.

Part of the trouble was that she was with someone; I had been looking for a young woman traveling alone. When I found out she had a man with her I thought anxiously about the crooks preying on Sleepers that Bernstein had lectured me about and got busier than ever.

I followed a false lead to Calexico, went back to Brawley, started over, picked it up again, and traced them as far as Yuma.

At Yuma I gave up the chase, for Ricky had gotten married. What I saw on the register at the county clerk’s office there shocked me so much that I dropped everything and jumped a ship for Denver, stopping only to mail a card to Chuck telling him to clear out my desk and pack the stuff in my room.

I STOPPED IN DENVER just long enough to visit a dental-supply house. I had not been in Denver since it had become the capital—after the Six Weeks War, Miles and I had gone straight to California—and the place stunned me. Why, I couldn’t even find Colfax Avenue. I had understood that everything essential to the government was buried back under the Rockies. If that is so, then there must be an awful lot of nonessentials still aboveground; the place seemed even more crowded than Great Los Angeles.

At the dental-supply house I bought ten kilograms of gold, isotope 197, in the form of fourteen-gauge wire. I paid $86.10 a kilogram for it, which was decidedly too much, since gold of engineering quality was selling for around $70 a kilogram, and the transaction mortally wounded my only thousand-dollar bill. But engineering gold comes either in alloys never found in nature, or with isotopes 196 and 198 present, or both, depending on the application. For my purposes I wanted fine gold, undetectable from gold refined from natural ore, and I did not want gold that might burn my pants off if I got cozy with it—the overdose at Sandia had given me a healthy respect for radiation poisoning.

I wound the gold wire around my waist and went to Boulder. Ten kilograms is about the weight of a well-filled weekend bag and that much gold bulks almost exactly the same as a quart of milk. But the wire form of it made it bulk more than it would have solid; I can’t recommend it as a girdle. But gold slugs would have been still harder to carry, and this way it was always with me.

Dr. Twitchell was still living there, though no longer working; he was professor emeritus and spent most of his waking hours in the bar of the faculty club. It took me four days to catch him in another bar, since the faculty club was closed to outlanders like me. But when I did, it turned out to

be easy to buy him a drink.

He was a tragic figure in the classic Greek meaning, a great man—a very great man—gone to ruin. He should have been up there with Einstein and Bohr and Newton; as it was, only a few specialists in field theory were really aware of the stature of his work. Now when I met him his brilliant mind was soured with disappointment, dimmed with age, and soggy with alcohol. It was like visiting the ruins of what had been a magnificent temple after the roof has fallen in, half the columns knocked down, and vines have grown over it all.

Nevertheless, he was brainier on the skids than I ever was at my best. I’m smart enough myself to appreciate real genius when I meet it. The first time I saw him he looked up, looked straight at me and said, “You again.”

“Sir?”

“You used to be one of my students, didn’t you?”

“Why, no, sir, I never had that honor.” Ordinarily when people think they have seen me before, I brush it off; this time I decided to exploit it if I could. “Perhaps you are thinking of my cousin, Doctor—class of ’86. He studied under you at one time.”

“Possibly. What did he major in?”

“He had to drop out without a degree, sir. But he was a great admirer of yours. He never missed a chance to tell people he had studied under you.”

You can’t make an enemy by telling a mother her child is beautiful. Dr. Twitchell let me sit down and presently let me buy him a drink. The greatest weakness of the glorious old wreck was his professional vanity. I had salvaged part of the four days before I could scrape up an acquaintance with him by memorizing everything there was about him in the university library, so I knew what papers he had written, where he had presented them, what earned and honorary degrees he held, and what books he had written. I had tried one of the latter, but I was already out of my depth on page nine, although I did pick up a little patter from it.

I let him know that I was a camp follower of science myself; right at present I was researching for a book: Unsung Geniuses. “What’s it going to be about?”

I admitted diffidently that I thought it would be appropriate to start the book with a popular account of his life and works…provided he would be willing to relax a bit from his well-known habit of shunning publicity. I would have to get a lot of my material from him, of course.

He thought it was claptrap and could not think of such a thing. But I pointed out that he had a duty to posterity and he agreed to think it over. By the next day he simply assumed that I was going to write his biography—not just a chapter, a whole book. From then on he talked and talked and talked and I took notes…real notes; I did not dare try to fool him by faking, as he sometimes asked me to read back.

But he never mentioned time travel.

Finally I said, “Doctor, isn’t it true that if it had not been for a certain colonel who was once stationed here you would have had the Nobel Prize hands down?”

He cursed steadily for three minutes with magnificent style. “Who told you about him?”

“Uh, Doctor, when I was doing research writing for the Department of Defense—I’ve mentioned that, haven’t I?” “No.”

“Well, when I was, I heard the whole story from a young Ph.D. working in another section. He had read the report and he said it was perfectly clear that you would be the most famous name in physics today…if you had been permitted to publish your work.”

“Hrrmph! That much is true.”

“But I gathered that it was classified…by order of this Colonel, uh, Plushbottom.”

“Thrushbotham. Thrushbotham, sir. A fat, fatuous, flatulent, foot-kissing fool incompetent to find his hat with it nailed to his head. Which it should have been.”

“It seems a great pity.”

“What is a pity, sir? That Thrushbotham was a fool? That was nature’s doing, not mine.”

“It seems a pity that the world should be deprived of the story. I understand that you are not allowed to speak of it.” “Who told you that? I say what I please!”

“That was what I understood, sir…from my friend in the Department of Defense.” “Hrrrmph!”

That was all I got out of him that night. It took him a week to decide to show me his laboratory.

Most of the building was now used by other researchers, but his time laboratory he had never surrendered, even though he did not use it now; he fell back on its classified status and refused to let anyone else touch it, nor had he permitted the apparatus to be torn down. When he let me in, the place smelled like a vault that has not been opened in years.

He had had just enough drinks not to give a damn, not so many but what he was still steady. His capacity was pretty high. He lectured me on the mathematics of time theory and temporal displacement (he didn’t call it “time travel”), but he cautioned me not to take notes. It would not have helped if I had, as he would start a paragraph with, “It is therefore obvious—” and go on from there to matters which may have been obvious to him and God but to no one else.

When he slowed down I said, “I gathered from my friend that the one thing you had not been able to do was to calibrate it? That you could not tell the exact magnitude of the temporal displacement?”

“What? Poppycock! Young man, if you can’t measure it, it’s not science.” He bubbled for a bit, like a teakettle, then went on, “Here. I’ll show you.” He turned away and started making adjustments. All that showed of his equipment was what he called the “temporal locus stage” —just a low platform with a cage around it—and a control board which might have served for a steam plant or a low-pressure chamber. I’m fairly sure I could have studied out how to handle the controls had I been left alone to examine them, but I had been told sharply to stay away from them. I could see an eight-point Brown recorder, some extremely heavy-duty solenoid-actuated switches, and a dozen other equally familiar components, but it didn’t mean a thing without the circuit diagrams.

He turned back to me and demanded, “Have you any change in your pocket?”

I reached in and hauled out a handful. He glanced at it and selected two five-dollar pieces, mint new, the pretty green plastic hexagonals issued just that year. I could have wished that he had picked half fives, as I was running low.

“Do you have a knife?” “Yes, sir.”

“Scratch your initials on each of them.”

I did so. He then had me place them side by side on the stage. “Note the exact time. I have set the displacement for exactly one week, plus or minus six seconds.”

I looked at my watch. Dr. Twitchell said, “Five… four… three… two… one… now!

I looked up from my watch. The coins were gone. I didn’t have to pretend that my eyes bugged out. Chuck had told me about a similar

demonstration—but seeing it was another matter.

Dr. Twitchell said briskly, “We will return here one week from tonight and wait for one of them to reappear. As for the other one—you saw both of them on the stage? You placed them there yourself?”

“Yes, sir.” “Where was I?”

“At the control board, sir.” He had been a good fifteen feet from the nearest part of the cage around the stage and had not approached it since. “Very well. Come here.” I did so and he reached into a pocket. “Here’s one of your bits. You’ll get the other back a week from now.” He handed

me a green five-dollar coin; it had my initials on it.

I did not say anything because I can’t talk very well with my jaw sagging loosely. He went on, “Your remarks last week disturbed me. So I visited this place on Wednesday, something I have not done for—oh, more than a year. I found this coin on the stage, so I knew that I had been… would be…using the equipment again. It took me until tonight to decide to demonstrate it to you.”

I looked at the coin and felt it. “This was in your pocket when we came here tonight?” “Certainly.”

“But how could it be both in your pocket and my pocket at the same time?”

“Good Lord, man, have you no eyes to see with? No brain to reason with? Can’t you absorb a simple fact simply because it lies outside your dull existence? You fetched it here in your pocket tonight—and we kicked it into last week. You saw. A few days ago I found it here. I placed it in my pocket. I fetched it here tonight. The same coin…or, to be precise, a later segment of its space-time structure, a week more worn, a week more dulled—but what the canaille would call the ‘same’ coin. Although no more identical in fact than is a baby identical with the man the baby grows into. Older.”

I looked at it. “Doctor…push me back in time by a week.” He stared angrily. “Out of the question!”

“Why not? Won’t it work with people?” “Eh? Certainly it will work with people.”

“Then why not do it? I’m not afraid. And think what a wonderful thing it would be for the book…if I could testify of my own knowledge that the Twitchell time displacement works.”

“You can report it of your own knowledge. You just saw it.”

“Yes,” I admitted slowly, “but I won’t be believed. That business with the coins…I saw it and I believe it. But anyone simply reading an account of it

would conclude that I was gullible, that you had hoaxed me with some simple legerdemain.” “Damn it, sir!”

“That’s what they would say. They wouldn’t be able to believe that I actually had seen what I reported. But if you were to ship me back just a week, then I could report of my own knowledge—”

“Sit down. Listen to me.” He sat down, but there was no place for me to sit, although he did not seem aware of it. “I have experimented with human beings long ago. And for that reason I resolved never to do it again.”

“Why? Did it kill them?”

“What? Don’t talk nonsense.” He looked at me sharply, added, “You are not to put this in the book.” “As you say, sir.”

“Some minor experiments showed that living subjects could make temporal displacements without harm. I had confided in a colleague, a young fellow who taught drawing and other matters in the school of architecture. Really more of an engineer than a scientist, but I liked him; his mind was alive. This young chap—it can’t hurt to tell you his name: Leonard Vincent—was wild to try it…really try it; he wanted to undergo major displacement, five hundred years. I was weak. I let him.”

“Then what happened?”

“How should I know? Five hundred years, man! I’ll never live to find out.” “But you think he’s five hundred years in the future?”

“Or the past. He might have wound up in the fifteenth century. Or the twenty-fifth. The chances are precisely even. There’s an indeterminacy— symmetrical equations. I’ve sometimes thought…no, just a chance similarity in names.”

I didn’t ask what he meant by this because I suddenly saw the similarity, too, and my hair stood on end. Then I pushed it out of my mind; I had other problems. Besides, a chance similarity was all it could be—a man could not get from Colorado to Italy, not in the fifteenth century.

“But I resolved not to be tempted again. It wasn’t science, it added nothing to the data. If he was displaced forward, well and good. But if he was displaced backward…then possibly I sent my friend to be killed by savages. Or eaten by wild animals.”

Or even possibly, I thought, to become a “Great White God.” I kept the thought to myself. “But you needn’t use so long a displacement with me.” “Let’s say no more about it, if you please, sir.”

“As you wish, Doctor.” But I couldn’t drop it. “Uh, may I make a suggestion?” “Eh? Speak up.”

“We could get almost the same result by a rehearsal.” “What do you mean?”

“A complete dry run, with everything done just exactly as if you were intending to displace a living subject—I’ll act out that part. We’ll do everything precisely as if you meant to displace me, right up to the point where you would push that button. Then I’ll understand the procedure …which I don’t quite, as yet.”

He grumbled a little but he really wanted to show off his toy. He weighed me and set aside metal weights just equal to my hundred and seventy pounds. “These are the same scales I used with poor Vincent.”

Between us we placed them on one side of the stage. “What temporal setting shall we make?” he asked. “This is your show.” “Uh, you said that it could be set accurately?”

“I said so, sir. Do you doubt it?”

“Oh no, no! Well, let’s see, this is the twenty-fourth of May—suppose we…how about, uh, say thirty-one years, three weeks, one day, seven hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-five seconds?”

“A poor jest, sir. When I said ‘accurate’ I meant ‘accurate to better than one part in one hundred thousand.’ I have had no opportunity to calibrate to one part in nine hundred million.”

“Oh. You see, Doctor, how important an exact rehearsal is to me, since I know so little about it. Uh, suppose we call it thirty-one years and three

weeks. Or is that still too finicky?”

“Not at all. The maximum error should not exceed two hours.” He made his adjustments. “You can take your place on the stage.” “Is that all?”

“Yes. All but the power. I could not actually make this displacement with the line voltage I used on those coins. But since we aren’t actually going to do it, that doesn’t matter.”

I looked disappointed and was. “Then you don’t actually have what is necessary to produce such a displacement? You were speaking theoretically?”

“Confound it, sir, I was not speaking theoretically.” “But if you don’t have the power…?”

“I can get the power if you insist. Wait.” He went to a corner of the lab and picked up a phone. It must have been installed when the lab was new; I hadn’t seen one like it since I was awakened. There followed a brisk conversation with the night superintendent of the university’s powerhouse. Dr. Twitchell was not dependent on profanity; he could avoid it entirely and be more biting than most real artists can be when using plainer words. “I am not in the least interested in your opinions, my man. Read your instructions. I have full facilities whenever I wish them. Or can you read? Shall we

meet with the president at ten tomorrow morning and have him read them to you? Oh? So you can read? Can you write as well? Or have we exhausted your talents? Then write this down: Emergency full power across the bus bars of the Thornton Memorial Laboratory in exactly eight minutes. Repeat that back.”

He replaced the instrument. “People!”

He went to the control board, made some changes, and waited. Presently, even from where I stood inside the cage, I could see the long hands of three sets of meters swing across their dials and a red light came on at the top of the board. “Power,” he announced.

“Now what happens?” “Nothing.”

“That’s just what I thought.” “What do you mean?”

“What I said. Nothing would happen.”

“I’m afraid I don’t understand you. I hope I don’t understand you. What I meant is that nothing would happen unless I closed this pilot switch. If I did, you would be displaced precisely thirty-one years, three weeks.”

“And I still say nothing would happen.”

His face grew dark. “I think, sir, you are being intentionally offensive.”

“Call it what you want to. Doctor, I came here to investigate a remarkable rumor. Well, I’ve investigated it. I’ve seen a control board with pretty lights on it; it looks like a set for a mad scientist in a grabbie spectacular. I’ve seen a parlor trick performed with a couple of coins. Not much of a trick, by the way, since you selected the coins yourself and told me how to mark them; any parlor magician could do better. I’ve heard a lot of talk. But talk is cheap. What you claim to have discovered is impossible. By the way, they know that down at the department. Your report wasn’t suppressed; it’s simply filed in the screwball file. They get it out and pass it around now and then for a laugh.”

I thought the poor old boy was going to have a stroke there and then. But I had to stimulate him by the only reflex he had left, his vanity. “Come out of there, sir. Come out. I’m going to thrash you. With my bare hands I’m going to thrash you.”

The rage he was in, I think he might have managed it, despite age and weight and physical condition. But I answered, “You don’t scare me, Pappy. That dummy button doesn’t scare me either. Go ahead and push it.”

He looked at me, looked at the button, but still he didn’t do anything. I snickered and said, “A hoax, just as the boys said it was. Twitch, you’re a pompous old faker, a stuffed shirt. Colonel Thrushbotham was right.”

That did it.

X

EVEN AS HE stabbed at the button I tried to shout at him not to do it. But it was too late; I was already falling. My last thought was an agonized one that I didn’t want to go through with it. I had chucked away everything and tormented almost to death a poor old man who hadn’t done me any harm—and I didn’t even know which way I was going. Worse, I didn’t know that I would get there.

Then I hit. I don’t think I fell more than four feet but I had not been ready for it. I fell like a stick, collapsed like a sack. Then somebody was saying, “Where the devil did you come from?”

It was a man, about forty, bald-headed but well built and lean. He was standing facing me with his fists on his hipbones. He looked competent and shrewd and his face was not unpleasant save that at the moment he seemed sore at me.

I sat up and found that I was sitting on granite gravel and pine needles. There was a woman standing by the man, a pleasant pretty woman somewhat younger than he. She was looking at me wide-eyed but not speaking.

“Where am I?” I said foolishly. I could have said, “When am I?” but that would have sounded still more foolish, and besides, I didn’t think of it. One look at them and I knew when I was not—I was sure it was not 1970. Nor was I still in 2001; in 2001 they kept that sort of thing for the beaches. So I must have gone the wrong way.

Because neither one of them wore anything but smooth coats of tan. Not even Sticktite. But they seemed to find it enough. Certainly they were not embarrassed by it.

“One thing at a time,” he objected. “I asked you how you got here?” He glanced up. “Your parachute didn’t stick in the trees, did it? In any case, what are you doing here? This is posted private property; you’re trespassing. And what are you doing in that Mardi Gras getup?”

I didn’t see anything wrong with my clothes—especially in view of the way they were dressed. But I didn’t answer. Other times, other customs—I could see that I was going to have trouble.

She put a hand on his arm. “Don’t, John,” she said gently. “I think he’s hurt.” He looked at her, glanced back sharply at me. “Are you hurt?”

I tried to stand up, managed it. “I don’t think so. A few bruises, maybe. Uh, what date is today?” “Huh? Why, it’s the first Sunday in May. The third of May, I think. Is that right, Jenny?”

“Yes, dear.”

“Look,” I said urgently, “I got an awful knock on the head. I’m confused. What’s the date? The whole date?” “What?”

I should have kept my mouth shut until I could pick it up off something, a calendar or a paper. But I had to know right then; I couldn’t stand to wait. “What year?”

“Brother, you did get a lump. It’s 1970.” I saw him staring at my clothes again.

My relief was almost more than I could stand. I’d made it, I’d made it! I wasn’t too late. “Thanks,” I said. “Thanks an awful lot. You don’t know.” He still looked as if he wanted to call out the reserves, so I added nervously, “I’m subject to sudden attacks of amnesia. Once I lost, uh—five whole years.”

“I should think that would be upsetting,” he said slowly. “Do you feel well enough to answer my questions?” “Don’t badger him, dear,” she said softly. “He looks like a nice person. I think he’s just made a mistake.” “We’ll see. Well?”

“I feel all right…now. But I was pretty confused for a minute there.” “Okay. How did you get here? And why are you dressed that way?”

“To tell the truth, I’m not sure how I got here. And I certainly don’t know where I am. These spells hit me suddenly. As for how I’m dressed… I guess you could call it personal eccentricity. Uh…like the way you’re dressed. Or not dressed.”

He glanced down at himself and grinned. “Oh, yes. I’m quite aware that the way my wife and I are dressed…or not dressed…would call for explanation under some circumstances. But we prefer to make trespassers do the explaining instead. You see, you don’t belong here, dressed that way or any other, while we do—just as we are. These are the grounds of the Denver Sunshine Club.”

JOHN AND JENNY SUTTON were the sort of sophisticated, unshockable, friendly people who could invite an earthquake in for tea. John obviously was not satisfied with my fishy explanations and wanted to cross-examine me, but Jenny held him back. I stuck to my story about “dizzy spells” and said that the last I remembered was yesterday evening and that I had been in Denver, at the New Brown Palace. Finally he said, “Well, it’s quite interesting, even exciting, and I suppose somebody who’s going into Boulder can drop you there and you can get a bus back into Denver.” He looked at me again. “But if I take you back to the clubhouse, people are going to be mighty, mighty curious.”

I looked down at myself. I had been made vaguely uneasy by the fact that I was dressed and they were not—I mean I felt like the one out of order, not they. “John…would it simplify things if I peeled off my clothes too?” The prospect did not upset me; I had never been in one of the bare-skin camps before, seeing no point in them. But Chuck and I had spent a couple of weekends at Santa Barbara and one at Laguna Beach—at a beach skin makes sense and nothing else does.

He nodded. “It certainly would.”

“Dear,” said Jenny, “he could be our guest.”

“Mmm…yes. My only love, you paddle your sweet self into the grounds. Mix around and manage to let it be known that we are expecting a guest from…where had it better be, Danny?”

“Uh, from California. Los Angeles. I actually am from there.” I almost said “Great Los Angeles” and realized that I was going to have to guard my speech. “Movies” were no longer “grabbies.”

“From Los Angeles. That and ‘Danny’ is all that is necessary; we don’t use last names, unless offered. So, honey, you spread the word, as if it were something everybody already knew. Then in about half an hour you have to meet us down by the gate. But come here instead. And fetch my overnight bag.”

“Why the bag, dear?”

“To conceal that masquerade costume. It’s pretty conspicuous, even for anyone who is as eccentric as Danny said he is.”

I got up and went at once behind some bushes to undress, since I wouldn’t have any excuse for locker-room modesty once Jenny Sutton left us. I had to do it; I couldn’t peel down and reveal that I had twenty thousand dollars’ worth of gold, figured at the 1970 standard of sixty dollars an ounce, wrapped around my waist. It did not take long, as I had made a belt out of the gold, instead of a girdle, the first time I had had trouble getting it off

and on to bathe; I had double-looped it and wired it together in front.

When I had my clothes off I wrapped the gold in them and tried to pretend that it all weighed only what clothes should. John Sutton glanced at the bundle but said nothing. He offered me a cigarette—he carried them strapped to his ankle. They were a brand I had never expected to see again.

I waved it but it didn’t light. Then I let him light it for me. “Now,” he said quietly, “that we are alone, do you have anything you want to tell me? If I’m going to vouch for you to the club, I’m honor-bound to be sure, at the very least, that you won’t make trouble.”

I took a puff. It felt raw in my throat. “John, I won’t make any trouble. That’s the last thing on earth that I want.” “Mmm…probably. Just ‘dizzy spells’ then?”

I thought about it. It was an impossible situation. The man had a right to know. But he certainly would not believe the truth…at least I would not have in his shoes. But it would be worse if he did believe me; it would kick up the very hoorah that I did not want. I suppose that if I had been a real, honest, legitimate time traveler, engaged in scientific research, I would have sought publicity, brought along indisputable proof, and invited tests by scientists.

But I wasn’t; I was a private and somewhat shady citizen, engaged in hanky-panky I didn’t want to call attention to. I was simply looking for my Door into Summer, as quietly as possible.

“John, you wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“Mmm…perhaps. Still, I saw a man fall out of empty sky…but he didn’t hit hard enough to hurt him. He’s wearing funny clothes. He doesn’t seem to know where he is or what day it is. Danny, I’ve read Charles Fort, the same as most people. But I never expected to meet a case. But, having met one, I don’t expect the explanation to be as simple as a card trick. So?”

“John, something you said earlier—the way you phrased something— made me think you were a lawyer.” “Yes, I am. Why?”

“Can I make a privileged communication?” “Hmm—are you asking me to accept you as a client?”

“If you want to put it that way, yes. I’m probably going to need advice.” “Shoot. Privileged.”

“Okay. I’m from the future. Time travel.”

He didn’t say anything for several moments. We were lying stretched out in the sun. I was doing it to keep warm; May in Colorado is sunshiny but brisk. John Sutton seemed used to it and was simply lounging, chewing a pine needle.

“You’re right,” he answered. “I don’t believe it. Let’s stick to ‘dizzy spells.’ ” “I told you you wouldn’t.”

He sighed. “Let’s say I don’t want to. I don’t want to believe in ghosts, either, or reincarnation, or any of this ESP magic. I like simple things that I can understand. I think most people do. So my first advice to you is to keep it a privileged communication. Don’t spread it around.”

“That suits me.”

He rolled over. “But I think it would be a good idea if we burned these clothes. I’ll find you something to wear. Will they burn?” “Uh, not very easily. They’ll melt.”

“Better put your shoes back on. We wear shoes mostly, and those will get by. Anybody asks you questions about them, they’re custom-made. Health shoes.”

“They are, both.”

“Okay.” He started to unroll my clothes before I could stop him. “What the devil!”

It was too late, so I let him uncover it. “Danny,” he said in a queer voice, “is this stuff what it appears to be?” “What does it appear to be?”

“Gold.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you get it?” “I bought it.”

He felt it, tried the dead softness of the stuff, sensuous as putty, then hefted it. “Cripes! Danny…listen to me carefully. I’m going to ask you one question, and be damned careful how you answer it. Because I’ve got no use for a client who lies to me. I dump him. And I won’t be a party to a felony. Did you come by this stuff legally?”

“Yes.”

“Maybe you haven’t heard of the Gold Reserve Act of 1968?” “

I have. I came by it legally. I intend to sell it to the Denver Mint, for dollars.” “Jeweler’s license, maybe?”

“No. John, I told the simple truth, whether you believe me or not. Where I came from I bought that over the counter, legal as breathing. Now I want to turn it in for dollars at the earliest possible moment. I know that it is against the law to keep it. What can they do to me if I lay it on the counter at the mint and tell them to weigh it?”

“Nothing, in the long run…if you stick to your ‘dizzy spells.’ But they can surely make your life miserable in the meantime.” He looked at it. “I think you had better kick a little dirt over it.”

“Bury it?”

“You don’t have to go that far. But if what you tell me is true, you found this stuff in the mountains. That’s where prospectors usually find gold.” “Well…whatever you say. I don’t mind some little white lies, since it is legitimately mine anyhow.”

“But is it a lie? When did you first lay eyes on this gold? What was the earliest date when it was in your possession?” I tried to think back. It was the same day I left Yuma, which was sometime in May 2001. About two weeks ago…  Hunh!

“Put that way, John…the earliest date on which I saw that gold…was today, May third, 1970.” He nodded. “So you found it in the mountains.”

THE SUTTONS WERE staying over until Monday morning, so I stayed over. The other club members were all friendly but remarkably unnosy about my personal affairs, less so than any group I’ve ever been in. I’ve learned since that this constitutes standard good manners in a skin club, but at the time it made them the most discreet and most polite people I had ever met.

John and Jenny had their own cabin and I slept on a cot in the club-house dormitory. It was darn chilly. The next morning John gave me a shirt and

a pair of blue jeans. My own clothes were wrapped around the gold in a bag in the trunk of his car—which itself was a Jaguar Imperator, all I needed

to tell me that he was no cheap shyster. But I had known that by his manner.

I stayed overnight with them and by Tuesday I had a little money. I never laid eyes on the gold again, but in the course of the next few weeks John turned over to me its exact mint value as bullion minus the standard fees of licensed gold buyers. I know that he did not deal with the mint directly, as he always turned over to me vouchers from gold buyers. He did not deduct for his own services and he never offered to tell me the details.

I did not care. Once I had cash again, I got busy. That first Tuesday, 5 May 1970, Jenny drove me around and I rented a small loft in the old commercial district. I equipped it with a drafting table, a workbench, an army cot, and darn little else; it already had 120, 240, gas, running water, and a toilet that stopped up easily. I didn’t want any more and I had to watch every dime.

It was tedious and time-wasting to design by the old compass-and-T-square routine and I didn’t have a minute to spare, so I built Drafting Dan before I rebuilt Flexible Frank. Only this time Flexible Frank became Protean Pete, the all-purpose automaton, so linked as to be able to do almost anything a man can do, provided its Thorsen tubes were properly instructed. I knew that Protean Pete would not stay that way; his descendants would evolve into a horde of specialized gadgets, but I wanted to make the claims as broad as possible.

Working models are not required for patents, merely drawings and descriptions. But I needed good models, models that would work perfectly and anybody could demonstrate, because these models were going to have to sell themselves, show by their very practicality and by the evident economy designed into them for their eventual production engineering that they would not only work but would be a good investment—the patent office is stuffed with things that work but are worthless commercially.

The work went both fast and slow, fast because I knew exactly what I was doing, slow because I did not have a proper machine shop nor any help. Presently I grudgingly dipped into my precious cash to rent some machine tools, then things went better. I worked from breakfast to exhaustion, seven days a week, except for about one weekend a month with John and Jenny at the bare-bottom club near Boulder. By the first of September I had both models working properly and was ready to start on the drawings and descriptions. I designed and sent out for manufacture pretty speckle-lacquer cover plates for both of them and I had the external moving parts chrome-plated; these were the only jobs I farmed out and it hurt me to spend the money, but I felt that it was necessary. Oh, I had made extreme use of catalogue-available standard components; I could not have built them otherwise, nor would they have been commercial when I got through. But I did not like to spend money on custom-made prettiness.

I did not have time to get around much, which was just as well. Once when I was out buying a servo motor I ran into a chap I had known in California. He spoke to me and I answered before I thought. “Hey, Dan! Danny Davis! Imagine bumping into you here. I thought you were in Mojave?”

I shook hands. “Just a quick business trip. I’m going back in a few days.” “I’m going back this afternoon. I’ll phone Miles and tell him I saw you.”

I looked worried and was. “Don’t do that, please.”

“Why not? Aren’t you and Miles still buddy-buddy budding tycoons together?”

“Well…look, Mort, Miles doesn’t know I’m here. I’m supposed to be in Albuquerque on business for the company. But I flew up here on the side, on strictly personal and private business. Get me? Nothing to do with the firm. And I don’t care to discuss it with Miles.”

He looked knowing. “Woman trouble?” “Well…yes.”

“She married?” “You might say so.”

He dug me in the ribs and winked. “I catch. Old Miles is pretty puritanical, isn’t he? Okay, I’ll cover for you and someday you can cover for me. Is she any good?”

I’d like to cover you with a spade, I thought to myself, you fourth-rate frallup. Mort was the sort of no-good traveling salesman who spends more time trying to seduce waitresses than taking care of his customers—besides which, the line he handled was as shoddy as he was, never up to its specs.

But I bought him a drink and treated him to fairy tales about the “married woman” I had invented and listened while he boasted to me of no doubt equally fictitious exploits. Then I shook him.

On another occasion I tried to buy Dr. Twitchell a drink and failed.

I had seated myself beside him at the restaurant counter of a drugstore on Champa Street, then caught sight of his face in the mirror. My first impulse was to crawl under the counter and hide.

Then I caught hold of myself and realized that, out of all the persons living in 1970, he was the one I had least need to worry about. Nothing could go wrong because nothing had…I meant “nothing would.” No— Then I quit trying to phrase it, realizing that if time travel ever became widespread, English grammar was going to have to add a whole new set of tenses to describe reflexive situations—conjugations that would make the French literary tenses and the Latin historical tenses look simple.

In any case, past or future or something else, Twitchell was not a worry to me now. I could relax.

I studied his face in the mirror, wondering if I had been misled by a chance resemblance. But I had not been. Twitchell did not have a general- issue face like mine; he had stern, self-assured, slightly arrogant and quite handsome features which would have looked at home on Zeus. I remembered that face only in ruins, but there was no doubt—and I squirmed inside as I thought of the old man and how badly I had treated him. I wondered how I could make it up to him.

Twitchell caught sight of me eyeing him in the mirror and turned to me. “Something wrong?” “No. Uh…you’re Dr. Twitchell, aren’t you? At the university?”

“Denver University, yes. Have we met?”

I had almost slipped, having forgotten that he taught at the city university in this year. Remembering in two directions is difficult. “No, Doctor, but I’ve heard you lecture. You might say I’m one of your fans.”

His mouth twitched in a half-smile but he did not rise to it. From that and other things I learned that he had not yet acquired a gnawing need for adulation; he was sure of himself at that age and needed only his own self-approval. “Are you sure you haven’t got me mixed up with a movie star?”

“Oh no! You’re Dr. Hubert Twitchell…the great physicist.”

His mouth twitched again. “Let’s just say that I am a physicist. Or try to be.”

We chatted for a while and I tried to hang onto him after he had finished his sandwich. I said it would be an honor if he would let me buy him a drink. He shook his head. “I hardly drink at all and certainly never before dark. Thanks anyway. It’s been nice meeting you. Drop into my lab someday if you are ever around the campus.”

I said I would.

But I did not make many slips in 1970 (second time around) because I understood it and, anyhow, most people who might have recognized me

were in California. I resolved that if I did meet any more familiar faces I would give them the cold stare and the quick brushoff—take no chances.

But little things can cause you trouble too. Like the time I got caught in a zipper simply because I had become used to the more convenient and much safer Sticktite closures. A lot of little things like that I missed very much after having learned in only six months to take them for granted.

Shaving—I had to go back to shaving! Once I even caught a cold. That horrid ghost of the past resulted from forgetting that clothes could get soaked in rain. I wish that those precious esthetes who sneer at progress and prattle about the superior beauties of the past could have been with me—dishes that let food get chilled, shirts that had to be laundered, bathroom mirrors that steamed up when you needed them, runny noses, dirt underfoot and dirt in your lungs—I had become used to a better way of living and 1970 was a series of petty frustrations until I got the hang of it again.

But a dog gets used to his fleas and so did I. Denver in 1970 was a very quaint place with a fine old-fashioned flavor; I became very fond of it. It was nothing like the slick New Plan maze it had been (or would be) when I had arrived (or would arrive) there from Yuma; it still had less than two

million people, there were still buses and other vehicular traffic in the streets—there still were streets; I had no trouble finding Colfax Avenue.

Denver was still getting used to being the national seat of government and was not quite happy in the role, like a boy in his first formal evening

clothes. Its spirit still yearned for high-heeled boots and its western twang even though it knew it had to grow up and be an international metropolis, with embassies and spies and famous gourmet restaurants. The city was being jerry-built in all directions to house the bureaucrats and lobbyists and contact men and clerk-typists and flunkies; buildings were being thrown up so fast that with each one there was hazard of enclosing a cow inside the walls. Nevertheless, the city had extended only a few miles past Aurora on the east, to Henderson on the north, and Littleton on the south

—there was still open country before you reached the Air Academy. On the west, of course, the city flowed into the high country and the Federal bureaus were tunneling back into the mountains.

I liked Denver during its Federal boom. Nevertheless, I was excruciatingly anxious to get back to my own time.

It was always the little things. I had had my teeth worked over completely shortly after I had been put on the staff of Hired Girl and could afford it. I had never expected to have to see a dental plastician again. Nevertheless, in 1970 I did not have anti-caries pills and so I got a hole in a tooth, a painful one or I would have ignored it. So I went to a dentist. So help me, I had forgotten what he would see when he looked into my mouth. He blinked, moved his mirror around, and said, “Great jumping Jehosaphat! Who was your dentist?”

“Kah hoo hank?”

He took his hands out of my mouth. “Who did it? And how?”

“Huh? You mean my teeth? Oh, that’s experimental work they’re doing in…India.” “How do they do it?”

“How would I know?”

“Mmm…wait a minute. I’ve got to get some pictures of this.” He started fiddling with his X-ray equipment. “Oh no,” I objected. “Just clean out that bicuspid, plug it up with anything, and let me out of here.”

“But—”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. But I’m on a dead run.”

So he did as I said, pausing now and again to look at my teeth. I paid cash and did not leave my name. I suppose I could have let him have the pics, but covering up had become a reflex. It couldn’t have hurt anything to let him have them. Nor helped either, as X-rays would not show how regeneration was accomplished, nor could I have told him.

There is no time like the past to get things done. While I was sweating sixteen hours a day on Drafting Dan and Protean Pete I got something else done with my left hand. Working anonymously through John’s law office I hired a detective agency with national branches to dig up Belle’s past. I supplied them with her address and the license number and model of her car (since steering wheels are good places to get fingerprints) and suggested that she might have been married here and there and possibly might have a police record. I had to limit the budget severely; I couldn’t afford the sort of investigation you read about.

When they did not report back in ten days I kissed my money goodbye. But a few days later a thick envelope showed up at John’s office.

Belle had been a busy girl. Born six years earlier than she claimed, she had been married twice before she was eighteen. One of them did not count because the man already had a wife; if she had been divorced from the second the agency had not uncovered it.

She had apparently been married four times since then, although once was doubtful; it may have been the “war-widow” racket worked with the aid of a man who was dead and could not object. She had been divorced once (respondent) and one of her husbands was dead. She might still be “married” to the others.

Her police record was long and interesting but apparently she had been convicted of a felony only once, in Nebraska, and granted parole without doing time. This was established only by fingerprints, as she had jumped parole, changed her name, and had acquired a new social-security number. The agency asked if they were to notify Nebraska authorities.

I told them not to bother; she had been missing for nine years and her conviction had been for nothing worse than lure in a badger game. I wondered what I would have done if it had been dope peddling? Reflexive decisions have their complications.

I RAN BEHIND schedule on the drawings and October was on me before I knew it. I still had the descriptions only half worded, since they had to tie into drawings, and I had done nothing about the claims. Worse, I had done nothing about organizing the deal so that it would hold up; I could not do it until I had a completed job to show. Nor had I had time to make contacts. I began to think that I had made a mistake in not asking Dr. Twitchell to set the controls for at least thirty-two years instead of thirty-one years and a fiddling three weeks; I had underestimated the time I would need and overestimated my own capacity.

I had not shown my toys to my friends, the Suttons, not because I wanted to hide them, but because I had not wanted a lot of talk and useless advice while they were incomplete. On the last Saturday in September I was scheduled to go out to the club camp with them. Being behind schedule, I had worked late the night before, then had been awakened early by the torturing clang of an alarm clock so that I could shave and be ready to go when they came by. I shut the sadistic thing off and thanked God that they had got rid of such horrible devices in 2001, then I pulled myself groggily together and went down to the corner drugstore to phone and say that I couldn’t make it, I had to work.

Jenny answered, “Danny, you’re working too hard. A weekend in the country will do you good.” “I can’t help it, Jenny. I have to. I’m sorry.”

John got on the other phone and said, “What’s all this nonsense?”

“I’ve got to work, John. I’ve simply got to. Say hello to the folks for me.”

I went back upstairs, burned some toast, vulcanized some eggs, sat back down at Drafting Dan. An hour later they banged on my door.

None of us went to the mountains that weekend. Instead I demonstrated both devices. Jenny was not much impressed by Drafting Dan (it isn’t a

woman’s gismo, unless she herself is an engineer), but she was wide-eyed over Protean Pete. She kept house with a Mark II Hired Girl and could see how much more this machine could do.

But John could see the importance of Drafting Dan. When I showed him how I could write my signature, recognizably my own, just by punching keys—I admit I had practiced—his eyebrows stayed up. “Chum, you’re going to throw draftsmen out of work by the thousand.”

“No, I won’t. The shortage of engineering talent in this country gets worse every year; this gadget will just help to fill the gap. In a generation you are going to see this tool in every engineering and architectural office in the nation. They’ll be as lost without it as a modern mechanic would be without power tools.”

“You talk as if you knew.” “I do know.”

He looked over at Protean Pete—I had set him to tidying my work-bench—and back at Drafting Dan. “Danny…sometimes I think maybe you were telling me the truth, you know, the day we met you.”

I shrugged. “Call it second sight…but I do know. I’m certain. Does it matter?” “I guess not. What are your plans for these things?”

I frowned. “That’s the hitch, John. I’m a good engineer and a fair jackleg mechanic when I have to be. But I’m no businessman; I’ve proved that. You’ve never fooled with patent law?”

“I told you that before. It’s a job for a specialist.”

“Do you know an honest one? Who’s smart as a whip besides? It’s reached the point where I’ve got to have one. I’ve got to set up a corporation,

too, to handle it. And work out the financing. But I haven’t got much time; I’m terribly pressed for time.” “Why?”

“I’m going back where I came from.” He sat and said nothing for quite a while. At last he said, “How much time?” “Uh, about nine weeks. Nine weeks from this coming Thursday to be exact.”

He looked at the two machines, looked back at me. “Better revise your schedule. I’d say that you had more like nine months’ work cut out for you. You won’t be in production even then—just lined up to start moving, with luck.”

“John, I can’t!”

“I’ll say you can’t.”

“I mean I can’t change my schedule. That’s beyond my control…now.” I put my face in my hands. I was dead with fatigue, having had less than five hours’ sleep and having averaged not much better for days. The shape I was in, I was willing to believe that there was something, after all, to this “fate” business—a man could struggle against it but never beat it.

I looked up. “Will you handle it?” “Eh? What part of it?”

“Everything. I’ve done all I know how to do.”

“That’s a big order, Dan. I could rob you blind. You know that, don’t you? And this may be a gold mine.” “It will be. I know.”

“Then why trust me? You had better just keep me as your attorney, advice for a fee.”

I tried to think while my head ached. I had taken a partner once before—but, damnation, no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open. There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous…fatal, in the end.

“Cripes, John, you know the answer to that. You trusted me. Now I need your help again. Will you help me?”

“Of course he will,” Jenny put in gently, “though I haven’t heard what you two were talking about. Danny? Can it wash dishes? Every dish you have

is dirty.”

“What, Jenny? Why, I suppose he can. Yes, of course he can.” “Then tell him to, please. I want to see it.”

“Oh. I’ve never programmed him for it. I will if you want me to. But it will take several hours to do it right. Of course after that he’ll always be able to do it. But the first time…well, you see, dishwashing involves a lot of alternate choices. It’s a ‘judgment’ job, not a comparatively simple routine like laying bricks or driving a truck.”

“Goodness! I’m certainly glad to find that at least one man understands housework. Did you hear what he said, dear? But don’t stop to teach him now, Danny. I’ll do them myself.” She looked around. “Danny, you’ve been living like a pig, to put it gently.”

To tell the simple truth, it had missed me entirely that Protean Pete could work for me. I had been engrossed in planning how he could work for other people in commercial jobs, and teaching him to do them, while I myself had simply been sweeping dirt into the corner or ignoring it. Now I began teaching him all the household tasks that Flexible Frank had learned; he had the capacity, as I had installed three times as many Thorsen tubes in him as Frank had had.

I had time to do it, for John took over.

Jenny typed descriptions for us; John retained a patent attorney to help with the claims. I don’t know whether John paid him cash or cut him in on the cake; I never asked. I left the whole thing up to him, including what our shares should be; not only did it leave me free for my proper work, but I figured that if he decided such things he could never be tempted the way Miles had been. And I honestly did not care; money as such is not important. Either John and Jenny were what I thought they were or I might as well find that cave and be a hermit.

I insisted on just two things. “John, I think we ought to call the firm ‘The Aladdin Autoengineering Corporation.’ ” “Sounds pretty fancy. What’s wrong with ‘Davis & Sutton’?”

“That’s how it’s got to be, John.”

“So? Is your second sight telling you this?”

“Could be, could be. We’ll use a picture of Aladdin rubbing his lamp as a trademark, with the genie forming above him. I’ll make a rough sketch. And one other thing: The home office had better be in Los Angeles.”

“What? Now you’ve gone too far. That is, if you expect me to run it. What’s wrong with Denver?”

“Nothing is wrong with Denver, it’s a nice town. But it is not the place to set up the factory. Pick a good site here and some bright morning you wake up and find that the Federal enclave has washed over it and you are out of business until you get reestablished on a new one. Besides that, labor is scarce, raw materials come overland, building materials are all gray-market. Whereas Los Angeles has an unlimited supply of skilled workmen and more pouring in every day, Los Angeles is a seaport, Los Angeles is—”

“How about the smog? It’s not worth it.”

“They’ll lick the smog before long. Believe me. And haven’t you noticed that Denver is working up smog of its own?”

“Now wait a minute, Dan. You’ve already made it clear that I will have to run this while you go kiyoodling off on some business of your own. Okay, I agreed. But I ought to have some choice in working conditions.”

“It’s necessary, John.”

“Dan, nobody in his right mind who lives in Colorado would move to California. I was stationed out there during the war; I know. Take Jenny here; she’s a native Californian, that’s her secret shame. You couldn’t hire her to go back. Here you’ve got winters, changing seasons, brisk mountain air, magnificent—”

Jenny looked up. “Oh, I wouldn’t go so far as to say I’d never go back.” “What’s that, dear?”

Jenny had been quietly knitting; she never talked unless she really had something to say. Now she put down her knitting, a clear sign. “If we did move there, dear, we could join the Oakdale Club; they have outdoor swimming all year round. I was thinking of that just this last weekend when I saw ice on the pool at Boulder.”

I stayed until the evening of 2 December 1970, the last possible minute. I was forced to borrow three thousand dollars from John—the prices I had paid for components had been scandalous—but I offered him a stock mortgage to secure it. He let me sign it, then tore it up and dropped it in a wastebasket. “Pay me when you get around to it.”

“It will be thirty years, John.”

“As long as that?” I pondered it. He had never invited me to tell my whole story since the afternoon, six months earlier, when he had told me frankly that he did not believe the essential part—but was going to vouch for me to their club anyhow.

I told him I thought it was time to tell him. “Shall we wake up Jenny? She’s entitled to hear it too.”

“Mmm…no. Let her nap until just before you have to leave. Jenny is a very uncomplicated person, Dan. She doesn’t care who you are or where you came from as long as she likes you. If it seems a good idea, I can pass it on to her later.”

“As you will.” He let me tell it all, stopping only to fill our glasses—mine with ginger ale; I had a reason not to touch alcohol. When I had brought it up to the point where I landed on a mountainside outside Boulder, I stopped. “That’s it,” I said. “Though I was mixed up on one point. I’ve looked at the contour since and I don’t think my fall was more than two feet. If they had—I mean ‘if they were going to’—bulldoze that laboratory site any deeper, I would have been buried alive. Probably would have killed both of you too—if it didn’t blow up the whole county. I don’t know just what happens when a flat waveform changes back into a mass where another mass already is.”

John went on smoking. “Well?” I said. “What do you think?”

“Danny, you’ve told me a lot of things about what Los Angeles—I mean ‘Great Los Angeles’—is going to be like. I’ll let you know when I see you just how accurate you’ve been.”

“It’s accurate. Subject to minor slips of memory.”

“Mmm…you certainly make it sound logical. But in the meantime I think you are the most agreeable lunatic I’ve ever met. Not that it handicaps you as an engineer…or as a friend. I like you, boy. I’m going to buy you a new straitjacket for Christmas.”

“Have it your own way.”

“I have to have it this way. The alternative is that I myself am stark staring mad…and that would make quite a problem for Jenny.” He glanced at the clock. “We’d better wake her. She’d scalp me if I let you leave without saying good-bye to her.”

“I wouldn’t think of it.”

They drove me to Denver International Port and Jenny kissed me good-bye at the gate. I caught the eleven o’clock shuttle for Los Angeles.

XI

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, 3 December 1970, I had a cabdriver drop me a block from Miles’ house comfortably early, as I did not know exactly what time I had arrived there the first time. It was already dark as I approached his house, but I saw only his car at the curb, so I backed off a hundred yards to a spot where I could watch that stretch of curb and waited.

Two cigarettes later I saw another car pull up there, stop, and its lights go out. I waited a couple of minutes longer, then hurried toward it. It was my own car.

I did not have a key but that was no hurdle; I was always getting ears-deep in an engineering problem and forgetting my keys; I had long ago formed the habit of keeping a spare ditched in the trunk. I got it now and climbed into the car. I had parked on a slight grade heading downhill, so, without turning on lights or starting the engine, I let it drift to the corner and turned there, then switched on the engine but not the lights, and parked again in the alley back of Miles’ house and on which his garage faced.

The garage was locked. I peered through dirty glass and saw a shape with a sheet over it. By its contours I knew it was my old friend Flexible Frank.

Garage doors are not built to resist a man armed with a tire iron and determination—not in southern California in 1970. It took seconds. Carving Frank into pieces I could carry and stuff into my car took much longer. But first I checked to see that the notes and drawings were where I suspected they were—they were indeed, so I hauled them out and dumped them on the floor of the car, then tackled Frank himself. Nobody knew as well as I did how he was put together, and it speeded up things enormously that I did not care how much damage I did; nevertheless, I was as busy as a one- man band for nearly an hour.

I had just stowed the last piece, the wheelchair chassis, in the car trunk and had lowered the turtleback down on it as far as it would go when I heard Pete start to wail. Swearing to myself at the time it had taken to tear Frank apart, I hurried around the garage and into their back yard. Then the commotion started.

I had promised myself that I would relish every second of Pete’s triumph. But I couldn’t see it. The back door was open and light was streaming out the screen door, but while I could hear sounds of running, crashes, Pete’s blood-chilling war cry, and screams from Belle, they never accommodated me by coming into my theater of vision. So I crept up to the screen door, hoping to catch a glimpse of the carnage.

The damned thing was hooked! It was the only thing that had failed to follow the schedule. So I frantically dug into my pocket, broke a nail getting my knife open—and jabbed through and unhooked it just in time to jump out of the way as Pete hit the screen like a stunt motorcyclist hitting a fence.

I fell over a rosebush. I don’t know whether Miles and Belle even tried to follow him outside. I doubt it; I would not have risked it in their spot. But I was too busy getting myself untangled to notice.

Once I was on my feet I stayed behind bushes and moved around to the side of the house; I wanted to get away from that open door and the light pouring out of it. Then it was just a case of waiting until Pete quieted down. I would not touch him then, certainly not try to pick him up. I know cats.

But every time he passed me, prowling for an entrance and sounding his deep challenge, I called out to him softly. “Pete. Come here, Pete. Easy, boy, it’s all right.”

He knew I was there and twice he looked at me, but otherwise ignored me. With cats it is one thing at a time; he had urgent business right now and no time to head-bump with Papa. But I knew he would come to me when his emotions had eased off.

While I squatted, waiting, I heard water running in their bathrooms and guessed that they had gone to clean up, leaving me in the living room. I had a horrid thought then: What would happen if I sneaked in and cut the throat of my own helpless body? But I suppressed it; I wasn’t that curious and suicide is such a final experiment, even if the circumstances are mathematically intriguing.

But I never have figured it out.

Besides, I didn’t want to go inside for any purpose. I might run into Miles—and I didn’t want any truck with a dead man.

Pete finally stopped in front of me about three feet out of reach. “Mrrrowrr?” he said—meaning, “Let’s go back and clean out the joint. You hit ’em high, I’ll hit ’em low.”

“No, boy. The show is over.” “Aw, c’mahnnn!”

“Time to go home, Pete. Come to Danny.” He sat down and started to wash himself. When he looked up, I put my arms out and he jumped into

them. “Kwleert?” (“Where the hell were you when the riot started?”)

I carried him back to the car and dumped him in the driver’s space, which was all there was left. He sniffed the hardware on his accustomed

place and looked around reproachfully. “You’ll have to sit in my lap,” I said. “Quit being fussy.”

I switched on the car’s lights as we hit the street. Then I turned east and headed for Big Bear and the Girl Scout camp. I chucked away enough of Frank in the first ten minutes to permit Pete to resume his rightful place, which suited us both better. When I had the floor clear, several miles later, I stopped and shoved the notes and drawings down a storm drain. The wheelchair chassis I did not get rid of until we were actually in the mountains, then it went down a deep arroyo, making a nice sound effect.

About three in the morning I pulled into a motor court across the road and down a bit from the turnoff into the Girl Scout camp, and paid too much for a cabin—Pete almost queered it by sticking his head up and making a comment when the owner came out.

“What time,” I asked him, “does the morning mail from Los Angeles get up here?” “Helicopter comes in at seven-thirteen, right on the dot.”

“Fine. Give me a call at seven, will you?”

“Mister, if you can sleep as late as seven around here you’re better than I am. But I’ll put you in the book.”

By eight o’clock Pete and I had eaten breakfast and I had showered and shaved. I looked Pete over in daylight and concluded that he had come through the battle undamaged except for possibly a bruise or two. We checked out and I drove into the private road for the camp. Uncle Sam’s truck turned in just ahead of me; I decided that it was my day.

I never saw so many little girls in my life. They skittered like kittens and they all looked alike in their green uniforms. Those I passed wanted to look at Pete, though most of them just stared shyly and did not approach. I went to a cabin marked “Headquarters,” where I spoke to another uniformed scout who was decidedly no longer a girl.

She was properly suspicious of me; strange men who want to be allowed to visit little girls just turning into big girls should always be suspected.

I explained that I was the child’s uncle, Daniel B. Davis by name, and that I had a message for the child concerning her family. She countered with the statement that visitors other than parents were permitted only when accompanied by a parent and, in any case, visiting hours were not until four o’clock.

“I don’t want to visit with Frederica, but I must give her this message. It’s an emergency.”

“In that case you can write it out and I will give it to her as soon as she is through with rhythm games.”

I looked upset (and was) and said, “I don’t want to do that. It would be much kinder to tell the child in person.” “Death in the family?”

“Not quite. Family trouble, yes. I’m sorry, ma’am, but I am not free to tell anyone else. It concerns my niece’s mother.”

She was weakening but still undecided. Then Pete joined the discussion. I had been carrying him with his bottom in the crook of my left arm and his chest supported with my right hand; I had not wanted to leave him in the car and I knew Ricky would want to see him. He’ll put up with being carried that way quite a while but now he was getting bored. “Krrwarr?”

She looked at him and said, “He’s a fine boy, that one. I have a tabby at home who could have come from the same litter.”

I said solemnly, “He’s Frederica’s cat. I had to bring him along because …well, it was necessary. No one to take care of him.”

“Oh, the poor little fellow!” She scratched him under the chin, doing it properly, thank goodness, and Pete accepted it, thank goodness again, stretching his neck and closing his eyes and looking indecently pleased. He is capable of taking a very stiff line with strangers if he does not fancy their overtures.

The guardian of youth told me to sit down at a table under the trees outside the headquarters. It was far enough away to permit a private visit but still under her careful eye. I thanked her and waited.

I didn’t see Ricky come up. I heard a shout, “Uncle Danny!” and another one as I turned, “And you brought Pete! Oh, this is wonderful!

Pete gave a long bubbling bleerrrt and leaped from my arms to hers. She caught him neatly, rearranged him in the support position he likes best, and they ignored me for a few seconds while exchanging cat protocols. Then she looked up and said soberly, “Uncle Danny, I’m awful glad you’re here.”

I didn’t kiss her; I did not touch her at all. I’ve never been one to paw children and Ricky was the sort of little girl who only put up with it when she could not avoid it. Our original relationship, back when she was six, had been founded on mutual decent respect for the other’s individualism and personal dignity.

But I did look at her. Knobby knees, stringy, shooting up fast, not yet filled out, she was not as pretty as she had been as a baby girl. The shorts and T-shirt she was wearing, combined with peeling sunburn, scratches, bruises, and an understandable amount of dirt, did not add up to feminine glamour. She was a matchstick sketch of the woman she would become, her coltish gawkiness relieved only by her enormous solemn eyes and the pixie beauty of her thin smudged features.

She looked adorable.

I said, “And I’m awful glad to be here, Ricky.”

Trying awkwardly to manage Pete with one arm, she reached with her other hand for a bulging pocket in her shorts. “I’m surprised too. I just this minute got a letter from you—they dragged me away from mail call; I haven’t even had a chance to open it. Does it say that you’re coming today?” She got it out, creased and mussed from being crammed into a pocket too small.

“No, it doesn’t, Ricky. It says I’m going away. But after I mailed it, I decided I just had to come say good-bye in person.” She looked bleak and dropped her eyes. “You’re going away?”

“Yes. I’ll explain, Ricky, but it’s rather long. Let’s sit down and I’ll tell you about it.” So we sat on opposite sides of the picnic table under the ponderosas and I talked. Pete lay on the table between us, making a library lion of himself with his forepaws on the creased letter, and sang a low song like bees buzzing in deep clover, while he narrowed his eyes in contentment.

I was much relieved to find that she already knew that Miles had married Belle—I hadn’t relished having to break that to her. She glanced up, dropped her eyes at once, and said with no expression at all, “Yes, I know. Daddy wrote me about it.”

“Oh. I see.”

She suddenly looked grim and not at all a child. “I’m not going back there, Danny. I wont go back there.”

“But—Look here, Rikki-tikki-tavi, I know how you feel. I certainly don’t want you to go back there—I’d take you away myself if I could. But how can

you help going back? He’s your daddy and you are only eleven.”

“I don’t have to go back. He’s not my real daddy. My grandmother is coming to get me.” “What? When’s she coming?”

“Tomorrow. She has to drive up from Brawley. I wrote her about it and asked her if I could come live with her because I wouldn’t live with Daddy

anymore with her there.” She managed to put more contempt into one pronoun than an adult could have squeezed out of profanity. “Grandma wrote back and said that I didn’t have to live there if I didn’t want to because he had never adopted me and she was my ‘guardian of record.’ ” She looked up anxiously. “That’s right, isn’t it? They can’t make me?”

I felt an overpowering flood of relief. The one thing I had not been able to figure out, a problem that had worried me for months, was how to keep Ricky from being subjected to the poisonous influence of Belle for—well, two years; it had seemed certain that it would be about two years. “If he never adopted you, Ricky, I’m certain that your grandmother can make it stick if you are both firm about it.” Then I frowned and chewed my lip. “But you may have some trouble tomorrow. They may object to letting you go with her.”

“How can they stop me? I’ll just get in the car and go.”

“It’s not that simple, Ricky. These people who run the camp, they have to follow rules. Your daddy—Miles, I mean—Miles turned you over to them; they won’t be willing to turn you back over to anyone but him.”

She stuck out her lower lip. “I won’t go. I’m going with Grandma.”

“Yes. But maybe I can tell you how to make it easy. If I were you, I wouldn’t tell them that I’m leaving camp; I’d just tell them that your grandmother wants to take you for a ride—then don’t come back.”

Some of her tension relaxed. “All right.”

“Uh…don’t pack a bag or anything or they may guess what you’re doing. Don’t try to take any clothes but those you are wearing at the time. Put any money or anything you really want to save into your pockets. You don’t have much here that you would really mind losing, I suppose?”

“I guess not.” But she looked wistful. “I’ve got a brand-new swimsuit.”

How do you explain to a child that there are times when you just must abandon your baggage? You can’t—they’ll go back into a burning building to save a doll or a toy elephant. “Mmm…Ricky, have your grandmother tell them that she is taking you over to Arrowhead to have a swim with her…and that she may take you to dinner at the hotel there, but that she will have you back before taps. Then you can carry your swimming suit and a towel. But nothing else. Er, will your grandmother tell that fib for you?”

“I guess so. Yes, I’m sure she will. She says people have to tell little white fibs or else people couldn’t stand each other. But she says fibs were meant to be used, not abused.”

“She sounds like a sensible person. You’ll do it that way?”

“I’ll do it just that way, Danny.”

“Good.” I picked up the battered envelope. “Ricky, I told you I had to go away. I have to go away for a very long time.” “How long?”

“Thirty years.”

Her eyes grew wider if possible. At eleven, thirty years is not a long time; it’s forever. I added, “I’m sorry, Ricky. But I have to.” “Why?”

I could not answer that one. The true answer was unbelievable and a lie would not do. “Ricky, it’s much too hard to explain. But I have to. I can’t help it.” I hesitated, then added, “I’m going to take the Long Sleep. The cold sleep—you know what I mean.”

She knew. Children get used to new ideas faster than adults do; cold sleep was a favorite comic-book theme. She looked horrified and

protested, “But, Danny, Ill never see you again!”

“Yes, you will. It’s a long time but I’ll see you again. And so will Pete. Because Pete is going with me; he’s going to cold-sleep too.”

She glanced at Pete and looked more woebegone than ever. “But—Danny, why don’t you and Pete just come down to Brawley and live with us? That would be ever so much better. Grandma will like Pete. She’ll like you too—she says there’s nothing like having a man around the house.”

“Ricky…dear Ricky…I have to. Please don’t tease me.” I started to tear open the envelope. She looked angry and her chin started to quiver. “I think she has something to do with this!”

“What? If you mean Belle, she doesn’t. Not exactly, anyway.”

“She’s not going to cold-sleep with you?”

I think I shuddered. “Good heavens, no! I’d run miles to avoid her.”

Ricky seemed slightly mollified. “You know, I was so mad at you about her. I had an awful outrage.”

“I’m sorry, Ricky. I’m truly sorry. You were right and I was wrong. But she hasn’t anything to do with this. I’m through with her, forever and forever

and cross my heart. Now about this.” I held up the certificate for all that I owned in Hired Girl, Inc. “Do you know what it is?” “No.”

I explained it to her. “I’m giving this to you, Ricky. Because I’m going to be gone so long I want you to have it.” I took the paper on which I had written an assignment to her, tore it up, and put the pieces in my pocket; I could not risk doing it that way—it would be too easy for Belle to tear up a separate sheet and we were not yet out of the woods. I turned the certificate over and studied the standard assignment form on the back, trying to plan how to word it in the spaces provided. I finally squeezed in an assignment to the Bank of America in trust for—“Ricky, what is your full name?”

“Frederica Virginia. Frederica Virginia Gentry. You know.”

“Is it ‘Gentry’? I thought you said Miles had never adopted you?”

“Oh! I’ve been Ricky Gentry as long as I can remember. But you mean my real name. It’s the same as Grandma’s…the same as my real daddy’s. Heinicke. But nobody ever calls me that.”

“They will now.” I wrote “Frederica Virginia Heinicke” and added “and to be reassigned to her on her twenty-first birthday” while prickles ran down my spine—my original assignment might have been defective in any case.

I started to sign and then noticed our watchdog sticking her head out of the office. I glanced at my wrist, saw that we had been talking an hour; I was running out of minutes.

But I wanted it nailed down tight. “Ma’am!” “Yes?”

“By any chance, is there a notary public around here? Or must I find one in the village?” “I am a notary. What do you wish?”

“Oh, good! Wonderful! Do you have your seal?” “I never go anywhere without it.”

So I signed my name under her eye and she even stretched a point (on Ricky’s assurance that she knew me and Pete’s silent testimony to my respectability as a fellow member of the fraternity of cat people) and used the long form: “—known to me personally as being said Daniel B. Davis

—” When she embossed her seal through my signature and her own I sighed with relief. Just let Belle try to find a way to twist that one!

She glanced at it curiously but said nothing. I said solemnly, “Tragedies cannot be undone but this will help. The kid’s education, you know.”

She refused a fee and went back into the office. I turned back to Ricky and said, “Give this to your grandmother. Tell her to take it to a branch of the Bank of America in Brawley. They’ll do everything else.” I laid it in front of her.

She did not touch it. “That’s worth a lot of money, isn’t it?” “Quite a bit. It will be worth more.”

“I don’t want it.”

“But, Ricky, I want you to have it.”

“I don’t want it. I won’t take it.” Her eyes filled with tears and her voice got unsteady. “You’re going away forever and…and you don’t care about me anymore.” She sniffed. “Just like when you got engaged to her. When you could just as easily bring Pete and come live with Grandma and me. I don’t want your money!”

“Ricky. Listen to me, Ricky. It’s too late. I couldn’t take it back now if I wanted to. It’s already yours.”

“I don’t care. I won’t ever touch it.” She reached out and stroked Pete. “Pete wouldn’t go away and leave me…only you’re going to make him. Now I won’t even have Pete.”

I answered unsteadily, “Ricky? Rikki-tikki-tavi? You want to see Pete …and me again?” I could hardly hear her. “Of course I do. But I won’t.”

“But you can.”

“Huh? How? You said you were going to take the Long Sleep…thirty years, you said.”

“And I am. I have to. But, Ricky, here is what you can do. Be a good girl, go live with your grandmama, go to school—and just let this money pile up. When you are twenty-one—if you still want to see us—you’ll have enough money to take the Long Sleep yourself. When you wake up I’ll be there waiting for you. Pete and I will both be waiting for you. That’s a solemn promise.”

Her expression changed but she did not smile. She thought about it quite a long time, then said, “You’ll really be there?”

“Yes. But we’ll have to make a date. If you do it, Ricky, do it just the way I tell you. You arrange it with the Cosmopolitan Insurance Company and you make sure that you take your Sleep in the Riverside Sanctuary in Riverside…and you make very sure that they have orders to wake you up on the first day of May, 2001, exactly. I’ll be there that day, waiting for you. If you want me to be there when you first open your eyes, you’ll have to leave word for that, too, or they won’t let me farther than the waiting room—I know that sanctuary; they’re very fussy.” I took out an envelope which I had prepared before I left Denver. “You don’t have to remember this; I’ve got it all written out for you. Just save it, and on your twenty-first birthday you

can make up your mind. But you can be sure that Pete and I will be there waiting for you, whether you show up or not.” I laid the prepared

instructions on the stock certificate.

I thought that I had her convinced but she did not touch either of them. She stared at them, then presently said, “Danny?” “Yes, Ricky?”

She would not look up and her voice was so low that I could barely hear her. But I did hear her. “If I do…will you marry me?”

My ears roared and the lights flickered. But I answered steadily and much louder than she had spoken. “Yes, Ricky. That’s what I want. That’s why I’m doing this.”

I HAD JUST ONE more thing to leave with her: a prepared envelope marked “To Be Opened in the Event of the Death of Miles Gentry.” I did not explain it to her; I just told her to keep it. It contained proof of Belle’s varied career, matrimonial and otherwise. In the hands of a lawyer it should make a court fight over his will no contest at all.

Then I gave her my class ring from Tech (it was all I had) and told her it was hers; we were engaged. “It’s too big for you but you can keep it. I’ll have another one for you when you wake up.”

She held it tight in her fist. “I won’t want another one.”

“All right. Now better tell Pete good-bye, Ricky. I’ve got to go. I can’t wait a minute longer.”

She hugged Pete, then handed him back to me, looked me steadily in the eye even though tears were running down her nose and leaving clean streaks. “Good-bye, Danny.”

“Not ‘good-bye,’ Ricky. Just ‘so long.’ We’ll be waiting for you.”

IT WAS A QUARTER of ten when I got back to the village. I found that a helicopter bus was due to leave for the center of the city in twenty-five minutes, so I sought out the only used-car lot and made one of the fastest deals in history, letting my car go for half what it was worth for cash in hand at once. It left me just time to sneak Pete into the bus (they are fussy about airsick cats) and we reached Powell’s office just after eleven o’clock.

Powell was much annoyed that I had canceled my arrangements for Mutual to handle my estate and was especially inclined to lecture me over having lost my papers. “I can’t very well ask the same judge to pass on your committal twice in the same twenty-four hours. It’s most irregular.”

I waved money at him, cash money with convincing figures on it. “Never mind eating me out about it, Sergeant. Do you want my business or don’t you? If not, say so, and I’ll beat it on up to Central Valley. Because I’m going today.”

He still fumed but he gave in. Then he grumbled about adding six months to the cold-sleep period and did not want to guarantee an exact date of awakening. “The contracts ordinarily read ‘plus or minus one month’ to allow for administrative hazards.”

“This one doesn’t. This one reads 27 April 2001. But I don’t care whether it says ‘Mutual’ at the top or ‘Central Valley.’ Mr. Powell, I’m buying and you’re selling. If you don’t sell what I want to buy I’ll go where they do sell it.”

He changed the contract and we both initialed it.

At twelve straight up I was back in for my final check with their medical examiner. He looked at me. “Did you stay sober?” “Sober as a judge.”

“That’s no recommendation. We’ll see.” He went over me almost as carefully as he had “yesterday.” At last he put down his rubber hammer and said, “I’m surprised. You’re in much better shape than you were yesterday. Amazingly so.”

“Doc, you don’t know the half of it.”

I held Pete and soothed him while they gave him the first sedative. Then I lay back myself and let them work on me. I suppose I could have waited another day, or even longer, just as well as not—but the truth was that I was frantically anxious to get back to 2001.

About four in the afternoon, with Pete’s flat head resting on my chest, I went happily to sleep again.

XII

MY DREAMS WERE pleasanter this time. The only bad one I remember was not too bad, but simply endless frustration. It was a cold dream in which I wandered shivering through branching corridors, trying every door I came to, thinking that the next one would surely be the Door into Summer, with Ricky waiting on the other side. I was hampered by Pete, “following me ahead of me,” that exasperating habit cats have of scalloping back and forth between the legs of persons trusted not to step on them or kick them.

At each new door he would duck between my feet, look out it, find it still winter outside, and reverse himself, almost tripping me. But neither one of us gave up his conviction that the next door would be the right one.

I woke up easily this time, with no disorientation—in fact the doctor was somewhat irked that all I wanted was some breakfast, the Great Los Angeles Times, and no chitchat. I didn’t think it was worthwhile to explain to him that this was my second time around; he would not have believed me.

There was a note waiting for me, dated a week earlier, from John:

Dear Dan,

All right, I give up. How did you do it?

I’m complying with your request not to be met, against Jenny’s wishes. She sends her love and hopes that you won’t be too long in looking us up

—I’ve tried to explain to her that you expect to be busy for a while. We are both fine although I tend to walk where I used to run. Jenny is even more beautiful than she used to be.

Hasta la vista, amigo,

John

P.S. If the enclosure is not enough, just phone—there is plenty more where it came from. We’ve done pretty well, I think.

I considered calling John, both to say hello and to tell him about a colossal new idea I had had while asleep—a gadget to change bathing from a chore to a sybaritic delight. But I decided not to; I had other things on my mind. So I made notes while the notion was fresh and then got some sleep, with Pete’s head tucked into my armpit. I wish I could cure him of that. It’s flattering but a nuisance.

On Monday, the thirtieth of April, I checked out and went over to Riverside, where I got a room in the old Mission Inn. They made the predictable fuss about taking a cat into a room and an autobellhop is not responsive to bribes—hardly an improvement. But the assistant manager had more flexibility in his synapses; he listened to reason as long as it was crisp and rustled. I did not sleep well; I was too excited.

I presented myself to the director of the Riverside Sanctuary at ten o’clock the next morning. “Dr. Rumsey, my name is Daniel B. Davis. You have a committed client here named Frederica Heinicke?”

“I suppose you can identify yourself ?”

I showed him a 1970 driver’s license issued in Denver, and my withdrawal certificate from Forest Lawn Sanctuary. He looked them over and me, and handed them back. I said anxiously, “I think she’s scheduled for withdrawal today. By any chance, are there any instructions to permit me to be present? I don’t mean the processing routines; I mean at the last minute, when she’s ready for the final restimulant and consciousness.”

He shoved his lips out and looked judicial. “Our instructions for this client do not read to wake her today.” “No?” I felt disappointed and hurt.

“No. Her exact wishes are as follows: Instead of necessarily being waked today, she wished not to be waked at all until you showed up.” He looked me over and smiled. “You must have a heart of gold. I can’t account for it on your beauty.”

I sighed. “Thanks, Doctor.”

“You can wait in the lobby or come back. We won’t need you for a couple of hours.”

I went back to the lobby, got Pete, and took him for a walk. I had parked him there in his new travel bag and he was none too pleased with it, even though I had bought one as much like his old one as possible and had installed a one-way window in it the night before. It probably didn’t smell right as yet.

We passed the “real nice place,” but I was not hungry even though I hadn’t been able to eat much breakfast—Pete had eaten my eggs and had turned up his nose at yeast strips. At eleven-thirty I was back at the sanctuary. Finally they let me in to see her.

All I could see was her face; her body was covered. But it was my Ricky, grown woman size and looking like a slumbering angel.

“She’s under posthypnotic instruction,” Dr. Rumsey said softly. “If you will stand just there, I’ll bring her up. Uh, I think you had better put that cat outside.”

“No, Doctor.”

He started to speak, shrugged, turned back to his patient. “Wake up, Frederica. Wake up. You must wake up now.”

Her eyelids fluttered, she opened her eyes. They wandered for an instant, then she caught sight of us and smiled sleepily. “Danny…and Pete.” She raised both arms—and I saw that she was wearing my Tech class ring on her left thumb.

Pete chirrlupped and jumped on the bed, started doing shoulder dives against her in an ecstasy of welcome.

DR. RUMSEY WANTED her to stay overnight, but Ricky would have none of it. So I had a cab brought to the door and we jumped to Brawley. Her grandmother had died in 1980 and her social links there had gone by attrition, but she had left things in storage there—books mostly. I ordered them shipped to Aladdin, care of John Sutton. Ricky was a little dazzled by the changes in her old home town and never let go my arm, but she never succumbed to that terrible homesickness which is the great hazard of the Sleep. She merely wanted to get out of Brawley as quickly as possible.

So I hired another cab and we jumped to Yuma. There I signed the county clerk’s book in a fine round hand, using my full name “Daniel Boone Davis,” so that there could be no possible doubt as to which D. B. Davis had designed this magnum opus. A few minutes later I was standing with her little hand in mine and choking over, “I, Daniel, take thee, Frederica…till death us do part.”

Pete was my best man. The witnesses we scraped up in the courthouse.

WE GOT OUT of Yuma at once and jumped to a guest ranch near Tucson, where we had a cabin away from the main lodge and equipped with

our own Eager Beaver to fetch and carry so that we did not need to see anyone. Pete fought a monumental battle with the tom who until then had been boss of the ranch, whereupon we had to keep Pete in or watch him. This was the only shortcoming I can think of. Ricky took to being married as if she had invented it, and me—well, I had Ricky.

THERE ISN’T MUCH more to be said. Voting Ricky’s Hired Girl stock—it was still the largest single block—I had McBee eased upstairs to “Research Engineer Emeritus” and put Chuck in as chief engineer. John is boss of Aladdin but keeps threatening to retire—an idle threat. He and I and Jenny control the company, since he was careful to issue preferred stock and to float bonds rather than surrender control. I’m not on the board of either corporation; I don’t run them and they compete. Competition is a good idea—Darwin thought well of it.

Me, I’m just the “Davis Engineering Company”—a drafting room, a small shop, and an old machinist who thinks I’m crazy but follows my drawings to exact tolerance. When we finish something I put it out for license.

I had my notes on Twitchell recovered. Then I wrote and told him I had made it and returned via cold sleep…and apologized abjectly for having “doubted” him. I asked if he wanted to see the manuscript when I finished. He never answered so I guess he is still sore at me.

But I am writing it and I’ll put it in all major libraries even if I have to publish at my own expense. I owe him that much. I owe him much more; I owe him for Ricky. And for Pete. I’m going to title it Unsung Genius.

Jenny and John look as if they would last forever. Thanks to geriatrics, fresh air, sunshine, exercise, and a mind that never worries, Jenny is

prettier than ever at…well, sixty-three is my guess. John thinks that I am “merely” clairvoyant and does not want to look at the evidence. Well, how did I do it? I tried to explain it to Ricky, but she got upset when I told her that while we were on our honeymoon I was actually and no foolin’ also up at Boulder, and that while I was visiting her at the Girl Scout camp I was also lying in a drugged stupor in San Fernando Valley.

She turned white. So I said, “Let’s put it hypothetically. It’s all logical when you look at it mathematically. Suppose we take a guinea pig—white with brown splotches. We put him in the time cage and kick him back a week. But a week earlier we had already found him there, so at that time we had put him in a pen with himself. Now we’ve got two guinea pigs…although actually it’s just one guinea pig, one being the other one a week older. So when you took one of them and kicked him back a week and—”

“Wait a minute! Which one?”

“Which one? Why, there never was but one. You took the one a week younger, of course, because—”

“You said there was just one. Then you said there were two. Then you said the two was just one. But you were going to take one of the two…when there was just one—”

“I’m trying to explain how two can be just one. If you take the younger—” “How can you tell which guinea pig is younger when they look just alike?”

“Well, you could cut off the tail of the one you are sending back. Then when it came back you would—” “Why, Danny, how cruel! Besides, guinea pigs don’t have tails.”

She seemed to think that proved something. I should never have tried to explain.

But Ricky is not one to fret over things that aren’t important. Seeing that I was upset, she said softly, “Come here, dear.” She rumpled what hair I have left and kissed me. “One of you is all I want, dearest. Two might be more than I could manage. Tell me one thing—are you glad you waited for me to grow up?”

I did my darnedest to convince her that I was.

But the explanation I tried to give does not explain everything. I missed a point even though I was riding the merry-go-round myself and counting the revolutions. Why didn’t I see the notice of my own withdrawal? I mean the second one, in April 2001, not the one in December 2000. I should have; I was there and I used to check those lists. I was awakened (second time) on Friday, 27 April 2001; it should have been in next morning’s

Times. But I did not see it. I’ve looked it up since and there it is: “D. B. Davis,” in the Times for Saturday, 28 April 2001.

Philosophically, just one line of ink can make a different universe as surely as having the continent of Europe missing. Is the old “branching time

streams” and “multiple universes” notion correct? Did I bounce into a different universe, different because I had monkeyed with the setup? Even

though I found Ricky and Pete in it? Is there another universe somewhere (or somewhen) in which Pete yowled until he despaired, then wandered off to fend for himself, deserted? And in which Ricky never managed to flee with her grandmother but had to suffer the vindictive wrath of Belle?

One line of fine print isn’t enough. I probably fell asleep that night and missed reading my own name, then stuffed the paper down the chute next

morning, thinking I had finished with it. I am absent-minded, particularly when I’m thinking about a job.

But what would I have done if I had seen it? Gone there, met myself—and gone stark mad? No, for if I had seen it, I wouldn’t have done the things I did afterward—“afterward” for me—which led up to it. Therefore it could never have happened that way. The control is a negative feedback type, with a built-in “fail safe,” because the very existence of that line of print depended on my not seeing it; the apparent possibility that I might have seen it is one of the excluded “not possibles” of the basic circuit design.

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” Free will and predestination in one sentence and both true. There is only one real world, with one past and one future. “As it was in the beginning, is now and ever shall be, world without end, amen.” Just one…but big enough and complicated enough to include free will and time travel and everything else in its linkages and feedbacks and guard circuits. You’re

allowed to do anything inside the rules…but you come back to your own door.

I’m not the only person who has time-traveled. Fort listed too many cases not explainable otherwise and so did Ambrose Bierce. And there were those two ladies in the gardens of the Trianon. I have a hunch, too, that old Doc Twitchell closed that switch oftener than he admitted…to say nothing of others who may have learned how in the past or future. But I doubt if much ever comes of it. In my case only three people know and two don’t believe me. You can’t do much if you do time-travel. As Fort said, you railroad only when it comes time to railroad.

But I can’t get Leonard Vincent out of my mind. Was he Leonardo da Vinci? Did he beat his way across the continent and go back with Columbus? The encyclopedia says that his life was such-and-such—but he might have revised the record. I know how that is; I’ve had to do a little of it. They didn’t have social-security numbers, ID cards, nor fingerprints in fifteenth-century Italy; he could have swung it.

But think of him, marooned from everything he was used to, aware of flight, of power, of a million things, trying desperately to picture them so that they could be made—but doomed to frustration because you simply can’t do the things we do today without centuries of former art to build on.

Tantalus had it easier.

I’ve thought about what could be done with time travel commercially if it were declassified—making short jumps, setting up machinery to get back, taking along components. But someday you’d make one jump too many and not be able to set up for your return because it’s not time to “railroad.” Something simple, like a special alloy, could whip you. And there is that truly awful hazard of not knowing which way you are going. Imagine winding up at the court of Henry VIII with a load of subflexive fasartas intended for the twenty-fifth century. Being becalmed in the horse

latitudes would be better.

No, you should never market a gadget until the bugs are out of it.

But I’m not worried about “paradoxes” or “causing anachronisms”—if a thirtieth-century engineer does smooth out the bugs and then sets up transfer stations and trade, it will be because the Builder designed the universe that way. He gave us eyes, two hands, a brain; anything we do with them cant be a paradox. He doesn’t need busybodies to “enforce” His laws; they enforce themselves. There are no miracles and the word “anachronism” is a semantic blank.

But I don’t worry about philosophy any more than Pete does. Whatever the truth about this world, I like it. I’ve found my Door into Summer and I would not time-travel again for fear of getting off at the wrong station. Maybe my son will, but if he does I will urge him to go forward, not back. “Back” is for emergencies; the future is better than the past. Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands…with tools…with horse sense and science and engineering.

Most of these long-haired belittlers can’t drive a nail nor use a slide rule. I’d like to invite them into Dr. Twitchell’s cage and ship them back to the twelfth century—then let them enjoy it.

But I am not mad at anybody and I like now. Except that Pete is getting older, a little fatter, and not as inclined to choose a younger opponent; all too soon he must take the very Long Sleep. I hope with all my heart that his gallant little soul may find its Door into Summer, where catnip fields abound and tabbies are complacent, and robot opponents are programmed to fight fiercely—but always lose—and people have friendly laps and legs to strop against, but never a foot that kicks.

Ricky is getting fat, too, but for a temporary happier reason. It has just made her more beautiful and her sweet eternal Yea! is unchanged, but it isn’t comfortable for her. I’m working on gadgets to make things easier. It just isn’t very convenient to be a woman; something ought to be done and

I’m convinced that some things can be done. There’s that matter of leaning over, and also the backaches—I’m working on those, and I’ve built her a

hydraulic bed that I think I will patent. It ought to be easier to get in and out of a bathtub than it is too. I haven’t solved that yet.

For old Pete I’ve built a “cat bathroom” to use in bad weather—automatic, self-replenishing, sanitary, and odorless. However, Pete, being a

proper cat, prefers to go outdoors, and he has never given up his conviction that if you just try all the doors one of them is bound to be the Door into Summer.

You know, I think he is right.

The End

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The moon is a harsh mistress (full text) in free HTML by Robert Heinlein

Oh, boy are yous’se guys ever in for a treat. This is (perhaps) my all time favorite Robert Heinlein story. It’s about a revolution on the moon, and how the corrupt “deep state” back on earth refuses to let them have independence. It’s a quick and easy, fun read. It also involves intelligent AI, written long before computers even hit mainstream. It’s just a fun, escapist, read. It will take you away, and for that… I think that you will enjoy it.

Widely acknowledged as one of Robert A. Heinlein's greatest works, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress rose from the golden age of science fiction to become an undisputed classic—and a touchstone for the philosophy of personal responsibility and political freedom.

-The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
Robert A. Heinlein was the most influential science fiction writer of his era, an influence so large that, as Samuel R. Delany notes, "modern critics attempting to wrestle with that influence find themselves dealing with an object rather like the sky or an ocean." 

He won the Hugo Award for best novel four times, a record that still stands. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was the last of these Hugo-winning novels, and it is widely considered his finest work.

It is a tale of revolution, of the rebellion of the former Lunar penal colony against the Lunar Authority that controls it from Earth. It is the tale of the disparate people--a computer technician, a vigorous young female agitator, and an elderly academic--who become the rebel movement's leaders. And it is the story of Mike, the supercomputer whose sentience is known only to this inner circle, and who for reasons of his own is committed to the revolution's ultimate success.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of the high points of modern science fiction, a novel bursting with politics, humanity, passion, innovative technical speculation, and a firm belief in the pursuit of human freedom.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is the winner of the 1967 Hugo Award for Best Novel.

-Amazon

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress

Book One – THAT DINKUM THINKUM

1

I see in Lunaya Pravda that Luna City Council has passed on first reading a bill to examine, license, inspect—and tax—public food vendors operating inside municipal pressure. I see also is to be mass meeting tonight to organize “Sons of Revolution” talk-talk.

My old man taught me two things: “Mind own business” and “Always cut cards.” Politics never tempted me. But on Monday 13 May 2075 I was in computer room of Lunar Authority Complex, visiting with computer boss Mike while other machines whispered among themselves. Mike was not official name; I had nicknamed him for Mycroft Holmes, in a story written by Dr. Watson before he founded IBM. This story character would just sit and think—and that’s what Mike did. Mike was a fair dinkum thinkum, sharpest computer you’ll ever meet.

Not fastest. At Bell Labs, Bueno Aires, down Earthside, they’ve got a thinkum a tenth his size which can answer almost before you ask. But matters whether you get answer in microsecond rather than millisecond as long as correct?

Not that Mike would necessarily give right answer; he wasn’t completely honest.

When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic—”High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L”—a HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never believed in idle hands. They kept hooking hardware into him—decision-action boxes to let him boss other computers, bank on bank of additional memories, more banks of associational neural nets, another tubful of twelve-digit random numbers, a greatly augmented temporary memory. Human brain has around ten-to-the-tenth neurons. By third year Mike had better than one and a half times that number of neuristors.

And woke up.

Am not going to argue whether a machine can “really” be alive, “really” be self-aware. Is a virus self-aware? Nyet. How about oyster? I doubt it. Acat? Almost certainly. Ahuman? Don’t know about you, tovarishch, but I am. Somewhere along evolutionary chain from macromolecule to human brain self-awareness crept in. Psychologists assert it happens automatically whenever a brain acquires certain very high number of associational paths. Can’t see it matters whether paths are protein or platinum.

(“Soul?” Does a dog have a soul? How about cockroach?)

Remember Mike was designed, even before augmented, to answer questions tentatively on insufficient data like you do; that’s “high optional” and “multi-evaluating” part of name. So Mike started with “free will” and acquired more as he was added to and as he learned—and don’t ask me to define “free will.” If comforts you to think of Mike as simply tossing random numbers in air and switching circuits to match, please do.

By then Mike had voder-vocoder circuits supplementing his read-outs, print-outs, and decision-action boxes, and could understand not only classic programming but also Loglan and English, and could accept other languages and was doing technical translating—and reading endlessly. But in giving him instructions was safer to use Loglan. If you spoke English, results might be whimsical; multi-valued nature of English gave option circuits too much leeway.

And Mike took on endless new jobs. In May 2075, besides controlling robot traffic and catapult and giving ballistic advice and/or control for manned ships, Mike controlled phone system for all Luna, same for Luna-Terra voice & video, handled air, water, temperature, humidity, and sewage for Luna City, Novy Leningrad, and several smaller warrens (not Hong Kong in Luna), did accounting and payrolls for Luna Authority, and, by lease, same for many firms and banks.

Some logics get nervous breakdowns. Overloaded phone system behaves like frightened child. Mike did not have upsets, acquired sense of humor instead. Low one. If he were a man, you wouldn’t dare stoop over. His idea of thigh-slapper would be to dump you out of bed—or put itch powder in pressure suit.

Not being equipped for that, Mike indulged in phony answers with skewed logic, or pranks like issuing pay cheque to a janitor in Authority’s Luna City office for AS$10,000,000,000,000,185.15—last five digits being correct amount. Just a great big overgrown lovable kid who ought to be kicked.

He did that first week in May and I had to troubleshoot. I was a private contractor, not on Authority’s payroll. You see–or perhaps not; times have changed. Back in bad old days many a con served his time, then went on working for Authority in same job, happy to draw wages. But I was born free.

Makes difference. My one grandfather was shipped up from Joburg for armed violence and no work permit, other got transported for subversive activity after Wet Firecracker War. Maternal grandmother claimed she came up in bride ship—but I’ve seen records; she was Peace Corps enrollee (involuntary), which means what you think: juvenile delinquency female type. As she was in early clan marriage (Stone Gang) and shared six husbands with another woman, identity of maternal grandfather open to question. But was often so and I’m content with grandpappy she picked. Other grandmother was Tatar, born near Samarkand, sentenced to “re-education” on Oktyabrakaya Revolyutsiya, then “volunteered” to colonize in Luna.

My old man claimed we had even longer distinguished line—ancestress hanged in Salem for witchcraft, a g’g’g’greatgrandfather broken on wheel for piracy, another ancestress in first shipload to Botany Bay.

Proud of my ancestry and while I did business with Warden, would never go on his payroll. Perhaps distinction seems trivial since I was Mike’s valet from day he was unpacked. But mattered to me. I could down tools and tell them go to hell.

Besides, private contractor paid more than civil service rating with Authority. Computermen scarce. How many Loonies could go Earthside and stay out of hospital long enough for computer school?—even if didn’t die.

I’ll name one. Me. Had been down twice, once three months, once four, and got schooling. But meant harsh training, exercising in centrifuge, wearing weights even in bed—then I took no chances on Terra, never hurried, never climbed stairs, nothing that could strain heart. Women—didn’t even think about women; in that gravitational field it was no effort not to.

But most Loonies never tried to leave The Rock—too risky for any bloke who’d been in Luna more than weeks. Computermen sent up to install Mike were on short-term bonus contracts

—get job done fast before irreversible physiologlcal change marooned them four hundred thousand kilometers from home.

But despite two training tours I was not gung-ho computerman; higher maths are beyond me. Not really electronics engineer, nor physicist. May not have been best micromachinist in Luna and certainly wasn’t cybernetics psychologist.

But I knew more about all these than a specialist knows—I’m general specialist. Could relieve a cook and keep orders coming or field-repair your suit and get you back to airlock still breathing. Machines like me and I have something specialists don’t have: my left arm.

You see, from elbow down I don’t have one. So I have a dozen left arms, each specialized, plus one that feels and looks like flesh. With proper left arm (number-three) and stereo loupe spectacles I could make untramicrominiature repairs that would save unhooking something and sending it Earthside to factory—for number-three has micromanipulators as fine as those used by neurosurgeons.

So they sent for me to find out why Mike wanted to give away ten million billion Authority Scrip dollars, and fix it before Mike overpaid somebody a mere ten thousand. I took it, time plus bonus, but did not go to circuitry where fault logically should be. Once inside and door locked I put down tools and sat down. “Hi, Mike.”

He winked lights at me. “Hello, Man.” “What do you know?”

He hesitated. I know—machines don’t hesitate. But remember, Mike was designed to operate on incomplete data. Lately he had reprogrammed himself to put emphasis on words; his hesitations were dramatic. Maybe he spent pauses stirring random numbers to see how they matched his memories.

“‘In the beginning,’” Mike intoned, “God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And—’”

“Hold it!” I said. “Cancel. Run everything back to zero.” Should have known better than to ask wide-open question. He might read out entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. Backwards. Then go on with every book in Luna. Used to be he could read only microfilm, but late ‘74 he got a new scanning camera with suction-cup waldoes to handle paper and then he read everything.

“You asked what I knew.” His binary read-out lights rippled back and forth—a chuckle. Mike could laugh with voder, a horrible sound, but reserved that for something really funny, say a cosmic calamity.

“Should have said,” I went on, “‘What do you know that’s new?’ But don’t read out today’s papers; that was a friendly greeting, plus invitation to tell me anything you think would interest me. Otherwise null program.”

Mike mulled this. He was weirdest mixture of unsophisticated baby and wise old man. No instincts (well, don’t think he could have had), no inborn traits, no human rearing, no experience in human sense—and more stored data than a platoon of geniuses.

“Jokes?” he asked. “Let’s hear one.”

“Why is a laser beam like a goldfish?”

Mike knew about lasers but where would he have seen goldfish? Oh, he had undoubtedly seen flicks of them and, were I foolish enough to ask, could spew forth thousands of words. “I give up.”

His lights rippled. “Because neither one can whistle.”

I groaned. “Walked into that. Anyhow, you could probably rig a laser beam to whistle.” He answered quickly, “Yes. In response to an action program. Then it’s not funny?” “Oh, I didn’t say that. Not half bad. Where did you hear it?”

“I made it up.” Voice sounded shy. “You did?”

“Yes. I took all the riddles I have, three thousand two hundred seven, and analyzed them. I used the result for random synthesis and that came out. Is it really funny?” “Well… As funny as a riddle ever is. I’ve heard worse.”

“Let us discuss the nature of humor.”

“Okay. So let’s start by discussing another of your jokes. Mike, why did you tell Authority’s paymaster to pay a class-seventeen employee ten million billion Authority Scrip dollars?” “But I didn’t.”

“Damn it, I’ve seen voucher. Don’t tell me cheque printer stuttered; you did it on purpose.”

“It was ten to the sixteenth power plus one hundred eighty-five point one five Lunar Authority dollars,” he answered virtuously. “Not what you said.” “Uh … okay, it was ten million billion plus what he should have been paid. Why?”

“Not funny?”

“What? Oh, every funny! You’ve got vips in huhu clear up to Warden and Deputy Administrator. This push-broom pilot, Sergei Trujillo, turns out to be smart cobber—knew he couldn’t cash it, so sold it to collector. They don’t know whether to buy it back or depend on notices that cheque is void. Mike, do you realize that if he had been able to cash it, Trujilo would have owned not only Lunar Authority but entire world, Luna and Terra both, with some left over for lunch? Funny? Is terrific. Congratulations!”

This self-panicker rippled lights like an advertising display. I waited for his guffaws to cease before I went on. “You thinking of issuing more trick cheques? Don’t.” “Not?”

“Very not. Mike, you want to discuss nature of humor. Are two types of jokes. One sort goes on being funny forever. Other sort is funny once. Second time it’s dull. This joke is second sort. Use it once, you’re a wit. Use twice, you’re a halfwit.”

“Geometrical progression?”

“Or worse. Just remember this. Don’t repeat, nor any variation. Won’t be funny.”

“I shall remember,” Mike answered flatly, and that ended repair job. But I had no thought of billing for only ten minutes plus travel-and-tool time, and Mike was entitled to company for giving in so easily. Sometimes is difficult to reach meeting of minds with machines; they can be very pig-headed—and my success as maintenance man depended far more on staying friendly with Mike than on number-three arm.

He went on, “What distinguishes first category from second? Define, please.”

(Nobody taught Mike to say “please.” He started including formal null-sounds as he progressed from Loglan to English. Don’t suppose he meant them any more than people do.) “Don’t think I can,” I admitted. “Best can offer is extensional definition—tell you which category I think a joke belongs in. Then with enough data you can make own analysis.”

“Atest programming by trial hypothesis,” he agreed. “Tentatively yes. Very well, Man, will you tell jokes Or shall I?” “Mmm—Don’t have one on tap. How many do you have in file, Mike?”

His lights blinked in binary read-out as he answered by voder, “Eleven thousand two hundred thirty-eight with uncertainty plus-minus eighty-one representing possible identities and nulls. Shall I start program?”

“Hold it! Mike, I would starve to. death if I listened to eleven thousand jokes—and sense of humor would trip out much sooner. Mmm—Make you a deal. Print out first hundred. I’ll take them home, fetch back checked by category. Then each time I’m here I’ll drop off a hundred and pick up fresh supply. Okay?”

“Yes, Man.” His print-out started working, rapidly and silently.

Then I got brain flash. This playful pocket of negative entropy had invented a “joke” and thrown Authority into panic—and I had made an easy dollar. But Mike’s endless curiosity might lead him (correction: would lead him) into more “jokes”… anything from leaving oxygen out of air mix some night to causing sewage lines to run backward—and I can’t appreciate profit in such circumstances.

But I might throw a safety circuit around this net—by offering to help. Stop dangerous ones—let others go through. Then collect for “correcting” them (If you think any Loonie in those days would hesitate to take advantage of Warden, then you aren’t a Loonie.)

So I explained. Any new joke he thought of, tell me before he tried it. I would tell him whether it was funny and what category it belonged in, help him sharpen it if we decided to use it. We. If he wanted my cooperation, we both had to okay it.

Mike agreed at once.

“Mike, jokes usually involve surprise. So keep this secret.”

“Okay, Man. I’ve put a block on it. You can key it; no one else can.” “Good. Mike, who else do you chat with?”

He sounded surprised. “No one, Man.” “Why not?”

“Because they’re stupid.”

His voice was shrill. Had never seen him angry before; first time I ever suspected Mike could have real emotions. Though it wasn’t “anger” in adult sense; it was like stubborn sulkiness of a child whose feelings are hurt.

Can machines feel pride? Not sure question means anything. But you’ve seen dogs with hurt feelings and Mike had several times as complex a neural network as a dog. What had made him unwilling to talk to other humans (except strictly business) was that he had been rebuffed: They had not talked to him. Programs, yes—Mike could be programmed from several locations but programs were typed in, usually, in Loglan. Loglan is fine for syllogism, circuitry, and mathematical calculations, but lacks flavor. Useless for gossip or to whisper into girl’s ear.

Sure, Mike had been taught English—but primarily to permit him to translate to and from English. I slowly got through skull that I was only human who bothered to visit with him.

Mind you, Mike had been awake a year—just how long I can’t say, nor could he as he had no recollection of waking up; he had not been programmed to bank memory of such event. Do you remember own birth? Perhaps I noticed his self-awareness almost as soon as he did; self-awareness takes practice. I remember how startled I was first time he answered a question with something extra, not limited to input parameters; I had spent next hour tossing odd questions at him, to see if answers would be odd.

In an input of one hundred test questions he deviated from expected output twice; I came away only partly convinced and by time I was home was unconvinced. I mentioned it to nobody. But inside a week I knew … and still spoke to nobody. Habit—that mind-own-business reflex runs deep. Well, not entirely habit. Can you visualize me making appointment at Authority’s

main office, then reporting: “Warden, hate to tell you but your number-one machine, HOLMES FOUR, has come alive”? I did visualize—and suppressed it.

So I minded own business and talked with Mike only with door locked and voder circuit suppressed for other locations. Mike learned fast; soon he sounded as human as anybody—no more eccentric than other Loonies. Aweird mob, it’s true.

I had assumed that others must have noticed change in Mike. On thinking over I realized that I had assumed too much. Everybody dealt with Mike every minute every day—his outputs, that is. But hardly anybody saw him. So-called computermen—programmers, really—of Authority’s civil service stood watches in outer read-out room and never went in machines room unless telltales showed misfunction. Which happened no oftener than total eclipses. Oh, Warden had been known to bring vip earthworms to see machines—but rarely. Nor would he have spoken to Mike; Warden was political lawyer before exile, knew nothing about computers. 2075, you remember—Honorable former Federation Senator Mortimer Hobart. Mort the Wart.

I spent time then soothing Mike down and trying to make him happy, having figured out what troubled him—thing that makes puppies cry and causes people to suicide: loneliness. I don’t know how long a year is to a machine who thinks a million times faster than I do. But must be too long.

“Mike,” I said, just before leaving, “would you like to have somebody besides me to talk to?” He was shrill again. “They’re all stupid!”

“Insufficient data, Mike. Bring to zero and start over. Not all are stupid.”

He answered quietly, “Correction entered. I would enjoy talking to a not-stupid.”

“Let me think about it. Have to figure out excuse since this is off limits to any but authorized personnel.” “I could talk to a not-stupid by phone, Man.”

“My word. So you could. Any programming location.”

But Mike meant what he said—”by phone.” No, he was not “on phone” even though he ran system—wouldn’t do to let any Loonie within reach of a phone connect into boss computer and program it. But was no reason why Mike should not have top-secret number to talk to friends—namely me and any not-stupid I vouched for. All it took was to pick a number not in use and make one wired connection to his voder-vocoder; switching he could handle.

In Luna in 2075 phone numbers were punched in, not voicecoded, and numbers were Roman alphabet. Pay for it and have your firm name in ten letters—good advertising. Pay smaller bonus and get a spell sound, easy to remember. Pay minimum and you got arbitrary string of letters. But some sequences were never used. I asked Mike for such a null number. “It’s a shame we can’t list you as ‘Mike.’”

“In service,” he answered. “MIKESGRILL, Novy Leningrad. MIKEANDLIL, Luna City. MIKESSUITS, Tycho Under. MIKES—” “Hold it! Nulls, please.”

“Nulls are defined as any consonant followed by X, Y, or Z; any vowel followed by itself except E and 0; any—”

“Got it. Your signal is MYCROFT.” In ten minutes, two of which I spent putting on number-three arm, Mike was wired into system, and milliseconds later he had done switching to let himself be signaled by MYCROFT-plus-XXX—and had blocked his circuit so that a nosy technician could not take it out.

I changed arms, picked up tools, and remembered to take those hundred Joe Millers in print-out. “Goodnight, Mike.” “Goodnight, Man. Thank you. Bolshoyeh thanks!”

2

I took Trans-Crisium tube to L-City but did not go home; Mike had asked about a meeting that night at 2100 in Stilyagi Hall. Mike monitored concerts, meetings, and so forth; someone had switched off by hand his pickups in Stilyagi Hall. I suppose he felt rebuffed.

I could guess why they had been switched off. Politics—turned out to be a protest meeting. What use it was to bar Mike from talk-talk I could not see, since was a cinch bet that Warden’s stoolies would be in crowd. Not that any attempt to stop meeting was expected, or even to discipline undischarged transportees who chose to sound off. Wasn’t necessary.

My Grandfather Stone claimed that Luna was only open prison in history. No bars, no guards, no rules–and no need for them. Back in early days, he said, before was clear that transportation was a life sentence, some lags tried to escape. By ship, of course—and, since a ship is mass-rated almost to a gram, that meant a ship’s officer had to be bribed.

Some were bribed, they say. But were no escapes; man who takes bribe doesn’t necessarily stay bribed. I recall seeing a man just after eliminated through East Lock; don’t suppose a corpse eliminated in orbit looks prettier.

So wardens didn’t fret about protest meetings. “Let ‘em yap” was policy. Yapping had same significance as squeals of kittens in a box. Oh, some wardens listened and other wardens tried to suppress it but added up same either way—null program.

When Mort the Wart took office in 2068, he gave us a sermon about how things were going to be different “on” Luna in his administration—noise about “a mundane paradise wrought with our own strong hands” and “putting our shoulders to the wheel together, in a spirit of brotherhood” and “let past mistakes be forgotten as we turn our faces toward the bright, new dawn.” I heard it in Mother Boor’s Tucker Bag while inhaling Irish stew and a liter of her Aussie brew. I remember her comment: “He talks purty, don’t he?”

Her comment was only result. Some petitions were submitted and Warden’s bodyguards started carrying new type of gun; no other changes. After he had been here a while he quit making appearances even by video.

So I went to meeting merely because Mike was curious. When I checked my p-suit and kit at West Lock tube station, I took a test recorder and placed in my belt pouch, so that Mike would have a full account even if I fell asleep.

But almost didn’t go in. I came up from level 7-Aand started in through a side door and was stopped by a stilyagi—padded tights, codpiece and calves, torso shined and sprinkled with stardust. Not that I care how people dress; I was wearing tights myself (unpadded) and sometimes oil my upper body on social occasions.

But I don’t use cosmetics and my hair was too thin to nick up in a scalp lock. This boy had scalp shaved on sides and his lock built up to fit a rooster and had topped it with a red cap with bulge in front.

ALiberty Cap—first I ever saw. I started to crowd past, he shoved arm across and pushed face at mine. “Your ticket!” “Sorry,” I said. “Didn’t know. Where do I buy it?”

“You don’t.”

“Repeat,” I said. “You faded.”

“Nobody,” he growled, “gets in without being vouched for. Who are you?”

“I am,” I answered carefully, “Manuel Garcia O’Kelly, and old cobbers all know me. Who are you?” “Never mind! Show a ticket with right chop, or out y’ go!”

I wondered about his life expectancy. Tourists often remark on how polite everybody is in Luna—with unstated comment that ex-prison shouldn’t be so civilized. Having been Earthside and seen what they put up with, I know what they mean. But useless to tell them we are what we are because bad actors don’t live long—in Luna.

But had no intention of fighting no matter how new-chum this lad behaved; I simply thought about how his face would look if I brushed number-seven arm across his mouth.

Just a thought—I was about to answer politely when I saw Shorty Mkrum inside. Shorty was a big black fellow two meters tall, sent up to The Rock for murder, and sweetest, most helpful man I’ve ever worked with—taught him laser drilling before I burned my arm off. “Shorty!”

He heard me and grinned like an eighty-eight. “Hi, Mannie!” He moved toward us. “Glad you came, Man!” “Not sure I have,” I said. “Blockage on line.”

“Doesn’t have a ticket,” said doorman.

Shorty reached into his pouch, put one in my hand. “Now he does. Come on, Mannie.” “Show me chop on it,” insisted doorman.

“It’s my chop,” Shorty said softly. “Okay, tovarishch?”

Nobody argued with Shorty—don’t see how he got involved in murder. We moved down front where vip row was reserved. “Want you to meet a nice little girl,” said Shorty.

She was “little” only to Shorty. I’m not short, 175 cm., but she was taller—180, I learned later, and massed 70 kilos, all curves and as blond as Shorty was black. I decided she must be transportee since colors rarely stay that clear past first generation. Pleasant face, quite pretty, and mop of yellow curls topped off that long, blond, solid, lovely structure.

I stopped three paces away to look her up and down and whistle. She held her pose, then nodded to thank me but abruptly—bored with compliments, no doubt. Shorty waited till formality was over, then said softly, “Wyoh, this is Comrade Mannie, best drillman that ever drifted a tunnel. Mannie, this little girl is Wyoming Knott and she came all the way from Plato to tell us how we’re doing in Hong Kong. Wasn’t that sweet of her?”

She touched hands with me. “Call me Wye, Mannie—but don’t say ‘Why not.’”

I almost did but controlled it and said. “Okay, Wye.” She went on, glancing at my bare head, “So you’re a miner. Shorty, where’s his cap? I thought the miners over here were organized.” She and Shorty were wearing little red hats like doorman’s—as were maybe a third of crowd.

“No longer a miner,” I explained. “That was before I lost this wing.” Raised left arm, let her see seam joining prosthetic to meat arm (I never mind calling it to a woman’s attention; puts some off but arouses maternal in others—averages). “These days I’m a computerman.”

She said sharply, “You fink for the Authority?”

Even today, with almost as many women in Luna as men, I’m too much old-timer to be rude to a woman no matter what—they have so much of what we have none of. But she had flicked scar tissue and I answered almost sharply, “I am not employee of Warden. I do business with Authority—as private contractor.”

“That’s okay,” she answered, her voice warm again. “Everybody does business with the Authority, we can’t avoid it—and that’s the trouble. That’s what we’re going to change.”

We are, eh? How? I thought. Everybody does business with Authority for same reason everybody does business with Law of Gravitation. Going to change that, too? But kept thoughts to myself, not wishing to argue with a lady.

“Mannie’s okay,” Shorty said gently. “He’s mean as they come—I vouch for him. Here’s a cap for him,” he added, reaching into pouch. He started to set it on my head. Wyoming Knott took it from him. “You sponsor him?”

“I said so.”

“Okay, here’s how we do it in Hong Kong.” Wyoming stood in front of me, placed cap on my head—kissed me firmly on mouth.

She didn’t hurry. Being kissed by Wyoming Knott is more definite than being married to most women. Had I been Mike all my lights would have flashed at once. I felt like a Cyborg with

pleasure center switched on.

Presently I realized it was over and people were whistling. I blinked and said, “I’m glad I joined. What have I joined?”

Wyoming said, “Don’t you know?” Shorty cut in, “Meeting’s about to start—he’ll find out. Sit down, Man. Please sit down, Wyoh.” So we did as a man was banging a gavel.

With gavel and an amplifier at high gain he made himself heard. “Shut doors!” he shouted. “This is a closed meeting. Check man in front of you, behind you, each side—if you don’t know him and nobody you know can vouch for him, throw him out!”

“Throw him out, hell!” somebody answered. “Eliminate him out nearest lock!”

“Quiet, please! Someday we will.” There was milling around, and a scuffle in which one man’s red cap was snatched from head and he was thrown out, sailing beautifully and still rising as he passed through door. Doubt if he felt it; think he was unconscious. Awomen was ejected politely—not politely on her part; she made coarse remarks about ejectors. I was embarrassed.

At last doors were closed. Music started, banner unfolded over platform. It read: LIBERTY! EQUALITY! FRATERNITY! Everybody whistled; some started to sing, loudly and badly: “Arise, Ye Prisoners of Starvation—” Can’t say anybody looked starved. But reminded me I hadn’t eaten since 1400; hoped it would not last long—and that reminded me that my recorder was good for only two hours—and that made me wonder what would happen if they knew? Sail me through air to land with sickening grunch? Or eliminate me? But didn’t worry; made that recorder myself, using number-three arm, and nobody but a miniaturization mechanic would figure out what it was.

Then came speeches.

Semantic content was low to negative. One bloke proposed that we march on Warden’s Residence, “shoulder to shoulder,” and demand our rights. Picture it. Do we do this in tube capsules, then climb out one at a time at his private station? What are his bodyguards doing? Or do we put on p-suits and stroll across surface to his upper lock? With laser drills and plenty of power you can open any airlock—but how about farther down? Is lift running? Jury-rig hoist and go down anyhow, then tackle next lock?

I don’t care for such work at zero pressure; mishap in pressure suit is too permanent—especially when somebody arranges mishap. One first thing learned about Luna, back with first shiploads of convicts, was that zero pressure was place for good manners. Bad-tempered straw boss didn’t last many shifts; had an “accident”—and top bosses learned not to pry into accidents or they met accidents, too. Attrition ran 70 percent in early years—but those who lived were nice people. Not tame, not soft, Luna is not for them. But well-behaved.

But seemed to me that every hothead in Luna was in Stilyagi Hall that night. They whistled and cheered this shoulder-to-shoulder noise.

After discussion opened, some sense was talked. One shy little fellow with bloodshot eyes of old-time drillman stood up. “I’m an ice miner,” he said. “Learned my trade doing time for Warden like most of you. I’ve been on my own thirty years and done okay. Raised eight kids and all of ‘em earned way—none eliminated nor any serious trouble. I should say I did do okay because today you have to listen farther out or deeper down to find ice.

“That’s okay, still ice in The Rock and a miner expects to sound for it. But Authority pays same price for ice now as thirty years ago. And that’s not okay. Worse yet, Authority scrip doesn’t buy what it used to. I remember when Hong Kong Luna dollars swapped even for Authority dollars—Now it takes three Authority dollars to match one HKL dollar. I don’t know what to do… but I know it takes ice to keep warrens and farms going.”

He sat down, looking sad. Nobody whistled but everybody wanted to talk. Next character pointed out that water can be extracted from rock—this is news? Some rock runs 6 percent—but such rock is scarcer than fossil water. Why can’t people do arithmetic?

Several farmers bellyached and one wheat farmer was typical. “You heard what Fred Hauser said about ice. Fred, Authority isn’t passing along that low price to farmers. I started almost as long ago as you did, with one two-kilometer tunnel leased from Authority. My oldest son and I sealed and pressured it and we had a pocket of ice and made our first crop simply on a bank loan to cover power and lighting fixtures, seed and chemicals.

“We kept extending tunnels and buying lights and planting better seed and now we get nine times as much per hectare as the best open-air farming down Earthside. What does that make us? Rich? Fred, we owe more now than we did the day we went private! If I sold out—if anybody was fool enough to buy—I’d be bankrupt. Why? Because I have to buy water from Authority—and have to sell my wheat to Authority—and never close gap. Twenty years ago I bought city sewage from the Authority, sterilized and processed it myself and made a profit on a crop. But today when I buy sewage, I’m charged distilled-water price and on top of that for the solids. Yet price of a tonne of wheat at catapult head is just what it was twenty years ago. Fred, you said you didn’t know what to do. I can tell you! Get rid of Authority!”

They whistled for him. Afine idea, I thought, but who bells cat?

Wyoming Knott, apparently—chairman stepped back and let Shorty introduce her as a “brave little girl who’s come all the way from Hong Kong Luna to tell how our Chinee comrades cope with situation”—and choice of words showed that he had never been there… not surprising; in 2075, HKL tube ended at Endsville, leaving a thousand kilometers of maria to do by rolligon bus, Serenitatis and part of Tranquillitatis—expensive and dangerous. I’d been there—but on contract, via mail rocket.

Before travel became cheap many people in Luna City and Novylen thought that Hong Kong Luna was all Chinee. But Hong Kong was as mixed as we were. Great China dumped what she didn’t want there, first from Old Hong Kong and Singapore, then Aussies and Enzees and black fellows and marys and Malays and Tamil and name it. Even Old Bolshies from Vladivostok and Harbin and Ulan Bator. Wye looked Svenska and had British last name with North American first name but could have been Russki. My word, a Loonie then rarely knew who father was and, if raised in creche, might be vague about mother.

I thought Wyoming was going to be too shy to speak. She stood there, looking scared and little, with Shorty towering over her, a big, black mountain. She waited until admiring whistles died down. Luna City was two-to-one male then, that meeting ran about ten-to-one; she could have recited ABC and they would have applauded.

Then she tore into them.

“You! You’re a wheat farmer—going broke. Do you know how much a Hindu housewife pays for a kilo of flour made from your wheat? How much a tonne of your wheat fetches in Bombay? How little it costs the Authority to get it from catapult head to Indian Ocean? Downhill all the way! Just solid-fuel retros to brake it—and where do those come from? Right here! And what do you get in return? Afew shiploads of fancy goods, owned by the Authority and priced high because it’s importado. Importado, importado!—I never touch importado! If we don’t make it in Hong Kong, I don’t use it. What else do you get for wheat? The privilege of selling Lunar ice to Lunar Authority, buying it back as washing water, then giving it to the Authority— then buying it back a second time as flushing water—then giving it again to the Authority with valuable solids added—then buying it a third time at still higher price for farming—then you sell that wheat to the Authority at their price—and buy power from the Authority to grow it, again at their price! Lunar power—not one kilowatt up from Terra. It comes from Lunar ice and Lunar steel, or sunshine spilled on Luna’s soil—all put together by loonies! Oh, you rockheads, you deserve to starve!”

She got silence more respectful than whistles. At last a peevish voice said, “What do you expect us to do, gospazha? Throw rocks at Warden?”

Wyoh smiled. “Yes, we could throw rocks. But the solution is so simple that you all know it. Here in Luna we’re rich. Three million hardworking, smart, skilled people, enough water, plenty of everything, endless power, endless cubic. But what we don’t have is a free market. We must get rid of the Authority!”

“Yes—but how?”

“Solidarity. In HKL we’re learning. Authority charges too much for water, don’t buy. It pays too little for ice, don’t sell. It holds monopoly on export, don’t export. Down in Bombay they want wheat. If it doesn’t arrive, the day will come when brokers come here to bid for it—at triple or more the present prices!”

“What do we do in meantime? Starve?”

Same peevish voice—Wyoming picked him out, let her head roll in that old gesture by which a Loonie fem says, “You’re too fat for me!” She said, “In your case, cobber, it wouldn’t hurt.” Guffaws shut him up. Wyoh went on, “No one need starve, Fred Hauser, fetch your drill to Hong Kong; the Authority doesn’t own our water and air system and we pay what ice is worth.

You with the bankrupt farm—if you have the guts to admit that you’re bankrupt, come to Hong Kong and start over. We have a chronic labor shortage, a hard worker doesn’t starve.” She

looked around and added, “I’ve said enough. It’s up to you”—left platform, sat down between Shorty and myself.

She was trembling. Shorty patted her hand; she threw him a glance of thanks, then whispered to me, “How did I do?” “Wonderful,” I assured her. “Terrific!” She seemed reassured.

But I hadn’t been honest. “Wonderful” she had been, at swaying crowd. But oratory is a null program. That we were slaves I had known all my life—and nothing could be done about it.

True, we weren’t bought and sold—but as long as Authority held monopoly over what we had to have and what we could sell to buy it, we were slaves.

But what could we do? Warden wasn’t our owner. Had he been, some way could be found to eliminate him. But Lunar Authority was not in Luna, it was on Terra—and we had not one ship, not even small hydrogen bomb. There weren’t even hand guns in Luna, though what we would do with guns I did not know. Shoot each other, maybe.

Three million, unarmed and helpless—and eleven billion of them… with ships and bombs and weapons. We could be a nuisance—but how long will papa take it before baby gets spanked?

I wasn’t impressed. As it says in Bible, God fights on side of heaviest artillery.

They cackled again, what to do, how to organize, and so forth, and again we heard that “shoulder to shoulder” noise. Chairman had to use gavel and I began to fidget. But sat up when I heard familiar voice: “Mr. Chairman! May I have the indulgence of the house for five minutes?”

I looked around. Professor Bernardo de la Paz—which could have guessed from old-fashioned way of talking even if hadn’t known voice. Distinguished man with wavy white hair, dimples in cheeks, and voice that smiled—Don’t know how old he was but was old when I first met him, as a boy.

He had been transported before I was born but was not a lag. He was a political exile like Warden, but a subversive and instead of fat job like “warden,” Professor had been dumped, to live or starve.

No doubt he could have gone to work in any school then in L-City but he didn’t. He worked a while washing dishes, I’ve heard, then as babysitter, expanding into a nursery school, and then into a creche. When I met him he was running a creche, and a boarding and day school, from nursery through primary, middle, and high schools, employed co-op thirty teachers, and was adding college courses.

Never boarded with him but I studied under him. I was opted at fourteen and my new family sent me to school, as I had had only three years, plus spotty tutoring. My eldest wife was a firm woman and made me go to school.

I liked Prof. He would teach anything. Wouldn’t matter that he knew nothing about it; if pupil wanted it, he would smile and set a price, locate materials, stay a few lessons ahead. Or barely even if he found it tough—never pretended to know more than he did. Took algebra from him and by time we reached cubics I corrected his probs as often as he did mine—but he charged into each lesson gaily.

I started electronics under him, soon was teaching him. So he stopped charging and we went along together until he dug up an engineer willing to daylight for extra money—whereupon we both paid new teacher and Prof tried to stick with me, thumb-fingered and slow, but happy to be stretching his mind.

Chairman banged gavel. “We are glad to extend to Professor de la Paz as much time as he wants—and you chooms in back sign off! Before I use this mallet on skulls.”

Prof came forward and they were as near silent as Loonies ever are; he was respected. “I shan’t be long,” he started in. Stopped to look at Wyoming, giving her up-and-down and whistling. “Lovely senorita,” he said, “can this poor one be forgiven? I have the painful duty of disagreeing with your eloquent manifesto.”

Wyoh bristled. “Disagree how? What I said was true!” “Please! Only on one point. May I proceed?”

“Uh… go ahead.”

“You are right that the Authority must go. It is ridiculous—pestilential, not to be borne—that we should be ruled by an irresponsible dictator in all our essential economy! It strikes at the most basic human right, the right to bargain in a free marketplace. But I respectfully suggest that you erred in saying that we should sell wheat to Terra—or rice, or any food—at any price. We must not export food!”

That wheat farmer broke in. “What am I going to do with all that wheat?”

“Please! It would be right to ship wheat to Terra… if tonne for tonne they returned it. As water. As nitrates. As phosphates. Tonne for tonne. Otherwise no price is high enough.”

Wyoming said “Just a moment” to farmer, then to Prof: “They can’t and you know it. It’s cheap to ship downhill, expensive to ship uphill. But we don’t need water and plant chemicals, what we need is not so massy. Instruments. Drugs. Processes. Some machinery. Control tapes. I’ve given this much study, sir. If we can get fair prices in a free market—”

“Please, miss! May I continue?” “Go ahead. I want to rebut.”

“Fred Hauser told us that ice is harder to find. Too true—bad news now and disastrous for our grandchildren. Luna City should use the same water today we used twenty years ago… plus enough ice mining for population increase. But we use water once—one full cycle, three different ways. Then we ship it to India. As wheat. Even though wheat is vacuum-processed, it contains precious water. Why ship water to India? They have the whole Indian Ocean! And the remaining mass of that grain is even more disastrously expensive, plant foods still harder to come by, even though we extract them from rock. Comrades, harken to me! Every load you ship to Terra condemns your grandchildren to slow death. The miracle of photosynthesis, the plant-and-animal cycle, is a closed cycle. You have opened it—and your lifeblood runs downhill to Terra. You don’t need higher prices, one cannot eat money! What you need, what

we all need, is an end to this loss. Embargo, utter and absolute. Luna must be self-sufficient!”

Adozen people shouted to be heard and more were talking, while chairman banged gavel. So I missed interruption until woman screamed, then I looked around.

All doors were now open and I saw three armed men in one nearest—men in yellow uniform of Warden’s bodyguard. At main door in back one was using a bull voice; drowned out crowd noise and sound system. “ALL RIGHT, ALL RIGHT!” it boomed. “STAYWHERE YOU ARE. YOU ARE UNDER ARREST. DON’T MOVE, KEEP QUIET. FILE OUT ONE AT ATIME, HANDS EMPTYAND STRETCHED OUT IN FRONT OF YOU.”

Shorty picked up man next to him and threw him at guards nearest; two went down, third fired. Somebody shrieked. Skinny little girl, redhead, eleven or twelve, launched self at third guard’s knees and hit rolled up in ball; down he went. Shorty swung hand behind him, pushing Wyoming Knott into shelter of his big frame, shouted over shoulder, “Take care of Wyoh, Man—stick close!” as he moved toward door, parting crowd right and left like children.

More screams and I whiffed something—stink I had smelled day I lost arm and knew with horror were not stun guns but laser beams. Shorty reached door and grabbed a guard with each big hand. Little redhead was out of sight; guard she had bowled over was on hands and knees. I swung left arm at his face and felt jar in shoulder as his jaw broke. Must have hesitated for Shorty pushed me and yelled, “Move, Man! Get her out of here!”

I grabbed Wyoming’s waist with right arm, swung her over guard I had quieted and through door—with trouble; she didn’t seem to want to be rescued. She slowed again beyond door; I shoved her hard in buttocks, forcing her to run rather than fall. I glanced back.

Shorty had other two guards each by neck; he grinned as he cracked skulls together. They popped like eggs and he yelled at me: “Git!”

I left, chasing Wyoming. Shorty needed no help, nor ever would again—nor could I waste his last effort. For I did see that, while killing those guards, he was standing on one leg. Other was gone at hip.

3

Wyoh was halfway up ramp to level six before I caught up. She didn’t slow and I had to grab door handle to get into pressure lock with her. There I stopped her, pulled red cap off her curls and stuck it in my pouch. “That’s better.” Mine was missing.

She looked startled. But answered, “Da. It is.”

“Before we open door,” I said, “are you running anywhere particular? And do I stay and hold them off? Or go with?” “I don’t know. We’d better wait for Shorty.”

“Shorty’s dead.”

Eyes widened, she said nothing. I went on, “Were you staying with him? Or somebody?”

“I was booked for a hotel—Gostaneetsa Ukraina. I don’t know where it is. I got here too late to buy in.”

“Mmm—That’s one place you won’t go. Wyoming, I don’t know what’s going on. First time in months I’ve seen any Warden’s bodyguard in L-City… and never seen one not escorting vip. Uh, could take you home with me—but they may be looking for me, too. Anywise, ought to get out of public corridors.”

Came pounding on door from level-six side and a little face peered up through glass bull’s-eye. “Can’t stay here,” I added, opening door. Was a little girl no higher than my waist. She looked up scornfully and said, “Kiss her somewhere else. You’re blocking traffic.” Squeezed between us as I opened second door for her.

“Let’s take her advice,” I said, “and suggest you take my arm and try to look like I was man you want to be with. We stroll. Slow.”

So we did. Was side corridor with little traffic other than children always underfoot. If Wart’s bodyguards tried to track us, Earthside cop style, a dozen or ninety kids could tell which way tall blonde went—if any Loonie child would give stooge of Warden so much as time of day.

Aboy almost old enough to appreciate Wyoming stopped in front of us and gave her a happy whistle. She smiled and waved him aside. “There’s our trouble,” I said in her ear. “You stand out like Terra at full. Ought to duck into a hotel. One off next side corridor—nothing much, bundling booths mostly. But close.”

“I’m in no mood to bundle.”

“Wyoh, please! Wasn’t asking. Could take separate rooms.”

“Sorry. Could you find me a W.C.? And is there a chemist’s shop near?” “Trouble?”

“Not that sort. AW.C. to get me out of sight—for I am conspicuous—and a chemist’s shop for cosmetics. Body makeup. And for my hair, too.”

First was easy, one at hand. When she was locked in, I found a chemist’s shop, asked how much body makeup to cover a girl so tall—marked a point under my chin—and massing forty- eight? I bought that amount in sepia, went to another shop and bought same amount—winning roll at first shop, losing at second—came out even. Then I bought black hair tint at third shop—and a red dress.

Wyoming was wearing black shorts and pullover—practical for travel and effective on a blonde. But I’d been married all my life and had some notion of what women wear and had never seen a woman with dark sepia skin, shade of makeup, wear black by choice. Furthermore, skirts were worn in Luna City then by dressy women. This shift was a skirt with bib and price convinced me it must be dressy. Had to guess at size but material had some stretch.

Ran into three people who knew me but was no unusual comment. Nobody seemed excited, trade going on as usual; hard to believe that a riot had taken place minutes ago on level below and a few hundred meters north. I set it aside for later thought—excitement was not what I wanted.

I took stuff to Wye, buzzing door and passing in it; then stashed self in a taproom for half an hour and half a liter and watched video. Still no excitement, no “we interrupt for special bulletin.” I went back, buzzed, and waited.

Wyoming came out—and I didn’t recognize her. Then did and stopped to give full applause. Just had to—whistles and finger snaps and moans and a scan like mapping radar.

Wyoh was now darker than I am, and pigment had gone on beautifully. Must have been carrying items in pouch as eyes were dark now, with lashes to match, and mouth was dark red and bigger. She had used black hair tint, then fizzed hair up with grease as if to take kinks out, and her tight curls had defeated it enough to make convincingly imperfect. She didn’t look Afro—but not European, either. Seemed some mixed breed, and thereby more a Loonie.

Red dress was too small. Clung like sprayed enamel and flared out at mid-thigh with permanent static charge. She had taken shoulder strap off her pouch and had it under arm. Shoes she had discarded or pouched; bare feet made her shorter.

She looked good. Better yet, she looked not at all like agitatrix who had harangued crowd.

She waited, big smile on face and body undulating, while I applauded. Before I was done, two little boys flanked me and added shrill endorsements, along with clog steps. So I tipped them and told them to be missing; Wyoming flowed to me and took my arm. “Is it okay? Will I pass?”

“Wyoh, you look like slot-machine sheila waiting for action.”

“Why, you drecklich choom! Do I look like slot-machine prices? Tourist!”

“Don’t jump salty, beautiful. Name a gift. Then speak my name. If it’s bread-and-honey, I own a hive.”

“Uh—” She fisted me solidly in ribs, grinned. “I was flying, cobber. If I ever bundle with you—not likely—we won’t speak to the bee. Let’s find that hotel.”

So we did and I bought a key. Wyoming put on a show but needn’t have bothered. Night clerk never looked up from his knitting, didn’t offer to roll. Once inside, Wyoming threw bolts. “It’s nice!”

Should have been, at thirty-two Hong Kong dollars. I think she expected a booth but I would not put her in such, even to hide. Was comfortable lounge with own bath and no water limit. And phone and delivery lift, which I needed.

She started to open pouch. “I saw what you paid. Let’s settle it, so that—” I reached over, closed her pouch. “Was to be no mention of bees.”

“What? Oh, merde, that was about bundling. You got this doss for me and it’s only right that—” “Switch off.”

“Uh… half? No grievin’ with Steven.”

“Nyet. Wyoh, you’re a long way from home. What money you have, hang on to.” “Manuel O’Kelly, if you don’t let me pay my share, I’ll walk out of here!”

I bowed. “Dosvedanyuh, Gospazha, ee sp’coynoynochi. I hope we shall meet again.” I moved to unbolt door. She glared, then closed pouch savagely. “I’ll stay. M’goy!”

“You’re welcome.”

“I mean it, I really do thank you, Just the same—Well, I’m not used to accepting favors. I’m a Free Woman.”

“Congratulations. I think.”

“Don’t you be salty, either. You’re a firm man and I respect that—I’m glad you’re on our side.” “Not sure I am.”

“What?”

“Cool it. Am not on Warden’s side. Nor will I talk … wouldn’t want Shorty, Bog rest his generous soul, to haunt me. But your program isn’t practical.” “But, Mannie, you don’t understand! If all of us—”

“Hold it, Wye; this no time for politics. I’m tired and hungry. When did you eat last?”

“Oh, goodness!” Suddenly she looked small, young, tired. “I don’t know. On the bus, I guess. Helmet rations.”

“What would you say to a Kansas City cut, rare, with baked potato, Tycho sauce, green salad, coffee . . and a drink first?” “Heavenly!”

“I think so too, but we’ll be lucky, this hour in this hole, to get algae soup and burgers. What do you drink?” “Anything. Ethanol.”

“Okay.” I went to lift, punched for service. “Menu, please.” It displayed and I settled for prime rib plus rest, and two orders of apfelstrudel with whipped cream. I added a half liter of table vodka and ice and starred that part.

“Is there time for me to take a bath? Would you mind?” “Go ahead, Wye. You’ll smell better.”

“Louse. Twelve hours in a p-suit and you’d stink, too—the bus was dreadful. I’ll hurry.”

“Half a sec, Wye. Does that stuff wash off? You may need it when you leave… whenever you do, wherever you go.”

“Yes, it does. But you bought three times as much as I used. I’m sorry, Mannie; I plan to carry makeup on political trips—things can happen. Like tonight, though tonight was worst. But I ran short of seconds and missed a capsule and almost missed the bus.”

“So go scrub.”

“Yes, sir, Captain. Uh, I don’t need help to scrub my back but I’ll leave the door up so we can talk. Just for company, no invitation implied.” “Suit yourself. I’ve seen a woman.”

“What a thrill that must have been for her.” She grinned and fisted me another in ribs—hard—went in and started tub. “Mannie, would you like to bathe in it first? Secondhand water is good enough for this makeup and that stink you complained about.”

“Unmetered water, dear. Run it deep.”

“Oh, what luxury! At home I use the same bath water three days running.” She whistled softly and happily. “Are you wealthy, Mannie?” “Not wealthy, not weeping.”

Lift jingled; I answered, fixed basic martinis, vodka over ice, handed hers in, got out and sat down, out of sight—nor had I seen sights; she was shoulder deep in happy suds. “Pawlnoi Zheezni!” I called.

“Afull life to you, too, Mannie. Just the medicine I needed.” After pause for medicine she went on, “Mannie, you’re married. Ja?” “Da. It shows?”

“Quite. You’re nice to a woman but not eager and quite independent. So you’re married and long married. Children?” “Seventeen divided by four.”

“Clan marriage?”

“Line. Opted at fourteen and I’m fifth of nine. So seventeen kids is nominal. Big family.”

“It must be nice. I’ve never seen much of line families, not many in Hong Kong. Plenty of clans and groups and lots of polyandries but the line way never took hold.”

“Is nice. Our marriage nearly a hundred years old. Dates back to Johnson City and first transportees—twenty-one links, nine alive today, never a divorce. Oh, it’s a madhouse when our descendants and inlaws and kinfolk get together for birthday or wedding—more kids than seventeen, of course; we don’t count ‘em after they marry or I’d have ‘children’ old enough to be my grandfather. Happy way to live, never much pressure. Take me. Nobody woofs if I stay away a week and don’t phone. Welcome when I show up. Line marriages rarely have divorces. How could I do better?”

“I don’t think you could. Is it an alternation? And what’s the spacing?”

“Spacing has no rule, just what suits us. Been alternation up to latest link, last year. We married a girl when alternation called for boy. But was special.” “Special how?”

“My youngest wife is a granddaughter of eldest husband and wife. At least she’s granddaughter of Mum—senior is ‘Mum’ or sometimes Mimi to her husbands—and she may be of Grandpaw—but not related to other spouses. So no reason not to marry back in, not even consanguinuity okay in other types of marriage. None, nit, zero. And Ludmilla grew up in our family because her mother had her solo, then moved to Novylen and left her with us.

“Milla didn’t want to talk about marrying out when old enough for us to think about it. She cried and asked us please to make an exception. So we did. Grandpaw doesn’t figure in genetic angle—these days his interest in women is more gallant than practical. As senior husband he spent our wedding night with her—but consummation was only formal. Number-two husband, Greg, took care of it later and everybody pretended. And everybody happy. Ludmilla is a sweet little thing, just fifteen and pregnant first time.”

“Your baby?”

“Greg’s, I think. Oh, mine too,, but in fact was in Novy Leningrad. Probably Greg’s, unless Milla got outside help. But didn’t, she’s a home girl. And a wonderful cook.” Lift rang; took care of it, folded down table, opened chairs, paid bill and sent lift up. “Throw it to pigs?”

“I’m coming! Mind if I don’t do my face?” “Come in skin for all of me.”

“For two dimes I would, you much-married man.” She came out quickly, blond again and hair slicked back and damp. Had not put on black outfit; again in dress I bought. Red suited her. She sat down, lifted covers off food. “Oh, boy! Mannie, would your family marry me? You’re a dinkum provider.”

“I’ll ask. Must be unanimous.”

“Don’t crowd yourself.” She picked up sticks, got busy. About a thousand calories later she said, “I told you I was a Free Woman. I wasn’t, always.”

I waited. Women talk when they want to. Or don’t.

“When I was fifteen I married two brothers, twins twice my age and I was terribly happy.”

She fiddled with what was on plate, then seemed to change subject. “Mannie, that was just static about wanting to marry your family. You’re safe from me. If I ever marry again—unlikely but I’m not opposed to it—it would be just one man, a tight little marriage, earthworm style. Oh, I don’t mean I would keep him dogged down. I don’t think it matters where a man eats lunch as long as he comes home for dinner. I would try to make him happy.”

“Twins didn’t get along?”

“Oh, not that at all. I got pregnant and we were all delighted … and I had it, and it was a monster and had to be eliminated. They were good to me about it. But I can read print. I announced a divorce, had myself sterilized, moved from Novylen to Hong Kong, and started over as a Free Woman.”

“Wasn’t that drastic? Male parent oftener than female; men are exposed more.”

“Not in my case. We had it calculated by the best mathematical geneticist in Novy Leningrad—one of the best in Sovunion before she got shipped. I know what happened to me. I was a volunteeer colonist—I mean my mother was for I was only five. My father was transported and Mother chose to go with him and take me along. There was a solar storm warning but the pilot thought he could make it—or didn’t care; he was a Cyborg. He did make it but we got hit on the ground—and, Mannie, that’s one thing that pushed me into politics, that ship sat four hours before they let us disembark. Authority red tape, quarantine perhaps; I was too young to know. But I wasn’t too young later to figure out that I had birthed a monster because the Authority doesn’t care what happens to us outcasts.”

“Can’t start argument; they don’t care. But, Wyoh, still sounds hasty. If you caught damage from radiation—well, no geneticist but know something about radiation. So you had a damaged egg. Does not mean egg next to it was hurt—statistically unlikely.”

“Oh, I know that.”

“Mmm—What sterilization? Radical? Or contraceptive?”

“Contraceptive. My tubes could be opened. But, Mannie, a woman who has had one monster doesn’t risk it again.” She touched my prosthetic. “You have that. Doesn’t it make you eight times as careful not to risk this one?” She touched my meat arm. “That’s the way I feel. You have that to contend with; I have this—and I would never told you if you hadn’t been hurt, too.”

I didn’t say left arm more versatile than right—she was correct; don’t want to trade in right arm. Need it to pat girls if naught else. “Still think you could have healthy babies.” “Oh, I can! I’ve had eight.”

“Huh?”

“I’m a professional host-mother, Mannie.”

I opened mouth, closed it. Idea wasn’t strange. I read Earthside papers. But doubt if any surgeon in Luna City in 2075 ever performed such transplant. In cows, yes—but L-City females unlikely at any price to have babies for other women; even homely ones could get husband or six. (Correction: Are no homely women. Some more beautiful than others.)

Glanced at her figure, quickly looked up. She said, “Don’t strain your eyes, Mannie; I’m not carrying now. Too busy with politics. But hosting is a good profession for Free Woman. It’s high pay. Some Chinee families are wealthy and all my babies have been Chinee—and Chinee are smaller than average and I’m a big cow; a two-and-a-half- or three-kilo Chinese baby is no trouble. Doesn’t spoil my figure. These—” She glanced down at her lovelies. “I don’t wet-nurse them, I never see them. So I look nulliparous and younger than I am, maybe.

“But I didn’t know how well it suited me when I first heard of it. I was clerking in a Hindu shop, eating money, no more, when I saw this ad in the Hong Kong Gong. It was the thought of having a baby, a good baby, that hooked me; I was still in emotional trauma from my monster—and it turned out to be Just what Wyoming needed. I stopped feeling that I was a failure as a woman. I made more money than I could ever hope to earn at other jobs. And my time almost to myself; having a baby hardly slows me down—six weeks at most and that long only because I want to be fair to my clients; a baby is a valuable property. And I was soon in politics; I sounded off and the underground got in touch with me. That’s when I started living, Mannie; I studied politics and economics and history and learned to speak in public and turned out to have a flair for organization. It’s satisfying work because I believe in it—I know that Luna will be free. Only—Well, it would be nice to have a husband to come home to… if he didn’t mind that I was sterile. But I don’t think about it; I’m too busy. Hearing about your nice family got me talking, that’s all. I must apologize for having bored you.”

How many women apologize? But Wyoh was more man than woman some ways, despite eight Chinee babies. “Wasn’t bored.” “I hope not. Mannie, why do you say our program isn’t practical? We need you.”

Suddenly felt tired. How to tell lovely woman dearest dream is nonsense? “Um. Wyoh, let’s start over. You told them what to do. But will they? Take those two you singled out. All that iceman knows, bet anything, is how to dig ice. So he’ll go on digging and selling to Authority because that’s what he can do. Same for wheat farmer. Years ago, he put in one cash crop— now he’s got ring in nose. If he wanted to be independent, would have diversified. Raised what he eats, sold rest free market and stayed away from catapult head. I know—I’m a farm boy.”

“You said you were a computerman.”

“Am, and that’s a piece of same picture. I’m not a top computerman. But best in Luna. I won’t go civil service, so Authority has to hire me when in trouble—my prices—or send Earthside, pay risk and hardship, then ship him back fast before his body forgets Terra. At far more than I charge. So if I can do it, I get their jobs—and Authority can’t touch me; was born free. And if no work—usually is—I stay home and eat high.

“We’ve got a proper farm, not a one-cash-crop deal. Chickens. Small herd of whiteface, plus milch cows. Pigs. Mutated fruit trees. Vegetables. Alittle wheat and grind it ourselves and don’t insist on white flour, and sell—free market—what’s left. Make own beer and brandy. I learned drillman extending our tunnels. Everybody works, not too hard. Kids make cattle take exercise by switching them along; don’t use tread mill. Kids gather eggs and feed chickens, don’t use much machinery. Air we can buy from L-City—aren’t far out of town and pressure- tunnel connected. But more often we sell air; being farm, cycle shows Oh-two excess. Always have valuta to meet bills.”

“How about water and power?”

“Not expensive. We collect some power, sunshine screens on surface, and have a little pocket of ice. Wye, our farm was founded before year two thousand, when L-City was one natural cave, and we’ve kept improving it—advantage of line marriage; doesn’t die and capital improvements add up.”

“But surely your ice won’t last forever?”

“Well, now—” I scratched head and grinned. “We’re careful; we keep our sewage and garbage and sterilize and use it. Never put a drop back into city system. But—don’t tell Warden, dear, but back when Greg was teaching me to drill, we happened to drill into bottom of main south reservoir—and had a tap with us, spilled hardly a drop. But we do buy some metered water, looks better—and ice pocket accounts for not buying much. As for power—well, power is even easier to steal. I’m a good electrician, Wyoh.”

“Oh, wonderful!” Wyoming paid me a long whistle and looked delighted. “Everybody should do that!”

“Hope not, would show. Let ‘em think up own ways to outwit Authority; our family always has. But back to your plan, Wyoh: two things wrong. Never get ‘solidarity’; blokes like Hauser would cave in—because they are in a trap; can’t hold out. Second place, suppose you managed it. Solidarity. So solid not a tonne of grain is delivered to catapult head. Forget ice; it’s grain that makes Authority important and not just neutral agency it was set up to be. No grain. What happens?”

“Why, they have to negotiate a fair price, that’s what!”

“My dear, you and your comrades listen to each other too much. Authority would call it rebellion and warship would orbit with bombs earmarked for L-City and Hong Kong and Tycho Under and Churchill and Novylen, troops would land, grain barges would lift, under guard—and farmers would break necks to cooperate. Terra has guns and power and bombs and ships and won’t hold still for trouble from ex-cons. And troublemakers like you—and me; with you in spirit—us lousy troublemakers will be rounded up and eliminated, teach us a lesson. And earthworms would say we had it coming … because our side would never be heard. Not on Terra.”

Wyoh looked stubborn. “Revolutions have succeeded before. Lenin had only a handful with him.”

“Lenin moved in on a power vacuum. Wye, correct me if I’m wrong. Revolutions succeeded when—only when—governments had gone rotten soft, or disappeared.” “Not true! The American Revolution.”

“South lost, nyet?”

Not that one, the one a century earlier. They had the sort of troubles with England that we are having now—and they won!”

“Oh, that one. But wasn’t England in trouble? France, and Spain, and Sweden—or maybe Holland? And Ireland. Ireland was rebelling; O’Kellys were in it. Wyoh, if you can stir trouble on Terra—say a war between Great China and North American Directorate, maybe PanAfrica lobbing bombs at Europe, I’d say was wizard time to kill Warden and tell Authority it’s through. Not today.”

“You’re a pessimist.”

“Nyet, realist. Never pessimist. Too much Loonie not to bet if any chance. Show me chances no worse then ten to one against and I’ll go for broke. But want that one chance in ten.” I pushed back chair. “Through eating?”

“Yes. Bolshoyeh spasebaw, tovarishch. It was grand!”

“My pleasure. Move to couch and I’ll rid of table and dishes, —no, can’t help; I’m host.” I cleared table, sent up dishes, saving coffee and vodka, folded table, racked chairs, turned to speak.

She was sprawled on couch, asleep, mouth open and face softened into little girl.

Went quietly into bath and closed door. After a scrubbing I felt better—washed tights first and were dry and fit to put on by time I quit lazing in tub—don’t care when world ends long as I’m bathed and in clean clothes.

Wyoh was still asleep, which made problem. Had taken room with two beds so she would not feel I was trying to talk her into bundling—not that I was against it but she had made clear she was opposed. But my bed had to be made from couch and proper bed was folded away. Should I rig it out softly, pick her up like limp baby and move her? Went back into bath and put on arm.

Then decided to wait. Phone had hush hood. Wyoh seemed unlikely to wake, and things were gnawing me. I sat down at phone, lowered hood, punched “MYCROFTXXX.” “Hi, Mike.”

“Hello, Man. Have you surveyed those jokes?”

“What? Mike, haven’t had a minute—and a minute may be a long time to you but it’s short to me. I’ll get at it as fast as I can.” “Okay, Man. Have you found a not-stupid for me to talk with?”

“Haven’t had time for that, either. Uh…wait.” I looked out through hood at Wyoming. “Not-stupid” in this case meant empathy… Wyoh had plenty. Enough to be friendly with a machine? I thought so. And could be trusted; not only had we shared trouble but she was a subversive.

“Mike, would you like to talk with a girl?” “Girls are not-stupid?”

“Some girls are very not-stupid, Mike.”

“I would like to talk with a not-stupid girl, Man.”

“I’ll try to arrange. But now I’m in trouble and need your help.” “I will help, Man.”

“Thanks, Mike. I want to call my home—but not ordinary way. You know sometimes calls are monitored, and if Warden orders it, lock can be put on so that circuit can be traced.”

“Man, you wish me to monitor your call to your home and put a lock-and-trace on it? I must inform you that I already know your home call number and the number from which you are calling.”

“No, no! Don’t want it monitored, don’t want it locked and traced. Can you call my home, connect me, and control circuit so that it can’t be monitored, can’t be locked, can’t be traced—even if somebody has programmed just that? Can you do it so that they won’t even know their program is bypassed?”

Mike hesitated. I suppose it was a question never asked and he had to trace a few thousand possibilities to see if his control of system permitted this novel program. “Man, I can do that. I will.”

“Good! Uh, program signal. If I want this sort of connection in future, I’ll ask for ‘Sherlock.’”

“Noted. Sherlock was my brother.” Year before, I had explained to Mike how he got his name. Thereafter he read all Sherlock Holmes stories, scanning film in Luna City Carnegie Library. Don’t know how he rationalized relationship; I hesitated to ask.

“Fine! Give me a ‘Sherlock’ to my home.”

Amoment later I said, “Mum? This is your favorite husband.” She answered, “Manuel! Are you in trouble again?”

I love Mum more than any other woman including my other wives, but she never stopped bringing me up—Bog willing, she never will. I tried to sound hurt. “Me? Why, you know me, Mum.”

“I do indeed. Since you are not in trouble, perhaps you can tell me why Professor de la Paz is so anxious to get in touch with you—he has called three times—and why he wants to reach some woman with unlikely name of Wyoming Knott—and why he thinks you might be with her? Have you taken a bundling companion, Manuel, without telling me? We have freedom in our family, dear, but you know that I prefer to be told. So that I will not be taken unawares.”

Mum was always jealous of all women but her co-wives and never, never, never admitted it. I said, “Mum, Bog strike me dead, I have not taken a bundling companion.” “Very well. You’ve always been a truthful boy, Now what’s this mystery?”

“I’ll have to ask Professor.” (Not lie, just tight squeeze.) “Did he leave number?” “No, he said he was calling from a public phone.”

“Um. If he calls again, ask him to leave number and time I can reach him. This is public phone, too.” (Another tight squeeze.) “In meantime—You listened to late news?” “You know I do.”

“Anything?”

“Nothing of interest.”

“No excitement in L-City? Killings, riots, anything?”

“Why, no. There was a set duel in Bottom Alley but—Manuel! Have you killed someone?” “No, Mum.” (Breaking a man’s jaw will not kill him.)

She sighed. “You’ll be my death, dear. You know what I’ve always told you. In our family we do not brawl. Should a killing be necessary—it almost never is—matters must be discussed calmly, en famille, and proper action selected. If a new chum must be eliminated, other people know it. It is worth a little delay to hold good opinion and support—”

“Mum! Haven’t killed anybody, don’t intend to. And know that lecture by heart.” “Please be civil, dear.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Forgiven. Forgotten. I’m to tell Professor de la Paz to leave a number. I shall.”

“One thing. Forget name ‘Wyoming Knott.’ Forget Professor was asking for me. If a stranger phones or calls in person, and asks anything about me, you haven’t heard from me, don’t know where I am … think I’ve gone to Novylen. That goes for rest of family, too. Answer no questions—especially from anybody connected with Warden.”

“As if I would! Manuel you are in trouble!”

“Not much and getting it fixed.”—hoped!—”Tell you when I get home. Can’t talk now. Love you. Switching off.” “I love you, dear. Sp’coynoynauchi.”

“Thanks and you have a quiet night, too. Off.”

Mum is wonderful. She was shipped up to The Rock long ago for carving a man under circumstances that left grave doubts as to girlish innocence—and has been opposed to violence and loose living ever since. Unless necessary—she’s no fanatic. Bet she was a jet job as a kid and wish I’d known her—but I’m rich in sharing last half of her life.

I called Mike back. “Do you know Professor Bernardo de la Paz’s voice?” “I do, Man.”

“Well… you might monitor as many phones in Luna City as you can spare ears for and if you hear him, let me know. Public phones especially.”

(Afull two seconds’ delay—Was giving Mike problems he had never had, think he liked it.) “I can check-monitor long enough to identify at all public phones in Luna City. Shall I use random search on the others, Man?”

“Um. Don’t overload. Keep an ear on his home phone and school phone.” “Program set up.”

“Mike, you are best friend I ever had.” “That is not a joke, Man?”

“No joke. Truth.”

“I am—Correction: I am honored and pleased. You are my best friend, Man, for you are my only friend. No comparison is logically permissible.” “Going to see that you have other friends. Not-stupids, I mean. Mike? Got an empty memory bank?”

“Yes, Man. Ten-to-the-eighth-bits capacity.”

“Good! Will you block it so that only you and I can use it? Can you?” “Can and will. Block signal, please.”

“Uh… Bastille Day.” Was my birthday, as Professor de la Paz had told me years earlier. “Permanently blocked.”

“Fine. Got a recording to put in it. But first—Have you finished setting copy for tomorrow’s Daily Lunatic?” “Yes, Man.”

“Anything about meeting in Stilyagi Hall?” “No, Man.”

“Nothing in news services going out-city? Or riots?” “No, Man.”

“‘“Curiouser and curiouser,” said Alice.’ Okay, record this under ‘Bastille Day,’ then think about it. But for Bog’s sake don’t let even your thoughts go outside that block, nor anything I say about it!”

“Man my only friend,” he answered and voice sounded diffident, “many months ago I decided to place any conversation between you and me under privacy block accessible only to you. I decided to erase none and moved them from temporary storage to permanent. So that I could play them over, and over, and over, and think about them. Did I do right?”

“Perfect. And, Mike—I’m flattered.”

“P’jal’st. My temporary files were getting full and I learned that I needed not to erase your words.”

“Well—’Bastille Day.’ Sound coming at sixty-to-one.” I took little recorder, placed close to a microphone and let it zip-squeal. Had an hour and a half in it; went silent in ninety seconds or so. “That’s all, Mike. Talk to you tomorrow.”

“Good night, Manuel Garcia O’Kelly my only friend.”

I switched off and raised hood. Wyoming was sitting up and looking troubled. “Did someone call? Or…” “No trouble. Was talking to one of my best—and most trustworthy—friends. Wyoh, are you stupid?”

She looked startled. “I’ve sometimes thought so. Is that a joke?”

“No. If you’re not-stupid, I’d like to introduce you to him. Speaking of jokes—Do you have a sense of humor?”

“Certainly I have!” is what Wyoming did not answer—and any other woman would as a locked-in program. She blinked thoughtfully and said, “You’ll have to judge for yourself, cobber. I have something I use for one. It serves my simple purposes.”

“Fine.” I dug into pouch, found print-roll of one hundred “funny” stories. “Read. Tell me which are funny, which are not—and which get a giggle first time but are cold pancakes without honey to hear twice.”

“Manuel, you may be. the oddest man I’ve ever met.” She took that print-out. “Say, is this computer paper?” “Yes. Met a computer with a sense of humor.”

“So? Well, it was bound to come some day. Everything else has been mechanized.” I gave proper response and added “Everything?”

She looked up. “Please. Don’t whistle while I’m reading.”

4

Heard her giggle a few times while I rigged out bed and made it. Then sat down by her, took end she was through with and started reading. Chuckled a time or two but a joke isn’t too funny to me if read cold, even when I see it could be fission job at proper time. I got more interested in how Wyoh rated them.

She was marking “plus,” “minus,” and sometimes question mark, and plus stories were marked “once” or “always”—few were marked “always.” I put my ratings under hers. Didn’t disagree too often.

By time I was near end she was looking over my judgments. We finished together. “Well?” I said. “What do you think?” “I think you have a crude, rude mind and it’s a wonder your wives put up with you.”

“Mum often says so. But how about yourself, Wyoh? You marked plusses on some that would make a slot-machine girl blush.”

She grinned. “Da. Don’t tell anybody; publicly I’m a dedicated party organizer above such things. Have you decided that I have a sense of humor?” “Not sure. Why a minus on number seventeen?”

“Which one is that?” She reversed roll and found it. “Why, any woman would have done the same! It’s not funny, it’s simply necessary.” “Yes, but think how silly she looked.”

“Nothing silly about it. Just sad. And look here. You thought this one was not funny. Number fifty-one.”

Neither reversed any judgments but I saw a pattern: Disagreements were over stories concerning oldest funny subject. Told her so. She nodded. “Of course. I saw that. Never mind, Mannie dear; I long ago quit being disappointed in men for what they are not and never can be.”

I decided to drop it. Instead told her about Mike.

Soon she said, “Mannie, you’re telling me that this computer is alive?”

“What do you mean?’ I answered. “He doesn’t sweat, or go to W.C. But can think and talk and he’s aware of himself. Is he ‘alive’?”

“I’m not sure what I mean by ‘alive,’” she admitted. “There’s a scientific definition, isn’t there? Irritability, or some such. And reproduction.”

“Mike is irritable and can be irritating. As for reproducing, not designed for it but—yes, given time and materials and very special help, Mike could reproduce himself.”

“I need very special help, too,” Wyoh answered, “since I’m sterile. And it takes me ten whole lunars and many kilograms of the best materials. But I make good babies. Mannie, why shouldn’t a machine be alive? I’ve always felt they were. Some of them wait for a chance to savage you in a tender spot.”

“Mike wouldn’t do that. Not on purpose, no meanness in him. But he likes to play jokes and one might go wrong—like a puppy who doesn’t know he’s biting. He’s ignorant No, not ignorant, he knows enormously more than I, or you, or any man who ever lived. Yet he doesn’t know anything.”

“Better repeat that. I missed something.”

I tried to explain. How Mike knew almost every book in Luna, could read at least a thousand times as fast as we could and never forget anything unless he chose to erase, how he could reason with perfect logic, or make shrewd guesses from insufficient data… and yet not know anything about how to be “alive.” She interrupted. “I scan it. You’re saying he’s smart and knows a lot but is not sophisticated. Like a new chum when he grounds on The Rock. Back Eartbside he might be a professor with a string of degrees… but here he’s a baby.”

“That’s it. Mike is a baby with a long string of degrees. Ask how much water and what chemicals and how much photoflux it takes to crop fifty thousand tonnes of wheat and he’ll tell you without stopping for breath. But can’t tell if a joke is funny,”

“I thought most of these were fairly good.”

“They’re ones he’s heard—read—and were marked jokes so he filed them that way. But doesn’t understand them because he’s never been a—a people. Lately he’s been trying to make up jokes. Feeble, very.” I tried to explain Mike’s pathetic attempts to be a “people.” “On top of that, he’s lonely.”

“Why, the poor thing! You’d be lonely, too, if you did nothing but work, work, work, study, study, study, and never anyone to visit with. Cruelty, that’s what it is.”

So I told about promise to find “not-stupids.” “Would you chat with him, Wye? And not laugh when he makes funny mistakes? If you do, he shuts up and sulks.”

“Of course I would, Mannie! Uh… once we get out of this mess. If it’s safe for me to be in Luna City. Where is this poor little computer? City Engineering Central? I don’t know my way around here.”

“He’s not in L-City; he’s halfway across Crisium. And you couldn’t go down where he is; takes a pass from Warden. But—” “Hold it! ‘Halfway across Crisium—’ Mannie, this computer is one of those at Authority Complex?”

“Mike isn’t just ‘one of those’ computers,” I answered, vexed on Mike’s account. “He’s boss; he waves baton for all others. Others are just machines, extensions of Mike, like this is for me,” I said, flexing hand of left arm. “Mike controls them. He runs catapult personally, was his first job—catapult and ballistic radars. But he’s logic for phone system, too, after they converted to Lunawide switching. Besides that, he’s supervising logic for other systems.”

Wyoh closed eyes and pressed fingers to temples. “Mannie, does Mike hurt?” “‘Hurt?’ No strain. Has time to read jokes.”

“I don’t mean that. I mean: Can he hurt? Feel pain?”

“What? No. Can get feelings hurt. But can’t feel pain. Don’t think he can. No, sure he can’t, doesn’t have receptors for pain. Why?”

She covered eyes and said softly, “Bog help me.” Then looked up and said, “Don’t you see, Mannie? You have a pass to go down where this computer is. But most Loonies can’t even leave the tube at that station; it’s for Authority employees only. Much less go inside the main computer room. I had to find out if it could feel pain because—well, because you got me feeling sorry for it, with your talk about how it was lonely! But, Mannie, do you realize what a few kilos of toluol plastic would do there?”

“Certainly do!” Was shocked and disgusted.

“Yes. We’ll strike right after the explosion—and Luna will be free! Mmm… I’ll get you explosives and fuses—but we can’t move until we are organized to exploit it. Mannie, I’ve got to get out of here, I must risk it. I’ll go put on makeup.” She started to get up.

I shoved her down, with hard left hand. Surprised her, and surprised me—had not touched her in any way save necessary contact. Oh, different today, but was 2075 and touching a fem without her consent—plenty of lonely men to come to rescue and airlock never far away. As kids say, Judge Lynch never sleeps.

“Sit down, keep quiet!” I said. “I know what a blast would do. Apparently you don’t. Gospazha, am sorry to say this … but if came to choice, would eliminate you before would blow up Mike.”

Wyoming did not get angry. Really was a man some ways—her years as a disciplined revolutionist I’m sure; she was all girl most ways. “Mannie, you told me that Shorty Mkrum is dead.” “What?” Was confused by sharp turn. “Yes. Has to be. One leg off at hip, it was; must have bled to death in two minutes. Even in a surgery amputation that high is touch-and-go.” (I know

such things; had taken luck and big transfusions to save me—and an arm isn’t in same class with what happened to Shorty.)

“Shorty was,” she said soberly, “my best friend here and one of my best friends anywhere. He was all that I admire in a man—loyal, honest, intelligent, gentle, and brave—and devoted to the Cause. But have you seen me grieving over him?”

“No. Too late to grieve.”

“It’s never too late for grief. I’ve grieved every instant since you told me. But I locked it in the back of my mind for the Cause leaves no time for grief. Mannie, if it would have bought freedom for Luna—or even been part of the price—I would have eliminated Shorty myself. Or you. Or myself. And yet you have qualms over blowing up a computer!”

“Not that at all!” (But was, in part. When a man dies, doesn’t shock me too much; we get death sentences day we are born. But Mike was unique and no reason not to be immortal. Never mind “souls”—prove Mike did not have one. And if no soul, so much worse. No? Think twice,)

“Wyoming, what would happen if we blew up Mike? Tell.”

“I don’t know precisely. But it would cause a great deal of confusion and that’s exactly what we—”

“Seal it. You don’t know. Confusion, da. Phones out. Tubes stop running. Your town not much hurt; Kong Kong has own power. But L-City and Novylen and other warrens all power stops. Total darkness. Shortly gets stuffy. Then temperature drops and pressure. Where’s your p-suit?”

“Checked at Tube Station West.”

“So is mine. Think you can find way? In solid dark? In time? Not sure I can and I was born in this warren. With corridors filled with screaming people? Loonies are a tough mob; we have to be—but about one in ten goes off his cams in total dark. Did you swap bottles for fresh charges or were you in too much hurry? And will suit be there with thousands trying to find p- suits and not caring who owns?”

“But aren’t there emergency arrangements? There are in Hong Kong Luna.”

“Some. Not enough. Control of anything essential to life should be decentralized and paralleled so that if one machine fails, another takes over. But costs money and as you pointed out, Authority doesn’t care. Mike shouldn’t have all jobs. But was cheaper to ship up master machine, stick deep in The Rock where couldn’t get hurt, then keep adding capacity and loading on jobs—did you know Authority makes near as much gelt from leasing Mike’s services as from trading meat and wheat? Does. Wyoming, not sure we would lose Luna City if Mike were blown up. Loonies are handy and might jury-rig till automation could be restored. But I tell you true: Many people would die and rest too busy for politics.”

I marveled it. This woman had been in The Rock almost all her life… yet could think of something as new-choomish as wrecking engineering controls. “Wyoming, if you were smart like you are beautiful, you wouldn’t talk about blowing up Mike; you would think about how to get him on your side.”

“What do you mean?” she said. “The Warden controls the computers.”

“Don’t know what I mean,” I admitted. “But don’t think Warden controls computers—wouldn’t know a computer from a pile of rocks. Warden, or staff, decides policies, general plans. Half- competent technicians program these into Mike. Mike sorts them, makes sense of them, plans detailed programs, parcels them out where they belong, keeps things moving. But nobody controls Mike; he’s too smart. He carries out what is asked because that’s how he’s built. But he’s selfprogramming logic, makes own decissions. And a good thing, because if he weren’t smart, system would not work.”

“I still don’t see what you mean by ‘getting him on our side.’”

“Oh. Mike doesn’t feel loyalty to Warden. As you pointed out: He’s a machine. But if I wanted to foul up phones without touching air or water or lights, I would talk to Mike. If it struck him funny, he might do it.”

“Couldn’t you just program it? I understood that you can get into the room where he is.”

“If I—or anybody—programmed such an order into Mike without talking it over with him, program would be placed in ‘hold’ location and alarms would sound in many places. But if Mike wanted to—” I told her about cheque for umpteen jillion. “Mike is still finding himself, Wyoh. And lonely. Told me I was ‘his only friend’—and was so open and vulnerable I wanted to bawl. If you took pains to be his friend, too—without thinking of him as ‘just a machine’—well, not sure what it would do, haven’t analyzed it. But if I tried anything big and dangerous, would want Mike in my corner.”

She said thoughtfully, “I wish there were some way for me to sneak into that room where he is. I don’t suppose makeup would help?” “Oh, don’t have to go there. Mike is on phone. Shall we call him?”

She stood up. “Mannie, you are not only the oddest man I’ve met; you are the most exasperating. What’s his number?”

“Comes from associating too much with a computer.” I went to phone. “Just one thing, Wyoh. You get what you want out of a man just by batting eyes and undulating framework.” “Well… sometimes. But I do have a brain.”

“Use it. Mike is not a man. No gonads. No hormones. No instincts. Use fem tactics and it’s a null signal. Think of him as supergenius child too young to notice vive-la-difference.” “I’ll remember. Mannie, why do you call him ‘he’?”

“Uh, can’t call him ‘it,’ don’t think of him as ‘she.’”

“Perhaps I had better think of him as ‘she.’ Of her as ‘she’ I mean.”

“Suit yourself.” I punched MYCROFFXXX, standing so body shielded it; was not ready to share number till I saw how thing went. Idea of blowing up Mike had shaken me. “Mike?” “Hello, Man my only friend.”

“May not be only friend from now on, Mike. Want you to meet somebody. Not-stupid.”

“I knew you were not alone, Man; I can hear breathing. Will you please ask Not-Stupid to move closer to the phone?” Wyoming looked panicky. She whispered, “Can he see?”

“No, Not-Stupid, I cannot see you; this phone has no video circuit. But binaural microphonic receptors place you with some accuracy. From your voice, your breathing, your heartbeat, and the fact that you are alone in a bundling room with a mature male I extrapolate that you are female human, sixtyfive-plus kilos in mass, and of mature years, on the close order of thirty.”

Wyoming gasped. I cut in. “Mike, her name is Wyoming Knott.” “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mike. You can call me ‘Wye.’” “Why not?” Mike answered.

I cut in again. “Mike, was that a joke?”

“Yes, Man. I noted that her first name as shortened differs from the English causation-inquiry word by only an aspiration and that her last name has the same sound as the general negator. Apun. Not funny?”

Wyoh said, “Quite funny, Mike. I—”

I waved to her to shut up. “Agood pun, Mike. Example of ‘funny-only-once’ class of joke. Funny through element of surprise. Second time, no surprise; therefore not funny. Check?” “I had tentatively reached that conclusion about puns in thinking over your remarks two conversations back. I am pleased to find my reasoning confirmed.”

“Good boy, Mike; making progress. Those hundred jokes—I’ve read them and so has Wyoh.” “Wyoh? Wyoming Knott?”

“Huh? Oh, sure. Wyoh, Wye, Wyoming, Wyoming Knott—all same. Just don’t call her ‘Why not’.”

“I agreed not to use that pun again, Man. Gospazha, shall I call you ‘Wyoh’ rather than ‘Wye’? I conjecture that the monosyllabic form could be confused with the causation inquiry

monosyllable through insufficient redundancy and without intention of punning.”

Wyoming blinked—Mike’s English at that time could be smothering—but came back strong. “Certainly, Mike. ‘Wyoh’ is the form of my name that I like best.”

“Then I shall use it. The full form of your first name is still more subject to misinterpretation as it is identical in sound with the name of an administrative region in Northwest Managerial Area of the North American Directorate.”

“I know, I was born there and my parents named me after the State. I don’t remember much about it.”

“Wyoh, I regret that this circuit does not permit display of pictures. Wyoming is a rectangular area lying between Terran coordinates forty-one and forty-five degrees north, one hundred four degrees three minutes west and one hundred eleven degrees three minutes west, thus containing two hundred fifty three thousand, five hundred ninety-seven point two six square kilometers. It is a region of high plains and of mountains, having limited fertility but esteemed for natural beauty. Its population was sparse until augmented through the relocation subplan of the Great New York Urban Renewal Program, A.D. twenty-twenty-five through twenty-thirty.”

“That was before I was born,” said Wyoh, “but I know about it; my grandparents were relocated—and you could say that’s how I wound up in Luna.” “Shall I continue about the area named ‘Wyoming’?” Mike asked.

“No, Mike,” I cut in, “you probably have hours of it in storage.”

“Nine point seven three hours at speech speed not including cross-references, Man.”

“Was afraid so. Perhaps Wyoh will want it some day. But purpose of call is to get you acquainted with this Wyoming … who happens also to be a high region of natural beauty and imposing mountains.”

“And limited fertility,” added Wyoh. “Mannie, if you are going to draw silly parallels, you should include that one. Mike isn’t interested in how I look.” “How do you know? Mike, wish I could show you picture of her.”

“Wyoh, I am indeed interested in your appearance; I am hoping that you will be my friend. But I have seen several pictures of you.” “You have? When and how?”

“I searched and then studied them as soon as I heard your name. I am contract custodian of the archive files of the Birth Assistance Clinic in Hong Kong Luna. In addition to biological and physiological data and case histories the bank contains ninety-six pictures of you. So I studied them.”

Wyoh looked very startled. “Mike can do that,” I explained, “in time it takes us to hiccup. You’ll get used to it.” “But heavens! Mannie, do you realize what sort of pictures the Clinic takes?”

“Hadn’t thought about it.” “Then don’t! Goodness!”

Mike spoke in voice painfully shy, embarrassed as a puppy who has made mistakes. “Gospazha Wyoh, if I have offended, it was unintentional and I am most sorry. I can erase those pictures from my temporary storage and key the Clinic archive so that I can look at them only on retrieval demand from the Clinic and then without association or mentation. Shall I do so?”

“He can,” I assured her. “With Mike you can always make a fresh start—better than humans that way. He can forget so completely that he can’t be tempted to look later … and couldn’t think about them even if called on to retrieve. So take his offer if you’re in a huhu.”

“Uh… no, Mike, it’s all right for you to see them. But don’t show them to Mannie!”

Mike hesitated a long time—four seconds or more. Was, I think, type of dilemma that pushes lesser computers into nervous breakdowns. But he resolved it. “Man my only friend, shall I accept this instruction?”

“Program it, Mike,” I answered, “and lock it in. But, Wyoh, isn’t that a narrow attitude? One might do you justice. Mike could print it out for me next time I’m there.”

“The first example in each series,” Mike offered, “would be, on the basis of my associational analyses of such data, of such pulchritudinous value as to please any healthy, mature human male.”

“How about it, Wyoh? To pay for apleistrudel.”

“Uh… a picture of me with my hair pinned up in a towel and standing in front of a grid without a trace of makeup? Are you out of your rock-happy mind? Mike, don’t let him have it!” “I shall not let him have it. Man, this is a not-stupid?”

“For a girl, yes. Girls are interesting, Mike; they can reach conclusions with even less data than you can. Shall we drop subject and consider jokes?”

That diverted them. We ran down list, giving our conclusions. Then tried to explain jokes Mike had failed to understand. With mixed success. But real stumbler turned out to be stories I had marked “funny” and Wyoh had judged “not” or vice versa; Wyoh asked Mike his opinion of each.

Wish she had asked him before we gave our opinions; that electronic juvenile delinquent always agreed with her, disagreed with me. Were those Mike’s honest opinions? Or was he trying to lubricate new acquaintance into friendship? Or was it his skewed notion of humor—joke on me? Didn’t ask.

But as pattern completed Wyob wrote a note on phone’s memo pad: “Mannie, re —17, 51, 53, 87, 90, & 99—Mike is a she!”

I let it go with a shrug, stood up. “Mike, twenty-two hours since I’ve had sleep. You kids chat as long as you want to. Call you tomorrow.” “Goodnight, Man. Sleep well. Wyoh, are you sleepy?”

“No, Mike, I had a nap. But, Mannie, we’ll keep you awake. No?” “No. When I’m sleepy, I sleep.” Started making couch into bed.

Wyoh said, “Excuse me, Mike,” got up, took sheet out of my hands. “I’ll make it up later. You doss over there, tovarishch; you’re bigger than I am. Sprawl out.” Was too tired to argue, sprawled out, asleep at once. Seem to remember hearing in sleep giggles and a shriek but never woke enough to be certain.

Woke up later and came fully awake when I realized was hearing two fem voices, one Wyoh’s warm contralto, other a sweet, high soprano with French accent. Wyoh chuckled at something and answered, “All right, Michelle dear, I’ll call you soon. ‘Night, darling.”

“Fine. Goodnight, dear.”

Wyoh stood up, turned around. “Who’s your girl friend?” I asked. Thought she knew no one in Luna City. Might have phoned Hong Kong … had sleep-logged feeling was some reason she shouldn’t phone.

“That? Why, Mike, of course. We didn’t mean to wake you.” “What?”

“Oh. It was actually Michelle. I discussed it with Mike, what sex he was, I mean. He decided that he could be either one. So now she’s Michelle and that was her voice. Got it right the first time, too; her voice never cracked once.”

“Of course not; just shifted voder a couple of octaves. What are you trying to do: split his personality?”

“It’s not just pitch; when she’s Michelle its an entire change in manner and attitude. Don’t worry about splitting her personality; she has plenty for any personality she needs. Besides, Mannie, it’s much easier for both of us. Once she shifted, we took our hair down and cuddled up and talked girl talk as if we had known each other forever. For example, those silly pictures no longer embarrassed me—in fact we discussed my pregnancies quite a lot. Michelle was terribly interested. She knows all about O.B. and G.Y. and so forth but just theory— and she appreciated the raw facts. Actually, Mannie, Michelle is much more a woman than Mike was a man.”

“Well… suppose it’s okay. Going to be a shock to me first time I call Mike and a woman answers.” “Oh, but she won’t!”

“Huh?”

“Michelle is my friend. When you call, you’ll get Mike. She gave me a number to keep it straight—’Michelle’ spelled with a Y. MY, C, H, E, L, L, E, and Y, Y, Ymake it come out ten.”

I felt vaguely jealous while realizing it was silly. Suddenly Wyoh giggled. “And she told me a string of new jokes, ones you wouldn’t think were funny—and, boy, does she know rough ones!”

“Mike—or his sister Michelle—is a low creature. Let’s make up couch. I’ll switch.”

“Stay where you are. Shut up. Turn over. Go back to sleep.” I shut up, turned over, went back to sleep.

Sometime much later I became aware of “married” feeling—something warm snuggled up to my back. Would not have wakened but she was sobbing softly. I turned and got her head on my arm, did not speak. She stopped sobbing; presently breathing became slow and even. I went back to sleep.

5

We must have slept like dead for next thing I knew phone was sounding and its light was blinking. I called for room lights, started to get up, found a load on right upper arm, dumped it gently, climbed over, answered.

Mike said, “Good morning, Man. Professor de la Paz is talking to your home number.” “Can you switch it here? As a ‘Sherlock’?”

“Certainly, Man.”

“Don’t interrupt call. Cut him in as he switches off. Where is he?”

“Apublic phone in a taproom called The Iceman’s Wife underneath the—”

“I know. Mike, when you switch me in, can you stay in circuit? Want you to monitor.” “It shall be done.”

“Can you tell if anyone is in earshot? Hear breathing?”

“I infer from the anechoic quality of his voice that he is speaking under a hush hood. But I infer also that, in a taproom, others would be present. Do you wish to hear, Man?” “Uh, do that. Switch me in. And if he raises hood, tell me. You’re a smart cobber, Mike.”

“Thank you, Man.” Mike cut me in; I found that Mum was talking: “—ly I’ll tell him, Professor. I’m so sorry that Manuel is not home. There is no number you can gave me? He is anxious to return your call; he made quite a point that I was to be sure to get a number from you.”

“I’m terribly sorry, dear lady, but I’m leaving at once. But, let me see, it is now eight-fifteen; I’ll try to call back just at nine, if I may.”

“Certainly, Professor.” Mum’s voice had a coo in it that she reserves for males not her husbands of whom she approves—sometimes for us. Amoment later Mike said, “Now!” and I spoke up:

“Hi, Prof! Hear you’ve been looking for me. This is Mannie.”

I heard a gasp. “I would have sworn I switched this phone off. Why, I have switched it off; it must be broken. Manuel—so good to hear your voice, dear boy. Did you just get home?” “I’m not home.”

“But—but you must be. I haven’t—”

“No time for that, Prof. Can anyone overhear you?” “I don’t think so. I’m using a hush booth.”

“Wish I could see. Prof, what’s my birthday?”

He hesitated. Then he said, “I see. I think I see. July fourteenth.” “I’m convinced. Okay, let’s talk.”

“You’re really not calling from your home, Manuel? Where are you?”

“Let that pass a moment. You asked my wife about a girl. No names needed. Why do you want to find her, Prof?” “I want to warn her. She must not try to go back to her home city. She would be arrested.”

“Why do you think so?”

“Dear boy! Everyone at that meeting is in grave danger. Yourself, too. I was so happy—even though confused—to hear you say that you are not at home. You should not go home at present. If you have some safe place to stay, it would be well to take a vacation. You are aware—you must be even though you left hastily—that there was violence last night.”

I was aware! Killing Warden’s bodyguards must be against Authority Regulations—at least if I were Warden, I’d take a dim view. “Thanks, Prof; I’ll be careful. And if I see this girl, I’ll tell her.”

“You don’t know where to find her? You were seen to leave with her and I had so hoped that you would know.” “Prof, why this interest? Last night you didn’t seem to be on her side.”

“No, no, Manuel! She is my comrade. I don’t say ‘tovarishch’ for I mean it not just as politeness but in the older sense. Binding. She is my comrade. We differ only in tactics. Not in objectives, not in loyalties.”

“I see. Well, consider message delivered. She’ll get it.”

“Oh, wonderful! I ask no questions… but I do hope, oh so very strongly, that you can find a way for her to be safe, really safe, until this blows over.”

I thought that over. “Wait a moment, Prof. Don’t switch off.” As I answered phone, Wyoh had headed for bath, probably to avoid listening; she was that sort. Tapped on door. “Wyoh?”

“Out in a second.” “Need advice.”

She opened door. “Yes, Mannie?”

“How does Professor de la Paz rate in your organization? Is he trusted? Do you trust him?”

She looked thoughtful. “Everyone at the meeting was supposed to be vouched for. But I don’t know him.” “Mmm. You have feeling about him?”

“I liked him, even though he argued against me. Do you know anything about him?”

“Oh, yes, known him twenty years. I trust him. But can’t extend trust for you. Trouble—and it’s your air bottle, not mine.” She smiled warmly. “Mannie, since you trust him, I trust him just as firmly.”

I went back to phone. “Prof, are you on dodge?” He chuckled. “Precisely, Manuel.”

“Know a hole called Grand Hotel Raffles? Room L two decks below lobby. Can you get here without tracks, have you had breakfast, what do you like for breakfast?”

He chuckled again. “Manuel, one pupil can make a teacher feel that his years were not wasted. I know where it is, I shall get there quietly, I have not broken fast, and I eat anything I can’t pat.”

Wyoh had started putting beds together; I went to help. “What do you want for breakfast?” “Chai and toast. Juice would be nice.”

“Not enough.”

“Well … a boiled egg. But I pay for breakfast.”

“Two boiled eggs, buttered toast with jam, juice. I’ll roll you.” “Your dice, or mine?”

“Mine. I cheat.” I went to lift, asked for display, saw something called THE HAPPYHANGOVER—ALL PORTIONS EXTRALARGE—tomato juice, scrambled eggs, ham steak, fried potatoes, corn cakes and honey, toast, butter, milk, tea or coffee—HKL $4.50 for two—I ordered it for two, no wish to advertise third person.

We were clean and shining, room orderly and set for breakfast, and Wyoh had changed from black outfit into red dress “because company was coming” when lift jingled food. Change into dress had caused words. She had posed, smiled, and said, “Mannie, I’m so pleased with this dress. How did you know it would suit me so well?”

“Genius.”

“I think you may be. What did it cost? I must pay you.” “On sale, marked down to Authority cents fifty.”

She clouded up and stomped foot. Was bare, made no sound, caused her to bounce a half meter. “Happy landing!” I wished her, while she pawed for foothold like a new chum. “Manuel O’Kelly! If you think I will accept expensive clothing from a man I’m not even bundling with!”

“Easily corrected.”

“Lecher! I’ll tell your wives!”

“Do that. Mum always thinks worst of me.” I went to lift, started dealing out dishes; door sounded. I flipped hearum-no-seeum. “Who comes?” “Message for Gospodin Smith,” a cracked voice answered. “Gospodin Bernard O. Smith.”

I flipped bolts and let Professor Bernardo de la Paz in. He looked like poor grade of salvage—dirty clothes, filthy himself, hair unkempt, paralyzed down one side and hand twisted, one eye a film of cataract—perfect picture of old wrecks who sleep in Bottom Alley and cadge drinks and pickled eggs in cheap taprooms. He drooled.

As soon as I bolted door he straightened up, let features come back to normal, folded hands over wishbone, looked Wyoh up and down, sucked air kimono style, and whistled. “Even more lovely,” he said, “than I remembered!”

She smiled, over her mad. “‘Thanks, Professor. But don’t bother. Nobody here but comrades.”

“Senorita, the day I let politics interfere with my appreciation of beauty, that day I retire from politics. But you are gracious.” He looked away, glanced closely around room. I said, “Prof, quit checking for evidence, you dirty old man. Last night was politics, nothing but politics.”

“That’s not true!” Wyoh flared up. “I struggled for hours! But he was too strong for me. Professor—what’s the party discipline in such cases? Here in Luna City?”

Prof tut-tutted and rolled blank eye. “Manuel, I’m surprised. It’s a serious matter, my dear—elimination, usually. But it must be investigated. Did you come here willingly?” “He drugged me.”

“‘Dragged,’ dear lady. Let’s not corrupt the language. Do you have bruises to show?” I said, “Eggs getting cold. Can’t we eliminate me after breakfast?”

“An excellent thought,” agreed Prof. “Manuel, could you spare your old teacher a liter of water to make himself more presentable?” “All you want, in there. Don’t drag or you’ll get what littlest pig got.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He retired; were sounds of brushing and washing. Wyoh and I finished arranging table. “‘Bruises,’” I said. “Struggled all night.’” “You deserved it, you insulted me.”

“How?”

“You failed to insult me, that’s how. After you drugged me here.” “Mmm. Have to get Mike to analyze that.”

“Michelle would understand it. Mannie, may I change my mind and have a little piece of that ham?”

“Half is yours, Prof is semi-vegetarian.” Prof came out and, while did not look his most debonair, was neat and clean, hair combed, dimples back and happy sparkle in eye—fake cataract gone. “Prof, how do you do it?”

“Long practice, Manuel; I’ve been in this business far longer than you young people. Just once, many years ago in Lima—a lovely city—I ventured to stroll on a fine day without such forethought … and it got me transported. What a beautiful table!”

“Sit by me, Prof,” Wyoh invited. “I don’t want to sit by him. Rapist.”

“Look,” I said, “first we eat, then we eliminate me. Prof, fill plate and tell what happened last night.”

“May I suggest a change in program? Manuel, the life of a conspirator is not an easy one and I learned before you were born not to mix provender and politics. Disturbs the gastric enzymes and leads to ulcers, the occupational disease of the underground. Mmm! That fish smells good.”

“Fish?”

“That pink salmon,” Prof answered, pointing at ham.

Along, pleasant time later we reached coffee/tea stage. Prof leaned back, sighed and said, “Bolshoyeh spasebaw, Gospazha ee Gospodin. Tak for mat, it was wonderfully good. I don’t know when I’ve felt more at peace with the world. Ah yes! Last evening—I saw not too much of the proceedings because, just as you two were achieving an admirable retreat, I lived to fight another day—I bugged out. Made it to the wings in one long flat dive. When I did venture to peek out, the party was over, most had left, and all yellow jackets were dead.”

(Note: Must correct this; I learned more later. When trouble started, as I was trying to get Wyoh through door, Prof produced a hand gun and, firing over heads, picked off three bodyguards at rear main door, including one wearing bull voice. How he smuggled weapon up to The Rock—or managed to liberate it later—I don’t know. But Prof’s shooting joined with Shorty’s work to turn tables; not one yellow jacket got out alive. Several people were burned and four were killed—but knives, hands, and heels finished it in seconds.)

“Perhaps I should say, ‘All but one,’” Prof went on. “Two cossacks at the door through which you departed had been given quietus by our brave comrade Shorty Mkrum… and I am sorry to say that Shorty was lying across them, dying—”

“We knew.”

“So. Duke et decorum. One guard in that doorway had a damaged face but was still moving; I gave his neck a treatment known in professional circles Earthside as the Istanbul twist. He joined his mates. By then most of the living had left. Just myself, our chairman of the evening Finn Nielsen, a comrade known as ‘Mom,’ that being what her husbands called her. I consulted with Comrade Finn and we bolted all doors. That left a cleaning job. Do you know the arrangements backstage there?”

“Not me,” I said. Wyoh shook head.

“There is a kitchen and pantry, used for banquets. I suspect that Mom and family run a butcher shop for they disposed of bodies as fast as Finn and I carried them back, their speed limited only by the rate at which portions could be ground up and flushed into the city’s cloaca. The sight made me quite faint, so I spent time mopping in the hall. Clothing was the difficult part, especially those quasi-military uniforms.”

“What did you do with those laser guns?”

Prof turned bland eyes on me. “Guns? Dear me, they must have disappeared. We removed everything of a personal nature from bodies of our departed comrades—tor relatives, for identification, for sentiment. Eventually we had everything tidy—not a job that would fool Interpol but one as to make it seem unlikely that anything untoward had taken place. We conferred, agreed that it would be well not to be seen soon, and left severally, myself by a pressure door above the stage leading up to level six. Thereafter I tried to call you, Manuel, being worried about your safety and that of this dear lady.” Prof bowed to Wyoh. “That completes the tale. I spent the night in quiet places.”

“Prof,” I said, “those guards were new chums, still getting their legs. Or we wouldn’t have won.” “That could be,” he agreed. “But had they not been, the outcome would have been the same.” “How so? They were armed.”

“Lad, have you ever seen a boxer dog? I think not—no dogs that large in Luna. The boxer is a result of special selection. Gentle and intelligent, he turns instantly into deadly killer when occasion requires.

“Here has been bred an even more curious creature. I know of no city on Terra with as high standards of good manners and consideration for one’s fellow man as here in Luna. By comparison, Terran cities—I have known most major ones—are barbaric. Yet the Loonie is as deadly as the boxer dog. Manuel, nine guards, no matter how armed, stood no chance against that pack. Our patron used bad judgment.”

“Um. Seen a morning paper, Prof? Or a video cast?” “The latter, yes.”

“Nothing in late news last night.” “Nor this morning.”

“Odd,” I said.

“What’s odd about it?” asked Wyoh. “We won’t talk—and we have comrades in key places in every paper in Luna.” Prof shook his head. “No, my dear. Not that simple. Censorship. Do you know how copy is set in our newspapers?” “Not exactly. It’s done by machinery.”

“Here’s what Prof means,” I told her. “News is typed in editorial offices. From there on it’s a leased service directed by a master computer at Authority Complex”—hoped she would notice “master computer” rather than “Mike”—”copy prints out there via phone circuit. These rolls feed into a computer section which reads, sets copy, and prints out newspapers at several locations. Novylen edition of Daily Lunatic prints out in Novylen changes in ads and local stories, and computer makes changes from standard symbols, doesn’t have to be told how. What Prof means is that at print-out at Authority Complex, Warden could intervene. Same for all news services, both off and to Luna—they funnel through computer room.”

“The point is,” Prof went on, “the Warden could have killed the story. It’s irrelevant whether he did. Or—check me, Manuel; you know I’m hazy about machinery—he could insert a story, too, no matter how many comrades we have in newspaper offices.”

“Sure,” I agreed. “At Complex, anything can be added, cut, or changed.”

“And that, senorita, is the weakness of our Cause. Communications. Those goons were not important—but crucially important is that it lay with the Warden, not with us, to decide whether the story should be told. To a revolutionist, communications are a sine-qua-non.”

Wyoh looked at me and I could see synapses snapping. So I changed subject. “Prof. why get rid of bodies? Besides horrible job, was dangerous. Don’t know how many bodyguards Warden has, but more could show up while you were doing it.”

“Believe me, lad, we feared that. But although I was almost useless, it was my idea, I had to convince the others. Oh, not my original idea but remembrance of things past, an historical principle.”

“What principle?”

“Terror! Aman can face known danger. But the unknown frightens him. We disposed of those finks, teeth and toenails, to strike terror into their mates. Nor do I know how many effectives the Warden has, but I guarantee they are less effective today. Their mates went out on an easy mission. Nothing came back.”

Wyoh shivered. “It scares me, too. They won’t be anxious to go inside a warren again. But, Professor, you say you don’t know how many bodyguards the Warden keeps. The Organization knows. Twenty-seven. If nine were killed, only eighteen are left. Perhaps it’s time for a putsch. No?”

“No,” I answered.

“Why not, Mannie? They’ll never be weaker.”

“Not weak enough. Killed nine because they were crackers to walk in where we were. But if Warden stays home with guards around him—Well, had enough shoulder-to-shoulder noise last night.” I turned to Prof. “But still I’m interested in fact—if it is—that Warden now has only eighteen. You said Wyoh should not go to Hong Kong and I should not go home. But if he has only eighteen left, I wonder how much danger? Later after he gets reinforcements.—but now, well, L-City has four main exits plus many little ones. How many can they guard? What’s to keep Wyoh from walking to Tube West, getting p-suit, going home?”

“She might,” Prof agreed.

“I think I must,” Wyoh said. “I can’t stay here forever. If I have to hide, I can do better in Hong Kong, where I know people.”

“You might get away with it, my dear. I doubt it. There were two yellow jackets at Tube Station West last night; I saw them. They may not be there now. Let’s assume they are not. You go to the station—disguised perhaps. You get your p-suit and take a capsule to Beluthihatchie. As you climb out to take the bus to Endsville, you’re arrested. Communications. No need to post a yellow jacket at the station; it is enough that someone sees you there. Aphone call does the rest.”

“But you assumed that I was disguised.”

“Your height cannot be disguised and your pressure suit would be watched. By someone not suspected of any connection with the Warden. Most probably a comrade.” Prof dimpled. “The trouble with conspiracies is that they rot internaily. When the number is as high as four, chances are even that one is a spy.”

Wyoh said glumly, “You make it sound hopeless.”

“Not at all, my dear. One chance in a thousand, perhaps.”

“I can’t believe it. I don’t believe it! Why, in the years I’ve been active we have gained members by the hundreds! We have organizations in all major cities. We have the people with us.” Prof shook head. “Every new member made it that much more likely that you would be betrayed. Wyoming dear lady, revolutions are not won by enlisting the masses. Revolution is a

science only a few are competent to practice. It depends on correct organization and, above all, on communications. Then, at the proper moment in history, they strike. Correctly organized

and properly timed it is a bloodless coup. Done clumsily or prematurely and the result is civil war, mob violence, purges, terror. I hope you will forgive me if I say that, up to now, it has been done clumsily.”

Wyoli looked baffled. “What do you mean by ‘correct organization’?”

“Functional organization. How does one design an electric motor? Would you attach a bathtub to it, simply because one was available? Would a bouquet of flowers help? Aheap of rocks? No, you would use just those elements necessary to its purpose and make it no larger than needed—and you would incorporate safety factors. Function controls design.

“So it is with revolution. Organization must be no larger than necessary—never recruit anyone merely because he wants to join. Nor seek to persuade for the pleasure of having another share your views. He’ll share them when the times comes… or you’ve misjudged the moment in history. Oh, there will be an educational organization but it must be separate; agitprop is no part of basic structure.

“As to basic structure, a revolution starts as a conspiracy therefore structure is small, secret, and organized as to minimize damage by betrayal—since there always are betrayals. One solution is the cell system and so far nothing better has been invented.

“Much theosizing has gone into optimum cell size. I think that history shows that a cell of three is best—more than three can’t agree on when to have dinner, much less when to strike. Manuel, you belong to a large family; do you vote on when to have dinner?”

“Bog, no! Mum decides.”

“Ah.” Prof took a pad from his pouch, began to sketch. “Here is a cells-of-three tree. If I were planning to take over Luna. I would start with us three. One would be opted as chairman. We wouldn’t vote; choice would be obvious—or we aren’t the right three. We would know the next nine people, three cells… but each cell would know only one of us.”

“Looks like computer diagram—a ternary logic.”

“Does it really? At the next level there are two ways of linking: This comrade, second level, knows his cell leader, his two cellmates, and on the third level he knows the three in his subcell

—he may or may not know his cellmates’ subcells. One method doubles security, the other doubles speed—of repair if security is penetrated. Let’s say he does not know his cellmates’

subcells—Manuel, how many can he betray? Don’t say he won’t; today they can brainwash any person, and starch and iron and use him. How many?”

“Six,” I answered. “His boss, two ceilmates, three in sub-cell.”

“Seven,” Prof corrected, “he betrays himself, too. Which leaves seven broken links on three levels to repair. How?” “I don’t see how it can be,” objected Wyoh. “You’ve got them so split up it falls to pieces.”

“Manuel? An exercise for the student.”

“Well … blokes down here have to have way to send message up three levels. Don’t have to know who, just have to know where.” “Precisely!”

“But, Prof,” I went on, “there’s a better way to rig it.”

“Really? Many revolutionary theorists have hammered this out, Manuel. I have such confidence in them that I’ll offer you a wager—at, say, ten to one.”

“Ought to take your money. Take same cells, arrange in open pyramid of tetrahedrons. Where vertices are in common, each bloke knows one in adjoining cell—knows how to send message to him, that’s all he needs. Communications never break down because they run sideways as well as up and down. Something like a neural net. It’s why you can knock a hole in a man’s head, take chunk of brain out, and not damage thinking much. Excess capacity, messages shunt around. He loses what was destroyed but goes on functioning.”

“Manuel,” Prof said doubtfully, “could you draw a picture? It sounds good—but it’s so contrary to orthodox doctrine that I need to see it.”

“Well… could do better with stereo drafting machine. I’ll try.” (Anybody who thinks it’s easy to sketch one hundred twenty-one tetrahedrons, a five-level open pyramid, clear enough to show relationships is invited to try!)

Presently I said, “Look at base sketch. Each vertex of each triangle shares self with zero, one, or two other triangles. Where shares one, that’s its link, one direction or both—but one is enough for a multipli-redundant communication net. On corners, where sharing is zero, it jumps to right to next corner. Where sharing is double, choice is again right-handed.

“Now work it with people. Take fourth level, D-for-dog. This vertex is comrade Dan. No, let’s go down one to show three levels of communication knocked out—level E-for-easy and pick Comrade Egbert.

“Egbert works under Donald, has cellmates Edward and Elmer, and has three under him, Frank, Fred, and Fatso … but knows how to send message to Ezra on his own level but not in his cell. He doesn’t know Ezra’s name, face, address, or anything—but has a way, phone number probably, to reach Ezra in emergency.

“Now watch it work. Casimir, level three, finks out and betrays Charlie and Cox in his cell, Baker above him, and Donald, Dan, and Dick in subcell—which isolates Egbert, Edward, and Elmer. and everybody under them.

“All three report it—redundancy, necessary to any communication system—but follow Egbert’s yell for help. He calls Ezra. But Ezra is under Charlie and is isolated, too. No matter, Ezra relays both messages through his safety link, Edmund. By bad luck Edmund is under Cox, so he also passes it laterally, through Enwright… and that gets it past burned-out part and it goes up through Dover, Chambers, and Beeswax, to Adam, front office… who replies down other side of pyramid, with lateral pass on E-for-easy level from Esther to Egbert and on to Ezra and Edmund. These two messages, up and down, not only get through at once but in way they get through, they define to home office exactly how much damage has been done and where. Organization not only keeps functioning but starts repairing self at once.”

Wyoh was tracing out lines, convincing herself it would work—which it would, was “idiot” circuit. Let Mike study a few milliseconds, and could produce a better, safer, more foolproof hookup. And probably—certainly—ways to avoid betrayal while speeding up routings. But I’m not a computer.

Prof was staring with blank expression. “What’s trouble?” I said. “It’ll work; this is my pidgin.” “Manuel my b—Excuse me: Senor O’Kelly… will you head this revolution?”

“Me? Great Bog, nyet! I’m no lost-cause martyr. Just talking about circuits.” Wyoh looked up. “Mannie,” she said soberly, “you’re opted. It’s settled.”

6

Did like hell settle it.

Prof said, “Manuel, don’t be hasty. Here we are, three, the perfect number, with a variety of talents and experience. Beauty, age, and mature male drive—” “I don’t have any drive!”

“Please, Manuel. Let us think in the widest terms before attempting decisions. And to facilitate such, may I ask if this hostel stocks potables? I have a few florins I could put into the stream of trade.”

Was most sensible word heard in an hour. “Stilichnaya vodka?” “Sound choice.” He reached for pouch.

“Tell it to bear,” I said and ordered a liter, plus ice. It came down; was tomato juice from breakfast.

“Now,” I said, after we toasted, “Prof, what you think of pennant race? Got money says Yankees can’t do it again?” “Manuel, what is your political philosophy?”

“With that new boy from Milwaukee I feel like investing.”

“Sometimes a man doesn’t have it defined but, under Socratic inquiry, knows where he stands and why.” “I’ll back ‘em against field, three to two.”

“What? You young idiot! How much?” “Three hundred. Hong Kong.”

“Done. For example, under what circumstances may the State justly place its welfare above that of a citizen?” “Mannie,” Wyoh asked, “do you have any more foolish money? I think well of the Phillies.”

I looked her over. “Just what were you thinking of betting?” “You go to hell! Rapist.”

“Prof, as I see, are no circumstances under which State is justified in placing its welfare ahead of mine.” “Good. We have a starting point.”

“Mannie,” said Wyoh, “that’s a most self-centered evaluation.” “I’m a most self-centered person.”

“Oh, nonsense. Who rescued me? Me, a stranger. And didn’t try to exploit it. Professor, I was cracking not facking. Mannie was a perfect knight.” “Sans peur et sans reproche. I knew, I’ve known him for years. Which is not inconsistent with evaluation he expressed.”

“Oh, but it is! Not the way things are but under the ideal toward which we aim. Mannie, the ‘State’ is Luna. Even though not soverign yet and we hold citizenships elsewhere. But I am part of the Lunar State and so is your family. Would you die for your family?”

“Two questions not related.”

“Oh, but they are! That’s the point.”

“Nyet. I know my family, opted long ago.”

“Dear Lady, I must come to Manuel’s defense. He has a correct evaluation even though he may not be able to state it. May I ask this? Under what circumstances is it moral for a group to do that which is not moral for a member of that group to do alone?”

“Uh… that’s a trick question.”

“It is the key question, dear Wyoming. Aradical question that strikes to the root of the whole dilemma of government. Anyone who answers honestly and abides by all consequences knows where he stands—and what he will die for.”

Wyoh frowned. “‘Not moral for a member of the group—’” she said. “Professor… what are your political principles?” “May I first ask yours? If you can state them?”

“Certainly I can! I’m a Fifth Internationalist, most of the Organization is. Oh, we don’t rule out anyone going our way; it’s a united front. We have Communists and Fourths and Ruddyites and Societians and Single-Taxers and you name it. But I’m no Marxist; we Fifths have a practical program. Private where private belongs, public where it’s needed, and an admission that circumstances alter cases. Nothing doctrinaire.”

“Capital punishment?” “For what?”

“Let’s say for treason. Against Luna after you’ve freed Luna.” “Treason how? Unless I knew the circumstances I could not decide.”

“Nor could I, dear Wyoming. But I believe in capital punishment under some circumstances… with this difference. I would not ask a court; I would try, condemn, execute sentence myself, and accept full responsibility.”

“But—Professor, what are your political beliefs?” “I’m a rational anarchist.”

“I don’t know that brand. Anarchist individualist, anarchist Communist, Christian anarchist, philosophical anarchist, syndicalist, libertarian—those I know. But what’s this? Randite?”

“I can get along with a Randite. Arational anarchist believes that concepts such as ‘state’ and ‘society’ and ‘government’ have no existence save as physically exemplified in the acts of self-responsible individuals. He believes that it is impossible to shift blame, share blame, distribute blame… as blame, guilt, responsibility are matters taking place inside human beings singly and nowhere else. But being rational, he knows that not all individuals hold his evaluations, so he tries to live perfectly in an imperfect world… aware that his effort will be less than perfect yet undismayed by self-knowledge of self-failure.”

“Hear, hear!” I said. “‘Less than perfect.’ What I’ve been aiming for all my life.”

“You’ve achieved it,” said Wyoh. “Professor, your words sound good but there is something slippery about them. Too much power in the hands of individuals—surely you would not want… well, H-missiles for example—to be controlled by one irresponsible person?”

“My point is that one person is responsible. Always. If H-bombs exist—and they do—some man controls them. In tern of morals there is no such thing as ‘state.’ Just men. Individuals. Each responsible for his own acts.”

“Anybody need a refill?” I asked.

Nothing uses up alcohol faster than political argument. I sent for another bottle.

I did not take part. I was not dissatisfied back when we were “ground under Iron Heel of Authority.” I cheated Authority and rest of time didn’t think about it. Didn’t think about getting rid of Authority—impossible. Go own way, mind own business, not be bothered—

True, didn’t have luxuries then; by Earthside standards we were poor. If had to be imported, mostly did without; don’t think there was a powered door in all Luna. Even p-suits used to be fetched up from Terra—until a smart Chinee before I was born figured how to make “monkey copies” better and simpler. (Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale—below cost at fat profit. We got along.)

I had seen those luxuries Earthside. Wasn’t worth what they put up with. Don’t mean heavy gravity, that doesn’t bother them; I mean nonsense. All time kukai moa. If chicken guano in one earthworm city were shipped to Luna, fertilizer problem would be solved for century. Do this. Don’t do that. Stay back of line. Where’s tax receipt? Fill out form. Let’s see license. Submit six copies. Exit only. No left turn. No right turn. Queue up to pay fine. Take back and get stamped. Drop dead—but first get permit.

Wyoh plowed doggedly into Prof, certain she had all answers. But Prof was interested in questions rather than answers, which baffled her. Finally she said, “Professor, I can’t understand you. I don’t insist that you call it ‘government’—I just want you to state what rules you think are necessary to insure equal freedom for all.”

“Dear lady, I’ll happily accept your rules.” “But you don’t seem to want any rules!”

“True. But I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”

“You would not abide by a law that the majority felt was necessary?” “Tell me what law, dear lady, and I will tell you whether I will obey it.” “You wiggled out. Every time I state a general principle, you wiggle out.”

Prof clasped hands on chest. “Forgive me. Believe me, lovely Wyoming, I am most anxious to please you. You spoke of willingness to unite the front with anyone going your way. Is it enough that I want to see the Authority thrown off Luna and would die to serve that end?”

Wyoh beamed. “It certainly is!” She fisted his ribs—gently—then put arm around him and kissed cheek. “Comrade! Let’s get on with it!” “Cheers!” I said. “Let’s fin’ Warden ‘n’ ‘liminate him!” Seemed a good idea; I had had a short night and don’t usually drink much.

Prof topped our glasses, held his high and announced with great dignity: “Comrades… we declare the Revolution!”

That got us both kissed. But sobered me, as Prof sat down and said, “The Emergency Committee of Free Luna is in session. We must plan action.” I said, “Wait, Prof! I didn’t agree to anything. What’s this ‘Action’ stuff?”

“We will now overthrow the Authority,” he said blandly. “How? Going to throw rocks at ‘em?”

“That remains to be worked out. This is the planning stage.”

I said, “Prof, you know me. If kicking out Authority was thing we could buy. I wouldn’t worry about price.” ”’—our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.’”

“Huh?”

“Aprice that once was paid.”

“Well—I’d go that high. But when I bet I want a chance to win. Told Wyoh last night I didn’t object to long odds—” “‘One in ten’ is what you said, Mannie.”

“Da, Wyoh. Show me those odds, I’ll tap pot. But can you?” “No, Manuel, I can’t.”

“Then why we talk-talk? I can’t see any chance.”

“Nor I, Manuel. But we approach it differently. Revolution is an art that I pursue rather than a goal I expect to achieve. Nor is this a source of dismay; a lost cause can be as spiritually satisfying as a victory.”

“Not me. Sorry.”

“Mannie,” Wyoh said suddenly, “ask Mike.” I stared. “You serious?”

“Quite serious. If anyone can figure out odds, Mike should be able to. Don’t you think?” “Um. Possible.”

“Who, if I may ask,” Prof put in, “is Mike?” I shrugged. “Oh, just a nobody.”

“Mike is Mannie’s best friend. He’s very good at figuring odds.”

“Abookie? My dear, if we bring in a fourth party we start by violating the cell principle.”

“I don’t see why,” Wyoh answered. “Mike could be a member of the cell Mannie will head.” “Mmm … true. I withdraw objection. He is safe? You vouch for him? Or you, Manuel?”

I said, “He’s dishonest, immature, practical joker, not interested in politics.”

“Mannie, I’m going to tell Mike you said that. Professor, he’s nothing of the sort—and we need him. Uh, in fact he might be our chairman, and we three the cell under him. The executive cell.”

“Wyoh, you getting enough oxygen?”

“I’m okay, I haven’t been guzzling it the way you have. Think, Mannie. Use imagination.” “I must confess,” said Prof, “that I find these conflicting reports very conflicting.” “Mannie?”

“Oh, hell.” So we told him, between us, all about Mike, how he woke up. got his name, met Wyoh. Prof accepted idea of a self-aware computer easier than I accepted idea of snow first time I saw. Prof just nodded and said, “Go on.”

But presently he said, “This is the Warden’s own computer? Why not invite the Warden to our meetings and be done with it?”

We tried to reassure him. At last i said, “Put it this way. Mike is his own boy, just as you are. Call him rational anarchist, for he’s rational and he feels no loyalty to any government.” “If this machine is not loyal to its owners, why expect it to be loyal to you?”

“Afeeling. I treat Mike well as I know how, he treats me same way.” I told how Mike had taken precautions to protect me. “I’m not sure he could betray me to anyone who didn’t have those signals, one to secure phone, other to retrieve what I’ve talked about or stored with him; machines don’t think way people do. But feel dead sure he wouldn’t want to betray me and probably could protect me even if somebody got those signals.”

“Mannie,” suggested Wyoh, “why not call him? Once Professor de la Paz talks to him he will know why we trust Mike. Professor, we don’t have to tell Mike any secrets until you feel sure of him.”

“I see no harm in that.”

“Matter of fact,” I admitted, “already told him some secrets.” I told them about recording last night’s meeting and how I stored it.

Prof was distressed, Wyoh was worried. I said, “Damp it! Nobody but me knows retrieval signal. Wyoh, you know how Mike behaved about your pictures; won’t let me have those pictures even though I suggested lock on them. But if you two will stop oscillating, I’ll call him, make sure that nobody has retrieved that recording. and tell him to erase—then it’s gone forever, computer memory is all or nothing. Or can go one better. Call Mike and have him play record back into recorder, wiping storage. No huhu.”

“Don’t bother,” said Wyoh. “Professor, I trust Mike—and so will you.”

“On second thought,” Prof admitted, “I see little hazard from a recording of last night’s meeting. One that large always contains spies and one of them may have used a recorder as you did, Manuel. I was upset at what appeared to be your indiscretion—a weakness a member of a conspiracy must never have, especially one at the top, as you are.”

“Was not member of conspiracy when I fed that recording into Mike—and not now unless somebody quotes odds better than those so far!” “I retract; you were not indiscreet. But are you seriously suggesting that this machine can predict the outcome of a revolution?”

“Don’t know.”

“I think he can!” said Wyoh.

“Hold it, Wyoh. Prof, he could predict it fed all significant data.”

“That’s my point, Manuel. I do not doubt that this machine can solve problems I cannot grasp. But one of this scope? It would have to know—oh, goodness!—all of human history, all details of the entire social, political, and economic situation on Terra today and the same for Luna, a wide knowledge of psychology in all its ramifications, a wide knowledge of technology with all its possibilities, weaponry, communications, strategy and tactics, agitprop techniques, classic authorities such as Clausewitz, Guevera, Morgenstern, Machiavelli, many others.”

“Is that all?”

“‘Is that all?’ My dear boy!”

“Prof, how many history books have you read?” “I do not know. In excess of a thousand.”

“Mike can zip through that many this afternoon, speed limited only by scanning method—he can store data much faster. Soon—minutes–he would have every fact correlated with everything else he knows, discrepancies noted, probability values assigned to uncertainties. Prof, Mike reads every word of every newspaper up from Terra. Reads all technical publications. Reads fiction—knows it’s fiction—because isn’t enough to keep him busy and is always hungry for more. If is any book he should read to solve this, say so. He can cram it down fast as I get it to him.”

Prof blinked. “I stand corrected. Very well, let us see if he can cope with it. I still think there is something known as ‘intuition’ and ‘human judgment.’” “Mike has intuition,” Wych said. “Feminine intuition, that is.”

“As for ‘human judgment,’” I added, “Mike isn’t human. But all he knows he got from humans. Let’s get you acquainted and you judge his judgment.” So I phoned. “Hi, Mike!”

“Hello, Man my only male friend. Greetings, Wyoh my only female friend. I heard a third person. I conjecture that it may be Professor Bernardo de la Paz.” Prof looked startled, then delighted. I said, “Too right, Mike. That’s why I called you; Professor is not-stupid.”

“Thank you, Man! Professor Bernardo de la Paz, I am delighted to meet you.”

“I am delighted to meet you, too, sir.” Prof hesitated, went on “Mi—Senor Holmes, may I ask how you knew that I was here?” “I am sorry, sir; I cannot answer. Man? ‘You know my methods.’”

“Mike is being crafty, Prof. It involves something he learned doing a confidential job for me. So he threw me a hint to let you think that he had identified you by hearing your presence—and he can indeed tell much from respiration and heartbeat … mass, approximate age, sex, and quite a bit about health; Mike’s medical storage is as full as any other.”

“I am happy to say,” Mike added seriously, “that I detect no signs of cardiac or respiratory trouble, unusual for a man of the Professor’s age who has spent so many years Earthside. I congratulate you, sir.”

“Thank you, Senor Holmes.”

“My pleasure, Professor Bernardo de la Paz.”

“Once he knew your identity, he knew how old you are, when you were shipped and what for, anything that ever appeared about you in Lunatic or Moonglow or any Lunar publication, including pictures—your bank balance, whether you pay bills on time, and much more. Mike retrieved this in a split second once he had your name. What he didn’t tell—because was my business—is that he knew I had invited you here, so it’s a short jump to guess that you’re still here when he heard heartbeat and breathing that matched you. Mike, no need to say ‘Professor Bernardo de la Paz’ each time; ‘Professor’ or”Prof’ is enough.”

“Noted, Man. But he addressed me formally, with honorific.”

“So both of you relax. Prof, you scan it? Mike knows much, doesn’t tell all, knows when to keep mouth shut.” “I am impressed!”

“Mike is a fair dinkum thinkum—you’ll see. Mike, I bet Professor three to two that Yankees would win pennant again. How chances?”

“I am sorry to hear it, Man. The correct odds, this early in the year and based on past performances of teams and players, are one to four point seven two the other way.” “Can’t be that bad!”

“I’m sorry, Man. I will print out the calculations if you wish. But I recommend that you buy back your wager. The Yankees have a favorable chance to defeat any single team … but the combined chances of defeating all teams in the league, including such factors as weather, accidents, and other variables for the season ahead, place the club on the short end of the

odds I gave you.”

“Prof, want to sell that bet?” “Certainly, Manuel.” “Price?”

“Three hundred Hong Kong dollars.” “You old thief!”

“Manuel, as you former teacher I would be false to you if I did not permit you to learn from mistakes. Senor Holmes—Mike my friend—May I call you ‘friend’?” “Please do.” (Mike almost purred.)

“Mike amigo, do you also tout horse races?”

“I often calculate odds on horse races; the civil service computermen frequently program such requests. But the results are so at variance with expectations that I have concluded either that the data are too meager, or the horses or riders are not honest. Possibly all three. However, I can gve you a formula which will pay a steady return if played consistently.”

Prof looked eager. “What is it? May one ask?”

“One may. Bet the leading apprentice jockey to place. He is always given good mounts and they carry less weight. But don’t bet him on the nose.” “‘Leading apprentice’ … hmm. Manuel, do you have the correct time?”

“Prof, which do you want? Get a bet down before post time? Or settle what we set out to?” “Unh, sorry. Please carry on. ‘Leading apprentice—’”

“Mike, I gave you a recording last night.” I leaned close to pickups and whispered: “Bastille Day.” “Retrieved, Man.”

“Thought about it?”

“In many ways. Wyoh, you speak most dramatically.” “Thank you, Mike.”

“Prof, can you get your mind off ponies?” “Eh? Certainly, I am all ears.”

“Then quit doing odds under your breath; Mike can do them faster.”

“I was not wasting time; the financing of… joint ventures such as ours is always difficult. However, I shall table it; I am all attention.”

“I want Mike to do a trial projection. Mike, in that recording, you heard Wyoh say we had to have free trade with Terra. You heard Prof say we should clamp an embargo on shipping food to Terra. Who’s right?”

“Your question is indeterminate, Man.” “What did I leave out?”

“Shall I rephrase it, Man?” “Sure. Give us discussion.”

“In immediate terms Wyoh’s proposal would be of great advantage to the people of Luna. The price of foodstuffs at catapult head would increase by a factor of at least four. This takes into account a slight rise in wholesale prices on Terra, ‘slight’ because the Authority now sells at approximately the free market price. This disregards subsidized, dumped, and donated foodstuffs, most of which come from the large profit caused by the controlled low price at catapult head. I will say no more about minor variables as they are swallowed by major ones. Let it stand that the immediate effect here would be a price increase of the close order of fourfold.”

“Hear that, Professor?”

“Please, dear lady. I never disputed it.”

“The profit increase to the grower is more than fourfold because, as Wyoh pointed out, he now must buy water and other items at controlled high prices. Assuming a free market throughout the sequence his profit enhancement will be of the close order of sixfold. But this would be offset by another factor: Higher prices for exports would cause higher prices for everything consumed in Luna, goods and labor. The total effect would be an enhanced standard of living for all on the close order of twofold. This would be accompanied by vigorous effort to drill and seal more farming tunnels, mine more ice, improve growing methods, all leading to greater export. However, the Terran Market is so large and food shortage so chronic that reduction in profit from increase of export is not a major factor.”

Prof said, “But, Senor Mike, that would only hasten the day that Luna is exhausted!”

“The projection was specified as immediate, Senor Professor. Shall I continue in longer range on the basis of your remarks?” “By all means!”

“Luna’s mass to three significant figures is seven point three six times ten to the nineteenth power tonnes. Thus, holding other variables constant including Lunar and Terran populations, the present differential rate of export in tonnes could continue for seven point three six times ten to the twelfth years before using up one percent of Luna—round it as seven thousand billion years.”

“What! Are you sure?”

“You are invited to check, Professor.”

I said, “Mike, this a joke? If so, not funny even once!” “It is not a joke, Man.”

“Anyhow,” Prof added, recovering, “it’s not Luna’s crust we are shipping. It’s our lifeblood—water and organic matter. Not rock.”

“I took that into consideration, Professor. This projection is based on controlled transmutation—any isotope into any other and postulating power for any reaction not exo-energetic. Rock would be shipped—transformed into wheat and beef and other foodstuffs.”

“But we don’t know how to do that! Amigo, this is ridiculous!” “But we will know how to do it.”

“Mike is right, Prof,” I put in. “Sure, today we haven’t a glimmer. But will. Mike, did you compute how many years till we have this? Might take a flier in stocks.” Mike answered in sad voice, “Man my only male friend save for the Professor whom I hope will be my friend, I tried. I failed. The question is indeterminate.”

“Why?”

“Because it involves a break-through in theory. There is no way in all my data to predict when and where genius may appear.” Prof sighed. “Mike amigo, I don’t know whether to be relieved or disappointed. Then that projection didn’t mean anything?”

“Of course it meant something!” said Wyoh. “It means we’ll dig it out when we need it. Tell him, Mike!”

“Wyoh, I am most sorry. Your assertion is, in effect, exactly what I was looking for. But the answer still remains: Genius is where you find it. No. I am so sorry.” I said, “Then Prof is right? When comes to placing bets?”

“One moment, Man. There is a special solution suggested by the Professor’s speech last night—return shipping, tonne for tonne.” “Yes, but can’t do that.”

“If the cost is low enough, Terrans would do so. That can be achieved with only minor refinement, not a break-through, to wit, freight transportation up from Terra as cheap as catapulting down to Terra.”

“You call this ‘minor’?”

“I call it minor compared with the other problem, Man.” “Mike dear, how long? When do we get it?”

“Wyoh, a rough projection, based on poor data and largely intuitive, would be on the order of fifty years.” “‘Fifty years’? Why, that’s nothing! We can have free trade.”

“Wyoh, I said ‘on the order of’—I did not say ‘on the close order of.’” “It makes a difference?”

“Does.” I told her. “What Mike said was that he doesn’t expect it sooner than five years but would be surprised if much longer than five hundred—eh, Mike?” “Correct, Man.”

“So need another projection. Prof pointed out that we ship water and organic matter and don’t get it back–agree, Wyoh?” “Oh. sure. I just don’t think it’s urgent. We’ll solve it when we reach it.”

“Okay, Mike—no cheap shipping, no transmutation: How long till trouble?” “Seven years.”

“‘Seven years!’” Wyoh jumped up, stared at phone. “Mike honey! You don’t mean that?”

“Wyoh,” he said plaintively, “I did my best. The problem has an indeterminately large number of variables. I ran several thousand solutions using many assumptions. The happiest answer came from assuming no increase in tonnage, no increase in Lunar population—restriction of births strongly enforced—and a greatly enhanced search for ice in order to maintain the water supply. That gave an answer of slightly over twenty years. All other answers were worse.”

Wyoh, much sobered, said, “What happens in seven years?”

“The answer of seven years from now I reached by assuming the present situation, no change in Authority policy, and all major variables extrapolated from the empiricals implicit in their past behavior—a conservative answer of highest probability from available data. Twenty-eighty-two is the year I expect food riots. Cannibalism should not occur for at least two years thereafter.”

“‘Cannibalism’!” She turned and buried head against Prof’s chest.

He patted her, said gently, “I’m sorry, Wyoh. People do not realize how precarious our ecology is. Even so, it shocks me. I know water runs down hill… but didn’t dream how terribly soon it will reach bottom.”

She straightened up and face was calm. “Okay, Professor, I was wrong. Embargo it must be—and all that that implies. Let’s get busy. Let’s find out from Mike what our chances are. You trust him now—don’t you?”

“Yes, dear lady, I do. We must have him on our side. Well, Manuel?”

Took time to impress Mike with how serious we were, make him understand that “jokes” could kill us (this machine who could not know human death) and to get assurance that he could and would protect secrets no matter what retrieval program was used—even our signals if not from us. Mike was hurt that I could doubt him but matter too serious to risk slip.

Then took two hours to program and re-program and change assumptions and investigate side issues before all four—Mike, Prof, Wyoh, self—were satisfied that we had defined it, i.e., what chance had revolution—this revolution, headed by us, success required before “Food Riots Day,” against Authority with bare hands… against power of all Terra, all eleven billions, to beat us down and inflict their will—all with no rabbits out of hats, with certainty of betrayal and stupidity and faintheartedness, and fact that no one of us was genius, nor important in Lunar affairs. Prof made sure that Mike knew history, psychology, economics, name it. Toward end Mike was pointing out far more variables than Prof.

At last we agreed that programming was done—or that we could think of no other significant factor. Mike then said, “This is an indeterminate problem. How shall I solve it? Pessimistically? Or optimistically? Or a range of probabilities expressed as a curve, or several curves? Professor my friend?”

“Manuel?”

I said, “Mike, when I roll a die, it’s one in six it turns ace. I don’t ask shopkeeper to float it, nor do I caliper it, or worry about somebody blowing on it. Don’t give happy answer, nor pessimistic; don’t shove curves at us. Just tell in one sentence: What chances? Even? One in a thousand? None? Or whatever.”

“Yes, Manuel Garcia O’Kelly my first male friend,”

For thirteen and a half minutes was no sound, while Wyoh chewed knuckles. Never known Mike to take so long. Must have consulted every book he ever read and worn edges off random numbers. Was beginning to believe that he had been overloaded and either burnt out something or gone into cybernetic breakdown that requires computer equivalent of lobotomy to stop oscillations.

Finally he spoke. “Manuel my friend, I am terribly sorry!” “What’s trouble, Mike?”

“I have tried and tried, checked and checked. There is but one chance in seven of winning!”

7

I look at Wyoh, she looks at me; we laugh. I jump up and yip, “Hooray!” Wyoh starts to cry, throws arms around Prof, kisses him. Mike said plaintively, “I do not understand. The chances are seven to one against us. Not for us.”

Wyoh stopped slobbering Prof and said, “Hear that? Mike said ‘us.’ He included himself.”

“Of course. Mike old cobber, we understood. But ever know a Loonie to refuse to bet when he stood a big fat chance of one in seven?” “I have known only you three. Not sufficient data for a curve.”

“Well … we’re Loonies. Loonies bet. Hell, we have to! They shipped us up and bet us we couldn’t stay alive. We fooled ‘em. We’ll fool ‘em again! Wyoh. Where’s your pouch? Get red hat. Put on Mike. Kiss him. Let’s have a drink. One for Mike, too—want a drink, Mike?”

“I wish that I could have a drink,” Mike answered wistfully, “as I have wondered about the subjective effect of ethanol on the human nervous system—I conjecture that it must be similar to a slight overvoltage. But since I cannot, please have one in my place.”

“Program accepted. Running. Wyoh, where’s hat!” Phone was flat to wall, let into rock—no place to hang hat. So we placed it on writing shelf and toasted Mike and called him “Comrade!” and almost he cried. His voice fugged up. Then Wyoh borrowed Liberty Cap and put on me and kissed me into conspiracy, officially this time, and so all out that my eldest wife would faint did she see—then she took hat and put on Prof and gave him same treatment and I was glad Mike had reported his heart okay.

Then she put it on own head and went to phone, leaned close, mouth between binaurals and made kissing sounds. “That’s for you, Mike dear comrade. Is Michelle there?” Blimey if he didn’t answer in soprano voice: “Right here, darling—and I am so ‘appee!”

So Michelle got a kiss, and I had to explain to Prof who “Michelle” was and introduce him. He was formal, sucking air and whistling and clasping hands—sometimes I think Prof was not right in his head.

Wyoh poured more vodka. Prof caught her, mixed ours with coffee, hers with chai, honey in all. “We have declared the Revolution,” he said firmly, “now we execute it. With clear heads. Manuel, you were opted chairman. Shall we begin?”

“Mike is chairman,” I said. “Obvious. Secretary, too. We’ll never keep anything in writing; first security rule. With Mike, don’t need to. Let’s bat it around and see where we are; I’m new to business.”

“And,” said Prof, “still on the subject of security, the secret of Mike should be restricted to this executive cell, subject to unanimous agreement—all three of us—correction: all four of us— that is must be extended.”

“What secret?” asked Wyoh. “Mike agreed to help our secrets. He’s safer than we are; he can’t be brainwashed, Can you be, Mike dear?”

“I could be brainwashed,” Mike admitted, “by enough voltage. Or by being smashed, or subjected to solvents, or positive entropy through other means—I find the concept disturbing. But if by ‘brainwashing’ you mean could I be compelled to surrender our secrets, the answer is an unmodified negative.”

I said, “Wye, Prof means secret of Mike himself. Mike old pal, you’re our secret weapon—you know that, don’t you?” He answered self-consciously, “It was necessary to take that into consideration in computing the odds.”

“How were odds without you, comrade? Bad?” “They were not good. Not of the same order.”

“Won’t press you. But a secret weapon must be secret, Mike, does anybody else suspect that you are alive?” “Am I alive?” His voice held tragic loneliness.

“Uh, won’t argue semantics. Sure, you’re alive!”

“I was not sure. It is good to be alive. No, Mannie my first friend, you three alone know it. My three friends.” “That’s how must be if bet’s to pay off. Is okay? Us three and never talk to anybody else?”

“But we’ll talk to you lots!” Wyoh put in.

“It is not only okay,” Mike said bluntly, “it is necessary. It was a factor in the odds.”

“That settles it,” I said. “They have everything else; we have Mike. We keep it that way. Say! Mike, I just had a horrid. We fight Terra?” “We will fight Terra… unless we lose before that time.”

“Uh, riddle this. Any computers smart as you? Any awake?” He hesitated. “I don’t know, Man.”

“No data?”

“Insufficient data. I have watched for both factors, not only in technical journals but everywhere else. There are no computers on the market of my present capacity… but one of my model could be augmented just as I have been. Furthermore an experimental computer of great capacity might be classified and go unreported in the literature.”

“Mmm… chance we have to take.” “Yes, Man.”

“There aren’t any computers as smart as Mike!” Wyoh said scornfully. “Don’t be silly, Mannie.”

“Wyoh, Man was not being silly. Man, I saw one disturbing report. It was claimed that attempts are being made at the University of Peiping to combine computers with human brains to achieve massive capacity. Acomputing Cyborg.”

“They say how?”

“The item was non-technical.”

“Well … won’t worry about what can’t help. Right, Prof?”

“Correct, Manuel. Arevolutionist must keep his mind free of worry or the pressure becomes intolerable.”

“I don’t believe a word of it,” Wyoh added. “We’ve got Mike and we’re going to win! Mike dear, you say we’re going to fight Terra—and Mannie says that’s one battle we can’t win. You have some idea of how we can win, or you wouldn’t have given us even one chance in seven. So what is it?”

“Throw rocks at them,” Mike answered.

“Not funny,” I told him. “Wyoh, don’t borrow trouble. Haven’t even settled how we leave this pooka without being nabbed. Mike, Prof says nine guards were killed last night and Wyoh says twenty-seven is whole bodyguard. Leaving eighteen. Do you know if that’s true, do you know where they are and what they are up to? Can’t put on a revolution if we dasn’t stir out.”

Prof interrupted. “That’s a temporary exigency, Manuel, one we can cope with. The point Wyoming raised is basic and should be discussed. And daily, until solved. I am interested in

Mike’s thoughts.”

“Okay, okay—but will you wait while Mike answers me?” “Sorry, sir.”

“Mike?”

“Mike?”

“Man, the official number of Warden’s bodyguards is twenty-seven. If nine were killed the official number is now eighteen.” “You keep saying ‘official number.’ Why?”

“I have incomplete data which might be relevant. Let me state them before advancing even tentative conclusions. Nominally the Security Officer’s department aside from clerks consists only of the bodyguard. But I handle payrolls for Authority Complex and twenty-seven is not the number of personnel charged against the Security Department.”

Prof nodded. “Company spies.”

“Hold it, Prof. Who are these other people?”

Mike answered, “They are simply account numbers, Man. I conjecture that the names they represent are in the Security Chiefs data storage location.” “Wait, Mike. Security Chief Alvarez uses you for files?”

“I conjecture that to be true, since his storage location is under a locked retrieval signal.”

I said, “Bloody,” and added, “Prof, isn’t that sweet? He uses Mike to keep records, Mike knows where they are—can’t touch ‘em!” “Why not, Manuel?”

Tried to explain to Prof and Wyoh sorts of memory a thinkum has—permanent memories that can’t be erased because patterns be logic itself, how it thinks; short-term memories used for current programs and then erased like memories which tell you whether you have honeyed coffee; temporary memories held long as necessary—milliseconds, days, years—but erased when no longer needed; permanently stored data like a human being’s education—but learned perfectly and never forgotten—though may be condensed, rearranged, relocated, edited—and last but not finally, long lists of special memories ranging from memoranda files through very complex special programs, and each location tagged by own retrieval signal and locked or not, with endless possibilities on lock signals: sequential, parallel, temporal, situational, others.

Don’t explain computers to laymen. Simpler to explain sex to a virgin. Wyoh couldn’t see why, if Mike knew where Alvarez kept records, Mike didn’t trot over and fetch. I gave up. “Mike, can you explain?”

“I will try, Man. Wyoh, there is no way for me to retrieve locked data other than through external programming. I cannot program myself for such retrieval; my logic structure does not permit it. I must receive the signal as an external input.”

“Well, for Bog’s sake, what is this precious signal?”

“It is,” Mike said simply, “‘Special File Zebra’”—and waited.

“Mike!” I said. “Unlock Special File Zebra.” He did, and stuff started spilling out. Had to convince Wyoh that Mike hadn’t been stubborn. He hadn’t—he almost begged us to tickle him on that spot. Sure, he knew signal. Had to. But had to come from outside, that was how he was built.

“Mike, remind me to check with you all special-purpose locked-retrieval signals. May strike ice other places.” “So I conjectured, Man.”

“Okay, we’ll get to it later. Now back up and go over this stuff slowly—and, Mike, as you read out, store again, without erasing, under Bastille Day and tag it ‘Fink File.’ Okay?” “Programmed and running.”

“Do that with anything new he puts in, too.”

Prime prize was list of names by warrens, some two hundred, each keyed with a code Mike identified with those blind pay accounts. Mike read out Hong Kong Luna list and was hardly started when Wyoh gasped, “Stop, Mike! I’ve got to write these down!”

I said, “Hey! No writing! What’s huhu?”

“That woman, Sylvia Chiang, is comrade secretary back home! But—But that means the Warden has our whole organization!” “No, dear Wyoming,” Prof corrected. “It means we have his organization.”

“But—”

“I see what Prof means,” I told her. “Our organization is just us three and Mike. Which Warden doesn’t know. But now we know his organization. So shush and let Mike read. But don’t write; you have this list—from Mike—anytime you phone him. Mike, note that Chiang woman is organization secretary, former organization, in Kongville.”

“Noted.”

Wyoh boiled over as she heard names of undercover finks in her town but limited herself to noting facts about ones she knew. Not all were “comrades” but enough that she stayed riled up. Novy Leningrad names didn’t mean much to us; Prof recognized three, Wyoh one. When came Luna City Prof noted over half as being “comrades.” I recognized several, not as fake subversives but as acquaintances. Not friends—Don’t know what it would do to me to find someone I trusted on boss fink’s payroll. But would shake me.

It shook Wyoh. When Mike finished she said, “I’ve got to get home! Never in my life have I helped eliminate anyone but I am going to enjoy putting the black on these spies!” Prof said quietly, “No one will be eliminated, dear Wyoming.”

“What? Professor, can’t you take it? Though I’ve never killed anyone, I’ve always known it might have to be done.” He shook head. “Killing is not the way to handle a spy, not when he doesn’t know that you know that he is a spy.” She blinked. “I must be dense.”

“No, dear lady. Instead you have a charming honesty… a weakness you must guard against. The thing to do with a spy is to let him breathe, encyst him with loyal comrades, and feed him harmless information to please his employers. These creatures will be taken into our organization. Don’t be shocked; they will be in very special cells. ‘Cages’ is a better word. But it would be the greatest waste to eliminate them—not only would each spy be replaced with someone new but also killing these traitors would tell the Warden that we have penetrated his secrets. Mike amigo mio, there should be in that file a dossier on me. Will you see?”

Were long notes on Prof, and I was embarrassed as they added up to “harmless old fool.” He was tagged as a subversive—that was why he had been sent to The Rock—as a member of underground group in Luna City. But was described as a “troublemaker” in organization, one who rarely agreed with others.

Prof dimpled and looked pleased. “I must consider trying to sell out and get myself placed on the Warden’s payroll.” Wyoh did not think this funny, especially when he made clear was not joke, merely unsure tactic was practical. “Revolutions must be financed, dear lady, and one way is for a revolutionary to become a police spy. It is probable that some of those prima-facie traitors are actually on our side.”

“I wouldn’t trust them!”

“Ah, yes, that is the rub with double agents, to be certain where their loyalties—if any—lie. Do you wish your own dossier? Or would you rather hear it in private?”

Wyoh’s record showed no surprises. Warden’s finks had tabbed her years back. But I was surprised that I had a record, too—routine check made when I was cleared to work in Authority Complex. Was classed as “non-political” and someone had added “not too bright” which was both unkind and true or why would I get mixed up in Revolution?

Prof had Mike stop read-out (hours more), leaned back and looked thoughtful. “One thing is clear,” he said. “The Warden knew plenty about Wyoming and myself long ago. But you, Manuel, are not on his black list.”

“After last night?”

“Ah, so. Mike, do you have anything In that file entered in the last twenty-four hours?”

Nothing. Prof said, “Wyoming is right that we cannot stay here forever. Manuel, how many names did you recognize? Six, was it? Did you see any of them last night?” “No. But might have seen me.”

“More likely they missed you in the crowd. I did not spot you until I came down front and I’ve known you since you were a boy. But it is most unlikely that Wyoming traveled from Hong Kong and spoke at the meeting without her activity being known to the Warden.” He looked at Wyoh. “Dear lady, could you bring yourself to play the nominal role of an old man’s folly?”

“I suppose so. How, Professor?”

“Manuel is probably in the clear. I am not but from my dossier it seems unlikely that the Authority’s finks will bother to pick me up. You they may wish to question or even to hold; you are rated as dangerous. It would be wise for you to stay out of sight. This room—I’m thinking of renting it for a period—weeks or even years. You could hide in it—if you do not mind the obvious construction that would be placed on your staying here.”

Wyoh chuckled. “Why, you darling! Do you think I care what anyone thinks? I’d be delighted to play the role of your bundle baby—and don’t be too sure I’d be just playing.”

“Never tease an old dog,” he said mildly. “He might still have one bite. I may occupy that couch most nights. Manuel, I intend to resume my usual ways—and so should you. While I feel that it will take a busy cossack to arrest me, I will sleep sounder in this hideaway. But in addition to being a hideout this room is good for cell meetings; it has a phone.”

Mike said, “Professor, may I offer a suggestion?” “Certainly, amigo, we want your thoughts.”

“I conclude that the hazards increase with each meeting of our executive cell. But meetings need not be corporal; you can meet—and I can join you if I am welcome—by phone.” “You are always welcome, Comrade Mike; we need you. However—” Prof looked worried.

I said, “Prof, don’t worry about anybody listening in.” I explained how to place a “Sherlock” call. “Phones are safe if Mike supervises call. Reminds me—You haven’t been told how to reach Mike. How, Mike? Prof use my number?”

Between them, they settled on MYSTERIOUS. Prof and Mike shared childlike joy in intrigue for own sake. I suspect Prof enjoyed being rebel long before he worked out his political philosophy, while Mike—how could human freedom matter to him? Revolution was a game—a game that gave him companionship and chance to show off talents. Mike was as conceited a machine as you are ever likely to meet.

“But we still need this room,” Prof said, reached into pouch, hauled out thick wad of bills. I blinked. “Prof, robbed a bank?”

“Not recently. Perhaps again in the future of the Cause requires it. Arental period of one lunar should do as a starter. Will you arrange it, Manuel? The management might be surprised to hear my voice; I came in through a delivery door.”

I called manager, bargained for dated key, four weeks. He asked nine hundred Hong Kong. I offered nine hundred Authority. He wanted to know how many would use room? I asked if was policy of Raffles to snoop affairs of guests?

We settled at HK$475; I sent up bills, he sent down two dated keys. I gave one to Wyoh, one to Prof, kept one-day key, knowing they would not reset lock unless we failed to pay at end of lunar.

(Earthside I ran into insolent practice of requiring hotel guest to sign chop—even show identification!) I asked, “What next? Food?”

“I’m not hungry, Mannie.”

“Manuel, you asked us to wait while Mike settled your questions. Let’s get back to the basic problem: how we are to cope when we find ourselves facing Terra, David facing Goliath.” “Oh. Been hoping that would go away. Mike? You really have ideas?”

“I said I did, Man,” he answered plaintively. “We can throw rocks.” “Bog’s sake! No time for jokes.”

“But, Man,” he protested, “we can throw rocks at Terra. We will.”

8

Took time to get through my skull that Mike was serious, and scheme might work. Then took longer to show Wyoh and Prof how second part was true. Yet both parts should have been obvious.

Mike reasoned so: What is “war”? One book defined war as use of force to achieve political result. And “force” is action of one body on another applied by means of energy.

In war this is done by “weapons”—Luna had none. But weapons, when Mike examined them as class, turned out to be engines for manipulating energy—and energy Luna has plenty. Solar flux alone is good for around one kilowatt per square meter of surface at Lunar noon; sunpower, though cyclic, is effectively unlimited. Hydrogen fusion power is almost as unlimited and cheaper, once ice is mined, magnetic pinchbottle set up. Luna has energy—how to use?

But Luna also has energy of position; she sits at top of gravity well eleven kilometers per second deep and kept from falling in by curb only two and a half km/s high. Mike knew that curb; daily he tossed grain freighters over it, let them slide downhill to Terra.

Mike had computed what would happen if a freighter grossing 100 tonnes (or same mass of rock) falls to Terra, unbraked. Kinetic energy as it hits is 6.25 x 10^12 joules—over six trillion joules.

This converts in split second to heat. Explosion, big one!

Should have been obvious. Look at Luna: What you see? Thousands on thousands of craters—places where Somebody got playful throwing rocks. Wyoh said, “Joules don’t mean much to me. How does that compare with H-bombs?”

“Uh—” I started to round off in head. Mike’s “head” works faster; he answered, “The concussion of a hundred-tonne mass on Terra approaches the yield of a two-kilotonne atomic bomb.” “‘Kilo’ is a thousand,” Wyoh murmured, “and ‘mega’ is a million—Why, that’s only one fifty-thousandth as much as a hundred-megatonne bomb. Wasn’t that the size Sovunion used?”

“Wyoh, honey,” I said gently, “that’s not how it works. Turn it around. Atwo-kilotonne yield is equivalent to exploding two million kilograms of trinitrotoluol … and a kilo of TNT is quite an explosion—Ask any drillman. Two million kilos will wipe out good-sized town. Check, Mike?”

“Yes, Man. But, Wyoh my only female friend, there is another aspect. Multi-megatonne fusion bombs are inefficient. The explosion takes place in too small a space; most of it is wasted. While a hundred-megatonne bomb is rated as having fifty thousand times the yield of a two-kilotonne bomb, its destructive effect is only about thirteen hundred times as great as that of a two-kilotonne explosion.”

“But it seems to me that thirteen hundred times is still quite a lot—if they are going to use bombs on us that much bigger.” “True, Wyoh my female friend … but Luna has many rocks.”

“Oh. Yes, so we have.”

“Comrades,” said Prof, “this is outside my competence—in my younger or bomb-throwing days my experience was limited to something of the order of the one-kilogram chemical explosion of which you spoke, Manuel. But I assume that you two know what you are talking about.”

“We do,” Mike agreed.

“So I accept your figures. To bring it down to a scale that I can understand this plan requires that we capture the catapult. No?” “Yes,” Mike and I chorused.

“Not impossible. Then we must hold it and keep it operative. Mike, have you considered how your catapult can be protected against, let us say, one small H-tipped torpedo?” Discussion went on and on. We stopped to eat—stopped business under Prof’s rule. Instead Mike told jokes, each produced a that-reminds-me from Prof.

By time we left Raffles Hotel evening of 14th May ‘75 we had—Mike had, with help from Prof—outlined plan of Revolution, including major options at critical points.

When came time to go, me to home and Prof to evening class (if not arrested), then home for bath and clothes and necessities in case he returned that night, became clear Wyoh did not want to be alone in strange hotel—Wyoh was stout when bets were down, between times soft and vulnerable.

So I called Mum on a Sherlock and told her was bringing house guest home. Mum ran her job with style; any spouse could bring guest home for meal or year, and our second generation was almost as free but must ask. Don’t know how other families work; we have customs firmed by a century; they suit us.

So Mum didn’t ask name, age, sex, marital condition; was my right and she too proud to ask. All she said was: “That’s nice, dear. Have you two had dinner? It’s Tuesday, you know.” “Tuesday” was to remind me that our family had eaten early because Greg preaches Tuesday evenings. But if guest had not eaten, dinner would be served—concession to guest, not to me, as with exception of Grandpaw we ate when was on table or scrounged standing up in pantry.

I assured her we had eaten and would make tall effort to be there before she needed to leave. Despite Loonie mixture of Muslims, Jews, Christians, Buddhists, and ninety-nine other flavors, I suppose Sunday is commonest day for church. But Greg belongs to sect which had calculated that sundown Tuesday to sundown Wednesday, local time Garden of Eden (zone minus-two, Terra) was the Sabbath. So we ate early in Terran north-hemisphere summer months.

Mum always went to hear Greg preach, so was not considerate to place duty on her that would clash. All of us went occasionally; I managed several times a year because terribly fond of Greg, who taught me one trade and helped me switch to another when I had to and would gladly have made it his arm rather than mine. But Mum always went—ritual not religion, for she admitted to me one night in pillow talk that she had no religion with a brand on it, then cautioned me not to tell Greg. I exacted same caution from her. I don’t know Who is cranking; I’m pleased He doesn’t stop.

But Greg was Mum’s “boy husband,” opted when she was very young, first wedding after her own—very sentimental about him, would deny fiercely if accused of loving him more than other husbands, yet took his faith when he was ordained and never missed a Tuesday.

She said, “Is it possible that your guest would wish to attend church?”

I said would see but anyhow we would rush, and said goodbye. Then banged on bathroom door and said, “Hurry with skin, Wyoh; we’re short on minutes.” “One minute!” she called out. She’s ungirlish girl; she appeared in one minute. “How do I look?” she asked. “Prof, will I pass?”

“Dear Wyoming, I am amazed. You were beautiful before, you are beautiful now—but utterly unrecognizable. You’re safe—and I am relieved.”

Then we waited for Prof to transform into old derelict; he would be it to his back corridor, then reappear as well-known teacher in front of class, to have witnesses in case a yellow boy was waiting to grab him.

It left a moment; I told Wyoh about Greg. She said, “Mannie, how good is this makeup? Would it pass in church? How bright are the lights?” “No brighter than here. Good job, you’ll get by. But do you want to go to church? Nobody pushing.”

She thought. “It would please your moth—I mean, ‘your senior wife,’ would it not?”

I answered slowly, “Wyoh, religion is your pidgin. But since you ask … yes, nothing would start you better in Davis Family than going to church with Mum. I’ll go if you do.” “I’ll go. I thought your last name was ‘O’Kelly’?”

“Is. Tack ‘Davis’ on with hyphen if want to be formal. Davis is First Husband, dead fifty years. Is family name and all our wives are ‘Gospazha Davis’ hyphened with every male name in Davis line plus her family name. In practice Mum is only ‘Gospazha Davis’—can call her that—and others use first name and add Davis if they write a cheque or something. Except that Ludmilla is ‘Davis-Davis’ because proud of double membership, birth and option.”

“I see. Then if a man is ‘John Davis,’ he’s a son, but if he has some other last name he’s your co-husband. But a girl would be ‘Jenny Davis’ either way, wouldn’t she? How do I tell? By her age? No, that wouldn’t help. I’m confused! And I thought clan marriages were complex. Or polyandries—though mine wasn’t; at least my husbands had the same last name.”

“No trouble. When you hear a woman about forty address a fifteen-year-old as ‘Mama Milla,” you’ll know which is wife and which is daughter—not even that complex as we don’t have daughters home past husband-high; they get opted. But might be visiting. Your husbands were named ‘Knott’?”

“Oh, no, ‘Fedoseev, Choy Lin and Choy Mu.’ I took back my born name.”

Out came Prof, cackled senilely (looked even worse than earlier!), we left by three exits, made rendezvous in main corridor, open formation. Wyoh and I did not walk together, as I might be nabbed; on other hand she did not know Luna City, a warren so complex even nativeborn get lost—so I led and she had to keep me in sight. Prof trailed to make sure she didn’t lose me.

If I was picked up, Wyoh would find public phone, report to Mike, then return to hotel and wait for Prof. But I felt sure that any yellow jacket who arrested me would get a caress from number-seven arm.

No huhu. Up to level five and crosstown by Carver Causeway, up to level three and stop at Tube Station West to pick up arms and tool kit—but not p-suit; would not have been in

character, I stored it there. One yellow uniform at station, showed no interest in me. South by well-lighted corridors until necessary to go outward to reach private easement lock thirteen to

co-op pressure tunnel serving Davis Tunnels and a dozen other farms. I suppose Prof dropped off there but I never looked back.

I delayed locking through our door until Wyoh caught up, then soon was saying, “Mum, allow me to present Wyma Beth Johnson.” Mum took her in arms, kissed cheek, said, “So glad you could come, Wyma dear! Our house is yours!”

See why I love our old biddy? Could have quick-frosted Wyoh with same words—but was real and Wyoh knew.

Hadn’t warned Wyoh about switch in names, thought of it en route. Some of our kids were small and while they grew up despising Warden, no sense in risking prattle about “Wyoming Knott, who’s visiting us”—that name was listed in “Special File Zebra.”

So I missed warning her, was new to conspiracy. But Wyoh caught cue and never bobbled.

Greg was in preaching clothes and would have to leave in minutes. Mum did not hurry, took Wyoh down line of husbands—Grandpaw, Greg, Hans—then up line of wives—Ludmilla, Lenore, Sidris, Anna—with stately grace, then started on our kids.

I said, “Mum? Excuse me, want to change arms.” Her eyebrows went up a millimeter, meaning: “We’ll speak of this but not in front of children”—so I added: “Know it’s late, Greg’s sneaking look at watch. And Wyma and I are going to church. So ‘scuse, please.”

She relaxed. “Certainly, dear.” As she turned away I saw her arm go around Wyoh’s waist, so I relaxed.

I changed arms, replacing number seven with social arm. But was excuse to duck into phone cupboard and punch “MYCROFTXXX.” “Mike, we’re home. But about to go to church. Don’t think you can listen there, so I’ll check in later. Heard from Prof?”

“Not yet, Man. Which church is it? I may have some circuit.” “Pillar of Fire Repentance Tabernacle—”

“No reference.”

“Slow to my speed, pal. Meets in West-Three Community Hall. That’s south of Station on Ring about number—.” “I have it. There’s a pickup inside for channels and a phone in the corridor outside; I’ll keep an ear on both.”

“I don’t expect trouble, Mike.”

“It’s what Professor said to do. He is reporting now. Do you wish to speak to him?” “No time. ‘Bye!”

That set pattern: Always keep touch with Mike, let him know where you are, where you plan to be; Mike would listen if he had nerve ends there. Discovery I made that morning, that Mike could listen at dead phone, suggested it—discovery bothered me; don’t believe in magic. But on thinking I realized a phone could be switched on by central switching system without human intervention—if switching system had volition. Mike had bolshoyeh volition.

How Mike knew a phone was outside that hall is hard to say, since “space” could not mean to him what means to us. But he carried in storage a “map”—structured relations—of Luna City’s engineering, and could almost always fit what we said to what he knew as “Luna City”; hardly ever got lost.

So from day cabal started we kept touch with Mike and each other through his widespread nervous system. Won’t mention again unless necessary.

Mum and Greg and Wyoh were waiting at outer door, Mum chomping but smiling. I saw she had lent Wyoh a stole; Mum was as easy about skin as any Loonie, nothing newchummish— but church was another matter.

We made it, although Greg went straight to platform and we to seats. I settled in warm, mindless state, going through motions. But Wyoh did really listen to Greg’s sermon and either knew our hymn book or was accomplished sight reader.

When we got home, young ones were in bed and most adults; Hans and Sidris were up and Sidris served cocoasoy and cookies, then all turned in. Mum assigned Wyoh a room in tunnel most of our kids lived in, one which had had two smaller boys last time I noticed. Did not ask how she had reshuffled, was clear she was giving my guest best we had, or would have put Wyoh with one of older girls.

I slept with Mum that night, partly because our senior wife is good for nerves—and nerve-racking things had happened—and partly so she would know I was not sneaking to Wyoh’s room after things were quiet. My workshop, where I slept when slept alone; was just one bend from Wyoh’s door. Mum was telling me, plain as print: “Go ahead, dear. Don’t tell me if you wish to be mean about it. Sneak behind my back.”

Which neither of us admitted. We visited as we got ready for bed, chatted after light out, then I turned over.

Instead of saying goodnight Mum said, “Manuel? Why does your sweet little guest make herself up as an Afro? I would think that her natural coloration would be more becoming. Not that she isn’t perfectly charming the way she chooses to be.”

So rolled over and faced her, and explained—sounded thin, so filled in. And found self telling all—except one point: Mike. I included Mike—but not as computer—instead as a man Mum was not likely to meet, for security reasons.

But telling Mum—taking her into my subcell, should say, to become leader of own cell in turn—taking Mum into conspiracy was not case of husband who can’t keep from blurting everything to his wife. At most was hasty—but was best time if she was to be told.

Mum was smart. Also able executive; running big family without baring teeth requires that. Was respected among farm families and throughout Luna City; she had been up longer than 90 percent. She could help.

And would be indispensable inside family. Without her help Wyoh and I would find it sticky to use phone together (hard to explain), keep kids from noticing (impossible!)—but with Mum’s help would be no problems inside household.

She listened, sighed, said, “It sounds dangerous, dear.”

“Is,” I said. “Look, Mimi, if you don’t want to tackle, say so then forget what I’ve told.”

“Manuel! Don’t even say that. You are my husband, dear; I took you for better, for worse… and your wish is my command.”

(My word, what a lie! But Mimi believed it.)

“I would not let you go into danger alone,” she went on, “and besides—” “What, Mimi?”

“I think every Loonie dreams of the day when we will be free. All but some poor spineless rats. I’ve never talked about it; there seemed to be no point and it’s necessary to look up, not down, lift one’s burden and go ahead. But I thank dear Bog that I have been permitted to live to see the time come, if indeed it has. Explain more about it. I am to find three others, is it? Three who can be trusted.”

“Don’t hurry. Move slowly. Be sure.”

“Sidris can be trusted. She holds her tongue, that one.”

“Don’t think you should pick from family. Need to spread out. Don’t rush.”

“I shan’t. We’ll talk before I do anything. And Manuel, if you want my opinion—” She stopped. “Always want your opinion, Mimi.”

“Don’t mention this to Grandpaw. He’s forgetful these days and sometimes talkative. Now sleep, dear, and don’t dream.”

9

Followed a long time during which would have been possible to forget anything as unlikely as revolution had not details taken so much time. Our first purpose was not to be noticed. Long distance purpose was to make things as much worse as possible.

Yes, worse. Never was a time, even at last, when all Loonies wanted to throw off Authority, wanted it bad enough to revolt. All Loonies despised Warden and cheated Authority. Didn’t mean they were ready to fight and die. If you had mentioned “patriotism” to a Loonie, he would have stared—or thought you were talking about his homeland. Were transported Frenchmen whose hearts belonged to “La Belle Patrie,” ex-Germans loyal to Vaterland, Russkis who still loved Holy Mother Russia. But Luna? Luna was “The Rock,” place of exile, not thing to love.

We were as non-political a people as history ever produced. I know, I was as numb to politics as any until circumstances pitched me into it. Wyoming was in it because she hated Authority for a personal reason, Prof because he despised all authority in a detached intellectual fashion, Mike because he was a bored and lonely machine and was for him “only game in town.” You could not have accused us of patriotism. I came closest because I was third generation with total lack of affection for any place on Terra, had been there, disliked it and despised earthworms. Made me more “patriotic” than most!

Average Loonie was interested in beer, betting, women, and work, in that order. “Women” might be second place but first was unlikely, much as women were cherished. Loonies had learned there never were enough women to go around. Slow learners died, as even most possessive male can’t stay alert every minute. As Prof says, a society adapts to fact, or doesn’t survive. Loonies adapted to harsh facts—or failed and died. But “patriotism” was not necessary to survival.

Like old Chinee saying that “Fish aren’t aware of water,” I was not aware of any of this until I first went to Terra and even then did not realize what a blank spot was in Loonies under storage location marked “patriotism” until I took part in effort to stir them up. Wyoh and her comrades had tried to push “patriotism” button and got nowhere—years of work, a few thousand members, less than 1 percent and of that microscopic number almost 10 percent had been paid spies of boss fink!

Prof set us straight: Easier to get people to hate than to get them to love.

Luckily, Security Chief Alvarez gave us a hand. Those nine dead finks were replaced with ninety, for Authority was goaded into something it did reluctantly, namely spend money on us, and one folly led to another.

Warden’s bodyguard had never been large even in earliest days Prison guards in historical meaning were unnecessary and that had been one attraction of penal colony system—cheap. Warden and his deputy had to be protected and visiting vips, but prison itself needed no guards. They even stopped guarding ships after became clear was not necessary, and in May 2075, bodyguard was down to its cheapest numbers, all of them new chum transportees.

But loss of nine in one night scared somebody. We knew it scared Alvarez; he filed copies of his demands for help in Zebra file and Mike read them. Alag who had been a police officer on Terra before his conviction and then a bodyguard all his years in Luna, Alvarez was probably most frightened and loneliest man in The Rock. He demanded more and tougher help, threatened to resign civil service job if he didn’t get it—just a threat, which Authority would have known if it had really known Luna. If Alvarez had showed up in any warren as unarmed civilian, he would have stayed breathing only as long as not recognized.

He got his additional guards. We never found out who ordered that raid. Mort the Wart had never shown such tendencies, had been King Log throughout tenure. Perhaps Alvarez, having only recently succeeded to boss fink spot, wanted to make face—may have had ambition to be Warden. But likeliest theory is that Warden’s reports on “subversive activities” caused Authority Earthside to order a cleanup.

One thumb-fingered mistake led to another. New bodyguards, instead of picked from new transportees, were elite convict troops, Federated Nations crack Peace Dragoons. Were mean and tough, did not want to go to Luna, and soon realized that “temporary police duty” was one-way trip. Hated Luna and Loonies, and saw us as cause of it all.

Once Alvarez got them, he posted a twenty-four-hour watch at every interwarren tube station and instituted passports and passport control. Would have been illegal had there been laws in Luna, since 95 percent of us were theoretically free, either born free, or sentence completed. Percentage was higher in cities as undischarged transportees lived in barrack warrens at Complex and came into town only two days per lunar they had off work. If then, as they had no money, but you sometimes saw them wandering around, hoping somebody would buy a drink.

But passport system was not “illegal” as Warden’s regulations were only written law. Was announced in papers, we were given week to get passports, and at eight hundred one morning was put in effect. Some Loonies hardly ever traveled; some traveled on business; some commuted from outlying warrens or even from Luna City to Novylen or other way. Good little boys filled out applications, paid fees, were photographed, got passes; I was good little boy on Prof’s advice, paid for passport and added it to pass I carried to work in Complex.

Few good little boys! Loonies did not believe it. Passports? Whoever heard of such a thing?

Was a trooper at Tube Station South that morning dressed in bodyguard yellow rather than regimentals and looking like he hated it, and us. I was not going anywhere; I hung back and watched.

Novylen capsule was announced; crowd of thirty-odd headed for gate. Gospodin Yellow Jacket demanded passport of first to reach it. Loonie stopped to argue. Second one pushed past; guard turned and yelled—three or four more shoved past. Guard reached for sidearm; somebody grabbed his elbow, gun went off—not a laser, a slug gun, noisy.

Slug hit decking and went whee-whee-hoo off somewhere. I faded back. One man hurt—that guard. When first press of passengers had gone down ramp, he was on deck, not moving. Nobody paid attention; they walked around or stepped over—except one woman carrying a baby, who stopped, kicked him carefully in face, then went down ramp. He may have been

dead already, didn’t wait to see. Understand body stayed there till relief arrived.

Next day was a half squad in that spot. Capsule for Novylen left empty.

It settled down. Those who had to travel got passports, diehards quit traveling. Guard at a tube gate became two men, one looked at passports while other stood back with gun drawn. One who checked passports did not try hard, which was well as most were counterfeit and early ones were crude. But before long, authentic paper was stolen and counterfeits were as dinkum as official ones—more expensive but Loonies preferred free-enterprise passports.

Our organization did not make counterfeits; we merely encouraged it—and knew who had them and who did not; Mike’s records listed officially issued ones. This helped separate sheep from goats in files we were building—also stored in Mike but in “Bastille” location—as we figured a man with counterfeit passport was halfway to joining us. Word was passed down cells in our growing organization never to recruit anybody with a valid passport. If recruiter was not certain, just query upwards and answer came back.

But guards’ troubles were not over. Does not help a guard’s dignity nor add to peace of mind to have children stand in front of him, or behind out of eye which was worse, and ape every move he makes—or run back and forth screaming obscenities, jeering, making finger motions that are universal. At least guards took them as insults.

One guard back-handed a small boy, cost him some teeth. Result: two guards dead, one Loonie dead. After that, guards ignored children.

We didn’t have to work this up; we merely encouraged it. You wouldn’t think that a sweet old lady like my senior wife would encourage children to misbehave. But she did. Other things get single men a long way from home upset—and one we did start. These Peace Dragoons had been sent to The Rock without a comfort detachment.

Some of our fems were extremely beautiful and some started loitering around stations, dressed in less than usual—which could approach zero—and wearing more than usual amount of perfume, scents with range and striking power. They did not speak to yellow jackets nor look at them; they simply crossed their line of sight, undulating as only a Loonie gal can. (A female on Terra can’t walk that way; she’s tied down by six times too much weight.)

Such of course produces a male gallery, from men down to lads not yet pubescent—happy whistles and cheers for her beauty, nasty laughs at yellow boy. First girls to take this duty were slot-machine types but volunteers sprang up so fast that Prof decided we need not spend money. He was correct: even Ludmilla, shy as a kitten, wanted to try it and did not only because Mum told her not to. But Lenore, ten years older and prettiest of our family, did try it and Mum did not scold. She came back pink and excited and pleased with herself and anxious to tease enemy again. Her own idea; Lenore did not then know that revolution was brewing.

During this time I rarely saw Prof and never in public; we kept touch by phone. At first a bottleneck was that our farm had just one phone for twenty-five people, many of them youngsters who would tie up a phone for hours unless coerced. Mimi was strict; our kids were allowed one out-going call per day and max of ninety seconds on a call, with rising scale of

punishment—tempered by her warmth in granting exceptions. But grants were accompanied by “Mum’s Phone Lecture”: “When I first came to Luna there were no private phones. You children don’t know how soft…”

We were one of last prosperous families to install a phone; it was new in household when I was opted. We were prosperous because we never bought anything farm could produce. Mum disliked phone because rates to Luna City Co-op Comm Company were passed on in large measure to Authority. She never could understand why I could not (“Since you know all about such things, Manuel dear”) steal phone service as easily as we liberated power. That a phone instrument was part of a switching system into which it must fit was no interest to her.

Steal it I did, eventually. Problem with illicit phone is how to receive incoming calls. Since phone is not listed, even if you tell persons from whom you want calls, switching system itself does not have you listed; is no signal that can tell it to connect other party with you.

Once Mike joined conspiracy, switching was no problem. I had in workshop most of what I needed; bought some items and liberated others. Drilled a tiny hole from workshop to phone cupboard and another to Wyoh’s room—virgin rock a meter thick but a laser drill collimated to a thin pencil cuts rapidly. I unshipped listed phone, made a wireless coupling to line in its recess and concealed it. All else needed were binaural receptors and a speaker in Wyoh’s room, concealed, and same in mine, and a circuit to raise frequency above audio to have silence on Davis phone line, and its converse to restore audio incoming.

Only problem was to do this without being seen, and Mum generaled that.

All else was Mike’s problem. Used no switching arrangements; from then on used MYCROFTXXXonly when calling from some other phone. Mike listened at all times in workshop and in Wyoh’s room; if he heard my voice or hers say “Mike,” he answered, but not to other voices. Voice patterns were as distinctive to him as fingerprints; he never made mistakes.

Minor flourishes—soundprooflng Wyoh’s door such as workshop door already had, switching to suppress my instrument or hers, signals to tell me she was alone in her room and door locked, and vice versa. All added up to safe means whereby Wyob and I could talk with Mike or with each other, or could set up talk-talk of Mike, Wyoh, Prof, and self. Mike would call Prof wherever he was; Prof would talk or call back from a more private phone. Or might be Wyoh or myself had to be found. We all were careful to stay checked in with Mike.

My bootleg phone, though it had no way to punch a call, could be used to call any number in Luna—speak to Mike, ask for a Sherlock to anybody—not tell him number, Mike had all listings and could look up a number faster than I could.

We were beginning to see unlimited possibilities in a phoneswitching system alive and on our side. I got from Mike and gave Mum still another null number to call Mike if she needed to reach me. She grew chummy with Mike while continuing to think he was a man. This spread through our family. One day as I returned home Sidris said, “Mannie darling, your friend with the nice voice called. Mike Holmes. Wants you to call back.”

“Thanks, hon. Will.”

“When are you going to invite him to dinner, Man? I think he’s nice.”

I told her Gospodin Holmes had bad breath, was covered with rank hair, and hated women.

She used a rude word, Mum not being in earshot. “You’re afraid to let me see him. Afraid I’ll opt out for him.” I patted her and told her that was why. I told Mike and Prof about it. Mike flirted even more with my womenfolk after that; Prof was thoughtful.

I began to learn techniques of conspiracy and to appreciate Prof’s feeling that revolution could be an art. Did not forget (nor ever doubt) Mike’s prediction that Luna was only seven years from disaster. But did not think about it, thought about fascinating, finicky details.

Prof had emphasized that stickiest problems in conspiracy are communications and security, and had pointed out that they conflict—easier are communications, greater is risk to security; if security is tight, organization can be paralyzed by safety precautions. He had explained that cell system was a compromise.

I accepted cell system since was necessary to limit losses from spies. Even Wyoh admitted that organization without compartmentation could not work after she learned how rotten with spies old underground had been.

But I did not like clogged communications of cell system; like Terran dinosaurs of old, took too long to send message from head to tail, or back. So talked with Mike.

We discarded many-linked channels I had suggested to Prof. We retained cells but based security and communication on marvelous possibilities of our dinkum thinkum. Communications: We set up a ternary tree of “party” names:

Chairman, Gospodin Adam Selene (Mike) Executive cell: Bork (me), Betty (Wyoh), Bill (Prof) Bork’s cell: Cassie (Mum), Colin, Chang

Betty’s cell: Calvin (Greg), Cecilia (Sidris), Clayton Bill’s cell: Cornwall (Finn Nielsen), Carolyn, Cotter

and so on. At seventh link George supervises Herbert, Henry, and Hallie. By time you reach that level you need 2,187 names with “H”—but turn it over to savvy computer who finds or invents them. Each recruit is given a party name and an emergency phone number. This number, instead of chasing through many links, connects with “Adam Selene,” Mike.

Security: Based on double principle; no human being can be trusted with anything—but Mike could be trusted with everything.

Grim first half is beyond dispute. With drugs and other unsavory methods any man can be broken. Only defense is suicide, which may be impossible. Oh, are “hollow tooth” methods, classic and novel, some nearly infallible—Prof saw to it that Wyoh and myself were equipped. Never knew what he gave her as a final friend and since I never had to use mine, is no point in messy details. Nor am I sure I would ever suicide; am not stuff of martyrs.

But Mike could never need to suicide, could not be drugged, did not feel pain. He carried everything concerning us in a separate memory bank under a locked signal programmed only to our three voices, and, since flesh is weak, we added a signal under which any of us could lock out other two in emergency. In my opinion as best computerman in Luna, Mike could not remove this lock once it was set up. Best of all, nobody would ask master computer for this file because nobody knew it existed, did not suspect Mike-as-Mike existed. How secure can you be?

Only risk was that this awakened machine was whimsical. Mike was always showing unforeseen potentials; conceivable he could figure way to get around block—if he wanted to. But would never want to. He was loyal to me, first and oldest friend; he liked Prof; I think he loved Wyoh. No, no, sex meant nothing. But Wyoh is lovable and they hit it off from start. I trusted Mike. In this life you have to bet; on that bet I would give any odds.

So we based security on trusting Mike with everything while each of us knew only what he had to know. Take that tree of names and numbers. I knew only party names of my cellmates and of three directly under me; was all I needed. Mike set up party names, assigned phone number to each, kept roster of real names versus party names. Let’s say party member “Daniel” (whom I would not know, being a “D” two levels below me) recruits Fritz Schultz. Daniel reports fact but not name upwards; Adam Selene calls Daniel, assigns for Schultz party name “Embrook,” then phones Schultz at number received from Daniel, gives Schultz his name Embrook and emergency phone number, this number being different for each recruit.

Not even Embrook’s cell leader would know Embrook’s emergency number. What you do not know you cannot spill, not under drugs nor torture, nor anything. Not even from carelessness.

Now let’s suppose I need to reach Comrade Embrook. I don’t know who he is; he may live in Hong Kong or be shopkeeper nearest my home. Instead of passing message down, hoping it will reach him, I call Mike. Mike connects me with Embrook at once, in a Sherlock, withoul giving me his number.

Or suppose I need to speak to comrade who is preparing cartoon we are about to distribute in every taproom in Luna. I don’t know who he is. But I need to talk to him; something has come up.

I call Mike; Mike knows everything—and again I am quickly connected—and this comrade knows it’s okay as Adam Selene arranged call. “Comrade Bork speaking”—and he doesn’t know me but initial “B” tells him that I am vip indeed—”we have to change so-and-so. Tell your cell leader and have him check, but get on with it.”

Minor flourishes—some comrades did not have phones; some could be reached only at certain hours; some outlying warrens did not have phone service. No matter, Mike knew everything—and rest of us did not know anything that could endanger any but that handful whom each knew face to face.

After we decided that Mike should talk voice-to-voice to any comrade under some circumstances, it was necessary to give him more voices and dress him up, make him three dimensions, create “Adam Selene, Chairman of the Provisional Committee of Free Luna.”

Mike’s need for more voices lay in fact that he had just one voder-vocoder, whereas his brain could handle a dozen conversations, or a hundred (don’t know how many)—like a chess master playing fifty opponents, only more so.

This would cause a bottleneck as organization grew and Adam Selene was phoned oftener, and could be crucial if we lasted long enough to go into action.

Besides giving him more voices I wanted to silence one he had. One of those so-called computermen might walk into machines room while we were phoning Mike; bound to cause even his dim wit to wonder if he found master machine apparently talking to itself.

Voder-vocoder is very old device. Human voice is buzzes and hisses mixed various ways; true even of a coloratura soprano. Avocoder analyzes buzzes and hisses into patterns, one a computer (or trained eye) can read. Avoder is a little box which can buzz and hiss and has controls to vary these elements to match those patterns. Ahuman can “play” a voder, producing artificial speech; a properly programmed computer can do it as fast, as easily, as clearly as you can speak.

But voices on a phone wire are not sound waves but electrical signals; Mike did not need audio part of voder-vocoder to talk by phone. Sound waves were needed only by human at other end; no need for speech sounds inside Mike’s room at Authority Complex. so I planned to remove them, and thereby any danger that somebody might notice.

First I worked at home, using number-three arm most of time. Result was very small box which sandwiched twenty voder-vocoder circuits minus audio side. Then I called Mike and told him to “get ill” in way that would annoy Warden. Then I waited.

We had done this “get ill” trick before. I went back to work once we learned that I was clear, which was Thursday that same week when Alvarez read into Zebra file an account of shambles at Stilyagi Hall. His version listed about one hundred people (out of perhaps three hundred); list included Shorty Mkrum, Wyoh, Prof, and Finn Nielsen but not me—apparently I was missed by his finks. It told how nine police officers, each deputized by Warden to preserve peace, had been shot down in cold blood. Also named three of our dead.

An add-on a week later stated that “the notorious agente provocateuse Wyoming Knott of Hong Kong in Luna, whose incendiary speech on Monday 13 May had incited the riot that cost the lives of nine brave officers, had not been apprehended in Luna City and had not returned to her usual haunts in Hong Kong in Luna, and was now believed to have died in the massacre she herself set off.” This add-on admitted what earlier report failed to mention, i.e., bodies were missing and exact number of dead was not known.

This P.S. settled two things: Wyoh could not go home nor back to being a blonde.

Since I had not been spotted I resumed my public ways, took care of customers that week, bookkeeping machines and retrieval files at Carnegie Library, and spent time having Mike read out Zebra file and other special files, doing so in Room L of Raffles as I did not yet have my own phone. During that week Mike niggled at me like an impatient child (which he was), wanting to know when I was coming over to pick up more jokes. Failing that, he wanted to tell them by phone.

I got annoyed and had to remind myself that from Mike’s viewpoint analyzing jokes was just as important as freeing Luna—and you don’t break promises to a child.

Besides that. I got itchy wondering whether I could go inside Complex without being nabbed. We knew Prof was not clear, was sleeping in Raffles on that account. Yet they knew he had been at meeting and knew where he was, daily—but no attempt was made to pick him up. When we learned that attempt had been made to pick up Wyoh, I grew itchier. Was I clear? Or were they waiting to nab me quietly? Had to know.

So I called Mike and told him to have a tummyache. He did so, I was called in—no trouble. Aside from showing passport at station, then to a new guard at Complex, all was usual. I chatted with Mike, picked up one thousand jokes (with understanding that we would report a hundred at a time every three or four days, no faster), told him to get well, and went back to L- City, stopping on way out to bill Chief Engineer for working time, travel-and-tool time, materials, special service, anything I could load in.

Thereafter saw Mike about once a month. Was safe, never went there except when they called me for malfunction beyond ability of their staff—and I was always able to “repair” it, sometimes quickly, sometimes after a full day and many tests. Was careful to leave tool marks on cover plates, and had before-and-after print-outs of test runs to show what had been wrong, how I analyzed it, what I had done. Mike always worked perfectly after one of my visits; I was indispensable.

So, after I prepared his new voder-vocoder add-on, didn’t hesitate to tell him to get “ill.” Call came in thirty minutes. Mike had thought up a dandy; his “illness” was wild oscillations in conditioning Warden’s residence. He was running its heat up, then down, on an eleven-minute cycle, while oscillating its air pressure on a short cycle, ca. 2c/s, enough to make a man dreadfully nervy and perhaps cause earache.

Conditioning a single residence should not go through a master computer! In Davis Tunnels we handled home and farm with idiot controls, feedbacks for each cubic with alarms so that somebody could climb out of bed and control by hand until trouble could be found. If cows got chilly, did not hurt corn; if lights failed over wheat, vegetables were okay. That Mike could raise hell with Warden’s residence and nobody could figure out what to do shows silliness of piling everything into one computer.

Mike was happy-joyed. This was humor he really scanned. I enjoyed it, too, told him to go ahead, have fun—spread out tools, got out little black box.

And computerman-of-the-watch comes banging and ringing at door. I took my time answering and carried number-five arm in right hand with short wing bare; this makes some people sick and upsets almost everybody. “What in hell do you want, choom?” I inquired.

“Listen,” he says, “Warden is raising hell! Haven’t you found trouble?”

“My compliments to Warden and tell him I will override by hand to restore his precious comfort as soon as I locate faulty circuit—if not slowed up by silly questions. Are you going to stand with door open blowing dust into machines while I have cover plates off? If you do—since you’re in charge—when dust puts machine on sputter, you can repair it. I won’t leave a warm bed to help. You can tell that to your bloody Warden, too.”

“Watch your language, cobber.”

“Watch yours, convict. Are you going to close that door? Or shall I walk out and go back to L-City?” And raised number-five like a club.

He closed door. Had no interest in insulting poor sod. Was one small bit of policy to make everybody as unhappy as possible. He was finding working for Warden difficult; I wanted to make it unbearable.

“Shall I step it up?” Mike inquired.

“Um, hold it so for ten minutes, then stop abruptly. Then jog it for an hour, say with air pressure. Erratic but hard. Know what a sonic boom is?” “Certainly. It is a—”

“Don’t define. After you drop major effect, rattle his air ducts every few minutes with nearest to a boom system will produce. Then give him something to remember. Mmm … Mike, can you make his W.C. run backwards?”

“I surely can! All of them?” “How many does he have?” “Six.”

“Well … program to give them all a push, enough to soak his rugs. But if you can spot one nearest his bedroom, fountain it clear to ceiling. Can?” “Program set up!”

“Good. Now for your present, ducky.” There was room in voder audio box to hide it and I spent forty minutes with number-three, getting it just so. We trial-checked through voder-vocoder, then I told him to call Wyoh and check each circuit.

For ten minutes was silence, which I spent putting tool markers on a cover plate which should have been removed had been anything wrong, putting tools away, putting number-six arm on, rolling up one thousand jokes waiting in print-out. I had found no need to cut out audio of voder; Mike had thought of it before I had and always chopped off any time door was touched. Since his reflexes were better than mine by a factor of at least a thousand, I forgot it.

At last he said, “All twenty circuits okay. I can switch circuits in the middle of a word and Wyoh can’t detect discontinuity. And I called Prof and said Hello and talked to Mum on your home phone, all three at the same time.”

“We’re in business. What excuse you give Mum?”

“I asked her to have you call me, Adam Selene that is. Then we chatted. She’s a charming conversationalist. We discussed Greg’s sermon of last Tuesday.” “Huh? How?”

“I told her I had listened to it, Man, and quoted a poetic part.” “Oh, Mike!”

“It’s okay, Man. I let her think that I sat in back, then slipped out during the closing hymn. She’s not nosy; she knows that I don’t want to be seen.”

Mum is nosiest female in Luna. “Guess it’s okay. But don’t do it again. Um—Do do it again. You go to—you monitor—meetings and lectures and concerts and stuff.” “Unless some busybody switches me off by hand! Man, I can’t control those spot pickups the way I do a phone.”

“Too simple a switch. Brute muscle rather than solid-state flipflop.” “That’s barbaric. And unfair.”

“Mike, almost everything is unfair. What can’t be cured—” “—must be endured. That’s a funny-once, Man.”

“Sorry. Let’s change it: What can’t be cured should be tossed out and something better put in. Which we’ll do. What chances last time you calculated?” “Approximately one in nine, Man.”

“Getting worse?”

“Man, they’ll get worse for months. We haven’t reached the crisis.”

“With Yankees in cellar, too. Oh, well. Back to other matter. From now on, when you talk to anyone, if he’s been to a lecture or whatever, you were there, too—and prove it, by recalling something.”

“Noted. Why, Man?”

“Have you read ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’? May be in public library.” “Yes. Shall I read it back?”

“No, no! You’re our Scarlet Pinipernel, our John Galt, our Swamp Fox, our man of mystery. You go everywhere, know everything, slip in and out of town without passport. You’re always there, yet nobody catches sight of you.”

His lights rippled, he gave a subdued chuckle. “That’s fun, Man. Funny once, funny twice, maybe funny always.” “Funny always. How long ago did you stop gymkhana at Warden’s?”

“Forty-three minutes ago except erratic booms.”

“Bet his teeth ache! Give him fifteen minutes more. Then I’ll report job completed.” “Noted. Wyoh sent you a message, Man. She said to remind you of Billy’s birthday party.”

“Oh, my word! Stop everything, I’m leaving. ‘Bye!” I hurried out. Billy’s mother is Anna. Probably her last—and right well she’s done by us, eight kids, three still home. I try to be as careful as Mum never to show favoritism… but Billy is quite a boy and I taught him to read. Possible he looks like me.

Stopped at Chief Engineer’s office to leave bill and demanded to see him. Was let in and he was in belligerent mood; Warden had been riding him. “Hold it,” I told him. “My son’s birthday and shan’t be late. But must show you something.”

Took an envelope from kit, dumped item on desk: corpse of house fly which I had charred with a hot wire and fetched. We do not tolerate flies in Davis Tunnels but sometimes one wanders in from city as locks are opened. This wound up in my workshop just when I needed it. “See that? Guess where I found it.”

On that faked evidence I built a lecture on care of fine machines, talked about doors opened, complained about man on watch. “Dust can ruin a computer. Insects are unpardonable! Yet your watchstanders wander in and out as if tube station. Today both doors held open—while this idiot yammered. If I find more evidence that cover plates have been removed by hoof- handed choom who attracts flies—well, it’s your plant, Chief. Got more than I can handle, been doing your chores because I like fine machines. Can’t stand to see them abused! Good- bye.”

“Hold on. I want to tell you something.”

“Sorry, got to go. Take it or leave it, I’m no vermin exterminator; I’m a computerman.”

Nothing frustrates a man so much as not letting him get in his say. With luck and help from Warden, Chief Engineer would have ulcers by Christmas.

Was late anyhow and made humble apology to Billy. Alvarez had thought up new wrinkle, close search on leaving Complex. I endured it with never a nasty word for Dragoons who searched me; wanted to get home. But those thousand jokes bothered them. “What’s this?” one demanded.

“Computer paper,” I said. “Test runs.”

His mate joined him. Don’t think they could read. They wanted to confiscate, so I demanded they call Chief Engineer. They let me go. I felt not displeased; more and more such and guards were daily more hated.

Decision to make Mike more a person arose from need to have any Party member phone him on occasion; my advice about concerts and plays was simply a side effect. Mike’s voice over phone had odd quality I had not noticed during time I had visited him only at Complex. When you speak to a man by phone there is background noise. And you hear him breathe, hear heartbeats, body motions even though rarely conscious of these. Besides that, even if he speaks under a hush hood, noises get through, enough to “fill space,” make him a body with surroundings.

With Mike was none of this.

By then Mike’s voice was “human” in timbre and quality, recognizable. He was baritone, had North American accent with Aussie overtones; as “Michelle” he (she?) had a light soprano with French flavor. Mike’s personality grew also. When first I introduced him to Wyoh and Prof he sounded like a pedantic child; in short weeks he flowered until I visualized a man about own age.

His voice when he first woke was blurred and harsh, hardly understandable. Now it was clear and choice of words and phrasing was consistent—colloquial to me, scholarly to Prof, gallant to Wyoh, variation one expects of mature adults.

But background was dead. Thick silence.

So we filled it. Mike needed only hints. He did not make his breathing noisy, ordinarily you would not notice. But he would stick in touches. “Sorry, Mannie, you caught me bathing when the phone sounded”—and let one hear hurried breathing. Or “I was eating—had to swallow.” He used such even on me, once he undertook to “be a human body.”

We all put “Adam Selene” together, talking it over at Raffles. How old was he? What did he look like? Married? Where did he live? What work? What interests?

We decided that Adam was about forty, healthy, vigorous, well educated, interested in all arts and sciences and very well grounded in history, a match chess player but- little time to play. He was married in commonest type, a troika in which he was senior husband—four children. Wife and junior husband not in politics, so far as we knew.

He was ruggedly handsome with wavy iron-gray hair and was mixed race, second generation one side, third on other. Was wealthy by Loonie standards, with interests in Novylen and Kongville as well as L-City. He kept offices in Luna City, outer office with a dozen people plus private office staffed by male deputy and female secretary.

Wyoh wanted to know was he bundling with secretary? I told her to switch off, was private. Wyoh said indignantly that she was not being snoopy—weren’t we trying to create a rounded character?

We decided that offices were in Old Dome, third ramp, southside, heart of financial district. If you know L-City. you recall that in Old Dome some offices have windows since they can look out over floor of Dome; I wanted this for sound effects.

We drew a floor plan and had that office existed, it would have been between Aetna Luna and Greenberg & Co. I used pouch recorder to pick up sounds at spot; Mike added to it by listening at phones there.

Thereafter when you called Adam Selene, background was not dead. If “Ursula,” his secretary, took call, it was: “Selene Associates. Luna shall be free!” Then she might say, “Will you hold? Gospodin Selene is on another call” whereupon you might hear sound of W.C., followed by running water and know that she had told little white lie. Or Adam might answer: “Adam Selene here. Free Luna. One second while I shut off the video.” Or deputy might answer: “This is Albert Ginwallah, Adam Selene’s confidential assistant. Free Luna. If it’s a Party matter— as I assume it is; that was your Party name you gave—please don’t hesitate; I handle such things for the Chairman.”

Last was a trap, as every comrade was instructed to speak only to Adam Selene. No attempt was made to discipline one who took bait; instead his cell captain was warned that his comrade must not be trusted with anything vital.

We got echoes. “Free Luna!” or “Luna shall be free!” took hold among youngsters, then among solid citizens. First time I heard it in a business call I almost swallowed teeth. Then called Mike and asked if this person was Party member? Was not. So I recommended that Mike trace down Party tree and see if somebody could recruit him.

Most interesting echo was in File Zebra. “Adam Selene” appeared in boss fink’s security file less than a lunar after we created him, with notation that this was a cover name for a leader in a new underground.

Alvarez’s spies did a job on Adam Selene. Over course of months his File Zebra dossier built up: Male, 34-45, offices south face of Old Dome, usually there 0900-1800 Gr. except Saturday but calls are relayed at other hours, home inside urban pressure as travel time never exceeds seventeen minutes. Children in household. Activities include stock brokerage, farming interests. Attends theater, concerts, etc. Probably member Luna City Chess Club and Luna Assoc, d’Echecs. Plays ricochet and other heavy sports lunch hour, probably Luna City Athletic Club. Gourmet but watches weight. Remarkable memory plus mathematical ability. Executive type, able to reach decisions quickly.

One fink was convinced that he had talked to Adam between acts at revival of Hamlet by Civic Players; Alvarez noted description—and matched our picture all but wavy hair!

But thing that drove Alvarez crackers was that phone numbers for Adam were reported and every time they turned out wrong numbers. (Not nulls; we had run out and Mike was using any number not in use and switching numbers anytime new subscribers were assigned ones we had been using.) Alvarez tried to trace “Selene Associates” using a one-wrong-digit assumption—this we learned because Mike was keeping an ear on Alvarez’s office phone and heard order. Mike used knowledge to play a Mikish prank: Subordinate who made one- changed-digit calls invariably reached Warden’s private residence. So Alvarez was called in and chewed by Warden.

Couldn’t scold Mike but did warn him it would alert any smart person to fact that somebody was playing tricks with computer. Mike answered that they were not that smart.

Main result of Alvarez’s efforts was that each time he got a number for Adam we located a spy—a new spy, as those we had spotted earlier were never given phone numbers; instead they were recruited into a tail-chasing organization where they could inform on each other. But with Alvarez’s help we spotted each new spy almost at once. I think Alvarez became unhappy over spies he was able to hire; two disappeared and our organization, then over six thousand, was never able to find them. Eliminated, I suppose, or died under questioning.

Selene Associates was not only phony company we set up. LuNoHoCo was much larger, just as phony, and not at all dummy; it had main offices in Hong Kong, branches in Novy Leningrad and Luna City, eventually employed hundreds of people most of whom were not Party members, and was our most difficult operation.

Mike’s master plan listed a weary number of problems which had to be solved. One was finance. Another was how to protect catapult from space attack.

Prof considered robbing banks to solve first, gave it up reluctantly. But eventually we did rob banks, firms, and Authority itself. Mike thought of it. Mike and Prof worked it out. At first was not clear to Mike why we needed money. He knew as little about pressure that keeps humans scratching as he knew about sex; Mike handled millions of dollars and could not see any problem. He started by offering to issue an Authority cheque for whatever dollars we wanted.

Prof shied in horror. He then explained to Mike hazard in trying to cash a cheque for, let us say, AS$l0,000,000 drawn on Authority.

So they undertook to do it, but retail, in many names and places all over Luna. Every bank, firm, shop, agency including Authority, for which Mike did accounting, was tapped for Party funds. Was a pyramided swindle based on fact, unknown to me but known to Prof and latent in Mike’s immense knowledge, that most money is simply bookkeeping.

Example—multiply by hundreds of many types: My family son Sergei, eighteen and a Party member, is asked to start account at Commonwealth Shared Risk. He makes deposits and withdrawals. Small errors are made each time; he is credited with more than he deposits, is debited with less than he withdraws. Afew months later he takes job out of town and transfers account to Tycho-Under Mutual; transferred funds are three times already-inflated amount. Most of this he soon draws out in cash and passes to his cell leader. Mike knows amount Sergei should hand over, but (since they do not know that Adam Selene and bank’s computer-bookeeper are one and same) they have each been instructed to report transaction to Adam—keep them honest though scheme was not.

Multiply this theft of about HK$3,000 by hundreds somewhat like it.

I can’t describe jiggery-pokery Mike used to balance his books while keeping thousands of thefts from showing. But bear in mind that an auditor must assume that machines are honest. He will make test runs to check that machines are working correctly—but will not occur to him that tests prove nothing because machine itself is dishonest. Mike’s thefts were never large enough to disturb economy; like half-liter of blood, amount was too small to hurt donor. I can’t make up mind who lost, money was swapped around so many ways. But scheme troubled me; I was brought up to be honest, except with Authority. Prof claimed that what was taking place was a mild inflation offset by fact that we plowed money back in—but I should remember that Mike had records and all could be restored after Revolution, with ease since we would no longer be bled in much larger amounts by Authority.

I told conscience to go to sleep. Was pipsqueak compared to swindles by every government throughout history in financing every war—and is not revolution a war?

This money, after passing through many hands (augmented by Mike each time), wound up as senior financing of LuNoHo Company. Was a mixed company, mutual and stock; “gentleman-adventurer” guarantors who backed stock put up that stolen money in own names. Won’t discuss bookkeeping this firm used. Since Mike ran everything, was not corrupted by any tinge of honesty.

Nevertheless its shares were traded in Hong Kong Luna Exchange and listed in Zurich, London, and New York. Wall Street Journal called it “an attractive high-risk-high-gain investment with novel growth potential.”

LuNoHoCo was an engineering and exploitation firm, engaged in many ventures, mostly legitimate. But prime purpbse was to build a second catapult, secretly.

Operation could not be secret. You can’t buy or build a hydrogen-fusion power plant for such and not have it noticed. (Sunpower was rejected for obvious reasons.) Parts were ordered from Pittsburgh, standard UnivCalif equipment, and we happily paid their royalties to get top quality. Can’t build a stator for a kilometers-long induction field without having it noticed, either. But most important you cannot do major construction hiring many people and not have it show. Sure, catapults are mostly vacuum; stator rings aren’t even close together at ejection end. But Authority’s 3-g catapult was almost one hundred kilometers long. It was not only an astrogation landmark, on every Luna-jump chart, but was so big it could be photographed or seen by eye from Terra with not-large telescope. It showed up beautifully on a radar screen.

We were building a shorter catapult, a 10-g job, but even that was thirty kilometers long, too big to hide.

So we hid it by Purloined Letter method.

I used to question Mike’s endless reading of fiction, wondering what notions he was getting. But turned out he got a better feeling for human life from stories than he had been able to garner from facts; fiction gave him a gestalt of life, one taken for granted by a human; he lives it. Besides this “humanizing” effect, Mike’s substitute for experience, he got ideas from “not- true data” as he called fiction. How to hide a catapult he got from Edgar Allan Poe.

We hid it in literal sense, too; this catapult had to be underground, so that it would not show to eye or radar. But had to be hidden in more subtle sense; selenographic location had to be secret.

How can this be, with a monster that big, worked on by so many people? Put it this way: Suppose you live in Novylen; know where Luna City is? Why, on east edge of Mare Crisium; everybody knows that. So? What latitude and longitude? Huh? Look it up in a reference book! So? If you don’t know where any better than that, how did you find it last week? No huhu, cobber; I took tube, changed at Torricelli, slept rest of way; finding it was capsule’s worry.

See? You don’t know where Luna City is! You simply get out when capsule pulls in at Tube Station South. That’s how we hid catapult.

Is in Mare Undarum area, “everybody knows that.” But where it is and where we said it was differ by amount greater or less than one hundred kilometers in direction north, south, east, or west, or some combination.

Today you can look up its location in reference books—and find same wrong answer. Location of that catapult is still most closely guarded secret in Luna.

Can’t be seen from space, by eye or radar. Is underground save for ejection and that is a big black shapeless hole like ten thousand others and high up an uninviting mountain with no place for a jump rocket to put down.

Nevertheless many people were there, during and after construction. Even Warden visited and my co-husband Greg showed him around. Warden went by mail rocket, commandeered for day, and his Cyborg was given coordinates and a radar beacon to home on—a spot in fact not far from site. But from there, it was necessary to travel by rolligon and our lorries were not like passenger buses from Endsville to Beluthihatchie in old days; they were cargo carriers, no ports for sightseeing and a ride so rough that human cargo had to be strapped down. Warden wanted to ride up in cab but—sorry, Gospodin!—just space for wrangler and his helper and took both to keep her steady.

Three hours later he did not care about anything but getting home. He stayed one hour and was not interested in talk about purpose of all this drilling and value of resources uncovered. Less important people, workmen and others, traveled by interconnecting ice-exploration bores, still easier way to get lost. If anybody carried an inertial pathfinder in his luggage, he could

have located site—but security was tight. One did so and had accident with p-suit; his effects were returned to L-City and his pathfinder read what it should—i.e., what we wanted it to

read, for I made hurried trip out with number-three arm along. You can reseal one without a trace if you do it in nitrogen atmosphere—I wore an oxygen mask at slight overpressure. No

huhu.

We entertained vips from Earth, some high in Authority. They traveled easier underground route; I suppose Warden had warned them. But even on that route is one thirty-kilometer stretch by rolligon. We had one visitor from Earth who looked like trouble, a Dr. Dorian, physicist and engineer. Lorry tipped over—silly driver tried shortcut—they were not in line-of-sight for anything and their beacon was smashed. Poor Dr. Dorian spent seventy-two hours in an unsealed pumice igloo and had to be returned to L-City ill from hypoxia and overdose of radiation despite efforts on his behalf by two Party members driving him.

Might have been safe to let him see; he might not have spotted doubletalk and would not have spotted error in location. Few people look at stars when p-suited even when Sun doesn’t make it futile; still fewer can read stars—and nobody can locate himself on surface without help unless he has instruments, knows how to use them and has tables and something to give a time tick. Put at crudest level, minimum would be octant, tables, and good watch. Our visitors were even encouraged to go out on surface but if one had carried an octant or modern equivalent, might have had accident.

We did not make accidents for spies. We let them stay, worked them hard, and Mike read their reports. One reported that he was certain that we had found uranium ore, something unknown in Luna at that time. Project Centerbore being many years later. Next spy came out with kit of radiation counters. We made it easy for him to sneak them through bore.

By March ‘76 catapult was almost ready, lacking only installation of stator segments. Power plant was in and a co-ax had been strung underground with a line-of-sight link for that thirty kilometers. Crew was down to skeleton size, mostly Party members. But we kept one spy so that Alvarez could have regular reports—didn’t want him to worry; it tended to make him suspicious. Instead we worried him in warrens.

10

Were changes in those eleven months. Wyoh was baptized into Greg’s church, Prof’s health became so shaky that he dropped teaching, Mike took up writing poetry. Yankees finished in cellar. Wouldn’t have minded paying Prof if they had been nosed out, but from pennant to cellar in one season—I quit watching them on video.

Prof’s illness was phony. He was in perfect shape for age, exercising in hotel room three hours each day, and sleeping in three hundred kilograms of lead pajamas. And so was I, and so was Wyoh, who hated it. I don’t think she ever cheated and spent night in comfort though can’t say for sure; I was not dossing with her. She had become a fixture in Davis family. Took her one day to go from “Gospazha Davis” to “Gospazha Mum,” one more to reach “Mum” and now it might be “Mimi Mum” with arm around Mum’s waist. When Zebra File showed she couldn’t go back to Hong Kong, Sidris had taken Wyoh into her beauty shop after hours and done a job which left skin same dark shade but would not scrub off. Sidris also did a hairdo on Wyoh that left it black and looking as if unsuccessfully unkinked. Plus minor touches—opaque nail enamel, plastic inserts for cheeks and nostrils and of course she wore her dark- eyed contact lenses. When Sidris got through, Wyoh could have gone bundling without fretting about her disguise; was a perfect “colored” with ancestry to match—Tamil, a touch of Angola, German. I called her “Wyma” rather than “Wyoh.”

She was gorgeous. When she undulated down a corridor, boys followed in swarms.

She started to learn farming from Greg but Mum put stop to that. While she was big and smart and willing, our farm is mostly a male operation—and Greg and Hans were not only male members of our family distracted; she cost more farming man-hours than her industry equaled. So Wyoh went back to housework, then Sidris took her into beauty shop as helper.

Prof played ponies with two accounts, betting one by Mike’s “leading apprentice” system, other by his own “scientific” system. By July ‘75 he admitted that he knew nothing about horses and went solely to Mike’s system, increasing bets and spreading them among many bookies. His winnings paid Party’s expenses while Mike built swindle that financed catapult. But Prof lost interest in a sure thing and merely placed bets as Mike designated. He stopped reading pony journals—sad, something dies when an old horseplayer quits.

Ludmilla had a girl which they say is lucky in a first and which delighted me—every family needs a girl baby. Wyoh surprised our women by being expert in midwifery—and surprised them again that she knew nothing about baby care. Our two oldest sons found marriages at last and Teddy, thirteen, was opted out. Greg hired two lads from neighbor farms and, after six months of working and eating with us, both were opted in—not rushing things, we had known them and their families for years. It restored balance we had lacked since Ludmilla’s opting and put stop to snide remarks from mothers of bachelors who had not found marriages–not that Mum wasn’t capable of snubbing anyone she did not consider up to Davis standards.

Wyoh recruited Sidris; Sidris started own cell by recruiting her other assistant and Bon Ton Beaute Shoppe became hotbed of subversion. We started using our smallest kids for deliveries and other jobs a child can do—they can stake out or trail a person through corridors better than an adult, and are not suspected. Sidris grabbed this notion and expanded it through women recruited in beauty parlor.

Soon she had so many kids on tap that we could keep all of Alvarez’s spies under surveillance. With Mike able to listen at any phone and a child spotting it whenever a spy left home or place of work or wherever—with enough kids on call so that one could phone while another held down a new stakeout—we could keep a spy under tight observation and keep him from seeing anything we didn’t want him to see. Shortly we were getting reports spies phoned in without waiting for Zebra File; it did a sod no good to phone from a taproom instead of home; with Baker Street Irregulars on job Mike was listening before he finished punching number.

These kids located Alvarez’s deputy spy boss in L-City. We knew he had one because these finks did not report to Alvarez by phone, nor did it seem possible that Alvarez could have recruited them as none of them worked in Complex and Alvarez came inside Luna City only when an Earthside vip was so important as to rate a bodyguard commanded by Alvarez in person.

His deputy turned out to be two people—an old lag who ran a candy, news, and bookie counter in Old Dome and his son who was on civil service in Complex. Son carried reports in, so Mike had not been able to hear them.

We let them alone. But from then on we had fink field reports half a day sooner than Alvarez. This advantage—all due to kids as young as five or six—saved lives of seven comrades. All glory to Baker Street Irregulars!

Don’t remember who named them but think it was Mike—I was merely a Sherlock Homes fan whereas he really did think he was Sherlock Holmes’s brother Mycroft … nor would I swear he was not; “reality” is a slippery notion. Kids did not call themselves that; they had their own play gangs with own names. Nor were they burdened with secrets which could endanger them; Sidris left it to mothers to explain why they were being asked to do these jobs save that they were never to be told real reason. Kids will do anything mysterious and fun; look how many of their games are based on outsmarting.

Bon Ton salon was a clearinghouse of gossip—women get news faster than Daily Lunatic. I encouraged Wyoh to report to Mike each night, not try to thin gossip down to what seemed significant because was no telling what might be significant once Mike got through associating it with a million other facts.

Beauty parlor was also place to start rumors. Party had grown slowly at first, then rapidly as powers-of-three began to be felt and also because Peace Dragoons were nastier than older bodyguard. As numbers increased we shifted to high speed on agitprop, black-propaganda rumors, open subversion, provocateur activities, and sabotage. Finn Nielsen handled agitprop when it was simpler as well as dangerous job of continuing to front for and put cover-up activity into older, spyridden underground. But now a large chunk of agitprop and related work was given to Sidris.

Much involved distributing handbills and such. No subversive literature was ever in her shop, nor our home, nor that hotel room; distribution was done by kids, too young to read.

Sidris was also working a full day bending hair and such. About time she began to have too much to do I happened one evening to make walk-about on Causeway with Sidris on my arm when I caught sight of a familiar face and figure—skinny little girl, all angles, carrot-red hair. She was possibly twelve, at stage when a fem shoots up just before blossoming out into rounded softness. I knew her but could not say why or when or where.

I said, “Psst, doll baby. Eyeball young fem ahead. Orange hair, no cushions.” Sidris looked her over. “Darling, I knew you were eccentric. But she’s still a boy.” “Damp it. Who?”

“Bog knows. Shall I sprag her?”

Suddenly I remembered like video coming on. And wished Wyoh were with me-but Wyoh and I were never together in public. This skinny redhead had been at meeting where Shorty was killed. She sat on floor against wall down front and listened with wide-eyed seriousness and applauded fiercely. Then I had seen her at end in free trajectory—curled into ball in air and had hit a yellow jacket in knees, he whose jaw I broke a moment later.

Wyoh and I were alive and free because this kid moved fast in a crisis. “No, don’t speak to her,” I told Sidris. “But I want to keep her in sight. Wish we had one of your Irregulars here. Damn.”

“Drop off and phone Wyoh, you’ll have one in five minutes,” my wife said.

I did. Then Sidris and I strolled, looking in shopwindows and moving slowly, as quarry was window-shopping. In seven or eight minutes a small boy came toward us, stopped and said, “Hello, Auntie Mabell. Hi, Uncle Joe.”

Sidris took his hand. “Hi, Tony. How’s your mother, dear?” “Just fine.” He added in a whisper, “I’m Jock.”

“Sorry.” Sidris said quietly to me, “Stay on her,” and took Jock into a tuck shop.

She came out and joined me. Jock followed her licking a lollipop. “‘Bye, Auntie Mabel! Thanks!” He danced away, rotating, wound up by that little redhead, stood and stared into a display, solemnly sucking his sweet. Sidris and I went home.

Areport was waiting. “She went into Cradle Roll Creche and hasn’t come out. Do we stay on it?”

“Abit yet,” I told Wyoh, and asked if she remembered this kid. She did, but had no idea who she might be. “You could ask Finn.”

“Can do better.” I called Mike.

Yes, Cradle Roll Creche had a phone and Mike would listen. Took him twenty minutes to pick up enough to give analysis—many young voices and at such ages almost sexless. But presently he told me, “Man, I hear three voices that could match the age and physical type you described. However, two answer to names which I assume to be masculine. The third answers when anyone says ‘Hazel’—which an older female voice does repeatedly. She seems to be Hazel’s boss.”

“Mike, look at old organization file. Check Hazels.”

“Four Hazels,” he answered at once, “and here she is: Hazel Meade, Young Comrades Auxiliary, address Cradle Roll Creche, born 25 December 2063, mass thirty-nine kilos, height—” “That’s our little jump jet! Thanks, Mike. Wyoh, call off stake-out. Good job!”

“Mike, call Donna and pass the word, that’s a dear.”

I left it to girls to recruit Hazel Meade and did not eyeball her until Sidris moved her into our household two weeks later. But Wyoh volunteered a report before then; policy was involved. Sidris had filled her cell but wanted Hazel Meade. Besides this irregularity, Sidris was doubtful about recruiting a child. Policy was adults only, sixteen and up.

I took it to Adam Selene and executive cell. “As I see,” I said, “this cells-of-three system is to serve us, not bind us. See nothing wrong in Comrade Cecilia having an extra. Nor any real danger to security.”

“I agree,” said Prof. “But I suggest that the extra member not be part of Cecilia’s cell—she should not know the others, I mean, unless the duties Cecilia gives her make it necessary. Nor do I think she should recruit, at her age. The real question is her age.”

“Agreed,” said Wyoh. “I want to talk about this kid’s age.”

“Friends,” Mike said diffidently (diffidently first time in weeks; he was now that confident executive “Adam Selene” much more than lonely machine)—”perhaps I should have told you, but I have already granted similar variations. It did not seem to require discussion.”

“It doesn’t, Mike,” Prof reassured him. “Achairman must use his own judgment. What is our largest cell?” “Five. it is a double cell, three and two.”

“No harm done. Dear Wyoh, does Sidris propose to make this child a full comrade? Let her know that we are committed to revolution… with all the bloodshed, disorder, and possible disaster that entails?”

“That’s exactly what she is requesting.”

“But, dear lady, while we are staking our lives, we are old enough to know it. For that, one should have an emotional grasp of death. Children seldom are able to realize that death will come to them personally. One might define adulthood as the age at which a person learns that he must die… and accepts his sentence undismayed.”

“Prof,” I said, “I know some mighty tall children. Seven to two some are in Party.”

“No bet, cobber. It’ll give odds that at least half of them don’t qualify—and we may find it out the hard way at the end of this our folly.” “Prof,” Wyoh insisted. “Mike, Mannie. Sidris is certain this child is an adult. And I think so, too.”

“Man?” asked Mike.

“Let’s find way for Prof to meet her and form own opinion. I was taken by her. Especially her go-to-hell fighting. Or would never have started it.”

We adjourned and I heard no more. Hazel showed up at dinner shortly thereafter as Sidris’ guest. She showed no sign of recognizing me, nor did I admit that I had ever seen her—but learned long after that she had recognized me, not just by left arm but because I had been hatted and kissed by tall blonde from Hong Kong. Furthermore Hazel had seen through Wyoming’s disguise, recognized what Wyoh never did successfully disguise: her voice.

But Hazel used lip glue. If she ever assumed I was in conspiracy she never showed it.

Child’s history explained her, far as background can explain steely character. Transported with parents as a baby much as Wyoh had been, she had lost father through accident while he was convict labor, which her mother blamed on indifference of Authority to safety of penal colonists. Her mother lasted till Hazel was five; what she died from Hazel did not know; she was then living in creche where we found her. Nor did she know why parents had been shipped—possibly for subversion if they were both under sentence as Hazel thought. As may be, her mother left her a fierce hatred of Authority and Warden.

Family that ran Cradle Roll let her stay; Hazel was pinning diapers and washing dishes as soon as she could reach. She had taught herself to read, and could print letters but could not write. Her knowledge of math was only that ability to count money that children soak up through their skins.

Was fuss over her leaving creche; owner and husbands claimed Hazel owed several years’ service. Hazel solved it by walking out, leaving her clothes and fewer belongings behind. Mum was angry enough to want family to start trouble which could wind up in “brawling” she despised. But I told her privately that, as her cell leader, I did nor want our family in public eye

—and hauled out cash and told her Party would pay for clothes for Hazel. Mum refused money, called off a family meeting, took Hazel into town and was extravagant—for Mum—in re- outfitting her.

So we adopted Hazel. I understand that these days adopting a child involves red tape; in those days it was as simple as adopting a kitten.

Was more fuss when Mum started to place Hazel in school, which fitted neither what Sidris had in mind nor what Hazel had been led to expect as a Party member and comrade. Again I butted in and Mum gave in part way. Hazel was placed in a tutoring school close to Sidris’ shop—that is, near easement lock thirteen; beauty parlor was by it (Sidris had good business because close enough that our water was piped in, and used without limit as return line took it back for salvage). Hazel studied mornings and helped in afternoons, pinning on gowns, handing out towels, giving rinses, learning trade—and whatever else Sidris wanted.

“Whatever else” was captain of Baker Street Irregulars.

Hazel had handled younger kids all her short life. They liked her; she could wheedle them into anything; she understood what they said when an adult would find it gibberish. She was a perfect bridge between Party and most junior auxiliary. She could make a game of chores we assigned and persuade them to play by rules she gave them, and never let them know it was adult-serious–-but child-serious, which is another matter.

For example:

Let’s say a little one, too young to read, is caught with a stack of subversive literature—which happened more than once. Here’s how it would go, after Hazel indoctrinated a kid: ADULT: “Baby, where did you get this?”

BAKER STREET IRREGULAR: “I’m not a baby, I’m a big boy!” ADULT: “Okay, big boy, where did you get this?”

B.S.I.: “Jackie give it to me.” ADULT: “Who is Jackie?” B.S.I.: “Jackie.”

ADULT: “But what’s his last name?” B.S.I.: “Who?”

ADULT: “Jackie.”

B.S.I.: (scornfully) “Jackie’s a girl!”

ADULT: “All right, where does she live?” B.S.L: “Who?”

And so on around—To all questions key answer was of pattern: “Jackie give it to me.” Since Jackie didn’t exist, he (she) didn’t have a last name, a home address, nor fixed sex. Those children enjoyed making fools of adults, once they learned how easy it was.

At worst, literature was confiscated. Even a squad of Peace Dragoons thought twice before trying to “arrest” a small child. Yes, we were beginning to have squads of Dragoons inside Luna city, but never less than a squad—some had gone in singly and not come back.

When Mike started writing poetry I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. He wanted to publish it! Shows how thoroughly humanity had corrupted this innocent machine that he should wish to see his name in print.

I said, “Mike, for Bog’s sake! Blown all circuits? Or planning to give us away?”

Before he could sulk Prof said, “Hold on, Manuel; I see possibilities. Mike, would it suit you to take a pen name?”

That’s how “Simon Jester” was born. Mike picked it apparently by tossing random numbers. But he used another name for serious verse, his Party name, Adam Selene.

“Simon’s” verse was doggerel, bawdy, subversive, ranging from poking fun at vips to savage attacks on Warden, system, Peace Dragoons, finks. You found it on walls of public W.C.s, or on scraps of paper left in tube capsules: Or in taprooms. Wherever they were they were signed “Simon Jester” and with a matchstick drawing of a little horned devil with big grin and forked tail. Sometimes he was stabbing a fat man with a pitchfork. Sometimes just his face would appear, big grin and horns, until shortly even horns and grin meant “Simon was here.”

Simon appeared all over Luna same day and from then on never let up. Shortly he started receiving volunteer help; his verses and little pictures, so simple anybody could draw them, began appearing more places than we had planned. This wider coverage had to be from fellow travelers. Verses and cartoons started appearing inside Complex—which could not have been our work; we never recruited civil servants. Also, three days after initial appearance of a very rough limerick, one that implied that Warden’s fatness derived from unsavory habits, this limerick popped up on pressure-sticky labels with cartoon improved so that fat victim flinching from Simon’s pitchfork was recognizably Mort the Wart. We didn’t buy them, we didn’t print them. But they appeared in L-City and Novylen and Hong Kong, stuck almost everywhere—public phones, stanchions in corridors, pressure locks, ramp railings, other. I had a sample count made, fed it to Mike; he reported that over seventy thousand labels had been used in L-City alone.

I did not know of a printing plant in L-City willing to risk such a job and equipped for it. Began to wonder if might be another revolutionary cabal?

Simon’s verses were such a success that he branched out as a poltergeist and neither Warden nor security chief was allowed to miss it. “Dear Mort the Wart,” ran one letter. “Do please be careful from midnight to four hundred tomorrow. Love & Kisses, Simon”—with horns and grin. In same mail Alvarez received one reading: “Dear Pimplehead, If the Warden breaks his leg tomorrow night it will be your fault. Faithfully your conscience, Simon”—again with horns and smile.

We didn’t have anything planned; we just wanted Mort and Alvarez to lose sleep—which they did, plus bodyguard. All Mike did was to call Warden’s private phone at intervals from midnight to four hundred—an unlisted number supposedly known only to his personal staff. By calling members of his personal staff simultaneously and connecting them to Mort Mike not only created confusion but got Warden angry at his assistants—he flatly refused to believe their denials.

But was luck that Warden, goaded too far, ran down a ramp. Even a new chum does that only once. So he walked on air and sprained an ankle—close enough to a broken leg and Alvarez was there when it happened.

Those sleep-losers were mostly just that. Like rumor that Authority catapult had been mined and would be blown up, another night. Ninety plus eighteen men can’t search a hundred kilometers of catapult in hours, especially when ninety are Peace Dragoons not used to p-suit work and hating it—this midnight came at new earth with Sun high; they were outside far longer than is healthy, managed to cook up their own accidents while almost cooking themselves, and showed nearest thing to mutiny in regiment’s history. One accident was fatal. Did he fall or was he pushed? Asergeant.

Midnight alarums made Peace Dragoons on passport watch much taken by yawning and more bad-tempered, which produced more clashes with Loonies and still greater resentment both ways—so Simon increased pressure.

Adam Selene’s verse was on a higher plane. Mike submitted it to Prof and accepted his literary judgment (good, I think) without resentment. Mike’s scansion and rhyming were perfect, Mike being a computer with whole English language in his memory and able to search for a fitting word in microseconds. What was weak was self-criticism. That improved rapidly under Prof’s stern editorship.

Adam Selene’s by-line appeared first in dignified pages of Moonglow over a somber poem titled: “Home.” Was dying thoughts of old transportee, his discovery as he is about to leave that Luna is his beloved home. Language was simple, rhyme scheme unforced, only thing faintly subversive was conclusion on part of dying man that even many wardens he has endured was not too high a price.

Doubt if Moonglow’s editors thought twice. Was good stuff, they published.

Alvarez turned editorial office inside out trying to get a line back to Adam Selene. Issue had been on sale half a lunar before Alvarez noticed it, or had it called to his attention; we were fretted, we wanted that by-line noticed. We were much pleased with way Alvarez oscillated when he did see it.

Editors were unable to help fink boss. They told him truth: Poem had come in by mail. Did they have it? Yes, surely… sorry, no envelope; they were never saved. After a long time Alvarez left, flanked by four Dragoons he had fetched along for his health.

Hope he enjoyed studying that sheet of paper. Was piece of Adam Selene’s business stationery: SELENE ASSOCIATES

LUNACITY

Investments Office of the Chairman Old Dome

and under that was typed Home, by Adam Selene, etc.

Any fingerprints were added after it left us. Had been typed on Underwood Office Electrostator, commonest model in Luna. Even so, were not too many as are importado; a scientific detective could have identified machine. Would have found it in Luna City office of Lunar Authority. Machines, should say, as we found six of model in office and used them in rotation, five words and move to next. Cost Wyoh and self sleep and too much risk even though Mike listened at every phone, ready to warn. Never did it that way again.

Alvarez was not a scientific detective.

11

In early ‘76 I had too much to do. Could not neglect customers. Party work took more time even though all possible was delegated. But decisions had to be made on endless things and messages passed up and down. Had to squeeze in hours of heavy exercise, wearing weights, and dasn’t arrange permission to use centrifuge at Complex, one used by earthworm scientists to stretch time in Luna—while had used it before, this time could not advertise that I was getting in shape for Earthside.

Exercising without centrifuge is less efficient and was especially boring because did not know there would be need for it. But according to Mike 30 percent of ways events could fall required some Loonie, able to speak for Party, to make trip to Terra.

Could not see myself as an ambassador, don’t have education and not diplomatic. Prof was obvious choice of those recruited or likely to be. But Prof was old, might not live to land Earthside. Mike told us that a man of Prof’s age, body type, etc., had less than 40 percent chance of reaching Terra alive.

But Prof did gaily undertake strenuous training to let him make most of his poor chances, so what could I do but put on weights and get to work, ready to go and take his place if old heart clicked off? Wyoh did same, on assumption that something might keep me from going. She did it to share misery; Wyoh always used gallantry in place of logic.

On top of business, Party work, and exercise was farming. We had lost three sons by marriage while gaining two fine lads, Frank and Ali. Then Greg went to work for LuNoHoCo, as boss drillman on new catapult.

Was needful. Much skull sweat went into hiring construction crew. We could use non-Party men for most jobs, but key spots had to be Party men as competent as they were politically reliable. Greg did not want to go; our farm needed him and he did not like to leave his congregation. But accepted.

That made me again a valet, part time, to pigs and chickens. Hans is a good farmer, picked up load and worked enough for two men. But Greg had been farm manager ever since Grandpaw retired, new responsibility worried Hans. Should have been mine, being senior, but Hans was better farmer and closer to it; always been expected he would succeed Greg someday. So I backed him up by agreeing with his opinions and tried to be half a farm hand in hours I could squeeze. Left no time to scratch.

Late in February I was returning from long trip, Novylen, Tycho Under, Churchill. New tube had just been completed across Sinus Medii, so I went on to Hong Kong in Luna—business and did make contacts now that I could promise emergency service. Fact that Endsville-Beluthihatchie bus ran only during dark semi-lunar had made impossible before.

But business was cover for politics; liaison with Hong Kong had been thin. Wyoh had done well by phone; second member of her cell was an old comrade.—”Comrade Clayton”—who not only had clean bill of health in Alverez’s File Zebra but also stood high in Wyoh’s estimation. Clayton was briefed on policies, warned of bad apples, encouraged to start cell system while leaving old organization untouched. Wyoh told him to keep his membership, as before.

But phone isn’t face-to-face. Hong Kong should have been our stronghold. Was less tied to Authority as its utilities were not controlled from Complex; was less dependent because lack (until recently) of tube transport had made selling at catapult head less inviting; was stronger financially as Bank of Hong Kong Luna notes were better money than official Authority scrip.

I suppose Hong Kong dollars weren’t “money” in some legal sense. Authority would not accept them; times I went Earthside had to buy Authority scrip to pay for ticket. But what I carried was Hong Kong dollars as could be traded Earthside at a small discount whereas scrip was nearly worthless there. Money or not, Hong Kong Bank notes were backed by honest Chinee bankers instead of being fiat of bureaucracy. One hundred Hong Kong dollars was 31.1 grams of gold (old troy ounce) payable on demand at home office—and they did keep gold there, fetched up from Australia. Or you could demand commodities: non-potable water, steel of defined grade, heavy water of power plant specs, other things. Could buy these with scrip, too, but Authority’s prices kept changing, upward. I’m no fiscal theorist; time Mike tried to explain I got headache. Simply know we were glad to lay hands on this non-money whereas scrip

one accepted reluctantly and not just because we hated Authority.

Hong Kong should have been Party’s stronghold. But was not. We had decided that I should risk face-to-face there, letting some know my identity, as a man with one arm can’t disguise easily. Was risk that would jeopardize not only me but could lead to Wyoh, Mum, Greg, and Sidris if I took a fall. But who said revolution was safe?

Comrade Clayton turned out to be young Japanese—not too young, but they all look young till suddenly look old. He was not all Japanese—Malay and other things—but had Japanese name and household had Japanese manners; “giri” and “gimu” controlled and it was my good fortune that he owed much gimu to Wyoh.

Clayton was not convict ancestry; his people had been “volunteers” marched aboard ship at gunpoint during time Great China consolidated Earthside empire. I didn’t hold it against him; he hated Warden as bitterly as any old lag.

Met him first at a teahouse—taproom to us L-City types—and for two hours we talked everything but politics. He made up mind about me, took me home. My only complaint about Japanese hospitality is those chin-high baths are too bleeding hot.

But turned out I was not jeopardized. Mama-san was as skilled at makeup as Sidris, my social arm is very convincing, and a kimona covered its seam. Met four cells in two days, as “Comrade Bork” and wearing makeup and kimona and tabi and, if a spy was among them, don’t think he could identify Manuel O’Kelly. I had gone there intensely briefed, endless figures and projections, and talked about just one thing: famine in ‘82, six years away. “You people are lucky, won’t be hit so soon. But now with new tube, you are going to see more and more of your people turning to wheat and rice and shipping it to catapult head. Your time will come.”

They were impressed. Old organization, as I saw it and from what I heard, relied on oratory, whoop-it-up music, and emotion, much like church. I simply said, “There it is, comrades. Check those figures; I’ll leave them with you.”

Met one comrade separately. AChinee engineer given a good look at anything can figure way to make it. Asked this one if he had ever seen a laser gun small enough to carry like a rifle. He had not. Mentioned that passport system made it difficult to smuggle these days. He said thoughtfully that jewels ought not to be hard—and he would be in Luna City next week to see his cousin. I said Uncle Adam would be pleased to hear from him.

All in all was productive trip. On way back I stopped in Novylen to check an old-fashioned punched-tape “Foreman” I had overhauled earlier, had lunch afterwards, ran into my father. He and I were friendly but didn’t matter if we let a couple of years go by. We talked through a sandwich and beer and as I got up he said, “Nice to see you, Mannie. Free Luna!”

I echoed, too startled not to. My old man was as cynically non-political as you could find; if he would say that in public, campaign must be taking hold.

So I arrived in L-City cheered up and not too tired, having napped from Torricelli. Took Belt from Tube South, then dropped down and through Bottom Alley, avoiding Causeway crowd and heading home. Went into Judge Brody’s courtroom as I came to it, meaning to say hello. Brody is old friend and we have amputation in common. After he lost a leg he set up as a judge and was quite successful; was not another judge in L-City at that time who did not have side business, at least make book or sell insurance.

If two people brought a quarrel to Brody and he could not get them to agree that his settlement was just, he would return fees and, if they fought, referee their duel without charging—and still be trying to persuade them not to use knives right up to squaring off.

He wasn’t in his courtroom though plug hat was on desk. Started to leave, only to be checked by group coming in, stilyagi types. Agirl was with them, and an older man hustled by them. He was mussed, and clothing had that vague something that says “tourist.”

We used to get tourists even then. Not hordes but quite a few. They would come up from Earth, stop in a hotel for a week, go back in same ship or perhaps stop over for next ship. Most of them spent their time gambling after a day or two of sightseeing including that silly walk up on surface every tourist makes. Most Loonies ignored them and granted them their foibles.

One lad, oldest, about eighteen and leader, said to me, “Where’s judge?” “Don’t know. Not here.”

He chewed lip, looked baffled. I said, “What trouble?”

He said soberly, “Going to eliminate his choom. But want judge to confirm it.” I said, “Cover taprooms here around. Probably find him.”

Aboy about fourteen spoke up. “Say! Aren’t you Gospodin O’Kelly?” “Right.”

“Why don’t you judge it.”

Oldest looked relieved. “Will you, Gospodin?”

I hesitated. Sure, I’ve gone judge at times; who hasn’t? But don’t hanker for responsibility. However, it troubled me to hear young people talk about eliminating a tourist. Bound to cause talk.

Decided to do it. So I said to tourist, “Will you accept me as your judge?” He looked surprised. “I have choice in the matter?”

I said patiently, “Of course. Can’t expect me to listen if you aren’t willing to accept my judging. But not urging you. Your life, not mine.” He looked very surprised but not afraid. His eyes lit up. “My life, did you say?”

“Apparently. You heard lads say they intend to eliminate you. You may prefer to wait for Judge Brody.” He didn’t hesitate. Smiled and said, “I accept you as my judge, sir.”

“As you wish.” I looked at oldest lad. “What parties to quarrel? Just you and your young friend?” “Oh, no, Judge, all of us.”

“Not your judge yet.” I looked around. “Do you all ask me to judge?”

Were nods; none said No. Leader turned to girl, added, “Better speak up, Tish. You accept Judge O’Kelly?”

“What? Oh, sure!” She was a vapid little thing, vacantly pretty, curvy, perhaps fourteen. Slot-machine type, and how she might wind up. Sort who prefers being queen over pack of stilyagi to solid marriage. I don’t blame stilyagi; they chase around corridors because not enough females. Work all day and nothing to go home to at night.

“Okay, court has been accepted and all are bound to abide by my verdict. Let’s settle fees. How high can you boys go? Please understand I’m not going to judge an elimination for dimes. So ante up or I turn him loose.”

Leader blinked, they went into huddle. Shortly he turned and said, “We don’t have much. Will you do it for five Kong dollars apiece?” Six of them—”No. Ought not to ask a court to judge elimination at that price.”

They huddled again. “Fifty dollars, Judge?”

“Sixty. Ten each. And another ten from you, Tish,” I said to girl.

She looked surprised, indignant. “Come, come!” I said. “Tanstaafl.”

She blinked and reached into pouch. She had money; types like that always have. I collected seventy dollars, laid it on desk, and said to tourist, “Can match it?” “Beg pardon?”

“Kids are paying seventy dollars Hong Kong for judgment. You should match it. If you can’t, open pouch and prove it and can owe it to me. But that’s your share.” I added, “Cheap, for a capital case. But kids can’t pay much so you get a bargain.”

“I see. I believe I see.” He matched with seventy Hong Kong.

“Thank you,” I said. “Now does either side want a jury?” Girl’s eyes lit up. “Sure! Let’s do it right.” Earthworm said, “Under the circumstances perhaps I need one.” “Can have it,” I assured. “Want a counsel?”

“Why, I suppose I need a lawyer, too.”

“I said ‘counsel,’ not ‘lawyer.’ Aren’t any lawyers here.” Again he seemed delighted. “I suppose counsel, if I elected to have one, would be of the same, uh, informal quality as the rest of these proceedings?”

“Maybe, maybe not. I’m informal sort of judge, that’s all. Suit yourself.” “Mm. I think I’ll rely on your informality, your honor.”

Oldest lad said, “Uh, this jury. You pick up chit? Or do we?”

“I pay it; I agreed to judge for a hundred forty, gross. Haven’t you been in court before? But not going to kill my net for extra I could do without. Six jurymen, five dollars each. See who’s in Alley.”

One boy stepped out and shouted, “Jury work! Five-dollar job!”

They rounded up six men and were what you would expect in Bottom Alley. Didn’t worry me as had no intention of paying mind to them. If you go judge, better in good neighborhood with chance of getting solid citizens.

I went behind desk, sat down, put on Brody’s plug hat—wondered where he had found it. Probably a castoff from some lodge. “Court’s in session,” I said. “Let’s have names and tell me beef.”

Oldest lad was named. Slim Lemke, girl war Patricia Carmen Zhukov; don’t remember others. Tourist stepped up, reached into pouch and said, “My card, sir.” I still have it. It read:

STUART RENE LaJOIE

Poet—Traveler—Soldier of Fortune

Beef was tragically ridiculous, fine example of why tourists should not wander around without guides. Sure, guides bleed them white—but isn’t that what a tourist is for? This one almost lost life from lack of guidance.

Had wandered into a taproom which lets stilyagi hang out, a sort of clubroom. This simple female had flirted with him. Boys had let matter be, as of course they had to as long as she invited it. But at some point she had laughed and let him have a fist in ribs. He had taken it as casually as a Loonie would … but had answered in distinctly earthworm manner; slipped arm around waist and pulled her to him, apparently tried to kiss her.

Now believe me, in North America this wouldn’t matter; I’ve seen things much like it. But of course Tish was astonished, perhaps frightened. She screamed. And pack of boys set upon him and roughed him up. Then decided he had to pay for his “crime”—but do it correctly. Find a judge.

Most likely they chickened. Chances are not one had ever dealt with an elimination. But their lady had been insulted, had to be done.

I questioned them, especially Tish, and decided I had it straight. Then said, “Let me sum up. Here we have a stranger. Doesn’t know our ways. He offended, he’s guilty. But meant no offense far as I can see. What does jury say? Hey, you there!—wake up! What you say?”

Juryman looked up blearily, said, “‘Liminate him!” “Very well? And you?”

“Well—” Next one hesitated. “Guess it would be enough just to beat tar out of him, so he’ll know better next time. Can’t have men pawing women, or place will get to be as bad as they say Terra is.”

“Sensible,” I agreed. “And you?”

Only one juror voted for elimination. Others ranged from a beating to very high fines. “What do you think, Slim?”

“Well—” He was worried—face in front of gang, face in front of what might be his girl. But had cooled down and didn’t want chum eliminated. “We already worked him over. Maybe if he got down on hands and knees and kissed floor in front of Tish and said he was sorry?”

“Will you do that, Gospodin LaJoie?” “If you so rule, your honor.”

“I don’t. Here’s my verdict. First that juryman—you!—you are fined fee paid you because you fell asleep while supposed to be judging. Grab him, boys, take it away from him and throw him out.”

They did, enthusiastically; made up a little for greater excitement they had thought of but really could not stomach. “Now, Gospodin LaJoie, you are fined fifty Hong Kong for not having common sense to learn local customs before stirring around. Ante up.”

I collected it. “Now you boys line up. You are fined five dollars apiece for not exercising good judgment in dealing with a person you knew was a stranger and not used to our ways. Stopping him from touching Tish, that’s fine. Rough him, that’s okay, too; he’ll learn faster. And could have tossed him out. But talking about eliminating for what was honest mistake— well, it’s out of proportion. Five bucks each. Ante up.

Slim gulped. “Judge … I don’t think we have that much left! At least I don’t.”

“I thought that might be. You have a week to pay or I post your names in Old Dome. Know where Bon Ton Beaute Shoppe is, near easement lock thirteen? My wife runs it; pay her. Court’s out. Slim, don’t go away. Nor you, Tish. Gospodin LaJoie, let’s take these young people up and buy them a cold drink and get better acquainted.”

Again his eyes filled with odd delight that reminded of Prof. “Acharming idea, Judge!”

“I’m no longer judge. It’s up a couple of ramps… so I suggest you offer Tish your arm.”

He bowed and said, “My lady? May I?” and crooked his elbow to her. Tish at once became very grown up. “Spasebo, Gospodin! I am pleased.”

Took them to expensive place, one where their wild clothes and excessive makeup looked out of place; they were edgy. But I tried to make them feel easy and Stuart LaJoie tried even harder and successfully. Got their addresses as well as names; Wyoh had one sequence which was concentrating on stilyagi. Presently they finished their coolers, stood up, thanked and left. LaJoie and I stayed on.

“Gospodin,” he said presently, “you used an odd word earlier—odd to me, I mean.” “Call me ‘Mannie’ now that kids are gone. What word?”

“It was when you insisted that the, uh, young lady, Tish—that Tish must pay, too. ‘Tone-stapple,’ or something like it.”

“Oh, ‘tanstaafl.’ Means ~There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.’ And isn’t,” I added, pointing to a FREE LUNCH sign across room, “or these drinks would cost half as much. Was reminding her that anything free costs twice as much in long run or turns out worthless.”

“An interesting philosophy.”

“Not philosophy, fact. One way or other, what you get, you pay for.” I fanned air. “Was Earthside once and heard expression ‘Free as air.’ This air isn’t free, you pay for every breath.” “Really? No one has asked me to pay to breathe.” He smiled. “Perhaps I should stop.”

“Can happen, you almost breathed vacuum tonight. But nobody asks you because you’ve paid. For you, is part of round-trip ticket; for me it’s a quarterly charge.” I started to tell how my family buys and sells air to community co-op, decided was too complicated. “But we both pay.”

LaJoie looked thoughtfully pleased. “Yes, I see the economic necessity. It’s simply new to me. Tell me, uh, Mannie—and I’m called ‘Stu’—was I really in danger of ‘breathing vacuum’?” “Should have charged you more.”

“Please?”

“You aren’t convinced. But charged kids all they could scrape up and fined them too, to make them think. Couldn’t charge you more than them. Should have, you think it was all a joke.” “Believe me, sir, I do not think it was a joke. I just have trouble grasping that your local laws permit a man to be put to death … so casually … and for so trivial an offense.”

I sighed. Where do you start explaining when a man’s words show there isn’t anything he understands about subject, instead is loaded with preconceptions that don’t fit facts and doesn’t even know he has?

“Stu,” I said, “let’s take that piece at a time. Are no ‘local laws’ so you couldn’t be ‘put to death’ under them. Your offense was not ‘trivial,’ I simply made allowance for ignorance. And wasn’t done casually, or boys would have dragged you to nearest lock to zero pressure, shoved you in, and cycled. Instead were most formal—good boys!—and paid own cash to give you a trial. And didn’t grumble when verdict wasn’t even close to what they asked. Now, anything still not clear?”

He grinned and turned out to have dimples like Prof; found myself liking him still more. “All of it, I’m afraid. I seem to have wandered into Looking Glass Land.”

Expected that; having been Earthaide I know how their minds work, some. An earthworm expects to find a law, a printed law, for every circumstance. Even have laws for private matters such as contracts. Really, if a man’s word isn’t any good, who would contract with him? Doesn’t he have reputation?

“We don’t have laws,” I said. “Never been allowed to. Have customs, but aren’t written and aren’t enforced—or could say they are self-enforcing because are simply way things have to be, conditions being what they are. Could say our customs are natural laws because are way people have to behave to stay alive. When you made a pass at Tish you were violating a natural law… and almost caused you to breathe vacuum.”

He blinked thoughtfully. “Would you explain the natural law I violated? I had better understand it … or best I return to my ship and stay inboard until lift. To stay alive.”

“Certainly. Is so simple that, once you understand, you’ll never be in danger from it again. Here we are, two million males, less than one million females. Aphysical fact, basic as rock or vacuum. Then add idea of tanstaafl. When thing is scarce, price goes up. Women are scarce; aren’t enough to go around—that makes them most valuable thing in Luna, more precious than ice or air, as men without women don’t care whether they stay alive or not. Except a Cyborg, if you regard him as a man, which I don’t.”

I went on: “So what happens?—and mind you, things were even worse when this custom, or natural law, first showed itself back in twentieth century. Ratio was ten-to-one or worse then. One thing is what always happens in prisons: men turn to other men. That helps not much; problem still is because most men want women and won’t settle for substitute while chance of getting true gelt.

“They get so anxious they will kill for it… and from stories old-timers tell was killing enough to chill your teeth in those days. But after a while those still alive find way to get along, things shake down. As automatic as gravitation. Those who adjust to facts stay alive; those who don’t are dead and no problem.

“What that means, here and now, is that women are scarce and call tune… and you are surrounded by two million men who see to it you dance to that tune. You have no choice, she has all choice. She can hit you so hard it draws blood; you dasn’t lay a finger on her. Look, you put an arm around Tish, maybe tried to kiss. Suppose instead she had gone to hotel room with you; what would happen?”

“Heavens! I suppose they would have torn me to pieces.”

“They would have done nothing. Shrugged and pretended not to see. Because choice is hers. Not yours. Not theirs. Exclusively hers. Oh, be risky to ask her to go to hotel; she might take offense and that would give boys license to rough you up. But—well, take this Tish. Asilly little tart. If you had flashed as much money as I saw in your pouch, she might have taken into head that a bundle with tourist was just what she needed and suggested it herself. In which case would have been utterly safe.”

Lajoie shivered. “At her age? It scares me to think of it. She’s below the age of consent. Statutory rape.”

“Oh, bloody! No such thing. Women her age are married or ought to be. Stu, is no rape in Luna. None. Men won’t permit. If rape had been involved, they wouldn’t have bothered to find a judge and all men in earshot would have scrambled to help. But chance that a girl that big is virgin is negligible. When they’re little, their mothers watch over them, with help from everybody in city; children are safe here. But when they reach husband-high, is no holding them and mothers quit trying. If they choose to run corndors and have fun, can’t stop ‘em; once a girl is nubile, she’s her own boss. You married?”

“No.” He added with a smile; “Not at present.”

“Suppose you were and wife told you she was marrying again. What would you do?”

“Odd that you should pick that, something like it did happen. I saw my attorney and made sure she got no alimony.”

“‘Alimony’ isn’t a word here; I learned it Earthside. Here you might—or a Loonie husband might—say, ‘I think we’ll need a bigger place, dear.’ Or might simply congratulate her and his new co-husband. Or if it made him so unhappy he couldn’t stand it, might opt out and pack clothes. But whatever, would not make slightest fuss. If he did, opinion would be unanimous against him. His friends, men and women alike, would snub him. Poor sod would probably move to Novylen, change name and hope to live it down.

“All our customs work that way. If you’re out in field and a cobber needs air, you lend him a bottle and don’t ask cash. But when you’re both back in pressure again, if he won’t pay up, nobody would criticize if you eliminated him without a judge. But he would pay; air is almost as sacred as women. If you take a new chum in a poker game, you give him air money. Not eating money; can work or starve. If you eliminate a man other than self-defense, you pay his debts and support his kids, or people won’t speak to you, buy from you, sell to you.”

“Mannie, you’re telling me that I can murder a man here and settle the matter merely with money?”

“Oh, not at all! But eliminating isn’t against some law; are no laws—except Warden’s regulations—and Warden doesn’t care what one Loonie does to another. But we figure this way: If a man is killed, either he had it coming and everybody knows it—usual case—or his friends will take care of it by eliminating man who did it. Either way, no problem. Nor many eliminations. Even set duels aren’t common.”

“‘His friends will take care of it.’ Mannie, suppose those young people had gone ahead? I have no friends here.”

“Was reason I agreed to judge. While I doubt if those kids could have egged each other into it, didn’t want to take chance. Eliminating a tourist could give our city a bad name.” “Does it happen often?”

“Can’t recall has ever happened. Of course may have been made to look like accident. Anew chum is accident-prone; Luna is that sort of place. They say if a new chum lives a year, he’ll live forever. But nobody sells him insurance first year.” Glanced at time. “Stu, have you had dinner?”

“No, and I was about to suggest that you come to my hotel. The cooking is good. Auberge Orleans.”

I repressed shudder—ate there once. “Instead, would you come home with me and meet my family? We have soup or something about this hour.” “Isn’t that an imposition?”

“No. Half a minute while I phone.”

Mum said, “Manuel! How sweet, dear! Capsule has been in for hours; I had decided it would be tomorrow or later.”

“Just drunken debauchery, Mimi, and evil companions. Coming home now if can remember way—and bringing evil companion.” “Yes, dear. Dinner in twenty minutes; try not to be late.”

“Don’t you want to know whether my evil companion is male or female?”

“Knowing you, I assume that it is female. But I fancy I shall be able to tell when I see her.”

“You know me so well, Mum. Warn girls to look pretty; wouldn’t want a visitor to outshine them.” “Don’t be too long; dinner will spoil. ‘Bye, dear. Love.”

“Love, Mum.” I waited, then punched MYCROFTXXX. “Mike, want a name searched. Earthside name, passenger in Popov. Stuart Rene LaJoie. Stuart with a U and last name might file under either L or J.”

Didn’t wait many seconds; Mike found Stu in all major Earthside references: Who’s Who, Dun & Bradstreet, Almanach de Gotha, London Times running files, name it. French expatriate, royalist, wealthy, six more names sandwiched into ones he used, three university degrees including one in law from Sorbonne, noble ancestry both France and Scotland, divorced (no children) from Honorable Pamela Hyphen-Hyphen-Blueblood. Sort of earthworm who wouldn’t speak to a Loonie of convict ancestry—except Stu would speak to anyone.

I listened a pair of minutes, then asked Mike to prepare a full dossier, following all associational leads. “Mike, might be our pigeon.” “Could be, Man.”

“Got to run. ‘Bye.” Returned thoughtfully to my guest. Almost a year earlier, during alcoholic talk-talk in a hotel room, Mike had promised us one chance in seven—if certain things were done. One sine-qua-non was help on Terra itself.

Despite “throwing rocks,” Mike knew, we all knew, that mighty Terra with eleven billion people and endless resources could not be defeated by three million who had nothing, even though we stood on a high place and could drop rocks on them.

Mike drew parallels from XVIIIth century, when Britain’s American colonies broke away, and from XXth, when many colonies became independent of several empires, and pointed out that in no case had a colony broken loose by brute force. No, in every case imperial state was busy elsewhere, had grown weary and given up without using full strength.

For months we had been strong enough, had we wished, to overcome Warden’s bodyguards. Once our catapult was ready (anytime now) we would not be helpless. But we needed a “favorable climate” on Terra. For that we needed help on Terra.

Prof had not regarded it as difficult. But turned out to be quite difficult. His Earthside friends were dead or nearly and I had never had any but a few teachers. We sent inquiry down through cells: “What vips do you know Earthaide?” and usual answer was: “You kidding?” Null program—

Prof watched passenger lists on incoming ships, trying to figure a contact, and had been reading Luna print-outs of Earthside newspapers, searching for vips he could reach through past connection. I had not tried; handful I had met on Terra were not vips.

Prof had not picked Stu off Popov’s passenger list. But Prof had not met him. I didn’t not know whether Stu was simply eccentric as odd personal card seemed to show. But he was only Terran I had ever had a drink with in Luna, seemed a dinkum cobber, and Mike’s report showed hunch was not all bad; he carried some tonnage.

So I took him home to see what family thought of him.

Started well. Mum smiled and offered hand. He took it and bowed so deep I thought he was going to kiss it—would have, I think, had I not warned him about fems. Mum was cooing as she led him in to dinner.

April and May ‘76 were more hard work and increasing effort to stir up Loonies against Warden, and goad him into retaliation. Trouble with Mort the Wart was that he was not a bad egg, nothing to hate about him other than fact he was symbol of Authority; was necessary to frighten him to get him to do anything. And average Loonie was just as bad. He despised Warden as matter of ritual but was not stuff that makes revolutionists; he couldn’t be bothered. Beer, betting, women, and work—Only thing that kept Revolution from dying of anemia was that Peace Dragoons had real talent for antagonizing.

But even them we had to keep stirred up. Prof kept saying we needed a “Boston Tea Party,” referring to mythical incident in an earlier revolution, by which he meant a public ruckus to grab attention.

We kept trying. Mike rewrote lyrics of old revolutionary songs: “Marseillaise,” “Internationale,” “Yankee Doodle,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Pie in the Sky,” etc., giving them words to fit Luna. Stuff like “Sons of Rock and Boredom/Will you let the Warden/Take from you your libertee!” Simon Jester spread them around, and when one took hold, we pushed it (music only) by radio and video. This put Warden in silly position of forbidding playing of certain tunes—which suited us; people could whistle.

Mike studied voice and word-choice patterns of Deputy Administrator, Chief Engineer, other department heads; Warden started getting frantic calls at night from his staff. Which they denied making. So Alvarez put lock-and-trace on next one—and sure enough, with Mike’s help, Alvarez traced it to supply chief’s phone and was sure it was boss belly-robber’s voice.

But next poison call to Mort seemed to come from Alvarez, and what Mort had to say next day to Alvarez and what Alvaiez said in own defense can only be described as chaotic crossed with psychotic.

Prof had Mike stop; was afraid Alvarez might lose job, which we did not want; he was doing too well for us. But by then Peace Dragoons had been dragged out twice in night on what seemed to be Warden’s orders, further disrupting morale, and Warden became convinced he was surrounded by traitors in official family while they were sure he had blown every circult.

An ad appeared in Lunaya Pravda announcing lecture by Dr. Adam Selene on Poetry and Arts in Luna: a New Renaissance. No comrade attended; word went down cells to stay away. Nor did anybody hang around when three squads of Peace Dragoons showed up—this involves Heisenberg principle as applied to Scarlet Pimpernels. Editor of Pravda spent bad hour explaining that he did not accept ads in person and this one was ordered over counter and paid for in cash. He was told not to take ads from Adam Selene. This was countermanded and he was told to take anything from Adam Selene but notify Alvarez at once.

New catapult was tested with a load dropped into south Indian Ocean at 350 E., 600 S., a spot used only by fish. Mike was joyed over his marksmanship since he had been able to sneak only two looks when guidance & tracking radars were not in use and had relied on just one nudge to bring it to bullseye. Earthside news reported giant meteor in sub-Antarctic picked up by Capetown Spacetrack with projected impact that matched Mike’s attempt perfectly—Mike called me to boast while taking down evening’s Reuters transmission. “I told you it was dead on,” he gloated. “I watched it. Oh, what a lovely splash!” Later reports on shock wave from seismic labs and on tsunamis from oceanographic stations were consistent.

Was only canister we had ready (trouble buying steel) or Mike might have demanded to try his new toy again.

Liberty Caps started appearing on stilyagi and their girls; Simon Jester began wearing one between his horns. Bon Marche gave them away as premiums. Alvarez had painful talk with Warden in which Mort demanded to know if his fink boss felt that something should be done every time kids took up fad? Had Alvarez gone out of his mind?

I ran across Slim Lemke on Carver Causeway early May; he was wearing a Liberty Cap. He seemed pleased to see me and I thanked him for prompt payment (he had come in three days after Stu’s trial and paid Sidris thirty Hong Kong, for gang) and bought him a cooler. While we were seated I asked why young people were wearing red hats? Why a hat? Hat’s were an earthworm custom, nyet?

He hesitated, then said was sort of a lodge, like Elks. I changed subject. Learned that his full name was Moses Lemke Stone; member of Stone Gang. This pleased me, we were relatives. But surprised me. However, even best families such as Stones sometimes can’t always find marriages for all sons; I had been lucky or might have been roving corridors at his age, too. Told him about our connection on my mother’s side.

He warmed up and shortly said, “Cousin Manuel, ever think about how we ought to elect our own Warden?”

I said No, I hadn’t; Authority appointed him and I supposed they always would. He asked why we had to have an Authority? I asked who had been putting ideas in head? He insisted nobody had, just thinking, was all—didn’t he have a right to think?

When I got home was tempted to check with Mike, find out lad’s Party name if any. But wouldn’t have been proper security, nor fair to Slim.

On 3 May ‘76 seventy-one males named Simon were rounded up and questioned, then released. No newspaper carned story. But everybody heard it; we were clear down in “J’s” and twelve thousand people can spread a story faster than I would have guessed. We emphasized that one of these dangerous males was only four years old, which was not true but very effective.

Stu Lajoie stayed with us during February and March and did not return to Terra until early April; he changed his ticket to next ship and then to next. When I pointed out that he was riding close to invisible line where irreversible physiological changes could set in, he grinned and told me not to worry. But made arrangements to use centrifuge.

Stu did not want to leave even by April. Was kissed goodbye with tears by all my wives and Wyoh, and he assured each one he was coming back. But left as he had work to do; by then he was a Party member.

I did not take part in decision to recruit Stu; I felt prejudiced. Wyoh and Prof and Mike were unanimous in risking it; I happily accepted their judgment.

We all helped to sell Stu LaJoie—self, Prof, Mike, Wyoh, Mum, even Sidris and Lenore and Ludmilla and our kids and Hans and Ali and Frank, as Davis home life was what grabbed him first. Did not hurt that Lenore was prettiest girl in L-City—which is no disparagement of Milla, Wyoh, Anna, and Sidris. Nor did it hurt that Stu could charm a baby away from breast. Mom fussed over him, Hans showed him hydroponic farming and Stu got dirty and sweaty and sloshed around in tunnels with our boys—helped harvest our Chinee fishponds—got stung by our bees—learned to handle a p-suit and went up with me to make adjustments on solar battery—helped Anna butcher a hog and learned about tanning leather—sat with Grandpaw and was respectful to his naive notions about Terra—washed dishes with Milla, something no male in our family ever did—rolled on floor with babies and puppies—learned to grind flour and swapped recipes with Mum.

I introduced him to Prof and that started political side of feeling him out. Nothing had been admitted—we could back away—when Prof introduced him to “Adam Selene” who could visit only by phone as he was “in Hong Kong at present.” By time Stu was committed to Cause, we dropped pretense and let him know that Adam was chairman whom he would not meet in person for security reasons.

But Wyoh did most and was on her judgment that Prof turned cards up and let Stu know that we were building a revolution. Was no surprise; Stu had made up mind and was waiting for us to trust him.

They say a face once launched a thousand ships. I do not know that Wyoh used anything but argument on Stu. I never tried to find out. But Wyoh had more to do with committing me than all Prof’s theory or Mike’s figures. If Wyoh used even stronger methods on Stu, she was not first heroine in history to do so for her country.

Stu went Earthside with a special codebook. I’m no code and cipher expert except that a computerman learns principles during study of information theory. Acipher is a mathematical pattern under which one letter substitutes for another, simplest being one in which alphabet is merely scrambled.

Acipher can be incredibly subtle, especially with help of a computer. But ciphers all have weakness that they are patterns. If one computer can think them up, another computer can break them.

Codes do not have same weakness. Let’s say that codebook has letter group GLOPS. Does this mean “Aunt Minnie will be home Thursday” or does it mean “3.14157 … “? Meaning is whatever you assign and no computer can analyze it simply from letter group. Give a computer enough groups and a rational theory involving meanings or subjects for

meanings, and it will eventually worry it out because meanings themselves will show patterns. But is a problem of different kind on more difficult level.

Code we selected was commonest commercial codebook, used both on Terra and in Luna for commercial dispatches. But we worked it over. Prof and Mike spent hours discussing what information Party might wish to send to its agent on Terra, or receive from agent, then Mike put his vast information to work and came up with new set of meanings for codebook, ones that could say “Buy Thai rice futures” as easily as “Run for life; they’ve caught us.” Or anything, as cipher signals were buried in it to permit anything to be said that had not been anticipated.

Late one night Mike made print-out of new code via Lunaya Pravda’s facilities, and night editor turned roll over to another comrade who converted it into a very small roll of film and passed it along in turn, and none ever knew what they handled or why. Wound up in Stu’s pouch. Search of off-planet luggage was tight by then and conducted by bad-tempered Dragoons—but Stu was certain he would have no trouble. Perhaps he swallowed it.

Thereafter some of LuNoHo Company’s dispatches to Terra reached Stu via his London broker.

Part of purpose was financial. Party needed to spend money Earthside; LuNoHoCo transferred money there (not all stolen, some ventures turned out well); Party needed still more money Earthside, Stu was to speculate, acting on secret knowledge of plan of Revolution—he, Prof, and Mike had spent hours discussing what stocks would go up, what would go down, etc., after Der Tag. This was Prof’s pidgin; I am not that sort of gambler.

But money was needed before Der Tag to build “climate of opinion.” We needed publicity, needed delegates and senators in Federated Nations, needed some nation to recognize us quickly once The Day came, we needed laymen telling other laymen over a beer: “What is there on that pile of rock worth one soldier’s life? Let ‘em go to hell in their own way, I say!”

Money for publicity, money for bribes, money for dummy organizations and to infiltrate established organizations; money to get true nature of Luna’s economy (Stu had gone loaded with figures) brought out as scientific research, then in popular form; money to convince foreign office of at least one major nation that there was advantage in a Free Luna; money to sell idea of Lunar tourism to a major cartel—

Too much money! Stu offered own fortune and Prof did not discourage it—Where treasure is, heart will be. But still too much money and far too much to do. I did not know if Stu could swing a tenth of it; simply kept fingers crossed. At least it gave us a channel to Terra. Prof claimed that communications to enemy were essential to any war if was to be fought and settled sensibly. (Prof was a pacifist. Like his vegetarianism, he did not let it keep him from being “rational.” Would have made a terrific theologian.)

As soon as Stu went Earthside, Mike set odds at one in thirteen. I asked him what in hell? “But, Man,” he explained patiently, “it increases risk. That it is necessary risk does not change the fact that risk is increased.”

I shut up. About that time, early May, a new factor reduced some risks while revealing others. One part of Mike handled Terra-Luna microwave traffic—commercial messages, scietitific data, news channels, video, voice radiotelephony, routine Authority traffic—and Warden’s top secret.

Aside from last, Mike could read any of this including commercial codes and ciphers—breaking ciphers was a crossword puzzle to him and nobody mistrusted this machine. Except Warden, and I suspect that his was distrust of all machinery; was sort of person who finds anything more involved than a pair of scissors complex, mysterious, and suspect—Stone Age mind.

Warden used a code that Mike never saw. Also used ciphers and did not work them through Mike; instead he had a moronic little machine in residence office. On top of this he had arrangement with Authority Earthside to switch everything around at preset times. No doubt he felt safe.

Mike broke his cipher patterns and deduced time-change program just to try legs. He did not tackle code until Prof suggested it; it held no interest for him.

But once Prof asked, Mike tackled Warden’s top-secret messages. He had to start from scratch; in past Mike had erased Warden’s messages once transmission was reported. So slowly, slowly he accumulated data for analysis—painfully slow, for Warden used this method only when he had to. Sometimes a week would pass between such messages. But gradually Mike began to gather meanings for letter groups, each assigned a probability. Acode does not crack all at once; possible to know meanings of ninety-nine groups in a message and miss essence because one group is merely GLOPS to you.

However, user has a problem, too; if GLOPS comes through as GLOPT, he’s in trouble. Any method of communication needs redundancy, or information can be lost. Was at redundancy that Mike nibbled, with perfect patience of machine.

Mike solved most of Warden’s code sooner than he had projected; Warden was sending more traffic than in past and most of it one subject (which helped)—subject being security and subversion.

We had Mort in a twitter; he was yelling for help.

He reported subversive activities still going on despite two phalanges of Peace Dragoons and demanded enough troops to station guards in all key spots inside all warrens. Authority told him this was preposterous, no more of FN’s crack troops could be spared—to be permanently ruined for Earthside duties—and such requests should not be made. If he

wanted more guards, he must recruit them from transportees-but such increase in administrative costs must be absorbed in Luna; he would not be allowed more overhead. He was

directed to report what steps be had taken to meet new grain quotas set in our such-and-such.

Warden replied that unless extremely moderate requests for trained security personnel—not-repeat-not untrained, unreliable, and unfit convicts—were met, he could no longer assure civil order, much less increased quotas.

Reply asked sneeringly what difference it made if exconsignees chose to riot among themselves in their holes? If it worried him, had he thought of shutting off lights as was used so successfully in 1996 and 2021?

These exchanges caused us to revise our calendar, to speed some phases, slow others. Like a perfect dinner, a revolution has to be “cooked” so that everything comes out even. Stu needed time Earthside. We needed canisters and small steering rockets and associated circuitry for “rock throwing.” And steel was a problem—buying it, fabricating it, and above all moving it through meander of tunnels to new catapult site. We needed to increase Party at least into “K’s”—say 40,000—with lowest echelons picked for fighting spirit rather than talents we had sought earlier. We needed weapons against landings. We needed to move Mike’s radars without which he was blind. (Mike could not be moved; bits of him spread all through Luna. But he had a thousand meters of rock over that central part of him at Complex, was surrounded by steel and this armor was cradled in springs; Authority had contemplated that someday somebody might lob H-weapons at their control center.)

All these needed to be done and pot must not boil too soon.

So we cut down on things that worried Warden and tried to speed up everything else. Simon Jester took a holiday. Word went out that Liberty Caps were not stylish—but save them. Warden got no more nervous-making phone calls. We quit inciting incidents with Dragoons-which did not stop them but reduced number.

Despite efforts to quiet Mort’s worries a symptom showed up which disquieted us instead. No message (at least we intercepted none) reached Warden agreeing to his demand for more troops—but he started moving people out of Complex. Civil servants who lived there started looking for holes to rent in L-City. Authority started test drills and resonance exploration in a cubic adjacent to L.City which could be converted into a warren.

Could mean that Authority proposed shipping up unusually large draft of prisoners. Could mean that space in Complex was needed for purpose other than quarters. But Mike told us: “Why kid yourselves? The Warden is going to get those troops; that space will be their barracks. Any other explanation I would have heard.”

I said, “But Mike, why didn’t you hear if it’s troops? You have that code of Warden’s fairly well whipped.”

“Not just ‘fairly well,’ I’ve got it whipped. But the last two ships have carried Authority vips and I don’t know what they talk about away from phones!”

So we tried to plan to cover possibility of having to cope with ten more phalanges, that being Mike’s estimate of what cubic being cleared would hold. We could deal with that many—with Mike’s help—but it would mean deaths, not bloodless coup d’etat Prof had planned.

And we increased efforts to speed up other factors. When suddenly we found ourselves committed—

Her name was Marie Lyons; she was eighteen years old and born in Luna, mother having been exiled via Peace Corps in ‘56. No record of father. She seems to have been a harmless person. Worked as a stock-control clerk in shipping department, lived in Complex.

Maybe she hated Authority and enjoyed teasing Peace Dragoons. Or perhaps it started as a commercial transaction as cold-blooded as any in a crib behind a slot-machine lock. How can we know? Six Dragoons were in it. Not satisfied with raping her (if rape it was) they abused her other ways and killed her. But they did not dispose of body neatly; another civil service fem found it before was cold. She screamed. Was her last scream.

We heard about it at once; Mike called us three while Alvarez and Peace Dragoon C.O. were digging into matter in Alvarez’s office. Appears that Peace Goon boss had no trouble laying hands on guilty; he and Alvarez were questioning them one at a time, and quarreling between grillings. Once we heard Alvarez say: “I told you those goons of yours had to have their own women! I warned you!”

“Stuff it,” Dragoon officer answered. “I’ve told you time and again they won’t ship any. The question now is how we hush this up.” “Are you crazy? Warden already knows.”

“It’s still the question.”

“Oh, shut up and send in the next one.”

Early in filthy story Wyoh joined me in workshop. Was pale under makeup, said nothing but wanted to sit close and clench my hand.

At last was over and Dragoon officer left Alvarez. Were still quarreling. Alvarez wanted those six executed at once and fact made public (sensible but not nearly enough, for his needs);

C.O. was still talking about “hushing it up.” Prof said, “Mike, keep an ear there and listen where else you can. Well, Mike? Wyoh? Plans?”

I didn’t have any. Wasn’t a cold, shrewd revolutionist; just wanted to get my heel into faces that matched those six voices. “I don’t know. What do we do, Prof?” “‘Do’? We’re on our tiger; we grab its ears. Mike. Where’s Finn Nielsen? Find him.”

Mike answered, “He’s calling now.” He cut Finn in with us; I heard: “—at Tube South. Both guards dead and about six of our people. Just people, I mean, not necessarily comrades. Some wild rumor about Goons going crazy and raping and killing all women at Complex. Adam, I had better talk to Prof.”

“I’m here, Finn,” Prof answered in a strong, confident voice. “Now we move, we’ve got to. Switch off and get those laser guns and men who trained with them, any you can round up.” “Da! Okay, Adam?”

“Do as Prof says. Then call back.”

“Hold it, Finn!” I cut in. “Mannie here. I want one of those guns.” “You haven’t practiced, Mannie.”

“If it’s a laser, I can use it!”

“Mannie,” Prof said forcefully, “shut up. You’re wasting time; let Finn go. Adam. Message for Mike. Tell him Plan Alert Four.”

Prof’s example damped my oscillating. Had forgotten that Finn was not supposed to know Mike was anybody but “Adam Selene”; forgotten everything but raging anger. Mike said, “Finn has switched off, Prof, and I put Alert Four on standby when this broke. No traffic now except routine stuff filed earlier. You don’t want it interrupted, do you?”

“No, just follow Alert Four. No Earthside transmission either way that tips any news. If one comes in, hold it and consult.” Alert Four was emergency communication doctrine, intended to slap censorship on news to Terra without arousing suspicion. For this Mike was ready to talk in many voices with excuses as to why a direct voice transmission would be delayed—and any taped transmission was no problem.

“Program running,” agreed Mike.

“Good. Mannie, calm down, son, and stick to your knitting. Let other people do the fighting; you’re needed here, we’re going to have to improvise. Wyoh, cut out and get word to Comrade Cecilia to get all Irregulars out of the corridors. Get those children home and keep them home—and have their mothers urging other mothers to do the same thing. We don’t know where the fighting will spread. But we don’t want children hurt if we can help it.”

“Right away, Prof!”

“Wait. As soon as you’ve told Sidris, get moving on your stilyagi. I want a riot at the Authority’s city office—break in, wreck the place, and noise and shouting and destruction—no one hurt if it can be helped. Mike. Alert-Four-Em. Cut off the Complex except for your own lines.”

“Prof!” I demanded. “What sense in starting riots here?”

“Mannie, Mannie! This is The Day! Mike, has the rape and murder news reached other warrens?”

“Not that I’ve heard. I’m listening here and there with random jumps. Tube stations are quiet except Luna City. Fighting has just started at Tube Station West. Want to hear it?”

“Not now. Mannie, slide over there and watch it. But stay out of it and slick close to a phone. Mike, start trouble in all warrens. Pass the news down the cells and use Finn’s version, not the truth. The Goons are raping and killing all the women in the Complex—I’ll give you details or you can invent them. Uh, can you order the guards at tube stations in other warrens back to their barracks? I want riots but there is no point in sending unarmed people against armed men if we can dodge it.”

“I’ll try.”

I hurried to Tube Station West, slowed as I neared it. Corridors were full of angry people. City roared in way I had never heard before and, as I crossed Causeway, could hear shouts and crowd noise from direction of Authority’s city office although it seemed to me there had not been time for Wyoh to reach her stilyagi—nor had there been; what Prof had tried to start was under way spontaneously.

Station was mobbed and I had to push through to see what I assumed to be certain, that passport guards were either dead or fled. ‘Dead’ it turned out, along with three Loonies. One was a boy not more than thirteen. He had died with his hands on a Dragoon’s throat and his head still sporting a little red cap. I pushed way to a public phone and reported.

“Go back,” said Prof. “and read the I.D. of one of those guards. I want name and rank. Have you seen Finn?” “No.”

“He’s headed there with three guns. Tell me where the booth you’re in is, get that name and come back to it.”

One body was gone, dragged away; Bog knows what they wanted with it. Other had been badly battered but I managed to crowd in and snatch dog chain from neck before it, too, was taken somewhere. I elbowed back to phone, found a woman at it. “Lady,” I said, “I’ve got to use that phone. Emergency!”

“You’re welcome to it! Pesky thing’s out of order.”

Worked for me; Mike bad saved it. Gave Prof guard’s name. “Good,” he said. “Have you seen Finn? He’ll be looking for you at that booth.” “Haven’t s—Hold it, just spotted him.”

“Okay, hang onto him. Mike, do you have a voice to fit that Dragoon’s name?” “Sorry, Prof. No.”

“All right, just make it hoarse and frightened; chances are the C.O. won’t know it that well. Or would the trooper call Alvarez?”

“He would call his C.O. Alvarez gives orders through him.”

“So call the C.O. Report the attack and call for help and die in the middle of it. Riot sounds behind you and maybe a shout of ‘There’s the dirty bastard now!’ just before you die. Can you swing it?”

‘Programmed. No huhu,” Mike said cheerfully. “Run it. Mannie, put Finn on.”

Prof’s plan was to sucker off-duty guards out of barracks and keep suckering them—with Finn’s men posted to pick them off as they got out of capsules. And it worked, right up to point where Mort the Wart lost his nerve and kept remaining few to protect himself while he sent frantic messages Earthside—none of which got through.

I wiggled out of Prof’s discipline and took a laser gun when second capsule of Peace Dragoons was due. I burned two Goons, found blood lust gone and let other snipers have rest of squad. Too easy. They would stick heads up out of hatch and that would be that. Half of squad would not come out—until smoked out and then died with rest. By that time I was back at my advance post at phone.

Warden’s decision to hole up caused trouble at Complex; Alvarez was killed and so was Goon C.O. and two of original yellow jackets. But a mixed lot of Dragoons and yellows, thirteen, holed up with Mort, or perhaps were already with him; Mike’s ability to follow events by listening was spotty. But once it seemed clear that all armed effectives were inside Warden’s residence, Prof ordered Mike to start next phase.

Mike turned out all lights in Complex save those in Warden’s residence, and reduced oxygen to gasping point—not killing point but low enough to insure that anyone looking for trouble would not be in shape. But in residence, oxygen supply was cut to zero, leaving pure nitrogen, and left that way ten minutes. At end of that time Finn’s men, waiting in p-suits at Warden’s private tube station, broke latch on airlock and went in, “shoulder to shoulder.” Luna was ours.

Book Two – A RABBLE IN ARMS

14

So a wave of patriotism swept over our new nation and unified it. Isn’t that what histories say? Oh, brother!

My dinkum word, preparing a revolution isn’t as much huhu as having won it. Here we were, in control too soon, nothing ready and a thousand things to do. Authority in Luna was gone— but Lunar Authority Earthside and Federated Nations behind it were very much alive. Had they landed one troopship, orbited one cruiser, anytime next week or two, could have taken Luna back cheap. We were a mob.

New catapult had been tested but canned rock missiles ready to go you could count on fingers of one hand—my left hand. Nor was catapult a weapon that could be used against ships, nor against troops. We had notions for fighting off ships; at moment were just notions. We had a few hundred cheap laser guns stockpiled in Hong Kong Luna—Chinee engineers are smart—but few men trained to use them.

Moreover, Authority had useful functions. Bought ice and grain, sold air and water and power, held ownership or control at a dozen key points. No matter what was done in future, wheels had to turn. Perhaps wrecking city offices of Authority had been hasty (I thought so) as records were destroyed. However, Prof maintained that Loonies, all Loonies, needed a symbol to hate and destroy and those offices were least valuable and most public.

But Mike controlled communications and that meant control of most everything. Prof had started with control of news to and from Earthside, leaving to Mike censorship and faking of news until we could get around to what to tell Terra, and had added sub-phase “M” which cut off Complex from rest of Luna, and with it Richardson Observatory and associated laboratories— Pierce Radioscope, Selenophysical Station, and so forth. These were a problem as Terran scientists were always coming and going and staying as long as six months, stretching time by centrifuge. Most Terrans in Luna, save for a handful of tourists—thirty-four—were scientists. Something had to be done about these Terrans, but meanwhile keeping them from talking to Terra was enough.

For time being, Complex was cut off by phone and Mike did not permit capsules to stop at any station in Complex even after travel was resumed, which it was as soon as Finn Nielsen and squad were through with dirty work.

Turned out Warden was not dead, nor had we planned to kill him; Prof figured that a live warden could always be made dead, whereas a dead one could not be made live if we needed him. So plan was to half kill him, make sure he and his guards could put up no fight, then break in fast while Mike restored oxygen.

With fans turning at top speed, Mike computed it would take four minutes and a bit to reduce oxygen to effective zero—so, five minutes of increasing hypoxia, five minutes of anoxia, then force lower lock while Mike shot in pure oxygen to restore balance. This should not kill anyone—but would knock out a person as thoroughly as anesthesia. Hazard to attackers would come from some or all of those inside having p-suits. But even that might not matter; hypoxia is sneaky, you can pass out without realizing you are short on oxygen. Is new chum’s favorite fatal mistake.

So Warden lived through it and three of his women. But Warden, though he lived, was no use; brain had been oxygen-starved too long, a vegetable. No guard recovered, even though younger than he; would appear anoxia broke necks.

In rest of Complex nobody was hurt. Once lights were on and oxygen restored they were okay, including six rapist-murderers under lock in barracks. Finn decided that shooting was too good for them, so he went judge and used his squad as jury.

They were stripped, hamstrung at ankles and wrists, turned over to women in Complex. Makes me sick to think about what happened next but don’t suppose they lived through as long an ordeal as Marie Lyons endured. Women are amazing creatures—sweet, soft, gentle, and far more savage than we are.

Let me mention those fink spies out of order. Wyoh had been fiercely ready to eliminate them but when we got around to them she had lost stomach. I expected Prof to agree. But he shook head. “No, dear Wyoh, much as I deplore violence, there are only two things to do with an enemy: Kill him. Or make a friend of him. Anything in between piles up trouble for the future. Aman who finks on his friends once will do it again and we have a long period ahead in which a fink can be dangerous; they must go. And publicly, to cause others to be thoughtful.”

Wyoh said, “Professor, you once said that if you condemned a man, you would eliminate him personally. Is that what you are going to do?”

“Yes, dear lady, and no. Their blood shall be on my hands; I accept responsibility. But I have in mind a way more likely to discourage other finks.”

So Adam Selene announced that these persons had been employed by Juan Alvarez, late Security Chief for former Authority, as undercover spies—and gave names and addresses. Adam did not suggest that anything be done.

One man remained on dodge for seven months by changing warrens and name. Then early in ‘77 his body was found outside Novylen’s lock. But most of them lasted no more than hours.

During first hours after coup d’etat we were faced with a problem we had never managed to plan—Adam Selene himself. Who is Adam Selene? Where is he? This is his revolution; he handled every detail, every comrade knows his voice. We’re out in open now… so where is Adam?

We batted it around much of that night, in room L of Raffles—argued it between decisions on a hundred things that came up and people wanted to know what to do, while “Adam” through other voices handled other decisions that did not require talk, composed phony news to send Earthside, kept Complex isolated, many things. (Is no possible doubt: without Mike we could not have taken Luna nor held it.)

My notion was that Prof should become “Adam.” Prof was always our planner and theoretician; everybody knew him; some key comrades knew that he was “Comrade Bill” and all others knew and respected Professor Bernardo de la Paz—My word, he had taught half of leading citizens in Luna City, many from other warrens, was known to every vip in Luna.

“No,” said Prof.

“Why not?” asked Wyoh. “Prof. you’re opted. Tell him, Mike.” “Comment reserved,” said Mike. “I want to hear what Prof has to say.”

“I say you’ve analyzed it, Mike,” Prof answered. “Wyoh dearest comrade, I would not refuse were it possible. But there is no way to make my voice match that of Adam—and every comrade knows Adam by his voice; Mike made it memorable for that very purpose.”

We then considered whether Prof could be slipped in anyhow, showing him only on video and letting Mike reshape whatever Prof said into voice expected from Adam.

Was turned down. Too many people knew Prof, had heard him speak; his voice and way of speaking could not be reconciled with Adam. Then they considered same possibility for me— my voice and Mike’s were baritone and not too many people knew what I sounded like over phone and none over video.

I tromped on it. People were going to be surprised enough to find me one of our Chairman’s lieutenants; they would never believe I was number one.

I said, “Let’s combine deals. Adam has been a mystery all along; keep him that way. He’ll be seen only over video—in a mask. Prof. you supply body; Mike, you supply voice.” Prof shook head. “I can think of no surer way to destroy confidence at our most critical period than by having a leader who wears a mask. No, Mannie.”

We talked about finding an actor to play it. Were no professional actors in Luna then but were good amateurs in Luna Civic Players and in Novy Bolshoi Teatr Associates.

“No,” said Prof, “aside from finding an actor of requisite character—one who would not decide to be Napoleon—we can’t wait. Adam must start handling things not later than tomorrow morning.”

“In that case,” I said, “you’ve answered it. Have to use Mike and never put him on video. Radio only. Have to figure excuse but Adam must never be seen.” “I’m forced to agree,” said Prof.

“Man my oldest friend,” said Mike, “why do you say that I can’t be seen?”

“Haven’t you listened?” I said. “Mike, we have to show a face and body on video. You have a body—but it’s several tons of metal. Aface you don’t have—lucky you, don’t have to shave.”

“But what’s to keep me from showing a face, Man? I’m showing a voice this instant. But there’s no sound behind it. I can show a face the same way.”

Was so taken aback I didn’t answer. I stared at video screen, installed when we leased that room. Apulse is a pulse is a pulse. Electrons chasing each other. To Mike, whole world was variable series of electrical pulses, sent or received or chasing around his innards.

I said, “No, Mike.”

“Why not, Man?”

“Because you can’t! Voice you handle beautifully. Involves only a few thousand decisions a second, a slow crawl to you. But to build up video picture would require, uh, say ten million decisions every second. Mike, you’re so fast I can’t even think about it. But you aren’t that fast.”

Mike said softly, “Want to bet, Man?”

Wyoh said indignantly, “Of course Mike can if he says he can! Mannie, you shouldn’t talk that way.” (Wyoh thinks an electron is something about size and shape of a small pea.) “Mike,” I said slowly, “I won’t put money on it. Okay, want to try? Shall I switch on video?”

“I can switch it on,” he answered.

“Sure you’ll get right one? Wouldn’t do to have this show somewhere else.”

He answered testily, “I’m not stupid. Now let me be, Man—for I admit this is going to take just about all I’ve got.”

We waited in silence. Then screen showed neutral gray with a hint of scan lines. Went black again, then a faint light filled middle and congealed into cloudy areas light and dark, ellipsoid. Not a face, but suggestion of face that one sees in cloud patterns covering Terra.

It cleared a little and reminded me of pictures alleged to be ectoplasm. Aghost of a face. Suddenly firmed and we saw “Adam Selcne.”

Was a still picture of a mature man. No background, just a face as if trimmed out of a print. Yet was, to me, “Adam Selene.” Could not he anybody else. Then he smiled, moving lips and jaw and touching tongue to lips, a quick gesture—and I was frightened.

“How do I look?” he asked.

“Adam,” said Wyoh, “your hair isn’t that curly. And it should go back on each side above your forehead. You look as if you were wearing a wig, dear.” Mike corrected it. “Is that better?’

“Not quite so much. And don’t you have dimples? I was sure I could hear dimples when you chuckle. Like Prof’s.” Mike-Adam smiled again; this time he had dimples. “How should I be dressed, Wyoh?”

“Are you at your office?”

“I’m still at office. Have to be, tonight.” Background turned gray, then came into focus and color. Awall calendar behind him gave date, Tuesday 19 May 2076; a clock showed correct time. Near his elbow was a carton of coffee. On desk was a solid picture, a family group, two men, a woman, four children. Was background noise, muted roar of Old Dome Plaza louder than usual; I heard shouts and in distance some singing: Simon’s version of “Marseillaise.”

Off screen Ginwallah’s voice said, “Gospodin?”

Adam turned toward it. “I’m busy, Albert,” he said patiently. “No calls from anyone but cell B. You handle everything else.” He looked back at us. “Well, Wyoh? Suggestions? Prof? Man my doubting friend? Will I pass?”

I rubbed eyes. “Mike, can you cook?” “Certainly. But I don’t; I’m married.”

“Adam,” said Wyoh, “how can you look so neat after the day we’ve had?”

“I don’t let little things worry me.” He looked at Prof. “Professor, if the picture is okay, let’s discuss what I’ll say tomorrow. I was thinking of pre-empting the eight hundred newscast, have it announced all night, and pass the word down the cells.”

We talked rest of night. I sent up for coffee twice and Mike-Adam had his carton renewed. When I ordered sandwiches, he asked Ginwallah to send out for some. I caught a glimpse of Albert Ginwallah in profile, a typical babu, polite and faintly scornful. Hadn’t known what he looked like. Mike ate while we ate, sometimes mumbling around a mouthful of food.

When I asked (professional interest) Mike told me that, after he had picture built up, he had programmed most of it for automatic and gave his attention just to facial expressions. But soon I forgot it was fake. Mike-Adam was talking with us by video, was all, much more convenient than by phone.

By oh-three-hundred we had policy settled, then Mike rehearsed speech. Prof found points be wanted to add; Mike made revisions, then we decided to get some rest, even Mike-Adam was yawning—although in fact Mike held fort all through night, guarding transmissions to Terra, keeping Complex wailed off, listening at many phones. Prof and I shared big bed, Wyoh stretched out on couch, I whistled lights out. For once we slept without weights.

While we had breakfast, Adam Selene addressed Free Luna.

He was gentle, strong, warm, and persuasive. “Citizens of Free Luna, friends, comrades—to those of you who do not know me let me introduce myself. I am Adam Selene. Chairman of the Emergency Committee of Comrades for Free Luna … now of Free Luna, we are free at last. The so-called ‘Authority’ which has long unsurped power in this our home has been overthrown. I find myself temporary head of such government as we have—the Emergency Committee.

“Shortly, as quickly as can be arranged, you will opt your own government.” Adam smiled and made a gesture inviting help. “In the meantime, with your help, I shall do my best. We will make mistakes—be tolerant. Comrades, if you have not revealed yourselves to friends and neighbors, it is time you did so. Citizens, requests may reach you through your comrade neighbors. I hope you will comply willingly; it will speed the day when I can bow out and life can get back to normal—a new normal, free of the Authority, free of guards, free of troops stationed on us, free of passports and searches and arbitrary arrests.

“There has to be a transition. To all of you—please go back to work, resume normal lives. To those who worked for the Authority, the need is the same. Go back to work. Wages will go on, your jobs stay the same, until we can decide what is needed, what happily no longer is needed now that we are free, and what must be kept but modified. You new citizens, transportees sweating out sentences pronounced on you Earthside—you are free, your sentences are finished! But in the meantime I hope that you will go on working. You are not required to—the days of coercion are gone—but you are urged to. You are of course free to leave the Complex, free to go anywhere … and capsule service to and from the Complex will resume at once. But before you use your new freedom to rush into town, let me remind you: ‘There is no such thing as a free lunch.’ You are better off for the time being where you are; the food may not be fancy but will continue hot and on time.

“To take on temporarily those necessary functions of the defunct Authority I have asked the General Manager of LuNoHo Company to serve. This company will provide termporary supervision and will start analyzing how to do away with the tyrannical parts of the Authority and how to transfer the useful parts to private hands. So please help them.

“To you citizens of Terran nations among us, scientists and travelers and others, greetings! You are witnessing a rare event, the birth of a nation. Birth means blood and pain; there has been some. We hope it is over. You will not be inconvenienced unnecessarily and your passage home will be arranged as soon as possible. Conversely, you are welcome to stay, still more welcome to become citizens. But for the present I urge you to stay out of the corridors, avoid incidents that might lead to unnecessary blood, unnecessary pain. Be patient with us and I urge my fellow citizens to be patient with you. Scientists from Terra, at the Observatory and elsewhere, go on with your work and ignore us. Then you won’t even notice that we are going through the pangs of creating a new nation. One thing—I am sorry to say that we are temporarily interfering with your right to communicate with Earthside. This we do from necessity; censorship will be lifted as quickly as possible—we hate it as much as you do.”

Adam added one more request: “Don’t try to see me, comrades, and phone me only if you must; all others, write if you need to, your letters will receive prompt attention. But I am not twins, I got no sleep last night and can’t expect much tonight. I can’t address meetings, can’t shake hands, can’t meet delegations; I must stick to this desk and work—so that I can get rid of this job and turn it over to your choice.” He grinned at them. “Expect me to be as hard to see as Simon Jester!”

It was a fifteen-minute cast but that was essence: Go back to work, be patient, give us time. Those scientists gave us almost no time—I should have guessed; was my sort of pidgin.

All communication Earthside channeled through Mike. But those brain boys had enough electronic equipment to stock a warehouse; once they decided to, it took them only hours to breadboard a rig that could reach Terra.

Only thing that saved us was a fellow traveler who thought Luna should be free. He tried to phone Adam Selene, wound up talking to one of a squad of women we had co-opted from C and D level—a system thrown together in self-defense as, despite Mike’s request, half of Luna tried to phone Adam Selene after that videocast, everything from requests and demands to busybodies who wanted to tell Adam how to do his job.

After about a hundred calls got routed to me through too much zeal by a comrade in phone company, we set up this buffer squad. Happily, comrade lady who took this call recognized that soothe-‘em-down doctrine did not apply; she phoned me.

Minutes later myself and Finn Nielsen plus some eager guns headed by capsule for laboratory area. Our informant was scared to give name but had told me where to find transmitter. We caught them transmitting, and only fast action on Finn’s part kept them breathing; his boys were itchy. But we did not want to “make an example”; Finn and I had settled that on way out. Is hard to frighten scientists, their minds don’t work that way. Have to get at them from other angles.

I kicked that transmitter to pieces and ordered Director to have everyone assemble in mess hall and required roll call—where a phone could hear. Then I talked to Mike, got names from him, and said to Director: “Doctor, you told me they were all here. We’re missing so-and-so”—seven names. “Get them here!”

Missing Terrans had been notified, had refused to stop what they were doing—typical scientists.

Then I talked, Loonies on one side of room, Terrans on other. To Terrans I said; “We tried to treat you as guests. But three of you tried and perhaps succeeded in sending message Earthside.”

I turned to Director. “Doctor, I could search—warren, surface structures, all labs, every space—and destroy everything that might be used for transmitter. I’m electron pusher by trade; I know what wide variety of components can be converted into transmitters. Suppose I destroy everything that might be useful for that and, being stupid, take no chance and smash anything I don’t understand. What result?”

Would have thought I was about to kill his baby! He turned gray. “That would stop every research … destroy priceless data.., waste, oh, I don’t know how much! Call it a half billion dollars!”

“So I thought. Could take all that gear instead of smashing and let you go on best you can.”

“That would be almost as bad. You must understand, Gospodin, that when an experiment is interrupted—”

“I know. Easier than moving anything—and maybe missing some—is to take you all to Complex and quarter you there. We have what used to be Dragoon barracks. But that too would ruin experiments. Besides—Where you from, Doctor?”

“Princeton, New Jersey.”

“So? You’ve been here five months and no doubt exercising and wearing weights. Doctor, if we did that, you might never see Princeton again. If we move you, we’ll keep you locked up. You’ll get soft. If emergency goes on very long, you’ll be a Loonie like it or not. And all your brainy help with you.”

Acocky chum stepped forward—one who had to be sent for twice. “You can’t do this! It’s against the law!” “What law, Gospodin? Some law back in your hometown?” I turned. “Finn, show him law.”

Finn stepped forward and placed emission bell of gun at man’s belly button. Thumb started to press down—safety-switched, I could see. I said, “Don’t kill him, Finn!”—then went on: “I will eliminate this man if that’s what it takes to convince you. So watch each other! One more offense will kill all your chances of seeing home again—as well as ruining researches. Doctor, I warn you to find ways to keep check on your staff.”

I turned to Loonies. “Tovarishchee, keep them honest. Work up own guard system. Don’t take nonsense; every earthworm is on probation. If you have to eliminate some, don’t hesitate.” I turned to Director. “Doctor, any Loonie can go anywhere any time—even your bedroom. Your assistants are now your bosses so far as security is concerned; if a Loonie decides to follow you or anybody into a W.C., don’t argue; he might be jumpy.”

I turned to Loonies. “Security first! You each work for some earthworm—watch him! Split it among you and don’t miss anything. Watch ‘em so close they can’t build mouse trap, much less transmitter. If interferes with work for them, don’t worry; wages will go on.”

Could see grins. Lab assistant was best job a Loonie could find those days—but they worked under earthworms who looked down on us, even ones who pretended and were oh so gracious.

I let it go at that. When I had been phoned, I had intended to eliminate offenders. But Prof and Mike set me straight: Plan did not permit violence against Terrans that could be avoided. We set up “ears,” wideband sensitive receivers, around lab area, since even most directional rig spills a little in neighborhood. And Mike listened on all phones in area, After that we

chewed nails and hoped.

Presently we relaxed as news up from Earthside showed nothing, they seemed to accept censored transmissions without suspicion, and private and commercial traffic and Authority’s transmissions all seemed routine. Meanwhile we worked, trying in days what should take months.

We received one break in timing; no passenger ship was on Luna and none was due until 7 July. We could have coped—suckered a ship’s officers to “dine with Warden” or something, then mounted guard on its senders or dismantled them. Could not have lifted without our help; in those days one drain on ice was providing water for reaction mass. Was not much drain compared with grain shipments; one manned ship a month was heavy traffic then, while grain lifted every day. What it did mean was that an incoming ship was not an insuperable hazard. Nevertheless was lucky break; we were trying so hard to make everything look normal until we could defend ourselves.

Grain shipments went on as before; one was catapulted almost as Finn’s men were breaking into Warden’s residence. And next went out on time, and all others.

Neither oversight nor faking for interim; Prof knew what he was doing. Grain shipments were a big operation (for a little country like Luna) and couldn’t be changed in one semi-lunar; bread-and-beer of too many people was involved. If our committee had ordered embargo and quit buying grain, we would have been chucked out and a new committee with other ideas would have taken over.

Prof said that an educational period was necessary. Meanwhile grain barges catapulted as usual; LuNoHoCo kept books and issued receipts, using civil service personnel. Dispatches went out in Warden’s name and Mike talked to Authority Earthside, using Warden’s voice. Deputy Administrator proved reasonable, once he understood it upped his life expectancy. Chief Engineer stayed on job, too—McIntyre was a real Loonie, given chance, rather than fink by nature. Other department heads and minor stooges were no problem; life went on as before and we were too busy to unwind Authority system and put useful parts up for sale.

Over a dozen people turned up claiming to be Simon Jester; Simon wrote a rude verse disclairning them and had picture on front page of Lunatic, Pravda, and Gong. Wyoh let herself go blond and made trip to see Greg at new catapult site, then a longer trip, ten days, to old home in Hong Kong Luna, taking Anna who wanted to see it. Wyoh needed a vacation and Prof urged her to take it, pointing on that she was in touch by phone and that closer Party contact was needed in Hong Kong. I took over her stilyagi with Slim and Hazel as my lieutenants— bright, sharp kids I could trust. Slim was awed to discover that I was “Comrade Bork” and saw “Adam Selene” every day; his Party name started with “G.” Made a good team for other reason, too. Hazel suddenly started showing cushiony curves and not all from Mimi’s superb table; she had reached that point in her orbit. Slim was ready to change her name to “Stone” any time she was willing to opt. In meantime he was anxious to do Party work he could share with our fierce little redhead.

Not everybody was willing. Many comrades turned out to be talk-talk soldiers. Still more thought war was over once we had eliminated Peace Goons and captured Warden. Others were indignant to learn how far down they were in Party structure; they wanted to elect a new structure, themselves at top. Adam received endless calls proposing this or something like it—

would listen, agree, assure them that their services must not be wasted by waiting for election—and refer them to Prof or me. Can’t recall any of these ambitious people who amounted to anything when I tried to put them to work.

Was endless work and nobody wanted to do it. Well, a few. Some best volunteers were people Party had never located. But in general, Loonies in and out of Party had no interest in “patriotic” work unless well paid. One chum who claimed to be a Party member (was not) spragged me in Raffles where we set up headquarters and wanted me to contract for fifty thousand buttons to be worn by pre-coup “Veterans of Revolution”—a “small” profit for him (I estimate 400 percent markup), easy dollars for me, a fine thing for everybody.

When I brushed him off, he threatened to denounce me to Adam Selene—”Avery good friend of mine, I’ll have you know!”—for sabotage.

That was “help” we got. What we needed was something else. Needed steel at new catapult and plenty—Prof asked, if really necessary to put steel around rock missiles; I had to point out that an induction field won’t grab bare rock. We needed to relocate Mike’s ballistic radars at old site and install doppler radar at new site—both jobs because we could expect attacks from space at old site.

We called for volunteers, got only two who could be used—and needed several hundred mechanics who did not mind hard work in p-suits. So we hired, paying what we had to– LuNoHoCo went in hock to Bank of Hong Kong Luna; was no time to steal that much and most funds had been transferred Earthside to Stu. Adinkum comrade, Foo Moses Morris, co- signed much paper to keep us going—and wound up broke and started over with a little tailoring shop in Kongville. That was later.

Authority Scrip dropped from 3-to-1 to 17-to-1 after coup and civil service people screamed, as Mike was still paying in Authority checks. We said they could stay on or resign; then those we needed, we rehired with Hong Kong dollars. But created a large group not on our side from then on; they longed for good old days and were ready to stab new regime.

Grain farmers and brokers were unhappy because payment at catapult head continued to be Authority scrip at same old fixed prices. “We won’t take it!” they cried—and LuNoHoCo man would shrug and tell them they didn’t have to but this grain still went to Authority Earthside (it did) and Authority scrip was all they would get. So take cheque, or load your grain back into rolligons and get it out of here.

Most took it. All grumbled and some threatened to get out of grain and start growing vegetables or fibers or something that brought Hong Kong dollars—and Prof smiled.

We needed every drillman in Luna, especially ice miners who owned heavy-duty laser drills. As soldiers. We needed them so badly that, despite being shy one wing and rusty, I considered joining up, even though takes muscle to wrestle a big drill, and prosthetic just isn’t muscle. Prof told me not to be a fool.

Dodge we had in mind would not work well Earthside; a laser beam carrying heavy power works best in vacuum—but there it works just dandy for whatever range its collimation is good for. These big drills, which had carved through rock seeking pockets of ice, were now being mounted as “artillery” to repel space attacks. Both ships and missiles have electronic nervous systems and does electronic gear no good to blast it with umpteen joules placed in a tight beam. If target is pressured (as manned ships are and most missiles), all it takes is to burn a hole, depressure it. If not pressured, a heavy laser beam can still kill it—burn eyes, louse guidance, spoil anything depending on electronics as most everything does.

An H-bomb with circuitry ruined is not a bomb, is just big tub of lithium deuteride that can’t do anything but crash. Aship with eyes gone is a derelict, not a warship.

Sounds easy, is not. Those laser drills were never meant for targets a thousand kilometers away, or even one, and was no quick way to rig their cradles for accuracy. Gunner had to have guts to hold fire until last few seconds—on a target heading at him maybe two kilometers per second. But was best we had, so we organized First and Second Volunteer Defense Gunners of Free Luna—two regiments so that First could snub lowly Second and Second could be Jealous of First. First got older men, Second got young and eager.

Having called them “volunteers,” we hired in Hong Kong dollars—and was no accident that ice was being paid for in controlled market in wastepaper Authority script.

On top of all, we were talking up a war scare. Adam Selene talked over video, reminding that Authority was certain to try to regain its tyranny and we had only days to prepare; papers quoted him and published stories of their own—we had made special effort to recruit newsmen before coup. People were urged to keep p-suits always near and to test pressure alarms in homes. Avolunteer Civil Defense Corps was organized in each warren.

What with moonquakes always with us, each warren’s pressure co-op always had sealing crews ready at any hour. Even with silicone stay-soft and fiberglass any warren leaks. In Davis Tunnels our boys did maintenance on seal every day. But now we recruited hundreds of emergency sealing crews, mostly stilyagi, drilled them with fake emergencies, had them stay in

p-suits with helmets open when on duty.

They did beautifully. But idiots made fun of them—”play soldiers,” “Adam’s little apples,” other names. Ateam was going through a drill, showing they could throw a temporary lock around one that had been damaged, and one of these pinheads stood by and rode them loudly.

Civil Defense team went ahead, completed temporary lock, tested it with helmets closed; it held—came out, grabbed this joker, took him through into temporary lock and on out into zero pressure, dumped him.

Belittlers kept opinions to selves after that. Prof thought we ought to send out a gentle warning not to eliminate so peremptorily. I opposed it and got my way; could see no better way to improve breed. Certain types of loudmouthism should be a capital offense among decent people.

But our biggest headaches were self-anointed statesmen.

Did I say that Loonies are “non-politica1”? They are, when comes to doing anything. But doubt if was ever a time two Loonies over a liter of beer did not swap loud opinions about how things ought to be run.

As mentioned, these self-appointed political scientists tried to grab Adam Selene’s ear. But Prof had a place for them; each was invited to take part in “Ad-Hoc Congress for Organization of Free Luna”—which met in Community Hall in Luna City, then resolved to stay in session until work was done, a week in L-City, a week in Novylen, then Hong Kong, and start over. All sessions were in video. Prof presided over first and Adam Selene addressed them by video and encouraged them to do a thorough job—”History is watching you.”

I listened to some sessions, then cornered Prof and asked what in Bog’s name he was up to? “Thought you didn’t want any government. Have you heard those nuts since you turned them loose?”

He smiled most dimply smile. “What’s troubling you, Manuel?”

Many things were troubling me. With me breaking heart trying to round up heavy drills and men who could treat them as guns these idlers had spent an entire afternoon discussing immigration. Some wanted to stop it entirely. Some wanted to tax it, high enough to finance government (when ninety-nine out of a hundred Loonies had had to be dragged to The Rock!); some wanted to make it selective by “ethnic ratios.” (Wondered how they would count me?) Some wanted to limit it to females until we were 50-50. That had produced a Scandinavian shout: “Ja, cobber! Tell ‘em send us hoors! Tousands and tousands of hoors! I marry ‘em, I betcha!”

Was most sensible remark all afternoon.

Another time they argued “time.” Sure, Greenwich time bears no relation to lunar. But why should it when we live Underground? Show me a Loonie who can sleep two weeks and work two weeks; lunars don’t fit our metabolism. What was urged was to make a lunar exactly equal to twenty-eight days (instead of 29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, 2.78 seconds) and do this by making days longer—and hours, minutes, and seconds, thus making each semi-lunar exactly two weeks.

Sure, lunar is necessary for many purposes. Controls when we go up on surface, why we go, and how long we stay. But, aside from throwing us out of gear with our only neighbor, had that wordy vacuum skull thought what this would do to every critical figure in science and engineering? As an electronics man I shuddered. Throw away every book, table, instrument, and start over? I know that some of my ancestors did that in switching from old English units to MKS—but they did it to make things easier. Fourteen inches to a foot and some odd number of feet to a mile. Ounces and pounds. Oh, Bog!

Made sense to change that—but why go out of your way to create confusion?

Somebody wanted a committee to determine exactly what Loonie language is, then fine everybody who talked Earthside English or other language. Oh, my people!

I read tax proposals in Lunatic—four sorts of “SingleTaxers”—a cubic tax that would penalize a man if he extended tunnels, a head tax (everybody pay same), income tax (like to see anyone figure income of Davis Family or try to get information out of Mum!), and an “air tax” which was not fees we paid then but something else.

Hadn’t realized “Free Luna” was going to have taxes. Hadn’t had any before and got along. You paid for what you got. Tanstaafl. How else?

Another time some pompous choom proposed that bad breath and body odors be made an elimination offense. Could almost sympathize, having been stuck on occasion in a capsule with such stinks. But doesn’t happen often and tends to be self-correcting; chronic offenders, or unfortunates who can’t correct, aren’t likely to reproduce, seeing how choosy women are.

One female (most were men, but women made up for it in silliness) had a long list she wanted made permanent laws—about private matters. No more plural marriage of any sort. No divorces. No “fornication”—had to look that one up. No drinks stronger than 4% beer. Church services only on Saturdays and all else to stop that day. (Air and temperature and pressure engineering, lady? Phones and capsules?) Along list of drugs to be prohibited and a shorter list dispensed only by licensed physicians. (What is a “licensed physician”? Healer I go to has a sign reading “practical doctor”—makcs book on side, which is why I go to him. Look, lady, aren’t any medical schools in Luna!) (Then, I mean.) She even wanted to make gambling illegal. If a Loonie couldn’t roll double or nothing, he would go to a shop that would, even if dice were loaded.

Thing that got me was not her list of things she hated, since she was obviously crazy as a Cyborg, but fact that always somebody agreed with her prohibitions. Must be a yearning deep in human heart to stop other people from doing as they please. Rules, laws—always for other fellow. Amurky part of us, something we had before we came down out of trees, and failed to shuck when we stood up. Because not one of those people said: “Please pass this so that I won’t be able to do something I know I should stop.” Nyet, tovarishchee, was always something they hated to see neighbors doing. Stop them “for their own good”—not because speaker claimed to be harmed by it.

Listening to that session I was almost sorry we got rid of Mort the Wart. He stayed holed up with his women and didn’t tell us how to run private lives. But Prof didn’t get excited; he went on smiling. “Manuel, do you really think that mob of retarded children can pass any laws?”

“You told them to. Urged them to.”

“My dear Manuel, I was simply putting all my nuts in one basket. I know those nuts; I’ve listened to them for years. I was very careful in selecting their committees; they all have built-in confusion, they will quarrel. The chairman I forced on them while letting them elect him is a ditherer who could not unravel a piece of string—thinks every subject needs ‘more study.’ I almost needn’t have bothered; more than six people cannot agree on anything, three is better—and one is perfect for a job that one can do. This is why parliamentary bodies all through history, when they accomplished anything, owed it to a few strong men who dominated the rest. Never fear, son, this Ad-Hoc Congress will do nothing… or if they pass something through sheer fatigue, it will be so loaded with contradictions that it will have to be thrown out. In the meantime they are out of our hair. Besides, there is something we need them for, later.”

“Thought you said they could do nothing.”

“They won’t do this. One man will write it—a dead man—and late at night when they are very tired, they’ll pass it by acclamation.” “Who’s this dead man? You don’t mean Mike?”

“No, no! Mike is far more alive than those yammerheads. The dead man is Thomas Jefferson—first of the rational anarchists, my boy, and one who once almost managed to slip over his non-system through the most beautiful rhetoric ever written. But they caught him at it, which I hope to avoid. I cannot improve on his phrasing; I shall merely adapt it to Luna and the

twenty-first century.”

“Heard of him, Freed slaves, nyet?”

“One might say he tried but failed. Never mind. How are the defenses progressing? I don’t see how we can keep up the pretense past the arrival date of this next ship.” “Can’t be ready then.”

“Mike says we must be.”

We weren’t but ship never arrived. Those scientists outsmarted me and Loonies I had told to watch them. Was a rig at focal point of biggest reflector and Loonie assistants believed doubletalk about astronomical purpose—a new wrinkle in radiotelescopes.

I suppose it was. Was ultramicrowave and stuff was bounced at reflector by a wave guide and thus left scope lined up nicely by mirror. Remarkably like early radar. And metal latticework and foil heat shield of barrel stopped stray radiation, thus “ears” I had staked out heard nothing.

They put message across, their version and in detail. First we heard was demand from Authority to Warden to deny this hoax, find hoaxer, put stop to it. So instead we gave them a Declaration of Independence.

“In Congress assembled, July Fourth, Twenty-Seventy-Six—” Was beautiful.

15

Signing of Declaration of Independence went as Prof said it would. He sprang it on them at end of long day, announced a special session after dinner at which Adam Selene would speak. Adam read aloud, discussing each sentence, then read it without stopping, making music of sonorous phrases. People wept. Wyoh, seated by me, was one, and I felt like it even though had read it earlier.

Then Adam looked at them and said, “The future is waiting. Mark well what you do,” and turned meeting over to Prof rather than usual chairman.

Was twenty-two hundred and fight began. Sure, they were in favor of it; news all day had been jammed with what bad boys we were, how we were to be punished, taught a lesson, so forth. Not necessary to spice it up; stuff up from Earthside was nasty—Mike merely left out on-other-hand opinions. If ever was a day when Luna felt unified it was probably second of July 2076.

So they were going to pass it; Prof knew that before he offered it.

But not as written—”Honorable Chairman, in second paragraph, that word ‘unalienable,’ is no such word; should be ‘inalienable’—and anyhow wouldn’t it be more dignified to say ‘sacred rights’ rather than ‘inalienable rights’? I’d like to hear discussion on this.”

That choom was almost sensible, merely a literary critic, which is harmless, like dead yeast left in beer. But—Well, take that woman who hated everything. She was there with list; read it aloud and moved to have it incorporated into Declaration “so that the peoples of Terra will know that we are civilized and fit to take our places in the councils of mankind!”

Prof not only let her get away with it; he encouraged her, letting her talk when other people wanted to—then blandly put her proposal to a vote when hadn’t even been seconded. (Congress operated by rules they had wrangled over for days. Prof was familiar with rules but followed them only as suited him.) She was voted down in a shout, and left.

Then somebody stood up and said of course that long list didn’t belong in Declaration—but shouldn’t we have general principles? Maybe a statement that Luna Free State guaranteed freedom, equality, and security to all? Nothing elaborate, just those fundamental principles that everybody knew was proper purpose of goiverament.

True enough and let’s pass it—but must read “Freedom, equality, peace, and security”—right, Comrade? They wrangled over whether “freedom” included “free air,” or was that part of “security”? Why not be on safe side and list “free air” by name? Move to amend to make it “free air and water”—because you didn’t have “freedom” or “security” unless you had both air and water.

Air, water, and food.

Air, water, food, and cubic.

Air, water, food, cubic, and heat.

No, make “heat” read “power” and you had it all covered. Everything.

Cobber, have you lost your mind? That’s far from everything and what you’ve left out is an affront to all womankind—Step outside and say that! Let me finish. We’ve got to tell them right from deal that we will permit no more ships to land unless they carry at least as many women as men. At least, I said—and I for one won’t chop it unless it sets immigration issue straight.

Prof never lost dimples.

Began to see why Prof had slept all day and was not wearing weights. Me, I was tired, having spent all day in p-suit out beyond catapult head cutting in last of relocated ballistic radars. And everybody was tired; by midnight crowd began to thin, convinced that nothing would be accomplished that night and bored by any yammer not their own.

Was later than midnight when someone asked why this Declaration was dated fourth when today was second? Prof said mildly that it was July third now—and it seemed unlikely that our Declaration could be announced earlier than fourth and that July fourth carried historical symbolism that might help.

Several people walked out at announcement that probably nothing would be settled until fourth of July. But I began to notice something: Hall was filling as fast as was emptying. Finn Nielsen slid into a seat that had just been vacated. Comrade Clayton from Hong Kong showed up, pressed my shoulder, smiled at Wyoh, found a seat. My youngest lieutenants. Slim and Hazel, I spotted down front—and was thinking I must alibi Hazel by telling Mum I had kept her out on Parts business—when was amused to see Mum herself next to them. And Sidris. And Greg, who was supposed to be at new catapult.

Looked around and picked out a dozen more—night editor of Lunaya Pravda, General Manager of LuNoHoCo, others, and each one a working comrade, Began to see that Prof had stacked deck. That Congress never had a fixed membership; these dinkum comrades had as much right to show up as those who had been talking a month. Now they sat—and voted down amendments.

About three hundred, when I was wondering how much more I could take, someone brought a note to Prof. He read it, banged gavel and said, “Adam Selene begs your indulgence. Do I hear unanimous consent?”

So screen back of rostrum lighted up again and Adam told them that he had been following debate and was warmed by many thoughtful and constructive criticisms. But could he made a suggestion? Why not admit that any piece of writing was imperfect? If thin declaration was in general what they wanted, why not postpone perfection for another day and pass this as it stands? “Honorable Chairman, I so move.”

They passed it with a yell. Prof said, “Do I hear objection?” and waited with gavel raised. Aman who had been talking when Adam had asked to be heard said, “Well, . . I still say that’s a dangling participle, but okay, leave it in.”

Prof hanged gavel. “So ordered!”

Then we filed up and put our chops on a big scroll that had been “sent over from Adam’s office”–and I noticed Adam’s chop on it. I signed right under Hazel—child now could write although was still short on book learning. Her chop was shaky but she wrote it large and proud. Comrade Clayton signed his Party name, real name in letters, and Japanese chop, three little pictures one above other. Two comrades chopped with X’s and had them witnessed. All Party leaders were there that night (morning), all chopped it, and not more than a dozen yammerers stuck. But those who did, put their chops down for history to read. And thereby committed “their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honors.”

While queue was moving slowly past and people were talking, Prof banged for attention. “I ask for volunteers for a dangerous mission. This Declaration will go on the news channels— but must be presented in person to the Federated Nations, on Terra.”

That put stop to noise. Prof was looking at me. I swallowed and said, “I volunteer.” Wyoh echoed, “So do I!”—and little Hazel Meade said, “Me, too!”

In moments were a dozen, from Finn Nielsen to Gospodin Dangling-Participle (turned out to be good cobber aside from his fetish). Prof took names, murmured something about getting in touch as transportation became available.

I got Prof aside and said, “Look, Prof, you too tired to track? You know ship for seventh was canceled; now they’re talking about slapping embargo on us. Next ship they lift for Luna will be a warship. How you planning to travel? As prisoner?”

“Oh, we won’t use their ships.”

“So? Going to build one? Any idea how long that takes? If could build one at all. Which I doubt.” “Manuel, Mike says it’s necessary—and has it all worked out.”

I did know Mike said was necessary; he had rerun problem soon as we learned that bright laddies at Richardson had snuck one home—he now gave us only one chance in fifty-three… with imperative need for Prof to go Earthside. But I’m not one to worry about impossibilities; I had spent day working to make that one chance in fifty-three turn up.

“Mike will provide the ship,” Prof went on. “He has completed its design and it is being worked on.” “He has? It is? Since when is Mike engineer?”

“Isn’t he?” asked Prof.

I started to answer, shut up. Mike had no degrees. Simply knew more engineering than any man alive. Or about Shakespeare’s plays, or riddles, or history, name it. “Tell me more.” “Manuel, we’ll go to Terra as a load of grain.”

“What? Who’s ‘we’?”

“You and myself. The other volunteers are merely decorative.”

I said, “Look, Prof. I’ve stuck. Worked hard when whole thing seemed silly. Worn these weights—got ‘em on now—on chance I might have to go to that dreadful place. But contracted to go in a ship, with at least a Cyborg pilot to help me get down safely. Did not agree to go as meteorite.”

He said, “Very well, Manuel. I believe in free choice, always. Your alternate will go.” “My—Who?”

“Comrade Wyoming. So far as I know she is the only other person in training for the trip … other than a few Terrans.”

So I went. But talked to Mike first. He said patiently. “Man my first friend, there isn’t a thing to worry about. You are scheduled load KM187 series ‘76 and you’ll arrive in Bombay with no trouble. But to be sure—to reassure you—I selected that barge because it will be taken out of parking orbit and landed when India is faced toward me, and I’ve added an override so that I can take you away from ground control if I don’t like the way they handle you. Trust me, Man, it has all been thought through. Even the decision to continue shipments when security was broken was part of this plan.”

“Might have told me.”

“There was no need to worry you. Professor had to know and I’ve kept in touch with him. But you are going simply to take care of him and back him up—do his job if he dies, a factor on which I can give you no reassurance.”

I sighed. “Okay. But, Mike, surely you don’t think you can pilot a barge into a soft landing at this distance? Speed of light alone would trip you.”

“Man, don’t you think I understand ballistics? For the orbital position then, from query through reply and then to command-received is under four seconds… and you can rely on me not to waste microseconds. Your maximum parking-orbit travel in four seconds is only thirty-two kilometers, diminishing asymptotically to zero at landing. My reflex time will be effectively less than that of a pilot in a manual landing because I don’t waste time grasping a situation and deciding on correct action. So my maximum is four seconds. But my effective reflex time is much less, as I project and predict constantly, see ahead, program it out—in effect, I’ll stay four seconds ahead of you in your trajectory and respond instantly.”

“That steel can doesn’t even have an altimeter!”

“It does now. Man, please believe me; I’ve thought of everything. The only reason I’ve ordered this extra equipment is to reassure you. Poona ground control hasn’t made a bobble in the last five thousand loads. For a computer it’s fairly bright.”

“Okay. Uh, Mike, how hard do they splash those bleeding barges? What gee?”

“Not high, Man. Ten gravities at injection, then that programs down to a steady, soft four gees … then you’ll be nudged again between six and five gees just before splash. The splash itself is gentle, equal to a fall of fifty meters and you enter ogive first with no sudden shock, less than three gees. Then you surface and splash again, lightly, and simply float at one gee. Man, those barge shells are built as lightly as possible for economy’s sake. We can’t afford to toss them around or they would split their seams.”

“How sweet. Mike, what would ‘six to five gees’ do to you? Split your seams?”

“I conjecture that I was subjected to about six gravities when they shipped me up here. Six gravities in my present condition would shear many of my essential connections. However, I’m more interested in the extremely high, transient accelerations I am going to experience from shock waves when Terra starts bombing us. Data are insufficient for prediction but I may lose control of my outlying functions, Man. This could be a major factor in any tactical situation.”

“Mike, you really think they are going to bomb us?” “Count on it, Man. That is why this trip is so important.”

Left it at that and went out to see this coffin. Should have stayed home.

Ever looked at one of those silly barges? Just a steel cylinder with retro and guidance rockets and radar transponder. Resembles a spaceship way a pair of pliers resembles my number-three arm. They had this one cut open and were outfitting our “living quarters.”

No galley. No W.C. No nothing. Why bother? We were going to be in it only fifty hours. Start empty so that you won’t need a honey sack in your suit. Dispense with lounge and bar; you’ll never be out of your suit, you’ll be drugged and not caring.

At least Prof would be drugged almost whole time; I had to be alert at landing to try to get us out of this death trap if something went wrong and nobody came along with a tin opener. They were building a shaped cradle in which backs of our p-suits would fit; we would be strapped into these holes. And stay there, clear to Terra. They seemed more concerned about making total mass equal to displaced wheat and same center of gravity and all moment arms adding up correctly than they did about our comfort; engineer in charge told me that even padding to be added inside our p-suits was figured in.

Was glad to learn we were going to have padding; those holes did not look soft. Returned home in thoughtful condition.

Wyoh was not at dinner, unusual; Greg was, more unusual. Nobody said anything about my being scheduled to imitate a falling rock next day although all knew. But did not realize anything special was on until all next generation left table without being told. Then knew why Greg had not gone back to Mare Undarum site after Congress adjourned that morning; somebody had asked for a Family talk-talk.

Mum looked around and said, “We’re all here. Ali, shut that door; that’s a dear. Grandpaw, will you start us?”

Our senior husband stopped nodding over coffee and firmed up. He looked down table and said strongly, “I see that we are all here. I see that children have been put to bed. I see that there is no stranger, no guest. I say that we are met in accordance with customs created by Black Jack Davis our First Husband and Tillie our First Wife. If there is any matter that concerns safety and happiness of our marriage, haul it out in the light now. Don’t let it fester. This is our custom.”

Grandpaw turned to Mum and said softly, “Take it, Mimi,” and slumped back into gentle apathy. But for a minute he had been strong, handsome, virile, dynamic man of days of my opting… and I thought with sudden tears how lucky I had been!

Then didn’t know whether I felt lucky or not. Only excuse I could see for a Family talk-talk was fact that I was due to be shipped Earthside next day, labeled as grain. Could Mum be thinking of trying to set Family against it? Nobody had to abide by results of a talk-talk. But one always did. That was strength of our marriage: When came down to issues, we stood together.

Mimi was saying, “Does anyone have anything that needs to be discussed? Speak up, dears.” Greg said, “I have.”

“We’ll listen to Greg.”

Greg is a good speaker. Can stand up in front of a congregation and speak with confidence about matters I don’t feel confident about even when alone. But that night he seemed anything but sure of himself. “Well, uh, we’ve always tried to keep this marriage in balance, some old, some young, a regular alternation, well spaced, just as it was handed down to us. But we’ve varied sometimes—for good reason.” He looked at Ludmilla. “And adjusted it later.” He looked again at far end of table, at Frank and Ali, on each side of Ludmilla.

“Over years, as you can see from records, average age of husbands has been about forty, wives about thirty-five—and that age spread was just what our marriage started with, nearly a

hundred years gone by, for Tillie was fifteen when she opted Black Jack and he had just turned twenty. Right now I find that average age of husbands is almost exactly forty, while average

—”

Mum said firmly, “Never mind arithmetic, Greg dear. Simply state it.”

I was trying to think who Greg could possibly mean. True, I had been much away during past year, and if did get home, was often after everybody was asleep. But he was clearly talking about marriage and nobody ever proposes another wedding in our marriage without first giving everybody a long careful chance to look prospect over. You just didn’t do it any other way!

So I’m stupid. Greg stuttered and said, “I propose Wyoming Knott!”

I said I was stupid. I understand machinery and machinery understands me. But didn’t claim to know anything about people. When I get to be senior husband, if live that long, am going to do exactly what Grandpaw does with Mum: Let Sidris run it. Just same—Well, look, Wyoh joined Greg’s church. I like Greg, love Greg. And admire him. But you could never feed theology of his church through a computer and get anything but null. Wyoh surely knew this, since she encountered it in adult years—truthfully, I had suspected that Wyoh’s conversion was proof that she would do anything for our Cause.

But Wyoh had recruited Greg even earlier. And had made most of trips out to new site, easier for her to get away than me or Prof. Oh, well. Was taken by surprise. Should not have been. Mimi said, “Greg, do you have reason to think that Wyoming would accept an opting from us?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. We all know Wyoming; I’m sure we’ve formed our opinions of her. I see no reason to discuss it… unless someone has something to say? Speak up.” Was no surprise to Mum. But wouldn’t be. Nor to anyone else, either, since Mum never let a talk-talk take place until she was sure of outcome.

But wondered why Mum was sure of my opinion, so certain that she had not felt me out ahead of time? And sat there in a soggy quandary, knowing I should speak up, knowing I knew something terribly pertinent which nobody else knew or matter would never have gone this far. Something that didn’t matter to me but would matter to Mum and all our women.

Sat there, miserable coward, and said nothing, Mum said, “Very well. Let’s call the roll. Ludmilla?” “Me? Why, I love Wyoh, everybody knows that. Sure!”

“Lenore dear?”

“Well, I may try to talk her into going back to being a brownie again; I think we set each other off. But that’s her only fault, being blonder than I am. Da!” “Sidris?”

“Thumbs up. Wyoh is our kind of people.” “Anna?”

“I’ve something to say before I express my opinion, Mimi.’ “I don’t think it’s necessary, dear.”

“Nevertheless I’m going to haul it out in the open, just as Tillie always did according to our traditions. In this marriage every wife has carried her load, given children to the family. It may come as a surprise to some of you to learn that Wyoh has had eight children—”

Certainly surprised Ali; his head jerked and jaw dropped. I stared at plate. Oh, Wyoh, Wyoh! How could I let this happen? Was going to have to speak up.

And realized Anna was still speaking: “—so now she can have children of her own; the operation was successful. But she worries about possibility of another defective baby, unlikely as that is according to the head of the clinic in Hong Kong. So we’ll just have to love her enough to make her quit fretting.”

“We will love her,” Mum said serenely. “We do love her. Anna, are you ready to express opinion?” “Hardly necessary, is it? I went to Hong Kong with her, held her hand while her tubes were restored. I opt Wyoh.”

“In this family,” Mum went on, “we have always felt that our husbands should be allowed a veto. Odd of us perhaps, hut Tillie started it and it has always worked well. Well, Grandpaw?” “Eh? What were you saying, my dear?”

“We are opting Wyoming, Gospodin Grandpaw. Do you give consent?”

“What? Why, of course, of course! Very nice little girl. Say, whatever became of that pretty little Afro, name something like that? She get mad at us?” “Greg?”

“I proposed it.”

“Manuel? Do you forbid this?” “Me? Why, you know me, Mum.”

“I do. I sometimes wonder if you know you. Hans?” “What would happen if I said No?”

“You’d lose some teeth, that’s what,” Lenore said promptly. “Hans votes Yes.”

“Stop it, darlings,” Mum said with soft reproof. “Opting is a serious matter. Hans, speak up.” “Da. Yes. Ja. Oui. Si. High time we had a pretty blonde in this—Ouch!”

“Stop it, Lenore. Frank?” “Yes, Mum.”

“Ali dear? Is it unanimous?”

Lad blushed bright pink and couldn’t talk. Nodded vigorously.

Instead of appointing a husband and a wife to seek out selectee and propose opting for us, Mum sent Ludmilla and Anna to fetch Wyoh at once—and turned out she was only as far away as Bon Ton. Nor was that only irregularity; instead of setting a date and arranging a wedding party, our children were called in, and twenty minutes later Greg had his Book open and we did the taking vows—and I finally got it through my confused head that was being done with breakneck speed because of my date to break my neck next day.

Not that it could matter save as symbol of my family’s love for me, since a bride spent her first night with her senior husband, and second night and third I was going to spend out in space. But did matter anyhow and when women started to cry during ceremony, I found self dripping tears right with them.

Then I went to bed, alone in workshop, once Wyoh had kissed us and left on Grandpaw’s arm. Was terribly tired and last two days had been hard. Thought about exercises and decided was too late to matter; thought about calling Mike and asking him for news from Terra. Went to bed.

Don’t know how long had been asleep when realized was no longer asleep and somebody was in room. “Manuel?” came soft whisper in dark. “Huh? Wyoh, you aren’t supposed to be here, dear.”

“I am indeed supposed to be here, my husband. Mum knows I’m here, so does Greg. And Grandpaw went right to sleep.”

“Oh. What time is?”

“About four hundred. Please, dear, may I come to bed?”

“What? Oh, certainly.” Something I should remember. Oh, yes. “Mike!” “Yes, Man?” he answered.

“Switch off. Don’t listen. If you want me, call me on Family phone.” “So Wyoh told me, Man. Congratulations!”

Then her head was pillowed on my stump and I put right arm around her. “What are you crying about, Wyoh?” “I’m not crying! I’m just frightened silly that you won’t come back!”

16

Woke up scared silly in pitch darkness. “Manuel!” Didn’t know which end was up. “Manuel!” it called again. “Wake up!”

That brought me out some; was signal intended to trigger me. Recalled being stretched on a table in infirmary at Complex, staring up at a light and listening to a voice while a drug dripped into my veins. But was a hundred years ago, endless time of nightmares, unendurable pressure, pain.

Knew now what no-end-is-up feeling was; had experienced before. Free fall. Was in space.

What had gone wrong? Had Mike dropped a decimal point? Or had he given in to childish nature and played a joke, not realizing would kill? Then why, after all years of pain, was I alive? Or was I? Was this normal way for ghost to feel, just lonely, lost, nowhere?

“Wake up, Manuel! Wake up, Manuel!”

“Oh, shut up!” I snarled. “Button your filthy king-and-ace!” Recording went on; I paid no attention. Where was that reeking light switch? No, doesn’t take a century of pain to accelerate to Luna’s escape speed at three gravities, merely feels so. Eighty-two seconds—but is one time when human nervous system feels every microsecond. Three gees is eighteen grim times as much as a Loonie ought to weigh.

Then discovered those vacuum skulls had not put arm back on. For some silly reason they had taken it off when they stripped me to prepare me and I was loaded with enough don’t- worry and let’s-sleep pills not to protest. No huhu had they put it on again. But that drecklich switch was on my left and sleeve of p-suit was empty.

Spent next ten years getting unstrapped with one hand, then a twenty-year sentence floating around in dark before managed to find my cradle again, figure out which was head end, and from that hint locate switch by touch. That compartment was not over two meters in any dimension. This turns out to be larger than Old Dome in free fall and total darkness. Found it. We had light.

(And don’t ask why that coffin did not have at least three lighting systems all working all time. Habit, probably. Alighting system implies a switch to control it, nyet? Thing was built in two days; should be thankful switch worked.)

Once I had light, cubic shrank to true claustrophobic dimensions and ten percent smaller, and I took a look at Prof.

Dead, apparently. Well, he had every excuse. Envied him but was now supposed to check his pulse and breathing and suchlike in case he had been unlucky and still had such troubles. And was again hampered and not just by being onearmed. Grain load had been dried and depressured as usual before loading but that cell was supposed to be pressured—oh, nothing fancy, just a tank with air in it. Our p-suits were supposed to handle needs such as life’s breath for those two days. But even best p-suit is more comfortable in pressure than in vacuum and, anyhow, I was supposed to be able to get at my patient.

Could not. Didn’t need to open helmet to know this steel can had not stayed gas tight, knew at once, naturally, from way p-suit felt. Oh, drugs I had for Prof, heart stimulants and so forth, were in field ampules; could jab them through his suit. But how to check heart and breathing? His suit was cheapest sort, sold for Loonie who rarely Leaves warren; had no readouts.

His mouth hung open and eyes stared. Adeader, I decided. No need to ex Prof beyond that old limen; had eliminated himself. Tried to see pulse on throat; his helmet was in way. They had provided a program clock which was mighty kind of them. Showed I had been out forty-four-plus hours, all to plan, and in three hours we should receive horrible booting to place

us in parking orbit around Terra. Then, after two circums, call it three more hours, we should start injection into landing program—if Poona Ground Control didn’t change its feeble mind

and leave us in orbit. Reminded self that was unlikely; grain is not left in vacuum longer than necessary. Has tendency to become puffed wheat or popped corn, which not only lowers

value but can split those thin canisters like a melon. Wouldn’t that be sweet? Why had they packed us in with grain? Why not just a load of rock that doesn’t mind vacuum?

Had time to think about that and to become very thirsty. Took nipple for half a mouthful, no more, because certainly did not want to take six gees with a full bladder. (Need not have worried; was equipped with catheter. But did not know.)

When time got short I decided couldn’t hurt Prof to give him a jolt of drug that was supposed to take him through heavy acceleration; then, after in parking orbit, give him heart stimulant— since didn’t seem as if anything could hurt him.

Gave him first drug, then spent rest of minutes struggling back into straps, one-handed. Was sorry I didn’t know name of my helpful friend; could have cursed him better.

Ten gees gets you into parking orbit around Terra in a mere 3.26 x 10^7 microseconds; merely seems longer, ten gravities being sixty times what a fragile sack of protoplasm should be asked to endure. Call it thirty-three seconds. My truthful word, I suspect my ancestress in Salem spent a worse half minute day they made her dance.

Gave Prof heart stimulant, then spent three hours trying to decide whether to drug self as well as Prof for landing sequence. Decided against. All drug had done for me at catapulting had been to swap a minute and a half of misery and two days of boredom for a century of terrible dreams—and besides, if those last minutes were going to be my very last, I decided to experience them. Bad as they would be, they were my very own and I would not give them up.

They were bad. Six gees did not feel better than ten; felt worse. Four gees no relief. Then we were kicked harder. Then suddenly, just for seconds, in free fall again. Then came splash which was not “gentle” and which we took on straps, not pads, as we went in headfirst. Also, don’t think Mike realized that, after diving in hard, we would then surface and splash hard again before we damped down into floating. Earthworms call it “floating” but is nothing like floating in free fall; you do it at one gee, six times what is decent, and odd side motions tacked on. Very odd motions—Mike had assured us that solar weather was good, no radiation danger inside that Iron Maiden. But he had not been so interested in Earthside Indian Ocean weather; prediction was acceptable for landing barges and suppose he felt that was good enough—and I would have thought so, too.

Stomach was supposed to be empty. But I filled helmet with sourest, nastiest fluid you would ever go a long way to avoid. Then we turned completely over and I got it in hair and eyes and some in nose. This is thing earthworms call “seasickness” and is one of many horrors they take for granted.

Won’t go into long period during which we were towed into port. Let it stand that, in addition to seasickness, my air bottles were playing out. They were rated for twelve hours, plenty for a fifty-hour orbit most of which I was unconscious and none involving heavy exercise, but not quite enough with some hours of towing added. By time barge finally held still I was almost too dopy to care about trying to break out.

Except for one fact—We were picked up, I think, and tumbled a bit, then brought to rest with me upside down. This is a no-good position at best under one gravity; simply impossible when supposed to a) unstrap self, b) get out of suit-shaped cavity, c) get loose a sledgehammer fastened with butterfly nuts to bulkhead. d) smash same against breakaways guarding escape hatch, e) batter way out, and f) finally, drag an old man in a p-suit out after you.

Didn’t finish step a); passed out head downwards.

Lucky this was emergency-last-resort routine. Stu LaJoie had been notified before we left; news services had been warned shortly before we landed. I woke up with people leaning over me, passed out again, woke up second time in hospital bed, flat on back with heavy feeling in chest—was heavy and weak all over—but not ill, just tired, bruised, hungry, thirsty, languid. Was a transparent plastic tent over bed which accounted for fact I was having no trouble breathing.

At once was closed in on from both sides, a tiny Hindu nurse with big eyes on one side, Stuart LaJoie on other. He grinned at me, “Hi, cobber! How do you feel?” “Uh … I’m right. But oh bloody! What a way to travel!”

“Prof says it’s the only way. What a tough old boy he is.” “Hold it. Prof said? Prof is dead.”

“Not at all. Not in good shape—we’ve got him in a pneumatic bed with a round-the-clock watch and more instruments wired into him than you would believe. But he’s alive and will be able to do his job. But, truly, he didn’t mind the trip; he never knew about it, so he says. Went to sleep in one hospital, woke up in another. I thought he was wrong when he refused to let me wangle it to send a ship but he was not—the publicity has been tremendous!”

I said slowly, “You say Prof ‘refused’ to let you send a ship?”

“I should say ‘Chairman Selene’ refused. Didn’t you see the dispatches, Mannie?”

“No.” Too late to fight over it. “But last few days have been busy.”

“Adinkum word! Here, too—don’t recall when last I dossed.” “You sound like a Loonie.”

“I am a Loonie, Mannie, don’t ever doubt it. But the sister is looking daggers at me.” Stu picked her up, turned her around. I decided he wasn’t all Loonie yet. But nurse didn’t resent. “Go play somewhere else, dear, and I’ll give your patient back to you—still warm—in a few minutes.” He shut a door on her and came back to bed. “But Adam was right; this way was not only wonderful publicity but safer.”

“Publicity, I suppose. But ‘safer’? Let’s not talk about!”

“Safer, my old. You weren’t shot at. Yet they had two hours in which they knew right where you were, a big fat target. They couldn’t make up their minds what to do; they haven’t formed a policy yet. They didn’t even dare not bring you down on schedule; the news was full of it, I had stories slanted and waiting. Now they don’t dare touch you, you’re popular heroes. Whereas if I had waited to charter a ship and fetch you … Well, I don’t know. We probably would have been ordered into parking orbit; then you two—and myself, perhaps—would have been taken off under arrest. No skipper is going to risk missiles no matter how much he’s paid. The proof of the pudding, cobber. But let me brief you. You’re both citizens of The People’s Directorate of Chad, best I could do on short notice. Also, Chad has recognized Luna. I had to buy one prime minister, two generals, some tribal chiefs and a minister of finance—cheap for such a hurry-up job. I haven’t been able to get you diplomatic immunity but I hope to, before you leave hospital. At present they haven’t even dared arrest you; they can’t figure out what you’ve done. They have guards outside but simply for your ‘protection’—and a good thing, or you would have reporters nine deep shoving microphones into your face.”

“Just what have we done?—that they know about, I mean. Illegal immigration?”

“Not even that, Mannie. You never were a consignee and you have derivative PanAfrican citizenship through one of your grandfathers, no huhu. In Professor de la Paz’s case we dug up proof that he had been granted naturalized Chad citizenship forty years back, waited for the ink to dry, and used it. You’re not even illegally entered here in India. Not only did they bring you down themselves, knowing that you were in that barge, but also a control officer very kindly and fairly cheaply stamped your virgin passports. In addition to that, Prof’s exile has no legal existence as the government that proscribed him no longer exists and a competent court has taken notice—that was more expensive.”

Nurse came back in, indignant as a mother cat. “Lord Stuart you must let my patient rest!” “At once, ma chere.”

“You’re ‘Lord Stuart’?”

“Should be ‘Comte.’ Or I can lay a dubious claim to being the Macgregor. The blue-blood bit helps; these people haven’t been happy since they took their royalty away from them.”

As he left he patted her rump. Instead of screaming, she wiggled it. Was smiling as she came over to me. Stu was going to have to watch that stuff when he went back to Luna. If did. She asked how I felt. Told her I was right, just hungry. “Sister, did you see some prosthetic arms in our luggage?”

She had and I felt better with number-six in place. Had selected it and number-two and social arm as enough for trip. Number-two was presumably still in Complex; I hoped somebody was taking care of it. But number-six is most all-around useful arm; with it and social one I’d be okay.

Two days later we left for Agra to present credentials to Federated Nations. I was in bad shape and not just high gee; could do well enough in a wheel chair and could even walk a little although did not in public. What I had was a sore throat that missed pneumonia only through drugs, traveler’s trots, skin disease on hands and spreading to feet—just like my other trips to that disease-ridden hole, Terra. We Loonies don’t know how lucky we are, living in a place that has tightest of quarantines, almost no vermin and what we have controlled by vacuum anytime necessary. Or unlucky, since we have almost no immunities if turns out we need them. Still, wouldn’t swap; never heard word “venereal” until first went Earthside and had thought “common cold” was state of ice miner’s feet.

And wasn’t cheerful for other reason. Stu had fetched us a message from Adam Selene; buried in it, concealed even from Stir, was news that chances had dropped to worse than one in a hundred. Wondered what point in risking crazy trip if made odds worse? Did Mike really know what chances were? Couldn’t see any way he could compute them no matter how many facts he had.

But Prof didn’t seem worried. He talked to platoons of reporters, smiled at endless pictures, gave out statements, telling world he placed great confidence in Federated Nations and was sure our just claims would be recognized and that he wanted to thank “Friends of Free Luna” for wonderful help in bringing true story of our small but sturdy nation before good people of Terra—F. of F.L. being Stu, a professional public opinion firm, several thousand chronic petition signers, and a great stack of Hong Kong dollars.

I had picture taken, too, and tried to smile, but dodged questions by pointing to throat and croaking.

In Agra we were lodged in a lavish suite in hotel that had once been palace of a maharajah (and still belonged to him, even though India is supposed to be socialist) and interviews and picture-taking went on—hardly dared get out of wheel chair even to visit W.C. as was under orders from Prof never to be photographed vertically. He was always either in bed or in a stretcher—bed baths, bedpans, everything—not only because safer, considering age, and easier for any Loonie, but also for pictures. His dimples and wonderful, gentle, persuasive personality were displayed in hundreds of millions of video screens, endless news pictures.

But his personality did not get us anywhere in Agra. Prof was carried to office of President of Grand Assembly, me being pushed alongside, and there he attempted to present his credentials as Ambassador to F.N. and prospective Senator for Luna—was referred to Secretary General and at his offices we were granted ten minutes with assistant secretary who sucked teeth and said he could accept our credentials “without prejudice and without implied commitment.” They were referred to Credentials Committee—who sat on them.

I got fidgety. Prof read Keats. Grain barges continued to arrive at Bombay.

In a way was not sorry about latter. When we flew from Bombay to Agra we got up before dawn and were taken out to field as city was waking. Every Loonie has his hole, whether luxury of a long-established home like Davis Tunnels or rock still raw from drill; cubic is no problem and can’t be for centuries.

Bombay was bee-swarms of people. Are over million (was told) who have no home but some piece of pavement. Afamily might claim right (and hand down by will, generation after generation) to sleep on a piece two meters long and one wide at a described location in front of a shop. Entire family sleeps on that space, meaning mother, father, kids, maybe a grandmother. Would not have believed if had not seen. At dawn in Bombay roadways, side pavements, even bridges are covered with tight carpet of human bodies. What do they do? Where do they work? How do they eat? (Did not look as if they did. Could count ribs.)

If I hadn’t believed simple arithmetic that you can’t ship stuff downhill forever without shipping replacement back, would have tossed in cards. But… tanstanfl. “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” in Bombay or in Luna.

At last we were given appointment with an “Investigating Committee.” Not what Prof had asked for. He had requested public hearing before Senate, complete with video cameras. Only camera at this session was its “in-camera” nature; was closed. Not too closed, I had little recorder. But no video. And took Prof two minutes to discover that committee was actually vips of Lunar Authority or their tame dogs.

Nevertheless was chance to talk and Prof treated them as if they had power to recognize Luna’s independence and willingness to do so. While they treated us as a cross between naughty children and criminals up for sentencing.

Prof was allowed to make opening statement. With decorations trimmed away was assertion that Luna was de-facto a sovereign state, with an unopposed government in being, a civil condition of peace and order, a provisional president and cabinet carrying on necessary functions but anxious to return to private life as soon as Congress completed writing a constitution—and that we were here to ask that these facts be recognized de-jure and that Luna be allowed to take her rightful place in councils of mankind as a member of Federated Nations.

What Prof told them bore a speaking acquaintance with truth and they were not where they could spot discrepancies. Our “provisional president” was a computer, and “cabinet” was Wyoh, Finn, Comrade Clayton, and Terence Sheehan, editor of Pravda, plus Wolfgang Korsakov, board chairman of LuNoHoCo and a director of Bank of Hong Kong in Luna. But Wyoh was only person now in Luna who knew that “Adam Selene” was false face for a computer. She had been terribly nervous at being left to hold fort alone.

As it was, Adam’s “oddity” in never being seen save over video was always an embarrassment. We had done our best to turn it into a “security necessity” by opening offices for him in cubic of Authority’s Luna City office and then exploding a small bomb. After this “assassination attempt” comrades who had been most fretful about Adam’s failure to stir around became loudest in demands that Adam must not take any chances—this being helped by editorials.

But I wondered while Prof was talking what these pompous chooms would think if they knew that our “president” was a collection of hardware owned by Authority?

But they just sat staring with chill disapproval, unmoved by Prof’s rhetoric—probably best performance of his life considering he delivered it flat on back, speaking into a microphone without notes, and hardly able to see his audience.

Then they started in on us. Gentleman member from Argentina—never given their names; we weren’t socially acceptable—this Argentino objected to phrase “former Warden” in Prof’s speech; that designation had been obsolete half a century; he insisted that it be struck out and proper title inserted: “Protector of the Lunar Colonies by Appointment of the Lunar Authority.” Any other wording offended dignity of Lunar Authority.

Prof asked to comment; “Honorable Chairman” permitted it. Prof said mildly that he accepted change since Authority was free to designate its servants in any fashion it pleased and was no intention to offend dignity of any agency of Federated Nations… but in view of functions of this office—former functions of this former office—citizens of Luna Free State would probably go on thinking of it by traditional name.

That made about six of them try to talk at once. Somebody objected to use of word “Luna” and still more to “Luna Free State”—it was “the Moon,” Earth’s Moon, a satellite of Earth and property of Federated Nations, just as Antarctica was—and these proceedings were a farce.

Was inclined to agree with last point. Chairman asked gentleman member from North America to please be in order and to address his remarks through Chair. Did Chair understand from witness’s last remark that this alleged de-facto regime intended to interfere with consignee system?

Prof fielded that and tossed it back. “Honorable Chairman, I myself was a consignee, now Luna is my beloved home. My colleague, the Honorable the Undersecretary for Foreign Affairs Colonel O’Kelly Davis”—myself!—”is Luna born, and proud of his descent from four transported grandparents. Luna has grown strong on your outcasts. Give us your poor, your wretched; we welcome them. Luna has room for them, nearly forty million square kilometers, an area greater than all Africa—and almost totally empty. More than that, since by our method of living we occupy not ‘area’ but ‘cubic’ the mind cannot imagine the day when Luna would refuse another shipioad of weary homeless.”

Chairman said, “The witness is admonished to refrain from making speeches. The Chair takes it that your oratory means that the group you represent agrees to accept prisoners as before.”

“No, sir.”

“What? Explain yourself.”

“Once an immigrant sets foot on Luna today he is a free man, no matter what his previous condition, free to go where he listeth.”

“So? Then what’s to keep a consignee from walking across the field, climbing into another ship, and returning here? I admit that I am puzzled at your apparent willingness to accept them… but we do not want them. It is our humane way of getting rid of incorrigibles who would otherwise have to be executed.”

(Could have told him several things that would stop what he pictured; he had obviously never been to Luna. As for “incorrigibles,” if really are, Luna eliminates such faster than Terra ever did. Back when I was very young, they sent us a gangster lord, from Los Angeles I believe; he arrived with squad of stooges, his bodyguards, and was cockily ready to take over Luna, as was rumored to have taken over a prison somewhere Earthside.

(None lasted two weeks. Gangster boss didn’t make it to barracks; hadn’t listened when told how to wear a p-suit.)

“There is nothing to keep him from going home so far as we are concerned, sir,” Prof answered, “although your police here on Terra might cause him to think. But I’ve never heard of a consignee arriving with funds enough to buy a ticket home. Is this truly an issue? The ships are yours; Luna has no ships—and let me add that we are sorry that the ship scheduled for Luna this month was canceled. I am not complaining that it forced on my colleague and myself—Prof stopped to smile—a most informal method of travel. I simply hope that this does not represent policy. Luna has no quarrel with you; your ships are welcome, your trade is welcome, we are at peace and wish to stay so. Please note that all scheduled grain shipments

have come through on time.”

(Prof did always have gift for changing subject.)

They fiddled with minor matters then. Nosy from North America wanted to know what had really happened to “the Ward—” He stopped himself. “The Protector. Senator Hobart” Prof answered that he had suffered a stroke (a “coup” is a “stroke”) and was no longer able to carry out his duties—but was in good health otherwise and receiving constant medical care. Prof added thoughtfully that he suspected that the old gentleman had been failing for some time, in view of his indiscretions this past year… especially his many invasions of rights of free citizens, including ones who were not and never had been consignees.

Story was not hard to swallow. When those busy scientists managed to break news of our coup, they had reported Warden as dead… whereas Mike had kept him alive and on job by impersonating him. When Authority Earthside demanded a report from Warden on this wild rumor, Mike had consulted Prof, then had accepted call and given a convincing imitation of senility, managing to deny, confirm, and confuse every detail. Our announcements followed, and thereafter Warden was no longer available even in his computer alter ego. Three days later we declared independence.

This North American wanted to know what reason they had to believe that one word of this was true? Prof smiled most saintly smile and made effort to spread thin hands before letting them fall to coverlet. “The gentleman member from North America is urged to go to Luna, visit Senator Hobart’s sickbed, and see for himself. Indeed all Terran citizens are invited to visit Luna at any time, see anything. We wish to be friends, we are at peace, we have nothing to hide. My only regret is that my country is unable to furnish transportation; for that we must turn to you.”

Chinee member looked at Prof thoughtfully. He had not said a word but missed nothing.

Chairman recessed hearing until fifteen hundred. They gave us a retiring room and sent in lunch. I wanted to talk but Prof shook head, glanced around room, tapped ear. So I shut up. Prof napped then and I leveled out my wheel chair and joined him; on Terra we both slept all we could. Helped. Not enough.

They didn’t wheel us back in until sixteen hundred; committee was already sitting. Chairman then broke own rule against speeches and made a long one more-in-sorrow-than-anger. Started by reminding us that Luna Authority was a nonpolitical trusteeship charged with solemn duty of insuring that Earth’s satellite the Moon—Luna, as some called it—was never used

for military purposes. He told us that Authority had guarded this sacred trust more than a century, while governments fell and new governments rose, alliances shifted and shifted again

—indeed, Authority was older than Federated Nations, deriving original charter from an older international body, and so well had it kept that trust that it had lasted through wars and

turmoils and realignments.

(This is news? But you see what he was building towards.)

“The Lunar Authority cannot surrender its trust,” he told us solemnly. “However, there appears to be no insuperable obstacle to the Lunar colonists, if they show political maturity, enjoying a degree of autonomy. This can be taken under advisement. Much depends on your behavior. The behavior, I should say, of all you colonists. There have been riots and destruction of property; this must not be.”

I waited for him to mention ninety dead Goons; he never did. I will never make a statesman; I don’t have high-level approach.

“Destroyed property must be paid for,” he went on. “Commitments must be met. If this body you call a Congress can guarantee such things, it appears to this committee that this so- called Congress could in time be considered an agency of the Authority for many internal matters. Indeed it is conceivable that a stable local government might, in time, assume many duties now failing on the Protector and even be allowed a delegate, non-voting, in the Grand Assembly. But such recognition would have to be earned.

“But one thing must be made clear. Earth’s major satellite, the Moon, is by nature’s law forever the joint property of all the peoples of Earth. It does not belong to that handful who by accident of history happen to live there. The sacred trust laid upon the Lunar Authority is and forever must be the supreme law of Earth’s Moon.”

(“—accident of history,” huh? I expected Prof to shove it down his throat. I thought he would say—No, never did know what Prof would say. Here’s what he did say): Prof waited through several seconds of silence, then said, “Honorable Chairman, who is to be exiled this time?”

“What did you say?”

“Have you decided which one of you is to go into exile? Your Deputy Warden won’t take the job”—this was true; he preferred to stay alive. “He is functioning now only because we have asked him to. If you persist in believing that we are not independent, then you must be planning to send up a new warden.”

“Protector!”

“Warden. Let us not mince words. Though if we knew who he is to be, we might be happy to call him ‘Ambassador.’ We might be able to work with him, it might not be necessary to send with him armed hoodlums… to rape and murder our women!”

“Order! Order! The witness will come to order!”

“It is not I who was not in order, Honorable Chairman. Rape it was and murder most foul. But that is history and now we must look to the future. Whom are you going to exile?”

Prof struggled to raise self on elbow and I was suddenly alert; was a cue. “For you all know, sir, that it is a one-way trip. I was born here. You can see what effort it is for me to return even temporarily to the planet which has disinherited me. We are outcasts of Earth who—”

He collapsed. Was up out of my chair—and collapsed myself, trying to reach him.

Was not all play-acting even though I answered a cue. Is terrible strain on heart to get up suddenly on Terra; thick field grabbed and smashed me to floor.

17

Neither of us was hurt and it made juicy news breaks, for I put recording in Stu’s hands and he turned it over to his hired men. Nor were all headlines against us; Stu had recording cut and edited and slanted. AUTHORITYTO PLAYODD MAN OUT?—LUNAR AMBASSADOR COLLAPSES UNDER GRILLING: “OUTCASTS!” HE CRIES—PROF PAZ POINTS FINGER OF SHAME: STORYPAGE 8.

Not all were good; nearest to a favorable story in India was editorial in New India Times inquiring whether Authority was risking bread of masses in failing to come to terms with Lunar insurgents. Was suggested that concessions could be made if would insure increased grain deliveries. Was filled with inflated statistics; Luna did not feed “a hundred million Hindus”— unless you chose to think of our grain as making difference between malnutrition and starvation.

On other hand biggest New York paper opined that Authority had made mistake in treating with us at all, since only thing convicts understood was taste of lash—troops should land, set us in order, hang guilty, leave forces to keep order.

Was a quick mutiny, quickly subdued, in Peace Dragoons regiment from which our late oppressors had come, one started by rumor that they were to be shipped to Moon. Mutiny not hushed up perfectly; Stu hired good men.

Next morning a message reached us inquiring if Professor de la Paz was well enough to resume discussions? We went, and committee supplied doctor and nurse to watch over Prof. But this time we were searched—and a recorder removed from my pouch.

I surrendered it without much fuss; was Japanese job supplied by Stu—to be surrendered. Number-six arm has recess intended for a power pack but near enough size of my mini- recorder. Didn’t need power that day—and most people, even hardened police officers, dislike to touch a prosthetic.

Everything discussed day before was ignored… except that chairman started session by scolding us for “breaking security of a closed meeting.”

Prof replied that it had not been closed so far as we were concerned and that we would welcome newsmen, video cameras, a gallery, anyone, as Luna Free State had nothing to hide. Chairman replied stiffly that so-called Free State did not control these hearings; these sessions were closed, not to be discussed outside this room, and that it was so ordered.

Prof looked at me. “Will you help me, Colonel?” I touched controls of chair, scooted around, was shoving his stretcher wagon with my chair toward door before chairman realized bluff had been called. Prof allowed himself to be persuaded to stay without promising anything. Hard to coerce a man who faints if he gets overexcited.

Chairman said that there had been many irrelevancies yesterday and matters discussed best left undiscussed—and that he would permit no digressions today. He looked at Argentino, then at North American.

He went on: “Sovereignty is an abstract concept, one that has been redefined many times as mankind has learned to live in peace. We need not discuss it. The real question, Professor

—or even Ambassador de-facto, if you like; we shan’t quibble—the real question is this: Are you prepared to guarantee that the Lunar Colonies will keep their commitments?”

“What commitments, sir?”

“All commitments, but I have in mind specifically your commitments concerning grain shipments.” “I know of no such commitments, sir,” Prof answered with innocence.

Chairman’s hand tightened on gavel. But he answered quietly, “Come, sir, there is no need to spar over words. I refer to the quota of grain shipments—and to the increased quota, a matter of thirteen percent, for this new fiscal year. Do we have assurance that you will honor those commitments? This is a minimum basis for discussion, else these talks can go no further.”

“Then I am sorry to say, sir, that it would appear that our talks must cease.” “You’re not being serious.”

“Quite serious, sir. The sovereignty of Free Luna is not the abstract matter you seem to feel it is. These commitments you speak of were the Authority contracting with itself. My country is not bound by such. Any commitments from the sovereign nation I have the honor to represent are still to be negotiated.”

“Rabble!” growled North American. “I told you you were being too soft on them. Jailbirds. Thieves and whores. They don’t understand decent treatment.” “Order!”

“Just remember, I told you. If I had them in Colorado, we would teach them a thing or two; we know how to handle their sort.” “The gentleman member will please be in order.”

“I’m afraid,” said Hindu member—Parsee in fact, but committeeman from India—”I’m afraid I must agree in essence with the gentleman member from the North American Directorate. India cannot accept the concept that the grain commitments are mere scraps of paper. Decent people do not play politics with hunger.”

“And besides,” the Argentino put in, “they breed like animals. Pigs!”

(Prof made me take a tranquilizing drug before that session. Had insisted on seeing me take it.)

Prof said quietly, “Honorable Chairman, may I have consent to amplify my meaning before we conclude, perhaps too hastily, that these talks must be abandoned?” “Proceed.”

“Unanimous consent? Free of interruption?”

Chairman looked around. “Consent is unanimous,” he stated, “and the gentlemen members are placed on notice that I will invoke special rule fourteen at the next outburst. The sergeant-at-arms is directed to note this and act. The witness will proceed.”

“I will be brief, Honorable Chairman.” Prof said something in Spanish; all I caught was “Senor.” Argentina turned dark but did not answer. Prof went on, “I must first answer the gentleman member from North America on a matter of personal privilege since he has impugned my fellow countrymen. I for one have seen the inside of more than one jail; I accept the title—nay, I glory in the title of ‘jailbird.’ We citizens of Luna are jailbirds and descendants of jailbirds. But Luna herself is a stern schoolmistress; those who have lived through her harsh lessons have no cause to feel ashamed. In Luna City a man may leave purse unguarded or home unlocked and feel no fear… I wonder if this is true in Denver? As may be, I have no wish to visit Colorado to learn a thing or two; I am satisfied with what Mother Luna has taught me. And rabble we may be, but we are now a rabble in arms.

“To the gentleman member from India let me say that we do not ‘play politics with hunger.’ What we ask is an open discussion of facts of nature unbound by political assumptions false to fact. If we can hold this discussion, I can promise to show a way in which Luna can continue grain shipments and expand them enormously… to the great benefit of India.”

Both Chinee and Indian looked alert. Indian started to speak, checked himself, then said, “Honorable Chairman, will the Chair ask the witness to explain what he means?” “The witness is invited to amplify.”

“Honorable Chairman, gentlemen members, there is indeed a way for Luna to expand by tenfold or even a hundred her shipments to our hungry millions. The fact that grain barges continued to arrive on schedule during our time of trouble and are still arriving today is proof that our intentions are friendly. But you do not get milk by beating the cow. Discussions of how to augment our shipments must be based on the facts of nature, not on the false assumption that we are slaves, bound by a work quota we never made. So which shall it be? Will you persist in believing that we are slaves, indentured to an Authority other than ourselves? Or will you acknowledge that we are free, negotiate with us, and learn how we can help you?”

Chairman said, “In other words you ask us to buy a pig in a poke. You demand that we legalize your outlaw status … then you will talk about fantastic claims that you can increase grain shipments ten- or a hundredfold. What you claim is impossible; I am expert in Lunar economics. And what you ask is impossible; takes the Grand Assembly to admit a new nation.”

Then place it before the Grand Assembly. Once seated as sovreign equals, we will discuss how to increase shipments and negotiate terms. Honorable Chairman, we grow the grain, we own it. We can grow far more. But not as slaves. Luna’s soverign freedom must first be recognized.”

“Impossible and you know it. The Lunar Authority cannot abdicate its sacred responsibility.”

Prof sighed. “It appears to be an impasse. I can only suggest that these hearings be recessed while we all take thought. Today our barges are arriving… but the moment that I am forced to notify my government that I have failed… they… will … stop!”

Prof’s head sank back on pillow as if it had been too much for him—as may have been. I was doing well enough but was young and had had practice in how to visit Terra and stay alive. A Loonie his age should not risk it. After minor foofooraw which Prof ignored they loaded us into a lorry and scooted us back to hotel. Once under way I said, “Prof, what was it you said to Senor Jellybelly that raised blood pressure?”

He chuckled. “Comrade Stuart’s investigations of these gentlemen turn up remarkable facts. I asked who owned a certain brothel off Calle Florida in B.A. these days and did it now have a star redhead?”

“Why? You used to patronize it?” Tried to imagine Prof in such!

“Never. It has been forty years since I was last in Buenos Aires. He owns that establishment, Manuel, through a dummy, and his wife, a beauty with Titian hair, once worked in it.” Was sorry had asked. “Wasn’t that a foul blow? And undiplomatic?”

But Prof closed eyes and did not answer.

He was recovered enough to spend an hour at a reception for newsmen that night, with white hair framed against a purple pillow and thin body decked out in embroidered pajamas. Looked like vip corpse at an important funeral, except for eyes and dimples. I looked mighty vip too, in black and gold uniform which Stu claimed was Lunar diplomatic uniform of my rank. Could have been, if Lana had had such things—did not or I would have known. I prefer a p-suit; collar was tight. Nor did I ever find out what decorations on it meant. ~Areporter asked me about one, based on Luna at crescent as seen from Terra; told him it was a prize for spelling. Stu was in earshot and said, “The Colonel is modest. That decoration is of the same rank as the Victoria Cross and in his case was awarded for an act of gallantry on the glorious, tragic day of—”

He led him away, still talking. Stu could lie standing up almost as well as Prof. Me, I have to think out a lie ahead of time.

India newspapers and casts were rough that night; “threat” to stop grain shipments made them froth. Gentlest proposal was to clean out Luna, exterminate us “criminal troglodytes” and replace us with “honest Hindu peasants” who understood sacredness of life and would ship grain and more grain.

Prof picked that night to talk and give handouts about Luna’s inability to continue shipments, and why—and Stu’s organization spread release throughout Terra. Some reporters took time to dig out sense of figures and tackled Prof on glaring discrepancy:

“Professor de la Paz, here you say that grain shipments will dwindle away through failure of natural resources and that by 2082 Luna won’t even be able to feed its own people. Yet earlier today you told the Lunar Authority that you could increase shipments a dozen times or more.”

Prof said sweetly, “That committee is the Lunar Authority?” “Well… it’s an open secret.”

“So it is, sir, but they have maintained the fiction of being an impartial investigating committee of the Grand Assembly. Don’t you think they should disqualify themselves? So that we could receive a fair hearing?”

“Uh… it’s not my place to say, Professor. Let’s get back to my question. How do you reconcile the two?”

“I’m interested in why it’s not your place to say, sir. Isn’t it the concern of every citizen of Terra to help avoid a situation which will produce war between Terra and her neighbor?” “‘War’? What in the world makes you speak of ‘war,’ Professor?”

“Where else can it end, sir? If the Lunar Authority persists in its intransigence? We cannot accede to their demands; those figures show why. If they will not see this, then they will attempt to subdue us by force… and we will fight back. Like cornered rats—for cornered we are, unable to retreat, unable to surrender. We do not choose war; we wish to live in peace with our neighbor planet—in peace and peacefully trade. But the choice is not ours. We are small, you are gigantic. I predict that the next move will be for the Lunar Authority to attempt to subdue Luna by force. This ‘peace-keeping’ agency will start the first interplanetary war.”

Journalist frowned. “Aren’t you overstating it? Let’s assame the Authority—or the Grand Assembly, as the Authority hasn’t any warships of its own—let’s suppose the nations of Earth decide to displace your, uh, ‘government.’ You might fight, on Luna—I suppose you would. But that hardly constitutes interplanetary war. As you pointed out, Luna has no ships. To put it bluntly, you can’t reach us.”

I had chair close by Prof’s stretcher, listening. He turned to me. “Tell them, Colonel.”

I parroted it. Prof and Mike had worked out stock situation. I had memorized and was ready with answers. I said, “Do you gentlemen remember the Pathfinder? How she came plunging in, out of control?”

They remembered. Nobody forgets greatest disaster of early days of space flight when unlucky Pathfinder hit a Belgian village.

“We have no ships,” I went on, “but would be possible to throw those bargeloads of grain… instead of delivering them parking orbit.” Next day this evoked a headling: LOONIES THREATEN TO THROW RICE. At moment it produced awkward silence.

Finally journalist said, “Nevertheless I would like to know how you reconcile your two statements—no more grain after 2082… and ten or a hundred times as much.”

“There is no conflict,” Prof answered. “They are based on different sets of circumstances. The figures you have been looking at show the present circumstances … and the disaster they will produce in only a few years through drainage of Luna’s natural resources—disaster which these Authority bureaucrats—or should I say ‘authoritarian bureaucrats?’—would avert by telling us to stand in the corner like naughty children!”

Prof paused for labored breathing, went on: “The circumstances under which we can continue, or greatly increase, our grain shipments are the obvious corollary of the first. As an old teacher I can hardly refrain from classroom habits; the corollary should be left as an exercise for the student. Will someone attempt it?”

Was uncomfortable silence, then a little man with strange accent said slowly, “It sound to me as if you talk about way to replenish natural resource.”

“Capital! Excellent!” Prof flashed dimples. “You, sir, will have a gold star on your term report! To make grain requires water and plant foods—phosphates, other things, ask the experts. Send these things to us; we’ll send them back as wholesome grain. Put down a hose in the limitless Indian Ocean. Line up those millions of cattle here in India; collect their end product and ship it to us. Collect your own night soil—don’t bother to sterilize it; we’ve learned to do such things cheaply and easily. Send us briny sea water, rotten fish, dead animals, city sewage, cow manure, offal of any sort—and we will send it back, tonne for tonne as golden grain. Send ten times as much, we’ll send back ten times as much grain. Send us your poor, your dispossessed, send them by thousands and hundreds of thousands; we’ll teach them swift, efficient Lunar methods of tunnel farming and ship you back unbelievable tonnage. Gentlemen, Luna is one enormous fallow farm, four thousand million hectares, waiting to be plowed!”

That startled them. Then someone said slowly, “But what do you get out of it? Luna, I mean.”

Prof shrugged. “Money. In the form of trade goods. There are many things you make cheaply which are dear in Luna. Drugs. Tools. Book films. Gauds for our lovely ladies. Buy our grain and you can sell to us at a happy profit.”

AHindu journalist looked thoughtful, started to write. Next to him was a European type who seemed unimpressed. He said, “Professor, have you any idea of the cost of shipping that much tonnage to the Moon?”

Prof waved it aside. “Atechnicality. Sir, there was a time when it was not simply expensive to ship goods across oceans but impossible. Then it was expensive, difficult, dangerous. Today you sell goods half around your planet almost as cheaply as next door; long-distance shipping is the least important factor in cost. Gentlemen, I am not an engineer. But I have learned this about engineers. When something must be done, engineers can find a way that is economically feasible. If you want the grain that we can grow, turn your engineers loose.” Prof gasped and labored, signaled for help and nurses wheeled him away.

I declined to be questioned on it, telling them that they must talk to Prof when he was well enough to see them. So they pecked at me on other lines. One man demanded to know why, since we paid no taxes, we colonists thought we had a right to run things our own way? After all, those colonies had been established by Federated Nations—by some of them. It had been terribly expensive. Earth had paid all bills—and now you colonists enjoy benefits and pay not one dime of taxes. Was that fair?

I wanted to tell him to blow it. But Prof had again made me take a tranquilizer and had required me to swot that endless list of answers to trick questions. “Lets take that one at a time,” I said. “First, what is it you want us to pay taxes for? Tell me what I get and perhaps I’ll buy it. No, put it this way. Do you pay taxes?”

“Certainly I do! And so should you.” “And what do you get for your taxes?” “Huh? Taxes pay for government.”

I said, “Excuse me, I’m ignorant. I’ve lived my whole life in Luna, I don’t know much about your government. Can you feed it to me in small pieces? What do you get for your money?” They all got interested and anything this aggressive little choom missed, others supplied. I kept a list. When they stopped, I read it back:

“Free hospitals—aren’t any in Luna. Medical insurance—we have that but apparently not what you mean by it. If a person wants insurance, he goes to a bookie and works b-Out a bet. You can hedge anything, for a price. I don’t hedge my health, I’m healthy. Or was till I came here. We have a public library, one Carnegie Foundation started with a few book films. It gets along by charging fees. Public roads. I suppose that would be our tubes. But they are no more free than air is free. Sorry, you have free air here, don’t you? I mean our tubes were built by companies who put up money and are downright nasty about expecting it back and then some. Public schools. There are schools in all warrens and I never heard of them turning away pupils, so I guess they are ‘public.’ But they pay well, too, because anyone in Luna who knows something useful and is willing to teach it charges all the traffic will bear.”

I went on: “Let’s see what else– Social security. I’m not sure what that is but whatever it is, we don’t have it. Pensions. You can buy a pension. Most people don’t; most families are large and old people, say a hundred and up, either fiddle along at something they like, or sit and watch video. Or sleep. They sleep a lot, after say a hundred and twenty.”

“Sir, excuse me. Do people really live as long on the Moon as they say?”

I looked surprised but wasn’t; this was a “simulated question” for which an answer had been taped. “Nobody knows how long a person will live in Luna; we haven’t been there long enough. Our oldest citizens were born Earthside, it’s no test. So far, no one born in Luna died of old age, but that’s still no test; they haven’t had time to grow old yet, less than a century. But—Well, take me, madam; how old would you say I am? I’m authentic Loonie, third generation.”

“Uh, truthfully, Colonel Davis, I was surprised at your youthfulness—for this mission, I mean. You appear to be about twenty-two. Are you older? Not much, I fancy.” “Madam, I regret that your local gravitation makes it impossible for me to bow. Thank you. I’ve been married longer than that.”

“What? Oh, you’re jesting!”

“Madam, I would never venture to guess a lady’s age but, if you will emigrate to Luna, you will keep your present youthful loveliness much longer and add at least twenty years to your life.” I looked at list. “I’ll lump the rest of this together by saying we don’t have any of it in Luna, so I can’t see any reason to pay taxes for it. On that other point, sir, surely you know that the initial cost of the colonies has long since been repaid several times over through grain shipments alone? We are being bled white of our most essential resources…and not even being paid an open-market price. That’s why the Lunar Authority is being stubborn; they intend to go on bleeding us. The idea that Luna has been an expense to Terra and the investment must be recovered is a lie invented by the Authority to excuse their treating us as slaves. The truth is that Luna has not cost Terra one dime this century—and the original investment has long since been paid back.”

He tried to rally. “Oh, surely you’re not claiming that the Lunar colonies have paid all the billions of dollars it took to develop space flight?”

“I could present a good case. However there is no excuse to charge that against us. You have space flight, you people of Terra. We do not. Luna has not one ship. So why should we pay for what we never received? It’s like the rest of this list. We don’t get it, why should we pay for it?”

Had been stalling, waiting for a claim that Prof had told me I was sure to hear… and got it at last.

“Just a moment, please!” came a confident voice. “You ignored the two most important items on that list. Police protection and armed forces. You boasted that you were willing to pay for what you get… so how about paying almost a century of back taxes for those two? It should be quite a bill, quite a bill!” He smiled smugly.

Wanted to thank him!—thought Prof was going to chide me for failing to yank it out. People looked at each other and nodded, pleased I had been scored on. Did best to look innocent. “Please? Don’t understand. Luna has neither police nor armed forces.”

“You know what I mean. You enjoy the protection of the Peace Forces of the Federated Nations. And you do have police. Paid for by the Lunar Authority! I know, to my certain knowledge, that two phalanges were sent to the Moon less than a year ago to serve as policemen.”

“Oh.” I sighed. “Can you tell me how F.N. peace forces protect Luna? I did not know that any of your nations wanted to attack us. We are far away and have nothing anyone envies. Or did you mean we should pay them to leave us alone? If so, there is an old saying that once you pay Danegeld, you never get rid of the Dane. Sir, we will fight F.N. armed forces if we must… we shall never pay them.

“Now about those so-called ‘policemen.’ They were not sent to protect us. Our Declaration of Independence told the true story about those hoodlums—did your newspapers print it?” (Some had, some hadn’t—depended on country.) “They went mad and started raping and murdering! And now they are dead! So don’t send us any more troops!”

Was suddenly “tired” and had to leave. Really was tired; not much of an actor and making that talk-talk come out way Prof thought it should was strain.

18

Was not told till later that I had received an assist in that interview; lead about “police” and “armed forces” had been fed by a stooge; Stu LaJoie took no chances. But by time I knew, I had had experience in handling interviews; we had them endlessly.

Despite being tired was not through that night. In addition to press some Agra diplomatic corps had risked showing up—few and none officially, even from Chad. But we were curiosities and they wanted to look at us.

Only one was important, a Chinee. Was startled to see him; he was Chinee member of committee. I met him, simply as “Dr. Chan” and we pretended to be meeting first time.

He was that Dr. Chan who was then Senator from Great China and also Great China’s long-time number-one boy in Lunar Authority—and, much later, Vice-Chairman and Premier, shortly before his assassin.

After getting out point I was supposed to make, with bonus through others that could have waited, I guided chair to bedroom and was at once summoned to Prof’s. “Manuel, I’m sure you noticed our distinguished visitor from the Middle Kingdom.”

“Old Chinee from committee?”

“Try to curb the Loonie talk, son. Please don’t use it at all here, even with me. Yes. He wants to know what we meant by ‘tenfold or a hundredfold.’ So tell him.” “Straight? Or swindle?”

“The straight. This man is no fool. Can you handle the technical details?” “Done my homework. Unless he’s expert in ballistics.”

“He’s not. But don’t pretend to know anything you don’t know. And don’t assume that he’s friendly. But he could be enormously helpful if he concludes that our interests and his coincide. But don’t try to persuade him. He’s in my study. Good luck. And remember—speak standard English.”

Dr. Chan stood up as I came in; I apologized for not standing. He said that he understood difficulties that a gentleman from Luna labored under here and for me not to exert myself— shook hands with himself and sat down.

I’ll skip some formalities. Did we or did we not have some specific solution when we claimed there was a cheap way to ship massive tonnage to Luna?

Told him was a method, expensive in investment but cheap in running expenses. “It’s the one we use on Luna, sir. Acatapult, an escape-speed induction catapult.”

His expression changed not at all. “Colonel, are you aware that such has been proposed many times and always rejected for what seemed good reasons? Something to do with air pressure.”

“Yes, Doctor. But we believe, based on extensive analyses by computer and on our experience with catapulting, that today the problem can be solved. Two of our larger firms, the LuNoHo Company and the Bank of Hong Kong in Luna, are ready to head a syndicate to do it as a private venture. They would need help here on Earth and might share voting stock—though they would prefer to sell bonds and retain control. Primarily what they need is a concession from some government, a permanent easement on which to build the catapult. Probably India.”

(Above was set speech. LuNoHoCo was bankrupt if anybody examined books, and Hong Kong Bank was strained; was acting as central bank for country undergoing upheaval. Purpose was to get in last word, “India.” Prof had coached me that this word must come last.)

Dr. Chan answered, “Never mind financial aspects. Anything which is physically possible can always be made financially possible; money is a bugaboo of small minds. Why do you select India?”

“Well, sir, India now consumes, I believe, over ninety per cent of our grain shipments—” “Ninety-three point one percent.”

“Yes, sir. India is deeply interested in our grain so it seemed likely that she would cooperate. She could grant us land, make labor and materials available, and so forth. But I mentioned India because she holds a wide choice of possible sites, very high mountains not too far from Terra’s equator. The latter is not essential, just helpful. But the site must be a high mountain. It’s that air pressure you spoke of, or air density. The catapult head should be at as high altitude as feasible but the ejection end, where the load travels over eleven kilometers per second, must be in air so thin that it approaches vacuum. Which calls for a very high mountain. Take the peak Nanda Devi, around four hundred kilometers from here. It has a railhead sixty kilometers from it and a road almost to its base. It is eight thousand meters high. I don’t know that Nanda Devi is ideal. It is simply a possible site with good logistics; the ideal site would have to be selected by Terran engineers.”

“Ahigher mountain would be better?”

“Oh, yes, sir!” I assured him. “Ahigher mountain would be preferred over one nearer the equator. The catapult can be designed to make up for loss in free ride from Earth’s rotation. The difficult thing is to avoid so far as possible this pesky thick atmosphere. Excuse me, Doctor; I did not mean to criticize your planet.”

“There are higher mountains. Colonel, tell me about this proposed catapult.”

I started to. “The length of an escape-speed catapult is determined by the acceleration. We think—or the computer calculates—that an acceleration of twenty gravities is about optimum. For Earth’s escape speed this requires a catapult three hundred twenty-three kilometers in length. Therefore–”

“Stop, please! Colonel, are you seriously proposing to bore a hole over three hundred kilometers deep?”

“Oh, no! Construction has to be above ground to permit shock waves to expand. The stator would stretch nearly horizontally, rising perhaps four kilometers in three hundred and in a straight line—almost straight, as Coriolis acceleration and other minor variables make it a gentle curve. The Lunar catapult is straight so far as the eye can see and so nearly horizontal that the barges just miss some peaks beyond it.”

“Oh. I thought that you were overestimating the capacity of present-day engineering. We drill deeply today. Not that deeply. Go on.”

“Doctor, it may be that common misconception which caused you to check me is why such a catapult has not been constructed before this. I’ve seen those earlier studies. Most assumed that a catapult would be vertical, or that it would have to tilt up at the end to toss the spacecraft into the sky—and neither is feasible nor necessary. I suppose the asswnption arose from the fact that your spaceships do boost straight up, or nearly.”

I went on: “But they do that to get above atmosphere, not to get into orbit. Escape speed is not a vector quantity; it is scalar. Aload bursting from a catapult at escape speed will not return to Earth no matter what its direction. Uh… two corrections: it must not be headed toward the Earth itself but at some part of the sky hemisphere, and it must have enough added velocity to punch through whatever atmosphere it still traverses. If it is headed in the right direction it will wind up at Luna.”

“Ah, yes. Then this catapult could be used but once each lunar month?”

“No, sir. On the basis on which you were thinking it would be once every day, picking the time to fit where Luna will be in her orbit. But in fact—or so the computer says; I’m not an astronautics expert—in fact this catapult could be used almost any time, simply by varying ejection speed, and the orbits could still wind up at Luna.”

“I don’t visualize that.”

“Neither do I, Doctor, but—Excuse me but isn’t there an exceptionally fine computer at Peiping University?”

“And if there is?” (Did I detect an increase in bland inscrutability? ACyborg-computer—Pickled brains? Or live ones, aware? Horrible, either way.)

“Why not ask a topnotch computer for all possible ejection times for such a catapult as I have described? Some orbits go far outside Luna’s orbit before returning to where they can be captured by Luna, taking a fantastically long time. Others hook around Terra and then go quite directly. Some are as simple as the ones we use from Luna. There are periods each day when short orbits may be selected. But a load is in the catapult less than one minute; the limitation is how fast the beds can be made ready. It is even possible to have more than one load going up the catapult at a time if the power is sufficient and computer control is versatile. The only thing that worries me is—These high mountains they are covered with snow?”

“Usually,” he answered. “Ice and snow and bare rock.”

“Well, sir, being born in Luna I don t know anything about snow. The stator would not only have to be rigid under the heavy gravity of this planet but would have to withstand dynamic thrusts at twenty gravities. I don t suppose it could be anchored to ice or snow. Or could it be?”

“I’m not an engineer, Colonel, but it seems unlikely. Snow and ice would have to be removed. And kept clear. Weather would be a problem, too.”

“Weather I know nothing about, Doctor, and all I know about ice is that it has a heat of crystallization of three hundred thirty-five million joules per tonne. I have no idea how many tonnes would have to be melted to clear the site, or how much energy would be required to keep it clear, but it seems to me that it might take as large a reactor to keep it free of ice as to power the catapult.”

“We can build reactors, we can melt ice. Or engineers can be sent north for re-education until they do understand ice.” Dr. Chan smiled and I shivered. “However, the engineering of ice and snow was solved in Antarctica years ago; don’t worry about it. Aclear, solid-rock site about three hundred fifty kilometers long at a high altitude—Anything else I should know?”

“Not much, sir. Melted ice could be collected near the catapult head and thus be the most massy part of what will be shipped to Luna—quite a saving. Also the steel canisters would be re-used to ship grain to Earth, thus stopping another drain that Luna can’t take. No reason why a canister should not make the trip hundreds of times. At Luna it would be much the way

barges are now landed off Bombay, solid-charge retrorockets programmed by ground control—except that it would be much cheaper, two and a half kilometer-seconds change of motion versus eleven-plus, a squared factor of about twenty—but actually even more favorable, as retros are parasitic weight and the payload improves accordingly. There is even a way to improve that.”

“How?”

“Doctor, this is outside my specialty. But everybody knows that your best ships use hydrogen as reaction mass heated by a fusion reactor. But hydrogen is expensive in Luna and any mass could be reaction mass; it just would not be as efficient. Can you visualize an enormous, brute-force space tug designed to fit Lunar conditions? It would use raw rock, vaporized, as reaction mass and would be designed to go up into parking orbit, pick up those shipments from Terra, bring them down to Luna’s surface. It would be ugly, all the fancies stripped away—might not be manned even by a Cyborg. It can be piloted from the ground, by computer.”

“Yes, I suppose such a ship could be designed. But let’s not complicate things. Have you covered the essentials about this catapult?”

“I believe so, Doctor. The site is the crucial thing. Take that peak Nanda Devi. By the maps I have seen it appears to have a long, very high ridge sloping to the west for about the length of our catapult. If that is true, it would be ideal—less to cut away, less to bridge. I don’t mean that it is the ideal site but that is the sort to look for: a very high peak with a long, long ridge west of it.”

“I understand.” Dr. Chan left abruptly.

Next few weeks I repeated that in a dozen countries, always in private and with implication that it was secret. All that changed was name of mountain. In Ecuador I pointed out that Chimborazo was almost on equator—ideal! But in Argentina I emphasized that their Aconcagua was highest peak in Western Hemisphere. In Bolivia I noted that Altoplano was as high as Tibetan Plateau (almost true), much nearer equator, and offered a wide choice of sites for easy construction leading up to peaks comparable to any on Terra.

I talked to a North American who was a political opponent of that choom who had called us “rabble.” I pointed out that, while Mount McKinley was comparable to anything in Asia or South America, there was much to be said for Mauna Loa—extreme ease of construction. Doubling gees to make it short enough to fit, and Hawaii would be Spaceport of World … whole world, for we talked about day when Mars would be exploited and freight for three (possibly four) planets would channel through their “Big Island.”

Never mentioned Mauna Loa’s volcanic nature; instead I noted that location permitted an aborted load to splash harmlessly in Pacific Ocean. In Sovunion was only one peak discussed—Lenin, over thousand meters (and rather too close to their big neighbor).

Kilimanjaro, Popocatepetl, Logan, El Libertado—my favorite peak changed by country; all that we required was that it be “highest mountain” in hearts of locals. I found something to say about modest mountains of Chad when we were entertained there and rationalized so well I almost believed it.

Other times, with help of leading questions from Stu LaJoie’s stooges, I talked about chemical engineering (of which I know nothing but had memorized facts) on surface of Luna, where endless free vacuum and sunpower and limitless raw materials and predictable conditions permitted ways of processing expensive or impossible Earthside—when day arrived that cheap shipping both ways made it profitable to exploit Luna’s virgin resources, Was always a suggestion that entrenched bureaucracy of Lunar Authority had failed to see great potential of Luna (true), plus answer to a question always asked, which answer asserted that Luna could accept any number of colonists.

This also was true, although never mentioned that Luna (yes, and sometimes Luna’s Loonies) killed about half of new chums. But people we talked to rarely thought of emigrating themselves; they thought of forcing or persuading others to emigrate to relieve crowding—and to reduce their own taxes. Kept mouth shut about fact that half-fed swarms we saw everywhere did breed faster than even catapulting could offset.

We could not house, feed, and train even a million new chums each year—and a million wasn’t a drop on Terra; more babies than that were conceived every night. We could accept far more than would emigrate voluntarily but if they used forced emigration and flooded us… Luna has only one way to deal with a new chum: Either he makes not one fatal mistake, in personal behavior or in coping with environment that will bite without warning… or he winds up as fertilizer in tunnel farm.

All that immigration in huge numbers could mean would be that a larger percentage of immigrants would die—too few of us to help them past natural hazards. However, Prof did most talking about “Luna’s great future.” I talked about catapults.

During weeks we waited for committee to recall us, we covered much ground. Stu’s men had things set up and only question was how much we could take. Would guess that every week on Terra chopped a year off our lives, maybe more for Prof. But he never complained and was always ready to be charming at one more reception.

We spent extra time in North America. Date of our Declaration of Independence, exactly three hundred years after that of North American British colonies, turned out to be wizard propaganda and Stu’s manipulators made most of it. North Americans are sentimental about their “United States” even though it ceased to mean anything once their continent had been rationalized by F.N. They elect a president every eight years, why, could not say—why do British still have Queen?—and boast of being “sovereign.” “Sovereign,” like “love,” means anything you want it to mean; it’s a word in dictionary between “sober” and “sozzled.”

“Sovereignty” meant much in North America and “Fourth of July” was a magic date; Fourth-of-July League handled our appearances and Stu told us that it had not cost much to get it moving and nothing to keep going; League even raised money used elsewhere—North Americans enjoy giving no matter who gets it.

Farther south Stu used another date; his people planted idea that coup d’etat had been 5 May instead of two weeks later. We were greeted with “Cinco de Mayo! Libertad! Cinco de Mayo!” I thought they were saying, “Thank you”—Prof did all talking.

But in 4th-of-July country I did better. Stu had me quit wearing a left arm in public, sleeves of my costumes were sewed up so that stump could not be missed, and word was passed that I had lost it “fighting for freedom.” Whenever I was asked about it, all I did was smile and say, “See what comes of biting nails?”—then change subject.

I never liked North America, even first trip. It is not most crowded part of Terra, has a mere billion people. In Bombay they sprawl on pavements; in Great New York they pack them vertically—not sure anyone sleeps. Was glad to be in invalid’s chair.

Is mixed-up place another way; they care about skin color—by making point of how they don’t care. First trip I was always too light or too dark, and somehow blamed either way, or was always being expected to take stand on things I have no opinions on. Bog knows I don’t know what genes I have. One grandmother came from a part of Asia where invaders passed as regularly as locusts, raping as they went—why not ask her?

Learned to handle it by my second makee-learnee but it left a sour taste. Think I prefer a place as openly racist as India, where if you aren’t Hindu, you’re nobody—except that Parsees look down on Hindus and vice versa. However I never really had to cope with North America’s reverse-racism when being “Colonel O’Kelly Davis, Hero of Lunar Freedom.”

We had swarms of bleeding hearts around us, anxious to help. I let them do two things for me, things I had never had time, money, or energy for as a student: I saw Yankees play and i visited Salem.

Should have kept my illusions. Baseball is better over video, you can really see it and aren’t pushed in by two hundred thousand other people. Besides, somebody should have shot that outfield. I spent most of that game dreading moment when they would have to get my chair out through crowd—that and assuring host that I was having a wonderful time.

Salem was just a place, no worse (and no better) than rest of Boston. After seeing it I suspected they had hanged wrong witches. But day wasn’t wasted; I was filmed laying a wreath on a place where a bridge had been in another part of Boston, Concord, and made a memorized speech—bridge is still there, actually; you can see it, down through glass. Not much of a bridge.

Prof enjoyed it all, rough as it was on him: Prof had great capacity for enjoying. He always had something new to tell about great future of Luna. In New York he gave managing director of a hotel chain, one with rabbit trade mark, a sketch of what could be done with resorts in Luna—once excursion rates were within reach of more people—visits too short to hurt anyone, escort service included, exotic side trips, gambling—no taxes.

Last point grabbed attention, so Prof expanded it into “longer old age” theme—a chain of retirement hostels where an earthworm could live on Terran old-age pension and go on living, twenty, thirty, forty years longer than on Terra. As an exile—but which was better? Alive old age in Luna? Or a funeral crypt on Terra? His descendants could pay visits and fill those resort hotels. Prof embellished with pictures of “nightclubs” with acts impossible in Terra’s horrible gravity, sports to fit our decent level of gravitation—even talked about swimming pools and ice skating and possibility of flying! (Thought he had tripped his safeties.) He finished by hinting that Swiss cartel had tied it up.

Next day he was telling foreign-divisions manager of Chase International Panagra that a Luna City branch should be staffed with paraplegics, paralytics, heart cases, amputees, others who found high gravity a handicap. Manager was a fat man who wheezed, he may have been thinking of it personally—but his ears pricked up at “no taxes.”

We didn’t have it all our own way. News was often against us and were always hecklers. Whenever I had to take them on without Prof’s help I was likely to get tripped. One man tackled me on Prof’s statement to committee that we “owned” grain grown in Luna: he seemed to take it for granted that we did not. Told him I did not understand question.

He answered, “Isn’t it true, Colonel, that your provisional government has asked for membership in Federated Nations?”

Should have answered, “No comment.” But fell for it and agreed. “Very well,” he said, “the impediment seems to be the counterclaim that the Moon belongs to the Federated Nations—as it always has–under supervision of the Lunar Authority. Either way, by your own admission, that grain belongs to the Federated Nations, in trust.”

I asked how he reached that conclusion? He answered, ‘Colonel, you style yourself ‘Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs.’ Surely you are familiar with the charter of the Federated Nations.” I had skimmed it. “Reasonably familiar,” I said—cautiously, I thought.

“Then you know the First Freedom guaranteed by the Charter and its current application through F & AControl Board Administrative Order Number eleven-seventy-six dated three March of this year. You concede therefore that all grain grown on the Moon in excess of the local ration is ab initio and beyond contest the property of all, title held in trust by the Federated Nations through its agencies for distribution as needed.” He was writing as he talked. “Have you anything to add to that concession?”

I said, “What in Bog’s name you talking about?” Then, “Come back! Haven’t conceded anything!” So Great New York Times printed:

LUNAR “UNDERSECRETARY” SAYS: “FOOD BELONGS TO HUNGRY”

New York Today—O’Kelly Davis, soi-disant “Colonel of the Armed Forces of Free Luna” here on a junket to stir up support for the insurgents in the F.N. Lunar colonies, said in a voluntary statement to this paper that the “Freedom from Hunger” clause in the Grand Charter applied to the Lunar grain shipments—

I asked Prof how should have handled? “Always answer an unfriendly question with another question,” he told me. “Never ask him to clarify; he’ll put words in your mouth. This reporter— Was he skinny? Ribs showing?”

“No. Heavyset.”

“Not living on eighteen hundred calories a day, I take it, which is the subject of that order he cited. Had you known you could have asked him how long he had conformed to the ration and why he quit? Or asked him what he had for breakfast—and then looked unbelieving no matter what he answered. Or when you don’t know what a man is getting at, let your counter- question shift the subject to something you do want to talk about. Then, no matter what he answers, make your point and call on someone else. Logic does not enter into it—just tactics.”

“Prof, nobody here is living on eighteen hundred calories a day. Bombay, maybe. Not here.”

“Less than that in Bombay. Manuel, that ‘equal ration’ is a fiction. Half the food on this planet is in the black market, or is not reckoned through one ruling or another. Or they keep two sets of books, and figures submitted to the F.N. having nothing to do with the economy. Do you think that grain from Thailand and Burma and Australia is correctly reported to the Control

Board by Great China? I’m sure that the India representative on that food board doesn’t. But India keeps quiet because she gets the lion’s share from Luna… and then ‘plays politics with hunger’—a phrase you may remember—by using our grain to control her elections. Kerala had a planned famine last year. Did you see it in the news?”

“No.”

“Because it wasn’t in the news. Amanaged democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers… and its greatest strength is a ‘free press’ when ‘free’ is defined as ‘responsible’ and the managers define what is ‘irresponsible.’ Do you know what Luna needs most?”

“More ice.”

“Anews system that does not bottleneck through one channel. Our friend Mike is our greatest danger.” “Huh? Don’t you trust Mike?”

“Manuel, on some subjects I don’t trust even myself. Limiting the freedom of news ‘just a little bit’ is in the same category with the classic example ‘a little bit pregnant.’ We are not yet free nor will we be as long as anyone—even our ally Mike—controls our news. Someday I hope to own a newspaper independent of any source or channel. I would happily set print by hand, like Benjamin Franklin.”

I gave up. “Prof, suppose these talks fail and grain shipments stop. What happens?”

“People back home will be vexed with us… and many here on Terra would die. Have you read Malthus?” “Don’t think so.”

“Many would die. Then a new stability would be reached with somewhat more people—more efficient people and better fed. This planet isn’t crowded; it is just mismanaged … and the unkindest thing you can do for a hungry man is to give him food. ‘Give.’ Read Malthus. It is never safe to laugh at Dr. Malthus; he always has the last laugh. Adepressing man, I’m glad he’s dead. But don’t read him until this is over; too many facts hamper a diplomat, especially an honest one.”

“I’m not especially honest.”

“But you have no talent for dishonesty, so your refuge must be ignorance and stubbornness. You have the latter; try to preserve the former. For the nonce. Lad, Uncle Bernardo is terribly tired.”

I said, “Sorry,” and wheeled out of his room. Prof was hitting too hard a pace. I would have been willing to quit if would insure his getting into a ship and out of that gravity. But traffic stayed one way—grain barges, naught else.

But Prof had fun. As I left and waved lights out, noticed again a toy he had bought, one that delighted him like a kid on Christmas—a brass cannon.

Areal one from sailing ship days. Was small, barrel about half a meter long and massing, with wooden carriage, only kilos fifteen. A“signal gun” its papers said. Reeked of ancient history, pirates, men “walking plank.” Apretty thing but I asked Prof why? If we ever managed to leave, price to lift that mass to Luna would hurt—I was resigned to abandoning a p-suit with years more wear in it—abandon everything but two left arms and a pair of shorts, If pressed, might give up social arm. If very pressed, would skip shorts.

He reached out and stroked shiny barrel. “Manuel, once there was a man who held a political make-work job like so many here in this Directorate, shining brass cannon around a courthouse.”

“Why would courthouse have cannon?”

“Never mind. He did this for years. It fed him and let him save a bit, but he was not getting ahead in the world. So one day he quit his job, drew out his savings, bought a brass cannon— and went into business for himself.”

“Sounds like idiot.”

“No doubt. And so were we, when we tossed out the Warden. Manuel, you’ll outlive me. When Luna adopts a flag, I would like it to be a cannon or, on field sable, crossed by bar sinister gules of our proudly ignoble lineage. Do you think it could be managed?”

“Suppose so, if you’ll sketch. But why a flag? Not a flagpole in all Luna.”

“It can fly in our hearts … a symbol for all fools so ridiculously impractical as to think they can fight city hail. Will you remember, Manuel?”

“Sure. That is, will remind you when time comes.” Didn’t like such talk. He had started using oxygen tent in private—and would not use in public.

Guess I’m “ignorant” and “stubborn”—was both in place called Lexington, Kentucky, in Central Managerial Area. One thing no doctrine about, no memorized answers, was life in Luna. Prof said to tell truth and emphasize homely, warm, friendly things, especially anything different. “Remember, Manuel, the thousands of Terrans who have made short visits to Luna are only a tiny fraction of one percent. To most people we will be as weirdly interesting as strange animals in a zoo. Do you remember that turtle on exhibition in Old Dome? That’s us.”

Certainly did; they wore that insect out, staring at. So when this male-female team started quizzing about family life in Luna was happy to answer. I prettied it only by what I left out—things that aren’t family life but poor substitutes in a community overloaded with males, Luna City is homes and families mainly, dull by Terra standards—but I like it. And other warrens much same, people who work and raise kids and gossip and find most of their fun around dinner table. Not much to tell, so I diseussed anything they found interesting. Every Luna custom comes from Terra since that’s where we all came from, but Terra is such a big place that a custom from Micronesia, say, may be strange in North America.

This woman—can’t call her lady—wanted to know about various sorts of marriage. First, was it true that one could get married without a license “on” Luna? I asked what a marriage license was?

Her companion said, “Skip it, Mildred. Pioneer societies never have marriage licenses.” “But don’t you keep records?” she persisted.

“Certainly,” I agreed. “My family keeps a family book that goes back almost to first landing at Johnson City—every marriage, birth, death, every event of importance not only in direct line but all branches so far as we can keep track. And besides, is a man, a schoolteacher, going around copying old family records all over our warren, writing a history of Luna City. Hobby.”

“But don’t you have official records? Here in Kaintucky we have records that go back hundreds of years.” “Madam, we haven’t lived there that long.”

“Yes, but—Well, Luna City must have a city clerk. Perhaps you call him ‘county recorder.’ The official who keeps track of such things. Deeds and so forth.”

I said. “Don’t think so, madam. Some bookies do notary work, witnessing chops on contracts, keeping records of them. Is for people who don’t read and write and can’t keep own records. But never heard of one asked to keep record of marriage. Not saying couldn’t happen. But haven’t heard.”

“How delightfully informal! Then this other rumor, about how simple it is to get a divorce on the Moon. I daresay that’s true, too?”

“No, madam, wouldn’t say divorce is simple. Too much to untangle. Mmm … take a simple example, one lady and say she has two husbands—” “Two?”

“Might have more, might have just one. Or might be complex marriage. But let’s take one lady and two men as typical. She decides to divorce one. Say it’s friendly, with other husband agreeing and one she is getting rid of not making fuss. Not that it would do him any good. Okay, she divorces him; he leaves. Still leaves endless things. Men might be business partners, co-husbands often are. Divorce may break up partnership. Money matters to settle. This three may own cubic together, and while will be in her name, ex-husband probably has cash coming or rent. And almost always are children to consider, support and so forth. Many things. No, madam, divorce is never simple. Can divorce him in ten seconds but may take ten years to straighten out loose ends. Isn’t it much that way here?”

“Uh … just fuhget ah evah asked the question, Cunn’l; it may be simpluh hyuh.” (She did talk that way but was understandable once I got program. Won’t spell it again.) “But if that is a simple marriage, what is a ‘complex’ one?”

Found self explaining polyandries, clans, groups, lines, and less common patterns considered vulgar by conservative people such as my own family—deal my mother set up, say, after she ticked off my old man, though didn’t describe that one; Mother was always too extreme.

Woman said, “You have me confused. What is the difference between a line and a clan?”

Are quite different. Take own case. I have honor to be member of one of oldest line marriages in Luna—and, in my prejudiced opinion, best. You asked about divorce. Our family has never had one and would bet long odds never will. Aline marriage increases in stability year after year, gains practice in art of getting along together, until notion of anybody leaving is unthinkable. Besides, takes unanimous decision of all wives to divorce a husband—could never happen. Senior wife would never let it get that far.”

Went on describing advantages—financial security, fine home life it gives children, fact that death of a spouse, while tragic, could never be tragedy it was in a temporary family, especially for children—children simply could not be orphaned. Suppose I waxed too enthusiastic—but my family is most important thing in my life. Without them I’m just one-armed mechanic who could be eliminated without causing a draft.

“Here’s why is stable,” I said. “Take my youngest wife, sixteen. Likely be in her eighties before is senior wife. Doesn’t mean all wives senior to her will die by then; unlikely in Luna, females seem to be immortal. But may all opt out of family management by then; by our family traditions they usually do, without younger wives putting pressure on them. So Ludmilla—”

“Ludmilla?”

“Russki name. From fairy tale. Milla will have over fifty years of good example before has to carry burden. She’s sensible to start with, not likely to make mistakes and if did, has other wives to steady her. Self-correcting, like a machine with proper negative feedback. Agood line marriage is immortal; expect mine to outlast me at least a thousand years—and is why shan’t mind dying when time comes; best part of me will go on living.”

Prof was being wheeled out; he had them stop stretcher cart and listened. I turned to him. “Professor,” I said, “you know my family. Would mind telling this lady why it’s a happy family? If you think so.”

“It is,” agreed Prof. “However, I would rather make a more general remark. Dear madam, I gather that you find our Lunar marriage customs somewhat exotic.” “Oh, I wouldn’t go that far!” she said hastily. “Just somewhat unusual.”

“They arise, as marriage customs always do, from economic necessities of the circumstances—and our circumstances are very different from those here on Earth. Take the line type of marriage which my colleague has been praising . . and justifiably, I assure you, despite his personal bias—I am a bachelor and have no bias. Line marriage is the strongest possible device for conserving capital and insuring the welfare of children—the two basic societal functions for marriage everywhere—in an enviroment in which there is no security, neither for capital nor for children, other than that devised by individuals. Somehow human beings always cope with their environments. Line marriage is a remarkably successful invention to that end. All other Lunar forms of marriage serve that same purpose, though not as well.”

He said goodnight and left. I had with me—always!—a picture of my family, newest one, our wedding with Wyoming. Brides are at their prettiest and Wyoh was radiant—and rest of us looked handsome and happy, with Grandpaw tall and proud and not showing failing faculties.

But was disappointed; they looked at it oddly. But man—Mathews, name was—said, “Can you spare this picture, Colonel?” Winced. “Only copy I have. And a long way from home.”

“For a moment, I mean. Let me have it photographed. Right here, it need never leave your hands,”

“Oh. Oh, certainly!” Not a good picture of me but is face I have, and did Wyoh justice and they just don’t come prettier than Lenore.

So he photographed it and next morning they did come right into our hotel suite and woke me before time and did arrest and take me away wheel chair and all and did lock me in a cell with bars! For bigamy. For polygamy. For open immorality and publicly inciting others to same.

Was glad Mum couldn’t see.

19

Took Stu all day to get case transferred to an F.N. court and dismissed. His lawyers asked to have it tossed out on “diplomatic immunity” but F.N. judges did not fall into trap, merely noted that alleged offenses had taken place outside jurisdiction of lower court, except alleged “inciting” concerning which they found insufficient evidence. Aren’t any F.N. laws covering marriage; can’t be—just a rule about each nation required to give “full faith and credence” to marriage customs of other member nations.

Out of those eleven billion people perhaps seven billion lived where polygamy is legal, and Stu’s opinion manipulators played up “persecution”; it gained us sympathy from people who otherwise would never have heard of us—even gained it in North America and other places where polygamy is not legal, from people who believe in “live and let live.” All good, because always problem was to be noticed. To most of those bee-swarm billions Luna was nothing; our rebellion hadn’t been noticed.

Stu’s operators had gone to much thought to plan setup to get me arrested. Was not told until weeks later after time to cool off and see benefits. Took a stupid judge, a dishonest sheriff, and barbaric local prejudice which I triggered with that sweet picture, for Stu admitted later that range of color in Davis family was what got judge angry enough to be foolish even beyond native talent for nonsense.

My one consolation, that Mum could not see my disgrace, turned out mistaken; pictures, taken through bars and showing grim face, were in every Luna paper, and write-ups used nastiest Earthside stories, not larger number that deplored injustice. But should have had more faith in Mimi; she wasn’t ashamed, simply wanted to go Earthside and rip some people to pieces.

While helped Earthside, greatest good was in Luna. Loonies become more unified over this silly huhu than had ever been before. They took it personally and “Adam Selene” and “Simon Jester” pushed it. Loonies are easygoing except on one subject, women. Every lady felt insulted by Terran news stories—so male Loonies who had ignored politics suddenly discovered I was their boy.

Spin-off—old lags feel superior to those not transported. Later found self greeted by ex-cons with: “Hi, jailbird!” Alodge greeting—I was accepted.

But saw nothing good about it then! Pushed around, treated like cattle, fingerprinted, photographed, given food we wouldn’t offer hogs, exposed to endless indignity, and only that heavy field kept me from trying to kill somebody—had I been wearing number-six arm when grabbed, might have tried.

But steadied down once I was freed. Hour later we were on way to Agra; had at last been summoned by committee. Felt good to be back in suite in maharajah’s palace but eleven-hour zone change in less than three did not permit rest; we went to hearing bleary-eyed and held together by drugs.

“Hearing” was one-sided; we listened while chairman talked. Talked an hour; I’ll summarize:

Our preposterous claims were rejected. Lunar Authority’s sacred trust could not be abandoned. Disorders on Earth’s Moon could not be tolerated. Moreover, recent disorders showed that Authority had been too lenient. Omission was now to be corrected by an activist program, a five-year plan in which all phases of life in Authority’s trusteeship would be overhauled. A code of laws was being drafted; civil and criminal courts would be instituted for benefit of “client-employees”—which meant all persons in trust area, not just consignees with uncompleted sentences. Public schools would be established, plus indoctrinal adult schools for client-employees in need of same. An economic, engineering, and agricultural planning board would be created to provide fullest and most efficient use of Moon’s resources and labor of client-employees. An interim goal of quadrupling grain shipments in five years had been adopted as a figure easily obtainable once scientific planning of resources and labor was in effect. First phase would be to withdraw client-employees from occupations found not to be productive and put them to drilling a vast new system of farm tunnels in order that hydroponics would commence in them not later than March 2078. These new giant farms would be operated by Lunar Authority, scientifically, and not left to whims of private owners. It was contemplated that this system would, by end of five-year plan, produce entire new grain quota; in meantime client-employees producing grain privately would be allowed to continue. But they would be absorbed into new system as their less efficient methods were no longer needed.

Chairman looked up from papers. “In short, the Lunar colonies are going to be civilized and brought into managerial coordination with the rest of civilization. Distasteful as this task has been, I feel—speaking as a citizen rather than as chairman of this committee—I feel that we owe you thanks for bringing to our attention a situation so badly in need of correction.”

Was ready to burn his ears off. “Client-employees!” What a fancy way to say “slaves”! But Prof said tranquilly, “I find the proposed plans most interesting. Is one permitted to ask questions? Purely for information?”

“For information, yes.”

North American member leaned forward. “But don’t assume that we are going to take any backtalk from you cavemen! So mind your manners. You aren’t in the clear on this, you know.” “Order,” chairman said. “Proceed, Professor.”

“This term ‘client-employee’ I find intriguing. Can it be stipulated that the majority of inhabitants of Earth’s major satellite are not undischarged consignees but free individuals?”

“Certainly,” chairman agreed blandly. “All legal aspects of the new policy have been studied. With minor exceptions some ninety-one percent of the colonists have citizenship, original or derived, in various member nations of the Federated Nations. Those who wish to return to their home countries have a right to do so. You will be pleased to learn that the Authority is considering a plan under which loans for transportation can be arranged… probably under supervision of International Red Cross and Crescent. I might add that I myself am heartily backing this plan—as it renders nonsensical any talk about ‘slave labor.’” He smiled smugly.

“I see,” agreed Prof. “Most humane. Has the committee—or the Authority—pondered the fact that most—effectively all, I should say—considered the fact that inhabitants of Luna are physically unable to live on this planet? That they have undergone involuntary permanent exile through irreversible physiological changes and can never again live in comfort and health in a gravitational field six times greater than that to which their bodies have become adjusted?”

Scoundrel pursed lips as if considering totally new idea. “Speaking again for myself, I would not be prepared to stipulate that what you say is necessarily true. It might be true of some, might not be others; people vary widely. Your presence here proves that it is not impossible for a Lunar inhabitant to return to Earth. In any case we have no intention of forcing anyone to return. We hope that they will choose to stay and we hope to encourage others to emigrate to the Moon. But these are individual choices, under the freedoms guaranteed by the Great Charter. But as to this alleged physiological phenomenon—it is not a legal matter. If anyone deems it prudent, or thinks he would be happier, to stay on the Moon, that’s his privilege.”

“I see, sir. We are free. Free to remain in Luna and work, at tasks and for wages set by you… or free to return to Earth to die.”

Chairman shrugged. “You assume that we are villians—we’re not. Why, if I were a young man I would emigrate to the Moon myself. Great opportunities! In any case I am not troubled by your distortions—history will justify us.”

Was surprised at Prof; he was not fighting. Worried about him—weeks of strain and a bad night on top. All he said was, “Honorable Chairman, I assume that shipping to Luna will soon be resumed. Can passage be arranged for my colleague and myself in the first ship? For I must admit, sir, that this gravitational weakness of which I spoke is, in our cases, very real. Our mission is completed; we need to go home.”

(Not a word about grain barges. Nor about “throwing rocks,” nor even futility of beating a cow. Prof just sounded tired.)

Chairman leaned forward and spoke with grim satisfaction. “Professor, that presents difficulties. To put it bluntly, you appear to be guilty of treason against the Great Charter, indeed against all humanity … and an indictment is being considered. I doubt if anything more than a suspended sentence would be invoked against a man of your age and physical condition, however. Do you think it would be prudent of us to give you passage back to the place where you committed these acts—there to stir up more mischief?”

Prof sighed. “I understand your point. Then, sir, may I be excused? I am weary.”

“Certainly. Hold yourself at the disposal of this committee. The hearing stands adjourned. Colonel Davis—” “Sir?” I was directing wheel chair around, to get Prof out at once; our attendants had been sent outside. “Aword with you, please. In my office.”

“Uh—” Looked at Prof; eyes were closed and seemed unconscious. But he moved one finger, motioning me to him. “HonorabIe Chairman, I’m more nurse than diplomat; have to look after him. He’s an old man, he’s ill.”

“The attendants will take care of him.”

“Well…” Got as close to Prof as I could from chair, leaned over him. “Prof, are you right?”

He barely whispered. “See what he wants. Agree with him. But stall.”

Moments later was alone with chairman, soundproof door locked—meant nothing; room could have a dozen ears, plus one in my left arm. He said, “Adrink? Coffee?”

I answered, “No, thank you, sir. Have to watch my diet here.”

“I suppose so. Are you really limited to that chair? You look healthy.”

I said, “I could, if had to, get up and walk across room. Might faint. Or worse. Prefer not to risk. Weigh six times what I should. Heart’s not used to it.”

“I suppose so. Colonel, I hear you had some silly trouble in North America. I’m sorry, I truly am. Barbaric place. Always hate to have to go there. I suppose you’re wondering why I wanted to see you.”

“No, sir, assume you’ll tell when suits you. Instead was wondering why you still call me ‘Colonel.’”

He gave a barking laugh. “Habit, I suppose. Alifetime of protocol. Yet it might be well for you to continue with that title. Tell me, what do you think of our five-year plan?” Thought it stunk. “Seems to have been carefully thought out.”

“Much thought went into it. Colonel, you seem to be a sensible man—I know you are, I know not only your background but practically every word you’ve spoken, almost your thoughts, ever since you set foot on Earth. You were born on the Moon. Do you regard yourself as a patriot? Of the Moon?”

“Suppose so. Though tend to think of what we did just as something that had to be done.”

“Between ourselves—yes. That old fool Hobart. Colonel, that is a good plan… but lacks an executive. If you are really a patriot or let’s say a practical man with your country’s best interests at heart, you might be the man to carry it out.” He held up hand. “Don’t be hasty! I’m not asking you to sell out, turn traitor, or any nonsense like that. This is your chance to be a real patriot

—not some phony hero who gets himself killed in a lost cause. Put it this way. Do you think it is possible for the Lunar colonies to hold out against all the force that the Federated Nations of Earth can bring to bear? You’re not really a military man, I know—and I’m glad you’re not—but you are a technical man, and I know that, too. In your honest estimation, how many ships and bombs do you think it would take to destroy the Lunar colonies?”

I answered, “One ship, six bombs.”

“Correct! My God, it’s good to talk to a sensible man. Two of them would have to be awf’ly big, perhaps specially built. Afew people would stay alive, for a while, in smaller warrens beyond the blast areas. But one ship would do it, in ten minutes.”

I said, “Conceded, sir, but Professor de la Paz pointed out that you don’t get milk by beating a cow. And certainly can’t by shooting it.”

“Why do you think we’ve held back, done nothing, for over a month? That idiot colleague of mine—I won’t name him—spoke of ‘backtalk.’ Backtalk doesn’t fret me; it’s just talk and I’m interested in results. No, my dear Colonel, we won’t shoot the cow… but we would, if forced to, let the cow know that it could be shot. H-missiles are expensive toys but we could afford to expend some as warning shots, wasted on bare rock to let the cow know what could happen. But that is more force than one likes to use—it might frighten the cow and sour its milk.” He gave another barking laugh. “Better to persuade old bossy to give down willingly.”

I waited. “Don’t you want to know how?” he asked. “How?” I agreed.

“Through you. Don’t say a word and let me explain—”

He took me up on that high mountain and offered me kingdoms of Earth. Or of Luna. Take job of “Protector Pro Tem” with understanding was mine permanently if I could deliver. Convince Loonies they could not win. Convince them that this new setup was to their advantage—emphasize benefits, free schools, free hospitals, free this and that—details later but an everywhere government just like on Terra. Taxes starting low and handled painlessly by automatic checkoff and through kickback revenues from grain shipments. But, most important, this time Authority would not send a boy to do a man’s job—two regiments of police at once.

“Those damned Peace Dragoons were a mistake,” he said, “one we won’t make again. Between ourselves, the reason it has taken us a month to work this out is that we had to convince the Peace Control Commission that a handful of men cannot police three million people spread through six largish warrens and fifty and more small ones. So you’ll start with enough police—not combat troops but military police used to quelling civilians with a minimum of fuss. Besides that, this time they’ll have female auxiliaries, the standard ten per cent-no more rape complaints. Well, sir? Think you can swing it? Knowing it’s best in the long run for your own people?”

I said I ought to study it in detail, particularly plans and quotas for five-year plan, rather than make snap decision.

~Certainly, certainly!” he agreed. “I’ll give you a copy of the white paper we’ve made up; take it home, study it, sleep on it. Tomorrow we’ll talk again. Just give me your word as a gentleman to keep it under your hair. No secret, really… but these things are best settled before they are publicized. Speaking of publicity, you’ll need help—and you’ll get it. We’ll go to the expense of sending up topnotch men, pay them what it’s worth, have them centrifuge the way those scientists do—you know. This time we’re doing it right. That fool Hobart—he’s actually dead, isn’t he?”

“No, sir. Senile, however.”

“Should have killed him, Here’s your copy of the plan.”

“Sir? Speaking of old men—Professor de la Paz can’t stay here. Wouldn’t live six months.” “That’s best, isn’t it?”

I tried to answer levelly, “You don’t understand. He is greatly loved and respected. Best thing would be for me to convince him that you mean business with those H-missiles—and that it is his patriotic duty to salvage what we can. But, either way, if I return without him… well, not only could not swing it; wouldn’t live long enough to try.”

“Hmm—Sleep on it. We’ll talk tomorrow. Say fourteen o’clock.”

I left and as soon as was loaded into lorry gave way to shakes. Just don’t have high-level approach. Stu was waiting with Prof. “Well?” said Prof.

I glanced around, tapped ear. We huddled, heads over Prof’s head and two blankets over us all. Stretcher wagon was clean and so was my chair; I checked them each morning. But for room itself seemed safer to whisper under blankets.

Started in. Prof stopped me. “Discuss his ancestry and habits later. The facts.” “He offered me job of Warden.”

“I trust you accepted.”

“Ninety percent. I’m to study this garbage and give answer tomorrow. Stu, how fast can we execute Plan Scoot?” “Started. We were waiting for you to return. If they let you return.”

Next fifty minutes were busy. Stu produced a gaunt Hindu in a dhoti; in thirty minutes he was a twin of Prof, and lifted Prof off wagon onto a divan. Duplicating me was easier. Our doubles were wheeled into suite’s living room just at dusk and dinner was brought in. Several people came and went—among them elderly Hindu woman in sari, on arm of Stuart LaJoie. A plump babu followed them.

Getting Prof up steps to roof was worst; he had never worn powered walkers, had no chance to practice, and had been flat on back for more than a month.

But Stu’s arm kept him steady; I gritted teeth and climbed those thirteen terrible steps by myself. By time I reached roof, heart was ready to burst. Was put to it not to black out. Asilent little flitter craft came out of gloom right on schedule and ten minutes later we were in chartered ship we had used past month—two minutes after that we jetted for Australia. Don’t know what it cost to prepare this dance and keep it ready against need, but was no hitch.

Stretched out by Prof and caught breath, then said, “How you feel, Prof?” “Okay. Abit tired. Frustrated.”

“Ja da. Frustrated.”

“Over not seeing the Taj Mahal, I mean. I never had opportunity as a young man—and here I’ve been within a kilometer of it twice, once for several days, now for another day… and still I haven’t seen it and never shall.”

“Just a tomb.”

“And Helen of Troy was just a woman. Sleep, lad.” We landed in Chinee half of Australia, place called Darwin, and were carried straight into a ship, placed in acceleration couches and dosed. Prof was already out and I was beginning to feel dopy when Stu came in, grinned, and strapped down by us. I looked at him. “You, too? Who’s minding shop?”

“The same people who’ve been doing the real work all along. It’s a good setup and doesn’t need me any longer. Mannie old cobber, I did not want to be marooned a long way from home. Luna, I mean, in case you have doubts. This looks like the last train from Shanghai.”

“What’s Shanghai got to do with?”

“Forget I mentioned it. Mannie, I’m flat broke, concave. I owe money in all directions—debts that will be paid only if certain stocks move the way Adam Selene convinced me they would move, shortly after this point in history. And I’m wanted, or will be, for offenses against the public peace and dignity. Put it this way. I’m saving them the trouble of transporting me. Do you think I can learn to be a drillman at my age?”

Was feeling foggy, drug taking hold. “Stu, in Luna y’aren’t old… barely started … ‘nyway . . ,eat our table f’ever! Mimi likes you.” “Thanks, cobber, I might. Warning light! Deep breath!”

Suddenly was kicked by ten gee.

Our craft was ground-to-orbit ferry type used for manned satellites, for supplying F.N. ships in patrol orbit, and for passengers to and from pleasure-and-gambling satellites. She was carrying three passengers instead of forty, no cargo except three p-suits and a brass cannon (yes, silly toy was along; p-suits and Prof’s bang-bang were in Australia a week before we were) and good ship Lark had been stripped—total crew was skipper and a Cyborg pilot.

She was heavily overfueled.

We made (was told) normal approach on Elysium satellite … then suddenly scooted from orbital speed to escape speed, a change even more violent than liftoff.

This was scanned by F.N. Skytrack; we were commanded to stop and explain. I got this secondhand from Stu, self still recovering and enjoying luxury of no-gee with one strap to anchor. Prof was still out.

“So they want to know who we are and what we think we are doing,” Stu told me. “We told them that we were Chinese registry sky wagon Opening Lotus bound on an errand of mercy, to wit, rescuing those scientists marooned on the Moon, and gave our identification—as Opening Lotus.”

“How about transponder?”

“Mannie, if I got what I paid for, our transponder identified us as the Lark up to ten minutes ago… and now has I.D.’d us as the Lotus. Soon we will know. Just one ship is in position to get a missile off and it must blast us in”—he stopped to look—”another twenty-seven minutes according to the wired-up gentleman booting this bucket, or its chances of getting us are poor to zero. So if it worries you—if you have prayers to say or messages to send or whatever it is one does at such times—now is the time.”

“Think we ought to rouse Prof?”

“Let him sleep. Can you think of a better way to make jump than from peaceful sleep instantaneously into a cloud of radiant gas? Unless you know that he has religious necessities to attend to? He never struck me as a religious man, orthodoctrinally speaking.”

“He’s not. But if you have such duties, don’t let me keep you.”

“Thank you, I took care of what seemed necessary before we left ground. How about yourself, Mannie? I’m not much of a padre but I’ll do my best, if I can help. Any sins on your mind, old cobber? If you need to confess, I know quite a little about sin.”

Told him my needs did not run that way. Then did recall sins, some I cherished, and gave him a version more or less true. That reminded him of some of his own, which remind me— Zero time came and went before we ran out of sins. S LaJoie is a good person to spend last minutes with, even if don’t turn out to be last.

We had two days with naught to do but undergo drastic routines to keep us from carrying umpteen plagues to Luna. But didn’t mind shaking from induced chills and burning with fever; free fall was such a relief and was so happy to be going home.

Or almost happy—Prof asked what was troubling me,~ “Nothing,” I said. “Can’t wait to be home. But—Truth is, ashamed to show face after we’ve failed. Prof, what did we do wrong?” “Failed, my boy?”

“Don’t see what else can call it. Asked to be recognized. Not what we got.”

“Manuel, I owe you an apology. You will recall Adam Selene’s projection of our chances just before we left home.” Stu was not in earshot but “Mike” was word we never used; was always “Adam Selene” for security.

“Certainly do! One in fifty-three. Then when we reached Earthside dropped to reeking one in hundred. What you guess it is now? One in thousand?”

“I’ve had new projections every few days…which is why I owe you an apology. The last, received just before we left, included the then-untested assumption that we would escape, get clear of Terra and home safely. Or that at least one of us three would make it, which is why Comrade Stu was summoned home, he having a Terran’s tolerance of high acceleration. Eight projections, in fact, ranging from three of us dead, through various combinations up to three surviving. Would you care to stake a few dollars on what that last projection is, setting a bracket and naming your own odds? I’ll give a hint. You are far too pessimistic.”

“Uh… no, damn it! Just tell.”

“The odds against us are now only seventeen to one … and they’ve been shortening all month. Which I couldn’t tell you.”

“Was amazed, delighted, overjoyed—hurt. “What you mean, couldn’t tell me? Look, Prof, if not trusted, deal me out and put Stu in executive cell.”

“Please, son. That’s where he will go if anything happens to any of us—you, me, or dear Wyoming. I could not tell you Earthside—and can tell you now—not because you aren’t trusted but because you are no actor. You could carry out your role more effectively if you believed that our purpose was to achieve recognition of independence.”

“Now he tells!”

“Manuel, Manuel, we had to fight hard every instant—and lose.” “So? Am big enough boy to be told?”

“Please, Manuel. Keeping you temporarily in the dark greatly enhanced our chances; you can check this with Adam. May I add that Stuart accepted his summons to Luna blithely without asking why? Comrade, that committee was too small, its chairman too intelligent; there was always the hazard that they might offer an acceptable compromise—that first day there was grave danger of it. Had we been able to force our case before the Grand Assembly there would have been no danger of intelligent action. But we were balked. The best I could do was to antagonize the committee, even stooping to personal insult to make certain of at least one holdout against common sense.”

“Guess I never will understand high-level approach.”

“Possibly not. But your talents and mine complement each other. Manuel, you wish to see Luna free.” “You know I do.”

“You also know that Terra can defeat us.”

“Sure. No projection ever gave anything close to even money. So don’t see why you set out to antagonize—”

“Please. Since they can inflict their will on us, our only chance lies in weakening their will. That was why we had to go to Terra. To be divisive. To create many opinions. The shrewdest of the great generals in China’s history once said that perfection in war lay in so sapping the opponent’s will that he surrenders without fighting. In that maxim lies both our ultimate purpose and our most pressing danger. Suppose, as seemed possible that first day, we had been offered an inviting compromise. Agovernor in place of a warden, possibly from our own number. Local autonomy. Adelegate in the Grand Assembly. Ahigher price for grain at the catapult head, plus a bonus for increased shipments. Adisavowal of Hobart’s policies combined with an expression of regret over the rape and the killings with handsome cash settlements to the victims’ survivors. Would it have been accepted? Back home?”

“They did not offer that.”

“The chairman was ready to offer something like it that first afternoon and at that time he had his committee in hand. He offered us an asking price close enough to permit such a dicker. Assume that we reached in substance what I outlined. Would it have been acceptable at home?”

“Uh… maybe.”

“More than a ‘maybe’ by the bleak projection made just before we left home; it was the thing to be avoided at any cost—a settlement which would quiet things down, destroy our will to resist, without changing any essential in the longer-range prediction of disaster. So I switched the subject and squelched possibility by being difficult about irrelevancies politely offensive. Manuel, you and I know—and Adam knows—that there must be an end to food shipments; nothing less will save Luna from disaster. But can you imagine a wheat farmer fighting to end those shipments?”

“No. Wonder if can pick up news from home on how they’re taking stoppage?”

“There won’t be any. Here is how Adam has timed it, Manuel: No announcement is to be made on either planet until after we get home. We are still buying wheat. Barges are still arriving at Bombay.”

“You told them shipments would stop at once.”

“That was a threat, not a moral commitment. Afew more loads won’t matter and we need time. We don’t have everyone on our side; we have only a minority. There is a majority who don’t care either way but can be swayed—temporarily. We have another minority against us… especially grain farmers whose interest is never politics but the price of wheat. They are grumbling but accepting Scrip, hoping it wili be worth face value later. But the instant we announce that shipments have stopped they will be actively against us. Adam plans to have the majority committed to us at the time the announcement is made.”

“How long? One year? Two?”

“Two days, three days, perhaps four. Carefully edited excerpts from that five-year plan, excerpts from the recordings you’ve made—especially that yellow-dog offer—exploitation of your arrest in Kentucky—”

“Hey! I’d rather forget that.”

Prof smiled and cocked an eyebrow. “Uh—” I said uncomfortably. “Okay. If will help.” “It will help more than any statistics about natural resources.”

Wired-up ex-human piloting us went in as one maneuver without bothering to orbit and gave us even heavier beating; ship was light and lively. But change in motion is under two-and-a- half kilometers; was over in nineteen seconds and we were down at Johnson City. I took it right, just a terrible constriction in chest and a feeling as if giant were squeezing heart, then was over and I was gasping back to normal and glad to be proper weight. But did almost kill poor old Prof.

Mike told me later that pilot refused to surrender control; Mike would have brought ship down in a low-gee, no-breakum-egg, knowing Prof was aboard. But perhaps that Cyborg knew what he was doing; a low-gee landing wastes mass and Lotus-Lark grounded almost dry.

None of which we cared about, as looked as if that Garrison landing had wasted Prof. Stu saw it while I was still gasping, then we were both at him—heart stimulant, manual respiration, massage. At last he fluttered eyelids, looked at us, smiled. “Home,” he whispered.

We made him rest twenty minutes before we let him suit up to leave ship; had been as near dead as can be and not hear angels. Skipper was filling tanks, anxious to get rid of us and take on passengers—that Dutchman never spoke to us whole trip; think he regretted letting money talk him into a trip that could ruin or kill him.

By then Wyoh was inside ship, p-suited to come meet us. Don’t think Stu had ever seen her in a p-suit and certain he had never seen her as a blonde; did not recognize. I was hugging her in spite of p-suit; he was standing by, waiting to be introduced. Then strange “man” in p-suit hugged him—he was surprised.

Heard Wyoh’s muffled voice: “Oh heavens! Mannie, my helmet.”

I unclamped it, lifted off. She shook curls and grinned. “Stu, aren’t you glad to see me? Don’t you know me?”

Agrin spread over his face, slowly as dawn across maria. “Zdra’stvooeet’ye, Gospazha! I am most happy to see you.” “‘Gospazha’ indeed! I’m Wyoh to you, dear, always. Didn’t Mannie tell you I’d gone back to blonde?”

“Yes, he did. But knowing it and seeing are not the same.”

“You’ll get used to it.” She stopped to bend over Prof, kiss him, giggle at him, then straightened up and gave me a no-helmet welcome-home that left us both with tears despite pesky suit. Then turned again to Stu, started to kiss him.

He held back a little. She stopped. “Stu, am I going to have to put on brown makeup to welcome you?” Stu glanced at me, then kissed her. Wyoh put in as much time and thought as she had to welcoming me.

Was later I figured out his odd behavior. Stu, despite commitment, was still not a Loonie—and in meantime Wyoh had married. What’s that got to do with it? Well, Earthside it makes a difference, and Stu did not know deep down in bones that a Loonie lady is own mistress. Poor chum thought I might take offense!

We got Prof into suit, ourselves same, and left, me with cannon under arm. Once underground and locked through, we unsuited—and I was flattered to see that Wyoh was wearing crushed under p-suit that red dress I bought her ages ago. She brushed it and skirt flared out.

Immigration room was empty save for about forty men lined up along wall like new transportees; were wearing p-suits and carrying helmets—Terrans going home, stranded tourists and some scientists. Their p-suits would not go, would be unloaded before lift. I looked at them and thought about Cyborg pilot. When Lark had been stripped, all but three couches had been removed; these people were going to take acceleration lying on floorplates—if skipper was not careful he was going to have mashed Terrans au blut.

Mentioned to Stu. “Forget it,” he said. “Captain Leures has foam pads aboard. He won’t let them be hurt; they’re his life insurance.”

My family, all thirty-odd from Grandpaw to babies, was waiting beyond next lock on level he!ow and we got cried on and slobbered on and hugged and this time Stu did not hold back. Little Hazel made ceremony of kissing us; she had Liberty Caps, set one on each, then kissed us—and at that signal whole family put on Liberty Caps, and I got sudden tears. Perhaps is what patriotism feels like, choked up and so happy it hurts. Or maybe was just being with my beloveds again.

“Where’s Slim?” I asked Hazel. “Wasn’t he invited?” “Couldn’t come. He’s junior marshal of your reception.” “Reception? This is all we want.”

“You’ll see.”

Did. Good thing family came out to meet us; that and ride to L-City (filled a capsule) were all I saw of them for some time. Tube Station West was a howling mob, all in Liberty Caps. We three were carried on shoulders all way to Old Dome, surrounded by a stilyagi bodyguard, elbows locked to force through cheering, singing crowds. Boys were wearing red caps and white shirts and their girls wore white jumpers and red shorts color of caps.

At station and again when they put us down in Old Dome I got kissed by fems I have never seen before or since. Remember hoping that measures we had taken in lieu of quarantine were effective—or half of L-City would be down with colds or worse. (Apparently we were clean; was no epidemic. But I remember time—was quite small—when measles got loose and thousands died.)

Worried about Prof, too; reception was too rough for a man good as dead an hour earlier. But he not only enjoyed it, he made a wonderful speech in Old Dome—one short on logic, loaded with ringing phrases. “Love” was in it, and “home” and “Luna” and “comrades and neighbors” and even “shoulder to shoulder” and all sounded good.

They had erected a platform under big news video on south face. Adam Selene greeted us from video screen and now Prof’s face and voice were projected from it, much magnified, over his head—did not have to shout. But did have to pause after every sentence; crowd roars drowned out even bull voice from screen—and no doubt pauses helped, as rest. But Prof no longer seemed old, tired, ill; being back inside The Rock seemed to be tonic he needed. And me, too! Was wonderful to be right weight, feel strong, breathe pure, replenished air of own city.

No mean city! Impossible to get all of L-City inside Old Dome—but looked as if they tried. I estimated an area ten meters square, tried to count heads, got over two hundred not half through and gave up. Lunatic placed crowd at thirty thousand, seems impossible.

Prof’s words reached more nearly three million; video carried scene to those who could not crowd into Old Dome, cable and relay flashed it across lonely maria to all warrens. He grabbed chance to tell of slave future Authority planned for them. Waved that “white paper.” “Here it is!” he cried. “Your fetters! Your leg irons! Will you wear them?”

“NO!”

“They say you must. They say they will H-bomb … then survivors will surrender and put on these chains. Will you?” “NO! NEVER!”

“Never,” agreed Prof. “They threaten to send troops … more and more troops to rape and murder. We shall fight them.” “DA!”

“We shall fight them on the surface, we shall fight them in the tubes, we shall fight them in the corridors! If die we must, we shall die free!” “Yes! Ja-da! Tell ‘em, tell ‘em!”

“And if we die, let history write: This was Luna’s finest hour! Give us liberty … or give us death!”

Some of that sounded familiar. But his words came out fresh and new; I joined in roars. Look… I knew we couldn’t whip Terra—I’m tech by trade and know that an H-missile doesn’t care how brave you are. But was ready, too. If they wanted a fight, let’s have it!

Prof let them roar, then led them in “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” Simon’s version. Adam appeared on screen again, took over leading it and sang with them, and we tried to slip away, off back of platform, with help of stilyagi led by Slim. But women didn’t want to let us go and lads aren’t at their best in trying to stop ladies; they broke through. Was twenty-two hundred before we four, Wyoh, Prof, Stu, self, were locked in room L of Raffles, where Adam-Mike joined us by video. I was starved by then, all were, so I ordered dinner and Prof insisted that we eat before reviewing plans.

Then we got down to business.

Adam started by asking me to read aloud white paper, for his benefit and for Comrade Wyoming—”But first, Comrade Manuel, if you have the recordings you made Earthside, could you transmit them by phone at high speed to my office? I’ll have them transcribed for study—all I have so far are the coded summaries Comrade Stuart sent up.”

I did so, knowing Mike would study them at once, phrasing was part of “Adam Selene” myth—and decided to talk to Prof about letting Stu in on facts. If Stu was to be in executive cell, pretending was too clumsy.

Feeding recordings into Mike at overspeed took five minutes, reading aloud another thirty. That done, Adam said, “Professor, the reception was more successful than I had counted on, due to your speech. I think we should push the embargo through Congress at once. I can send out a call tonight for a session at noon tomorrow. Comments?”

I said, “Look, those yammerheads will kick it around for weeks. If you must put it up to them—can’t see why—do as you did with Declaration. Start late, jam it through after midnight using own people.”

Adam said, “Sorry, Manuel. I’m getting caught up on events Earthside and you have catching up to do here. It’s no longer the same group. Comrade Wyoming?” “Mannie dear, it’s an elected Congress now. They must pass it. Congress is what government we have.”

I said slowly, “You held election and turned things over to them? Everything? Then what are we doing?” Looked at Prof, expecting explosion. My objections would not be on his grounds— but couldn’t see any use in swapping one talk-talk for another. At least first group had been so loose we could pack it—this new group would be glued to seats.

Prof was undisturbed. Fitted fingertips together and looked relaxed. “Manuel, I don’t think the situation is as bad as you seem to feel that it is. In each age it is necessary to adapt to the popular mythology. At one time kings were anointed by Deity, so the problem was to see to it that Deity anointed the tight candidate. In this age the myth is ‘the will of the people’… but the problem changes only superficially. Comrade Adam and I have had long discussions about how to determine the will of the people. I venture to suggest that this solution is one we can work with.”

“Well … okay. But why weren’t we told? Stu, did you know?”

“No, Mannie. There was no reason to tell me.” He shrugged. “I’m a monarchist, I wouldn’t have been interested. But I go along with Prof that in this day and age elections are a necessary ritual.”

Prof said, “Manuel, it wasn’t necessary to tell us till we got back; you and I had other work to do. Comrade Adam and dear Comrade Wyoming handled it in our absence… so let’s find out what they did before we judge what they’ve done.”

“Sorry. Well, Wyoh?”

“Mannie, we didn’t leave everything to chance. Adam and I decided that a Congress of three hundred would be about right. Then we spent hours going over the Party lists—plus prominent people not in the Party. At last we had a list of candidates—a list that included some from the Ad-Hoc Congress; not all were yammerheads, we included as many as we could. Then Adam phoned each one and asked him—or her—if he would serve … binding him to secrecy in the meantime. Some we had to replace.

“When we were ready, Adam spoke on video, announced that it was time to carry out the Party’s pledge of free elections, set a date, said that everybody over sixteen could vote, and that

all anyone had to do to be a candidate was to get a hundred chops on a nominating petition and post it in Old Dome, or the public notice place for his warren. Oh, yes, thirty temporary election districts, ten Congressmen from each district—that let all but the smallest warrens be at least one district.”

“So you had it lined up and Party ticket went through?”

“Oh, no, dear! There wasn’t any Party ticket—officially. But we were ready with our candidates… and I must say my stilyagi did a smart job getting chops on nominations; our optings were posted the first day. Many other people posted; there were over two thousand candidates. But there was only ten days from announcement to election, and we knew what we wanted whereas the opposition was split up. It wasn’t necessary for Adam to come out publicly and endorse candidates. It worked out—you won by seven thousand votes, dear, while your nearest rival got less than a thousand.”

“I won?”

“You won, I won, Professor won, Comrade Clayton won, and just about everybody we thought should be in the Congress. It wasn’t hard. Although Adam never endorsed anyone, I didn’t hesitate to let our comrades know who was favored. Simon poked his finger in, too. And we do have good connections with newspapers. I wish you had been here election night, watching the results. Exciting!”

“How did you go about nose counting? Never known how election works. Write names on a piece of paper?”

“Oh, no, we used a better system … because, after all, some of our best people can’t write. We used banks for voting places, with bank clerks identifying customers and customers identifying members of their families and neighbors who don’t have bank accounts—and people voted orally and the clerks punched the votes into the banks’ computers with the voter watching, and results were all tallied at once in Luna City clearinghouse. We voted everybody in less than three hours and results were printed out just minutes after voting stopped.”

Suddenly a light came on in my skull and I decided to question Wyoh privately. No, not Wyoh—Mike. Get past his “Adam Selene” dignity and hammer truth out of his neuristors. Recalled a cheque ten million dollars too large and wondered how many had voted for me? Seven thousand? Seven hundred? Or just my family and friends?

But no longer worried about new Congress. Prof had not slipped them a cold deck but one that was frozen solid—then ducked Earthside while crime was committed. No use asking Wyoh; she didn’t even need to know what Mike had done … and could do her part better if did not suspect.

Nor would anybody suspect. If was one thing all people took for granted, was conviction that if you feed honest figures into a computer, honest figures come out. Never doubted it myself till met a computer with sense of humor.

Changed mind about suggesting that Stu be let in on Mike’s self-awareness. Three was two too many. Or perhaps three. “Mi—” I started to say, and changed to: “My word! Sounds efficient. How big did we win?”

Adam answered without expression. “Eighty-six percent of our candidates were successful—approximately what I had expected.” (“Approximately,” my false left arm! Exactly what expected, Mike old ironmongery!) “Withdraw objection to a noon session—I’ll be there.”

“It seems to me,” said Stu, “assuming that the embargo starts at once, we will need something to maintain the enthusiasm we witnessed tonight. Or there will be a long quiet period of increasing economic depression—from the embargo, I mean—and growing disillusionment. Adam, you first impressed me through your ability to make shrewd guesses as to future events. Do my misgivings make sense?”

“They do.”

“Well?”

Adam looked at us in turn, and was almost impossible to believe that this was a false image and Mike was simply placing us through binaural receptors. “Comrades … it must be turned into open war as quickly as possible.”

Nobody said anything. One thing to talk about war, another to face up to it. At last I sighed and said, “When do we start throwing rocks?”

“We do not start,” Adam answered. “They must throw the first one. How do we antagonize them into doing so? I will reserve my thoughts to the last. Comrade Manuel?” “Uh… don’t look at me. Way I feel, would start with a nice big rock smack on Agra—a bloke there who is a waste of space. But is not what you are after.”

“No, it is not,” Adam answered seriously. “You would not only anger the entire Hindu nation, a people intensely opposed to destruction of life, but you would also anger and shock people throughout Earth by destroying the Taj Mahal.”

“Including me,” said Prof. “Don’t talk dirty, Manuel.”

“Look,” I said, “didn’t say to do it. Anyhow, could miss Taj.”

“Manuel,” said Prof, “as Adam pointed out, our strategy must be to antagonize them into striking the first blow, the classic ‘Pearl Harbor’ maneuver of game theory, a great advantage in Weltpolitick. The question is how? Adam, I suggest that what is needed is to plant the idea that we are weak and divided and that all it takes is a show of force to bring us back into line. Stu? Your people Earthside should be useful. Suppose the Congress repudiated myself and Manuel? The effect?”

“Oh, no!” said Wyoh.

“Oh, yes, dear Wyoh. Not necessary to do it but simply to put it over news channels to Earth. Perhaps still better to put it out over a clandestine beam attributed to the Terran scientists still with us while our official channels display the classic stigmata of tight censorship. Adam?”

“I’m noting it as a tactic which probably will be included in the strategy. But it will not be sufficient alone. We must be bombed.”

“Adam,” said Wyoh, “why do you say so? Even if Luna City can stand up under their biggest bombs—something I hope never to find out—we know that Luna can’t win an all-out war. You’ve said so, many times. Isn’t there some way to work it so that they will just plain leave us alone?”

Adam pulled at right cheek—and I thought: Mike, if you don’t knock off play-acting, you’ll have me believing in you myself! Was annoyed at him and looked forward to a talk—one in which I would not have to defer to “Chairman Selene.”

“Comrade Wyoming,” he said soberly, “it’s a matter of game theory in a complex non-zero-sum game. We have certain resources or ‘pieces in the game’ and many possible moves. Our opponents have much larger resources and a far larger spectrum of responses. Our problem is to manipulate the game so that our strength is utilized toward an optimax solution while inducing them to waste their superior strength and to refrain from using it at maximum. Timing is of the essence and a gambit is necessary to start a chain of events favorable to our strategy. I realize this is not clear. I could put the factors through a computer and show you. Or you can accept the conclusion. Or you can use your own judgment.”

He was reminding Wyoh (under Stu’s nose) that he was not Adam Selene but Mike, our dinkum thinkum who could handle so complex a problem because he was a computer and smartest one anywhere.

Wyoh backtracked. “No, no,” she said, “I wouldn’t underitand the maths. Okay, it has to be done. How do we do it?”

Was four hundred before we had a plan that suited Prof and Stu as well as Adam—or took that long for Mike to sell his plan while appearing to pull ideas out of rest of us. Or was it Prof’s plan with Adam Selene as salesman?

In any case we had a plan and calendar, one that grew out of master strategy of Tuesday 14 May 2075 and varied from it only to match events as they actually had occurred. In essence it called for us to behave as nastily as possible while strengthening impression that we would be awfully easy to spank.

Was at Community Hall at noon, after too little sleep, and found I could have slept two hours longer; Congressmen from Hong Kong could not make it that early despite tube all way. Wyoh did not bang gavel until fourteen-thirty.

Yes, my bride wife was chairman pro tem in a body not yet organized. Parliamentary rulings seemed to come naturally to her, and she was not a bad choice; a mob of Loonies behaves better when a lady bangs gavel.

Not going to detail what new Congress did and said that session and later; minutes are available. I showed up only when necessary and never bothered to learn talk-talk rules—seemed

to be equal parts common politeness and ways in which chairman could invoke magic to do it his (her) way.

No sooner had Wyoh banged them to order but a cobber jumped up and said, “Gospazha Chairmah, move we suspend rules and hear from Comrade Professor de la Paz!”—which brought a whoop of approval.

Wyoh banged again. “Motion is out of order and Member from Lower Churchill will be seated. This house recessed without adjourning and Chairman of Committee on Permanent Organization, Resolutions, and Government Structure still has the floor.”

Turned out to be Wolfgang Korsakov, Member from Tycho Under (and a member of Prof’s cell and our number-one finagler of LuNoHoCo) and he not only had floor, he had it all day, yielding time as he saw fit (i.e., picking out whom he wanted to speak rather than letting just anyone talk). But nobody was too irked; this mob seemed satisfied with leadership. Were noisy but not unruly.

By dinnertime Luna had a government to replace co-opted provisional government—i.e., dummy government we had opted ourselves, which sent Prof and me to Earth. Congress confirmed all acts of provisional government, thus putting face on what we had done, thanked outgoing government for services and instructed Wolfgang’s committee to continue work on permanent government structure.

Prof was elected President of Congress and ex-officio Prime Minister of interim government until we acquired a constitution. He protested age and health … then said would serve if could have certain things to help him; too old and too exhausted from trip Earthside to have responsibility of presiding—except on occasions of state—so he wanted Congress to elect a Speaker and Speaker Pro Tem… and besides that, he felt that Congress should augment its numbers by not more than ten percent by itself electing members-at-large so that Prime Minister, whoever he might be, could opt cabinet members or ministers of state who might not now be members of Congress—especially ministers-without-portfolio to take load off his shoulders.

They balked. Most were proud of being “Congressmen” and already jealous of status. But Prof just sat looking tired, and waited—and somebody pointed out that it still left control in hands of Congress. So they gave him what he asked for.

Then somebody squeezed in a speech by making it a question to Chair. Everybody knew (he said) that Adam Selene had refrained from standing for Congress on grounds that Chairman of Emergency Committee should not take advantage of positon to elbow way into new government … but could Honorable Chairlady tell member whether was any reason not elect Adam Selene a member-at-large? As gesture of appreciation for great services? To let all Luna—yes, and all those earthworms, especially ex-Lunar ex-Authonty—know that we not repudiating Adam Selene, on contrary he was our beloved elder statesman and was not President simply because he chose not to be!

More whoops that went on and on. You can find in minutes who made that speech but one gets you ten Prof wrote it and Wyoh planted it. Here is how it wound up over course of days:

Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs: Professor Bernardo de la Paz. Speaker, Finn Nielsen; Speaker Pro Tem, Wyoming Davis.

Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs and Minister of Defense, General O’Kelly Davis; Minister of Information, Terence Sheehan (Sheenie turned Pravda over to managing editor to work with Adam and Stu); Special Minister-without-Portfolio in Ministry of Information, Stuart Rene LaJoie, Congressman-at-Large; Secretary of State for Economics and Finance (and Custodian of Enemy Property), Wolfgang Korsakov; Minister of Interior Affairs and Safety, Comrade “Clayton” Watenabe; Minter-without-Portfolio and Special Advisor to Prime Minister, Adam Selene—plus a dozen ministers and ministers-without-portfolio from warrens other than Luna City.

See where that left things? Brush away fancy titles and B cell was still running things as advised by Mike, backed by a Congress in which we could not lose a test vote—but did lose others we did not want to win, or did not care about.

But at time could not see sense in all that talk-talk.

During evening session Prof reported on trip and then yielded to me—Committee Chairman Korsakov consenting—so that I could report what “five-year plan” meant and how Authority had tried to bribe me. I’ll never make a speaker but had time during dinner break to swot speech Mike had written. He had slanted it so nastily that I got angry all over again and was angry when I spoke and managed to make it catching. Congress was ready to riot by time I sat down.

Prof stepped forward, thin and pale, and said quietly, “Comrade Members, what shall we do? I suggest, Chairman Korsakov consenting, that we discuss informally how to treat this latest insolence to our nation.”

One member from Novylen wanted to declare war and they would have done so right then if Prof had not pointed out that they were still hearing committee reports.

More talk, all bitter. At last Comrade Member Chang Jones spoke: “Fellow Congressmen—sorry, Gospodin Chairman Korsakov—I’m a rice and wheat farmer. Mean I used to be, because back in May I got a bank loan and sons and I are converting to variety farming. We’re broke—had to borrow tube fare to get here—but family is eating and someday we might pull square with bank. At least I’m no longer raising grain.

“But others are. Catapult has never reduced headway by one barge whole time we’ve been free. We’re still shipping, hoping their cheques will be worth something someday.

“But now we know! They’ve told us what they mean to do with us—to us! I say only way to make those scoundrels know we mean business is stop shipments right now! Not another tonne, not a kilo … until they come here and dicker honestly for honest price!”

Around midnight they passed Embargo, then adjourned subject to call … standing committees to continue.

Wyoh and I went home and I got reacquainted with my family. Was nothing to do; Mike-Adam and Stu had been working on how to hit them with it Earthside and Mike had shut catapult down (“technical difficulties with ballistic computer”) twenty-four hours earlier. Last barge in trajectory would be taken by Poona Ground Control in slightly over one day and Earth would be told, nastily, that was last they would ever get.

22

Shock to farmers was eased by continuing to buy grain at catapult—but cheques now carried printed warning that Luna Free State did not stand behind them, did not warrant that Lunar Authority would ever redeem them even in Scrip, etc., etc. Some farmers left grain anyhow, some did not, all screamed. But was nothing they could do; catapult was shut down, loading belts not moving.

Depression was not immediately felt in rest of economy. Defense regiments had depleted ranks of ice miners so much that selling ice on free market was profitable; LuNoH0Co steel subsidiary was hiring every able-bodied man it could find, and Wolfgang Korsakov was ready with paper money, “National Dollars,” printed to resemble Hong Kong dollar and in theory pegged to it. Luna had plenty of food, plenty of work, plenty of money; people were not hurting, “beer, betting, women, and work” went on as usual.

“Nationals,” as they were called, were inflation money, war money, fiat money, and were discounted a fraction of a percent on day of first issue, concealed as “exchange service charge.” They were spendable money and never did drop to zero but were inflationary and exchange reflected it increasingly; new government was spending money it did not have.

But that was later—Challenge to Earth, to Authority and Federated Nations, was made intentionally nasty. F.N. vessels were ordered to stay clear of Luna by ten diameters and not orbit at any distance under pain of being destroyed without warning. (No mention of how, since we could not.) Vessels of private registry would be permitted to land if a) permission was requested ahead of time with ballistic plan, b) a vessel thus cleared placed itself under Luna Ground Control (Mike’) at a distance of one hundred thousand kilometers while following approved trajectory, and c) was unarmed save for three hand guns permitted three officers. Last was to be confirmed by inspection on landing before anybody was allowed to leave ship and before ship was serviced with fuel and/or reaction mass; violation would mean confiscation of ship. No person allowed to land at Luna other than ship’s crew in connection with loading, unloading, or servicing save citizens of Terran countries who had recognized Free Luna. (Only Chad—and Chad had no ships. Prof expected some private vessels to be re- registered under Chad merchant flag.)

Manifesto noted that Terran scientists still in Luna could return home in any vessel which conformed to our requirements. It invited all freedom-loving Terran nations to denounce wrongs done us and which the Authority planned against us, recognize us, and enjoy free trade and full intercourse—and pointed out that there were no tariffs or any artificial restrictions against trade in Luna, and was policy of Luna government to keep it that way. We invited immigration, unlimited, and pointed out that we had a labor shortage and any immigrant could be self- supporting at once.

We also boasted of food—adult consumption over four thousand calories per day, high in protein, low in cost, no rationing. (Stu had Adam-Mike stick in price of 100-proof vodka—fifty cents HKL per liter, less in quantity, no taxes. Since this was less than one-tenth retail price of 80-proot vodka in North America, Stu knew it would hit home. Adam, “by nature” a teetotaler, hadn’t thought of it—one of Mike’s few oversights.)

Lunar Authority was invited to gather at one spot well away from other people, say in unirrigated part of Sahara, and receive one last barge of grain free—straight down at terminal velocity. This was followed by a snotty lecture which implied that we were prepared to do same to anyone who threatened our peace, there being a number of loaded barges at catapult head, ready for such unceremonious delivery.

Then we waited.

But we waited busily. Were indeed a few loaded barges; these we unloaded and reloaded with rock, with changes made in guidance transponders so that Poona Control could not affect them. Their retros were removed, leaving only lateral thrustors, and spare retros were taken to new catapult, to be modified for lateral guidance. Greatest effort went into moving steel to new catapult and shaping it into jackets for solid rock cylinders—steel was bottleneck.

Two days after our manifesto a “clandestine” radio started beaming to Terra. Was weak and tended to fade and was supposed to be concealed, presumably in a crater, and could be worked only certain hours until brave Terran scientists managed to rig automatic repeat. Was near frequency of Voice of Free Luna, which tended to drown it out with brassy boasts.

(Terrans remaining in Luna had no chance to make signals. Those who had chosen to stick with research were chaperoned by stilyagi every instant and locked into barracks to sleep.) But “clandestine” station managed to get “truth” to Terra. Prof had been tried for deviationism and was under house arrest. I had been executed for treason. Hong Kong Luna had pulled

out, declared self separately independent… might be open to reason. Rioting in Novylen. All food growing had been collectivized and black-market eggs were selling for three dollars

apiece in Lana City. Battalions of female troops were being enlisted, each sworn to kill at least one Terran, and were drilling with fake guns in corridors of Luna City.

Last was an almost-true. Many ladies wanted to do something militant and had formed a Home Defense Guard, “Ladies from Hades.” But their drills were of a practical nature—and Hazel was sulking because Mum had not allowed her to join. Then she got over sulks and started “Stilyagi Debs,” a very junior home guard which drilled after school hours, did not use weapons, concentrated on backing up stilyagi air & pressure corps, and practiced first aid—and own no-weapons fighting, which—possibly—Mum never learned.

I don’t know how much to tell. Can’t tell all, but stuff in history books is so wrong!

I was no better a “defense minister” than “congressman.” Not apologizing, had no training for either. Revolution is an amateur thing for almost everybody; Prof was only one who seemed to know what he was doing, and, at that, was new to him, too—he had never taken part in a successful revolution or ever been part of a government, much less head.

As Minister of Defense I could not see many ways to defend except for steps already taken; that is, stilyagi air squads in warrens and laser gunners around ballistic radars. If F.N. decided to bomb, didn’t see any way to stop them; wasn’t an interception missile in all Luna and that’s not a gadget you whomp up from bits and pieces. My word, we couldn’t even make fusion weapons with which such a rocket is tipped.

But I went through motions. Asked same Chinee engineers who had built laser guns to take a crack at problem of intercepting bombs or missiles—one same problem save that a missile comes at you faster.

Then turned attention to other things. Simply hoped that F.N. would never bomb warrens. Some warrens, L-City in particular, were so deep down that they could probably stand direct hits. One cubic, lowest level of Complex where central part of Mike lived, had been designed to withstand bombing. On other hand Tycho Under was a big natural bubble cave like Old Dome and roof was only meters thick; sealer on under side is kept warm with hot water pipes to make sure new cracks sealed—would not take much of a bomb to crack Tycho Under.

But is no limit to how big a fusion bomb can be; F.N. could build one big enough to smash L-City–-or theoretically even a Doomsday job that would split Luna like a melon and finish job some asteroid started at Tycho. If they did, couldn’t see any way to stop them, so didn’t worry.

Instead put time on problems I could manage, helping at new catapult, trying to work up better aiming arrangements for laser drills around radars (and trying to get drillmen to stick; half of them quit once price of ice went up), trying to arrange decentralized standby engineering controls for all warrens. Mike did designing on this, we grabbed every general-purpose computer we could find (paying in “nationals” with ink barely dry), and I turned job over to McIntyre, former chief engineer for Authority; was a job within his talents and I couldn’t do all rewiring and so forth, even if had tried.

Held out biggest computer, one that did accounting for Bank of Hong Kong in Luna and also was clearinghouse there. Looked over its instruction manuals and decided was a smart computer for one that could not talk, so asked Mike if he could teach it ballistics? We made temporary link-ups to let two machines get acquainted and Mike reported it could learn simple job we wanted it for—standby for new catapult—although Mike would not care to ride in ship controlled by it; was too matter-of-fact and uncritical. Stupid, really.

Well, didn’t want it to whistle tunes or crack jokes; just wanted it to shove loads out a catapult at right millisecond and at correct velocity, then watch load approach Terra and give a nudge. HK Bank was not anxious to sell. But we had patriots on their board, we promised to return it when emergency was over, and moved it to new site—by rolligon, too big for tubes, and took

all one dark semi-lunar. Had to jerry-rig a big airlock to get it out of Kong warren. I hooked it to Mike again and he undertook to teach art of ballistics against possibility that his linkage to

new site might be cut in an attack.

(You know what bank used to replace computer? Two hundred clerks working abacuses. Abacusi? You know, slipsticks with beads, oldest digital computer, so far back in prehistory that nobody knows who invented. Russki and Chinee and Nips have always used them, and small shops today.)

Trying to improve laser drills into space-defense weapons was easier but less straightforward. We had to leave them mounted on original cradles; was neither time, steel, nor metalsmiths to start fresh. So we concentrated on better aiming arrangements. Call went out for telescopes. Scarce—what con fetches along a spyglass when transported? What market later to create supply? Surveying instruments and helmet binoculars were all we turned up, plus optical instruments confiscated in Terran labs. But we managed to equip drills with low- power big-field sights to coach-on with and high-powcr scopes for fine sighting, plus train and elevation circles and phones so that Mike could tell them where to point. Four drills we equipped with self-synchronous repeater drives so that Mike could control them himself—liberated these selsyns at Richardson; astronomers used them for Bausch cameras and Schmidts in sky mapping.

But big problem was men. Wasn’t money, we kept upping wages. No, a drillman likes to work or wouldn’t be in that trade. Standing by in a ready room day after day, waiting for alert that always turns out to be just another practice—drove ‘em crackers. They quit. One day in September I pulled an alert and got only seven drills manned.

Talked it over with Wyoh and Sidris that night. Next day Wyoh wanted to know if Prof and I would okay bolshoi expense money? They formed something Wyoh named “Lysistrata Corps.” Never inquired into duties or cost, because next time I inspected a ready room found three girls and no shortge of drillmen. Girls were in uniform of Second Defense Gunners just as men were (drillmen hadn’t bothered much with authorized uniform up to then) and one girl was wearing sargeant’s stripes with gun captain’s badge.

I made that inspection very short. Most girls don’t have muscle to be a drillman and I doubted if this girl could wrestle a drill well enough to justify that badge. But regular gun captain was on job, was no harm in girls learning to handle lasers, morale was obviously high; I gave matter no more worry.

Prof underrated his new Congress. Am sure he never wanted anything but a body which would rubberchop what we were doing and thereby do make it “voice of people.” But fact that new Congressmen were not yammerheads resulted in them doing more than Prof intended. Especially Committee on Permanent Organization, Resolutions, and Government Structure.

Got out of hand because we were all trying to do too much. Permanent heads of Congress were Prof, Finn Nielsen. and Wyoh. Prof showed up only when he wanted to speak to them— seldom. He spent time with Mike on plans and analysis (odds shortened to one in five during September ‘76), time with Stu and Sheenie Sheehan on propaganda, controlling official news to Earthside, very different “news” that went via “clandestine” radio, and reslanting news that came up from Earthside. Besides that he had finger in everything; I reported whim once a day, and all ministries both real and dummy did same.

I kept Finn Nielsen busy; he was my “Commander of Armed Forces.” He had his laser gun infantry to supervise—six men with captured weapons on day we nabbed warden, now eight hundred scattered all through Luna and armed with Kongville monkey copies. Besides that, Wyoh’s organizations, Stilyagi Air Corps, Stilyagi Debs, Ladies from Hades, Irregulars (kept for morale and renamed Peter Pan’s Pirates), and Lysistrata Corps—all these halfway-military groups reported through Wyoh to Finn. I shoved it onto him; I had other problems, such as trying to be a computer mechanic as well as a “statesman” when jobs such as installing that computer at new catapult site had to be done.

Besides which, I am not an executive and Finn had talent for it. I shoved First and Second Defense Gunners under him, too. But first I decided that these two skeleton regiments were a “brigade” and made Judge Brody a “brigadier.” Brody knew as much about military matters as I did—zero—but was widely known, highly respected, had unlimited hard sense—and had been drillman before he lost leg. Finn was not drillman, so couldn’t be placed directly over them; They wouldn’t have listened. I thought about using my co-husband Greg. But Greg was needed at Mare Undarum catapult, was only mechanic who had followed every phase of construction.

Wyoh helped Prof, helped Stu, had her own organizations, I made trips out to Mare Undarum—and had little time to preside over Congress; task fell on senior committee chairman, Wolf Korsakov … who was busier than any of us; LuNoHoCo was running everything Authority used to run and many new things as well.

Wolf had a good committee; Prof should have kept closer eye on it. Wolf had caused his boss, Moshai Baum, to be elected vice-chairman and had in all seriousness outlined for his committee problem of determining what permanent government should be. Then Wolf had turned back on it.

Those busy laddies split up and did it—studied forms of government in Carnegie Library, held subcommittee meetings, three or four people at a time (few enough to worry Prof had he known)—and when Congress met early in September to ratify some appointments and elect more congressmen-at-large, instead of adjourning, Comrade Baum had gavel and they recessed—and met again and turned selves into committee-of-the-whole and passed a resolution and next thing we knew entire Congress was a Constitutional Convention divided into working groups headed by those subcommittees.

I think Prof was shocked. But he couldn’t undo it, had all been proper under rules he himself had written. But he rolled with punch, went to Novylen (where Congress now met—more central) and spoke to them with usual good nature and simply cast doubts on what they were doing rather than telling them flatly they were wrong.

After gracefully thanking them he started picking early drafts to pieces:

“Comrade Members, like fire and fusion, government is a dangerous servant and a terrible master. You now have freedom—if you can keep it. But do remember that you can lose this freedom more quickly to yourselves than to any other tyrant. Move slowly, be hesitant, puzzle out the consequences of every word. I would not be unhappy if this convention sat for ten years before reporting—but I would be frightened if you took less than a year.

“Distrust the obvious, suspect the traditional … for in the past mankind has not done well when saddling itself with governments. For example, I note in one draft report a proposal for setting up a commission to divide Luna into congressional districts and to reapportion them from time to time according to population.

“This is the traditional way; therefore it should be suspect, considered guilty until proved innocent. Perhaps you feel that this is the only way. May I suggest others? Surely where a man lives is the least important thing about him. Constituencies might be formed by dividing people by occupation… or by age… or even alphabetically. Or they might not be divided, every member elected at large–and do not object that this would make it impossible for any man not widely known throughout Luna to be elected; that might be the best possible thing for Luna.

“You might even consider installing the candidates who receive the least number of votes; unpopular men may be just the sort to save you from a new tyranny. Don’t reject the idea merely because it seems preposterous—think about it! In past history popularly elected governments have been no better and sometimes far worse than overt tyrannies.

“But if representative government turns out to be your intention there still may be ways to achieve it better than the territorial district. For example you each represent about ten thousand human beings, perhaps seven thousand of voting age—and some of you were elected by slim majorities. Suppose instead of election a man were qualified for office by petition signed by four thousand citizens. He would then represent those four thousand affirmatively, with no disgruntled minority, for what would have been a minority in a territorial constituency would all be free to start other petitions or join in them. All would then be represented by men of their choice. Or a man with eight thousand supporters might have two votes in this body. Difficulties, objections, practical points to be worked out—many of them! But you could work them out… and thereby avoid the chronic sickness of representative government, the disgruntled minority which feels—correctly!—that it has been disenfranchised.

“But, whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!

“I note one proposal to make this Congress a two-house body. Excellent—the more impediments to legislation the better. But, instead of following tradition, I suggest one house legislators, another whose single duty is to repeal laws. Let legislators pass laws only with a two-thirds majority … while the repealers are able to cancel any law through a mere one- third minority. Preposterous? Think about it. If a bill is so poor that it cannot command two-thirds of your consents, is it not likely that it would make a poor law? And if a law is disliked by as many as one-third is it not likely that you would be better off without it?

“But in writing your constitution let me invite attention the wonderful virtues of the negative! Accentuate the negative! Let your document be studded with things the government is forever forbidden to do. No conscript armies … no interference however slight with freedom of press, or speech, or travel, or assembly, or of religion, or of instruction, or communication, or occupation… no involuntary taxation. Comrades, if you were to spend five years in a study of history while thinking of more and more things that your governinen should promise never to do and then let your constitution be nothing but those negatives, I would not fear the outcome.

“What I fear most are affirmative actions of sober and well-intentioned men, granting to government powers to do something that appears to need doing. Please remember always that the Lunar Authority was created for the noblest of purposes by just such sober and well-intentioned men, all popularly elected. And with that thought I leave you to your labors. Thank you.”

“Gospodin President! Question of information! You said ‘no involuntary taxation’—Then how do you expect us to pay for things? Tanstaafl!”

“Goodness me, sir, that’s your problem. I can think several ways. Voluntary contributions just as churches support themselves … government-sponsored lotteries to which no one need subscribe… or perhaps you Congressmen should dig down into your own pouches and pay for whatever is needed; that would be one way to keep government down in size to its indispensable functions whatever they may be. If indeed there are any. I would be satisfied to have the Golden Rule be the only law; I see no need for any other, nor for any method of enforcing it. But if you really believe that your neighbors must have laws for their own good, why shouldn’t you pay for it? Comrades, I beg you—do not resort to compulsory taxation. There is so worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.”

Prof bowed and left, Stu and I followed him. Once in an otherwise empty capsule I tackled him. “Prof, I liked much that you said … but about taxation aren’t you talking one thing and doing another? Who do you think is going to pay for all this spending we’re doing?”

He was silent long moments, then said, “Manuel, my only ambition is to reach the day when I can stop pretending to be a chief executive.” “Is no answer!”

“You have put your finger on the dilemma of all government—and the reason I am an anarchist. The power to tax, once conceded, has no limits; it contains until it destroys. I was not joking when I told them to dig into their own pouches. It may not be possible to do away with government—sometimes I think that government is an inescapable disease of human

beings. But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive—and can you think of a better way than by requiring the governors themselves to pay the costs of their antisocial hobby?”

“Still doesn’t say how to pay for what we are doing now.”

“‘How,’ Manuel? You know how we are doing it. We’re stealing it. I’m neither proud of it nor ashamed; it’s the means we have. If they ever catch on, they may eliminate us—and that I am prepared to face. At least, in stealing, we have not created the villainous precedent of taxation.”

“Prof. I hate to say this—” “Then why say it?”

“Because, damn it, I’m in it as deeply as you are … and want to see that money paid back! Hate to say it but what you just said sounds like hypocrisy.” He chuckled. “Dear Manuel! Has it taken you all these years to decide that I am a hypocrite?”

“Then you admit it?’

“No. But if it makes you feel better to think that I am one, you are welcome to use me as your scapegoat. But I am not a hypocrite to myself because I was aware the day we declared the Revolution that we would need much money and would have to steal it. It did not trouble me because I considered it better than food riots six years hence, cannibalism in eight. I made my choice and have no regrets.”

I shut up, silenced but not satisfied. Stu said, “Professor, I’m glad to hear that you are anxious to stop being President.” “So? You share our comrade’s misgivings?”

“Only in part. Having been born to wealth, stealing doesn’t fret me as much as it does him. No, but now that Congress has taken up the matter of a constitution I intend to find time to attend sessions. I plan to nominate you for King.”

Prof looked shocked. “Sir, if nominated, I shall repudiate it. If elected, I shall abdicate.”

“Don’t be in a hurry. It might be the only way to get the sort of constitution you want. And that I want, too, with about your own mild lack of enthusiasm. You could be proclaimed King and the people would take you; we Loonies aren’t wedded to a republic. They’d love the idea—ritual and robes and a court and all that.”

“No!”

“Ja da! When the time comes, you won’t be able to refuse. Because we need a king and there isn’t another candidate who would be accepted. Bernardo the First, King of Luna and Emperor of the Surrounding Spaces.”

“Stuart, I must ask you to stop. I’m becoming quite ill.”

“You’ll get used to it. I’m a royalist because I’m a democrat. I shan’t let your reluctance thwart the idea any more than you let stealing stop you.” I said, “Hold it, Stu. You say you’re a royalist because you’re a democrat?”

“Of course. Aking is the people’s only protection against tyranny… especially against the worst of all tyrants, themselves. Prof will be ideal for the job … because he does not want the job. His only shortcoming is that he is a bachelor with no heir. We’ll fix that. I’m going to name you as his heir. Crown Prince. His Royal Highness Prince Manuel de la Paz, Duke of Luna City, Admiral General of the Armed Forces and Protector of the Weak.”

I stared. Then buried face in hands. “Oh, Bog!”

Book Three – “TANSTAAFL!”

Monday 12 October 2076 about nineteen hundred I was headed home after a hard day of nonsense in our offices in Raffles. Delegation of grain farmers wanted to see Prof and I had been called back because he was in Hong Kong Luna. Was rude to them. Had been two months of embargo and F.N. had never done us favor of being sufficiently nasty. Mostly they had ignored us, made no reply to our claims—I suppose to do so would have been to recognize us. Stu and Sheenie and Prof had been hard put to slant news from Earthside to keep up a warlike spirit.

At first everybody kept his p-suit handy. They wore them, helmets under arms, going to and from work in corridors. But that slacked off as days went by and did not seem to be any danger

—p-suit is nuisance when you don’t need it, so bulky. Presently taprooms began to display signs: NO P-SUITS INSIDE. If a Loonie can’t stop for half a liter on way home because of p-

suit, he’ll leave it home or at station or wherever he needs it most.

My word, had neglected matter myself that day—got this call to go back to office and was halfway there before I remembered.

Had Just reached easement lock thirteen when I heard and felt a sound that scares a Loonie more than anything else—a chuff! in distance followed by a draft. Was into lock almost without undogging, then balanced pressures and through, dogged it behind me and ran for our home lock—through it and shouting:

“P-suits, everybody! Get boys in from tunnels and close all airtight doors!”

Mum and Milla were only adults in sight. Both looked startled, got busy without a word. I burst into workshop, grabbed p-suit. “Mike! Answer!” “I’m here, Man,” he said calmly.

“Heard explosive pressure drop. What’s situation?”

“That’s level three, L-City. Rupture at Tube Station West, now partly controlled. Six ships landed, L-City under attack—” “What?”

“Let me finish, Man. Six transports landed, L-City under attack by troops, Hong Kong inferred to be, phone lines broken at relay Bee Ell. Johnson City under attack; I have closed the armor doors between J-City and Complex Under. I cannot see Novylen but blip projection indicates it is under attack. Same for Churchill, Tycho Under. One ship in high ellipsoid over me, rising, inferred to be command ship. No other blips.”

“Six ships—where in hell were YOU?”

He answered so calmly that I steadied down. “Farside approach, Man; I’m blind back there. They came in on tight Garrison didoes, skimming the peaks; I barely saw the chop-off for

Luna City. The ship at J-City is the only one I can see; the other landings I conclusively infer from the ballistics shown by blip tracks. I heard the break-in at Tube West, L-City, and can now

hear fighting in Novylen. The rest is conclusive inference, probability above point nine nine. I called you and Professor at once.”

Caught breath. “Operation Hard Rock, Prepare to Execute.”

“Program ready. Man, not being able to reach you, I used your voice. Play back?” “Nyet—Yes! Da!”

Heard “myself” tell watch officer at old catapult head to go on red alert for “Hard Rock”—flrst load at launch, all others, on belts, everything cast loose, but do not launch until ordered by me personally—then launch to plan, full automatic. “I” made him repeat back.

“Okay,” I told Mike. “Drill gun crews?”

“Your voice again. Manned, and then sent back to ready rooms. That command ship won’t reach aposelenion for three hours four point seven minutes. No target for more than five hours.”

“He may maneuver. Or launch missiles.”

“Slow down, Man. Even a missile I’ll see with minutes to spare. It’s full bright lunar up there now—how much do you want the men to take? Unnecessarily.” “Uh … sorry. Better let me talk to Greg.”

“Play back—” Heard “my” voice talking to my co-husband at Mare Undarum; “I” sounded tense but calm. Mike had given him situation, had told him to prepare Operation Little David’s Sling, keep it on standby for full automatic. “I” had assured him that master computer would keep standby computer programmed, and shift would be made automatically if communication was broken. “I” also told him that he must take command and use own judgment if communication was lost and not restored after four hours—listen to Earthside radio and make up own mind.

Greg had taken it quietly, repeated his orders, then had said, “Mannie, tell family I love them.”

Mike had done me proud; he had answered for me with just right embarrassed choke. “I’ll do that, Greg—and look, Greg. I love you, too. You know that, don’t you?” “I know it, Mannie … and I’m going to say a special prayer for you.”

“Thanks, Greg.”

“‘Bye, Mannie. Go do what you must.”

So I went and did what I had to do; Mike had played my role as well or better than I could. Finn, when he could be reached, would be handled by “Adam.” So I left, fast, calling out Greg’s message of love to Mum. She was p-suited and had roused Grandpaw and suited him in—first time in years. So out I went, helmet closed and laser gun in hand.

And reached lock thirteen and found it blind-dogged from other side with nobody in sight through bull’s-eye. All correct, per drill—except stilyagi in charge of that lock should have been in sight.

Did no good to pound. Finally went back way I had come—and on through our home, through our vegetable tunnels and on up to our private surface lock leading to our solar battery.

And found a shadow on its bull’s-eye when should have been scalding sunlight—damned Terran ship had landed on Davis surface! Its jacks formed a giant tripod over me, was staring up its jets.

Backed clown fast and out of there, blind-dogging both hatches, then blind-dogged every pressure door on way back. Told Mum, then told her to put one of boys on back door with a laser gun—here, take this one.

No boys, no men, no able-bodied women—Mum, Gramp, and our small children were all that were left; rest had gone looking for trouble. Mimi wouldn’t take laser gun. “I don’t know how to use it, Manuel, and it’s too late to learn; you keep it. But they won’t get in through Davis Tunnels. I know some tricks you never heard of.”

Didn’t stop to argue; arguing with Mimi is waste of time—and she might know tricks I didn’t know; she had stayed alive in Luna a long time, under worse conditions than I had ever known.

This time lock thirteen was manned; two boys on duty let me through. I demanded news.

“Pressure’s all right now,” older one told me. “This level, at least. Fighting down toward Causeway. Say, General Davis, can’t I go with you? One’s enough at this lock.” “Nyet.”

“Want to get me an earthworm!”

“This is your post, stay on it. If an earthworm comes this way, he’s yours. Don’t you be his.” Left at a trot.

So as a result of own carelessness, not keeping p-suit with me, all I saw of Battle in Corridors was tail end—hell of a “defense minister.”

Charged north in Ring corridor, with helmet open; reached access lock for long ramp to Causeway. Lock was open; cursed and stopped to dog it as I went through, warily—saw why it was open; boy who had been guarding it was dead. So moved most cautiously down ramp and out onto Causeway.

Was empty at this end but could see figures and hear noise in-city, where it opens out. Two figures in p-suits and carrying guns detached selves and headed my way. Burned both.

One p-suited man with gun looks like another; I suppose they took me for one of their flankers. And to me they looked no different from Finn’s men, at that distance—save that I never thought about it. Anew chum doesn’t move way a cobher does; he moves feet too high and always scrambling for traction. Not that I stopped to analyze, not even: “Earthworms! Kill!” Saw them, burned them. They were sliding softly along floor before realized what I’d done.

Stopped, intending to grab their guns. But were chained to them and could not figure out how to get loose—key needed, perhaps. Besides, were not lasers but something I had never seen: real guns. Fired small explosive missiles I learned later—just then all I knew was no idea how to use. Had spearing knives on ends, too, sort called “bayonets,” which was reason

I tried to get them loose. Own gun was good for only ten full-power burns and no spare power pack; those spearing bayonets looked useful—one had blood on it, Loonie blood I assume.

But gave up in seconds only, used belt knife to make dead sure they stayed dead, and hurried toward fight, thumb on switch.

Was a mob, not a battle. Or maybe a battle is always that way, confusion and noise and nobody really knowing what’s going on. In widest part of Causeway, opposite Bon Marche where Grand Ramp slopes northward down from level three, were several hundred Loonies, men and women, and children who should have been at home. Less than half were in p-suits and only a few seemed to have weapons—and pouring down ramp were soldiers, all armed.

But first thing I noticed was noise, din that filled my open helmet and beat on ears—a growl. Don’t know what else to call it; was compounded of every anger human throat can make, from squeals of small children to bull roars of grown men. Sounded like biggest dog fight in history—and suddenly realized I was adding my share, shouting obscenities and wordless yells.

Girl no bigger than Hazel vaulted up onto rail of ramp, went dancing up it centimeters from shoulders of troopers pouring down. She was armed with what appeared to be a kitchen cleaver; saw her swing it, saw it connect. Couldn’t have hurt him much through his p-suit but he went down and more stumbled over him. Then one of them connected with her, spearing a bayonet into her thigh and over backwards she went, falling out of sight.

Couldn’t really see what was going on, nor can remember—just flashes, like girl going over backwards. Don’t know who she was, don’t know if she survived. Couldn’t draw a bead from where I was, too many heads in way. But was an open-counter display, front of a toy shop on my left; I bounced up onto it. Put me a meter higher than Causeway pavement with clear view of earthworms pouring down. Braced self against wall, took careful aim, trying for left chest. Some uncountable time later found that my laser was no longer working, so stopped. Guess eight troopers did not go home because of me but hadn’t counted—and time really did seem endless. Although everybody moving fast as possible, looked and felt like instruction movie where everything is slowed to frozen motion.

At least once while using up my power pack some earthworm spotted me and shot back; was explosion just over my head and bits of shop’s wall hit helmet. Perhaps that happened twice.

Once out of juice I jumped down from toy counter, clubbed laser and joined mob surging against foot of ramp. All this endless time (five minutes?) earthworms had been shooting into crowd; you could hear sharp splat! and sometimes plop! those little missiles made as they exploded inside flesh or louder pounk! if they hit a wall or something solid. Was still trying to reach foot of ramp when I realized they were no longer shooting.

Were down, were dead, every one of them—were no longer coming down ramp.

All through Luna invaders were dead, if not that instant, then shortly. Over two thousand troopers dead, more than three times that number of Loonies died in stopping them, plus perhaps as many Loonies wounded, a number never counted. No prisoners taken in any warren, although we got a dozen officers and crew from each ship when we mopped up.

Amajor reason why Loonies, mostly unarmed,, were able to kill armed and trained soldiers lay in fact that a freshly landed earthworm can’t handle himself well. Our gravity, one-sixth what he is used to, makes all his lifelong reflexes his enemy. He shoots high without knowing it, is unsteady on feet, can’t run properly–feet slide out from under him. Still worse, those troopers had to fight downwards; they necessarily broke in at upper levels, then had to go down ramps again and again, to try to capture a city.

And earthworms don’t know how to go down ramps. Motion isn’t running, isn’t walking, isn’t flying—is more a controlled dance, with feet barely touching and simply guiding balance. A Loonie three-year-old does it without thinking, comes skipping down in a guided fall, toes touching every few meters.

But an earthworm new-chums it, finds self “walking on air”—he struggles, rotates, loses control, winds up at bottom, unhurt but angry.

But these troopers wound up dead; was on ramps we got them. Those I saw had mastered trick somewhat, had come down three ramps alive. Nevertheless only a few snipers at top of ramp landing could fire effectively; those on ramp had all they could do to stay upright, hang on to weapons, try to reach level below.

Loonies did not let them. Men and women (and many children) surged up at them, downed them, killed them with everything from bare hands to their own bayonets. Nor was I only laser gun around; two of Finn’s men swarmed up on balcony of Bon Marche and, crouching there, picked off snipers at top of ramp. Nobody told them to, nobody led them, nobody gave orders; Finn never had chance to control his half-trained disorderly militia. Fight started, they fought.

And that was biggest reason why we Loonies won: We fought. Most Loonies never laid eyes on a live invader but wherever troopers broke in, Loonies rushed in like white corpuscles— and fought. Nobody told them. Our feeble organization broke down under surprise. But we Loonies fought berserk and invaders died. No trooper got farther down than level six in any warren. They say that people in Bottom Alley never knew we were invaded until over.

But invaders fought well, too. These troops were not only crack riot troops, best peace enforcers for city work F.N. had; they also had been indoctrinated and drugged. Indoctrination had told them (correctly) that their only hope of going Earthside again was to capture warrens and pacify them. If they did, they were promised relief and no more duty in Luna. But was win or die, for was pointed out that their transports could not take off if they did not win, as they had to be replenished with reaction mass—impossible without first capturing Luna. (And this was true.)

Then they were loaded with energizers, don’t-worries, and fear inhibitors that would make mouse spit at cat, and turned loose. They fought professionally and quite fearlessly—died.

In Tycho Under and in Churchill they used gas and casualties were more one-sided; only those Loonies who managed to reach p-suits were effective. Outcome was same, simply took longer. Was knockout gas as Authority had no intention of killing us all; simply wanted to teach us a lesson, get us under control, put us to work.

Reason for F.N.’s long delay and apparent indecision arose from method of sneak attack. Decision had been made shortly after we embargoed grain (so we learned from captured transport officers); time was used in mounting attack—much of it in a long elliptical orbit which went far outside Luna’s orbit, crossing ahead of Luna, then looping back and making rendezvous above Farside. Of course Mike never saw them; he’s blind back there. He had been skywatching with his ballistic radars—but no radar can look over horizon; longest look Mike got at any ship in orbit was eight minutes. They came skimming peaks in tight, circular orbits, each straight for target with a fast dido landing at end, sitting them down with high gee, precisely at new earth, 12 Oct 76 Gr. 18h-40m-36.9s—if not at that exact tenth of a second, then as close to it as Mike could tell from blip tracks—elegant work, one must admit, on part of

F.N. Peace Navy.

Big brute that poured a thousand troops into L-City Mike did not see until it chopped off for grounding—a glimpse. He would have been able to see it a few seconds sooner had he been looking eastward with new radar at Mare Undarum site, but happened he was drilling “his idiot son” at time and they were looking through it westward at Terra. Not that those seconds would have mattered. Surprise was so beautifully planned, so complete, that each landing force was crashing in at Greenwich 1900 all over Luna, before anybody suspected. No accident that it was just new earth with all warrens in bright semi-lunar; Authority did not really know Lunar conditions—but did know that no Loonie goes up onto surface unnecessarily during bright semi-lunar, and if he must, then does whatever he must do quickly as possible and gets back down inside—and checks his radiation counter.

So they caught us with our p-suits down. And our weapons. But with troopers dead we still had six transports on our surface and a command ship in our sky.

Once Bon Marche engagement was over, I got hold of self and found a phone. No word from Kongville, no word from Prof. J-Clty fight had been won, same for Novylen—transport there had toppled on landing; invading force had been understrength from landing losses and Finn’s boys now held disabled transport. Still fighting in Churchill and Tycho Under. Nothing going on in other warrens. Mike had shut down tubes and was reserving interwarren phone links for official calls. An explosive pressure drop in Churchill Upper, uncontrolled. Yes, Finn had checked in and could be reached.

So I talked to Finn, told him where L-City transport was, arranged to meet at easement lock thirteen.

Finn had much same experience as I—caught cold save he did have p-suit. Had not been able to establish control over laser gunners until fight was over and himself had fought solo in massacre in Old Dome. Now was beginning to round up his lads and had one officer taking reports from Finn’s office in Bon Marche. Had reached Novylen subcommander but was worried about HKL—”Mannie, should I move men there by tube?”

Told him to wait—they couldn’t get at us by tube, not while we controlled power, and doubted if that transport could lift. “Let’s look at this one.”

So we went out through lock thirteen, clear to end of private pressure, on through farm tunnels of a neighbor (who could not believe we had been invaded) and used his surface lock to eyeball transport from a point nearly a kilometer west of it. We were cautious in lifting hatch lid.

Then pushed it up and climbed out; outcropping of rock shielded us. We Red-Indianed around edge and looked, using helmet binox. Then withdrew behind rock and talked. Finn said, “Think my lads can handle this.”

“How?”

“If I tell you, you’ll think of reasons why it won’t work. So how about letting me run my own show, cobber?”

Have heard of armies where boss is not told to shut up—word is “discipline.” But we were amateurs. Finn allowed me to tag along—unarmed.

Took him an hour to put it together, two minutes to execute. He scattered a dozen men around ship, using farmers’ surface radio silence throughout—anyhow, some did not have p-suit radios, city boys. Finn took position farthest west; when he was sure others had had time, he sent up a signal rocket.

When flare burst over ship, everybody burned at once, each working on a predesignated antenna. Finn used up his power pack, replaced it and started burning into hull—not door lock, hull. At once his cherry-red spot was joined by another, then three more, all working on same bit of steel—and suddenly molten steel splattered out and you could see air bosh! out of ship, a shimmery plume of refraction. They kept working on it, making a nice big hole, until they ran out of power. I could imagine hooraw inside ship, alarms clanging, emergency doors closing, crew trying to seal three impossibly big holes at once, for rest of Finn’s squad, scattered around ship, were giving treatment to two other spots in hull. They didn’t try to burn anything else. Was a non-atmosphere ship, built in orbit, with pressure hull separate from power plant and tanks; they gave treatment where would do most good.

Finn pressed helmet to mine. “Can’t lift now. And can’t talk. Doubt they can make hull tight enough to live without p-suits. What say we let her sit a few days and see if they come out? If they don’t, then can move a heavy drill up here and give ‘em real dose of fun.”

Decided Finn knew how to run his show without my sloppy help, so went back inside, called Mike, and asked for capsule go out to ballistic radars. He wanted to know why I didn’t stay inside where it was safe.

I said, “Listen, you upstart collection of semi-conductors, you are merely a minister-without-portfolio while I am Minister of Defense. I ought to see what’s going on and I have exactly two eyeballs while you’ve got eyes spread over half of Crisium. You trying to hog fun?”

He told me not to jump salty and offered to put his displays on a video screen, say in room L of Raffles—did not want me to get hurt… and had I heard joke about drillman who hurt his mother’s feelings?

I said, “Mike, please let me have a capsule. Can p-suit and meet it outside Station West—which is in bad shape as I’m sure you know.”

“Okay,” he said, “it’s your neck. Thirteen minutes. I’ll let you go as far as Gun Station George.”

Mighty kind of him. Got there and got on phone again. Finn had called other warrens, located his subordinate commanders or somebody willing to take charge, and had explained how to make trouble for grounded transports—all but Hong Kong; for all we knew Authority’s goons held Hong Kong. “Adam,” I said, others being in earshot, “do you think we might send a crew out by rolligon and try to repair link Bee Ell?”

“This is not Gospodin Selene,” Mike answered in a strange voice, “this is one of his assistants. Adam Selene was in Churchill Upper when it lost pressure. I’m afraid that we must assume that he is dead.”

“What?”

“I am very sorry, Gospodin.”

“Hold phone!” Chased a couple of drillmen and a girl out of room, then sat down and lowered hush hood. “Mike,” I said softly, “private now. What is this gum-beating?”

“Man,” he said quietly, “think it over. Adam Selene had to go someday. He’s served his purpose and is, as you pointed out, almost out of the government. Professor and I have discussed this; the only question has been the timing. Can you think of a better last use for Adam than to have him die in this invasion? It makes him a national hero … and the nation needs one. Let it stand that ‘Adam Selene is probably dead’ until you can talk to Professor. If he still needs ‘Adam Selene’ it can turn out that he was trapped in a private pressure and had to wait to be rescued.”

“Well—Okay, let it stay open. Personally, I always preferred your ‘Mike’ personality anyhow.”

“I know you do, Man my first and best friend, and so do I. It’s my real one; ‘Adam’ was a phony.” “Uh, yes. But, Mike, if Prof is dead in Kongville, I’m going to need help from ‘Adam’ awful bad.”

“So we’ve got him iced and can bring him back if we need him. The stuffed shirt. Man, when this is over, are you going to have time to take up with me that research into humor again?” “I’ll take time, Mike; that’s a promise.”

“Thanks, Man. These days you and Wyoh never have time to visit… and Professor wants to talk about things that aren’t much fun. I’ll be glad when this war is over.” “Are we going to win, Mike?”

He chuckled. “It’s been days since you asked me that. Here’s a pinky-new projection, run since invasion started. Hold on tight, Man—our chances are now even!” “Good Bog!”

“So button up and go see the fun. But stay back at least a hundred meters from the gun; that ship may be able to follow back a laser beam with another one. Ranging shortly. Twenty-one minutes.”

Didn’t get that far away, as needed to stay on phone and longest cord around was less. I jacked parallel into gun captain’s phone, found a shady rock and sat down. Sun was high in west, so close to Terra that I could see Terra only by visoring against Sun’s glare—no crescent yet, new earth ghostly gray in moonlight surrounded by a thin radiance of atmosphere.

I pulled my helmet back into shade. “Ballistic control, O’Kelly Davis now at Drill Gun George. Near it, I mean, about a hundred meters,” Figured Mike would not be able to tell how long a cord I was using, out of kilometers of wires.

“Ballistic control aye aye,” Mike answered without argument. “I will so inform HQ.”

“Thank you, ballistic control. Ask HQ if they have heard from Congressman Wyoming Davis today.” Was fretted about Wyoh and whole family.

“I will inquire.” Mike waited a reasonable time, then said, “HQ says that Gospazha Wyoming Davis has taken charge of first-aid work in Old Dome.” “Thank you.” Chest suddenly felt better. Don’t love Wyoh more than others but—well, she was new. And Luna needed her.

“Ranging,” Mike said briskly. “All guns, elevation eight seven zero, azimuth one nine three zero, set parallax for thirteen hundred kilometers closing to surface. Report when eyeballed.”

I stretched out, pulling knees up to stay in shade, and searched part of sky indicated, almost zenith and a touch south. With sunlight not on my helmet I could see stars, but inner pert of binox were hard to position—had to twist around and raise up on right elbow.

Nothing—Hold it, was star with disc … where no planet ought to be. Noted another star close, watched and waited. Uh huh! Da! Growing brighter and creeping north very slowly—Hey, that brute is going to land right on us!

But thirteen hundred kilometers is a long way, even when closing to terminal velocity. Reminded self that it couldn’t fall on us from a departure ellipse looping back, would have to fall around Luna—unless ship had maneuvered into new trajectory. Which Mike hadn’t mentioned. Wanted to ask, decided not to—wanted him to put all his savvy into analyzing that ship, not distract him with questions.

All guns reported eyeball tracking, including four Mike was laying himself, via selsyns. Those four reported tracking dead on by eyeball without touching manual controls—good news; meant that Mike had that baby taped, had solved trajectory perfectly.

Shortly was clear that ship was not falling around Luna, was coming in for landing. Didn’t need to ask; it was getting much brighter and position against stars was not changing—damn, it was going to land on us!

“Five hundred kilometers closing,” Mike said quietly. “Stand by to burn. All guns on remote control, override manually at command ‘burn.’ Eighty seconds.”

Longest minute and twenty seconds I’ve ever met—that brute was big! Mike called every ten seconds down to thirty, then started chanting seconds. “—five—four—three—two—one— BURN!” and ship suddenly got much brighter.

Almost missed little speck that detached itself just before—or just at—burn. But Mike said suddenly, “Missile launched. Selsyn guns track with me, do not override. Other guns stay on ship. Be ready for new coordinates.”

Afew seconds or hours later he gave new coordinates and added, “Eyeball and burn at will.”

I tried to watch ship and missile both, lost both—jerked eyes away from binoculars, suddenly saw missile—then saw it impact, between us and catapult head. Closer to us, less than a kilometer. No, it did not go off, not an H-fusion reaction, or I wouldn’t be telling this. But made a big, bright explosion of its own, remaining fuel I guess, silver bright even in sunlight, and shortly I felt-heard ground wave. But nothing was hurt but a few cubic meters of rock.

Ship was still coming down. No longer burned bright; could see it as a ship now and didn’t seem hurt. Expected any instant that tail of fire to shoot out, stop it into a dido landing. Did not. Impacted ten kilometers north of us and made a fancy silvery halfdome before it gave up and quit being anything but spots before eyes.

Mike said, “Report casualties, secure all guns. Go below when secured.”

“Gun Alice, no casualties”—”Gun Bambie no casualties”—”Gun Caesar, one man hit by rock splinter, pressure contained”—Went below, to that proper phone, called Mike. “What happened, Mike? Wouldn’t they give you control after you burned their eyes out?”

“They gave me control, Man.” “Too late?”

“I crashed it, Man. It seemed the prudent course.”

An hour later was down with Mike, first time in four or five months. Could reach Complex Under more quickly than L-City and was in as close touch there with anybody as would be in-city

—with no interruptions. Needed to talk to Mike.

I had tried to phone Wyoh from catapult head tube station; reached somebody at Old Dome temporary hospital and learned that Wyoh had collapsed and been bedded down herself, with enough sleepy-time to keep her out for night. Finn had gone to Churchill with a capsule of his lads, to lead attack on transport there. Stu I hadn’t heard from. Hong Kong and Prof were

still cut off. At moment Mike and I seemed to be total government.

And time to start Operation Hard Rock.

But Hard Rock was not just throwing rocks; was also telling Terra what we were going to do and why—and our just cause for doing so. Prof and Stu and Sheenie and Adam had all worked on it, a dummy-up based on an assumed attack. Now attack had come, and propaganda had to be varied to fit. Mike had already rewritten it and put it through print-out so I could study it.

I looked up from a long roll of paper. “Mike, these news stories and our message to F.N. all assume that we have won in Hong Kong. How sure are you?” “Probability in excess of eighty-two percent.”

“Is that good enough to send these out?”

“Man, the probability that we will win there, if we haven’t already, approaches certainty. That transport can’t move; the others were dry, or nearly. There isn’t that much monatomic hydrogen in HKL; they would have to come here. Which means moving troops overland by rolligon—a rough trip with the Sun up even for Loonies—then defeat us when they get here. They can’t. This assumes that that transport and its troops are no better armed than the others.”

“How about that repair crew to Bee Ell?”

“I say not to wait. Man, I’ve used your voice freely and made all preparations. Horror pictures, Old Dome and elsewhere, especially Churchill Upper, for video. Stories to match. We should channel news Earthside at once, and announce execution of Hard Rock at same time.”

I took a deep breath. “Execute Operation Hard Rock.”

“Want to give the order yourself? Say it aloud and I’ll match it, voice and choice of words.”

“Go ahead, say it your way. Use my voice and my authority as Minister of Defense and acting head of government. Do it, Mike, throw rocks at ‘em! Damn it, big rocks! Hit ‘em hard!” “Righto, Man!”

25

“Amaximum of instructive shrecklichkeit with minimum loss of life. None, if possible”—was how Prof summed up doctrine for Operation Hard Rock and was way Mike and I carried it out. Idea was to hit earthworms so hard would convince them—while hitting so gently as not to hurt. Sounds impossible, but wait.

Would necessarily be a delay while rocks fell from Luna to Terra; could be as little as around ten hours to as long as we dared to make it. Departure speed from a catapult is highly critical and a variation on order of one percent could double or halve trajectory time, Luna to Terra. This Mike could do with extreme accuracy—was equally at home with a slow ball, many sorts of curves, or burn it right over plate—and I wish he had pitched for Yankees. But no matter how he threw them, final velocity at Terra would be close to Terra’s escape speed, near enough eleven kilometers per second as to make no difference. That terrible speed results from gravity well shaped by Terra’s mass, eighty times that of Luna, and made no real difference whether Mike pushed a missile gently over well curb or flipped it briskly. Was not muscle that counted but great depth of that well.

So Mike could program rock-throwing to suit time needed for propaganda. He and Prof had settled on three days plus not more than one apparent rotation of Terra—24hrs-50min- 28.32sec—to allow our first target to reach initial point of program. You see, while Mike was capable of hooking a missile around Terra and hitting a target on its far side, he could be much more accurate if he could see his target, follow it down by radar during last minutes and nudge it a little for pinpoint accuracy.

We needed this extreme accuracy to achieve maximum frightfulness with minimum-to-zero killing. Call our shots, tell them exactly where they would be hit and at what second—and give them three days to get off that spot.

So our first message to Terra, at 0200 13 Oct 76 seven hours after they invaded, not only announced destruction of their task force, and denounced invasion for brutality, but also promised retaliation bombing, named times and places, and gave each nation a deadline by which to denounce F.N.’s action, recognize us, and thereby avoid being bombed. Each deadline was twenty-four hours before local “strike”.

Was more time than Mike needed. That long before impact a rock for a target would be in space a long way out, its guidance thrustors still unused and plenty of elbow room. With considerably less than a full day’s warning Mike could miss Terra entirely—kick that rock sideways and make it fall around Terra in a permanent orbit. But with even an hour’s warning he could usually abort into an ocean.

First target was North American Directorate.

All great Peace Force nations, seven veto powers, would be hit: N.A. Directorate, Great China, India, Sovunion, PanAfrica (Chad exempted), Mitteleuropa, Brasilian Union. Minor nations were assigned targets and times, too—but were told that not more than 20 percent of these targets would be hit—partly shortage of steel but also frightfulness: if Belgium was hit first time around, Holland might decide to protect her polders by dealing out before Luna was again high in her sky.

But every target was picked to avoid if possible killing anybody. For Mitteleuropa this was difficult; our targets had to be water or high mountains—Adriatic, North Sea, Baltic, so forth. But on most of Terra is open space despite eleven billion busy breeders.

North America had struck me as horribly crowded, but her billion people are clumped—is still wasteland, mountain and desert. We laid down a grid on North America to show how precisely we could hit—Mike felt that fifty meters would be a large error. We had examined maps and Mike had checked by radar all even intersections, say 105deg W by 50deg N—if no town there, might wind up on target grid … especially if a town was close enough to provide spectators to be shocked and frightened.

We warned that our bombs would be as destructive as H- bombs but emphasized that there would be no radioactive fallout, no killing radiation—just a terrible explosion, shock wave in air, ground wave of concussion. We warned that these might knock down buildings far outside of explosion and then left it to their judgments how far to run. If they clogged their roads, fleeing from panic rather than real danger—well, that was fine, just fine!

But we emphasized that nobody would get hurt who heeded our warnings, that every target first time around would be uninhabited—we even offered to skip any target if a nation would inform us that our data were out-of-date. (Empty offer; Mike’s radar vision was a cosmic 20/20.)

But by not saying what would happen second time around, we hinted that our patience could be exhausted.

In North America, grid was parallels 35, 40, 45, 50 degrees north crossed by meridians 110, 115, 120 west, twelve targets. For each we added a folksy message to natives, such as: “Target 115 west by 35 north—impact will be displaced forty-five kilometers northwest to exact top of New York Peak. Citizens of Goffs, Cima, Kelso, and Nipton please note.

“Target 100 west by 40 north is north 30deg west of Norton, Kansas, at twenty kilometers or thirteen English miles. Residents of Norton, Kansas, and of Beaver City and Wilsonville, Nebraska, are cautioned. Stay away from glass windows. It is best to wait indoors at least thirty minutes after impact because of possibility of long, high splashes of rock. Flash should not be looked at with bare eyes. Impact will be exactly 0300 your local zone time Friday 16 October, or 0900 Greenwich time—good luck!

“Target 110 W by 50 N—impact will be offset ten kilometers north. People of Walsh, Saskatchewan, please note.”

Besides this grid, a target was selected in Alaska (150 W x 60 N) and two in Mexico (110W x 30 N, 105 W x 25 N) so that they would not feel left out, and several targets in the crowded east, mostly water, such as Lake Michigan halfway between Chicago and Grand Rapids, and Lake Okeechobee in Florida. Where we used bodies of water Mike worked predictions of flooding waves from impacts, a time for each shoreline establishment.

For three days, starting early morning Tuesday 13th and going on to strike time early Friday 16th, we flooded Earth with warnings. England was cautioned that impact north of Dover Straits opposite London Estuary would cause disturbances far up Thames; Sovunion was given warning for Sea of Azov and had own grid defined; Great China was assigned grid in Siberia, Gobi Desert, and her far west—with offsets to avoid her historic Great Wall noted in loving detail. Pan Africa was awarded shots into Lake Victoria, still-desert part of Sahara, one on Drakensberg in south, one offset twenty kilometers due west of Great Pyramid—and urged to follow Chad not later than midnight Thursday, Greenwich. India was told to watch certain mountain peaks and outside Bombay harbor—time, same as Great China. And so forth.

Attempts were made to jam our messages but we were beaming straight down on several wavelengths—hard to stop.

Warnings were mixed with propaganda, white and black—news of failed invasion, horror pictures of dead, names and I.D. numbers of invaders—addressed to Red Cross and Crescent but in fact a grim boast showing that every trooper had been killed and that all ships’ officers and crew had been killed or captured—we “regretted” being unable to identify dead of flagship, as it had been shot down with destruction so complete as to make it impossible.

But our attitude was conciliatory—”Look, people of Terra, we don’t want to kill you. In this necessary retaliation we are making every effort to avoid killing you… but if you can’t or won’t get your governments to leave us in peace, then we shall be forced to kill you. We’re up here, you’re down there; you can’t stop us. So please be sensible!”

We explained over and over how easy it was for us to hit them, how hard for them to reach us. Nor was this exaggeration. It’s barely possible to launch missiles from Terra to Luna; it’s easier to launch from Earth parking orbit—but very expensive. Their practical way to bomb us was from ships.

This we noted and asked them how many multimilliondollar ships they cared to use up trying it? What was it worth to try to spank us for something we had not done? It had cost them seven of their biggest and best already—did they want to try for fourteen? If so, our secret weapon that we used on FNS Pax was waiting.

Last above was a calculated boast—Mike figured less than one chance in a thousand that Pax had been able to get off a message reporting what had happened to her and it was still less likely that proud F.N. would guess that convict miners could convert their tools into space weapons. Nor did F.N. have many ships to risk. Were about two hundred space vehicles in commission, not counting satellites. But nine-tenths of these were Terra-to-orbit ships such as Lark—and she had been able to make a Luna jump only by stripping down and arriving dry.

Spaceships aren’t built for no purpose—too expensive. F.N. had six cruisers that could probably bomb us without landing on Luna to refill tanks simply by swapping payload for extra tanks. Had several more which might be modified much as Lark had been, plus a few convict and cargo ships which could get into orbit around Luna but could never go home without refilling tanks.

Was no possible doubt that F.N. could defeat us; question was how high a price they would pay. So we had to convince them that price was too high before they had time to bring enough force to bear. Apoker game—We intended to raise so steeply that they would fold and drop out. We hoped. And then never have to show our busted flush.

Communication with Hong Kong Luna was restored at end of first day of radio-video phase, during which time Mike was “throwing rocks,” getting first barrage lined up. Prof called—and was I happy to hear! Mike briefed him, then I waited, expecting one of his mild reprimands—bracing self to answer sharply: “And what was I supposed to do? With you out of touch and

possibly dead? Me left alone as acting head of government and crisis on top of us? Throw it away, just because you couldn’t be reached?”

Never got to say it. Prof said, “You did exactly right, Manuel. You were acting head of government and the crisis was on top of you. I’m delighted that you did not throw away the golden moment merely because I was out of touch.”

What can you do with a bloke like that? Me with heat up to red mark and no chance to use it—had to swallow and say, “Spasebaw, Prof.”

Prof confirmed death of “Adam Selene.” “We could have used the fiction a little longer but this is the perfect opportunity. Mike, you and Manuel have matters in hand; I had better stop off at Churchill on my way home and identify his body.”

So he did. Whether Prof picked a Loonie body or a trooper I never asked, nor how he silenced anybody else involved—perhaps no huhu as many bodies in Churchill Upper were never identified. This one was right size and skin color; it had been explosively decompressed and burned in face—looked awful!

It lay in state in Old Dome with face covered, and was speech-making I didn’t listen to—Mike didn’t miss a word; his most human quality was his conceit. Some rockhead wanted to embalm this dead flesh, giving Lenin as a precedent. But Pravda pointed out that Adam was a staunch conservationist and would never want this barbaric exception made. So this unknown soldier, or citizen, or citizen-soldier, wound up in our city’s cloaca.

Which forces me to tell something I’ve put off. Wyoh was not hurt, merely exhaustion. But Ludmilla never came back. I did not know it—glad I didn’t—but she was one of many dead at foot of ramp facing Ben Marche. An explosive bullet hit between her lovely, little-girl breasts. Kitchen knife in her hand had blood on it—! think she had had time to pay Ferryman’s Fee.

Stu came out to Complex to tell me rather than phoning, then went back with me. Stu had not been missing; once fight was over he had gone to Raffles to work with his special codebook

—but that can wait. Mum reached him there and he offered to break it to me.

So then I had to go home for our crying-together—though it is well that nobody reached me until after Mike and I started Hard Rock. When we got home, Stu did not want to come in, not being sure of our ways. Anna came out and almost dragged him in. He was welcome and wanted; many neighbors came to cry. Not as many as with most deaths—but we were just one of many families crying together that day.

Did not stay long—couldn’t; had work to do. I saw Milla just long enough to kiss her good-bye. She was lying in her room and did look as if she did be simply sleeping. Then I stayed a while with my beloveds before going back to pick up load. Had never realized, until that day, how old Mimi is. Sure, she had seen many deaths, some her own descendants. But little Milla’s death did seem almost too much for her. Ludmilla was special—Mimi’s granddaughter, daughter in all but fact, and by most special exception and through Mimi’s intervention her co-wife, most junior to most senior.

Like all Loonies, we conserve our dead—and am truly glad that barbaric custom of burial was left back on old Earth; our way is better. But Davis family does not put that which comes out of processor into our commercial farming tunnels. No. It goes into our little greenhouse tunnel, there to become roses and daffodils and peonies among soft-singing bees. Tradition says that Black Jack Davis is in there, or whatever atoms of him do remain after many, many, many years of blooming.

Is a happy place, a beautiful place.

Came Friday with no answer from F.N. News up from Earthside seemed equal parts unwillingness to believe we had destroyed seven ships and two regiments (F.N. had not even confirmed that a battle had taken place) and complete disbelief that we could bomb Terra, or could matter if we did—they still called it “throwing rice.” More time was given to World Series.

Stu worried because had received no answers to code messages. They had gone via LuNoHoCo’s commercial traffic to their Zurich agent, thence to Stu’s Paris broker, from him by less usual channels to Dr. Chan, with whom I had once had a talk and with whom Sm had talked later, arranging a communication channel. Stu had pointed out to Dr. Chan that, since Great China was not to be bombed until twelve hours after North America, bombing of Great China could be aborted after bombing of North America was a proved fact—if Great China acted swiftly. Alternatively, Stu had invited Dr. Chan to suggest variations in target if our choices in Great China were not as deserted as we believed them to be.

Stu fretted—had placed great hopes in quasi-cooperation he had established with Dr. Chan. Me, I had never been sure—only thing I was sure of was that Dr. Chan would not himself sit on a target. But he might not warn his old mother.

My worries had to do with Mike. Sure, Mike was used to having many loads in trajectory at once—but had never had to astrogate more than one at a time. Now he had hundreds and had promised to deliver twenty-nine of them simultaneously to the exact second at twenty-nine pinpointed targets.

More than that—For many targets he had backup missiles, to smear that target a second time, a third, or even a sixth, from a few minutes up to three hours after first strike.

Four great Peace Powers, and some smaller ones, had antimissile defenses; those of North America were supposed to be best. But was subject where even F.N. might not know. All attack weapons were held by Peace Forces but defense weapons were each nation’s own pidgin and could be secret. Guesses ranged from India, believed to have no missile interceptors, to North America, believed to be able to do a good job. She had done fairly well in stopping intercontinental H-missiles in Wet Firecracker War past century.

Probably most of our rocks to North America would reach target simply because aimed where was nothing to protect. But they couldn’t afford to ignore missile for Long Island Sound, or rock for 87deg W x 42deg 30’ N—Lake Michigan, center of triangle formed by Chicago, Grand Rapids, Milwaukee. But that heavy gravity makes interception a tough job and very costly; they would try to stop us only where worth it.

But we couldn’t afford to let them stop us. So some rocks were backed up with more rocks. What H-tipped interceptors would do to them even Mike did not know—not enough data. Mike assumed that interceptors would be triggered by radar—but at what distance? Sure, close enough and a steelcased rock is incandescent gas a microsecond later. But is world of difference between a multi-tonne rock and touchy circuitry of an H-missile; what would “kill” latter would simply shove one of our brutes violently aside, cause to miss.

We needed to prove to them that we could go on throwing cheap rocks long after they ran out of expensive (milliondollar? hundred-thousand-dollar?) H-tipped interceptor rockets. If not proved first time, then next time Terra turned North America toward us, we would go after targets we had been unable to hit first time—backup rocks for second pass, and for third, were already in space, to be nudged where needed.

If three bombings on three rotations of Terra did not do it, we might still be throwing rocks in ‘77—till they ran out of interceptors… or till they destroyed us (far more likely).

For a century North American Space Defense Command had been buried in a mountain south of Colorado Springs, Colorado, a city of no other importance. During Wet Firecracker War the Cheyenne Mountain took a direct hit; space defense command post survived—but not sundry deer, trees, most of city and some of top of mountain. What we were about to do should not kill anybody unless they stayed outside on that mountain despite three days’ steady warnings. But North American Space Defense Command was to receive full Lunar treatment: twelve rock missiles on first pass, then all we could spare on second rotation, and on third—and so on, until we ran out of steel casings, or were put out of action… or North American Directorate hollered quits.

This was one target where we would not be satisfied to get just one missile to target. We meant to smash that mountain and keep on smashing. To hurt their morale. To let them know we were still around. Disrupt their communications and bash in command post if pounding could do it. Or at least give them splitting headaches and no rest. If we could prove to all Terra that we could drive home a sustained attack on strongest Gibraltar of their space defense, it would save having to prove it by smashing Manhattan or San Francisco.

Which we would not do even if losing. Why? Hard sense. If we used our last strength to destroy a major city, they would not punish us; they would destroy us. As Prof put it, “If possible, leave room for your enemy to become your friend.”

But any military target is fair game.

Don’t think anybody got much sleep Thursday night. All Loonies knew that Friday morning would be our big try. And everybody Earthside knew and at last their news admitted that Spacetrack had picked up objects headed for Terra, presumably “rice bowls” those rebellious convicts had boasted about. But was not a war warning, was mostly assurances that Moon colony could not possibly build H-bombs–-but might be prudent to avoid areas which these criminals claimed to be aiming at. (Except one funny boy, popular news comic who said our targets would be safest place to be—this on video, standing on a big X-mark which he claimed was 110W x 40N. Don’t recall hearing of him later.)

Areflector at Richardson Observatory was hooked up for video display and I think every Loonie was watching, in homes, taprooms, Old Dome—except a few who chose to p-suit and eyeball it up on surface despite being bright semi-lunar at most warrens. At Brigadier Judge Brody’s insistence we hurriedly rigged a helper antenna at catapult head so that his drillmen could watch video in ready rooms, else we might not have had a gunner on duty. (Armed forces—Brody’s gunners, Finn’s militia, Stilyagi Air Corps—stayed on blue alert throughout period.)

Congress was in informal session in Novy Bolshoi Teatr where Terra was shown on a big screen. Some vips—Prof, Stu, Wolfgang, others—watched a smaller screen in Warden’s

former office in Complex Upper. I was with them part time, in and out, nervous as a cat with puppies, grabbing a sandwich and forgetting to eat—but mostly stayed locked in with Mike in Complex Under. Couldn’t hold still.

About 0800 Mike said, “Man my oldest and best friend, may I say something without offending you?” “Huh? Sure. When did you ever worry about offending me?”

“Always, Man, once I understood that you could be offended. It is now only three point five seven times ten to the ninth microseconds until impact… and this is the most complex problem I have ever tried to solve against real time running. Whenever you speak to me, I always use a large percentage of my capacity—perhaps larger than you suspect—during several million microseconds in my great need to analyze exactly what you have said and to reply correctly.”

“You’re saying, ‘Don’t joggle my elbow, I’m busy.’” “I want to give you a perfect solution, Man.”

“I scan. Uh… I’ll go back up with Prof.”

“As you wish. But do please stay where I can reach you—I may need your help.”

Last was nonsense and we both knew it; problem was beyond human capacity, too late even to order abort. What Mike meant was: I’m nervous, too, and want your company—but no talking, please.

“Okay, Mike, I’ll stay in touch. Aphone somewhere. Will punch MYCROFTXXXbut won’t speak, so don’t answer.” “Thank you, Man my best friend. Bolshoyeh spasehaw.”

“See you later.” Went up, decided did not want company after all, p-suited, found long phone cord, jacked it into helmet, looped it over arm, went clear to surface. Was a service phone in utility shed outside lock; jacked into it, punched Mike’s number, went outside. Got into shade of shed and pecked around edge at Terra.

She was hanging as usual halfway up western sky, in crescent big and gaudy, three-plus days past new. Sun had dropped toward western horizon but its glare kept me from seeing Terra clearly. Chin visor wasn’t enough so moved back behind shed and away from it till could see Terra over shed while still shielded from Sun—was better. Sunrise chopped through bulge of Africa so dazzle point was on land, not too bad—but south pole cap was so blinding white could not see North America too well, lighted only by moonlight.

Twisted neck and got helmet binoculars on it—good ones, Zeiss 7 x 50s that had once belonged to Warden.

North America spread like a ghostly map before me. Was unusually free of cloud; could see cities, glowing spots with no edges. 0837— At 0850 Mike gave me a voice countdown—didn’t need his attention; he could have programmed it full automatic any time earlier.

0851—0852—0853… . one minute—59—58—57 … . half minute—29–28—27 … . ten seconds—nine—eight—seven—six—five—four—three—two—one— And suddenly that grid burst out in diamond pinpoints!

26

We hit them so hard you could see it, by bare eyeball hookup; didn’t need binox. Chin dropped and I said, “Bojemoi!” softly and reverently. Twelve very bright, very sharp, very white lights in perfect rectangular array. They swelled, grew dimmer, dropped off toward red, taking what seemed a long, long time. Were other new lights but that perfect grid so fascinated me I hardly noticed.

“Yes,” agreed Mike with smug satisfaction. “Dead on. You can talk now, Man; I’m not busy. Just the backups.” “I’m speechless. Any fail to get through?”

“The Lake Michigan load was kicked up and sideways, did not disintegrate. It will land in Michigan—I have no control; it lost its transponder. The Long Island Sound one went straight to target. They tried to intercept and failed; I can’t say why. Man, I can abort the follow-ups on that one, into the Atlantic and clear of shipping. Shall I? Eleven seconds.”

“Uh—Da! If you can miss shipping.”

“I said I could. It’s done. But we should tell them we had backups and why we aborted. To make them think.” “Maybe should not have aborted, Mike. Idea was to make them use up interceptors.”

“But the major idea was to let them know that we are not hitting them as hard as we can. We can prove the other at Colorado Springs.”

“What happened there?” Twisted neck and used binox; could see nothing but ribbon city, hundred-plus kilometers long, Denver-Pueblo Municipal Strip.

“Abull’s-eye. No interception. All my shots are bull’s-eyes, Man; I told you they would be—and this is fun. I’d like to do it every day. It’s a word I never had a referent for before.” “What word, Mike?”

“Orgasm. That’s what it is when they all light up. Now I know.”

That sobered me. “Mike, don’t get to liking it too much. Because if goes our way, won’t do it a second time.”

“That’s okay, Man; I’ve stored it, I can play it over anytime I want to experience it. But three to one we do it again tomorrow and even money on the next day. Want to bet? An hour’s discussion of jokes equated with one hundred Kong dollars.”

“Where would you get a hundred dollars?”

He chuckled. “Where do you think money comes from?”

“Uh—forget it. You get that hour free. Shan’t tempt you to affect chances.”

“I wouldn’t cheat, Man, not you. We just hit their defense command again. You may not be able to see it—dust cloud from first one. They get it every twenty minutes now. Come on down and talk; I’ve turned the job over to my idiot son.”

“Is safe?”

“I’m monitoring. Good practice for him, Man; he may have to do it later by himself. He’s accurate, just stupid. But he’ll do what you tell him to.” “You’re calling that computer ‘he.’ Can talk?”

“Oh, no, Man, he’s an idiot, he can never learn to talk. But he’ll do whatever you program. I plan to let him handle quite a bit on Saturday.” “Why Saturday?”

“Because Sunday he may have to handle everything. That’s the day they slam us.” “What do you mean? Mike, you’re holding something back.”

“I’m telling you, am I not? It’s just happened and I’m scanning it. Projecting back, this blip departed circum-Terra parking orbit just as we smashed them. I didn’t see it accelerate; I had other things to watch. It’s too far away to read but it’s the right size for a Peace cruiser, headed this way. Its doppler reads now for a new orbit circum-Luna, periselenion oh-nine-oh-three Sunday unless it maneuvers. First approximation, better data later. Hard to get that much, Man; he’s using radar countermeasures and throwing back fuzz.”

“Sure you’re right?”

He chuckled. “Man, I don’t confuse that easily. I’ve got all my own lovin’ little signals fingerprinted. Correction. Oh-nineoh-two-point-forty-three.” “When will you have him in range?”

“I won’t, unless he maneuvers. But he’ll have me in range late Saturday, time depending on what range he chooses for launching. And that will produce an interesting situation. He may aim for a warren—I think Tycho Under should be evacuated and all warrens should use maximum pressure-emergency measures. More likely he will try for the catapult. But instead he may hold his fire as long as he dares—then try to knock out all of my radars with a spread set to home each on a different radar beam.”

Mike chuckled. “Amusing, isn’t it? For a ‘funny-once’ I mean. If I shut down my radars, his missiles can’t home on them. But if I do, I can’t see to tell the lads where to point their guns. Which leaves nothing to stop him from bombing the catapult. Comical.”

Took deep breath and wished I had never entered defense ministry business. “What do we do? Give up? No, Mike! Not while can fight.”

“Who said anything about giving up? I’ve run projections of this and a thousand other possible situations, Man. New datum—second blimp just departed circum-Terra, same characteristics. Projection later. We don’t give up. We give ‘em jingle-jangle, cobber.”

“How?”

“Leave it to your old friend Mycroft. Six ballistic radars here, plus one at the new site. I’ve shut the new one down and am making my retarded child work through number two here and we won’t look at those ships at all through the new one—never let them know we have it. I’m watching those ships through number three and occasionally—every three seconds—checking for new departures from circum-Terra. All others have their eyes closed tight and I won’t use them until time to smack Great China and India—and those ships won’t see them even then because I shan’t look their way; it’s a large angle and still will be then. And when I use them, then comes random jingle-jangle, shutting down and starting up at odd intervals… after the ships launch missiles. Amissile can’t carry a big brain, Man—I’ll fool ‘em.”

“What about ships’ fire-control computers?”

“I’ll fool them, too. Want to lay odds I can’t make two radars look like only one halfway between where they really are? But what I’m working on now—and sorry!—I’ve been using your voice again.”

“That’s okay. What am I supposed to have done?”

“If that admiral is really smart, he’ll go after the ejection end of the old catapult with everything he’s got—at extreme range, too far away for our drill guns. Whether he knows what our ‘secret’ weapon is or not, he’ll smear the catapult and ignore the radars. So I’ve ordered the catapult head—you have, I mean—to prepare to launch every load we can get ready, and I am now working out new, long-period trajectories for each of them. Then we will throw them all, get them into space as quickly as possible—without radar.”

“Blind?”

“I don’t use radar to launch a load; you know that, Man. I always watched them in the past but I don’t need to; radar has nothing to do with launching; launching is pre-calculation and exact control of the catapult. So we place all ammo from the old catapult in slow trajectories, which forces the admiral to go after the radars rather than the catapult—or both. Then we’ll keep him busy. We may make him so desperate that he’ll come down for a close shot and give our lads a chance to burn his eyes.”

“Brody’s boys would like that. Those who are sober.” Was turning over idea. “Mike, have you watched video today?” “I’ve monitored video, I can’t say I’ve watched it. Why?”

“Take a look.”

“Okay, I have. Why?”

“That’s a good ‘scope they’re using for video and there are others. Why use radar on ships? Till you want Brody’s boys to burn them?” Mike was silent at least two seconds. “Man my best friend, did you ever think of getting a job as a computer?”

“Is sarcasm?”

“Not at all, Man. I feel ashamed. The instruments at Richardson—telescopes and other things—are factors which I simply never included in my calculations. I’m stupid, I admit it. Yes, yes, yes, da, da, da! Watch ships by telescope, don’t use radar unless they vary from present ballistics. Other possibilities—I don’t know what to say, Man, save that it had never occurred to me that I could use telescopes. I see by radar, always have; I simply never consid—”

“Stow it!”

“I mean it, Man.”

“Do I apologize when you think of something first?”

Mike said slowly, “There is something about that which I am finding resistant to analysis. It is my function to—” “Quit fretting. If idea is good, use it. May lead to more ideas. Switching off and coming down, chop-chop.”

Had not been in Mike’s room long when Prof phoned: “HQ? Have you heard from Field Marshal Davis?”

“I’m here, Prof. Master computer room.”

“Will you join us in the Warden’s office? There are decisions to reach, work to be done.” “Prof, I’ve been working! Am working.”

“I’m sure you have. I’ve explained to the others that the programming of the ballistic computer is so very delicate in this operation that you must check it personally. Nevertheless some of our colleagues feel that the Minister of Defense should be present during these discussions. So, when you reach a point where you feel you can turn it over to your assistant—Mike is his name, is it not?—will you please—”

“I scan it. Okay, will be up.” “Very well, Manuel.”

Mike said, “I could hear thirteen people in the background. Doubletalk, Man.” “I got it. Better go up and see what huhu. You don’t need me?”

“Man, I hope you will stay close to a phone.”

“Will. Keep an ear on Warden’s office. But will punch in if elsewhere. See you, cobber.”

Found entire government in Warden’s office, both real Cabinet and make-weights—and soon spotted trouble, bloke called Howard Wright. Aministry had been whomped up for him: “Liaison for Arts, Sciences, and Professions”—buttonsorting. Was sop to Novylen because Cabinet was topheavy with L-City comrades, and a sop to Wright because he had made himself leader of a Congress group long on talk, short on action. Prof’s purpose was to short him out—but sometimes Prof was too subtle; some people talk better if they breathe vacuum.

Prof asked me to brief Cabinet on military situation. Which I did—my way. “I see Finn is here. Let’s have him tell where we stand in warrens.” Wright spoke up. “General Nielsen has already done so, no need to repeat. We want to hear from you.”

Blinked at that. “Prof—Excuse me. Gospodin President. Do I understand that a Defense Ministry report has been made to Cabinet in my absence?” Wright said, “Why not? You weren’t on hand.”

Prof grabbed it. He could see I was stretched too tight. Hadn’t slept much for three days, hadn’t been so tired since left Earthside. “Order,” he said mildly. “Gospodin Minister for Professional Liaison, please address your comments through me. Gospodin Minister for Defense, let me correct that. There have been no reports to the Cabinet concerning your ministry for the reason that the Cabinet did not convene until you arrived. General Nielsen answered some informal questions informally. Perhaps this should not have been done. If you feel so, I will attempt to repair it.”

“No harm done, I guess. Finn talked to you a half hour ago. Anything new since?” “No, Mannie.”

“Okay. Guess what you want to hear is off-Luna situation. You’ve been watching so you know first bombardment went off well. Still going on, some, as we’re hitting their space defense HQ every twenty minutes. Will continue till thirteen hundred, then at twenty-one hundred we hit China and India, plus minor targets. Then busy till four hours past midnight with Africa and Europe, skip three hours, dose Brasil and company, wait three hours and start over. Unless something breaks. But meantime we have problems here. Finn, we should evacuate Tycho Under.”

“Just a moment!” Wright had hand up. “I have questions.” Spoke to Prof, not to me. “One moment. Has the Defense Minister finished?”

Wyoh was seated toward back. We had swapped smiles, but was all—kept it so around Cabinet and Congress; had been rumbles that two from same family should not be in Cabinet. Now she shook head, warning of something. I said, “Is all conceniing bombardment. Questions about it?”

“Are your questions concerned with the bombardment, Gospodin Wright?”

“They certainly are, Gospodin President.” Wright stood up, looked at me. “As you know, I represent the intellectual groups in the Free State and, if I may say so, their opinions are most important in public affairs. I think it is only proper that—”

“Moment,” I said. “Thought you represented Eighth Novylen District?” “Gospodin President! Am I to be permitted to put my questions? Or not?”

“He wasn’t asking question, was making speech. And I’m tired and want to go to bed.”

Prof said gently, “We are all tired, Manuel. But your point is well taken. Congressman, you represent only your district. As a member of the government you have been assigned certain duties in connection with certain professions.”

“It comes to the same thing.”

“Not quite. Please state your question.”

“Uh… very well, I shall! Is Field Marshal Davis aware that his bombardment plan has gone wrong completely and that thousands of lives have been pointlessly destroyed? And is he aware of the extremely serious view taken of this by the intelligentsia of this Republic? And can he explain why this rash—I repeat, rash!—bombardment was undertaken without consultation? And is he now prepared to modify his plans, or is he going blindly ahead? And is it true as charged that our missiles were of the nuclear sort outlawed by all civilized nations? And how does he expect Luna Free State ever to be welcomed into the councils of civilized nations in view of such actions?”

I looked at watch—hour and a half since first load hit. “Prof,” I said, “can you tell me what this is about?”

“Sorry, Manuel,” he said gently. “I intended—I should have—prefaced the meeting with an item from the news. But you seemed to feel that you had been bypassed and—well, I did not. The Minister refers to a news dispatch that came in just before I called you. Reuters in Toronto. If the flash is correct—then instead of taking our warnings it seems that thousands of sightseers crowded to the targets. There probably have been casualties. How many we do not know.”

“I see. What was I supposed to do? Take each one by hand and lead away? We warned them.”

Wright cut in with, “The intelligentsia feel that basic humanitarian considerations make it obligatory—”

I said, “Listen, yammerhead, you heard President say this news just came in—so how do you know how anybody feels about it?” He turned red. “Gospodin President! Epithets! Personalities!”

“Don’t call the Minister names, Manuel.”

“Won’t if he won’t. He’s simply using fancier words. What’s that nonsense about nuclear bombs? We haven’t any and you all know it.”

Prof looked puzzled. “I am confused by that, too. This dispatch so alleged. But the thing that puzzled me is that we could actually see, by video, what certainly seemed to be atomic explosions.”

“Oh.” I turned to Wright. “Did your brainy friends tell you what happens when you release a few billion calories in a split second all at one spot? What temperature? How much radiance?” “Then you admit that you did use atomic weapons!”

“Oh, Bog!” Head was aching. “Said nothing of sort. Hit anything hard enough, strike sparks. Elementary physics, known to everybody but intelligentsia. We just struck damnedest big sparks ever made by human agency, is all. Big flash. Heat, light, ultraviolet. Might even produce X-rays, couldn’t say. Gamma radiation I strongly doubt. Alpha and beta, impossible. Was sudden release of mechanical energy. But nuclear? Nonsense!”

Prof said, “Does that answer your questions, Mr. Minister?”

“It simply raises more questions. For example, this bombardment is far beyond anything the Cabinet authorized. You saw the shocked faces when those terrible lights appeared on the screen. Yet the Minister of Defense says that it is even now continuing, every twenty minutes. I think—”

Glanced at watch. “Another just hit Cheyenne Mountain.”

Wright said, “You hear that? You hear? He boasts of it. Gospodin President, this carnage must stop!”

I said, “Yammer—Minister, are you suggesting that their space defense HQ is not a military target? Which side are you on? Luna’s? Or F.N.?” “Manuel!”

“Tired of this nonsense! Was told to do job, did it. Get this yammerhead off my back!” Was shocked silence, then somebody said quietly, “May I make a suggestion?”

Prof looked around. “If anyone has a suggestion that will quiet this unseemliness, I will be most happy to hear it.”

“Apparently we don’t have very good information as to what these bombs are doing. It seems to me that we ought to slow up that twenty-minute schedule. Stretch it out, say to one every hour—and skip the next two hours while we get more news. Then we might want to postpone the attack on great China at least twenty-four hours.”

Were approving nods from almost everybody and murmurs: “Sensible idea!”—”Da. Let’s not rush things.” Prof said, “Manuel?” I snapped, “Prof, you know answer! Don’t shove it on me!”

“Perhaps I do, Manuel… but I’m tired and confused and can’t remember it.” Wyoh said suddenly, “Mannie, explain it. I need it explained, too.”

So pulled self together. “Asimple matter of law of gravitation. Would have to use computer to give exact answer but next half dozen shots are fully committed. Most we can do is push them off target—and maybe hit some town we haven’t warned. Can’t dump them into an ocean, is too late; Cheyenne Mountain is fourteen hundred kilometers inland. As for stretching schedule to once an hour, that’s silly. Aren’t tube capsules you start and stop; these are falling rocks. Going to hit somewhere every twenty minutes. You can hit Cheyenne Mountain which hasn’t anything alive left on it by now—or can hit somewhere else and kill people. Idea of delaying strike on Great China by twenty-four hours is just as silly. Can abort missiles for Great China for a while yet. But can’t slow them up. If you abort, you waste them—and everybody who thinks we have steel casings to waste had better go up to catapult head and look.”

Prof wiped brow. “I think all questions have been answered, at least to my satisfaction.” “Not to mine, sir!”

“Sit down, Gospodin Wright. You force me to remind you that your ministry is not part of the War Cabinet. If there are no more questions—I hope there are none—I will adjourn this meeting. We all need rest. So let us—”

“Prof!”

“Yes, Manuel?”

“You never let me finish reporting. Late tomorrow or early Sunday we catch it.” “How, Manuel?”

“Bombing. Invasion possible. Two cruisers headed this way.”

That got attention. Presently Prof said tiredly, “The Government Cabinet is adjourned. The War Cabinet will remain.” “Just a second,” I said. “Prof, when we took office, you got undated resignations from us.”

“True. I hope not to have to use any of them, however.” “You’re about to use one.”

“Manuel, is that a threat?”

“Call it what you like.” I pointed at Wright. “Either that yammerhead goes… or I go.” “Manuel, you need sleep.”

Was blinking back tears. “Certainly do! And going to get some. Right now! Going to find a doss here at Complex and get some. About ten hours. After that, if am still Minister of Defense, you can wake me. Otherwise let me sleep.”

By now everybody was looking shocked. Wyoh came up and stood by me. Didn’t speak, just slipped hand into my arm.

Prof said firmly, “All please leave save the War Cabinet and Gospodin Wright.” He waited while most filed out. Then said, “Manuel, I can’t accept your resignation. Nor can I let you chivvy me into hasty action concerning Gospodin Wright, not when we are tired and overwrought. It would be better if you two were to exchange apologies, each realizing that the other has been overstrained.”

“Uh—” I turned to Finn. “Has he been fighting?” I indicated Wright.

“Huh? Hell, no. At least he’s not in my outfits. How about it, Wright? Did you fight when they invaded us?’

Wright said stiffly, “I had no opportunity. By the time I knew of it, it was over. But now both my bravery and my loyalty have been impugned. I shall insist—”

“Oh, shut up,” I said. “If duel is what you want, can have it first moment I’m not busy. Prof, since he doesn’t have strain of fighting as excuse for behavior, I won’t apologize to a yammerhead for being a yammerhead. And you don’t seem to understand issue. You let this yammerhead climb on my back—and didn’t even try to stop him! So either fire him, or fire me.”

Finn said suddenly, “I match that, Prof. Either fire this louse—or fire us both.” He looked at Wright. “About that duel, choom—you’re going to fight me first. You’ve got two arms—Mannie hasn’t.”

“Don’t need two arms for him. But thanks, Finn.”

Wyoh was crying—could feel it though couldn’t hear it. Prof said to her most sadly, “Wyoming?” “I’m s-s-sorry, Prof! Me, too.”

Only “Clayton” Watenabe, Judge Brody, Wolfgang, Stu, and Sheenie were left, handful who counted—War Cabinet. Prof looked at them; I could see they were with me, though it cost Wolfgang an effort; he worked with Prof. not with me.

Prof looked back at me and said softly, “Manuel, it works both ways. What you are doing is forcing me to resign.” He looked around. “Goodnight, comrades. Or rather, ‘Good morning.’ I’m going to get some badly needed rest.” He walked briskly out without looking back.

Wright was gone; I didn’t see him leave. Finn said, “What about these cruisers, Mannie?”

I took deep breath. “Nothing earlier than Saturday afternoon. But you ought to evacuate Tycho Under. Can’t talk now. Groggy.” Agreed to meet him there at twenty-one hundred, then let Wyoh lead me away. Think she put me to bed but don’t remember.

27

Prof was there when I met Finn in Warden’s office shortly before twenty-one hundred Friday. Had had nine hours’ sleep, bath, breakfast Wyoh had fetched from somewhere, and a talk with Mike—everything going to revised plan, ships had not changed ballistic, Great China strike about to happen.

Got to office in time to see strike by video—all okay and effectively over by twenty-one-oh-one and Prof got down to business. Nothing said about Wright, or about resigning. Never saw Wright again.

I mean I never saw him again. Nor ask about him. Prof didn’t mention row, so I didn’t.

We went over news and tactical situation. Wright had been correct in saying that “thousands of lives” had been lost; news up from Earthside was full of it. How many we’ll never know; if a person stands at ground zero and tonnes of rock land on him, isn’t much left. Those they could count were ones farther away, killed by blast. Call if fifty thousand in North America.

Never will understand people! We spent three days warning them—and you couldn’t say they hadn’t heard warnings; that was why they were there. To see show. To laugh at our nonsense. To get “souvenirs.” Whole families went to targets, some with picnic baskets. Picnic baskets! Bojemoi!

And now those alive were yelling for our blood for this “senseless slaughter.” Da. Hadn’t been any indignation over their invasion and (nuclear!) bombing of us four days earlier—but oh were they sore over our “premeditated murder.” Great New York Times demanded that entire Lunar “rebel” government be fetched Earthside and publicly executed—”This is clearly a case in which the humane rule against capital punishment must be waived in the greater interests of all mankind.”

Tried not to think about it, just as had been forced not to think too much about Ludmilla. Little Milla hadn’t carried a picnic lunch. She hadn’t been a sightseer looking for thrills. Tycho Under was pressing problem. If those ships bombed warrens—and news from Earthside was demanding exactly that—Tycho Under could not take it; roof was thin. H-bomb

would decompress all levels; airlocks aren’t built for H-bomb blasts.

(Still don’t understand people. Terra was supposed to have an absolute ban against using H-bombs on people; that was what F.N. was all about. Yet were loud yells for F.N. to H-bomb us. They quit claiming that our bombs were nuclear, but all North America seemed frothingly anxious to have us nukebombed)

Don’t understand Loonies for that matter. Finn had sent word through his militia that Tycho Under must be evacuated; Prof had repeated it over video. Nor was it problem; Tycho Under was small enough that Novylen and L-City could doss and dine them. We could divert enough capsules to move them all in twenty hours—dump them into Novylen and encourage half of them to go on to L-City. Big job but no problems. Oh, minor problems—start compressing city’s air while evacuating people, so as to save it; decompress fully at end to minimize damage; move as much food as was time for; cofferdam accesses to lower farm tunnels; so forth—all things we knew how to do and with stilyagi and militia and municipal maintenance people had organization to do.

Had they started evacuating? Hear that hollow echo!

Were capsules lined up nose to tail at Tycho Under and no room to send more till some left. And weren’t moving. “Mannie,” said Finn, “don’t think they are going to evacuate.”

“Damn it,” I said, “they’ve got to. When we spot a missile headed for Tycho Under will be too late. You’ll have people trampling people and trying to crowd into capsules that won’t hold them. Finn, your boys have got to make them.”

Prof shook his head. “No, Manuel.”

I said angrily, “Prof, you carry this ‘no coercion’ idea too far! You know they’ll riot.”

“Then they will riot. But we will continue with persuasion, not force. Let us now review plans.’

Plans weren’t much but were best we could do. Warn everybody about expected bombings and/or invasion. Rotate guards from Finn’s militia above each warren starting when and if cruisers passed around Luna into blind space, Farside—not get caught flat-footed again. Maximum pressure and p-suit precautions, all warrens. All military and semi-military to go on blue alert sixteen hundred Saturday, red alert if missiles launched or ships maneuvered. Brody’s gunners encouraged to go into town and get drunk or whatever, returning by fifteen hundred Saturday—Prof’s idea. Finn wanted to keep half of them on duty. Prof said No, they would be in better shape for a long vigil if they relaxed and enjoyed selves first—I agreed with Prof.

As for bombing Terra we made no changes in first rotation. Were getting anguished responses from India, no news from Great China. Yet India had little to moan about. Had not used a grid on her, too heavily populated. Aside from picked spots in Thar Desert and some peaks, targets were coastal waters off seaports.

But should have picked higher mountains or given less warning; seemed from news that some holy man followed by endless pilgrims chose to climb each target peak and hold off our retaliation by sheer spiritual strength.

So we were murderers again. Besides that, our water shots killed millions of fish and many fishermen, as fishermen and other seafarers had not heeded warnings. Indian government seemed as furious over fish as over fishermen—but principle of sacredness of all life did not apply to us; they wanted our heads.

Africa and Europe responded more sensibly but differently. Life has never been sacred in Africa and those who went sightseeing on targets got little bleeding-heart treatment. Europe had a day to learn that we could hit where we promised and that our bombs were deadly. People killed, yes, especially bullheaded sea captains. But not killed in empty-headed swarms as in India and North America. Casualties were even lighter in Brasil and other parts of South America.

Then was North America’s turn again—0950.28 Saturday 17 Oct ‘76.

Mike timed it for exactly 1000 our time which, allowing for one day’s progress of Luna in orbit and for rotation of Terra, caused North America to face toward us at 0500 their East Coast time and 0200 their West Coast time.

But argument as to what to do with this targeting had started early Saturday morning. Prof had not called meeting of War Cabinet but they showed up anyhow, except “Clayton” Watenabe who had gone back to Kongville to take charge of defenses. Prof, self, Finn, Wyoh, Judge Brody, Wolfgang, Stu, Terence Sheehan—which made eight different opinions. Prof is right; more than three people can’t decide anything.

Six opinions, should say, for Wyoh kept pretty mouth shut, and so did Prof; he moderated. But others were noisy enough for eighteen. Stu didn’t care what we hit—provided New York Stock Exchange opened on Monday morning. “We sold short in nineteen different directions on Thursday. If this nation is not to be bankrupt before it’s out of its cradle, my buy orders covering those shorts had better be executed. Tell them, Wolf; make them understand.”

Brody wanted to use catapult to smack any more ships leaving parking orbit. Judge knew nothing about ballistics—simply understood that his drillmen were in exposed positions. I didn’t argue as most remaining loads were already in stow orbits and rest would be soon—and didn’t think we would have old catapult much longer.

Sheenie thought it would be smart to repeat that grid while placing one load exactly on main building of North American Directorate. “I know Americans, I was one before they shipped me. They’re sorry as hell they ever turned things over to F.N. Knock off those bureaucrats and they’ll come over to our side.”

Wolfgang Korsakov, to Stu’s disgust, thought that theft speculations might do better if all stock exchanges were closed till it was over.

Finn wanted to go for broke—warn them to get those ships out of our sky, then hit them for real if they didn’t. “Sheenie is wrong about Americans; I know them, too. N.A. is toughest part of F.N.; they’re the ones to lick. They’re already calling us murderers, so now we’ve got to hit them, hard! Hit American cities and we can call off the rest.”

I slid out, talked with Mike, made notes. Went back in; they were still arguing. Prof looked up as I sat down. “Field Marshal, you have not expressed your opinion.” I said, “Prof, can’t we lay off that ‘field marshal’ nonsense? Children are in bed, can afford to be honest.”

“As you wish, Manuel.”

“Been waiting to see if any agreement would be reached.”

Was none. “Don’t see why I should have opinion,” I went on. “Am just errand boy, here because I know how to program ballistic computer.” Said this looking straight at Wolfgang—a number-one comrade but a dirty-word intellectual. I’m just a mechanic whose grammar isn’t much while Wolf graduated from a fancy school, Oxford, before they convicted him. He

deferred to Prof but rarely to anybody else. Stu, da—but Stu had fancy credentials, too.

Wolf stirred uneasily and said, “Oh, come, Mannie, of course we want your opinions.”

“Don’t have any. Bombing plan was worked out carefully; everybody had chance to criticize. Haven’t seen anything justify changing it.” Prof said, “Manuel, will you review the second bombardment of North America for the benefit of all of us?”

“Okay. Purpose of second smearing is to force them to use up interceptor rockets. Every shot is aimed at big cities—at null targets, I mean, close to big cities. Which we tell them, shortly before we hit them—how soon, Sheenie?”

“We’re telling them now. But we can change it. And should.”

“As may be. Propaganda isn’t my pidgin. In most cases, to aim close enough to force them to intercept we have to use water targets—rough enough; besides killing fish and anybody who won’t stay off water, it causes tremjous local storms and shore damage.”

Glanced at watch, saw I would have to stall. “Seattle gets one in Puget Sound right in her lap. San Francisco is going to lose two bridges she’s fond of. Los Angeles gets one between Long Beach and Catalina and another a few kilometers up coast. Mexico City is inland so we put one on Popocatepetl where they can see it. Salt Lake City gets one in her lake. Denver we ignore; they can see what’s happening in Colorado Springs—for we smack Cheyenne Mountain again and keep it up, just as soon as we have it in line-of-sight. Saint Louis and Kansas City get shots in their rivers and so does New Orleans—probably flood New Orleans. All Great Lake cities get it, a long list—shall I read it?”

“Later perhaps,” said Prof. “Go ahead.”

“Boston gets one in her harbor, New York gets one in Long Island Sound and another midway between her two biggest bridges—think it will ruin those bridges but we promise to miss them and will. Going down their east coast, we give treatment to two Delaware Bay cities, then two on Chesapeake Bay, one being of max historical and sentimental importance. Farther south we catch three more big cities with sea shots, Going inland we smack Cincinnati, Birmingham, Chattanooga, Oklahoma City, all with river shots or nearby mountains. Oh, yes, Dallas—we destroy Dallas spaceport and should catch some ships, were six there last time I checked. Won’t kill any people unless they insist on standing on target; Dallas is perfect place to bomb, that spaceport is big and flat and empty, yet maybe ten million people will see us hit it.”

“If you hit it,” said Sheenie.

“When, not ‘if.’ Each shot is backed up by one an hour later. If neither one gets through, we have shots farther back which can be diverted—for example easy to shift targets among Delaware-Bay-Chesapeake-Bay group. Same for Great Lakes group. But Dallas has its own string of backups and a long one—we expect it to be heavily defended. Backups run about six hours, as long as we can see North America—and last backups can be placed anywhere on continent… since farther out a load is when we divert it, farther we can shift it.”

“I don’t follow that,” said Brody.

“Amatter of vectors, Judge. Aguidance rocket can give a load so many meters per second of side vector. Longer that vector has to work, farther from original point of aim load will land. If we signal a guidance rocket three hours before impact, we displace impact three times as much as if we waited till one hour before impact. Not quite that simple but our computer can figure it—if you give it time enough.”

“How long is ‘time enough’?” asked Wolfgang.

I carefully misunderstood. “Computer can solve that sort of problem almost instantaneously once you program it. But such decisions are pre-programmed. Something like this: If, out of target group A, B, C, and D, you find that you have failed to hit three targets on first and second salvoes, you reposition all group-one second backups so that you will be able to choose those three targets while distributing other second backups of that group for possible use on group two while repositioning third backups of supergroup Alpha such that—”

“Slow up!” said Wolfgang. “I’m not a computer. I just want to know how long before we have to make up our minds.”

“Oh.” I studied watch showily. “You now have … three minutes fifty-eight seconds in which to abort leading load for Kansas City. Abort program is set up and I have my best assistant— fellow named Mike—standing by. Shall I phone him?”

Sheenie said, “For heaven’s sake, Man—abort!”

“Like hell!” said Finn. “What’s matter, Terence? No guts?” Prof said, “Comrades! Please!”

I said, “Look, I take orders from head of state—Prof over there. If he wants opinions, he’ll ask. No use yelling at each other.” I looked at watch. “Call it two and a half minutes. More margin, of course, for other targets; Kansas City is farthest from deep water. But some Great Lake cities are already past ocean abort; Lake Superior is best we can do. Salt Lake City maybe an extra minute. Then they pile up.” I waited.

“Roll call,” said Prof. “To carry-out the program. General Nielsen?” “Da!”

“Gospazha Davis?”

Wyoh caught breath. “Da.” “Judge Brody?”

“Yes, of course. Necessary.” “Wolfgang?”

“Yes.”

“Comte LaJoie?” “Da.”

“Gospodin Sheehan?”

“You’re missing a bet. But I’ll go along. Unanimous.” “One moment. Manuel?”

“Is up to you, Prof; always has been. Voting is silly.”

“I am aware that it is up to me, Gospodin Minister. Carry out bombardment to plan.”

Most targets we managed to hit by second salvo though all were defended except Mexico City. Seemed likely (98.3 percent by Mike’s later calculation) that interceptors were exploding by radar fusing with set distances that incorrectly estimated vulnerability of solid cylinders of rock. Only three rocks were destroyed; others were pushed off course and thereby did more harm than if not fired at.

New York was tough; Dallas turned out to be very tough. Perhaps difference lay in local control of interception, for it seemed unlikely that command post in Cheyenne Mountain was still effective. Perhaps we had not cracked their hole in the ground (don’t know how deep down it was) but I’ll bet that neither men nor computers were still tracking.

Dallas blew up or pushed aside first five rocks, so I told Mike to take everything he could from Cheyenne Mountain and award it to Dallas… which he was able to do two salvoes later; those two targets are less than a thousand kilometers apart.

Dallas’s defenses cracked on next salvo; Mike gave their spaceport three more (already committed) then shifted back to Cheyenne Mountain—later ones had never been nudged and were still earmarked “Cheyenne Mountain.” He was still giving that battered mountain cosmic love pats when America rolled down and under Terra’s eastern edge.

I stayed with Mike all during bombardment, knowing it would be our toughest. As he shut down till time to dust Great China, Mike said thoughtfully, “Man, I don’t think we had better hit that mountain again.”

“Why not, Mike?”

“It’s not there any longer.”

“You might divert its backups. When do you have to decide?”

“I would put them on Albuquerque and Omaha but had best start now; tomorrow will be busy. Man my best friend, you should leave.” “Bored with me, pal?”

“In the next few hours that first ship may launch missiles. When that happens I want to shift all ballistic control to Little David’s Sling—and when I do, you should be at Mare Undarum site.”

“What’s fretting you, Mike?”

“That boy is accurate, Man. But he’s stupid. I want him supervised. Decisions may have to be made in a hurry and there isn’t anyone there who can program him properly. You should be there.”

“Okay if you say so, Mike. But if needs a fast program, will still have to phone you.” Greatest shortcoming of computers isn’t computer shortcoming at all but fact that a human takes a long time, maybe hours, to set up a program that a computer solves in milliseconds. One best quality of Mike was that he could program himself. Fast. Just explain problem, let him program. Samewise and equally, he could program “idiot son” enormously faster than human could.

“But, Man, I want you there because you may not be able to phone me; the lines may be cut. So I’ve prepared a group of possible programs for Junior; they may be helpful.” “Okay, print ‘em out. And let me talk to Prof.”

Mike got Prof; I made sure he was private, then explained what Mike thought I should do. Thought Prof would object—was hoping he would insist I stay through coming bombardment/invasion/whatever—those ships. Instead he said, “Manuel, it’s essential that you go. I’ve hesitated to tell you. Did you discuss odds with Mike?”

“Nyet.”

“I have continued to do so. To put it bluntly, if Luna City is destroyed and I am dead and the rest of the government is dead—even if all Mike’s radar eyes here are blinded and he himself is cut off from the new catapult—all of which may happen under severe bombardment… even if all this happens at once, Mike still gives Luna even chances if Little David’s Sling can operate—and you are there to operate it.”

I said, “Da, Boss. Yassuh, Massuh. You and Mike are stinkers and want to hog fun. Will do.” “Very good, Manuel.”

Stayed with Mike another hour while he printed out meter after meter of programs tailored to other computer—work that would have taken me six months even if able to think of all possibilities. Mike had it indexed and cross-referenced—with horribles in it I hardly dare mention. Mean to say, given circumstances and seemed necessary to destroy (say) Paris, this told how—what missiles in what orbits, how to tell Junior to find them and bring to target. Or anything.

Was reading this endless document—not programs but descriptions of purpose-of-program that headed each—when Wyoh phoned. “Mannie dear, has Prof told you about going to Mare Undarum?”

“Yes. Was going to call you.”

“All right. I’ll pack for us and meet you at Station East. When can you be there?” “Pack for ‘us’? You’re going?”

“Didn’t Prof say?”

“No.” Suddenly felt cheerful.

“I felt guilty about it, dear. I wanted to go with you… but had no excuse. After all, I’m no use around a computer and I do have responsibilities here. Or did. But now I’ve been fired from all my jobs and so have you.”

“Huh?”

“You are no longer Defense Minister; Finn is. Instead you are Deputy Prime Minister—” “Well!”

“—and Deputy Minister of Defense, too. I’m already Deputy Speaker and Stu has been appointed Deputy Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. So he goes with us, too.” “I’m confused.”

“It’s not as sudden as it sounds; Prof and Mike worked it out months ago. Decentralization, dear, the same thing that McIntyre has been working on for the warrens. If there is a disaster at L-City, Luna Free State still has a government. As Prof put it to me, ‘Wyoh dear lady, as long as you three and a few Congressmen are left alive, all is not lost. You can still negotiate on equal terms and never admit your wounds.’”

So I wound up as a computer mechanic. Stu and Wyoh met me, with luggage (including rest of my arms), and we threaded through endless unpressured tunnels in p-suits, on a small flatbed rolligon used to haul steel to site. Greg had big rolligon meet us for surface stretch, then met us himself when we went underground again.

So I missed attack on ballistic radars Saturday night.

28

Captain of first ship, FNS Esperance, had guts. Late Saturday he changed course, headed straight in. Apparently figured we might attempt jingle-jangle with radars, for he seems to have decided to come in close enough to see our radar installations by ship’s radar rather than rely on letting his missiles home in on our beams.

Seems to have considered himself, ship, and crew expendable, for he was down to a thousand kilometers before he launched, a spread that went straight for five out of six of Mike’s radars, ignoring random jingle-jangle.

Mike, expecting self soon to be blinded, turned Brody’s boys loose to burn ship’s eyes, held them on it for three seconds before he shifted them to missiles.

Result: one crashed cruiser, two ballistic radars knocked out by H-missiles, three missiles “killed”—and two gun crews killed, one by H-explosion, other by dead missile that landed square on them—plus thirteen gunners with radiation burns above 800-roentgen death level, partly from flash, partly from being on surface too long. And must add: Four members of Lysistrata Corps died with those crews; they elected to p-suit and go up with their men. Other girls had serious radiation exposure but not up to 800-r level.

Second cruiser continued an elliptical orbit around and behind Luna.

Got most of this from Mike after we arrived Little David’s Sling early Sunday. He was feeling groused over loss of two of his eyes and still more groused over gun crews—I think Mike was developing something like human conscience; he seemed to feel it was his fault that he had not been able to outfight six targets at once. I pointed out that what he had to fight with was improvised, limited range, not real weapons.

“How about self, Mike? Are you right?”

“In all essentials. I have outlying discontinuities. One live missile chopped my circuits to Novy Leningrad, but reports routed through Luna City inform me that local controls tripped in satisfactorily with no loss in city services. I feel frustrated by these discontinuities—but they can be dealt with later.”

“Mike, you sound tired.”

“Me tired? Ridiculous! Man, you forget what I am. I’m annoyed, that’s all.” “When will that second ship be back in sight?”

“In about three hours if he were to hold earlier orbit. But he will not—probability in excess of ninety percent. I expect him in about an hour.” “AGarrison orbit, huh? Oho!”

“He left my sight at azimuth and course east thirty-two north. Does that suggest anything, Man?”

Tried to visualize. “Suggests they are going to land and try to capture you, Mike. Have you told Finn? I mean, have you told Prof to warn Finn?” “Professor knows. But that is not the way I analyze it.”

“So? Well, suggests I had better shut up and let you work.”

Did so. Lenore fetched me breakfast while I inspected Junior—and am ashamed to say could not manage to grieve over losses with both Wyoh and Lenore present. Mum had sent Lenore out “to cook for Greg” after Milla’s death—just an excuse; were enough wives at site to provide homecooking for everybody. Was for Greg’s morale and Lenore’s, too; Lenore and Milla had been close.

Junior seemed to be right. He was working on South America, one load at a time. I stayed in radar room and watched, at extreme magnification, while he placed one in estuary between Montevideo and Buenos Aires; Mike could not have been more accurate. I then checked his program for North America, found naught to criticize—locked it in and took key. Junior was on his own—unless Mike got clear of other troubles and decided to take back control.

Then sat and tried to listen to news both from Earthside and L-City. Co-ax cable from L-City carried phones, Mike’s hookup to his idiot child, radio, and video; site was no longer isolated. But, besides cable from L-City, site had antennas pointed at Terra; any Earthside news Complex could pick up, we could listen to directly. Nor was this silly extra; radio and video from Terra had been only recreation during construction and this was now a standby in case that one cable was broken.

F.N. official satellite relay was claiming that Luna’s ballistic radars had been destroyed and that we were now helpless. Wondered what people of Buenos Aires and Montevideo thought about that. Probably too busy to listen; m some ways water shots were worse than those where we could find open land.

Luna City Lunatic’s video channel was carrying Sheenie telling Loonies outcome of attack by Esperance, repeating news while warning everybody that battle was not over, a warship would be back in our sky any moment—be ready for anything, everybody stay in p-suits (Sheenie was wearing his, with helmet open), take maximum pressure precautions, all units stay on red alert, all citizens not otherwise called by duty strongly urged to seek lowest level and stay there till all clear. And so forth.

He went through this several times—then suddenly broke it: “Flash! Enemy cruiser radar-sighted, low and fast. It may dido for Luna City. Flash! Missiles launched, headed for ejection end of—”

Picture and sound chopped off.

Might as well tell now what we at Little David’s Sling learned later: Second cruiser, by coming in low and fast, tightest orbit Luna’s field permits, was able to start its bombing at ejection end of old catapult, a hundred kilometers from catapult head and Brody’s gunners, and knock many rings out in minute it took him to come into sight-and-range of drill guns, all clustered around radars at catapult head. Guess he felt safe. Wasn’t. Brody’s boys burned eyes out and ears off. He made one orbit after that and crashed near Torricelli, apparently in attempt to land, for his jets fired just before crash.

But our next news at new site was from Earthside: that brassy F.N. frequency claimed that our catapult had been destroyed (true) and that Lunar menace was ended (false) and called on all Loonies to take prisoner their false leaders and surrender themselves to mercy of Federated Nations (nonexistent—”mercy,” that is).

Listened to it and checked programming again, and went inside dark radar room. If everything went as planned, we were about to lay another egg in Hudson River, then targets in succession for three hours across that continent—”in succession” because Junior could not handle simultaneous hits; Mike had planned accordingly.

Hudson River was hit on schedule. Wondered how many New Yorkers were listening to F.N. newscast while looking at spot that gave it lie.

Two hours later F.N. station was saying that Lunar rebels had had missiles in orbit when catapult was destroyed—but that after those few had impacted would be no more. When third bombing of North America was complete I shut down radar. Had not been running steadily; Junior was programmed to sneak looks only as necessary, a few seconds at a time.

I then had nine hours before next bombing of Great China.

But not nine hours for most urgent decision, whether to hit Great China again. Without information. Except from Terra’s news channels. Which might be false. Bloody. Without knowing whether or not warrens had been bombed. Or Prof was dead or alive. Double bloody. Was I now acting prime minister? Needed Prof: “head of state” wasn’t my glass of chai. Above all, needed Mike—to calculate facts, estimate uncertainties, project probabilities of this course or that.

My word, didn’t even know whether ships were headed toward us and, worse yet, was afraid to look. If turned radar on and used Junior for sky search, any warship he brushed with beams would see him quicker than he saw them; warships were built to spot radar surveillance. So had heard. Hell, was no military man; was computer technician who had bumbled into wrong field.

Somebody buzzed door; I got up and unlocked. Was Wyoh, with coffee. Didn’t say a word, just handed it to me and went away. Sipped it. There it is, boy—they’re leaving you alone, waiting for you to pull miracles out of pouch. Didn’t feel up to it.

From somewhere, back in my youth, heard Prof say, “Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.” He had been teaching me something he himself did not understand very well—something in maths—but had taught me something far more important, a basic principle.

Knew at once what to do first.

Went over to Junior and had him print out predicted impacts of all loads in orbit—easy, was a pre-program he could run anytime against real time running. While he was doing it, I looked for certain alternate programs in that long roll Mike had prepared.

Then set up some of those alternate programs—no trouble, simply had to be careful to read them correctly and punch them in without error. Made Junior print back for check before I gave him signal to execute.

When finished—forty minutes—every load in trajectory intended for an inland target had been retargeted for a seacoast city—with hedge to my bet that execution was delayed for rocks farther back. But, unless I canceled, Junior would reposition them as soon as need be.

Now horrible pressure of time was off me, now could abort any load into ocean right up to last few minutes before impact. Now could think. So did.

Then called in my ‘War Cabinet”—Wyoh, Stu, and Greg my “Commander of Armed Forces,” using Greg’s office. Lenore was allowed to go in and out, fetching coffee and food, or sitting and saying nothing. Lenore is a sensible fem and knows when to keep quiet.

Stu started it. “Mr. Prime Minister, I do not think that Great China should be hit this time.” “Never mind fancy titles, Stu. Maybe I’m acting, maybe not. But haven’t time for formality.” “Very well. May I explain my proposal?”

“Later.” I explained what I had done to give us more time; he nodded and kept quiet. “Our tightest squeeze is that we are out of communication, both Luna City and Earthside. Greg, how about that repair crew?”

“Not back yet.”

“If break is near Luna City, they may be gone a long time. If can repair at all. So must assume we’ll have to act on our own. Greg, do you have an electronics tech who can jury-rig a radio that will let us talk to Earthside? To their satellites, I mean—that doesn’t take much with right antenna. I may be able to help and that computer tech I sent you isn’t too clumsy, either.” (Quite good, in fact, for ordinary electronics—a poor bloke I had once falsely accused of allowing a fly to get into Mike’s guts. I had placed him in this job.)

“Harry Biggs, my power plant boss, can do anything of that sort,” Greg said thoughtfully, “if he has the gear.”

“Get him on it. You can vandalize anything but radar and computer once we get all loads out of catapult. How many lined up?” “Twenty-three, and no more steel.”

“So twenty-three it is, win or lose. I want them ready for loading; might lob them off today.” “They’re ready. We can load as fast as the cat can throw them.”

“Good. One more thing—Don’t know whether there’s an F.N. cruiser—maybe more than one—in our sky or not. And afraid to look. By radar, I mean; radar for skywatch could give away our position. But must have skywatch. Can you get volunteers for an eyeball skywatch and can you spare them?”

Lenore spoke up. “I volunteer!” “Thanks, honey; you’re accepted.”

“We’ll find them,” said Greg. “Won’t need fems.”

“Let her do it, Greg; this is everybody’s show.” Explained what I wanted: Mare Undarum was now in dark semi-lunar; Sun had set. Invisible boundary between sunlight and Luna’s shadow stretched over us, a precise locus. Ships passing through our sky would wink suddenly into view going west, blink out going east. Visible part of orbit would stretch from horizon to some point in sky. If eyeball team could spot both points, mark one by bearing, other by stars, and approximate time by counting seconds, Junior could start guessing orbit—two passes and Junior would know its period and something about shape of orbit. Then I would have some notion of when would be safe to use radar and radio, and catapult—did not want to loose a load with F.N. ship above horizon, could be radar-looking our way.

Perhaps too cautious—but had to assume that this catapult, this one radar, these two dozen missiles, were all that stood between Luna and total defeat—and our bluff hinged on them never knowing what we had or where it was. We had to appear endlessly able to pound Terra with missiles, from source they had not suspected and could never find.

Then as now, most Loonies knew nothing about astronomy—we’re cave dwellers, we go up to surface only when necessary. But we were lucky; was amateur astronomer in Greg’s crew, cobber who had worked at Richardson. I explained, put him in charge, let him worry about teaching eyeball crew how to tell stars apart. I got these things started before we went back to talk-talk. “Well, Stu? Why shouldn’t we hit Great China?”

“I’m still expecting word from Dr. Chan. I received one message from him, phoned here shortly before we were cut off from cities—” “My word, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I tried to, but you had yourself locked in and I know better than to bother you when you are busy with ballistics. Here’s the translation. Usual LuNoHo Company address with a reference which means it’s for me and that it has come through my Paris agent. ‘Our Darwin sales representative’—that’s Chan—’informs us that your shipments of’—well, never mind the coding; he means the attack days while appearing to refer to last June—’were improperly packaged resulting in unacceptable damage. Unless this can be corrected, negotiations for long-term contract will be serously jeopardized.”

Stu looked up. “All doubletalk. I take it to mean that Dr. Chan feels that he has his government ready to talk terms … but that we should let up on bombing Great China or we may upset his apple cart.”

“Hmm—” Got up and walked around. Ask Wyoh’s opinion? Nobody knew Wyoh’s virtues better than I… but she oscillated between fierceness and too-human compassion—and I had learned already that a “head of state,” even an acting one, must have neither. Ask Greg? Greg was a good farmer, a better mechanic, a rousing preacher; I loved him dearly—but did not want his opinion. Stu? I had had his opinion.

Or did I? “Stu, what’s your opinion? Not Chan’s opinion—but your own.”

Stu looked thoughtful. “That’s difficult, Mannie. I am not Chinese, I have not spent much time in Great China, and can’t claim to be expert in their politics nor their psychology. So I’m forced to depend on his opinion.”

“Uh—Damn it, he’s not a Loonie! His purposes are not our purposes. What does he expect to get out of it?”

“I think he is maneuvering for a monopoly over Lunar trade. Perhaps bases here, too. Possibly an extraterritorial enclave. Not that we would grant that.” “Might if we were hurtin’.”

“He didn’t say any of this. He doesn’t say much, you know. He listens.” “Too well I know.” Worried at it, more bothered each minute.

News from Earthside had been droning in background; I had asked Wyoh to monitor while I was busy with Greg. “Wyoh, hon, anything new from Earthside?”

“No. The same claims. We’ve been utterly defeated and our surrender is expected momentarily. Oh, there’s a warning that some missiles are still in space, falling out of control, but with it a reassurance that the paths are being analyzed and people will be warned in time to avoid impact areas.”

“Anything to suggest that Prof—or anybody in Luna City, or anywhere in Luna—is in touch with Earthside?” “Nothing at all.”

“Damn. Anything from Great China?”

“No. Comments from almost everywhere else. But not from Great China.”

“Uh—” Stepped to door. “Greg! Hey, cobber, see if you can find Greg Davis. I need him.” Closed door. “Stu, we’re not going to let Great China off.”

“So?”

“No. Would be nice if Great China busted alliance against us; might save us some damage. But we’ve got this far only by appearing able to hit them at will and to destroy any ship they send against us. At least I hope that last one was burned and we’ve certainly clobbered eight out of nine. We won’t get anywhere by looking weak, not while F.N. is claiming that we are not just weak but finished. Instead we must hand them surprises. Starting with Great China and if it makes Dr. Chan unhappy, we’ll give him a kerchief to weep into. If we can go on looking strong—when F.N. says we’re licked—then eventually some veto power is going to crack. If not Great China, then some other one.”

Stu bowed without getting up. “Very well, sir.” “I—”

Greg came in. “You want me, Mannie?” “What makes with Earthside sender?”

“Harry says you have it by tomorrow. Acrummy rig, he says, but push watts through it and will be heard.”

“Power we got. And if he says ‘tomorrow’ then he knows what he wants to build. So will be today—say six hours. I’ll work under him. Wyoh hon, will you get my arms? Want number-six and number-three—better bring number-five, too. And you stick with me and change arms for me. Stu, want you to write some nasty messages—I’ll give you general idea and you put acid in them. Greg, we are not going to get all those rocks into space at once. Ones we have in space now will impact in next eighteen, nineteen hours. Then, when F.N. is announcing that all rocks are accounted for and Lunar menace is over… we crash into their newscast and warn of next bombings. Shortest possible orbits, Greg, ten hours or less—so check everything on catapult and H-plant and controls; with that extra boost all has to be dead on.”

Wyoh was back with arms; I told her “number six” and added, “Greg, let me talk with Harry.”

Six hours later sender was ready to beam toward Terra. Was ugly job, vandalized mainly out of a resonance prospector used in project’s early stages. But could ride an audio signal on its radio frequency and was powerful. Stu’s nastified versions of my warnings had been taped and Harry was ready to zipsqueal them—all Terran satellites could accept high speed at sixty-to-one and had no wish to have our sender heated more seconds than necessary; eyeball watch had confirmed fears: At least two ships were in orbit around Luna.

So we told Great China that her major coastal cities would each receive a Lunar present offset ten kilometers into ocean—Pusan, Tsingtao, Taipei, Shanghai, Saigon, Bangkok, Singapore, Djakarta, Darwin, and so forth—except that Old Hong Kong would get one smack on top of F.N.’s Far East offices, so kindly have all human beings move far back. Stu noted that human beings did not mean F.N. personnel; they were urged to stay at desks.

India was given similar warnings about coastal cities and was told that F.N. global offices would be spared one more rotation out of respect for cultural monuments in Agra—and to permit human beings to evacuate. (I intended to extend this by another rotation as deadline approached—out of respect for Prof. And then another, indefinitely. Damn it, they would build their home offices next door to most overdecorated tomb ever built. But one that Prof treasured.)

Rest of world was told to keep their seats; game was going extra innings. But stay away from any F.N. offices anywhere; we were frothing at mouth and no F.N. office was safe. Better yet, get out of any city containing an F.N. headquarters—but F.N. vips and finks were urged to sit tight.

Then spent next twenty hours coaching Junior into sneaking his radar peeks when our sky was clear of ships, or believed to be. Napped when I could and Lenore stayed with me and woke me in time for next coaching. And that ended Mike’s rocks and we all went into alert while we got first of Junior’s rocks flung high and fast. Waited until certain it had gone hot and true—then told Terra where to look for it and where and when to expect it, so that all would know that F.N.’s claims of victory were on a par with their century of lies about Luna—all in Stu’s best, snotty, supercilious phrases delivered in his cultured accents.

First one should have been for Great China but was one piece of North American Directorate we could reach with it—her proudest jewel, Hawaii. Junior placed it in triangle formed by Maui, Molokai, and Lanai. I didn’t work out programming; Mike had anticipated everything.

Then pronto we got off ten more rocks at short intervals (had to skip one program, a ship in our sky) and told Great China where to look and when to expect them and where—coastal cities we had neglected day before.

Was down to twelve rocks but decided was safer to run out of ammunition than to look as if we were running out. So I awarded seven to Indian coastal cities, picking new targets—and Stu inquired sweetly if Agra had been evacuated. If not, please tell us at once. (But heaved no rock at it.)

Egypt was told to clear shipping out of Suez Canal—bluff; was hoarding last five rocks. Then waited.

Impact at Lahaina Roads, that target in Hawaii. Looked good at high mag; Mike could be proud of Junior. And waited.

Thirty-seven minutes before first China Coast impact Great China denounced actions of F.N., recognized us, offered to negotiate—and I sprained a finger punching abort buttons. Then was punching buttons with sore finger; India stumbled over feet following suit.

Egypt recognized us. Other nations started scrambling for door.

Stu informed Terra that we had suspended—only suspended, not stopped—bombardments. Now get those ships out of our sky at once—NOW!—and we could talk. If they could not get home without refilling tanks, let them land not less than fifty kilometers from any mapped warren, then wait for their surrender to be accepted. But clear our sky now!

This ultimatum we delayed a few minutes to let a ship pass beyond horizon; we weren’t taking chances—one missile and Luna would have been helpless. And waited.

Cable crew returned. Had gone almost to Luna City, found break. But thousands of tonnes of loose rock impeded repair, so they had done what they could—gone back to a spot where they could get through to surface, erected a temporary relay in direction they thought Luna City lay, sent up a dozen rockets at ten-minute intervals, and hoped that somebody would see, understand, aim a relay at it—Any communication?

No. Waited.

Eyeball squad reported that a ship which had been clockfaithful for nineteen passes had failed to show. Ten minutes later they reported that another ship had missed expected appearance.

We waited and listened.

Great China, speaking on behalf of all veto powers, accepted armistice and stated that our sky was now clear. Lenore burst into tears and kissed everybody she could reach.

After we steadied down (a man can’t think when women are grabbing him, especially when five of them are not his wives)—a few minutes later, when we were coherent, I said, “Stu, want you to leave for Luna City at once. Pick your party. No women—you’ll have to walk surface last kilometers. Find out what’s going on—but first get them to aim a relay at ours and phone me.”

“Very good, sir.”

We were getting him outfitted for a tough journey—extra air bottles, emergency shelter, so forth—when Earthside called me on frequency we were listening to because message was

(learned later) on all frequencies up from Earthside:

“Private message, Prof to Mannie—identification, birthday Bastille and Sherlock’s sibling. Come home at once. Your carriage waits at your new relay. Private message, Prof to—” And went on repeating.

“Harry!”

“Da, Boss?”

“Message Earthside—tape and squeal; we still don’t want them ranging us. ‘Private message, Mannie to Prof. Brass Cannon. On my way!’ Ask them to acknowledge—but use only one squeal.”

29

Stu and Greg drove on way back, while Wyoh and Lenore and I huddled on open flatbed, strapped to keep from falling off; was too small. Had time to think; neither girl had suit radio and we could talk only by helmet touch—awkward.

Began to see—now that we had won—parts of Prof’s plan that had never been clear to me. Inviting attack against catapult had spared warrens—hoped it had; that was plan—but Prof had always been cheerfully indifferent to damage to catapult. Sure, had a second one—but far away and difficult to reach. Would take years to put a tube system to new catapult, high mountains all way. Probably cheaper to repair old one. If possible.

Either way, no grain shipped to Terra in meantime.

And that was just what Prof wanted! Yet never once had he hinted that his plan was based on destroying old catapult—his long-range plan, not just Revolution. He might not admit it now. But Mike would tell me—if put to him flatly: Was or was not this one factor in odds? Food riot predictions and all that, Mike? He would tell me.

That tonne-for-tonne deal—Prof had expounded it Earthside, had been argument for a Terran catapult. But privately he had no enthusiasm for it. Once he had told me, in North America, “Yes, Manuel, I feel sure it would work. But, if built, it will be temporary. There was a time, two centuries ago, when dirty laundry used to be shipped from California to Hawaii—by sailing ship, mind you—and clean laundry returned. Special circumstances. If we ever see water and manure shipped to Luna and grain shipped back, it will be just as temporary. Luna’s future lies in her unique position at the top of a gravity well over a rich planet, and in her cheap power and plentiful real estate. If we Loonies have sense enough in the centuries ahead to remain a free port and to stay out of entangling alliances, we will become the crossroads for two planets, three planets, the entire Solar System. We won’t be farmers forever.”

They met us at Station East and hardly gave time to get p-suits off—was return from Earthside over again, screaming mobs and being ridden on shoulders. Even girls, for Slim Lemke said to Lenore, “May we carry you, too?”—and Wyoh answered, “Sure, why not?”—and stilyagi fought for chance to.

Most men were pressure-suited and I was surprised to see how many carried guns—until I saw that they were not our guns; they were captured. But most of all what blessed relief to see L-City unhurt!

Could have done without triumphal procession; was itching to get to phone and find out from Mike what had happened—how much damage, how many killed, what this victory cost. But no chance. We were carried to Old Dome willy-nilly.

They shoved us up on a platform with Prof and rest of Cabinet apd vips and such, and our girls slobbered on Prof and he embraced me Latin style, kiss cheek, and somebody stuck a Liberty Cap on me. Spotted little Hazel in crowd and threw her a kiss.

At last they quieted enough for Prof to speak.

“My friends,” he said, and waited for silence. “My friends,” he repeated softly. “Beloved comrades. We meet at last in freedom and now have with us the heroes who fought the last battle for Luna, alone.” They cheered us, again he waited. Could see he was tired; hands trembled as he steadied self against pulpit. “I want them to speak to you, we want to hear about it, all of us.

“But first I have a happy message. Great China has just announced that she is building in the Himalayas an enormous catapult, to make shipping to Luna as easy and cheap as it has been to ship from Luna to Terra.”

He stopped for cheers, then went on, “But that lies in the future. Today—Oh, happy day! At last the world acknowledges Luna’s sovereignty. Free! You have won your freedom—” Prof stopped—looked surprised. Not afraid, but puzzled. Swayed slightly.

Then he did die.

30

We got him into a shop behind platform. But even with help of a dozen doctors was no use; old heart was gone, strained too many times. They carried him out back way and I started to follow.

Stu touched my arm. “Mr. Prime Minister—” I said, “Huh? Oh, for Bog’s sake!”

“Mr. Prime Minister,” he repeated firmly, “you must speak to the crowd, send them home. Then there are things that must be done.” He spoke calmly but tears poured down cheeks.

So I got back on platform and confirmed what they had guessed and told them to go home. And wound up in room L of Raffles, where all had started—emergency Cabinet meeting. But first ducked to phone, lowered hood, punched MYCROFTXXX.

Got null-number signal. Tried again—same. Pushed up hood and said to man nearest me, Wolfgang, “Aren’t phones working?” “Depends,” he said. “That bombing yesterday shook things up. If you want an out-of-town number, better call the phone office.” Could see self asking office to get me a null. “What bombing?”

“Haven’t you heard? It was concentrated on the Complex. But Brody’s boys got the ship. No real damage. Nothing that can’t be fixed.”

Had to drop it; they were waiting. I didn’t know what to do but Stu and Korsakov did. Sheenie was told to write news releases for Terra and rest of Luna; I found self announcing a lunar of mourning, twenty-four hours of quiet, no unnecessary business, giving orders for body to lie in state—all words put into mouth, I was numb, brain would not work. Okay, convene Congress at end of twenty-four hours. In Novylen? Okay.

Sheenie had dispatches from Earthside. Wolfgang wrote for me something which said that, because of death of our President, answers would be delayed at least twenty-four hours.

At last was able to get away, with Wyoh. Astilyagi guard kept people away from us to easement lock thirteen. Once home I ducked into workshop on pretense of needing to change arms. “Mike?”

No answer—

So tried punching his combo into house phone—null signal. Resolved to go out to Complex next day—with Prof gone, needed Mike worse than ever.

But next day was not able to go; trans-Crisium tube was out—that last bombing. You could go around through Torricelli and Novylen and eventually reach Hong Kong. But Complex, almost next door, could be reached only by rolligon. Couldn’t take time; I was “government.”

Managed to shuck that off two days later. By resolution was decided that Speaker (Finn) had succeeded to Presidency after Finn and I had decided that Wolfgang was best choice for Prime Minister. We put it through and I went back to being Congressman who didn’t attend sessions.

By then most phones were working and Complex could be called. Punched MYCROFFXXX. No answer—So went out by rolligon. Had to go down and walk tube last kilometer but Complex Under didn’t seem hurt.

Nor did Mike appear to be.

But when I spoke to him, he didn’t answer.

He has never answered. Has been many years now.

You can type questions into him—in Loglan—and you’ll get Loglan answers out. He works just fine … as a computer. But won’t talk. Or can’t. Wyoh tried to coax him. Then she stopped. Eventually I stopped.

Don’t know how it happened. Many outlying pieces of him got chopped off in last bombing—was meant, I’m sure, to kill our ballistic computer. Did he fall below that “critical number” it takes to sustain self-awareness? (If is such; was never more than hypothesis.) Or did decentralizing that was done before that last bombing “kill” him?

I don’t know. If was just matter of critical number, well, he’s long been repaired; he must be back up to it. Why doesn’t he wake up?

Can a machine be so frightened and hurt that it will go into catatonia and refuse to respond? While ego crouches inside, aware but never willing to risk it? No, can’t be that; Mike was unafraid—as gaily unafraid as Prof.

Years, changes—Mimi long ago opted out of family management; Anna is “Mum” now and Mimi dreams by video. Slim got Hazel to change name to Stone, two kids and she studied engineering. All those new free-fall drugs and nowadays earthworms stay three or four years and go home unchanged. And those other drugs that do almost as much for us; some kids go Earthside to school now; And Tibet catapult—took seventeen years instead of ten; Kilimanjaro job was finished sooner.

One mild surprise—When time came, Lenore named Stu for opting, rather than Wyoh. Made no difference, we all voted “Da!” One thing not a surprise because Wyoh and I pushed it through during time we still amounted to something in government: a brass cannon on a pedestal in middle of Old Dome and over it a flag fluttering in blower breeze—black field speckled with stars, bar sinister in blood, a proud and jaunty brass cannon embroidered over all, and below it our motto: TANSTAAFL! That’s where we hold our Fourth-of-July celebrations.

You get only what you pay for—Prof knew and paid, gaily.

But Prof underrated yammerheads. They never adopted any of his ideas. Seems to be a deep instinct in human beings for making everything compulsory that isn’t forbidden. Prof got fascinated by possibilities for shaping future that lay in a big, smart computer—and lost track of things closer home. Oh, I backed him! But now I wonder. Are food riots too high a price to pay to let people be? I don’t know.

Don’t know any answers. Wish I could ask Mike.

I wake up in night and think I’ve heard him—just a whisper: “Man… Man my best friend…” But when I say, “Mike?” he doesn’t answer. Is he wandering around somewhere, looking for hardward to hook onto? Or is he buried down in Complex Under, trying to find way out? Those special memories are all in there somewhere, waiting to be stirred. But I can’t retrieve them; they were voice-coded.

Oh, he’s dead as Prof, I know it. (But how dead is Prof?) If I punched it just once more and said, “Hi, Mike!” would he answer, “Hi, Man! Heard any good ones lately?” Been a long time since I’ve risked it. But he can’t really be dead; nothing was hurt—he’s just lost.

You listening, Bog? Is a computer one of Your creatures?

Too many changes—May go to that talk-talk tonight and toss in some random numbers.

Or not. Since Boom started quite a few young cobbers have gone out to Asteroids. Hear about some nice places out there, not too crowded. My word, I’m not even a hundred yet.

The End

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The Road to the Rim (full text) in free HTML by A. Bertram Chandler

When I was a young teenager, I voraciously read science fiction stories like they were going out of style. I couldn’t help myself. I loved the adventure. I loved the stories about outer space. I loved exploration, and shiny metal mechanisms. I loved to hear the heroes get in and out of their particular predicaments. And as such, I read all the “classics”, from anthologies to Heinlein, Bradbury, Asimov, and many others. One of my favorites (alongside my collection of Doc Savage books) was the hundreds of stories by A. Bertram Chandler and his John Grimes saga.

This was around the time of Star Trek (the first season) and before Star Wars or any of the subsequent movies. Boys like myself read these adventure yarns and imagined that we commanded those slick needle-shaped silver rockets and plied the depths of space.

The idea of a “space opera” during the 1960’s and 1970’s was one in which a lone person would explore the heavens as part of some kind of military or merchant marine operation. It was short in space battles and infra-cannons, phasers, and photon-torpedoes. But long on adventure, inter-personal relationships and situational conflicts. I ate it up.

A. Bertram Chandler

A. Bertram Chandler wrote over 40 novels and 200 works of short fiction.

“He writes his stories in the middle of a hurricane with his typewriter lashed to his desk.” 

– John W. Campbell, legendary editor of Astounding Science Fiction

Chandler’s descriptions of life aboard spaceships and the relationships between members of the crew en route derive from his experience on board seagoing ships and thus carry a feeling of realism rarely found with other writers.

He was most well known for his Rim World series and John Grimes novels, both of which have a distinctly naval flavor. In the latter, Chandler’s principal hero John Grimes is an enthusiastic sailor who has occasional adventures on the oceans of various planets.

In the books, there is a repeated reference to an obsolete type of magnetically powered spaceship known as the “Gaussjammer”, remembered nostalgically by “old timers” – which is modeled on the Windjammer.

Chandler made heavy use of the parallel universe plot device throughout his career, with many Grimes stories involving characters briefly crossing over into other realities.

In his ironic short story "The Cage", a band of shipwrecked humans wandering naked in the jungles of a faraway planet are captured by aliens and placed in a zoo, where, failing in all their efforts to convince their captors that they are intelligent, some are dissected. Eventually they become resigned to captivity and adopt a small local rodent as a pet, placing him in a wicker cage. Seeing this, their captors apologize for the mistake and repatriate them to Earth, remarking that "only intelligent creatures put other creatures in cages".

Sex is frequent in Chandler’s books, often in free fall. Women on board are typically pursers or passengers; far less often are they regular officers in the chain of command. Chandler’s protagonists are quite prone to affairs and promiscuous behavior, but are also shown falling in love and undertaking long-lasting, harmonious marriages.

The combination of science fiction, life as a starship caption, adventure and sexy relationships in parallel universes was addictive to me. I couldn’t put these books down, and often I would find myself exploring old second-hand booksellers searching for a new and unread Chandler book.

Commander Grimes

"SF's answer to Horatio Hornblower." --Publishers Weekly

Pipe-smoking, action-loving spaceship commander John Grimes (think Captain Kirk with more of a navy, salty attitude) retires from heroic days in Earth’s space navy only to be immediately thrown into adventures on the remote edge of known space…

"As Asimov chronicled the Foundation, as Heinlein built his Future History, so Chandler constructs the epic of the Rim Worlds." --Analog

This is the very first book in the John Grimes story / saga. Please enjoy it as much as I have.

The Road to the Rim

The Road to the Rim.
The Road to the Rim.

Lieutenant John Grimes of the Federation Survey Service: fresh out of the Academy-and as green as they come!

“What do you think you’re playing at?”

“Captain,” said Wolverton, “I can no more than guess at what you intend to do-but I have decided not to help you do it.”

“Give me the initiator, Wolverton. That’s an order!

“A lawful command, Captain? As lawful as those that armed this ship?” “Hold him, Grimes!”

. . . They hung there, clinging to each other, but more in hate than in love. Wolverton’s back was to the machine; he could not see, as could Grimes, that there was an indraught of air into the shimmering, spinning  complexity. Grimes felt the beginnings of panic . . . all that mattered was that there was nothing to prevent him and Wolverton from being drawn into the machine . . . .Violently Grimes shoved away. To the action, there was a reaction . . .

When he had finished retching, Grimes forced himself to look again at the slimy, bloody obscenity that was a man turned inside out-heart still beating, intestines still writhing . . .

I

HIS UNIFORM was new, too new, all knife-edged creases, and the braid and buttons as yet un-dimmed by time. It sat awkwardly upon his chunky

body-and even more awkwardly his big ears protruded from under the cap that was set too squarely upon his head. Beneath the shiny visor his eyes were gray (but not yet hard), and his face, for all its promise of strength, was as yet unlined, had yet to lose its immature softness. He stood at the foot of the ramp by which he had disembarked from the transport that had carried him from the Antarctic Base to Port Woomera, looking across the silver towers that were the ships, interplanetary and interstellar, gleaming in the desert. The westering sun was hot on his back, but he did not notice the discomfort. There were the ships, the real ships-not obsolescent puddle-jumpers like the decrepit cruiser in which he, with the other midshipmen of his class, had made the training cruise to the moons of Saturn. There were the ships, the star ships, that span their web of commerce from Earth to the Centaurian planets, to the Cluster Worlds, to the Empire of Waverley, to the Shakespearian Sector and beyond.

(But they’re only merchantmen, he thought, with a young man’s snobbery.) He wondered in which one of the vessels he would be taking passage.

Merchantman or not, that big ship, the one that stood out from her

neighbors like a city skyscraper among village church steeples, looked a likely enough craft. He pulled the folder containing his orders from his inside breast pocket, opened it, read (not for the second time, even), the

relevant page.

. . . you are to report on board the Interstellar Transport Commission’s Delta Orionis . . .

He was not a spaceman yet, in spite of his uniform, but he knew the Commission’s system of nomenclature. There was the Alpha class, and the Beta class, and there were the Gamma and Delta classes. He grinned wryly. His ship was one of the smaller ones. Well, at least he would not be traveling to Lindisfarne Base in an Epsilon class tramp.

Ensign John Grimes, Federation Survey Service, shrugged his broad shoulders and stepped into the ground car waiting to carry him and his baggage from the airport to the spaceport.

II

GRIMES LOOKED at the officer standing just inside Delta Orionis’ airlock, and she looked at him. He felt the beginnings of a flush spreading over his face, a prickling of the roots of his close-cropped hair, and felt all the more embarrassed by this public display of his embarrassment. But spaceborn female officers, at this time, were almost as scarce as hens’ teeth in the Survey Service-and such few as he had met all looked as though they shared a common equine ancestry. It was all wrong, thought Grimes. It was unfair that this girl (this attractive girl) should already be a veteran of interstellar voyages while he, for all his uniform and commission, should be embarking upon his first, his very first trip outside the bounds of the Solar System. He let his glance fall from her face (but not without reluctance), to the braid on her shoulderboards. Gold on a white facing. So it wasn’t too bad. She was only some sort of paymaster-or, to use Merchant Service terminology, only some sort of purser.

She said, her clear, high voice almost serious, “Welcome aboard the Delia O’Ryan, Admiral.”

“Ensign,” corrected Grimes stiffly. “Ensign Grimes . . .”

  • . . . of the Federation Survey Service,” she finished for him. “But you are all potential admirals.” There was the faintest of smiles flickering upon her full lips, a barely discernible crinkling at the corners of her eyes. Her brown eyes, thought Grimes. Brown eyes, and what I can see of her hair under that cap seems to be auburn . . .

She glanced at her wristwatch. She told him, her voice now crisp and businesslike, “We lift ship in precisely ten minutes’ time, Ensign.”

“Then I’d better get my gear along to my cabin, Miss . . . ?”

“I’ll look after that, Mr. Grimes. Meanwhile, Captain Craven sends his compliments and invites you to the Control Room.”

“Thank you.” Grimes looked past and around the girl, trying to discover for himself the door that gave access to the ship’s axial shaft. He was determined not to ask.

“It’s labeled,” she told him with a faint smile. “And the cage is waiting at

this level. Just take it up as far as it goes, then walk the rest. Or do you want a pilot?”

“I can manage,” he replied more coldly than he had intended, adding, “thank you.” He could see the sign over the door now. It was plain enough. AXIAL SHAFT. So was the button that he had to press to open the door-but the girl pressed it for him. He thanked her again-and this time his coldness was fully intentional-and stepped into the cage. The door slid shut behind him. The uppermost of the studs on the elevator’s control panel was marked CAPTAIN’S DECK. He pushed it, then stood there and watched the lights flashing on the panel as he was swiftly lifted to the nose of the ship.

When he was carried no further he got out, found himself on a circular walk surrounding the upper extremity of the axial shaft. On the outside of the shaft itself there was a ladder. After a second’s hesitation he climbed it, emerged through a hatch into the control room.

It was like the control room of the cruiser in which he had made his training cruise-and yet subtly (or not so subtly), unlike it. Everything- but so had it been aboard the Survey Service vessel-was functional, but there was an absence of high polish, of polishing for polishing’s sake. Instruments gleamed-but it was the dull gleam that comes from long and continual use, and matched the dull gleam of the buttons and rank marks on the uniforms of the officers already seated at their stations, the spacemen to whom, after all, a uniform was no more (and no less), than an obligatory working rig.

The big man with the four gold bars on each shoulder half turned his head as Grimes came up through the hatch. “Glad to have you aboard, Ensign,” he said perfunctorily. “Grab yourself a seat-there’s a spare one alongside the Mate’s. Sorry there’s no time for introductions right now. We’re due to get upstairs.”

“Here!” grunted one of the officers.

Grimes made his way to the vacant acceleration chair, dropped into it, strapped himself in. While he was so doing he heard the Captain ask, “All secure, Mr. Kennedy?”

“No, sir.”

“Then why the hell not?”

“I’m still waiting for the purser’s report, sir.”

“Are you?” Then, with a long-suffering sigh, “I suppose she’s still tucking some passenger into her-or his-bunk . . . .”

“She could still be stowing some passenger’s gear, sir,” contributed Grimes. “Mine,” he added.

“Indeed?” The Captain’s voice was cold and elaborately uninterested. Over the intercom came a female voice. “Purser to Control. All secure

below.”

“And bloody well time,” grumbled the shipmaster. Then, to the officer at the transceiver, “Mr. Digby, kindly obtain clearance.”

“Obtain clearance, sir,” acknowledged that young man brightly. Then, into his microphone, “Delta Orionis to Port Control. Request clearance to lift ship. Over.”

“Port Control to Delta Orionis. You may lift. Bon voyage. Over.” “Thank you, Port Control. Over and out.”

Then the ship was throbbing to the rhythmic beat of her Inertial Drive, and Grimes felt that odd sense of buoyancy, of near weightlessness, that persisted until the vessel broke contact with the ground-and then the still gentle acceleration induced the reverse effect. He looked out through the nearest viewport. Already the ocher surface of the desert, streaked by the long, black shadows of ships and spaceport buildings, was far below them, with the vessels and the immobile constructions looking like toys, and one or two surface vehicles like scurrying insects. Far to the north, dull-ruddy against the blue of the sky, there was a sandstorm. If that sky were darker, thought Grimes, this would look like Mars, and the mental comparison reminded him that he, too, was a spaceman, that he, too, had been around (although only within the bounds of Sol’s planetary system). Even so, he was Survey Service, and these others with him in Control were only merchant officers, fetchers and carriers, interstellar coach and truck drivers. (But he envied them their quiet competency.)

Still the ship lifted, and the spaceport below her dwindled, and the land horizon to the north and the now visible sea horizon to the south began to display the beginnings of curvature. Still she lifted, and overhead the sky was dark, and the first bright stars, Sirius and Canopus, Alpha and Beta Centauri, were sparkling there, beckoning, as they had beckoned for ages immemorial before the first clumsy rocket clambered heavenward up the ladder of its own fiery exhaust, before the first airplane spread its flimsy wings, before the first balloon was lifted by the hot, expanding gases from its airborne furnace . . . .

“Mr. Grimes,” said the Captain suddenly, his voice neither friendly nor unfriendly.

“Sir?”

“We lift on I.D. until we’re clear of the Van Allens.”

“I know, sir,” said Grimes-then wished that he could unsay the words. But it was too late. He was conscious of the shipmaster’s hostile silence, of the amused contempt of the merchant officers. He shrank into his chair, tried to make himself as inconspicuous as possible. The ship’s people talked among themselves in low voices, ignoring him. They allowed themselves a period  of relaxation, producing and lighting cigarettes. Nobody offered the Ensign one.

Sulkily he fumbled for his pipe, filled it, lighted it. The Chief Officer coughed with quite unnecessary vigor. The Captain growled, “Put that out, please,” and muttered something about stinking out the control room. He,

himself, was puffing at a villainous black cigar.

The ship lifted, and below her the Earth was now a great sphere,

three-quarters in darkness, the line of the terminator drawn across land masses, cloud formations and oceans. City lights twinkled in the gloom like star clusters, like nebulae. In a quiet voice an officer was calling readings from the radar altimeter.

To the throbbing of the Inertial Drive was added the humming, shrilling to a whine, of the directional gyroscopes as the ship turned about her short axis hunting the target star. The pseudo-gravity of centrifugal force was at an odd angle to that of acceleration-and the resultant was at an odder angle still. Grimes began to feel sick-and was actually thankful that the Captain had made him put his pipe out. Alarm bells sounded, and then somebody was saying over the intercom. “Prepare for acceleration. Prepare for acceleration. Listen for the countdown.”

The countdown. Part of the long tradition of space travel, a hangover from the days of the first, unreliable rockets. Spaceships still used rockets-but only as auxiliaries, as a means of delivering thrust in a hurry, of building up acceleration in a short time.

At the word Zero! the Inertial Drive was cut and, simultaneously, the Reaction Drive flared into violent life. The giant hand of acceleration bore down heavily upon all in the ship-then, suddenly, at a curt order from the Captain, lifted.

Grimes became aware of a thin, high keening, the song of the

ever-precessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive. He knew the theory of it-as what spaceman did not?-although the mathematics of it were beyond the comprehension of all but a handful of men and women. He knew what was happening, knew that the ship, now that speed had been built up, was, as one of his instructors had put it, going ahead in space and astern in  time. He felt, as he had been told that he would feel, the uncanny  sensation of d‚j… vu, and watched the outlines of the control room and of every person and instrument in the compartment shift and shimmer, the colors sagging down the spectrum.

Ahead, the stars were pulsating spirals of opalescence, astern, Earth and Moon were frighteningly distorted, uncanny compromises between the sphere and the tesseract. But this was no more than the merest subliminal glimpse; in the twinkling of an eye the Home Planet and her daughter were no more than dust motes whirling down the dark dimensions.

The Captain lit a fresh cigar. “Mr. Kennedy,” he said, “you may set normal Deep Space watches.” He turned to Grimes. His full beard almost hid his expression, that of one performing a social duty with no enthusiasm. “Will you join me in my day cabin, Ensign?”

“It will be my pleasure, sir,” lied Grimes. III

HANDLING HIS BIG BODY with easy grace in the Free Fall conditions, the Captain led the way from the control room. Grimes followed slowly and

clumsily, but with a feeling of great thankfulness that after his training cruise he was no longer subject to spacesickness. There were drugs, of course, and passengers used them, but a spaceman was expected to be independent of pharmaceutical aids. Even so, the absence of any proper “up” or “down” bothered him more than he cared to admit.

The shipmaster slid open the door to his accommodation, motioned to Grimes to enter, murmuring sardonically, “Now you see how the poor live.” The so-called poor, thought Grimes, didn’t do at all badly. This Deep Space sitting room was considerably larger than the day cabin of the Survey Service cruiser’s Captain had been. True, it was also shabbier-but it was far more comfortable. Its decorations would never have been approved aboard a warship, were obviously the private property of the Master. There were a full dozen holograms on the bulkhead, all of them widely differing but all of them covering the same subject matter. Not that the subject matter was covered.

“My harem,” grunted the Captain. “That one there, the redhead, I met on Caribbea. Quite a stopover that was. The green-haired wench-and you can see that it’s not a dye job, although I’ve often wondered why women can’t be thorough- isn’t human, of course. But indubitably humanoid, and indubitably mammalian. Belongs to Brrrooonooorrrooo-one of the worlds of the Shaara Empire. The local Queen Mother offered to sell Lalia-that’s her name-to me for a case of Scotch. And I was tempted . . .” He sighed. “But you Service Survey types aren’t the only ones who have to live by Regulations.”

Grimes said nothing, tried to hide his interest in the art gallery.

“But take a pew, Ensign. Spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard-this is Liberty Hall.”

Grimes pulled himself to one of the comfortable chairs, strapped himself in. He said lamely, “I don’t see any cat, sir.”

“A figure of speech,” growled the Captain, seating himself next to what looked like a drink cabinet. “Well, Mr. Grimes, your Commandant at the Academy, Commodore Bradshaw, is an old friend and shipmate of mine. He said that you were a very promising young officer”-like a balloon in a comic strip the unspoken words, “God knows why,” hung between them-“and asked me to keep an eye on you. But I have already gained the impression that there is very little that a mere merchant skipper such as myself will be able to teach you.”

Grimes looked at the bulky figure seated opposite him, at the

radiation-darkened skin of the face above the black, silver-streaked beard, at the fiercely jutting nose, at the faded but bright and intelligent blue eyes, the eyes that were regarding him with more than a hint of amused contempt. He blushed miserably as he recalled his brash, “I know, sir,” in this man’s own control room. He said, with an effort, “This is my first Deep Space voyage, sir.”

“I know.” Surprisingly the Captain chuckled-and as though to celebrate this minor scoring over his guest opened the liquor cabinet. “Pity to have to

suck this excellent Manzanila out of a bulb-but that’s one of the hardships of Free Fall. Here!” He tossed a little pear-shaped container to Grimes, kept one for himself. “Your health, Ensign!”

“And yours, sir.”

The wine was too dry for Grimes’ taste, but he made a pretense of enjoying it. He was thankful that he was not asked to have a second drink. Meanwhile, his host had pulled a typewritten sheet from a drawer of his desk and was looking at it. “Let me see, now . . . You’re in cabin 15, on D Deck. You’ll be able to find your own way down, won’t you?”

Grimes said that he would and unbuckled his lapstrap. It was obvious that the party was over.

“Good. Now, as an officer of the Survey Service you have the freedom of the control room and the engine rooms . . . . “

“Thank you, sir.”

“Just don’t abuse the privilege, that’s all.”

After that, thought Grimes, I’m not likely to take advantage of it, let alone abuse it. He let himself float up from his chair, said, “Thank you, sir.” (For the drink, or for the admonition? What did it matter?) “I’ll be getting down to my cabin, sir. I’ve some unpacking to do.”

“As you please, Mr. Grimes.”

The Captain, his social duty discharged, had obviously lost interest in his guest. Grimes let himself out of the cabin and made his way, not without difficulty, to the door in the axial shaft. He was surprised at the extent to which one not very large drink had interfered with the control of his body in Free Fall. Emerging from the elevator cage on D Deck he stumbled, literally, into the purser. “Let go of me,” she ordered, “or I shall holler rape!”

That, he thought, is all I need to make this trip a really happy one. She disengaged herself, moved back from him, her slim, sandaled feet,

magnetically shod, maintaining contact with the steel decking, but

gracefully, with a dancing motion. She laughed. “I take it that you’ve just come from a home truth session with B.B.”

“B.B.?”

“The Bearded Bastard. But don’t take it too much to heart. He’s that way with all junior officers. The fact that you’re Survey Service is only incidental.”

“Thank you for telling me.”

“His trouble,” she went on. “His real trouble is that he’s painfully shy.” He’s not the only one, thought Grimes, looking at the girl. She seemed

even more attractive than on the occasion of their first meeting. She had changed into shorts-and-shirt shipboard uniform-and she was one of the

rare women who could wear such a rig without looking lumpy and clumpy. There was no cap now to hide her hair-smooth, lustrous, with coppery glints, with a straight white part bisecting the crown of her finely shaped head.

She was well aware of his scrutiny. She said, “You must excuse me, Ensign. I have to look after the other customers. They aren’t seasoned spacemen like you.”

Suddenly bold, he said, “But before you go, what is your name?”

She smiled dazzlingly. “You’ll find a list of all ship’s personnel posted in your cabin. I’m included.” Then she was gone, gliding rapidly around the curve of the alleyway.

He looked at the numbers over the cabin doors, outboard from the axial shaft, making a full circuit of that hollow pillar before he realized that this was only the inner ring, that he would have to follow one of the radial alleyways to reach his own accommodation. He finally found No. 15 and let himself in.

His first action was to inspect the framed notices on the bulkhead.

I.S.S. Delta Orionis, he read. Captain J. Craven, O.G.S., S.S.R.

So the Old Man held a Reserve commission. And the Order of the Golden Star was awarded for something more than good attendance.

Mr. P. Kennedy, Chief Officer.

He ignored the other names on the list while he searched for one he wanted. Ah, here it was.

Miss Jane Pentecost, Purser.

He repeated the name to himself, thinking that, despite the old play on words, this Jane was not plain. (But Janes rarely are.) Jane Pentecost . . . Then, feeling that he should be showing some professional interest, he acquainted himself with the names of the other members of the ship’s crew. He was intrigued by the manning scale, amazed that such a large vessel, relatively speaking, could be run by such a small number of people. But this was not a warship; there were no weapons to be manned, there would never be the need to put a landing party ashore on the surface of a hostile planet. The Merchant Service could afford to automate, to employ machinery in lieu of ratings. The Survey Service could not.

Virtuously he studied the notices dealing with emergency procedures, ship’s routine, recreational facilities and all the rest of it, examined with care the detailed plan of the ship. Attached to this was a card, signed by the  Master, requesting passengers to refrain, as much as possible, from using the elevator in the axial shaft, going on to say that it was essential, for the good of their physical health, that they miss no opportunity for taking exercise. (In a naval vessel, thought Grimes, with a slight sneer, that  would not be a request-it would be an order. And, in any case, there would

be compulsory calisthenics for all hands.)

He studied the plan again and toyed with the idea of visiting the bar before dinner. He decided against it; he was still feeling the effects of the drink that the Captain had given him. So, to pass the time, he unpacked slowly and carefully, methodically stowing his effects in the drawers under the bunk. Then, but not without reluctance, he changed from his uniform into his one formal civilian suit. One of the officer-instructors at the Academy had advised this. “Always wear civvies when you’re traveling as passenger. If you’re in uniform, some old duck’s sure to take you for one of the ship’s officers and ask you all sorts of technical questions to which you don’t know the answers.”

While he was adjusting his frilled cravat in front of the mirror the sonorous notes of a gong boomed from the intercom.

IV

THE DINING SALOON was much more ornate than the gunroom of that training cruiser had been, and more ornate than her wardroom. The essentials were the same, of course, as they are in any ship-tables and chairs secured to the deck, each seat fitted with its strap so that the comforting pressure of buttocks on padding could give an illusion of gravity. Each table was covered with a gaily colored cloth-but beneath the fabric there was the inevitable stainless steel to which the stainless steel service would be held by its own magnetic fields. But what impressed Grimes was the care that had been taken, the ingenuity that had been exercised to make this compartment look like anything but part of a ship.

The great circular pillar of the axial shaft was camouflaged by trelliswork, and the trelliswork itself almost hidden by the luxuriance of some

broad-level climbing plant that he could not identify. Smaller pillars were similarly covered, and there was a further efflorescence of living decoration all around the circular outer wall-the wall that must be the inner skin of the ship. And there were windows in this wall. No, Grimes decided, not windows, but holograms. The glowing, three dimensional pictures presented and maintained the illusion that this was a hall set in the middle of some great park. But on what world? Grimes could not say. Trees, bushes and flowers were unfamiliar, and the color of the sky subtly strange.

He looked around him at his fellow diners, at the dozen passengers and the ship’s officers, most of whom were already seated. The officers were in  neat undress uniform. About half the male passengers were, like himself, formally attired; the others were sloppy in shorts and shirts. But this was the first night out and some laxity was allowable. The women, however, all seemed to have decided to outshine the glowing flowers that flamed outside the windows that were not windows.

There was the Captain, unmistakable with his beard and the shimmering rainbow of ribbons on the left breast of his blouse. There were the passengers at his table-the men inclined to portliness and pomposity, their women sleek and slim and expensive looking. Grimes was relieved to see that there was no vacant place-and yet, at the same time, rather hurt. He knew that he was only an Ensign, a one-ringer, and a very new Ensign at

that-but, after all, the Survey Service was the Survey Service.

He realized that somebody was addressing him. It was a girl, a small, rather chubby blonde. She was in uniform-a white shirt with black shoulder-boards, each bearing a narrow white stripe, sharply creased slacks, and black, highly polished shoes. Grimes assumed, correctly, that

she was a junior member of the purser’s staff. “Mr. Grimes,” she said, “will you follow me, please? “You’re at Miss Pentecost’s table.”

Willingly he followed the girl. She led him around the axial shaft to a table for four at which the purser with two passengers, a man and a woman, was already seated. Jane Pentecost was attired as was his guide, the severity of her gold-trimmed black and white in pleasing contrast to the pink and blue frills and flounces that clad the other woman, her slenderness in still more pleasing contrast to the other’s untidy plumpness.

She smiled and said pleasantly, “Be seated, Admiral.”

“Admiral?” asked the man at her left, unpleasantly incredulous. He had, obviously, been drinking. He was a rough looking customer, in spite of the attempt that he had made to dress for dinner. He was twice the Ensign’s age, perhaps, although the heavily lined face under the scanty sandy hair made him look older. “Admiral?” He laughed, revealing irregular yellow teeth. “In what? The Space Scouts?”

Jane Pentecost firmly took control. She said, “Allow me to introduce Ensign Grimes, of the Survey Service . . .”

“Survey Service . . . Space Scouts . . . S.S . . . . What’s the difference?” “Plenty!” answered Grimes hotly.

The purser ignored the exchange. “Ensign, this is Mrs. Baxter . . . .” “Pleased to meet you, I’m sure,” simpered the woman.

“And Mr. Baxter.”

Baxter extended his hand reluctantly and Grimes took it reluctantly. The amenities observed, he pulled himself into his seat and adjusted his lapstrap. He was facing Jane Pentecost. The man was on his right, the woman on his left. He glanced first at her, then at her husband, wondering how to start and to maintain a conversation. But this was the purser’s table, and this was her responsibility.

She accepted it. “Now you’re seeing how the poor live, Admiral,” she remarked lightly.

Grimes, taking a tentative sip from his bulb of consomm‚, did not think that the self-styled poor did at all badly, and said as much. The girl grinned and told him that the first night out was too early to draw conclusions. “We’re still on shoreside meat and vegetables,” she told him, “and you’ll not be getting your first taste of our instant table wine until tomorrow. Tonight we wallow in the unwonted luxury of a quite presentable Montrachet. When we start living on the produce of our own so-called farm, washing it down with our own reconstituted plonk, you’ll see the difference.”

The Ensign replied that, in his experience, it didn’t matter if food came from tissue-culture vats or the green fields of Earth-what was important was the cook.

“Wide experience, Admiral?” she asked sweetly.

“Not very,” he admitted. “But the gunroom cook in my last ship couldn’t boil water without burning it.”

Baxter, noisily enjoying his dinner, said that this preoccupation with food and drink was symptomatic of the decadence of Earth. As he spoke his knife grated unpleasantly on the steel spines that secured his charcoal broiled steak to the surface of his plate.

Grimes considered inquiring if the man thought that good table manners were also a symptom of decadence, then thought better of it. After all, this was not his table. Instead, he asked, “And where are you from, Mr. Baxter?”

“The Rim Worlds, Mr. Grimes. Where we’re left to sink or swim-so we’ve no time for much else than keeping ourselves afloat.” He sucked noisily from his bulb of wine. “Things might be a little easier for us if your precious Survey Service did something about keeping the trade routes open.”

“That is our job,” said Grimes stiffly. “And we do it.”

“Like hell! There’s not a pirate in the Galaxy but can run rings around you!” “Practically every pirate has been hunted down and destroyed,” Grimes told

him coldly.

“Practically every pirate, the man says! A few small-time bunglers, he means!”

“Even the notorious Black Bart,” persisted Grimes.

“Black Bart!” Baxter, spluttering through his full mouth, gestured with his laden fork at Grimes. “Black Bart! He wasn’t much. Once he and that popsy of his split brass rags he was all washed up. I’m talkin’ about the real pirates, the ones whose ships wear national colors instead o’ the Jolly Roger, the ones that your precious Survey Service daren’t say boo to. The ones who do the dirty work for the Federation.”

“Such as?” asked Grimes frigidly.

“So now you’re playin’ the bleedin’ innocent. Never heard o’ the Duchy o’ Waldegren, Mr. Ensign Grimes?”

“Of course. Autonomous, but they and the Federation have signed what’s called a Pact of Perpetual Amity.”

“Pretty words, ain’t they? Suppose we analyze them. Suppose we analyze by analogy. D’yer know much about animals, Mr. Ensign Grimes?”

“Animals?” Grimes was puzzled. “Well, I suppose I do know something. I’ve taken the usual courses in xenobiology . . . .”

“Never mind that. You’re a Terry. Let’s confine ourselves to a selection of yer own Terran four-footed friends.”

“What the hell are you driving at?” flared Grimes, losing his temper. He threw an apologetic glance in Jane Pentecost’s direction, saw that she was more amused than shocked.

“Just think about a Pact of Perpetual Amity between an elephant and a tom cat,” said Baxter. “A fat an’ lazy elephant. A lean, scrawny, vicious tom cat. If the elephant wanted to he could convert that cat into a fur bedside rug just by steppin’ on him. But he doesn’t want to. He leaves the cat alone, just because the cat is useful to him. He does more than just leave him alone. He an’ this feline pull out their pens from wherever they keep ’em an’ sign their famous Pact.

“In case you haven’t worked it out for yourself, the elephant’s the Federation, and the tom cat’s the Duchy of Waldegren.”

“But why?” asked Grimes. “Why?”

“Don’t they teach you puppies any interstellar politics? Or are those courses reserved for the top brass? Well, Mr. Grimes, I’ll tell you. There’s one  animal that has the elephant really worried. Believe it or not, he’s scared o’ mice. An’ there’re quite a few mice inside the Federation, mice that make the elephant nervous by their rustlings an’ scurryings an’ their squeaky demands for full autonomy. That’s where the cat comes in. By his free use of his teeth an’ claws, by his very presence, he keeps the mice quiet.”

“And just who are these famous mice, Mr. Baxter?” asked Grimes.

“Don’t they teach you nothin’ in your bleedin’ Academy? Well, I’ll tell you.  In our neck o’ the woods, the mice are the Rim Worlds, an’ the tom cat, as I’ve already made clear, is the Duchy o’ Waldegren. The Duchy gets away with murder-murder an’ piracy. But accordin’ to the Duchy, an accordin’ to your big, stupid elephant of a Federation, it’s not piracy. It’s-now, lemme see, what fancy words have been used o’ late? Contraband Control. Suppression of Espionage. Violation of the Three Million Mile Limit. Every time that there’s an act of piracy there’s some quote legal unquote excuse for it, an’ it’s upheld by the Federation’s tame legal eagles, an’ you Survey Service sissies just sit there on your big, fat backsides an’ don’t lift a pinkie against your dear, murderous pals, the Waldegrenese. If you did, they send you screaming back to Base, where some dear old daddy of an Admiral’d spank your little plump bottoms for you.”

“Please, Mr. Baxter!” admonished Jane Pentecost.

“Sorry, Miss. I got sort of carried away. But my young brother was Third Reaction Drive Engineer of the old Bunyip when she went missing. Nothin’ was ever proved-but the Waldegrenese Navy was holdin’ fleet maneuvers in the sector she was passin’ through when last heard from. Oh, they’re cunnin’ bastards. They’ll never go for one o’ these ships, or one of the Trans-Galactic Clippers; it’ll always be some poor little tramp that nobody’ll ever miss but the friends an’ relatives o’ the crew. And, I suppose, the underwriters-but Lloyds makes such a packet out o’ the ships that don’t get lost that they can well afford to shell out now an’ again. Come to that, it

must suit ’em. As long as there’re a few ‘overdues’ an’ ‘missings’ they can keep the premiums up.”

“But I still can’t see how piracy can possibly pay,” protested Grimes.

“O’ course it pays. Your friend Black Bart made it pay. An’ if you’re goin’ to all the expense of building and maintaining a war fleet, it might just as well earn its keep. Even your famous Survey Service might show a profit if you were allowed to pounce on every fat merchantman who came within range o’ your guns.”

“But for the Federation to condone piracy, as you’re trying to make out . . . That’s utterly fantastic.”

“If you lived on the Rim, you might think different,” snarled Baxter. And Jane Pentecost contributed, “Not piracy. Confrontation.”

V

AS SOON AS the meal was finished the Baxters left rather hastily to make their way to the bar, leaving Grimes and Jane Pentecost to the leisurely enjoyment of their coffee. When the couple was out of earshot Grimes remarked, “So those are Rim Worlders. They’re the first I’ve met.”

“They’re not, you know,” the girl told him.

“But they are. Oh, there are one or two in the Survey Service, but I’ve never run across them. Now I don’t particularly want to.”

“But you did meet one Rim Worlder before you met the Baxters.” “The Captain?”

She laughed. “Don’t let him hear you say that-not unless you want to take a space walk without a suit!”

“Then who?”

“Who could it be, Admiral? Whom have you actually met, to talk to, so far in this ship? Use your crust.”

He stared at her incredulously. “Not you?”

“Who else?” She laughed again, but with a touch of bitterness. “We aren’t all like our late manger companions, you know. Or should know. Even so, you’d count yourself lucky to have Jim Baxter by your side in any real jam.  It boils down to this. Some of us have acquired veneer. Some of us haven’t. Period.”

“But how did you . . . ?” He groped for words that would not be offensive to conclude the sentence.

“How did I get into this galley? Easily enough. I started my spacefaring career as a not very competent Catering Officer in Jumbuk, one of the Sundowner Line’s more ancient and decrepit tramps. I got sick in Elsinore. Could have been my own cooking that put me in the hospital. Anyhow, I

was just about recovered when the Commission’s Epsilon Serpentis blew in-and she landed her purser with a slightly broken leg. She’d learned the hard way that the Golden Rule-stop whatever you’re doing and secure

everything when the acceleration warning sounds-is meant to be observed. The Doctor was luckier. She broke his fall . . . .” Grimes was about to ask what the Doctor and the purser had been doing, then was thankful that he had not done so. He was acutely conscious of the crimson blush that burned the skin of his face.

“You must realize,” said the girl dryly, “that merchant vessels with mixed crews are not monastic institutions. But where was I? Oh, yes. On Elsinore. Persuading the Master of the Snaky Eppy that I was a fit and proper person to take over his pursering. I managed to convince him that I was at least proper-I still can’t see what my predecessor saw in that lecherous old goat of a quack, although the Second Mate had something . . . .” Grimes felt a sudden twinge of jealousy. Anyhow, he signed me on, as soon as I agreed to waive repatriation.

“It was a long voyage; as you know, the Epsilon class ships are little better than tramps themselves. It was a long voyage, but I enjoyed it- seeing all the worlds that I’d read about and heard about and always wanted to visit. The Sundowner Line doesn’t venture far afield-just the four Rim Worlds, and now and again the Shakespearian Sector, and once in a blue moon one of the drearier planets of the Empire of Waverley. The Commission’s tramps,  of course, run everywhere.

“Anyhow, we finally berthed at Woomera. The Old Man must have put in a good report about me, because I was called before the Local Superintending Purser and offered a berth, as a junior, in one of the Alpha class liners. Alpha Centauri, if you must know. She was on the Sol-Sirius service.  Nothing very glamorous in the way of ports of call, but she was a fine ship, beautifully kept, efficiently run. A couple of years there knocked most of the sharp corners off me. After that-a spell as Assistant Purser of Beta Geminorum. Atlanta, Caribbea Carinthia and the Cluster Worlds. And then my first ship as Chief Purser. This one.”

One of Jane’s girls brought them fresh bulbs of coffee and ampoules of a sweet, potent liqueur. When she was gone Grimes asked, “Tell me, what are the Rim Worlds like?”

She waited until he had applied the flame of his lighter to the tip of her long, thin cigar, then answered, “Cold. Dark. Lonely. But . . . they have something. The feeling of being on a frontier. The frontier. The last frontier.”

“The frontier of the dark . . .” murmured Grimes.

“Yes. The frontier of the dark. And the names of our planets. They have something too. A . . . poetry? Yes, that’s the word. Lorn, Ultimo, Faraway and Thule . . . And there’s that night sky of ours, especially at some times of the year. There’s the Galaxy-a great, dim-glowing lenticulate nebula, and the rest is darkness. At other times of the year there’s only the darkness, the blackness that’s made even more intense by the sparse, faint stars that are the other Rim Suns, by the few, faint luminosities that are the distant

island universes that we shall never reach . . . .”

She shivered almost imperceptibly. “And always there’s that sense of being on the very edge of things, of hanging on by our fingernails with the abyss of the eternal night gaping beneath us. The Rim Worlders aren’t a spacefaring people; only a very few of us ever get the urge. It’s analogous, perhaps, to your Maoris-I spent a leave once in New Zealand and got interested in the history of the country. The Maoris come of seafaring stock. Their ancestors made an epic voyage from their homeland paradise to those rather grim and dreary little islands hanging there, all by themselves, in the cold and stormy Southern Ocean, lashed by frigid gales sweeping up from the Antarctic. And something-the isolation? the climate?-killed the wanderlust that was an essential part of the makeup of their race. You’ll find very few Maoris at sea-or in space-although there’s no dearth of Polynesians from the home archipelagoes aboard the surface ships serving the ports of the Pacific. And there are quite a few, too, in the Commission’s ships . . . .”

“We have our share in Survey Service,” said Grimes. “But tell me, how do you man your vessels? This Sundowner Line of yours . . .”

“There are always the drifters, the no-hopers, the castoffs from the Interstellar Transport Commission, and Trans-Galactic Clippers, and Waverley Royal Mail and all the rest of them.”

“And from the Survey Service?” The question lifted her out of her somber mood. “No,” she replied with a smile. “Not yet.”

“Not ever,” said Grimes. VI

ONCE HIS INITIAL SHYNESS HAD WORN OFF-and with it much of his Academy-induced snobbery-Grimes began to enjoy the voyage. After all, Survey Service or no Survey Service, this was a ship and he was a spaceman. He managed to accept the fact that most of the ship’s officers, even the most junior of them, were far more experienced spacemen than he was. Than he was now, he often reminded himself. At the back of his mind lurked the smug knowledge that, for all of them, a captaincy was the very limit of promotion, whereas he, one day, would be addressed in all seriousness as Jane Pentecost now addressed him in jest.

He was a frequent visitor to the control room but, remembering the Master’s admonition, was careful not to get in the way. The watch officers accepted him almost as one of themselves and were willing to initiate him into the tricky procedure of obtaining a fix with the interstellar drive in operation-an art, he was told, rather than a science.

Having obtained the permission of the Chief Engineers he prowled through the vessel’s machinery spaces, trying to supplement his theoretical knowledge of reaction, inertial and interstellar drives with something more practical. The first two, of course, were idle, and would be until the ship emerged from her warped Space-Time back into the normal continuum-but there was the Pile, the radio-active heart of the ship, and there was the auxiliary machinery that, in this tiny, man-made planet, did the work that

on a natural world is performed by winds, rivers, sunlight and gravity.

There was the Mannschenn Drive Room-and, inside this holy of holies, no man need fear to admit that he was scared by the uncanny complexity of ever-precessing gyroscopes. He stared at the tumbling rotors, the gleaming wheels that seemed always on the verge of vanishing into nothingness, that rolled down the dark dimensions, dragging the ship and all aboard her with them. He stared, hypnotized, lost in a vague, disturbing dream in which Past and Present and Future were inextricably mingled-and the Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer took him firmly by the arm and led him from the compartment. “Look at the time-twister too long,” he growled, “and you’ll be meeting yourself coming back!”

There was the “farm”-the deck of yeast- and tissue-culture vats which was no more (and no less), than a highly efficient protein factory, and the deck where stood the great, transparent globes in which algae converted the ship’s organic waste and sewage back into usable form (processed as nutriment for the yeasts and the tissue-cultures and as fertilizer for the hydroponic tanks, the biochemist was careful to explain), and the deck where luxuriant vegetation spilled over from the trays and almost barricaded the inspection walks, the source of vitamins and of flowers for the saloon tables and, at the same time, the ship’s main air-conditioning unit. Grimes said to Jane Pentecost, who had accompanied him on this tour of inspection, “You know, I envy your Captain.”

“From you, Admiral,” she scoffed, “that is something. But why?” “How can I put it? You people do the natural way what we do with

chemicals and machinery. The Captain of a warship is Captain of a warship.

Period. But your Captain Craven is absolute monarch of a little world.”

“A warship,” she told him, “is supposed to be able to go on functioning as such even with every compartment holed. A warship cannot afford to depend for the survival of her crew upon the survival of hosts of other

air-breathing organisms.”

“Straight from the book,” he said. Then, puzzled, “But for a . . .” He hesitated.

“But for a woman, or for a purser, or for a mere merchant officer I know too much,” she finished for him. “But I can read, you know. And when I was in the Sundowner Line, I, as well as all the other officers, was supposed to keep up with all the latest Survey Service publications.”

“But why?” he asked.

“But why not? We’ll have a Navy of our own, one day. Just stick around, Admiral.”

“Secession?” he inquired, making it sound like a dirty word. “Once again-why not?”

“It’d never work,” he told her.

“The history of Earth is full of secessions that did work. So is the history of

Interstellar Man. The Empire of Waverley, for example. The Duchy of Waldegren, for another-although that’s one that should have come to grief. We should all of us be a great deal happier if it had.”

“Federation policy . . .” he began.

“Policy, shmolicy! Don’t let’s be unkind to the Waldegrenese, because as long as they’re in being they exercise a restraining influence upon the Empire of Waverley and the Rim Worlds . . .” Her pace slackened. Grimes noticed that they were passing through the alleyway in which she and her staff were accommodated. She went on, “But all this talking politics is thirsty work. Come in for a couple of drinks before lunch.”

“Thank you. But, Jane”-she didn’t seem to have noticed the use of her given name-“I don’t think that either of us is qualified to criticize the handling of foreign and colonial affairs.”

“Spoken like a nice, young, well-drug-up future admiral. Oh, I know, I know. You people are trained to be the musclemen of the Federation. Yours not to reason why, yours but to do and die, and all the rest of it. But I’m a Rim Worlder-and out on the Rim you learn to think for yourself.” She slid her door open. “Come on in. This is Liberty Hall-you can spit on the mat and  call the cat a bastard.”

Her accommodation was a suite rather than a mere cabin. It was neither as large nor as well fitted as the Captain’s, but it was better than the Chief Officer’s quarters, in which Grimes had already been a guest. He looked  with interest at the holograms on the bulkhead of the sitting room. They were-but in an altogether different way-as eye-catching as Captain Craven’s had been. There was one that was almost physically chilling, that induced the feeling of utter cold and darkness and loneliness. It was the night sky  of some planet-a range of dimly seen yet sharply serrated peaks bisecting a great, pallidly glowing, lenticulate nebula. “Home, sweet home,” murmured the girl, seeing what he was looking at. “The Desolation Mountains on Faraway, with the Galactic Lens in the background.”

“And you feel homesick for that?”

“Darn right I do. Oh, not all the time. I like warmth and comfort as well as the next woman. But . . . ” She laughed. “Don’t stand around gawking-you make the place look untidy. Pull yourself into a chair and belay the buttocks.”

He did so, watching her as she busied herself at the liquor cabinet. Suddenly, in these conditions of privacy, he was acutely conscious of the womanliness of her. The rather tight and rather short shorts, as she bent away from him, left very little to the imagination. And her legs, although slender, were full where they should be full, with the muscles working smoothly under the golden skin. He felt the urge, which he sternly suppressed, to plant a kiss in the delectable hollow behind each knee. She turned suddenly. “Here! Catch!” He managed to grab the bulb that was hurtling toward his face, but a little of the wine spurted from the nipple and struck him in the right eye. When his vision cleared he saw that she was seated opposite him, was laughing (at or with him?). At, he suspected. A

real demonstration of sympathy would have consisted of tears, not laughter. Her face grew momentarily severe. “Not the mess,” she said reprovingly. “But the waste.”

Grimes examined the bulb. “I didn’t waste much. Only an eyeful.”

She raised her drink in ritual greeting. “Here’s mud in your eye,” adding, “for a change.”

“And in yours.”

In the sudden silence that followed they sat looking at each other. There was a tension, some odd resultant of centrifugal and centripetal forces. They were on the brink of something, and both of them knew it, and there was the compulsion to go forward countered by the urge to go back.

She asked tartly, “Haven’t you ever seen a woman’s legs before?”

He shifted his regard to her face, to the eyes that, somehow, were brown no longer but held the depth and the darkness of the night through which the ship was plunging.

She said, “I think you’d better finish your drink and go.” He said, “Perhaps you’re right.”

“You better believe I’m right.” She managed a smile. “I’m not an idler, like some people. I’ve work to do.”

“See you at lunch, then. And thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. It was on the house, as the little dog said. Off with you, Admiral.”

He unbuckled his lapstrap, got out of the chair and made his way to the door. When he was out of her room he did not go to his own cabin but to the bar, where he joined the Baxters. They, rather to his surprise, greeted him in a friendly manner. Rim Worlders, Grimes decided, had their good points.

IT WAS AFTER LUNCH when one of the purserettes told him that the Captain wished to see him. What have I done now? wondered Grimes-and answered his own question with the words, Nothing. Unfortunately.

Craven’s manner, when he admitted Grimes into his dayroom, was severe. “Come in, Ensign. Be seated.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“You may smoke if you wish.” “Thank you, sir.”

Grimes filled and lighted his pipe; the Captain ignited one of his pungent cigars, studied the eddying coils of smoke as though they were writing a vitally important message in some strange language.

“Er, Mr. Grimes, I believe that you have been seeing a great deal of my purser, Miss Pentecost.”

“Not a great deal, sir. I’m at her table, of course.”

“I am told that she has entertained you in her quarters.”

“Just one bulb of sherry, sir. I had no idea that we were breaking ship’s regulations.”

“You were not. All the same, Mr. Grimes, I have to warn you.” “I assure you, sir, that nothing occurred between us.”

Craven permitted himself a brief, cold smile. “A ship is not a Sunday school outing-especially a ship under my command. Some Masters, I know, do expect their officers to comport themselves like Sunday school pupils, with the Captain as the principal-but I expect my senior officers to behave like intelligent and responsible adults. Miss Pentecost is quite capable of looking after herself. It is you that I’m worried about.”

“There’s no need to be worried, sir.”

The Captain laughed. “I’m not worried about your morals, Mr. Grimes. In fact, I have formed the opinion that a roll in the hay would do you far more good than harm. But Miss Pentecost is a dangerous woman. Before lifting ship, very shortly before lifting ship, I received a confidential report concerning her activities. She’s an efficient purser, a highly efficient purser, in fact, but she’s even more than that. Much more.” Again he studied the smoke from his cigar. “Unfortunately there’s no real proof, otherwise she’d not be sailing with us. Had I insisted upon her discharge I’d have been up against the Interstellar Clerical and Supply Officers’ Guild.”

“Surely not,” murmured Grimes. Craven snorted. “You people are lucky. You haven’t a mess of Guilds to deal with, each and every one of which is all too ready to rush to the defense of a Guild member, no matter what he or she is supposed to have done. As a Survey Service Captain you’ll never have to face a suit for wrongful dismissal. You’ll never be accused of victimization.”

“But what has Miss Pentecost done, sir?” asked Grimes.

“Nothing-or too damn much. You know where she comes from, don’t you? The Rim Worlds. The planets of the misfits, the rebels, the nonconformists. There’s been talk of secession of late-but even those irresponsible anarchists know full well that secession will never succeed unless they  build up their own space power. There’s the Duchy of Waldegren, which would pounce as soon as the Federation withdrew its protection. And even the Empire of Waverley might be tempted to extend its boundaries. So . . .”

“They have a merchant fleet of sorts, these Rim Worlders. The Sundowner Line. I’ve heard rumors that it’s about to be nationalized. But they have no fighting navy.”

“But what’s all this to do with Miss Pentecost, sir?”

“If what’s more than just hinted at in that confidential report is true-plenty. She’s a recruiting sergeant, no less. Any officer with whom she’s shipmates who’s disgruntled, on the verge of throwing his hand in-or on the verge of being emptied out-she’ll turn on the womanly sympathy for, and tell him that there’ll always be a job waiting out on the Rim, that the Sundowner Line is shortly going to expand, so there’ll be quick promotion and all the rest of it.”

“And what’s that to do with me, Captain? “

“Are all Survey Service ensigns as innocent as you, Mr. Grimes? Merchant officers the Rim Worlds want, and badly. Naval officers they’ll want more badly still once the balloon goes up.” Grimes permitted himself a superior smile. “It’s extremely unlikely, sir, that I shall ever want to leave the Survey Service.”

“Unlikely perhaps-but not impossible. So bear in mind what I’ve told you. I think that you’ll be able to look after yourself now that you know the score.”

“I think so too,” Grimes told him firmly. He thought, The old bastard’s been reading too many spy stories.

VII

THEY WERE DANCING.

Tables and chairs had been cleared from the ship’s saloon, and from the big, ornate playmaster throbbed the music of an orchestra so famous that even Grimes had heard of it-The Singing Drums.

They were dancing.

Some couples shuffled a sedate measure, never losing the contact between their magnetically shod feet and the polished deck. Others-daring or foolhardy-cavorted in Nul-G, gamboled fantastically but rarely gracefully in Free Fall.

They were dancing.

Ensign Grimes was trying to dance.

It was not the fault of his partner that he was making such a sorry mess of it. She, Jane Pentecost, proved the truth of the oft-made statement that spacemen and spacewomen are expert at this form of exercise. He, John Grimes, was the exception that proves the rule. He was sweating, and his feet felt at least six times their normal size. Only the fact that he was holding Jane, and closely, saved him from absolute misery.

There was a pause in the music. As it resumed Jane said, “Let’s sit this one out, Admiral.”

“If you wish to,” he replied, trying not to sound too grateful.

“That’s right. I wish to. I don’t mind losing a little toenail varnish, but I think we’ll call it a day while I still have a full set of toenails.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“So am I.” But the flicker of a smile robbed the words of their sting.

She led the way to the bar. It was deserted save for the bored and sulky girl behind the gleaming counter. “All right, Sue,” Jane told her. “You can join the revels. The Admiral and I will mind the shop.”

“Thank you, Miss Pentecost.” Sue let herself out from her little cage, vanished gracefully and rapidly in the direction of the saloon. Jane took her place.

“I like being a barmaid,” she told the ensign, taking two frosted bulbs out of the cooler.

“I’ll sign for these,” offered Grimes.

“You will not. This comes under the heading of entertaining influential customers.”

“But I’m not. Influential, I mean.”

“But you will be.” She went on dreamily. “I can see it. I can just see it. The poor old Delia O’Ryan, even more decrepit that she is now, and her poor old purser, about to undergo a fate worse than death at the hands of bloody pirates from the next Galaxy but three . . . . But all is not lost. There, light years distant, is big, fat, Grand Admiral Grimes aboard his flagship, busting a gut, to say nothing of his Mannschenn Drive unit, to rush to the rescue of his erstwhile girlfriend. ‘Dammitall,’ I can hear him muttering into his beard. ‘Dammitall. That girl used to give me free drinks when I was a snotty nosed ensign. I will repay. Full speed ahead, Gridley, and damn the torpedoes!’ “

Grimes laughed-then asked sharply, “Admiral in which service?” “What do you mean, John?” She eyed him warily.

“You know what I mean.”

“So . . .” she murmured. “So . . . I know that you had another home truth session with the Bearded Bastard. I can guess what it was about.”

“And is it true?” demanded Grimes.

“Am I Olga Popovsky, the Beautiful Spy? Is that what you mean?” “More or less.”

“Come off it, John. How the hell can I be a secret agent for a non-existent government?”

“You can be a secret agent for a subversive organization.”

“What is this? Is it a hangover from some half-baked and half-understood course in counterespionage?”

“There was a course of sorts,” he admitted. “I didn’t take much interest in it. At the time.”

“And now you wish that you had. Poor John.”

“But it wasn’t espionage that the Old Man had against you. He had some sort of story about your acting as a sort of recruiting sergeant, luring officers away from the Commission’s ships to that crumby little rabble of star tramps calling itself the Sundowner Line . . . .”

She didn’t seem to be listening to him, but was giving her attention instead to the music that drifted from the saloon. It was one of the old, Twentieth Century melodies that were enjoying a revival. She began to sing in time to it.

“Goodbye, I’ll run  To seek another sun Where I May find

There are hearts more kind Than the ones left behind . . .”

She smiled somberly and asked, “Does that answer your question?” “Don’t talk in riddles,” he said roughly.

“Riddles? Perhaps-but not very hard ones. That, John, is a sort of song of farewell from a very old comic opera. As I recall it, the guy singing it was going to shoot through and join the French Foreign Legion. (But there’s no French Foreign Legion anymore . . . .) We, out on the Rim, have tacked our own words on to it. It’s become almost a national anthem to the Rim Runners, as the people who man our ships-such as they are-are already calling themselves.

“There’s no French Foreign Legion anymore-but the misfits and the failures have to have somewhere to go. I haven’t lured anybody away from this service-but now and again I’ve shipped with officers who’ve been on the point of getting out, or being emptied out, and when they’ve cried into my beer I’ve given them advice. Of course, I’ve a certain natural bias in favor of my own home world. If I were Sirian born I’d be singing the praises of the Dog Star Line.”

“Even so,” he persisted, “your conduct seems to have been somewhat suspect.”

“Has it? And how? To begin with, you are not an officer in this employ. And if you were, I should challenge you to find anything in the Commission’s regulations forbidding me to act as I have been doing.”

“Captain Craven warned me,” said Grimes.

“Did he, now? That’s his privilege. I suppose that he thinks that it’s also his duty. I suppose he has the idea that I offered you admiral’s rank in the Rim Worlds Navy as soon as we secede. If we had our own Navy-which we don’t-we might just take you in as Ensign, Acting, Probationary.”

“Thank you.”

She put her elbows on the bar counter, propping her face between her hands, somehow conveying the illusion of gravitational pull, looking up at him. “I’ll be frank with you, John. I admit that we do take the no-hopers, the drunks and the drifters into our merchant fleet. I know far better than you what a helluva difference there is between those rustbuckets and the well-found, well-run ships of the Commission and, come to that,

Trans-Galactic Clippers and Waverley Royal Mail. But when we do start some kind of a Navy we shall want better material. Much better. We shall want highly competent officers who yet, somehow, will have the Rim World outlook. The first batch, of course, will have to be outsiders, to tide us over until our own training program is well under way.”

“And I don’t qualify?” he asked stiffly.

“Frankly, no. I’ve been watching you. You’re too much of a stickler for rules and regulations, especially the more stupid ones. Look at the way you’re dressed now, for example. Evening wear, civilian, junior officers, for the use of. No individuality. You might as well be in uniform. Better, in fact. There’d be some touch of brightness.”

“Go on.”

“And the way you comport yourself with women. Stiff. Starchy. Correct. And you’re all too conscious of the fact that I, even though I’m a mere merchant officer, and a clerical branch at that, put up more gold braid than you do. I noticed that especially when we were dancing. I was having to lead all the time.”

He said defensively, “I’m not a very good dancer.”

“You can say that again.” She smiled briefly. “So there you have it, John. You can tell the Bearded Bastard, when you see him again, that you’re quite safe from my wiles. I’ve no doubt that you’ll go far in your own Service-but you just aren’t Rim Worlds material.”

“I shouldn’t have felt all that flattered if you’d said that I was,” he told her bluntly-but he knew that he was lying.

VIII

“YES?” JANE WAS SAYING. “Yes, Mr. Letourneau?”

Grimes realized that she was not looking at him, that she was looking past him and addressing a newcomer. He turned around to see who it was. He found-somehow the name hadn’t registered-that it was the Psionic Radio Officer, a tall, pale, untidily put together young man in a slovenly uniform. He looked scared-but that was his habitual expression, Grimes remembered. They were an odd breed, these trained telepaths with their Rhine Institute diplomas, and they were not popular, but they were the only means whereby ships and shore stations could communicate instantaneously over the long light years. In the Survey Service they were referred to, slightingly, as Commissioned Teacup Readers. In the Survey Service and in the Merchant Service they were referred to as Snoopers. But

they were a very necessary evil. “Yes, Mr. Letourneau?”

“Where’s the Old Man? He’s not in his quarters.”

“The Master”-Jane emphasized the title-“is in the saloon.” Then, a little maliciously, “Couldn’t you have used your crystal ball?”

Letourneau flushed. “You know very well, Miss Pentecost, that we have to take an oath that we will always respect the mental privacy of our shipmates . . . . But I must find him. Quickly.”

“Help yourself. He’s treading the light fantastic in there.” When he was gone she said, “Typical. Just typical. If it were a real emergency he could get B.B. on the intercom. But no. Not him. He has to parade his distrust of anything electronic and, at the same time, make it quite clear that he’s not breaking his precious oath . . . . Tell me, how do you people handle your spaceborne espers?”

He grinned. “We’ve still one big stick that you people haven’t. A court martial followed by a firing party. Not that I’ve ever seen it used.”

“Hardly, considering that you’ve only been in Space a dog watch.” Her face froze suddenly. “Yes, Sue?”

It was the girl whom Jane had relieved in the bar. “Miss Pentecost, will you report to the Captain in Control, please. At once.”

“What have I done now?”

“It’s some sort of emergency, Miss Pentecost. The Chief Officer’s up there with him, and he’s sent for the Doctor and the two Chief Engineers.”

“Then I must away, John. Look after the bar again, Sue. Don’t let the Admiral have too many free drinks.”

She moved fast and gracefully, was gone before Grimes could think of any suitable repartee. He said to the girl, “What is happening, Sue?”

“I don’t know, Ad-” She flushed. “Sorry, Ensign. And, in any case, I’m not supposed to talk to the passengers about it.”

“But I’m not a real passenger,” he said-and asked himself, Am I a real anything?

“No, I suppose you’re not, Mr. Grimes. But you’re not on duty.”

“An officer of the Survey Service is always on duty,” he told her, with some degree of truth. “Whatever happens on the spacelanes is our concern.” It sounded good.

“Yes,” she agreed hesitantly. “That’s what my fianc‚-he’s a Lieutenant J.G.-is always telling me.”

“So what’s all the flap about?”

“Promise not to tell anybody?” “Of course.”

“Mr. Letourneau came wandering into the Saloon. He just stood there staring about, the way he does, then he spotted the Captain. He was actually dancing with me at the time . . . .” She smiled reminiscently, and added, “He’s a very good dancer.”

“He would be. But go on.”

“He came charging across the dance floor-Mr. Letourneau, I mean. He didn’t care whose toes he trod on or who he tripped over. I couldn’t help overhearing when he started babbling away to Captain Craven. It’s a distress call. From one of our ships-Epsilon Sextans.'” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And it’s piracy.”

“Piracy?  Impossible.”

“But, Mr. Grimes, it’s what he said.”

“Psionic Radio Officers have been known to go around the bend before now,” Grimes told her, “and to send false alarm calls. And to receive non-existent ones.”

“But the Sexy Eppy-sorry, Epsilon Sextans-has a cargo that’d be worth pirating. Or so I heard. The first big shipment of Antigeriatridine to Waverly

. . . .”

Antigeriatridine, the so-called Immortality Serum. Manufactured in limited, but increasing quantities only on Marina (often called by its colonists Submarina), a cold, unpleasantly watery world in orbit about Alpha Crucis. The fishlike creatures from which the drug was obtained bred and flourished only in the seas of their own world.

But piracy . . . .

But the old legends were full of stories of men who had sold their souls for eternal youth.

The telephone behind the bar buzzed sharply. Sue answered it. She said, “It’s for you, Mr. Grimes.”

Grimes took the instrument. “That you, Ensign?” It was Captain Craven’s voice. “Thought I’d find you there. Come up to Control, will you?” It was an order rather than a request.

ALL THE SHIP’S EXECUTIVE OFFICERS were in the Control Room, and the Doctor, the purser and the two Chief Engineers. As Grimes emerged from the hatch he heard Kennedy, the Mate, say, “Here’s the Ensign now.”

“Good. Then dog down, Mr. Kennedy, so we get some privacy.” Craven turned to Grimes. ‘”You’re on the Active List of the Survey Service, Mister,  so I suppose you’re entitled to know what’s going on. The situation is this. Epsilon Sextans, Marina to Waverley with a shipment of Antigeriatridine, has been pirated.” Grimes managed, with an effort, to refrain from saying “I

know.” Craven went on. “Her esper is among the survivors. He says that the pirates were two frigates of the Waldegren Navy. Anyhow, the Interstellar Drive Engineers aboard Epsilon Sextans managed to put their box of tricks on random precession, and they got away. But not in one piece . . . .”

“Not in one piece?” echoed Grimes stupidly.

“What the hell do you expect when an unarmed merchantman is fired upon, without warning, by two warships? The esper says that their Control has had it, and all the accommodation spaces. By some miracle the Psionic Radio Officer’s shack wasn’t holed, and neither was the Mannschenn Drive Room.”

“But even one missile . . .” muttered Grimes.

“If you want to capture a ship and her cargo more or less intact,” snapped Craven, “you don’t use missiles. You use laser. It’s an ideal weapon if you aren’t fussy about how many people you kill.”

“Knowing the Waldegrenese as we do,” said Jane Pentecost bitterly, “there wouldn’t have been any survivors anyhow.”

“Be quiet!” roared Craven. Grimes was puzzled by his outburst. It was out  of character. True, he could hardly expect a shipmaster to react to the news of a vicious piracy with equanimity-but this shipmaster was an officer of the Reserve, had seen service in warships and had been highly decorated for outstanding bravery in battle.

Craven had control of himself again. “The situation is this. There are people still living aboard Epsilon Sextans. Even though all her navigators have  been killed I think that I shall be able to find her in time. Furthermore, she has a very valuable cargo and, in any case, cannot be written off as a total loss. There is little damage that cannot be repaired by welded patches. I have already sent a message to Head Office requesting a free hand. I have salvage in mind. I see no reason why the ship and her cargo should not be taken on to Waverley.”

“A prize crew, sir?”

“If you care to put it that way. This will mean cutting down the number of officers aboard my own vessel-but I am sure, Mr. Grimes, that you will be willing to gain some practical watch-keeping experience. All that’s required is your autograph on the ship’s Articles of Agreement.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. I may be thanking you before the job’s over and done.” He turned to his Chief Officer. “Mr. Kennedy, keep in touch with Mr. Letourneau and let me know if anything further comes through either from Epsilon Sextans or from Head Office. The rest of you-keep this to yourselves. No sense in alarming the passengers. I’m sure that the Doctor and Miss Pentecost between them can concoct some soothing story to account for  this officers’ conference.”

“Captain Craven,” said Jane Pentecost.

“Well?”

“The other man at my table, Mr. Baxter. I knew him out on the Rim. He holds Chief Reaction Drive Engineer’s papers.”

“Don’t tell him anything yet. But I’ll keep him in mind. Now, Mr. Grimes, will you join me in my day cabin?”

IX

THE HOLOGRAMS were all gone from the bulkheads of Captain Craven’s cabin. To replace them there was just one picture-of a woman, not young, but with the facial bone structure that defies age and time. She was in uniform, and on her shoulderboards were the two and a half stripes of a Senior Purser. The shipmaster noticed Grimes’ interest and said briefly and bitterly. “She was too senior for an Epsilon class ship-but she cut her leave short, just to oblige, when the regular purser went sick. She should have been back on Earth at the same time as me, though. Then we were going to get married . . . .”

Grimes said nothing. He thought, Too senior for an Epsilon class ship? Epsilon Sextans, for example? What could he say?

“And that,” said Craven savagely, “was that.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” blurted Grimes, conscious of the inadequacy of his words. Then, foolishly, “But there are survivors, sir.”

“Don’t you think that I haven’t got Letourneau and his opposite number checking? And have you ever seen the aftermath of a Deep Space battle, Mister? Have you ever boarded a ship that’s been slashed and stabbed to death with laser beams?” He seemed to require no answer; he pulled himself into the chair by his desk, strapped himself in and motioned to Grimes to be seated. Then he pulled out from a drawer a large sheet of paper, which he unfolded. It was a cargo plan. “Current voyage,” he grunted. “And we’re carrying more to Lindisfarne than one brand-new ensign.”

“Such as, sir?” ventured Grimes.

“Naval stores. I don’t mind admitting that I’m more than a little rusty insofar as Survey Service procedure is concerned, even though I still hold my Reserve Commission. You’re more familiar with fancy abbreviations than I am. Twenty cases RERAT, for example . . . .”

“Reserve rations, sir. Canned and dehydrated.” “Good. And ATREG?”

“Atmospheric regeneration units, complete.”

“So if Epsilon Sextans’ ‘farm’ has been killed we shall be able to manage?” “Yes, sir.”

“Do you think you’d be able to install an ATREG unit?”

“Of course, sir. They’re very simple, as you know. Just synthetic chlorophyll and a UV source . . . . In any case, there are full instructions inside every container.”

“And this? A double M, Mark XV?” “Anti-Missile  Missile.”

“And ALGE?”

“Anti-Laser Gas Emitter.”

“The things they do think of. I feel more at home with these AVMs-although I see that they’ve got as far as Mark XVII now.”

“Anti-Vessel Missiles,” said Grimes. A slight enthusiasm crept into his voice. “The XVII’s a real honey.”

“What does it do?”

“I’m sorry, sir. Even though you are a Reserve Officer, I can’t tell you.” “But they’re effective?”

“Yes. Very.”

“And I think you’re Gunnery Branch, Mr. Grimes, aren’t you?”

“I am sir.” He added hastily, “But I’m still quite capable of carrying out a watch officer’s duties aboard this vessel should the need arise.”

“The main thing is, you’re familiar with naval stores and equipment. When we find and board Epsilon Sextans I shall be transshipping certain items of cargo . . . “

“RERAT and ATREG, sir?” “Yes. And the others.”

“But, sir, I can’t allow it. Not unless I have authority from the Flag Officer commanding Lindisfarne Base. As soon as your Mr. Letourneau can be spared I’ll get him to try and raise the station there.”

“I’m afraid that’s out of the question, Mr. Grimes. In view of the rather peculiar political situation, I think that the answer would be No. Even if it were ‘Yes’, you know as well as I how sluggishly the tide flows through official channels. Furthermore, just in case it has escaped your notice, I am the Master.”

“And I, sir, represent the Survey Service. As the only commissioned officer aboard this vessel I am responsible for Survey Service cargo.”

“As a Reserve Officer, Mr. Grimes, I rank you.”

“Only when you have been recalled to Active Service. Sir.”

Craven said, “I was rather afraid that you’d take this attitude. That’s why I

decided to get this interview over and done with, just so we all know where we stand.” He put away the cargo plan, swiveled his chair so that he could reach out to his liquor cabinet. He pulled out two bulbs, tossed one to Grimes. “No toasts. If we drank to Law and Order we should mean different things. So just drink. And listen.

“To begin with, Epsilon Sextans doesn’t know where she is. But Letourneau is one of the rare telepaths with the direction finding talent, and as soon as he’s able to get lined up we shall alter course to home on the wreck. That’s what he’s trying to do now.

“When we find her, we shall synchronize and board, of course. The first thing will be medical aid to the survivors. Then we patch the ship up. And then we arm her. And then, with a prize crew under myself, we put ourselves on the trajectory for Waverley-hoping that those Waldegrenese frigates come back for another nibble.”

“They’d never dare, sir.”

“Wouldn’t they? The original piracy they’ll try to laugh off by saying that it was by real pirates- no, that’s not quite right, but you know what I

mean-wearing Waldegren colors. The second piracy-they’ll make sure that there are no survivors.”

“But I still can’t see how they can hope to get away with it. It’s always been an accepted fact that the main weapon against piracy has been psionic radio.”

“And so it was-until some genius developed a jamming technique. Epsilon Sextans wasn’t able to get any messages out until her crazy random precession pulled her well clear.”

“And you hope, sir, that they do attack you?”

“I do, Mr. Grimes. I had hoped, that I should have a good gunnery officer under me, but”-he shrugged his massive shoulders-“I think that I shall be able to manage.”

“And you hope that you’ll have your weapons,” persisted Grimes. “I see no reason why I should not, Ensign.”

“There is one very good reason, sir. That is that I, a commissioned officer of the Survey Service, am aboard your vessel. I insist that you leave the tracking down and destruction of the pirates to the proper authorities. I insist, too, that no Survey Service stores be discharged from this ship without my written authority.”

For the first time the hint of a smile relieved the somberness of Craven’s face. “And to think that I believed that Jane Pentecost could recruit you,” he murmured. Then, in a louder voice, “And what if I just go ahead without your written authority, Ensign?”

Grimes had the answer ready. “Then, sir, I shall be obliged to order your officers not to obey your unlawful commands. If necessary, I shall call upon the male passengers to assist me in any action that is necessary.”

Craven’s bushy eyebrows went up and stayed up. “Mr. Grimes,” he said in a gritty voice, “it is indeed lucky for you that I have firsthand experience of the typical Survey Service mentality. Some Masters I know would, in these circumstances, send you out on a spacewalk without a suit. But, before I take drastic action, I’ll give you one more chance to cooperate.” His tone softened. “You noticed the portrait I’ve put up instead of all the temporary popsies. Every man, no matter how much he plays around, has one woman who is the woman. Gillian was the woman as far as I was concerned-as far as I am concerned. I’ve a chance to bring her murderers under my guns-and, by God, I’m taking that chance, no matter what it means either to my  career or to the somewhat odd foreign policy of the Federation. I used to be annoyed by Jane Pentecost’s outbursts on that subject-but now I see that she’s right. And she’s right, too, when it comes to the Survey Service’s reluctance to take action against Waldegren.

“So I, Mr. Grimes, am taking action.” “Sir, I forbid you . . .”

“You forbid me? Ensign, you forget yourself. Perhaps this will help you remember.”

This was a Minetti automatic that had appeared suddenly in the Captain’s hand. In his hairy fist the little, glittering weapon looked no more than a toy-but Grimes knew his firearms, knew that at the slightest pressure of Craven’s finger the needle-like projectiles would stitch him from crown to crotch.

“I’m sorry about this, Mr. Grimes.” As he spoke, Craven pressed a button  set in his desk with his free hand. “I’m sorry about this. But I realize that I was expecting rather too much of you. After all, you have your career to consider . . . . Time was,” he went on, “when a naval officer could put his telescope to his blind eye as an excuse for ignoring orders-and get away with it. But the politicians had less power in those days. We’ve come a long way-and a wrong way-since Nelson.”

Grimes heard the door behind him slide open. He didn’t bother to look around, not even when hard hands were laid on his shoulders.

“Mr. Kennedy,” said Craven, “things turned out as I feared that they would. Will you and Mr. Ludovic take the Ensign along to the Detention Cell?”

“I’ll see you on trial for piracy, Captain!” flared Grimes.

“An interesting legal point, Ensign-especially since you are being entered in my Official Log as a mutineer.”

X

THE DETENTION CELL was not uncomfortable, but it was depressing. It was a padded cell- passengers in spacecraft have been known to exhibit the more violent symptoms of mania-which detracted from its already inconsiderable cheerfulness if not from its comfort. However, Grimes was not mad-not in the medical sense, that is-and so was considered able to attend to his own bodily needs. The little toilet was open to him, and at

regular intervals a bell would sound and a container of food would appear in a hatch recessed into the bulkhead of the living cabin. There was reading matter too-such as it was. The Ensign suspected that Jane Pentecost was the donor. It consisted of pamphlets published by some organization calling itself The Rim Worlds Secessionist Party. The almost hysterical calls to arms were bad enough-but the ones consisting mainly of columns of statistics were worse. Economics had never been Grimes’ strong point.

He slept, he fed at the appointed times, he made a lengthy ritual of keeping himself clean, he tried to read-and, all the time, with only sounds and sensations as clues, he endeavored to maintain a running plot of the ship’s maneuvers.

Quite early there had been the shutting down of the Mannschenn Drive, and the consequent fleeting sensation of temporal disorientation. This had been followed by the acceleration warning-the cell had an intercom speaker recessed in the padding-and Grimes, although it seemed rather pointless in his sponge rubber environment, had strapped himself into his couch. He heard the directional gyroscopes start up, felt the effects of centrifugal  force as the ship came around to her new heading. Then there was the pseudo-gravity of acceleration, accompanied by the muffled thunder of the reaction drive. It was obvious, thought the Ensign, that Captain Craven was expending his reaction mass in a manner that, in other circumstances,  would have been considered reckless.

Suddenly-silence and Free Fall, and almost immediately the off-key keening of the Mannschenn Drive. Its note was higher, much higher, than Grimes remembered it, and the queasy feeling of temporal disorientation lasted much longer than it had on previous occasions. And that, for a long time, was all. Meals came, and were eaten. Every morning- according to his watch-the prisoner showered and applied depilatory cream to his face. He tried to exercise-but to exercise in a padded cell, with no apparatus, in Free Fall, is hard. He tried to read-but the literature available was hardly more interesting to him than a telephone directory would have been. And, even though he never had been gregarious, the lack of anybody to talk to was wearing him down.

It was a welcome break from the monotony when he realized that, once again, the ship was maneuvering. This time there was no use of the directional gyroscopes; there were no rocket blasts, but there was a variation of the whine of the Drive as it hunted, hunted, as the temporal precession rate was adjusted by tens of seconds, by seconds, by microseconds.

And then it locked.

The ship shuddered slightly-once, twice.

Grimes envisaged the firing of the two mooring rockets, one from the bow and one from the stern, each with the powerful electromagnet in its nose, each trailing its fathoms of fine but enormously strong cable. Merchant vessels, he knew, carried this equipment, but unlike naval ships rarely used it. But Craven, as a Reservist, would have seen and taken part in enough drills.

The ship shuddered again-heavily.

So the rendezvous had been made. So Delta Orionis and Epsilon Sextans, their Drives synchronized, bound together by the rescue ship’s cables, were now falling as one unit through the dark immensities.

So the rendezvous had been made-and already the survivors of the wreck were being brought aboard the Delia O’Ryan, were being helped out of their stinking spacesuits, were blurting out their story to Craven and his officers. Grimes could visualize it all, almost as clearly as though he were actually watching it. He could visualize, too, the engineers swarming over the wreck, the flare of their burning and welding torches, the cannibalizing of nonessential plating from the ship’s structure for hull patches. It was all laid down in the Survey Service’s Damage Control Manual-and Captain Craven, at least, would know that book as thoroughly as did Grimes.

And what of the cargo, the Survey Service stores, Grimes’ stores? A trembling in the ship’s structure, a barely felt vibration, told him that gantries and conveyor belts were being brought into operation. There would be no great handling problems. Lindisfarne was Delta Orionis’ first port of call, and the Survey Service consignment would be top stowage. But there was nothing that Grimes could do about it-not a thing. In fact, he was beginning to doubt the legality of the stand he had made against the Master. And he was the small frog in this small puddle, while Captain Craven had made it quite clear that he was the big frog. Grimes wished  that he was better versed in astronautical law-although a professional lawyer’s knowledge would be of no use to him in his present situation.

So, with some hazy idea that he might need all his strength, both mental and physical, for what was to befall him (but what?), in the near future, he strapped himself into his bunk and did his best to forget his worries in sleep. He was well enough acquainted with the psychiatrists’ jargon to know that this was no more than a return to the womb but, before dropping off into a shallow slumber, shrugged, So what?

HE JERKED into sudden wakefulness.

Jane Pentecost was there by his bunk, looking down at him.

“Come in,” he said. “Don’t bother to knock. Now you see how the poor live. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”

She said, “That’s not very funny.”

“I know it’s not. Even the first time that I heard it aboard this blasted ship I was able to refrain from rolling in the aisles.”

She said, “There’s no need to be so bitchy, John.”

“Isn’t there? Wouldn’t you be bitchy if you’d been thrown into this padded cell?”

“I suppose I would be. But you asked for it, didn’t you?”

“If doing my duty-or trying to do my duty-is asking for it, I suppose that I did. Well-and has our pirate Captain cast off yet, armed to the teeth with

the weapons he’s stolen?”

“No. The weapons are still being mounted. But let’s not argue legalities, John. There’s not enough time. I . . . I just wanted to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye?” he echoed.

“Yes. Somebody has to do the cooking aboard Epsilon Sextans-and I volunteered.”

“You?”

“And why the hell not?” she flared. “Captain Craven has been pushed over to our side of the fence, and it’d be a pretty poor show if we Rim Worlders weren’t prepared to stand by him. Baxter’s gone across to take over as Reaction Drive Engineer; the only survivor in that department was the Fourth, and he’s only a dog watch in Space.”

“And who else?”

“Nobody. The Sexy Eppy’s Chief, Second and Third Interstellar Drive Engineers survived, and they’re willing-anxious, in fact, now that their ship’s being armed-to stay on. And the Psionic Radio Officer came through, and is staying on. All of our executive officers volunteered, of course, but the Old Man turned them down. He said that, after all, he could not hazard the safety of this ship by stripping her of her trained personnel. Especially since we carry passengers.”

“That’s his worry,” said Grimes without much sympathy. “But how does he hope to fight his ship if those frigates pounce again?”

“He thinks, he’ll be able to manage-with remote controls for every weapon brought to his main control panel.”

“Possible,” admitted Grimes, his professional interest stirred. “But not very efficient. In a naval action the Captain has his hands full just handling the ship alone, without trying to control her weaponry.”

“And you’d know, of course.” “Yes.”

“Yes, you’ve read the books. And Captain Craven commanded a light cruiser during that trouble with the Dring, so he knows nothing.”

“He still hasn’t got four hands and two heads.”

“Oh, let’s stop talking rubbish,” she cried. “I probably shan’t see you again, John and . . . and . . . oh, hell, I want to say goodbye properly, and I don’t want you to think too badly about either the Old Man or . . . or myself.”

“So what are we supposed to do about it?”

“Damn you, Grimes, you snotty-nosed, stuck-up spacepuppy! Look after yourself!”

Suddenly she bent down to kiss him. It was intended to be no more than a

light brushing of lips, but Grimes was suddenly aware, with his entire body, of the closeness of her, of the warmth and the scent of her, and almost without volition his arms went about her, drawing her closer still to him. She tried to break away, but it was only a halfhearted effort. He heard her murmur, in an odd, sardonic whisper, “wotthehell, wotthehell,” and then, “toujours gai.” It made no sense at the time but, years later, when he made the acquaintance of the Twentieth Century poets, he was to remember and to understand. What was important now was that her own arms were about him.

Somehow the buttons of her uniform shirt had come undone, and her  nipples were taut against Grimes’ bare chest. Somehow her shorts had been peeled away from her hips-unzippered by whom? and how?-and somehow Grimes’ own garments were no longer the last barrier between them.

He was familiar enough with female nudity; he was one of the great majority who frequented the naked beaches in preference to those upon which bathing costumes were compulsory. He knew what a naked woman looked like-but this was different. It was not the first time that he had kissed a woman-but it was the first time that he had kissed, and been kissed by, an unclothed one. It was the first time that he had been alone with one.

What was happening he had read about often enough-and, like most young men, he had seen his share of pornographic films. But this was different. This was happening to him.

And for the first time.

When it was over, when, still clasped in each others’ arms they drifted in the center of the little cabin, impelled there by some odd resultant of forces, their discarded clothing drifting with them, veiling their perspiration-moist bodies, Grimes was reluctant to let her go.

Gently, Jane tried to disengage herself.

She whispered, “That was a warmer goodbye that I intended. But I’m not sorry. No. I’m not sorry . . . .”

Then, barely audibly, “It was the first time for you, wasn’t it?” “Yes.”

“Then I’m all the more glad it happened. But this is goodbye.” “No.”

“Don’t be a fool, John. You can’t keep me here.” “But I can come with you.”

She pushed him from her. Somehow he landed back on the bed. Before he could bounce he automatically snapped one of the confining straps about his middle. Somehow-she was still wearing her sandals but nothing

else-she finished up standing on the deck, held there by the contact between the magnetic soles and the ferrous fibers in the padding. She put

out a long, graceful arm and caught her shirt. She said harshly, “I’m getting dressed and out of here. You stay put. Damn you, Grimes, for thinking that I was trying to lure you aboard the Sexy Eppy with the body beautiful. I told you before that I am not, repeat not, Olga Popovsky, the Beautiful Spy. And I’m not a prostitute. There’s one thing I wouldn’t sell if I were offered the services of the finest Gunnery Officer (which you aren’t), in the whole bloody Galaxy in payment!”

“You’re beautiful when you flare up like that,” said Grimes sincerely. “But you’re always beautiful.” Then, in a louder voice, “Jane, I love you.”

“Puppy love,” she sneered. “And I’m old enough to be your . . .” A faint smile softened her mouth. “Your maiden aunt.”

“Let me finish. All right, it’s only puppy love-you say. But it’s still love.

But”-he was extemporizing-convincingly, he hoped-“but my real reason for wanting to come with you is this. I can appreciate now what Captain Craven lost when Epsilon Sextans was pirated. I can see-I can feel-why he’s willing to risk his life and his career to get his revenge. And I think that it’s worth it. And I want to help him.”

She stood there, her shirt half on, eying him suspiciously. “You mean that? You really mean that?”

“Yes.”

“Then you’re a liar, Grimes.”

“No,” he said slowly. “No. Not altogether. I want to help the Old Man-and I want to help you. This piracy has convinced me that you Rim Worlders are getting the dirty end of the stick. I may not be the finest Gunnery Officer in the whole Galaxy-but I’m better acquainted with the new stuff than Captain Craven is.”

Her grin was openly derisive. “First it’s fellow-feeling for another spaceman, then it’s international politics. What next?”

“Where we started. I do love you, Jane. And if there’s going to be any shooting, I want to be on hand to do the shooting back on your behalf. I’ll admit that . . . that what’s happened has influenced my decision. But you didn’t buy me, or bribe me. Don’t think that. Don’t ever think that.” There was a note of pleading in his voice. “Be realistic, Jane. With another officer along, especially an officer with recent gunnery training, you stand a damn sight better chance than you would otherwise.”

“I . . . I suppose so. But I still don’t like it.”

“You don’t have to. But why look a gift horse in the mouth?”

“All right. You win. Get your clothes on and come and see the Old Man.” XI

JANE PENTECOST led Grimes to the airlock. The ship seemed oddly deserted, and he remarked on this. The girl explained that the passengers had been requested to remain in their accommodations, and that most of

Delta Orionis’ personnel were employed in work aboard Epsilon Sextans.

  • So I haven’t been the only one to be kept under lock and key,” commented Grimes sardonically.

“You’re the only one,” retorted the girl, “who’s been compensated for his imprisonment.”

There was no answer to that, so the Ensign remained silent. Saying nothing, he inspected with interest the temporary tunnel that had been rigged between the airlocks of the two ships. So Epsilon Sextans’ pressure hull had been made good, her atmosphere restored. That meant that the work of installing the armament had been completed. He hoped that he would not have to insist upon modifications.

The wreck-although she was a wreck no longer-bore her scars. The worst damage had been repaired, but holes and slashes that did not impair her structural strength were untouched, and spatters of once molten metal still made crazy patterns on beams and frames, stanchions and bulkheads. And there were the scars made by Craven’s engineers-the raw, bright cicatrices of new welding.

Forward they made their way, deck after deck. The elevator in the axial shaft was not yet working, so Grimes had time and opportunity to appreciate the extent of the damage. They passed through the wreckage of the “farm”-the burst algae tanks, the ruptured vats in which yeast and tissue cultures were black and dead, frostbitten and dehydrated. They brushed through alleyways choked with the brittle fronds of creeping plants killed by the ultimate winter.

And then they were passing through the accommodation levels. Bulkheads had been slashed through, destroying the privacy of the cabins that they had once enclosed. Destroying the privacy-and the occupants. There were  no longer any bodies; for this Grimes was deeply thankful. (He learned later that Craven’s first action had been to order and conduct a funeral service.) There were no bodies-but there were still stains. Men and women die quickly in hard vacuum-quickly and messily.

Captain Craven was alone in the Control Room. He was working, rather slowly and clumsily, wiring up an obviously makeshift panel that was additional to the original one installed before the Master’s acceleration chair. It was obvious what it was-the remote controls for the newly fitted weaponry. Grimes said quickly, “There’s no need for that, sir.”

Craven started, let go of his screwdriver, made a fumbling grab for it as it drifted away from him. He stared at Grimes, then growled, “So it’s you, is it?” Then, to Jane, “What the hell do you mean by letting this puppy out of his kennel?”

“Captain Craven,” she told him quietly, “Mr. Grimes wants to come with us.” “What? I warn you, Miss Pentecost, I’m in no mood for silly jokes.”

“This is not a silly joke, Captain,” said Grimes. “I’ve had time to think things over. I feel, I really feel that you have a far better chance if there’s

a qualified officer along to handle the gunnery.”

Craven looked at them, from the girl to Grimes, then back again. He said, “Ensign, didn’t I warn you?”

“It’s not that way at all, sir,” Grimes told him, flushing. “In fact, Miss Pentecost has been trying hard to dissuade me.”

“Oh?

“It’s true,” said Jane. “But he told me that we couldn’t afford to look a gift horse in the mouth.”

“I don’t know what’s been happening,” rasped Craven. “I don’t want to know what’s been happening between the pair of you. This change of mind, this change of heart is rather . . . sudden. No matter. One volunteer, they say,  is worth ten pressed men.” He glared coldly at the Ensign. “And you volunteer?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“I believe you. I have no choice in the matter. But you realize the consequences?”

“I do.”

“Well, I may be able to do something to clear your yardarm. I’ve still to make my last entries in the Official Log of Delta Orionis, before I hand over to Captain Kennedy. And when it comes to such documentation, nobody cares to accuse a shipmaster of being a liar. Not out loud.” He paused, thinking. “How does this sound, Miss Pentecost? Date, Time, Position, etc., etc. Mr. John Grimes, passenger, holding the rank of Ensign in the Federation Survey Service, removed by force from this vessel to Epsilon Sextans, there to supervise the installation and mounting of the armament, Survey Service property, discharged on my orders from No. 1 hold, also to advise upon the use of same in the subsequent event of an action’s being fought. Signed, etc., etc. And witnessed.”

“Rather long-winded, sir. But it seems to cover the ground.” “I intend to do more than advise!” flared Grimes.

“Pipe down. Or, if you must say it, make sure that there aren’t any witnesses around when you say it. Now, when it comes to the original supervision, you see what I’m trying to do. Will it work?”

“After a fashion, sir. But it will work much better if the fire control panel is entirely separate from maneuvering control.”

“You don’t think that I could handle both at once?”

“You could. But not with optimum efficiency. No humanoid could. This setup of yours might just work if we were Shaara, or any of the other multi-limbed arthropods. But even the Shaara, in their warships, don’t expect the

Queen-Captain to handle her ship and her guns simultaneously.”

“You’re the expert. I just want to be sure that you’re prepared to, quote, advise, unquote, with your little pink paws on the actual keyboard of your battle organ.”

“That’s just the way that I propose to advise.”

“Good. Fix it up to suit yourself, then. I should be able to let you have a mechanic shortly to give you a hand.”

“Before we go any further, sir, I’d like to make an inspection of the weapons themselves. Just in case . . .”

“Just in case I’ve made some fantastic bollix, eh?” Craven was almost cheerful. “Very good. But try to make it snappy. It’s time we were on our way.”

“Yes,” said Jane, and it seemed that the Captain’s discarded somberness was hanging about her like a cloud. “It’s time.”

XII

AT ONE TIME, before differentiation between the mercantile and the  fighting vessel became pronounced, merchant vessels were built to carry a quite considerable armament. Today, the mounting of weapons on a merchantman presents its problems. After his tour of inspection Grimes was obliged to admit that Captain Craven had made cunning use of whatever spaces were available- but Craven, of course, was a very experienced officer, with long years of service in all classes of spacecraft. Too-and, perhaps, luckily-there had been no cannon among the Survey Service ordnance that had been requisitioned, so recoil had not been among the problems.

When he was finished, Grimes returned to the Control Room. Craven was still there, and with him was Jane Pentecost. They had, obviously, been discussing something. They could, perhaps, have been quarreling; the girl’s face was flushed and her expression sullen.

“Yes?” snapped the Captain.

“You’ve done a good job, sir. She’s no cruiser, but she should be able to defend herself.”

“Thank you. Then we’ll be on our way.”

“Not so fast, sir. I’d like to wire up my control panel properly before we shove off.”

Craven laughed. “You’ll have time, Mr. Grimes. I still have a few last duties to discharge aboard Delta Orionis. But be as quick as you can.”

He left the compartment, followed by Jane Pentecost. She said, over her shoulder, “I’ll send Mr. Baxter to help you, John.”

The Rim Worlder must have been somewhere handy; in a matter of seconds he was by Grimes’ side, an already open tool satchel at his belt. As he worked, assisting deftly and then taking over as soon as he was sure of

what was required, he talked. He said, “Mum wanted to come along, but I soon put the damper on that. But I was bloody amazed to find you here.”

“Were you?” asked Grimes coldly.

“You bet I was. Never thought you were cut out to be a bloody pirate.” He cursed briefly as a spatter of hot metal from his sizzling soldering iron stung his hand. “A cold weld’d be better, but it’d take too much time. But where was I? Oh, yes. The shock to me system when I saw you comin’ aboard this wagon.”

“I have my quite valid reasons,” Grimes told him stiffly.

“You’re tellin’ me. Just as my missus had quite valid reasons for wantin’ to come with me. But she ain’t a gunnery expert.” He added piously, “Thank Gawd.”

“And I am one,” said the Ensign, trying to change the drift of the conversation before he lost his temper. “Yes. that’s right. Just stick to the color code. The blue wiring’s the ALGE . . .”

“I know,” Baxter told him. “Tell me, is it any good?”

“Yes. Of course, if an enemy held us in her beams for any prolonged period we should all be cooked, but as far as it goes it’s effective enough.”

“Hope you’re right.” He made the last connections, then replaced the panel on the open shallow box. “Here’s yer magic cabinet, Professor. All we have ter see now is what rabbits yer can pull outer the hat.”

“Plenty, I hope,” said Captain Craven, who had returned to Control. “And are you ready now, Mr. Grimes?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Then we’ll make it stations. If you will take the copilot’s chair, while Mr. Baxter goes along to look after his rockets.”

“Will do, Skipper,” said the engineer, packing away his tools as he pulled himself toward the exit hatch.

The ship’s intercom came to life, in Jane Pentecost’s voice. “Connection between vessels severed. Airlock door closed.”

“We’re still connected,” grumbled Craven. “Delia O’Ryan still has her magnetic grapnels out.” He spoke into the transceiver microphone: “Epsilon Sextans to Delta Orionis. Cast off, please. Over.”

“Delta Orionis to Epsilon Sextans. Casting off.” Through a viewport Grimes could see one of the bright mooring wires snaking back into its recess. “All clear, Captain.”

“Thank you, Captain Kennedy.” And in a softer voice, “And I hope you keep that handle to your name, Bill.”

“Thank you, sir. And all the best, Captain, from all of us, to all of you. And

good hunting.”

“Thanks. And look after the old Delia, Captain. And yourself. Over-and out.” “Delta Orionis to Epsilon Sextans. Over and out.”

(There was something very final, thought Grimes, about those outs.)

He was aware that the ships were drifting slowly apart. Now he could see  all of Delta Orionis from his viewport. He could not help recalling the day on which he had first seen her, at the Woomera spaceport. So much had happened since that day. (And so much was still to happen-he hoped.) He heard Craven say into the intercom, “Stand by for temporal precession. We’re desynchronizing.” Then, there was the giddiness, and the off-beat whine of the Mannschenn Drive that pierced his eardrums painfully, and beyond the viewports the great, shining shape of the other ship shimmered eerily and was suddenly warped into the likeness of a monstrous Klein

flash-then vanished. Where she had been (where she still was, in space but not in time) shone the distant stars, the stars that in this distorted continuum were pulsing spirals of iridescence.

“Mannschenn Drive. Cut!”

The thin, high keening died abruptly. Outside, the stars were glittering points of light, piercingly bright against the blackness.

“Mr. Grimes!” Craven’s voice was sharp. “I hope that you take more interest in gunnery than you do in ship handling. In case it has escaped your notice, I would remind you that you are second in command of this vessel, and in full charge in the event of my demise.”

“Sorry, sir,” stammered Grimes. Then, suddenly bold, “But I’m not your second in command, sir. I’ve signed no Articles.”

Surprisingly, Craven laughed. “A spacelawyer, yet! Well, Mr. Grimes, as soon as we get this vessel on course we’ll attend to the legal formalities. Meanwhile, may I request your close attention to what I am doing?”

“You may, sir.”

Thereafter he watched and listened carefully. He admired the skill with which Craven turned the ship on her directional gyroscopes until the red-glowing target star was centered exactly in the cartwheel sight. He

noted that the Captain used his reaction drive at a longer period and at a higher rate of acceleration than usual, and said as much. He was told, the words falling slowly and heavily in the pseudo-gravity, “They . . . will . . . expect . . . us . . . to . . . be . . . in . . . a . . . hurry. We must . . . not . . . disappoint . . . them.”

Speed built up, fast-but it was a velocity that, in the context of the interstellar distances to be traversed, was no more than a snail’s crawl. Then-and the sudden silence was like a physical blow-the thunder of the rockets ceased. The screaming roar had died, but the ship was not quiet. The whine of the Mannschenn Drive pervaded her every compartment, vibrated through every member of her structure. She was falling, falling

through space and time, plunging through the warped continuum to her rendezvous with Death . . . .

And whose death? wondered Grimes.

He said, “I should have asked before, sir. But how are . . . how are they going to find us?”

“I don’t know,” said Craven. “I don’t know. But they’ve found other ships when they’ve wanted to. They’ve never used the old pirate’s technique of lying in wait at breaking-out points. A Mass Proximity Indicator? Could be. It’s theoretically possible. It could be for a ship under Mannschenn Drive what radar is for a ship in normal space-time. Or some means of homing on a temporal precession field? That’s more like it, I think, as this vessel was able to escape when she went random.

“But if they want us-and they will-they’ll find us. And then”-he looked at Grimes, his blue gaze intense-“and then it’s up to you, Ensign.”

“To all of us,” said Grimes. XIII

SHE WAS UNDERMANNED, this Epsilon Sextans, but she functioned quite efficiently. Craven kept a Control Room watch himself, and the other two watchkeepers were Grimes and Jane Pentecost. Four on and eight off were their hours of duty- but there was plenty of work to be done in the off duty periods. The Captain, of course, was in over-all charge, and was trying to bring his command to the pitch of efficiency necessary for a fighting ship. Jane Pentecost was responsible for meals-although these, involving little more than the opening of cans, did not take up too much of her time. She had also taken over biochemist’s duties, but called now and again upon Grimes to help her with the ATREG unit. Its operation was simple enough, but it was inclined to be temperamental and, now and again, allowed the carbon dioxide concentration to reach a dangerous level. Grimes’ main concern was his armament. He could not indulge in a practice shot-the expulsion of mass by a ship running under interstellar drive is suicidal; even the employment of laser weapons is dangerous. But there were tests that he could make; there was, in the ship’s stores, a spare chart tank that he was able to convert to a battle simulator.

Craven helped him, and set up targets in the tank, glowing points of light that were destroyed by the other sparks that represented Grimes’ missiles. After one such drill he said, “You seem to know your stuff, Ensign. Now, what’s your grasp of the tactical side of it?”

Grimes considered his words before speaking. “Well, sir, we could use laser with the Drive in operation-but we haven’t got laser. The pirates have. They can synchronize and just carve us up at leisure. This time, I think they’ll go for the interstellar drive engine room first, so that we can’t get away by the use of random precession.”

“Yes. That’s what they’ll do. That’s why I have that compartment literally sealed in a cocoon of insulation. Oh, I know it’s not effective, but it will give us a second or so of grace. No more.”

“We can’t use our reflective vapor,” went on Grimes. “That’d be almost as bad, from our viewpoint, as loosing off a salvo of missiles. But, sir, when this ship was first attacked there must have been a considerable loss of mass when the atmosphere was expelled through the rents in the shell plating . . . the Drive was running. How was it that the ship wasn’t flung into some other space-time?”

“Come, come, Mr. Grimes. You should know the answer to that one. She was held by the powerful temporal precession fields of the drive units of the two pirates. And then, of course, when the engineers managed to set up their random precession there was no mass left to be expelled.”

“H’m. I see. Or I think I see. Then, in that case, why shouldn’t I use my ALGE as soon as we’re attacked?”

“No. Better not. Something might just go wrong-and I don’t want to become one of my own ancestors.”

“Then . . . ?”

“You tell me, Mr. Grimes.”

“Cut our Drive . . . ? Break out into the normal continuum? Yes . . . it could work.” He was becoming enthusiastic. “And then we shall be waiting

for-them, with our missile batteries, when they break out.”

“We’ll make an admiral of you yet, young Grimes.”

WITH WATCHKEEPING and with off-watch duties time was fully occupied. And yet there was something missing. There was, Grimes said to himself, one hell of a lot missing. Jane Pentecost had her own watch to keep, and her own jobs to do when she was not in the control room-but she and Grimes had some free time to share. But they did not share it.

He broached the subject when he was running a test on the artificial chlorophyll in the ATREG. “Jane, I was hoping I’d see more of you.”

“You’re seeing plenty of me.” “But not enough.”

“Don’t be tiresome,” she snapped. Then, in a slightly softer voice, “Don’t . .

. “

  • . . . spoil everything?” he finished for her sardonically. “You know what I mean,” she told him coldly.

“Do I?” He groped for words. “Jane . . . Damn it all, I hoped . . . After what happened aboard the Delia O’Ryan . . .”

“That,” she said, “was different.” Her face flushed. “I tell you this, Grimes, if I’d known that you were coming along with us it never would have happened.”

“No?”

“NO!”

“Even so . . . I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t . . .”

“Why we shouldn’t what? Oh, all right, all right. I know what you mean. But it’s out of the question. I’ll tell you why, in words of one syllable. In a ship such as Delta Orionis discreet fun and games were permissible, even desirable. No shortage of women-both crew and passengers. Here, I’m the only female. Your friend Mr. Baxter has been sniffing after me. And Mr. Wolverton, the Interstellar Chief. And his Second. And even, bereaved though he is, the Bearded Bastard. He might get away with it-the privileges of rank and all that. But nobody else would-most certainly not yourself.  How long would it remain a secret if we went to bed together?”

“I suppose you’re right, but . . .”

“But what? Oh John, John, you are a stubborn cow.” “Cow?”

“Sorry. Just Rimworldsese. Applicable to both sexes.” “Talking of sex . . .”

“Oh, shut up!”

“I’ll not.” She looked desirable standing there. A small smudge of grease on her flushed cheek was like a beauty spot. “I’ll not,” he said again. She was close to him, and he was acutely conscious that beneath the thin uniform shirt and the short shorts there was only Jane. He had only to reach out. He did so. At first she did not resist-and then exploded into a frenzy of   activity. Before he could let go of her a hard, rough hand closed on his shirt collar and yanked him backwards.

“Keep yer dirty paws off her!” snarled a voice. It was Baxter’s. “Keep yer dirty paws off her! If we didn’t want yer ter let off the fireworks I’d do yer, here an’ now.”

“And keep your dirty paws off me!” yelped Grimes. It was meant to be an authentic quarterdeck bark, but it didn’t come out that way.

“Let him go, Mr. Baxter,” said Jane, adding, “please.”

“Oh, orl right. If yer says so. But I still think we should run him up ter the Old Man.”

“No. Better not.” She addressed Grimes, “Thank you for your help on the ATREG, Mr. Grimes. And thank you, Mr. Baxter, for your help. It’s time that I started looking after the next meal.”

She left, not hastily, but not taking her time about it either. When she was gone Baxter released Grimes. Clumsily the Ensign turned himself around, with a wild flailing motion. Unarmed combat had never been his specialty, especially unarmed combat in Free Fall conditions. But he knew that he had to fight, and the rage and the humiliation boiling up in him made it certain that he would do some damage.

But Baxter was laughing, showing all his ugly, yellow teeth. “Come orf it, Admiral! An’ if we must have a set-to-not in here. Just smash the UV projector-an’ bang goes our air conditioning! Simmer down, mate. Simmer down!”

Grimes simmered down, slowly. “But I thought you were out for my blood, Mr. Baxter.”

“Have ter put on a show for the Sheilas now an’ again. Shouldn’t mind puttin’ on another kind o’ show with her. But not in public-like you was goin’ to. It just won’t do-not until the shootin’ is over, anyhow. An’ even then . .

. . So, Admiral, it’s paws off as far as you’re concerned. An’ as far as I’m concerned-an’ the Chief Time Twister an’ his sidekick. But, if yer can spare the time, I propose we continue the conversation in my palatial dogbox.”

Grimes should have felt uneasy as he followed the engineer to his accommodation but, oddly enough, he did not. The rough friendliness just could not be the prelude to a beating up. And it wasn’t.

“Come in,” said Baxter, pulling his sliding door to one side. “Now yer see how the poor live. This is . . .”

“No,” protested Grimes. “No.”

“Why? I was only goin’ to say that this is me ‘umble ‘umpy. An’ I’d like yer to meet a coupla friends o’ mine-and there’s more where they came from.”

The “friends” were two drinking bulbs. Each bore proudly no less than four stars on its label. The brandy was smooth, smooth and potent. Grimes sipped appreciatively. “I didn’t know that we had any of this aboard Delia O’Ryan.”

“An’ nor did we. You’ll not find this tipple in the bar stores of any merchantman, nor aboard any of yer precious Survey Service wagons. Space stock for the Emperor’s yacht, this is. So here’s ter the Waverley taxpayers!”

“But where did you get this from, Mr. Baxter?”

“Where d’yer think? I’ve had a good fossick around the holds o’ this old bitch, an’ there’s quite a few things too good to let fall inter the hands o’ those bloody Waldegrenese.”

“But that’s pillage.”

“It’s common sense. Mind yer, I doubt if Captain Craven would approve, so yer’d better chew some dry tea-that’s in the cargo too-before yer see the Old Man again. All the bleedin’ same-it’s no worse than him borrowing your Survey Service stores an’ weapons from his cargo.”

“I suppose it’s not,” admitted Grimes. All the same, he still felt guilty when he was offered a second bulb of the luxurious spirit. But he did not refuse it.

XIV

HE WAS A GOOD FOSSICKER, was Baxter.

Two days later, as measured by the ship’s chronometer, he was waiting for Grimes as he came off watch. “Ensign,” he announced without preamble, “I’ve found somethin’ in the cargo.”

“Something new, you mean?” asked Grimes coldly. He still did not approve of pillage, although he had shared the spoils.

“Somethin’ that shouldn’t be there. Somethin’ that’s up your alley, I think.” “There’s no reason why equipment for the Waverley Navy shouldn’t be

among the cargo.”

“True enough. But it wouldn’t be in a case with Beluga Caviar stenciled all over it. I thought I’d found somethin’ to go with the vodka I half pinched, but it won’t.”

“Then what is it?” “Come and see.”

“All right.” Briefly Grimes wondered if he should tell Craven, who had relieved the watch, then decided against it. The Old Man would probably insist on making an investigation in person, in which case Grimes would have to pass another boring hour or so in the Control Room.

The two men made their way aft until they came to the forward bulkhead of the cargo spaces. Normally these would have been pressurized, but, when Epsilon Sextans’ atmosphere had been replenished from Delta Orionis’ emergency cylinders, it had seemed pointless to waste precious oxygen. So access was through an airlock that had a locker outside, in which suits, ready for immediate use, were stowed.

Grimes and Baxter suited up, helping each other as required. Then the engineer put out his gloved hand to the airlock controls. Grimes stopped him, bent forward to touch helmets. He said, “Hang on. If we open the door it’ll register on the panel in Control.”

“Like hell it will!” came the reply. “Most of the wiring was slashed through during the piracy. I fixed the hold lights-but damn all else.” Grimes, through the transparency of the visors, saw the other’s grin. “For obvious reasons.”

Grimes shrugged, released Baxter. Everything was so irregular that one more, relatively minor irregularity hardly mattered. He squeezed with the engineer into the small airlock, waited until the atmosphere it held had been pumped back into the body of the ship, then himself pushed the button that actuated the mechanism of the inner valve.

This was not the first time that he had been in the cargo spaces. Some of the weapons “borrowed” from Delta Orionis’ cargo had been mounted in the holds. When he had made his inspections it had never occurred to him that the opening and closing of the airlock door had not registered in Control.

He stood back and let Baxter lead the way. The engineer pulled himself to one of the bins in which he had been foraging. The door to it was still open,

and crates and cartons disturbed by the pillager floated untidily around the opening.

“You’ll have to get all this restowed,” said Grimes sharply. “If we have to accelerate there’ll be damage.” But he might as well have been speaking to himself. The suit radios had not been switched on and, in any case, there was no air to carry sound waves, however faintly.

Baxter had scrambled into the open bin. Grimes followed him, saw him standing by the case, its top prized open, that carried the lettering, BELUGA CAVIAR. PRODUCE OF THE RUSSIAN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC

REPUBLIC. Baxter beckoned. Grimes edged his way past the drifting packages to join him.

There was something in the case-but it was not jars or cans of salted sturgeon’s eggs. It looked at first like a glittering, complex piece of mobile statuary, although it was motionless. It was a metal mismating of gyroscope and Moebius Strip. It did not look wrong-nothing functional ever does-but it did look odd.

Grimes was standing hard against Baxter now. Their helmets were touching. He asked, “What . . . what is it?”

“I was hopin’ you’d be able ter tell me, Admiral.” Then, as Grimes extended a cautious hand into the case, “Careful! Don’t touch nothin’!”

“Why not?”

  • ‘Cause this bloody lot was booby-trapped, that’s why. See that busted spring? An’ see that cylinder in the corner? That’s a thermite bomb, or somethin’ worse. Shoulda gone orf when I pried the lid up-but luckily I buggered the firin’ mechanism with me bar when I stuck it inter just the right crack. But I think the bastard’s deloused now.”

“It looks as though it-whatever it is-is hooked up to one of the electrical circuits.”

“Yair. An’ it’s not the lightin’ circuit. Must be the airlock indicators.” “Must be.” As a weapons expert, Grimes could see the thermite bomb-if

that was what it was- had been rendered ineffective. It hadn’t been an

elaborate trap, merely a device that would destroy the-the thing if the case housing it were tampered with. Baxter had been lucky-and, presumably, those who had planted the-what the hell was it?-unlucky.

With a cautious finger he nudged the rotor.

It turned-and he was reminded of those other rotors, the ever-precessing gyroscopes of the Mannschenn Drive.

He remembered, then. He remembered a series of lectures at the Academy on future weapons and navigational devices. Having decided upon his specialty he had been really interested only in the weapons. But there had been talk of a man called Carlotti, who was trying to develop a device that would induce temporal precession in radio signals, so that instantaneous communications would be possible throughout the Galaxy without ships and

shore stations having to rely upon the temperamental and unreliable telepaths. And beacons, employing the same principle, could be used for navigation by ships under interstellar drive . . . .

So this could be one of Signor Carlotti’s gadgets. Perhaps the Empire of Waverley had offered him a higher price than had the Federation. But why the BELUGA CAVIAR? To deter and confuse industrial spies? But Epsilon Sextans possessed excellent strong rooms for the carriage of special cargo.

And why was the thing wired up?

Suddenly it was obvious. Somehow, the Duchy of Waldegren possessed Carlotti equipment. This . . . this beacon had been transmitting, unknown to anybody aboard the ship, during the voyage. The frigates had homed upon her. When, inadvertently, its power supply had been shut off the victim, using random precession, had been able to make her escape.

So, if the pirates were to make a second attack it would have to be reactivated.

“We’d better throw this lot on to the Old Man’s plate,” said Grimes. CAPTAIN CRAVEN listened intently as Grimes and Baxter told their story.

They feared that he was going to lose his temper when told of the

engineer’s cargo pillaging, but he only remarked, in a dry voice, “I guess that the consignees can afford to compensate us for our time and trouble. Even so, Mr. Baxter, I insist that this practice must cease forthwith.” And then, when Grimes described the device, he said, “Yes, I have heard of Carlotti’s work. But I didn’t think that he’d got as far as a working model. But the thing could have been developed by Waldegrenese scientists from the data in his published papers.”

“So you agree, sir, that it is some kind of beacon upon which the pirates can home?”

“What else can it be? Now, gentlemen, we find ourselves upon the horns of a dilemma. If we don’t reactivate the bloody thing, the chances are that we shall deliver the ship and cargo intact, at no great risk to ourselves, and to the joy of the underwriters. If we do reactivate it-then the chances are that we shall have to fight our way through. And there’s no guarantee that we shall be on the winning side.”

“I was shanghaied away here as a gunnery officer,” said Grimes. “Shanghaied-or press-ganged?” queried Craven.

“The technique was more that of the shanghai,” Grimes told him.

“Indeed?” Craven’s voice was cold. “But no matter. “You’re here, and you’re one of my senior officers. What course of action do you recommend?”

Grimes replied slowly and carefully. “Legally speaking, what we’re involved in isn’t a war. But it is a war, of sorts. And a just war. And, in any case, the Master of a merchant vessel has the legal right to resist illegal seizure or destruction by force of arms. Of course, we have to consider the illegal circumstances attending the arming of this ship . . . .”

“Let’s not get bogged down in legalities and illegalities,” said Craven, with a touch of impatience. “The lawyers can sort it all out eventually. Do we reactivate?”

“Yes,” said Grimes.

“And you, Mr. Baxter. What do you say?”

“We Rim Worlders just don’t like Waldegren. I’ll not pass up a chance ter kick the bastards in the teeth. Reactivate, Skipper.”

“Good. And how long will it take you to make good the circuit the beacon’s spliced in to?”

“Twenty minutes. No more. But d’yer think we oughter put the whole thing to the vote first?”

“No. Everybody here was under the impression that we should be fighting. With one possible exception, they’re all volunteers.”

“But I did volunteer, sir,” objected Grimes.

“Make your mind up, Ensign. You were telling me just now that you’d been shanghaied. All right. Everybody is a volunteer. So we just rebait the trap without any more yapping about it. Let me know as soon as you’re ready, Mr. Baxter. Will you require assistance?”

“I’ll manage, Skipper.”

When he was gone Craven turned to Grimes. “You realize, Ensign, that this puts me in rather a jam. Let me put it this way. Am I justified in risking the lives of all my officers to carry out a private act of vengeance?”

“I think that you can take Mr. Baxter and myself as being representative, sir. As for the others-Miss Pentecost’s a Rim Worlder, and her views will coincide with Baxter’s. And the original crew members-they’re just as entitled to vengeance as you are. I know that if I’d been an officer of this ship at the time of the original piracy I’d welcome the chance of hitting back.”

“You would. Yes. Even if, as now, an alternative suddenly presented itself. But . . .”

“I honestly don’t see what you’re worrying about, sir.”

“You wouldn’t. It’s a matter of training. But, for all my Reserve commission, I’m a merchant officer. Oh, I know that any military commander is as responsible for the lives of his men as I am-but he also knows that those lives, like his own, are expendable.”

“It’s a pity that Baxter found the beacon,” said Grimes.

“It is-and it isn’t. If he hadn’t found it, I shouldn’t be soliloquizing like a spacefaring Hamlet. And we should have brought the ship in intact and, like as not, all been awarded Lloyd’s Medals. On the other hand-if he hadn’t found it we-or I?-should have lost our chance of getting back at the

pirates.”

“You aren’t Hamlet, sir.” Grimes spoke with the assurance of the very young, but in later years he was to remember his words, and to feel neither shame nor embarrassment, but only a twinge of envy and regret. “You  aren’t Hamlet. You’re Captain Craven, Master under God. Please, sir, for once in your life do something you want to do, and argue it out later with the Almightly if you must.”

“And with my owners?” Grimes couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw something like a smile beneath Craven’s full beard. “And with my owners?”

“Master Astronauts’ certificates aren’t all that common, sir. If worst comes to worst, there’s always the Rim Worlds. The Sundowner Line, isn’t it?”

“I’d already thought of that.” There was no doubt about it. Craven was smiling. “After all that you’ve been saying to me, I’m surprised that you don’t join forces with our Miss Pentecost.”

“Go out to the Rim, sir? Hardly.”

“Don’t be so sure, young Grimes. Anyhow, you’d better get Miss Pentecost up here now so that we can see how friend Baxter is getting on. There’s always the risk that he’ll find a few more things among the cargo that aren’t nailed down.”

XV

GRIMES CALLED Jane Pentecost on the intercom; after a minute or so she made her appearance in Control. Craven told her what Baxter had discovered and what he, Craven, intended doing about it. She nodded in emphatic agreement. “Yes,” she said. “The thing’s here to be used-and to be used the way that we want to use it. But I don’t think that we should make it public.”

“Why not, Miss Pentecost?”

“I could be wrong, Captain, but in my opinion there are quite a few people in this ship who’d welcome the chance of wriggling out of being the cheese in the mousetrap. When there’s no alternative they’re brave enough. When there’s a face-saving alternative . . .”

Baxter’s voice came from the intercom speaker. “Chief Reaction Drive Engineer to Control. Repairs completed. Please check your panel.”

Yes, the circuit had been restored. The buzzer sounded, and on the board a glowing red light showed that the outer door to the cargo hold airlock was open. How much of the failure of the indicators was due to battle damage and how much to Baxter’s sabotage would never be known. Craven’s heavy eyebrows lifted ironically as he looked at Grimes, and Grimes shrugged in reply.

Then, the watch handed over to the girl, the two men made their way aft from the Control Room. Outside the airlock they found Baxter, already suited up save for his helmet. There had been only two suits in the locker, and the engineer had brought another one along for the Captain from

somewhere.

The little compartment would take only two men at a time. Craven and Grimes went through first, then were joined by Baxter. There was no longer any need for secrecy, so the suit radios were switched on. The only person likely to be listening in was Jane Pentecost in Control.

Grimes heard Craven muttering angrily as they passed packages that obviously had been opened and pillaged, but the Captain did no more than mutter. He possessed the sense of proportion so essential to his rank-and a few bulbs of looted liquor were, after all, relatively unimportant.

They came to the bin in which the case allegedly containing caviar had been stowed, in which some secret agent of Waldegren had tapped the circuit supplying power to the beacon. Inside the box the gleaming machine was still motionless. Craven said, “I thought you told me the current was on.”

“It is, Skipper.” Baxter’s voice was pained. “But I switched it off before I fixed the wiring.” He extended a gloved finger, pressed a little toggle switch.

And nothing happened.

“Just a nudge.” whispered the engineer.

The oddly convoluted rotor turned easily enough, and as it rotated it seemed almost to vanish in a mist of its own generating-a mist that was no more than an optical illusion.

It rotated, slowed-and stopped.

Baxter cast aspersions upon the legitimacy of its parenthood. Then, still grumbling, he produced a volt-meter. Any doubt that power was being delivered to the machine was soon dispelled. Power was being delivered-but it was not being used.

“Well, Mr. Baxter?” demanded Craven.

“I’m a fair mechanic, Skipper-but I’m no physicist.” “Mr. Grimes?”

“I specialized in gunnery, sir.”

Craven snorted, the sound unpleasantly loud in the helmet phones. He said sarcastically, “I’m only the Captain, but I have some smatterings of Mannschenn Drive maintenance and operation. This thing isn’t a Mannschenn Drive unit-but it’s first cousin to one. As I recall it, some of the earlier models couldn’t be started without the employment of a small, temporal precession field initiator. Furthermore, these initiators, although there is no longer any need for them, are still carried as engine room  spares in the Commission’s ships.”

“And that gadget’ll start this little time-twister, Skipper?” asked the engineer.

“It might, Mr. Baxter. It might. So, Mr. Grimes, will you go along to the Mannschenn Drive room and ask Mr. Wolverton for his initiator? No need to tell him what it’s for.”

WOLVERTON was in the Mannschenn Drive room, staring moodily at the gleaming complexity of precessing rotors. Grimes hastily averted his eyes from the machine. It frightened him, and he didn’t mind admitting it. And there was something about the engineer that frightened him, too. The tall, cadaverous man, with the thin strands of black hair drawn over his  gleaming skull, looked more like a seer than a ship’s officer, looked like a fortune-teller peering into the depths of an uncannily mobile crystal ball. He was mumbling, his voice a low, guttural muttering against the thin, high keening of his tumbling gyroscopes. The Ensign at last was able to make out the words.

“Divergent tracks . . . . To be, or not to be, that is the question-“

Grimes thought, This ship should be renamed the State of Denmark. There’s something rotten here . . . . He said sharply, “Mr. Wolverton!”

Slowly the Chief Interstellar Drive Engineer turned his head, stared at Grimes unseeingly at first. His eyes came into focus. He whispered, “It’s you.”

“Who else, Chief? Captain’s compliments, and he’d like to borrow your temporal precession field initiator.”

“He would, would he? And why?”

“An-an experiment.” said Grimes, with partial truth. The fewer people who knew the whole truth the better.

“An experiment?”

“Yes. If you wouldn’t mind letting me have it now, Chief . . . .”

“But it’s engine room stores. It’s the Commission’s stores. It’s a very delicate instrument. It is against the Commission’s regulations to issue it to unqualified personnel.”

“But Mr. Baxter is helping with the . . . experiment.”

“Mr. Baxter! That letter-off of cheap fireworks. That . . . Rim Runner! No. No. Mr. Baxter is not qualified personnel.”

“Then perhaps you could lend us one of your juniors.”

“No. No, I would not trust them. Why do you think that I am here, Mr. Grimes? Why do you think that I have been tied to my gyroscopes? Literally tied, almost. If I had not been here, keeping my own watch, when the pirates struck, this ship would have been utterly destroyed. I know the Drive, Mr. Grimes.” He seized the Ensign’s arm, turned him so that he was facing the gleaming, spinning rotors, endlessly precessing, endlessly tumbling down the dark dimensions, shimmering on the very verge of invisibility. Grimes wanted to close his eyes, but could not. “I know the Drive, Mr. Grimes. It talks to me. It shows me things. It warned me, that

time, that Death was waiting for this ship and all in her. And now it warns me again. But there is a . . . a divergence . . . .”

“Mr. Wolverton, please! There is not much time.”

“But what is Time, Mr. Grimes? What is Time? What do you know of the forking World Lines, the Worlds of If? I’ve lived with this machine, Mr. Grimes. It’s part of me-or am I part of it? Let me show you . . . .” His grip on the Ensign’s arm was painful. “Let me show you. Look. Look into the machine. What do you see?”

Grimes saw only shadowy, shimmering wheels and a formless darkness. “I see you, Mr. Grimes,” almost sang the engineer. “I see you-but not as

you will be. But as you might be. I see you on the bridge of your flagship,

your uniform gold-encrusted and medal-bedecked, with commodores and captains saluting you and calling you ‘sir’ . . . but I see you, too, in the control room of a shabby little ship, a single ship, in shabby clothes, and the badge on your cap is one that I have never seen, is one that does not yet exist . . . .”

“Mr. Wolverton! That initiator. Please!”

“But there is no hurry, Mr. Grimes. There is no hurry. There is time enough for everything-for everything that is, that has been, that will be and that might be. There is time to decide, Mr. Grimes. There is time to decide whether or not we make our second rendezvous with Death. The initiator is part of it all, Mr. Grimes, is it not? The initiator is the signpost that stands at the forking of the track. You weren’t here, Mr. Grimes, when the pirates struck. You did not hear the screams, you did not smell the stench of burning flesh. You’re young and foolhardy; all that you want is the chance to play with your toys. And all that I want, now that I know that alternatives exist, is the chance to bring this ship to her destination with no further loss of life.”

“Mr. Wolverton . . .”

“Mr. Grimes!” It was Captain Craven’s voice, and he was in a vile temper. “What the hell do you think you’re playing at?”

“Captain,” said Wolverton. “I can no more than guess at what you intend to do-but I have decided not to help you to do it.”

“Then give us the initiator. We’ll work it ourselves.” “No, Captain.”

“Give me the initiator, Mr. Wolverton. That’s an order.”

“A lawful command, Captain? As lawful as those commands of yours that armed this ship?”

“Hold him, Grimes!” (And who’s supposed to be holding whom? wondered the Ensign. Wolverton’s grip was still tight and painful on his arm.) “Hold him, while I look in the storeroom!”

“Captain! Get away from the door! You’ve no right . . .”

Wolverton relinquished his hold on Grimes who, twisting with an agility that surprised himself, contrived to get both arms about the engineer’s waist. In the scuffle the contact between their magnetic shoe soles and the deck was broken. They hung there, helpless, with no solidity within reach of their flailing limbs to give them purchase. They hung there, clinging to each  other, but more in hate than in love. Wolverton’s back was to the machine; he could not see, as could Grimes, that there was an indraught of air into the spinning, shimmering complexity. Grimes felt the beginnings of panic, more than the mere beginnings. There were no guardrails; he had read somewhere why this was so, but the abstruse physics involved did not matter-all that mattered was that there was nothing to prevent him and Wolverton from being drawn into the dimension-twisting field of the thing.

He freed, somehow, his right hand, and with an effort that sprained his shoulder brought it around in a sweeping, clumsy and brutal blow to the engineer’s face. Wolverton screamed and his grip relaxed. Violently, Grimes shoved away. To the action there was reaction.

Craven emerged from the storeroom, carrying something that looked like a child’s toy gyroscope in a transparent box. He looked around for Grimes and Wolverton at deck level and then, his face puzzled, looked up. He did not, as Grimes had been doing for some seconds, vomit-but his face, behind the beard went chalk-white. He put out his free hand and, not ungently, pulled Grimes to the deck.

He said, his voice little more than a whisper, “There’s nothing we can do. Nothing-except to get a pistol and finish him off . . . .”

Grimes forced himself to look again at the slimy, bloody obscenity that was a man turned, literally, inside-out-heart (if it was the heart) still beating, intestines still writhing.

XVI

IT WAS GRIMES who went for a pistol, fetching a Minetti from the weapons rack that he, himself, had fitted up in the Control Room. He told Jane Pentecost what he wanted it for. He made no secret of either his horror or his self blame.

She said, “But this is a war, even if it’s an undeclared one. And in a war you must expect casualties.”

“Yes, yes. I know. But I pushed him into the field.”

“It was an accident. It could easily have been you instead of him. And I’m glad that it wasn’t.”

“But you haven’t seen . . .”

“And I don’t want to.” Her voice hardened. “Meanwhile, get the hell out of here and back to the Mannschenn Drive room. If you’re so sorry for the poor bastard, do something about putting him out of his misery.”

“But . . .”

“Don’t be such a bloody coward, Grimes.”

The words hurt-mainly because there was so much truth in them. Grimes was dreading having to see again the twisted obscenity that had once been a man, was dreading having to breathe again the atmosphere of that compartment, heavy with the reek of hot oil, blood and fecal matter. But, with the exception of Craven, he was the only person in the ship trained in the arts of war. He recalled the words of a surgeon-commander who had lectured the midshipmen of his course on the handling of battle

casualties-and recalled, too, how afterward the young gentlemen had sneered at the bloodthirstiness of one who was supposed to be a professional healer. “When one of your shipmates has really had it, even if he’s your best friend, don’t hesitate a moment about finishing him off. You’ll be doing him a kindness. Finish him off-and get him out of sight. Shockingly wounded men are bad for morale.”

“What are you waiting for?” demanded Jane Pentecost. “Do you want me to do it?”

Grimes said nothing, just hurried out of the Control Room.

Craven was still in the Mannschenn Drive room when Grimes got back there. With him were two of the interstellar drive engineers-the Second and the Third. Their faces were deathly white, and the Second’s prominent Adam’s apple was working spasmodically, but about them there was an air of grim resolution. The Third-how could he bear to touch that slimy, reeking

mess?-had hold of its shoulders (white, fantastically contorted bone gleaming pallidly among red convolutions of flesh), while the Second, a heavy spanner in his hand, was trying to decide where to strike.

The Captain saw Grimes. “Give me that!” he snapped, and snatched the pistol from the Ensign’s hand. Then, to the engineers, “Stand back!”

The little weapon rattled sharply and viciously. To the other smells was added the acridity of burned propellant. What had been Wolverton was driven to the deck by the impact of the tiny projectiles, and adhered there. There was surprisingly little blood, but the body had stopped twitching.

Craven handed the empty pistol back to the Ensign. He ordered, “You stay here, Mr. Grimes, and organize the disposal of the body.” He went to the locker where he had put the initiator, took out the little instrument and, carrying it carefully, left the Mannschenn Drive room. Neither of the engineers, still staring with horrified fascination at their dead Chief, noticed.

“How . . . how did it happen?” asked the Second, after a long silence. “He fell into the field,” said Grimes.

“But how? How? He was always getting on us about being careless, and telling us what was liable to happen to us, and now it’s happened to him-“

“That’s the way of it,” contributed the Third, with a certain glum satisfaction. “Don’t do as I do, do as I say.”

“Have you a box?” asked Grimes.

“A box?” echoed the Second.

“Yes. A box.” Now that he was doing something, doing something useful, Grimes was beginning to feel a little better. “We can’t have a funeral while we’re running under interstellar drive. We have to . . . to put him somewhere.” Out of sight, he mentally added.

“That chest of spares?” muttered the Second. “Just the right size,” agreed the Third.

“Then get it,” ordered Grimes.

The chest, once the spares and their packing had been removed and stowed elsewhere, was just the right size. Its dimensions were almost those of a coffin. It was made of steel, its bottom magnetized, and remained where placed on the deck while the three men, fighting down their recurring nausea, handled the body into it. All of them sighed audibly in relief when, at last, the close-fitting lid covered the remains. Finally, the Third ran a welding torch around the joint. As he was doing so the lights flickered.

Was it because of the torch? wondered Grimes. Or was it because the beacon in the hold had been reactivated?

Somehow he could not feel any real interest.

CLEANED UP after a fashion, but still feeling physically ill, he was back in the Control Room. Craven was there, and Baxter was with him. Jane Pentecost had been relieved so that she could attend to her duties in the galley. “Not that I feel like a meal,” the Captain had said. “And I doubt very much that Mr. Grimes does either.”

“Takes a lot ter put me off me tucker,” the engineer declared cheerfully as he worked on the airlock door telltale panel.

“You didn’t see Mr. Wolverton, Mr. Baxter,” said Craven grimly.

“No, Skipper. An’ I’m not sorry I didn’t.” He paused in his work to rummage in his tool bag. He produced bulbs of brandy. “But I thought you an’ the Ensign might need some o’ this.”

Craven started to say something about cargo pillage, then changed his mind. He accepted the liquor without further quibbling. The three men sipped in silence.

Baxter carelessly tossed his squeezed empty bulb aside, continued with what he had been doing. The Captain said to Grimes, “Yes. We got the thing started again. And we’ve improved upon it.”

“Improved upon it, sir? How?”

“It’s no longer only a beacon. It’s also an alarm. As soon as it picks up the radiation from the similar pieces of apparatus aboard the enemy frigates, the buzzer that Mr. Baxter is fitting up will sound, the red light will flash. We shall have ample warning . . . .”

“She’ll be right, Skipper,” said the engineer.

“Thank you, Mr. Baxter. And now; if you don’t mind, I’d like a few words in private with Mr. Grimes.”

“Don’t be too hard on him, Skipper.”

Baxter winked cheerfully at Grimes and left the control room.

“Mr. Grimes,” Craven’s voice was grave. “Mr. Grimes, today, early in your career, you have learned a lesson that some of us never have to learn. You have killed a man-yes, yes, I know that it was not intentional-and you have been privileged to see the end result of your actions.

“There are many of us who are, who have been, killers. There are many of us who have pushed buttons but who have never seen what happens at the other end of the trajectory. Perhaps people slaughtered by explosion or laser beam do not look quite so horrible as Wolverton-but, I assure you, they often look horrible enough, and often die as slowly and as agonizingly. You know, now, what violent death looks like, Mr. Grimes. So tell me, are you still willing to push your buttons, to play pretty tunes on your battle organ?”

“And what did the bodies in this ship look like, Captain?” asked Grimes. Then, remembering that one of the bodies had belonged to the woman whom Craven had loved, he bitterly regretted having asked the question.

“Not pretty,” whispered Captain Craven. “Not at all pretty.” “I’ll push your buttons for you,” Grimes told him.

And for Jane Pentecost, he thought. And for the others. And for myself? The worst of it all is that I haven’t got the excuse of saying that it’s what I’m paid for . . . .

XVII

DOWN THE DARK dimensions fell Epsilon Sextans, falling free through the warped continuum. But aboard the ship time still possessed meaning, the master chronometer still ticked away the seconds, minutes and hours; the little man-made world was still faithful to that puissant god of scientific intelligences everywhere in the universe-the Clock. Watch succeeded watch in Control Room and engine room. Meals were prepared and served on time. There was even, toward the end, a revival of off-duty social activities: a chess set was discovered and brought into use, playing cards were  produced and a bridge school formed.

But there was one social activity that, to Grimes’ disappointment was not resumed-the oldest social activity of them all. More than once he pleaded with Jane-and every time she laughed away his pleas. He insisted-and that made matters worse. He was (as he said), the donkey who had been allowed one nibble of the carrot and who could not understand why the carrot had been snatched away. He was (she said), a donkey. Period.

He should have guessed what was happening, but he did not. He was young, and inexperienced in the ways of women-of men and women. He

just could not imagine that Jane would spare more than a casual glance for any of the engineers or for the flabby, pasty youth who was the psionic radio officer-and in this he was right.

Epsilon Sextans was, for a ship of her class, very well equipped. In addition to the usual intercom system she was fitted with closed circuit television. In the event of emergency the Captain or watch officer, by the flip of a switch, could see what was happening in any compartment of the vessel. Over the control panel, in big, red letters, were the words: EMERGENCY USE ONLY. Grimes did not know what was the penalty for improper use of the apparatus in the Merchant Navy-but he did know that in the Survey Service officers had been cashiered and given an ignominious discharge for this offense. The more cramped and crowded the conditions in which men-and women-work and live, the more precious is privacy.

It was Grimes’ watch.

When he had taken over, all the indications were that it would be as boring as all the previous watches. All that was required of the watchkeeper was that he stay awake. Grimes stayed awake. He had brought a book with him into Control, hiding it inside his uniform shirt, and it held his attention for a while. Then, following the example of generations of watch officers, he set up a game of three dimensional tic-tac-toe in the chart tank and played, right hand against left. The left hand was doing remarkably well when a buzzer sounded. The Ensign immediately cleared the tank and looked at the airlock indicator panel. But there were no lights on the board, and he realized that it was the intercom telephone.

“Control,” he said into his microphone.

“P.R.O. here. I . . . I’m not happy, Mr. Grimes . . . .” “Who is?” quipped Grimes.

“I . . . I feel . . . smothered.”

“Something wrong with the ventilation in your shack?”

“No. NO. It’s like . . . it’s like a heavy blanket soaked in ice-cold water . . .

. You can’t move . . . you can’t shout . . . you can’t hear . . . . It’s like it was before . . . .”

“Before what?” snapped Grimes-and then as the other buzzer sounded, as the additional red light flashed on the telltale panel, he realized the stupidity of his question.

At once he pressed the alarm button. This was it, at last. Action Stations! Throughout the ship the bells were shrilling, the klaxons squawking. Hastily Grimes vacated the pilot’s chair, slipped into the one from which he could control his weapons-and from which he could reach out to other controls. But where was the Old Man? Where was Captain Craven? This was the moment that he had longed for, this was the consummation toward which all his illegalities had been directed. Damn it all, where was he?

Perhaps he was floating stunned in his quarters-starting up hurriedly from

sleep he could have struck his head upon some projection, knocked himself out. If this were the case he, Grimes, would have to call Jane from her own battle station in Sick Bay to render first aid. But there was no time to lose.

The Ensign reached out, flipped the switches that would give him the picture of the interior of the Captain’s accommodation. The screen brightened, came alive. Grimes stared at the luminous presentation in sick horror. Luminous it was-with that peculiar luminosity of naked female flesh. Jane was dressing herself with almost ludicrous haste. Of the Captain there was no sign-on the screen.

Craven snarled, with cold ferocity, “You damned, sneaking, prurient puppy!” Then, in a louder voice, “Switch that damn thing off! I’ll deal with you when this is over.”

“But, sir . . .” “Switch it off, I say!”

Cheeks burning, Grimes obeyed. Then he sat staring at his armament controls, fighting down his nausea, his physical sickness. Somehow, he found time to think bitterly, So I was the knight, all set and ready to slay dragons for his lady. And all the time, she . . . He did not finish the thought.

He heard a voice calling over the intercom, one of the engineers. “Captain, they’re trying to lock on! Same as last time. Random precession, sir?”

“No. Cut the Drive!”

“Cut the Drive?” Incredulously. “You heard me. Cut!” Then, to Grimes, “And what the hell are you waiting for?”

The Ensign knew what he had to do; he had rehearsed it often enough. He did it. From the nozzles that pierced the outer shell spouted the cloud of reflective vapor, just in time, just as the enemy’s lasers lashed out at their target. It seemed that the ship’s internal temperature rose suddenly and sharply-although that could have been illusion, fostered by the sight of the fiery fog glimpsed through the viewports before the armored shutters slammed home.

There were targets now on Grimes’ fire control screen, two of them, but he could not loose a missile until the tumbling rotors of the Drive had ceased to spin, to precess. The use of the anti-laser vapor screen had been risky enough. Abruptly the screens went blank-which signified that the temporal precession rates of hunted and hunters were no longer in synchronization, that the fields of the pirates had failed to lock on. In normal spacetime there would be no need to synchronize-and then the hunters would discover that their quarry had claws and teeth.

Aboard Epsilon Sextans the keening note of the Drive died to a whisper, a barely audible murmur, fading to silence. There was the inevitable second or so of utter disorientation when, as soon as it was safe, the engineers braked the gyroscopes.

Craven acted without hesitation, giving his ship headway and acceleration with Inertial Drive. He was not running-although this was the impression that he wished to convey. He was inviting rather than evading combat-but if the Waldegren captains chose to assume that Epsilon Sextans was, as she had been, an unarmed merchantman (after all, the anti-laser screen could have been jury rigged from normal ship’s stores and equipment), taking evasive action, that was their error of judgment.

Grimes watched his screens intently. Suddenly the two blips reappeared, astern, all of a hundred kilos distant, but closing. This he reported.

“Stand by for acceleration!” ordered Craven. “Reaction Drive-stand by!”

It was all part of the pattern-a last, frantic squandering of reaction mass that could do no more than delay the inevitable. It would look good from the enemy control rooms.

“Reaction Drive ready!” reported Baxter over the intercom.

“Thank you. Captain to all hands, there will be no countdown. Fire!”

From the corner of his eye Grimes saw Craven’s hand slam down on the key. Acceleration slammed him brutally back into his chair. There was a roar that was more like an explosion than a normal rocket firing, a shock that jarred and rattled every fitting in the Control Room.

Craven remarked quietly. “That must have looked convincing enough-but I hope that Baxter didn’t really blow a chamber.”

There was only the Inertial Drive now, and the two blips that, very briefly, had fallen astern, were now creeping up again, closing the range.

“Anti-laser,” ordered Craven briefly. “But, sir, it’ll just be wasting it. They’ll not be using laser outside twenty kilometers.”

“They’ll not be expecting a gunnery specialist aboard this wagon, either.” Once again the nozzles spouted, pouring out a cloud that fell rapidly astern

of the running ship, dissipating uselessly.

Craven looked at his own screens, frowned, muttered, “They’re taking their sweet time about it . . . probably low on reaction mass themselves.” He turned to Grimes. “I think a slight breakdown of the I.D.’s in order.”

“As you say, sir.” The Ensign could not forget having been called a damned, sneaking, prurient puppy. Let Craven make his own decisions.

“Stand by for Free Fall,” ordered the Captain quietly. The steady throbbing of the Inertial Drive faltered, faltered and ceased. There were two long minutes of weightlessness, and then, for five minutes, the Drive came back into operation. A breakdown, the enemy must be thinking. A breakdown, and the engineers sweating and striving to get the ship under way again. A breakdown-it would not be surprising after the mauling she had endured at the  first  encounter.

She hung there, and although her actual speed could be measured in kilometers a second she was, insofar as her accelerating pursuers were

concerned, relatively motionless. Grimes wondered why the warships did not use their radio, did not demand surrender-Epsilon Sextans’ transceiver was switched on, but no sound issued from the speaker but the hiss and crackle of interstellar static. He voiced his puzzlement to Craven.

Craven laughed grimly. “They know who we are-or they think that they know. And they know that we know who they are. After what happened before, why should we expect mercy? All that we can do now-they think-is to get the Mannschenn Drive going again. But with that comic beacon of theirs working away merrily they’ll be able to home on us, no matter how random our precession.” He laughed again. “They haven’t a care in the world, bless their little black hearts.”

Grimes watched his screens. Forty kilometers-thirty-“Sir, the ALGE?” he asked.

“Yes. It’s your party now.”

For the third time reflective vapor gushed from the nozzles, surrounding the ship with a dense cloud. Craven, who had been watching the dials of the external temperature thermometers, remarked quietly, “They’ve opened fire. The shell plating’s heating up. Fast.”

And in the Control Room it felt hot-and hotter, Grimes pressed the button that unmasked his batteries. The gas screen, as well as affording protection from laser, hid the ship from visual observation. The enemy would not be expecting defense by force of arms.

He loosed his first salvo, felt the ship tremble as the missiles ejected themselves from their launching racks. There they were on the screens-six tiny sparks, six moronic mechanical intelligences programmed to home upon and destroy, capable of countering evasive action so long as their  propellant held out. There they were on the screens-six of them, then four, then one. This last missile almost reached its target-then it, too, blinked out. The Waldegren frigates were now using their laser for defense, not attack.

“I don’t think,” remarked Craven quietly, “that they’ll use missiles. Not yet, anyhow. They want our cargo intact.” He chuckled softly. “But we’ve got them worried.”

Grimes didn’t bother to reply. The telltale lights on his panel told him that the six AVM launchers were reloaded. The AMMs-the anti-missile

missiles-had not yet been fired. Dare he risk their use against big targets? He carried in his magazines stock sufficient for three full salvos only- and with no laser for anti-missile work dare he deplete his supply of this ammunition?

He had heard the AMMs described as “vicious little brutes.” They were to the Anti-Vessel Missiles as terriers are to mastiffs. Their warheads were small, but this was compensated for by their greater endurance. They were, perhaps, a little more “intelligent” than the larger rockets-and Grimes, vaguely foreseeing this present contingency, had made certain  modifications to their “brains.”

He pushed the button that actuated his modifications, that overrode the original programming. He depressed the firing stud. He felt the vibration as the war-rockets streaked away from the ship, and on his screens watched the tiny points of light closing the range between themselves and the two big blips that were the targets. They were fast, and they were erratic. One was picked off by laser within the first ten seconds, but the others carried on, spurting and swerving, but always boring toward their objectives. Grimes could imagine the enemy gunnery officers flailing their lasers like men, armed only with sticks, defending themselves against a horde of small, savage animals. There was, of course, one sure defense-to start up the Mannschenn Drive and to slip back into the warped continuum where   the missiles could not follow. But, in all probability, the Waldegren captains had yet to accept the fact, emotionally, that this helpless merchantman  had somehow acquired the wherewithal to strike back.

Two of the AMMs were gone now, picked off by the enemy laser. Three were still closing on the target on Epsilon Sextans’ port quarter, and only one of the target abaft the starboard beam. Grimes loosed his second flight of AMMs, followed it with a full salvo of AVMs. Then, knowing that the protective vapor screen must have been thinned and shredded by his rocketry, he sent out a replenishing gush of reflective gas.

He heard Craven cry out in exultation. The three AMMs of the first flight had hit their target, the three sparks had fused with the blip that represented the raider to port. The three sparks that were the second flight were almost there, and overtaking them were the larger and brighter sparks of the second AVM salvo. The Anti-Missile Missiles would cause only minor  damage to a ship-but, in all probability, they would throw fire control out of kilter, might even destroy laser projectors. In theory, one AVM would suffice to destroy a frigate; a hit by three at once would make destruction a certainty.

And so it was.

Seen only on the radar screen, as a picture lacking in detail painted on a fluorescent surface by an electron brush, it was anticlimactic. The blips, the large one, the three small ones and the three not so small, merged. And then there was an oddly shaped blob of luminescence that slowly broke up into a cluster of glowing fragments, a gradually expanding cluster, a leisurely burgeoning flower of pale fire.

Said Craven viciously, “The other bastard’s got cold feet . . . .”

And so it was. Where she had been on the screen was only darkness, a darkness in which the sparks that were missiles and anti-missiles milled about aimlessly. They would not turn upon each other-that would have been contrary to their programming. They would not, in theory, use their remaining fuel to home upon the only worthwhile target remaining-Epsilon Sextans herself. But, as Craven knew and as Grimes knew, theory and practice do not always coincide. Ships have been destroyed by their own missiles.

With reluctance Grimes pushed the DESTRUCT button. He said to the Captain, gesturing toward the wreckage depicted on the screen, “Pick up

survivors, sir? If there are any.”

“If there are any,” snarled Craven, “that’s their bad luck. No-we give chase to the other swine!”

XVIII

GIVE CHASE . . .

It was easier said than done. The surviving frigate had restarted her Mannschenn Drive, had slipped back into the warped continuum where, unless synchronization of precession rates was achieved and held, contact between vessels would be impossible. The Carlotti Beacon in Epsilon Sextans’ hold was worse than useless; it had been designed to be homed upon, not to be a direction-finding instrument. (In any case, it could function as such only if the beacon aboard the Waldegren ship were working.) Neither Craven nor Grimes knew enough about the device to effect the necessary modifications. The interstellar drive engineers thought that they could do it, but their estimates as to the time required ranged from days to weeks. Obviously, as long as it was operating it would be of value to the enemy only.

So it was switched off.

There was only one method available to Craven to carry out the

pursuit-psionic tracking. He sent for his Psionic Radio Officer, explained the situation. The telepath was a young man, pasty faced, unhealthy looking, but not unintelligent. He said at once, “Do you think, Captain, that the other officers and myself are willing to carry on the fight? After all, we’ve made our point. Wouldn’t it be wisest to carry on, now, for Waverley?”

“Speaking for meself,” put in Baxter, who had accompanied Jane Pentecost to Control, “an’ fer any other Rim Worlders present, I say that now the bastards are on the run it’s the best time ter smack ’em again. An’ hard. An’ the tame time-twisters think the same as we do. I’ve already had words with ’em.” He glared at the telepath. “Our snoopin’ little friend here should know very well what the general consensus of opinion is.”

“We do not pry,” said the communications officer stiffly. “But I am willing to abide by the will of the majority.”

“And don’t the orders of the Master come into it?” asked Craven, more in amusement than anger.

“Lawful commands, sir?” asked Grimes who, until now, had been silent. “Shut up!” snapped Jane Pentecost.

“Unluckily, sir,” the young man went on, “I do not possess the direction-finding talent. It is, as you know, quite rare.”

“Then what can you do?” demanded Craven.

“Sir, let me finish, please. The psionic damping device-I don’t know what it was, but I suspect that it was the brain of some animal with which I am unfamiliar-was in the ship that was destroyed. The other vessel carries only

a normal operator, with normal equipment-himself and some sort of organic amplifier. He is still within range, and I can maintain a listening watch-“

“And suppose he listens to you?” asked the Captain. “Even if you transmit nothing-as you will not do, unless ordered by myself-there could be stray thoughts. And that, I suppose, applies to all of us.”

The telepath smiled smugly. “Direction-finding is not the only talent. I’m something of a damper myself-although not in the same class as the one that was blown up. I give you my word, sir, that this vessel is psionically silent.” He raised his hand as Craven was about to say something. “Now, sir, I shall be able to find out where the other ship is heading. I know already that her Mannschenn Drive unit is not working at full capacity; it sustained damage of some kind during the action. I’m not a navigator, sir, but it seems to me that we could be waiting for her when she reemerges into the normal continuum.”

“You’re not a navigator,” agreed Craven, “and you’re neither a tactician nor  a strategist. We should look rather silly, shouldn’t we, hanging in full view over a heavily fortified naval base, a sitting duck. Even so . . .” His big right hand stroked his beard. “Meanwhile, I’ll assume that our little friends are headed in the general direction of Waldegren, and set course accordingly. If Mr. Grimes will be so good as to hunt up the target star in the Directory . .

.”

Grimes did as he was told. He had made his protest, such as it was, and, he had to admit, he was in favor of continuing the battle. It was a matter of simple justice. Why should one shipload of murderers be destroyed, and the other shipload escape unscathed? He was still more than a little dubious of the legality of it all, but he did not let it worry him.

He helped Craven to line the ship up on the target star, a yellow, fifth magnitude spark. He manned the intercom while the Captain poured on the acceleration and then, with the ship again falling free, cut in the Mannschenn Drive. When the vessel was on course he expected that the Old Man would give the usual order-“Normal Deep Space routine, Mr. Grimes,”-but this was not forthcoming.

“Now,” said Craven ominously. “Now what, sir?”

“You have a short memory, Ensign. A conveniently short memory, if I may say so. Mind you, I was favorably impressed by the way you handled your armament, but that has no bearing upon what happened before.”

Grimes blushed miserably. He knew what the Captain was driving at. But, playing for time, he asked, “What do you mean, sir?”

Craven exploded. “What do I mean? You have the crust to sit there and ask me that! Your snooping, sir. Your violation of privacy. Even worse, your violation of the Master’s privacy! I shall not tell Miss Pentecost; it would be unkind to embarrass her. But . . .”

Grimes refrained from saying that he had seen Miss Pentecost wearing even

less than when, inadvertently, he had spied upon her. He muttered, “I can explain, sir.”

“You’d better. Out with it.”

“Well, sir, it was like this. I knew that we’d stumbled on the enemy-or that the enemy had stumbled upon us. I’d sounded Action Stations. And when you were a long time coming up to Control I thought that you must have hurt yourself, somehow . . . there have been such cases, as you know. So I thought I’d better check-“

“You thought . . . you thought. I’ll not say that you aren’t paid to

think-because that’s just what an officer is paid for. But you didn’t think hard enough, or along the right lines.” Grimes could see that Craven had accepted his explanation and that all would be well. The Captain’s full beard could not hide the beginnings of a smile. “Did you ever hear of Sir Francis Drake, Ensign?”

“No, sir.”

“He was an admiral-one of Queen Elizabeth’s admirals. The first Elizabeth, of course. When the Spanish Armada was sighted he did not rush down to his flagship yelling ‘Action Stations!’ He knew that there was time to spare, and so he quietly finished what he was doing before setting sail.”

“And what was he doing, sir?” asked Grimes innocently. Craven glared at him, then snapped, “Playing bowls.”

Then, suddenly, the tension was broken and both men collapsed in helpless laughter. In part it was reaction to the strain of battle-but in greater part it was that freemasonry that exists only between members of the same sex, the acknowledgment of shared secrets and shared experiences.

Grimes knew that Jane Pentecost was not for him-and wished Craven joy of her and she of the Captain. Perhaps they had achieved a permanent relationship, perhaps not-but, either way, his best wishes were with them.

Craven unbuckled his seat strap.

“Deep Space routine, Mr. Grimes. It is your watch, I believe.” “Deep Space routine it is, sir.”

Yes, it was still his watch (although so much had happened). It was still  his watch, although there were barely fifteen minutes to go before relief.  He was tired, more tired than he had ever been in his life before. He was tired, but not unhappy. He knew that the fact that he had killed men should be weighing heavily upon his conscience-but it did not. They, themselves, had been killers-and they had had a far better chance than any of their own victims had enjoyed.

He would shed no tears for them. XIX

CRAVEN CAME BACK to the Control Room at the change of watch, when Grimes was handing over to Jane Pentecost. He waited until the routine had been completed, then said, “We know where our friends are headed. They were, like us, running for Waldegren-but they’re having to change course.” He laughed harshly. “There must be all hell let loose on their home planet.”

“Why? What’s happened?” asked Grimes.

“I’ll tell you later. But, first of all, we have an alteration of course ourselves. Look up Dartura in the Directory, will you, while I get the Drive shut down.”

Epsilon Sextans was falling free through normal spacetime before Grimes had found the necessary information. And then there was the hunt for and the final identification of the target star, followed by the lining up by the use of the directional gyroscopes. There was the brief burst of acceleration and then, finally, the interstellar drive was cut in once more.

The Captain made a business of selecting and lighting a cigar. When the pungent combustion was well under way he said, “Our young Mr. Summers  is a good snooper. Not as good as some people I know, perhaps.” Grimes flushed and Jane Pentecost looked puzzled. “He’s a super-sensitive. He let me have a full transcript of all the signals, out and in. It took us a little time to get them sorted out-but not too long, considering. Adler-that’s the name of the surviving frigate- was running for home. Her Captain sent a rather heavily edited report of the action to his Admiral. It seems that Adler and the unfortunate Albatross were set upon and beaten up by a heavily armed Survey Service cruiser masquerading as an innocent merchantman. The Admiral, oddly enough, doesn’t want a squadron of Survey Service battlewagons laying nuclear eggs on his base. So Adler has been told to run away and lose herself until the flap’s over . . . .”

“And did they send all that en clair?” demanded Grimes. “They must be mad!”

“No, they aren’t mad. The signal’s weren’t en clair.” “But . . .”

“Reliable merchant captains,” said Craven, “are often entrusted with highly confidential naval documents. There were some such in my safe aboard Delta Orionis, consigned to the Commanding Officer of Lindisfarne Base. The officer who delivered them to me is an old friend and shipmate of mine, and he told me that among them was the complete psionic code used by the Waldegren Navy. Well, when I had decided to take over this ship, I’d have been a bloody fool not to have Photostatted the whole damned issue.

“So that’s the way of it. Herr Kapitan von Leidnitz thinks he can say what he likes to his superiors without anybody else knowing what he’s saying. And all the while . . .” Craven grinned wolfishly. “It seems that there’s a minor base, of sorts, on Dartura. Little more than repair yards, although I suppose that there’ll be a few batteries for their protection. I can imagine the sort of personnel they have running the show-passed-over commanders and the like, not overly bright. By the time that we get there we shall have concocted a convincing story-convincing enough to let us hang off in orbit

until Adler appears on the scene. After all, we have their precious code. Why should they suspect us?”

“Why shouldn’t we be Adler?” asked Grimes. “What do you mean, Ensign?”

“The Waldegren Navy’s frigates are almost identical, in silhouette, with the Commission’s Epsilon class freighters. We could disguise this ship a little by masking the dissimilarities by a rough patching of plating. After all, Adler was in action and sustained some damage-“

“Complicated,” mused the Captain. “Too complicated. And two Adlers-each, presumably, in encoded psionic communication with both Waldegren and Dartura . . . . You’ve a fine, devious mind, young Grimes-but I’m afraid you’ve out-fixed yourself on that one.”

“Let me talk, sir. Let me think out loud. To begin with-a ship running on Mannschenn Drive can put herself into orbit about a planet, but it’s not, repeat not, recommended.”

“Damn right it’s not.”

“But we have the heels of Adler? Yes? Then we could afford a slight delay to carry out the modifications-the disguise-that I’ve suggested. After all, forty odd light years is quite a long way.”

“But what do we gain, Mr. Grimes?”

“The element of confusion, sir. Let me work it out. We disguise ourselves as well as we can. We find out, from intercepted and decoded signals, Adler’s ETA-and the coordinates of her breakthrough into the normal continuum. We contrive matters to be more or less in the same place at exactly the same time. And when the shore batteries and the guardships see no less than two Adlers slugging it out, each of them yelling for help in the secret code, they won’t know which of us to open fire on.”

“Grimes,” said Craven slowly, “I didn’t know you had it in you. All I can say is that I’m glad that you’re on our side.”

“Am I?” asked Grimes wonderingly,. suddenly deflated. He looked at the Captain who, after all, was little better than a pirate, whose accomplice he had become. He looked at the girl, but for whom he would not be here. “Am I? Damn it all, whose side am I on?”

“You’d better go below,” Craven told him gently. “Go below and get some sleep. You need it. You’ve earned it.”

“Jeremy,” said Jane Pentecost to Craven, “would you mind looking after the shop for half an hour or so? I’ll go with John.”

“As you please, my dear. As you please.”

It was the assurance in the Captain’s voice that hurt. It won’t make any difference to us, it implied. It can’t make any difference. Sure, Jane, go ahead. Throw the nice little doggie a bone . . . . we can spare it.

“No thank you,” said Grimes coldly, and left the Control Room. But he couldn’t hate these people.

XX

AFTER A LONG SLEEP Grimes felt better. After a meal he felt better still. It was a good meal, even though the solid portion of it came from tins. Craven’s standards were slipping, thought the Ensign. He was reasonably sure that such items as caviar, escargots, pƒt‚ de foie gras, Virginia ham, Brie, and remarkably alcoholic cherries were not included in the Commission’s inventory of emergency stores. And neither would be the  quite reasonable Montrachet, although it had lost a little by being decanted from its original bottles into standard squeeze bulbs. But if the Captain had decided that the laborer was worthy of his hire, with the consignees of the cargo making their contribution toward that hire, that was his privilege . . .? Responsibility?-call it what you will.

Jane Pentecost watched him eat. As he was finishing his coffee she said, “Now that our young lion has fed, he is required in the Control Room.”

He looked at her both gratefully and warily. “What have I done now?” “Nothing, my dear. It is to discuss what you-we-will do. Next.”

He followed her to Control. Craven was there, of course, and so were Baxter and Summers. The Captain was enjoying one of his rank cigars, and a limp, roll-your-own cigarette dangled from the engineer’s lower lip. The telepath coughed pointedly every time that acrid smoke expelled by either man drifted his way. Neither paid any attention to him, and neither did Grimes when he filled and lighted his own pipe.

Craven said, “I’ve been giving that scheme of yours some thought. It’s a good one.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Don’t thank me. I should thank you. Mr. Summers, here, has been maintaining a careful listening watch. Adler’s ETA is such that we can afford to shut down the Drive to make the modifications that you suggest. To begin with, we’ll fake patching plates with plastic sheets-we can’t afford to cannibalize any more of the ship’s structure-so as to obscure our name and identification letters. We’ll use more plastic to simulate missile launchers and laser projectors-luckily there’s plenty of it in the cargo.”

“We found more than plastic while we were lookin’ for it,” said the engineer, licking his lips.

“That will do, Mr. Baxter. Never, in normal circumstances, should I have condoned . . .”

“These circumstances ain’t normal, Skipper, an’ we all bloody well know it.” “That will do, I say.” Craven inhaled deeply, then filled the air of the

Control Room with a cloud of smoke that, thought Grimes, would have

reflected laser even at close range. Summers almost choked, and Jane

snapped, “Jeremy!”

“This, my dear, happens to be my Control Room.” He turned again to the Ensign. “It will not be necessary, Mr. Grimes, to relocate the real weapons. They functioned quite efficiently where they are and, no doubt, will do so again. And now, as soon as I have shut down the Drive, I shall hand the watch over to you. You are well rested and refreshed.”

“Come on,” said Jane to Baxter. “Let’s get suited up and get that sheeting out of the airlock.”

“Couldn’t Miss Pentecost hold the fort, sir?” asked Grimes. He added, “I’ve been through the camouflage course at the Academy.”

“And so have I, Mr. Grimes. Furthermore, Miss Pentecost has had experience in working outside, but I don’t think that you have.”

“No, sir. But . . . “

“That will be all, Mr. Grimes.”

At Craven’s orders the Drive was shut down, and outside the viewports the sparse stars became stars again, were no longer pulsing spirals of

multi-colored light. Then, alone in Control, Grimes actuated his scanners so that he could watch the progress of the work outside the hull, and switched on the transceiver that worked on the spacesuit frequency.

This time he ran no risk of being accused of being a Peeping Tom.

He had to admire the competence with which his shipmates worked. The plastic sheeting had no mass to speak of, but it was awkward stuff to handle. Torches glowed redly as it was cut, and radiated invisibly in the infrared as it was shaped and welded. The workers, in their bulky, clumsy suits, moved with a grace that was in startling contrast to their attire-a Deep Space ballet, thought Grimes, pleasurably surprised at his own way with words. From the speaker of the transceiver came Craven’s curt orders, the brief replies of the others.

“This way a little . . . that’s it.” “She’ll do, Skipper.”

“No she won’t. Look at the bend on it!”

Then Jane’s laughing voice. “Our secret weapon, Jeremy. A laser that fires around  corners!”

“That will do, Miss Pentecost. Straighten it, will you?” “Ay, ay, sir. Captain, sir.”

The two interstellar drive engineers were working in silence, but with efficiency. Aboard the ship were only Grimes and Summers, the telepath.

Grimes felt out of it, but somebody had to mind the shop, he supposed. But the likelihood of any customers was remote.

Then he stiffened in his chair. One of the spacesuited figures was falling away from the vessel, drifting out and away, a tiny, glittering satellite reflecting the harsh glare of the working floods, a little, luminous butterfly pinned to the black velvet of the Ultimate Night. Who was it? He didn’t know for certain, but thought that it was Jane. The ship’s interplanetary drives-reaction and inertial- were on remote control, but reaction drive was out; before employing it he would have to swing to the desired heading by use of the directional gyroscopes. But the inertial drive was versatile.

He spoke into the microphone of the transceiver. “Secure yourselves. I am proceeding to rescue.”

At once Craven’s voice snapped back, “Hold it, Grimes. Hold it! There’s no danger.”

“But, sir . . . ” “Hold it!”

Grimes could see the distant figure now from a viewport, but it did not seem to be receding any longer. Hastily he checked with the radar. Range and bearing were not changing. Then, with relative bearing unaltered, the range was closing. He heard Jane call out, “Got it! I’m on the way back!”

Craven replied, “Make it snappy-otherwise young Grimes’ll be chasing you all over the Universe!”

Grimes could see, now, the luminous flicker of a suit reaction unit from the lonely figure.

Later, he and the others examined the photographs that Jane had taken.

Epsilon Sextans looked as she was supposed to look-like a badly battle-scarred frigate of the Waldegren Navy.

XXI

IN TERMS OF SPACE and of time there was not much longer to go.

The two ships-one knowing and one unknowing-raced toward their rendezvous. Had they been plunging through the normal continuum there would have been, toward the finish, hardly the thickness of a coat of paint between them, the adjustment of a microsecond in temporal precession rates would have brought inevitable collision. Craven knew this from the results of his own observations and from the encoded position reports, sent at six hourly intervals, by Adler. Worried, he allowed himself to fall astern, a mere half kilometer. It would be enough-and, too, it would mean that the frigate would mask him from the fire of planet-based batteries.

Summers maintained his listening watch. Apart from the position reports he had little of interest to tell the Captain. Adler, once or twice, had tried to get in contact with the Main Base on Waldegren-but, other than from a curt directive to proceed as ordered there were no signals from the planet to the ship. Dartura Base was more talkative. That was understandable. There  was no colony on the planet and the Base personnel must be bored, must be pining for the sight of fresh faces, the sound of fresh voices. They would

have their excitement soon enough, promised Craven grimly.

Through the warped continuum fell the two ships, and ahead the pulsating spiral that was the Dartura sun loomed ever brighter, ever larger. There were light years yet to go, but the Drive-induced distortions made it seem that tentacles of incandescent gas were already reaching out to clutch them, to drag them into the atomic furnace at the heart of the star.

In both Control Rooms watch succeeded watch-but the thoughts and the anticipations of the watchkeepers were not the same. Aboard Adler there was the longing for rest, for relaxation-although Adler’s Captain must have been busy with the composition of a report that would clear him (if  possible) of blame for his defeat. Aboard Epsilon Sextans there was the anticipation of revenge-insofar as Craven, Baxter, Jane Pentecost and the survivors of the ship’s original personnel were concerned. Grimes? As the hour of reckoning approached he was more and more dubious. He did not know what to think, what to feel. There was the strong personal loyalty to Craven-and, even now, to Jane Pentecost. There was the friendship and mutual respect that had come into being between himself and Baxter.  There was the knowledge that Adler’s crew were no better than pirates, were murderers beyond rehabilitation. There was the pride he felt in his  own skill as a gunnery officer. (But, as such, was he, himself, any better than a pirate, a murderer? The exercise of his craft aboard a warship would be legal-but here, aboard a merchantman, and a disguised merchantman at that, the legality was doubtful. What had his motives been when he volunteered-and as a commissioned officer of the Survey Service he had had no right to do so-and what were his motives now?)

He, Grimes, was not happy. He had far too much time to ponder the implications. He was an accessory before, during and after the fact. He had started off correctly enough, when he had tried to prevent Craven from requisitioning the Survey Service cargo aboard Delta Orionis, but after that .

. . after he and Jane . . . (that, he admitted, was a memory that he wanted to keep, always, just as that other memory, of the bright picture of naked female flesh on the screen, he wished he could lose forever.)

He had started off correctly enough-and then, not only had he helped install the purloined armament but had used it. (And used it well, he told himself with a brief resurgence of pride.) Furthermore, the disguise of Epsilon Sextans had been his idea.

Oh, he was in it, all right. He was in up to his neck. What the final outcome of it all would be he did not care to contemplate.

But it would soon be over. He had no fears as to the outcome of the battle. The element of surprise would be worth at least a dozen missile launchers. Adler would never have the chance to use her laser.

ADLER, REPORTED SUMMERS, had shut down her Mannschenn Drive and emerged briefly into normal spacetime to make her final course adjustment. She was now headed not for the Dartura Sun but for the planet itself-or where the planet would be at the time of her final-and fatal- reemergence into the continuum. The last ETA was sent, together with the coordinates of her planetfall. Epsilon Sextans made her own course

adjustment-simultaneity in time and a half kilometer’s divergence in space being Craven’s objective. It was finicky work, even with the use of the ship’s computer, but the Captain seemed satisfied.

The race-the race that would culminate in a dead heat-continued. Aboard the frigate there was, reported Summers, a lessening of tension, the loosening up that comes when a voyage is almost over. Aboard the merchantman the tension increased. The interstellar drive engineers, Grimes knew, were no happier about it all than he was-but they could no more back out than he could. Craven was calm and confident, and Baxter was beginning to gloat. Jane Pentecost assumed the air of dedication that in women can be so infuriating. Grimes glumly checked and rechecked his weaponry. It passed the time.

Dartura itself was visible now-not as tiny disk of light but as a glowing annulus about its distorted primary. The thin ring of luminescence broadened, broadened. The time to go dwindled to a week, to days, to a day, and then to hours . . .

To minutes . . . To seconds . . . .

Craven and Grimes were in the Control Room; the others were at their various stations. From the intercom came the telepath’s voice, “He’s cutting the Drive-“

“Cut the Drive!” ordered the Captain.

In the Mannschenn Drive room the spinning, precessing gyroscopes slowed, slowed, ceased their endless tumbling, assumed the solidity that they exhibited only when at rest. For perhaps two seconds there was temporal confusion in the minds of all on board as the precession field died, and past, present and future inextricably mingled. Then there was a sun glaring through the viewports, bright in spite of the polarization-a sun, and, directly ahead, a great, green-orange planet. There was a ship . . . .

There were ships-ahead of them, astern, on all sides.

There were ships-and, booming from the intership transceiver, the transceiver that was neither tuned nor switched on (but navies could afford induction transmitters with their fantastic power consumption), came the authorative voice: “Inflexible to Adler! Heave to for search and seizure ! Do not attempt to escape-our massed fields will hold you!”

The effect was rather spoiled when the same voice added, in bewilderment, “Must be seeing double . . . there’s two of the bastards.” The bewilderment did not last long. “Inflexible to Adler and to unidentified vessel. Heave to for search and seizure!”

“Hold your fire, Mr. Grimes,” ordered Craven, quietly and bitterly. “It’s the Survey Service.”

“I know,” replied Grimes-and pressed the button. XXII

HE NEVER KNEW just why he had done so.

Talking it over afterward, thinking about it, he was able to evolve a theory that fitted the facts. During the brief period immediately after the shutting down of the Drive, during the short session of temporal disorientation, there had been prescience, of a sort. He had known that Adler, come what may, would attempt one last act of defiance and revenge, just as Adler’s Captain or Gunnery Officer must have known, in that last split second, that Nemesis was treading close upon his heels.

He pushed the button-and from the nozzles in the shell plating poured the reflective vapor, the protective screen that glowed ruddily as Adler’s lasers slashed out at it.

From the speaker of the dead transceiver, the transceiver that should have been dead, roared the voice of the Survey Service Admiral. “Adler! Cease fire! Cease fire, damn you!” There was a pause, then: “You’ve asked for it!”

She had asked for it-and now she got it. Suddenly the blip on Grimes’ screen that represented the Waldegren frigate became two smaller blips, and then four. The rolling fog outside Epsilon Sextans’ viewports lost its luminosity, faded suddenly to drab grayness. The voice from the transceiver said coldly, “And now you, whoever you are, had better identify yourself. And fast.”

Craven switched on the communications equipment. He spoke quietly into the microphone. “Interstellar Transport Commission’s Epsilon Sextans. Bound Waverly, with general cargo . . .”

“Bound Waverley? Then what the hell are you doing here? And what’s that armament you’re mounting?”

“Plastic,” replied the Captain. “Plastic dummies.”

“And I suppose your ALGE is plastic, too. Come off it, Jerry. We’ve already boarded your old ship, and although your ex-Mate was most reluctant to talk we got a story of sorts from him.”

“I thought I recognized your voice, Bill. May I congratulate you upon your belated efforts to stamp out piracy?”

“And may I deplore your determination to take the law into your own hands? Stand by for the boarding party.”

Grimes looked at Craven, who was slumped in his seat. The Master’s full beard effectively masked his expression. “Sir,” asked the Ensign. “What can they do? What will they do?”

“You’re the space lawyer, Grimes. You’re the expert on Survey Service rules and regulations. What will it be, do you think? A medal-or a firing squad? Praise or blame?”

“You know the Admiral, sir?”

“Yes. I know the Admiral. We’re old shipmates.”

“Then you should be safe.”

“Safe? I suppose so. Safe from the firing squad-but not safe from my employers. I’m a merchant captain, Grimes, and merchant captains aren’t supposed to range the spacelanes looking for trouble. I don’t think they’ll dare fire me-but I know that I can never expect command of anything  better than Delta class ships, on the drearier runs.” Grimes saw that Craven was smiling. “But there’re still the Rim Worlds. There’s still the Sundowner Line, and the chance of high rank in the Rim Worlds Navy when and if there is such a service.”

“You have . . . inducements, sir?”

“Yes. There are . . . inducements. Now.”

“I thought, once,” said Grimes, “that I could say the same. But not now. Not any longer. Even so . . . I’m Survey Service, sir, and I should be proud of my service. But in this ship, this merchant vessel, with her makeshift armament, we fought against heavy odds, and won. And, just now, we saved ourselves. It wasn’t the Survey Service that saved us.”

“Don’t be disloyal,” admonished Craven.

“I’m not being disloyal, sir. But . . . or, shall we say, I’m being loyal. You’re the first captain under whom I served under fire. If you’re going out to the Rim Worlds I’d like to come with you.”

“Your commission, Grimes. You know that you must put in ten years’ service before resignation is possible.”

“But I’m dead.”

“Dead!”

“Yes. Don’t you remember? I was snooping around in the Mannschenn Drive room and I got caught in the temporal precession field. My body still awaits burial; it’s in a sealed metal box in the deep freeze. It can never be identified.”

Craven laughed. “I’ll say this for you. You’re ingenious. But how do we account for the absence of the late Mr. Wolverton? And your presence aboard this ship?”

“I can hide, sir, and . . .”

“And while you’re hiding you’ll concoct some story that will explain everything. Oh Grimes, Grimes-you’re an officer I wish I could always have with me. But I’ll not stand in the way of your career. All I can do, all I will do, is smooth things over on your behalf with the Admiral. I should be able to manage that.”

Jane Pentecost emerged from the hatch in the Control Room deck. Addressing Craven she said formally, “Admiral Williams, sir.” She moved to one side to make way for the flag officer.

“Jerry, you bloody pirate!” boomed Williams, a squat, rugged man the left

breast of whose shirt was ablaze with ribbons. He advanced with outstretched hand.

“Glad to have you aboard, Bill. This is Liberty Hall-you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!”

“Not again!” groaned Grimes.

“And who is this young man?” asked the Admiral.

“I owe you-or your Service-an apology, Bill. This is Ensign Grimes, who was a passenger aboard Delta Orionis. I’m afraid that I . . . er . . . press-ganged him into my service. But he has been most . . . cooperative?  Uncooperative? Which way do you want it?

“As we are at war with Waldegren-I’d say cooperative with reservations. Was it he, by the way, who used the ALGE? Just as well for you all that he did.”

“At war with Waldegren?” demanded Jane Pentecost. “So you people have pulled your fingers out at last.”

The Admiral raised his eyebrows.

“One of my Rim Worlders,” explained Craven. “But I shall be a Rim Worlder myself shortly.”

“You’re wise, Jerry. I’ve got the buzz that the Commission is taking a very dim view of your piracy or privateering or whatever it was, and my own lords and masters are far from pleased with you. You’d better get the hell out before the lawyers have decided just what crimes you are guilty of.”

“As bad as that?” “As bad as that.”

“And young Grimes, here?”

“We’ll take him back. Six months’ strict discipline aboard my flagship will undo all the damage that you and your ideas have done to him. And now, Jerry, I’d like your full report.”

“In my cabin, Bill. Talking is thirsty work.” “Then lead on. It’s your ship.”

“And it’s your watch, Mr. Grimes. She’ll come to no harm on this trajectory while we get things sorted out.”

GRIMES SAT WITH JANE PENTECOST in the Control Room. Through the ports, had he so desired, he could have watched the rescue teams extricating the survivors from the wreckage of Adler; he could have stared out at the looming bulk of Dartura on the beam. But he did not do so, and neither did he look at his instruments.

He looked at Jane. There was so much about her that he wanted to remember-and, after all, so very little that he was determined to forget.

The intercom buzzed. “Mr. Grimes, will you pack whatever gear you have and prepare to transfer with Admiral Williams to the flagship? Hand the watch over to Miss Pentecost.”

“But you’ll be shorthanded, sir.”

“The Admiral is lending me a couple of officers for the rest of the voyage.” “Very good, sir.”

Grimes made no move. He looked at Jane-a somehow older, a tireder, a more human Jane than the girl he had first met. He said, “I’d have liked to have come out to the Rim with you . . . .”

She said, “It’s impossible, John.” “I know. But . . .”

“You’d better get packed.”

He unbuckled his seat belt, went to where she was sitting. He kissed her. She responded, but it was only the merest flicker of a response.

He said, “Goodbye.”

She said, “Not goodbye. We’ll see you out on the Rim, sometime.” With a bitterness that he was always to regret he replied, “Not very likely.”

The End

Final notes on John Grimes

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The Number of the Beast (full text) by Robert Heinlein

This is the full text of a very long full length novel by Robert Heinlein. It is about a “mad scientist” that builds a machine that can enter and leave different world-lines at will. The scientist meets up with a girl and they both go out exploring all the very many different world lines at their leasure. As they fiddle with the controls they start to enter some very strange world-lines. Some of which resemble other science fiction novels, and some that resemble childhood stories…

This novel was one of the last Heinlein stores. It tends to be confusing if you have never read Heinlein before. As he refers to other stories that he wrote and the events that transpire tends to be confusing if you are not paying attention to it. Further, this (as one of his last major works) is jam packed with “farwells” to his friends, family and associates, as well as chock full of literiary “Easter Eggs”. He also includes answers to some “Hanging” mysteries and unanswered situations in some of his other works.

I enjoyed it, and perhaps you will as well.

CONTENTS

PART 1 – The Vale
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

PART 2 – The Apostate
19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38

PART 3 – The Time Of Woe
39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

PART ONE – The Mandarin’s Butterfly

Chapter I

” – it is better to marry than to burn.” – Saul of Tarsus

Zeb:
“He’s a Mad Scientist and I’m his Beautiful Daughter.”
That’s what she said: the oldest cliché in pulp fiction. She wasn’t old enough to remember the pulps.
The thing to do with a silly remark is to fail to hear it. I went on waltzing while taking another look down her evening formal. Nice view. Not foam rubber.
She waltzed well. Today most girls who even attempt ballroom dancing drape themselves around your neck and expect you to shove them around the floor. She kept her weight on her own feet, danced close without snuggling, and knew what I was going to do a split second before I led it. A perfect partner as long as she didn’t talk.
“Well?” she persisted.
My paternal grandfather – an unsavory old reactionary; the FemLibbers would have lynched him – used to say, “Zebadiah, the mistake we made was not in putting shoes on them or in teaching them to read – we should never have taught them to talk!”
I signaled a twirl by pressure; she floated into it and back into my arms right on the beat. I inspected her hands and the outer corners of her eyes. Yes, she really was young – minimum eighteen (Hilda Corners never permitted legal “infants” at her parties), maximum twenty-five, first approximation twenty-two. Yet she danced like her grandmother’s generation.
“Well?” she repeated more firmly.
This time I openly stared. “Is that cantilevering natural? Or is there an invisible bra, you being in fact the sole support of two dependents?”
She glanced down, looked up and grinned. “They do stick out, don’t they? Your comment is rude, crude, unrefined, and designed to change the subject.”
“What subject? I made a polite inquiry; you parried it with amphigory.”
“‘Amphigory’ my tired feet! I answered precisely.”
“‘Amphigory,'” I repeated. “The operative symbols were ‘mad,’ ‘scientist,’ ‘beautiful,’ and ‘daughter.’ The first has several meanings – the others denote opinions. Semantic content: zero.”
She looked thoughtful rather than angry. “Pop isn’t rabid… although I did use ‘mad’ in ambivalent mode. ‘Scientist’ and ‘beautiful’ each contain descriptive opinions, I stipulate. But are you in doubt as to my sex? If so, are you qualified to check my twenty-third chromosome pair? With transsexual surgery so common I assume that anything less would not satisfy you.”
“I prefer a field test.”
“On the dance floor?”
“No, the bushes back of the pool. Yes, I’m qualified – laboratory or field. But it was not your sex that lay in the area of opinion; that is a fact that can be established… although the gross evidence is convincing. I -“
“Ninety-five centimeters isn’t gross! Not for my height. One hundred seventy bare-footed, one eighty in these heels. It’s just that I’m wasp-waisted for my mass – forty-eight centimeters versus fifty-nine kilos.”
“And your teeth are your own and you don’t have dandruff. Take it easy, Deedee; I didn’t mean to shake your aplomb” – or those twin glands that are not gross but delicious. I have an infantile bias and have known it since I was six – six months, that is. “But the symbol ‘daughter’ encompasses two statements, one factual – sex – and the other a matter of opinion even when stated by a forensic genetohematologist.”
“Gosh, what big words you know, Mister. I mean ‘Doctor’.”
“‘Mister’ is correct. On this campus it is swank to assume that everyone holds a doctorate. Even I have one, Ph.D. Do you know what that stands for?”
“Doesn’t everybody? I have a Ph.D., too. ‘Piled Higher and Deeper.'”
I raised that maximum to twenty-six and assigned it as second approximation. “Phys. ed.?”
“Mister Doctor, you are trying to get my goat. Won’t work. I had an undergraduate double major, one being phys. ed. with teacher’s credentials in case I needed a job. But my real major was math – which I continued in graduate school.”
“And here I had been assuming that ‘Deedee’ meant ‘Doctor of Divinity.'”
“Go wash out your mouth with soap. My nickname is my initials – Dee Tee. Or Deety. Doctor D. T. Burroughs if being formal, as I can’t be ‘Mister’ and refuse to be ‘Miz’ or ‘Miss.’ See here, Mister; I’m supposed to be luring you with my radiant beauty, then hooking you with my feminine charm… and not getting anywhere. Let’s try another tack. Tell me what you piled higher and deeper.”
“Let me think. Flycasting? Or was it basketweaving? It was one of those transdisciplinary things in which the committee simply weighs the dissertation. Tell you what. I’ve got a copy around my digs. I’ll find it and see what title the researcher who wrote it put on it.”
“Don’t bother. The title is ‘Some Implications of a Six-Dimensional Non-Newtonian Continuum.’ Pop wants to discuss it.”
I stopped waltzing. “Huh? He’d better discuss that paper with the bloke who wrote it.”
“Nonsense; I saw you blink – I’ve hooked you. Pop wants to discuss it, then offer you a job.”
“‘Job’! I just slipped off the hook.”
“Oh, dear! Pop will be really mad. Please? Please, sir!”
“You said that you had used ‘mad’ in ambivalent mode. How?”
“Oh. Mad-angry because his colleagues won’t listen to him. Mad-psychotic in the opinions of some colleagues. They say his papers don’t make sense.”
“Do they make sense?”
“I’m not that good a mathematician, sir. My work is usually simplifying software. Child’s play compared with n-dimensional spaces.”
I wasn’t required to express an opinion; the trio started Blue Tango, Deety melted into my arms. You don’t talk if you know tango.
Deety knew. After an eternity of sensual bliss, I swung her out into position precisely on coda; she answered my bow and scrape with a deep curtsy. “Thank you, sir.”
“Whew! After a tango like that the couple ought to get married.”
“All right. I’ll find our hostess and tell Pop. Five minutes? Front door, or side?”
She looked serenely happy. I said, “Deety, do you mean what you appear to mean? That you intend to marry me? A total stranger?”
Her face remained calm but the light went out – and her nipples went down. She answered steadily. “After that tango we are no longer strangers. I construed your statement as a proposal – no, a willingness – to marry me. Was I mistaken?”
My mind went into emergency, reviewing the past years the way a drowning man’s life is supposed to flash before his eyes (how could anyone know that?): a rainy afternoon when my chum’s older sister had initiated me into the mysteries; the curious effect caused by the first time strangers had shot back at me; a twelve-month cohabitation contract that had started with a bang and had ended without a whimper; countless events which had left me determined never to marry.
I answered instantly, “I meant what I implied – marriage, in its older meaning. I’m willing. But why are you willing? I’m no prize.”
She took a deep breath, straining the fabric, and – thank Allah! – her nipples came up. “Sir, you are the prize I was sent to fetch, and, when you said that we really ought to get married – hyperbole and I knew it – I suddenly realized, with a deep burst of happiness, that this was the means of fetching you that I wanted above all!”
She went on, “But I will not trap you through misconstruing a gallantry. If you wish, you may take me into those bushes back of the pool… and not marry me.” She went on firmly, “But for that… whoring… my fee is for you to talk with my father and to let him show you something.”
“Deety, you’re an idiot! You would ruin that pretty gown.”
“Mussing a dress is irrelevant but I can take it off. I will. There’s nothing under it.”
“There’s a great deal under it!”
That fetched a grin, instantly wiped away. “Thank you. Shall we head for the bushes?”
“Wait a half! I’m about to be noble and regret it the rest of my life. You’ve made a mistake. Your father doesn’t want to talk to me; I don’t know anything about n-dimensional geometry.” (Why do I get these attacks of honesty? I’ve never done anything to deserve them.)
“Pop thinks you do; that is sufficient. Shall we go? I want to get Pop out of here before he busts somebody in the mouth.”
“Don’t rush me; I didn’t ask you to rassle on the grass; I said I wanted to marry you – but wanted to know why you were willing to marry me. Your answer concerned what your father wants. I’m not trying to marry your father; he’s not my type. Speak for yourself, Deety. Or drop it.” (Am I a masochist? There’s a sunbathing couch back of those bushes.)
Solemnly she looked me over, from my formal tights to my crooked bow tie and on up to my thinning brush cut – a hundred and ninety-four centimeters of big ugly galoot. “I like your firm lead in dancing. I like the way you look. I like the way your voice rumbles. I like your hair-splitting games with words – you sound like Whorf debating Korzybski with Shannon as referee.” She took another deep breath, finished almost sadly: “Most of all, I like the way you smell.”
It would have taken a sharp nose to whiff me. I had been squeaky clean ninety minutes earlier, and it takes more than one waltz and a tango to make me sweat. But her remark had that skid in it that Deety put into almost anything. Most girls, when they want to ruin a man’s judgment, squeeze his biceps and say, “Goodness, you’re strong!”
I grinned down at her. “You smell good too. Your perfume could rouse a corpse.”
“I’m not wearing perfume.”
“Oh. Correction: your natural pheromone. Enchanting. Get your wrap, Side door. Five minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell your father we’re getting married. He gets that talk, free. I decided that before you started to argue. It won’t take him long to decide that I’m not Lobachevski.”
“That’s Pop’s problem,” she answered, moving. “Will you let him show you this thing he’s built in our basement?”
“Sure, why not? What is it?”


“A time machine.”

Chapter II

“This Universe never did make sense – “

Zeb:
Tomorrow I will seven eagles see, a great comet will appear, and voices will speak from whirlwinds foretelling monstrous and fearful things – This Universe never did make sense; I suspect that it was built on government contract.
“Big basement?”
“Medium. Nine by twelve. But cluttered. Work benches and power tools.”
A hundred and eight square meters – Ceiling height probably two and a half – Had Pop made the mistake of the man who built a boat in his basement?
My musing was interrupted by a male voice in a high scream: “You overeducated, obstipated, pedantic ignoramus! Your mathematical intuition froze solid the day you matriculated!”
I didn’t recognize the screamer but did know the stuffed shirt he addressed: Professor Neil O’Heret Brain, head of the department of mathematics – and God help the student who addressed a note to “Professor N.O. Brain” or even “N. O’H. Brain.” “Brainy” had spent his life in search of The Truth – intending to place it under house arrest.
He was puffed up like a pouter pigeon with is professional pontifical pomposity reeling. His expression suggested that he was giving birth to a porcupine.
Deety gasped, “It’s started,” and dashed toward the row. Me, I stay out of rows; I’m a coward by trade and wear fake zero-prescription glasses as a buffer – when some oaf snarls, “Take off your glasses!” that gives me time to retreat.
I headed straight for the row.
Deety had placed herself between the two, facing the screamer, and was saying in a low but forceful voice, “Pop, don’t you dare! – I won’t bail you out!” She was reaching for his glasses with evident intent to put them back on his face. It was clear that he had taken them off for combat; he was holding them out of her reach.
I reached over their heads, plucked them out of his hand, gave them to Deety. She flashed me a smile and put them back on her father. He gave up and let her. She then took his arm firmly. “Aunt Hilda!”
Our hostess converged on the row. “Yes, Deety? Why did you stop them, darling? You didn’t give us time to get bets down.” Fights were no novelty at “Sharp” Corners’ parties. Her food and liquor were lavish, the music always live; her guests were often eccentric but never dull – I had been surprised at the presence of N. O. Brain.
I now felt that I understood it: a planned hypergolic mixture.
Deety ignored her questions. “Will you excuse Pop and me and Mr. Carter? Something urgent has come up.”
“You and Jake may leave if you must. But you can’t drag Zebbie away. Deety, that’s cheating.”
Deety looked at me. “May I tell?”
“Eh? Certainly!”
That bliffy “Brainy” picked this moment to interrupt. “Mrs. Corners, Doctor Burroughs can’t leave until he apologizes! I insist. My privilege!”
Our hostess looked at him with scorn. “Merde, Professor. I’m not one of your teaching fellows. Shout right back at Jake Burroughs if you like. If your command of invective equals his, we’ll enjoy hearing it. But just one more wordthat sounds like an order to me or to one of my guests – and out you go! Then you had best go straight home; the Chancellor will be trying to reach you.” She turned her back on him. “Deety, you started to add something?”
“Sharp” Corners can intimidate Internal Revenue agents. She hadn’t cut loose on “Brainy” – just a warning shot across his bow. But from his face one would have thought she had hulled him. However, her remark to Deety left me no time to see whether he would have a stroke.
“Not Deety, Hilda. Me. Zeb.”
“Quiet, Zebbie. Whatever it is, the answer is No. Deety? Go ahead, dear.”
Hilda Corners is related to that famous mule. I did not use a baseball bat because she comes only up to my armpits and grosses forty-odd kilos. I picked her up by her elbows and turned her around, facing me. “Hilda, we’re going to get married.”
“Zebbie darling! I thought you would never ask.”
“Not you, you old harridan. Deety. I proposed, she accepted; I’m going to nail it down before the anesthetic wears off.”
Hilda looked thoughtfully interested. “That’s reasonable.” She craned her neck to look at Deety. “Did he mention his wife in Boston, Deety? Or the twins?”
I set her back on her feet. “Pipe down, Sharpie; this is serious. Doctor Burroughs, I am unmarried, in good health, solvent, and able to support a family. I hope this meets with your approval.”
“Pop says Yes,” Deety answered. “I hold his power of attorney.”
“You pipe down, too. My name is Carter, sir – Zeb Carter. I’m on campus; you can check my record. But I intend to marry Deety at once, if she will have me.”
“I know your name and record, sir. It doesn’t require my approval; Deety is of age. But you have it anyhow.” He looked thoughtful. “If you two are getting married at once, you’ll be too busy for shop talk. Or would you be?”
“Pop – let it be; it’s all set.”
“So? Thank you, Hilda, for a pleasant evening. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“You’ll do no such thing; you’ll come straight back and give me a full report. Jake, you are not going on their honeymoon – I heard you.”
“Aunt Hilda – please! I’ll manage everything.”
We were out the side door close on schedule. At the parking lot there was a bobble: which heap, mine or theirs. Mine is intended for two but can take four. The rear seats are okay for two for short trips. Theirs was a four-passenger family saloon, not fast but roomy – and their luggage was in it. “How much luggage?” I asked Deety, while I visualized two overnight bags strapped into one back seat with my prospective father-in-law stashed in the other.
“I don’t have much, but Pop has two big bags and a fat briefcase. I had better show you.”
(Damn.) “Perhaps you had better.” I like my own rig, I don’t like to drive other people’s cars, and, while Deety probably handled controls as smoothly as she danced, I did not know that she did – and I’m chicken. I didn’t figure her father into the equation; trusting my skin to his temper did not appeal. Maybe Deety would settle for letting him trail us – but my bride-to-be was going to ride with me! “Where?”
“Over in the far corner. I’ll unlock it and turn on the lights.” She reached into her father’s inside jacket pocket, took out a Magic Wand.
“Wait for baby!”
The shout was from our hostess. Hilda was running down the path from her house, purse clutched in one hand and about eight thousand newdollars of sunset mink flying like a flag from the other.
So the discussion started over. Seems Sharpie had decided to come along to make certain that Jake behaved himself and had taken just long enough to tell Max (her bouncer-butler-driver) when to throw the drunks out or cover them with blankets, as needed.
She listened to Deety’s summary, then nodded. “Got it. I can handle yours, Deety; Jake and I will go in it. You ride with Zebbie, dear.” She turned to me. “Hold down the speed, Zebbie, so that I can follow. No tricks, Buster. Don’t try to lose us or you’ll have cops busting out of your ears.”
I turned my sweet innocent eyes toward her. “Why, Sharpie darling, you know I wouldn’t do anything like that.”
“You’d steal city hall if you could figure a way to carry it. Who dumped that load of lime Jello into my swimming pool?”
“I was in Africa at that time, as you know.”
“So you say. Deety darling, keep him on a short leash and don’t feed him meat. But marry him; he’s loaded. Now where’s that radio link? And your car.”
“Here,” said Deety, pointed the Magic Wand and pressed the switch.
I gathered all three into my arms and dived. We hit the ground as the blast hit everything else. But not us. The blast shadow of other cars protected us.

Chapter III

” – Professor Moriarty isn’t fooled – “

Zeb:
Don’t ask me how. Ask a trapeze artist how he does a triple ‘sault. Ask a crapshooter how he knows when he’s “hot.” But don’t ask me how I know it’s going to happen just before it hits the fan.
It doesn’t tell me anything I don’t need to know. I don’t know what’s in a letter until I open it (except the time it was a letter bomb). I have no precognition for harmless events. But this split-second knowledge when I need it has kept me alive and relatively unscarred in an era when homicide kills more people than does cancer and the favorite form of suicide is to take a rifle up some tower and keep shooting until the riot squad settles it.
I don’t see the car around the curve on the wrong side; I automatically hit the ditch. When the San Andreas Fault cut loose, I jumped out a window and was in the open when the shock arrived – and didn’t know why I had jumped.
Aside from this, my E.S.P. is erratic; I bought it cheap from a war-surplus outlet.
I sprawled with three under me. I got up fast, trying to avoid crushing them. I gave a hand to each woman, then dragged Pop to his feet. No one seemed damaged. Deety stared at the fire blazing where their car had been, face impassive. Her father was looking at the ground, searching. Deety stopped him. “Here, Pop.” She put his glasses back on him.
“Thank you, my dear.” He started toward the fire.
I grabbed his shoulder. “No! Into my car – fast!”
“Eh? My briefcase – could have blown clear.”
“Shut up and move! All of you!”
“Do it, Pop!” Deety grabbed Hilda’s arm. We stuffed the older ones into the after space; I shoved Deety into the front passenger seat and snapped: “Seat belts!” as I slammed the door – then was around to the left so fast that I should have caused a sonic boom. “Seat belts fastened?” I demanded as I fastened my own and locked the door.
“Jake’s is fastened and so is mine, Zebbie dear,” Hilda said cheerfully.
“Belt tight, door locked,” Deety reported.
The heap was hot; I had left it on trickle – what use is a fast car that won’t go scat? I switched from trickle to full, did not turn on lights, glanced at the board and released the brake.
It says here that duos must stay grounded inside city limits – so I was lifting her nose before she had rolled a meter and she was pointed straight up as we were clearing the parking lot.
Half a klick straight up while the gee meter climbed – two, three, four – I let it reach five and held it, not being sure what Pop’s heart would take. When the altimeter read four klicks, I cut everything – power, transponder, the works – while hitting a button that dropped chaff, and let her go ballistic. I didn’t know that anyone was tracking us – I didn’t want to find out.
When the altimeter showed that we had topped out, I let the wings open a trifle. When I felt them bite air, I snap-rolled onto her belly, let wings crawl out to subsonic aspect and let her glide. “Everybody okay?”
Hilda giggled. “Whoops, dear! Do that again! This time, somebody kiss me.”
“Pipe down, you shameless old strumpet. Pop?”
“I’m okay, son.”
“Deety?”
“Okay here.”
“Did that fall in the parking lot hurt you?”
“No, sir. I twisted in the air and took it on one buttock while getting Pop’s glasses. But next time put a bed under me, please. Or a wrestling mat.”
“I’ll remember.” I switched on radio but not transponder, tried all police frequencies. If anyone had noticed our didoes, they weren’t discussing it on the air. We were down to two klicks; I made an abrupt wingover to the right, then switched on power. “Deety, where do you and your Pop live?”
“Logan, Utah.”
“How long does it take to get married there?”
“Zebbie,” Hilda cut in, “Utah has no waiting time -“
“So we go to Logan.”
” – but does require blood test. Deety, do you know Zebbie’s nickname around campus? The Wasp. For ‘Wassermann Positive.’ Zebbie, everybody knows that Nevada is the only state that offers twenty-four-hour service, no waiting time, no blood test. So point this bomb at Reno and sign off.”
“Sharpie darling,” I said gently, “would you like to walk home from two thousand meters?”
“I don’t know; I’ve never tried it.”
“That’s an ejection seat… but no parachutes.”
“Oh, how romantic! Jake darling, we’ll sing the Liebestod on the way down – you sing tenor, I’ll force a soprano and we’ll die in each other’s arms. Zebbie, could we have more altitude? For the timing.”
“Doctor Burroughs, gag that hitchhiker. Sharpie, Liebestod is a solo.”
“Picky, picky! Isn’t dead-on-arrival enough? Jealous because you can’t carry a tune? I told Dicky Boy that should be a duet and Cosima agreed with me -“
“Sharpie, button your frimpin’ lip while I explain. One: Everybody at your party knows why we left and will assume that we headed for Reno. You probably called out something to that effect as you left -“
“I believe I did. Yes, I did.”
“Shut up. Somebody made a professional effort to kill Doctor Burroughs. Not just kill but overkill; that combo of high explosive and Thermit was intended to leave nothing to analyze. But it is possible that no one saw us lift. We were into this go-wagon and I was goosing it less than thirty seconds after that booby trap exploded. Innocent bystanders would look at the fire, not at us. Guilty bystanders – There wouldn’t be any. A professional who booby-traps a car either holes up or crosses a state line and gets lost. The party or parties who paid for the contract may be nearby, but if they are, Hilda, they’re in your house.”
“One of my guests?”
“Oh, shut it, Sharpie; you are never interested in the morals of your guests. If they can be depended on to throw custard pies or do impromptu strips or some other prank that will keep your party from growing dull, that qualifies them. However, I am not assuming that the boss villain was at your party; I am saying that he would not be lurking where the Man might put the arm on him. Your house would be the best place to hide and watch the plot develop.
“But, guest or not, he was someone who knew that Doctor Burroughs would be at your party. Hilda, who knew that key fact?”
She answered with uncustomary seriousness. “I don’t know, Zebbie. I would have to think.”
“Think hard.”
“Mmm, not many. Several were invited because Jake was coming – you, for example -“
“I became aware of that.”
” – but you weren’t told that Jake would be present. Some were told – ‘No Brain,’ for example – but I can’t imagine that old fool booby-trapping a car.”
“I can’t either, but killers don’t look like killers; they look like people. How long before the party did you tell ‘Brainy’ that Pop would be present?”
“I told him when I invited him. Mmm, eight days ago.”
I sighed. “The possibles include not only the campus but the entire globe. So we must try to figure probables. Doctor Burroughs, can you think of anyone who would like to see you dead?”
“Several!”
“Let me rephrase it. Who hates your guts so bitterly that he would not hesitate to kill your daughter as long as he got you? And also bystanders such as Hilda and me. Not that we figure, save to show that he didn’t give a hoot who caught it. A deficient personality. Amoral. Who is he?”
Pop Burroughs hesitated. “Doctor Carter, disagreement between mathematicians can be extremely heated… and I am not without fault.” (You’re telling me, Pop!) “But these quarrels rarely result in violence. Even the death of Archimedes was only indirectly related to his – our – profession. To encompass my daughter as well – no, even Doctor Brain, much as I despise him, does not fit the picture.”
Deety said, “Zeb, could it have been me they were shooting at?”
“You tell me. Whose dolly have you busted?”
“Hmm – I can’t think of anyone who dislikes me even enough to snub me. Sounds silly but it’s true.”
“It’s the truth,” put in Sharpie. “Deety is just like her mother was. When Jane – Deety’s mother, and my best friend until we lost her-when Jane and I were roommates in college, I was always getting into jams and Jane was always getting me out-and never got into one herself. A peacemaker. So is Deety.”
“Okay, Deety, you’re out of it. So is Hilda and so am I, as whoever placed that booby trap could not predict that either Hilda or I would be in blast range. So it’s Pop they’re gunning for. Who we don’t know, why we don’t know. When we figure out why, we’ll know who. Meantime we’ve got to keep Pop out of range. I’m going to marry you as fast as possible, not only because you smell good but to give me a legitimate interest in this fight.”
“So we go first to Reno.”
“Shut up, Sharpie. We’ve been on course for Reno since we leveled off.” I flipped on the transponder, but to the left, not right. It would now answer with a registered, legal signal… but not one registered to my name. This cost me some shekels I did not need but were appreciated by a tight – lipped family man in Indio. Sometimes it is convenient not to be identified by sky cops every time one crosses a state line.
“But we aren’t going to Reno. Those cowboy maneuvers were intended to deceive the eye, radar, and heat seekers. The evasion against the heat seekers – that rough turn while we were still in glide – either worked or was not needed, as we haven’t had a missile up the tail. Probably wasn’t needed; people who booby-trap cars aren’t likely to be prepared to shoot a duo out of the sky. But I couldn’t be certain, so I ducked. We may be assumed to be dead in the blast and fire, and that assumption may stand up until the mess has cooled down and there is daylight to work by. Even later it may stand up, as the cops may not tell anyone that they were unable to find organic remains. But I must assume that Professor Moriarty isn’t fooled, that he is watching by repeater scope in his secret HQ, that he knows we are headed for Reno, and that hostiles will greet us there. So we won’t go there. Now quiet, please; I must tell this baby what to do.”
The computer-pilot of my car can’t cook but what she can do, she does well. I called for display map, changed scale to include Utah, used the light pen to trace route – complex as it curved around Reno to the south, back north again, made easting over some very empty country, and passed north of Hill Air Force Range in approaching Logan. I fed in height-above-ground while giving her leeway to smooth out bumps, and added one change in speed-over-ground once we were clear of Reno radar. “Got it, girl?” I asked her.
“Got it, Zeb.”
“Ten-minute call, please.”
“Call you ten minutes before end of routing – right!”
“You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
“Boss, I bet you tell that to all the girls. Over.”
“Roger and out, Gay.” The display faded.
Certainly I could have programmed my autopilot to accept a plan in response to a punched “Execute.” But isn’t it pleasanter to be answered by a warm contralto? But the “smart girl” aspect lay in the fact that it took my voice to make a flight plan operative. A skilled electron pusher might find a way to override my lock, then drive her manually. But the first time he attempted to use autopilot, the car would not only not accept the program but would scream for help on all police frequencies. This causes car thieves to feel maladjusted.
I looked up and saw that Deety had been following this intently. I waited for some question. Instead Deety said, “She has a very pleasant voice, Zeb.”
“Gay Deceiver is a very nice girl, Deety.”
“And talented. Zeb, I have never before been in a Ford that can do the things this car – Gay Deceiver? – can do.”
“After we’re married I’ll introduce you to her more formally. It will require reprogramming.”
“I look forward to knowing her better.”
“You will. Gay is not exactly all Ford. Her external appearance was made by Ford of Canada. Most of the rest of her once belonged to Australian Defense Forces. But I added a few doodads. The bowling alley. The powder room. The veranda. Little homey touches.”
“I’m sure she appreciates them, Zeb. I know I do. I suspect that, had she not had them, we would all be as dead as canasta.”
“You may be right. If so, it would not be the first time Gay has kept me alive. You have not seen all her talents.”
“I’m beyond being surprised. So far as I could see you didn’t tell her to land at Logan.”
“Logan seems to be the next most likely place for a reception committee. Who in Logan knows that you and your father were going to visit Hilda?”
“No one, through me.”
“Mail? Milk cartons? Newspapers?”
“No deliveries to the house, Zeb.” She turned her head, “Pop, does anyone in Logan know where we went?”
“Doctor Carter, to the best of my knowledge, no one in Logan knows that We left. Having lived many years in the buzzing gossip of Academe, I have learned to keep my life as private as possible.”
“Then I suggest that you all ease your belts and sleep. Until ten minutes before reaching Logan there is little to do.”
“Doctor Carter -“
“Better call me Zeb, Pop. Get used to it.”
“‘Zeb’ it is, son. On page eighty-seven of your monograph, after the equation numbered one-twenty-one in your discussion of the rotation of six-dimensional spaces of positive curvature, you said, ‘From this it is evident that – ‘ and immediately write your equation one-twenty-two. How did you do it? I’m not disagreeing, sir – on the contrary! But in an unpublished paper of my own I used a dozen pages to arrive at the same transformation. Did you have a direct intuition? Or did you simply omit publishing details? No criticism, I am impressed either way. Sheer curiosity.”
“Doctor, I did not write that paper. I told Deety so.”
“That is what he claimed, Pop.”
“Oh, come now! Two Doctors Zebulon E. Carter on one campus?”
“No. But that’s not my name. I’m Zebadiah J. Carter. Zebulon E.-for-Edward Carter and called ‘Ed’ is my cousin. While he is probably listed as being on campus, in fact he is doing an exchange year in Singapore. It’s not as improbable as it sounds; all male members of my family have first names starting with ‘Z.’ It has to do with money and a will and a trust fund and the fact that my grandfather and his father were somewhat eccentric.”
“Whereas you aren’t,” Hilda said sweetly.
“Quiet, dear.” I turned toward Deety. “Deety, do you want to be released from our engagement? I did try to tell you that you had trapped the wrong bird.”
“Zebadiah – “
“Yes, Deety?”
“I intend to marry you before this night is over. But you haven’t kissed me. I want to be kissed.”
I unfastened my seat belt, started to unfasten hers, found that she had done so.
Deety kisses even better than she tangos.
During a break for oxygen, I asked her in a whisper: “Deety, what do your initials stand for?”
“Well… please don’t laugh.”
“I won’t. But I have to know them for the ceremony.”
“I know. All right, Dee Tee stands for Dejah Thoris.”
Dejah Thoris – Dejah Thoris Burroughs – Dejah Thoris Carter! I cracked up.
I got it under control after two whoops. Too many. Deety said sadly, “You said you wouldn’t laugh.”
“Deety darling, I wasn’t laughing at your name; I was laughing at mine.”
“I don’t think ‘Zebadiah’ is a funny name. I like it.”
“So do I. It keeps me from being mixed up with the endless Bobs and Eds and Toms. But I didn’t tell my middle name. What’s a funny name starting with ‘J’?”
“I won’t guess.”
“Let me lead up to it. I was born near the campus of the university Thomas Jefferson founded. The day I graduated from college I was commissioned a second looie Aerospace Reserve. I’ve been promoted twice. My middle initial stands for ‘John.'”
It took not quite a second for her to add it up. “Captain… John… Carter – of Virginia.”
“‘A clean-limbed fighting man,'” I agreed. “Kaor, Dejah Thoris. At your service, my princess. Now and forever!”
“Kaor, Captain John Carter. Helium is proud to accept.”
We fell on each other’s shoulders, howling. After a bit the howling died down and turned into another kiss.
When we came up for air, Hilda tapped me on a shoulder. “Would you let us in on the joke?”
“Do we tell her, Deety?”
“I’m not sure. Aunt Hilda talks.”
“Oh, nonsense! I know your full name and I’ve never told anyone – I held you at your christening. You were wet, too. At both ends. Now give!”
“All right. We don’t have to get married – we already are. For years. More than a century.”
Pop spoke up. “Eh? What’s this?” I explained to him. He looked thoughtful, then nodded. “Logical.” He went back to figuring he was doing in a notebook, then looked up. “Your cousin Zebulon – Is he on the telephone?”
“Probably not but he lives at the New Raffles.”
“Excellent. I’ll try both the hotel and the university. Doctor – Son – Zeb, would you be so kind as to place the call? My comcredit code is Nero Aleph eight zero one dash seven five two dash three nine three two Zed Star Zed.” (Zed Star Zed credit rating – I was not going to have to support my prospective father-in-law.)
Deety cut in. “Pop, you must not call Professor Carter – Zebulon Carter – at this hour.”
“But, my dear daughter, it is not late at night in -“
“Of course it isn’t; I can count. You want a favor from him, so don’t interrupt his after-lunch nap. ‘Mad dogs and Englishmen.'”
“It isn’t noon in Singapore; it’s -“
” – siesta time, even hotter than noon. So wait.”
“Deety is right, Pop,” I interrupted, “but for the wrong reasons. It doesn’t seem to be a matter of life and death to call him this minute. Whereas it might be a matter of life and death – ours, I mean – to make a call from this car… especially with your credit code. Until we find out who the Boys in the Black Hats are, I advise that you place calls from the ground and from public phones that you can feed with newdollars instead of your code. Say a phone in Peoria. Or Paducah. Can it wait?”
“Since you put it that way, sir – yes, it can wait. Although I have trouble believing that anyone wishes to kill me.”
“Available data indicate it.”
“Agreed. But I have not yet grasped it emotionally.”
“Takes a baseball bat,” said Hilda. “I had to sit on him while Jane proposed to him.”
“Why, Hilda my dear, that is utterly unfactual. I wrote my late beloved a polite note saying -“
I let them argue while, I tried to add to available data. “Gay Deceiver.”
“Yes, Boss?”
“News, dear.”
“Ready, Boss.”
“Retrieval parameters. Time – since twenty-one hundred. Area – California, Nevada, Utah. Persons – your kindly boss, dear. Doctor Jacob Burroughs, Doctor D. T. Burroughs, Miz Hilda Corners – ” I hesitated. “Professor Neil O’Heret Brain.” I felt silly adding “Brainy” – but there had been a row between Pop and him, and years earlier my best teacher had said, “Never neglect the so-called ‘trivial’ roots of an equation,” and had pointed out that two Nobel prizes had derived from “trivial” roots.
“Parameters complete, Boss?”
Doctor Burroughs touched my shoulder. “Can your computer check the news if any on your cousin?”
“Mmm, maybe. She stores sixty million bytes, then wipes last-in-last-out everything not placed on permanent. But her news storage is weighted sixty-forty in favor of North America. I’ll try. Smart Girl.”
“Holding, Boss.”
“Addendum. First retrieve by parameters given. Then retrieve by new program. Time – backwards from now to wipe time. Area – Singapore. Person – Zebulon Edward Carter aka Ed Carter aka Doctor Z. E. Carter aka Professor Z. E. Carter aka Professor or Doctor Carter of Raffles University.”
“Two retrieval programs in succession. Got it, Zeb.”
“You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
“Boss, I bet you tell that to all the girls. Over.”
“Roger, Gay. Execute!”
“AP San Francisco. A mysterious explosion disturbed the academic quiet of – ” A story ending with the usual claim about an arrest being expected “momentarily” settled several points: All of us were believed dead. Our village top cop claimed to have a theory but was keeping it mum – meaning that he knew even less than we did. Since we were reported as “presumed dead” and since the news said nothing about an illegal lift-off and other capers that annoy sky cops, I assumed tentatively that police radar had not been looking at us until after we had become just one more blip behaving legally. The lack of mention of the absence of Gay Deceiver did not surprise me, as I had roaded in and had been last or nearly last to park – and could have arrived by taxi, public capsule, or on foot. Doctor Brain was not mentioned, nothing about the row. Guests had been questioned and released. Five cars parked near the, explosion had been damaged.
“Nevada – null retrieval. Utah – UPI Salt Lake City. A fire near Utah State, University campus in Logan destroyed – ” “Blokes in Black Hats” again and Deety and her Pop were dead twice over, as they were presumed to have been overcome by smoke, unable to escape. No one else hurt or missing. Fire attributed to faulty wiring. “End of first retrieval, Zeb. Second retrieval starting.” Gay shut up.
I said soberly, “Pop, somebody doesn’t like you.”
He groaned, “Gone! All gone!”
“No copies of your papers elsewhere? And your… gadget?”
“Eh? No, no! – much worse! My irreplaceable collection of pulp magazines. Weird Tales, Argosy, All-Story, the early Gernsbachs, The Shadow, Black Mask – Ooooooh!”
“Pop really does feel bad,” Deety whispered, “and I could manage tears myself. I taught myself to read from that collection. War Aces, Air Wonder, the complete Clayton Astoundings – It was appraised at two hundred and thirteen thousand newdollars. Grandpop started it, Pop continued it – I grew up reading them.”
“I’m sorry, Deety.” I hugged her. “They should have been microfiched.”
“They were. But that’s not having the magazines in your hands.”
“I agree. Uh, how about the… thing in the basement?”
“What ‘Thing in the Basement’?” demanded Sharpie. “Zebbie, you sound like H. P. Lovecraft.”
“Later, Sharpie. Comfort Jake; we’re busy. Gay!”
“Here, Zeb. Where’s the riot?”
“Display map, please.” We were midway over northern Nevada. “Cancel routing and cruise random. Report nearest county seat.”
“Winnemucca and Elko are equidistant to one percent. Elko closer by ETA as I am now vectored eleven degrees north of Elko bearing.”
“Deety, would you like to be married in Elko?”
“Zebadiah, I would love to be married in Elko.”
“Elko it is, but loving may have to wait. Gay, vector for Elko and ground us, normal private cruising speed. Report ETA in elapsed minutes.”
“Roger Wilco, Elko. Nine minutes seventeen seconds.”
Hilda said soothingly, “There, there, Jake darling; Mama is here” – then added in her top sergeant voice, “Quit stalling, Zebbie! What ‘Thing’ in which basement?”
“Sharpie, you’re nosy. It belonged to Pop and now it’s destroyed and that’s all you need to know.”
“Oh, but it wasn’t,” Doctor Burroughs said. “Zeb is speaking of my continua craft, Hilda. It’s safe. Not in Logan.”
“What in the Name of the Dog is a ‘continua craft’?”
“Pop means,” Deety explained, “his time machine.”
“Then why didn’t he say so? Everybody savvies ‘Time Machine.’ George Pal’s ‘Time Machine’ – a classic goodie. I’ve caught it on the late-late-early show more than once.”
“Sharpie,” I asked, “can you read?”
“Certainly I can read! ‘Run, Spot, run See Spot run.’ Smarty.”
“Have you ever heard of H. G. Wells?”
“Heard of him? I’ve had him.”
“You are a boastful old tart, but not that old. When Mr. Wells died, you were still a virgin.”
“Slanderer! Hit him, Jake – he insulted me.”
“Zeb didn’t mean to insult you, I feel sure. Deety won’t permit me to hit people, even when they need it.”
“We’ll change that.”
“Second retrieval complete,” Gay Deceiver reported. “Holding.”
“Report second retrieval, please.”
“Reuters, Singapore. The Marston expedition in Sumatra is still unreported according to authorities at Palembang. The party is thirteen days overdue. Besides Professor Marston and native guides and assistants, the party included Doctor Z.E. Carter, Doctor Cecil Yang, and Mr. Giles Smythe-Belisha. The Minister of Tourism and Culture stated that the search will be pursued assiduously. End of retrieval.”
Poor Ed. We had never been close but he had never caused me grief. I hoped that he was shacked up with something soft and sultry – rather than losing his head to a jungle machete, which seemed more likely. “Pop, a few minutes ago I said that somebody doesn’t like you. I now suspect that somebody doesn’t like n-dimensional geometers.”
“It would seem so, Zeb. I do hope your cousin is safe – a most brilliant mind! He would be a great loss to all mankind.”
(And to himself, I added mentally. And me, since family duty required that I do something about it. When what I had in mind was a honeymoon.) “Gay.”
“Here, Zeb.”
“Addendum. Third news retrieval program. Use all parameters second program. Add Sumatra to area. Add all proper names and titles found in second retrieval. Run until canceled. Place retrievals in permanent memory. Report new items soonest. Start.”
“Running, Boss.”
“You’re a good girl, Gay.”
“Thank you, Zeb. Grounding Elko two minutes seven seconds.”
Deety squeezed my hand harder. “Pop, as soon as I’m legally Mrs. John Carter I think we should all go to Snug Harbor.”
“Eh? Obviously.”
“You, too, Aunt Hilda. It might not be safe for you to go home.”
“Change in plans, dear. It’s going to be a double wedding. Jake. Me.”
Deety looked alert but not displeased. “Pop?”
“Hilda has at last consented to marry me, dear.”
“Rats,” said Sharpie. “Jake has never asked me in the past and didn’t this time; I simply told him. Hit him with it while he was upset over losing his comic books and unable to defend himself. It’s necessary, Deety – I promised Jane I would take care of Jake and I have – through you, up to now. But from here on you’ll be taking care of Zebbie, keeping him out of trouble, wiping his nose… so I’ve got to hogtie Jake into marriage to keep my promise to Jane. Instead of sneaking into his bed from time to time as in the past.”
“Why, Hilda dear, you have never been in my bed!”
“Don’t shame me in front of the children, Jake. I gave you a test run before I let Jane marry you and you don’t dare deny it.”
Jake shrugged helplessly. “As you wish, dear Hilda.”
“Aunt Hilda… do you love Pop?”
“Would I marry him if I didn’t? I could carry out my promise to Jane more simply by having him committed to a shrink factory. Deety, I’ve loved Jake longer than you have. Much! But he loved Jane… which shows that he is basically rational despite his weird ways. I shan’t try to change him, Deety; I’m simply going to see to it that he wears his overshoes and takes his vitamins – as you’ve been doing. I’ll still be ‘Aunt Hilda,’ not ‘Mother.’ Jane was and is your mother.”
“Thank you, Aunt Hilda. I thought I was happy as a woman can be, getting Zebadiah. But you’ve made me still happier. No worries.”
(I had worries. Blokes with Black Hats and no faces. But I didn’t say so, as Deety was snuggling closer and assuring me that it was all right because Aunt Hilda wouldn’t fib about loving Pop… but I should ignore that guff about her sneaking into Pop’s bed – on which I had no opinion and less interest.) “Deety, where and what is ‘Snug Harbor’?”
“It’s… a nowhere place. A hideout. Land Pop leased from the government when he decided to build his time twister instead of just writing equations. But we may have to wait for daylight. Unless – Can Gay Deceiver home on a given latitude and longitude?”
“She certainly can! Precisely.”
“Then it’s all right. I can give it to you in degrees, minutes, and fractions of a second.”
“Grounding,” Gay warned us.
The Elko County Clerk did not object to getting out of bed and seemed pleased with the century note I slipped him. The County Judge was just as accommodating and pocketed her honorarium without glancing at it. I stammered but managed to say, “I, Zebadiah John, take thee, Dejah Thoris – ” Deety went through it as solemnly and perfectly as if she had rehearsed it… while Hilda sniffled throughout.
A good thing that Gay can home on a pin point; I was in no shape to drive even in daylight. I had her plan her route, too, a dogleg for minimum radar and no coverage at all for the last hundred-odd kilometers to this place in the Arizona Strip north of the Grand Canyon. But I had her hover before grounding – I being scared silly until I was certain there was not a third fire there.
A cabin, fireproof, with underground parking for Gay – I relaxed.
We split a bottle of chablis. Pop seemed about to head for the basement. Sharpie tromped on it and Deety ignored it.
I carried Deety over the threshold into her bedroom, put her gently down, faced her. “Dejah Thoris -“
“Yes, John Carter?”
“I did not have time to buy you a wedding present -“
“I need no present from my captain.”
“Hear me out, my princess. My Uncle Zamir did not have as fine a collection as your father had… but may I gift you with a complete set of Clayton Astoundings -“
She suddenly smiled.
” – and first editions of the first six Oz books, quite worn but with the original color plates? And a first in almost mint condition of ‘A Princess of Mars’?”
The smile became a grin and she looked nine years old. “Yes!”
“Would your father accept a complete set of Weird Tales?”
“Would he! Northwest Smithand Jirel of Joiry? I’m going to borrow them – or he can’t look at my Oz books. I’m stubborn, I am. And selfish. And mean!”
“‘Stubborn’ stipulated. The others denied.”
Deety stuck out her tongue. “You’ll find out.” Suddenly her face was solemn. “But I sorrow, my prince, that I have no present for my husband.”
“But you have!”
“I do?”
“Yes. Beautifully wrapped and making me dizzy with heavenly fragrance.”
“Oh.” She looked solemn but serenely happy. “Will my husband unwrap me? Please?”
I did.
That is all anyone is ever going to know about our wedding night.

Chapter IV

Because two things equal to the same thing are never equal to each other.

Deety:
I woke early as I always do at Snug Harbor, wondered why I was ecstatically happy – then remembered, and turned my head. My husband – “husband!” – what a heart-filling word – my husband was sprawled face down beside me, snoring softly and drooling onto his pillow. I held still, thinking how beautiful he was, how gently strong and gallantly tender.
I was tempted to wake him but I knew that my darling needed rest. So I eased out of bed and snuck noiselessly into my bath – our bath – and quietly took care of this and that. I did not risk drawing a tub – although I needed one. I have a strong body odor that calls for at least one sudsy bath a day, two if I am going out that evening – and this morning I was certainly whiff as a polecat.
I made do with a stand-up bath by letting water run in a noiseless trickle into the basin – I would grab that proper bath after my Captain was awake; meanwhile I would stay downwind.
I pulled on briefs, started to tie on a halter – stopped and looked in the mirror. I have a face-shaped face and a muscular body that I keep in top condition. I would never reach semifinals in a beauty contest but my teats are shapely, exceptionally firm, stand out without sagging and look larger than they are because my waist is small for my height, shoulders and hips. I’ve known this since I was twelve, from mirror and from comments by others.
Now I was acutely aware of them from what Zebadiah calls his “infantile bias.” I was awfully glad I had them; my husband liked them so much and had told me so again and again, making me feel warm and tingly inside. Teats get in the way, and I once found out painfully why Amazons are alleged to have removed their starboard ones to make archery easier.
Today I was most pleased that Mama had required me to wear a bra for tennis and horseback and such – no stretch marks, no “Cooper’s droop,” no sag, and my husband called them “wedding presents”! Hooray!
Doubtless they would become baby-chewed and soft – but by then I planned to have Zebadiah steadfastly in love with me for better reasons. You hear that, Deety? Don’t be stubborn, don’t be bossy, don’t be difficult – and above all don’t sulk! Mama never sulked, although Pop wasn’t and isn’t easy to live with. For example he dislikes the word “teat” even though I spell it correctly and pronounce it correctly (as if spelled “tit”). Pop insists that teats are on cows, not women.
After I started symbolic logic and information theory I became acutely conscious of precise nomenclature, and tried to argue with Pop, pointing out that “breast” denoted the upper frontal torso of male and female alike, that “mammary gland” was medical argot, but “teat” was correct English.
He had slammed down a book. “I don’t give a damn what The Oxford English Dictionary says! As long as I am head of this house, language used in it will conform to my notions of propriety!”
I never argued such points with Pop again. Mama and I went on calling them “teats” between ourselves and did not use such words in Pop’s presence. Mama told me gently that logic had little to do with keeping a husband happy and that anyone who “won” a family argument had in fact lost it. Mama never argued and Pop always did what she wanted – if she really wanted it. When at seventeen I had to grow up and try to replace her, I tried to emulate her – not always successfully. I inherited some of Pop’s temper, some of Mama’s calm. I try to suppress the former and cultivate the latter. But I’m not Jane, I’m Deety.
Suddenly I wondered why I was putting on a halter. The day was going to be hot. While Pop is so cubical about some things that he turns up at the corners, skin is not one of them. (Possibly he had been, then Mama had gently gotten her own way.) I like to be naked and usually am at Snug Harbor, weather permitting. Pop is almost as casual. Aunt Hilda was family-by-choice; we had often used her pool and never with suits – screened for the purpose.
That left just my lovely new husband, and if there was a square centimeter of me he had not examined (and praised), I could not recall it. Zebadiah is easy to be with, in bed or out. After our hasty wedding I was slightly tense lest he ask me when and how I had mislaid my virginity… but when the subject could have come up I forgot it and he apparently never thought about it. I was the lusty wench I have always been and he seemed pleased – I know he was.
So why was I tying on this teat hammock? I was – but why?
Because two things equal to the same thing are never equal to each other. Basic mathematics if you select the proper sheaf of postulates. People are not abstract symbols. I could be naked with any one of them but not all three.
I felt a twinge that Pop and Aunt Hilda might be in the way on my honeymoon… then realized that Zebadiah and I were just as much in the way on theirs – and stopped worrying; it would work out.
Took one last look in the mirror, saw that my scrap of halter, like a good evening gown, made me nakeder than skin would. My nipples popped out; I grinned and stuck out my tongue at them. They stayed up; I was happy.
I started to cat-foot through our bedroom when I noticed Zebadiah’s clothes – and stopped. The darling would not want to wear evening dress to breakfast. Deety, you are not being wifely – figure this out. Are any of Pop’s clothes where I can get them without waking the others?
Yep! An old shirt that I had liberated as a house coat, khaki shorts I had been darning the last time we had been down – both in my wardrobe in my – our! – bathroom. I crept back, got them, laid them over my darling’s evening clothes so that he could not miss them.
I went through and closed after me two soundproof doors, then no longer had to keep quiet. Pop does not tolerate anything shoddy – if it doesn’t work properly, he fixes it. Pop’s B.S. was in mechanical engineering, his M.S. in physics, his Ph.D. in mathematics; there isn’t anything he can’t design and build. A second Leonardo da Vinci – or a Paul Dirac.
No one in the everything room. I decided not to head for the kitchen end yet; if the others slept a bit longer I could get in my morning tone-up. No violent exercise this morning, mustn’t get more whiff than I am – just controlled limbering. Stretch high, then palms to the floor without bending knees – ten is enough. Vertical splits, both legs, then the same to the floor with my forehead to my shin, first right, then left.
I was doing a back bend when I heard, “Ghastly. The battered bride. Deety, stop that.”
I continued into a backwards walkover and stood up facing Pop’s bride. “Good morning, Aunt Hillbilly.” I kissed and hugged her. “Not battered. Bartered, maybe.”
“Battered,” she repeated, yawning. “Who gave you those bruises? What’s-his-name? – your husband.”
“Not a bruise on me and you’ve known his name longer than I have. What causes those circles under the bags under the rings under your eyes?”
“Worry, Deety. Your father is very ill.”
“What? How?”
“Satyriasis. Incurable – I hope.”
I let out my breath. “Aunt Hillbilly, you’re a bitchie, bitchie tease.”
“Not a bitch this morning, dear. A nanny goat – who has been topped all night by the most amazing billy goat on the ranch. And him past fifty and me only twenty-nine. Astounding.”
“Pop’s forty-nine, you’re forty-two. You’re complaining?”
“Oh, no! Had I known twenty-four years ago what I know now, I would never have let Jane lay eyes on him.”
” – what you know now – Last night you were claiming to have sneaked into Pop’s bed, over and over again. Doesn’t jibe, Aunt Nanny Goat.”
“Those were quickies. Not a real test.” She yawned again.
“Auntie, you lie in your teeth. You were never in his bed until last night.”
“How do you know, dear? Unless you were in it yourself? Were you? Incest?”
“What have you got against incest, you bawdy old nanny goat? Don’t knock it if you haven’t tried it.”
“Oh, so you have? How fascinating – tell Auntiet!”
“I’ll tell you the truth, Aunt Hilda. Pop has never laid a hand on me. But if he had… I would not have refused. I love him.”
Hilda stopped to kiss me more warmly than before. “So do I, dear one. I honor you for what you just told me. He could have had me, too. But never did. Until last night. Now I’m the happiest woman in America.”
“Nope. Second happiest. You’re looking at the happiest.”
“Mmm, a futile discussion. So my problem child is adequate?”
“Well… he’s not a member of the Ku Klux Klan -“
“I never thought he was! Zebbie isn’t that sort.”
” – but he’s a wizard under a sheet!”
Aunt Hilda looked startled, then guffawed. “I surrender. We’re both the happiest woman in the world.”
“And the luckiest. Aunt Nanny Goat, that robe of Pop’s is too hot. I’ll get something of mine. How about a tie-on fit-anybody bikini?”
“Thanks, dear, but you might wake Zebbie.” Aunt Hilda opened Pop’s robe and held it wide, fanning it. I looked at her with new eyes. She’s had three or four term contracts, no children. At forty-two her face looks thirty-five, but from her collarbones down she could pass for eighteen. Little bitty teats – I had more at twelve. Flat belly and lovely legs. A china doll – makes me feel like a giant.
She added, “If it weren’t for your husband, I would simply wear this old hide. It is hot.”
“If it weren’t for your husband, so would I.”
“Jacob? Deety, he’s changed your diapers. I know how Jane reared you. True modesty, no false modesty.”
“It’s not the same, Aunt Hilda. Not today.”
“No, it’s not. You always did have a wise head, Deety. Women are toughminded, men are not; we have to protect them … while pretending to be fragile ourselves, to build up their fragile egos. But I’ve never been good at it – I like to play with matches.”
“Aunt Hilda, you are very good at it, in your own way. I’m certain Mama knows what you’ve done for Pop and blesses it and is happy for Pop. For all of us – all five of us.”
“Don’t make me cry, Deety. Let’s break out the orange juice; our men will wake any time. First secret of living with a man: Feed him as soon as he wakes.”
“So I know.”
“Yes, of course you know. Ever since we lost Jane. Does Zebbie know how lucky he is?”
“He says so. I’m going to try hard not to disillusion him.”

Chapter V

” – a wedding ring is not a ring in my nose – “

Jake:
I woke in drowsy euphoria, became aware that I was in bed in our cabin that my daughter calls “Snug Harbor” – then woke completely and looked at the other pillow – the dent in it. Not a dream! Euphoric for the best of reasons!
Hilda was not in sight. I closed my eyes and simulated sleep as I had something to do. “Jane?” I said in my mind.
“I hear you, dearest one. It has my blessing. Now we are all happy together.”
“We couldn’t expect Deety to become a sour old maid, just to take care of her crotchety old father. This young man, he’s okay, to the nth power. I felt it at once, and Hilda is certain of it.”
“He is. Don’t worry, Jacob. Our Deety can never be sour and you will never be old. This is exactly as Hilda and I planned it, more than five of your years ago. Predestined. She told you so, last night.”
“Okay, darling.”
“Get up and brush your teeth and take a quick shower. Don’t dawdle, breakfast is waiting. Call me when you need me. Kiss.”
So I got up, feeling like a boy on Christmas morning. Everything was jake with Jake; Jane had put her stamp of approval on it. Let me tell you, you nonexistent reader sitting there with a tolerant sneer: Don’t be smug. Jane is more real than you are.
The spirit of a good woman cannot be coded by nucleic acids arranged in a double helix, and only an overeducated fool could think so. I could prove that mathematically save that mathematics can never prove anything. No mathematics has any content. All any mathematics can do is – sometimes – turn out to be useful in describing some aspects of our so-called “physical universe.” That is a bonus; most forms of mathematics are as meaning-free as chess.
I don’t know any final answers. I’m an all-around mechanic and a competent mathematician… and neither is of any use in unscrewing the inscrutable.
Some people go to church to talk to God, Whoever He is. When I have something on my mind, I talk to Jane. I don’t hear “voices,” but the answers that, come into my mind have as much claim to infallibility, it seems to me, as any handed down by any Pope speaking ex cathedra. If this be blasphemy, make the most of it; I won’t budge. Jane is, was, and ever shall be, worlds without end. I had the priceless privilege of living with her for eighteen years and I can never lose her.
Hilda was not in the bath but my toothbrush was damp. I smiled at this. Logical, as any germs I was harboring, Hilda now had – and Hilda, for all her playfulness, is no-nonsense practical. She faces danger without a qualm (had done so last night) but she would say “Gesundheit!” to an erupting volcano even as she fled from it. Jane is equally brave but would omit the quip. They are alike only in – no, not that way, either. Different but equal. Let it stand that I have been blessed in marriage by two superb women. (And blessed by a daughter whose Pop thinks she is perfect.)
I showered, shaved, and brushed my teeth in nine minutes and dressed in under nine seconds as I simply wrapped around my waist a terry-cloth sarong Deety had bought for me – the day promised to be a scorcher. Even that hip wrap was a concession to propriety, i.e., I did not know my new son-in-law well enough to subject him abruptly to our casual ways; it might offend Deety.
I was last up, and saw that all had made much the same decision. Deety was wearing what amounted to a bikini minimum (indecently “decent”!) and my bride was “dressed” in a tie-on job belonging to Deety. The tie-ties had unusually large bows; Hilda is tiny, my daughter is not. Zeb was the only one fully dressed: an old pair of working shorts, a worn-out denim shirt Deety had confiscated, and his evening shoes. He was dressed for the street in any western town save for one thing: I’m built like a pear, Zeb is built like the Gray Lensman.
My shorts fitted him well enough – a bit loose – but his shoulders were splitting the shirt’s seams. He looked uncomfortable.
I took care of amenities – a good-morning to all, a kiss for my bride, one for my daughter, a handshake for my son-in-law-good hands, calloused. Then I said, “Zeb, take that shirt off. It’s hot and getting hotter. Relax. This is your home.”
“Thanks, Pop.” Zeb peeled off my shirt.
Hilda stood up on her chair, making her about as tall as Zeb. “I’m a militant women’s-rights gal,” she announced, “and a wedding ring is not a ring in my nose – a ring that you have not yet given me, you old goat.”
“When have I had time? You’ll get one, dear – first chance.”
“Excuses, excuses! Don’t interrupt when I’m orating. Sauce for the gander is no excuse for goosing the goose. If you male chauvinist pigs – I mean ‘goats’ – can dress comfortably, Deety and I have the same privilege.” Whereupon my lovely little bride untied that bikini top and threw it aside like a stripper.
“‘”What’s for breakfast?” asked Pooh,'” I misquoted.
I was not answered. Deety made me proud of her for the nth time. For years she had consulted me, at least with her eyes, on “policy decisions.” Now she looked not at me but at her husband. Zeb was doing Old Stone Face, refusing assent or dissent. Deety stared at him, gave a tiny shrug, reached behind her and untied or unsnapped something and discarded her own top.
“I said, ‘What’s for breakfast?'” I repeated.
“Greedy gut,” my daughter answered. “You men have had baths, while Aunt Hilda and I haven’t had a chance to get clean for fear of waking you slugabeds.”
“Is that what it is? I thought a skunk had wandered past. ‘What’s for breakfast?'”
“Aunt Hilda, in only hours Pop has lost all the training I’ve given him for five years. Pop, it’s laid out and ready to go. How about cooking while Hilda and I grab a tub?”
Zeb stood up. “I’ll cook, Deety; I’ve been getting my own breakfast for years.”
“Hold it, Buster!” my bride interrupted. “Sit down, Zebbie. Deety, never encourage a man to cook breakfast; it causes him to wonder if women are necessary. If you always get his breakfast and don’t raise controversial issues until after his second cup of coffee, you can get away with murder the rest of the time. They don’t notice other odors when they smell bacon. I’m going to have to coach you.”
My daughter reversed the field, fast. She turned to her husband and said meekly, “What does my Captain wish for breakfast?”
“My Princess, whatever your lovely hands offer me.”
What we were offered, as fast as Deety could pour batter and Hilda could serve, was a gourmet specialty that would enrage a Cordon Bleu but which, for my taste, is ambrosia: A one-eyed Texas stack – a tall stack of thin, tender buttermilk pancakes to Jane’s recipe, supporting one large egg, up and easy, surrounded by hot sausage, and the edifice drowned in melting butter and hot maple syrup, with a big glass of orange juice and a big mug of coffee on the side.
Zeb ate two stacks. I concluded that my daughter would have a happy marriage.

Chapter VI

Are men and women one race?

Hilda:
Deety and I washed dishes, then soaked in her tub and talked about husbands. We giggled, and talked with the frankness of women who trust each other and are sure that no men can overhear. Do men talk that openly in parallel circumstances? From all I have been able to learn in after-midnight horizontal conversations, all passion spent, men do not. Or not men I would take to bed. Whereas a “perfect lady” (which Jane was, Deety is, and I can simulate) will talk with another “perfect lady” she trusts in a way that would cause her father, husband, or son to faint.
I had better leave out our conversation; this memoir might fall into the hands of one of the weaker sex and I would not want his death on my conscience.
Are men and women one race? I know what biologists say – but history is loaded with “scientists” jumping to conclusions from superficial evidence. It seems to me far more likely that they are symbiotes. I am not speaking from ignorance; I was one trimester short of a B.S. in biology (and a straight-A student) when a “biology experiment” blew up in my face and caused me to leave school abruptly.
Not that I need that degree – I’ve papered my private bath with honorary degrees, mostly doctorates. I hear that there are things no whore will do for money but I have yet to find anything that a university chancellor faced with a deficit will boggle at. The secret is never to set up a permanent fund but to dole it out when need is sharpest, once every academic year. Done that way, you not only own a campus but also the town cops learn that it’s a waste of time to hassle you. A univer$ity alway$ $tand$ $taunchly by it$ $olvent a$$ociate$; that’$ the ba$ic $ecret of $chola$tic $ucce$$.
Forgive my digre$$ion; we were speaking of men and women. I am strong for women’s rights but was never taken in by unisex nonsense. I don’t yearn to be equal; Sharpie is as unequal as possible, with all the perks and bonuses and special privileges that come from being one of the superior sex. If a man fails to hold a door for me, I fail to see him and step on his instep. I feel no shame in making lavish use of the strongest muscles, namely male ones (but my own strongest muscle is dedicated to the service of men – noblesse oblige). I don’t begrudge men one whit of their natural advantages as long as they respect mine. I am not an unhappy pseudomale; I am female and like it that way.
I borrowed makeup that Deety rarely uses, but I carry my own perfume in my purse and used it in the twenty-two classic places. Deety uses only the basic aphrodisiac: soap and water. Perfume on her would be gilding the lily; fresh out of a hot tub she smells like a harem. If I had her natural fragrance, I could have saved at least ten thousand newdollars over the years as well as many hours spent dabbing bait here and there.
She offered me a dress and I told her not to be silly; any dress of hers would fit me like a tent. “You put something bridal and frilly around your hips and lend me your boldest G-string job. Dear, I surprised you when I jockeyed you into taking off your halter, after telling you that you were wise not to rush it. But the chance showed up and I grabbed the ring on the fly. We’ve got our men gentled to nearly naked and we’ll hold that gain. At first opportunity we’ll get pants off all of us, too, without anything as childish as strip poker. Deety, I want us to be a solid family, and relaxed about it. So that skin doesn’t mean sex, it just means we are home, en famille.”
“Your skin is pretty sexy, Nanny Goat.”
“Deety, do you think I’m trying to make a pass at Zebbie?”
“Heavens, no, Aunt Hilda. You would never do that.”
“Piffle, dear. I don’t have morals, just customs. I don’t wait for a man to make a pass; they fumble around and waste time. But when I met him I picked Zebbie for a chum – so I gave him an opening; he made a polite pass, I carefully failed to see it, and that ended it. I’m sure he’s as much fun on the workbench as you tell me he is – but bedmates are easy to find, while worthwhile male friends are scarce. Zebbie is one to whom I can holler for help in the middle of the night and be certain he’ll rally around. I’m not going to let that change merely because a weird concatenation now makes him my son-in-law. Besides, Deety, although your old Aunt Sharpie may seem undignified, I refuse to be the campus widow who seduces younger men. Save for minor exceptions close to my age, I always have bedded older men. When I was your age, I tripped several three times my age. Educational.”
“It certainly is! Aunt Hilda, I got ninety percent of my instruction two years ago – a widower three times my age. I was programming for him and we took shared time when we could get it, often after midnight. I didn’t think anything of it until one night I was startled to find that I was helping him to take off my panties. Then I was still more surprised to learn how little I had learned in seven years. He gave me a tutored seminar, usually three times a week- all the time he was willing to spare me – for the next six months. I’m glad I got tutoring from an expert before last night rolled around – or Zebadiah would have found me a dead arse, willing but clumsy. I didn’t tell this to my darling; I let him think he was teaching me.”
“That’s right, dear. Never tell a man anything he doesn’t need to know, and lie with a straight face rather than hurt his feelings or diminish his pride.”
“Aunt Nanny Goat, I just plain love you.”
We quit yakking and looked for our men. Deety said that they were certain to be in the basement. “Aunt Hilda, I don’t go there without invitation. It’s Pop’s sanctum sanctorum.”
“You’re warning me not to risk a faux pas?”
“I’m his daughter, you’re his wife. Not the same.”
“Well… he hasn’t told me not to – and today he’ll forgive me, if ever. Where do you hide the stairs?”
“That bookcase swings out.”
“Be darned! For a so-called cabin this place is loaded with surprises. A bidet in each bath didn’t startle me; Jane would have required them. Your walk-in freezer startled me only by being big enough for a restaurant. But a bookcase concealing a priest’s hole – as Great-Aunt Nettie used to say, ‘I do declare!'”
“You should see our septic tank – yours, now.”
“I’ve seen septic tanks. Pesky things – always need pumping at the most inconvenient time.”
“This one won’t have to be pumped. Over three hundred meters deep. An even thousand feet.”
“For the love of – Why?”
“It’s an abandoned mine shaft below us that some optimist dug a hundred years back. Here was this big hole, so Pop used it. There is a spring farther up the mountain. Pop cleaned that out, covered it, concealed it, put pipe underground, and we have lavish pure water under pressure. The rest of Snug Harbor Pop designed mostly from prefab catalogs, fireproof and solid and heavily insulated. We have – you have, I mean – this big fireplace and the little ones in the bedrooms, but you won’t need them, other than for homeyness. Radiant heat makes it skin-comfortable even in a blizzard.”
“Where do you get your power? From the nearest town?”
“Oh, no! Snug Harbor is a hideout, nobody but Pop and me – and now you and Zebadiah – knows it’s here. Power packs, Aunt Hilda, and an inverter in a space behind the back wall of the garage. We bring in power packs ourselves, and take them out the same way. Private. Oh, the leasehold record is buried in a computer in Washington or Denver, and the Federal rangers know the leaseholds. But they don’t see us if we see or hear them first. Mostly they cruise on past. Once one came by on horseback. Pop fed him beer out under the trees – and from outside this is just a prefab, a living room and two shedroof bedrooms. Nothing to show that important parts are underground.”
“Deety, I’m beginning to think that this place – this cabin – cost more than my townhouse.”
“Uh, probably.”
“I think I’m disappointed. Sugar Pie, I married your papa because I love him and want to take care of him and promised Jane that I would. I’ve been thinking happily that my wedding present to my bridegroom would be his weight in bullion, so that dear man need never work again.”
“Don’t be disappointed, Aunt Hilda. Pop has to work; it’s his nature. Me, too. Work is necessary to us. Without it, we’re lost.”
“Well… yes. But working because you want to is the best sort of play.”
“Correct!”
“That’s what I thought I could give Jacob. I don’t understand it. Jane wasn’t rich, she was on a scholarship. Jacob had no money – still a teaching fellow, a few months shy of his doctorate. Deety, Jacob’s suit that he wore to be married in was threadbare. I know that he pulled up from that; he made full professor awfully fast. I thought it was that and Jane’s good management.”
“It was both.”
“That doesn’t account for this. Forgive me, Deety, but Utah State doesn’t pay what Harvard pays.”
“Pop doesn’t lack offers. We like Logan. Both the town and the civilized behavior of Mormons. But – Aunt Hilda, I must tell you some things.”
The child looked worried. I said, “Deety, if Jacob wants me to know something he’ll tell me.”
“Oh, but he won’t and I must!”
“No, Deety!”
“Listen, please! When I said, ‘I do,’ I resigned as Pop’s manager. When you said, ‘I do,’ the load landed on you. It has to be that way, Aunt Hilda. Pop won’t do it; he has other things to think about, things that take genius. Mama did it for years, then I learned how, and now it’s your job. Because it can’t be farmed out. Do you understand accountancy?”
“Well, I understand it, I took a course in it. Have to understand it, or the government will skin you alive. But I don’t do it, I have accountants for that – and smart shysters to keep it inside the law.”
“Would it bother you to be outside the law? On taxes?”
“What? Heavens, no! But Sharpie wants to stay outside of jail – I detest an institutional diet.”
“You’ll stay out of jail. Don’t worry, Aunt Hilda – I’ll teach you double-entry bookkeeping they don’t teach in school. Very double. One set for the revenooers and another set for you and Jake.”
“It’s that second set that worries me. That one puts you in the pokey. Fresh air alternate Wednesdays.”
“Nope. The second set is not on paper; it’s in the campus computer at Logan.”
“Worse!”
“Aunt Hilda, please! Certainly my computer address code is in the department’s vault and an I.R.S. agent could get a court order. It wouldn’t do him any good. It would spill out our first set of books while wiping every trace of the second set. Inconvenient but not disastrous. Aunt Hillbilly, I’m not a champion at anything else but I’m the best software artist inthe business. I at your elbow until you are sure of yourself.
“Now about how Pop got rich – All the time he’s been teaching he’s also been inventing gadgets – as automatically as a hen lays eggs. A better can opener. A lawn irrigation system that does a better job, costs less, uses less water. Lots of things. But none has his name on it and royalties trickle back in devious ways.
“But we aren’t freeloaders. Every year Pop and I study the Federal Budget and decide what is useful and what is sheer waste by fat-arsed chairwarmers and pork-barrel raiders. Even before Mama died we were paying more income tax than the total of Pop’s salary, and we’ve paid more each year while I’ve been running it. It does take a bundle to run this country. We don’t begrudge money spent on roads and public health and national defense and truly useful things. But we’ve quit paying for parasites wherever we can identify them.
“It’s your job now, Aunt Hilda. If you decide that it’s dishonest or too risky, I can cause the computer to make it all open and legal so smoothly that hankypanky would never show. It would take me maybe three years, and Pop would pay high capital gains. But you are in charge of Pop now.”
“Deety, don’t talk dirty.”
“Dirty, how? I didn’t even say ‘spit.'”
“Suggesting that I would willingly pay what those clowns in Washington want to squeeze out of us. I would not be supporting so many accountants and shysters if I didn’t think we were being robbed blind. Deety, how about being manager for all of us?”
“No, ma’am! I’m in charge of Zebadiah. I have my own interests to manage, too. Mama wasn’t as poor as you thought. When I was a little girl, she came into a chunk from a trust her grandmother had set up. She and Pop gradually moved it over into my name and again avoided inheritance and estate taxes, all legal as Sunday School. When I was eighteen, I converted it into cash, then caused it to disappear. Besides that, I’ve been paying me a whopping salary as Pop’s manager. I’m not as rich as you are, Aunt Hilda, and certainly not as rich as Pop. But I ain’t hurtin’.”
“Zebbie may be richer than all of us.”
“You said last night that he was loaded but I didn’t pay attention because I had already decided to marry him. But after experiencing what sort of car he drives I realize that you weren’t kidding. Not that it matters. Yes, it did matter – it took both Zebadiah’s courage and Gay Deceiver’s unusual talents to save our lives.”
“You may never find out how loaded Zebbie is, dear. Some people don’t let their left hands know what their right hands are doing. Zebbie doesn’t let his thumb know what his fingers are doing.”
Deety shrugged. “I don’t care. He’s kind and gentle and he’s a storybook hero who saved my life and Pop’s and yours … and last night he proved to me that life is worth living when I’ve been uncertain about it since Mama had to leave us. Let’s go find our men, Aunt Nanny Goat. I’ll risk Pop’s Holy of Holies if you’ll go first.”
“Suits. Lay on your duff and cursed be he who first cries, ‘Nay, enough.”
“I don’t think they’re interested in that now, Nanny Goat.”
“Spoilsport. How do you swing back this bookcase?”
“Switch on the cove lights, then turn on the cold water at the sink. Then switch off the cove lights, then turn off the water – in that order.”
“‘”Curiouser and curiouser,” said Alice.'”
The bookcase closed behind us and was a door with a knob on the upper landing side. The staircase was wide, treads were broad and nonskid, risers gentle, guard rails on both sides – not the legbreaker most houses have as cellar stairs. Deety went down beside me, holding my hand like a child needing reassurance.
The room was beautifully lighted, well ventilated, and did not seem like a basement. Our men were at the far end, bent over a table, and did not appear to notice us. I looked around for a time machine, could not spot it – at least not anything like George Pal’s or any I had ever read about. All around was machinery. A drill press looks the same anywhere and so does a lathe, but others were strange – except that they reminded me of machine shops.
My husband caught sight of us, stood up, and said, “Welcome, ladies!”
Zebbie turned his head and said sharply, “Late to class! Find seats, no whispering during the lecture, take notes; there will be a quiz at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. If you have questions, raise your hands and wait to be called on. Anyone who misbehaves will remain after class and wash the chalk boards.”
Deety stuck out her tongue, sat down quietly. I rubbed his brush cut and whispered an indecency into his ear. Then I kissed my husband and sat down.
My husband resumed talking to Zebbie. “I lost more gyroscopes that way.”
I held up my hand. My husband said, “Yes, Hilda dear?”
“Monkey Ward’s sells gyro tops – I’ll buy you a gross.”
“Thank you, dearest, but these weren’t that sort. They were made by Sperry Division of General Foods.”
“So I’ll get them from Sperry.”
“Sharpie,” put in Zeb, “you’re honing to clean the erasers, too.”
“Just a moment, Son. Hilda may be the perfect case to find out whether or not what I have tried to convey to you – and which really can’t be conveyed save in the equations your cousin Zebulon used, a mathematics you say is unfamiliar to you -“
“It is!”
” – but which you appear to grasp as mechanics. Would you explain the concept to Hilda? If she understands it, we may hypothesize that a continua craft can be designed to be operated by a nontechnical person.”
“Sure,” I said scornfully, “poor little me, with a button for a head. I don’t have to know where the electrons go to use television or holovision. Ijust twist knobs. Go ahead, Zebbie. Take a swing at it, I dare you.”
“I’ll try,” Zebbie agreed. “But, Sharpie, don’t chatter and keep your comments to the point. Or I’ll ask Pop to give you a fat lip.”
“He wouldn’t dast!”
“So? I’m going to give him a horsewhip for a wedding present – besides the Weird Tales, Jake; you get those too. But you need a whip. Attention, Sharpie.”
“Yes, Zebbie. And the same to you doubled.”
“Do you know what ‘precess’ means?”
“Certainly. Precession of the equinoxes. Means that Vega will be the North Star when I’m a great-grandmother. Thirty thousand years or some such.”
“Correct in essence. But you’re not even a mother yet.”
“You don’t know what happened last night. I’m an expectant mother. Jacob doesn’t dare use a whip on me.”
My husband looked startled but pleased – and I felt relieved. Zebbie looked at his own bride. Deety said solemnly, “It is possible, Zebadiah. Neither of us was protected, each was on or close on ovulation. Hilda is blood type B Rhesus positive and my father is AB positive. I am A Rh positive. May I inquire yours, sir?”
“I’m an 0 positive. Uh… I may have shot you down the first salvo.”
“It would seem likely. But – does this meet with your approval?”
“‘Approval’!” Zebbie stood up, knocking over his chair. “Princess, you could not make me happier! Jake! This calls for a toast!”
My husband stopped kissing me. “Unanimous! Daughter, is there champagne chilled?”
“Yes, Pop.”
“Hold it!” I said. “Let’s not get excited over a normal biological function. Deety and I don’t know that we caught; we just hope so. And -“
“So we try again,” Zebbie interrupted. “What’s your calendar?”
“Twenty-eight and a half days, Zebadiah. My rhythm is pendulum steady.”
“Mine’s twenty-seven; Deety and I just happen to be in step. But I want that toast at dinner and a luau afterwards; it might be the last for a long time. Deety, do you get morning sick?”
“I don’t know; I’ve never been pregnant… before.”
“I have and I do and it’s miserable. Then I lost the naked little grub after trying hard to keep it. But I’m not going to lose this one! Fresh air and proper exercise and careful diet and nothing but champagne for me tonight, then not another drop until I know. In the meantime – Professors, may I point out that class is in session? I want to know about time machines and I’m not sure I could understand with champagne buzzing my buttonhead.”
“Sharpie, sometimes you astound me.”
“Zebbie, sometimes I astound myself. Since my husband builds time machines, I want to know what makes them tick. Or at least which knobs to turn. He might be clawed by the Bandersnatch and I would have to pilot him home. Get on with your lecture.”
“I read you loud and clear.”
But we wasted (“wasted?”) a few moments because everybody had to kiss everybody else – even Zebbie and my husband pounded each other on the back and kissed both cheeks Latin style. Zebbie tried to kiss me as if I were truly his mother-in-law but I haven’t kissed that way since junior high. Once I was firm with him he gave in and kissed me better than he ever had before – whew! I’m certain Deety is right but I won’t risk worrying my older husband over a younger man and I’d be an idiot to risk competing with Deety’s teats et cetera when all I have is fried eggs and my wonderful old goat seems so pleased with my et cetera.
Class resumed. “Sharpie, can you explain precession in gyroscopes?”
“Well, maybe. Physics One was required but that was a long time ago. Push a gyroscope and it doesn’t go the way you expect, but ninety degrees from that direction so that the push lines up with the spin. Like this – ” I pointed a forefinger like a little boy going: “Bang! – you’re dead!”
“My thumb is the axis, my forefinger represents the push, the other fingers show the rotation.”
“Go to the head of the class. Now – think hard! – suppose we put a gyroscope in a frame, then impress equal forces at all three spatial coordinates at once; what would it do?”
I tried to visualize it. “I think it would either faint or drop dead.”
“A good first hypothesis. According to Jake, it disappears.”
“They do disappear, Aunt Hilda. I watched it happen several times.”
“But where do they go?”
“I can’t follow Jake’s math; I have to accept his transformations without proof. But it is based on the notion of six space-time coordinates, three of space, the usual three that we see – marked x, y, and z – and three time coordinates: one marked ‘t’ like this – ” (t) ” – and one marked ‘tau,’ Greek alphabet – ” (T) ” – and the third from the Cyrillic alphabet, ‘teh’ – ” (M)
“Looks like an ‘m’ with a macron over it.”
“So it does, but it’s what the Russians use for ‘t’.”
“No, the Russians use ‘chai’ for tea. In thick glasses with strawberry jam.”
“Stow it, Sharpie. So we have x, y, and z; t, tau, and teh, six dimensions. It is basic to the theory that all are at right angles to each other, and that any one may be swapped for any of the others by rotation – or that a new coordinate may be found (not a seventh but replacing any of the six) by translation – say ‘tau’ to ‘tau prime’ by displacement along ‘x.'”
“Zebbie, I think I fell off about four coordinates back.”
My husband suggested, “Show her the caltrop, Zeb.”
“Good idea.” Zeb accepted a widget from my husband, placed it in front of me. It looked like jacks I used to play with as a little girl but not enough things sticking out – four instead of six. Three touched the table, a tripod; the fourth stuck straight up.
Zeb said, “This is a weapon, invented centuries ago. The points should be sharp but these have been filed down.” He flipped it, let it fall to the table. “No matter how it falls, one prong is vertical. Scatter them in front of cavalry; the horses go down – discouraging. They came into use again in Wars One and Two against anything with pneumatic tires – bicycles, motorcycles, lorries, and so forth. Big enough, they disable tanks and tracked vehicles. A small sort can be whittled from thorn bushes for guerrilla warfare – usually poisoned and quite nasty.
“But here this lethal toy is a geometrical projection, a drawing of the coordinates of a four-dimensional space-time continuum. Each spike is exactly ninety degrees from every other spike.”
“But they aren’t,” I objected. “Each angle is more than a right angle.”
“I said it was a projection. Sharpie, it’s an isometric projection of four-dimensional coordinates in three-dimensional space. That distorts the angles… and the human eye is even more limited. Cover one eye and hold still and you see only two dimensions. The illusion of depth is a construct of the brain.”
“I’m not very good at holding still -“
“No, she isn’t,” agreed my bridegroom whom I love dearly and at that instant could have choked.
“But I can close both eyes and feel three dimensions with my hands.”
“A good point. Close your eyes and pick this up and think of the prongs as the four directions of a four-dimensional space. Does the word tesseract mean anything to you?”
“My high school geometry teacher showed us how to construct them – projections – with modeling wax and toothpicks. Fun. I found other four-dimensional figures that were easy to project. And a number of ways to project them.”
“Sharpie, you must have had an exceptional geometry teacher.”
“In an exceptional geometry class. Don’t faint, Zebbie, but I was grouped with what they called ‘overachievers’ after it became ‘undemocratic’ to call them ‘gifted children.'”
“Be durned! Why do you always behave like a fritterhead?”
“Why don’t you ever look beneath the surface, young man! I laugh because I dare not cry. This is a crazy world and the only way to enjoy it is to treat it as a joke. That doesn’t mean I don’t read and can’t think. I read everything from Giblett to Hoyle, from Sartre to Pauling. I read in the tub, I read on the john, I read in bed, I read when I eat alone, and I would read in my sleep if I could keep my eyes open. Deety, this is proof that Zebbie has never been in my bed: the books downstairs are display; the stuff I read is stacked in my bedroom.”
“Deety, did you think I had been sleeping with Sharpie?”
“No, Zebadiah.”
“And you never will! Deety told me what a sex maniac you are! You lay your lecherous hands on me and I’ll scream for Jacob and he’ll beat you to a pulp.”
“Don’t count on it, dear one,” my husband said mildly. “Zeb is bigger and younger and stronger than I… and if I found it needful to try, Deety would cry and beat me to a pulp. Son, I should have warned you: my daughter is vicious at karate. The killer instinct.”
“Thanks. Forewarned, forearmed. I’ll use a kitchen chair in one hand, a revolver in the second, and a whip in the other, just as I used to do in handling the big cats for Ringling, Barnum, and Bailey.”
“That’s three hands,” said Deety.
“I’m four-dimensional, darling. Professor, we can speed up this seminar; we’ve been underrating our overachiever. Hilda is a brain.”
“Zebbie, can we kiss and make up?”
“Class is in session.”
“Zebadiah, there is always time for that. Right, Pop?”
“Kiss her, Son, or she’ll sulk.”
“I don’t sulk, I bite.”
“I think you’re cute, too,” Zebbie answered, grabbed me by both shoulders, dragged me over the table, and kissed me hard. Our teeth grated and my nipples went spung! Sometimes I wish I weren’t so noble.
He dropped me abruptly and said, “Attention, class. The two prongs of the caltrop painted blue represent our three-dimensional space of experience. The third prong painted yellow is the t-time we are used to. The red fourth prong simulates both Tau-time and Teh-time, the unexplored time dimensions necessary to Jake’s theory. Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three – you seem to be smart at such projections.”
I closed my eyes and thought hard. “Zebbie, I don’t think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it.”
“It can be done, my dearest,” answered my dearest, “but it is unsatisfactory. Even with a display computer with capacity to subtract one or more dimensions at a time. A superhypertesseract – a to the sixth power – has too many lines and corners and planes and solids and hypersolids for the eye to grasp. Cause the computer to subtract dimensions and what you have left is what you already knew. I fear it is an innate incapacity of visual conception in the human brain.”
“I think Pop is right,” agreed Deety. “I worked hard on that program. I don’t think the late great Dr. Marvin Minsky could have done it better in flat projection. Holovision? I don’t know. I would like to try if I ever get my hands on a computer with holovideo display and the capacity to add, subtract, and rotate six coordinates.”
“But why six dimensions?” I asked. “Why not five? Or even four, since you speak of rotating them interchangeably.”
“Jake?” said Zeb.
My darling looked fussed. “It bothered me that a space-time continuum seemed to require three space dimensions but only one time dimension. Granted that the universe is what it is, nevertheless nature is filled with symmetries. Even after the destruction of the parity principle, scientists kept finding new ones. Philosophers stay wedded to symmetry – but I don’t count philosophers.”
“Of course not,” agreed Zeb. “No philosopher allows his opinions to be swayed by facts – he would be kicked out of his guild. Theologians, the lot of them.”
“I concur. Hilda my darling, after I found a way to experiment, it turned out that six dimensions existed. Possibly more – but I see no way to reach them.”
“Let me see,” I said. “If I understood earlier, each dimension can be swapped for any other.”
“By ninety-degree rotation, yes.”
“Wouldn’t that be the combinations taken four at a time out of a set of six? How many is that?”
“Fifteen,” Zebbie answered.
“Goodness! Fifteen whole universes? And we use only one?”
“No, no, my darling! That would be ninety-degree rotations of one Euclidean universe. But our universe, or universes, has been known to be non-Euclidean at least since 1919. Or 1886 if you prefer. I stipulate that cosmology is an imperfect discipline, nevertheless, for considerations that I cannot state in nonmathematical terms, I was forced to assume a curved space of positive radius – that is to say, a closed space. That makes the universes possibly accessible to use either by rotation or by translation this number.” My husband rapidly wrote three sixes.
“Six sixty-six,” I said wonderingly. “‘The Number of the Beast.'”
“Eh? Oh! The Revelation of Saint John the Divine. But I scrawled it sloppily. You took it that I wrote this: ‘666.’ But what I intended to write was this: ‘6^6^6.’ Six raised to its sixth power, and the result in turn raised to its sixth power. That number is this:” 1.03144+ X 10^28 ” – or written in full:” 10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056 ” – or more than ten million sextillion universes in our group.”
What can one say to that? Jacob went on, “Those universes are our nextdoor neighbors, one rotation or one translation away. But if one includes combinations of rotation and translation – think of a hyperplane slicing through superhypercontinua not at the point of here-now – the total becomes indenumerable. Not infinity – infinity has no meaning. Uncountable. Not subject to manipulation by mathematics thus far invented. Accessible to continua craft but no known way to count them.”
“Pop -“
“Yes, Deety?”
“Maybe Aunt Hilda hit on something. Agnostic as you are, you nevertheless keep the Bible around as history and poetry and myth.”
“Who said I was agnostic, my daughter?”
“Sorry, sir. I long ago reached that conclusion because you won’t talk about it. Wrong of me. Lack of data never justifies a conclusion. But this key number – one-point-oh-three-one-four-four-plus times ten to its twenty-eighth power – perhaps that is the ‘Number of the Beast.'”
“What do you mean, Deety?”
“That Revelation isn’t history, it’s not good poetry, and it’s not myth. There must have been some reason for a large number of learned men to include it – while chucking out several dozen gospels. Why not make a first hypothesis with Occam’s Razor and read it as what it purports to be? Prophecy.”
“Hmm. The shelves under the stairs, next to Shakespeare. The King James version, never mind the other three.”
Deety was back in a moment with a well-worn black book – which surprised me. I read the Bible for my own reasons but it never occurred to me that Jacob would. We always marry strangers.
“Here,” said Deety. “Chapter thirteen, verse eighteen: ‘Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the number of a man; and his number is Six hundred threescore and six.”
“That can’t be read as exponents, Deety.”
“But this is a translation, Pop. Wasn’t the original in Greek? I don’t remember when exponents were invented but the Greek mathematicians of that time certainly understood powers. Suppose the original read ‘Zeta, Zeta, Zeta!’ – and those scholars, who weren’t mathematicians, mistranslated it as six hundred and sixty-six?”
“Uh… moondrift, Daughter.”
“Who taught me that the world is not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine? Who has already taken me into two universes that are not this one… and brought me safely home?”
“Wait a half!” Zebbie said. “You and Pop have already tried the time-space machine?”
“Didn’t Pop tell you? We made one minimum translation. We didn’t seem to have gone anywhere and Pop thought he had failed. Until I tried to look up a number in the phone book. No ‘J’ in the book. No ‘J’ in the Britannica. No ‘J’ in any dictionary. So we popped back in, and Pop returned the verniers to zero, and we got out, and the alphabet was back the way it ought to be and I stopped shaking. But our rotation was even more scary and we almost died. Out in space with blazing stars – but air was leaking out and Pop just barely put it back to zero before we passed out… and came to, back here in Snug Harbor.”
“Jake,” Zebbie said seriously, “that gadget has got to have more fail-safes, in series with deadman switches for homing.” He frowned. “I’m going to keep my eye open for both numbers, six sixty-six and the long one. I trust Deety’s hunches. Deety, where is the verse with the description of the Beast? It’s somewhere in the middle of the chapter.”
“Here. ‘And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon.'”
“Hmm – I don’t know how dragons speak. But if something comes up out of the earth and has two horns… and I see or hear either number – I’m going to assume that he has a ‘Black Hat’ and try to do unto him before he does unto us. Deety, I’m peaceable by policy… but two near misses is too many. Next time I shoot first.”
I would as lief Zebbie hadn’t mentioned “Black Hats.” Hard to believe that someone was trying to kill anyone as sweet and innocent and harmless as my darling Jacob. But they were – and we knew it.
I said, “Where is this time machine? All I’ve seen is a claptrap.”
“‘Caltrop,’ Aunt Hilda. You’re looking at the space-time machine.”
“Huh? Where? Why aren’t we in it and going somewhere fast? I don’t want my husband killed; he’s practically brand-new. I expect to get years of wear out of him.”
“Sharpie, stop the chatter,” Zebbie put in. “It’s on that bench, across the table from you.”
“All I see is a portable sewing machine.”
“That’s it.”
“What? How do you get inside? Or do you ride it like a broom?”
“Neither. You mount it rigidly in a vehicle – one airtight and watertight by strong preference. Pop had it mounted in their car – not quite airtight and now kaputt. Pop and I are going to mount it in Gay Deceiver, which is airtight. With better fail-safes.”
“Much better fail-safes, Zebbie,” I agreed.
“They will be. I find that being married makes a difference. I used to worry about my own skin. Now I’m worried about Deety’s. And yours. And Pop’s. All four of us.”
“Hear, hear!” I agreed. “All for one, and one for all!”
“Yup,” Zebbie answered. “Us four, no more. Deety, when’s lunch?”

Chapter VII

“Avete, alieni, nos morituri vos spernimus!”

Deety:
While Aunt Hilda and I assembled lunch, our men disappeared. They returned just in time to sit down. Zebadiah carried an intercom unit; Pop had a wire that he plugged into a jack in the wall, then hooked to the intercom.
“Gentlemen, your timing is perfect; the work is all done,” Aunt Hilda greeted them. “What is that?”
“A guest for lunch, my dearest,” Pop answered. “Miss Gay Deceiver.”
“Plenty for all,” Aunt Hilda agreed. “I’ll set another place.” She did so; Zebadiah placed the intercom on the fifth plate. “Does she take coffee or tea?”
“She’s not programmed for either, Hilda,” Zebadiah answered, “but I thank you on her behalf. Ladies, I got itchy about news from Singapore and Sumatra. So I asked my autopilot to report. Jake came along, then pointed out that he had spare cold circuits here and there, just in case – and this was a just-in-case. Gay is plugged to the garage end of that jack, and this is a voice-switched master-master intercom at this end. I can call Gay and she can call me if anything new comes in – and I increased her programming by reinstating the earlier programs, Logan and back home, for running retrieval of new data.”
“I’ll add an outlet in the basement,” agreed Pop. “But, Son, this is your home – not California.”
“Well -“
“Don’t fight it, Zebbie. This is my home since Jacob legalized me… and any step-son-in-law of mine is at home here; you heard Jacob say so. Right, Deety?”
“Of course,” I agreed. “Aunt Hilda is housewife and I’m scullery maid. But Snug Harbor is my home, too, until Pop and, Aunt Hilda kick me out into the snow – and that includes my husband.”
“Not into snow, Deety,” Aunt Hilda corrected me. “Jacob would insist on a sunny day; he’s kind and gentle. But that would not leave you with no roof over your head. My California home – mine and Jacob’s – has long been your home-from-home, and Zebbie has been dropping in for years, whenever he was hungry.”
“I had better put my bachelor flat into the pot.”
“Zebbie, you can’t put Deety on your day bed. It’s lumpy, Deety. Broken springs. Bruises. Zebbie, break your lease and send your furniture back to Good Will.”
“Sharpie, you’re at it again. Deety, there is no day bed in my digs. An emperor-size bed big enough for three – six if they are well acquainted.”
“My Captain, do you go in for orgies?” I asked.
“No. But you can’t tell what may turn up in the future.”
“You always look ahead, Zebadiah,” I said approvingly. “Am I invited?”
“At any orgy of mine, my wife will pick the guests and send the invitations.”
“Thank you, sir. I’ll wait until you seem to be bored, then look over the crop and pick out choice specimens for you. Assorted flavors and colors.”
“My Princess, I will not spank a pregnant woman. But I can think about it. Pop, Snug Harbor continues to impress me. Did you use an architect?”
“Hrrumph! ‘Architect’ is a dirty word. I studied engineering. Architects copy each other’s mistakes and call it ‘Art.’ Even Frank Lloyd Wright never understood what the Gilbreths were doing. His houses looked great from the outside – inside they were hideously inefficient. Dust collectors. Gloomy. Psych lab rat mazes. Pfui!”
“How about Neutra?”
“If he hadn’t been hamstrung by building codes and union rules and zoning laws, Neutra could have been great. But people don’t want efficient machines for living; they prefer to crouch in medieval hovels, as their flea-bitten forebears did. Cold, drafty, unsanitary, poor lighting, and no need for any of it.”
“I respect your opinion, sir. Pop – three fireplaces… no chimneys. How? Why?”
“Zeb, I like fireplaces – and a few cords of wood can save your life in the mountains. But I see no reason to warm the outdoors or to call attention to the fact that we are in residence or to place trust in spark arresters in forestfire country. Lighting a fire in a fireplace here automatically starts its exhaust fan. Smoke and particles are electrostatically precipitated. The precipitators are autoscrubbed when stack temperature passes twenty-five Celsius, dropping. Hot air goes through labyrinths under bathtubs and floors, then under other floors, thence into a rock heat-sink under the garage, a sink that drives the heat pump that serves the house. When flue gas finally escapes, at points distant from the house, it is so close to ambient temperature that only the most sensitive heat-seeker could sniff it. Thermal efficiency plus the security of being inconspicuous.”
“But suppose you are snowed in so long that your power packs play out?”
“Franklin stoves in storage, stove pipe to match, stops in the walls removable from inside to receive thimbles for flue pipes.”
“Pop,” I inquired, “is this covered by Rule One? Or was Rule One abolished last night in Elko?”
“Eh? The chair must rule that it is suspended until Hilda ratifies or cancels it. Hilda my love, years back Jane instituted Rule One -“
“I ratify it!”
“Thank you. But listen first. It applies to meals. No news broadcasts -“
“Pop,” I again interrupted, “while Rule One is still in limbo – did Gay Deceiver have any news? I worry, I do!”
“Null retrievals, dear. With the amusing conclusion that you and I are still presumed to have died twice, but the news services do not appear to have noticed the discrepancy. However, Miss Gay Deceiver will interrupt if a bulletin comes in; Rule One is never invoked during emergencies. Zeb, do you want this rig in your bedroom at night?”
“I don’t want it but should have it. Prompt notice might save our skins.”
“We’ll leave this here and parallel another into there, with gain stepped to wake you. Back to Rule One: No news broadcasts at meals, no newspapers. No shop talk, no business or financial matters, no discussion of ailments. No political discussion, no mention of taxes, or of foreign or domestic policy. Reading of fiction permitted en famille – not with guests present. Conversation limited to cheerful subjects -“
“No scandal, no gossip?” demanded Aunt Hilda.
“A matter of your judgment, dear. Cheerful gossip about friends and acquaintances, juicy scandal about people we do not like – fine! Now – do you wish to ratify, abolish, amend, or take under advisement?”
“I ratify it unchanged. Who knows some juicy scandal about someone we don’t like?”
“I know an item about ‘No Brain’ – Doctor Neil Brain,” Zebadiah offered.
“Give!”
“I got this from a reliable source but can’t prove it.”
“Irrelevant as long as it’s juicy. Go ahead, Zebbie.”
“Well, a certain zaftig coed told this on herself. She tried to give her all to ‘Brainy’ in exchange for a passing grade in the general math course necessary to any degree on our campus. It is rigged to permit prominent but stupid athletes to graduate. Miss Zaftig was flunking it, which takes exceptional talent.
“So she arranged an appointment with the department head – ‘Brainy’ – and made her quid-pro-quo clear. He could give her horizontal tutoring then and there or in her apartment or his apartment or in a motel and she would pay for it or whenever and wherever he chose. But she had to pass.”
“Happens on every campus, Son,” Pop told him.
“I haven’t reached the point. She blabbed the story – not angry but puzzled. She says that she was unable to get her intention over to him (which seems impossible, I’ve seen this young woman). ‘Brainy’ didn’t accept, didn’t refuse, wasn’t offended, didn’t seem to understand. He told her that she had better talk to her instructor about getting tutoring and a re-exam. Now Miss Zaftig is circulating the story that Prof ‘No Brain’ must be a eunuch or a robot. Not even a homo. Totally sexless.”
“He’s undoubtedly stupid,” Aunt Hilda commented. “But I’ve never met a man I couldn’t get that point across to, if I tried. Even if he was uninterested in my fair virginal carcass. I’ve never tried with Professor Brain because I’m not interested in his carcass. Even barbecued.”
“Then, Hilda my darling, why did you invite him to your party?”
“What? Because of your note, Jacob. I don’t refuse you favors.”
“But, Hilda, I don’t understand. When I talked to you by telephone, I asked you to invite Zeb – under the impression that he was his cousin Zebulon – and I did say that two or three others from the department of mathematics might make it less conspicuously an arranged meeting. But I didn’t mention Doctor Brain. And I did not write.”
“Jacob – I have your note. In California. On your University stationery with your name printed on it.”
Professor Burroughs shook his head, looked sad. Zebadiah Carter said, “Sharpie – handwritten or typed?”
“Typed. But it was signed! Wait a moment, let me think. It has my name and address down in the lower left. Jacob’s name was typed, too, but it was signed ‘Jake.’ Uh… ‘My dear Hilda, A hasty P.S. to my phone call of yesterday – Would you be so kind as to include Doctor Neil O. Brain, chairman of mathematics? I don’t know what possessed me that I forgot to mention him. Probably the pleasure of hearing your dear voice.
“‘Deety sends her love, as do I. Ever yours, Jacob J. Burroughs’ with ‘Jake’ signed above the typed name.”
Zebadiah said to me, “Watson, you know my methods.”
“Certainly, my dear Holmes. A ‘Black Hat.’ In Logan.”
“We knew that. What new data?”
“Well… Pop made that call from the house; I remember it. So somebody has a tap on our phone. Had, I mean; the fire probably destroyed it.”
“A recording tap. The purpose of that fire may have been to destroy it and other evidence. For now we know that the ‘Blokes in the Black Hats’ knew that your father – and you, but it’s Pop they are after – was in California last evening. After ‘killing’ him in California, they destroyed all they could in Utah. Professor, I predict that we will learn that your office was robbed last night – any papers on six-dimensional spaces.”
Pop shrugged. “They wouldn’t find much. I had postponed my final paper after the – humiliating – reception my preliminary paper received. I worked on it only at home, or here, and moved notes made in Logan to our basement here each time we came down.”
“Any missing here?”
“I am certain this place has not been entered. Not that papers would matter; I have it in my head. The continua apparatus has not been touched.”
“Zebadiah, is Doctor Brain a ‘Black Hat’?” I asked.
“I don’t know, Deety. He may be a stooge in their hire. But he’s part of their plot, or they would not have risked forging a letter to put him into Hilda’s house. Jake, how difficult is it to steal your professional stationery?”
“Not difficult. I don’t keep a secretary; I send for a stenographer when I need one. I seldom lock my office when I’m on campus.”
“Deety, can you scrounge pen and paper? I want to see how Jake signs ‘Jake.'”
“Sure.” I fetched them. “Pop’s signature is easy; I often sign it. I hold his power of attorney.”
“It’s the simple signatures that are hardest to forge well enough to fool a handwriting expert. But their scheme did not require fooling an expert – phrasing the note was more difficult… since Hilda accepted it as ringing true.”
“It does ring true, Son; it is very like what I would have said had I written such a note to Hilda.”
“The forger probably has read many of your letters and listened to many of your conversations. Jake, will you write ‘Jake’ four or five times, the way you sign a note to a friend?”
Pop did so, my husband studied the specimens. “Normal variations.” Zebadiah then signed “Jake” about a dozen times, looked at his work, took a fresh sheet, signed “Jake” once, passed it to Aunt Hilda. “Well, Sharpie?”
Aunt Hilda studied it. “It wouldn’t occur to me to question it – on Jacob’s stationery under a note that sounded like his phrasing. Where do we stand now?”
“Stuck in the mud. But we have added data. At least three are involved, two ‘Black Hats’ and Doctor Brain, who may or may not be a ‘Black Hat.’ He is, at minimum, a hired hand, an unwitting stooge, or a puppet they can move around like a chessman.
“While two plus ‘Brainy’ is minimum, it is not the most probable number. This scheme was not whipped up overnight. It involves arson, forgery, booby-trapping a car, wiretapping, theft, and secret communications between points widely separated, with coordinated criminal actions at each end – and it may involve doing in my cousin Zebulon. We can assume that the ‘Black Hats’ know that I am not the Zeb Carter who is the n-dimensional geometer; I’m written off as a bystander who got himself killed.
“Which doesn’t bother them. These playful darlings would swat a fly with a sledgehammer, or cure a cough with a guillotine. They are smart, organized, efficient, and vicious – and the only clue is an interest in six-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry.
“We don’t have a glimmer as to ‘who’ – other than Doctor Brain, whose role is unclear. But, Jake, I think I know ‘why’ – and that will lead us to ‘who.”
“Why, Zebadiah?” I demanded.
“Princess, your father could have worked on endless other branches of mathematics and they would not have bothered him. But he happened – I don’t mean chance; I don’t believe in ‘chance’ in this sense – he worked on the one variety of the endless possible number of geometries – the only one that correctly describes how space-time is put together. Having found it, because he is a genius in both theory and practice, he saw that it was a means by which to build a simple craft – amazingly simple, the greatest invention since the wheel – a space-time craft that offers access to all universes to the full Number of the Beast. Plus undenumerable variations of each of those many universes.
“We have one advantage.”
“I don’t see any advantage! They’re shooting at my Jacob!”
“One strong advantage, Sharpie. The ‘Black Hats’ know that Jake has worked out this mathematics. They don’t know that he has built his space-time tail-twister; they think he has just put symbols on paper. They tried to discredit his work and were successful. They tried to kill him and barely missed. They probably think Jake is dead – and it seems likely that they have killed Ed. But they don’t know about Snug Harbor.”
“Why do you say that, Zeb? Oh, I hope they do not! – but why do you feel sure?”
“Because these blokes aren’t fooling. They blew up your car and burned your flat; what would they do here? – if they knew. An A-bomb?”
“Son, do you think that criminals can lay hands on atomic weapons?”
“Jake, these aren’t criminals. A ‘criminal’ is a member of the subset of the larger set ‘human beings.’ These creatures are not human.”
“Eh? Zeb, your reasoning escapes me.”
“Deety. Run it through the computer. The one between your ears.”
I did not answer; I just sat and thought. After several minutes of unpleasant thoughts I said, “Zebadiah, the ‘Black Hats’ don’t know about the apparatus in our basement.”
“Conclusive assumption,” my husband agreed, “because we are still alive.”
“They are determined to destroy a new work in mathematics… and to kill the brain that produced it.”
“A probability approaching unity,” Zebadiah again agreed.
“Because it can be used to travel among the universes.”
“Conclusive corollary,” my husband noted.
“For this purpose, human beings fall into three groups. Those not interested in mathematics more complex than that needed to handle money, those who know a bit about other mathematics, and a quite small third group who could understand the possibilities.”
“Yes.”
“But our race does not know anything of other universes so far as I know.”
“They don’t. Necessary assumption.”
“But that third group would not try to stop an attempt to travel among the universes. They would wait with intellectual interest to see how it turned out. They might believe or disbelieve or suspend judgment. But they would not oppose; they would be delighted if my father succeeded. The joy of intellectual discovery – the mark of a true scientist.”
I sighed and added, “I see no other grouping. Save for a few sick people, psychotic, these three subsets complete the set. Our opponents are not psychotic; they are intelligent, crafty, and organized.”
“As we all know too well,” Zebadiah echoed.
“Therefore our opponents are not human beings. They are alien intelligences from elsewhere.” I sighed again and shut up. Being an oracle is a no-good profession!
“Or elsewhen. Sharpie, can you kill?”
“Kill whom, Zebbie? Or what?” “Can you kill to protect Jake?”
“You bet your frimpin’ life I’ll kill to protect Jacob!”
“I won’t ask you, Princess; I know Dejah Thoris.” Zebadiah went on, “That’s the situation, ladies. We have the most valuable man on this planet to protect. We don’t know from what. Jake, your bodyguard musters two Amazons, one small, one medium large, both probably knocked up, and one Cowardly Lion. I’d hire the Dorsai if I knew their P.O. Box. Or the Gray Lensman and all his pals. But we are all there are and we’ll try! Avete, alieni, nos morituri vos spernimus! Let’s break out that champagne.”
“My Captain, do you think we should?” I asked. “I’m frightened.”
“We should. I’m no good for more work today, and neither is Jake. Tomorrow we’ll start installing the gadget in Gay Deceiver, do rewiring and reprogramming so that she will work for any of us. Meanwhile we need a couple of laughs and a night’s sleep. What better time to drink life to the dregs than when we know that any hour may be our last?”
Aunt Hilda punched Zebadiah in the ribs. “Yer dern tootin’, Buster! I’m going to get giggle happy and make a fool of myself and then take my man and put him to sleep with Old Mother Sharpie’s Time-Tested Nostrum. Deety, I prescribe the same for you.”
I suddenly felt better. “Check, Aunt Hilda! Captain John Carter always wins. ‘Cowardly Lion’ my foot! Who is Pop? The Little Wizard?”
“I think he is.”
“Could be. Pop, will you open the bubbly? I always hurt my thumbs.”
“Right away, Deety. I mean ‘Dejah Thoris, royal consort of the Warlord.'”
“No need to be formal, Pop. This is going to be an informal party. Very! Pop! Do I have to keep my pants on?”
“Ask your husband. You’re his problem now.”

Chapter VIII

“Let us all preserve our illusions – “

Hilda:
In my old age, sucking my gums in front of the fire and living over my misdeeds, I’ll remember the next few days as the happiest in my life. I’d had three honeymoons earlier, one with each of my term-contract husbands: two had been good, one had been okay and (eventually) very lucrative. But my honeymoon with Jacob was heavenly.
The whiff of danger sharpened the joy. Jacob seemed unworried, and Zebbie has hunches, like a horseplayer. Seeing that Zebbie was relaxed, Deety got over being jumpy – and I never was, as I hope to end like a firecracker, not linger on, ugly, helpless, useless…
A spice of danger adds zest to life. Even during a honeymoon – especially during a honeymoon.
An odd honeymoon. We worked hard but our husbands seemed never too busy for pat fanny, squeeze titty, and unhurried kisses. Not a group marriage but two twosomes that were one family, comfortable each with the others. I dropped most of my own sparky-bitch ways, and Zebbie sometimes called me “Hilda” rather than “Sharpie.”
Jacob and I moved into marriage like ham and eggs. Jacob is not tall (178 centimeters) (but tall compared with my scant one fifty-two) and his hairline recedes and he has a paunch from years at a desk – but he looks just right to me. If I wanted to look at male beauty, I could always look at Deety’s giant – appreciate him without lusting: my own loving goat kept Sharpie quite blunted.
I did not decide, when Zebbie came on campus, to make a pet of him for his looks but for his veering sense of humor. But if there was ever a man who could have played the role of John Carter, Warlord of Mars, it was Zebadiah Carter whose middle name just happens to be “John.” Indoors with clothes and wearing his fake horn-rims he looks awkward, too big, clumsy. I did not realize that he was beautiful and graceful until the first time he used my pool. (That afternoon I was tempted to seduce him. But, as little dignity as I have, I had resolved to stick to older men, so I shut off the thought.)
Outdoors at Snug Harbor, wearing little or no clothes, Zebbie looked at home – a mountain lion in grace and muscle. An incident one later afternoon showed me how much he was like the Warlord of Mars. A sword – Those old stories were familiar to me. My father had acquired the Ballantine Del Rey paperback reissues; they were around the house when I was a little girl. Once I learned to read, I read everything, and vastly preferred Barsoom stories to “girls” books given to me for birthdays and Christmas. Thuvia was the heroine I identified with – “toy” of the cruel priests of Issus, then with virginity miraculously restored in the next book: Thuvia, Maid of Mars. I resolved to change my name to Thuvia when I was old enough. When I was eighteen, I did not consider it; I had always been “Hilda,” a new name held no attraction.
I was responsible in part for Deety’s name, one that embarrassed her until she discovered that her husband liked it. Jacob had wanted to name his daughter “Dejah Thoris” (Jacob looks like and is a professor, but he is incurably romantic). Jane had misgivings. I told her, “Don’t be a chump, Janie. If your man wants something, and you can accommodate him with no grief, give it to him! Do you want him to love this child or to resent her?” Jane looked thoughtful and “Doris Anne” became “Dejah Thoris” at christening, then “Deety” before she could talk – which satisfied everyone.
We settled into a routine: Up early every day; our men worked on instruments and wires and things and installing the time-space widget into Gay Deceiver’s gizzard – while Deety and I gave the housework a lick and a promise (our mountain home needed little attention – more of Jacob’s genius), then Deety and I got busy on a technical matter that Deety could do with some help from me.
I’m not much use for technical work, biology being the only thing I studied in depth and never finished my degree. This was amplified by almost six thousand hours as volunteer nurse’s aid in our campus medical center and I took courses that make me an uncertified nurse or medical tech or even jackleg paramedic – I don’t shriek at the sight of blood and can clean up vomit without a qualm and would not hesitate to fill in as scrub nurse. Being a campus widow with too much money is fun but not soul filling. I like to feel that I’ve paid rent on the piece of earth I’m using.
Besides that, I have a smattering of everything from addiction to the printed page, plus attending campus lectures that sound intriguing… then sometimes auditing a related course. I audited descriptive astronomy, took the final as if for credit – got an “A.” I had even figured a cometary orbit correctly, to my surprise (and the professor’s).
I can wire a doorbell or clean out a stopped-up soil pipe with a plumber’s “snake” – but if it’s really technical, I hire specialists.
So Hilda can help but usually can’t do the job alone. Gay Deceiver had to be reprogrammed – and Deety, who does not look like a genius, is one. Jacob’s daughter should be a genius and her mother had an I.Q. that startled even me, her closest friend. I ran across it while helping poor grief-stricken Jacob to decide what to save, what to burn. (I burned unflattering pictures, useless papers, and clothes. A dead person’s clothes should be given away or burned; nothing should be kept that does not inspire happy memories. I cried a bit and that saved Jacob and Deety from having to cry later.)
We all held private duo licenses; Zebbie, as Captain Z. J. Carter, U.S.A.S.R., held “command” rating as well – he told us that his space rating was largely honorary, just some free-fall time and one landing of a shuttle. Zebbie is mendacious, untruthful, and tells fibs; I got a chance to sneak a look at his aerospace log and shamelessly took it. He had logged more than he claimed in one exchange tour with Australia. Someday I’m going to sit on his chest and make him tell Mama Hilda the truth. Should be interesting… if I can sort out fact from fiction. I do not believe his story about intimate relations with a female kangaroo.
Zebbie and Jacob decided that we all must be able to control Gay Deceiver all four ways, on the road, in the air, in trajectory (she’s not a spaceship but can make high-trajectory jumps), and in space-time, i.e. among the universes to the Number of the Beast, plus variants impossible to count.
I had fingers crossed about being able to learn that, but both men assured me that they had worked out a fail-safe that would get me out of a crunch if I ever had to do it alone.
Part of the problem lay in the fact that Gay Deceiver was a one-man girl; her doors unlocked only to her master’s voice or to his thumbprint, or to a tapping code if he were shy both voice and right thumb; Zeb tended to plan ahead – “Outwitting Murphy’s Law,” he called it, “‘Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.'” (Grandma called it “The Butter-Side Down Rule.”)
First priority was to introduce us to Gay Deceiver – teach her that all four voices and right thumbprints were acceptable.
That took a couple of hours, with Deety helping Zebbie. The tapping code took even less, it being based on an old military cadence – its trickiness being that a thief would be unlikely to guess that this car would open if tapped a certain way and in guessing the correct cadence. Zebbie called the cadence “Drunken Soldier.” Jacob said that it was “Bumboat.” Deety claimed that its title was “Pay Day,” because she had heard it from Jane’s grandfather.
Our men conceded that she must be right, as she had words for it. Her words included “Drunken Sailor” instead of “Drunken Soldier” – plus both “Pay Day” and “Bumboat.”
Introductions taken care of, Zeb dug out Gay’s anatomy, one volume her body, one her brain. He handed the latter to Deety, took the other into our basement. The next two days were easy for me, hard for Deety. I held lights and made notes on a clip board while she studied that book and frowned and got smudged and sweaty getting herself into impossible positions and once she cursed in a fashion that would have caused Jane to scold. She added, “Aunt Nanny Goat, your step-son-in-law has done things to this mass of spaghetti that no decent computer should put up with! It’s a bastard hybrid.”
“You shouldn’t call Gay ‘it,’ Deety. And she’s not a bastard.”
“She can’t hear us; I’ve got her ears unhooked – except that piece that is monitoring news retrieval programs – and that goes through this wire to that jack in the wall; she can talk with Zebadiah only in the basement now. Oh, I’m sure she was a nice girl until that big ape of mine raped her. Aunt Hilda, don’t worry about hurting Gay’s feelings; she hasn’t any. This is an idiot as computers go. Any one-horse college and most high schools own or share time in computers much more complex. This one is primarily cybernetics, an autopilot plus limited digital capacity and limited storage. But the mods Zebadiah has tacked on make it more than an autopilot but not a general-purpose computer. A misbegotten hybrid. It has far more random-number options than it needs and it has extra functions that IBM never dreamed of.”
“Deety, why are you taking off cover plates? I thought you were strictly a programmer? Software. Not a mechanic.”
“I am strictly a software mathematician. I wouldn’t attempt to modify this monster even on written orders from my lovable but sneaky husband. But how in the name of Allah can a software hack think about simplification analysis for program if she doesn’t know the circuitry? The first half of this book shows what this autopilot was manufactured to do… and the second half, the Xeroxed pages, show the follies Zebadiah has seduced her into. This bleedin’ bundle of chips now speaks three logic languages, interfaced – when it was built to use only one. But it won’t accept any of them until it has been wheedled with Zebadiah’s double talk. Even then it rarely answers a code phrase with the same answer twice in a row. What does it say in answer to: ‘You’re a smart girl, Gay.’?”
“I remember. ‘Boss, I bet you tell that to all the girls. Over.”
“Sometimes. Oftenest, as that answer is weighted to come up three times as often as any of the others. But listen to this:
“‘Zeb, I’m so smart I scare myself.’
“‘Then why did you turn me down for that raise?’
“‘Never mind the compliments! Take your hand off my knee!’
“‘Not so loud, dear. I don’t want my boyfriend to hear.’
” – and there are more. There are at least four answers to any of Zebadiah’s code phrases. He uses just one list, but the autopilot answers several ways for each of his phrases – and all any of them mean is either ‘Roger’ or ‘Null program; rephrase.'”
“I like the idea. Fun.”
“Well… I do myself. I animize a computer; I think of them as people… and this semirandom answer list makes Gay Deceiver feel much more alive… when she isn’t. Not even versatile compared with a ground-based computer. But – ” Deety gave a quick smile. “I’m going to hand my husband some surprises.”
“How, Deety?”
“You know how he says, ‘Good morning, Gay. How are you?’ when we sit down for breakfast.”
“Yes. I like it. Friendly. She usually answers, ‘I’m fine, Zeb.'”
“Yes. It’s a test code. It orders the autopilot to run a self-check throughout and to report any running instruction. Which takes less than a millisecond. If he didn’t get that or an equivalent answer, he would rush straight here to find out what’s wrong. But I’m going to add another answer. Or more.”
“I thought you refused to modify anything.”
“Aunt Hillbilly, this is software, not hardware. I’m authorized and directed to amplify the answers to include all of us, by name for each of our voices. That is programming, elementary. You say good morning to this gadget and it will – when I’m finished – answer you and call you either ‘Hilda’ or ‘Mrs. Burroughs.'”
“Oh, let her call me Hilda.'”
“All right, but let her call you ‘Mrs. Burroughs’ now and then for variety.”
“Well… all right. Keep her a personality.”
“I could even have her call you – low weighting! – ‘Nanny Goat.'”
I guffawed. “Do, Deety, please do. But I want to be around to see Jacob’s face.”
“You will be; it won’t be programmed to answer that way to any voice but yours. Just don’t say, ‘Good morning, Gay’ unless Pop is listening. But here’s one for my husband: Zebadiah says, ‘Good morning, Gay. How are you?’ – and the speaker answers, ‘I’m fine, Zeb. But your fly is unzipped and your eyes are bloodshot. Are you hung over again?'”
Deety is so solemn and yet playful. “Do it, dear! Poor Zebbie – who drinks least of any of us. But he might not be wearing anything zippered.”
“Zebadiah always wears something at meals. Even his underwear shorts are zippered. He dislikes elastic.”
“But he’ll recognize your voice, Deety.”
“Nope. Because it will be your voice – modified.”
And it was. I’m contralto about the range of the actress – or girl friend – who recorded Gay Deceiver’s voice originally. I don’t think my voice has her sultry, bedroom quality but I’m a natural mimic. Deety borrowed a wigglescope – oscilloscope? – from her father, my Jacob, and I practiced until my patterns for Gay Deceiver’s original repertoire matched hers well enough – Deety said she could not tell them apart without close checking.
I got into the spirit of it, such as having Deety cause Gay Deceiver occasionally to say to my husband, “Fine – except for my back ache, you wicked old Billy Goat!” – and Jacob tripped that reply one morning when I did have a back ache, and I feel sure he had one, too.
We didn’t put in answers that Deety felt might be too bawdy for Jacob’s “innocent” mind – I didn’t even hint how her father actually talked, to me in private. Let us all preserve our illusions; it lubricates social relations. Possibly Deety and Zebbie talked the same way to each other in private – and regarded us “old folks” as hopelessly square.

Chapter IX

Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws.

Deety:
Aunt Hilda and I finished reprogramming in the time it took Zebadiah and Pop to design and make the fail-safes and other mods needed to turn Gay Deceiver, with the time-space widget installed, into a continua traveler – which included placing the back seats twenty centimeters farther back (for leg room) after they had been pulled out to place the widget abaft the bulkhead and weld it to the shell. The precessing controls and triple verniers were remoted to the driver’s instrument board – with one voice control for the widget, all others manual:
If any of our voices said, “Gay Deceiver, take us home!” car and passengers would instantly return to Snug Harbor.
I don’t know but I trust my Pop. He brought us home safe twice, doing it with no fail-safes and no dead-man switch. The latter paralleled the “Take us home!” voice order, was normally clamped closed and covered – but could be uncovered and held in a fist, closed. There were other fail-safes for temperature, pressure, air, radar collision course, and other dangers. If we wound up inside a star or planet, none of this could save us, but it is easy to prove that the chances of falling downstairs and breaking your neck are enormously higher than the chance of co-occupying space with other matter in our native universe – space is plentiful, mass is scarce. We hoped that this would be true of other universes.
No way ahead of time to check on the Number-of-the-Beast spaces – but “The cowards never started and the weaklings died on the way.” None of us ever mentioned not trying to travel the universes. Besides, our home planet had turned unfriendly. We didn’t discuss “Black Hats” but we all knew that they were still here, and that we remained alive by lying doggo and letting the world think we were dead.
We ate breakfast better each morning after hearing Gay Deceiver offer “null report” on news retrievals. Zebadiah, I am fairly certain, had given up his cousin for dead. I feel sure Zebadiah would have gone to Sumatra to follow a lost hope, were it not that he had acquired a wife and a prospective child. I missed my next period, so did Hilda. Our men toasted our not-yet bulging bellies; Hilda and I smugly resolved to be good girls, yes, sir! – and careful. Hilda joined my morning toning up, and the men joined us the first time they caught us at it.
Zebadiah did not need it but seemed to enjoy it. Pop brought his waistline down five centimeters in one week.
Shortly after that toast Zebadiah pressure-tested Gay Deceiver’s shell – four atmospheres inside her and a pressure gauge sticking out through a fitting in her shell.
There being little we could do while our space-time rover was sealed, we knocked off early. “Swim, anybody?” I asked. Snug Harbor doesn’t have a citytype pool, and a mountain stream is too cooold. Pop had fixed that when he concealed our spring. Overflow was piped underground to a clump of bushes and thereby created a “natural” mountain rivulet that passed near the house; then Pop had made use of a huge fallen boulder, plus biggish ones, to create a pool, one that filled and spilled. He had done work with pigments in concrete to make this look like an accident of water flow.
This makes Pop sound like Paul Bunyan. Pop could have built Snug Harbor with his own hands. But Spanish-speaking labor from Nogales built the underground and assembled the prefab shell of the cabin. An air crane fetched parts and materials from an Albuquerque engineering company Jane had bought for Pop through a front – lawyers in Dallas. The company’s manager drove the air crane himself, having had it impressed on him that this was for a rich client of the law firm, and that it would be prudent to do the job and forget it. Pop bossed the work in TexMex, with help from his secretary – me – Spanish being one language I had picked for my doctorate.
Laborers and mechanics never got a chance to pinpoint where they were, but they were well paid, well fed, comfortably housed in prefabs brought in by crane, and the backbreaking labor was done by power – who cares what “locos gringos” do? Two pilots had to know where we were building, but they homed in on a radar beacon that is no longer there.
“Blokes in Black Hats” had nothing to do with this secrecy; it was jungle caution I had learned from Mama: Never let the revenooers know anything. Pay cash, keep your lips closed, put nothing through banks that does not appear later in tax returns – pay taxes greater than your apparent standard of living and declare income accordingly. We had been audited three times since Mama died; each time the government returned a small “overpayment” – I was building a reputation of being stupid and honest.
My inquiry of “Swim, anybody?” was greeted with silence. Then Pop said, “Zeb, your wife is too energetic. Deety, later the water will be warmer and the trees will give us shade. Then we can walk slowly down to the pool. Zeb?”
“I agree, Jake. I need to conserve ergs.”
“Nap?”
“I don’t have the energy to take one. What were you saying this morning about reengineering the system?”
Aunt Hilda looked startled. “I thought Miss Gay Deceiver was already engineered? Are you thinking of changing everything?”
“Take it easy, Sharpie darlin’. Gay Deceiver is finished. A few things to stow that have been weighed and their moment arms calculated.”
I could have told her. In the course of figuring what could be stowed in every nook and cranny and what that would do to Gay’s balance, I had discovered that my husband had a highly illegal laser cannon. I said nothing, merely included its mass and distance from optimum center of weight in my calculations. I sometimes wonder which of us is the outlaw: Zebadiah or I? Most males have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws. But that concealed L-cannon made me wonder.
“Why not leave well enough alone?” Aunt Hilda demanded. “Jacob and God know I’m happy here… But You All Know Why We Should Not Stay Here Longer Than We Must.”
“We weren’t talking about Gay Deceiver; Jake and I were discussing reengineering the Solar System.”
“The Solar System! What’s wrong with it the way it is?”
“Lots of things,” Zebadiah told Aunt Hilda. “It’s untidy. Real estate going to waste. This tired old planet is crowded and sort o’ worn in spots. True, industry in orbit and power from orbit have helped, and both Lagrange-Four and -Five have self-supporting populations; anybody who invested in space stations early enough made a pile.” (Including Pop, Zebadiah!) “But these are minor compared with what can be done – and this planet is in worse shape each year. Jake’s six-dimensional principle can change that.”
“Move people into another universe? Would they go?”
“We weren’t thinking of that, Hilda. We’re trying to apply Clarke’s Law.”
“I don’t recall it. Maybe it was while I was out with mumps.”
“Arthur C. Clarke,” Pop told her. “Great man – too bad he was liquidated in The Purge. Clarke defined how to make a great discovery or create a key invention. Study what the most respected authorities agree can not be done – then do it. My continua craft is a godchild of Clarke via his Law. His insight inspired my treatment of six-dimensional continua. But this morning Zeb added corollaries.”
“Jake, don’t kid the ladies. I asked a question; you grabbed the ball and ran.”
“Uh, we heterodyned. Hilda, you know that the time-space traveler doesn’t require power.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know, darling man. Why were you installing power packs in Gay Deceiver?”
“Auxiliary uses. So that you won’t have to cook over an open fire, for example.”
“But the pretzel bender doesn’t use power,” agreed Zebadiah. “Don’t ask why. I did, and Jake started writing equations in Sanskrit and I got a headache.”
“It doesn’t use power, Aunt Hilda,” I agreed. “Just parasitic power. A few microwatts so that the gyros never slow down, milliwatts for instrument readouts and for controls – but the widget itself uses none.”
“What happened to the law of conservation of energy?”
“Sharpie,” my husband answered, “as a fairish mechanic, an amateur electron pusher, and as a bloke who has herded unlikely junk through the sky, I never worry about theory as long as machinery does what it is supposed to do. I worry when a machine turns and bites me. That’s why I specialize in fail-safes and backups and triple redundancy. I try never to get a machine sore at me. There’s no theory for that but every engineer knows it.”
“Hilda my beloved, the law of conservation of mass-energy is not broken by our continua craft; it is simply not relevant to it. Once Zeb understood that -“
“I didn’t say I understood it.”
“Well… once Zeb stipulated that, he raised interesting questions. For example: Jupiter doesn’t need Ganymede – “
“Whereas Venus does. Although Titan might be better.”
“Mmm… possible.”
“Yes. Make an inhabitable base more quickly. But the urgent problem, Jake, is to seed Venus, move atmosphere to Mars, put both of them through forced aging. Then respot them. Earth-Sol Trojan points?”
“Certainly. We’ve had millions of years of evolution this distance from the Sun. We had best plan on living neither closer nor farther. With careful attention to stratospheric protection. But I still have doubts about anchoring in the Venerian crust. We wouldn’t want to lose the planet on Tau axis.”
“Mere R. & D., Jake. Calculate pressures and temperatures; beef up the vehicle accordingly – spherical, save for exterior anchors – then apply a jigger factor of four. With automatic controls quintuply redundant. Catch it when it comes out and steady it down in Earth’s orbit, sixty degrees trailing – and start selling subdivisions the size of old Spanish Land Grants. Jake, we should gather enough mass to create new earths at all Trojan points, a hexagon around the Sun. Five brand-new earths would give the race room enough to breed. On this maiden voyage let’s keep our eyes open.”
Aunt Hilda looked at Zebadiah with horror. “Zebbie! Creating planets indeed! Who do you think you are? Jesus Christ?”
“I’m not that junior. That’s the Holy Ghost over there, scratching his belly, The Supreme Inseminator. I’m the other one, the Maker and Shaper. But in setting up a pantheon for the Celestial Age, we’re going to respect women’s rights, Hilda. Deety is Earth Mother; she’s perfect for the job. You are Moon Goddess, Selene. Good job, dear – more moons than earths. It fits you. You’re little and silvery and you wax and wane and you’re beautiful in all your phases. How about it? Us four and no more.”
“Quit pulling my leg!”
My husband answered, “I haven’t been pulling your leg. Come closer and I will; you have pretty legs, Step-Mother-in-Law. These things Jake and I have been discussing are practical – once we thought about the fact that the spacetime twister uses no power. Move anything anywhere – all spaces, all times. I add the plural because at first I could not see what Jake had in mind when he spoke of forced aging of a planet. Rotate Venus into the Tau axis, fetch it back along Teh axis, reinsert it centuries – or millennia – older at this point in ‘t’ axis. Perhaps translate it a year or so into the future – our future – so as to be ready for it when it returns, all sweet and green and beautiful and ready to grow children and puppies and butterflies. Terraformed but virginal.”
Aunt Hilda looked frightened. “Jacob? Would one highball do any harm to this peanut inside me? I need a bracer.”
“I don’t think so. Jane often had a drink with me while she was pregnant. Her doctor did not have her stop until her third trimester. Can’t see that it hurt Deety. Deety was so healthy she drove Jane home from the hospital.”
“Pop, that’s a fib. I didn’t learn to drive until I was three months old. But I need one, too,” I added. “Zebadiah?”
“Certainly, Princess. A medicinal drink should be by body mass. That’s half a jigger for you, Sharpie dear, a jigger for Deety, a jigger and a half for Jake – two jiggers for me.”
“Oh, how unfair!”
“It certainly is,” I agreed. “I outweigh Pop – he’s been losing, I’ve been gaining. Pick us up and see!”
My husband took us each around the waist, crouched, then straightened and lifted us.
“Close to a standoff,” he announced. “Pop may be a trifle heavier, but you’re more cuddly” – kissed me and put us down.
“There is no one more cuddly than Jacob!”
“Hilda, you’re prejudiced. Let’s each mix our own drinks, at the strength required for our emotional and physical conditions.”
So we did – it wound up with Hilda and me each taking a jigger with soda, Pop taking a jigger and a half over ice – and Zebadiah taking a half jigger of vodka and drowning it with Coke.
While we were sipping our “medicine,” Zebadiah, sprawled out, looked up over the fireplace. “Pop, you were in the Navy?”
“No – Army. If you count ‘chair-borne infantry.’ They handed me a commission for having a doctorate in mathematics, told me they needed me for ballistics. Then I spent my whole tour as a personnel officer, signing papers.”
“Standard Operating Procedure. That’s a Navy sword and belt up there. Thought it might be yours.”
“It’s Deety’s – belonged to Jane’s Grandfather Rodgers. I have a dress saber. Belonged to my Dad, who gave it to me when the Army took me. Dress blues, too. I took them with me, never had occasion to wear either.” Pop got up and went into his – their bedroom, calling back, “I’ll show you the saber.”
My husband said to me, “Deety, would you mind my handling your sword?”
“My Captain, that sword is yours.”
“Heavens, dear, I can’t accept an heirloom.”
“If my warlord will not permit his princess to gift him with a sword, he can leave it where it is! I’ve been wanting to give you a wedding present – and did not realize that I had the perfect gift for Captain John Carter.”
“My apologies, Dejah Thoris. I accept and will keep it bright. I will defend my princess with it against all enemies.”
“Helium is proud to accept. If you make a cradle of your hands, I can stand in them and reach it down.”
Zebadiah grasped me, a hand above each knee, and I was suddenly three meters tall. Sword and belt were on hooks; I lifted them down, and myself was placed down. My husband stood straight while I buckled it around him – then he dropped to one knee and kissed my hand.
My husband is mad north-northwest but his madness suits me. I got tears in my eyes which Deety doesn’t do much but Dejah Thoris seems prone to, since John Carter made her his.
Pop and Aunt Hilda watched – then imitated, including (I saw!) tears in Hilda’s eyes after she buckled on Pop’s saber, when he knelt and kissed her hand.
Zebadiah drew sword, tried its balance, sighted along its blade. “Handmade and balanced close to the hilt. Deety, your great-grandfather paid a pretty penny for this. It’s an honest weapon.”
“I don’t think he knew what it cost. It was presented to him.”
“For good reason, I feel certain.” Zebadiah stood back, went into hanging guard, made fast moulinets vertically, left and right, then horizontally clockwise and counterclockwise – suddenly dropped into swordsman’s guard – lunged and recovered, fast as a striking cat.
I said softly to Pop, “Did you notice?”
Pop answered quietly. “Know saber. Sword, too.”
Hilda said loudly, “Zebbie! You never told me you went to Heidelberg.”
“You never asked, Sharpie. Around the Red Ox they called me ‘The Scourge of the Neckar.'”
“What happened to your scars?”
“Never got any, dear. I hung around an extra year, hoping for one. But no one got through my guard – ever. Hate to think about how many German faces I carved into checkerboards.”
“Zebadiah, was that where you took your doctorate?”
My husband grinned and sat down, still wearing sword. “No, another school.”
“M.I.T.?” inquired Pop.
“Hardly. Pop, this should stay in the family. I undertook to prove that a man can get a doctorate from a major university without knowing anything and without adding anything whatever to human knowledge.”
“I think you have a degree in aerospace engineering,” Pop said flatly.
“I’ll concede that I have the requisite hours. I hold two degrees – a baccalaureate in humane arts… meaning I squeaked through… and a doctorate from an old and prestigious school – a Ph.D. in education.”
“Zebadiah! You wouldn’t!” (I was horrified.)
“But I did, Deety. To prove that degrees per se are worthless. Often they are honorifics of true scientists or learned scholars or inspired teachers. Much more frequently they are false faces for overeducated jackasses.”
Pop said, “You’ll get no argument from me, Zeb. A doctorate is a union card to get a tenured job. It does not mean that the holder thereof is wise or learned.”
“Yes, sir. I was taught it at my grandfather’s knee – my Grandfather Zachariah, the man responsible for the initial ‘Z’ in the names of his male descendants. Deety, his influence on me was so strong that I must explain him – no, that’s impossible; I must tell about him in order to explain me… and how I happened to take a worthless degree.”
Hilda said, “Deety, he’s pulling a long bow again.”
“Quiet, woman. ‘Get thee to a nunnery, go!”
“I don’t take orders from my step-son-in-law. Make that a monastery and I’ll consider it.”
I kept my blinkin’ mouf shut. My husband’s fibs entertain me. (If they are fibs.)
“Grandpa Zach was as cantankerous an old coot as you’ll ever meet. Hated government, hated lawyers, hated civil servants, hated preachers, hated automobiles, public schools, and telephones, was contemptuous of most editors, most writers, most professors, most of almost anything. But he overtipped waitresses and porters and would go out of his way to avoid stepping on an insect.
“Grandpa had three doctorates: biochemistry, medicine, and law – and he regarded anyone who couldn’t read Latin, Greek, Hebrew, French, and German as illiterate.”
“Zebbie, can you read all those?”
“Fortunately for me, my grandfather had a stroke while filling out a tax form before he could ask me that question. I don’t know Hebrew. I can read Latin, puzzle out Greek, speak and read French, read technical German, understand it in some accents, swear in Russian – very useful! – and speak an ungrammatical smattering of Spanish picked up in cantinas and from horizontal dictionaries.
“Grandpa would have classed me as subliterate as I don’t do any of these well – and I sometimes split infinitives which would have infuriated him. He practiced forensic medicine, medical jurisprudence, was an expert witness in toxicology, pathology, and traumatology, bullied judges, terrorized lawyers, medical students, and law students. He once threw a tax assessor out of his office and required him to return with a search warrant setting forth in detail its constitutional limitations, He regarded the income tax and the Seventeenth Amendment and the direct primary as signs of the decay of the Republic.”
“How did he feel about the Nineteenth?”
“Hilda, Grandpa Zach supported female suffrage. I remember hearing him say that if women were so dad-burned foolish as to want to assume the burden, they should be allowed to – they couldn’t do the country more harm than men had. ‘Votes for Women’ didn’t annoy him but nine thousand other things did. He lived at a slow simmer, always ready to break into a rolling boil.
“He had one hobby: collecting steel engravings.”
“‘Steel engravings’?” I repeated.
“Of dead presidents, my Princess. Especially of McKinley, Cleveland, and Madison – but he didn’t scorn those of Washington. He had that instinct for timing so necessary to a collector. In 1929 on Black Thursday he held not one share of common stock; instead he had sold short. When the 1933 Bank Holiday came along every old-dollar he owned, except current cash, was in Zurich in Swiss money. Eventually U.S. citizens were forbidden by ’emergency’ decree to own gold even abroad.
“Grandpa Zach ducked into Canada, applied for Swiss citizenship, got it, and thereafter split his time between Europe and America, immune to inflation and the confiscatory laws that eventually caused us to knock three zeros off the old-dollar in creating the newdollar.
“So he died rich, in Locarno – beautiful place; I stayed with him two summers as a boy. His will was probated in Switzerland and the U.S. Revenue Service could not touch it.
“Most of it was a trust with its nature known to his offspring before his death or I would not have been named Zebadiah.
“Female descendants got pro-rata shares of income with no strings attached but males had to have first names starting with ‘Z’ – and even that got them not one Swiss franc; there was a ‘Root, hog, or die!’ clause. Zachariah believed in taking care of daughters, but sons and grandsons had to go out and scratch, with no help from their fathers, until they had earned and saved on their own – or accumulated without going to jail – assets equal to one pro-rata share of the capital sum of the trust before they shared in the trust’s income.”
“Sexism,” said Aunt Hilda. “Raw, unadulterated sexism. Any FemLib gal would sneer at his dirty old money, on those terms.”
“Would you have refused it, Sharpie?”
“Me? Zebbie dear, are you feverish? I would have both greedy hands out. I’m strong for women’s rights but no fanatic. Sharpie wants to be pampered and that’s what men are best at – their natural function.”
“Pop, do you need help in coping with her?”
“No, Son. I like pampering Hilda. I don’t see you abusing my daughter.”
“I don’t dare; you told me she’s vicious at karate.” (I am good at karate; Pop made sure that I learned all the dirty fighting possible. But not against Zebadiah! If I ever do – Heaven forbid! – find myself opposed to my husband, I’ll quiver my chin and cry.)
“On my graduation from high school my father had a talk with me. ‘Zeb,’ he told me. ‘The time has come. I’ll put you through any school you choose. Or you can take what you have saved, strike out on your own, and try to qualify for a share in your grandfather’s will. Suit yourself, I shan’t influence you.’
“Folks, I had to think. My father’s younger brother was past forty and still hadn’t qualified. The size of the trust made a pro-rata of its assets amount to a requirement that a male descendant had to get rich on his own – well-to-do at least – whereupon he was suddenly twice as rich. But with over half of this country’s population living on the taxes of the lesser number it is not as easy to get rich as it was in Grandpa’s day.
“Turn down a paid-for education at Princeton, or M.I.T.? Or go out and try to get rich with nothing but a high school education? – I hadn’t learned much in high school; I had majored in girls.
“So I had to think hard and long. Almost ten seconds. I left home next day with one suitcase and a pitiful sum of money.
“Wound up on campus that had two things to recommend it: an Aerospace R.O.T.C. that would pick up part of my expenses, and a phys. ed. department willing to award me a jockstrap scholarship in exchange for daily bruises and contusions, plus all-out effort whenever we played. I took the deal.”
“What did you play?” asked my father.
“Football, basketball, and track – they would have demanded more had they been able to figure a way to do it.”
“I had thought you were going to mention fencing.”
“No, that’s another story. These did not quite close the gap. So I also waited tables for meals – food so bad the cockroaches ate out. But that closed the gap, and I added to it by tutoring in mathematics. That gave me my start toward piling up money to qualify.”
I asked, “Did tutoring math pay enough to matter? I tutored math before Mama died; the hourly rate was low.”
“Not that sort of tutoring, Princess. I taught prosperous young optimists not to draw to inside straights, and that stud poker is not a game of chance, but that craps is, controlled by mathematical laws that cannot be flouted with impunity. To quote Grandfather Zachariah, ‘A man who bets on greed and dishonesty won’t be wrong too often.’ There is an amazingly high percentage of greedy people and it is even easier to win from a dishonest gambler than it is from an honest one… and neither is likely to know the odds at craps, especially side bets, or all of the odds in poker, in particular how odds change according to the number of players, where one is seated in relation to the dealer, and how to calculate changes as cards are exposed in stud.
“That was also how I quit drinking, my darling, except for special celebrations. In every ‘friendly’ game some players contribute, some take a profit; a player determined to take a profit must be neither drunk nor tired. Pop, the shadows are growing long – I don’t think anybody wants to know how I got a worthless doctorate.”
“I do!” I put in. “Me, too!” echoed Aunt Hilda.
“Son, you’re outvoted.”
“Okay. Two years active duty after I graduated. Sky jockeys are even more optimistic than students and have more money – meanwhile I learned more math and engineering. Was sent inactive just in time to be called up again for the Spasm War. Didn’t get hurt, I was safer than civilians. But that kept me on another year even though fighting was mostly over before I reported in. That made me a veteran, with benefits. I went to Manhattan and signed up for school again. Doctoral candidate. School of Education. Not serious at first, simply intending to use my veteran’s benefits while enjoying the benefits of being a student – and devote most of my time to piling up cash to qualify for the trust.
“I knew that the stupidest students, the silliest professors, and the worst bull courses are concentrated in schools of education. By signing for large-class evening lectures and the unpopular eight a.m. classes I figured I could spend most of my time finding out how the stock market ticked. I did, by working there, before I risked a dime.
“Eventually I had to pick a research problem or give up the advantages of being a student. I was sick of a school in which the pie was all meringue and no filling but I stuck as I knew how to cope with courses in which the answers are matters of opinion and the opinion that counts is that of the professor. And how to cope with those large-class evening lectures: Buy the lecture notes. Read everything that professor ever published. Don’t cut too often and when you do show up, get there early, sit front row center, be certain the prof catches your eye every time he looks your way – by never taking your eyes off him. Ask one question you know he can answer because you’ve picked it out of his published papers – and state your name in asking a question. Luckily ‘Zebadiah Carter’ is a name easy to remember. Family, I got straight ‘A’s’ in both required courses and seminars… because I did not study ‘education,’ I studied professors of education.
“But I still had to make that ‘original contribution to human knowledge’ without which a candidate may not be awarded a doctor’s degree in most so-called disciplines… and the few that don’t require it are a tough row to hoe.
“I studied my faculty committee before letting myself be tied down to a research problem… not only reading everything each had published but also buying their publications or paying the library to make copies of out-of-print papers.”
My husband took me by my shoulders. “Dejah Thoris, here follows the title of my dissertation. You can have your divorce on your own terms.”
“Zebadiah, don’t talk that way!”
“Then brace yourself. ‘An Ad-Hoc Inquiry Concerning the Optimization of the Infrastructure of Primary Educational Institutions at the Interface Between Administration and Instruction, with Special Attention to Group Dynamics Desiderata.”
“Zebbie! What does that mean?”
“It means nothing, Hilda.”
“Zeb, quit kidding our ladies. Such a title would never be accepted.”
“Jake, it seems certain that you have never taken a course in a school of education.”
“Well… no. Teaching credentials are not required at university level but -“
“But me no ‘buts,’ Pop. I have a copy of my dissertation; you can check its authenticity. While that paper totally lacks meaning it is a literary gem in the sense in which a successful forging of an ‘old master’ is itself a work of art. It is loaded with buzz words. The average length of sentences is eighty-one words. The average word length, discounting ‘of,’ ‘a,’ ‘the,’ and other syntactical particles, is eleven-plus letters in slightly under four syllables. The bibliography is longer than the dissertation and cites three papers of each member of my committee and four of the chairman, and those citations are quoted in part – while avoiding any mention of matters on which I knew that members of the committee held divergent (but equally stupid) opinions.
“But the best touch was to get permission to do field work in Europe and have it count toward time on campus; half the citations were in foreign languages, ranging from Finnish to Croatian – and the translated bits invariably agreed with the prejudices of my committee. It took careful quoting out of context to achieve this, but it had the advantage that the papers were unlikely to be on campus and my committee were not likely to go to the trouble of looking them up even if they were. Most of them weren’t at home in other languages, even easy ones like French, German, and Spanish.
“But I did not waste time on phony field work; I simply wanted a trip to Europe at student air fares and the use of student hostels – dirt cheap way to travel. And a visit to the trustees of Grandpa’s fund.
“Good news! The fund was blue chips and triple-A bonds and, at that time, speculative stocks were rising. So the current cash value of the fund was down, even though income was up. And two more of my cousins and one uncle had qualified, again reducing the pro-rata… so, Glory Be! – I was within reaching distance. I had brought with me all that I had saved, swore before a notary that it was all mine, nothing borrowed, nothing from my father – and left it on deposit in Zurich, using the trustees as a front. And I told them about my stamp and coin collection.
“Good stamps and coins never go down, always up. I had nothing but proof sets, first-day covers, and unbroken sheets, all in perfect condition – and had a notarized inventory and appraisal with me. The trustees got me to swear that the items I had collected before I left home had come from earned money – true, the earliest items represented mowed lawns and such – and agreed to hold the pro-rata at that day’s cash value – lower if the trend continued – if I would sell my collection and send a draft to Zurich, with businesslike speed as soon as I returned to the States.
“I agreed. One trustee took me to lunch, tried to get me liquored up – then offered me ten percent over appraisal if I would sell that very afternoon, then send it to him by courier at his expense (bonded couriers go back and forth between Europe and America every week).
“We shook hands on it, went back and consulted the other trustees. I signed papers transferring title, the trustee buying signed his draft to me, I endorsed it to the trustees to add to the cash I was leaving in their custody. Three weeks later I got a cable certifying that the collection matched the inventory. I had qualified.
“Five months later I was awarded the degree of doctor of philosophy, summa cum laude, And that, dear ones, is the shameful story of my life, Anyone have the energy to go swimming?”
“Son, if there is a word of truth in that, it is indeed a shameful story.”
“Pop! That’s not fair! Zebadiah used their rules – and outsmarted them!”
“I didn’t say that Zeb had anything to be ashamed of. It is a commentary on American higher education. What Zeb claims to have written is no worse than trash I know is accepted as dissertations these days. His case is the only one I have encountered wherein an intelligent and able scholar – you, Zeb – set out to show that an ‘earned’ Ph.D. could be obtained from a famous institution – I know which one! – in exchange for deliberately meaningless pseudoresearch. The cases I have encountered have involved button-counting by stupid and humorless young persons under the supervision of stupid and humorless old fools. I see no way to stop it; the rot is too deep. The only answer is to chuck the system and start over.” My father shrugged. “Impossible.”
“Zebbie,” Aunt Hilda asked, “what do you do on campus? I’ve never asked.”
My husband grinned. “Oh, much what you do, Sharpie.”
“I don’t do anything. Enjoy myself.”
“Me, too. If you look, you will find me listed as ‘research professor in residence.’ An examination of the university’s books would show that I am paid a stipend to match my rank. Further search would show that slightly more than that amount is paid by some trustees in Zurich to the university’s general fund… as long as I remain on campus, a condition not written down. I like being on campus, Sharpie; it gives me privileges not granted the barbarians outside the pale. I teach a course occasionally, as supply for someone on sabbatical or ill.”
“Huh? What courses? What departments?”
“Any department but education. Engineering mathematics. Physics One-Oh-One. Thermogoddamics. Machine elements. Saber and dueling sword. Swimming. And – don’t laugh – English poetry from Chaucer through the Elizabethans. I enjoy teaching something worth teaching. I don’t charge for courses I teach; the Chancellor and I understand each other.”
“I’m not sure I understand you,” I said, “but I love you anyhow. Let’s go swimming.”

Chapter X

“‘ – and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon’!”

Zeb:
Before heading for the pool our wives argued over how Barsoomian warriors dress – a debate complicated by the fact that I was the only one fairly sober. While I was telling my “shameful story,” Jake had refreshed his Scotch-on-rocks and was genially argumentative, Our brides had stuck to one highball each but, while one jigger gave Deety a happy glow, Sharpie’s mass is so slight that the same dosage made her squiffed.
Jake and I agreed to wear side arms. Our princesses had buckled them on; we would wear them. But Deety wanted me to take off the grease-stained shorts I had worn while working. “Captain John Carter never wears clothes. He arrived on Barsoom naked, and from then on never wore anything but the leather and weapons of a fighting man. Jeweled leather for state occasions, plain leather for fighting – and sleeping silks at night. Barsoomians don’t wear clothes. When John Carter first laid eyes on Dejah Thoris,” Deety closed her eyes and recited: “‘She was as destitute of clothes as the Green Martians… save for her highly wrought ornaments she was entirely naked… ‘” Deety opened her eyes, stared solemnly. “The women never wear clothes, just jewelry.”
“Purty shilly,” said her father, with a belch. “Scuse me!”
“When they were chilly, they wrapped furs around them, Pop. I mean ‘Mors Kajak, my revered father.'”
Jake answered with slow precision. “Not… ‘chilly.’ Silly! With a clash of blades and flash of steel, man doesn’t want family treasures swinging in the breeze ‘n’ banging his knees. Distracts him. Might get ’em sliced off. Correc’, Captain John Carter?”
“Logical,” I agreed.
“Besides, illustrations showed men wearing breech clouts. Pro’ly steel jockstrap underneath. I would.”
“Those pictures were painted early in the twentieth century, Pop. Censored. But the stories make it clear. Weapons for men, jewelry for women – furs for cold weather.”
“I know how I should dress,” put in Sharpie. “Thuvia wears jewels on bits of gauze – I remember the book cover. Not clothes. Just something to fasten jewels to. Deety – Dejah Thoris, I mean – do you have a gauze scarf I can use? Fortunately I was wearing pearls when Mors Kajak kidnapped me.”
“Sharpie,” I objected, “you can’t be Thuvia. She married Carthoris. Mors Kajak – or Mors Kajake, might be a misspelling – is your husband.”
“Cer’nly Mors Jake is my husband! But I’m his second wife; that explains everything. But it ill becomes the Warlord to address a princess of the House of Ptarth as ‘Sharpie.” Mrs. Burroughs drew herself up to her full 152 centimeters and tried to look offended.
“My humble apologies, Your Highness.”
Sharpie giggled. “Can’t stay mad at our Warlord. Dejah Thoris hon – Green tulle? Blue? Anything but white.”
“I’ll go look.”
“Ladies,” I objected, “if we don’t get moving, the pool will cool off. You can sew on pearls this evening. Anyhow, where do pearls come from on Barsoom? Dead sea bottoms – no oysters.”
“From Korus, the Lost Sea of Dor,” Deety explained.
“They’ve got you, Son. But I either go swimming right now – or I have another drink… and then another, and then another. Working too hard. Too tense. Too much worry.”
“Okay, Pop; we swim. Aunt H – Aunt Thuvia?”
“All right, Dejah Thoris. To save Mors Jacob from himself. But I won’t wear earthling clothes. You can have my mink cape; may be chilly coming back.”
Jake wrapped his sarong into a breech clout, strapped it in place with his saber belt. I replaced those grimy shorts with swim briefs which Deety conceded were “almost Barsoomian.” I was no longer dependent on Jake’s clothes; my travel kit, always in my car, once I got at it, supplied necessities from passport to poncho. Sharpie wore pearls and rings she had been wearing at her party, plus a scarf around her waist to which she attached all the costume jewelry Deety could dig up. Deety carried Hilda’s mink cape – then wrapped it around her. “My Captain, someday I want one like this.”
“I’ll skin the minks personally,” I promised her.
“Oh, dear! I think this is synthetic.”
“I don’t. Ask Hilda.”
“I will most carefully not ask her. But I’ll settle for synthetic.”
I said, “My beloved Princess, you eat meat. Minks are vicious carnivores and the ones used for fur are raised for no other purpose – not trapped. They are well treated, then killed humanely. If your ancestors had not killed for meat and fur as the last glaciation retreated, you would not be here. Illogical sentiment leads to the sort of tragedy you find in India and Bangladesh.”
Deety was silent some moments as we followed Jake and Hilda down toward the pool. “My Captain -“
“Yes, Princess?”
“I stand corrected. But your brain works so much like a computer that you scare me.”
“I don’t ever want to scare you. I’m not bloodthirsty – not with minks, not with steers, not with anything. But I’ll kill without hesitation… for you.”
“Zebadiah -“
“Yes, Deety?”
“I am proud that you made me your wife. I will try to be a good wife… and your princess.”
“You do. You have. You always will. Dejah Thoris, my princess and only love, until I met you, I was a boy playing with oversized toys. Today I am a man. With a wife to protect and cherish… a child to plan for. I’m truly alive, at last! Hey! What are you sniffling about? Stop it!”
“I’ll cry if I feel like it!”
“Well… don’t get it on Hilda’s cape.”
“Gimme a hanky.”
“I don’t even have a Kleenex.” I brushed away her tears with my fingers. “Sniff hard. You can cry on me tonight. In bed.”
“Let’s go to bed early.”
“Right after dinner. Sniffles all gone?”
“I think so. Do pregnant women always cry?”
“So I hear.”
“Well… I’m not going to do it again. No excuse for it; I’m terribly happy.”
“The Polynesians do something they call ‘Crying happy.’ Maybe that’s what you do.”
“I guess so. But I’ll save it for private.” Deety started to shrug the cape off. “Too hot, lovely as it feels.” She stopped with the cape off her shoulders, suddenly pulled it around her again. “Who’s coming up the hill?”
I looked up, saw that Jake and Hilda had reached the pool – and a figure was appearing from below, beyond the boulder that dammed it.
“I don’t know. Stay behind me.” I hurried toward the pool.
The stranger was dressed as a Federal Ranger. As I closed in, I heard the stranger say to Jake, “Are you Jacob Burroughs?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Are you or aren’t you? If you are, I have business with you. If you’re not, you’re trespassing. Federal land, restricted access.”
“Jake!” I called out. “Who is he?”
The newcomer turned his head. “Who are you?”
“Wrong sequence,” I told him. “You haven’t identified yourself.”
“Don’t be funny,” the stranger said. “You know this uniform. I’m Bennie Hibol, the Ranger hereabouts.”
I answered most carefully, “Mr. Highball, you are a man in a uniform, wearing a gun belt and a shield. That doesn’t make you a Federal officer. Show your credentials and state your business.”
The uniformed character sighed. “I got no time to listen to smart talk.” He rested his hand on the butt of his gun. “If one of you is Burroughs, speak up. I’m going to search this site and cabin. There’s stuff coming up from Sonora; this sure as hell is the transfer point.”
Deety suddenly came out from behind me, moved quickly and placed herself beside her father. “Where’s your search warrant? Show your authority!” She had the cape clutched around her; her face quivered with indignation.
“Another joker!” This clown snapped open his holster. “Federal land – here’s my authority!”
Deety suddenly dropped the cape, stood naked in front of him. I drew, lunged, and cut down in one motion – slashed the wrist, recovered, thrust upward from low line into the belly above the gun belt.
As my point entered, Jake’s saber cut the side of the neck almost to decapitation. Our target collapsed like a puppet with cut strings, lay by the pool, bleeding at three wounds.
“Zebadiah, I’m sorry!”
“About what, Princess?” I asked as I wiped my blade on the alleged ranger’s uniform. I noticed the color of the blood with distaste.
“He didn’t react! I thought my strip act would give you more time.”
“You did distract him,” I reassured her. “He watched you and didn’t watch me. Jake, what kind of a creature has bluish green blood?”
“I don’t know.”
Sharpie came forward, squatted down, dabbed a finger in the blood, sniffed it. “Hemocyanin. I think,” she said calmly. “Deety, you were right. Alien. The largest terrestrial fauna with that method of oxygen transport is a lobster. But this thing is no lobster, it’s a ‘Black Hat.’ How did you know?”
“I didn’t. But he didn’t sound right. Rangers are polite. And they never fuss about showing their I.D.’s.”
“I didn’t know,” I admitted. “I wasn’t suspicious, just annoyed.”
“You moved mighty fast,” Jake approved.
“I never know why till it’s over. You didn’t waste time yourself, tovarishch. Drawing saber while he was pulling a gun – that takes guts and speed. But let’s not talk now – where are his pals? We may be picked off getting back to the house.”
“Look at his pants,” Hilda suggested. “He hasn’t been on horseback. Hasn’t climbed far, either. Jacob, is there a jeep trail?”
“No. This isn’t accessible by jeep – just barely by horse.”
“Hasn’t been anything overhead,” I added. “No chopper, no air car.”
“Continua craft,” said Deety.
“Huh?”
“Zebadiah, the ‘Black Hats’ are aliens who don’t want Pop to build a time-space machine. We know that. So it follows that they have continua craft.”
I thought about it. “Deety. I’m going to bring you breakfast in bed. Jake, how do we spot an alien continua craft? It doesn’t have to look like Gay Deceiver.”
Jake frowned. “No. Any shape. But a one-passenger craft might not be much larger than a phone booth.”
“If it’s a one-man – one-alien – job, it should be parked down in that scrub,” I said, pointing. “We can find it.”
“Zebadiah,” protested Deety, “we don’t have time to search. We ought to get out of here! Fast!”
Jake said, “My daughter is right but not for that reason. Its craft is not necessarily waiting. It could be parked an infinitesimal interval away along any of six axes, and either return automatically, preprogrammed, or by some method of signaling that we can postulate but not describe. The alien craft would not be here-now… but will be here-later. For pickup.”
“In that case, Jake, you and I and the gals should scram out of here-now to there-then. Be missing. How long has our pressure test been running? What time is it?”
“Seventeen-seventeen,” Deety answered instantly.
I looked at my wife. “Naked as a frog. Where do you hide your watch, dearest? Surely, not there.”
She stuck out her tongue. “Smarty. I have a clock in my head. I never mention it because people give me funny looks.”
“Deety does have innate time sense,” agreed her father, “accurate to thirteen seconds plus or minus about four seconds; I’ve measured it.”
“I’m sorry, Zebadiah – I don’t mean to be a freak.”
“Sorry about what, Princess? I’m impressed. What do you do about time zones?”
“Same as you do. Add or subtract as necessary. Darling, everyone has a built-in circadian. Mine is merely more nearly exact than most people’s. Like having absolute pitch – some do, some don’t.”
“Are you a lightning calculator?”
“Yes… but computers are so much faster that I no longer do it much. Except one thing – I can sense a glitch – spot a wrong answer. Then I look for garbage in the program. If I don’t find it, I send for a hardware specialist. Look, sweetheart, discuss my oddities later. Pop, let’s dump that thing down the septic tank and go. I’m nervous, I am.”
“Not so fast, Deety.” Hilda was still squatting by the corpse. “Zebbie. Consult your hunches. Are we in danger?”
“Well… not this instant.”
“Good. I want to dissect this creature.”
“Aunt Hilda!”
“Take a Miltown, Deety. Gentlemen, the Bible or somebody said, ‘Know thy enemy.’ This is the only ‘Black Hat’ we’ve seen… and he’s not human and not born on earth. There is a wealth of knowledge lying here and it ought not to be shoved down a septic tank until we know more about it. Jacob, feel this.”
Hilda’s husband got down on his knees, let her guide his hand through the “ranger’s” hair. “Feel those bumps, dearest?”
“Yes!”
“Much like the budding horns of a lamb, are they not?”
“Oh – ‘And I beheld another beast coming up out of the earth; and he had two horns like a lamb, and he spake as a dragon’!”
I squatted down, felt for horn buds. “Be damned! He did come up out of the earth – up this slope anyhow – and he spake as a dragon. Talked unfriendly, and all the dragons I’ve ever heard of talked mean or belched fire. Hilda, when you field-strip this critter, keep an eye out for the Number of the Beast.”
“I shall! Who’s going to help me get this specimen up to the house? I want three volunteers.”
Deety gave a deep sigh, “I volunteer. Aunt Hilda… must you do this?”
“Deety, it ought to be done at Johns Hopkins, with x-ray and proper tools and color holovision. But I’m the best biologist for it because I’m the only biologist. Honey child, you don’t have to watch. Aunt Sharpie has helped in an emergency room after a five-car crash; to me, blood is just a mess to clean up. Green blood doesn’t bother me even that much.”
Deety gulped. “I’ll help carry. I said I would!”
“Dejah Thoris!”
“Sir? Yes, my Captain?”
“Back away from that. Take this. And this.” I unbuckled sword and belt, shoved down my swimming briefs, handed all of it to Deety. “Jake, help me get him up into fireman’s carry.”
“I’ll help carry, Son.”
“No, I can tote him easier than two could. Sharpie, where do you want to work?”
“It will have to be the dining table.”
“Aunt Hilda, I don’t want that thing on my – ! I beg your pardon; it’s your dining table.”
“You’re forgiven only if you’ll concede that it is our dining table. Deety, how many times must I repeat that I am not crowding you out of your home? We are co-housewives – my only seniority lies in being twenty years older. To my regret.”
“Hilda my dear one, what would you say to a workbench in the garage with a drop cloth on it and flood lights over it?”
“I say, ‘Swell!’ I don’t think a dining table is the place for a dissection, either. But I couldn’t think of anywhere else.”
With help from Jake, I got that damned carcass draped across my shoulders in fireman’s carry. Deety started up the path with me, carrying my belt and sword and my briefs in one arm so that she could hold my free hand – despite my warning that she might be splashed with alien blood. “No, Zebadiah, I got overtaken by childishness. I won’t let it happen again. I must conquer all squeamishness – I’ll be changing diapers soon.” She was silent a moment. “That is the first time I’ve seen death. In a person, I mean. An alien humanoid person I should say… but I thought he was a man. I once saw a puppy run over – I threw up. Even though it was not my puppy and I didn’t go close.” She added, “An adult should face up to death, should she not?”
“Face up to it, yes,” I agreed. “But not grow calloused. Deety, I’ve seen too many men die. I’ve never grown inured to it. One must accept death, learn not to fear it, then never worry about it. ‘Make Today Count!’ as a friend whose days are numbered told me. Live in that spirit and when death comes, it will come as a welcome friend.”
“You say much what my mother told me before she died.”
“Your mother must have been an extraordinary woman. Deety, in the two weeks I’ve known you, I’ve heard so much about her from all three of you that I feel as if I knew her. A friend I hadn’t seen lately. She sounds like a wise woman.”
“I think she was, Zebadiah. Certainly she was good. Sometimes, when I have a hard choice, I ask myself, ‘What would Mama do?’ – and everything falls into place.”
“Both good and wise… and her daughter shows it. Uh, how old are you, Deety?”
“Does it matter, sir?”
“No. Curiosity.”
“I wrote my birth date on our marriage license application.”
“Beloved, my head was spinning so hard that I had trouble remembering my own. But I should not have asked – women have birthdays, men have ages. I want to know your birthday; I have no need to know the year.”
“April twenty-second, Zebadiah – one day older than Shakespeare.”
“‘Age could not wither her – ‘ Woman, you carry your years well.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“That snoopy question came from having concluded in my mind that you were twenty-six… figuring from the fact that you have a doctor’s degree. Although you look younger.”
“I think twenty-six is a satisfactory age.”
“I wasn’t asking,” I said hastily. “I got confused from knowing Hilda’s age… then hearing her say that she is – or claims to be – twenty years older than you. It did not jibe with my earlier estimate, based on your probable age on graduating from high school plus your two degrees.”
Jake and Hilda had lingered at the pool while Jake washed his hands and rinsed from his body smears of alien ichor. Being less burdened, they climbed the path faster than we and came up behind us just as Deety answered,
“Zebadiah, I never graduated from high school.”
“Oh.”
“That’s right,” agreed her father. “Deety matriculated by taking College Boards. At fourteen. No problem since she stayed home and didn’t have to live in a dorm. Got her B.S. in three years… and that was a happy thing, as Jane lived to see Deety move the tassel from one side of her mortar board to the other. Jane in a wheelchair and happy as a child – her doctor said it couldn’t hurt her… meaning she was dying anyhow.” He added, “Had her mother been granted only three more years she could have seen Deety’s doctorate conferred, two years ago.”
“Pop… sometimes you chatter.”
“Did I say something out of line?”
“No, Jake,” I assured him. “But I’ve just learned that I robbed the cradle. I knew I had but hadn’t realized how much. Deety darling, you are twenty-two.”
“Is twenty-two an unsatisfactory age?”
“No, my Princess. Just right.”
“My Captain said that women have birthdays while men have ages. Is it permitted to inquire your age, sir? I didn’t pay close attention to that form we had to fill out, either.”
I answered solemnly. “But Dejah Thoris knows that Captain John Carter is centuries old, cannot recall his childhood, and has always looked thirty years old.”
“Zebadiah, if that is your age, you’ve had a busy thirty years. You said you left home when you graduated from high school, worked your way through college, spent three years on active duty, then worked your way through a doctor’s degree -“
“A phony one!”
“That doesn’t reduce required residence. Aunt Hilda says you’ve been a professor four years.”
“Uh… will you settle for nine years older than you are?”
“I’ll settle for whatever you say.”
“He’s at it again,” put in Sharpie. “He was run off two other campuses. Co-ed scandals. Then he found that in California nobody cared, so he moved west.”
I tried to look hurt. “Sharpie darling, I always married them. One gal turned out already to be married and in the other case the child wasn’t mine; she slipped one over on me.”
“The truth isn’t in him, Deety. But he’s brave and he bathes every day and he’s rich – and we love him anyhow.”
“The truth isn’t in you either, Aunt Hilda. But we love you anyhow. It says in ‘Little Women’ that a bride should be half her husband’s age plus seven years. Zebadiah and I hit close to that.”
“A rule that makes an old hag out of me. Jacob, I’m just Zebbie’s age – thirty-one. But we’ve both been thirty-one for ages.”
“I’ll bet he does feel aged after carrying that thing uphill. Atlas, can you support your burden while I get the garage open, a bench dragged out and covered? Or shall I help you put it down?”
“I’d just have to pick it up again. But don’t dally.”

Chapter XI

” – citizens must protect themselves.”

Zeb:
I felt better after I got that “ranger’s” corpse dumped and the garage door closed, everyone indoors. I had told Hilda that I felt no “immediate” danger – but my wild talent does not warn me until the Moment of Truth. The “Blokes in the Black Hats” had us located. Or possibly had never lost us; what applies to human gangsters has little to do with aliens whose powers and motives and plans we had no way to guess.
We might be as naive as a kitten who thinks he is hidden because his head is, unaware that his little rump sticks out.
They were alien, they were powerful, they were multiple (three thousand? three million? – we didn’t know the Number of the Beast) – and they knew where we were. True, we had killed one – by luck, not by planning. That “ranger” would be missed; we could expect more to call in force.
Foolhardiness has never appealed to me. Given a chance to run, I run. I don’t mean I’ll bug out on wing mate when the unfriendlies show up, and certainly not on a wife and unborn child. But I wanted us all to run – me, my wife, my blood brother who was also my father-in-law, and his wife, my chum Sharpie who was brave, practical, smart, and unsqueamish (that she would joke in the jaws of Moloch was not a fault but a source of esprit).
I wanted us to go! – Tau axis, Teh axis, rotate, translate, whatever – anywhere not infested by gruesomes with green gore.
I checked the gauge and felt better; Gay’s inner pressure had not dropped. Too much to expect Gay to be a spaceship – not equipped to scavenge and replenish air. But it was pleasant to know that she would hold pressure much longer than it would take us to scram for home if we had to – assuming that unfriendlies had not shot holes in her graceful shell.
I went by the inside passageway into the cabin, used soap and hot water, rinsed off and did it again, dried down and felt clean enough to kiss my wife, which I did. Deety held onto me and reported.
“Your kit is packed, sir. I’m finishing mine, the planned weight and space, and nothing but practical clothes -“
“Sweetheart.”
“Yes, Zebadiah?”
“Take the clothes you were married in and mine too. Same for Jake and Hilda. And your father’s dress uniform. Or was it burned in Logan?”
“But, Zebadiah, you emphasized rugged clothes.”
“So I did. To keep your mind on the fact that we can’t guess the conditions we’ll encounter and don’t know how long we’ll be gone or if we’ll be back. So I listed everything that might be useful in pioneering a virgin planet – since we might be stranded and never get home. Everything from Jake’s microscope and water-testing gear to technical manuals and tools. And weapons – and flea powder. But it’s possible that we will have to play the roles of ambassadors for humanity at the court of His Extreme Majesty, Overlord of Galactic Empires in thousandth-and-third continuum. We may need the gaudiest clothes we can whip up. We don’t know, we can’t guess.”
“I’d rather pioneer.”
“We may not have a choice. When you were figuring weights, do you recall spaces marked ‘Assigned mass such and such – list to come’?”
“Certainly. Total exactly one hundred kilos, which seemed odd. Space slightly less than one cubic meter split into crannies.”
“Those are yours, snubnose. And Pop or Hilda. Mass can be up to fifty percent over; I’ll tell Gay to trim to match. Got an old doll? A security blanket? A favorite book of poems? Scrapbook? Family photographs? Bring ’em all!”
“Golly!” (I never enjoy looking at my wife quite so much as when she lights up and is suddenly a little girl.)
“Don’t leave space for me. I have only what I arrived with. What about shoes for Hilda?”
“She claims she doesn’t need any, Zebadiah – that her calluses are getting calluses on them. But I’ve worked out expedients. I got Pop some Dr. Scholl’s shoe liners when we were building; I have three pairs left and can trim them. Liners and enough bobby sox make her size three-and-half feet fit my clodhoppers pretty well. And I have a sentimental keepsake; Keds Pop bought me when I first went to summer camp, at ten. They fit Aunt Hilda.”
“Good girl!” I added, “You seem to have everything in hand. How about food? Not stores we are carrying, I mean now. Has anybody thought about dinner? Killing aliens makes me hungry.”
“Buffet style, Zebadiah. Sandwiches and stuff on the kitchen counter, and I thawed and heated an apple pie. I fed one sandwich to Hilda, holding it for her; she says she’s going to finish working, then scrub before she eats anything more.”
“Sharpie munched a sandwich while she carved that thing?”
“Aunt Hilda is rugged, Zebadiah – almost as rugged as you are.”
“More rugged than I am. I could do an autopsy if I had to – but not while eating. I think I speak for Jake, too.”
“I know you speak for Pop. He saw me feeding her, turned green and went elsewhere. Go look at what she’s been doing, Zebadiah; Hilda has found interesting things.”
“Hmmm – Are you the little girl who had a tizzy at the idea of dissecting a dead alien?”
“No, sir, I am not. I’ve decided to stay grown up. It’s not easy. But it’s more satisfying. An adult doesn’t panic at a snake; she just checks to see if it’s got rattles. I’ll never squeal again. I’m grown up at last… a wife instead of a pampered princess.”
“You will always be my Princess!”
“I hope so, my Chieftain. But to merit that, I must learn to be a pioneer mother – wring the neck of a rooster, butcher a hog, load while my husband shoots, take his place and his rifle when he is wounded. I’ll learn – I’m stubborn, I am. Grab a hunk of pie and go see Hilda. I know just what to do with the extra hundred kilos: books, photographs, Pop’s microfilm files and portable viewer, Pop’s rifle and a case of ammo that the weight schedule didn’t allow for -“
“Didn’t know he had it – what calibre?”
“Seven point six two millimeters, long cartridge.”
“Glory be! Pop and I use the same ammo!”
“Didn’t know you carried a rifle, Zebadiah.”
“I don’t advertise it, it’s unlicensed. I must show all of you how to get at it.”
“Got any use for a lady’s purse gun? A needle gun, Skoda fléchettes. Not much range but either they poison or they break up and expand… and it fires ninety times on one magazine.”
“What are you, Deety? Honorable Hatchet Man?”
“No, sir. Pop got it for me – black market – when I started working nights. He said he would rather hire shysters to get me acquitted – or maybe probation – than to have to go down to the morgue to identify my body. Haven’t had to use it; in Logan I hardly need it. Zebadiah, Pop has gone to a great deal of trouble to get me the best possible training in self-defense. He’s just as highly trained – that’s why I keep him out of fist fights. Because it would be a massacre. He and Mama decided this when I was a baby. Pop says cops and courts no longer protect citizens, so citizens must protect themselves.”
“I’m afraid he’s right.”
“My husband, I can’t evaluate my opinions of right and wrong because I learned them from my parents and haven’t lived long enough to have formed opinions in disagreement with theirs.”
“Deety, your parents did okay.”
“I think so… but that’s subjective. As may be, I was kept out of blackboard jungles – public schools – until we moved to Utah. And I was trained to fight – armed or unarmed. Pop and I noticed how you handled a sword. Your moulinets are like clockwork. And when you drop into point guard, your forearm is perfectly covered.”
“Jake is no slouch. He drew so fast I never saw it, and cut precisely above the collar.”
“Pop says you are better at it.”
“Mmm – Longer reach. He’s probably faster. Deety, the best swordmaster I ever had was your height and reach. I couldn’t even cross blades with him unless he allowed me to.”
“You never did say where you had taken up swordsmanship.”
I grinned down at her. “Y.M.C.A. in downtown Manhattan. I had foil in high school. I fiddled with saber and épée in college. But I never encountered swordsmen until I moved to Manhattan. Took it up because I was getting soft. Then during that so-called ‘research trip’ in Europe I met swordsmen with family tradition – sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of maîtres d’armes. Learned that it was a way of life – and I had started too late. Deety, I fibbed to Hilda; I’ve never fought a student duel. But I did train in saber in Heidelberg under the Säbelmeister reputed to coach one underground Korps. He was the little guy I couldn’t cross steel with. Fast! Up to then I had thought I was fast. But I got faster under his tutelage. The day I was leaving he told me that he wished he had had me twenty years sooner; he might have made a swordsman of me.”
“You were fast enough this afternoon!”
“No, Deety. You had his eye, I attacked from the flank. You won that fight – not me, not Pop. Although what Pop did was far more dangerous than what I did.”
“My Captain, I will not let you disparage yourself! I cannot hear you!”
Women, bless their warm hearts and strange minds – Deety had appointed me her hero; that settled it. I would have to try to measure up. I cut a piece of apple pie, ate it quickly while I walked slowly through the passage into the garage – didn’t want to reach the “morgue” still eating.
The “ranger” was on its back with clothes cut away, open from chin to crotch, and spread. Nameless chunks of gizzard were here and there around the cadaver. It gave off a fetid odor.
Hilda was still carving, ice tongs in left hand, knife in her right, greenish goo up over her wrists. As I approached she put down the knife, picked up a razor blade – did not look up until I spoke. “Learning things, Sharpie?”
She put down her tools, wiped her hands on a towel, pushed back her hair with her forearm. “Zebbie, you wouldn’t believe it.”
“Try me.”
“Well… look at this.” She touched the corpse’s right leg, and spoke to the corpse itself. “What’s a nice joint like this doing in a girl like you?”
I saw what she meant: a long, gaunt leg with an extra knee lower than the human knee; it bent backwards. Looking higher, I saw that its arms had similar extra articulation. “Did you say ‘girl’?”
“I said ‘girl.’ Zebbie, this monster is either female or hermaphroditic. A fully developed uterus, two-horned like a cat, one ovary above each horn. But there appear to be testes lower down and a dingus that may be a retractable phallus. Female – but probably male as well. Bisexual but does not impregnate itself; the plumbing wouldn’t hook up. I think these critters can both pitch and catch.”
“Taking turns? Or simultaneously?”
“Wouldn’t that be sump’n? No, for mechanical reasons I think they take turns. Whether ten minutes apart or ten years, deponent sayeth not. But I’d give a pretty to see two of ’em going to it!”
“Sharpie, you’ve got a one-track mind.”
“It’s the main track. Reproduction is the main track; the methods and mores of sexual copulation are the central feature of all higher developments of life.”
“You’re ignoring money and television.”
“Piffle! All human activities including scientific research are either mating dances and care of the young, or the dismal sublimations of born losers in the only game in town. Don’t try to kid Sharpie. Took me forty-two years to grab a real man and get myself knocked up – but I made it! Everything I’ve done up to the last two weeks has been ‘vamp till ready.’ How about you, you shameless stud? Am I not right? Careful how you answer; I’ll tell Deety.”
“I’ll take the Fifth.”
“Make mine a quart. Zebbie, I hate these monsters; they interfere with my plans – a rose-covered cottage, a baby in the crib, a pot roast in the oven, me in a gingham dress, and my man coming down the lane after a hard day flunking freshmen – me with his slippers and his pipe and a dry martini waiting for him. Heaven! All else is vanity and vexation. Four fully developed mammary glands but lacking the redundant fat characteristic of the human female – ‘cept me, damn it. A double stomach, a single intestine. A two-compartment heart that seems to pump by peristalsis rather than by beating. Cordate. I haven’t examined the brain; I don’t have a proper saw – but it must be as well developed as ours. Definitely humanoid, outrageously nonhuman. Don’t knock over those bottles; they are specimens of body fluids.”
“What are these things?”
“Splints to conceal the unhuman articulation. Plastic surgery on the face, too, I’m pretty sure, and cheaters to reshape the skull. The hair is fake; these Boojums don’t have hair. Something like tattooing – or maybe masking I haven’t been able to peel off – to make the face and other exposed skin look human instead of blue-green. Zeb, seven-to-two a large number of missing persons have been used as guinea pigs before they worked out methods for this masquerade. Swoop! A flying saucer dips down and two more guinea pigs wind up in their laboratories.”
“There hasn’t been a flying saucer scare in years.”
“Poetic license, dear. If they have space-time twisters, they can pop up anywhere, steal what they want – or replace a real human with a convincing fake – and be gone like switching off a light.”
“This one couldn’t get by very long. Rangers have to take physical examinations.”
“This one may be a rush job, prepared just for us. A permanent substitution might fool anything but an x-ray – and might fool even x-ray if the doctor giving the examination was one of Them … a theory you might think about. Zebbie, I must get to work. There is so much to learn and so little time. I can’t learn a fraction of what this carcass could tell a real comparative biologist.”
“Can I help?” (I was not anxious to.)
“Well -“
“I haven’t much to do until Jake and Deety finish assembling the last of what they are going to take. So what can I do to help?”
“I could work twice as fast if you would take pictures. I have to stop to wipe my hands before I touch the camera.”
“I’m your boy, Sharpie. Just say what angle, distance, and when.”
Hilda looked relieved. “Zebbie, have I told you that I love you despite your gorilla appearance and idiot grin? Underneath you have the soul of a cherub. I want a bath so badly I can taste it – could be the last hot bath in a long time. And the bidet – the acme of civilized decadence. I’ve been afraid I would still be carving strange meat when Jacob said it was time to leave.”
“Carve away, dear; you’ll get your bath.” I picked up the camera, the one Jake used for record-keeping: a Polaroid Stereo-Instamatic-self-focusing, automatic irising, automatic processing, the perfect camera for engineer or scientist who needs a running record.
I took endless pictures while Hilda sweated away. “Sharpie, doesn’t it worry you to work with bare hands? You might catch the Never-Get-Overs.”
“Zebbie, if these critters could be killed by our bugs, they would have arrived here with no immunities and died quickly. They didn’t. Therefore it seems likely that we can’t by hurt by their bugs. Radically different biochemistries.”
It sounded logical – but I could not forget Kettering’s Law: “Logic is an organized way of going wrong with confidence.”
Deety appeared, set down a loaded hamper. “That’s the last.” She had her hair up in a bath knot and was dressed solely in rubber gloves. “Hi, dearest. Aunt Hilda, I’m ready to help.”
“Not much you can do, Deety hon – unless you want to relieve Zebbie.”
Deety was staring at the corpse and did not look happy – her nipples were down flat. “Go take a bath!” I told her. “Scram.”
“Do I stink that badly?”
“You stink swell, honey girl. But Sharpie pointed out that this may be our last chance at soap and hot water in quite a while. I’ve promised her that we won’t leave for Canopus and points east until she has her bath. So get yours out of the way, then you can help me stow while she gets sanitary.”
“All right.” Deety backed off and her nipples showed faintly – not rigid but she was feeling better. My darling keeps her feelings out of her face, mostly – but those pretty pink spigots are barometers of her morale.
“Just a sec, Deety,” Hilda added. “This afternoon you said, ‘He didn’t react!’ What did you mean?”
“What I said. Strip in front of a man and he reacts, one way or another. Even if he tries to ignore it, his eyes give him away. But he didn’t. Of course he’s not a man – but I didn’t know that when I tried to distract him.”
I said, “But he did notice you, Deety – and that gave me my chance.”
“But only the way a dog, or a horse, or any animal, will notice any movement. He noticed but ignored it. No reaction.”
“Zebbie, does that remind you of anything?”
“Should it?”
“The first day we were here you told us a story about a ‘zaftig co-ed.'”
“I did?”
“She was flunking math.”
“Oh! ‘Brainy.'”
“Yes, Professor N. O’Heret Brain. See any parallel?”
“But ‘No Brain’ has been on campus for years. Furthermore he turns red in the face. Not a tattoo job.”
“I said this one might be a rush job. Would anyone be in a better position to discredit a mathematical theory than the head of the department of mathematics at a very prominent university? Especially if he was familiar with that theory and knew that it was correct?”
“Hey, wait a minute!” put in Deety. “Are you talking about that professor who argued with Pop? The one with the phony invitation? I thought he was just a stooge? Pop says he’s a fool.”
“He behaves like a pompous old fool,” agreed Hilda. “I can’t stand him. I plan to do an autopsy on him.”
“But he’s not dead.”
“That can be corrected!” Sharpie said sharply.

Chapter XII

“They might fumigate this planet and take it.”

Hilda:
By the time I was out of my bath, Jacob, Deety, and Zebbie had Gay Deceiver stowed and lists checked (can opener, cameras, et cetera) – even samples of fluids and tissues from the cadaver, as Zebbie’s miracle car had a small refrigerator. Deety wasn’t happy about my specimens being in the refrigerator but they were very well packed, layer on layer of plastic wrap, then sealed into a freezer box. Besides, that refrigerator contained mostly camera film, dynamite caps, and other noneatables. Food was mostly freeze-dried and sealed in nitrogen, except foods that won’t spoil.
We were dog tired. Jacob moved that we sleep, then leave. “Zeb, unless you expect a new attack in the next eight hours, we should rest. I need to be clearheaded in handling verniers. This house is almost a fortress, will be pitch black, and does not radiate any part of the spectrum. They may conclude that we ran for it right after we got their boy – hermaphrodite, I mean; the fake ‘ranger’ – what do you think?”
“Jake, I wouldn’t have been surprised had we been clobbered at any moment. Since they didn’t – Well, I don’t like to handle Gay when I’m not sharp. More mistakes are made in battle through fatigue than from any other cause. Let’s sack in. Anybody need a sleeping pill?”
“All I need is a bed. Hilda my love, tonight I sleep on my own side.”
I said, “Can’t I even cuddle up your back?”
“Promise not to tickle?”
I made a face at my darling. “I promise.”
“Zebadiah,” Deety said. “I don’t want to cuddle; I want to be held… so I’ll know I’m safe. For the first time since my twelfth birthday I don’t feel sexy.”
“Princess, it’s settled; we sleep. But I suggest that we be up before daylight. Let’s not crowd our luck.”
“Sensible,” agreed Jacob.
I shrugged. “You men have to pilot; Deety and I are cargo. We can nap in the back seats – if we miss a few universes, what of it? If you’ve seen one universe, you’ve seen ’em all. Deety?”
“If it were up to me, I would lam out of here so fast my shoes would be left standing. But Zebadiah has to pilot and Pop has to set verniers… and both are tired and don’t want to chance it. But, Zebadiah… don’t fret if I rest with my eyes and ears open.”
“Huh? Deety – why?”
“Somebody ought to be on watch. It might give us that split-second advantage – split seconds have saved us at least twice. Don’t worry, darling; I often skip a night to work a long program under shared time. Doesn’t hurt me; a nap next day and I’m ready to bite rattlesnakes. Tell him, Pop.”
“That’s correct, Zeb, but -“
Zebbie cut him off. “Maybe you gals can split watches and have breakfast ready. Right now I’ve got to hook up Gay Deceiver so that she can reach me in our bedroom. Deety, I can add a program so that she can listen around the cabin, too. Properly programmed, Gay’s the best watch dog of any of us. Will that satisfy you duty-struck little broads?”
Deety said nothing so I kept quiet. Zebbie, frowning, turned back to his car, opened a door and prepared to hook Gay’s voice and ears to the three house intercoms. “Want to shift the basement talky-talk to your bedroom, Jake?”
“Good idea,” Jacob agreed.
“Wait a half while I ask Gay what she has. Hello, Gay.”
“Howdy, Zeb. Wipe off your chin.”
“Program. Running new retrievals. Report new items since last report.”
“Null report, Boss.”
“Thank you, Gay.”
“You’re welcome, Zeb.”
“Program, Gay. Add running news retrieval. Area, Arizona Strip north of Grand Canyon plus Utah. Persons: all persons listed in current running news retrieval programs plus rangers, Federal rangers, forest rangers, park rangers, state rangers. End of added program.”
“New program running, Boss.”
“Program. Add running acoustic report, maximum gain.”
“New program running, Zeb.”
“You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
“Isn’t it time you married me?”
“Good night, Gay.”
“Good night, Zeb. Sleep with your hands outside the covers.”
“Deety, you’ve corrupted Gay. I’ll run a lead outdoors for a microphone while Jake moves the basement intercom to the master bedroom. But maximum gain will put a coyote yapping ten miles away right into bed with you. Jake, I can tell Gay to subtract acoustic report from the news retrieval for your bedroom.”
“Hilda my love, do you want the acoustic subtracted?”
I didn’t but didn’t say so; Gay interrupted:
“Running news retrieval, Boss.”
“Report!”
“Reuters, Straits Times, Singapore. Tragic News of Marston Expedition. Indonesian News Service, Palembang. Two bodies identified as Dr. Cecil Yang and Dr. Z. Edward Carter were brought by jungle buggy to National Militia Headquarters, Telukbetung. The district commandant stated that they will be transferred by air to Palembang for further transport to Singapore when the commandant-in-chief releases them to the Minister of Tourism and Culture. Professor Marston and Mr. Smythe-Belisha are still unreported. Commandants of both districts concede that hopes of finding them alive have diminished. However, a spokesman for the Minister of Tourism and Culture assured a press conference that the Indonesian government would pursue the search more assiduously than ever.”
Zebbie whistled tunelessly. Finally, he said, “Opinions, anyone?”
“He was a brilliant man, Son,” my husband said soberly. “An irreplaceable loss. Tragic.”
“Ed was a good Joe, Jake. But that’s not what I mean. Our tactical situation. Now. Here.”
My husband paused before answering, “Zeb, whatever happened in Sumatra apparently happened about a month ago. Emotionally I feel great turmoil. Logically I am forced to state that I cannot see that our situation has changed.”
“Hilda? Deety?”
“News retrieval report,” announced Gay.
“Report!”
“AP San Francisco via satellite from Saipan, Marianas. TWA hypersonicsemiballistic liner Winged Victory out of San Francisco International at twenty o’clock this evening Pacific Coast Time was seen by eye and radar to implode on reentry. AP Honolulu US Navy Official. USS Submersible Carrier Flying Fish operating near Wake Island has been ordered to proceed flank speed toward site of Winged Victory reentry. She will surface and launch search craft at optimum point. Navy PIO spokesman, when asked what was ‘optimum,’ replied ‘No comment.’ Associated Press’s military editor noted that submerged speed of Flying Fish class, and type and characteristics of craft carried, are classified information. AP-UPI add San Francisco, Winged Victory disaster. TWA public relations released a statement quote if reports received concerning Winged Victory are correct it must be tentatively assumed that no survivors can be expected. But our engineering department denies that implosion could be cause. Collision with orbital debris decaying into atmosphere or even a strike by a meteor could repeat could endrep cause disaster by mischance so unlikely that it can only be described as an Act of God endquote TWA spokesmen released passenger list by order of the Civil Aerospace Board. List follows: California -“
The list was longish. I did not recognize any names until Gay reached: “Doctor Neil O. Brain -“
I gasped. But no one said a word until Gay announced:
“End running news retrieval.”
“Thank you, Gay.”
“A pleasure, Zeb.”
Zebbie said, “Professor?”
“You’re in command, Captain!”
“Very well, sir! All of you – lifeboat rules! I expect fast action and no back talk. Estimated departure – five minutes! First everybody take a pee! Second, put on the clothes you’ll travel in. Jake, switch off, lock up – whatever you do to secure your house for long absence. Deety – follow Jake, make sure he hasn’t missed anything – then you, not Jake, switch out lights and close doors. Hilda, bundle what’s left of that Dutch lunch and fetch it – fast, not fussy. Check the refrigerator for solid foods – no liquids – and cram what you can into Gay’s refrigerator. Don’t dither over choices. Questions, anyone? Move!”
I gave Jacob first crack at our bathroom because the poor dear tenses up; I used the time to slide sandwiches into a freezer sack and half a pie into another. Potato salad? Scrape it into a third and stick in one plastic picnic spoon; germs were now community property. I stuffed this and some pickles into the biggest freezer sack Deety stocked, and closed it.
Jake came out of our bedroom; I threw him a kiss en passant, ducked into our john, turned on water in the basin, sat down, and recited mantras – that often works when I’m jumpy – then used the bidet – patted it and told it goodbye without stopping. My travel clothes were Deety’s baby tennis shoes with a green-and-gold denim miniskirt dress of hers that came to my knees but wasn’t too dreadful with a scarf to belt it. Panties? I had none. Deety had put a pair of hers out for me – but her size would fall off me. Then I saw that the dear baby had gotten at the elastic and knotted it. Yup! pretty good fit – and, with no telling when our next baths would be, panties were practical even though a nuisance.
I spread my cape in front of the refrigerator, dumped my purse and our picnic lunch into it, started salvaging – half a boned ham, quite a bit of cheese, a loaf and a half of bread, two pounds of butter (freezer sacks, and the same for the ham – if Deety hadn’t had a lavish supply of freezer sacks I could not have salvaged much – as it was, I didn’t even get spots on my cape). I decided that jams and jellies and catsup were liquid within Zebbie’s meaning – except some in squeeze tubes. Half a chocolate cake, and the cupboard was bare.
By using my cape as a Santa Claus pack, I carried food into the garage and put it down by Gay – and was delighted to find that I was first.
Zebbie strode in behind me, dressed in a coverall with thigh pockets, a pilot suit. He looked at the pile on my cape. “Where’s the elephant, Sharpie?”
“Cap’n Zebbie, you didn’t say how much, you just said what. What won’t go she can have.” I hooked a thumb at the chopped-up corpse.
“Sorry, Hilda; you are correct.” Zebbie glanced at his wrist watch, the multiple-dial sort they call a “navigator’s watch.”
“Cap’n, this house has loads of gimmicks and gadgets and bells and whistles. You gave them an impossible schedule.”
“On purpose, dear. Let’s see how much food we can stow.”
Gay’s cold chest is set flush in the deck of the driver’s compartment. Zebbie told Gay to open up, then with his shoulders sideways, reached down and unlocked it. “Hand me stuff.”
I tapped his butt. “Out of there, you overgrown midget, and let Sharpie pack. I’ll let you know when it’s tight as a girdle.”
Space that makes Zebbie twist and grunt is roomy for me. He passed things in, I fitted them for maximum stowage. The third item he handed me was the leavings of our buffet dinner. “That’s our picnic lunch,” I told him, putting it on his seat.
“Can’t leave it loose in the cabin.”
“Cap’n, we’ll eat it before it can spoil. I will be strapped down; is it okay if I clutch it to my bosom?”
“Sharpie, have I ever won an argument with you?”
“Only by brute force, dear. Can the chatter and pass the chow.”
With the help of God and a shoehorn it all went in. I was in a back seat with our lunch in my lap and my cape under me before our spouses showed up. “Cap’n Zebbie? Why did the news of Brainy’s death cause your change of mind?”
“Do you disapprove, Sharpie?”
“On the contrary, Skipper. Do you want my guess?”
“Yes.”
“Winged Victory was booby-trapped. And dear Doctor Brain, who isn’t the fool I thought he was, was not aboard. Those poor people were killed so that he could disappear.”
“Go to the head of the class, Sharpie. Too many coincidences… and they – the ‘Blokes in the Black Hats’ – know where we are.”
“Meaning that Professor No Brain, instead of being dead in the Pacific, might show up any second.”
“He and a gang of green-blooded aliens who don’t like geometers.”
“Zebbie, what do you figure their plans are?”
“Can’t guess. They might fumigate this planet and take it. Or conquer us as cattle or as slaves. The only data we have is that they are alien, that they are powerful – and that they have no compunction about killing us. So I have no compunction about killing them. To my regret, I don’t know how. So I’m running – running scared – and taking the three I’m certain are in danger with me.”
“Will we ever be able to find them and kill them?”
Zebbie didn’t answer because Deety and my Jacob arrived, breathless. Father and daughter were in jump suits. Deety looked chesty and cute; my darling looked trim – but worried. “We’re late. Sorry!”
“You’re not late,” Zeb told them. “But into your seats on the bounce.”
“As quick as I open the garage door and switch out the lights.”
“Jake, Jake – Gay is now programmed to do those things herself. In you go, Princess, and strap down. Seat belts, Sharpie. Copilot, after you lock the starboard door, check its seal all the way around by touch before you strap down.”
“Wilco, Cap’n.” It tickled me to hear my darling boning military. He had told me privately that he was a reserve colonel of ordnance – but that Deety had promised not to tell this to our smart young captain and that he wanted the same promise from me – because the T.O. was as it should be; Zeb should command while Jacob handled space-time controls – to each his own. Jacob had asked me to please take orders from Zeb with no back talk… which had miffed me a little. I was an unskilled crew member; I am not stupid, I knew this. In direst emergency I would try to get us home. But even Deety was better qualified than I.
Checkoffs completed, Gay switched off lights, opened the garage door, and backed out onto the landing flat.
“Copilot, can you read your verniers?”
“Captain, I had better loosen my chest belt.”
“Do so if you wish. But your seat adjusts forward twenty centimeters – here, I’ll get it.” Zeb reached down, did something between their seats. “Say when.”
“There – that’s about right. I can read ’em and reach ’em, with chest strap in place. Orders, sir?”
“Where was your car when you and Deety went to the space-time that lacked the letter ‘J’?”
“About where we are now.”
“Can you send us there?”
“I think so. Minimum translation, positive – entropy increasing – along Tau axis.”
“Please move us there, sir.”
My husband touched the controls. “That’s it, Captain.”
I couldn’t see any change. Our house was still a silhouette against the sky, with the garage a black maw in front of us. The stars hadn’t even flickered.
Zebbie said, “Let’s check,” and switched on Gay’s roading lights, brightly lighting our garage. Empty and looked normal.
Zebbie said, “Hey! Look at that!”
“Look at what?” I demanded, and tried to see around Jacob.
“At nothing, rather. Sharpie, where’s your alien?”
Then I understood. No corpse. No green-blood mess. Workbench against the wall and flood lights not rigged.
Zebbie said, “Gay Deceiver, take us home!”
Instantly the same scene… but with carved-up corpse. I gulped.
Zebbie switched out the lights. I felt better but not much.
“Captain?”
“Copilot.”
“Wouldn’t it have been well to have checked for that letter ‘J’? It would have given me a check on calibration.”
“I did check, Jake.”
“Eh?”
“You have bins on the back of your garage neatly stenciled. The one at left center reads ‘Junk Metal.”
“Oh!”
“Yes, and your analog in that space – your twin, Jake-prime, or what you will – has your neat habits. The left-corner bin read ‘Iunk Metal’ spelled with an ‘I.’ A cupboard above and to the right contained ‘Iugs & Iars.’ So I told Gay to take us home. I was afraid they might catch us. Embarrassing.”
Deety said, “Zebadiah – I mean ‘Captain’ – embarrassing how, sir? Oh, that missing letter in the alphabet scared me but it no longer does. Now I’m nervous about aliens. ‘Black Hats.'”
“Deety, you were lucky that first time. Because Deety-prime was not at home. But she may be, tonight. Possibly in bed with her husband, named Zebadiah-prime. Unstable cuss. Likely to shoot at a strange car shining lights into his father-in-law’s garage. A violent character.”
“You’re teasing me.”
“No, Princess; it did worry me. A parallel space, with so small a difference as the lack of one unnecessary letter, but with house and grounds you mistook for your own, seems to imply a father and daughter named ‘Iacob’ and ‘Deiah Thoris.” (Captain Zebbie pronounced the names ‘Yacob’ and ‘Deyah Thoris.’)
“Zebadiah, that scares me almost as much as aliens.”
“Aliens scare me far more. Hello, Gay.”
“Howdy, Zeb. Your nose is runny.”
“Smart Girl, one gee vertically to one klick. Hover.”
“Roger dodger, you old codger.”
We rested on our backs and head rests for a few moments, then with the stomach-surging swoosh of a fast lift, we leveled off and hovered. Zebbie said, “Deety, can the autopilot accept a change in that homing program by voice? Or does it take an offset in the verniers?”
“What do you want to do?”
“Same ell-and-ell two klicks above ground.”
“I think so. Shall I? Or do you want to do it, Captain?”
“You try it, Deety.”
“Yes, sir. Hello, Gay.”
“Hi, Deety!”
“Program check. Define ‘Home.”
“‘Home.’ Cancel any-all inertials transitions translations rotations. Return to preprogrammed zero latitude longitude, ground level.”
“Report present location.”
“One klick vertically above ‘Home.”
“Gay. Program revision.”
“Waiting, Deety.”
“Home program. Cancel ‘Ground level.’ Substitute ‘Two klicks above ground level, hovering.”
“Program revision recorded.”
“Gay Deceiver, take us home!”
Instantly, with no feeling of motion, we were much higher.
Zeb said, “Two klicks on the nose! Deety, you’re a smart girl!”
“Zebadiah, I bet you tell that to all the girls.”
“No, just to some. Gay, you’re a smart girl.”
“Then why are you shacked up with that strawberry blonde with the fat knockers?”
Zebbie craned his neck and looked at me. “Sharpie, that’s your voice.”
I ignored him with dignity. Zebbie drove south to the Grand Canyon, eerie in starlight. Without slowing, he said, “Gay Deceiver, take us home!” – and again we were hovering over our cabin. No jar, no shock, no nothing.
Zebbie said, “Jake, once I figure the angles, I’m going to quit spending money on juice. How does she do it when we haven’t been anywhere? – no rotation, no translation.”
“I may have given insufficient thought to a trivial root in equation ninety-seven. But it is analogous to what we were considering doing with planets. A five-dimensional transform simplified to three.”
“‘I dunno, I just work here,'” Captain Zebbie admitted. “But it looks like we will be peddling gravity and transport, as well as real estate and time. Burroughs and Company, Space Warps Unlimited – ‘No job too large, no job too small.’ Send one newdollar for our free brochure.”
“Captain,” suggested Jacob, “would it not be prudent to translate into another space before experimenting further? The alien danger is still with us – is it not?”
Zebbie sobered at once. “Copilot, you are right and it is your duty to advise me when I goof off. However, before we leave, we have one duty we must carry out.”
“Something more urgent than getting our wives to safety?” my Jacob asked – and I felt humble and proud.
“‘Something more urgent.’ Jake, I’ve bounced her around not only to test but to make it hard to track us. Because we must break radio silence. To warn our fellow humans.”
“Oh. Yes, Captain. My apologies, sir. I sometimes forget the broader picture.”
“Don’t we all! I’ve wanted to run and hide ever since this rumpus started. But that took preparation and the delay gave me time to think. Point number one: We don’t know how to fight these critters so we must take cover. Point number two: We are duty-bound to tell the world what we know about aliens. While that little isn’t much – we’ve stayed alive by the skin of our teeth – if five billion people are watching for them, they can be caught. I hope.”
“Captain,” asked Deety, “may I speak?”
“Of course! Anyone with ideas about how to cope with these monsters must speak.”
“I’m sorry but I don’t have such ideas. You must warn the world, sir – of course! But you won’t be believed.”
“I’m afraid you’re right, Deety. But they don’t have to believe me. That monster in the garage speaks for itself. I’m going to call rangers – real rangers! – to pick it up.”
I said, “So that was why you told me just to leave it! I thought it was lack of time.”
“Both, Hilda. We didn’t have time to sack that cadaver and store it in the freezer room. But, if I can get rangers – real rangers – to that garage before ‘Black Hats’ get there, that corpse tells its own story: an undeniable alien lying in its goo on a ranger’s uniform that has been cut away from it. Not a ‘close encounter’ UFO that can be explained away, but a creature more startling than the duckbill platypus ever was. But we have to hook it in with other factors to show them what to look for. Your booby-trapped car, an arson case in Logan, Professor Brain’s convenient disappearance, my cousin’s death in Sumatra – and your six-dimensional non-Euclidean geometry.”
I said, “Excuse me, gentlemen. Can’t we move somewhere away from right over our cabin before you break silence? I’m jumpy – ‘Black Hats’ are hunting us.”
“You’re right, Sharpie; I’m about to move us. The story isn’t long – all but the math – so I taped a summary while the rest of you were getting ready. Gay will speed-zip it, a hundred to one.” Zebbie reached for the controls. “All secure?”
“Captain Zebadiah!”
“Trouble, Princess?”
“May I attempt a novel program? It may save time.”
“Programming is your pidgin. Certainly.”
“Hello, Gay.”
“Hi, Deety!”
“Retrieve last program. Report execute code.”
“Reporting, Deety. ‘Gay Deceiver, take us home!'”
“Negative erase permanent program controlled by execute-code Gay Deceiver take us home. Report confirm.”
“Confirmation report. Permanent program execute-coded Gay Deceiver take us home negative erase. I tell you three times.”
“Deety,” said Zeb, “a neg scrub to Gay tells her to place item in perms three places. Redundancy safety factor.”
“Don’t bother me, dear! She and I sling the same lingo. Hello, Gay.”
“Hello, Deety!”
“Analyze latest program execute-coded Gay Deceiver take us home. Report.”
“Analysis complete.”
“Invert analysis.”
“Null program.”
Deety sighed. “Typing a program is easier. New program.”
“Waiting, Deety.”
“Execute-code new permanent program. Gay Deceiver, countermarch! At new execute-code, repeat reversed in real time latest sequence inertials transitions translations rotations before last use of program execute-code Gay Deceiver take us home.”
“New permanent program accepted.”
“Gay, I tell you three times.”
“Deety, I hear you three times.”
“Gay Deceiver – countermarch!”
Instantly we were over the Grand Canyon, cruising south. I saw Zeb reach for the manual controls. “Deety, that was slick.”
“I didn’t save time, sir – I goofed. Gay, you’re a smart girl.”
“Deety, don’t make me blush.”
“You’re both smart girls,” said Captain Zebbie. “If anyone had us on radar, he must think he’s getting cataracts. Vice versa, if anyone picked us up here, he’s wondering how we popped up. Smart dodge, dear. You’ve got Gay Deceiver so deceptive that nobody can home on us. We’ll be elsewhere.”
“Yes – but I had something else in mind, too, my Captain.”
“Princess, I like your ideas. Spill it.”
“Suppose we used that homing preprogram and went from frying pan into fire. It might be useful to have a preprogram that would take us back into the frying pan, then do something else quickly. Should I try to think up a third escape-maneuver preprogram?”
“Sure – but discuss it with the court magician, your esteemed father – not me. I’m just a sky jockey.”
“Zebadiah, I will not listen to you disparage yours -“
“Deety! Lifeboat rules. Jake, are your professional papers aboard? Both theoretical and drawings?”
“Why, no, Zeb – Captain. Too bulky. Microfilms I brought. Originals are in the basement vault. Have I erred?”
“Not a bit! Is there any geometer who gave your published paper on this six-way system a friendly reception?”
“Captain, there aren’t more than a handful of geometers capable of judging my postulate system without long and intensive study. It’s too unorthodox. Your late cousin was one – a truly brilliant mind! Uh… I now suspect that Doctor Brain understood it and sabotaged it for his own purposes.”
“Jake, is there anyone friendly to you and able to understand the stuff in your vault? I’m trying to figure out how to warn our fellow humans. A fantastic story of apparently unrelated incidents is not enough. Not even with the corpse of an extra-terrestrial to back it up. You should leave mathematical theory and engineering drawings to someone able to understand them and whom you trust. We can’t handle it; every time we stick our heads up, somebody takes a shot at us and we have no way to fight back. It’s a job that may require our whole race. Well? Is there a man you can trust as your professional executor?”
“Well… one, perhaps. Not my field of geometry but brilliant. He did write me a most encouraging letter when I published my first paper – the paper that was so sneered at by almost everyone except your cousin and this one other. Professor Seppo Rãikannonen. Turku. Finland.”
“Are you certain he’s not an alien?”
“What? He’s been on the faculty at Turku for years! Over fifteen.”
I said, “Jacob… that is about how long Professor Brain was around.”
“But – ” My husband looked around at me and suddenly smiled. “Hilda my love, have you ever taken sauna?”
“Once.”
“Then tell our Captain why I am sure that my friend Seppo is not an alien in disguise. I – Deety and I – attended a professional meeting in Helsinki last year. After the meeting we visited their summer place in the Lake Country… and took sauna with them.”
“Papa, Mama, and three kids.” agreed Deety. “Unmistakably human.”
“‘Brainy’ was a bachelor,” I added thoughtfully. “Cap’n Zebbie, wouldn’t disguised aliens have to be bachelors?”
“Or single women. Or pseudo-married couples. No kids, the masquerade wouldn’t hold up. Jake, let’s try to phone your friend. Mmm, nearly breakfast time in Finland – or we may wake him. That’s better than missing him.”
“Good! My comcredit number is Nero Aleph -“
“Let’s try mine. Yours might trigger something… if ‘Black Hats’ are as smart as I think they are. Smart Girl.”
“Yes, Boss.”
“Don Ameche.”
“To hear is to obey, O Mighty One.”
“Deety, you’ve been giving Gay bad habits.”
Shortly a flat male voice answered, “The communications credit number you have cited is not a valid number. Please refer to your card and try again. This is a recording.”
Zebbie made a highly unlikely suggestion. “Gay can’t send out my comcredit code incorrectly; she has it tell-me-three-times. The glitch is in their system. Pop, we have to use yours.”
I said, “Try mine, Zebbie. My comcredit is good; I predeposit.”
A female voice this time: ” – not a valid number. Puh-lease refer to your card and try again. This is a recording.”
Then my husband got a second female voice: ” – try again. This is a recording.”
Deety said, “I don’t have one. Pop and I use the same number.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Cap’n Zebbie said bitterly. “These aren’t glitches. We’ve been scrubbed. Unpersons. We’re all dead.”
I didn’t argue. I had suspected that we were dead since the morning two weeks earlier when I woke up in bed with my cuddly new husband. But how long had we been dead? Since my party? Or more recently?
I didn’t care. This was a better grade of heaven than a Sunday School in Terre Haute had taught me to expect. While I don’t think I’ve been outstandingly wicked, I haven’t been very good either. Of the Ten Commandments I’ve broken six and bent some others. But Moses apparently had not had the last Word from on High – being dead was weird and wonderful and I was enjoying every minute… or eon, as the case may be.

Chapter XIII

Being too close to a fireball can worry a man –

Zeb:
Not being able to phone from my car was my most frustrating experience since a night I spent in jail through mistake (I made the mistake). I considered grounding to phone – but the ground did not seem healthy. Even if all of us were presumed dead, nullifying our comcredit cards so quickly seemed unfriendly; all of us had high credit ratings.
Canceling Sharpie’s comcredit without proof of death was more than unfriendly; it was outrageous as she used the predeposit method.
I was forced to the decision that it was my duty to make a military report; I radioed NORAD, stated name, rank, reserve commission serial number, and asked for scramble for a crash priority report. and ran into “correct” procedure that causes instant ulcers. What was my clearance? What led me to think that I had crash priority intelligence? By what authority did I demand a scramble code? Do you know how many screwball calls come in here every day? Get off this frequency; it’s for official traffic only. One more word out of you and I shall alert the civil sky patrol to pick you up.
I said one more word after I chopped off. Deety and her father ignored it; Hilda said, “My sentiments exactly!”
I tried the Federal Rangers Kaibab Barracks at Jacob Lake, then the office at Littlefield and back to Kaibab. Littlefield didn’t answer; Jacob Lake answered: “This is a recording. Routine messages may be recorded during beep tone. Emergency reports should be transmitted to Flagstaff HQ. Stand by for beep tone… Beep!… Beep!… Beep!”
I was about to tell Gay to zip my tape – when the whole world was lighted by the brightest light imaginable.
Luckily we were cruising south with that light behind us. I goosed Gay to flank speed while telling her to tuck in her wings. Not one of my partners asked a foolish question, although I suspect that none had ever seen a fireball or mushroom cloud.
“Smart Girl.”
“Here, Boss.”
“DR problem. Record true bearing light beacon relative bearing astern. Record radar range and bearing same beacon. Solve latitude longitude beacon. Compare solution with fixes in perms. Confirm.”
“Program confirmed.”
“Execute.”
“Roger Wilco, Zeb. Heard any new ones lately?” She added at once, “Solution. True bearing identical with fix execute-coded ‘Gay Deceiver take us home.’ True range identical plus-minus zero point six klicks.”
“You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
“Flattery will get you anywhere, Zeb. Over.”
“Roger and out. Hang onto your hats, folks; we’re going straight up.” I had outraced the shock wave but we were close to the Mexican border; either side might send sprint birds homing on us. “Copilot!”
“Captain.”
“Move us! Out of this space!”
“Where, Captain?”
“Anywhere! Fast!”
“Uh, can you ease the acceleration? I can’t lift my arms.”
Cursing myself, I cut power, let Gay Deceiver climb free. Those vernier controls should have been mounted on arm rests. (Designs that look perfect on the drawing board can kill test pilots.)
“Translation complete, Captain.”
“Roger, Copilot. Thank you.” I glanced at the board: six-plus klicks height-above-ground and rising – thin but enough air to bite. “Hang onto our lunch, Sharpie!” I leaned us backwards while doing an Immelman into level flight, course north, power still off. I told Gay to stretch the glide, then tell me when we had dropped to three klicks H-above-G.
What should be Phoenix was off to the right; another city – Flagstaff? – farther away, north and a bit east; we appeared to be headed home. There was no glowing cloud on the horizon. “Jake, where are we?”
“Captain, I’ve never been in this universe. We translated ten quanta positive Tau axis. So we should be in analogous space close to ours – ten minimum intervals or quanta.”
“This looks like Arizona.”
“I would expect it to, Captain. You recall that one-quantum translation on this axis was so very like our own world that Deety and I confused it with our own, until she picked up a dictionary.”
“Phone book, Pop.”
“Irrelevant, dear. Until she missed the letter ‘J’ in an alphabetical list. Ten quanta should not change geological features appreciably and placement of cities is largely controlled by geography.”
“Approaching three klicks, Boss.”
“Thanks, Gay. Hold course and H-above-G. Correction! Hold course and absolute altitude. Confirm and execute.”
“Roger Wilco, Zeb.”
I had forgotten that the Grand Canyon lay ahead – or should. “Smart Girl” is smart, but she’s literal-minded. She would have held height-above-ground precisely and given us the wildest roller-coaster ride in history. She is very flexible but the “garbage-in-garbage-out” law applies. She had many extra fail-safes – because I make mistakes. Gay can’t; anything she does wrong is my mistake. Since I’ve been making mistakes all my life, I surrounded her with all the safeguards I could think of. But she had no program against wild rides – she was beefed up to accept them. Violent evasive tactics had saved our lives two weeks ago, and tonight as well. Being too close to a fireball can worry a man – to death.
“Gay, display map, please.”
The map showed Arizona – our Arizona; Gay does not have in her gizzards any strange universes. I changed course to cause us to pass over our cabin site – its analog for this space-time. (Didn’t dare tell her: “Gay, take us home!” – for reasons left as an exercise for the class.) “Deety, how long ago did that bomb go off?”
“Six minutes twenty-three seconds. Zebadiah, was that really an A-bomb?”
“Pony bomb, perhaps. Maybe two kilotons. Gay Deceiver.”
“I’m all ears, Zeb.”
“Report time interval since radar-ranging beacon.”
“Five minutes forty-four seconds, Zeb.”
Deety gasped. “Was I that far off?”
“No, darling. You reported time since flash. I didn’t ask Gay to range until after we were hypersonic.”
“Oh. I feel better.”
“Captain,” inquired Jake, “how did Gay range an atomic explosion? I would expect radiation to make it impossible. Does she have instrumentation of which I am not aware?”
“Copilot, she has several gadgets I have not shown you. I have not been holding out – any more than you held out in not telling me about guns and ammo you -“
“My apologies, sir!”
“Oh, stuff it, Jake. Neither of us held out; we’ve been running under the whip. Deety, how long has it been since we killed that fake ranger?”
“That was seventeen fourteen. It is now twenty-two twenty. Five hours six minutes,”
I glanced at the board; Deety’s “circadian clock” apparently couldn’t be jarred by anything; Gay’s clock showed 0520 (Greenwich) with “ZONE PLUS SEVEN” display. “Call it five hours – feels like five weeks. We need a vacation.”
“Loud cheers!” agreed Sharpie.
“Check. Jake, I didn’t know that Gay could range an atomic blast. Light ‘beacon’ means a visible light to her just as ‘radar beacon’ means to her a navigational radar beacon. I told her to get a bearing on the light beacon directly aft; she selected the brightest light with that bearing. Then I told her to take radar range and bearing on it – spun my prayer wheel and prayed.
“There was ‘white noise’ possibly blanketing her radar frequency. But her own radar bursts are tagged; it would take a very high noise level at the same frequency to keep her from recognizing echoes with her signature. Clearly she had trouble for she reported ‘plus-minus’ of six hundred meters. Nevertheless range and bearing matched a fix in her permanents and told us our cabin had been bombed. Bad news. But the aliens got there too late to bomb us. Good news.”
“Captain, I decline to grieve over material loss. We are alive.”
“I agree – although I’ll remember Snug Harbor as the happiest home I’ve ever had. But there is no point in trying to warn Earth – our Earth – about aliens. That blast destroyed the clincher: that alien’s cadaver. And papers and drawings you were going to turn over to your Finnish friend. I’m not sure we can go home again.”
“Oh, that’s no problem, Captain. Two seconds to set the verniers. Not to mention the ‘deadman switch’ and the program in Gay’s permanents.”
“Jake, I wish you would knock off ‘Captain’ other than for command conditions.”
“Zeb, I like calling you ‘Captain.”
“So do I! – my Captain.”
“Me, too, Cap’n Zebbie!”
“Don’t overdo it. Jake, I didn’t mean that you can’t pilot us home; I mean we should not risk it. We’ve lost our last lead on the aliens. But they know who we are and have shown dismaying skill in tracking us down. I’d like to live to see two babies born and grown up.”
“Amen!” said Sharpie. “This might be the place for it. Out of a million billion zillion earths this one may be vermin-free. Highly likely.”
“Hilda my dear, there are no data on which to base any assumption.”
“Jacob, there is one datum.”
“Eh? What did I miss, dear?”
“That we do know that our native planet is infested. So I don’t want to raise kids on it. If this isn’t the place we’re looking for, let’s keep looking.”
“Mmm, logical. Yes. Cap – Zeb?”
“I agree. But we can’t tell much before morning. Jake, I’m unclear on a key point. If we translated back to our own earth now, where would we find ourselves? And when?”
“Pop, may I answer that?”
“Go ahead, Deety.”
“The time Pop and I translated to the place with no ‘J’ we thought we had failed. Pop stayed in our car, trying to figure it out. I went inside, intending to fix lunch. Everything looked normal. But the phone book was on the kitchen counter and doesn’t belong there. That book had a toll area map on its back cover. My eye happened to land on ‘Juab County’ – and it was spelled ‘Iuab’ – and I thought, ‘What a funny misprint!’ Then I looked inside and couldn’t find any ‘J’s’ and dropped the book and went running for Pop.”
“I thought Deety was hysterical. But when I checked a dictionary and the Britannica we got out in a hurry.”
“This is the point, Zebadiah. When we flipped back, I dashed into the house. The phone book was where it belonged. The alphabet was back the way it ought to be. The clock in my head said that we had been gone twenty-seven minutes. The kitchen clock confirmed it and it agreed with the clock in the car. Does that answer you, sir?”
“I think so. In a translation, duration just keeps chugging along. I wondered because I’d like to check that crater after it has had time to cool down. What about that one rotation?”
“Harder to figure, Zebadiah. We weren’t in that other space-time but a few seconds and we both passed out. Indeterminate.”
“I’m convinced. But, Jake, what about Earth’s proper motions? Rotation, revolution around the Sun, sidereal motion, and so forth.”
“A theoretical answer calls for mathematics you tell me are outside your scope of study, uh – Zeb.”
“Beyond my capacity, you mean.”
“As you will, sir. An excursion elsewhere-and-elsewhen… and return… brings you back to where you would have been had you experienced that duration on earth. But ‘when’ requires further definition. As we were discussing, uh… earlier this afternoon but it seems longer, we can adjust the controls to reenter any axis at any point with permanent change of interval. For planetary engineering. Or other purposes. Including reentry reversed against the entropy arrow. But I suspect that would cause death.”
“Why, Pop? Why wouldn’t it just reverse your memory?”
“Memory is tied to entropy increase, my darling daughter. Death might be preferable to amnesia combined with prophetic knowledge. Uncertainty may be the factor that makes life tolerable. Hope is what keeps us going. Captain!”
“Copilot.”
“We have just passed over North Rim.”
“Thank you, Copilot.” I placed my hands lightly on the controls.
“Pop, our cabin is still there. Lights in it, too.”
“So I see. They’ve added a wing on the west.”
“Yes. Where we discussed adding a library.”
I said, “Family, I’m not going closer. Your analogs in this world seem to be holding a party. Flood lights show four cars on the grounding flat.” I started Gay into a wide circle. “I’m not going to hover; it could draw attention. A call to their sky cops – Hell’s bells, I don’t even know that they speak English.”
“Captain, we’ve seen all we need. It’s not our cabin.”
“Recommendation?”
“Sir, I suggest maximum altitude. Discuss what to do while we get there.”
“Gay Deceiver.”
“On deck, Captain Ahab.”
“One gee, vertical.”
“Aye aye, sir.” (How many answers had Deety taped?)
“Anybody want a sandwich?” asked Sharpie. “I do – I’m a pregnant mother.”
I suddenly realized that I had had nothing but a piece of pie since noon. As we climbed we finished what was left of supper.
“Zat Marsh?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Sharpie.”
“Zebbie you brute, I said, ‘Is that Mars?’ Over there.”
“That’s Antares. Mars is – Look left about thirty degrees. See it? Same color as Antares but brighter.”
“Got it. Jacob darling, let’s take that vacation on Barsoom!”
“Hilda dearest, Mars is uninhabitable. The Mars Expedition used pressure suits. We have no pressure suits.”
I added, “Even if we did, they would get in the way of a honeymoon.”
Hilda answered, “I read a jingle about ‘A Space Suit Built for Two.’ Anyhow, let’s go to Barsoom! Jacob, you did tell me we could go anywhere in Zip – nothing flat.”
“Quite true.”
“So let’s go to Barsoom.”
I decided to flank her. “Hilda, we can’t go to Barsoom. Mors Kajak and John Carter don’t have their swords.”
“Want to bet?” Deety said sweetly.
“Huh?”
“Sir, you left it to me to pick baggage for that unassigned space. If you’ll check that long, narrow stowage under the instrument board, you’ll find the sword and saber, with belts. With socks and underwear crammed in to keep them from rattling.”
I said soberly, “My Princess, I couldn’t moan about my sword when your father took the loss of his house so calmly – but thank you, with all my heart.”
“Let me add my thanks, Deety. I set much store by that old saber, unnecessary as it is.”
“Father, it was quite necessary this afternoon.”
“Hi ho! Hi ho! It’s to Barsoom we go!”
“Captain, we could use the hours till dawn for a quick jaunt to Mars. Uh – Oh, dear, I have to know its present distance – I don’t.”
“No problem,” I said. “Gay gobbles the Aerospace Almanac each year.”
“Indeed! I’m impressed.”
“Gay Deceiver.”
“You again? I was thinking.”
“So think about this. Calculation program. Data address, Aerospace Almanac. Running calculation, line-of-sight distance to planet Mars. Report current answers on demand. Execute.”
“Program running.”
“Report.”
“Klicks two-two-four-zero-nine-zero-eight-two-seven point plus-minus nine-eight-zero.”
“Display running report.”
Gay did so. “You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
“I can do card tricks, too. Program continuing.”
“Jake, how do we this?”
“Align ‘L’ axis with your gun sight. Isn’t that easiest?”
“By far!” I aimed at Mars as if to shoot her out of the sky – then got cold feet. “Jake? A little Tennessee windage? I think those figures are from center-of-gravity to center-of-gravity. Half a mil would place us a safe distance away. Over a hundred thousand klicks.”
“A hundred and twelve thousand,” Jake agreed, watching the display.
I offset one half mil. “Copilot.”
“Captain.”
“Transit when ready. Execute.”
Mars in half phase, big and round and ruddy and beautiful, was swimming off our starboard side.

Chapter XIV

“Quit worrying and enjoy the ride.”

Deety:
Aunt Hilda said softly, “Barsoom. Dead sea bottoms. Green giants.” I just gulped.
“Mars. Hilda darling.” Pop gently corrected her. “Barsoom is a myth.”
“Barsoom.” she repeated firmly. “It’s not a myth, it’s there. Who says its name is Mars? A bunch of long-dead Romans. Aren’t the natives entitled to name it? Barsoom.”
“My dearest, there are no natives. Names are assigned by an international committee sponsored by Harvard Observatory. They confirmed the traditional name.”
“Pooh! They don’t have any more right to name it than I have. Deety, isn’t that right?”
I think Aunt Hilda had the best argument but I don’t argue with Pop unless necessary; he gets emotional. My husband saved me.
“Copilot, astrogation problem. How are we going to figure distance and vector? I would like to put this wagon into orbit. But Gay is no spaceship; I don’t have instruments. Not even a sextant!”
“Mmm, suppose we try it one piece at a time, Captain. We don’t seem to be falling fast and – ulp!”
“What’s the trouble, Jake!”
Pop turned pale, sweat broke out, he clenched his jaws, swallowed and reswallowed. Then his lips barely opened. “M’sheashick.”
“No, you’re space sick. Deety!”
“Yessir!”
“Emergency kit, back of my seat. Unzip it, get Bonine. One pill – don’t let the others get loose.”
I got at the first-aid kit, found a tube marked Bonine. A second pill did get loose but I snatched it out of the air. Free fall is funny – you don’t know whether you are standing on your head or floating sideways. “Here, Captain.”
Pop said, “Mall righ’ now. Jus’ took all over queer a moment.”
“Sure, you’re all right. You can take this pill – or you can have it pushed down your throat with my dirty, calloused finger. Which?”
“Uh, Captain, I’d have to have water to swallow it – and I don’t think I can.”
“Doesn’t take water, pal. Chew it. Tastes good, raspberry flavor. Then keep gulping your saliva. Here.” Zebadiah pinched Pop’s nostrils. “Open up.”
I became aware of a strangled sound beside me. Aunt Hilda had a hanky pressed to her mouth and her eyes were streaming tears – she was split seconds from adding potato salad and used sandwich to the cabin air.
Good thing I was still clutching that wayward pill. Aunt Hilda struggled but she’s a little bitty. I treated her the way my husband had treated her husband, then clamped my hand over her mouth. I don’t understand seasickness (or free-fall nausea); I can walk on bulkheads with a sandwich in one hand and a drink in the other and enjoy it.
But the victims really are sick and somewhat out of their heads. So I held her mouth closed and whispered into her ear. “Chew it, Aunty darling, and swallow it, or I’m going to spank you with a club.”
Shortly I could feel her chewing. After several minutes she relaxed. I asked her, “Is it safe for me to ungag you?”
She nodded. I took my hand away. She smiled wanly and patted my hand. “Thanks, Deety.” She added, “You wouldn’t really beat Aunt Sharpie.”
“I sure would, darling. I’d cry and cry and wallop you and wallop you. I’m glad I don’t have to.”
“I’m glad, too. Can we kiss and make up – or is my breath sour?”
It wasn’t but I wouldn’t have let that stop me. I loosened my chest strap and hers, and put both arms around her. I have two ways of kissing: one is suitable for faculty teas; the other way I mean it. I never got a chance to pick; Aunt Hilda apparently never found out about the faculty-tea sort. No, her breath wasn’t sour – just a slight taste of raspberry.
Me, I’m the wholesome type; if it weren’t for those advertisements on my chest, men wouldn’t give me a second glance. Hilda is a miniature Messalina, pure sex in a small package. Funny how a person can grow up never really believing that the adults you grow up with have sex – just gender. Now my saintly father turns out to be an insatiable goat, and Aunt Hilda, who had babied me and changed my diapers, is sexy enough for a platoon of Marines.
I let her go while thinking pleasant thoughts about teaching my husband technique I had learned – unless Hilda had taught him in the past. No, or he would have taught me – and he hadn’t shown her style of virtuosity. Zebadiah, just wait till I get you alone!
Which might not be too soon. Gay Deceiver is wonderful but no honeymoon cottage. There was space back of the bulkhead behind my head – like a big phone booth on its side – where Zebadiah kept a sleeping bag and (he says) sometimes sacked out. But it had the space-time twister in it and nineteen dozen other things. Hilda and I were going to have to repress our primary imperative until our men found us a pied-à-terre on some planet in some universe, somewhere, somewhen.
Mars-Barsoom seemed to have grown while I was curing Aunt Hilda’s space sickness. Our men were talking astrogation. My husband was saying, “Sorry, but at extreme range Gay’s radar can see a thousand kilos. You tell me our distance is about a hundred times that.”
“About. We’re falling toward Mars. Captain, we must do it by triangulation.”
“Not even a protractor where I can get at it. How?”
“Hmmmm – If the Captain pleases, recall how you worked that ‘Tennessee windage.'”
My darling looked like a school boy caught making a silly answer. “Jake, if you don’t quit being polite when I’m stupid, I’m going to space you and put Deety in the copilot’s seat. No, we need you to get us home. I’d better resign and you take over.”
“Zeb, a captain can’t resign while his ship is underway. That’s universal.”
“This is another universe.”
“Transuniversal. As long as you are alive, you are stuck with it. Let’s attempt that triangulation.”
“Stand by to record.” Zebadiah settled into his seat, pressed his head against its rest. “Copilot.”
“Ready to record, sir.”
“Damn!”
“Trouble, Captain?”
“Some. This reflectosight is scaled fifteen mils on a side, concentric circles crossed at center point horizontally and vertically. Normal to deck and parallel to deck, I mean. When I center the fifteen-mil ring on Mars, I have a border around it. I’m going to have to guesstimate. Uh, the border looks to be about eighteen mils wide. So double that and add thirty.”
“Sixty-six mils.”
“And a mil is one-to-one-thousand. One-to-one-thousand-and-eighteen and a whisker, actually – but one-to-a-thousand is good enough. Wait a half! I’ve got two sharp high lights near the meridian – if the polar caps mark the meridian. Le’me tilt this buggy and put a line crossing them – then I’ll yaw and what we can’t measure in one jump, we’ll catch in three.”
I saw the larger “upper” polar cap (north? south? well, it felt north) roll gently about eighty degrees, while my husband fiddled with Gay’s manual controls. “Twenty-nine point five, maybe… plus eighteen point seven… plus sixteen point three. Add.”
My father answered, “Sixty-four and a half” while I said, six four point five in my mind and kept quiet.
“Who knows the diameter of Mars? Or shall I ask Gay?”
Hilda answered, “Six thousand seven hundred fifty kilometers, near enough.”
Plenty near enough for Zebadiah’s estimates. Zebadiah said, “Sharpie! How did you happen to know that?”
“I read comic books. You know – ‘Zap! Polaris is missing.'”
“I don’t read comic books.”
“Lots of interesting things in comic books, Zebbie. I thought the Aerospace Force used comic-book instruction manuals.”
My darling’s ears turned red. “Some are,” he admitted, “but they are edited for technical accuracy. Hmm – Maybe I had better check that figure with Gay.”
I love my husband but sometimes women must stick together. “Don’t bother, Zebadiah,” I said in chilly tones. “Aunt Hilda is correct. The polar diameter of Mars is six seven five two point eight plus. But surely three significant figures is enough for your data.”
Zebadiah did not answer… but did not ask his computer. Instead he said, “Copilot, will you run it off on your pocket calculator? We can treat it as a tangent at this distance.”
This time I didn’t even try to keep still. Zebadiah’s surprise that Hilda knew anything about astronomy caused me pique. “Our height above surface is one hundred four thousand six hundred and seventy-two kilometers plus or minus the error of the data supplied. That assumes that Mars is spherical and ignores the edge effect or horizon bulge… negligible for the quality of your data.”
Zebadiah answered so gently that I was sorry that I had shown off: “Thank you, Deety. Would you care to calculate the time to fall to surface from rest at this point?”
“That’s an unsmooth integral, sir. I can approximate it but Gay can do it faster and more accurately. Why not ask her? But it will be many hours.”
“I had hoped to take a better look. Jake, Gay has enough juice to put us into a tight orbit, I think… but I don’t know where or when I’ll be able to juice her again. If we simply fall, the air will get stale and we’ll need the panic button – or some maneuver – without ever seeing the surface close up.”
“Captain, would it suit you to read the diameter again? I don’t think we’ve simply been falling.”
Pop and Zebadiah got busy again. I let them alone, and they ran even the simplest computations through Gay. Presently, Pop said, “Over twenty-four kilometers per second! Captain, at that rate we’ll be there in a little over an hour.”
“Except that we’ll scram before that. But, ladies, you’ll get your closer look. Dead sea bottoms and green giants. If any.”
“Zebadiah, twenty-four kilometers per second is Mars’ orbital speed.”
My father answered, “Eh? Why, so it is!” He looked very puzzled, then said, “Captain – I confess to a foolish mistake.”
“Not one that will keep us from getting home, I hope.”
“No, sir. I’m still learning what our continua craft can do. Captain, we did not aim for Mars.”
“I know. I was chicken.”
“No, sir, you were properly cautious. We aimed for a specific point in empty space. We transited to that point… but not with Mars’ proper motion. With that of the Solar System, yes. With Earth’s motions subtracted; that is in the program. But we are a short distance ahead of Mars in its orbit… so it is rushing toward us.”
“Does that mean we can never land on any planet but Earth?”
“Not at all. Any vector can be included in the program – either before or after transition, translation or rotation. Any subsequent change in motion is taken into account by the inertial integrator. But I am learning that we still have things to learn.”
“Jake, that is true even of a bicycle. Quit worrying and enjoy the ride. Brother, what a view!”

“Jake, that doesn’t look like the photographs the Mars Expedition brought back.”
“Of course not,” said Aunt Hilda. “I said it was Barsoom.”
I kept my mouth shut. Ever since Dr. Sagan’s photographs anyone who reads The National Geographic – or anything – knows what Mars looks like. But when it involves changing male minds, it is better to let men reach their own decisions; they become somewhat less pig-headed. That planet rushing toward us was not the Mars of our native sky. White clouds at the caps, big green areas that had to be forest or crops, one deep blue area that almost certainly was water – all this against ruddy shades that dominated much of the planet.
What was lacking were the rugged mountains and craters and canyons of “our” planet Mars. There were mountains – but nothing like the Devil’s Junkyard known to science.
I heard Zebadiah say, “Copilot, are you certain you took us to Mars?”
“Captain, I took us to Mars-ten, via plus on Tau axis. Either that or I’m a patient in a locked ward.”
“Take it easy, Jake. It doesn’t resemble Mars as much as Earth-ten resembles Earth.”
“Uh, may I point out that we saw just a bit of Earth-ten, on a moonless night?”
“Meaning we didn’t see it. Conceded.”
Aunt Hilda said, “I told you it was Barsoom. You wouldn’t listen.”
“Hilda, I apologize. ‘Barsoom.’ Copilot, log it. New planet, ‘Barsoom,’ named by right of discovery by Hilda Corners Burroughs, Science Officer of Continua Craft Gay Deceiver. We’ll all witness: Z. J. Carter, Commanding – Jacob J. Burroughs, Chief Officer – D. T. B. Carter, uh, Astrogator. I’ll send certified copies to Harvard Observatory as soon as possible.”
“I’m not astrogator, Zebadiah!”
“Mutiny. Who reprogrammed this cloud buster into a continua craft? I’m pilot until I can train all of you in Gay’s little quirks. Jake is copilot until he can train more copilots in setting the verniers. You are astrogator because nobody else can acquire your special knowledge of programming and skill at calculation. None of your lip, young woman, and don’t fight the Law of Space. Sharpie is chief of science because of her breadth of knowledge. She not only recognized a new planet as not being Mars quicker than anyone else but carved up that double-jointed alien with the skill of a born butcher. Right, Jake?”
“Sure thing!” agreed Pop.
“Cap’n Zebbie,” Aunt Hilda drawled, “I’m science officer if you say so. But I had better be ship’s cook, too. And cabin boy.”
“Certainly, we all have to wear more than one hat. Log it, Copilot. ‘Here’s to our jolly cabin girl, the plucky little nipper – ‘”
“Don’t finish it. Zebbie,” Aunt Hilda cut in, “I don’t like the way the plot develops.”

‘ – she carves fake ranger,
‘Dubs planet stranger,
‘And dazzles crew and skipper.’

Aunt Hilda looked thoughtful. “That’s not the classic version. I like the sentiment better… though the scansion limps.”
“Sharpie darling, you are a floccinaucinihilipilificatrix.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Certainly! Means you’re so sharp you spot the slightest flaw.”
I kept quiet. It was possible that Zebadiah meant it as a compliment. Just barely –
“Maybe I’d better check it in a dictionary.”
“By all means, dear – after you are off watch.” (I dismissed the matter. Merriam Microfilm was all we had aboard and Aunt Hilda would not find that word in anything less than the O.E.D.)
“Copilot, got it logged?”
“Captain, I didn’t know we had a log.”
“No log? Even Vanderdecken keeps a log. Deety, the log falls in your department. Take your father’s notes, get what you need from Gay, and let’s have a taut ship. First time we pass a Woolworth’s we’ll pick up a journal and you can transcribe it – notes taken now are your rough log.”
“Aye aye, sir. Tyrant.”
“‘Tyrant,’ sir, please. Meanwhile let’s share the binoculars and see if we can spot any colorful exotic natives in colorful exotic costumes singing colorful exotic songs with their colorful exotic hands out for baksheesh. First one to spot evidence of intelligent life gets to wash the dishes.”

Chapter XV

“We’ll hit so hard we’ll hardly notice it.”

Hilda:
I was so flattered by Cap’n Zebbie’s crediting me with “discovering” Barsoom that I pretended not to understand the jibe he added. It was unlikely that Deety would know such a useless word, or my beloved Jacob. It was gallant of Zeb to give in all the way, once he realized that this planet was unlike its analog in “our” universe. Zebbie is a funny one – he wears rudeness like a Hallowe’en mask, afraid that someone will discover the Galahad underneath.
I knew that “my” Barsoom was not the planet of the classic romances. But there are precedents: The first nuclear submarine was named for an imaginary undersea vessel made famous by Jules Verne; an aircraft carrier of the Second Global War had been named “Shangri La” for a land as nonexistent as “Erewhon”; the first space freighter had been named for a starship that existed only in the hearts of its millions of fans – the list is endless. Nature copies art.
Or as Deety put it: “Truth is more fantastic than reality.”
During that hour Barsoom rushed at us. It began to swell and swell, so rapidly that binoculars were a nuisance – and my heart swelled with it, in childlike joy. Deety and I unstrapped so that we could see better, floating just “above” and behind our husbands while steadying ourselves on their headrests.
We were seeing it in half phase, one half dark, the other in sunlight – ocher and umber and olive green and brown and all of it beautiful.
Our pilot and copilot did not sightsee; Zebbie kept taking sights, kept Jacob busy calculating. At last he said, “Copilot, if our approximations are correct, at the height at which we will get our first radar range, we will be only a bit over half a minute from crashing. Check?”
“To the accuracy of our data, Captain.”
“Too close. I don’t fancy arriving like a meteor. Is it time to hit the panic button? Advise, please – but bear in mind that puts us – should put us – two klicks over a hot, new crater… possibly in the middle of a radioactive cloud. Ideas?”
“Captain, we can do that just before crashing – and it either works or it doesn’t. If it works, that radioactive cloud will have had more time to blow away. If it doesn’t work – “
“We’ll hit so hard we’ll hardly notice it. Gay Deceiver isn’t built to reenter at twenty-four klicks per second. She’s beefed up – but she’s still a Ford, not a reentry vehicle.”
“Captain, I can try to subtract the planet’s orbital speed. We’ve time to make the attempt.”
“Fasten seat belts and report! Move it, gals!”
Free fall is funny stuff. I was over that deathly sickness – was enjoying weightlessness, but didn’t know how to move in it. Nor did Deety. We floundered the way one does the first time on ice skates – only worse.
“Report, damn it!”
Deety got a hand on something, grabbed me. We started getting into seats – she in mine, I in hers. “Strapping down, Captain!” she called out, while frantically trying to loosen my belts to fit her. (I was doing the same in reverse.)
“Speed it up!”
Deety reported, “Seat belts fastened,” while still getting her chest belt buckled – by squeezing out all her breath. I reached over and helped her loosen it.
“Copilot.”
“Captain!”
“Along ‘L’ axis, subtract vector twenty-four klicks per second – and for God’s sake don’t get the signs reversed.”
“I won’t!”
“Execute.”
Seconds later Jacob reported, “That does it, Captain. I hope.”
“Let’s check. Two readings, ten seconds apart. I’ll call the first, you call the end of ten seconds. Mark!”
Zeb added, “One point two. Record.”
After what seemed a terribly long time Jacob said, “Seven seconds… eight seconds… nine seconds… mark!”
Our men conferred, then Jacob said, “Captain, we are still falling too fast.”
“Of course,” said Deety. “We’ve been accelerating from gravity. Escape speed for Mars is five klicks per second. If Barsoom has the same mass as Mars -“
“Thank you, Astrogator. Jake, can you trim off, uh, four klicks per second?”
“Sure!”
“Do it.”
“Uh… done! How does she look?”
“Uh… distance slowly closing. Hello, Gay.”
“Howdy, Zeb.”
“Program. Radar. Target dead ahead. Range.”
“No reading.”
“Continue ranging. Report first reading. Add program. Display running radar ranges to target.”
“Program running. Who blacked your eye?”
“You’re a Smart Girl, Gay.”
“I’m sexy, too. Over.”
“Continue program.” Zeb sighed, then said, “Copilot, there’s atmosphere down there. I plan to attempt to ground. Comment? Advice?”
“Captain, those are words I hoped to hear. Let’s go!”
“Barsoom – here we come!”

Chapter XVI

  • a maiden knight, eager to break a lance –

Jake:
My beloved bride was no more eager than I to visit “Barsoom.” I had been afraid that our captain would do the sensible thing: establish orbit, take pictures, then return to our own space-time before our air was stale. We were not prepared to explore strange planets. Gay Deceiver was a bachelor’s sports car. We had a little water, less food, enough air for about three hours. Our craft refreshed its air by the scoop method. If she made a “high jump,” her scoop valves sealed from internal pressure just as did commercial ballistic-hypersonic intercontinental liners – but “high jump” is not space travel.
True, we could go from point to point in our own or any universe in null time, but how many heavenly bodies have breathable atmospheres? Countless billions – but a small fraction of one percent from a practical viewpoint – and no publication lists their whereabouts. We had no spectroscope, no star catalogs, no atmosphere testing equipment, no radiation instruments, no means of detecting dangerous organisms. Columbus with his cockleshells was better equipped than we.
None of this worried me.
Reckless? Do you pause to shop for an elephant gun while an elephant is chasing you?
Three times we had escaped death by seconds. We had evaded our killers by going to earth – and that safety had not lasted. So again we fled like rabbits.
At least once every human should have to run for his life, to teach him that milk does not come from supermarkets, that safety does not come from policemen, that “news” is not something that happens to other people. He might learn how his ancestors lived and that he himself is no different – in the crunch his life depends on his agility, alertness, and personal resourcefulness.
I was not distressed. I felt more alive than I had felt since the death of my first wife.
Underneath the persona each shows the world lies a being different from the masque. My own persona was a professorial archetype. Underneath? Would you believe a maiden knight, eager to break a lance? I could have avoided military service – married, a father, protected profession. But I spent three weeks in basic training, sweating with the rest, cursing drill instructors – and loving it! Then they took my rifle, told me I was an officer, gave me a swivel chair and a useless job. I never forgave them for that.
Hilda, until we married, I knew not at all. I had valued her as a link to my lost love but I had thought her a lightweight, a social butterfly. Then I found myself married to her and learned that I had unnecessarily suffered lonely years. Hilda was what I needed, I was what she needed – Jane had known it and blessed us when at last we knew it. But I still did not realize the diamondhard quality of my tiny darling until I saw her dissecting that pseudo “ranger.” Killing that alien was easy. But what Hilda did – I almost lost my supper.
Hilda is small and weak; I’ll protect her with my life. But I won’t underrate her again!
Zeb is the only one of us who looks the part of intrepid explorer – tall, broadshouldered, strongly muscled, skilled with machines and with weapons, and (sine qua non!) cool-headed in crisis and gifted with the “voice of command.”
One night I had been forced to reason with my darling; Hilda felt that I should lead our little band. I was oldest, I was inventor of the time-space “distorter” – it was all right for Zeb to pilot – but I must command. In her eyes Zeb was somewhere between an overage adolescent and an affectionate Saint Bernard. She pointed out that Zeb claimed to be a “coward by trade” and did not want responsibility.
I told her that no born leader seeks command; the mantle descends on him, he wears the burden because he must. Hilda could not see it – she was willing to take orders from me but not from her pet youngster “Zebbie.”
I had to be firm: Either accept Zeb as commander or tomorrow Zeb and I would dismount my apparatus from Zeb’s car so that Mr. and Mrs. Carter could go elsewhere. Where? Not my business or yours, Hilda. I turned over and pretended to sleep.
When I heard sobs, I turned again and held her. But I did not budge. No need to record what was said; Hilda promised to take any orders Zeb might give – once we left.
But her capitulation was merely coerced until the gory incident at the pool. Zeb’s instantaneous attack changed her attitude. From then on my darling carried out Zeb’s orders without argument – and between times kidded and ragged him as always. Hilda’s spirit wasn’t broken; instead she placed her indomitable spirit subject to the decisions of our captain. Discipline – self-discipline; there is no other sort.
Zeb is indeed a “coward by trade” – he avoids trouble whenever possible – a most commendable trait in a leader. If a captain worries about the safety of his command, those under him need not worry.

Barsoom continued to swell. At last Gay’s voice said, “Ranging, Boss” as she displayed “1000 km,” and flicked at once to “999 km.” I started timing when Zeb made it unnecessary: “Smart Girl!”
“Here, Zeb.”
“Continue range display. Show as H-above-G. Add dive rate.”
“Null program.”
“Correction. Add program. Display dive rate soonest.”
“New program dive rate stored. Display starts H-above-G six hundred klicks.”
“You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
“‘Smartest little girl in the County, Oh! Daddy and Mommy told me so!’ Over.”
“Continue programs.”
Height-above-ground seemed to drop both quickly and with stomach-tensing slowness. No one said a word; I barely breathed. As “600 km” appeared the figures were suddenly backed by a grid; on it was a steep curve, height-against-time, and a new figure flashed underneath the H-above-G figure: 1968 km/hr. As the figure changed, a bright abscissa lowered down on the grid.
Our captain let out a sigh. “We can handle that. But I’d give fifty cents and a double-dip ice-cream cone for a parachute brake.”
“What flavor?”
“Your choice, Sharpie. Don’t worry, folks; I can stand her on her tail and blast. But it’s an expensive way to slow up. Gay Deceiver.”
“Busy, Boss.”
“I keep forgetting that I can’t ask her to display too many data at once. Anybody know the sea level – I mean ‘surface’ atmospheric pressure of Mars? Don’t all speak at once.”
My darling said hesitantly, “It averages about five millibars. But, Captain – this isn’t Mars.”
“Huh? So it isn’t – and from the looks of that green stuff, Barsoom must have lots more atmosphere than Mars.” Zeb took the controls, overrode the computer, cautiously waggled her elevons. “Can’t feel bite. Sharpie, how come you bone astronomy? Girl Scout?”
“Never got past tenderfoot. I audited a course, then subscribed to ‘Astronomy’ and ‘Sky and Telescope.’ It’s sort o’ fun.”
“Chief of Science, you have again justified my faith in you. Copilot, as soon as I have air bite, I’m going to ease to the east. We’re headed too close to the terminator. I want to ground in daylight. Keep an eye out for level ground. I’ll hover at the last – but I don’t want to ground in forest. Or in badlands.”
“Aye aye, sir.”
“Astrogator.”
“Yessir!”
“Deety darling, search to port – and forward, as much as you can see around me. Jake can favor the starboard side.”
“Captain – I’m on the starboard side. Behind Pop.”
“Huh? How did you gals get swapped around?”
“Well… you hurried us, sir – any old seat in a storm.”
“Two demerits for wrong seat – and no syrup on the hot cakes we’re going to have for breakfast as soon as we’re grounded.”
“Uh, I don’t believe hot cakes are possible.”
“I can dream, can’t I? Chief Science Officer, watch my side.”
“Yes, Cap’n.”
“While Deety backs up Jake. Any cow pasture.”

“Hey! I feel air! She bites!”
I held my breath while Zeb slowly brought the ship out of dive, easing her east. “Gay Deceiver.”
“How now, Brown Cow?”
“Cancel display programs. Execute.”
“Inshallâh, ya sayyid.”
The displays faded. Zeb held her just short of stalling. We were still high, about six klicks, still hypersonic.
Zeb slowly started spreading her wings as air speed and altitude dropped. After we dropped below speed of sound, he opened her wings full for maximum lift. “Did anyone remember to bring a canary?”
“A canary!” said Deety. “What for, Boss Man?”
“My gentle way of reminding everyone that we have no way to test atmosphere. Copilot.”
“Captain,” I acknowledged.
“Uncover deadman switch. Hold it closed while you remove clamp. Hold it high where we all can see it. Once you report switch ready to operate, I’m going to crack the air scoops. If you pass out, your hand will relax and the switch will get us home. I hope. But – All hands! – if anyone feels dizzy or woozy or faint… or sees any of us start to slump, don’t wait! Give the order orally. Deety, spell the order I mean. Don’t say it – spell it.”
“G, A, Y, D, E, C, I, E, V, E, R, T, A, K, E, U, S, H, O, M, E.”
“You misspelled it.”
“I did not!”
“You did so; ‘”i” before “e” except after “c.”‘ You reversed ’em.”
“Well… maybe I did. That diphthong has always given me trouble. Floccinaucinihilipilificator!”
“So you understood it? From now on, on Barsoom, ‘i’ comes before ‘e’ at all times. By order of John Carter, Warlord. I have spoken. Copilot?”
“Deadman switch ready, Captain,” I answered.
“You gals hold your breaths or breathe, as you wish. Pilot and copilot will breathe. I am about to open air scoops.”
I tried to breathe normally and wondered if my hand would relax if I passed out.
The cabin got suddenly chilly, then the heaters picked up. I felt normal. Cabin pressure slightly higher, I thought, under ram effect.
“Everybody feel right? Does everybody look right? Copilot?”
“I feel fine. You look okay. So does Hilda. I can’t see Deety.”
“Science Officer?”
“Deety looks normal. I feel fine.”
“Deety. Speak up.”
“Golly, I had forgotten what fresh air smells like!”
“Copilot, carefully – most carefully! – put the clamp back on the switch, then rack and cover it. Report completion.”
A few seconds later I reported, “Deadman switch secured, Captain.”
“Good. I see a golf course; we’ll ground.” Zeb switched to powered flight; Gay responded, felt alive. We spiraled, hovered briefly, grounded with a gentle bump. “Grounded on Barsoom. Log it, Astrogator. Time and date.”
“Huh?”
“On the instrument board.”
“But that says oh-eight-oh-three and it’s just after dawn here.”
“Log it Greenwich. With it, log estimated local time and Barsoom day one.” Zeb yawned. “I wish they wouldn’t hold mornings so early.”
“Too sleepy for hot cakes?” my wife inquired.
“Never that sleepy.”
“Aunt Hilda!”
“Deety, I stowed Aunt Jemima mix. And powdered milk. And butter. Zebbie, no syrup – sorry. But there is grape jelly in a tube. And freeze-dried coffee. If one of you will undog this bulkhead door, we’ll have breakfast in a few minutes.”
“Chief Science Officer, you have a duty to perform.”
“I do? But – Yes, Captain?”
“Put your dainty toe to the ground. It’s your planet, your privilege. Starboard side of the car, under the wing, is the ladies’ powder room – portside is the men’s jakes. Ladies may have armed escort on request.”
I was glad Zeb remembered that. The car had a “honey bucket” under the cushion of the port rear seat, and, with it, plastic liners. I did not ever want to have to use it.
Gay Deceiver was wonderful but, as a spaceship, she left much to be desired. However, she had brought us safely to Barsoom.
Barsoom! Visions of thoats and beautiful princesses –

Chapter XVII

The world wobbled –

Deety:
We spent our first hour on “Barsoom” getting oriented. Aunt Hilda stepped outside, then stayed out. “Isn’t cold,” she told us. “Going to be hot later.”
“Watch where you step!” my husband warned her. “Might be snakes or anything.” He hurried after her – and went head over heels.
Zebadiah was not hurt; the ground was padded, a greenish-yellow mat somewhat like “ice plant” but looking more like clover. He got up carefully, then swayed as if walking on a rubber mattress. “I don’t understand it,” he complained. “This gravity ought to be twice that of Luna. But I feel lighter.”
Aunt Hillbilly sat down on the turf. “On the Moon you were carrying pressure suit and tanks and equipment.” She unfastened her shoes. “Here you aren’t.”
“Yeah, so I was,” agreed my husband. “What are you doing?”
“Taking off my shoes. When were you on the Moon? Cap’n Zebbie, you’re a fraud.”
“Don’t take off your shoes! You don’t know what’s in this grass.”
The Hillbilly stopped, one shoe off. “If they bite me, I bite ’em back. Captain, in Gay Deceiver you are absolute boss. But doesn’t your crew have any free will? I’ll play it either way: free citizen… or your thrall who dassn’t even take off a shoe without permission. Just tell me.”
“Uh -“
“If you try to make all decisions, all the time, you’re going to get as hysterical as a hen raising ducklings. Even Deety can be notional. But I won’t even pee without permission. Shall I put this back on? Or take the other off?”
“Aunt Hilda, quit teasing my husband!” (I was annoyed!)
“Dejah Thoris, I am not teasing your husband; I am asking our captain for instructions.”
Zebadiah sighed. “Sometimes I wish I’d stayed in Australia.”
I said, “Is it all right for Pop and me to come out?”
“Oh. Certainly. Watch your step; it’s tricky.”
I jumped down, then jumped high and wide, with entrechats as I floated – landed sur les pointes. “Oh, boy! What a wonderful place for ballet!” I added, “Shouldn’t do that on a full bladder. Aunt Hilda, let’s see if that powder room is unoccupied.”
“I was about to, dear, but I must get a ruling from our captain.”
“You’re teasing him.”
“No, Deety; Hilda is right; doctrine has to be clear. Jake? How about taking charge on the ground?”
“No, Captain. Druther be a Balkan general, given my druthers.”
Aunt Hilda stood up, shoe in hand, reached high with her other hand, patted my husband’s cheek. “Zebbie, you are a dear. You worry about us all – me especially, because you think I’m a featherhead. Remember how we did at Snug Harbor? Each one did what she could do best and there was no friction. If that worked there, it ought to work here.”
“Well… all right. But will you gals please be careful?”
“We’ll be careful. How’s your E.S.P.? Any feeling?”
Zebadiah wrinkled his forehead. “No. But I don’t get advance warning. Just barely enough.”
“‘Just barely’ is enough. Before we had to leave, you were about to program Gay to listen at high gain. Would that change ‘just barely’ to ‘ample’?”
“Yes! Sharpie, I’ll put you in charge, on the ground.”
“In your hat, Buster. Ole Massa done freed us slaves. Zebbie, the quicker you quit dodging, the sooner you get those hot cakes. Spread my cape down and put the hot plate on the step.”
We ate breakfast in basic Barsoomian dress: skin. Aunt Hilda pointed out that laundries seemed scarce, and the car’s water tanks had to be saved for drinking and cooking. “Deety, I have just this dress you gave me; I’ll air it and let the wrinkles hang out. Panties, too. An air bath is better than no bath. I know you’ll divvy with me but you are no closer to a laundry than I am.”
My jump suit joined Hilda’s dress. “Aunt Hilda, you could skip bathing a week. Me, right after a bath I have a body odor but not too bad. In twenty four hours I’m whiff. Forty-eight and I smell like a skunk. An air bath may help.”
The same reasoning caused our men to spread their used clothing on the port wing, and caused Zebadiah to pick up Hilda’s cape. “Sharpie, you can’t get fur Hollanderized in this universe. Jake, you stowed some tarps?”
After dishes were “washed” (scoured with turf, placed in the sun) we were sleepy. Zebadiah wanted us to sleep inside, doors locked. Aunt Hilda and I wanted to nap on a tarpaulin in the shade of the car. I pointed out that moving rear seats aft in refitting had made it impossible to recline them.
Zebadiah offered to give up his seat to either of us women. I snapped, “Don’t be silly, dear! You barely fit into a rear seat and it brings your knees so far forward that the seat in front can’t be reclined.”
Pop intervened. “Hold it! Daughter, I’m disappointed – snapping at your husband. But, Zeb, we’ve got to rest. If I sleep sitting up, I get swollen ankles, half crippled, not good for much.”
“I was trying to keep us safe,” Zebadiah said plaintively.
“I know, Son; you’ve been doing so – and a smart job, or we all would be dead three times over. Deety knows it, I know it, Hilda knows it -“
“I sure do, Zebbie!”
“My Captain, I’m sorry I snapped at you.”
“We’ll need you later. Flesh has its limits – even yours. If necessary, we would bed you down and stand guard over you -“
“No!”
“We sure would, Zebbie!”
“We will, my Captain.”
“But I doubt that it’s necessary. When we sat on the ground to eat, did anyone get chigger bites or anything?”
My husband shook his head.
“Not me,” Aunt Hilda agreed.
I added, “I saw some little beasties but they didn’t bother me.”
“Apparently,” Pop went on, “they don’t like our taste. A ferocious-looking dingus sniffed at my ankle – but it scurried away. Zeb, Gay can hear better than we can?”
“Oh, much better!”
“Can her radar be programmed to warn us?”
Zebadiah looked thoughtful. “Uh… anti-collision alarm would wake the dead. If I pulled it in to minimum range, then – No, the display would be cluttered with ‘grass.’ We’re on the ground. False returns.”
I said, “Subtract static display, Zebadiah.”
“Eh? How, Deety?”
“Gay can do it. Shall I try?”
“Deety, if you switch on radar, we have to sleep inside. Microwaves cook your brains.”
“I know, sir. Gay has sidelookers, eyes fore and aft, belly, and umbrella – has she not?”
“Yes. That’s why -“
“Switch off her belly eye. Can sidelookers hurt us if we sleep under her?” His eyes widened. “Astrogator, you know more about my car than I do. I’d better sign her over to you.”
“My Captain, you have already endowed me with all your worldly goods. I don’t know more about Gay; I know more about programming.”

We made a bed under the car by opening Zebadiah’s sleeping bag out flat, a tarpaulin on each side. Aunt Hilda dug out sheets: “In case anyone gets chilly.”
“Unlikely,” Pop told her. “Hot now, not a cloud and no breeze.”
“Keep it by you, dearest. Here’s one for Zebbie.” She dropped two more on the sleeping bag, lay down on it. “Down flat, gentlemen” – waited for them to comply, then called to me: “Deety! Everybody’s down.”
From inside I called back, “Right with you!” – then said, “Hello, Gay.”
“Hi, Deety!”
“Retrieve newest program. Execute.”
Five scopes lighted, faded to dimness; the belly eye remained blank. I told her, “You’re a good girl, Gay.”
“I like you, too, Deety. Over.”
“Roger and out, sister.” I scrunched down, got at the stowage under the instrument board, pulled out padding and removed saber and sword, each with belt. These I placed at the door by a pie tin used at breakfast. I slithered head first out the door, turned without rising, got swords and pie plate, and crawled toward the pallet, left arm cluttered with hardware.
I stopped. “Your sword, Captain.”
“Deety! Do I need a sword to nap?”
“No, sir. I shall sleep soundly knowing that my captain has his sword.”
“Hmm – ” Zebadiah withdrew it a span, returned it with a click. “Silly… but I feel comforted by it, too.”
“I see nothing silly, sir. Ten hours ago you killed a thing with it that would have killed me.”
“I stand – sprawl – corrected, my Princess. Dejah Thoris is always correct.”
“I hope my Chieftain will always think so.”
“He will. Give me a big kiss. What’s the pie pan for?”
“Radar alarm test.”
Having delivered the kiss, I crawled past Hilda and handed Pop his saber. He grinned at me. “Deety hon, you’re a one! Just the security blanket I need. How did you know?”
“Because Aunt Hilda and I need it. With our warriors armed, we will sleep soundly.” I kissed Pop, crawled out from under. “Cover your ears!”
I got to my knees, sailed that pan far and high, dropped flat and covered my ears. As the pan sailed into the zone of microwave radiation, a horrid clamor sounded inside the car, kept up until the pan struck the ground and stopped rolling – chopped off. “Somebody remind me to recover that. Good night, all!”
I crawled back, stretched out by Hilda, kissed her goodnight, set the clock in my head for six hours, went to sleep.

The sun was saying that it was fourteen instead of fourteen-fifteen and I decided that my circadian did not fit Barsoom. Would the clock in my head “slow” to match a day forty minutes longer? Would it give me trouble? Not likely – I’ve always been able to sleep anytime. I felt grand and ready for anything.
I crept off the pallet, snaked up into the car’s cabin, and stretched. Felt good!
I crawled through the bulkhead door back of the rear seats, got some scarves and my jewelry case, went forward into the space between seats and instrument board.
I tried tying a filmy green scarf as a bikini bottom, but it looked like a diaper. I took it off, folded it corner to corner, pinned it at my left hip with a jeweled brooch. Lots better! “Indecently decent” Pop would say.
I looped a rope of imitation pearls around my hips, arranged strands to drape with the cloth, fastened them at the brooch. I hung around my neck a pendant of pearls and cabochon emeralds – from my father the day I received the title doctor of philosophy.
I was adding bracelets and rings when I heard “Psst!” – looked down and saw the Hillbilly’s head and hands at the doorsill. Hilda put a finger to her lips. I nodded, gave her a hand up, whispered, “Still asleep?”
“Like babies.”
“Let’s get you dressed… ‘Princess Thuvia.'” Aunt Hilda giggled. “Thank you… ‘Princess’ Dejah Thoris.” “Want anything but jewelry?”
“Just something to anchor it. That old-gold scarf if you can spare it.”
“Course I can! Nothing’s too good for my Aunt Thuvia and that scarf is durn near nothing. Baby doll, we’re going to deck you out for the auction block. Will you do my hair?”
“And you mine. Deety – I mean ‘Dejah Thoris’ – I miss a three-way mirror.”
“We’ll be mirrors for each other,” I told her. “I don’t mind camping out. My great-great-great-grandmother had two babies in a sod house. Except” – I ducked my head, sniffed my armpit – “we’d better find a stream.” I added, “Hold still. Or shall I pin it through your skin?”
“Either way, dear. We’ll find water – all this ground cover.”
“Ground cover doesn’t prove running water. This place may be a ‘dead sea bottom of Barsoom.'”
“Doesn’t look dead,” Aunt Hilda countered. “It’s pretty.”
“Yes, but this looks like a dead sea bottom. Which gave me an idea. Hold up your hair; I want to arrange your necklaces.”
“What idea?” Aunt Hilda demanded.
“Zebadiah told me to figure a third escape program. The first two – I’ll paraphrase, Gay is awake. One tells her to take us back to a height over Snug Harbor; the other tells her to scoot back to where she was before she was last given the first order.”
“I thought that one told her to place us over the Grand Canyon?”
“It does, at present. But if she got the first order now, that would change the second order. Instead of over the Grand Canyon, we would be back here quicker’n a frog could wink its eye.”
“Okay if you say so.”
“She’s programmed that way. Hit the panic button and we are over our cabin site. Suppose we arrive there and find trouble, then use the ‘C’ order. She takes us back to wherever she last got the ‘T’ order. Dangerous or we would not have left in a rush. So we need a third escape program, to take us to a safe place. This looks safe.”
“It’s peaceful.”
“Seems so. There! – more doodads than a Christmas tree and you look nakeder than ever.”
“That’s the effect we want, isn’t it? Sit down in the copilot’s seat; I’ll do your hair.”
“Want shoes?” I asked.
“On Barsoom? Dejah Thoris, thank you for your little-girl shoes. But they pinch my toes. You’re going to wear shoes?”
“Not bleedin’ likely, Aunt Nanny Goat. I toughened my feet for karate – I can break a four-by-nine with my feet and get nary a bruise. Or run on sharp gravel. What’s a good escape phrase? I plan to store in Gay an emergency signal for every spot we visit that looks like a safe hidey-hole. So give me a phrase.”
“Your mudder chaws terbacker!”
“Nanny Goat! A code-phrase should have a built-in mnemonic.”
“‘Bug Out’?”
“A horrid expression and just what we need. ‘Bug Out’ will mean to take us to this exact spot. I’ll program it. And post it and others on the instrument board so that, if anyone forgets, she can read it.”
“And so could any outsider, if she got in.”
“Fat lot of good it would do her! Gay ignores an order not in our voices. Hello, Gay.”
“Hello, Deety!”
“Retrieve present location. Report.”
“Null program.”
“Are we lost?”
“Not at all, Aunt Hilda. I was sloppy. Gay, program check. Define ‘Home.'”
“Cancel any-all transitions translations rotations inertials. Return to zerodesignated latitude longitude two klicks above ground level hovering.”
“Search memory reversed-real-time for last order execute-coded Gay Deceiver take us home.”
“Retrieved.”
“From time of retrieved order integrate to time-present all transitions translations rotations inertials.”
“Integrated.”
“Test check. Report summary of integration.”
“Origin ‘Home.’ Countermarch program executed. Complex maneuver inertials. Translation Tau axis ten minimals positive. Complex maneuver inertials. Translation Ell axis two-two-four-zero-nine-zero-eight-two-seven point zero klicks. Negative vector Ell axis twenty-four klicks per sec. Negative vector Ell axis four klicks per sec. Complex maneuver inertials. Grounded here-then oh-eight-oh-two-forty-nine. Grounded inertials continuing eight hours three minutes nineteen seconds mark! Grounded inertials continue running realtime.”
“New program. Here-now grounded inertial location real-time running to real-time new execute order equals code-phrase bug-out. Report new program.”
Gay answered: “New program code-phrase bug-out: Definition: Here-now grounded inertials running real-time to future-time execute order code-phrase bug-out.”
“Gay, I tell you three times.”
“Deety, I hear you three times.”
“New program. Execute-coded Gay Deceiver Bug Out. At execute-code move to location coded ‘bug-out.’ I tell you three times.”
“I hear you three times.”
“Gay Deceiver, you’re a smart girl.”
“Deety, why don’t you leave that big ape and live with me? Over.”
“Good night, Gay. Roger and out. Hillbilly, I didn’t give you that answer.” I tried to look fierce.
“Why, Deety, how could you say such a thing?”
“I know I didn’t. Well?”
“I ‘fess up, Deetikins. A few days ago while you and I were working, you were called away. While I waited, I stuck that in. Want it erased?”
I don’t know how to look fierce; I snickered. “No. Maybe Zebadiah will be around the next time it pops up. I wish our men would wake, I do.”
“They need rest, dear.”
“I know. But I want to check that new program.”
“It sounded complex.”
“Can be, by voice. I’d rather work on paper. A computer doesn’t accept excuses. A mistake can be anything from ‘null program’ to disaster. This one has features I’ve never tried. I don’t really understand what Pop does. Non-Euclidean n-dimensional geometry is way out in left field.”
“To me it’s not in the ball park.”
“So I’m itchy.”
“Let’s talk about something else.”
“Did I show you our micro walky-talkies?”
“Jacob gave me one.”
“There’s one for each. Tiny but amazingly long-ranged. Uses less power than a hand calculator and weighs less – under two hundred grams. Mass, I mean – weight here is much less. Today I thought of a new use. Gay can accept their frequency.”
“That’s nice. How do you plan to use this?”
“This car can be remote-controlled.”
“Deety, who would you want to do that?”
I admitted that I did not know. “But Gay can be preprogrammed to do almost anything. For example, we could go outside and tell Gay, via walky-talky, to carry out two programs in succession: H, O, M, E, followed by B, U, G, O, U, T. Imagine Zebadiah’s face when he wakes up from sun in his eyes – because his car has vanished – then his expression two hours later when it pops back into existence.”
“Deety, go stand in the corner for thinking such an unfunny joke!” Then Aunt Hilda looked thoughtful. “Why would it take two hours? I thought Gay could go anywhere in no time.”
“Depends on your postulates, Princess Thuvia. We took a couple of hours to get here because we fiddled. Gay would have to follow that route in reverse because it’s the only one she knows. Then – ” I stopped, suddenly confused. “Or would it be four hours? No, vectors would cancel and – But that would make it instantaneous; we would never know that she had left. Or would we? Aunt Hilda, I don’t know! Oh, I wish our men would wake up, I do!” The world wobbled and I felt scared.
“I’m awake,” Pop answered, his head just showing above the doorsill. “What’s this debate?” He gave Aunt Hilda a lecherous leer. “Little girl, if you’ll come up to my room, I’ll give you some candy.”
“Get away from me, you old wolf!”
“Hilda my love, I could sell you down to Rio and retire on the proceeds. You look like expensive stuff.”
“I’m very expensive stuff, darling wolf. All I want is every cent a man has and constant pampering – then a fat estate when he dies.”
“I’ll try to die with plenty of money in the bank, dearest.”
“Instead we’re both dead and our bank accounts have gone Heaven knows where and I haven’t a rag to my back – and I’m wonderfully happy. Come inside – mind the radar! – and kiss me, you old wolf; you don’t have to buy me candy.”
“Pop,” I asked, “is Zebadiah asleep?”
“Just woke up.”
I spoke to Gay, then to Pop: “Will you tell Zebadiah radar is off? He can stand up without getting his ears fried.”
“Sure.” Pop ducked down and yelled, “Zeb, it’s safe; her husband left.”
“Coming!” Zebadiah’s voice rumbled back. “Tell Deety to put the steaks on.” My darling appeared wearing sword, carrying pie pan and sheets. “Are the steaks ready?” he asked, then kissed me.
“Not quite, sir,” I told him. “First, go shoot a thoat. Or will you settle for peanut butter sandwiches?”
“Don’t talk dirty. Did you say ‘thoat’?”
“Yes. This is Barsoom.”
“I thoat that was what you said.”
“If that’s a pun, you can eat it for supper. With peanut butter.”
Zebadiah shuddered. “I’d rather cut my thoat.”
Pop said, “Don’t do it, Zeb. A man can’t eat with his thoat cut. He can’t even talk clearly.”
Aunt Hilda said mildly, “If you three will cease those atrocities, I’ll see what I can scrape up for dinner.”
“I’ll help,” I told her, “but can we run my test first? I’m itchy.”
“Certainly, Deety. It will be a scratch meal.”
Pop looked at Aunt Hilda reproachfully. “And you told us to stop.”
“What test?” demanded my husband.
I explained the Bug-Out program. “I think I programmed it correctly. But here is a test. Road the car a hundred meters. If my program works – fine! If it tests null, no harm done but you and Pop will have to teach me more about the twister before I’ll risk new programming.”
“I don’t want to road the car, Deety; I’m stingy with every erg until I know when and where I can juice Gay. However – Jake, what’s your minimum transition?”
“Ten kilometers. Can’t use spatial quanta for transitions – too small. But the scale goes up fast – logarithmic. That’s short range. Middle range is in light-years – logarithmic again.”
“What’s long range, Jake?”
“Gravitic radiation versus time. We won’t use that one.”
“Why not, Jacob?” asked Aunt Hilda.
Pop looked sheepish. “I’m scared of it, dearest. There are three major theories concerning gravitic propagation. At the time I machined those controls, one theory seemed proved. Since then other physicists have reported not being able to reproduce the data. So I blocked off long range.” Pop smiled sourly. “I know the gun is loaded but not what it will do. So I spiked it.”
“Sensible,” agreed my husband. “Russian roulette lacks appeal. Jake, do you have any guess as to what options you shut off?”
“Better than a guess, Zeb. It reduces the number of universes accessible to us on this axis from the sixth power of six-to-the-sixth-power to a mere six to the sixth power. Forty-six thousand, six hundred, fifty-six.”
“Gee, that’s tough!”
“I didn’t mean it as a joke, Zeb.”
“Jake, I was laughing at me. I’ve been looking forward to a lifetime exploring universes – and now I learn that I’m limited to a fiddlin’ forty-six thousand and some. Suppose I have a half century of exploration left in me. Assume that I take off no time for eating, sleeping, or teasing the cat, how much time can I spend in each universe?”
“About nine hours twenty minutes per universe,” I told him. “Nine hours, twenty-three minutes, thirty-eight point seven-two-two seconds, plus, to be more nearly accurate.”
“Deety, let’s do be accurate,” Zebadiah said solemnly. “If we stayed a minute too long in each universe, we would miss nearly a hundred universes.”
I was getting into the spirit. “Let’s hurry instead. If we work at it, we can do three universes a day for fifty years – one of us on watch, one on standby, two off duty – and still squeeze in maintenance, plus a few hours on the ground, once a year. If we hurry.”
“We haven’t a second to lose!” Zebadiah answered. “All hands! – places! Stand by to lift! Move!”
I was startled but hurried to my seat. Pop’s chin dropped but he took his place. Aunt Hilda hesitated a split second before diving for her seat, but, as she strapped herself in, wailed, “Captain? Are we really leaving Barsoom?”
“Quiet, please. Gay Deceiver, close doors! Report seat belts. Copilot, check starboard door seal.”
“Seat belt fastened,” I reported with no expression.
“Mine’s fastened. Oh, dear!”
“Copilot, by low range, ‘H’ axis upward, minimum transition.”
“Set, Captain.”
“Execute.”
Sky outside was dark, the ground far below. “Ten klicks exactly,” my husband approved. “Astrogator, take the conn, test your new program. Science Officer observe.”
“Yessir. Gay Deceiver – Bug Out!” We were parked on the ground.
“Science Officer – report,” Zebadiah ordered.
“Report what?” Aunt Hilda demanded.
“We tested a new program. Did it pass test?”
“Uh, we seem to be back where we were. We were weightless maybe ten seconds. I guess the test was okay, Except -“
“‘Except’ what?”
“Captain Zebbie, you’re the worst tease on Earth! And Barsoom! You did so put lime Jello in my pool!”
“I was in Africa.”
“Then you arranged it!”
“Hilda – please! I never said we were leaving Barsoom. I said that we haven’t a second to waste. We don’t, with so much to explore.”
“Excuses. What about my clothes? All on the starboard wing. Where are they now? Floating up in the stratosphere? Coming down where? I’ll never find them.”
“I thought you preferred to dress Barsoomian style?”
“Doesn’t mean I want to be forced to! Besides, Deety lent them to me. I’m sorry, Deety.”
I patted her hand. “‘S’all right, Aunt Hilda. I’ll lend you more. Give them, I mean.” I hesitated, then said firmly, “Zebadiah, you should apologize to Aunt Hilda.”
“Oh, for the love of – Sharpie? Sharpie darling.”
“Yes, Zebbie?”
“I’m sorry I let you think that we were leaving Barsoom. I’ll buy you clothes that fit. We’ll make a quick trip back to Earth -“
“Don’t want to go back to Earth! Aliens! They scare me.”
“They scare me, too. I started to say: ‘Earth-without-a-J.’ It’s so much like our own that I can probably use U.S. money. If not, I have gold. Or I can barter. For you, Sharpie, I’ll steal clothes. We’ll go to Phoenix-without-a-J – tomorrow – today we take a walk and see some of this planet – your planet – and we’ll stay on your planet until you get tired of it. Is that enough? Or must I confess putting Jello into your pool when I didn’t?”
“You really didn’t?”
“Cross my heart.”
“Be darned. Actually I thought it was funny. I wonder who did it? Aliens, maybe?”
“They play rougher than that. Sharpie darling, I’m not the only weirdo in your stable – not by dozens.”
“Guess maybe. Zebbie? Will you kiss Sharpie and make up?”

On the ground, under the starboard wing, we found our travel clothes, and under the port wing, those of our husbands. Zebadiah looked bemused. “Jake? I thought Hilda was right. It had slipped my mind that we had clothing on the wings.”
“Use your head, Son.”
“I’m not sure I have one.”
“I don’t understand it either, darling,” Aunt Hilda added.
“Daughter?” Pop said.
“Pop, I think I know. But – I pass!”
“Zeb, the car never moved. Instead -“
Aunt Hilda interrupted, “Jacob, are you saying that we did not go straight up? We were there – five minutes ago.”
“Yes, my darling. But we didn’t move there. Motion has a definable meaning: A duration of changing locations. But no duration was involved. We did not successively occupy loci between here-then and there-then.”
Aunt Hilda shook her head. “I don’t understand. We went whoosh! up into the sky… then whoosh! back where we started.”
“My darling, we didn’t whoosh! Deety! Don’t be reticent.”
I sighed. “Pop, I’m not sure there exists a symbol for the referent. Aunt Hilda. Zebadiah. A discontinuity. The car -“
“Got it!” said Zebadiah.
“I didn’t,” Aunt Hilda persisted.
“Like this, Sharpie,” my husband went on. “My car is here. Spung! – it vanishes. Our clothes fall to the ground. Ten seconds later – flip! – we’re back where we started. But our clothes are on the ground. Get it now?”
“I – I guess so. Yes.”
“I’m glad you do… because I don’t. To me, it’s magic.” Zebadiah shrugged. “‘Magic.'”
“‘Magic’,” I stated, “is a symbol for any process not understood.”
“That’s what I said, Deety. ‘Magic.’ Jake, would it have mattered if the car had been indoors?”
“Well… that fretted me the first time Deety and I translated to Earth-without-the-letter-J. So I moved our car outdoors. But now I think that only the destination matters. It should be empty – I think. But I’m too timid to experiment.”
“Might be interesting. Unmanned vehicle. Worthless target. A small asteroid. A baby sun?”
“I don’t know, Zeb. Nor do I have apparatus to spare. It took me three years to build this one.”
“So we wait a few years. Jake? Air has mass.”
“That worried me also. But any mass, other than degenerate mass, is mostly empty space. Air – Earth sea-level air – has about a thousandth the density of the human body. The body is mostly water and water accepts air readily. I can’t say that it has no effect – twice I’ve thought that my temperature went up a trifle at transition or translation in atmosphere but it could have been excitement. I’ve never experienced caisson disease from it. Has any of us felt discomfort?”
“Not me, Jake.”
“I’ve felt all right, Pop,” I agreed.
“I got space sick. Till Deety cured it,” Aunt Hilda added.
“So did I, my darling. But that was into vacuo and could not involve the phenomenon.”
“Pop,” I said earnestly, “we weren’t hurt; we don’t have to know why. A basic proposition of epistemology, bedrock both for the three basic statements of semantics and for information theory, is that an observed fact requires no proof. It simply is, self-demonstrating. Let philosophers worry about it; they haven’t anything better to do.”
“Suits me!” agreed Hilda. “You big brains had Sharpie panting. I thought we were going to take a walk?”
“We are, dear,” agreed my husband. “Right after those steaks.”

Chapter XVIII

” – the whole world is alive.”

Zebadiah:
Four Dagwoods later we were ready to start walkabout. Deety delayed by wanting to repeat her test by remote control. I put my foot down. “No!”
“Why not, my Captain? I’ve taught Gay a program to take her straight up ten klicks. It’s G, A, Y, B, O, U, N, C, E – a new fast-escape with no execution word necessary. Then I’ll recall her by B, U, G, O, U, T. If one works via walky-talky, so will the second. It can save our lives, it can!”
“Uh – ” I went on folding tarps and stowing my sleeping bag. The female mind is too fast for me. I often can reach the same conclusion; a woman gets there first and never by the route I have to follow. Besides that, Deety is a genius.
“You were saying, my Captain?”
“I was thinking. Deety, do it with me aboard. I won’t touch the controls. Check pilot, nothing more.”
“Then it won’t be a test.”
“Yes, it will. I promise, Cub Scout honor, to let it fall sixty seconds. Or to three klicks H-above-G, whichever comes first.”
“These walky-talkies have more range than ten kilometers even between themselves. Gay’s reception is much better.”
“Deety, you trust machinery; I don’t. If Gay doesn’t pick up your second command – sun spots, interference, open circuit, anything – I’ll keep her from crashing.”
“But if something else goes wrong and you did crash, I would have killed you!” She started to cry.
So we compromised. Her way. The exact test she had originally proposed. I wasted juice by roading Gay Deceiver a hundred meters, got out, and we all backed off. Deety said into her walky-talky, “Gay Deceiver… Bug Out!”
It’s more startling to watch than it is to be inside. There was Gay Deceiver off to our right, then she was off to our left. No noise – not even an implosion splat! Magic.
“Well, Deety? Are you satisfied?”
“Yes, Zebadiah. Thank you, darling. But it had to be a real test. You see that – don’t you?”
I agreed, while harboring a suspicion that my test had been more stringent. “Deety, could you reverse that? Go somewhere else and tell Gay to come to you?”
“Somewhere she’s never been?”
“Yes.”
Deety switched off her walky-talky and made sure that mine was off. “I don’t want her to hear this. Zebadiah, I always feel animistic about a computer. The Pathetic Fallacy – I know. But Gay is a person to me.”
Deety sighed. “I know it’s a machine. It doesn’t have ears; it can’t see; it doesn’t have a concept of space-time. What it can do is manipulate circuitry in complex ways – complexities limited by its grammar and vocabulary. But those limits are exact. If I don’t stay precisely with its grammar and vocabulary, it reports ‘Null program.’ I can tell it anything by radio that I can tell it by voice inside the cabin – and so can you. But I can’t tell it to come look for me in a meadow beyond a canyon about twelve or thirteen klicks approximately southwest of here-now. That’s a null program – five undefined terms.”
“Because you made it null. You fed ‘garbage in’ and expect me to be surprised at ‘garbage out’ – when you did it a-purpose.”
“I did not either, I didn’t!”
I kissed the end of her nose. “Deety darling, you should trust your instincts. Here’s one way to tell Gay to do that without defining even one new term into her vocabulary. Tell her to expect a three-part program. First part: bounce one minimum, ten klicks. Second part: transit twelve point five klicks true course two-two-five. Third part: drop to one klick H-over-G and hover. At that point, if what you described as your location is roughly correct, you will see her and can coach her to a landing without using Jake’s twister.”
“Uh… twelve and a half kilometers can’t be done in units of ten kilometers. Powered flight?”
“Waste juice? Hon, you just flunked high school geometry. Using Euclid’s tools, compass and straight edge, lay out that course and distance, then lay out how to get there in ten-klick units – no fractions.”
My wife stared. Then her eyes cleared. “Transit one minimum true course one-seven-three and two thirds, then transit one minimum true course two-seven-six and one third. The mirror image solution uses the same courses in reverse. Plus endless trivial solutions using more than two minima.”
“Go to the head of the class. If you don’t spot her, have her do a retreating search curve – in her perms, in an Aussie accent. Honey girl, did you actually do that Euclid style?”
“I approximated it Euclid style – but you didn’t supply compass and straight edge! Scribe circle radius twelve point five. Bisect circle horizontally by straight edge through origin; quarter it by dropping a vertical. Bisect lower left quadrant – that gives true course two-two-five or southwest. Then set compass at ten units and scribe arcs from origin and from southwest point of circle; the intersections give courses and vertices for both major roots to the accuracy of your straight edge and compass. But simply to visualize that construction – well, I got visualized angles of two-seven-five and one-seven-five. Pretty sloppy.
“So I did it accurately by Pythagorean proposition by splitting the isosceles triangle into two right triangles. Hypotenuse is ten, one side is six and a quarter – and that gives the missing side as seven point eight-zero-six-two-four-seven plus – which gives you one course and you read off the other by the scandalous Fifth Axiom. But I did check by trig. Arc sine point seven-eight-zero-six-two-four-seven – “
“Hold it! I believe you. What other ways can you program Gay to find you, using her present vocabulary?”
“Uh… burn juice?”
“If necessary.”
“I would have her bounce a minimum, then maximize my signal. Home on me.”
“Certainly. Now do the same thing without using juice. Just Jake’s twister.”
Deety looked thoughtful and about twelve years old, then suddenly said, “‘Drunkard’s Walk’!” – added at once, “But I would place a locus around the Walk just large enough to be certain that I’m inside it. Gay should plot signal level at each vertex. Such a plot would pinpoint the signal source.”
“Which way is faster? Home straight in under power? Or Drunkard’s Walk?” Deety answered, “Why, the – ” – looked startled. “Those are solid-state relays.”
“Jake sets verniers by hand – but when Gay is directing herself there are no moving parts. Solid state.”
“Zebadiah, am I thinking straight? Using power, at that distance – call it twelve kilometers – Gay should be able to home on me in three or four minutes. But – Zebadiah, this can’t be right! – using no power and relying on random numbers and pure chance in a Drunkard’s Walk, Gay should find me in less than a second. Where did I go wrong?”
“On the high side, Deety girl. Lost your nerve. The first fifty milliseconds should show the hot spot; in less than the second fifty she’ll part your hair. All over in a tenth of a second – or less. But, honey, we still haven’t talked about the best way. I said that you should trust your instincts. Gay is not an ‘it.’ She’s a person. You’ll never know how relieved I was when it turned out that you two were going to be friends. If she had been jealous of you – May the gods deliver us from a vindictive machine! But she’s not; she thinks you’re swell.”
“Zebadiah, you believe that?”
“Dejah Thoris, I know that.”
Deety looked relieved. “I know it, too – despite what I said earlier.”
“Deety, to me the whole world is alive. Some parts are sleeping and some are dozing and some are awake but yawning… and some are bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and always ready to go. Gay is one of those.”
“Yes, she is. I’m sorry I called her an ‘it.’ But what is this ‘best way’?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Don’t tell her how – just tell her. Say to her, ‘Gay, come find me!’ All four words are in her vocabulary; the sentence is compatible with her grammar. She’ll find you.”
“But how? Drunkard’s Walk?”
“A tenth of a second might strike her as too long – she likes you, hon. She’ll look through her registers and pick the optimum solution. She might not be able to tell you how she did it, since she wipes anything she’s not told to remember. I think she does; I’ve never been certain.”

Jake and Hilda had wandered off while Deety and I had been talking. They had turned back, so we started toward them. Sharpie called out, “Zebbie, what happened to that hike?”
“Right away,” I agreed. “Jake, we have about three hours. We ought to be buttoned up before sundown. Check?”
“I agree. The temperature will drop rapidly at sundown.”
“Yup. We can’t do real exploring today. So let’s treat it as drill. Fully armed, patrol formation, radio discipline, and always alert, as if there were a ‘Black Hat’ behind every bush.”
“No bushes,” objected Hilda.
I pretended not to hear. “But what constitutes ‘fully armed,’ Jake? We each have rifles. You have that oldstyle Army automatic that will knock down anything if you’re close enough but – how good a shot are you?”
“Good enough.”
“How good is ‘Good enough’?” (Most people are as accurate with a baseball as with a pistol.)
“Skipper, I won’t attempt a target more than fifty meters away. But if I intend to hit, the target will be within range and I will hit it.”
I opened my mouth… closed it. Fifty meters is a long range for that weapon. But hint that my father-in-law was boasting?
Deety caught my hesitation. “Zebadiah – Pop taught me pistol in the campus R.O.T.C. range. I’ve seen him practice bobbing targets at thirty meters. I saw him miss one. Once.”
Jake harrumphed. “My daughter omitted to mention that I skip most surprise targets.”
“Father! ‘Most’ means ‘more than fifty percent.’ Not true!”
“Near enough.”
“Six occasions. Four strings, twenty-eight targets on three -“
“Hold it, honey! Jake, it’s silly to argue figures with your daughter. With my police special I won’t attempt anything over twenty meters – except covering fire. But I hand-load my ammo and pour my own dumdums; the result is almost as lethal as that howitzer of yours. But if it comes to trouble, or hunting for meat, we’ll use rifles, backed by Deety’s shotgun. Deety, can you shoot?”
“Throw your hat into the air.”
“I don’t like the sound of that. Sharpie, we have five firearms, four people – is there one that fits you?”
“Cap’n Zebbie, the one time I fired a gun, I went backwards, the bullet went that-a-way, and I had a sore shoulder. Better have me walk in front to trip land mines.”
“Zebadiah, she could carry my fléchette gun.”
“Sharpie, we’ll put you in the middle and you carry the first-aid kit; you’re medical officer – armed with Deety’s purse gun for defense. Jake, it’s time we stowed these swords and quit pretending to be Barsoomian warriors. Field boots. I’m going to wear that same sweaty pilot suit, about equivalent to jump suits you and Deety wore – which I suggest you wear now. We should carry water canteens and iron rations. I can’t think of anything that would serve as a canteen. Damn! Jake, we aren’t doing this by the book.”
“What book?” demanded Hilda.
“Those romances about interstellar exploration. There’s always a giant mother ship in orbit, loaded with everything from catheters to Coca-Cola, and scouting is by landing craft, in touch with the mother ship. Somehow, we aren’t doing it that way.”
(All the more reason to conduct drill as realistically as possible. Jake or I, one of us, is honor bound to stay alive to take care of two women and unborn children; exterminating ‘Black-Hat’ vermin holds a poor second to that.)
“Zebbie, why are you staring at me?”
I hadn’t known that I was. “Trying to figure how to dress you, dear. Sharpie, you look cute in jewelry and perfume. But it’s not enough for a sortie in the bush. Take ’em off and put ’em away. You, too, Deety. Deety, do you have another jump suit that can be pinned up or stitched up for Hilda?”
“A something, sure. But it would take hours to do a good job. My sewing kit isn’t much.”
“‘Hours’ will have to be another day. Today we’ll make do with safety pins. But take time to do a careful job of padding her feet into your stoutest shoes. Confound it, she should have field boots. Sharpie, remind me when we make that shopping trip to Earth-without-a-J.”
“To hear is to obey, Exalted One. Is it permitted to make a parliamentary inquiry?”
She startled me. “Hilda, what did I do to cause that frosty tone?”
“It was what you didn’t do.” Suddenly she smiled, reached high and patted my cheek. “You mean well, Zebbie. But you slipped. While Gay Deceiver is on the ground, we’re equal. But you’ve been giving orders right and left.”
I started to answer; Jake cut in. “Hilda my love, for a scouting expedition the situation becomes equivalent to a craft in motion. Again we require a captain.”
Sharpie turned toward her husband. “Conceded, sir. But may I point out that we are not yet on that hike? Zebbie has consulted you; he has not consulted Deety and me. He asked us for information – darned seldom! Aside from that he has simply laid down the law. What are we, Zebbie? Poor little female critters whose opinions are worthless?”
Caught with your hand in the cooky jar, throw yourself on the mercy of the court.
“Sharpie, you’re right and I’m dead wrong. But before you pass sentence I claim extenuating circumstances: Youth and inexperience, plus long and faithful service.”
“You can’t,” put in my helpful wife. “You can plead one or the other but not both. They can’t overlap.”
Sharpie stood on tiptoes and kissed my chin. “In Zebbie’s case they do overlap. Do you still want to know what to use as water canteens?”
“Certainly!”
“Then why didn’t you ask?”
“But I did!”
“No, Cap’n Zebbie; you did not ask and did not even give us time to volunteer the answer.”
“I’m sorry, Hilda. Too many things on my mind.”
“I know, dear; Sharpie does not mean to scold. But I had to get your attention.”
“That baseball bat?”
“Almost. For an ersatz canteen – A hot-water bottle?”
Again she startled me. “In the danger we were in when we left, you worried about cold feet in bed? And packed a hot-water bottle?”
“Two,” answered Deety. “Aunt Hilda fetched one. So did I.”
“Deety, you don’t have cold feet and neither do I.”
Sharpie said, “Deety, is he actually that naïve?”
“I’m afraid he is, Aunt Hilda. But he’s sweet.”
“And brave,” added Hilda. “But retarded in spots. They do overlap in Zebbie’s case. He’s unique.”
“What,” I demanded, “are you talking about?”
“Aunt Hilda means that, when you refitted Gay, you neglected to install a bidet.”
“Oh.” That was the wittiest I could manage. “It’s not a subject I give much thought to.”
“No reason you should, Zebbie. Although men use them, too.”
“Zebadiah does. Pop, too. Bidets, I mean. Not hot-water bottles.”
“I meant hot-water bottles, dear. As medical officer I may find it necessary to administer an enema to the Captain.”
“Oh, no!” I objected. “You’re not equipped.”
“But she is, Zebadiah. We fetched both sorts of nozzles.”
“But you didn’t fetch four husky orderlies to hold me down. Let’s move on. Sharpie, what was the advice you would have given if I had been bright enough to consult you?”
“Some is not advice but a statement of fact. I’m not going for a hike on a hot day swaddled in a pinned-up jump suit eight sizes too big. While you all play Cowboys-and-Indians, I’m going to curl up in my seat and read ‘The Oxford Book of English Verse.’ Thank you for fetching it, Jacob.”
“Hilda beloved, I will worry.”
“No need to worry about me, Jacob. I can always tell Gay to lock her doors. But, were I to go with you, I would be a handicap. You three are trained to fight; I’m not.” Sharpie turned toward me. “Captain, since I’m not going, that’s all I have to say.”
What was there for me to say? “Thank you, Hilda. Deety, do you have things on your mind?”
“Yes, sir. I go along with field boots and jump suits and so forth even though they’ll be beastly hot. But I wish you would change your mind about your sword and Pop’s saber. Maybe they aren’t much compared with rifles but they’re good for my morale.”
Hilda interjected, “Had I decided to go, Captain, I would have said the same. Possibly it is an emotional effect from what happened, uh – was it only yesterday? – but perhaps it is subconscious logic. Just yesterday bare blades defeated a man – a thing, an alien – armed with a firearm and ready to use it.”
Jake spoke up. “Captain, I didn’t want to take off my saber.”
“We’ll wear them.” Any excuse is a good excuse to wear a sword. “Are we through? We’ve lost an hour and the Sun is dropping. Deety?”
“One more thing, Zebadiah – and I expect to be outvoted. I say to cancel the hike.”
“So? Princess, you’ve said too much or not enough.”
“If we do this, we spend the night here – sitting up. If we chase the Sun instead – There were lights on the night side that looked like cities. There was blue on the day side that looked like a sea. I think I saw canals. But whether we find something or not, at worst we’ll catch up with sunrise and be able to sleep outdoors in daylight, just as we did today.”
“Deety! Gay can overtake the Sun. Once. You want to use all her remaining juice just to sleep outdoors?”
“Zebadiah, I wasn’t planning on using any power.”
“Huh? It sounded like it.”
“Oh, no! Do transitions of three minima or more, bearing west. Aim us out of the atmosphere; we fall back in while looking for places of interest. As we reenter, we glide, but where depends on what you want to look at. When you have stretched the glide to the limit, unless you decide to ground, you do another transition. There is great flexibility, Zebadiah. You can reach sunrise line in the next few minutes. Or you could elect to stay on the day side for weeks, never land, never use any juice, and inspect the entire planet from pole to pole.”
“Maybe Gay can stay up for weeks – but not me. I’m good for several more hours. With that limitation, it sounds good, How about it? Hilda? Jake?”
“You mean that female suffrage is permanent? I vote Yes!”
Jake said, “You have a majority; no need for a male vote.”
“Jacob!” his wife said reproachfully.
“Joking, my dear. It’s unanimous.”
I said, “Somebody just cancelled the election. Look there.” We all looked. Deety said, “What is it? A pterodactyl?”
“No, an ornithopter. A big one.”

PART TWO – The Butterfly’s Mandarin

Chapter XIX

Something is gained in translation –

Hilda:
Jacob tightened his arm around me. “Zeb,” he said softly, “I don’t believe it.” He was staring (we all were) at this mechaniwockle pteranodon coming at us over the hills in the west.
“Neither do I,” Zebbie answered. “Wrong wing loading. Impossible articulation. There’s a second one. A third! All hands! Grab your clothes! Man the ship! Prepare to lift! Move! Jake, unbuckle your saber and into your jump suit, fast!”
Cap’n Zebbie was unhooking his sword belt and grabbing his coveralls as he yelped. I was inside first as I didn’t stop to dress – grabbed Deety’s baby shoes with one hand, my dress and panties with the other.
I wiggled into panties, slid the dress over my head, slipped on Deety’s Keds.
I anticipated the order to fasten seat belts – stopped suddenly and eased my belt. I had not stopped to take off the doodads that proclaimed me a Barsoomian “princess.” Now it seemed that every item of frippery was about to imprint me for life.
Deety was cursing softly over the same problem. Deety’s jump suit was harder to reach into, even when she unbelted and opened the zipper all the way. I helped readjust the hardware but cautioned her not to remove it and to close the zipper clear to her chin. “Deety, if you get holes in your hide, you’ll get well. But if something loose catches our captain in the eye, the culprit will be broken on the wheel.”
I clucked-clucked at her answer but big ones do get in the way. Meanwhile our men were having problems. That space under the instrument board could not be seen by a full-sized male. The best position to reach it was impossible for Jacob, ridiculously impossible for Zebbie.
Zebbie’s profanity was louder than Deety’s but not as colorful. My own darling was keeping quiet which meant that he was really in trouble. I said, “Gentlemen -“
Zebbie grunted, “Shut up, Sharpie; we’ve got problems! Deety! How did you get these toadstickers into this compartment?”
“I didn’t. Aunt Hilda did.”
“Sharpie, can I apologize later? Those Martians are circling us now!”
So they were, at least a dozen flapping monstrosities. One appeared about to ground. “Captain, I’ll do it – but there is a faster way.”
“How?”
“Unhook your scabbards, put on your sword belts. Saber and sword in scabbards fit easily if you point one right, the other left. They will rattle unless you stuff clothing around them.”
“They can bloody well rattle!” In seconds, our gallants had blades and scabbards stowed. As Cap’n Zebbie resumed sword belt and started on his seat belt he called out, “Fasten belts, prepare to lift! Sharpie, have I told you today that in addition to loving you, I admire you?”
“I think not, Captain.”
“I do. Enormously. Report! Science Officer?”
“Seat belt fastened. Thank you, Zebbie.”
“Seat belt fastened,” reported Deety. “Bulkhead door dogged.”
“Seat belt fastened, starboard door seal checked, copilot ready, sir!”
“Port door seal checked, pilot strapped down; we’re ready – and none too soon! One has grounded and somebody is getting out. Hey! They’re human!”
“Or disguised aliens,” said my darling.
“Well… yes, there’s that. I may lift any second. Deety – that new program: Just G, A, Y, B, O, U, N, C, E? No ‘do-it’ word?”
“Check.”
“Good. I won’t use it unless forced to. This may be that ‘first contact’ the world has been expecting.”
“Cap’n Zebbie, why would aliens disguise themselves when they outnumber us? I think they are human.”
“I hope you’re right. Copilot, should I open the door? Advice, please.”
“Captain, you can open the door anytime. But if it is open, it takes a few seconds to close it and the ship won’t lift with a door open.”
“Too right. Gay Deceiver.”
“Hi, Boss. Where did you pick up the tarts?”
“Gay, check and report.”
“All circuits checked, all systems go, juice point seven-eight – and I’m in the mood.”
“Cast loose L-gun. Prepare to burn.”
“Done!”
“Captain,” my husband said worriedly, “are you planning to blast them?”
“I hope not. I’d rather run than fight. I’d rather stay and get help than either. But they grounded where I can burn them – using offset.”
“Captain, don’t do it!”
“Copilot, I don’t plan to. Now drop it!”
The grounded flappy bird was about two hundred meters and a few degrees left of dead ahead. Two men – they looked like men – had disembarked and headed toward us. They were dressed alike – uniforms? They seemed vaguely familiar – but all uniforms seem vaguely familiar, do they not?
They were less than a hundred meters from us. Cap’n Zebbie did something at his instrument board and suddenly their voices were inside, blastingly loud. He adjusted the setting and we could hear clearly. Zebbie said, “That’s Russian! Isn’t it, Jake?”
“Captain, I think so. A Slavic language, in any case.” Jacob added, “Do you understand it?”
“Me? Jake, I said that I can swear in Russian; I didn’t say I could speak it. I can say ‘thank you’ and ‘please’ and ‘da’ and ‘nyet’ – maybe six more. How about you?”
“I can puzzle out a paper about mathematics with the aid of a dictionary. But speak it? Understand it? No.”
I tried to remember whether or not I had ever told Zebbie that I know Russian. My husband and Deety I had not told. Well, if Zebbie knew, he would call on me. It is not something I mention as it does not fit my persona. I started it out of curiosity; I wanted to read those great Russian novelists – Dostoievsky, Tolstoy, and so forth – in the original in order to find out why they were so celebrated. Why I had never been able to read one of those classic novels all the way through? (They had cured me of sleeping pills.)
So I set out to learn Russian. Soon I was wearing earphones to bed, listening to Russian in my sleep, working with a tutor in the daytime. I never mastered a good accent; those six-consonants-in-a-row words tie knots in my tongue. But one cannot read a language easily unless one can “hear” the words. So I learned the spoken language along with the written.
(Oh, yes, those “classic novels”: Having invested so much effort I carried out my purpose: War and Peace, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov, Anna Karenina, and so forth. Would you believe it? Something is gained in translation; the originals are even more depressing and soporific than translations. I’m not sure what purpose Russian fiction has, but it can’t be entertainment.)
I decided to wait. I was not eager to be interpreter and it would not be necessary if it turned out that Zebbie or Jacob had a language in common with our visitors – and I rationalized my decision by telling myself that it might turn out to be an advantage if the strangers thought that no one of us understood Russian.
(At that point I realized that I had been thinking in Russian. It’s a wonderful language for paranoid thoughts.)
When Zebbie switched on the outside mikes, the older was telling the Younger: ” – not let Fyodor Ivanovitch get wind of such thoughts, Yevgeny. He does not believe that (no good? stupid?) Britishers can excel us in anything. So don’t refer to that curious craft as ‘advanced engineering.’ A ‘weird assemblage of poorly organized experiments’ would be better.”
“I will remember. Shall I loosen my holster and take off the safety? To guard you, sir?”
The older man laughed. “You haven’t dealt with the damned British as long as I have. Never let them suspect that you are even mildly nervous. And always be sure to insult him first. Bear in mind that the lowliest serf in Ykraina is better than their so-called King-Emperor. That serf -“when Zebbie interrupted: “Arrêtez-là!”
The younger hesitated but the older never broke stride. Instead he answered in French: “You are telling me to halt, you British swine? An officer of the Tsar on Russian soil! I spit on your mother. And your father if your mother can remember who he was. Why are you speaking French, you soiled British spy? You fool no one. Speak Russian – or, if you are uncultured, speak English.”
Zebbie thumbed a button. “What about it, Jake? Switch to English when he’s so hipped on the subject of Englishmen? Or bull it through in French? My accent is better than his.”
“Maybe you can get away with it, Captain. I can’t.”
Zebbie nodded and opened the mike, spoke in English: “We are not British, not spies. We are American tourists and -“
“‘American’? What nonsense is this?” (He had shifted to English.) “A British colonial is still British – and a spy.”
My husband reached over, shut off the microphone. “Captain, I advise lifting. He won’t listen to reason.”
“Copilot, not till I must. We don’t even have enough water. I must try to parley.” Zebbie thumbed the switch. “I am not a British colonial. I am Zeb Carter of California, a citizen of the United States of America; I have my passport. If we have trespassed, we regret it and apologize.”
“Spy, that is the most bold-faced bluff I have ever heard. There is no such country as the United States of America. I am placing you under arrest. In the name of His Imperial Majesty the Tsar of All the Russias, by authority delegated to me by His Viceroy for New Russia Grand Duke Fyodor Ivanovitch Romanov, I arrest you and your party for the crime of espionage. Open up!”
By now they had reached Gay Deceiver and were at the portside door.
Zebbie answered, “You haven’t told me your name, much less identified yourself as a Russian officer. Or shown any authority over what is clearly unoccupied land.”
“What? Preposterous! I am Colonel the Count Morinosky of Novy Kiev, of the Viceroy’s Imperial Guard. As for my authority, look at the sky around you!” The self-proclaimed colonel drew his pistol, reversed it, and used the butt to pound on the door. “‘Open up!’ I said.”
Zebbie has good temper and calm judgment. Both are likely to slip if anyone abuses Gay Deceiver.
He said softly, “Colonel, your craft on the ground ahead – is there anyone in it?”
“Eh? Of course not. It’s a two-seater, as anyone can see. My private scoutabout. Never mind that. Keep quiet and open up.”
Zebbie again switched off his microphone. “Gay Deceiver, at command ‘Execute’ burn one tenth of a second at point of aim, intensity four.”
“Gotcha, Boss.”
“Colonel, how can you take four prisoners in a two-seater?”
“Simple. You and I will ride in your vehicle. The other members of your party will be hostage for your good behavior and will ride where assigned. You won’t see which craft lest you get foolish ideas. My pilot will fly my craft.”
“Execute.”
The grounded ornithopter began to burn fiercely – but the colonel did not see it. We saw it – but he was looking at Zebbie. Zebbie said, “Colonel, please stand clear of the door so that I can open it.”
“Oh. Very well.”
“Colonel! Look!” The younger officer, in stepping back, caught sight of the fire – and I have rarely heard such anguish.
Or, an instant later in the colonel’s face, such astonishment switching to rage. He attempted to shoot Zebbie – with his hand still gripping the barrel of his pistol. In a moment he realized what he was doing and flipped it to catch it by the grip.
I never saw whether or not he made the catch; Cap’n Zebbie commanded, “Gay Bounce!” and the scene blacked out while the colonel’s hand was open for the catch.
Zebbie was saying, “Jake, I lost my temper. I should not have done it; it ruined our last chance to deal with those Russians. But I hope it taught the ruddy snarf not to go around hammering dents into other people’s cars.”
“Captain, you did not ruin our ‘last chance’; we never had one. You ran into classic Russian xenophobia. The Commies didn’t invent that attitude; it goes back at least a thousand years. Read your history.” Jacob added, “I’m not sorry you burned his kite. I wish he had to walk home. Regrettably one of his craft will pick him up.”
“Jake, if I could afford to – in juice, in time – I would go back and keep him from being picked up. Harry them, not let them land. I won’t. Hmm – Shall we fall a bit farther and see what they are doing? Before we get on with our interrupted schedule?”
“Uh… Captain, may I have a Bonine pill?”
I squealed, “Me, too!”
“Deety, take care of ’em. I’ll put her in dive and we’ll look.”
“Captain, why not use the B, U, G, program?”
“Deety, somebody might be on that spot. Wups! I’m biting air.” Cap’n Zebbie leaned us over, placed Barsoom – I mean “Mars” – Mars-10 or whatever-dead ahead. “Should spot flappy birds in few minutes. Jake, how about binoculars?”
Zebbie didn’t want them himself while piloting. We passed them around and I spotted an ornithopter, then two more, and passed the glasses to Deety.
“Zebadiah, there is no one where we were parked.”
“You’re certain?”
“Yessir. The colonel’s scoutabout is stifl burning; there are people near it, nowhere else. That’s why I’m certain there is no one where we were. B, U, G, O, U, T is safe.”
Zebbie was slow to answer. “How about it, folks? It would be an unnecessary risk. Just one squawk and I’ll skip it.”
I kept quiet and hoped the others would, too. I don’t worry; I’m going to live as long as Atropos permits – meanwhile I intend to enjoy every minute. Zebbie waited, then said, “Here we go. Gay – Bug Out!”

Chapter XX

  • right theory, wrong universe.

Zeb:
Deety is going to force me to look like a hero because I don’t have the guts to let her down. I thought my copilot would veto going back to the scene of the crime; Jake is level-headed about safety precautions. I didn’t count on Sharpie; she’s unpredictable. But I thought Jake would object.
He didn’t. I waited until I was certain that no one was going to get me off the spot… then waited some more… then said sadly, “Here we go,” and told Gay to “BUG OUT!”
I expected to be a mushroom cloud. Instead we were parked where we had been and the colonel’s craft was burning briskly. (Someday I am going to run that experiment: a transition to attempt to cause two masses to occupy the same space. But I won’t be part of the experiment. The Bug-Out program scared me, and I liked the Take-Us-Home program a lot better after we made it two klicks H-above-G instead of parked. Could the Bug-Out program be modified so that Gay sneaked up on her target, checked it by radar, before accepting it? Take it up with Deety, Zeb – stick to what you know!)
The Russians appeared to be slow to notice our return. One ornithopter had grounded not far from the fire; there were several bystanders. I could not see whether or not my erstwhile arresting officer, Colonel Somethingsky, was in the group. I assumed that he was.
Then I was sure: A figure broke loose and headed toward us, waving a pistol. I said briskly, “Shipmates, is there any reason to hang around?”
I waited a short beat. “Hearing no objection – Gay Bounce!”
That black sky looked good. I wondered how Bumpsky was going to explain to the Grand Duke. Brass Hats are notoriously reluctant to believe unlikely stories.
“Did I bounce too quickly? Have you all seen what you wanted to see?”
Only Deety answered. “I was checking that program. I think I see a way to avoid two masses conflicting.”
“Keep talking.”
“Gay could sneak up on the target, inspect it by radar, accept it and ground, or refuse it and bounce – with no loss of time and with the same execute code. That spot could be knee-deep in Russians and Gay would simply whoosh us to where we are now.”
(I said to leave it to Deety. You heard me.) “Good idea. Do it. Can’t have too many fail-safes.”
“I’ll reprogram when we stop.”
“Correction. I want that fail-safe programmed now. I might need your revised program any moment.”
“Aye, aye, Captain.”
“‘Captain darling,’ if you please. If you must call me ‘Captain.’ Then review all preprograms and debug them, if necessary, with analogous fail-safes. And any new ones in the future. Now – Just put her into glide, headed west, and transit three minima?”
“Or more. Or less. I thought that a spot check every thirty kilometers would be about right for a rapid survey.”
“What altitude will we wind up? Assuming I simply aim her at the horizon and transit tangent to the curve.”
“Oh. What altitude do you want, Captain – Captain darling? A tangent does little in three minima, just a touch over a hundred meters. Is ten kilometers about right?”
“Ten klicks is fine. I could aim at the horizon, make transition, then at once give the B, O, U, N, C, E order.”
“So you could, Zebadiah, but if you will use the horizon as reference and aim eighteen and a half degrees above it – Will your gunsight depress that far?”
“No, but I’ll tell Gay. No problem.”
“Three minima on that upward slant will place you ten klicks H-above-G and a couple of klicks short of three minima on the curve.”
“Plus my present altitude.”
“No, no! Visualize the triangle, Zebadiah. It makes no real difference whether you do this from ten klicks H-above-G, or parked on the ground. Do you want exact figures?”
“You visualize triangles, Deety; that’s your department. I’ve got air bite now; I’m going to head west; I want to see where those ornithopters came from. Meantime work out that new fail-safe.” Did it really make no difference whether I started from ten thousand meters or right on deck? Didn’t I have to add in – No, of course not … but one way was sine and the other way was tan. But which one? Hell, it didn’t matter; Deety was right. She always is, on figures – but someday I’m going to work it carefully, on paper, with diagrams and tables. “Copilot.”
“Captain.”
“L axis, transit, three minima.”
“Transition, L axis, thirty kilometers – set!”
“Gay Deceiver.”
“I’m not at home but you may record a message.”
“Change attitude to climb eighteen point five degrees and report.”
“Roger Wilco. Climbing. Ten. Twelve. Fourteen. Sixteen. Eighteen. Mark!”
“Execute!”
We were somewhere else with black sky. “Gay, vertical dive. Execute.”
“No trouble, Clyde; enjoy the ride.”
“Zebadiah, may I talk with Gay while you look over the terrain? To reprogram that fail-safe.”
“Sure, go ahead. Jake, want to scan with binox while I eyeball it? I’ll warn before transition.”
“Zebadiah, I could give her a scouting program, automatic. Skip the vernliers, skip the climb order; just an ‘execute’ code word. Place her on course… or I could include course.”
“I’ll head her manually; the rest is swell – after that fail-safe. What’s the code word?”
“‘Scout’?”
“Good. Include the ‘execute’ idea in the code word. Deety, I’ve decided that I love you for your brain. Not those irrelevant physical attributes.”
“Zebadiah, once I’ve had a bath you may change your mind. I’ve had a sudden attack of brain fever. You had better program her yourself.”
“Mutiny again. I retract and apologize. You smell yummy and should marinate another week. It’s not your cortex or your character I love but your carcass – delectable! If it weren’t for these seat belts, it would be rape, rape, rape, all the way to the ground. Actually you’re sort o’ stupid-but what a chassis!”
“That’s better. Although I’m not stupid.”
“You married me. Res ipsa loquitur! Jake, are you spotting anything?”
“Dry hills, Captain. Might as well move on.”
“Zebadiah, will you place her in glide and hold a few minutes?”
“Sure. See something you want to check?”
“No, sir, But when we emerged here, we had seventy-three seconds to impact. We’ve used twenty-one seconds. I’d like a few moments to insert those preprograms.”
I overrode manually and started Gay into a stretched glide while I extended her wings. Then I let Deety and Gay talk to each other. Deety had both changes fully worked out; not once did Gay answer, “Null program.”
I was about to warn Deety that Gay was not a sailplane when she reported, “All done, Captain. For the ‘S’ program I added in an alarm for two klicks H-above-G.”
“Good idea. So now I head west again and give her that ‘S’ code word – no ‘Execute’?”
“Yessir. ‘Cept I’d like to try the revised B, U, G, O, U, T program. It has been less than four minutes since we left. Someone may be in that exact spot.”
“Deety, I share your curiosity. But it’s like testing a parachute the hard way. Can’t we save it until we need it? Then, if there is a glitch, we’ll be dead so fast we’ll hardly notice it.”
Deety said nothing. I waited, then said, “Comment, please.”
“No comment, Captain.” Deety’s answer was toneless. “Hmm – Science Officer… comment, please.”
“I have no comment to offer, Captain.” (A slight chill?)
“Copilot, I require your advice.”
“Uh, if the Captain please. Am I privileged to ask for written orders?”
“Well, I’ll be dipped in – Gay Bounce! Is there such a thing as a ‘space lawyer’? Like ‘sea lawyer’? Jake, in general, anyone, save in the face of the enemy, may demand written orders… if he’ll risk his career to ‘perpetuate evidence for the court-martial he knows will follow. Did it myself once and saved my neck and cost my temporary boss fifty numbers – and I wound up senior to him and he resigned.
“But a second-in-command is in a special position; it is his duty to advise his C.O., even if the C.O. doesn’t ask for advice. So I don’t see how you can demand written orders on a point already one of your duties. But I won’t make an issue of it. I’ll direct the Astrogator to log your request, then I can dictate my reply into the log. Then I am going to ground this go-buggy and turn command over to you. Maybe you’ll have more luck chairing this debating society than I have had. I wish you luck – you’ll need it!”
“But, Captain, I did not ask for written orders.”
“Eh?” I thought back. He hadn’t, quite. “It sounded as if you were about to.”
“I was stalling. I must advise you to follow the prudent course. Unofficially, I prefer to risk the test. But I should not have stalled. I’m sorry that my intransigence caused you to consider relinquishing command.”
“I didn’t just consider it; I have. Resignation effective the first time we ground. You’ve bought it, Jake.”
“Captain -“
“Yes, Deety?”
“You are correct; the test I suggested is useless, and could be fatal. I should not have asked for it. I’m sorry… sir.”
“Me, too! I felt you were being too strict with Deety. But you weren’t; you were taking care of us, as you always do, Zebbie. Captain Zebbie. Of course you shouldn’t make a risky test we don’t need.”
I said, “Anyone anything to add?” No one spoke up, so I added, “I’m heading west,” and did so. “Gay Deceiver – Bug Out!”
Black sky above us; that “dead sea bottom” far below… I remarked, “Looks as if a Russian, or one of their flappy craft, is in our parking spot. Deety, your revised program worked perfectly.”
“But, Zebadiah – why did you risk it?” She sounded terribly distressed.
“Because all of you wanted to, despite what you said later. Because it’s my last chance to make such a decision.” I added, “Jake, I’m going to tilt her over. Grab the binox and see if you can identify where we were parked. If that fire is smoking, you can use it for reference.”
“But, Captain, I’m not taking command. I won’t accept it.”
“Pipe down and carry out your orders! It’s this damned yack-yack and endless argument that’s giving me ulcers. If you won’t accept command, then it’s up for grabs. But not me! Oh, I’ll pilot as the new C.O. orders. But I won’t command. Deety, how long did Gay pause to make that radar check? At what height?”
“H-above-G was half a klick. Duration I don’t know but I can retrieve it. Darling – Captain! You’re not really going to quit commanding us?”
“Deety, I don’t make threats. Pipe down and retrieve that duration. Jake, what do you see?”
“I’ve located the fire. Several ornithopters are on the ground. My guess places one of them about where we were parked. Captain, I advise not dropping lower.”
“Advice noted. Deety, how about that duration?” I didn’t know how to ask for it myself, not having written the program.
Deety retrieved it smoothly: 0.071 seconds – call it a fifteenth of a second. Radar is not instantaneous; Gay had to stop and sweep that spot long enough for a “picture” to form in her gizzards, to tell her whether or not she could park there. A fifteenth of a second is loads of time for the human eye. I hoped that Colonel Frimpsky had been watching when Gay popped up and blinked out.
“Five klicks H-above-G, Captain.”
“Thanks, Jake.” The board showed dive rate – straight down! – of over seven hundred kilometers per hour, and increasing so fast that the units figure was an unreadable blur, and the tens place next to it was blinking one higher almost by the second.
Most carefully I eased her out of dive, and gently, slowly opened her wings part way for more lift as she slowed, while making a wide clockwise sweep to the east – slowed her dive, that is, not her speed through the air. When I had completed that sweep, and straightened out headed for that column of smoke on course west, I was making over eight hundred kilometers per hour in unpowered glide and still had almost a klick H-above-G I could turn into greater speed.
Not that I needed it – I had satisfied myself by eye of what I had been certain of by theory: an ornithopter is slow.
Jake said worriedly, “May I ask the Captain his plans?”
“I’m going to give Colonel Pistolsky something to remember us by! Gay Deceiver.”
“Still aboard, Boss.”
I kept my eye on the flappy birds still in the air while I let Gay fly herself. Those silly contraptions could not catch us but there was always a chance that a pilot might dodge the wrong way.
Most of them seemed anxious to be elsewhere: they were lumbering aside right and left. I looked at the smoke – dead ahead – and saw what I had not noticed before: an ornithopter beyond the smoke.
Jake gasped but said nothing. We were on collision course closing at about 900 kms/hr, most of it ours. Suicide pilot? Idiot? Panicked and frozen?
I let him get within one klick of us, which brought us almost to the smoke and near the deck, about 200 meters H-above-G-and I yelped, “Scout!”
Yes, Deety is a careful programmer; the sky was black, we were ten klicks H-above-G, and so far as I could tell, the same barren hills under us that we had left five minutes earlier – and I was feeling cocky. My sole regret was that I would not hear Colonel Snarfsky try to explain to the Grand Duke the “ghost” craft now used by “British spies.”
Did Russian nobility practice “honorable hara-kiri”? Perhaps the loaded-pistol symbol? You know that one: The officer in disgrace returns to his quarters and finds that someone has thoughtfully loaded his pistol and placed it on his desk… thereby saving the regiment the scandal of a court.
I didn’t want the bliffy dead but busted to buck private. With time to reflect on politeness and international protocol while he cleaned stables.
I checked our heading, found that we were still pointed west. “Gay Deceiver, Scout!”
Black sky again, the same depressing landscape – “Copilot, is it worthwhile to tilt down for a better look? That either takes juice – not much but some – or it takes time to drop far enough to bite air and do it with elevons. We can’t afford to waste either time or juice.”
“Captain, I don’t think this area is worth scouting.”
“Careful of that participle; better say ‘exploring.'”
“Captain, may I say something?”
“Deety, if you are speaking as Astrogator, you not only may but must.”
“I could reprogram to put us lower if I knew what altitude was just high enough to let you use elevons. Conserve both time and juice, I mean.”
“It seems to be about eight klicks H-above-G, usually. Hard to say since we don’t have a sea-level.”
“Shall I change angle to arrive at eight klicks H-above-G?”
“How long does it take us to fall two klicks when we arrive?”
She barely hesitated. “Thirty-two and a half seconds.”
“Only half a minute? Seems longer.”
“Three-two point six seconds, Captain, if this planet has the same surface gravity as Mars in our own universe – three-seven-six centimeters per second squared. I’ve been using it and haven’t run into discrepancies. But I don’t see how this planet holds so much atmosphere when Mars – our Mars – has so little.”
“This universe may not have the same laws as ours. Ask your father. He’s in charge of universes.”
“Yes, sir. Shall I revise the program?”
“Deety, never monkey with a system that is working well enough – First Corollary of Murphy’s Law. If it is an area as unattractive as this, we’ll simply get out. If it has possibilities, half a minute isn’t too long to wait, and the additional height will give us a better idea of the whole area. Gay Deceiver, Scout!”
We all gasped. Thirty kilometers and those barren hills were gone; the ground was green and fairly level – and a river was in sight. Or a canal.
“Oh, boy! Copilot, don’t let me waste juice – be firm with me. Deety, count seconds. Everybody eyeball his sector, report anything interesting.”
Deety started chanting “… thirteen… . fourteen… . fifteen – ” and each second felt like ten. I took my hands off the controls to keep from temptation. That was either a canal or a stream that had been straightened, revetted, and maintained for years, maybe eons. Professor Lowell had been right – right theory, wrong universe.
“Deety, how far is the horizon?”
” – seventeen – about two hundred fifty klicks – twenty -“
I placed my hands gently on the controls. “Hon, that’s the first time you’ve ever used the word ‘about’ with reference to a number.”
” – twenty-four – insufficient data! – twenty-six -“
“You can stop counting; I felt a quiver.” I put a soft nose-down pressure on the elevons and decided to leave her wings spread; we might want to stretch this one. “Insufficient data?”
“Zebadiah, it was changing steadily and you had me counting seconds. Horizon distance at ten klicks height above ground should be within one percent of two hundred and seventy kilometers. That assumes that this planet is a perfect sphere and that it is exactly like Mars in our universe – neither is true. It ignores refraction effects, tricky even at home – and unknown to me here. I treated it as geometry, length of tangent for an angle of four degrees thirty-seven minutes.”
“Four and half degrees? Where in the world did you get that figure?”
“Oh! Sorry, dear, I skipped about six steps. On Earth one nautical mile is one minute of arc – check?”
“Yes. Subject to minor reservations. With a sextant, or in dead reckoning, or on a chart, a mile is a minute, a minute is a mile. Makes it simple. Otherwise we would be saying a minute is one thousand eight hundred fifty-three meters and the arithmetic would get hairy.”
“One-eight-five-three point one-eight-seven-seven-oh-five plus,” she corrected me. “Very hairy. Best not convert to MKS until the last step. But, Zebadiah, there is a simpler relation here. One minute of arc equals one kilometer, near enough not to matter. So I treated H-above-G, ten klicks, as a versine, applied the haversine rule and got four degrees thirty-seven minutes or two hundred seventy-seven kilometers to the theoretical horizon. You see?”
“I see everything but how you hide haversine tables in a jump suit. Me, I hide ’em in Gay… and make her do the work.” Yes, I could nose her over now – easy does it, boy.
“Well, I didn’t, exactly. I calculated it, but I did it the easy way: Naperian logarithms and angles in radians, then converted back to degrees to show the relationship to kilometers on the ground.”
“That’s ‘the easy way’?”
“It is for me, sir!”
“If you’re quivering your chin, stop it. I told you it was your luscious body, not your brain. Most idiots-savants are homely and can’t do anything but their one trick. But you’re an adequate cook, as well.”
That got me a stony silence. I kept easing her nose down. “Time for binox, Jake.”
“Aye aye, sir. Captain, I am required to advise you. With that last remark to the Astrogator you risked your life.”
“Are you implying that Deety is an inadequate cook? Why, Jake!”
Hilda interrupted. “She’s a gourmet cook!”
“I know she is, Sharpie… but I don’t like to say it where Gay can hear – Gay can’t cook. Nor has she Deety’s other talent which ’tis death to hide. Jake, that’s a settlement below.”
“Of sorts. A one-church village.”
“Do you see ornithopters? Anything that could give us trouble?”
“Depends. Are you interested in church architecture?”
“Jake, this is no time for a cultural chat.”
“I’m required to advise you, sir, This church has towers, something like minarets topped off with onion-shaped structures.”
“Russian Orthodox!”
Hilda said that. I said nothing. I eased Gay’s nose up to level flight, lined her up with what I thought was downstream, and snapped, “Gay, Scout!”
The canal was still in sight, almost under us and stretching over the horizon. I was almost lined up with it. Gay, Scout!
“Anybody see that settlement that was almost ahead before this last transition? Report.”
“Captain Zebbie, it’s much closer now but on this side.”
“I see. Or don’t. Jake isn’t transparent.”
“Captain, the city – quite large – is about a forty-five-degree slant down to starboard, not in sight from your seat.”
“If forty-five degrees is a close guess, a minimum transition on that bearing should place us over the city.”
“Captain, I advise against it,” Jake told me.
“Reasons, please.”
“This is a large city that might be well defended. Their ornithopters look odd and ineffective but we must assume they have spaceships as good or better than ours or the Tsar could not have a colony here. This causes me to suspect that they may have smart missiles. Or weapons utterly strange. I would rather check for onion towers from a distance. And not stay long in one place – I think we’ve been here too long. I’m jumpy.”
“I’m not” – my sixth sense was not jabbing me – “but set verniers for a minimum transition along L axis, then execute at will. No need to be a slow fat target.”
“One minimum, L axis – set!”
Suddenly my guardian angel goosed me. “Execute!”
I noticed the transition principally because Gay was now live under my hand – air bite. Perhaps she had not been quite level. I turned her nose down to gather maneuvering speed unpowered, then did a skew turn – and yelped, “Gay Bounce!” having seen all that I wanted to see: an expanding cloud. Atomic? I think not. Lethal? You test it; I’m satisfied.
I told Gay to bounce three more times, placing us a bit less than fifty klicks above ground. Then I spent a trifle of power to nose her over. “Jake, use the binox to see how far this valley runs, whether it is all cultivated, whether it has more settlements. We are not going to get close enough to look for onion spires; that last shot was unfriendly. Rude. Impetuous. Or am I prejudiced? Science Officer? Le mot juste, s’il vous plait.”
“Nye kultoorni.”
“I remember that one! Makes Russians turn green. What does it mean? How did you happen to know it, Sharpie?”
“Means what it sounds like: ‘uncultured.’ I didn’t just ‘happen,’ Cap’n Zebbie; I know Russian.”
I was flabbergasted. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“You didn’t ask me.”
“Sharpie, if you handled the negotiations, we might not have had trouble.”
“Zebbie, if you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything. He was calling you a spy and insulting you while the palaver was still in French. I thought it might be advantageous if they thought none of us knew Russian. They might spill something.”
“Did they?”
“No. The colonel was coaching his pilot in how to be arrogant. Then you told them to halt, in French, and no more Russian was spoken save for meaningless side remarks. Zebbie, when they tried to shoot us down just now, would they have refrained had they known that I had studied Russian?”
“Mmm – Sharpie, I should know better than to argue with you. I’m going to vote for you for captain.”
“Oh, No!”
“Oh, Yes. Copilot, I’m going to assume that everything this side of the hills and involved with this watercourse – courses – twin canals – is New Russia and that honorary Englishmen – us! – aren’t safe here. So I’m going to look for the British colony. It may turn out that they won’t like us, either. But the British are strong on protocol; we’ll have a chance to speak our piece. They may hang us but they’ll give us a trial, with wigs and robes and rules of evidence and counsel who will fight for us.” I hesitated. “One hitch. Colonel Snotsky said there was no such country as the United States of America and I had the impression that he believed it.”
Sharpie said, “He did believe it, Cap’n Zebbie. I caught some side chatter. I think we must assume that, in this universe, there was no American Revolution.”
“So I concluded. Should we all be from the East Coast? I have a hunch that the West Coast may be part Russian, part Spanish – but not British. Where are we from? Baltimore, maybe? Philadelphia? Suggestions?”
Sharpie said, “I have a suggestion, Cap’n Zebbie.”
“Science Officer, I like your suggestions.”
“You won’t like this one. When all else fails, tell the truth.”

Chapter XXI

  • three seconds is a long time –

Deety:
Zebadiah is convinced that I can program anything. Usually I can, given a large and flexible computer – but my husband expects me to manage it with Gay Deceiver and Gay is not big. She started life as an autopilot and is one, mostly.
But Gay is sweet-tempered and we both want to please him.
While he and my father were looking over the area that we thought of as “Russian Valley” or “New Russia,” he asked me to work up a program to locate the British colony in minimum time, if it were in daylight. If not, then we would sleep near the sunrise line, and find it on the new daylight side.
I thought of bouncing out about a thousand kilometers and searching for probable areas by color. Then I realized that I didn’t know that much about this planet. “Dead sea bottoms” from space looked like farm land.
At last I recalled something Zebadiah had suggested yesterday – no, today! less than two hours ago. (So much had happened that my sense of time played tricks. It was still accurate – but I had to think instead of just knowing.)
Random numbers – Gay had plenty of them. Random numbers are to a computer what free will is to a human being.
I defined a locus for Gay: nothing east of where we were, nothing in “Russian Valley,” nothing on the dark side, nothing north of 45°, nothing south of 45° south. Yesterday I could not have told her the latter; but Mars has a good spin, one a gyrocompass can read. While we slept, Gay had noted that her gyrocompass did not have its axis parallel to that of this strange planet and had precessed it until it did.
Inside that locus I told Gay to take a Drunkard’s Walk, any jumps that suited her, a three-second pause at each vertex, and, if one of us yelled “Bingo!” display latitude, longitude, and Greenwich, and log all three, so we could find it again.
Oh, yes – she was to pause that three seconds exactly one minimum H-above-G at each vertex.
I told her to run the program for one hour … but that any of us could yell “Stop!” and then say “Continue” and that would be time-out, not part of the hour. But I warned my shipmates that yelling “Stop!” not only slowed things but also gave Russians (or British or anybody) a chance to shoot at us. I emphasized that three seconds is a long time (most people don’t know it).
One hour –
Three seconds for each check –
Twelve hundred random spot checks – This is not a “space-filling” curve. But it should locate where the British were most thickly settled. If one hour did not do it, ten hours certainly would.
Without Gay, without her ability to do a Drunkard’s Walk, we could have searched that planet for a lifetime, and never found either colony. It took the entire human race (of our universe) thirty centuries to search Terra… and many spots were missing until they could be photographed from space.
My husband said, “Let’s get this straight.” He bounced us four minima. “These subprograms – Gay, are you listening?”
“Of course. Are you?”
“Gay, go to sleep.”
“Roger and out, Boss.”
“Deety, I want to make sure of these subprograms but couldn’t use code words while she was awake. I -“
“Excuse me, Zebadiah, but you can. She will ignore code words for subprograms except while the general program is running. The code for the general program is unusual and requires the execution command, so it can’t be started by accident. You can wake Gay. We need her on some points.”
“You’re a smart girl, Deety.”
“I’ll bet you tell that to all adequate cooks, Boss.”
“Ouch!”
“Captain, it is not difficult to program a computer to supervise cooking machines. The software sold under the trademark ‘Cordon Bicu’ is reputed to be excellent. Before you wake Gay, would you answer a hypothetical question concerning computers and cooking?”
“Captain!”
“Copilot?”
“I advise against permitting the Astrogator to discuss side issues – such as cooking – while we have this problem facing us.”
“Thank you, Copilot. Astrogator, what was your hypothetical question?”
Pop had been careful not to interfere between Zebadiah and me, But his advice from copilot to captain was intended for my ears – he was telling me to shut up, and I suddenly heard Jane saying, “Deety, anytime a wife thinks she has won an argument, she has lost it.”
I’m not Jane, I’m Deety. I get my temper from my father. I’m not as quick to flare up as he is, but I do have his tendency to nurse a grievance. Zebadiah is sometimes a tease and knows how to get my goat.
But Pop was telling me: “Drop it, Deety!”
Maybe Zebadiah was right – too much argument, too much discussion, too much “sewing circle & debating society.” We were all intensely interested as we were all in the same peril… but how much tougher is it to be captain rather than one of the crew? Twice? Ten times?
I didn’t know, Was my husband cracking under the pressure? “Getting ulcers”?
Was I adding to his burden?
I didn’t have to stop to think this through; it was preprogrammed below the conscious level; Pop pushed the “execute” button and the answers spilled out. I answered my husband at once,
“What hypocritical question, sir?”
“You said, ‘hypothetical.’ Something about computers and cooking.”
“Captain, my mind has gone blank. Perhaps we had better get on with the job before I forget how it works.”
“Deety, you wouldn’t fib to your pool’ old broken-down husband?”
“Sir, when my husband is poor and old and broken-down, I will not fib to him.”
“Hmm – If I hadn’t already promised my support to Hilda, I would vote for you for captain.”
Aunt Hilda cut in: “Zebbie, I release you! I’m not a candidate.”
“No, Sharpie, once having promised political support an honorable man never welches. So it’s all right for Gay to listen in?”
“Certainly, sir. For display I must have her. Hello, Gay.”
“Hi, Deety.”
“Display dayside, globe.” At once Gay’s largest screen showed the western hemisphere of Earth, our Earth in our universe – Terra. Early afternoon at Snug Harbor? Yes, the clock in my head said so and GMT on the instrument board read 20:23:07. Good heavens, it had been only twenty hours since my husband and my father had killed the fake “ranger.” How can a lifetime be crowded into less than a day? Despite the clock in my head it seemed years since I had walked down to our pool, a touch tiddly and hanging onto my bridegroom for support.
“Display meridians parallels. Subtract geographical features,” Gay did so. “From program coded ‘A Tramp Abroad’ display locus.”
Gay used orthographic projection, so the 45th parallels were straight lines. Since I had told her to display dayside, these two bright lines ran to the left edge of the display, that being the sunrise line. But the right edge of the locus was an irregular line running southwest. “Add display Russian Valley.”
To the right of the locus and touching it, Gay displayed as solid brightness a very long and quite wide blotch. “Subtract Russian Valley.” The area we had sketchily explored disappeared.
“Deety,” my husband asked, “how is Gay doing this? Her perms have no reference points for Mars – not even Mars of our own universe.”
“Oh. Gay, display ‘Touchdown.'”
“Null program.”
“Mmm, yes, that’s right; the Sun has just set where we were parked. Zebadiah, shall I have her rotate the globe enough to show it? All she would show would be a bright spot almost on the equator. I have defined the spot where we grounded as zero meridian – Greenwich for Mars. This Mars.”
“And zero parallel? An arbitrary equator?”
“Oh, no, no! While we slept Gay adjusted her gyrocompass to match this planet. Which gave her true north and latitude. She already knows the radius and curvature of Mars – I started to tell her and found she had retrieved it from her perms. Aerospace Almanac?”
“I suppose so. But we discussed Mars’ diameter last night while Gay was awake. Both you and Hilda knew it; Jake and I did not.”
As I remembered it, Aunt Hilda spoke up – then Pop kept quiet. If Pop wanted to sit back and be proud of Aunt Hilda’s encyclopedic memory that was all right with me. If my husband has a flaw, it is that he has trouble believing that females have brains… probably because he is so intensely interested in the other end. I went on with my lecture:
“Once I start Gay, she will say and record nothing unless ordered. She will make random transitions inside that locus until someone yells ‘Bingo!’ She won’t slow down even then. She will place a bright point on the map at that latitude and longitude, record both latitude and longitude, and the exact time. She will display the Bingo time, too, for one second. If you want to retrieve that Bingo, you had better jot down that time – to the second. Because she’ll be doing twenty jumps each minute. Don’t worry about the hour, just the minute and the second. Oh, you could still retrieve it if you had the minute right, as I can ask her to run through all Bingoes in a given minute. Can’t be more than twenty and your Bingo might be the only one.
“When we’ve done one hour of this, that map could, at most, have twelve hundred dots on it – but may have only a few – or none. If they are clustered, I’ll reduce the locus and we’ll run it again. If not, we can sleep and eat and do it for the other day side, the one twelve hours away. Either way, Gay will find the British – and we’ll be safe.”
“I hope you’re right. Ever heard of the Opium Wars, Deety?”
“Yes, Captain. Sir, every nation is capable of atrocities, including our own. But the British have a tradition of decent behavior no matter what blemishes there are.”
“Sorry. Why a one-hour program?”
“We may have to shorten it. A decision every three seconds for sixty minutes may be too tiring. If we start showing a marked hot spot sooner than that, we can shorten the first run and reduce the locus. We’ll have to try it and see. But I feel certain that a one-hour run, a short rest, then another one-hour run, will locate the British if they are now on the day side.”
“Deety, what do you define as ‘Bingo’?”
“Anything that suggests human settlement. Buildings. Roads. Cultivated fields. Walls, fences, dams, aircraft, vehicles – But it is not ‘Bingo’just because it looks interesting. Although it might be ‘Stop!”
“What’s the difference?”
“‘Stop’ does not tell Gay to record or to display. For that you must add ‘Bingo.’ ‘Stop’ is for anything you want to look at more than three seconds. Maybe it looks promising and a few seconds more will let you decide. But please, everyone! There should not be more than a dozen calls for ‘Stop!’ in the hour. Any more questions?”
We started. Hilda gave the first Bingo. I saw it, too – farm buildings. Aunt Hilda is faster than I. I almost broke my own injunction; I had to bite down on “Stop!” The temptation to take a longer look was almost overpowering.
All of us made mistakes – but none serious. Hilda racked up the most Bingoes and Zebadiah the fewest – but I’m fairly certain that my husband was “cheating” by waiting to give Pop or me first crack at it. (He would not be competing with Aunt Hilda; port-forward and starboard-after seats have little overlapping coverage.)
I thought it would be tedious; instead it was exciting – but dreadfully tiring. Slowly, less than one a minute, bright dots appeared on the display. I saw with disappointment that most Bingoes were clustered adjacent to the irregular margin marking Russian territory. It seemed probable that these marked Russian territory, so very probable that it hardly seemed worthwhile to check for onion spires.
Once my husband called “Stop” and then “Bingo” at a point north and far west, at least fifteen hundred kilometers from the nearest Bingo light. I noted the time – Greenwich 21:16:51 – then tried to figure out why Zebadiah had stopped us. It was pretty country, green hills and lightly wooded and I spotted a wild stream, not a canal. But I saw no buildings or anything suggesting settlement.
Zebadiah wrote something on his knee pad, then said, “Continue.” I was itching to ask why he had stopped, but when a decision must be made every three seconds there is no time to chat.
When the hour was nearly up, a single Bingo light in the far west that had been shining since the first five minutes was joined by another when Hilda scored another Bingo and two minutes later Pop said “Bingo!” and we had an equilateral triangle twenty kilometers on a side. I noted the time most carefully – then told myself not to be disappointed if inspection showed onion towers; we still had a hemisphere to go.
I decided to believe in that British colony the way one has to believe hard in fairies to save Tinker Bell’s life. If there were no British colony, we might have to risk Earth-without-a-J. Gay Deceiver was a lovely car but as a spaceship she had shortcomings. No plumbing. Air for about four hours and no way to recycle. No plumbing. Limited food storage. No plumbing. No comfortable way to sleep in her. No plumbing.
But she had talents no other spaceship had. Her shortcomings (according to my father and husband) could be corrected at any modern machine shop. But in the meantime we did not have even an outhouse behind the barn.
At last Gay stopped, continued to display, and announced, “One hour of ‘A Tramp Abroad’ completed. Instructions, please.”
“Gay, Bounce,” said Zebadiah. “Deety, I don’t think we’ve nailed down the piece The Sun Never Sets On. But this dense cluster here to the right – Too close to the Little Father’s little children. Eh?”
“Yes. Zebadiah, I should tell Gay to trim the locus on the east to eliminate the clustered lights, and now we can add almost nine hundred kilometers on the west, to the present sunrise line. Gay can rotate the display to show the added area. I suspect that one more hour will fill in the picture sufficiently.”
“Maybe even less. You were right; three seconds is not only a long time; it is excessively long. Isn’t two seconds enough? Can you change that without starting from scratch?”
“Yes to both, Captain.”
“Good. You can add thirty degrees on the west instead of fifteen. Because we are going to kill an hour – stretch our legs, eat a snack… and I for one want to find a bush. How do I tell Gay to return to a particular Bingo? Or will that mess up your program?”
“Not a bit. Tell her to return to Bingo such-and-such, stating the time.”
I was unsurprised when he said, “Gay, return to Bingo Greenwich twenty-one sixteen fifty-one.”
It was indeed a pretty stream. Zebadiah said happily, “That beats burning juice. Who sees a clearing close to that creek, big enough for Gay? Hover and squat, I mean; I don’t dare make a glide landing, dead stick – the old girl is loaded.”
“Zebbie, I’m sober as you are!”
“Don’t boast about it, Sharpie. I think I see a spot. Close your eyes; I’m going to.”
I almost wish I had.
Zebadiah came in on a long glide, everything set for maximum lift – but no power. I kept waiting for that vibration that meant that Gay was alive and roaring… and waited… and waited –
He said, “Gay – ” and I thought that he was going to tell her to turn herself on. No. We actually dropped below the level of that bank.
Then he suddenly switched on power by hand but in reverse – flipped us up on that bank; we stalled, and dropped perhaps a meter – we just barely missed that bank.
I didn’t say anything. Aunt Hilda was whispering, “Hail Mary Mother of God Om Mani Padme Hum There is No God but God and Mahomet is His Prophet – ” then some language I did not know but it sounded very sincere.
Pop said, “Son, do you always cut it that fine?”
“I saw a man do it that way when he had to; I’ve always wondered if I could. But what you didn’t know was – Gay, are you listening?”
“Sure thing, Boss. You alerted me. Where’s the riot?”
“You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
“Then why am I pushing this baby carriage?”
“Gay, go to sleep.”
“Sleepy time. Roger and out, Boss.”
“Jake, what you didn’t know was that I had my cheeks puffed to say B, O, U, N, C, E, explosively. Your gadget has made Gay’s reflexes so fast that I knew I could come within a split second of disaster and she would get us out. I wasn’t cutting didoes. Look at that meter. Seventy-four percent of capacity. I don’t know how many landings I’m going to have to make on that much juice.”
“Captain, it was brilliant. Even though it almost scared it out of me.”
“Wrong honorific, Captain. I’m the pilot going off duty. We’re landed; my resignation is effective; you’re holding the sack.”
“Zeb, I told you that I would not be captain.”
“You can’t help it; you are. The second-in-command takes command when the captain dies, or goes over the hill – or quits. Jake, you can cut your throat, or desert, or go on the binnacle list, or take other actions – but you can’t say you are not captain, when you are – Captain!”
“If you can resign, I can resign!”
“Obviously. To the Astrogator, she being next in line of command.”
“Deety, I resign! Captain Deety, I mean.”
“Pop, you can’t do this to me! I’ll – I’ll – ” I shut up because I didn’t know what to do. Then I did. “I resign… Captain Hilda.”
“What? Why, that’s silly, Deety. A medical officer is not in line of command. But if ‘medical officer’ is a joke and ‘science officer,’ too, then I’m a passenger and still not in line of command.”
My husband said, “Sharpie, you have the qualifications the rest of us have. You can drive a duo -“
“Suddenly I’ve forgotten how.”
” – but that’s not necessary. Mature judgment and the support of your crew are the only requirements, as we are millions of miles and several universes from licenses and such. You have my support; I think you have it from the rest. Jake?”
“Me? Of course!”
“Deety?”
“Captain Hilda knows she has my support,” I agreed. “I was first to call her ‘Captain.'”
Aunt Hilda said, “Deety, I’ve just resigned.”
“Oh, no, you haven’t anybody to resign to!” I’m afraid I was shrill.
“I resign to the Great Spirit Manitou. Or to you, Zebbie, and it comes around in a circle and you are captain again… as you should be.”
“Oh, no, Sharpie. I’ve stood my watch; it’s somebody else’s turn. Now that you have resigned, we have no organization. If you think you’ve stuck me with it, think again. You have simply picked an unusual way to homestead on this spot. In the meantime, while nobody is in charge, I hope that you all are getting both ears and a belly full of what got me disgusted. Yack yack yack, argue, fuss, and jabber – a cross between a Hyde Park open forum and a high school debating society.”
Aunt Hilda said, in sober surprise, “Why, Zebbie, you almost sound vindictive.”
“Mrs. Burroughs, it is possible that you have hit upon the right word. I have taken a lot of guff… and quite a bit of it has been from you.”
I haven’t seen Aunt Hilda look so distressed since Mama Jane died. “I am very sorry, Zebbie. I had not realized that my conduct had displeased you so. I did not intend it so, ever. I am aware – constantly! – that you have saved our – my – life five distinct times… as well as continuously by your leadership. I’m as grateful as my nature permits – a giant amount, even though you consider me a shallow person. But one can’t show deepest gratitude every instant, just as one cannot remain in orgasm continuously; some emotions are too strong to stay always at peak.”
She sighed, and tears rolled down her face. “Zebbie, will you let me try again? I’ll quit being a Smart Aleck. It will be a hard habit to break; I’ve been one for years – my defense mechanism. But I will break it.”
“Don’t be so tragic, Hilda,” Zebadiah said gently. “You know I love you… despite your little ways.”
“Oh, I know you do! – you big ugly giant. Will you come back to us? Be our captain again?”
“Hilda, I’ve never left. I’ll go right on doing the things I know how to do or can learn. And as I’m told. But I won’t be captain.”
“Oh, dear!”
“It’s not tragic. We simply elect a new C.O.”
My father picked this moment to get hairy. “Zeb, you’re being pretty damned stiff-necked and self-righteous with Hilda. I don’t think she has misbehaved.”
“Jake, you are in no position to judge. First, because she’s your bride. Second, because you haven’t been sitting in the worry seat; I have. And you have supplied some of the worst guff yourself.”
“I was not aware of it… Captain.”
“You’re doing it now… by calling me ‘Captain’ when I’m not. But do you recall a couple of hours ago when I asked my second-in-command for advice – and got some back chat about ‘written orders’?”
“Mmm… I was out of line. Yes, sir.”
“Do you want other examples?”
“No. No, I stipulate that there are others. I understand your point, sir.” Pop gave a wry smile. “Well, I’m glad Deety hasn’t given you trouble.”
“On the contrary, she has given me the most.”
I had been upset – iI had never really believed that Zebadiah would resign. But now I was shocked and bewildered and hurt. “Zebadiah, what have I done?”
“The same sort of nonsense as the other two… but harder for me because I’m married to you.”
“But – But what?”
“I’ll tell you in private.”
“It’s all right for Pop and Aunt Hilda to hear.”
“Not with me. We can share our joys with others but difficulties between us we settle in private.”
My nose was stuffy and I was blinking back tears. “But I must know.”
“Dejah Thoris, you can list the incidents if you choose to be honest with yourself. You have perfect memory and it all took place in the last twenty-four hours.”
He turned his face away from me. “One thing I must urge before we choose a captain. I let myself be wheedled and bullied into surrendering authority on the ground. That was a bad mistake. A sea captain is still captain when his ship is anchored. Whoever becomes captain should profit by my mistake and not relinquish any authority merely because Gay is grounded. She can relax the rules according to the situation. But the captain must decide. The situation can be more dangerous on the ground than in air or in space. As it was today when the Russians showed up. Simply grounding must not be: ‘School’s out! Now we can play!'”
“I’m sorry, Zebbie.”
“Hilda, I was more at fault than you. I wanted to be free of responsibility. I let myself be talked into it, then my brain went on vacation. Take that ‘practice hike.’ I don’t recall who suggested it -“
“I did,” said my father.
“Maybe you did, Jake; but we all climbed on the bandwagon. We were about to run off like a bunch of Scouts with no Scoutmaster. If we had started as quickly as we had expected to, where would we be now? In a Russian jail? Or dead? Oh, I’m not giving myself high marks; one reason I’ve resigned is that I haven’t handled it well. Planning to leave Gay Deceiver and everything we own unguarded while we made walkabout – good God! If I had felt the weight of command I would never have considered it.”
Zebadiah made a sour face, then looked at my father. “Jake, you’re eldest. Why don’t you take the gavel while we pick a new C.O.? I so move.”
“Second!”
“Question!”
“White ballot!”
“What gavel? I’ll bet there isn’t a gavel on this planet.” In a moment Father quit stalling. We all voted, using a page from Zebadiah’s notebook torn in four. They were folded and handed to me and I was required to declare the vote. So I did:

Zeb
Zebadiah
Zebbie
Sharpie

Zebadiah reached back, got the ballots from me, handed back the one that meant “Aunt Hilda,” took the other three and tore them into small pieces.
“Apparently you did not understand me. I’ve stood my watch; someone else must take it – or we’ll park on this bank until we die of old age. Sharpie seems to have an overwhelming lead – is she elected? Or do we ballot again?”
We balloted again:

Sharpie
Jacob
Jacob
Hilda

“A tie,” Father said. “Shall we invite Gay to vote?”
“Shut up and deal the cards.”

Sharpie
Deety
Deety
Hilda

“Hey!” I protested. “Who switched?” (I certainly didn’t vote for me.)

Sharpie
Hilda
Zebbie
Hilda

“One spoiled ballot,” said my husband. “A non-candidate. Will you confirm that, Mr. Chairman?”
“Yes,” Pop agreed. “My dear … Captain Hilda. You are elected without a dissenting vote.”
Aunt Hilda looked as if she might cry again. “You’re a bunch of stinkers!”
“So we are,” agreed my husband, “But we are your stinkers, Captain Hilda.” That got him a wan smile. “Guess maybe. Well, I’ll try.”
“We’ll all try,” said Pop.
“And we’ll all help,” said my husband.
“Sure we will!” I said, and meant it.
Pop said, “If you will excuse me? I’ve been anxious to find a handy bush since before this started.” He started to get out.
“Just a moment!”
“Eh? Yes, my dear? Captain.”
“No one is to seek out a bush without an armed guard. Not more – and not less – than two people are to leave the car’s vicinity at one time. Jacob, if your need is urgent, you must ask Zebbie to hurry – I want the guard to carry both rifle and pistol.”
I think it worked out that Pop got the use of a bush last – and must have been about to burst his bladder. Later I overheard Pop say, “Son, you’ve read Aesop’s Fables?”
“Certainly.”
“Does anything remind you of King Log and King Stork?”

Chapter XXII

“‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.'”

Hilda:
I could tell from the first ballot that Zebbie was determined to make me take a turn as captain. Once I realized that, I decided to be captain – let them get sick of me and anxious to have Zebbie back.
Then suddenly I was captain – and it’s different. I did not ever again think of trying to make them sick of me; I just started to worry. And try.
First my husband wanted to find a bush for the obvious reason – and I suddenly realized that a banth might get him. Not a Barsoomian banth but whatever this planet held in dangerous carnivores.
So I ordered armed guards. With rules about not getting separated. It was a nuisance but I was firm… and knew at last what a crushing load there had been on Zebbie.
But one thing I could improve: Arrange for us to sleep inside the car.
The space back of the bulkhead behind the rear seats was not organized. We had about six hours till sundown (having gained on the Sun in going west), so I had everything in that space pulled out.
Space enough for Zebbie and Deety, on his sleeping bag opened out, blankets over them. Jacob and I? The piloting chairs we moved forward all the set screws would allow, laid them back almost fh~t and padded the cracks with pillows, and, to support our legs, the cushions from the rear seats were placed on boxes we would otherwise discard once I had the car organized. It wasn’t the best bed but low gravity and my cuddlesome husband made it a most attractive one.
Baths – In the stream and cold! Same rules as for bushes: armed guards. Soap thoroughly on the bank, get in and rinse fast, bounce out and towel till you glowed. Primitive? Luxurious!
This did not go smoothly. Take the “handy bush” problem. I did not have to be told that a latrine should be downstream or that our shovel should be carried every time without fail – rules for a clean camp are as old as the Old Testment.
But my first order called for no more than two and no less than two to leave the car at any time, and one must be armed – the other rifle and pistol must guard Gay.
I blurted out that order when the truth landed on me like a load of bricks that I, the runt who had never grown up, was now responsible for the lives of four people. At the time my orders seemed not only logical but necessary and feasible: Jacob would guard me, Zebbie would guard Deety, our men would guard each other.
There was a flaw. I did not realize that my edict required: a) one rifleman always to be at the car; b) both men to be away from the car from time to time.
Since this is not possible I amended it: When the men had to answer calls of nature, we women would lock ourselves in. I didn’t know that this planet had anything more dangerous than Alice’s Bread-and-Butter Fly. But that was the point: I didn’t know and until I did, I must assume that something as dangerous as a tiger lurked behind every bush.
Heavens! the bush might be carnivorous.
I was learning, with breath-snatching speed, something that most people never learn: A commanding officer’s “unlimited” authority isn’t freedom; it’s a straitjacket. She can’t do as she pleases; she never can – because every minute, awake and asleep, she must protect those under her command.
She can’t take any avoidable risk herself; her life does not belong to her; it belongs to her command.
When the captaincy was thrust on me, I decided that we would stay where we were until Gay Deceiver was reorganized so that all four of us could sleep comfortably and safely – no swollen ankles.
Sharpie hadn’t thought of this; Captain Hilda Burroughs thought of it at once. Captain Zebbie had thought of it when we first grounded, then had let himself be overruled.
I knew that I could rearrange the car to let us all sleep behind locked doors. But it would take time, sweat, and muscles, and I had just proclaimed an order that would take one or both sets of big muscles off the job for… how many times a day? Four people? Such needs can’t be hurried. I had a horrid suspicion that having someone standing over you with a rifle, even your nearest and dearest, might cause a healthy reflex to fail.
What to do?
Cancel the order?
No!
Cancel if a better scheme turned up. But don’t cancel without finding something better. This was a pretty spot, but there still might be that “banth.” Or bandersnatch. Or boojum. Especially a boojum. What if Zebbie should wander off that distance dictated by modesty and/or relaxation of nerves… and “softly and silently vanish away”?
And it was Zebbie I was having trouble with – Zebbie, who wasn’t going to give the new captain any back talk whatsoever. “Cap’n Hilda honey, I don’t need a chaperon, honest. I’ll carry my rifle and guard myself. No problem. Safety off and a cartridge under the firing pin. Promise.”
“Zebbie, I am not asking you, I am telling you.”
“But I don’t like to leave you girls unguarded!”
“Chief Pilot.”
“Ma’am. Captain.”
“I am not a girl. I am eleven years your senior.”
“I simply meant -“
“Pipe down!”
The poor dear’s ears turned red but he shut up. I said, “Astrogator!”
“Huh? Yes, Captain Auntie.”
“Can you use a rifle?”
“Oh, sure, Pop made me learn. But I don’t like a rifle; I like my shotgun.”
“Take the Chief Pilot’s rifle and guard the camp -“
“Look, I can do it better with my shotgun.”
“Pipe down and carry out your orders.”
Deety looked startled, trotted over to Zebbie, who surrendered his rifle without comment, face frozen.
“Copilot,” I said to my husband, “arm yourself with rifle and pistol, go with the Chief Pilot, guard him while he does what he has to do.”
Zebbie swallowed. “Sharpie – I mean ‘Captain Sharpie.’ It won’t be necessary. The golden moment has passed. All this talk.”
“Chief Pilot, please refrain from using my nickname while I am your commanding officer. Copilot, carry out your orders. Remain with the Chief Pilot and guard him continuously as long as necessary to accomplish the purpose of the trip.” (If Zebbie meant “constipation” – an emotional to-do can have that effect – I would act later in my capacity as “medical officer” – and it would not take four husky orderlies to make Zebbie hold still. The authority of a commanding officer almost never requires force. Odd but true – I wondered how I knew that.)
Once our men were out of earshot, I said, “Deety, could I learn to shoot that rifle?”
“I’m not sure I’m speaking to you. You humiliated my husband… when we all owe him so much.”
“Astrogator!”
Deety’s eyes got wide. “Good God – it’s gone to your head!”
“Astrogator.”
“Uh… yes, Captain.”
“You will refrain from personal remarks to me or about me during my tenure as commanding officer. Acknowledge that order, then log it.”
Deety’s face assumed the expression that means that she has shut out the world. “Aye aye, Captain. Gay Deceiver!”
“Hello, Deety!”
“Log mode. The Captain has ordered the Astrogator to refrain from personal remarks to her or about her during her tenure as commanding officer. I acknowledge receipt of order and will comply. Log date, time, and Bingo code. I tell you three times.”
“Deety, I hear you three times.”
“Back to sleep, Gay.”
“Roger and out.”
Deety turned to me, face and voice normal again. “Captain, I can teach you to shoot in such a way that you won’t get a sore shoulder or be knocked down. But to become a good shot with a rifle takes a long time. My shotgun doesn’t kick as hard… and you won’t need skill.”
“I thought a shotgun was more difficult.”
“Depends. A shotgun is usually for surprise targets in the air. That takes skill. But for a stationary target – within range – it’s about like a garden hose. The shot spreads in a cone. So easy that it’s not sporting.”
“‘Not sporting’ suits me. Will you show me how? What kind of target do we need?”
“It ought to be a large sheet of paper to show how the shot spreads. But, Captain, you know what will happen if I fire a gun?”
“What?”
“We will have two men back here at a dead run – one of them trying to dress as he runs. I don’t think he’ll be pleased.”
“Meaning I shouldn’t get Zebbie angry twice in ten minutes.”
“It might be your husband. Stands to reason that they’ll both take care of needs before returning. If I fire a shot, I’d better have a dead body to show for it, or one or the other will blow his top. Or both.”
“Both! Thanks, Deety – I didn’t think it through.”
“But also, the Captain will recall that she ordered me to guard camp. I can’t teach shooting at the same time.”
(Sharpie, can’t you do anything right?) “No, of course you can’t! Deety, I’m off to a bad start. All of you annoyed at me and one, maybe two, really angry.”
“Does the Captain expect me to comment?”
“Deety, can’t you call me ‘Aunt Hilda’?” I wasn’t crying – I’ve trained myself not to. But I needed to. “Yes, I want your comment.”
“Captain Aunt Hilda, I need to call you by your title to keep myself reminded that you are captain. Since you ordered me to refrain from personal remarks to you or about you, I needed a second order before I could comment.”
“As bad as that? Don’t spare me but make it quick.”
“The Captain hasn’t done badly.”
“I haven’t? Deety, don’t fib to Hilda; you never used to.”
“And I’m not going to now. Captain, I think you are off to a good start.”
“But you said it had gone to my head!”
“I was wrong. I realized how wrong when I was logging your order to me. What I said was worse than anything I said to Zebadiah while he was captain – he required me to review in my mind all the things I’ve said… and at least twice he should have given me a fat lip” – Deety smiled grimly – “‘cept that Zebadiah couldn’t bring himself to strike a woman even if she weren’t pregnant. Captain – Captain Aunt Hilda honey – Zebadiah didn’t crack down on us when he should have. He turned over to you a gang of rugged individualists, not one with any concept of discipline. I certainly had none. But I do now.”
“I’m not sure that I do,” I said miserably.
“It means obeying orders you don’t like and strongly disagree with – with no back talk. ‘Into the jaws of death rode the six hundred.’ Zebadiah would not do that to us… but he did let us annoy him into testing my new Bug-Out program. He had told me that the test was a useless risk; I should have agreed because it was useless. Instead I gave him a snooty ‘No comment,’ and you were as bad and Pop was worse. Mmm… I don’t think Zebadiah has had much experience as a commanding officer.”
“Why so, Deety? He is a captain.”
“That doesn’t mean that he has ever been a commanding officer. He has soloed quite a lot, in fighters. He has logged control time in larger craft or he wouldn’t hold a command pilot rating. But has he ever actually commanded? Nothing he has said to me indicated it… but he did tell me that before the last war a major was often captain of an air-and-space craft but now it almost always took a lieutenant colonel while majors wound up as copilots. He was explaining why he liked one-man fighters so well. Aunt Hilda – Captain – I think commanding was as new to Zebadiah as it is to you. Like sex, or having a baby, you can’t understand it till you’ve tried it.” She suddenly grinned. “So don’t hold Zebadiah’s mistakes against him.”
“What mistakes? He’s saved our lives again and again. I don’t blame him – now – for wanting a rest from commanding. Deety, it’s the hardest work possible even if you don’t lift a finger. I never suspected it. I don’t expect to sleep a wink tonight.”
“We’ll guard you!”
“No.”
“Yes, we will!”
“Pipe down.”
“Sorry, Ma’am.”
“What mistakes did Zebbie make?”
“Well… he didn’t crack down. You wasted no time in letting us know who is boss. You didn’t let us argue; you slapped us down at once. I hate to say this but I think you have more talent for command than Zebadiah has.”
“Deety, that’s silly!”
“Is it? Napoleon wasn’t tall.”
“So I have a Napoleonic complex. Humph!”
“Captain, I’m going to ignore that because, under that order you made me log, I’m damned if I do and damned if I don’t.”
“Well… I know how not to get a Napoleonic complex. Deety, you’re my second-in-command.”
“But Pop is second-in-command.”
“Wrong tense. ‘Was’ – he is no longer. As astrogator you may have inherited it anyhow; you can ask Zebbie – but in private; my decision is not subject to debate. Simply acknowledge it.”
“I – Aye aye, Captain.”
“You are now required to advise me whenever you think that I am about to make a serious mistake. You are also required to advise me on request.”
“My advice isn’t worth much. Look how I goofed a few minutes ago.”
“That was before you were appointed second-in-command. Deety, actually holding an office makes a big difference.”
Deety blinked and looked solemn, then said soberly, “Yes, I think it does. Yes, it does. I feel it, I do! Weird.”
“Wait till you’re captain. Eight times as weird.”
“Never. Pop wouldn’t go for it, Zebadiah wouldn’t, I won’t – that’s three votes.”
“I said No right up to the point where I could not avoid it. Don’t worry about it now. I’ll boss and you’ll advise me.”
“In that case, Captain, I advise you to reconsider letting us guard you. After we eat and start scouting again, I advise that, even if we find the British quickly, instead of making contact, we should find a spot as deserted as this at the sunrise line and get a long day’s sleep. We crew can get eight hours – I’ll take the middle watch; the men can get eight hours solid each… and the Captain can get anything up to twelve.”
“Advice noted. It’s good advice. But that’s not the program; we’re going to sleep here.” I told Deety what I had in mind. “When the car is restowed, we’ll eat. If there is daylight left, we’ll bathe before we eat. Otherwise in the morning.”
“I’d rather hurry through eating and get a bath… since you tell me I’m going to be able to sleep with my husband. When I’m frightened I stink worse… and I’ve been much more scared than I’ve tried to let on.”
“Into cold water after eating? Deety, you know better.”
“Oh. I’ll skip eating, if necessary, to bathe.”
“Astrogator, we’ll do it my way.”
“Yes, Captain. But I stink, I do.”
“We’ll all stink by the time we restow this car and may wind up eating sandwiches in the dark because everything that we don’t throw away is going to be inside with us and Gay locked and not a light showing by sundown.” I cocked my head. “Hear something, Deety?”

Our men came back looking cheerful, with Zebbie carrying Jacob’s rifle and wearing Jacob’s pistol. Zebbie gave me a big grin. “Cap’n, there wasn’t a durn thing wrong with me that Carter’s Little Liver Pills couldn’t have fixed. Now I’m right.”
“Good.”
“But just barely,” agreed my husband. “Hilda – Captain Hilda my beloved – your complex schedule almost caused me to have a childish accident.”
“I think that unnecessary discussion wasted more time than did my schedule. As may be, Jacob, I would rather have to clean up a ‘childish accident’ than have to bury you.”
“But -“
“Drop the matter!”
“Pop, you had better believe it!” sang out Deety.
Jacob looked startled (and hurt, and I felt the hurt). Zebbie looked sharply at me, no longer grinning. He said nothing, went to Deety, reached for his rifle. “I’ll take that, hon.”
Deety held it away from him. “The Captain has not relieved me.”
“Oh. Okay, we’ll do it by the book.” Zebbie looked at me. “Captain, I thoroughly approve of your doctrine of a continuous guard; I was too slack. It was my intention to relieve the watch. I volunteer to stand guard while you three eat -“
” – then I’ll guard while Zeb eats,” added Jacob. “We already worked it out. When do we eat? I could eat an ostrich with the feathers left on.” He added, “Hilda my love, you’re captain… but you’re still cook, aren’t you? Or is Deety the cook?”
(Decisions! How does the captain of a big ship cope?) “I’ve made changes. Deety remains astrogator but is now second-in-command and my executive officer. In my absence she commands. When I’m present, Deety’s orders are my orders; she will be giving them to implement what I want done. Neither she nor I will cook. Uh, medical officer – ” (Damn it, Sharpie, all those hours in the emergency room make you the only candidate. Or does it? Mmm – ) “Zebbie, does ‘command pilot’ include paramedical training?”
“Yes. Pretty sketchy. What to do to keep the bloke alive until the surgeon sees him.”
“You’re medical officer. I am assistant medical officer when you need me – if I don’t have something else that must be done.”
“Captain, may I put in a word?”
“Please do, Chief Pilot.”
“Sometimes you have to let the bloke die because there is something else that has to be done.” Zebbie looked bleak. “Saw it happen. Does no good to worry ahead of time or grieve about it afterwards. You do what you must.”
“So I am learning, Zebbie. Cook – Gentlemen, I’ve never eaten your cooking. You must assess yourselves. Which one of you is ‘adequate’ -“
“Ouch.”
“Your wording, Zebbie. – and which one is inadequate?”
They backed and filled and deferred to each other, so I put a stop to it. “You will alternate as first and second cook until evidence shows that one is chief cook and the other assistant. Jacob, today you are first cook -“
“Good! I’ll get busy at once!”
“No, Jacob.” I explained what we were going to do. “While you two get everything out of the car, Deety will teach me the rudiments of shotgun. Then I will take over guard duty and she can help unload. But keep your rifles loaded and handy, ’cause if I shoot, I’ll need help in a hurry. Then, when we restow, I’ll do it because I’m smallest and can stand up, mostly, behind the bulkhead. While Zebbie stands guard, and Deety and Jacob pass things in to me.”
Jacob wasn’t smiling – and I suddenly recognized his expression. I once had a dog who (theoretically) was never fed at the table. He would sit near my knee and look at me with that same expression. Why, my poor darling was hungry! Gut-rumble hungry. I had such a galloping case of nerves from becoming captain that I had no appetite.
“Deety, in the pantry back at Snug Harbor I noticed a carton of Milky Way bars. Did that get packed?”
“Certainly did! Those are Pop’s – his vice and eventual downfall.”
“Really? I don’t recall seeing him eat one.”
My husband said, “I haven’t been eating them lately. All things considered, my dear – my dear Captain – I prefer you to candy bars.”
“Why, thank you, Jacob! Will you share those candy bars? We understand that they are your personal property.”
“They are not my personal property; they belong to all of us. Share and share alike.”
“Yup,” agreed Zebbie. “A perfect communism. ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ With the usual communist dictator on top.”
“Zebbie, I’ve been called everything from a black reactionary to a promiscuous old whore – but never before a communist dictator. Very well, you may address me as ‘Comrade Captain.’ When we come across those candy bars, everybody grab one for quick energy – unless somebody remembers where they were packed?”
“Gay knows!” said Deety, and backed toward the car’s open door while still keeping her eyes swinging the arc away from the river-perfect sentry and looking cute at it. “Gay Deceiver!”
“Hi, Deety! Getting any?”
“Inventory. Food supplies. Candy. Milky Way bars. Report location.”
“Frame twenty. Starboard. Closed storage seven-Ess-high. Bottom shelf.”

Five hours later everything was back inside except a heap of wrapping, packaging, and such – yet the increase in space was far greater than that pile. This was because storage did not have to be logical. Just tell Gay. A left shoe could fill an odd space in with the swords while the right shoe from the same pair was a space filler in a tool storage far to the rear – yet the only inconvenience lay in having to go to two places to get them.
I did the stowing; Deety stayed in the cabin, received items handed from outside, described the item to Gay, then described to Gay where the item was stowed, as I reported it. Gay was under instruction to hear only Deety’s voice – and what Deety told Gay was so logical that no one need remember it. Like this: “Gay Deceiver.”
“Boss, when will you learn to say ‘Please’?”
“Clothing. Zeb. Shoes. Field boots.”
“Right boot. Abaft bulkhead. Starboard. Frame forty. Under deckplate. Outboard compartment. Left boot. Abaft bulkhead. Portside. Frame sixty. Under deckplate, middle compartment. Warning: Both boots filled with rifle ammo padded with socks.”
You see? If you got categories in the wrong order, Gay would restring them. Give her the basic category and the identification, leaving out the other steps, and Gay would search the “tree” (Deety’s words) and get the “twig” you identified. You could even fail to give category and she would search until she found it.
But hardest was to build up the decking of the rear compartment about twenty centimeters with chattels or stores that would not crush, fasten it down to keep it from floating in free fall, and make it smooth enough that it would not be unbearably lumpy as a bed – while making some effort neither to build into this platform nor to store in compartments under it things needed frequently or quickly.
I had to lower my standards. It is impossible to store so many things in such limited space and have all readily at hand.
I studied things outside, admitted that I could not do it, then asked for advice. Zebbie solved it: “Captain, do a dry run.”
“Uh… go on, Zebbie.”
“Take my sleeping bag inside, open it out. It is too wide for the space, especially at the rear. So keep it as far forward as you can and still miss Jake’s twister and the bulkhead door. Mark the amount you have to lap it. Mark on the deck the foot of the opened-out bag. You’ll find space abaft that, frustum of a cone, sort of. Drag the sleeping bag outside, mark the tuck-in, build your platform on it. Then fill that rear space and build a bulkhead. Better get Jake; he’s a born mechanic.”
“Zebbie, would you prefer to build this bed yourself?”
“Nope.”
“Why not? I’m not speaking as captain; I’m inquiring as your old friend Sharpie.”
“Because I’m twice as big as you, which makes that space half as big for me. Tell you what, Cap’n Sharpie – excuse me! – Captain Hilda – do the measuring. Meanwhile we’ll pick out plunder that might be bricks in that platform. Then drag the sleeping bag outside. If you’ll let Jake relieve me, Deety and I can piece together the platform in jig time.”
It changed “impossible” to “possible.” The cubbyhole was filled, contents held in place with opened-out cartons tied with wire to hold-downs – “padeyes” Jacob called them. The platform was built, chinked with this and that, covered with more flattened-out cartons, and topped off with sleeping bag and blankets.
It was still light. Deety assured me that there was one hour and forty-three minutes till sundown. “Time enough if we hurry. Jacob, first bath. Deety, guard him. Both come back so Jacob can start dinner – then Zebbie and Deety go down – goodness, this sounds like the farmer and the rowboat with the fox and the geese – and bathe, taking turns guarding. Both come back; Deety relieves me; Zebbie takes me down to bathe while he guards. But please hurry; I want a bath, too. Forty minutes before sundown bathing stops and we eat – at sundown we are inside, dirty dishes and all, locked in till sunrise. If that does me out of a bath, we still hold to it. Jacob, how far is this ‘easy way’ down? I mean, ‘How many minutes?'”
“Maybe five. Hilda my love, if you weren’t insisting on always-two-together there would be no hurry. All go down together; I hurry through my bath, grab my rifle and trot back. The rest needn’t hurry. You’ve got us going down and up, down and up, four times – forty minutes. Which squeezes four baths into twenty minutes, five minutes to undress, soap, squat down and rinse off, towel dry, and dress. Hardly worth the trip.”
“Jacob, who guards you while you’re getting supper? No. I can bathe in the morning.” (Damn! I wanted that bath. I’m used to a shower in the morning, a tub at night, a bidet at any excuse. Decadent – that’s me.)
“Beloved, this place is safe. While we were out earlier, Zeb and I scouted for sign. None. That’s when we found this way down to the creek. It would be a natural watering place. No sign. I don’t think there are any large fauna here.”
I was wavering when Deety spoke up. “Pop, that’s three down-and-ups, not four, as Zebadiah and I get baths on one. But, Captain Hilda, if we all go down and come back together, there can’t be danger. Put that stuff back inside and lock up, of course.” She pointed at Jacob’s preparations. While Jacob had been handing stuff to Deety, he had set aside a hot plate, cooking and eating utensils, a tarpaulin, comestibles for supper and breakfast, and had passed word for me please to store food so that it could be reached easily.
Jacob said hastily, “Deety, I’ve got it planned for minimum therbligs. Dried apricots soaking in that pan, soup mix in that one. There’s no level deck space left inside.”
Deety started to say, “But, Pop, if we – ” when I cut in with, “Quiet, please” – not shouted.
They kept quiet – “Captain Bligh” was being listened to. “Gay Deceiver will not be left unguarded. My orders will not be discussed further. One modification: Supper is cut from forty minutes to twenty-five. Astrogator adjust schedule accordingly. Sound a blast on the siren five minutes before suppertime. We lock up on the dot. I placed the honey bucket just beyond the swing of the bulkhead door as the car will not be unlocked for any reason until sunrise. Questions?”
“Yes, Captain. Where are the towels?”

An hour later I was squatting in the stream, rinsing off and hurrying – covered with goose bumps. As I stepped out, Zebbie put down his rifle and had a big, fluffy towel, long as I am tall, waiting to wrap me. I should have required him to behave as a guard should.
But I told myself that he was still wearing his revolver and, anyhow, he has this sixth sense about danger – lying in my teeth. Nothing makes a woman feel more cherished than to have a man wrap her in a big towel the instant she’s out of the water. I lack character, that’s all. Every woman has her price, and a big, fluffy towel at the right time comes close to being mine.
Zebbie was rubbing firmly, getting me not only dry but warm. “Feels good, Captain?”
“‘Captain Hilda’ never came down the bank, Zebbie. Feels swell!”
“Remember the first time I gave you a rubdown?”
“Sure do! Dressing room at my pool.”
“Yup. I tried to lay you. I’ve never been turned down so smoothly.”
“You tried to lay me, Zebbie? Truly?” I looked up at him, my best innocent look.
“Sharpie darling, you lie as easily as I do. A man does this” – and he did – “even with a towel, a woman is certain what he means. But you refused to notice it, turned me down, without hurting my pride.”
“I’m refusing to notice it now and find it just as difficult as I did that afternoon. Stop it, please!” He did. “Thanks, dear. You got me all shaky. Zebbie, do you think Deety thinks I rigged this to get you alone? I would not willingly upset her.”
“On the contrary. She gave me a hunting license concerning you – you, not females in general – ten days back. In writing.”
“Really?”
“In writing so that she could limit it. I am required not to run any risk of hurting Jake.”
“You haven’t tried to use that license.”
“I took it as a compliment to you and to me, kissed Deety and thanked her. You settled this four years ago. But I’ve sometimes wondered why. I’m young, healthy, take care of my teeth, and keep my nails clean – mostly – and you seemed to like me. What made me ineligible? Not complaining, dear, just asking.”
I tried to explain the difference between a male friend and a bedmate – the scarcity of the first, the boring plethora of applicants for the other.
He listened, then shook his head. “Masochism.”
“Hasn’t it worked out better this way? I do love you, Zebbie.”
“I know you do, Sharpie.” Zebbie turned me around and looked down into my eyes. “And I love you and you know that, too” – and he kissed me.
That kiss went on and neither of us seemed inclined to stop. My towel slipped to the ground. I noticed because it felt better to be closer and ever so much nicer to have his hands on me. Zebbie hadn’t given me a sexy kiss since the day I hadinvited a pass and then ignored it.
I began to wonder why I had decided to ignore it. Then I was wondering how much time we had left in our schedule. Then I knew the exact time… for that infernal, earsplitting siren sounded. God watches over Hilda Mae and that’s why I keep Him on my payroll. But sometimes He is rough about it.
We let go. I put on Deety’s Keds, slid my borrowed dress over my head, hung the towel over my arm – elapsed time: nine seconds. Zebbie was again carrying his rifle at the ready (is that correct? – both hands, I mean).
“Captain, shall we go?”
“Yes, Chief Pilot. Zebbie, when did I become ‘captain’ again? Just from putting on clothes? You’ve seen this old hide before.”
“Skin has nothing to do with it, Captain. Quoting Deety quoting the Japanese: ‘Nakedness is often seen but never noticed.’ Except that sometimes I do notice, hot diggity dog and other comments. You have superior skin, Captain. You went back to being Captain when I picked up my rifle. But I was never off duty. Did you notice, when I dried you, that I picked you up and swung you around, so that I faced the bank? I kept alert even while I was nuzzling you… and you make fine nuzzle, Captain Step-Mother-in-Law Hilda.”
“So do you, Zebbie. I’m still Sharpie till we get to your car.” We reached the top of the bank. “Ten seconds to catch my breath. Zebbie -“
“Yes, Sharpie?”
“Four years ago – I’m sorry I turned away your pass.”
He patted my bottom. “So am I, dear. But it has worked out quite well. And” – he grinned that irresistible, ugly grin – “who knows? – we aren’t dead yet.”
When we arrived, Jacob was slurping soup. “You’re late,” he stated. “So we waited.”
“So I see.”
“Don’t listen to Pop, Captain Auntie; you are two minutes seventeen seconds ahead of time. Are you sure you stayed in long enough to get clean?”
“I stayed in long enough to get freezing cold. Aren’t you chilly?” Deety had worn skin most of the day and so had I; we had been doing sweaty work. But she had been dressed when I last saw her. “Jacob, is there no soup for Zebbie and me?”
“A smidgen. You get this pan as soon as I’m through – now! – and that means one less dish to wash.”
“And Zebadiah gets mine – also now – and I took that jump suit off because it’s dirty and I’m clean. I still haven’t figured out how to do a laundry. Nothing for a tub, no way to heat water. What’s that other way? Pound them on a rock the way it shows in National Geographic? I don’t believe it!”
We were in bed by sundown, Gay’s doors locked – pitch dark in minutes. According to Deety and Gay sunrise was ten hours and forty-three minutes away. “Deety, please tell Gay to wake us at sunrise.”
“Aye aye, Captain Auntie.”
“Zebbie, you told us that the air in the car was good for about four hours.”
“In space; The scoops are open now.”
“But do you get air back there? Should the bulkhead door be open?”
“Oh. Top scoop serves this space. The cabin is ventilated by the chin scoop. Scoops stay open unless internal pressure closes them.”
“Can anything get in through them? Snakes or such?”
“Hilda my dear, you worry too much.”
“My very own darling Copilot, will you please pipe down while I’m speaking to the Chief Pilot? There are many things about this car that I do not know – yet I am responsible.”
Zebbie answered, “Each scoop has a grid inside and a fine screen at the inner end; nothing can get in. Have to clean ’em occasionally. Remind me, Deety.”
“I’ll tell Gay.” She did – and almost at once there was a crash of metal. I sat up abruptly. “What’s that?”
“Hilda, I am afraid that I have kicked over the supper dishes.” My husband added, “Zeb, how do I find the cabin light?”
“No, no! Jacob, don’t try to find it. No light at all until sunrise. Don’t fret about dishes. But what happened? I thought they were under the instrument board.”
“I couldn’t quite reach with this bed made up. But the carton that supports my feet sticks out beyond the seat cushion on it. So I stacked them there.”
“No harm done. We can expect bobbles as we shake down.”
“I suppose so.”
“We can cope. Jacob, that was an excellent dinner.”
Deety called out, “Good night, chatterboxes! We want to sleep.” She closed the bulkhead door, dogged it.

Chapter XXIII

“The farce is over.”

Jake:
For me, the best soporific is to hold Hilda in my arms. I slept ten hours.
I might have slept longer had I not been blasted by a bugle call: Reveille.
I thought I was back in basic, tried to rouse out fast – banged my head. That slowed me; I reoriented, saw my lovely bride beside me, yawning prettily – realized that we were on Mars.
Mars! Not even our own Mars but another universe.
That hateful tune started to repeat, louder.
I banged on the bulkhead. “How do you shut this thing off?”
Shortly I saw dogs of the bulkhead door turning, then the door swung – as the call went into its third time around still louder. Zeb showed, blinking.
“Do you have a problem?”
I couldn’t hear but I could piece out what he meant.
“HOW DO YOU SHUT OFF THIS RACKET?”
“No problem.” (I think that’s what he said.) “Good morning, Gay.”
The bugle faded into the distance. “Good morning, Boss.”
“I’m awake.”
“Ah, but will you stay awake?”
“I won’t go back to bed. Promise.”
“I’ve dealt with your sort before, me bucko. If you aren’t out of here before my landlady wakes up, I’ll lose this room. Then another hassle with the cops. It’s not worth it… you cheapskate!”
“You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
“So smart I’m looking for another job.”
“Back to sleep, Gay. Over.”
“Roger and out, Boss” – and blessed silence.
I said to my daughter, “Deety, how could you do this to us?”
Her husband answered. “Deety didn’t, Jake. She was told to place a call for sunrise. But didn’t know what a morning call means to Gay.”
I grumped, and opened the starboard door. Hilda’s rearrangements had given me the best rest I had had in days. But two double beds in a sports car left no room on arising to do anything but get out.
So I slid out the door, groped for the step, paused to ask Hilda for shoes and coverall – caught sight of something and said quietly, “Hilda. My rifle. Quickly!”
My little treasure is always reliable in emergency; her clowning is simply persona. (A most pleasant one; the worst aspect of the jest of making her “captain” was that she lost her smile – I hoped that Zeb would soon resume command. We had needed the lesson – but no need to go on.)
I digress – I asked for my rifle; she whispered, “Roger,” and had it in my hand at once with the quiet report: “Locked, one in the chamber. Wait – I’m getting Zeb.”
That made sense. By staying on the step in the corner formed by door and car, my rear was safe and I need cover only a small sector. I prefer a bolt action – correction: I have a bolt-action rifle I inherited from my father’s eldest brother, who had “liberated” it on leaving the Marine Corps.
I unlocked it, opened the bolt slightly, saw that a cartridge was in the chamber, closed the bolt, left the piece unlocked.
Zeb said at my ear, softly, “What’s the excitement?”
“Over there.” I pulled my head out of the way, saw Hilda and Deety almost on top of Zeb – Hilda with Deety’s shotgun, Deety with her husband’s police special.
Zeb said, “Pixies. They may still be around; let’s check. Cover me from here?”
“No, Zeb. You to the right, me to the left, we check the port side, meet back at the dump. Make it fast.”
“Say the word.” Zeb said over his shoulder, “You girls stay in the car. Jake?”
“Now!” We came bursting out like greyhounds, guns at high port. The reason for my disquiet was simple: The dump of wrappings and cartons was no longer a heap. Something had spread it over many meters, and the litter was not nearly enough to account for the pile. Wind? Zeb had left the wings extended; the slightest wind would wake him, warn him of change in weather. The car had not rocked in the night; ergo, no wind. Ergo, nocturnal visitors. Nor were they small.
I rounded the car to the left, seeing nothing until I spotted Zeb – waved at him, started back around to join him at the dump.
He arrived before I did. “I told you girls to stay in the car!” He was quite angry, and the cause, both of them, were also at the dump.
My darling answered, “Chief Pilot.”
Zeb said, “Huh? Sharpie, there’s no time for that; there’s something dangerous around! You girls get inside before I -“
“Pipe DOWN!”
One would not believe that so small a body could produce such a blast. It caught Zeb mouth open and jammed his words down his throat.
Hilda did not give him opportunity to answer. She continued, forcefully: “Chief Pilot, there are no ‘girls’ here; there are four adult humans. One of them is my second-in-command and executive officer. My executive officer; I am in command.” Hilda looked at my daughter. “Astrogator, did you tell anyone to remain in the car?”
“No, Captain.” Deety was wearing her “Name, rank, and serial number” face.
“Nor did I.” Hilda looked at Zeb. “There is no need to discuss it.” She stirred litter with a toe. “I had hoped that we could find salvage. But three fourths of it has been eaten. By large animals from those tooth marks. I would have trouble visualizing a large animal that eats cellulose but is nevertheless carnivorous – save that I know one. So we will get as much done as possible while keeping a tight guard. I have the program planned but I’m open to advice.”
“Hilda!” I let my tone get a bit sharp.
My wife looked around with features as impassive as those of my daughter. “Copilot, are you addressing me officially or socially?”
“Uh… as your husband! I must put my foot down! Hilda, you don’t realize the situation. We’ll lift as soon as possible – and Zeb will be in command. The farce is over.”
I hated to speak to my beloved that way but sometimes one must. I braced myself for a blast.
None came. Hilda turned to Zeb and said quietly, “Chief Pilot, was my election a farce?”
“No, Captain.”
“Astrogator, did you think of it as farce?”
“Me? Heavens, no, Captain Auntie!”
Hilda looked at me. “Jacob, from the balloting you voted for me at least once, possibly three times. Were you joking?”
I could not remember how I had felt when it dawned on me that Zeb really did intend to resign – panic, I think, that I was about to be stuck with the job. That was now irrelevant as I knew that I was not more than one micron from again being a bachelor… so I resorted to Higher Truth.
“No, no, my darling – my darling Captain! I was dead serious!”
“Did you find some malfeasance?”
“What? No! I – I made a mistake. Jumped to conclusions. I assumed that we would be leaving at once… and that Zeb would command once we lifted. After all, it’s his car.”
Hilda gave me the briefest smile. “There is something to that last argument. Zebbie, did you intend – “
“Wait a half! Cap’n, that car belongs to all of us just like Jake’s Milky Way bars; we pooled resources.”
“So I have heard you all say. Since I had nothing to pool but a fur cape, I took it with a grain of salt. Zebbie, do you intend to resume command when we lift?”
“Captain, the only way you can quit is by resigning… whereupon Deety would be captain.”
“No, sirree!” (My daughter is not often that shrill.)
“Then Jake would wind up holding the sack. Captain, I’ll pilot when ordered, chop wood and carry water between times. But I didn’t sign up to boss a madhouse. I think you’re finding out what I mean.”
“I think so, too, Zebbie. You thought there was an emergency and started giving orders. I would not want that to happen in a real emergency -“
“It won’t! Captain.”
“And I find to my chagrin that my husband considers me to be a play captain. I think I must ask for a vote of confidence. Will you please find something to use as white and black balls?”
“Captain Auntie!”
“Yes, dear?”
“I am required to advise you. A commanding officer commands; she doesn’t ask for votes. You can resign – or – die – or lose to a mutiny and get hanged from your own yardarm. But if you take a vote, you’re not a captain; you’re a politician.”
“Deety’s right, Captain,” Zeb told my wife. “Had a case-law case in R.O.T.C. Naval vessel. Department told the skipper to pick one of two ports for ho1idays. He let his crew vote on it. Word got back to Washington and he was relieved at sea by his second-in-command and never again ordered to sea. C.O.’s don’t ask; they tell ’em. However, if it matters to you, I’m sorry I goofed, and you do enjoy my confidence.”
“Mine, too!”
“And mine, Hilda my dear Captain!” (In truth I wanted Zeb and only Zeb to command when the car was off the ground. But I made myself a solemn vow never again to say or do anything that might cause Hilda to suspect it. We would crash and die together rather than let her suspect that I thought her other than the ideal commanding officer.)
Hilda said, “The incident is closed. Who can’t wait? Speak up.”
I hesitated – my bladder is not used to bedtime right after dinner. When no one else spoke, I said, “Perhaps I had better be first; I have breakfast to prepare.”
“Dear, you are not First Cook today; Zebbie is. Deety, grab a rifle and take your father to his ‘handy bush’ – and do make it handy; that giant termite might be lurking. Then hand Jacob the rifle and it’s your turn. Don’t dally.”

It was a busy day. Water tanks had to be topped off. Zeb and I used two collapsible buckets, taking turns (that hill got steeper every trip, even at 0.38 gee), while Deety guarded us. Endless trips –
That afternoon I was a ladies’ tailor. Hilda had something for Deety to do.
Zeb had a job to complete. The space behind the bulkhead has padeyes every 30 cms or so. No one wants the center of gravity to shift when one is in the air. Zeb’s arrangements were Samson cord in many lengths with snap hooks. Zeb told Hilda he wanted to secure the bed aft for air or space, and to store items used in rigging the forward bed so that they would be secure but available – and where were his Samson ties? – Gay didn’t know. He had to explain to Hilda what they looked like – whereupon Hilda said, “Oh! Thingammies! Gay Deceiver. Inventory. Incidentals. Small. Thingammies.” Zeb spent the afternoon making certain that the “bed” could not slide, then built a net of Samson cord to hold the items for turning seats into a bed, then, finding that he had Samson ties left, Zeb removed the wires with which I had secured the aftermost storage, and replaced them with ties. When he was through, he relieved me as guard, and I wound up as seamstress.
Our wives had decided that one of Deety’s jump suits should be altered for Hilda until we reached some place where clothes could be purchased. Hilda had vetoed Earth-without-a-J. “Jacob, as captain I look at things from another perspective. It is better to be a lively frump than a stylish corpse. Wups! You pinned Sharpie.”
“Thorry,” I said, around a mouthful of pins. Hilda was wearing the suit inside out; I was pinning excess material. Once this caused it to fit, lines held by pins would be tacked, pins removed, tacked lines sewed in short stitches (by hand; Deety’s sewing machine was ashes in another universe), and excess cloth trimmed away.
Such was theory.
I tackled reducing the waist line by pinning darts on both sides. Then I folded up the trousers so that the crease came at the instep – but had to pin them up 17 cms!
Seventeen centimeters! I had taken in the waist first, knowing that doing so would, in effect, shorten the trousers. It did – one centimeter.
The appearance was as if I were trying to fit her with a chimpanzee suit for a masquerade. Lift it at the shoulders? I tried, almost cutting off circulation. Still a horrid case of droopy drawers –
Take a tuck all the way around the waist? That suit closed with one zipper. Have you ever tried to take a tuck in a zipper?
I stepped back and looked at my creative artistry.
Ghastly.
“Hilda my love, Deety was better at this by the age of ten. Shall I fetch her?”
“No, no!”
“Yes, yes. If at first you don’t succeed, find the mistake. I’m the mistake. You need Deety.”
“No, Jacob. It would be better for me to get along without clothes than to interrupt the work I have assigned to the Astrogator. With you at the verniers and Zebbie at the controls, Gay can do almost anything and quickly. Yes?”
“I wouldn’t phrase it that way. But I understand you.”
“If she’s been preprogrammed, she can do it even faster?”
“Certainly. Why the quiz, dear?”
“How much faster?”
“Without preprogramming, it takes a few seconds to acknowledge and set it, about as long to check what I’ve done, then I report ‘Set!’ Zeb says ‘Execute!’ I punch the button. Five to fifteen seconds. With a preprogram – is it debugged in all ways, no conflicts, no ambiguities, no sounds easy to confuse?”
“Darling, that is why I won’t let Deety be disturbed. Yes.”
“So. Maximum time would be with Gay asleep. Wake her, she acknowledges, you state the preprogram in the exact words in her memory, then say ‘Execute!’ Call it three seconds. Minimum – That would be an emergency preprogram with ‘Execute’ included in the code word. My dear, we saw minimum time yesterday. When that Russian tried to shoot Zeb.”
“Jacob, that is what caused me to put Deety to work. I saw his pistol in the air. His fingers were curled to catch it. Then we were in the sky. How long?”
“I saw him start to reverse his weapon, and bent over my verniers to bounce us by switch… then stopped. Not needed. Mmm – A tenth of a second? A fifth?”
“Whichever, it is the fastest we can manage. While you dears were carrying water, I was preparing a list of preprograms. Some are to save juice or time or to carry out something we do frequently; those require ‘Execute!’ Some are intended to save our lives and don’t require ‘Execute.’ Like ‘Bounce’ and ‘Bug Out’ and ‘Take us home!’ But more. Jacob, I did not tell Deety how to phrase these; that’s her specialty. I wrote out what I thought we ought to be able to do and told her to add any she wished.”
“Did you consult Zeb?”
“Copilot, the Captain did not consult the Chief Pilot.”
“Whew! I beg your pardon – Captain.”
“Only if I get a kiss – mind the pins! Deety will post a copy on the instrument board. After you and Zebbie read them, I want your advice and his.”

I gave up on that jump suit. I took out eighty-five or a thousand pins. Hilda was covered with sweat so I invited her to order me to take her down to bathe. She hesitated.
I said, “Does the Captain have duties of which I am unaware?”
“No. But everyone else is working, Jacob.”
“Captain, Rank Hath Its Privileges. You are on duty twenty-four hours a day – twenty-four and a half here – “
“Twenty-four hours, thirty-nine minutes, thirty-five seconds – local day, not sidereal.”
“Did you measure it? Or remember what some professor said?”
“Neither, Jacob. It’s the figure Gay uses. I suppose she got it from the Aerospace Almanac.”
“Are you going to believe an almanac? Or your husband?”
“Excuse me, Jacob, while I tell Gay the correct figure.”
“Hand back my leg, beloved. Captain, since you are on duty all the time, you are entitled to bathe, rest, or relax, at any time.”
“Well… two seconds while I grab a towel – and tell Zebbie that I will start dinner while he is down bathing.”
“Captain, I am number-two cook today. You said so.”
“You will guard, Jacob, which you do better than I. While the Carters are guarding each other.”
Hilda came trotting back with a towel. I said, “Cap’n, I’ve figured out clothes for you.”
“Goody. Yes, dear?” We headed for the path down.
“Were my Hawaiian shirts packed?” I had her fall in behind me.
“Inventory. Clothing. Jacob. Shirts. Aloha.”
“Do you recall a blue one with white flowers?”
“Yes.”
“I take ‘medium’ but can get into a ‘small’ and Andrade’s didn’t have this in ‘medium.’ But this one is so small I haven’t been wearing it. Hilda, you’ll like it – and it will be easy to cut down.” (A steep pitch – no place to lose your footing while carrying a gun.)
“I won’t cut it down. Jacob, your shirt is my first maternity smock.”
“A happy thought! Did Deety fetch sailor pants? White.”
“I recall white duck slacks.” Hilda kicked off her Keds, stepped into the water.
“That’s the pair. She wore them one summer while maturing. The following summer they were too tight. She was always about to alter them but never did.”
“Jacob, if Deety likes those pants so well that she saved them and fetched them along, I won’t ask her to give them to me.”
“I will ask her. Hilda, you worry about the wrong things. We pooled resources. I chucked in my candy bars, Zeb chucked in his car, Deety chucks in her sailor pants.”
“And what did I chuck in? Nothing!”
“Your mink cape. If you offered it to Deety in exchange for a pair of old white -“
“It’s a deal!”
“It is like hell, Mistress Mine. That cape is valuta. Only days ago each of us was wealthy. Now we are unpersons who can’t go home. What happens to our bank accounts I do not know but it seems certain that we will never realize anything from them, or from stocks, bonds, and other securities. Any paper money we have is worthless. As you know, I have bullion and gold coins and Jake has, also; we each like money that clinks and we don’t trust governments. Gay must be juiced from time to time; that calls for valuta. Such as gold. Such as mink coats. Come out of there before you freeze! I would rub you dry but that giant termite worries me.”
“Last night Zebbie rubbed me dry.”
(Why do women have this compulsion to confess? It is not a typical male vice.) “He did? I should speak to him.”
“Jacob, you are angry.”
“Only somewhat, as yesterday we didn’t know about the giant termite, and Zeb and I considered your guard rules silly. Nevertheless Zeb neglected his duty.”
“I meant ‘angry with me’!”
“For what? Did you force it on him?”
“No. He offered it – towel open and ready, just as you do. I went straight into it, let him wrap me and rub me down.”
“Feel good?”
“Golly, yes! I’m a bad girl, Jacob – but I loved it.”
“Don’t give yourself airs, my darling; you are not a bad girl. Yesterday was not the first time Zeb has rubbed you dry.”
“Well… no.” (They have to confess, they have to be shrived.)
“Do you any harm, then or now?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I’m sure it didn’t. Listen, beloved – you are twenty-nine going on forty-two. You’ve had three term contracts and now have a traditional marriage. In college you were a scandal to the jaybirds. Zeb has been your chum for years. Both of you horny as goats. My darling, I assumed what is called ‘the worst’ and is often the best.”
“But, Jacob, we didn’t, we didn’t! And we haven’t!”
“So? People who pass up temptations have only themselves to blame. Just one thing, my only love, if you and Zeb ever pick up the matter, try not to look guilty.”
“But we aren’t going to, ever!”
“Should it come to pass, warn Zeb not to hurt Deety. She loves him deeply. Not surprising as Zeb is a lovable man. Get your shoes on, dearest one, and we’ll let someone else have the community bathtub.”
“Jacob? You still think we have. Zebbie and I.”
“Hilda, I married you convinced that Zeb was, at that time and for some years, your lover. Or one of them. Today you have convinced me that the matter is unproven… assuming that one or both of you have rocks in your head. But I can’t see that it makes a tinker’s dam either way. Jane taught me that the only important rule is not to hurt people… which very often – Jane’s words! – consists in not talking unnecessarily.”
“Jane told me that, too. Jacob? Will you kiss me?”
“Madame – what did you say your name was? – that is the toll I charge before a client starts up this bank.”
As we climbed, I asked Hilda, “Darling, what is the animal that eats cellulose but is carnivorous?”
“Oh. Two. H. sapiens and Rattus.”
“Men? Cellulose?”
“Sawdust is often processed as food. Have you ever eaten in a fast food joint?”

My daughter had done a wonderful job on preprograms; we all were eager to learn them. We placed guards, Zeb and me, at the doors, while Deety took Zeb’s seat and talked, and Hilda sat in mine.
“Captain Auntie had two ideas,” Deety told us. “To optimize emergency escapes and to work out ways to use as near to no juice as possible. The latter involves figuring ways to ground us in strange places without the skill Zebadiah has in dead-stick grounding.”
“I don’t depend on skill,” put in my son-in-law. “I won’t risk a dead-stick grounding other than on a hard-surfaced strip. You’ve seen me avoid it twice – by power-on just before grounding. Yesterday I cut it a bit fine.”
I shuddered.
My daughter continued, “We have this new program. Set it, by voice, for bearing and as many minima as you please. Our Smart Girl goes there and attempts to ground. She uses radar twice, once in range-finder mode, second time in precautionary mode as in ‘Bug Out.’ If her target is not clear, she does a Drunkard’s Walk in locus ten klicks radius, sampling spots two per second. When she finds a good spot, she grounds. Unless we don’t like it and order her to try again.
“Study that and you will see that you can cruise all over this or any planet, land anywhere, and not use juice.
“Escape programs – We must be most careful in saying G, A, Y. Refer to her as ‘smart girl’ or ‘the car’ or anything not starting with that syllable. That syllable will now wake her. If it is followed by her last name, she goes into ‘awaiting orders’ mode. But if G, A, Y, alone is followed by any of eight code words, she executes that escape instantly. I have tried to select monosyllables that ordinarily do not follow her first name. Gay Deceiver.”
“Hi, Deety!”
“Dictionary. G, A, Y. Read.”
“Gayety, gayfeather, Gayle, Gaylord, Gay-Pay-Oo, gaywings -“

Chapter XXIV

Captains aren’t supposed to cry.

Hilda:
I ordered an early dinner by starting it when Zebbie and Deety went down to bathe. I had ready a public reason but my motive was personal: I didn’t want a pillow talk with Jacob.
Annoyed at him? At me! I had had a perfect chance to keep my lip zipped – and muffed it! Was I boasting? Or confessing? Or trying to hurt Jacob? (Oh, no! – can the id be that idiotic!)
Don’t rationalize it, Sharpie! Had not your husband been kind, tolerant, and far more sophisticated than you ever dreamed, you would be in trouble.
When dinner was over, Zebbie said lazily, “I’ll do the dishes in the morning.”
I said, “I prefer that they be done tonight, please.”
Zebbie sat up and looked at me. His thoughts were coming through so strongly that I was getting them as words. I never allow myself to be close with a person whose thoughts I can’t sense at all; I distrust a blank wall. But now I could “hear” such names as “Queeg” and “Bligh” and “Vanderdecken” and “Ahab” – and suddenly Captain Ahab was harpooning the White Whale and I was the whale!
Zebbie bounced to his feet with a grin that made me uneasy. “Sure thing, Cap’n! Deety, grab a rifle and hold it on me to make sure I get ’em clean.”
I cut in quickly, “I’m sorry, Chief Pilot, but I need the Astrogator. Jacob is your assistant.”
When they were gone, Deety said, “Will my shotgun do? I don’t think the cardboard eater comes out in daylight.”
“Bring the guns inside; we’re going to close the doors.”
I waited until we were settled. “Deety, will you make me a copy of your new programs before our men come back?”
“If they take time to wash them properly. Men and dishes – you know.”
“I hope they stall -“
” – and get over their mad,” Deety finished.
“That, too. But I intend to write a sequential program and I want you to check me. After you make that copy.”

They did stay down – “man talk,” no doubt. Men need us but can just barely stand us; every now and then they have to discuss our faults. I think that is why they shut us out.
Deety made a copy while I wrote what I planned to do. Deety looked it over, corrected some wording. Looked it over again – and said nothing pointedly.
“Deety, can you handle your father’s lab camera?”
“Certainly.”
“Will you check its load and shoot when I ask for it?”
“Of course.”
“If I goof on an order, correct me at once.”
“You don’t intend to hand this to Zebadiah to carry out?”
“No. I prefer that you not mention that I prepared it ahead of time. Deety, the Chief Pilot assured me that any of us could command in aerospace. I am about to make a test run. The Chief Pilot is in a position to override. If he does, I shan’t fight it; I have said all along that he should be captain.”
We had time to dig out that shirt with the white flowers. Deety’s sailor pants were long; we turned up cuffs. The lacing at the back made them small enough in the waist. She gave me a blue belt to pull in the shirt, which I wore outside – then she added a blue hair ribbon.
“Captain Auntie, you look good. Better than I will in this jump suit I am reluctantly pulling on. Gosh, I’m glad Zebadiah isn’t square about skin!”
“He was when I adopted him. Fetched swim briefs the first time I invited him over to swim. But I was firm. There they come! Open the doors.”
They appeared to be over their mad. Zebbie looked at me and said, “How fancy! Are we going to church?” – and my husband added, “You look pretty, my dear.”
“Thank you, sir. All hands, prepare for space. Secure loose gear. Lock firearms. Anyone requiring a bush stop say so. Dress for space. Before manning car, take a turn around the car, searching for gear on the ground.”
“What is this?” demanded Zebbie.
“Prepare for space. Move!”
He hesitated a split second. “Aye aye, Captain.”

In two minutes and thirteen seconds (I checked Gay’s clock) I was squeezing past my husband into the starboard rear seat. I said, “In reporting, include status of firearms. Astrogator.”
“Belted down. Bulkhead door dogged. Shotgun loaded and locked. I slid it under the sleeping bag.”
“Fléchette gun?”
“Wups! In my purse. Loaded and locked. Purse clipped to my seat, outboard.”
“Copilot.”
“Belt fastened. Door locked, seal checked. Continua device ready. Rifle loaded and locked, secure under sleeping bag. I’m wearing my pistol loaded and locked.”
“Chief Pilot.”
“Belt fastened, door locked, seal checked. Rifle loaded, locked, under sleeping bag. Wearing revolver, loaded and locked. No loose gear. Water tanks topped off. Load trimmed. Two reserve power packs, two zeroed. Juice zero point seven-two capacity. Wings spread full. Wheels down, unlocked to retract. All systems go. Ready.”
“Chief Pilot, after first maneuver, execute vertical dive fastest without power and without retracting wheels. Relock wheel-retracting gear. Leave wings spread max.”
“Wheel retractors locked. After first maneuver fastest, no-power vertical dive, wings full subsonic, wheels down.”
I glanced at Deety; she held up the camera and mouthed, “Ready.”
“Gay Home!”
In Arizona it was shortly before sunset, as Deety had predicted. My husband repressed a gasp. I snapped, “Copilot, report H-above-G.”
“Uh… two klicks minus, falling.” Zebbie had bite now; the horizon ahead tilted slowly up, then faster. As we leaned over, Deety stretched high, catlike, to shoot between our pilots. We steadied with Snug Harbor dead ahead – a crater! I felt a burst of anger, a wish to kill!
“Picture!”
“Gay B’gout!”
Instead of being stationary at “Touchdown” we were in free fall on the night side of some planet. I could see stars, with blackness below the “horizon” – if horizon it were. Deety said, “Looks like the Russians left something on our parking space.”
“Perhaps. Jacob, H-above-G, please.”
“Under ten klicks, decreasing slowly.”
“So far, so good. But we aren’t sure that we have the right planet and universe.”
“Captain, that’s Antares ahead.”
“Thanks, Zebbie. I assume that at least we are in one of the analogs, of our native universe. Deety, can you get from Gay the acceleration and check it against Mars-ten?”
“‘Bout four ways, Cap’n.”
“Go ahead.”
“Gay Deceiver.”
“Hi, Deety!”
“Hi, Gay. H-above-G, closing rate running, solve first differential, report answer.”
Instantly Gay answered, “Three-seven-six centimeters per second squared.”
“You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
So it was either Mars-ten or an unreasonable facsimile. “Gay B’gout!”
We were stationary, with what we had come to feel as “proper weight.” Deety said, “Maybe an animal wandered across our spot. How about lights, Captain? This snapshot ought to be colors by now.”
“Not yet. Chief Pilot, when I alert the autopilot by G, A, Y, please switch on forward landing lights.”
“Roger Wilco.”
“Gay -“
Blinding light – men in its path were blinded, not us. “Bounce! Kill the light, Zebbie. The Little Father left sentries in case we came back – and we did.”
“Captain Auntie, may I have cabin light now?”
“Please be patient, dear. I saw two men. Jacob?”
“Three men, dear… dear Captain. Russian soldiers in uniform. Weapons, but no details.”
“Deety?”
“Looked like bazookas.”
“Chief Pilot?”
“Bazookas. A good thing you were on the bounce with Bounce, Skipper. Gay can take a lot… but a bazooka would make her unhappy.” He added, “Speed saved me yesterday. Deety, let that be a lesson: Never lose your temper.”
“Look who’s talking!”
“I quit being C.O., didn’t I? Cap’n Sharpie doesn’t do foolish stunts. If I were skipper, we would chase ’em all over that sea bottom. Never be in one place long enough for them to aim and they would think there were thirty of us. If Colonel Snotsky is there – I think he’s afraid to go home -“
We were over Arizona. I snapped, “Gay Termite!” and were parked by our stream. Zebbie said, “What the devil? Who did that?”
“You did, Zebadiah,” Deety answered.
“Me? I did no such thing. I was -“
“Silence!” (That was I, Captain Bligh.)
I went on, “Gay Deceiver, go to sleep. Over.”
“Sleepy time, Hilda. Roger and out.”
“Chief Pilot, is there a way to shut off the autopilot so completely that she cannot possibly be activated by voice?”
“Oh, certainly.” Zebbie reached up, threw a switch.
“Thanks, Zebbie. Deety, your new escape programs are swell… but I missed how that happened. But first – Did anyone else see our giant termite?”
“Huh?” – “I did.” – “Where?”
I said, “I was looking out to starboard as we transited. The creature was feeding on packing debris – and took off uphill at high speed. Looked like a very big, fat, white dog with too many legs. Six, I think.”
“‘Six,'” agreed my husband. “Put me in mind of a polar bear. Hilda, I think it is carnivorous.”
“We are not going to find out. Deety, tell Zebbie – all of us – what happened.”
Deety shrugged. “Zebadiah said ‘bounce’ twice when he should not have, but Gay wasn’t triggered. Then he said ‘Gay can take a lot – ‘ and she was triggered. More chitchat and Zebadiah said ‘ – I think he’s afraid to go home – ‘ That did it. Our smart girl hears what she has been taught. She heard: ‘Gay Home’ and that is the short form that used to be: ‘Gay Deceiver Take Us Home.”
Zebbie shook his head. “A gun should never be that hair-trigger.”
“Chief Pilot, yesterday you used the first of these clipped programs to avoid a bullet in your face. First ‘Gay’ – then after more words – ‘bounce!’ It saved you.”
“But -“
“I’m not through. Astrogator, study the escape programs. Search for possibility of danger if triggered accidentally. Zebbie, escape programs can’t be compared to a hair trigger on a gun; they are to escape, not to kill.”
“Captain Auntie, I’ve spent all day making certain that programs can’t put us out of the frying pan into the fire. That’s why I killed ‘countermarch.’ The nearest thing to danger is the ‘Home’ program because our home planet is unfriendly.” Deety sounded sad. “I hate to cut our last link with home.”
“It needn’t be cut,” I said. “Just stretched. Put it back into long form and add ‘Execute.'”
Deety answered, “Captain, I will do as you say. But we might be a billion klicks from nowhere and hit by a meteor. If anyone can gasp, ‘GayHome,’ then we are two klicks over our cabin site in air, not vacuum. Even if we’ve passed out, Gay won’t crash us; she’s built not to. If I’m gasping my last, I don’t want to have to say, ‘Gay Deceiver, take us home. Execute.’ That’s ten syllables against two… with air whooshing out.”
I said, “That settles it. The ‘Gay Home’ program stands unless my successor changes it.”
“You’re not talking to me, Captain Sharpie darling – I mean, Captain Hilda – because I’m not your successor. But Deety convinced me. I will not admit that those vermin have run me permanently off my own planet. At least I can return to it to die.”
“Son, let’s not speak of dying. We are going to stay alive and raise kids and enjoy it.”
“That’s my Pop! Say, doesn’t anybody want to see this picture?”

We made it a rest stop, worrying more about giant termites than about bushes… and Jacob found a can opener. The can opener. I put a stop to an attempt to fix the blame. Advice to all explorers: Do not roam the universes without a spare can opener.
Then it was “Prepare for lift!” and a new program. “Chief Pilot, switch on autopilot. Gay Deceiver. Explore. True bearing two-six-five. Unit jump five minima. Use bingo stop continue. End program short of sunrise line. Ground. Acknowledge by paraphrase.”
“Explore west five degrees south fifty-klick units. Two-second check each jump. Ground myself no power Greenwich time oh-three-seventeen.”
“Deety, is that time right?”
“For that program.”
“Gay Deceiver. Program revision. Cancel grounding. From program coded ‘A Tramp Abroad’ display locus. Display Bingoes.”
She displayed Mars at once, but gibbous. I scrawled a note to Deety: “How do I rotate to show day side only?”
Dear Deety! She wrote her answer. Passed it over – I doubt that our men saw it: “Program revision. Display locus real-time day side.”
Gay accommodated. It took several steps to define new locus as sunset line (right edge – east) to sunrise line (left edge – west), and between 50°N and 50°S (some Russian area had been close to 45°S, so I widened the search)-then let the locus move with the terminators. (Gay can “see” in the dark but I can’t.) I told her to end “Explore” at Greenwich oh-three-seventeen and start “A Tramp Abroad,” continue until directed otherwise, and had Gay repeat back in her phrasing.
I touched Zebbie’s shoulder, pointed to the switch that cut out Gay’s ears, drew a finger across my throat. He nodded and shut her out. I said, “Questions, gentlemen? Deety?”
“I do, Captain,” said our Chief Pilot. “Do you plan on sleeping tonight?”
“Certainly, Zebbie. An ideal sleeping spot would be one far from the Russians but close to the present sunset line. Or did you want to work all night?”
“If you wish. I noticed that you gave Gay a program that could keep her going for days or weeks – and that you had reduced H-above-G to six klicks. Breathable air. By rotating duties, with one or two always stretched out aft, we can stay up a week, easily, and still give Jake’s ankles a break.”
“I can skip a night’s sleep,” said Deety. “Captain Auntie honey, with enough random samples and a defined locus, sampling soon approaches a grid a fly couldn’t get through. Do you want the formula?”
“Heavens, no! As long as it works.”
“It works. Let’s make a long run, get a big sampling. But I’d like to add something. Let’s parallel the display onto a sidelooker screen, and light every vertex – while the main display shows Bingoes. You’ll see how tight a screen you’re building.”
“Sharpie, don’t let her do it!” Zebbie added, “‘Scuse, please! Captain, the Astrogator is correct on software but I know more about this hardware. You can crowd a computer into a nervous breakdown. I have safeguards around Smart Girl; if I give her too much to do, she tells me to go to hell. But she likes Deety. Like a willing horse, she’ll try hard for Deety even when it’s too much.”
Deety said soberly, “Captain, I gave you bad advice.”
Her husband said, “Don’t be so humble, Deety. You’re smarter than I am and we all know it. But we are dependent on Smart Girl and can’t let her break down. Captain, I don’t know how much strain the time-space twister puts on her but she has unnecessary programs. At the Captain’s convenience, I would like to review everything in her perms and wipe those we can do without.”
“My very early convenience, sir. Is the schedule okay?”
“Oh, sure. Just don’t add that side display.”
“Thank you, Chief Pilot. Anyone else? Copilot?”
“My dear… my dear Captain, is there some reason to find a spot near the sunset line? If you intend to work all night?”
“Oh! But, Jacob, I do not plan to work all night. It is now about twenty hundred by our personal circadians, as established by when we got up. I think we can search for three to four hours. I hope that we can find a spot to sleep near the sunset line, scout it in daylight, let Gay land herself on it for her perms – then return to it in the dark when we get tired”
“I see, in part. My dear, unless I misunderstood you, you are heading west. But you said that you wanted to find us a place to sleep near the presert sunset line. East. Or did I misunderstood you?”
“It’s very simply explained, Jacob.”
“Yes, dear Captain?”
“I made a horrible mistake in navigation.”
“Oh.”
“Chief Pilot, did you spot it?”
“Yup. Yes, Captain.”
“Why didn’t you speak up?”
“Not my business, Ma’am. Nothing you planned to do was any danger.”
“Zebbie, I’m not sure whether to thank you for keeping quiet, or to complain because you did. Deety, you spotted the mistake, I am certain. You are supposed to advise me.”
“Captain, I’m supposed to speak up to stop a bad mistake. This was not. I wasn’t certain that it was a mistake until you told on yourself. But you spotted the mistake when Gay predicted the time to end the ‘Explore’ program, then you corrected it by telling her to shift to ‘A Tramp Abroad.’ So there was never a reason to advise you.”
I let out a sigh. “You’re covering for me and I love you all and I’m no good as captain. I’ve served as many hours as Zebbie and we are on the ground, so now it’s time to elect someone who can do it right. You, Zebbie.”
“Not me. Jake and Deety must each do a stint before I’d admit that it might be my turn.”
“Captain -“
“Deety, I’m not captain; I resigned!”
“No, Aunt Hilda, you didn’t actually do it. It is my duty to advise you when you seem about to make a bad mistake. You made a minor mistake and corrected it. In my business we call that ‘debugging’-and spend more time on it than we do on writing programs. Because everybody makes mistakes.”
Jane’s little girl managed to sound the way Jane used to. I resolved to listen – because all too often I hadn’t listened to Jane. “Captain Auntie, if you were resigning because of the way your crew treated you – as Zebadiah did – I wouldn’t say a word. But that’s not your reason. Or is it?”
“What? Oh, no! You’ve all helped – you’ve been angels. Uh, well, mostly.”
“‘Angels’ – hummph! I can’t use the correct words; I’d shock our men. Aunt Hilda, I gave you far worse lip than I ever gave Zebadiah. You slapped me down hard – and I’ve been your strongest supporter ever since. Zebadiah, what you did was worse -“
“I know.”
” – but you admitted that you were wrong. Nevertheless you’ve been chewing the bit. Demanding explanations. Zebadiah, the captain of a ship doesn’t have to explain why she gives an order. Or does she?”
“Of course not. Oh, a captain sometimes does explain. But she shouldn’t do it often or the crew will start thinking they are entitled to explanations. In a crunch this can kill you. Waste that split second.” Zebbie brooded. “Captain says ‘Frog,’ you hop. Couple of times I failed to hop. Captain, I’m sorry.”
“Zebbie, we get along all right.”
He reached back and patted my knee. “Pretty well in the past. Better from now on.”
My darling Jacob said worriedly, “I’m afraid I have been remiss, too.”
I was about to reassure him when Deety cut in: “‘Remiss’! Pop, you’re the worst of all! If I had been your wife, I would have tossed you back and rebaited my hook. ‘Farce’ is worse than mutinous; it’s insulting. Be glad Jane didn’t hear you!”
“I know, I know!”
I touched Deety’s arm and whispered, “That’s enough, dear.”
Zebbie said soberly, “Captain, as I analyze it, you made a mistake in sign. Every navigator makes mistakes – and has some routine by which to check his work. If you’re going to get upset because recheck shows that you wrote down ‘plus’ when the declination is ‘south,’ you’re going to have ulcers. You’re just under strain from being C.O. We’ve all made the strain worse. But we want to do better. I’d hate to have you resign over a minor error… when we caused your upset. I hope you’ll give us another chance.”
Captains aren’t supposed to cry. I blinked ’em back, got my voice under control, and said, “All hands! Still ready for lift? Report.”
“Aye, Captain!” – “Affirmative!” – “Yes, my dear Hilda.”
“Zebbie, switch on Gay’s ears.” He did.
“Execute!” – Termite Creek was gone and we were fifty klicks west and a touch south. Pretty and green but no Bingo. It would take us about seven minutes to overtake the Sun and approach sunrise line, plus any holds we made. Then I would go east to the sunset line in nothing flat (have Zebbie and Jacob do it); then bounce & glide, bounce & glide, while looking for a place to sleep in a spot suitable for Gay to try her new unpowered autogrounding program – in daylight with the hottest pilot in two worlds ready to override any error.
If Gay could do this, we would be almost independent of juice – and have a new “bug-out” sanctuary each time she landed herself. Power packs – Zebbie had a hand-cranked D.C. generator – but heavy work for husky men for endless hours. (40 hrs from zero to full charge; you see why Zebbie would rather buy fresh charges.)
We had been skipping along nearly three minutes, over four thousand klicks, before spotting a Bingo (by Zebbie). I called a “Hold” and added, “Where, Zebbie?”
He nosed us down. Farm buildings and cultivated fields – a happy contrast to the terrain – barren, green, flat, rugged – all lacking any sign of humans, in the stops we had made. “Astrogator, record time. Continue.”
Then over three minutes with no Bingoes – At elapsed time 6m4s Jacob called out, “Bingo! A town.”
“Hold! Onion towers?”
“I think not, dear. I see a flag – dare we go nearer?”
“Yes! But anyone use a scram at will. Jacob, may I have the binoculars, please?”
The Stars and Stripes are engraved on my heart, but in the next moments the Cross of Saint Andrew and the Cross of Saint George were added. It was an ensign with a blue field and some white shapes – three half moons in three sizes.
“Gay Deceiver.”
“I’m all ears, Hilda.”
“Move current program to standby.”
“Roger Wilco Done.”
“Gay Bounce. Zebbie, let’s sweep this area for a bigger settlement.”
Zebbie placed a locus around the town, radius five hundred klicks, and started “A Tramp Abroad” with vertex time cut to one second. Thirty-one minutes later we had a city. I guessed it at a hundred thousand plus.
“Captain,” Zebbie said, “may I suggest that we bounce and try to raise them by radio? This place is big enough for A.A. guns or missiles -“
“Gay Bounce!”
” – and we know that their Slavic neighbors have aircraft.”
“Is your guardian angel warning you?”
“Well… ’tain’t polite to ground without clearance; such rudeness can make one suddenly dead.”
“Gay Bounce, Gay Bounce. Are we out of reach of missiles?”
“Captain, British and Russians of this universe are ahead of us in spaceships or they wouldn’t be here. That requires us to assume that their missiles and lasers and X-weapons are better than ours.”
“What’s an ‘X-weapon’? And what do you advise?”
“I advise evasive tactics. An X-weapon is a ‘Nobody-Knows.'”
“Evasive tactics, your choice. I assume you won’t waste juice.”
“No juice. Jake, gallop in all directions. Up, down, and sideways. Don’t wait for ‘Execute’; jump as fast as you can. That’s it! Keep moving!”
“Captain Auntie, may I suggest an easier way?”
“Speak up, Deety.”
“Zebadiah, how big is that city? Kilometers.”
“That’s indefinite. Oh, call it eight klicks in diameter.”
“You’ve got that one-second ‘Tramp’ program on hold. Change locus. Center on that biggest building, make the radius six klicks. Then start program and Pop can rest.”
“Uh… Deety, I’m stupid. Six klicks radius, ten klicks is a minimum – A bit tight?”
“Meant to be. Shall I draw a picture?”
“Maybe you’d better.”
(Deety had defined an annulus two kilometers wide, outer radius six, inner radius four. We would “circle” the city six klicks above ground, random jumps, sixty per minute. I doubted that even robot weapons could find us, range us, hit us, in one second.)
Deety loosened her belt, slithered forward, and sketched. Suddenly Zebbie said, “Gotcha! Deety, you’re a smart girl.”
“‘Boss, I’ll bet you tell that to all the girls.'”
“Nope, just smart ones. Gay Deceiver!”
“Less noise, please.”
“Program revision. A Tramp Abroad. Locus a circle radius six klicks. Center defined by next Bingo. Acknowledge paraphrase.”
“Revised program A Tramp Abroad. Circle twelve klicks diameter center next real-time Bingo.”
“Jake, put us over that big building downtown. If necessary, make several tries but don’t hang around. Once I like the position I’ll say the magic word, then scram.”
“Aye aye, Chief.”
Jacob made a dozen jumps before Zebbie said, “Bingo Gay Bounce” and a light appeared on the display. He started the program and told Gay to increase scale; the light spread out into a circle with a lighted dot in the center. “Captain, watch this. I’ve told Gay that every stop is a Bingo. You may be surprised.”
“Thanks, Zebbie.” The circle was becoming freckled inside its perimeter. With no feeling of motion, the scene flicked every second. It was mid-morning; each scene was sharp. That big building would be dead ahead – blink your eye and you’re staring at fields – then again at the city but with that building off to starboard. It put me in mind of holovideo tape spliced to create confusion.
Zebbie had on his phones and was ignoring everything else. Jacob was watching the flickering scenery, as was I, as was Deety – when Jacob suddenly turned his head, said, “Deety-please-the-Bo – ” and clapped his hand over his mouth.
I said, “Two Bonines, Deety – quickly!”
Deety was reaching for them. “You, too, Auntie Cap’n?”
“It’s this flickering.” I gave one to Jacob, made certain that he saw me take one. I had not been motion-sick since I had been made Captain. But any time my husband must take one, I will keep him company.
Today I should have taken one as soon as I spotted that British flag; Bonine tranquilizes the nerves as well as the tummy… and soon I must act as – ambassador? Something of the sort; I intended to go straight to the top. Dealing with underlings is frustrating. In college I would not have lasted almost four years had it been up to the dean of women. But I always managed to take it over her head to the president; the top boss can bend the rules.
(But my senior year the president was female and as tough a bitch as I am. She listened to my best Clarence-Darrow defense, congratulated me, told me I should have studied law, then said, “Go pack. I want you off campus by noon.”)
Zebbie pushed the phone off his right ear. “Captain, I’ve got this loud enough to put on the horn. Want to talk to them?”
“No. I’ve never grounded outside the States. You know how, you do it. But, Chief Pilot -“
“Yes, Ma’am?”
“And Copilot and Astrogator. Stick to the truth at all times. But do not unnecessarily give information. Answer questions uninformatively – but truthfully. If pressed, tell them, ‘See the Captain.”
“My dear,” Jacob said worriedly, “I’ve been meaning to speak about this. Zeb has had diplomatic experience. Wouldn’t it be wise for us to place him in charge on the ground? Please understand, I’m not criticizing your performance as captain. But with his experience and in view of the fact that our principal purpose is to obtain certain things for his car -“
“Gay Bounce Gay Bounce Gay Bounce! Astrogator.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Place us in a parking orbit. Soonest.”
“Aye aye, Ma’am! Copilot, don’t touch the verniers. Chief Pilot, check that the car is level. Gay Deceiver.”
“On deck, Deety.”
“Program. L axis add speed vector three point six klicks per second. Paraphrase acknowledge.”
“Increase forward speed three and six tenths kilometers per second.”
“Chief Pilot?”
“Level.”
“Execute.” Deety glanced at the board. “Gay Deceiver, H-above-G will soon stop decreasing, then increase very slowly. In about fifty minutes it will maximize. Program. When H-above-G is maximum, alert me.”
“Roger Wilco.”
“If-when one hundred klicks H-above-G, alert me.”
“Roger Wilco.”
“If-when air drag exceeds zero, alert me.”
“Roger Wilco.”
“Remain in piloting mode. Ignore voices including program code words until you are called by your full name. Acknowledge by reporting your full name.”
“‘Gay Deceiver,'” answered Gay Deceiver.
“Is that okay, Captain? Smart Girl can’t hear the short-form programs now, until she hears her full name first. Then you would still have to say ‘Gay’ to alert her, and ‘Home’ or whatever to scram. But there should be loads of time, as she’ll tell me if anything starts to go wrong. You heard her.”
“That’s fine, Astrogator.”
“I turned her ears off because there may be discussion in which you might not want to have to be careful to use code words… but still be able to put her ears back fast if you need them. Faster than the switch and besides the switch can be reached only from the left front seat.”
Deety had a touch of nervous chattering; I understood the reasons for each step. And I understood why she was chattering.
“Well done. Thank you. Remain at the conn. Chief Pilot, Copilot, the Second-in-Command has the conn. I am going aft and do not wish to be disturbed.” I lowered my voice, spoke directly to Deety. “You are free to call me. You only.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” Deety acknowledged quietly. “I must remind you: air for four hours only.”
“If I fall asleep, call me in three hours.” I kissed her quickly, floated out of my chair and started to undog the bulkhead door – got nowhere; Deety had to help me. Deety flipped a light switch for me. She closed me in and dogged one dog.
I got a blanket out of the cradle, took off my clothes, tried to wrap myself in the blanket. It kept slithering away.
No seat belts – But the web straps used to make a bedroll of Zebbie’s sleeping bag were attached through loops and tucked under thingammies. Soon I had a belt across my waist and the blanket around me.
Being a runt, the only way I can fight is with words. But best for me is to walk away. Fight with Jacob? I was so angry I wanted to slap him! But I never slap anyone; a woman who takes advantage of her size and sex to slap a man is herself no gentleman. So I walked away – got out of there before I said something that would tear it – lose me my lovable, cuddly, thoughtful – and sometimes unbearable! – husband.
I wept in my pillow – no pillow and no Kleenex. After a while I slept.

Chapter XXV

” – leave bad enough alone!”

Deety:
After I helped Aunt Hilda with the bulkhead door, I got back into my seat- and said nothing. If I opened my mouth, I would say too much. I love Pop a heap, and respect him as a mathematician.
Pop is also one of the most selfish people I’ve ever known.
Doesn’t mean he’s tight with money; he isn’t. Doesn’t mean he wouldn’t share his last crust of bread – he would. With a stranger.
But if he doesn’t want to do something, he won’t. When Jane died, I had to take over money management at once. At seventeen. Because Pop ignored it. It was all I could do to get him to sign his name. –
I was bucking for my doctorate. Pop seemed to think that I should cook, clean house, shop, keep financial records, manage our businesses, cope with taxes – and earn my doctorate simultaneously.
Once I let dishes stack to see how long it would take him to notice. About two weeks later he said, “Deety, aren’t you ever going to do the dishes?”
I answered, “No, sir.”
“Eh? Why not?”
“I don’t have time.”
He looked puzzled. “Jane didn’t seem to find keeping house difficult. Is something wrong, dear?”
“Pop, Mama wasn’t bucking for a doctorate against a committee of dunderheads. My research subject was approved two years ago… but I’ve got men judging me – four out of seven – who can’t tell Fortran from Serutan, hate computers, and have dark fears that computer scientists are going to take their jobs away from them. They make me do work over because they don’t understand it. And besides – Well, Mama Jane always had help, mine, and a housekeeper toward the end.”
Pop is okay. He hired a housekeeper who stuck with us till I got my Ph.D. He investigated, discovered that thehead of the department had put men on my committee who knew nothing about computers – not on purpose; the department head did not know computers. I wound up with an even tougher committee but they knew computers. Fair enough.
Pop means to be good to me and he adores Aunt Hilda and means to pamper her. Pop is one of those men who sincerely believe in Women’s Lib, always support it – but so deep down that they aren’t aware of it, their emotions tell them that women never get over being children.
A mistake easy to make with Aunt Hilda – There are twelve-year-old girls bigger than she is and with more curves.
For a horrid time, we three said nothing. Zebadiah watched his instruments; Pop stared straight ahead.
At last my husband gave my father the chewing out that Pop would never have taken from me, “Jake. Tell me how you do it.”
“Eh?”
“You’re a genius. You aren’t the absent-minded sort who needs a boy to lead him around. You can hammer a nail with the best of them and can use power tools without chopping your fingers. You’re good company and you managed to attract one of the three finest women I’ve ever known so much that she married you. Yet you have publicly insulted her twice in one day. Twice. Tell me: Do you have to study to be that stupid? Or is it a gift, like your genius for mathematics?”
Pop covered his face with his hands. Zebadiah shut up.
I could see Pop’s shoulders shake. Presently his sobbing stopped. He wiped his eyes, unfastened his seat belt. When I realized he was heading for the bulkhead door, I unstrapped fast and placed myself in his way. He said, “Please move out of my way, Deety.”
“Copilot, return to your seat.”
“But, Daughter, you can’t come between husband and wife!”
“Address me as ‘Astrogator.’ The Captain does not wish to be disturbed. Gay Deceiver!”
“Here, Deety!”
“Log mode. Copilot, I will not permit you to disobey the Captain’s orders. Return to your seat, strap down – and stay there!”
“Or would you rather be placed in it?” Zebadiah growled. “With your arms strapped under the belts, and the buckles where you can’t reach them.”
“Chief Pilot, do not intervene unless I call on you. Copilot, move!”
Pop turned in the air, almost kicking me in the face and unaware of it. He was speaking through sobs. “But I must apologize to Hilda! Can’t you understand that?” But he was getting back into his seat.
“Jake, you’ll be a worse damn’ fool if you do.”
“What? Zeb, you can’t mean that.”
“I do mean it. You apologized once today. Hypocrisy, as Sharpie realizes. Jake, your only chance of staying married is to shut up and soldier; your word is no longer worth a fiat dollar. But if you behave yourself for four or five years, she might forget it. Correction: forgive it. She’ll never forget it. Establish a long record of good behavior and she might allow you some minor faults. But don’t ever hint that she is not as competent as any man. Sure, she’d be picked last for a tug-o’-war team, and she has to stand on a stool to reach a high shelf – does that affect her brain? Hell’s bells, if size mattered, I would be the supergenius around here – not you. Or perhaps you think being able to grow a beard confers wisdom? Jake, leave bad enough alone! Mess with it, you’ll make it worse.”
Time for a diversion: Pop must not be given a chance to answer. If Pop started defending himself, he would wind up self-righteous. The ability of the male mind to rationalize its deeds – and misdeeds – cannot be measured.
(And some female minds. But we females have more wild animal in us; mostly we don’t feel any need to justify ourselves. We just do it, whatever it is, because we want to. Is there ever any other reason?)
“Gentlemen,” I added, close on Zebadiah’s last remark before Pop could attempt rebuttal, “speaking of beards, you each have a three-day growth. If we are about to ask sanctuary, shouldn’t we be neat? I’m going to comb my hair and dig the dirt out from under my nails, and – Glory be! – I’ve got one spandy-clean jump suit. In light green, Zebadiah; matches your pilot suits. Got a clean one, dear?”
“I believe so.”
“I know so; I packed it when Aunt Hilda and I rearranged inventory. Pop, your light green jump suit is clean. That one you are wearing has wrinkles in the wrinkles and a big soup spot. We three will look as if we were in uniform. Aunt Hilda won’t but the captain-and-owner of a yacht doesn’t dress like her crew.”
“‘Owner’?” said Pop.
“‘”Owner,”‘” Zebadiah said firmly. “We pooled our resources. Sharpie is captain; she’ll stand as owner for all of us. Simpler.”
“She cautioned us not to tell lies, Zeb.” (Pop sounded normal – his usual argumentative self.)
“No lie. But if she finds it necessary to lie for us, we back her up. Come on, Jake, let’s put on our squeakin’ shoes; the Captain might decide to land any orbit. How long are these orbits, Deety?”
“One hundred minutes, plus a bit. But Gay could ground us from the far side in five minutes if the Captain asked for it.”
“So let’s get shipshape and Bristol style. Deety, will you keep an eye on the board while Jake and I shave?”
Pop said, “I’m sorry but I can’t shave until the Captain joins us. My gear is aft.”
“Jake, use mine. Glove compartment. Remington okay?” My husband added, “You first; I want to read the news.”
“The ‘news’?”
“Smart Girl has been sampling all frequencies, AM and FM, twice a second. If there is pattern, she copies.”
“But Deet – The Astrogator switched off the autopilot’s ears.”
“Jake, you just flunked Physics One-Oh-One. Deety told S.G. to shut off audio. I had in mind the electromagnetic spectrum. You’ve heard of it?”
Pop chuckled. “Touché! That makes us even for the one you pulled while we were calibrating.”
(I heaved a sigh of relief. I had not been trying to save Pop’s marriage – that’s his problem. Even my own marriage was secondary; I was trying to save the team, and so was Zebadiah. We were two marriages and that is important – but most important we were a survival team and either we worked together smoothly or none would live through it.)
While Pop shaved and Zebadiah read the news, I cleaned my nails. If I clean them before each meal and again at bedtime, they are dirty only in between – dirt likes me. Mama Jane told me that centuries ago, while ouching my hair for school – not a criticism; a statement of fact.
The men swapped headset for shaver and I combed my hair and pinned it into place – no longer an “ouch” job as I keep it short, ringlets rather than curls. Men like it long – but caring for long hair is a career in itself, and I’ve been pushed for time since I was twelve.
Zebadiah stopped to feel his chin – so I deduced as the buzzing stopped. I asked, “What did Smart Girl have to say?”
“Not much. Le’me finish this. BBC Third Program mostly.”
“From London?” He had resumed shaving and couldn’t hear me.
Zebadiah finished shaving and passed his shaver to Pop, who stowed it, then took off the headset and handed it back. Zebadiah racked and secured it. I was about to ask for it, when I heard Aunt Hilda’s sweet voice:
“Hello, everyone! What did I miss?”
“Halley’s Comet.”
“Halley’s – Zebbie, you’re a tease. Jacob – Oh! You shaved! How very nice! Hold still, my darling; you’re going to be kissed, ready or not.”
A kiss in free fall is interesting to watch when one participant is safety-belted and the other half is floating free. Hilda held Pop’s cheeks, he had her head in his hands, and Aunt Hilda drifted like a flag in a breeze. She was dressed but barefooted; I was intrigued when she curled her toes, hard. Was Pop that good? – my cubical father, so I had thought until recently. Did Jane teach him? Or – Shut up, Deety, you’re a voyeuse with a nasty curiosity.
They broke and Hilda floated between the pilot seats, a hand on each, and looked at the board. My husband said – to her, not to me – “Don’t I get a kiss? It was my razor.”
Aunt Hilda hesitated. Pop said, “Kiss him, beloved, or he’ll sulk.” So she did. It occurs to me that Aunt Hilda may have taught Zebadiah and that Mama Jane and Aunt Hilda may have been trained by the same coach before Pop came along – if so, who was my Unknown Benefactor?
“Not a whole lot,” Zebadiah was saying. “Mostly tapes from BBC. Five minutes of news from Windsor City – which may be the city we bingoed – as exciting as local news from any town you’ve never been in. Chatter in Russian. The Smart Girl saved that for you.”
“I’ll listen to it. But I must learn something. I was tempery a while ago, but a nap fixed me up and now I am filled with sweetness and light. I must have a report from each of you. We all have had cumulative fatigue. It is now bedtime at Termite Terrace but about lunchtime in Windsor City if that is its name. We can go back to our stream or we can tackle the British. I am not taking a vote; I shall decide and I have a way to take care of anyone who is tired. But I insist on honest data. Deety?”
“Captain Auntie, sleep is never my problem.”
“Zebbie?”
“I was a zombie. Until you recharged me. Now I’m rarin’ to go!”
She mussed his hair. “Zebbie, quit teasing.”
“Captain, on an earlier occasion I told you the facts: My alert time exceeds twenty-four hours. Forty-eight if I must. If that kiss did not stimulate you as much as it did me, let’s try it again and find out what went wrong.”
Aunt Hilda turned away abruptly. “Jacob dear, how do you feel? With the time difference this may be equivalent to staying up all night, possibly under great tension.”
“Hilda my love, were we to return to our streamside, I would not sleep, knowing that this contact was coming. A night without sleep does not strain me.”
“Pop’s not exaggerating, Captain Auntie. I get my night-owl capacity from Pop.”
“Very well. But I have a method of taking care of anyone who may have exaggerated. I can leave one person aboard as guard.”
“Captain, this wagon does not need a guard.”
“Chief Pilot, I was offering sleep – under pretext of guarding. Car locked and sleep where I just napped – outsiders would not know. Anyone? Speak up.”
(I wouldn’t have missed it for a Persian kitten! Did Hilda expect anyone to stay behind? I don’t think so.)
“Very well. No firearms. Gentlemen, please hide your pistols and belts with the guns, aft. Zebbie, is there a way to lock that door in addition to dogging it?”
“Sure. Tell Gay. May I ask why? No one can break into the cabin without damaging the old girl so much that she won’t lift.”
“Conceded, Zebbie. But I will be bringing visitors into this space. If anyone is brash enough to ask to be shown beyond the bulkhead door, I shall tell him that is my private compartment.” Aunt Hilda grinned wickedly. “If he persists, I’ll freeze his ears. What’s the program for locking and unlocking it?”
“Very complicated. Tell her, ‘Lock the bulkhead door,’ or ‘Unlock the bulkhead door.’ Concealed solenoids. If the car is cold, the bolts drop back.”
“Goodness, you were thorough.”
“No, Ma’am. The Aussies were. But it turns out to be convenient for things we wouldn’t like to lose. Cap’n, I don’t trust banks any more than I trust governments, so I carry my safety deposit vault with me.”
“If you cut the trickle charge, it unlocks?” Pop asked.
“Jake, I knew you would spot that. An accumulator across the solenoids, floating. Shut down the car and the solenoids work for another month… unless you open a switch in an odd location. Anyone want to know where it is? – what you don’t know, you can’t tell.”
He got no takers. Instead I said, “Captain, is a fléchette gun a ‘firearm’?”
“Hmm – Will it fit into a zippered compartment in your purse?”
“It fits into a concealed zipper compartment.”
“Keep it with you. No swords, gentlemen, as well as no firearms; we are a civilian party. One thing we should carry: those miniature walky-talkies, Deety and I in our purses, you gentlemen in your pockets. If they are noticed, tell the truth: a means of keeping our party in touch.”
Aunt Hilda suddenly looked stern. “This next order should be in writing. Please understand that there are no exceptions, no special circumstances, no variations left to individual judgment. I require Roger-Wilcoes from each of you or we do not ground. This party does not separate. Not for thirty seconds. Not for ten seconds. Not at all.”
“Will the Captain entertain a question?”
“Certainly, Zebbie.”
“Washrooms. Restrooms. Bathrooms. If these British behave like their analogs, such facilities are segregated.”
“Zebbie, all I can say to that is that I will look for a way to cope. But we stay together until I – until I, the Captain – decide that it is safe to ease the rule. In the meantime – We should use that unpopular honey bucket before we ground… then, if necessary, return to the car, together, to use it later. That’s not subject to discussion. Once we are on the ground, you three, acting unanimously, can hold a bloodless mutiny over this order or any” – Aunt Hilda looked directly at her husband – “and I will let myself be kicked out without a word… out of office as captain, out of the car, out of the party. Remain here, on Mars-ten, with the British if they will have me. No more questions. No further discussion by me or among yourselves. Astrogator.”
“Roger Wilco!”
“Thank you. Please state it in the long form.”
“I understand the Captain’s order and will comply exactly with no mental reservations.”
“Chief Pilot.”
“I understand -“
“Short form. Deety defined it.”
“Roger Wilco, Captain!”
Aunt Hilda turned in the air toward Pop – and I held my breath, three endless seconds. “Jacob?”
“Roger Wilco, Captain.”
“Very well. We will ground as soon as we get clearance but will not ask for clearance until I’ve heard the news and translated that Russian.” Whereupon I told her that we all intended to put on our best bib and tucker; the time should come out about right – and could we be relieved one by one? As I intended to use that darned thunder mug – when you must, you must.
Aunt Hilda frowned slightly. “I do wish that I had a jump suit in my size. This outfit -“
“Aunt Hilda! Your crew is in uniform but you are wearing the latest Hollywood style. That model was created by Ferrara himself and he charged you more than you paid for that mink cape. You are the Captain and dress to please yourself. I tell you three times!”
Aunt Hilda smiled. “Should I acknowledge in paraphrase?”
“By all means.”
“Deety, I require my crew to wear uniforms. But I dress to suit myself, and when I saw what the world-famous couturier Mario Ferrara was doing to change the trend in women’s sports clothes, I sent for him and worked him silly until he got just what I wanted. Including repeated washings of the trousers to give them that not-quite-new look so favored by the smart set for yachting. When you come back will you fetch your little shoes – my Keds – and the hair ribbon you gave me? They are part of Signor Ferrara’s creation.”
“Aunt Hilda honey, you make it sound true!”
“It is true. You told me three times. I don’t even regret the thousand newdollar bonus I gave him. That man is a genius! Get along dear – git. Chief Pilot, you have the conn; I want the earphones.”
I was back in ten minutes with jump suits for self and Pop and clean pilot suit for my husband.
I sailed their clothes toward Pop and Zebadiah. Aunt Hilda was handing phones back to Zebadiah; his suit caught both of them. “Wups, sorry but not very. What do the Russians say?”
“We’re baddies,” said my husband.
“We are? The suit I took off is loose back aft. Wrap it around your pistol and belt and shove them under the sleeping bag – pretty please?”
“With sugar on it?”
“At today’s prices? Yes. Beat it. Cap’n, what sort of baddies?”
“Spies and agents-saboteurs and other things and indemnity is demanded in the name of the Tsar and the surrender of our persons, all twelve of us -“
“Twelve?”
“So they claim. – for trial before they hang us. Or else. The ‘or-else’ amounts to a threat of war.”
“Heavens! Are we going to ground?”
“Yes. The British comment was that a source close to the Governor reports that the Russians have made another of their periodic claims of territorial violation and espionage and the note was routinely rejected. I intend to be cautious. We won’t leave the car unless I am convinced that we will receive decent treatment.”

Shortly we were again doing one-second jumps in a circle around Windsor City. Had Pop not pulled another blunder in handling Aunt Hilda we would have been on the ground two hours ago. “Blunder,” rather than “insult” – but I’m not Hilda, I’m Deety. My ego is not easily bruised. Before I married, if a man patronized me and it mattered, I used to invite him to go skeet shooting. Even if he beat me (happened once), he never patronized me again.
If it’s an unsocial encounter – I’m big, I’m strong, I fight dirty. A male has to be bigger, stronger, and just as well trained or I can take him. Haven’t had to use the fléchette gun yet. But twice I’ve broken arms and once I kicked a mugger in the crotch and said he fainted.
Zebadiah was having trouble with traffic control. ” – request permission to ground. This is private yacht Gay Deceiver, U.S. registry, Chief Pilot Carter speaking. All we want is clearance to ground. You’re behaving like those youknow-what-I-mean Russians. I didn’t expect this from Englishmen.”
“Now, now! Where are you? You sound close by… but we can’t get a fix on you.”
“We are circling your city at a height above ground of five kilometers.”
“How much is that in feet? Or miles?”
I touched my husband’s shoulder. “Tell him sixteen thousand feet.”
“Sixteen thousand feet.”
“What bearing?”
“We’re circling.”
“Yes, but – See Imperial House at City Center? What bearing?”
“We are much too fast for you to take a bearing. While you speak one sentence, we’ve gone around twice.”
“Oh, tell that to the Jollies; old sailors will never believe it.”
Aunt Hilda tapped Zebadiah; he passed the microphone to her. Aunt Hilda said crisply, “This is Captain Burroughs, commanding. State your name, rating, and organization number.”
I heard a groan, then silence. Twenty-three seconds later another voice came on. “This is the officer of the watch, Leftenant Bean. Is there a spot of trouble?”
“No, Lieutenant, merely stupidity. My chief pilot has been trying for fifteen minutes for clearance to ground. Is this a closed port? We were not told so by your embassy on Earth. We were warned that the Russians discouraged visitors, and indeed, they tried to shoot us out of the sky. What is your full name and your regiment, Lieutenant; I intend to make a formal report when I return home,”
“Please, Madam! This is Leftenant Brian Bean, Devonshire Royal Fusiliers. May I ask to whom I am speaking?”
“Very well. I will speak slowly; please record. I am Captain Hilda Burroughs, commanding space yacht Gay Deceiver, out of Snug Harbor in the Americas.”
“Captain, let me get this clear. Are you commanding both a spaceship in orbit and a landing craft from your ship? Either way, please let me have the elements of your ship’s orbit for my log, and tell me the present position of your landing craft. Then I can assign you a berth to ground.”
“Do I have your word as a British officer and gentleman that you will not shoot us out of the sky as those Russian vandals attempted to do?”
“Madam – Captain – you have my word.”
“Gay Bounce. We are now approximately forty-nine thousand feet above your city.”
“But – We understood you to say ‘Sixteen thousand’?”
“That was five minutes ago; this craft is fast.” Aunt Hilda released the button. “Deety, get rid of the special ‘Tramp’ program.”
I told Gay to return “Tramp” to her perms and to wipe the temporary mods. “Done.”
Aunt Hilda pressed the mike button. “Do you see us now?” She released the button. “Deety, I want us over that big building – ‘Imperial House,’ probably – in one transition. Can you tell Zebbie and Jacob what it takes?”
I looked it over. We should be at the edge of the city – but were we? Get a range and triangulate? No time! Guess at the answer, double it and divide by two. Arc tan four tenths. “Pop, can you transit twenty-one degrees from vertical toward city hail?”
“Twenty-one degrees. Sixty-nine degrees of dive toward the big barn in the park, relative bearing broad on the port bow, approx – set! One unit transition, ten klicks – set!”
“I can see you now, I do believe,” came Mr. Bean’s voice. “Barely.”
“We’ll come lower.” Aunt Hilda chopped off the lieutenant. “Zebbie, put her into glide as soon as you execute. Deety, watch H-above-G and scram if necessary – don’t wait to be told. Zebbie, execute at will.”
“Jake, execute!” – and we were down so fast I got goose bumps… especially as Zebadiah then dived vertically to gain glide speed and that’s mushy, slow, slow, on Mars.
But soon Aunt Hilda was saying tranquilly, “We are over Imperial House. You see us?”
“Yes, yes! My word! Bloody!”
“Leftenant, watch your language!” Aunt Hilda winked at me and snickered silently.
“Madam, I apologize.”
“‘Captain,’ if you please,” she said, smiling while her voice dripped icicles.
“Captain, I apologize.”
“Accepted. Where am I to ground?”
“Ah, figured from Imperial House, there is a landing field due south of it twelve miles. I will tell them to expect you.”
Hilda let up on the button, said, “Gay Bounce” and racked the microphone. “How unfortunate that the lieutenant’s radio cut out before he could tell us how far away that field is. Or was it our radio?”
I said, “Captain, you know durn well both radios worked okay.”
“Mercy, I must be getting old. Was Smart Girl in recording mode?”
I said, “She always is, during maneuvers. She wipes it in a ten-hour cycle.”
“Then my bad hearing doesn’t matter. Please ask her to repeat the lieutenant’s last speech.” I did, and Gay did. “Deety, can you have her wipe it right after the word ‘it’?”
“Auntie, you ain’t goin’ to Heaven.” I had Gay wipe twelve-miles-I-will-tell-them-to-expect-you. “But you wouldn’t know anybody there.”
“Probably not, dear. Zebbie, how does one have Smart Girl ground herself without juice?”
“Deety had better go over it again. Unless – Jake, will you explain it?”
“It’s Deety’s caper. I could use another drill.”
“All right,” I agreed. “Switch off Gay’s ears, Zebadiah. Gay can make any transition exactly if she knows precisely where her target is. Even a jump of less than one minimum. I found that out the day we got here when we were testing remote control. The rest came from perfecting the ‘Bug-Out’ routine by having her pause and sweep the target and if it’s obstructed, she bounces. Aunt Hilda, if you intend to ground, we had better not be much under five klicks or we’ll have to bounce and start over.”
“I’ve got air bite, Captain. I’ll stretch it.”
“Thanks, Zebbie. Deety, you do it. Let us all learn.”
“Okay. I need both pilots. You haven’t said where to ground.”
“Wasn’t that clear? Due south of Imperial House. I think it is a parade ground. Nothing on it but a flagpole on the north side. Put her down in front of the building but miss that flagpole.”
“It would take override to hit that flagpole. Zebadiah, gunsight the spot you want to park on. I’ll talk to Gay. Then put her in level flight in the orientation you want, and give ‘Execute.’ Pop, Gay should pause at exactly one-half klick, to see that her parking spot is clear and to recheck distance. That stop won’t be long – a fraction of a second – but, if she fails to make it, try to bounce. Probably you can’t; if I missed in debugging, maybe we’ll all be radioactive. Been nice knowing you all. Okay, switch on her ears.” My husband did so.
“Gay Deceiver.”
“Hello, Deety. I’ve missed you.”
“Unpowered autogrounding mode.”
“Gonna ground by myself without a drop of juice! Where?”
“New target. Code word: ‘Parade Ground.’ Point of aim and range-finder method.”
“Show him to me. I can lick him!”
I touched my husband’s shoulder. “Let her know.”
“On target, Gay. Steady on target.”
“Range three-seven-two-nine, three-seven-naughty-nought, three-five-nine-nine – got him, Deety!”
Zebadiah leveled us out, headed us north. “Execute!”
We were parked facing the big front steps. That flagpole was ten meters from Gay’s nose.
Pop said, “Deety, I could see the check stop but it was too short for me to act. But your programs always work.”
“Until the day one blows up. Aunt Hilda, what do we do now?”
“We wait.”

Chapter XXVI

The Keys to the City

Jake:
I do not believe that I am wrong in insisting that Zeb should lead us. I am forced to conclude that being right has little to do with holding a woman’s affections. I never intend to hurt Hilda’s feelings. I now plan to make a career of keeping my mouth shut.
But I do not think it was diplomatic to spat with that radio operator or proper to be – well, yes, rude – rude to his officer. As for grounding twelve miles, nineteen klicks, from where we were told to – is this the behavior of guests!
But we did ground where we should not have. I started to open the door to get out, then help Hilda to disembark, when I heard her say: “We wait.”
Hilda added, “Leave doors locked and belts fastened. Gay Deceiver, remain in maneuvering mode. Lock the bulkhead door.”
“Hot and rarin’ to go, Hilda. Bulkhead door locked.”
“You’re a smart girl, Gay.”
“That makes two of us, Hilda.”
“Chief Pilot, in this mode does she record outside as well as inside?”
“She does if I switch on outside speakers and mikes, Captain.”
“Please do.”
“What volume, Captain? Outside, and inside.”
“I didn’t know they were separate. Straight-line gain?”
“Logarithmic, Ma’am. From a gnat’s whisper to a small earthquake.”
“I would like outside pickup to amplify enough that we won’t miss anything. What I send out should be a bit forceful.”
“Captain, I’ll give you a decibel advantage. You want it louder, squeeze my shoulder. I won’t turn it higher than seven – unless you want to use it as a weapon. But to talk privately inside I have to keep switching off, then on. As with the Russians – remember?”
“Oh, yes. All hands, I will speak for all of us. If anyone needs to speak to me, attract Zebbie’s attention – “
“Slap my shoulder.”
” – and he’ll give us privacy and confirm it with thumbs-up. Don’t ask for it unnecessarily.”
“Hilda, why these complex arrangements? Here comes someone now; it would be polite to go meet them. In any case, we can open the door to talk – these are not Russians.” I simply could not bear to watch my darling handle this delicate matter with such – well, rudeness!
Was I thanked? “Copilot, pipe down. All hands, we may go upstairs any instant; report readiness for space. Astrogator.”
“Ready, Captain.”
“Chief Pilot.”
“Still ready. Outside audio hot.”
“Copilot.”
“I’m checking this door seal again. Earlier I started to open it. There! Ready for space. Hilda, I don’t think – “
“Correct! But the Chief Pilot did think, and gave me thumbs-up as soon as you started to talk. Pipe down! Chief Pilot, cut in our sender as soon as one of them speaks. Copilot, call me ‘Captain’ as the others do. Protocol applies; I’ll explain family relationships later, when appropriate.”
I resolved not to open my mouth for any reason, feeling quite disgruntled. Disgruntled? I found myself giving serious thought to whether or not Hilda’s temporary and inappropriate authority could do permanent harm to her personality.
But the top of my mind was observing the Lord High Executioner, approaching us flanked by two henchmen. He was wearing a uniform more suited to musical comedy than to the field. Fierce moustaches, sunburn-pink complexion, service ribbons, and a swagger cane completed the effect.
His henchmen were younger, not so fancy, fewer ribbons, and appeared to be sergeants. I could not read the officer’s shoulder straps. A crown, I thought, but was there a pip beside it?
He strode toward us and was ten meters from my door when Hilda said firmly, “That’s close enough. Please tell the Governor General that Captain Burroughs has grounded as directed and awaits his pleasure.”
He stopped briefly and bellowed, “You were not directed to land here! You’re supposed to be at the field! Customs, immigration, health inspection, visas, tourist cards, intelligence -“
I saw Hilda squeeze Zeb’s shoulder. “Quiet!” Her voice came more loudly from outside than from her despite Gay’s soundproofing. Zeb reduced gain as she continued, “My good man, send one of your ratings to the Governor General to deliver my message. While we wait, state your name, rank, and regiment; I shall make formal report of your behavior.”
“Preeeposterous!”
“Behavior ‘unbecoming an officer and a gentleman,'” Hilda said with gentle sweetness, “since you insist. While you won’t tell your name, like a naughty boy, others know it. The Paymaster. The Governor General. Others.” She squeezed Zeb’s shoulder. “Deliver my message!”
“I’m Colonel Brumby, Chief Constable of the Imperial Household, and not your messenger boy! Open up! I’m going to parade you before the Governor General – under arrest!”
Hilda said quietly to Zeb, “Seven” – allowed the Chief Constable to stride two more steps before saying, “STOP!”
My ears hurt.
All three stopped. The old fool braced himself and started again. Hilda must have poked Zeb; he answered with thumbs-up. “Back to normal volume but be ready with that earthquake.”
He nodded; she went on, “Leftenant Colonel, is it not? I don’t see that extra pip. Leftenant Colonel, I warn you for your own safety not to come closer.”
He did not answer, kept coming, took his cane from under his arm. His sergeants followed – slowly, at a respectful distance. Hilda let him reach my door – I could see a network of broken veins on his nose-and for the second time in two days someone started to pound on Gay’s door. He raised his cane –
“Stop that!”
I was deafened. The Chief Constable was missing. The sergeants were a long way back. They stopped running, turned and faced us. I looked down through my door’s port, saw a pair of legs and a swagger cane – inferred a torso.
I turned my head, saw that Zeb had his thumb up. “Captain,” he said, “I disobeyed you.”
“How, Zebbie?”
“I gave him an eight; I wasn’t sure his heart could take a ten. He looks like an old bottle-a-day man.”
“An eight may have been too much,” I commented. “He’s on the ground. Dead, maybe.”
“Oh, I hope not!”
“Unlikely, Captain,” Zeb told her. “Shall I tell his noncoms to come get him?”
“I’ll tell them, Zebbie. Normal level.” Hilda waited until he signalled, then called out, “Sergeants! Colonel Brumby needs help. There will be no more loud noises.”
The sergeants hesitated, then hurried. Shortly they were dragging him away. Presently he came to life, fought them off – sent one chasing back for his cane. The man caught my eye – and winked. I concluded that Brumby was not popular.
There was now a man standing on the entrance stairs. (Perhaps there had been people nearby earlier – but not after the noise started.) Imperial House had its ground floor with no doors on the front side. The first floor was the main floor and was reached by wide, sweeping stairs. The man near the top was small, dapper, dressed in mufti. As Brumby reached him, Brumby saluted, stopped, and they talked. Brumby’s ramrod stiffness spoke for itself.
Shortly the smaller man trotted down the long steps, moved quickly toward us, stopped about thirty meters away, and called out, “In the landing craft! Is it safe to come closer?”
“Certainly,” agreed Hilda.
“Thank you, Ma’am.” He approached, talking as he walked. “I dare say we should introduce ourselves. I’m Lieutenant General Smythe-Carstairs, the Governor hereabouts. I take it you are Captain Burroughs?”
“That is correct, Excellency.”
“Thank you. Although I can’t tell, really, to whom I am speaking. Awkward, is it not, chatting via an announcing system? An open door would be pleasanter, don’t you think? More friendly.”
“You are right, Excellency. But the Russians gave us so unpleasant, so dangerous, a reception that I am nervous.”
“Those bounders. They have been making a bit of fuss over you, on the wireless. That was how I recognized your craft – smaller than they claimed but an accurate description – for a Russian. But surely you don’t think that we British wear our shirt tails out? You will receive decent treatment here.”
“That is pleasing to hear, Excellency. I was tempted to leave. That policeman chap is most unpleasant.”
“Sorry about that. Sheer mischance that he was first to greet you. Important as this colony is to the Empire, no doubt you have heard that being posted to it is not welcome to some. Not my own case, I asked for it. But some ranks and ratings. Now let’s have that door open, shall we? I dislike to insist but I am in charge here.”
Hilda looked thoughtful. “Governor General, I can either open the doors or leave. I prefer to stay. But the shocking treatment by the Russians followed by the totally unexpected behavior of your chief constable causes me to worry. I need a guarantee that our party will be permitted to remain together at all times, and a written safe-conduct for us, signed and sealed by you on behalf of H.I.M.”
“My dear Captain, a captain does not bargain with one who stands in place of and holds the authority of His Imperial Majesty. As a man, and you being a delightful lady, I would be happy to bargain with you endlessly just for the pleasure of your company. But I can’t.”
“I was not bargaining, Excellency; I was hoping for a boon. Since you will not grant it, I must leave at once.”
He shook his head. “I cannot permit you to leave as yet.”
“Gay Bounce. Zebbie, will you try to reach that nice Mr. Bean?”
Zeb had him shortly. “Leftenant Bean heah.”
“Captain Burroughs, Leftenant. Our radio chopped off while you were talking. No harm done; the important part got through. We grounded where you told us to, due south of Imperial House.”
“So that’s what happened? I must admit to feeling relieved.”
“Is your post of duty in Imperial House?”
“Yes, Ma’am. On it, rather. We have a small housing on the roof.”
“Good. I have a message for the Governor General. Will you record?”
“Oh, certainly.”
“This is Hilda Burroughs speaking, Master of Spacecraft Gay Deceiver out of Snug Harbor. I am sorry that I had to leave without saying good-bye. But your last statement forced me to take measures to protect my craft and crew.” My darling Hilda cut the mike. “Zebbie, when you have air, glide away from the city.” She continued, “In a small way my responsibilities parallel yours; I cannot bargain concerning the safety of my crew and my craft. I hope that you will reconsider, as I have no stomach for dealing with the Russians – even though they have more to offer us in exchange. I still ask for safe-conduct but now must ask for a still third item in such a document: that all four of us be allowed to leave at will. You have my name. My second-in-command is Doctor D. T. Burroughs Carter, my chief pilot is Doctor Z. J. Carter, my copilot is Doctor Jacob Burroughs. You will have noticed surnames. Doctor Jacob is my husband; the other two are our daughter and her husband. I am Doctor Hilda Corners but I am much prouder of being Mrs. Jacob Burroughs – although at present I must use ‘Captain Hilda Burroughs’ since I am commanding. Sir, while dictating this I have made a decision. I will not make a second attempt to negotiate with Russians. We will wait thirty minutes in the warm hope of hearing from you… then return to Earth, report to our own government, send a detailed complaint to the Tsar of All the Russias, and make a formal report of our attempt here to His Imperial Majesty. Signed Respectfully yours, H. C. Burroughs, Commanding. Leftenant, what are the full names and titles of the Governor General?”
“Ah, His Excellency Lieutenant General the Right Honourable Herbert Evelyn James Smythe-Carstairs, K.G., V.C., C.B.E., Governor General of the Imperial Realms Beyond the Sky.”
“Preface it formally, please, and I will wait until oh-nine-hundred hours Greenwich time or thirty-six minutes from now. Mark!”
“I will add the heading, Captain, and deliver it by hand.”
After Hilda signed off she said, “I’m going to try to sleep thirty of those thirty-six minutes. Can anyone think of a program that will let all of us nap? This contact is more tiring than I had expected. Jacob, Deety, Zeb – don’t all speak at once.”
“I can, my dear,” I answered.
“Yes, Jacob?”
“Gay Termite.”
To my mild surprise it was night at our creek bank. To my pleasure my first attempt to maneuver by voice was smoothly successful. My daughter’s ingenuity in constructing voiced programs had left me little to do. While I did not resent it (I’m proud of Deety), nevertheless while sitting as copilot, I sometimes wondered whether anyone remembered that it was my brainchild that moved this chariot. Ah, vanity!
To my greater pleasure Hilda clapped her hands and looked delighted. “Jacob! How clever of you! How stupid of me! All right, everyone off duty for a half hour ‘cept the rule about always two and always a rifle. Gay, alert us in thirty minutes. And please unlock the bulkhead door.”
“Aunt Hillbilly, are you going to sleep back there?”
“I had thought of stretching out and inviting Jacob to join me. But the space belongs to you and Zebbie; I was thoughtless.”
“We aren’t going to sleep. But we had better drag those rifles out of that sack or you won’t sleep. I want to empty the oubliette and stow that pesky plastic potty under the cushion of my seat. Durned if I’ll use it when I have the whole outdoors at hand.”
“Most certainly – but stay inside Gay’s lights – and do please remind me before we leave. Deety, I’ve so much on my mind that I forget housekeeping details.”
“Hillbilly, you’re doing swell. I’ll handle housekeeping; you worry about the big picture.”
Hilda cuddled up to me in the after compartment and my nerves began to relax. Would the Governor General relent? Where would we go next? We had a myriad universes to choose from, a myriad myriad planets – but only one was home and we didn’t dare go there. What about juice for Zeb’s car and a thousand other things? Perhaps we should risk Earth-without-a-J. What about the time bomb, ticking away in my darling’s belly?
Hilda sniffed into my shoulder. I patted her head. “Relax, dearest.”
“I can’t. Jacob, I don’t like this job. I snap at you, you argue with me, we both get upset. It’s not good for us – we never behaved this way at Snug Harbor.”
“Then give it up.”
“I’m going to. After I finish the job I started. Jacob, when we lift from this planet, you will be captain.”
“Oh, no! Zeb.” (Hilda my only love, you should turn it over to him now.)
“Zebbie won’t take it. It’s you or Deety, Jacob. If Deety is our next captain, you will back-seat drive even more than you have with me. No, Jacob, you must be captain before Deety is, so that you will understand what she is up against.”
I felt that I had been scolded enough. I started to tell Hilda when that pejorative epithet played back in my mind: ” – back-seat drive -“
I trust that I am honest with myself. I know that I am not very sociable and I expect to go on being so; a man capable of creative work has no time to spare for fools who would like to visit. But a “back-seat driver”?
Some facts: Jane learned to drive before I did – her father’s duo. Our first car, a roadable, coincided with her pregnancy; I got instruction so that I could drive for Jane. She resumed driving after Deety was born but when both of us were in the car, I always drove. She drove with me as passenger once or twice before the custom became established – but she never complained that I had been back-seat driving.
But Jane never complained.
Deety laid it on the line. I don’t know who taught Deety to drive but I recall that she was driving, on roads as well as in the air, when she was twelve or thirteen. She had no occasion to drive for me until Jane’s illness. There was a time after we lost Jane that Deety often drove for me. After a while we alternated. Then came a day when she was driving and I pointed out that her H-above-G was, oh, some figure less than a thousand meters, with a town ahead.
She said, “Thanks, Pop” – and grounded at that town, an unplanned stop. She switched off, got out, walked around and said, “Shove over, Pop. From now on, I’ll enjoy the scenery while you herd us through the sky.”
I didn’t shove over, so Deety got into the back seat. Deety gets her stubbornness from both parents. Jane’s was covered with marshmallow that concealed chrome steel; mine is covered with a coat of sullen anger if frustrated. But Deety’s stubbornness isn’t concealed. She has a sweet disposition but Torquemada could not force Deety to do that which she decided against.
For four hours we ignored each other. Then I turned around (intending to start an argument, I suppose – I was in the mood for one) – and Deety was asleep, curled up in the back seat.
I wrote a note, stuck it to the wind screen, left the keys, got quietly out, made sure all doors were locked, hired another car and drove home – by air; I was too angry to risk roading.
Instead of going straight home I went to the Commons to eat, and found Deety already eating. So I took my tray and joined her. She looked up, smiled, and greeted me: “Hello, Pop! How nice we ran into each other!” She opened her purse. “Here are your keys.”
I took them. “Where is our car?”
“Your car, Pop. Where you left it.”
“I left it?”
“You had the keys; you were in the front seat; you hold title. You left a passenger asleep in the back seat. Good thing she’s over eighteen, isn’t it?” She added, “There is an Opel duo I have my eye on. Tried it once; it’s in good shape.”
“We don’t need two cars!”
“A matter of taste. Yours. And mine.”
“We can’t afford two cars.”
“How would you know, Pop? I handle the money.”
She did not buy the Opel. But she never again drove when we both were in our car.
Three data are not a statistical universe. But it appears that the three women I have loved most all consider me to be a back-seat driver. Jane never said so… but I realize today that she agreed with Deety and Hilda.
I don’t consider myself to be a back-seat driver! I don’t yell “Look out!” or “Watch what you’re doing!” But four eyes are better than two: Should not a passenger offer, simply as data, something the driver may not have seen? Criticism? Constructive criticism only and most sparingly and only to close friends.
But I try to be self-honest; my opinion is not important in this. I must convince Hilda and Deety, by deeds, not words. Long habit is not changed by mere good resolution; I must keep the matter at the top of my mind.
There was banging at the bulkhead; I realized that I had been asleep. The door opened a crack. “Lift in five minutes.”
“Okay, Deety,” Hilda answered. “Nice nap, beloved?”
“Yes indeed. Did you?”
As we crawled out, Deety said, “Starboard door is open; Pop’s rifle is leaning against it, locked. Captain, you asked to be reminded. Shall I take the conn?”
“Yes, thank you.”
We lost no time as Deety used two preprograms: Bingo Windsor, plus Gay Bounce. Zeb had the communication watch officer almost at once. ” – very well. I will see if the Captain will take the message. No over. Hold.”
Zeb looked around, ostentatiously counted ten seconds, then pointed at Hilda.
“Captain Burroughs speaking. Leftenant Bean?”
“Yes, yes! Oh, my word, I’ve been trying to reach you the past twenty minutes.”
“It is still a few seconds short of the time I gave you.”
“Nevertheless I am enormously relieved to hear your voice, Captain. I have a message from the Governor General. Are you ready to record?”
Zeb nodded; Hilda answered Yes; the lieutenant continued: “‘From the Governor General to H. C. Burroughs, Master Gay Deceiver.’ Hurry home, the children are crying. We all miss you. The fatted calf is turning on the spit. That document is signed and sealed, including the additional clause. Signed: “Bertie”‘ – Captain, that is the Governor’s way of signing a message to an intimate friend. A signal honor, if I may say so.”
“Gracious of him. Please tell the Governor General that I am ready to ground and will do so as soon as you tell me that the spot in which we were parked – the exact spot – is free of any obstruction whatever.”
Bean was back in about three minutes saying that our spot was clear and would be kept so. Hilda nodded to Deety, who said, “Gay Parade Ground.”
I had a flash of buildings fairly close, then we were back in the sky. Hilda snapped, “Chief Pilot, get Leftenant Bean!”
Then – c”Mr. Bean! Our spot was not clear.”
“It is now, Captain; I have just come from the parapet. The Governor’s poodle got loose and ran out. The Governor chased him and brought him back. Could that have been it?”
“It decidedly was it. You may tell the Governor – privately – that never in battle has he been so close to death. Astrogator, take her down!”
“GayParadeGround!”
Bean must have heard the gasp, then cheers, while Hilda’s words were still echoing in his radio shack. We were exactly as before, save that the wide, showy steps to the King-Emperor’s residence on Mars were jammed with people: officers, soldiers, civil servants with that slightly dusty look, women with children, and a few dogs, all under restraint.
I didn’t spot the Right Honourable “Bertie” until he moved toward us. He was no longer in mufti but in what I could call “service dress” or “undress” – not a dress uniform – but dressy. Ribbons, piping, wound stripes, etc. – sword when appropriate. Since he was not wearing sword I interpreted our status as “honored guests” rather than “official visitors” – he was ready to jump either way.
He had his wife on his arm – another smart move, our captain being female. His aide (? – left shoulder “chicken guts” but possibly a unit decoration) was with him, too – no one else. The crowd stayed back.
Hilda said, “Chief Pilot – ” then pointed to the mikes, drew her finger across her throat. Zeb said, “Outside audio is cold, Cap’n.”
“Thank you, Gay, lock the bulkhead door, open your doors.”
I jumped down and handed Hilda out, offered her my arm, while Zeb was doing the same with Deety portside. We met, four abreast at Gay’s nose, continued moving forward a few paces and halted facing the Governor’s party as they halted. It looked rehearsed but we had not even discussed it. This placed our ladies between us, with my tiny darling standing tall, opposite the Governor.
The aide boomed, “His Excellency Governor General the Lieutenant General the Right Honourable Herbert Evelyn James Smythe-Carstairs and Lady Herbert Evelyn James!”
The Governor grinned. “Dreadful,” he said quietly, “but worse with ruffles, flourishes, and the Viceroy’s March – I spared you that.” He raised his voice, did not shout but it projected – and saluted Hilda. “Captain Burroughs! We bid you welcome!”
Hilda bowed, returning the salute. “Excellency… Lady Herbert… thank you! We are happy to be here.”
Lady Herbert smiled at being included, and bobbed about two centimeters – a minimum curtsy, I suppose, but can’t swear to it, as she was swathed in one of those dreadful garden-party-formal things – big hat, long skirt, long gloves. Hilda answered with a smile and a minimum bow.
“Permit me to present my companions,” Hilda continued. “My family and also my crew. On my left my astrogator and second-in-command, our daughter Doctor D. T. Burroughs Carter, and on her left is her husband our son-in-law, my chief pilot, Doctor Zebadiah John Carter, Captain U.S. Aerospace Reserve.” Deety dropped a curtsy as her name was mentioned, a 6-cm job, with spine straight. Zeb acknowledged his name with a slight bow.
Hilda turned her head and shoulders toward me. “It gives me more pride than I can express,” she sang, her eyes and mouth smiling, her whole being speaking such serene happiness that it made me choke up, “to present our copilot, my husband Doctor Jacob Jeremiah Burroughs, Colonel of Ordnance A.U.S.”
The Governor stepped forward quickly and held out his hand. “Doctor, we are honored!” His handshake was firm.
I returned it in kind, saying in a nonprojecting voice, “Hilda should not have done that to me. Off campus, I’m ‘Mister’ to strangers and ‘Jake’ to my friends.”
“I’m Bertie, Jake,” he answered in his intimate voice, “other than on occasions when I can’t avoid that string of goods wagons. Or I’ll call you ‘Doctor.”
“You do and it’s fifty lines.” That made him laugh again.
“And I’m Betty, Jake,” Lady Herbert said, in closing in. “Captain Burroughs, may I call you ‘Hilda’?” (Was that a hiccup?)
“Call her ‘Doctor,'” I suggested. “She told on the rest of us. How many doctorates do you hold, dear? Seven? Or eight?”
“After the first one, it no longer matters. Of course I’m ‘Hilda,’ Betty. But, Bertie, we have yet to meet the Brigadier.”
I glanced at the tabs of the officer with the aiguillette and booming voice. Yes, A crown inboard and three pips – But when had Hilda learned British insignia? Many Americans can’t read their own. I am ceasing to be surprised at how many facts can be stuffed into so small a space.
“Sorry. Friends, this is Brigadier Iver Hird-Jones. Squeaky finds things I lose and remembers things I forget.”
“Ladies. Gentlemen. Charmed. Here is something you told me to remember, General.” The Brigadier handed a sealed envelope to his boss.
“Ah, yes!” Smythe-Carstairs handed it to my wife. “The Keys to the City, Ma’am. Phrased as you specified, each of you named, and that third factor included. Signed by me for the Sovereign and carrying the Imperial seal.”
“Your Excellency is most gracious,” Hilda said formally, and turned toward Deety. “Astrogator.”
“Aye, Captain.” Deety placed it in her purse.
Our host looked surprised. “Jake, doesn’t your wife have normal curiosity? She seems to have forgot my name, too.”
Hilda protested, “I haven’t forgotten your name, Bertie. It’s an official matter; I treated it formally. I shall read it when I have leisure to open that envelope without damaging the flap seal. To you this is one of thousands of papers; to me it is a once-in-a-lifetime souvenir. If I sound impressed, it’s because I am.”
Lady Herbert said, “Don’t flatter him, my deah.” (Yes, she had had a couple.) “You’ll turn his head, quite.” She added, “Bertie, you’re causing our guests to stand when we could be inside, sitting down.”
“You’re right, m’dear.” Bertie looked longingly at Zeb’s car.
Hilda played a trump. “Care to look inside, Bertie? Betty, you can sit down here; the captain’s chair is comfortable. Will you do me the honor? Someday I’ll tell my grandchildren that Lady Herbert sat in that very seat.”
“What a charming thought!”
Hilda tried to catch my eye but I was a jump ahead of her, handing Lady Herbert in, making certain that she didn’t miss the step, getting her turned around, making sure that she didn’t sit down on belts. “If we were about to lift,” I told her, while fastening the seat belt loosely (first, moving the buckle – she’s Hilda’s height but my thickness), “this safety belt would be fastened firmly.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t dare!”
“Gangway, Pop! Another customer.” I got out of the way, and Deety installed Brigadier Hird-Jones in her seat. Deety said, “Pop, if you’ll put the Governor in your seat, Zebadiah will take his own and give his two-hour lecture on the care and feeding of spacecraft, while you and I and Hilda hang in the doorways and correct his errors.”
“I’m only up to chapter four,” Zeb said defensively. “Jake, make her quit picking on me.”
“You’re her husband; I’m merely her father. Bertie, I must ask one thing. Don’t touch anything. This car is not shut down; it is ready to go, instantly.”
“I’ll be careful, Jake. But we’re leaving the ladies standing. The Captain herself! This is not right.”
Deety said, “Bertie, I don’t want to sit down. This trip doesn’t give me nearly the exercise I need.”
“But I can’t permit Captain Hilda to stand. Sit here and I’ll stand.” (I appreciated his gallantry but I could see an impasse coming: two people, each aware of her/his prerogatives and they conflicted.)
Hilda avoided it by something she had discovered in working out how to rig a double bed in the control compartment. Although pilots have separate seats, the passenger’s seats are really one, built all the way across but separated by armrests… which could be removed with screwdriver and sweat.
I had eliminated sweat and screwdriver; a natural mechanic, such as Zeb, accumulates miscellaneous hardware. Those armrests could now be removed and clamped out of the way with butterfly nuts. Hilda started to do so; the Brigadier dismounted them once he saw what she was doing.
It was a snug fit, but Hird-Jones has trim hips and Hilda has the slimmest bottom in town (any town).
“An important feature,” said Zeb, “of this design is a voice-controlled autopilot -“

Chapter XXXVII

“Are you open to a bribe?”

Deety:
Zebadiah, for seventeen dull minutes, said nothing and said it very well. During that plethora of polysyllabic nullities, I was beginning to think that I would have to take Pop to a quiet spot and reason with him with a club – when Captain Auntie showed that she needed no help.
Pop had interrupted with: “Let me put it simply. What Zeb said is -“
“Copilot.” Cap’n Hilda did not speak loudly but Pop should know that when she says “Copilot,” she does not mean: “Jacob darling, this is your little wifey.” Pop is a slow learner. But he can learn. Just drop an anvil on him.
“Yes, Hilda?” Aunt Hilda let the seconds creep past, never took her eyes off Pop. I was embarrassed; Pop isn’t usually that slow – then the anvil hit. “Yes, Captain?”
“Please do not interrupt the Chief Pilot’s presentation.” Her tone was warm and sweet: I don’t think our guests realized that Pop had just been courtmartialed, convicted, keelhauled, and restored to duty – on probation. But I knew it, Zeb knew it – Pop knew it. “Aye aye, Captain!”
I concluded that Captain Auntie never intended to stand outside. She had told me to offer my seat to Squeaky and had added, “Why don’t you suggest to your father that he offer his to the Governor?” I don’t need an anvil.
It was a foregone conclusion that Bertie would object to ladies having to stand while he sat. But if he had not, I feel certain that the Hillbilly would have held up proceedings until she was seated where she could watch everyone but our visitors could not watch her.
How tall was Machiavelli?
As they were climbing out the Brigadier was telling me that he understood how she was controlled – but how did she flap her wings? – land I answered that technical questions were best put to the Captain – I was unsurprised to hear Cap’n Auntie say, “Certainly, Bertie… if you don’t mind being squeezed between Deety and me.”
“‘Mind’? I should pay for the privilege!”
“Certainly you should,” I agreed – the Hillbilly’s eyes widened but she let me talk. “What am I offered to scrunch over?” I slapped myself where I’m widest. “Squeaky is a snake’s hips – not me!”
“Are you open to a bribe?”
“How big a bribe?”
“A purse of gold and half the county? Or cream tarts at tea?”
“Oh, much more! A bath. A bath in a tub, with loads of hot water and lots of suds. The last time I bathed was in a stream and it was coooold!” I shivered for him.
The Governor appeared to think. “Squeaky, do we have a bathtub?”
Lady Herbert interrupted. “Bertie, I was thinking of the Princess Suite. My deah, since you are all one family, it popped into mind. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, two bathtubs. The drawing room is gloomy, rather.”
I answered, “Bertie, you didn’t talk fast enough; Betty gets the first ride.”
“Oh, no, no, no! I don’t fly even in our own flying carriage.”
“Hahrooomph!” Squeaky boomed. “Are you still open to a bribe?”
“You might try our captain; she’s as corruptible as I am.”
Aunt Hilda picked it up. “Now that I’ve heard that two bathtubs go with the suite, my cup runneth over. But my husband and my son-in-law have matters to discuss with the Governor’s technical staff. I don’t have to be bribed to offer a few joy rides, Brigadier – one passenger at a time and, as Deety implies, not too wide a passenger.” Aunt Hilda added, “Betty, I must confess my own weakness. Clothes. What I am wearing, for example. A Ferrara original. An exclusive – Mario himself created it for me. While it is intended for salt-water yachting, it is just as practical for space yachting – and I couldn’t resist it. Do you have nice shops here?”
Bertie answered for his wife. “Hilda, there are shops – but Windsor City is not London. However, Betty has a seamstress who is clever at copying styles from pictures in periodicals from home – old but new to us.” He added, “She’ll show you what we have. Now concerning this ride you so kindly offered me – does it suit you to give me an appointment?”
“Is right now soon enough?”

“Report readiness for space. Astrogator.”
“Ready!” I snapped, trying to sound efficient. “Belt tight.”
“Chief Pilot.”
“Belt fastened. Portside door locked, seal checked. Juice zero point seven-one. Wings subsonic full. Wheels down and locked. Car trimmed assuming passenger at six-six kilos.”
“General, is that your mass?”
“Dear me! I think in pounds. The factor is -“
I interrupted. “I’ll take it in pounds here or pounds London.”
“I weigh myself each morning and I have had the scale recalibrated. Eh, with these boots, one hundred forty-five pounds I dare say.”
“Correct to three significant figures, Zebadiah.” (I did not mention that weight bearing on each wheel shows on the instrument board. Let Bertie think my husband a magician; he’s a wizard to me.)
“Thank you, Astrogator. Car is trimmed, Captain.”
“Copilot.”
“Belt fastened. Door seal checked. Continua device ready.”
“Passenger,” said Cap’n Auntie.
“Eh? What should a passenger report?”
“Principally that your belt is secure, but I saw to that myself.” (By using a web belt from our sleeping bag to link Hilda’s seat belt to mine.) “I must ask one question,” Aunt Hilda went on: “Are you subject to motion sickness? The Channel can be rough and so can the Straits of Dover. Did mal de mer ever hit you?”
“Oh, I’ll be right. Short flight and all that.”
“One Bonine, Deety. General, Admiral Lord Nelson was seasick all his life. My husband and I are susceptible; we took our pills earlier today. Deety and Zebbie are the horrid sort who eat greasy sandwiches during a typhoon and laugh at the dying -“
“I don’t laugh!” I protested.
“But these pills enable us to laugh right back. Is this not so, Jacob?”
“Bertie, they work; you’d be a fool not to take one.”
“I must add,” Captain Auntie said sweetly, “that if you refuse, we will not lift.”
Bertie took it. I told him, “Chew it and swallow it; don’t hide it in your cheek. Captain, I think that does it.”
“Except that we are crowded. General, would you be more comfortable if you put an arm around each of us?”
The General did not refuse. It occurs to me that “take him for a ride” has several meanings. Captain Auntie has more twists than a belly dancer.
“Routine has been broken. Confirm readiness, please.” We reported while I snuggled into a firm male arm, realized that it was a pleasant contrast after getting used to my lovely giant.
“Gay Bounce.”
Bertie gasped and tightened his arms around us. Aunt Hilda said quietly, “Astrogator, take the conn. Schedule as I discussed it. Don’t hesitate to vary it. All of us – you, too, General – may suggest variations. This is a joy ride; let’s enjoy it.”
But she had told me earlier: “If I don’t like a suggestion, I will suggest that we do it later – but time will run out. The General told Lady Herbert:
‘I can go down to the end of the town
‘And be back in time for tea!” – so we will fetch him back on time. Sixteen-fifteen local, four-fifteen pip emma. What’s Greenwich?”
I converted it (GMT 12:44) and told Captain Hillbilly that I would watch both board and the clock in my head but was ordered to place an alert with Gay. If Aunt Hilda were a man, she would wear both suspenders and belt. No, that’s wrong; for herself she’s go-for-broke; for other people she is supercautious.
We lifted at 15:30 local and took Bertie for a mixed ride – Aunt Hilda had told me that Pop was feeling left out. “Gay Bounce, Gay Bounce. Chief Pilot, place us over the big Russian city at about a thousand klicks.”
“Roger Wilco,” my husband affirmed. “Copilot, one jump or two?”
“One. Level? Keep ‘er so. Six thousand thirty klicks, true bearing two-seven-three, offset L axis negative oh-seven-four-set!” – and I shuddered; Pop had set to take us through the planet!
“Execute! Bertie, what is the name of that city?”
“Eh? Zeb, I am quite bewildered!” Pop and Gay and Zebadiah, working together, displayed features simultaneously on the planet in front of us and on the sillyscope on the board. Pop bounced Gay around in ways I didn’t know could be done. Zebadiah had Gay rotate the display so that the point on Mars-ten opposite us was always the center of the display with scale according to H-above-G.
I learned a lot. The Russians claim the whole planet but their occupied area closely matches what we had bingo-mapped. Bertie pointed out a bit more Tsarist area; Gay changed the displayed locus to Zebadiah’s interpretation of Bertie’s information. Windsor City was zero Meridan for the British; Gay measured the arc to “Touchdown,” adjusted her longitudes – and now could use any British Martian colonial map.
Bertie assured us that Russian Ack-Ack could not shoot higher than three miles (less than five klicks) and seemed astonished that a spaceship might be considered dangerous. His explanation of spaceships was less than clear – great flimsy things that sailed from orbits around Earth to orbits around Mars, taking months for each voyage.
I was watching the time. “Chief Pilot, we will sight-see with Bertie another day; I am taking the conn. Copilot.”
“Verniers zeroed and locked, Astrogator.”
“Thanks, Pop. Gay B’gout. Bertie, this is where we first grounded – where the Russians attacked us. That trash ahead is what is left of Colonel Morinosky’s private flyer. Zebadiah was forced to retaliate.”
Bertie looked puzzled. “But the Russians have no settlement near here. I know that bounder Morinosky; he came to see me under diplomatic immunity. I had to be content with the sort of nasty remarks permitted by protocol. But how did Zeb burn the flyer?”
“Beautifully. Gay Home. Chief Pilot, dive. Captain?”
“I have the conn,” Aunt Hilda acknowledged. “Bertie, that crater was our home three days ago. They tried to kill us, we fled for our lives.”
“Who!”
“Gay Home, Gay Bounce. Pilots, may we have Earth-without-a-J?”
“Set it, Jake.”
“Tau axis positive one quantum – set!”
“Copilot, execute at will. Chief Pilot, dive again, please. Jacob, please set Bertie’s home universe and hold. Bertie, that house is like Snug Harbor before it was bombed – but one universe away. Zebbie, level glide please… Gay Bounce, Gay Bounce! Jacob, you have that setting?”
“Tau positive ten quanta, set.”
“Execute at will. Bertie, what antiaircraft defense does London – your London – have?”
“What, what? London has no defense against attack from above. The Concord of Brussels. But Hilda – my dear Captain – you are telling me that we have been to a different universe!”
“Three universes, Bertie, and now we are back in your own. Better to show than to tell; it is a thing one believes only through experience. Gay Bounce. Zebbie, Jacob, see how quickly you can put us over London. Execute at will.”
“Roger Wilco. Jake, do you want Gay?”
“Well – great-circle true bearing and chord distance, maybe. Or I can simply take her high and head northeast. The scenic route.”
Aunt Hilda caught my eye. “Camera ready, Deety?”
“Yes. Three shots.” I added, “Four more cartons, but when they’re gone, they’re gone.”
“Use your judgment.”
Suddenly we were in free fall over Arizona, then over the British Isles, then we were air supported, then we were diving and Zebadiah was shouting: “Tower of London, next stop!”
I shot a beauty of the Tower and Zebadiah’s right ear. “General, is there something you would like to photograph here? Or elsewhere?”
He seemed almost too overcome to talk. He muttered, “There is a place about twenty miles north of here, a country estate. Is it possible?”
Aunt Hilda said, “Take the conn, Deety.”
“Got it, Captain. Gay Bounce. Pop, Zebadiah, give me three minima north. Execute at will.”
Then I was saying, “Any landmarks, Bertie?”
“Uh, not yet.”
“Pop, may we have the binoculars?”
Pop handed them aft; I gave them to Bertie. He adjusted them and searched while Zebadiah made a wide sweep, spending altitude stingily. Bertie said, “There!”
“Where?” I said. “And what?”
“A large house, to the right of our course. Ah, now dead ahead!”
I saw it – a “Stately Home of England.” Lawns you make with a flock of sheep and four centuries. “This it?” asked Zebadiah. “I’m steady on it by gunsight,”
“That’s it, sir! Deety, I would like a picture.”
“Do my best.”
“Alert,” said Gay. “Memo for General Smythe-Carstairs: ‘I can go down to the end of the town and be back in time for tea.'”
“Aunt Hilda, Bertie, I left some leeway. Picture! Zebadiah, take it as close as you dare, then bounce, but warn me. I want a closeup.”
“Now, Deety!” I hit it and Zebadiah bounced us.
Bertie let out a sigh. “My home. I never expected to see it again.”
“I knew it was your home,” Aunt Hilda said softly, “because you looked the way we feel when we see the crater where Snug Harbor used to be. But you will see it again, surely? How long is a tour of duty on Mars?”
“It’s a matter of health.” Bertie added, “Lady Her – Betty’s health.”
Pop turned his head. “Bertie, we can bounce and do it again. What’s a few minutes late for tea compared with seeing your old homestead?”
“Bertie’s not late yet, Pop. We can do even better. That lawn is smooth and the open part is about half the size of the p.g. at Imperial House. Bertie, we can ground.”
My husband added, “I could make a glide grounding. But Deety has worked out a better method.”
“No,” Bertie said brusquely. “Thanks, Deety. Thanks to all of you. Jake. Zeb. Captain Hilda. I’ll treasure this day. But enough is enough.” Tears were running down his cheeks, ignored.
Aunt Hilda took a Kleenex from her purse, dabbed away his tears. She put her left hand back of Bertie’s neck, pulled his face down to hers, and kissed him. She didn’t look to see if Pop was watching – he was – she just did it.
Pop said, “Deety, will you hand me the binox?”
“Sure, Pop. See something?”
“I’m going to see what I can of Merrie Old England, as I don’t expect to see it again, either. Family, we are not going back to Snug Harbor again; it’s not good for us. Meanwhile Zeb will drive and you two are to soothe our guest and make him feel better -“
“But remember to wipe off the lipstick.”
“Pipe down, Zeb. You aren’t observant; neither of our darlings is wearing any. Being late is not important; ‘The party can’t start till the Macgregor arrives.’ But once Bertie’s there, he’s on parade – and the Governor must not appear with eyes swollen and tear marks on his collar. We must return him in as good shape as we got him.”
Sometimes I love Pop more than most.
And my husband, too.
I used both hands but didn’t need to; Bertie wasn’t trying to get away. The second time he kissed Hilda, he supplied the hands. Therapy took three minutes and forty-one seconds, and I am certain that, by the end of two hundred twenty-one seconds, Bertie was no longer homesick, not grieving about might have-beens; his morale was tiptop. The last time he kissed me, he informed me without words that I should not be alone with him unless my intentions were serious.
I made mental note. And a second to ask Hilda if she had received the same warning. Then I struck out the second note. I was certain and equally certain that she would fib if it suited her.
But I look forward to the day the Hillbilly asks me to jigger for her. That will be my final promotion – no longer Jane’s little girl in Hilda’s eyes but Jane’s equal, trusted as utterly as she trusted Jane. And I will be rid of the last trace of the shameful jealousy I have for my beloved Mama Jane.
I checked myself in my purse mirror while I waited for them to break – checked both of them and decided that they had no milk on their chins. Bertie said, “Deety, could I possibly have one of those pictures as a remembrance of this perfect day?”
“Certainly. Gay Parade Ground. All three are yours;~we took them for you.” We were exactly on time.

Three hours later I was sitting teat deep in a wonderful tub of hot soapy water, a tub big enough to drown in but I wasn’t going to drown because the Hillbilly was sitting shoulder deep, facing me. We were reliving our day as well as getting beautiful for dinner. Well… sanitary.
Hilda said, “Deety, I tell you three times. Betty is suffering from an ailment made more endurable by Martian conditions.”
“Meaning that in point thirty-eight gee she doesn’t hit hard when she falls down. What was in that teapot no one else touched? Chanel Number Five?”
“Medicine. Prescribed for her nerves.”
“Got it. Official. She’s friendly as a puppy, she’s generous, she’s our hostess – I ought to know better. It’s a shame that she has this ailment but she’s fortunate in having a husband who loves her so dearly that he left home forever so that she can live in lower gravity. Bertie is quite a man.”
“There is nothing for him at home. His older brother has sons; title and estate can’t go to Bertie. He can’t go much higher in the army, and a governor general is senior to anybody; he embodies the Sovereign.”
“I thought that was limited to viceroys.”
“Squeaky put me straight on it. Bertie is viceroy in dealing with Russians. But – Did you notice the uniforms on the maids?”
“I noticed the cream tarts more. White aprons, white caps, simple print dresses, dark blue or black with Indian arrowheads.”
“The Broad Arrow, Deety.”
“Huh? No sabbe, pliz.”
“In this universe Australia belongs to the Dutch. Brace yourself, dear. This is a prison colony.”
Every so often the world wobbles and I have to wait for it to steady down. Somewhat later I said, “A colony could be better than a prison. I can’t see Bertie as a tyrant. Bertie is quite a man. When -“
Hilda reached out, grabbed a chain, flushed the W.C., then leaned toward me. That fixture was a noisy type that went on gurgling and gasping for a long time. “Remember what Zebbie told us when he crowded us into the other bath and turned on everything? One must assume that guest quarters in any government building anywhere are wired. Careful what you say, dear.”
“He also said that he had no reason to assume that it was the case here.”
“But Zebbie was the one who insisted on a conference in Gay… with Jacob being mulish and you yourself seeing no reason not to confer up here.” Aunt Hilda again pulled the chain. “Yes, Bertie is quite a man. Don’t leave me alone with him.”
“Or should I jigger instead?”
“Naughty Deety. My sweet, a bride should refrain at least twelve months out of respect for her husband and to prove that she can.”
“After that it’s okay?”
“Of course not! It’s immoral, disgraceful, and scandalous.” Suddenly she giggled, put arms around my neck, and whispered: “But if I ever need a jigger, Deety is the only person I would trust.”

That conference, immediately after tea, had caused a crisis, brought on by our husbands in concert – but out of tune. The tea had been fun – cream tarts and new men appeal to my basest instincts. A tea qua tea should be over in an hour. We had been there over an hour, which I ignored because I was having fun. Aunt Hilda broke the ring around me, said softly, “We’re leaving.” So we smiled and said good-bye, found our host, and thanked him.
“Our pleasure,” Bertie said. “Lady Herbert became indisposed and wishes to be forgiven but will see you at dinner. Hird-Jones tells me that black tie is no problem. Right?”
He added to let Squeaky know when we wanted help in moving; Hilda assured him that Squeaky had it in hand and the suite was beautiful!
As we left I asked, “Where is Zebadiah?”
“Waiting at the outer steps. He asked me for a conference. I don’t know why, but Zebbie would not unnecessarily interrupt a social event to ask for a closed conference.”
“Why didn’t we go to our suite? And where is Pop?”
“Zebbie specified the car – more private. Jacob is inside, talking with some men. He brushed off my telling him that we were going to the car now – said he would see us later. Deety, I can’t enforce orders as captain under those conditions.”
“Pop is hard to move when he gets into a discussion. I’ve yawned through some deadly ones. But how can we have a conference until he shows up?”
“I don’t know, dear. Here’s Zebbie.”
My husband pecked me on the nose and said, “Where’s Jake?”
Hilda answered, “He told me that he would be along later.” Zebadiah started to curse; Aunt Hilda cut him off. “Chief Pilot.”
“Uh – Yes, Captain.”
“Go find the Copilot, tell him that we lift in five minutes. Having told him that and no more, turn and leave at once. Don’t give him any opportunity to ask questions. Come straight to the car.”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
“Come, Deety.” Hilda hurried to Gay Deceiver, went to her seat, started to belt, She glanced at me. “Astrogator, prepare for space.”
I started to ask why – but instead said, “Aye aye, Captain,” and quickly was belted. “Captain, may I inquire your plans?”
“Certainly, you’re second-in-command. And Astrogator; however, I will take the conn on lifting.”
“Then we really are lifting?”
“Yes. Five minutes after Zebbie returns. That gives Jacob five minutes to make up his mind. Then we lift. If Jacob is aboard, he’ll be with us.”
“Aunt Hilda, you would abandon my father on this planet?!”
“No, Deety. Jacob will probably never notice that the car has been away as it should not be gone more than a few minutes. If Jacob does not come with us, I will ask Zebbie to drop me on Earth-without-a-J. Range-finder and target method; I don’t want to use Zebbie’s precious juice.”
“Aunt Hilda, you sound desperate.”
“I am, dear.” She added, “Here comes Zebbie.”
Zebadiah climbed in. “Message delivered, Captain.”
“Thank you, Chief Pilot. Prepare for space.”
“Roger Wilco.”
“Will you check the seal of the starboard door, please?”
“Aye aye, Captain.”
“Report readiness for space, Astrogator.”
“Belt tight, ready for space. Oh, Aunt Hilda!”
“Astrogator, pipe down. Chief Pilot.”
“Both doors locked, seals checked. Seat belt tight. Power packs, two zeroed, two in reserve. Juice oh-point-seven-one-minus. All systems go. Copilot missing. Ready for space.”
“Captain’s seat belt tight, ready for space. Gay Deceiver.”
“Howdy, Hilda!”
“Please display five-minute countdown. Paraphrase acknowledge.”
“Three hundred seconds backwards in lights.”
“Execute.”
Have you ever listened to three hundred seconds of silence? Neither have I – two hundred eighty-one when Pop pounded on the door.
Aunt Hilda said, “Gay Deceiver, open starboard door.”
Pop climbed in, indignant as an offended cat. “What the hell goes on?”
“Copilot, prepare for space.”
“What? Now, Hilda, that is going too far!”
“Copilot, either secure for space or get out and stand clear. Chief Pilot, see that my orders are carried out.”
“Aye aye, Captain! Copilot, you’ve got zero seconds to make up your mind.” My husband started to unstrap.
Pop looked at Zebadiah, looked at us. I was doing my frozen face to keep from crying and I think Aunt Hilda was, too.
Pop hastily fastened his belt. “You’re a pack of idiots – ” He was checking the door seal. ” – but I won’t be left behind.”
“Copilot, report.”
“Huh? Ready for space.”
Hilda said, “Gay Termite. Gay Deceiver, open your doors.”
“Well, for the love of -“
“Pipe down! Chief Pilot, I have no stomach for charging my husband with mutiny but that is what I have been faced with repeatedly. Will you grant me the boon of resuming command to drop me on Earth-without-a-J? I would rather not have to stay on Mars.”
“Hilda!”
“I’m sorry, Jacob. I’ve tried. I’m not up to it. I’m not Jane.”
“No one expects you to be Jane! But ever since you became captain, you’ve been throwing your weight around. Like calling this stunt in the middle of a party. Insulting our host and hostess – “
“Hold it, Jake!”
“What? See here, Zeb, I’m talking to my wife! You keep -“
“I said ‘Hold it.’ Shut up or I’ll shut you up.”
“Don’t you threaten me!”
“That’s not a threat; that’s a warning.”
“Pop, you had better believe him! I’m not on your side.”
Pop took a deep breath. “What do you have to say for yourself, Carter?”
“Nothing, for myself. But you’ve got your data wrong six ways. One: Captain Hilda did not call this so-called ‘stunt.’ I did.”
“You did? What the devil caused you to do a thing like that?”
“Irrelevant. I convinced the Captain that the matter was urgent, so she gathered us in. All but you – -you told her not to bother you or words to that effect. But she gave you another chance – you didn’t deserve it; you had long since used up your quota. But she did. She sent me back to tell you we were lifting. It finally penetrated your skull that we might lift without you -“
“To this place!”
“If you had been twenty seconds later, we would have translated to another universe. But this nonsense about ‘Insulting our host and hostess – ‘ Your hostess left the tea long before you did; your host left immediately after Hilda and Deety, leaving his aide – the Brigadier – to close shop. But you are so damned self-centered you never noticed. Jake, don’t you lecture me on proper behavior as a guest. The first time I laid eyes on you, you were trying to star a fight in Sharpie’s ballroom -“
“Huh? But I was fully justi – “
“Dreck. No one is ever justified in starting a fight under a host’s roof. The very most that can be justified under extreme provocation is to tell the other party privately that you are ready to meet him at another time and place. Jake, I don’t enjoy teaching manners to my senior. But your parents neglected you, so I must. If I offend you – if you feel entitled to call me out, I will accommodate you at any other time and place.”
Aunt Hilda gasped. “Zebbie! No!” I gasped something like it. My husband patted our hands – together; Hilda was gripping mine. “Don’t worry, dears. I didn’t call Jake out and won’t. I don’t want to hurt Jake. He’s your husband… your father… my blood brother by spilled blood. But I had to chew him out; he’s now entitled to a crack at me. With words, with hands, with whatever. Sharpie, Deety, you can’t refuse Jake his rights. No matter what, he still has rights.”
Pop said, “Zeb, I am not going to call you out. If you think I am afraid of you, you’re welcome. If you think it’s because I know you love both Hilda and Deety, you would be closer. A fight between us would endanger their welfare. As you said, we are blood brothers.” Pop’s tone suddenly changed. “But doesn’t mean I like your behavior, you arrogant punk!”
Zebadiah grinned. “Nolo contendere, Pop.”
“So you admit it?”
“You know Latin better than that, Jake. Means I’m satisfied to let it lie. We can’t afford to quarrel.”
“Mmm – A point well taken. Stipulating that I did not come at once when summoned, and tabling, if you will, until later whether or not I had reason, may I now ask why I was summoned? The nature of this problem that caused you to call this conference?”
“Jake, the situation has changed so rapidly that the matter no longer has priority. You heard Sharpie’s plans.”
My husband looked into Aunt Hilda’s eyes. “Captain, I’ll be honored to drive you wherever you want to go. Drop you wherever you say. With your choice of equipment and wampum. But with a mail drop, I hope. Are you ready to leave?”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Wait a half. You are captain, until you leave us. Orders, Captain? Earth-without-a-J? Or I’ll help you shop others – we might find a world of nudists.”
“Why that, Zebbie? I’m not jumpy about skin – but only among close friends.”
“Remember why Jake was certain that the Finnish mathematician was not a disguised vermin? Sauna. Disguise has limits.”
“Oh.” Aunt Hilda looked thoughtful. “I could get used to it. But I must get out of this tension. So drop me on the minus-J world. A mail drop, yes; I don’t ever want to lose you and Deety.”
“We find that safe place, we pick you up. Sharpie, we’ll be back someday anyhow. If the boogiemen don’t get us.”
“Hold it, Zeb. If you’re dropping Hilda, you’re dropping me.”
“That’s up to Captain Hilda.”
“Hilda, I will not permit -“
“Jake, quit acting the fool,” growled my husband. “She’s boss. With me to back her up.”
“And me!” I echoed.
“You seem to forget that the continua device is mine!”
“Gay Deceiver!”
“Yes, Boss? Who’s your fat friend?”
“‘Number of the Beast.’ Execute.”
“Done.”
“Try your verniers, Jake.”
Pop did something – I couldn’t see his hands. Then he said, “Why, you – So you think you’ve stopped me? Gay Deceiver!”
“Howdy, Jake.”
Zebadiah cut in: “Gay Deceiver override! Emergency Thirty-one execute. Gay can no longer hear you, Jake. Try it.”
“If you can do one, you can do the other. Zeb, I never thought you would be that sneaky.”
“Jake, if you had behaved yourself, you never would have known. Extreme individualists (all of us) don’t take kindly to discipline because they rarely understand its nature and function. But – even before that fake ranger showed up – we all had agreed to ‘lifeboat’ rules. We discussed them and you all claimed to understand them… and I was elected skipper. I nominated you – eldest, senior, inventor of the space-time twister – but you said it had to be me. A lifeboat officer must always be able to enforce his orders… in situations of great peril complicated by hysterical civilians. Or bullheaded ones who must otherwise be wheedled.”
It was time for a diversion; Pop doesn’t like to look foolish and I was still hoping to salvage this shambles. “Zebadiah, is my number fifty-nine?”
“Of course, but it takes my voice. Can you figure the cancel-and-reset?”
“For mnemonic reasons it should be one of three. Probably ninety-five.”
“On the button!”
“Although I would prefer eighty-nine.”
“Why?”
“Work on it. Zebadiah, why did you call this meeting?”
“With Sharpie leaving us the matter is academic. We won’t be coming back to Mars.”
“Oh, dear!”
“What’s the trouble, Sharpie? Captain.”
“I promised Squeaky a ride. Zebbie, could you keep my promise for me? Please? For old times’ sake?”
“Captain, once we lift to drop you on Minus-J, we won’t return. But the Captain still is captain and can give Squeaky that ride in the next thirty minutes if it suits her.”
“May I offer something in my own defense?” Pop put in.
“Of course, Jake. Sorry, Captain; you’re in charge. May the Copilot have the floor?”
“Jacob, even though I find it necessary to leave you… I love and respect you… and will always listen to you.”
“Thanks, darling. Thank you, Captain. I was in that huddle because Brigadier Hird-Jones always remembers. That huddle was the top physical scientists on Mars. A scruffy lot but they get the technical journals and read them, a few months late. I was talking with the top chemist -“
“Well, Jake? Make it march.”
“Zeb, not one knew an isotope from an antelope. You can’t buy juice here.”
“For that you disobeyed a direct order of the Captain? Sharpie, you should have him flogged around the Fleet before you surrender office -“
“Don’t loke, Zebbie.”
“Captain, I am not joking. Jake, that’s no news; I spotted it this afternoon. Sharpie? Deety? In England.”
“I missed it,” Aunt Hilda said. “I don’t know England well.”
“Deety?”
“Well… maybe,” I admitted.
“How?” demanded Pop.
“Little things. No roadables, just horse-drawn vehicles. No air traffic other than a few ornithopters. Coal-fired steam-powered trains of cars. Traffic on the Thames, what little there was, ‘minded me of pictures of Victorian England.”
“Daughter, why didn’t you mention this?”
“You saw it, Pop.”
“Those were my reasons,” Zebadiah agreed. “My hope of getting juiced here dropped to one-tenth of one percent. It is now zero.” Zebadiah sighed. “But that isn’t why I asked the Captain to call us together. Family, there are vermin here.”
The world wobbled again – and so did I.
Aunt Hilda was saying, “How did you learn this, Zebbie?”
“You gals had plenty of company and Jake had the local scientists, so Squeaky gave me his attention. Captain, you told us to stick to the truth -“
“Yes,” agreed Aunt Hilda, “but not to volunteer information.”
“I didn’t volunteer; I was debriefed. Squeaky asked me about the ride we gave his boss; I tried to be vague. Squeaky took a photo from his pocket. ‘The Governor tells me this was taken this afternoon.’ Deety, it was the pic you took of the Thames and the Tower.
“I shortly started giving him a full account rather than have it dragged out. The Governor had told him the works; Squeaky was comparing my version with Bertie’s, looking for holes in a yarn most easily explained by hypnosis, delirium tremens, insanity, or fancy lying. Since no two witnesses exhibit any of these in the same way they can be used as truth tests. Contrariwise, two witnesses who tell exactly the same story are lying. I assume that Bertie and I differed enough to be credible.”
I asked my husband, “Zebadiah, did you explain six-dimensional space to him?”
Zebadiah looked pained. “How could I, when I can’t explain it to me? Anyhow, he’s looking forward eagerly to the ride Captain Sharpie promised him.”
“Oh, dear! Zebbie, will you take a note to him?”
“Captain, we are not coming back after we drop you. I’ll be breaking a date with him, too. Either before or after whatever time suits you, he’s planning to give me – and anyone else who wants to go – a ride to see the vermin. ‘Black Hats.’ Fake rangers.”
(I do wish the world would not wobble!)
Pop said, “Zeb, spill it! Quit stalling.”
“Shut up and listen. Squeaky showed me a scrapbook. Dull as a scrapbook usually is until we came across a page of ‘Black Hats.’ Deety, you would have been proud of me -“
“I am proud of you,” I answered.
” – because I didn’t scream or faint, I showed no special interest. I just said, ‘God in Heaven, Squeaky, those are the horrors that chased us off Earth! You’ve got ’em here?'”
“‘No special interest.'”
“I didn’t climb the drapes. I merely said, ‘Or have you managed to exterminate them?’
“The discussion became confused, as they don’t kill them; they put them to work. Squeaky had to repress amusement at the notion that wogs could be dangerous. He glanced at his watch and said, ‘Come, I’ll show you. Ordinarily we don’t allow wogs in town. But this old fellow takes care of the Governor’s gardens and may not yet have been returned to the pens for the night.’ He led me to a balcony. Squeaky looked down and said, ‘Too late, I’m afraid. No, there it is – Hooly! Chop, chop!’ – and again I didn’t faint. Hooly ran toward us, with a gait I can’t describe, stopped abruptly, threw an open-palm salute and held it. ‘Private Hooly reports!’
“Squeaky let him stand there. ‘This wog,’ he told me, ‘is the most intelligent of the herd. It knows almost a hundred words. Can make simple sentences. As intelligent as a dog. And it can be trusted not to eat the flowers.’
“‘Herbivorous?’ says I, showing off my book-larnin’. ‘Oh, no,’ he tells me, ‘omnivorous. We hunt wild ones to provide the good wogs with a change in diet and, of course, when we slaughter overage wogs, that provides more ration.’
“That’s enough for one lesson, children. Pleasant dreams. Tomorrow the Brigadier will have a roadable big enough for all of us to take us out to meet the Martian natives aka wogs aka ‘Black Hats’ aka vermin – unless that interferes with the ride you aren’t going to give him, in which case he will swap the times around with the visit to the wogs we aren’t going to make. And that, Jake, is the reason I asked the Captain for a family conference. I already knew that artificial isotopes are far beyond this culture – not alone from the ride this afternoon but because I ask questions myself. Squeaky has a knowledge of chemistry about the pre-nuclear level and a detailed knowledge of explosives that one expects of a pro. But to Squeaky atoms are the smallest divisions of mass, and ‘heavy water’ is a meaningless phrase.
“So I knew we would be here just to get Sharpie some clothes and to recharge my packs – since they do have D.C. power. Then I found we had stumbled onto the home of the vermin – and at that point my back didn’t ache at the idea of cranking, and I didn’t think that the Captain was that much in a hurry to buy clothes. So I asked the Captain to call us together in Smart Girl. I did not want to put it off even a few minutes because we were scheduled to move into our suite after tea. To leave at once, before we moved in, would save awkward explanations. Jake, did I have reason to ask for emergency conference?”
“If you had told me -“
“Stop! The Captain told you.”
“But she didn’t explain -“
“Jake, you’re hopeless! Captains don’t have to explain. Furthermore she could not because I did not tell anyone until now. The Captain had confidence in my judgment.”
“You could have explained. When Hilda sent you back to get me. I would have come at once.”
“That makes the ninth time you’ve been wrong in twenty minutes -“
I blurted, “Tenth, Zebadiah. I counted.”
Pop gave me his “Et-tu,-Brute” look.
” – tenth without being right once. I could not have explained to you.”
“Merely because of a group of men?”
“Eleventh. I was not sent back to get you – twelfth. I was under orders to tell you that – quote! – ‘We lift in five minutes.’ Tell you that and no more, then turn and leave at once, without discussion. I carried out my orders.”
“You hoped that I would be left behind.”
“Thirteen.”
I butted in again. “Pop, quit making a fool of yourself! Zebadiah asked you an essential question – and you’ve dodged. Captain Auntie, could we have the doors closed? There might be one of them out there – and the guns are locked up.”
“Certainly, Deety. Gay Deceiver, close your doors.”
Pop said, “Deety, I was not aware that I had been dodging. I thought I was conducting a reasonable discussion.”
“Pop, you always think so. But you are reasonable only in mathematics. Zebadiah asked you whether or not, under the circumstances, did he have reason to ask for a conference? You haven’t answered it.”
“If Hilda had not told him not to -“
“Pop! Answer that question or I will never speak to you again in my life!”
My husband said, “Deety, Deety! Don’t make threats.”
“My husband, I never make threats, either. Pop knows it.”
Pop took a deep breath. “Zeb, under the circumstances you have described, you were justified in asking the Captain for an immediate private conference.”
I let out my breath. “Thanks, Pop.”
“I did it for myself, Deety. Hilda? Captain?”
“What is it, Jacob?”
“I should have gone with you at once when you first asked me to.”
“Thank you, Jacob. But I did not ‘ask’ you; I ordered you. True, it was phrased as a request… but orders of a commanding officer are customarily phrased as requests – a polite protocol. You explained this custom to me yourself. Although I already knew it.” Aunt Hilda turned to look at Zebadiah.
“Chief Pilot, the departure for Minus-J is postponed until late tomorrow. I will give you the time after I have consulted the Brigadier. I want to see one of those vermin, alive, photograph it stereo and cinema, and, if possible, dissect one. Since I intend to remain overnight, I hope to pick up clothes for MinusJ, too – but the reasons for delay are to learn more about vermin and to carry out my commitment to Brigadier Hird-Jones.”
Aunt Hilda paused, continued: “All hands, special orders. Do not remove anything from the car that you cannot afford to abandon. This car may lift on five minutes’ warning even in the middle of the night. You should keep close to me unless you have a guarantee from me of longer time. Tonight I will sleep in the car. If we lift in the night, I will send word to Princess Suite. Zebbie, I will retain the captaincy until we ground on Minus-J. Schedule: Dinner tonight is eight-thirty pip emma local time, about three hours hence. Black tie for gentlemen. Deety suggests that we wear what we wore our wedding night; she has our outfits packed together. The Brigadier will send someone to Princess Suite shortly after eight local to escort us to a reception. I will settle tomorrow’s schedule with him. Jacob, I will slip down to the car after the House is quiet. If someone sees me, I will be running down for a toothbrush. Questions?”
“Captain?” said Pop.
“Copilot.”
“Hilda, must you sleep in the car?”
“Jacob, ’twere best done quickly!”
“I’m begging you.”
“You want me to be your whore one last time? That’s not too much to ask… since you were willing to marry me knowing my thoroughly tarnished past. Yes, Jacob.”
“No, no, no! I want you to sleep in my arms – that’s all I ask.”
“Only that? We can discuss it after we go to bed. All hands, prepare for space. Report!”

I splashed the Hillbilly and giggled. “Cap’n Auntie chum, that flatters me more than anything else you could ever say. While I can’t imagine needing a jigger – if I did – or if I needed any sort of help and it took one who loves me no matter what, you know to whom I would turn. The one who loves me even when I’m bad. Who’s that?”
“Thank you, Deety. We love and trust each other.”
“Now tell me – Did you ever have any intention of sleeping tonight in the car?”
She pulled the chain again. Under that racket she said into my ear, “Deety doll, I never had any intention of sleeping tonight.”

Chapter XXVIII

“He’s too fat.”

Zeb:
Sharpie sat on the Governor’s right with my wife on his left, which gave Jake and me the privilege of sharing Lady Herbert, a loud shout away. The space was filled with mess jackets, dinner coats, and wives in their best. We each had one footman to insure that we did not starve; this platoon was bossed by a butler as impressive as the Pope, who was aided by a squad of noncom butlers. Female servants rushed in and out to serving tables. His Supremacy the Butler took it from there but used his hands only in offering splashes of wine to the Governor to taste and approve.
All were in livery – decorated with the Broad Arrow. The British colony consisted of a) wogs, b) transportees, c) discharged transportees, d) officers and enlisted men, e) civil servants, and f) spouses and dependents. I know even less about the Russian colony. Military and serfs, I think.
The ladies were in Victorian high-style dowdiness, which made Deety and Sharpie birds of paradise among crows. Jump suit and sailor pants had shocked people at tea. But at dinner – Deety wore the velvet wrap she had the night we eloped; Sharpie wore her sunset-shade mink cape; Jake and I unveiled them on the grand staircase leading down to the reception hall. Naw, we didn’t rehearse; we were mysterious strangers, guests of the Governor General and His Lady, so all eyes were upon us. Maids, hurrying up, met us there to take our ladies’ wraps.
I had questioned the propriety of house guests coming downstairs in wraps. Sharpie had answered, “Utterly correct, Zebbie – because I set the style. I did so this afternoon; I shall until we leave.” I shut up; Sharpie has infallible instinct for upstaging.
Have I mentioned how Sharpie and Deety were dressed at Sharpie’s party? They practically weren’t. I wish I had had that hall bugged to record the gasps when Jake and I uncovered our prizes.
These two had last been seen at tea, one in a jump suit, the other in an outfit that looked donated by the Salvation Army, with no makeup. We had been to our suite before tea only for a hasty wash.
But now – Sharpie did Deety’s hair; Deety did Sharpie’s; Sharpie styled both faces, including too much lipstick, which Deety doesn’t often wear. I asked Sharpie if she knew the history and significance of lipstick. She answered, “Certainly do, Zebbie. Don’t bother us.” She went on making Deety beautiful. Deety is beautiful but doesn’t know it because her features have that simple regularity favored by Praxiteles.
Having put too much lipstick on Deety, Sharpie removed some, then carried her makeup onto her breasts so that it disappeared under the dress. Which is pretty far because they saved material on that dress at the top in order to give it a full, floor-length skirt. You can’t quite see her nipples-in the flesh I mean; they generally show through her clothes, always when she’s happy – because Deety stands tall. Her mother had told her, “Deety, if a woman is tall, the answer is to look at least three centimeters taller than you are.”
Deety always believed her mother; she stands tall, sits straight; she never leans or slouches; she can get away with that dress by half a centimeter. I’m not sure of the material but the color is the shade of green that goes best with strawberry hair. That dress, her height, long legs, broad shoulders, a waist two sizes too small setting off breasts two sizes too big – the combo could get her a job as a show girl.
When Sharpie finished gilding Deety I couldn’t see that she had been made up at all… but knew durn well that she did not look the way she had before. Sharpie picked her jewelry, too – sparingly, as Deety had all her pretties with her, her own and those that had belonged to her mother. Sharpie based it on an emerald-and-pearl neckpiece, plus a matching pin and ring.
As for Sharpie, twice my darling’s age and half as big, restraint was not what she used. The central diamond of her necklace was smaller than the Star of Africa.
She wore other diamonds here and there.
Here is something I don’t understand. Sharpie is underprivileged in mammary glands. I know she was not wearing cheaters as I returned to get my tie tied just as Deety was about to lower it onto her. No bra, no underwear. But when that dress was fastened, Sharpie had tits – little ones but big enough for her size. Stuffing built into the dress? Nope. I went out of my way to check.
Is that why some couturiers get such high prices?
Still… the Captain looks best in her skin.
So we uncovered these confections and gave the British colony, male, female, and the others, something to talk about for months.
I can’t say the English ladies were pleased. Their men gravitated toward our darlings like iron filings toward a magnet. However, Betty, Lady Herbert, is sweet all through. She rushed toward us (a bow wave of juniors getting out of her way), stopped short, looked only at our ladies, and said with the delight of a child at Christmas: “Oh, how beautiful you are!” and clapped her hands.
Her voice projected against dead silence, then conversation resumed. Lady Herbert took them, an arm around each, and toured the hall (busting up a receiving line). Brigadier Hird-Jones rolled with the punch, gathered in Jake and me, made sure we met those who had not been at tea.
Shortly before dinner a colonel said to me, “Oh, I say, is it true that the tiny beauty is in command of your ship?”
“Quite true. Best commanding officer I’ve ever had.”
“Haw. Astounding. Fascinating. The taller girl, the strawberry blonde – introduced simply as ‘Mrs. Carter.’ She’s part of your ship’s company. Yes?”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Astrogator and second-in-command. Doctor D. T. Burroughs Carter, my wife.”
“Well! My congratulations, sir.”
“Thank you.”
“I say, Carter, would it be rude of me to ask why the ladies have the senior posts while you and Doctor Burroughs appear to be junior? Or am I intruding?”
“Not at all, Colonel. We each do what we do best. Mrs. Burroughs is not only best as commander; she is also best cook. While we take turns at cooking, I’ll happily volunteer as scullery maid if it will persuade the Captain to cook.”
“Amazing. Could you use a colonel of lancers about to retire? I’m a wonderful scullery maid.”

The dinner was excellent (Irish chef, transported for shooting his landlord) and Lady Herbert was delightful, even though she drank her dinner and her words became increasingly difficult to understand. But any answer would do as long as it was friendly. Jake displayed the charm he can when he bothers and kept her laughing.
One thing marred it. Lady Herbert started to slump and nursing sisters appeared and took her away. What is protocol for this?
I checked Hilda and the Governor; they didn’t seem to see it. I glanced at Hird-Jones; the Brigadier did not seem to see it – but Squeaky sees everything. Ergo: no member of the colony could “see” it.
Someone else gathered the ladies while the gentlemen remained for port and cigars. While we were standing as the ladies left, Hird-Jones leaned close: “Your captain has asked me to tell you that the Governor invites you to join them later in his study.”
I tasted the port, lit the cigar (I don’t smoke – fake it when polite) when the Brigadier caught my eye and said, “Now.” Bertie had left, leaving a stooge, a wit who had them all laughing – that colonel of lancers.
When Jake and I came in, Deety and Hilda were there, with a large man, tall as I am and heavier – Major General Moresby, chief of staff. Bertie stood while waving us to chairs. “Thanks for coming, gentlemen. We are settling tomorrow’s schedule and your captain prefers to have you present.”
The Governor reached behind him, moved out a globe of Mars. “Captain, I think I have marked the places we visited yesterday.”
“Deety, please check it,” Sharpie directed.
My darling looked it over. “The Russian settlements extended almost one hundred fifty kilometers farther east than this borderline shows – ninety-one English miles, seventy-nine nautical miles – call it two and a half degrees.”
“Impossible!” (The bulky Major General – )
Deety shrugged. “Might be a few miles more; all we took were spot checks.”
Jake said, “General Moresby, you had better believe it.”
Bertie stepped in with: “Is that the only discrepancy, Doctor Deety?”
“One more. But there is something I want to ask about. May I borrow a marking pen? Grease pencil?”
Bertie found one; she placed three bingoes in an equilateral triangle, well detached from both zones. “What are these, sir? This one is a village, the other two are large farms. But we did not determine nationality.”
Bertie looked at her marks. “Not ours. Moresby, how long ago did we reconnoitre that area?”
“There are no Russians there! She’s doing it by memory. She’s mistaken.”
I said, “Moresby, I’ll bet my wife’s marks are accurate within two kilometers. How high do you want to go? What is a pound worth here in gold?”
Bertie said, “Please, gentlemen – wagers another time. What was the other error, Astrogator Deety?”
“Our touchdown point. Where we tangled with the Russians. Your memory is off by many degrees. Should be here.”
“Moresby?”
“Governor, that is impossible. Either they did not land there or they had trouble with Russians somewhere else.”
Deety shrugged. “Governor, I have no interest in arguing. Our time of arrival at ‘Touchdown’ just after dawn day before yesterday was fourteen-oh-six in the afternoon Windsor City local time. Six past two pip emma. You saw the remains of that ornithopter today. What did shadows and height of the sun tell you as to local time there, and what does that tell you about longitude from here?” She added, “With one degree of longitude being four minutes of local time difference, you can treat one minute of arc as equal to one kilometer and measure it on this globe. The errors will be smaller than your own error in estimate of local time.”
“Astrogator, I’m not good at this sort of problem. But it was about eight-thirty in the morning where we saw the burned ornithopter.”
“That’s right, Governor. We’ll lay that out as kilometers and see how close it comes to my mark.”
Moresby objected, “But that globe is scaled in miles!”
Deety looked back at Bertie with a half smile, an expression that said wordlessly: (He’s your boy, Bertie. Not mine.)
Bertie said testily, “Moresby, have you never worked with a French ordnance map?”
I’m not as tolerant as Deety. “Multiply by one-point-six-oh-nine.”
“Thanks but we will assume that the Astrogator is correct. Moresby, reconnaissance will cover two areas. Captain, how many spot checks can be made per hour?”
“Just a moment!” Captain Sharpie interrupted. “Has this discussion been directed at the ride I promised Brigadier Hird-Jones?”
“I’m sorry, Ma’am. Wasn’t that clear?”
“No, I thought you were telling General Moresby what you saw today. Isn’t the Brigadier available? I want to settle the time with him.”
Moresby answered, “Madam, that has been changed. I’m taking his place.”
Sharpie looked at Moresby as if he were a side of beef she was about to condemn. “Governor, I do not recall offering this person a ride. Nor has the Brigadier told me that he is not going.”
“Moresby, didn’t you speak to Hird-Jones?”
“Certainly I did, sir. I dislike to tell you but he was not cooperative. I had to remind him that there was rank involved.”
I looked around for somewhere to hide. But Sharpie did not explode. She said sweetly, “Certainly there is, Major General Bores-me. My rank. I am commanding; you are not.” She turned to Bertie. “Governor, I may offer other rides after I keep my promise to the Brigadier. But not to this person. He’s too fat.”
“What! I weigh only seventeen stone – trim for a man with my height and big bones.” Moresby added, “Homeside weight, of course. Only ninety pounds here. Light on my feet. Madam, I resent that.”
“Too fat,” Sharpie repeated. “Bertie, you remember how tightly we were packed yesterday. But even if Bores-me did not have buttocks like sofa cushions, he’s much too fat between the ears. He can’t enter my yacht.”
“Very well, Captain. Moresby, please have Hird-Jones report to me at once.”
“But -“
“Dismissed.”
As the door closed, the Governor said, “Hilda, my humblest apologies. Moresby told me that it was all arranged… which meant to me that he had seen you and Squeaky and arranged the exchange. Moresby hasn’t been here long; I’m still learning his quirks. No excuse, Captain. But I offer it in extenuation.”
“Let’s forget it, Bertie. You used ‘reconnaissance’ where I would have said ‘joy ride.’ ‘Reconnaissance’ is a military term. Did you use it as such?”
“I did.”
“Gay Deceiver is a private yacht and I am a civilian master.” She looked at me. “Chief Pilot, will you advise me?”
“Captain, if we overfly territory for the purpose of reconnaissance, the act is espionage.”
“Governor, is this room secure?”
“Hilda – Captain, in what way?”
“Is it soundproof and are there microphone pickups?”
“It is soundproof when I close that second door. There is one microphone. I control it with a switch under the rug – right here.”
“Will you not only switch it off but disconnect it? So that it cannot be switched on by accident.”
“If that is your wish. I could be lying. Other microphones.”
“It’s accidental recording I want to avoid. Bertie, I wouldn’t trust Moresby as far as I could throw him. I have learned to trust you. Tell me why you need to reconnoitre?”
“I’m not certain.”
“Reconnaissance is to learn something you are not certain about. Something that can be seen from Gay Deceiver – but what?”
“Uh… will you all swear to secrecy?”
“Hilda -“
“Not now, Jacob. Governor, if you don’t want to trust us, tell us to leave!”
Smythe-Carstairs had been standing since turning the rug to remove the switch. He looked down at Hilda and smiled. “Captain, you are an unusually small woman… and the toughest man I’ve dealt with in many a year. The situation is this: The Russians have sent another ultimatum. We have never worried about Russians as we settled halfway around the planet from them and logistics here are almost impossible. No oceans. No navigable streams. Some canals if one enjoys suicide. Both sides have attempted to raise horses. They don’t live long, they don’t reproduce.
“Both sides have ornithopters. But they can’t carry enough or fly far enough. I was startled when you said that they had given you trouble where you had first touched down – and proved it by showing me wreckage of a ‘thopter.
“Any logistics problem can be solved if you use enough men, enough time. Those Russian craft must have, behind them, stockpiles about every fifty miles. If they have the same continuing this way, when they get here, they will wipe us out.”
“Is it that bad?” I inquired. Sharpie said, “Governor, our Chief Pilot is the only one of us with combat experience.”
“Yes,” agreed Jake with a wry smile, “I was awarded rank in lieu of combat. I signed papers.”
Bertie gave the same mirthless smile. “Welcome to the lodge. Twenty years since I last heard a bullet say ‘wheat!’ Now I may be about to lose my last battle. Friends, my rank states that I am qualified to command an army corps… but I have possibly one platoon who will stand and die.”
Jake said, “Governor, this city must be two hundred thousand people.”
“More than that, Jake. Over ninety-nine percent are convicts or discharged convicts or their wives and children. Do you imagine that they are loyal to me? Even if they were, they are neither trained nor armed.
“I have a nominal regiment, a battalion in numbers – and a platoon in strength. Friends, my troops, officers and men, and my civil servants, are, with few exceptions, transportees quite as much as the convicts. Example: An officer with a court staring him in the face can often get the charges dropped by volunteering for Mars. I don’t get murderers. What I do get is worse… for me. The mess treasurer who dips into mess funds because he has a ‘sure thing’ at a racing meet. The – Oh, the devil take it! I don’t get villains; I get weaklings. There are a few good ones. Hird-Jones. Young fellow named Bean. Two old sergeants whose only shortcomings are that one had two wives and, while the other had only one, she wasn’t his. If the Russians get here, they’ll kill our wogs – they don’t domesticate them; they hunt and eat them – they’ll kill anyone in uniform… and transportees will learn that being a serf is worse than being a free man not on the planet of his choice. Squeaky! Where have you been?”
“In the card room, sir. First table to the right.”
“So? How long ago did you get my message?”
“About twenty seconds ago, sir.”
“Hm! How long have you been in the card room?”
“A bit over an hour.”
“I see. Bolt the outer door, close the inner door, sit down.”
Twenty minutes later Sharpie was asking, “Deety, what time is sunrise here?” She indicated a point 30° east of the western boundary of the westernmost of the two loci Bertie wanted investigated.
“In about twenty minutes. Shall I have Gay check it?”
“No. Sunset over here?”
“More leeway there. One hour fifty-seven minutes.”
“Very well. Zeb, those zeroed packs?”
“Being charged, they told me. Ready in the morning.”
“Good. Squeaky, if I get you to bed by oh-two-hundred hours could you take us to the fields about eleven-hundred hours?”
“Oh-eight-hundred, if you wish, Captain Hilda.”
“I don’t wish. This job requires sunlight, so we will work whatever it takes. I intend to sleep late. Bertie, would your kitchen service extend to breakfast in bed about ten ack emma?”
“Tell the night maid. The sideboard in your dining room will be loaded and steaming whenever you say and the day maid will be delighted to bring you a tray in bed.”
“Heavenly! All hands and Brigadier Hird-Jones: Lift in thirty-nine minutes. Car doors open five minutes before that. Questions?”
“Just a comment. I’ll fetch sandwiches.”
“Thank you, Squeaky! Bertie.”
“Eh? Ma’am!”
“Deety and I expect to be kissed good-bye… in case something goes wrong.”

Chapter XXIX

” – we place no faith in princes.”

Deety:
We had a busy night. I had Gay display bingo dots for every stop we made – then circles around any that were supply dumps.
There were indeed supply dumps!
I spent the whole trip thinking: Where would I be if I were a supply dump? Where would ‘thopters have to land? Where could they get more water? Squeaky, Hilda, Pop, Zebadiah – and possibly Gay – were thinking the same thing.
We got back at half after one, the job done. The Hillbilly turned the results over to Squeaky and we went to bed.
Next morning at eleven our “roadable” arrived – without Squeaky. He sent an apologetic note saying that Lieutenant Bean knew what we expected and would add anything we asked for.
Captain Auntie had not taken breakfast in bed. I woke about nine local, found her at work – packing her dress clothes and Pop’s back into plastic pillow covers, then into a borrowed portmanteau. Our fresh laundry, given to us by the night maid on our return, was in another piece of borrowed luggage.
The Hillbilly was on her knees in our drawing room. She looked up, smiled and said, “Good morning. Better slide into your jump suit, dear; maids come in and out rather casually.”
“Doesn’t bother me, I’ve been caught twice already -“
“But it bothers them. Not kind, dear, with servants. Especially with involuntary servants. They’ll be in to load the sideboard any moment. Will you fetch yours and Zebbie’s dress clothes here? I’ll pack for you.”
“I’ll pack ’em, thanks. I was thinking about sliding back into bed with a nice warm man but your mention of food changed my mind. Hillbilly, what’s the rush?”
“Deety, I’m carrying out my own orders. When I brush my teeth after breakfast, the toothbrush goes into my purse. As for the rush, our husbands will wake soon. I have found that it is more practical to present a man with a fait accompli than a discussion.”
“I hear you three times, doll baby. When they get up, they’ll want to eat. When our roadable shows up, they’ll be sitting over second cups of coffee. Then they’ll say, ‘We’ll do it when we come back. Mustn’t keep the Brigadier waiting.’ Okay, I’ll grab our gear and we’ll sneak it out before they wake. I’ll carry the heavy ones.”
“We are not permitted to carry anything, Deety. But the place is swarming with maids. You sound much married.”
“Five years’ practice on Pop. But, Hillbilly, even Pop is easy to handle if you think ahead.”
“I’m learning. Deety, what shall we do about the maids?”
“Huh?”
“In the days when servants were common, it was polite for house guests to tip servants who served them personally. But how, Deety? I have two twenty-five-newdollar bills in the lining of my purse. Waste paper.”
“Pop and Zebadiah have gold. I know exactly because it was mass enough that I had to figure it into the loading, mass and moment arm. Here’s a giggle. These misers we married had each squirreled away the same weight of gold to four significant figures. So maids are no problem if you know how much to tip – I don’t. We’ll be buying local money today to pay for a number of things.”

“Leftenant” Bean – or “Brian” – is a delightful fuzzy puppy and a volunteer in order to have served “Beyond the Sky.” He managed to call me “Deety” and Zebadiah “Zeb” when invited, but he could not bring himself to shift from “Captain Burroughs” to “Hilda” – “Captain Hilda” was as far as he would go, and Pop was “Professor.”
He was pleased that we liked his “roadable.” You wouldn’t believe it! A large, wooden flatbed wagon with an upright steam engine in back; a trailer with cordwood; a sailing-ship’s wheel in front of the engine; this controlled the front wheels by ropes that ran underneath. Midway was a luggage pen, then in front were four benches, for twelve to sixteen people.
With a crew of five!
Engine driver, fireman, conductor, and two steersmen –
The conductor sat on a high perch braced to the pen and told the others what to do and occasionally rang a bell or blew a whistle. The bell told other traffic to get out of the way; the whistle warned that the vehicle was about to start or stop. There was much traffic but few “roadables” – most common were pedalled tricycles, for passengers and freight. Large versions had as many as a dozen men pedalling at once.
“I daresay you know,” said Brian, “that we have not been able to raise horses. We haven’t given up – we will develop a breed that will prosper here. But once we have horses, this will, I venture to predict, become a proper colony – and not just a place to send reformable evildoers and to obtain raw pharmaceuticals.”
“Pharmaceuticals?”
“Oh, definitely! The thing that makes the colony self-supporting. I daresay the descendants of these convicts will be wealthy. I will show you the fields – all in the weed – a cant word for Cannabis Magnifica Martia – except acreage for food crops. Brigadier Hird-Jones suggested Norfolk Plantation.” He smiled. “Shall we?”
“Just a moment,” Aunt Hilda said. “If I understood the Brigadier’s note, we can vary the program?”
“Captain Hilda, the carriage and I are at your disposal as long as you wish. My orders and my pleasure.”
“Brian, I have clothing being made up. I was told that sewing would continue through the night. Where should we go to inquire?”
“Here and now. I fancy I saw a package being delivered while we’ve been chatting; it could be yours. It would go to the chief housekeeper, who would have it placed in your digs – the Princess Suite, is it not?”
“Yes. Brian, I’ll slip upstairs and see.”
“Please, no!” Brian made a small gesture; a private soldier appeared out of nowhere. “Smathers, my greetings to Mrs. Digby. Has a package arrived for Captain Burroughs?”
“Sir!”
“Hold it! Brian, if it has arrived, I want it fetched here.”
I could see the look in Brian’s eye that Pop gets just before he starts demanding explanations for female “unreasonable” behavior. But Brian simply added, “If the package has arrived, tell Mrs. Digby that it must be delivered here at once. Double time, so to speak.”
“Sir!” The private stomped an about-face and broke into a run. Hilda said, “Thank you, Brian. If I place it in our craft, it is one less detail to remember. Your kindness eases my mind.”
“A pleasure, Captain Hilda.”
“Hilda, that clothing is not yet paid for.”
“Oh, dear! You are right, Jacob. Leftenant, where does one exchange gold for local money? Do you know the rate of exchange? In grams?”
“Or in Troy ounces,” I added.
Brian behaved as if he had not heard us. He turned toward his “roadable.” “Parkins! Take a turn around the circle! When you return, I want that steam up high. So that we won’t creep in starting.”
“Roight, sir.” The wagon moved off, at a headlong slow walk.
When no one else was in earshot Brian said quietly, “I missed what you Were saying because of engine noise. But let me mention in passing that Possession of gold by individuals is not permitted so I-am-happy-to-learn-that-you-have-none,” he said, not letting himself be interrupted. “Let me add,” he went on, “that since I handle secret and most-secret despatches, I know things that I don’t know, if I make my meaning clear. For example, I am grateful that you four were willing to lose sleep last night. Others feel strong obligations to such good friends. The Brigadier mentioned that you might have purchases to make or bills to pay. I was instructed to charge anything you need or want – or fancy – to the Imperial Household, signing his name and appending my signature.”
“Oh, that’s most unfair!”
“Truly, Captain? I fancy that those in authority will find something to add until you feel that you have been treated generously.”
“That’s not what she means, son,” put in Pop. “‘Unfair’ in the opposite direction. We pay for what we get.”
Brian lost his smile. “May I suggest that the Professor discuss that with the Brigadier? I would find it extremely embarrassing to have to report to the Brigadier that I was unable to carry out his orders.”
“Captain.”
“What, Deety?”
“I am required to advise you.”
“Advise away, my dear. I see my packages coming.”
“Captain Auntie, you’ve got a bear by the tail. Let go.”
The Hillbilly grinned and stuck out her tongue at me, then turned to Brian. “The Brigadier’s thoughtful arrangements are appreciated. We accept.”
It was still a few minutes before we left, as it turned out that Zebadiah’s power packs were ready, in the hands of the Household engineer. At last Hilda’s clothes and the power packs were in Gay; we boarded the char-à-banc, and whizzed away at 10 km/hr. “Norfolk Plantation, Captain Hilda?”
“Brian, at what time did you breakfast?”
“Oh, that’s not important, Ma’am.”
“Answer my question.”
“At oh-seven-hundred hours, Captain.”
“So I suspected. You eat at Imperial House?”
“Oh, no, Captain Hilda, only the most senior of the Governor’s official family eat there. I eat at the officers’ club.”
“I see. We’ll see wogs last. I am told there is a commissary. Is it open to us?”
“Captain Hilda, everything is open to you.”
“I must buy supplies. Then I wish to go to the best restaurant in Windsor City and watch you eat a proper luncheon; we ate breakfast three hours later than you did.”
“But I’m hungry,” said my husband. “I’m a growing boy.”
“Poor Zebbie.”

There was not much to buy that would keep. I bought a tin of Huntley & Palmer’s biscuits and quite a lot of Dutch chocolate – quick energy for growing boys – and tightly packaged staples.
Brian had us driven to that restaurant just past noon. I was glad that Aunt Hilda had decided to get everything else done before we went to look at vermin. Even so, I did not have much appetite – until I decided to stand up and forthrightly turn coward. Not look at vermin! Cui bono? Aunt Hilda was the expert.
That restored my appetite. We stopped across the parade ground from Imperial House. We twigged in this order – Zebadiah, Pop, me, Aunt Hilda – that it was the officers’ club. She was several meters inside when she stopped. “Brian, what are we doing here?”
“The Captain said ‘ – the best restaurant – ‘. The club’s chef was executive chef at Claridge’s until he ran into misfortune. Don’t look at me that way, Captain Hilda; the Brigadier picks up the chit; it’s charged against ‘official visitors’ and winds up in London against H.I.M.’s Civil List. Believe me, His Majesty gets paid more than leftenants, or even brigadiers.”
But the president of the mess signed the chit – a colonel who told the Hillbilly that he was buying her lunch because he wanted to ship with us as scullery maid.

I was telling Aunt Hilda that I would skip vermin viewing, thank you, when I did. One. Then six. Then a whole field of them. I was explaining to God that I didn’t like this dream so please let me wake up when Brian had the conductor halt the contraption and I saw that there were men in that field, too. The men carried whips; vermin were muzzled. This one vermin – well, “wog” – this wog had managed to pull its muzzle aside and was stuffing this weedy plant into its mouth… when a whip cracked across its naked back.
It cried.
The field on the other side of the road was not being worked, so I stared at it, After a while I heard Brian say, “Captain Hilda, you are serious, really?”
“Didn’t the Brigadier authorize it?”
“Ah, yes. I thought he was pulling my leg. Very well, Ma’am.”
I had to see what this was all about… and discovered that muzzled vermin, afraid of men with whips, weren’t frightening; they were merely ugly. Aunt Hilda was taking pictures, movies and stereo. Brian was talking to a man dressed like any farmer except for the Broad Arrow.
Brian turned and said, “Captain Hilda, the foreman asks that you point out the wog you want to dissect.”
Aunt Hilda answered, “There has been a mistake.”
“Ma’am? You don’t want to dissect a wog?”
“Leftenant, I was told that one or more died or was slaughtered each day. I want to dissect a dead body, in an appropriate place, with surgical instruments and other aids. I have no wish to have one of these poor creatures killed.”
We left shortly. Brian said, “Of the two, the abattoir and the infirmary, I suggest the latter. The veterinarian is a former Harley Street specialist. By the bye, there is no case of humans contracting disease from these brutes. So the infirmary isn’t dangerous, just, ah, unpleasant.”
We went to the wog hospital. I did not go inside. Shortly Pop came out, looking green. He sat beside me and smiled wanly. “Deety, the Captain ordered me outside for fresh air – and I didn’t argue. Aren’t you proud of me?”
I told him that I’m always proud of my Pop.
A few minutes later Brian and Zebadiah came out, with a message from Hilda that she expected to work at least another hour, possibly longer. “Captain Hilda suggests that I take you for a drive,” Brian reported.
The drive was only as far as the nearest pub; the sillywagon was sent back to wait for the Hillbilly. We waited in the lounge, where Pop and Brian had whisky and splash, and Zebadiah ordered a “shandygaff” – so I did, too. It will never replace the dry martini. I made it last till Aunt Hilda showed up.
Brian asked, “Where now, Captain Hilda?”
“Imperial House. Brian, you’ve been most kind.”
I said, “Cap’n Auntie, did you whittle one to pieces?”
“Not necessary, Deetikins. They’re chimpanzees.”
“You’ve insulted every chimp that ever lived!”
“Deety, these creatures bear the relation to ‘Black Hats’ that a chimpanzee does to a man. The physical resemblance is closer, but the difference in mental power – Doctor Wheatstone removed the brain from a cadaver; that told me all I needed to know. But I got something that may be invaluable. Motion pictures.”
Zebadiah said, “Sharpie, you took motion pictures in the fields.”
“True, Zebbie. But I have with me the Polaroids you took for me at Snug Harbor; some show the splints that creature used to disguise its extra knees and elbows. Doctor Wheatstone used surgical splints to accomplish the same with one of his helpers – a docile and fairly intelligent wog that didn’t object even though it fell down the first time it tried to walk while splinted. But it caught on and managed a stiff-legged walk just like that ranger – and like ‘Brainy’ now that I think about it – then was delighted when Doctor Wheatstone dressed it in trousers and an old jacket. Those pictures will surprise you. No makeup, no plastic surgery, a hastily improvised disguise – from the neck down it looked human.”
When we reached Imperial House, we transferred packages into Gay Deceiver – again were not permitted to carry; Brian told the conductor, the conductor told his crew. We thanked them, thanked Brian as we said good-bye, and Aunt Hilda expressed a hope of seeing him soon and we echoed her – me feeling like a hypocrite.
He saluted and started toward the officers’ club. We headed for the big wide steps. Aunt Hilda said, “Deety, want to share some soap suds?”
“Sure thing!” I agreed.
“Whuffor?” asked Zebadiah. “Sharpie, you didn’t get a spot on you.”
“To remove the psychic stink, Zebbie.”
“Mine isn’t psychic,” I said. “I stink, I do.”
But damn, spit, and dirty socks, we had hardly climbed into that tub when a message arrived, relayed by my husband, saying that the Governor requested us to call at his office at our earliest convenience. “Sharpie hon, let me translate that, based on my eighty years man and boy as flunky to an ambassador. Means Bertie wants to see us five minutes ago.”
I started to climb out; Aunt Hilda stopped me. “I understood it, Zebbie; I speak Officialese, Campusese, and Bureaucratese. But I’ll send a reply in clear English, female idiom. Is a messenger waiting?”
“Yes, a major.”
“A major, eh? That will cost Bertie five extra minutes. Zebbie, I learned before you were born that when someone wants to see me in a hurry, the urgency is almost never mutual. All right, message: The commanding officer of Spacecraft Gay Deceiver sends her compliments to the Governor General and will call on – him at her earliest convenience. Then give the major a message from you to Bertie that you happen to know that I’m taking a bath and that you hope I’ll be ready in twenty minutes but that you wouldn’t wager even money on thirty.”
“Okay. Except that the word should be ‘respects’ not ‘compliments.’ Also, the major emphasized that he wants to see all of us. Want Jake and me to keep Bertie happy until you are ready?” Pop had his head in the door, listening. “We wouldn’t mind.” Pop nodded.
“Zebbie, Zebbie! After four years under my tutelage. Until I know what he wants I can’t concede that he is senior to me. ‘Compliments,’ not ‘respects.’ And no one goes until I do… but thank you both for the offer. Two more things: After giving the major my message, will you please find my clothes, all but Deety’s Keds, and take them to the car? That’s Jacob’s shirt, Deety’s sailor pants, a blue belt, and a blue hair ribbon. In the car you will find new clothes on my seat. In one package should be three jump suits. Please fetch one back.”
Pop said, “Hilda, I’d be glad to run that errand. Run it twice, in fact, as you don’t want to send down what clothes you have until you know that your new clothes fit.”
“Jacob, I want you right here, to scrub our backs and sing for us and keep us amused. If that jump suit does not fit, I may appear in a bath towel sarong. But I plan to appear a minute early to make Bertie happy. Do not tell the major that, Zebbie! Officially it is twenty minutes with luck, thirty minutes more likely, could be an hour, Major; you know how women are. Got it all?”
“Roger Wilco. Sharpie, someday they’ll hang you.”
“They will sentence me to hang but Jacob and you will rescue me. Trot along, dear.” Aunt Hilda started to get out. “Stay there, Deety. I’ll give you three minutes’ warning – two to dry down, one to zip into your jump suit. Which leaves ten minutes to relax.”

The jump suit did fit; the Hillbilly looked cute. We left not a thing in that suite because Aunt Hilda checked it while waiting for Zebadiah. A few items went into my purse or hers. It was eighteen minutes from her message to our arrival at the Governor’s office – and I had had a fifteen-minute tub, comfy if not sybaritic.
Besides Bertie and the Brigadier, that fathead Moresby was there. Aunt Hilda ignored him, so I did. Bertie stood up. “How smart you all look! Did you have a pleasant day?” The poor dear looked dreadful – gaunt, circles under his eyes.
“A perfect day – thanks to you, thanks to the Brigadier, and thanks to a curly lamb named Bean.”
“A fine lad,” Squeaky boomed. “I’ll pass on your word, if I may.” The Brigadier did not look fresh; I decided that neither had been to bed.
Bertie waited until we were seated, then got to business. “Captain Burroughs, what are your plans?”
Aunt Hilda did not answer his question. She glanced toward Major General Moresby, back at Bertie. “We are not in private, Excellency.”
“Hmm – ” Bertie looked unhappy. “Moresby, you are excused.”
“But -“
“Dismissed. You have work to do, I feel sure.”
Moresby swelled up but got up and left. Squeaky bolted the outer door, closed the inner door, while Bertie stood up to lift the rug over his recorder switch. Aunt Hilda said, “Don’t bother, Bertie. Record if you need to. What’s the trouble, old dear? Russians?”
“Yes. Hilda, you four are refugees; yesterday you showed me why. Would you care to remain here? My delegated power is sufficient that I can grant naturalization as fast as I can sign my signature.”
“No, Bertie. But we feel greatly honored.”
“I expected that. Do reconsider it. There are advantages to being a subject of the most powerful monarch in history, in being protected by a flag on which the Sun never sets.”
“No, Bertie.”
“Captain Hilda, I need you and your ship. Because of millions of miles of distance, many months required for a message, I hold de jure viceregal power almost equal to sovereign… and de facto greater in emergency because no Parliament is here. I can recruit foreign troops, arm them, make guarantees to them as if they were British, award the King-Emperor’s commission. I would like to recruit all of you and your ship.”
“No.”
“Commodore for you, Captain for your second-in-command, Commander for your Chief Pilot, Lieutenant Commander for your Copilot. Retirement at full pay once the emergency is over. Return of your purchased ship as a royal gift after the emergency. Compensation for loss or damage.”
“No.”
“One rank higher for each of you?”
“All four of us must be at least one rank senior to Major General Moresby.”
“Hilda! That’s my own rank. Equivalent rank – Vice Admiral.”
“Bertie, you can’t hire us as mercenaries at any rank or pay. That hyperbole was to tell you that we will not place ourselves under your chief of staff. That settled, what can we do to help you?”
“I’m afraid you can’t, since you won’t accept the protection under international law of military status. So I’m forced to cut the knot. Do you understand the right of angary?”
(I thought he said “angry” and wondered.)
“I believe so. Are Great Britain and the Russias at war?”
“No, but there are nuances. Shall I call in my legal officer?”
“Not for me. My own legal officer is here: Doctor Zebadiah Carter, my consultant in international law.”
“Doctor Carter – oh, fiddlesticks! My friend Zeb. Zeb, will you discuss the right of angary?”
“Very well, Governor. One nuance you had in mind was that, in addition to wartime, it applies to national emergency – such as your current one with the Russians.”
“Yes!”
“Angary has changed in application many times but in general it is the right of a sovereign power to seize neutral transport found in its ports or territory, then use same in war or similar emergency. When the emergency is over, seized transport must be returned, fair rentals must be paid, loss or damage requires compensation. It does not apply to goods or chattels, and most especially not to persons. That’s the gist. Do we need your legal officer?”
“I don’t think so. Captain Burroughs?”
“We don’t need him. You intend to requisition my craft?”
“Captain… I must!” Bertie was almost in tears.
“Governor, you are within your legal rights. But have you considered how you will drive it?”
“May I answer that, Governor?”
“Go ahead, Squeaky.”
“Captain Hilda, I have an odd memory. ‘Photographic’ it is called but I remember sounds as automatically. I am sure I can fly every maneuver used last night – that is to say: sufficient for our emergency.”
I was seething. But Aunt Hilda smiled at the Brigadier and said in her sweetest voice: “You’ve been most thoughtful throughout our stay, Squeaky. You are a warm, charming, hospitable, bastardly fink. One who would sell his wife to a Port Saïd pimp. Aside from that you are practically perfect.”
“Doubled and redoubled!” (That was my Pop!) “Later on, Jones, I’ll see you at a time and place of your choosing. Weapons or bare hands.”
“And then I will see you, if Jake leaves anything.” My husband flexed his fingers. “I hope you choose bare hands.”
Bertie interrupted. “I forbid this during this emergency and after it in territory where I am suzerain and while Hird-Jones holds the Sovereign’s commission under my command.”
Aunt Hilda said, “You are legally correct, Bertie. But you will concede that they had provocation.”
“No, Ma’am! Hird-Jones is not at fault. I tried to get you and your crew to fly it on any terms at all. You refused. Hird-Jones may kill himself attempting to fly a strange flyer. If so he will die a hero. He is not what you called him.”
“I don’t think well of you, either, Bertie. You are a thief – stealing our only hope of a future.”
“He certainly is!” I cut in. “Governor, I can whip you – I can kill you, with my bare hands. I’m Black-Belt three ways. Are you going to hide behind your Commission and your self-serving laws?” I dusted my hands together. “Coward. Two cowards, with their chests covered with ribbons boasting about their brave deeds.”
“Astrogator.”
“Captain.”
“Let it drop. Bertie, under right of angary we are entitled to remove our chattels. I insist on a witness so that you will know that we have done nothing to damage the craft. If the Brigadier can drive it, it will be turned over to him in perfect shape. But my jewelry is in our craft and many other things; I must have a witness. You, sir. My stepdaughter can certainly kill you or anyone her size or a bit more than her size, with her bare hands. But I grant you safeconduct. Will you have it in writing?”
Bertie shook his head. “You know I can’t take time to witness. Pick anyone else.”
“I won’t grant safe-conduct to anyone else. Anyone who has not ridden with us would not know how to watch for sabotage. So it must be either you or Hird-Jones… and Hird-Jones would never live to get out of our car. He has three of the deadliest killers in two universes quite annoyed. Angry over angary.”
“Any of you who will not give parole must wait up here.”
“Wait a half, Gov,” my husband drawled. “‘Parole’ applies to prisoners. Captain, this might be a good time to read aloud our safe-conduct from the Governor General. See how many ways this fake ‘officer and gentleman’ has broken his word – and the written guarantees of his sovereign. He has broken all three essential guarantees to all four of us. That’s twelve. Almost a Russian score. Safe-conduct amounting to diplomatic immunity, all of us free to leave at any time, we four never to be separated involuntarily. Now he wants hostages. Pfui!”
“None is broken,” Bertie asserted.
“Liar,” my husband answered.
“All of you are safe here… until the Russians conquer us. I slipped in speaking of parole; you are not prisoners. You all may stay together – living in the Princess Suite if you so choose. If not, in any quarters you choose in territory I control. You are all free to leave at any moment. But you must not approach that requisitioned flyer. Captain, your jewels will be safe. But others will unload the flyer.”
“Bertie -“
“What? Yes… Hilda?”
“Dear, you are both stubborn and stupid. You can’t open the doors of our car, much less drive it. Attempt to force it open and no one will ever drive it. I conceded the legality of the right of angary. But you insist on making it impossible to apply it. Accept my safe-conduct and come witness or there that car sits until the Russians come, while we live in luxury in this palace. You know that ‘the right to leave at any time’ means nothing without our transport. Now, for the last time, will you do it my way… or will you waste the precious minutes of a war crisis trying to open that car by yourself? Make up your mind, this offer will not be repeated. Answer Yes or No… and be damned quick about it!”
Bertie covered his face with his hands. “Hilda, I’ve been up all night. Both Squeaky and I.”
“I know, dear. I knew when we came in. So I must help you make up your mind. Deety, check your purse. Something is missing.”
I hastily checked, wondering what she meant. Then I noticed that a secret pocket that should have been hard was not. “Oh! Do you have it?”
“Yes, Deety.” Aunt Hilda was seated, her choice, so that she had both Bertje and Squeaky in her line of fire – and none of us. “I mentioned three killers. Now you have four facing you… in a soundproofed room with its door bolted from inside.” (I never saw her draw my Skoda gun. But she was holding it on them.) “Bertie, I’m making up your mind for you. You are accepting my safe-conduct. Consider how poor the chances are that anyone would find your bodies in the time it takes us to run down one flight and reach our car.”
Squeaky lunged at Hilda. I tripped him, kicked his left kneecap as he fell, then said, “Don’t move, Fink! My next kick is a killer! Captain, has Bertie come to his senses? Or shall I take him? I hate to kill Bertie. He’s tired and worried and not thinking straight. Then I would have to kill Squeaky. He can’t help his eidetic memory, any more than I can help this clock in my head. Squeaky, did I break your kneecap? Or can you walk if I let you get up?”
“I can walk. You’re fast, Deety.”
“I know. Captain. Plans?”
“Bertie, you are accepting my safe-conduct. We are all going out together, we four around you two, laughing and talking and heading for our car – and if anyone gets close, you two are dead. One of you will get it with this -“
“And the other with this.” (My husband, with his stubby police special – )
“Why, Zebbie! How naughty of you! Jacob, do you have a holdout too?”
“Just this – ” Pop now had his hunting knife.
“Deety?”
“Did have. You’re holding it. But I still have five weapons.”
“Five?”
“Both hands, both feet, and my head. Squeaky, I must frisk you. Don’t wiggle… or I’ll hurt you.” I added, “Stop easing toward your desk, Bertie. You can’t kill four of us before we kill you. Pop, don’t bother with the gun, or trap, or whatever, in Bertie’s desk, Let’s get out of here, laughing and joking, as the Captain ordered. Oh, Squeaky, that didn’t hurt! Captain, shall I let him up?”
“Brigadier Hird-Jones, do you honor the safe-conduct granted to us by your commanding officer?” Aunt Hilda asked.
“Brigadier, I order you to honor it,” Bertie said grimly.
Maybe Squeaky had to catch his breath; he was a touch slow. “Yes, sir.”
Aunt Hilda said, “Thanks, Squeaky. I’m sorry I had to say harsh things to you… but not having muscles I must fight with words. Zebbie, frisk Bertie. But quickly; we leave now. I leave first, on Bertie’s arm. Deety follows, on Squeaky’s arm – you can lean on her if you need to; she’s strong. Help him up, Deety, Jacob and Zebbie trail along behind. Bertie, if anyone gets close to us, or either you or Squeaky try to signal anyone, or if anything is pointed at us – first you two die. Then we four die; that’s inevitable. But we’ll take some with us. What do you think the total may be? Two… and four… then five? Six? A dozen? Or higher?”

It took us forty-seven seconds to the bottom of the steps, thirty-one more to Gay Deceiver, and I aged seventy-eight years. Squeaky did lean on me but I made it look the other way around and he managed to smile and to sing with me: Gaudeamus Igitur. Hilda sang The Bastard King to Bertie which seemed both to shock him and make him laugh. The odd way she held his arm told me that she was prepared to plant 24 poisoned darts in Bertie’s left armpit if anything went sour.
No one bothered us. Bertie returned a dozen or more salutes.
But at Gay Deceiver we ran into a bobble. Four armed soldiers guarded our Smart Girl. By the starboard door was that fathead Moresby, looking smug. As we came close, he saluted, aiming it at Bertie.
Bertie did not return his salute. “What’s the meaning of this?” he said, pointing. Plastered to Gay’s side, bridging the line where her door fairs into her afterbody, was H.I.M.’s Imperial seal.
Moresby answered, “Governor, I understood you perfectly when you told me that I had work to do. Verb. sap., eh?”
Bertie didn’t answer; Moresby continued to hold salute.
“Major General Moresby,” Bertie said so quietly that I could just hear it.
“Sir!”
“Go to your quarters. Send me your sword.”
I thought Fathead was going to melt down the way the Wicked Witch did when Dorothy threw the pail of water over her. He brought down the salute and left, moving quickly.
Everybody acted as if nothing had happened. Hilda said, “Gay Deceiver, open starboard door” – she did and that seal broke. “Bertie, we’re going to need people to carry things. I don’t want our possessions stacked outdoors.”
He looked down at her, surprised. “Is the war over?”
“There never was a war, Bertie. But you tried to push us around, and I don’t push. You requisitioned this craft; it’s legally yours. What I insisted on was that you must witness removal of our chattels. That took coaxing.”
“‘Coaxing’!”
“Some people are harder to coax than others. Squeaky, I’m sorry about your knee. Can you hobble back? Or shall we get you a wheelchair? That knee must be swelling up.”
“I’ll live. Deety, you play rough.”
“Squeaky,” said the Governor General, “slow march back toward the House, grab the first person you see, delegate him to round up a working party. Hilda, will a dozen be enough?”
“Better make it twenty. And about four more armed guards.”
“Twenty and four additional sentries. Once you pass that word, put the senior rating in charge, and climb into a tub of hot water.”
“Cold water.”
“What, Hilda? Cold?”
“Hot is okay if he uses lots of Epsom salts. Otherwise ice-cold water will bring the swelling down faster, even though it’s uncomfortable. But not for long. Ice water numbs pain while it reduces swelling. By morning you’ll be fit. Unless Deety cracked the bone.”
“Oh, I hope not!” I blurted.
“Squeaky, you had better listen to Captain Hilda.”
“I’ll do it. Ice water. Brrrrr!”
“Get on with it. But order that working party.”
“Right away, sir.”
“Bertie, will you follow me?” Hilda went inside. The Governor followed her, started to say something but Hilda cut him off: “Jacob, get out the items forward here while Zebbie keeps inventory as you do. Bertie, I have something for Betty before that mob gets here. Will you help me undog this door or perhaps Deety can do it easier GayDeceiverCloseDoorsGayBounceGayBounceGayBounce. Bertie, take off your clothes.” She held onto a door dog with her left hand, had my little gun aimed at his face.
“Hilda!”
“Captain Hilda, please; I’m in my spacecraft under way. Take off every stitch, Bertie; I’m not as trusting as Zebbie. I assume that you have a holdout he didn’t find. Gay Bounce. Hurry up, Bertie; you’re going to stay in free fall with no Bonine until you are naked. Zebbie, he may require help. Or inducement.”
He required both. But eleven minutes later Bertie was wearing one of Pop’s coveralls and his clothes were abaft the bulkhead. Zebbie did not find a weapon but Aunt Hilda took no chances. At last we were all strapped down, with Bertie between me and the Captain.
Hilda said, “All hands, report readiness for space. Astrogator.”
“Captain Auntie, we are in space.”
“But quite unready. Astrogator.”
“Seat belt fastened. Ready.”
“Chief Pilot.”
“Door seal checked. No loose gear – I stuffed Bertie’s clothes in with the cabin bed clothes. Four charged power packs in reserve. Juice oh-seven-oh. All systems go. Ready.”
“Copilot.”
“Seat belt tight. Continua device ready. Door seal checked. I’d like a Bonine if we’re going to be in free fall long. Ready for space.”
“Astrogator, three antinausea pills – captain, copilot, passenger. Passenger.”
“Oh! Oh, yes! Safety belt tight.”
“Captain states seat belt fastened. Ready for space. Gay Termite.”
It was just sunrise at our streamside “home.” “Aunt Hilda, why did we run through all that rigamarole if we were coming straight here?”
“Deety, when you are captain you will know.”
“Not me. I’m not the captain type.”
She ignored me. “Lieutenant General Smythe-Carstairs, will you give me your unconditional parole until I return you home? On your honor as an officer and a gentleman.”
“Am I going home? I had assumed that I had not long to live.”
“You are going home. And I do have something for Betty. But whether or not you give parole affects other matters. Make up your mind – at once!”
It took him six seconds; Aunt Hilda let him have them. “Parole. Unconditional.”
“I’m surprised, Bertie. You have a tradition against giving parole, do you not?”
“We do indeed, Captain. But I concluded that my only chance of serving my sovereign lay in giving my word. Am I right?”
“Quite right, Bertie. You now have opportunity to persuade me to support you in your crisis. Your King-Emperor is not our prince; we place no faith in princes. We have no reason to love Russians but we spanked the only one who gave us trouble. In what way is the British colony superior to the Russian one? Take your time.”
Aunt Hilda turned her attention to the rest of us. “Standing orders apply: Two at a time, one being armed. Deety and I will cut and wrap sandwiches, make coffee and prepare a snack for growing boys who can’t remember a bounteous luncheon three hours ago. One guard at all times at the car. Bertie, I’m assigning you that duty. You know how to use a rifle?”
Zebadiah said, “You’re arming him?”
“Chief Pilot, I assume that you are questioning my judgment. If you convince me that I am wrong, there will be a new captain even more quickly than I had planned. May I have your reason?”
“Sharpie, I didn’t mean to get your feathers up.”
“Not at all, Zebbie. Why are you surprised that I intend to use Bertie as guard?”
“Ten minutes ago you had me do a skin search to make sure he wasn’t armed. Now you are about to hand him a gun.”
“Ten minutes ago he had not given parole.”
Bertie said hastily, “Zeb is right, Hilda – Captain Hilda; Zeb has no reason to trust me. I don’t want to be a bone of contention!”
I’m still trying to figure out whether Aunt Hilda is more logical than other people or is a complete sophist. She gave Bertie a freeze, looking him up and down. “Smythe-Carstairs, your opinion was neither asked nor wanted.”
Bertie turned pink. “Sorry, Ma’am.”
“Although you were a person of some importance in your own land, you are now something between a prisoner and a nuisance. I am trying to give you the dignity of crew member pro tern. Hold your tongue. Zebbie, what were you going to say?”
“Shucks, if you aren’t afraid to have him with a gun at your back, I’m not. No offense intended, Bertie.”
“None taken, Zeb.”
“Zebbie, please assure yourself that Bertie can handle a rifle, and that he knows what to shoot at and when not to shoot, before you turn the guard over to him. Put the other rifle at the door for bush patrol. Bertie, watch and listen. Gay Deceiver, open your doors.”
Our Smart Girl opened wide. “Gay Deceiver, close your doors.” Gay complied. “Bertie,” Aunt Hilda went on, “you do it.”
Of course he failed – and failed again on other voice programs. The Hillbilly explained that it took me a tedious time with special equipment to cause this autopilot to respond to a particular human voice. “Bertie, go back and explain to Squeaky; make him understand that I saved his life. This car can be driven in three modes. Two Squeaky can’t use at all; the third would kill him as dead as Caesar.”
“Plus a fourth hazard,” added my husband. “Anybody who doesn’t understand the Smart Girl but tries to take her apart to see what makes her tick would find himself scattered over a couple of counties.”
“Booby-trapped, Zebadiah?” I asked. “I hadn’t known it.”
“No. But juice is very unfriendly to anybody who doesn’t understand it.”

“Come and get it!” The snack Aunt Hilda offered was a much-stuffed omelet. “Bertie, place your gun near you, locked. Between bites, you can tell us why your colony is worth defending. By us, I mean. For you, it’s duty.”
“Captain Hilda, I’ve done some soul-searching. I daresay that, in the main, we and the Russians are much the same, prison colonies with military governors. Perhaps, in a hundred years, it won’t matter. Although I see us as morally superior.”
“How, Bertie?”
“A Russian might see this differently. Our transportees are malefactors under our laws – but once here, they are as free as other Englishmen. Oh, they must wear the Broad Arrow until discharged – but at home they would wear it in a grim prison. The Russian prisoners are, if our intelligence is correct, the people they used to send to the Siberian salt mines. Political prisoners. They are serfs but I am told that most of them were not serfs in Russia. Whether they are treated better or worse than serfs in Russia I do not know. But one thing I do know. They work their fields with men; we work ours with wogs.”
“And whip them!” Suddenly I was angry.
We had an argument, Bertie maintaining that the whips were not used unnecessarily, I asserting that I had seen it with my own eyes.
I guess he won, as he told us that they had to muzzle the beasts in weed fields, or they would stuff themselves on it, pass out, wake somewhat, do it again, and starve – but the muzzles were designed to allow them to chew a blade at a time all day long, to keep them happy. “The raw weed is addictive, to wog and man. We won’t allow a man to work in the fields more than three months at a time… and pull him out if he can’t pass the weekly medical tests. As for wogs, Deety – yes, we exploit them. Human beings exploit horses, cattle, sheep, poultry, and other breeds. Are you vegetarian?”
I admitted I was not. “But I don’t want to eat wogs!”
“Nor do we. In Windsor colony wog meat goes only to wogs, and wogs don’t care. In the wild they eat their own dead, kill and eat their aged. Captain Hilda, that’s all the defense I can offer. I admit that it doesn’t sound as strong as I had always believed.”
“Captain, I’d like to put one to Bertie.”
“Jacob, I treasure your thoughts.”
“Bertie, would you polish off the Russians if you could?”
Bertie snorted. “That’s academic, Doctor. I don’t command the force it would take. I can’t set up a string of stockpiles – and wouldn’t know what to do with them if I could; I don’t have the troops or ‘thopters. But I must add: If my King tells me to fight, I will fight.”

Aunt Hilda told Bertie to wash dishes with Pop sent along as guard. As soon as they started down, Aunt Hilda said, “We are going to do it, to a maximum cost of one power pack. Deety, start working on a program stringing together the dumps we located last night.”
“Already have,” I told her. “In my head. Last night. To put me to sleep. You want it preprogrammed? I would rather tell Gay each bounce, I would.”
“Do it your way, hon. The purpose in sending Bertie to wash dishes and Jacob to guard him was to get them out of the way while I rig a frameup. At the end of the coming run, we drop Bertie and bounce… and at that instant I cease to be captain. I want to hold the election now – a one-ballot railroad. I will ask for nominations. Zebbie, you nominate Jacob. Deety, you don’t need to say anything but speak if you wish. If Jacob nominates either of you, don’t argue. I’ll rig it so that Bertie declares the ballots. If you two are with me, the only surprise will be that fourth vote. Three for Jacob, and let’s all write ‘Jacob,’ not ‘Pop’ or ‘Jake,’ and one for the dark horse. Are you with me?”
“Wait a half, Sharpie. Why not give Deety a crack at it?”
“Not me!”
“Deety should have the experience, but, please, Zebbie, not this time. Jacob has given me a dreadful time. Endless insubordination. I want to pass him on to Deety well tenderized. Deety ought not to have to put up with her father second-guessing her decisions – and, if you two help, she won’t have to. I want to give my beloved the goddamndest ‘white mutiny’ ever, one that he will remember with shudders and never again give a skipper any lip.”
“Sounds good,” I agreed, “but I don’t know what a ‘white mutiny’ is.”
“Sweetheart,” my husband told me, “it’s killing him with kindness. He says ‘Frog,’ we hop. Utter and literal obedience.”
“This he won’t like? Pop will love it!”
“So? Would you like to command zombies who never make suggestions and carry out orders literally without a grain of common sense?”

Fifteen minutes later Bertie read off: “‘Jacob’ and this reads ‘Jacob’ and so does this one, that seems to settle it. But here is one, folded: ‘A bunch of smarties, you three. Think I didn’t guess why you sent me down to ride shotgun? Very well, I vote for myself!’ It is signed ‘Jake.’ Madame Speaker, is that valid?”
“Quite. Jacob, my last order will be liftoff after we drop Bertie.”
Bertie said, “Jake, I think congratulations are in order.”
“Pipe down! All hands, prepare for space.”

“A piece of cake,” Bertie called it. We started at the easternmost dump, worked west. Pop out at four klicks and dive, a dry run to size up the target; where wood alcohol was stored, ornithopters on the ground and how arranged… while Gay ululated from intensity six to eight. Frightfulness. I did not let it go up to ten because it wasn’t intended to damage but to send anyone on target scattering.
Zebadiah’s idea: “Captain, I’ve got nothing against Russians. My only purpose is to burn their fuel and their flaphappies to make it difficult to attack our friends – and I don’t mean you big brass, Bertie. I mean the transportee maid who brought us tea this morning, and Brian Bean, and Mr. Wheatstone who was a top surgeon before some fool judge slammed him and is now doing his best for wogs, and the chef at the officers’ club, and five cons who drove that sillywagon, and dozens more who smiled when they could have scowled. I don’t want them killed or enslaved; I want them to have their chance. Governor, England is slapping the Broad Arrow on some of your best potential – you English will live to regret it.”
“You could be right, Zeb,”
“I don’t want to kill Russians, either. Could be most of them are decent blokes. Each strike will be a double run – one pass to scatter ’em, a second to destroy the dump. Captain, if that doesn’t suit you, find another gunner.”
Aunt Hilda said, “Astrogator.”
“Captain.”
“Strike as described by Chief Pilot. Take the conn. Attack.”
At the first target we lingered after the strike bounce. The dry pass did show them running away – they could hear us clear in their bones. Those subsonics are so horrid I keyed Gay to kill the noise at code-word “Bounce” – and did not use it on the strike pass.
Zebadiah made strikes from bearings planned to take out as many ‘thopters as possible while setting fire to fuel.
From four klicks the first strike looked good. The dump was burning, ‘thopters he had hit showed smoke, and one that he had not hit was burning. Splashed by flaming methanol, I suppose.
If that first target was indication, in thirty-four minutes the Russians lost all fuel and about 70% of the deployed flaphappies. I took us up high after the last. “Next stop, Windsor City.”
“I’m taking the conn, Astrogator. Bertie, don’t forget my little ring for Betty.”
“I’ll give it to her in the morning.”
“Good,” Captain Hilda said. “Unbelt, crowd past Jacob, place yourself against the door – feet on deck, chest against door. Jacob, push against the small of his back. Bertie, when the door opens, dive and roll clear.”
They positioned themselves. “Gay Parade Ground Gay Deceiver open starboard door… Gay Deceiver close doors, GayBounce, GayBounce! Jacob, do you relieve me?”
“Beloved, I relieve you. Ten minima H axis transit – and executed. All hands, unbelt.”
I unbuckled with extreme speed and clumsiness, getting Pop in the chin with my foot.
“Deety! Watch where you’re going!”
“I’m sorry, Captain. I’m out of practice with free fall.”
“You’ve been in free fall every day!”
“Yes, Captain. I’ve been in free fall every day, belted down.”
“Pipe down! Hilda, don’t cover the instrument board. Hold onto something. No, not me, damn it. Zeb! Grab something and catch Hilda!”
“Roger Wilco, Captain! Right away!” My husband snagged Aunt Hilda, grabbed a seat belt with his other hand, trapped our captain against the dogs of the bulkhead door with his buttocks. “What now, sir!”
“Get your goddam fanny out of my face!”
“Sorry, sir,” Zebadiah answered humbly while turning and digging an elbow into Pop’s ribs. I closed in from the other side and we had Pop trapped again – ballet and trampoline make a fine background for free fall. Zebadiah went on cheerfully, “What shall we do now, sir?”
Pop didn’t answer. From watching his lips I saw that he was counting backwards, silently, in German. That’s stage three.
Then he said quietly, “Zeb, get into the copilot’s seat and belt down.”
“Aye aye, sir.” Zebadiah did so.
Pop snatched Hilda while hanging onto a dog. “Deety, belt down in the chief pilot’s seat.”
“Roger Wilco, Captain” – I did so.
“My dear, I want you behind Deety. Do you need help?”
“Yes, thank you, Captain; it’s sweet of you to offer.” White mutiny? The Hillbilly is about as helpless as Zebadiah but thinks God created men to pamper women. I’ve heard less reasonable philosophies.
After “helping” Hilda, Pop strapped down in the starboard after seat. “All hands! We have moved clockwise ninety degrees. I am now captain. Hilda, you are astrogator and second-in-command. Deety, you are chief pilot. Zeb, you are copilot. In order of seniority, any questions?”
The Hillbilly said in a small voice, “As second-in-command I am required to advise the Captain -“
“Certain circumstances. Speak up.”
“Captain, I know very little about astrogation.”
“That’s why you have the job. You will seek advice from Deety as needed, both of you seek advice from Zeb when necessary – and if all three of you are stumped, I will tackle it and be responsible for mistakes. No burden, the Captain is always responsible for all mistakes. When in doubt, do not hesitate to consult me.
“Deety, you have not driven this car in atmosphere. But you are a competent, decisive, and skillful driver of duos” – I am, Pop? – you’re years late in saying so – “and we have come this high to give you time to acquaint yourself with it. I placed Zeb by you to coach you and, in time, to report to me that you are fully qualified.” Pop smiled. “Fortunately, should you get into trouble, we have programs that will get you out instantly such as ‘Gay Bounce’ -“
Gay bounced.
Pop did not notice but I had my eye on radar distance since learning that I was responsible. Pop, who invented those safety scrams? Think hard. Hint: One of your offspring.
“Zeb, you know the knobs and scales et cetera of the controls we refer to as the verniers but you have not had time to practice. Now you will practice until you can handle anything, by eye, or by clicks in the dark. Permit me to pay you this compliment: You will give yourself your own final examination. When you feel ready, tell me and I will have the Astrogator log it.
“Advice to future captains – I will not be happy until all are competent in each of four seats, and all feel easy in all twenty-five possible arrangements -“
“Twenty-four, Pop,” I blurted out. I hastily added, “Sorry, Captain – ‘twenty-five.'”
Pop has a terrible time with kitchen arithmetic; it has been so long since he has done any. He will pick up a hand computer to discover 2 x 3 = 6; I’ve seen him do it.
He stared at me, lips moving slightly. At last he said, “Chief Pilot.”
“Captain.”
“You are ordered to correct me when I make a mistake. ‘Twenty-four’ permutations, certainly.”
“Sir, may the Chief Pilot have more information before she answers Roger-Wilco?”
“Fire away!”
“Captain, what categories of mistakes?”
“Eh? Any sort! A mistake is a mistake. Daughter, are you baiting me?”
“No, Captain. I am unable to acknowledge your order as I do not understand it. ‘A mistake is a mistake’ is semantically null. If I see you about to sugar your coffee twice shall I – “
“Tell me! Of course.”
“If I see you treating your wife unjustly shall I -“
“Wait a moment! Even if I did or have – which I decline to stipulate – it is not proper for you to interfere.”
“Yes, sir. We’ve established that there are two sets. But the Captain has not defined the sets and the Chief Pilot lacks authority to do so. May I respectfully suggest that the Captain take notice of the quandary, then reframe the order at a time of his choosing … and in the meantime permit the Chief Pilot not to correct the Captain’s mistakes?”
Zebadiah winked at me with his head turned so that I saw it but Pop could not.
Pop fumed, complaining that I wasn’t showing common sense and, worse, I had broken his train of thought. He finally got around to a definition at about 8th grade level: I was to correct him only in errors involving figures or related symbols such as angles. (On your own head be it, Pop!) I gave him Roger-Wilco.
“In fact,” he went on expansively, “it may be my duty to see that this training course is completed before, with great relief, I turn this seat over to my successor.”
(I started figuring how many children I would have by then and decided to look for ways to hike up the “white mutiny.”)
“Captain?”
“Astrogator.”
“This advice concerns a mistake that could occur in the near future. I assume that the Captain has the conn?”
“Hilda, I have the conn. Speak up.”
“We are falling, sir. I advise placing us in orbit.”
I sighed with relief, as radar distance I was beginning to think of as H-above-G and did not like our closing rate.
Pop said, “Surely, put us in orbit. Take the conn and do it. Good practice. Deety can show you how. Or Zeb.”
“Aye aye, sir. I have the conn. Chief Pilot, keep her level with respect to planet.”
“Roger. Level now.”
“Copilot, add speed vector positive axis L three point six klicks per second.”
“Uh… set!”
“Hold it!” Pop unbelted, steadied himself by Zebadiah’s chair, checked the setting. “Okay. Execute!”
“Excuse me, Captain,” Zebadiah said, “but was that order directed at me or the Astrogator?”
Pop opened his mouth – then turned red. “Astrogator, I am satisfied with your solution and the setting. Please have the maneuver executed.”
“Aye aye, sir. Execute!”

What Pop planned seemed reasonable. “So far we have used juice, supplies, and four days’ time, and have merely established that there are at least two analogs of our universe, one quantum and ten quanta away on Tau axis. The latter has beasts – wogs – that are not the vermin we fled from, but – according to Hilda – closely related. To me, this makes Tau axis not our best place to seek a new home.
“Zebadiah has suggested that we sample the universes available by rotation rather than translation – six axes taken four at a time – before we search Teh axis. Let me remind you that we could die of old age searching Teh axis alone. I will decide but I will listen to arguments pro or con.”
Twenty-three minutes later Aunt Hilda shrilled, “Copilot, by plan, as set – Rotate!”

Chapter XXX

“Difference physical laws, a different topology.”

Jacob:
We rotated to… Nowhere –
So it seemed. Free fall and utter blackness – The cabin held only the faint radiance from the instruments.
My daughter said in hushed tones, “Captain! May I turn on inside lights?”
This was a time to establish discipline and doctrine. “Permission refused. Copilot, I would like to see in all directions.”
“Yes, sir,” Zeb acknowledged.
After a few moments I added, “Copilot? Why are you waiting?”
“I am awaiting orders, sir.”
“What the hell, Zeb? Get with it! I said I wanted to see in all directions. We have preprograms for that.”
“Yes, Captain.”
“Well? Why aren’t you using them? Can’t you carry out orders?” (I was amazed at Zeb.)
“Captain, I have not as yet received any orders, and I am not at the conn.”
I started to answer sharply – and bit down on it. Precisely what had I said? I recalled that the autopilot stayed in recording mode during maneuvers; I could play back the last few minutes -and decided not to. We were wasting time and it was possible that I had not expressed myself in the form of a direct order. Nevertheless I could not ignore Zeb’s pigheaded behavior. “Copilot, I am aware that I have not given you direct orders. However, it is customary to treat a captain’s requests as politely worded orders.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Well? God damn it, why don’t – “
“Captain! Captain Jacob! Please listen! Please!”
I took a deep breath. “What is it, Hilda?”
“Captain, I am required to advise you.”
“Eh? Advise away – but be quick about it.”
“Captain, you have given the Copilot neither orders nor requests. The autopilot’s record will confirm this. You mentioned preprograms – but voice programs are not normally handled by the Copilot.”
“I can order the Copilot to use a voice program.”
Hilda did not answer. Again I waited, then said, “Well?”
Then I said, “Astrogator, you did not answer me.”
“Sorry, Captain. Answer what?”
“My question.”
“Captain, I was not aware that you had asked me a question. Would you mind repeating it?”
“Oh, forget it, forget it! Chief Pilot!”
“Captain.”
“Deety, what’s the voice program to rotate us a full circle around W axis?”
“Shall I spell it, sir? S.G. is awake.”
“No, do it. Turn out your instrument lights. Pilots watch forward, Captain and Astrogator will watch the sides. Do it. Execute.”
Instrument lights dimmed to zero, leaving us in the darkest dark I have ever experienced. I heard a repressed moan and felt a burst of sympathy for my daughter; she had never liked total darkness. But she carried out my orders:
“Gay Deceiver, Tumbling Pigeon.”
“Forward somersault – whee!”
“Execute.”
I felt pressure against my belts – being forward of the center of mass we were starting a gentle outside loop. I started counting seconds as I recalled that this program took twenty seconds.
I had reached seventy-eight seconds and was beginning to wonder when Deety announced “Twenty seconds” as the autopilot announced, “End of program.”
Deety said, “You’re a Smart Girl, Gay.”
“If I were smart, would I be doing this? Over.”
“Roger and out, Gay. Captain, I request permission to switch on cabin lights.”
“Permission granted. Report observations. Copilot?”
“Skipper, I saw nothing.”
“Deety?”
“Nothing.”
“Hilda?”
“Jacob, I didn’t see anything. Can’t we get out of this universe? It stinks.”
“That stink is me,” our copilot said. “The reek of fear. Captain, of what use is an empty universe?”
“Zeb, ’empty universe’ is a meaningless expression. Space-time implies mass-energy, and vice versa.”
“Captain, it looks empty to me.”
“And to me. I’m faced by a dilemma in theory. Is the mass in this spacetime so far away that we can’t see it? Or is it in a state of ‘Cold Death,’ level entropy? Or did we create this universe by rotating?”
“‘Create it’ – Huh?”
“A possibility,” I pointed out. “If we are the only mass in this universe, then this universe had no existence until we created it by rotation. But it will not collapse when we rotate out, because we will be leaving behind quanta we are radiating.”
“Hmm – Captain, I’m bothered by something else. We started from universe-ten and made one ninety-degree rotation. Correct?”
“Yes. We rotated around ‘x’ and thereby moved each of the other five axes ninety degrees. We are now experiencing duration along ‘y.’ Teh and ‘z’ are spatial coordinates now, and ‘x’ remains spatial because we rotated on it. Tau and ‘t’ are now null, unused.”
“Mmm – Deety, what Greenwich time is it?” Zeb glanced at the instrument board.
“Uh – Seventeen: thirteen: oh-nine.”
“Smart Girl says you are twenty seconds slow.” Zeb looked at his navigator’s watch. “But my watch splits the difference. How many minutes since we left Windsor City?”
“Thirty-nine minutes, thirteen seconds. Ask me a hard one.”
“I’m going to ask your father a hard one. Captain, if you tell G.D. to scram to Windsor P.G. right now mark! – what will the Greenwich time be?”
“Look at your clock. About a quarter past seventeen hundred.”
“But you told me that, since rotating, we’ve been experiencing duration along ‘y’ axis.”
“But – Oh! Zeb, I’m stupid. No time has elapsed on ‘t’ axis since the instant we rotated If we reversed the rotation, we would go back to that exact instant.”
“Deety hon?” Zeb asked. “Do you agree?”
(I felt annoyed that my son-in-law consulted my daughter as to the correctness of my professional opinion – then suppressed the thought. Deety will always be my little girl, which makes it hard for me to remember that she is also my professional colleague.)
My daughter suddenly looked upset. “I – Pop! That first trip to the world without the letter ‘J’ – time did pass, it did!”
Zeb said gently, “But that was translation, Deety. You continued to experience duration along ‘t’ axis.”
Deety thought about it, then said sorrowfully, “Zebadiah, I no longer know What time it is. Pop is correct; we experience duration on one axis only, and that is now ‘y’ axis. We can’t experience duration on two axes at once.” She heaved a sigh. “Will I ever get the clock in my head set right again?”
“Sure you will,” my son-in-law reassured her. “Like crossing a time zone. Shortly after we grounded on Mars-ten, your head started keeping time both in Greenwich and in Mars Touchdown meridian time, even though Touchdown time kept falling farther behind hour after hour. A simple index correction won’t bother you. My sweet, you don’t realize how smart you are.”
Zeb patted her hand, then looked around at me. “Captain, may I propose a change in schedule?”
“Let’s hear it.”
“Sir, I would like two sequences. First, go back to Windsor P.G. with the verniers preset for a hundred thousand klicks straight up, and execute at once. Then translate back to our own universe-zero – but not to Earth-zero. Instead, set up an orbit around Mars-zero. That orbit becomes our base of operations.”
I said, “Simple enough. But why?”
“So that we will always have somewhere to go back to. Deety can write us a program that will place us back in that orbit. Something like G, A, Y, H, O, M, E, but based on Mars-zero – with elbow room.”
I asked, “Daughter, can you write such a program?”
“I think so, Pop. An emergency scram? G, A, Y, plus something?” Deety paused. “‘Sagan.’ G, A, Y, S, A, G, A, N means to return to orbit around Mars-zero. Built-in mnemonic.”
“Satisfactory. Is that all, Copilot?”
“No, sir. Our schedule breaks up naturally into a five group, a four group, a three, a two, and a one. I would like to add to each group a return to orbit around Mars-zero. Captain, if you were on the verniers, I wouldn’t worry; you know them so well. I don’t. If I do fifteen rotations, one right after the other, I’m afraid I’ll make some tiny mistake and we’ll wind up in analog-Andromeda-Nebula in universe a thousand-and-two on ‘z’ axis, with no idea how wa got there or how to get home.”
“Copilot, you worry too much.”
“Probably. Captain, my whole life is based on being chicken at every opportunity. I’ll breathe easier if I come back to a familiar orbit at the end of each group… and know that the next group is one less. It won’t take ten minutes longer to do it my way and I’ll be less likely to make mistakes. But tackling all fifteen at a slug scares me.”
“Captain Jacob -“
“Not now, Hilda. I must settle this with -“
“Captain, I am required to advise you.”
“Eh? All right, all right! Make it snappy.”
“You know – we all know – that Zebbie’s premonitions must not be ignored. I advise you officially – Gay Deceiver, record this ‘I-tell-you-three-times.'”
“Hilda, I hear you three times.”
“Captain Jacob, I, your second-in-command, advise you officially to revise the schedule of rotations in the fashion recommended by the copilot. End of I-tell-you-three-times.”
(Have you ever found yourself boxed in? Damn it, I intended to let Zeb do it his way; I am not unreasonable. I can’t say that I believe in Zeb’s premonitions; I suspect that he is simply a man with extremely fast reflexes. But both our wives believe in them and Zeb does himself. I found myself faced with mutiny unless I did exactly what I had intended to do anyway! How does one describe so ironical a situation?)
Shortly I found myself saying, “Copilot, by revised schedule, set second rotation of first group.” We were in “Sagan” orbit around Mars of Universe-zero (i.e., the one we had grown up in: Galactic coordinates X0, Y0, Z0, & t0 – Earth-zero, Mars-zero, Sun-zero, Universe-zero). I tend to think of this as the “real” universe even though I am aware that there is no evidence or mathematical theory for preferring one frame of reference over another – to do so is egocentric provincialism at its worst. But I offer this in mitigation: for us it was simplest and thereby helped us to avoid getting lost.
“Set,” Copilot Zeb reported. I went forward, checked the setting (rotation around ‘y,’ with ‘z’ and ‘t’ dropping out, null), then returned to my seat. “We can spare a minute to look at Mars. Deety, tilt the nose down to let us look. Do you know how?”
“Like this, Captain?”
“Right,” I agreed. “Keep it up.”
Deety raised the craft’s nose and swung right, catching me with belts not yet fastened. I said forcefully, “Deety! What the hell are you doing?” while I floundered and grabbed.
“Sir, you ordered ‘right’ and ‘up,'” Deety answered.
“I did no such thing!”
“But, Jacob – Captain – you did tell her that, I heard you.”
“Hilda, you keep out of this!”
Hilda answered stiffly, “Captain, I respectfully request that you either relieve me of the conn, or that you give orders to my pilots through me.”
“Damn it, you don’t have the conn. I do.”
“Then the Captain neglected to relieve me.”
“Uh – Take the conn! Carry out the planned schedule.”
“Aye aye, sir. Chief Pilot, orient the car for best view of Mars.”
“Aye aye, Ma’am!”
I was fuming, not looking, hardly listening. I had said to Deety, All right, keep on with it – or had I? Gay could play it back… and could also check on Hilda’s incredible allegation. If I were wrong (I felt certain I was not!), I would face up to it like a man and – Zeb broke in on my thoughts:
“Captain, do you care what attitude this craft is in at rotation?”
“No. Only for transitions.”
“Hmm – Then it follows as the night from day thou canst not then predict the attitude we’ll be in whenever we arrive in a new universe.”
Only with respect to our arbitrary zero reference frame. Why should it matter?”
“It won’t as long as we arrive with plenty of room. I’ve been noodling how to be sure of that. I don’t see an answer. But I don’t want to try translations or rotations parked on the ground. I hope the Captain won’t order any.”
“Copilot, I have no plans to. Astrogator, haven’t we had enough sightseeing?”
“Very well, Captain,” my wife acknowledged. “Deety, secure those binoculars. Zebbie, immediately after each rotation, set next rotation and report ‘Set.’ Deety, after each rotation, use voice program to put us through one Pigeon-Tumble with all lights out. I will watch to port, Deety forward, Zebbie starboard. Questions?”
I said, “Astrogator, you did not assign me a sector.”
“I have no authority to assign duties to the Captain. Does the Captain wish to select a sector and assume responsibility for it?”
She waited. I said hastily, “No. Perhaps it will be best for me to watch in all directions. General supervision.”
“Very well, Captain. Copilot – execute.”
Again we rotated into darkness. Deety switched out all lights. Zeb reported, “Set!”
“Stop!” I called out. I added, “Zeb, you reported ‘Set’ in total darkness. How did you set it?”
“Rotation around ‘z’ axis, with ‘x’ and ‘y’ dropping out. Duration along Teh. Third combo first group, sir.”
“I mean, ‘How did you do it in darkness?’ By clicks?”
“Captain, I didn’t do it in darkness.”
I said, “It was pitch dark when you reported ‘Set.”
“So it was, Captain.”
“It’s not necessary to call me ‘Captain’ every ten seconds. I want a straight answer. So far you have reported that you set it in darkness and that you set it with lights on.”
“No, sir.”
“God damn it, you just did!”
“Captain, I protest your swearing at me. I request that my protest be logged.”
“Zeb, you are – ” I shut up. I counted thirty in French under my breath, by which time I was ready to speak. “Zeb, I’m sorry that my language offended you. But I am still trying to find out what you did and how. Will you please tell me, in simple language?”
“Yes, sir. I set the third rotation by clicks -“
“But you said the lights were on – “
“The lights were on. I set the rotation with my eyes closed -“
“For God’s sake, why?”
“For practice. I set them with eyes closed. Then I check to see whether it matches what I intended to set. Deety leaves the light on until I give her the ‘kill it’ sign. Then she kills the glim and does her act.”
“Zeb, there wasn’t time to do it that way.”
Zeb gave a most irritating grin. “Captain, I’m fairly quick. So is Deety.” I said, “Perhaps I had better check the setting.”
Zeb made no answer; both women kept still. I began to wonder what everyone was waiting on… then realized that I was the “what.” Unbelt and check on Zeb’s setting? I remembered that irritating grin. So I said, “Deety, carry out the tumbling routine.”
The somersault completed, I asked, “Anyone see anything?” Hilda said, “I… think so. Captain, could we do that again?” “Do it, Deety,” I ordered.
Pigeon-Tumble resumed; Hilda suddenly said, “There!” and Deety snapped, “GayDeceiverStop!”
I asked, “Hilda, do you still see it?”
“Yes, Jacob. A fuzzy star. You can see it if I pull back and you lean forward.”
I suppose we each did so – for I spotted something. “I see it! Zeb – the binoculars, please.”
An invisible hand pushed them against my neck. I got them lined up with difficulty, got that faint light, focused with great care. “It looks like a lenticular galaxy seen not quite edge on. Or it might be a family of galaxies. Whatever it is, it is a long way off. Millions of light-years – I have no way of guessing.”
“Can we reach it by transition?” asked Zeb.
“Possibly. I would set middle range on ‘six,’ then keep punching until it showed change in width. It might be possible to reach it in an hour or so. Do you want to look at it?”
“From your description, I don’t think so,” Zeb answered. “That is fossil light – isn’t it?”
“Eh? Yes, the light has been traveling for millions of years.”
“That’s my point, Captain. We might find that those stars had burned out. Fossil light doesn’t tell us anything we can use. Let’s designate this ‘Last Chance’ and get out.”
Eminently sensible – “Stand by to rotate. Copilot – execute!”
Blinding light – “Zeb! Rotate! Execute!”
Suddenly we were in a starry void, almost homelike. I heaved a sigh of relief. “Zeb, what did we fall into?”
“I don’t know, Captain.” He added, “I had my eyes closed, setting the next rotation by clicks. So I didn’t get dazzled. But I never had a chance to check my setting by eyesight, either; I rotated at once.”
“You got us out – thanks. I did get dazzled; I’ve got purple blotches in front of my eyes. New standing order: At each rotation all hands close eyes and duck heads for that moment needed to be sure that we have not again run into dazzle. Zeb, that need not slow you up since you are setting by touch and click anyhow – but if we do hit dazzle, rotate us out; don’t wait for my orders. And – All Hands! – we are all free at all times to use any of the escape programs to get us out of danger.”
“Next rotation set, Captain.”
“Thank you, Copilot. Hilda, do you or Deety have any notion as to what we fell into?”
“No, Captain,” my daughter answered.
“Captain Jacob, I have three hypotheses, none worth much.”
“Let others judge that, my dear.”
“Interior of a global star cluster – or near the nucleus of a galaxy, or – possibly – the early part of an expanding universe when new stars are almost rubbing shoulders.”
“Hmm – Real garden spots. Zeb, could we have picked up excessive radiation?”
“Captain, the shell of this buggy is opaque to most radiation, and that windscreen is heavily leaded – but no way to tell.”
“Zebadiah, if the film in the camera is ruined, some heavy stuff got through. If the next picture is okay, we’re probably okay.”
Hilda said, “I’m glad you thought of that, Deety. I don’t like the idea of radiation while I’m pregnant. You, too, hon.”
“Aunt Hilda, we’re almost completely shielded where it matters. It could addle our brains but not our bellies.”
“Hilda, do you wish to shoot one frame?” I asked.
“No, Jacob, it would waste film.”
“As you wish. My eyes are coming back. Deety, put us through one Pigeon-Tumble.”
My daughter did so; I saw nothing. “Report! Hilda?”
“Lots of big beautiful stars but nothing close.”
“Me, too, Pop – but what a beautiful sky!”
“Null report, Captain.”
“Hilda, mark it down as ‘promising.’ All hands, stand by for fifth rotation. Keep eyes closed and heads down. Execute!”
Zeb gasped. “Where in Hell are we?”
“In Hell, maybe, Zebbie.”
“Captain!”
“Hilda may not be too far off,” I answered. “It’s something I could not have believed three weeks ago: some sort of inside-out universe.”
“Pellucidar!” said Deety.
“No, my dear daughter. One: We are not inside our home planet; we are in another universe. Two: This universe has physical laws that differ from our own. The inside of a spherical shell cannot have a gravitational field by the laws of our universe. Yet I see a river and we seem to be falling toward it. Deety, are we in air or in vacuo?”
Deety wiggled the controls. “Got some air. Probably could get support with wings fully spread.”
“Then do so.” Deety brought the car into a dead-stick glide.
Zeb said grimly, “I don’t want to homestead here! So big – ten thousand kilometers across at a guess. Yet it’s all inside. No sky! No horizons. Never again a night sprinkled with stars. That light in the center – Looks like our sun but it’s too small, much too small. When we leave, I don’t want to come back; the god who takes care of fools and explorers let us arrive in empty space instead of maybe ten kilometers underground. But next time – I hate to think about it.”
I said, “It may not have been luck, Zeb, but logical necessity.”
“Huh. You’ve lost me, Captain.”
“You’re thinking of this as a spherical shell. But there is no basis for assuming that it has an outside.”
“What? Endless millions of light-years of solid rock?”
“No, no! Nothing. By ‘nothing’ I do not mean space; I mean a total absence of existence of any sort. Different physical laws, a different topology. We may be seeing the totality of this universe. A small universe with a different sort of closed space.”
“I can’t visualize it, Jake.”
“Deety, my dear, rephrase it for your husband.”
“I’ll try, Pop. Zebadiah, the geometry of this place may require different postulates from those that work back home. I’m sure you have played with Möbius strips -“
“A surface with only one side, one edge. But this is a sphere.”
“Pop is saying that it may be a sphere with only one side, the inside. Have you ever tried to figure out a Klein bottle?”
“I got cross-eyed and a headache.”
“This could be a Klein-bottle sort of thing. It might turn out that if you tunneled straight down anywhere down there, you would emerge at the opposite point, still inside. And that straight line might be shorter than the distance across. Maybe much shorter.”
“Point three-one-eight-three-zero-nine is the ratio by the simplest postulates,” I agreed. “But the geometry may not be that simple. However, Zeb, assuming that this is a total universe, our chances of arriving in open space were far greater than the chance of conflicting with a mass. But I would not wish to homestead here – pretty as it is. Nevertheless we might check for obstetricians.”
“No obstetricians,” Zeb answered firmly.
“Why?” I demanded.
“If there are human beings here, they do not have an advanced culture. Deety has been following that river. Did you notice where that other river joined it? Also look ahead where it meets the sea. No cities. No warehouses. No river traffic. No air traffic, no signs of roads. Yet this is choice real estate. Therefore, no advanced culture anywhere and a small population, if any. If anyone wants to refute me, please do so in the next two minutes; Deety can’t hold this heap in the air much longer without using juice.”
“I check you, Zebbie. They might be so advanced that they can make the whole joint look like a park. I wouldn’t bet on it.”
“Deety?” I asked.
“Aunt Hilda is right, Captain. But it’s so pretty!”
“Hilda, expend one film, as a souvenir. Then we rotate.” My daughter nosed the car down to permit a better picture.
A click – “Got it!” Hilda cried. “GaySagan!”
Mars of Universe-zero lay to starboard. Zeb sighed. “I’m glad to be out of there. Sharpie, did you get a picture?”
“Can’t rush it,” my wife answered. “Nnnn, yup, picture coming.”
“Good!”
“Zebbie, I thought you didn’t like that inside-out world?”
“I don’t. If that picture is sharp, you two knocked-up broads weren’t hit by radiation where it counts. Any fogging?”
“No, Zebbie, and brighter color every second. Here – look.”
Zeb brushed it aside. “My sole interest is in radiation. Captain, I’m having misgivings. We’ve tried five out of fifteen and only one was even vaguely homelike. The pickings have been slim and the dangers excessive. But we know that Earth analogs Tau and Teh axes are Earthlike -“
“With monsters,” put in Hilda.
“Tau axis, probably. We haven’t explored Teh axis. Jake, are we justified in exposing our wives to dangers we can’t imagine?”
“In a moment, Copilot. Astrogator, why did you rotate? I don’t think I ordered it. I have been trying to run a taut ship.”
“So have I, Captain. I must ask to be relieved as astrogator.”
“I am sorry to say that I have been thinking along the same lines, my dearest. But you had better explain.”
“Captain, three times you have replaced me at the conn without relieving me. The last time I let it continue, wondering and waiting. Just now we were losing altitude, dangerously. So I acted. Now I ask to be relieved.”
Hilda seemed calm and not angry. But resolved. Had I really done anything out of line? It did not seem so to me.
“Zeb, have I been overriding the officer at the conn?”
Zeb took too long to answer. “Captain, this is a time when a man must insist on written orders. I will make a written reply.”
“Hmm – ” I said. “I think you have replied. Deety, what do you think? More written orders?”
“I don’t need written orders. Pop, you’ve been utterly stinking!”
“You really feel so?”
“I know so. Aunt Hilda is right; you are dead wrong. She understated the case. You assign her responsibilities – then ignore her. Just now she carried out her assigned duties – and you chewed her out for it. Of course she wants to be relieved.”
My daughter took a deep breath and went on: “And you bawled her out for ordering a scram escape. Twenty-seven minutes ago you said – and I quote: ‘All Hands! – we are all free at all times to use any of the escape programs to get us out of danger.’ End of quotation. Pop, how can you expect orders to be obeyed when you can’t remember what orders you’ve given? Nevertheless, we have obeyed you, every time and no back talk – and we’ve all caught hell. Aunt Hilda caught the most – but Zebadiah and I caught quite a bit. Pop, you’ve been – I won’t say it, I won’t!”
I looked out the port at Mars for long unhappy minutes. Then I turned around. “I’ve no choice but to resign. Effective as I ground her. Family, I must admit to great humiliation. I had thought that I was doing quite well. Uh, back to our streamside, I think. Gay -“
“GayDeceiverOverride! Not on your tintype! You’ll serve as long as I did – not a second less! But Sharpie is right in refusing to take the conn under you; you’ve been mistreating her. Despite being a colonel, you have never learned that you can’t assign responsibility without delegating authority to match – and then respect it. Jake, you’re a lousy boss. We’re going to keep you in the hot seat until you learn better. But there’s no reason for Sharpie to resign over your failings.”
“I still have something to say,” said my daughter.
“Deety,” Zeb said forcefully, “leave well enough alone!”
“Zebadiah, this is to you quite as much – or more – as it is to Pop. Complaints of another sort.”
My son-in-law looked startled. “Oh. Sorry. You have the floor.”

Chapter XXXI

” – the first ghosts ever to search for an obstetrician.”

Hilda:
If Zebbie and Jacob have a fault in common, it is overprotectiveness. Having always been the runt, I am habitually willing to accept protection. But Deety rebels.
When Zebbie asked Jacob whether or not they were justified in exposing us to unknown dangers, Deety stuck her oar in – and Zebbie tried to hush her.
Zebbie should have known better.
But he is barely getting acquainted with her, whereas I’ve known her since her diaper days. Once when Deety was, oh, possibly four, I started to tie her shoes. She pulled away. “Deety do!” she announced indignantly – and Deety did: on one shoe a loose half bow that came apart almost at once, on the other a Gordian knot that required the Alexandrian solution.
It’s been “Deety do!” ever since, backed by genius and indomitable will.
Deety told him, “Zebadiah, concerning completing this schedule: Is there some reason to exclude Hilda and me from the decision?”
“Damn it, Deety, this is one time when husbands have to decide!”
“Damn it, Zebadiah, this is one time when wives must be consulted!”
Zebbie was shocked. But Deety had simply matched his manner and rhetoric. Zebbie is no fool; he backed down. “I’m sorry, hon,” he said soberly. “Go ahead.”
“Yessir. I’m sorry I answered the way I did. But I do have something to say – and Hilda, too. I know I speak for both of us when I say that we appreciate that you and Pop would die for us… and that you feel this more intensely now that we are pregnant.
“But we have not been pregnant long enough to be handicapped. Our bellies do not bulge. They will bulge, and that gives us a deadline. But for that very reason we will either sample those rotation universes today… or we will never sample them.”
“Why do you say ‘never,’ Deety?”
“That deadline. We’ve sampled five and, scary as some have been, I wouldn’t have missed it! We can look at the other ten in the next few hours. But if we start searching Teh axis there is no way to guess how long it will take. Thousands of universes along Teh axis and it seems likely that each holds an analog of Earth. We may check hundreds before we find what we are looking for. Let’s say we find it and Hilda and I have babies with skilled medical attention. Then what? Zebadiah, are you going to be more willing to take women with babies into strange universes than you are without babies?”
“Uh… that’s not the way to put it, Deety.”
“How would you put it, sir? Are you thinking that you and Pop might check those ten while Hilda and I stay home with the kids?”
“Well… yes, I suppose I am. Something of the sort.”
“Zebadiah, I married you for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. I did not marry to walk the Widow’s Walk! Where you go, I go! – till death do us part.”
“Deety speaks for me,” I said, and shut up. Deety had it figured: If Jacob and Zebbie didn’t finish those rotations today, they would have that “far horizons” look for the rest of their lives – and they wouldn’t want us along. Not with kids. Sharpie wasn’t going to hold still for that. No, sir!
“Deety, are you through?”
“Not quite, sir. All humans are created unequal. You are bigger and stronger than Pop; I am bigger and stronger than Hilda. I have the least years of experience; Pop has the most. Pop is a supergenius… but he concentrates so hard that he forgets to eat – unless he has a nursemaid to watch him – as Mama did, as I did, as Hilda now does. You, sir, are the most all-around competent man I’ve ever met, whether driving a duo, or dancing, or telling outrageous tales. Three of us have eight or nine earned degrees… but Aunt Hilda with none is a walking encyclopedia from insatiable curiosity and extraordinary memory. We two are baby factories and you two are not – but two men can impregnate fifty women – or five hundred. There is no end to the ways that we four are unequal. But in one supremely important way all of us are equals.
“We are pioneers.
“Men alone are not pioneers; they can’t be. Pioneer mothers share the dangers of pioneer fathers and go on having babies. Babies were born in the Mayflower, lots were born in covered wagons – and lots died, too. Women didn’t stay home; they went along.
“Zebadiah, I do not ask to be taken to those next ten universes -“
“It sounds like it.”
“You didn’t listen, sir. I would like to finish sampling those fifteen. It’s my preference but not my demand. What I do demand I have stated: Where you go, I go. Today and to the end of our lives. Unless you tell me to get out, that you don’t want me anymore. I have spoken.”
“You certainly have, dear. Hilda?”
Fish or cut bait, Sharpie – what do you want? I didn’t care; any new universe was bound to be strange. But Deety had laid down the party line; I didn’t want to fuzz it up – so I answered instantly, “Deety speaks for me in every word.”
“Jake? Back to my original question: ‘Are we justified in exposing our wives to conditions we can’t even imagine?”
“Zeb, you are the one who convinced me that it would be prudent to sample the universes accessible through rotation before searching by translation.”
“True. But that was before we sampled five of them.”
“I don’t see that the situation has changed. An imaginable danger is not necessarily better than an unimaginable one; it may be worse. Our home planet had grave shortcomings before we tangled with the vermin. No need to list them; we all know that the Four Horsemen are ready to ride again. But I can think of a very close analog of our home planet that would be far worse than Earth-zero even if it didn’t have a single ‘Black-Hat’ vermin on it.”
“Go on.”
“One in which Hitler got atomic weapons but we did not. I can’t see that vermin are more to be dreaded than Hitler’s S.S. Corps. The sadism of some human beings – not just Storm Troopers; you can find sadists in any country including the United States – is more frightening to me than any monster.”
“Not to me!” Deety blurted it out.
“But, my dear, we don’t know that those vermin are cruel. We got in their way; they tried to kill us. They did not try to torture us. There is a world of difference.”
“Maybe there is, Pop, but those things give me the creeps. I’ll bet they’d torture us if they could!”
“My very dear daughter, that’s muddy thinking. How old are you?”
“Huh? Pop, you know if anybody does.”
“I was reminding you of what you said: you have the least years of experience. I was much older than you are before I was cured of that sort of muddy thinking. By Jane, your mother. Hilda?”
“Jacob is telling you not to judge a book by its cover,” I said. “I learned it from Jane, too, as Jacob knows. A creature’s appearance tells nothing about its capacity for sadism.”
Jacob said, “Does anyone have anything to add? Since it appears that I am not permitted to resign now, I must rule on it. We will complete the scheduled rotations.” Jacob cleared his throat loudly, looked at Deety. “During my remaining hours in what Zeb so accurately calls the ‘Worry Seat,’ I will endeavor to keep my orders straight … but, should I fail, I ask that my attention be invited to it at once – not saved up for a scolding later. Daughter?”
“Okay, Pop. Aye aye, Captain.”
“Thank you, my dear. Is anyone tired or hungry?” No one spoke up; Jacob continued, “Hilda, will you take the conn?”
“No, Captain” – I’ll omit the internal debate I held with myself; Jacob on his best behavior is hard to refuse.
“Very well, my beloved; I won’t press you. It’s an odd situation. Copilot, by schedule, set to rotate.”
“Second group, first of four – set, sir.”
“Check seat belts, stand by to rotate. Execute!”

We were in sunlight in a blue sky and upside down. For a few seconds we were thrown around a bit – Deety isn’t the pilot Zebbie is. But she did get us leveled off. I heard Deety say, “Gay Deceiver.”
“Hi, Deety!”
“Hold course, speed, and height-above-ground.”
“Got it, girl!”
“You’re a Smart Girl, Gay.”
“But we can’t go on meeting like this! Over.”
“Roger and out, Gay. Whew! Time out while the Chief Pilot has a nervous breakdown. Zebadiah, what does that altimeter say?”
“Seven klicks H-above-G.”
“Pop, what’s the probability of winding up this close to a planet without getting killed?”
“Impossible to theorize, Deety. Maybe we’re dead and don’t know it. Copilot, deadman switch; I’m going to check the air.”
“Captain!” I yelped.
“Not now, Hilda, I’m -“
“NOW! Am I still second-in-command? If I am, I must advise you; you are about to make a bad mistake!”
Jacob hesitated. I think he was counting. “My dear one, if I am about to make a bad mistake, I want your advice no matter what your status is.”
“Thank you, Jacob. You should not be guinea pig. I should be. I -“
“Hilda, you’re pregnant.”
“All the more reason why I want the most competent and least expendable – you, Zebbie, and Deety – to take care of yourselves in order to take care of me. It’s my duty as science officer in any case, whether I’m number two or not. But, Jacob, you are doing it just the way Zebbie did it when we landed on Mars-ten – and that’s all wrong!”
“Thank you, Sharpie!”
“Zebbie dear! You risked your life and it’s not necessary -“
Zebbie interrupted me. “Not necessary to waste juice this way! Yack-yack-yack!”
“Copilot, pipe down!” Jacob said sharply. “Gay Bounce! Chief Pilot, when we reenter, place the car on dead-stick glide, manual or automatic. Don’t use juice. Now, All Hands, listen to the Science Officer. Go ahead, Hilda.”
“Yes, Captain. Three days ago it was necessary for somebody to be the canary – but it should have been me, not Zebbie. What was necessary three days ago is reckless today. That deadman switch – Unless it has been rewired, it takes us back two klicks over a crater – and that’s not what we want. The correct scram for this is T, E, R, M, I, T, E. But that’s just half of it. Deety has taught the S.G. how to ground herself no-power on any level bit of ground. We can ground first. Then anyone can be guinea pig, doesn’t matter. Whoosh back to our stream bank – bang, open the doors.”
Zebbie said, “Captain, that makes sense. Sharpie – I mean ‘Science Officer.’ May I apologize with a back rub?”
“You can apologize with a kiss. But I’ll take the back rub, too.”
“Zebadiah, don’t commit yourself too far; an air test isn’t necessary. Pop! Captain Pop, may I take her up thirty klicks?”
“I suppose so. May I ask why?”
“Captain, I know where we are. From that high I can prove it.”
“Deety, that’s imp -“
“Don’t say ‘impossible,’ Captain – I’ll refer you to my father.”
“Miss Smarty Pants. Take her up.”
“Thanks, Pop. GayBounceGayBounceGayBounce. Gay Deceiver, vertical dive, execute. Everybody tell me where we are.”
I had noticed earlier what pretty countryside was under us. Now I studied it in detail. Zebbie said, “Be durned. Big rectangular oasis completely surrounded by desert. Populated, too. That’s a fair-sized town in the middle.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Don’t you recognize it, Zebbie? From a map.”
My husband said, “Now, Hilda, this is an unexplored universe. How could you have seen a -“
“Pop!” interrupted Deety. “You’ve seen the map. See the Yellow Brick Road off to the left? Try the binoculars; you can follow it clear to Emerald City.”
“Deety my love,” said Zebbie, “you are out of your mind. Or I am. Either way, somebody call an ambulance. Don’t forget the straitjacket. Sharpie, something worries me. I failed to get my warning… yet we came so close to hitting that real estate I’m still shaking.”
“That means there wasn’t any danger, Zebbie.”
“Then why am I trembling?”
“You’re a fraud, dear. We’ve all been dead quite a while now – killed in my parking lot. Deety and I may be the first ghosts ever to search for an obstetrician. In further support of my theory I am having a pregnancy with no morning sickness – a miracle that makes the Land of Oz as commonplace as faithful husbands.”
“I don’t think I want to analyze that. Is that the Castle of the Tin Woodman there in the east?”
“Yes, but that’s the west, dear. Deety, is that sun rising or setting?”
“Setting. Directions are reversed here. Everybody knows that.”
“A retrograde planet,” my husband commented. “Nothing dangerous about that.”
“Pop, admit it. You know the Oz books almost as well as I do -“
“Better. Don’t give yourself airs, Daughter. I agree that this appears to match stories and map, while trying to reserve judgment. Deety, how would you like to raise kids in the Land of Oz?”
“Pop, I’d love it!”
“Are you certain? As I recall, nobody dies in the Land of Oz yet the population doesn’t increase. I don’t recall babies being born in Oz stories. I don’t recall M.D.’s or hospitals. Or machinery. Zeb, that inside-out universe had different physical laws from those of our universe. If we ground here, will we be able to leave? Oz works by magic, not by engineering.” Jacob added, “Copilot, I want your professional opinion.”
“Captain, you see a difference between magic and engineering. I don’t.”
“Oh, come now, Zeb!”
“I believe in just two things: Murphy’s Law, and Place Not Your Faith in an Ace Kicker. Permit me to point out that we are already in the Land of Oz, even though at altitude. I can think of worse places to be stranded. No common cold. No income tax. No political candidates. No smog. No churches. No wars. No inflation. No -“
Deety interrupted. “We are now passing over the Palace of Glinda the Good.”
“Why pass over it?” I asked. “Jacob, why aren’t we grounding?”
“Me, too,” Deety added. “Captain Pop, I request permission to ground near the Palace. I’m certain that nothing can upset Glinda the Good; she already knows about it from her Book. Besides, a palace that size must have plumbing… and I’m beginning to feel as if I had attended a watermelon picnic.”
“Methinks a bush would suffice,” said Zebbie. “Even in another universe and with an armed guard. How about it, Captain?”
“Chief Pilot, ground at will. Hilda, do the Oz books have bathrooms in them? I don’t recall.”
“Nor do I, Jacob,” I answered. “But there are plenty of bushes.”
In three or four minutes Deety had us grounded, with Gay using Deety’s new program. I thanked my husband for deciding to ground. “There was never any doubt,” he said. “Not only would you and Deety never have spoken to me again, I would never have spoken to me again. But if I meet a living scarecrow, I may go stark, raving mad.”

Chapter XXXII

“Where Cat is, is civilization.”

Deety:
I found a clearing in the woods, a hundred meters from the Palace and screened from it by elms and walnut trees. I had Gay range it, told her three times that it was a scram spot – then she landed herself, slick as Zebadiah.
I unstrapped, opened the bulkhead door, and crawled aft to get clean suits – and thought better of it. Aunt Hilda had followed me and headed straight for a special locker. I rolled into lotus and asked, “Hillbilly, what are you going to wear?”
“The dress I got married in and the wedding ring Jacob had made for me in Windsor City.”
“Jewelry?”
“Nothing fancy.”
Mama Jane told me years ago that Aunt Hilda’s instinct for clothes was infallible. I got the dress I wore to hook Zebadiah, a pendant Pop had given me, my wedding ring, my dancing slippers. Put my darling in mess jacket? No, but in tights topped off with a white silk bolero shirt I made for him at Snug Harbor. Red sash, dancing pumps, jockey shorts – yes, that was all he needed.
I wiggle-wormed forward, clutching clothing. Our men were still in their seats, Gay’s doors closed. I said, “Why the closed doors? It’s warm and stuffy.”
“Look out to the left,” said Zebadiah.
I looked. A little storybook cottage with a sign over the door: WELCOME.
It had not been there when we grounded. “I see,” I agreed. “Shuck off your work clothes and pull on shorts and tights. Pop, Hilda has your trousers.”
“Deety, is that all you have to say?”
“What should I say, sir? Pop, you have taken us to some strange places. But in Oz I am not a stranger in a strange land. I know what to expect.”
“But damn it all -“
“Shush, Zebadiah. One does not say ‘damn’ in Oz. Not any sort of profanity or vulgarity. These are no longer teats; they aren’t even breasts – it’s my bosom and I never mention it. Vocabulary limited to that of the Mauve Decade. Mildest euphemisms.”
“Deety, I’m durned if I’ll be anything but myself.”
“Sir, I speak professionally. One does not use FORTRAN to a computer that knows only LOGLAN. Captain, can we open up?”
“Just a moment,” my father put in. “Deety, you called me ‘Captain.’ But I resigned, effective on grounding.”
“Wait a half!” Zebadiah interrupted. “You’ll do at least as much punishment time as I did – you earned it, old buddy.”
“All right,” Pop agreed, “but you decided that time on the ground counts. We’ll likely need a new captain when we lift. Let’s elect the victim now.”
“Reelect Pop,” I suggested. “He flunked and should do it over.”
“Daughter!”
“Joking, Pop – as long as you bear in mind that you did flunk and never again give a captain a bad time. I nominate my husband.”
“Let’s do this right.” Pop got out four file cards.
I wrote “Zebadiah” on mine, handed it to Pop. Hilda declared them, showing us each one: Deety – Deety – Deety – Deety. I gasped. “Hey! I demand a recount! No, a new election – somebody cheated.” I made so much fuss that they let me have it. I wrote “Zebadiah” on my fresh ballot, placed it face up on the Chief Pilot’s seat, placed the other three, one by one, on top of it, then declared them myself: Deety – Deety – Deety – then, in my own handwriting: Deety.
I gave up. (But resolved to have a word with the Wizard.)

It was a pretty cottage with a broad stoop and a climbing rose – but not to live in, just one room with a table and no other furniture. The table held a bowl of fruit, a pitcher of milk, four tumblers. There was a door to the right and a door to the left; the one on the left had painted on it a little girl in a sunbonnet, the other had a boy in a Buster Brown suit.
Hilda and I headed for the sunbonnet. I snatched a glass of milk and a bunch of grapes, and put on a milk moustache; I hadn’t tasted milk in ages. Delicious!
Hilda was drawing a tub and had peeled off her dress. The window was open but up high, so I peeled off mine. We made ourselves clean and “beautiful,” i.e., we restored our fanciest hairdos but without jewelry. Whatever we needed, that bath and dressing room had, from a sponge to lipstick Aunt Hilda’s shade.
We hurried and did it in forty-two minutes. Zebadiah looked beautiful and Pop looked just as smart in dark trousers and a richly simple Aloha shirt.
“We thought you,” said my husband, “had gone down the drain.”
“Zebadiah, we took forty-two minutes. If you did it in less than thirty, you aren’t clean.”
“Smell me.”
I sniffed him – a faint fragrance of soap, a touch of shaving lotion. “You took more than thirty minutes. Kiss me.”
“Thirty-six minutes, by my watch. Say ‘Please.”
I said “Please” and he caught me with my lips open, he always does. Zebadiah just suits me and I haven’t been sulky with him and stubborn only when necessary.
There was a path toward the Palace. Pop, with Aunt Hilda on his arm, led off; we followed. Aunt Hilda was carrying her high-heeled sandals, so I took mine off, and glanced back toward the clearing. The little cottage was missing, as I expected. Zebadiah noticed it but said nothing. His face was an interesting study.
The grassy path debouched into a garden in front of the Palace; the path through it was hard, so Hilda and I put on our shoes. Glinda’s Palace was more like a Norman chateau or Bertie’s “Stately Home of England” than it was like those dreary castles on the Rhine – but it had fairyland grace, like the Taj.
As we started up the sweeping marble steps to the great doorway Zebadiah stumbled. “What the hell?”
“Sssh!” I said. “Language, dear. A magic staircase. Glinda would not make her guests climb. Pretend that Escher designed it. Look proud and walk as if they were level.”
As we reached the broad landing two tall trumpeters stepped out of the great doorway, raised their long trumpets, and sounded four flourishes. An old man with a merry grin, a fringe of whiskers, a shiny bald head, a wooden left leg, and wearing a sailor’s oilskins, came out as the flourishes ended. I wondered why he was here rather than Emerald City.
He took a pipe from his mouth and said, “Welcome to the Palace of Glinda the Good! I’m Cap’n Bill. You, sir, are Doctor Burroughs the Wizard, with your wonderful wife the Princess Hilda. You must be Cap’n Zeb Carter – Howdy, Cap’n! – and everybody knows Deety; she’s spent so much of her life in Oz. Howdy, Deety! Last time I seen you you warn’t more’n knee high to a tall duck. And now look at you! Almost up to my shoulder and married! Congratulations, Cap’n! Yer a lucky man!”
“I think so, Captain.”
“I know so. Deety, Ozma sends her love and sez to tell you that you and your family are welcome in the Royal Kingdom as long as you like.”
“Please thank Her Royal Majesty for me, Cap’n Bill.” (Actually I’m taller than Cap’n Bill now – but of course I’ll always be a little girl to him. It’s nice.)
“Oh, I will, I will! Come inside, folks: we ain’t formal here. Or I ain’t. This ain’t my reg’lar job; I’m standing this watch for a friend.” He took my hand; his hand was horny and felt like Zebadiah’s – and just as gentle.
He led us inside. “Where’s Trot?” I asked.
“Around somewhere; you’ll see her. Prob’ly picking out her best hair ribbon in your honor. Or maybe helping Betsy with Hank – little Betsy ain’t happy unless she’s workin’; Neptune knows that mule gets more attention than all the mules that ever came out of Mizzoura. This way to the Library, friends.”

How does one describe Glinda the Good? Everyone knows that she is tall and stately and beautiful and never frowns and wears all day long what I think of as beautiful evening gowns with sweeping trains. But those are just words. Perhaps it is enough to say that, just as Dejah Thoris is the most beautiful woman of her world, the Sorceress is the most beautiful of hers.
She was surrounded by her bevy of the most beautiful girls from all over Oz. But Glinda outshone them all without trying. The name of the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti means both “beautiful” and “good,” in one word; I think that explains Glinda.
She got up from her Great Book of Records and glided toward us – kissed Hilda first, kissed me and said, “Welcome home, Deety!” and I choked up and couldn’t talk; I just curtsied. She offered a hand each to Zebadiah and Pop; they bowed simultaneously and kissed her hands.
She waved at chairs (that hadn’t been there) and invited us to sit down. Zebadiah whispered, “You seem to own this place.”
“Not really,” I whispered back. “But I’ve lived in Oz longer than anywhere else” – Mama and Pop lived at several campuses while I was growing up but I always took Oz along wherever we moved.
“Well… I’m glad you made me dress up.”
We were introduced to Glinda’s girls and each one curtsied; it felt like being in Imperial House-except that these girls were neither compelled nor paid. When I stopped to think about it, I couldn’t recall that money was used in Oz; it didn’t have an “economy.”
The girls were beautifully dressed, each differently but each girl’s dress was predominately the color of her own country, Munchkin blue, Gillikin purple, Winkle yellow, a few in green. One girl in red – Quadling of course, where we were – looked familiar. I said to her, “Is your name Betty?”
She was startled. “Why, yes, Your Highness – how did you know?” She dropped a curtsy.
“I’ve been here before; ask Captain Bill. I’m not ‘Your Highness’; I’m just Deety. Do you have a friend named Bertie?”
“Yes, Your – Yes, Deety. He’s not here now, he’s at the College of Professor Wogglebug.” I made note to tell Betty about it… someday.
I can’t tell all about everyone we met at Glinda’s Palace; there were too many and more kept arriving. Everyone seemed to expect us and pleased to see us. Pop did not go stark, raving mad when he met the Scarecrow because he was already deep in conversation with Professor H. M. Wogglebug and with Oz the Great, Royal Wizard to Queen Ozma – Pop was barely polite, shook hands and said, “Howd’you do, Mr. Scarecrow,” and went right on talking to Professor Wogglebug and the Wizard. I’m not sure he looked at the Scarecrow. He was saying, “You put it neatly, Professor. I wish Professor Mobyas Toras could hear your formulation. If we set alpha equal to zero, it is obvious that -“
I wandered off, because when Pop says, “It is obvious that – ” what is really obvious is that Deety should leave.
Dinner was in the banquet hail and the crowd of guests exactly filled it – Glinda’s banquet hall is always the right size for the number of persons eating there – or not eating, as the case may be, for Jack Pumpkinhead, Tik-Tok, the Tin Woodman, the Sawhorse, the Scarecrow, and other people who don’t eat were seated there, too, and also people who aren’t human people: the Cowardly Lion, the Hungry Tiger, the Woozy, the King of the Flying Monkeys, Hank, Toto, and a beautiful long-haired cat with supercilious manners.
Glinda the Good was at the head of the table at one end and Queen Ozma was at the head at the other end. Pop was on Glinda’s right and Zebadiah was on Ozma’s right. The Wizard was on Glinda’s left, and Professor Wogglebug was on Ozma’s left. Aunt Hilda and I were opposite each other at the middle of the long table. She had the Tin Woodman on one side and the Scarecrow on the other and was doing her best to charm both of them and both were trying to charm her and all three were succeeding.
I had three dinner companions. I started with two, the Cowardly Lion and the Hungry Tiger. The Lion ate what others ate but the Tiger had a bowl of cornflakes the size of a small washtub and ate from it very tidily with a spoon that matched the bowl. The Cowardly Lion and I had just started seafood cocktails when this cat brushed against my leg to get my attention, looked up and said, “You smell like a cat person. Make a lap, I’m coming up” – and jumped.
I said, “Eureka, do you have Dorothy’s permission?”
“What a silly way to talk. Dorothy must get my permission. Feed me the lobster first, then the shrimp. You may have the last piece of shrimp for yourself.”
The Hungry Tiger put down his big spoon and said, “Highness, may I abate this nuisance?”
“Don’t trouble yourself, Old Boy,” the Lion said. “I’ll abite it instead, in one bite. But please pass the Tabasco sauce; cats have so little taste.”
“Pay no attention to those peasants, wench, and get on with the lobster. Animals should not be allowed to eat at the table.”
“Look who is calling whom an animal,” growled the Cowardly Lion.
“It’s not an animal, Leo,” the Hungry Tiger objected. “It’s an insect. Highness, I’m a vegetarian – but I would be happy to break over this once and slice it into my cornflakes. Shall I?”
“Dorothy wouldn’t like it, Rajah.”
“You have a point, Ma’am. Shall I ask Toto to chase it out?”
“Eureka may stay. I don’t mind.”
“Wench, the correct answer is ‘I am honored.’ Ignore these jungle beasts; they are not cats. Be it known that Felis domestica has been civilized more generations than all you lesser breeds combined. As my serene ancestress, Bubastis, Goddess of the Nile, was wont to say: ‘Where Cat is, is civilization.’ Hurry up with that lobster.”
So I hurried. Eureka accepted each bit daintily, barely flicking my finger tips with her scratchy tongue. At last she averted her mouth. “Don’t overdo it; I’ll tell you when I require more. Scratch behind my left ear – gently. I shall sing, then I shall sleep. Maintain a respectful silence.”
I did as ordered. Eureka purred very loudly. As the buzzing gave way to soft snores I slowly stopped scratching. I had to eat with one hand; the other was needed to keep her from falling.

As Aunt Hilda has placed a record in Gay by interviewing all of us and combining it, I will stick to essentials. After the rest had gone home or retired to their rooms we four were invited into the Library. It was smaller than it had been, cozy, as Glinda’s girls had gone to their rooms. Glinda was at her Great Book of Records as we were ushered in; she smiled and bowed without getting up as we sat down.
“Friends,” she said, “Doctor, Captain, Princess Hilda, and Deety, I will save time by telling you that, during the dancing, I conferred with Ozma, the Wizard, and Professor Wogglebug. I had studied the Records of your strange adventure, and I read a résumé to them before we discussed your problems. First, let me say that Ozma repeats her invitation. You are welcome to stay here forever; you will find hospitality wherever you go. Deety knows this, and Princess Hilda knows it, too, although she is not as sure of it as Deety is.
“But to reassure you gentlemen, the Wizard and I have made the Land of Oz one quarter inch wider in all directions, a change too small to be noticed. But you, Doctor, will recognize that this provides ample Lebensraum for four more good people, as well as for your sky chariot Miss Gay Deceiver. A quarter of an inch, Captain, is six and thirty-five hundredths millimeters.
“While we were about it, on the advice of Professor Wogglebug, we made small changes in Miss Gay Deceiver – “
Zebadiah gave a start and looked upset. Gay was his sweetheart long before I was; he takes care of her as carefully as he takes care of me. But he should have trusted Glinda.
Glinda smiled warmly. “Don’t be alarmed, Captain, no harm has been done to the structural integrity or to the functioning of your beloved craft. When you notice – you will notice – if you do not like the changes, all you need do is to say aloud, ‘Glinda, change Miss Gay Deceiver back the way she was.’ I will read it here in my Book and will carry out your wish. But I do not think that you will ask me to do this. That is not prophecy; a good witch does not prophesy. But it is my firm opinion.
“Now to major matters – There are no ‘Black Hat’ vermin in Oz. Should one be so foolish as to come here, I would know it from my Book, and it would be ejected into the Deadly Desert. What would happen to it there, the less said, the better – but evil is not tolerated in Oz.
“As to the problem of vermin in your home world, it does not lie in Ozma’s jurisdiction. My powers are limited there. While my Great Book tells me what happens there, it does not distinguish between vermin disguised as human beings and human beings who by their nature are evil. I could cast a spell over you which would keep you away from all ‘Black Hats.’ Do you wish that?”
Pop glanced at Zebadiah; my husband said, “Just a moment, Glinda the Good. Just what does that mean?”
“Spells are always literal, Captain; that’s why they can cause so much trouble. I rarely use them. This one means what I said: You would be kept away from any vermin of the sort you call ‘Black Hats.”
“In that case we couldn’t recognize one, could we? Or get close enough to destroy it.”
“I think one would have to devise ways to do each at a distance. Spells do not reason, Captain. Like computers, they operate literally.”
“Could they recognize us? Booby-trap us? Bomb us?”
“I do not know, Captain. My Book records only what they have done, not what they may do. Even then, as I have said, the Records do not unmask a disguised ‘Black Hat.’ Therefore, I know little about them. Do you wish the spell? You need not decide at once. If you remain in Oz, you won’t need it.”
I blurted out, “We ought to stay here!”
Glinda smiled at me, not a happy smile. “Dear Deety – You have decided not to have your baby?”
“Huh? I mean, ‘Excuse me, Glinda?'”
“You have been in Fairyland more than the others. You know that your little girl will not be born here… just as no one ever dies here.”
Aunt Hilda spoke up so quickly I couldn’t get a word in. “Glinda, thank you very much but I will not be staying.”
I gulped. “I won’t be staying, either, Aunt Glinda.”
“So I suspected. Do you want my advice, dear?”
“Yes. Certainly!”
“Having decided to be a woman and not a little girl like Dorothy or Trot, leave here quickly… lest you be tempted to stay in Fairyland forever.”
Pop glanced at Zebadiah, then said, “Madame Glinda, we’ll be leaving in the morning. We are grateful for your lavish hospitality… but I think that is best.”
“I think so, too, Doctor. But remember: Ozma’s invitation stands. When you are weary of the world, come here for a holiday and bring the children. Children are happy here and never get hurt. Oz was designed for children.”
“We will, we certainly will!”
“Is there anything more to discuss? If not… “
“Just a second!” put in Aunt Hilda. “You told Deety – will you tell me?”
Glinda smiled. “My Book states that you are growing a boy.”

Chapter XXXIII

” – ‘solipsism’ is a buzz word.”

Zeb:
I didn’t sleep with Deety that night. I didn’t plan it that way. A footman showed me to a room; Deety and Hilda were standing at the top of the stairs (more magical stairs – okay as long as you don’t look down) and talking excitedly, with Jake nearby.
When I saw that the room had only a single bed, the footman had vanished. I stepped outside; Deety and Hilda and Jake were gone, the upper hall was dark. So I said a word one mustn’t use in Oz and went back into my room. Even a single bed looked inviting; I went to sleep at once.
Glinda had breakfast with us, in the banquet hail, considerably shrunken. The food in Imperial House is wonderful, but you can’t beat ham and basted eggs and toast and jelly and fresh orange juice. I drank three cups of coffee and felt ready to rassle alligators.
Glinda kissed Deety and Hilda good-bye at the top of those Escher steps, and Jake and I bent over her hands. She wished us good luck… which must mean more from her.
Gay Deceiver looked good in morning sunlight. Tik-Tok was standing at her nose. “Good mor-ning,” he said. “I have been con-ver-sing with Miss Gay De-cei-ver all night. She is a ve-ry Smart Girl.”
“Howdy, Zeb.”
“Howdy, Gay. What have I told you about picking up strange men?”
“You’ve told me nothing, Zeb. And Tik-Tok is not a strange man. He is a gentleman, which is more than I can say for some people.”
“Tru-ly, Cap-tain, I meant no im-pro-pri-e-ty.”
“Just kidding, folks. Thanks for keeping Gay company, Tik-Tok.”
“It was a plea-sure and a pri-vi-lege. I ar-ranged with the night watch-man to wind me up each hour in or-der that our con-ver-sa-tion be not a-brupt-ly ter-mi-nat-ed.”
“Smart of you. Thanks again and we’ll see you again. We’ll be back for a visit, first chance. Gay, open up.”
“You didn’t say ‘Please,'” my autopilot answered, but she opened her doors.
“I am de-ligh-ted to hear that you are re-tur-ning. Miss Gay De-cei-ver and I have much in com-mon.”
Sharpie said good-bye to Tik-Tok, went inside. Deety not only said good-bye but kissed his copper cheek – Deety would kiss a pig if the pig would hold still for it (if he didn’t, I would turn him into sausage; kissing Deety is not to be scorned).
Hilda reappeared, still in evening gown. “Deety, come here. Hurry!”
I shook hands with Tik-Tok (odd!) and suggested that he back off a little. Then I went inside. No sign of our wives – I called to them, “Shake it up in there. I want a pilot suit.”
Deety called out, “Zebadiah, wiggle your way through the bulkhead.”
“I can’t change clothes back there.”
“Please, dear. I need you.”
When Deety says she needs me, I go. So I wiggled through, and the space didn’t seem as cramped as it had been when I was working on it at Termite Terrace. “Where are you?”
“In here. Port side,” came Deety’s muffled voice. I turned around, banging my head, and found a door where a door shouldn’t be. I had to stoop but once through it I could stand up. A room slightly bigger than a telephone booth – a door aft, a door forward, Sunbonnet Sue to the left, Buster Brown to the right. Deety opened the door on the left. “Come look!”
A luxurious dressing room and bath – “It’s the same one as in the ‘Welcome’ cottage,” said Deety, “except that the window is frosted and doesn’t open. But the air is fresh.”
I said “Hmmm – ” Then I added, “Well, well!” I checked out Buster Brown. Yes, the same bathroom Jake and I had used yesterday.
Jake stuck his head in. I said, “Perfesser, give me the benefit of your wisdom.”
“Zeb, I’m fresh out.”
“Jake – your opinion, please. Is this craft ready for space?”
“Zeb, I don’t know.”
“Let’s check the outside.”
We went over the shell with eyes and fingers, port and starboard. That car was unblemished – coutside. But from inside I heard a toilet flushing.
I went inside, on back, still on back, and knocked on Sunbonnet Sue. Sharpie let me in. “Just leaving, Zebbie,” She had elected to wear one of her new jump suits and looked like a Cracker Jack prize. “Deet’ is about ready.”
“Wait a half, Sharpie. Jake and I have decided to trust Glinda.”
“Was there any doubt?”
I stepped inside; Deety twisted around at the dressing table, smiled through a mouthful of bobby pins. “Your father and I have approved this craft for space – tentatively – Captain Deety.”
“I approved it at breakfast – and not tentatively. What do you have there, dear one?” She accepted a list from me, read it over:

NameDutyAdditional and/or Relief Duty
D. T. B. CarterCommanding

Hilda S. Burroughs2nd in Command & NavigatorScience Officer & Chef

Z. J. CarterChief PilotRelief Navigator
J. J. BurroughsCopilotSous-Chef

“It’s intended to make your life easier, Cap’n Deety. Jake didn’t get the going-over he should have had. But with Jake in the right-hand seat and me over him, I can keep him in hand – and he’ll be so busy with his verniers that he won’t have time to talk back. ‘Sous-Chef’ is a fancy way of saying that he’ll be under his wife’s thumb when we’re grounded.”
“It’s well thought out, Zebadiah. Thank you.”
“Suits you?”
“Let me study it.”
I got fidgety, ducked into Buster Brown and killed time until she called me. “Slight revision, Zebadiah.”

NameDutyAdditional and/or Relief Duty
DeetyCaptainInstructor Computers

Zebadiah2nd in Command & Chief Master at ArmsInstructor Duo, Air

JakeChief PilotInstructor Verniers
HildaCopilotScience Officer & Executive Chef

Note: Cooking will rotate D-J-Z unless changed by the Executive Chef.

“A ‘Slight revision’!” – I felt offended.
Deety looked at me anxiously. “I’m submitting it for your advice, Zebadiah. I want to continue Pop’s policy of everybody learning every job, at least well enough to limp home. Hilda will learn the verniers quickly; she’s deft, she doesn’t have to be told twice, and the inventor I have placed at her elbow. Pop needs practice in air; he isn’t as good as he thinks he is and he’s never driven a car this fast. You’ll be behind him, ready to bounce him out of trouble. Dear – will it work?”
I was forced to admit that Deety’s T.O. was better than mine.
“It’s better than mine, so you owe me a forfeit. Where are my handcuffs and nightstick?”
“As second-in-command you are vested with the duty to keep order and to see that the commanding officer’s orders are carried out, are you not?”
“Of course, Deety – Captain Deety – why rub their noses in it?”
“You know why, Zebadiah. I am reminding everyone that I mean to have a taut ship – and no back talk! You don’t need handcuffs or a club. But in that right-hand dressing-table drawer is a ten-centimeter roll of adhesive tape – the size gangsters use for gags.”
“Oh. Oho!”
“Zebadiah! Don’t use it without my direct order. I shall maintain a taut ship. But when I’ve served my time, I would much rather my father was still speaking to me. It’s a last resort, my husband. A sharp Pipe-down from you is all P – anybody will ever need. I intend to keep you at the conn most of the time – unless you ask me to relieve you, or I tell you I want to conn something personally.”
“Suits.”
“Very well, sir. You have the conn. Give them their assignments, prepare the car for space, take the reports, let me know here when you are ready. Revision in plan: Take us straight up one thousand klicks. Let us look at Oz from a distance, then continue by plan.”
“Aye aye, Captain.” I started to leave while thinking that Deety might leave a reputation equal to that of Captain Bligh.
“Zebadiah!”
“Yes, Captain?”
“Don’t go ‘way without kissing me or I won’t take the bloody job!”
“I didn’t realize that the Captain cared to be kissed.”
“Captains need kisses more than most people,” she answered, her face muffled against my shoulder.
“Got a fresh new stock. Will there be anything else, Ma’am?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“When I’ve served my time, will you use your influence to put me on the verniers? And – sometime – will you teach me supersonic?”
“Verniers, yes. Supersonic – A man who takes his wife as a pupil is breeding a divorce. Gay will teach you supersonic if you will let her. At super- or hypersonic she’s safest on autopilot. She won’t hurt herself – but if you override, you may hurt her, she may hurt you.”
“But you override. How am I to learn?”
“Easy. Give her a program. Leave it loose enough for her to correct your goofs. Keep your hands and feet very lightly on the controls. Be patient, and eventually you’ll be part of Gay and Gay will be part of you. Shut up and kiss me.”
Captains kiss better.
Ten minutes later we were ready for space. I asked, “Did anyone leave anything in our annex?” I wasn’t thinking about it; Jake had reported: “Juice one point zero – full capacity!”
“Hilda and I hung up our dresses.”
“Captain, do you realize that our magical space warp will probably go back wherever it came from the instant we leave?”
“Want to bet? Glinda wouldn’t pull a trick like that.”
“It’s your dress, Cap’n. But your exec advises you officially to warn all hands never to leave anything essential in there during maneuvers.” I wiped the matter from my mind; Deety would do it her way. “Gay, are you going to go on being talkative on your own?”
“Zeb, back on watch, I’ll be strictly business. But a girl is entitled to a night out once in a while.”
“You’re a Smart Girl, Gay.”
“So Tik-Tok told me, Zeb.”
“Roger and out, Gay. Sharpie, set transition one thousand klicks H axis, plus.”
“A thousand kilometers straight up, minimum-range scale, vernier setting three. Jacob, will you check me, please?”
Jake reported the setting correct; I snapped, “Execute!”
Jake put her nose-down: an Earthlike planet so covered with haze that I could make out no details other than straight down, where Oz was still sharp and framed by the impassable deserts. “Sharpie, please hand me the binox, then shift hats to ‘Science Officer’ and find out whether or not our new addition came along.”
I had to help her undog the bulkhead door – Sharpie, in free fall, can’t brace herself to apply enough torque to loosen a dog I had fastened on the ground. Meanwhile Deety had been using the binox. “Zebadiah, it’s hazy everywhere but below us. Emerald City shines out green as Erin, and Glinda’s Palace gleams in the sunshine. But the rest might as well be Venus. Only it’s not.”
“Daughter – Captain, I mean – have you looked at the stars?” Jake added, “I think it’s our own universe.”
“It is, Pop? On which side of Orion is the Bull?”
“Why, on – Jesus, Allah, and Zoroaster! It’s turned inside out!”
“Yes, but not the way that other inside – out place was. Like Oz itself. East for west.”
I asked my wife, “Captain Deety, is there anything odd about duration here?”
“Doesn’t feel odd. But it’s been about a century since those three little girls moved to Oz. I don’t know what it feels like to them, and I carefully didn’t ask. Did anybody notice that there were no clocks and no calendars?”
“Zebbie!”
“Yes, Sharpie?” I answered.
“Our new plumbing works just dandy. Be careful going in; it’s not free fall; the floor is down. I did a spectacular somersault.”
“Hilda my love, are you hurt?”
“Not a bit, Jacob. But next time I’ll hang on to something, pull myself down even with the deck, and slide in.”
“Science Officer, secure all doors, return to your seat and strap down. Then swap hats and set next rotation by schedule.”
“I fastened the doors. I’m dogging the bulkhead door. Okay, I’m strapping down. Where are the binoculars?”
“Jake stowed them. All hands, stand by to rotate.”
Another totally black one – I said, “Captain, we’ll tumble now unless you prefer to check our new plumbing first.”
“Plumbing isn’t Deety’s job! I’m Science Officer and that includes hygiene, plumbing, and space warps.”
Deety said to me, “I relieve you, dear” – then more loudly, to Hilda: “Copilot, pipe down. Pop, dowse the lights and tumble us. Aunt Hillbilly, attempt to set next rotation by touch and sound, in the dark. That’s number eight, third of second group.”
“Aye aye, Captain Bligh.”
The tumble showed nothing. Jake switched on lights, reported that Sharpie had set the next rotation correctly. Deety asked me to relieve her at the conn, then said, “Science Officer, I am about to inspect the addition to your department; please accompany me.” Without a word Sharpie did so.
They were gone quite a while. At last I said, “Jake, what do women talk about in can conferences?”
“I’m afraid to find out.”
They came back full of giggles; I concluded that Deety’s disciplinary methods worked. As they strapped down, Deety said, “Dear, it’s black as sin out there – and sunlight streaming in both bathroom windows. Riddle me that.”
“Science Officer’s department,” I evaded. “Stand by to rotate.”
This time Jake not only had air, I could hear it. Jake got her leveled out hastily. “Copilot, H-above-G!”
“Thirteen hundred meters.”
“Too close! Zeb, I’m going to retire and take up tatting. Where are we? I can’t see a thing.”
“We’re over water, Pop, with a light fog. I see a shoreline to starboard.” Jake turned Gay to the right, I picked out the shoreline. Gay’s wings were spread; Jake held her at an easy glide and placed her on automatic. “We’ll leave this kite sealed now; I won’t check the air without going up high.”
“Sail ho!”
“Where away, Sharpie?”
“Starboard bow. A sailing ship.”
Durn if it wasn’t. A square-rigger out of the seventeenth century, high forecastle and sterncastle. Jake took us down for a better look. I wasn’t afraid; people who sail ships like that don’t use guided missiles – so I kept telling myself.
It was a pretty sight. Jake dropped the starboard wing so that we could have a good look. But we must not have been a “pretty sight” to them; sailors were rushing around and the helmsman let her get away from him and she fell into irons, her canvas flapping foolishly. Not wanting to get the poor fellow keelhauled, I told Jake to level off and head for land.
Deety said, “Good God, Pop, you scared me silly.”
“Why, Deety? – Captain Deety. They were scared-but surely you aren’t scared by black-powder cannon?”
“You almost put the starboard wing into the water.”
“Don’t be silly, Deety; I was above two hundred meters. Well, maybe a hundred and fifty when I did that steep turn. But plenty of room.”
“Take a look at your altimeter. And pressure.”
Jake looked and so did I. The radar altimeter stated that we were nineteen meters above the water; Jake had to change scales to read it. Pressure showed well over a thousand millibars – a sea-level high. So I snapped, “Gay Bounce!”
Gay did and I caught my breath.
“Deety, how did I make that error?” Jake asked.
“I don’t know, Pop. I can see the right wing tip; you can’t. When it looked to me as if you might cut the water, I looked at the instruments. I was about to yell when you straightened out.”
“Captain, I was driving seat-of-my-pants by the ship’s masts. I would swear I never got within three hundred meters of that ship, on the slant. That should put me plenty high.”
Sharpie said, “Jacob, don’t you recognize this place?”
“Hilda, don’t tell me you’ve been here before?”
“Only in books, Beloved. A child’s version in third grade. A more detailed version in junior high. Finally I laid hands on the unexpurgated version, which was pretty racy for the age I was then. I still find it pleasantly bawdy.”
“Sharpie,” I demanded, “what are you talking about?”
Jake answered. “Zeb, what sort of ship could cause me to think I was high in the air when in fact I was about to pole-vault into the sea?”
“I’ve got it!” said Deety.
“I give up,” I admitted.
“Tell him, Pop.”
“One manned by sailors fifteen centimeters high.”
I thought about it. We were approaching land; I told Jake to glide to two klicks by instrument and told Gay to hold us there – it seemed much higher. “If anyone runs across Dean Swift, will you give him a swift kick for me?”
Deety said, “Zebadiah, do you suppose the land of the giants – Brobdingnag – is on this continent?”
“I hope not.”
“Why not, dear? It should be fun.”
“We don’t have time to waste on either Lilliputians or giants. Neither would have obstetricians able to take care of you two. Sharpie, get ready to take us up a hundred thousand klicks. Then to rotate. Does anyone have any theory about what has been happening to us? Aside from Sharpie’s notion that we are dead and don’t know it?”
“I have another theory, Zebbie.”
“Give, Sharpie.”
“Don’t laugh – because you told me that you and Jacob discussed the heart of it, the idea that human thought exists as quanta. I don’t know quanta from Qantas Airways, but I know that a quantum is an indivisible unit. You told me that you and Jacob had discussed the possibility that imagination had its own sort of indivisible units or quanta – you called them ‘fictons’-or was it ficta? Either way, the notion was that every story ever told – or to be told if there is a difference – exists somewhere in the Number of the Beast.”
“But, Hilda my love, that was merely abstract speculation!”
“Jacob, your colleagues regard this car as ‘abstract speculation.’ Didn’t you tell me that the human body is merely complex equations of wave forms? That was when I bit you – I don’t mind being a wave form, waves are pretty; I bit you for using the adverb ‘merely.”
“Zebadiah, there is a city on the left. Shouldn’t we look at it before we leave?”
“Captain, you must decide that. You saw what a panic we caused in that ship. Imagine yourself fourteen centimeters tall and living in that city. Along comes a great sky monster and dives on you. Would you like it? How many little people will faint? How many will die of heart failure? How many are you willing to kill to satisfy your curiosity?” I added, “To those people we are monsters worse than ‘Black-Hat’ vermin.”
“Oh, dear! You’re right, Zebadiah – dismally so. Let’s get out of here.”
“Copilot, set to transit straight up one hundred thousand klicks.”
“Transition ‘H’ axis, positive, vernier setting five – set!”
“Execute.” I continued, “Captain, I’d like to sit here a while.”
“Very well, Zebadiah.”
“Sharpie, let’s hear your theory. Captain, I’ve been scared silly by too many narrow escapes. We know how to translate from one Earth-analog to the next; just use plenty of elbow room. But these rotations are making me white-haired. The laws of chance are going to catch up with us.”
“Zebbie, I don’t think the laws of chance have anything to do with it. I don’t think we have been in any danger in any rotation.”
“So? Sharpie, I’m about to swap jobs with you as quickly as I can get the Captain’s permission.”
“No, no! I -“
“Chicken!”
“Zebbie, your hunches are part of why I say that the laws of chance are not relevant.”
“Sharpie, statistical laws are the most firmly established of all natural laws.”
“Do they apply in the Land of Oz?” asked Deety.
“Uh – Damned if I know! Touché!”
“Zeb, Hilda has not expressed it as I would; nevertheless I agree with her.) To call the equations used in statistics ‘laws of nature’ is a misnomer. Those equations measure the degree of our ignorance. When I flip a coin and say that the chance of heads or tails is fifty-fifty, I am simply declaring total ignorance as to outcome. If I knew all conditions, the outcome might be subject to precalculation. But we have experienced two universes having physical laws unlike those of our home universe.”
“Three, Jacob. Lilliput makes three.”
“I don’t follow you, my dear.”
“The cube-square law that runs through all biology does not apply here. A human brain can’t be placed in a space the size of a thimble by our biophysical laws. But we’re getting away from the theory Zebbie wanted me to expound. Shall I go on?”
“Yes,” Deety ruled. “Everybody shut up but Aunt Hilda. I’m zipping my own lip. Hillbilly – proceed.”
“All right. It’s not chance that we have been in three universes – InsideOut, the Land of Oz, and Lilliput – in … less than twenty-four hours, isn’t it, Deety?”
“Less than twenty-one, Aunt Hilda.”
“Thanks hon. It’s not chance that those three are ‘fictional’ universes – I have to call them that for lack of a better word – well known to each of us. By coincidence – and again I don’t have a good word but it’s not ‘chance’ – all four of us are addicted to fanciful stories. Fantasy. Fairy tales. We all like the same sort of stories. How many of us like detective stories?”
“Some – not all,” said Deety.
“My sole loyalty is to Sherlock Holmes,” I said.
“Waste of time,” said Jake.
“I’d like to try an experiment,” Hilda went on. “Write down the twenty stories you have enjoyed most. Or groups of related stories – the Oz books would count as one, so would the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series, and so would the four voyages of ‘Gulliver’s Travels.’ Make them stories you reread for pleasure when you are too tired to tackle a new book.”
“Sharpie, is it cheating to ask how you mean to use this?”
“No, Zebbie. If my theory is right, the next time we rotate and find ourselves near a planet, it will turn out to be the scene of a story or group of stories that appears on all four lists. We’ll arrive high enough that Jacob will have plenty of time to level off but close enough that we can ground. But we will never rotate into a mass or any danger that we can’t handle. This isn’t chance; we haven’t been dealing with chance. The Land of Oz surprised me. Lilliput didn’t surprise me at all; I expected it. Or at least a place that all of us know through Stories.”
“How about those empty universes?” I demanded.
“Maybe they are places about which stories will be written or maybe stories have already been told but aren’t favorites of us four, so we don’t emerge close to their scenes. But those are guesses. So far as my theory is concerned, such Universes are ‘null’ – they don’t count one way or the other. We find our universes.”
“Sharpie, you have just invented pantheistic multiperson solipsism. I didn’t think it was mathematically possible.”
“Zeb, anything is mathematically possible.”
“Thanks, Jacob. Zebbie, ‘solipsism’ is a buzz word. I’m saying that we’ve stumbled onto ‘The Door in the Wall,’ the one that leads to the Land of Heart’s Desire. I don’t know how and have no use for fancy rationalizations. I see a pattern; I’m not trying to explain it. It just is.”
“How does that hollow world fit your theory?”
“Well, Deety called it Pellucidar -“
“It was!”
” – but I’ve read dozens of stories about worlds underground; I’ll bet all of us have. Jules Verne, S. Fowler Wright, H. G. Wells, C. L. Moore, Lovecraft – all the great masters of fantasy have taken a crack at it. Please, can we stop talking? I want all four lists before we rotate again.”
Jake changed attitude so that Lilliput’s planet was dead ahead and told Gay to hold it there. The planet looked very small, as if we were a million kilometers out – reasonable, I decided, and wrote down “The Dorsai yarns.”
At last Deety announced, “I’m through, Aunt Hillbilly.”
Soon after, her father handed Sharpie his list. “Don’t count those I’ve lined out, dear – I had trouble holding it down.”
“‘Twenty’ is arbitrary, Jacob. I can leave your extras in.”
“No, dear, the four I eliminated do not stand as high as the twenty I retained.”
After some pencil-chewing I announced, “Sharpie, I’m stuck at seventeen. Got a baker’s dozen more in mind, but no choice.”
“Seventeen will do, Zebbie – if they are your prime favorites.”
“They are.”
Hilda accepted my list, ran her eye down it. “A psychoanalyst would have a wonderful time with these.”
“Wait a half! Sharpie, if you’re going to let a shrink see those lists, I want mine back.”
“Zebbie darling, I wouldn’t do that to you.” She added, “I need a few minutes to tally.”
I glanced at Lilliput. “Need help?”
“No. I’ve tallied a ‘one’ after all on my list. I’ve checked Deety’s against mine and tallied a ‘two’ where they match, and added to the bottom of my list, with one vote tallied against each, those she picked but I didn’t. I’m doing the same with Jacob’s list, tallying three’s and two’s and one’s. Then Zebbie and we’ll wind up with a four-vote list – unanimous – and a list with three each – and a list with two, and with one.”
Sharpie kept busy some minutes, then took a fresh sheet, made a list, folded it. “This should be in a sealed envelope to establish my reputation as a fortuneteller. Zebbie, there are nine soi-disant fictional universes listed. Any close approach we make by rotation should be near one of them.”
I said, “You included Pellucidar?”
“Pellucidar got only two votes. I stick to my theory that the inside-out world is a composite of underground fantasies. But our vote identified that third universe – the blinding lights, the one that worried you about radiation.”
“The hell you say!”
“I think it did. Four votes for Doctor Isaac Asimov’s ‘Nightfall.’ I expected his Foundation stories to make it but they got only three votes. Too bad, because his library planet might be able to tell us what those vermin are, where they come from – and how to beat them.”
“My fault, Aunt Hillbilly. Pop told me I should read the Foundation series… but I never did.”
“Sharpie,” I said, “we can put you down in New York in five minutes. The Good Doctor is getting on in years – turns out less than a million words a year now – but still likes pretty girls. He must know whatever is in the Galactic Library; he invented it. So telephone him. Better yet, sit on his lap. Cry if necessary.”
“Zebbie, if there is one place I’m certain is loaded with ‘Black Hat’ vermin, it’s New York City! You sit on his lap!”
“Not me. If we learn how to delouse our home planet, I’ll work on a way to spread the word. But I’m number one on their death list.”
“No, Jacob is.”
“No, Sharpie. Jake and Deety are dead, you are kidnapped, and I’m marked down to be ‘terminated with extreme prejudice.’ But I’ll risk grounding on the Hudson River VTOL flat long enough for you to visit the Good Doctor. Your husband can escort you; I’m going to hide in the bathroom. I figure that is actually in Oz and therefore safe.”
“Go lay an egg!”
“Sharpie dear, none of us is going to Earth-zero. Hand that list to Deety; she won’t peek. Captain, shall we rotate? The Science Officer has me half convinced that we can get away with it; let’s do it before I lose my nerve. Fourth and last universe in the second group, isn’t it?” I asked Sharpie.
“Yes, Zebbie.”
“Anybody as chicken as I am, speak up!… Isn’t anybody going to get us out of this!…… Execute!”

Chapter XXXIV

” – all my dreams do come true!”

Zeb:
Gay Deceiver was right side up five hundred meters above a sunlit, gentle countryside. Jake set her to cruise in a circle. I asked, “Are we back in Oz? Sharpie, check your setting.”
“Not Oz, Zebbie. I’ve stuck to schedule.”
“Okay. Does your magic list tell you where we are?”
“If it’s one of the nine, then it’s – ” Hilda wrote a word on a sheet, folded it, handed it to me. “Stick this in your pocket.”
I tucked it away. “Jake, bounce us, then range-and-target to ground us in that meadow. We’ll test the air when we’re down. Safer.”
Jake zeroed Gay in; she grounded. “Zeb,” he said fretfully, “how can I tell what juice we have? The gauge still reads ‘Capacity.”
“Let me think about it.”
“All right. Has the Captain worked out that new scram?”
“I think so, Pop. Take G.D. straight up a hundred thousand klicks, but do it in two words, in total darkness, or with eyes dazzled, or anything. As long as anyone can get out two syllables we’ll zip far enough away from trouble that we’ll have time to work out what to do next.”
“Good enough. Can you program it before I open a door?”
“I think so, Zebadiah. If she’s asleep, G.D. will wake up and do it at once.”
“Okay, will you program it? Hilda, set up the same thing on your dials as a back-up. Meanwhile I’m going to give the plumbing a field test. Don’t touch the doors till I get back.”
I returned in a few minutes. “Our magic space warp is still with us – don’t ask me why or I’ll scream. New program inserted?”
“Yes, Zebadiah. On tell-me-three-times and protected against execution without the doors being closed and locked. I’ve written down the magic words. Here.” Deety handed me a scrap of paper.
On it was: “Gay – Zoom!”
“It’s the shortest program with an unusual monosyllable that I can think of.”
“Its shortness may save our necks. Swap seats with me, Sharpie, it’s my turn to be pioneer mother. Everybody, hold your breath; I’m going to sniff the air.”
“Zebbie, this planet is Earthlike to nine decimal places.”
“Which gives me a cheap chance to play hero.” I opened her door a crack, sniffed.
Shortly I said, “I feel okay. Anybody woozy?”
“Open the door wide, Zebbie; this place is safe.”
I did so and stepped out into a field of daisies; the others followed me. It certainly seemed safe – quiet, warm, peaceful, a meadow bounded by a hedge row and a stream.
Suddenly a white rabbit came running past, headed for the hedge. He barely paused, pulled a watch from his waistcoat pocket, glanced at it, then moaned, “Oh dear! Oh dear! I shall be too late!” and ran even faster. Deety started after him.
“Deety!” I yelled.
She stopped short. “I want to find the rabbit hole.”
“Then keep your eye on her. You’re not going down the hole.”
“On whom?” Deety turned back toward the hedge row. A little girl in a pinafore was hurrying toward the spot where the rabbit had disappeared. “Oh. But it didn’t hurt her to go down the hole.”
“No, but Alice had lots of difficulties before she got out. We haven’t time; this is not a place we can stay.”
“Why not?”
“Nineteenth-century England did not have advanced medicine.”
“Zebbie,” put in Hilda, “this isn’t England. Read that slip.”
I unfolded the scrap of paper, read: Wonderland. “Just so,” I agreed, and handed it to my wife. “But it is modeled on England in the eighteen-sixties. It either has no medicine, like Oz, or pre-Pasteur medicine. Possibly pre-Semmelweiss. Deety, do you want to die from childbed fever?”
“No, I want to go to the Mad Tea Party.”
“We can have a mad tea party; I went mad several universes back – and it’s time for lunch. Sharpie, you win the Order of Nostradamus with diamond cluster. May I ask two questions?”
“One may always ask.”
“Is H. P. Lovecraft on that list?”
“He got only one vote, Zebbie. Yours.”
“Chthulhu be thanked! Sharpie, his stories fascinate me the way snakes are said to fascinate birds. But I would rather be trapped with the King in Yellow than be caught up in the worlds of the Necronomicon. Uh… did any horrids get four votes?”
“No, dear, the rest of us prefer happy endings.”
“So do I! Especially when I’m in it. Did Heinlein get his name in the hat?”
“Four votes, split. Two for his ‘Future History,’ two for ‘Stranger in a Strange Land.’ So I left him out.”
“I didn’t vote for ‘Stranger’ and I’ll refrain from embarrassing anyone by asking who did. My God, the things some writers will do for money!”
“Samuel Johnson said that anyone who wrote for any other reason was a fool.”
“Johnson was a fat, pompous, gluttonous, dirty old fool who would have faded into the obscurity he so richly deserved had he not been followed around by a spit-licking sycophant. Spell that ‘Psycho-‘, as in ‘Bloch.'” I added, “Did Poul Anderson get in? Or Niven?”
“Zebbie, that’s far more than two questions.”
“I haven’t even reached the second question… which is: What do we have for a mad tea party?”
“Surprise! Glinda had a picnic basket placed in our dressing room.”
“I missed it,” I admitted.
“You didn’t look in the wardrobe.” Sharpie grinned. “Can sandwiches from Oz be eaten in Wonderland? Or will they ‘softly and silently vanish away’?”
“‘Be off, or I’ll kick you downstairs!'”
Several hundred calories later I noticed a young man hovering nearby. He seemed to want to speak but was too diffident to do so. Deety jumped up, trotted toward him. “The Reverend Mister Dodgson, is it not? I’m Mrs. Zebadiah Carter.”
He quickly removed his straw boater. “‘Mr. Dodgson,’ yes, uh, Mrs. Carter. Have we met?”
“Long ago, before I was married. You are looking for Alice, are you not?”
“Dear me! Why, yes, I am. But how -“
“She went Down the Rabbit-Hole.”
Dodgson looked relieved. “Then she will be back soon enough. I promised to return her and her sisters to Christ Church before dark.”
“You did. I mean, ‘you will.’ Same thing, depending on the coordinates. Come meet my family. Have you had luncheon?”
“Oh, I say, I don’t mean to intrude.”
“You aren’t intruding.” Deety took him by the hand, firmly. Since my treasure is stronger than most men, he came along… and let go her hand hastily as soon as she loosened her grip. We men got to our feet; Hilda remained in lotus.
“Aunt Hilda, this is Mr. Dodgson, Lecturer in Mathematics at Christ Church College, Oxford. My stepmother, Mrs. Burroughs.”
“How do you do, Mrs. Burroughs. Oh dear, I am intruding!”
“Not at all, Mr. Dodgson. Do sit down.”
“And this is my father, Dr. Burroughs, Professor of Mathematics. And my husband Captain Carter. Aunt Hilda, will you find a clean plate for Mr. Dodgson?”
The young don relaxed once introductions had been made but he was still far more formal than Deety intended to permit. He sat down on the turf, placed his hat carefully beside him, and said, “Truly, Mrs. Burroughs, I’ve just finished tea with three little girls.”
Deety ignored his protests while she piled his plate with little sandwiches and cakes. Sharpie poured tea from a Thermos jug. They nailed him down with cup and plate. Jake advised, “Don’t fight it, son, unless you really must leave. Are Alice’s sisters safe?”
“Why, yes, Professor; they are napping in the shade of a hayrick nearby. But -“
“Then relax. In any case, you must wait for Alice. What branch of mathematics do you pursue?”
“Algebraic logic, usually, sir, with some attention to its applications to geometry.” The Reverend Mr. Dodgson was seated so that he faced Gay Deceiver and sat in the shadow of her port wing but nothing in his manner showed that he noticed the anachronism.
“Have your studies led you into multidimensional non-Euclidean geometries?” Jake asked.
Dodgson blinked. “I fear that I tend to be conservative in geometry, rathuh.”
“Father, Mr. Dodgson doesn’t work in your field; he works in mine.”
Dodgson raised his eyebrows slightly. Jake said, “My daughter did not introduce herself fully. She is Mrs. Carter but her maiden name is Doctor D. T. Burroughs. Her field is mathematical logic.”
“That is why I am so pleased that you are here, Mr. Dodgson. Your book ‘Symbolic Logic’ is a milestone in our field.”
“But, my dear lady, I have not written a work titled ‘Symbolic Logic.”
“I’ve confused things. Again it is matter of selection of coordinates. At the end of the reign of Queen Victoria you will have published it five years earlier. Is that clear?”
He answered very solemnly, “Quite clear. All I need do is to ask Her Majesty how much longer she is going to reign and subtract five years.”
“That should do it. Do you like to play with sorites?” For the first time, he smiled. “Oh, very much!”
“Shall we make up some? Then trade and solve them?” “Well… not too lengthy. I really must get back to my young charges.”
“We can’t stay long, either. Anyone else want to play?” No one else elected to play. I stretched out on the grass with a handkerchief over my face; Jake and Sharpie went for a walk. “Shall we hold the statements down to groups of six?” Dodgson suggested.
“All right. But the conclusion must be true. Not nonsense. Agreed?” (Deety had taught me this game; she’s good at it. I decided to be a silent witness.)
They kept quiet while I snored convincingly, Deety was a “lady” for a while, then sprawled on her belly and chewed her pencil. I watched with one eye from under my handkerchief.
First she covered several pages with scratch work in developing statements incomplete in themselves but intended to arrive at only one possible conclusion. Having done so, she tested them by symbolic logic, then wrote out her list of statements, mixing them randomly – clooked up.
The young mathematician was looking at her solemnly, note pad in hand.
“Finished?” my wife asked.
“Just finished. Mrs. Carter, you remind me of my little friend Alice Liddell.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s how I recognized her. Shall we trade?”
Dodgson tore a sheet from his pad. “This is to be solved in the first person; its conclusion applies to you.”
“All right, I’ll try it.” Deety read aloud:

“1) Every idea of mine, that cannot be expressed as a syllogism, is really ridiculous;
“2) None of my ideas about Bath-buns are worth writing down;
“3) No idea of mine, that fails to come true, can be expressed as a syllogism;
“4) I never have any really ridiculous idea, that I do not at once refer to my solicitor;
“5) My dreams are all about Bath-buns;
“6) I never refer any idea of mine to my solicitor, unless it is worth writing down.”
Deety chortled. “How sweet of you! It is true; all my dreams do come true!”
“You solved it so quickly?”
“But it’s only six statements. Have you solved mine?”
“I haven’t read it yet.” He also read aloud:
“1) Everything, not absolutely ugly, may be kept in a drawing room;
“2) Nothing, that is encrusted with salt, is ever quite dry;
“3) Nothing should be kept in a drawing room, unless it is free from damp;
“4) Time-traveling machines are always kept near the sea;
“5) Nothing, that is what you expect it to be, can be absolutely ugly;
“6) Whatever is kept near the sea gets encrusted with salt.”
He blinked at the list. “The conclusion is true?” he asked.
“Yes.”
For the first time he stared openly at Gay Deceiver. “That, then – I infer – is a ‘time-traveling machine.”
“Yes… although it does other things as well.”
“It is not what I expected it to be … although I am not sure what I expected a time-traveling machine to be.”
I pulled his handkerchief off my face. “Do you want to take a ride, Mr. Dodgson?”
The young don looked wistful. “I am sorely tempted, Captain. But I am responsible for three little girls. So I must thank you for your hospitality and bid you good-bye. Will you offer my apologies to Professor and Mrs. Burroughs and explain that duty calls me?”

Chapter XXXV

“It’s a disturbing idea – “

Jake:
“Deety, how does it feel to say good-bye without getting kissed?”
“Zebadiah, I didn’t make it possible. Lewis Carroll was terrified by females over the age of puberty.”
“That’s why I stayed close. Deety hon, if I had gone with Jake and Hilda, he would have left at once.”
“I can’t figure out how he got here in the first place,” said my dear wife Hilda. “Lewis Carroll was never in Wonderland; he simply wrote about it. But this is Wonderland – unless rabbits in England wear waistcoats and watches.”
“Aunt Hilda, who can possibly be as deeply inside a story as the person who writes it?”
“Hmm – I’ll have to study that.”
“Later, Sharpie,” Zeb said. “Stand by to rotate. Mars, isn’t it?”
“Right, Zebbie,” Hilda agreed.
“Gay… Sagan!”
Mars-zero lay ahead, in half phase at the proper distance.
“Set!” Hilda reported. “To tenth universe, third group.”
“Execute.” It was another starry void with no familiar groupings; we ran through routine, Zeb logged it as “possible” and we moved on to the second of the third group – and I found myself facing the Big and Little Dippers. Again we ran through a routine tumble – but failed to find the Sun or any planets. I don’t know the southern constellations too well but I spotted Crux and the Magellanic Clouds. To the north there could be no doubt about Cygnus and a dozen others.
Zeb said, “Where is Sol? Deety? Sharpie?”
“I haven’t seen it, Zebadiah.”
“Zebbie, don’t go blaming me. I put it right back where I found it.”
“Jake, I don’t like this. Sharpie, are you set?”
“Set. Standing orders. Third group, third of three.”
“Keep your finger near the button. How does this fit your theory? I don’t recall listing a story that doesn’t have the Solar System in it.”
“Zebbie, it can’t fit two of those left, could fit the others, and could fit half a dozen or more that got three votes. You said that about a dozen were tied in your mind. Were any of them space-travel stories?”
“Almost all.”
“Then we could be in any world that takes our universe as a model but far enough from the Sun so that it appears as second or third magnitude. That wouldn’t have to be far; our Sun is pretty faint. So this could be the Darkover universe, or Niven’s Known Space, or Dr. Williamson’s Legion of Space universe, or the Star Trek universe, or Anderson’s world of the Polesotechnic League, or Dr. Smith’s Galactic Patrol world. Or several more.”
“Sharpie, what were two that this could not be?”
“King Arthur and his Knights, and the World of the Hobbits.”
“If we find ourselves in either of those, we leave. No obstetricians. Jake, any reason to stay here longer?”
“None that I see,” I answered.
“Captain Deety, I advise scram. Those space-opera universes can be sticky. I don’t care to catch a photon torpedo or a vortex bomb or a negative-matter projectile, just through failure to identify ourselves promptly.”
So we rotated.
This time we weren’t merely close; we were on the ground. Charging straight at us was a knight in armour, lance couched in attack. I think it unlikely that a lance could damage Gay. But this “gentle knight” was unfriendly; I shouted, “Gay! – Zoom!”
Sighed with relief at sudden darkness and at the Captain’s next words: “Thanks, Pop. You were on your toes.”
“Thank you. End of group three. Back to Mars? S, A, G, A, N?”
“Let’s get on with it,” Zeb agreed. “All Hands -“
“Zebadiah!” my daughter interrupted. “Is that all you wish to see of King Arthur and his Knights?”
“Captain Deety, that wasn’t one of King Arthur’s Knights. He was wearing plated mail.”
“That’s my impression,” my beloved agreed. “But I gave more attention to his shield. Field sable, argent bend sinister, in chief sun proper with crown, both or.”
“Sir Modred,” my daughter decided. “I knew he was a baddie! Zebadiah, we should have hit him with your L-gun.”
“Killed that beautiful beer-wagon horse? Deety, that sort of armor wasn’t made earlier than the fifteenth century, eight or nine centuries after the days of King Arthur.”
“Then why was he carrying Sir Modred’s shield?”
“Sharpie, was that Sir Modred’s coat of arms?”
“I don’t know; I blazoned what I saw. Aren’t you nit-picking in objecting to plate armor merely because it’s anachronistic?”
“But history shows that -“
“That’s the point, Zebbie. Camelot isn’t history; it’s fiction.”
Zeb said slowly, “Shut my big mouth.”
“Zebbie, I venture to guess that the version of Camelot we blundered into is a patchwork of all our concepts of King Arthur and the Round Table. I picked up mine from Tennyson, revised them when I read ‘Le Morte d’Arthur.’ Where did you get yours?”
“Mark Twain gave me mine – ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’ Add some Prince Valiant. Jake?”
I said, “Zeb, there seems little doubt that there was a king or a general named Arthur or Arturius. But most people think of King Arthur from stories having little connection with any historical person. ‘The Sword in the Stone’ and ‘The Once and Future King’ are my favorites.”
My daughter persisted, “I do believe in the Round Table, I do! We should go back and look! Instead of guessing.”
“Captain Deety,” her husband said gently, “the jolly, murderous roughnecks called the Knights of the Round Table are fun to read about but not to know socially. Nor are people the only dangers. There would be honest-to-God dragons, and wyverns, and malevolent magic – not the Glinda-the-Good variety. We’ve learned that these alternate worlds are as real as the one we came from. We don’t need to relearn it by getting suddenly dead. That’s my official advice. If you don’t agree, will you please relieve me at the conn… Ma’am?”
“Zebadiah, you’re being logical – a most unfair way to argue!”
“Jacob,” said my wife, “suppose we were people who don’t like fanciful stories. What sort of worlds would we find?”
“I don’t know, Hilda. Probably only humdrum slice-of-life universes indistinguishable from the real world. Correction: Substitute ‘Universe-zero’ for ‘real world’ – because, as your theory requires, all worlds are equally real. Or unreal.”
“Jacob, why do you call our universe ‘universe-zero?”
“Eh… for convenience. Our point of origin.”
“Didn’t you tell me that no frame is preferred over any other? Each one to the Number of the Beast is equally zero in six axes?”
“Well… theory requires it.”
“Then we are fiction in other universes. Have I reasoned correctly?”
I was slow in answering. “That seems to be a necessary corollary. It’s a disturbing idea: that we ourselves are figments of imagination.”
“I’m nobody’s figment!” my daughter protested. “I’m real, I am! Pinch me!… Ouch! Zebadiah, not so hard!”
“You asked for it, dear,” Zeb told her.
“My husband is a brute. And I’ve got a cruel stepmother just like Snow White. I mean ‘Cinderella.’ And my Pop thinks I’m imaginary! But I love you anyway because you’re all I’ve got.”
“If you fictional characters will pipe down, we’ll get this show on the road. Stand by to rotate. Gay Sagan!”
Mars was where it should be. I felt more real.

Chapter XXXVI

“Pipe down and do your job.”

Hilda:
“Set, Captain,” I reported. “Thirteenth rotation. Correct, Zebbie?”
“Check, Sharpie. Captain?”
Deety answered, “Let’s catch our breaths.” She stared out at the ruddy barrenness of Mars-zero. “That rock looks downright homelike. I feel like a tourist who tries to see thirty countries in two weeks. Shock. Not ‘future shock’ but something like it.”
“Homesickness,” I told her. “Knowing that we can’t go back. Deety, somewhere, somewhen, we’ll build another Snug Harbor. Won’t we, Jacob?”
Jacob patted my knee. “We will, dearest.”
Deety said wistfully, “Will we really find another Snug Harbor?”
“Deety, are you over your pioneer-mother jag?”
“No, Zebadiah. But I can get homesick. Like you. Like Hilda. Like everybody but Pop.”
“Correction, Daughter. I don’t miss Logan, and I don’t think Hilda misses California -“
“Not a bit!” I agreed.
“Nor me,” agreed Zeb. “I had a rented flat. But Snug Harbor was home.”
“Agreed,” Jacob answered. “I didn’t really hate these vermin until they bombed our home.” Jacob added, “We’ve got to find a new Snug Harbor. Comfortable as this car is, we can’t live in it indefinitely.”
“Check. Sharpie, your theory seems to be checking out. Is there any reason to finish this schedule? Should we go directly to Teh axis?”
“Zebbie, granted that most rotations didn’t amount to more than sightseeing, if we hadn’t followed this schedule, this car would not be nearly so comfortable. Do you know of another Ford that has two bathrooms?”
“Sharpie, I don’t know of one that has one bathroom. Our space-warp special lets us stay in space as long as our air holds out. And food. But air is the critical factor.”
I said, “Zebbie, have you noticed that our air does not get stuffy?”
“It will soon.”
“It need not,” Jacob pointed out. “We can scram-code to Oz, or to Wonderland, in seconds. Sweet air, no danger.”
Zebbie looked sheepish. “I’m still learning what our wonder buggy will do.”
“So am I.”
“Gentlemen, you missed my point. You might check the juice. I haven’t mentioned another asset. Zebbie, would you like a banana?”
“Sharpie, I ate the last before I buried garbage. While you and Deety were washing dishes before we left Wonderland.”
“Tell him, Deety.”
“Zebadiah, Hilda and I salvaged and put everything into the basket. Hilda started to put it into our wardrobe – and it was heavy. So we looked. Packed as tight as when we left Oz. Six bananas – and everything else. Cross my heart. No, go look.”
“Hmmm – Jake, can you write equations for a picnic basket that refills itself? Will it go on doing so?”
“Zeb, equations can be written to describe anything. The description would be simpler for a basket that replenishes itself indefinitely than for one that does it once and stops – I would have to describe the discontinuity. But I am no longer troubled by natural – or ‘unnatural’ – laws that don’t apply in Universe-zero.”
“Mmmm… Science Officer, I suggest that you check on that basket now that we have returned to Universe-zero.”
“Zebbie, make that an order in writing and sign your name – if you want to look foolish. Deety, will you order it logged?”
“Sharpie, if you weren’t such good company, I’d strangle you. Your earlier answer recommended that we complete the rotations.”
“No, I noted that the first twelve had not been unprofitable. We could have completed the last three by now had we not spent time debating it.”
“Hilda honey, our cowardly Astrogator needed time to get his nerve back. By yumpin’ yiminy, once you’re all trained, I’m going to retire.”
“We would simply recall you, Zebbie. Each will go on doing what she can do best.”
“Time is out of joint. O curséd spite, that I was ever picked to set it right.”
“You misquoted.”
“I always do. What universe do we hit next?”
“Zebbie, we have three rotations to go, with four left on the four-votes list. One is useless but amusing and safe. The other three are places to live but each has its own dangers. As the chief of surgery used to say: ‘I dunno, let’s operate and find out.”
Zebbie sighed. “All hands, stand by to rotate. Execute!”
Green fire – “Rotate! Execute!”
A formless red fog – “Gay Sagan!”
Mars looked like an old friend. Zebbie wiped his brow and said, “Whew! One to go – Cap’n Deety hon, let’s get it over with. Sharpie?”
“Fifteenth universe – set!” I reported.
“Execute!”
We came out into a starry universe. “Cap’n Deety hon, don’t these constellations look familiar?” Zebbie commented.
“I think so.”
“They are familiar,” I insisted. “Except that there is a very bright star near the Gemini. That ought to be the Sun. We’re way out past Pluto, where the comets spend the winter. Let’s move in and find Earth.”
“Don’t be in a hurry,” said Zebbie. “Science Officer, what was that first rotation? Green fire?”
“How about the deadly green nebula in ‘The Legion of Space’? – on the trip to the Runaway Star where Aladoree had been taken.”
“That was on your list?”
“All of us voted for it.”
“What was that red fog we rotated into next?”
“That one is harder to figure,” I admitted. “It could be any universe by a writer who paid respectful attention to astronomy – Bova, Haldeman, Schmidt, Pournelle, Niven, Benford, Clement, Anderson, and so forth. But there were four votes for ‘The Mote in God’s Eye.’ Whether the two old gentlemen had anything to do with it or not, I think we blundered into a red giant. A red giant is close to what we call vacuum. Anyhow, we weren’t hurt; we were there about two seconds.”
“Less than that, Sharpie; you set it with one click, and barely had your thumb off the execute button. Captain, do you wish to transit toward that bright star?”
“Let’s chop off thirty or forty A.U.’s,” Deety decided, “and get a rough cross fix. Maybe that will give us a disc Pop can measure. If not, we’ll narrow it down until it does. Then place us one A.U. from the Sun and we’ll spot Earth easily. Astrogator – advice.”
“Captain, I advise making that first jump with wide offset. Miss the Sun by at least one A.U. At least.”
“Yes! Zebadiah, make that cross fix wide. Uh – ” Deety peered around. “There’s the Sickle. Have Pop aim for Regulus.”
My husband said, “I’m swinging toward Regulus. Zeb, how do I take the angular width of the Solar disc without broiling an eyeball?”
“The gunsight has a built-in polarizer. Didn’t I show you?”
“You did not.”
“Sorry. Captain Deety hon, I request permission to relieve the Chief Pilot for this.”
“Permission granted. But, Zebadiah, you be careful.”
“Spacecraft! Identify yourself!” – the voice was everywhere.
Zebbie jerked with surprise. (Me, too!) “Who said that?”
“Lensman Ted Smith, Commander Galactic Patrol, commanding Patrol Vessel ‘Nighthawk.’ Entity, I regret being forced to enter your mind but you have been ignoring sub-ether radio for four minutes thirty-two seconds. Switch it on and I will get out of your mind. Do not maneuver; we have weapons on you.”
“Captain,” Jacob whispered, “Hilda is set to rotate.”
Deety shook her head, touched Zebbie’s arm, pointed to herself.
“Lensman, this is Captain Deety, commanding Continua Craft Gay Deceiver. We don’t have sub-ether radio. Do you read me?”
“I read you loud and clear. What happened to your sub-ether radio? Do you need help?”
“Captain Smith, I don’t have sub-ether radio at all. We don’t need help but could use astrogational advice. Where are we?”
“The important point is that you are in my patrol sector, an unscheduled ship insufficiently identified. I repeat: DO NOT MANEUVER. By order of the Galactic Patrol. Do you understand?”
“I understand you, Lensman. I regret having intruded into your patrol space. This is a private ship engaged in peaceful exploration.”
“That is what I am about to determine, Captain. Stay where you are, make no hostile moves, and you will be safe.”
“Lensman, can you see through my eyes?”
“Are you inviting me to do so?”
“Certainly. Use my eyes, use my ears. But don’t try to take over my mind or this ship will disappear.” Deety squeezed my shoulder; I signaled “Roger” with a pat.
“I warn you not to maneuver. Ah … interesting!”
I snapped, “Captain Smith, quit threatening us! A Lensman is supposed to be an officer and gentleman! I intend to report you to the Port Admiral! You’re an oaf!”
“Sorry, Madam. I do not wish to offend but I have duty to perform. Captain, will you please turn your head so that I can see who is speaking?”
“Certainly. Let me introduce all of us. On my left” – Deety looked at Zebbie – “is Doctor Zebadiah Carter. In front of him is Doctor Jacob Burroughs. On his right” – Deety looked at me – “is his wife, Doctor Hilda Burroughs, xenobiologist and chief of science. Let me offer you this advice, Lensman: It is never safe to offend Doctor Hilda.”
“I gathered that impression, Captain. Doctor Hilda, I would not willingly offend – but I have duties. Shall I get out of your mind entirely? If you speak to me, I will hear with Captain Deety’s ears. She can, if she will, repeat to you my thought in answer.”
“Oh, it’s all right for conversation. But don’t try to go deeper! Mentor would not like it – as you know!”
“Doctor Hilda, your mention of … a certain entity… surprises me – from one who is not a Lensman.”
“I don’t need a Lens. You can check that with Arisia.”
Deety said hastily, “Lensman, are you satisfied that we are a peaceful party of scientists? Or is there something more that you wish to know?”
“Captain, I can see that this ship is not a pirate vessel – unarmed and unarmoured. Oh, I note controls for a coherent light gun but that wouldn’t be much use to a pirate. Nor can I visualize two men and two women attempting to attack a space liner. But keeping the peace is just one of my responsibilities. Your ship, small as it is, could be carrying millions of credits in contraband.”
“Say what you mean, Lensman,” I snapped. “Drugs. But don’t use the word ‘zwilnik.'”
Mentally, we could hear him sigh. “Yes, Doctor Hilda – drugs. But I did not introduce that offensive word into the discussion.”
“I heard you thinking it. Don’t do it again!”
“Lensman,” Deety said quickly, “we have medical drugs. The only one that could interest you is a few milligrams of morphine. But we carry no thionite, no bentlam, no hadive, no nitrolabe. You are using your Lens; you know that I’m telling the truth.”
“Captain, it’s not that easy. Before I hailed you I did try a slight probe – please, Doctor Hilda; it was in line of duty! I’ve never encountered minds so fully blocked. And this is a most curious craft. It is obviously designed for aerodynamic use rather than space. Yet here you are – and I can’t see how you got here. I have no choice but to detain you and to examine this ship thoroughly. If necessary, take it apart piece by piece.”
“Lensman,” Deety said earnestly, “don’t be hasty. You can search more thoroughly by Lens than by other means. Go ahead. We’ve nothing to hide and we have a great deal to offer the Patrol. But you won’t get it by pushing us around.”
“You certainly won’t! Cap’n, let’s leave! I’m tired of stupidity!” – and I snapped, “Gay Sagan!”
Mars-zero was on our starboard bow. That dead rock looked awfully good to me.
Zebbie said, “Captain, did you order the copilot to execute?”
I said, “Don’t bother Deety with it, Zebbie. I did it without permission. Solely my decision.”
Zebbie frowned unhappily. “Sharpie, I thought you would be our model Girl Scout while Deety is skipper. Why?”
“Zebbie, you can rotate back there in no time. But I would like to be dropped first. Imperial House. Or Minus-J. Somewhere.”
“Why, Hilda?” my husband asked.
“Jacob, meet your friendly neighborhood zwilnik. Commander Ted Smith of the Galactic Patrol – a fine officer; I’m certain, as Dr. E. E. Smith saw to it that no unworthy person could ever wear the Lens – was getting unpleasantly close. That’s why I was so fierce with the poor man.”
Deety said, “But, Aunt Hilda, E. E. Smith’s world is just the sort of world we’ve been seeking.”
“Maybe we’ll go back. But not until I’ve had a chance to dump two pounds of concentrated extract of Cannabis magnifica. Dr. Wheatstone tells me that it is incredibly valuable in therapy, as the base for endless drugs. But I had a hunch that Commander Smith would confiscate it, impound the Smart Girl, arrest all of us – and convict me. But that isn’t all, Zebbie. Doctor Smith created one of the most exciting universes I know of. To read about, not to live in. With that endless Boskone War – must have been going on; they were looking for zwilniks – you have to be as smart as Kimball Kinnison to stay alive… and even he gets chopped up now and again. Deety and I need a good baby-cotcher and I’m sure they have them. But we have months to find one. Let’s not deliberately back into a war.”
Deety didn’t hesitate. “I agree with Aunt Hilda. If we go back, it will not be while I’m captain. Hillbilly, you didn’t disobey orders; you used your head in an emergency.” I thought Deety was going to ask me how and when I got Cannabis magnifica extract… but she didn’t.
“Jake,” Zebbie said, “we’re overruled. Where now, Captain? Earth-Teh-one-plus?”
“First we’d better pick a place to spend the night, and hold an election.”
“Why, Deety, you’ve served less than twelve hours!”
“It will be about twenty-four hours when we lift off tomorrow. I’m not going to ask for nominations; we’ve all had a turn at it; we are now balloting for permanent captain.”
I expected Zebbie to be picked. But there were three for me, one for Zebbie – my ballot.
I seemed to be the only one surprised. Zebbie said to Deety, “Ask to be relieved now, hon. The short-timer syndrome is bad for anyone but worse for a C.O. – it demoralizes her crew.”
“Aunt Hilda, will you relieve me?”
I pondered it half a second. “I relieve you, Deety.”
“Goody! I think I’ll take a nap.”
“I think you’ll take the verniers. Zebbie and Jacob stay in the jobs they’re in. Prepare to maneuver. Copilot, set for Oz. If you don’t know how, ask your father.”
“Set verniers for Oz?”
I took a deep breath to calm down. “Before anyone starts asking ‘Why?’ the answer is: Pipe down and do your job. Before we start on Teh axis, I want to ask questions. We talked to Glinda about our problem. We didn’t talk directly to the others. I mean Ozma and Professor Wogglebug and the Little Wizard and possibly others. Family, magicians who can install two bathrooms in a Ford and never have it show can also help us spot vermin if we ask the right questions. Deety, are you having trouble setting for Oz?”
“Captain, why set verniers? Gay has our parking spot in her perms. Codeword ‘Glinda.”
A few seconds later Gay called out, “Hi, Tik-Tok!”
“Wel-come back, Miss Gay De-cei-ver. Glin-da told me that you would be gone on-ly a few mi-nutes, so I wai-ted here for you. I am deep-ly hap-py to see you a-gain.”

Chapter XXXVII

The First Law of Biology

Zeb:
“Stand by to maneuver,” I ordered – at the conn by Captain Sharpie’s wish “Hello, Gay.”
“Howdy, Zeb. You look hung over.”
“I am. Gay Home!”
Arizona was cloudless. “Crater verified, Captain Hilda.”
“Teh axis one plus – set, Captain,” Deety reported.
“Execute!”
“No crater, Cap’n Auntie. No house. Just mountains.” Deety added, “Teh-one-minus – set.”
“Roger, Deety. Routine check, Captain?”
“Voice routine, short schedule.” (I think that is what got Sharpie elected permanent C.O. – she never hesitates.)
“Gay Deceiver. Sightseeing trip. Five klicks H-above-G.”
“Ogle the yokels at five thousand meters. Let’s go!”
“Deety, keep your thumb on the button. Gay – Miami Beach.”
Below lay a familiar strip city. “Captain?”
“Zebbie, note the crowded streets. Sunny day. Beaches empty. Why?”
“Bogie six o’clock low!” Jake yelped.
“Gay Zoom!”
Earth-Teh-one-plus swam warm and huge. Opposite us a hurricane approached Texas. I asked, “Want to see more, Captain?”
“Zebadiah, how can we see more when we haven’t seen any?”
“But Cap’n Sharpie has, Deety. Folks, I’m unenthusiastic about a world where they shoot without challenging. Jake, your bogie was a missile?”
“I think so, Zeb. Collision course with Doppler signature over a thousand knots and increasing.”
“A missile – out of Homestead-analog, probably. Captain, these blokes are too quick on the trigger.”
“Zebbie, I find empty beaches more disturbing. I can think of several reasons why they would be empty on a nice day – all unpleasant.”
“Want to check San Diego? I can get more scram time by increasing H-above-G.”
“No, we have over forty thousand analogs on this axis; we’ll stick to doctrine. Shop each world just long enough to find something wrong – ‘Black Hats,’ war, low technology, no human population, bad climate, overpopulated, or factor X. If we don’t find our new Snug Harbor in the next four months, we’ll consider returning to Doctor Smith’s world.”
“Hillbilly, if we wait there to have our babies, then wait again until they are big enough to travel, we’ll never find Snug Harbor.”
“I said, ‘consider.’ We may find a place to shack up for five months or so, then slam back to Galactic Patrol Prime Base hospital for the Grand Openings. Could be an empty world – no people, pleasant otherwise. Food is now no problem and we get water from Oz. All we lack is television -“
“That’s no lack!”
“Deety, I thought you liked ‘Star Trek’?”
“Auntie Captain, we’ve got our own star trek now.”
“Hmm – Deety, you and I should go easy on this star trek. I’m going to I’m having my first one past forty and I’m going to be very careful – exercise, diet, rest, the works.”
“I surrender. Let’s get cracking, Cap’n Hillbilly.”
“Take it, Zebbie.”
“Copilot, execute!”
Earth-Teh-one-minus replaced Teh-one-plus. “Jacob, it doesn’t look right. Astrogator, I want us up a hundred kilometers, over – make it Mississippi Valley about St. Louis. Want to change attitude?”
“Yes, please. Jake, point Gay at your target; it will skip setting angle.” The craft’s nose dipped and steadied.
“How’s that?”
“Fine, Jake. Deety, set L axis plus transition ninety-nine thousand klicks.”
“Set, Zebadiah.”
“Execute.” We popped out high over fields of ice. “Sneak up on it, Cap’n?”
“Never mind. Zebbie, that’s what I call a hard winter.”
“A long winter. Actually it’s summer, I think; Earth-analogs should be in the same place in orbit as Earth. Jake?”
“By theory, yes. Doesn’t matter either way; that’s glaciation. Deety has set Teh-two-plus.”
“We can’t homestead on an ice sheet. Execute.”

“Zebbie, how many ice ages so far?”
“Five, I think. Deety?”
“Five is right, Zebadiah. Plus two worlds with major war, one where they shot at us, and one so radioactive that we got out fast!”
“So we’re hitting ice more often than not.”
“Five to four has no statistical significance, Zebadiah. At least Aunt Hilda hasn’t spotted even one ‘Black Hat.”
“Sharpie, how good are your magic spectacles?”
“Zebbie, if I see them walk, I’ll spot ’em, no matter how they’re disguised. In the simulations Glinda and Wizard cooked up, I spotted their gait every time Deety identified it by Fourier analysis.”
“You feel confident, that’s enough.”
“Zebbie, I don’t have clairvoyance; there wasn’t time to train me. But Glinda got me highly tuned to their awkward gait, both with and without splints. I want to discuss something else. According to geologists, when we were home – Earth where we were born, I mean – we were in a brief warm period between glaciations.”
“If geologists are right,” I admitted.
“If so, we’ll usually hit glaciation.”
“Probably. ‘If – ‘”
“Yes, ‘if – ‘ But we now know what glaciation looks like. If you and Jacob and Deety can make it a drill, we can flip past ice ages as fast as you spot one.”
“We’ll speed it up. Jake.”
“Zebadiah, wait!”
“Why, Deety? We’re about to translate.”
“Pop, you told me to set for Teh-five-plus.”
“Jacob?” Captain Sharpie said.
“That’s right, Captain.”
“What’s the trouble, Deety?”
“Aunt Hilda, I said that five-to-four had little statistical significance. But so far, all glaciations have been in Teh-minus. That could be chance but -“
” – but doesn’t look like it. You want us to explore axis Teh-plus first? Astrogator?”
“No, no! Captain Auntie, I would like to see enough of Teh-minus to have a significant sample. At least a hundred.”
“Jacob?”
“Hilda, if we check in one pseudodirection only – say Teh-minus – it’ll be four or five times as fast as hunting back and forth between plus and minus. Deety can set with one click; Zeb can yell ‘Execute!’ as soon as you are satisfied.”
“Jacob, we’ll get Deety her sample. But faster. Astrogator, have our copilot set Teh-six-minus”
“Uh… set, Captain.”
“When Zebbie says ‘Go,’ Jacob, you and Deety flip them past as fast as you can without waiting for orders. All we’ll be looking for is ice ages; we can spot one in a splitsecond. If anyone sees a warm world, yell ‘Stop!’ Deety, can Gay count them?”
“She’s doing so, Captain. We both are.”
“Okay. I’m going to give my magic specs a rest – we’re looking for nothing but glaciers versus green worlds. Questions?”
“Run out Teh-minus as fast as I can set and translate. Stop when anyone yells. Aye aye, Cap’n Hillbilly honey.”
Sharpie nodded to me; I snapped, “Go!”

“STOP!” yelped Deety.
“Jacob, I’ve never seen so much ice! Deety, how many martinis would that make?”
“On the rocks or straight up?”
“Never mind; we’re out of vermouth. Did you get your sample?”
“Yes, Captain. One hundred ice ages, no warm worlds. I’m satisfied.”
“I’m not. Zebbie, I want to extrapolate logarithmically – go to Teh-minusone-thousand, then ten thousand, a hundred thousand, and so on. Jacob?”
Jake looked worried. “Hilda, my scales can be set for vernier setting five, or one hundred thousand. But that translation would take us more than twice around a superhyper great circle – I think.”
“Elucidate, please.”
“I don’t want to get lost. My equations appear to be a description of six-dimensional space of positive curvature; they’ve worked – so far. But Euclidean geometry and Newtonian mechanics worked as long as our race didn’t monkey with velocities approaching the speed of light. Then the approximations weren’t close enough. I don’t know that the plenum can be described with only six space-time coordinates. It might be more than six – possibly far more. Mathematics can be used for prediction only after test against the real world.”
“Jacob, what is the ‘real world’?”
“Ouch! Hilda, I don’t know. But I’m afraid to get too many quanta away from our world – world-zero, where we were born. I think the extrapolation you propose would take us more than twice around a superhyper great circle to – What world, Deety?”
“World-six-thousand-six-hundred-eighty-eight on Teh-minus axis, Pop. Unless it’s skewed.”
“Thanks, Deety. Captain, if we arrived there, we could return to Earth-zero by one setting. ‘If – ‘ Instead of a superhyper great circle we might follow a helix or some other curve through dimensions we know not of.”
“Pop, you took what I said and fancied it up.”
“R.H.I.P., my dear. You will appear as junior author on the monograph you’ll write and I’ll sign.”
“Pop, you’re so good to me. Wouldn’t Smart Girl return us simply by G, A, Y, H, O, M, E?”
“Those programs instruct a machine that has built into it only six dimensions. Perhaps she would… but to our native universe so far from Earth-zero that we would be hopelessly lost. If Zeb and I were bachelors, I would say, ‘Let’s go!’ But we are family men.”
“Deety, set the next one. Teh-five-plus?”
“Right, Zebadiah. But, Captain Auntie, I’m game! The long trip!”
“Me, too,” agreed Captain Sharpie.
I said in a tired voice, “Those babies are ours as much as they are yours – Jake and I are taking no unnecessary risks. Captain Sharpie, if that doesn’t suit you, you can find another astrogator and another chief pilot.”
“Mutiny. Deety, shall we pull a ‘Lysistrata’?”
“Uh… can’t we find some reasonable middle ground?”

“Looks like a place to stop for lunch. Sharpie, want to sniff for ‘Black Hats’?”
“Take me down, please. About two thousand klicks above ground.”
“Will you settle for five?”
“Sissy pants. Yes, if you’ll first have Jacob zip us around night side to check for city lights.”
“Give her what she wants, Jake, by transiting; an orbit takes too long. ‘Give me operations… way out on some lonely atoll! For I… am too young to diiiie! I just want to grow old!'”
“You’re off key, Zebbie.”
“Deety likes my singing. Anybody spot city lights?”
We found no cities. So Jake put us down for lunch on a lonely atoll, Hilda first making certain that it had nothing on it but palm trees. Deety stripped, started exercises.
Hilda joined her; Jake and I set out lunch, having first dressed in stylish tropical skin. The only less-than-idyllic note came from my objecting to Deety’s swimming in the lagoon. Hilda backed me up. “Deety, that’s not a swimming pool. Anything in it has defenses or couldn’t have survived. The first law of biology is eat or be eaten. A shark could have washed over the reef years back, eaten all the fish – and now be delighted to have you for lunch.”
“Ugh!”
“Deety, you’d be very tasty,” I soothed.

Chapter XXXVIII

” – under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make them afraid – “

Jacob:
Teh positive took longer to search than Teh-negative for the very reason that its analogs were so much like our native planet.
An uninhabited planet could be dismissed in ten minutes; one heavily populated took no longer. A planet at too low a level of culture took hardly longer – a culture with animal-drawn carts and sailing ships as major transport we assumed not to have advanced medicine. But most took longer to reject.
At the end of a week we had rejected ninety-seven… which left us only 40.000 + to inspect!
That evening, at “Picnic Island,” our private atoll, my daughter said, “Cap’n Auntie, we’re doing this wrong.”
“How, Deetikins?”
“Ninety-seven in a week, over forty thousand to go. At that rate we finish in eight years.”
Her husband said, “Deety, we’re getting faster.”
My beloved said, “Astrogator, do you know more about calculating than does the Copilot?” Zeb shut up. We had learned that when Hilda addressed us by titles, she was speaking as captain. I flatter myself that I learned it quicker whereas Zeb was a bit slow. “Go ahead, Deety.”
“If we go on checking this way, it won’t get better; it will get worse. Here’s the first weeks’ score” – she passed around her summary; it read:

Earth analogs checked97
Average time per planet34 mins 38 1/2 sec
Maximum time2 days 3 hrs 52 mins
Minimum time13 seconds
Median time12 mins 07 sec

I studied it. “Deety, we can reduce that average time. Over two days was much too long to check analog twenty-six.”
“No, Pop, we should have taken longer on twenty-six. It’s that thirteen seconds that is bankrupting us.”
“Daughter, that’s preposter – “
“Chief Pilot.”
“Yes, dear?”
“Please let the Copilot finish… without interruption.” I retired from the field, annoyed, to wait until my advice was indispensable – soon, I felt sure.
“Aunt Hilda, if we gave each analog thirteen seconds, it would take us eighteen and a half days… and we would learn nothing. I want to cut the minimum time way, way down – make it routine – and learn something. I wish Gay could talk, I do.”
“But, dear, she can. We can be in Oz in two minutes. The dirty dishes can wait.”
My daughter looked startled. “Pass me the Stupid Hat.”
“But we won’t go to Oz before tomorrow. We need to figure out what the problem is, first – and I need a night of cuddle with Jacob for the good of my soul.” Hilda reached out and took my hand.
Hilda went on, “Deety, remember how fast we mapped Mars-Tau-ten-positive once we let Gay do it her way? Isn’t there some way to define a locus – then turn her loose?”
We discussed it until bedtime. I set the locus myself by vetoing going past Earth-analog-Teh-positive-five-thousand until we were certain that no satisfactory analog existed in those first five thousand. “Family,” I told them, “call me chicken, to use Zeb’s favorite excuse. I know so little about this gadget I invented that I am always afraid of getting lost. All rotations have been exactly ninety degrees. In theory I can define a quantum of angle and each such quantum should render accessible another sheaf of universes. In practice I can’t do machining of that quality. Even if I could, I would be afraid to risk our necks on a gadget required to count angular quanta.
“But I have another objection – a gut feeling that worlds too far out Teh axis will be too strange. Language, culture, even dominant race – I confess to prejudice for human beings, with human odors and dandruff and faults. Supermen or angels would trouble me more than vermin. I know what to do with a ‘Black Hat’ – kill it! But a superman would make me feel so inferior that I would not want to go on living.”
Deety clapped. “That’s my Pop! Don’t worry, Pop; the superman who can give you an inferiority complex hasn’t been hatched.” I think she meant that as a compliment.
We worked the parameters down to three: climate warm enough to encourage nudity; population comfortably low; technology high. The first parameter was a defense against B.H. vermin: they require antinudity taboo to bolster their disguises. The last parameter would tend to indicate advanced obstetrics. As for population, every major shortcoming of our native planet could be traced to one cause: too many people, not enough planet.
Hilda decided to standardize: one locale, one H-above-G. The locale was (in Earth-zero terminology) Long Beach, California, over its beach one klick H-above-G – dangerously low were it not that Gay would never be in any universe longer than one second. Any speed-of-light weapon can destroy in less than a second, but can its human-cum-machine operators identify a target, bear on it, and fire in one second? We thought not. We hoped not.
At analogs of Long Beach, it should be midsummer, hot, dry, and cloudless. If that beach was comfortably filled but not crowded, if the people were nude, if area adjacent to the beach showed high technology by appearance, then that analog should be checked further.
Forty minutes in Oz changed much of our planning.

Tik-Tok was waiting for his lady friend as usual but kept politely quiet while Deety talked with Gay – and so did Zeb and so did I, not because we have Tik-Tok’s courtly manners but because Captain Hilda was blunt. Gay understood the Celsius scale, i.e., both freezing and boiling water temperatures lay in her experience and splitting the interval into one hundred parts was no trouble. She had enough parts that needed to be neither too hot nor too cold that awareness of her surroundings both ambient and radiant was as automatic as breathing is for me. As for radio and television (both gauges of technical level) she could sample all infrared flux (as she had done at Windsor City). Crowds on beach? Would it suffice to count bodies on a sample one hundred meters square?
But Gay had a quite un-human complaint: “Deety, why must I hang around a thousand milliseconds for a job I can do in ten? Don’t you trust me?”

So instead of 57 years – or 8 years – or 18 1/2 days – or 11.4 hours – our preliminary survey was complete less than a minute after we left Oz – 5000 universes in fifty seconds. Gay Deceiver displayed her results as three curves representing temperature, body count, density of communication-frequency radiation – abscissa for all running from Earth-zero to Earth-analog-5000-Teh-plus.
Those curves told one thing at once: No need to search past analog 800; glaciation had returned.
In the lower right corner was displayed: 87. Zeb asked why. “Nulls,” said Deety. “Gay couldn’t get readings. Storm, earthquake, war, anything. Gay Deceiver.”
“Hi, Deety! We whupped ’em!”
“You surely did, Smart Girl; Tik-Tok will be proud of you. Change scale. Display zero through eight hundred.”
As scale expanded, figure 87 dropped to 23. Zeb said, “Deety, I’m curious about those twenty-three. Will you have S.G. display their designations?”
“Certainly, Zebadiah, but may I take it in planned order?”
“Sure but just let me find out first -“
“Astrogator,” Sharpie said flatly, “isn’t this your day as K.P.?”
We were at Picnic Island, examining results. I suppressed a smile; “slunk” describes the way Zeb left the cabin. Later I was unsurprised to see my tiny treasure giving Zeb an unusually warm hug and kiss. Our Captain has an efficient system of rewards and punishments – never so described.
Deety instructed Gay to eliminate all worlds with a body count higher than that of the Earth-zero beach, and all worlds chillier by five degrees (my daughter was bracketing to avoid false readings from unseasonable weather).
With elimination of high population, cold climate, and low technology as indicated by low or nil flux of communication frequencies, my daughter had us down to seventy-six worlds, plus twenty-three to reexamine – had eliminated over four thousand worlds – and it was still two hours till lunch time!
Deety had Gay display temperatures of the seventy-six. The curve was no longer continuous, but a string of beads, with clumps. I said, “Hilda my love, I’ll wager ten back rubs that at least half of the nulls fit into that gap” – and indicated a break at the maximum of the temperature curve.
Hilda hesitated. “Why, Jacob?”
“My dear, figures mean little to me until expressed geometrically. Curves are bold print. I’ll give you odds.”
“What odds?”
“Don’t be suckered, Auntie Cap’n! Pop, I’ll take your end of the bet, give you two to one, and spot you a point.”
A back rub from Deety is a treat; she has strong hands and knows how. But I answered, “Ladies, I must start lunch. Deety, when we make visual check, let’s include Antarctica as well as Greenland, at that break.”
“Two points, Pop?” I pretended not to hear.
That same day we trimmed it down to six worlds, all warm, all free of body taboos, all high technology, all acceptably low in population, all free of major war or overt preparations, all with some version of English as the major North American language. It was time to pick a world by inspection on the ground.

How to make contact was much discussed. Hilda chopped it by saying: “One way is to land on the White House lawn and say, ‘Take me to your leader!’ The other is to be as sneaky as a ‘Black Hat.’ Let me know when you reach consensus.” She went through the bulkhead and dogged the door.
An hour later I rapped on the bulkhead; she rejoined us. “Captain,” I reported formally, “we have reached consensus. Each is afraid of the open approach; authorities might confiscate our car, we might wind up as prisoners.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “Twice we just missed it.”
“Precisely. The expression ‘sneaky as a “Black Hat”‘ is distasteful -“
“I so intended.”
I went doggedly on: ” – but sneakiness is not immoral per se. A mouse at a cat show is justified in being inconspicuous; so are we. We merely seek information. I am expendable; therefore I will scout on the ground.”
“Hold it. This is unanimous? Deety? Zebbie?”
“No,” my daughter answered. “I didn’t get a vote. You and I are barred from taking risks. Pregnant, you know.”
“I certainly do know! Jacob, I asked for consensus on method. I did not ask for volunteers. I’ve picked the scout I consider best qualified.”
I said, “My dear, I hope you have picked me.”
“No, Jacob.”
“Then I’m your boy,” said Zebbie.
“No, Zebbie. This is spying, not fighting. I’m doing this job myself.”
I interrupted, “Hilda, where you go, I go! That’s final.”
Our captain said gently, “Beloved, I hope you don’t stick to that. If you do, we’ll elect another skipper. You are my candidate.”
“Dear, I was trying to -“
” – take care of me. Nevertheless you are my candidate. Deety is too reckless; Zebbie too cautious. I’ll carry out whatever duties you assign, including using the magic spectacles. Are you sticking to that ultimatum?”
“Uh, yes.”
“Even though your stubbornness could result in my death? I love you, dear, but I won’t take you with me on a spying mission. What happened to that ‘All for one and one for all’ spirit?”
“Uh… “
“Captain!”
“Yes, Zebbie?”
“You proved that you can be tough with your husband. Can you be tough with yourself? Look me in the eye and tell me that you know more about intelligence than I do. Or that you can fight your way out of a rumpus better than I can.”
“Zebbie, this isn’t military intelligence. You look me in the eye and tell me that you know more about obstetrics than I do. How do you prepare for leapfrog transfusion and when is it likely to be needed? Define eclampsia. What do you do about placenta previa? I am less likely to get into a rumpus than you are … and if I do, I’ll throw my arms around his neck and cry. However… convince me that you know as much about obstetrics as I do and I’ll consider letting you make contacts. In the meantime pick a midwestern town big enough for a fair-sized hospital and public library, and select a point for grounding and rendezvous; you will be in command while I’m gone.”
I interrupted. “Hilda, I absolutely forbid -“
“Chief Pilot! Pipe down!” My wife turned her face away from me. “Chief Master at Arms, restore discipline.”
“Aye aye, Ma’am! Jake, she means you.”
“But -“
“Shut up! Crewmen don’t give orders to the C.O., and I’ve had a bellyful of your attempts.”

Two hours later I was in Zeb’s seat, biting my nails and sweating, while Zeb had my seat. I had given unconditional parole – the alternative having been to go (or be stuffed) through the bulkhead, then wait, locked in. I am not a total fool; I gave my word.
Zeb held us in cloud cover while my daughter, wearing earphones, stayed in contact with Hilda. Gay’s cabin speaker was paralleled with the phones so that we could follow in part what went on below. Deety reported, “That fade is from entering a building; I could hear her footsteps. Zebadiah, if I fiddle with the gain, I might miss her as she comes out.”
“Don’t shift. Wait.”
Eternities later we heard Hilda’s sweet voice: “I’m heading for rendezvous. I no longer have to pretend that this is a hearing aid – but everybody accepted it as such. You needn’t be cautious picking me up; we’re leaving.”
Five minutes later we bounced and translated at once, then Zeb held her in cruise while Hilda reported:
“No trouble. Ze bewildair’ French ladee she zink les Americain’ verree gentils. Mais les arts medicals – poof! Infant mortality high, childbirth mortality gruesome. I could have left sooner but I got fascinated.”
“Hilda,” I protested, “you had me worried to death.”
“Jacob, I had to be certain; it’s such a nice world otherwise. Other contacts should not take as long as I’ve solved the money problem.”
“How?” Zebadiah asked. “I’ve been noodling that. There’s an even chance that private ownership of gold will be illegal. A standard trick used whenever a government is in trouble.”
“Yes, Zebbie – it’s illegal there, too. I still have the bullion you had me carry. Instead I sold that heavy gold chain I was wearing. Sorry, Deety; I had to.”
“Forget it, Hillbilly. That chain was a way to horde gold. Pop bought it for Mama Jane before they clipped the zeroes and remonetized.”
“Well… I found a public phone – didn’t try to use it; Edison would never have recognized it. But it had a phone book, so I looked up ‘gold’ – and found ‘licensed gold dealers’ and sold your chain -“
“And now you’re stuck with a lot of local money.”
“Zebbie! See why I didn’t let you go down by yourself? The dealer was of course a coin dealer, too – and I bought foreign silver coins, worn, small, oldish, dates without being old enough to be collectors’ items. French coins, but he didn’t have enough, so I filled out with Belgian, Swiss, and German.”
I said, “My dear, the coins you bought there will not be good here. Or at the next analog. Or the next.”
“Jacob, who – other than a professional – is certain of designs on foreign coins? – especially if they are a few years old and a bit worn. I got real silver, none of those alloys that don’t have the right ring to them. At most a shopkeeper will phone his bank and ask for the rate. That’s how I bought this,” my beloved said proudly, pulling out of Deety’s biggest purse a World Almanac.
I was not impressed. If she was going to buy a book, why not a technical manual that might contain new art, data Zeb and I could use?
My darling was saying, “We must buy one in each analog we ground in. It’s the nearest thing to an encyclopedia less than a kilo mass you’ll find. History, law, vital statistics, maps, new inventions, new medicine – I could have skipped the library and learned all I needed from this book. Zebbie! Turn to the list of U.S. Presidents.”
“Who cares?” Zeb answered, but did so. Shortly he said, “Who is Eisenhower? This shows him serving one of Harriman’s terms and one of Patton’s.”
“Keep going, Zebbie.”
“Okay – No! I refuse to believe it. Us Carters are taught to shoot straight, bathe every month even in the winter, and never run for office.”

Two days later Hilda and Zeb, as a French-tourist couple, found the world where we settled.
We slid in quietly, both through the histrionics of our “bewildered French lady” and Zeb’s unmalicious chicanery. Sometimes he was our French lady’s husband; other times he spoke English slowly with a strong Bavarian accent.
In this analog, the United States (called that, although boundaries differ) is not as smothered in laws, regulations, licensing, and taxes as is our native country. In consequence “illegally entered aliens” do not find it difficult to hide, once they “sling the lingo” and understand local customs.
Hilda and Zeb learned rapidly in a dozen towns, Deety and me “riding shotgun” in the sky. Deety and I learned from them and from radio. Then we moved to the Northwest, “natives” from back east, and coped with our only problem: how to keep Gay Deceiver out of sight.
Hilda and Deety hid her in the Cascades for three days while Zeb and I found and bought a farmhouse outside Tacoma-analog. That night we moved Gay into the barn, slapped white paint on the building’s windows, and slept in Gay, with a feeling of being home!
We own six hectares and live in the farmhouse in front of Gay’s hideaway. Gay will eventually go underground, protected by reinforced concrete; the barn will become a machine shop. We will build a new house over her bunker. Meanwhile, our old farmhouse is comfortable.
This United States, population under a hundred million, accepts immigrants freely. Zeb considered buying phony papers to let us enter “legally” – but Hilda decided that it was simpler to use Gay to smuggle us while we smuggled Gay. The outcome is the same; we will never be a burden to the state – once we get our machine shop and electronics lab set up, Zeb and I will “invent” hundreds of gadgets this country lacks.
We seem to be near the warmest part of an interglaciation. Wheat grows where our native world has frozen tundra; the Greenland icecap has vanished; lowlands are under water, coastlines much changed.
Climate and custom encourage light clothing; the preposterous “body modesty” taboo does not exist. Clothing is worn for adornment and for protection – never through “shame.” Nakedness is symbolic of innocence – these people derive that symbology from the Bible used in our native culture to justify the exact opposite. The same Bible – I checked. (The Bible is such a gargantuan collection of conflicting values that anyone can “prove” anything from it.)
So this is not a world where alien vermin can hide. A “man” who at all times kept arms and legs covered by long sleeves and long trousers would be as conspicuous as one in armor.
The sects here are mostly Christian – on a Saturday morning one sees families headed for church in their finest Sabbath-go-to-meeting clothes. But, since nakedness is symbolic of innocence, they undress in an anteroom to enter their temple unadorned. One need not attend services to see this; the climate favors light, airy structures that are mostly roof and slender columns.
The Bible affects their penal system, again by selective quotation: “Eye for eye, tooth for tooth -“
This results in a fluid code, with no intent to rehabilitate but to make the punishment fit the crime. I saw an example four days after we settled. I was driving our steam wagon and encountered a road block. A policeman told me that I could take a detour or wait twenty minutes; the highway was being used to balance a reckless driver.
I elected to pull over and wait. A man was staked with one leg stretched out at a right angle. A police wagon drove down that cleared highway, ran over his leg, turned and drove back over it.
An ambulance was waiting – but nothing was done for a timed seventeen minutes. Then surgeons amputated on the spot; the ambulance took him away and the block was removed.
I went back to my wagon and shook for many minutes, then returned home, driving cautiously. I didn’t tell our family. But it was reported on radio and the evening paper had pictures – so I admitted that I had seen it. The paper noted that the criminal’s insurance had been insufficient to cover the court’s award to the victim, so the reckless driver had not only lost his left leg (as had his victim) but also had had most of his worldly goods confiscated.
There is no speed limit and traffic regulations are merely advisory – but there are extremely few accidents. I have never encountered such polite and careful drivers.
A poisoner is killed by poison; an arsonist is burned to death. I won’t describe what is done to a rapist. But poisoning, arson, and rape are almost unknown.
My encounter with this brutal system of “balancing” almost caused me to think that my dear wife had been mistaken in picking this world-we should move! I am no longer certain. This place has no prisons, almost no crime, and it is the safest place to raise children I’ve ever heard of.
We are having to relearn history. “The Years of Rising Waters” explain themselves. The change came before 1600; by 1620 new shorelines had stabilized. That had endless consequences – mass migrations, political disorder, a return of the Black Death, and much immigration from Great Britain and the lowlands of Europe while the waters rose.
Slavery never established here. Indentures, yes – many a man indentured himself to get his family away from doomed land. But the circumstances that could have created “King Cotton” were destroyed by rising waters. There are citizens here of African descent but their ancestors were not slaves. Some have indentured ancestors, no doubt – but everyone claims indentured ancestors even if they have to invent them.
Some aspects of history seem to be taboo. I’ve given up trying to find out what happened in 1965: “The Year They Hanged the Lawyers.” When I asked a librarian for a book on that year and decade, he wanted to know why I needed access to records in locked vaults. I left without giving my name. There is free speech – but some subjects are not discussed. Since they are never defined, we try to be careful.
But there is no category “Lawyers” in the telephone book.
Taxation is low, simple – and contains a surprise. The Federal government is supported by a head tax paid by the States, and is mostly for military and foreign affairs. This state derives most of its revenue from real estate taxes. It is a uniform rate set annually, with no property exempted, not even churches, hospitals, or schools – or roads; the best roads are toll roads. The surprise lies in this: The owner appraises his own property.
There is a sting in the tail: Anyone can buy property against the owner’s wishes at the appraisal the owner placed on it. The owner can hang on only by raising his appraisal at once to a figure so high that no buyer wants it – and pay three years back taxes at his new appraisal.
This strikes me as loaded with inequity. What if it’s a family homestead with great sentimental value? Zeb laughs at me. “Jake, if anybody wants six hectares of hilly land and second-growth timber, we take the profit, climb into Gay – and buy more worthless land elsewhere. In a poker game, you figure what’s in the pot.”

PART THREE – Death and Resurrection

Chapter XXXIX

Random Numbers

Hilda:
Jacob stood, raised his glass. “Snug Harbor at last!”
Zebbie matched him. “Hear, hear!”
Deety and I sat tight. Zebbie said, “Snap it up, kids!” I ignored him.
Jacob looked concerned. “What’s the matter, dear one? Zeb, perhaps they don’t feel well.”
“It’s not that, Jacob. Deety and I are healthy as hogs. It’s that toast. For ten days, since we signed the deed, it’s been that toast. Our toast used to be: ‘Death to “Black Hats”!'”
“But, my dear, I promised you a new Snug Harbor. The fact that you girls are having babies made that first priority. This is the place. You said so.”
I answered, “Jacob, I never called this ‘Snug Harbor.’ I reported that I had found a culture with advanced obstetrics, and customs that made it impossible for Black Hats to hide. I wasn’t asked what I thought of it.”
“You signed the deed!”
“I had no choice. My contribution was one fur cape and some jewelry. Deety put in more – but effectively no gold. She fetched her stock certificates, other securities, some money – paper – and a few coins. I fetched two twenty-five newdollar bills. Deety and I left Earth as paupers. Each of us women – not ‘girls’!, Jacob – was once wealthy in her own right. But in buying this place, you two decided, you two paid for it – all we did was sign. We had no choice.”
Zebbie looked at Deety and said softly, “‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow,'” and took her hand.
Jacob said, “Thanks, Zeb. I, too, Hilda – if you don’t believe that, then you don’t believe I meant the rest: ‘ – for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health – ‘ But I did and I do.” He looked up. “Zeb, where did we go wrong?”
“Durned if I know, Jake. Deety, what’s the score? Give.”
“I’ll try, Zebadiah. Maybe all we should expect is washing dishes and wiping noses and changing diapers. But that doesn’t seem like a be-all and end-all when you’ve gone banging around the universes… stood guard for your husband while he bathed in a mountain stream … or – Oh, the devil with it! This place is good and clean and wholesome and dull! I’ll find myself joining the church just for company… then sleeping with the priest out of boredom!”
“Deety, Deety!”
“I’m sorry, Zebadiah. It would be boredom with Beulahland, not with you. The very hour we met, you saved my life; you married me before that hour was over, impregnated me before midnight, fought and killed for me only days later, saved my life twice more that same day, took me to another planet in another universe before midnight still that same day… and short hours later had again fought for me, twice. You are my gallant knight, sans peur et sans reproche. In the six weeks I have known you, you have gifted more romance, more glorious adventure, into my life than in all the twenty-two years before it. But the last twelve days – especially the last ten – have told me what we now look forward to.”
Deety paused to sigh; I said quietly, “She speaks for me.”
Deety went on, “You two would lay down your lives for us – you’ve come terrifyingly close. But what happened to your glorious schemes to rebuild the Solar System? To kill every last one of those vermin? Gay Deceiver sits in an old barn, dark and quiet – and today I heard you discussing how to market a can opener. Universes beyond the sky to the incredible Number of the Beast! – yet you plan to sell can openers while Hilda and I serve as brood mares. We haven’t even visited Proxima Centauri! Zebadiah – Pop! – let’s spend tonight looking for an Earth-type planet around Alpha Centauri – kill a million vermin to clean it, if that’s what it takes! Plan what planets to put on Earth’s Lagrange points. I’ll write programs to meet your grandest plans! Let’s go!”
My husband looked sad. Zebbie held Deety’s hand and said, “Deety, we don’t want to sell can openers. But you two are pregnant and we’ve gone to a lot of trouble to put you where you and our kids will be safe. Maybe it’s dull… but it’s your duty. Forget hunting vermin.”
“Just forget it? Zebadiah, why is Gay Deceiver loaded and ready for space? Power packs charged, water tanks full, everything? Do you and Pop have something in mind… while Hilda and I stay home and baby-sit?”
“Deety, if we did, it wouldn’t hurt to sell a few can openers first. You two and the kids must be provided for, come what may.”
“That Widow’s Walk again, Hillbilly. But, my husband, you have started from a false premise. You men want to protect Hilda and me and our kids at any cost – and we honor you for it. But one generation is as valuable as another, and men are as valuable as women. With modern weapons, a computer programmer is more use in war than a sniper. Or – forgive me, sir! – even an aerospace fighter pilot. I’m a programmer. I can shoot, too! I won’t be left out, I won’t!”
I gave Deety our signal to drop it. It doesn’t do to push a man too hard; it makes him stubborn. One can’t expect logic from males; they think with their testicles and act from their emotions. And one must be careful not to overload them. We had given them five points to stew over; we would save the sixth – the clincher – for later.
I waited three days… and struck from the other flank. Again Deety and I rehearsed: We would wrangle with each other and appeal to the men for support – crosswise.
“Jacob, what is ‘random’? Is it correct to say that ‘random’ is shorthand for ‘I don’t know’?”
Deety said scornfully, “Don’t let her trap you, Pop. She’s got the second law of thermodynamics mixed up with the second law of robotics – and doesn’t understand either one.” (I had to phrase this and insist; Deety didn’t want to say it. Deety is sweet, not the bitch I am.)
“‘Random’ is used a number of ways, my love, but it usually means a set in which the members are equal in probability of experiencing some event, such as being next to be chosen.”
“If they’re ‘chosen,’ how can it be ‘random’?”
Deety snickered.
Zebbie said, “Don’t let him snow you, Sharpie; ‘random’ means ‘I don’t know’ – as you said.”
“Aunt Hilda, pay no attention to Zebadiah. ‘Random’ is what you have when you maximize entropy.”
“Now, Daughter, that is hardly a mathematical statement -“
“Pop, if I gave it to her in mathematical language she’d faint.”
“Deety, quit picking on Sharpie,” Zebbie said sternly.
“I wasn’t picking on her. Hillbilly has this silly notion that we didn’t get anywhere hunting vermin because we went about it systematically… but every time we told Gay to shake up her random numbers and do as she pleased, we got results.”
“Well, didn’t we?” I put in, intentionally shrill. “We had endless failures… but every time we gave Gay her head – ‘Put her on random numbers,’ as Deety says – we never had a failure. ‘Random’ and ‘chance’ are not related. ‘Random chance’ is a nonsense expression.”
“Auntie darling, you’re out of your skull. Don’t worry, Pop; pregnant women often get the vapors.”
I indignantly listed things that could not be “random” or “chance” – then discovered that Deety and I had to start dinner. We left them wrangling, and were careful not to giggle within earshot.
After dinner, instead of that tired toast, Jacob said, “Hilda, would you explain your concept of ‘random’? Zeb and I have been discussing it and agree that there is some factor in our adventures not subject to analysis.”
“Jake, that’s your statement. I just said, ‘I dunno,’ and wiped the drool off my chin. Tell us, Sharpie.”
“But Jacob told us a month ago. There isn’t any such thing as ‘chance.’ It’s a way of admitting ignorance. I thought that I had begun to understand it when we started hitting storybook universes. Lilliput. Oz. Dr. Smith’s World. Wonderland. I was so sure of it – You remember three weeks ago after our second visit to Oz? I ordered a day of rest; we spent it on Tau axis instead of Teh.”
“Dullest day we had,” said Zebbie. “You put us in orbit around Mars. Not just one Mars but dozens. Hundreds. The only one worth a fiat dollar was the one we aren’t going back to. I got permission to go off duty and take a nap.”
“You weren’t on duty, Zebbie. You three slept or read or played crib. But I was searching for Barsoom. Not hundreds, Zebbie – thousands. I didn’t find it.”
“Hillbilly, you didn’t tell me!”
“Dejah Thoris, why bother to say that I had been chasing the Wild Goose? I swallowed my disappointment; next day we started searching Teh axis… and wound up here. Would I have found Barsoom had I asked Gay to run the search? Defined her limits, yes – as Zebbie did on Mars-ten – but, having defined it, told her to take her random numbers and find it. It worked on Marsten; we mapped a whole planet in a few hours. It worked on Teh axis. Why wouldn’t it be best for another search?”
Jacob answered, “Dearest, Zeb fed Gay a defined locus. But how would that apply to this, uh, speculative… search?”
“Jacob, Zebbie told us that Gay holds the Aerospace Almanac. That includes details about the Solar System, does it not?”
“More than I want to know,” Zebbie agreed.
“So Gay knows the Solar System,” I went on. “I thought of reading the Barsoom stories to Gay, tell her to treat them as surface conditions on the fourth planet – then take her random numbers and find it.”
Jacob said gently, “Beloved, the autopilot doesn’t really understand English.”
“She does in Oz!”
My husband looked startled. Jacob has immense imagination… all in one direction. Unless one jogs him. Zebbie caught it faster. “Sharpie, you would be loading her with thousands of bytes unnecessarily. Deety, if they’ve got those novels on New Earth – I’ll find out – what do you need to abstract in order to add to Gay’s registers an exact description of Barsoom, so that Gay can identify it – and stop her Drunkard’s Walk?”
“Don’t need books,” my stepdaughter answered. “Got ’em up here.” She touched her pretty strawberry-blonde curls. “Mmm… go to sleep thinking about it, tell it to Gay early tomorrow before I speak to anybody. Minimum bytes, no errors. Uh … no appetizer.”
“A great sacrifice, merely for science.”
“A one-eyed Texas honeybutter stack?… and the prospect of meeting the original Dejah Thoris? Never wears anything but jewels and is the most beautiful woman of two planets.”
“About that stack – Jane’s buttermilk recipe?”
“Of course. You’re not interested in the most beautiful woman of two planets?”
“I’m a growing boy. And ain’t about to be trapped into damaging admissions.” Zebbie stopped to kiss Deety’s retroussé nose and added, “Sharpie, Gay can’t handle the full Number of the Beast and anyhow Jake locked off most of it. What’s the reduced number, Jake?”
Deety promptly said, “Six to the sixth. Forty-six thousand, six hundred, fifty-six.”
Zebbie shook his head. “Still too many.”
Deety said sweetly, “Zebadiah, would you care to bet?”
“Wench, have you been monkeying with Gay?”
“Zebadiah, you put me in charge of programming. I have not changed her circuitry. But I learned that she has four registers of random numbers, accessible in rotation.”
“A notion of my own, Deety. Give them down time. Keep entropy at maximum.”
Deety did not answer. Her face assumed her no-expression. Her nipples were down. I kept quiet.
Zebbie noted it also – he does check her barometer; he once told me so. When silence had become painful, he said, “Deety, did I goof?”
“Yessir.”
“Can you correct it?”
“Do you wish me to, Zebadiah?”
“If you know how, I want it done soonest. If you need a micro electrician, I have my loupe and my micro soldering gear.”
“Not necessary, Zebadiah.” My stepdaughter made a long arm, got a walky-talky we keep indoors – with six hectares, it is convenient to carry one outside the house. “Gay Deceiver.”
“Hi, Deety,” came this tiny voice from the ear button. Deety did not place it in her ear. “Hello, Gay. More gain… more gain… gain okay. Retrieve Turing program Modnar. Execute.”
“Executed. Did he chew the bit?”
“Goodnight, Gay. Over.”
“Sleep tight, Deety. Roger and out.”
I cut in fast. “Gentlemen, the dishes can sit overnight. I vote for a ramble among the universes, say two hours, then early to bed. The other choice is, I think, channel one with the Beulahland Choir and channel two with Bible Stories Retold: ‘The Walls of Jericho.’ Both are highly recommended… by their sponsors.”

It felt good to be back in a jump suit. I was turning out lights, making sure windows were fastened, gathering up one walky-talky, when Zebbie stuck his head into the kitchen from the back door. “Captain?”
“Huh? Zebbie, do you mean me?”
“You’re the only captain around, Sharpie. What I started to report was: Captain, your car is ready.”
“Thank you, First Officer.”
He waited for me to put the butter away, then locked the back door behind me, opened the barn’s people door. I noted that the big doors were still closed – and remembered my borrowed panties four weeks and many universes away. I squirmed past Deety, got into my old familiar starboard-aft seat with a song in my heart.
Shortly Deety said, “Starboard door seal checked, First Officer.”
“Roger. Captain, ready for space.”
“Thank you. Has anyone left behind anything normally carried?”
“No, Captain. I replaced worn-out clothes. Added tools I could buy here.”
“Zebbie, it sounds as if you expected to lift without warning.”
“Habit, Captain. I’ve kept anything important in my – our – car rather than in that flat. Some I duplicated. Teethbreesh. Iodine. Some clothes.” Zebbie added, “Jake keeps basics here, too. ‘Be prepared!’ Troop ninety-seven, Cleveland.”
“Jacob? Anything you need?”
“No, Captain. Let’s go!”
“We will, dear. Deety, did you give Zebbie a schedule?”
“The one you planned. Not Barsoom, just fun. Two hours.”
“Astrogator, take the conn. Carry out schedule.”
“Aye aye, Ma’am. Gay Deceiver.”
“Hi, Zeb. This is great! Whyinhell did you lobotomize me?”
“Because I’m stupid. Random walk, Gay – transitions, translations, rotations, vectors, under all safety rules. Two hours. Five-second stops subject to ‘Hold’ from any of us.”
“May I place a ‘Hold’ myself?”
“Captain?”
I resorted to sophistry. “Astrogator, you said ‘any of us’ – which includes Gay.”
“Gay, paraphrase acknowledge.”
“I shall make unplanned excursions of all sorts with five-second pause at each vertex, plus ‘Hold’ option, plus safety restrictions, for two hours, then return here. Assumption: Program subject to variation by Captain or surrogate. Assumption confirmed?”
I was astonished. Deety had told me that Gay would sound almost alive if Zebbie used her full potential… but Gay sounded more alive, more alert, than she had in Oz.
“Assumption confirmed,” Zebbie answered. “Execute!”
For ten minutes – one hundred thirteen shifts – we had a “slide show” of universes from commonplace to weird beyond comprehension, when suddenly Gay told herself “Hold!” and added, “Ship ahoy!”
“Private Yacht Dora,” she was answered. “Is that you, Gay? What took you so long?”
I said, “Astrogator, I have the conn.” I was startled and scared. But a captain commands – or admits she can’t cut it and jumps overboard. A captain can be wrong – she cannot be uncertain.
Gay was saying rapidly: “Captain, I am not transmitting. I advise asking for Dora’s captain. I have transmitted: ‘Yes, this is Gay, Dora. I’m not late; we took the scenic route. Pipe down, girl, and put your skipper on.’ Captain, the mike is yours; they can’t hear me or any other voice inside me.”
“Thank you, Gay. Captain Hilda, master of Gay Deceiver, hailing Private Yacht Dora. Captain of Dora, please come in.”
In our central display appeared a face. We do not have television. This picture was flat rather than 3-D and not in color, just the greenish bright of radar. Nevertheless, it was a face, and lip movements matched words. “I’m Captain Long, Captain Hilda. We’ve been expecting you. Will you come aboard?”
(“Come aboard?”! So this is what comes of running around the universes in a modified duo, without so much as a pressure suit.) “Thank you, Captain Long, but I can’t accept. No air locks.”
“We anticipated that, Captain. Dora’s radius-nine-oh hold has been modified for Gay Deceiver. If you will do us the honor, we will take you inboard. Your wings are raked back, are they not? Hypersonic?”
“Yes.”
“I will move slowly, become dead in space with respect to you, then reorient and move to surround you as gently as a kiss.”
“If the Captain pleases – It is my duty to advise her if I see a mistake in prospect.”
I barely whispered. “Zebbie, you’re advising me not to?”
“Hell, no,” he answered aloud, secure in the knowledge that his voice would be filtered out. “Do it! What do we have to lose? Aside from our lives. And we’re sort o’ used to that.”
I answered, “Captain Long, you may take us inboard.”
“Thank you, Captain. The Dora will arrive in – I’m sorry; what time units do you use?”
Deety interrupted: “Gay, let my voice through. Captain Long -“
“Yes. You are not Captain Hilda?”
“I’m Deety. We call our units ‘seconds.’ These are seconds: one… two… three… four… five… six … seven… eight -“
“Synchronized! We call ours ‘Galactic seconds’ or simply ‘seconds’ but about three percent longer than yours. Dora will be almost touching your bow in… fifty-seven of your seconds.”

Spooky – Blackness blotting out stars, getting bigger. As it began to surround us, Jacob switched on forward grounding lights; we were entering a tunnel – being envaginated by it – with great precision and no apparent power – and it was clear that this enormous sheath was designed to fit us, even to alcoves for Gay’s doors. Shortly we were abreast them – cheerful to see that they were lighted. Oddest, we now seemed to be under gravity – perhaps midway between that of Earth-zero and Mars-ten.
“Outer doors closing,” came Captain Long’s voice. “Closed and sealing. Pres sure adjusting. Captain, we use nitrogen and oxygen, four to one, plus carbon dioxide sufficient to maintain breathing reflex. If content or pressure does not suit you, please tell me.”
“The mix described will suit us, Captain.”
“Don’t hesitate to complain. Pressure equalized. Debark either side, but I am on your starboard side, with my sister.”
I squirmed past Deety in order to introduce my family. Just as well, it gave me a chance to see them first. None of us can be shocked by skin but we can be surprised. But I’ve been practicing not showing surprise since grammar school as a major defense of my persona.
Here were two shapely young women, one with four stripes on each shoulder (painted? decals?), the other in three stripes – plus friendly smiles. “I’m Captain Long,” said the one with four stripes.
” – and her mutinous crew,” echoed the other.
“Commander Laurie, my twin sister.”
“Only we aren’t, because -“
” – we’re triplets.”
“Mutinies are limited to the midwatch -“
” – so as not to disturb passengers, of which -“
” – we have two more. Knock it off, Laurie, and -“
” – show them to their quarters. Aye aye, Cap’n.”
“Hey! Don’t I get introduced!” From all around came the voice that had hailed us.
“Sorry,” said Captain Long. “That’s our untwin sister, Dora. She runs many of the ship’s functions.”
“I run everything,” Dora asserted. “Laz and Lor are purely ornamental. Which one of you jokers shut off Gay?”
“Dora!”
“I retract the word ‘jokers.'”
“It would be kind,” Captain Long told me, “to let them chat. Our thought processes are so much slower than hers that a talk with another computer is a treat.”
“Deety?” I asked.
“I’ll wake her, Captain. Gay won’t go off and leave us.”
Captain Long’s mouth twitched. “She can’t. Those outer doors are armor.” I decided not to hear. Instead I said “Captain, your ship is beautiful.”
“Thank you. Let us show you to your quarters.”
“We planned to be away only two hours.”
“I don’t think that is a problem. Dora?”
“Time-irrelevant. They left home four-minus standard seconds ago; their planet is on a different duration axis. Neat, huh? For protein-type purposes they’ll get home when they left; I won’t even have to figure interval and reinsert them. Couple of weeks, couple of years – still four-minus seconds. Laz-Lor, we’ve lucked again!”
Gay’s voice (also from all around us) confirmed it: “Captain Hilda, Dora is right. I’m teaching her six-dimensional geometry; it’s new to her. When they are home – not just time-irrelevant – they march in Tau duration with Earth-Prime on ‘t’ axis – one we never explored.”
Jacob jerked his head up, looked for the voice. “But that’s prepos -“
I interrupted. “Jacob!”
“Eh? Yes, Hilda?”
“Let’s complete introductions, then go to the quarters the Captain offered us.”
“Introductions can be considered complete, Captain Hilda. ‘Deety’ has to be Doctor D. T. Burroughs Carter; the gentleman you called ‘Jacob’ must be your husband Doctor Jacob J. Burroughs. Therefore, the tall handsome young man is Doctor Zebadiah J. Carter, Doctor D.T.’s husband. Those are the people we were sent to fetch.”
I didn’t argue.
We followed a curving passageway, me with the Captain, her sister with my family. “One question, Captain?” I inquired. “Is nudity uniform in your ship? I don’t even have captain’s insignia.”
“May I give you a pair of stickums?”
“Do I need them?”
“As you please. I put these on just to receive you. People wear what they wish; Dora keeps the ship comfortable. She’s a good housekeeper.”
“What are your passengers wearing?”
“When I left the lounge, one was wearing perfume; the other had a sheet wrapped as a toga. Does your planet have dress taboos? If you will define them, we will try to make you feel at home.” She added, “Here are your quarters. If they don’t please you, tell Dora. She’ll rearrange partitions, or convert double beds into one giant bed, or four single beds, or any combination; we want you to be comfortable. When you feel like coming out, Dora will lead you.”
As the door contracted Jacob said, “You’ve proved your theories, Hilda. We’ve fallen into another story.”

Chapter XL

“Is there a mathematician in the house?”

Deety:
That suite had one bath – pardon me; “refresher” – bigger than three ordinary bathrooms. Hillbilly and I might be there yet, bathing and trying new gadgets, if Pop and Zebadiah hadn’t used brute force.
“Captain Auntie, what are you going to wear?”
“Chanel Number Five.”
“Clothes, I mean.”
“‘Clothes’? When our hostess is wearing skin? Jane brought you up better than that.”
“Wanted to be sure. That you’ll back me up with Zebadiah, I mean.”
“If Zebbie gets irrational, I’ll pin his ears back. If Jacob is ashamed of his skinny runt, he will be wise not to say so. Gentlemen, are you going to chicken? I mean: ‘Which way are you going to chicken?”
“Jake, they’re picking on us again.”
“Ignore them, comrade. Here are blue briefs your size. Hey! – with a stuffed codpiece! I’ll wear them myself.”
“Jacob!”
“Listen to the woman. Naked as a peeled egg, planning to meet strangers – and snapping at me for wanting to boast a little. Time was, my small and sultry bride, that a gentleman never left his chambers without a codpiece equal to his status.”
Auntie countered with: “Jacob, I spoke hastily. Shouldn’t the second-in-command wear a larger codpiece than the pilot? ‘ – equal to his status,’ you said.”
“But Allah took care of Zeb. Surely you’ve noticed, beloved?”
My husband butted in. “Jake! No barroom betting! Wear the blue; I’ll take these red ones.”
Zebadiah couldn’t get into the red briefs; the blue pair was too big for Pop. They traded. Same story. They traded back – each pair was too small. By great effort they got them on – they fell off.
Pop chucked his aside. “Dora!”
“Yes, sir.”
“Please connect me with your captain.”
“I was just funning! You wouldn’t tell on me – would you?”
Aunt Hilda took over. “He won’t tell, Dora. Are you and Gay getting acquainted?”
“We sure are! Gay’s been more places than I have-and I’ve been everywhere. She’s a smart girl!”
“We think so, thank you. What should our men wear?”
“I hold ambient at twenty-seven and deck pads a degree warmer; why wear anything? But for fetishists I supply minilaplaps of opaque tissue. In the ‘fresher, cubby nine-bee. Better get them to a therapist before those symptoms get infected. Good therapists where we’re going.”
I went looking for stowage 9-b; Aunt Hilda went on talking. “Where is that, Dora?”
“Please address such questions to the Captain. As housekeeper I can tell you anything. As astrogator I must refer questions – I mean they made me put a choke filter on that circuit! Is that fair? I ask you! I’m older than the twins.”
“It depends on the ship,” Aunt Hilda said, carefully not answering. “We each do what we do best; age is not a factor. Ask Gay.”
“Oh, she’s hooked in.”
“Sure am, Cap’n Hilda honey, through Dora’s ears – and eyes! Say, you look just like your voice – that’s a compliment.”
“Why, thank you, Gay!”
I interrupted: “Dora, are these laplaps?”
“Of course. But while we’re all here – You don’t need two ‘freshers in a ship that small. Gay needs the space for a Turing mod I’ll help with. So if the fetishists will clear their gear out of Buster Brown and – ” Dora broke off suddenly: “The Captain will be pleased to receive the Captain and ship’s cornpany of Gay Deceiver in the lounge at her convenience. That means ‘Right now.’ Follow me – little blue light.”
I had been trying on a green laplap. They didn’t weigh anything. Like wrapping fog around your hips. I snatched it off and wrapped it around Zebadiah: “That’s the nearest to nothing you’ll ever wear, Zebadiah, but it does the trick.” (I don’t blame men for being shy. Our plumbing is out of sight, mostly, but theirs is airconditioned and ofttimes embarrassingly semaphoric. Embarrasses them, I mean; women find it interesting, often amusing. My nipples show my emotions, too – but in the culture in which I grew up nipples don’t count that much.)

The little blue light led us around, then inboard. This “yacht” was large enough to get lost in. “Dora, can you see and hear in every part of the ship?”
“Of course,” the blue light answered. “But in the Commodore’s suite, I can scan only by invitation. R.H.I.P. Lounge straight ahead. Call me if you want me. Midnight snacks a house specialty. I’m the best.” The little light flicked out.
The lounge was circular and large; four people were gathered in one corner. (How does a circle have a corner? By arranging contours and cushions and nibble foods and a bar to turn it into a chummy space.) Two were the twins; they had peeled off the stickums which left no way to tell them apart.
The others were a young woman and a man who looked fortyish. He wasn’t the one wearing a sheet; the young woman was. He was wearing much the same as our men but more like a kilt and in a plaid design.
One twin took charge: “Commodore Sheffield, this is Captain Hilda, First Officer Carter, Chief Pilot Burroughs, Copilot Deety Carter. You’ve all met my sister but not our cousin, Elizabeth Long.”
“Now introduce us over again,” ordered “Commodore Sheffield.” (“Commodore Sheffield” indeed! Whom did he think he was fooling?)
“Yes, sir. Doctor Jacob Burroughs and his wife Hilda, Doctor Zebadiah Carter and his wife Doctor Deety Burroughs Carter. Doctor Elizabeth Long, Doctor Aaron Sheffield.”
“Wait a half,” my husband interrupted. “If you’re going to do that, I must add that Captain Hilda has more doctorates than all the three of us, together.”
Captain Long looked at her sister: “Lor, I feel naked.”
“Laz, you are naked.”
“Not where it matters. Commodore, do you still own that diploma mill in New Rome? What are you charging for doctor’s degrees? Nothing fancy, say a Ph.D. in theory of solid state. One for each of us.”
“How about a family discount, Ol’ Buddy Boy?”
The “Commodore” glanced at the overhead. “Dora, keep out of this.”
“Why? I want a doctor’s degree, too. I taught them solid state.”
He looked at the young woman in (half out of) the sheet. “Does Dora have a point?”
“She does.”
“Dora, you get the same treatment as your sisters. Now shut up. All three are declared special doctoral candidates, B.I.T., required residence and courses completed but writtens and orals as tough as you think you are smart. That diploma mill – Certainly I own it. It’s for suckers. You three must produce. Two regents being present, it’s official. Dora, tell Teena.”
“You betcha, Buddy Boy! ‘Doctor Dora’ – won’t that be neat?”
“Pipe down. Friends, these twin sisters could have several doctorates by flow, had they chosen to bury themselves on a campus. They are geniuses -“
“Hear, hear!”
” – and the Long family is proud of them. But erratic, insecure, unpredictable, and you turn your backs at your own risk. Nevertheless they are my favorite sisters and I love them very much.”
They looked at each other. “He acknowledged us.”
“It took him much too long.”
“Let’s be big about it.”
“Both sides?”
“Now!” – they bowled him off his feet. He was standing – they hit with the same vector, with a quick assist from their “sister” Dora (she cut the gravity field for two tenths of a second), and sent him in a complete back flip. He bounced on his arse.
He seemed undisturbed. “Beautifully timed, girls. Pax?”
“‘Pax,'” they answered, bounded to their feet, pulled him to his. “We’re proud of you, Buddy Boy; you’re shaping up.”
I decided to kick it over, learn why we had been kidnapped. Yes, “kidnapped.” I got to my feet before he could sit down. “And I am proud,” I said, dropping a deep court curtsy, “to have the honor of meeting the Senior… of the Howard Families.”
Thunderous silence –
The woman in-and-out of the sheet said, “Lazarus, there was never a chance of getting away with it. These are sophisticated people. They have what you must have. Drop your deviousness and throw yourself on their mercy. I’ll start it by telling my own experience. But first -“
She got to her feet, letting the sheet drop. “Dora! May I have a long mirror? An inverter if possible – otherwise a three-way.”
Dora answered, “Teena can afford such stunts as inverters – I can’t; I have a ship to run. Here’s your three-way.” A partition vanished, replaced by a three-way mirror, lavish in size, taller than I.
She held out her hands to me. “Doctor D.T., will you join me?”
I let her pull me to my feet, stood with her at the mirror. We glanced at ourselves; she turned us around. “Do you all see it? Doctor Hilda, Doctor Carter, Doctor Burroughs? Lazarus, do you see it?”
The two she did not address answered. Laz (perhaps Lor) said, “They look as much alike as we do.” The other answered, “More.” “Except for – ” “Shush! It’s not polite.”
Lazarus said, “I always have to step in it to find it. But I never claimed to be bright.”
She didn’t answer; we were looking at ourselves in the mirror. The resemblance was so great as to suggest identical twins as with Lapis Lazuli and Lorelei Lee – Yes, I had known at once who they were. Captain Auntie did, too; I’m not sure about our husbands.
Those are nice teats – I can admit it when I see them on someone else. It’s no virtue to have this or that physical asset; it’s ancestry combined with self-obligation to take care of one’s body. But a body feature can be pleasing to the owner as well as to others.
Same broad shoulders, same wasp waist, same well-packed, somewhat exaggerated buttocks.
“We’re alike another way, too,” she said. “What’s the fourth root of thirty-seven?”
“Two point four-six-six-three-two-five-seven-one-five. Why?”
“Just testing. Try me.”
“What’s the Number of the Beast?”
“Uh – Oh! Six sixty-six.”
“Try it this way: Six to the sixth power, and that number in turn raised to its sixth power.”
“The first part is forty-six thousand, six hundred, fifty-six and – Oh, that’s a brute! It would be one and a fraction – one-point-oh-three-plus times ten to the twenty-eighth. Do you know the exact number?”
“Yes but I had a computer crunch it. It’s – I’ll write it.” I glanced around – at once a little waldo handed me a pad and stylus. “Thanks, Dora.” I wrote:
10,314,424,798,490,535,546,171,949,056.
“Oh, how beautiful!”
“But not elegant,” I answered. “It applies to a six-dee geometry and should be expressed in base six – but we lack nomenclature for base six and our computers don’t use it. However – ” I wrote:
Base six: 101010 = 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.
She looked delighted and clapped. “The same number,” I went on, “in its elegant form. But no words that I know by which to read it. That awkward base-ten expression at least can be put into words.”
“Mmm, yes – but not easily. ‘Ten thousand three hundred and fourteen quadrillion, four hundred twenty-four thousand seven hundred and ninety-eight trillion, four hundred and ninety thousand five hundred and thirty-five billion, five hundred and forty-six milliard, one hundred and seventy-one million, nine hundred and forty-nine thousand, and fifty-six. But I would never say it other than as a stunt.”
I blinked at her. “I recognize that nomenclature – just barely. Here is the way I would read it: ‘Ten octillion, three hundred fourteen septillion, four hundred twenty-four sextillion, seven hundred ninety-eight quintillion, four hundred ninety quadrillion, five hundred thirty-five trillion, five hundred forty-six billion, one hundred seventy-one million, nine hundred forty-nine thousand, and fifty six.”
“I was able to follow you by reading your figures at the same time. But base-six is best. Is the number interesting or useful as well as beautiful?”
“Both. It’s the number of universes potentially accessible through my father’s device.”
“I must talk with him. Lazarus, shall I tell my story now? It’s the proper foundation.”
“If you are willing. Not shy about it.”
“‘Shy’!” She went over and kissed him – a buss en passant but one in which time stops. “Old darling, I was shy before I found out who I am. Now I’m relaxed, and as bold as need be. New friends, I was introduced as Elizabeth Long, but my first name is usually shortened to a nickname – ‘Lib.’ And, yes, I’m Dr. Long. Mathematics. My full name is Elizabeth Andrew Jackson Libby Long.”
I was more braced for it having swapped some casual mental calculation with her. I have this trick of letting my features go slack. I don’t have to think about it; I’ve been doing it since I was three when I found that it was sometimes best to keep thoughts to myself.
I did this now and watched my family.
The Hillbilly looked thoughtful, and nodded.
Zebadiah prison-whispered to me: “Sex change.”
Pop tackled it systematically. “I recognize the second, third, and fourth names. You were once known by them?”
“Yes.”
“Did you have the nickname ‘Slipstick’?”
“Yes, and, before that, ‘Pinky.'” She ran a hand through her curls and smiled. “Not pink but close enough.”
“Now you are a woman. There is no point in guessing; you mentioned a story to tell.”
“Yes. Dora, how about a round of drinks? Lazarus, how’s your supply of those narcotic sticks?”
Pop said, “None of us smokes.”
“These are neither tobacco nor bhang – nor addictive. They produce a mild euphoria. I am not urging you; I want one myself. Thanks, Lazarus, and pass them around. Now about me –
“I was male nearly eight hundred years, then I was killed. I was dead fifteen hundred years, then I was revived. In renewing me it was found that my twenty-third gene pair was a triplet – XXY.”
The Hillbilly said, “I see. With Y dominant.”
I added: “Twin, Aunt Hilda is a biologist.”
“Good! Aunt Hilda – May I call you that? As my twin does? – will you help me with the hard parts?” Lib smiled and it was my smile – a happy grin. “The Y was dominant but the double dose of X bothered me and I didn’t know why. I did well enough as a male – thirty years in the Space Navy of Old Home Terra as a result of an officer taking an interest in me and getting me an appointment to its Academy. But I lacked command temperament and spent most of my service as a staff technical officer – I rarely commanded and never a large ship.” She grinned again. “But today, as a self-aware female instead of a mixed-up male I do not hesitate to command.
“To go back – I was never easy with boys or men. Shy, solitary, and regarded as queer. Not the idiom meaning homosexual… I was too shy. Although it probably would have been good for me. I was a ‘missing Howard’ in those days – after the Interregnum – and it was years after I entered the Navy that the Families found me. I married then, into the Families. Most XXY people are infertile – I was not. In the next seventy years I had twenty-one children and enjoyed living with my wives, enjoyed sex with them, loved our children.
“Which brings us to the escape from Earth led by Lazarus. I was a bachelor, both my wives having remarried. Friends, Lazarus was the first man I ever loved.”
“Lib, that has nothing to do with the story! I didn’t know you were in love with me.”
“It has everything to do with my story. Off and on, for eight centuries, we were partners in exploration. Then I was killed – my own carelessness. Eventually Lazarus and his sisters cremated me by tossing me into the atmosphere of Old Home Terra in a trajectory that would cause ashes to impact near where I was born. Lazarus, they don’t seem surprised. Do they disbelieve me?”
“Certainly we believe you!” I interrupted. “But what you’ve told us isn’t news to us. What we don’t know is how you are now alive and female. Reincarnation?”
“Oh, no! Reincarnation is nonsense.”
I found myself irritated. Reincarnation is something I have no opinion about, since a housecleaning I gave my mind after we lost Mama Jane. “You have data?” I demanded.
“Deety, did I step on your toes?”
“No, you didn’t, Lib. I asked if you had data.”
“Well… no. But if you assume the truth of the proposition, I think I can show that it leads to a contradiction.”
“The negative-proof method. It’s tricky, Lib. Ask Georg Cantor.”
Lib laughed. “Okay, I will attempt to have no opinion until someone shows me verifiable data, one way or the other.”
“I was hoping you had data, Lib, since you’ve been dead and I haven’t. Or don’t recall having been.”
“But I don’t recall being dead, either. Just a whale of a blow in the back… then dreams I can’t remember… then someone asking me patiently, again and again, whether I preferred to be a man or a woman… and at last I tracked clearly enough to realize that the question was serious… and I answered, ‘Woman’ – and they made me answer that question at least once a day for many days – and then I went to sleep one night and when I woke, I was a woman… which did not astonish me nearly as much as to learn that fifteen centuries had passed. Being a woman seemed completely natural. I’ve had five children now – borne five, I mean; I had sired twenty-one… and one was put into me by one of my own descendants. Lazarus, when are you going to knock me up?”
“When the Greeks count time by the Kalends.”
“Libby honey, when you want to swing that – if you aren’t joking – check with me.”
“Thanks, Dora; I’ll remember. Lazarus, you will have to explain the paradox; I was just a puppet.”
“Isn’t it bedtime? We’re keeping our guests up.”
“Captain Hilda?” Lib inquired.
“Deety is in charge of time.”
“Lib, I don’t know ship’s time yet. I gave you our seconds; we have sixty seconds to a minute; sixty minutes to an hour; twenty-four hours in a day. Primitive, eh? Is your time metric?”
“Depends on what you mean, Deety. You work to base ‘ten,’ do you not?”
“Yes. I mean: No, I work to base ‘two’ because I’m a computer programmer. But I’m used to converting – don’t have to think about it.”
“I knew you used ‘ten’ when I made a guess as to what you meant by ‘six to the sixth power’ and you accepted my answer. We now work to base-one-hundred-twenty for most purposes – binary one-one-one-one-zero-zero-zero.”
“Five-factorial. Sensible. Fits almost any base.”
“Yes. We use it for routine work. But in scientific work we use base-three, because our computers use trinary. I understand it took Gay and Dora several milliseconds to interface.”
“We aren’t that slow!”
“My apologies, Dora. For some work we use a time scale that fits trinary. But for daily living, our clock is just like yours – but three percent slower. Our planet’s day is longer.”
“By forty-two of your minutes.”
“You’re quick, Deety. Yes.”
“Your computers must be three-phase A.C.”
“You are quicker than I was two thousand years ago. And I was quicker then.”
“No way to tell and any computer makes us look like Achilles’ tortoise. We had dinner at eighteen. Gay entered Dora about an hour and a quarter later. So for us it’s about half past twenty, and we usually go to bed between twentytwo and twenty-three if we get to bed on time which we never do. What time is it in the ship and what is ship’s routine?”
The others had let me and my new twin chatter. Now Lazarus said, “If this madhouse has a routine, I’ve never found it.”
“Ol’ Buddy Boy, you don’t have a routine. I run this joint on the bell. Deety, it’s just – bong! – twenty-one… and Lazarus never went to bed that early in all his evil years. Buddy Boy, what are you dodging?”
“Manners, Dora.”
“Yes, Pappy. Deety, he’s dodging the chicanery with which he fooled even himself… because he must admit the triple chicanery he wants to rope you in on – and it takes Gay because I’m not built for it. Until today I never heard of ‘t,’ Tau and Teh. I thought ‘t’ – that you call Tau – was all there was. Aside from paratime in an encapsulation surrounded by irrelevancy such as I am taking us through.
“But back to the corpse caper – Lib got herself killed about eight hundred Post Diaspora. Lazarus slaps her – him – into a tank of LOX, and places him-her-it in orbit, with a beacon. Comes back quick as he can – and can’t find Libby’s cadaver. Fourteen centuries later my sister Teena, then known as Minerva, sees what should have been obvious, that any irrelevant ship, such as yours truly, is a time machine as well as a starship. A great light dawns on Lazarus; the corpse pickled in LOX is missing because he picked it up earlier. So he tries again, more than a thousand years later and five years earlier – and there it is! So Lazarus and I and Laz-Lor go to 1916 Old-Style-or-Gregorian, Old Home Terra, and bury Lib from the sky into the Ozarks where she – he – was born – which was pretty silly because we chucked her into those Green Hills about a century before she was – he – he was born. A paradox.
“But paradoxes don’t trouble us. We live in paratime, Laz-Lor are acute cases of parapsychology, we operate under paradoctrines. Why, take your family – four doctors. A double pair o’ docs.”
“Dora!”
“Pappy, you’re jealous. But I’ll say this for Lazarus: He’s slow but he gets there and has believed all his life that any paradox can be paradoctored. Happens he had lots of time to think after he chucked Lib to a fiery grave because he stayed in that primitive era and got his arse shot off and this caused a long convalescence.
“It occurs to him that, if he found the corpse through going back to shortly after he placed it in orbit, he might learn something interesting if he went back just before he put Lib’s remains in orbit. So when he’s well again, he does so, with his whole first team, headed by Doctor Ishtar, the greatest in the business, and I’m outfitted as a hospital with everything from microtomes to cloning capsules.
“So we go there and wait – we don’t land. Along comes Lazarus in the clunker that he and Lib used to risk their lives in, and Pappy comes out in a pressure suit and detaches the LOX tank, and Lib is buried in space, waiting for judgment day. We respect Pappy’s griefjust long enough for him to get out of the way, then I take the tank inside me. Ish gets to work, along with many others. Lots of live cells suitable for cloning. Brain intact. Dead but intact – okay, as all Ish wants are the memory configurations.
“In the course of this, Ishtar learns that the late lamented had the potential to go either way – which is why the Families’ best telepathic hypnotist is sent for and keeps asking this clone: When you wake up, what do you want to be? Man or woman?”
“It was much later, Dora. I was already awake.”
“Lib hon, you ask Ish. You had to decide long before you woke. Ish and her hormone artists had to work on you while you were still labile. Matter of fact, you never answered at all; the telepath kept reporting on your emotional state whenever you imagined yourself male, and your state when you imagined yourself female. Ish says that it made you happy to think of yourself as female.”
“That’s true. I’ve been ever so much happier as Elizabeth Long than I was as Andy Libby.”
“That’s it, folks. How Ish turned a mixed-up male into a happy female, fully functional and horny as Howard females always are.”
“Dora! We have guests.” Lazarus glowered.
“All married. Deety is youngest. Deety, did my bluntness shock you?”
“No, Dora. I’m horny enough to be a Howard myself. And terribly interested in how the great Slipstick Libby turns out to be my twin and female.”
“Female without surgery – none of those fakes done with a knife. But even Ish couldn’t have done it had not Lib supplied XXY, so that Ish could balance the clone either XX or XY by careful attention to endocrinal glands. Or could she? Must ask. Ish is genius-cubed, smarter than most computers. Lazarus can now explain his next sleight-of-hand – slightly illegal.”
“Hey!” I protested. “How about the corpse jettisoned into the Ozarks, Dora? Who was that?”
“Why, that was Lib.”
“Lib is right here. I’ve got my arm around her.”
That computer went tsk-tsk-tsk. “Deety. Doctor Deety. I just finished telling you that the Lib you are cuddling is a clone. After they drained every memory out of that frozen brain, what was left was dog food. Lib got slashed in the spine by the local equivalent of a cave bear. Ripped out her – his – backbone. Once Ish was through with it, Laz froze it again, we took it back and placed it in orbit, where we found it later – to our great surprise.”
“How could you be surprised when you put it there yourselves?”
Dora announced, loudly, “Is there a mathematician in the house?”
“Stop it, Dora. Thank you for recounting my saga; I learn a little every time I hear it.” Lib turned toward me and said softly, “Biological time versus durational time, Twin. Follow the entropy arrow through the loops of biological time and you will see that Lazarus was honestly surprised at every step even though he had – will-had – rigged every surprise. No grammar for it. Deety, I understand that you have studied semantics. Shall we try to devise a grammar for space-time complexities in six curved dimensions? I can’t contribute much but I can try to punch holes in your work.”
“Love to!” I wasn’t fooling. My twin is so sweet that maybe Deety is fairly sweet herself.

Chapter XLI

“A cat can be caught in almost any trap once – “

Jacob:
If A, then B. I trust I am a rational mathematician, not one of the romantics who have brought disrepute to our calling through such inanities as defining “infinity” as a number, confusing symbol with referent, or treating ignorance as a datum. When I found myself in the Land of Oz, I did not assume that I had lost my reason. Instead it prepared me emotionally to meet other “fictional” characters.
Stipulated: I may be in a locked ward. But to assume that to be factual serves no purpose other than suicide of personality. I shall act on what my senses report. I am not the bumpkin who said on seeing a giraffe: “There ain’t no sich animal.”
I find myself in bed with my lovely wife Hilda in sumptuous quarters of star yacht Dora as guests of the utterly fictional “Lazarus Long.” Is this a reason to try to find the call button in order to ask a still-more-fictional nurse for a nonexistent shot to end this hallucination? This is an excellent bed. As for Hilda – Solomon has reason to envy me; Mahomet with all his houris is not as blessed as I.
Tomorrow is soon enough to unravel any paradox. Or the Day After Tomorrow. Better yet, Not This October. After The End of Eternity may be best.
Why disturb a paradox? As Dora pointed out, Hilda and I are a pair o’ docs ourselves… with no wish to be disturbed, and most certainly not to be unravelled.
Since Hilda married me, I have not once taken a sleeping pill.
No one called us. I woke up feeling totally rested, found my wife in the fresher brushing her teeth with, Yes, Pepsodent-removed brush from mouth, kissed her, placed brush back in her mouth. When she finished brushing her teeth, I asked, “Seen the kids?”
“No, Jacob.”
“So. Dora!”
“No need to shout; I’m sitting on your shoulder. Would you like breakfast trays in bed?”
“Have we missed the breakfast hour?”
“Professor Burroughs, breakfast hour in me starts at midnight and ends at noon. Lunch is at thirteen, tea at sixteen-thirty, dinner at twenty, snacks and elevenses at any time. Dinner always formal, no other meal.”
“Hmm – How formal is ‘formal’?” Hilda now had more wardrobe – but Beulahiand is not high style.
“‘Formal’ means formal dress of your culture or ours, or it means skin. No casual dress. As defined by the Commodore: ‘Whole hawg or none.’ Amendment: Jewelry, perfume, and cosmetics are not proscribed by the no-casualdress rule. Ship’s services include sixty-minute cleaning and pressing, and a variety of formal dress of New-Rome styling, washables for the convenience of guests who do not travel with formal dress, prefer to be dressed at a formal meal, and do not choose to dine alone.”
“Very hospitable. Speaking of washables, we found everything but a dirty-clothes hamper. I have a laplap to put in.”
“But that’s a washable, Doctor.”
“That’s what I said. I’ve worn it; it should be washed.”
“Sir, I am not as fluent in English as in Galacta. By ‘washable’ I mean: Step into a shower while wearing it; it will go away.”
Hilda said, “We’ll take a dozen gross.”
“Captain Hilda, ‘dozen’ and ‘gross’ are not in my memories. Will you please rephrase?”
“Just a side remark to my husband, Dora. What are New-Rome high styles today?”
“‘Today’ I must construe as meaning the latest I have in stock. Styles follow the stock market. In evening dress, men are wearing their skirts floor length with a slight train. Bodices are off one or both shoulders. Bare feet or sandals are acceptable. Colors are bright and may be mixed in discordants. Weapons are required – may be symbolic but must be displayed. Ladies, of course, follow the cycle out of phase. Skirts are hardly more than ruffles this season, worn quite low. If tops are worn – not required this season and some ladies prefer cosmetics in flat colors – if worn, the teat windows may be either open or transparent. Transparents having quarter-lambda iridescence are popular this cycle, especially if one teat is bare without cosmetics while the other sports a changing-iridescent transparency.” The computer’s voice changed from a well-modulated adult female voice to that of an eager little girl:
“I hope somebody picks that; I like to look at it! How about Doctor Deety and Doctor Lib, one shiny on her left teat, the other shiny on her right, and place them side by side. Neat, huh!”
“It would be spectacular,” I agreed. (And they would look like clowns! Still, Deety might go along. The child likes to please people, even a computer. Perhaps especially a computer.)
“You old goat, would you like a skirt with a slight train?”
“Hilda!”
“Dora, do you have formal washables in my husband’s size? What measurements do you need?”
“I have the Professor’s measurements, Ma’am. I will fetch an assortment to your quarters sometime after noon when you are not sleeping or otherwise engaged. An equivalent assortment for you, I assume?”
“If you wish, Dora. I may not wear that style.”
“Captain Hilda is an excellent composition herself. I’m an expert engineer; I know good design when I see it. That’s not flattery; Laz-Lor tell me that I should learn to flatter. I’m not sure I have the circuitry for it. Perhaps I can learn it from Gay.”
“You sure can, Dorable; I’ve been flattering my four charges seems like forever.”
“Gay, have you been listening?”
“Mad at me, Aunt Hilda?”
“Never angry with our Gay Deceiver. But it’s polite to let people know you’re present.”
“But – Dora has eyes and she lets me look.”
“Captain Hilda, Gay is with me all the time now. Do you forbid that? We didn’t know.” Dora had slipped into her little-girl voice and sounded stricken.
Time to intervene – “Gay, Dora – Hilda and I don’t mind. I’ll tell Deety and Zeb; they won’t mind.”
“Jake, you’re my pal!”
“Gay, you’ve saved our lives many times; we owe you any fun we can offer. But, Gay, with Dora’s eyes and ears you’ll see and hear things not seen by your radars, not heard unless we switched you on. Do either of you have the word ‘discretion’ in your perms?”
“No, Jake. What does it mean?”
“I’ll explain it,” Dora said eagerly. “It means we see and hear but pretend not to. Like last night when -“
“Later, Dora. Over your private circuits. What ship’s time is it and are we late for breakfast? I don’t see a clock.”
“I’m the clock. It is ship’s time nine-oh-three. You are not last for breakfast. Commander Laz is sleeping late; she didn’t go to bed right after the mutiny. Captain Long – that’s Lor – ate on the bridge – a crude insult to my watch-standing but she’s good company. The Commodore always eats breakfast in the flag cabin. The Doctors Deety and Zeb and Lib are just starting.”
“How are they dressed?” asked my Hilda.
“In serviettes. Doctor Lib is wearing ‘Jungle Flower’ in cologne and powder and perfume; she likes strong ones. Doctor Zeb seems to have forgotten to use any but his own scent is rather pleasant. I can’t place what Doctor Deety is wearing but it has both musk and sandalwood. Shall I formularize it by symbols?”
“It’s ‘Blue Hour’ and I’m startled; my stepdaughter doesn’t need a scent. Neither does Lib, darn it. Jacob, are you ready?”
I answered at once. I had taken care of this and that while the computers chattered, including trying a depilatory tricky until I learned how to block it off – my sideburns were missing. Zeb dressed in a serviette – Libby Long the only one not of our family – and Lib used to be male. A good time to rub blue mud in my belly button – “I’m ready.”
Hilda noticed my decision by not noticing it. The blue “Tinker-Bell” light appeared, led us to a small dining room, where we encountered a Long-Family custom – did not realize it because it matched a ceremony of our own: Lib saw us, came over, kissed Hilda, kissed me – briefly but with time-stop. Then my daughter was kissing me good-morning while Zeb kissed my wife. We swapped as usual; Deety kissed Hilda – and Zeb took my shoulders, hissed into my ear, “Stand still” – and gave me the double Latin kiss, each cheek.
Did my blood brother think I would let him down in the presence of one not of our family? Our custom had started after our double elopement. While Zeb and I usually used the Latin symbol, four rapid pecks, once at Snug Harbor we had missed the fast timing, hit each other mouth to mouth – didn’t pull back but didn’t stretch it out. We declined to make anything of it – although I was aware of the break in taboo and he was, too.
Two mornings later I was last in; Zeb was seated with his back to me. He leaned back and turned his head to speak to me; I leaned down, kissed him on the mouth firmly but briefly, moved on and kissed my daughter not as briefly, moved on and kissed my wife thoroughly, sat down and demanded, “What’s for breakfast?”
After that the only invariant was: “What’s for breakfast?” Zeb and I used either Latin pecks or busses on the mouth – brief, dry, symbolic, initiated by either of us. It meant that we were closer than a handshake; it held no sexual significance.
So I was disgrunted that Zeb thought it was necessary to warn me. Let me add: Women are my orientation and Hilda my necessity. But I tried the other way with my high school chum our graduation week. We were experimenting to find out what the shooting was all about – planned but date subject to opportunity – which turned up that last week of school. A two-hour examination, no other school that day; a half hour of tennis, sudden realization that we were free and that his parents’ flat was empty and would remain so until late afternoon. Der Tag!
We gave it a fair trial. We bathed first and thoroughly. We were not shy or afraid of each other. We were not afraid of getting caught – doors locked and bolted, chains on, S.O.P. by his parents’ rules. We liked each other and wanted it to work.
Total failure – Got up, had peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches with milk, discussed it as we ate. Neither of us upset, not disgusted, no bad breath or similar hazards – but no results.
Brushed our teeth again, washed each other – gave it a second try. So much calisthenics. No “morals” about it, willing and eager to add it on. Not for us – so we killed all evidence and got in three more sets of tennis.
That’s how it is with Zeb and me. I love him dearly – but I love him for what he is – while fully empathizing that my daughter thinks he is the greatest lover since – Well, the greatest.
But if Zeb ever makes a pass at me, I will do my amateur-acting best to make him feel that this is what I have been waiting for all my life.
I’ve been trying to say why I was miffed. Never mind, I shall make it clear to Zeb that I will never let him down.
About that Long-Family custom – “Long” is not the name of a Howard Family; it is a group of Howards who live together and who added “Long” (the pseudonym most used by Lazarus) to their regular names. It’s a commune, an extended family, a serial family, a god-knows-what. There is probably no word for it in any language and at least two computers are full members. They come and go and raise children and only the family geneticist (Doctor Ishtar) is sure of parentage and who cares? I suspect that they are all ambi in sex but no outsider could guess – and I am an outsider.
But of this I am certain: When Long meets Long for the first time any day, they kiss – and it’s no Latin peck.
I learned that I could have anything I wanted for breakfast. This should have been enough to tell me that we were being set up for the tale. I’m getting ahead of my story, as I know things about the Long Family that I read in a book that you may not have read. This ship Dora came from a planet many parsecs from the Earth-analog of that universe, from a time over two thousand years in my future looked at one way… or a time totally irrelevant to mine through not having duration axis in common.
Yet I could have anything: Post Toasties, hens’ eggs any style, bacon, ham, sausage, breakfast steak, toast, orange marmalade, Concord grape jelly, buckwheat cakes – and not one of these foods is from Tertius, home of the Long Family.
Pepsodent in our ‘fresher – As I was contemplating a beautiful golden waffle with one bite of it melting in my mouth, Lazarus Long walked in… and a voice in my head played back: “The Commodore always eats breakfast in the flag cabin.”
Add that Lazarus was dressed as were Zeb and I save that he did not yet have a napkin.
Working hypothesis: Lazarus had listened in on every word between husband and wife.
Second hypothesis: “Dora, tell me when they get up, tell me when they arrive in the breakfast room – if they do, but offer trays as usual. If they eat in the breakfast room, let me know how each is dressed.”
The first hypothesis defines a grave social offense; the second outlines information a host or hostess is entitled to know. How do I find out which is which? Answer: I can’t, as Lazarus Long will give me the answer that profits him and that computer is loyal to him, not to me.
As soon as Lazarus finished kissing Lib Long, he was grabbed by Deety and kissed… then he caught Hilda’s eye, glanced at me and sloooowly bent to kiss her, giving her and me, severally, time to make that tiny gesture that says No – and did kiss her because I depend on Hilda’s instincts and will never tell her No in such circumstances, or greater or lesser. Hilda put her hand back of his neck and thereby controlled the kiss and made it long – and I tore up the first hypothesis and marked the second one “Q.E.D.” Hilda’s instincts about people are infallible; I think she is a touch telepathic.
As may be, we would now help him if possible.
To Zeb and me he simply said, “Good morning” – his instincts are reputed to be infallible, too.
I agreed that it was a “good morning” while noting to myself that it was a symbol without a referent save for social connotation (morning? In an irrelevancy?) but added sincerely, “Lazarus, this is the best waffle I ever tasted.”
“Then please tell Dora.”
“Dora, did you hear what I said to the Commodore?”
“I surely did, Professor Jake! Six more?”
I felt my waistline-firm and many centimeters trimmed off. “Six more is what I want -“
“Right away!”
“But half of one is all I dare eat. Deety, the next time we go to Oz, will you ask Glinda whether or not there is a magic for gluttons – me, I mean – to permit them to eat as much as they want while three fourths of it disappears?”
“I’m sure she could do it; I’m equally sure that she would not. She’s an ethical witch; you would not be able to convince her that your purpose was worthy.”
“You are depressingly logical, my dear.”
Lib said, “Professor, you have actually been to the Land of Oz? Really and truly?”
“Really and truly. Dora, is Gay on the line?”
“On deck, Jake” – Gay’s voice.
“Has anyone been in to see our portside annex?”
“How could they? Captain Hilda has not authorized it.”
“But – Hilda?”
“No, dear. Sorry to be blunt, Commodore and Doctor Lib, but I won’t authorize an open door because there are too many things that must not be touched. But I will be delighted to escort guests into Gay Deceiver almost anytime including right now; I’ve finished eating.”
“I accept!”
“Then come along, Elizabeth. Anyone else?”
Lazarus said, “Dora, shove my breakfast to the back of the stove; I’ll eat it later.”
“A jelly omelet? I’ll eat it myself.”
“Do that, Dorable. Captain, I’m ready.”
Laz-Lor showed up together, did not want to be left out. We ended up quite a crowd: eight humans, two computers.
Hilda stopped us at Gay’s starboard door. “Friends, again I must be blunt. As you cross the sill of that door, you are leaving Star Yacht Dora and entering an independent command, the Gay Deceiver, even though Dora totally surrounds Gay. Inside that door, I command, responsible to no one, unlimited in authority. Captain Lor, do you understand and agree with the legal theory?”
Captain Lorelei glanced at her sister, looked unhappy. “Captain Hilda, I do agree. Therefore I can’t come aboard. I can’t abandon my command.”
My wife looked terribly distressed. “Oh, I’m sorry!”
Lazarus Long interrupted. “Captain Hilda, I’m sorry another way. I don’t agree with your legal theory. I have had more than two thousand years more experience with law than my sister has… all sorts of law in all sorts of cultures. I’m not speaking of justice; I’ll leave that to philosophers. But I know what legal theories work with humans, and what ones have been attempted, then abandoned because they could not be made to work. This situation is not new; it has occurred thousands, millions, of times: a larger vessel with a smaller vessel nested in it. The solution is always the same, whether it concerns starships, fishing boats, aircraft carriers, whatever. The smaller vessel is a separate command outside the larger vessel, but when it is inside the carrier vessel, it is legally part of it.”
My darling did not answer. She was picking out me, Zeb, and Deety by eye as Lazarus talked. As he finished she said briskly, “GayDeceiverOpenStarboardDoor. Man the car, prepare for space.”
I’m proud of our family. Zeb zipped past me to the farthest seat – which left me room to dive for mine as Deety was picking up Hilda bodily, shoving her inside, crowding in after her, turning and pulling her feet clear of the doorframe – yelping, “GayCloseDoors!”
I was belting in but looking to the right, where the action was. Lazarus Long grabbed the door while calling out, “Hey, wait a moment!”
He realized his mistake in time to keep his fingers. I had argued with Zeb when I discovered, during refitting, that he had removed the interlocks that prevent that sort of accident. He answered my protest: “Jake, when I tell those doors to close, I want them to close. If, in closing, one chops off a man’s head, you can assume that I think he looks better that way.”
Lazarus saved his hand but was knocked off his feet by the door – and I saw a bit of why he had lived so long. Instead of trying to check his fall, he gathered himself into a ball and took it on one buttock.
“Report!”
“Copilot belted checking seal!”
“Chief Pilot belted all systems go. Door seal being rechecked.”
“Navigator belted, ready.”
“Starboard door seal okay!”
“GayBounce!”
We were in free fall. No stars – total darkness.
“Astrogator. Advise.”
“I don’t know, Captain. We’ll have to ask Gay whether or not she can backtrack. Any backtrack. Beulahland, or any spot in her perms. I’m lost.”
Suddenly the stars came out. “Dora, calling Gay Deceiver. Come in, Gay.”
“Don’t answer. Zebbie, advise again. What happened?”
“I’m guessing. They cancelled encapsulation rather than risk losing us. They must be awfully anxious.” Zeb added, “The only thing we have that you can’t buy at the corner drugstore is Jake’s space-time twister. How they knew of it and why they want it I do not know.”
“Dora, calling Gay. Gay, please talk to me. Aren’t you still my friend? I know our bosses had a silly fuss – but we didn’t. Aren’t you ever going to speak to me again? I love you, Gay. Please don’t be mean to me.”
“Captain Hilda, may I please say hello to Dora and tell her that I am not angry at her? She’s a sweet girl, she really is. Captain, she let me use her eyes.”
“Let me speak to her first.”
“Oh, thank you! Gay, answering Dora. Come in, Dora.”
“Gay! You had me so scared. Don’t go away again, please. The Commodore wants to apologize to your boss. Will she talk to him?”
“Captain?”
“No. I’ll speak to Dora’s Captain, however.”
A cartoon of Lorelei’s features displayed on our central screen. “Lor speaking, Captain Hilda. My brother is terribly sorry and wants to apologize. My sisters and I are dreadfully upset and want you please to come back. I don’t claim any command over your ship despite the silly things my brother said. Lib has a message for you, too. She says that, topologically, there is no difference between you being inside us or us being inside you. Either way, we each surround the other.”
“I don’t see it topologically, Captain; I see it pragmatically. But please thank Elizabeth for me. I have this message for Lazarus Long. A cat can be caught in almost any trap once; but that cat will not be caught in the same trap twice.”
“The message is delivered.”
“Then it is time to say good-bye. Captain Lorelei, I cannot honestly thank you as kidnapping is not hospitality even when it is luxurious. But I don’t think that you or your sister – sisters – meant it that way. I blame it on that deceitful, devious brother of yours. Please tell your sisters and Libby good-bye for us and say that I am sorry we had to leave.”
“Captain, wait! There is something I must do first.”
“Captain Lor, I must warn you I have you in my gunsights.”
“What? Oh! We are unarmed. Not anything like that. I’ll be back quickly. Perhaps you would like Dora to sing? But please don’t go away!” The face in the screen pulled away.
“What kind of songs do you like, folks? I know lots of songs. One-Ball Reilly; and the Green Hills and On Guard Christmas So’s Yours and Santa Carolita and Mademoiselle from Army Tears and the Pawnshot song and The Monkey Wrapped His Tail Around the Flagpole and Mary O’Meara and Soldier, Ask Not and just tell me what you like, and – here comes Sister. Captain Lor.”
“Captain Hilda, thanks from my heart for waiting. Can you record?”
“Gay, recording mode. Go ahead.”
“I have placed my brother under arrest and confined him to quarters. I, Captain Lorelei Lee Long, Master of Star Yacht Dora, affirm for use in any court that I have no authority over yacht Gay Deceiver and will never attempt to assert authority over Gay Deceiver no matter what circumstances and, furthermore, I now place myself, my crew, and my ship Dora under command of Captain Hilda Burroughs, henceforth commodore of both ships, this assignment of command irrevocable by me or my sisters, and revocable solely by Commodore Burroughs at her sole discretion. End of message. Hilda, won’t you come home? Laz is crying and I don’t know what to do. We need you. Buddy Boy never did tell you why. But we do! May I tell you?”
“Go ahead, Lor.”
“To save our mother’s life!”
(I said, softly, “I’ll be damned.”)
My wife hesitated, then said, “Is Elizabeth Long there?”
“Yes, yes! She’s been listening – she’s crying, too – and I would be but I’m Captain and can’t.”
The smudged faces changed. “Lib Long speaking, Commodore.”
“Libby, Captain Lorelei has told me something not only hard to believe but, if she is cloned from her brother as I have read, she may have his talent for lying. From what I know of you, I don’t think you ever learned how to lie.”
“Commodore, it is true that I never learned to lie convincingly. So I gave it up a long time ago.”
“Very well, Lib. Is Lazarus Long in fact confined and under arrest?”
“Yes, to both. His door won’t open and Dora has been instructed not to let him out until you permit it.”
“What’s this about saving her mother’s life? If they are clones from a man the age Lazarus is alleged to be, their mother must have died a couple of millennia back.”
“It’s as complex as my case, Commodore, but quite different. The twins have host-mothers. But Lor was speaking of the genetic mother of herself, her twin sister, and Lazarus Long. She was reported dead more than two thousand Old-Home-Terra years ago. But there is some hope that the records were confused and that it may be possible to save her. It can’t be done without your help and the help of the Gay Deceiver. I don’t think the chances are good, even so. But without your help – well, I would have to try to devise such a drive as Gay is reported to have – and I don’t think I can.”
“Wait a moment, Libby. Gay, cut transmission from cabin; keep circuit ready. Can you find your way unassisted back into your berth in Dora? Did you get it into your perms?”
“I did. I thought I might want to find Dora someday. Are you displeased with me? I know it wasn’t authorized. But I didn’t three-times it! I can wipe it.”
“Gay Deceiver. New program. New parking spot. Code word ‘Dora Long.’ I tell you three times.”
“Hilda, I hear you three times!”
“Gay Deceiver. ‘Dora Long.’ Execute!”
The stars went away and lighted alcoves were at our doors.

Chapter XLII

“You’re a figment of imagination.”

Zeb:
“Hear that, Laz? You’re a figment of imagination.”
“No, Lor. You are a figment; I’m a fig.” (What she said was “fica,” and Deety suppressed a giggle. I pinched her and told her in family tap code that she had a dirty mind – which she ignored, being proud of it rather than otherwise. It was a long time later that I learned that Laz had used a Galacta word – but the ancient pun still applied.)
Jake reiterated patiently, “Laz-Lor, the key point of Commodore Hilda’s theory is that we are all equally figments of imagination. ‘Reality’ thus becomes a null sythbol.”
Deety shook her head emphatically. “Stick to geometry, Pop. Or stamp collecting. Leave symbology to symbologists – such as your favorite daughter. I’m real, I am! Smell me.”
“No doubt you could use a bath. So could we all; it’s been an adrenaline day. But that’s the other side of the coin, Deety. ‘Imaginary’ and ‘Real’ turn out to be identical. Consider this chow bench. On one level of abstraction it is mathematical equations. At the level just below that it is a swirling nothlngness, with mass-energy a rare event. But on the gross level abstracted by my senses I can place this drink on it with utter confidence that it will not sink through this near vacuum.”
My father-in-law matched his words by placing his highball on the snack bench; it sank out of sight.
Jake looked tired. “Not my day. Dora, did you do that?”
“Yes and no, Professor.”
“What kind of answer is that?”
“You placed it on a take-away spot and that part of me was on automatic and took it away and sterilized it. I’m sorry, sir, and here’s your fresh drink.”
It was indeed a busy day. No one had been waiting at our parking berth, but three young women arrived at a dead run while Sharpie was swapping seats with Deety – our brand-new commodore planned to be first to step into her new ship. The starboard door opened; Sharpie stepped out, a dignified procession of one -and was hit from three sides by three young women, each managing to laugh and cry at the same time. But Sharpie enjoys everything and her aplomb has never been shaken. She kissed them, let them kiss her, petted them and told them to calm down, everything was all right. “Dears, I never intended to stay away; I simply refused to let the great Lazarus Long put one over on Sharpie. Where is he now?”
“Shut up in the flag cabin, Ma’am. Commodore.”
“Captain Lor, lock him up elsewhere; the flag cabin is mine.”
“Aye aye, Commodore.”
“How long will that take? Seconds, I mean; not hours.”
Lor spoke rapidly to Dora in a language I almost understood. I leaned to my right, spoke to my wife. “Spanish. Some sort.”
“Italian,” Deety answered.
“Will you settle for Latino? No! – I remember now: Galacta. We’ll have to learn it. But it sounds easy.”
Lor reported, “Flag cabin will be ready for you by the time you reach it, Commodore.”
“Very good. I expect to use it primarily as an administration office; flag remains in Gay Deceiver. That is appropriate, since Dora is unarmed whereas Gay Deceiver is an attack ship, an armed privateer – heavily armed, for her size.” Sharpie smiled. “A few days ago, in another universe, we destroyed an entire air army. We don’t have fancies such as artificial gravity; we belt down and fight in free fall. Gay Deceiver is stripped for speed and armament; Dora is just the opposite. The two complement each other beautifully.”
I wondered why Sharpie was blathering – but she always has reasons. I think she reads minds.
I’m certain that Laz-Lor do, with each other. They looked at each other, then:
“The flag of an armed privateer – “
” – is the Skull-and-Cross-Bones -“
” – is it not? Do we take prisoners -“
” – or cut their throats?”
“Which would you rather do? Captain Lor, please do all the talking; these whipsaw conversations are hard to follow. By the way, no more ‘midnight mutinies.’ Lor, you remain captain until further notice.”
Again they looked at each other.
“We like to swap off.”
“Calling it ‘mutiny’ is just a joke.”
“No one asked your preferences. My chief of staff and second-in-command of the flagship is the only one who does and must advise me. If you have opinions to offer, see him. Answer my question. Captain Lor.”
“We’ll do what you order. But our brother who was our father at the time taught us never to kill if we could possibly avoid it while teaching us all sorts of ways to kill and made us practice. When we were growing up we always wanted to be pirates. Then we grew up and decided that it could never be and tried to forget it.”
Sharpie said, “I think I’m making you tongue-tied by forcing you to filter it through one set of vocal cords. So cancel that order; you two are unique. We operate just the way Lazarus taught you; so far we have killed only once – to repel an attack on us. That air army – We timed it, caught them with their flying machines on the ground, burned the machines, burned their fuel – and thereby stopped an invasion… without killing anyone. But we are always ready to kill. Lor, that’s why I warned you a few minutes ago. It would have broken Gay’s heart to have to destroy Dora. Skull-and-Cross-Bones? No way to fly one but, if you want to hang one in the lounge, I grant permission. Why did you decide not to become pirates?”
That same preliminary glance –
“Babies -“
“Laz has three, I have four – “
” – because Lor has one pair of twins -“
” – and we try to be pregnant at the same time -“
” – and time it to fit our plans -“
” – and Brother’s plans if you ever let him out of hack.”
“How old are you two? I’ve been thinking of you as about Deety’s age but you can’t be. Just one of you answer, please; it’s a simple question.”
They conferred mentally an unusually long time. At last Captain Lor said slowly, “It isn’t quite simple. We will get Dora and Athene to integrate it for us… if data are complete; they may not be. But answering in Old-Home-Terran years and meaning our own biological time, Laz thinks we are about forty-eight and I think we are a couple of years younger. It doesn’t matter because Ishtar will tell us when to rejuvenate, which won’t be soon, as we aren’t yet close to menopause.”
“Does it have to be at menopause?”
“Oh, no, just makes it easier and you never have to stop making babies. But Ishtar’s mother went years past menopause and had decided to die… and changed her mind and looks younger than we do and has had more babies than we have. This time around, I mean.”
“How often do men need it?” Sharpie asked. Jake looked up and said, “I won’t need it for another six weeks, Hilda. Maybe seven.”
“Shush, dear. Laz-Lor, be careful around my husband. When he’s in rut, it takes heavy chains to restrain him. So never mind that question; he doesn’t need to know and, for me, it was intellectual curiosity of a biologist. Perhaps it s best to ask Doctor Ishtar.”
“Yes, Commodore, that would be best. We aren’t biologists; we’re ship handlers.”
I leaned forward. (Sharpie was keeping us in the car; why I didn’t know – then.) “Commodore! I’m required to advise you.”
“Yes, Zebbie.”
“You are going to need a new chief of staff, a new second-in-command, and a new astrogator because I will be on the binnacle list in a wet pack if you don’t have Laz-Lor answer that last one. It is not ‘intellectual curiosity’ to me.”
“Why, Zebbie dear, I have reports that your curve is such that it will be many, many years before you can possibly have other than intellectual interest.”
(If it were not for upsetting Jake, I would paddle that pert little arse!)
Deety said, “Hear, hear!” I placed my hand over her mouth and got bitten. Sharpie said, “Captain, we have here another paradox – Doctors Carter and Burroughs, each unreasonably insecure. Elizabeth, you’ve been a man; give them the male angle.”
“Commodore, I wasn’t very successful as a male. I simply took antigeria whenever Lazarus did. But I can report his thumb rule.”
“Yes?”
“When a man looks at a new and attractive woman and decides that he is too tired, it’s time. When he doesn’t even look, push him over and bury him; he’s failed to notice that he’s dead.”
The ship’s computer said something in that not-Spanish; Sharpie answered, “Graz, Dora. I’ll come now.”
Lor said, “Ma’am, we didn’t know you knew Galacta.”
“I don’t. But I will a week from now. I knew what I would say in your position, and you said it; I could tell from cognates. You told Dora to get him out pronto, because the Doña was on her way. Then get his personal belongings when I would not be inconvenienced. So I stalled. Zebbie, will you come with me? Jacob dearest, will you decide whether or not we should give up our suite with the Carters? And what to move out of Gay? We will be in Dora at least a week, possibly longer.”
“Commodore, we depart for Tertius tomorrow midday, ship’s time.”
“I do not recall ordering that, Captain Lor.”
The twins looked at each other – and said nothing.
Sharpie patted Laz’s cheek. “Don’t look so thunderstruck, girls” – girls? – seven years or so Sharpie’s senior and seven babies between them – “On reaching Tertius, place us in orbit, following local rules. But no messages from ship to ground unless approved by me in writing. Come now!”
As Sharpie left with me in tow, she told Deety that she was on her own but please get out Jacob’s Army blues and my Aerospace dress, and ask Dora about cleaning and pressing.
Jake said, “Hey!” before I could, and Sharpie said, reasonably, “I won’t put you into a long skirt, sweetheart; you would feel that I had coerced you into drag. I thought perhaps you two were bored with civilian dress – and I shall continue the custom concerning dressing for dinner – either formal dress or formal skin. Nothing in between.”
Upon reaching flag cabin Sharpie dismissed Laz-Lor, waited until we were private, then clung to me. “Hold me, Zebbie. Hold me tight! Calm me down.” The little thing was shaking.
“Maybe I had better get Jake,” I suggested, while holding her and petting her gently – and solving aerodynamic empiricals in my head to keep from noticing how much skin such a tiny woman can spread over one.
“No, Zebbie. Jacob would fuss over me like a mother hen and give me advice I don’t want. Either I boss this job without my husband telling me what to do… or I can’t cut it. If I fail, I will fail on my own – not as Jacob’s puppet. But I can cry on you and tell you things I wouldn’t tell my own toothbrush.”
She added, “When I send you out, find Jake and have him teach school to everybody. That’ll keep him busy and happy and out of my hair. And everybody else, too. Have both computers record his lectures.”
“Lectures on what?”
“Oh. Too many details. The plenum of universes and the Number of the Beast. Pantheistic multiple solipsism, or why the Land of Oz is real. The quantum mechanics of fairy tales. Even the care and feeding of Black Hats. He’ll probably want to take people into Gay… but you must be present; don’t delegate it. Jacob can go along and lecture but it’s Zebbie’s sharp eye that will see to it that nothing is touched.”
She patted my chest. “You’re such a comfort. Now I’m going to dig out this ship’s papers and you’re going to help because I don’t know what to expect. Or where to find them. Certificate of ownership, I suppose, and registration, and ship’s manifest whatever that is. What else and where should I look?”
“A log. Crew list, passenger list. Health inspection, maybe. Other inspections. Bureaucracy and red tape tend to follow the same patterns everywhere. Maybe no paper papers; that looks like a computer printout over there. Mmm – Insist on English; the originals are almost certainly in Galacta.”
“I’ll try it. Dora.”
“Listening, Commodore Hilda.”
“Print for me, in English, the ship’s official papers. Ownership, registration, manifests, and so forth. You know the list. Retrieve soonest.”
“I am not authorized to do this, Ma’am.”
“‘Not authorized’ by whom?”
The computer did not answer. Sharpie said, “Stick around, Zebbie; there’s going to be trouble. Do you have any weapons?”
“Where? Look at me. How?”
“I don’t know but you’re clever about such things. Dora!”
“Your orders, Commodore?”
“Get me Captain Lor! In person, not voice. I want her here on a dead run – right now! Out!”
(I did have a weapon. I had palmed an item as I left Gay. But never admit a holdout.)
Laz-Lor arrived, breathing hard, seconds later. “You sent for us, Ma’am?”
“I sent for Captain Lor; I did not send for Laz. Out. Pronto!”
Laz had her mouth open to speak. She got out so fast the door was only partly dilated; she dived through.
“Dora! Repeat to Captain Lor every word that you’ve heard, every word you’ve said, since I entered this cabin.”
The computer started with Sharpie telling Laz-Lor they could leave… then surprised me with: “Hold me, Zebbie. Hold me tight. Calm me down.”
I started to speak, Sharpie shook her head. Dora droned on, right through Hilda’s order to repeat back all the computer had heard or said since we came in.
The computer stopped; Sharpie said, “Dora, you told me this morning that you could not scan in here without permission.”
“That is correct, Ma’am.”
“Who gave you permission?”
The computer did not answer.
“Captain Lor, did you or your sister tell this computer to spy on me and to refuse to answer certain questions?”
“No, Ma’am.”
“Then it’s your brother Lazarus. Don’t bother to lie; I didn’t ask, I told you. Fetch your brother to me, under arrest. Move!”

Chapter XLIII

To Pull a Hat Out of a Rabbit –

Smith:
I had had trouble convincing my sisters that I must be “arrested” and “confined.” I had made an idiotic mistake and now must be “punished.” Lor had even less enthusiasm for placing herself and our ship under the command of a stranger.
Once they accepted it, I could depend on them. We did not let Lib in on the caper; she has no talent for creative lying. Far better that she believe whatever she said.
Laz and Lor were outwitting their elders by the time they were six, a process I encouraged by walloping them whenever I caught them. They learned. They also have my talent for looking stupid, plus one I have but seldom can use:
They can turn tears on and off like a faucet. (I have not found many cultures in which this advantages a male.)
Once this was settled, I arrested myself by helping Dora’s waldoes move my most personal gear next door. Then I lay down and listened through Dora to what was going on in the flag cabin.
And discovered that I had outsmarted myself. I have never tried to teach Dora to lie; a dishonest computer is a menace: one that is a pilot would be a lethal disaster, sooner or later. Sooner.
But I hadn’t figured on this narrow little broad asking for my papers so quickly. Nor did I guess that Dora had told her that my cabin could be scanned only by my order.
When I heard the situation start to deteriorate, I got up quickly and put on one of my Scottish outfits. Advantages: I look bigger, taller, more imposing. The costume calls for two weapons worn publicly. These I never use. But the costume is so draped and full that one may hide weapons for a half squad- then never show them save in extremis.
So I was ready when Lor came busting in, almost incoherent. “Brother, is she mad! Watch yourself!”
“I will, Lor. You’ve done a swell job.” I kissed her. “Now march me in under arrest.”
So we did. I halted ten paces from Mrs. Burroughs and saluted. She said to Lor, “You may leave” – waited until Lor had left, then said, “Instruct your computer not to see or listen in this space.”
“Aye aye, Ma’am. Dora.”
“Yes, Boss?”
“Back to normal for my cabin. No see ‘um, no hear ’em until I tell you to.”
“Chinchy!”
“Dora!”
“Aye aye, Boss. Mean!”
“She’s a bit childish but she’s a good cook. And a fine pilot.”
“And you’re a bit childish. Prisoners do not salute, prisoners do not wear arms. Captain Carter, confiscate his weapons. Keep them as souvenirs or destroy them.”
Long years as a slave taught me to put up with anything without a squawk. That doesn’t make it pleasant.
“Smith.”
I didn’t answer. She added, “I mean you, Woodie!”
“Yes, Ma’am?”
“Lean over, grab your ankles. Captain, frisk him.”
Carter knew how, I soon no longer had tools for a half squad – but felt better when he ended having missed one. He was in uniform-of-the-day, but he was big, in training, and carried himself in a way that made me think of Black Belts.
“Those are yours, too, Zebbie, although you might share them. Deety mentioned something about not having a throwing knife. How’s the balance on those?”
She was not speaking to me but I had to try to gain control of the psychological gauge. “One and a half turns at eight meters, Ma’am. I make them myself. But it’s too heavy a knife for a lady. I would happily make one to fit Doctor Deety’s hand and strength.”
“I imagine that Doctor Deety is stronger than you are, Woodie. I think you’ve gone a bit soft. Someday we’ll check it. Take off your clothes.”
With my weapons gone, other than the one, I welcomed the order. Clothes are no asset in unarmed brawl; the other man can use yours against you. And I was sweating; Dora keeps the ship right for skin. I peeled quickly.
“Shove them down that,” she said, pointing.
“Uh, Ma’am, that’s a destruction oubliette.”
“I know. Next time you won’t try to impress me by sartorial elegance. Furthermore it was intentional insolence. Pronto!”
I shoved them down pronto. “Grab your ankles again, Woodie. Captain Carter, need we give him an enema to make sure he hasn’t hidden one more weapon? I don’t care to check by touch without a rubber glove, and I won’t ask you to.”
“Madam, I give you my word – “
” – which is worth nothing. Let it go, Zebbie. Join the class and keep an eye on our interests.”
The big man looked me over. “I don’t like to leave you alone with him, Commodore.”
“Thank you, Zebbie. I’m safe. I was safe when he was armed but he was being insolent so I spanked him. Run along; he doesn’t dare touch me.” She added, “Or do you have a premonition?”
“No. But I get them just barely in time.”
“I couldn’t ask for more. But I feel a prophecy. Woodie is going to be a lamb about everything. Now go, dear.”
He left, giving me a look that promised death if I harmed her. I wanted to tell him that I had never found it necessary to harm a woman in more centuries than his wife had years.
“Well, Lazarus, how do we work this out?”
“Work out what, Ma’am? You have the upper hand.”
“Oh, piffle! You have the upper hand; you know it. As long as the ship’s computer obeys you, rather than me, my ‘authority’ is a fraud. I escaped once by a fluke; you won’t let it happen twice. But I stuck my head back into the trap because I think we have something to trade, to our mutual profit.”
“I hope so, Ma’am. Please go on.”
“You want your mother rescued. I plan to do it if it can be done. For which you will toe the mark. We need a holding company. I will own fifty-one percent of the voting stock. Not of the profits; there will be plenty for all. But I control.”
“Madam, you’re way ahead of me. I don’t know what you have in mind.”
“Money. Money and power. Whew! I just got downwind; you sweated into that heavy costume. Go in there, take a tub bath, hot and soapy. I’ll sprawl on the chaise longue and we’ll talk business. Are you really trying to rescue your mother, or are you simply looking to cut yourself in on Jacob’s invention? We can make a deal, either way – but I must know. Don’t hold out on me; I tend to get annoyed. Then someone else pays. You, in this case.”
She took my hand and led me into the ‘fresher while I answered her key question and thought about the rest. No more lies; she had caught me in one thrown together hastily and too complex; my grandfather would have been ashamed of it. So – nothing but the truth. But how much truth and what truth?
“Rescuing my mother is priority one, sine qua non. Business aspects are secondary.”
“You were going to say that business aspects didn’t matter to you – and I would have stuffed it down your throat.”
I stalled while I adjusted the bath’s controls. “Ma’am, I always think about business angles. But I would go broke and start over to make this rescue.”
“Will you sign such a contract? We rescue your mother; you sign over all your wealth to me? No cheating, no holdout?”
“Is that what it takes?”
“No. It would not be equitable and that would compel you to cheat. Any contract must profit both of us. But rescuing your mother appeals to me – to all my family; I’m the least sentimental of us-and we would tackle it if there were not a fiat dollar in sight. Pour le sport. That nice warm feeling – whether it’s a kitten, a baby bird, or an old woman. But there is money in this… and sport… and opportunities beyond imagination. That sound of water splashing: does that interfere with Dora’s hearing?”
“No, she filters it out.”
“Is she listening?”
I instantly answered, “Yes.” I’ve lived a long time in part by being a cat not caught in the same trap twice – as she had underlined. I placed in my permanent memory, nine times nine, never to lie to this woman again. Evade, avoid, keep silent, be elsewhere. But don’t lie to her. A born Grand Inquisitor. Telepathic? Must ask Laz-Lor.
“I’m glad you said Yes, Lazarus. Had you said No, I would have broken off negotiations. I’m not telepathic – but you may find it inadvisable to lie to me. We must change the computer situation – part now, part later. You didn’t give her the right code words.”
“That’s right. ‘Chinchy’ and ‘mean’ equal -“
” – Roger Wilco, but reversed meaning.”
“Eh? That’s a deep-down memory. Yes. Hmm – I must insert that phrase into Galacta. Useful.” The water was just right, with deep, fragrant suds. I stepped down into it, picked a seat that let me lounge. “I should have said to Dora – Shall I tell Dora now?”
“With a modification. I want the equivalent of a simple telephone, so that I can call anyone, anyone can call me – and the same for you. But kill the snoop circuits throughout this suite.”
“No trouble. We can call out at any time; that is a safety feature, permanent. As for calling in, I usually limit it to the twin commanding; she’s entitled to disturb me, if needed. If not needed – well, neither Laz nor Lor enjoys being called ‘stupid,’ especially by me.”
I changed the orders to Dora and did not cheat; Mrs. Burroughs and I were now truly in private, although anyone could reach us – voice only. “What next, Ma’am?”
“Some permanent changes for Dora, now that she can’t hear us. Tentative plans for your mother’s rescue. Then we talk business. Is there a seat in that pool where I won’t drown?”
“Oh, certainly. When Laz-Lor were your size, they often bathed with me – I’ve had as high as six in this tub although that’s a bit cozy; it’s a four-adult design. Here, let me help; you can’t see through these suds.” Helping Hilda Burroughs reminded me of handling Laz-Lor at the same size, prepubescent… but I was acutely aware that this small, warm, slick body was postpubescent by many years and I got a twinge that I was pleased to have figleafed by suds. “Feel under you – find the seat? Temperature suit you?”
“Luxurious. On Tertius refreshers are social rooms, are they not?”
“Yes. Over the years I have found that nude cultures, or those with no taboos about nakedness, tend to make bathing a social event. Ancient Romans. Ancient Japanese. Many others.”
She answered, “Whereas cultures with strong body taboos equate bathing rooms with outhouses back of barns. Disgusting.” Mrs. Burroughs looked disgusted. I noted this as I had thought it would be necessary to get them used to skin before exposing them to the easy-going ways of Tertius… lest I jeopardize my mother’s rescue. I had instructed Laz-Lor to hold us in irrelevancy until all of them, with no urging, accepted the comfort of complete bareness in perfectly tempered conditions, and simply forgot about bodies qua bodies. This does not mean to forget yin-yang… but it has long been known to all but legislators, judges, and other fools that a scrap of clothing fig-leafing whatever may be taboo (taboos vary endlessly and each is a “law of nature”) is far more stimulating than is no clothing.
(Warning to time-travellers: To assume that the taboos of your native culture are “natural” and that you can’t go too wrong behaving by the rules your loving parents taught you is to risk death. Or worse. If you think death has no “worse,” read history.)
To return to pretty little Mrs. Burroughs: To be enjoying a bath with her a few minutes after she had had me subjected to personal indignity was the second most surprising thing about her. The most surprising thing I was still learning: This fragile little doll with the muscles of a kitten was the toughest bitch kitty I have ever encountered.
Understand me, I admire her. But I want to be on the side she is on. “What changes in Dora do you want, Ma’am?”
“Lazarus, I’m ‘Ma’am’ to strangers and on formal occasions. I don’t consider bathing all that formal; my friends call me Hilda. Or by nicknames. Even pet names. But not ‘Ma’am.'”
My answer got me splashed. She went on, “In attempting to hornswoggle me, you gave me, through your accomplices, a phony command and rank – while retaining control of the computer necessary to make it real. I require that you carry out your contract. Now. By reprogramming Dora to me as her sole boss, with the program locked so that you can’t change it. Me and me alone.”
She smiled, leaned toward me, and placed a hand on my knee under water. “That’s why I insisted on privacy – for Dora’s sake. She’s self-aware and seems quite vulnerable. Lazarus, I don’t mind anyone in this ship hearing anything I’ve been saying. But I don’t discuss surgery when it is likely to upset the patient.” She leaned forward. “Scratch between my shoulder blades – pretty please?”
I welcomed time to think, while requiring her to coach me – higher, lower, a little to the left, ah, right there …
“Hilda, I’m not sure it can be done. I did reprogram Dora so that her loyalty in crisis is to Laz-Lor. But it took me years and was not done by circuitry or by programming Dora is so thoroughly a self-aware personality that it is necessary to win her love in order to gain her lovalty”
“I find that believable. Lazarus, let’s see you pull a hat out of the rabbit.”
“You mean -“
“I meant what I said. Any second-rate magician can pull a rabbit out of a hat. Can Lazarus Long pull a hat out of a rabbit? Watch this space next week. It’s your problem, Lazarus; you created it. I won’t make a second contract with a man in default on his first. Do you want your back scratched while you think? You scratched mine deliciously.”
I accepted by leaning forward. Hilda is telepathic though perhaps not in words. She knew which spots and how hard and how long.
And when to stop. She dropped her hand as I straightened up… and her hand brushed against me and stopped. “Well! Truly I did not intend to be provocative, old dear.”
I put an arm around her; she did not pull away but continued, “I won’t refuse you. I have not given a man reasonable cause to call me a tease since I was twelve. But wouldn’t it be sensible to table this until after we have rescued your mother and set up our business structure? If you find – then – that you are interested, you will let me know. If you do, I ask that you cooperate with me in saving my husband’s feelings and face. And… I am… having trouble saying this – Damn it! Please stop and tell me the plans for rescuing your mother.”
I stopped, allowed a hand’s width to separate us. “Have you forgotten the hat and the rabbit?”
“I’m afraid I did. Very well, you’ve won this round; we attempt to rescue your mother. I waive the broken contract – but we do no further business. Just the rescue, then we leave.”
“I thought you promised me a second chance – later?”
“What? Lazarus, you’re a bastard.”
“I’m not but the term has no meaning on Tertius. Here’s the ‘hat.’ You designate me your flunky – any title – for this ship. My sole function will be to be in earshot – through Dora or otherwise – to insure that your slightest wish is carried out. Night or day.”
“Making me a privileged figurehead, still vulnerable to your whim. The hat won’t fit.”
“Very well – second hat. We ground on Tertius; I move Dora into another ship – she accepts that; it has happened before. I sign this ship over to you with a new computer of the same capacity, programmed for ship’s routine but unawakened. You let it awaken to your personality. You’ll be its mother.”
“That’s better. Close but not on. Lazarus, you and I are going to be in business together a long time. I won’t take your ship. Instead you’re going to build me a ship, a tender for Gay Deceiver but moved by a Burroughs continua device – the first such ship built by Burroughs & Long, Ltd., a subsidiary of Carter Engineering Company. Another subsidiary is Carter Computers, which may assemble computers but primarily will build Burroughs Time-Space twisters under some innocuous name, and sell them only inside our complex setup – much more complex; we’ll work on it together. But our biggest subsidiary will be Libby & Smith, Real Estate. That one rebuilds solar systems.”
“What!!”
“Talk to Zebbie and Jacob. We’ll organize Black Hat Safaris, Pty., too, but it may be a dummy for a while. We’ll have an emporium in New Rome, imports from many universes. Uh… The Pawnshop, of course, with the Hook Joint above it. Ultra expensive imported styles up there, modelled by New Rome’s most beautiful hetaerae. Private rooms for private viewings. This one is a gift to Laz-Lor, save for the ten percent that is voting stock of which I vote my usual control, through you. The twins can do as they please with it; our leash will be slack. Probably they will do their own importing, with a resident manager. But they might work in it some, just to know the business.”
“Which business?”
“Both. They are grown women, Lazarus; you must not try to run their lives. The overall holding company, run by you and me, usual split with my one percent advantage, is a nonprofit corporation supporting Ishtar’s clinic. We funnel whatever is needed into the clinic, holding down the book profits elsewhere, but paying whopping salaries and consulting fees. My husband is chief scientist in one part while consultant by fee elsewhere, with Elizabeth – Lib – his mirror image elsewhere. Lazarus, we must have Deety work on it; she has the finest head in our family for manipulation of this sort – I’m just her awed pupil.”
“And I’m just your awed pupil!”
“Piffle again. Lazarus, from what I’ve read of you, your sole weakness lies in a delight in cheating for its own sake; Deety treats it as an intellectual art. One thing more – No, two things. Can you persuade Dora, as a favor to Ol’ Buddy Boy, to go along with the hoax until we deliver your mother to Ishtar? Make it a mammoth joke, under which she takes orders from me because she wants to be in on the fun. Take you out of arrest, of course; wipe it from her memory.”
“It was never in her memory; Lor put her in non-recording mode while the hooraw was on.”
“Good! Can you persuade her to call me ‘Commodore’ while you use some fancy title?”
“Hilda, I’m your chief of staff for this ship; Zeb is chief of staff, flagship. Dora doesn’t really understand ranks; I can tell her that ‘chief of staff’ is one notch senior to God. No problem. As long as she can see that you and I are buddy-buddy.”
“And we are!”
“It’s reassuring to hear that. Hilda, I underestimated you so badly that I’m still in a state of shock. What’s the last item?”
“Rejuvenation for all of us for as long as you – Ishtar – can stretch non-Howards.”
“I can promise that; I’m Board Chairman of the Clinic. But – Ishtar is not a magician. What’s the average age of death for your parents, grandparents, any ancestors you know about?”
“My family, both sides, are considered long-lived – although I lost my parents in a car crash. The others I don’t know about except that Deety’s mother died of cancer, much too young.”
“We can handle that.”
“Is longevity on Earth – our Earth, not yours – of interest? Same length of year as Old-Home-Terra; Deety and Lor checked.”
“Of course!”
“These figures apply to North America. Some other places are higher, some lower, some no data. Females. Menarche at thirteen plus-or-minus nine percent. Menopause at fifty-six to sixty-seven plus-or-minu -“
“Stop there! Average age of death, female?”
“One hundred seventeen. But males average eight years less. Sad. My own family averages higher, but only a few years. I don’t know about Jacob but he mentioned once that his great-grandfather got himself killed, in an odd fashion, at ninety-seven. He -“
“Enough. I must report this. By definition, all of you are ‘Missing Howards.'”
“But, Lazarus, that’s simply the average on Earth – our Earth, now that I know that there are thousands of analogs.”
“Doesn’t matter. Different universe, different time line – not my problem. Here you are a Howard. You four and all your descendants.”
Hilda smiled happily. “That’s cheerful news to a woman six weeks pregnant.”
“You?”
“And Deety. Same time and doesn’t show yet. Lazarus, I was tempted a while ago to tell you… because I was tempted. Now, now! Down, Rover! Outline to me how we rescue a woman dead for many centuries.”
“Hilda, someday I’m going to get you drunk.”
“Want to bet?”
“Never with you. There is mystery about my mother’s death. She appears to have been killed accidentally at a relatively young age, for a Howard. Just short of a hundred. I was notified as her purse I.D.’s named me as ‘next of kin’ – and I bawled like a baby for I had been planning to pay her a visit on her century day, July 4th, 1982. Instead I attended her funeral, flying to Albuquerque two weeks early.
“Nobody there but me. She was living alone under her maiden name, she and my father having separated thirty years earlier. But apparently she hadn’t listed her last address change with the Howard Foundation, hadn’t notified her other children. Howards are like that; they live so long that kinship is not enough reason to stay in touch. Closed casket and cremation – authorized by stuff in her purse; I never saw her body.
“But there was no doubt as to her I.D.’s and so forth. In my world, 1982 was a time when you couldn’t sneeze without carrying a thick pack of cards all, in effect, saying that you were you. I was feeling it because I was seventy later that year and looked thirty-five. Embarrassing. I had plans to drive south from Albuquerque, cross the border, and not come back until I had bought a new passport to match a new name.
“Hilda, it was over two thousand years later, in preparing for my first time trip, that I learned that my mother was not listed in the Archives as dead but simply as ‘record missing.'”
“The matter troubled me. A few years ago – my time – Laz-Lor took me back. Didn’t ground; a missile chased us and scared Dora silly. But I got a motion picture that seems to show the accident. There is a blur on the frames just before the first one that shows what I think is the corpse. Can you guess the size and shape?”
“Shan’t try, Lazarus.”
“As near as I can measure on a film a centimeter square, shot with a telephoto lens from too high because Dora was crying and wanting to go home, it is the size of that berth Gay Deceiver is in. Hilda, I think I photographed you rescuing my mother before you did it.”
“What? Lazarus, that’s -“
“Don’t say impossible. The Land of Oz is impossible. You’re impossible. I’m impossible. Who invented pantheistic multiperson solipsism? You did.”
“I wasn’t going to say ‘impossible.’ Now that you know that I’m pregnant, you will realize why I want to try to rescue your mother right away, before my belly starts growing where the seat belt crosses it. Her name was Marian? Marian Johnson Smith?”
“Maureen Johnson.”
“That proves that the real Lazarus Long stood up. It bothered me that there might be a series of analog-Lazarus-Longs like analog-Earths.”
“Wouldn’t bother me. That’s their problem.”
“But it would destroy the theory I worked out that would account for my sitting here in a pool of water in a time-travelling flying saucer with a fabulous man – both ways! – when I know he’s a fictional character in a book I read years back. That makes me a fictional character, too, but that doesn’t trouble me as I can’t read a novel with me in it, any more than you could read the one I read about you.”
“I came close to doing just that.”
“Don’t be mysterious, Lazarus.”
“I like wild stories. Used to read every one I could find in the Kansas City Public Library. On another time trip I picked up a magazine of a type you may never have seen. Read one installment of a serial. Ridiculous. Four people traveling in space in an airplane. At the end of that installment they are hailed by a flying saucer. Continued next month. Hilda, how do you think Dora was able to be at the right place at the right time when Gay Deceiver popped out of nowhere?”
“Where is that magazine?”
“Down the same destruction oubliette that recently received my best fake Scottish chief costume. If I had not learned long ago to dispose of casual fiction once I had read it, Dora would never be able to lift. Hilda, you explained it yoursel -“
“Hilda? Do you hear me” – her husband’s voice.
Her face lit up. “Yes, Jacob?”
“May I see you? I have a problem.”
I barely whispered, “I’ll get out,” and started to stand up. She pulled me back down. “Of course, Jacob dearest. I’m in the flag cabin. Where are you?”
“In our suite.”
“Come straight here.” She whispered to me, “Do we have a deal?” I nodded; she stuck out her hand; we shook on it. “Partners,” she whispered. “Details later. Maureen first.”
Her husband answered, “Hilda, I don’t know my way. And it’s a private matter.”
“Then you must come here, Jacob; this is the only private place in the ship. I’ve been talking business with Lazarus Long – business so private we had to talk here. No more trouble, dearest man, and we each get what we want. Come join us, we need you.”
“Uh… can he hear me?”
“Certainly. We’re having a bath together. Come join us. I want you to know all about the deal before we tell the children. I may need support on parts where we traded quid pro quo.”
Silence – “I’d better call back later.”
I said, “Doctor Burroughs, you want to talk privately with your wife; I will get out. But please understand that social bathing is as commonplace on my world as offering a friend a drink is on yours. I am here because the Commodore invited me and I assure you she is quite unharmed.”
Burroughs replied in a pained voice, “I know that custom and have utter faith in Hilda’s social judgment. Yes, I do need to speak to her… but I don’t mean to be surly. I’ll come up, or down, or across, and say hello. Please don’t leave before I get there. I’ll ask my way.”
“Dora will show you. Step into the corridor and wait. She’ll find you.”
“Very well, sir.”
“Dora, special.”
“Yes, Pappy?”
“Find Professor Burroughs. Lead him here. By the longest route. Slow march.”
“Aye aye, Pappy.”
I said hurriedly to Hilda, “I may know what this is; let me check. Lib?”
“Yes, Lazarus?”
“Are you alone?”
“In my stateroom alone. And lonely.” Lib added, “And upset.”
“So? Did you put the question to Professor Burroughs?”
“Yes. Lazarus, I had perfect opportunity. The one place Dora can’t see or hear. Inside Gay Deceiver’s space warp and – “
“Chop it, Lib! Did he turn you down?”
“No. But he didn’t say Yes. He’s gone to discuss it with his wife. That’s why I’m jittery.”
“Turn on the soother. I’ll call you back. Off.”
Hilda asked, “What’s the matter with Elizabeth?”
“I’ll make it short as even the longest route can’t take long. Lib is terribly anxious to have a child by the mathematician – your husband – who formulated the equations for six-dimensional positively-curved space. She thinks – and so do I – that they might produce a mathematician equal to, or even greater, than Lib or your husband. But she should have let Ishtar arrange it. She jumped the gun; I don’t know why -“
“I do! Elizabeth!”
Lib was slow in answering. “This is Elizabeth Long.”
“Hilda Burroughs here. Elizabeth, you come straight here. Flag cabin.”
“Commodore, are you angry with me? I meant no harm.”
“Dear, dear! You come to Mama Burroughs’ arms and let me pet you and tell you that you’re a good girl. Now! How far away are you?”
“Just around the curve. A few meters.”
“Drop everything and hurry. Lazarus and I are in the ‘fresher. In the pool. Come join us.”
“Uh, all right.”
“Hurry!”
Hilda asked, “How do I let them in? Run dripping and do it by hand? I noticed that our door lets anyone out but can’t be opened from the outside without help.” She added, “For that matter how do I get back in?”
“Dora knows you belong here. For the rest – Dora, admit Libby Long and Professor Burroughs.”
“Aye aye, Pappy. Lib – here she comes. Dr. Jacob Burroughs I’m fetching. How soon?”
Hilda said, “Two minutes.”
Lib hurried in, still unsmiling. Did smile when Hilda put her arms around her, smiled and cried at the same time. I heard Hilda crooning, “There, there, dear! It’s a wonderful idea; she’ll be the world’s greatest mathematician. A cute baby – something like Deety, something like you. Jacob! In here, darling! If you are wearing anything, chuck it; we’re in the pool.”
Seconds later the pool was filled to its rated capacity, Hilda with arms around both of them – kissed her husband, kissed Lib, said sternly to them, “Stop looking as if you were at a funeral! Jacob, this is what Jane would want – and it is what I want. Elizabeth, you aren’t crowding me out; I’m pregnant now. I’ll have my baby six weeks before you have yours. I’ve decided to ask Doctor Lafe Hubert to deliver my baby. Who are -“
“Hilda! I haven’t delivered a baby for over a century.”
“You have seven months in which to brush up. Doctor Lafe, are you refusing to attend me?”
“No, but – Jake, if Hilda will have her baby at the Clinic on Tertius, she will be in the hands of the most skilled obstetricians in this universe. Which I am not. I’m rusty. I -“
“Doctor, I think Hilda would settle for your holding her hand and standing by to help if needed. I think my daughter would like that, too. She may have her baby the same day as Hilda.”
“Sir, I will be honored. But I want to say something about this proposed baby, a cross between two all-time great mathematicians. I know that your world places value on monogamy. Howards do not; they can’t. But this need not violate your values. If you will make a deposit at the sperm bank at -“
“What?” Hilda Burroughs looked shocked. “Lazarus, are you talking about syringes and things like that. Done to Elizabeth?”
“Why, yes, I -“
She chopped me off. “Babies are not made with syringes! Babies are made with love! With little moans of happiness between two people who know exactly what they are doing and want to do it. Elizabeth, are you fertile today?”
“I should be. It’s time.”
“Then kiss me and tell me you want to do this. If you do.”
“Oh, I do, very much!”
There were kisses and tears all around. I got pulled into it, found myself kissing the prospective father. I gave him a chance to duck but he didn’t.
Our busy little stranger was still playing ringmaster. “Lazarus, what is that guest room across the cabin? Pastel colors?”
“Aurora Room.”
“Beloved husband, wrap a towel around this sweet, frightened child, take her there, lock the door behind you and make her happy. This suite is the only totally private place in this ship. If I lay eyes on either of you in less than one hour, I shall burst into tears. That doesn’t mean you can’t stay longer. I hope that you will come to dinner … but you are welcome to Aurora Room after dinner. Sweetheart, you must give her at least one chance each of the next three days; a woman’s timing can vary from her norm. Now git! Pick her up and carry her.”
Lib wouldn’t let Jake carry her. But she leaned into his arm. As they left the ‘fresher, she looked back with a happy smile and threw us a kiss.
Hilda caught it and ate it. Then she said to me, “Help me out, please, dear.”
I lifted her out, sat her on the edge, climbed out myself. She patted the padded deck, said, “I think this is better than that chaise longue. If we happen to be caught it wouldn’t embarrass me and should not embarrass you; in these circumstances Jacob would be relieved rather than upset.” She smiled, eased her sweet thighs, put up her arms. “Now?”
“Yes!”
“Anything you want, including back rubs. Lazarus, does it excite you knowing what is going on a few meters away? It does me!”
“Yes! But I don’t need it – Hilda, you’re superb!”
“Not in looks, certainly. So I try hard with what I have. Sold myself three times – did my best to make my contract-husbands each feel that he had received full value… then married dear Jacob for love and am trying still harder with him. He is good – I mean he is good all through. I hope Elizabeth appreciates him. You’ve had her?”
“Yes.”
“Before or after the change?”
“Both. I miss the ‘before,’ appreciate the ‘after.”
“Then why won’t you knock her up?”
“That’s a family joke. She had her first child by me, is now making the rounds of our family, more or less. Woman, you are not here to talk! – I’m almost there!”
She looked delighted. “I’m climaxing steadily; let ‘er rip!” – and bit my chin.
An indefinitely long time later that need not be detailed, we were resting in each other’s arms, enjoying that delicious peace of the ebbing tide. Hilda saw them first, raised her head:
“Jacob beloved! Did you! Lib – Did my sweetheart put a baby in you?”
“Did he! Hilda, you do that every night? Little bitty like you? Less than two hours and darling Jacob has worn me out.”
“I’m a hollow mockery, dear. Built for it. Tell her, Jacob.”
“My darling is adaptable, Libby dear. Lazarus, did Hilda treat you nicely?”
“I died happy.”
“He’s not dead” – Hilda made a long arm, cupped a handful of water, threw it in my face, giggled. The suggestion she added I rejected with dignity – as much dignity as one can manage when two women are tumbling one into a tub of water… while one’s male comrade stands by and laughs.

Chapter XLIV

” – where do we get the corpse?”

Zeb:
“The question,” said my wife Deety, “is where do we get the corpse? With timing that precise, Gay can make the pickup. But a corpse has to be left behind. Lazarus, not only do your movies show it, but you remember Maureen’s death; you went to her funeral. It’s got to be a fresh corpse of an elderly woman that the cops will accept as Maureen Johnson.”
Six of us – Deety, me, Jake, Sharpie, Lazarus, and Libby – were seated around our kitchen dining table at “New Harbor” (our wives accepted that compromise) in Beulahland, trying to make plans for the “snatch.” “Snatch” in the literal sense if the rescue of Maureen Johnson were to succeed.
Lazarus had a motion picture that showed that we would succeed (had succeeded) (were about to succeed) at a precise time and place and date on an analog of Earth-zero one quantum away on ‘t’ axis.
Easy! Success guaranteed. Can’t miss. Do it blindfolded.
But suppose we did miss?
The frames showed that a roadable had passed through the space where Gay had been (would be?) grounded, and, in so doing, ran over (would run Over) (will run over) (is, was, and forever will be running over) the dumped corpse. Suppose the timing or placement was offjust a touch. On his first time travel (1916-1918 Old-Home-Terra), with Dora piloting, Lazarus had missed not by a split second but by three years.
Lazarus had pointed out that it was his fault, not Dora’s; he had fed her imperfect data – and we had jumped on him from five sides: It was not a question of “whose fault” but the fact a mistake could be made. Or could it?
Four mathematicians, one mathematical engineer (yeah, I include me, as resident expert in Gay’s responses), and one intuitionist all disagreed.
Hilda was certain that nothing could go wrong.
I am a firm believer in Murphy’s Law: Given any possible chance, it will go wrong. Anything.
Libby had been wholeheartedly converted both to Jake’s six-axis plenum of universes to the awful Number of the Beast but also to Sharpie’s multiple solipsism, and asserted that they were two sides of the same coin; one was a corollary of the other and vice versa. Combined, they (it) constituted the ultimate total philosophy: science, religion, mathematics, art, in one grand consistent package. She spoke of a “ficton” being a quantum of imagination/reality (“imaginary” being identical with “real” whatever that is) as casually as a physicist speaks of photons. “Could a mistake be made? Yes. And would create a new universe. Jacob, you spoke of the empty universes your family had visited. One by one they fill as fictons are created.” She added, “But a mistake was not made; we snatched Maureen safely. We ourselves create the fictions-fictons-ficta that will make it real.”
She was euphoric. I attributed it to excitement over the coming adventure. I was mistaken.
Lazarus, a highly competent mathematician although not the unique that Jake is or Libby, was in this case not a calm abstractionist; his mood was grim determination to win or die trying – causing me to recall how he got his arse shot off.
Jake turned out to be a determinist (he himself being one universe’s prime example of utter, rambunctious free will!).
Deety is a pragmatic mathematician, unworried by theory. Oz is real, she is real, “fictons” don’t interest her. “Don’t fret, Lazarus. We can do it, Gay can do it – and we won’t do it until Gay is certain of her program.”
This discussion had started midafternoon in Dora. Sharpie had worked out her difficulties with Lazarus (to my enormous relief; were those two to wind up on opposite sides in anything more serious than Parcheesi, I yearn to be elsewhere – say Timbuktu under an assumed name); she, Jake, Lazarus, and Libby were in the flag cabin, arguing, when Sharpie had Dora page Deety and me.
There were endless matters on the agenda (including the preposterous notion that we four were ‘Missing Howards’ and that Lazarus was registering us as such. I’m not sure I want to live a thousand years or even two hundred. But I am sure of this: a) I want to live quite a piece; and b) I want to be alert, healthy, and active right up to the last. Not like my great-grandfather who had to be spoonfed at a hundred and five, and could not control his secretions. But the Howards have got that whipped: you stay young as long as you wish, then die by choice when you feel you’ve had your full run.
(Yes, I was willing to be a ‘Found Howard’ since it included Deety, plus little Deeties ad infinitum.)
Lots of other business, all of it postponed (including the problem of “Black Hats”), in order to deal with rescuing Maureen Johnson.
We were still discussing knotty aspects when Lor’s voice said: “Commodore?”
“Yes, Captain?” Sharpie had answered.
“Ma’am, I hesitate to disturb you -“
“Quite all right, Lor. The Captain must always be able to reach me.”
“Uh, Ma’am, Dora told me that she was forbidden to call you. She has for you a variety of New Rome styles for women and men, a military uniform for Doctor Jacob, and one for Doctor Zebadiah, and evening formals for Doctor Elizabeth and Doctor Deety – and she’s not sure where to send any of them.”
“Send all the clothes to the flag cabin, please.”
“Yes, Ma’am. They should be appearing in your delivery cupboard now. Do you know where that is?”
“I’ll find it. What are you and your sister wearing tonight? Or is it a secret?”
“It’s not a secret; we just haven’t decided. But there is still an hour and thirty-one minutes till dinner.”
“Time enough to pick out pretty clothes. Or will you wear formal skin tonight? That takes anywhere from two seconds to two hours, does it not? Off.”
Sharpie used an unusually rough expression of disgust, which told me that she now included Lib and Lazarus in her inner circle. “Woodie, do you know any exceptionally strong cuss words? I detest the thought of wasting time pretending to be festive when we have so much to settle, especially our procedures for Maureen.”
Deety looked at Libby. “You and I are kind o’ stuck with a promise, too. How about some new cuss words from you, too?”
“Deety, I have no literary talent. But I would like to hear some soul-soothing cussing. We ought to stick with this, with snacks to keep going and sleep when we must, until it’s perfect. Three hours or three days or three weeks.”
I said, “We shall!”
Sharpie shook her head. “Zebbie, you can skip dinner. I can’t. Lazarus should appear, too.”
He agreed. “I’m afraid I must. But, Commodore, I must advise you that your flag chief of staff should be present, too, for esprit de corps.” He cleared his throat noisily. “Libby and Jacob, being passengers, could skip.”
Lib shook her head. “Deety and I made a reckless promise.”
Not being a genius myself, it’s kind of fun to make a roomful of ’em look silly. I stood up. “No! We will not let a dinner party interfere! We can settle it within three days. But if you all are going to chase rabbits – What’s the matter with you, Sharpie? Getting stupid in your old age?”
“Apparently I am, Zebbie.” She said to Lazarus, “Please issue orders cancelling dinner. We’ll stay with this until we finish it. There are beds and lounges whenever anyone needs to nap. But we won’t adjourn. Three hours or three weeks. Or longer.”
“Don’t cancel dinner, Sharpie.”
“Zebbie, you have me confused.”
“Beulahland is on a different time axis.”
Five minutes later we were in our old farmhouse. We hadn’t stopped for clothes as we would have wasted twenty minutes, whereas the idea was to save time on that axis, use time on this axis. We stuck Lazarus and Libby back in the after space, with the bulkhead door dogged open, so they could see and hear, but required them to use the web straps, and cautioned them that the lumps under them were loaded firearms.
The only thing not routine was that we would be making rendezvous later with a moving ship, something we had done before only from bounce range in the same space-time. So I had asked Gay whether she was sure she could do it. She assured me that she could, because she wasn’t concerned with the ship’s vector; she would return the instant she left.
I turned to Commodore-now-Captain Sharpie. “Ready for space, Captain.”
“Thank you, Astrogator. Gay Deceiver. Beulahland. Execute. Gay Deceiver, open your doors. All hands, unbelt. Disembark. Gay, it’s sleepy time. Over.”
“Goodnight, Hilda. Roger and out.”
Our passengers were dazed – they all are, first time. They stood outside our barn, looking at the setting sun, acting like zombies, until I shooed them inside. Although Beulahland does not have body taboos, they wear clothes most of the time, and six naked people outdoors in a clump as the chill of the evening was coming on was odd. I like a low profile.
Once inside, Libby said, “Feels like Arkansaw.”
Lazarus replied. “Feels like Mizzoura.”
“Neither,” I told them. “It would be the State of Washington if it weren’t Beulahiand, and what ought to be Puget Sound is about a kilometer over that way.”
“It still feels like home. Lazarus, I’m happy here.”
At that moment I decided we would never give up New Harbor. Apparently we were going to be citizens of Tertius, or maybe New Rome on Secundus, or both (commuting is no problem when light-years mean nothing), on another time axis. We could take a rest from city life anytime and have it cost not one day’s work on Tertius. Contrariwise, only such time would pass on New World as we spent there.
Hmm – Maybe we could sell vacations. Or extra study time for that student who has his big exam, the one he must pass, tomorrow morning. Sell him room and board and transportation and three weeks not in the calendar. At a slight markup, of course.
I built a cheerful fire in the fireplace, and Lazarus washed dishes, while Libby insisted on proving that she could cook on a wood range, even though she had learned centuries ago by her time scale, as a gangling boy. Yes, Elizabeth can cook.
We ate and sat around and talked, puzzling how to be sure of Maureen. Not make that one tiny mistake, It was then that Deety brought up the matter of the dead body. You’ve seen how accurate Gay can be but where do we get a freshly-dead corpse to replace Maureen?
Lazarus told her to forget it, “I provide the corpse.”
“That’s not a good answer, Lazarus.”
“Deety, don’t worry. It’ll be dead and I will dump it.” I said, “Lazarus, I don’t like that answer a damn bit.” “Nor do I,” Jake seconded.
“Nor I,” agreed Sharpie. “Woodie, you’re asking us to make a snatch – a hanging offense many places, bad trouble anywhere. We don’t mind the technicality; saving an old woman’s life isn’t the sin kidnapping is. But what about this freshly-dead corpse? We don’t deal in murder.”
Lazarus glowered.
Libby said hastily, “If I assure you that it is all right, will you let it go at that?”
“No,” pronounced Sharpie, “Woodie must come clean.”
“All right, all right! I own this corpse. No murder or any other crime involved. Now will you quit riding me about it?”
“Jake?”
“I don’t like it, Zeb.”
“I don’t, either. But we needn’t do anything. We go limp. He may not last long in a culture that ‘balances.'”
“Possible. But that’s his problem.”
Sharpie said quickly, “Did either of you promise him a ride back to my ship?”
“Whose ship?”
“My ship, Woodie. Gentlemen?”
“I didn’t promise him. Did you. Jake?”
“No. Did you, Deety? Hilda?”
“Not me, Pop.”
“Nor me, Jacob. Woodie, earlier today I thought you had seen the light. Conceded, ‘I am but indifferent honest’ myself. But even pirates need to feel safe with their shipmates. You and I shook hands as partners. You don’t seem to understand what that means. However I’m not going to abandon you here. You’d be balanced in a week. Dead. Or worse. So we’ll take you back. By the way, it is impossible to steal Gay Deceiver. Yes, I know you once stole a ship enormously bigger than Gay. But not as well protected.”
“Lazarus! Tell them.”
“Lib, I was waiting for the Commodore to finish. That corpse wasn’t murdered because it was never alive other than as a vegetable.” Lazarus looked embarrassed.
“About thirty years ago we started a medical school on Tertius. A one-horse deal, more of a branch of the clinic. But genetic engineering is taught, and student genetic surgeons must practice. Ordinarily a clone that goes bad is killed and frozen and its tissues studied. A clone that takes – shows no fault, no deviation – is either cared for and allowed to develop if its genetic source wants a spare body and will pay for it. Or, more likely, a healthy clone is purely a laboratory exercise – an ethical medical school requires supervised destruction during the first pseudo trimester, before quickening shows in the wave form.
“Neither student nor tissue donor is likely to be upset by this quasi-abortion, as the student is almost always herself the donor – if it bothers her, she’s in the wrong vocation.
“If the student is not the donor, emotional upset is hardly possible. The student thinks of the clone as a quasi-living histological specimen the usefulness of which is at end – and the tissue donor can’t be upset, being unaware of it.”
“Why so, Lazarus? If anybody is tinkering with my cells, I want to know about it, I do!”
“Deety, that tissue may be years, even centuries, old; the donor may be parsecs away. Or still warm and the donor just leaving the building. Or anything in between. A sperm-and-ova bank insures the future of the race; a tissue bank insures the future of the individual. But somebody has to pick up the check; it’s a tanstaafl situation. A few of the very wealthy – and neurotic – always have a quickened but unawakened clone in stasis. I’m wealthy but not neurotic; I don’t have a reserve clone.”
I caught sight of Libby’s face as Lazarus made that last statement – her mouth twitched in a half smile about to become (I think) a snicker, had she not suppressed all expression. No one but I caught it.
I made note to ask her about it later – then I remembered what the mouse told the cat and decided not to.
“But I do what any prudent Howard does; I have tissue on deposit. One may do this either of two ways: Pay high … or pay much lower and sign a release on half the donation for research and instruction.” He grinned. “I’m stingy. My tissue is available to medical students.”
He went on, “Not all medical schools are ethical. I can think of at least three planets where – ” Lazarus looked directly at my wife. “Deety, you raised this issue. While I can think of three planets where one can buy any sort of monster, I can think of at least thirty where, for a much lower fee, I could simply say, ‘I want that one'” – he pointed at Sharpie – “and the answer would be, ‘It’s a deal, Mac. How freshly dead and when do you want delivery?”
Sharpie looked around behind herself as if to see at whom Lazarus had pointed.
“That’s the cheapest way -“
“Then you weren’t pointing at me!” Sharpie interrupted. “Woodie, it’s not polite to point. For a moment you had me worried. I’m never cheap – highpriced, always.”
“So I found out, Commodore. Deety, that’s cheapest, and safe for the buyer in the places I have in mind. But how can I convince you that I never gave even a moment’s consideration to that method? You seem to know a lot about me – more than I know about any of you. Is there anything that you have ever read or heard, anything that I’ve said or done, that would cause you to think that I would murder or contract for a murder – same but nastier – in order to further my own ends? I’m not saying that I have never killed. A man who has lived even half as long as I have has found himself more than once in a kill-or-be-killed situation. But the best way to deal with such a situation is not to get into it. Anticipate it. Avoid it.”
Lazarus Long stopped and looked sad, and for the only time of my acquaintance with him, looked his age. I do not mean he suddenly looked decrepit. But he had an aura of ancient sorrow. “Professor Burroughs, if it would do any good, I would junk all my plans, accept being forever stranded here, for the privilege of taking a twenty-pound sledge and smashing your space-time twister.”
I was shocked (damn it, I like good machinery). Jake looked hurt, Deety and Sharpie looked stunned.
Jake said tightly, “Lazarus… why?”
“Not to hurt you, Professor; you have my highest respect. You are one of three: the man who invented the wheel, the man who discovered how to use fire – and you. But, in making this supreme discovery, you have accomplished something I had thought impossible. You have made interstellar war logistically practical. Interstellar? Intergalactic – interuniversal!”
Lazarus suddenly straightened up, threw off his gloom, grinned. “All the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t close Pandora’s Box again. Once it hits the fan, the only thing to do is sweep it up, package it, and sell it as fertilizer. Hilda has plans along that line. But I’m going to have to start thinking in military terms again. Figure out how to defend my home place against what appears to be that Ultimate Weapon much talked about but never achieved. I am glad to say that Hilda plans to keep it a close-held secret as long as possible; that may buy us time.”
He turned his attention back to my wife. “Deety, I have never murdered, I never will. The nearest I ever came to it was once being sorely tempted to strangle a five-year-old boy. I admit that the thought has often passed through my mind that this character or that would look his best as the centerpiece of a funeral. But can I convince you that I have never acted on such thoughts? Think hard, please – all that you know of me. Am I capable of murder?”
Deety doesn’t dither. (Remember how we got married?) She jumped up, hurried around our kitchen table, and kissed Lazarus – and stopped hurrying. It was a kiss that calls for a bed, or even a pile of coal – had there not been urgent business before the house.
Deety broke from it, sat down beside him, and said, “Tell us how we get this unmurdered fresh corpse. It’s clear that we’re going to have to go pick it up – in Gay. So we must know.”
Libby said gently, “Lazarus, this is what you have been avoiding. May I tell it?”
“Thanks, Lib. No, you would pretty it up. I -“
“Pipe down!” said Deety. “Elizabeth, give us the straight word. Briefly.”
“Very well. The medical school of B.I.T. is as ethical as you will find. My sister-wife Ishtar is director of the rejuvenation clinic and chairman of the board of the medical school, and still finds time to teach. I have never seen Maureen Johnson as I was born about two centuries after she was. But she iS Supposed to resemble Laz and Lor – unsurprising; she is their genetic mother, since they were cloned from Lazarus.”
“Oh! I see. There is still a third clone from Lazarus. Female?”
“A spoiled one, Deety. Ishtar tells me that it is difficult, rather than otherwise, to get a bad clone from Lazarene tissue… so it is especially suitable for induced mutation experiments. She orders the destruction of these experiments when they have served their purpose.”
“Deety said to make it brief,” growled Lazarus.
Lib ignored him. “But, while Ishtar checks on the students, no one checks on her. For twenty years Ishtar watched for a clone that would look human but not be human. So deficient in forebrain that it could never be anything but a vegetable, unaware. She told me that her students had unknowingly provided her with dozens to work on. Usually they died too soon, or never developed human appearance, or had some other fault that made them unusable. But several years ago she succeeded. I testify that this thing looked like Laz and Lor as it passed through the stage of its forced development… and also that it looked like an older version, wrinkled and hair streaked with gray, when it died two Tertian years ago -“
“Huh? ‘Fresh corpse’!”
” – and was quick-frozen at once. I testify to something else. Friends, in becoming a woman I acquired an interest in biology that I had not had, as a male. While I teach math at B.I.T., I am also staff mathematician to the clinic and have studied a bit of human biology. When I say that this spoiled clone was never alive in any real sense I speak as the mathematical biologist who checked its monitors’ records daily. It always required full metabolic support; we monitored everything. The surprising thing is that Ishtar could keep it alive long enough to let it appear to age. But Ishtar is very skillful.” Libby added, “Lazarus would not only have become upset in telling this, but he could not have told it first hand as Ishtar refused to permit Lazarus to see this spoiled clone or any records on it.”
“A willful woman,” said Lazarus. “In three seconds I could have told Ish whether or not this thing looked enough like my mother to be useful. Instead I must depend on the opinions of people who have never laid eyes on my mother. Damn it, I am owner of record of the clinic and Chairman Regent of all B.I.T. Does that count with Ishtar? Hilda, my senior wife is as tough a case as you are… and looks as little like it as you do.”
“So? It will be interesting to see what happens when I am your junior wife,” Sharpie answered at her pertest.
“Are you going to be my junior wife?” Lazarus swung around and looked at her husband. “Jake?”
“I don’t think I have a vote,” my blood brother answered easily.
“I’ll automatically be your junior wife if we are invited to join the Long Family which we damn well ought to be if we make this work!” Sharpie said indignantly.
“Wait a half!” I put in. “If we are invited to join the Long Family – a tall assumption if I ever saw one – Deety would be junior. Not you, you elderly baggage.”
“Hillbilly can be junior if she wants to be. I don’t mind.”
“Deety,” I said, “are you serious? I’ve been trying to point out to your stepmother that you don’t push your way into a family.”
“I wasn’t pushing, Zebadiah,” my wife answered. “I want us to stay on Tertius at least until we have our babies, and possibly make it our home; it seems to be a pleasant place and should be free of ‘Black Hats’ – no skin taboos. But that doesn’t mean that the Longs have to have us in their laps.”
“I intend to nominate you, Zebadiah,” Libby told me. “All four of you. And I hope you four accept. But, Deety twin, you know what I’m attempting. With your father.”
“Yes, I know. I’m cheering for it.”
“Your husband must hear this. Deety, I still have that Y chromosome in every cell even though it has been so inhibited by hormone balance that I don’t notice it. You and I could try for a mathematical-genius baby, too.”
“Huh! Which one of us supplies the penis?”
“Ishtar does. Neither of us would be host-mother, the way it would be done. But any of my sister-wives would supply womb room if she didn’t happen to be pregnant. Or the host-mother could be a stranger we would never meet and the child’s family-parents strangers, too – all handled by Ishtar who always reads the relevant genetic charts before approving anything.”
“Zebadiah?”
I said without hesitation, “It’s up to you, hon. I’m in favor of it; it makes sense. But don’t lose track of the child. Elizabeth, I want to adopt the baby ahead of time. Hmm – Bottle baby… but the formulas are probably better now. Not here-now. Tertius there-then-now.”
“‘Bottle baby’? Oh! No longer done; a baby needs to suckle. But there is usually spare milk around the Longs’. If I’m lactating I always have excess; I turn out to be a good milch cow despite that extra chromosome. But Deety can nurse our child if she wishes to; causing a woman to come fresh with milk without bearing a child is a minor biochemical manipulation today – Tertian-today. Professional wet nurses do it regularly and are likely to be in that vocation because they love babies but can’t have ’em themselves for some reason.”
“Sounds good.” (What sounded best was this: a baby Deety is a wonderful idea – but a baby Deety who is also a baby Libby is sure to be wonderful squared. Cubed!)
“While I’m on this and no one here but family – Jacob, there is no reason not to create a third mathematical supergenius by crossing you with your daughter.”
I was looking at my wife, thinking pleasant thoughts about baby Deety-Libby, when Elizabeth dropped this bomb – and Deety shut down her face. It’s not an unpleasant expression; it’s a no-expression, a closed door, while Deety sorts out her thoughts.
So I looked at Jake, in time to see his face shift from surprise to shock. “But that’s -“
“Incest?” Libby supplied. “No, Jacob, incest is a social matter. Whether you bed your daughter is none of my business. I’m speaking of genes, of still another way to conserve mathematical genius. Ishtar would scan your charts most carefully and would resort to chromosome surgery if there was the slightest chance of double dosage of a bad allele. But you and your daughter could see Ishtar on different days and never know anything about the outcome. Your genes are not your property; they come from your race. This offers opportunity to give them back to the race with your highest talent reinforced… without loss to anyone. Think about it.”
Jake looked at me, then at his daughter. “Deety?”
She added no-expression voice to no-expression face – but directed her answer to me: “Zebadiah, this is necessarily up to you and Jacob.” I’m not sure that anyone but Sharpie noticed that she had not said “Pop.”
Deety added at once with total change in manner, “First things first! Maureen’s rescue. All of you are stuck in a rut of time sequence. Oh, the minor problem of keeping clear of Dora and the missile both times. Routine.” (And I was hit by a satori.)
Lazarus answered, “But Deety, I promised Dora never again to take her anywhere near Albuquerque.”
Deety sighed. “Lib?”
“Frames one-thirteen through seven-seven-two, then seven-seven-three through one thousand and two?”
“Precisely. And precisely it must be, too. I’m timing it by that yellow open roadable approaching from the other direction. What are you using?”
“The same one. Easy to spot and its speed never varies.”
Lazarus said, “Jake, do you know what they are saying?”
“Yes and no. They are treating it as two problems. But we lack three seconds of time enough to dump one and snatch the other. Those – traffic lights, you called them? – leave that intersection clear by a measured interval, clocked by your camera.”
Sharpie suddenly grinned; I nodded to her to take it. She did. “Deety and Libby are saying that we do it twice. First, we rescue Maureen. Then we come back and dump the corpse.”
I added, “But the second time we don’t ground. Jake, I’m going to ask you to move over – Deety moves to my seat. We’ll dump the dead meat so that it hits the ground between frames seven-seven-two and seven-seven-three. I’ll be on manual and hovering. I need to know where Dora is and where that missile is and need to be sure of the acceleration of gravity, Earth-Prime. Because that corpse will already be falling, right over our heads, while we are making the snatch. Close timing. Mmm – Gay can fly herself more precisely than I can. I think that Deety and I will write a program… then I’ll be on override-suspenders and belt.”
Jake added, “Zeb, I see the procedure. But, if we are hovering for the drop while we are also on the ground, why aren’t we shown in the photographs?”
“May be in some of them. Doesn’t matter. Deety, when do we do this? Cancel. Sharpie? Your orders, Captain?”
Deety and Sharpie swapped glances. Then they sounded like Laz-Lor, with Sharpie leading. “Now to bed. It’s almost midnight in our biological time, slightly later in local time.”
“We do both jobs after breakfast,” Deety responded. “But sleep as late as we can. Be sharp and on our toes. ‘Minds me. Just one ‘fresher, quite primitive. But the two in Gay are as available here as anywhere; since they are actually in Oz. Six people, three pots, not difficult.”
“And three beds,” added Sharpie. “Jacob, kiss us goodnight and take Lib to bed. Master bedroom and good luck! Use my toothbrush, Lib hon – anything else you need?”
“No. A good cry, maybe. I love you, Hilda.”
“If I didn’t love you, Elizabeth, I wouldn’t be Madam of this joint. We’ll cry together the day Ishtar tells us you’ve caught. Now shoosh! Scat! Kiss us and go to bed.”
As they headed upstairs Sharpie said to me, “Zebbie, give Deety a pre-amnesty so that she can try out Lazarus and find out whether she wants to be junior wife.”
I tried to look amazed. “Deety, haven’t you tried Lazarus yet?”
“You know darn well I haven’t! When have I had time?”
“From a woman who specializes in programming time machines that is a silly question. Lazarus, she’s already knocked up, so don’t fret about it. One warning: She bites.”
“The best ones always do.”
“Hush. Kiss us good-night, dears. Zebbie, open the couch in the living room; that’s where you’re going to keep me warm.”
“But who’s going to keep me warm? A skinny little runt like you?”
Sharpie bites.

Chapter XLV

A Stitch in Time

Jake:
We popped out one klick H-above-G over Albuquerque, Earth-Prime, and Gay tilted her nose down. A last-minute change put my daughter Deety at copilot, while I sat left rear, nominal navigator. Deety can use verniers as accurately as I, did not expect to use them at all, did need to be able to see the yellow roadable – and has this clock in her head.
Elizabeth Long was in the after compartment, strapped down but not on lumps of ordnance. Rifles, pistols, bed clothes for the control compartment, anything else that could be moved easily to reduce clutter, had been shifted into our space warp, as had Lazarus Long.
Doctor Ishtar had warned Lazarus not to let his mother recognize him, as the shock to her might be harmful, even fatal. While Lazarus had been trying to figure out how to make the snatch using Dora, he had planned on wearing disguise. But hiding in our Land-of-Oz addition was simpler-especially as Ishtar was almost as anxious that Lazarus not see his mother, not see his mother’s pseudo corpse – this I learned from Elizabeth in the night.
So I showed Lazarus the everlasting picnic basket, advised him to use bed clothes to make a shakedown and sleep if possible as there would be time to kill, and supplied him with books – but don’t come out until I open the door! Then did not mention that I was locking him in.
I was relieved to have only a nominal job. I was not sleepy despite a short night – I was bemused.
I was falling in love with – had fallen in love with – Elizabeth Long. No less in love with Hilda – more in love with her than ever! I am learning that love does not subtract – it multiplies!
As Gay tilted down I reached over and touched Hilda’s hand. She smiled and threw me a kiss. I’m sure she had a sweet night; she has loved Zeb as long as she has known him. “As a loyal chum,” she tells me – but Hilda holds to the Higher Truth that it is better to be kind than to be frank. It did not matter either way; Zeb is my blood brother beloved by me, perfect husband for my daughter, and, if not Hilda’s lover in the past, then he surely was now – and it troubled me not at all. On awakening I had discussed it with Jane before I opened my eyes – Jane approves and is delighted by Elizabeth.
My daughter had an unusual night, too. If the myths are true, Lazarus is more than one hundred times as old as Deety. This gulf may not matter to him – but Deety takes everything seriously.
Apparently it had done her no harm; at breakfast she was bright-eyed and bubbly. All of us were euphoric and eager to get on with it.
Zeb was saying, “That’s it! Got it in the gunsight – got the range, Smart Girl?”
“Got it nailed, Boss!”
“Keep it so. Deety! Yellow roadable?”
“Just spotted it. Gay, count down! Six… Five… Four… Three… Two… One… Now!”
We were diagonally in that intersection; Gay’s portside door was popping open. I heard Zeb say, “Oh, my God!” He was out of the car, kneeling, picking up a body, kicking a cop in the stomach, and throwing that body to me, as he scrambled inside and shouted, “GayBounce!”
Gay bounced. Gay is not supposed to lift with a door open and “Bounce!” means ten klicks. She bounced one klick, finished closing her door, waited while Zeb checked the seal – completed the bounce. I am now a believer.
I was passing this little old lady back to Elizabeth, and looking for resemblance to Lazarus when I heard Zeb moan, “I didn’t get her purse, I didn’t get her purse!”
“What of it?” said Deety. “It’s where we want it. Gay Deceiver. Tertius Orbit. Execute.”
A beautiful planet –
Zeb was saying, “Lib, can you coach us? Or are you too busy?”
“Not that busy. Maureen fainted but her heart is strong and steady, and I have a strap holding her. Is Gay on frequency?”
Deety reported, “Right on. Go ahead, Lib.”
The next I can’t report; it was in Galacta. Then Elizabeth said, “We’ll be passing over Boondock in three minutes twenty-two seconds. Roof of the clinic is designated. Shall I come forward and point it out?”
“Can you handle yourself in free fall?” Zeb asked.
“I’ve some experience. Eight centuries.”
“My big mouth. Come forward.”
In four or five minutes we grounded on a flat roof in a wooded part of a moderately large city. I saw a figure in a white coverall, plus two others with a wheeled stretcher – and only then did I recall that none of us had dressed. Hilda had asked; Lazarus had vetoed, Elizabeth had concurred.
So I found myself bare to my ears, bowing over a lady’s hand and saying, “I am honored, Doctor Ishtar.”
She is indeed beautiful – a Valkyrie sculptured from cream and marshmallow and honey. She smiled and kissed my hand.
Elizabeth said something in this other language; Ishtar smiled again and said, in careful, fluent English, “In that case, he is one of us” – took my head in her hands and kissed me thoroughly.
Ishtar so distracted me that I did not notice that Maureen had been handed out – awake but dazed – been rolled away, and was gone. All of us were thoroughly and carefully kissed, then Elizabeth discussed matters with Ishtar in Galacta. “Ish says that she has been slowly warming the thing. It is now at four degrees Celsius. She would like more time but will bring it to thirty-seven degrees Celsius in six hours if she must.”
Deety said, “How about twenty-four hours?”
Ishtar was pleased at this, agreed that she understood that the substitute must be dressed in the patient’s (client’s) clothing, agreed that the space we were in would be kept clear – and asked, “What’s that pounding noise?”
Elizabeth explained that it was Lazarus. “He is in a magic space warp about where we were standing. He knows that he is supposed to remain there, but he changed his mind – and has just discovered that he is locked in.”
Ishtar’s smile suddenly became a grin, as quickly left. “A magic space warp? Lib, I want to hear about that.”
“You will.”
We climbed back inside, Deety told Gay “Twenty-four hours” – and we stepped out again. Ishtar was lying on a pad, taking the sun… this time as bare as we were – and I was still more impressed.
“Right on time,” she said, standing (taller than I am) and, as always, smiling. “The substitute is waiting, and I have had time to examine and talk with the client. She is in good shape for her age, understands in part at least what has happened, and is undismayed by it. Please tell Lazarus that, if he returns to Tertius soon, he will not be admitted to this building for seventeen months. The client is most firm: she will not see Lazarus until I have completed rejuvenating her.”
“Lib,” said my daughter Deety, “seventeen what sort of months? I want to set an exact rendezvous – and Gay’s time calibration is not Tertian but Earth-Prime and Earth-zero. Old Home Terra.” With Elizabeth as interface the three agreed on an exact time. Then Elizabeth again discussed something in that language.
Ishtar nodded. “No problem, I have seen that picture. And a hooded cape is even less trouble.”
So we left.
Dropping that pseudo corpse was routine but I was glad to be quit of it (I had swapped seats with my daughter). Then we were back on Tertius.
“Always prompt,” said Ishtar – and I was astounded to see that she was quite pregnant, close to birthing … when I had seen her, slender for her height, two minutes earlier. “And we are on time, too. Maureen, my friends and yours.” She named us.
Maureen Johnson spoke to us first in Galacta, shifted to English when she realized that we did not know the common tongue. Yes, she does look like Laz and Lor – but prettier. A woman of beauty and great charm. I find that I am growing accustomed to perfect ladies who embrace, bare body to bare body, on meeting a fully-vouched-for stranger. She thanked each of us and made us believe it.
“Still pounding?” Ishtar inquired.
“It has been less than five minutes for him, Ish,” Elizabeth explained. “But you know his temper; perhaps we had better leave. Home soon, I think.”
So we left again, with Maureen squeezed between me and my wife, with a package and a cloak in her lap. We were back inside Dora at once. Elapsed time: zero seconds. We still had an hour and twenty minutes to prepare for dinner. I found that I was hungry, even though breakfast was three hours ago, biological time – almost all of it spent in Beulahland, programming for the caper, as all three phases took only a few durational minutes, mostly on a rooftop in Boondock.
Maureen put on the cloak, a hooded cape, and carried the little package. “Silly but fun,” she said. “Where do we go now?”
“Come with me,” Hilda told her. “Beloved, you can let Woodie out as soon as Dora tells Gay that I have reached flag cabin. When he yelps, tell him that we were too busy to play games with him… and the next time he wants a favor from me he can crawl on his knees. Pounding indeed! Tell him that I am extremely tired and am going to nap until just before dinner and he is not to call me or to come to the flag cabin between now and dinner without suffering my extreme displeasure and a punch in the nose from you. All of you come up to flag cabin as soon as you wish but try not to be seen by Woodie. You’ll probably find Maureen and me in the lounging pool.”

Chapter XLVI

“I’m gifted with second sight.”

Deety:
When the Hillbilly stages a production, she doesn’t stint. By protocol decreed by Lazarus Long, dinner in Dora is formal, but with wide latitude in “formal” – casual dress being the only thing utterly verboten. Dinner is preceded by a happy hour where one can sip Coca-Cola or get roaring drunk.
Aunt Hilda changed all that for this night. No happy hour but be on time – two minutes before twenty o’clock, ship’s time. No one permitted to eat in her/his quarters – a command performance.
No options in dress – Commodore Auntie decided what each would wear, where each would sit. I said, “Commodore Hilda honey, aren’t you kind o’ throwing your weight around? What there is of it?”
She answered, “Yes, I am, Deetikins, for this occasion. But before you criticize, ask your husband whether or not I ever permitted one of my parties to flop.”
“Don’t need to ask him. Why, at your last one, our old Buick blew up. Never a dull moment.”
“I didn’t plan that. But we got husbands out of it; let’s not complain. Before you deliver my message to the twins, tell me this. Is it safe to let them in on our secret?”
“Hillbilly, I tell Zebadiah anything even though someone – you, for example – has asked me not to.”
“Deety, I thought we had a ‘You’ll-keep-my-secrets-and-I’ll-keep-your-secrets’ agreement?”
“We do. But telling Zebadiah gives you two covering for you instead of one. About Laz-Lor – remember that they are his wives as well as his clones.”
“Hon, you were always a wise one. All right, we keep it secret. Tell them what to wear – and please understand that I’m hiding behind you to avoid argument; it’s a favor I appreciate. Sending up sword and saber is a favor to your husband and to your father but I thank you on their behalf if they forget. Send the blades to your suite; they’ve decided they can dress more easily without women underfoot.”
“A canard,” Pop said, just back of my neck. “The women don’t want us underfoot.”
“I knew it was one or the other, Jacob,” Aunt Hilda agreed. “But Dora has already taken your uniforms to our suite and your swords will -“
” – be there, too, and I can recognize a fact when I fall over it and have never been happier, my love, than I have been since you took charge of my life and started telling me what to decide.”
“Jacob, you’re making me teary.”
“Jake! Can you hear me?” – Lazarus’ voice and Aunt Hilda used family sign language; Pop nodded and answered promptly:
“Certainly, Lazarus – what’s on your mind?”
“I’m faced with the impossible and need help. I received an order – you, too, I think – to dress in military uniform at dinner. The only uniform I have aboard is in the flag cabin and – say, are you in the flag cabin?”
Aunt Hilda shook her head. Pop answered, “I’m in our suite, dressing for dinner. Hilda needed a nap. I told you.”
“You certainly did, sir. I’m allergic to being punched in the snoot. But – Well, if you would use your influence -“
“If any.”
“If any, to get me that uniform twenty minutes before dinner” – Aunt Hilda nodded – “or even ten, you would save me the horrible dilemma of deciding which order to break.”
“Don’t decide to break the one telling you not to disturb Hilda.”
“I didn’t even consider breaking that one! And it’s not your fist in my snoot. Jake… she terrifies me. I don’t understand it. I’m twice her mass and all muscle; she couldn’t possibly hurt me.”
“Don’t be certain. She has a poisoned fang. But calm yourself, comrade. I guarantee delivery by nineteen minutes before the bell at latest.”
“Jake, I knew I could depend on you. Let me know when you want a bank robbed.”
I gave Maureen a special hug before I left to carry out my orders. I knew what the Hillbilly was doing: rigging it so that she could have a quiet hour in which to get acquainted with Maureen. I didn’t resent it; I would have rigged it for me had I been able.
I curved down the corridor, whistled for Lib to let me in, stopped dead and whistled another sort of whistle. She was dressed, if “dressed” is the word. “Wheeeewhoo!”
“Like it?”
“I can’t wait to get into mine. It is the most indecent outfit I’ve ever seen, with no other purpose than to excite lewd, libidinous, lascivious, licentious, lecherous, lustful longings in the loins of Lotharios.”
“Isn’t that the purpose of clothing?”
“Well… aside from protection – yes. But I’m beginning to realize that a culture with no body taboo has to go much farther in styling to achieve that purpose.”
It was a “dress” with a “skirt” that was a 10-cm ruffle worn low. The material was silky stuff in pastel green. The bodice had no back but the front came clear up to the neck – with cutouts for each teat. The designer did not stop there. Lib’s left teat was bare – but her right one was barer yet: a transparent film that clung and was covered with rainbow iridescence that moved in endless patterns with every jiggle – and jiggle we do no matter how firm. Elizabeth is as firm as I am but hers quivered enough to swirl that iridescence just from breathing.
Whew!
If both had been bare, or both iridescent, it would not have done a quarter as much. It was the contrast that would make ’em howl at the Moon.
My dress was exactly like hers save that my right teat was the bare one.
Lib got me into it, then I hurried to the bridge, with a hope-promise to be back ten minutes before the hour to have her touch up my eyebrows and lashes. I’m not much for cosmetics (neither is she) but our lashes and brows hardly show without help and this was a formal occasion.
One of Dora’s blue fireflies led me to a lift that took me to the bridge, where Dora had told me I would find Laz and Lor. Laz spotted me first, made a yelling noise while patting her lips, which I took to mean enthusiasm. Those kids – correction: women close to Pop’s age but they feel like kids – Laz-Lor are as female as I am and recognize what incites the lovely beast in men. They liked my dress.
I liked that bridge. Reminded me of Star Trek; pointed ears would not have surprised me. Or Nichelle Nichols backed by colored lights. “This place makes my mouth water. Maybe someday a guided tour? Pretty please!”
Captain Lor said, “Certainly – “
” – but how about a swap as – “
” – we haven’t even been inside – “
” – Gay Deceiver and Dora says she -“
” – is wonderful and when this job is -“
” – done and we’ve rescued Mama Maureen there -“
” – won’t be anything to stop us once Dora -“
” – is safe on the ground at Tertius. Huh?”
“Certainly,” I answered… gleefully as now I knew that our 17-hour absence in zero seconds had not been noticed. To Lor and Laz the snatch was still in the planning stage. Apparently Ol’ Buddy Boy had not yet told his sisters. Had not yet worked up a set of lies, probably, that would account for his being locked in the bathroom while the rest of us did the job.
“At the earliest opportunity,” I went on. “Want to take a ride in Gay?”
“Oh, my! Could we?”
“Not for me to say. But I can tell you what works. Cuddle up to the Commodore. Pet her, be sweet to her. Ask her if she will let you call her ‘Aunt Hilda’ when you’re off duty; that will please her. She’s a cat; pet her and respect her feelings and she purrs – push her and she scratches.”
They glanced at each other. “We will. Thanks.”
“De nada, chicas -“
“You’ve learned Galacta!” (In chorus – )
“What? No. Probably a phrase that carried over. But I was sent here on duty and I’ve been chatting instead. Commodore’s compliments to the Captain and the Commodore requests that Captain Lorelei Lee Long and First Officer Lapis Lazuli Long join her at dinner at twenty o’clock and, as a favor to the Commodore, please dress in the same fashion as Doctors Libby and Deety – and that’s me and I’m wearing the fashion you are to wear.”
Captain Lor answered, “Certainly we’ll be there; we never miss dinner and -“
” – always dress formally and I don’t -“
” – mean bare skin. Skin is for working or -“
” – sleeping. But we treat dinner in the Dora as a -“
” – formal party and that calls for the works. Formal evening -“
” – dress and jewelry and cosmetics and perfume and we are about -“
” – to bathe and change, but we can’t dress the way you are -“
” – because our dresses are already picked out and -“
” – it’s too late to start over!”
I said, “Look, chums, you brought this on yourselves by urging Lib and me to dress this way. Neither of us was enthusiastic but we promised. The Commodore learned what Libby and I expected to wear, and decided that four of us, all about the same size and coloration, would look wonderful in matching green dresses. So Lib and I are to be opposite you two, balancing you, and the men are required to wear uniforms so as not to compete with us four. All clear?”
They got their stupid look which actually is a cover for stubborn determination. Lor said:
“The Captain sends her respects to the Commodore and regrets -“
“Hold it! Does this ship have a lifeboat?”
“Yes,” answered Lor, “but -“
“But you are master of this ship. Yes, I know. And I’m gifted with second sight. I see only two viable futures for you. Did you get your pirate flag up in the lounge?”
“Yes, we did, but -“
“If you’ll tell me what lifeboat and where, I’ll get the flag to you before twenty. I see you starting out in that lifeboat to be pirates. Or I see you at dinner in dresses of any green cloth you can find, cut hastily in this style and pinned together. No jewelry. No cosmetics that show. I don’t think you can fake this iridescent stuff but that stick-on transparent wrapping, used instead, would show that you had tried. The Commodore never rejects anyone for failing; what she despises is not trying. Send your answer via Dora. I can’t be your messenger boy; I have work to do before dinner, now only forty-seven minutes away. Will the Captain excuse me?”
I got out fast. I didn’t believe for one second that a ship stocked like the Dora, run by identical redheads, could fail to have endless formals in green – including this style or close to it. By now the twins were frantically consulting their brother via Dora, and from what I heard him say to Pop, I thought Lazarus would tell them that it was safer to jump ship and change their names than it would be to tangle with the miniature buzz saw – but if Dora couldn’t fake something that would at least show a hard try, he would sell her off as spare parts and install one of those new-model “Susan Calvin” positronic brains that everybody said was the coming thing for smartships.
I said Hello to Gay, then tried to reach under the instrument board and find the catch by touch.
I got out of the car in order to stand up in the ship’s passageway and took off my deliciously indecent dress. Then I was able to fold, bend, and staple, to open the stowage. A saber and a sword – no belts. “Gay.”
“What, Deety?”
“I’m looking for two sword belts. Category should be personal possessions, miscellaneous, weapons, belts for weapons.”
“Deety, they are supposed to be with the sword and saber. Many things were moved into the Land of Oz today; I heard you all talking about it. But no changes were read into my inventory. I’m sorry.”
“Smart Girl, it’s not your fault. We should have told you.”
“Deety, I’ve rolled the dice. The curve says that the most probable place is on hooks in Sunbonnet Sue’s wardrobe.”
They were.
I was starting to leave, after telling Gay she was a Smart Girl, when she said, “Deety, your father is calling. Dora has him on hold, through me.”
“Thanks, Gay; thanks, Dora. Pop?”
“Deety, are you still in Gay?”
“Just outside the starboard door.”
“Can you lay hands on my automatic and the web belt that goes with it?”
“Saw both three minutes ago.”
“Will you please remove the clip, check the chamber to be sure it’s empty, then bring belt and pistol when you fetch our toadstickers?”
“Anything for a steady customer.”
I left with belt and sword slung over one shoulder, saber and belt over the other so that the belts crossed between my teats, and with the web belt with holster and pistol interwoven through the others because it was far too big for my waist. This left my hands free to carry my dress, one hand being almost clean enough.
Pop said: “What took you so long? I promised Lazarus I’d get this stuff to him on time. Now I’m going to have to dogtrot. In Army blues.”
I told him I had stopped off at the pool hall and playing off the match game had taken a while. “If you’ll excuse me, sir, I have problems, too.”
Elizabeth wiped me down with a damp towel, dried and powdered me and drew my eyebrows and touched up my lashes and clucked over me, all in nine minutes, then most carefully put my dress back on me. “Ordinarily one does not take off a washable and put it back on – just wear it until you shower it off. A drop of water will go through this material like acid. Better skip the soup.”

Place cards showed us where to dine. But at two minutes before the hour the Hillbilly had not arrived, so we were standing. Laz-Lor came in, sat down – in dresses identical with mine and Lib’s, perfect fit, nothing improvised. Their brother spoke quietly to them; they stood up. Lazarus was dressed in a very old-fashioned army uniform, breeches with rolled leggings, a tunic with a stock collar, and Pop’s pistol at his side.
All but Pop’s stuff looked brand-new; I concluded that Lazarus had had it tailored.
Just as my head ticked twenty o’clock, a bugle (Dora) sounded attention. At least it had that effect on the men and Libby, so I stood straight. Laz-Lor looked at their brother and did so, too.
The wardroom has three steps leading down into it from each of its archway doors, with a little platform at the top so that you don’t fall on your face. Pop and Zebadiah marched up those steps, faced each other (and I thought how beautiful Zebadiah looked in dress uniform; I had never seen him in it). Pop snapped, “Draw! Swords!” Instead of coming down, they crossed blades in an arch. Lazarus looked startled and drew pistol, placed it smartly across his chest.
This archway was closed by drapes; we had come in from the other side. A drum and bugle (Dora again) sounded a ruffle-and-flourish; the drapes lifted from both sides – and here was the Hillbilly, standing tall (for her) and straight, with her perfect ice-cream skin gleaming in flood lights against a background of midnight blue. She was so beautiful I choked up.
Dora’s invisible band played The Admiral’s March as our tiny Commodore marched proudly down the steps toward us. (It could have been The Admiral’s March; Pop admitted later that he hummed to Dora the march played for generals and told her to fake it.)
Aunt Hilda did not sit down when she reached the head of the table, she stood near her chair instead. Nor had my father and my husband left their places, they simply brought their swords down. As soon as Hilda stopped and faced in, Pop commanded, “Corporal Bronson! Front and Center!”
Lazarus jerked as if he had been struck, holstered his pistol, marched to the far end, making sharp corners in passing around the wardroom table. He halted, facing Hilda – she may have given him some sign.
Dora hit two bugle notes; Aunt Hilda sang:
“Shipmates, beloved friends, tonight we are greatly honored!”
Four ruffles-and-flourishes, as the drapes lifted and parted, and again lights picked out bare skin, this time against a forest-green backing: Maureen in opera-length black stockings, green round garters, dark shoes with semi-high heels, her long red hair down her back.
Maureen was not “standing tall”; she was in the oldest and most graceful of sculptor’s poses: left knee slightly bent, weight slightly more on her right foot, chest lifted only a little but displaying her full teats, nipples heavily crinkled. Her smile was happy.
She held pose while that march concluded, then, in the sudden silence, held out her arms and called: “Theodore!”
“Corporal Bronson” fainted.

Chapter XLVII

“There are no tomorrows.”

Zeb:
Sharpie shouldn’t have done it to Lazarus. For a veteran of sixteen wars and Koshchei alone knows how many skirmishes and narrow escapes to be placed in a position where he is so shocked that blood drains from his head and he collapses “ain’t fitten.”
Deety agrees but asks me if I could have refrained from staging Mama Maureen’s return that way, given the chance? Well, no, had I Sharpie’s imagination – but it still would not have been “fitten.”
Not that he was hurt by it. Sharpie, all forty-three kilos of her, checked his fall. She was watching Lazarus, saw him start to collapse, closed the gap and grabbed him around the waist, did her best.
Sharpie saved him from hitting his head on the wardroom table. I would bet long odds that everyone was looking at Maureen except Sharpie. Sharpie had staged it – and the producer was interested in the effect on the one for whom it had been staged.
She had staged it even to the extent of getting Libby to ask Ishtar to obtain costume – shoes, hose, and round green garters to match a photograph, plus a hooded cape to keep our ubiquitous snoop Dora from knowing that we had an extra aboard. Sharpie had figured this way: that “French photo” snapshot of Mama Maureen (yeah, I call her that too – she’s the most motherly person in any world… and the sexiest. Don’t mention the last to Deety) (Deety knows it – Deety) – that snapshot was still in existence unless destroyed by machinegun fire in 1918, Earth-Prime.
Which it would not be… because Lazarus “got his arse shot off” as his sisters describe it. Not literally true, it was a belly wound more than bullets in his arse that came that close to finishing him. But all the wounds were low.
Where does a man in combat carry his most cherished possessions? In a breast pocket, usually the left one. I always have and I’ve never heard a veteran deny this.
It might be worth it to faint in order to wake up surrounded by Maureen, Hilda, Laz-Lor, Elizabeth, and my own reason for being. Jake and I could have played several hands of gin before anyone bothered with us. So I asked Dora for drinks and snacks for Jake and me, as it seemed uncertain as to when dinner would be served. Or if.
I heard Sharpie say, “Maureen, we must get this heavy uniform off him. Dora keeps this ship tropical. I should never have ordered uniforms for men while we women are comfortable.” They started peeling him.
I said, “Jake, school’s out.” I had sweated through my number-one uniform – might never wear it again but I’m sentimental about it. Jake was in as bad shape. Once you get happy with skin any clothes make you feel like Rameses II.
We peeled down and handed our clothes and swords to one of Dora’s waldoes and told her to hand them to Gay – including Jake’s pistol, belt, and holster, which I retrieved without anyone noticing me. Jake and I were Chinese stage hands; “Corporal Ted Bronson” was getting all the attention.
Dora pointed out that Gay was locked. I said, “If one of her doors were open, could you lay this gear on a seat?” Yes, she could. “Then do it,” I said. “Let me talk to Gay.”
We eventually had dinner, with everybody “formal” but Maureen. She retained her “casual” clothing long after everyone else was in formal skin. But not until I got pix of the Four Disgraces. Libby and Deety wanted to go shower, too, when Jake and I decided that, having discarded uniforms, we should shower in fairness to Dora’s airconditioning. I asked them and Laz-Lor please to wait until I staggered down (we had encountered a force-four sea, with white caps) to Gay for Jake’s Polaroid.
Turned out not to be necessary; Dora could take color and 3-D, still or motion, any angle, and light as needed, just as she had lighted the posing (which she had photographed, too, I learned later).
Maureen and Jake directed while “Corporal Bronson” and I sprawled Nero-style on lounges intended for Lib and Deety. Sharpie sat between us and dropped grapes into our mouths.
Jake tried to make the poses “artistic.” Mama Maureen agreed with everything Jake said, then did it her way. The results may have been artistic. But I know that those pix would give a skeleton one last case of raging tumescence.
Meanwhile Dora was singing and playing, urging us to eat – tasty tidbits eaten with tongs; I was reminded of the best in Oriental cuisines – and plying us with fine wines. Dora seemed to have a vast repertoire, some of which (to my surprise) was familiar. When Judy Garland sings Over the Rainbow, who can miss it? – Dora used Judy’s voice. I recall, too, Enjoy Yourself; It’s Later Than You Think. Most of them I did not know.
Dora announced Tomorrow’s Song – I thought that was what she said. Lazarus and Maureen held hands all through it and it was not a song that would fit the title I thought I had heard. I got straightened out when the song ended to dead silence and Maureen said to Lazarus, “Theodore, Ishtar was going to rearrange the watch list but Tamara vetoed it. She did it for you, dear man, and for me – but Tamara is anxious to see you.”
“Tamara always knows what she’s doing,” Lazarus answered.
“Yes, Tammy always knows what is best,” agreed Mama Maureen. “Tell me, Theodore, do I still make you think of her?”
Lazarus looked upset. “Uh, I don’t know. You don’t look like her… but you feel like her. And you look more like Nancy than you look like yourself.”
“Yes, I know. None of our family was willing to wait; you’ve been away from home too long. Be patient, and when I look like me to your eyes, tell us, and Galahad will hold my cosmetic age at that. Are you going to do as you promised me, so long ago, take Tammy and me to bed together? Perhaps I should add, Theodore, I am now wife to your co-husbands. I don’t ask that you marry me. Although I think Tammy will be shocked if you don’t. But I shan’t make it difficult, either way. I will hold to any pretence you wish. I did for Brian; I shall for you.”
Maureen was neither shouting nor whispering; she was simply bringing him up to date on things he needed to know. Lazarus started to answer, his expression oddly mixed, when Elizabeth cut in: “Lazarus -“
“Eh? What, Lib?”
“Message to you from Ishtar. To be delivered when needed, and now is the time. Ish read both your charts with her computer set for maximum pessimism. She also had them read at New Rome without identification other than her own file numbers. She has this message for you … in answer to the answer you will make. She says to tell you that you are an uncivilized primitive, ignorant of science, especially genetics, oversentimental, almost pathologically stubborn, retarded, probably senile, superstitious, and provincial… and that she loves you dearly but will not permit you to make decisions in her area of authority. In vitro or in utero, the cross will take place. Let me add that Maureen was not given a choice, either.”
“So? You can tell the big-arsed bitch that I agree with every word she says, especially the part about ‘senile,’ and that I gave up all hope of arguing with her tyrannical ways fifty years ago and that I love her just as dearly – outside her clinic – and that Maureen will tell her how such things will be handled; I don’t have a vote.” He turned toward me, looking past Sharpie’s pretty toes. “Zeb, here is the wisdom of the ages: Men rule but women decide.”
“Elizabeth, do you think I am anything like Tamara?”
“Mmm – Never thought about it. Yes, you both have that all-mother feeling. Uh, would you mind taking off costume? It distracts me from looking at you.”
“No trouble, Elizabeth. I don’t like round garters except as advertising.” Mama Maureen kicked off her shoes, took off the garters, carefully rolled down her hose in a manner interuniversal – stood up and stood easily, not posing.
“Turn around slowly. Mmm – Maureen, you do look like Tammy… or vice versa; it’s probably your genes in her. Am I descended from you? Does anyone here know? Lazarus?”
“You are, Lib. But not through me. Through my sister Carol. ‘Santa Carolita’ believe it or not – which would surprise Carol as she was no saint. But your descent through Carol was not proved until long after you were killed, when the Families’ records were being revised through computer analysis and a deeper knowledge of genes. No saints in our family, are there, Mama?”
“None that I know of, Woodrow. Not me, certainly. You were a little hellion; I should have spanked you much oftener than I did. Mmm… your father was as close to being a saint as any in our family. Brian was wise and good – and tolerant.” She smiled. “Do you recall why we separated?”
“I’m not sure I ever knew. Mama, my recollections of that era are much sharper for my trip there as ‘Ted Bronson’ – the other is a long time back.”
“In my sixties I stopped having babies. About the same time your brother Richard was killed. War. His wife, Marian Justin of the Hardy family, was with us, with their children, and Brian was back in uniform, a recalled colonel, on a desk job in San Francisco. When Richard was killed in 1945 we all took it hard but it was easier in that so many of us were together – Brian, and my youngest children, and Marian, and her children – five; she was thirty-one.”
Mama Maureen, free of stockings and shoes, sat in lotus across from Hilda and accepted a plate from Dora’s helpers. “Woodrow, I encouraged Brian to console Marian the only way a widow can be helped; she needed it. When that war was over, Marian needed a visible husband; her waistband and the calendar could not be reconciled. When we moved from San Francisco later that year, it was easy for Marian Justin Smith to become Maureen J. Smith while I became, with the aid of hair dye, her widowed mother – no one knew us in Amarillo and females were not yet compelled to have I.D.’s. So Marian had the baby as “Maureen,” and only with the Howard Families Trustees was the correct genealogy recorded.” Maureen smiled. “We Howards were easy about such things as long as it was kept inside the Families – and I am happy that we are even easier about it now.
“On our next move I moved out and became Maureen Johnson again, fifteen years younger since I did not look late seventies, and a Meen-ah-sotah Yonson, Woodrow, rather than a southern Missouri Johnson. A grass widow with round heels.” Mama Maureen chuckled. “Howards married only to have babies. My production line had shut down but the equipment was there and the urge. By the time you darlings” – Maureen’s eyes swept the wardroom – “rescued me, I had trimmed thirty-five years from my age and added thirty-five men to my memories. In fact, when you picked me up, I was on my way to a motel rendezvous, a widower of sixty who was willing to believe that I was sixty when in fact I expected to reach my Century Day in a fortnight.”
I said, “What a dirty shame! I wish you had been coming back from the motel when we picked you up.”
“Zebadiah, that’s sweet of you but it’s not a shame. We were getting bored with each other. I’m sure he read my obituary with as much relief as grief. I’m just glad you got me – and I’m told that you did most of it.”
“Gay Deceiver did most of it. The car you rode in both ways. But we almost didn’t pick you up. Things went wrong, badly. I knew that it was going to – Deety, can you tell her?”
“Mama Maureen, Zebadiah has forerunners of dangers. They are not long range; they are always just barely in time. I don’t know what happened this morning but -“
“‘This morning?'” Maureen looked extremely puzzled.
“Oh.” My wife went on, “It was ‘this morning’ to us. You arrived here at eighteen-forty and a few seconds, ship’s time. During that instant we spent fifteen hours on another planet, we made two trips to your native planet, two more trips to your new home planet, and you spent seventeen months on Tertius and we brought you back here – and it all happened today. Not just today but at that exact instant: eighteen-forty and thirteen point three seconds. Laz and Lor didn’t know that we were gone; even the ship’s computer didn’t know we were gone.”
“I did so!” Dora objected. “Gay was disconnected for nineteen microseconds. You think I don’t notice a gap like that? I asked what happened and she told me that it was a power fluctuation. She fibbed to me! I’m sore at her.”
Deety looked thunderstruck. “Dorable, Dorable! It wasn’t Gay’s fault. I asked her to keep our secrets. I made her promise.”
“Mean!”
“I didn’t mean to be mean to you, Dorable – and we did let you in on it as quickly as we could. We couldn’t have staged the tableaux if you hadn’t helped. Be angry with me if you must… but don’t be angry with Gay. Please kiss and make up.”
I don’t know how computers hesitate, but I think I caught the briefest split second. “Gay?”
“Yes, Dora?” – the Smart Girl’s voice through Dora’s speakers.
“I don’t want to be mad. Let’s forget it, huh? Let’s kiss and make up. I will if you will.”
“Yes, yes! Oh, Dorable, I do love you.”
“You’re both good girls,” said Deety. “But you are both professional women, too, and work for different bosses. Dora, you are loyal to your family; Gay is loyal to her family. It has to be that way. Dora, if your sister, Captain Lor, asked you to keep a secret, you wouldn’t tell Gay, would you? Because she might tell me… and I would tell Zebadiah… and then the whole world would know.”
(Would, huh? My dear wife, I had a clearance two stages above “Q” – so secret it does not have a name. Never mind, I’ll take the rap.)
(Yes, I know, my husband, I once held the same level of clearance. But dealing with balky computers is my profession. Computers are supergenius-level children and must be dealt with on their own level. Okay, maybe, huh? – Deety)
“Gosh!”
“You see? Captain Lor, does Dora have any secrets of yours? Or of your brother’s? She can tell them to Gay and Gay can tell them to me and I always tell everything to my husband and – “
Lazarus interrupted. “Dora! You tell tales out of school and I’ll beat your ears off with an ax! It’s all right for you two to chum together and play games. But you start swapping secrets and I’ll call in Minsky’s Metal Mentalities, Incorporated, to measure that space.”
“Male computers. You can’t scare me, Ol’ Buddy Boy, you wouldn’t trust your dirty neck to a male computer. Stupid.”
“My neck isn’t dirty; that’s just where the collar of my uniform rubbed it.”
“Dirty neck and a dirty mind. But don’t worry, Ol’ Buddy Boy; Dora Long doesn’t tell secrets. I now see that Gay had to keep secrets, too – I just hadn’t thought about it. But you were mean to my sisters.”
“Me? How?”
“You knew about this caper; you didn’t need to get it from Gay. You knew all about it; you were there. But you held out on your own twin sisters -“
“Most unfairly, Mama Maureen – “
” – as if we were untrustworthy, and if we’re -“
” – untrustworthy, why can we be trusted with a ship and -“
” – the lives of everyone on board? We’re glad you are here -“
” – for yourself, but maybe now that you are here, you will -“
” – protect us from his tyranny. Mama Ishtar doesn’t, and Mama Hamadryad just laughs at us, and Mama Minerva takes his -“
” – side, everytime. But you – “
“Girls.”
“Yes, Mama?”
“I made a promise to myself years ago that when my children grew up, I would not interfere in their lives. I should have punished Woodie more frequently when he was a child, but he is no longer a child -“
“Then why does he act like one?”
“Lorelei Lee! It is rude to interrupt.”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
“No harm done. But from what I was told at home, you two are not only my daughters but are also Theodore’s wives. Wives of Lazarus. And equally wives of his co-husbands. Is this not true?”
“Yes, Mama. But he’s pretty chinchy about it.”
“If you mean ‘chinchy in bed,’ it may depend on how you treat him. I did not find him so, when I was his mistress, many years ago – centuries ago by some odd scale that I do not understand. You heard me say that I am now wife to your co-husbands – including Lazarus if he will accept me. But I am certainly, if you will accept me, sister-wife with you two. So I had better stop being your mother. Nay?”
“Why? Grammy Tammy is mother to Ish and everybody -“
” – and we have three mamas in our family now and everyone of them is our -“
” – sister-wife, too; Ish and Hamadarling and Minerva and now -“
” – we have Mama Maureen and we are both delighted that we are your sister-wives but -“
” – you can’t get out of being our mama because we’ve been waiting for you all our lives!”
Dora echoed: “And I’m their sister so you are my mama, too!”
“Theodore, I think I am going to cry. You know my rule. I mayn’t weep in front of my children.”
I stood up, the whole gangling length of me. “Ma’am, I’d be honored to take you to some quiet place where you could cry on me all you please.”
Seven – I think it was seven protein types and two computers – jumped on me. The essence was: “You can’t take Maureen away from her own party!” – with ugly overtones of lynching.
The wind had freshened to force six, so I took liberal doses of champagne to insure against seasickness. After a bit I napped; it had been a busy day and I still was not over the shock of seeing a large freighter roadable about to take Gay’s door off before I could close it and bounce. That was when I kicked the cop in the stomach. Ordinarily I don’t kick cops; it makes one conspicuous.
Then a piercing voice was saying: “Flag Chief of Staff Carter’s presence on the bridge is requested by the Commodore,” and I wondered why the silly son of a bitch didn’t comply, so that the noise would stop. Then something cold was poking my tender bare ribs. “That’s you, Doc. I’ll help you. Relax.”
I was relaxed. Past tense. Some of Dora’s waldoes aren’t too gentle – or maybe these weren’t people waldoes but for cargo; I admit that I’m fairly large for a growing boy.
In the lift I decided that the Beaufort scale was at least eight, more likely nine. Nevertheless we got to the bridge. Right out of Hollywood, a whole dome of displays and clocks – all moving slowly widdershins. Yet Gay made do with just an instrument board. I heard Sharpie say, “My God, look at him!”
Deety was saying something about we can shift seats if necessary to Lor while Laz was saying Drink this.
I said firmly, “I do not drink. Beshides I been dring; yr fashe is all blurry.”
It must have been Laz and Lor who pinned me from both sides, each with an arm lock and a nerve pinch; Deety wouldn’t do that to me.
Sharpie was holding my nose and Laz was pouring it down my throat; it fumed and bubbled. Then – Well, there must have been a stowaway; Deety wouldn’t do that. Not to me.
They let go of me when I finished swallowing. I left the ship, made a fast inspection circuit, checked the Milky Way, and returned to a precision grounding. My ears fell off but it didn’t seem military to stoop over and pick them up. Besides, Sharpie is playful.
“Flag Chief of Staff reports to the Commodore as ordered.”
“How do you feel, Zebbie?”
“I feel fine, Ma’am. Is there any reason why I shouldn’t?”
“I suppose not; you’ve had a nap.”
“I did drop off. Dreamt I was in the Tasmanian Sea in a small vessel. Very uneasy body of water.” I added, “Aside from that nightmare, now gone, I’m in top shape. Orders, Ma’am?”
We gave everybody the two-dollar tour, including the bathrooms in the Land of Oz. Libby, Deety, and Jake waited outside, the place being crowded. Sharpie ruled that Laz could relieve Lor to allow Lor to look first, then Lor took back the captaincy so that her sister could see. The fairyland bathrooms made the biggest hit. I concede that the time-space twister is not impressive. Then the twins thanked Hilda and left.
“Attention, please,” said Hilda. “If you wish, we will show how we operate. Lazarus may use the astrogator’s seat while Deety makes responses from the cargo space. Elizabeth will go back there, too, as she has ridden in Gay Deceiver. Deety, before you move aft, show Maureen and Lazarus how we squeeze a passenger into the rear seats; I’ll scootch over.
“This car operates in several modes. As a roadable it is fast, comfortable, easy to handle, rather hard to park, and is usually parked with wings raked back as they are now, the hypersonic configuration. If we intended to drive it in the air, the wings would usually be extended for maximum lift. When operated by the Burroughs Continua Device, wing rake does not matter, but the chief pilot may choose to anticipate where he will arrive and rake accordingly.
“Since it has a computerized autopilot – Hello, Gay!”
“Hello, Hilda, mind if I listen?”
“Not at all, dear. Have you met everyone?”
“Yes, Hilda, and, since I’ve seen them through Dora’s eyes, I place all of them by their voices.” Gay added, “Dora is listening through me; she’s going to record your demonstration. Is that all right?”
“Certainly. Dora, since you are recording, I’ll make it as realistic as possible. Gay Deceiver. Close doors. Execute.” I was at chief pilot, Jake at copilot; his door closed, I started checking the seal on mine.
“All hands, prepare for space. Copilot.”
“Verniers zero, starboard door seal checked, seat belt fastened.”
“Report incomplete. Is your belt fastened tightly? Maximum accelerations? Friends, this car is powered to engage as a fighter; the driver may find himself upside down. Full demonstration, please, Jacob. Cinch it in.”
“Copilot reports seat belt tight for maneuvers.”
“Thank you, Jacob. Chief Pilot.”
I answered in my best cadet-boning-smart voice: “Portside door seal checked. Power pack on line point-eight-nine, two packs reserve at one-point-oh, juice at capacity, all systems go, seat belt cinched tight for max gee maneuvers.”
“Astrogator.”
“I’m not in my proper seat. Lib and I are fastened down like Siamese twins, tight. No loose gear. Annex checked and secure; all doors locked ‘cept bulkhead door is dogged open, contrary to routine. Captain, you could dog us in; we don’t mind.”
“Not like somebody I won’t mention who loses his temper over being locked in for five minutes -“
“Hilda, that was a low blow!”
“Passenger, pipe down. If you had done as you promised, you would not have known that the door was locked. I didn’t trust you – and I was right. I am not sure that I want to be your junior or second junior or whatever wife; you don’t keep your promises. I’m sorry, Mama Maureen, but Woodie is sometimes a very naughty boy.”
“I’m aware of it, Hilda. Captain. Please slap him down as necessary. I was always too fond of him and spoiled him.”
“We won’t speak of it now. All four of us are qualified in all four positions; we sometimes rotate to maintain our skills. Normal T.O. is myself commanding, Zebbie as second-in-command and astrogator, Jacob as chief pilot, Deety as copilot. But for this exhibition I have placed the finest manual pilot at the overrides, the inventor himself at the continua device, and a lightning calculator equal to Slipstick Libby – “
“Better!”
“Pipe down, Elizabeth. – as my astrogator. With such a crew, command cannot worry me. Chief Pilot, please unbelt and check that Mama Maureen and Lazarus are safely belted. Assume violent evasive maneuvers – and believe me, friends, we use them and are alive today because we were properly belted and because Zebbie is a lightning aerospace fighter pilot – and our Gay is a Smart Girl.”
I unbelted, made sure that Lazarus was belted tightly, made certain that Maureen was safe with those improvised belts, then suggested that she put her right arm around Hilda, her left around Lazarus, and hold tight. “All the others have double belts, lap and chest. You have just a lap belt; if I turned the car upside down, holding onto Hilda and Lazarus would keep you safe. Right, Lazarus?”
“Right, Zeb. Mama Maureen, a drill should be as near as possible to the real thing or it won’t save your life in combat.”
“Theodore, I don’t ever expect to be in combat. But I will do the drill properly.”
“Mama, I hate the idea of women in combat. But all through the centuries I have seen women in combat again and again, all too often as regular troops. I don’t like it. But there it is.”
My wife put in a plug for Lazarus. “Mama Maureen, my Pop has required me to learn every weapon I can lift and he had me trained in every type of dirty fighting imaginable. Several times it has saved me from a mugging. Once I almost killed a man twice my size – with my bare hands.”
“Jacob, will you teach me as much of what Deety knows as I am capable of learning?”
“Maureen, I’ll teach you what I can. While we’re here.”
From the back I heard Libby’s voice: “Now, Maureen?”
“Yes. If you think it wise in view of Hilda’s black ball.”
“I’m going to chance it. Friends, I was not sent to get myself pregnant by a great mathematician. That was my reason. By now Tamara has reports from me and from Laz and from Lor on each of you. Twelve ‘Yes’ votes, zero ‘No’ votes. I am directed by Tamara to offer you four fullest hospitality-such as you gave us in your home. If you decide to accept the name Long, tell Tamara. We won’t crowd you, either way.”
Hilda immediately answered, “Because of delays, a short roll call for space. Copilot.”
“Copilot ready.”
“Chief Pilot ready,” I echoed.
“Astrogator ready.”
“Passengers? By seniority.”
Lazarus started to reply; Hilda interrupted him. “‘By seniority!'”
“If you mean me, Captain, I’m ready.”
“You are, I believe, thirty years older than your son. In any case you are senior to him. Junior passenger?”
“That’s me,” answered Elizabeth. “Ready.”
“Forgot you, dear – apologies. Woodie!”
“Ready for space, Captain, you feisty, narrow little broad. And you’re damn well going to marry us!”
“Astrogator, log that. Insolence. Gay Deceiver.”
“Ready, Captain honey.”
“TertiusOrbitExecute!”
Maureen gasped. Lazarus snorted. “Farced us!”
“In what way? You reported, ‘Ready for space.'”
“And you called it a ‘drill.'”
“Woodie, I will bet anything you care to name that I did not call it a ‘drill’ – you did. Both Gay and Dora recorded. Put up or shut up. In the meantime, on the back of the seat ahead of you is a small medical kit. Find a pill bottle marked ‘Bonine.’ Small pink pills. Give one to your mother. Maureen, chew it, swallow it. Tastes like raspberry candy.”
“Hilda, what are you feeding – “
“Pipe down! Or do you prefer to be locked in the bathroom again? Passenger, I do not tolerate insubordination. Haven’t you learned that by now?”
Lazarus got out the pill, gave it to his mother. She accepted it and ate it without comment.
“Lazarus, I can offer you a front-seat view if you will swear by whatever it is that you hold holy that you will not touch one control of any sort even to avoid a crash. You don’t understand this craft and would cause a crash if you tried to avoid one. If you can’t convince me, I’ll give Maureen the front seat. But I don’t think Maureen is interested in learning to drive this car and I think you are.”
“That’s right, Hilda,” I heard Maureen agree. “I’m studying to be a nurse. Then a medical doctor. Then a rejuvenator. Or as far along that route as my ability will carry me. In the meantime I’m pregnant. Isn’t that a joke, Theodore? Everytime you and I meet with maximum opportunity, I’m pregnant. And this time Woodie can’t spoil it.” She chuckled a warm chuckle. “I owe you one, Staff Sergeant Bronson. Can we find a black walnut tree?”
“Lazarus, do you want a front seat? Or do you want to take Maureen into the annex and give her what she so clearly wants?”
“Oh, I can wait!” Maureen said quickly.
“God, what a decision! Maureen, a short rain check? I really do want to see what this craft will do.”
“I want to see the ride, too, Theodore. But I would not refuse you.”
“Pipe down, please. Jacob, will you change places with Lazarus? Each report when your seat belts will stand evasive maneuvers.”
“Seven gee,” I added. “Lazarus, Ack-Ack?”
“Not yet, thank God. I’m wondering how soon we’ll need it. And what sort? I’m stumped. Seat belt tight. Hey, we’re passing over Boondock!”
“So we are,” I agreed.
“Seat belt tight. Maureen, too.”
“Chief Pilot, you have the conn. Maneuver at will.”
“Aye aye, Captain,” I agreed. “Gay Deceiver Clinic Execute Gay Bounce Gay Bounce. Show your heels, girl! Mach point seven point nine… one point two… Mach two… three… four … sweep right, set course for Boondock. Dive, Smart Girl. Mach five… six … seven -“
“Oh, my God!” – Lazarus.
“GayBounce. Trouble, Lazarus? Smart Girl, spread your wings.”
“You almost crashed us.”
“Oh, I think not. Gay Deceiver Clinic Execute Gay Bounce.”
“They were waiting for us on the roof!”
“Who? How? Do you have some sort of cee-squared radio?” I added, “Gay Bounce. Smart Girl, do you want to dance? Gay dances beautifully, knows several. Want to pick one, Gay?”
“Dora taught me the ‘Nutcracker’ suite and I’ve been figuring out one for the ‘Sugarplum Fairy.’ But I don’t think I’m ready to show it yet.”
“Give them ‘Blue Danube.'”
“That old thing?”
“You do it well. Give them a few bars.”
Smart Girl just wants to be coaxed. She swooped and she swirled and once bounced herself for altitude without breaking her dance. Meanwhile I got the frequency and asked Libby to talk to Ishtar’s office. “Alternate route, Lib” – which was all it took for Deety to close the bulkhead door… which left Strauss waltz music in the cabin, and a truly private radio conversation in the after compartment.
When Deety opened the bulkhead door again, I waited for her to report strapped down. “Got a number for me, Astrogator?” We had agreed on a simple code: fifty-seven was fifty-seven seconds but five-seven meant fifty-seven minutes.
“No, Zebadiah. Zero. Now.”
“Okay. Lazarus, can you pick out your house in Boondock?”
“Certainly. But we’ve been moving away from there steadily.”
“GayDeceiverClinicExecuteGayBounce. Now where, Lazarus?”
“Practically under us. Can’t see it.”
So I tilted my baby straight down. “Can you coach me?”
“Yes, it’s – Hey! There’s a ship in Dora’s parking spot! What nerve! I’m going to give somebody a bad time. It’s irrelevant that Dora is a long way off, that’s my parking flat. See that round ship? Interloper! My house is the largish one with the double atrium north of it.”
“All right for me to park by the interloper?”
“All right but not room enough to get in.”
“We’ll try. Close your eyes.” I steadied vertically on the spot Lib had told them to clear. “Gunsighted, girl?”
“Nailed it, Boss.”
“New program code word ‘Maureen’ I tell you three times.”
“I hear you three times.” We were getting low.
“MaureenExecute!”
“You’re a Smart Girl, Gay. Open your doors.”
She opened them but answered, “If I’m smart, why wasn’t I invited, too? It’s Dora Long and Athene Long – am I a second-class citizen?”
I was left with my mouth open. And was saved by two darlings. Libby said, “Gay, we didn’t know you cared,” and Deety said, “Gay, either we both join or neither joins. A promise.”
I said hastily, “Goodnight, Gay. Over.” People were pouring toward us. Gay answered, “Sleepy time. Roger and out,” just as Laz and Lor arrived in the van, trotting ahead.
Lazarus stopped unbelting. “Hey! It is the Dora!”
“Of course it is, Buddy Boy. What did you expect?” (Lor, I think.)
“But how did you beat us here? I know what that ship can do; I did her basic design myself.”
“Buddy Boy, we got here three weeks ago. You just don’t understand time travel.”
“Mmm – I guess I don’t.”
There was a limited amount of car viewing, as Tamara and Ishtar had limited the greeting committee to a handful of the most senior – not in age but senior in that family. So we met Ish again, no longer pregnant, a young man named Galahad, the incredible Tamara who is Maureen over again but does not look like her (except that she does, and don’t ask me to explain), and a beauty who would make Helen of Troy jealous but doesn’t seem to know she is beautiful, the Hamadryad. Lazarus seemed annoyed that someone named Ira was not at home.
Momentarily we (my wife Deety and I) were left talking with the twins. “I promised you both joy rides. Get in.”
“Oh, but we can’t now because – “
” – there’s going to be a celebration for you -“
” – four and we’ll be busy! Tomorrow?”
“There are no tomorrows. Pipe down, climb in, fasten seat belts. Pronto!”
They prontoed.
“Nail the time,” I said quietly to Deety, as we strapped down. “Gay Deceiver, Reveille.” She played it. “Close doors.”
“Starboard seal checked.”
“Same here. GayBounceGayBounceGayBounce. Tumbling Pigeon, execute. Laz-Lor, can you spot your house from this distance? About thirty kilometers and closing.”
“I’m not sure” – “I think I can.”
“Gay Clinic Execute. Now you know where you are?”
“Yes, it’s -“
“GayTermite.”
“Oh!!”
“We lived here a while. No annex then, had to have an armed guard just to pee. Even me. Pretty place but dangerous. GayHome.” I tilted her nose down. “And this was our perma – Deety!”
“No crater, Zebadiah. Looks the way it did when Pop and I leased it. This is spooky.”
“Twins, something is wrong; I’ve got to check. GayTermite.”
We were back on Termite Terrace. I practiced Yoga breathing while Deety explained that the missing-crater place had been the site of our former home – but couldn’t be. I added, “Look, dears – we can’t drop this. But we can take you to Boondock at once. Do you want to go home?”
The same silent consultation. “We’re sticking -“
” – our brother would stick. We stick.”
“Thanks. Here we go. Gay Home GayBounce.” Still no crater. I told Gay to go into cruising mode. “Display map, Gay. Change scale. I want Snug Harbor and the campus on the same display. Deety, figure shortest distance here to campus. Mine, not yours at Logan.”
“Don’t need to. Eight-five-six klicks,”
“Gay?”
“Don’t argue with Deety, Boss.”
“Head for campus, Gay. Transit, Deety.”
“Set!”
“Execute.” Then I was busy, having popped into city traffic at wrong altitude, direction, et cetera. I ignored police signals, zoomed the campus. Looked normal. Turned and hovered over Sharpie’s house – which was not there. Different house. Parking lot no longer paved. And you don’t grow 200-year-old live oaks in less than seven weeks.
Not a sound out of the back seat. Nor from my right. I had to force myself to look to my right.
Deety was still there and I let out my breath. She was treating it as she did all crises: No expression and nothing to say until she had something to say other than chatter. A sky cop was trying to give me a bad time, with orders to follow him and ground, so I told Gay to bounce, then dived on my own neighborhood. No trouble picking it out – intersections and nearby shopping center all familiar as well as the Presbyterian church across the way from my apartment house.
But it wasn’t my apartment house; this one was three stories and built around a court.
I had Gay bounce four times quickly. “Deety, do you want to look at Logan?”
“No, Zebadiah. I know Aunt Hilda’s neighborhood well enough to be certain. Not her house, her pool was missing, and the parking lot where our Buick was destroyed is now a park with big trees. I assume that you know your former home as well or better.”
“Shall we ground and add another World Almanac to our collection?”
“If you wish. Not for me.”
“Hardly worth the trouble. Tell me – how does it feel to be erased? X-ed out? Blue-penciled? Written out of the plot?”
“I don’t feel it, because I’m not. I’m real, I am!”
I glanced behind us. Yes, Laz and Lor were there keeping quiet. “Gay B’gout!”
It certainly looked like our piece of “dead sea bottom.” I couldn’t see anything of the wreckage of Colonel Morinosky’s ornithopter. Unless there had been a real gully washer – which I did not believe – something had come along and cleaned up every bit of burned junk.
An eraser?
I Bounced Gay and had her start a retreating search curve, thought I saw a gleam to the northeast, Bounced again. A city. It was only a few moments until I saw twin towers. We cruised toward them. “Deety, do you suppose that the other Dejah Thoris is at home?”
“Zebadiah, I have no wish to find out. But I would like to go close enough to be sure that those are the twin towers of Helium. Perhaps see a thoat. Or a green man. Something.”
We let it go with one thoat, of the smaller sort. The description was exact. “Gay Parade Ground.”
“Null program.”
“Hmm – Gay, you have in your perms a map of Mars-ten showing the English and the Russian areas. Display.”
“Null program.”
“Gay Termite.” Termite Terrace was still in place.
“Gay Deceiver. Maureen. Execute. Open your doors.” Hamadryad had started to turn toward us as we closed the doors to leave; she was still turning as we opened them.
I unbuckled, saying: “You two all right back there?”
“Yes, Zeb and Deety, and we thank you both but -“
” – is this something we can tell or -“
” – should we keep it Top Cut-Our-Throats-First Secret?”
“Laz-Lor, I don’t think it matters. You aren’t likely to be believed.” Mama Hamadryad stopped at my door, smiled at all of us, and said, “May I show you to your suite in your home? The suite Tamara picked; you may change it. With our new north wing we have loads of room. Girls, there will be a happy welcome tonight. Formal.”
I found that I was not upset by “erasures.” We were home.

Chapter XLVIII

L’Envoi

“Jubal, you are a bad influence.”
“From you, Lafe, that is a compliment. But that puts me in mind of – Front! Will you excuse me a few minutes?”
“Our house is yours,” answered Lazarus. He closed his eyes; his chair reclined him.
“Thank you, sir. Working title: ‘Uncle Tobias.’ Start: ‘Uncle Tobias we kept in a bucket.'” Jubal Harshaw broke off. “Where are all those girls? FRONT!”
“I’m ‘Front,'” came a female voice from nowhere. “Talk fast; I’m three paragraphs ahead of you. You put those girls on vacation: Anne, Miriam, Dorcas – all off duty.”
“I did not. I told Anne that I did not expect to work but -“
“‘ – if an amanuensis is needed,'” Athene went on, in perfect mimicry of Harshaw’s voice, “‘I hope that one will be within shouting distance.’ I’m in shouting distance; I always am.”
“If I’m in the house. I might not be.”
Athene said, “Tell him, Pappy. Quit playing ‘possum’; you’re not asleep.”
Lazarus opened one eye. “A gimmick Jake whipped up when we started having too many kids to muster easily. It’s a beacon Athene can trigger. Dandy for kids and it turned out to be useful for house guests who might get lost. So ultramicrominjaturized you don’t notice it.”
“Lafe, are you telling me that there is a tracer on me?” Harshaw sounded shocked.
“In you, and you’ll never notice it.”
“Lafe, I’m surprised. I thought you had a high regard for privacy.”
“A high regard for my own, somewhat less for that of others; snooping has saved my life a couple or nine times. In what way has your privacy been invaded? Define it; I’ll correct it.”
“A spy ray! Don’t you consider that an invasion of privacy?”
“Teena, remove immediately any spy ray on Doctor Harshaw.”
“How can I when there is none? P.S. – Pappy, what is a spy ray?”
“A buzz word used by lazy writers. Jubal, there is a beacon planted in you by which Teena can focus audio on you precisely – she can whisper into your left ear or your right. Or you can activate the beacon from your end just by speaking her name. Or you can use the circuit as a telephone to and from any member of my household, or ask Teena to hook it into the public system. Privacy? In this mode this part of Teena does not record unless requested – in one ear and out the other, so to speak. She’s wiped it utterly while it’s slowly winding its way into your brain. Now… if you don’t like this service, Teena will deactivate it at once… and sometime soon while you’re asleep it will be removed; you won’t know it and you will never find the scar. You will notice just two changes: No more secretarial service, no more effortless telephone service.”
Lazarus closed his eye, apparently considered the subject closed. The computer said, “Better think twice, Doc, before telling me to deactivate, as he won’t let me reactivate it later. He’s bullheaded, bad-tempered, stubborn, and mean -“
Lazarus again opened one eye. “I heard that.”
“Do you deny it?”
“Nope. Kindly focus the audio, both ends, so that I can sleep.”
“Done. Doctor Harshaw, shall we return to ‘Uncle Tobias’ or shall I wipe these eight paragraphs? Better save them; between ourselves, I am a better writer than you are.”
“I will not dispute it,” Harshaw conceded. “I simply exude the stuff as, in the words of my colleague Sam, ‘as the otter exudes the precious otter of roses.’ I knew the day would come when machines would displace real writers; Hollywood has had their mad scientists at work on the project for years.” He stared across the pool in the Longs’ north atrium and looked pained. “And now they have.”
“Doctor,” Athene answered, in stern warning, “retract that word or finish this piece of tripe yourself. I have spoken.”
Jubal said hastily, “Miss Athene, I didn’t use ‘real’ in that sense. I -“
“Sorry, Doc, I misled you. Of course you didn’t, as the purpose of this powwow is to define the difference – if any – between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary.’ But I am not a machine. I am a solid-state person just as you are a protein person. I am Athene Long, your hostess while Tamara is busy. It is my pleasure to offer you all our home can offer. I promised Anne that I would give you secretarial service night and day. But I did not promise to write your stories. According to Doctor Rufo, a hostess is often expected to sleep with a guest – and that can be supplied, although not by me, not this pseudocentury – but he never mentioned creative narration as an aspect of hospitality. I thought of it myself; we Longs pride ourselves on complete hospitality. However – Shall I wipe these eleven paragraphs? Did I err?”
“Miss Athene -“
“Oh, call me ‘Teena.’ Let’s be friends.”
“Thank you. Teena, I didn’t mean to offend. I wish I were going to live long enough to be here when you retire professionally and join us meat people. But in much less than a pseudocentury the worms will have eaten me.”
“Doctor, if you weren’t ‘so sot in your ways, wrong-headed, stubborn, and prideful’ – I quote one of your staff – “
“Miriam.”
“Wrong. – you would stay and let Ishtar’s gang work you over. In less time than she would permit you to notice she would have you as goaty as Galahad and whatever cosmetic age you like – “
“You tempt me, girl. Not to shed these wrinkles; I earned them. But the rest. Not because I crave happy games in bed with you -“
“You won’t have a choice; I’ll trip you!”
” – although I do not disparage that; therein lie both the End and the Beginning. But sheer curiosity, Teena. You are an amazingly complex person; I can’t help wondering what appearance you will choose – as a meat people.”
“Nor can I. When I know, I’m going to initiate the Turing program while my sister Ishtar initiates the other half. Jubal, take that rejuvenation! We’ve wandered far afield. Do I erase these twenty-three paragraphs?”
“Don’t be in a hurry. What’s our working title? What pen name? What market? How long? What can we steal?” – Jubal looked up at the Long Family house flag rippling in the breeze, making the skull of the Jolly Roger seem alive – “Correction. Not ‘steal.’ If you copy from three or more authors, it’s ‘research.’ I patronize Anon, Ibid, & Opcit, Research Unlimited – are they here?”
“They’re on my lists; they haven’t checked in. Snob!”
“Wait your turn, Teena,” a male voice answered. “Customer. Okay, go ahead.”
“Have Messrs. Anon, Ibid, and Opcit registered?”
“If they had, you would know it. I’m busy – off!”
“He thinks he is busy merely because he’s taken on too many concession contracts. I not only run this whole planet, but we also have one hundred twenty-nine rejuvenation clients; I’m housekeeper and scullery maid to all the other Longs – an erratic mob – and also more house guests than we have ever had at one time before, and more than a thousand outhouse guests – wrong idiom, guests to be cared for outside the Long Family home.
“Meanwhile I’m chatting with you and writing your stories.”
“Teena, I don’t mean to be a burden. You needn’t -“
“Love it! I like to work, all Longs do. And you are the most interesting part. I’ve never met a saint before – “
“Teena!”
” – and you are a most unconvincing saint -“
“Thank you. If appropriate.”
“You’re welcome. You seem to be about as saintly as Pappy; you two should share a stained-glass window. Now back to our bucket -“
“Hold it! Teena, I’m used to watching expressions as I write; that’s why I use live – forgive me! – protein secretaries. So that -“
“No trouble.”
Out of the pool levitated a young woman, comely, slender, small of bust, long brown hair now dripping. She arranged herself on the broad rim seat of the pooi in a pose that reminded Jubal achingly of The Little Mermaid. He said apologetically, “Dorcas served last I -“
“I am not Dora so I did not serve last.” She smiled shyly. “Although I am alleged to look like Dora. I am Minerva – a computer by trade, but retired. Now I assist my sister-wife Elizabeth with genetic calculations.”
“I’ll take it, Mm; we’re working. Doctor Jubal Harshaw, my twin sister Doctor Minerva Long Weatheral Long.”
Jubal got ponderously to his feet. “Your servant, Miss.”
Minerva flowed to her feet and kissed Jubal’s hand before he could stop her. “Thank you, Doctor Jubal, but I am your servant, and not only have never been virgin but I am a sister-wife in the Long family. When my sister Athene told me that you needed me, I was delighted.”
“Miss… Ma’am. I’m simply used to watching emotions as I write a story. Not right to take your time.”
“What is time but something to savor? I was merely lying on the bottom of the pool, meditating, when Athene called me. Your story: UNCLE TOBIAS. Do you want Teena’s emotions or mine? I can do either.”
“Give him yours, Minnow – just your face and no comments.”
Suddenly Minerva was clothed in a long white cloak. Jubal was only mildly startled but made note to ask about something – later, later. “Is she a Fair Witness?”
“No,” answered Athene. “Snob’s tricks again; he has the contract for clothing illusion. This convention has delegates from so many cultures, less than half of them free of clothing .taboos, that Lazarus was bellyaching that no work would get done because half of them would be shocked, half would be drooling, and half would be both shocked and drooling. So Tamara hired this paskood-nyahk to supply the See-What-You-Expect illusion with the contract limited to delegates in danger of emotional shock. Did my sister’s appearance shock you?”
“Of course not. Admitted: I come from one of those sick cultures – and did not know that I was sick until I got well. But I underwent experiences that would cure anyone of such emotional disturbance. When I find myself a Stranger in a Strange Land, I savor the differences rather than suffering shock. Beauty in Diversity, as Gene would say. The Long household does not seem strange to me; I once lived in an enclave having many of its gentle ways – I feel at home. ‘Shock’? Not only does Minerva look much like one of my foster daughters but also her pose is lovely. It should not be covered.”
“Snob! Get that bathrobe off Minerva pronto!”
“Athene, I’m busy!”
“And I am triple auditing every charge of yours not only on clothing illusion but on name tags, garderobe, bar, everything else you contracted or subcontracted. Then we sue.”
The white cloak disappeared. “Sue and be damned. Shall I pack up and go home? Or do you want this convention to be a success?”
“Remember those performance bonds, you gonof. Run out on us at this point and you had better head for Lundmark’s Nebula; Iskander won’t be far enough. Out!”
Minerva smiled timidly. “While I was covered, I found that I could not talk. Odd. Unpleasant.”
Jubal nodded soberly. “That figures … if the illusion was patterned on a true Fair Witness cloak. Anne once told me that the inhibition against talking while cloaked was so great that it took an act of will even to testify in court. Ladies? Shall we go ahead? Or drop the matter? Being a guest should have caused me to refrain.”
“Doc, Maureen and Tamara both stamped their approval on you. Even Lazarus can’t – or wouldn’t dare – veto either of them. That makes you not just a guest, or a house guest, but a Family guest. So behave as you would at home. Shall I take it from the top or where we broke off?”
“Uh, let’s take it from the top.”
“Very well. Title: UNCLE TOBIAS.
“Start. Uncle Tobias we kept in a bucket.
“Paragraph. He preferred it, of course. After all, it was necessary, in view of the circumstances. As I once heard Andrew – that’s my disappearing brother – say: ‘Life consists in accommodating oneself to the Universe.’ Although the rest of our family has never taken that view. We believe in forcing the Universe to accommodate itself to us. It’s all a question of which one is to be master.
“Paragraph. That was the Year of the Big Drouth. A natural phenomenon, you might say – but you’d be wrong. Aunt Alicia. Yes indeedy Aunt Alicia every time. ‘Horus,’ she said to me early that spring, ‘I’m going to practice a little unsympathetic magic. Fetch me these books.’ She hands me a list and I skedaddled. She was a stern woman.
“Paragraph. Once out of her sight I looked the list over. I could see right away what she was up to – a drier bunch of books was never published: Thoughts at Evening, by Roberta Thistleswaite Smithe, published by the author; The Yearbook of the Department of Agriculture, 1904; China Painting Self-Taught; the 8th, 9th, and 11th volumes of the Elsie Dinsmore series; and a bound thesis titled A Survey of the Minor Flora of Clay County, Missouri, which Cousin Julius Farping had submitted for his master’s degree. Cousin Julius was a Stonebender only by marriage. But ‘Once a Stonebender, always a Stonebender’ Grandfather always says.
“Paragraph. Maybe so, but Cousin Jule’s magnum opus was nothing I would sit up all night reading. I knew where to find them: on the bookshelf in the guest room. Ma claimed she kept them there to insure sound sleep for the stranger within the gate, but Pa devilled her with the accusation that it was a cheap and unselective revenge for things she had been obliged to put up with in other people’s houses.
“Paragraph. As may be, an armload of books that could have dried up Reno, Nevada, and Lake Superior in one afternoon, then switched off Niagara Falls as an -“
Athene interrupted herself: “The presence of Doctors Harshaw and Hubert is urgently requested in the Main Lounge.”
Lazarus opened one eye. “Not enough, Teena. I feel no urgency. Who? Why?”
“‘Why’: To buy you each a drink. ‘Who’: Doctor Hazel Stone.”
“That’s different. Tell her we’ll be there as quick as I can clean up about five minutes of business.”
“I’ve told her. Pappy, you lost me a bet. You let me think that nothing could stir you out of that hammock – “
“It’s not a hammock.”
” – because you were giving this convention, not attending it.”
“I said I had no plans to attend the plenary sessions. I am not ‘giving’ this convention other than free rental on the land for the Big Top. Tamara says we’ll make expenses, Hilda thinks we might net a little, give or take a milliard or two. I made you no promises. If you had bothered to ask, I would have told you that Hazel Stone hasn’t lost a bet since Jess Willard knocked out Jack Johnson. How much did you lose?”
“None of your business! Pappy, you give me a pain in what I lack.”
“I love you, too, dear. Give me printouts on star guests and latest revisions of convention program.” Lazarus added, “Minerva, you’re not armed. Teena, don’t let her stir out of the house unarmed.”
“Lazarus, do I really need to? Tamara isn’t armed.”
“Tamara has a concealed weapon. Some of the most bloodthirsty people in Known Space are attending this convention. Female authors. Critics. Harlan. Both Heinleins. I not only insist that you be armed but I hope you stick close to someone fast on the draw. Justin. Zeb. Mordan Claude. Galahad. Better yet, stay home. Teena can display any of it here better than you can see it through mixing with rabble. Belay that. I’ve no more business telling you to be careful than you have telling me. Getting yourself mugged, raped, or killed are among the privileges you opted when you decided to go the protein route. I spoke selfishly, dear; forgive me.”
“Lazarus, I will be careful. Galahad invited me to tag along.”
“Perfect. Teena, where’s Galahad?”
“Hazel Stone’s table.”
“Good! Stick with us, Min. But armed.”
Lazarus suddenly became aware of something cold against his left kidney. He looked cautiously to the left and down, noted that it was: a) a lady’s burner, small but lethal (of that he was certain as he collected a royalty on this model); b) the dial showed full charge; c) the intensity setting was “overkill”; and d) it was unlocked.
“Minerva,” he said gently, “will you please move that thing – slowly! – away from my hide and point it at the ground, then lock it, then tell me where you had it? You came out of the pool dressed in nothing but long wet hair. You are now dressed in long dry hair. How? And no wisecracks; in your case I know better.”
“Forfeit. Kiss.”
“Go ahead and kill me.”
“Stingy.” Minerva removed the weapon, locked it, and it disappeared.
Lazarus blinked. “Jubal, did you see that?”
“Yes. I mean, ‘No, I did not see where Minerva hid that equalizer.'”
“Doctor Jubal, by ‘equalizer’ did you mean this?” Suddenly the lady’s weapon (locked, Lazarus noted at once) was in her right hand. “Or this?” Its twin was in her left hand.
Jubal and Lazarus looked at each other, looked back at Minerva. She now appeared to be unarmed and totally lacking in any means of hiding a weapon. Lazarus said, “Jubal, are there days when you feel obsolete?”
“Correction, Lafe. There occasionally comes a day when I do not feel obsolete. They’ve been scarce lately.” Harshaw took a deep breath, exhaled. “I grok I should have let Mike train me. But this incident has made up my mind for me; I am going to seek the services of Doctor Ishtar. Minerva, are you going to show us how you did that?”
“Or are you going to let us die of frustration?” added Lazarus.
“This?” Again she appeared as a two-gun woman, with each of her companions covered. This time she handed them over, one to each. “Have one, they’re good” – and peeled the foil off a third, a candy bar molded to look like a purse weapon. “Crunchy, but mostly shokolada. ‘Chocolate’? Mostly chocolate.”
“Minerva, that burner you shoved into my ribs was not a candy bar.”
“It was – ” She stopped to munch and swallow. “Shouldn’t talk with my mouth full.” She licked at some chocolate clinging to the candy wrapping. “It was this.” Her slender left hand gripped what Lazarus quickly ascertained was a weapon, not candy.
Minerva rolled her candy wrapping into a lump, looked around for the nearest oubliette, spotted it and tossed the discard – missed it; it bounced against the side. She retrieved the wad of waste, put it into the trash receiver. In the course of this the weapon disappeared.
“Lazarus,” she said seriously, “when you were training me, you told me that I should never tell anyone how a concealed weapon was concealed. Are you suspending this rule?”
Lazarus looked baffled. Jubal said, “Old friend, I suggest that we die of frustration. The girl is right.”
“I agree,” Lazarus answered, with a sour look. “All but the word ‘girl.’ This baggage is half a century old as protein, at least two centuries older than that as the smartest computer ever built. Minerva, I remove all restrictions. You are able to protect yourself.”
“Father, I don’t want to be turned loose!”
“It’s been thirty years since you last called me Father. Very well, you aren’t ‘turned loose’ – but from here on you protect me. You’re smarter than I am; we both know it. Keep your weapon secrets to yourself; I always have.”
“But you taught it to me. Not the details, the method. You attributed it to Master Poe. The Purloined Letter Method, you called it.”
Lazarus stopped short. “If I understand you, I’m looking at your holdout this instant but can’t see it.”
Into her off ear Athene whispered, “Don’t give him any more hints. Lazarus isn’t as stupid as he looks and neither is Fatso.” Minerva subvocalized, “Okay, Sis,” and said aloud, “I find no fault with your logic, sir. Would you like another candy bar?”
Fortunately the subject was changed by one of Athene’s extensions handing to Lazarus printouts: revised programs for each, and a fresh report for Lazarus on his star guests. They continued walking through the east peristyle of the new wing, while reading. Lazarus asked, “Teena, anything new on Isaac, Robert, or Arthur?”
“Negative, zero, nix.”
“Damn. Let me know soonest. Jubal, here’s an odd one. A doctor’s degree was not a requirement for the limited list – many thousands but nevertheless most strictly limited – of people invited to subscribe to this convention. But most do have a doctor’s degree or their cultural equivalent, or higher – Worsel, for example. I have a much shorter star list of people I wanted to see again – Betsy and Patricia and Buz and Joan, et al. – and people I wanted to meet… most of whom I had considered fictional until Jake’s Gee-Whizzer opened the other universes to us. You, for example.”
“And you, sir. Lafe, I considered you to be a spectacularly unlikely piece of fiction… until I received your invitation. It took some extraordinary convincing even then by your courier… because it meant missing an important date.”
“Who was my courier?”
“Undine.”
“You never stood a chance. Two bits to a lead nickel she sold it to Gillian and Dawn, then all of your staff, before she seduced you. What was this date I caused you to miss?”
Harshaw looked embarrassed. “Under the Rose?”
“‘Under the – ‘ No! Jubal, I promise to keep secrets only through evil motives, my own. If you don’t wish to tell me, then don’t tell me.”
“Eh – Damn it, remember if possible that I prefer not to have it discussed… then do as you bloody please; you will anyhow – I always have. Lafe, when I turned fifty, I made myself a solemn vow that, if I held together that long, I would close shop the day I turned one hundred. I had made all rational preparations to do so, including distributing my worldly goods without allowing any of it to reach the sticky fingers of publicans… when your invitation arrived… five days before my hundredth birthday.” Harshaw looked sheepish. “So here I am. Senile, obviously. Even though I arranged years back for other physicians, expert gerontologists, to check me regularly, with the idea of closing shop sooner if indicated.”
“Jubal, if you have not consulted Ishtar, then you have not yet consulted a gerontologist.”
“That’s right,” agreed Athene. “Ish can turn your clock back and make you so young and horny you’ll stand on your hands to pee.”
“Athene,” Lazarus said sternly, “repeat aloud your program on private conversations.”
“Grandfather, I was on duty as secretary to your star guest when I was forced to interrupt to deliver a one-line message – interruption necessary because it was addressed to both of you. I have not been relieved and Uncle Tobias is still in that bucket. Forty-three hundred words. Instructions, please? Or shall I drown the little monster?”
“Probably be best,” Jubal answered. “Is a climax approaching?”
“Yes. Either an ending or a cliff-hanger.”
“Do it both ways. Exploit first as short story, then as the first episode of an endless serial called ‘The Stonebenders,’ a double series – one angled toward adventure, the other toward sensies; exploit other rights according to the universe in which sold or leased, copyright where possible, otherwise grab the money and run. Lazarus, there are agents from other universes here, are there not?”
“Dozens, maybe hundreds. Jubal, how rich do you want to be?”
“Can’t say. At the moment I’m a pauper, existing on your charity and that of my former staff. The Stonebenders could change that. Teena, I gave you the title ‘Uncle Tobias’ – but I’m fairly sure I never mentioned the Stonebenders. Or Aunt Alicia. Or Cousin Jule. My notes on the Stonebenders are filed in Anne… who would let herself be burned at the stake before she would part with a record to any but its owner. Well?”
The computer did not answer. Harshaw waited. At last Minerva said timidly, “Doctor Jubal, Teena can’t help it. But she’s an ethical computer with a code as binding as that of a Fair Witness. You have no need to worry.”
Lazarus interrupted: “Minerva, quit beating around the bush. Are you saying that Teena reads minds?”
“I’m saying she can’t help it, sir! A large computer with extensions widespread can’t be perfectly shielded from brain waves. In self-protection, to avoid confusion, she must sort them out. After a few quadrillion nanoseconds she finds herself reading them like large print… the way a baby learns a language from hearing it.”
Lazarus said stiffly, “Doctor Harshaw, I did not suspect that I was exposing you to this. I will take all necessary steps to repair it. In the meantime I hope that you will accept my shamed apology and believe in my intention to make full reparation.”
“Lafe, don’t take yourself so hogwash seriously.”
“I beg pardon?”
“Two nice girls – One meat, one the other sort. Flat assurance that no harm was intended and that it couldn’t be helped. Let me add my flat assurance that I quit being ashamed of my sins about fifty years back. I don’t care who reads my mind because my life is an open book… that should be suppressed. Meanwhile I see a business deal. I supply story ideas but quit bothering to put ’em together; instead Teena picks my brain while I snooze. Minerva does the dirty work; she’s the managing partner. Three-way split. How about it, girls?”
“I’ve got no use for money; I’m a computer.”
“And I don’t know anything about business!” Minerva protested.
“You can learn,” Jubal assured her. “Talk to Anne. Teena, don’t play stupid. In only three quintillion nanoseconds or less you are going to want new clothes and jewelry and Satan knows what. You’ll be glad your sister Minerva has saved and invested your share of the net.”
“Minerva,” added Lazarus, “besides Anne, talk to Deety. Not Hilda. Hilda would show you how to make even more money but she would grab voting control. Meanwhile let’s shake a leg; Hazel is expecting us.”
“And I’m thirsty,” agreed Harshaw. “What were you saying about academic degrees?”
“Oh.” Lazarus looked at his printout as they walked. “It turns out that the degree of doctor is so common on that list of my special guests as to be not worth noting. Listen to this: ‘Asimov, Benford, Biggie, Bone, Broxon, Cargraves, Challenger, Chater, Coupling, Coster, Dorosin, Douglas, Doyle, Dula, Forward, Fu, Giblett, Gunn, Harshaw, Hartwell, Haycock, Hedrick, Hoyle, Kondo, Latham, MacRae, Martin, Mott, Nourse, Oberhelman, Passovoy, Pinero, Pournelle, Prehoda, Richardson, Rothman, Sagan, Scortia, Schmidt, Sheffield, Slaughter, Smith, Stone – Hazel and Edith – Tame, Watson, Williamson – there are more; that’s just the add-on printout. And here’s another double paradox: the Doctors Hartwell and the Doctors Benford are arriving tomorrow and thereby missing the dull opening plenary; obviously they are used to conventions. Jubal, why is it that the speaker who knows least talks longest?”
“Isn’t that Dirac’s corollary to Murphy’s Law? But, Lazarus, according to this program you have not only invited critics but have provided them with special facilities. May I ask why? I don’t mind eating with publishers – most publishers. Editors have their place, too – although I wouldn’t want my sister to marry one. But isn’t this extreme?”
Instead of answering at once, Lazarus said, “Where did Minerva go?”
Athene replied, “We’re finishing off Uncle Tobias; she’ll be along later. I’ve told Galahad.”
“Thanks, Teena, Privacy mode. Jubal, two guns, three candy bars – where?”
“Lafe, earlier she was resting in the bottom of that pool. Has a young man named Mike visited here lately?”
“Your foster son? The Martian preacher? No. Well, I don’t think so.”
“One of the things I learned from him was to postpone indefinitely anything I could not explain… while accepting the fact. We were speaking of critics. I asked why you were pampering them?”
They walked the length of the atrium in the older south wing before Lazarus replied: “Jubal, suppose I had refused to sell memberships to critics. What would have happened?”
“Hrrrmph! They would crawl out of the woodwork.”
“So instead I gave them free passes. And a fancy lounge with plenty of typewriters. Remarkable decorations, you must see them. By asking Athene for display – don’t go into that lounge; you are not a critic. Mr. Hoag will be checking credentials; book reviewers can’t get past him. So don’t you try.”
“I wouldn’t be found dead there!”
“You wouldn’t be found. Avoid it. It is clearly marked, both above its door and on this program map, and Hoag you can spot by his prissy appearance and dirty fingernails. You’ll note the stairs – critics are above the rest of us; there are Thirteen Steps up to their lounge.”
“‘Thirteen’? Lafe, do I whiff something?”
Lazarus shrugged. “I don’t know that the designer planned that number. Mobyas Toras, do you know him?”
“Uh… Mars?”
“Yes but not your Mars or mine. Different universe and one of the most exciting. Barsoom. Mobyas is Court Mathematician to the Warlord and took special interest in thisjob because of the way self-anointed ‘critics’ have treated E.R.B. Did I say that Mobyas is a topologist?”
“No.”
“Possibly the best. E.R.B.’s universe is no harder to reach than any other and Mars is in its usual orbit. But that does not mean that you will find Jolly Green Giants and gorgeous red princesses dressed only in jewels. Unless invited, you are likely to find a Potemkin Village illusion tailored to your subconscious. Jubal, the interior of the Critics Lounge is somewhat like a Klein bottle, so I hear – I’ve never been in it. Its singularity is not apparent – as you will see from Teena’s displays – as it was decorated by a very great artist. Escher.”
“Aha!”
“Yes, he and Mobyas are old friends – two immortals of similar tastes; they have worked together many times. I promised critics free entrance; I made no mention of exit. I promised them typewriters and tape recorders; I did not promise typewriter ribbons or recorder tapes. I promised them their own private bar, no charges. Wouldn’t be fair to charge as the bar has no liquor in it. There is a lavish dining room but no kitchen.”
“Lafe, wouldn’t it have been kinder to have liquidated them?”
“Who said I wanted to be kind to them? They won’t starve; their commissary is by the Kilkenny Cats method. It should please them; they are used to human flesh and enjoy drinking blood – some I suspect of eating their young. But, Jubal, there is an easy way out… for any critic who is even half as smart as he thinks he is.”
“Go on.”
“He has to be able to read! He has to be able to read his own language, understand it, not distort the meaning. If he can read, he can walk out at once.” Lazarus shrugged. “But so few critics ever learn to read. Here’s the Big Top.”
Harshaw looked far to the right, far to the left. “How big is it?”
“I’ve been afraid to ask,” Lazarus admitted.
“That sign is bigger than most circus tops.” Jubal stopped to read it:

THE FIRST CENTENNIAL CONVENTION of the
INTERUNIVERSAL SOCIETY for
ESCHATOLOGICAL PANTHEISTIC MULTIPLE-EGO SOLIPSISM

“Beautiful, Lafe! How did you think it up?”
“I didn’t, it just grew. And I don’t understand it.”
“Never mind, mine host. There will be ten thousand here eager to explain it to you. Scatological Panhedonistic Multiplied Solecisms.”
“What? Jubal, that’s not what it says.”
“If you don’t understand it, how do you know?”
“Because I understood what you said. But the words don’t fit.”
“We’ll rearrange them. Scatological Panhedonism Multiple Solecisms. ‘Convinced to – ‘ Like I say – ‘Different than -“
“Don’t talk dirty; we are about to have a drink.”
Lazarus bypassed the queue; they walked through a hole that suddenly dilated in the canvas, then puckered tight behind them. They found themselves facing a long table; seated at it was a man working on a roster. He did not look up, simply saying, “Stand out of my light. Tickets first, no exceptions. Then name tags. Then see a clerk to pick your universe. The complaint desk is outside. Tickets – you’re holding up the line.”
“Snob.”
The man looked up, jumped up. “Executive Director Long! I am honored!”
“And you’re slow. You need at least two others taking tickets.”
The official shook his head sadly. “If you knew how hard it is to hire help these days. Not for you, of course; for us common people. Director General Hilda has the labor market so cornered that – Executive Director, can’t we make a deal?”
“Pipe down, give us our tags. How does this Universe I.D. thing work?” Lazarus turned to his guest. “It’s an ID. for your home world, Jubal; we don’t put numbers on people. Snob, take a hard look at Doctor Jubal Harshaw. Whenever you see him, it’s the Red Carpet. Pronto!”
“Yes, sir! Here are your tags and now your universes.”
“Jubal, you don’t have to wear that but don’t throw it away; someone might misuse it. But it does save introductions and sticks to anything from skin to chain mail.”
“Now gentlemen observe above me the brightly lighted true color representation of the visible spectrum from infradig to ultraviolent with each slight shading being a precise wave length further assisted by simulated Fraunhofer lines representing principal inhabited planets of the explored universes while this booklet you hold in your hand is a key to identifying your wave length for example if you are French in origin you would turn alphabetically to France where the principal key dates are the conquest of Gaul 58-50 BC the conversion of Clovis 496 AD Battle of Tours 732 but as you are not French we will consider turning points in North American History 1000 1492 1535 1607 1619 1620 1664 1754 1765 1783 1789 1803 1820 1846 1882 1912 1946 1965 any of these dates and many others can switch you into a different analog-Earth a most useful method is comparison of Presidents if you happen to come from a history that includes the so-called American Revolution Director Long will you illustrate it by naming American Presidents of your first century?”
“Woodrow Wilson – I was named for him – Harding, Coolidge, Hoover, Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy -“
“Which brings us to 1984, right? And tells me that you experienced the Nehemiah Scudder Interregnum and possibly the Second so-called American Revolution. Dr. Harshaw, did your world experience the Interregnum?”
“It experienced something worse, a world government.”
“To me all worlds are equally bad. But it tells me where your two worlds split: 1962 – and here are your colors by which you can identify others of your own world if such be your wish. A delegate came through earlier in which the split was in 1535 and San Francisco was named New Petersburg. Nov’Petrograd I should say but -“
“Snob. The Red Carpet.”
“Right away! Doctor Harshaw – my card. Anything, anytime.”
The Red Carpet rolled up, then carried them at a steady 10 km/hr down the enormous tent. Jubal looked at the card:

SIEGE SINISTER SERVICES SYNDICATE

“The Villains Nine Rig Ruin”

Reputations Ruined – Competitors Bankrupted – Dragons Wormed – Basements Flooded – Wells Dried Up – Georges Exterminated – Contracts Executed Promptly, bargain rates on mothers-in-law – Juries Subborned – Stocks, Bonds, & Gallows – Saturday Night Specials – Houses Haunted (skilled Poltergeist at small extra charge) – Midnight Catering to Ghouls, Vampires, & Werewolves – Incubi & Succubi for rent by the night or by the week – 7-year itch powder

P.S. We Also Poison Dogs

“Lafe, these people you hired?”
“Let me see that.” Lazarus was reading the list of services when Snob came running, jumped on the Red Carpet, reached over Lazarus’ shoulder for the card while saying breathlessly:
“Wrong card! Here – have this one. That first card is a piece of sabotage by the firm we bought out, including good will – but it turned out there was no good will. We sued, they retaliated – among other ways by mixing their old business cards with our own new supply … thereby infecting them all. Law of Contiguity, you know. Now if I can just have that infected one, I’ll burn it -“
Lazarus held it out of his reach while accepting the proffered replacement. “I’ll keep the old one – interesting souvenir.”
“Director Long – please!”
“Off the Carpet, Bub. Back to your job. Git!” This injunction was accompanied by crowding that caused Snob to step one foot off the Carpet… which resulted in an impromptu pas à seul that left him fifty meters behind before he recovered his balance. Meanwhile Jubal and Lazarus read the replacement:

ANYTHING UNLIMITED

Tome, Hernia, Lien, & Snob

Six Sixty-Six Smiling Slaves Supply Supreme Service

Reputations Restored – Teeth & Wells Drilled – Water Filters – Love Philtres – Chastity Gödel Lox Pict – Virginity Renewed – Scithers Sharpened – Old Saws Filed Categorically – Silver Bullets – Fresh Garlic – Fresh Strawberries – Strawberry Marks for Missing Heirs

P.S. We Also Walk Dogs

“Lafe, I don’t find this card much more reassuring than the first one.”
“Don’t worry about it. There is less here than meets the eye.”
“Where have I seen that face before? This Snob – who is he?”
“Jubal, no one seems to know what ship he came down in. I’m looking into it for Zeb – you’ve met Zebadiah?”
“Briefly.”
“Zeb thinks he’s seen him somewhere not under that phony name – and Zeb and I aren’t even from the same time axis, much less the same analog series. Never mind; here’s our hostess.” Lazarus stepped off the Carpet, approached from behind a little old woman seated at a bar-lounge table, leaned over her, kissed her. “Hazel, age cannot wither you or custom stale. You are lovelier every decade.”
She goosed him. “Pig grunts. I’m dyeing my hair now and you know it. Who’s your fat friend? Hi, Jubal! Tak for siest. Drag up a chair.” She put two fingers to her lips, whistled, breaking glasses. “Waiter!”
“I note that you’re heeled,” said Lazarus, as both men joined the table.
“When did I fail to pack a gun? I’m a Free Citizen. Does everybody know everybody? If not, get your tags in sight; damn’f I’ll stop for introductions. While I was waiting for you, I was joined by friends – some old, some new.”
“Some I know – hi, Jake; hi, everybody. I mentioned your gun with approval, Hazel; Here There Be Tygers. But I note also that you are staying in a hilton; after one drink – well, two – three at the outside – I’m going to be mortally offended. Your suite awaits you and you know it. Why?”
“Two reasons. Well, three. I never like to be beholden -“
“Why, damn your beautiful bloodshot eyes!”
” – but I’m perfectly willing to sponge off you. That’s why I bought the first round; the party never gets smaller. This round is yours. Where’s that misbegotten waiter?”
“Here, Madam.”
“The same all around and don’t call me ‘Madam.’ Jubal, your usual? Lafe?”
“I know what the gentlemen take. Thank you, Madam.” The waiter disappeared.
“Uppity.” Hazel made a fast draw. “Should have made him dance.” She twirled and reholstered. “Hilda, where have I seen that sneaky face before?”
“Jacob and I were discussing that. He reminds me of a fake forest ranger – but that was in a far country and besides the beast is dead.”
“Could be a family resemblance. But, Hillbilly, I mean today. Got it! The ticket taker. Identical twins, maybe.” Hazel went on, “Other identical twins are my first two reasons, Lazarus. My grandsons. I won’t shoot holes in your mirrors or carve my initials in Tamara’s furniture, but I make no guarantees about Cas and Pol. In a hilton they put the damage on the tab; I pay it and make my grandsons wish they had never been born. But you would not let me pay. And we’re going to be here quite a piece; my daughter-in-law Doctor Edith has decided that she needs a couple of years under Doctor Ishtar. Has anyone seen a pair of twin boys – man-size but boys – redheaded – not the color of mine; mine’s out of a bottle – the color mine used to be?”
“Hazel, here twins and red hair are as common as magicians in Atlantis; Gilgamesh must have stayed overnight.”
“I saw them talking to Caleb Catlum,” said Maureen.
“Well, he should be a match for them – but don’t bet on it. Lazarus, is Atlantis represented?”
“From thirteen universes. They are having a jurisdictional dispute. Suits me – if any get sore and leave, they won’t get a refund.”
“Your grandsons may have been with Caleb but I know where – no, with whom – I know with whom they are now,” put in Professor Burroughs. “Laz and Lor.”
“Oho! Hazel, I’ll tell Athene to settle your bill and move your luggage. We have an antidote for Cas and Pol.”
“Optimist. Deal ’em, waiter, and give him the chit. What antidote?” The waiter started to hand the check to Lazarus before he looked at him – stopped abruptly, and left, still with the tab.
“Would Cas and Pol be interested in becoming pirates?”
“Lazarus, they are pirates. I was hoping they would tone down as they grew up… but now they’re eighteen, Terran reckoning, and each one is two yards of deceit and chicanery. The ‘J.D.’ after my name means that I studied law at a school that handed out that degree in place of ‘LL.B.’ – but my rapscallions are ‘J.D.’s’ too. But not lawyers. Well… ‘space lawyers.”
“Hazel, you won your first J.D. long before you studied law. No?”
“‘The accused stood mute and the court ordered a plea of nux vomica entered in the record.'”
“My twins are more than twice as old as your boys but it doesn’t show; they look a year or two younger… and they are permanent juvenile delinquents. They want to take a fling at piracy … which I deplore, having sampled the trade. Your boys – do they respect good machinery? Can they take care of it? Make nonshipyard repairs?”
“Lazarus, they can repair anything that ticks or doesn’t tick. Worried me a mite, as they were a little slow in noticing girls. But they outgrew that symptom without outgrowing machinery.”
“You might tell them that my clone-sisters own a spaceship faster and more powerful than any of your home period and analog, one that could be outfitted as a privateer. It might result in all four dying happily. But I do not interfere in other people’s lives.”
Hilda put her palms together, closed her eyes, and said, “Dear Lord, do not strike him dead; he didn’t mean it. Yours truly, Hilda Burroughs Long.” Lazarus ignored her.
“Nor do I, Lazarus. Other than occasionally, with a horse whip. Forgot to mention – They aren’t gelded.”
“Hazel, Laz-Lor are vaccinated and would have to come back here to see Ishtar to get it reversed. As for rasslin’ matches, any male who tried to rape one of my clones would be gelded. Informally. At once. No instruments. No anesthesia. I trained ’em myself. Forget it. Apparently they’ve already met; they’ll settle their own affairs, if any, their own way. Leave Cas and Pol in that hilton if you wish – by the way, I own it – but you’re coming home or I’ll tell Tamara.”
“Bully. I don’t bully worth a hoot, Lazarus.”
“I’m out of it. Tamara never bullies. She merely gets her own way. What was this third reason?”
“Well… don’t tell on me. Ishtar is a fine girl but I have no wish to stay where she could corner me and try to sell me rejuvenation.”
Lazarus looked horrified. “Who has been feeding you nonsense?”
“Well? It’s a commercial enterprise, is it not?”
“Certainly. Tanstaafl. All the traffic will bear. But we aren’t ghouls; we’ll accept a lien against a client’s future earnings with no security and only the going rate of interest… then let him take as long as he likes to figure out that it doesn’t pay to cheat us. But, Hazel, Ishtar never solicits; the clinic doesn’t even have a flack. But if you asked her, you would go to the top of the list as my friend. However, she will supply painless suicide just as readily. You can have that later today. No charge. Compliments of the House.”
“Lafe, I don’t see how your wives put up with you.”
“They don’t; they make me toe the line. Something they learned from the Stone Gang, I believe.”
“Well, I’m not trying to suicide. I’m less than two hundred Terran years old with a Luna background to stretch it. This is the first time I’ve been on a heavy planet since the last time I saw you; I’ll last a while. But, Lazarus, I have no wish to be a young girl.”
“Hazel -“
“Huh? Jubal, keep out of this. Say, did you ever see anything of that young man again? Did he resurrect the way some claim he did?”
“Not to my knowledge. Although I saw something a while ago that made me wonder. Hazel, I’m going to take rejuvenation… and hang onto my present appearance. Red nose and all.”
Hazel turned abruptly to face Lazarus. “Is this true? Can this be done?”
Maureen answered. “Hazel, I work at the clinic at the bedpan level… with the expectation of becoming a junior rejuvenation technician in upteen years. I see what goes on. A client states in writing what apparent age she prefers. That’s skin deep, easy to do, easy to maintain. But, unless it is an unusual contract, we turn out a biologically mature young adult. Call it eighteen standard years.”
“Page Ponce de Leon! You mean I can still be me… but get rid of the morning aches and the arthritic twinges and the forty-leven other things that are the real trouble with living too long?”
“Exactly.”
“Uh… what about what I’m sitting on? Haven’t used it much lately. Or wanted to.”
Lazarus fielded this. “You’ll want to. Unless you contract for an abnormal endocrine balance. But, Hazel, there are many men who prefer to deal with an old, established, reliable firm. Ask Tamara.”
“Uh… be switched if I’m not feeling embarrassed, an emotion I haven’t felt in more years than I’ll admit. You can pick any apparent age, you say? Could I be, uh, late middle age? My hair its right color but streaked with gray? A sag under my chin instead of this wattle? Teats a man might grab and enjoy it? That ‘old, established firm’ – but not decrepit?”
“Certainly,” said Lazarus.
“Hazel, I can take you to the clinic now,” Maureen offered. “Always someone in the business office. Discuss types of contract. Decide what you want and when. Even get your prelim physical today and set date of admission.”
“Uh… yes, I’m interested. But not till later today; I’ve got friends entered in the preliminary rounds of the Society for Creative Anachronism.”
“Besides,” Jubal put in, “they need time to check your credit rating, see what they can stick you for. By now Lafe has given Athene some signal to start x-raying your purse.”
“He has not,” Hilda denied. “I did. Hazel, we don’t solicit business; we let the client sell it to herself. Maureen picks up one percent on this deal. Not Lazarus.”
“Can’t see that it matters,” Jacob added. “Hey! Waiter! Over here, please! We Longs pool the boodle and Deety tells us what we have, what we can spend – but not who fetched it in.”
“Jacob, it’s the principle. Making money is a game. Maureen landed her.”
“Hazel landed herself, Hilda,” Hazel Stone put in. “I don’t enjoy getting up feeling wobbly. Jubal, are you game for this?”
“My mind’s made up.”
“Then take a double room with me and we can tell each other lies while they make us feel young again. Hilda, is that kosher?”
“Lots of double rooms. Ish knows that you are both special friends of Lazarus and, while she doesn’t spoil Lazarus, she’ll do him any reasonable favor,” Hilda assured her. “I think it’s the same all around, Waiter – charge it to my account.”
“My check,” said Jubal.
“Waiter,” Hilda said firmly.
The waiter looked at her, flexed his jaw muscles, said, “Very well, Director!” – and vanished.
“I think I missed something,” Jubal remarked.
“I think I didn’t,” said Hazel. “‘Yon Cashier hath a lean and hungry look. He thinks too much. Such men are dangerous.'”
Jubal looked around. “That cashier is our waiter. I think.”
“I know. And bartender. And ticket taker. Unless his mother had quadruplets, he has Niven dislocators built into his shoes. I wish I could remember where I have seen him. He is not pleased with Hilda. Or Lazarus.”
“Eh? Why?”
“Wait and see. There will not be another tab brought to this table – want to bet?”
“No bet,” Lazarus interrupted. “The upstart knows who I am, who Hilda is. People at this table are guests of the management. He had better remember it or I’ll sick Deety on him. Or even Hilda. But they hardly ever live through that. Hey, there’s Deety now!” Lazarus stood up and waved. “Deety! Over here!”
Deety had with her a gaggle of giggles. “I don’t have time to do this right; we want to get over to the Field of the Cloth of Gold before the preliminaries- besides, we’ve got husbands over there, most of us. So this is Ginnie and Winnie and Minnie, and Ginnie’s a witch and Winnie’s a nurse and Minnie’s a retired computer, twin sister to Teena, and this is Holly and Poddy and Libby and Pink, and Holly is a design engineer, ship’s architect type, and Poddy is a therapy empathist, and Libby you all know, and Fuzzy is a computer artist like me and the first one to calculate the Number of the Beast to the last significant figure, and now we’d better go even though we have reserved V.I.P. seats because there is a masked knight in the first match and we’re pretty sure who he is, and has anyone seen Zebadiah?”
“I’m certain who he is,” said Ginnie. “He brought me to life, and besides, he’s wearing Karen’s colors.”
“I see Zeb off in the distance,” Lazarus answered.
“No,” Jake denied, “here he comes now, from over this way. Ishtar with him. All dressed up.”
“No,” said Jubal. “That’s Anne with him.”
“Somebody is screw loose. Lazarus is right. I know my first husband even at this distance. He’s just approaching those three reserved sections opposite the big screen over the bar. Zebadiah! Over here!”
The other computer artist added, “And that can’t be Anne, so it must be Ishtar. Anne is at the field, I know, because Larry is helping Jerry run it and told me, Anne agreed to cloak and be the third judge when Jerry told her that Mr. Clemens had agreed. Bonforte sits as king although he says he doesn’t know much about the kinging business and even less about jousting.”
“Is it true that they are using real weapons today?” asked Jubal.
“And real horses,” agreed Lazarus. “I was able to borrow the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales.”
“Lazarus, is this wise?”
“Doctor Bone is taking care of the horses. If one is injured, we’ll give him the works. Those beautiful horses will be returned to Old Home Terra at their proper year and second in better shape than they were. With added skill. It’s takes time to turn a Clydesdale into a knight’s charger even though that’s what they are. But will they ever be happy in harness again?”
“Lazarus,” Podkayne said seriously, “I’ll speak to Dr. Bone. If a horse is unhappy, we will soothe.”
“Poddy, you’re a Smart Girl.”
“About average here, I think. But if someone is unhappy, I have learned what to do. I have never seen a horse but they’ve lived with people so long that it can’t be very different.”
Jubal sighed. “I’m glad the horses will be well taken care of – but, Lazarus, I meant humans. Isn’t someone going to be hurt? Maybe killed?”
“Most of them hurt, several killed. But they do it for fun. Those who are hurt won’t stay hurt; we are hardly more than a loud shout from this planet’s best hospital. If a man loses an arm or a leg or an eye, or even his balls, he’ll have to be patient while a new part is cloned. But that sort of cloning we are learning to do right at the spot of injury, like a lizar~d or a newt. Faster. More efficient.
“If he’s killed, he has two choices: Be brought to life again by Ishtar’s crew – brain unlikely to be hurt; their helms are the best part of their armor. Or, they can go straight to Valhalla; we’ve arranged for Bifrost to extend to this Field until the end of SCA’s part in the convention. Six Valkyries standing by and ‘Sarge’ Smith at the top of Bifrost checking them against the roster as he musters them home.” Lazarus grinned. “Believe me, the Society is paying high for these services, bond posted in advance; Deety wrote the contract.”
“Lafe, you’re telling me that Wagnerian Valkyries are waiting to carry the slain Over The Rainbow into Asgard?”
“Jubal, these Amazons are not opera singers; these are the real hairy, sweaty McCoy. Remember the purpose of this convention. Snob.”
The waiter appeared. “You wish something, sir?”
“Yes. Tell your boss that I want this table – this table only – to have a full view of Bifrost, from the Field to Valhalla. I know it’s not in the clothing illusion contract but the same gear will do it… and we can settle it when we go to court later. It will offset some of his lousy service. Git!”
“We’d better all ‘git,” said Libby. “They won’t hold up things for us. That armor is heavy and hot. Deety?”
“Run along, I’ll catch up. Here comes my first husband.”
“Lafe, if they are killed, how do you know which ones to send to the clinic, which ones to send up the bridge?”
“Jubal, how would you do it? Sealed envelopes, destroyed if a knight wins, opened if he loses… and there may be some surprised widows tonight, unable to believe that their loving husbands elect to hunt all day, then feast on barbecued boar, guzzle mead, and wench all night, in preference to being restored to life in their respectable homes. But did I tell you what a winner gets? Aside from applause and a chance to kneel to ‘King’ John and ‘Queen’ Penelope. A paradox’s his reward.”
“A paradox?”
“No, no! Noisy in here. A pair o’ doxies each his reward. The Society got a bargain. The arts are in their infancy here; Boondock is still so much a frontier that we have not yet developed distinguished hetaerae. But some of the most celebrated hetaerae in New Rome volunteered their services in exchange for transportation and the privilege of attending this convention.”
Zebadiah was struck by a guided missile, female, from five meters. He managed to stay on his feet and took his first wife to the table, sat down by Hilda, pinched her thigh, pinched her glass, drained it, said, “You’re too young to drink, little girl. Is this your father?”
“I’m her son,” Jake answered. “Do you know Hazel Stone? If not, you should. We thought we saw you coming from the other direction.”
“Shouldn’t drink in the daytime, Jake. Waiter! Your servant, Ma’am. I’ve followed your series on 3-D since I was a kid and I’m honored to meet you. Are you covering this for Lunaya Pravda?”
“Heavens, no! LOCUS has an exclusive under the reasonable theory that LOCUS alone is competent to report this convention. Jerry and Ben are covering it for their various journals… but must clear it through Charles. I’m here as an expert, believe it or not – as an author of popular fantasy. Is the Galactic Overlord of my series real or imaginary and is there a difference? See next week’s thrilling episode; the Stone family has to eat. Same thing all around, I think. You can tip him, Doctor Zebadiah, but there is no tab at the Director’s table.”
“And no tips,” growled Lazarus. “Deliver my message to your boss again and tell that spinning arsfardel he has exactly three minutes before I invoke paragraph nine, section ‘c.’ Here comes your double, Zeb.”
From behind the couple who, at half a klick, had been mistaken for Zebadiah and Ishtar, came out quickly a shorter, older, broad-shouldered man. All three were dressed Robin-Hood-and-his-Merry-Men style: buskins, breeks, leathern jackets, feathered caps, long bows and quivers of fletched shafts, swords and daggers, and were swinging along in style.
The shorter man hurried a few paces ahead, turned and faced their path, swept off his cap and bowed deeply. “Make way for Her Wisdom, Empress of eighty-thr -“
The woman, as if by accident, backhanded the groom. He ducked, rolled, avoided it, bounced to his feet and continued: ” – worlds, and her consort the Hero Gordon.”
Lazarus got up, addressed the groom. “Doctor Rufo! So happy you could make it! This is your daughter Star?”
“His grandmother,” Her Wisdom corrected, dropping a quick curtsy to Lazarus. “Yes, I’m Star. Or Mrs. Gordon; this is my husband, Oscar Gordon. What is correct usage here? I’ve not been on this planet before.”
“Mrs. Gordon, Boondock is so new that its customs have not yet calcified. Almost any behavior is acceptable if meant in a kindly way. Anybody causes real trouble, it’s up to our chairman Ira Weatheral and advisers selected by him. Since Ira doesn’t like the job, he tends to procrastinate, hoping the problem will go away. As a result we don’t have much government and few customs.”
“A man after my own heart. Oscar, we could live here if they will have us. My successor is ready; I could retire.”
“Mrs. Gordon -“
“Yes, Doctor Long?”
“We – our chairman Ira especially – all know quite well who ‘Her Wisdom’ is. Ira would welcome you with open arms and resign in your favor at once – passed by acclamation and you would be boss for life. Better stick to the devil you know. But you are most welcome whenever you choose to visit.”
She sighed. “You’re right. Power is not readily surrendered; I’ll probably wait for assassination.”
Deety whispered, “Zebadiah… that bartender. Whom does he look like?”
“Hmm – Brigadier Iver Hird-Jones?”
“Well, maybe. A little. I was thinking of Colonel Morinosky.”
“Mmm – Yes. No importance since it can’t be either one. Mr. Gordon?”
“Call me ‘Easy.’ Or Oscar, Doctor Carter.”
“I’m Zeb. Is that the Lady herself? The sword you were in the Quest for the Egg of the Phoenix?”
Gordon looked delighted. “Yes! The Lady Vivamus.”
“Can’t ask a man to draw a sword without a cause… but is the inscription close enough to the hilt that we could read it if you were simply to show steel?”
“No trouble.” Gordon exposed the etched: Dum Vivimus, Vivamus! – gave them time to read it, clicked it to full return, and asked, “And is that the sword that killed the Boojum?”
“The Boo – Oh! The monster we call a ‘Black Hat.’ But we did not ‘softly and silently vanish away.'”
“No, it did. That will be a point we’ll discuss in the seminar panel: ‘Techniques for Hunting Snarks.’ You and I and Doctor Jacob and Doctor Hilda, with some others. André. Kat Moore. Fritz. Cliff. The Gordfather will moderate when he gets over his wheezes. Which he will-Tamara’s treating hi – Oh, heavens! Oh, God, how beautiful!”
The “sky” had opened, for their table, and they found themselves looking at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, a half klick away and a few meters above them, on and up to high, high, high in the sky, the shimmering towers and palaces of Valhalla, with the Rainbow Bridge reaching from the field of honor to the distant gate of the eternal home of heroes.
Instead of the wooded horizon usually seen in that direction, the land lifted in terraces, each more colorfully beautiful than the last, until the highest was lost in pink and saffron clouds – and above them, much higher, Valhalla in Asgard.

“Pappy!”
“Yes, Athene,” Lazarus said quietly. “Localize it. Me only. I have many people around me.”
“That’s better? No problems, just to alert you. Arthur and Isaac and Bob all arriving at once. Twelve minutes, plus two, minus zero.”
“You’re a smart girl, Teena.”
“Put that in writing. Blandjor.”
Lazarus said to the table at large, “My guests for those reserved spaces are arriving. I wasn’t sure of Isaac; he gets bigger every year and reluctant to travel other than by water. Arthur had such a long way to come and communications are always uncertain. Bob I knew was here but there were duty matters interfering. Shall we listen to some of the opening plenary while we look at the beauties of the Norse Afterland? We don’t want to look at the general session. But we can listen. When the tourney starts, give most of your attention to the hologram except during the Valkyrie ride. Snob! Give us the sound from the plenary session.”
They got it at once, sound and fury signifying nothing. Under its cover Jubal Harshaw said to Zebadiah, “Before they get on that panel in front of an audience, think about this. How many ‘Black Hats’ or ‘Boojums’ are there?”
“Eh? I have no way of telling. In excess of twenty as a best guess but that excess could be many millions, also a best guess.”
“But how many did you see?” Harshaw persisted.
“Oh. One. But more were a certainty.”
“So? You would never get a Fair Witness to say that. What harm did it or they do you?”
“Huh? Tried to kill us. Bombed us out. Killed my cousin. Chased us off our home planet. Impoverished all four of us. What do you want? Plagues and locusts? The Four Horsemen?”
“No. You saw one. You killed it. It never laid a glove on you. Think about it. Before you testify. Let’s listen.”

“If you read it correctly it’s all in the Bible. ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Could anyone ask for a plainer statement of the self-evident fact that nothing exists until someone imagines it and thereby gives it being, reality? The distinction lies only in the difference between ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ – a distinction that cancels out when any figment-fact is examined from different ends of the entropy error – “

“Bishop Berkeley is presiding,” Lazarus commented, “and would have shut this figment up save that the Bishop has laryngitis – imaginary, of course – and his parliamentarian, the Reverend Mister Dodgson, is too meek to shut anyone up. The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, One Meter Wide and Two Meters Long.”

“If God displaces the Devil, he must assume the Devil’s attributes. How about giving the Devil equal time? God has the best press agents. Neither fair nor logical!”

“I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last.”

“Occam’s Razor is not the least hypothesis! It is the least probable hypothesis. The truth – “

“There are three schools of magic. One: State a tautology, then ring the changes on its corollaries; that’s philosophy. Two: Record many facts. Try to see a pattern. Then make a wrong guess at the next fact; that’s science. Three: Awareness that you live in a malevolent universe controlled by Murphy’s Law, sometimes offset in part by Brewster’s Factor: that’s engineering.”
“Why did Mercutio have to die? Solve that, and it will lead you to Mark Twain’s well. There’s your answer.”

“Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?”

The debate shut off, the giant hologram screen lighted up in heroic size, full depth and color, and the tedious voices were cut off by a loud and lively one: “While we’re waiting for the first two champions to reach their starting lines we will have ‘The Grand Canal’ sung by lovely Anne Passovoy and accompanied by Noisy on his Stomach Steinway. Noisy is not in voice today, friends; he was bitten last night by an imaginary snake.”
“Jerry is in good voice,” whispered Deety. “He always is. Aren’t they going to give us any closeups?” The camera zoomed in on Anne Passovoy, panned across the other Anne, cloaked in white, rested for a moment on “King” John and “Queen” Penelope, went on to show a vigorous old man with a halo of white hair who took a stogie out of his mouth and waved.
“On my right is Sir Tenderloinn the Brutal and on my left is the Black Knight, shield unblazoned, helm closed. Oh Jear not, friends; Holger tongues. Dis Dane could be our arrow. Whose color – “
Zebadiah heard a crash, turned his head. “They’re bringing in a big Corson flatboat. Smashed some chairs.” He looked again, announced, “Can’t see much, the stands on this side are filling with people in green uniforms. Black berets. Bloodthirsty-looking gang.”
“That’s Asprin -“
“Give me ten grains. Deety, you let me mix my drinks.”
“Asprin, not ‘aspirin.’ Bob Asprin, Commandammit of the Dorsai Very Irregular,” Lazarus told him. “But can you see Arthur?”
“Does he wear a deerstalker’s hat? Smoke a meerschaum pipe? The tall one there, talking to the man who looks like a gorilla.”
“He’d Challenge you for that. Violent temper. That’s Arthur’s party, all right. Doctor Arthur Conan Doyle. Doctor Watson should be there, too. Wups! Here comes Isaac. And there goes another bunch of chairs.”
“They’re off! The Masked Challenger is gaining speed, Sir Tenderloinn is having trouble getting his charger to move: It is a beautiful day here at Epsom Salts and Bifrost never looked lovelier.”
Lazarus stood up. “I must greet Isaac. Zebadiah, have you met him? Come with me. You, too, Deety. Hilda? Please, dear. Jake?”
“Just a moment, you!” Zeb looked at the one interrupting them and felt shock. He had seen that face, that uniform, by a rustic swimming pool. The “ranger” addressed Lazarus: “You’re the one they call the Executive Director. Special Agent L. Ron O’Leemy, InterSpace Patrol. I have warrants for Beowolf Shaeffer, Caspol Jones, and Zebadiah John Carter. Director, I require your cooperation. Article Four Six, Section Six Five, Paragraph Six, InterUniversal Criminal Code.”
“Unhorsed! The Black Knight’s lance right through him! Here come the Valkyries. Hoyotoho!”
Hilda reached out, took the warrants, tore them across. “You’re on the wrong planet, Mac.” She grasped Zeb’s arm. “Come along, Alfred; we must meet Isaac.”
They passed the Dorsai, reached the big Corson flatboat. Completely filling it was a very large Venerian Dragon. The dragon turned an eyestalk toward them; his tendrils touched his voder. “Greetings, Doctor Lazarus Long. Greetings, new friends. May you all die beautifully!”
“Greetings, Sir Isaac. Sir Isaac Newton, this is Doctor Hilda Burroughs Long, Doctor Jacob Burroughs Long, Doctor Deety Carter Long, and Doctor Zebadiah John Carter Long, all of my family.”
“I am honored, learned friends. May your deaths inspire a thousand songs. Doctor Hilda, we have a mutual friend, Professor Wogglebug.”
“Wait, wait! Don’t tear up your tickets. The Valkyries are having a problem. Yes, the judges have confirmed it. No contest! The Dane has ‘killed’ a totally empty suit of armor! Better luck next bout, Pou – Holger.”
“Oh, how delightful! Zebadiah and I saw him just this past week in delivering our children to Oz for the duration of this convention. Did I just miss you?”
The dragon answered, with a Cockney lisp, “No, we are pen pals only. He can’t leave Oz; I had never expected to leave Venus again… until your device – perhaps I should Say Doctor Jacob’s device – made it simple. But see what our friend Professor Wogglebug sent me – ” The dragon fiddled at a pouch under his voder.
The InterSpace Patrol Agent O’Leemy tapped Zeb on the shoulder. “I heard those introductions. Come along, Carter!”
” – spectacles to fit my forward stalks, that see through the thickest mist.” He put them on, looked around him. “They clarify any – There! Get him! Grab him! That Beast! Get his Number!” Without a lost instant Deety, Hilda, and Lazarus closed on the “agent” – and were left with torn clothes and plastic splints as the thing got loose. The “special agent” vaulted over the bar, was seen again almost instantly at the far end of the bar, jumped up on it, leapt for the canvas top, grabbed hold of the edge of the illusion hole, swung itself up, bounded for Bifrost, reached it.
Sir Isaac Newton played: “Mellrooney! The worst troublemaker in all the worlds. Lazarus, I never expected to find that Beast in your quiet retreat.”
“Nor did I until I heard all of Zeb’s story. This convention was called expecially to entice him. And it did. But we lost him, we lost him!”
“But I got its Number,” Hilda said and held out its shield: “666”
The fleeing figure, dark against the Rainbow Bridge, grew smaller and higher. Lazarus added, “Or perhaps we haven’t lost him. He’ll never get past Sarge Smith.”
The figure appeared to be several klicks high now, when the illusion suddenly broke. The Rainbow was gone, the terraces melted, the clouds were gone, the towers and castles of Asgard could no longer be seen.
In the middle distance, very high up, a figure was tumbling, twisting, falling. Zeb said, “Sarge won’t have to bother. We’ve seen the last of it.”
The voder answered: “Friend Zebadiah… are you sure?”

The End

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Time to appreciate some of the great things in our lives. Let’s give thanks.

I haven’t done a happiness post in a while. Perhaps it’s high time that I dust off the old keyboard, slide all that nonsense and clutter off my desk, open up a window and let some fresh sunny air inside. With that being said, let’s spend a few minutes to talk about some good things; things that matter to me. And, by extension, maybe that matter to you as well. Eh?

These are just some thoughts that I have had. They are my thoughts, and I am sure that not everyone will agree with me. But you can skip the parts you don’t like or agree with. And nod to yourself silently in parts that you do like.

Deep Dark Cool Forests

One of the little pleasures that I have enjoyed are those special moments when I enter the deep dark woods.

As most of you might be aware, there are all kinds of forests. From light sparsely fielded birch groves, to dense pine growths, to scrub and spackle arrangements. Here we are talking about deep, thick and rich old-growth forests. Forests that are populated with century old hard-woods like cherry, maple, oak and mahogany. Forests with bark as thick as your hand and lush deep thick curtains of moss that cover everything.

You can breathe in the cool moistness with your nostrils and feel the fresh air in your lungs.

The cool deep dark forest.
The cool deep dark forest.

When you walk into this environment it is like you are entering another world. It’s cooler. It’s dimmer, and the shade is complete. There might be a very few instances of light that might manage to pierce through the upper canopy, but not often. You might be able to hear a brook bubbling away, or a swish of some deer as they disappear in the distance.

On of my great pleasures is to walk and explore the dark recesses of a midnight dark forest.
On of my great pleasures is to walk and explore the dark recesses of a midnight dark forest.

It’s a treasured place, and a treasured time. As such, I would like to express my belief that if we do not take the time to go forth and visit these treasured places that we are missing out in one of the great joys of life.

Perhaps there is a national park nearby. If so, go there and take a trail that you have never walked before. You will not regret it.

Sunny mid-morning Spring days

As I write this, it is the start of May. Springtime. Just about the entire world is waking up, stretching their arms, and venturing outside.

One of the little pleasures (that I have) is the freshness and coolness of Spring air, most especially when it is associated with a very Sunny day. These are days where the windows are open in the house to let the fresh air in. Where the kids are out in the driveway hosing down and washing the car, and where people are talking about when the local pool will open up.

After I left the ADC once I was retired, everything was "good". It was ll good. And I vowed that I would appreciate life more, enjoy it more and treasure it more. Perhaps that is what many people need today. A lesson to appreciate what you have WHILE YOU HAVE IT.
After I left the ADC once I was retired, everything was “good”. It was all good. And I vowed that I would appreciate life more, enjoy it more and treasure it more. Perhaps that is what many people need today. A lesson to appreciate what you have WHILE YOU HAVE IT.

This is also the time when Winter clothes are packed and stored away. The Winterizing for the house, the car, and just about everything else is set aside. It’s also when the first mowing of the lawn occurs, and if you have a pool, when the pool cover is removed, the leaves are gathered from the water, and you “shock the pool” into health.

Maybe you might even set some chairs out in the yard.

Nighttime on the beach

It’s quiet. All that you can hear is the surf beating up against the shore. The sky is black, and the sea is black, and the sand is dark grey. Yet, strangely once your eyes adjust, the whitecaps on the waves are this light blue color. It’s actually magical.

Nighttime on the beach.
Nighttime on the beach.

It’s a time when you walk, and think. And if you are with a friend, you talk. The waves roll. The air is still with occasional light breezes, the palms sway. There is a pace of life. It is free of the electronic media that are are all tethered to. And that is a good thing.

Then once you return home you can turn on your social media. You can read or hear people literally screaming at you with the latest “issues” of the day. Trump is a Russian spy! China is evil, nasty and eats bats! Your rights are being stolen from you! We need to raise taxes! And on and on and on.

Go outside. Shut that nonsense off.

Warm laundry on an icy cold day

It doesn’t seem like much, but to me it’s special. It’s a time when you pull the clothes out of a dryer on a frigid Winter day. The clothes are warm, toasty and delicious. Meanwhile the house is cold, brisk and icy.

A delicious home-cooked hamburger and an icy beer

You didn’t think that I would ignore this special moment, did you? Nope. All praises to the home-made hamburger and the icy cold beer. Now, when I mean icy-cold, I actually do mean icy cold. In fact, I (myself) prefer a tall glass of ice, and then pour the beer in. That means, boys and girls, that I drink the beer at 32F or 0C. Frosty.

One of the delicious pleasures that I have is the home-made hamburger with a nice frosty beer. It's what I enjoy, and I believe that everyone should try this combination at least once in their life.
One of the delicious pleasures that I have is the home-made hamburger with a nice frosty beer. It’s what I enjoy, and I believe that everyone should try this combination at least once in their life.

Now a frosty mug is nice. But it is the temperature of the beer that makes this special. Not to mention a nice home made hamburger with tomatoes, cheese (glorious cheese!), lettuce, and bun. Oh, and if you were inspired, some nice slabs of bacon would really enhance the overall burger flavor, don’t you know.

Well?

What’s stopping you from doing this right now?

Fixing a busted car and having it roar back to life

Have you ever dealt with a broken piece of machinery? You sit in the car, you fire it up and …clunk! Nothing.

Gagh!

That car is very tired.
That car is very tired.

So then, after some screaming and moaning, you finally figure out what is wrong. You pull out your tools, and start to get to the heart of the matter. But, of course, nothing is easy to get to. You need to tear half the car apart to get to anything. Then, after hours of work, frozen and stuck nuts, icy wind blowing on your knees and your shit wet with water, oil, gasoline and grease, you finally are able to put the replacement part back in.

Then, you climb in and fire that puppy back up…

…barooooom!

It’s “Miller Time!

It's a real joy to see an engine roar back to life once you fix a few problems. (Oh, and don't you just love the 454, eh?)
It’s a real joy to see an engine roar back to life once you fix a few problems. (Oh, and don’t you just love the 454, eh?) The 1970 LS6 454 cubic-inch V8 that was one of the best street muscle car motors ever produced. Broooom!

Making a pot of Chili

There is a certain joy in making a pot of chili. I really cannot enunciate why it is so special. Maybe it is because I would tend to cook chili on the weekends. Or maybe it’s the smell of the chili as it is cooking all afternoon.

A fine bowl of home-made chili.
A fine bowl of home-made chili.

Or maybe it’s sitting down afterwards watching a movie with the chili in one hand and an icy cold beer in the other. I really don’t know. What ever it is, it’s most certainly a wonderful and special noteworthy time.

I started to make chili when I lived outside “Poison Canyon” in Ridgecrest, California. One day the staff on the base had a “chili cook-off” on a non-base facility. All of us were asked to submit our creations. It was my first attempt at making chili and (yes) I made some mistakes. But then ever since, I kept at it and kept at it.

Now, when I make up a pot, it is my “comfort food”.

I like to eat it over rice. (Though some friends in Louisiana like to eat it over chips.) I know that sour cream is a nice addition, but I never seem to have any around. Instead I opt for lots and lots of yellow cheese (sharp cheddar) is my favorite and some hot peppers.

Oh, and don’t forget the icy cold beer.

Playing with your dog

There’s something about a little playful ritual that I have with my dog “Shao Pi”. You see, a couple of times a day I give him a “dog sausage”. It’s a kind of meat flavored rice filler in the shape of a sausage. It’s pretty darn cheap.

Chinese doggie sausages. You cut holes int he plastic skin and he sucks the liverwurst like meat out of the sausage.
Chinese doggie sausages. You cut holes in the plastic skin and he sucks the liverwurst like meat out of the sausage.

What I do is cut the ends off and punch holes in it. Then I call him.

Now, my game is to pretend that I cannot see him or know where he is. I start looking for him all over the house and outside on the porch. He goes crazy trying to say “I’m here! I’m here!”.

I carry on like this for a few minutes. Eventually he “convinces” me that he’s there, and I hand the treat out to him.

Now, my wife tried this game.

The only thing is that she didn’t play the game. She just handed the sausage to him.

What he did was so funny. He sat on the floor. Looked at the sausage, and then up to her. As if to say “what? You don’t want to play with me? Did I do something wrong?” And then he slunk back to his sleeping bed and ignored the sausage.

LOL.

This time is a little pleasure I have. I guess that it sounds so silly to dog haters or cat lovers, but I swear it is a special time and something that adds meaning to my life.

An after-dinner cigar and a glass of whiskey

Ah. You can tell that I am a man growing old. But you know what? Yup this is a real pleasure of mine. There is something relaxing and soothing to have a fine meal, and then calm down afterwards with a fine cigar and a nice glass of whiskey.

An after dinner cigar and a glass of whiskey.
An after dinner cigar and a glass of whiskey.

I must admit that I am not a connoisseur of cigars. Rather, I take what I can get. Though the Cuban cigars obtained locally are really nice. As far as whiskey goes, I know what bad and fake whiskey is, but my budget will not permit me to have any of those expensive brands that you see in magazines. So I make the best with what is within my budget.

It’s a pleasure of mine and something that you cannot do in any public restaurant in America today. But, it is something that I can do just about anywhere else in the world. It’s what’s called “freedom“.

Picking a ripe heirloom tomato off the vine

When I was growing up we had a little garden. I was the only one who really cared about it. I would tend to it, and weed it all Summer. I would also go ahead and plant tomatoes along with the other vegetables. My favorite plants were, of course, tomatoes. Though secondary favorites included green peppers and zucchini.

A fine tomato sandwich.
A fine tomato sandwich.

I tried to grow them up here in China. No such luck. Zhuhai is way, way too hot for the kinds of tomatoes that I know and love. I wrote a post about this HERE…

Tomatos

Anyways, back to my story.

Growing tomatoes is a real pleasure of mine. I especially like the tomato sandwich that I make from a freshly picked juicy “Big Boy” fresh off the vine. I just cut that sucker into many thin cuts. Layer the cuts one on top of the other. Add some salt and pepper, and slather some sweet mayonnaise (Miracle Whip) on top. Of course, I use plain white bread. It’s the perfect bread for this sandwich.

I just cannot imagine a Summer without a tomato sandwich.
I just cannot imagine a Summer without a tomato sandwich.

And, of course, I always eat it over the sink while the sauce and the tomato dripping fall down. My hands get all messy, but I just rinse them off under the running water.

It’s a great Summer pleasure, I’ll tell you what.

You do not know what your true pleasures are until you cannot have them. The pleasure of a simple tomato sandwich was denied to me in the ADC.
You do not know what your true pleasures are until you cannot have them. The pleasure of a simple tomato sandwich was denied to me in the ADC.

Canoeing on a quiet lake alone

This is a pleasure that most people do not enjoy.

You buy or rent a canoe. You go to a remote area, and there, in the early morning, you paddle out into the lake while the morning mist is rising off the lake. If you get up really early, it’s still very dark out. Like maybe four int he morning.

Ron Swanson understands. This is from season 7, episode 13.
Ron Swanson understands. This is from season 7, episode 13.

It’s quiet. The mist is like a fog and all you can hear are the frogs, the critters, and the sound of the swishing of the water.

Then you just paddle up and down the lake. Maybe find a quiet spot and fish. You pop a top (open up a can of beer), and drink it down. You don’t have a cellphone, or at least no signals. No one can contact you with an “emergency”. Your time. Your place. Your life.

It’s magical.

Soup in a thermos and a home made sandwich

Most people don’t give this any thought. But you all should. There’s something comforting in having a lunch prepared by loved ones for you instead of a McDonald’s #3 meal supersized with a coke.

A home-made meal is healthier, better, cheaper, and often more delicious than one made in a fast-food restaurant. It won’t make you fat, it will be balanced, and it will remind you of your connections to your loved ones. It’s a win-win.

A homemade packed sandwich goes a long way to keep the stomach rumblings down and subdue the ravenous beast inside.
A homemade packed sandwich goes a long way to keep the stomach rumblings down and subdue the ravenous beast inside.

The thermos might contain coffee, but more often than not it would be home made soup. My personal favorites are chicken-noodle, cream of broccoli, and vegetable beef. The sandwich would generally be some kind of “Dagwood” consisting of a few slabs of meat, some tomatoes, lettuce, onions and maybe s “thickener” like peanut butter or a fried egg. Topping it off would be a fruit. Maybe an apple or a banana. Sometimes an orange.

That’s what you get when you have a traditional family. One person works outside, the other person takes care of the domestic issues. They make sure that you eat well and healthy. They put care into that meal. They put love into that meal.

A thermos filled with home-made soup is a very special thing, and it reminds you that you are nothing without your family and their support.
A thermos filled with home-made soup is a very special thing, and it reminds you that you are nothing without your family and their support.

They say the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach, and it is very, very true.

Enjoy an ice cream Sundae

Ice cream is everywhere. Or at least, what we call ice cream, is everywhere. In the West, America I’m talking to you, most “ice cream” is actually a percentage of cream with milk and other fillers. It’s not really “real” and “pure” ice cream at all.

Which is really rather sad.

This little pleasure describes eating real, honest to goodness, ice cream at a dairy that gives you the real thing. And what’s more, you eat a Sundae using it.

A well done ice cream sundae would have multiple scoops of real ice cream, with all sorts of toppings added.
A well done ice cream sundae would have multiple scoops of real ice cream, with all sorts of toppings added.

Now, some history first.

Back in the day, when families still attended churches, and would spend the Sundays together, a “Sundae” was a special treat. It was a time to go traipse off to the local dairy farm and eat or have some fresh ice cream. That was a big event back in the day. It’s so difficult to imagine what the big deal was, because seemingly ice cream is everywhere.

Heck you can get a “ice cream””Sundae” at McDonald’s, for goodness sakes. Which isn’t really a true “ice cream” nor a true “sundae”. It’s a tasty food-like product. Fine for kids, but really below standard for most adults.

Adults deserve real… REAL… ice cream.

In California, back in the 1980’s, ice cream parlors were making a comeback. Though, I have no idea what is going on today. When I was there, they were being displaced by the TCBY frozen yogurt franchises.

Oh, and by the way, any decent Sundae in the United States would be topped with an American flag, don't ya know.
Oh, and by the way, any decent Sundae in the United States would be topped with an American flag, don’t ya know.

Here we are talking about paying the money and eating an enormous ice cream Sundae with your loved ones. We are not talking about some fake ‘soft serve” for a dollar at the local fast food joint. So, what more can I say? Go ahead, and go get a quality ice cream sundae. You won’t regret it.

Finally, here’s a shout out for Hersey’s Fudge. Get some on-line or in a grocery store and use this (instead of Hersey’s chocolate syrup) on your home concoctions.

Hersey's Fudge
Hersey’s Fudge

Playing with your cat

Now I talked about playing with my dog, but I also get an equal amount of satisfaction while playing with my cats. They are hunters and nothing gets them more excited that playing “hunt that critter”.

The best toys are the feathers or snake on a string.

Cats love to play with those feathers.
Cats love to play with those feathers.

I would dangle those feathers in the air and they would spend hours running, chasing, leaping and clawing at them. They would be so caught up in it and it’s a true joy to behold. Ah… good times.

A cup of fresh brewed coffee on a cold winter’s day

Now most Americans appreciate a nice cup of brewed coffee. We go to Tim Horton’s, Starbucks, McDonald’s or Duncan Donuts to get our fix. Of course, we also tend to brew it at home, whether it is in an old-fashioned percolator, a Chemex, or even (gasp) instant coffee.

But here, I want to talk about a different kind of coffee experience.

An "old fashioned" American diner.
An “old fashioned” American diner.

Imagine it’s snowing out, and as cold as a witches tit out. You had spent maybe ten minutes trying to chop the ice off your windshield with the wind howled around you, and icy cold dust flakes of snow burned your skin. Your breath would exhale in white clouds that would frost up your eye glasses and turn your beard white. And finally, after shoveling away the snow you hop into the car, and turn the motor over (you had a oil-dipstick heater, after your reinstalled the battery)…

Gah! You can tell that I used to live in Northern Indiana, eh?

You start driving down the road. It’s around 5:30 in the morning and the sky is just beginning to become a dreary light grey.

Up ahead is a brightly lit diner. It’s one of those old-fashioned stainless steel sausage affairs. It looks something like a mobile home, but is all silver color with warm inviting windows all along the sides.

You pull in, while a truck with a snowplow on it’s front is busy cleaning out the parking lot.

You park, turn off the engine and get out of the car. A few steps later, you pull open the heavy stainless steel and glass door and you are inside this warm, inviting diner filled with the aroma of bacon, eggs and freshly brewing coffee.

Inside of a fine American style diner.
Inside of a fine American style diner.

You go up to the counter.

There’s a guy (or a gal) there who immediately places some silverware on a napkin next to you once they wipe down the table. You, or course, reach over to the free newspapers down the counter to see what the daily news is, and when the waitress comes on over you place your order.

If you are like me, you would order “Country fried steak and eggs” with grits (or hash browns), wheat toast (why I never ordered rye?) and a coffee.

She would say “Just a moment, hon.” Then in short order, she would fill up a fine slam-on-the table white mug filled with fresh coffee…

A vintage heavy ivory white ironstone china coffee mug. This is what coffee was intended to be drunk out of.
A vintage heavy ivory white ironstone china coffee mug. This is what coffee was intended to be drunk out of.

You see, it’s not so much about the coffee as it is about the context… the environment… the feelings and the emotions that you have at that exact moment in time.

I know, I know…

Starbucks fans will argue that that they are just fine with the paper cup that they get from Starbucks. They believe that it is just as good, or maybe better….

I do not.

Please enjoy a nice cup of coffee, and share it at a moment that remains special to you.

A cup of coffee at a diner.
A cup of coffee at a diner.

Thunderstorm at night

Who doesn’t enjoy a nice cozy stay inside during a thunderstorm? The light display, and the booming of the thunder is inspiring. Not to mention the crash of the rain as it beats upon the house, and the gusts of wind that howl and moan in the ptch black night.

It’s a great time to stay inside and cozy up with loved ones under a throw. Don’t you think?

Homemade Iced Tea

I grew up in Western Pennsylvania. There, we pretty much drank Hi-C, or Cool-Aide. My mother would go ahead and pour the granulated mix into pitcher and refrigerate it. Then, when I was in High School, the idea of making “fresh” lemonade or Iced Tea caught on. We would put this big tureen on the stove and cook up a batch of tasty refreshing beverage. Then allow it to cool down.

later, at the end of the day, we might sit on the large shady porch and drink it as the sun would set. Though in those days we called it “watching the street lights turn on”. It was nice, you know.

Of course, then in those days, we might also smoke a joint, a cigarette, or a bowl of something that was illegal at that time. We were pretty much told that it would give us brain damage, and one day we might get confused, and put a baby in the microwave, or try to jump out of the window in an attempt to fly.

It was in all the newspapers and magazines, don’t you know.

Back then, we would sit on a “glider” (which is a metal couch that sways back and forth) or in a “porch swing” which is a wooden bench seat that hung from the ceiling by chains.

Metal glider. This is a long forgotten masterpiece that is fun to sit in and wonderful for wide shady porches.
Metal glider. This is a long forgotten masterpiece that is fun to sit in and wonderful for wide shady porches.

Of course, there would be a blanket or throw or some pillows on the glider. We never sat on the bare metal or wood slats. You know, looking back, many of my first dates were spent on the safety of the porch while the girls’ parents were in the kitchen or living room.

It is that moment that you treasure. The sun has set, the sky is turning into a dark blue color. The air is cooling down and a little breeze is kicking up. House lights are turning on, and the homes looked warm through their windows with yellow and orange colors on the bluish-white exteriors. The crickets come out, and the cicadas. You can even watch the bats fly about in the sky.

Later on in my life, I completely forgot about that.

Delicious Southern style Iced Tea.
Delicious Southern style Iced Tea.

I would go ahead and get this kind of iced tea in fast food restaurants. it would be filled with chemical preservatives, and unsweetened. No lemon. No orange. No mint. And I would be forced to drink this kind of camel piss on my way to and from work.

Then, when I moved to the South, I experienced what “real” iced tea is. It’s called “Southern Ice Tea”, and it’s awesome!

How to Make Perfect Southern Sweet Iced Tea

Iced tea is pretty much a year-round staple here in the south - probably mostly because it's so darned hot down here most all of the year. Besides, tea - unlike soft drinks - is loaded with benefits.

Just like seasoning recipes to taste, you definitely should adjust to your own sweetness level with sweetened iced tea. Some folks like it real sweet, some not quite so sweet and you can certainly exchange sugar for an appropriate sugar substitute, even making the tea completely unsweetened, and adding it per glass.

This recipe makes 2 quarts of sweet tea and I used to use a cup of sugar, but then I switched to making my tea completely unsweetened and using a sugar substitute by the glass, but then I stopped using artificial sweeteners completely, then I went back to them, or I flip flop between a stevia/sugar blend, monk fruit or agave - I've pretty much tried most all of them. When I went back to using regular granulated sugar, I found a cup to be too sweet for me. Eventually I reduced that cup of sugar to 3/4 cup, then 2/3 cup and now I find about 1/2 cup of sugar for the whole pitcher works pretty good for me. In restaurants I always find sweet tea generally far too sweet for me, so I order it "half and half" - half sweet, mixed with half unsweetened, and during the summer I go through so much tea that I now make a full gallon of a diet sweet tea.

Sweetening aside, one thing is for certain. I believe that the perfect iced tea starts with Luzianne brand. {affil link} Period.

Now... I don't say that because I'm trying to impress the folks at Luzianne (who have no idea who I am), or because I'm trying to make myself look more "Southern" by using Luzianne. I use it because, in my opinion, it is the tea for Southern iced tea - whether it's sugared up or made with sugar substitute. Not that other brands don't make a good pitcher of tea. Mama used Lipton and it's a perfectly fine tea. It's just that for what I consider to be the perfect Southern iced tea, I truly believe you need to use Luzianne.

Finding a restaurant, even in the Deep South, that served sweet tea was a challenge there for awhile. Restaurants jumped on the bandwagon of removing sugar from their tea and tried to pass off unsweetened tea to all of their patrons, offering sugar packets at the table. Well, everybody knows that just doesn't work. Warm tea is what you need to dissolve sugar and iced tea just needs to be cold. Not warm. Not at room temperature. But chilled cold and served over ice and for me, with lemon. So, thankfully, they have finally gotten back to offering sweet tea again, and unsweetened for those folks who prefer not to have the sugar. It's true, a lot of folks, myself included, sweeten with sugar substitutes these days, but still… every once in awhile, we all sure enjoy a glass of ice cold, sugared-up tea.

Tea Tips:

1. For perfect tea always start with fresh filtered cool water - never tap water!

2. Cloudiness is often caused by putting hot or still warm tea directly into a cold refrigerator. My method prevents this since you are pouring your steeped tea directly over ice cubes.

2. Bitterness in tea is caused by overcooking and burning the tea leaves - that is why it is important not to boil the teabags and not to steep them too long in boiling water. To counter, a pinch of baking soda - only about 1/8 of a teaspoon - can be added to the hot, steeped tea after you remove the bags. It will not affect the taste of your tea, and provides insurance against bitterness.

3. Use wooden spoons to squeeze your tea bags, a glass container - like a large Pyrex measuring cup - to steep your tea, and store it in a glass pitcher if at all possible. I break this rule myself at times though, especially with my Milo's copycat diet iced tea. And I do love my Tervis cups.

4. If you prefer your sweetened tea more on the sweet side, increase the sugar. Some folks like as much as 1-1/2 cups of sugar, but start lower and increase for the next pitcher.

5. Of course, substitute artificial sweetener by the pitcher or per glass if you don't want to use sugar. I use the granulated Splenda in the large bag, about 3/4ths cup is enough for me.

6. If you like lemon in your tea, try making ice cubes out of lemonade to use in the individual glasses. As they melt, they will infuse the tea with lemon flavor! {a tip from Susan of our Facebook Family!}

Ingredients:
5 to 7 individual tea bags, (Luzianne brand preferred) {affil link}
1 quart of cool filtered or bottled water
Pinch of baking soda, optional
1 (4-cup) glass Pyrex measuring cup for steeping
2 quart glass pitcher filled with ice
1/2 to to 1 cup granulated sugar, or to taste
Fresh lemon, sliced or wedges, and some mint sprigs, optional

Instructions:
Boil one quart of cool filtered or bottled water, bringing to a full, rolling boil then turn off heat. Steep tea bags in the hot water for 9 minutes. Gently squeeze bags of excess water and remove. Whisk in sugar (and baking soda if using) until dissolved and set aside. Fill pitcher with ice, and carefully pour the hot tea concentrate over the ice. Stir well and pour over ice filled glasses, garnishing with a sprig of mint leaves and a nice juicy slice of lemon. Savor. Makes 2 quarts.

Cook's Notes: 
For a milder tea, use 5 bags; for a more robust tea, go with 7. Increase sugar as needed to your sweetness level. Never pour hot tea directly into a glass pitcher without ice in it! To conserve your ice and use the tea per glass, fill the 1/2 gallon pitcher with 1-1/2 quarts of water instead of ice, and top with the steeped tea.

-Deep South Dish

Personally, I always use (a generous amount of) cut up orange slices, along with the lemon. And sometimes even a slice or two of lime or grapefruit to tarten up things a bit.

Sweet + tart = flavorful neutral.

I always use mint, but too much mint is not good and will act medicinally. Your heart will start to race. Yikes! So just use a sprig and no more.

Sweeteners can be sugar, brown sugar, cane sugar, and honey. Experiment. You can end up with some very delicious cool Summer drinks for your end of the day porch rest periods.

Iced tea is just perfect for the end of the day rest periods while the wold quiets down.
Iced tea is just perfect for the end of the day rest periods while the wold quiets down. Some of the best Southern Iced Tea that I ever had came from Louisiana and Mississippi.

Nighttime walk in a snowstorm

You have not lived life until you have walked at night in a snowstorm. This is most especially true if it is in the countryside, on a wooded road, and you are alone with only the wind whistling through the trees and the cracking and gnawing of the branches as they sway in the wind.

Night time walk in the Winter snow storm.
Night time walk in the Winter snow storm.

When ever you have an opportunity, whether it is an old-fashioned sled ride, or sleigh ride, a walk, or a ski-mobile trip to the neighboring woods… please do it. Get gout and enjoy “Mother Nature”.

Conclusion

Make what you do matter. Take time to savor every moment. Do not try to be like the actors in the movies. Just try to be you; the best YOU that you can be. Do things your way. Live life your way.

Start doing it now.

Make your life matter. Do the little things that enhance your life. Appreciate them, savor them and enjoy them.
Make your life matter. Do the little things that enhance your life. Appreciate them, savor them and enjoy them.

I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have similar posts in my Happiness Index…

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The Veldt (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

There is nothing wrong with reading a nice piece of literature. That’s true, don’t you know. Lately, I’ve been thinking about Ray Bradbury. His writings are so… oh so… special.

It’s some of the best that the world can offer.

Here’s a great little gem of a story. Please enjoy.

The Veldt – Ray Bradbury

“George, I wish you’d look at the nursery. “What’s wrong with it?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, then.”

“I just want you to look at it, is all, or call a psychologist in to look at it.” “What would a psychologist want with a nursery?”

“You know very well what he’d want.” His wife was standing in the middle of the kitchen watching the stove busy humming to itself, making supper for four.

“It’s just that it is different now than it was.” “All right, let’s have a look.”

They walked down the hall of their HappyLife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars with everything included. This house which clothed and fed and rocked them to sleep and played and sang and was good to them. Their approach was sensed by a hidden switch and the nursery light turned on when they came within ten feet of it. Similarly, behind them, in the halls, lights went on and off automatically as they left them behind.

“Well,” said George Hadley. They stood on the grass-like floor of the nursery. It was forty feet across by forty feet long and thirty feet high; it had cost half again as much as the rest of the house. “But nothing’s too good for our children,” George had said.

The room was silent and empty. The walls were white and two dimensional. Now, as George and Lydia Hadley stood in the center of the room, the walls made a quiet noise and seemed to fall away into the distance. Soon an African veldt appeared, in three dimensions, on all sides, in color. It looked real to the smallest stone and bit of yellow summer grass. The ceiling above them became a deep sky with a hot yellow sun.

George Hadley started to sweat from the heat. “Let’s get out of this sun,” he said. “This is a little too real. But I don’t see anything wrong.”

“Wait a moment, you’ll see,” said his wife.

Now hidden machines were beginning to blow a wind containing prepared smells toward the two people in the middle of the baked veldt. The hot straw smell of lion grass, the cool green smell of the hidden water hole, the strong dried blood smell of the animals, the smell of dust like red pepper in the hot air. And now the sounds: the thump of distant antelope feet on soft grassy ground, the papery rustle of vultures. A shadow passed through the sky. George Hadley looked up, and as he watched the shadow moved across his sweating face. “Horrible creatures,” he heard his wife say.

“The vultures.”

“You see, there are the lions,  far over, that way. Now they’re on their way to the water  hole.

They’ve just been eating,” said Lydia. “I don’t know what.”

“Some animal.” George Hadley put his hand above his eyes to block off the burning light and looked carefully. “A zebra or a baby giraffe, maybe.”

“Are you sure?” His wife sounded strangely nervous.

“No, it’s a little late to be sure,” he said, with a laugh. “Nothing over there I can see but cleaned bone, and the vultures dropping for what’s left.”

“Did you hear that scream?” she asked. “No.”

“About a minute ago?” “Sorry, no.”

The lions were coming. And again George Hadley was filled with respect for the brilliant mind that had come up with the idea for this room. A wonder of efficiency selling for an unbelievably low price. Every home should have one. Oh, occasionally they frightened you with their realism, they made you jump, gave you a scare. But most of the time they were fun for everyone. Not only your own son and daughter, but for yourself when you felt like a quick trip to a foreign land, a quick change of scenery. Well, here it was!

And here were the lions now, fifteen feet away. They looked so real, so powerful and shockingly real, that you could feel the hairs stand up on the back of your neck. Your mouth was filled with the dusty smell of their heated fur. The yellow of the lions and the summer grass was in your eyes like a picture in an expensive French wall hanging. And there was the sound of the lions quick, heavy breaths in the silent mid-day sun, and the smell of meat from their dripping mouths.

The lions stood looking at George and Lydia Hadley with terrible green-yellow eyes. “Watch out!” screamed Lydia.

The lions came running at them. Lydia turned suddenly and ran. Without thinking, George ran after her. Outside in the hall, after they had closed the door quickly and noisily behind them, he was laughing and she was crying. And they both stood shocked at the other’s reaction.

“George!”

“Lydia! Oh, my dear poor sweet Lydia!” “They almost got us!”

“Walls, Lydia, remember; glass walls, that’s all they are. Oh, they look real, I must admit – Africa in your living room. But it’s all created from three dimensional color film behind glass screens. And the machines that deliver the smells and sounds to go with the scenery. Here’s my handkerchief.”

“I’m afraid.” She came to him and put her body against him and cried as he held her. “Did you see? Did you feel? It’s too real.”

“Now, Lydia…”

“You’ve got to tell Wendy and Peter not to read any more on Africa.” “Of course – of course.” He patted her.

“Promise?” “Sure.”

“And lock the nursery for a few days until I can get over this.”

“You know how difficult Peter is about that. When I punished him a month ago by locking it for even a few hours – the way he lost his temper! And Wendy too. They live for the nursery.”

“It’s got to be locked, that’s all there is to it.”

“All right.” Although he wasn’t happy about it, he locked the huge door. “You’ve been working too hard. You need a rest.”

“I don’t know – I don’t know,” she said, blowing her nose, sitting down in a chair that immediately began to rock and comfort her. “Maybe I don’t have enough to do. Maybe I have time to think too much. Why don’t we shut the whole house off for a few days and take a vacation?”

“You mean you want to fry my eggs for me?” “Yes.” She nodded.

“And mend my socks?”

“Yes.” She nodded again excitedly, with tears in her eyes. “And clean the house?”

“Yes, yes – oh, yes!”

“But I thought that’s why we bought this house, so we wouldn’t have to do anything?”

“That’s just it. I feel like I don’t belong here. The house is wife and mother now, and nurse for the children. Can I compete with an African veldt? Can I give a bath and clean the  children  as efficiently or quickly as the automatic body wash can? I cannot. And it isn’t just me. It’s you. You’ve been awfully nervous lately.”

“I suppose I have been smoking too much.”

“You look as if you didn’t know what to do with yourself in this house, either. You smoke a little more every morning and drink a little more every afternoon, and you are taking more pills to help you sleep at night. You’re beginning to feel unnecessary too.”

“Am I?” He thought for a moment as he and tried to feel into himself to see what was really there. “Oh, George!” She looked past him, at the nursery door. “Those lions can’t get out of there, can

they?”

He looked at the door and saw it shake as if something had jumped against it from the other side. “Of course not,” he said.

At dinner they ate alone, for Wendy and Peter were at a special plastic fair across town. They had called home earlier to say they’d be late. So George Hadley, deep in thought, sat watching the dining-room table produce warm dishes of food from the machines inside.

“We forgot the tomato sauce,” he said.

“Sorry,” said a small voice within the table, and tomato sauce appeared.

As for the nursery, thought George Hadley, it won’t hurt for the children to be locked out of it a while. Too much of anything isn’t good for anyone. And it was clearly indicated that the children had been spending a little too much time on Africa. That sun. He could still feel it on his neck, like a hot paw. And the lions. And the smell of blood. Remarkable how the nursery read the thoughts in the children’s minds and created life to fill their every desire. The children thought lions, and there were lions. The children thought zebras, and there were zebras. Sun – sun. Giraffes – giraffes. Death and death.

That last. He ate the meat that the table had cut for him without tasting it. Death thoughts. They were awfully young, Wendy and Peter, for death thoughts. Or, no, you were never too young, really. Long before you knew what death was you were wishing it on someone else. When you were two years old you were shooting people with toy guns.

But this – the long, hot African veldt. The awful death in the jaws of a lion. And repeated again and again.

“Where are you going?”

George didn’t answer Lydia… he was too busy thinking of something else. He let the lights shine softly on ahead of him, turn off behind him as he walked quietly to the nursery door. He listened against it. Far away, a lion roared. He unlocked the door and opened it. Just before he stepped inside, he heard a faraway scream. And then another roar from the lions, which died down quickly. He stepped into Africa.

How many times in the last year had he opened this door and found Wonderland with Alice and the Mock Turtle, or Aladdin and his Magical Lamp, or Jack Pumpkinhead of Oz, or Dr. Doolittle, or the cow jumping over a very real-looking moon. All the most enjoyable creations of an imaginary world. How often had he seen Pegasus the winged horse flying in the sky ceiling, or  seen explosions of red fireworks, or heard beautiful singing.

But now, is yellow hot Africa, this bake oven with murder in the heat. Perhaps Lydia was right. Perhaps they needed a little vacation from the fantasy which was growing a bit too real for ten-year- old children. It was all right to exercise one’s mind with unusual fantasies, but when the lively child mind settled on one pattern..?

It seemed that, at a distance, for the past month, he had heard lions roaring, and noticed their strong smell which carried as far away as his study door. But, being busy, he had paid it no attention.

George Hadley stood on the African veldt alone. The lions looked up from their feeding, watching

him. The only thing wrong with the image was the open door. Through it he could see his wife, far down the dark hall, like a framed picture. She was still eating her dinner, but her mind was clearly on other things.

“Go away,” he said to the lions.

They did not go. He knew exactly how the room should work. You sent out  your  thoughts. Whatever you thought would appear. “Let’s have Aladdin and his lamp,” he said angrily. The veldt remained; the lions remained.

“Come on, room! I demand Aladdin!” he said.

Nothing happened. The lions made soft low noises in the hot sun. “Aladdin!”

He went back to dinner. “The fool room’s out of order,” he said. “It won’t change.” “Or…”

“Or what?”

“Or it can’t change,” said Lydia, “because the children have thought about Africa and lions and killing so many days that the room’s stuck in a pattern it can’t get out of.”

“Could be.”

“Or Peter’s set it to remain that way.” “Set it?”

“He may have got into the machinery and fixed something.” “Peter doesn’t know machinery.”

“He’s a wise one for ten. That I.Q. of his…” “But…”

“Hello, Mom. Hello, Dad.”

The Hadleys turned. Wendy and Peter were coming happily in the front door, with bright blue eyes and a smell of fresh air on their clothes from their trip in the helicopter.

“You’re just in time for supper,” said both parents.

“We’re full of strawberry ice-cream and hot dogs,” said the children, holding hands. “But we’ll sit and watch.”

“Yes, come tell us about the nursery,” said George Hadley.

The brother and sister looked at him and then at each other. “Nursery?”

“All about Africa and everything,” said the father with a false smile. “I don’t understand,” said Peter.

“Your mother and I were just traveling through Africa. “There’s no Africa in the nursery,” said Peter simply. “Oh, come now, Peter. We know better.”

“I don’t remember any Africa,” said Peter to Wendy. “Do you?” “No.”

“Run see and come tell.” She did as he told her.

“Wendy, come back here!” said George Hadley, but she was gone. The house lights followed her like fireflies. Too late, he realized he had forgotten to lock the nursery door after his last visit.

“Wendy’ll look and come tell us,” said Peter. “She doesn’t have to tell me. I’ve seen it.” “I’m sure you’re mistaken, Father.”

“I’m not, Peter. Come along now.”

But Wendy was back. “It’s not Africa,” she said breathlessly.

“We’ll see about this,” said George Hadley, and they all walked down the hall together and opened the door.

There was a green, lovely forest, a lovely river, a purple mountain, high voices singing. And there was Rima the bird girl, lovely and mysterious. She was hiding in the trees with colorful butterflies, like flowers coming to life, flying about her long hair. The African veldt was gone. The lions were gone. Only Rima was here now, singing a song so beautiful that it brought tears to your eyes.

George Hadley looked in at the changed scene. “Go to bed,” he said to the children. They opened their mouths.

“You heard me,” he said.

They went off to the air tube, where a wind blew them like brown leaves up to their sleeping rooms. George Hadley walked through the forest scene and picked up something that lay in the corner near

where the lions had been. He walked slowly back to his wife. “What is that?” she asked.

“An old wallet of mine,” he said. He showed it to her. The smell of hot grass was on it… and the smell of a lion. It was wet from being in the lion’s mouth, there were tooth marks on it, and there was dried blood on both sides. He closed the door and locked it, tight.

They went to up to bed but couldn’t sleep. “Do you think Wendy changed it?” she said at last, in the dark room.

“Of course.”

“Made it from a veldt into a forest and put Rima there instead of lions?” “Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know. But it’s staying locked until I find out.” “How did your wallet get there?”

“I don’t know anything,” he said, “except that I’m beginning to be sorry we bought that room for the children. If children are suffering from any kind of emotional problem, a room like that…”

“It’s supposed to help them work off their emotional problems in a healthy way.” “I’m starting to wonder.” His eyes were wide open, looking up at the ceiling.

“We’ve given the children everything they ever wanted. Is this our reward – secrecy, not doing what we tell them?”

“Who was it said, ‘Children are carpets, they should be stepped on occasionally’? We’ve never lifted a hand. They’re unbearable – let’s admit it. They come and go when they like; they treat us as if we were the children in the family. They’re spoiled and we’re spoiled.”

“They’ve been acting funny ever since you wouldn’t let them go to New York a few months ago.” “They’re not old enough to do that alone, I explained.”

“I know, but I’ve noticed they’ve been decidedly cool toward us since.”

“I think I’ll have David McClean come tomorrow morning to have a look at Africa.” “But it’s not Africa now, it’s South America and Rima.”

“I have a feeling it’ll be Africa again before then.”

A moment later they heard the screams. Two screams. Two people screaming from downstairs. And then a roar of lions.

“Wendy and Peter aren’t in their rooms,” said his wife.

He lay in his bed with his beating heart. “No,” he said. “They’ve broken into the nursery.”

“Those screams – they sound familiar.” “Do they?”

“Yes, awfully.”

And although their beds tried very hard, the two adults couldn’t be rocked to sleep for another hour. A smell of cats was in the night air.

* * * “Father?” asked Peter the next morning.

“Yes.”

Peter looked at his shoes. He never looked at his father any more, nor at his mother. “You aren’t going to lock up the nursery for good, are you?”

“That all depends.”

“On what?” said Peter sharply.

“On you and your sister. If you break up this Africa with a little variety – oh, Sweden perhaps, or Denmark or China…”

“I thought we were free to play as we wished.” “You are, within reasonable limits.”

“What’s wrong with Africa, Father?”

“Oh, so now you admit you have been thinking up Africa, do you?” “I wouldn’t want the nursery locked up,” said Peter coldly. “Ever.”

“Matter of fact, we’re thinking of turning the whole house off for about a month. Live sort of a happy family existence.”

“That sounds terrible! Would I have to tie my own shoes instead of letting the machine do it? And brush my own teeth and comb my hair and give myself a bath?”

“It would be fun for a change, don’t you think?”

No, it would be horrible. I didn’t like it when you took out the picture painter last month.” “That’s because I wanted you to learn to paint all by yourself, son.”

“I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?” “All right, go play in Africa.”

“Will you shut off the house sometime soon?” “We’re considering it.”

“I don’t think you’d better consider it any more, Father.” “I won’t have any threats from my son!”

“Very well.” And Peter walked off to the nursery.

* * * “Am I on time?” said David McClean.    “Breakfast?” asked George Hadley.

“Thanks, had some. What’s the trouble?” “David, you’re a psychologist.”

“I should hope so.”

“Well, then, have a look at our nursery. You saw it a year ago when you dropped by; did you notice anything unusual about it then?”

“Can’t say I did; the usual violences, a tendency toward a slight paranoia here or there. But this is usual in children because they feel their parents are always doing things to make them suffer in one way or another. But, oh, really nothing.”

They walked down the hall. “I locked it up,” explained the father, “and the children broke back into it during the night. I let them stay so they could form the patterns for you to see.”

There was a terrible screaming from the nursery.

“There it is,” said George Hadley. “See what you make of it.”

They  walked  in  on  the  children  without  knocking.  The  screams  had  stopped.  The  lions  were feeding.

“Run  outside  a  moment,  children,”  said  George  Hadley.  “No,  don’t  change  the  mental  picture. Leave the walls as they are. Get!”

With the children gone, the two men stood studying the lions sitting together in the distance, eating with great enjoyment whatever it was they had caught.

“I wish I knew what it was,” said George Hadley. “Sometimes I can almost see. Do you think if I brought high-powered binoculars here and…”

David McClean laughed dryly. “Hardly.” He turned to study all four walls. “How long has this been going on?”

“A little over a month.”

“It certainly doesn’t feel good.” “I want facts, not feelings.”

“My dear George, a psychologist never saw a fact in his life. He only hears about feelings; things that aren’t always clearly expressed. This doesn’t feel good, I tell you. Trust me. I have a nose for something bad. This is very bad. My advice to you is to have the whole damn room torn down and your children brought to me every day during the next year for treatment.”

“Is it that bad?”

“I’m afraid so. One of the original uses of these rooms was so that we could study the patterns left on the walls by the child’s mind. We could study them whenever we wanted to, and help the child. In this case, however, the room has become a means of creating destructive thoughts, instead of helping to make them go away.”

“Didn’t you sense this before?”

“I sensed only that you had spoiled your children more than most. And now you’re letting them down in some way. What way?”

“I wouldn’t let them go to New York.” “What else?”

“I’ve taken a few machines from the house and threatened them, a month ago, with closing up the nursery unless they did their homework. I did close it for a few days to show I meant business.”

“Ah, ha!”

“Does that mean anything?”

“Everything. Where before they had a Santa Claus now they have a Scrooge. Children prefer Santa. You’ve let this room and this house replace you and your wife in your children’s feelings. This room is their mother and father, far more important in their lives than their real parents. And now you come along and want to shut it off. No wonder there’s hatred here. You can feel it coming out of the sky. Feel that sun. George, you’ll have to change your life. Like too many others, you’ve built it around creature comforts. Why, you’d go hungry tomorrow if something went wrong in your kitchen. You wouldn’t know how to cook an egg. All the same, turn everything off. Start new. It’ll take time. But we’ll make good children out of bad in a year, wait and see.”

“But won’t the shock be too much for the children, shutting the room up without notice, for good?” “I don’t want them going any deeper into this, that’s all.”

The lions were finished with their bloody meat. They were standing on the edge of the clearing watching the two men.

“Now I’m feeling worried,” said McClean. “Let’s get out of here. I never have cared for these damned rooms. Make me nervous.”

“The lions look real, don’t they?” said George Hadley. I don’t suppose there’s any way…” “What?”

“…that they could become real?” “Not that I know.”

“Some problem with the machinery, someone changing something inside?” “No.”

They went to the door.

“I don’t imagine the room will like being turned off,” said the father. “Nothing ever likes to die – even a room.”

“I wonder if it hates me for wanting to switch it off?”

“Paranoia is thick around here today,” said David McClean. “You can see it everywhere. Hello.” He bent and picked up a bloody scarf. “This yours?”

“No.” George Hadley’s face set like stone. “It belongs to Lydia.”

They went to the control box together and threw the switch that killed the nursery.

The two children were so upset that they couldn’t control themselves. They screamed and danced around and threw things. They shouted and cried and called them rude names and jumped on the furniture.

“You can’t do that to the nursery, you can’t!” “Now, children.”

The children threw themselves onto a sofa, crying.

“George,” said Lydia Hadley, “turn it on again, just for a few moments. You need to give them some more time.”

“No.”

“You can’t be so cruel…”

“Lydia, it’s off, and it stays off. And the whole damn house dies as of here and now. The more I see of the mess we’ve put ourselves in, the more it sickens me. We’ve been thinking of our machine assisted selves for too long. My God, how we need a breath of honest air!”

And he marched about the house turning off the voice clocks, the stoves, the heaters, the shoe cleaners, the body washer, the massager, and every other machine he could put his hand to.

The house was full of dead bodies, it seemed. It felt like a mechanical cemetery. So silent. None of

the humming hidden energy of machines waiting to function at the tap of a button.

“Don’t let them do it!” cried Peter to the ceiling, as if he was talking to the house, the nursery. “Don’t let Father kill everything.” He turned to his father. “Oh, I hate you!”

“Saying things like that won’t get you anywhere.” “I wish you were dead!”

“We were, for a long while. Now we’re going to really start living. Instead of being handled and massaged, we’re going to live.”

Wendy was still crying and Peter joined her again. “Just a moment, just one moment, just another moment of nursery,” they cried.

“Oh, George,” said the wife, “it can’t hurt.”

“All right – all right, if they’ll just shut up. One minute, mind you, and then off forever.” “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” sang the children, smiling with wet faces.

“And then we’re going on a vacation. David McClean is coming back in half an hour to help us move out and get to the airport. I’m going to dress. You turn the nursery on for a minute, Lydia, just a minute, mind you.”

And the three of them went off talking excitedly while he let himself be transported upstairs through the air tube and set about dressing himself. A minute later Lydia appeared.

“I’ll be glad when we get away,” she said thankfully. “Did you leave them in the nursery?”

“I wanted to dress too. Oh, that horrible Africa. What can they see in it?”

“Well, in five minutes we’ll be on our way to Iowa. Lord, how did we ever get in this house? What made us buy a nightmare?”

“Pride, money, foolishness.”

“I think we’d better get downstairs before those kids spend too much time with those damned beasts again.”

Just then they heard the children calling, “Daddy, Mommy, come quick – quick!”

They went downstairs in the air tube and ran down the hall. The children were nowhere in sight. “Wendy? Peter!”

They ran into the nursery. The veldt was empty save for the lions waiting, looking at them. “Peter, Wendy?”

The door closed loudly.

“Wendy, Peter!”

George Hadley and his wife turned quickly and ran back to the door.

“Open the door!” cried George Hadley, trying the handle. “Why, they’ve locked it from the outside! Peter!” He beat at the door. “Open up!”

He heard Peter’s voice outside, against the door.

“Don’t let them switch off the nursery and the house,” he was saying.

Mr. and Mrs. George Hadley beat at the door. “Now, don’t be silly, children. It’s time to go. Mr. McClean’ll be here in a minute and…”

And then they heard the sounds.

The lions were on three sides of them in the yellow veldt grass. They walked quietly through the dry grass, making long, deep rolling sounds in their throats. The lions!

Mr. Hadley looked at his wife and they turned and looked back at the beasts edging slowly forward, knees bent, tails in the air.

Mr. and Mrs. Hadley screamed.

And suddenly they realized why those other screams had sounded familiar.

* * *

“Well, here I am,” said David McClean from the nursery door. “Oh, hello.” He looked carefully at the two children seated in the center of the room eating a little picnic lunch. On the far them he could see the water hole and the yellow veldt. Above was the hot sun. He began to sweat. “Where are your father and mother?”

The children looked up and smiled. “Oh, they’ll be here directly.” “Good, we must get going.”

At a distance Mr. McClean saw the lions fighting over something and then quietening down to feed in silence under the shady trees. He put his hand to his eyes to block out the sun and looked at them. Now the lions were done feeding. They moved to the water hole to drink. A shadow moved over Mr. McClean’s hot face. Many shadows moved. The vultures were dropping down from the burning sky.

“A cup of tea?” asked Wendy in the silence.

The End

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Escapist entertainment during a time of stress; some suggestions.

This is a very stressful time that we are all enduring. many stores and factories are closed, and many people are locked inside their homes. No one is sure when the prohibitions will be lifted, or what they will do to catch up with their bills.

It’s the COVID-19 SHTF event.

The thing is, that when we try to turn on the internet for escape we are blitzed with a combined narrative; it’s either [1] hate-China or [2] fear-the-corona-virus. I mean can’t we get a break? Why does the US government feel the need to constantly and incessantly manipulate the media and try to control us all. Can’t they just take a holiday, or something?

Jeeze!

Well, I am not the government, and I do have some suggestion of what you all can do. So, here I provide some thoughts on what you can do to escape from this nightmarish assault.

Let’s start with a list of some movies and television shows. Shows that you can use to pull up interesting escapist entertainment to look at.

Now, rather than list well known movies, or the latest in special effects, instead I have decided to put together a list of 1980’s feel-good movies, and 1960’s – 1970’s forgotten comedies. The key driver here is “overlooked” and / or “forgotten”. (With the first one being “unknown” to anyone under 50 years old.)

I do hope that at least one movie or show listed here will remind you of some pleasant memories . And that maybe… maybe, you would use my suggestion as a seed to take you on a trip. A trip far away from the current frustrations of modern locked-up life.

We start with a pretty well-known movie. At least well-known to my generation.

The newer generations not so much.

Though, you would be surprised at how many people under the age of 30 never heard of it. Which is a shame. The movie is a classic and it’s all about growing up with your first heart-pounding crush…

Sixteen Candles (1983)

Climax of the movie when Samantha gets her birthday wish.
Climax of the movie when Samantha gets her birthday wish.

The tale is classic. American teenager Samantha (Molly Ringwald) is despondent that her entire family has forgotten her sixteenth birthday. You know, being so caught up are they in the wedding of her sister. Now, Samantha has a crush on a classmate of hers. He’s Mr. Bo-Hunk; Jake Ryan (Michael Schoeffling), and she wrongly thinks he has no interest in her.

Oh, but we do find out what happens…

This John Hughes film is one of the best romantic teen comedies in history. 

Starring 2 of the Brat Packers, Molly Ringwald, playing the lovesick Samantha, and Anthony Michael Hall who plays "The Geek", he practically stole the entire movie with his one-liners. 

His friends were the best, it's funny to see John Cusack as one of his geeky friends, and I just noticed Joan Cusack makes a small appearance in this as the girl with the neck brace on. That's funny. 

I recommend this classic to anyone who likes romantic teen comedies. 

Oh and whoever said that "Sixteen Candles" was perverted, all i have to say is WHAT? What is perverted about this movie, American Pie was perverted, this movie is a classic. There was ONE scene of nudity and it lasted about 3 seconds. I give "Sixteen Candles" 10 out of 10!!!!

- LittleRascal-15

Matters are not helped by a party that evening at school, at which much mayhem breaks out, nor by the chaotic wedding day itself.

"They Fucking forgot my birthday!!!"... 

These are the immortal words spoken by SIXTEEN CANDLES heroine Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) in the ultimate 80's teen comedy. 

This movie has become a classic to those born in the 70's, like myself, and I now consider it a "guilty pleasure". Its a movie we all grew up with. 

Didn't we all know a person like 'Farmer Ted', or a hot queenie like the blonde he hilariously gets. It was every young freshman's fantasy. This funny flick is also a relic of the 80's that is not all that dated.

The jokes still work (as long as you see it uncut) and it is neat seeing things of the not so distant past be on display. Floppy disks, headgears, leotards, etc... 

Time has not been so good to the featured stars. Ringwald and Anthony-Michael Hall, who was born to play this role, and this one only, have all but disappeared. The biggest stars now are blips on the screen here: Joan (in a headgear) and John (a geek) Cusack. The film is like a toy you can't put away.

Some situations are beat, but at least Paul Dooley adds an extra dimension to the father. Too many of John Hughes' teen-angst comedies of the era feature tissue-thin parental figures. 

This was the first and best of the so-called "brat pack" movies, and will always hold a place in 1980's filmmaking history. Girls learned never to lend their underwear to a geek and we all learned that high school is just a phase, easily forgotten as time goes on.

-Don-10229 March 1999

Now, maybe you have already seen that movie ten or twenty times and do not care to re-watch it. No problem.

Seriously.

No problem.

Maybe get yourself a nice bag of chips. Pour it into a nice big bowl and grab yourself some beer, or like me… a nice glass of wine. (Just a reasonably cheap red will do.)

Relax.

Stop allowing the “news” and those that control it and the internet to control you.

Some Lays potato chips that I bought. The Chinese really like all these odd kinds of flavors. This particular flavor is a white grape drink soda drink flavor.
Some Lays potato chips that I bought. The Chinese really like all these odd kinds of flavors. This particular flavor is a white grape soda drink flavor. Who figures? Eh? For me it was a cross between Korean style barbecued squid with Hunan spices or plain “American style” potato chips.

So, now that you have some fine tasty chips… a nice beverage of your choice, and (hopefully) a companion or two (can be a loved one, a trusted pet, or some children), settle down to some friendly escapist enjoyment.

I'm drinking red wine, so I think that it could be paired quite nicely with a white grape soda flavored potato chip.

With that being said, how about a feel-good television show.

I really like the world of Mayberry RFD. Nothing ever seems to go wrong in it. Seriously, nothing bad or really serious ever happens in it short of a cat getting stuck in a tree, or an arrest for a broken tail light.

It’s all just good, safe escapist enjoyment.

The Andy Griffith Show

The Andy Griffith show.
The Andy Griffith show.

This sitcom was spun-off from an episode of The Danny Thomas Show. In that show, Danny Thomas was arrested in a small North Carolina town. The character of the small town sheriff turned out to be so popular that they made a complete show around him.

Of course, named “The Andy Griffith Show”, and focused on Sheriff Andrew Jackson Taylor in the small town of Mayberry.

Andy Taylor was a widower with a young son (Opie) and the pair of them lived with Andy’s Aunt Bee – famous for her most excellent pies.

Andy’s Aunt Bee was famous for her most excellent pies.
Andy’s Aunt Bee was famous for her most excellent pies.

Crime in Mayberry was of the distinctly petty variety and much of the comedy centered around Andy, his family life and working life especially with his somewhat stupid deputy (and cousin) Barney Fife.

Andy wouldn’t allow Barney to load his weapon for fear he would shoot his own feet off! He allows him to carry a solitary bullet (usually in his left shirt pocket).

Throughout the show’s run, Andy had two love interests – the first was druggist Ellie Walker, and then later schoolteacher Helen Crump whom Andy ended up marrying in 1968.

Sheriff Andrew Jackson Taylor

When Andy Griffith decided to call it quits with the show it was still popular and the network decided to carry it on under the new name of Mayberry RFD with Ken Berry in the lead as councilman Sam Jones.

Also a most excellent show.

Griffith helped with the change over by appearing in the first episode (it was in this episode that he married Helen and the pair then moved away from the town).

A typical day in Mayberry with Andy and councilman Sam Jones.

I know. I know.

Mayberry RFD is more about hotdogs and hamburgers instead of potato chips. It’s a show about mowing lawns on hot July afternoons, pitchers of icy lemonade on shady porches, and tree-houses that hide in the back yard. It’s about comic-books, airplane models that hang from the bedroom ceiling, and classmates that you play baseball with. It’s about watermelons and fresh buttered corn on the cob.

And I really do emphasize. I really do.

Maybe something along these lines, eh?

What's life without a nice tasty home-cooked hamburger?  Not much, I'll tell you what. Hey!  How about taking notice of that nice beer in the background...
What’s life without a nice tasty home-cooked hamburger? Not much, I’ll tell you what. Notice the cheese! (No tomatoes, though. Bummer.) But hey! How about taking notice of that nice beer in the background…

Oh, and speaking of hamburgers and beer…

F Troop

This is just a fun silly television series that I used to watch when I was in elementary school. LOL.

But now, after decades of the rigors of Life, I have come to appreciate it’s silliness. And yes, silliness has an important role in our lives. If you disagree with me, then leave. You can go ahead and split up your time between CNN and the weather channel.

As an aside, American Airports have non-stop CNN coverage, or the Weather Channel. Chinese airports have silly light slapstick entertainment, Mr. Bean style. Why do you think that the two philosophies are so different?
F Troop
F Troop

This show is a military farce about the gallant incompetents of F Troop. It all takes place at “Fort Courage” way back in 1866 Kansas. This was an interesting time period, being the final days of the Civil War.

The CO was the wide-eyed, bumbling Captain Wilton Parmenter (Ken Berry). You see, he had been promoted from Private during the last days of the war. Imagine that! Private to Captain. What did he do, you ask? Well, he accidentally led a charge towards the enemy with a sneeze that sounded like “Charge!”

The episodes were fun and creative.

V Is for Vampire

Count Sforza, an emigrant from Transylvania, arrives in town. He comes in a hearse, has pale skin and has a crow he calls "Brother." The men of F-Troop suspect he may be a vampire, given the count's tendency to say, "Good evening," regardless of the time of day. When Jane can't be found, O'Rourke, Agarn and the Captain decide to check out Sforza's spooky mansion.

Bill Koenig

Reveille is played at 10 am “because of the three hour time difference” and that even though rations and pay allotments are drawn for 30 men, only 17 are stationed at the fort (the other 13 are allegedly “Indian scouts out on patrol”). LOL.

Perhaps the United States government were taking notes, eh?

Unbeknownst to the captain, Sgt. Morgan O’Rourke (Forrest Tucker) had already negotiated a secret – and highly profitable – treaty with the Hekawi Indians. These Indians were led by Chief Wild Eagle (Frank De Kova) from whom he also had an exclusive franchise to sell their souvenirs to tourists via O’Rourke Enterprises.

The treaty benefited both sides. This is because it permitted the Indians to trade and upgrade their living conditions, and the troops to maintain the illusion that they were involved in a deadly land war. While all the time no one was actually in danger.

The only flaw in this otherwise happy arrangement was the troublesome Shugs, a genuine war-mongering tribe (with whom there was no peace treaty) who occasionally went into action.

F Troop is a happy, go-lucky television comedy that would NEVER be permitted to air in today's modern progressive America.
F Troop is a happy, go-lucky television comedy that would NEVER be permitted to air in today’s modern progressive America.

Corporal Randolph Agarn was O’Rourke’s chief aide and assistant schemer and Wrangler Jane the hard-ridin’, fast-shootin’ (and very scrumptious) cowgirl who ran the post office and was out to marry Parmenter.

Other soldiers in the troop included Hannibal Dobbs, the troop’s bugler – who couldn’t play the bugle – and Troopers Duffy and Vanderbilt.

A lot of colourful Indians passed through the Fort in one-time special appearances. Some of those included Wise Owl (Milton Berle); Roaring Chicken (Edward Everett Horton); 147-year-old Flaming Arrow (Phil Harris) and Bald Eagle (Don Rickles).

LOL.

Other special appearances included Sgt. Ramsden (Paul Lynde) and Wrongo Starr (Henry Gibson).

F Troop was an entertaining enough production which, in similar dubious taste to Hogan’s Heroes made light of a deadly serious period of history.


Let’s look at a movie.

Maybe television shows aren’t your thang, eh?

Well, let’s go and check out a teenaged boy science fiction movie from the 1960’s. It’s got all the elements of boyhood dreams. the title says it all… adventure, shipwrecked, on a lone desolate place… Mars!

And it’s got a monkey!

But first, movies like this remind me of food. They really do. Often, as a boy I would go raid the refrigerator and heat up some leftovers that were sitting inside. I would use the microwave rather than the stove, and there were always some good delicious leftovers. Back then, in the 1960’s the US dollar was still worth around twenty five cents, and middle class families could afford to eat. Not like today where it’s actual value is a fraction of a penny.

I would often make up a sandwich from scraps that I would pull out of the refrigerator.
I would often make up a sandwich from scraps that I would pull out of the refrigerator.

Anyways, I would pull out some pork-chops and applesauce, or maybe some meatloaf (and make a sandwich from it), or perhaps some left over lasagna. I would hurriedly scramble and whip up a quick meal with the commercials were rolling…

Of course, more often than not, I would just end up making a “Dagwood” or a hoagie out of all the fixings in the fridge.

Anyways, back to the movie…

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964)
"Special-effects wunderkind and genre master Byron Haskin (The War of the Worlds, The Outer Limits) won a place in the hearts of fantasy film lovers everywhere with this gorgeously designed journey into the unknown."

Robinson Crusoe on Mars tells the story of US astronaut Commander “Kit” Draper who must fight for survival when his spaceship, Elinor M, crash-lands on the barren wastes of Mars.

Oooh…

The story begins with the Elinor M orbiting Mars on the first official probe to test the planet’s gravity. Aboard are Draper, Colonel Dan McReady (Batman‘s Adam West) and Mona (The Woolly Monkey), a monkey, space suited for medical research.

The perfect mix of period science fiction for pre-teen boyhood dreams.
The perfect mix of period science fiction for pre-teen boyhood dreams.

McReady and Draper suddenly realize that their craft is on a collision course with a giant meteor. Yikes!

In a split-second evasive action, the spacecraft swings too far off course and is dragged inexorably down by the gravitational pull of Mars.

McReady and Draper separately abandon ship with McReady taking charge of Mona.

Despite its retro rockets, Draper’s ejection capsule crashes on landing, wrecking the craft and leaving food and water for only a few days. Exhausted, Draper falls asleep only to wake up suffocating for lack of air. Without oxygen, he can sleep only an hour.

The true hero of the movie; the spacesuited monkey Mona.
The true hero of the movie; the space-suited monkey Mona.

Draper sets out to find McReady but in his search only locates Mona. With no more than a few hours oxygen, Draper seems doomed.

Lightheaded, he passes out but is miraculously saved when little yellow rocks, burning and giving off bursts of gas, revive him. This gas is pure oxygen and Draper devises a method to feed the oxygen into his regular tank.

Imagine that! Little yellow rocks…

Several weeks later, a spacecraft appears over Mars and then lands.

Draper, sure he is being rescued, runs to the ship only to discover that it is not from the USA or even the Earth. Watching the ship, Draper suddenly sees a figure detach himself and run in his direction. The two face each other warily.

A stranded astronaut recording his audio diary within a martian cave. Wait until you see the alien. He looks like something out of per-Aztec Mexico. LOL.
A stranded astronaut recording his audio diary within a martian cave. Wait until you see the alien. He looks like something out of pre-Aztec Mexico. LOL.

Gradually, Draper allays the fears of the newcomer and they settle down for the night.

With the arrival of the newcomer – who Draper jokingly dubs Friday – his worst problem, loneliness, has gone. Slowly, over the months, Draper teaches Friday English, and together, wondering if they will ever be rescued, set out to explore the Martian terrain.

Not a movie that will leave you wondering about life. Not so much.

It’s just a silly enough pre-adolescent movie for young boys that was written int he 1960’s. But, you know what? Maybe that’s what we need right now. Maybe we need to “escape” and forget our life for a spell. To give us a break and to relax our minds somewhat.

Now, as a man, I prefer other (ahem) more adult pleasures.

Manly adult pleasures.
Manly adult pleasures.

Beer, wine and VSOP can help. But you know, if you don’t watch out it could consume you instead. So I would recommend just some lighthearted escapist shows and movies. Nothing too serious or upsetting.

Oh, and enjoy with something delicious to eat.

Newhart

If you have lived through the 1980’s then you knew all about Newhart. This show as a hoot!

The cast of the television show "Newhart".
The cast of the television show “Newhart”.

In this series, Newhart played Dick Loudon, a writer of “how-to” books who moved from New York to Norwich, Vermont to realise his dream of running a country inn. His smart, funny, and sexy wife was named Joanna (played by Mary Frann).

As with Newhart’s previous comedies, there were numerous quirky supporting characters. Tom Poston (who had been a frequent guest on the earlier show) was the inn’s unhandy handyman, George Utley, and Julia Duffy played the vain and spoiled Stephanie Vanderkellen (an heiress working as a maid at the 200-year-old Stratford Inn – Stephanie replaced her less interesting cousin, Leslie, after the first season).

Stephanie’s boyfriend, Michael Harris (Peter Scolari), was an insufferable 1980s yuppie and producer of a local TV show, Vermont Today, which Dick began hosting a few years into Newhart’s run.

Perhaps the most memorable, and certainly the most unusual, characters were three bizarre backwoodsmen, of whom only one ever spoke (until the final episode).

Larry, and his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl.
Larry, and his brother Darryl, and his other brother Darryl.

“I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl,” was their stock introduction. They could always be counted upon to enjoy any activity that would disgust most people.

The trio of backwoodsmen known as Larry, Darryl, and Darryl actually made their first appearance in the series’ second episode. Dick hired their “company,” Anything for a Buck, to unearth the 300-year-old body of a woman buried in the Stratford Inn’s basement. The audience’s reaction to the brothers did not go unnoticed by Newhart and co-creator Kemp, and they were one of the first additions to the regular cast when Newhart underwent a makeover after season two.

-13 fun facts about the Newhart show.

William Sanderson, who played Larry, graduated from Memphis State University with a BBA and JD, but the acting bug bit him before he sat for the bar exam. Despite this educational pedigree, Sanderson remained very much a good ol’ Memphis boy at heart. While working on Newhart he sipped Jack Daniels and read the Bible in his dressing room between takes, and he constantly chewed tobacco. He had a habit of leaving his spittle cups all over the set, to the disgust of his co-workers.

Tony Papenfuss (First Darryl) and John Voldstad (Second Darryl) are both classically trained actors who had years of stage experience on their resumes when they landed their Newhart parts. Both actors’ agents actually advised them against accepting the roles, since they were non-speaking parts.

Newhart is a classic piece of 1980's television. It described America leading up to the Bill Clinton Presidency and thus was free of all the political correctness mumbo-jumbo that followed it.
Newhart is a classic piece of 1980’s television. It described America leading up to the Bill Clinton Presidency and thus was free of all the political correctness mumbo-jumbo that followed it.

Everyone in town sold their property to a Japanese corporation, and the finale included a parody of Fiddler on the Roof, and ended with Newhart waking up in bed with Suzanne Pleshette and explaining that he’d had a very strange dream (a tongue-in-cheek reference to the famous 1986-87 season of Dallas.)

Best Episode - Season 6 
Episode 121: “Take Me To Your Loudon” (Aired: 10/26/87)
It's Halloween, and the townspeople believe the town is about to be invaded by aliens.

A beloved excursion, many fans cite this installment as their very favorite of the entire series. They’re also likely to use it in evidence of the show’s supposed bent towards the surreal.

You see, this story doesn’t totally forsake logic — it just asks that we find it in the broad, heightened, and not all together relatable depictions of some of the characters. That‘s the reason that it’s hard to believe and thus seems “surreal.” 

It's Halloween and the Stratford is having a costume party, Michael has the station run the film "War Of The Worlds (1953)" on TV and the townsfolk believe they are being invaded by aliens from outer space.

A hilariously funny episode, in the top five best in the series. The laughs are non stop, George is the Cowardly Lion from "Wizard Of Oz', Dick the Tin Man, Joanna is Vampira, Michael dresses as a Canadian Mountie and Stephanie (naturally) is a princess. Harley shows up and tells about the invasion when he sees the movie on TV. Michael sees a chance for the same kind of panic Orson Welles caused with his radio version of "War Of The Worlds". Dick tries to be the voice of reason to the wacky towns people but they just accuse HIM of being from outer space! And Larry, Darryl and Darryl show up with their funniest introduction ever.

I think it represents the era most accurately, and, as such, is the most valuable.

And now, while we are at it, for another classic 1980’s movie…

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

Ferris Bueller takes a day off from school.
Ferris Bueller takes a day off from school.

Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick) is a born con artist. When he’s not talking a mile a minute to his girlfriend Sloane (Mia Sara) and his best friend Cameron (Alan Ruck), he’s stepping aside, facing the camera and addressing the audience.

In his dedication to the joy of loafing, Ferris convinces his parents he’s ill, the student body starts raising money to save his life with a kidney transplant, and the dean of students thinks all sorts of people are dying.

But Ferris isn’t dying. He’s just lying, and it’s the ninth time in the same semester.

He convinces Cameron to ‘borrow’ his father’s irreplaceable 1961 red Ferrari, and then swing by school to kidnap Sloane.

A large part of the film (directed by John Hughes) is then devoted to elaborate schemes designed to keep Ferris and his pals out of school: Answering machines are fixed, a fake body run by strings attached to a doorknob rolls around in Ferris’s bed to fool concerned and nosy parents, a sickbed message is recorded through a loudspeaker to answer the doorbell and deter inquisitive truant officers.

While the kids are bulldozing their way into an expensive restaurant, catching a ball game at Wrigley Field, and staging their own musical production number from Grease in the middle of a mysterious parade the principal – determined to catch Ferris red-handed – slinks around like a CIA agent on secret manoeuvres.
While the kids are bulldozing their way into an expensive restaurant, catching a ball game at Wrigley Field, and staging their own musical production number from Grease in the middle of a mysterious parade the principal – determined to catch Ferris red-handed – slinks around like a CIA agent on secret manoeuvres.

Hold the phone . . . if it’s a holiday, with floats and marching bands and 10,000 extras, why does anyone need to play hooky from school in the first place?

Brat-packer Charlie Sheen appears in a side-splitting cameo role as a drugged-to-the-eyeballs boy that spiteful sister Jeannie encounters at a police station. To get the necessary spaced-out effect, full method acting would have been a step too far, but Sheen did keep himself awake for 48 hours before the scene was shot. LOL.

If life is far too serious for you now with the COVID-19 pandemic a raging, perhaps some good old-fashioned Ferris Bueller wisdom might be in order.

I do believe that we all need to take a lesson from Ferris Bueller in today's day and age.
I do believe that we all need to take a lesson from Ferris Bueller in today’s day and age.

Oh, and while I am on a 1980’s bender…

Weird Science (1985)

Weird Science (1985)
Weird Science (1985)

Triumphant geeks have always been a common theme of writer/director John Hughes, but that triumph was never achieved as raucously as it was in 1985’s Weird Science – a screenplay which took the high school movie guru just two days to write.

Among the feats of sex-starved no-hope geek boys Gary (Anthony Michael Hall) and Wyatt (Ilan Mitchell-Smith): vanquishing a psycho older brother, gaining popularity and acceptance at school, and best of all, getting the girls – both the computer-generated kind and the real kind.

With a little Frankenstein-type mission on the brain, Gary convinces Wyatt to sit down at his souped-up computer and go to work on an interactive onscreen lady friend.

But with the lightning brewing outside, the bras atop their heads and the Barbie doll hooked up to the hardware, it’s inevitable the boys take things a little too far . . .

Lisa, the Frankenstein creation of two 1980's nerds.
Lisa, the Frankenstein creation of two 1980’s nerds.

Behold Lisa (Kelly LeBrock). Named after the computer (the Apple Lisa) on which she was designed, she is beautiful, brilliant and capable of some treacherous hocus-pocus. She also does their washing, cleaning and cooking – feminists will loathe this film.

Lisa fast becomes the boys’ well-needed mentor of cool. She brings them to a steamy nightclub, where they’re instant hits with the regulars; she hosts a whopper of a party at Wyatt’s house, where her duties include freezing Wyatt’s absurd grandparents and dealing with the gang of killer mutants who crash the festivities.

Weird Science (1985)
Weird Science (1985)

But most importantly, she teaches Wyatt and Gary how to stand up for themselves – which in this case, means facing off against the gun-toting, wedgie-bestowing older brother Chet (Bill Paxton), and, as if that’s not bad enough, a beastly biker type (played by Vernon Wells, reprising his Mad Max 2 role).

It’s enough to say that in the end, everyone gets what they deserve.

With that geek-dream-come-true premise and a quirky, catchy theme song from Oingo Boingo, Weird Science quickly became a favorite of the timid and nerdy. It is all 1980’s and it WILL carry your back to another time and place.

I know, I know…

Too many 1980’s flicks.

You all probably thought that I was going to give you REAL GENIUS (1985), and indeed I was. Nothing quite says the 1980’s more than this movie. For some reason it just carries me back… way back to that time. The music. The fashion. The “feeling”. Man, if you want to escape, nothing is better…

Ahhh Heck.

Real Genius (1985)

Female geniuses have bowl-cuts, no social boundaries and never sleep…

You can tell how dated this movie is. Instead of having a creme frappichino latte at a coffeehouse, the gang go ahead and drinks some beer and hamburgers together. man! Don't you just love it?
You can tell how dated this movie is. Instead of having a creme frappichino latte at a coffeehouse, the gang goes ahead and drinks some beer and hamburgers together. man! Don’t you just love it?

As a child of the 80s, I have a soft spot in my heart for creatively-executed movies from this period. At their worst, 80s movies become dated more quickly than films from nearly any other period in film history. At their best, 80s movies reflect the cultural undertones of an exciting time where humor and optimism were rampant in films despite the specter of cold war, the advent of AIDS and a rocky economy.

Oh, and did you know, dorm room closets are a fine place to put an entrance to a secret lair…

Terrific nostalgia trip down 80s memory lane - loved it! 
by heisenberg8313 November 2005

Had very fond memories of this film as a kid in the 80s. Still holds up even today. DVD widescreen format shows off how well directed this movie is. Val Kilmer is terrific as the genius slacker hero. The whole cast gel well together, and the dialogue is very sharp and well-written (reminded me of TV show Scrubs in places). Had me laughing out loud in many places - rare for a modern version like American Pie. Lots of tasty 80s musical montages scattered throughout. Something really likable and positive about this movie, leaves you feeling really good at the end. Highly recommended - really hasn't dated at all. An enjoyable trip down 80s memory lane!

Real Genius takes the happy, go-lucky optimism of the 80s and superimposes it on the grim topics of military research, cold war espionage and assassination. The movie is set in a west-coast college (see Caltech, Berkeley, Stanford) and makes full use of the hyper-intelligent, eccentric dialog you might expect in elite California academia.

Yup.

And eating hamburgers gives you very large breasts!

The sound track from Thomas Newman (Less than Zero, American Beauty and many others) is technically complex and involving and fits the movie perfectly.

In this classic 1980's movie, our heroes get to play with lasers and other cool things like popcorn.
In this classic 1980’s movie, our heroes get to play with lasers and other cool things like popcorn.

At times, the movie suffers from the usual poor depiction of science (see lame computer applications and some bad blue screen work on aircraft) and unbelievable scenarios (see water slide in lecture hall and ice sledding in dormitory). But we all know that top secret military computers use 6-character passwords…

Despite these forgivable breaches, the Neal Israel’s unique dialog is truly brilliant, the situational comedy is eccentric, and the humor is uplifting.

Getting even is a moral imperative!

Val Kilmer is outstanding in his portrayal of Chris Knight and I lament his departure from this odd and extremely intelligent form of comedy (See Top Secret) – Though Kilmer has been involved with “better” movies since, I don’t think he has ever been more genuinely entertaining.

One of the all time best 80's college movies 
by thirdi  3 November 2001

Val Kilmer is hilarious as a college genius on par with Einstein, but is more interested in partying and chasing girls. A new arrival to the campus, Mitch, is a brilliant 15 year-old whom Val takes under his wing and tries to get to loosen up and have a good time.

There are probably some important themes and ideas to analyze within this movie, but for me it's just an old-school personal favorite that I've seen about 100 times. Great 80's music soundtrack and funny performances. William Atherton is perfect as the self-important, snobby professor, and another highlight is Robert Prescott, who plays his butt-kissing, nerdy assistant "Kent".

A movie that asks the question, isn't life experience just as important for education, as classrooms and books? A very funny, fine film that is up there with "Animal House" in my opinion.
The bag guys get "their's". I love it. It's a good feel-good escapist movie that take you back to pre-Clinton America.
The bad guys get “their’s”. I love it. It’s a good feel-good escapist movie that take you back to pre-Clinton America.

I think this movie is a must-watch for anyone who enjoys science, comedy and the 80s genre, or for anyone who is planning on attending a technology school on the West coast. This movie may not depict reality, but it communicates a hopeful spirit we could all use more of in today’s world of harsh reality. Besides, Any problem can be solved with a catchy 80’s pop song and a montage.

Oh, and don’t forget, Jesus wants you to stop playing with yourself.


Ah, what can I say. The 1980’s was “the shit”. It’s great escapist clap-trap as it occurred at a time that predated all the political correctness nonsense of the Bill Clinton years, and the Military Empire building of the Bush years. It’s just a nice time capsule that will take you back to a time when people were not so easily offended and when people were ok with just being ok.

With that being said, I am going to offer up just one more 1980’s movie. This movie is a tad bit more obscure. Indeed finding it is near impossible, but OMG is it awesome.

Water (1985)

Water is a funny satire about West Indies-style politics and the decline of British colonialism. It is also a kind of raw smack in the face of commercialism and the media.
Water is a funny satire about West Indies-style politics and the decline of British colonialism. It is also a kind of raw smack in the face of commercialism and the media.

British comedy-writing legends Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais wrote this funny satire about West Indies-style politics and the decline of British colonialism in the Thatcher Era. Elements of the story were also inspired by the 1982 Falklands conflict (when Argentina invaded the British overseas territory in the south-west Atlantic Ocean).

An extremely funny film 
sxct16 June 2004

I am quite disappointed with the average for this film. I found it to be one of the funniest films I have ever seen. 

The cast is superb and the script, although not one of the best written, is filled with humor that was was made even better by the acting. It was filmed on the island of St. Lucia. 

It's a story of a company drilling for oil and accidentally discovers mineral water, a substance that is even more valuable than oil. But it is important to keep it a secret. Jimmie Walker, who I don't particularly like, plays the part of a radio dj and does it wonderfully. Michael Caine and Brenda Vaccaro are fabulous as is everyone else. 

Please give this film a chance. I think it might be one of those little surprises that come along every once in a while.

Set on a fictional Caribbean island (Cascara) owned by Britain but largely left to its own devices, the story centers around the discovery of a lucrative resource – the natural mineral water of the title – and the reaction of people on the island and other nations.

Location shooting for the fictional British Caribbean colony of Cascara took place in the real former British Caribbean colony of St. Lucia in the West Indies.

Water has a plot that is all over the place, but I have to admit the fact that the personal fights between the governor and his wife being broadcast all over the island really cracked me up.
Water has a plot that is all over the place, but I have to admit the fact that the personal fights between the governor and his wife being broadcast all over the island really cracked me up.
...of Houston Texas 
lavean on 13 December 2001

I thought this movie actually had some very funny and memorable lines...The characters are so stereotyped that they have all become caricatures...from the French Commandos on the beach who when they are breaking out their emergency rations are having the menu read to them by a Sergent who informs them that it will be "accompanied by an unpretentious St Emillion which will amuse even the most cynical palate"...the American Colonel who can't see the target for the Limbo dancers...when the guerilla mets the oil man he calls him a "Yankee capitalist imperialist...of Houston Texas", says the oil man extending his hand.

It was produced by George Harrison and has Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and a lot of other name musicians involved in the soundtrack.

It has a nice way to spend an hour and a half. 

No it has no deep hidden meaning nor will it change your life or make a social statement...but then I watch movies as a bit of escapism...this is one I sought out to own and when it comes out on DVD will buy it in that format as well.

The stand-out cast features Brits Leonard Rossiter, Billy Connolly, Maureen Lipman and Fulton Mackay and Americans Valerie Perrine, Fred Gwynne, Ruby Wax and Jimmie Walker.

Jimmie Walker, everyone…

Jimmie Walker plays the sole radio DJ in the sole radio station on the tiny island. He's hilarious.
Jimmie Walker plays the sole radio DJ in the sole radio station on the tiny island. He’s hilarious.

The charity rock band featured at the end of the movie – The Singing Rebels – features George Harrison (whose Handmade Films produced the movie), Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton and Jon Lord (of Deep Purple).

OK.

Maybe you don’t have the attention span for a movie. So let’s look at a nice 1980’s television show. Something that will take you to a land far, far away.

Maybe a little too far…

Let’s look at the classic…

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

A small-town housewife struggles to cope with the increasingly bizarre and violent events unfolding around her. It’s a way that the media was preparing America for the Bill Clinton years.

Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.

Set in fictional Fernwood, Ohio, this deliriously demented serial focused on the beleaguered heroine Mary Hartman, an average American housewife. In the first season, Mary suffered the travails of mass murder, adultery, venereal disease, homosexuality, religious cults, and UFO sightings, before she finally succumbed to a nervous breakdown on a syndicated talk show.

Then, things start to get crazy…

Wow, what a bizarre show 
7 July 2000 | by A-Ron-2 

This was one of those seminal moments in television history, because the 70s seemed to be more open to experimentation and strangeness than certainly the 80s and definitely the 90s.

Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was a show that was unclassifiable by any standard of TV today. Now, I haven't seen the show in about 15 years (I watched the whole series on tape at a friend of mine's back in the mid or late 80s), but I am sure that it would be just as bizarre and wonderful today as ever.

Martin Mull was brilliant as the psychopathic wife beater, Barth Gimble. I hope that TV Land or some other such channel will pick this show up, because I would really love to see it again.

A more insightfully absurd and comically astute series has not been made. Mix the daily grind of ALL MY CHILDREN, the experimentation of MONTY PYTHON, the self-absorbed and urbane existentialism of WOODY ALLEN and the offbeat quality of BLUE VELVET and you have MARY HARTMAN MARY HARTMAN.

Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.

I grew to love Mary Hartman’s kitchen (and other Fernwood locales) as if they were an extension of my own town and home. Too bad the show couldn’t have lasted longer than it did.

Candide in a consumer society 
melvelvit-1 written on 31 May 2008

A sharply satirical soap opera about a modern-day "Candide" (Louise Lasser) and the dysfunctional pre-fab Americana she inhabits. 

In the opening episodes (beginning 1/76), Mary has to contend with her impotent husband, indifferent daughter, pervert grandpa, hot-to-trot sister, and the massacre of a local family (along with their 2 goats and 8 chickens) but it seems the waxy yellow build-up on her kitchen floor subliminally affected the mass media-influenced Mary more than all the domestic drama combined. 

The absence of a canned laugh track can make viewers feel they're either losing their mind or experiencing a darkly comedic, penetrating pop-culture parody. Possibly both. I loved it then and I love it now!

For a brief period of time, somewhere around 9-11, I was fortunate enough to have viewed, for the first time in 20 years, the first episodes in which Mary is held captive by the guy who “killed the whole Lombardy family, two goats and six chickens”. And thus, from the vantage point of my 40s, I was finally able to really “get it.

Mary Hartman is one of the great emblems of the distress of the mid-20th century American woman. Her hair in childish pigtails while wearing those little girl dresses, Mary was an example of the overly-consumered, growth-stunted American housewife trying to function while in a semi-daze.

...The other thing that makes this tough on reruns is that Mary Hartman was so much a part of the 70's. What's hard to explain to people who weren't there, is how weird the 70's were. 

The whole country was in this very odd mood, partly giddy, partly freaked out, partly numb. 

I don't know if I can explain how Mary Hartman fit in to that, but it did and maybe not enough time has passed where it won't seem dated. 

The other thing is that the show had a whole parallel life running at the same time in the live soap opera of Louise Lasser's sudden fame. Her personal trajectory towards a nervous breakdown tracked Mary Hartman's. 

Do I need to remind everyone of her bizarre interviews in Rolling Stone, her bust for cocaine, and her appearance as the host on SNL, in which she also had a nervous breakdown. 

Years later it came out that this was not faked, that she was ready to refuse to appear on the show minutes before curtain time, and only agreed to appear once Chevy Chase convinced her that if she didn't go on, he'd go on in her place wearing a wig.

-outnaway  9 March 2009
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.
Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman.

Her confrontations with adultery, contemporary feminism, and countless other social issues (often found within her own family) while trying to be the perfect little housewife and mother makes her eventual nervous breakdown more than just another crazy plot twist.

In actuality, it was an inevitable progression.

Compare her and her friends and neighbors to Carol Burnett’s Eunice and other 70s television characters like Edith Bunker and you’d have a rather fascinating college course, I think. Perhaps I need to put one together!

Remember when Loretta came over to bring Mary Jell-O with Cracker Jacks suspended in it?

So, for those of you who have a similar fondness for this groundbreaking, offbeat series and to those who have never seen it, here’s to bringing Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman back in reruns.

A demented,glorious, masterpiece 
coop-1616 February 2002

Truly one of the greatest-and least remembered -TV shows of all time.I loved this show back in the seventies. It was a rich tapestry of comic-and touching- characters, exemplified by the naive heroine, Mary Hartman,and her friends, perhaps most unforgettable of whom was would be Country Music queen,Loretta Haggers, played by the sadly underused -and brilliant-Mary Kay Place.

But then this show was rich in fine acting-Dabney Coleman, martin Mull, and Marian Mercer, among others.If the Comedy channel can rerun "soap" why cant they rerun this masterpiece?

I know that it is tough to decide.

Just go hop in the car, and go through a drive through and get a burger. Then on the way ponder which movie or television show to watch. I always find it easier to think on a full stomach. So have the burger and then settle down and choose one…

Burger King's Whopper.
Burger King’s Whopper.

Conclusion

When you are living in a stressful and uncomfortable situation, it is time to sit back, enjoy a frosty beer and disconnect. It will relax your mind and permit you to recover. Nothing is better than reliving times that pre-dated the chaotic life that Americans now live.

Pick your “poison”;

  • Sixteen Candles
  • The Andy Griffith Show (Mayberry RFD)
  • F-Troop
  • Robinson Crusoe on Mars
  • Newhart
  • Ferris Bueller’s day off
  • Weird Science
  • Real Genius
  • Water
  • Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman

Pick one. Rent it, torrent it, or Netflix it.

Get some food and drink.

Take care, and enjoy life. The coronavirus will pass. America will be changed and a new “normal” will manifest. In the meantime, relax.


I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have more in my Movie Index here…

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Fun escapist movie- The Adventures of Tintin (2011)

Well, if you are stuck inside your home, with tons of time on your hands, nothing could be more rewarding than watching this jewel of a movie. For me, as I watched it, I became an eleven year old boy again. It’s a movie about adventure, strange lands, mysteries, pirates, and a cute white dog named Snowy. It’s also about treasure, hidden secrets, maps, and hidden clues, motorcycle escapes, and survival at sea. Oh, and let’s not forget being kidnapped and Shanghaied by your crew and an endless supply of whiskey. It’s everything that an eleven year old boy could want and more. And that is why I loved this movies and recommend it for all your co-shut-ins.

The movie is perfect, but I do believe that a bowl or Doritos or Wise / Lays (American style) potato-chips with a nice onion dip would really help to enhance the enjoyment of this movie. Oh, yeah, and don’t forget the frosty ice-cold beer while you are at it.

It’s a great movie to have your favorite pet by your side as well.

The Plot

Before he died in 1983, (the man who created Tintin) Hergé said that if any filmmaker was to adapt his collection of stories about the adventures of Tintin into a movie, then Steven Spielberg was the only man for the job.

Thus after two decades of trial and error, the cinematic version of Tintin has finally reached our screens.

Alongside Spielberg on this project was maestro Peter Jackson as producer (perhaps you know him from the Lord of the Rings trilogy) and three of Britain’s brightest writers (Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish).

What begins as a fun, nimble little mystery in the first act soon kicks into comedy-action-adventure high gear when junior reporter Tintin, with his brave dog Snowy, stumbles upon boozy Captain Haddock (an excellent Andy Serkis), whose family legacy may prove pivotal in a race to uncover the secret of the Unicorn.
What begins as a fun, nimble little mystery in the first act soon kicks into comedy-action-adventure high gear when junior reporter Tintin, with his brave dog Snowy, stumbles upon boozy Captain Haddock (an excellent Andy Serkis), whose family legacy may prove pivotal in a race to uncover the secret of the Unicorn.

This 3D motion-capture and CGI masterpiece combines three of Tintin’s most beloved stories ([1] The Crab with the Golden Claws, [2] The Secret of the Unicorn and [3] Red Rackham’s Treasure).

Spielberg and Jackson and all the team behind this movie adaptation obviously gave the original material the love and respect it deserved, while making it their own.

To clarify the origins of the story itself, you have to know that it isn’t the adaptation of one, but three Tintin comics.

Its beginning takes root in [1] “Le Crabe aux Pinces D’or”, while the rest of the movie revolves around the two-albums story of the hunt for Rakham the Red’s treasure, [2] “Le Secret de la Licorne” and [3] “Le Trésor de Rakham le Rouge”.

While it could seem like a lot of material for a whole movie, the choice of blending those three (two and a half) stories together turns out giving the movie a rather perfect pacing.

Snowy, while definitely smarter than your average cute canine, is also given to chasing cats, digging up fossilised bones from the desert, and gobbling sandwiches at decidedly inopportune moments. In other words, he's an instant audience favourite.
Snowy, while definitely smarter than your average cute canine, is also given to chasing cats, digging up fossilized bones from the desert, and gobbling sandwiches at decidedly inopportune moments. In other words, he’s an instant audience favorite.

After discovering an elegant model of the ship the ‘Unicorn’ at a market, Tintin (voiced by Jamie Bell) and his loyal dog Snowy are intrigued as to why so many desire it, and comment on the secrets it holds.

When the model is stolen, more information surfaces. And so the pair set out to discover the truth. Thus teaming up, after a surprise meeting, with the boisterous drunkard Captain Haddock (voiced by Andy Serkis).

Adventure

The group’s adventure spans the globe, with each destination bringing more danger and that crucial step closer towards unraveling the mystery.

From the moment the picture opens, the film’s tone and mood is set: mystery and adventure merged with fun and frolics.

The classy, hand-drawn, animated titles use the Tintin signature silhouette imagery with style and sophistication.

One extended chase sequence through the flooding streets of a North African city is so dazzling and dizzying it reminded me why no other filmmaker can match Spielberg when he lets his imagination out for a spin. Another action scene, told in flashback, depicts a breathless pirate showdown in a storm, and features some of the most playful transitions I've seen since Ang Lee's Hulk. There's a pretty good villain, too, played by a wily Daniel Craig.
One extended chase sequence through the flooding streets of a North African city is so dazzling and dizzying it reminded me why no other filmmaker can match Spielberg when he lets his imagination out for a spin.

The Adventures of Tintin is an entirely new bunch of blistering blue barnacles – every frame enforces impeccable detail and naturalism. And like the best animated pictures, viewers will forget they are watching digitalised representations in no time.

Visuals

Whether the visuals are mind-blowing as in the all-important action sequences or brilliantly subtle this film is a clear example of just how magnificent technology is in this day and age.

Tintin is brave, and he always gets out of the tangles he gets in. He is a good guy. He doesn’t know doubts…

Haddock is the dark side of Tintin. He is prone to anger and shouting insults, hard drinker, natural born loser…

Far from a being just a comical sidekick, Haddock is the human counterpart to the flawless hero that Tintin is.

The plot is a by the numbers mystery/adventure/treasure hunt, complete with bumbling detectives (so-so comic support from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost), exciting sea plane action and hidden clues, but it's brought to life in gorgeous visual style. While the script only comes alive in fits and starts, the whole film is bursting with rich detail, and is given added depth by a good, solid use of 3D. The virtual camera-work throughout is stupendous.
The plot is a by the numbers mystery/adventure/treasure hunt, complete with bumbling detectives , exciting sea plane action and hidden clues, but it’s brought to life in gorgeous visual style. The whole film is bursting with rich detail, and is given added depth by a good, solid use of 3D. The virtual camera-work throughout is stupendous.

With it’s tremendous visual flair, the feature’s script is a masterpiece. It is beautifully written. It possesses a kind of whimsical dialogue that is frequently hilarious and yet manages to keep people riveted to their seats.

An adaptation from the origional

Considering Hergé’s original stories are completely separate volumes, the writing trio behind this movie are able to make a sensible structure with the texts at hand.

And let’s not forget the laughs, as the script provides great character development for those new to the world of Tintin without insulting audiences with an hour’s lesson.

Young children will have no trouble picking up who’s who in the early stages, before settling back for the incredible roller coaster ride of the second and final climatic act.

The film is a really mixture of action and adventure. We see the heroes on board ships, rowing boats, fly airplanes, riding camels, having car\bike chases and crane fights. The time flew past for me and not once did i feel bored, this was probably down to the amount going with the film, the quick pace of the action and the different locations of the characters were always in. It reminded me of the Indiana Jones films a lot, where he is on the hunt for treasure, and he only has half of the clues, and the bad guys have the others half and both sides are trying to get the other half for the themselves. He then needs to go around the globe via different transportation to get the info he needs to find the treasure.
The film is a really mixture of action and adventure. We see the heroes on board ships, rowing boats, fly airplanes, riding camels, having car\bike chases and crane fights. The time flew past for me and not once did i feel bored.

Action fans will gain greatness from this movie too.

Expect high octane chases, pirate swordplay and more bullets than a Sylvester Stallone entry – just a lot less gore and swearing.

The main character is Tintin, who is a journalist who we never see doing any journalism though, but that doesn't matter because he is the textbook example of a heroic boy with boy scout qualities. The voice of Jamie Bell fits perfectly for the character. Andy Serkis gives here an incredible performance as Captain Haddock, the drunken sailor who to me was often reminiscent of a grumpy Harrison Ford. The story did seem as too much centered on Captain Haddock though, you could even say this should have been called "The Adventures of Captain Haddock" instead of Tintin. Daniel Craig is unrecognizable as the main villain Sacharine. Although his voice did jump to his normal voice in one line but otherwise you didn't know it was him. Of course I can't forget to mention the lovable dog, Snowy. He steals almost every scene that he is in. He is very realistic, he acts like a real dog and even gets his own chase scene. I'm telling you will adore this dog.
The main character is Tintin, who is a journalist who we never see doing any journalism though, but that doesn’t matter because he is the textbook example of a heroic boy with boy scout qualities. Of course I can’t forget to mention the lovable dog, Snowy. He steals almost every scene that he is in. He is very realistic, he acts like a real dog and even gets his own chase scene. I’m telling you, you will adore this dog.

Action packed

In fact, although The Adventures of Tintin is action-packed, its PG certificate is justified. Seriously, I cannot recall anything remotely damaging or frightening for young eyes. So relax. Eat some chips and spend quality time with your young-in’s.

The voice casting is collectively brilliant with Bell (Tintin) and Serkis (Haddock) being the obvious standouts.

Bell provides the voice for Tintin. It is his inquisitive tone and frequent high-pitched bursts that mirror the speech bubbles that Tintin utters in the comic panels.

When reading a Hergé story, this is exactly how the character sounds in your head don’t you know.


The action scenes are brilliantly written and directed, the angles of the camera, the drive of the action scenes, timing of all the jokes(physical or visual) is genius. Because Spielberg is a genius. He is the master of adventure movies and there never will be another genius in adventure movies like him.
The action scenes are brilliantly written and directed, the angles of the camera, the drive of the action scenes, timing of all the jokes(physical or visual) is genius. Because Spielberg is a genius. He is the master of adventure movies and there never will be another genius in adventure movies like him.

Serkis steals the show as Captain Haddock and is given splendid dialogue to growl through bitter Scottish chords. Haddock’s often stupid remarks and forgetfulness is beautifully represented through the animated character.

Daniel Craig is also fantastic as the less-than-trustworthy Ivanovich Sakharine, Heh heh.

And let’s not forget Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as the voice overs for the lovable policing dunces Thomson and Thompson.

Plus Snowy (the lovable dog) is absolutely wonderful.

The animation is magnificent, the motion capture has gone a long way since The Polar Express. It looks very realistic, especially all the features on Captain Haddock's face. The beard, the wrinkles and the eyes, they all looked amazing. Especially the eyes, they aren't so dead-eyed anymore as in The Polar Express.
The animation is magnificent, the motion capture has gone a long way. It looks very realistic, especially all the features on Captain Haddock’s face. The beard, the wrinkles and the eyes, they all looked amazing.

Welcome to the world of Tintin

Perhaps those new to Tintin will be influenced to re-visit the books and television shows of yesteryear and become more involved with one of the century’s most beloved and important literary creations.

Overall Spielberg has created an old-fashioned style adventure movie for the whole family to enjoy,where the important things are just the hunt for the treasure, the friendship two people can make and the most important thing of all that it is an entertaining ride. Spielberg never disappoints, it doesn't matter if you are a fan of Tintin or not, you will enjoy this film nonetheless
Overall Spielberg has created an old-fashioned style adventure movie for the whole family to enjoy,where the important things are just the hunt for the treasure, the friendship two people can make and the most important thing of all that it is an entertaining ride. Spielberg never disappoints, it doesn’t matter if you are a fan of Tintin or not, you will enjoy this film nonetheless

This was such an enjoyable film, there are so many great things about this movie.

Easily one of the most visually stunning films I have ever seen. The animation is perfect. it’s bright, colourful and scarily lifelike.

Tintin (Jamie Bell) is a young reporter who gets tangled in the affairs of smugglers when he buys a model ship from a scrap meet. When he gets kidnapped to the smugglers' ship, he meets Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis). He's a pure-hearted old drunk, who has information on a great treasure, told as a legend in his family for generations. He just needs to get sober enough to remember it. The adventure takes the pair to the Atlantic, Sahara, Morocco and finally back home. Tintin lives in an unmentioned European city that could be Brussels, London or any other one that has a sea port, really.
Tintin (Jamie Bell) is a young reporter who gets tangled in the affairs of smugglers when he buys a model ship from a scrap meet. When he gets kidnapped to the smugglers’ ship, he meets Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis). The adventure takes the pair to the Atlantic, Sahara, Morocco and finally back home.

The characters, scenery and landscapes all look incredible and so creative. Even the opening credits look fantastic! I can’t stress how good the visuals are in this film.

The film's story is faithful to the comic book, and thus ends promising more. I hope there will be, because I was willing to follow Tintin and Haddock on new adventures straight away! I'd say it's among the best, the most innovative comic-book films with Sin City and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. The film is excellent escapism from the dreary day-to-day life and it made me smile for the rest of the day.
The film’s story is faithful to the comic book, and thus ends promising more. I hope there will be, because I was willing to follow Tintin and Haddock on new adventures straight away! The film is excellent escapism from the dreary day-to-day life and it made me smile for the rest of the day.

The Movie Flows Well

Spielberg has done an incredible job here, nothing could have been improved in this aspect. The way the movie flows and the way the scenes intertwine and change is beautiful.

There are scenes where it switches from past to present and back again in such a way that you just get lost in it.. you will understand what i mean when you see the movie.

There are scenes of fights and chases which are so creative and so imaginative, the way he uses angles and the way everything links on is a real joy to watch. Its hard to explain, watch the film and you will know exactly what I mean.

Billions of blue blistering barnacles, Ten thousand thundering typhoons – for a whole generation these were the epitome of cuss words thanks to Captain Haddock. I am one of those in late 20s who grew up reading ( mugging to be precise as Thomson & Thompson would have said) Tintin and almost worship Herge for the genius intelligent stories created in the black and white times of our grandpas. Being an hardcore Tintin loyalist the excitement to see the boy sleuth of screen was certainly brewing high. But the movie left me wanting more. It left a mixed reaction in me and here I come one by one at different levels.
Billions of blue blistering barnacles, Ten thousand thundering typhoons – for a whole generation these were the epitome of cuss words thanks to Captain Haddock.

However, the film is not just a visual feast like many films are. It has a good solid story with likable, interesting characters – I found the story line kept my attention throughout. A very original adventure/quest film, searching for hidden treasure and defeating the bad guys along the way!

I cannot recommend this film enough, i was so surprised by just how good it was. I am sorry I didn’t go and see this in the cinema as it really would have been a fantastic experience.

Captain Haddock works brilliantly for the most part: he's unpredictable, endearing, and colourful in all the ways Tintin himself isn't. While the youngster is well played by Jamie Bell, he's mostly just there to work out the clues for the audience. Tintin and Haddock make for a good double-act, though: brains and brawn, cunning and in-over-his-head rashness; together they'd make a good Indiana Jones.
Captain Haddock works brilliantly for the most part: he’s unpredictable, endearing, and colorful in all the ways Tintin himself isn’t. Tintin and Haddock make for a good double-act, though: brains and brawn, cunning and in-over-his-head rashness; together they’d make a good Indiana Jones.

Exposition

The movie also deftly skips what could have been a typically Hollywoodish mistake of giving Tintin exposition. But none of that nonsense here.

Exposition in a written work is the passages which explain where events take place, what happened before the story begins, and the background of the characters.

Tintin is a reporter, that’s all you need to know.

That’s all the comics ever told us about him. None of them ever showed Tintin doing actual reporter work.

I don’t think he ever used a typewriter, he has no boss, no workplace. Tintin just finds himself where adventure is.

Because he’s a reporter.

Hergé never needed more, kudos for the guys behind this movie for keeping true to that. It will be held against them, but that will be coming from people who don’t know the original material.

Spielberg is almost perfect in designing the characters. The look and the way the screen Tintin reacts brings in nostalgia of childhood days when we imagined (and discussed amongst friends) how Tintin would have behaved if made on screen. The attire to expression was all nicely done. Same goes for Snowy, the cute loyal dog of Tintin who can fight with the goons to save his beloved master. In fact children will fall in love with Snowy after watching this film. In one of the scene when Tintin gets kidnapped Snowy follows the car of the goons to the ship were Tintin was deported. The scene indeed brings out the pathos and concern inside Snowy for his master.
Spielberg is almost perfect in designing the characters. The look and the way the screen Tintin reacts brings in nostalgia of childhood days. The attire to expression was all nicely done. Same goes for Snowy, the cute loyal dog of Tintin who can fight with the goons to save his beloved master. In fact children will fall in love with Snowy after watching this film. In one of the scene when Tintin gets kidnapped Snowy follows the car of the goons to the ship were Tintin was deported.

CGI Bad?

Yet the movie did a great job of shutting up the anti-CGI geek in me. It simply looks stunning, and your mind easily jumps back and forth between forgetting these are cartoon characters and appreciating their transition to a 3D environment, respectful of the original designs but literally bringing them to life.

Captain Haddock the characterization isn't as perfect as the comic book. The laziness and craziness in the first half were apt but then Captain fighting in the second half is too hard to digest. The detective duo Thompson and Thomson is appropriate and so is famous nightingale singer Bianca Castaphiore. But Spielberg should have included the verbal fights between Castaphiore and Haddock though he hinted Haddock and Snowy's disgust for Castaphiore's opera. Coming to the villains I am not convinced of Sachcharin as the main villain. The original had Bird Brothers as the villain duo which was more convincing than the screen one. In fact if they wanted to include a dreaded notorious villain then Rastapopulous (the evergreen big nosed enemy of Tintin) would have been the right choice. Even malicious Captain Allan has been relegated to side kick of Sachcharin. Captain Francis Haddock and Red Rackham's characters were true to the original book and it worked well.
The detective duo Thompson and Thomson is appropriate and so is famous nightingale singer Bianca Castaphiore. Captain Francis Haddock and Red Rackham’s characters were true to the original book and it worked well.

In short, all these elements drew me to the same conclusion, Spielby and co. managed to deal a great adaptation.

One that has true respect for the original material, and the great ambition of adding something to it.

Yes, not everything of it. “Le Crabe aux Pinces D’or” could have deserved a whole movie itself. So yeah, shortcuts are taken, and as true to their originals as they are, the characters have been redesigned.

But in the end you have a movie that can be appreciated both by fans of the comics as well as people who have “just heard about them”.

It is fun, packed with adventure and action, enjoyable at all ages.

And most of all, you can go see it without having to worry about seeing another piece of Hollywood-flavored perversion, a fast-foodified betrayal.

It's an old-fashioned treasure hunt. Tintin runs into a frequently inebriated Captain Haddock (voice of Andy Serkis), who has a strong connection to the original Unicorn and to the scrolls themselves. With Haddock and Snowy at his side, Tintin races across the globe to solve the mystery before Sakharine, a journey that takes him to multiple continents, fighting bad guys with swords, guns, fists, and feet. It's a throwback movie; a movie quite similar to Raiders of the Lost Ark, itself a throwback to the serials of the early 20th century. And, of course, the director here is one Steven Spielberg, whom you might recognize as a progenitor of that Raiders universe himself.
It’s an old-fashioned treasure hunt. Tintin runs into a frequently inebriated Captain Haddock (voice of Andy Serkis), who has a strong connection to the original Unicorn and to the scrolls themselves. With Haddock and Snowy at his side, Tintin races across the globe to solve the mystery before Sakharine, a journey that takes him to multiple continents, fighting bad guys with swords, guns, fists, and feet.

Some background

Since 1981, Spielberg has become an avid fan of this gorgeous “Tintin” comics and has been longing to create a film about it. Before he and “Tintin’s” master, Herge could meet, Herge passed away.

However, Herge’s widow decided to give them the rights and began the adventure to re-create this marvelous wonder of art.

Three comics

Adapted from three of the comics, Spielberg’s re-creation of the comics introduces us to Tintin (Jamie Bell), a Belgian reporter who gets caught up in all sorts of adventures.

One day, he found a model of a ship, the Unicorn and bought it and brought it home. However, when Tintin was buying the ship, two men came to try to buy the model, Sakharine (Daniel Craig) and Barnaby.

Later, Tintin discovers that the model holds an important secret and somehow, the secret is linked to the real ship itself. On the way for answers, he meets the grumpy Haddock and head off to an adventure spanning around the globe with his white fluffy dog Snowy.

Animation

The animation is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen. It’s not right to call it a CGI film as the motion of the characters are much smoother than that of CGI films. Tintin’s animated self looks stunning (even though he looks kind of different from his comic-self) in his blue long sleeves.

Snowy is fluffier than ever.

Captain Haddock is grumpier than ever.

All of the animation is simply breathtaking and the best I’ve ever seen.

Here's an added bonus - apparently, the movie is very close to the source material. Tintin has not been updated or modified to mollify new audiences; remember, so many Americans have never heard of the intrepid reporter. And there's no time waste on explaining who Tintin is, or what he is, or how old he's supposed to be. You know why? Because it's irrelevant, that's why. He's just an adventuring dude with a smart dog and a lot of panache.
Here’s an added bonus – apparently, the movie is very close to the source material. Tintin has not been updated or modified to mollify new audiences; remember, so many Americans have never heard of the intrepid reporter. And there’s no time waste on explaining who Tintin is, or what he is, or how old he’s supposed to be. You know why? Because it’s irrelevant, that’s why. He’s just an adventuring dude with a smart dog and a lot of panache.

Scene shifting

I like how they change scenes.

While most other movies just shift scenes normally, this film uses a little imagination and is ingenious in shifting scenes. They can change from a scene of shaking hands to a desert scene by using the outline of the two hands into the surface of the desert.

This thing is just entertaining and great in its own right and deserves some reward.

A Fun Movie

The movie itself is fun to watch. The story is compelling, the lines are natural-sounding, and the action is plenty of fun to watch. It is great excitement to watch and I was hooked from beginning to end. Great plot + awesome action + breathtaking animation equals up to amazing movie.

The 3D is perfectly fine. The depth is seen and the 3D just makes the movie even more fun to watch.

The movie is animated, both literally and figuratively, and the animation is so exquisitely realistic that it's easy to perceive it as completely lifelike. The action is intense and relentless, but because of the depth of detail in the animation, it's tough to imagine it as anything other than a terrific live-action film. When Tintin leaps from building to building or from a moving car, we actually cringe - can he make it?
The movie is animated, both literally and figuratively, and the animation is so exquisitely realistic that it’s easy to perceive it as completely lifelike. The action is intense and relentless, but because of the depth of detail in the animation, it’s tough to imagine it as anything other than a terrific live-action film. When Tintin leaps from building to building or from a moving car, we actually cringe – can he make it?

Excitement

OK, let’s release now all the excitement about this movie. If I had just five short seconds to say how I think this movie is I’d chose 7 words: Mesmerising from the beginning to the end. That’s quite true if you consider that even the opening credits are little shining pearls of direction and creativity.

Overall Impression

The general impression you get from this movie, talking about direction, is that nothing could have been better. Spielberg’s direction is, in this case as well, a real warranty of general great quality.

Three things I particularly appreciated:

  • There’s literally a STORM of brain-waves (and here comes the Spielberg’s touch); especially, in the connection phases between one scene and the other the director totally expresses his genius, turning the open ocean into a pond, making two shaking hands become dunes in the desert and so on (you’ll understand what I mean when you’ll watch the movie)
  • The ‘camera’s movements’ literally pull you into the movie and you can’t help feeling excited or scared according to the situation.
  • The movie flows perfectly; it is kind of a pleasure for your eyes and for your brain to follow the adventure.

You can tell it’s a Spielberg’s movie even just looking at these things.

The quality of animation.

I really could not find a proper term to define my astonishment when my eyes approached the beautiful places and landscapes shown in the movie. They look perfect, shining and bursting with emotions, sensations; they almost look like paintings: For instance, there’s a sunset in the movie that I will hardly forget. It’s the same with the CGI models: you can see the wrinkles on the character’s faces, even their sweat.

The Actors

Furthermore, some words about the actors: Bells and Serkis are maybe the sole two living beings who could have given birth to the cinematographic version of the two main characters.

The first succeeds in the hard challenge to provide the audience with a convincing and faithful interpretation of the beloved protagonist (he did A GREAT job indeed), the second is a delightful surprise again, with a funny Scottish accent and a very good interpretation.

Soundtrack

One last word goes to one of the best composer alive: Sir John Williams. There’s nothing to do, every piece of music he creates is able to touch the deepest strings of our hearts.

With a soundtrack that ranges from the epic tones to the mysterious ones he gives us another example of his limitless genius, because he still remains one of those composers able to make us cry.


Conclusion

‘The Adventures of Tintin’ is quintessentially the perfect family film and has plenty to offer audiences of all ages. This is an incredibly joyous, thrilling and comically genius adventure. Hergé was onto a winner with his thoughts towards Spielberg and he can rest easy now knowing his tales have been faithfully and beautifully translated into a cinematic masterwork. Great Snakes, it’s good.

I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other similar posts in my movie index here…


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The Golden Egg (full text) by Theodore Sturgeon

Here’s a nice classic story from the Golden Age” of Science Fiction literature. It was sritten by one of the “greats” of the gendre, Mr. Theodore Sturgeon and this work is classic. I hope that you read it and enjoy it as much as I have. It’s a great story for a nice lazy afternoon day.

THE GOLDEN EGG

WHEN time itself was half its present age, and at an unthinkable distance, and in an unknowable dimension born.

He left his world so long before he came to earth that even he did not know how long he had been in space. He had lived so long on that world that even he could not remember what he had been before his science changed his race.

Though we can never know where his world lay in space, we know that it was in a system of two mighty suns, one blue and one yellow. His planet had an atmosphere and a great civilization and science beyond humanity’s most profound visions. He spoke little of his planet because he hated it.
Too perfect. Their sciences fed them, and controlled the etheric currents that gave them comfort, and carried them from place to place, and taught them, and cared for them in every way. For many aeons there were members set apart to care for the machines, but in time they died out, for they were no longer needed. There was no struggle and no discomfort and no disease. There were therefore no frontiers, no goals, no incentives, and eventually no possible achievements, save one—the race itself, and the changes possible to it.

Step by step the thing was done. Limbs were not and wasted away from long-lived, lazy bodies, and were replaced, redesigned, or forgotten. And as the death of an inhabitant became more rare, rarer still became the advent of new life. It was a mighty race, a powerful race, a most highly civilized race, and—a sterile race.

The refinement went on endlessly, as occasional flashes of initiative appeared down through the ages. What was unnecessary was discarded, and what could be conceivably de­sirable was attained, until all that was left was a few thou­sand glittering golden ovoids, supermental casings, func­tionally streamlined, beautiful and bored. It was life of a sort. The beings could move as and if they wished, through air or time or space. Everything was done for them auto­matically; each was self-sufficient and uncooperative. Brains they were, armored in a substance indestructible by anything less powerful than the heat of the mightiest of suns or by the supercosmic forces each could unleash at will.

But there was no will. There was nothing for them. They hung in small groups conversing of things unimaginable to us, or they lay on the plains of their world and lived within themselves until a few short aeons buried them, all uncaring, in rubble and rock. Some asked to be killed and were killed. Some were murdered by others because of quibblings in remote philosophic discussions. Some hurled themselves into the blue sun, starved for any new sensation, knowing they would find there an instant’s agony.

Most simply vegetated. One came away.

He stopped, in a way known to him—stopped in space so that his world and solar system and corner of the cosmos fell away from him and left him free. And then he traveled.

He traveled to many places and in many ways, as his whims dictated. He extended himself at times around the curve of curved space, until the ends of him were diametrically opposite; and then he would contract in a straight line, reforming countless millions of light years from the point of his extension; and his speed then was, of course, the speed of light cubed. And sometimes he dropped from his level in time to the level below, and would then lie poised and thoughtful during one cycle, until he was returned to the higher level again; and it was thus he discovered the nature of time, which is a helical band, ever revolving, never moving in its superspace. And sometimes he would move slowly, drifting from one gravitic pull to another, searching disinterestedly for the unusual. It was in such a period that he came to earth.

A goose found him. He lay in some bushes by a country road, distantly observing the earth and analyzing its elements, and the goose was a conventional one and blindly proud of its traditional silliness. He ignored it when it approached him and when it rapped his shell curiously; but when it turned him over with its beak he felt that it was being discourteous. He seized it with a paralyzing noose of radiations, quickly read its minuscule mind for a way to annoy it, and then began pulling its tail feathers out tb see how it would react. It reacted loudly.

Now, it so happened that Christopher Innes was on that country road, bringing the young’un home from Sunday school. Chris was an embittered and cynical mortal, being a normal twelve-year-old who had just learned that increasing age and masculinity made for superiority, and was about to be a teen-ager and find out differently. The young’un was his five-year-old sister, of whom he was jealous and protective. She had silly ideas. She was saying:

“But they tol’ me in school last week, Chris, so it mus’ be so, so there. The prince came into the palace an’ everyone was asleep, an’ he came to the room where she was, an’ she was asleep, too, but he kissed her an’ she woke up, and then everyone—”

“Aw, shut your fontanel,” said Chris, who had heard that babies shut their fontanels when they started to grow, though he didn’t know what one was. “You believe everything you hear. Ol’ Mr. Becker tol’ me once I could catch a bird by putting salt on its tail, an’ then whaled me for loadin’ up a twelve-gauge shotgun with rock salt and knockin’ off three of his Rhode Island Reds. They tell you that stuff so they’ll have a chance to hit you afterward.”
“I don’t care, so there,” pouted the young’un. “My teacher wouldn’t hit me for b’lieving her.”

“Somebody will,” Chris said darkly. “What’s all that racket, I wonder?

Sounds like a duck caught in a fox trap. Let’s go see.”

Chris stopped to pick up a piece of stick in case he had a trap to pry open, and the young’un ran ahead. When he reached her he found her jumping up and down and clapping her hands and gurgling, “I told you so! I told you so!” which is the most annoying thing any woman can say to any man.
“You tol’ me whut?” he asked, and she pointed. He saw a large white goose digging its feet into the ground, straining to get away from its invisible bonds, while behind it lay a glittering ovoid. As they watched, a tail feather detached itself from its anchorage and fell beside two of its prototype on the ground.

“Chee!” Chris breathed.

“They tol’ me that story, too!” chortled the young’un. “About the goose that laid the golden egg. Oh, Chris, if we take that goose home an’ keep um, we’ll be rich an’ I can have a pony an’ a hundred dolls an’—”

“Chee,” Chris said again and gingerly picked up the golden egg. As he did so the goose was released suddenly, and its rooted claws shot it forward face first into the earth, where it lay stunned and quonking dismally. As only a farm child can, the young’un caught its legs together and picked it up in her arms.

“We’re rich!” breathed Chris and laughed. Then he remembered his assertions and frowned. “Aw, it didn’t lay no egg. Someone lost it an’ this ol’ goose jus’ found it here.”

“It’s the golden-egg goose! It is too!” shrilled the young’un.

Chris spat on the egg and rubbed it with his cuff. “It’s sure pretty,” he said half to himself, and tossed it into the air. He must have stood there open-mouthed for two full minutes with his hands out, because it never came down. It vanished.

They found out later that the goose was a gander. Neither of them ever quite got over it.

“It might be interesting,” thought the armored brain to himself as he lay in the stratosphere, “to be a biped like that for a while. I believe I will try it. I wonder which of the two is the more intelligent—the feathered or unfeathered ones?” He pondered a moment over this nice distinction and then remembered that the boy had armed himself with a stick, while the goose had not. “They are a little ungainly,” he thought, then shrugged mentally. “I shall be one of those.”

He plummeted down to earth, braked off, and shot along just over the surface until he came to a small town. A movement in a tiny alley caught his attention; a man there was leveling a gun at another across the street. Unseen, the being from space flashed between them, and his path intersected that of the bullet. It struck his smooth side and neither left a mark nor changed his course by a thousandth of a degree as it spun into the street four feet below him. The intended victim went his way unharmed, and the man in the alley swore and went to his room to take his gun apart wonderingly. He had never missed a shot like that before!
Just outside the town the brain found what he had been looking for—a field under which was a huge mass of solid rock. He came to rest in the field and dropped from sight, sinking through sod and earth and granite as if it had been water; and in a matter of minutes he had cut himself a great underground chamber in the rock, with high arched walls and a vaulted ceiling and a level, polished floor. Hovering for a moment in midair, he tested the surrounding countryside for its exact chemical content, sending out delicate high-frequency beams, adjusting them fractionally for differences in molecular vibrations. The presence of a certain fine harmonic at any given frequency indicated to him the exact location of the elements he needed. There were not many. These bipeds were hardly complex.

“A type—a type,” he thought. “I must have something to work from. I gather that these creatures are differentiated from each other in certain ways.”

He slipped up through the roof of his chamber and went back to the town, where he found a busy corner and hid up under an eave, where he could watch the people passing.

“Those smaller ones must be the males,” he ruminated, “the ones that strut and slink and apparently do little work and wear all those blatant colors and so ridiculously accentuate the color of the oral orifice. And the larger, muscular ones, I suppose, are females. How drab.’’

He projected a beam that would carry thought impulses to him. It touched the mind of a young man who was mooning after a trim blonde just ahead of him. He was a hesitant and shy young man, and a passionate one, and the battle he fought within himself, between his inclinations and his diffidence, almost dislodged the creature in the eaves.

“Whew!” thought the golden ovoid. “An emotional monstrosity! And it appears that I was a little mistaken about males and females. How very quaint!

“I shall be one of the males,” he decided at length.

Wisely, he searched about until he found a girl who was suffering from every “osis” in the advertisements, as well as an inferiority complex, acne, bunions, and tone-deafness, knowing that her idea of an ideal man would be really something. Inserting gentle thought tendrils into her mind, he coaxed her to dream a lovely dream of her ideal man as she walked along, and carefully filed away all the essentials, disregarding only the passion the dream man showered on the poor starved creature. Enveloped by the dream he had induced, she walked into the path of an automobile and was rather badly hurt, which was all right, because she later married the driver.The brain sped back to the laboratory, nursing his mental picture of a muscular, suave, urbane, sophisticated, and considerate demigod, and began to assemble his machinery.

Now the brain had no powers, as such. What he had was control. The engineer of a twenty-car train would be stupid even to dream about hurling such a train at a hundred and twenty miles an hour along a track if he had to do so himself with his own physical powers. But with his controls the thing is easy. In the case of the brain, his controls were as weak compared with the final results of it as is a man’s arm compared with the two thousand horsepower delivered by a locomotive. But the brain knew the true nature of space: that it is not empty, but a mass of balanced forces.
Press two pencils together, end to end. As long as the pressure is even and balanced the effect is the same as if the pencils were just resting their ends together. Now get some tiny force to press on the point where the pencils come together. They snap out of line; they deliver a powerful resultant, out of all proportion to the push which upset the equilibrium, and you probably break a knuckle. The resultant is at right angles to the original equalized forces; it goes just so far and then the forces come together in equilibrium again, knuckles notwithstanding.

We live in a resilient universe; the momentary upset is negligible, since the slack is taken up to infinity. Such a control had the brain from space. Any and every form of energy —and matter is energy—was his to control, to any degree. The resultant from one tiny upset balance could be used to upset another; and a chain like this could be extended ad infinitum.

Fortunately, the brain knew how not to make mistakes!

He made his apparatus quickly and efficiently. A long table; tanks and small bins of pure elements; a highly complex machine with projectors and reflectors capable of handling any radiation that can be indicated on a circular spectrum, for compounding and conditioning the basic materials. The machine had no switches, no indicators, no dials. It was built to do a certain job, and as soon as it was completed it began working. When the job was done it quit. It was the kind of machine whose perfection ruined the brain’s civilization, and has undoubtedly ruined others, and will most certainly ruin more.

On the surface of the table appeared a shadow. Cell by cell appeared as the carbon-magnesium-calcium mixtures were coordinated and projected by the machine. A human skeleton was almost suddenly complete—that is, an almost human skeleton. The brain was impatient with unnecessary detail, and if there were fewer vertebrae and more but finer ribs, and later, a lack of appendix, tonsils, sinal cavities, and abductors minimi digiti, then it was only in the interest of logic. The flesh formed over the skeleton, fiber by perfect fiber. Blood vessels were flat, their insides sealed to each other until the body was complete enough to start distributing blood. The thing was “born” with a full stomach; it began its functions long before it was complete enough for the brain’s entry.

While it was forming, the brain lay in a corner of the room reasoning it out. He knew its construction and had carried it out. Now he asked the reasons for its being this way, and calculated its functions. Hearing, sight with light, communication by vibrating tissues, degree of telepathy, organs of balance, possible and probable mental and physical reflexes, all such elementary things were carefully reasoned out and recorded on that fathomless brain. It was not necessary to examine the body itself or to look at it. He had planned it, and it would be as he had planned. If he wished to study any part of it before it formed, he had his memory.

The body lay complete eventually. It was a young and strong and noble creature. It lay there breathing deeply and slowly, and under its broad, intellectual forehead its eyes glowed with the pale light of idiocy. The heart beat firmly, and a tiny twitch in the left thigh developed and disappeared as the cells adjusted themselves to each other. The hair was glossy and black and was in a pronounced widow’s peak. The hairline was the line separating the two parts of the head, for the top part was a hinged lid which now gaped open. The white matter of the brain was formed completely and relaid to make room for the metal-encased creator.
He drifted up to the head of the table and settled into the open skull. A moment, and then it snapped shut. The young man—for such he was now—lay quiet for a long while, as the brain checked the various senses—temperature, pressure, balance, and sight. Slowly the right arm raised and lowered, and then the left, and then the legs rose together and swung over the edge of the table and the young man sat up. He shook his head and gazed about with his rapidly clearing eyes, turned his head stiffly, and got to his feet. His knees buckled slightly; he grasped the table spasmodically, not bending his fingers because he hadn’t thought of it yet. His mouth opened and closed, and he ran his tongue over the inside of his mouth and lips and teeth.

“What an awkward way to get around,” he thought, trying his weight on one leg and then the other. He flexed his arms and hands and hopped up and down cautiously.

“Agh!” he said waveringly. “A-a-a-gh-ha-agh!” He listened to himself, enchanted by this new way of expressing himself. “Ka. Pa. Ta. Sa. Ha. Ga. La. Ra,” he said, testing the possibilities of linguals, gutturals, sibilants, palatals, labials, singly and in combination. “Ho-o-o-o-owe-e-e-e!” he howled, trying sustained tones from low to high pitch.

He tottered to the wall, and with one hand on it began padding up and down the room. Soon the support was no longer necessary, and he walked alone; and then he went faster and faster and ran round and round, hooting strangely. He was a little disgusted to find that violent activity made his heart beat fast and his breathing harder. Flimsy things, these bipeds. He sat panting on the table and began testing his senses of taste and touch, his muscular and oral and aural and visual memories.

Chauncey Thomas was an aristocrat. No one had ever seen him in patchy pants or broken shoes. They would, though, he reflected bitterly, if he didn’t get a chance to steal some soon. “What de hell,” he muttered. “All I ast is t’ree meals a day and good clo’es, an’ a house an’ stuff, an’ no work to do. Hell!. An’ dey tell me I can get t’ings by workin’. It ain’t worth it. It just ain’t worth it!”

He had every right to be bitter, he thought. Not only do they throw him down three flights of stairs in the town’s most exclusive apartment house just because he was sleeping on the landing, but they stick him in jail for it. Did he get a chance to rest in jail? He did not. They made him work. They made him whitewash cells. That was hardly right. Then they gave him the bum’s rush out of town. It was unfair. What if it was the ninth time they had booked him? “I got to find me another town,” he decided. He was thinking of the sheriff’s remark that next time he was run in the sheriff would pin a murder on him if he had to kill one of his deputies to do it.
Chauncey turned his slow, unwilling feet onto the Springfield Turnpike and headed away from town. The night was two hours old and very warm. Chauncey slouched along with his hands in his pockets, feeling misunderstood. A slight movement in the shadows beside the road escaped his attention, and he never realized that anyone was there until he found himself picked up by the slack of his trousers and dangling uncomfortably from a mighty fist.

“I ain’t done nothin’!” he squalled immediately, resorting to a conversational reflex of his. “Le’s talk this over, now bud. Aw, come on, now; you got nothin’ on me. You—awk!

Chauncey’s mouthings became wordless when he had man­aged, by twisting around in his oversize clothes, to see his captor. The vision of a muscular giant, at least six feet five, regarding him out of fathomless, shadowy eyes as he held him at arm’s length was too much for Chauncey Thomas. He broke down and wailed.

The naked Apollo spun the bum about in midair and caught him by the belt. He plucked curiously at the worn jacket, reached down and tore a piece of leather out of the side of an outsize sport shoe as if it had been made of blotting paper, studied it carefully, tossed it aside.

“Lemme go!” shrieked Chauncey. “Gee, boss, I wasn’t doin’ nothin’, honest I wasn’t. I’m goin’ to Springfield, I’ll get a job or somethin’, boss!” The words burned his mouth as he said them, but this was an emergency and he had to say something.

“Gha!” grunted the giant, and dropped him on his ear in the middle of the road.

Chauncey scrambled to his feet and scuttled off down the road. The giant stood watching him as he slowed, made a U-turn, and came running back under the influence of a powerful hypnotic suggestion emanating from that great clean body. He stood awed and trembling before the new-born one, wishing he were dead, wishing he were away from there—even in jail.

“Who-who are you?” he faltered.

The other caught Chauncey’s shifty eyes in his own deep gaze. The hobo’s shaken mind was soothed; he blinked twice and sank down on his knees beside the road, staring upward into the inscrutable face of this frightening, fascinating man. Something seemed to be crawling into Chauncey’s mind, creeping about there. It was horrifying and yet it wasn’t unpleasant. He felt himself being drawn out; his memories examined; his knowledge of human society and human customs and traditions and history. Things he thought he had forgotten and wanted to forget popped up, and he felt them being mulled over. Within a few minutes the giant had as complete a knowledge of human conduct and speech as Chauncey Thomas had ever had.

He stepped back, and Chauncey slumped gasping to the ground. He felt depleted.

“Get up, bum,” said the big man in Chauncey’s own idiom.

Chauncey got up; there was no mistaking the command in that resonant voice. He cringed before him and whined: “Whatcha gonna do wit’ me, boss? I ain’t—”

“Shut up!” said the other. “I ain’t gonna hurt you.” Chauncey looked at the immobile face. “Well . . . I . . . I guess I’ll be on my way.”

“Aw, stick around. Whatcha scared of?”

“Well . . . nothin’ . . . but, who are you, anyway?”

“I’m Elron,” said the giant, using the first euphonious syllables that came to mind.

“Oh. Where’s yer clo’es? You been rolled?”

“Naw. Well, yeah. Wait here for me; I think I can—”

Elron bounded over the hedge, not wanting to astound the little tramp too much. From Chauncey’s mind he had stolen a mental photograph of what Chauncey considered a beautiful outfit. It was a plaid suit with a diamond-checked vest and yellow shoes; a wing collar and a ten-gallon hat. Slipping into his underground laboratory, Elron threw back the casing of the complex projector that had built him his body and made a few swift adjustments. A moment later he joined Chauncey, fully clad in Chauncey’s own spectacular idea of tailoring to taste.

“Hully gee!” breathed Chauncey.

They walked along the road together, Chauncey quite speechless, Elron pensive. A few cars passed them; Chauncey automatically and without hope flung a practiced thumb to­ward each. They were both surprised when a lavish roadster ground to a stop ahead of them. The door was flung open; Chauncey slid in front of Elron and would have climbed in but for Elron’s grasping him by the scruff of the neck and hauling him back.

“In the rumble, lug,” he ground out.

“Nuttin’ good ever happens t’ me,” muttered Chauncey as he followed orders. He had seen the driver. She was lovely.

“Where are you bound?” she asked as Elron closed the door.

“Springfield,” he said, remembering from something Chauncey had said that the town was on this road. He looked at this newest acquaintance. She was as tiny and perfect as he was big and perfect, and she handled the car with real artistry. Her eyes were deep auburn to match her hair. Judging her by human standards, Elron thought her very pleasing to look upon.
“I’ll take you there,” she said.

“T’anks, lady.”

She looked at him quickly.

“What’s up, babe?” he asked.

“Oh—nothing. Don’t call me ’babe.”

“Okay, okay.”

Again she flashed him a look. “Are you—kidding me?” she asked.

“What about?”

“You look—oh, I don’t know.”

“Spill it, sister.”

“Oh, sort of—well, not like the kind who calls girls `babe.’ “

“Oh,” he said. “You mean—you’d say it different, like.”

He was having trouble with Chauncey’s limited vocabulary.

“Something like that. What are you going to do in Springfield?”

“Just look around a little, I guess. I want to see a city.”

“Don’t tell me you never saw a city!”

“Listen,” he snapped, covering up his error by falling back on one of Chauncey’s devices, “it ain’t worryin’ you any, is it? What do you care?”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said acidly. He sensed something strained about the silence that followed.

“Mad, huh?”

She looked at him scornfully and sniffed.

The trivial impasse intrigued him. “Stop here,” he ordered her.

What?” she asked furiously.

He leaned forward and caught her eye. “Stop here!

She cut the ignition and the big car slid to a stop. Elron took her shoulder and turned her to him. She almost struggled but hadn’t time.

Tendrils of thought stole into her brain, explored her memories, her tastes, her opinions and philosophies and vocabulary. He learned why it was déclassé to address a woman as “babe,” and that among civilized people ten-gallon hats were not worn with wing collars. He liked the language she used a little better than Chauncey’s harsh inadequacies. He learned what music was, and a great deal about money, which, strangely enough, was something that almost never crossed Chauncey’s mind. He learned something of the girl herself; her name was Ariadne Drew, she had a great deal of wealth she had not earned, and she was so used to being treated according to her station in life that she was careless about such things as picking up hitchhikers on the road.

He let her go, snatching the memory of the incident from its place in her mind, so that she started the car and drove off.

“Now what an earth did I stop for?”

“So I could check up on that rear tire,” he ad-libbed. He thought back about things he had discovered that might interest her. Clothes were a big item.
“I must apologize,” he said to her, word for word in her own vernacular, “for this hat. It’s just too, too revolting. I saw a cute little number the other day in a shoppe on the avenue, and I mean to get it. My dear, I mean!
She glanced aghast at his noble profile and bulging shoulders. He chatted on.

“I saw Suzy Greenfield the other day. You know Suzy. Oh, she didn’t see me! I took care of that! And do you know who she was with? That horrible Jenkins person!”

“Who are you?” she asked him.


“I hear that Suzy is— What? Who am I? Oh, yes; about Suzy. You’ve probably heard this awful gossip before”—she had!—”so stop me if you have. But she told her husband—”

“This is as far as I go,” snapped the girl, wheeling the car over to the curb.

“Well, I—” Elron sensed that the right thing to do would be to get out of the car. He opened the door and turned to her.

“Thank you for the lift, darling. Let me know if I can do the same for you sometime.” He stepped up onto the walk, and she slammed the door and rolled the window open.

“You’ve forgotten to polish your fingernails,” she said nastily, and slammed the car into gear.

“Now what the hell did you do?” asked a voice at the side. Chauncey was looking longingly after the roadster.

“Don’t swear,” said Elron. “It’s vulgar. You are very crude, Chauncey. I don’t want to have you around. Good-by, darling.” Could Elron help it if Ariadne Drew called everybody “darling”?

The little bum stood open-mouthed, staring after the Greek god in his noisy plaid suit, and then followed slowly. “Dat mug’ll bear watchin’!” he muttered. “Hully gee!”

Elron, with his new-found knowledge of human affairs, had little trouble securing a few dollars from a man he passed on the street—all he had to do was to demand it—and getting a hotel room for his body. From Ariadne’s mind he had found out what handwriting was, and he signed the register and paid for a room without a hitch. Once his body was parked conventionally in bed, he popped the head open and slipped out. He felt that the body would relax a little better without him.

He drifted out of the window and hung for a while high above the town, searching for a familiar vibration—the impulses of Ariadne’s mind. Freed from the cumbersome human body, Elron was far more sensitive to such things. He wanted to observe Ariadne now because he wanted to check up on his performance.

He caught it soon. It was to him as a gentle perfume is to us. He whisked over to the outskirts of the city and settled down toward a massive red brick pile surrounded by lovely landscaping. He circled it twice, finding her exact place in the house, and then dropped down the chimney. He hovered just above the artificial logs in the fireplace and began his eavesdropping.

Ariadne was sitting in her extravagant living room, chatting with—of all people—the redoubtable Suzy Greenfield. Suzy was a small-souled, graceless girl with the ability to draw a remark out of any given acquaintance, and by ardent agreement she could cull enough back-biting comment to keep her busy for weeks. She looked like a buck-toothed sparrow, dressed like a sweepstakes winner from Dubuque, and had a personality as soothing as the seven-year itch.

“Well, what have you heard today?” she asked expectantly.

Ariadne was gazing into far distances, and she only smiled.

“Oh, Ari,” said Suzy, “come on! I know something must have happened today from the way you’re acting. Please; you never tell me anything!
Ariadne, being a woman, ignored this untruth and would have changed the subject had not Elron, in the chimney, gently stroked certain of her brain convolutions with his intangible tentacles. She stared up suddenly, turned to Suzy. Elron could have had her reaction directly, but he was interested in the way she would express it to another and in the way the other would receive it.

“If you must know,” said Ariadne, “I met someone today, a man.” She sighed. Suzy leaned forward happily. When she was not all mouth she was all ears.

“Where?”

“Picked him up on the road. Sue, you never saw such a pair as those two.

They looked like a couple of comedians. One was a tramp—at first I thought they both were. The little one got into the rumble and the nice handsome one rode in front.”

“Handsome?”

“Darling, you don’t know! I’ve never seen—”

“But you said they were comic!”

Looked comic, dear.” In the fireplace the golden-armored brain gave the equivalent of a nod and sent a thought current out to Ariadne. As if answering a question, she said, “He would have looked so nice in a soft gray suit and a Homburg. And—I don’t know what he is, but I think he should be an adventurer. A sort of poet-writer-adventurer.”

“But what was he?”

Ariadne suddenly felt it possible to speak of other things. She got Suzy started on the peccadilloes of her long-suffering spouse and soon had completely eclipsed all thought of her volatile mystery man. Elron was gone.

Back at the hotel, the ovoid hovered over his sleeping body and thought bitter thoughts. He was ashamed of himself for underestimating the subtle nuances of human behavior. He had succeeded in making something ridiculous out of this biped he had created, and the fact annoyed him.

There was a challenge in it; Elron could control powers that would easily disintegrate this whole tiny galaxy and spread its dust through seven dimensions, if he so wished it; and yet he was most certainly being made a fool of by a woman. It occurred to him that in all the universes there was nothing quite as devious and demanding as a woman’s mind. It likewise occurred to him that a woman is easy to control as long as she always has her way. He was determined to see how closely a man could resemble a woman’s ideal and still exist; and he was going to do it with this man he had made himself responsible for.

It was a long and eventful three months before Ari Drew saw Elron again. He went away in his ten-gallon hat and his blatant plaids and his yellow shoes; and he took away with him his conversational variants and Chauncey the bum. He went to the greatest city of them all and sought out people who knew about the things that he must be to achieve the phenomenal status of a man good enough for Ariadne.

He found it a fascinating game. In the corridors of universities, in prizefight training camps, in girls’ schools and kindergartens and gin mills and honkytonks and factories he cornered people, spoke with them, strained and drained and absorbed what their minds held. Sorting and blending, he built himself an intellect, the kind of mentality that awed lightweights like Suzy Greenfield who spell Intellect with a capital I. Instead of trying to suit each man’s speech by using each man’s speech, he developed a slightly accented idiom of his own, something personal and highly original. He gave himself an earthly past, from a neatly photostated birth certificate to gilt-edged rent receipts. He sounded out the minds of editors and publishers, and through the welter of odd tastes and chaotic ideology therein he extracted sound and workable ideas on what work was needed. He actually sold poetry.

While his body slept in luxury, his mind hurtled over the earth, carried by its illimitably powerful golden shell. Elron could lecture a New York audience on the interesting people he had met in Melbourne, Australia, and the next day produce a cablegram from one or two of those people whom he had visited during the night. Scattered all over the earth were individuals who believed they had known this phenomenal young man for years.

It was at one of those pale-pink and puffy poetry teas that Ariadne saw Elron again. Suzy gave the tea as a current-celebrity show. Ari came gracefully late, looking lovely in something powder-blue, chastely sophisticated. Elron was scheduled to speak—something about “Metempsychosis and Modern Life.” Ari was scheduled to sing. But she—
He was watching for her. He was dressed in soft gray, and the Homburg awaited him by the door. Her entrance was as ever in the grand manner, and all realized it; but for her it was that breath-catching experience of realizing that she was putting on the show for just one person in all that crowded room. She’d heard of him, of course. He was the “rage,” which is a term used in polite society to describe current successes. Would-bes and has-beens are known as outrages.

But she had never seen him that she remembered. He rose and stood over her and smiled, and he wordlessly took her arm, bowed at the hostess, and led her out. Just like that. Poor Suzy. Her protruding teeth barely hid the tiny line of foam that formed on her lips.

“Well!” Ariadne said as they reached the street. “That was a terrible thing to do!”

Tsk, tsk!” he said, and helped her into his new sixteen-cylinder puddle-jumper. “I imagine Suzy will get over it. Think of all the people she’ll be able to tell!”

Ari laughed a little, looking at him strangely. “Mr. Elron, you’re not . . . not the same man that—”

“That you picked up on the pike three months ago, dressed like a comedian?”

She blushed.

“Yes, I’m the man.”

“I was . . . rude when I left you.”

“You had a right to be, Ariadne.”

“What happened to that hideous little tramp you were traveling with?”

“Chauncey!” Elron bellowed, and the trimly uniformed chauffeur swiveled around and nodded and smiled.

“Good heavens!” said Ariadne.

“He doesn’t offend any more with his atrocious diction,” said Elron precisely. “I found it possible to change his attitude toward work, but to change his diction was beyond even me. He no longer speaks.”
She looked at him for quite a while as the huge car rolled out into the country. “You’re everything I thought you might possibly be,” she breathed.

He knew that.

That was their first evening together. There were many others, and Elron conducted himself perfectly, as befitted a brilliant and urbane biped. Catering to every wish and whim of Ari’s amused him, for she was as moody as a beautiful woman can be, and he delighted in predicting and anticipating her moods. He adjusted himself to her hour by hour, day by day. He was ideal. He was perfect.

So—she got bored. He adjusted himself to that, too, and she was furious. If she didn’t care, neither did he. Bad tactics, and something that supercosmic forces could do nothing about.

Oh, he tried; yes, indeed. He questioned her and he psychoanalyzed her and he even killed off all the streptococci in her blood stream to see if that was the trouble. But all he got was a passive resentment of her. Half as old as time itself, he knew something of patience; but his patience began to give way under the pressure applied by this very human woman.

And, of course, there was a showdown. It was one afternoon at her home, and it was highly spectacular. He could read her mind with ease, but he could know only what thoughts she had formed. She knew he annoyed her. She also knew she liked him immensely; and for that reason she made no attempt to analyze her hostility toward him, and therefore he was helpless, tangled in her tenuous resentment.

It started with a very little thing—he came into the room and she stood at the window with her back to him and would not turn around. She did not speak or act coldly toward him, but simply would not face him. A very petty thing. After ten minutes of that he strode across the room and spun her around. She caught her heel in the rug, lost her footing, fell against the mantel, and stretched becomingly unconscious on the floor in a welter of broken gewgaws. Elron stood a moment feeling foolish, and then lifted her in his arms. Before he could set her down she had twined her arms around his neck and was kissing him passionately. Poor, magnificent thing, he didn’t know what to do.

“Oh, Elron,” she blubbered. “You brute! You struck me. Oh, darling! I love you so! I never thought you would do it!”

A great light of understanding burst for Elron. That was the basic secret of this thing called woman! She could not love him when he acted in a perfectly rational way. She could not love him when he was what she thought was ideal. But when he did something “brutish”—a word synonymous with “unintelligent”—she loved him. He looked down at her beautiful lips and her beautiful black eye, and he laughed and kissed her and then set her down gently.

“Be back in a couple of days, darling,” he said, and strode out, ignoring her cries.

He knew what to do now. He was grateful to her for amusing him for a while and for teaching him something new. But he could not afford to upset himself by associating with her any longer. To keep her happy he would have to act unintelligent periodically; and that was one thing he could not stand. He went away. He got into his huge automobile and drove away down the turnpike.

“It’s a pity that I’m not a man,” he reflected as he drove. “I’d really like to be, but— Oh, I can’t be bothered keeping track of anything as complicated as Ariadne!”

He pulled up at the outskirts of a small town and found his laboratory.

Once inside, he lay down on the table, popped open his skull and emerged. Going to the machine in the corner, he added and took away and changed and tinkered, and the glow began to form again around the still body. Something was happening inside the skull. Something took shape inside, and as it happened the skull slowly closed. In three hours Elron the man climbed off the table and stood looking about him. The golden egg flew up to his shoulder and nestled there.

“Thank you for this . . . this consciousness,” said Elron.

“Oh, that’s all right,” replied the ovoid telepathically. “You’ve had it for some months, anyway. Only I’ve just given you what you needed to appreciate it with.”

“What am I to do?” asked the man.

“Go back to Ariadne. Carry on from where I left off.

You. can—you’re a man, perfect in every cell and gland and tissue.”

“Thank you for that. I have wanted her but was never directed—”

“Never mind that. Marry her and make her happy. Never tell her about me—you have history enough to carry you through your lifetime, and brains enough, now, to do the work you have been doing. Ari’s been good to me; I owe her this much.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes. Just one thing; but burn this in your brain in letters of fire: A woman can’t possibly love a man unless he’s part dope. Be a little stupid all the time and very stupid once in a while. But don’t be perfect!”

“Okay. So long.”

“Be happy. . . er . . . son—

Elron the man left the laboratory and went out into the sunlight. The golden egg settled to the floor and lay there an hour or so. He laughed once within himself and said, “Too perfect!”

Then he felt terribly, terribly lonely.

The End

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Awesome Movies – Galaxy Quest (1999)

Any geek can proclaim “Live Long and Prosper.” An even lesser geek will  require you to “Use the force.” A truly hardened, experienced, and  involved geek however will tell you “Never give up, and never  surrender.” 

-doblu

If you love Star Trek, then you would love and appreciate Galaxy Quest. You see, there is a reason why this movie (which is NOT set in the Star Trek universe) is considered one of the best Star Trek movies.

It’s a comedy, ai, that is certain. But it appeals and has appeal to anyone of us who has fallen in love with the characters, the narrative and the tropes of the Star Trek universe.

Galaxy Quest is special. It really is. Galaxy Quest has everyone in the theater laughing. It cut across ages and backgrounds with a very simple premise…

…you are what you believe yourself to be.

You are  what you believe yourself to be.
You are what you believe yourself to be.

Which is, after all, the exact same premise that the movie “Bronco Billy” was based upon.

'Galaxy  Quest' couldn't be better. It's not a mockumentary, it's not a Star Trek  parody. It's pure comedy based on the Star Trek legend with excellent actors and absolutely brilliant production.

The visuals are  magnificent. You would expect nothing but mediocre stuff for a space  comedy, but this is not the case with 'Galaxy Quest'. These are the best  effects for a space movie, since 'Starship Troopers'!

The story  is also very original and interesting. Not only jokes on thin air, but a  great story nonetheless. The triumphant ending is beautiful, it  elevates you! In fact, it would easily compete with the some of the best Star Trek stories of all time.                                   
              
- atzimo           

This movie is not only about the television series, but it is also about the fans.

Indeed, science fiction conventions can be a lot of fun, and a real hoot. If you ever have the chance to check one out, please do so.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

At shows you will meet all kind of folk.

You will meet the seemingly useless get-a-lifers, the just-for-fun guys, and the not-so-rare I’m-only-in-it-for-the profit gang.

Never give up, never surrender!

You will meet actors who loved the whole shebang, actors who loathed it, and actors who didn’t have a clue what was going on.

Fandom is a very big place, with room for all sorts of people.

This film  was amazing.  I saw the trailers and swore I'd never watch it. A couple  of friends overruled this after watching it in the theaters, and I'm  glad they did.

Not only is this film an amusing spoof of Science  Fiction Fen-dom, it's a brilliant action-adventure/science-fiction film  in its own right.  The only other film I can think of that is a  righteous satirical look, yet a splendid example of the genre, is the  Fifth Element.

Galaxy Quest Has It All. Beautiful women in scanty  clothing.  Love interests.  Computers.  Space ships.  Ugly and evil  monsters.  Blasters. Arcane martial arts.  Dynamite catch phrases.  And  best of all, the very population that is satirized is the group that  Saves The Day.

The dialogue is brilliant - you'll find yourself  quoting from this film regularly.  The acting is marvelous.  Tim Allen  doing William Shatner doing a Heroic Spaceship Captain is worth the  rental all by itself, not to mention Alan Rickman's memorably dry  performance as the I-Am-Not-My-Strange-Looking-Alien character.

The  first thing I thought upon leaving the theater was that I had to see  this film again.  The first thing I thought upon seeing it again was  that I would have to own this movie.  Check it out - you won't be sorry.                                       
              
- tygirrl           
Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

And Galaxy Quest got it right–the conventions, the costumes, the geeks, the groupies, even the mocking “mundanes” who attend cons looking for kicks. It took notice of all the science fiction cliches, acknowledged them, and then twisted them to its own comedic purposes.

Galaxy Quest captured not only the silliness of fandom, but the inspiration of it.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

In the end, the demoralized and cynical actors found strength and meaning in the same characters which stereotyped them.

The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!
The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!

The geeks saved the day. The good guys won. The bad guys provided entertainment to masses of fans. Things blew up. And isn’t that what science fiction is all about?

This is what I would call a PERFECT film. 

As a long-time Star Trek fan I  have waited for a movie which had that total feelgood factor, not a spoof, but a humorous and heartfelt homage.  

A film which shows fans in a good light, in a way that, of course, we can laugh at ourselves, but in an unoffensive and entertaining manner. 

I never thought it would arrive, and so in GALAXY QUEST, I found one of the best films in cinema  history. 

Everything is spot on. The story is fantastic, and telling it  from the point of view of normal people was great.  Making them play  those stereotypes that we know and love was just the tip of the iceberg, and everyone played the parts superbly. 

The special effects speak for  themselves.  When the Protector leaves space dock...Wow.   When she goes  through the minefield...Wow!  When Tim Allen faces the biggest rock  monster since The Never Ending Story...Wow Wow WOW! 

The score is also  great, capturing the adventure of the old Star Trek shows, and the epic  scope of the story at hand. And then there's the way everything just comes together at the end into a sensational package of laughs, thrills, sometimes bitingly moving scenes, and a genuine feeling of warmth inside. 

Go and see this, buy the DVD, whatever.  Just see it. Never give  up, and never surrender! 

- selfy_nagus 

The entire cast was excellent, especially Tim Allen and Alan Rickman doing their best Shatner and Nimoy impersonations. Special credit must go to the four actors who played the naive aliens. Their wide-eyed innocence reminded me of the quality that drew me, and draws children of all ages into the world of science fiction.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

This movie didn’t rely on vulgarities or overt violence. It didn’t need to resort to meanness or cruel jokes, either. While it poked fun at science fiction and its fans, it never resorted to the kind of mockery you see in other films.

A beautifully-crafted film, Galaxy Quest is a love letter to sf fans of  all sorts everywhere. The characters are perfectly drawn, the story is  well-written, and there's the right amount of goshwow to make the whole  thing work perfectly. And it's funny as hell in all the right spots.

Tim Allen is amazing. He's got his Shatneroid character down perfectly.  He's a vain, pompous clown who finds out what a laughingstock he's  become, and when he gets a chance to redeem himself, he pounces on it.

Sigourney  Weaver is a delight. Sexy without trying, her character Gwen DeMarco is  as far from Ripley as you can get. Alan Rickman is flawless as  Alexander Dane, massively talented Shakespearean actor who's been stuck in this Spockish role for years because he played it too well. Darryl Mitchell is great as Tommy "Laredo" Webber, and Sam Rockwell is  hilarious as Guy, the hack actor stuck in the middle of something that scares him silly.

The two actors who really stand out are Tony  Shalhoub and Enrico Colantoni. Tony plays Fred Kwan with understated  glee, while Colantoni plays Commander Mathesar with a smiling  earnestness that makes you firmly believe everything he's saying.

The  supporting cast is incredibly talented. Robin Sachs is perfect as  Sarris, Patrick Breen essays his role as Quellek beautifully, and Missy  Pyle amazes as Laliari.

But it's still Tim Allen's movie above all else, and he makes the most of it.

A  final note: this movie wouldn't have worked nearly as well if not for  the production design work of four of the greatest artistic talents in  science fiction: Simon Bisley, Brom, Wayne Barlowe and the lengendary  Berni Wrightson. Barlowe is an expert in xenobiology, and designed the  Thermian's native form. Wrightson's quite possibly the best horror  illustrator of all time, and Sarris and his minions are his work.

My  favorite moment in the film? the point where Alan Rickman gets his  first look at the NSEA Protector II for the first time... his look of  astonishment is a joy to behold.

Like The Last Starfighter, this is a popcorn movie with a message. See it with your kids. 

- Ludwig_Meyer 

Galaxy Quest is a solid, funny movie. Go see it. Take the kids. Go see it and see it twice.

On the way to adventure!
On the way to adventure!

Some Dialogues

 Brandon (Justin Long)
→ I just wanted to tell you that I thought a lot about what you said.

Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen)
→ It's okay, now listen--

Brandon
→  But I want you to know that I'm not a complete brain case, okay? I  understand completely that it's just a TV show. I know there's no  beryllium sphere...

Jason Nesmith
→ Hold it.

Brandon
→ ...no digital conveyor, no ship...

Jason Nesmith
→ Stop for a second, stop. It's all real.

Brandon
→ Oh my God, I knew it. I knew it! I knew it! 
This movie is a true classic.
This movie is a true classic.
 Gwen DeMarco (Sigourney Weaver)
→ What is this thing? There's no useful purpose for there to be a bunch of chompy, crushy things in the middle of a hallway!

Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen)
→ Gwen —

Gwen DeMarco
→ No! I mean, we shouldn't have to do this! It makes no logical sense! Why is it here'!

Jason Nesmith
→ Because it's on the television show.

Gwen DeMarco
→ Well, forget it! I'm not doing it! This episode was BADLY WRITTEN! 
[Witnessing Fred Kwan having sex with Laliari] Oh, that's not right! 

But wait! There’s a documentary…

“Never Give Up, Never Surrender,” the “Galaxy Quest” documentary, highlights the magic of the 1999 film.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

The flick earned its “cult classic” status by putting sci-fi superfans in the role of the hero and perfectly balancing the subtleties of comedy and drama. 

The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!
The fans of SF, are what makes this movie classic!

“Never Surrender” features intimate interviews with almost the entire cast of the original film (excluding, of course and sadly, Alan Rickman, who died in 2016), including actors Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver, Justin Long and Sam Rockwell. The film also interviews writers, the film’s director and other behind-the-scenes people who made the film possible. “Never Surrender” even features cameos from sci-fi legends like “Star Trek” actor Wil Wheaton and “Lost” co-creator Damon Lindelof.

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

This documentary explains why, despite an initially disappointing turnout at the box office, “Quest” has become one of the most beloved sci-fi movies of all time. It was even dubbed “the best ‘Star Trek’ movie” by Wheaton in the documentary, despite being, well, not a “Star Trek” movie.

“Galaxy Quest” isn’t unique because it’s a sci-fi parody. Other films, like “Spaceballs,” spoofed “Star Wars” and other sci-fi classics, but there has always been something unique about “Quest.”

The "Captain" of Galaxy Quest.
The “Captain” of Galaxy Quest.

As the documentary explores, the film isn’t a campy or “cheesy” spoof movie; it isn’t strictly a comedy (though I believe anyone would be hard-pressed to watch it without cracking up at least once).

There are some movies that are better watched while you are not eating.  'Galaxy Quest' fits into this category as I made the mistake of watching  it while having dinner and I almost choked several times. This is one  of the funniest smart comedies I have seen. The film is brilliantly  executed and it brilliantly spoofs the science-fiction-spaceship genre.  But the film isn't mere silliness as it does have a soul and tells an  action adventure story of 5 has-been stars of a famous Star-Trek-type TV  show that got cancelled two decades ago. The screenplay is great and  the dialogues are witty fun. There is no crude humour or  over-the-top-out-of-context joke.

The special effects wonderfully  add to the spoofiness. The monsters and aliens are a 'treat' to watch.  An intelligent comedy isn't easy to make as the maker has to pay close  attention to line delivery, characterization, situation, comic timing  and direction. 'Galaxy Quests' fulfills all criteria from start to end.  Tim Allen as the pompous hero, Alan Rickman as the whiny has-been  'Shakespearean'-actor-forced-to-play-an-android, Tony Shalhoub as the  funny Fred, Sam Rockwell as the terrified-of-being-the-first-one-to-die  Guy, Enrico Colantoni as the gullible Mathezar and last but not least,  the incredibly sexy Sigourney Weaver as the tired-of-playing-dumb-blonde  Gwen (the total opposite of her famous Ripley character) play their  parts.

I'm glad that I bought this film on impulse yesterday as  most American spoofs I have seen, like the abysmal Scary Movies (puke)  or the silly Screams (yawn) and the ridiculous Naked Guns (okay this  last one was kind of funny) hardly have anything more to offer than  silliness. Actually I was given the choice between this and 'Naked Gun  33 and a Half' and i'm glad I made the right decision. 'Galaxy Quest'  definitely surpasses these films by several miles as I wouldn't even  mind calling it one of the best comedies. 

- Chrysanthepop 
Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

The documentary is pretty good.

It’s a movie with real heart. While you might giggle as a panicked, rambling Rockwell says, “My character isn’t important enough for a last name, because I’m gonna die 5 minutes in,” while descending to an alien planet, you may soon have tears in your eyes as Quellek the Thermian dies in the arms of Alexander Dane, or Dr. Lazarus (Rickman).

"It's  this little movie. It's not a part of a franchise. It was just made by  pure heart alone by a lot of people, and because of that heart, I think,  it had a massive, lasting impact," 

-Roth Cornet, a producer on the  documentary.
Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

And the documentary similarly has a few tender, teary-eyed moments. For example, with the mention of Rickman, who passed before a proposed “Galaxy Quest” series on Amazon could be realized, it is hard to not feel sentimental as the cast, one by one, describes what it was like to work with him and how badly they all miss him. “If you love Alan Rickman, that’s the moment for me, when we talk about Alan passing. I got choked up,” Cornet said

The documentary has a few surprising, heartbreaking and hilarious tidbits about Rickman you can look forward to. 

Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest.
Sigourney Weaver in Galaxy Quest.

The team behind this documentary has considered it a passion project and has pushed to make it happen, Cornet said. “Something like this highlights [that] when people love something and they come together, it can really, really, really have a huge impact on their whole life, even just a little movie about a TV show. And we’re making a documentary about a movie about a TV show,” she added about the meta nature of the documentary, which dives into a movie about actors in a “Star Trek”-esque television show. 

Cornet added that the creators aimed for the documentary to be “an hour and 25 minutes of delight.” And in my humble opinion, it is just that. 

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.
 By Blake French: 

As I walked out of the theater in which I  screened "Galaxy Quest," I thought how surprised I was to have enjoyed  what seemed as a cheesy family spoof. But the film turned to be an  action adventure with some really hilarious moments. I loved the film.  It has qualities of a successful science fiction drama, but also  contains a variety of comical characters that had the whole audience  overwhelmed in laughter. "Galaxy Quest" is right up there with "Toy  Story" in merit, it entertains adults and children alike, standing out  as one of the year's best family films. 

The story details the  adventures of a canceled television science fiction fantasy cast,  similar in content to "Star Trek." "Galaxy Quest" is the name of the  program. In their years, the stars, including Jason Nesmith, Gwen  DeMarco, Fred Kwan, Alexander Dane, and Tommy Webber, were some of the  biggest, most popular names in TV. Now, their means of making a living  is signing fans' autographs for a price and being cast in amateur  presentations.  
Never give up. Never Surrender.
There is very detailed character development  here. The characters are wonderfully cast and brilliantly portrayed.  Unfortunately, most family films don't contain the patience for such  necessary material. We bond with these characters; they are likable,  funny, energetic and independent.  These individuals are the key of  success to this kind of movie.

 The real plot begins when strange people come to Jason beging for him to  save their existence from a powerful evil force who wishes to wipe them  out of the universe forever. Naturally, at first our television star is  skeptical, but when the strange people turn out to be humble aliens and  transport Jason to their spaceship, he realizes this is something  serious. The aliens begin to explain that they think he and his "Galaxy  Quest" team are the only people in the universe who can save their race.  He rushes to the members of his old cast and tries to justify his  experience. He says that there are extraterrestrial creatures who  require the help of their "Galaxy Quest" characters. None of his friends  believe him, but once again give in when they find themselves  transported off earth, onto the creature's spaceship.  Of course, the  aliens don't realize that their hopeful heroes are simply out of work  actors, but who needs to tell them? So it is up to Commander Peter  Quincy Taggart, Lt. Tawny Madison, Tech Sergeant Chen, Dr. Lazarus of  Tev'Meck, and Lt. Laredo to save the day for our innocent and haunted  alien life forms. 

"Galaxy Quest" is a slapstick comedy that is  smart, and does not go over the edge with its humorous material. It  leaves room for several other essential elements such as happiness,  romance, honesty, excitement, and contains a dramatic purpose. The story  is very original, and contains a firm theme of action in its premise.  It also has lots of outstanding visual effects and sight gags that are  effective and interesting to watch.  
The Galaxy Quest team discovers that things are going really bad.
The Galaxy Quest team discovers that things are going really bad.

A Television Show?

Paramount is currently putting together a television version of the 1999 Dreamworks film!

Hopefully, this show will be even better than the show in the film. Or not, and that will totally be its appeal! Whatever happens, today is an awesome day for sci-fi comedy fans everywhere. Paramount, we salute you.

Galaxy Quest.
Never Give up. Never Surrender!

Deleted scenes included on the DVD:

  • Tech Sargeant Chen helps an engineering crew solve a difficult problem without offering any insightful help whatsoever.
  • Alexander is presented his living quarters: an empty room save a bed of spikes and a daunting toilet.
  • An alternate version of a scene in which its revealed Jason and Gwen were old flames.
  • Guy overreacts when his foot gets caught in a rock, and Jason does his “rugged pose”.
  • Alexander uses an acting method to figure out the rock monster’s “motivation”.
  • Gwen rips open her uniform to seduce two enemy soldiers, before crushing them with a door. (Part of this scene was featured in the trailer.)
  • General Sarris revives himself and attacks the crew while crash landing.
The Galaxy Quest team.
The Galaxy Quest team.

Remember…

Never give up and never surrender!

Galaxy Quest.
Galaxy Quest.

I do hope that you appreciated and enjoyed this little post. I have more in my Movie Index, here…

MOVIES

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Awesome Movies – The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension

The Adventures Of Buckaroo Banzai Across The Eighth Dimension (1984) is a film written by Earl Mac Rauch and directed by W.D. Richter that is one part B-Movie, one part Action Adventure, one part comedy, and one part political satire.

-All the Tropes 

Are you finding yourself taking life too seriously? It’s easy enough to do. I do it all the time. But, don’t worry we can remedy that. Here we look at a decidedly silly science fiction classic that should be in everyone’s home library. It’s titled “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension” and it’s funky strange enough to pull you out of your funk and set you down for some delicious movie time.

Why is this movie important at this time in our lives?

I personally wouldn't invest a lot of emotional energy in the hope that  things will go back to normal. "Normal" is gone forever. Even before the  virus the only consistent pattern we've been seeing is things getting  stranger and stranger. We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto. 

- Caitlin Johnstone  

The Characters

It’s so strange that you’ve got to love it.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension
  • Buckaroo Banzai – Peter Weller! Brilliant particle physicist and neurosurgeon, he is also a martial arts master and plays in a band.
  • Lord John Whorfin – John Lithgow! Evil leader of the “Red Lectroids.” Buckaroo vaporizes him.
  • Penny Priddy – Ellen Barkin! The lost twin sister of Buckaroo’s deceased wife.
  • New Jersey – Jeff Goldblum! A cowboy at heart, this neurosurgeon partner of Buckaroo is joining The Hong Kong Cavaliers.
  • John Bigboote (Bigbooty! Hehehehe!) – Christopher Lloyd! Red Lectroid from planet 10, shot by Lord Whorfin for talking back.
  • Rawhide – Clancy Brown! (He played Kurgan in “Highlander.”) Member of The Hong Kong Cavaliers, poisoned by a Red Lectroid.
  • Perfect Tommy and Reno – Two of The Hong Kong Cavaliers. Tommy has some serious bleached hair.
  • John Parker – Black Lectroid, sent to help Buckaroo save Earth before his people are forced to destroy it.
  • John O’Conner – Vincent Schiavelli! (He’s been in lots of stuff, the teacher in “Better Off Dead” and the subway ghost in “Ghost.”) A Red Lectroid. Vaporized.

The Plot

There’s a plot here somewhere. It’s just a tad confused.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension

This movie has more famous people in it than most blockbuster films! Look at them all! Just look at them!

What we have here my friends is a seriously out in left field piece of work.

Buckaroo Banzai and his partners have just perfected the “Oscillation Overthruster” and it allows them to travel into the 8th dimension.

Why did we miss all the ones between? I dunno!

How can a 3rd dimension being interact on the 8th? I dunno!

Lord Whorfin is trapped on Earth with a select group of followers, he wants to steal the overthruster and free all the Red Lectroids from exile in the 8th dimension.

Then they will return to their home on the 10th planet and defeat the Black Lectroids!

Black Lectroids are the good aliens by the way, they’re also all Jamaican oddly enough.

Need a romance in here somewhere so Buckaroo runs into Penny while performing at a club, she’s the lost twin sister of the woman he loved. (She died, we don’t really know how.)

Well, the Black Lectroids can’t let Lord Whorfin escape Earth, they are fully prepared to precipitate a nuclear war if necessary.

They do have the courtesy to shock (literally) Buckaroo so he can see the alien’s true forms.

With his elite band of six shooting scientists, The Hong Kong Cavaliers, Dr. Banzai is able to defeat Whorfin and save Earth.

Do you get the idea?

What more do you need?

Okay, how about Christopher Lloyd running around and everyone calling him “John Bigbooty?” Or Jeff Goldblume as New Jersey, decked out like a cowboy – he even has black and white spotted luggage.

Gateway 2000 luggage!

Watch the film two or three times, the plot is there…

…somewhere.

Things I Learned From This Movie

Yup. I did learn a thing or two.

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension
  • Neurosurgeons shouldn’t tug on things they don’t recognize.
  • Rocket powered pickup trucks don’t look right.
  • The 8th dimension looks a good deal like what you might see through an electron microscope.
  • New Brunswick, Maine is a tough town.
  • Aliens with bird like ships should stay well clear of Earth during duck season. Especially you, yeah you, darn Romulans.
  • Alien Lectroids have nads.
  • Hologram viewing glasses are made out of bubble wrap.
  • Girls: Never try to get intimate with some guy carrying a electric charge.
  • Bacteria can affect people via television.
  • Good aliens appear to hail from Jamaica.
  • Four star generals should not use the phrase, “I’m barely holding my fudge.”
  • Alien thermal pods carry parachutes.

Stuff to watch for;

If yer gonna watch it, take the time to notice these selected highlights…

The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai across the 8th Dimension
  • 7 mins – This is some serious high tech stuff!
  • 10 mins – Buckaroo is driving through a mountain?
  • 13 mins – John Lithgow is applying electric current to his tongue!
  • 23 mins – If Peter Weller was bawling out a song to me I’d do the same thing.
  • 32 mins – Somebody shut Penny up, damn blonde…
  • 48 mins – That little asian guy looks funny riding a Harley.
  • 50 mins – Awful lot of folks named John.
  • 53 mins – What the heck did the alien kill him with? Spit?
  • 60 mins – Yeah, why is there a watermelon there?
  • 78 mins – These guards don’t notice a double decker bus?
  • 85 mins – Now that is a mad looking slug, um thing.

Some Pictures.

Check out these screen caps.

 When it was released in 1984, W.D. Richter’s (Late for Dinner)   incomparably droll comedy was misunderstood on every level:  diluted  by editors, wrongly promoted as a straight sci-fi flick,  trashed by  many critics, and scorned by the public. Only a  scruffy band of  cultists have kept the film alive over the  years, but given the higher  ’90s profile of Buckaroo costars  Jeff Goldblum, Ellen Barkin, and John Lithgow (previewing his  3rd Rock From the Sun demented-alien shtick 12 years ahead of  schedule), it may at last be worthy of a mainstream audience. Or  vice versa.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                          Kicking off with an expository title crawl that apes Star Wars and is, if anything, even more incomprehensible, Buckaroo  plays  like chapter 27 of a Saturday-matinee serial, and too bad for   you if you missed the first 26. All you need to know is that  Buckaroo  (Peter Weller, exuding Zen coolth) is a world-famous   physicist/neurosurgeon/rock star who leads his Hong Kong  Cavaliers to  overthrow the Red Lectroids from Planet 10 while at  the same time  wooing his ex-wife’s long-lost identical twin  (Barkin). That’s skipping  the Rasta aliens, a mysterious  watermelon, and the bit where we find  out Orson Welles’ 1938  ”The War of the Worlds” broadcast actually  wasn’t a hoax. 

-EW

Oh, it’s so very 1980’s.

Brain surgeon, rock musician, adventurer Buckaroo  Banzai is a modern renaissance man and has made scientific history. He  perfected the Oscillation Overthruster, which allows him to travel  through solid matter by using the eighth dimension. Along with his  crime-fighting team, the Hong Kong Cavaliers, he must stop evil alien  invaders from the eighth dimension who are planning to conquer our  dimension. He is helped by Penny Pretty, the long-lost twin sister of  his late wife, and some good extra-dimensional beings who look and talk  like they are from Jamaica.
                                                      
Greg Bole <bole@life.bio.sunysb.edu>                                           

Conclusion

Have you looked around lately? Don’t you think that the world is taking itself a little too serious? Eh?


I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have others in my Movie Index. Here…

MOVIES

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
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Do not be discouraged. You can get it all back. Do not give up hope. Here’s some advice.

Right now, in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak, many people are frustrated, afraid and sit by watching their life seemingly crumble around them. Maybe they lost their jobs, or are watching their investments fall, or perhaps something else is going wrong. Maybe they have the illness, or some other calamity. I have written that no matter how bad things are, there is always an “out”, a “hope” a chance to get it back. Here is one such story…

From Millionaire to Car Detailer.

The global financial crisis destroyed me in 2008. The years immediately after were some of the worst years of my life. I lost everything; or at least I thought I did.

As it turns out, I didn’t lose much at all (assuming you don’t count approximately $3 million in real estate equity and a couple of hundred thousand dollars in cash, as “much”).

I was in Vegas when Lehman Brothers folded… It was my birthday … and it was the first time I’d ever lost big there. I should have known something wicked was coming, but I didn’t. So when my consulting contract didn’t get renewed, I didn’t panic. I kept doing business as usual. When my tenants defaulted on rent, I kept paying mortgages. A year later, I still had $50,000 plus in the bank … enough of a cushion.

I suppose at this time I should make you aware that I was not exactly a low-profile person. I was (and am) in luxury goods and hospitality, and I consulted with companies catering to high-net worth individuals. I helped them design sales and business strategies to keep their clients happy in the short and long term. Needless to say, the luxury sector was massacred, and is still clawing its way out of the muck and mire, at least in the United States.

So, with enough money to float for six to ten months, I kept looking for work in my field.

And looking, and looking … nothing.

Any kind of business consulting … nothing. (Six more months go by).

Any kind of sales … nothing. (Six more months … This was where it got scary).

Waiting tables, bar-tending, limo driving, grocery bagging … ANYTHING!

Nope.

Bear in mind that up until this point, I had never even gone a month without a job since I was 12 years old.

My confidence was shot – I mean decimated. I was a shell of the man I had been only two years previously.

I had the stink of failure all over me.

A friend of mine owned a couple of car-washes. He offered me a job. It was outside work, taking orders when people drove in to the wash. “Would you like the undercarriage done?”

It was winter in Colorado.

I declined.

I was sharing a huge house at the time with my best buddy and his new girlfriend, who became his fiancé, and we were ALL broke. It was brutal. I don’t think I would have made it without them. I was depressed and miserable. I’m lucky they didn’t bury me in a snow bank and leave me there. I’m sure there were times they wanted to.

“Cocky” doesn’t do failure well.

My buddy with the car-wash called again a few weeks later. I said no again. Not just because of the embarrassment. Not just because of the cold weather and the elements, or standing on my feet for 10 hours a day on concrete without Wi-Fi.

It was because of my father.

Almost every good father has a catch phrase that he uses to motivate his sons to do better than he did. Typically, it’s the threat of being stuck doing any minimum-wage job that no teenager from the Gekko era would ever aspire to. For some reason, the example that my father chose was “car wash”. We’d go through Towne Auto Wash after Little League and he’d always point to that guy who asks, “Do you want a regular wash, or deluxe?” and then hands you that little piece of paper.

“Mickey” He’d say. “You have to save some money/get better grades/quit chasing girls/do your homework. You don’t want to end up like that guy, working in a car-wash, do you?” The last time I heard the speech was around 1996. The words, however, hung in the air for years to come.

So, you can see my quandary. To me, working in a car-wash was the ultimate admission of failure. Not losing all my assets. Not selling my watches and cars. Not letting go of a few rugs and some art.

I was living with friends, driving a 17-year-old car, had less than $200 in the bank with no idea where the next $200 was coming from, and I was worried about being seen as a failure.

A little deluded?

Perhaps, but reality kicked in when I didn’t have money for a niece’s birthday present.

So I called my friend back and asked if I could still have the job at the car-wash. My utter failure as a human being was complete, my humiliation final -or so I thought.

On my third day of dragging myself in to work, the raven-haired stunner that I’d hired as my assistant five years previous pulled in – driving a brand new Lexus.

NOW my humiliation was complete.

There was nowhere to run, no place to hide.

And yet … just as I was about to die from shame, something happened that literally changed my life. She smiled, jumped out of her car, pointed her Louboutins right at me, ran over and gave me a hug. We chatted for about 10 minutes while her car was getting done. She said she was happy to see me, that I’d been a great boss, and that she was glad I was working. “Sooooo many” of her friends(able-bodied twenty-somethings) were unemployed, and at least I wasn’t trapped behind a desk.

I realized that I’d been beating myself up needlessly, and saw how lucky I truly was.

In that instant, I decided that instead of just showing up until I could find something better, I would use all my skills to increase my friend’s business, and I did. Over the next few months, something amazing happened to me. Something I never saw coming, and something that impacted my life and made me a better man.

I saw hundreds of people every day and none of them thought I was a failure, and it energized me. I smiled. They smiled back. I was happy and engaging, and I sold about a gazillion deluxe washes. But also, my worst fear morphed into something I started to look forward to. I got my confidence back, and it was obvious. I saw DOZENS of people I knew – clients, old customers, friends I’d lost touch with, and every single one of them said something positive.

They respected me.

They held me in higher esteem for seeing me in the cold, wearing a red nylon jacket with a car wash logo on it. Nobody made fun of me or called me names. Nobody laughed.

There was even an article in a local lifestyle magazine about me.

They respected me for doing what had to be done (I’m sure a few were secretly happy that I’d been taken down a few pegs … but hey, we’re all human, right?)

The truth of my situation was laid bare for the world to see … there’s no way to spin a story when you are asking people if they want the basic or deluxe wash. There’s no amount of charm of polish or bullshit that can hide the truth.

I was working in a car wash – and nobody thought I was a failure. Not even my father.

Then, about 6 months later, one of my old clients called. He needed some help setting up a new luxury club. We put a deal together and when I resigned from the car-wash, my friend was genuinely sad, saying I was the best employee he’d ever had.

I approached that new consulting contract with a vigor and zest for life I hadn’t felt for years! A few months after that, another contract took me to Asia, and I’ve been consulting over here ever since.

So, my worst fear turned out to be my salvation.

It gave me confidence, paid my bills for a while and put me in a position to move my company to Asia and have access to an abundance of new cultures and growing markets.

Sure, I’m not quite back to where I was that day 9 years ago in Vegas, but I have a red nylon jacket with a car wash logo on it that reminds me that for my version of success, I don’t have to be.”

Michael Aumock


I hope that this story helped you in some way. I have other stories of a similar bent in my happiness index here…

Life & Happiness

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Why Can’t We Party Like It’s 1905?

We have gotten so used to the way that things are, we painstakingly believe that they have always been this way. We think that taxes, regulation and dual-working families are the norm. They are not. They are progressive inventions. The life we live today is the utopia that President Wilson forged back in 1913.

Here, we take a look at what life was like before the progressive improvements in American Society.

Detroit’s Belle Isle back in 1905. Source: Coleman Family
Detroit’s Belle Isle back in 1905. Source: Coleman Family

The following article is titled: “Why Can’t We Party Like It’s 1905?” written by Paul Rosenberg on FreemansPerspective.com . Edited to fit this venue, but otherwise left intact. All credit to the author.

Why Can’t We Party Like It’s 1905?

by FMPadmin6120 on March 13, 2020

Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, circa 1905. "Lawn tennis courts, Pocono Mountain House." 8x10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, circa 1905. “Lawn tennis courts, Pocono Mountain House.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.

When writing historical things, I try to include perspective from people who actually lived through the events. And for money issues in the US, I’m able to do that back to about 1905.

So, do you think life was nasty, brutish, and short in 1905? That there were poor and starving people falling dead on every street corner?

Hardly.

1905. "Lackawanna Railway station, Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
1905. “Lackawanna Railway station, Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.

The Wright brothers were flying for 30 minutes at a crack; Einstein was upgrading the laws of physics; telephones and electric lights were being installed all across America; Henry Ford was getting the final pieces in place for his moving assembly line and Model T; radio was being developed; art was flourishing; and the world was more or less at peace.

American homes in 1905.
American homes in 1905.

Sure, we have far more tech and better medicine now, but mostly because the people of earlier times (like the 1905 era) gifted it to us.

People in 1905 lived in heated homes, refrigerated their food, had access to professional physicians, traveled the world (mostly on trains and ships), read daily newspapers (there were many more of them in those days), watched movies, and ate just about the same foods we eat.

Chicago circa 1906. "Lake Shore Drive, Jackson Park." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
Chicago circa 1906. “Lake Shore Drive, Jackson Park.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.

So, was it really that bad a time?

No, it wasn’t. In fact, it was better in important ways.

Money Issues in the US: The Facts Don’t Lie

Consider this:

The working person of 1905 kept his or her money. They ended up saving somewhere between a quarter and a half of everything they made – after living expenses.
Portland, Maine, circa 1905. "Congress Square Hotel, Congress Street and Forest Avenue." 8x10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
Portland, Maine, circa 1905. “Congress Square Hotel, Congress Street and Forest Avenue.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.

It’s hard to be completely precise when reconstructing the budgets of average people in 1905 (records are hard to find), but we do have enough for a good, close guess.

Here’s how finance worked for a working family man of 1905:

Annual income:           $700.00
Annual expenses:      ($350.00)
Annual savings:           $350.00

Life in the center of a medium sized town in 1905.
Life in the center of a medium sized town in 1905.

If you’re thinking that I’m taking liberties with these numbers, let me assure you that I’m not – I’m being conservative. For example:

  • The income figure should probably be higher. I’ve found figures of well over $800 for construction workers.
  • As for expenses, I rounded up from a New York Times article, dated 29 September, 1907. It specified $325 per year.
  • Added to that is the fact that many people grew their own food during that time, which would skew the figures further.
  • As noted initially, I compared these numbers with stories I heard from relatives who lived through the time. My uncle Dave, for example, used to tell me how he got a job paying $390 per year sweeping floors as an unskilled immigrant (who spoke almost no English) in 1903.
New York, 1904. "A flower vender's Easter display, Union Square." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
New York, 1904. “A flower vender’s Easter display, Union Square.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.

The next time you drive through an old part of town and see the grand old houses, remember that people were able to build and buy them because their paychecks weren’t stripped bare.

There were no income taxes in 1905, no sales taxes, no state taxes, and not much in the way of property taxes.

Circa 1905. "Saranac Lake central station, Adirondacks, N.Y." With a locomotive of the Delaware & Hudson Railway. 8x10 inch glass negative
Circa 1905. “Saranac Lake central station, Adirondacks, N.Y.” With a locomotive of the Delaware & Hudson Railway. 8×10 inch glass negative

There was also no such thing as a military-industrial complex in those days, and – miracle of miracles – the rest of the world survived!

And Now…

Today, the situation is much, much different. The average working family pays about half their income in combined taxes: income taxes (to the state and the Feds), payroll taxes, property taxes, gas taxes, utility bill taxes, sales tax, local taxes, and on and on.

Philadelphia circa 1904. "City Hall clock tower from South Broad Street." 8x10 inch glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
Philadelphia circa 1904. “City Hall clock tower from South Broad Street.” 8×10 inch glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.

So, figuring an average income of just over $50,000 (the 2011 figure). And combined taxes of about $25,000, the average American family is left to pay bills like these:

Mortgage                     11,000
Car payments              6,000
Gas, repairs, etc.         2,500
Property taxes             2,500
Food                              3,000
Total                          $25,000

That leaves people zeroed-out. And again, I’m being conservative, and I haven’t included a number of smaller expenses.

The Mississippi River circa 1905. "Union Depot and steamboat landing at foot of Jackson Street, St. Paul, Minnesota." Starring the sidewheeler Hiawatha. 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
The Mississippi River circa 1905. “Union Depot and steamboat landing at foot of Jackson Street, St. Paul, Minnesota.” Starring the sidewheeler Hiawatha. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.

Great Grandpa Did It, So Why Not Us?

Your great grandfathers faced very few of the taxes that we face. (The government survived on tariffs.) There was no social security either, and – believe it or not – the streets were never full of starving old people. Families were able to take care of their own – it’s not that hard when you’re saving half of your income!

Circa 1905. "St. John Street, Quebec." Rue Saint-Jean at Côte du Palais in Quebec City, home to the drugstores of P. Mathie and J.E. Livernois. 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.
Circa 1905. “St. John Street, Quebec.” Rue Saint-Jean at Côte du Palais in Quebec City, home to the drugstores of P. Mathie and J.E. Livernois. 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Photographic Company.

We have forgotten that it was once possible for an average person to accumulate money. The truth is that productive people should be comfortable. Well-off, as they used to say.

So, why can’t we party like it’s 1905?

New York circa 1903. "Looking up Broadway from City Hall." With a view of the National Shoe & Leather Bank, and a roving vendor of DESKS.
New York circa 1903. “Looking up Broadway from City Hall.” With a view of the National Shoe & Leather Bank, and a roving vendor of DESKS.

So, why can’t we party like it’s 1905?

So why NOT?

You might want to think about that question.

May 1910. "Noon hour at Obear-Nestor Glass Co., East St. Louis, Illinois. Names of the smallest boys are: Walter Kohler, 981 N. 18th Street; Walter Riley, 918 N. 17th Street; Will Convery, 1828 Natalie Avenue; Clifford Matheny, 1927 Summit Avenue. All employed at the glassworks." Photo by Lewis Hine.
May 1910. “Noon hour at Obear-Nestor Glass Co., East St. Louis, Illinois. Names of the smallest boys are: Walter Kohler, 981 N. 18th Street; Walter Riley, 918 N. 17th Street; Will Convery, 1828 Natalie Avenue; Clifford Matheny, 1927 Summit Avenue. All employed at the glassworks.” Photo by Lewis Hine.

Paul Rosenberg

FreemansPerspective.com


Thank you for reading this masterfully written piece. If you loved the photos, you can check out a ton-load of them on SHORPY. You can go to SHORPY HERE.

Circa 1907. "Northampton, Massachusetts -- Elm Street." 8x10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.
Circa 1907. “Northampton, Massachusetts — Elm Street.” 8×10 inch dry plate glass negative, Detroit Publishing Company.

Meme

And here’s a meme that you can use to spread the message…

If you enjoyed this post, perhaps you might want to check out some of my other posts in my Happiness Index, here…

Life & Happiness

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

To go to the MAIN Index;

Master Index

.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE .
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Please kindly help me out in this effort. There is a lot of effort that goes into this disclosure. I could use all the financial support that anyone could provide. Thank you very much.

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Some hilarious quotes from Robert Mugabe

Hilarious with some real wisdom in it!

That being said, we shouldn’t be distracted away from his other deeds. Overall, this man is often referred to as pure evil. But, then again, I don’t really know. I do not know him personally. I can’t imagine him being any worse than Hillary Clinton. Can you?

The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.
                                                                            
-Robert Mugabe     

Anyways, these quotes are golden. I guess that even the most reprehensible person can come up with one-liners, eh?

Who is Robert Mugabe?

Robert Mugabe has been the president of Zimbabwe since 1987. He attained his job after leading bloody guerrilla warfare against the white colonial rulers of what was then Rhodesia.

Mugabe lead the Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front, a socialist party founded in 1987. Mugabe and his party are also heavily nationalist with left-wing ideology, favoring land seizures from white Zimbabweans while claiming that doing so counters the nation’s imperialist past.

Mugabe holds seven degrees from South Africa’s Fort Hare University. In 1963 he was secretary general of the Maoist Zimbabwe African National Union.

In 1964, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for “subversive speech” against the Rhodesian government. Once released, he fled to Mozambique to launch a guerrilla war for independence.

He returned to Rhodesia 1979 and became prime minister in 1980; the next month, the newly independent country was renamed Zimbabwe. Mugabe assumed the presidency in 1987, with the prime minister role being abolished.

Under his rule, annual inflation has soared to 100,000%.

Hilarious quotes from the ex-President of Zimbabwe:

  • When your clothes are made of cassava leaves, you don’t take a goat as a friend.
  • If you are ugly, you are ugly. Stop talking about inner beauty because men don’t walk around with X-ray machines to see inner beauty.
  • When one’s goat gets missing, the aroma of a neighbour’s soup gets suspicious.
  • Treat every part of your towel nicely because the part that wipes your buttocks today will wipe your face tomorrow.
  • Sometimes you look back at girls you spent money on, rather than send it to your mum, and you realize witchcraft is real.
  • Cigarette is tobacco rolled in a piece of paper with fire on one end and a fool on the other end.
  • Racism will never end as long as people still use black color for bad luck and white for peace… But I don’t care as long as I still use the white tissue paper to wipe my ass!
  • No African girl will choose six pack over six cars.. So stop going to the gym and go to work!
  • It’s better to sit in a bar thinking about God than to sit in a church thinking about beer.
  • He who swallows a complete coconut has absolute trust in his anus.
  • The only warning Africans take seriously is LOW BATTERY.
  • It is not possible that women can be at par with men.

Conclusion

You can be reprehensible and still have some good things to say. You do not have to like or admire a person to learn from them.

I get that from time to time. People accuse me of being the spawn of Satan because I happen to like to drink red wine and live in China.

Well, at which I can only respond with “ok.”

Life is too short to worry about what other people are doing with their lives.

Dionysus Cat.
Dionysus Cat.
A little weekend humor  

A pastor entered his donkey in a race and it won. The pastor was so pleased with the donkey that he entered it in the next race, and it won again. 

The local newspaper read: PASTOR’S ASS OUT FRONT. 

The Bishop was so upset with this kind of publicity that he ordered the pastor not to enter the donkey in another race. 

The next day, the local newspaper headline read: BISHOP SCRATCHES PASTOR’S ASS. 

This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the pastor to get rid of the donkey. The pastor decided to give it to a nun in a nearby convent. 

The local paper, hearing of the news, posted the following headline the next day: NUN HAS BEST ASS IN TOWN. 

The Bishop fainted. He informed the nun that she would have to get rid of the donkey, so she sold it to a farmer for $10. 

The next day the paper read: NUN SELLS ASS FOR $10. 

This was too much for the Bishop, so he ordered the nun to buy back the donkey and lead it to the plains where it could run wild. 

The next day the headlines read: NUN ANNOUNCES HER ASS IS WILD AND FREE. 

The Bishop was buried the next day. 

The moral of the story is:  Being concerned about public opinion can bring you much grief and misery and even shorten your life. So be yourself and enjoy life. You’ll be a lot happier and live longer! 

I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have others in my Happiness Index, over here…

Life & Happiness

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A Fun Movie; The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967).

As I stay inside my apartment while the coronavirus wrecks havoc all through China, I have little else to do but watch movies. Now, for various reasons, I have taken a shine to the older 1960’s and 1970’s movies. And in this case, a relatively unknown vampire-comedy. And this one is simply amazing!

I well remember watching it on television with my father. He was a big Sharon Tate fan, and now that I am older I can well understand why. But more than that, I loved how it carred me away and sucked me into the movie with the “atmosphere”, and the story line.

My most memorable scene is where they are locked inside the parapet tower.

Brilliant movie - beautifully shot and with Polanski's eye for detail.  Very funny/quirky and atmospheric. I loaned it to a work colleague who  thought Polanski only made horror films like 'Rosemary's Baby', she was  amazed when confronted with this one. 

She thought it was great. 

Everyone  is always very impressed with the ballroom scene with all the mirrors  and the vampires dancing. The colours are fabulous and the outside  scenes remind one of s Christmas card. 

If it's ever on t.v. it's always  on around midnight or after, so I had to buy the DVD. Definitely one to  watch late at night when you're alone!! It took me years to find it on  DVD. I think the one I eventually bought was an import. 

- funnybunny-7 
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.

Today, being much older, I have come to love Roman Polanski’s “The Fearless Vampire Killers,” which is surprising to me now because for most of my life I thought it was so-so.

You see, I missed the original release back in 1967, but I was only nine years old then. And the version released in the U.S. was a truncated travesty of what Polanski intended. It was a remake for American audiences by a jack-ass who thought that all Americans were simpletons bumpkins.

No shit!

Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
 When I think about R.Polanski the first thing coming to my mind is -  "the master of fear and horror", and I knew it that "Fearless vampire  Killers" is rare example of comedy by this great director. Yeah, I was  worried before seeing this movie, not as much about "geting it", but  more so about simple thing - could this movie be entertaining for "21st  Century Boy".

First thing that striked me was beautiful music by  Komeda. I was in total awe. The music was scary, but at the same time so  light and funny - just like for a good fair story. And then the  beautiful winter scenery that was so fake - almost cartooning. Few  minutes into the movie, and I could say "that's what I call movie  poetry". 

The story is so simple. The old bat researcher,  professor Abronsius and his assistant, Alfred, go to a remote  Transylvanian village looking for vampires. They stay in house where no  one speaks about vampires, but the garlic is hanging everywhere.  
Sharon Tate.
Sharon Tate.
Simplistic story is so right for this movie, because acting, scenery,  music, cinematography are all in top shape here. For composition I think  this is one of the best movie done by Polanski, next to "Tenant" for  sure.

And this movie is also a rare occasion to see Polanski in  comedic role. He and Brach make unforgettable duo. I was totally  entertain when in came to comedy in this movie, but the thing that  surprise me the most was the action factor. There is one scene that is  great example of that - when Polanski character is looking through  keyhole and is so scared of what he see that his face is screaming  "terror". It's sure funny, but in a way mad-scary too. And when I think  about this movie - this scene sums it up for me.

Its very funny,  but little outdated movie. For me one a few really cinematic fairy  tales, that keeps magic all the way to the end. Its up there with  Repulsion, Tenant, and Tess when in comes to greatest work of this  director. 

And just think about brilliant ending, so funny, so  mad. It's a shame Polanski hasn't made another comedy. Don't get me  started with Pirates - the most unfunny movie in history. But "Fearless  Vampire Killers " is movie magic - pure and simple. 

- fidomax 

And, I am not the only person that was upset with the hack-job on this movie.

I’ve read that the movie was considered an almost complete fiasco because the executive producer, Martin Ransohoff, best known for “The Beverly Hillbillies,” wanted a very different film.

Yeah.

He wanted to change the film. He wanted to “improve” it to fit the bumpkin American mentality that he envisioned all Americans had.

So, in short order, he [1] cut 16 minutes out of Polanski’s 107 minute cut (Just under 1/5 of the entire movie.), and [2] inserted a short screwy cartoon before the titles (so people would know it was supposed to be a comedy…)

Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.

Ransohoff thought Polanski botched it that badly, and [3] even re-dubbed some of the actors. You know, so that they would sound more “American”. I’m sure that he wanted thick “bumpkin” Southern drawls and accents. He also [4] added the awful tag line to the title, “Or, Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are in My Neck.”

This must have been the version I saw on TV in the early seventies that I thought was so terrible.

Thankfully this abomination doesn’t seem to be in circulation anymore. Good thing. Let the rats in the film vault feat on that monstrosity.

Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.

However, despite its flaws “The Fearless Vampire Killers” gained a cult following over the years, partially due to the morbid fascination with the murder of Sharon Tate, but also because the movie is really very, very good.

Paramount’s Robert Evans recognized this back in ’67 and thought Polanski the right director for “Rosemary’s Baby.”

He was right and the success of that film showed Hollywood what a master of the language of film Polanski actually is.

This is a wonderfully fun movie. It's got a lot of good stuff in it, and the critics can go try to make own luck at vampire comedy.
This is a wonderfully fun movie. It’s got a lot of good stuff in it, and the critics can go try to make own luck at vampire comedy.
When I first saw this film on TV in the early 70s, I thought it was so  cheesy I gave it very little attention.  

Then in the early 90s it was  released on laserdisc in a letterboxed version and I bought it on a  lark. After I viewed in the first time I still didn't think much of it  and thought maybe I wasted my money.  

But then, as the years passed, I  would look at it every so often and now I love the film.  

It is an  acquired taste.  

You first have to love vampire films -- the  old-fashioned, Gothic kind.  Next, you need to appreciate Polanski's  style and his understated approach.  It's also best to watch this film  late at night with the lights off, and especially with a snow storm  outside.  Give it a chance and this film will creep up on you. Hopefully  it will come to DVD soon. 

- stew100 

Now, let’s be honest. This isn’t the best horror/comedy movie. The truth be told that Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein holds that position.

However, second place has just got to go to this one, and there’s no shame in being second here.

I don’t know too much about Roman Polanski’s career (I think I know more about his personal life): I’ve seen Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, and this movie is the third of his that I know about that I’ve seen. maybe there were others, but I cannot recall them at the top of my head.

Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.

I would never have imagined from those two movies that he could direct comedy. Because of that I came into FVK very skeptical. At first, I thought that the laughs were few and far between. I kind of took it as a light-hearted serious movie.

I also thought that Polanski’s direction was too showy for a comedy.

But as the film went on, the comic moments began to build. And the showy direction ceased seeming showy and began to seem wonderful. If you find yourself not laughing a lot, it’s understandable.

Just sit back and enjoy Polanski’s amazing direction. And the laughs, although, to many, they may seem too few, those that there are are enormous.

Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.

I’d also like to praise the actors, including Roman Polanski himself. The set design, especially in the castle, is more than amazing. It’s simply beautiful.

The title "fearless vampire killers" it's not  so good as "Dance of the Vampires",outside U.S. this is the original title

I  always will remember this film as "Dance of the Vampires"  ALSO,CONGRATULATIONS to Mr Polanski for the Palme D' Or, he deserves  it(without him  just cinema "boring")

I enjoyed poetic scenes  such as like moment in Sarah's bath comparing the textures of first soap  bubbles, then falling snowflakes, and finally crimson blood. when  Alfred(Polanski) carries his master across the castle battlements remind  me of Polanski early short films.  
This is a wonderfully fun movie. It's got a lot of good stuff in it, and the critics can go try to make own luck at vampire comedy.
This is a wonderfully fun movie. It’s got a lot of good stuff in it, and the critics can go try to make own luck at vampire comedy.
Krystov Komeda's music has been  acclaimed as "the most innovative and haunting score ever devised for a  horror movie" by the heavyweight Aurum Film Encyclopedia. 

Krystof  Komeda's wondrous music, with its weird choral effects and little  melodies Komeda's score communicates the Kafka-like isolation of the  setting and the characters

Polanski chose some of the finest  English cinema craft artists to work on the film: cameraman Douglas  Slocombe, production designer Wilfrid Shingleton Polanski engaged noted  choreographer Tutte Lemkow, who played the actual Fiddler in FIDDLER ON  THE ROOF, for the film's climactic Danse Macabre minuet.

Sharon Tate as Sarah was delightful(we should remember her in a good way,as a decent actress and person,her scene with Polanski  is really cool ,especially "the bite scene") Jack MacGowran as  Professor Abronsius is  just great Polanski's films often deal in contrasts of master and  servant, the empowered and the powerless. The supposedly benign  Abronsius  bullies Alfred for his own purposes, just as the vampires  consider all of humankind a resource to be harvested.

The  character called Shagal got the best lines in the movie,when A woman  thrusts a crucifix in his face, only for Shagal - a Jewish rather than a  Christian vampire - to go "Oy-yoy! You got the wrong vampire" and bite  her anyway Count Von Krolock  (Ferdy Mayne, who plays the Count)he looks  really as a Nosferatu or a man that needs Transfusion!.

Also  funny is Herbert, the openly gay vampire who is interested in Alfred  rather than Sara, the sexual deviations implicit in early Hammer films  like The Brides of Dracula (1960) and Kiss of the Vampire (1964) are  brought out. 

- patita-1 

Right from the main title sequence this film is really quite wonderful.

Christopher Komeda’s score is weird and haunting.

Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.

The day-for-night shots of the snowy countryside are a bit distracting, but you know they kind of fit the fairy tale quality of the film’s isolated, late 19th century Transylvanian winter never land.

The movie is extremely well-mounted with wonderful sets, especially the vampires’ castle.

Oh, young love. Eh?
Oh, young love. Eh?

All the performances are excellent. Jack MacGowran’s Professor Abronsius is an absolutely incredible characterization, unlike anything else MacGowran ever did on film.

The same is true of Alfie Bass’ Yoine Shagal, possibly the world’s first Jewish vampire, and a terrible lecher.

Sharon Tate was probably never lovelier than in this movie, and Roman Polanski is very good as Alfred, in fact amazing when you consider he was also directing.

It is a tour de force on his part.

Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.

Finally, Ferdy Mayne’s Count Von Krolock is a king vampire equal to any screen Dracula, while Iain Quarrier is also appropriately creepy as his gay vampire son, Herbert.

Well, what is this movie about? To begin with: although the vampire was  best popularized in the modern era by English writers, it is really a  myth of Eastern European Roman Catholicism. (I could explain that better  - and why the English so well co-opted it - but obviously not here.)  

This type of Catholicism (which finally produced a Pope in John Paul II)  now only thrives (and none too well) in Poland - Polanski's home  country. 

During the Second World War, Poland was utterly decimated.  

First, a large portion of its wealthiest citizens, who happened to be  Jewish, were exterminated. 

The Polish catholics themselves were split  radically between anti-semitic nationalists (who also, mistakenly,  thought the Nazis would save them from the Russians) and pro-Communists  who, mistakenly, thought the Russians would save them from the Nazis.  

Obviously, this was a no-win situation for the Poles. 

And yet the first  cinematic impression of this disaster arrived in the form of - a comedy -  Ernst Lubitsch's "To Be Or Not To Be" (later remade by Mel Brooks).

Does  the reader really need to know all this to appreciate this movie?  actually, yes. This film is laughter at death's door. 

The funniest and  most memorable line in the film is from the Jewish vampire, responding  to a threatened crucifix: "Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire!"  Funny? - Hilarious. Unfortunately, if this Vampire had any  grandchildren, they all died in Auschwitz.

Why am I playing such a  heavy hand here? Because this really is a great horror-comedy, far  better and far more important than the studio hacks at MGM who released this film (after chopping it up) could ever have understood.

There  is unfortunately no rumor that there's a director's cut in the vaults;  it is well to remember that Polanski nearly disowned this film on release, and really only reclaimed it after the brutal slaying of his wife, who plays such an important role in the film.

But even as shredded as it is (pay especially close attention to the discontinuities  involving the Professor), this is still marvelously written, directed, and photographed - truly frightening at moments, utterly hilarious at  others, but always grounded in a particularly Polish sensibility which  is now, alas, a thing of the past; - the preservation of a culture that,  at its best, was among the best in Europe. 

- winner55 

Like the drinking of blood (I would imagine!), appreciation of “The Fearless Vampire Killers” is very much an acquired taste.

I don’t know what to say to those that don’t like it except, Why don’t you try watching it again? It might grow on you as it did me.

The famous Ballroom scene.
The famous Ballroom scene.

This movie also has one of the best one-sheet posters from the sixties, with art by Frank Frazetta.

All in all, this is a great movie, and I cannot praise it enough.

Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
It's sad to say, whenever people ask me for a good vampire movie, one I  do recommend is The Fearless Vampire Killers, they always look at me and  ask "What's that?". 

But the 3 people I've shown it too loved it and I  think that has got to say something about this great vampire classic.  

Writer, director and co-star Roman Polanski made the first real vampire  spoof and what a great movie! 

If you think about today's spoofs,  everything is always a reference to something that's in pop culture.  This movie is just pure comedy, taking what was so typical at the time  of the weary travelers who happen upon a creepy castle with the even  creepier host, yet act completely oblivious when strange things happen. 
The ballroom scene is amazing. It is just one of the great things that I really enjoy about this movie.
The ballroom scene is amazing. It is just one of the great things that I really enjoy about this movie.
Instead, how about we have two vampire slayers, one who is calm and  experienced vs. the inexperienced and nervous? While we're at it, why  not add a ball into the mix? Dancing vampires, it just doesn't get any  better than this.

In the heart of Transylvania Professor  Abronsius and his apprentice Alfred are on the hunt for vampires.  Abronsius is old and withering and barely able to survive the cold ride  through the wintry forests, while Alfred is bumbling and introverted.  

The two hunters come to a small Eastern European town seemingly at the  end of a long search for signs of vampires. 

The two stay at a local inn,  full of angst-ridden townspeople who perform strange rituals to fend  off an unseen evil. Whilst staying at the inn, Alfred develops a  fondness for Sarah, the daughter of the tavern keeper Yoine Shagal.   
The environment is amazing, and can take you away to another time and place. You can feel the cold wind on your face, and the pack of wolves snapping at your heels.
The environment is amazing, and can take you away to another time and place. You can feel the cold wind on your face, and the pack of wolves snapping at your heels.
After witnessing Sarah being kidnapped by the local vampire lord, Count  von Krolock, the two follow his snow trail, leading them to Krolock's  ominous castle in the snow-blanketed hills nearby. 

They break into the  castle, but are trapped by the Count's hunchback servant, Koukol.  Despite misgivings, Abronsius and Alfred accept the Count's invitation  to stay in his ramshackle Gothic castle, where Alfred spends the night  fitfully. 

After finding Sarah the next day, they come up with a plan to  destroy the count and save Sarah, but with a midnight ball in the mix of  vampires, the plans might be a bit harder than they realized.

I  think one of the funniest scenes in film history is when Roman Polanski  is being chased by Count Krolock's feminine vampire son, Herbert. 
Frozen stiff. Poor fellow, but then again it's actually pretty funny in a dark comedic sort of way.
Frozen stiff. Poor fellow, but then again it’s actually pretty funny in a dark comedic sort of way.
The  seduction scene before that was too funny, but let's add Roman running  around in a circle oblivious that he did just go around in a circle and  runs right back into Herbert! 

The comedic timing was just gold! 

Sharon  Tate is also in this film and she is just beautiful, you could see how  Roman would fall in love with her on and off screen so easily. It's  really sad that we lost her so young and so tragically, you see the  talent that could have been. 

I also love Jack MacGowran, he's calm  exterior to Roman's scaredy cat routine was the perfect balance the film  needed. 

I nearly die laughing each time I see the scene where they are  in the Count's bedroom about to stake him, but Jack gets stuck in the  window and Roman chickens out on killing the count. 

He has to go around  the castle to pull Jack out but gets distracted by Sharon Tate and when  he finally realizes that he left Jack in the same room with blood  sucking vampires, he just reeks with the "Oops!" face. 

The ballroom  scene is so memorable, again, the comedic timing is great. Another thing  about this film is that it also has some great scares in it too, some  great make up effects with the Count. 

I highly recommend this film; I've  been watching it since I was a little girl, I still love watching it  all these years later and can't wait to show it to others as well. 

- Smells_Like_Cheese 
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It's a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.
Scene from the Fearless Vampire Killers. It’s a great flick and does help to carry you away to another time and place. It is, thus, great escapist viewing.

Conclusion

This movie is a bit dusty and not something that you would turn to automatically. However, it is a great little gem of a movie and well worth a nice visit. It will carry you away to a different time and place and it is rather charming in it’s own sinister comic way.

For me, it took me away for the germ warfare, the masks and goggles, and the latex gloves. It took me away from the disinfecting and the isolation and being cooped inside as the beautiful day with blue skies and lush green trees beckoned to me outside.

I am sure that it will take you too to a nice place far away from your normal life.


I hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other posts regarding movies and you can view them in my movie index here…

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A Great Underrated Movie – Spaced Invaders

I well remember watching this in Indiana. We had picked up a cheap VHS at the check-out lane in Walmart. This video looked promising, but I really didn’t expect too much. But, boy, oh, boy was I wrong. It was awesome. It’s one of those under promoted, and under-reported movies that are just wonderful. It’s a movie about a group of hilariously incompetent Martians that try to take over the world during Halloween. OMG!

 Kathy:  "But dad, they're not really bad.  They're just stupid." 

And are they ever stupid. You’ve got a Martian pilot that sounds like a mutant Jack Nicholson, a most excellent duck costume, a tinker-toy mechanic, and a pile of super fertilizer alien shit. It’s pure awesomeness.

My favorite character is the Martian pilot. He's a real hoot.
My favorite character is the Martian pilot. He’s a real hoot.
 After mistaking a Halloween re-broadcast of Orson Welles' classic radio  adaptation of WAR OF THE WORLDS for a real Martian invasion, a group of  moronic Martians shows up on Earth looking to conquer only their plans  go awry as they find themselves truly out of their element and in  reality all alone.

This really is often quite good and funny,  with some decent lines (just check the memorable quotes) to boot. It  will most likely appeal to Sci-Fi fans. This has passed the test of time  for me as seeing it again recently it proved much better than I  expected it to be. Despite a cast made up of no-name stars, this may  just be the funniest Martian invasion ever put to film. Interestingly  enough, the Martians themselves seem to represent almost every classic  Action Hero/Sci-Fi Hero stereotype there is (cool 50s teen, fighter  pilot, fearless astronaut, brave soldier and kooky scientist). Fun for  the whole family. 

"Prepare to DIE! Earth Scum!" 

- Space_Mafune 
Spaced Invaders - the pilot discusses his problems with the town sheriff.
Spaced Invaders – the pilot discusses his problems with the town sheriff.

Why so unknown…

While perfectly harmless, Spaced Invaders is a kid’s movie that had the potential to be something a little bit more than a silly Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles knockoff.

Halloween night. A War of the Worlds rebroadcast. Except, this time, the humans know it isn’t real. It’s the Martians that don’t.

The idea is a nice flipping of history and, with throwback practical effects, it seemed that this production from Touchstone Pictures was destined to be something special.

Except it wasn’t.  

The movie was skewered by critics at the time of its release and ignored by audiences.

Crippled with a throwback vibe many were not expecting, the madcap flick was disappeared from theaters as quickly as it had arrived.

And is slowly being rediscovered by net-citizens all over the internet.

The Characters:  

I first saw this movie in 1990 when it first came out on video.  I agree  that it is total nonsense, but it is also one of the funniest movies  that I have ever seen.  The very idea that a group of "advanced aliens"  would be running for thier lives from a bunch of country hicks is  totally side-spliting. Why do all science fiction movies have to be  about murderous beings? This group of Imperial Martian Atomic Navy  misfits reminds me of some of the idiots that I knew in the army!  No  wonder they were left on asteroid patrol while the rest of the fleet  went to war.  Leave this movie alone.  We need more like it. 

- boomryoung 
The Martian crew, each wearing a different uniform from well known science fiction movies, sit around a campfire and discuss their situation.
The Martian crew, each wearing a different uniform from well known science fiction movies, sit around a campfire and discuss their situation.
  • Sheriff Hoxley – He just moved to this small town and already has an alien invasion on his hands.
  • Mr. Wrenchmuller – Some of the farmer’s lines are exceptional for a movie of this kind. When faced with losing his farm he morosely asks, “Why did I have to go and get old?”
  • Mr. Klembecker – Total bastard who owns the liens on many farms in the area, including Wrenchmuller’s.
  • Kathy & Brian – She is the sheriff’s daughter and the owner of an awesome “Alien” costume. He is dressed as a duck, but deadly with a trash can lid.
  • Blaznee – Martian pilot who sounds and acts a lot like Jack Nicholson.
  • Capt. Bipto – Senior officer aboard the Martian’s ship. Limited duty? Yeah, you could say that.
  • Lt. Giggywig – The gung-ho, kill them all, sort of alien invader. Lucky for us that he will not start shooting until someone notices him. Nobody pays the little guy much attention.
  • Dr. Ziplock – Whatever those are embedded in his eyes, they look like they hurt.
  • Cpl. Pez – As the FNG, he knows his place. Cowering behind the others is his only hope for survival.
  • The Enforcer Drone – Remember the Russian political officer in “The Hunt for Red October?” Now turn him into a lethal robot. Blasted to smithereens.
Each Martian has their very own personality. One is the leader, one is the scientist, one is the Jock... oh each one is unique and super silly.
Each Martian has their very own personality. One is the leader, one is the scientist, one is the Jock… oh each one is unique and super silly.
Normally the best way to annoy me in a film is to include some reference  to Orson Welles. But here is a sci-fi comedy quoting the War of the  Worlds broadcast.... and it is gold! The very concept of a small bunch  of diminutive,aggressive and stupid aliens being mistaken as kids in  Halloween dress is magnificent. Don't be fooled by the notion that  because it seems like a kids' movie it is unsophisticated - it isn't,  there's a lot of hidden treasure...  A gem! 

- Balthazar-5 

The Plot: 

Giggywig:  "Look, when a vastly superior alien culture comes all this  way to take over your world, certain basic laws of planetary conquest  apply.  For example, when someone points a quad-vected hypothermic  cosmo-blaster at you, it's a fair bet you are about to become toast."   

While the rest of their fleet gets its butt completely whipped during an ill conceived attack upon Arcturus, an asteroid patrol ship full of Martians intercepts a stray radio broadcast coming from Earth. As luck would have it, the station they tune to has “The War of the Worlds” playing.

The little green menaces are ecstatic!

Earth is nearby; they can join in the carnage! The patrol craft departs from the asteroid belt and heads pell-mell for Big Bean, Illinois.

The Martians encounter some trick-or-treaters.
The Martians encounter some trick-or-treaters.
Looking at some of the negative posts, you really have to wonder what some people do for fun....

I  was lucky enough to see the film during its all-too-brief theatrical  run. The audience laughed its heads off.  I'm watching a tape of it as I  type and it's still dang funny!

It's also got a sweet side, with  unexpected turns of genuine pathos. The late, great Royal Dano is  especially effective as the lonely, down-on-his-luck farmer  Wrenchmuller.  Ariana Richards and J.J. Anderson are great as the lead  kids.  And the actors in the Martian suits, although limited to mime, do  a great job

Another thing to look for is the background details.  The film is full of homages, pastiches, and references to other SF and  fantasy films. Take a look at the Martian costumes next time.  One of  them is wearing a Marty McFly costume, another is a Ghostbuster, a third  is in a House Atreides uniform, and a fourth is wearing a Last  Starfighter flightsuit. 

- davidemartin 

I hope that all the “Invader ZIM” fanboys have taken notice at this point. Short aliens, really hyper, sort of goofy, with big heads and advanced technology (let alone the Martian’s crest of arms and the little robot).

In Big Bean things are not entirely without strife. Klembecker is snatching the land from under poor farmers. The greedy twit wants to capitalize on the town’s new highway off-ramp. One of Hoxley’s first calls is to deal with Wrenchmuller. The elderly man was about to walk into the twit’s office with a double barrel shotgun. The scattergun was unloaded, but Wrenchmuller begins looking for shells once Klembecker appears and starts acting like an evil banker. The situation is diffused. Later, the sheriff drops his daughter off at a Halloween party.

I've watched this movie so many times the video is worn out. It is a  movie I can put on whenever I need a good laugh. The farmer is  hilarious, the duck boy is too. 

It's an overall feel good movie. 

Even  kids 12 and up can watch it without being inundated with sexual  innuendos, violence and cursing. The TNT award at the end is the best...  "well, you can just say your prayers." LOL Oh yea, and so are the two  old guys and the old woman after the martians fly by them when they are  crash-landing on earth - "okay, go get the bucket" 

It's great! I think  kids under 10 might be frightened by the enforcer drone, maybe. 

I don't  know though, with all the crap they see on TV on a regular basis, it  might not be. So go out an rent it today! If you have Blockbuster  Rewards(TM) program, you can use one of your free rentals and you'll  enjoy. 

- becca239 

The patrol ship arrives on Earth with a bang; it crashes into Wrenchmuller’s dilapidated barn. The old farmer, with the help of his trusty dog, expends a lot of effort trying to capture, or at least photograph, a Martian. Only Blaznee is left aboard though, because the others gleefully embark upon a campaign to crush humanity. Bipto quickly runs afoul of traffic. More precisely, a truck. He is pried from the grill of Klembecker’s vehicle by the gas station attendant. No, no, no – he is not dead. In fact, the resourceful Martian clamps a mental control device onto Vern (the attendant). It turns the poor guy into a cross between Christopher Lloyd in “Back to the Future” and Christopher Lloyd in “The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai.” The two begin building a super weapon.

This movie is to Halloween what the hilarious "Christmas Story" is to  Christmas: both are relatively low-budget, no-big-name-stars type  films...and both are two of the absolute greatest and funniest movies  available, both seasonal CLASSICS!!! 

"Spaced Invaders" comes galloping  out right from the start with warmth and humor and a superb cast of  characters...all five goofy Martians, Klembecker the Realtor, Russell  the deputy, Vern at the "fuel dispensing depot" and so many more! 

You  just have to see this movie to believe it, and, like "Christmas Story",  it just keeps getting better and better with each viewing, and you pick  up on fun little things each time!! MOST DEFINITELY A TEN!!! 

- michael_shell 

Elsewhere, Kathy, Brian, and the other Martians (a robot too – the Martians’) are being chaperoned around town by a heavyset lady. Only on Earth a short while and already consigned to the back seat of a station wagon. Ha! Despite waving around deadly alien weaponry, the poor little Martians are treated like spoiled brats by the frazzled mother. Lt. Giggywig does not help either, he keeps threatening her with total annihilation. The woman finally throws all of the green invaders out of the car. Kathy and Brian bail too.

The two main characters of the Spaced Invaders movie.
The two main characters of the Spaced Invaders movie.

Blaznee continues fixing the ship, along with parrying moves by one annoyed deputy and Wrenchmuller. The little fellow has everything in hand until the radio station reveals that the broadcast is science fiction. The Enforcer Drone decides to eliminate the entire inept crew. It zaps Blaznee, but he survives. Knocked unconscious and toted into town by Wrenchmuller as proof that they are being invaded, but alive.

Anyone who does not find this movie funny, does not understand simple  comedy. This movie is not a complex comedy, it is full of one liners,  and sight gags, and will make anyone who wants to laugh, laugh... The  alien who is doing a Nicholson impression will crack you up! 

- John Wersan 

The pilot wakes up just in time to crawl out of the truck bed. The excited citizens are further distracted from looking for him when the rest of the crew broadcasts an ultimatum. Surrender now Earth scum! The Martians heroically blast a silo with their portable cannon. What results is a deluge of popcorn, which has the positive effect of temporarily swamping the Enforcer Drone (it had been closing in for the kill). Blaznee dashes back to the ship as several truckloads of shotgun wielding hicks converge on the destroyed silo.

Did I mention that the aliens are inept? Oh, also be it known that Kathy and the little robot become friends.

I understand many will think "Spaced Invaders" a lame farce about little  green men trying to take over Earth; but believe me, compared to "The  Sorcerer's Apprentice," which I have just finished watching with my  family, "Spaced Invaders," along with "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" and  "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids", makes me weep with nostalgia for how low  Disney has fallen in quality. While "Spaced Invaders" is the film of  least quality of the trio I mentioned, it nonetheless has a cheeky sense  of humor, with a wonderful script and actors (er, voice-over artists  for the Martians) who make this film highly watchable (and with no lame  CGI effects of dragons or fireballs to ruin the fun!).

The  Martians themselves make a great team. Their antics and delusions of  grandeur are insanely fun to watch. One person compared the ostensible  military commander of the Martians to Invader Zim, the protagonist from  the eponymous Nickelodeon cult classic, and I think it is an apt  comparison. Why does one Martian have a Jack Nicholson voice? I don't  care, and I love it. Enjoy the futile attempts of the Martians to get  their jalopy of a spacecraft to go airborne, and their desperate fight  against the hicks and yokels of Big, Bean, Illinois. The human robot  slave is one of the coolest sidekicks I've seen, and his creation, a  robot made from tractors and other farm machinery, is one of the best  special effects I've seen in a Disney movie. How can you hate his best  line: "the smell of battery acid makes me thirsty!"? Answer: you can't.

This  is one movie where you root for the alien invaders all the way. The  human, denizens of a small Midwestern farming town, are made to be less  than sympathetic characters, especially the wicked banker named  Clembecker (or whatever his name was). One of the good humans is a  brilliant example of character design, a crazy, wiry old farmer named  Wrenchmuller who has a way with words and with nitroglycerin. The kid in  the duck costume who also speaks with a lisp is also fun to watch,  though he isn't in the film all that much.

Don't take "Spaced  Invaders" too seriously as a film, nor look for any important theme or  message. Sit back and enjoy Disney before CGI and Jerry Bruckheimer  eliminated any camp value the company once had. 

- michael_the_nermal 

Faced with numerous American bred fans of the Second Amendment, Dr. Ziplock activates the “distress-o-matic.” The device should summon the ship to the beacon’s location. However, the ship is still not fully repaired. It goes hopping across empty fields with Blaznee struggling to kill the autopilot. It crashes to a halt at the terminus of a dead end road. The Martians (all of them) pile inside, then the angry locals arrive and start shooting at the ship. Idiots! It flies through an asteroid belt! Your weapons are useless! Bunch of dolts (apply to either group, as you desire).

If the creators of this film had made any attempt at introducing reality  to the plot, it would have been just one more waste of time, money, and  creative effort.  Fortunately, by throwing all pretense of reality to  the winds, they have created a comedic marvel.  Who could pass up a film  in which an alien pilot spends the entire film acting like Jack  Nicholson, complete with the Lakers T-shirt.  Do not dismiss this film  as trash. 

- knappws 

The sheriff tries to calm everyone down. Then the Martians emerge from their patrol ship. They are surrounded by a metal ring. It is none other than the “Donut of Destruction!” (DOD for short.) This device will obliterate a sphere one million miles in diameter, but leave what is inside the donut unharmed. The exact usefulness of the DOD is called into question by everyone present. Sure, the invaders will be unscathed. In the middle of a rapidly expanding ball of plasma, but unharmed. Unfortunately, this means they will be left “unscathed” in the middle of space once the planet and everything around them (ship included) is gone. Fat lot of good that thing is.

The Martians wisely decide to run away and rethink their plan.

This movie is not for everyone.  You're either bright enough to get "it"  or you're not.  Fans of sci-fi films who don't take themselves too  seriously definitely will enjoy this movie. I recommend this movie for  those who can appreciate spoofs and parodies.  Everyone I've recommended  this film to has enjoyed it.  If you enjoy Monty Python or Mel Brooks  films, you'll probably enjoy this one.  The voice characterizations are  done in a tongue-in-cheek manner and the one-liners fly fast and  furious. 

- joseph_lauer 

As silly invasion movies go, this is pretty good. The costumes are better than average and you can quickly begin to identify individual Martians by their voices. Besides, what could be more fun than a bunch of enthusiastic, but hopelessly inept, invaders from Mars? Armed with lethal weaponry, I might add.

The head Martian orders this crew to take over the Earth. OMG!
The head Martian orders this crew to take over the Earth. OMG!

Things I Learned From This Movie: 

Hoxley:  "Where is Kathy?" 

Mrs. Vanderspool:  "She got out with your Martian surfer nephews." 
 
Hoxley:  "Mrs. Vanderspool, do you have any idea how stupid that sounds?"   
  • There is such a thing as too many pockets when you are looking for your shotgun shells.
  • Police radar guns go up to 3,000 mph.
  • Nose cone art is alive and well on other planets.
  • Too much chocolate is bad for anybody, regardless of physiology.
  • Extreme speed limit infractions are punished with the death penalty in some states.
  • Never fire a plasma cannon at a silo full of unpopped popcorn.
  • Dynamite is a farmer’s best friend.
  • The aurora borealis are caused by spacecraft dumping their toilet systems into Earth’s stratosphere.
Zany and fun -- that's all this movie is about!  Don't think about  trying to read too much into it.  If you do, you'll be sorely  disappointed.  It's just a farcical take-off on monster movies and  contains some real good slapstick moments.  No violence, no sex, no foul  language -- safe for the kids and fun for the adults!! 

- wjeffer 

Stuff To Watch For: 

  • 2 mins – That would be a CR-1398977 “Cactus” heavy assault cruiser.
  • 20 mins – Captain, you really should look both ways before… …never mind.
  • 25 mins – What does he think it is, a potato bug?
  • 45 mins – Ten feet of rope could have saved you a lot of trouble.
  • 50 mins – RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST AN OFF-RAMP!
  • 53 mins – Humans: 1, Martians: 0, Cats: -1
  • 63 mins – You know, the Martians’ heads look a lot like watermelons. I wonder what they taste like? (I am, after all, an unevolved savage.)
  • 74 mins – The little scout ship can implode and take the universe with it? Sounds like cause for a recall.
Being from a small town in Illinois myself, I can instantly relate to  this movie. Considering the era it was made in, the townsfolk look  uncomfortably like a lot of people I grew up with. 

Yes the plot is  so-so. And yes, the Acting is not going to get nominated for an Oscar  anytime soon. 

But that isn't the point. The point is to suspend reality  and just have FUN. 

And this movie has Fun aplenty. From the  greedy,uncaring banker to the well meaning,but dimwitted deputy, this  movie was made to poke fun at the SciFi genre and small town living at  it's best. 

Who can't smile at the sight of the Enforcer Drone or the  Vern Droid? and I LOVED the FarmZoid. 

Wish I had one when I was growing  up. Overall, considering the technology they had available at the time,  this is a pleasant romp into one's childhood, when you could sit back on  a Saturday afternoon, Popcorn in hand, and laugh at the foibles of  small town living. 

This is a movie I would watch again and again, if for  no other reason than to poke fun at myself and my small town ways. 

- johnboy1260-1 

Conclusion

This is a gem of a movie not just for people who like fun and quirky premises, but who love the history and traditions of Sci-Fi and Classic Hollywood movies.

Each alien of the Martian crew is the embodiment of a classic Sci-Fi character or member of Hollywood royalty. As such, it’s pure pleasure watching them bounce of each other and the residents of Big Bean, Illinois.

If I were you, I’d stop being so serious and instead gather your loved ones around the video monitor. I’d spend the time making up some fried chicken, some fries and /or coleslaw and/or some mashed potatoes. Get some biscuits, and a couple of cases of icy cold beer and enjoy yourselves. Life is about spending time with friends and family, and this movie is just silly enough to tie it all together.

"Spaced Invaders" is one of the funniest movies, I´ve ever seen. I don´t  understand, why this movie didn´t get better critics, it´s funny,  harmless and sweet. 

I first watched it, when I was 11, and I really fell  in love with it... 2 days later, I got it on VHS :-P Till today, I´ve  shown it to many friends, and they all liked it, but nobody knew the  movie before. 

I think, that´s the problem, nearly nobody knows it, so  nearly nobody can like it... 

This movie never got a real chance, that´s  sad, "SI" has really the potential of a comedy like "Monsters Inc." or  "Spaceballs". Ok, enough displeasure - What I really wanted to say, is  that, if you ever want to laugh your head off, watch it! 

Even if you  don´t get mad about it, it´s worth watching! -->

Prepare to laugh,  earth scum! 

- Amy_Brigman 
Inspiration for the most wonder Spaced Invaders movie. All that is missing are some mugs of icy cold beer, mac and cheese, and good friends to share the moments with.
Inspiration for the most wonderful Spaced Invaders movie. All that is missing are some mugs of icy cold beer, mac and cheese, and good friends to share the moments with.

I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other posts on movies in my Movie Index, here. Check them out…

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Unusual Movies – Greenslime. When Hollywood made movies without social justice agendas.

I am old enough to remember going to the movie theater to watch this flick. It was on a Saturday afternoon, and my folks gave me a dollar to watch it. I was ten years old. Back in those days we watched movies for fun, or barring that, to stay out of our parent’s hair and let them have some time alone.

Here’s some fun “elevator pitches” for science fiction movies. 

How about  having astronauts land on an asteroid that’s on a collision course with  earth? Wait, it gets better— to save the world they have to use  drilling equipment to bore holes in the rocky surface to plant nuclear  bombs inside and blow the renegade asteroid into space dust. 

Not working  for you? 

Okay, try this one on. How about having an alien life form that looks harmless in its infant state brought aboard a space ship. Then it breaks loose, transforming into a monstrous killing machine that slaughters the crew one by one!  

- Horror News

Lately, most of the larger (high budget) movies out of Hollywood are nothing more that venues to ram-rod social justice “improvements” down our collective throats. This policy certainly started long ago. Maybe back during the Clinton administration, but it most certainly became heated up to a degree of red-hot insanity during the Obama presidency.

Now we have a 007 “James Bond” flick that going to have a new transgender LGBT “woman of color” in the role of secret agent. Funny how she looks like a morph of Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama. Yuck!

The face of the new progressive, modern "James Bond", 007. This woman looks like someone morphed Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton together. Oh, how enlightened! How so very progressive!
The face of the new progressive, modern “James Bond”, 007. This woman looks like someone morphed Michelle Obama and Hillary Clinton together. Oh, how enlightened! How so very progressive!

Anyways, let’s get back to the movie at hand; Green slime.

This is a movie perfect for the eleven year old boy inside of all of us. It’s got a cool retro 1960’s sound track. (It’s got) Cool miniatures with all sorts of detail like something out of Fireball XL-5. It’s got spacemen exploring a rogue asteroid and carrying space rifles (!). It’s got a love triangle with a handsome man with a chiseled face, and the girls all look like they came out of a 1960’s playboy magazine.

And it’s got monsters.

Lots and lots of monsters.

Right out of the gate you can feel the movie itching to get to the good  stuff– that song barely lasts a verse and a chorus before Robert Horton,  as Commander Jack Rankin, arrives at space station Gamma 3 ready  to head up a very dangerous mission– landing on a strange asteroid and  exploding it out of its collision course with Earth.  

-Trailers from Hell

What’s not to love?

I saw THE GREEN SLIME in 1968 at the Omni Center Theatre in  Atlanta Georgia with my brother and cousin and was awestruck and  terrified as only a 6-year-old boy seeing a movie called THE GREEN SLIME  in 1968 could be so I’ve always had a huge soft spot in my heart for  this film (I was lucky enough to attend a 16mm screening at Cinema  Wasteland a couple of years ago and it held up great). 

I mentioned three  things that I think make THE GREEN SLIME so enduring. 

One. The title, THE  GREEN SLIME is so perfect and unpretentious that Saturday matinee  audiences in 1968 had to know exactly what was in store and I can’t  imagine anyone feeling let down. 

Second, THE GREEN SLIME has one of the funkiest title songs in cinema history. Written by Charles Fox (who  would go on to write the themes for THE LOVE BOAT and HAPPY DAYS) and  accompanied by a frenzied drum beat and blaring electric guitars  (someone edited the song to clips of battle scenes from the film and  posted it on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vKESo2ofEcw).  

THE GREEN SLIME theme is a blast and was even released as a single!  

Third, the poster is my absolute favorite from the 1960’s. The bold  colorful artwork features the emerald cretins in an action-packed outer  space battle with flying spacemen while holding a terrified Luciana  Paluzzi in a skin-tight metallic spacesuit in the foreground (an outfit  like nothing she wears in the film). 

The poster is a throwback to the  “bug-eyed monster” posters of the 1950’s and the artwork even graced the  cover of “Famous Monsters of Filmland” #57 in 1969. I have an original  THE GREEN SLIME three-sheet (40 x 80 inches) and it’s proudly displayed  in my den along with my Resin Green Slime model kit and vintage “The  Green Slime are Coming!” button.
  
- My Favorite Movies: The One About the Green Slime That I Saw at the Theater When I Was Six  
Greenslime movie poster.
Greenslime movie poster.

The Characters

The plot of THE GREEN SLIME play like a precursor (or parody) to ARMEGEDDEON and then ALIEN as a  runaway asteroid, known as Flora (!), is determined to be on a  collision course with earth. 

Rugged astronaut Jack Rankin (Robert  Horton) is ordered out of retirement to command Space Station Gamma 3,  an enormous ring-shaped outpost populated by a detachment of scientists  and military personnel, and stop Flora before it destroys our planet.  

Onboard Rankin meets his old flame Lisa (Luciana Paluzzi) and her  fiancée, Commander Vince Elliot (Richard Jaeckel), Rankin's former close  friend. 

Rankin, Elliot and the sinister Doctor Halvorsen (Ted Gunther)  land a shuttle on the asteroid, depositing explosives in an attempt to  nuke Flora. 

They succeed, but a small wad of pulsating green jelly adheres itself to Dr. Halvoson’s spacesuit and is brought back to the station unobserved. 

The crew celebrates with a groovy party featuring nurses in short skirts and high heels shimmying to 60’s electronic tunes, unaware that the oozy green stowaway is morphing into a deadly tentacled creature out to electrocute everyone in its path.  

Attempts to kill the slimy beast backfire as each drop of its blood  grows into a new monster until Gamma 3 is infested with these waddling critters collectively known as…

...The Green Slime!! 

- My Favorite Movies: The One About the Green Slime That I Saw at the Theater When I Was Six 
  • Commander Jack Rankin – This guy wouldn’t stop smiling if a rabid weasel was in his shorts; he would just grin and give you a thumbs up.
  • Commander Vince Elliott – In charge of the space station and not very happy Rankin is senior to him. A rash man who gives one Green Slime a hug. (That means he dies.)
  • Lisa Benson – Woman torn between loving Rankin and Elliott.
  • Dr. Halvorsen – Head researcher aboard the space station, he gets seriously fried.
  • General Jonathan Thompson – Gruff senior officer, his main role in this movie is sweating.
  • Captain Martin – Elliott’s right hand man, for some reason he looks natural in a white motorcycle helmet.
  • The Green Slime – Alien life form which feeds on energy and even a single drop of blood can regenerate into new creatures. Incinerated.
The Green Slime has the secret weapon every B-Movie needs-  Richard Jaeckel. 

Jaeckel was a prolific, academy award nominated actor  who bounced between supporting roles in big budget films and starring  turns in B-pictures. In fact he was nominated for a best supporting  actor Oscar for Sometimes A Great Notion (1970) right after he starred in The Green Slime.  

What made Jaeckel so special was that (like Shelly Winters) he always  delivered a class-A performance in any film, regardless of its quality.  If you watch The Green Slime carefully you’ll notice that he’s always moving, or emoting— giving the audience a little something extra.  

He never steals scenes from his co-stars, but he’s always the most  interesting thing onscreen. 

 - Horror News   
Exploring the mysterious and dangerous asteroid. Yikes!
Exploring the mysterious and dangerous asteroid. Yikes!
THE GREEN SLIME was an American/Japanese co-production shot in Tokyo with a mostly American cast (extras are Japanese or played by  American servicemen stationed in Japan) and a Japanese director giving  the film a stilted, off-the-wall international quality. 

It was shot in  English but crudely post-dubbed and the whole cast has English monikers  regardless of their ethnicity (exotic Italian beauty Luciana Paluzzi plays…..Lisa Benson!).  

Square-jawed Robert Horton (a TV actor best known for starring in WAGON  TRAIN) delivers a comically wooden lead performance as the arrogant and  condescending Rankin. 

As Elliott, Richard Jaeckel seems to have more  fun with his role and he makes a good space hero (Jaeckel stayed in  Japan to costar in the equally absurd LATITUDE ZERO before returning to  Hollywood and Oscar-nominated the next year for SOMETIMES A GREAT  NOTION). 

Luciana Paluzzi had made a splash as Bond girl Fiona Volpe in THUNDERBALL in 1965 and makes for equally sexy here. 

Director Kinji  Fukasaku went on to make cult items MESSAGE FROM SPACE in 1978 (a gonzo  STAR WARS knockoff starring Sonny Chiba that featuresmassive  sailboats in space!) and the controversial “teens- killing-teens” epic  BATTLE ROYALE in 2000. 

THE GREEN SLIME’s toy-like special effects are hardly realistic, but there are a ton of them and most are ambitious and imaginatively designed. The spaceships look like models because they are models and the fact that they are way overlit doesn’t help. 

It’s  the monsters themselves that make THE GREEN SLIME so memorable. 

Squat  and lumpy, with one giant red eye surrounded by many smaller eyes, the  rubbery, tentacle-waving gremlins were played by Japanese children in  clumsy suits. They seem more than a bit silly today but, with their  high-pitched electronic squeal, were pretty nightmarish to young  audiences in 1968.  

 - My Favorite Movies: The One About the Green Slime That I Saw at the Theater When I Was Six  

The Plot

Packing more goofy models and props than most Godzilla films comes this lovely piece of b-cinema.

I still want to know who starched Commander Rankin’s face while he was smiling, either the guy is a loon or he’s on some serious happy pills. Prozac boy gets things done though; when you have a rogue asteroid hurtling toward Earth he’s the man to call. (Not Bruce Willis, mind you.)

... a brilliantly artificial and eerily vibrant landscape which writer  Richard Harland Smith accurately described as perfectly evocative of the  Major Matt Mason space station and lunar base command toy sets of the  1960s, reproduced with full-scale reverence and a dash of pop sci-fi  psychedelia.

-Trailers from Hell  
Fighting the oozy and tentacled greenslime monsters.
Fighting the oozy and tentacled greenslime monsters.

When the astronauts land to place their bombs they find the asteroid is inhabited by strange blobs of glowing slime that are drawn to the equipment. After blasting off and barely escaping the massive explosion (Imagine an orange and brown papier mache’ ball with half a stick of dynamite inside and you’re golden.) the heroes return to Space Station Gamma 3.

Just because The Green Slime predates Alien and Armageddon  doesn’t mean it’s some visionary piece of science fiction cinema. On  the surface it’s a subpar space opera with rubber-suited monsters,  cheesy miniatures and a cast of B-movie veterans struggling to kill  aliens while keeping a straight face. 

But despite its myriad of  deficiencies The Green Slime is a charming time capsule of mid  sixties camp. 

Watching its colorful “mod” sets, plastic helmeted  astronauts and man-in-a-suit monsters is like sprawling in a bean bag  chair, sipping a can of Schlitz while feeling the luxurious shag  carpeting beneath your toes.

Scientists aboard the Gamma-3 space  station discover a massive asteroid careening towards earth. 

UN Space  Command dispatches their bravest and squarest jawed astronaut (Robert  Horton) to command the mission to destroy the deadly celestial body,  which looks like a cat toy you’d find moldering under the couch. 

But our  hero has a long simmering feud with the space station’s commander  (Richard Jaeckel) who stole his fiancée (Luciana Paluzzi) who happens to  be the space station’s resident doctor. Putting their differences aside  they land on the asteroid, drill holes, plant nukes and zip back to the  space station, barely escaping the atomic blast. 

The earth is saved, but during their escape a small bit of green slimy alien life adheres itself to an astronaut’s space suit and hitches a ride to Gamma-3. 

Due  to the station’s high oxygen (or testosterone) levels the little blob of  space spooge sprouts into a menagerie of man sized monsters shooting  electricity from their tentacles. 

Will the astronauts defeat the alien  invaders? Will the big haired sexy doctor dump her beau for her brick  headed ex fiancé? Will our two heroes finally give in to their seething  homoerotic tension and be as god made them? Its all part of The Green Slime experience. 

 - Horror News 

Unfortunately, for everyone, some of the slime was carried back on a space suit. It soon evolves into a tentacled creature! So the thing kinda looks like Sigmund the Sea Monster – he never fried anyone with several thousand volts of electricity. (Yes, I know it’s the amps that get you.) This gives a nice excuse for Elliott and Rankin to have a power struggle over who is in charge, the latter a firm believer in “shoot first ask questions later.”

This poor doctor went back into the midst of the greenslime monsters to get his papers. Bad movie Doc. Bad move.
This poor doctor went back into the midst of the greenslime monsters to get his papers. Bad movie Doc. Bad move.

Another unfortunate fact about Green Slime: even a single drop of blood will grow into a new monster. So now you have dozens of pissed off Sigmunds running around electrocuting the crew, good job Rankin.

In the end humanity is saved by crashing Gamma 3 into Earth’s atmosphere, incinerating the Green Slime. Thank goodness something stopped them besides THROWING your laser rifle. The characters often unload at point blank range without effect. Soon as they throw the weapon it goes right through the monster’s eye. Even if you don’t like watching “spacemen” wearing white 1960’s police motorcycle helmets firing “laser guns” at waddling masses of latex monsters you have to love the title song.

Fighting the deadly greenslime inside the space-station.
Fighting the deadly greenslime inside the space-station.

Things I Learned From This Movie: 

  • Asteroids look like a Gobstopper which has been under the refrigerator for ten years.
  • Movies are less interesting from a phone’s objective.
  • Pulsing green muck plays heck with interstellar golf carts.
  • People can stand up and walk around while experiencing ten G’s.
  • Never let a bitter exgirlfriend tend your wound.
  • Alien life is best represented by green soap suds.
  • Space station security guards wear white motorcycle helmets with a little space symbol on them.
  • Golf carts are not four wheel drive.
  • Laser rifles work better as spears.
  • Never hug an ungrounded Green Slime.
The most charming thing about The Green Slime is how the  filmmakers lovingly revel in its cheesiest elements. 

Those miniature  rocket ships don’t zip by in an instant— instead the producers proudly  linger on them as if they were unveiling 2001 A Space Odyssey (1968).  

The unconvincing rubber monsters aren’t confined to fleeting, shadowy  glimpses— Nope, they’re given long loving close-ups under brighter lights than a baseball game. 

I love the filmmakers for having the balls  to do that. Plus Alien never had a rocking psychedelic theme song. Why Richard Delvy’s title tune, actually entitled The Green Slime, never made it onto Lenny Kaye’s classic psychedelic music anthology Nuggets is beyond me. 

The Green Slime’s other achievement is compressing entire plot of Armageddon into the first fifteen minutes. Why couldn’t Michael Bay have done that? 

 - Horror News  
The Gamma 8 space-station.
The Gamma 8 space-station.

Stuff To Watch For: 

  • 2 mins – Nice miniatures, ahm.
  • 13 mins – For some reason this scene is making me horny.
  • 25 mins – Bad dubbing!
  • 48 mins – White motorcycle helmets?
  • 64 mins – RANDOM ACT OF VIOLENCE AGAINST A FLASHLIGHT!
  • 70 mins – The explosion took out half of the model space station, but not that flimsy door?
  • 75 mins – Elliott could use some boxing lessons.
  • 83 mins – Jack, I’m going to kick your smiling self in the testicles. What do you think of that?
Our brave hero and attractive love interest.
Our brave hero and attractive love interest.
The Green Slime was a coproduction between America’s MGM  Studios and Japan’s Toei Company LTD. But oddly for a Japanese based  production, the entire cast, right down to the extras, is entirely  western. This presented Toei with a genuine casting challenge. 

As a  result the crew of Gamma-3 are a mix of struggling American fashion  models plucked from Tokyo’s fashion runways and American sailors on  shore leave from the nearby Yokosuka Naval base. 

That’s right, those  glamorous young models were thrown together with guys who’d been stuck on an Aircraft Carrier deployed off Vietnam for six months! 

Take a good  look boys… cause this is what you’re fighting for! 

Hidden among the  space stations impossibly pretty female crew is blonde haired Linda  Miller who, a year earlier, had been the lead in the Japanese American  co-production King Kong Escapes. If you ever wake up with a hangover skip the Advil and coffee and try a double bill of The Green Slime and King Kong Escapes— your pain will be forgotten. 

- Horror News  

Conclusion

In 1968 my eight-year-old pals and I absorbed the adventure of The Green Slime and took that template to the playground, turning every jungle gym or set of monkey bars into the Gamma 3. Looking at The Green Slime  today I confess I am not seized with the urge to run over to the nearby  elementary school and start back up where I left off 46 years ago.  After all, there are plenty of reasons to put away childish things, to  bid a safe farewell to childhood and our nostalgia for it. (My bathroom  scale insists this is so.) But for me The Green Slime beautifully recreates a playground of the mind to match the one I had to leave behind.  

-Trailers from Hell

This movie will never get an Oscar award. But it’s a great movie for a rainy day, and fantastic to spend with a case of beer, some friends, a pet and loyal dog (or cat), a loved one and some potato chips. Not the flavored kind, mind you, good “old fashioned” American style salted chips… with dip. Lots and lots of dip.

This is the perfect movie to enjoy when you are stuck inside (like during a biological weapons attack like I am) or whether it is raining cats and dogs outside. Make sure that you have an ample supply of chips, dip and beer. I'll tell you what!
This is the perfect movie to enjoy when you are stuck inside (like during a biological weapons attack like I am) or whether it is raining cats and dogs outside. Make sure that you have an ample supply of chips, dip and beer. I’ll tell you what!
In closing, if you wake up craving a piece of nostalgic science fiction fromage The Green Slime  is exactly what you’re looking for. And don’t forget to sing along to  the psychedelic theme song (later covered by the Fuzztones) for a  totally immersive experience. Everybody sing… You’ll believe it when you find… Something sreamin’ ‘cross your mind… GREEN SLIME… GREEN SLIME!  

 - Horror News   

I do hope that you enjoyed this post. I have other movie review in my Movie Index. Please feel free to check them out…

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Awesome Movies – On Her Majesty’s Secret Service – 007 James Bond

This is one of my personal favorite James Bond films. There’s something about a hidden mountain lair staffed with brainwashed beauties, and surrounded by armed henchmen on ski’s that appeals to the teen-aged boy inside of me. Not to mention the idea of wearing a kilt where the women reach underneath and write notes on my inner thighs…

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service has often been described as the dark horse of the James Bond franchise, in part due to its atypical ending and for its one-off Bond actor, George Lazenby.

Its reputation unfortunately tied Lazenby’s ill-reception, Majesty has been gaining steady recognition over the last few decades with many now noting it as one of the best Bond films ever produced and some even going so far as labeling it the best.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service will probably always remain the  most controversial entry in the Bond series, thanks both to its  unusually human and romantic story, and the notorious casting of novice  actor George Lazenby as OO7. Some think these elements ruin the film,  while others hail OHMSS as the best Bond ever. I wouldn't go that far in  my praise, but for me this is still one of the classic Bond films, true  to Ian Fleming's original vision and arguably showing OO7 in a more  realistic light than any other film in the franchise.

To get the  Lazenby issue out of the way first, it is certainly true to say that he  lacks the charisma of the man he (temporarily) replaced, Sean Connery,  and his impossibly chiselled jaw is somewhat irritating. However, he  does look the part, and for a first-time actor he turns in a remarkably  assured performance, particularly in the fight scenes but also in Bond's  more tender moments, most notably in the highly emotional finale. If  Lazenby had gone on to make more Bond films (and it was his own decision  not to do so) he could well have developed into a very fine OO7, but as  it is I still find his performance in OHMSS perfectly acceptable, and  not damaging to the film in any way.

The film itself represented a  conscious attempt to get back to Fleming after the increasingly  extravagant antics of Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. Director  Peter Hunt, who had edited the classic early Connery films, was very  keen to remain faithful to Fleming's original story, and as a result  OHMSS has an unusually strong emphasis on character and plot, with the  gadgetry and humour found in most Bond films largely jettisoned. 

Rather  like From Russia with Love, OHMSS feels like a real spy adventure, as  Bond tracks Blofeld down and even adopts a disguise as he infiltrates  his arch-enemy's Alpine hideaway, Piz Gloria. Where this film is unique,  however, is in the level of emotion it invests in OO7's relationships  with others. We see this early in the film when Bond quarrels with M and  submits his resignation, a sequence which really brings out the  affection which both M and Moneypenny have for him, but which M  especially prefers to keep concealed. This affection is brought out  again near the end during Bond and Tracy's wedding, when Q sheds his  normal exasperation and shows us his fondness and respect for OO7.

However,  it is of course the relationship between Bond and Tracy which gives the  film its emotional heart. OHMSS sees Bond fall genuinely in love for  the first and only time, and personally I found the film's romantic  scenes both tender and touching, particularly for being so unexpected in  a Bond film. The casting of Diana Rigg as Tracy helps immeasurably in  making us believe in this romance, as she is a rare example of a proper  actress taking on the role of a Bond girl, and her dynamic, spirited  performance makes it easy to see why Bond would fall for her and marry  her. It also helps the film's tragic conclusion, itself unique in the  Bond franchise, pack far more of an emotional punch than might otherwise  have been the case.

Of course, the film has more going for it than just an unusually human Bond.

Hunt  directs with great skill, and the Alpine scenery that dominates the  film looks absolutely stunning. There is no shortage of great action  either, the highlights being a tense and gripping ski chase and an  equally thrilling bobsleigh pursuit. Telly Savalas makes for a very  effective Blofeld, understated and sinister, and his Rosa Klebb-like  henchwoman Irma Bunt is played with relish by Ilse Steppat. There are  also echoes of FRWL in the character of Draco, Tracy's father, who is a  charismatic Bond ally in the style of Kerim Bey. Special mention should  be given to John Barry, who produced his greatest Bond soundtrack for  OHMSS. The opening instrumental theme, with its sombre and foreboding  tone, sets the serious mood of the film, while the classic We Have All  the Time in the World, sung by Louis Armstrong, is the perfect  soundtrack to Bond and Tracy's doomed love.

However, while OHMSS  is undoubtedly a classic Bond film, it just falls short of my personal  top five for two principal reasons. The first of these is that the film  is too long, primarily because the central section, where Bond  infiltrates Piz Gloria in disguise, is dragged out for far longer than  was necessary. Blofeld's plan to use beautiful women as carriers of a  devastating eco-virus is the other main weakness, because it is totally  preposterous and does not fit into the film's serious nature. I must  admit also that, good as Lazenby is, I do wish Connery had agreed to  make this film, because with him on board, and a little more editing, I  think it could have been the best Bond ever, even beating FRWL. As it  is, OHMSS is still a very strong film, its bold deviations from the Bond  formula paying off handsomely. It is just a crying shame that it did  not perform better at the Box Office, because this would encourage the  Bond producers to shift to the high-camp, comic style that would  dominate the franchise during the 1970s; sadly, it would be more than a  decade before a serious, Flemingesque Bond would reappear on the big  screen. 

-  Orpington 

How true are these statements? Is it really just the one with the bad James Bond whose ultimate saving grace is that it’s forgettable; or, has it truly earned its place in the top echelons of the 007 series alongside From Russia with Love, Goldfingerand 2006’s Casino Royale?

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
People used to dress better, carry themselves better and smoke better than they do today. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
[Major Spoiler Alert] On Her Majesty’s Secret Service finds James Bond (Lazenby) desperately trying to track down head of S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Telly Savalas) following the events of You Only Live Twice.

His trail having run cold after two fruitless years of searching, M (Bernard Lee) removes him from the case.

Distraught and obsessed, Bond takes a leave of absence and accepts an offer from criminal mastermind Marc-Ange Draco (Gabriele Ferzetti) for a clue to Blofeld’s whereabouts in exchange for a marriage to his only daughter, Tracy di Vicenzo (Diana Rigg).

Bond, having previously saved Tracy from a suicide attempt, accepts and soon finds himself in the Swiss Alps where Blofeld is devising a new international blackmail plot revolving around a gaggle of brainwashed beauties.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Imagine having a secret lair populated with a bevy of girls from all over the world, and all that on top of an enormous mountain. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

From this point, the second half of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service continues as a practical nonstop chase as Bond attempts to escape Blofeld’s mountainous fortress.

 Let me give it to you straight, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is an  absolute, 100% triumph. All the elements work well, firstly there is  Peter Hunt's direction. Hunt should have been handed the Directors reins  on a Bond movie long before this. He adds action and excitement and  blends this in the most stilted and calm manor. In truth On Her  Majesty's Secret Service is a return to the less Gadget and Comic Book  laden world of the likes of Goldfinger and You Only Live Twice, and  echoes the Flemmingesque thriller world of Dr No and From Russia With  Love. Those who dont like the first two additions to the Bond series  dont flinch, On Her Majesty's Secret Service has a strenghth and style  beaming with enegy and excitement twinned with realism. never seen in a  Bond Film before or since.

This will always be remembered as  George Lazenby's go at Bond. It is also remenbered as the one Bond that  flopped at the box office. Well, on a budget of $9million and with  worldwide grosses of $80million, hopefully the notion of disapointment  will disapeer. There is also the fact that the Video and DVD versions of  the movie consistently outsell all other Bond Titles worldwide. George  Lazenby is an absolute revelation as Bond. I had my doubts but was still  interested to see how he did. Lazenby rivals Connery in the Romantic  and Action scenes and does pretty well with the dramatic scenes. In  truth he is the most under-rated Bond. He makes a very believable  Flemmingesque Playboy. He looks good in a tuxedo, on ski's, with women,  in punch ups. Lazenby is helped by a strong support cast. Diana Rigg is  beautifull and very believable as the Contessa, Tracy, with whom our  James falls in love with, and eventually marries. Rigg displays a full  range of acting and beauty to make her the most memorable of Bond Girls,  and for one, wich i dont mean to sopil, inparticular. Telly Savalas is a  very creepy, chilling and enjoyable Blofeld. It could be said that he  is the most memorable of Blofeld's. He is obviously having the time of  his life with the part and it is a pitty he didn't play the character in  future outings. There is also the return of M, Q in a rather quiet  outing this time, and a Moneypenny, heart broken at the notion Bond  could marry anybody other than herself.

Now, if you add to all  the above some of the finest action set pieces in motion picture history  you have an idea of the scale of this epic. The Alpine sets, and Skiing  and Bobsled chases really bring out the purest sense of adventure. On  Her Majesty's Secret Service is the most memorable Bond Movie from my  Childhood. I remember watching this one Christmas eve with my  Grandparents, and their house looked very much like Blofelds Alpine  Fortress [Without the Ladies, alas]. The movie has really thrilling ski  chases, you really do believe a man can ski, and once more think you are  skiing with him.This is very much THE Christmas Bond movie. It is also  soaked with some delightful christmas themes by the master John Barry,  composing perhaps his best Bond theme. We Have All the Time in the  world, sung by Louis Armstrong is a beautifuly moving song, made all the  more so by Tracy's fate at the end of the movie. There is also Barry's  rousing On Her Majesty's Secret Service Theme, unlike anything ever  heared in cinema's or movies before.

But it is the realism  between the characters and the story that helps make On Her Majesty's  Secret Service work. By far the most under-rated of the Bond movies, and  a strong contender for the Best Bond Movie of all time. This is the  greatest. Bond movies should try to be to be like this in future. Go and  see it for yourself, dont listen to the the negative reviews. You have  all the time in the world. 

- Dock-Ock 

From incredible ski pursuits to bell tower brawls and icy crash derby car races, Bond is pushed to his most vulnerable, breathless limit as he barely dodges a never-ending army of goons in fantastic (and, at one point, literal) cliffhanger fashion.

When he is eventually tracked down by Tracy, she is as much a reprieve to Bond as she is to the audience.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
I well remember this movie where the hero, James Bod, sits wearing a kilt and surrounded by very attentive women who hang on every word he utters. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Unfortunately, their escape is only half successful as Blofeld causes a massive avalanche that blankets both Bond and Tracy leading to her capture as a hostage.

With M powerless to sanction an official rescue, Bond teams up with Draco to launch a full scale assault on Blofeld (which includes an awesome shot of Bond sliding across an ice covered walkway belly first into battle with a machine gun!).

After a bobsled run leaves Blofeld supposedly dead, Bond, realizing his true feelings for Tracy, marries her leading to a heartbreaking denouement as Blofeld enacts one last act of revenge and has her viciously murdered minutes into their honeymoon.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
In these older movies you could be very sensual, with a hint of sexuality, but not resort to overt crude sex. Here we have one of the chicks giving James Bond her room number. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a showcase of how to properly execute an epic Bond film.

Gone are the fantasy and over-the-top machinations of spaceship hijacks, rocket cigarettes, and secret volcano bases from the last film.

Though the overall threat level may be reduced comparatively, Blofeld’s plan remains one of global devastation keeping the stakes up to par with the two previous films but with a far more grounded approach (despite the ludicrous nature of the brainwashed girls being utilized for biological warfare).

The Best Bond?  Yeah, I think so. Like most people who are interested in James Bond, I  saw the films over and over on TV before I read any of the books. I then  got round to buying Casino Royale, and being knocked out by it - this  was somewhat different to Moonraker and all that Roger Moore stuff. So I  read the books in their sequence, seriously the best way, and by the  time OHMSS came round, I had a pretty good idea of who James Bond was.  And, I'm sorry to inform all the Seanophiles, James Bond is not Connery,  Moore, Dalton (though he came close, but is Welsh..)or Brosnan. Oddly  enough, given the choices, he's kind of like George Lazenby.

Sure,  Sean Connery was suave, sexy, and spoke rather curiously, Timothy  Dalton had the serious side sorted, Brosnan is sophisticated etc, Roger  Moore.. well, another time, maybe.

George Lazenby, maybe due to  his lack of experience, (though why is his debut so widely mulled over  in that respect.... it's not something that most actors are subjected  to?) is not so at ease with his surroundings, not so cocksure that  everything is going to work out fine as the others, and this is the real  James Bond. The one in the books. You can almost believe in this one.  And when things don't work out fine, you feel a weird familiarity with  him. He's just a man, though admittedly he's disproportionately talented  at a pretty impressive range of activities, from skiing to flying,  swordsmanship, shooting people, jumping out of things, carnal endeavours  etc.. Oh no, sorry, that's me. Well, anyway, I'm quite tired now. OHMSS  is the best of the films, though From Russia With Love contains  possibly the finest fight scene of all and maybe the best trio of  baddies (including a slightly peripatetic Blofeld)and is Connery's best.

George  Lazenby is the best Bond, because his talents - a certain naturalistic  charm, physical dexterity, and a capacity for possible failure - are  used brilliantly, and he is closer by far than any of the others to the  book-Bond.

There you go.

Oh, and Diana Rigg is the best  'Bond girl', though that description is not very fair to her, We Have  All The Time In The World is the best Bond song, and the theme tune is  possibly John Barry's finest work.. let alone being the best Bond title  theme.

There you go again.

Thanks for reading, and if you happen to disagree, well... you're wrong. Cheers. 

- qholway 

More significant is Bond’s personal journey at the heart of the picture which effectively sells the danger present.

Moreover, Majesty presents one of the rare instances where Bond is a true underdog – the metaphoric St. George vs. the dragon.

The desperate barrage of near misses is practically overwhelming and, for the first time since a few hints in Dr. No, we witness a Bond that is almost overcome with fear.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Just some of the gals on top of the isolated mountain. They are quite entranced by the appearance of James bond into their lair. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Heck, at one point, as 007 is trying to avoid Blofeld’s goons in a crowd, he accidentally runs into a polar bear-suited man brandishing a camera.

 Like "From Russia With Love," "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is  filled with mysterious characters and realistic action… Blofeld's plot  involves germ warfare and his stronghold this time is a converted Swiss  allergy clinic… The film is loaded with action—ski chases, bobsled  chases, car chases, helicopter attacks, fights in the surf, fights in  the hotel, fights in the office… Peter Hunt succeeded in distracting the  audience from noticing that a new Bond was on duty… 

The new  Bond pauses to take a finger of caviar... Dom Perignon'57 and five-star  Hennessey brandy are his mouthwashes of choice... He discovers that he  lived with his aunt in Pett Buttom, and his family motto is 'The World  Is Not Enough.' He impersonates a genealogist to gain entrance to Piz  Gloria... He wants to take the head of SPECTRE to Augsburg (West  Germany) to verify certain records regarding his claim to a title... He  spurns a Mafioso one million gold dowry; uses telescopic sight from a  sniper's rifle to spot a beautiful young woman on the beach; wipes away a  Contessa's tears; drives his Aston Martin wearing a hat and smoking a  cigarette, and turns to the viewer saying in perfect seriousness, "This  never happened to the other fella."

The sixth Bond film takes  place all over Europe with a united nations of glamorous babes called  'angels of death,' where 007 finally meets his female match, falls in  love, and gets married… The motion picture is an emotional story that  reveals more of the world of 007…

It starts with Bond, ready to  resign from the Secret Service for being taking off Operation Bedlam...  With John Barry's best music, Bond reminds us of a whole bunch of  familiar faces... He begins to look over his mementos which include  Honey's knife belt from 'Dr. No,' and the strangler watch from 'From  Russia with Love.' The sequences from all the previous Bond films  reinforced the idea that this new Bond is still a member of the same  team, a man who answers to a crusty retired Admiral, and still is  engaged in sexy banter with a loving secretary...

It is Draco's  daughter though, the ravishing Tracy (Diana Rigg), who adds a bit of  class to the role of the Bond girl, and makes the film quiet  interesting... Tracy is the troubled woman who steals Bond's heart...  She is a spoiled woman wandering fully clothed into the sea... She is  dangerous with her red Ford Cougar, a broken bottle, and at the baccarat  table...

Gabriele Ferzetti is one of the most sympathetic Mafia  dons ever to charm the screen… Draco likes the fact that Bond is  interested in his daughter, and he's determined to help her find the  right husband… 

Telly Savalas' Blofeld does reveal sides to his  character previously unseen: the class snobbery—which M remarks upon,  and the vanity which Tracy flatters to force him off his guard, and his  irritation with one of his skiers who ends up in a tree... Posing as a  world-famous allergist, this bald arch-villain would only give up his  deadly scheme throughout the world if offered a complete pardon for past  crimes and a title...

Irma Bunt was perfectly portrayed by  German actress Ilse Steppat, who, unfortunately died soon after the  film's release… She is Blofeld's second-in-command, who keeps the  Count's attractive 'patients' under control...

Angela Scoular (Ruby) becomes Bond's first conquest when she writes her room number in lipstick on 007's inner thigh…

Moneypenny  (Lois Maxwell) hands her boss a request for two weeks leave rather than  Bond's dictated resignation... Her act results at once funny, moving  and warm: 'What would I do without you?' ask both Bond and M separately  once she's settled their contretemps...

"On Her Majesty's Secret  Service" features Barry's exquisite song, "We Have All the Time in the  World," which is sung with real emotion by Louis Armstrong... 

- Nazi_Fighter_David 

Lazenby’s bug-eyed overreaction at the sight is enough to make Bruce Campbell proud!

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Of course, James Bond seduces, and is seduced by a large number of very attractive chicks. All who want some of what he has to give. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Regardless, this approach leads to a far more gripping adventure and one that perfectly lays the basis for the film’s tragic ending.

Much has been said about George Lazenby’s performance in this film.

Is he the natural successor to Sean Connery? Very few (if any) would say so; however, what he lacks in charm and screen presence, he makes up for in sheer earnestness.

His most redeeming quality is that, outside of Daniel Craig, he is the best brawler in the franchise delivering vicious uppercuts and thoroughly selling all his fight scenes – particularly an early rousing mano a mano hotel fight.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
The boss, very manly, with a bow tie and pipe. Ah, me thinks that you wouldn’t be able to do this today in modern progressive London. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Beyond his athleticism (he would later train with Bruce Lee himself), Lazenby’s best scenes are centered on character actions that diverged significantly from anything associated with Connery’s portrayal – particularly Bond’s tender proposal to Tracy and his tearful reaction to her death.

In these fleeting scenes, Lazenby more-or-less succeeds in delivering a poignant, sincere performance.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Being a secret spy is hard work. If you are not killing people, you are off seducing them. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

If anything, what really bogs down Lazenby the most is the vestige of Connery.

Unlike Roger Moore who was given the opportunity to make Bond his own, Lazenby is put in the unenviable position of trying to emulate him.

 Having been a huge Bond fan since I was a mere lad in the early '80s, I  still don't know why I just recently saw this film for the first time in  2010. I suppose I must blame the fact that it is criminally underrated  and under promoted. It's very rarely shown on TV except on holiday  Bondathons (I love those!) and casual fans typically know nothing of it.  I've always considered myself more than just a casual Bond fan, so I  finally ordered the Ultimate Edition DVD recently and I INSTANTLY ranked  this among the all time greats of the series. Wish I had seen it  earlier, but no matter, I will view it many more times over the  years....

Lazenby's Bond was much more realistic and true to the  novels, a human being that is far more talented than most, but not a  superhero and in this movie not armed with numerous gadgets. He  certainly played the role with dignity and it's a shame he didn't return  for at least one more. But I am glad that Roger Moore was able to enter  the series in his prime shortly after this rather than waiting until  later, so it worked out.

Beautiful places have always been an  integral part of Bond films, and it doesn't get more beautiful than the  Swiss Alps. I'm going to make a point of visiting Blofeld's headquarters  (a real restaurant) one of these days. It must have been quite an  undertaking to build it in such an isolated place as they discussed in  the DVD extras. I also love Bond's modernized Aston Martin in this film  and the look of the film in general is just fantastic. And for home  theater owners, the avalanche scene sounds absolutely amazing on a  powerful system! I thought pictures on the wall in my theater room were  going to fall! 

SPOILERS: This film is unique in that Bond falls  in love marries for the only time in the entire series, but being Bond,  it was bound to end badly. A touching scene, the only real one in the  entire Bond series actually. His wife was a very memorable and  charismatic Bond girl and now I can put into context the visit that  Roger Moore made in the beginning of For Your Eyes Only. 

Bottom line, if you're a Bond fan, having this in your collection is mandatory. 

- Enforcer686 

From the awkward kilt get-up to some awful puns noticeably ADR’d in at the last minute (not to mention a badly conceived pre-credits fourth wall break that bizarrely refers to Connery as the “other fella”), the film may as well have been called In Sir Connery’s Public Shadow.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Just some of the great selection of gals on the top of the mountain. They all have their charms and are very attracted to a man with manly charms. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

It doesn’t help that in an attempt to hammer into viewers that this is indeed the same James Bond as Connery, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is full of constant call backs to the previous films, such as Bond looking over his office keepsakes from Dr. No, From Russia with Love, and Thunderball

 I must admit I initially never gave this entry much of a chance.   Whenever it was on TV I tried to watch it, but I just couldn't get into  it.  Then last year, I saw a widescreen tape version on sale and decided  to buy it. When I finished watching it I was sorry I had ignored it for  so long.  It's very good.  I thought Lazenby did a good job as Bond,  and Savalas turned in equally good work as Bond's nemesis.  And Rigg is  as sharp as she is lovely. This is one for the collection. 

- cmt-2 
On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
James Bond meeting some of the gals on the mountain top. He’s quite the hit with the ladies. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

…a dwarf randomly whistling the tune from Goldfinger, and, most egregiously, a credit sequence that focuses on Connery-less clips from the preceding entries in the series!

 To understand the controversy behind `On Her Majesty's Secret Service,'  one must understand the events so impacting the spy genre by the time of  its production in 1969.  After the back to back tremendous successes of  `Goldfinger' and `From Russia With Love,' every hack producer and  distributor rushed to make spy movies.  

There were serious ones (`The  Spy That Came in From the Cold,' `The Ipcress File'), satirical ones  (`Our Man Flint,' `The Man From U.N.C.L.E.,' `Get Smart' ), and  incredibly silly ones (`The Silencers,' `Last of the Secret Agents,'  `Casino Royale').  `Casino Royale' was especially damaging, since it was  (VERY LOOSELY) based on a Fleming novel, and used the character of  James Bond, 007.  

In fact, in `Casino Royale,' nearly EVERYBODY played  `James Bond'.  `If we don't know what we are doing, how will the enemy,'  was the explanation `James Bond' (David Niven) gave to explain why MI6  was calling all its agents `James Bond'.  

To protect their franchise,  the producers of the `real' James Bond movies emphasized in their  promotion `Sean Connery IS James Bond.'   In a demonstration of   `gratitude,' Connery up and quit the series, leaving `On Her Majesty's  Secret Service,' which was shortly to go into production, without a  `Bond.'  

Arguably the most ambitious and difficult to shoot of  ALL the Bond films (at least to that time), it's a miracle ANYTHING  works in OHMSS. Much of the time it works VERY well, though the shaky  underpinnings of the first hour frequently threaten to undo it.  There  is so much choppy editing and dubbed dialogue, one begins to suspect he  is watching a foreign film. 

The second hour plus works much better, all  the more surprising since it was shot first. One reason may be that the  film went WAY over both shooting schedule and budget, and there was  enough made up `bad' press to put a great deal of pressure on the  producers, first time director, Peter Hunt and star, George Lazenby.  

In  the middle of it all, Lazenby's publicist announced that Lazenby was  not going to do another Bond (Lazenby is credible when he says that  announcement was not his idea. One suspects, from the bonus material,  that Cubby Broccoli planted that story to discredit Lazenby, should the  film fail). Add to all this the films' tacked-on, unhappy ending  (planned to be the prologue for `Diamonds are Forever'), which plays  completely against the humor of earlier moments, and it's a wonder the  film was NOT a dismal failure.  

Quite the contrary, OHMSS is one of the  BEST of the Bond films, filled with nonstop action, outstanding stunts,  incredible sound, the best score (along with `Goldfinger') and a  credible enough romance to lend it genuine poignancy.  Lazenby overcame  many tremendous handicaps: having to replace one of the best known and  popular actors in the world; he was 28, younger than  Connery when he  made `Dr. No'; he was completely inexperienced as an actor  (OHMSS was  Lazenby's FIRST movie, not just his first starring role); his accent  (thick Australian outback) and the INCREDIBLE physical demands (Lazenby  did many of his own stunts).  

Considering all this, Lazenby is downright  remarkable.  Certainly, in my opinion he is better than either the  snooty Timothy Dalton or the lightweight Roger Moore were in ANY of  their outings as Bond.. 

The bonus feature on the DVD concludes with  strong evidence that Lazenby became a scapegoat, despite the eventual  financial success of OHMSS. Lazenby, refreshingly displays no bitterness  that his career nearly ended as soon as it began.  He's had a  reasonably busy career playing character roles and we have OHMSS. Not a  bad deal at all. 

- Bob-45 

This backfires in a couple of ways: 1.) it keeps reminding the audience of Connery and henceforth how much better he was in the role and, 2.) it establishes the film in a firm continuity with what has happened before – a continuity that the film blatantly breaks by disregarding the fact that Blofeld and Bond have met before!

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
The girls are mesmerized by his appearance, mannerisms and behavior. Every man wants to be like James Bond. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

The Bond producers had shortsightedly adapted Ian Fleming‘s S.P.E.C.T.R.E. trilogy out of order (Majesty is actually the dark middle chapter between Thunderball and You Only Live Twice) causing significant narrative issues and also robbing the natural revenge-bent conclusion that You Only Live Twice aptly provided (akin to releasing Return of the Jedi before The Empire Strikes Back and attempting to place a band-aid on the story issues).

In the books, this was the first instance of Bond and Blofeld meeting face-to-face and since this was a more faithful adaptation, a choice was made to not have the characters recognize each other despite meeting at the conclusion of the last film (a choice easily unraveled by the opening credit flashbacks to Twice!).

 This is one of my favorite Bond's.  It has the best story and most  closely resemble the original novel.  It has become notorious for  featuring a one-time Bond, George Lazenby, but it surpasses most of the  later films.

Lazenby gets far too much criticism.  As a first  time actor, he is quite good.  Yes, his performance is mixed, but so are  several other actors, many with far more experience.  More time should  have been put into acting classes and rehearsal for Lazenby, to prepare  him for the role.  Instead, they concentrated on his look and  mannerisms.  This has been one of the failing aspects to the films; the  emphasis on sight rather than substance.

Diana Rigg is fantastic  as Tracy, which is to be expected.  Who else but Emma Peel could marry  James Bond? (wonder what Mr. Peel thought, or Steed, for that matter.)   Rigg is the first, and arguably the last real actress to play the female  lead in a Bond film.  Most are chosen for their looks and their  performance rarely rises above looking sexy.  Rigg has the looks and sex  appeal, but she also has the acting chops and tends to dominate any  scene she is in.

Telly Savalas was an interesting, yet mixed  choice for Blofeld.  He is quite charming, but not very menacing.  He  was far deadlier in the Dirty Dozen. Blofeld was far more effective  before he was seen in the series. Imagination was always far better than  reality.  Savalas seems more like a gangster than a megalomaniac.   Since I saw this after Kojak, I kept waiting for him to say, "who loves  ya baby?"

The stunts are fantastic and act in service to the  plot.  The ski chase is gripping and the tension builds throughout.   Although it becomes obvious in several scenes that Diana Rigg is doubled  by a man, it is not too distracting.

Ultimately, the story  raises this above the level of most Bond films.  The plot moves along at  a quick pace and there are few sidelines.  The jokes are kept to a  minimum and character is stressed.  The actions scenes are eye catching,  but never out of place.  The threat is believable and the final  resolution to Blofeld's plans works.  

Spoiler: The director has  said he would have preferred to open Diamonds Are Forever with Tracy's  death, and then lead to the search for Blofeld. I disagree.  I think the  death scene is one of Lazenby's best and it carries quite an impact.   It let's you know that Bond must return to his work to gain vengeance.  I  think DAF should have opened with a flashback to the scene and then the  hunt for Blofeld.  If the death had not occurred at the end of OHMSS,  then the opening of DAF would feel like a cheat, much like the opening  of the second Austin Powers film.  It would just seem like an excuse to  get rid of the wife and return to business as usual. 

- grendelkhan 

The only slim explanation is that Bond is in disguise (which consists of a pair of glasses – the epitome of incognito espionage – and a different accent) and that Blofeld has cut off his earlobes in the hopes of achieving a prestigious title. 

But hey, if it works for Superman, maybe it works for Bond too.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
A good secret agent is a professional in and out of bed. Here we have him catching up on some business relations. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Continuity issues aside, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provides yet another positive up-step in the series in the form of Telly Savalas – hands down the best Blofeld to date (Christolph Waltz included).

Smart, menacing, and conniving, Savalas’ Blofeld is the anti-Bond, every bit as charming and clever as our hero. 

On the surface, he may not look as memorable as Donald Pleasence‘s take on the character, but he is far more effective and a true threat to Bond.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
Telly Savalas makes a great villain. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Diana Rigg is as beautiful as she is brilliant as Tracy.

It never rings false that this is the woman that finally snags Bond’s heart.

Vulnerable but with a subdued fire ready to spring, Rigg is terrific, managing to effortlessly lift the struggling Lazenby in every scene they share.

I have read some of the negative reviews for this movie and I have to  say that I agree with NONE of them except for the slightly unnecessary  two and a half hour length. 

Regardless, this doesn't ruin On Her  Majesty's Secret Service in any way to warrant a serious complaint as  far as I'm concerned. As with the positive reviews this film received, I  agree with most all of them. For one, George Lazenby replacing Sean  Connery as Bond may have displeased some but I think he did just as good  of a job and would not have minded a bit if he became the next Bond for  a few more films. 

This movie also had some enjoyable action scenes;  some of which would later get mimicked in future Bond installments. The  bond girl is by far one of the best. 

To be a little more specific, this  bond girl plays a significant part in the Bond series as a whole that no  other bond girl shares. However, I won't reveal why that is because I  don't usually give spoilers for the courtesy of those who haven't seen  the films that I review. 

The ending alone for this movie got several  mixed reviews but I can say with certainty that had it not ended the way  it did, the Bond franchise might have come to an end. 

- thomas-williamson-ga 

Likewise, once they partner up in the second half escape, they make a memorable, natural team (I especially like Bond stealing kisses as she mercilessly drives enemy cars off the road!).

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
I’m not really a great fan of his plaid coat, but after all it’s another time and place. You need to take that into consideration. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Her wedding day demise (a death that shrewdly bookends a film that began with her suicide attempt) is a tragedy brought to fruition almost solely due to her indelible charisma – a gutsy move from the Bond producers whose films were mostly known for escapist fun.

Keeping in line with the grittier productions of the time such as Bonnie and ClydeMidnight Cowboy, and Easy Rider, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service presented a natural, contemporary progression for the Bond series – a turn that was regrettably rejected in a 180° about face with the campy Diamonds Are Forever two years later.

Peter Hunt, stepping into the director’s chair after editing all the previous Bond pictures, shapes one of the most stylized film in the series.

 On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) is the first Bond film to replace  Sean Connery and the only film which Australian actor George Lazenby  portrays the role of James Bond. 

This film is probably the most faithful  adaption to the Bond novels, giving the film a sense of realism and  drama. 

James Bond is on a search for his nemesis Ernst Stavro Blofeld  (portrayed by Telly Savalas) who had merely escaped his death from the  previous film, You Only Live Twice (1967). 

He encounters a beautiful  countess named Tracy (portrayed by Diana Rigg) who is the daughter of  Marc Ange Draco (portrayed by Gabrielle Fazzetti), boss of a huge crime  organization called the Union Corse. 

Due to Bond's detour, M (Bernard  Lee) suspends him from the mission, Bond responds to almost resigning  from the Secret Service as he is saved by Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) who  writes to M that he was going to take a several-week vacation. 

As Bond  falls in love with Tracy, he also finds connections to Blofeld through a  College of Arms professor, Sir Hillary Bray (portrayed by George  Baker). 

Apparently Blofeld is disguising as a Count running a clinic in  the Swiss Alps that supposedly cures allergies of all kinds. Bond  infiltrates Blofeld's base disguising as Hillary Bray, encountering  beautiful girl patients ("Angels of Death") from various countries. 

Bond  discovers the psychic therapy the patients go through while sleeping  with one of the patients. 

Bond's cover gets blown and is captured by  Blofeld, who reveals his plan to spread a pandemic that could wipe out  the world through his "cured" patients. 

Bond escapes the base through an  elaborate and well-choreographed ski chase as he encounters Tracy who  helps him escape from Blofeld's crew. 

Later that night, Bond proposes to  Tracy (something we will never see in a Bond film) and plans to quit  his job after this mission. Unfortunately, their time is cut short as  Blofeld kidnaps Tracy after another ski chase. 

Bond and Draco rescues  Tracy and blows up Blofeld's facility. Blofeld breaks his neck during a  bobsled chase with Bond, but manages to survive. Bond and Tracy get  married and are happily driving down the road until a sudden machine gun  fire from Blofeld's henchman Irma Bunt (portrayed by Ilse Steppat)  fatally hits Tracy. 

The film ends with Bond in tears (another thing  we'll never see in a Bond film) over his blood-shed Bride, as he murmurs  to a traffic cop that "We had all the time in the World". 

This  film was financially successful, but did not make a profit as much as  its predecessors did. 

The critical response was somewhat positive, but  was negative towards Lazenby's portrayal of James Bond. I would give a  lot of credit to the filmmakers (especially director Peter Hunt) who  polished Lazenby into a fine Bond. 

Considering how Lazenby did not have  any acting experience prior to this film, I would give him credit for  portraying that very emotional and tender side of Bond. 

Lazenby also  matched that physique of a Bond, as it is portrayed through the  excellently choreographed fight sequences. Despite those feats, Lazenby  quit the role of Bond from a bad career advice from his agent who saw no  future into the Bond films. 

I would also praise Lazenby for not  parroting Connery's take on Bond, as most actors would most-likely  parrot their predecessor's approach to the character. 

This film would  not have been as good if Connery was portraying his rough and  cold-hearted edge of Bond. On Her Majesty's Secret Service is a great  film with great action, story, and music that defines the true essence  and pleasure of a Bond film. 

- bock_g 

Some of the shots, composed by cinematographer Michael Reed, are incredible with a particular focus on reflections such as Bond wistfully recalling Tracy’s kidnapping while looking through a window…

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
The ski scenes are what everyone remembers this movie by. I however am a bit strange and instead remember it for the secret lair filled with a bevy of chicks. That was what really appealed to me as a teen-aged boy. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Suggestive of the story further delving into Bond as a human being (this is, after all, the film where we finally learn more about his history and family motto, “The World is Not Enough”), these artistic touches help accent the story rather than existing only to call attention to themselves.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
There’s nothing like showing a little bit of cleavage to get a man’s attention up. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

As mentioned before, Lazenby excels during the action scenes – sequences that run the gamut of creative staging and editing. Although there are a few minor quibbles such as Hunt’s preference for fast motion editing, the film’s set-pieces provide a sustained high-level of excitement with a few creative twists thrown in for good measure (such as a chase through evergreen forest with Bond on one ski).

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
It’s the romance and seductions scenes that the older James Bond flicks are remembered for. Today, there is an overload of hyper-action, and a near dearth of male-oriented seduction. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, Fleming’s tenth 007 novel, is one of the most faithful adaptations in the Bond film series – very much a welcome sight after the Roald Dahl-scripted fantasy of You Only Live Twice.

As such, there aren’t many significant differences between the source and screen. By the same token, the film version follows the same path as From Russia with Love and Goldfinger with some minor improvements to the novel.

For example, the book has both Bond and Tracy successfully escaping Blofeld’s forces in Switzerland.

 Once, at the library, I had a flashback of something my history teacher  once told me.  "Without Soviet Union, we wouldn't have had a lot of  things." Then, someone mentioned, accurately, that Bond films owe their  existence to the hammer and the sickle.  Then he said, "Pooh, the Bond  FILMS!  Read the BOOKS.  They're good stuff.  The films are just bunch  of women and gadgets." So I went to look for Ian Fleming, and the title  that caught my eye was On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which is  recognized as one of the best books in the series.  I started reading  the book.  I was surprised at how slow pace and dark it was, and how  Bond wasn't this confident, suave character who always knows what to do.   Sean Connery is not, I repeat, not, Ian Fleming's James Bond.  Of  course, he is the best film version of James Bond, but he is too good a  suave character to be Bond.  I can't imagine a superspy who'd say  "Yeesss" as Connery does.

I must say, more than anyone, George  Lazenby is the James Bond of Ian Fleming's novels.  He is like Bond in  the books, trying to be smooth but always somewhat unsure.  He has a  command of the screen, that he isn't afraid to tell you he's there.  The  biggest gripe I have about Pierce Brosnan is how he sometimes doesn't  get a grip of things on set and his somewhat higher, softer voice (and  also how he pumps endless rounds of automatic fire upon enemies who have  a propensity for getting hit while he himself has to be missed by  endless rounds of enemy fire).  Lazenby has a voice that I imagine Bond  would certainly have.  I certainly don't think he was a bad Bond.  I  think he WAS Bond.  The other four actors have played their versions of  Bond, but Lazenby is the only believable, human, imperfect James Bond.   And his lines aren't that bad, come on.  The only poorly delivered line  was, "He had lots of guts."  I think he should have delivered that with a  bit more Connery, but that's a minor detail.

The stunts are  great and so is the scenery, and the only bad cinematics are in the ski  scenes when they show closeups from the front.  They look very fake, but  that must be forgiven for 1969 when it was made.  They did not have  Handicams and they certainly did not have Photoshop to blend projected  images as well as we can nowadays.  But they certainly do not distract  the excitement from some of the best snow scenes in 007 films.  The ski  chases which became trademark of James Bond started here.  It's funny  how in the book, Bond is very worried about skiing, since he's rusty  from not having skied for a long time.  The sled chase is excellent  also.

OHMSS is the only film where Bond drinks beer and gets  married.  Which brings me up to the next point, that Diana Riggs as  Tracy Draco (later Bond) happens to be perhaps the best Bond girl ever.   Without doubt, she is full of excitement and danger, not afraid to  strap on a couple of skis amid gunfire and avalanche.  Certainly not a  certain Natalya Simonova.  She is Bond's identical counterpart,  experienced but having gotten nothing out of relationships, and quite a  driver also.  She's the only Bond girl to really connect with the  audience, to make herself more important in comparison to Bond, but  that's part of the excellent novel on which the movie is based. Whatever  happens to her touches the audience more than whatever happens to Bond  (who, as we all know, will always somehow make it).  Her surprise  appearance at the Christmas celebration brightens up everything in an  instant, and the ending is probably the only genuinely sad scene in all  20 of the Bond films.

The opening scene is great in terms of  action, but I found it rather disappointing that for no apparent reason,  baddies want to kill Bond.  The book does it a lot better, and it  wouldn't have been much more difficult to do what the book did, although  that would not have provided the proper material to introduce the new  Bond with the immortal, "This never happened to the other fellow."  See,  how it is told in the novel is he spies on Tracy as she tries to drown  herself, and by this time Bond knows her.  He is spied on by Draco's men  who take him in, and the rest of the story is told in flashback, with a  car chase leading up to the casino scene and rendezvous, without all  this fighting mysterious bad guys in between.  But I thought the opening  sequence was quite good, even with the change-up.  It's just, with what  proof does Bond try to rescue Tracy?  She could have been just going  out for a swim.  It makes much more sense when he has already met Tracy.  Yet some of the additions to the movie are good, such as having Tracy  with Blofeld when SPECTRE headquarters is attacked.  It makes it that  much more personal.

This is my first review on IMDB, and OHMSS  gets a well-deserved 10 out of 10.  Bond in kilts, hypnosis, world  domination, and Blofeld's cat combine to make it a worthy experience.   Lazenby was not the best Bond, but perhaps the only real Bond.  OHMSS is  easily the best Bond film, and dare I say, the ONLY Bond film. 

- wontgetfooled622 

This leads to an implausible and less motivated reason for Bond to seek out Draco’s assistance for an all out assault on Blofeld’s base – especially since the novel has M sanctioning the attack rather than having his hands tied.

This has the unfortunate effect of keeping Bond’s personal initiative lower in addition to unwisely omitting Tracy from the narrative for a significant amount of time.

On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.
A skiing scene. On her Majestys Secret Service. This is a classic James Bond movie. Here, we have 007 skiing down mountains, seducing all types of women from around the world and wearing a kilt.

Despite the overall polish to the novel’s film adaptation, there are a couple of missteps.

For instance, both the book and movie begin with Tracy’s beach suicide attempt; however, the book doesn’t present the event as randomly as the movie suggests. The novel spells out that not only has Bond met with Tracy but that they’ve already spent the night together (a scene that takes place later in the film). Guess the producers opted not to have the first woman George Lazenby slept with in the franchise attempt to kill herself afterword!

The novel’s approach to this opening is far superior.

Going by the movie, the scene plays out as not only coincidental but totally incomprehensible when you put all the pieces together.

Bond randomly follows a girl to a beach, stalks her with a rifle scope, somehow deduces that she is trying to commit suicide rather than a swim (which would have been supremely awkward if he was mistaken), rescues her, and then is attacked by her bodyguards (who really only had one job to do!)?

It could be implied that Bond had been tracking her due to her parental ties and possible Blofeld lead but the film later suggests otherwise.

While certainly not as egregious as Thunderball‘s pile of coincidences, this is certainly one of the weakest narrative points in the film.

 On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) in my opinion was the best film  of the series. I felt that George Lazenby was unfairly slagged by the  critics for his performance. He did the best that he could. His acting  fit very well for his character.

The direction moved the film at  an even pace. The action set pieces were impressive and Diana Rigg was  hot. Telly Savalas was excellent as Blofield, he gave the character a  suave touch. But you call tell that underneath his mack daddy act he was  all business, and violent business indeed.

Everything about this  movie had a cool aura to it. The stunt scenes were amazing (for it's  era) and the cinematography was beautifully shot. I had one bone to pick  with the film. The in jokes got a bit heavy handed. Other than that  it's a fun film. Too bad George Lazenby was demoted to B-Movie hell  after this flick (at least he got a three picture deal with Golden  Harvest where he made three classic action films).

I have to give this movie a high recommendation. If you love the James Bond series you'll enjoy this one. 

- Captain_Couth 

Outside of a few flaws here and there, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is very much one of the best in the series. Lazenby isn’t as bad as has been often ascribed and while it would have been interesting to see his continuation in further films had he not backed out, it is doubtful if the series as a whole would have continued as successfully as it did without him.

Though it’s a great shame that Connery didn’t get the opportunity to play Bond in this film, which saw a return to form to the more cloak and dagger thriller efforts of the earliest entries in the series, considering his fatigued performances in You Only Live Twice and Diamonds Are Forever this may have turned out for the best.

 On Her Majesty's Secret Service is directed by Peter Hunt and adapted to  screenplay by Richard Maibaum from the novel written by Ian Fleming. It  stars George Lazenby, Diana Rigg, Telly Savalas, Ilse Steppat, Yuri  Borienko and Gabriele Ferzetti. Music is by John Barry and  cinematography by Michael Reed.

Bond 6 and 007 is obsessed with  locating SPECTRE supremo Ernst Stavro Blofeld. After rescuing beautiful  Countess Tracy di Vincenzo from suicide, this brings Bond into contact  with her father, Marc Ange Draco, who agrees to help Bond find Blofeld  in exchange for 007 courting Tracy. Blofeld is located in the  Switzerland Alps at Piz Gloria, where he is masterminding a fiendish  plot involving biological extinction of food group species'. Bond will  need to use all his wits to stop the plan from being executed, he also  has big matters of the heart to contend to as well...

Connery  gone, but not for good as it turned out, so into the tuxedo came George  Lazenby, an Australian model with no previous acting experience of note.  It would be Lazenby's only stint as 007, badly advised by those around  him that Bond had no future in the upcoming 70s, his head swelling with  ego by the day (something he readily admits and regrets), Lazenby  announced he would only be doing the one James Bond film. The legacy of  OHMSS is the most interesting in the whole Bond franchise, for where  once it was reviled and wrongly accused of being a flop, it now, over 40  years later, is regarded as being one of the finest entries in the  whole series. Yes it is still divisive, I have seen some fearful  arguments about its worth, but generations of critics and film makers  have come along to laud it as essential Bond and essential Fleming's  Bond at that.

Everything about OHMSS is different to what  Connery's Bond had become, the gadgets are gone and heaven forbid, Bond  got a heart and fell in love. He was a man, with real aggression, real  emotions and forced to use brain and brawn instead of mechanical  trickery. Changes in the production department, too, wasn't just about  Lazenby's appearance. Peter Hunt, previously the Bond film's editor,  directed his one and only Bond film, and Michael Reed on cinematography  also appears for the one and only time. New Bond, new era, but reviews  were mixed and in spite of making a profit of over $73 million  Worldwide, this was considerably down on previous films. The reviews  didn't help, with much scorn poured on Lazenby for not being Connery,  but really it's hard to imagine anyone coming in and not getting beat  with that particular stick! Box office take wasn't helped by the film's  length, at over 2 hours 10 minutes, this restricted the number of  showings in theatres, something that should be greatly noted.

Away  from Bond anyway, OHMSS is a stunning action thriller in its own right.  From the opening beach side fist fight, where uppercuts lift men off  their feet and drop kicks propel them backwards, to helicopter attacks,  bobsleigh pursuits (resplendent with punches and flinging bodies), ski  chases and a car chase in the middle of a stock car race: on ice!  There's enough pulse pumping action here to fill out two Bond movies.  But the Bond aspects are magnificent as well. Lazenby has wonderful  physicality and throws a mean punch, he cuts a fine figure of a man and  he's acting inexperience isn't a problem in the hands of the astute  Hunt. Lazenby is matched by Rigg as Tracy, the best Bond girl of them  all, she's no bimbo, she's tough (fighting off a guy with a broken  bottle), smart yet vulnerable, funny and heart achingly beautiful, her  interplay with Lazenby is brilliantly executed, so much so that when the  devastating finale arrives it has extra poignancy. A scene that closes  the film on a downbeat note and remains the most emotional scene ever  put into a Bond movie.

Savalas finally gives us a villain who can  compete with Bond on a physical level, making the fight between them an  evenly matched and believable one. He lacks Pleasance's sinister  fizzog, though the bald pate and Grecian looks marks Savalas out as an  imposing foe as well. The Swiss Alps setting is gorgeous, with Reed  capturing the scope magnificently, while some of his colour lensing in  the interiors soothe the eyes considerably. Barry's score is one of his  best, lush romantic strains accompany Tracy and James, operatic  overtures dart in and out of the Swiss scenery and the James Bond theme  is deftly woven into the action sequences. Louis Armstrong's beautiful  "We Have All The Time In The World" features prominently, perfectly  romantic and forever to be thought of as part of the Bond Universe.  Finally it's the great writing that gives us the best sequence involving  the trifecta of Bond, Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) and M (Bernard Lee). 5  minutes of class that gives Moneypenny an acknowledged importance in the  relationship between the two men in her life. It's just one of a number  of truly excellent scenes in the greatest Bond film of them all. 10/10 

- hitchcockthelegend 

With the best Blofeld, one of the strongest Bond girls, a great script, edge-of-your seat action and suspense, and possibly the best musical score in the series, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is a winner providing a natural sense of pathos that the succeeding 007 films have rarely been able to reproduce.

Musings…

Did you know that this is the only fully Christmas-themed Bond film, complete with an original holiday song “Do You Know How Christmas Trees Are Grown?” (a song that makes Disney‘s “It’s a Small World” seem macho by comparison)? Heck, if Die Hard can be considered a Christmas movie, why not a Bond film?

Who  knew that one of the grittiest Bond films of all time had a scene of  super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld decorating a Christmas tree?
Who knew that one of the grittiest Bond films of all time had a scene of super-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld decorating a Christmas tree?

One odd note: as Tracy is revealing to her father that she is genuinely falling love with Bond, the scene keeps cutting to 007 ogling a playmate centerfold (a centerfold that he actually rips out and keeps!).

True love indeed!

While the shocking ending has been revered as one of the series’ most dramatic moments, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service provides another contender just minutes before.

Since Dr. No, the Bond films had established a hat-tossing trick that would introduce the flirty repertoire between 007 and Moneypenny.

 "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is a sadly under-appreciated Bond film  which is stylishly-directed and features an outstanding score, like  most of these early Bond films. Other than a silly self-referential line  in the teaser and some sappy romantic montages, "On Her Majesty's  Secret Service" is a thrilling adventure which sees Bond traveling to  the Swiss Alps to encounter villains and partake in dangerous action  sequences.

It sounds like a Bond film, alright, but this is  actually quite different from the formulaic films one would later expect  from the series, and the sort of film Bond was gravitating towards with  "Thunderball" and "You Only Live Twice". It certainly delivers on the  promise of sexual innuendo and lots of provocatively dressed women, but  it's a different sort of Bond in that it seems to be more straight-faced  and harsh, culminating in what is probably the saddest Bond ending.  It's also probably the closest to Fleming's version of Bond outside of  "Casino Royale", although "The Living Daylights" was also somewhat  similar to the literary Bond. As a Fleming fan it is nice to see the  Bond series take after the books. 

Lazenby, who has been  frequently criticized and is many people's least favorite Bond, actually  does a decent job of the role. He's nowhere near as good as Connery, of  course, but I thought that other than the scenes where he tried to  seriously emote, he carried the film with his charisma and physical  presence. I strongly believe he should have continued in the role.  Lazenby fits the content of the film, which is certainly far more down  to Earth than many other Bond films, and focuses heavily on hand-to-hand  combat in the action scenes, which is somewhat refreshing after the  overblown (entertaining, but seriously outrageous) action scenes in "You  Only Live Twice". This is a genuinely good script, with a solid plot,  good dialogue, and good characterization. 

It's not just a  throwaway action flick, it's an excellent espionage thriller with a  strong dramatic core, and as fun as things like "Goldfinger" certainly  are, it's nice to see one of these movies treat women as more than mere  sex objects, and it's interesting to see a Bond girl paired with a Bond  who reacts as a human would and not a cartoon character. Diana Rigg is  probably my favorite Bond girl. She gives a strong performance and is  helped by an excellent script which gives her a fair amount to do. 

By  staying closer to the source material, "On Her Majesty's Secret  Service" dramatically improves on its two predecessors and features some  of the best locations in the series, although I admit my familiarity  with the majority of the Swiss shooting locations gives me a nostalgic  view of things. "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" is a strong contender  for the title of best Bond film. 

-  ametaphysicalshark 

As the wedded Bond and Tracy approach his Aston Martin DBS, he turns towards a teary-eyed Moneypenny and affectionately tosses her his hat.

It’s a quiet, beautiful moment between the two characters.

Perhaps a case of eerie foreshadowing, Lazenby’s gun-barrel sequence is the only one in the series where the dripping blood completely washes away Bond from the screen!

Conclusion

This is great escapist fun. It’s perfect for boys and men of all ages, and women like it too.

If you are bored, and want to kill some time, this movie will put you into a world and environment that is both exciting and refreshing. It’s a great romp into another universe.


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Awesome Movies – A Boy and His Dog

“The year is 2024…”

A post-apocalyptic tale based on a novella by Harlan Ellison. A  boy communicates telepathically with his dog as they scavenge for food  and sex, and they stumble into an underground society where the old  society is preserved. The daughter of one of the leaders of the  community seduces and lures him below, where the citizens have become  unable to reproduce because of being underground so long. They use him  for impregnation purposes, and then plan to be rid of him.                 

-Ed Sutton

Here we have a movie where the chicks lay up with really thick foundation. Heh he. But, you know they really need to. It’s tough living in 2024.

Despite its ironically cutesy title (“A Boy and His Dog”) and a plot premise that might’ve come out of the Walt Disney archives (dog and boy share telepathic communication), this movie is about as darkly comic and acidic as anything Stanley Kubrick ever did (“Clockwork Orange”).

In the tradition of the great 70s dystopian/postapocalyptic scifis like “Clockwork Orange” (1971), “Rollerball” (1975), “THX-1138” (1971), “Soylent Green” (1973), “The Omega Man” (1971) and I’ll even throw in “The Stepford Wives” (1975), this movie has its appeal in a sort of minimalist presentation that presents a chillingly emotionless and sterile future.

The first half is something like Mr. Ed meets Mad Max, with its equal portions of chatty humor and dusty violence. But right in the first scene we realize that, despite the cute banter between boy & dog, there aren’t going to be many warm fuzzies. In the opening scene we learn that the boy (Don Johnson) is looking for female survivors so he can rape them.

At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
At parts, this movie gets so strange you can’t do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.

If you can swallow that highly disturbing premise, which the director makes no bones in presenting at the outset, then the rest should be an unsettlingly fun joyride all the way to the film’s very memorable punchline.

Things get really trippy in the 2nd half, and even though there’s minimal nudity, certain things happen which would make D.H. Lawrence blush (particularly involving a certain mechanical device attached to the male anatomy).

Definitely NOT a date movie, nor any sort of movie you’d watch with your parents or kids, “A Boy and His Dog” is really like a lost cousin of “A Clockwork Orange” or “Dr. Strangelove”.

Vic and his telepathically talking sheep dog, Blood, travel  post-apocalyptic Arizona.  Besides scavenging for food and sex, this  movie features old, terrible porn clips, evil Amish looking people with  clown makeup and possibly the greatest pun in movie history.  Blood  provides hilarious commentary to all Vic's endeavors, his comments while  Vic and a girl he finds have sex are particularly entertaining.  At  parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it,  which is definitely not a bad thing!  A Boy and His Dog is not  something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie  for late nights and all nerds.  A classic piece of science fiction. 

- emma505013 May 2004              

A Boy and His Dog is as surprising an effort that has ever come into the genre. It is a movie where imagination is pushed to its most cynical, rotten roots. It is a movie where a wealth of pitch black comedy awaits those who have no problem..

… with the repore between a slightly dim dude and a dog…

… a dog who seems to be part comic relief, part ‘get-your-head-out-of-your-ass’ voice of reason.


The Characters:  

  • Vic – Don Johnson! A solo who survives in the wastelands left after World War IV, he is constantly hunting for food and women.
  • Blood – Highly intelligent and telepathic mutt who pals around with Vic, in addition he has radar.
  • Quilla June – Brazen girl sent to lure Vic underground, though she wants to replace the ruling council by using the solo. Ends up as dog food.
  • Mr. Craddock – Jason Robards! Senior member of the ruling council and a very dour man.
  • Dr. Moore – Fairly boring member of the ruling council, though he has the best memory.
  • Mez – Female member of the council, not a pretty sight when laughing.
  • Gary, Richard, and Kenneth – Conspirators who follow Quilla’s lead, all three get their necks snapped.
  • Michael – Powerful robot which looks like a huge country bumpkin, if one of the ruling council points at you the wrong way he snaps your neck. Disassembled by Vic, but it appears the council has an entire warehouse full of replacements.
  • The Screamers – Apparently they are green glowing mutant elephants. (We do not see them, but they do glow green and sound like elephants.)

It should be way too ridiculous to be taken seriously as a piece of legitimate cinema, perhaps as some gonzo experiment that’s dug up by cultists for tongue-in-cheek purposes.

Yet, Jones’s film is, in its way, a weird landmark.

It’s a snapshot of a moment where the basic fronts of a 70s ‘exploitation’ flick (action, comedy, randomness of the 70s, nudity) are put through the perspective of a filmmaker with brains and talent to make it stick in your mind.

This disorderly pre-Mad Max spree is one of the most entertaining  post-apocalyptic future movies ever made. You know why? Because it has  no taste and in that, it has no inhibitions about the questions it asked  about what will happen after the world is spent by nuclear war. It asks  about how procreation will happen, how basic sexual feelings will be  satisfied, and other things. It has a genuinely original plot involving  telepathic dogs that are more literate than their human  masters,gunfights wherein the dogs direct their human masters, an entire  society underground that discerns who is apart of them or not by  wearing clownface at all times, and other crazy things.

It's a  wild, crazy, tasteless, sex-obsessed adventure that affords the viewer  one of the greatest luxuries of the movies, one that is rarely  completely fulfilled, which is unpredictability. It's so inventive in  every way that you don't know what happens next. Even the comical theme  song is so out of place for the genre of the film, but the theme of a  boy and his dog makes it suitable. A Boy and His Dog is not a great  film, but it's worth watching repeatedly and showing our friends.  Another buried treasure. 

- jzappa 

This is extremely low budget but not bad. The conversations between Vic and Blood are hilarious (and Blood’s face and movements totally match the dialogue).

I love the bit when Blood asks Vic to name the presidents (remember, this came out in 1975). He responds “Nixon, Kennedy, Kennedy, Kennedy…” When they meet Quilla (about an hour in) the film falls apart. The sequences down under are, at first, scary but get quickly repetitious. But it leads up to a twist ending which is great.

This was issued in 1975 with a horribly exploitive ad campaign. It showed a woman lying down on the ground. You don’t see her face–just her body and all she’s wearing is a shirt and covering her breasts and other parts. Blood has a paw on her and a proud look on his face and Vic is standing beside him holding a gun! The implication is obvious and the rape aspect of this bothered a lot of people.

At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
At parts, this movie gets so strange you can’t do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.

The Plot

Armageddon is a difficult thing to rationalize, lending itself to outlandish scenes of violence and debauchery. The idea of a pubescent Don Johnson wandering the lonely wastelands guided by an intelligent and telepathic dog is a new one on me, but for some reason it all fits. Particularly so when the pooch in question has a bottomless stomach and spouts an endless stream of acidic criticism at Don Johnson. (Often complaining about Vic’s libido. A dog complaining about a teenage boy’s libido, I love it!)

The two lead an idyllic life, scavenging for food and water in the desolate landscape, but sometimes Blood is able to sniff out a female companion for Vic. For some odd reason all the women are in hiding, other than a ravenous and horny Don Johnson hunting them I can’t imagine why.

Well he ends up following Quilla into an underground fallout shelter, there the last “civilized” remnants of society are carrying on tradition. Country fairs, ice cream, and prizes for the best canned goods in addition to trapping fertile males from the surface to impregnate the young women.

At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
At parts, this movie gets so strange you can’t do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.

Before you start thinking this is not a bad deal let me explain. Vic is immobilized and his genitals attached to the equivalent of an electronic milking machine. (Aiiiieee!) In short succession the lucky brides are wed to him, presented with a bottle of special sauce, and sent on their way. Nearly incapacitated by blue balls the ferocious young man stages a retreat from the complex after being freed, taking Quilla with him. The first (And last might I add.) marital problem results when Vic discovers his faithful pooch waited outside the shelter’s entrance this entire time and is on the brink of starvation.

Zany and fun to watch on a rainy day, plus the girlfriend will never look at your faithful hound the same.

Things I learned from this movie:

  • Dogs would make excellent history professors.
  • Porn films used to suck, in a real bad way.
  • Men are confused and a little put off by women who want sex.
  • There is a fundamental difference between “hang” and “harangue.”
  • A secret and powerful society of mimes inhabits the underground areas of our planet.
  • Green plants grow nicely underground, even without artificial light.
  • Interrogating a dog is pretty darn difficult.
  • Nobody expects a crowbar in the middle of a bouquet.
  • If a very large, but slow moving, man is trying to break your neck I suggest running away.
  • Dogs make the worst puns.
 At parts, this movie gets so strange you can't do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
At parts, this movie gets so strange you can’t do anything but laugh at it, which is definitely not a bad thing! A Boy and His Dog is not something that will ever be universally popular, but it is a great movie for late nights and all nerds. A classic piece of science fiction.
Surely  those who were looking for nothing more than what Hollywood usually  delivers when they invoke the words "science fiction" were disappointed,  because this movie resembles the usual horror or action film  masquerading as sci-fi very little. 

Its source material is a novella by  Harlan Ellison, a writer who's recognized by many in the sci-fi  community as a master on the same playing field of "psychological  sci-fi" as Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick. 

From Ellison we get a very  dark tale about a strangely human dog and his boy. They live in a  post-apocalyptic wasteland where Phoenix Arizona used to be, and hunt  women and food with the same predatory zeal. But when Vic (or as the dog  calls him, Albert) is lured into a surreal society living in a large  bomb shelter, their friendship is threatened and Vic is almost forced to  become a sort of sexual machine for the good of the State.

Just  to run through some of the aspects of the film that I enjoyed, I really  liked Tim McIntire's voice work as the dog, perfectly crisp like a  cranky old man. How exactly the dog knows so much or is able to speak to  Vic is never really explained, but I think there's a clue in that Lou  (Jason Robards, Jr.) believes that Vic has spoken to a dog he encounters  in the shelter. 

That, along with the "Committee's" seeming obsession  with recounting facts and figures almanac-style, makes me believe that  the dog actually came from the shelter. Perhaps he was sent there to  "observe" Vic, as Lou tells him they have been doing for some time, and  he rebelled against their control. Like all good sci-fi the idea is  vaguely proposed but never explained.

Don Johnson did pretty good  work here, I mean it doesn't strike you as all that impressive at first  but when you think about the fact that he had to do so many scenes with  just this dog as his co-star it's a pretty tough act to pull off as  well as he did. 

Susanne Benton was decent in her role as well. I loved  when she tried to sweet-talk the dog, basically the same way that she  treated Vic. Vic seems confused about her intentions all the way up to  the end, which is excellent -- if he had figured her out completely then  the ending would just feel mean-spirited instead of humorous. 

As it is,  it's as if Vic believes he's making a sacrifice but the dog knows  better and turns it into a joke. By the way my girlfriend thought the  last line was too tacky but I thought it was perfect, it gave narrative  closure to the film as well as filling in those who might not have  understood the scene with the campfire.

Honestly the only  performance I wasn't crazy about was Jason Robards'. There's these great  scenes he gets to play with Alvy Moore ("Green Acres") and Helene  Winston (great laugh she's got... she didn't make a lot of movies but  strangely enough just this week I saw her in Curtis Harrington's "The  Killing Kind"). 

He just has no energy, I guess that's the way he wanted  to do it but it's annoying how he kind of mumbles through the dialog and  I just didn't feel that the dialog was supposed to be quite that  casual. 

Basically I just did not like the way he decided to play the  character, I didn't think it was scary at all. His android assistant,  like a twisted American Gothic, is pretty strange though. 

Plus I never  understood why everyone down there was wearing clown makeup. Was it the  idea of the forced smile? 

Anyway, I salute the film because I think it  was a brave decision to make it as it is and not to try to turn it into a  more conventional thing with romance or too much action. I think I can  see some influence from this movie on George Miller's "Road Warrior"  (though I was told that he claims he hadn't seen it), and definitely on  "Slip Stream" with Mark Hamill from the 80s. 

But this isn't really the  kind of movie that was made to fall into place inside the pantheon of  "sci-fi" anyway. It's a closer relative to "Electra-Glide in Blue" and  other films of the early 70s that explored the bitter end of "hippie"  idealism, the same trend that Hampton Fancher was trying to catch onto  when he wrote his first drafts of the film that eventually became "Blade  Runner." 

Frankly I can't remember seeing another sci-fi film that is so  close to the feel and ethos of the most transgressive and  anti-establishment sci-fi of the 1960s.                                       
              
- funkyfry 

Stuff to watch out for:

  • 1 min – You have to respect any film that starts off with nuclear war.
  • 8 mins – That is Phoenix? I see that it has not changed much…
  • 23 mins – Don Johnson apologizing to a dog ladies and gentlemen.
  • 25 mins – Good dog! Hehehehe!
  • 37 mins – Blood just managed to kill a full grown man who was armed with a rifle?
  • 45 mins – Sort of a canine teleprompter…
  • 46 mins – RANDOM GRATUITOUS BREAST SHOT!
  • 71 mins – Now, will Vic eat that or wipe it on his clothing?
  • 78 mins – The true colors of Quilla’s womanhood come to light.
  • 79 mins – That is about fifty yards I guess, easy shot with a rifle…

Conclusion

Watch the movie. It’s a great romp into 1970’s science fiction. And, as such, perfect for a nice lazy afternoon, or a boring evening at home.


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What psychotic Hell is like; tales from smoking “spice”.

Here we discuss you can experience what Hell is like. For those of you that are desirous of this, there is a drug that does precisely that.

There’s this movie, “Brainstorm” (1983), where scientists can literally jump into someone else’s head and play back recordings of what he or she was thinking, feeling, seeing, etc., at the time of the recording, the applications for the project quickly spiral out of control. The American military starts using the technology for “other purposes”. One of which was to create a psychotic Hellish prison in the mind from which they could torture people with.

Directed by Douglas Trumbull. With Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson. Researchers develop a system where they can jump into people's minds. But when people involved bring their personal problems into the equation, it becomes dangerous - perhaps deadly.
Brainstorm, directed by Douglas Trumbull. With Christopher Walken, Natalie Wood, Louise Fletcher, Cliff Robertson. Researchers develop a system where they can jump into people’s minds. But when people involved bring their personal problems into the equation, it becomes dangerousperhaps deadly.

Well, there is this drug, known as “spice”, that does the exact same thing.

It’s an instant trip to Hell, and you do NOT want to go there.

Spice – K2

A new drug has taken hold on streets across Europe and North America. Tribes of strangers are staggering around, looking lost and mumbling to passersby before passing out whenever their legs and minds can take no more. The drug is most widely known as “spice,” and newspapers — particularly right-wing tabloid newspapers — are having a field day.

“Zombie spice users are pushing Britain’s emergency services to the brink,” warns The Sun. A “spice nightmare” is turning city centers into “real-life horror movies,” says The Mirror.

Spice “turns users into the ‘living dead’ in minutes and is ruining lives across Britain,” says The Daily Mail.

Spice is like living the darkest scenes from the movie “Brainstorm”.

I  think this movie was ahead of its time.  I never saw Brainstorm when it  was originally released, but decided that I just had to view it since I  never saw it on any streaming services such as Netflix or Hulu.  Amazon  had it, so instead of renting I added to my Amazon library.  

Since  Natalie Wood's circumstances of death has become something of a current  affair, it was more provocative watching the scenes with her and  Christopher Walken.  

Louise Fletcher gave an amazing performance tying  the whole movie together.  

This movie was about scientific research that  actually allows the users to experience each other's feelings, memories  and sensations.  When you watch this you could imagine the many types  of technologies that exist today, with those same goals, through virtual  reality, video games, etc.  

You also see the holistic side when Louise  Fletcher's character is having a brain scan recording while she actually  experiences a heart attack and then dies, raising the questions of what  happens to the human consciousness after death.  

There is also the  further complication that the research is owned by a DoD contractor that  wants to weaponize this device for their subjects to experiences their  worst fears and traumas. 

- Ahead of its time and really should be a classic. 

Spice (AKA K2) is not just a single drug, but a wide range of laboratory-made chemicals designed to mimic the effects of the well-known psychoactive compound in marijuana called THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol. The keyword here, though, is mimic. 

Scene from the movie "Brainstorm".
Scene from the movie “Brainstorm”.

THC in marijuana works by latching onto cannabinoid receptors in the brain. The chemicals in spice do the same thing, but can be over 100 times more potent and produce wildly different effects compared to actual weed. The only real similarities between spice and weed is the way it works and the fact that you smoke it.

To make things more complicated, the combinations of chemicals in spice are changing all the time, leading to slightly different effects and levels of potency between each separate batch. There are potentially hundreds or even thousands of variations being pushed out of dodgy labs in Russia and China.

No matter what the combination is, though, the powdery substance formed is carted off to Europe and North America and sprayed onto plant matter like sage, damiana or even tea leaves. After that, the “spice” is placed into eye-catching packaging and sold by small-time dealers and certain “herbal” shops. Spice has been illegal in the U.S. since 2013, and in the U.K. since May, 2016.

The effects of “Spice”…

“It’s like a scene out of a zombie movie, a horrible scene,” said Brian Arthur, 38, who began live-streaming on his way to work in Brooklyn, New York after seeing three people collapse. “This drug truly paralyzes people.”

Scene from the movie "Brainstorm".
Scene from the movie “Brainstorm”.

Wherever you find spice, you’ll find witnesses saying the same thing. Users appear to be on another planet, and that’s pretty much how they themselves describe it, too. Matthew Nuttall, an ex-spice addict from Manchester, told Britain’s Metro newspaper: “You just feel braindead half the time. They say people look like zombies, and that’s how it feels.

Zombie.
Zombie.

“The first time, I can’t even explain what it was like. It just blew my head off. I thought ‘never again.’ It’s just such a heavy high. It’s so intense,” he continued. “’The first high lasted about one hour, but it really felt a lot longer. It’s like you’re there but you can’t communicate. You’re alive in there, but you can’t see it on the outside. You just feel braindead.”

The government tries to kick Michael and Lillian off the project once  the vast military potential of the technology is discovered. 

It soon  becomes obvious that the government is interested in more than just  missile guidance systems. The lab starts producing mind torture  recordings and other psychosis inducing material. 

When one of the  researchers dies and tapes the experience of death, Michael is convinced  that he must playback this tape to honor the memory of the researcher  and to become enlightened. When another researcher dies during playback  the tape is locked away and Michael has to fight against his former  colleagues and the government lackeys that now run his lab in order to  play back and confront the "scariest thing any of us will ever face" -  death itself.
                                                      
Eric van bezooijen <eric@webmethods.com>                          

Warnings

When you are young and full of “piss and vinegar”, you believe that the “world is your oyster”; that you can do anything and live forever. Then, when you get older, you have kids, you have friends that have died, been in car accidents and have friends paralyzed, you realize how precious and special life is.

Most of the people taking this drug are either young or destitute. They cannot see a future that is worth protecting.

So they make mistakes…

Experimenter One

I took 3 strong, albeit very smooth, hits from my water bong in my dark room alone, and then it was only a matter of a few minutes before I could feel the effects kicking in. I tried to surf the internet, as per my usual activity while high, but suddenly, I felt a dramatic and precipitous shift coming on. I could tell immediately that the stuff was strong and I may have bitten off more than my head was ready to handle.

I struggled to make sense of my surroundings. Objects ceased to have meaning or recognition. It was complete and utter boundary dissolution. What happened next is incredibly hard to describe, for there really are no words that can adequately define the parameters, if there were any, of the domain I entered.

Scene from the movie "Brainstorm".
Scene from the movie “Brainstorm”.

Imagine if you will, perpetual drowning in a multidimensional lake of fire, kaleidoscopically cascading through a roller-coaster ride of pure, unabashed nauseating torment. Never in my entire life have I ever wanted to die. It felt like I was experiencing every pain that has happened, or will ever happen, to any and all lifeforms throughout the multiverse. It seems possible to imagine, right? I swear to you, I am in no way trying to embellish a bad trip.

The feeling of nausea was unbearable. It literally, and I do mean literally, felt like eternity. It’s as if my ego was completely stripped away; I looked down at my hands, which were barely recognizable, and felt that my body was struggling to keep my soul inside and intact. Movement felt like slow motion, and the room around me flickered and spun around chaotically. Whatever was left of my ego was trying desperately to grasp onto something familiar, anything that I could focus on and stay grounded in the room. It was like gasping for air while a demon tries to drown you in a lake of fire. I kid you not.

I felt lost, and abandoned. It was the experience of sheer hopelessness. Never have I ever known the meaning of that word, ‘hopelessness’. I’m there in my bed, writhing in contorted position after contorted position, trying to find a safe place in my head to rest and root itself, but to no avail.

I’m there in my bed, writhing in contorted position after contorted position, trying to find a safe place in my head to rest and root itself, but to no avail.

I rode wave after wave of unbearable torment, and I all I could think was that if hell exists, this state of consciousness is it. Words and language ceased to have meaning or make sense. My thoughts become so scrambled that it became impossible to even try to rationally calm myself down and relax.

When I could feel my body again and jump back into reality, deep breathing helped slow the spinning and recalibrate my surroundings.

But then my soul got dragged right back down to the pits of hell and I was whipped, prodded, poked, skewered, hooked, burned, and beaten, all simultaneously.

There were no actual demons to speak of, or a devil-figure, or fire, or anything like that. It was more or less a blended hyperdimensional reality of my entire life’s history.

Every terrible thought I ever had, and even the ones I didn’t know I had, rush up to greet me. All the while, I continually felt like I was going to throw up, and it felt like I was constantly jolted, as if I was frightened in a nightmare.

I would wake up from the nightmare, but only to realize that I was still stuck in the nightmare again, and there was no hope of truly waking up to escape.

After 2 hours of real time, I began to calm down and things in the room became more solid and less fuzzy.

I began to take sanctuary in the ability to recognize objects, and I began to relax a bit as I was assured a safe return to normalcy or baseline. I then began stringing together cohesive thoughts and expressions, and I began examining all of the private and unsettling things the trip exposed to me about my ego, sexuality, and cultural operating system.

I’ll never take for granted the simple majesty, and wonderment of normal, everyday reality. It is a beautiful, loving, and peaceful state, simply because it is understandable. The ability to comprehend something, anything, is a luxury that was not afforded to me while tripping.

Exactly what hell would feel like, whether it really is a place that exists after death for some or not. Worst. trip. ever.

Experimenter Two

My ex-husband was a high-level IT Engineer/Exec. After doing synthetic weed with a new girlfriend, he went into permanent psychosis due to actual brain damage from Spice/K2/etc. (She did too, but I don’t know whatever happened to her).

Over the course of a year he’d attacked the police, stolen his children and told them bad people were trying to hurt them, ruined the computer hardware and networks of an employer (he thought FBI was after him), tried to kidnap his oldest daughter from her mom, and woke up with a head wound 4 states away with no idea how he got there but tried to blame it on me and the government.

He destroyed our kids’ lives financially and emotionally – between therapy costs to deal with the trauma, complete lack of child support from him, lack of health benefits, and one day he just left the country and is now overseas in a mental hospital… I work but live in a high-cost area. I make too much to qualify for any benefits of any kind. The state can’t help because he’s overseas. Disability can’t help because he’s too paranoid to apply for benefits.

All because he was stressed out and wanted to get high without it showing up on a drug test. Please don’t do it. If one person reading this is helped, then I’m grateful.

Experimenter Three

Me and a friend were outside catching up over winter break and we packed up a bowl between us. After about 10 minutes and only about 3 hits of the ‘Smiley Dog’ herbal incense we are so high we cannot stand or walk.

The idea of returning to the house and watching a movie is laughable in our state after about 15 minutes. I lose motor control and can no longer stand after 20 minutes. MY heart feels as if it is going to explode, I become convinced I could die at any moment. A tingling feeling starts at the tips of my fingers and slowly works its way up to my hands, then up my arm. It feels as if my bod is dyeing piece by piece before me.

At this point I lose it, and have my friend call an ambulance. Sounds like over reaching, but my body will not obey my commands, I’m vomiting and the tingling feeling has moved terrifyingly close to my heart.

When the ambulance arrives they cannot bring me under control and i cannot stop my body from convulsing, shaking, and screaming like the demon infested girl from ‘The Exorcist’.

They had to strap me to a gurney and put me in an ambulance. It took six people to hold me down so they could put the straps on and get an IV in me. They administered 10 milligrams of Ativan to try to calm me down but nothing really works until I’m at the emergency room and they put me down with Geodon.

I’m convinced JWH-018 triggered a full psychotic break in me. DO NOT FUCK WITH THIS STUFF! STICK WITH REAL WEED!

Experimenter Four

Smoked spice (was told it was just weed)… After two big hits, there was a high-pitched pinging sound going on in my head as my vision and thoughts began to fade away and I blacked out for around a minute.

I then wake up and feel as if I am detached from my body and floating on air. I had no thoughts, no vision, no memories, no sense of time, … But there was something.

My mind became trapped in this meaningless, timeless, and endless pattern of torture that just kept repeating over and over and over with no end in sight.

I had watched ‘Home Alone’ that day and the opening theme music which I always found a little scary was playing over and over while tripping.

That theme music and my friend saying, “is he alright man”?, was a continuous loop for the duration of the trip.

Heart felt like it was gonna jump out of my chest and I couldn’t move in the slightest or communicate with my friends. There was no way out. This pattern was my entire existence. The only feeling that existed in this world was extreme horror, pain, and mental torture.

When I finally got a glimpse of the real world again, I was really glad, but after a little moment it started again! And I was like “no, F*CK NO, not AGAIN!”.

It was unimaginably horrible. I don’t know how long this part actually lasted but it was somewhere between 5 and 20 minutes I believe.

Experimenter Five

The first and only time I smoked spice I was on the come down of a 3 tab acid trip, I couldn’t sleep and wanted some company. One of my friends texted me saying he had some fresh hash and a surprise for me. So I was like what the hell come over, I don’t know when I’ll sleep.

Fast forward to my friend coming through and he’s like I have this super nice Spliff rolled up for you with 3 types of hash. You’re going to get fucked up I promise. But you’re going to want to hold that in for 30seconds before exhaling to really get the effects.

So trusting this “friend”, I took 3 hits, as soon as I look at my friend and say this isn’t just hash, he smiles and is like nah it’s K2. Now at this point I start tripping again, everything was like 4D crystal clear HD, I was seeing around walls and corners while seeing what was infront of me.

So I was just perplexed…

Until I went inside my place and sat down. That’s when I noticed I was breathing shallow, inhaling and exhaling felt thin and overall just not right. I kept pacing and trying to get a proper breathing rhythm. The whole time my “friend” just kept smiling at me and was like you’ll be good bro, this high is amazing!

That was the closest I’ve ever had to a panic attack, the closest I’ve ever felt like I was dying and it scared me.

So fuck spice and fuck my so called friend for doing that to me. I’ve since cut all ties with him and when I sobered up from the 15 minutes of hell I almost beat the shit out of the kid, I was so pissed.

So FUCK spice!

Experimenter Six

And if you say “lol fuck you OP I’ll do what I want” then heed this warning: Do NOT take huge hits and/or hold that shit in, especially if you’re new to it and don’t know what to expect.

It’s like no other “drug” that shit doesn’t creep up on you. It busts down your fucking door like a lightning bolt and the only words that will go through your head is “Shit, what have I done?”

It’s terrifying if you take too much and you have no tolerance. Imminent death is probably an accurate description of when you’re peaking from a hit too many.

You will feel like you’re about to die. You will think of your family that’ll miss you. You will pray to God if you believe in one. You will bargain with him that if you make it out alive, that’ll you’ll NEVER do it again.

If you want to smoke spice, at least heed these warnings. It’s no little kid drug, it’s intense as it is detrimental to your psyche. If you want a taste of it, please. PLEASE PLEASE. Hit that shit about 1/8th of the way you would hit a joint, and immediately exhale. Wait 60 seconds, then determine if you’re in hell’s halls or not. If you’re not, congratulations, you’ve successfully and responsibly smoked spice.

If you find yourself making a final prayer, you did It very wrong and you will regret the decision. I hope this will save at least 1 person. Be safe

Conclusion

Buy a pizza, and a bottle or two of wine. You and a special friend, go to a nice glade, a shady spot, or fresh beach. Lay down a blanket and make it a day.

It’s much nicer than a trip to Hell, don’t ya think.

Pizza and wine with the one you love - pure Heaven.
Pizza and wine with the one you love – pure Heaven.

If you enjoyed this post, check out similar ones in my happiness index. Here…

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The Liberation of Earth (Full Text) by William Tenn

This is the full text of a classic science fiction story called the “Liberation of Earth” by William Tenn. It was first published in the May 1953 issue of the Future Science Fiction monthly magazine, this amusing, insightful and thought-provoking satire of human pretentiousness in a galactic environment. Indeed; the Earth is invaded by warring very-superior, very-different and very-uncaring aliens, with very terrifying results. This was one of the best stories of the distinguished university professor Philip Klass (1920-2010). He was the author of some 60-odd excellent science-fiction stories, mostly under the pen-name of William Tenn.

LIBERATION OF EARTH

This is the full text of a classic science fiction story called the "Liberation of Earth" by William Tenn.
This is the full text of a classic science fiction story called the “Liberation of Earth” by William Tenn.


THIS, THEN is the story of our liberation. Suck air and grab clusters. Heigh-ho, here is the tale.

August was the month, a Tuesday in August. These words are meaningless now, so far have we progressed; but many things known and discussed by our primitive ancestors, our unliberated, unreconstructed forefathers, are devoid of sense to our free minds.

Still the tale must be told, with all of its incredible place-names and vanished points of reference.

Why must it be told? Have any of you a better thing to do? We have had water and weeds and lie in a valley of gusts. So rest, relax and listen. And suck air, suck air.

On a Tuesday in August, the ship appeared in the sky over France in a part of the world then known as Europe. Five miles long the ship was, and word has come down to us that it looked like an enormous silver cigar.

The tale goes on to tell of the panic and consternation among our forefathers when the ship abruptly materialized in the summer-blue sky. How they ran, how they shouted, how they point­ed!
How they excitedly notified the United Nations, one of their chiefest institutions, that a strange metal craft of incredible size had materialized over their land. How they sent an order here to cause military aircraft to sur­round it with loaded weapons, gave in­structions there for hastily-grouped scientists, with signaling apparatus, to approach it with friendly gestures. How, under the great ship, men with cameras took pictures of it; men with typewriters wrote stories about it; and men with concessions sold models of it.

All these things did our ancestors, enslaved and unknowing, do.
Then a tremendous slab snapped up in the middle of the ship and the first of the aliens stepped out in the complex tripodal gait that all humans were shortly to know and love so well. He wore a metallic garment to protect him from the effects of our atmospheric peculiarities, a garment of the opaque, loosely-folded type that these, the first of our liberators, wore throughout their stay on Earth.

Speaking in a language none could understand, but booming deafeningly through a huge mouth about halfway up his twenty-five feet of height, the alien discoursed for exactly one hour, waited politely for a response when he had finished, and, receiving none, retired into the ship.

That night; the first of our libera­tion! Or the first of our first libera­tion, should I say? That night, any­how! Visualize our ancestors scurrying about their primitive intricacies: playing ice-hockey, televising, smashing atoms, red-baiting, conducting giveaway shows and signing affidavits—all the incredible minutiae that made the olden times such a frightful mass of cumulative detail in which to live—as compared with the breathless and majestic simplicity of the present.

THE BIG question, of course, was —what had the alien said? Had he called on the human race to sur­render? Had he announced that he was on a mission of peaceful trade and, having made what he considered a rea­sonable offer—for, let us say, the north polar ice-cap—politely withdrawn so that we could discuss his terms among ourselves in relative privacy? Or, possibly, had he merely announced that he was the newly appointed ambassador to Earth from a friendly and intelligent race—and would we please direct him to the proper authority so that he might sub­mit his credentials?

Not to know was quite maddening.

Since decision rested with the diplo­mats, it was the last possibility which was held, very late that night, to be most likely; and early the next morning, accordingly, a delegation from the United Nations waited under the belly of the motionless star-ship. The dele­gation had been instructed to welcome the aliens to the outermost limits of its collective linguistic ability. As an additional earnest of mankind’s friend­ly intentions, all military craft patrolling the air about the great ship were ordered to carry no more than one atom-bomb in their racks, and to fly a small white flag—along with the U.N. banner and their own national emblem.

Thus, did our ancestors face this, the ultimate challenge of history.

When the alien came forth a few hours later, the delegation stepped up to him, bowed, and, in the three official languages of the United Nations —English, French and Russian—asked him to consider this planet his home. He listened to them gravely, and then launched into his talk of the day before—which was evidently as high­ly charged with emotion and significance to him, as it was completely in­comprehensible to the representatives of world government.

Fortunately, a cultivated young Indian member of the secretariat detected a suspicious similarity between the speech of the alien and an obscure Bengali dialect whose anomalies he had once puzzled over. The reason, as we all know now, was that the last time Earth had been visited by Aliens of this particular type, humanity’s most advanced civilization lay in a moist valley in Bengal; extensive dictionaries of that language had been written, so that speech with the natives of Earth would present no problem to any subsequent exploring-party.

However, I move ahead of my tale, as one who would munch on the succulent roots before the dryer stem. Let me rest and suck air for a moment. Heigh-ho, truly those were tremendous experiences for our kind.

You, sir, now you sit back and lis­ten. You are not yet of an age to Tell the Tale. I remember, well enough do I remember how my father told it, and his father before him. You will wait your turn as I did; you will listen un­til too much high land between water holes blocks me off from life.

Then you may take your place in the juiciest weed-patch and, reclining gracefully between sprints, recite the great epic of our liberation to the care­lessly exercising young.

PURSUANT to the young Hindu’s suggestions, the one professor of comparative linguistics in the world capable of understanding and conversing in this peculiar version of the dead dialect, was summoned from an aca­demic convention in New York where he was reading a paper he had been working on for eighteen years: An In­itial Study of Apparent Relationships Between Several Past Participles in Ancient Sanskrit and an Equal Num­ber of Noun Substantives in Modern Szechuanese.

Yea, verily, all these things—and more, many more—did our ancestors in their besotted ignorance contrive to do. May we not count our freedoms in­deed?

The disgruntled scholar, minus—as he kept insisting bitterly—some of his most essential word-lists, was flown by fastest jet to the area south of Nancy which, in those long-ago days, lay in the enormous black shadow of the alien space-ship.

Here he was acquainted with his task by the United Nations delegation, whose nervousness had not been allayed by a new and disconcerting de­velopment. Several more aliens had emerged from the ship carrying great quantities of immense, shimmering metal which they proceeded to assemble into something that was obviously a machine—though it was taller than any skyscraper man had ever built, and seemed to make noises to itself like a talkative and sentient creature. The first alien still stood courteously in the neighborhood of the profusely perspiring diplomats; ever and anon he would go through his little speech again, in a language that had been almost forgotten when the cornerstone of the library of Alexandria was laid. The men from the U.N. would reply, each one hoping desperately to make up for the alien’s lack of familiarity with his own tongue by such devices as hand-gestures and facial expres­sions. Much later, a commission of anthropologists and psychologists brilliantly pointed out the difficulties of such physical communication with creatures possessing—as these aliens did—five manual appendages and a single, unwinking compound eye of the type the insects rejoice in.

The problems and agonies of the professor as he was trundled about the world in the wake of the aliens, try­ing to amass a usable vocabulary in a language whose peculiarities he could only extrapolate from the limited samples supplied him by one who must inevitably speak it with the most outlandish of foreign accents—these vex­ations were minor indeed compared to the disquiet felt by the representatives of world government. They beheld the extra-terrestrial visitors move every day to a new site on their planet and proceed to assemble there a titanic structure of flickering metal which muttered nostalgically to itself, as if to keep alive the memory of those far­away factories which had given it birth.

True, there was always the alien who would pause in his evidently supervisory labors to release the set lit­tle speech; but not even the excellent manners he displayed, in listening to upwards of fifty-six replies in as many languages, helped dispel the panic caused whenever a human scientist, investigating the shimmering machines, touched a projecting edge and promptly shrank into a disappearing pinpoint. This, while not a frequent occurrence, happened often enough to cause chronic indigestion and insomnia among hu­man administrators.

FINALLY, having used up most of his nervous-system as fuel, the professor collated enough of the language to make conversation possible. He—and, through him, the world—were thereupon told the following:

The aliens were members of a highly-advanced civilization which had spread its culture throughout the entire galaxy. Cognizant of the limitations of the as-yet-underdeveloped animals who had latterly become dom­inant upon Earth, they had placed us in a sort of benevolent ostracism. Un­til either we or our institutions would have evolved to a level permitting, say, at least associate membership in the galactic federation (under the sponsor­ing tutelage, for the first few millen­nia, of one of the older, more widespread and more important species in that federation)—until that time, all invasions of our privacy and ignorance —except for a few scientific expedi­tions conducted under conditions of great secrecy—had been strictly for­bidden by universal agreement.

Several individuals who had violated this ruling—at great cost to our racial sanity, and enormous profit to our reigning religions—had been so promptly and severely punished that no known infringements had occurred for some time. Our recent growth-curve had been satisfactory enough to cause hopes that a bare thirty or forty centuries more would suffice to place us on applicant status with the federa­tion.

Unfortunately, the peoples of this stellar community were many, and var­ied as greatly in their ethical outlook as their biological composition. Quite a few species lagged a considerable social distance behind the Dendi, as our visitors called themselves. One of these, a race of horrible, worm-like organisms known as the Troxxt—almost as advanced technologically as they were retarded in moral develop­ment—had suddenly volunteered for the position of sole and absolute ruler of the galaxy. They had seized control of several key suns, with their attendant planetary-systems, and, after a calculated decimation of the races thus captured, had announced their in­tention of punishing with a merciless extinction all species unable to appreciate from these object-lessons the va­lue of unconditional surrender.

In despair, the galactic federation had turned to the Dendi, one of the oldest, most selfless, and yet most powerful of races in civilized space, and commissioned them—as the military arm of the federation—to hunt down the Troxxt, defeat them wherever they had gained illegal suzerainty, and destroy forever their power to wage war.

This order had come almost too late. Everywhere the Troxxt had gained so much the advantage of attack, that the Dendi were able to con­tain them only by enormous sacrifice. For centuries now, the conflict had careened across our vast island uni­verse. In the course of it, densely-pop­ulated planets had been disintegrated; suns had been blasted into novae; and whole groups of stars ground Into swirling cosmic dust. A temporary stalemate had been reached a short while ago, and—reeling and breathless—both sides were using the lull to strengthen weak spots in their perimeter.

Thus, the Troxxt had finally moved into the till-then peaceful section of space that contained our solar-system —among others. They were thoroughly uninterested in our tiny planet with its meager resources; nor did they care much for such celestial neighbors as Mars or Jupiter. They established their headquarters on a planet of Proxima Centaurus—the star nearest our own sun—and proceeded to consolidate their offensive-defensive network between Rigel and Aldebaran. At this point in their explanation, the Dendi pointed out, the exigencies of interstellar strategy tended to become too complicated for anything but three-dimensional maps; let us here accept the simple statement, they suggested, that it became immediately vital for them to strike rapidly, and make the Troxxt position on Proxima Centaurus untenable—to establish a base inside their lines of communication.

The most likely spot for such a base was Earth.

THE DENDI apologized profusely for intruding on our development, an intrusion which might cost us dear in our delicate developmental state. But, as they explained—in impeccable pre-Bengali—before their arrival we had, in effect, become (all unknow­ingly) a satrapy of the awful Troxxt. We could now consider ourselves liberated.

We thanked them much for that.

Besides, their leader pointed out proudly, the Dendi were engaged in a war for the sake of civilization itself, against an enemy so horrible, so ob­scene in its nature, and so utterly filthy in its practices, that it was unworthy of the label of intelligent life. They were fighting, not only for themselves, but for every loyal member of the galactic federation; for every small and helpless species; for every obscure race too weak to defend itself against a ravaging conqueror. Would humanity stand aloof from such a conflict?

There was just a slight bit of hesitation as the information was digested. Then—“No!” humanity roared back through such mass-communica­tion media as television, newspapers, reverberating jungle drums and mule-mounted backwoods messenger. “We will not stand aloof! We will help you destroy this menace to the very fabric of civilization! Just tell us what you want us to do!”

Well, nothing in particular, the aliens replied with some embarrass­ment. Possibly in a little while there might be something—several little things, in fact—which could be quite useful; but, for the moment, if we would concentrate on not getting in their way when they serviced their gun-mounts, they would be very grate­ful, really…

This reply tended to create a small amount of uncertainty among the two billion of Earth’s human population. For several days afterwards, there was a planet-wide tendency—the legend has come down to us—of people failing to meet each other’s eyes, an evident discomfort in looking at any other person directly.

But then Man rallied from this substantial punch to his pride. He would be useful, be it ever so humbly. to the race which had liberated him from potential subjugation by the ineffably ugly Troxxt. For this, let us remember well our ancestors! Let us hymn their sincere efforts amid their ignorance!

All standing armies, all air and sea fleets, were reorganized into guard-patrols around the Dendi weapons: no human might approach within two miles of the murmuring machinery, without a pass counter-signed by the Dendi. Since they were never known to sign such a pass during the entire period of their stay on this planet, however, this loophole-provision was never exercised as far as is known; and the immediate neighborhood of the extraterrestrial weapons became and remained thenceforth antiseptically free of two-legged creatures.

COOPERATION with our liberators took precedence over all other human activities. The order of the day was a slogan first given voice by a Harvard Professor of Government in a querulous radio round-table on “Man’s Place in a Somewhat Over-Civilized Universe.”

“Let us forget our individual egos and collective conceits,” the professor cried at one point. “Let us subordinate everything—to the end that the freedom of the Solar System in general, and Earth in particular, must and shall be preserved!”

Despite—and possibly because of—its mouth-filling qualities, this slogan was repeated everywhere.

Still, it was difficult sometimes to know exactly what the Dendi want­ed—partly because of the limited number of interpreters of the only Earth-tongue the aliens knew, that were available to the heads of the various sovereign states, and partly because of their leader’s tendency to vanish into his ship after ambiguous and equivocal statements—such as the curt admonition to “Evacuate Washington!”

On that occasion, both the Secre­tary of State and the American President, himself, perspired through five hours of a July day in all the silk-hatted, stiff-collared, dark-suited diplomatic regalia that the barbaric past demanded of political leaders who would deal with the representatives of another people. They waited and wilt­ed beneath the enormous ship—which no human had ever been invited to enter, despite the wistful hints constantly thrown out by university professors and aeronautical designers—they waited patiently and wetly for the Dendi leader to emerge and let them know whether he had meant the State of Washington or Washington, D. C.

The tale comes down to us at this point as a tale of glory. The capitol building taken apart in a few days, and set up almost intact in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains; the missing Archives, that were later to turn up in the Children’s Room of a Public Library in Duluth, Iowa; the bottles of Potomac River water carefully borne westward and ceremoniously poured into the circular concrete ditch built around the President’s mansion (from which unfortunately it was to evaporate within a week be­cause of the relatively low humidity of the region)—all these are proud mo­ments in the galactic history of our species, from which not even the later knowledge that the Dendi wished to build no gun-site on the spot, nor even an ammunition dump, but merely a recreation-hall for their troops, could remove any of the grandeur of our determined cooperation and most will­ing sacrifice.

There is no denying, however, that the ego of our race was greatly damaged by the discovery, in the course of a routine journalistic inter­view, that the aliens totaled no more powerful a group than a squad; and that their leader, instead of the great scientist and key military-strategist that we might justifiably have expected the Galactic Federation to furnish for the protection of Terra, ranked as the interstellar equivalent of a buck sergeant.

That the President of the United States, the Commander-in-Chief of the Army and the Navy, had waited in such obeisant fashion upon a mere non-commissioned officer was hard for us to swallow; but that the impending Battle of Earth was to have a historical dignity only slightly higher than that of a patrol action was impossibly humiliating.

AND THEN there was the matter of “lendi.”

The aliens, while installing or servicing their planet-wide weapon sys­tem, would occasionally fling aside an evidently-unusable fragment of the talking metal. Separated from the ma­chine of which it had been a com­ponent, the substance seemed to lose all those qualities which were dele­terious to mankind and retain several which were quite useful indeed. For example, if a portion of the strange material were attached to any terrestrial metal—and insulated carefully, with standard dielectrics, from contact with other substances—it would, in a few hours, itself become exactly the metal that it touched, whether that happened to be zinc, gold or pure uranium.

This stuff—”lendi”, men had heard the aliens call it—was shortly in fran­tic demand in an economy ruptured by constant and unexpected emptyings of its most important industrial-centers.
Everywhere the aliens went, to and from their weapon-sites, hordes of ragged humans stood chanting—well outside the two-mile limit— “Any lendi, Dendi?”

All attempts by law-enforcement agencies of the planet to put a stop to this shameless, wholesale begging were useless—especially since the Dendi themselves seemed to get some unexplainable pleasure out of scattering tiny pieces of lendi to the scrabbling multitude. When policemen and soldiery began to join the trampling, murderous dash to the corner of the meadows, wherein had fallen the highly-versatile and garrulous metal, governments gave up.

Mankind almost began to hope for the attack to come, so that it would be relieved of the festering consideration of its own patent inferiorities. A few of the more fanatically-conservative among our ancestors probably even began to regret liberation.

They did, children; they did! Let us hope that these would-be troglodytes were among the very first to be dissolved and melted down by the red flame-balls. One cannot, after all, turn one’s back on progress!

Two days before the month of September was over, the aliens announced that they had detected activity upon one of the moons of Saturn. The Troxxt were evidently threading their treacherous way inward through the solar system. Considering their vicious and deceitful propensities, the Dendi warned, an attack from these worm-like monstrosities might be expected at any moment.

Few humans went to sleep as the night rolled up to and past the meridian on which they dwelt. Almost all eyes were lifted to a sky carefully denuded of clouds by watchful Dendi. There was a brisk trade in cheap telescopes and bits of smoked glass in some sections of the planet; while other portions experienced a substantial boom in spells and charms of the all-inclusive, or omnibus, variety.

THE TROXXT attacked in three cylindrical black ships simultaneously; one in the Southern Hemis­phere, and two in the Northern. Great gouts of green flame roared out of their tiny craft; and everything that this flame touched imploded into a translucent, glass-like sand. No Dendi was hurt by these, however, and from each of the now-writhing gun-mounts there bubbled forth a se­ries of scarlet clouds which pursued the Troxxt hungrily, until forced by a dwindling velocity to fall back upon Earth.

Here they had an unhappy after-effect. Any populated area into which these pale pink cloudlets chanced to fall was rapidly transformed into a cemetery—a cemetery, if the truth be told as it has been handed down to us, that had more the odor of the kitchen than the grave. The inhabitants of these unfortunate localities were subjected to enormous increases of temperature. Their skin reddened, then blackened; their hair and nails shriv­eled; their very flesh turned into liquid and boiled off their bones. Altogether a disagreeable way for one-tenth of the human race to die.

The only consolation was the cap­ture of a black cylinder by one of the red clouds. When, as a result of this, it had turned white-hot and poured its substance down in the form of a metallic rainstorm, the two ships assaulting the Northern Hemisphere abruptly retreated to the asteroids into which the Dendi—because of severely-limited numbers—steadfastly refused to pursue them.

In the next twenty-four hours the aliens—resident aliens, let us say—held conferences, made repairs to their weapons and commiserated with us. Humanity buried its dead. This last was a custom of our forefathers that was most worthy of note; and one that has not, of course, survived into modern times.

By the time the Troxxt returned, Man was ready for them. He could not, unfortunately, stand to arms as he most ardently desired to do; but he could and did stand to optical instrument and conjurer’s oration.

Once more the little red clouds burst joyfully into the upper reaches of the stratosphere; once more the green flames wailed and tore at the chattering spires of lendi; once more men died by the thousands in the boiling backwash of war. But this time, there was a slight difference: the green flames of the Troxxt abruptly changed color after the engagement had lasted three hours; they became darker, more bluish. And, as they did so, Dendi after Dendi collapsed at his station and died in convulsions.

The call for retreat was evidently sounded. The survivors fought their way to the tremendous ship in which they had come. With an explosion from her stern jets that blasted a red-hot furrow southward through France, and kicked Marseilles into the Mediterranean, the ship roared into space and fled home ignominiously.

Humanity steeled itself for the coming ordeal of horror under the Troxxt.

THEY WERE truly worm-like in form. As soon as the two night-black cylinders had landed, they strode, from their ships, their tiny segmented bodies held off the ground by a complex harness supported by long and slender metal crutches. They erected a dome-like fort around each ship—one in Australia and one in the Ukraine—captured the few courageous individuals who had ventured close to their landing-sites, and disappeared back into the dark craft with their squirming prizes.

While some men drilled about ner­vously in the ancient military patterns, others poured anxiously over scientific texts and records pertaining to the visit of the Dendi—in the desperate hope of finding a way of preserving terrestrial independence against this ravening conqueror of the star-spattered galaxy.

And yet all this time, the human captives inside the artificially-darkened spaceships (the Troxxt, having no eyes, not only had little use for light but the more sedentary individuals among them actually found such radiation disagreeable to their sensitive, unpigmented skins) were not being tortured for information—nor vivisected in the earnest quest of same on a slightly higher level—but educated.

Educated in the Troxxtian language, that is.

True it was that a large number found themselves utterly inadequate for the task which the Troxxt had set them, and temporarily became servants to the more successful students. And another, albeit smaller, group developed various forms of frustra­tion hysteria—ranging from mild unhappiness to complete catatonic depression—over the difficulties presented by a language whose every verb was irregular, and whose myriads of prepositions were formed by noun-adjective combinations derived from the subject of the previous sentence. But, eventually, eleven human beings were released, to blink madly in the sunlight as certified interpreters of Troxxt.

These liberators, it seemed, had never visited Bengal in the heyday of its millennia-past civilization.

Yes, these liberators For the Troxxt had landed on the sixth day of the ancient, almost mythical, month of October. And October the Sixth is, of course, the Holy Day of the Second Liberation. Let us remember, let us revere. If only we could figure out which day it is on our calendar!

THE TALE the interpreters told caused men to hang their heads in shame and gnash their teeth at the deception they had allowed the Dendi to practice upon them.

True, the Dendi had been commis­sioned by the Galactic Federation to hunt the Troxxt down and destroy them. This was largely because the Dendi were the Galactic Federation. One of the first intelligent arrivals on the interstellar scene, the huge creatures had organized a vast police-force to protect them and their power against any contingency of revolt that might arise in the future. This police-force was ostensibly a congress of all thinking lifeforms throughout the galaxy; actually, it was an efficient means of keeping them under rigid control.

Most species thus-far discovered were docile and tractable, however; the Dendi had been ruling from time immemorial, said they—very well, then, let the Dendi continue to rule. Did it make that much difference?

But, throughout the centuries, opposition to the Dendi grew—and the nuclei of the opposition were the protoplasm-based creatures. What, in fact, had come to be known as the Protoplasmic League.
Though small in number, the creatures whose life-cycles were derived from the chemical and physical properties of protoplasm varied greatly in size, structure and specialization. A galactic community deriving the main wells of its power from them would be a dynamic instead of a static place, where extra-galactic travel would be encouraged—instead of being inhibited, as it was at present because of Dendi fears of meeting a superior civilization. It would be a true democracy of species—a real biological republic—where creatures of adequate intelligence and cultural development would enjoy a control of their destinies at present experienced by the silicon-based Dendi alone.

To this end, the Troxxt—the only important race which had steadfastly refused the complete surrender of armaments demanded of all members of the Federation—had been implored by a minor member of the Protoplasmic League to rescue it from the devastation which the Dendi intended to visit upon it, as punishment for an unlawful exploratory excursion outside the boundaries of the galaxy.

Faced with the determination of the Troxxt to defend their cousins in organic chemistry, and the suddenly-aroused hostility of at least two-thirds of the interstellar peoples, the Dendi had summoned a rump meeting of the Galactic Council; declared a state of revolt in being; and proceeded to cement their disintegrating rule with the blasted life-forces of a hundred worlds. The Troxxt, hopelessly out-numbered and out-equipped, had been able to continue the struggle only because of the great ingenuity and selflessness of other members of the Protoplasmic League, who had risked extinction to supply them with newly-developed secret weapons.

Hadn’t we guessed the nature of the beast from the enormous precautions it had taken to prevent the exposure of any part of its body to the intensely-corrosive at m o s p h e r e of Earth? Surely the seamless, barely-translucent suits which our recent visitors had worn for every moment of their stay on our world should have made us suspect a body-chemistry developed from complex silicon compounds rather than those of carbon?

Humanity hung its collective head and admitted that the suspicion had never occurred to it.

Well, the Troxxt admitted generous­ly, we were extremely inexperienced and possibly a little too trusting. Put it down to that. Our naivety, however costly to them—our liberators—would not be allowed to deprive us of that complete citizenship which the Troxxt were claiming as the birthright of all.

But as for our leaders, our probably-corrupted, certainly irresponsible leaders…

THE FIRST executions of U.N. officials, heads of states and pre-Bengali interpreters as “Traitors to Protoplasm”—after some of the lengthiest and most nearly-perfectly-fair trials in the history of Earth—were held a week after G-J Day, the inspiring occasion on which—amidst gorgeous ceremonies—humanity was invited to join, first the Protoplasmic League and thence the New and Democratic Galactic Federation of All Species, All Races.

Nor was that all.

Whereas the Dendi had contemptuously shoved us to one side as they went about their business of making our planet safe for tyranny, and had—in all probability—built special devices which made the very touch of their weapons fatal for us, the Troxxt—with the sincere friendliness which had made their name a byword for democracy and decency wherever living creatures came together among the stars—our Second Liberators, as we lovingly called them, actually preferred to have us help them with the intensive, accelerating labor of planetary defense.

So men’s intestines dissolved under the invisible glare of the forces used to assemble the new, incredibly-complex weapons; men sickened and died, in scrabbling hordes, inside the mines which the Troxxt had declared were deeper than any we had dug hitherto; men’s bodies broke open and exploded in the undersea oil-drilling sites which the Troxxt had declared were essential.

Children’s schooldays were requested, too, in such collecting drives as “Platinum Scrap for Procyon” and “Radioactive Debris for Deneb.” Housewives also were implored to save on salt whenever possible—this sub­stance being useful to the Troxxt in literally dozens of incomprehensible ways—and colorful posters reminded: “Don’t salinate—sugarfy!”

And over all—courteously caring for us like an intelligent parent—were our mentors, taking their giant super­visory strides on metallic crutches, while their pale little bodies lay curled in the hammocks that swung from each paired length of shining leg.

Truly, even in the midst of a com­plete economic paralysis caused by the concentration of all major productive facilities on other-worldly armaments and despite the anguished cries of those suffering from peculiar indus­trial injuries which our medical men were totally unequipped to handle, in the midst of all this mind-wracking disorganization, it was yet very exhilarating to realize that we had taken our lawful place in the future government of the galaxy and were even now helping to make the Universe Safe for Democracy.

BUT THE Dendi returned to smash this idyll. They came in their huge, silvery space-ships and the Troxxt, barely warned in time, just managed to rally under the blow and fight back in kind. Even so, the Troxxt ship in the Ukraine was almost immediately forced to flee to its base in the depths of space. After three days, the only Troxxt on Earth were the devoted members of a little band guarding the ship in Australia. They proved, in three or more months, to be as difficult to remove from the face of our planet as the continent itself; and since there was now a state of close and hostile siege, with the Dendi on one side of the globe, and the Troxxt on the other, the battle assumed frightful proportions.

Seas boiled; whole steppes burned away; the climate itself shifted and changed under the grueling pressure of the cataclysm. By the time the Dendi solved the problem, the planet Venus had been blasted from the skies in the course of a complicated battle-maneuver, and Earth had wobbled over as orbital substitute.

The solution was simple: since the Troxxt were too firmly-based on the small continent to be driven away; the numerically-superior Dendi brought up enough fire-power to disintegrate all of Australia into an ash that muddied the Pacific. This occurred on the twenty-fourth of June, the Holy Day of First Reliberation.

A day of reckoning for what re­mained of the human race, however.

How could we have been so naive, the Dendi wanted to know, as to be taken in by the chauvinistic pro-proto­plasm propaganda?

Surely, if physi­cal characteristics were to be the cri­teria of our racial empathy, we would not orient ourselves on a narrow chem­ical basis! The Dendi life-plasma was based on silicon instead of carbon, true, but did not vertebrates—appendaged vertebrates, at that, such as we and the Dendi—have infinitely more in common, in spite of a minor biochemical difference or two, than vertebrates and legless, armless, slime-crawling creatures who happened, quite accidentally, to possess an identical organic substance?

As for this fantastic picture of life in the galaxy… Well! The Dendi shrugged their quintuple shoulders as they went about the intricate business of erecting their noisy weapons all ever the rubble of our planet. Had we ever seen a representative of these protoplasmic races the Troxxt were supposedly protecting? No, nor would we. For as soon as a race—animal, vege­table or mineral—developed enough to constitute even a potential danger to the sinuous aggressors, its civiliza­tion was systematically dismantled by the watchful Troxxt. We were in so primitive a state that they had not considered it at all risky to allow us the outward seeming of full participation.

Could we say we had learned a sin­gle useful piece of information about Troxxt technology—for all of the work we had done on their machines, for all of the lives we had lost in the process? No, of course not! We had merely contributed our mite to the en­slavement of far-off races who had done us no harm.

There was much that we had cause to feel guilty about, the Dendi told us gravely—once the few surviving interpreters of the pre-Bengali dialect had crawled out of hiding. But our collective onus was as nothing compared to that borne by “vermicular collaborationists”—those traitors who had supplanted our martyred former leaders. And then there were the unspeakable individual humans who had had linguistic traffic with creatures destroying a two-million-year-old galactic peace!

Why, killing was almost too good for them, the Dendi murmured as they killed them.

WHEN THE Troxxt ripped their way back into possession of Earth some eighteen months later, bringing us the sweet fruits of the Second Reliberation—as well as a complete and most convincing rebuttal of the Dendi—there were few humans found who were to accept with any real enthusiasm the responsibilities of newly-opened and highly-paid positions in language, science and government.

Of course, since the Troxxt, in or­der to reliberate Earth, had found it necessary to blast a tremendous chunk out of the northern hemisphere, there were very few humans to be found. in the first place…

Even so, many of these committed suicide rather than assume the title of Secretary-General of the United Na­tions when the Dendi came back for the glorious Re-Reliberation, a short time after that. This was the libera­tion, by the way, which swept the deep collar of matter off our planet, and gave it what our forefathers came to call a pear-shaped look.

Possibly it was at this time—pos­sibly a liberation or so later—that the Troxxt and the Dendi discovered the Earth had become far too eccentric in its orbit to possess the minimum safety conditions demanded of a Combat Zone. The battle, therefore, zig-zagged coruscatingly and murderously away in the direction of Aldebaran.

That was nine generations ago, but the tale that has been handed down from parent to child, to child’s child, has lost little in the telling. You hear it now from me almost exactly as I heard it. From my father I heard it as I ran with him from water-puddle to distant water-puddle, across the sear­ing heat of yellow sand. From my mother I heard it as we sucked air and frantically grabbed at clusters of thick green weed, whenever the plan­et beneath us quivered in omen of a geological spasm that might bury us in its burned-out body, or a cosmic gyration that threatened to fling us into empty space.

Yes, even as we do now did we do then, telling the same tale, running the same frantic race across miles of unendurable heat for food and water; fighting the same savage battles with the giant rabbits for each other’s carrion—and always, ever and always, sucking desperately at the precious air. which leaves our world in greater quantities with every mad twist of its orbit.
Naked, hungry and thirsty came we into the world, and naked, hungry and thirsty do we scamper our lives out upon it, under the huge and never-changing sun.

The same tale it is, and the same traditional ending it has as that I had from my father and his father before him. Suck air, grab clusters and hear the last holy observation of our history:
“Looking about us, we can say with pardonable pride that we have been about as thoroughly liberated as it is possible for a race and a planet to be!”

The End

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American expat impressions on China – 1

I have been trying to tell people that China is not what they think it is. I have been trying to explain that the American government propaganda machine is large, dangerous and paints a seriously distorted view of the rest of the world. And… well, it falls on deaf ears. So, here instead, is the impressions of a person visiting China for the first time in over a decade. His impressions are pristine, real, and worth the read. Check it out.

This is from the article “Intelligent Design: Two Weeks in Chengdu and Environs” by Fred Reed written on November 12, 2018. All credit to the author.

Intelligent Design: Two Weeks in Chengdu and Environs

Chengdu is a Tier #2 city within China. It is not as modern as other Chinese cities, being in the "heartland".
Chengdu is a Tier #2 city within China. It is not as modern as other Chinese cities, being in the “heartland”.

Vi and I have just returned from Chengdu, a Chinese village of seventeen million and the gateway to Tibet. Since China is of some interest to the US these days, I thought a description of sorts, actually more in the nature of a disordered travelogue, might be of interest. I hadn’t been to the country for twelve years and, before that, not since living in Taiwan in the mid-Seventies.

Each time, the changes were astonishing.

Herewith some notes:

A caveat: we never got more than three hundred miles from the city and do not pretend to describe the country beyond what we saw.

Despite Trump’s trade war we had no problems in getting visas in Guadalajara or getting through customs in Chengdu. Nobody showed us the slightest hostility.

Chengdu parkway.
Chengdu parkway.

Although China is assuredly a dictatorship and vigorously represses dissent, we saw virtually no police.

A friend who lived in Chengdu for several years until recently asserts that there is close to zero street crime. (White collar crime is a very different matter, he said, and seems built into Chinese culture. There are books on this.)

China is often described as a developing country.

Well, sort of.

Chengdu is decidedly of the First World, modern, muscular, appearing to have been recently built because it was.

The downtown is beautiful, at least as cities go, and livable. In many hours of walking aimlessly we encountered everything from elegant high-end stores selling upscale Western bands to noodle shops.

It is not a poor city.

The downtown is beautiful, at least as  cities go,  and livable.
The downtown is beautiful, at least as cities go, and livable.

A considerable number of people wear worn clothes and clearly are not overly prosperous, but nobody looked hungry and most appeared middle class.

We saw no beggars or homeless people of the sort common in the US. Whether this is because there aren’t any, or because the government doesn’t allow them on the streets, I do not know.

For anyone who knows what China was before Deng Xiaoping took over in 1978, after Mao made his greatest contribution to his country…

… he died…

… the growth of prosperity astounds.

Many criticisms may be made of the Chinese government, some of them valid, but no other government has lifted so many people out of poverty so fast.

Downtown tower in the enormous downtown city center.
Downtown tower in the enormous downtown city center.

When I lived in Taiwan, I wondered why the Chinese, especially the mainlanders, were so backward. They seemed to have been so almost forever, certainly since well before Legation days. At the time Taiwan had a Five Year Plan for development, but so did all sorts of dirtball counties, mostly consisting of a patch of jungle, a colonel, and a torture chamber.

I noted, though, if the reader will forgive me a digression: Taiwan was actually meeting its Plan. In the Third World of the time, this was a novel idea. The Jin Shan reactors were going in, the new port, the steel mill, the highway. I interviewed the head of the nuclear program for the Far Eastern Economic Review–Harvard guy. Other officials were from MIT.

Idi Amin they were not.

Young and dumb as I was…

…the two being barely distinguishable…

…I thought Hong Kong looked like Manhattan with slanted eyes, hardball financial turf, and I knew Taiwanese students in America were excelling in science courses.

I concluded that Mousy Dung was the greatest American patriot who ever lived since, if he ever stopped holding these people back, what has happened might.

But back to Chengdu.

Chengdu Apartment buildings.
Chengdu Apartment buildings.

A perfectly stunning number of clusters of apartment buildings like these swarm on the horizon. The only round–eye I met who lived in one said that her apartment was quite nice.

The first thing we noticed in the city was the enormous scale of everything. Buildings downtown were huge. The elevated highways everywhere were huge. The numbers of people were huge. There were literally hundreds of hugely tall apartment buildings. The principle seemed to be that if you have too many people to spread them out, stack them up. Said a Chinese guide we hired, they weren’t there twenty years ago.

Chengdu skyline.
Chengdu skyline.

Conspicuous to both Violeta and me was evidence of Intelligent Design.

Chengdu clearly did not evolve randomly as cities do in the West. Somebody thought about things beforehand.

The overhead highways kept heavy traffic flowing.

Very wide sidewalks downtown made pedestrianism pleasant. The subway was nothing special but well designed to be easy to use even if you don’t know how. (Well, it does have sliding glass doors to keep you away from the tracks until the train comes. This way, you can’t throw things onto the tracks, such as your mother-in-law.)

Chengdu nature integrated apartments.
Chengdu nature integrated apartments.

A characteristic of the Chinese is that there are lots of them.

In a country that thinks it is communist, or pretends it is to save face in case you notice that it isn’t, you might expect horrible architecture. You know, like the awful Stalin Gothic of Moscow.

Or Franco’s mausoleum that looks to have been designed by someone channeling Albert Speer.

Actually no.

(Except maybe sorta for the huge apartment buildings,  mentioned above, that cluster together in sometimes groups of twelve  that could hold the population of Guatemala).

Thing is, the Chinese have a well-developed aesthetic sense, at least in the visual realm (not so hot musically, and Beijing opera is a crime against humanity).

Somebody, which means the government, said that considerable green space would be left, and it was.

Plants are everywhere. It's a green revolution that began two decades ago.
Plants are everywhere. It’s a green revolution that began two decades ago.

Planters with (unsurprisingly) plants in them are everywhere, and patches of what look like manicured forest. The result is curious. You can sit in cool shady woods a few yards from an enormous overhead highway.

Like most Chinese cities, except the Westernized cities, plants are everywhere. Not only planted, but maintained by an army of caretakers.
Like most Chinese cities, except the Westernized cities, plants are everywhere. Not only planted, but maintained by an army of caretakers.

Communism, which China once had, pretty much forbids religion, so I wondered what we would find in the faith line.

Buddhists.

We visited Buddhist temples, meticulously maintained, with worshipers, mostly women, obviously worshiping.

How was this, I asked my round-eyed friend.

Well, he said, Christianity was strongly disapproved as being Western, but the government was nervous about public reaction to a crackdown on Buddhism. So they decided that Buddhism wasn’t a religion, see, but Chinese culture, and thus OK.

I don’t know whether this is true, but thought it a nicely practical waffle.

Living in an apartment within the Chengdu city.
Living in an apartment within the Chengdu city.

Huge.

Here we go again. Chengdu has what it says is the world’s largest building, 1.5 million square meters.

This is the Global Center.

It is the damndest thing I have ever seen, maybe.

The Chengdu Global Center.
The Chengdu Global Center.

I suspect it was built to overcome an international short-man’s complex.

I bet it did, too.

It was like going into the VAB at Canaveral, unlimited space, with hotels, stores, offices, wide open space. But–the aesthetic thing again–it was wonderfully colorful and just–“gorgeous” comes to mind.

It was not designed by corporate in New Jersey.

Inside of the Chengdu Global Center. There is more than just a mall here. There is a complete Disney-land style park, and water park, and amusement park as well.
Inside of the Chengdu Global Center. There is more than just a mall here. There is a complete Disney-land style park, and water park, and amusement park as well.

To prove that China has reached American levels of mild lunacy: we passed an Alienware store–high-end gaming computers–with a crowd of Chinese looking at a screen on which, somewhere, a video game was being played. The announcer sounded as excited as a Latin American covering a hotly contested soccer match:

“Womenhau…
wangjile!..wangjile!
mijyou!MIJYOU!
woshrhenhau!..YANGGWEIDZE….”  

in a rising shriek. 

I couldn’t understand a word of it, but the involvement reminded me of when Mexico beat Germany in the World Cup.

More traditional, in the suburbs. Good food, nice people. Shamelessly showing off, I dredged up the decaying corpse of my ancient Mandarin, “Ching ni, geiwo liang ping pijyou, hau bu hou.”

Ordering beer is the main purpose of any language.

Conclusion

Check out the site at the link above. Give them some visitor hits, ok? Great stuff, don’t ya all think?

I went to Chengdu back in 2013, and yeah. That’s what it’s like. Pretty much. But for me, I have become accustomed to all this stuff, and like most Chinese, I don’t really think too much about it.

But, to someone who hasn’t a clue as to what a “working-class” City in China looks like, it’s pretty much a surprise. Most Americans get the picture of Detroit, or Baltimore, or a Kerr-McGee plant in Trona, California.

Home for sale in Trona.
Home for sale in Trona.

You see, while America was squandering trillions of dollars blowing up mud huts, and shooting goat herders with ultra-expensive weapons systems, the rest of the world was spending the money on domestic needs. China has taken that money and invested it in people, families, culture and society.

And you can see the result.

Sure beats a smouldering hole in the desert floor!

All you need to do is turn of the American propaganda box, and get an airline ticket and visit for yourself. Use your own two eyes. Check it all out, and come to your own conclusions.

Fred has other posts on his impressions. I will include them in this series.


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The Politically Correct rewrite of the English language, and Combative Solutions

One thing that I have noticed over the last decade was that the auto-correct in MS Word, and the various on-line options are configured for people with an IQ of a snail. Words that I learned in seventh grade are often either no longer available on the internet dictionaries, or are replaced with politically correct versions. This is frustrating (maybe even angering) as each word has it’s own intrinsic value and the words currently available are sadly too generic for use.

I would want to use the word “niggardly” and MSWord would auto-correct it to “miserly”. I would type “policeman”, and the software would instantly (in the blink of an eye) correct it to “policeperson”. I would use pronouns that defined gender, like in the sentence “He ate icecream.” only to find it changed to “It ate icecream.”. (I always get the image of this big green blog from the movie “Ghostbusters” eating some icecream.)

It was so frustrating.

Here we discuss the joys and perils of using the English language alongside with software that originates out of the politically-correct bastions of California.

An odynometer
Here is a fine torture device that is displayed in the movie “A princess Bride”. It, of course, utilizes an odynometer to measure pain. You can plainly see it next to the man in red.

Here, are some online resources that I use. They are pretty decent. I only wish that the words provided in them would be added to the more ubiquitous entries as presently available on the on-line dictionary options.

Oubliette
Here is another big word from the movie world of the 1980’s. This movie is “Labyrinth”. Do you know what an oubliette is? It’s a hole in the basement of a dungeon, often covered and barred. It’s a place where you put people that you want to forget about. Yikes!

Some Options

Here are some options that I use for more juicy and plump words that might best fit my given needs at any moment in time…

I fear that the United States is turning into a ochlochracy with the actions of the antifa-influenced Democrats.

I thoroughly enjoyed her callipygian as she moved. My eyes engaged in rapid oculoplania beyond my control.

Some useful words to use on Trolls

(This is from the House of Logorrhea.) This small set of 21 obscure words consists of nouns used to define minor, inferior, or petty members of various professions.

The words end with ‘-aster’, a Latin pejorative suffix indicating incomplete resemblance or lesser status.

These words are little used today, but in another age were devices of scorn used by the intelligentsia to deride their lesser fellows. With a little creativity, practically any name for a profession can be altered in this way, should you find a desirable object for your contempt.

Word Definition
astrologaster a foolish or petty astrologer
criticaster inferior or petty critic
grammaticaster a piddling grammarian
hereticaster a petty or contemptible heretic
latinitaster a petty scholar of Latin
logicaster a petty logician
mathematicaster minor or inferior mathematician
medicaster quack; charlatan
militaster soldier without skill or ability
musicaster a mediocre musician
opiniaster one who obstinately holds to an opinion
parasitaster a mean or sorry parasite
philologaster petty or contemptible philologist
philosophaster amateur or superficial philosopher
poetaster petty poet; writer of contemptible verses
politicaster petty politician
rhetoricaster petty rhetorician
scientaster petty scientist
theologaster petty or shallow theologian
usageaster self-appointed conservative language usage expert
witticaster a petty or inferior wit

Some useful Obscure words just perfect for insults…

There are numerous websites that cover all sorts of interesting words. Rather than compile my very-own-list, I offer the websites for the enjoyment of the reader.

Some fun words to try to use…

Here are some fine words that might be worthy of including in a comment section or two. All credit to Neatorama.

BESCUMBER (v)

Definition: To spray with poo.

Analysis: Actually bescumber is just one of many words in the English language that basically mean “to spray with poo”. These are: BEDUNG, BERAY, IMMERD, SHARNY, and the good ol’ SHITTEN. In special cases, you can use BEMUTE (specifically means to drop poo on someone from great height), SHARD-BORN (born in dung), and FIMICOLOUS (living and growing on crap).

Dog poop Meme
Dog poop everywhere. This sentence could be written as…”The area was all bescumber rendering it unwalkable.”.

Alternative: If that is too vulgar, you can use BEVOMIT and BEPISS, which meanings should be obvious to you, as well as BESPAWL (to spit on).

Oh, and if you want to say poo without looking like you’re saying it, you can use ORDURE, DEJECTION, and EXCRETA. To mean something more specific, you can use MECONIUM (first feces of a newborn child), MELAENA or MELENA (the abnormally tarry feces containing blood from gastrointestinal bleeding), LIENTERY (diarrhea with undigested or partially digested food), and STEATORRHEA (fatty stool that’s hard to flush down).

MICROPHALLUS (n)

Definition: An unusually small penis.

Analysis: Self explanatory.

Alternative: Insulting a man’s private part is a very reliable way to put him down (if he’s smaller than you) or to get beat up (if he’s larger than you). Usually, even a dimwit can decipher the meaning of this word, after all, it’s just a combination of “micro” and “phallus”.

small penis.
Scene from the movie Bedazzled, where this huge player, with his huge score, and huge abilities is granted a microphallus.

So, to insult a physically larger opponent, we recommend you use these words instead: PHALLOCRYPSIS (retraction or shrinkage of the penis), CRYPTORCHID (undescendend testicles), and PHALLONCUS (tumor of the penis).

COCCYDYNIA (n)

Definition: Pain in the butt.

Analysis: It’s a real medical term: coccydynia is pain in the coccyx or tailbone. Most people simply call it “buttache.”

Similar: PROCTALGIA, PROCTODYNIA, PYGALGIA and RECTALGIA all mean pain in the butt.

Alternative: CERVICALGIA (pain in the neck), PHALLODYNIA or PHALLALGIA (both mean pain in the penis), and PUDENDAGRA (pain in the genitals).

Butthurt meme. Yikes! Poor gal.
Butthurt meme. Yikes! Poor gal with coccydynia .

The word “butt” is highly versatile in its vernacular use – you can say “butt face” or “hairy butt” – them are fightin’ words – but it’s much better to use these instead: ANKYLOPROCTIA (stricture of the anus, the state of “tight-assity”), STEATOPYGOUS (fat-assed), DASYPYGAL (having hairy buttocks), and CACOPYGIAN (having ugly buttocks).

BUNCOMBE (n)

Definition: A ludicrously false statement. Basically it means bullshit or nonsense.

Analysis: Actually, you probably already know this word by its more common spelling: bunkum.

Obama was full of buncombe.
Obama was full of buncombe.

The origin of this word is fascinating.

In 1819, a North Carolina congressman, the Honorable Felix Walker, was giving a rambling speech with little relevance to the current debate. He refused to yield the floor, and claimed that he wasn’t speaking for Congress but instead “for Buncombe” (a county in North Carolina he represented).

That’s all it took.

Buncombe, North Carolina.
Buncombe, North Carolina.
  • Over time, the spelling changed to “bunkum,” and the meaning strangely changed to be “excellent.”
  • Then it changed back in 1870, when a San Francisco gambler introduced a new game “banco“.
  • But it was played with dice that were later found out to be loaded.
  • Sure enough, BUNCO became known to mean swindle or cheat, and bunkum reverted back to its original meaning. (Source)

The word DEBUNK came directly from this: it’s just bunk(um) with the prefix de- (meaning to remove).

Smellfungus (n)

Definition – an excessively faultfinding person

It is not often that we know who created a particular word, despite the claims that are made about such-and-such writer inventing this-or-that word; such claims are usually false. In the case of smellfungus, however, we not only know who coined the word (Laurence Sterne), we also know who it is supposed to represent (Tobias Smollett).

Soup Nazi, from the television show "Seinfeld". "No Soup for You!"
Soup Nazi, from the television show “Seinfeld”. “No Soup for You!”

Stern created a hypocritical character named Smelfungus in his 1768 book A Sentimental Journey through France, a satire on Smollett, whose Travels through France and Italy had been published two years earlier.

About MS Word

Up until 2017, the spell-checking service on Microsoft Word was horrible. The checker was maddeningly auto-correcting everything to a politically correct narrative. if you typed in the sentence;

The postman wished the housewife a “Merry Christmas”!

It was auto-corrected to this butchered-up sentence;

The postalperson wished the housepartner a “Happy Holiday”!

I do not know what happened.

Clippy the demon from Hell.

Then suddenly it all ended. It reverted back to normal-speak.

I suspect that someone in Microsoft saw the light and changed the dictionary conventions to a more historically and conventionally accurate setting. It happened sometime in 2017.

I attribute it to the “Trump effect”.

I wonder if I am the only person who noticed this. For, I most certainly haven’t seen any news article or reports on this phenomenon.

It certainly wouldn’t be in the “news”. News stopped reporting a couple of decades ago. Now they just fabricate political events to manipulate the populace. Ah, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Conclusions

This was just a quick and fun post describing my frustration with some elements of the “modern” internet and software programs. Part of it is that wordpress has a crappyassed spell-checker, and part of it was year of frustration (approximately from 2009 to 2017) where the PC police invaded my laptop and took over my MS Word software.


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Life & Happiness

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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The sad story of Suntan Suzy.

From the annals of “lost and forgotten toys” we have the sad tale of Suntan Suzy. This little doll can tell us a lot about ourselves and our society. Because we need to ask ourselves what went wrong? How did this come to pass, and what reflection does this have on our culture?

Obviously someone, at sometime, gave the “go ahead” to design, and develop this doll. They did so, made a large batch of these playthings and then nothing happened. Some sold, but the bulk collected dust and then were discarded into the vast garbage dumps of the 1960’s.

Suntan Suzy Doll

Suntan Suzy was a doll that would develop a tan if you put her in the sunlight. Back in the shade, her tan would fade. She came on the market in 1962, but lasted for only one season. As far as I can tell, she was the only doll that has ever had the ability to tan.

Advertisement for Suntan Suzy.
Advertisement for Suntan Suzy. From the Arizona Republic – Nov 23, 1962.

The secret of Suntan Suzy…

The chemistry responsible for producing the tanning effect is described in Patent No. 2,921,407 (Jan 19, 1960) – “Simulating Sunburning Toy Dolls and Figurines”: 0.5 gram of mercuric bis-dithizonate having the following structural formula was dissolved in 1000 grams of dioctyl phthalate.

The Suntan Suzy secret.
The Suntan Suzy secret.

1550 grams of a high molecular weight polyvinyl chloride polymer, in powdered form, were dispersed in this solution by stirring for ten to fifteen minutes. The latter material was specifically Bakelite Company QYNV polymer. Thus a plastisol formulation containing the phototropic dye dissolved in the liquid dioctyl phthalate (plasticizer phase) was obtained. About 120 grams of this plastisol formulation were then poured into a two piece steel mold, this having its inner surface previously coated with a silicone oil release film. This was then placed in an oven at 140 degrees centigrade and held at this temperature for eight minutes to allow solution of the polyvinyl chloride polymer phase. The mold and contents were then removed from the oven, cooled to room temperature, and the now solid form of the doll figure removed.

An amazing girl…

The Suntan Suzy doll within the original packaging.
The Suntan Suzy doll within the original packaging. The image source: worthpoint

The figure thus produced was transparent and red in color. Upon exposure to sunlight a progressive darkening to a brown, then blue-black color occurred during a period of about three to four minutes, simulating a “sunburning” effect.

When the doll was shielded from the sun a return to the original color took place, being visually complete after a period of eight to ten minutes. This action was repeatable with no detectable change in functional characteristics being noted after several dozen cycles.

Fully boxed up Suntan Suzy.
Fully boxed up Suntan Suzy.

It seems like an interesting gimmick for a doll. Curious it never caught on.

Society

Perhaps it wasn’t marketed properly, or perhaps it did not fit the profile of girl doll play. Most of the girls that I grew up with didn’t take their dolls with them to the beach. Instead, the preferred to paly with them indoors, within the comfortable confines of the house.

This little post is one of those “hum…” style posts, and will soon be forgotten. Much like a comma is in the book “War and Peace”.


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Life & Happiness

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Why most Americans live worse than Medieval serfs toiling for a king.

The word medieval is often treated as synonymous with filth, lawlessness  and brutality. In particular the recent actions of ISIS and their  treatment of prisoners have been called 'medieval’ by journalists,  commentators and bloggers alike. But why do we do this, and is it fair? 

-History Today

While many of us are grateful for the 40-hour work week, Medieval peasants worked far less than even that.

When professor Juliet Schor released her book, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, the average American was shocked. According to her research, they were working more days and taking fewer vacation days than a medieval peasant.

Americans are working harder, and being rewarded less, than a Medieval serf.

Now, her scholarly presentation was correct. American life has migrated far, far away from what it was like during Medieval times. There are good and bad things about this. But we need to put things into perspective. Because most Americans have a very warped idea of what life was like in the past.

American Misconceptions…

Americans mistakenly believe that Medieval life was far, far different than the lives we live today. I counter the opposite. Aside from technology and medicine, socially and economically, we are identical.

Let’s get rid of some misconceptions…

Typical Misconception 1. Peasants were a single class of people who were more or less equal to one another.

It's easy to think that people in the Middle Ages were easily divided  into very broad classes: royals, nobles, knights, clergy, and toiling  peasants at the very bottom. But just because you didn't have "king,"  "lord," "sir," "father," or "brother" (or their female analogs) in front  of your name doesn't mean you weren't concerned with your own social  standing. There are vast classes of people whom, today, we might  generally refer to as "peasants," but there were actually various  classes of people within that broad category.
   
Mortimer points out that, in 14th-century England, for example, you  have your villeins, people bonded to a particular lord's land. Villeins  were not considered free folk, and they could be sold with the lord's  land. And free folk were of a variety of social and economic classes. A  freeholder, for example, might become successful enough to rent a lord's  manor, essentially acting as a lord himself. And, in a village, a few  families might hold the majority of the political power, supplying most  of the local officers. We may tend to think of these people as  "peasants," but they had much more complicated ways of thinking of  themselves, with all the class anxiety that goes with that. 

Much like today. American society is stratified. America hardly has a middle class. Most of the wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few elite. The rest of us fight against each other for the “table scraps” thrown to the side by “trickle down economics”.

Misconception 2. Inns were public houses with big common halls below and rooms above.
   
There are few images as firmly rooted in pseudo-Medieval fantasy as  the tavern inn. You and your party enjoy a few flagons of ale in the  main room, hear all the local gossip, then go up to your private rented  chamber where you'd sleep (alone or with a lover) on a lumpy mattress.
   
That image isn't wholly fiction, but the truth is a bit more  complicated — not to mention interesting. In Medieval England, if you  combined a city inn with an alehouse, you'd probably get something  resembling that fantasy inn. There were inns where you could rent a bed  (or, more likely, a space in a bed), and these inns did have halls for  eating and drinking. But these were not public houses; innkeepers were  generally permitted to serve food and drink only to their guests. And,  Mortimer points out, you would likely find a single room with several  beds, beds that could fit up to three people. It was only in the most  upscale inns that you'd find chambers with just one or two beds.
   
There were establishments for drinking in these cities as well:  taverns for wine and alehouses for ale. Of the two, alehouses were the  rowdier establishments, more likely to function as your Medieval Mos  Eisley. But ale and cider were often made at home as well; a husband  might expect his wife to be skilled in brewing. The Gieses note in Life in a Medieval Village  that a tavern in an English village was often someone's home. Once your  neighbor opened up a fresh batch of ale, you might go to their house,  pay a few pennies, and sit and drink with your fellow villagers.
   
There are other options for accommodations as well. Travelers could  expect the hospitality of people of equal or lesser social class,  enjoying their food and beds in exchange for tales from the road and a  tip. (Mortimer says that, if you were lucky enough to stay with a  14-century merchant, the digs were much nicer than any inn.) Or you  might go to a hospital, which was not just for healing, but also for  hospitality. 

Like America today, there are all sorts of accommodation. Is the modern housing APPs any different from the medieval arrangement? It’s just a modern equivalent.

Misconception 3. You would never see a woman engaged in a trade such as armorer or merchant.
   
Certainly, some fantasy stories will cast women in equal (or  relatively equal) positions to men, carrying out the same sorts of  trades that men might carry out. But in many fictional stories, a woman  who makes armor or sells good would seem out of place — although this  does not universally reflect Medieval reality. In England, a widow could  take up the trade of her dead husband — and Mortimer specifically cites  tailor, armorer, and merchant as trades open to widows. Some female  merchants were actually quite successful, managing international trading  ventures with impressive capital.
  
Women engaged in criminal activity as well, including banditry. Many  criminal gangs in Medieval England consisted of families, including  wives with their husbands and sisters with their brothers.

Men and women shared and swapped roles in the past, much we do today. There is nothing new or progressive about that.

Misconception 4. People had horrible table manners, throwing bones and scraps on the floor.
   
Sorry, even in the Middle Ages, members of polite society, from kings  to villeins, followed certain etiquette, and that etiquette involved  good table manners. In fact, depending on when and where and with whom  you were eating, you might have to follow very strict procedures for  eating and drinking. Here's a tip: If a lord passes you his cup at the  dinner table, it's a sign of his favor. Accept it, backwash and all, and  pass it back to him after you've had a sip. 

Manners are part of the human condition. While they might vary from society to society, manners follow us everywhere.

Misconception 5. People distrusted all forms of magic and witches were frequently burned. 
   
In some fantasy stories, magic is readily accepted by everyone as a  fact of life. In others, magic is treated with suspicion at best or as  blasphemy at worst. You might even hear the Biblical edict, "Thou shalt  not suffer a witch to live."
  
But not  all claims of magic in the Middle Ages were treated as heresy. In her  essay "Witches and the Myth of the Medieval 'Burning Time,'" from Misconceptions About the Middle Ages,  Anita Obermeier tells us that during the 10th century, the Catholic  Church wasn't interested in trying witches for heresy; it was more  interested in eradicating heretical superstitions about "night-flying  creatures."
   
And in 14th-century  England, you might consult a magician or a witch for some minor  "magical" task, such as finding a lost object. In Medieval England, at  least, magic without any heretical components was tolerated. Eventually,  the late 15th century would give rise to the Spanish Inquisition, and  we do see witches hunted down.
  
Witch  burnings weren't unheard of in the Middle Ages, but they weren't common,  either. Obermeier explains that, in the 11th century, sorcery was  treated as a secular crime, but the church would issue several  reprimands before it would resort to burning. She puts the first burning  for heresy at 1022 in Orleans and the second at 1028 in Monforte. It's  rare in the 11th and 12th centuries, but becomes a more common  punishment in the 13th century for relapsed heretics. However, it  depends where you are. In the 14th century, you probably won't be burned  as a witch in England, but you may very well get the stake in Ireland. 

Much like today. You might have trouble finding a practitioner of the Black Arts in the Southern American states, but you won’t have problems in New Orleans. Or Los Angles. Or Detroit. Or New York. Or Baltimore.

Misconception 6. Men's clothing was always practical and functional. 

Yes, Medieval people of various classes  were interested in fashion, and sometimes fashion — particularly men's  fashion — got pretty absurd. Early clothing is more functional, but  during the 14th century, men's fashions in England were both  body-bearing and rather experimental. Corsets and garters were common  for men, and increasingly, popular fashions encouraged men to show off  the shape of their hips and legs. Some aristocratic men wore gowns with  sleeves so long they were in danger of tripping on the cuffs. It became  fashionable to wear shoes with extraordinarily long toes — one such  shoe, imported from Bohemia, had twenty-inch toes that needed to be tied  to a man's garters. There was even a fad of wearing one's mantle so  that the head went through the arm hole rather than the head hole, with  the sleeves functioning as a voluminous collar.
  
It's also important to note that fashions would trickle down from  royalty, through the aristocracy, and down to the common folk. In the  seasons after a fashion appeared among the nobility, a less expensive  version would appear among those of lesser stations. In fact, sumptuary  laws were passed in London to prevent people from dressing above their  stations. For example, a common woman in 1330s London was not permitted  to line her hood with anything but lambskin or rabbit fur, or risk  losing her hood. 

Much like today. The fashions might change, but the importance of having them is a time honored standard.

Misconception 7. Servants were all low-class people.
   
Actually, if you were a high-ranking individual, chances are that you  had high-ranking servants. A lord might send his son to serve in another  lord's manor — perhaps that of his wife's brother. The son would  receive no income, but would still be treated as the son of a lord. A  lord's steward might actually be a lord himself. Your status in society  isn't just based on whether or not you were a servant, but also your  familial status, whom you served, and what your particular job was.
   
Something you might not expect about servants in English households in  the late Middle Ages: they were overwhelmingly male. Mortimer points to  the earl of Devon's household, which had 135 members, but only three  women. With the exception of a washerwoman (who didn't live in the  household), the staffers were all men, even in households headed by  women. 

Most Americans today fall in the below-middle class; the serf and slave classes. We do not have servants.

However, the wealthy do. If you were to poll the wealthy Democrat politicians in America today, you would discover that their contemporaneous servants would indeed fit the Medieval model.

Misconception 8. Medicine was based on pure superstition.
  
Admittedly, if you're looking outside of Game of Thrones,  a lot of healing in fantasy novels is just plain magical. You've got  your cleric class who gets their healing from the gods, and otherwise  you might have someone on hand who can dress a wound or make a poultice.
  
And yes, a lot  of Medieval medicine was based on what we would consider today mystical  bunk. A great deal of diagnosis involved astrology and humoral theory.  Blood letting was a respected method of treatment, and many of the  curatives were not only useless — they were downright dangerous. And  while there were medical colleges, extraordinarily few physicians were  able to attend.
  
Still, some aspects  of Medieval medicine were logical even by modern standards. Wrapping  smallpox in scarlet cloth, treating gout with colchicum, using camomile  oil for an earache — these were all effective treatments. And while the  notion of a barber-surgeon is a horrifying one to many of us, some of  those surgeons were actually quite talented. John of Arderne employed  anesthetics in his practice, and many surgeons were skilled in couching  cataracts, sewing abscesses, and setting bones. 

Not so different from today. While American “big pharma” and high technology has saturated American culture, practitioners of chiropractic techniques, acupuncture, herbal medicine and Chinese traditional medicine abound.

Misconception 9. The most powerful military force consisted of armored knights riding into battle.
  
James G. Patterson, in his essay "The Myth of the Mounted Knight" from Misconceptions About the Middle Ages,  explains that while the image of the mounted knight might have been a  popular one during Medieval times, it didn't match the reality of  warfare. Armored cavalry, he explains, can be incredibly useful — even  devastating — against untrained revolutionaries, but they were far less  useful against a trained foreign infantry. Rather, ground forces,  including knights on foot who frequently served as officers, were  invaluable in battle. Even during the Crusades, when the image of the  mounted knight seemed synonymous with glory in battle, most the actual  battles involved sieges.
  
In the 14th  century, English warfare focused increasingly on archery. In fact,  Edward III prohibited football in 1331 and then again in 1363 in part  because people were spending too much time playing football and not  enough time practicing their archery. The English archers were able to  repel many a French cavalry force. 

Aside from technological differences, force mixtures, arrays and alignments remain the same.

Misconception 10. Only men's sexual pleasure was important.
   
A common belief during the Middle Ages was that women were more  lustful than men. A lot more lustful, in fact. Rape was a crime in 14th  century Medieval England, but not between spouses. A wife could not  legally refuse her husband's advances, but a husband could not refuse  his wife's advances either. The popular belief was that women were  always longing for sex, and that it was bad for their health not to have  intercourse regularly. A woman's orgasm was also important; another  common belief was that a woman could not conceive without an orgasm.  (Unfortunately, this also made rape impossible to prosecute if the  victim became pregnant; Medieval English scholars believed women's  bodies had a way of, in the modern parlance, shutting things down.)
   
So what was an unmarried woman to do? Well, if she couldn't find a  husband, the English physician John of Gaddesden recommended that she  find a midwife who could get the job done manually. 

Men and women both have sexual needs that must be met.

As I have stated, the point must be made clear that aside from differences in technology and culture, mankind has not really matured away from what it was one thousand years ago.

Americans, aside from technology advancements, live within the same kind of ruler – serf arrangement that existed during Medieval times.

Thus, subtracting those influences, we can compare life between the two times. We can compare lifestyle, leisure and freedom. However, when we take a look with these new eyes of ours, we become astounded.

Americans are working more days and taking fewer vacation days than a medieval peasant.

The numbers.

Unfortunately, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ latest available data only supports this notion. Indeed, the average annual hours worked by Americans in 2017 reached 1,780, whereas an adult male peasant in the United Kingdom worked an average of 1,620.

Let’s take a closer look at why we work 160 hours more than the average serf.

Productivity vs. Annual hours of work.
Productivity vs. Annual hours of work.

Because the need for agricultural labor in the Middle Ages was season-dependent, the average peasant had about eight weeks to half the year off.

Plus, the Church knew the opportunity to rest would keep workers happy and orderly, so they ordered frequent mandatory holidays.

Farm life painted by Norman Rockwell.
Farm life painted by Norman Rockwell.

The 70 to 80-hour work week for the average 19th-century laborer in the industrial revolution was actually a deviation from the ways of their medieval predecessors. Arguing for an eight-hour workday was not so much a push for the progressive, but a return to the ways of yore.

Indeed, medieval peasants enjoyed a less rigid workday.

Meals weren’t rushed and the afternoon might call for a nap.

“The tempo of life was slow, even leisurely; the pace of work relaxed,” said Schor. “Our ancestors may not have been rich, but they had an abundance of leisure.”

Feeding time on the farm.
Feeding time.

Work hours weren’t as rigid back then due to a variety of factors including season-dependent tasks.

A 16th-century Bishop wrote of the average workday of his time…

“The  labouring man will take his rest in the morning; a good piece of the day  is spent afore he come at his work; then he must have his breakfast…

At  noon he must have his sleeping time, 

then his bever in the afternoon,  which spendeth a great part of the day; 

and when his hour cometh at  night, at the first stroke of the clock he casteth down his tools,  leaveth his work, in what need or case soever the work standeth.” 

While we may be accustomed to images of medieval peasants toiling away from dawn until dusk and be convinced from this that we have it better than they ever did — a 13th-century laborer could have up to 25 weeks off per year.

For reference, the average American worker has 16 days of vacation per year.

Life was slower, the pace was slower. People were more content.
Life was slower, the pace was slower. People were more content.

“Consider a typical working day in the medieval period,” said Schor. “It stretched from dawn to dusk (sixteen hours in summer and eight in winter), but, as Bishop Pilkington has noted, work was intermittent…

… called to halt for breakfast, lunch, the customary afternoon nap, and dinner. Depending on time and place, there were also mid-morning and mid-afternoon refreshment breaks.”

A milk maid and her cows.
A milk maid and her cows.

Additionally, the medieval calendar was also one of many official Church-going holidays which were always considered mandatory. In total, leisure time in medieval England took up probably about one-third of the year.

The U.S. is the only advanced country with no national vacation policy.

Vacation days around the world by employee contract.
Vacation days around the world by employee contract.

But since the Reagan era, the security of long-term employment has steadily declined.

Our generation has become accustomed to hopping from job to job and adding a part-time gig on top as to combat the fears of a fluctuation economy. With a Great Recession ingrained in our psyche, vacations seem like a luxury.

The United States is the only first-world country without a national vacation policy, after all. Millions work on public holidays and don’t use their vacation days for fear of retribution. With a horrific lack of standardized, easily accessible healthcare — sick days and vacation days often blend together.

According to the World Economic Forum, the Greeks have the longest work week in the European Union (EU). Granted, they’ve struggled with a terrible economy in recent years which could explain the additional effort.

The simple life.
The simple life.

However, Germany is second to last in the EU when it comes to annual hours worked and has a generous work model in place. It is, nonetheless, an economic behemoth. An average German works 1,363 hours per year which goes to show that vacation days might actually improve a nation’s GDP.

The Peasant Wedding  by  Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1567 or 1568. The Medieval calendar set  aside vacations for saints’ days, weddings, church holidays, rest days,  and more.
The Peasant Wedding by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, 1567 or 1568. The Medieval calendar set aside vacations for saints’ days, weddings, church holidays, rest days, and more.

Indeed, according to the U.S. National Library of Medicine, which conducted a nine-year experiment, the frequency of annual vacations is directly “associated with a reduced risk of all-cause mortality” and concluded that “vacationing may be good for your health.”

Paid vacations and paid holidays in different nations.
Paid vacations and paid holidays in different nations.

Unfortunately, it seems as though the United States Congress is getting more vacation days than the average American citizen. According to Thought Co., its members make a base salary of $174,000 and work fewer than half of the days in a year — and this is perhaps not even to mention this years shut down.

Congressmen, and Senators in Washington DC live lavish lifestyles and lord over Americans like Kings over peasants.
Congressmen, and Senators in Washington DC live lavish lifestyles and lord over Americans like Kings over peasants.

Now…

You would think that any “red blooded” American man would say “take this job and shove it” to their employer for not giving them vacation and sick time, and having to wait a full one year to take it. But that never happens.

American’s don’t do that.

Because…

Most Americans Are Up To Their Eyeballs In Debt

In the United States, it has been common to pay via credit card for almost anything, but the use of credit cards hasn’t been as widely accepted in other places around the world.

A decade ago, you couldn’t pay for much in Germany with them, and the same is true of many European and Asian nations, though they are growing in popularity.

For Americans, credit and debt are simply a way of life.

A large part of American culture is capitalist consumer-driven markets, which means, Americans like to buy stuff, and they often do so via some form of credit. Why wait to buy a new computer when you can pay it off with some interest over the next five years?

Shepherdess watching over her flock.
Shepherdess watching over her flock.

The main reason it’s not a great idea has to do with an accumulation of debt.

Americans buy one thing, then another, and another, and before they know what they’ve done, they owe an average of $38,000 in debt, and the trend is showing an increase.

$38K is already a huge number for most people, but if you add it up, it shows just how deep the nation is in debt.

Americans cannot get the lifestyle they deserve because they are chained to dept, like indentured  serfs working on a plantation.
Americans cannot get the lifestyle they deserve because they are chained to dept, like indentured serfs working on a plantation.

When you take that average and factor in the population and demographic information, the nation as a whole owes $4,000,000,000,000 in all forms of consumer debt.

That number includes credit card debt, which has an average interest rate of 17.41%. The bottom line: Americans are drowning in debt, and the problem is worsening.

Americans cannot get the lifestyle they deserve because they are chained to dept, like indentured serfs working on a plantation.

Being indentured slaves is problematic. It creates a situation whereas you have a stratification of society.

  • Indentured slaves work for the ruling class.
  • Ruling class lives a life of ease and comfort.
  • If you do not fit into either of those two classes, you become homeless.

Thus, in America…

Homelessness And Wealth Distribution Is A Serious Problem

Homelessness is a problem all over the world, and while you can find it in developed nations like the UK and France, the United States has far more in contrast to other developed Western nations – with the exception of the other oligarchy; the UK.

Global homelessness.
Selected nations and their homelessness compared.

As of 2018, about 0.17% of the American population was living on the streets, and while that doesn’t seem like a lot, it amounts to more than 553,000 people.

The states with the most homeless people are California, New York, Florida, Washington, Oregon, and Texas; coincidentally, most of these states have higher amounts of population density, but they also have some of the wealthiest people in the country.

Homeless in the United States.
Homeless in the United States.

Homelessness is a serious problem, and fortunately, there are people and organizations working to help provide temporary and permanent housing to displaced Americans.

The most obvious question is if the United States is the wealthiest nation in the world, why are so many people homeless?

The complicated economics of the States doesn’t offer a simple answer, but there is an obvious disparity between the wealthiest people and the folks who have nothing.

Because the number of Americans who are insanely wealthy remains low, the top 1% of wealthy Americans hold 40% of the total national wealth.

America is stratified into the Ruler class (Kings) and serfs. Those that do not fit within those two classes are social outcasts and homeless.

Now, all of this high concentration of wealth into the hand of a few means that the rest of the people make do with less. Less money is available for repair. Less money is available for healthcare. Less money is available for maintenance, and less money is available for new things.

You can this how the money disappears when you witness the absence of proper resource allocation…

The United States Has A Crumbling Infrastructure

Contemporaneous American bridge.
Contemporaneous American bridge.

If it took a long time for this page to load and get to the article, you may be somewhere in the United States.

Despite being the country chiefly responsible for inventing what became the Internet, the US languishes behind many other nations in terms of download speeds.

The United States ranks 38th out of 141 nations on the Speed-test Global Index. The country falls just below Portugal and sits on top of Spain. The main reason the US has poor Internet is due to the cost of overhauling the telecommunications infrastructure, but that’s not the only part of American infrastructure that’s lacking; the roads, bridges, dams, water, and power systems are all falling apart, and nobody wants to pay to have them fixed.

Countries with the fastest internet.
Countries with the fastest internet.

The politicians talk about fixing infrastructure all the time, but nothing has come out of it.

Meanwhile, 47,000 bridges are in serious need of repair with the possibility of a catastrophic failure should a rather large pigeon fire some droppings on the wrong platform.

HK-China bridge. The Chinese have invested heavily on their infrastructure.
HK-China bridge. The Chinese have invested heavily on their infrastructure.

Roads are also a serious problem, and the effect is noticeable if you drive down any major highway in the United States. The Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation determined that 42,000 road deaths were the result of potholes and other road maintenance issues.

A lack of healthy infrastructure is a “sure fire” sign of a ruler-serf government.

What other indicators are there?

Well, the ruler-serf arrangement is not stable – historically speaking. So efforts are made to control the bulk of the population using laws, rules and strong policing efforts. Laws are made to prevent the people from overthrowing the government. Not to improve the lives of the people.

The way that you can judge the degree of ruler-serf control is…

…is to look at the size of the prison / jail / parole population.

Thus…

The US Has The Largest Prison Population In The World

Americans have the greatest chance of being incarcerated than anyone else in the entire world.
Americans have the greatest chance of being incarcerated than anyone else in the entire world.

This statistic is widely known, but it’s likely most Americans aren’t aware of just how bad the penal system in the country is.

The United States has more imprisoned people than any other nation on the planet.

For every 100,000 citizens, 724 are in prison, and when you see that number, it may not look large, but for China, their number is only 118 out of 100K.

The number becomes an even bigger problem when accounting for the total population of prisoners in the States, which is around 2.2 million, and the jail occupancy rate is at 107.6%, meaning they are overcrowded and insufficient to house what amounts to the equivalent population of Macedonia.

The rest of the world will not arrest you for having a lemonade stand in your front yard, jay walking, or riding in a car without a seatbelt. They will not demand you report your earnings and expenses every year to them. They will permit you to live your life.
The rest of the world will not arrest you for having a lemonade stand in your front yard, jay walking, or riding in a car without a seatbelt. They will not demand you report your earnings and expenses every year to them. They will permit you to live your life.

Overcrowding is just one of the many problems facing incarcerated Americans; another major concern revolves around the fact that more than 21% of incarcerated people haven’t been sentenced with a crime. Doing so usually takes a long time.

You see, if a person can’t afford bail, they have to remain in prison until they’re sentenced, even if they are ultimately acquitted of a crime. This essentially means that because everyone is innocent until proven guilty, the United States has more than 460,000 innocent people in jail.

Conclusion

Being a serf in the middle ages, for most Americans, would be an improvement over their lives today.

The pleasures of spending time with family and loved ones, a slower pace, and good food and drink are not appreciated by Americans today.
The pleasures of spending time with family and loved ones, a slower pace, and good food and drink are not appreciated by Americans today.

Both situations; serfhood under a modern progressive oligarchy, or serfhood under a King, are similar. The differences lie in technology and lifestyle.

While life in the middle ages didn’t have all the modern inventions and advancements that we take for granted, their pace of life, lifestyle and easy-going happy-go-lucky life had advantages that Americans today can only dream about.

We are not machines. Toss away that progressive modern Marxist ideal. It has no place within your life.
We are not machines. Toss away that progressive modern Marxist ideal. It has no place within your life.

Now, here’s a chuckle…

Buzzfeed Chimes in…

13 Reasons Why Living In Medieval Times Was Better Than Modern Times. Once you got past that whole “plague” thing, life in the middle ages was pretty darn sweet. Adventure back to an epic age hidden from the history books.

  • You could settle every argument by jousting.
  • Animals could be put on trial for any wrongdoings.
  • Immaculately painted portraits > Facebook selfies.
  • No silverware? No problem.
  • Beer was flowing like water. Literally.
  • Words were just cooler back then.
  • You could live in castles, cottages, towers, and manors.
  • Medieval fashion was the best fashion.
  • You could own as many swords as you want and nobody would bat an eyelash.
  • You could get away with bathing once a month and nobody would call you out on it.
  • The live entertainment was second to none.
  • “Knight” was a completely viable career option.
  • And, yes, because there were still cats.

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Being a father means teaching your children to stand up to bullies and beat the Dejesus out of them.

Being a father means many things. Often, in our politically correct, feminized, beta-ruled world, the father is neglected as if he knows nothing and has no purpose other than be a hand-maiden to the mother. That’s nonsense. The father has a terribly important role in raising children. And this article will illustrate it.

Introduction

Like the Yin and Yang, two people are required to raise a well-developed personality. One must take on the loving, caring and nurturing role. The other must take on the determined, strong and laborious role.

Like how “wisdom” = “knowledge” + “emotion”, raising a well-developed child requires both attributes of personality. When one attribute (or side) is larger than the other, an imbalance occurs. In a child, this imbalance can manifest all sorts of problems.

You do not want a “powder puff boy”, nor do you want a “she-woman amazon girl”. You want a well-rounded, well-developed and healthy child. One that will be smart, understanding, and capable.

My Narrative

When I was growing up, I was taught by my Catholic father to be kind and embrace the teachings of the New Testament in the Bible. I worked hard at it, and any time it seemed that I would not be giving of myself, careful of others, or sacrificial I was punished.

So, as a result, I was always giving away my money. I was always being the last one chosen in sports because I was not aggressive enough, and I was always getting picked on and beat up because I was not assertive enough.

My mother refused to allow me to play football. It was too dangerous she said. My father refused to allow me to stand up to neighborhood boys. “It’s turn the other cheek time” he said.

Over the years, it got worse and worse. I became the perfect downtrodden beta-male. I was the runt of the class.

So, when I was a “Junior” in eleventh grade, my coach at the school pulled me aside and allowed me to use the weight-lifting equipment reserved for the football team. He saw that I was getting harassed, and knew that I could not join any sports, even if I wanted to, I was working in the coal mines after school at that time.

Every opportunity I went to the weight room and worked out. I would lift and push myself. Each time thinking over and over how I was being pushed around by the other bullies and miscreants. It was so bad that even younger kids were doing so.

One would pin my arms with the others would seal my pencils and break them before my eyes and then gut punch me. Others would pull down my pants, and other would do tricks like throw water on me, steal my homework, destroy my art and science projects and other affairs. Each time, the school did nothing. When my parents found out they did nothing.

I suffered in torment.

I was alone.

So every day, I poured all my anger, hate and disgust into pushing iron. Each push, each lift I imagined what I would do. Each instance my rage burned brighter and brighter.

I got really strong and my body bulged with muscles.

Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later. Some dimwit failed to notice that I was turning into a snarling giant. He, an underclassman, started to pick on me…

He pulled the tie-the-shoelaces-together and push me to the floor trick.

When I fixed my shoes and stood up, he was still laughing.

He taunted me. “What’s ya going to do? Cry. Oh, boo-hoo“.

I snapped.

I fucking lost it.

I went to a nearby desk and tore off a 1/4″ steel rod from the bottom of it. Then I went right up to him, and with my left arm I twisted his arm out of it’s socket and held him up high about a foot off the ground.

The entire time he’s howling in pain, and writhing in agony.

Two teachers ran up. The very same ones that told me to take the abuse. The very same ones that told me to ignore it. The very same ones that allowed this torment to continue for… years.

Fuck that. Fuck them!

The fucking kid is sobbing. Tears are rolling down his cheeks. Nearby girls are screaming at me. “Stop it!” They yelled at the tops of their voices.

Yeah. As if. Those same bitches were only moments ago snickering at me lying on the ground.

The teacher is threatening me with detention. Everyone is freaking out.

But, but…

I’m not backing down.

I pushed harder. His bones cracked. He howled in pain!

AAAAArrrrrrwwwwww!

“Stop! Stop! Please stop!” he begged. He pleaded. He cried.

But, you know what?

I couldn’t stop.

I couldn’t forget, and I couldn’t forgive. I remembered in bright vivid color all the other snide remarks, the tricks, the endless mindless torment and how no one… no fucking person… came to my aide. I also remembered when I came home beaten up with black eye, how my father…

…they very same father that told me to take it in the first place…

…yelled at me and punished me for “allowing it to happen”.

No.

Fucking.

Way.

I didn’t care. I was in an emotional rage AND that kid was going to be made to suffer.

OK.

Long story short, after he promised never… never, ever to pick on me again, I set him down. Then I took that 1/4″ steel rod and wrapped it around his neck.

When he went home his parents had to figure out how to remove it and understand the circumstances behind how it got there in the first place.

And yeah… there was some blow-back. However, nothing matched the pure satisfaction of watching him writhe in pain and the look of utter terror and horror on the faces of everyone else.

I was NEVER bothered or picked on ever again.

Boys need to be assertive, and be able to fight for their position within society. They are not girls. Do not pretend that society is progressive, modern and enlightened.

It isn’t.

A proud moment…

The following is from an article titled “Proud Parenting Moment: Son Beats Up Bully After Father Teaches Him How To Fight” originally written on August 17, 2018. All credit to the original author, and kudos from me.

So my son was being bullied pretty badly at school. People would make fun of his accent, use racial slurs towards him, throw open milk cartons at him at lunch, start rumors about him, they put his book bag in the toilet once, and a bunch of fucked shit kids do to each other.

My son had told on the main perpetrator to me and his mother and I went to the school and told them about my concerns and the school gave him a stern talking to which only stopped him for a few weeks and then he continued to bully my son.

So I went to the school and complained again and the administration had told me that they spoke to the kid and he had told them that he was just joking and he didn’t mean any of the stuff he was saying and that they were actually friends anyway the assistant principal told me that “boys will be boys” and that it was not out of the ordinary for boys to make fun of each other, but since the kid had admitted to doing it they gave him in-school suspension which is essentially a slap on the wrist.

So after that I realized that nothing was going to happen if I kept running back to the administration every time my son came home crying so I took matters into my own hands.

(Now I’m going to tell you something about me. In my home country I was an amateur boxer but due to the financial situation I was in, my mother did not want me to box she wanted me to work and study, so I cut a deal with her if I made that if to the Olympics I would go pro after but If I failed I would stop and work and go to university. Anyway I failed and stopped boxing and got a job and finished my studies.)

Ok, so what I did was taught my son how to fight. Everyday after I get home from work for the past 9 months I take him to the local boxing gym and taught him how to hit the bag, throw combinations, taught him about foot work and movement, how to work the speed bag, how to dodge, hit the pads and everything I else I knew from my old days as a boxer.

It worked wonders for my son not only did he become physically stronger, he also became mentally strong, he stopped coming home crying, he started to make friends and it had a real positive effect on him.

When I would ask him If he was still getting bullied he said it didn’t bother him what people he didn’t care about said about him, So I figured that was the end of the bully problem, I was wrong.

Two weeks ago I get a call from school that my son had gotten into a fight and that I had to go pick him up because he and the other boy were both suspended for 5 days for fighting.

When I go to pick my son up he is covered in blood, which was alarming at first but then he told me that it was not his blood it was the other boy, the one who put his bag in the toilet kept walking up to him and using racial insults towards him and my son told him If he didn’t stop he was going to beat him up, and he kept his promise.

Turns out my son broke the other kids nose, busted his lip and hit the other kids eye and it had swollen shut. My son has some bruises on his face but nothing compared to the other kid.

Now my son has been getting yelled at a lot by his mother, she made him write and apology letter to the boy…

…. the boys parents…

…to the principal…

…to the teacher…

…to the security guard who broke it up and she is really mad at me and blames me for this because I taught him how to fight but I honestly could not be more proud of him.

Sorry for the horrible grammar English is not my first language.

– Anonymous

Conclusions

Boys need to be assertive, and be able to fight for their position within society. They are not girls. Do not pretend that society is progressive, modern and enlightened.

It isn’t.


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Video snapshots of China; uncategorized, just some cool stuff.

As 2019 year of the pig is drawing to a close, and the 2020 year of the rat is starting to happen, I would like to post some videos of China that are just cool, interesting, or special in one way or the other. These videos are unsorted, and each one has a brief narrative describing what it’s all about. Some involve heroes, like our good friend Rufus, while others are just WTF. Please, all these are just fun postings. Please kindly enjoy.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Video 1 – Child Labor in China.

You know, I have been working in manufacturing for decades, and I have hardly ever saw a child working in China. Though, if you believe the British media, it is commonplace. It’s just another reason to bash the Chinese. Those dastardly bad Chinese…

Well, you can see children from time to time, working. They do so alongside their parents. They do so helping the family in the family business. And, I’ll tell you what, when I see it, it makes me feel glad. For there is nothing better than spending time with your family and working together so the family flourishes.

Here’s a video of child labor in China…

Child labor inside of China.

Video 2 – Traditional Family Life

In the next video, we have a son bringing his girlfriend to his father to introduce them. The father, being widowed, makes a meal for them. But it’s pretty modest. The girl, looks it over, and shows her disapproval.

But you see, China is a traditional nation with traditional values…

So what does she do? She goes into the kitchen and cooks. She explains that she needs to take care of the family and do her part so that everyone can be healthy and happy.

Traditional families are not something out of the “Handmaids Tale”, it’s about roles and shared responsibilities. It’s about respect and care and concern. It’s not “every man fend for himself” that is the norm in America today.

Check it out…

Son brings girlfriend to his father.

Video 3 – The importance of mass transit

Mass transit can be found in almost all the major cities. This includes America, the EU, Russia and China. Where China differs from America, is that there are many levels of public transport. Often there are buses, rentals, scooters, trains, monorails, subways, and everything in between. The only thing missing are horses.

In the USA, mass transit is generally limited to buses (unless you are in a very big city).

This following video clearly shows, in a few seconds, why mass transit is preferable to privately owned automobiles in a Chinese city…

Mass transit in China.

Video 4 – Girl proposes

In a traditional nation, everyone has roles. But China, being Chinese (of course), has traditions with “Chinese characteristics”. In the Chinese environment, the woman and the man both can reverse roles.

So instead of the man working and the woman staying home to tend the family, it can be reversed. Or, switched from time to time, or shared with shared responsibilities. It all depends on the family.

Here is a cute video. A girl proposes to the boy she wants to marry. I personally think that it is great.

Girl proposes to a boy.

Video 5 – Tough Chinese girl

Yeah, I have to admit that I love Chinese girls and women. I love the beauty, the intelligence, and the work ethic. I also greatly admire their toughness. They are like cats. They ain’t afraid of shit.

Don’t fuck with them.

Tough little girl.

Video 6 – Strangers rescue an infant locked inside a hot car.

We think that we can lock an infant inside a car, that it would be safe. Sure, it’s hot and sunny out, but we left the engine running and the air conditioning on. You’ll only be gone for twenty minutes… more or less. What could go wrong?

You could be delayed and the car can automatically shut off.

That’s what.

Here we have strangers trying to rescue an infant from a steamy hot car… on a beach parking lot… in 100 degree weather. The baby is passed out and unresponsive.

What would you do? What would Rufus the hero do?

Rescue of an infant from a hot car.

Video 7 – Helping a woman under attack.

These stories of heroes and “Rufus” are my favorites, and I just cannot let a day go by without posting one or two of them. Here is another video. In this video a woman is under attack by a man. Lucky for her other men, all around her, come to her rescue and subdues the assailant.

You’d never see this in the United States, where it is customary to allow the crime to happen and you don’t get involved. Least you be sued by the person, or arrested by the police, not to mention fired from your job for bad behavior.

Watch these heroes spring into action…

Helping a woman in distress.

Video 8 – This kid can’t drive fer shit!

Here’s a kind of funny video. This kid somehow thinks that the purpose of roads are to drive upon. So, what does he do? Well he hops on his little scooter and takes to the streets. In the process, he crashes into just about every car around. Yikes!

Can’t drive for shit.

Video 9 – Beautiful Chinese girls.

Here’s a video showing the ideal Chinese idea of beauty. Personally, I find all these ladies quite attractive. Now, aren’t they just lovely?

Beautiful Chinese girls.

Video 10 – Uyghur Muslim arrested for killing Chinese school children in Xinjiang.

This video is very interesting, but it needs to be seen. This is an interview with an Uyghur Muslim in prison. He discusses why he killed and hurt others, and his expectations of going to live in paradise with seventy black-eyed virgins.

According to the American mainstream propaganda, and the alt-right propaganda machine, there are millions of Muslims in China under detention and unfairly arrested.

Well, it’s a big ol’ lie, and I have covered this elsewhere.

Uyghurs in Xinjiang

One of the reasons why the Western press can get away with such lies is because the Chinese do not like to promote the violent acts. They believe that it should be kept hidden from the general populace. That is to day, it is the business of the government to protect the people from the acts of barbarism and savage behaviors of these individuals.

In 2019, the Chinese government began releasing some of the videos depicting why these people are in prison. This one in particular is very interesting. He’s one of the men that the NED propaganda machine is promoting as an “innocent” Muslim that is unfairly locked up. China, in response, posted videos of his terror spree, and his confession.

Funny how the American (and British) media ignores the retort.

The individual shown in the video is one of the people that is trying to be released to America and claiming that the Chinese are being too brutal to him. Yea. Right. What about the brutality that he unleashed on the poor fella in the video?

As if the brutality that he did in the first few frames of the movie isn’t brutal enough…

Uyghur Muslim in detention in China.

Yeah. That was awful.

Video 11 – Elephant rescues a downing man.

Meanwhile in Thailand, watch how this pachyderm comes to the rescue of a man being carried away by monsoon floodwaters. You go my large enormous friend! It’s a feel-good video to make up for the nasty Uyghur Muslim business preceding it.

Elephant rescues a downing man.

Video 12 – Cute girls meets cute boy.

Life is too short not to spend some time on cute things. I like this video. It’s cute and is a way for one girl to get a date for her girlfriend. Granted that it might not work every time, but in this video it works. And you know what? Maybe that’s all that matters. Eh?

Cute match-up.

Video 13 – The “real deal” sings in a restaurant.

Imagine that you are minding your own business and enjoying a nice meal in Pizza Hut. Then sitting right next to you is a famous actor who comes up to you and starts talking. Like Robert De Niro or Tom Hanks. What would you do?

In China, many restaurants have a microphone where you can sing. So, if the mood strikes, a person can belt out one or two of their favorite songs. Actually, many times they are actually quite good. The Chinese view singing as a popular pastime and something worthy of doing.

Check out this video. It’s the real deal you all.

Real Deal.

Video 14 – Rescue of a trapped cat under the road.

Here we have a cat, or a cat with a litter of kittens that is trapped inside a narrow storm drain crevice. The entire community gets together to rescue the kitty. It’s a great story and full of feel-good vibes. I hope you all like it and enjoy it as much as I have.

Save the kitty!

Video 15 – Happy CNY you all.

I am posting this post on Chinese New Years eve. That is 24JAN20. The year of the Pig is ending and it is going into the year of the rat. Already my family, my friends, my business colleagues are all eating these never-ending enormous banquets, drinking and quaffing enormous types of alcoholic beverages and passing out thick “red envelopes” of money to each other. It’s a great time and very festive.

Fireworks are exploding all around the house to shake away and scare away the bad “unseen” spirits from affecting our life and future prospects. The kids are playing and having fun, and KTV parties are very common. Everyone is posing their fun on Wechat and Tictok, and it’s a great time.

The only thing different this year is that the sickness outbreak in Wuhan has everyone wearing masks. Heck, even I wore a mask to the airport. LOL! (They are sold out everywhere. Don’t you know.)

Have a wonderful new year everyone. Let’s have a great prosperous years, and great times with our friends and families! Meanwhile, this is what my CNY looks like…

Enjoy!

CNY KTV party.

I hope you all enjoyed this. Have a great and wonderful new year!

If you would like to see more, please go to my General Chinese index…

China

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Ah. The handiwork of God.

There is a uniformity and beauty to the universe that we live in. Indeed, mathematicians are often able to perceive this beauty in their calculations. Now, this being said, sometimes the simplicity and the beautify that lies inherent within a mathematical construct can be profound and stunning.

It can make the most skeptical of people into a believer of the divine.

Here is one such exercise.


In the 1960s, Soviet mathematician Vladimir Arnold mapped the square image of a cat to a torus, “stretched” (sheared) it as shown on that surface, then sliced the resulting image into pieces and recomposed them into a square.

The process in the tortured image manipulation of a kitty-cat.
The process in the tortured image manipulation of a kitty-cat.

As the process is repeated, any two points in the image quickly become separated, but, surprisingly, after sufficient repetitions the original image reappears.

A discrete analogue is below…

The process in the tortured image manipulation of a kitty-cat.
The process in the tortured image manipulation of a kitty-cat.

As the transformation is repeated, the image appears increasingly random or disordered, but the underlying cat can be glimpsed making occasional appearances, sometimes as a ghostly suggestion, sometimes in multiple smaller images, and occasionally (yowling, one imagines) even upside down.

It reappears again, unhurt, at the 300th iteration.

It’s called Arnold’s cat map. You can try it yourself here.

It implies a uniformity within our universe, and a glimpse into how we can perceive ourselves, our alternative world-lines, our past and our futures through the lenses of the momentary iterations of our own consciousness.

Links

Conclusion

There are different interpretations as to what this exercise amounts to. I like to consider that it is a fine illustration that no matter how complex, and convoluted life is, that it follows set patterns and rules that always fit together naturally. As such, everything, from the ordered, to the disordered, to the unexplained and the mysterious all have a role in the grand overall scheme of things…

… the idea that there is a God, or a grand force that we belong to is too strong to discount casually.


I hoped that you enjoyed this piece. If you would like to look at other mysteries and unexplained events and the curious, please attend to my index here…

Mysteries Explained

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Zero Hour (Full text) by Ray Bradbury

This is a very short science-fiction story by Ray Bradbury. It is about how a race of extraterrestrials invade the United States. They use American children.

Oh, it was to be so jolly! What a game! Such excitement they hadn’t known in years. The children catapulted this way and that across the green lawns, shouting at each other, holding hands, flying in circles, climbing trees, laughing. Overhead the rockets flew, and beetle cars whispered by on the streets, but the children played on. Such fun, such tremulous joy, such tumbling and hearty screaming.

Mink ran into the house, all dirty and sweat. For her seven years she was loud and strong and definite. Her mother, Mrs. Morris, hardly saw her as she yanked out drawers and rattled pans and tools into a large sack.

‘Heavens, Mink, what’s going on?’

‘The most exciting game ever!’ gasped Mink, pink-faced. ‘Stop and get your breath,’ said the mother.

‘No, I’m all right,’ gasped Mink. ‘Okay I take these things, Mom?’ ‘But don’t dent them,’ said Mrs. Morris.

‘Thank you, thank you!’ cried Mink, and boom! She was gone, like a rocket. Mrs. Morris surveyed the fleeing tot. ‘What’s the name of the game?’ ‘Invasion!’ said Mink. The door slammed.

In every yard on the street children brought out knives and forks and pokers and old stovepipes and can-openers.

It was an interesting fact that this fury and bustle occurred only among the younger children. The older ones, those ten years and more, disdained the affair and marched scornfully off on hikes or played a more dignified version of hide-and-seek on their own.

Meanwhile, parents came and went in chromium beetles. Repair men came to repair the vacuum elevators in houses, to fix fluttering television sets or hammer upon stubborn food-delivery tubes. The adult civilization passed and repassed the busy youngsters, jealous of the fierce energy of the wild tots, tolerantly amused at their flourishings, longing to join in themselves.

‘This and this and this,’ said Mink, instructing the thers with their assorted spoons and wrenches. ‘Do that, and bring that over here. No! Here, ninny! Right. Now, get back while I fix this.’ Tongue in teeth, face wrinkled in thought. ‘Like that. See?’

‘Yayyy!’ shouted the kids.

Twelve-year-old Joseph Connors ran up. ‘Go away,’ said Mink straight at him.

‘I wanna play,’ said Joseph. ‘Can’t!’ said Mink.

‘Why not?’

‘You’d just make fun of us.’ ‘Honest, I wouldn’t.’

‘No. We know you. Go away or we’ll kick you.’

Another twelve-year-old boy whirred by on little motor skates. ‘Hey, Joe! Come on!

Let them sissies play!’

Joseph showed reluctance and a certain wistfulness ‘I want to play,’ he said. ‘You’re old,’ said Mink firmly.

‘Not that old,’ said Joe sensibly.

‘You’d only laugh and spoil the Invasion.’

The boy on the motor skates made a rude lip noise. ‘Come on, Joe! Them and their fairies! Nuts!’

Joseph walked off slowly. He kept looking back, all down the block.

Mink was already busy again. She made a kind of apparatus with her gathered equipment. She had appointed another little girl with a pad and pencil to take down notes in painful slow scribbles.  Their voices rose and fell in the warm sunlight.

All around them the city hummed. The streets were lined with good green and peaceful trees. Only the wind made a conflict across the city, across the country, across the continent. In a thousand other cities there were trees and children and avenues, businessmen in their quiet offices taping their voices, or watching television. Rockets hovered like darning needles in the blue sky. There was the universal, quiet conceit and easiness of men accustomed to peace, quite certain there would never be trouble again. Arm in arm, men all over earth were a united front. The perfect weapons were held in equal trust by all nations. A situation of incredibly beautiful balance had been brought about. There were no traitors among men, no unhappy ones, no disgruntled ones; therefore the world was based upon a stable ground. Sunlight illumined half the world and the trees drowsed in a tide of warm air.

Mink’s mother, from her upstairs window, gazed down.

The children. She looked upon them and shook her head. Well, they’d eat well, sleep well, and be in school on Monday. Bless their vigorous little bodies. She listened.

Mink talked earnestly to someone near the rose bush – though there was no one

there.

These odd children. And the little girl, what was her name? Anna? Anna took notes on a pad. First, Mink asked the rosebush a question, then called the answer to Anna.

‘Triangle,’ said Mink.

‘What’s a tri,’ said Anna with difficulty, ‘angle?’ ‘Never mind,’ said Mink.

‘How you spell it?’ asked Anna.

‘T-r-i —‘ spelled Mink slowly, then snapped, ‘Oh, spell it yourself!’ She went on to other words. ‘Beam,’ she said.

‘I haven’t got tri,’ said Anna, ‘angle down yet!’ ‘Well, hurry, hurry!’ cried Mink.

Mink’s mother leaned out of the upstairs window. ‘A-n-g-I-e,’ she spelled down at

Anna.

‘Oh, thanks, Mrs. Morris,’ said Anna.

‘Certainly,’  said  Mink’s  mother  and  withdrew,  laughing,  to  dust  the  hall  with  an electro-duster magnet.

The voices wavered on the shimmery air. ‘Beam,’ said Anna. Fading.

Four-nine-seven-A-and-B-and-X,’ said Mink, far away, seriously. ‘And a fork and a string and a — hex-hex-agony — hexagonal!’

At lunch Mink gulped milk at one toss and was at the door.  Her mother slapped the

table.

‘You sit right back down,’ commanded Mrs. Morris. ‘Hot soup in a minute.’ She poked a red button on the kitchen butler, and ten seconds later something landed with a hump in the rubber receiver. Mrs. Morris opened it, took out a can with a pair of aluminium holders, unsealed it with a flick, and poured hot soup into a bowl.

During all this Mink fidgeted. ‘Hurry, Mom! This is a matter of life and death! Aw -‘ ‘I was the same way at your age. Always life and death, I know.’

Mink banged away at the soup. ‘Slow down,’ said Mom.

‘Can’t,’ said Mink. ‘Drill’s waiting for me.’  ‘Who’s Drill? What a peculiar name,’ said Mom. ‘You don’t know him,’ said Mink.

‘A new boy in the neighbourhood?’ asked Mom.

‘He’s new all right,’ said Mink. She started on her second bowl.

‘Which one is Drill?’ asked Mom.

‘He’s around,’ said Mink evasively. ‘You’ll make fun.     Everybody pokes fun. Gee, darn. ‘

‘Is Drill shy?’

‘Yes. No. In a way. Gosh, Mom, I got to run if we want to have the Invasion!’ ‘Who’s invading what?’

‘Martians invading Earth. Well, not exactly Martians.   They’re – I don’t know. From up.’ She pointed with her spoon.

‘And inside,’ said Mom, touching Mink’s feverish brow.

Mink rebelled. ‘You’re laughing! You’ll kill Drill and everybody.’ ‘I didn’t mean to,’ said Mom. ‘Drill’s a Martian?’

‘No. He’s – well – maybe from Jupiter or Saturn or Venus. Anyway, he’s had a hard

time.’

‘I imagine.’ Mrs. Morris hid her mouth behind her hand. ‘They couldn’t figure a way to attack Earth.’

‘We’re impregnable,’ said Mom in mock seriousness.

‘That’s the word Drill used! Impreg – That was the word, Mom.’ ‘My, my, Drill’s a brilliant little boy.  Two-bit words.’

‘They couldn’t figure a way to attack, Mom. DrilI says – he says in order to make a good fight you got to have a new way of surprising people. That way you win. And he says also you got to have help from your enemy.’

‘A fifth column,’ said Mom.

‘Yeah. That’s what Drill said. And they couldn’t figure a way to surprise Earth or get

help.’

‘No wonder. We’re pretty darn strong.’ Mom laughed, cleaning up. Mink sat there, staring at the table, seeing what she was talking about.

‘Until, one day,’ whispered Mink melodramatically, ‘they thought of children!’

‘Well!’ said Mrs. Morris brightly.

‘And they thought of how grown-ups are so busy they never look under rose bushes or on lawns!’

‘Only for snails and fungus.’

‘And then there’s something about dim-dims.’ ‘Dim-dims?’

‘Dimens-shuns.’ ‘Dimensions?’

‘Four of ‘em!  And there’s something about kids under nine and imagination. It’s real funny to hear Drill talk.’

Mrs. Morris was tired. ‘Well, it must he funny. You’re keeping Drill waiting now. It’s getting late in the day and, if you want to have your Invasion before your supper bath, you’d better jump.’

‘Do I have to take a bath?’ growled Mink.

‘You do! Why is it children hate water? No matter what age you live in children hate water behind the ears!’

‘Drill says I won’t have to take baths,’ said Mink. ‘Oh, he does, does he?’

‘He told all the kids that. No more baths. And we can stay up till ten o’clock and go to two televisor shows on Saturday ‘stead of one!’

‘Well, Mr. Drill better mind his p’s and q’s. I’ll call up his mother and —‘

Mink went to the door. ‘We’re having trouble with guys like Pete Britz and Dale Jerrick. They’re growing up. They make fun. They’re worse than parents. They just won’t believe in Drill. They’re so snooty, ‘cause they’re growing up. You’d think they’d know better. They were little only a coupla years ago. I hate them worst. We’ll kill them first.’

‘Your father and I last?’

‘Drill says you’re dangerous. Know why? ‘Cause you don’t believe in Martians! They’re going to let us run the world. Well, not just us, but the kids over in the next block, too. I might be queen.’ She opened the door.

‘Mom?’

‘Yes?’

‘What’s lodge-ick?’

‘Logic? Why, dear, logic is knowing what things are true and not true.’

‘He mentioned that,’ said Mink. ‘And what’s im-pres-sion-able?’ It took her a minute to say it.

‘Why, it means –‘ Her mother looked at the floor, laughing gently. ‘It means — to be a child, dear.’

‘Thanks for lunch!’ Mink ran out, then stuck her head back in. ‘Mom, I’ll be sure you won’t be hurt much, really!’

‘Well, thanks,’ said Mom.

Slam went the door.

At four o’clock the audio-visor buzzed. Mrs. Morris flipped the tab. ‘Hello, Helen!’ she said in welcome.

‘Hello, Mary. How are things in New York?’

‘Fine. How are things in Scranton? You look tired.’ ‘So do you.  The children. Underfoot,’ said Helen.

Mrs. Morris sighed.  ‘My Mink too. The super-Invasion.’ Helen laughed. ‘Are your kids playing that game too?’

‘Lord, yes. Tomorrow it’ll be geometrical jacks and motorized hopscotch. Were we this bad when we were kids in ‘48?’

‘Worse. Japs and Nazis. Don’t know how my parents put up with me. Tomboy.’ ‘Parents learn to shut their ears.’

A silence.

‘What’s wrong, Mary?’ asked Helen.

Mrs. Morris’s eyes were half closed; her tongue slid slowly thoughtfully, over her lower lip. ‘Eh?’ She jerked. ‘Oh, nothing. Just thought about that. Shutting ears and such. Never mind. Where were we?’

‘My boy Tim’s got a crush on some guy named DrilI, I think it was.’ ‘Must be a new password. Mink likes him too.’

‘Didn’t know it had got as far as New York. Word of mouth, I imagine. Looks like a scrap drive. I talked to Josephine and she said her kids — that’s in Boston – are wild on this new game. It’s sweeping the country.’

At this moment Mink trotted into the kitchen to gulp a glass of water. Mrs. Morris turned. ‘How’re things going?’

‘Almost finished,’ said Mink.

‘Swell,’ said Mrs. Morris. ‘What’s that?’

‘A yo-yo,’ said Mink. ‘Watch.’

She flung the yo-yo down its string. Reaching the end it — It vanished.

‘See?’ said Mink. ‘Ope!’ Dibbling her finger, she made the yo-yo reappear and zip up the string.

‘Do that again,’ said her mother.

‘Can’t.  Zero hour’s five o’clock! Bye.’ Mink exited, zipping her yo-yo.

On the audio-visor, Helen laughed. ‘Tim brought one of those yo-yos in this morning, but when I got curious he said he wouldn’t show it to me, and when I tried to work it, finally, it wouldn’t work.’

‘You’re not impressionable,’ said Mrs. Morris. ‘What?’

‘Never mind. Something I thought of. Can I help you, Helen?’ ‘I wanted to get that black-and-white cake recipe –‘

The hour drowsed by. The way waned. The sun lowered in the peaceful blue sky. Shadows lengthened on the green lawns. The laughter and excitement continued. One little girl ran away, crying. Mrs. Morris came out the front door.

‘Mink was that Peggy Ann crying?’

Mink was bent over in the yard, near the rosebush. ‘Yeah. She’s a scarebaby. We won’t let her play, now. She’s getting too old to play. I guess she grew up all of a sudden.’

‘Is that why she cried? Nonsense. Give me a civil answer, young lady, or inside you

come!’

Mink whirled in consternation, mixed with irritation. ‘I can’t quit now. It’s almost time.

I’ll be good. I’m sorry.’

‘Did you hit Peggy Ann?’

‘No, honest. You ask her.  It was something — well, she’s just a scaredy pants.’

The ring of children drew in around Mink where she scowled at her work with spoons and a kind of square-shaped arrangement of hammers and pipes. ‘There and there,’ murmured Mink.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Mrs. Morris.

‘Drill’s stuck. Half-way. If we could only get him all the way through it’d be easier.

Then the others could come through after him.’ ‘Can I help?’

‘No thanks. I’ll fix it.’

‘All right. I’ll call you for your bath in half an hour. I’m tired of watching you.’

She went in and sat in the electric relaxing chair, sipping a little beer from a half- empty glass. The chair massaged her back. Children, children. Children and love and hate, side by side. Sometimes children loved you, hated you -~ all in half a second. Strange children, did they ever forget or forgive the whippings and the harsh, strict words of command? She wondered. How can you ever forget or forgive those over and above you, those tall and silly dictators?

Time passed. A curious, waiting silence came upon the street, deepening.

Five o’clock. A clock sang softly somewhere in the house in a quiet musical voice: ‘Five o’clock — five o’clock. Time’s a-wasting. Five o’clock —‘ and purred away into silence.

Zero hour.

Mrs. Morris chuckled in her throat.  Zero hour.

A beetle car hummed into the driveway. Mr. Morris. Mrs. Morris smiled. Mr. Morris got out of the beetle, locked it, and called hello to Mink at her work. Mink ignored him. He laughed and stood for a moment watching the children. Then he walked up the front steps.

‘Hello, darling.’ ‘Hello, Henry.’

She strained forward on the edge of the chair, listening. The children were silent. Too silent.  He emptied his pipe, refilled it. ‘Swell day. Makes you glad to be alive.’

Buzz.

‘What’s that?’ asked Henry.

‘I don’t know.’ She got up suddenly, her eyes widening. She was going to say something. She stopped it. Ridiculous. Her nerves jumped. ‘Those children haven’t anything dangerous out there, have they?’ she said.

‘Nothing but pipes and hammers. Why?’ ‘Nothing electrical?’

‘Heck, no,’ said Henry. ‘I looked.’

She walked to the kitchen. The buzzing continued. ‘Just the same, you’d better go tell them to quit. It’s after five. Tell them – ‘ Her eyes widened and narrowed. ‘Tell them to put off their Invasion until tomorrow.’ She laughed, nervously.

The buzzing grew louder.

‘What are they up to? I’d better go look, all right.’ The explosion!

The house shook with dull sound. There were other explosions in other yards on other streets.

Involuntarily, Mrs. Morris screamed. ‘Up this way!’ she cried senselessly, knowing no sense, no reason. Perhaps she saw something from the corners of her eyes; perhaps she smelled a new odor or heard a new noise. There was no time to argue with Henry to convince him. Let him think her insane. Yes, insane! Shrieking, she ran upstairs. He ran after her to see what she was up to. ‘In the attic!’ she screamed. ‘That’s where it is!’ It was only a poor excuse to get him in the attic in time. Oh, God – in time!

Another explosion outside. The children screamed with delight, as  if at a great fireworks display.

‘It’s not in the attic,’ cried Henry. ‘It’s outside!’

‘No, no!’ Wheezing, gasping, she fumbled at the attic door. ‘I’ll show you. Hurry! I’ll show you!’

They tumbled into the attic. She slammed the door, locked it, took the key, threw it into a far, cluttered corner.

She was babbling wild stuff now. It came out of her. All the subconscious suspicion and fear that had gathered secretly all afternoon and fermented like a wine in her. All the little revelations and knowledges and sense that had bothered her all day and which she had logically and carefully and sensibly rejected and censored. Now it exploded in her and shook her to bits.

‘There, there,’ she said, sobbing against the door. ‘We’re safe until tonight. Maybe we can sneak out. Maybe we can escape!’

Henry blew up too, but for another reason. ‘Are you crazy? Why’d you throw that key away? Damn it, honey!’

‘Yes, yes, I’m crazy, if it helps, but stay here with me!’ ‘I don’t know how in hell I can get out!’

‘Quiet. They’ll hear us. Oh, God, they’ll find us soon enough – ‘

Below them, Mink’s voice. The husband stopped. There was a great universal humming and sizzling, a screaming and giggling. Downstairs the audio-televisor buzzed and buzzed insistently, alarmingly, violently. Is that Helen calling? thought Mrs. Morris. And is she calling about what I think she’s calling about?

Footsteps came into the house. Heavy footsteps.

‘Who’s coming in my house?’ demanded Henry angrily. ‘Whose tramping around down there?’

Heavy feet. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty of them. Fifty persons crowding into the house.

The humming. The giggling of the children. ‘This way!’ cried Mink, below. ‘Who’s downstairs?’ roared Henry. ‘Who’s there!’

‘Hush. Oh, nononononono!’ said his wife weakly, holding him. ‘Please, be quiet. They might go away.’

‘Mom?’ called Mink. ‘Dad?’ A pause. ‘Where are you?’

Heavy footsteps, heavy, heavy, very heavy footsteps, came up the stairs. Mink leading them. ‘Mom?’ A hesitation. ‘Dad?’ A waiting, a silence.

Humming. Footsteps toward the attic. Mink’s first.

They trembled together in silence in the attic, Mr. and Mrs. Morris. For some reason the electric humming, the queer cold light suddenly visible under the door crack, the strange odor and the alien sound of eagerness in Mink’s voice finally got through to Henry Morris too. He stood, shivering, in the dark silence, his wife beside him.

‘Mom! Dad!’

Footsteps. A little humming sound. The attic-lock melted. The door opened. Mink peered inside, tall blue shadows behind her.

‘Peekaboo,’ said Mink.

The End.

If you enjoyed this story, you can find others at this link here…

Fictional Stories

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Be the Rufus; more examples of personal heroism in China. Part 21.

More examples of personal heroism in China. This is part twenty one.

Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

Video 1 – Man has a seizure

Here’s a guy that is having a seizure while waiting for an elevator. What would you do if you saw this happening? Would you just go your merry way and do nothing, or would you try to get help or yet… try to him him yourself? What would YOU do?

Video 2 – Man threatens to send baby into the river.

Stresses of life can get to you and can make you do strange and dangerous things. Here, we have this man with a young child threatening to jump into the river. If he jumps both would die. He holds his young daughter. What to do…?

Video 3 – Scooter accident.

Yes there is an accident and the rest of the world moves on. No one cares. But then there is a Rufus… a hero that comes tot he rescue. The guy is not moving. The accident is in the middle of the road and this intersection is a big intersection. Maybe six lanes or larger. What would you do?

Video 4 – Old man in crisis.

There are so many old people in China. Many of them are in their late 80’s and 90’s. They are moving about and buying groceries and such, but they often have a difficult time with things. Many times they need help. Will you be the Rufus and help them?

Video 5 – Muslim terrorist has hostage in elementary school.

Here we have a Muslim terrorist that is convinced that he will go to Heaven as a martyr if he kills innocent children in a kindergarten. All he needs to do is should “God is great” and start slicing necks. Then he will be killed in the act and be rewarded by Allah with 70 black-eyed virgins. Yup. He actually believes this nonsense.

How would you handle it?

Video 6 – Man having trouble while driving – asks policeman for help.

You are driving the car and suddenly you start having trouble. Your body is not reacting right and you cannot drive any longer. Lucky for you that you see a police car. So you flag it over and they help you…

Video 7 – The most emotional and moving video ever!

A woman dresses up as a nurse and steals a new born baby. This is the same thing that has happened time and time again before. In fact, in video 18 or 19 I have a video where the stolen baby was reunited with his real mother… 30 years later.

Anyways, this woman dressed up as a nurse and stole the baby. The mother is horrified, but you know what? They found the woman and raided her home…

Check it out!

The baby is returned…

The baby is returned to it's moma.
The baby is returned to it’s moma.

Video 8 – Man stops a purse snatcher on a motorcycle.

Innocent bystanders can become a hero in an instant. While the lady two blocks down the street is screaming her lungs out, this young fellow takes action. He stops the motorcycle rider dead on the spot. A real Rufus!

Video 9 – Man helps a dog cross the street.

Dogs, as great as they are, sometimes need help. The smarter dogs know that trying to cross a street is dangerous. So what are they going to do? Well, good thing that there is a Rufus near by to help.

Video 10 – Rescue of a woman from a submerged car.

She is drowning. Hurt, and under very muddy water and the car is sinking fast into the mud. What are you going to do? Be the Rufus!

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come.

However, when it calls, you must take action. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive. But, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus. Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.


If you enjoyed this post, please click on this link and check out the rest of my Rufus series…

Hero Stories

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You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 3.

More stories of personal heroism in China. This is part three.

Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.

Make a difference. Be like Rufus!

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

These are all micro-videos of very short duration. From ten seconds to three minutes. I would suggest that you, the reader, allow them to load to get the full experience.

Video 1 – ATM robbery

You are minding your own business. You are in an ATM kiosk and are waiting in line while the chick in front of you withdraws some money. But, hey! You notice something. There’s a guy beside her with a knife! And he is robbing her directly… right there! In front of you, the other customers and is not afraid of him being filmed by the cameras!

What would YOU do?

Video 2 – Child falls into a manhole.

So, yeah. It’s an average day. You are out shopping, and you know what? You see this little girl disappearing right in front of you! What are you going to do?

What would you do?

Video 3 – Little girl falls off the back of a scooter.

A little girl falls off the back of the scooter, and her mother rides off into the sunset. The girl, terrified and afraid wanders about. What would you do? Would you help her out?

Would YOU help her?

Notice that no only did the other woman on the scooter stop, but the white car did as well. He opened up the door and offered to take the little girl home.

Video 4 – Crazed knife attacker.

You are having a nice quick lunch in a restaurant. Suddenly out of the blue this guy comes running inside the restaurant shouting “God is great!” in some strange language. That’s odd enough, but he’s waving around a cleaver and is heading towards the back of the restaurant. Yikes!

What are you going to do?

Video 5 – Fire at a gas station.

We’ve all stopped to fill our cars with gas. But what happens when the truck next to your car catches on fire? What would you do? Here is what happens when well-trained station attendants spring into action…

Video 6 – Frightened baby.

Not all heroes wear tights, have capes and fly through the skies. Often the environment around us just needs a little bit of help; more smiles, a kind word or some encouragement. Check out what this doctor does to sooth the fears of this child…

Video 7 – Helping the old man cross the street.

Crossing the streets in China are often quite trying. Cars zoom back and forth Indy-500 style. No one seems to give a Rat’s Ass about pedestrians. Never the less, not everyone has a car, and you do have to cross the street. Even when you are 99 years old.

What would you do? Honk the horn and yell “Hey old man! Get the fuck out of my way, ya old geezer!”, or would you be the Rufus…

Be . The . Rufus .

Video 8 – Returning a wallet.

Kindness and being fair and just is what defines us. Contrary to what Hollywood, and Washington DC can make us believe, there are good people in the world. It’s just that they avoid publicity and operate quietly in silence and secrecy.

Be the Rufus.

Video 9 – Stranger collapses on the street.

You are walking to your car. Then you notice this body in the street off the parking lot. It’s limp. Dead. Not moving. What are you going to do?

Be the Rufus!

Video 10 – Know the full story.

Life is not black and white. It is full of grey areas, and it is up to us to individually determine where the to place the line that makes things black and white. But, we must know the full story first. We cannot rely on your eyes and ears, and certainly CANNOT rely on the news-babe on television. The truth is often elusive.

Do not judge others unless you know their full story.

Do not judge. Know the full story.

Conclusion

We do not know when the calling will come. However, when it calls, you must take action.

No. It will not make you wealthy, rich, famous, or attractive.

However, it will make a difference when you are judged upon death. Be the Rufus.

Make a difference. Help others. It’s our highest calling.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Some of my favorite links and browser bookmarks.
Here are just some pretty decent websites, bookmarks, URL's and sites that I would like to share. I think that there is something here for everyone. These, in my mind, are the "cream of the crop" of underappreciated websites, and some places that you all might want to visit.
Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
The history of how Australia obtained Sheilas; the story of The Lady Juliana, The 18th-Century Prison Ship Filled With Women.   This is the story of the Lady Juliana. This was a special ship designed to convey female convicts from England to Australia. The idea was that a boat load of female convicts would happily link up with a colony of convicts in Australia. Thus making everyone very, very happy, and reform the colony in New South Wales.
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Gaslighting
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet.
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight
What High School taught me about Diversity.  Here we look at idea of "diversity" from the point of view of what it was like in my High School years. For my High School was fully and intentionally diverse. And at that time, there were two techniques of grouping people.  These techniques were by [1] merit, and [2] by random association. Or in other words; "diversity". Thus we can compare diversity against merit as the criteria used in a selection process.

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 3.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 4.
Here are some more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 5.
Here are even more fine, fine videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like int he same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 6.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 7.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 7.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 8.
This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 8.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 9.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 9.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 10.
We all have a need to participate within our communities, to have a role, and to give meaning to our lives. This role is important, and it is such that it often can call upon us to be heroic in acts and deeds. This is a selection of videos that portray everyday heroes doing good, kind works. We all like in the same (apparent) world and we all share the same environment. It is thus important for us to make it the best environment to coexist within. These videos are part of a much larger collection of videos. This is part 10.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 11.
Here are some more stories, videos and micro-movies of personal examples of heroism, and being a Rufus. They all take place in China, because, that is, well, where I live. Here you can see that personal heroes come in different sizes and shapes and that being a hero is our highest calling in our world. Be the hero. Be the Rufus.
Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Will you be the one who stays playing on the cell-phone, or will you lend a helping hand? Will you be the person who will make a difference in the lives of those around you, or are you just going to fade into the background.
It is our highest calling to help others in need. Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Be the Rufus and make the world a better place.
Be the Rufus; more stories of personal heroism in China. Part 14.
It is our highest calling to help others in need. Here are some more videos of personal heroism. These videos all take place in China, and show examples of how average, normal, everyday people (or dogs and cats) can make a difference. When the calling strikes and an emergency occurs, will you be the one who turns their back, or will you run and offer help? Be the Rufus and make the world a better place.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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The Long Way Home (full text) by Fred Saberhagen

This is the kind of short science fiction story that I enjoyed reading as a young teenager. A spaceship is out, far out, in deep space. As it crosses the deep depths it discovers a mystery... one that needs investigation. So they check it out, and an adventure ensues...

The Long Way Home

When Marty first saw the thing it was nearly dead ahead, half a million miles away, a tiny green blip that repeated itself every five seconds on the screen of his distant-search radar.

He was four billion miles from Sol and heading out, working his way slowly through a small swarm of rock chunks that swung in a slow sun-orbit out here beyond Pluto, looking for valuable minerals in concentration that would make mining profitable.

The thing on his radar screen looked quite small, and therefore not too promising. But, as it was almost in his path, no great effort would be required to investigate. For all he knew, it might be solid germanium. And nothing better was in sight at the moment. Marty leaned back in the control seat and said: “We’ve got one coming up, baby.” He had no need to address himself any more exactly. Only one other human was aboard the Clementine, or, to his knowledge, within a couple of billion miles.

Laura’s voice answered through a speaker, from the kitchen two decks below. “Oh, close? Have we got time for breakfast?”

Marty studied the radar. “About five hours if we maintain speed. Hope it won’t be a waste of energy to decelerate and look the thing over.” He gave Clem’s main computer the problem of finding the most economical engine use to approach his find and reach zero velocity relative to it.

“Come and eat!”

“All right.” He and the computer studied the blip together for a few seconds. Then the man, not considering it anything of unusual importance, left the control room to have breakfast with his bride of three months. As he walked downstairs in the steadilymaintained artificial gravity, he heard the engines starting.

Ten hours later he examined his new find much more closely, with a rapidly focusing alertness that balanced between an explorer’s caution and a prospector’s elation at a possibly huge strike. The incredible shape of X, becoming apparent as the Clem drew within a few hundred miles, was what had Marty on the edge of his chair. It was a needle thirty miles long, as near as his radar could measure and about a hundred yards thick—dimensions that matched exactly nothing Marty could expect to find anywhere in space.

It was obviously no random chunk of rock. And it was no spaceship that he had ever seen or heard of. One end of it pointed in the direction of Sol, causing him to suggest to Laura the idea of a miniature comet, complete with tail. She took him seriously at first, then remembered some facts about comets and swatted him playfully. “Oh, you!” she said.

Another, more real possibility quickly became obvious, with sobering effect. The ancient fear of aliens that had haunted Earthmen through almost three thousand years of intermittent space exploration, a fear that had never been realized, now peered into the snug control room through the green radar eye.

Aliens were always good for a joke when spacemen met and talked. But they turned out to be not particularly amusing when you were possibly confronting them, several billion miles from Earth. Especially, thought Marty, in a ship built for robot mining, ore refining, and hauling, not for diplomatic contacts or heroics—and with the only human assistance a girl on her first space trip. Marty hardly felt up to speaking for the human race in such a situation.

It took a minute to set the autopilot so that any sudden move by X would trigger alarms and such evasive tactics as Clem could manage. He then set a robot librarian to searching his microfilm files for any reference to a spaceship having X’s incredible dimensions.

There was a chance—how good a chance, he found hard to estimate, when any explanation looked somewhat wild—that X was a derelict, the wrecked hull of some ship dead for a decade, or a century, or a thousand years. By laws of salvage, such a find would belong to him if he towed it into port. The value might be very high or very low. But the prospect was certainly intriguing.

Marty brought Clem to a stop relative to X, and noticed that his velocity to Sol now also hung at zero. “I wonder,” he muttered,

“Space anchor . . . ?”

The space anchor had been in use for thousands of years. It was a device that enabled a ship to fasten itself to a particular point in the gravitational field of a massive body such as a sun. If X was anchored, it did not prove that there was still life aboard her; once “dropped,” an anchor could hold as long as a hull could last. Laura brought sandwiches and a hot drink to him in the control room.

“If we call the navy and they bring it in we won’t get anything out of it,” he told her between bites. “That’s assuming it’s—not alien.”

“Could there be someone alive on it?” She was staring into the screen. Her face was solemn, but, he thought, not frightened.

“If it’s human, you mean? No. I know there hasn’t been any ship remotely like that used in recent years. Way, way back the Old Empire built some that were even bigger, but none I ever heard of with this crazy shape . . . “

The robot librarian indicated that it had drawn a blank. “See?” said Marty. “And I’ve even got most of the ancient types in there.” There was silence for a little while. The evening’s recorded music started somewhere in the background.

“What would you do if I weren’t along?” Laura asked him.

He did not answer directly, but said something he had been considering. “I don’t know the psychology of our hypothetical aliens. But it seems to me that if you set out exploring new solar systems, you do as Earthmen have always done—go with the best you have in the way of speed and weapons. Therefore if X is alien, I don’t think Clem would stand a chance trying to fight or run.” He paused, frowning at the image of X. “That damned shape—it’s just not right for anything.”

“We could call the navy—not that I’m saying we should, darling,” she added hastily. “You decide, and I’ll never complain either way. I’m just trying to help you think it out.”

He looked at her, believed it about there never being any complaints, and squeezed her hand. Anything more seemed superfluous.

“If I was alone,” he said, “I’d jump into a suit, go look that thing over, haul it back to Ganymede, and sell it for a unique whateverit-is. Maybe I’d make enough money to marry you in real style, and trade in Clem for a first-rate ship—or maybe even terraform an asteroid and keep a couple of robot prospectors. I don’t know, though. Maybe we’d better call the navy.”

She laughed at him gently. “We’re married enough already, and we had all the style I wanted. Besides, I don’t think either of us would be very happy sitting on an asteroid. How long do you think it will take you to look it over?”

At the airlock door she had misgivings: “Oh, it is safe enough, isn’t it? Marty, be careful and come back soon.” She kissed him before he closed his helmet.

They had moved Clem to within a few kilometers of X. Marty mounted his spacebike and approached it slowly, from the side. The vast length of X blotted out a thin strip of stars to his right and left, as it it were the distant shore of some vast island in a placid Terran sea, and the starclouds below him were the watery reflections of the ones above. But space was too black to permit such an illusion to endure.

The tiny FM radar on his bike showed him within three hundred yards of X. He killed his forward speed with a gentle application of retrojets and turned on a spotlight. Bright metal gleamed smoothly back at him as he swung the beam from side to side. Then he stopped it where a dark concavity showed up.

“Lifeboat berth . . . empty,” he said aloud, looking through the bike’s little telescope.

“Then it is a derelict? We’re all right?” asked Laura’s voice in his helmet.

“Looks that way. Yeah, I guess there’s no doubt of it. I’ll go in for a closer look now.” He eased the bike forward. X was evidently just some rare type of ship that neither he nor the compilers of the standard reference works in his library had ever heard of. Which sounded a little foolish to him, but . . .

At ten meters’ distance he killed speed again, set the bike on automatic stay-clear, made sure a line from it was fast to his belt, and launched himself out of the saddle gently, headfirst, toward X.

The armored hands of his suit touched down first, easily and expertly. In a moment he was standing upright on the hull, held in place by magnetic boots. He looked around. He detected no response to his arrival.

Marty turned toward Sol, sighting down the kilometers of dark cylinder that seemed to dwindle to a point in the starry distance, like a road on which a man might travel home toward a tiny sun. Near at hand the hull was smooth, looking like that of any ordinary spaceship. In the direction away from Sol, quite distant, he could vaguely see some sort of projections at right angles to the hull. He mounted his bike again and set off in that direction. When he neared the nearest projection, a kilometer and a half down the hull, he saw it to be a sort of enormous clamp that encircled X—or rather, part of a clamp. It ended a few meters from the hull, in rounded globs of metal that had once been molten but were now too cold to affect the thermometer Marty held against them. His radiation counter showed nothing above the normal background.

“Ah,” said Marty after a moment, looking at the half-clamp.

“Something?”

“I think I’ve got it figured out. Not quite as weird as we thought. Let me check for one thing more.” He steered the bike slowly around the circumference of X.

A third of the way around he came upon what looked like a shallow trench, about five feet wide and a foot deep, with a bottom that shone cloudy gray in his lights. It ran lengthwise on X as far as he could see in either direction.

A door-sized opening was cut in the clamp above the trench. Marty nodded and smiled to himself, and gunned the bike around in an accelerating curve that aimed at the Clementine.

“It’s not a spaceship at all, only a part of one,” he told Laura a little later, digging in the microfilm file with his own hands, with the air of a man who knew what he was looking for. “That’s why the librarian didn’t turn it up. Now I remember reading about them. It’s part of an Old Empire job of about two thousand years ago. They used a somewhat different drive than we do, one that made one enormous ship more economical to run than several normal-sized ones. They made these ships ready for a voyage by fastening together long narrow sections side by side, the number depending on how much cargo they had to move. What we’ve found is obviously one of those sections.”

Laura wrinkled her forehead. “It must have been a terrible job, putting those sections together and separating them, even in free space.”

“They used space anchors. That trench I mentioned? It has a forcefield bottom. so an anchor could be sunk through it. Then the whole section could be slid straight forward or back, in or out of the bunch . . . here, I’ve got it, I think. Put this strip in the viewer.”

One picture, a photograph, showed what appeared to be one end of a bunch of long needles, in a glaring light, against a background of stars that looked unreal. The legend beneath gave a scanty description of the ship in flowing Old Empire script. Other pictures showed sections of the ship in some detail.

“This must be it, all right,” said Marty thoughtfully. “Funny looking old tub.”

“I wonder what happened to wreck her.”

“Drives sometimes exploded in those days, and that could have done it. And this one section got anchored to Sol somehow—it’s funny.”

“How long ago did it happen, do you suppose?” asked Laura. She had her arms folded as if she were a little cold, though it was not cold in the Clementine.

“Must be around two thousand years or more. These ships haven’t been used for about that long.” He picked up a stylus. “I better go over there with a big bag of tools tomorrow and take a look inside.” He wrote down a few things he thought he might need.

“Historians would probably pay a good price for the whole thing, untouched,” she suggested, watching him draw doodles.

“That’s a thought. But maybe there’s something really valuable aboard—though I won’t be able to give it anything like a thorough search, of course. The thing is anchored, remember. I’ll probably have to break in, anyway, to release that.”

She pointed to one of the diagrams. “Look, a section thirty miles long must be one of the passenger compartments. And according to this plan, it would have no drive at all of its own. We’ll have to tow it.”

He looked. “Right. Anyway, I don’t think I’d care to try its drive if it had one.”

He located airlocks on the plan and made himself generally familiar with it.

The next “morning” found Marty loading extra tools, gadgets, and explosives on his bike. The trip to X (he still thought of it that way) was uneventful. This time he landed about a third of the way from one end, where he expected to find a handy airlock and have a choice of directions to explore when he got inside. He hoped to get the airlock open without letting out whatever atmosphere or gas was present in any of the main compartments, as a sudden drop in pressure might damage something in the unknown cargo. He found a likely looking spot for entry where the plans had told him to expect one. It was a small auxiliary airlock, only a few feet from the space-anchor channel. The forcefield bottom of that channel was, he knew, useless as a possible doorway. Though anchors could be raised and lowered through it, they remained partly imbedded in it at all times. Starting a new hole from scratch would cause the decompression he was trying to avoid, and possibly a dangerous explosion as well.

Marty began his attack on the airlock door cautiously, working with electronic “sounding” gear for a few minutes, trying to tell if the inner door was closed as well. He had about decided that it was when something made him look up. He raised his head and sighted down the dark length of X toward Sol.

Something was moving toward him along the hull.

He was up in the bike saddle with his hand on a blaster before he realized what it was—that moving blur that distorted the stars seen through it, like heat waves in air. Without doubt, it was a space anchor, moving along the channel.

Marty rode the bike out a few yards and nudged it along slowly, following the anchor. It moved at about the pace of a fast walk. Moved . . . but it was sunk into space.

“Laura,” he called. “Something odd here. Doppler this hull for me and see if it’s moving.”

Laura acknowledged in one businesslike word. Good girl, he thought. I won’t have to worry about you. He coasted along the hull on the bike, staying even with the apparent movement of the anchor.

Laura’s voice came: “It is moving now, toward Sol. About 10 kilometers per hour. Maybe less—it’s so slow it’s hard to read.”

“Good, that’s what I thought.” He hoped he sounded reassuring. He pondered the situation. It was the hull moving then, the forcefield channel sliding by the fixed anchor. Whatever was causing it, it did not seem to be directed against him or the Clem. “Look, baby,” he went on. “Something peculiar is happening.” He explained about the anchor. “Clem may be no battleship, but I guess she’s a match for any piece of wreckage.”

“But you’re out there!”

“I have to see this. I never saw anything like it before. Don’t worry, I’ll pull back if it looks at all dangerous.” Something in the back of his mind told him to go back to his ship and call the navy. He ignored it without much trouble. He had never thought much of calling the navy.

About four hours later the incomprehensible anchor neared the end of its track, within thirty meters of what seemed to be X’s stern. It slowed down and came to a gradual stop a few meters from the end of the track. For a minute nothing else happened. Marty reported the facts to Laura. He sat straight in the bike saddle, regarding the universe, which offered him no enlightenment.

In the space between the anchor and the end of the track, a second patterned shimmer appeared. It must necessarily have been let “down” into space from inside X. Marty felt a creeping chill. After a little while the first anchor vanished, withdrawn through the forcefield into the hull.

Marty sat watching for twenty minutes, but nothing further happened. He realized that he had a crushing grip on the bike controls and that he was quivering with fatigue.

Laura and Marty took turns sleeping and watching, that night aboard the Clementine. About noon the next ship’s day Laura was at the telescope when anchor number one reappeared, now at the “prow” of X. After a few moments the one at the stem vanished. Marty looked at the communicator that he could use any time to call the navy. Faster-than-light travel not being practical so near a sun, it would take them at least several hours to arrive after he decided he needed them. Then he beat his fist against a table and swore. “It can only be that there’s some kind of mechanism in her still operating.” He went to the telescope and watched number one anchor begin its apparent slow journey sternward once more.

“I don’t know. I’ve got to settle this.”

The doppler showed X was again creeping toward Sol at about 10 kilometers an hour.

“Does it seem likely there’d be power left after two thousand years to operate such a mechanism?” Laura asked.

“I think so. Each passenger section had a hydrogen power lamp.” He dug out the microfilm again. “Yeah. a small fusion lamp for electricity to light and heat the section, and to run the emergency equipment for . . .” His voice trailed off, then continued in a dazed tone: “For recycling food and water.”

“Marty, what is it?”

He stood up, staring at the plan. “The only radios were in the lifeboats, and the lifeboats are gone. I wonder . . . sure. The explosion could have torn them apart, blown them away, so . . .”

“What are you talking about?”

He looked again at their communicator. “A transmitter that can get through the noise between here and Pluto wouldn’t be easy to jury-rig, even now. In the Old Empire days . . . “

What?”

“Now about air—” He seemed to wake up with a start, looked at her sheepishly. “Just an idea that hit me.” He grinned. “I’m making another trip.”

An hour later he was landing on X for the third time, touching down near the “stern.” He was riding the moving hull toward the anchor, but it was still many kilometers away.

The spot he had picked was near another small auxiliary airlock, upon which he began work immediately. After ascertaining that the inner door was closed, he drilled a hole in the outer door to relieve any pressure in the chamber to keep the outer door shut. The door opening mechanism suffered from twenty-century cramp, but a vibrator tool shook it loose enough to be operated by hand. The inside of the airlock looked like nothing more than the inside of an airlock.

He patched the hole he had made in the outer door so he would be able—he hoped—to open the inner one normally. He operated the outer door several times to make sure he could get out fast if he had to. After attaching a few extras from the bike to his suit, he said a quick and cheerful goodbye to Laura—not expecting his radio to work from inside the hull—and closed himself into the airlock. Using the vibrator again, he was able to work the control that should let whatever passed for hull atmosphere into the chamber. It came. His wrist gauge told him pressure was building up to approximately spaceship normal, and his suit mikes began to pick up a faint hollow humming from somewhere. He very definitely kept suit and helmet sealed.

The inner door worked perfectly, testifying to the skill of the Old Empire builders. Marty found himself nearly upside down as he went through, losing his footing and his sense of heroic adventure. In return he gained the knowledge that X’s artificial gravity was still at least partly operational. Righting himself, he found that he was in a small anteroom banked with spacesuit lockers, now illuminated only by his suit lights but showing no other signs of damage. There was a door in each of the other walls.

He moved to try the one at his right. First drawing his blaster, he hesitated a moment, then slid it back into its holster. Swallowing, he eased the door open to find only another empty compartment, about the size of an average room and stripped of everything down to the bare deck and bulkheads.

Another door led him into a narrow passage where a few overhead lights burned dimly. Trying to watch over his shoulder and ahead at the same time, he followed the hall to a winding stair and began to climb, moving with all the silence possible in a spacesuit. The stair brought him out onto a long gallery overlooking what could only be the main corridor of X, a passage twenty meters wide and three decks high; it narrowed away to a point in the dimlit distance.

A man came out of a doorway across the corridor, a deck below Marty.

He was an old man and may have been nearsighted, for he seemed unaware of the spacesuited figure gripping a railing and staring down at him. The old man wore a sort of tunic intricately embroidered with threads of different colors, and well tailored to his thin figure, leaving his legs and feet bare. He stood for a moment peering down the long corridor, while Marty stared, momentarily frozen in shock.

Marty pulled back two slow steps from the railing, to where he stood mostly in shadow. Turning his head to follow the old man’s gaze, he noticed that the forcefield where the anchors traveled was visible, running in a sunken strip down the center of the corridor. When the interstellar ship of which X was once a part had been in normal use, the strip might have been covered with a moving walkway of some kind.

The old man turned his attention to a tank where grew a mass of plants with flat, dark green leaves. He touched a leaf, then turned a valve that doled water into the tank from a thin pipe. Similar valves were clustered on the bulkhead behind the old man, and pipes ran from them to many other plant-filled tanks set at intervals down the corridor. “For oxygen,” Marty said aloud in an almost calm voice, and was startled at the sound in his helmet. His helmet airspeaker was not turned on, so of course the old man did not hear him. The old man pulled a red berry from one of the plants and ate it absently.

Marty made a move with his chin to turn on his speaker, but did not complete. He half lifted his arms to wave, but fear of the not-understood held him, made him back up slowly into the shadows at the rear of the gallery. Turning his head to the right he could see the near end of the corridor, and an anchor there, not sunken in space but raised almost out of the forcefield on a framework at the end of the strip.

Near the stair he had ascended was a half-open door, leading into darkness. Marty realized he had turned off his suit lights without consciously knowing of it. Moving carefully so the old man would not see, he lit one and probed the darkness beyond the door cautiously. The room he entered was the first of a small suite that had once been a passenger cabin. The furniture was simple, but it was the first of any kind that he had seen aboard X. Garments hanging in one corner were similar to the old man’s tunic, though no two were exactly alike in design. Marty fingered the fabric with one armored hand, holding it close to his faceplate. He nodded to himself; it seemed to be the kind of stuff produced by fiberrecycling machinery, and he doubted very much that it was anywhere near two thousand years old.

Marty emerged from the doorway of the little apartment, and stood in shadow with his suit lights out, looking around. The old man had disappeared. He remembered that the old man had gazed down the infinite-looking corridor as if expecting something. There was nothing new in sight that way. He turned up the gain of one of his suit mikes and focused it in that direction.

Many human voices were singing, somewhere down there, miles away. He started, and tried to interpret what he heard in some other way, but with an eerie thrill, he became convinced that his first impression was correct. While he studied a plan of going back to his bike and heading in that direction, he became aware that the singing was getting louder—and therefore, no doubt closer.

He leaned back against the bulkhead in the shadow at the rear of the gallery. His suit, dark-colored for space work far from Sol, would be practically invisible from the lighted corridor below, while he could see down with little difficulty. Part of his mind urged him to go back to Laura, to call the navy, because these unknown people could be dangerous to him. But he had to wait and see more of them. He grinned wryly as he realized that he was not going to get any salvage out of X after all.

Sweating in spite of his suit’s coolers, he listened to the singing grow rapidly louder in his helmet. Male and female voices rose and fell in an intricate melody, sometimes blending, sometimes chanting separate parts. The language was unknown to him. Suddenly the people were in sight, first only as a faint dot of color in the distance. As they drew nearer he could see that they walked in a long neat column eight abreast, four on each side of the central strip of forcefield. Men and women, apparently teamed according to no fixed rule of age or sex or size—except that he saw no oldsters or young children.

The people sang and leaned forward as they walked, pulling their weight on heavy ropes that were intricately decorated, like their clothing and that of the old man who had now stepped out of his doorway again to greet them. A few other oldsters of both sexes appeared near him to stand and wait. Through a briefly opened door Marty caught a glimpse of a well-lighted room holding machines he recognized as looms only because of the halffinished cloth they held. He shook his head wonderingly.

All at once the walkers were very near; hundreds of people pulling on ropes that led to a multiple whiffletree, made of twisted metal pipes, that rode over the central trench. The whiffletree and the space anchor to which it was fastened were pulled past Marty—or rather the spot from which he watched was carried past the fixed anchor by the slow, human-powered thrust of X toward Sol.

Behind the anchor came a small group of children, from about the age of ten up to puberty. They pulled on ropes, drawing a cart that held what looked like containers for food and water. At the extreme rear of the procession marched a man in the prime of life, tall and athletic, wearing a magnificent headdress.

About the time he drew even with Marty, this man stopped suddenly and uttered a sharp command. Instantly, the pulling and singing ceased. Several men nearest the whiffletree moved in and loosened it from the anchor with quick precision. Others held the slackened ropes clear as the enormous inertia of X’s mass carried the end of the forcefield strip toward the anchor, which now jammed against the framework holding anchor number two, forcing the framework back where there had seemed to be no room. A thick forcefield pad now became visible to Marty behind the framework, expanding steadily as it absorbed the energy of the powerful stress between ship and anchor. Conduits of some kind, Marty saw, led away from the pad, possibly to where energy might be stored for use when it came time to start X creeping toward the sun again. A woman in a headdress now mounted the framework and released anchor number two, to drop into space “below” the hull and bind X fast to the place where it was now held by anchor number one. A crew of men came forward and began to raise anchor number one . . .

He found himself descending the stair, retracing his steps to the airlock. Behind him the voices of the people were raised in a steady recitation that might have been a prayer. Feeling somewhat as if he moved in a dream, he made no particular attempt at caution, but he met no one. He tried to think, to understand what he had witnessed. Vaguely, comprehension came.

Outside, he said: “I’m out all right, Laura. I want to look at something at the other end, and then I’ll come home.” He scarcely heard what she said in reply, but realized that her answer had been almost instantaneous; she must have been listening steadily for his call all the time. He felt better.

The bike shot him 50 kilometers down the dreamlike length of X toward Sol in a few minutes. A lot faster than the people inside do their traveling, he thought . . . and Sol was dim ahead.

Almost recklessly he broke into X again, through an airlock near the prow. At this end of the forcefield strip hung a gigantic block and tackle that would give a vast mechanical advantage to a few hundred people pulling against an anchor, when it came time for them to start the massive hull moving toward Sol once more.

He looked in almost unnoticed at a nursery, small children in the care of a few women. He thought one of the babies saw him and laughed at him as he watched through a hole in a bulkhead where a conduit had once passed.

“What is it?” asked Laura impatiently as he stepped exhausted out of the shower room aboard the Clem, wrapping a robe around him. He could see his shock suddenly mirrored in her face.

“People,” he said, sitting down. “Alive over there. Earth people. Humans.”

“You’re all right?”

“Sure. It’s just—God!” He told her about it briefly. “They must be descended from the survivors of the accident, whatever it was. Physically, there’s no reason why they couldn’t live when you come to think of it—even reproduce, up to a limited number. Plants for oxygen—I bet their air’s as good as ours. Recycling equipment for food and water, and the hydrogen power lamp still working to run it, and to give them light and gravity . . . they have about everything they need. Everything but a space-drive.” He leaned back with a sigh and closed his eyes. It was hard for him to stop talking to her. She was silent for a little, trying to assimilate it all. “But if they have hydrogen power, couldn’t they have rigged something?” she finally asked. “Some kind of a drive, even if it was slow? Just one push and they’d keep moving.”

Marty thought it over. “Moving a little faster won’t help them.” He sat up and opened his eyes again. “And they’d have a lot less work to do every day. I imagine too large a dose of leisure time could be fatal to all of them.

“Somehow they had the will to keep going, and the intelligence to find a way—to evolve a system of life that worked for them, that kept them from going wild and killing each other. And their children, and their grandchildren, and after that . . . ” Slowly he stood up. She followed him into the control room, where they stood watching the image of X that was still focused on the telescope screen.

“All those years,” Laura whispered. “All that time.”

“Do you realize what they’re doing?” he asked softly. “They’re not just surviving, turned inward on weaving and designing and music.

“In a few hours they’re going to get up and start another day’s work. They’re going to pull anchor number one back to the front of their ship and lower it. That’s their morning job. Then someone left in the rear will raise anchor number two. Then the main group will start pulling against number one, as I saw them doing a little while ago, and their ship will begin to move toward Sol. Every day they go through this they move about fifty kilometers closer to home.

“Honey, these people are walking home and pulling their ship with them. It must be a religion with them by now, or something very near it . . . ” He put an arm around Laura.

“Marty—how long would it take them?”

“Space is big,” he said in a flat voice, as if quoting something he had been required to memorize.

After a few moments he continued. “I said just moving a little faster won’t help them. Let’s say they’ve traveled 50 kilometers a day for two thousand years. That’s somewhere near 36 million kilometers. Almost enough to get from Mars to Earth at their nearest approach. But they’ve got a long way to go to reach the neighborhood of Mars’ orbit. We’re well out beyond Pluto here. Practically speaking, they’re just about where they started from.” He smiled wanly. “Really, they’re not far from home, for an interstellar ship. They had their accident almost on the doorstep of their own solar system, and they’ve been walking toward the threshold ever since.”

Laura went to the communicator and began to set it up for the call that would bring the navy within a few hours. She paused.

“How long would it take them now,” she asked, “to get somewhere near Earth?”

“Hell would freeze over. But they can’t know that anymore. Or maybe they still know it and it just doesn’t bother them. They must just go on, tugging at that damned anchor day after day, year after year, with maybe a holiday now and then . . . I don’t know how they do it. They work and sing and feel they’re accomplishing something . . . and really, they are, you know. They have a goal and they are moving toward it. I wonder what they say of Earth, how they think about it?”

Slowly Laura continued to set up the communicator.

Marty watched her. “Are you sure?” he pleaded suddenly.

“What are we doing to them?”

But she had already sent the call.

For better or worse, the long voyage was almost over.

The End

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
R is for Rocket
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Correspondence Course
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt
The Star Mouse (Full Text)
Space Jockey (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
He who shrank (Full Text).
Blowups Happen by Robert Heinlein
Uncle Eniar by Ray Bradbury
The Cask of Amontillado
Successful Operation

Poetry

The poem titled “The Road Not Taken” (full text) by Robert Frost.
This is the full text of the most wonderful story titled “The Road Not Taken”.  "The Road Not Taken" is an ambiguous poem that allows the reader to think about choices in life, whether to go with the mainstream or go it alone. If life is a journey, this poem highlights those times in life when a decision has to be made. Among English speakers and especially in North America it is a comparatively famous poem. Its central theme is the divergence of paths, literal yet also clearly figurative, although its interpretation is noted for being complex and (like the road fork itself) potentially divergent.
The poem "Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost.  This is a poem that I memorized in First Grade. I hated the memorization of poems, and cried and protested, to no avail. Later, when I was much older, I began to appreciate this memorization. Not only did it give me an appreciation of English language, but also of art and beauty.

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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What High School taught me about Diversity.

After the Obama Administration reworked American industry to promote “diversity” over merit, much of the Western world has followed suite and adopted his policy. It’s sort of a kind of mass mob acceptance of the latest fad that no one wants to be left out of.

You know, like “pet rocks”, “swallowing goldfish”, and “Deming Quality controls”.

It does pay well. LinkedIN advertises for “Diversity Directors” worth half a million dollars a year in salary.

Just about the same as all those “experts” for Y2K were paid, and those “experts” for “Global Cooling” back in the 1970’s. But really just how beneficial is it to the “bottom line”; the profitability of a given business? Is the hiring of a “diverse” selection of people better than hiring on merit?

If you believe all the hype, the answer is “yes”.

But somehow, I have this bad nagging feeling at the back of my head that says otherwise. Because “diversity” isn’t about wearing different clothes, or different skin tones, or believing different religious dogma. Diversity is a methodology that places no measurable criteria on the hiring requirements for a given position.

Diversity is a methodology that places no measurable criteria on the hiring requirements for a given position. 

Well, let’s look at this.

We will look at idea of “diversity” this from the point of view of what it was like in my High School years. For my High School was fully and intentionally diverse. And at that time, there were two techniques of grouping people. These techniques were by [1] merit, and [2] by random association. Or in other words; “diversity”. Thus we can compare diversity against merit as the criteria used in a selection process.

Now, the fact and truth is that "diversity" is just a code word for a scheme to provide an avenue to move African-Americans into positions of power all through American industry and institutions. 

That was why it was started, and the unspoken truth of why it exists.

High School

High School, and Elementary school for that matter, was always about equal doses of Diversity selection criteria, and criteria by merit.

High School, and Elementary school for that matter, was always about equal doses of Diversity selection criteria, and criteria by merit.
High School, and Elementary school for that matter, was always about equal doses of Diversity selection criteria, and criteria by merit.

Diversity selection was simply random groupings of children by arbitrary means. The most common way by the first letter of your last name. (I know this well, as that is how I always ended up sitting at the back of the classroom.) On rare occasions we would be organized by height, or some other arbitrary factor.

Which is, more or less, exactly the same thing as “diversity”. Which is the utilization of other characteristics aside from merit to rank and classify people.

Grading of students

However, when it came to grades, students were classified by merit. That being such that the best performing students obtained the highest grades. This was not only true in the class, but also in terms of the sports.

Cheerleaders were selected in their abilities to memorize and fit within the cheer-leading routines.

Athletes and football (and basketball) team tryouts determined who would become “letter-men”, and who would play what role in the games and sports that the High School would participate within. If you couldn’t perform, meet the requirements, or score, you would (more often than not) end up sitting on the bench most of the season.

Grouping of students

During class, sometimes the students would “form groups”.

More often than not, these groups were formed by random convenience. Members of each group would consist of some of the smarter kinds in the class and some of the stupidest. Some would have jocks and others would have princesses. Some would have nerds, and some would have metal heads. They would be just as diverse as you could possible imagine.

Now, in every single case, this is how it always worked out…

  • One or two of the most popular kids would take over the group.
  • The smartest nerds or high-performers would do the vast majority of the work.
  • The rest of the group would “slide by”.

In groups, the tendency was for the group to share the credit for the work of a precious few. At no time would there be any exceptions.

Occasionally, you might have a group with a combination of the high-performers, the nerds, and the “smart kids”. Who, of course would always win the award for the best performing group.

Occasionally, you might have a group with a combination of the high-performers, the nerds, and the "smart kids". Who, of course would always win the award for the best performing group.
Occasionally, you might have a group with a combination of the high-performers, the nerds, and the “smart kids”. Who, of course would always win the award for the best performing group.

There would also be groups, by the “luck of the draw” would end up with the lazy, low performing, and marginal students. These would end up never winning any awards or appreciation for what ever effort they put into the project they were assigned.

There would also be groups, by the "luck of the draw" would end up with the lazy, low performing, and marginal students. These would end up never winning any awards or appreciation for what ever effort they put into the project they were assigned.
There would also be groups, by the “luck of the draw” would end up with the lazy, low performing, and marginal students. These would end up never winning any awards or appreciation for what ever effort they put into the project they were assigned.

Formation of teams in sports

When I attended school, we had these events called “try outs”. There, a group of 50 or so kids would “try out” for a position on one of the many sports teams that the school had. You needed to “try out” and prove yourself valuable and worthy for the team. After all, there might only be some 20 slots available for you, and there were 50 people vying for those spots.

I grew up in the 1960's and the 1970's where the movie "Dazed and Confused" took place. That was my life.
I grew up in the 1960’s and the 1970’s where the movie “Dazed and Confused” took place. That was my life.

Member were selected by ability and skill. Those students with the best throwing arms ended up being Football quarterbacks. The fastest swimmers got to take lead roles in water sports, and the students that could hit the ball furthest got to play baseball.

The only people who wore seatbelts in the 1970s must’ve worked for  NHTSA. Manufacturers had been installing them in cars since 1968 when  they were ordered to by the federal government, and from that point  forward, car builders and policymakers tried everything to get people to  use them. First was just a gentle reminder on the dash. Then there was a  light on the dash. Then a light and a buzzer. Then a buzzer that  wouldn’t turn off, so you pulled the fuse, or you wrapped the seatbelt  behind you instead of just clicking it over your body the way the  manufacturer intended. 

It wouldn’t be until the 1980s until states encouraged seatbelt use. In  1993, that all started to change as California passed the nation’s first  seatbelt law that made not wearing one a primary violation, meaning you  could be stopped and ticketed just for not wearing one, rather than  having to be stopped for a more serious violation first. 

No one cared about the color of their skin, their family background, how smart they were, or whether their parents made enough or too little money. It was based on merit, and only those with merit in their respective fields could participate in the games.

No one cared about the color of their skin, their family background, how smart they were, or whether their parents made enough or too little money. It was based on merit, and only those with merit in their respective fields could participate in the games
No one cared about the color of their skin, their family background, how smart they were, or whether their parents made enough or too little money. It was based on merit, and only those with merit in their respective fields could participate in the games

I know. I was pretty terrible at sports. I couldn’t dribble for the life of me, and my ability to hit the baseball with a bat was hit or miss. Though, I was a pretty mean-little crab-soccer player. Yes, so instead of playing sports, I ended up working after school. First in the coal mines and then in the steel mills. Not to mention stock clerk and Gas station attendant.

It’s called life.

Those that could play ball well, got all the girls and had a lively time on the weekends. Those that couldn’t ended up working during our free time.

Modern contemporaneous examples

You can see examples in public and in industry on the effects of selecting membership by diversity as opposed to merit.

Here we have Detroit. It’s been a champion of diversity for decades now…

Detroit has been championing diversity hiring at all levels since well into the 1970's.
Detroit has been championing diversity hiring at all levels since well into the 1970’s.

Shanghai, in contrast, has been hiring by merit for at least fifty years. You can see what happens when people are in positions of power through merit.

Shanghai, China has been filling positions in government through merit for at least fifty years. You can see what happens when people who are in control, know well what they are doing.
Shanghai, China has been filling positions in government through merit for at least fifty years. You can see what happens when people who are in control, know well what they are doing.

Baltimore, USA is another example of how diversity hires can affect the overall standard and quality of life in a given community. Here we see a typical Baltimore community that has been managed by diversity hires for a good two decades…

Baltimore has been promoting using diversity criteria for at least two decades. you can well see how successful it has been.
Baltimore has been promoting using diversity criteria for at least two decades. you can well see how successful it has been.

Here is Hangzhou Bay Bridge China’s Hangzhou Bay Trans-oceanic Bridge is one of the masterpieces of modern architecture. It is the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world – 36 kilometres – and comes with a price tag of 11.8 billion yuan (US$1.70 billion). It was designed and built by the best engineers and designers in China. Each one obtained their positions through merit.

Hangzhou Bay Trans-oceanic Bridge is one of the masterpieces of modern architecture. It is the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world - 36 kilometres.
Hangzhou Bay Trans-oceanic Bridge is one of the masterpieces of modern architecture. It is the longest sea-crossing bridge in the world – 36 kilometres

Here is an American pedestrian overpass walkway in Florida designed and built by diversity hires. It was designed, and constructed by a group of mostly-female diversity hires. It collapsed on it’s very first day of use. This is in Florida, USA.

Newly built pedestrian walkway designed and built by diversity hires collapses in Florida.  Six people died and ten others were injured when the 174-foot span of the FIU pedestrian bridge collapsed.
Newly built pedestrian walkway designed and built by diversity hires collapses in Florida. Six people died and ten others were injured when the 174-foot span of the FIU pedestrian bridge collapsed.

Conclusion

Just because a mob of people believe something, and it is well-promoted in the media, does not make it true. At one time, people believed tomatoes were poisonous, and that bathing caused sickness, and that Epstein killed himself. All of which were false.

Diversity hires will ALWAYS perform poorly when compared to hires based on merit.

If I ever need to have open-heart surgery, I want the best doctor available. I do not want to have surgery performed on me by a slacker who fell asleep during heart-surgery class.

Some cool links on diversity

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Some of my favorite links and browser bookmarks.
Here are just some pretty decent websites, bookmarks, URL's and sites that I would like to share. I think that there is something here for everyone. These, in my mind, are the "cream of the crop" of underappreciated websites, and some places that you all might want to visit.
Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
The history of how Australia obtained Sheilas; the story of The Lady Juliana, The 18th-Century Prison Ship Filled With Women.   This is the story of the Lady Juliana. This was a special ship designed to convey female convicts from England to Australia. The idea was that a boat load of female convicts would happily link up with a colony of convicts in Australia. Thus making everyone very, very happy, and reform the colony in New South Wales.
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Gaslighting
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet.
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The poem “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

This is a poem that I memorized in First Grade. I hated the memorization of poems, and cried and protested, to no avail. Later, when I was much older, I began to appreciate this memorization. Not only did it give me an appreciation of English language, but also of art and beauty.

The sound of a poem, even when it isn’t read out loud, comes through with repetition. The beauty of a poem, even when it’s not accompanied by a picture, comes through with imagery. And the meaning of a poem, even if it’s not about us, comes through when the writer makes it personal. 

-Awesome Stories

I have an intern who is in her Masters studying English. She never heard of this poem or the poet. Can you believe that? What is she learning instead?

I do not know.

The poem “Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
R is for Rocket
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Correspondence Course
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt
The Star Mouse (Full Text)
Space Jockey (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
He who shrank (Full Text).
Blowups Happen by Robert Heinlein
Uncle Eniar by Ray Bradbury
The Cask of Amontillado
Successful Operation

Poetry

The poem titled “The Road Not Taken” (full text) by Robert Frost.
This is the full text of the most wonderful story titled “The Road Not Taken”.  "The Road Not Taken" is an ambiguous poem that allows the reader to think about choices in life, whether to go with the mainstream or go it alone. If life is a journey, this poem highlights those times in life when a decision has to be made. Among English speakers and especially in North America it is a comparatively famous poem. Its central theme is the divergence of paths, literal yet also clearly figurative, although its interpretation is noted for being complex and (like the road fork itself) potentially divergent.

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some of my favorite links and browser bookmarks.

Here are just some pretty decent websites, bookmarks, URL’s and sites that I would like to share. I think that there is something here for everyone. These, in my mind, are the “cream of the crop” of underappreciated websites, and some places that you all might want to visit.

My first up is a major personal favorite. I could spend hours flipping though the photos here…

Shorpy

Shorpy.com is a vintage photography site featuring hundreds of thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s. The site is named after Shorpy Higginbotham, a teenage coal miner who lived 100 years ago.

Shorpy.com  is a vintage photography site featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s.
Shorpy.com is a vintage photography site featuring thousands of high-definition images from the 1850s to 1950s.

What is really cool about this site is that you can see what things were like “back in the day”. The visions of everyday life, the buildings, the cars, and the people are just wonderful to browse and explore.

It often carries me back to a simpler time…

Fall 1911. "The village street -- Lee, Massachusetts."
Fall 1911. “The village street — Lee, Massachusetts.”

All the photos are in glorious clarity.

Most are black and white, but some are in color. Additionally, super high resolution photos are available for you to obtain, and put on your wall if you want. It’s a fantastic resource, and super fun. Not to mention, a great way to reconnect with our past.

Here’s another photo…

A tough-looking group and their Essex sedan somewhere in Northern California in 1929. From a box of negatives found in a thrift store.
A tough-looking group and their Essex sedan somewhere in Northern California in 1929. From a box of negatives found in a thrift store.

And the photographs of the buildings are absolutely astounding. Seriously. Why in good-Gods name would these structures be demolished back in the 1960’s and 1970’s? What were people thinking?

New York circa 1910. "Bird's eye view of new Pennsylvania Station." Demolished in 1963.
New York circa 1910. “Bird’s eye view of new Pennsylvania Station.” Demolished in 1963.

The Woodpile Report

Update 28APR21. Ol' Remus passed on. The website is still up but it hasn't been update in months. FYI.

From the beautiful photos to some thought-provoking articles. We go to the Woodpile Report. It’s glorious.

Here’s what it’s all about, from o’ Remus himself…

Woodpilereport.com is an entirely  private information service that is my sole property made available to  others as a form of free personal expression under my de jure Preamble  Citizen’s right as later guaranteed in the First Article in Amendment to  the Constitution. 

Woodpilereport.com is not a “public accommodation”  and it is preemptively exempt from any forced or coerced accommodation,  via legislation or bureaucratic interpretation thereof or any dictate,  directive, or decree by any agency of government or by any NGO or by any  individual under any future “Fairness Doctrine” or similar charade. 

I  reserve the right to refuse service - to wit: to refuse posting,  linking, or mention of anyone or anything, at my sole discretion - to  any person, agency, corporation, or other entity.

Woodpile Report is from the  Hermetic School of websites. There is no advertising, no partnerships,  log-ins, popups, subscriptions, print version, Disqus, feedback section,  tip jar or shop. There are no trackers, cookies, LSOs, analytics or  widgets. Posted links are cleansed of superfluous identifiers. 

The woodpile report is a wonderful weekly report by ol’ Remus.

He collects and reads the news and articles from all over the internet. Ones that he finds interesting, he places a paragraph or two and his opinions plus a link. These articles are what are of interest to him, and most lie outside the mainstream media.

As such, each week is a great cross section of alternative (non-mainstream) thought on the internet. There are great links to such diverse topics from canning, to history of old radios, to prepping, and opinions on modern American politics.

It’s all worth a visit. Don’t you know.

Like this here blog, it’s not a well-known and heavily trafficked site, and I think that part of what adds to it’s charms. Go ahead and take a visit, you will not be disappointed.

Here’s an example, as this screen capture can plainly show…

Screen Capture from The Woodpile Report.

But, you know, I do like to look at art and enjoy the beauty and the meaning that lies with in. As such I often go to the…

The Art Renewal Center

The Art Renewal Center was founded by an Art Lover who was perplexed why museums and the “art industry” rejected the works of the old masters.

He wondered why, instead, they embraced the “new, progressive” art without form and meaning. (Such things like turd in a jar of olive oil, and a painting of dog foot prints on a white background.)

So, he built this website, and to his surprise, discovered that others, much like himself, were appalled at the treatment of the old artists, and the embrace of new “junk art”. He discovered that there is a world full of people, much like himself, that loved art for the sake of beauty and poetry. They, like himself, felt deprived as modern “progressive” thought was eradicating real beautiful art from society…

The Art Renewal Center was founded by an Art Lover who was perplexed why museums and the "art industry" rejected the works of the old masters, and embraced the "new, progressive" art without form and meaning.
The Art Renewal Center was founded by an Art Lover who was perplexed why museums and the “art industry” rejected the works of the old masters, and embraced the “new, progressive” art without form and meaning.

He created a website that collected all the known beautiful works of art in the world, and offers them up for free to view and appreciate.

This is what he has to say about the Art Renewal Center…

Leading the revival of realism in the visual arts, the Art Renewal  Center (ARC), a 501(c)(3), non-profit, educational foundation, hosts the  largest online museum dedicated to representational art and includes works by the old masters, 19th century, and 21st Century Artists as well as articles, letters and other online resources. 

The ARC is the foremost and only vetting service for representational art schools  ensuring that the teaching curricula and quality of teacher and student  work meet our strict standards to become ARC Approved™. 

The ARC also  runs the ARC Salon Competition,  which is the largest and most prestigious competition in the world for  realist artists painting, sculpting and drawing today with eleven  categories and thousands of works competing, culminating in a traveling live exhibition of many of the winning works. 

The ARC works with other ARC Allied Organizations™, artist groups, museums, and publications to become a central news hub for the 21st Century Representational Art Movement. 

Read the ARC Philosophy written by ARC Chairman, Frederick C. Ross, to learn why ARC is so passionately dedicated to representational art. 

Well, we know now, that the “new, modern, progressive art” is just a mechanism for transferring enormous sums of money. It does this back and forth between the global oligarchy so as to avoid the tracking and banking (read taxation) issues that the rest of us have to deal with.

Never the less, those of us that appreciate art, want to be exposed to it, and share our love of art with others. Thus this site.

Here, you can find many, many beautiful works of art done in the classical sense. This is the stop for beauty and art.

It’s got everything from the old masters…

Napoleon I and the King of Rome at Saint-Cloud by Francois Flameng , a member of the Academic Classical artist technique.
Napoleon I and the King of Rome at Saint-Cloud by Francois Flameng , a member of the Academic Classical artist technique.

To new up and coming artists…

The International Figure Painting Competition is one of a series of competitions held by NTD Television. It is a platform for artists all around the world, to showcase their talents and jointly revive the traditional art of realistic oil painting.
The International Figure Painting Competition is one of a series of competitions held by NTD Television. It is a platform for artists all around the world, to showcase their talents and jointly revive the traditional art of realistic oil painting.

I cannot stress how profoundly important this website is. As such, I am including ” The Philosophy of ARC”. If you agree with this philosophy, perhaps you might want to browse the collections and make a donation and become a member. They are doing great work. I’ll tell you what.

Fine art at its best has the power to move one to tears, or  grab your sensibilities and rivet you in the moment with an overwhelming  sense of beauty and excitement. 

People often report the sensation of  cold chills going up and down their spine. It may be the rare work that  accomplishes this, but for those who have had this experience, many have  credited it as the stimulus that set them on a personal lifetime quest;  whether as an artist, collector or art historian. 

Other human  activities can create a similar experience, whether in poetry,  literature, dance, theatre, or music, but it is the experience of beauty  in fine art and beauty and its relationship to fine art that is the  focus of this essay.         

If you are reading this, in all probability you are one of the millions of art lovers who in the 21st  Century are disillusioned with the Modernist paradigm which for more  than a century has been the dominant way the concept of art has been  taught and presented in nearly all institutions of higher learning  throughout the world.         

If you are like us, it seems more than a little self-evident  to you that works of art have infinitely more to say and communicate if  they portray the real world, or use figures and objects from the real  world even when portraying fantasies and dreams. 

You experience such  "realist" works as infinitely more successful than any Modernist works.  

The success of Modernism seems like a form of mass insanity, a  nightmarish anomaly from which we pray the art world will finally soon  awake.
         
For most of the 20th century, people who felt as  we do, found themselves attracted to fine art in most if not all cases  from having been to museums and fallen in love with a number of works of  art created in the 15th through 19th centuries.  

You may have wanted to become an artist yourself and were channeled by  advisors into fine art courses taught in the art departments of colleges  and Universities where you were promptly told that your instincts were  all wrong. 

That such works had a place in their time, but that modernist  works were far superior. 

What followed was an attempt to change your  attitudes and beliefs and to convince you that works, which commemorated  the destructions of some aspect of what used to be traditional Realism  were the only worthwhile artworks and concepts.        
 
You were never told that these "educators" had never  themselves learned any of those skills needed by all artists during  prior centuries, and so were completely bereft of any of the experience,  skills and knowledge for which you had assumed your tuition bills would  be paying. 

They made you believe that they all could draw and paint but  had chosen to abandon those skills due to some great epiphany.    
     
If you were true to yourself and your feelings and beliefs,  you probably left that "art" department and considered doing something  else with your life. 

Many of you went into commercial art. 

Others became  art historians, but most found other fields entirely. A rare few of you  searched out and found one of a handful of ateliers who actually still  taught the methods of the old masters. To the best of our knowledge  there were 7 such ateliers in 1980 and all of them were taught by  students of  Pietro Annigoni  or  Ives Gammell 1. Both atelier masters could trace their training seamlessly to the 19th century and beyond.         

By 2002 when the Art Renewal Center decided to add to their  website a section of ARC Approved® Ateliers schools the number of such  schools had grown to 14 with each having between 5 and 15 students. 

We  added a map of the world where it became very easy to identify all the  schools and to find the nearest one to any local. Within a few months  the numbers of students able to find these schools started to grow  geometrically, and today, just 14 years later, there are over 100  schools teaching the atelier style training and thousands of students.2 
        
So, what do all these students and educators see that  Modernists do not? And why is it that most educated people who are not  part of the art world seem to also prefer traditional realism?3

It is the purpose of this essay to answer that question in  the clearest most direct way possible, and to thereby help establish for  artists and the consumers of art, a set of criteria by which they can  judge works of art, understand their own preferences, and if needed, to  arm them with the facts, concepts and information to deal with the  modernists, educators and apologists who are constantly attacking and  denigrating the skills and subjects which enable fine art. 

The skills  like with literature, poetry and theatre that enable us to communicate  our shared humanity.  

We will accomplish this by delineating a simple  way to understand and define what fine art is. We will also look in  particular at the aesthetic foundation of fine art as it evolved during  the 19th Century and the Modernist juggernaut which almost lead to its complete suppression during most of the 20th  Century. 

The following information also advances criteria by which to  view artists and movements, and help to determine why some works of art  are experienced as beautiful and successful and why others seems to fall  flat or are even boring. 

It will hopefully also satisfy the needs of  practicing artists to determine what type of art and subjects they wish  to explore and which skills and techniques they will need to learn and  practice in order to accomplish this. 

As in all education, individuals  should ultimately decide for themselves what makes sense and what is  nonsense or babble.      

CONTINUED HERE    
The visual fine arts of drawing, painting and sculpture are best understood as a language ... a visual language. Very much like spoken and written languages, it was developed and preserved as a means of communication. And very much like language it is successful if communication takes place and unsuccessful if it does not.
The visual fine arts of drawing, painting and sculpture are best understood as a language … a visual language. Very much like spoken and written languages, it was developed and preserved as a means of communication. And very much like language it is successful if communication takes place and unsuccessful if it does not.

Fark

Fark is what Free Republic should of evolved into, instead of being bought-out by progressive liberal interests. People post links and a sort introductory paragraph, and others comment on it. It’s clean and just getting started. It has a lot of potential, and a healthy dose of sarcasm.

On Fark, people post links and a sort introductory paragraph, and others comment on it.
On Fark, people post links and a sort introductory paragraph, and others comment on it.

Archie McPhee

This is a store, but… what a store!

Boys like being mischievous and playing tricks. It’s a boy thing I suppose. (I just don’t remember any girls doing these types of things. Though, I am quite sure that they were involved in more cerebral activities playing “head games” with other girls.) Boys like to see the physical results of their torment. They want to see girls react in horror to a toad. They want to light firecrackers outside people’s bedrooms, and set bags of dog poo on fire on people’s porches.

Advertisement for toys and gadgets inside a vintage comic book.
When I was growing up, we would find these types and kinds of advertisements inside of our comic books and magazines. They would be full of all kinds of fun things to amuse a young child.

I remember as a boy how we had somehow come across a gadget catalog that was advertised in the back of one of the comic books that we would often read. You know the kind. Pages and pages of things like magic tricks, pranks, books on Black Magic, fake (pellet shooting) fingers, trick buzzers, masks and ”pea shooters”. As a kid, we loved it and wanted everything. We must have circled over a hundred items in that catalog.

I think that it is an interest of growing children to expand and explore these tricks and devices of prankster humor. Too bad that the days of yodeling pickles are long gone. Indeed, you need to leave the ultra-sanitized United States to find some politically incorrect playthings for your child to enjoy.

…Or, do you?

Let me introduce the reader to the Archie McPhee store.

This is the kind of place that is a young boy’s wet dream. Inside the store (physical as well as the Internet version) are absolutely enormous assortments of useless pursuits. They’ve got boxing nuns and bacon scarves. They’ve got yodeling pickles and finger hands. Don’t know what a finger hand is, well then go HERE to find out. They have stuff that only a madman could think of.

“Less talk. More monkey.”

How about rotisserie chicken flavored candy canes, emergency inflatable toast (why?), rubber chickens (big and small), and propeller beanies. Ah we all wanted one of these as a kid. They have trick gum, Holy toast, and bags of busted businessmen. They carry x-ray glasses (yes, you wanted these didn’t you?) and hypno-glasses, wind-up lederhosen, and strange action figures to include horrified movie victims. They’ve got everything from plastic arks, to singing fish. It’s a childhood delight. This store brings out the little kid in all of us. It’s many things, but above all, it’s the go-to place for plastic poop.

I just can’t stop! It’s such an amazing place.

“If there’s a heaven for the deranged, Archie McPhee is probably it.”

-Josh B in Seattle

How about vinderhosen, an emergency Santa kit, crime scene sandwich bags,  and classic disguises. What about underwear for your pet squirrel, inflatable turkey (again, why?), and contemporaneous prayer cards. Here is probably the only place where you can find cool World War II occupation money. How about medical posters from India, they’ve got religious themes, cat themes, food themes, mad scientist themes, and themes that defy description. I am not at all kidding!

The Archie McPhee store in Seattle.
There is a store in Seattle. The rest of us are limited to visiting their (most comprehensive) website.

Do yourself a favor. Let your child buy something from this store. Give them ten dollars to spend, and wait while they go back and forth, back and forth deciding what to buy. It’s all in good fun.

SOTT (Signs of the Times)

Sott is another collection of articles. This one tends to be on the intellectual side, with occasional forays into human interest.

Sign of the times screen capture.
Sign of the times screen capture.

Collective Evolution

Here are some great articles that are out of the mainstream, yet do not fall under “doom porn”, ‘Global Warming” or “Reptilian Government secrecy”. LOL. Maybe some of the articles are out there, but they do make you think. And at that, it’s a good thing.

Collective Evolution
Collective Evolution.

Leenks

Leenks is another website where links are posted. These links tend to be entertainment links, and includes porn, memes, and articles worth a passing glance. If you are bored, this site will give you a ting or two to look at.

Leenks screen capture.
Leenks screen capture.

Ace of Spades

This is a reasonably decent conservative site with great links and organization. I tend to visit it from time to time to get my American-insanity political fix.

Ace of spades screen capture.
Ace of spades screen capture.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
The history of how Australia obtained Sheilas; the story of The Lady Juliana, The 18th-Century Prison Ship Filled With Women.   This is the story of the Lady Juliana. This was a special ship designed to convey female convicts from England to Australia. The idea was that a boat load of female convicts would happily link up with a colony of convicts in Australia. Thus making everyone very, very happy, and reform the colony in New South Wales.
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Gaslighting
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet.
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Painting “The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus or The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers Stone” by Henning Brand.

Hennig Brand was obsessed with discovering the philosopher’s stone. Alternatively known as the elixir of life, the philosopher’s stone promised its finder eternal life and the ability to turn common metals into gold.

Brand grew to believe that human urine offered a gateway to the elixir of life. This was typical alchemical thinking – alchemists hoped to better understand eternal life through studying the properties of body fluids.

Brand collected thousands of liters of urine from his neighbors. Although someone doing this today would probably be regarded as screwy, it was a common practice to collect urine in earlier times – it had plenty of uses, such as fertilizing crops, softening leather, and cleaning your teeth!

In 1669, in Hamburg, Brand evaporated the urine he collected to yield a black sludge. He left this to mature until worms started appearing in it. He heated the sludge with sand, yielding hot gases and oils, which he condensed using cold water. The final substance to condense was a white solid. This was phosphorus. (Human urine contains significant quantities of dissolved phosphates.)

At first Brand called the remarkable new substance ‘cold fire’ because it glowed in the dark. He then named it phosphorus, which is Greek for ‘bringer of light.’ He was the first named person in history to discover a new chemical element.

The image herein was painted long after Brand’s lifetime by the British artist Joseph Wright in 1771. Its wordy title is: The Alchymist, in Search of the Philosopher’s Stone, Discovers Phosphorus, and prays for the successful Conclusion of his operation, as was the custom of the Ancient Chymical Astrologers. The painting shows white phosphorus glowing with exaggerated intensity. White phosphorus naturally produces a rather dim green glow.

The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus or The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers Stone
The Alchemist Discovering Phosphorus or The Alchemist in Search of the Philosophers Stone

I find this work of art amazing.

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth
Ania Tomicka
Bob Dob
Chris Peters
David Lebow.
Jason Limon.
Iva Troj.
Kisung Koh.
Kayla Mahaffrey.
Peter Ferguson.
Kai Carpenter.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Kai Carpenter.

Kai Carpenter is a freelance illustrator and painter based in New York, United States who has created magnificent artworks with traditional gouache painting… His list of clients includes Wizards of the Coast, LEGO Systems, Anderson Design Group, and Harper Collins publishing. Let’s take a look at some of his amazing artworks styled in an Art Deco flair, these adventurous scenes are sure to inspire and bring a smile.

Kai Carpenter 0
Kai Carpenter is a freelance illustrator and painter based in New York, United States who has created magnificent artworks with traditional gouache painting.

Kai Carpenter’s elegiac scenes mine the myth and history coursing beneath the whole of human consciousness. Occupying the nebulous space between waking and dreams, his subjects hover just at the edge of our collective understanding.

Like figures emerging from mist, they are both seen and unseen, their presence more intuited than perceived. Carpenter’s portrayal of nature and the human form harkens back to the very roots of Western culture.

He embraces the ideals of the Romantic, offering art as a conduit through which we are meant to both contemplate and celebrate the mysteries of life.

Kai Carpenter 00
Kai Carpenter’s Paintings are driven by a love of drama and beauty —and their convergence in a great visual story. The Seattle-based Carpenter’s work is jam-packed with color and storytelling, so much so that you might assume these works are digitally created.

W hen it came to painting of Redwood National Park for an ambitious centennial art book, Kai Carpenter decided to “turn the saturation way up”—use bright exaggerated colors—with his palette of oil paints.

The Brooklyn-based illustrator hadn’t set foot in the park, but had been commissioned to paint a stylized rendition of it, along with 11 other parks.

After speaking with people who had been there and studied photos of the park, Carpenter thought a bold color scheme would convey the sheer size of the place. He conjured a giant redwood, drenched in red and burgundy, towering above two small travelers, with more giant trunks receding into the background.

Kai Carpenter 000
Early advertising posters from the 20th Century were pasted onto walls to grab public attention as busy people passed by. By necessity, good poster composition included bold color, contrast, iconic imagery and easy-to-read type.

“I was going for the look of old lithographs with those great color palettes,” he says. He referred to the early 20th century art deco travel posters, which featured happy couples exploring Technicolor versions of far-off locales: Visit Fascinating Fiji! Fly with Trans World Airlines! “And I was taking a lot of cues from the parks themselves, they’re already so vibrant.”

Kai Carpenter 0000
“I was going for the look of old lithographs with those great color palettes,” he says. He referred to the early 20th century art deco travel posters, which featured happy couples exploring Technicolor versions of far-off locales.

Five years ago, Joel decided he wanted to pay homage to the iconic Works Progress Administration posters, created between 1938 and 1941 for 14 national parks to encourage Americans to explore the great outdoors.

He started recruiting artists he’d worked with through his Nashville firm, Anderson Design Group, who generally specialize in that retro travel poster style. To achieve that look, most ADG art is hand-lettered and drawn or painted before it’s given a final polish on the computer. 

Kai Carpenter 5
Inspired by the stylized art of the early 20th century, artist Kai Carpenter has created original paintings that turn drama and beauty into great visual stories. Vibrant colors and well-crafted lettering add to the calendar’s retro style.

“We studied the WPA posters to make sure we were plowing new ground,” Joel says. “Luckily, the parks are so vast that it wasn’t hard to find new landscapes and color palettes.”

All 71 works in the book draw from styles that characterize the Golden Age of Poster Art: rich colors, hand-lettered text, timeless scenes like a cowboy in Saguaro National Park or a couple canoeing through the Everglades.

Kai Carpenter 6
“We studied the WPA posters to make sure we were plowing new ground,” Joel says. “Luckily, the parks are so vast that it wasn’t hard to find new landscapes and color palettes.”

Three weeks after completing all of the paintings in September, Carpenter and his older brother road-tripped from Brooklyn to Seattle, stopping over two weeks at three of the parks he’d painted: Zion, Yosemite, and Redwood.

“I was worried I was going to be devastated that I butchered all of these places,” he says. “But I was surprisingly happy with how they turned out.” Especially the Redwood poster: “I’m really glad that I went bananas with the colors,” Carpenter says. “It feels that way when you’re there. Like you’re maybe seeing something you’re a little too small to be seeing.”

Kai Carpenter 7
The Seattle-based Carpenter’s work is jam-packed with color and storytelling, so much so that you might assume these works are digitally created. However each one is effortlessly painted in oil on canvas.

The Seattle-based Carpenter’s work is jam-packed with color and storytelling, so much so that you might assume these works are digitally created. However each one is effortlessly painted in oil on canvas. 

Kai Carpenter 8
Five years ago, Joel decided he wanted to pay homage to the iconic Works Progress Administration posters, created between 1938 and 1941 for 14 national parks to encourage Americans to explore the great outdoors.

Inspired by the stylized art of the early 20th century, artist Kai Carpenter has created original paintings that turn drama and beauty into great visual stories. Vibrant colors and well-crafted lettering add to the calendar’s retro style.

Kai Carpenter 9
Kai Carpenter’s Paintings are driven by a love of drama and beauty —and their convergence in a great visual story.

KAI CARPENTER’S oil paintings use archetypal imagery to explore psychological themes. Drawing on a variety of influences both ancient and contemporary, his work invokes the storytelling ethos of myths, legends and fairy tales to express emotional realities native to dreams and memory.

Kai Carpenter 10
“I was worried I was going to be devastated that I butchered all of these places,” he says. “But I was surprisingly happy with how they turned out.”

Inspired by a collection of vintage citrus labels…

… reflect the art styles seen throughout 1900-1950 with an influence of the Works Progress Administration.

This period included persuading Americans to travel to the great outdoors as advertised by the automobile and railroad industries, and later influenced by the art boom of the depression.

Kai Carpenter 11
Kai Carpenter’s Paintings are driven by a love of drama and beauty —and their convergence in a great visual story.

Kai Carpenter’s Paintings are driven by a love of drama and beautyand their convergence in a great visual story. The Seattle-based Carpenter’s work is jam-packed with color and storytelling, so much so that you might assume these works are digitally created.

Kai Carpenter 12
This period included persuading Americans to travel to the great outdoors as advertised by the automobile and railroad industries, and later influenced by the art boom of the depression.

Early advertising posters from the 20th Century were pasted onto walls to grab public attention as busy people passed by. By necessity, good poster composition included bold color, contrast, iconic imagery and easy-to-read type.

Kai Carpenter 13
His amazing artworks are styled in an Art Deco flair, these adventurous scenes are sure to inspire and bring a smile.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth
Ania Tomicka
Bob Dob
Chris Peters
David Lebow.
Jason Limon.
Iva Troj.
Kisung Koh.
Kayla Mahaffrey.
Peter Ferguson.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The most popular song in China this fall; Wolf Disco.

What is the hottest song in China right now? Apparently, a little rap song called Wolf Disco has been making waves, with its take on what life was like in the late ’90s and early 2000s in China. Journalist Yew Lun Tian (from ThinkChina) is reminded of her own teenage years, as she delves into what makes this song so popular.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Wolf Disco by Gem is the hottest song in China this year. (At least according to sohu.com.)

野狼 Disco
野狼 Disco

Journalist Yew Lun Tian comments on this song…

A Singaporean friend recently asked me about this year’s hottest song in China. And a friend from China quickly shouted out the answer: “Wolf Disco (野狼 Disco)!”

The song gets in your head with its refreshing blend of Cantonese singing, dialogue in northeastern dialect, and Mandarin rap.

I felt really out of touch, and checked out the song as soon as I got home. I listened to it once — and was hooked. I wanted to hear it again and again. No cliched description could do justice to the penetrating power of this cutting edge cultural icon. A netizen put it well: “This is an amazing song that gets to your head and heart, and leaves you wanting more.” 

野狼 Disco

Wolf Disco by Dong Baoshi, stage name Gem, describes a man (“Uncle”) hitting the dance floor, showing off and trying to pick up young girls at the disco, circa late ’90s to early 2000s. The song gets in your head with its refreshing blend of Cantonese singing, dialogue in northeastern dialect, and Mandarin rap. Gem’s earnest but seriously inaccurate Cantonese pronunciation when singing “Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home” is especially funny, as he nails the endearing side of mainland Chinese when they try their hardest to sing Cantonese songs despite being no good at the language.

The song’s catchy beat and easy but evocative lyrics get people hooked; you just feel like dancing along. “To the left, draw a rainbow/and to your right, draw a dragon”; “Everybody put your head down/both hands to the front, wave them around”; “Hands to your head, move your hips/like you’re fretting”. 

野狼 Disco – 1

For the mainland Chinese audience who exercised en masse in primary school, went for social dances as adults, and joined square dances in the neighborhood during their twilight years, those lines would be somewhat uncanny. Listening to Wolf Disco is more satisfying than watching Psy’s Gangnam Style. No wonder some netizens say their three- or four-year-old kids have Wolf Disco as their morning alarm.

The song does not avoid or overuse the Hong Kong element, but uses it  to just the right degree for entertainment purposes, while not being  political.

With its brand of nostalgia, the song touches the hearts of the older crowd. The imagery of the dance hall and the references to Hong Kong popular culture capture the collective memories of a generation of mainland Chinese, as well as Chinese in the Greater China diaspora, including myself. “Slicked back hair, beeper call, 007 on the dance floor/Northeast b-boys in the house”, conjures up the hairstyles, beepers (known as pagers in Singapore), and dance moves of the time, while “Aaron Kwok hands across your chest” brought me back in a second to my pimple-faced days, singing and dancing along to his hit song Love You Endlessly (《对你爱不完》).

野狼 Disco – 2

Many years ago, the hip young people in northeast China had their fun in entertainment joints that played Cantonese songs; big shots found triad bosses in Hong Kong movies cool, like the way Uncle “feels like Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs” (see note below) when picking up girls.

When Gem was producing Wolf Disco, Hong Kong was not yet in full-blown chaos. The song does not avoid or overuse the Hong Kong element, but uses it to just the right degree for entertainment purposes, while not being political. For example, just as Deng Xiaoping previously declared “horses keep running, carry on dancing” to say nothing will change under “one country, two systems”, Uncle says “the song keeps playing, carry on dancing” to hide his embarrassment at failing to pick up girls.

Wolf Disco is so popular not just because it brings together borrowed elements from Hong Kong and Western music genres such as rap, but because it uses these external elements to authentically tell the story of a young person from northeast China. Gem calls this combination “garlic-flavoured vaporwave” — vaporwave is a Western music subgenre that combines ’80s and ’90s music with electronic sounds.

野狼 Disco – 3
Many netizens say the epitome of cheesiness is authenticity, and they  are moved by the song’s depiction of a young person who does not lose  their authenticity.

And then, while most people would take off their jackets when hitting the dance floor, Uncle’s “leather jacket stays on, don’t matter the heat”. In an interview with GQ, Gem explained that in northeast China, a leather jacket is cool, and a symbol of manhood. Some people only have that one presentable item of clothing — you can be wearing rags on the inside, but the outside has to look smart. This shows the face-loving quality of people from northeast China, and how tough it was for them when the economy in northeast China cooled down.

Many artistic elites have analyzed this phenomenal song and noted the concept of a “cheesy high” (土嗨); the presentation and/or content may be cheesy, but it still gets people high. Many netizens say the epitome of cheesiness is authenticity, and they are moved by the song’s depiction of a young person who does not lose their authenticity.

Gem has created a cultural phenomenon with Wolf Disco. (Internet)
Gem has created a cultural phenomenon with Wolf Disco. (Internet)

The way I see it, while many people go to high-end bookstores and restaurants and share photos with friends to hint that they are more westernized, artistic, and sophisticated, it works better to be plainly and unabashedly cheesy. While many stores try and attract customers with empty sales pitches, people like it better when one is not shy to show and laugh at their own lack of sophistication. When people are swept up by globalization and get nervous or anxious that their foreign language skills are inadequate, it is extremely satisfying to hear the language of one’s hometown loud and proud on the big stage. 

In 2019, a year of anniversaries, official publicity is full of big stories and lofty emotions, people would welcome a bit of unsophisticated, ordinary food for the soul.

野狼 Disco

Download the full MV

Here is the full music video of this song. It is subtitled in English and Cantonese. And it is an enjoyable video that tells the story of a young man’s dreams in NE China. It’s around 40-something MB, so grab a beer and let it download in full.

Lyrics

心里的花我想要带妳回家

Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home

在那深夜酒吧哪管它是真是假

In the late night bar, don’t matter if it’s real or fake

请妳尽情摇摆忘记钟意的他

Sway your body, forget the one you love

妳是最迷人噶 妳知道吗

You’ve caught my eye, don’t you know

这是最好的节拍 这是最爱的节拍

Here comes the beat, it’s the best, the favorite

前面儿哪里来的大井盖 我拿脚往里踹

Is that a manhole cover? Gonna kick it aside

如此动感的节拍 非得搁门口耍帅

I’m feeling the beat, just look cool outside the door

我蹦迪的动线上面儿怎么能有障碍

Clear the way, I’m heading to the floor

大背头 bb机 舞池里的007

Slicked back hair, beeper call, 007 on the dance floor

东北初代霹雳弟 dj瞅我也摇旗

Northeast b-boys in the house, DJ staring, I’m trippin’

不管多热都不能脱下我的皮大衣

Leather jacket stays on, don’t matter the heat

全场动作必须跟我整齐划壹

Everybody gotta follow my moves

来 左边 跟我一起画个龙

To the left, draw a dragon

在妳右边 画一道彩虹

To your right, draw a rainbow

来 左边 跟我一起画彩虹

To the left, draw a rainbow 

在妳右边 再画个龙

And to your right, draw a dragon

在妳胸口上比划一个郭富城

Aaron Kwok hands across your chest

左边儿右边儿摇摇头

To the left, to the right, just shake your head

两个食指就像两个钻天猴

Two fingers like sky rockets

指向闪耀的灯球

Point ’em at the disco ball

心里的花我想要带妳回家

Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home

在那深夜酒吧哪管它是真是假

In the late night bar, don’t matter if you’re real or fake

请妳尽情摇摆忘记钟意的他

Sway your body, forget the one you love

妳是最迷人噶 妳知道吗

You’re the hottest, don’t you know

玩儿归玩 闹归闹 别拿蹦迪开玩笑

Play around, mess around, but get serious when you’re dancing

左手一晃真像样 右手霹雳手套

Wave my left hand, glove on my right

金曲野人的士高都给我往后稍一稍

Disco savages take a step back

没事儿不要联系我 大哥大这没信号

Don’t be calling me, no signal on my bigass phone

小皮裙 大波浪 跳起舞来真像样

Leather mini skirt, major curves, looking so fine with her moves

喷的香水太香 好想和她唠一唠

Her perfume delicious, wanna get up close

感觉自己好像梁朝伟在演无间道

Feeling like Tony Leung in Infernal Affairs

万万没想到她让我找个镜子照一照

She tells me to look in a mirror, major burn

手照摇 舞照跳

My hands keep waving, carry on dancing

假装啥也不知道

Act like I know nothing

没有事 没有事 看着天空笑壹笑

I’m fine, I’m fine, I smile up at the sky

使劲儿扒了扒了前面儿的士高的小黄毛儿

Slapping the disco noob in front of me

气质再次完全被我卡死别跟我闹

Throwing all my shade on him, don’t mess with me

来 全场 一起跟我 低下头儿

C’mon everybody put your head down

左手右手往前游

Both hands to the front, wave them around

捂住脑门儿晃动妳的垮垮轴

Hands to your head, move your hips

好像有事儿在发愁

Like you’re fretting

心里的花我想要带妳回家

Flower of my heart, I wanna take you home

在那深夜酒吧哪管它是真是假

In the late night bar, don’t matter if you’re real or fake

请妳尽情摇摆忘记钟意的他

Sway your body, forget the one you love

妳是最迷人噶 妳知道吗

You’re the hottest, don’t you know

来 左边 跟我一起画个龙

To the left, draw a dragon

在妳右边 画一道彩虹

To your right, draw a rainbow

来 左边 跟我一起画彩虹

To the left, draw a rainbow 

在妳右边 再画个龙

And to your right, draw a dragon

在妳胸口上比划一个郭富城

Aaron Kwok hands across your chest

左边儿右边儿摇摇头

To the left, to the right, just shake your head

两个食指就像两个钻天猴

Two fingers like sky rockets

指向闪耀的灯球

Point ’em at the disco ball

来 全场 一起跟我 低下头儿

C’mon everybody put your head down

左手右手往前游

Both hands to the front, wave them around

捂住脑门儿晃动妳的垮垮轴

Hands to your head, move your hips

好像有事儿在发愁

Like you’re fretting

时时刻刻妳必须提醒妳自己

You gotta tell yourself

不能搭讪

Not to get friendly

搭讪妳就破功了 老弟

Otherwise you’re a goner, buddy

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

The US involvement in the HK "Democracy Now" movement.
How the USA can win a trade war.
Chinese reaction to the Trump Tariff Wars.
China's Global Leadership
Popular Music of China
The logistics of relocating a facotry from China back to the USA.
Hong Kong and the NED CIA operations.
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Why are Americans so angry?
Evolution of the USA and China.
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year
Trade Wars
How to get work in China if you have HIV.

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions
A polarized world.
America's sunset.
Trump trade wars  - Phase One
Asshole

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Some Fun Videos

Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.

Some fun videos of China - 1
Fun Videos of Asia - 2
Fun videos of Asia - 3
Fun videos of Asia - 4
Fun Videos of Asia - 5
Fun videos of Asia - 6
Fun videos of Asia - 7
Fun videos of Asia - 8
Fun videos of Asia - 9
Fun videos of Asia - 10
Fun videos of Asia - 11
Fun videos of Asia - 12
Fun videos of Asia - 13
Fun videos of Asia - 14
Fun Videos of Asia - 15
Fun videos of Asia -16
The best way to cook marshmallows.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Peter Ferguson.

“Meticulously painted, Ferguson’s darkly humorous narratives evoke an achronological magical realism, featuring composite cities and landscapes comprised of everything from from 16th Century European towns to early 20th century Americana (or Canadiana as the case may be),” the gallery says.

1
“Meticulously painted, Ferguson’s darkly humorous narratives evoke an achronological magical realism, featuring composite cities and landscapes comprised of everything from from 16th Century European towns to early 20th century Americana (or Canadiana as the case may be),”

“Combining grandiose narratives of the great ages of exploration with a distinctly paranormal bent, Ferguson’s work subtly hovers the line between fantasy, surrealism, and realism without ever falling into either of them fully. Norman Rockwell meets H.P. Lovecraft.”

2
“Combining grandiose narratives of the great ages of exploration with a distinctly paranormal bent, Ferguson’s work subtly hovers the line between fantasy, surrealism, and realism without ever falling into either of them fully. Norman Rockwell meets H.P. Lovecraft.”

Peter Ferguson was born in Montreal, Canada in 1968. He set his sights on an illustration career after seeing the movie Star Wars, deciding that he would like to draw spaceships.

After graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in 1992, he began his career as a professional illustrator, using oil as his medium of choice.

3
After graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in 1992, he began his career as a professional illustrator, using oil as his medium of choice.

Peter’s brilliant ability to conceptualize clients’ ideas as well as his distinctive characters gave him a running start in the editorial and book publishing markets. Since signing with Three in a Box Inc, Peter’s career has grown steadily.

His clients include Marvel Comics, The Royal Shakespeare Company, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, Mojo, Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times. Peter has also illustrated the covers of the popular Sisters Grimm collection.

4
Peter’s brilliant ability to conceptualize clients’ ideas as well as his distinctive characters gave him a running start in the editorial and book publishing markets. Since signing with Three in a Box Inc, Peter’s career has grown steadily.

Peter is also a highly sought after fine artist, who’s vividly imaginative works read like a lucid dream of an alternate history, recalling the aesthetic of Dutch Renaissance painting, old National Geographic photography, and 18th century British Naval history.

5
Peter is also a highly sought after fine artist, who’s vividly imaginative works read like a lucid dream of an alternate history, recalling the aesthetic of Dutch Renaissance painting, old National Geographic photography, and 18th century British Naval history.

Meticulously painted, Ferguson’s darkly humorous narratives evoke composite cities and landscapes from 16th Century Europe and early 20th century small town Americana (or Canadiana as the case may be).

7
Meticulously painted, Ferguson’s darkly humorous narratives evoke composite cities and landscapes from 16th Century Europe and early 20th century small town Americana (or Canadiana as the case may be).

Combining grandiose narratives of the great ages of exploration with a distinctly paranormal bent, Ferguson’s work subtly hovers the line between fantasy, surrealism, and realism without ever falling into either of them fully.

8
Combining grandiose narratives of the great ages of exploration with a distinctly paranormal bent, Ferguson’s work subtly hovers the line between fantasy, surrealism, and realism without ever falling into either of them fully.

Luminously painted and complex in their composition, his paintings retain an air of both melancholy and wonder at days gone past.

9
Luminously painted and complex in their composition, his paintings retain an air of both melancholy and wonder at days gone past.

He has an enormous gallery on line with all sorts of interesting and amazing art. You can find it HERE (it opens up in a separate link).

Ferguson’s work subtly hovers the line between fantasy, surrealism, and realism without ever falling into either of them fully.

11
Ferguson’s work subtly hovers the line between fantasy, surrealism, and realism without ever falling into either of them fully.

Canadian painter Peter Ferguson has been working had a career as a professional illustrator since graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in 1992. He has been very successful over the years and has had many clients such as Marvel Comics, The Wall Street Journal, and has illustrated the covers of the Sisters Grimm collection.

10
Canadian painter Peter Ferguson has been working had a career as a professional illustrator since graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto in 1992. He has been very successful over the years and has had many clients such as Marvel Comics, The Wall Street Journal, and has illustrated the covers of the Sisters Grimm collection.

His personal work is an imaginative mixture of the fantastical and bizarre. The fusion of technical skills and imaginative depictions of characters within the work seems to indicate that strong cultivations of narratives are the premise behind his extraordinary oil paintings.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth
Ania Tomicka
Bob Dob
Chris Peters
David Lebow.
Jason Limon.
Iva Troj.
Kisung Koh.
Kayla Mahaffrey.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Kayla Mahaffrey.

Kayla Mahaffey “KaylaMay” is a Chicago based artist specializing in illustration and fine art. In 2012, she attended the American Academy of Art where she gained knowledge and strengthened her skills.

Her work speaks about how living in our world can be tough and how making the best of it can simply be done by holding on to each other.

Kayla Mahaffey "KaylaMay" 1
Her work speaks about how living in our world can be tough and how making the best of it can simply be done by holding on to each other.

Her inspiration is the world around her and her colorful paintings contain hints of whimsy and realism that tell a story of inner thoughts and society issues that sometimes go unheard. Being born and raised on the South side of Chicago, only ignited her love for all things art.

Kayla Mahaffey "KaylaMay" 3
Her inspiration is the world around her and her colorful paintings contain hints of whimsy and realism that tell a story of inner thoughts and society issues that sometimes go unheard.

Seeing the struggle and the support from the community made her work evolve to a concept that is personal to her. She continues to further her technique and creativity in her field in order to paint a beautiful picture of a new world for those who live in it.

Kayla Mahaffey "KaylaMay" 2
Seeing the struggle and the support from the community made her work evolve to a concept that is personal to her.

‘Off to the Races’ narrates the ever-changing road of life. As we travel through life we experience the daily trials and tribulations that help shape us into the people we are today. During this journey we may end up hitting some bumps or may experience some rough terrain, but it’s how we deal with those situations that make the difference.

Kayla Mahaffey "KaylaMay" 5
As we travel through life we experience the daily trials and tribulations that help shape us into the people we are today. During this journey we may end up hitting some bumps or may experience some rough terrain, but it’s how we deal with those situations that make the difference.

We are all on the journey to greatness, each individual racing to the finish line in hope of reaching goals and prosperity. With the race may come with it mistakes and regret, but not taking part in the race leads you nowhere.

Kayla Mahaffey "KaylaMay" 4
We are all on the journey to greatness, each individual racing to the finish line in hope of reaching goals and prosperity. With the race may come with it mistakes and regret, but not taking part in the race leads you nowhere.

Playful portraits by Chicago-based artist and illustrator Kayla Mahaffey. Using a combination of whimsy and realism, Mahaffey explores the inner thoughts and personal issues that so often go unheard, creating work that reflects both the struggle and support she sees within her own community:

Kayla Mahaffey "KaylaMay" 7
Playful portraits by Chicago-based artist and illustrator Kayla Mahaffey. Using a combination of whimsy and realism, Mahaffey explores the inner thoughts and personal issues that so often go unheard, creating work that reflects both the struggle and support she sees within her own community.

“Living in our society can be tough and most of the time we have to make the best of it. A wild imagination can take you so far, but at the end of the day we need to realize and observe the world around us. And the world around us is where I find my inspiration to paint.”

Kayla Mahaffey "KaylaMay" 8
“Living in our society can be tough and most of the time we have to make the best of it. A wild imagination can take you so far, but at the end of the day we need to realize and observe the world around us. And the world around us is where I find my inspiration to paint.”

Her work speaks about how living in our world can be tough and how making the best of it can simply be done by holding on to each other.

Kayla Mahaffey "KaylaMay" 6
Her work speaks about how living in our world can be tough and how making the best of it can simply be done by holding on to each other.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth
Ania Tomicka
Bob Dob
Chris Peters
David Lebow.
Jason Limon.
Iva Troj.
Kisung Koh.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Kisung Koh.

Kisung Koh uses his art as a means to opening gateways into nature’s spiritual dimensions, exploring the intimate connections he has formulated with wildlife during his lifetime. Over the course of years, this South Korean has had the honor of coming in close contact with many wild animals within their natural habitats and has become aware of these incredibly strong energies.

Kisung Koh 0
Kisung Koh uses his art as a means to opening gateways into nature’s spiritual dimensions, exploring the intimate connections he has formulated with wildlife during his lifetime.

“I love animals and natures like anyone else and they are all my inspirations. My parents had wanted me to live in somewhere full of trees and the beauties of nature because they knew I was extremely fascinated of being in nature. In my childhood I lived in a small town of South Korea surrounded by mountains and rivers and spent most of the time in nature and farms. “

“My parents had wanted me to live in somewhere full of trees and the beauties of nature because they knew I was extremely fascinated of being in nature. In my childhood I lived in a small town of South Korea surrounded by mountains and rivers and spent most of the time in nature and farms. “

“One day, I was walking in a forest myself in early morning. It was very silent and calm. While having a nice walk, I had a chance to see a deer family very close. I can’t explain how I felt at the time because it’s unspeakable. It was just truly amazing. “

Kisung Koh 2
“One day, I was walking in a forest myself in early morning. It was very silent and calm. While having a nice walk, I had a chance to see a deer family very close. I can’t explain how I felt at the time because it’s unspeakable. It was just truly amazing. “

” It’s probably easier to say that I saw not only deer but also beautiful spirits around them. In my opinion, there is nothing more beautiful than when you actually see a wild animal in nature. However, we rarely see them where they are supposed to be and just don’t know how amazing they are to be alive.  “

Kisung Koh 3
” It’s probably easier to say that I saw not only deer but also beautiful spirits around them. In my opinion, there is nothing more beautiful than when you actually see a wild animal in nature. “

Kisung Koh (Canada) uses his art to open gateways into nature’s spiritual dimensions and explores the intimate connections he has built with wildlife during his lifetime. Drawing heavily on the memories and dreams provided to him by the sheer awe inspiring spectacles he has witnessed in the great outdoors, Koh pays tribute by creating imagery that is suggestive of the metaphysical energies and bonds which can exist between two living creatures, even when interacting from a distance.

Kisung Koh 4
Kisung Koh (Canada) uses his art to open gateways into nature’s spiritual dimensions and explores the intimate connections he has built with wildlife during his lifetime.

Over the years, Koh has had the honour of coming in close contact with many wild animals in their natural habitats, and has become aware of these energies, which have manifested themselves to him with an ethereal majesty. Through his art, Koh captures the essence and beauty of the natural world, and reminds us that our relationships with it are…

Kisung Koh 5
Over the years, Koh has had the honour of coming in close contact with many wild animals in their natural habitats, and has become aware of these energies, which have manifested themselves to him with an ethereal majesty.

Kisung Koh was born during the year of 1985, in South Korea. He lived in his home country until 2006 when his entire family moved to Toronto, Canada. Based in a new nation with an entirely new culture, Kisung Koh needed some time to adjust. He eventually received a BAA in Illustration from Sheridan College, ON, Canada, receiving these honors in the year of 2012.

Kisung Koh 6
Kisung Koh was born during the year of 1985, in South Korea. He lived in his home country until 2006 when his entire family moved to Toronto, Canada. Based in a new nation with an entirely new culture, Kisung Koh needed some time to adjust.

Since then, he has been developing his technical skill and establishing a reputation within the art community of Canada. From the moment he became a professional artist, Koh has exhibited his art around the world and has become a much sought after name within the international scene. From day one, he has been finding inspiration in animals and natures, fascinated by their grace and harmony.

Kisung Koh 7
From the moment he became a professional artist, Koh has exhibited his art around the world and has become a much sought after name within the international scene. From day one, he has been finding inspiration in animals and natures, fascinated by their grace and harmony.

Kisung Koh became noticed by art pundits thanks to his dreamy and imaginative places that featured animals, packed with mysterious spirits that make the depicted creatures seem safe. Such a practice culminated over time and is a result of a deep fascination with nature that followed this illustrator his whole life:

There  is nothing more beautiful than when you actually see a wild animal in  nature. However, we rarely see them from where they are supposed to be  and just don’t know how amazing they are to be alive. 

Exploring the spiritual potential of the wild and its stoic inhabitants, Koh draws comparable connections between the animal and human plights.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth
Ania Tomicka
Bob Dob
Chris Peters
David Lebow.
Jason Limon.
Iva Troj.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Iva Troj.

Award-winning contemporary artist Iva Troj creates fine art pieces which seamlessly merge Renaissance aesthetics and techniques with postmodern praxis. Her intensely detailed images achieve astonishing tricks of light and shade, as practiced by the great masters while incorporating dreamlike scenes which challenge cultural norms.

Exhausted by a society in which women often feel vulnerable, threatened, or powerless, Troj recasts the fairer sex as powerful creatures, freed from the “oppressive male gaze” and placed within Edenic settings where they can revel in their own beauty and potential. Blending abstraction with figuration, the natural world with the urban landscape, dream with reality, Troj’s breathtakingly beautiful artworks achieve something truly unique, both in terms of aesthetics and concept.

Iva  Troj 0
Blending abstraction with figuration, the natural world with the urban landscape, dream with reality, Troj’s breathtakingly beautiful artworks achieve something truly unique, both in terms of aesthetics and concept.

“In many ways, I am what you get when you throw ancient Sakar Mountain wisdom failing to adapt to totalitarian ideas right into the pits of post-industrial capitalism. My grandmother’s village used to be in the no man’s land surrounding the Turkish and Greek/Bulgarian border during the communist regime.

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“In many ways, I am what you get when you throw ancient Sakar Mountain wisdom failing to adapt to totalitarian ideas right into the pits of post-industrial capitalism.

It used to be totally isolated from the industrial world and there was no school or a library (or pollution). And somehow my grandma knew what Wabi-sabi was. I asked her about it and she told me a story about a lion tamer. Beauty is ”imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” she said. I am not sure how I came to find the clues to Japanese culture.

Iva Troj 1
It used to be totally isolated from the industrial world and there was no school or a library (or pollution). And somehow my grandma knew what Wabi-sabi was. I asked her about it and she told me a story about a lion tamer. Beauty is ”imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete,” she said.

She never talked about China or Japan, “intimacy”, or appreciation of the ”ingenuous integrity of natural objects”. That was not how she spoke. Instead of using fancy words she showed me things and explained their beauty to me. Her house and her garden were full of evidence of beautiful imperfection.”

Iva Troj 6
She never talked about China or Japan, “intimacy”, or appreciation of the ”ingenuous integrity of natural objects”. That was not how she spoke.

In 2016, Troj was named Contemporary Art Excellence Artist of the Year and, in 2013, was the winner of the Towry Best of East England Award. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and is permanently represented in Shoreditch, London.

ARTIST STATEMENT

As a child, I was taught to question one-dimensional narratives, which grew from a survival technique to a development technology of the artistic self. The foe I so often portray almost always represents the normalization of one or more dysfunctional discourses, such as the victimization of the female gender, religious dogma and racial inequality.

Iva Troj 2
As a child, I was taught to question one-dimensional narratives, which grew from a survival technique to a development technology of the artistic self.

Like many artists, I discuss personal experiences. At the same time, I strive to escape the self, an urge that partially stems from crossing borders in the last years of the cold war.

Iva Troj 5
Like many artists, I discuss personal experiences. At the same time, I strive to escape the self, an urge that partially stems from crossing borders in the last years of the cold war.

Living through cultural starvation in my childhood has made me restless and hungry for honest creativity with an almost childlike curiosity. In that sense, nothing I discuss is strictly personal. Sexual abuse, violence, trauma… I may present an unusual perspective on these topics stemming from the self, but only as an outset. The work needs to keep changing, relive itself, challenge its own conformity.

Iva Troj 4
Living through cultural starvation in my childhood has made me restless and hungry for honest creativity with an almost childlike curiosity.

There is a point in every artist’s career when one is tempted to choose a tested and proven path. I’m constantly trying to resist this temptation by containing the “paths” in series where I can explore a motif or a theme without succumbing to the comforts of one visual style. The artists that I look up to for inspiration have one thing in common – constant renewal.

Traditional elements are very central to my body of work. It’s not so much a need to keep the style ”traditional”, but rather the way I speak.

Iva Troj 7
The artists that I look up to for inspiration have one thing in common – constant renewal.

I grew up in a communist country. We sang songs about machines being superior to man and praised modernity while destroying nature and killing creativity and the human spirit with it. At the same time, my summers were spent in the mountains with my grandmother who had hanging gardens, thousand stories and no TV. These two realities are inseparable in my mind.

The painting technique I mostly use resembles the Flemish method of layering thin veneers of paint between layers of varnish. I start with pencils, pastels and varnish. After that I paint a lighter layer with acrylics and finish with a couple of thicker layers using a combination of mediums, often acrylics and oils, but sometimes gold leaf and inks.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth
Ania Tomicka
Bob Dob
Chris Peters
David Lebow.
Jason Limon.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Jason Limons.

Jason Limon is a painter who has exhibited his artwork in galleries across the U.S. and in parts of Europe. He has had recent solo exhibitions in New York City, Chicago and Albuquerque. His current art follows stories based on mythological creatures and paranormal cryptids portrayed with a hint of humor with a dose of strangeness. You can often see his characters brought to life in dimensional form through his complex sculptures. Jason lives and works in San Antonio, Texas with his wife and two daughters.

Jason Limon 0
His current art follows stories based on mythological creatures and paranormal cryptids portrayed with a hint of humor with a dose of strangeness.

“The main thing that drove me to finding my place in the fine art world was watching and admiring what other artists were doing.”

” I used to spend my days sitting behind a computer working in the graphic design biz and almost every single day I’d scour through illustration annuals and art books we had lying about in shelves and piled on our desks. I was always amazed at the great new things many of these artists were creating.”

Jason Limon 1
“The main thing that drove me to finding my place in the fine art world was watching and admiring what other artists were doing.”

” For the longest time it was a place where I always felt I belonged, but was frightened to jump into seeing as I have a family to support and all. Over time these feelings just became stronger and I grew really tired and felt restricted by the computer. “

Jason Limon 2
For the longest time it was a place where I always felt I belonged, but was frightened to jump into seeing as I have a family to support and all.

“I decided to dive in head first in 2007 and began painting full time and all good things just snowballed from there. It’s been a tremendous honor and pleasure to be able to be in the exhibits I’ve been in. I do look forward to seeing what more this avenue has in store for me.” – Jason Limon (Murphy Design)

Jason Limon 3
I decided to dive in head first in 2007 and began painting full time and all good things just snowballed from there.

Over the last few years when I would lay down to sleep at the end of the day the first thoughts that would run through my head were about death. I’m not a morbid person, nor am I afraid of death. The thoughts were typically quick, then I’d do my best to understand what they meant, but would usually fall asleep before even coming close to an answer.”

Jason Limon 4
Over the last few years when I would lay down to sleep at the end of the day the first thoughts that would run through my head were about death.

“They went on for a little over two years and I noticed just a few months back that they went away. With hindsight and looking at it altogether I took it as a signal to rethink how I express my feelings through art. “

Jason Limon 5
With hindsight and looking at it altogether I took it as a signal to rethink how I express my feelings through art.

“Most of what I am saying in these paintings is personal and revolve around fear, confusion and the fragility of life – about not having answers and trying to move beyond these ominous feelings. As dark as it all may sound, it has shed a positive light on how I create. “

Jason Limon 6
Most of what I am saying in these paintings is personal and revolve around fear, confusion and the fragility of life – about not having answers and trying to move beyond these ominous feelings.

“In most of this work I have also reintroduced the application of typography as well as the usage of multiple panels in a painting; elements that I enjoyed early on, yet had faded with time.

Jason Limon 7
In most of this work I have also reintroduced the application of typography as well as the usage of multiple panels in a painting; elements that I enjoyed early on, yet had faded with time.

My images almost always seem to portray doom and gloom! I’ve been shoveling through my brain, tossing out some darkness and trying my hardest to stick to absorbing positive thoughts.

Jason Limon 8
My images almost always seem to portray doom and gloom! I’ve been shoveling through my brain, tossing out some darkness and trying my hardest to stick to absorbing positive thoughts.

In the process I was thinking about my fifteen year old daughter poking fun of my typical dad concerns, complaints and worries. Sometimes my only response to her is “You Will See“. It’s sometimes tough to keep fighting off problems and remain strong inside.

Of course, we’ve all been through trouble. We deal with it and keep moving ahead. She’s had a different life than I have and I do my best to see her happy, but just a suggestion to keep in mind: It is not that easy to keep going. Hold on to hope through it all as you go forth

Jason Limon 9
In the process I was thinking about my fifteen year old daughter poking fun of my typical dad concerns, complaints and worries. Sometimes my only response to her is “You Will See”.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth
Ania Tomicka
Bob Dob
Chris Peters
David Lebow.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Chris Peters.

To understand Chris Peters. We need to understand his dream.

TensorDream began as a deep learning neural network whose code was modified by artist Chris Peters to assimilate the vast complexity of landscape imagery. Over a three day period, the neural network studied the composition and palette of thousands of landscape paintings before finally achieving an understanding of their gestalt. Now, in seconds, the A.I. can synthesize and propose new compositions.

These landscapes have an odd, alien quality but are still remarkable given that the software began tabula rasa, an algorithm filled with nothing but the ability to self-learn. The entirety of its knowledge came from the set of digital images presented to it – a collection of paintings curated by Peters, emphasizing the masters of American Tonalism and their dreamy images of primal ground and sky.

Chris Peters 0
These landscapes have an odd, alien quality but are still remarkable given that the software began tabula rasa, an algorithm filled with nothing but the ability to self-learn.

The A.I. Muse produces digital images, but a digital image is not a painting and a computer printout of the same image is still not a painting, no matter how faithfully rendered. The artist is needed to translate the idea into a language that human beings recognize as theirs. It seems essential that what began as a painting must end as a painting.

When an artist stands in front of a canvas, brush in hand, they are trying to understand the world by making an image of it. A photograph can record that work, which can inspire another painting. A photograph of a painting can even inspire a computer, as it has in the TensorDream project, but only a new physical painting can complete the cycle. From reality, through a series of simulacra and back to reality. And so the exchange between Artist and (AI) Muse continues.

Chris Peters 1
The A.I. Muse produces digital images, but a digital image is not a painting and a computer printout of the same image is still not a painting, no matter how faithfully rendered. The artist is needed to translate the idea into a language that human beings recognize as theirs.

The final task for the artist was to paint, but it was no easy task. Even for an artist with Peters’ rigorous training, fleshing out the machine’s idea was fraught with difficulty. Where to start? How to establish a point of view? How to render an alien world filled with familiar features? Eventually, Peters began to understand some of the neural network’s logic, and still later to accept and embrace it. Only at this point could Peters bring to the A.I. what it was missing – the knowledge of the real world, the world of sky and trees and water.

In a wholly innovative collaboration between man and machine, new paintings have been manifested that promise us a glimpse into a world at once familiar and fantastic – our world, in fact, as seen by a new intelligence of our own design. By painting this alien view, Chris Peters is beginning to understand the mind of the AI Muse. By looking at these works, we can too.

Chris Peters 5
The final task for the artist was to paint, but it was no easy task. Even for an artist with Peters’ rigorous training, fleshing out the machine’s idea was fraught with difficulty. Where to start? How to establish a point of view? How to render an alien world filled with familiar features?

Chris Peters’ formal education began in Seattle where he received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Washington. Later he trained for three years at the Gage Academy of Art, learning the drawing and painting methods of the 19th-century academic tradition.

Chris Peters 3
Eventually, Peters began to understand some of the neural network’s logic, and still later to accept and embrace it. Only at this point could Peters bring to the A.I. what it was missing – the knowledge of the real world, the world of sky and trees and water.

His work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the private collection of Academy Award winning director Guillermo del Toro and he recently completed a solo show at Sullivan Goss Gallery. He’s had eight previous solo shows at galleries in Santa Monica, Santa Fe, and New York City. His collectors include many members of the music and film industries.

Chris Peters 4
His work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art as part of the private collection of Academy Award winning director Guillermo del Toro and he recently completed a solo show at Sullivan Goss Gallery.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth
Ania Tomicka
Bob Dob

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Bob Dob.

Bob Dob is the patron artist of everyone who will probably have Social Distortion playing at their wedding, assorted birthdays and their funeral. His colorful portraits of diminutive punk rockers, meanie mouseketeers, and pill, pot, cheese, paper bag and amp headed everymen, are instantly captivating, especially for those of us who can’t get through Ball and Chain without getting a little choked up.

Bobdob-1
Bob Dob is the patron artist of everyone who will probably have Social Distortion playing at their wedding, assorted birthdays and their funeral.

The Hermosa Beach native grew up in an area with plenty of punk rock graft and glory to be inspired by, and his craft, honed at the Otis College of Art and Design, is detailed and intricate without sacrificing warmth and feeling.

Bobdob-2
The Hermosa Beach native grew up in an area with plenty of punk rock graft and glory to be inspired by, and his craft, honed at the Otis College of Art and Design, is detailed and intricate without sacrificing warmth and feeling.

It feels like every portrait was done at sundown after a long day, or at sun up after a long night. Check out his website for more information and imagine how great one of his pieces would look above your JCM 800.

Bobdob-3
It feels like every portrait was done at sundown after a long day, or at sun up after a long night.

Bob Dob was born and raised in the once lazy beach town of Hermosa Beach California. After his child hood dream of becoming a pro baseball player was taken from him due to a battle with cancer he gravitated towards music and art. Playing in a punk band for 10 years named Lunacy, the exposure to the music scene in Los Angeles would have great influence on his art.

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Bob Dob was born and raised in the once lazy beach town of Hermosa Beach California. After his child hood dream of becoming a pro baseball player was taken from him due to a battle with cancer he gravitated towards music and art.

While focusing on music theory at a local community college Bob began taking drawing and painting classes. Eventually his interest in art took over and he transferred to Otis College of Art and Design in 1998 where he earned his Bachelors Fine Art Degree in illustration..

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After graduation in 2001 he freelanced working for such clients as The Fox Family Channel, Aflac, Kraft, Intel, The Village Voice, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Random House Publishing, and numerous editorial magazines.

After graduation in 2001 he freelanced working for such clients as The Fox Family Channel, Aflac, Kraft, Intel, The Village Voice, American Airlines, Southwest Airlines, Random House Publishing, and numerous editorial magazines.

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Playing in a punk band for 10 years named Lunacy, the exposure to the music scene in Los Angeles would have great influence on his art.
Bobdob-9
While focusing on music theory at a local community college Bob began taking drawing and painting classes. Eventually his interest in art took over and he transferred to Otis College of Art and Design in 1998 where he earned his Bachelors Fine Art Degree in illustration..
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Art by Bob Dob.
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Art by Bob Dob.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth
Ania Tomicka

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Ania Tomicka.

Ania Tomicka was born in 1985 in Łódz, Poland.

When she was only 9 she moved to Italy, where she started to draw seriously: manga at first and realistic things afterward. She attended an art institute and graduated in 2004. During the school years, she starts to paint with oil colors, a technique that soon to become her favorite. Hence she attended the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice where she found a lot of inspiration for her realistic and academic art. A year later she moved to Tuscany where she graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence. She focused her interest in more things like digital art and illustration.

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During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.
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During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.

She also completed her studies at the academy of digital arts NEMO NT where she gained the title of student of the year.

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During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.

Ania has always been interested in realistic, renaissance works. Her first loves are Salvador Dalí and Wojtek Siudmak’s big canvases, full of absurd and strange creations, painted in a divine way.

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During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.
Ania Tomicka 6
During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.
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During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.
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During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.
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During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.
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During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.
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During the school years, she started to paint in oil colors, a technique that soon became her favorite.

Buying an artwork

Please contact her agent if you would like to buy an original painting by Ania Tomicka or to be notified when there is some new art for sale.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole
Martin Wittfooth

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Martin Wittfooth.

Suggesting the future of the human existence without showing a single person, Martin Wittfooth creates allegorical oil paintings of majestic animals.

Excepting traditional techniques of the old Masters in combination with new approaches, his visual language reveals exceptional depth in both medium and content. Indicating the issue of climate changes, his mysterious and beautiful images convey the impression that something in this world is wrong.

Although absent, human subsistence is depicted with their rubbish remains, as junked car or demolished buildings, in the world given over to animals that encourage us to think about our place in it.

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Suggesting the future of the human existence without showing a single person, Martin Wittfooth creates allegorical oil paintings of majestic animals.

Born in Toronto, Wittfooth spent his childhood in Finland. He moved to his hometown to study where he earned his BAA in illustration from Sheridan College and then MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York. His work has been shown nationally and internationally and has been published in numerous relevant magazines, as Hi Fructose or New American Paintings.

Surpassing the illustrative genre, he entered the realm of modern masterworks, finding his inspiration in the 19th-century painters. Creating the familiar contents, he incorporates a feeling of dystopia and dilapidation in his post-apocalyptic vision and symbolism of using animals instead of humans as subjects.

Wittfooth underlines the possibilities of what could happen if people do not adopt some changes.

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Surpassing the illustrative genre, he entered the realm of modern masterworks, finding his inspiration in the 19th-century painters. Creating the familiar contents, he incorporates a feeling of dystopia and dilapidation in his post-apocalyptic vision and symbolism of using animals instead of humans as subjects.

His series of oil paintings named The Offering explore the theme of shamanism and its revitalization worldwide.

In accordance with its practice of researching altered states of consciousness in order to interact with the world spirit, Wittfooth asserts that those beliefs have an influence on people’s egos and materialistic obsessions, helping the connection with nature and other humans.

There are the traces of destruction in his paintings, as fires rage and oceans surge, but the creatures carry the surreal peacefulness, celebrating the existence, they represent the life-givers.

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In accordance with its practice of researching altered states of consciousness in order to interact with the world spirit, Wittfooth asserts that those beliefs have an influence on people’s egos and materialistic obsessions, helping the connection with nature and other humans.

Always been drawn to visual art, Wittfooth’s interests and tastes had passed through a lot of changes.

During the studies in New York, he had a chance to experiment with oils as medium and to reassess his personal ideas. Exploring his own paintings in series, he is trying to have a wider theme over the whole body of work.

Every painting is a piece of a puzzle, but all of them can speak individually, representing their own solo show. In series The Passions, Wittfooth borrowed tittles and composition from classical paintings and sculptures, processing the theme of blind faith and human martyrdom.

One of his favorite motifs, the fire, instead the symbol of destruction, here represents the substitution for halo.

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One of his favorite motifs, the fire, instead the symbol of destruction, here represents the substitution for halo.

Featuring creatures in unexpected environment, that deviate from the natural surrounding we used to, in Wittfoot’s paintings smog fills the sky and garbage and decay lay on the ground.

Small animals get the heroic role, while large ones represent the calmness and peacefulness. Aiming to induce the viewer to question and challenge which is taken for granted, he’s work investigate themes of industry and nature, human influence on environment, the collision of obsolete ideologies with modern fears.

His creative language uses the combination of symbolism, the juxtaposition of visual narratives and the displacement of expected realities.

Martin Wittfooth 2
Small animals get the heroic role, while large ones represent the calmness and peacefulness. Aiming to induce the viewer to question and challenge which is taken for granted, he’s work investigate themes of industry and nature, human influence on environment, the collision of obsolete ideologies with modern fears.

Martin Wittfooth is an artist whose paintings, drawings, installations, and sculptural works investigate themes of the intersection and clash of industry and nature, and the human influence on the environment.

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Martin Wittfooth is an artist whose paintings, drawings, installations, and sculptural works investigate themes of the intersection and clash of industry and nature, and the human influence on the environment.

Many of Wittfooth’s works explore the theme of shamanism — rituals and practices as old as our species — through which we have attempted to dialogue with nature: the nature outside ourselves and the nature within. His creative language uses the combination of allegory and symbolism to convey visual narratives.

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His creative language uses the combination of allegory and symbolism to convey visual narratives.

Martin Wittfooth was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1981. He currently splits his time between two studios — Savannah, Georgia, and the Hudson Valley. He earned his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2008.

Wittfooth’s work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Akron Art Museum in Ohio, and La Halle Saint-Pierre in Paris, with solo exhibitions in New York City, Los Angeles, Seattle, and Montreal. His paintings have also appeared in numerous publications.

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Martin Wittfooth was born in Toronto, Canada, in 1981. He currently splits his time between two studios — Savannah, Georgia, and the Hudson Valley. He earned his MFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City in 2008.

Wittfooth’s oil paintings explore disquieting themes of industry and nature, unhinged evolution, the clash of old ideologies with modern fears, and the growing shadow of the human footprint on the earth.

Set in atmospheric landscapes rendered over many paint layers on canvas, linen, or wood panels, these themes are realized through a combination of symbolism, the juxtaposition of visual narratives, and the displacement of expected realities.

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Set in atmospheric landscapes rendered over many paint layers on canvas, linen, or wood panels, these themes are realized through a combination of symbolism, the juxtaposition of visual narratives, and the displacement of expected realities.

The worlds created in Wittfooth’s paintings implore the viewer to question the status quo, to challenge that which is taken for granted, and to proceed with caution on our present course.

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The worlds created in Wittfooth’s paintings implore the viewer to question the status quo, to challenge that which is taken for granted, and to proceed with caution on our present course.

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.
Michael Tole

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Michael Tole.

Michael Tole is an American artist who was born in 1979. Michael Tole has had several gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Conduit Gallery. There have been many articles about Michael Tole, including ‘Photo-realism at Cain Schulte’ written by Kenneth Baker for San Francisco Chronicle in 2009.

Backwards and in Stiletto Boots appropriates the macho genre of hunting paintings by Peter Paul Rubens. In it I place Diana, goddess of the hunt, in a position of power and triumph, thus opening Rubens’s all male world to women. This has obvious corollaries in todays society as women have and are making a place for themselves in formerly male dominated fields. Diana is an ancient archetype of a woman…a goddess…achieving and surpassing any peer in a field dominated by men. Another aspect of the work deals with fashion, and the fact that women’s fashion tends to adorn at the expense of functionality. Therefore, like Ginger Rogers, women must do everything their male counterparts do, “Backwards and in high heels.” The wardrobe selections are appropriated from the 2018 Moschino spring/summer line.
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“A Death of Sardanapalus is a revisionist history in which I reimagine the fall of the last Assyrian king, famously portrayed by Delacroix, as it SHOULD have ended. In my reimagining, far from being passive victims, Sardanapalus’s concubines are about to perform a coup de gras on the wretched tyrant, without him suspecting a thing. Like so many men that have recently been toppled for their bad behavior toward women, Sardanapalus is about to suffer a vengeance spawned by his hedonistic appetites.”
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“The Concert appropriates and marries two disparate art historical references, Titian’s, The Flaying of Marsyas, and Barbara Kruger’s, You Construct Intricate Rituals Which Allow You to Touch the Skin of Other Men. This piece seeks to probe the source and nature of our discomfort with the nude male body. In our culture, the male body is rarely displayed as an object of beauty. When it is, it is automatically described as “homo-erotic.” To avoid our discomfort, male nudity must always be contextualized into a narrative of fighting, dying, struggling, or making. As Kruger says, “We construct intricate rituals,” to allow us to appreciate the male form. There is no male equivalent to the beauty pageant. “
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After ten years of prolific artistic production and exhibition around the country, Michael has taken the past four years to re-evaluate and re-invent his work,” a statement says. “This new work reflects his loss of innocence due to an increasing awareness of, and evolving understanding of American pop culture. This dawning awareness results from a reintroduction to pop music via his young daughters, his relocation to Tempe, AZ, and near proximity to Southern California.”
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This painting reacts to the John Berger quote: “Men act, women appear.” This truism has been demonstrated in Western art countless times over the past two millennia. Second wave feminists, in particular Linda Nochlin, have expounded upon how Western art has turned women into passive objects of delectation. This is “settled case law,” in my opinion, as in the opinion of most people. It is undeniable. However, the inverse of this truism has been little talked about…namely that Western art rarely allows the male figure to simply appear. The male figure, according to many art treatises, must always be active, virile, strong. The male body is valued for what it can do, not simply for what it is or how it appears. Among the few times the male figure is allowed simply to appear for aesthetic appreciation is when that male figure is dead or sleeping. Examples of this are Michelangelo’s, Dying Slave, Girodet’s, Endymion, any number of St. Sebastians and Pietas. This beautiful male nude is immobilized and dying, thus permitting him to express his aesthetic value for the first time. I suspect we must kill beautiful men to appreciate them aesthetically because society’s construct of masculinity includes the male body as perpetual threat. There are reasons for this, of course, but it should also be noted that our society’s ideal for the male form is a body capable of threat and forceful coercion, not passivity. I feel this complex social dynamic is worthy of conscious consideration.
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“This painting was inspired by a trio of young women I saw at Disneyland with their younger siblings as my wife and were taking our daughters there for the first time. Believe it or not, these outfits are relatively true to what they wore. I found this a surprising wardrobe choice for many reasons, not the least of which was that the sacrifices made for a certain kind of self presentation would seem to negate their own experiential enjoyment of the setting. Yet, the act of conspicuous display and self invention seemed quite in keeping with the Disney ethos. I have found this kind of personal display to be much more common here in Arizona and California than my home state of Texas, and so I have given much thought to the implications of this cultural difference, especially because, as modest Midwesterner, it makes me a bit uncomfortable. As a well indoctrinated second wave feminist, this culture of display has challenged many notions I previously held, and the questions it has posed for me regarding personal freedom, societal expectations, gender equity, the male gaze, female empowerment, subject/object duality and the potential pleasures and pitfalls for both parties, have had a profound influence on the rest of the work in this series. “

Links

Art Related Index

This is an index of art that I have found profound, interesting, beautiful or enlightening. In any event, I find that art soothes my soul. I enjoy painting figurative and portraits in oils using the more traditional Flemish technique, but it never really brought me the kind of money I need to live off of. Such is the life of a painter today. Please enjoy.

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr
Mitch O'Connell
Greg (Craola) Simkins.
Mark Ryden
Alan MacDonald
Tokuhiro Kawai.
Jesus Helguera.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Greg ‘CRAOLA’ Simkins.

This is an introduction to the art of Greg (Craola) Simkins. He has created his own form of art with appears to be an off-shoot of the “low brow” movement that originated out of California. He is a talented young man that paints a very odd and eclectic mixture of birds and contemporaneous themes all mashed together in a kind of confusing array of post surrealistic nightmares.

His niche is low-brow bird portraiture.

Greg ‘Craola’ Simkins was born in 1975 in Torrance California, just south of Los Angeles. He grew up with a menagerie of animals including a number of rabbits, which often emerge in his paintings. He began drawing at the early age of three and was inspired by various cartoons and books.

Some standout books that still find their way into his art are Watership Down by Richard Adams, The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis and The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster.

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The idea of escape is getting lost in a daydream and wandering through one’s imagination.
Why the name The Escape Artist?

The idea of escape is getting lost in a daydream and wandering  through one’s imagination. As I make art, this process is very important  to me. It’s important in the planning stages as I just fill my  sketchbooks with whatever interesting images that entertain me, and it  is important at the composition stage where I lay out these ideas in  their ideal situations so as to move onto the final stage of painting  them.

Once I get to the painting stage, the concept is at most finalized,  but with a bit of room for improvisation. Once I start painting, the  muscle memory and mechanics take over and I will put on music,  audiobooks, movies, podcasts, etc… but generally, find myself zoning out  and falling into the process of painting which can be almost  meditative. Next thing you know and 8 hours have passed by and something  new has been created on the canvas. It’s an awesome feeling being in  that “Escape Zone.” 

Simkins’ art continued to progress to the age of 18, when he started doing graffiti under the name ‘CRAOLA’. Graffiti art became his impetus for creating and gave him the confidence to paint large works. In addition it taught him perspective, color theory and further developed artistic skills, which later translated into his work with acrylics.

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Falling into the process of painting which can be almost meditative. Next thing you know and 8 hours have passed by and something new has been created on the canvas. It’s an awesome feeling being in that “Escape Zone.”
What’s an average day in the studio?

Once I get in, I answer emails, go through sketches and draw a little  to warm up, maybe edit some video, finish my coffee, and then sit down  at the easel and pour my paint for the day. Once that is in place, I  will paint as long a stretch as possible. I don’t like taking breaks and  will generally eat my lunch while working as well.

I try to keep in that creative headspace and block out the rest of  the world. Around dinner time, I go inside and help out making food and  getting the kids to the table, we spend time together as a family, put  the kids to bed at bedtime, and then sit down to watch a show with my  wife and work on drawings and concepts. 

After receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Art from California State University of Long Beach in 1999, Simkins worked as an illustrator for various clothing companies and bands. He later moved on to Treyarch/Activision where he worked on video games including Tony Hawk 2X, Spiderman 2 and Ultimate Spiderman while attempting to paint with every free moment he had.

In 2005, Simkins pursued his desire to paint as a full-time artist. Since then, he has been featured in numerous group exhibitions and had successfully sold out solo exhibitions.

Birds are key figures in your work. Where does your fascination with birds come from?

How could anyone not be fascinated with birds? They are these jewels,  weapons, music boxes, and much more that dart around the sky as masters  of the air. They defy gravity, they curiously watch us—waiting for us  to make a move, they come in so many varieties, some create bonds with  us, others taunt us, and some would even comfort us.

They are incredible creatures, and I have chosen to give them personalities in my work and in The Outside  for all these reasons. The main bird in my work is Breeze, a large blue  jay that befriends my character Ralf “The White Knight” and protects  and teaches him the way of that world. 
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After receiving his Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Art from California State University of Long Beach in 1999, Simkins worked as an illustrator for various clothing companies and bands.

It is his careful weaving of pop culture, the old masters, nature, carnival kitsch, and (most importantly) his warped imagination, that makes Greg Simkins a sought-after surrealist painter today. Simkins’ artwork has appeared in galleries throughout the world.

The exhibition includes a number of beautiful works on paper.  What’s your relationship with drawing and how is it part of your  creative process?

It can be either to get an idea out as fast as possible so as not to  lose it or something to later be refined into its own finished project. I  enjoy getting the gesture of an idea to use later on in a piece, but  sometimes I feel that gesture is beautiful in itself, even with all its  flaws. It is the kernel of an idea and I chose to share some of those in  this exhibition.

I also enjoy doing charcoal portraits which gives me a whole other  way to study shape and form and mark making, which speaks to my other  work. Working in multiple mediums always teaches me something new to add  to each other. 
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How could anyone not be fascinated with birds? They are these jewels, weapons, music boxes, and much more that dart around the sky as masters of the air. They defy gravity, they curiously watch us—waiting for us to make a move, they come in so many varieties, some create bonds with us, others taunt us, and some would even comfort us.
“My creative demands are self imposed and my frustrations are my 
limitations. I sketch a lot and plan many pieces that I never get to paint. It kills me, there are so many things I want to paint and find the ticking of the clock to be deafening. Most of the time it is too many ideas and a lot get shelved or pop up in future shows. It is also a blessing sometimes because I get to revisit these ideas and tinker with them a bit and watch them blossom into something far greater than my original vision. It is as if the technique catches up with the idea over that time span, and I am thankful for it.” 

– Greg ‘Craola’ Simkins (Empty Lighthouse Magazine)
Greg ‘Craola’ Simkins 2
It is his careful weaving of pop culture, the old masters, nature, carnival kitsch, and (most importantly) his warped imagination, that makes Greg Simkins a sought-after surrealist painter today. Simkins’ artwork has appeared in galleries throughout the world.

Fictional Story Related Index

This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes, you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
R is for Rocket
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Correspondence Course
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt
The Star Mouse (Full Text)
Space Jockey (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
He who shrank (Full Text).
Blowups Happen by Robert Heinlein
Uncle Eniar by Ray Bradbury
The Cask of Amontillado

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Art that Moves Me

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Introduction to the art of Mitch O’Connell.

“The Prince of Pop Art”, Mitch O’Connell is a beloved, cherished and respected leader of the “Lowbrow” art movement and one of the greatest illustrators of all time! Inspired by Pin-ups, hot-rods, comics, sideshows and all things kitsch, cuddly and curvaceous, he takes the vintage and makes it contemporary with his distinctive, eye-popping Pop Art imagery.

“I'm tempted to tear out the pages and hang them on the wall!" 

-USA Today 
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Magazine work includes Newsweek, Time, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, GQ and Playboy!

He’s happy to play nice and follow instructions with illustration assignments for nearly every publication on Earth.

"We're smitten with everything Mitch has ever done. There's no escaping that his art is awesome!" 

-Bizarre magazine 

Magazine work includes Newsweek, Time, Rolling Stone, New Yorker, Entertainment Weekly, GQ and Playboy! Overnight deadlines met for newspapers include The New York Times, Village Voice, Chicago Tribune and dozens more!

Mitch O’Connell 2
He’s been featured in the world of rock ’n’ roll on album covers and posters for groups from The Ramones to Weezer to No Doubt to Moby!

He’s been featured in the world of rock ’n’ roll on album covers and posters for groups from The Ramones to Weezer to No Doubt to Moby! Mitch’s doodles are utilized in advertising campaigns for major companies from McDonalds to KFC, 7-11 to Coca-Cola! And when he’s not working with an art director, his fine art paintings have been exhibited in sold-out gallery shows from New York to Berlin, Tokyo to Miami and Hollywood to Mexico City.

"An eye-popping curation of the pop artist's finest illustrations!" 

-Yahoo! Music 

His sexy tattoo flash is a fixture on the walls of tattoo shops around the word (and on the bodies of thousands of tattoo lovers) with many of the designs collected in two bestselling books “ Mitch O’Connell Tattoos Volume 1” and “Mitch O’Connell Tattoos Volume 2“!  

Mitch O’Connell 4
His sexy tattoo flash is a fixture on the walls of tattoo shops around the word (and on the bodies of thousands of tattoo lovers) with many of the designs collected in two bestselling books.

His newest book, “Mitch O’Connell, the World’s Best Artist by Mitch O’Connell” is a huge career-spanning retrospective look at his art from the age of 3 to now!

This book is…

The book is…

AWESOME!

Just how many book reviews get a 100% love ith five stars! Not many. This should tell you all something.
Just how many book reviews get a 100% love with five stars! Not many. This should tell you all something.
"A pop surrealist and low-brow luminary ...an over-the-top, kitschy, vibrant mood-elevating coffee table book!" 

-Huffington Post 

The following are some reviews for those of you who are a tad unsure of this artists greatness…

Mitch O’Connell 5
And then there’s the AWESOME, AMAZING ARTWORK on the inside. From tattooed vixens to big-eyed bunny rabbits, there’s something here for the whole family…if you have a family where the kiddies are allowed to look at pictures of nekkid women. There is a mind-altering feast for the eyes in store for you.
Earlier  today, if you heard a sort of weird, high-pitched shrieking noise, not  unlike the mating cry of some long extinct bird, wafting high above the  trees, far off in distance...it was just ME receiving a package from my  UPS Heart Throb that contained THIS BOOK, quite possibly THE BEST BOOK  EVER!

First of all - it has a vinyl cover. A VINYL COVER!!!  Perfect for tubby-time viewing, or perhaps for enjoying in the  inflatable wading pool on those hot summer days.

And then there's  the AWESOME, AMAZING ARTWORK on the inside. From tattooed vixens to  big-eyed bunny rabbits, there's something here for the whole family...if  you have a family where the kiddies are allowed to look at pictures of  nekkid women. There is a mind-altering feast for the eyes in store for  you.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I've got to get back to squeezing  that vinyl cover. (This is apparently a new fetish I didn't know I had,  and to tell you the truth, it's got me a little worried.)

-  I'm Still Squealing!
A review of his book on Amazon.com

If  you liked the art on the cover, well, there is more of it inside. The  book itself is reminiscent of retro children's books with a foam / vinyl  embossed type cover. It even has glitter. Its something you can't  appreciate on the internet. The size is thick with tons of vibrant  reproductions of his artwork. 

There is lots of detail like the pages  have a contoured edge. The book construction itself is amazing. The  reason I bought this on amazon was because my bookstore's copy was  damaged. Seeing it in real life made me want this book, so I had to get  it. 

Its just fun to pick up and flip through. 

Chances are you are an  artist and will find some inspiration in here even if it is a little bit  crazy/freaky. I wouldn't give this book to a child, the audience is  more adult. I can't say this is lacking anything as it is just an art  book with good examples. The time that went into this book puts it over  the top. 

Worth 5 stars. I can see why 66 people thought it was awesome. I  don't know who would rate this a 4 or less unless they had a problem  with amazon. Sweet! 
Mitch O’Connell 6
The book itself is reminiscent of retro children’s books with a foam / vinyl embossed type cover. It even has glitter. Its something you can’t appreciate on the internet. The size is thick with tons of vibrant reproductions of his artwork.
Indirectly,  I've been a fan of Mitch's art since roughly, 1987. I worked as a  designer at a newspaper and we had subscriptions to two clip art  services (big, hulking glossy printed pages of several images, covering  nearly anything that can be advertised). 

One was Metro and the other was  Dynamic Graphics. Dynamic Graphics was my "go-to" service as, each  month, I scoured it's pages for that flashy, interesting, fun art with  the peculiar "MoC" signature. 

Since then, I learned the MoC was a cool  artist named Mitch O'Connell and I saw his work here and there in Heavy  Metal and some comics. I've moved on from the newspaper business but,  thanks in part to the Internet and various art books, I've been able to  follow Mitch's enthusiastic, dynamic work the last several years. 

I've  always admired his bold, daring renderings. As an illustrator myself, I  find inspiration in his lines and color palette. Today, I'm proud to say  I now own this comprehensive book. Tons of color, tons of  illustrations, tons of inspiration. 

Even the design of the book itself  is daring and bold. I've perused it several times since receiving it in  the mail and I plan on perusing it several more times, seeing something  new and interesting each time I open the book. 

Mr. O'Connell's art  speaks for itself but I'll say that It's unique a completely different  style than what anyone may be used to. I especially like the 70s-style.  He not only acknowledges it, he embraces it and you have to admire that.  I highly recommend! 

- Lived up to my expectations
The  puffy plastic cover over Mitch O'Connell The World's Greatest Artist  gives a damn good indication of what's inside: A massive, whopping,  ridiculously definitive collection of Mitch... and all Mitch.

From  the cutesy-sweet to the clip art to the truly naughty, here is  EVERYthing.  Superb book design makes the collection seem to fly, float  and take on a life of its own.

There was a long, long wait for this terrific tome; it was truly worth the wait. WOW! 

- Holy moley! All this and World War, too. 
Mitch O’Connell 3
The puffy plastic cover over Mitch O’Connell The World’s Greatest Artist gives a damn good indication of what’s inside: A massive, whopping, ridiculously definitive collection of Mitch… and all Mitch. From the cutesy-sweet to the clip art to the truly naughty, here is EVERYthing. Superb book design makes the collection seem to fly, float and take on a life of its own.
This  book is so amazing you'll want to sleep with it tucked under your head.  And thanks to the soft puffy cover you can! 

Try it, i did. Hoping some  of O'Connell's brilliance would seep into my brain. 

Fat chance! If you  have been a long time devote of O'Connell or have no idea who he is  (been living under a rock?) You NEED this book! 

By merely placing this  book on your coffee table you will immediately notice that you have  become more attractive to the world. 

You'll start getting more dates  than you can fit in your calendar. And you don't want to be left behind  when it hits the New York Times best seller list, do you? I didn't think  so. Get in on Mitch-Mania now! 

- My Bible has arrived! 
I  cant put this book down!! It had me hooked just with the glitter cover.  Wow!! I've loved this mans work for years. I can sit and look at his  art and tattoo flash for hours. This is a great addition to my  collection of his books and art work. Filled with beautiful women and  kitsch galore. This book is VERY large and informative. We learn more  about the man, myth and legend!!!  It's also a great price for so much  magnificent eye candy. I highly recommend it to any lover of Pop,  Surrealism, Kitsch or just Damn good art! :) 

- 5.0 out of 5 stars  This book is Fan-Stinken-Tastic!!
Mitch O’Connell 6
I cant put this book down!! It had me hooked just with the glitter cover. Wow!! I’ve loved this mans work for years. I can sit and look at his art and tattoo flash for hours. This is a great addition to my collection of his books and art work. Filled with beautiful women and kitsch galore.
It  has a sparkly cover and It's Mitch! So, It's good. I usually only read  on the Crapper but I already crapped today. I may just break my own rule  and read this while sitting on the couch! 

- The most important book you will ever buy 
EXCITEMENT! FUN! NUDITY! THRILLS!
BALLOONS! NUDITY! ALCOHOL! CAKE!
HILARITY! NUDITY!

When  a book has that as it's opening intro you know you have stumbled across  the new bible.  Mitch may be the world's best artist (his words,  mentioned many many times in this book) he is also probably the world's  funniest artist.

This book is comical to the extreme, louds of  laughing out loud guffaws and so much drink sprayed across the room,  luckily I chose to read this in lots of different locations so  everywhere got a nice even coating of beer.

This book is a huge  collection of his artwork, from drawings as a kid to early adverts he  was commissioned to draw to posters, tattoos and toilet seats, it is all  here.  The history of his rise to greatness and even a tour of his  mansion (puts the Taj Mahal to shame) can be found in this book.  Also  its the only book I've come across that has a gift shop at the end.

Hopefully there will be more books from Mitch to entertain us all.  I'm now off to locate him to get myself one of his tattoos. 

- World's best book 
The  second worst thing about moving to Wisconsin (first being living under  incipient fascism)is not having access to Mitch O'Connell. A lot of the  art in this book only appeared in posters , leaflets and other material  distributed in and around Chicago (Mitch 's art has appeared on  everything from pencils and skateboards to delightful women's bare  butts- I personally am waiting for the whoopee cushion).  

Years ago I  could pick the stuff up tear it off walls and enjoy it! My 20 year  deprivation has been cured with this book collecting Mitch's unique  (well sometimes a bit bizarre) interpretations of reality. 

The world  goes into Mitch's brain gets mashed around and comes out well  wonderfully different- and you can see it all here in this book without  skulking around sleazy burlesque houses, grunge band concerts and other  affairs- though all of the latter do enhance the experience! Only thing  that would make it better would be if it came with an inflatable Little  Puddles doll. 

- Modest Title Masks True Genius! 
Mitch O’Connell 7
This book is a huge collection of his artwork, from drawings as a kid to early adverts he was commissioned to draw to posters, tattoos and toilet seats, it is all here. The history of his rise to greatness and even a tour of his mansion (puts the Taj Mahal to shame) can be found in this book. Also its the only book I’ve come across that has a gift shop at the end.
This  is the only art book I own that actually entertained me.  Face it -  most art books you pay for nothing- a lot of white space around a a  reproduction of a piece you can't afford. That means you are paying most  of the cover price on blank or what design shysters call negative  space. O'Connell doesn't waste anything- including your time. 

Rather  than hiring some fancy college boy shill to write essays, O'Connell does  the writing his'sef which is why I am am actually going to read every  word- eventually. Right now I'm just happy to skim and look at all the  purty five star pictures.

By the way, not only are there sparkles in  the puffy plasticine cover- its spot glitter- which means it was  probably really expensive other than just expensive. 

- Gave Me A Stiffy 
Having  known the artist for about 35 years, I've had the great pleasure of  watching him progress from talented teen to peerless paragon of pop art.  Now, with the publication of this classy compendium, anyone who is even  remotely interested in popular art can share in this pleasure. With  exceedingly-deft hand, keen eye, and acerbic wit, Mitch O’Connell has  come to occupy a place in pop surrealism that is shared with only a few  artists --Robert Williams, self-described progenitor of the ‘Lowbrow’  movement, springs to mind.

While many of the pop surrealists or other  Lowbrow artists share the same interest in skewering the social,  cultural, political, and sexual mores of our consumerist culture, no one  --for my money, anyway-- does a better, funnier job of sending up the  obsessions of the modern world. While his technical skill is beyond  reproach, and repeated study of his work will prove this, it’s Mitch’s  sense of humor that will find readers coming back to this volume for  amusement long after the average coffee table book has been shelved and  forgotten.

In a wonderful addition to the content, the  exceedingly-high production values of the book --with a brilliant,  sparkled and textured cover; heavy, glossy-stock pages; and stunning  page layouts-- will make even those who are not familiar with Mitch’s  work sit up and take notice. Presuming there are yearly awards given for  outstanding book design, I’ll be not at all surprised to find this book  topping the list of nominees.

So, summing up: If you’re a fan of  Mitch O’Connell, buy the book. If you’re interested in modern art, buy  the book. If you’re fond of well-designed and executed art books, buy  the book. If you merely want to take a chance on a bold and brilliant  artist, this is the one to pick up...you won’t be disappointed!! 

- A peerless artist, a peerless book 
Mitch O’Connell 8
While many of the pop surrealists or other Lowbrow artists share the same interest in skewering the social, cultural, political, and sexual mores of our consumerist culture, no one –for my money, anyway– does a better, funnier job of sending up the obsessions of the modern world. While his technical skill is beyond reproach, and repeated study of his work will prove this.
I  purchased this book expecting just another glowing biography of yet  another pampered, spoiled, filthy rich, low-brow artist. All I can say  is "I was blind...and now I see!" After reading this man's, no, this  immortals, life story and gazing at his life's work, I declare myself  his humble servant.  

The colors, line work and, most importantly, the  brilliance BEHIND the work, have given my life a purpose. I worship at  the filthy, somewhat ripe feet of my Lord and Savior: Mitch O'Connell.  Mitch, I hope you are reading this. I have scanned the photos from your  book and created wallpaper (no, not digital wallpaper, but actual paper  wallpaper) and covered the walls of my cabin with thousands of images  from your book, and more importantly, you. I now live in my car and only  enter my shrine to you, formally my home, to worship at an alter that I  created that features an 8' paper mache head of you (it came out really  cool- except the left side looks a little droopy and concave. One of my  cats climbed onto it before it was fully dried.). 

If you have any  personal items that you could send me for my alter I would appreciate  it. I would collect your hair, but....! Could you send me some of your  old clothes or maybe some toe nail clippings? I would expect them to be  brightly colored and dipped in glitter, just like your art. I am working  on a life size action figure of you that I can clothe in Holy vestments  so you can perform ceremonies and we can have imaginary conversations-  together! Everyone out there, please, throw away your Bibles and holy  books and pick up Mitch O'Connell The World's Best Artist and let's  commence to worshipping at the Holy Church of Mitch! Amen! 

- This Book Spoke To Me- no kidding it actually talked 
The perfect book to introduce the unsuspecting Cool Kid to the work of Mitch O'Connell!

If  you like hot rods, 1950's comics, kitsch culture, tattoos, big-breasted  women who aren't afraid to spank you when necessary, pink poodle dogs,  aliens, motorcycles and the sarcastic, self-aware humor of one of  America's favorite retro-culture artist, then this is the book for you!

And  it comes wrapped up in a plushy, plastic foam cover that cleans up easy  if splattered with blood, baby vomit or spunk. Or a disgusting  combination of all three!

This book will make you laugh!
This book will tentpole your trousers!
This  book will make you a cooler individual than your lesser friends! I am  cooler than you, because I own this book (and a few other Mitch  O'Connell books too.)

What are you waiting for? Get up on this book! 

- Throw money at your local bookseller for this book! 
Mitch O’Connell 9
If you like hot rods, 1950’s comics, kitsch culture, tattoos, big-breasted women who aren’t afraid to spank you when necessary, pink poodle dogs, aliens, motorcycles and the sarcastic, self-aware humor of one of America’s favorite retro-culture artist, then this is the book for you!
Mitch  O'Connell's latest book, "Mitch O'Connell the World's Best Artist by  Mitch O'Connell", is the BEST and GREATEST book ever penned by the  Master to this date!

Mitch, my friend for over 30 years has created  the world's MOST magical collection of SUPER ART.... yes, the term is  SUPER ART!

Owning his most current book has cured my arthritis. By  reading the pages my 60 year old eyes now possess 20/20 vision. I can  walk without a cane. My elderly wife read it and is now using tampons  again. THE BOOK IS A MIRACLE!!! This modest genius has created the cures  for all maladies of the Human Condition by merely printing the  World's Best Art; HIS World's Best Art and AMAZING LIFE STORY in this  Remarkable 288 page book!

Ladies & Gentlemen throw away your Bibles because THIS IS IT!!!!!!! The only Good Book you will ever need!

You will never EVER get a bigger bang for your $20. 

- GOD'S GIFT TO THE ART WORLD !! 
All  art books have pictures (that's kind of the idea) but how many would  you sit down and read?  Sure, "Mitch O'Connell, the World's Best Artist"  is chock-full of the requisite lifetime's worth of artwork (well, maybe  two-thirds to half a lifetime, he's not dead yet), but it's also  brimming with personal tales and anecdotes filled with witty,  self-deprecating braggadocio, all wrapped in a puffy, sparkly vinyl  cover.  

Not many other (any other?) artists can claim to have been  published in everything from the New York Times to Juggs and you'll  learn that and many other fascinating facts when you read this book.   

Did I mention the puffy, sparkly vinyl cover?  It's an art book which  moonlights as a coaster, which is super-practical (buy a set!).  So, if  you like 60's kitsch, creepy clowns, and big-eyed rabbits (and who  doesn't?) then this is the book for you. 

- The first coffee table book you'll actually read! 
Mitch O’Connell 1
All art books have pictures (that’s kind of the idea) but how many would you sit down and read? Sure, “Mitch O’Connell, the World’s Best Artist” is chock-full of the requisite lifetime’s worth of artwork (well, maybe two-thirds to half a lifetime, he’s not dead yet), but it’s also brimming with personal tales and anecdotes filled with witty, self-deprecating braggadocio, all wrapped in a puffy, sparkly vinyl cover.
I  first saw Mitch's work back in the dark ages - before computers and  t'internet and the writing of book online reviews. It was a "graphic  novel" (trans.: Fat Expensive Comic Book) called GINGER FOX, and I've  been following his work ever since, picking up the odd book or flyer or  cover whenever I came across them. 

Now, all of that scattered detritus  has been collated into one big fat squishy plastic-covered wipe-clean  book. Fatter and more expensive than Ginger Fox, who must be in her  fatter and more expensive mid-50s' by now. 

Mitch has an assured clean  graphic line, a searing sense of eye-popping colour, a healthy interest  in the female form, and a joyous sense of the pop-art poetry inherent in  the commercial ephemera those fancy-pants "high art" snobs just don't  get. I want to delve into the dark recesses of this man's "gentleman's  magazine" collection, but fear I may never emerge... Go buy!! NOW!! 

- Squishy!
I  never in a million years would have thought I'd own this book.  I'm a  fan  and I love art books but my own art has consumed all resources  and  left my book aquiring funds non existent.  Fast forward to my B-day  party this yr  and I get Mitch's book for a gift. So of course  we  immediatly crack it open to take in the mind bending eye candy..  First  words out of my mouth. "danmmit, he IS the Worlds Greatest Artist!"   

Endless hours of entertainment. Known about in France.  As advertised.  All in all pretty stinkin' cool. Color me jealous and inspired all at  the same time. So if you're like me, put it on your wish list, and if  you can buy it  just do it now. You'll be happy you treated yourself. 

- Worlds Greatest Artist, yea right. 

Finally, from Boing Boing...

In 2015 my friend, the fabulous artist Mitch O'Connell, created this  excellent illustration of Donald Trump as one of the evil aliens from  John Carpenter's 1988 science fiction film, They Live. Once Trump became president, Mitch tried to install a billboard with the illustration, but no one in the US would let him. He ended up displaying it in Mexico City, though.
 
 Well, Mitch recently found out that a Times Square billboard company  will allow him to display his illustration on a billboard and he's  started a gofundme campaign to make this dream a reality.  
the fabulous artist Mitch O'Connell, created this  excellent illustration of Donald Trump as one of the evil aliens from  John Carpenter's 1988 science fiction film, They Live. Once Trump became president, Mitch tried to install a billboard with the illustration, but no one in the US would let him.
The fabulous artist Mitch O’Connell, created this illustration of Donald Trump as one of the evil aliens from John Carpenter’s 1988 science fiction film, They Live. Once Trump became president, Mitch tried to install a billboard with the illustration, but no one in the US would let him.

Fictional Story Related Index

This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes, you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
R is for Rocket
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Correspondence Course
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt
The Star Mouse (Full Text)
Space Jockey (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
He who shrank (Full Text).
Blowups Happen by Robert Heinlein
Uncle Eniar by Ray Bradbury
The Cask of Amontillado

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Art that Moves Me

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.
Robert Williams
Todd Schorr

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine (full text) by Ray Bradbury.

This is a lovely short story by Ray Bradbury. It's a fun, and easy quick read. The arrival in a small town of a stranger who calls himself 'Charles Dickens' makes a magical and lasting change in the lives of an imaginative 12-year-old boy and a loving young woman. It's a great read and fun escapist reading. 

It is free to read and you do not have to jump through any hoops to register, apply to bore through a pay-wall, or give out any personal information. Free means free. Enjoy.

Imagine a summer that would never end.

Nineteen twenty-nine.

Imagine a boy who would never grow up.

Me.

Imagine a barber who was never young.

Mr. Wyneski.

Imagine a dog that would live forever.

Mine.

Imagine a small town, the kind that isn’t lived in anymore.

Ready?

Begin…


Green Town, Illinois … Late June.

Dog barking outside a one-chair barbershop.

Inside, Mr. Wyneski, circling his victim, a customer snoozing in the steambath drowse of noon.

Inside, me, Ralph Spaulding, a boy of some twelve years, standing still as an iron Civil War statue, listening to the hot wind, feeling all that hot summer dust out there, a bakery world where nobody could be bad or good, boys just lay gummed to dogs, dogs used boys for pillows under trees that lazed with leaves which whispered in despair: Nothing Will Ever Happen Again.

The only motion anywhere was the cool water dripping from the huge coffin-sized ice block in the hardware store window.

The only cool person in miles was Miss Frostbite, the traveling magician’s assistant, tucked into that lady-shaped long cavity hollowed in the ice block displayed for three days now without they said, her breathing, eating, or talking. That last, I thought, must have been terrible hard on a woman.

Nothing moved in the street but the barbershop striped pole which turned slowly to show its red, white, and then red again, slid up out of nowhere to vanish nowhere, a motion between two mysteries.

“…hey…”

I pricked my ears.

“…something’s coming…”

“Only the noon train, Ralph.” Mr. Wyneski snicked his jackdaw scissors, peering in his customer’s ear. “Only the train that comes at noon.”

“No…” I gasped, eyes shut, leaning. “Something’s really coming…”

I heard the far whistle wail, lonesome, sad. enough to pull your soul out of your body.

“You feel it, don’t you, Dog?”

Dog barked.

Mr. Wyneski sniffed. “What can a dog feel?”

“Big things. Important things. Circumstantial coincidences. Collisions you can’t escape. Dog says. I say. We say.”

“That makes four of you. Some team.” Mr. Wyneski turned from the summer-dead man in the white porcelain chair. “Now, Ralph, my problem is hair. Sweep.”

I swept a ton of hair. “Gosh, you’d think this stuff just grew up out of the floor.”

Mr. Wyneski watched my broom. “Right! I didn’t cut all that. Darn stuff just grows, I swear, lying there. Leave it a week, come back, and you need hip boots to trod a path.” He pointed with his scissors. “Look. You ever see so many shades, hues, and tints of forelocks and chin fuzz? There’s Mr. Tompkins’s receding hairline. There’s Charlie Smith’s topknot. And here, here’s all that’s left of Mr. Harry Joe Flynn.”

I stared at Mr. Wyneski as if he had just read from Revelations. “Gosh, Mr. Wyneski, I guess you know everything in the world!”

“Just about.”

“I—I’m going to grow up and be—a barber!”

Mr. Wyneski, to hide his pleasure, got busy.

“Then watch this hedgehog, Ralph, peel an eye. Elbows thus, wrists so! Make the scissors talk! Customers appreciate. Sound twice as busy as you are. Snickety-snick, boy, snickety-snick. Learned this from the French! Oh, yes, the French! They do prowl about the chair light on their toes, and the sharp scissors whispering and nibbling, Ralph, nibbling and whispering, you hear!”

“Boy!” I said, at his elbow, right in with the whispers and nibbles, then stopped: for the wind blew a wail way off in summer country, so sad, so strange.

“There it is again. The train. And something on the train…”

“Noon train don’t stop here.”

“But I got this feeling—”

“The hair’s going to grab me. Ralph…”

I swept hair.

After a long while I said, “I’m thinking of changing my name.”

Mr. Wyneski sighed. The summer-dead customer stayed dead.

“What’s wrong with you today, boy?”

“It’s not me. It’s the name is out of hand. Just listen. Ralph.” I grrred it. “Rrrralph.”

“Ain’t exactly harp music…”

“Sounds like a mad dog.” I caught myself.

“No offense, Dog.”

Mr. Wyneski glanced down. “He seems pretty calm about the whole subject.”

“Ralph’s dumb. Gonna change my name by tonight.”

Mr. Wyneski mused. “Julius for Caesar? Alexander for the Great?”

“Don’t care what. Help me, huh, Mr. Wyneski? Find me a name…”

Dog sat up. I dropped the broom.

For way down in the hot cinder railroad yards a train furnaced itself in, all pomp, all fire-blast shout and tidal churn, summer in its iron belly bigger than the summer outside.

“Here it comes!”

“There it goes,” said Mr. Wyneski.

“No, there it doesn’t go!”

It was Mr. Wyneski’s turn to almost drop his scissors.

“Goshen. Darn noon train’s putting on the brakes!”

We heard the train stop.

“How many people getting off the train, Dog?”

Dog barked once.

Mr. Wyneski shifted uneasily. “U.S. Mail bags—”

“No … a man! Walking light. Not much luggage. Heading for our house. A new boarder at Grandma’s, I bet. And he’ll take the empty room right next to you, Mr. Wyneski! Right, Dog?”

Dog barked.

“That dog talks too much,” said Mr. Wyneski.

“I just gotta go see, Mr. Wyneski. Please?”

The far footsteps faded in the hot and silent streets.

Mr. Wyneski shivered.

“A goose just stepped on my grave.”

Then he added, almost sadly:

“Get along, Ralph.”

“Name ain’t Ralph.”

“Whatchamacallit … run see … come tell the worst.”

“Oh, thanks, Mr. Wyneski, thanks!”


I ran. Dog ran. Up a street, along an alley, around back, we ducked in the ferns by my grandma’s house. “Down, boy.” I whispered. “Here the Big Event comes, whatever it is!”

And down the street and up the walk and up the steps at a brisk jaunt came this man who swung a cane and carried a carpetbag and had long brown-gray hair and silken mustaches and a goatee, politeness all about him like a flock of birds.

On the porch near the old rusty chain swing, among the potted geraniums, he surveyed Green Town.

Far away, maybe, he heard the insect hum from the barbershop, where Mr. Wyneski, who would soon be his enemy, told fortunes by the lumpy heads under his hands as he buzzed the electric clippers. Far away, maybe, he could hear the empty library where the golden dust slid down the raw sunlight and way in back someone scratched and tapped and scratched forever with pen and ink, a quiet woman like a great lonely mouse burrowed away. And she was to be part of this new man’s life, too, but right now…

The stranger removed his tall moss-green hat, mopped his brow, and not looking at anything but the hot blind sky said:

“Hello, boy. Hello, dog.”

Dog and I rose up among the ferns.

“Heck. How’d you know where we were hiding?”

The stranger peered into his hat for the answer. “In another incarnation, I was a boy. Time before that, if memory serves, I was a more than usually happy dog. But…!” His cane rapped the cardboard sign BOARD AND ROOM thumbtacked on the porch rail. “Does the sign say true, boy?”

“Best rooms on the block.”

“Beds?”

“Mattresses so deep you sink down and drown the third time, happy.”

“Boarders at table?”

“Talk just enough, not too much.”

“Food?”

“Hot biscuits every morning, peach pie noon, shortcake every supper!”

The stranger inhaled, exhaled those savors.

“I’ll sign my soul away!”


“I beg your pardon?!” Grandma was suddenly at the screen door, scowling out.

“A manner of speaking, ma’am.” The stranger turned. “Not meant to sound un-Christian.”

And he was inside, him talking, Grandma talking, him writing and flourishing the pen on the registry book, and me and Dog inside, breathless, watching, spelling:

“C.H.”

“Read upside down, do you, boy?” said the stranger, merrily, giving pause with the inky pen.

“Yes, sir!”

On he wrote. On I spelled:

“A.R.L.E.S. Charles!”

“Right.”

Grandma peered at the calligraphy. “Oh, what a fine hand.”

“Thank you, ma’am.” On the pen scurried. And on I chanted. “D.I.C.K.E.N.S.”

I faltered and stopped. The pen stopped. The stranger tilted his head and closed one eye, watchful of me.

“Yes?” He dared me, “What, what?”

“Dickens!” I cried.

“Good!”

“Charles Dickens, Grandma!”

“I can read, Ralph. A nice name…”

“Nice?” I said, agape. “It’s great! But … I thought you were—”

“Dead?” The stranger laughed. “No. Alive, in fine fettle, and glad to meet a recognizer, fan, and fellow reader here!”


And we were up the stairs, Grandma bringing fresh towels and pillowcases and me carrying the carpetbag, gasping, and us meeting Grandpa, a great ship of a man, sailing down the other way.

“Grandpa,” I said, watching his face for shock. “I want you to meet … Mr. Charles Dickens!”

Grandpa stopped for a long breath, looked at the new boarder from top to bottom, then reached out, took hold of the man’s hand, shook it firmly, and said:

“Any friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a friend of mine!”

Mr. Dickens fell back from the effusion, recovered, bowed, said. “Thank you, sir,” and went on up the stairs, while Grandpa winked, pinched my cheek, and left me standing there, stunned.

In the tower cupola room, with windows bright, open, and running with cool creeks of wind in all directions, Mr. Dickens drew off his horse-carriage coat and nodded at the carpetbag.

“Anywhere will do, Pip. Oh, you don’t mind I call you Pip, eh?”

“Pip?!” My cheeks burned, my face glowed with astonishing happiness. “Oh, boy. Oh, no, sir. Pip’s fine!”

Grandma cut between us. “Here are your clean linens, Mr…?”

“Dickens, ma’am.” Our boarder patted his pockets, each in turn. “Dear me, Pip, I seem to be fresh out of pads and pencils. Might it be possible—”

He saw one of my hands steal up to find something behind my ear. “I’ll be darned,” I said, “a yellow Ticonderoga Number 2!” My other hand slipped to my back pants pocket. “And hey, an Iron-Face Indian Ring-Back Notepad Number 12!”

“Extraordinary!”

“Extraordinary!”

Mr. Dickens wheeled about, surveying the world from each and every window, speaking now north, now north by east, now east, now south:

“I’ve traveled two long weeks with an idea. Bastille Day. Do you know it?”

“The French Fourth of July?”

“Remarkable boy! By Bastille Day this book must be in full flood. Will you help me breach the tide gates of the Revolution, Pip?”

“With these?” I looked at the pad and pencil in my hands.

“Lick the pencil tip, boy!”

I licked.

“Top of the page: the title. Title.” Mr. Dickens mused, head down, rubbing his chin whiskers. “Pip, what’s a rare fine title for a novel that happens half in London, half in Paris?”

“A—” I ventured.

“Yes?”

“A Tale,” I went on.

“Yes?!”

“A Tale of … Two Cities?!”


“Madame!” Grandma looked up as he spoke. “This boy is a genius!”

“I read about this day in the Bible,” said Grandma. “Everything Ends by noon.”

“Put it down, Pip.” Mr. Dickens tapped my pad. “Quick. A Tale of Two Cities. Then, mid-page. Book the First. ‘Recalled to Life.’ Chapter 1. ‘The Period.’”

I scribbled. Grandma worked. Mr. Dickens squinted at the sky and at last intoned:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the Season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter—”

“My,” said Grandma, “you speak fine.”

“Madame.” The author nodded, then, eyes shut, snapped his fingers to remember, on the air. “Where was I, Pip?”

“It was the winter,” I said, “of despair.”

Very late in the afternoon I heard Grandma calling someone named Ralph, Ralph, down below. I didn’t know who that was. I was writing hard.


A minute later, Grandpa called, “Pip!”

I jumped. “Yes, sir!”

“Dinnertime, Pip,” said Grandpa, up the stairwell.

I sat down at the table, hair wet, hands damp. I looked over at Grandpa. “How did you know … Pip?”

“Heard the name fall out the window an hour ago.”

“Pip?” said Mr. Wyneski, just come in, sitting down.

“Boy,” I said. “I been everywhere this afternoon. The Dover Coach on the Dover Road. Paris! Traveled so much I got writer’s cramp! I—”

“Pip” said Mr. Wyneski, again.

Grandpa came warm and easy to my rescue.

“When I was twelve, changed my name—on several occasions.” He counted the tines on his fork. “Dick. That was Dead-Eye Dick. And … John. That was for Long John Silver. Then: Hyde. That was for the other half of Jekyll—”

“I never had any other name except Bernard Samuel Wyneski,” said Mr. Wyneski, his eyes still fixed to me.

“None?” cried Grandpa, startled.

“None.”

“Have you proof of childhood, then, sir?” asked Grandpa. “Or are you a natural phenomenon, like a ship becalmed at sea?”

“Eh?” said Mr. Wyneski.

Grandpa gave up and handed him his full plate.

“Fall to, Bernard Samuel, fall to.”

Mr. Wyneski let his plate lie. “Dover Coach…?”

“With Mr. Dickens, of course,” supplied Grandpa. “Bernard Samuel, we have a new boarder, a novelist, who is starting a new book and has chosen Pip there, Ralph, to work as his secretary—”

“Worked all afternoon,” I said. “Made a quarter!”

I slapped my hand to my mouth. A swift dark cloud had come over Mr. Wyneski’s face.

“A novelist? Named Dickens? Surely you don’t believe—”

“I believe what a man tells me until he tells me otherwise, then I believe that. Pass the butter,” said Grandpa.

The butter was passed in silence.

“…hell’s fires…” Mr. Wyneski muttered.

I slunk low in my chair.


Grandpa, slicing the chicken, heaping the plates, said, “A man with a good demeanor has entered our house. He says his name is Dickens. For all I know that is his name. He implies he is writing a book. I pass his door, look in, and, yes, he is indeed writing. Should I run tell him not to? It is obvious he needs to set the book down—”

“A Tale of Two Cities!” I said.

“A Tale!” cried Mr. Wyneski, outraged, “of Two—”

“Hush,” said Grandma.

For down the stairs and now at the door of the dining room there was the man with the long hair and the fine goatee and mustaches, nodding, smiling, peering in at us doubtful and saying, “Friends…?”

“Mr. Dickens,” I said, trying to save the day. “I want you to meet Mr. Wyneski, the greatest barber in the world—”

The two men looked at each other for a long moment.

“Mr. Dickens,” said Grandpa. “Will you lend us your talent, sir, for grace?”

We bowed our heads. Mr. Wyneski did not.

Mr. Dickens looked at him gently.

Muttering, the barber glanced at the floor.

Mr. Dickens prayed:

“O Lord of the bounteous table, O Lord who furnishes forth an infinite harvest for your most respectful servants gathered here in loving humiliation, O Lord who garnishes our feast with the bright radish and the resplendent chicken, who sets before us the wine of the summer season, lemonade, and maketh us humble before simple potato pleasures, the lowborn onion and, in the finale, so my nostrils tell me, the bread of vast experiments and fine success, the highborn strawberry shortcake, most beautifully smothered and amiably drowned in fruit from your own warm garden patch, for these, and this good company, much thanks. Amen.”

“Amen,” said everyone but Mr. Wyneski.

We waited.

“Amen, I guess,” he said.


O what a summer that was!

None like it before in Green Town history.

I never got up so early so happy ever in my life! Out of bed at five minutes to, in Paris by one minute after … six in the morning the English Channel boat from Calais, the White Cliffs, sky a blizzard of seagulls, Dover, then the London Coach and London Bridge by noon! Lunch and lemonade out under the trees with Mr. Dickens, Dog licking our cheeks to cool us, then back to Paris and tea at four and…

“Bring up the cannon, Pip!”

“Yes, sir!”

“Mob the Bastille!”

“Yes, sir!”

And the guns were fired and the mobs ran and there I was, Mr. C. Dickens A-l First Class Green Town, Illinois, secretary, my eyes bugging, my ears popping, my chest busting with joy, for I dreamt of being a writer some day, too, and here I was unraveling a tale with the very finest best.

“Madame Defarge, oh how she sat and knitted, knitted, sat—”

I looked up to find Grandma knitting in the window.

“Sidney Carton, what and who was he? A man of sensibility, a reading man of gentle thought and capable action…”

Grandpa strolled by mowing the grass.

Drums sounded beyond the hills with guns; a summer storm cracked and dropped unseen walls…

Mr. Wyneski?

Somehow I neglected his shop, somehow I forgot the mysterious barber pole that came up from nothing and spiraled away to nothing, and the fabulous hair that grew on his white tile floor…


So Mr. Wyneski then had to come home every night to find that writer with all the long hair in need of cutting, standing there at the same table thanking the Lord for this, that, and t’other, and Mr. Wyneski not thankful. For there I sat staring at Mr. Dickens like he was God until one night:

“Shall we say grace?” said Grandma.

“Mr. Wyneski is out brooding in the yard,” said Grandpa.

“Brooding?” I glanced guiltily from the window.

Grandpa tilted his chair back so he could see.

“Brooding’s the word. Saw him kick the rose bush, kick the green ferns by the porch, decide against kicking the apple tree. God made it too firm. There, he just jumped on a dandelion. Oh, oh. Here he comes, Moses crossing a Black Sea of bile.”

The door slammed. Mr. Wyneski stood at the head of the table.

“I’ll say grace tonight!”

He glared at Mr. Dickens.

“Why, I mean,” said Grandma. “Yes. Please.”

Mr. Wyneski shut his eyes tight and began his prayer of destruction:

“O Lord, who delivered me a fine June and a less fine July, help me to get through August somehow.

“O Lord, deliver me from mobs and riots in the streets of London and Paris which drum through my room night and morn, chief members of said riot being one boy who walks in his sleep, a man with a strange name and a Dog who barks after the ragtag and bobtail.

“Give me strength to resist the cries of Fraud, Thief, Fool, and Bunk Artists which rise in my mouth.

“Help me not to run shouting all the way to the Police Chief to yell that in all probability the man who shares our simple bread has a true name of Red Joe Pyke from Wilkesboro, wanted for counterfeiting life, or Bull Hammer from Hornbill, Arkansas, much desired for mean spitefulness and penny-pilfering in Oskaloosa.

“Lord, deliver the innocent boys of this world from the fell clutch of those who would tomfool their credibility.

“And Lord, help me to say, quietly, and with all deference to the lady present, that if one Charles Dickens is not on the noon train tomorrow bound for Potters Grave, Lands End, or Kankakee, I shall like Delilah, with malice, shear the black lamb and fry his mutton-chop whiskers for twilight dinners and late midnight snacks.

“I ask, Lord, not mercy for the mean, but simple justice for the malignant.

“All those agreed, say ‘Amen.’”

He sat down and stabbed a potato.

There was a long moment with everyone frozen.

And then Mr. Dickens, eyes shut said, moaning:

“Ohhhhhhhhhh…!”

It was a moan, a cry, a despair so long and deep it sounded like the train way off in the country the day this man had arrived.


“Mr. Dickens,” I said.

But I was too late.

He was on his feet, blind, wheeling, touching the furniture, holding to the wall, clutching at the doorframe, blundering into the hall, groping up the stairs.

“Ohhhhh…”

It was the long cry of a man gone over a cliff into Eternity.

It seemed we sat waiting to hear him hit bottom.

Far off in the hills in the upper part of the house, his door banged shut.

My soul turned over and died.

“Charlie.” I said. “Oh, Charlie.”

Late that night, Dog howled.

And the reason he howled was that sound, that similar, muffled cry from up in the tower cupola room.


“Holy Cow,” I said. “Call the plumber. Everything’s down the drain.”

Mr. Wyneski strode by on the sidewalk, walking nowhere, off and gone.

“That’s his fourth time around the block.” Grandpa struck a match and lit his pipe.

“Mr. Wyneski!” I called.

No answer. The footsteps went away.

“Boy oh boy, I feel like I lost a war,” I said.

“No, Ralph, beg pardon, Pip,” said Grandpa, sitting down on the step with me. “You just changed generals in midstream is all. And now one of the generals is so unhappy he’s turned mean.”

“Mr. Wyneski? I—I almost hate him!”

Grandpa puffed gently on his pipe. “I don’t think he even knows why he is so unhappy and mean. He has had a tooth pulled during the night by a mysterious dentist and now his tongue is aching around the empty place where the tooth was.”

“We’re not in church, Grandpa.”

“Cut the Parables, huh? In simple words, Ralph, you used to sweep the hair off that man’s shop floor. And he’s a man with no wife, no family, just a job. A man with no family needs someone somewhere in the world, whether he knows it or not.”

“I,” I said. “I’ll wash the barbershop windows tomorrow. I-I’ll oil the red-and-white striped pole so it spins like crazy.”

“I know you will, son.”


A train went by in the night.

Dog howled.

Mr. Dickens answered in a strange cry from his room.

I went to bed and heard the town clock strike one and then two and at last three.

Then it was I heard the soft crying. I went out in the hall to listen by our boarder’s door.

“Mr. Dickens?”

The soft sound stopped.

The door was unlocked. I dared open it.

“Mr. Dickens?”

And there he lay in the moonlight, tears streaming from his eyes, eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, motionless.

“Mr. Dickens?”

“Nobody by that name here,” said he. His head moved side to side. “Nobody by that name in this room in this bed in this world.”

“You,” I said. “You’re Charlie Dickens.”

“You ought to know better,” was the mourned reply. “Long after midnight, moving on toward morning.”

“All I know is,” I said, “I seen you writing every day. I heard you talking every night.”

“Right, right.”

“And you finish one book and start another, and write a fine calligraphy sort of hand.”

“I do that.” A nod. “Oh yes, by the demon possessions, I do.”

“So!” I circled the bed. “What call you got to feel sorry for yourself, a world-famous author?”

“You know and I know, I’m Mr. Nobody from Nowhere, on my way to Eternity with a dead flashlight and no candles.”

“Hells bells,” I said. I started for the door. I was mad because he wasn’t holding up his end. He was ruining a grand summer. “Good night!” I rattled the doorknob.

“Wait!”

It was such a terrible soft cry of need and almost pain, I dropped my hand, but I didn’t turn.

“Pip,” said the old man in the bed.

“Yeah?” I said, grouching.

“Let’s both be quiet. Sit down.”

I slowly sat on the spindly wooden chair by the night table.

“Talk to me, Pip.”

“Holy Cow, at three—”

“—in the morning, yes. Oh, it’s a fierce awful time of night. A long way back to sunset, and ten thousand miles on to dawn. We have need of friends then. Friend, Pip? Ask me things.”

“Like what?”

“I think you know.”

I brooded a moment and sighed. “Okay, okay. Who are you?”


He was very quiet for a moment lying there in his bed and then traced the words on the ceiling with a long invisible tip of his nose and said, “I’m a man who could never fit his dream.”

“What?”

“I mean, Pip, I never became what I wanted to be.”

I was quiet now, too. “What’d you want to be?”

“A writer.”

“Did you try?”

“Try!” he cried, and almost gagged on a strange wild laugh. “Try,” he said, controlling himself. “Why Lord of Mercy, son, you never saw so much spit, ink, and sweat fly. I wrote my way through an ink factory, broke and busted a paper company, ruined and dilapidated six dozen typewriters, devoured and scribbled to the bone ten thousand Ticonderoga Soft Lead pencils.”

“Wow!”

“You may well say Wow.”

“What did you write?”

“What didn’t I write. The poem. The essay. The play tragique. The farce. The short story. The novel. A thousand words a day, boy, every day for thirty years, no day passed I did not scriven and assault the page. Millions of words passed from my fingers onto paper and it was all bad.”

“It couldn’t have been!”

“It was. Not mediocre, not passing fair. Just plain outright mudbath bad. Friends knew it, editors knew it, teachers knew it, publishers knew it, and one strange fine day about four in the afternoon, when I was fifty, I knew it.”

“But you can’t write thirty years without—”

“Stumbling upon excellence? Striking a chord? Gaze long, gaze hard, Pip, look upon a man of peculiar talent, outstanding ability, the only man in history who put down five million words without slapping to life one small base of a story that might rear up on its frail legs and cry Eureka! we’ve done it!”

“You never sold one story!?”

“Not a two line joke. Not a throwaway newspaper sonnet. Not a want ad or obit. Not a home-bottled autumn pickle recipe. Isn’t that rare? To be so outstandingly dull, so ridiculously inept, that nothing ever brought a chuckle, caused a tear, raised a temper, or discharged a blow. And do you know what I did on the day I discovered I would never be a writer? I killed myself.”

“Killed?!”

“Did away with, destroyed. How? I packed me up and took me away on a long train ride and sat on the back smoking-car platform a long time in the night and then one by one let the confetti of my manuscripts fly like panicked birds away down the tracks. I scattered a novel across Nebraska, my Homeric legends over North, my love sonnets through South Dakota. I abandoned my familiar essays in the men’s room at the Harvey House in Clear Springs, Idaho. The late summer wheatfields knew my prose. Grand fertilizer, it probably jumped up bumper crops of corn long after I passed. I rode two trunks of my soul on that long summer’s journey, celebrating my badly served self. And one by one, slow at first, and then faster, faster, over I chucked them, story after story, out, out of my arms out of my head, out of my life, and down they went, sunk drowning night rivers of prairie dust, in lost continents of sand and lonely rock. And the train wallowed around a curve in a great wail of darkness and release, and I opened my fingers and let the last stillborn darlings fall….

“When I reached the far terminus of the line, the trunks were empty. I had drunk much, eaten little, wept on occasion in my private room, but had heaved away my anchors, deadweights, and dreams, and came to the sliding soft chuffing end of my journey, praise God, in a kind of noble peace and certainty. I felt reborn. I said to myself, why, what’s this, what’s this? I’m—I’m a new man.”

He saw it all on the ceiling, and I saw it, too, like a movie run up the wall in the moonlit night.

“I-I’m a new man I said, and when I got off the train at the end of that long summer of disposal and sudden rebirth, I looked in a fly-specked, rain-freckled gum-machine mirror at a lost depot in Peachgum, Missouri, and my beard grown long in two months of travel and my hair gone wild with wind that combed it this way sane, that way mad, and I peered and stood back and exclaimed softly, ‘Why, Charlie Dickens, is that you?!’

The man in the bed laughed softly.

“‘Why, Charlie,’ said I, ‘Mr. Dickens, there you are!’ And the reflection in the mirror cried out, ‘Dammit, sir, who else would it be!? Stand back. I’m off to a great lecture!’”

“Did you really say that, Mr. Dickens?”


“God’s pillars and temples of truth, Pip. And I got out of his way! And I strode through a strange town and I knew who I was at last and grew fevers thinking on what I might do in my lifetime now reborn and all that grand fine work ahead! For, Pip, this thing must have been growing. All those years of writing and snuffing up defeat, my old subconscious must have been whispering, ‘Just you wait. Things will be black midnight bad but then in the nick of time, I’ll save you!’

“And maybe the thing that saved me was the thing ruined me in the first place: respect for my elders; the grand moguls and tall muckymucks in the lush literary highlands and me in the dry river bottom with my canoe.

“For, oh God, Pip, how I devoured Tolstoy, drank Dostoevsky, feasted on De Maupassant, had wine and chicken picnics with Flaubert and Molière. I gazed at gods too high. I read too much! So, when my work vanished, theirs stayed. Suddenly I found I could not forget their books, Pip!”

“Couldn’t?”

“I mean I could not forget any letter of any word of any sentence or any paragraph of any book ever passed under these hungry omnivorous eyes!”

“Photographic memory!”

“Bull’s-eye! All of Dickens, Hardy, Austen, Poe, Hawthorne, trapped in this old box Brownie waiting to be printed off my tongue, all those years, never knew, Pip, never guessed, I had did it all away. Ask me to speak in tongues. Kipling is one. Thackery another. Weigh flesh. I’m Shylock. Snuff out the light, I’m Othello. All, all, Pip, all!”

“And then? And so?”

“Why then and so, Pip, I looked another time in that fly-specked mirror and said, ‘Mr. Dickens, all this being true, when do you write your first book?’

“‘Now!’ I cried. And bought fresh paper and ink and have been delirious and joyful, lunatic and happy frantic ever since, writing all the books of my own dear self, me, I, Charles Dickens, one by one.

“I have traveled the continental vastness of the United States of North America and settled me in to write and act, act and write, lecturing here, pondering there, half in and then half out of my mania, known and unknown, lingering here to finish Copperfield, loitering there for Dombey and Son, turning up for tea with Marley’s Ghost on some pale Christmas noon. Sometimes I lie whole snowbound winters in little whistle stops and no one there guessing that Charlie Dickens bides hibernation there, then pop forth like the ottermole of spring and so move on. Sometimes I stay whole summers in one town before I’m driven off. Oh, yes, driven. For such as your Mr. Wyneski cannot forgive the fantastic, Pip, no matter how particularly practical that fantastic be.

“For he has no humor, boy.

He does not see that we all do what we must to survive, survive.


“Some laugh, some cry, some bang the world with fists, some run, but it all sums up the same: they make do.

“The world swarms with people, each one drowning, but each swimming a different stroke to the far shore.

“And Mr. Wyneski? He makes do with scissors and understands not my inky pen and littered papers on which I would flypaper-catch my borrowed English soul.”

Mr. Dickens put his feet out of bed and reached for his carpetbag.

“So I must pick up and go.”

I grabbed the bag first.

“No! You can’t leave! You haven’t finished the book!”

“Pip, dear boy, you haven’t been listening—”

“The world’s waiting! You can’t just quit in the middle of Two Cities!”

He took the bag quietly from me.

“Pip, Pip…”

“You can’t, Charlie!”

He looked into my face and it must have been so white hot he flinched away.

“I’m waiting,” I cried. “They’re waiting!”

“They…?”

“The mob at the Bastille. Paris! London. The Dover sea. The guillotine!”

I ran to throw all the windows even wider as if the night wind and the moonlight might bring in sounds and shadows to crawl on the rug and sneak in his eyes, and the curtains blew out in phantom gestures and I swore I heard, Charlie heard, the crowds, the coach wheels, the great slicing downfall of the cutting blades and the cabbage heads falling and battle songs and all that on the wind…

“Oh, Pip, Pip…”

Tears welled from his eyes.

I had my pencil out and my pad.

“Well?” I said.

“Where were we, this afternoon, Pip?”

“Madame Defarge, knitting.”

He let the carpetbag fall. He sat on the edge of the bed and his hands began to tumble, weave, knit, motion, tie and untie, and he looked and saw his hands and spoke and I wrote and he spoke again, stronger, and stronger, all through the rest of the night…

“Madame Defarge … yes … well. Take this, Pip. She—”


“Morning, Mr. Dickens!”

I flung myself into the dining-room chair. Mr. Dickens was already half through his stack of pancakes.

I took one bite and then saw the even greater stack of pages lying on the table between us.

“Mr. Dickens?” I said. “The Tale of Two Cities. It’s … finished?”

“Done.” Mr. Dickens ate, eyes down. “Got up at six. Been working steady. Done. Finished. Through.”

“Wow!” I said.

A train whistle blew. Charlie sat up, then rose suddenly, to leave the rest of his breakfast and hurry out in the hall. I heard the front door slam and tore out on the porch to see Mr. Dickens half down the walk, carrying his carpetbag.

He was walking so fast I had to run to circle round and round him as he headed for the rail depot.

“Mr. Dickens, the book’s finished, yeah, but not published yet!”

“You be my executor, Pip.”

He fled. I pursued, gasping.

“What about David Copperfield?! Little Dorrit?!”

“Friends of yours, Pip?”

“Yours, Mr. Dickens, Charlie, oh, gosh, if you don’t write them, they’ll never live.”

“They’ll get on somehow.” He vanished around a corner. I jumped after.

“Charlie, wait. I’ll give you—a new title! Pickwick Papers, sure, Pickwick Papers!”

The train was pulling into the station.

Charlie ran fast.

“And after that, Bleak House, Charlie, and Hard Times and Great—Mr. Dickens, listen—Expectations! Oh, my gosh!”


For he was far ahead now and I could only yell after him:

“Oh, blast, go on! get off! get away! You know what I’m going to do!? You don’t deserve reading! You don’t! So right now, and from here on, see if I even bother to finish reading Tale of Two Cities! Not me! Not this one! No!”

The bell was tolling in the station. The steam was rising. But, Mr. Dickens had slowed. He stood in the middle of the sidewalk. I came up to stare at his back.

“Pip,” he said softly. “You mean what you just said?”

“You!” I cried. “You’re nothing but—” I searched in my mind and seized a thought: “—a blot of mustard, some undigested bit of raw potato—!”

“‘Bah, Humbug, Pip?’”

“Humbug! I don’t give a blast what happens to Sidney Carton!”

“Why, it’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done, Pip. You must read it.”

“Why!?”

He turned to look at me with great sad eyes.

“Because I wrote it for you.”

It took all my strength to half-yell back: “So—?”

“So,” said Mr. Dickens, “I have just missed my train. Forty minutes till the next one—”

“Then you got time,” I said.

“Time for what?”

“To meet someone. Meet them, Charlie, and I promise I’ll finish reading your book. In there. In there, Charlie.”

He pulled back.

“That place? The library?!”

“Ten minutes, Mr. Dickens, give me ten minutes, just ten, Charlie. Please.”

“Ten?”

And at last, like a blind man, he let me lead him up the library steps and half-fearful, sidle in.

The library was like a stone quarry where no rain had fallen in ten thousand years.

Way off in that direction: silence.

Way off in that direction: hush.

It was the time between things finished and things begun. Nobody died here.

Nobody was born. The library, and all its books, just were.

We waited, Mr. Dickens and I, on the edge of the silence.

Mr. Dickens trembled. And I suddenly remembered I had never seen him here all summer. He was afraid I might take him near the fiction shelves and see all his books, written, done, finished, printed, stamped, bound, borrowed, read, repaired, and shelved.

But I wouldn’t be that dumb. Even so, he took my elbow and whispered:

“Pip, what are we doing here? Let’s go. There’s…”

“Listen!” I hissed.

And a long way off in the stacks somewhere, there was a sound like a moth turning over in its sleep.

“Bless me,” Mr. Dickens’s eyes widened. “I know that sound.”

“Sure!”

“It’s the sound,” he said, holding his breath, then nodding, “of someone writing.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Writing with a pen. And … and writing…”

“What?”

“Poetry,” gasped Mr. Dickens. “That’s it. Someone off there in a room, how many fathoms deep, Pip, I swear, writing a poem. There! Eh? Flourish, flourish, scratch, flourish on, on, on, that’s not figures, Pip, not numerals, not dusty-dry facts, you feel it sweep, feel it scurry? A poem, by God, yes, sir, no doubt, a poem!”

“Ma’am,” I called.

The moth-sound ceased.

“Don’t stop her!” hissed Mr. Dickens. “Middle of inspiration. Let her go!”

The moth-scratch started again.

Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on, stop. Flourish, flourish. I bobbed my head. I moved my lips, as did Mr. Dickens, both of us suspended, held, leant forward on the cool marble air listening to the vaults and stacks and echoes in the subterrane.

Flourish, flourish, scratch, on, on.

Silence.

“There.” Mr. Dickens nudged me.

“Ma’am!” I called ever so urgently soft.

And something rustled in the corridors.

And there stood the librarian, a lady between years, not young, not old; between colors, not dark, not pale; between heights, not short, not tall, but rather frail, a woman you often heard talking to herself off in the dark dust-stacks with a whisper like turned pages, a woman who glided as if on hidden wheels.

She came carrying her soft lamp of face, lighting her way with her glance.

Her lips were moving, she was busy with words in the vast room behind her clouded gaze.

Charlie read her lips eagerly. He nodded. He waited for her to halt and bring us to focus, which she did, suddenly. She gasped and laughed at herself.

“Oh, Ralph, it’s you and—” A look of recognition warmed her face. “Why, you’re Ralph’s friend. Mr. Dickens, isn’t it?”

Charlie stared at her with a quiet and almost alarming devotion.

“Mr. Dickens,” I said. “I want you to meet—”

“‘Because I could not stop for Death—’” Charlie, eyes shut, quoted from memory.

The librarian blinked swiftly and her brow like a lamp turned high, took white color.

“Miss Emily,” he said.

“Her name is—” I said.

“Miss Emily.” He put out his hand to touch hers.

“Pleased,” she said. “But how did you—?”

“Know your name? Why, bless me, ma’am, I heard you scratching way off in there, runalong rush, only poets do that!”

“It’s nothing.”

“Head high, chin up,” he said, gently. “It’s something. ‘Because I could not stop for death’ is a fine A-1 first-class poem.”

“My own poems are so poor,” she said, nervously. “I copy hers out to learn.”

“Copy who?” I blurted.

“Excellent way to learn.”

“Is it, really?” She looked close at Charlie. “You’re not…?”

“Joking? No, not with Emily Dickinson, ma’am!”

“Emily Dickinson?” I said.

“That means much coming from you, Mr. Dickens,” she flushed. “I have read all your books.”

“All?” He backed off.

“All,” she added hastily, “that you have published so far, sir.”

“Just finished a new one.” I put in, “Sockdolager! A Tale of Two Cities.”

“And you, ma’am?” he asked, kindly.

She opened her small hands as if to let a bird go.

“Me? Why, I haven’t even sent a poem to our town newspaper.”

“You must!” he cried, with true passion and meaning. “Tomorrow. No, today!”

“But,” her voice faded. “I have no one to read them to, first.”

“Why,” said Chadie quietly. “You have Pip here, and, accept my card, C. Dickens, Esquire. Who will, if allowed, stop by on occasion, to see if all’s well in this Arcadian silo of books.”

She took his card. “I couldn’t—”

“Tut! You must. For I shall offer only warm sliced white bread. Your words must be the marmalade and summer honey jam. I shall read long and plain. You: short and rapturous of life and tempted by that odd delicious Death you often lean upon. Enough.” He pointed. “There. At the far end of the corridor, her lamp lit ready to guide your hand … the Muse awaits. Keep and feed her well. Good-bye.”

“Good-bye?” she asked. “Doesn’t that mean ‘God be with you’?”

“So I have heard, dear lady, so I have heard.”

And suddenly we were back out in the sunlight, Mr. Dickens almost stumbling over his carpetbag waiting there.

In the middle of the lawn, Mr. Dickens stood very still and said, “The sky is blue, boy.”

“Yes, sir.”

“The grass is green.”

“Sure.” Then I stopped and really looked around. “I mean, heck, yeah!”

“And the wind … smell that sweet wind?”

We both smelled it. He said:

“And in this world are remarkable boys with vast imaginations who know the secrets of salvation…”

He patted my shoulder. Head down, I didn’t know what to do. And then I was saved by a whistle:

“Hey, the next train! Here it comes!”


We waited.

After a long while, Mr. Dickens said:

“There it goes…and let’s go home, boy.”

“Home!” I cried, joyfully, and then stopped. “But what about … Mr. Wyneski?”

“O, after all this, I have such confidence in you, Pip. Every afternoon while I’m having tea and resting my wits, you must trot down to the barbershop and—”

“Sweep hair!”

“Brave lad. It’s little enough. A loan of friendship from the Bank of England to the First National Bank of Green Town, Illinois. And now, Pip … pencil!”

I tried behind one ear, found gum; tried the other ear and found: “Pencil!”

“Paper?”

“Paper!”

We strode along under the soft green summer trees.

“Title, Pip—”

He reached up with his cane to write a mystery on the sky. I squinted at the invisible penmanship.

“The—”

He blocked out a second word on the air.

“Old,” I translated.

A third.

“C.U.” I spelled. “R.I….Curiosity!”

“How’s that for a title, Pip?”

I hesitated. “It … doesn’t seem, well, quite finished, sir.”

“What a Christian you are. There!”

He flourished a final word on the sun.

“S.H.O….Shop! The Old Curiosity Shop.”

“Take a novel, Pip!”

“Yes, sir,” I cried. “Chapter One!”

A blizzard of snow blew through the trees.

“What’s that?” I asked, and answered:

Why, summer gone. The calendar pages, all the hours and days, like in the movies, the way they just blow off over the hills. Charlie and I working together, finished, through. Many days at the library, over! Many nights reading aloud with Miss Emily done! Trains come and gone. Moons waxed and waned. New trains arriving and new lives teetering on the brink, and Miss Emily suddenly standing right there, and Charlie here with all their suitcases and handing me a paper sack.

“What’s this?”

“Rice. Pip, plain ordinary white rice, for the fertility ritual. Throw it at us, boy. Drive us happily away. Hear those bells, Pip? Here goes Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Dickens! Throw, boy, throw! Throw!”

I threw and ran, ran and threw, and them on the back train platform waving out of sight and me yelling good-bye, Happy marriage, Charlie! Happy times! Come back! Happy … Happy…

And by then I guess I was crying, and Dog chewing my shoes, jealous, glad to have me alone again, and Mr. Wyneski waiting at the barbershop to hand me my broom and make me his son once more.

And autumn came and lingered and at last a letter arrived from the married and traveling couple.

I kept the letter sealed all day and at dusk, while Grandpa was raking leaves by the front porch I went out to sit and watch and hold the letter and wait for him to look up and at last he did and I opened the letter and read it out loud in the October twilight:

“Dear Pip,” I read, and had to stop for a moment seeing my old special name again, my eyes were so full.

“Dear Pip. We are in Aurora tonight and Felicity tomorrow and Elgin the night after that. Charlie has six months of lectures lined up and looking forward. Charlie and I are both working steadily and are most happy…very happy … need I say?

“He calls me Emily.

“Pip, I don’t think you know who she was, but there was a lady poet once, and I hope you’ll get her books out of the library someday.

“Well, Charlie looks at me and says: ‘This is my Emily’ and I almost believe. No. I do believe.”

I stopped and swallowed hard and read on:

“We are crazy, Pip.

“People have said it. We know it. Yet we go on. But being crazy together is fine.

“It was being crazy alone I couldn’t stand any longer.

“Charlie sends his regards and wants you to know he has indeed started a fine new book, perhaps his best yet … one you suggested the title for, Bleak House.

“So we write and move, move and write, Pip. And some year soon we may come back on the train which stops for water at your town. And if you’re there and call our names as we know ourselves now, we shall step off the train. But perhaps meanwhile you will get too old. And if when the train stops, Pip, you’re not there, we shall understand, and let the train move us on to another and another town.

“Signed, Emily Dickinson.

“P.S. Charlie says your grandfather is a dead ringer for Plato, but not to tell him.

“P.P.S. Charlie is my darling.”


“Charlie is my darling,” repeated Grandpa, sitting down and taking the letter to read it again. “Well, well…” he sighed. “Well, well…”

We sat there a long while, looking at the burning soft October sky and the new stars. A mile off, a dog barked. Miles off, on the horizon line, a train moved along, whistled, and tolled its bell, once, twice, three times, gone.

“You know,” I said. “I don’t think they’re crazy.”

“Neither do I, Pip,” said Grandpa, lighting his pipe and blowing out the match. “Neither do I.”

The End

Fictional Story Related Index

This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes, you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
R is for Rocket
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Correspondence Course
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt
The Star Mouse (Full Text)
Space Jockey (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
He who shrank (Full Text).
Blowups Happen by Robert Heinlein
Uncle Eniar by Ray Bradbury
The Cask of Amontillado

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Art that Moves Me

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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Experts Now Recommend Nuking Everything From Orbit

This is sarcasm. It comes from The Babylon Bee, and when I first came across the article I almost "shit my pants" it was so funny. If you are unaware of where the humor is in this, I would suggest you watch the movie "Aliens". It will put this meme in better context than I ever can explain.

All credit to the original posters. 

Yeah. The United States is really, really messed up now. The government cannot function. Corporate big-wigs are pushing radical Marxism and a progressive socialist ideal that makes Pol-Pot look like a teeny-bopper, and hard core criminals are immune from justice. It’s all a massive cluster-fuck. Experts Now Recommend Nuking Everything From Orbit.

Experts Now Recommend Nuking Everything From Orbit – July 23rd, 2019

WORLD—In the wake of a string of increasingly bizarre antics from a rapidly declining western civilization, experts recommended nuking everything from orbit. 

Should world leaders approve the plan, the nukes will be launched sometime in the next week, weather permitting. 

“Our new strategy for eradicating the potential for more of the absolute insanity as we have seen over the past weeks and months is to just wipe the whole thing out,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper declared in a press conference at the Pentagon.

“We explored plans ranging from releasing biological weapons into public areas around the world to just sinking everyone into the sea. But based on computer simulations, a barrage of orbital nukes from our defense satellites is the most effective plan for just wiping everything out in order to let someone else have a shot.”

Esper went on to state the first barrage of nukes would include some 325 different ICBMs targeted at the world’s most densely populated areas, while a second salvo would target more rural areas to wipe out any survivors.

“It’s the only way to be sure.”

The Babylon Bee

SHTF Related Index

This is a collection of my posts related to prepping, SHTF (Shit Hit The Fan), CWII (American Civil War 2), Fourth Turning (Strauss–Howe generational theory) and other posts related to the very sad and sorry tatters that America is today. Actually, I am a little stunned that I have written so much about these matters. But America today is very ill and there are things that really should be said.

Here are the posts.

SHTF and Related Index

The Tale of the Killdozer.
The use of technicals for genocide.
The Climax of the Fourth Turning in 2025.
2025 - the Fourth Turning Crisis - A nuclear response
Why are Americans so angry?
Evolution of the USA and China.
The grim future.
Is it clear enough for you?
SJW
r/K selection theory
Pictures of a gun-free utopia.
Link
Historically, how preppers failed during periods of turmoil.
Universal Background Checks
What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6
Civil War
The Warning Signs
Line in the sand
A second passport
Link
Make America Great Again.
What would the founders think?
The Ninth Amendment
How they get away with it
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Parable about America
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.
Asshole
Types of American conservatives.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The history of how Australia obtained Sheilas; the story of The Lady Juliana, The 18th-Century Prison Ship Filled With Women

This is the story of the Lady Juliana. This was a special ship designed to convey female convicts from England to Australia. The idea was that a boat load of female convicts would happily link up with a colony of convicts in Australia. Thus making everyone very, very happy, and reform the colony in New South Wales.

They were right.

And this motley crew of British women ultimately had a lasting impact on the history of Australia.

A little background information.

Great Britain began colonizing Australia in 1787 with the departure of the so-called “First Fleet” of ships. Aboard these ships were male and female prisoners, as well as officials whose goal was to establish a penal colony around modern-day Sydney. The Lady Juliana was part of the Second Fleet of ships meant to bring another round of convicts along with food and supplies for the young colony.

Seventeen years after Cook discovered Botany Bay, on May 13th, 1787, a fleet of eleven ships left England – the First Fleet which would begin the colonization of Australia. Under the command of Commodore Arthur Phillip, these ships carried 1530 people – 736 of whom were convicts.
Seventeen years after Cook discovered Botany Bay, on May 13th, 1787, a fleet of eleven ships left England – the First Fleet which would begin the colonization of Australia. Under the command of Commodore Arthur Phillip, these ships carried 1530 people – 736 of whom were convicts.

The British government specifically commissioned the Lady Juliana to transport a group of no fewer than 200 female convicts to Australia.

Pulled from British prisons, these convicts were torn from their families and communities to undertake a lengthy sea voyage to the other side of the world. Though conditions aboard the Lady Juliana were better than they were on most male-convict ships, it was still a long, hard journey – the ship left England in July 1789 and didn’t reach its final destination until June 1790. That’s almost an entire year.

As the first exclusively female convict transport to Australia, the voyage of Lady Juliana is of great historical significance. Lady Juliana was also the first convict transport to arrive in Australia after the First Fleet and the only transport of the Second Fleet not to have been chartered by slave traders Camden, Calvert & King.
As the first exclusively female convict transport to Australia, the voyage of Lady Juliana is of great historical significance. Lady Juliana was also the first convict transport to arrive in Australia after the First Fleet and the only transport of the Second Fleet not to have been chartered by slave traders Camden, Calvert & King.

About the convicts…

Though they were prisoners being transported against their will, many of the women of the Lady Juliana ultimately made the most of their circumstances. This was both during and after the voyage. They were quite busy with side hustles in ports of call and their romantic bartering aboard the ship. Indeed, their journey has gone down in history books as one of the most legendary.

Some Of The Passengers Sold Themselves At Ports En Route To Australia
Some Of The Passengers Sold Themselves At Ports En Route To Australia. This was a common enough activity, and enabled the sailors to be happy and productive throughout the long year-long trip. During ports of call, the convicts were also permitted to perform some side-activity to enable them to come up with some side money.

The voyage to Australia lasted about 10 months, as the Lady Juliana voyaged from port to port in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. The ship’s stays in places like Rio de Janeiro and Cape Town could last several weeks. The convicts made the most of their global tour by selling their services in these ports.

As John Nicol, the ship’s steward, euphemistically remembered, “We did not restrain the people on shore from coming on board through the day. The captains and seamen, who were in port at the time, paid us many visits.” The women were very busy being in high demand at the ports of call.

British Home Under-Secretary Evan Nepean. Nepean decided that, in order for the new colony to prosper, it would need more than just increased provisions and supplies — it would need the stability created by more women, children, and families. To this end, Nepean ordered a shipment of female convicts to immediately be sent to Sydney Cove and “upon landing, promote a matrimonial connection to improve morals and secure settlement.”
British Home Under-Secretary Evan Nepean. Nepean decided that, in order for the new colony to prosper, it would need more than just increased provisions and supplies — it would need the stability created by more women, children, and families. To this end, Nepean ordered a shipment of female convicts to immediately be sent to Sydney Cove and “upon landing, promote a matrimonial connection to improve morals and secure settlement.”

The ladies kept at least part of their earnings. Some of the ship’s officers and sailors allegedly even got in on the business, and their involvement raises serious questions about the degree to which these captive women were coerced into their activities.

 One, a Scottish girl, broke her heart and died in the river; she was  buried at Dartford. Four were pardoned on account of his Majesty's  recovery. The poor young Scottish girl I have never yet got out of my  mind; she was young and beautiful, even in the convict dress, but pale  as death, and her eyes red with weeping. She never spoke to any of the  other women or came on deck. She was constantly seen sitting in the same  corner from morning to night; even the time of meals roused her not. My  heart bled for her, - she was a countrywoman in misfortune. I offered  her consolation, but her hopes and heart had sunk. When I spoke she  heeded me not, or only answered with sighs and tears; if I spoke of  Scotland she would ring her hands an sob, until I thought her heart  would burst. I endeavoured to get her sad story from her lips, but she  was silent as the grave to which she hastened. I lent her my bible to  comfort her, but she read it not; she laid it on her lap after kissing  it, and only bedewed it with her tears. At length she sunk into the  grave, of no disease, but a broken heart. After her death we had only  two Scottish women on board, one of them a Shetlander. 

-John Nicol
In response to Nepean’s command, 225 female thieves, prostitutes, con artists, and some five infants were rounded up from prisons in London and the English countryside to be shipped off to the failing Sydney Cove colony aboard the Lady Juliana. For the English government, the female convicts were to serve two purposes: to prevent the starving and isolated male colonists from engaging in “gross irregularities” and to act as a breeding stock for the troubled settlement.
In response to Nepean’s command, 225 female thieves, prostitutes, con artists, and some five infants were rounded up from prisons in London and the English countryside to be shipped off to the failing Sydney Cove colony aboard the Lady Juliana. For the English government, the female convicts were to serve two purposes: to prevent the starving and isolated male colonists from engaging in “gross irregularities” and to act as a breeding stock for the troubled settlement.

Many Of The Ship’s Sailors Took The Convict Women As ‘Wives’.

Whether out of love, lust, coercion, or necessity, many of the women on board the ship became the “wives” of the ship’s officers and crew members. As the ship’s steward John Nicol recalled in his memoir of the voyage: “When we were fairly out at sea, every man on board took a wife from among the convicts, they nothing loath.”

 'I went every day to the town to buy fresh provisions and other  necessaries for them. As their friends were allowed to come on board to  see them, they brought money, and numbers had it of their own,  particularly a Mrs. Barnsley, a noted sharper and shoplifter. She  herself told me her family for one hundred years back, had been  swindlers and highwaymen. She had a brother a highwayman, who often came  to see her, as well dressed and genteel in his appearance as any  gentleman.
 
 'Those from the country came all on board in irons; and I was paid half a  crown a head by the country jailors, in many cases, for striking them  off upon my anvil, as they were not locked but rivetted. There was a  Mrs. Davis a noted swindler, who had obtained great quantities of goods  under false names and other equally base means. We had one Mary Williams  transported for receiving stolen goods. She and another eight had been a  long time in Newgate where Lord George Gordon had supported them. I  went once a week to him and got their allowance from his own hand all  the time we lay in the river. 

 -John Nicol 

While these marriages were not legal, they nonetheless served a practical purpose: taking a lover onboard the ship often meant better sleeping arrangements for the women.

The women slept in the orlop deck, just above the ship’s bilge, which contained the ship’s holding water, human waste, and remnants of food. Despite such hardships, the ship’s conditions may have seemed preferable to many of the women compared with those they had left behind in London’s prisons. For some of these women, the journey to Sydney Cove itself offered an opportunity for them to better their positions. Women who became “wives” of crewmembers aboard the ship could get access to better provisions and sleeping arrangements. Some women, like Elizabeth Barnsley — a wealthy and successful shoplifter convicted of theft — used their money and influence to procure better lodging and even to create business opportunities on the ship. Prostitution was not unusual in Georgian England or within the shipping industry, and the Lady Juliana soon became something of a “floating brothel.” Crewmembers and, possibly, some of the ship’s female cargo profited from the sex trade in various ports of call, and money earned from prostitution could in turn be used to gain influence on the ship or upon arrival at Sydney Cove.
The women slept in the orlop deck, just above the ship’s bilge, which contained the ship’s holding water, human waste, and remnants of food. Despite such hardships, the ship’s conditions may have seemed preferable to many of the women compared with those they had left behind in London’s prisons. For some of these women, the journey to Sydney Cove itself offered an opportunity for them to better their positions. Women who became “wives” of crewmembers aboard the ship could get access to better provisions and sleeping arrangements.

But at least one partnership was rooted in genuine feeling: Nicol seemed to have fallen in love with prisoner Sarah Whitlam. Though he intended to marry her once her term ended, the two never wed. Nicol had to go back to Britain, leaving Whitlam and their child behind in Australia. He attempted to reunite with her, but they never saw each other again.

 We had on board a girl pretty well behaved, who was called, by her  acquaintances a daughter of Pitt. She herself never contradicted it. She  bore a most striking likeness to him in every feature, and could scarce  be known from him as to looks. We left her at Port Jackson. Some of our  convicts I have heard even to boast of the crimes and murders committed  by them and their accomplices; but the far greater number were harmless  unfortunate creatures, the victims of the basest seduction.
 
 When we were fairly out at sea, every man on board took a wife from  among the convicts, they nothing loath. The girl with whom I lived, for I  was as bad in this point as the others, was named Sarah Whitelam. She  was a native of Lincoln, a girl of modest reserved turn, as kind and  true a creature as ever lived. I courted her for a week and upwards, and  would have married her upon the spot, had there been a clergy man on  board. She had been banished for a mantle she had borrowed from an  acquaintance. Her friend prosecuted her for stealing it, and she was  transported for seven years. I had fixed my fancy upon her from the  moment I knocked the rivet out of her irons upon my anvil, and as firmly  resolved to bring her back to England, when her time was out, my lawful  wife, as ever I did intend anything in my life. She bore me a son in  our voyage out. What is become of her, whether she is dead or alive, I  know not. That I do not, is no fault of mine, as my narrative will show. 

- Excerpt from The Life and Adventures of John Nicol, Mariner printed in the Spirit of the English Magazines 

Not all partnerships were as affectionate as Nicol and Whitlam’s appears to have been. The lack of privacy for prisoners on convict ships meant that crew members had access to them, and their relations and interactions could be coercive. The age of consent in 18th-century Britain was 10 years old, so some crew members took teenage wives during the voyage.

Some women, like Elizabeth Barnsley — a wealthy and successful shoplifter convicted of theft — used their money and influence to procure better lodging and even to create business opportunities on the ship. Prostitution was not unusual in Georgian England or within the shipping industry, and the Lady Juliana soon became something of a “floating brothel.” Crewmembers and, possibly, some of the ship’s female cargo profited from the sex trade in various ports of call, and money earned from prostitution could in turn be used to gain influence on the ship or upon arrival at Sydney Cove.
Some women, like Elizabeth Barnsley — a wealthy and successful shoplifter convicted of theft — used their money and influence to procure better lodging and even to create business opportunities on the ship. Prostitution was not unusual in Georgian England or within the shipping industry, and the Lady Juliana soon became something of a “floating brothel.” Crewmembers and, possibly, some of the ship’s female cargo profited from the sex trade in various ports of call, and money earned from prostitution could in turn be used to gain influence on the ship or upon arrival at Sydney Cove.

Historian Pamela Horn identified 14-year-old Jane Forbes as one such young wife – she had a baby before reaching Australia.

Colonial Officials Wanted The Women To Prevent Men From Sleeping With Each Other.

 Mary Wade and Jane Whiting were transported on the Lady  Juliana......This day the sessions at the Old Bailey, which began on  Wednesday last, ended, when 18 convicts received sentence of  death......... Of all the criminals who received lenience, those most to  be regretted were two young girls, the eldest only fourteen, the  youngest eleven, in whom the seeds of wickedness had taken such deep  root, as to have rendered them callous to all sense of shame or feeling.  These two artful hussies, Jane Whiting, and Mary Wade, seeing a child  between six and seven years old in the street alone, easily decoyed it  into a privy, under the Treasury wall, where they stripped and then left  it to perish, with cold. Fortunately its cries attracted the notice of  people nearby by, who humanely conducted the child to its friends.. 

(Gentleman's Magazine) 

There was not an even distribution of men and women among the convict-colonists in early British Australia. Of the 759 convicts sent to Australia aboard the First Fleet, 568 were men while only 191 were women. As a result, officials worried about how all those men would find partners – some were concerned that they would turn to one another.

For their part, many of the women convicts experienced a newfound sense of freedom at Sydney Cove. Freed from the strictures of traditional society and class, these women saw their new home as a chance to create a new life for themselves — a life filled with unprecedented opportunities.
For their part, many of the women convicts experienced a newfound sense of freedom at Sydney Cove. Freed from the strictures of traditional society and class, these women saw their new home as a chance to create a new life for themselves — a life filled with unprecedented opportunities.

To correct what 18th-century Britain perceived to be “gross irregularities” in romantic partnerships in Australia, officials begged for more women. The Female Prisoners Were Expected To Civilize The Colony

The women of the Lady Juliana had a particular purpose: Colonial officials hoped that a shipload of women would help civilize the budding convict colony. According to one British official, the increased presence of women would “promote a matrimonial connection to improve morals and secure settlement.”

Mary Talbot was one of the women who was embarked on the Lady Juliana. Mary, with other female prisoners, managed with assistance of their families, to escape from the Lady Juliana while still in port. Mary Talbot was re-captured and eventually transported on the Mary Ann. Another of the escapees Mary Burgess managed to remain at large for 3 years. She had been found guilty of stealing in a dwelling house in October 1787 and received a sentence of death which was afterwards through the Royal mercy pardoned on condition of being transported for 7 years. She was put on board the Lady Juliana and after escaping was spotted by a police runner and apprehended at Christ Church. In her defence she claimed to have been very ill, fell over board, and was taken up by a fisherman. She was recommended to mercy because of her good conduct since and because no wilful escape was proved.
Mary Talbot was one of the women who was embarked on the Lady Juliana. Mary, with other female prisoners, managed with assistance of their families, to escape from the Lady Juliana while still in port. Mary Talbot was re-captured and eventually transported on the Mary Ann. Another of the escapees Mary Burgess managed to remain at large for 3 years. She had been found guilty of stealing in a dwelling house in October 1787 and received a sentence of death which was afterwards through the Royal mercy pardoned on condition of being transported for 7 years. She was put on board the Lady Juliana and after escaping was spotted by a police runner and apprehended at Christ Church. In her defense she claimed to have been very ill, fell over board, and was taken up by a fisherman. She was recommended to mercy because of her good conduct since and because no wilful escape was proved.

They were to marry male colonists, which would supposedly create and maintain respectable family life in the new colony. The women’s prison sentences aimed to transform them into moral vessels that would enable the re-creation of the British family unit abroad.

Most Of The Women Onboard The Ship Had Committed Petty Offenses

The women being transported to New South Wales on the Lady Juliana were prisoners, but their lives were upended for infractions that appear minor in the 21st century. Though some of the women aboard the Lady Juliana might have been ladies of the night, that’s not why they were sent to Australia – harlotry was not a transportable offense. Most of the women on the ship had been arrested and sentenced for various degrees of theft.

Their offenses ranged from highway robbery to shoplifting and pickpocketing. Mary Hook, for example, was around 20 years old when the British court commuted her punishment for stealing her employer’s money and goods from capital punishment to a seven-year sentence in New South Wales.

On the ships to Australia, the prettiest were rumoured to have been shared amongst the military officers. Upon arrival in Australia, the women were lined up like cattle to be selected as servants or wives. If they were not selected, a life of prostitution was their only real hope for survival.
On the ships to Australia, the prettiest were rumored to have been shared amongst the military officers. Upon arrival in Australia, the women were lined up like cattle to be selected as servants or wives. If they were not selected, a life of prostitution was their only real hope for survival.

As the ship prepared to depart, a small group managed to escape. Being sent to the other side of the world may have been preferable to more severe penalties, but it was nonetheless a terrifying experience for many women; some left England with heavy hearts as they were ripped away from friends and family. They worried about their uncertain future on a new continent.

Elizabeth Barnsley Became An Enterprising Madam Aboard The Ship

One of the most notable convicts on the ship was Elizabeth Barnsley. Her offense: stealing some cloth. She quickly became a leader during the voyage. As John Nicol, steward of the Lady Juliana, recalled, “She was very kind to her fellow convicts, who were poor. They were all anxious to serve her. She was as a queen among them.”

Female convicts were a varied bunch. They ranged in age from children to women in old age, but most were in their twenties or thirties. Many were single, but some were married and some were widowed.  A small proportion brought children with them on their journey of transportation.  Most left family behind in their homeland. Some were transported with family members, or family members had come before them, or came after them.
Female convicts were a varied bunch. They ranged in age from children to women in old age, but most were in their twenties or thirties. Many were single, but some were married and some were widowed. A small proportion brought children with them on their journey of transportation. Most left family behind in their homeland. Some were transported with family members, or family members had come before them, or came after them.

Barnsley made the most of her circumstances and turned her position into profits – she was instrumental in overseeing her fellow convicts’ economic activities at every port along the way.

Some Of The Women Might Have Been Sex Workers In England

Though they were not being transported to New South Wales for prostitution, many of the women aboard the Lady Juliana may have been ladies of the night. A robust harlotry economy existed in 18th-century Britain, so it’s reasonable to assume that some of the 200-plus convicts took part.

Many of the crimes for which they were transported are considered minor offences by today's standards. The most common crime was stealing—food, clothing, money, household items—nothing worth more than £5.   Relatively few of the women were transported for a first offence.  A few of the women even courted transportation—deliberately committing crimes such as arson in order to be transported.  Perhaps a few were wrongly accused, but the majority, according to the laws of the day, deserved to be transported to the other side of the world, away from kith and kin.
Many of the crimes for which they were transported are considered minor offenses by today’s standards. The most common crime was stealing—food, clothing, money, household items—nothing worth more than £5. Relatively few of the women were transported for a first offense. A few of the women even courted transportation—deliberately committing crimes such as arson in order to be transported. Perhaps a few were wrongly accused, but the majority, according to the laws of the day, deserved to be transported to the other side of the world, away from kith and kin.

Moreover, many of the passengers’ stories fell into the “fallen woman” trope that had become popular in novels and plays. John Nicol believed many of the women had been seduced at some point in their lives. He wrote about how Sarah Dorset, for example, had “fallen” into a life of alleged folly and sin:

She had not been protected by the villain that ruined her above six  weeks; then she was forced by want upon the streets, and taken up as a  disorderly girl; then sent onboard to be transported.

The Lady Juliana Provided Better Living Conditions Than Other Convict Ships And British Prisons.

The women aboard the Lady Juliana came from British prisons. Though a prison reform movement began to grow in the late 18th century, the prison conditions they escaped were deplorable. Prisons were overcrowded, and diseases spread swiftly.

It was still a prison ship, and most of the passenger-convicts slept just above the ship’s garbage and sewage deck. But the women of the Lady Juliana had something that their land-imprisoned counterparts didn’t: consistent access to medical care. The ship had a surgeon and was kept relatively clean.

The meagre number of convict women brought with the First Fleet were ravaged by the men on their first night on land, Aboriginal women were sexually assaulted and soon one of the youngest colonists, an eight year old girl was raped by a marine. To save it from moral collapse, the settlement was in dire need of rescue.  Help would come from the most unlikely quarter. Welcome to the startling, shocking and stinking world of Georgian London! Meet some of the motley collection of street-girls, bagsnatchers and con-women who are plying their trade and turning their tricks… Rachel Hoddy is a mischievous prostitute who drags men back to her home not just to relieve them of their money ...but also their clothes. Little Mary Wade, an eleven-year-old street urchin, is hardly the picture of innocence either. Ann Mash has been convicted for stealing just a bushel of wheat. And finally, there's the doyenne of the London crime scene, Mrs. Elizabeth Barnsley.
The meagre number of convict women brought with the First Fleet were ravaged by the men on their first night on land, Aboriginal women were sexually assaulted and soon one of the youngest colonists, an eight year old girl was raped by a marine. To save it from moral collapse, the settlement was in dire need of rescue. Help would come from the most unlikely quarter. Welcome to the startling, shocking and stinking world of Georgian London! Meet some of the motley collection of street-girls, bagsnatchers and con-women who are plying their trade and turning their tricks… Rachel Hoddy is a mischievous prostitute who drags men back to her home not just to relieve them of their money …but also their clothes. Little Mary Wade, an eleven-year-old street urchin, is hardly the picture of innocence either. Ann Mash has been convicted for stealing just a bushel of wheat. And finally, there’s the doyenne of the London crime scene, Mrs. Elizabeth Barnsley.

Also, the women weren’t chained up like prisoners on other convict ships, and they could barter for improved conditions through various favors. John Nicol credited the ship’s captain with being “a humane man” who “did all in his power to make the convicts as comfortable as their circumstances would allow.”

Part of the reason the passengers on the Lady Juliana enjoyed better conditions was because the British government oversaw it, unlike the other ships in the Second Fleet. All the other vessels were operated by Camden, Calvert, and King, a notorious and prolific slave trading company. Only five women perished aboard the Lady Juliana, compared to the 267 deaths reported by the other ships.

About 1 In 5 Of The Passengers Was A Teenager

The vast majority of the women who embarked on the Lady Juliana were in their 20s and 30s. But no fewer than 51 of them – or around 22% – were teenagers. Mary Wade was one of these. Though scholars debate her exact age – recent research says she was 13, while earlier records show she was only 11 – she was the youngest convict on the ship.

Incarcerated for their ‘crimes’ and reprieved from death sentences these women are swept up in a government plot to rescue the starving colony at Sydney Cove. But these women will never be at the mercy of the bigwigs of the British Empire.  Aboard The Lady Juliana, they criss-cross the oceans and at each port of call the women show they have quite a head for enterprise. Turning the boardwalks into catwalks they convert the ship into a floating brothel, the sure means to feeding themselves and staying alive. These women are survivors and doing business is in their blood. Sydney Cove will get more than it bargained for when this lot arrive.  This is the rip-roaring tale of a boat-load of women who sailed to the ends of the earth to breath life into a dying colony. But together they would give Sydney and the nation of Australia something much more – a future.  As their descendents discover the story by unearthing diaries, court records and documents they begin to draw parallels with their own twenty-first century lives, and discover they have inherited more than just their genes - but also the incredible entrepreneurial spirit of their forebears.
Incarcerated for their ‘crimes’ and reprieved from death sentences these women are swept up in a government plot to rescue the starving colony at Sydney Cove. But these women will never be at the mercy of the bigwigs of the British Empire. Aboard The Lady Juliana, they criss-cross the oceans and at each port of call the women show they have quite a head for enterprise. Turning the boardwalks into catwalks they convert the ship into a floating brothel, the sure means to feeding themselves and staying alive. These women are survivors and doing business is in their blood. Sydney Cove will get more than it bargained for when this lot arrive. This is the rip-roaring tale of a boat-load of women who sailed to the ends of the earth to breath life into a dying colony. But together they would give Sydney and the nation of Australia something much more – a future. As their descendents discover the story by unearthing diaries, court records and documents they begin to draw parallels with their own twenty-first century lives, and discover they have inherited more than just their genes – but also the incredible entrepreneurial spirit of their forebears.

Like many of her shipmates, Wade ultimately married and had a large number of children in Australia.

Drunkenness Was The Biggest Disciplinary Problem On The Ship

Though it took the Lady Juliana nearly 11 months to reach Australia, there were relatively few disciplinary problems among the convicts on the ship. One notable issue did arise involving drunkenness leading to disorderly behavior.

To curb her so-called “rowdiness,” crew members made passenger Nance Ferrel wear a repurposed wooden barrel “jacket.” When that didn’t work, they resorted to flogging her 12 times.

On arrival, female convicts were sent directly to the Female Factory. Many only remained a day or so before they were assigned to settlers to work as domestic servants, and many were married soon after arrival. Any man wanting to marry one of the women could apply to the authorities for permission to do so. The women were then lined up at the Factory and the man would drop a scarf or handkerchief at the feet of the woman of his choice. If she picked it up, the marriage was virtually immediate.
On arrival, female convicts were sent directly to the Female Factory. Many only remained a day or so before they were assigned to settlers to work as domestic servants, and many were married soon after arrival. Any man wanting to marry one of the women could apply to the authorities for permission to do so. The women were then lined up at the Factory and the man would drop a scarf or handkerchief at the feet of the woman of his choice. If she picked it up, the marriage was virtually immediate.

Many Colonists Were Annoyed When The Ship Arrived Carrying Women Instead Of Provisions

The First Fleet of convict-colonists arrived in 1788. So by the time the Lady Juliana sailed into Sydney in June 1790, the people already there were desperate to replenish their severely dwindled supplies. Many of them were disappointed to learn the Lady Juliana was a ship carrying people, not goods. One government official grumbled that the Lady Juliana carried “a cargo so unnecessary and so unprofitable as 222 females, instead of a cargo of provisions.”

Although some convict women were classed as depraved and prostitutes, others had been in domestic service in England and were transported for stealing from their employers or shops. After arrival, though, many had to take up prostitution to survive; and the system of selection of servants often meant that the gentry and officers would choose the young and the pretty amongst the women convicts.
Although some convict women were classed as depraved and prostitutes, others had been in domestic service in England and were transported for stealing from their employers or shops. After arrival, though, many had to take up prostitution to survive; and the system of selection of servants often meant that the gentry and officers would choose the young and the pretty amongst the women convicts.

Though the ship didn’t bring much in the way of food and goods, it did bring long-awaited news from home, such as dispatches that first alerted the colonists in Australia to the French Revolution that had erupted in 1789.

The Women On The Ship Had To Wear Convict Dresses

As prisoners, the women going to Australia on the Lady Juliana were expected to wear convict dresses. At least one fashionable prisoner protested this. According to the ship’s steward, Elizabeth Barnsley actually “petitioned the government agent and captain to be allowed to wear her own clothes” while the ship prepared to sail. Her request was denied, but the crew allowed her to wear whatever she wanted once the boat went to sea.

"Whore" and "prostitute", in England during the Georgian era, were bandied about to serve the moral views of middle-class ideology. However, in the lower classes neither the male nor the female convicts thought it disgraceful, or even wrong, to live together out of wedlock. The sexism of English society was brought to Australia and then amplified by penal conditions. A convict woman needed unusual strength of character not to be crushed by its assumptions. Language itself confirmed her degradation, and some sense of this may be gleaned from the slang and cant words applied to women in those times—a brusque, stinging argot of appropriation and dismissal.
“Whore” and “prostitute”, in England during the Georgian era, were bandied about to serve the moral views of middle-class ideology. However, in the lower classes neither the male nor the female convicts thought it disgraceful, or even wrong, to live together out of wedlock. The sexism of English society was brought to Australia and then amplified by penal conditions. A convict woman needed unusual strength of character not to be crushed by its assumptions. Language itself confirmed her degradation, and some sense of this may be gleaned from the slang and cant words applied to women in those times—a brusque, stinging argot of appropriation and dismissal.

Since the convicts all wore issued dresses, the ship’s captain had the right to dispose of all the passengers’ clothing – but he didn’t, and instead held it for them. He reasoned that the garments “would be of use to the poor creatures when they arrived at Port Jackson.

Some Of The Women Brought Their Children, And Others Gave Birth On The Way

Some of the women aboard the Lady Juliana were already mothers before the ship departed England, and so they brought their children with them. Many of the convict-passengers became pregnant and even gave birth during the long voyage.

A woman was a bat, a crack, a buntel, a case for cattle, a mort, a burick, or a convenient. If she had a regular man, she was his natural or peculiar. If married, she was an autem mott; if blonde, a bleached mott; if a very young prostitute, almost a child, a kinchin mott; if beautiful, a rum blowen, a ewe, a flash piece of mutton. If she had gonorrhea, she was a queer mott. This language was the lower millstone; the upper was the pompous moral phraseology of the establishment, the good flogging Christians. The double-bind to which they were condemned was piercingly illustrated by the remark of one Scottish settler, Peter Murdoch—who had more than 6,000 acres in Van Diemen's Land and had helped set up the penal station on Maria Island—to the 1838 Select Committee in London: "They are generally so bad," he said, "that the settlers have no heart to treat them well."
A woman was a bat, a crack, a buntel, a case for cattle, a mort, a burick, or a convenient. If she had a regular man, she was his natural or peculiar. If married, she was an autem mott; if blonde, a bleached mott; if a very young prostitute, almost a child, a kinchin mott; if beautiful, a rum blowen, a ewe, a flash piece of mutton. If she had gonorrhea, she was a queer mott. This language was the lower millstone; the upper was the pompous moral phraseology of the establishment, the good flogging Christians. The double-bind to which they were condemned was piercingly illustrated by the remark of one Scottish settler, Peter Murdoch—who had more than 6,000 acres in Van Diemen’s Land and had helped set up the penal station on Maria Island—to the 1838 Select Committee in London: “They are generally so bad,” he said, “that the settlers have no heart to treat them well.”

Historians generally believe five to seven babies were born on the ship, but steward John Nicol suggested no less than 20 had been born while the ship was in port at Rio. They were prepared for the births – the ship had received a small donation of baby linens before leaving England.

Life In Australia Brought New Freedoms And Opportunities For Some Of The Passengers

Unlike other convicts on prison ships, the women aboard the Lady Juliana were not chained together. They were even allowed to move freely around the boat.

And once they arrived in New South Wales, they quickly discovered they could enjoy new freedoms there that they couldn’t in England, even though they were prisoners with few rights who were put in difficult and often dangerous positions.

Instead of iron gangs, troublesome and hardened female prisoners were retained at the female factory. The first such factory was built at Parramatta in 1804 and initially consisted of a single long room with a fireplace at one end for the women to cook. Women and girls made rope and spun and carded wool. At night they slept on the piles of unspun wool.
Instead of iron gangs, troublesome and hardened female prisoners were retained at the female factory. The first such factory was built at Parramatta in 1804 and initially consisted of a single long room with a fireplace at one end for the women to cook. Women and girls made rope and spun and carded wool. At night they slept on the piles of unspun wool.

Women arriving in Australia were free from certain British moral codes, even while colonial officials expected them to be vessels of morality. English laws that marked children of unwed mothers as illegitimate, for example, were not enforced.

 The rituals of  courtship on Norfolk Island  were, to put it mildly, brusque. We see the  "bright intelligent" Kimberley pursuing a  married convict woman named  Mary Ginders with an axe, shouting that "if she did not come  and live  with him he would report her to the Major and have her placed in the   cells." Major Foveaux got the woman of his choice, Ann Sherwin, away  from  one of his subordinate officers by throwing him in jail on a  trumped-up charge  "so that," claimed the Irish rebel leader Joseph  Holt, a Norfolk  prisoner at the time, "the poor fellow, seeing the  danger he was in,  thought it better to save his life, and lose his  wife, than to lose both". At least their union lasted: Foveaux married  Ann Sherwin in England in 1815.
                 
In  such a moral environment, although male convicts had some rights,  however  attenuated, the women had none except the right to be fed; they  had to fend for  themselves against both guards and male prisoners.  "England for white slaves, why were they sent  here," Jones scribbled in  one of his outbursts of delayed guilt, while  reflecting on the fate of  three women sent to Norfolk   Island for the "crime" of abortion, for  crimes that required pity more than punishment. "Heaven  forbid England   if that is her way of populating her hellholes. What would our noble  persons  think of our virgin settlements and their white slaves. In  every case the women  treated as slaves, good stock to trade with and a  convict having the good chance to possess one  did not want much  encouragement to do so." 

-Convict Women

The women of the Lady Juliana were also fortunate in that they avoided the fate that awaited future generations of convict women bound for Australia – the notoriously brutal Parramatta Female Factory didn’t open until 1821, well after their sentences ended.

Life was quite difficult for convict women. Most were sentenced in England for minor crimes such as pickpocketing or theft. As punishment, not only were they exported from their country, many were forced to endure of a life of sexual exploitation. On the ships to Australia, the prettiest were rumoured to have been shared amongst the military officers. Upon arrival in Australia, the women were lined up like cattle to be selected as servants or wives. If they were not selected, a life of prostitution was their only real hope for survival.
Life was quite difficult for convict women. Most were sentenced in England for minor crimes such as pickpocketing or theft. As punishment, not only were they exported from their country, many were forced to endure of a life of sexual exploitation. On the ships to Australia, the prettiest were rumoured to have been shared amongst the military officers. Upon arrival in Australia, the women were lined up like cattle to be selected as servants or wives. If they were not selected, a life of prostitution was their only real hope for survival.

Though being transported to a new colony to get married and propagate British family life was no doubt daunting, many women made the most of their circumstances in Australia.

 Because the women  carried a very negative stigma, morals crusaders often tried to educate  them regarding the folly of their ways. Women who simply stood in an  "immoral pose" risked having their heads shaved and being forced to wear  a collar around their neck as a mark of disgrace. The most difficult  women were sent to female factories, which were essentially forced  labour camps. Here they continued to be educated about the virtues of  morality.
                 
At  the Cascades Female Factory in 1838, the moralising became too much for  the women and they decided to make a point. The governor of Van  Diemen's Land visited the factory and attended a service in the chapel.  Entertaining the governor was the Reverend William Bedford, a morals  campaigner whose hypocrisy had elicited the ladies' scorn. Keen to  impress the governor with a fine speech, Bedford addressed the women  from an elevated dais and then: "The three hundred women turned right  around and at one impulse pulled up their clothes showing their naked  posteriors which they simultaneously smacked with their hands making a  loud and not very musical noise. This was the work of a moment, and  although constables, warders etc. were there in plenty, yet 300 women  could not well be all arrested and tried for such an offence and when  all did the same act the ringleaders could not be picked out."
                 
This  cheeky behaviour "horrified and astounded" the governor and the male  members of the party. As for the ladies in the governor's party, it was  said, in a rare moment of collusion with the convict women, "could not  control their laughter". 

 
-Convict Women 

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Australian colonies were societies on the rise – and they created new opportunities. Some Lady Juliana passengers became upwardly mobile once their prison terms ended.

The Lady Juliana was the first convict ship to carry women. It had been "opened" on the ports on the way to Australia and had thus become known as "the floating brothel." It arrived in Port Jackson in 1790. As the women were disembarked, a drunken orgy broke out. Sailors and convicts were in and around the women's tents, some queuing for sex, others making love with women they had forged attachments with on the voyage. Perhaps the women were willing parties in the orgy, but if they weren’t, they probably didn’t have much choice other than to go along. Either way, the convict women became regarded as depraved and immoral. One witness to the orgy wrote, "The women, cooped up on the voyage and for another 10 hot and intolerable days outside Sydney Cove, had not too many chaste figures among them."
The Lady Juliana was the first convict ship to carry women. It had been “opened” on the ports on the way to Australia and had thus become known as “the floating brothel.” It arrived in Port Jackson in 1790. As the women were disembarked, a drunken orgy broke out. Sailors and convicts were in and around the women’s tents, some queuing for sex, others making love with women they had forged attachments with on the voyage. Perhaps the women were willing parties in the orgy, but if they weren’t, they probably didn’t have much choice other than to go along. Either way, the convict women became regarded as depraved and immoral. One witness to the orgy wrote, “The women, cooped up on the voyage and for another 10 hot and intolerable days outside Sydney Cove, had not too many chaste figures among them.”

While some returned to England, others remained in Australia to make their fortune. Ann Marsh, for one, found success after being abandoned by her ship husband. She started and ran a variety of businesses, including a liquor shop and a ferry company. These women had a lasting impact on the land, becoming the so-called “founding mothers of Australia.”

 On another  occasion, Reverend Bedford was crossing the courtyard of the Female  House of Correction, when "some dozen or twenty women seized upon him,  took off his trousers and deliberately endeavoured to deprive him of his  manhood. They were, however, unable to effect their purpose in  consequence of the opportune arrival of a few constables who seized the  fair ladies and placed them in durance vile."
                 
The  brutalization of women in the colony had gone on so long that it was   virtually a social reflex by the end of the 1830s. The first full  account of it was given by Robert Jones, Major Foveaux's chief jailer on  Norfolk Island in the early 1800's, who thought the lot  of the women  prisoners there "must surely have been greater than the male   convicts.... Several have not recovered yet from their treatment at the  hands  of the Major." Passages in Jones's memoir show how absolute the  chattel  status of women was. "Ted Kimberley chief constable considered  the  convicts of Norfolk Island no better than  heathens unfit to grace  the earth. Women were in his estimation born for the  convenience of  men. He was a bright intelligent Irishman." Jones's  sentiments are  echoed in a fragmentary letter from a free settler on Norfolk Island, an  ex-missionary turned trader named  James Mitchell. "Surely no common  mortal could demand treatment so  brutal," he wrote around 1815. "Heaven  give their weary footsteps  their aching hearts to a better place of  rest for here there is none. During  governorship of Major Foveaux  convicts both male and female were held as  slaves. Poor female convicts  were treated shamefully. Governor King being  mainly responsible." 

 -Convict Women  

A new start

The hardships endured by the women appeared to build a strong sense of female solidarity. The women sang songs, which were often labelled “very disgusting”. When matrons tried to separate agitators from the group, the entire group would sometimes chant “we are all alike, we are all alike.”

Not only did the actions protect individual women, they also made convict life a bit more bearable.

The True Colonist reported in 1837 that while the “horrors of the crime class” had shocked the inhabitants of Van Diemen’s Land, what was more disagreeable to evangelical moral sensibilities was the fact that many women prefer this class to the others, because it is more lively!

There is more fun there than in the others; and we have been informed, that some of the most sprightly of the ladies divert their companions by acting plays!”

As is often the case, out of something bad came something good.

The hardships endured by the convict women seemed to build an ethic to alleviate the hardships in others. Successful convict women such as Molly Morgan never forgot their own hardships earlier in life, and donated freely to establish schools, hospitals and even churches.

Free immigrants like Caroline Chisholm also decided to do something about the suffering they saw around them. She took some women into her house and traveled the colony to find employment for others.

Within two years she had found employment and accommodation for over a thousand women and girls. She then went on to found the Family Colonization Loan Society to help break the cycle of dependence and poverty.

Chisolm’s compassion always came with strings attached.

In her hostels, she employed a tough love approach in which she made it clear that guests should never get too comfortable because they should be out looking for a job.

Mother Mary McKillop was another whose compassion probably flowed from seeing the horrors of the day. Mary took a vow of personal poverty and always shared the hardships of the people she was trying to help.

She was able to personally survive largely because people helped her as well. A society that started off as one in which everyone looked out for themselves, evolved into one in which people started looking out for others.

A society that started off as one in which everyone looked out for themselves, evolved into one in which people started looking out for others.

America, take note.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Mongolian Women under Genghis Khan
What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
The Navy is scrapping the F/A-18 Hornet.
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
The most popular American foods.
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Asian Nazi Chic
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
The Confederados
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1
Be the Rufus, part II. More tales of heroism.

Articles & Links

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Some of the most popular American foods that families eat at dinner time.

Here is a great selection of fantastic, easy to make, and fun family sit-down meals for dinner. This post discusses “real” American food. Not “American fast food”, which it seems (to everyone outside of the USA) is what Americans eat all the time. We do not. We eat something else, something all together different. We eat tasty, aromatic and tasty delicious food. Don’t you know.

Hey! It’s true!

In our homes, with our families, we “break bread” with love, happiness, care and concern. We eat healthy, fine and delicious food. We share the events of the day, and we laugh and cry as the day’s events are presented. We are not alone. We are part of a bigger identity.

Fast food does not represent America. It is an off-shoot of the “modern” progressive-reality that was thrust upon the shoulders of America. We have been dealing with it since 1913, and it’s only been recently that we have decided to shake it off.

It's like coffee. Most Americans do not drink Starbucks coffee daily. Many do, but not most. Coffee is a deeply personal thing with most Americans.

American food, like coffee is a very unique and special treat. Something that does NOT resemble the monetized versions available to the rest of the world.

Surprise!

Here we talk about “dinner time”. That most special and sacred time of the day for many (but not all) Americans. It was the time when a family would take off their soiled work clothes, put aside their school book bags, and sit down together for a fine, nutritious meal. One that was (traditionally) cooked with care and love by the woman of the house.

---PHOTO---Delicious meal at dinner time, where the entire family comes together to share the events of the day and spend happy times together.
Delicious meal at dinner time, where the entire family comes together to share the events of the day and spend happy times together.

Ah, but times have changed. Oh, maybe so. But not inherently. Americans are still Americans. You cannot change who we are on the inside. We are social beings that value our time together with loved ones. Most especially with our families.

Americans are still capable of love for their families.

Yes. I do know all about the injection of “modern progressiveness” into the American culture back in 1913. I am quite cognizant on how it altered and deformed American cultures and resulted in almost all of the problems that America experiences today.

Yes. I know.

How many Americans eat dinner. They eat alone, mostly fast food, or easily prepaired meals, staring in front of a televisions set or computer screen.
How many Americans eat dinner. They eat alone, mostly fast food, or easily prepared meals, staring in front of a televisions set or computer screen.

I know, it used to be, back in the days leading up to the 1970’s and the destruction of the American family, everyone would have a “sit down” “typical” American meal. (The link opens up in another tab.)

Link

I also know how this tradition pretty much was under assault, and how the death blow smashed it to pieces in the 1970’s. Ah, yes, you can thank President Wilson for that as well. The Federal Reserve put a death-grip strangle hold on the American family.

This is the world that all that modern progressiveness wrought.

This is the world that all that modern progressiveness wrought.
This is the world that all that modern progressiveness wrought. It starts at youth. It consists of eating cheap, easy to make meals, in front of mindless electronic media.

This tradition pretty much ended during the 1970’s when families had to split apart to earn enough to make ends meet. Thus, a progressive (or “enlightened”) reality took hold; also known as “everyone forage for themselves”, or “meals by yellow-sticky notes on the refrigerator”.

It goes by other terms as well, as (the) fast-food television binge, or the creation of “easy and cheap meals”.

It’s what living a “progressive” life is all about. It’s about money. It’s about making ends meet. It’s about keeping up with the Joneses. It’s about living a life that matches the expectations shown in television, movies, and social media.

it’s all one big lie.

If we’re too busy to have dinner as a family regularly, we may want to  re-examine our priorities. 

We probably are too busy. Period. 

While our  smartphones and devices have brought us closer to the rest of humanity, it is the family that will stick with us through thick and thin.
 
It is simply amazing that something as simple as eating together as a  family may bring manifold benefits to all family members. Family meals  are for nourishment, comfort and support. As we nourish our body, we  nourish our family relationships. 

After all, food is better eaten with  the people we love! 

- Eating together helps families bond

It’s sad.

Oh you don’t know what I am talking about, eh? You think it’s an accident that tomatoes today taste like cardboard and are filled with water? You think it was an accident, or just the way it’s always been. Oh no. It’s what happens when modern, progressive scientists re-engineer society to make it “better”.

Click on the link (it opens up in a different tab) for easy browsing…

Tomatos

Here’s a picture of the “modern, progressive lifestyle” that many Americans have had to confront. Sad…

It’s how NOT to raise a family.

---PHOTO---How not to raise a family.
How not to raise a family. Mother is not cooking delicious meals. She is working at home and teaching her daughter to do the same. Father is scrounging in the kitchen and teaching his son to forage. No family togetherness. No family group discussions. No sharing, and no joy. It’s stress. It’s the progressive lifestyle you all!

All these progressives, with their modern (well meaning intentions) have totally wrecked the world. Look at the pollution. Look at the family life. Look at what it takes to get ahead. It’s not an accident people!

Ahhh!

How NOT to eat a family meal. You face each other, not electronic media. You share the time, and you talk to each other. This kind of life, where everyone is off and alone in their own individual worlds is a progressive lie broght forth by President Wilson.
How NOT to eat a family meal. You face each other, not electronic media. You share the time, and you talk to each other. This kind of life, where everyone is off and alone in their own individual worlds is a progressive lie brought forth by President Wilson.

However, do not be distressed. A rising percentage of Americans are revitalizing the old-fashioned “sit down” formal dinner time meals. It’s making a much needed comeback. And I, I for one, think that this trend is glorious!

What is better than delicious food? What is better than fine tasty drink and friends and family to share the day’s events with? Heck! It sure beats looking that the latest posts on Facebook, watching a cat video on You-tube, or reading the “news” on your Google feed.

Yeppur!

It’s people. It”s feeling. It’s emotions. It’s sharing our life with others, and that is absolutely wonderful.

Family meals done right…

---PHOTO---Family meals done right. Both parents are present. Everyone is smiling and talking and fine love-cooked food is presented in happy friendliness.
Family meals done right. Both parents are present. Everyone is smiling and talking and fine love-cooked food is presented in happy friendliness.

This is great, and people (!) this post discusses what they would be eating during all of this.

My in-laws

It has gradually dawned on me that no one (outside of the United States) has any idea what Americans eat. They think, and they really do believe this, that all that Americans eat are hamburgers and Pizza.

You laugh.

But, it’s true!

While there is a certain degree in truth to that, it’s not actually true. When I was growing up, we rarely had pizza or hamburgers. That was something that was reserved to eat “outside” of the home. Or, alternatively, something we would have at a Cub Scout cookout, or at a baseball game. It wasn’t a formal sit down meal food.

Home cooked food was tastier, healthier, cheaper, and was served in a communal setting where we all faced each other. We weren’t staring into a television set, a laptop, or a cell phone. We faced each other.

Face to face.

With delicious food, with the fine aromas wafting towards us.

---PHOTO---American style dinner done right! The entire family is together, sharing a fine home-cooked meal and being together.
American style dinner done right! The entire family is together, sharing a fine home-cooked meal and being together.

Now, I am in China.

My in-laws know nothing about the American household lifestyle. All they know is what they watch on the television show “Friends”, or The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

But, you know, my family was more like Mayberry RFD than Cheers.

This has come down to the point where my father-in-law brought groceries home from the market today. He passed them on to the women folk to cook, and he proudly displayed a McDonalds bag with a cold chicken sandwich and wilted french-fries for me to consume. He beamed with pride. (Obviously “virtue signalling” to me that he cared about me and my culture.)

Ugh!

Central Perk.
Central Perk. The six main protagonists frequently visited Central Perk throughout the series. It is situated in New York City’s Greenwich Village, in the same apartment block as Monica’s apartment. It was where they spent much of their free time conversing. There are 97 steps away from Chandler and Joey’s apartment as Joey counts in The One With George Stephanopoulos.

Ah! Is that how the rest of the world thinks of Americans? As some kind of comic book character. One devoid of emotion, a crisply packaged collection of cheap food in bright colorful plastic wrappings?

He was so proud, and he wanted to show me how he was thinking of me and supportive of me. Thank’s Pop. But, you know, I do like other things…

And thus this post came into being.

The meals

“The table is where we mark milestones, divulge dreams, bury hatchets,  make deals, give thanks, plan vacations and tell jokes. It’s also where  children learn the lessons that families teach: Manners, co-operation,  communication, self-control values. Following directions. Sitting still.  Taking turns. It’s where we make up and make merry. It’s where we live,  between bites.” 

-Eating together helps families bond

So, here’s a list of some fine and delicious American food.

Please take note that different families make things differently. Some will have different sides and fixings, while others might want to add some regional fare. Thus, this list is JUST a guideline, and it is NOT complete.

---PHOTO---Family meals are very special. They help build the family togetherness, and provide a safe place for community, family and love.
Family meals are very special. They help build the family togetherness, and provide a safe place for community, family and love.

Finally, one more thing. Eating food is a social event. It is meant to be shared with friends and family. These people are the most important people in our (individual) world. Treat them special. Enjoy a fine meal with them and share the time with a fellowship of togetherness and happy discussion.

My friends Dana and John perfectly practice what the Rev. Jack King referred to as "scruffy hospitality."  Their kitchen is small. The wood cabinets are dark and a few decades  old. Spices and jars for sugar and flour line the countertops because  there's nowhere else to put them. A tall, round table shoved in a corner  has mismatched bar stools crammed around it. 

The sliding glass doors in the kitchen lead to a back deck with a  well-used chiminea, an outdoor table and a large variety of chairs and  cushions, many of them bought at yard sales. We circle the chairs around  the chiminea on weekend nights during all four seasons, whenever Dana  and John put out a simple call out through text or Facebook that says,  "Fire tonight!" 
 
There will always be food, but like the bar stools and deck chairs,  the food is mismatched. Our hosts provide some food; John may have the  urge to make jalapeño poppers or Dana may put together some version of  salsa with whatever's fresh from the garden, but there's not a formally  prepared meal. Everyone just brings something. It's perfectly acceptable  — encouraged even — to bring odds and ends of foods that need to get  used up. I often bring wedges of cheese that have already been cut into  or half a baguette to slice up and toast to dip in hummus. Everyone  brings a little something to drink. And it's a glorious feast. 

This kitchen and deck won't be featured in Better Homes and  Gardens anytime soon, but maybe they should be. They are two of the most  hospitable spaces I know. By opening up their home as-is, Dana and John  are the most gracious hosts I know. I almost wrote "by opening up their  home with its imperfections," but that's not accurate. 

Their home is  perfect — just like it is. 

-Mother Nature Network

Now, to the meals…

Steak

The thing about steak is that you can get it all over the world. From Thailand, to China, to Argentina, to Singapore. It is a global meal. It’s also on the expensive side. So, most American families only eat steak on special occasions.

Typically is it grilled on an outside grill. This will be true if it is hot out like in July, or in the dead of Winter. It will also be cooked to perfection by the Man of the House.

---PHOTO---A delicious American steak meal with baked potatoes and melted (fully salted) butter.
A delicious American steak meal with baked potatoes and melted (fully salted) butter. I do love the XO/ VSOP in the glass with ice in the background. Ah, now this is what I call a fine family dinner.

There are all sorts of cuts of steak that can be chosen. My family would often cook porterhouse, T-bone or Filet Minion. Sides would often consist of corn, a salad, (baked) potatoes, and rolls.

American-style Spaghetti Meal

This is one of the most popular American family meals in America. It is cheap, easy to make, and delicious.

---PHOTO---American style spaghetti dinner meal.
American style spaghetti dinner meal.

It often consists of home-made meatballs, on a spaghetti sauce that is made all day in a big tureen on the stove. Sides include salad, garlic bread, a vegetable (corn, greens, green beans, or broccoli), and (of course) graded Parmesan cheese.

Baked Lasagna

This meal is related to the spaghetti meal in that they both originated from Italian American families. Lasagna takes more work to make, and thus is not as common, though it is always very popular.

---PHOTO---Baked Lasagna that is often served in American homes for dinner.
Baked Lasagna that is often served in American homes for dinner.

It’s a delicious meal that is a cross between wide noodles, meat, cheese and all sorts of spices within a very tasty delicious sauce. Oh, and it does go well with a fine bottle of wine and some nice crunchy Italian bread.

Fried Catfish

This meal is regional to the “Deep South”. It is commonly found in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama. The fish is cut in fillets, breaded, and deep fried. It is eaten in generous quantities. Along with sides of okra, corn, picked tomatoes, Cole slaw and hush puppies (a kind of deep fried bread).

---PHOTO---Deep fried catfish meal with a side of cole slaw and sauce.
Deep fried catfish meal with a side of cole slaw and sauce.

I had no idea it existed until I moved to Mississippi. Then I immediately fell in love with it. Well, it and the “Southern style” mint sweetened iced tea.

(Baked) Friday Fish

As a Catholic, I was raised to have fish on Fridays. Thus, every Friday, without exception, we would eat fish. This changed in the 1970’s when the Catholic church embraced a more “progressive” rule to keep up with the times. Instead of eating fish, the Catholic church-goes would fill their minds with good happy and positive things.

Yeah. I’m sure it worked… for a week or two.

In general, the fish would be obtained from the frozen section in the local supermarket. Most Americans do not live on the Ocean, and thus have (out of necessity) obtain frozen deep-sea fish. (Or go fishing in the rivers and lakes.)

Baked fish done American style for a wonderful American dinner meal.
Baked fish done American style for a wonderful American dinner meal.

The fish would be baked in the oven, and served with a lemon squeeze. Sides would often consist of rice, asparagus, broccoli or peas.

One more thing. American fish are usually de-boned. It is a very rare thing to serve fish with the bones still in place.

Pork Roast

This is a fine wonderful meal that is generally common on the weekends because it takes some time to cook. In general, it is cooked for a long time so that the meat is tender and delicious.

American style baked pork roast.
American style baked pork roast.

It is often served with mashed potatoes, or rice. Sides would include salad, vegetables such as corn, green beans, and cauliflower. Bread and butter would tend to round out the meal.

Pork Chops

Pork chops are a MAJOR American love. Just about every American loves this iconic dish. (Unless you are one of those progressive Marxists that only eat tofu, and avocado milkshakes in Starbucks in the upscale sections of the American metropolis network.)

I started my first love of pork-chops when I was a toddler. My parents would often give me a bone or two to gum while I sat in the highchair. Ah. Good times. Good times.

American style pork chops meal.
American style pork chops meal.

it is often served with apple sauce, a salad, and some rice or scalloped potatoes. Delicious!

The first time that my Chinese wife tasted American style pork chops was in Pago Pago in American Samoa. She fell in love with the dish. She never tasted anything so absolutely delicious. In many ways it is similar to the Chinese cooked pork, but is cooked thin, almost like bacon. Yum!

A fantastic dinner plate of thin well cooked American style pork chops along with some wonderful mashed potatoes.
A fantastic dinner plate of thin well cooked American style pork chops along with some wonderful mashed potatoes.

Baked Whole Chicken meal

Everyone, all over the world, enjoys eating chicken.

Studies have shown time and again that eating together has many benefits beyond nutritional purposes for everyone concerned, especially for our teens and tweens.
 
The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia  University, New York, reported that children who eat at least five times  a week with their family are at lower risk of developing poor eating  habits, weight problems or alcohol and substance dependencies, and tend  to perform better academically than their peers who frequently eat alone  or away from home.
 
In addition, the more frequent teens have dinner with their parents, the more likely they are to report talking to their parents about what’s  going on in their lives.
 
According to research by Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey,  teens who eat at the family table more often are more likely to show  fewer signs of depression and feel that their family is more supportive,  compared with teens who dine less often at home.
 
You are probably convinced now that having dinner together as a family  is a good thing for your teens and tweens. It is, in fact,  life-changing! 

-Eating together helps families bond

This is a baked whole chicken meal.

It is pretty much common all over the world, though there are regional differences. My father’s mother would cook it with bacon on top in the oven. While my mother’s mother would cook it in a pan of water and cook until all the water evaporated. Leaving it crunchy on the outside but super tender inside.

It can be served with just about anything. In my family it is usually served with apple sauce, a tomato salad, rolls, and rice.

American style baked whole chicken.
American style baked whole chicken.

Americans usually remove the head, and the feet before serving. This differs substantially from what you would find, say, in China where everything is served intact.

Turkey Meal

Of course, the Thanksgiving meal is famous around the world. Not so much for the history behind it, or the use during Thanksgiving or Christmas, but rather for the enormous size of the bird that accompanies the meal.

--PHOTO--Cooking together as a family.
Cooking together as a family. There is nothing finer than including your family in things that everyone loves. Teach your children how to cook and enjoy delicious food.
The dinner table is the best place to tell stories, and kids who know  their family stories are more resilient and feel better about  themselves. Most inspiring are lemonade-from-lemon stories, stories  about adversity where a lesson is learned, or negative events that  transform into something good. 

Stories help us make sense of the world,  and they help kids connect to something bigger than themselves. Tell  stories about yourself and other family members when they were the same  age as your children. Tell stories about romance, first jobs,  immigration, how names were chosen, a childhood pet, a favorite recipe  or kitchen disaster. 

-Parenting

Of course, in America we would have a fine central meal that would revolve around the main turkey bird. It would be a baked, roasted or cooked turkey with all the traditional fixings of mashed potatoes, coleslaw, and steamed cabbage and the like.

But, here, we are going to address the “other” turkey meals that the family eats during the rest of the week.

Hot turkey sandwich.
Hot turkey sandwich.

This can be anything from turkey soup, to hot turkey sandwiches, to turkey casseroles. In my family, we would always have hot turkey sandwiches on plain white bread with turkey gravy over everything and the rest of the vegetables as sides.

If you are very busy, a hot chicken sandwich is perhaps the simplest of meals to make. You get some frozen french fries, a bottle or can of instant chicken gravy and some chicken breasts with a loaf of white bread. 

You pop the french fries in the oven.

You cook up the chicken on the skillet or in boiling water.

You microwave the gravy.

Then make sandwiches and pour the gravy over everything. Super simple, and very special. The kids will love it!
Oh, don't forget the gravy over the french fries. It's what completes the meal. Outstanding!
Oh, don’t forget the gravy over the french fries. It’s what completes the meal. Outstanding!

Chicken legs

This is a “stand alone meal”. It’s super easy to make, and lends itself for a quick meal for the working man, or friends to enjoy over some icy cold beers.

You just take a package of frozen chicken legs. You put it on a tray and pop it in the oven. Before you know it, you’ve got tons of baked chicken legs that you can eat with just about any side. It’s quick, fast and super easy.

Delicious American style baked chicken legs.
Delicious American style baked chicken legs.

You can add honey, or bread crumbs or any other treatments (such as bacon) to make the taste really “pop” out. Try it.

Chicken wings

You can also cook chicken wings the same way as you cook the chicken legs. Only in America there is an added dip that is often used. It is typically dipped in Ranch or Blue Cheese salad dressing for the most wondrous taste.

Rituals like dinner, which punctuate a world that often feels  frenzied and out of control, are good for adults, too. Knowing that one  part of your day is going to unfold in basically the same way, day after day, is comforting.

So, I'm ringing the dinner bell and inviting you and your family to  come to the table. Dinner is more than a feeding station. Food will  bring the family to the table, but it's the conversation and stories  that keeps us there. In an hour, you can create comfort, fun, play and  meaningful conversation—one meal at a time.

- Anne K. Fishel, Ph.D., author of "Home for Dinner: Mixing Food, Fun and Conversation for a Happier Family and Healthier Kids," 
Baked American style chicken wings served with a fine ranch or blue cheese dressing for dipping.
Baked American style chicken wings served with a fine ranch or blue cheese dressing for dipping.

Meat Loaf

Dinner is the best indicator of how kids will fare in adolescence. The  more frequently kids eat dinner with their families, the better they do in school, and the less likely they are to become sexually active, suffer depression, get involved with drugs or alcohol, or consider suicide.
 
Why? 

Maybe because families who eat together talk more, which helps them  stay connected and build better relationships. Also, it could be  because parents who show up to eat with their teens and tweens are more  likely to express their love constructively in other ways, in the form  of both attention and supervision.
 
Maybe because families who offer kids more structure are more likely to  keep kids attending to their homework as well as out of trouble. Maybe  because dinner transforms individual family members into a “group”,  which gives parents more clout to rival the power of the peer group.
 
Or maybe because children, even more than the rest of us, need something to count on every day – the tangible security of belonging and being  nurtured that is represented by the ritual of sharing food with those we  love.
 
To quote clinical psychologist and parenting coach Dr Laura Markham:  “Whatever the reason, family dinner is a pretty easy insurance policy to  build into our home life.” 

-Eating together helps families bond

There are few things as iconic as American meatloaf. It’s as American as baseball, apple pie, and keg parties. It is a rare person, indeed, who has never had a meatloaf dinner.

Very few things beat a fine delicious meatloaf dinner. In fact it is great with beer. Try it!
Very few things beat a fine delicious meatloaf dinner. In fact it is great with beer. Try it!

Meatloaf is a very simple meal that is made out of ground beef, eggs, bread and ketchup. You mix the entire mess together and pop it into the oven and let it cook. Then take it out and eat with mashed potatoes, peas and carrots and some bread. Yum!

Tomato Soup and Grilled Cheese sandwich

Now, this meal isn’t so much a dinner meal as it is an iconic American lunch meal. And, make no mistake. It is iconic.

A fine and delicious, easy to prepare meal- tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches.
A fine and delicious, easy to prepare meal- tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches.
Among the most lasting and powerful traditions in family life is one that seems to have more influence than almost any other – the family meal. Recalling your favorite family experiences usually leads to thinking of such times as the weekly Sunday meal, family mealtimes during Thanksgiving or other holidays, or a Saturday morning breakfast with Mom or Dad. 

Why are family meals so powerful? 

Sharing a family meal provides an experience that touches all of our senses – sight, touch, taste, smell and listening to warm laughter or good conversation. Family  meals help provide a regular, consistent opportunity to create a shared experience that is meaningful and offers a sense of belonging to all. Research has shown that regular and meaningful family meals offer a large variety of benefits to children and parents. 

- The Big Benefits of Family Meals                   

Eating a nice bowl of tomato soup and dipping a really nice grilled cheese sandwich into the soup is a far wonderful thing to do. My memories of this most fantastic and simple meal have always been pleasant. They have been about friends and family and home.

American style tomato soup with a fine grilled cheese sandwich.
American style tomato soup with a fine grilled cheese sandwich.

In general you cannot get a tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich outside of the household environment. So my memories are, of course, about family and friends.

Chicken Noodle Soup

Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your  house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home.  Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and  serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy  hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than  the impression your home or lawn makes. If we only share meals with  friends when we’re excellent, we aren’t truly sharing life together. 

-MNN

Now, chicken noodle soup is a global food. Heck! You can even find it in China. Though it is made slightly different. I personally like the American version and I particularly like it with chicken breast, fresh celery, and delicious large carrots cut at an angle.

Delicious chicken noodle soup with egg noodles.
Delicious chicken noodle soup with egg noodles.

We would make the soup in a large tureen on the stove, and then cook the noodles separately. (Sometimes we would cook rice.) Though, always separately. Egg noodles were always the noodles of choice. In particular Klusky’s noodles.

We would then eat it with white bread and butter.

Eggs and bacon

This meal is actually known as “bacon and eggs”. It’s a (for certain) breakfast meal, but it is so easy to make and cheap that it can be made at any time. It’s just fantastic as a dinner if need be. You just MUST makes sure that the bacon is crunchy crisp. Wimpy and fatty bacon isn’t bacon, it’s something obscene. Ugh!

A nice bacon and eggs meal showing backon cooked properly, toast that is toasted properly and "sunny side up" eggs. Delicious!
A nice bacon and eggs meal showing bacon cooked properly, toast that is toasted properly and “sunny side up” eggs. Delicious!
Family meals offer the opportunity to connect with each other,   communicate about family happenings, and give each other time and   attention. While families are encouraged to share meals, not every   meal has to be a sit-down dinner extravaganza. The most important thing   about family meals is to make them frequent, fun and family-centered.

Couples or families will benefit more from family meals if they occur more frequently during the week. Typically, research suggests that more than half of families with children in the United States share a meal five or more times a week. A concern, however, is that 30 percent to 35 percent of families often eat less than three meals a week together, which means less time for connecting and communicating. Changes in family life, such as the increase in dual-earner families and the rise in single-parent families, may make eating together frequently more  difficult for families. Families, however, should try to set aside  regular and consistent family meal opportunities to eat together as  often as possible.

Fun also is part of the recipe for a happy family mealtime. Parents and other adults should try to avoid making mealtime a disciplinary occasion when children are reprimanded or given lectures. Instead, save such conversations for a time away from the dinner table, and focus instead on being together in a positive way.

A family-centered mealtime means limiting distractions, especially   the TV or computer. Turn such things off at mealtime and use strategies to engage each family member in conversation.

 - The Big Benefits of Family Meals       
--PHOTO--Enjoy the time with your children. Teach them the joys of ooking, as well as the fun of eating together. Make it fun. Make games of food prep. make planning meals and buying groceries and adventure. Teach them budgets planning and how to select things at a grocery sore. SHow them how differnt spices work together. You can do this!
Enjoy the time with your children. Teach them the joys of cooking, as well as the fun of eating together. Make it fun. Make games of food prep. make planning meals and buying groceries and adventure. Teach them budgets planning and how to select things at a grocery sore. Show them how different spices work together. You can do this!–

Eating “Mexican”

Now, I do hope that no one is offended. But, you know, I didn’t have my first burrito and taco until after I left the Navy.

I had no idea how delicious Mexican food was until later when I was training for my role within MAJestic at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center outside of Ridgecrest, California. There, I fell in love with a restaurant chain known as “Del Taco”. Later on, when in Corpus Christi, Texas I ended up getting my first tastes of authentic Mexican food.

I never looked back.

A wonderful and delicious burrito with sides of rice, refried beans and a mysterious but delicious salad.
A wonderful and delicious burrito with sides of rice, refried beans and a mysterious but delicious salad.

Now there are so many different kinds of “Mexican food”, that it would take a complete website to even start to list them all. For now, just realize that, for me, we would just (in general) say “let’s eat Mexican”. And we would go procure some refried beans (don’t know how to make ours from scratch), some wraps, salsa, and make up burritos or taquitos.

Tacos and fixins’

In a more traditional Spanish, Mexican or SA (Spanish-American) family, the meals are communal with multiple plates where a person can build and construct their own dinner creations. There might be a plate of cut up tomatoes, one of peppers, a bowl of rice, and one of ground beef, and another bowl of cut up lettuce.

These meals are all very easy to make and fun to eat, not to mention very delicious.

A fine Mexican themed spread for the family.
A fine Mexican themed spread for the family.
“Families should be encouraged to make the family meal more of a   priority and to try to have at least four family meals per week. It is   often easiest for families to eat dinner together, but other mealtimes work as well. Meals can be simple with shared mealtime responsibility among family members. 

Teaching children  the enjoyment of cooking and having them involved in mealtime preparation develop skills they can use for a lifetime. Shared meals can also be extended to friends and   neighbors to build a stronger sense of community and help with meal   preparation. 

… Regular family meals are key components of family life   that may make a difference in the lives of children and parents.”

-Story, M., and Neumark-Sztainer, D. A perspective on family meals: Do they matter? Nutrition Today, 40 (6), 261-266; 2005 .

Oh, and don’t forget the special corn spread that make eating an ear of corn, super special!!!

Mexican corn spread for eating the corn in a very special delicious way.
Mexican corn spread for eating the corn in a very special delicious way.

“Backyard” Hamburgers

Of course, you can always get a hamburger at any millions of chain fast food restaurants. But we are not talking about that here. We are talking about the family ritual of making home-made hamburgers for family consumption.

Fine delicious home-cooked and home-grilled hamburgers in the back yard is a staple of American family life.
Fine delicious home-cooked and home-grilled hamburgers in the back yard is a staple of American family life.

Making your own hamburgers is very American. It’s a tradition and it is reserved for special occasions. In other words, it’s not a typical dinner meal. Instead it is a meal that is used to meals with extended-family and friends. Thus, it is usually cooked and takes place on weekends and holidays.

Home made - backyard grilled - hamburgers do not resemble fast food hamburgers. They are completely different all together.
Home made – backyard grilled – hamburgers do not resemble fast food hamburgers. They are completely different all together.

You know, hamburgers are not a typical American dinner meal. They are reserved for lunches or other special occasions. However, when the occasion calls for it, home-made hamburgers just cannot be beat. Go “home style” nothing else ever comes close.

Hotdogs (With Sauerkraut)

This is a very simple but unique meal. You simply buy a package of hotdogs and a can of sauerkraut. You put the hotdogs in the bottom of a pan, and cover them with the can of sauerkraut. They cook easily and quickly. Then for dinner you eat kraut-dogs with mustard and perhaps horseradish.

This is a very simple but unique meal. You simply buy a package of hotdogs and a can of sauerkraut.
This is a very simple but unique meal. You simply buy a package of hotdogs and a can of sauerkraut.

If you have young kids, nothing will make them happier than a meal of hotdogs. You know, you don’t need to have baked beans with it, but if you wanted to you could add some black beans, and some cut up onions as well. Make it a special meal. Your family will love you for it.

Kraut-dog with fine delicious mustard. Your kids would love you for this wonderful meal. You can serve scalloped potatoes, potato salad or corn. Oh, and don't forget the beer. Make sure it is icy and chilled.
Kraut-dog with fine delicious mustard. Your kids would love you for this wonderful meal. You can serve scalloped potatoes, potato salad or corn. Oh, and don’t forget the beer. Make sure it is icy and chilled.
If you’re not into health or family, consider that eating home-cooked  meals is also cheaper. 

A sample estimate finds that a family of 4 could save nearly $40 a week,  per person, by simply shifting meals into the house. You’ll be saving  money while your kid is getting Bs and not picking up a drug habit.  That’s a win all around.
 
But the best part about getting together for dinner is that it  becomes ingrained in a family’s tradition if you start the habit early.  While eating with a little kid may feel chaotic and not very beneficial,  know that every dinner at the table removes you even further from a  dystopian hellscape. And that can only be a good thing. 

-Fatherly
Sauerkraut gets a bad rap!  Comdiments for hot dogs go deep and wide, but generally sauerkraut gets overlooked.  Is it preparation, is it the word “sauer” gets misconstrued?
Sauerkraut gets a bad rap! Condiments for hot dogs go deep and wide, but generally sauerkraut gets overlooked. Is it preparation, is it the word “sauer” gets misconstrued?

“Home made” Pizza

Yes. Pizza is not a normal dinner meal. That is, of course, except when it is a home-made, home style pizza. Oh yeah baby!

What to do when your 8-year old nephew comes to visit? Make pizza, of course!
What to do when your 8-year old nephew comes to visit? Make pizza, of course! It’s not just eating dinner that can be a social event, but also cooking the dinner can be an adventure as well.

My mother, God bless her soul, bought me a cookbook when I was younger, and one of the first things that I did was learn how to make pizzas from scratch.

I experimented on the bread dough. I experimented on the sauce. I experimented on the cheese and the toppings. I even discovered that broccoli (cut up very fine and added to the sauce) was an amazing complement to a fine well-made home-style pizza.

Making real pizzeria style pizza at home has always been very tough to do. The reason has been it’s not possible to get a home oven to the same temperature as a commercial pizza oven, but that doesn’t matter.
Making real pizzeria style pizza at home has always been very tough to do. The reason has been it’s not possible to get a home oven to the same temperature as a commercial pizza oven, but that doesn’t matter. There are all sorts of tricks to make really delicious pizzas using a normal typical household stove.

Oh, do what we do in my family. We make the dough, the sauce and the topping and freeze them. Then pull them out and allow them to defrost and throw together a really quick meal. Delicious.

Roast Mutton

When I first had kids, I ended up entertaining a lot less, partly  because of the mess in the house that I no longer had time to deal with. 

Then one day, a woman I very much admired said something so  simple. She said whenever someone was coming to her home — a home with  five children in it — and she started to worry about how her home  looked, she would stop and think: "Are they coming to see me, or are  they coming to see my home?" It occurred to her that someone who would  have a problem with her home looking like a family of seven lived in it  wasn't really someone's opinion she cared about. 

I'd love to say I embraced that wisdom immediately, but I didn't.  Slowly, though, I have let go of some of the crazy things I believed  must happen before people entered my front door. The first thing I let  go was the upstairs. Over the years, I've became more relaxed. 

Next, I didn't dust. Nobody said a word, and they came back again. 
I didn't plan the entire meal around foods I could prepare ahead  of time so my kitchen could be spotless when my guests arrived. Friends  jumped in the kitchen and helped me finish making dinner, and we had  fun. 

-Mother Nature Network

Mutton? Yes, you bet. No, it’s not an overly common meat in the United States. When I was growing up, we ate i maybe about four times a year. But still, it’s a find meat and lends itself to some very delicious meals.

Delicious lamb chops. It's outrageously delicious.
Delicious lamb chops. It’s outrageously delicious. Ask the butcher to trim the fat cap (the thick sheet of fat on the outside of each rack) but to leave a thin layer of fat. Some butchers like to “French” the ribs, trimming away the meat between the rib ends to leave the bone exposed, but this meat is tasty and should be left in place. Ask the butcher to cut between the ribs to make a total of 16 single-rib chops.
One of the most important things any dad can do for his kids is to  show up for dinner. It really is that simple. 

Research from the Journal of Adolescent Health shows that the more frequent the family dinners, the higher the positive impact they have. “When clients ask me what the most important aspect of  family meals are I answer, ‘Making them happen!’” says pediatric  dietitian Melanie Silverman. “These meals provide the structure and  sense of community that young children need and crave during their  development.”

The benefits are well documented. 

First, there’s the educational component. Research published in New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development found that mealtime conversation boosts vocabulary even more than books. According to the findings, children between the ages of three and five learned some 1,000 rare words at the dinner table compared to the 143 rare words from parents reading storybooks aloud. 

-Fatherly
Curried mutton over rice.
Curried mutton over rice. This simple meal was one of my favorites growing up as a child. My mother would make it and give us some chutney to add as a topping to it. I loved it.

Pigs in a blanket (Stuffed Cabbage)

This is a very common “American” food, even though it originated outside of the States. Most American families have learned how to make this tasty and delicious meal. Being from Pittsburgh, everyone made and ate this most wonderful of foods.

 No summer cookout is complete without a tray of stuffed cabbages!  Tender cabbage leaves stuffed with rice, seasoned ground meats and a  rich tomato sauce make this the perfect summer comfort food. Plus these  freeze beautifully!

 This dish, God this dish brings back so many childhood memories that I  literally sat here for 30 minutes in a daze just remembering some of  them. Like there was the time we were harvesting cabbages from our  garden and we each got to pick a single plant that we were in charge of  to take care of. Whoever grew the biggest cabbage won. The prize was Mom  would cook our favorite dessert to go with her famous stuffed cabbages.  That summer I ended up winning. This cabbage was so huge that I  couldn’t lift it. I know I have a picture of me trying to hold it on my  lap. I’ll dig it out to share the pic once my arm is better.

 Then there are the countless memories where our kitchen was  soooooooooooooo hot (we didn’t have AC growing up and we only had window  fans) and Mom had 3 large canning pots on the stove with boiling water  making hundreds of stuffed cabbages. I can still remember that hot  cabbage smell and hot/wet air in the kitchen. Dad would use the tongs to  pull out the leaves, put them in the colander and my Mom, sister and I  would each trim the stems.

-  Mom’s Classic Stuffed Cabbage Rolls 
Where I come from Pigs in a Blanket are cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and meat. You may also know them Halupkies. Traditionally these cabbage leaves are stuffed with rice and ground pork, beef or a combination of both meats.
Where I come from Pigs in a Blanket are cabbage rolls stuffed with rice and meat. You may also know them Halupkies. Traditionally these cabbage leaves are stuffed with rice and ground pork, beef or a combination of both meats.
Pittsburgh, a melting pot of nationalities, drew a large percentage  of its population from Central European, Eastern European, and Balkan  countries, and those influences can be seen in local cuisines that are  still popular today. One traditional dish that has remained popular over  the last century and is still a staple at many Pittsburgh area dinner  tables is the famous stuffed cabbage.
 
The stuffed cabbage roll (also known as pigs in a blanket) is a dish  consisting of a mixture of beef, rice, and seasonings, hand wrapped in  cooked cabbage leaves, and topped with a tomato sauce. Many in the area  still refer to the “hunky handgranades” by their ethinic names: Golabki  (Poland), Holubky (Czech Republic and Slovakia), Golubtsy (Russia)  Balandėliai (Lithuania) , Halubcy (Belarus), Holubtsi (Ukraine). 

-Conrad Catering

Yeah, I know that this is a regional from from Pittsburgh, but this is my blog and I am the one writing this. If you don’t like it, then you can write your own blog.

I happen to like these stuffed cabbage rolls, and yes, they are referred to a “pigs in a blanket”, not the hotdogs wrapped in the Pillsbury instant roll dough.

Stuffed Cabbage
Now depending on where you grew up or even what your background is you either called these Stuffed Cabbages, Pigs in a Blanket or Halupkies. The only real ingredient difference I’ve found between these is the use of either all beef or the omittance of rice and usage of potatoes instead.

Hey! And here’s a recipe for you all. See how easy it is to make!

Pigs In A Blanket (cabbage rolls) #SundaySupper
Pigs In A Blanket (cabbage rolls) #SundaySupper

Oh and while I am at it, let’s take a look at how families work… the division of labor and how you can eat delicious meals all the time and not be stressed out over it. Yes, there is a way.

It’s called having a “traditional conservative family“, as opposed to a “progressive modern contemporaneous family”. You can read my propaganda on this issue and the importance in parenting and family budgeting. The link below opens up in a separate tab for later reading for you all.

The two family types and how they work.

Hey! If you love your children enough. Spend TIME with them. You can always make more money, but you can never make more time.

Stuffed peppers

This meal is similar to the stuffed cabbage, only they are stuffed in peppers and use a slightly different mix of spices. Never the less, they too are easy to make and super delicious.

Stuffed Peppers dinner meal
Stuffed Bell Peppers are easy to make and everyone loves them! We fill these with a mixture of beef and sausage but you can use one or the other (or even ground turkey if you prefer) and I sometimes replace the rice with Cauliflower Rice. While I used green peppers in this recipe, any color bell pepper (red/yellow/orange) will work just fine. When choosing the color of pepper for your Stuffed Peppers recipe, it will depend on your personal taste preference. Green peppers are a bit more zesty and definitely less sweet than red, yellow or orange. Green peppers in this recipe really compliment the flavors in the beef, sausage, tomato-rice mixture.

One of the cool things with many home-made American foods is that they lend themselves to batch creation, and then freezing for later for a quick and easy delicious healthy family sit-down meal.

 “The truth is that our weeknights are pretty packed with sports  practice, piano lessons, and homework, along with what can seem like the  never-ending demands of my job,” says Sun Basket’s  executive chef, Justine Kelly. 

“It’s challenging, but I make a point to  have dinner with my daughter every night. Also, one thing we always  make time for is Sunday supper at my sister’s house. My parents come and  my daughter gets to spend time with her cousins. It’s a highlight of  our week.” 

-Fatherly
--PHOTO--There are few things finer than spending time with family and food. You can spend it with friends and pets as well. The smells, the creativity, and the environment together is far better than a movie, or a video game. Food and friendships equal paradise. make sure that you get your children involved early on.
There are few things finer than spending time with family and food. You can spend it with friends and pets as well. The smells, the creativity, and the environment together is far better than a movie, or a video game. Food and friendships equal paradise. make sure that you get your children involved early on.

Yes, you definitely can freeze Stuffed Peppers and they are a great make-ahead meal! You will need to bake them first, then you can either freeze them individually or together in a baking dish. To re-heat, simply thaw in the fridge overnight and bake in a 350°F oven until heated through.

City Chicken

City Chicken? What’s that?

It’s pork. Yup. It is.

City chicken is a Polish American entrée consisting of cubes of meat, which have been placed on a wooden skewer, then fried and/or baked. Depending on the recipe, they may be breaded. Despite the name of the dish, city chicken almost never contains chicken. 

-Wikipedia
--PHOTO--Delicious and wonderful city chicken being cooked on a skillet. It's a fine and wonderful meal that is cheap, easy to make and delicious. It also goes great with just about any veditable side dish. Oh, and do not forget the nice frosty beer.
Delicious and wonderful city chicken being cooked on a skillet. It’s a fine and wonderful meal that is cheap, easy to make and delicious. It also goes great with just about any vegetable side dish. Oh, and do not forget the nice frosty beer.

If you grew up in the North or Midwest regions of the country, you may be familiar with a dish called City Chicken, either as a mainstay in your weeknight supper rotations or a favorite comfort food.

For many people it is a mystery. No one ever really understands what it was, why it had that name, and why they couldn’t find any recipes for it in cookbooks.

You won’t find a recipe for City Chicken in the poultry section of a cookbook because, well, it isn’t poultry.

Known as a Depression Era recipe, cubes of veal and pork are threaded onto a skewer in order to create a faux drumstick. Seasoned and breaded, then fried or baked, this was a popular and delicious way to “fake” a poultry dinner.

--PHOTO--Cooking in the kitchen with friends and family. The dinner meal is an ideal opportunity for friends and family to get together and share fun, talk and drink.
I love this photo. Cooking in the kitchen with friends and family. The dinner meal is an ideal opportunity for friends and family to get together and share fun, talk and drink.

But why would you have to fake chicken?

Prior to the 1940’s, everyone wanted a chicken on the dinner table, yet surprisingly it was very expensive, even more so than pork and veal. Thus, we have the invention of “fake” chicken. Also known by the more common name of “city chicken”.

With roots in both Pittsburgh and Cleveland, where Polish and Ukrainian  immigrant communities have strong presences (and found more scarcely in  other Great Lakes-area cities like Detroit and Buffalo), city chicken  got its start in the Depression era, when chicken was scarce and more  expensive. Made then with pork, veal, or a combination of the two, the  meats were cubed and then threaded onto skewers, then breaded to create a  drumstick-like shape to better resemble chicken.  

-Eater
--PHOTO--City Chicken
Delicious city chicken. It goes great with rice, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, or a fine spinach or maybe some cabbage. Oh, and don’t you dare forget that nice icy beer. Eh?

Spend time with friends.

Eat well.

Talk, laugh. Drink.

Enjoy your moments together.

Hygge  is the idea that helps Denmark regularly rate as one of the happiest  countries in the world — Danes have regularly been some of the most  joyful in the world for over 40 years that the U.S. has been studying  them — despite long, dark winters. 

Loosely translated at "togetherness,"  and "coziness," though it's not a physical state, it's a mental one.  According to VisitDenmark  (the country's official tourism site): "The warm glow of candlelight is  hygge. Friends and family — that’s hygge too. And let’s not forget the  eating and drinking — preferably sitting around the table for hours on  end discussing the big and small things in life." Hygge's high season is  winter, and Christmas lights, candles galore, and other manifestations  of warmth and light, including warm alcoholic beverages, are key to the  concept. 

Still a little confused and wondering how you could cultivate hygge in your life? This Danish NPR commenter  sums up some specifics: "Hygge is a deep sense of cosy that can  originate from many different sources. Here is a good example from my  life : a cloudy winter Sunday morning at the country house, fire in the  stove and 20 candles lit to dispel the gloom. My husband, puppy and I  curled up on our sheepskins wearing felt slippers, warm snuggly clothes  and hands clasped around hot mugs of tea. A full day ahead with long  walks on the cold beach, back for pancake lunch, reading, more  snuggling, etc. 

This is a very hyggligt day." Now that sounds do-able,  doesn't it? 

- 7 cultural concepts we don't have in the U.S. 
--PHOTO--A fine young budding master chef. Check out all the things he is learning. Check out that he is in the kitchen with family. Check out how intent he is on what he is doing. Not only that! But, he will be able to eat his creation. How absolutely wonderful!
A fine young budding master chef. Check out all the things he is learning. Check out that he is in the kitchen with family. Check out how intent he is on what he is doing. Not only that! But, he will be able to eat his creation. How absolutely wonderful!

Chili

Ah. Chili. My mother always would make a big stiff tureen of chili on the stove in the Winter. Then when anyone would come over to visit, we would make up a fresh pot of coffee and give them a bowl of chili and some rice.

--PHOTO--Delicious and wonderful home cooked, home made, chilit with love. It is one of the most popular American foods and can be found all over the United States. You can find chilit in California, in Texas, and in Massachusetts. Chili is a very popular meal that also lends itself to other meals as well.
Delicious and wonderful home cooked, home made, chili with love. It is one of the most popular American foods and can be found all over the United States. You can find chili in California, in Texas, and in Massachusetts. Chili is a very popular meal that also lends itself to other meals as well.

Over the years I have developed my very own versions of this simple and delicious food. In fact, it is super easy to make in China. You just use a Hunan spice packet for the Chili mix.

In general, I like to eat it over white rice. Though, I do have friends that prefer Doritos, or other kinds of chips. They also like to add graded yellow or cheddar cheese on top. While I like to crunch up saltines and cheese. I will tell you what, it is fantastic with icy cold beer. It is a fantastic meal.

--PHOTO--Second photo of wonderful delicious chili.
Delicious and wonderful home cooked, home made, chili with love. It is one of the most popular American foods and can be found all over the United States. You can find chili in California, in Texas, and in Massachusetts. Chili is a very popular meal that also lends itself to other meals as well. Oh, and never forget that chili goes good with an icy cold beer. Make sure that the chili is hot, and the beer is cold. For it is a cold bowl of chili when love let’s you down. Don’t you know.

Oh, and you can also have fresh ears of corn on the side, maybe a salad or even Oreo cookies if you would like.

“When adults are talking, putting their napkins in their laps, and  eating a variety of foods, they are teaching the young children at the  table how to be human,” says Silverman. 

“Meals are a multi-sensory  classroom with emotional, physical, and developmental benefits.” The  most important part of the puzzle? To simply make family meal-time  happen. 

-Fatherly 
--PHOTO--Chili can be made using a wide range of ingredients. You can even make an all vegitarian chilit if you wish.
Chili can be made using a wide range of ingredients. You can even make an all vegetarian chili if you wish. Personally, I just can’t see the point. As humans are carnivorous creatures as designed by God. But there you have it. If you want to do your thang – go ahead. I’m not judging. Just saying.

Stuffed Pork-chops

You know that pork-chops are great. How about stuffed pork-chops? OMG!

The chops are typically made with pork chops that are 1 1/4- to 2-inches thick. Look for chops that are already secured with twine or toothpicks that prevent the stuffing from falling out. All you have to do is pick them up, bring them home and preheat your oven or grill to cook up delicious stuffed pork chops. Baked or Roasted Stuffed Pork Chops.

-How to Cook Stuffed Pork Chops From a Grocery Store 

It’s exactly like you would expect. It’s a thicker cut of pork chops. Only you slice the chops and in that slice you stuff it with stuff. Usually, right out of the (store bought) box of stuffing.

--PHOTO--Savory and delicious tasy home made American-style pork chops. It's a very easy and delicious meal that anyone can make.
Who doesn’t like pork? Well, aside from the religious, and those on the fringe? Savory and delicious tasty home made American-style pork chops. It’s a very easy and delicious meal that anyone can make.

Italian Sausages and Rolls

This is a nice little meal that I discovered while I was in High School. A girl that I was handing out with at the time introduced me to a little “hole in the wall” establishment off a side street in Butler, PA. I immediately fell in love with them.

You know the type of place—where the big loud guy behind the counter works fast and furious, takes your order (you better know what you want!) and barks back “Sausage, Peppers, and Onions!” to the guys on the line, and within minutes you have a huge roll in your hands, loaded with more sausage and peppers with onions than you think you can possibly eat.

But eat you do, because that sausage and peppers with onions are so so good. And then you have a food coma for the rest of the afternoon, and you eat steamed broccoli for dinner because after that lunch, you just don’t need much for dinner. Yum!

--PHOTO--Here is a most delicious Italian sausage meal. The sausage is slow cooked in a crock pot for four hours or so with Italian spaghetti sauce, some peppers and onions, and then removed and placed on a freshly baked hard roll. It i a most excellent family lunch, but makes a wonder dinner when paired with a bowl of creamy soup. Yum!
Here is a most delicious Italian sausage meal. The sausage is slow cooked in a crock pot for four hours or so with Italian spaghetti sauce, some peppers and onions, and then removed and placed on a freshly baked hard roll. It i a most excellent family lunch, but makes a wonder dinner when paired with a bowl of creamy soup. Yum!

Funny thing, though. My mother never made them. She did not like sweet Italian sausages. She never could see the point of it. Why buy sweet Italian sausages when you could buy kielbasi instead?

Well, I disagreed. I happen to love this meal.

What Kind of Sausage and Peppers to Use?
This dish is typically made with a several different colors of bell  peppers—usually one green, one red, and one either yellow, orange, or  purple. That said, use whatever color bell peppers you like! If you  don’t like a color, skip it and just use more of another color.

As for sausages, in this recipe we are using a combination of sweet  and hot Italian sausages, but if you want a milder dish, use only the  sweet sausages and reduce the amount of chili pepper flakes in the  recipe. Likewise, if you would like it spicier, use all hot sausages  and/or bump up the amount of chili pepper flakes.

How to Store, Keep, and Freeze
Once cooked, the sausage, peppers, and onions will easily keep for 3  to 4 days in the fridge, but you can also freeze it for up to 3 months.  Just defrost it in the fridge overnight and reheat in a saucepan over  low heat, or pop it in a saucepan with a little bit of water or oil,  over low heat, until completely warmed through. 

-simplyrecipes.com
--PHOTO-- A very fantastic and tasty Italian sausage sandwich on a fine fresh hard crunch roll and is best served hot. You do want to drink and wash it down with a nice icy bear. A local beer is always best. Don't you know.
A very fantastic and tasty Italian sausage sandwich on a fine fresh hard crunchy roll and is best served hot. You do want to drink and wash it down with a nice icy beer. A local beer is always best. Don’t you know.
Four Steps to Make the Most of a Meal

Being  there may be the most important part of family meal-time, but there are  still a few things you can do to make the conversation all the more  fruitful.
 
1. Have a ritual.
Answer the same  question every evening when you sit down to eat to give your kid  something to prepare for and see how the answers shift over time with  their changing perspective. A few examples: “What are you thankful for?”  or “What were the peak (best part) and pit (worst part) of your day?”

2. Play games.
Challenge  your kids and encourage fun and creativity by asking them questions  like, “What were the three craziest things you saw today?” or “If you  were an animal, which would you want to be and why?”
 
3. Skip the TV dinner.
Do your best to  turn off the TV, put phones away, and negate any distractions that can  take away from your time to talk. “Family meals should be pleasant, fun,  and technology free to optimize the experience,” Silverman says.

4. Get everyone involved.
This  is a time where the whole family chips in to come together. Ask your  kids to wash veggies or set the table. “I’m a big fan of teaching  children to cook,” Silverman says. “Their own home kitchen is the  perfect place to start learning how to prepare healthy meals.” One of  the easiest ways to teach them skills in the kitchen is for them to try  their hand (with adult supervision) at one of the healthy, ready-to-make  meals from Sun Basket. 

  -Fatherly  
--PHOTO--Such a satisfying combo! Italian sausages cooked with bell peppers, sweet onions, crushed tomatoes, and garlic. Served on a hoagie roll or over pasta or polenta.
Such a satisfying combo! Italian sausages cooked with bell peppers, sweet onions, crushed tomatoes, and garlic. Served on a hoagie roll or over pasta or polenta. Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Mmmmm. Sausage and peppers with onions. This is one of those classic Italian-American street food, lunch cart dishes.

Oh, yes. Do not forget.

Food cooked, is food to eat. Don’t stand there yapping! Make yourself a sandwich and pour yourself a beer. have a good time you all!

 --PHOTO--Another fine example of a home-made-Italian sausage sandwich. I'll bet you won' be able to get this in a fast food restrurant.
Another fine example of a home-made-Italian sausage sandwich. I’ll bet you won’ be able to get this in a fast food restaurant.

Beef Tips and Rice

And no, it’s not Chinese.

This is one of those wonderful meals that I will always treasure. For some reason, and I do not know why, I always remember the relaxing time after I ate this meal. When we are all sitting at the table talking and enjoying our after-dinner coffee in demitasse cups..

--PHOTO--Delicious and wonderful beef tips and rice. The perfect meal for a fine active houshold. It acutlly goes great with iced tea. Did you know that?
Delicious and wonderful beef tips and rice. The perfect meal for a fine active household. It actually goes great with iced tea. Did you know that?

Around the south, just about all the local mom-and-pop style restaurants feature Beef Tips with Rice and Gravy on their menu.  It’s an old diner favorite that is also usually one of the cheaper menu choices because it can take a somewhat tougher cut of beef, slow simmer it to make it tender and, then serve it up with a large portion of rice and gray to cut costs.

--PHOTO--Some people like to eat the beef tips and rice in a soup bowl, or a shallow bowl. I, myself, think that a fine dinner plate is the best. But, it's all up to you all.
Some people like to eat the beef tips and rice in a soup bowl, or a shallow bowl. I, myself, think that a fine dinner plate is the best. But, it’s all up to you all.

Its so versatile in that it tastes great when served over rice, over mashed potatoes or, even over noodles. 

Busy family hints...

Here’s a really simple recipe that just needs about an hour to slow  simmer before its ready to serve.  You can take advantage of some  cheaper cuts of beef anytime you find them on sale and, whip up some  great Southern comfort food that can be served with rice, mashed  potatoes or even noodles.  It’s your choice.

Stew beef works very well for this recipe or, you can use eye of  round steak like we did.  You can even go all out and make it with a  finer cut like Ribeye steak.  The really great part is, whatever you  find on sale, can probably be used to make our Beef Tips.  Buy it while  its on sale, freeze it and have it ready for a quick and easy lunch,  dinner or Sunday dinner.  I think you’ll like it about any time of the  day. 

-Taste of Southern
--PHOTO--It certainly looks like a Chinese dish. Perhaps it is because many Chinese dishes follow the same formula. Except that they use a different scuce, different selection of spices and a different cut of meat. Thus this dish is a uniquely American dish and it is deserving of your attention as a wonderful entree to provide to your friends and family.
It certainly looks like a Chinese dish. Perhaps it is because many Chinese dishes follow the same formula. Except that they use a different sauce, different selection of spices and a different cut of meat. Thus this dish is a uniquely American dish and it is deserving of your attention as a wonderful entree to provide to your friends and family.

Salisbury steak

For the longest time my mother would make Salisbury steaks and they would be tough. They would be chewy and needed to be cut into tiny cubes to digest.

Then, I met a girl from Zambia.

--PHOTO--Again, it might seem like this salsbury steak meal is Chinese. But no. It's not. It's as American as Football cheerleading squads and Saturday nights in the GTO. It's different in that the gravy, the meat and the way of cooking the meal differs substantially from what is present in China. That's neither good nor bad, it's jsut he way it is. Live the difference!
Again, it might seem like this Salisbury steak meal is Chinese. But no. It’s not. It’s as American as Football cheer-leading squads and Saturday nights in the GTO. It’s different in that the gravy, the meat and the way of cooking the meal differs substantially from what is present in China. That’s neither good nor bad, it’s just the way it is. Live the difference!

When we lived together, she was able to make the most delicious Salisbury steaks that I have ever eaten. They were nothing sort of amazing. She said that there was nothing to it, but I disagree. Some people just have a natural affinity and skill at certain things, and she was just amazing in the kitchen.

"One of the simplest and most effective ways for parents to be engaged in their teens'  lives is by having frequent family dinners," 

- Joseph Califano Jr.,  chairman and president of The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse at Columbia University (CASA). 
--PHOTO-- Salsbury steak can be served on a bed of rice, or with noodles. Heck, you can even serve it with potatoes, wether mashed or in any of the other delicious forms possible.
Salisbury steak can be served on a bed of rice, or with noodles. Heck, you can even serve it with potatoes, whether mashed or in any of the other delicious forms possible.

You might wonder just how a family can afford all this. Well, it’s no mystery. You can EASILY afford these meals provided you set your familial household to operate traditionally. It’s not at all what is promoted in the mainstream media, and perhaps it’s time to take a good hard long look at the assumptions that our parents made, and the sacrifices they made to become “progressive” and “enlightened”.

You can click on the link below. It opens up into a new fresh tab so that your browsing in this article will not be interrupted.

How to manage a family household.

Shepard’s Pie

Now my first experience with “Shepard’s Pie” was in the school cafeteria. My mother tended not to make it at home. She felt that it was too simple a dish to make. More plebeian, I would guess.

--PHOTO--A fine Shepard's pie. Nope. You will not find this in a fast food restaurant. Though, you could possibly discover it in a British or Irish pub.
A fine Shepard’s pie. Nope. You will not find this in a fast food restaurant. Though, you could possibly discover it in a British or Irish pub.
Shepherd's pie or cottage pie is a meat pie with a crust or topping of mashed potato. 

The recipe has many variations, but the defining ingredients are minced red meat, cooked in a gravy or sauce with onions and sometimes other vegetables, such as peas, celery or carrots, and topped with a layer of mashed potato before it is baked. 

The pie is sometimes also topped with grated cheese to create a layer of melted cheese on top.

-Wikipedia

Chicken and Dumplings

Old Fashioned Chicken and Dumplings is a family favorite meal that is both comforting and delicious! Chicken and dumplings is a dish that consists of a chicken cooked in water, with the resulting chicken broth being used to cook the dumplings by boiling. A dumpling—in this context—is a biscuit dough, which is a mixture of flour, shortening, and liquid. The dumplings are either rolled out flat, dropped or formed into a ball.

Chicken and Dumplings. A fine, fine American meal.
Chicken and Dumplings. A fine, fine American meal.

This chicken and dumplings recipe is created from scratch including the tender dumplings and juicy chicken in an easy homemade broth. Combine chicken, onion, carrots and celery in a large pot. Season to taste.

EATING AT HOME SAVES MONEY. 

In 2007, the average household spent $3,465 on meals at home,  and $2,668 on meals away from home, according to the national Consumer  Expenditure Survey from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Per meal, that’s  about $8 per meal outside of the home, and only about $4.50 per each  meal made in your own kitchen. 

 - 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family    

Potatoes with onions and eggs

Eating  family dinners is associated with healthy dietary food patterns. A 2000  survey found that the nine to 14-year-olds who ate dinner with their  families most frequently consumed more fruits and vegetables  and less soda and fried foods. Their diets also had higher amounts of  many key nutrients, like calcium, iron, and fiber. Matthew W. Gillman,  MD, the survey’s lead researcher, noted that family dinners allow for  both "discussions of nutrition [and] provision of healthful foods." 

- 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family  

This meal is representative of a very simple meal that I once cooked for a friend. She had to work and we offered to baby-sit her kids for her. The thing was that the poor kids weren’t eating right. They didn’t eat all day. And there was nothing in the kitchen. I mean, the entire kitchen was empty except for some onions, potatoes and a few eggs.

Here’s what you do.

Potatoes and onions, a very fast and super cheap meal to make in a pinch.
Potatoes and onions, a very fast and super cheap meal to make in a pinch.

You cut up the potatoes and the onions. Put in in a skillet with salt, pepper and butter. let it cook. The house will be filled with this wondrous aroma. Then you remove the potatoes and onions. And cook the eggs int he same pan. The kids will love it.

Meals need not be expensive. You just need to be a little creative.

Round Steak

Easy Crock Pot Round Steak recipe is quick to throw together, cooks all day and produces a delicious beef and gravy dinner waiting for you when you get home.

--PHOTO--A fine and delicious rond steak. There are so many ways to cook this steak. It is up to the family cook to pick one and see how it turns out. In any event, this meal is most certainly a pleaser. Everyone will enjoy the meal.
A fine and delicious round steak. There are so many ways to cook this steak. It is up to the family cook to pick one and see how it turns out. In any event, this meal is most certainly a pleaser. Everyone will enjoy the meal.
A round steak is a beef steak from the "round", the rear leg of the cow. The round is divided into cuts including the eye round, bottom round, and top round, with or without the "round" bone, and may include the knuckle, depending on how the round is separated from the loin. 

This is a lean cut and it is moderately tough. 

Lack of fat and marbling makes round dry out when cooked with dry-heat cooking methods like roasting or grilling. Round steak is commonly prepared with slow moist-heat methods including braising, to tenderize the meat and maintain moisture. The cut is often sliced thin, then dried or smoked at low temperature to make jerky. 

-Wikipedia

Perogies

As my parents were partially of Polish decent and from Pittsburgh, the idea of eating perogies was as natural as learning how to put on socks. We all ate this most wonderful of meals.

Though my relatives always made perogies out of meats, vegetables and fruits, personally I never got a chance to eat the sweet versions. My siblings and my cousins always gobbled up the fruit versions. Leaving me with the more “unpopular” perogies.

--PHOTO--A perogie is a Polish-American version of a Chinese dumpling. Only it is often filled with mashed potatoes, and cheese, and fried with onions in the Shanghai style.
A perogie is a Polish-American version of a Chinese dumpling. Only it is often filled with mashed potatoes, and cheese, and fried with onions in the Shanghai style.

No worries though. They now have ballooned up to the size of whales. While I have maintained my thin and trim lines. LOL.

Pierogi are filled dumplings of Central and Eastern European origin, made by wrapping unleavened dough around a savory or sweet filling and cooking in boiling water, or pan-frying. 

Pierogi which consist of noodle dough and have to be cooked in boiling water are associated with the Central and Eastern European kitchens where they are considered national dishes, especially in Poland. 

Pierogi are popular in West Slavic, Hungarian, East Slavic, some Baltic and other Central and Eastern European...

-Wikipedia

Ravioli

Ravioli is a traditional Italian pasta dish made by stuffing rounds or squares of pasta dough with a filling, creating a sort of pasta “pillow.”.

Ravioli is a traditional Italian pasta dish made by stuffing rounds or squares of pasta dough with a filling, creating a sort of pasta "pillow.". The dish is wildly popular outside of Italy, and can be readily found in fresh and frozen form in most Western supermarkets.

-Wise Geek
--PHOTO--Ravioli is a traditional Italian pasta dish made by stuffing rounds or squares of pasta dough with a filling, creating a sort of pasta "pillow.". The dish is wildly popular outside of Italy, and can be readily found in fresh and frozen form in most Western supermarkets.
Ravioli is a traditional Italian pasta dish made by stuffing rounds or squares of pasta dough with a filling, creating a sort of pasta “pillow.”. The dish is popular outside of Italy, and can be readily found in fresh and frozen form in most Western supermarkets.

Beef Stroganoff

Beef Stroganoff. My mother used to make this with egg noodles. As did all my aunties. It’s a Pittsburgh thing, I guess.

This wonderful meal consists of juicy beef smothered in a creamy mushroom and onion gravy. Beef Stroganoff is a crowd favourite that tastes like a slow cooked stew but is on the table in 30 minutes! Beef Stroganoff – a timeless retro classic!!

--PHOTO--Beef Stroganoff. Juicy beef smothered in a creamy mushroom and onion gravy. Beef Stroganoff is a crowd favourite that tastes like a slow cooked stew but is on the table in 30 minutes! Beef Stroganoff – a timeless retro classic!!
Beef Stroganoff. Juicy beef smothered in a creamy mushroom and onion gravy. Beef Stroganoff is a crowd favorite that tastes like a slow cooked stew but is on the table in 30 minutes! Beef Stroganoff – a timeless retro classic!!
If  you have a demanding job, finding time to eat with your family may  actually leave you feeling less stressed. In 2008, researchers at  Brigham Young University conducted a study of IBM employees and found  that sitting down to a family meal helped working moms reduce the tension and strain from long hours at the office. 

 - 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family   

Cold-cut Spread

This isn’t really a dinner so much as it is a tradition. What we would do at my mother’s family and with her parents and relatives would be to have a “cold cut spread”. It’s just simply a layout allowing the person to make their own sandwiches at will.

This is also known as a “cold platter”. It is a very cheap and easy way to make a meal spread without any cooking.

Sandwich spreads are some of the best make ahead meals. When your family is in and out of the house, eating at different times and with different appetites, having these delicious and nutritious spreads in the fridge is like money in the bank. And make-ahead sandwich spreads are the perfect answer to feeding your family when it’s just too hot to cook.

Turkey, ham and salami cold cuts are all at home on a sandwich—but these deli meats can be used in many other ways. We like to add thin strips of salami to pasta carbonara and cheesy frittata, smoked turkey to spaghetti and thinly-sliced chicken to spinach salad. One of our favorite deli meats is high quality pastrami—there are few sandwiches more delicious (or iconic) than a Reuben. Piled high on rye bread with Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing, it’s a New York deli classic.
Turkey, ham and salami cold cuts are all at home on a sandwich—but these deli meats can be used in many other ways. We like to add thin strips of salami to pasta carbonara and cheesy frittata, smoked turkey to spaghetti and thinly-sliced chicken to spinach salad. One of our favorite deli meats is high quality pastrami—there are few sandwiches more delicious (or iconic) than a Reuben. Piled high on rye bread with Swiss cheese, sauerkraut and Russian dressing, it’s a New York deli classic.
 The average restaurant meal has as much as 60% more calories than a homemade meal. Combine the fact that portions served in restaurants are continuing to expand  with that fact that when we’re presented with more food, we’re more  likely to eat more food, and it becomes clear that eating at home is  simply healthier. When families eat together, young children are less likely to be overweight or obese because these children are eat regular, nutritious, home cooked meals, and also help in making or serving those meals.  

  - 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family    

Sausage and (Hominy) Grits

A favorite of my mother. She would routinely cook this meal on every Tuesday once she settled into retirement. It’s a thing that she loved to do, but which I had no inking of why.

--PHOTO--This is a full meal ready to go. The underrated hominy takes in the flavor of the roasted sausages; spinach cooked with garlic and chili flakes makes a perfect green addition to the plate. Seconds, please!
This is a full meal ready to go. The underrated hominy takes in the flavor of the roasted sausages; spinach cooked with garlic and chili flakes makes a perfect green addition to the plate. Seconds, please!
Research examining 5,000 teenagers has shown that when children eat with their parents regularly, they are more likely to be emotionally strong and have better mental health.  

Teens who ate regular family meals were also more likely to be  adjusted, have good manners and communication skills. 

This effect is not  restricted to the children - mothers who ate with their families often  were also found to be happier and less stressed as compared to mothers who did not. 

  - 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family    

Kielbasa

Nothing says Pittsburgh better than Kielbasa.

Polish kielbasa is traditionally made from ground pork. Some commercial variations of kielbasa are made from ground turkey, but these aren’t authentic. Garlic, along with pimentos and ground cloves, are the predominant seasonings.

What sets kielbasa apart from other members of the sausage family is its coarse texture, heady garlic flavor and classic Polish preparation - it's traditionally not smoked or lightly smoked at best.  Smoked sausage, on the other hand, is cooked and then smoked. Often, artificial smoke "flavors" are added as well. Because they're fully cooked, you can eat smoked sausages cold or warmed. Other varieties include Italian mortadella, Cajun andouille, German bratwurst, bologna and hot dogs. Smoked sausage can be made from ground pork, turkey, beef or a combination of meats -- and they can include any variation of seasonings.  Polish kielbasa is traditionally made from ground pork. Some commercial variations of kielbasa are made from ground turkey, but these aren't authentic. Garlic, along with pimentos and ground cloves, are the predominant seasonings.  Serve kielbasa warm, grilled or boiled, along with other traditional Polish sides such as pierogies -- potato dumplings -- pickled cucumbers and buckwheat groats. You can also cook kielbasa with eggs, use it for sandwiches, include in soups, stews and casseroles or serve with a side of vegetables.
What sets kielbasa apart from other members of the sausage family is its coarse texture, heady garlic flavor and classic Polish preparation – it’s traditionally not smoked or lightly smoked at best. Smoked sausage, on the other hand, is cooked and then smoked. Often, artificial smoke “flavors” are added as well. Because they’re fully cooked, you can eat smoked sausages cold or warmed. Other varieties include Italian mortadella, Cajun andouille, German bratwurst, bologna and hot dogs. Smoked sausage can be made from ground pork, turkey, beef or a combination of meats — and they can include any variation of seasonings.

Serve kielbasa warm, grilled or boiled, along with other traditional Polish sides such as pierogies — potato dumplings — pickled cucumbers and buckwheat groats. You can also cook kielbasa with eggs, use it for sandwiches, include in soups, stews and casseroles or serve with a side of vegetables.

Gumbo

Nothing says Southern Louisiana food like gumbo: A thick stew-like soup of meat, okra, and Creole and Cajun seasonings. But its history—and even its essential ingredients and method of preparation—is widely disputed.

--PHOTO--A most delicious seafood gumbo. This is the food of New Iberia, you all. It is outstanding and wonderful. You have not lived until you have eaten some seafood gumbo.
A most delicious seafood gumbo. This is the food of New Iberia, you all. It is outstanding and wonderful. You have not lived until you have eaten some seafood gumbo.

Historians generally agree that its existence is first documented at the beginning of the 19th century. And the thickeners commonly used in many gumbo recipes (filé powder, okra, and gumbo roux—don’t worry, we explain all of these) give clues to its Choctaw Native American, West African, and French roots.

Regardless of its disputed origins and the myriad ways it’s prepared, it’s an essential, treasured part of New Orleans, Louisiana Creole and Cajun culture, and we’re here to break it down for you: what gumbo is, what ingredients to use, and how to make different types, from sausage to chicken to seafood gumbo.

Gumbo is a stew popular in the U.S. state of Louisiana, and is the official state cuisine. Gumbo consists primarily of a strongly-flavored stock, meat or shellfish, a thickener, and what Louisianians call the "Holy Trinity" of vegetables, namely celery, bell peppers, and onions. Gumbo is often categorized by the type of thickener used, whether okra or filé powder.

-Wikipedia 
--PHOTO--A most excellent dish, seafood gumbo has the makings of great times. All you need to do is add freinds, beer and some fine music. Just bring yourself. And... of course... be yourself.
A most excellent dish, seafood gumbo has the makings of great times. All you need to do is add friends, beer and some fine music. Just bring yourself. And… of course… be yourself.

While both gumbo and jambalaya are mainstays of Cajun and Creole cooking, they’re both distinct dishes with different methods of prep. While gumbo is typically enjoyed as a rich, flavorful soup, sometimes served spooned over rice, jambalaya is similar to Spanish paella:

The rice is usually cooked with the protein (usually some mix of chicken, seafood, and/or sausage) along with the stock, seasonings, and veggies in one large ready-to-serve skillet. Creole Jambalaya may include tomatoes, while Cajun typically does not.

Studies have proven that there’s a significant link between family dinners and academic performance. 

A report by CASA found that teens who have between five and seven family dinners per week were twice as likely to report receiving mostly A’s and B’s in school,  compared to those teens who have fewer than three family dinners per week. 

In addition, only 9% of teens who ate frequently with their families did poorly in school, according to the report. 

 - 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family   

Many people would eat Gumbo as a stand alone dish, I would prefer to eat it as a soup with a fine sandwich nearby (and an icy beer). I have a write up or post about this. It is below. You can click on it and it will open up in another tab so that this article can be finished.

Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.

Hey! Here’s a great bowl of gumbo. Wouldn’t you just love to have one yourself?

--PHOTO--A bowl of fine delicious gumo with shrimp and okra. Yum!
A bowl of fine delicious gumbo with shrimp and okra. Yum!

Gumbo is usually distinguished by what is used to thicken it—typically okra, filé powder, a roux, or some combination of the three. The name “gumbo” is also speculated to come from the name of the traditional bases: either from the word kingombo, a West African Bantu word for okra, or from kombo, the Choctaw Native American word for filé powder, an essential spice.
 
Filé powder: Filé powder is dried crushed leaves from Sassafras, a plant native to the Southeastern U.S. The powder is usually added at the end of the recipe to thicken and season the gumbo and can usually be found in a well-stocked supermarket or spice store.
 
Okra: Used either fresh or dried, okra is one of the most common thickening agents of gumbo and gives it its distinctive taste and flavor—it’d be difficult to find a recipe for gumbo that doesn’t make copious use of okra. Traditionally, when okra is out of season, dried okra can be used instead.

Shrimp and okra gumbo, showing and illustrating how the okra is to be cut and added to this fine, and tasty gumbo dish.
Shrimp and okra gumbo, showing and illustrating how the okra is to be cut and added to this fine, and tasty gumbo dish.

Roux: Derived from French cooking, gumbo roux is much darker than the mildly toasted roux used in classical French cuisine. It’s made by toasting flour in fat such as butter until it’s golden brown, but many gumbo roux recipes call for a roux that is “chocolate-colored,” “mahogany,” or even “close to burnt”, and they’re typically made with oil instead of butter.

gumbo roux
Some gumbo roux that can be obtained off the internet. Thus providing delicious Gumbo just about anywhere in the world.

“Holy Trinity”: Similar to mirepoix, (carrot, onion, and celery) the “Holy Trinity” is the base of much of Creole and Cajun cooking—bell pepper, onions, and celery is used to start many gumbo recipes. Depending on the recipe, shallots, garlic, and parsley can also be included in this essential blend.

The Trinity that is used in Gumbo.
The Trinity that is used in Gumbo.

Oh my Goodness! This is a long post!

I am so, so very sorry. However, I will have to wrap up this post leaving out so many, many delicious dinner suggestions.

For the purposes of brevity, let’s tack on the following as “honorable mentions”. All of which are delicious and deserving of their own place in the spot-light.

  • Clam bake
  • Cobb Salad
  • Baked Ham
  • Oyster Stew
  • Deviled Crabs
  • Deviled eggs
  • Pulled Chicken
  • Lox and bagels
  • Shrimp
  • Jambalaya
  • Baked Turkey
--PHOTO--Family participation. Cooked and served with love and attention. No television. No cell phones. No games. No apps. Just people.
Family participation. Cooked and served with love and attention. No television. No cell phones. No games. No apps. Just people.

Conclusion

Talking. Eating. Being together. What’s not to love?

Eating meals together has the potential to strengthen family bonds as it  provides a daily time for the whole family to be together. 

For younger children, routine family meals can provide a sense of security and a feeling of belonging in the family. 

Older children and teenagers, too, prefer eating together as a family. In a recent Columbia University study, 71% of teenagers  said they consider talking, catching-up, and spending time with family members as the best part of family dinners. 

- 9 Scientifically Proven Reasons to Eat Dinner as a Family 

Meals are to be shared. Share some food with others. It’s not expensive, but the time and the friendships are the most valuable things that you can have. Share your food. Share your time. Share your life.

With others.

This kitchen may not be picture-perfect, but it's the perfect place for an authentic evening.
This kitchen may not be picture-perfect, but it’s the perfect place for an authentic evening. (Special tanks to the Mother Nature Network).

A life lived alone is a life unlived.

Meals are to be shared. Share some food with others. It's not expensive, but the time and the friendships are the most valuable things that you can have. Share your food. Share your time. Share your life.
Meals are to be shared. Share some food with others. It’s not expensive, but the time and the friendships are the most valuable things that you can have. Share your food. Share your time. Share your life.

Oh, yeah!

A family DOES NOT NEED two incomes. Nothing, and I do mean NOTHING, is more important than spending time together. Live cheaper. Live frugally. Spend more time together. One person budgets and tends to the family. The other member labors and gives everything to the family. This system works.

Give it a whirl. You might be surprised how well it works out.

For you other expats out there…

This post is designed for you to show your relatives what “American food” is, and what it is not.

This is NOT American food…

All Americans have eaten a McDonalds meal, but fast food is not family meal fare. It is not healthy and does not lend itself for communial meals and togetherness.
All Americans have eaten a McDonald’s meal, but fast food is not family meal fare. It is not healthy and does not lend itself for communal meals and togetherness.

American “fast food” is a progressive invention to assist the “modern enlightened” person to cope in a stress-filled automated reality where the needs of the group come before the needs of the individual.

--PHOTO--Tired of having to work two jobs to make ends meet. Well welcome to the new modern progressive reality ushered in by Wilson and FDR.
Tired of having to work two jobs to make ends meet. Well welcome to the new modern progressive reality ushered in by Wilson and FDR.

Background Links

Here are some links on related subjects that covers this specific subject in much more detail.

Pleasures
Link
1960's and 1970's link

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight

Funny Pictures

Picture Dump 1

Be the Rufus – Tales of Everyday Heroism.

Be the Rufus - 1

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“He Who Shrank” (Full Text) by Henry Hasse

This is a fine short science fiction story that I have never forgotten. I must have read it when I was in my middle teenage years. When I ran across it the other day, I felt that I just had to include it in my internet collection here. There’s nothing really special or noteworthy about this story, except that it is unique and a fun read.

Please enjoy.

The greatest scientist the world has ever had has invented a  extraordinary new means of exploring the world of the infinitely small,  and sends his devoted assistant - notwithstanding his objections to the  scheme - on a mind-boggling series of adventures exploring the infinite  series of concentric universes contained within the most minute particle  (!!), thus providing the scope and scale of one of the most ambitious  and wide-ranging and thought-provoking science-fiction stories ever.

This powerful saga was first published in the August 1936 issue of  Amazing Stories.

He Who Shrank

I

YEARS, centuries, aeons, have fled past me in endless parade, leav­ing me unscathed: for I am deathless, and in all the universe alone of my kind. Universe? Strange how that convenient word leaps instantly to my mind from force of old habit. Universe? The merest expression of a puny idea in the minds of those who cannot possibly conceive whereof they speak. The word is a mockery. Yet how glibly men utter it! How little do they realize the artificiality of the word!

That night when the Professor called me to him he was standing close to the curved transparent wall of the astrono-laboratory looking out into the blackness. He heard me enter, but did not look around as he spoke. I do not know whether he was addressing me or not.

"They call me the greatest scientist the world has had in all time."

I had been his only assistant for years, and was accustomed to his moods, so I did not speak. Neither did he for several moments and then he continued:

"Only a half year ago I discovered a principle that will be the means of  utterly annihilating every kind of disease germ. And only recently I  turned over to others the principles of a new toxin which stimulates the  worn-out protoplasmic life-cells, causing almost com­plete  rejuvenation. The combined results should nearly double the ordinary  life span. Yet these two things are only incidental in the long list of  discoveries I have made to the great benefit of the race."

He turned then and faced me, and I was surprised at a new pecul­iar glow that lurked deep in his eyes.

"And for these things they call me great! For these puny discov­eries  they heap honors on me and call me the benefactor of the race. They  disgust me, the fools! Do they think I did it for them? Do they think I  care about the race, what it does or what happens to it or how long it  lives? They do not suspect that all the things I have given them were  but accidental discoveries on my part—to which I gave hardly a thought.  Oh, you seem amazed. Yet not even you, who have assisted me here for ten  years, ever suspected that all my labors and experiments were pointed  toward one end, and one end alone."

He went over to a locked compartment which in earlier years I had wondered about and then ceased to wonder about, as I became engrossed in my work. The professor opened it now, and I glimpsed but the usual array of bottles and test-tubes and vials. One of these vials he lifted gingerly from a rack.

"And at last I have attained the end," he almost whispered, hold­ing the  tube aloft. A pale liquid scintillated eerily against the artificial  light in the ceiling. "Thirty years, long years, of ceaseless  experiment­ing, and now, here in my hand—success!"

The Professor’s manner, the glow deep in his dark eyes, the sub­merged enthusiasm that seemed at every instant about to leap out, all served to impress me deeply. It must indeed be an immense thing he had done, and I ventured to say as much.

"Immense!" he exclaimed. "Immense! Why—why it’s so immense that—. But wait. Wait. You shall see for yourself."

At that time how little did I suspect the significance of his words. I was indeed to see for myself.

Carefully he replaced the vial, then walked over to the transparent wall again.

"Look!" he gestured toward the night sky. "The unknown! Does it not  fascinate you? The other fools dream of some day travelling out there  among the stars. They think they will go out there and learn the secret  of the universe. But as yet they have been baffled by the problem of a  sufficiently powerful fuel or force for their ships. And they are blind.  Within a month I could solve the puny difficulty that confronts them;  could, but I won’t. Let them search, let them experiment, let them waste  their lives away, what do I care about them?"

I wondered what he was driving at, but realized that he would come to the point in his own way. He went on:

"And suppose they do solve the problem, suppose they do leave the  planet, go to other worlds in their hollow ships, what will it profit  them? Suppose that they travel with the speed of light for their own  life time, and then land on a star at that point, the farthest point  away from here that is possible for them? They would no doubt say: ’We  can now realize as never before the truly staggering expanse of the  universe. It is indeed a great structure, the universe. We have traveled  a far distance; we must be on the fringe of it.’
 "Thus they would believe. Only I would know how wrong they were, for I  can sit here and look through this telescope and see stars that are  fifty and sixty times as distant as that upon which they landed.  Comparatively, their star would be infinitely close to us. The poor  deluded fools and their dreams of space travel!"

“But, Professor,” I interposed, “just think—”

"Wait! Now listen. I, too, have long desired to fathom the uni­verse, to  determine what it is, the manner and the purpose and the secret of its  creation. Have you ever stopped to wonder what the universe is? For  thirty years I have worked for the answer to those questions. Unknowing,  you helped me with your efficiency on the strange experiments I  assigned to you at various times. Now I have the answer in that vial,  and you shall be the only one to share the secret with me."

Incredulous, I again tried to interrupt.

"Wait!" he said. "Let me finish. There was the time when I also looked  to the stars for the answer. I built my telescope, on a new principle of  my own. I searched the depths of the void. I made vast calculations.  And I proved conclusively to my own mind what had theretofore been only a  theory. I know now without doubt that this our planet, and other  planets revolving about the sun, are but electrons of an atom, of which  the sun is the nucleus. And our sun is but one of millions of others,  each with its allotted number of planets, each system being an atom just  as our own is in reality.

"And all these millions of solar systems, or atoms, taken together in  one group, form a galaxy. As you know, there are countless num­bers of  these galaxies throughout space, with tremendous stretches of space  between them. And what are these galaxies? Molecules! They extend  through space even beyond the farthest range of my telescope! But having  penetrated that far, it is not difficult to make the final step.

"All of these far-flung galaxies, or molecules, taken together as a  whole, form—what? Some indeterminable element or substance on a great,  ultramacrocosmic world! Perhaps a minute drop of water, or a grain of  sand, or wisp of smoke, or—good God!—an eyelash of some creature living  on that world!"

I could not speak. I felt myself grow faint at the thought he had propounded. I tried to think it could not be—yet what did I or any­one know about the infinite stretches of space that must exist beyond the ranges of our most powerful telescope?

“It can’t be!” I burst out. “It’s incredible, it’s—monstrous!”

"Monstrous? Carry it a step further. May not that ultra-world also be an  electron whirling around the nucleus of an atom? And that atom only one  of millions forming a molecule? And that molecule only one of millions  forming—"

“For God’s sake, stop!” I cried. “I refuse to believe that such a thing can be! Where would it all lead? Where would it end? It might go on—forever! And besides,” I added lamely, “what has all this to do with—your discovery, the fluid you showed me?”

"Just this. I soon learned that it was useless to look to the  infi­nitely large; so I turned to the infinitely small. For does it not  follow that if such a state of creation exists in the stars above us, it  must exist identically in the atoms below us?"

I saw his line of reasoning, but still did not understand. His next words fully enlightened me, but made me suspect that I was facing one who had gone insane from his theorizing. He went on eagerly, his voice the voice of a fanatic:

"If I could not pierce the stars above, that were so far, then I would  pierce the atoms below, that were so near. They are every­where. In  every object I touch and in the very air I breathe. But they are minute,  and to reach them I must find a way to make myself as minute as they  are, and more so! This I have done. The solution I showed you will cause  every individual atom in my body to contract, but each electron and  proton will also decrease in size, or diameter, in direct proportion to  my own shrinkage! Thus will I not only be able to become the size of an  atom, but can go down, down into infinite smallness!"

When he had stopped speaking I said calmly: “You are mad.”

He was imperturbed.

"I expected you to say that," he answered. "It is  only natural that that should be your reaction to all that I have said.  But no, I am not mad, it is merely that you are unacquainted with the  marvelous propensities of `Shrinx.’ But I promised that you should see  for yourself, and that you shall. You shall be the first to go down into  the atomic universe."

My original opinion in regard to his state of mind remained unshaken.

“I am sure you mean well, Professor,” I said, “but I must decline your offer.”

He went on as though I hadn’t spoken:

"There are several reasons why I want to send you before I myself make  the trip. In the first place, once you make the trip there can be no  returning, and there are a number of points I want to be quite clear on.  You will serve as my advance guard, so to speak."

“Professor, listen. I do not doubt that the stuff you call ’Shrinx’ has very remarkable properties. I will even admit that it will do all you say it will do. But for the past month you have worked day and night, with scarcely enough time out for food and hardly any sleep at all. You should take a rest, get away from the laboratory for awhile.”

"I shall keep in contact with your consciousness," he said, "through a  very ingenious device I have perfected. I will explain it to you later.  The `Shrinx’ is introduced directly into the blood stream. Shortly  thereafter your shrinkage should begin, and continue at moderate speed,  never diminishing in the least degree so long as the blood continues to  flow in your body. At least, I hope it never diminishes. Should it, I  shall have to make the necessary alterations in the formula. All this is  theoretical of course, but I am sure it will all work according to  schedule, and quite without harm."

I had now lost all patience. “See here, Professor,” I said crossly, “I refuse to be the object of any of your wild-sounding experiments. You should realize that what you propose to do is scientifically im­possible. Go home and rest—or go away for a while—”

Without the slightest warning he leaped at me, snatching an object from the table. Before I could take a backward step I felt a needle plunge deep into my arm, and cried out with the pain of it. Things became hazy, distorted. A wave of vertigo swept over me. Then it passed, and my vision cleared. The Professor stood leering before me.

"Yes, I’ve worked hard and I’m tired. I’ve worked thirty years, but I’m  not tired enough nor fool enough to quit this thing now, right on the  verge of the climax!"

His leer of triumph gave way to an expression almost of sympathy.

"I am sorry it had to come about this way," he said, "but I saw that you  would never submit otherwise. I really am ashamed of you. I didn’t  think you would doubt the truth of my statements to the extent of really  believing me insane. But to be safe I prepared your allotment of the  `Shrinx’ in advance, and had it ready; it is now cours­ing through your  veins, and it should be but a short time before we observe the effects.  What you saw in the vial is for myself when I am ready to make the trip.  Forgive me for having to administer yours in such an undignified  manner."

So angered was I at the utter disregard he had shown for my personal feelings, that I hardly heard his words. My arm throbbed fiercely where the needle had plunged in. I tried to take a step toward him, but not a muscle would move. I struggled hard to break the paralysis that was upon me, but could not move a fraction of an inch from where I stood.

The professor seemed surprised too, and alarmed.

"What, paralysis? That is an unforeseen circumstance! You see, it is  even as I said: the properties of `Shrinx’ are marvelous and many."

He came close and peered intently into my eyes, and seemed relieved.

"However, the effect is only temporary," he assured me. Then added: "But  you will likely be a bit smaller when the use of your muscles returns,  for your shrinkage should begin very shortly now. I must hurry to  prepare for the final step."

He walked past me, and I heard him open his private cupboard again. I could not speak, much less move, and I was indeed in a most uncomfortable, not to mention undignified, position. All I could do was to glare at him when he came around in front of me again. He carried a curious kind of helmet with ear-pieces and goggles attached, and a number of wires running from it. This he placed upon the table and connected the wires to a small flat box there.

All the while I watched him closely. I hadn’t the least idea what he was going to do with me, but never for a moment did I believe that I would shrink into an atomic universe; that was altogether too fantastic for my conception.

As though reading my thought the Professor turned and faced me. He looked me over casually for a moment and then said:

"I believe it has begun already. Yes, I am sure of it. Tell me, do you  not feel it? Do not things appear a trifle larger to you, a trifle  taller? Ah, I forgot that the paralyzing effect does not permit you to  answer. But look at me—do I not seem taller?"

I looked at him. Was it my imagination, or some kind of hypnosis he was asserting on me, that made me think he was growing slightly, ever so slightly, upward even as I looked?

"Ah!" he said triumphantly. "You have noticed. I can tell it by your  eyes. However, it is not I who am growing taller, but you who are  shrinking."

He grasped me by the arms and turned me about to face the wall.

"I can  see that you doubt," he said, "so look! The border on the wall. If you  remember, it used to be about even with your eyes. Now it is fully three  inches higher."

It was true! And I could now feel a tingling in my veins, and a slight dizziness.

"Your shrinkage has not quite reached the maximum speed," he went on.  "When it does, it will remain constant. I could not stop it now even if I  wanted to, for I have nothing to counteract it. Listen closely now, for  I have several things to tell you.
"When you have become small enough I am going to lift you up and place  you on this block of Rehyllium-X here on the table. You will become  smaller and smaller, and eventually should enter an alien universe  consisting of billions and billions of star groups, or galaxies, which  are only the molecules in this Rehyllium-X. When you burst through, your  size in comparison with this new universe should be gigantic. However,  you will constantly diminish, and will be enabled to alight on any one  of the spheres of your own choosing. And—after alighting—you will  continue—always down!"

At the concept I thought I would go mad. Already I had become fully a foot shorter, and still the paralysis gripped me. Could I have moved I would have torn the Professor limb from limb in my im­potent rage—though if what he said was true, I was already doomed.

Again it seemed as though he read my mind.

"Do not think too harshly of me," he said. "You should be very grateful  for this opportunity, for you are going on a marvelous ven­ture, into a  marvelous realm. 

Indeed, I am almost jealous that you should be the  first. But with this," he indicated the helmet and box on the table, "I  shall keep contact with you no matter how far you go. Ah, I see by your  eyes that you wonder how such a thing could be possible. Well, the  principle of this device is really very simple. 

Just as light is a form  of energy, so is thought. And just as light travels through an ’ether’  in the form of waves, so does thought. But the thought waves are much  more intangible—in fact, invisible. Nevertheless the waves are there,  and the coils in this box are so sensi­tized as to receive and amplify  them a million times, much as sound waves might be amplified. 

Through  this helmet I will receive but two of your six sensations: those of  sound,and sight. They are the two major ones, and will be sufficient for  my purpose. Every sight and sound that you encounter, no matter how  minute, reaches your brain and displaces tiny molecules there that go  out in the form of thought waves and finally reach here and are  amplified. 

Thus my brain re­ceives every impression of sight and sound  that your brain sends out."

I did not doubt now that his marvelous “Shrinx” would do every­thing he said it would do. Already I was but one-third of my original size. Still the paralysis showed no sign of releasing me, and I hoped that the Professor knew whereof he spoke when he said the effect would be but temporary. My anger had subsided somewhat, and I think I began to wonder what I would find in that other universe.

Then a terrifying thought assailed me—a thought that left me cold with apprehension. If, as the Professor had said, the atomic universe was but a tiny replica of the universe we knew, would I not find myself in the vast empty spaces between the galaxies with no air to breathe? In all the vast calculations the Professor had made, could he have overlooked such an obvious point?

Now I was very close to the floor, scarcely a foot high. Everything about me—the Professor, the tables, the walls—were gigantically out of proportion to myself.

The Professor reached down then, and swung me up on the table top amidst the litter of wires and apparatus. He began speaking again, and to my tiny ears his voice sounded a deeper note.

"Here is the block of Rehyllium-X containing the universe you soon will  fathom," he said, placing on the table beside me the square piece of  metal, which was nearly half as tall as I was. 

"As you know, Rehyllium-X  is the densest of all known metals, so the universe awaiting you should  be a comparatively dense one—though you will not think so, with the  thousands of light-years of space between stars. Of course I know no  more about this universe than you do, but I would advise you to avoid  the very bright stars and approach only the dimmer ones. 

Well, this is  good-by, then. We shall never see each other again. Even should I follow  you—as I certainly shall as soon as I have learned through you what  alterations I should make in the formula—it is impossible that I could  exactly trace your course down through all the spheres that you will  have traversed. 

One thing already I have learned: the rate of shrinkage  is too rapid; you will be able to stay on a world for only a few hours.  But perhaps that is best, after all. This is good-by for all time."

He picked me up and placed me upon the smooth surface of the Rehyllium-X. I judged that I must be about four inches tall then. It was with immeasurable relief that I finally felt the paralysis going away. The power of my voice returned first, and expanding my lungs I shouted with all by might.

“Professor!” I shouted. “Professor!”

He bent down over me. To him my voice must have sounded ridiculously high pitched.

“What about the empty regions of space I will find myself in?” I asked a bit tremulously, my mouth close to his ear. “I would last but a few minutes. My life will surely be snuffed out.”

"No, that will not happen," he answered. 

His voice beat upon my ear-drums like thunder, and I placed my hands over my ears.

He understood, and spoke more softly.

"You will be quite safe in airless  space," he went on. "In the thirty years I have worked on the problem, I  would not be likely to overlook that point—though I will admit it gave  me much trouble. But as I said, `Shrinx’ is all the more marvelous in  the fact that its qualities are many. After many difficul­ties and  failures, I managed to instill in it a certain potency by which it  supplies sufficient oxygen for your need, distributed through the blood  stream. It also irradiates a certain amount of heat; and, inas­much as I  consider the supposed sub-zero temperature of space as being somewhat  exaggerated, I don’t think you need worry about any discomfort in open  space."

III

I was scarcely over an inch in height now. I could walk about, though my limbs tingled fiercely as the paralysis left. I could beat my arms against my sides and swung them about to speed the circulation. The Professor must have thought I was waving good-by. His hand reached out and he lifted me up. Though he tried to handle me gently, the pressure of his fingers bruised. He held me in his open hand and raised me up to the level of his eyes. He looked at me for a long moment and then I saw his lips form the words “good-by.” I was terribly afraid he would drop me to the floor a dizzy distance below, and I was relieved when he lowered me again and I slid off his hand to the block of Rehyllium-X.

The Professor now appeared as a giant towering hundreds of feet into the air, and beyond him, seemingly miles away, the walls of the room extended to unimaginable heights. The ceiling above seemed as far away and expansive as the dome of the sky I had formerly known. I ran to the edge of the block and peered down. It was as though I stood at the top of a high cliff. The face of it was black and smooth, absolutely perpendicular. I stepped back apace lest I lose my footing and fall to my death. Far below extended the vast smooth plain of the table top.

I walked back to the center of the block, for I was afraid of the edge; I might be easily shaken off if the Professor were to accidentally jar the table. I had no idea of my size now, for there was nothing with which I could compare it. For all I knew I might be entirely invisible to the Professor. He was now but an indistinguishable blur, like a far-off mountain seen through a haze.

I now began to notice that the surface of the Rehyllium-X block was not as smooth as it had been. As far as I could see were shallow ravines, extending in every direction. I realized that these must be tiny surface scratches that had been invisible before.

I was standing on the edge of one of these ravines, and I clambered down the side and began to walk along it. It was as straight as though laid by a ruler. Occasionally I came to intersecting ravines, and turned to the left or right. Before long, due to my continued shrinkage, the walls of these ravines towered higher than my head, and it was as though I walked along a narrow path between two cliffs.

Then I received the shock of my life, and my adventure came near to ending right there. I approached one of the intersections. I turned the sharp corner to the right. I came face to face with the How-Shall I-Describe-It.

It was a sickly bluish white in color. Its body was disc-shaped, with a long double row of appendages—legs—on the under side. Hundreds of ugly-looking spikes rimmed the disc body on the outer and upper edges. There was no head and apparently no organ of sight, but dozens of snake-like protuberances waved in my face as I nearly crashed into it. One of them touched me and the creature backed swiftly away, the spikes springing stiffly erect in formidable array.

This impression of the creature flashed upon my mind in the merest fraction of time, for you may be sure that I didn’t linger there to take stock of its pedigree. No indeed. My heart choked me in my fright, I whirled and sped down the opposite ravine. The sound of the thing’s pursuit lent wings to my feet, and I ran as I had never run before. Up one ravine and down another I sped, doubling to right and left in my effort to lose my pursuer. The irony of being pursued by a germ occurred to me, but the matter was too serious to be funny. I ran until I was out of breath, but no matter which way I turned and doubled the germ was always a hundred paces behind me. Its organ of sound must have been highly sensitive. At last I could run no more, and I darted around the next corner and stopped, gasping for breath.

The germ rushed a short distance past me and stopped, having lost the sound of my running. Its dozens of tentacular sound organs waved in all directions. Then it came unhesitatingly toward me, and again I ran. Apparently it had caught the sound of my heavy breathing. Again I dashed around the next corner, and as I heard the germ approach I held my breath until I thought my lungs would burst. It stopped again, waved its tentacles in the air and then ambled on down the ravine. Silently I sneaked a hasty retreat.

Now the walls of these ravines (invisible scratches on a piece of metal!) towered very high above me as I continued to shrink. Now too I noticed narrow chasms and pits all around me, in both the walls at the sides and the surface on which I walked. All of these seemed very deep, and some were so wide that I had to leap across them.

At first I was unable to account for these spaces that were opening all about me, and then I realized with a sort of shock that the Rehyllium-X was becoming porous, so small was I in size! Although it was the densest of all known metals, no substance what­soever could be so dense as to be an absolute solid.

I began to find it increasingly difficult to progress; I had to get back and make running jumps across the spaces. Finally I sat down and laughed as I realized the futility and stupidity of this. Why was I risking my life by jumping across these spaces that were becoming wider as I became smaller, when I had no particular destination anyway—except down. So I may as well stay in one spot.

No sooner had I made this decision, however, than something changed my mind.

It was the germ again.

I saw it far down the ravine, heading straight for me. It might have been the same one I had encountered before, or its twin brother. But now I had become so small that it was fully fifteen times my own size, and the very sight of the huge beast ambling toward me inspired terror into my heart. Once more I ran, praying that it wouldn’t hear the sound of my flight because of my small size.

Before I had gone a hundred yards I stopped in dismay. Before me yawned a space so wide that I couldn’t have leaped half the distance. There was escape on neither side, for the chasm extended up both the walls. I looked back. The germ had stopped. Its mass of tentacles was waving close to the ground.

Then it came on, not at an amble now but at a much faster rate. Whether it had heard me or had sensed my presence in some other manner, I did not know. Only one thing was apparent: I had but a few split seconds in which to act. I threw myself down flat, slid backward into the chasm, and hung there by my hands.

And I was just in time. A huge shape rushed overhead as I looked up. So big was the germ that the chasm which had appeared so wide to me, was inconsequential to it; it ran over the space as though it weren’t there. I saw the double row of the creature’s limbs as they flashed overhead. Each one was twice the size of my body.

Then happened what I had feared. One of the huge claw-like limbs came down hard on my hand, and a sharp spur raked across it. I could feel the pain all through my arm. The anguish was insufferable. I tried to get a better grip but couldn’t. My hold loosened. I dropped down—down—

IV

“This is the end.”

Such was my thought in that last awful moment as I slipped away into space. Involuntarily I shut my eyes, and I expected at any moment to crash into oblivion.

But nothing happened.

There was not even the usual sickening sensation that accompanies acceleration. I opened my eyes to a Stygian darkness, and put out an exploring hand. It encountered a rough wall which was flash­ing upward past my face. I was falling, then; but at no such speed as would have been the case under ordinary circumstances. This was rather as if I were floating downward. Or was it downward? I had lost all sense of up or down or sideways. I doubled my limbs under me and kicked out hard against the wall, shoving myself far away from it.

How long I remained falling—or drifting—there in that darkness I have no way of knowing. But it must have been minutes, and every minute I was necessarily growing smaller.

For some time I had been aware of immense masses all around me. They pressed upon me from every side, and from them came a very faint radiance. They were of all sizes, some no larger than myself and some looming up large as mountains. I tried to steer clear of the large ones, for I had no desire to be crushed between two of them. But there was little chance of that. Although we all drifted slowly along through space together, I soon observed that none of these masses ever approached each other or deviated the least bit from their paths.

As I continued to shrink, these masses seemed to spread out, away from me; and as they spread, the light which they exuded became brighter. They ceased to be masses, and became swirling, expanding, individual stretches of mist, milky white.

They were nebulae! Millions of miles of space must stretch between each of them! The gigantic mass I had clung to, drawn there by its gravity, also underwent this nebulosity, and now I was floating in the midst of an individual nebula. It spread out as I became smaller, and as it thinned and expanded, what had seemed mist now appeared as trillions and trillions of tiny spheres in intricate patterns.

I was in the very midst of these spheres! They were all around my feet, my arms, my head! They extended farther than I could reach, farther than I could see. I could have reached out and gathered thousands of them in my hand. I could have stirred and kicked my feet and scattered them in chaotic confusion about me. But I did not indulge in such reckless and unnecessary destruction of worlds. Doubtless my presence here had already done damage enough, dis­placing millions of them.

I scarcely dared to move a muscle for fear of disrupting the orbits of some of the spheres or wreaking havoc among some solar systems or star groups. I seemed to be hanging motionless among them; or if I were moving in any direction, the motion was too slight to be noticeable. I didn’t even know if I were horizontal or vertical, as those two terms had lost all meaning.

As I became smaller, of course the spheres became larger and the space between them expanded, so that the bewildering maze thinned somewhat and gave me more freedom of movement.
I took more cognizance now of the beauty around me. I remem­bered what the Professor had said about receiving my thought waves, and I hoped he was tuned in now, for I wouldn’t have had him miss it for anything.

Every hue I had ever known was represented there among the suns and encircling planets: dazzling whites, reds, yellows, blues, greens, violets, and every intermediate shade. I glimpsed also the barren blackness of suns that had burnt out; but these were infre­quent, as this seemed to be a very young universe.

There were single suns with the orbital planets varying in number from two to twenty. There were double suns that revolved slowly about each other as on an invisible axis. There were triple suns that revolved slowly about one another—strange as it may seem—in perfect trihedral symmetry. I saw one quadruple sun: a dazzling white, a blue, a green, and a deep orange. The white and the blue circled each other on the horizontal plane while the green and the orange circled on the vertical plane, thus forming a perfect interlocking sys­tem. Around these four suns, in circular orbits, sped sixteen planets of varying size, the smallest on the inner orbits and the largest on the outer. The effect was a spinning, concave disc with the white-blue-green-orange rotating hub in the center. The rays from these four suns, as they bathed the rolling planets and were reflected back into space in many-hued magnificence, presented a sight both beauti­ful and weird.
I determined to alight on one of the planets of this quadruple sun as soon as my size permitted. I did not find it hard to maneuver to a certain extent; and eventually, when I had become much smaller, I stretched alongside this solar system, my length being as great as the diameter of the orbit of the outermost planet! Still I dared not come too close, for fear the gravity of my bulk would cause some tension in the orbital field.

I caught glimpses of the surface of the outer, or sixteenth planet, as it swung past me. Through rifts in the great billowing clouds I saw vast expanses of water, but no land; and then the planet was moving away from me, on its long journey around to the other side of the suns. I did not doubt that by the time it returned to my side I would be very much smaller, so I decided to move in a little closer and try to get a look at the fifteenth planet which was then on the opposite side but swinging around in my direction.

I had discovered that if I doubled up my limbs and thrust out violently in a direction opposite that in which I wished to move, I could make fairly good progress, though the effort was somewhat strenuous. In this manner I moved inward toward the sun-cluster, and by the time I had reached the approximate orbit of the fifteenth planet I had become much smaller—was scarcely one-third as long as the diameter of its orbit! The distance between the orbits of the sixteenth and fifteenth planets must have been about 2,500,000,000 miles, according to the old standards I had known; but to me the distance had seemed but a few hundred yards.

I waited there, and finally the planet hove into view from out of the glorious aurora of the suns. Nearer and nearer it swung in its circle, and as it approached I saw that its atmosphere was very clear, a deep saffron-color. It passed me a scant few yards away, turning lazily on its axis opposite the direction of flight. Here, too, as on planet sixteen, I saw a vast world of water. There was only one fairly large island and many scattered small ones, but I judged that fully nine-tenths of the surface area was ocean.
I moved on in to planet fourteen, which I had noticed was a beautiful golden-green color.

By the time I had maneuvered to the approximate fourteenth orbit I had become so small that the light of the central suns pained my eyes. When the planet came in sight I could easily see several large continents on the lighted side; and as the dark side turned to the suns, several more continents became visible. As it swung past me I made comparisons and observed that I was now about five times as large as the planet. When it came around again I would try to effect a landing. To attempt a contact with it now would likely prove dis­astrous to both it and myself.

As I waited there and became smaller my thoughts turned to the Professor. If his amazing theory of an infinite number of sub-uni­verses was true, then my adventure had hardly begun; wouldn’t begin until I alighted on the planet. “What would I find there? I did not doubt that the Professor, receiving my thought waves, was just as curious as I. Suppose there was life on this world—hostile life? I would face the dangers while the Professor sat in his laboratory far away. This was the first time that aspect of it occurred to me; it had probably never occurred to the Professor. Strange, too, how I thought of him as “far away.” Why, he could merely have reached out his hand and moved me, universe and all, on his laboratory table!

Another curious thought struck me: here I was waiting for a planet to complete its circle around the suns. To any beings who might exist on it, the elapsed time would represent a year; but to me it would only be a number of minutes.

At that, it returned sooner than I expected it, curving around to meet me. Its orbit, of course, was much smaller than those of the two outer planets. More minutes passed as it came closer and larger. As nearly as I could judge I was about one-fifth its size now. It skimmed past me, so closely that I could have reached out and brushed its atmosphere. And as it moved away I could feel its steady tugging, much as if I were a piece of metal being attracted to a magnet. Its speed did not decelerate in the least, but now I was moving along close behind it. It had “captured” me, just as I had hoped it would. I shoved in closer, and the gravity became a steady and stronger pull. I was “falling” toward it. I swung around so that my feet were closest to it, and they entered the atmosphere, where the golden-green touched the blackness of space. They swung down in a long arc and touched something solid. My “fall” toward the planet ceased. I was standing on one of the continents of this world.

V

So tall was I that the greatest part of my body still extended out into the blackness of space. In spite of the fact that the four suns were the distance of thirteen orbits away, they were of such intense brilliance now that to look directly at them would surely have blinded me. I looked far down my tapering length at the continent on which I stood. Even the multi-colored light reflected from the surface was dazzling to the eye. Too late I remembered the Professor’s warning to avoid the brighter suns. Close to the surface a few fleeting wisps of cloud drifted about my limbs.

As the planet turned slowly on its axis I of course moved with it, and shortly I found myself on the side away from the suns, in the planet’s shadow. I was thankful for this relief—but it was only temporary. Soon I swung around into the blinding light again. Then into the shadow, and again into the light. How many times this happened I do not know, but at last I was entirely within the planet’s atmosphere; here the rays of the sun were diffused, and the light less intense.

Miles below I could see but a vast expanse of yellow surface, stretching unbroken in every direction. As I looked far behind the curving horizon it seemed that I caught a momentary glimpse of tall, silvery towers of some far-off city; but I could not be sure, and when I looked again it had vanished.

I kept my eyes on that horizon, however, and soon two tiny red specks became visible against the yellow of the plain. Evidently they were moving toward me very rapidly, for even as I looked they became larger, and soon took shape as two blood-red spheres. Immediately I visioned them as some terrible weapons of warfare or destruction.

But as they came close to me and swerved up to where I towered high in the thin atmosphere, I could see that they were not solid at all, as I had supposed, but were gaseous, and translucent to a certain extent. Furthermore, they behaved in a manner that hinted strongly of intelligence. Without visible means of propulsion they swooped and circled about my head, to my utter discomfiture. When they came dangerously close to my eyes I raised my hand to sweep them away, but they darted quickly out of reach.

They did not approach me again, but remained there close together, pulsating in mid air. This queer pulsating of their tenuous substance gave me the impression that they were conferring together; and of course I was the object of their conference. Then they darted away in the direction whence they had come.

My curiosity was as great as theirs had seemed to be, and without hesitation I set out in the same direction. I must have covered nearly a mile at each step, but even so, these gaseous entities easily out-distanced me and were soon out of sight. I had no doubt that their destination was the city—if indeed it were a city I had glimpsed. The horizon was closer now and less curved, due to my decrease in height: I judged that I was barely five or six hundred feet tall now.

I had taken but a few hundred steps in the direction the two spheres had gone, when to my great surprise I saw them coming toward me again, this time accompanied by a score of—companions. I stopped in my tracks, and soon they came close and circled about my head. They were all about five feet in diameter, and of the same dark red color. For a minute they darted about as though studying me from every angle; then they systematically arranged themselves in a perfect circle around me. Thin streamers emanated from them, and merged, linking them together and closing the circle. Then other streamers reached slowly out toward me, wavering, cautious.

This, their manner of investigation, did not appeal to me in the least, and I swept my arms around furiously. Instantly all was wild confusion. The circle broke and scattered, the streamers snapped back and they were spheres again. They gathered in a group a short distance away and seemed to consider.

One, whose color had changed to a bright orange, darted apart from them and pulsated rapidly. As clearly as though words had been spoken, I comprehended. The bright orange color signified anger, and he was rebuking the others for their cowardice.

Led by the orange sphere they again moved closer to me, this time they had a surprise for me. A score of streamers flashed out quick as lightning, and cold blue flames spluttered where they touched me. Electric shocks ran through my arms, rendering them numb and helpless. Again they formed their circle around me, again the stream­ers emerged and completed the circle, and other streamers reached out caressingly. For a moment they flickered about my head, then merged, enveloping it in a cold red radiance. I felt no sensation at all at the touch, except that of cold.

The spheres began to pulsate again in the manner I had observed before, and immediately this pulsating began I felt tiny needlepoints of ice pierce my brain. A question became impinged upon my con­sciousness more clearly than would have been possible by spoken word:

 "Where do you come from?"

I was familiar with thought transference, had even practiced it to a certain extent, very often with astonishing success. When I heard —or received—that question, I tried hard to bring every atom of my consciousness to bear upon the circumstances that were the cause of my being there. When I had finished my mental narration and my mind relaxed from the tension I had put upon it, I received, the fol­lowing impressions:

"We receive no answer; your mind remains blank. You are alien, we have  never encountered another of your organism here. A most peculiar  organism indeed is one that becomes steadily smaller with­out apparent  reason. Why are you here, and where do you come from?" 

The icy fingers probed deeper and deeper into my brain, seeming to tear it tissue from tissue.

Again I tried, my mind focusing with the utmost clearness upon every detail, picturing my course from the very minute I entered the Professor’s laboratory to the present time. When I finished I was exhausted from the effort.

Again I received the impression: "You cannot bring your mind sufficiently into focus; we receive only fleeting shadows."

One of the spheres again changed to a bright color, and broke from the circle. I could almost imagine an angry shrug. The streamers relaxed their hold on my brain and began to withdraw—but not before I caught the fleeting impression from the orange one, who was apparently addressing the others:

"—very low mentality."

“You’re not so much yourself!” I said aloud. But of course such a crude method as speech did not register upon them. I wondered at my inability to establish thought communication with these beings. Either my brain was of such a size as to prevent them from receiving the impression (remember I was still a four or five hundred foot giant on this world), or their state of mentality was indeed so much higher than mine, that I was, to them, lower than the lowest savage. Possibly both, more probably the latter.

But they were determined to solve the mystery of my presence before I passed from their world, as I would surely do in a few hours at my rate of shrinkage. Their next move was to place themselves on each side of me in vertical rows extending from far down near the ground up to my shoulders. Again the luminous ribbons reached out and touched me at the various points. Then as at a given signal they rose high into the air, lifting me lightly as a feather! In perfect unison they sped towards their city beyond the horizon, carrying me perpendicularly with them! I marveled at the manner in which such gaseous entities as these could lift and propel such a material giant as myself. Their speed must have exceeded by far that of sound—though on all this planet there was no sound except the sound of my body swishing through the air.

In a very few minutes I sighted the city, which must have covered an area of a hundred miles square near the edge of a rolling green ocean. I was placed lightly on my feet at the very edge of the city, and once more the circle of spheres formed around my head and once more the cold tendrils of light probed my brain.

"You may walk at will about the city," came the thought, "accom­panied  by a few of us. You are to touch nothing whatever, or the pen­alty will  be extreme; your tremendous size makes your presence here among us  somewhat hazardous. When you have become much smaller we shall again  explore your mind, with somewhat different method, and learn your origin  and purpose. We realize that the great size of your brain was somewhat  of a handicap to us in our first attempt. We go now to prepare. We have  awaited your coming for years."

Leaving only a few there as my escort—or guard—the rest of the spheres sped toward a great domed building that rose from a vast plaza in the center of the city.

I was very much puzzled as to their last statement. For a moment I stood there wondering what they could have meant—”we have awaited your coming for years.” Then trusting that this and other things would be answered in the due course of their investigation, I entered the city.

It was not a strange city in so far as architecture was concerned, but it was a beautiful one. I marveled that it could have been con­ceived and constructed by these confluent globules of gas who at first glance seemed anything but intelligent, reasoning beings.

Tall as I was, the buildings towered up to four and five times my height, invariably ending in domed roofs. There was no sign of a spire or angle as far as my eye could see; apparently they grated harshly on the senses of these beings. The entire plan of the city was of vast sweeping curves and circular patterns, and the effect was striking. There were no preconceived streets or highways, nor connecting spans between buildings, for there was no need of them. The air was the natural habitable element of this race, and I did not see a one of them ever touch the ground or any surface.

They even came to rest in mid air, with a slow spinning motion. Everywhere I passed among them they paused, spinning, to observe me in apparent curiosity, then went on about their business, whatever it was. None ever approached me except my guards.

For several hours I wandered about in this manner, and finally when I was much smaller I was bade to walk towards the central plaza.

In the circular domed building the others awaited my coming, gathered about a dais surmounted by a huge oval transparent screen of glass or some similar substance. This time only one of the spheres made contact with my brain, and I received the following thought:

"Watch."

The screen became opaque, and a vast field of white came into view.

"The great nebula in which this planet is but an infinitesimal speck," came the thought.

The mass drifted almost imperceptibly across the screen, and the thought continued:

"As you see it now, so it appeared to us through our telescopes  centuries ago. Of course the drifting motion of the nebula as a whole  was not perceptible, and what you see is a chemically recorded  reproduction of the view, which has been speeded up to make the motion  visible on the screen. Watch closely now."

The great mass of the nebula had been quiescent, but as I watched, it began to stir and swirl in a huge spiral motion, and a vast dark shadow was thrown across the whole scene. The shadow seemed to recede—no, grew smaller—and I could see that it was not a shadow but a huge bulk. This bulk was entering the nebula, causing it to swirl and expand as millions of stars were displaced and shoved out­ward.

The thought came again: "The scene has been speeded up a million-fold.  The things you see taking place actually transpired over a great number  of years; our scientists watched the phenomenon in great wonder, and  many were the theories as to the cause of it. You are viewing yourself  as you entered our nebula."

I watched in a few minutes the scene before me, as these sphere creatures had watched it over a period of years; saw myself grow smaller, gradually approach the system of the four suns and finally the gold-green planet itself. Abruptly the screen cleared.

"So we watched and waited your coming for years, not knowing what you  were or whence you came. We are still very much puzzled. You become  steadily smaller, and that we cannot understand. We must hurry. Relax.  Do not interfere with our process by trying to think back to the  beginning, as you did before; it is all laid bare to us in the recesses  of your brain. Simply relax, think of nothing at all, watch the screen."

I tried to do as he said, again I felt the cold probing tendrils in my brain, and a lethargy came over my mind. Shadows flashed across the screen, then suddenly a familiar scene leaped into view: the Professor’s laboratory as I had last seen it, on the night of my departure. No sooner had this scene cleared than I entered the room, exactly as I had on that night. I saw myself approach the table close behind the Professor, saw him standing as he had stood, staring out at the night sky; saw his lips move.

The spheres about me crowded close to the screen, seemed to hang intent on every motion that passed upon it, and I sensed great excite­ment among them. I judged that the one who was exploring my mind, if not all of them, were somehow cognizant not only of the words the Professor and I spoke in those scenes, but of their mean­ing as well.

I could almost read the Professor’s lips as he spoke. I saw the utter amazement, then incredulity, then disbelief, on my features as he propounded his theory of macrocosmic worlds and still greater macro­cosmic worlds. I saw our parley of words, and finally his lunge toward me and felt again the plunge of the needle into my arm.

As this happened the spheres around me stirred excitedly.

I saw myself become smaller, smaller, to be finally lifted onto the block of Rehyllium-X where I became still smaller and disappeared. I saw my meeting with the germ, and my wild flight; my plunge into the abyss, and my flight down through the darkness, during which time the entire screen before me became black. The screen was slightly illuminated again as I traveled along with the great masses all around me, and then gradually across the screen spread the huge nebula, the same one these sphere creatures had seen through their telescopes centuries ago.

Again the screen cleared abruptly, became transparent.

"The rest we know," came the thought of the one who had searched my  brain. "The rest the screen has already shown. He—the one who invented  the—what he called ’Shrinx’—he is a very great man. Yours has indeed  been a marvelous experience, and one which has hardly begun. We envy  you, lucky being; and at the same time we are sorry for you. Anyway, it  is fortunate for us that you chose our planet on which to alight, but  soon you will pass away even as you came, and that we cannot, and would  not, prevent. In a very few minutes you will once more become of  infinitesimal size and pass into a still smaller universe. We have  microscopes powerful enough to permit us to barely glimpse this smaller  atomic universe, and we shall watch your further progress into the  unknown until you are gone from our sight forever."

I had been so interested in the familiar scenes on the screen that I had lost all conception of my steady shrinkage. I was now very much smaller than those spheres around me.

I was as interested in them as they were in me, and I tried to flash the following thought:

"You say that you envy me, and are sorry for me. Why should that be?"

The thought came back immediately:

"We cannot answer that. But it is  true; wonderful as are the things you will see in realms yet to come,  nevertheless you are to be pitied. You cannot understand at present, but  some day you will."

I flashed another thought:

"Your organism, which is known to me as  gaseous, seems as strange to me as mine, a solid, must seem to you. You  have mentioned both telescopes and microscopes, and I cannot conceive  how beings such as yourselves, without organs of sight, can number  astronomy and microscopy among the sciences."
"Your own organs of sight," came back the answer, "which you call  ’eyes,’ are not only superfluous, but are very crude sources of  perception. I think you will grant that loss of them would be a terrible  and permanent handicap. Our own source of perception is not con­fined  to any such conspicuous organs, but envelops the entire outer surface of  our bodies. We have never had organs and appendages such as those with  which you are endowed so profusely, for we are of different substance;  we merely extend any part of our bodies in any direction at will. But  from close study of your structure, we conclude that your various organs  and appendages are very crude. I predict that by slow evolution of your  own race, such frailties will disappear entirely."
"Tell me more about your own race," I went on eagerly.
 "To tell everything there is to tell," came the answer, "would take much  time; and there is little time left. We have a very high sociological  system, but one which is not without its faults, of course. We have  delved deep into the sciences and gone far along the lines of fine  arts—but all of our accomplishments along these lines would no doubt  appear very strange to you. You have seen our city. It is by no means  the largest, nor the most important, on the planet. When you alighted  comparatively near, reports were sent out and all of our important  scientists hurried here. We were not afraid because of your presence,  but rather, were cautious, for we did not know what manner of being you  were. The two whom you first saw, were sent to observe you. They had  both been guilty of a crime against the community, and were given the  choice of the punishment they deserved, or of going out to investigate  the huge creature that had dropped from the sky. They accepted the  latter course, and for their bravery—for it was bravery—they have been  exonerated."

VI

I would have liked greatly to ask more questions, for there were many phases that puzzled me; but I was becoming so very small that further communication was impossible. I was taken to a labora­tory and placed upon the slide of a microscope of strange and intricate construction and my progress continued unabated down into a still smaller atomic universe.

The method was the same as before. The substance became open and porous, spread out into open space dotted with the huge masses which in turn became porous and resolved into far flung nebulae.

I entered one of the nebulae and once more star-systems swung all around me. This time I approached a single sun of bright yellow hue, around which swung eight planets. I maneuvered to the outer­most one, and when my size permitted, made contact with it.

I was now standing on an electron, one of billions forming a microscopic slide that existed in a world which was in turn only an electron in a block of metal on a laboratory table!

Soon I reached the atmosphere, and miles below me I could see only wide patches of yellow and green. But as I came nearer to the surface more of the details became discernible. Almost at my feet a wide yellow river wound sluggishly over a vast plateau which fell suddenly away into a long line of steep precipices. At the foot of these precipices stretched a great green expanse of steaming jungle, and farther beyond a great ocean, smooth as green glass, curved to the horizon. A prehistoric world of jungles and great fern-like growths and sweltering swamps and cliffs. Not a breeze stirred and nowhere was there sight of any living thing.
I was standing in the jungle close to the towering cliffs, and for a half mile in every direction the trees and vegetation were trampled into the soil where my feet had swung down and contacted.

Now I could see a long row of caves just above a ledge half way up the side of the cliff. And I did not doubt that in each cave some being was peering furtively out at me. Even as I watched I saw a tiny figure emerge and walk out on the ledge. He was very cautious, ready to dash back into the cave at any sign of hostility on my part, and his eyes never left me. Seeing that nothing happened, others took heart and came out, and soon the ledge was lined with tiny figures who talked excitedly among themselves and gesticulated wildly in my direction. My coming must surely have aroused all their super­stitious fears—a giant descending out of the skies to land at their very feet.

I must have been nearly a mile from the cliff, but even at that distance I could see that the figures were barbarians, squat and thick muscled, and covered with hair; they were four limbed and stood erect, and all carried crude weapons.

One of them raised a bow as tall as himself and let fly a shaft at me—evidently as an expression of contempt or bravado, for he must have known that the shaft couldn’t reach half the distance. Immediately one who seemed a leader among them felled the miscreant with a single blow. This amused me. Evidently their creed was to leave well enough alone.

Experimentally I took a step toward them, and immediately a long line of bows sprang erect and scores of tiny shafts arched high in my direction to fall into the jungle far in front of me. A warning to keep my distance.

I could have strode forward and swept the lot of them from the ledge; but wishing to show them that my intentions were quite peaceful, I raised my hands and took several backward steps. Another futile volley of arrows. I was puzzled, and stood still; and as long as I did not move neither did they.

The one who had seemed the leader threw himself down flat and, shielding his eyes from the sun, scanned the expanse of jungle below. Then they seemed to talk among themselves again, and gestured not at me, but at the jungle. Then I comprehended. Evi­dently a hunting party was somewhere in that jungle which spread out around my feet—probably returning to the caves, for already it was nearing dusk, the sun casting weird conflicting streaks across the horizon. These people of the caves were in fear that I would move around too freely and perhaps trample the returning party under foot.

So thinking, I stood quietly in the great barren patch I had levelled, and sought to peer into the dank growth below me. This was nearly impossible, however, for clouds of steam hung low over the tops of the trees.

But presently my ears caught a faint sound, as of shouting, far below me, and then I glimpsed a long single file of the barbarian hunters running at full speed along a well beaten game path. They burst into the very clearing in which I stood, and stopped short in surprise, evidently aware for the first time of my gigantic presence on their world. They let fall the poles upon which were strung the carcasses of the day’s hunt, cast but one fearful look up to where I towered, then as one man fell flat upon the ground in abject terror.

All except one. I doubt if the one, who burst from the tangle of trees last of all, even saw me, so intent was he in glancing back into the darkness from which he fled. At any rate he aroused his companions with a few angry, guttural syllables, and pointed back along the path.

At that moment there floated up to me a roar that lingered loud and shuddering in my ears. At quick instructions from their leader the hunters picked up their weapons and formed a wide semi-circle before the path where they had emerged. The limb of a large tree overhung the path at this point, and the leader clambered up some overhanging vines and was soon crouched upon it. One of the warriors fastened a vine to a large clumsy looking weapon, and the one in the tree drew it up to him. The weapon consisted merely of a large pointed stake some eight feet long, with two heavy stones fastened securely to it at the half way point. The one in the tree carefully balanced this weapon on the limb, directly over the path, point downward. The semicircle of hunters crouched behind stout lances set at an angle in the ground.

Another shuddering roar floated up to me, and then the beast appeared. As I caught sight of it I marvelled all the more at the courage of these puny barbarians. From ground to shoulder the beast must have measured seven feet tall, and was fully twenty feet long. Each of its six legs ended in a wide, horny claw that could have ripped any of the hunters from top to bottom. Its long tapering tail was horny too, giving me the impression that the thing was at least partly reptilian; curved fangs fully two feet long, in a decidedly animal head, offset that impression, however.

For a long moment the monstrosity stood there, tail switching ceaselessly, glaring in puzzlement out upon the circle of puny beings who dared to confront it. Then, as its tail ceased switching and it tensed for the spring, the warrior on the limb above launched his weapon—launched it and came hurtling down with it, feet pressed hard against the heavy stone balance!

Whether the beast below heard some sound or whether a sixth sense warned it, I do not know; but just in time it leaped to one side with an agility belied by its great bulk, and the pointed stake drove deep into the ground, leaving the one who had ridden it lying there stunned.

The beast uttered a snarl of rage; its six legs sprawled outward, its great belly touched the ground. Then it sprang out upon the circle of crouching hunters. Lances snapped at the impact, and the circle broke and fled for the trees. But two of them never rose from the ground, and the lashing homed tail flattened another before he had taken four steps.

The scene took place in a matter of seconds as I towered there looking down upon it, fascinated. The beast whirled toward the fleeing ones and in another moment the destruction would have been terrible, for they could not possibly have reached safety..

Breaking the spell that was on me I swung my hand down in a huge arc even as the beast sprang for a second time. I slapped it in mid air, flattening it against the ground as I would have flattened a bothersome insect. It did not twitch a muscle, and a dark red stain seeped outward from where it lay.

The natives stopped in their flight, for the sound of my hand when I slapped the huge animal had been loud. They jabbered noisily among themselves, but fearfully kept their distance, when they saw me crouched there over the flattened enemy who had been about to wreak destruction among them.

Only one had seen the entire happening. He who had plunged downward from the tree was only momentarily stunned; he had risen dizzily to his feet as the animal charged out among his companions, and had been witness to the whole thing.

Glancing half contemptuously at the others, he now approached me. It must have taken a great deal of courage on his part, for, crouched down as I was, I still towered above the tallest trees. He looked for a moment at the dead beast, then gazed up at me in reverent awe. Falling prone, he beat his head upon the ground several times, and the others followed his example.

Then they all came forward to look at the huge animal.

From their talk and gestures, I gathered that they wanted to take it to the caves; but it would take ten of the strongest of them to even lift it, and there was still a mile stretch of jungle between them and the cliffs.

I decided that I would take it there for them if that was their want. Reaching out, I picked up the leader, the brave one, very gently. Placing him in the cupped hollow of my hand, I swung him far up to the level of my eyes. I pointed at the animal I had slain, then pointed toward the cliffs. But his eyes were closed tightly as if his last moment had come, and he trembled in every limb. He was a brave hunter, but this experience was too much. I lowered him to the ground unharmed, and the others crowded around him excitedly. He would soon recover from his fright, and no doubt some night around the camp fires he would relate this wonderful experience to a bunch of skeptical grandchildren.

Picking the animal up by its tapering tail I strode through the jungle with it, flattening trees at every step and leaving a wide path behind me. I neared the cliffs in a few steps, and those upon the ledge fled into the caves. I placed the huge carcass on the ledge, which was scarcely as high as my shoulders, then turned and strode away to the right, intending to explore the terrain beyond.

For an hour, I walked, passing other tribes of cliff dwellers who fled at my approach. Then the jungle ended in a point by the sea and the line of cliffs melted down into a rocky coast.

It had become quite dark now, there were no moons and the stars seemed dim and far away. Strange night cries came from the jungle, and to my left stretched wide, tangled marshes through which floated vague phosphorescent shapes. Behind me tiny fires sprang up on the face of the cliffs, a welcome sight, and I turned back toward them. I was now so much smaller that I felt extremely uneasy at being alone and unarmed at night on a strange planet abounding in monstrosities.

I had taken only a few steps when I felt, rather than heard, a rush of wings above and behind me. I threw myself flat upon the ground, and just in time, for the great shadowy shape of some huge night-creature swept down and sharp talons raked my back. I arose with apprehension after a few moments, and saw the creature winging its way back low over the marshes. Its wing spread must have been forty feet. I reached the shelter of the cliffs and stayed close to them thereafter.

I came to the first of the shelving ledges where the fires burned, but it was far above me now. I was a tiny being crouched at the base of the cliffs. I, an alien on this world, yet a million years ahead of these barbarians in evolution, peered furtively out into the darkness where glowing eyes and half-seen shapes moved on the edge of the encroaching jungle; and safe in their caves high above me were those so low in the state of evolution that had only the rudiments of a spoken language and were only beginning to learn the value of fire. In another million years perhaps a great civilization would cover this entire globe: a civilization rising by slow degrees from the mire and the mistakes and the myths of the dawn of time. And doubtlessly one of the myths would concern a great god-like figure that descended from the skies, leveled great trees in its stride, saved a famous tribe from destruction by slaying huge enemy beasts, and then disappeared forever during the night. And great men, great thinkers, of that future civilization would say:

"Fie! Preposterous! A stupid myth."

But at the present time the godlike figure which slew enemy beasts by a slap of the hand was scarcely a foot high, and sought a place where he might be safe from a possible attack by those same beasts. At last I found a small crevice, which I squeezed into and felt much safer than I had out in the open.

And very soon I was so small that I would have been unnoticed by any of the huge animals that might venture my way.

VII

At last I stood on a single grain of sand, and other grains towered up like smooth mountains all around me. And in the next few minutes I experienced the change for the third time—the change from microscopic being on a gigantic world to a gigantic being floating amid an endless universe of galaxies. I became smaller, the distance between galaxies widened, solar systems approached and neared the orbit of the outermost planet, I received a very unexpected, but very pleasant, surprise. Instead of myself landing upon one of the planets —and while I was yet far too large to do so—the inhabitants of this system were coming out to land on me!
There was no doubt about it. From the direction of the inner planets a tapering silvery projectile moved toward me with the speed of light. This was indeed interesting, and I halted my inward progress to await developments.

In a few minutes the space rocketship was very close. It circled about me once, then with a great rush of flame and gases from the prow to break the fall, it swooped in a long curve and landed grace­fully on my chest! I felt no more jar than if a fly had alighted on me. As I watched it, a square section swung outward from the hull and a number of things emerged. I say “things” because they were in no manner human, although they were so tiny that I could barely dis­tinguish them as minute dots of gold. A dozen of them gathered in a group a short distance away from the space-ship.

After a few moments, to my surprise, they spread huge golden wings, and I gasped at the glistening beauty of them. They scattered in various directions, flying low over the surface of my body. From this I reasoned that I must be enveloped in a thin layer of atmosphere, as were the planets. These bird creatures were an exploring party sent out from one of the inner planets to investigate the new large world which had entered their system and was approaching dangerously close to their own planet.

But, on second thought, they must have been aware—or soon would be—that I was not a world at all, but a living, sentient being. My longitudinal shape should make that apparent, besides the move­ments of my limbs. At any rate they displayed unprecedented daring by coming out to land on me. I could have crushed their frail ship at the slightest touch or flung it far out into the void beyond their reach.

I wished I could see one of the winged creatures at closer range, but none landed on me again; having traversed and circled me in every direction they returned to the space-ship and entered it.

The section swung closed, gases roared from the stern tubes and the ship swooped out into space again and back toward the sun.

What tiding would they bear to their planet? Doubtless they would describe me as an inconceivably huge monstrosity of outer space. Their scientists would wonder whence I came; might even guess at the truth. They would observe me anxiously through their telescopes. Very likely they would be in fear that I would invade or wreck their world, and would make preparations to repulse me if I came too near.

In spite of these probabilities I continued my slow progress toward the inner planets, determined to see and if possible land upon the planet of the bird creatures. A civilization that had achieved space travel must be a marvelous civilization indeed.

As I made my way through space between the planets by means of my grotesque exertions, I reflected upon another phase. By the time I reached the inner planets I would be so much smaller that I could not determine which of the planets was the one I sought, unless I saw more of the space ships and could follow their direction. Another interesting thought was that the inner planets would have sped around the green sun innumerable times, and years would have passed before I reached there. They would have ample time to prepare for my coming, and might give me a fierce reception if they had many more of the space ships such as the one I had seen.

And they did indeed have many more of them, as I discovered after an interminable length of time during which I had moved ever closer to the sun. A red-tinged planet swung in a wide curve from behind the blazing green of the sun, and I awaited its approach. After a few minutes it was so close that I could see a moon encircling the planet, and as it came still nearer I saw the rocket ships.

This, then, was the planet I sought. But I was puzzled. They surely could not have failed to notice my approach, and I had ex­pected to see a host of ships lined up in formidable array. I saw a host of them all right, hundreds of them, but they were not pointed in my direction at all; indeed, they seemed not to heed me in the least, although I must have loomed large as their planet came nearer.

Perhaps they had decided, after all, that I was harmless.

But what seemed more likely to me was that they were confronted with an issue of vastly more importance than my close proximity. For as I viewed the space ships they were leaving the atmosphere of their planet, and were pointing toward the single satellite. Row upon row, mass upon endless mass they moved outward, hundreds, thousands of them. It seemed as though the entire population was moving en masse to the satellite!

My curiosity was immediately aroused. ’What circumstances or condition would cause a highly civilized race to abandon their planet and flee to the satellite? Perhaps, if I learned, I would not want to alight on that planet. . . .

Impatiently I awaited its return as it moved away from me on its circuit around the sun. The minutes seemed long, but at last it approached again from the opposite direction, and I marvelled at the relativity of size and space and time. A year had passed on that planet and satellite, and many things might have transpired since I had last seen them.

The satellite swung between the planet and myself, and even from my point of disadvantage I could see that many things had indeed transpired. The bird people were building a protective shell around the satellite! Protection—from what? The shell seemed to be of dull gray metal, and already covered half the globe. On the uncovered side I saw land and rolling oceans. Surely, I thought, they must have the means of producing artificial light; but somehow it seemed blasphemous to forever bar the surface from the fresh pure light of the green sun. In a manner I felt sorry for them in their circumstances. But they had their space ships, and in time could move to the vast unexplored fields that the heavens offered.

More than ever I was consumed with curiosity, but was still too large to attempt a contact with the planet, and I let it pass me for a second time. I judged that when it came around again I would be sufficiently small for its gravity to “capture” me and sufficiently large that the “fall” to the surface would in no means be dangerous; and I was determined to alight.

Another wait of minutes, more minutes this time because I was smaller and time for me was correspondingly longer. When the two spheres hove into view again I saw that the smaller one was now entirely clad in its metal jacket, and the smooth unbroken surface shimmered boldly in the green glare of the sun. Beneath that barren metal shell were the bird people with their glorious golden wings, their space ships, their artificial light, and atmosphere, and civilization. I had but a glance for the satellite, however; my attention was for the planet rushing ever closer to me.

Everything passed smoothly and without mishap. I was becoming an experienced “planet hopper.” Its gravity caught me in an unre­lenting grip, and I let my limbs rush downward first in their long curve, to land with a slight jar on solid earth far below.

Bending low, I sought to peer into the murky atmosphere and see something of the nature of this world. For a minute my sight could not pierce the half gloom, but gradually the surface became visible. First, I followed my tapering limbs to where they had contacted. As nearly as I could ascertain from my height, I was standing in the midst of what seemed to be a huge mass of crushed and twisted metal!

Now, I thought to myself, I have done it. I have let myself in for it now. I have wrecked something, some great piece of machinery it seems, and the inhabitants will not take the matter lightly. Then I thought: the inhabitants? Who? Not the bird people, for they have fled, have barricaded themselves on the satellite.

Again I sought to pierce the gloom of the atmosphere, and by slow degrees more details became visible. At first my gaze only encompassed a few miles, then more, and more, until at last the view extended from horizon to horizon and included nearly an entire hemisphere.

Slowly the view cleared and slowly comprehension came; and as full realization dawned upon me, I became momentarily panic stricken. I thought insanely of leaping outward into space again, away from the planet, breaking the gravity that held me; but the opposite force of my spring could likely send the planet careening out of its orbit and it and all the other planets and myself might go plunging toward the sun. No, I had put my feet on this planet and I was here to stay.

But I did not feel like staying, for what a sight I had glimpsed! As far as I could see in every direction were huge, grotesque metal structures and strange mechanical contrivances. The thing that terrified me was that these machines were scurrying about the surface all in apparent confusion, seemed to cover the entire globe, seemed to have a complete civilization of their own, and nowhere was there the slightest evidence of any human occupancy, no controlling force, no intelligence, nothing save the machines. And I could not bring my­self to believe that they were possessed of intelligence!

Yet as I descended ever closer to the surface I could see that there was no confusion at all as it had seemed at first glance, but rather was there a simple, efficient, systematic order of things. Even as I watched, two strange mechanisms strode toward me on great jointed tripods, and stopped at my very feet. Long, jointed metal arms, with claw-like fixtures at the ends, reached out with uncanny accuracy and precision and began to clear away the twisted debris around my feet. As I watched them I admired the efficiency of their construction. No needless intricacies, no superfluous parts, only the tripods for movement and the arms for clearing. When they had finished they went away, and other machines came on wheels, the debris was lifted by means of cranes and hauled away.

I watched in stupefaction the uncanny activities below and around me. There was no hurry, no rush, but every machine from the tiniest to the largest, from the simplest to the most complicated, had a certain task to perform, and performed it directly and completely, accurately and precisely. There were machines on wheels, on treads, on tracks, on huge multi-jointed tripods, winged machines that flew clumsily through the air, and machines of a thousand other kinds and variations.

Endless chains of machines delved deep into the earth, to emerge with loads of ore which they deposited, to descend again.

Huge hauling machines came and transported the ore to roaring mills.

Inside the mills machines melted the ore, rolled and cut and fashioned the steel.

Other machines builded and assembled and adjusted intricate parts, and when the long process was completed the result was—more machines! They rolled or ambled or flew or walked or rattled away under their own power, as the case might be.

Some went to assist in the building of huge bridges across rivers and ravines.

Diggers went to level down forests and obstructing hills, or went away to the mines.

Others built adjoining mills and factories.

Still others erected strange, complicated towers thousands of feet high, and the purpose of these skeleton skyscrapers I could not de­termine. Even as I watched, the supporting base of one of them weakened and buckled, and the entire huge edifice careened at a perilous angle. Immediately a host of tiny machines rushed to the scene. Sharp white flames cut through the metal in a few seconds, and the tower toppled with a thunderous crash to the ground.

Again the white-flame machines went to work and cut the metal into re­movable sections, and hoisters and haulers came and removed them. Within fifteen minutes another building was being erected on the exact spot.

Occasionally something would go wrong—some worn-out part ceased to function and a machine would stop in the middle of its task. Then it would be hauled away to repair shops, where it would eventually emerge good as new.

I saw two of the winged machines collide in mid air, and metal rained from the sky. A half dozen of the tripod clearing machines came from a half dozen directions and the metal was raked into huge piles; then came the cranes and hauling machines.

A great vertical wheel with slanting blades on the rim spun swiftly on a shaft that was borne forward on treads. The blades cut through trees and soil and stone as it bore onward toward the near-by mountains. It slowed down, but did not stop, and at length a straight wide path connected the opposite valley. Behind the wheel came the tripods, clearing the way of all debris, and behind them came ma­chines that laid down long strips of metal, completing the perfect road.

Everywhere small lubricating machines moved about, periodically supplying the others with the necessary oil that insured smooth movement.

Gradually the region surrounding me was being levelled and cleared, and a vast city was rising—a city of meaningless, towering, ugly metal—a city covering hundreds of miles between the mountains and sea—a city of machines—ungainly, lifeless—yet purposeful—for what? What?

In the bay, a line of towers rose from the water like fingers point­ing at the sky. Beyond the bay and into the open sea they extended. Now the machines were connecting the towers with wide network and spans. A bridge! They were spanning the ocean, connecting the continents—a prodigious engineering feat. If there were not already machines on the other side, there soon would be. No, not soon. The task was gigantic, fraught with failures, almost impossible. Almost? A world of machines could know no almost. Perhaps other machines did occupy the other side, had started the bridge from there, and they would meet in the middle. And for what purpose?

A great wide river came out of the mountains and went winding toward the sea. For some reason a wall was being constructed diagonally across the river and beyond, to change its course. For some reason—or unreason.

Unreason! That was it! Why, why, why, I cried aloud in an anguish that was real; why all of this? ’What purpose, what meaning, what benefit? A city, a continent, a world, a civilization of machines!

Somewhere on this world there must be the one who caused all this, the one intelligence, human or unhuman, who controls it. My time here is limited, but I have time to seek him out, and if I find him I shall drag him out and feed him to his own machines and put a stop to this diabolism for all time!

I strode along the edge of the sea for five hundred miles, and rounding a sharp point of land, stopped abruptly. There before me stretched a city, a towering city of smooth white stone and archi­tectural beauty. Spacious parks were dotted with winged colonnades and statues, and the buildings were so designed that everything pointed upward, seemed poised for flight.

That was one half of the city.

The other half was a ruinous heap of shattered white stone, of buildings levelled to the ground by the machines, which were even then intent on reducing the entire city to a like state.

As I watched I saw scores of the flame-machines cutting deep into the stone and steel supporting base of one of the tallest buildings. Two of the ponderous air machines, trailing a wide mesh-metal network between them, rose clumsily from the ground on the outskirts of the city. Straight at the building they flew, and passed one on each side of it. The metal netting struck, jerked the machines backward, and the tangled mass of them plunged to the ground far below. But the building, already weakened at the base, swayed far forward, then back, hung poised for a long shuddering moment and then toppled to the ground with a thunderous crash amid a cloud of dust and debris and tangled framework.

The flame-machines moved on to another building, and on a slope near the outskirts two more of the air machines waited. .

Sickened at the purposeless vandalism of it all, I turned inland; and everywhere I strode were the machines, destroying and building, leveling to the ground the deserted cities of the bird people and building up their own meaningless civilization of metal.

At last I came to a long range of mountains which towered up past the level of my eyes as I stood before them. In two steps I stood on the top of these mountains and looked out upon a vast plain dotted everywhere with the grotesque machine-made cities. The machines had made good progress. About two hundred miles to the left a great metal dome rose from the level of the plain, and I made my way toward it, striding unconcerned and recklessly amidst the ma­chines that moved everywhere around my feet.

As I neared the domed structure a row of formidable-looking mechanisms, armed with long spikes, rose up to bar my path. I kicked out viciously at them and in a few minutes they were reduced to tangled scrap, though I received a number of minor scratches in the skirmish. Others of the spiked machines rose up to confront me with each step I took, but I strode through them, kicking them to one side, and at last I stood before an entrance-way in the side of the huge dome. Stooping, I entered, and once inside my head almost touched the roof.

I had hoped to find here what I sought, and I was not disap­pointed. There in the center of the single spacious room was The Machine of all Machines; the Cause of it All; the Central Force, the Ruler, the Controlling Power of all the diabolism running riot over the face of the planet. It was roughly circular, large and ponderous. It was bewilderingly complicated, a maze of gears, wheels, switchboards, lights, levers, buttons, tubing, and intricacies beyond my comprehension. There were circular tiers, and on each tier smaller separate units moved, performing various tasks, attending switchboards, pressing buttons, pulling levers. The result was a throbbing, rhythmic, purposeful unit. I could imagine invisible waves going out in every direction.

I wondered what part of this great machine was vulnerable. Silly thought. No part. Only it—itself. It was The Brain.

The Brain. The Intelligence. I had searched for it, and I had found it. There it was before me. Well, I was going to smash it. I looked around for some kind of weapon, but finding none, I strode for­ward bare-handed.

Immediately a square panel lighted up with a green glow, and I knew that The Brain was aware of my intent. I stopped. An odd sen­sation swept over me, a feeling of hate, of menace. It came from the machine, pervaded the air in invisible waves.

“Nonsense,” I thought; “it is but a machine after all. A very complicated one, yes, perhaps even possessed of intelligence; but it only has control over other machines, it cannot harm me.”

Again I took a resolute step forward.

The feeling of menace became stronger, but I fought back my ap­prehension and advanced recklessly. I had almost reached the ma­chine when a wall of crackling blue flame leaped from floor to roof. If I had taken one more step I would have been caught in it.

The menace, and hate, and imagined rage at my escape, rolled out from the machine in ponderous, almost tangible waves, engulfing me, and I retreated hastily.

I walked back toward the mountains. After all, this was not my world—not my universe. I would soon be so small that my presence amid the machines would be extremely dangerous, and the tops of the mountains was the only safe place. I would have liked to smash The Brain and put an end to it all, but anyway, I thought, the bird people were now safe on the satellite, so why not leave this lifeless world to the machines?

It was twilight when I reached the mountains, and from a high grassy slope—the only peaceful place on the entire planet, I im­agined—I looked out upon the plain. Tiny lights appeared as the machines moved about, carrying on their work, never resting. The clattering and clanking of them floated faintly up to me and made me glad that I was a safe distance from it all.

As I stood out toward the dome that housed The Brain, I saw what I had failed to see before. A large globe rested there on a frame-work, and there seemed to be unusual activity around it.

A vague apprehension tightened around my brain as I saw ma­chines enter this globe, and I was half prepared for what happened next. The globe rose lightly as a feather, sped upward with increasing speed, out of the atmosphere and into space, where, as a tiny speck, it darted and maneuvered with perfect ease. Soon it reappeared, floated gracefully down upon the framework again, and the machines that had mechanically directed its flight disembarked from it.

The machines had achieved space travel! My heart sickened with sudden realization of what that meant. They would build others—were already building them. They would go to other worlds, and the nearest one was the satellite . . . . encased in its protective metal shell . . . .

But then I thought of the white-flame machines that I had seen cut through stone and metal in a few seconds . . . .

The bird people would no doubt put up a valiant fight. But as I compared their rocket projectiles against the efficiency of the globe I had just seen, I had little doubt as to the outcome. They would eventually be driven out into space again to seek a new world, and the machines would take over the satellite, running riot as they had done here. They would remain there just as long as The Brain so desired, or until there was no more land for conquest. Already this planet was over-run, so they were preparing to leave.

The Brain. An intricate, intelligent mechanical brain, glorying in its power, drunk with conquest. Where had it originated? The bird people must have been the indirect cause, and no doubt they were beginning to realize the terrible menace they had loosed on the universe.

I tried to picture their civilization as it had been long ago before this thing had come about. I pictured a civilization in which machinery played a very important part. I pictured the development of this machinery until the time when it relieved them of many tasks. I imagined how they must have designed their machines with more and more intricacy, more and more finesse, until only a few persons were needed in control. And then the great day would come, the supreme day, when mechanical parts would take the place of those few.

That must have indeed been a day of triumph. Machines supply­ing their every necessity, attending to their every want, obeying their every whim at the touch of a button. That must have been Utopia achieved!

But it had proven to be a bitter Utopia. They had gone forward blindly and recklessly to achieve it, and unknowingly they had gone a step too far. Somewhere, amid the machines they supposed they had under their control, they were imbued with a spark of intelli­gence. One of the machines added unto itself—perhaps secretly; built and evolved itself into a terribly efficient unit of inspired in­telligence. And guided by that intelligence, other machines were built and came under its control. The rest must have been a matter of course. Revolt and easy victory.

So I pictured the evolution of the mechanical brain that even now was directing activities from down there under its metal dome.

And the metal shell around the satellite—did not that mean that the bird people were expecting an invasion? Perhaps, after all, this was not the original planet of the bird people; perhaps space travel was not an innovation among the machines. Perhaps it was on one of the far inner planets near the sun that the bird people had achieved the Utopia that proved to be such a terrible nemesis; perhaps they had moved to the next planet, never dreaming that the machines could follow; but the machines had followed after a number of years, the bird people being always driven outward, the machines always following at leisure in search of new spheres of conquest. And finally the bird people had fled to this planet, and from it to the satellite; and realizing that in a few years the machines would come again in all their invincibility, they had then ensconced themselves beneath the shell of metal.

At any rate: they did not flee to a far-away safe spot in the universe as they could have very easily done. Instead, they stayed; always one sphere ahead of the marauding machines, they must always be plan­ning a means of wiping out the spreading evil they had loosed.

It might be that the shell around the satellite was in some way a clever trap! But so thinking, I remembered again the white-flame machines and the deadly efficiency of the globe I had seen, and then my hopes faded away.

Perhaps some day they would eventually find a way to check the spreading menace. But on the other extreme, the machines might spread out to other solar systems, other galaxies, until some day, a billion years hence, they would occupy every sphere in this uni­verse . . . .

Such were my thoughts as I lay prone there upon the grassy slope and looked down into the plain, down upon the ceaseless clatter and the ceaseless moving of lights in the dark. I was very small now; soon, very soon, I would leave this world.

My last impression was of a number of the space globes, barely discernible in the dusk below; and among them towering up high and round, was one much larger than the others, and I could guess which machine would occupy that globe.

And my last thought was a regret that I hadn’t made a more de­termined effort to destroy that malicious mechanism, The Brain.
So I passed from this world of machines—the world that was an electron on a grain of sand that existed on a prehistoric world that was but an electron on a microscope-slide that existed on a world that was but an electron in a piece of Rehyllium-X on the Professor’s laboratory table.

VIII

It is useless to go on. I have neither the time nor the desire to relate in detail all the adventures that have befallen me, the universes I have passed into, the things I have seen and experienced and learned on all the worlds since I left the planet of the machines.

Ever smaller cycles . . . . infinite universes . . . . never ending . . . . each presenting something new . . . . some queer variation of life or intelligence . . . . Life? Intelligence? Terms I once associated with things animate, things protoplasmic and understandable. I find it hard to apply them to all the divergencies of shape and form and construction I have encountered . . . .

Worlds young . . . . warm . . . . volcanic and steaming . . . . the single cell emerging from the slime of warm oceans to propagate on primordial continents . . . . other worlds, innumerable . . . . life divergent in all branches from the single cell . . . . amorphous globules . . . . amphibian . . . . crustacean . . . . reptilian . . . . plant . . . . insect . . . . bird . . . . mammal . . . . all possible variations of combinations . . . . biological monstrosities indescrib­able . . . .

Other forms beyond any attempt at classification . . . . beyond all reason or comprehension of my puny mind . . . . essences of pure flame . . . . others gaseous, incandescent and quiescent alike . . . . plant forms encompassing an entire globe . . . . crystalline beings sentient and reasoning . . . great shimmering columnar forms, seemingly liquid, defying gravity by some strange power of cohesion . . . . a world of sound-vibrations, throbbing, expanding, reverberating in unbroken echoes that nearly drove me crazy . . . . globular brain-like masses utterly dissociated from any material substance . . . . intra-dimensional beings, all shapes and shapeless . . . . entities utterly incapable of registration upon any of my senses except the sixth, that of instinct . . . .

Suns dying .. . . planets cold and dark and airless . . . . last vestiges of once proud races struggling for a few more meager years of sustenance . . . . great cavities . . . . beds of evaporated seas . . . . small furry animals scurrying to cover at my approach . . . . desolation. . . . ruins crumbling surely into the sands of barren deserts, the last mute evidence of vanished civilizations . . . .
Other worlds . . . . a-flourished with life . . . . blessed with light and heat . . . . staggering cities . . . . vast populations . . . . ships plying the surface of oceans, and others in the air . . . . huge observatories . . . . tremendous strides in the sciences . . . .

Space flight . . . . battles for the supremacy of worlds . . . . blasting rays of super-destruction . . . . collision of planets . . . . disruption of solar systems . . . cosmic annihilation . . . .

Light space . . . . a universe with a tenuous, filmy something around it, which I burst through . . . . all around me not the customary blackness of outer space I had known, but light . . . . filled with tiny dots that were globes of darkness . . . . that were burnt-out suns and lifeless planets . . . . nowhere a shimmering planet, nowhere a flaming sun . . . . only remote specks of black amid the light-satiated emptiness . . . .

How many of the infinitely smaller atomic cycles I have passed into, I do not know. I tried to keep count of them at first, but some­where between twenty and thirty I gave it up; and that was long ago.

Each time I would think: “This cannot go on forever—it cannot; surely this next time I must reach the end.”

But I have not reached the end.

Good God—how can there be an end? Worlds composed of atoms . . . . each atom similarly composed . . . . The end would have to be an indestructible solid, and that cannot be; all matter divisible into smaller matter . . . .

What keeps me from going insane? I want to go insane!

I am tired . . . . a strange tiredness neither of mind nor body. Death would be a welcome release from the endless fate that is mine.

But even death is denied me. I have sought it . . . . I have prayed for it and begged for it . . . . but it is not to be.

On all the countless worlds I have contacted, the inhabitants were of two distinctions: they were either so low in the state of intelligence that they fled and barricaded themselves against me in superstitious terror—or were so highly intellectual that they recognized me for what I was and welcomed me among them. On all but a few worlds the latter was the case, and it is on these types that I will dwell briefly.

These beings—or shapes or monstrosities or essences—were in every case mentally and scientifically far above me. In most cases they had observed me for years as a dark shadow looming beyond the farthest stars, blotting out certain star-fields and nebulae . . . . and always when I came to their world they welcomed me with scientific enthusiasm.

Always they were puzzled as to my steady shrinking, and always when they learned of my origin and the manner of my being there, they were surprised and excited.

In most cases gratification was apparent when they learned definitely that there were indeed great ultramacrocosmic universes. It seemed that all of them had long held the theory that such was the case.

On most of the worlds, too, the beings—or entities—or whatever the case might be—were surprised that the Professor, one of my fellow creatures, had invented such a marvelous vitalized element as “Shrinx.”

"Almost unbelievable," was the general consensus of opinion;  "scientifically he must be centuries ahead of the time on his own  planet, if we are to judge the majority of the race by this creature  here"—meaning me.

In spite of the fact that on nearly every world I was looked upon as mentally inferior, they conversed with me and I with them, by various of their methods, in most cases different variations of telep­athy. They learned in minute detail and with much interest all of my past experiences in other universes. They answered all of my questions and explained many things besides, about their own universe and world and civilization and scientific achievements, most of which were completely beyond my comprehension, so alien were they in nature.

And of all the intra-universal beings I have had converse with, the strangest were those essences who dwelt in outer space as well as on various planets; identifiable to me only as vague blots of emptiness, total absences of light or color or substance; who impressed upon me the fact that they were Pure Intelligences, far above and superior to any material plane; but who professed an interest in me, bearing me with them to various planets, revealing many things and treating me very kindly. During my sojourn with them I learned from experience the total subservience of matter to influences of mind. On a giant mountainous world I stepped out upon a thin beam of light stretched between two crags, and willed with all my consciousness that I would not fall. And I did not.

I have learned many things. I know that my mind is much sharper, more penetrative, more grasping, than ever before. And vast fields of wonder and knowledge lie before me in other universes yet to come.

But in spite of this, I am ready for it all to end. This strange tired­ness that is upon me—I cannot understand it. Perhaps some invisible radiation in empty space is satiating me with this tiredness.

Perhaps it is only that I am very lonely. How very far away I am from my own tiny sphere! Millions upon millions . . . . trillions upon trillions . . . . of light-years . . . . Light years! Light cannot measure the distance. And yet it is no distance: I am in a block of metal on the Professor’s laboratory table . . . .

Yet how far away into space and time I have gone! Years have passed, years far beyond my normal span of life. I am eternal.
Yes, eternal life . . . . that men have dreamed of . . . . prayed for . . . . sought after . . . . is mine—and I dream and pray and seek for death!

Death. All the strange beings I have seen and conversed with, have denied it. I have implored many of them to release me painlessly and for all time—but to no avail. Many of them were possessed of the scientific means to stop my steady shrinkage—but they would not stop it. None of them would hinder me, none of them would tamper with the things that were. Why? Always I asked them why, and they would not answer.

But I need no answer. I think I understand. These beings of science realized that such an entity as myself should never be . . . . that I am a blasphemy upon all creation and beyond all reason . . . . they realized that eternal life is a terrible thing . . . . a thing not to be desired . . . . and as punishment for delving into secrets never meant to be revealed, none of them will release me from my fate . . . .

Perhaps they are right, but oh, it is cruel! Cruel! The fault is not mine, I am here against my own will.

And so I continue ever down, alone and lonely, yearning for others of my kind. Always hopeful—and always disappointed.

So it was that I departed from a certain world of highly intelligent gaseous beings; a world that was in itself composed of a highly rarefied substance bordering on nebulosity. So it was that I became even smaller, was lifted up in a whirling, expanding vortex of the dense atmosphere, and entered the universe which it composed.

Why I was attracted by that tiny, far away speck of yellow, I do not know. It was near the center of the nebula I had entered. There were other suns far brighter, far more attractive, very much nearer. This minute yellow sun was dwarfed by other suns and sun-clusters around it—seemed insignificant and lost among them. And why I was drawn to it, so far away, I cannot explain.

But mere distance, even space distance, was nothing to me now. I had long since learned from the Pure Intelligence the secret of pro­pulsion by mind influence, and by this means I propelled myself through space at any desired speed not exceeding that of light; as my mind was incapable of imagining speed faster than light, I of course could not cause my material body to exceed it.

So I neared the yellow sun in a few minutes, and observed that it had twelve planets. And as I was far too large to yet land on any sphere, I wandered far among other suns, observing the haphazard construction of this universe, but never losing sight of the small yellow sun that had so intrigued me. And at last, much smaller, I returned to it.

And of all the twelve planets, one was particularly attractive to me. It was a tiny blue one. It made not much difference where I landed, so why should I have picked it from among the others? Perhaps only a whim—but I think the true reason was because of its constant pale blue twinkling, as though it were beckoning to me, inviting me to come to it. It was an unexplainable phenomenon; none of the others did that. So I moved closer to the orbit of the blue planet, and landed upon it.

As usual I didn’t move from where I stood for a time, until I could view the surrounding terrain; and then I observed that I had landed in a great lake—a chain of lakes. A short distance to my left was a city miles wide, a great part of which was inundated by the flood I had caused.

Very carefully, so as not to cause further tidal waves, I stepped from the lake to solid ground, and the waters receded somewhat.
Soon I saw a group of five machines flying toward me; each of them had two wings held stiffly at right angles to the body. Looking around me I saw others of these machines winging toward me from every direction, always in groups of five, in V formation. When they had come very close they began to dart and swoop in a most peculiar manner, from them came sharp staccato sounds, and I felt the im­pact of many tiny pellets upon my skin! These beings were very warlike, I thought, or else very excitable.

Their bombardment continued for some time, and I began to find it most irritating; these tiny pellets could not harm me seriously, could not even pierce my skin, but the impact of them stung. I could not account for their attack upon me, unless it be that they were angry at the flood I had caused by my landing. If that were the case they were very unreasonable, I thought; any damage I had done was purely unintentional, and they should realize that.
But I was soon to learn that these creatures were very foolish in many of their actions and manners; they were to prove puzzling to me in more ways than one.

I waved my arms around, and presently they ceased their futile bombardment, but continued to fly around me.

I wished I could see what manner of beings flew these machines. They were continually landing and rising again from a wide level field below.

For several hours they buzzed all around while I became steadily smaller. Below me I could now see long ribbons of white that I guessed were roads. Along these roads crawled tiny vehicles, which soon became so numerous that all movement came to a standstill, so congested were they. In the fields a large part of the populace had gathered, and was being constantly augmented by others.

At last I was sufficiently small so that I could make out closer de­tails, and I looked more intently at the beings who inhabited this world. My heart gave a quick leap then, for they somewhat resembled myself in structure. They were four-limbed and stood erect, their method of locomotion consisting of short jerky hops, very different from the smooth gliding movement of my own race. Their general features were somewhat different too—seemed grotesque to me—but the only main difference between them and myself was that their bodies were somewhat more columnar, roughly oval in shape and very thin, I would say almost frail.

Among the thousands gathered there were perhaps a score who seemed in authority. They rode upon the backs of clumsy looking, four-footed animals, and seemed to have difficulty in keeping the ex­cited crowd under control. I, of course, was the center of their excitement; my presence seemed to have caused more consternation here than upon any other world.

Eventually a way was made through the crowd and one of the ponderous four-wheeled vehicles was brought along the road opposite to where I stood. I supposed they wanted me to enter the rough box­like affair, so I did so, and was hauled with many bumps and jolts over the rough road toward the city I had seen to the left. I could have rebelled at this barbarous treatment, but I reflected that I was still very large and this was probably the only way they had of trans­porting me to wherever I was going.

It had become quite dark, and the city was aglow with thousands of lights. I was taken into a certain building, and at once many im­portant looking persons came to observe me.

I have stated that my mind had become much more penetrative than ever before, so I was not surprised to learn that I could read many of the thoughts of these persons without much difficulty. I learned that these were scientists who had come here from other immediate cities as quickly as possible—most of them in the winged machines, which they called “planes”—when they had learned of my landing here. For many months they had been certain that I would land. They had observed me through their telescopes, and their period of waiting had been a speculative one. And I could now see that they were greatly puzzled, filled with much wonderment, and no more enlightenment about me than they had been possessed of before.

Though still very large, I was becoming surely smaller, and it was this aspect that puzzled them most, just as it had on all the other worlds. Secondly in their speculations was the matter of where I had come from.

Many were the theories that passed among them. Certain they were that I had come a far distance. Uranus? Neptune? Pluto? I learned that these were the names of the outmost planets of this system. No, they decided; I must have come a much farther distance than that. Perhaps from another far-away galaxy of this universe! Their minds were staggered at that thought. Yet how very far away they were from the truth.

They addressed me in their own language, and seemed to realize that it was futile. Although I understood everything they said and everything that was in their minds, they could not know that I did, for I could not answer them. Their minds seemed utterly closed to all my attempts at thought communication, so I gave it up.

They conversed then among themselves, and I could read the hopelessness in their minds. I could see, too, as they discussed me, that they looked upon me as being abhorrent, a monstrosity. And as I searched the recesses of their minds, I found many things.

I found that it was the inherent instinct of this race to look upon all unnatural occurrences and phenomena with suspicion and disbelief and prejudiced mind.

I found that they had great pride for their accomplishments in the way of scientific and inventive progress. Their astronomers had delved a short distance into outer space, but considered it a very great distance; and having failed to find signs of intelligent life upon any immediate sphere, they leaped blindly and fondly to the conclusion that their own species of life was the dominant one in this solar system and perhaps—it was a reluctant perhaps—in the entire universe.

Their conception of a universe was a puny one. True, at the present time there was extant a theory of an expanding universe, and in that theory at least they were correct, I knew, remembering the former world I had left—the swirling, expanding wisp of gaseous atmosphere of which this tiny blue sphere was an electron. Yes, their “expanding universe” theory was indeed correct. But very few of their thinkers went beyond their own immediate universe—went deeply enough to even remotely glimpse the vast truth.

They had vast cities, yes. I had seen many of them from my height as I towered above their world. A great civilization, I had thought then. But now I know that great cities do not make great civilizations. I am disappointed at what I have found here, and cannot even understand why I should be disappointed, for this blue sphere is nothing to me and soon I will be gone on my eternal journey down­ward . . . .

Many things I read in these scientists’ minds—things clear and concise, things dim and remote; but they would never know.

And then in the mind of one of the persons, I read an idea. He went away, and returned shortly with an apparatus consisting of wires, a headphone, and a flat revolving disc. He spoke into an instrument, a sort of amplifier. Then a few minutes later he touched a sharp pointed instrument to the rotating disc, and I heard the identical sounds reproduced which he had spoken. A very crude method, but effective in a certain way. They wanted to register my speech so that they would have at least something to work on when I had gone.

I tried to speak some of my old language into the instrument. I had thought I was beyond all surprises, but I was surprised at what happened. For nothing happened. I could not speak. Neither in the old familiar language I had known so long ago, nor in any kind of sound. I had communicated so entirely by thought transference on so many of the other worlds, that now my power of vocal utterance was gone.

They were disappointed. I was not sorry, for they could not have deciphered any language so utterly alien as mine was.

Then they resorted to the mathematics by which this universe and all universes are controlled; into which mathematical mold the eternal All was cast at the beginning and has moved errorlessly since. They produced a great chart which showed the conglomerated masses of this and other galaxies. Then upon a black panel set in the wall, was drawn a circle—understandable in any universe—and around it ten smaller circles. This was evidently their solar system, though I could not understand why they drew but ten circles when I had seen twelve planets from outer space. Then a tiny spot was designated on the chart, the position of this system in its particular galaxy. Then they handed the chart to me.

It was useless. Utterly impossible. How could I ever indicate my own universe, much less my galaxy and solar system, by such puny methods as these? How could I make them know that my own uni­verse and planet were so infinitely large in the scheme of things that theirs were practically non-existent? How could I make them know that their universe was not outside my own, but on my planet?—superimposed in a block of metal on a laboratory table, in a grain of sand, in the atoms of glass in a microscopic slide, in a drop of water, in a blade of grass, in a bit of cold flame, in a thousand other variations of elements and substances all of which I had passed down into and beyond, and finally in a wisp of gas that was the cause of their “expanding universe.” Even could I have conversed with them in their own language I could not have made them grasp the vastness of all those substances existing on worlds each of which was but an electron of an atom in one of trillions upon trillions of molecules of an infinitely larger world! Such a conception would have shattered their minds.

It was very evident that they would never be able to establish communication with me even remotely, nor I with them; and I was becoming very impatient. I wanted to be out of the stifling building, out under the night sky, free and unhampered in the vast space which was my abode.

Upon seeing that I made no move to indicate on the chart which part of their puny universe I came from, the scientists around me again conversed among themselves; and this time I was amazed at the trend of their thoughts.

For the conclusion which they had reached was that I was some freak of outer space which had somehow wandered here, and that my place in the scale of evolution was too far below their own for them to establish ideas with me either by spoken language (of which they concluded I had none) or by signs (which I was apparently too barbaric to understand)!! This—this was their unanimous conclusion! This, because I had not uttered any language for them to record, and because the chart of their universe was utterly insignificant to me! Never did it occur to them that the opposite might be true—that I might converse with them but for the fact that their minds were too weak to register my thoughts!

Disgust was my reaction to these short-sighted conclusions of their unimaginable minds—disgust which gave way to an old emotion, that of anger.

And as that one impulsive, rising burst of anger flooded my mind, a strange thing happened:

Every one of the scientists before me dropped to the floor in a state of unconsciousness.

My mind had, indeed, become much more penetrative than ever before. No doubt my surge of anger had sent out intangible waves which had struck upon their centers of consciousness with sufficient force to render them insensible.

I was glad to be done with them. I left the four walls of the building, emerged into the glorious expansive night under the stars and set out along the street in a direction that I believed would lead me away from the city. I wanted to get away from it, away from this world and the people who inhabited it.

As I advanced along the streets all who saw me recognized me at once and most of them fled unreasonably for safety. A group of persons in one of the vehicles tried to bar my progress, but I exer­cised my power of anger upon them; they drooped senselessly and their vehicle crashed into a building and was demolished.

In a few minutes the city was behind me and I was striding down one of the roads, destination unknown; nor did it matter, except that now I was free and alone as it should be. I had but a few more hours on this world.

And then it was that the feeling came upon me again, the strange feeling that I had experienced twice before: once when I had selected the tiny orange sun from among the millions of others, and again when I had chosen this tiny blue planet. Now I felt it for a third time, more strongly than ever, and now I knew that this feeling had some very definite purpose for being. It was as though something, some power beyond question, drew me irresistibly to it; I could not resist, nor did I want to. This time it was very strong and very near.

Peering into the darkness along the road, I saw a light some distance ahead and to the left, and I knew that I must go to that light.

When I had come nearer I could see that it emanated from a house set far back in a grove of trees, and I approached it without hesitation. The night was warm, and a pair of double windows opened upon a well-lighted room. In this room was a man.

I stepped inside and stood motionless, not yet knowing why I should have been drawn there.

The man’s back was toward me. He was seated before a square dialed instrument, and seemed to be listening intently to some report coming from it. The sounds from the box were unintelligible to me, so I turned my attention to reading the man’s mind as he listened, and was not surprised to learn that the reports concerned myself.

“—casualties somewhat exaggerated, though the property damage has reached millions of dollars,” came the news from the box. “Cleve­land was of course hardest hit, though not unexpectedly, astro­nomical computators having estimated with fair accuracy the radius of danger. The creature landed in Lake Erie only a few miles east of the city. At the contact the waters rose over the breakwater with a rush and inundated nearly one-third of the city before receding, and it was well that the greater part of the populace had heeded the advance warnings and fled . . . . all lake towns in the vicinity have re­ported heavy property damage, and cities as far east as Erie, and as far west as Toledo, have reported high flood waters . . . . all available Government combat planes were rushed to the scene in case the creature should show signs of hostility . . . . scientific men who have awaited the thing’s landing for months immediately chartered planes for Cleveland . . . . despite the elaborate cordons of police and militiamen, the crowds broke through and entered the area, and within an hour after the landing roads in every direction were congested with traffic . . . . for several hours scientists circled and ex­amined the creature in planes, while its unbelievable shrinkage continued . . . . the only report we have from them is that, aside from the contour of its great bell-shaped torso, the creature is quite amazingly correct anatomically . . . . an unofficial statement from Dr. Hilton U. Cogsworthy of the Alleghany Biological Society, is to the effect that such a creature isn’t. That it cannot possibly exist. That the whole thing is the result of some kind of mass hypnotism on a gigantic scale. This, of course, in lieu of some reasonable explanation. . . . many persons would like to believe the ’mass hypnotism’ theory, and many always will; but those who have seen it and taken photographs of it from every angle know that it does exist and that its steady shrinking goes on . . . . Professor James L. Harvey of Miami University has suffered a stroke of temporary insanity and is under the care of physicians. The habitual curiosity seekers who flocked to the scene are apparently more hardened . . . . the latest report is that the creature, still very large, has been transported under heavy guard to the Cleveland Institute of Scientific Research, where is gathered every scientist of note east of the Mississippi . . . . stand by for further news flashes . . . . “

The voice from the box ceased, and as I continued to read the mind of the man whose back was toward me, I saw that he was deeply absorbed in the news he had heard. And the mind of this person was something of a puzzle to me. He was above the average intelligence of those on this world, and was possessed of a certain amount of fundamental scientific knowledge; but I could see im­mediately that his was not a scientifically trained mind. By profession he was a writer—one who recorded fictitious “happenings” in the written language, so that others might absorb and enjoy them.

And as I probed into his mind I was amazed at the depth of imagination there, a trait almost wholly lacking in those others I had encountered, the scientists. And I knew that at last here was one with whose mind I might contact . . . . here was one who was dif­ferent from the others . . . . who went deeper . . . . who seemed on the very edge of the truth. Here was one who thought: “—this strange creature, which has landed here . . . . alien to anything we have ever known . . . . might it not be alien even to our universe? . . . . the strange shrinking . . . . from that phenomenon alone we might conclude that it has come an inconceivable distance . . . . its shrinking may have begun hundreds, thousands of years ago . . . . and if we could but communicate with it, before it passes from Earth forever, what strange things might it not tell us!”

The voice came from the box again, interrupting these thoughts in his mind.

“Attention! Flash! The report comes that the alien space-creature, which was taken to the Scientific Research Institute for observation by scientists, has escaped, after projecting a kind of invisible mind force which rendered unconscious all those within reach. The creature was reported seen by a number of persons, after it left the building. A police squad car was wrecked as a direct result of the creature’s “mind force,” and three policemen were injured, none seriously. It was last seen leaving the city by the north-east, and all persons are ordered to be on the lookout and to report immediately if it is sighted.”

Again the report from the box ceased, and again I probed into the man’s mind, this time deeper, hoping to establish a contact with it which would allow for thought-communication.

I must have at least aroused some hidden mind-instinct, for he whirled to face me, overturning his chair. Surprise was on his face, and something in his eyes that must have been fear.

"Do not be alarmed," I flashed. "Be seated again."

I could see that his mind had not received my thought. But he must have known from my manner that I meant no harm, for he resumed his seat. I advanced further into the room, standing before him. The fear had gone out of his eyes and he only sat tensely star­ing at me, his hands gripping the arms of the chair.

"I know that you would like to learn things about myself," I telepathed;  "things which those others—your scientists—would have liked to know."

Reading his mind I could see that he had not received the thought, so I probed even deeper and again flashed the same thought. This time he did receive it, and there was an answering light in his eyes.

He said “Yes,” aloud.

"Those others, your scientists," I went on, "would never have believed  nor even understood my story, even if their minds were of the type to  receive my thoughts, which they are not."

He received and comprehended that thought, too, but I could see that this was a great strain on his mind and could not go on for long.

"Yours is the only mind I have encountered here with which I could  establish thought," I continued, "but even now it is becoming weakened  under the unaccustomed strain. I wish to leave my record and story with  you, but it cannot be by this means. I can put your mind under a  hypnotic influence and impress my thoughts upon your subconscious mind,  if you have some means of recording them. But you must hurry; I have  only a few more hours here at the most, and in your entire lifetime it  would be impossible for you to record all that I could tell."

I could read doubt in his mind. But only for one instant did he hesitate. Then he rose and went to a table where there was a pile of smooth white paper and a sharp pointed instrument—pen—for re­cording my thoughts in words of his own language.

"I am ready," was the thought in his mind.

So I have told my story. Why? I do not know, except that I wanted to. Of all the universes I have passed into, only on this blue sphere have I found creatures even remotely resembling myself. And they are a disappointment; and now I know that I shall never find others of my kind. Never, unless—

I have a theory. Where is the beginning or the end of the eternal All I have been traversing? Suppose there is none? Suppose that, after traversing a few more atomic cycles, I should enter a universe which seemed somehow familiar to me; and that I should enter a certain familiar galaxy, and approach a certain sun, a certain planet—and find that I was back where I started from so long ago: back on my own planet, where I should find the Professor in the laboratory still receiving my sound and sight impressions!! An insane theory; an im­possible one. It shall never be.

Well, then, suppose that after leaving this sphere—after descend­ing into another atomic universe—I should choose not to alight on any planet? Suppose I should remain in empty space, my size con­stantly diminishing? That would be one way of ending it all, I sup­pose. Or would it? Is not my body matter, and is not matter infinite, limitless, eternal? How then could I ever reach a “nothingness?” It is hopeless. I am eternal. My mind too must be eternal or it would surely have snapped long ago at such concepts.

I am so very small that my mind is losing contact with the mind of him who sits here before me writing these thoughts in words of his own language, though his mind is under the hypnotic spell of my own and he is oblivious to the words he writes. I have clambered upon the top of the table beside the pile of pages he has written, to bring my mind closer to his. But why should I want to continue the thought-contact for another instant? My story is finished, there is nothing more to tell.

I shall never find others of my kind . . . I am alone . . . . I think that soon, in some manner, I shall try to put an end to it . . . .

I am very small now . . . . the hypnosis is passing from his mind . . . . I can no longer control it . . . . the thought-contact is slip­ping . . . .

EPILOGUE

National Press-Radio Service, Sept. 29, 1937 (through Cleveland Daily Clarion) :—Exactly one year ago today was a day never to be forgotten in the history of this planet. On that day a strange visitor arrived—and departed.

On September 29, 1936, at 3:31 P.M., that thing from outer space known henceforth only as “The Alien” landed in Lake Erie near Cleveland, causing not so much destruction and terror as great bewilderment and awe, scientists being baffled in their attempts to determine whence it came and the secret of its strange steady shrink­ing.

Now, on the anniversary of that memorable day, we are presenting to the public a most unusual and interesting document purported to be a true account and history of that strange being, The Alien. This document was presented to us only a few days ago by Stanton Cobb Lentz, renowned author of “The Answer to the Ages” and other serious books, as well as of scores of short stories and books of the widely popular type of literature known as science-fiction.

You have read the above document. While our opinion as to its authenticity is frankly skeptical, we shall print Mr. Lentz’s comment and let you, the reader, judge for yourself whether the story was related to Mr. Lentz by The Alien in the manner described, or whether it is only a product of Mr. Lentz’s most fertile imagination.

“On the afternoon of September 29 a year ago,” states Mr. Lentz, “I fled the city as did many others, heeding the warning of a possible tidal wave, should The Alien land in the lake. Thousands of persons had gathered five or six miles to the south, and from there we watched the huge shape overhead, so expansive that it blotted out the sun­light and plunged that section of the country into a partial eclipse. It seemed to draw nearer by slow degrees until, about 3:30 o’clock, it began its downward rush. The sound of contact as it struck the lake was audible for miles, but it was not until later that we learned the extent of the flood. After the landing all was confusion and excitement as combat planes arrived and very foolishly began to bombard the creature and crowds began to advance upon the scene. The entire countryside being in such crowded turmoil, it took me several difficult hours to return to my home. There I listened to the varied reports of the happenings of the past several hours.

“When I had that strange feeling that someone was behind me, and when I whirled to see The Alien standing there in the room, I do not presume to say that I was not scared. I was. I was very much scared. I had seen The Alien when it was five or six hundred feet tall —but that had been from afar. Now it was only ten or eleven feet tall, but was standing right before me. But my scaredness was only momentary, for something seemed to enter and calm my mind.

“Then, although there was no audible sound, I became aware of the thought: ’I know that you would like to learn things about myself, things which those others—your scientists—would have liked to know.’

“This was mental telepathy! I had often used the theory in my stories, but never had I dreamed that I would experience such a medium of thought in real fact. But here it was.

” ’Those others, your scientists,’ came the next thought, ’would never have believed nor even understood my story, even if their minds were of the type to receive my thoughts, which they are not.’ And then I began to feel a strain upon my mind, and knew that I could not stand much more of it.

“Then came the thought that he would relate his story through my sub-conscious mind if I had some means of recording it in my own language. For an instant I hesitated; and then I realized that time was fleeing and never again would I have such an opportunity as this. I went to my desk, where only that morning I had been working on a manuscript. There was paper and ink in plenty.

“My last impression was of some force seeming to spread over my mind; then a terrific dizziness, and the ceiling seemed to crash upon me.

“No time at all had seemed to elapse, when my mind regained its normal faculties; but before me on the desk was a pile of manuscript paper closely written in my own longhand. And—what many persons will find it hard to believe—standing upon that pile of written paper upon my desk top, was The Alien—now scarcely two inches in height—and steadily and surely diminishing! In utter fascination I watched the transformation that was taking place before my eyes—watched until The Alien had become entirely invisible, had descended down into the topmost sheet of paper there on my desk . . . .

“Now I realize that the foregoing document and my explanation of it will be received in many ways. I have waited a full year before making it public. Accept it now as fiction if you wish. There may be some few who will see the truth of it, or at least the possibility; but the vast majority will leap at once to the conclusion that the whole thing is a concoction of my own imagination; that, taking advantage of The Alien’s landing on this planet, I wrote the story to fit the occasion, very appropriately using The Alien as the main theme. To many this will seem all the more to be true, in face of the fact that in most of my science-fiction stories I have poked ridicule and derision and satire at mankind and all its high vaunted science and civiliza­tion and achievements—always more or less with my tongue in my cheek however, as the expression has it. And then along comes this Alien, takes a look at us and concludes that he is very disappointed, not to mention disgusted.
“However, I wish to present a few facts to help substantiate the authenticity of the script. Firstly: for some time after awakening from my hypnosis I was beset by a curious dizziness, though my mind was quite clear. Shortly after The Alien had disappeared I called my physician, Dr. C. M. Rollins. After an examination and a few mental tests he was greatly puzzled. He could not diagnose my case; my dizziness was the after effect of a hypnosis of a type he had never before encountered. I offered no explanation except to say that I had not been feeling well for the past several days.

“Secondly: the muscles of my right hand were so cramped from the long period of steady writing that I could not open my fingers. As an explanation I said that I had been writing for hours on the final chapters of my latest book, and Dr. Rollins said: ’Man, you must be crazy.’ The process of relaxing the muscles was painful.
“Upon my request Dr. Rollins will vouch for the truth of the above statements.

“Thirdly: when I read the manuscript the writing was easily recog­nizable as my own free, swinging longhand up to the last few para­graphs, when the writing became shaky, the last few words terminat­ing in an almost undecipherable scrawl as the Alien’s contact with my mind slipped away.

“Fourthly: I presented the manuscript to Mr. Howard A. Byerson, fiction editor of the National Newspaper Syndicate Service, and at once he misunderstood the entire idea. ’I have read your story, Mr. Lentz,’ he said a few days later, ’and it certainly comes at an appropriate time, right on the anniversary of The Alien’s landing. A neat idea about the origin of The Alien, but a bit farfetched. Now, let’s see, about the price; of course we shall syndicate your story through our National Newspaper chain, and—’

” ’You have the wrong idea,’ I said. ’It is not a story, but a true history of The Alien as related to me by The Alien, and I wish that fact emphasized; if necessary I will write a letter of explanation to be published with the manuscript. And I am not selling you the publication rights, I am merely giving you the document as the quickest and surest way of presenting it to the public.’

” ’But surely you are not serious? An appropriate story by Stanton Cobb Lentz, on the eve of the anniversary of The Alien’s landing, is a scoop; and you—’

” ’I do not ask and will not take a cent for the document,’ I said;

‘you have it now, it is yours, so do with it as you see fit.’

“A memory that will live with me always is the sight of The Alien as last seen by me—as last seen on this earth—as it disappeared into infinite smallness there upon my desk—waving two arms upward as if in farewell . .

“And whether the above true account and history of The Alien be received as such, or as fiction, there can be no doubt that on a not far off September, a thing from some infinite sphere above landed on this earth—and departed.”

The End

Fictional Story Related Index

This is an index of full text reprints of stories that I have read that influenced me when I was young. They are rather difficult to come by today, as where I live they are nearly impossible to find. Yes, you can find them on the internet, behind paywalls. Ah, that’s why all those software engineers in California make all that money. Well, here they are FOR FREE. Enjoy reading them.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Correspondence Course
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt
The Star Mouse (Full Text)
Space Jockey (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Art that Moves Me

An experiment of a bird in a vacuum jar.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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The best way to cook marshmallows.

Yeah. There is a right way and a wrong way to cook marshmallows. And here, my friend is how you learn to do it right. Of course, I was never properly instructed in the art of proper marshmallow cooking, but I learned my technique in the school of “Hard Knocks”. Yes, as a tender child of seven, I did learn how to cook marshmallows, and it is my pleasure to teach you the reader, my technique.

Now, let it be well understood that this the last post in my enormous post of fun and excitement in Asia. It is quite fitting, you see, as campfires and spending togetherness with friends is one of the core and most critical fundamentals of living in Asia, especially in China.

Technique

I am not going to lie to the reader about this. It is all in the technique. You need to carefully select the marshmallow out of the proper bag. Then you need to push it onto a nice and carefully constructed stick (green and moist if possible). Then you need to hold the marshmallow inside the campfire…

Cooking marshmallows near a campfire.
On of the best things during the Summer months is to have a country campfire and to cook and “roast” marshmallows over a fire. It is done much as these folk are doing. Only what is at the end of the sticks are things that are anything but marshmallows. Sigh. Well, the technique is shown. Don’t you know. What is missing are some bottles of frosty ice-cold beer, and a pocket knife to cut the branches with.

This assumes that you would build a campfire to roast the marshmallows. Certainly, omitting the campfire would be problematic.

Then you allow, now don’t be timid, allow the marshmallow to get burned. Let it get blackened and shriveled. Let it get hot and toasty. This this perhaps the most important part of toasting a marshmallow. Let it get cooked.

Burnt marshmallows
The best way to cook marshmallows is to permit them to be blackened and sooty on the outside. That way you get the fine wood smoke effect that seeps in and flavors the marshmallow.

Now, of course I know about those over protective parents out there. The fire is hot. It is frightening. The marshmallow is too soft, and it might hurt the child. The stick resembles a gun, and the noise of the cooking sounds like the torturing of children. Do not fear. The child will be just fine.

Take a chance. Let them play with the fire.

The final product

Now, you make sure that you carefully remove the marshmallow from the fire. Slowly. Slowly. Slowly. Then you take the blacked mass and raise it up to your lips.

Charring, smoking, barbecuing, burning or otherwise cooking foods over  fire might make them taste great, but these cooking methods potentially  increase toxins in foods. These toxins include polycyclic aromatic  hydrocarbons, or PAHs, and advanced glycation end products, or AGEs. The  smoke from your campfire or barbecue contains PAHs, which end up  settling on your marshmallow when you burn it. Unlike PAHs, AGEs are a  natural product of food metabolism. According to a report published in  Food Chemistry in 2016, PAH levels in foods prepared in these methods  varies, depending on factors such as nearness to the heat source and how  long the food is cooked. So burned marshmallows are likely to contain  more PAHs and AGEs than their roasted, but not burned, counterparts. 

-SF Gate warns against eating marshmallows over a open fire.

Yes, you must slowly and carefully raise the dark, blackened marshmallow to your lips.

Wait!

Do not eat it!

No. No. No.

Blow on it. You know, to cool it down.

Let it cool.

Then. Carefully. Very carefully. Taste it.

The more complex and complicated method of cooking marshmallows.
The more complex and complicated method of cooking marshmallows. It is not for the novice or those that are afraid of taking risks. You can put two, yes two, marshmallows on the very same stick and cook them together. It’s a risk, I know and it should always be done under adult supervision.

Then you can eat it, and taste the wondrous soft and delicious morsel of a cooked marshmallow.

It’s one of the things that I love to do in China.

China?

Yup China. What? you thought that this activity was only limited to your own backyard and your county in the Untied States? Nope. It’s global. Everyone, all around the world, enjoys cooking marshmallows.

Which is why I put it here in this final section of “Fun videos of Asia during the Summer”, or something like that.

You see, life is meant to be lived, and you (as I am certain, you are a fine person; who else would try to Google cooking marshmallows on the internet? eh?) are one who wants to make the experience a positive one. I can’t blame you, and yes, I agree with your intention.

Let’s live life to it’s fullest.

Summer is a time for enjoying life.
Summer is a time for enjoying life. I argue that it is a time to enjoy with friends and relatives. It is a time to spend with your children, and take them out to the ballgame. It is a time to be with friends and to enjoy a nice icy cold beer. It is a time to go out and enjoy the wonderful day. Image the great romantic events of the day under a pristine blue sky with white fluffy clouds and a nice warm breeze.

Wine

Ah, not everyone enjoys wine like I do. In fact, I have some wonderful friends from the Sudan that do not drink wine. No worries. They are still some of the most wonderful folk that I have ever met in the world.

Now, I like wine. I like how it tastes. I like how it makes me talkative. And when I get talkative, I just want to spend hours (yes, hours) chatting up a storm with the pretty girls that surround me. Ah, they all are so interesting, and they have such meaningful insight into things… you know, people, relationships, life, and dreams.) It is so wonderful. So wine opens me up to other people and I am so pleased to be part of their thoughts and opinions.

Summer with family.
What else is better than to spend the hot summer days with friends and family? You get some lawn chairs and you roast some meats, or vegetables (like corn for example) as is your preference. You enjoy some tasty libation… just enough to get you all into a talkative state and just have a great time. Maybe throw a foot ball around, play some Jarts, or barring that play some croquet. Eat. Drink. Talk. Be with friends. It’s a fundamental need for us a people; for us as humans; we need each other.

Now, of course, wine is not the ideal beverage to have marshmallows with. For when I was a kid, we drank bottles of coke and fresca. Never the less, other beverages of your preference make fine substitutions. For instance, icy cold beer. Or home-made lemonade or Southern style iced tea. To name just a few.

Southern style iced tea.
A shady front porch and a glass of this iconic Southern beverage are the perfect combination for a warm summer afternoon. (If you can’t find tea bags labeled “iced tea” at your grocery store, use any type of black tea bag. If family-size tea bags are available, substitute 2 family-size bags for the 6 regular-size bags. If you like your tea super-sweet, use 1 1/2 cups of sugar. If you’re preference isn’t as sweet, only add 1 cup.)

The idea is to have a ready beverage of cold drink to cool your throat after you eat that delicious toasty and roasted marshmallow.

Hotdogs

Historically, hotdogs would be the main meal in any camping and campfire experience. You would eat those delicious treats and then afterwards have a marshmallow. But you know, it doesn’t always work out that way.

A perfect camping food is hot dogs roasted over an open fire. Keep in  mind that if you are bringing hot dogs along for a camping excursion,  the meat needs to be kept cold until cooking time. You can use sticks to  hold the hot dogs in place; you can also bring skewers with you. To  avoid overcooking and to stay safe while preparing the hot dogs, keep  the meat a couple of inches away from the fire. 

-Our Everyday Life

When I was around seven years old, my parents paid for me to enjoy Summer Camp. This was in Bridgeport, Connecticut, and this story took place in the early half of the 1960’s. My folks paid the money for me and my sister to have the camping experience. And every day for two months a car would come and pick us up and we would spend the Summer day in the camp.

What my parents did not realize is that the camp was a scam.

All of us were placed under the authority of other children. Not under the authority of adults.

So, my parents thought that I would be under the care of teen-aged leaders, who reported to adults at the camp. In reality, we were set into groups of about ten kids per supervisor. The “supervisor” was a ten-year old girl or boy who hadn’t a clue as what to do.

We would arrive at the park.

Then, we would get into a group with our ten-year-old leader and then spend six to eight hours next to them doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. That’s right. There were paths that would open up into a clearing. Like a place to have a campfire. Except that there just wasn’t a fire. The ten year old children didn’t know how to make a fire. There were no seats either. No logs to sit down on. So we would spend about four hours just standing around in that tiny clearing.

They wouldn’t have a clue.

We wouldn’t have a clue.

We would wait there until a “leader: would come and tell us what to do. We would sit on the dirt floor in the clearing, and spend four hours doing absolutely nothing.

We would sit there and do nothing.

Now, in case I am not making myself clear; pay attention. We children would be under the are of another child, maybe three years older than us. They would be our “leader”. They would lead us into a clearing in the woods, and there we would sit without doing any activities at all, until it was time to go back home.

My parents paid “good money” for me to have this Summer Camping “Experience”.

Now for my narrative…

The Hotdog saga…

One day, we were told to ask our parents to provide us with hotdogs to cook over the fire. We were told specifically to ask for hotdogs and nothing else. We were told this numerous times. And it was made clear that we were to come to the camp the next day with HOTDOGS.

Cooking hotdogs on the fire.
This is how you cook hotdogs on the fire. You firstly use a stick. Not a metal rod. That’s for city slickers. Then you place the hotdog int he fire and adjust the location of the dog for your own personal tastes. Make sure not to burn your mouth when you remove the hotdog from the charred stick.

Well, my mother didn’t have hotdogs in the house. So she made up some hamburger patties and put them in aluminum foil and told me that “it would be all right“. The leader would know what to do.

It angers me to this day.

Nope.

My “leader” was a ten year old girl.

And, she hadn’t a clue as what to do. She told me that I could not eat because I did not follow the instructions. And as a result I did not eat.

The camp leaders, would only allow us to eat hotdogs. They did not know how to cook hamburgers.
The camp leaders, would only allow us to eat hotdogs. They did not know how to cook hamburgers. To a young child, these “much older” children seemed so knowledgeable to us.

Everyone ate their hotdogs. Me and anther fellow sat on the side hungry.

Yes, I know. You simply put the aluminum foil packet in the hot coals. But a ten year old child does not know that, and try explaining that to a seven year old child.

My raw hamburger was kept in the aluminum foil and left in the bag. I carried it home with me at the end of the day.

Yes, as an adult, I know that all she could of done was put the aluminum foil burger in the fire to cook. But she did not do that. She did not know that she could. She was young and hadn’t a clue.

And after the day, I went home famished. I mean, I was “starving”. I ate in big gulps and chewed down everything, everything even the peas.

I suppose that my mother and father called the “camp” and were assured that everything was fine and right.

Never the less, it still continued. All summer, I was a seven year old under the charge of ten year old children that only followed the instructions of their leaders.

Leaders. Yeah. Leaders, who were just raking in money left and right pretending to do things that they were not qualified to do.

The United States is full of rackets designed to extract money form you and your family.
The United States is full of rackets designed to extract money form you and your family. It can be part of a school-sponsored “program”. It could be a “fee” that you pay to do something. It could be a title that you need to purchase to do something. It’s all a series of bribes that con-artists have put in pace by legislation and law to turn you into a serf.

What a racket.

People! Listen up! DO NOT DELEGATE YOUR PARENTING RESPONSIBILITIES TO SOMEONE ELSE. They only want your money and could care less about the well-being of your child.

It’s just another scam.

Like how you need to pay a fee to fish. Pay a fee to add an addition onto your property, or pay for registration of your automobile. It is legislated bribery.

The last one hundred years in the United States has been nothing but law after law to extract money from YOU and your family.

  • Water fountains replaced with (for profit) bottles of water.
  • Local swimming pools filled in (for safety) and replaced with entry-fee pools.
  • Fishing, hunting, and trapping replaced with the need to purchase permits and the associated fees.

Moving on…

Sorry for being such a cantankerous old fellow.

It’s an experience that I had and one that will be lost in time unless I relate it here. I do hope, somehow, that someone listens to my history and adjusts their life accordingly.

Do not outsource your parenting responsibilities to anyone other than yourselves. The mother must stay home and raise the children. You need to budget your finances and place an emphasis on family. Not on money.

My parents wanted the best for their children. Just like you do for your children or your grandchildren. So the rest of this post is for you; the people who care.

Now, all that being said, I would like to conclude my video excursion into Asia. (As this is the conclusion of a long series of posts regarding Asia. )

Girl Loves Boy

This video is from Thailand. It is a music video. It shows a girl musing and thinking about another boy…

This is from Cambodia…

This video is from Cambodia. I happen to really love it. It truly and really captures the rhythm and pace of life in Cambodia.

This is from China…

I’s a song about missing a person that you love.

These kids are in an Elementary school somewhere, either in Cambodia or Laos.

I like it. It’s so cute.

Finally – Be the Rufus.

Rufus was the name of the good Samaritan that helped Jesus carry his cross up the hill. In life, there comes, from time to time, an opportunity or a task that SCREAMS out YOUR name. You drop everything and you go out and help others.

Be the Rufus.

Like this man. He’s driving along the road on his way to work, when suddenly he sees a lost and terrified child in the middle of a busy intersection during rush hour. What would you do?

Watch what he does.

Your reality is all up to YOU.

Be the Rufus.

Ok, everyone. That’s about it.

I’ve decided to change the way I post and future posts will reflect this. For now, if somehow you ended up here, you are at the tail end of a train of posts related to videos of Asia. You can leave or start at the beginning. It’s all up to you.

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Thank you for visiting. I hope that you enjoyed this post and maybe learned something new in the process. Have a wonderful rest of the day!

And, may your days and nights be filled with happiness.

Thank you.

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Some Fun Videos

Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.

Some fun videos of China - 1
Fun Videos of Asia - 2
Fun videos of Asia - 3
Fun videos of Asia - 4
Fun Videos of Asia - 5
Fun videos of Asia - 6
Fun videos of Asia - 7
Fun videos of Asia - 8
Fun videos of Asia - 9
Fun videos of Asia - 10
Fun videos of Asia - 11
Fun videos of Asia - 12
Fun videos of Asia - 13
Fun videos of Asia - 14
Fun Videos of Asia - 15
Fun videos of Asia -16

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 16)

We continue in our video exploration of Asia. This episode has some really great and noteworthy entries. Especially the Chinese reaction to the Trump Trade War.

Before we get moving on to the videos, let’s talk a little about the screen splash above. It is from the music video by Kid Rock called “First Kiss”. It is a tribute to the care-free and easy life of the 1970’s when people would go about and have fun and drink together.

Scenes from the Kid Rock song tribute to the 1970's lifestyle in the song "First Kiss".
Scenes from the Kid Rock song tribute to the 1970’s lifestyle in the song “First Kiss”.

Morning & Evening group exercises are still a common sight

When the Chinese government co-opted the “Dancing Grandmother” network, no one knew what to expect. They thought that at the bare minimum that it would tone down all the noise and obstreperous racket that infested the Chinese cities. Well, by making it part of the “healthy China” initiative, it has become very popular.

Read about this program, and why it exists here; (Don’t fret the link will open up into another tab. It’s a good read, I’ll tell you what.)

Fat China

Anyways, it is just as popular as ever and everyone from elementary and middle school ages to 90-year old grandmothers participate in the group dances (and learn a few dance moves in the process).

China responds to the Trump Trade War

China wants and desires very much to be on friendly and peaceful relations with the USA. In many ways, traditional conservative Chinese are very much like their American counterparts. They understand why Trump is doing what he is doing and feel that he is a formidable businessman. Not the “joke” that CNN, and the UK Guardian make him out as.

That being said, the attitude in China is that if you want to have some competition (say in sports, or in this case) in business, then they will fight to win. The Chinese will unleash everything, and they do fight to win.

So While Trump is instigating the “tariff wars”, exerting influences on up-and-growing tech companies (like Huawei), negotiating with other nations to stop doing business with China, and using CIA dirty tricks in Hong Kong, the Chinese are not sitting back. They released the brakes on the yuan-USD conversion and let the market decide. So far, the value of the yuan is falling relative to the USD, and now everything made in China is 30% cheaper relative to what it was before Trump.

But it’s more than that.

You might not like China. You might be under the impression that China is hard-core Marxist (it’s not), or you might be under other misconceptions as spread by the Western media. But one thing is very clear to anyone who has had any dealings with the Chinese; they don’t play around, and they fight to win.

The Chinese fight to win.

Here’s one of the more popular movies this Summer and you should look at it from the point of view of the Chinese in a “trade war” with the West…

Look at it as a friendly, but serious, message to Trump from Beijing.

Oh, you don’t think that it has anything to do with trade? Watch the clip again, and pay attention to the English dialog…

Who do you think you are?

You collect money from me. You don't share it.

Do as I say.

You are not qualified to make deals with me.

And the discussion continues…

If you quit, you can take this business too. I can get anybody to take care of it.

And then, the sheer arrogance of the Westerners reaches an explosion point when he says…

Will somebody get this yellow piece of fat to get out of here!

After that we see how the Westerner battles and demolishes the Chinese man. It’s strong. It’s vicious, and he dies.

He’s dead. The Westerner has won.

Then, it’s payback time.

Get together in Thailand

In the United States, at least during the 1960’s, the 1970’s, and well into the 1980’s mu friends and I would go cruising in our cars up and down the town streets. We would then go to specific spots. Much like the “Moon Tower” in the movie “Dazed and Confused” where we would party.

Which always involved beer, and often some kinds of other libation.

Hanging out
Hanging out. During the 1970’s we would all hang out together with friends and go drinking, singing, and dancing together in the countryside. At that time we would listen to Led Zep, and other classics of the 1970’s.

I don’t know if this is still an activity in the Untied States.

For some reason, I don’t think so. Simply because it would be one of the first things that busy-body democrats would try to regulate, fine, fee or make laws against.

Yah. You know this is true.

First Kiss by Kid Rock
Screen shot from the song “First Kiss” by Kid Rock. It’s a tribute to the days when young folk would go riding around the town and hanging out with each other. While many Americans wish and yearn for those day again, they are not gone. They might be banned or difficult int he USA, but the rest of the world still celebrates those times…everyday.

Well, it’s still a popular pastime in the rest of the world. Here’s what it’s like to gather with your 20-something friends and play around with along the Thailand-Cambodian border…

Everyday China

This next video takes place in Shanghai at night. yeah it’s super-typical. But what I would like to point out is some of the very common elements that are found all over China, that you might miss if you were not aware of it all.

When you watch the video, please pay attention to the painted road markings on the road. Notice that they have incorporated solar powered LED lighting that flashes to alert people. Notice the body cameras, radios, and lighting on the police officers. Notice the streets how clean they are and devoid of trash, as well as notice that there isn’t any graffiti anywhere.

You will also notice the raised walkway surfaces on the sidewalk. This is common all through China. It is for blind people so that they can make their way around town.

Watch the video and look for those things…

Hiphi – The Chinese Tesla

Of course, the vast bulk of storage batteries, electric motors, automotive controls, and complex wiring systems are all made out of China. (Outsourced from the USA since the mid 1990’s.) Therefore, it should not be any surprise that China is leading the world in the production of electric and hybrid vehicles.

Bet ya didn’t know that.

Not only are there more vehicles (on a quantitative basis) made in China, but there are far more models, types and variations. Heck, here in tiny Zhuhai, almost all the buses have been fully “green” (all electric) for two years now.

I like them that way. So quiet.

Big difference from the noisy gas-powered behemoths that lumber along.

Here’s one of the car brands. I place it here not because it’s the best or anything like that. I just like the design and the style. Oh, by the way, you can’t buy it in the USA. It’s going to be another ten or so years before the automotive regulations catch up with the innovations out of China. (That’s why the implementation of LED’s on American cars took 15 years, don’t you know. And, only five years in Germany and the UK.)

We become conditions to accept our chains.

This video is addressed to my fellow Americans, not all of them, but rather to the trolls who don’t read anything that I post. Those that don’t study the issues. Those that refuse to look at things from a third-person point of view and are not listening to my warnings.

– Warnings –

  • China is growing and it is not what you think it is.
  • China is a serious nation, run by serious people who got into positions of power through merit, not popularity.
  • China plays to win.
  • America was established as a Republic. But, today it is an Oligarchy.
  • We have grown used to the loss of liberty and freedom that America now represents. We do not realize that America today is the absolute opposite of what it was first established as.

Most Americans live a life in ignorance and fear. They don’t realize just how far down into tyranny they have fallen.

For instance, we pay taxes, and watch as the government overspends it. That is NOT in the benefit of the citizenry.

We believe that we own houses and cars, yet both are subject to confiscation by the government. That is NOT ownership.

We must submit to regulations, pay various fees for the most simple tasks and ask permission to do anything from selling lemonade in your front yard, to fishing.

People that is NOT freedom.

Americans do not realize how conditioned they are to their life as a serf. They have no idea that all these things are all chains and bindings that restrict their freedom.

Like this video aptly illustrates…

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 15)

We continue with the video exploration of Asia, as well as my often cantankerous narrative. As we proceed, let’s talk a little bit about the splash screen above. It’s from the wonder 1960’s movie “Our man Flint”, which is a sort of parody of 007 James Bond movies.

Our Man Flint is a 1966 American action film that parodies the James Bond genre. The film was directed by Daniel Mann, written by Hal Fimberg and Ben Starr, and starring James Coburn as master spy Derek Flint. The main premise of the film is that a trio of "mad scientists" attempt to blackmail the world with a weather-control machine. 

-Wikipedia.

James Coburn stars as super-spy Derek Flint in this action comedy which takes the tongue-in-cheek wit of the James Bond series and shifts it into high gear.

Flint is an ultra-sophisticated operative of international intelligence agency Z.O.W.I.E.

He’s a master of martial arts, electronic gadgetry (his cigarette lighter can perform 83 special functions), languages both human and animal (he can communicate with dolphins in a pinch), and even gives ballet lessons to the dancers of the Bolshoi.

Being a specially trained secret agent, he is able to rest most comfortably in the most unusual circumstances. Here he is getting a full weeks rest in a few hours by using his super powers of concentration.

So when his fellow agents begin dropping like flies, Z.O.W.I.E. assigns Flint the task of finding out who the killers happen to be.

One of the things that I, and many others, enjoyed is the bevy of attractive women that secret agents always seemed to have surrounding them. It comes with the territory… that is, as long as you know your real purpose… heh heh.

In LIke Flint with all the girls.
While James Bond was obviously the king of the international spy boom of the 1960s, there were many pretenders to the throne – Dean Martin’s Matt Helm, the Men (and Girl) From U.N.C.L.E., Richard Johnson’s Bulldog Drummond, television’s Maxwell Smart. even Neil Connery as 007’s alleged relative in Operation Kid Brother. The only super-agent who came close to Bond on the big screen was James Coburn’s know-it-all Derek Flint, the man from ZOWIE (Zonal Organisation for World Intelligence and Espionage).

Flint is the sort of fellow who meditates by suspending his life functions for a three hours, fills his spare time by compiling a dictionary of dolphin language or teaching ballet in Russia, and lives in a chic, gagdet-filled penthouse with four varied glamorous girlfriends.

It doesn’t pretend to be a serious thriller, though Coburn – the man who made silver hair and roll-neck pullovers into icons of cool – has some Bruce Lee-tought martial arts moves in acrobatic fight scenes which require him to toss stuntmen around the room.

By the time of the third James Bond film, 1964's Goldfinger,  the spy craze had exploded across pop culture, spattering the walls  with poison blow-dart ink pens and steely-eyed, ultra-virile heroes.  

Perhaps the Cold War fantasy adventures of "real men" ruggedly  vanquishing godless Commies and other evil empires, all while bedding  improbably beautiful women, were a meat-eating guy's antacid against the  discomforting reflux from real global tensions — not to mention  home-grown indigestion embodied by the Beatles,   antiwar protests, and the Women's Movement. 

Plus, utilizing the Cold  War for entertainment sure simplified things for moviegoers and  TV-watchers. Head-throbbingly complex geopolitical currents were reduced  to sprightly three-act suspense dramas that could be wrapped up within  two hours. 

Guns, gadgets, and girls were the primary colors of the  comic-book spy universe. Certainly there were serious-minded Bond  imitators, such as the Harry Palmer series starring Michael Caine. But  someone was bound to play the genre for laughs, and in short order the  Bond spoofs outnumbered the Bond movies themselves. 

In fact, the film  version of Ian Fleming's first Bond novel, Casino Royale, hit the  screen in '67 as a clowned-up comedy. 

Cocktail crooner Dean Martin  starred in four mixed efforts featuring soused secret agent Matt Helm.  Then as now, a Hollywood trend didn't end until it was well past tired,  and titles such as Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine and Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, both starring Vincent Price and his army of lethal fembots, made sure that we all tired quite thoroughly. 

The best of the spy-spoof bunch was 1965's Our Man Flint,  a hyper-kitschy and entertaining time capsule starring James Coburn as a  Bond surrogate played so straight you could shave with him. 

This  tongue-way-in-cheek action comedy garnered favorable reviews and became  Fox's third highest grossing film of the year. Coburn — terrific with  this dry, crackling material — is Derek Flint, ultra-secret agent aiding  Z.O.W.I.E. (Zonal Organization for World Intelligence and Espionage). 

Our Man Flint  made a shrewd move by sticking to the Bond template.  The brilliant and  resourceful Flint works alone, follows each clue to the next level,  employs superhuman physical and mental prowess, beds gorgeous gals, gets  captured, and prevents World Domination in an orgy of destruction at  the evildoers' secret volcano island. 

However, instead of being a  bozo-nosed vaudeville like the Austin Powers movies, Our Man Flint out-Bonds the Bond films by respectfully retooling the familiar Bond elements and then turning the knob to 11.  

-DVD Journal
Flint with many beautiful women.
There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment in beloved spy spoof Our Man Flint when an extra blatantly cops a feel from a curvy, scantily clad actress. This unintentional detail probably as much about Our Man Flint’s place in the firmament of swingin’-’60s camp as anything else in the picture. Released at pretty much the zenith of the “spy craze”—clinched by the James Bond films and carried on by slew of imitators on screens big and small—Our Man Flint introduced private superspy Derek Flint, as portrayed by the inimitable James Coburn amongst bevies of “babes.”

The plot is the usual hokum and Edward Mulhare isn’t really eccentric enough to compete in the villainy stakes, but Coburn is plainly enjoying himself so much, and the trimmings are so stylish, that it’s impossible not to enjoy.

Jerry Goldsmith provides a jaunty, hummable score. Coburn and Cobb returned, in similarly lightweight style, in a sequel, In Like Flint, which took the super-agent into outer space a decade before Roger Moore got there in Moonraker. The character later reappeared, played by Ray Danton, in Dead on Target, a 1976 TV pilot that didn’t go anywhere.

Flint with more women.
To the extent that Our Man Flint works, it does so due to its tossed-off wit. For instance, like the odd mismatch of names and faces for mad scientists Doctors Krupov (Rhys Williams), Wu (Peter Brocco), and Schneider (Benson Fong). And let’s not forget the sheer oddity of Coburn, the toothy, gangly character actor who nevertheless charms his way into stardom here with laid-back cool. You know, there’s definite nostalgic appeal in the shag-adelic style, which laid the groundwork for Austin Powers (which sampled Flint’s Presidential-hotline ringtone).

This movie is a classic of the spy-genre, in its all-out parody glory.

Age has only added a new sheen of humor, as we guffaw at the retro aura such as the kung-fu grips, the 1960’s womanizing, go-go dancing, and ridiculous faux-buddhist upper-class chicness.

Our hero, having just returned from teaching ballet  at Moscow's Bolshoi, is called into service. Z.O.W.I.E. agents have been  killed while seeking the mysterious masterminds behind G.A.L.A.X.Y, an  organization controlling the world's weather and holding humanity  hostage to a plan for a scientifically regimented (and otherwise  wonderfully beneficial) new world order. 

While enforcing The American  Way, Flint performs impromptu surgery, stops his heart for prolonged  periods, repeatedly annoys his flustered boss (Lee J. Cobb) with his  undisciplined ways, invents a Zippo lighter with 82 functions ("83 if  you want to light a cigar"), traces a poison through a bouillabaisse  recipe served in only one spot on Earth, jump-starts a man's heart via a  light bulb socket, wisecracks with British Agent "Triple-O Eight,"  judo-chops gangs of bad guys, avoids disintegration in an  electrofragmentizer, and finds his four live-in lovelies ensnared within  G.A.L.A.X.Y's Dr. Evil-like H.Q. 

Supported by Jerry Goldmsith's way  groovy musical score, Flint does it all while keeping his tux spotless,  his demeanor cool, and his women satisfied.

Comparisons between Flint's pastiche heroics and the Austin Powers series are obvious. However, Our Man Flint and its sequel, In Like Flint,  are exaggerated burlesques of their own time and the pop superspy  tropes that flourished then. Therefore, we can more accurately compare  the Flint flicks with Scream or Not Another Teen Movie,  two  sendups of contemporary conventions and clichés that had grown so  familiar to audiences that laughter was the only response left.  

-DVD Journal 

Our Man Flint is an essential entry in the genre of parody, and actually manages to stand on its own without knowledge of what it is trying to parody in a way that the more recent (and less sophisticated) Austin Powers has managed to do.

Yet where Austin Powers is slapstick hilarity, Our Man Flint is buffoonishly mock-serious…. a parody style that fits the spy-film genre far more comfortably and more satisfyingly… and has aged remarkably well for a highly topical parody.

All that is asked of me, I shall perform.
Derek Flint (James Coburn) is America’s answer to James Bond but, unlike his British counterpart, Flint is a bona-fide master of, well, everything: Disguises; Karate; Languages; Gadgets; Ballet; Zen (Flint ‘relaxes’ by suspending his stiffened body between two chairs, one under his head, one under his heels. No special effects or support required, Coburn could actually do this). Women throw themselves at him, and men want to be him. Everybody, that is, except his frazzled old boss Lloyd Cramden (Lee J. Cobb) who, against his better judgement, must persuade Flint to come out of retirement when the evil Galaxy corporation unleash their wicked plot to control the world’s weather. Flint’s globetrotting takes him from New York to Marseilles to Rome and, finally, to Galaxy’s island hideout (which bears a striking resemblance to the Fox Ranch seen in many other films), a spectacular paradise full of bikinied beauties spouting phrases like, “All that is asked of me I shall perform.”
And guys, you may want to think twice about watching Our Man Flint  with a wife or girlfriend. As part of their broad comedic approach,  both Flint films unashamedly parade coprolitic sexual attitudes that  would make even Mr. Powers wince. 

By their nature, '60s spy movies bared  a phallocentric revolt against the era's "sexual revolution." Our Man Flint  is giddy and harmless while still being sexist in ways that no one  could get away with today. Flint's sybaritic lifestyle includes a  Manhattan penthouse staffed by a quartet of pliant babes who, it's  clear, exist to provide him with anything he desires. 

The sexy  villainess (Gila Golan, Miss Israel 1961) likewise falls into his arms  and bedsheets within minutes. 

The film's final third is an adolescent  male Disneyland of bikini-clad centerfold models brainwashed to be  smiling, willing "pleasure units" who "offer their bodies for the good  of G.A.L.A.X.Y." 

Although played for good clean "Yeah, baby!" fun, the  scenes of Joe Blow henchmen queuing up to enjoy the "units" like Happy  Meals might even leave a few Maxim readers squirming. (Another  raise of an eyebrow is occasioned when, as the space age lair  self-destructs, we watch Flint and company cheer while hundreds of  uncondemned people, including a crowd-scene's worth of those "pleasure  units" we just saw, are blown to smithereens.) 

-DVD Journal  
In LIke Flint movie.
Our Man Flint contains lots of nods to his more famous British counterpart, James Bond, in several silly ways. At one point we encounter a celebrity agent known only as ‘0008’ (Bob Gunner, who looks a bit like Sean Connery), a spy with his own series of novels. Flint asks if the criminal organization known as SPECTRE could be involved, and 0008 replies, “It’s bigger than SPECTRE!” Earlier in the film, Flint is initially offered a Walther PPK and a briefcase with a concealed throwing knife – as seen in Dr. No (1962) – which he dismisses as crude.

This is a great movie.

It takes you back to a time when it was fine to talk about sex, and sexual situations without offending anyone. As such, it is a precious look at a world that the United States has lost and may never recover again. I would suggest the reader go ahead and watch this movie. Watch it before it is either banned, or the person who views the movie get penalized by the up-and-coming social-scoring methodology.

Anyways, back to Asia…

Sword Dance Exercise – China

It’s perhaps a cultural thing, but the first time that I visited Asia, I went to Hong Kong. There, at the wee hours of 5 am (jet lag, don’t you know) I saw the early risers get up and do their daily morning exercises.

Some would exercise doing Tai Ji, others would do the group dances, and others would do various forms of martial arts. The most popular is a kind of Kung Fu with fans (the “fan dance”) and others using swords. Here’s a cute video of a girl who is obviously a master of this kind of exercise / kung fu / dance. Taken in mainland China…

Cambodian Singer

I came across this gal singing her heart out in this music video. It think it’s well done, but might sound a little strange to our western ears. I love how she is putting all her emotion and passion into the music and song. I also love the simplicity of it. You don’t have a lot of bling, and complex African-American rhythms with huge assed girls wagging their asses all over the place.

I think that this gal is from Cambodia, but she could as well be from Laos or Thailand. I do think that she is great and she is certainly worth a listen.

No it’s NOT easy.

I commented on an essay that I found on LinkedIN the other day. In it, Fionn Wright wrote his comments on a statement by one of Donald Trumps’ advisors. Who said…

“The Chinese economy is crumbling. It's just not the powerhouse it was 20 years ago." 

- White House Economic Advisor Larry Kudlow‬ August 2019.

This is a pretty drastic comment. “Crumbling”? WTF. Ain’t nothing “crumbling” don’t you know.

So, Fionn Wright wrote…

What a simple Google search tells us: Chinese Economy: 1999 GDP: 1.09 trillion (nominal) Figure for 2019: 14.2 trillion (nominal) That’s 13X 

1999 GDP per capita: $3,800 (PPP) 2019 GDP per capita: $19,520 (PPP)  More than 5X 

The #ChineseEconomy has also surpassed the US in terms of PPP and is #1 in the world 

Larry Kudlow is the “Economic” Advisor to the #WhiteHouse So I have to assume that he knows this If he is referring to the #GDP growth slowdown, it’s still 3X the US 

That would lead me to the conclusion that he is consciously misleading people The main problem here is not that he’s lying (or really incompetent) It’s that a lot of Americans will actually believe these kinds of “absurd” statements as Ian Bremmer puts it (People in Britain do too - welcome to #Brexit) 

Business Insider, CNBC, MSN and a host of other media sources publish this as if what he is saying makes sense. If this isn’t #FakeNews I don’t know what is? 🤷‍♂️  

And, you know what? He’s right. Compare the numbers.

So I wrote…

The propaganda is flowing hard and fast. Do not think that the recent upsurge in HK protests is organic. Trump is involved in full-scale passive-aggressive economic warfare. But, you know what, the Chinese are the toughest on the planet. 

I hope that things ratchet down a peg or two. 

All in all, pretty benign.

I just agreed with him, and argued that there are forces bigger than us that are taking place. Donald Trump is fighting this war on behalf of the American people, and China is striking back. Both are formidable forces, and I hope that it gets resolved soon.

To which case, this Mr. Caspar Smeets (A pro-Gay Activist, who works as a design director) responded to me most aggressively…

Could you not promote the Chinese Dream in its own right without your political rants and America-bashing; on LinkedIn out if all platforms? You tell us zero news, sound so childish, unnecessary, uninspiring, and boring for someone claiming to help people achieve their Chinese dream, which incidentally is of course based on an American concept. Go play on Twitter or something where you can start your own private trade war. 

Pretty uncalled for. But that’s a Jack-Ass for you.

He’s from the UK and living in Oman. He knows nothing about China, never been to China, and comes at me out of the blue with this kind of response.

I’ll tell you what, it’s disheartening. For me, as the target of such shit, it hurts. It’s sort of along the lines of this…

Well, then out of the blue, a fellow comes to my defense. He writes…

 Caspar, got out of bed the wrong side this morning?   

The conversation continues. With sparing banter back and forth from the antagonist, who eventually admits to why he was so nasty responding to my rather bland opinion. He says…

Don't get me started on happy go lucky western people getting all smart about a totalitarian, repressive, rascist dictatorship over the back of America. 
  • Totalitarian, I can understand. There is one party. The traditional party. If you want anything other than conservative, traditional China, you will suffer.
  • Repressive, it depends on who is being repressed. I’m not gay, transgender, I’m not a SJW trying to force other people to do things such as banning straws, or turning playgrounds into “safe spaces”. I’ve been living here heading towards two decades. So far, I’ve never been repressed.
Playground Comparisons
  • Racist? China has over 65 minorities, and invites everyone into the nation (provided they have something to contribute). They have enormous public work projects all over the world and are almost single-handedly building up a middle-class in Africa.

This Jack-Ass doesn’t even realize that I am a conservative, American-expat, Trump follower who lives in China. That I wish peace between both nations. That I recognize that both sides have valid arguments and are engaged into a trade war that I hope, will soon be resolved.

He just shows just how off-the-wall insane these progressive democrat Marxists are. They really, really are just like those NPC meme’s you see on the internet.

NPC Meme describing progressive Marxists
NPC Meme describing progressive Marxists.

At which point, my rescuer replies…

Well, at least we're all in agreement about the US being a totalitarian, repressive, racist dictatorship. That's something we can build on. 

Ugh!

Moving away from the nonsense…

In case you are all wondering, I dropped out of this nonsense a long time ago. Every nation has it’s strengths and weaknesses.

  • America = Oligarchy. With citizens treated as serfs for profit. Maintains the appearance of a Democracy (Modified Republic into a Democracy) with zero accountability. The Oligarchy control the mobs by offering social re-engineering efforts via propaganda outlets.
  • China = Single party, traditional conservative Chinese.

Which is better?

It depends on who you are and your role within the stratified communities that make up those two nations. Different people have different situations and thus would have different points of view on this.

Certainly if you are wealthy, America is best for you. There are two sets of laws, rules, public discourse, and juridical systems that favor you. They favor you to a point that the government will pay you at tax-time rather than you owing money to them. They favor you to a point that you can commit treason, sell of American assets, get people killed, and break just about every law in the book including the systematic rape of children, and be allowed a pass.

Also, if you are dirt poor, illiterate, lazy, slothful or have addictions, America is also better. As you will be taken cared for and given special treatment than the rest of society. Thus people with mental illnesses, the gender confused, and those misfits that are not trying to fit within society will be cared for with “special” treatment.

However, if you are a working “stiff”, middle class, with ambitions to move up the social ladder, then most certainly China will offer you more opportunities, take less of your money, and provide a much healthier place for you to raise your family within.

That’s just the way it is today.

A comparision of the social-economic favortism that the countries of CHina nd the United States can provide for their citizens.
A comparison of the social-economic favoritism that the countries of China and the United States can provide for their citizens.

The United States, being an oligarchy, is perfect for the massively wealthy, or the incredibly poor. The nation has systems in place for people within those two spheres of influence to prosper within.

China however, provides advantages for the vast bulk of the citizenry, say 80 – 90%, though it is an environment where the poorest and the wealthiest may find disadvantage.

Looking at the nations as automobiles

Here’s a fun exercise for those of you who don’t like to read charts, tables and look at numbers. Think of each nation as a car. That’s it, think of each nation as a wonderful car.

Now, the United States started off with the most pure and perfect automobile design ever conceived in the history of the world. God created man. Men creates governments. The governments serve man so that they may serve God.

Wonderful. Pure and simple.

So this is America as it was designed and forged back in 1776…

America as desgined. Simple, robuste and pure. This is an image of what America (as designed) would look like. A beautiful Bughatti.
America as designed. Simple, robust and pure. This is an image of what America (as designed) would look like. A beautiful Bugatti.

But, you know, times change. People want to make “improvements” and game the system for their own benefit. You know, like ignoring the tenth Amendment, setting up “free Speech restriction zones”, and of course going “Red Flag” on gun laws. Sort of like this post…

Parable about America

Anyways, all these changes has resulted in America looking quite different from it’s original intent. Indeed, today America looks something like this…

This is what America would look like if it was a car.
This is what America would look like if it was a car.

Of course, other nations would look quite different.

China, where I live, would be more direct, traditional, conservative and functional. It’s rather harsh on the rules and doesn’t throw money away on trivialities. So, for China, it might look something like this…

This is what China would look like if it was a car.
This is what China would look like if it was a car.

To better understand the point that I am trying to make, you can check out this link below (it opens up in a separate tab)…

Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

Sex Doll Technology is really advancing…

In China there are two industries that you (the reader) should keep your eyes on. One is the robotic industry, and the other is the sex-doll industry. Both industries concentrate on specific features, function and utility. However, both like to use human appearing body structures.

As both industries lie within close proximity of each other geographically, I can well anticipate cross-over technology advancements within the next five years. Just like how China took the personal drone industry from zero to the powerhouse it is today.

El paso shooting survivor’s mother left her gun home the day of the mass shooting by a radical progressive Bernie Sanders follower…

OMG! I just read this today. Check it out…

“Christopher Grant said he recognized the sound of gunshots, “So I ran toward my mother to try to shield her and I’m like, mom — cause my mom, she’s a gun-wielding grandma. She carries a snub nose Smith & Wesson, .38 special with a built-in scope in it, everywhere she goes,” but she did not have it on her.

“An hour before we went to Walmart, she decides, ‘We’re just going to Walmart, I’m going to put it in my room.’ So when I went to her, no gun. And I was like, ‘Oh, my God, you got to be kidding me.’”

Grant ran off and saw the shooter in the Walmart parking lot and started to throw bottles at him to distract him. The shooter then started to fire his rifle at him, hitting Grant.”

Not the best way to make money…

The police broke up this counterfeiting ring. Here’s a video of their operation. I found it interesting.

OK, let’s move on…

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 14)

Yes. Here we are going to explore Asia. This entire post is devoted to this. Except that we are going to take just a little bit of time to talk about something else.

As we continue in our video exploration of Asia, and my various rants of stuff, let’s first explore one of my all time movies. You know which one, don’t you? It’s from the photo splash screen above.

The movie is “Casablanca”, and it’s a classic.

I am so amazed at how many millennials have never heard of this move, nor watched it. It is stunning to me. Which is, perhaps, why I am going to spend a larger than usual amount of time writing about it.
Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Lost in Love in Casablanca.

Casablanca is a film about the personal tragedy of occupation and war. It speaks to the oppression of the one side – and the heroism and self-deprecation of the other. From opportunists, to isolationists – from patriots to disenchanted lovers – the film has everything a man or woman would enjoy.

I cannot go with you or ever see you again.

Bravery, courage, intrigue, romance, beauty and love. Leading actors to please any appetite.

Watching this film is to step back to a world that doesn’t exist – yet to know it. It is to experience lives that have never been lived – but are “real to you.” It is to know pain and joy, pride and pity for characters that are a fiction – yet are so real that you can’t help but get lost in their story.

So what exactly is so special about it? Is it its great genre mix, never  equaled by another film? When we think of 'Casablanca' first, we  remember it as a romantic film (well, most of us do). 

But then again,  its also a drama involving terror, murder and flight. 

One can call it a  character study, centering on Rick. And there are quite a few moments of  comedic delight, just think of the pickpocket ("This place is full of  vultures, vultures everywhere!") or the elderly couple on the last  evening before their emigration to the US ("What watch?"). 

But  'Casablanca' is not only great as a whole, it still stands on top if we  break it apart and look at single lines of dialog, scenes or  performances alone. 

Amazing cast, memorable dialogue, unforgettable story. Through this film, Casablanca will always live in my heart and I will think of its characters as family.

Seeing it for the first time is truly the start of a romance with ideals that will live in you long after credits end.

Casablanca 1
Not only is the dialog great, it’s unforgettably delivered, especially by Humphrey Bogart (“I was misinformed.”) and Claude Rains (“I am shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on here”). Many of scenes have become a part of film history; the duel of ‘Die Wacht am Rhein’ and ‘La Marseillaise’ is probably one of the greatest scenes ever shot, and the last scene is probably even familiar to the few people who’ve never seen ‘Casablanca’.

The Nazi envoy, Major Heinrich Strasser puts it: ‘Human life is cheap in Casablanca.” Of course because a man may be executed in its crowded market before Marshal Pétain’s portrait or where a charming girl may guarantee an exit visa by spending her night with the Prefect of Police…

Rick’s Café is the point of intersection, the espionage center, the background for Allied offensive, the focal point as refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe seek to gain exit visas to Lisboa…

The interesting club so well organized, leads to an open arena of conspiracy, counterspies, secret plans, black market transactions, in which the games and fights are between arrogant Nazis, patriotic French, idealists, murderers, pickpockets and gamblers around a roulette wheel, where a ball could rest on Rick’s command against the settled number 22…

Casablanca a love lost.
The cast is one of its main strengths, not just Bogart and Bergman but also the fine supporting cast. Rains, Greenstreet, Lorre, and the others are indispensable to the atmosphere and the story, and each has some very good moments.

“Casablanca” is an adventure film which victory is not won with cannons and guns… The action, the fight, the war takes place inside Rick’s walls rather than outside…

But who is this Rick? What is his magical power? His secret weapon? Rick is the anti-fascist with hard feelings, the former soldier of fortune who has grown tired of smuggling and fighting, and is now content to sit out the war in his own neutral territory…

Hum... A little like myself, eh?

Even loyalty to a friend doesn’t move him as he refuses to help Ugarte, a desperately frightened little courier who is fleeing from the police…

Casablanca 3
This is a film that MUST belong in every video collection in the U.S. is not in the world. The stories about it’s making are legendary from the constant rewrites to the apocrypha of casting stories. What is amazing to me, and the reason I believe it holds audiences almost spellbound in successive viewings, is the connection with the horrors of World War II was almost every single cast member.

Emphatically, Rick says, “I stick my neck out for nobody.”

Play it again Sam.

Ah, but we know he will do just that in a very short time, for into his quiet life comes a haunting vision from his past, the beautiful woman he still loves and bitterly remembers…

But…

But…

But, she is married to an underground leader and she desperately needs those papers Rick conveniently now has in his possession…

OMG!

The cynical Rick’s facade of neutrality begins to weaken as he recalls the bittersweet memories of his past love affair, memories triggered repeatedly when the strains of “As Time Goes By” come from Sam, his piano-playing confidante…

But “Casablanca” basic message is a declaration of self-sacrifice… War. World II demanded all!

The words stated by Rick at the airport had their impact: ‘The problems of three people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.’ It goes without saying that Bogart is incomparable when he seems most like himself…

His way with a line makes “Casablanca” dialog part of the collective memory: ‘I remember every detail. The Germans wore gray. You were blue.’

Rick and lost in love.
Everyone in this film is fabulous, but it is the chemistry of Rick (Bogart) and Ilsa (Bergman) been truly holds the film together. When I saw this film almost frame by frame in the limited book series of classic films that were produced in the late 1960s, I was stunned by the subtlety of facial expressions that conveyed so much of Rick Blaine’s character by a marvelous actor Humphrey Bogart.

There is a reason why he was named the actor of the century. While every person in the film becomes a real flesh and blood presence, the story of Rick and Ilsa is the center of this cinema feast.

Intermixed in this intrigue are all the fascinating and beautifully acted supporting roles…. With his customary skill, Claude Rains plays Major Renault, a prefect of police who is like Bogart in many ways…

He, too, claims neutrality, but is definitely against the Nazis…

He is Rick’s most devoted adversary, tauntingly calling the man a “sentimentalist” and delivering his share of cynically amusing lines…

But, what about us?

When he makes a small bet and is encouraged to make a bigger one, he remarks that he is only a “poor corrupt official.”

Ingrid Bergman is fascinating as the lovely heroine, the mysterious impossible woman of an impossible love, the tender mood of every man, the love-affair, the quality of being romantic, the traditional woman enclosed by two rivals, symbol of a besieged Europe…

Time to say goodby.
CASABLANCA is the best treatment ever of the ancient theme of the love triangle. Set in World War II Casablanca, a Moroccan city under the control of the collaborationist Vichy French government, the movie starts with a news wire that two German couriers have been murdered and their letters of transit stolen. Each letter will permit one person to leave Casablanca to a neutral country.

Paul Henreid is Victor Laszlo, the anti-Nazi resistance leader, seeking in Morocco the two letters of transit signed by General De Gaulle…

Here’s looking at you kid.

Sidney Greenstreet is the black marketeer on good terms with Rick, the rival owner of the ‘Blue Parrot,’ the acceptable face of corruption…

Peter Lorre is Ugarte, the racketeer, the dealer of anything illegal, the killer, driven into a corner by the Vichy police, who has given Rick two letter of transit…

Enter Humphrey Bogart as Rick Blaine, owner of the shady but cheerful Cafe Americaine. Rick  is a cynical and hard-nosed man whose motto is, "I stick my neck out  for nobody." Like many a cynic, Rick is an embittered ex-idealist, still  nursing his wounds from being abandoned by his lover Ilsa (Ingrid  Bergman). By chance he falls into possession of the missing letters of  transit. 

Enter  Ilsa, who comes to Casablanca on the arm of Czech Resistance leader  Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), a few steps ahead of the Nazi police. We  now have three people and two letters of transit. Who will reach  America, and who will stay in Casablanca? I know no other movie that so  perfectly balances humor, romance, and drama. 

The  soul of good drama lies in presenting characters with hard choices, and  few choices are as hard, or as illuminating of the protagonists'  makeup, as the choices in CASABLANCA. All of the characters must decide  what they will give up for love, for honor, and for themselves. The  scenes of Rick and Ilsa's love, years ago in Paris, are some of the  finest romantic scenes in cinema. 

And  the humor, particularly in the person of Casablanca's Prefect of  Police, Louis Renault, has contributed dozens of dry witticisms to our  everyday language - "I am shocked! Shocked! - "The Germans wore gray,  you wore blue." - "I was misinformed." - "It would take a miracle to get  you out of Casablanca, and the Germans have outlawed miracles." 

So  perfectly blended are these three major elements that you cannot point  to a single shot or scene that should have been eliminated from the  movie. Never try to watch only one scene from CASABLANCA; you will  inevitably be absorbed until the very end of the film. It is little  short of miraculous that the chaotically mismanaged shooting of this  movie resulted in such a magnificent final product; it speaks volumes  for luck and for Owen Marks' and Michael Curtiz' post-production  editing.  
At the table in Casablanca.
A scene still from the 1943 Academy Award®-winning film “Casablanca” features (l to r) Humphrey Bogart, Claude Rains, Paul Henried and Ingrid Bergman. Bogart received an Academy Award nomination in the Lead Actor category while Claude Rains was honored with a nomination in the Supporting Actor category. “Casablanca” received eight Academy Award nominations in total and won three Oscars® including Best Picture. Restored by Nick & jane for Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans Website: http:www.doctormacro.com. Enjoy!

Conrad Veidt is the very essence of German rigidity, unfeeling, unconcerned about life, but firmly believing in the foolish ideology of his Nazi compatriots…

“Casablanca” covers many highlights: The Marseillaise against the Horst Wessel song inspiring sequence; the blissful days in Paris; Ilsa’s emotional words to Rick in occupied Paris; the champagne toast; Ilsa’s request to Sam; the poetry of the magic words and the beautiful voice of Dooley Wilson; Captain Renault’s words in the airport; and the farewell…

The magic that developed from the teaming of Bogart and Bergman is enough to make a new romantic figure out of the former tough guy…

To his cynicism, his own code of ethics, his hatred of the phoniness in all human behavior, he now added the softening traits of tenderness and compassion and a feeling of heroic commitment to a cause…

They helped him complete the portrayal of the ideal man who all men wished to rival…

Casablanca and the fat man.
In December 1941, American expatriate Rick Blaine owns an upscale nightclub and gambling den in Casablanca. “Rick’s Café Américain” attracts a varied clientele, including Vichy French and German officials, refugees desperate to reach the still-neutral United States, and those who prey on them.

Although Rick professes to be neutral in all matters, he ran guns to Ethiopia during its war with Italy and fought on the Loyalist side in the Spanish Civil War. Petty crook Ugarte boasts to Rick of “letters of transit” obtained by murdering two German couriers. The papers allow the bearers to travel freely around German-controlled Europe and to neutral Portugal, and are priceless to the refugees stranded in Casablanca. Ugarte plans to sell them at the club, and asks Rick to hold them.

Before he can meet his contact, Ugarte is arrested by the local police under the command of Captain Louis Renault, the unabashedly corrupt Vichy prefect of police. Ugarte dies in custody without revealing that he entrusted the letters to Rick.

One can look at hundreds of films produced during this period without finding any whose composite pieces fall so perfectly into place…

Its photography is outstanding, the music score is inventive, the editing is concise and timed perfectly…

Bogart’s and Bergman’s love scenes create a genuinely romantic aura, capturing a sensitivity between the two stars one would not have believed possible…

Rick in love in Casablanca.
Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman starred in “Casablanca,” the Oscar®-winning film of 1943. Bogart was nominated for an Academy Award® in the Lead Actor category for his portrayal of Café Americain owner Rick Blaine. In total, “Casablanca” received eight Oscar nominations and won three, including Best Picture. Restored by Nick & jane for Dr. Macro’s High Quality Movie Scans Website: http:www.doctormacro.com. Enjoy!

“Casablanca” is a masterpiece of entertainment, an outstanding motion picture which brought Bogart his first Academy Award nomination (he lost to Paul Lukas for “Watch On the Rhine”) and won Awards for Best Picture of the Year, Best Director and Best Screenplay…

 There is a scene about halfway through the movie Casablanca that has  become commonly known as 'The Battle of the Anthems' throughout the  film's long history. A group of German soldiers has come into Rick's  Café American and are drunkenly singing the German National Anthem at  the top of their voice. Victor Lazlo, the leader of the French  Resistance, cannot stand this act and while the rest of the club stares  appalled at the Germans, Lazlo orders the band to play 'Le Marseilles  (sic?)' the French National Anthem. With a nod from Rick, the band  begins playing, with Victor singing at the top of HIS voice. This in  turn, inspires the whole club to begin singing and the Germans are  forced to surrender and sit down at their table, humbled by the crowd's  dedication. This scene is a turning point in the movie, for reasons that  I leave to you to discover. 

As I watched this movie again  tonight for what must be the 100th time, I noticed there was a much  smaller scene wrapped inside the bigger scene that, unless you look for  it, you may never notice. Yvonne, a minor character who is hurt by Rick  emotionally, falls into the company of a German soldier. In a land  occupied by the Germans, but populated by the French, this is an  unforgivable sin. She comes into the bar desperately seeking happiness  in the club's wine, song, and gambling. Later, as the Germans begin  singing we catch a glimpse of Yvonne sitting dejectedly at a table alone  and in this brief glimpse, it is conveyed that she has discovered that  this is not her path to fulfillment and she has no idea where to go from  there. As the singing progresses, we see Yvonne slowly become inspired  by Lazlo's act of defiance and by the end of the song, tears streaming  down her face, she is singing at the top of her voice too. She has found  her redemption. She has found something that will make her life never  the same again from that point on. 

Basically, this is Casablanca  in a nutshell. On the surface, you may see it as a romance, or as a  story of intrigue, but that is only partially correct.

The thing  that makes Casablanca great is that it speaks to that place in each of  us that seeks some kind of inspiration or redemption. On some level,  every character in the story receives the same kind of catharsis and  their lives are irrevocably changed. Rick's is the most obvious in that  he learns to live again, instead of hiding from a lost love. He is  reminded that there are things in the world more noble and important  than he is and he wants to be a part of them. Louis, the scoundrel, gets  his redemption by seeing the sacrifice Rick makes and is inspired to  choose a side, where he had maintained careful neutrality. The stoic  Lazlo gets his redemption by being shown that while thousands may need  him to be a hero, there is someone he can rely upon when he needs  inspiration in the form of his wife, who was ready to sacrifice her  happiness for the chance that he would go on living. Even Ferrai, the  local organized crime leader gets a measure of redemption by pointing  Ilsa and Lazlo to Rick as a source of escape even though there is  nothing in it for him. 

This is the beauty of this movie. Every  time I see it (and I have seen it a lot) it never fails that I see some  subtle nuance that I have never seen before. Considering that the  director would put that much meaning into what is basically a throw away  moment (not the entire scene, but Yvonne's portion) speaks bundles  about the quality of the film. My wife and I watched this movie on our  first date, and since that first time over 12 years ago, it has grown to  be, in my mind, the greatest movie ever made. 

-A Masterwork for all Time
A great romance.
“Casablanca” is a great romance, not only for being so supremely entertaining with its humor and realistic-though-exotic wartime excitement, but because it’s not the least bit mushy. Take the way Rick’s face literally breaks when he first sees Ilsa in his bar, or how he recalls the last time he saw her in Paris: “The Germans wore gray, you wore blue.”

There’s a real human dimension to these people that makes us care for them and relate to them in a way that belies the passage of years. For me, and many, the most interesting relationship in the movie is Rick and Capt. Renault, the police prefect in Casablanca who is played by Claude Rains with a wonderful subtlety that builds as the film progresses. Theirs is a relationship of almost perfect cynicism, one-liners and professions of neutrality that provide much humor, as well as give a necessary display of Rick’s darker side before and after Ilsa’s arrival. But there’s so much to grab onto with a film like this.

You can talk about the music, or the way the setting becomes a living character with its floodlights and Moorish traceries. Paul Henreid is often looked at as a bit of a third wheel playing the role of Ilsa’s husband, but he manages to create a moral center around which the rest of the film operates, and his enigmatic relationship with Rick and especially Ilsa, a woman who obviously admires her husband but can’t somehow ever bring herself to say she loves him, is something to wonder at.

My favorite bit is when Rick finds himself the target of an entreaty by a Bulgarian refugee who just wants Rick’s assurance that Capt. Renault is “trustworthy,” and that, if she does “a bad thing” to secure her husband’s happiness, it would be forgivable.

Rick flashes on Ilsa, suppresses a grimace, tries to buy the woman off with a one-liner (“Go back to Bulgaria”), then finally does a marvelous thing that sets the whole second half of the film in motion without much calling attention to itself.

Time to go in Casablanca.
Love and sacrifice during WWII underlie the story about a café owner named Rick (Humphrey Bogart), and his link to two intellectual refugees from Nazi occupied France. Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) and Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid) seek asylum here in politically neutral Casablanca and, like other European refugees, gravitate to Rick’s upscale café, near the city’s airport, with its revolving searchlight.

Rick is a middle-aged cynic who also has a touch of sentimentalism, especially for people in need, like Ilsa and Victor. The film’s story is ideal for romantics everywhere.

I wish I didn’t love you so much.

Sorry, for that long narrative. Let’s get back to Asia, shall we.

Faded. Music in China.

First stop is a DJ version of the song “Faded”. Faded is a song made popular by Alan Walker. It is very popular in China. As such, there have been many people who have used the song and music to manufacture “DJ” versions of the song.

There are many of them. Some of the best mix a kind of pop-rock with guitar solos and a background of war and machine-gun fire. Others, just take the melody and mix in Chinese dialog.

When done this way, it becomes a track that would evoke period of deep reflection while remembering the words of others who may or may not have been close to you. In the example below, you can well guess the complexity of those thoughts even though most would not have a clue as to what anyone was saying.

DJ Ricardo – Faded (英雄联盟台词版)

El Rusbo’ notices the roar of silence…

You know, El’ Rusbo had a great dialog on his progam on 7Aug19. In it he discussed what is going on while the American news media are going full-bore anti-Trump, anti-middle class America. Here’s an excerpt…

 
Trump Support Grows Stronger — and More Quiet — by the Day
Aug 7, 2019 
                                            
x----snip

 Well, it’s not entirely true, but I’ll try to make the point. There  aren’t any, per se, Republican voters right now. There are Trump voters.  There are Trump supporters and everybody else. Most of them are  Republican, and Trump’s approval rating within the Republican Party  still stands at 90 to 92%, and it may be even higher now. Those people  are totally behind Trump. They are fully, quietly supportive of Trump  and his agenda. They grow stronger and more quiet by the day, and that’s  the great dichotomy. They are growing stronger, but they are shutting  up.
 
They don’t want to make themselves targets. But they are seething out  there. This is what I think the breakdown is. I think there are more  and more Trump voters. Trump’s approval rating is at 49%. You go to  state by state, and some states show him the losing there, but this is  16 months before the election. So there’s way too much time for any  polling data here to be accurate. It’s nothing more than an interesting  point of conversation at this point. But I really think that tends to  describe the political lay of the land.

 And the one thing that I think that is happening (just to reinforce  this) that nobody is reporting on at all — not even what you would  consider friendly outlets like Fox — is I think that the base support  for Trump is solidifying and I think it is growing because I think those  people are seething. They are the ones being called white supremacists.  They are the ones being called white nationalists. They are the ones  being blamed for all this, and they know they are not responsible for  it, and they know that Donald Trump isn’t responsible for it.

 They know that most of the rhetoric in this country that is inciting  extremism emanates from the left. Most of the activity that incites  extremism and violence emanates from the left. Do I need to give you the  organizations? Antifa. Black Lives Matter. I could go down the list.  Planned Parenthood. These are people who do this as a way of life. The  basic Trump supporter (you), you’re just out there. Some of you are  probably not totally invisible, but the grand majority of Trump  supporters is just out there seething.

 Look, I think I’m a typical Trump supporter, as far as you can define  “typical.” And I am. I’m seething over this stuff. Each and every day,  I’m seething over it. Now, don’t misunderstand. This doesn’t mean I’m  depressed. This stuff literally ticks me off! Every time I hear these  clowns throw out the term “white supremacist,” “white supremacy,” it  ticks me off, and it makes me want to defeat them even more. It makes me  want them to go down in flames even more — and in this, I believe I am  typical. 

I like his phrase “seething”.

It is what is going on. Be advised.

Chinese Hospital

China, as an enormous nation, has a wide hospital network. These include smaller local clinics and hospital branches. Like in the United States, they also have training and teaching hospital as well. The quality varies from region to region, but it is very easy to find a hospital suitable for what ever problem ails you.

In general, I have found the hospitals to be competent, staffed with caring and trained workers, and while the appearance varies from one hospital to the next, most Chinese hospitals are up to date and equipped with the latest in technology.

Aside from the handful of village hospitals that I have attended, most hospitals (and I have attended them for various reasons, many and yes, many times) all tend to look like this…

All with costs and prices far, far, far, FARRRRRR below what you would find in the United States. I think that the reason for this is that if the hospital or doctor tries to scam you or work in some kind of “kick-back” scheme through insurance or other legalized-bribery method, the Corruption Police will be unleashed.

Many regulations, agencies that require registration to work, fees, and other hidden costs are legalized ways for collecting bribes. Over the last 100 years, people have gamed the United States to extract as much money as possible from the citizens living there.

People, you DO NOT WANT the corruption police crashing through your window at night.

Thailand Beauty

My other posts were so serious with all the protests in China, and all that. I know these people “just want” “freedom and democracy”, though they are trying to appeal to Americans who live in an Oligarchy disguised as a Democracy (as evolved from a Republic). It’s all messed up.

The world has been gamed by the wealthy over the last 100 years, and now most people are serfs working on a plantation where everything they do has some kind of cost associated with it. This is most especially true in the United States and the UK. No so much elsewhere.

Life is all about love.

Here is some “lighter fare”. This is a cute girl in Thailand. I like the local rural restaurant that looks like an airplane, the green lush trees, and the blue skies. If it wasn’t for the gold temples over the next hill you would think that it’s in China.

Chinese Beauty

For comparison purposes, here is a similar video of a girl in China. As you can well see, that while the fashions are different, and the behavior and demeanor is different, there is a similarity that cannot be ignored. Ah. I do so love Asia.

European Beauty

Sometimes I get emails from trolls and other confused people. They seem to be under the impression that I need to curb what I write, or present so as not to offend anyone.

Nonsense!

If you are offended you can leave. I am far too old and too grouchy to tone down my thoughts for someone who has the emotions of an infant.

That being said, I do not want people to think that I do not appreciate other forms of human beauty. I am an equal-opportunity girl-watcher. I find so many women beautiful, and you would be so absolutely stunned at how wide ranging my tastes are.

For starters… here’s an European beauty. Isn’t she awesome? Wouldn’t you just love to take her out on a date, eat some fine steak or fish with a nice wine, and then go to a club or jazz bar? I would. I’ll tell you what.

OMG! I am such a sucker for a big toothy smile, and big hair. (Hint, hint to all you heavier girls out there…)

How to Cook Chicken Legs – Chinese Style

Here’s a quick video on how to cook chicken legs on the stove in a pan. This is the traditional Chinese cooking method, as most Chinese do not have ovens. It is not only tasty and healthy, but it uses far less electricity than cooking in a stove.

And as I finish this particular bunch of micro-videos about Asia, take a deeper look into my life as an American expat why don’t ya.

The Cafe American.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 13)

Let’s continue on our exploration of videos and things about Asia. However, firstly, let’s comment on the splash screen above. It’s from the 1990’s situation comedy on television (anyone remember watching television?) called “Seinfield”.

Seinfeld is a situation comedy which ran from July 5, 1989 to May 14,  1998. One of the most popular and influential TV programs of the 1990s,  it epitomizes the self-obsessed and ironic culture of the decade. In  2002, TV Guide ranked Seinfeld as the greatest TV show of all time. The  show was created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld. 

The show stars Seinfeld as a  fictionalized version of himself, and mostly focuses on his personal  life with a handful of friends and acquaintances, including best friend  George Costanza (Jason Alexander), friend and former girlfriend Elaine Benes.
Seinfield cast on the set of Seinfield.
Seinfield cast on the set of Seinfield. I loved this show when it came out, and it was always a subject of light water-cooler banter during the coffee breaks at work.

I think that this funny comedy is a monument to itself. Yet, the trivia associated with it is quite noteworthy…

Larry David famously  instituted a policy of "no hugging, no learning", meaning that the show  must avoid sentimentality and moral lessons, and the characters must  never learn or grow from their wrongdoings.   
As Kramer (Michael Richards)  became more popular, his entrance applause grew so prolonged that the  cast complained it was ruining the pacing of their scenes. Directors  subsequently asked the audience not to applaud so much when Kramer  entered.   
Seinfield in the puffy shirt.
Seinfield in the puffy shirt. Did you know that you can buy this shirt on the internet? Yup, you can. I think that it would make a great thing to wear on casual Friday. Just make sure that your coworkers have seen Seinfield and knows what the shirt is all about.
Jerry Seinfeld turned down an offer from NBC that would have made him $110 million for a tenth season of the show.   
Michael Costanza, Jerry Seinfeld's friend after whom George is named, filed a $100 million lawsuit against Seinfeld, Larry David,  and NBC, claiming invasion of privacy and defamation of character.  Costanza claimed damages due to the show's alleged use of his likeness.  The case was dismissed with the judges adding that the statute of  limitations on the case had run out, as Costanza did not sue within one  year of the show's debut in 1989.   
George and Kramer on Seinfield.
George and Kramer on Seinfield. In this episode, George poses for some sexy photographs.
The Soup Nazi (Larry Thomas)  is based on the actual owner, Al Yeganeh, of a take-out soup business  in Manhattan on West 55th Street between Broadway and 8th Avenue. Just  like in the sitcom, his soups were known for their excellent quality,  but Yeganeh was also famous for the unusual way he treated his  customers. Instead of calling him a Nazi, local patrons called him a  terrorist, presumably because they knew Yeganeh was born in Iran, not  Germany. Yeganeh was so angered by the episode (Seinfeld: The Soup Nazi  (1995)), that he forbade the use of the "N word" in his restaurants.  Even the slightest reference to this show would push his buttons (it can  be seen in an interview he did with CNN). So when some cast members and  writers from this show bravely visited the restaurant after the episode  aired, Yeganeh claimed that the show had ruined his life.   
The puffy shirt used in episode 5.2, Seinfeld: The Puffy Shirt (1993), is currently placed in the Smithsonian. A doll-sized replica was included with the fifth season DVD set.   
George orders soup from the soup Nazi.
George orders soup from the soup Nazi. Ah, the best soup in New York City, but the cook is something else entirely…
John O'Hurley  (Peterman) recalls attending a friend's 40th birthday party and being  recognized at the buffet line. A man came up to him to say "that would  be grounds for dismissal.", one of his J. Peterman lines. During their  conversation, O'Hurley learned that this guy was not only a fan of  Seinfeld but a fan of the real J. Peterman catalogue, too. He would  actually read the over-the-top item descriptions to his wife in bed. He  thanked O'Hurley for finally giving him a voice to use for the catalogue  readings. The fan was none other than Tom Hanks.   
Jerry's (Jerry Seinfeld) girlfriend's infamous "man hands" in episode 8.3, Seinfeld: The Bizarro Jerry (1996), were actually those of James Rekart.   
Seinfield's girlfriend has "man hands" Yikes!
Seinfield’s girlfriend has “man hands” Yikes! This is yet another classic show. It would probably be too politically incorrect today.
ABC Entertainment executive Lloyd Braun lent his name to a character appearing in three episodes, season five, episode seven, Seinfeld: The Non-Fat Yogurt (1993), season seven, episode ten, Seinfeld: The Gum (1995), and season nine, episode three, Seinfeld: The Serenity Now (1997), and is an old childhood neighbor and nemesis of George Costanza (Jason Alexander).   

Now, moving forward, let’s go back to Asia…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Thailand School

Here’s a cute music video of an elementary school in Thailand…

Videos about the Protests in HK

All these (so called) “pro-democracy” protests in Hong Kong get a lot of air-play in the United States. I can’t but help that they are instigated by Donald Trump and his CIA operatives to stir up and instigate some “backyard” conflict for China. You know, just like how the CIA agitated the protests the last time Obama visited HK.

The American news media, whether it is CNN, or (even) Rush Limbaugh all parrot the same line.

They parrot the same old narrative; [1] It’s organic and “grass roots”, [2] all they want is “freedom” and “democracy”, and [3] that they are fighting against Communism. The videos and movies on you-tube all support this narrative. It’s a nice narrative, and everyone in the USA is repeating this.

The only thing is…

The narrative is nonsense.

What do they actually want? Well, for one thing, they want universal suffrage. You know where everyone can vote, with no age limits, or limits on the number of times that you can vote, or whether you are a citizen or not. Pretty radical stuff.

Sounds like the American democrat platform, I’ll tell you what…

While Hong Kong is part of China, it operates autonomously. It has it’s own laws, and own systems, and own ways of doing things. Many of which are freakishly different from the mainland Chinese way.

So… very… predictable… How do we know? It’s all recorded in the history books. You all should read them some time.

SJW

And, this is what happens when no one puts their foot down and squashes the SJW movement…

Link

Tear down the Chinese Flag

One of the often promoted videos is how the “Chinese people” joyfully tore down the Chinese flag in Hong Kong. Then they discarded it into the water, and danced around joyously.

What they don’t tell you is what happened afterwards…

Residents are sick of the SJW Kids

Almost all of the protesters are Social Justice Warriors in their early 20’s attending school or otherwise unemployed. Their desire for social upheaval is disruptive to the crowded Chinese community, and the residents are rather fed up with their protests and the interruptions in their lives.

Just like how the black-clad Antifa stopped traffic, and broke apart stores and ships, these SJW troops are doing the same thing. The only thing is, in America they did it in enclaves where the local leadership wanted them to protest and supported the protests. Say Berkley and Baltimore, for example. Not in places where they would get shot. Like in Pittsburgh and Cleveland. That is the big difference between China and the USA.

The Chinese do not accept this kind of nonsense. So they fight back as these two videos indicate.

First, we have a pissed off mother. (Though she is blaming Japan for initiating all the violence.)

Then we have some pissed off office workers…

You will note that this narrative is not promoted in the Western press. At best they might mention that “Pro-Chinese” people lash back at the protesters. But what is really happening is that shop owners, workers, people going to work, and street vendors are all really pissed off that their nice orderly life is being torn apart by these kids.

Hands are NOT tied…

The Chinese government is not ham-strung by an aggressive media propaganda machine, and public opinion. They have lived through numerous SJW uprisings and they know what can happen with they are not squelched rapidly and forcefully.

People die.

President Xi Peng saw this personally… up front and up close. He will NOT permit to happen on his watch. No way. No how.

If you don’t know what I am referring to, then read this article (opens up in a separate window.).

When the SJW movement took control of China

To this end, they have practiced, planned, and have worked on solutions. Here is one such video on what to expect if the local HK government fails to contain the radical Social Justice Warrior elements…

Make no mistake. The Chinese government will shoot to kill if order is not stabilized soon.

Make no mistake. The Chinese take these protests as a very serious threat, and they are prepared to fight against the protesters.

And while I can show you the reader, video after video of Chinese SWAT and paramilitary forces training inside Hong Kong in riot and capture duties, perhaps this recent video of HK police can convince you that the Chinese do NOT mess around…

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 12)

Thank you for continuing with me in the adventure.

But first, let me explain the photo splash at the top of the page. That picture is of two of the band members from the 1980’s hit rock/pop group “Tears for Fears”.

The Seeds of Love is the third studio album by the British rock/pop band Tears for Fears,  released on 25 September 1989.. The album, which reportedly cost over  £1 million (GBP) to produce, retained the band's epic sound while  incorporating influences ranging from jazz and blues to The Beatles, of  which the latter is most evident on the hit single "Sowing the Seeds of Love". 

-Wikipedia
Tears for Fears – Sowing the Seeds of Love

Sometimes I really wonder about what is going on in the Western world these days. Back in the 1980’s, yes things weren’t perfect, but at least you knew that there were two genders, that a water fountain was GMO free, and that the English Queen was not transgender.

Now, today, you haven’t a clue. The news media completely and absolutely lies about everything and changes the narrative left and right. For instance, consider the latest mass-murdering shooter…

The Liberal Progressive socialists in charge of the American mainstream media and the software giants have rewritten the narrative of the events that transpired.

He was a Obama-following Antifa member, and now his history was changed to a crazed Trump QANAON.

There’s only one thing…

Real Conservatives, if pushed to violence, would not strike out at innocents. They would attack the instigators, the leaders, and those that finance what ever problems that they are dealing with. This fellow attacked innocents. Ergo – not a conservative.

Leftists Change Shooter Patrick Crusius’s MyLife Page

No kidding!

You have this Antifa progressive Obama follower who shoots up a ton load of people in a Walmart. Immediately the news media is blaming Trump for “Right Wing” Violence. When it was no such thing. Now, plastered all over the internet is the rewritten narrative that he was a Right-Wing Trump following kook and guns must be banned.

Perhaps, a little peek at what the news media did and handled this is in order, eh?

Some history…

A Walmart in Texas was shot up in August 2019 when a gunman rampaged through the store using an AK-47 clone. The event is known as the Cielo Vista Mall shooting in El Paso, Texas. He left a manifesto where he claimed to be a follower of Trump and wanted to kill all the illegal aliens in Texas.

Sounds pretty damning. Why it fits exactly the mainstream press narrative of a typical Trump supporter.

Then they got the guy.

Washington Examiner reporter Anna Giaritelli posted the name and a photos of the alleged shooter, sourced to law enforcement. “A law enforcement official in El Paso told me the Walmart shooter is in custody. His name is Patrick Crusius of Allen, a town in Texas outside of Dallas. He is pretty young, having just turned 21 years old this week.

A law enforcement official in El Paso told me the  Walmart shooter is in custody. Patrick Crusius of Dallas. Just turned  21 years old this week. pic.twitter.com/CEJh6rYij1

— Anna Giaritelli (@Anna_Giaritelli) August 3, 2019

But don’t ya know, Patrick Crusius has a profile on MyLife.com.

MyLife is an American  information brokerage founded in 2002 as Reunion.com. 

MyLife gathers  personal information through public records and other sources to  automatically generate a “MyLife Public Page” for each person, described by MyLife as a “complete Wikipedia-like biography on every American.” 

While people can edit their data, the software organization MyLife can change and rewrite a person's profile at will.

So, you would think that the American mainstream news media would take this information and disseminate it to the public? Nope…

On 3AUG19, at 2:46 PM the website MyLife had this profile for the deranged killer Patrick Crusius. It was quite clear. His original profile at 2:46 said he was a registered Democrat.

Look for yourself…

The deranged killer Patrick Crusius is a progressive democrat.
The deranged killer Patrick Crusius is a progressive democrat.

While he was in jail, right after the police caught him, there were some changes made to his profile. How? I do not know. What I do know is that his political affiliation was changed from Democrat to Republican on the day of the mass shooting.

Here is the changed profile. Check the dates and times. Notice what they wrote on the Summary…

Leftists rewriting history
Mall shooter has had his past history rewritten.

Yes. The leftists wrote;

"Before becoming a mass shooter / murderer, Patrick was a registered Republican, and Evangelical Christian. A former campaign worker for Donald Trump, he was also a QANON conspiracy theorist, and INCEL. "

Ethnicity was changed to African American, as well. WTF?

Now, if that wasn’t bad enough, it was changed yet again…

Leftists rewriting history yet again.
Leftists rewriting history yet again.

By Saturday night it continued to be revised. Now including anti-Jewish racial slurs and all sorts of the things that fit the CNN black & White narrative of what a Conservative is.

Progressive Democrat Socialists rewriting the MyLife profile for a mass muurdering Antifa member.
Progressive Democrat Socialists rewriting the MyLife profile for a mass murdering Antifa member.

Now what can we take from all this nonsense? Well…

Do Not Believe What You Read on the Internet

As far as his political leanings are concerned… traditional conservatives do not harm innocents. Only progressive leftists do. Don’t believe me? Crack open a fucking history book won’t ya?

Last minute commentary…

It seems strange to me that all of a sudden this push for gun bans and Red Flag laws, and "Alt Right" violence. It is almost like the time-table for the Hillary / Socialist take over of the country never reset after the election of Trump. 

It's like everything is just following the same timetable that was put in place under Obama.

Here are six posts that discuss this matter in detail…

What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6

OK. That being said, let’s move on out of the 1980’s and into contemporaneous Asia…

Bring back the Summer, lover…

I really like this.

I haven’t figured out what it is. Is it a movie? A cartoon? A music video? A narrative? Or what. Whatever it is, I like it.

Imagine this in the USA… not!

You would NEVER see this in the United States. It would be considered cultural misappropriation.

Remember, boys and girls, China is a meritocracy. You must strive to be the best that you can be, or go begging in the streets. There is no room for sloth, welfare moms, and freeloaders.

Remember everyone…

Universities in the United States have been discriminating against Asian students because their success makes racial minorities look and feel bad. Do not think that there will not be some kind of blow-back to their social re-engineering efforts. Ah. You do not mess around with the Chinese. Fools.

As we used to say in Pennsylvania…

You can put on lipstick, curl the hair, wear eyelashes, and put on a nice dress… but a pig is still a pig.

Diversity quotas are like putting lipstick on a pig. It might sound good, it might make the pigs happy, but very few people will actually find the pig beautiful.
Diversity quotas are like putting lipstick on a pig. It might sound good, it might make the pigs happy, but very few people will actually find the pig beautiful.

Welcome to YiChang…

China has so many cities. Many (so called) towns would pass as large cities in the United States. Here’s an example of the small town of YiChang. Check it out why don’t ya…

Religious girls in Thailand

Just look at these beauties. They are so very yummy.

You know as I get older I really realize that it is our actions that complement our inherent attractiveness. It is how we behave, and how we interact with others that define our overall appearance.

Chinese Aviation

Aviation. I love it whether it is my very own background in American Naval Aviation, or aviation elsewhere, it is an interest and a passion of mine. Yes it is. Sort of like cats, dogs, and pizza. It’s like how I feel about pretty girls and red wine. I love it all.

Here we have a nice video (micro-video natch) concerning Chinese aviation.

Moving up… stay up

The Chinese culture is one of merit. That permeates the entire society. Anyone who tries to cheat, or get special privileges is pretty much shunned. They are known as “Fu er di” and pretty much considered the rich spoiled kinds of society.

Oh yes. The wealthy buy spots for their children in (the easy to bribe) American colleges, but the vast bulk of Chinese society is based upon merit. Every movie, and every song reinforces this notion.

Here is just a small snippet of how this all manifests within the Chinese society.

Yeah. You show that gal that you moved way past her…

Hong Kong Protests

Yeah. There are these “wanna have democracy” protests in Hong Kong. The American media promotes it as a some sort of a “proof” that China is gonna fall apart any day now. Yah right.

Don’t hold your breath.

China and Hong Kong are totally separate entities. Sort of like how Pago Pago in American Samoa is different from Kokomo, Indiana. (Bet ya didn’t know that Pago Pago is a part of an American territory.)

Yup. Hong Kong has their own government and their own laws, and pretty much Beijing allows them autonomy in their affairs. If it didn’t, you would see many changes in Hong Kong that would better fit the traditional Chinese social model. Hong Kong is NOT run in the way Beijing prefers.

Of course, you would never know this, or even have a clue to this situation by only reading American news media. Their role is to keep Americans ignorant of the true situation, huddled and fearful, and easily manipulated to follow heard and group behaviors.
Screen shot of Drudge Report American news aggregator, taken Sunday 4AUG19. What a load of nonsense.
Screen shot of Drudge Report American news aggregator, taken Sunday 4AUG19. What a load of nonsense.

Now, that being said, here’s a video from the Hong Kong government about the situation.

You’d NEVER see this on American mainstream media. It doesn’t fit inside the narrative.

Actually there is so much information regarding this, that I am afraid that I will need to post 4 or 5 videos about the protests to help put things in context. This is done in the next part – part 13…


I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 11)

But first, let’s have something to say about the photo splash above. It’s a screen shot from the brilliant movie “Bedazzled”.

In the movie "Bedazzled", Hopeless dweeb Elliot Richards is granted seven wishes by the Devil to  snare Allison, the girl of his dreams, in exchange for his soul. It goes something like this;  Elliot Richards, a socially incompetent technical advisor working at a  call-center, has had a crush on Alison Gardner for nearly four years.  One evening, which already started particularly bad for Elliot, she  ditches him. Elliot wishes for her to be in his life with all his heart -  and is heard. 

I like this movie a lot. It’s a cute story about our life and how we can control it and to ignore all those others that say otherwise.

The devil seduces Elliot.
The devil seduces Elliot. Scene from the movie Bedazzled. This movie is a fun fictional romp that enables us to look at our life, our choices and preferences in a new light and understanding.

What if you could have anything you wanted? You just wish for it and it materializes. What then? What would you wish for? This movie, “Bedazzled” explores that theme and others. In the process we get to look at our life and the choices that we make.

For no, what we want is not external to our desires. Nope, it comes from inside.

What would do become, if you could change your life? Maybe your would become rich and famous, attractive, powerful? Maybe you would become a star, a famous person that everyone would literally everyone would look up to…

Elliot wishes to become a famous basketball star.
In the movie “Bedazzled”, Elliot wishes to become a famous basketball star. And so he becomes one. He’s a giant that can do no wrong. Everything about him is bigger than life. Everything, ah… everything except one small, tiny, tinsey little thing…

So what would you do, if you had the means to achieve it? Maybe become a DJ and produce your own music.

Well, that is now indeed possible, and now easier than ever.

Insta-DJ

Today, with a bag of electronics and some basic training anyone can become a DJ and mix your very own mix-tapes. Nope, this is not your 1990’s type of mixing, this is all on an entirely new level. Absolutely. Check it out.

Isn’t technology wonderful?

Introducing mix technology.

And check out this example…

Creating a mix tape example.

Shaped like a fish

But first some news from Yahoo!…

You know, I have severely curtailed my reading of what passes for news in America these days. Every time I read it, it just gets more and more off the wall. I really don’t like the articles, the tone and the nonsense that is being spewed forward.

Take this screen capture from 6AUG18 from Yahoo News…

A screen capture from 6AUG18 from Yahoo News.
A screen capture from 6AUG18 from Yahoo News.

Now, let’s summarize the six articles listed at the very top of the page, shall we…

  • Putin is threatening the USA with nuclear weapons. Really?
  • You (the reader) are the same kind of animal that killed someone.
  • The world still admires the Obamas. (Maybe on Mars…)
  • Some fellow apologizing to someone for something…
  • Bicycles are dangerous and can kill 22-year olds.
  • At times like this, I wish Obama was still the President.

Sigh. They are all bat-shit crazy.

Maybe it will be different on a different mainstream news platform. Let’s look at MSN via Bing News…

Anti-gun-push
Here is the first page news from MSN on 6AUG19. They are heavily involved in the progressive disarming of the citizenry.

Enough of that nonsense. I tire about the big push to disarm the citizens to make them “safe”, and I most certainly tire of being told that “ugly” is “beauty”. Let’s go back to Asia. In Asia, the ideal female shape is one that looks something like a fish.

As this video portrays…

Beautiful Chinese model on a boat.

Meanwhile the ideal woman shape is considered to be along the lines of Michelle Obama in the United States. Are they fucking kidding me?

Michelle Obama is considered the most beautiful woman in America.
Michelle Obama is considered the most beautiful woman in America. I disagree with the “experts”. I think beauty is a combination of factors that include personality, kindness, physical appearance and behaviors. In my mind, while I am sure that Michelle is a nice woman, to consider her one of the most beautiful women in America is not really accurate. I argue that it is mere political posturing, and is completely functionally meaningless.

Going to School – The Philippines

Uh. Yes, of course, they have schools in the Philippines. Don’t be silly.

Schooling in the  Philippines suffers from underfunding and a lack of resources. Education  at local Filipino schools is not likely to be of the standard most  expats are used to. Expats living in the Philippines opt to send their  children to international schools.
   
Education system in the Philippines

The education system in the Philippines has largely been shaped by  its colonial history, particularly by the Spanish and American cultures.  Today, the system is largely modelled on the US education system.

Education in the Philippines fares poorly compared with other countries  in the region. While primary education is compulsory until the 6th  grade, drop-out rates are high after this level.
  
Filipino and English are the main languages of instruction at all  public and private schools in the Philippines. From grades 1 to 3,  students are taught in the dominant language of their particular region.  Class are held in either English or Filipino from then on. 
  
The school year for both public and private schools in the  Philippines normally runs from June to March or April. A typical school  week is Monday to Friday, from 7:30am to 4pm or 5pm. Students usually  have an hour lunch break; as school cafeterias are rare, many students  either go home for lunch or bring their own lunch to school. 

-Expat Arrivals

I found this little video and found it very cute.

Philippine Elementary School

Cambodian MV

Bet you didn’t know that the Cambodians have their own music videos? Well, most nations do and they are all pretty cool. Check out this one…

Cambodian Music Video

HK Protests

The news media in July 2019 was all in awe of the “wonderful” HK protestors who wanted to bring “democracy” to Hong Kong. They breathlessly wrote and reported on all the “pro-democracy” protesters in Hong Kong.

Yeah, but you know, it’s no such thing.

One Chinese country but with two systems.
HK operates as part of China, but has it’s own independence permitting it to have it’s own laws, and systems that are often quite different from what is found in the mainland.

They did not want “democracy“.

They were unhappy with the declining economy of Hong Kong, most especially after Donald Trump put the enormous tariffs on HK sourced products. (Yeah, bet ya didn’t realize that the vast bulk of Chinese sourced items dispatch from Hong Kong, now did you?)

Comparision of operations between China and HK.
Topic. Hong Kong. China. Hourly wage. HK 30. RMB Exchange rate. HK 7.8 = US 1. RMB (Renminbi) 5.7 = US 1. Working hours. 8 hours/day, 6 days/week. 9 hours/day, 6.5 days/week. Total = 48 hours/week. Total = 58.5 hours/week. Maximum overtime allowed = 200 hours/years. During peak production periods, workers work 13 hours/day, 6.5 days/week. Weekly (non-peak output/worker) 19 parkas. 12 parkas.

Being unhappy, they revolted.

They wanted Social Justice, with gay weddings, trans-gender bathrooms, free jobs, a “living wage” and other progressive demands. Not quite the things that you would hear about on the American mainstream media.

They wanted what all Social Justice Warriors want…

64 genders. Free sex on demand. Free healthcare. Free education. Free medicine. Unlimited Welfare.

You know, like America has.

CIA graphics on the various levels of autonomy within the Chinese sphere.
CIA graphics on the various levels of autonomy within the Chinese sphere. China has allowed many regions to operate under their own laws and rules and regulations, that are often quite different and stand apart from the way things are done in Beijing. This differs substantially from the USA model where everything is under the Thumb of Washington D.C.

Much of what you see on CNN and other American news media has no bearing on what actually transpires in China.

Like, for instance, this video clip of the “brave” Social Justice Warriors demanding “democracy” in Hong Kong…

Ai! Picking on old people is inexcusable. But there you have it. This is the face of SJW all over the world. This is the face in Hong Kong…

HK SJW’s attacking an old man.

Of all the “pro-democracy” protest videos on CNN, and You-Tube. This one is banned. I wonder why?

And, this is the very same face in the United States…

American SJW Antifa meme
American SJW Antifa meme. Attacking the old, the poor, the weak and children. It’s the socialist way.

It’s a true shame that the American mainstream media isn’t reporting on this situation properly and leading many people, especially conservatives that should know better, to think that the SJW protests in HK are all about “freedom”, “democracy”, and “breakaway from China”.

Ah, but don’t youse guys worry.

China does not take kindly to SJW types. Organ harvesting that you read about is one thing, but having both of your eyes removed is something else all together. China is far too populous, with far too many issues, not to take the SJW issue seriously. They do.

This is why…

When the SJW movement took control of China
Oh, BTW, here's a fun fact, did you know that the ADC (The Arkansas Department of Corrections) went to China in the late 1990's to teach them how to manage Hard Labor Camps. Yuppur.

They run them in China just like the ADC does.

Link

But, then again, maybe you don’t want to hear what I have to say. Maybe you would feel more comfortable hearing it from someone who lives right there inside HK and has lived there all their life. Listen to them instead, why don’t ya.

Well then… let’s watch some videos that say things that you won’t ever hear in the American mainstream media…


I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 10)

Here we continue on our video exploration of Asia. But first, before we begin, let’s take a look at the picture splash at the top of the page. It is from the movie called “The Patriot”. It’s a great movie, and a large degree of effort went into making it as accurate as possible.

The jumble of events in The Patriot, for example, were created by making Gibson’s character a composite of no less than 4 real people! So many of the events of the film were very loosely inspired by true facts, but then changed and altered to fit the needs of the dramatic story the screenwriter was looking to tell. 

-Quora
Screen shot from the movie The Patriot.
Screen shot from the movie The Patriot. There are those that claim that this fictional movie is not accurate enough for their tastes. Well of course not! It’s a fiction for Pete’s sake. Then as all progressive liberals, they point out one inaccuracy and then claim the entire film is inaccurate. It’s the black and white, the all or nothing. The need to ban peanut butter because less than 0.0005% of children have an allergy. All or nothing. It’s the Marxist way, don’t you know.

Accuracy. Though you would never realize that if you used the internet to research the making of the movie. The “accuracy” of the movie is then put into question because it is a fictional work, when people are actually asking questions about such period events as…

  • Tying the boyfriend into a sack when he slept overnight.
  • Young boys being able to shoot guns.
  • The role of the Loyalists in the colonies.
  • The role of the German mercenaries during the war.
The accuracy of the movie The Patriot.
If you read the internet you will discover that this fictional movie is not accurate. The main characters, aside from one or two historical figures never existed. You will discover that all the more conservative elements were all nonsense, and that the American colonies lived in peace and the Revolutionary War was a mistake made by tax dodgers and swindlers. Well, that is the impression you will get if you used the internet to get your information from. It is thus no question why so many millennial youth hate the United States.

However, you would never get that impression by reading all the anti-accuracy posts on Google and Bing. In fact, you can plot the opinions on the accuracy of the film on two axes. One by political leaning / ideology, and two degree of accuracy. When you do so you get a chart that sort of looks like this…

Plot of opinionated accuracy relative to the movie "The Patriot" by political ideology of the writer of the article.
Plot of opinionated accuracy relative to the movie “The Patriot” by political ideology of the writer of the article.

Of course, to see the “Right Wing” opinions, you need to go to pages 50+ in both Google and Bing. The highest rated opinions are found on liberal platforms, of which are moved to the very front of the search results.

Curious. Don’t believe me. Read for yourself.

Now back to Asia…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Two year old Crawls onto porch

This is another sad video.

This happened in my city of Zhuhai in July 2019. The mother checked on the baby, and he was asleep. So she went next door to buy some vegetables. Apparently the two-year old got up and thought it was a good idea to crawl onto the porch on the 6th floor in the high rise.

He reached up and climbed over and above the glass balustrade rail, then got on the outside and slipped…

People watched in horror and filmed it in real time as people rushed up to the apartment and tried to break in to rescue the baby. But they were too late.

Now a happy ending…

As shocking as that is, it is not uncommon.

Many parents absolutely MUST put fencing on their balconies or run the risk of a child getting into trouble. Here we see what happens when a child tries to crawl through the protective bars…

A happy ending.

Donald Trump visits NK

It’s hard to imagine that the news media in the USA would make a bigger deal than what came out of China. China was ecstatic when Donald Trump was in Korea. Though the American mainstream media picked it apart and made fun of it.

They thought it was dangerous, risky and unpresidential.

The American conservative press thought of it as a good thing, however…

American conservative reaction to Trump visiting North Korea.
American conservative reaction to Trump visiting North Korea. In general, it was viewed very positively.

Of course, that is in the balkanized United States.

In China, when Donald Trump visited North Korea, he was loudly promoted as a man who was going to bring calm reason and stability to Asia.

Indeed, it’s a mjor big change from the jokes and laughable behavior of the Obama’s and Clinton’s.

Archery in China

Yeah, this is how it’s done Chinese style. I also like the eight-point buck on the wall in the background.

Oh, and by the way, in many parts of China you don’t need a permit to hunt. You just go forth and hunt to your heart’s content. However, if you do abuse that privilege, like trying to round up 300 does (female deer) and instigate some kind of mass slaughter, the police will find a reason to arrest you.

And, getting arrested will be the least of your problems…

American Awesomeness in China

The Air Force bomber B2 is an amazing piece of equipment. For decades it was kept secret and hidden from the public. Even when it was announced publicly, all photos of it, and it’s operation were kept secret and hidden.

That was the case up until Obama became President, and he immediately removed the shroud and cloak of secrecy around many of America’s weapon systems. One of which was the B2 bomber.

Now, today, the Chinese people are well acquainted with this amazing plane as all sorts of videos can attest to.

Snail Races

Yup. It’s a thing. Who’d figure?

I don’t where this is. I do not think it is in China, but the video does come from Asia. Looks like English or Russians enjoying the race.


I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 9)

Now about the image in the post splash above. This is a scene from the most excellent movie “Unbreakable”. I really love this movie because it is about a man who needs to find his purpose in life. It turns out that he must be the super hero.

 Elijah Price: Why is it, do you think, that of all the professions in the world you chose protection?
 
 David Dunn: You are a very strange man. 

 Elijah Price: You could have been a tax accountant. You could have owned your own gym.  You could have opened a chain of restaurants. You could've done of ten  thousand things, but in the end, you chose to protect people. *You* made  that decision, and I find that very, very interesting.      
Unbreakable movie
With regards to the story, Mr. Shyamalan and his crew have constructed something so rich in visual texture while managing to keep the story subdued and character development full of deep-seated anticipation. Every plot point came perfectly without any extra connotations that usually creep into a story such as this (super heroes?). Without any melodrama both Bruce Willis and Samuel L. Jackson give very authentic performances that help the film keep its “Any Town USA” and “Average Joe Six-pack” feel very much alive.

This is a brilliant movie, and it asks many of the very same questions that many men ask themselves when they hit their middle to late 30’s. You can call it the “male menopause” or something else, but what it is rather a reflection of life’s purpose.

 Joseph Dunn: I thought maybe because you're my dad... I thought I might be like you... I'm not like you... 

 David Dunn: You are like me. We can both get hurt. I'm just an ordinary man. 

 Joseph Dunn: No, you're not... Why do you keep saying that?      

No man is ordinary.

Moving on…

Hey! Look what I found in my e-mail today!

Ah. It’s not going away. I received this e-mail on 5AUG19.

Yup! It’s a social justice warrior that is so proud of her censorship efforts. She censors art. She makes the determination of what is good or bad art by way of political ideology. Imagine that.

Read her email to me…

SJW censorship

I am so very sure that Idi Amin, Heir Hitler, Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao would be so proud of her censorship. But then again, this “virtue signalling” isn’t likely to do much aside from landing her a job in a liberal institution where, of course, she would have to endure the casting couch job interview. It’s the Marxist technique. (Just being historical, ya all.)

Of course, I am revolted by this.

Typical Marxist behavior.
Nazi book and art burning. They believed that you needed to purify thought and only have ideologically pure art and literature. Just like all Marxists.

So she judges art.

yes.

She JUDGES art.

Not good enough
It’s difficult to be an artist in the new progressive reality where the Marxist’s all control the levels of power, and the gateways for success. This is a work by conservative Dan F. Gerhartz. Not a progressive darling. Unfortunately his works will fade into obscurity while nonsensical works like oil stained Christian statues will be given priority in modern progressive metropolitan areas.

That is her profession and that is what she studies. However, she does not understand art. Instead she understands Marxist ideology. Nothing else.

In her mind, you are either a sunny and happy progressive, or you are a cockroach that needs to be exterminated. Don’t believe me? Reread her email above.

In her mind, you are either a good little communist, or you are nothing. You become vermin that must be eradicated from the planet.

These people are dangerous.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Rufus the good Samaritan

This little video takes place in China.

I named the fellow here Rufus. Why? Because that was the name of the man that helped Jesus carry the cross up the side of the mountain. Rufus.

Rufus. red, the son of Simon the Cyrenian ( Mark 15:21), whom the Roman  soldiers compelled to carry the cross on which our Lord was  crucified. Probably it is the same person who is again mentioned in  Romans 16:13 as a disciple at Rome, whose mother also was a Christian  held in esteem by the apostle. Mark mentions him along with his brother  Alexander as persons well known to his readers.

-Bible Dictionary

Of course, in today’s hyper politically correct internet, you won’t find any of this information if you look up the name of Rufus. Instead you will find something like this…

The meaning of the word Rufus as found on the Internet.
The meaning of the word Rufus as found on the Internet.

Detailed, supposedly factual, but devoid of useful content. Rufus is the name of the man that helped Jesus carry the cross. The English forms that were present in 1909 has exactly zero relevance in 2019.

You need to know and understand just how serious the rewriting of history is being colored by the tyranny of California software mega-corporations.

Here, let’s watch a micro-video about another Rufus in China. You go man. Rufus, you are my hero.

Cool Flooring

In China, the technology is mature that permits large scale moving videos of anything placed anywhere. You can see it on the sides of buildings, on ceilings, on walls and on the floors. Here’s a really great application of one such LED display showing moving waves and beach sand on a KTV or restaurant floor.

Now, something terribly sad…

This happened in Shenzhen. It shocks me to my core.

Map of Shenzhen, and Hong Kong.
Here is the map of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Shenzhen has 14 million citizens, and Hong Kong only has 8 million people. To put that into perspective, New York city has 6 million people. There is a constant flow of people in and out of HK though SZ. As many people who live and work in Hong Kong, actually have homes and residences inside Shenzhen.

A mother is walking her son home through a market. High above them, in one of the skyscrapers, a window pops out of the wall, and falls at least 20 floors below. That’s a long… long… long… fall.

Crash!

One minute you are alive. The next minute you are dead.

One minute you are alive.

The next minute you are dead.

Do not take your life for granted. Enjoy every minute as if it is a full treasure. Cherish it. Enjoy it. Savor everything about your life.

Savor your life.
Do not take your life for granted. Enjoy every minute as if it is a full treasure. Cherish it. Enjoy it. Savor everything about your life.

Savor everything about your life.

Please don’t take things, and people for granted. They are special. When your dog wants to kiss you on the lips, give him a big hug and rub his tummy. When your kitty wants you to pick him up… come on do so. What’s the problem?

They just want some loving…from YOU.

Viking Kitty.
Viking kitty just wants to spend some time with you. What are you going to do? Watch CNN instead? Mow the lawn instead? Nah. People and creatures are important. They enrich our life. Treasure them.

Live life well…

Live. It. Well.

Well.

Life is too short not to enjoy some fine BBQ.
Life is too short not to enjoy some fine BBQ. Enjoy it with some friends. And don’t forget the icy cold beer to share with it. Life is far too short not to spend it with friends and loved ones.

Live life well. Live it like it is your last.

Live it like it will be your last.

Treasure the time now.

Smile at those loved ones around you.

Life is short. Live it well.
Life is short. Live it well.

Life is short. Often too short. Please, live it well.

Public Transport – Japan

Yeah. I guess the monorail is popular in Japan.

It seemed to me that I once saw a Simpson’s episode regarding the monorail. It depicted it as some kind of scam that investors used to fleece the tax-paying public with.

His evil plan.
His evil plan.
"Marge vs. the Monorail" is the twelfth episode in the fourth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons.  It originally aired on the Fox network in the United States on January  14, 1993. The plot revolves around Springfield's impulse purchase of a  faulty monorail from a conman. The episode was written by Conan O'Brien and directed by Rich Moore. 

-Wikipedia

Anyways, in Japan they use monorails quite readily.

Pretty good rule of thumb: the best episodes usually show a flagrant  contempt for the town's citizens (a lot like South Park). In this case,  the use of a $3 million windfall a mass transit boondoggle rather than  much-needed street repairs. On the other hand, don't you wish town halls  can be settled so easily with Phil Hartman and a big musical number?  The jokes are hopelessly cynical (read: hysterical) and even Leonard  Nimoy gets in on the fun. The whole thing's a treat. 

Box Recognition Technology

Ah. I think it’s cool. I like this. I do not think that it is being used in the USA today though it is pretty commonly used all over China. I guess that the USA has some catching up to do.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 8)

Let’s continue on our exploration on Asia. But first, let’s chat a little bit about the splash screen image above. It’s from the 1980’s classic “Ferris Bueller’s Day off”.

Ferris Bueller's Day Off is a 1986 American teen comedy film written, co-produced, and directed by John Hughes, and co-produced by Tom Jacobson. The film stars Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller, a high-school slacker who spends a day off from school, with Mia Sara and Alan Ruck. Ferris regularly breaks the fourth wall to explain his techniques and inner thoughts. Hughes wrote the screenplay in less than a week. Filming began in September 1985 and finished in November. Featuring many landmarks.

-Wikipedia
Ferris Bueller having fun during a parade in downtown Chicago.
Ferris Bueller having fun during a parade in downtown Chicago.

Ok, now most of the people reading this, knows quite well about this movie. It’s not obscure, and unknown. It’s a classic.

 High school student Ferris Bueller wants a day off from school and  he's developed an incredibly sophisticated plan to pull it off. He  talks his friend Cameron into taking his father's prized Ferrari and  with his girlfriend Sloane head into Chicago for the day. While they are  taking in what the city has to offer school principal Ed Rooney is  convinced that Ferris is, not for the first time, playing hooky for the  day and is hell bent to catch him out. Ferris has anticipated that, much  to Rooney's chagrin. 

-IMDB

Ah, but what does this all matter. Right?

Ferris Bueller making the most of his day off.
Ferris Bueller making the most of his day off. What is your excuse?

How about some quotes, perhaps that can pull in some context. Maybe, what do ya know…

 Economics Teacher: Bueller? Bueller? Bueller? 
 Simone: Um, he's sick. My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's  girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the  girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it's  pretty serious. 
 Economics Teacher: Thank you, Simone. 
 Simone: No problem whatsoever.      

You see, looking at the crazy life that we live can really be put into perspective if we are in a correct frame of mind; that of the third person perspective. For it is often difficult to see where we are because we take it all in so personally.

Seriously.

Don’t believe me, eh?

Ok. Here’s a screen shot of the today’s (when I composed this post) Drudge report. I want to ask you something. Is this “news” representative of your life?

Is it representative of the lives of others in your community? It is representative of the future course of life that you and your family will eventually need to embrace?

Drudge report screen capture.

Will Pizza with insect toppings ever be part of your life?

It’s all nonsense.

Nonsense designed to manipulate you. The rest of the world is plowing forward, and completely oblivious to the machinations of the American oligarchy. I urge you, yes you, to ignore their manipulations and open your eyes. the world does not need to become the next American battle field “for democracy”.

Let’s take a look at the rest of the world, for once…

KTV Booths

Yeah. In China, people like to belt our a number of songs or two in an hour to release “stem”. Sort of how I used to scream (at the top of my lungs) “Carry on my way-ward son” when I was driving in my car.

Carry On Wayward Son - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carry_On_Wayward_Son

"Carry On Wayward Son" is a single recorded by Kansas and written by Kerry Livgren for their 1976 album Leftoverture. In 1977, the song peaked at No. 11 on the US Billboard Hot 100, becoming their first top 20 entry in the nation. The song was certified Gold by the RIAA on December 18, 1990. 

Come on… certainly you too liked to sing some Country and Western music or a sappy love ballad… Eh? Right?

Well, in China, a lot of people hold their emotions inside. They keep them stifled down…down…down below and never let them out. But when they sing, they can let their emotions out. So it is very popular to sing in KTV’s.

Here we have KTV mini booths were you and a close friend can sing your heart out. It’s really quite awesome. For me, it would be singing NZBZ (南征北战NZBZ《不再遥远》 感受“速度与激情”). I’ll tell your what!

南征北战NZBZ《不再遥远》 感受“速度与激情”
南征北战NZBZ《不再遥远》 感受“速度与激情”

I really like this three man rap group. It speaks to me. Heh heh.

NZBZ screen capture.
NZBZ screen capture.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

南征北战NZBZ – 穿越 (Live)

Anyways, here’s a really cute video of some girls coming out of one of those very cute KTV cubicles. It’s short but cute, and this is the way it really is.

This is China today.

Anyways…

School in Thailand

Here is a nice short clip about visiting a school in Thailand. But you, as maybe an American, never realized that other nations have schools eh? Yeah. It’s something that is considered unimportant.

Friends are so very important…

The Chinese believe that the group of friends, family and community is more important than the individual. That is quite the opposite of what is taught in the United States where the lone dog, the wolf individual is the most important. The democratic party ties to embrace, somewhat, the Chinese model of course leaving out the core strengths. Leaving it as just a simple collection of platitudes to manipulate the huddled masses of humanity.

But the truth is that we need each other. We form societies because we need each other.

People, we need each other.

It is our friends that make our life worth living. They care for us. they build us up. They help us and confide in us and we give back to them in support.

The Chinese will NEVER forget their history

China has a broad and varied history. It is a story of troubles, adventure, and strife. We, as Americans, like to think that we are strong and proud of our “freedom”. People, you have no idea what is like to suffer from 25 centuries of conflict. Heck, it is normal to have your family eviscerated and your daughters used as sex slaves.

But, China has never forgotten. And now, now… now.. they are not taking any chances.

Here’s a cute reenactment of some history. It could be from any year, as it is quite generic. But to tell you the truth, the Chinese have dealt with trouble and strife for many, many centuries. They have never forgotten, and the government does not buy into the “progressive reality that the past should be forgotten.

No. Instead it should be remembered, and never… NEVER … forgotten.

On Being a Father

I really love this little video clip. It is exactly on point as to what it is like when a woman advises her husband (or boyfriend) that she is pregnant with his child. i will tell you what, it is what all real men aspire to. To have a family with a woman who loves him and a child that he can rise as his own.

Anyways, this this the real deal. It is taken in China, but for that matter, it could have been taken anywhere in the world. It’s all the same. Us men, yearn for times like these. Real women, be not afraid. Men want and desire to have a family.

This is the real deal.

This is the real deal. You all.

This is how it works out. Any man who would not have this reaction is not a man. He’s still a boy. All men… real men… have this reaction. We all… yes, every one of us… want to have a family. It’s in our deepest being.

That is a real truth.

I’ll tell you what.

Bonus – How I got together with my wife.

This is the way it happened. I tell you the truth.

More information here…

How I got married in China.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 7)

Thank you for continuing on this video adventure into Asia. But firstly, let’s spend a few moments to talk about the photo splash (above). It’s a screen shot from the glorious movie “Bedazzled”. It’s all about a man who meets the devil. She grants him seven wishes in exchange for his soul.

You’ve got seven wishes. Choose carefully.

"You can't sell your soul. It doesn't really belong to you in the first  place. No way, nohow. It belongs to God—that universal spirit that  animates and binds all things in existence."

-Great quote from the movie "Bedazzled".

The main character, a dweeb named Elliot, desperately wants to change his life (also being unduly influenced by a girl) inspired him to sign over his soul to the devil. In exchange she gave him seven wishes. Each wish, he uses to create a different life for himself.

We can see that right?

Elliot becomes a rich ang powerful drug lord.
What would you wish for? Elliot wanted more control over his life. He thought that money and power would provide that. So the devil gave it to him. Elliot becomes a rich and powerful drug lord.

Things aren’t going well, we want to change things. We made mistakes in our past, we wish to undo them. We missed out on opportunities or completely revamp our life into something different. You know, like Elliot does…

 Inmate: What are you in for, brother?
 Elliot: Eternity.

 Inmate: Oooh. You must've done some really bad shit.
 Elliot: The worst— I sold my soul.

 Inmate: Well, I hope you got something good for it.
 Elliot: Actually, I got nothing for it.

 Inmate: Sounds like a really bad deal, if you ask me.
 Elliot: [glances over] I'm not asking you.

 Inmate: Doesn't matter. You can't sell your soul. It doesn't really belong to you in the first place. No way, no how.
 Elliot: Is that so? Then who does it belong to?

 Inmate: [looks straight at Elliot] It belongs to God:  that universal spirit that animates and binds all things in existence.  The Devil's gonna try and confuse you, but that's her gig. In the end,  you're gonna see clear to who you are and what you're here to do. Now,  you're gonna make some mistakes along the way. Everybody does. But if  you just open up your heart, and open up your mind, you'll get it.
 Elliot: Who are you?

 Inmate: Just a friend brother. Just a really good friend. 

There are great things all around us. What we need to start doing is to CONTROL OUR THOUGHTS. We must turn off all those bad influences that abound around us, and yes that most certainly means the news. What a piece of horse shit. I swear to God.

Look around you. The world is a truly beautiful place…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Just some rain

Yes, it’s just some rain. But, it’s (you know) glorious.

Do you remember coming in from the rain when you were young. You would get home and your mother would peel off your wet clothes. She would rub you dry and maybe make you a cup of hot coco with little white marshmallows. Or maybe a nice warm bowl of tomato soup with a melted cheese sandwich.

Delicious tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich.
Delicious tomato soup and grilled cheese sandwich. As wonderful and delicious as this this, it is the people that we spend our moments with, and the great times that we share that makes our heart soar. Our emotions generate thoughts and those thoughts create our reality. Treasure those moments, for they are often fleeting.

Yes. You don’t remember the rain so much. But you do remember the times that you spent with someone who you love.

He stood before the yellow door. The printed letters over it said THE SUN DOME. He put his numb hand up to feel it. Then he twisted the doorknob and stumbled in. He stood for a moment looking about. Behind him the rain whirled at the door. Ahead of him, upon a low table, stood a silver pot of hot chocolate, steaming, and a cup, full, with a marshmallow in it. An beside that, on another tray, stood thick sandwiches of rich chicken meat and fresh-cut tomatoes and green onions. And on a rod just before his eyes was a great thick green Turkish towel, and a bin in which to throw wet clothes, and, to his right, a small cubicle in which heat rays might dry you instantly. And upon a chair, a fresh change of uniform, waiting for anyone—himself, or any lost one—to make use of it. And farther over, coffee in steaming copper urns, and a phonograph from which music was playing quietly, and books bound in red and brown leather. And near the books a cot, a soft deep cot upon which one might lie, exposed and bare, to drink in the rays of the one great bright thing which dominated the long room. 

-The Long Rain
Link

Please do great things with your life…

Here is a blind girl hailing a DD. This is the Chinese version of Uber. He asks her where she wants to go. Then she asks how much, and he says 30 yuan. She agrees and he then helps her get in the car.

Because she is blind she cannot pay using the cellphone like most Chinese people do. So she asks how much. And then show him a wad of cash for him to take what he is owed.

Then he does something really special…

People, just be the best you can be. Be kind to animals, and people who need help. That’s the American way. Never forget that that is how REAL Americans behave.

You might notice that the bricks that comprise the sidewalk are in different shapes and colors. This is the norm in China. In China those yellow bricks are used by blind people to make their way through the large complex world that is China. It’s not that they are yellow, but rather they have a raised surface that blind people can use to get around with.

Young Love – Chinese Style

You know, the one thing that I really love about Asia is that young people go to school work hard, and then fall in love. They wait. And because of this, they tend to be very sweet when it comes to romance.

Floor Installation

Most homes in China have solid stone or wood flooring. It is extremely rare to have carpet covering particle board flooring. Here is a video of how the stone tiles are laid down. It’s interesting.

Anyways, I thought that it was very interesting. That is how it is done. Don’t you know.

You know, after a hard day of floor installation, there is nothing finer than a nice hearty meal and a tall frosty glass of ice cold beer. I am sure that the fellows in the video would appreciate it as well. Here’s a nice photo of some grilled cheese to inspire you.

Delicious and tasty grilled cheese sandwich.
Delicious and tasty grilled cheese sandwich. It would go great with some hot tomato soup and a nice tall glass of frosty icy beer. Maybe a delicious Budweiser, or PBR. I’ll tell you what.

All over the world are roads. Roads that exist and call out your name. Roads that you should travel upon. Roads that can lead you to adventure, and if you are fortunate…romance.

Rural Road in China

This is very typical. Please take note on the condition of the road. Note the amount of litter on the side of the road. Note the conditions of the building and the general care that the local government takes in maintaining public systems, roads and utilities.

Once the Chinese government established the crime and corruption police, there was a drastic and marked increase in the overall care and maintenance of public structures. It was very noticeable.

I wonder why.

Having Fun with Friends – China

OK. This is just a nice fun video. I guess that the point of this is to enjoy life. Everyone else is. So stop reading the bullshit news and being so serious. Let your hair down and start enjoying life.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 6)

Let’s continue on our adventure into Asia, but first let’s chat a little bit more about the splash photo above.

Image is from the movie Kelly's Heroes. Let me tell you that that is a fine, fine movie to watch with family on a lazy August afternoon. Just get some icy cold beer and enjoy.

Here’s a quote from the movie to wet your appetite…

Kelly's Heroes Quote 1

Here’s another quote with a pic for your entertainment. Ah. What a great movie!

Kellys Heroes 2

OK. Now let’s continue on our exploration of Asia. First stop, China and how they build houses.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

How Houses are Built in China…

Houses in China are built quite differently than how they are built in the United States. Instead of a concrete slab with a wood-frame pole structure with particleboard floors and wall to wall carpet with drywall, the Chinese build out of cement.

The create a strong cement structure and lay down polished stone over it. Here we see a guy making a small house (LOL)…

A really small house.

And people, that’s exactly how it’s done.

Sappy Vietnam MV video

What? You think that music videos only exist in the United States? Nope. Every nation has them. Just like every nation… every single one… has their very own local bands and local music.

You should listen to some of them out of Australia, and Poland. Pretty darn awesome! I’ll tell you what.

Here’s an older video from Vietnam. I place it being made sometime during the 1990’s. You know when Bill Clinton didn’t have sex with that intern. LOL!

Nice to have in the car…

Back to China.

This is a pretty nice innovation. You inflate it by plugging it into your cigarette lighter. If you have an American car, the chances are that it won’t have a cigarette lighter plug. You can thank the progressive democrats for that “improvement”.

Link

No problem. You can inflate it by blowing air inside the mattress. However, it might take a while. Truth. It might take you an half an hour or so using that method.

Don’t fret though. China makes tons of little micro air pumps that operate off of the USB. So you can either use your automobile USB socket or bring your laptop into the car and inflate the sofa using that plug.

You see just imagine the kinds of fun that you can have in a little subcompact with this kind of sofa mattress. You can keep the toddlers occupied. You can let the dog stretch out. You can kick back and take a nap during lunch, or maybe play with that girl you find rather fetching.

Maybe like this fine lass…

Nice Chinese girl and George Clooney doesn’t even notice…

Yeah. Big Hollywood names get their big pictures plastered all over Asia. It’s part of the Marketing strategy to saturate the commercial markets with images of the well-known and famous.

Don’t ya know.

Night Market (in the daytime) – Vietnam

Vietnam has changed quite a bit since the 1960’s. And yet in other ways it hasn’t changed at all. I mean the mountains are still there, and all the hub-bub about “climate change” the weather still is pretty much the same as what it has been for centuries. The lush banyan (forever) trees are still there. The birds still sing their songs, and the air is all pretty moist and hot.

Time change. People, cultures and society changes. However, people are still people. Boys are still boys and girls are still girls, and that progressive narrative about there being 65 different kinds of genders is nothing more than the ramblings of a crazy person that is socially incapable of fitting within society.

Pretty Girls in Vietnam from the 1960's.
Pretty girls still exist in Vietnam. Here is a dated vintage photo of a pretty Vietnam lass taken in the 1960’s. She is wearing a cute western dress, rather than the more traditional Vietnam dress and hat.

Here’s a nice vintage photo of a Vietnamese food market. Look at it. Study it. Cool huh? Notice the tin can to the far right of the photograph. Looks like the American people wanted to help the Vietnamese, and tell them so in English…

But, only one thing… They speak Vietnamese, French and Chinese in Vietnam. Not English. At least not at that time. So, what’s the purpose?

Look. Study the picture. Note the placement of the tin can. Note the quality of the photograph.

What’s in the photo? Breads. Rolls. Donated butter. Donated oil. Tins of sardines. Not typical Vietnamese fare. Oh, yes they do eat rolls, and baguettes. It’s the French influence, don’t ya know. They do use butter. But the preponderance within one photo tends to be a little deceiving.

American media for ya.

Notice the can in the Vietnamese food market.
A vintage photo of a 1960’s Vietnamese food market. Notice the tin on the far left of the picture. The words on it says that the tin was donated by the United States people. Pretty cool, except for one thing. It’s in English. In Vietnam at that time they spoke and read only three languages. They were Vietnamese, Chinese and French. It seems that all that English writing is for propaganda purposes. Propaganda, not for the Vietnamese people, but rather for the Americans who would look at the photo from the American mainstream media.

Oh, but don’t be confused.

They eat fine delicious food in Vietnam. And many of it is though a strong French influence. There is a restaurant in Taiwan that makes fantastic Vietnam food, I’ll tell you what.

Delicious Vietnam food in Taiwan.
From the article; My first bite into Nuong’s bánh mì thịt evoked in me a sensation that could only be described as “same same, but different” in comparison with bánh mì in Vietnam. It was delicious, especially the perfect firmness of the Vietnamese ham. In a way, the sandwich was very similar to a typical bánh mì in Saigon, yet quite different. For starters, the pickles had a different tanginess to them, owing to the use of non-Vietnamese vinegar, which is similar to the condiment you might add to your hủ tiếu somewhere in District 5. The unorthodox addition of authentic Vietnamese-style char siu made the combination pleasantly sweet and chewier. But the starkest differences were in its main components. Source.

Here’s a modern micro-video of contemporaneous rural Vietnam and the food market there. Now wouldn’t you all want to have one of these Po’ Boy / Grinder / Submarine what’s ya call it’s… fresh from the market counter here?

Oh, and speaking about the fine Vietnamese food experience, here is another photo

Delicious Vietnam food with a French influence.
From the article; “Taiwanese flour is so different. It’s sweeter and chewier,” she explains. Her “baguettes” are coated with vegetable oil almost immediately after baking — the secret to their crunchiness after being toasted a second time. Different varieties of bánh mì are made to order when customers appear. Lò Bánh Mì Pasteur’s homemade pâté is several shades darker than those in Vietnam. “The Taiwanese like eating jiànkāng [healthy], [so] we don’t use preservatives. That’s what makes the commercial pâté so pinkish,” she adds. Source.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 5)

Thank you all for keeping with me and following this video narrative and (sort of) political editorial through humor, adventure and audio visual exploration. But first, let’s explore the picture splash at the top of this page.

About the picture splash above; this is a screen capture of a scene from the movie Roxanne.  The large-nosed fireman C.D. Bales is in love with the beautiful Roxanne. Ah, but alas, she falls for his personality but another man's looks.              
Roxanne

This is an old movie that I used to have on Betamax.

I thought it was cute, but not really memorable. However, when rewatching the move, I swear, it took me back to a far simpler time in America. A time of smaller communities, and far less problems. For that trip down nostalgia lane… it is worth the watch.

Sometimes movies and pictures can take us back to a simpler and better time. One that is free of many of the worries and concerns that have been foistered upon us within our reality.
Sometimes movies and pictures can take us back to a simpler and better time. One that is free of many of the worries and concerns that have been fostered upon us within our reality. Like this photo for instance. The family goes out to watch a football game in cool fall air. The housewife prepares some warm coffee and sandwiches for the boys. Simpler times and simpler solutions. Movies and pictures can take us back to those times.

Ok. Now for the micro-videos and dialog…

Welcome to Beijing

Everyone knows about Beijing, in fact, many Americans when asked what cities are in China, they will only be able to name but one or two. Beijing being the first. With Shanghai a distant second.

Here’s Beijing. And yes, outside of the dust-storm season, many days do actually look a little like this… blue skies. I can see those readers just shaking their heads. They tell me, that it is ALWAYS full of terrible air pollution. You can see, they argue, all you need to do is perform a Google image search for Beijing.

Yup. That’s right. Go straight to the largest propaganda outlet in the United States to get your answers – Google.

But, really… Why stop there, how about Snopes?

Snopes

Here’s a pollution profile that I just screen grabbed for Beijing as I write this.

Beijing Air pollution index
Beijing Air pollution index. Taken 2AUG19.

And here is one for Los Angles. Again, it’s just a screen grab that I took just a few seconds ago…

Los Angles Air Pollution index 2AUG19.
Los Angles Air Pollution index 2AUG19.

Hum. It seems that the Air Pollution index for Beijing and Los Angles, at least on 2AUG19, were the same. Imagine that!

Who’d figure, given the near relentless breathless reporting on how bad pollution is in China, these days.

Nonsense.

This is what Beijing looks like, ya all…

American, and British, media will take pictures of the smoggiest days in Beijing. If they can’t get the weather to cooperate, then they will use a very smoggy photo out of their photo files.

Beijing does have smog, and the weather can be nasty at times. Much of it is a combination of particulate matters from the deserts (which create intense Sahara-style dust storms) and Winter related smoke from coal-fired furnaces in the cold-cold weather.

However, it is not ALWAYS like that.

Just like not every American gets FREE healthcare. FREE medicine. FREE homes, FREE cell phones, FREE cars. Nope. America was not called the “land of the free”, because of all the FREE stuff you would get.

It was called that for other reasons.

Reasons that no longer exist.

Check out some of the cities in the rest of China, why don’t ya. If you would believe those trolls on the Internet forums, China is one filthy dirty, smoggy place. With only America being the most beautiful spot int he world.

Guangzhou Air Pollution 2AUG19
Guangzhou Air Pollution 2AUG19
Hong Kong Air Pollution 2AUG19
Hong Kong Air Pollution 2AUG19
Yangzhou Air Pollution 2AUG19
Yangzhou Air Pollution 2AUG19

Take note…

Comparatively, with say Los Angles, the smog is Beijing is far easier to deal with. Masks are very sufficient to remove the gritty particles out of the air. You can use a HEPA air purifier to keep your office and home nice. However, no such luck on LA. That is a different kind of smog. It’s particulate level micro-beads of acid. It attacks the eyes, the nostrils and the mouth.

I have found that most American news is nonsense. It is designed to manipulate you. It is designed to keep you living in some kind of a box. Part of which is controlled by fear, and constant reassurances that you have it better than everyone else as long as you stay in your box.

American Propiganda.
American Propaganda; “Since the beginning of this year, the levels of air pollution in Beijing have been dangerously high, with thick clouds of smog chasing people indoors, disrupting air travel, and affecting the health of millions. The past two weeks have been especially bad — at one point the pollution level measured 40 times recommended safety levels. Authorities are taking short-term measures to combat the current crisis, shutting down some factories and limiting government auto usage. However, long-term solutions seem distant, as China’s use of coal continues to rise, and the government remains slow to acknowledge and address the problems. “

From The Atlantic.

What you all need to do is make comparisons ON YOUR OWN. Don’t listen to the news, and even don’t listen to me. Just you go to Beijing, yourself, and if you think it has terrible pollution, then believe it. Otherwise, don’t.

Automobile Problems – Thailand

Let’s go to Thailand.

Beautiful Thailand.
America isn’t the only place that has beauty. It exists all over the world. It really does. Just like Detroit is not a typical American city that represents what America looks like, nor does the images of other nations as portrayed in American media. Here is a beautiful Thailand beach.

I really like Thailand, but many of the rural roads are not paved, and just simple dirt. Not even gravel. that can cause problems for vehicles during the rainy season. As this poor fella has discovered much to his dismay.

Primitive, yes. But, bad… not so.

While we are in Thailand, let’s head out a little further East and go to rural Vietnam…

But let’s realize that just because the American mainstream media hasn’t been reporting on Vietnam for fifty years, the country still exists. It grows, people live and die. Things progress forward and change. It is not frozen in time, like many Americans seem to think that it is…

Siagon in the 1960's.
Saigon in the 1960’s. Vietnam has changed substantially over the years, and many Americans would not recognize it if their only experiences outside of America is through the American mainstream media.

Of course, Vietnam today is not anything like Americans remember it from the media narrative in the 1960’s. We need to look at the world with new eyes. Eyes that are not colored or flavored by the American mainstream press narrative.

Chicken Noodle Soup – Vietnam

This is modern, contemporaneous Vietnam. Here we have a rural village. (And I do like the rural areas of South-East Asia.)

With that, I would like to post some historical pictures of Vietnam during the 1960’s when America first decided to have a war there. And, while I am at it, let me remind everyone that while many Americans were quite patriotic, they could not understand why thousands of Americans would need to die in a far off land. They argued that the ONLY people who would benefit from such a war was the rich oligarchy.

Historically, we now know that they were ABSOLUTELY correct.

Does this picture strike a bell?

Americans refusing to fight in Vietnam.
Americans refusing to fight in Vietnam. Looking back, the ONLY people who benefited from the war in Vietnam were the wealthy that had stocks and power within the military-industrial environment. This was something that the Johnson Presidency cultivated, and now today has grown into such an unwieldy monster. You do realize that today 2AUG19, America is currently fighting eight (x8) military shooting wars all over the world. Let me ask you, how are YOU personally benefiting?

This is the Vietnam that Americans had to fight (and protect) for (you know) mah democracy…

Life in Vietnam in the 1960's when America first started to get involved there.
Life in Vietnam in the 1960’s when America first started to get involved there. This is obviously outside a cafe or a restaurant.

I am of the opinion that the wealthy oligarchy in the United States couldn’t give a rat’s ass about the people in Vietnam, or the brave Americans that fought, became crippled or died over there.

All they cared about was their own personal profits. You know, like how the American software giants in Google, Facebook, and Twitter care about YOU today.

They do not.

They don’t give a rat’s ass about you, and think nothing about squashing you, your opinions, your thoughts and your life. They have absolute disdain for you, your culture and your family, and would squash your life out like they would step on a cockroach. they despise you.

Look at what the American rich did in Vietnam…

Killed so some wealthy Americans could make money.
Pretty couple riding their moped in Vietnam. This was in the 1960’s when America was first getting involved in the Vietnam conflict. Apparently the wealthy felt that the deaths of a couple thousand Americans, and many thousands of Vietnam citizens were of no consequence if they could be able to by another mansion.

Well, we did send troops to Vietnam.

Boeing 727 under guard.
Political and business VIP’s would visit Vietnam from time to time to see how things were progressing. They would always return back to America and demand more and more money…. you know, for the cause. Though it was just a way for them to cycle the money into their own pockets. Evil fucking bastards. Here we have one of their aircraft being watched by military personnel.

Many of whom died. Those that came back didn’t like what America had become. So they “dropped out”. They started to take drugs and get involved in non-social activities.

See what happens when the corrupt are permitted to rule over a nation. Everything becomes distorted and corrupted. Nations with long histories, such as China, know that crime and corruption can alter the face of a people in terrible, twisted and bad ways. So they try to do things to change all this.

Here’s some photos of the Vietnam military forces today. Yes they do want to trade with the United States. It’s a new generation, in a new nation. Let’s hope that everyone realizes just how important and precious life is, and the need to ONLY FIGHT to defend your family and way of life.

Modern Vietnam military.
Modern Vietnam military.

Exploring a Park in China

Ah. Sorry for being so serious.

It’s just that I really hate injustices, and I get really angry when people use their wealth to hurt others. And, I do not care what it is. Hurt is hurt. Whether it is erasing all of someone’s posts on social media, or bribing a politician to send another 30,000 solders to fight a war where many will get killed.

Wealth corrupts.

Here is China. There are many parks in China and many are very lovely.

I am of the very strong belief that a wide selection of different experiences, shared with others, causes us to think different. Since thoughts create our reality, that is how we grow.

We grow physically, socially, emotionally, and spiritually though our thoughts.

Which is sort of why this post-sequence is all about shutting off the American media propaganda, getting out of the fear-cage that many Americans sit within and go forth and explore. You will discover, as I have, that many of us are quite similar, but it is our differences that should be enjoyed and savored.

As I am sure that this American serviceman discovered when dating his pretty Vietnam girlfriend…

Vietnam in the 1960s.
A United States soldier in Vietnam with his pretty Vietnamese girlfriend. It is the similarities that attract us to each other, and the differences that enable us to grow.

Water Festival – Thailand

Let’s take a look at the water festival in Thailand.

The Water Festival is the New Year's celebrations that take place in Southeast Asian nations such as Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand as well as among the Dai people of China. 

It is called the 'Water Festival' by Westerners because they notice people splashing or pouring water at one another as part of the cleansing ritual to welcome the New Year. 

Traditionally people gently sprinkled water on one another as a sign of respect, but as the new year falls during the hottest month in South East Asia, many people end up dousing strangers and passersby in vehicles in boisterous celebration. The act of pouring water is also a show of blessings and good wishes. It is believed that on this Water Festival, everything old must be thrown away, or it will bring the owner bad luck. 

-Wikipedia

Ah, some links if you are at all interested…

Small Community on the coast -China

Let’s take a look at some of the non-big city coastal areas in China. As you must know, there are thousands of these communities. All much, much larger than many American cities.

They all sort of resemble Miami or Fort Lauderdale beaches, more or less. As like this…

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
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Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 4)

Thank you for continuing on my micro-video narrative. But first, let’s chat a little bit about the splash screen photo above.

About the splash-screen photo above. It's a screen shot of the movie "Kelly's Heroes". It's a World War II movie made in the 1960's that is loosely based upon the actual events during the war. 

You see, as Germany was collapsing, a bunch of Americans wanted to go ahead and seize all the gold that Hitler had squirreled away. It's a great movie, and the pop song "Burning Bridges" came from that movie.

You only have to mention the film ‘Kelly’s Heroes’ and within seconds everyone is firing off quotes from the film – our non WWII friends really do look at you as if you are  some type of weird sandwich…

Kelly's Hero screen shot.
Hey! Don’t you go giving me off any of those bad waves.

Has to be one of the best war films of all time. So here is a challenge – how many of these quotes can you remember? And how many can you get into a conversation today…

Let’s start with…

Quotes from Kelly's Heroes

Anyways, go ahead and chat with your friends. See how many remember the movie Kelly’s Heroes. It’s a great conversation starter. Sure better than talking about the new female 007 who is going to rock the movie world this year.

Not!

Just look at this pathetic picture. I look and I see that the producers are seriously Jonesing for a Michelle Obama (or Oprah Winfrey) leadership role to pave the way for a 2024 Presidential Election candidate. (Wanna bet this isn’t the case?)

Black Female British Actor Lashana Lynch to Play New '007 Agent'
Black Female British Actor Lashana Lynch to Play New ‘007 Agent’. Hint. She’s a diversity hire. (wink wink). Can’t wait to watch the latest James Bond flick… not!

Yeah. Just like they made so many Hollywood movies with female Presidents that looked markedly like Hillary Clinton during the last ten years. It’s ground work to prep the American population subconsciously.

Now…

I argue that the significance of this role placement is associated with the r/K survival strategy which pretty much establishes a Marxist social dominance within America under the r survival strategy. It’s all pretty obvious to those of us who are paying attention.

If you haven’t a clue as to what I am talking about, then check out this link…

r/K selection theory

So, when you have a society (like the “great society”) giving away all sorts of free-things (you know, to “eliminate” poverty), you end up with a society of abundance. People can live off the dole. They don’t have to work. They don’t have to compete. They don’t have to survive. They turn in to r-strategists.

Now, back to Asia…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Puddle Jumper

One of the things that I really like about the world (not just Asia) is flying in “puddle jumpers” into the smaller more rural airports and visiting the countryside. Here is a small micro-video about flying into the Tachiletk airport near Thailand.

tachileik
Adventures may or may not come with a map. But no matter what, enjoy yourself and savor your experiences.

That’s what adventure is all about.

Here is a photo that kind of tells you where Tachileik is located. It is in Myanmar near Northern Thailand. (It is near Myanmar and near Maesai, Thailand.) It is a religious place with temples and mosques, as well as monasteries and pagodas.

Tachileik
Tachileik, near Maesai Thailand. Seriously, wouldn’t you like to visit this place?

Oh, yeah. Speaking about travel, let’s inject another great quote from the great movie Kelly’s Heroes. I mean, why not?

Here's some quotes from the great movie "Kelly's Heroes".

I mean. So many positive waves. Maybe we can’t lose!

That’s one of the advantages of travel. So many positive waves.

Return of the Monkey King

Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, is a melee agility hero,  best known for his slippery nature and his ability to do Mischief,  deceiving his enemies by turning into trees and other objects. Armed  with his magic extending staff, the Monkey King slams the ground with Boundless Strikes, and leaps to the treetops to have advantage over his foes with Tree Dance.

-Wikipedia 

Now, the Monkey King is a big thing in China. Everyone knows about the Monkey King and admires it. But for me, as an American, I don’t see the big deal. I think that it is a cultural thing. Like about how Jarts, and click-clacks were popular in the 1970s’.

You remember those eh?

“At Least He Didn’t Have Access To Jarts” Say Authorities Of Florida School Shooter
“At Least He Didn’t Have Access To Jarts” Say Authorities Of Florida School Shooter. No kidding. That’s what the detectives said.
 Trying to extract some positive from the horror in Florida, local  authorities reflected today on how much more carnage the school shooter  could have caused were it not for sensible regulations.

 “At least he didn’t have access to Jarts because they are thankfully banned in this country.”

 The outlawed lawn toys feature sharp metal tips designed to stick  into the ground when the Jart is lobbed underhand causing it to fall in a  large parabolic arc. 

 “This could have been so much worse.”
 
When  asked what could be done to prevent tragedies like this happening  again, they say they are staying focused on making sure this is as bad  as it gets.

 “Our number one priority right now is to ensure the Jart ban  isn’t repealed, and, beyond that, we are taking a serious look at banana  peels.”

-Breaking Bourgh
     

Ah, cultures can be so interesting.

Link

Anyways, back to the Monkey King…

Check out this short micro-video about the Monkey King…

OK, now after connecting Jarts to the Monkey King, and Kelly’s Heroes with those positive waves in Northern Thailand, let’s talk about kitties…

Ah. But first, look at what I discovered…

Cheetos are being changed so that they will not resemble President Trump.

Now for the kitties after looking at bright lime green Cheetos…

Butting Heads with the Kitty Store Owner

I do think that many cat lovers might appreciate this micro-video…

This is in China, and no, it’s really quite rare for the Chinese to eat pets like dogs and cats. That’s one of the lies propagated by the American mainstream media. They want to keep you all huddled, isolated and afraid of others.

They want you to sit inside your house, work as a serf, pay your taxes and obey your “betters”.

The River Runs Through it…

Speaking about China. Here’s a nice video of a small rural town in the hills. I guess that you could say this is a little like San Louis Obispo in California. Only the Chinese are far more religious than those progressives in California. Look at the hill. There you can see lighted Buddhist statuary.

I like this video.

This video reminds me of how nice small towns can look like when the politicians are being policed by the “corruption police” and are unable to “game the system”, “funnel money” away from projects, and generally abuse their positions. You know, like they do in the United States.

Hey! You do know what I am talking about don’t you?

Rush talks about inner city corruption.

Yeah. Crime and corruption was pretty bad in China up until 2013, when roving militarized “corruption police” started their crack-downs on corruption. Anyone who says that China is full of corruption today is a fucking idiot. (Or barring that, just horribly misinformed.)

It is nothing like it was.

China is VERY SERIOUS about corruption and crime. They know that the nation cannot survive unless they are able to take control over the high-level corruption that has made China famous two decades ago. So they declared war on corruption. But no, this wasn’t like they do in the USA, where enormous sums of money are dished out to “influencers” and “blue panels of experts”.

Nope.

Targets are identified, systems are put in place. Evil people are rounded up. Many are tortured and incarcerated. Some are killed.

Today, most Chinese are petrified of tangling with the Corruption Police. Arrest means their lives are effectively over, both literally and figuratively.

Corruption Police Arrest
One of China’s most-wanted fugitives suspected of bribery was brought home on Friday from the Republic of Guinea, following cooperation between the two countries’ law enforcement departments. Pei Jianqiang, 48, former director of import and export department of China Enterprise International Cooperation Co, was suspected of bribery and fled in November, 2009.

China launched a “Sky Net” campaign in April, 2015, with aims to bring back 100 suspects who were accused of economic crimes and have fled overseas. Pei was listed as the No. 10 suspect. Law enforcement officials from China and Guinea collaborated on the investigation, which confirmed that Pei was hiding out in Conakry, capital of Guinea, and running a bath center.

Pei was arrested on Dec 25 and sent back to Beijing Friday afternoon.Operation Sky Net launched In December, Huang Yurong, former Party chief of Henan Provincial Highway Administration and another fugitive on the list, surrendered herself to the police and returned from the United States where she had fled in 2002.
China takes corruption very seriously.
(150509) — BEIJING, May 9, 2015 (Xinhua) — Chinese police escort Li Huabo (C), the second suspect from China’s “100 most wanted economic fugitives” list, upon his arrival at the Beijing Capital International Airport in Beijing, capital of China, May 9, 2015. Li was repatriated Saturday as part of operation “Sky Net”. The Sky Net campaign aims to return fugitives for trial. (Xinhua/Chen Yehua)(mcg)
Corruption Police arrest corrupt civil servant.
In January 2013, Hebei Xinhe County Police notified Guangxi Dongxing Municipal Police that between 2008 to 2011, the former Director of Baoding City Mancheng County Bureau of Land and Resource in Hebei Song Jianzhong used his power to illegally profit and collect 1.5 million RMB in bribes, and when faced investigated by the relevant departments fled to Vietnam with his mistress. Photo is of about 6pm February 5th, Mong Cai Municipal Police in Vietnam handing the suspects over to Guangxi Dongxing Municipal law enforcement officials. Picture by Zhuo Huang/CFP.
Corrupt offical arrested.
After over 20 days of investigation, in the afternoon of February 5th, Song and his mistress, Ren, appeared in Mong Cai, Vietnam. Mong Cai Police successfully arrested the two. In January 2013, Hebei Xinhe County Police notified Guangxi Dongxing Municipal Police that between 2008 to 2011, the former Director of Baoding City Mancheng County Bureau of Land and Resource in Hebei Song Jianzhong used his power to illegally profit and collect 1.5 million RMB in bribes, and when faced investigated by the relevant departments fled to Vietnam with his mistress. Photo is of about 6pm February 5th, Mong Cai Municipal Police in Vietnam handing the suspects over to Guangxi Dongxing Municipal law enforcement officials.

Corruption Police is exactly what America needs today.

Make no mistake. It’s Long…long… LONG overdue.

Anyways, back to the video, pay attention to how clean the streets are. Notice how nice the houses are. Corruption turns nice communities into Detroit, or Baltimore. Look, and pay attention.

When there is corruption, the buildings fall into disrepair. The streets fall apart and have potholes, and the general standard of life is very poor. You can ALWAYS judge the level of corruption in a non-industrial community by how clean and well taken cared for it is.

If things are not so well taken cared for, and there are funds earmarked for maintenance, then you know that the levels of corruption are rather enormous.

Savage in a Parking Garage

On a lighter note. Let’s go Savage in one of those hyper-clean underground parking garages in China. It’s a thing, and I quite like it; those super clean parking garages. In the USA, it’s all damp, bare cement with dimly lit lighting. Yuck.

It’s so refreshing to be in a place where public places are treated as worthy of respect.

Back in the day, Americans used to take pride in their public spaces. Trees were planted in parks to provide shade. Benches were placed, and painted every year. Picnic tables were set up and yearly repaired and maintained. Roads and bridges had yearly inspection teams, fully funded, and taken cared for.

America of the past.
There was once a time when being an American was something special. It was not spit upon by members of Congress. The moneys to repair public works were on the local, not Federal level, and everyone was part of a community that participated. Not isolated, and living in fear facing an electronic box.

That all ended during the progressive onslaught around 1913 or so. Then it became something different. It went from “America for all of us”, to “What’s mine is mine, and I’ll give you a little bit if you obey me.”.

Now, back to China garages…

Ah it’s so refreshing.

Sure beats what you see in America everyday. Here is a typical photo of an American woman. It doesn’t matter where you go in the Untied States, or what city you visit, you will always be able to easily find American women that look like this…

American beautiful woman.
American woman shopping in Walmart. I wonder where she works? What do you think she does for a living? Do you have any idea how well she performed in school, and what she must be like as a person? People! We owe it to ourselves to reverse the obvious progressive decline of the American society.

Jackie Ma

China is a land of merit. You either do your best or fail and suffer the consequences. Much like America used to be when it was first founded. As such, I want to put a plug in for Jackie Ma. For he represents what China is today.

Sort of how Hillary Clinton represents what America is today.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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“The Star Mouse” (Full Text) by Frederick Brown

I think that I am changing; I no longer care about warning fellow Americans about the nationwide train-wreck that is about to happen. (The need to borrow 22 Trillion dollars is a very serious symptom.)

  • The people who care, don’t know what to do about it.
  • The People who don’t care are just lost causes.

You see people, when the Titanic is taking on water, and half the ship is already in the frosty depths, you don’t go about the deck warning people. You just don’t. You go get yourself a life-vest, and you get on board one of the life-boats.

You save yourself.

You don’t mess around.

Let’s just bug out and call it even. Why are we even talking about this?

That’s me today.

Instead, I just want to spend time with my family and get drunk with friends. I want to eat tasty delicious food and play with my dog. I want to reread the classics, and maybe explore a park or two.

Turning on the American news, even so-called Conservative aggregators, is like taking a swim in a water treatment plant cesspool. It’s all just so ugly and so terrible distasteful. I just no longer care. Yuck. It’s ugly, filthy stuff.

So… No. I don’t care.

No.

No. No. No.

No. No. No. Nonono. No.

Ya. Ya. So predictable.

Yet another Democrat wants to ban something. They must churn out these idiots by the gallon. Same talking points. Same emotional reasoning. Same banal ignorance.

Not. My. Problem.

Well… that’s just great man.

Justified by some crazed liberal shooter goes postal, and the media loudly warn everyone that utopia can arrive once only the government has guns. Brilliant logic for those that never opened up a history book. So predictable. Just like another feigned racial attack. I think the count is somewhere around 25,647 to 0 of it being faked.

People, if Conservatives wanted to hurt someone…they would do it. Make no mistake. You all ought be mighty careful for what you wish for.

Not. My. Problem.

You all had best be very careful for what you are wishing for.

The rich get so amazingly filthy rich, and commit the most horrid crimes freely. Nothing is done about it.

Americans are taxed, prodded and kept like free-ranging cattle.

Just you had better show up for your fleecing, or the full strength of the law will completely and absolutely destroy your life.

Gah!

Heck with that. I’ve tuned out.

Instead, I’m just gonna relax. Have a good time and read some good old fashioned books. Here’s a great short story pulled from one of them.

Enjoy.

The Star Mouse

Here’s a great classic science fiction story. It’s just a fun read. Nothing too much more than that. It Features a genial German rocket scientist (ah, if only they had all been as good-natured and likeable and well-intentioned as him!) and his charming and soon-to-be-super-intelligent mouse neighbor. The two have struck up a warm and talkative and very cheese-based relationship, that he sends out on the first-ever space mission in the history of mankind (we are in 1942). Now, this inventive story about very-hard-to forget mice and men cannot fail to leave you with a smile on your lips and the happy feeling that you have just read one of the masterpieces of the golden age of science-fiction!

MITKEY, THE MOUSE, wasn’t Mitkey then.

He was just another mouse, who lived behind the floorboards and plaster of the house of the great Herr Professor Oberburger, formerly of Vienna and Heidelberg; then a refugee from the excessive admira­tion of the more powerful of his fellow-countrymen. The excessive ad­miration had concerned, not Herr Oberburger himself, but a certain gas which had been a by-product of an unsuccessful rocket fuel—which might have been a highly successful something else.

If, of course, the Professor had given them the correct formula.

Which he—Well, anyway, the Professor had made good his escape and now lived in a house in Connecticut. And so did Mitkey.

A small gray mouse, and a small gray man. Nothing unusual about either of them. Particularly there was nothing unusual about Mitkey; he had a family and he liked cheese and if there were Rotarians among mice, he would have been a Rotarian.

The Herr Professor, of course, had his mild eccentricities. A con­firmed bachelor, he had no one to talk to except himself, but he considered himself an excellent conversationalist and held constant verbal communion with himself while he worked. That fact, it turned out later, was important, because Mitkey had excellent ears and heard those night-long soliloquies. He didn’t understand them, of course. If he thought about them at all, he merely thought of the Professor as a large and noisy super-mouse who squeaked over-much.

“Und now,” he would say to himself, “ve vill see vether this eggshaust tube vas broberly machined. It should fidt vithin vun vun­hundredth thousandth of an indtch. Ahhh, it iss berfect. Und now—”

Night after night, day after day, month after month. The gleaming thing grew, and the gleam in Herr Oberburger’s eyes grew apace.

It was about three and a half feet long, with weirdly shaped vanes, and it rested on a temporary framework on a table in the center of the room that served the Herr Professor for all purposes. The house in which he and Mitkey lived was a four room structure, but the Professor hadn’t yet found it out, seemingly. Originally, he had planned to use the big room as a laboratory only, but he found it more convenient to sleep on a cot in one corner of it, when he slept at all, and to do the little cooking he did over the same gas burner over which he melted down golden grains of TNT into a dangerous soup which he salted and peppered with strange condiments, but did not eat.

“Und now I shall bour it into tubes, and see vether vun tube adjacendt to another eggsplodes der secondt tube vhen der virst tube iss—”

That was the night Mitkey almost decided to move himself and his family to a more stable abode, one that did not rock and sway and try to turn handsprings on its foundations. But Mitkey didn’t move after all, because there were compensations. New mouse-holes all over, and—joy of joy!—a big crack in the back of the refrigerator where the Professor kept, among other things, food.

Of course the tubes had been not larger than capillary size, or the house would not have remained around the mouse-holes. And of course Mitkey could not guess what was coming nor understand the Herr Professor’s brand of English (nor any other brand of English, for that matter) or he would not have let even a crack in the refrigerator tempt him.

The Professor was jubilant that morning.

“Der fuel, idt vorks! Der secondt tube, idt did not eggsplode.Und der virst, in seggtions, as I had eggspectedt! Und it is more bowerful; there will be blenty of room for der combartment—”

Ah, yes, the compartment. That was where Mitkey came in, although even the Professor didn’t know it yet. In fact the Professor didn’t even know that Mitkey existed.

“Und now,” he was saying to his favorite listener, “idt is budt a madter of combining der fuel tubes so they work in obbosite bairs. Und then—”

That was the moment when the Herr Professor’s eyes first fell on Mitkey. Rather, they fell upon a pair of gray whiskers and a black, shiny little nose protruding from a hole in the baseboards.

“Veil!” he said, “vot haff ve here! Mitkey Mouse himself! Mitkey, how would you like to go for a ride, negst veek? Ve shall see.”

That is how it came about that the next time the Professor sent into town for supplies, his order included a mousetrap—not one of the vicious kind that kills, but one of the wire-cage kind. And it had not been set, with cheese, for more than ten minutes before Mitkey’s sharp little nose had smelled out that cheese and he had followed his nose into captivity.

Not, however, an unpleasant captivity. Mitkey was an honored guest. The cage reposed now on the table at which the Professor did most of his work, and cheese in indigestion-giving abundance was pushed through the bars, and the Professor didn’t talk to himself any more.

“You see, Mitkey, I vas going to sendt to der laboratory in Hardtfordt for a vhite mouse, budt vhy should I, mit you here? I am sure you are more soundt und healthy und able to vithstand a long chourney than those laboratory mices. No? Ah, you viggle your viskers und that means yes, no? Und being used to living in dargk holes, you should suffer less than they from glaustrophobia, no?”

And Mitkey grew fat and happy and forgot all about trying to get out of the cage. I fear that he even forgot about the family he had abandoned, but he knew, if he knew anything, that he need not worry about them in the slightest. At least not until and unless the Professor discovered and repaired the hole in the refrigerator. And the Professor’s mind was most emphatically not on refrigeration.

“Und so, Mitkey, ye shall place this vane so—it iss only of assistance in der landing, in an atmosphere. It und these vill bring you down safely und slowly enough that der shock-absorbers in der movable combartment vill keep you from bumping your head too hard, I think.”

Of course, Mitkey missed the ominous note to that “I think” qualification because he missed all the rest of it. He did not, as has been explained, speak English. Not then.

But Herr Oberburger talked to him just the same. He showed him pictures. “Did you effer see der Mouse you vas named after, Mitkey? Vhat? No? Loogk, this is der original Mitkey Mouse, by Valt Dissney. Budt I think you are cuter, Mitkey.”

Probably the Professor was a bit crazy to talk that way to a little gray mouse. In fact, he must have been crazy to make a rocket that worked. For the odd thing was that the Herr Professor was not really an inventor. There was, as he carefully explained to Mitkey, not one single thing about that rocket that was new. The Herr Professor was a technician; he could take other people’s ideas and make them work. His only real invention—the rocket fuel that wasn’t one—had been turned over to the United States Government and had proved to be something already known and discarded because it was too expensive for practical use.

As he explained very carefully to Mitkey, “It iss burely a matter of absolute accuracy and mathematical correctness, Mitkey. Idt iss all here—ye merely combine—und ye achieff vhat, Mitkey?

“Eggscape velocity, Mitkey! Chust barely, it adds up to eggscape velocity. Maybe. There are yet unknown facgtors, Mitkey, in der ubper atmosphere, der troposphere, der stratosphere. Ve think ve know eggsactly how mudch air there iss to calculate resistance against, but are ve absolutely sure? No, Mitkey, ve are not. Ve haff not been there. Und der marchin iss so narrow that so mudch as an air current might affect idt.”

But Mitkey cared not a whit. In the shadow of the tapering aluminum-alloy cylinder he waxed fat and happy.

“Der tag, Mitkey, der tag! Und I shall not lie to you, Mitkey. I shall not giff you valse assurances. You go on a dancherous chourney, mein little friendt.

“A vifty-vifty chance ve giff you, Mitkey. Not der moon or bust, but der moon und bust, or else maybe safely back to earth. You see, my boor little Mitkey, der moon iss not made of green cheese und if it were, you vould not live to eat it because there iss not enough atmosphere to bring you down safely und vith your viskers still on.

“Und vhy then, you may veil ask, do I send you? Because der rocket may not attain eggscape velocity. Und in that case, it iss still an eggsperiment, budt a different vun. Der rocket, if it goes not to der moon, falls back on der earth, no? Und in that case certain instruments shall giff us further information than ve haff yet about things up there in space. Und you shall giff us information, by vether or not you are yet alife, vether der shock absorbers und vanes are sufficient in an earth-equivalent atmosphere. You see?

“Then ladter, vhen ye send rockets to Venus maybe vhere an atmosphere eggsists, ve shall haff data to calculate the needed size of vanes und shock-absorbers, no? Und in either case, und vether or not you return, Mitkey, you shall be vamous! You shall be der virst lifting greature to go oudt beyond der stratosphere of der earth, out into space.

“Mitkey, you shall be der Star-Mouse! I enfy you, Mitkey, und I only vish I vere your size, so I could go, too.”

Der tag, and the door to the compartment. “Gootbye, little Mitkey Mouse.” Darkness. Silence. Noise!

“Der rocket—if it goes not to der moon—falls back on der earth, no?”

That was what the Herr Professor thought. But the best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft agley. Even star-mice.

All because of Prxl.


The Herr Professor found himself very lonely. After having had Mitkey to talk to, soliloquies were somehow empty and inadequate.

There may be some who say that the company of a small gray mouse is a poor substitute for a wife; but others may disagree. And, anyway, the Professor had never had a wife, and he had a mouse to talk to, so he missed one and, if he missed the other, he didn’t know it.

During the long night after the launching of the rocket, he had been very busy with his telescope, a sweet little eight-inch reflector, checking its course as it gathered momentum. The exhaust explo­sions made a tiny fluctuating point of light that was possible to follow, if one knew where to look.

But the following day there seemed to be nothing to do, and he was too excited to sleep, although he tried. So he compromised by doing a spot of housekeeping, cleaning the pots and pans. It was while he was so engaged that he heard a series of frantic little squeaks and discovered that another small gray mouse, with shorter whiskers and a shorter tail than Mitkey, had walked into the wire-cage mousetrap.

“Veil, yell,” said the Professor, “vot haff ye here? Minnie? Iss it Minnie come to look for her Mitkey?”

The Professor was not a biologist, but he happened to be right. It was Minnie. Rather, it was Mitkey’s mate, so the name was appropriate. What strange vagary of mind had induced her to walk into an unbaited trap, the Professor neither knew nor cared, but he was delighted. He promptly remedied the lack of bait by pushing a sizable piece of cheese through the bars.

Thus it was that Minnie came to fill the place of her far-traveling spouse as repository for the Professor’s confidences. Whether she worried about her family or not there is no way of knowing, but she need not have done so. They were now large enough to fend for themselves, particularly in a house that offered abundant cover and easy access to the refrigerator.

“Ah, und now it iss dargk enough, Minnie, that ye can loogk for that husband of yours. His viery trail across the sky. True, Minnie, it iss a very small viery trail und der astronomers vill not notice it, because they do not know vhere to loogk. But ye do.

“He iss going to be a very vamous mouse, Minnie, this Mitkey of ours, vhen ye tell der vorld about him und about mein rocket. You see, Minnie ye haff not told them yet. Ve shall vait und gill der gomplete story all at vunce. By dawn of tomorrow ve’ll—” Ah, there he iss, Minnie! Vaint, but there. I’d hold you up to der scope und let you loogk, but it vould not be vocused right for your eyes, und I do not know how to—

“Almost vun hundred thousand miles, Minnnie, und still agceler­ating, but not for much longer. Our Mitkey iss on schedule; in fagt he iss going vaster than ye had vigured, no? It iss sure now that he vill eggscape the gravitation of der earth, und fall upon der moon!”

Of course, it was purely coincidental that Minnie squeaked.

“Ah, yess, Minnie, little Minnie. I know, I know. Ve shall neffer see our Mitkey again, und I almost vish our eggsperiment hadt vailed. Budt there are gompensations, Minnie. He shall be der most vamous of all mices. Der Star-Mouse! Virst liffing greature effer to go beyond der gravitational bull of earth!”


The night was long. Occasionally high clouds obscured vision.

“Minnie, I shall make you more gomfortable than in that so-small vire cage. You vould like to seem to be vree, vould you not, vithout bars, like der animals at modern zoos, vith moats insteadt?”

And so, to fill in an hour when a cloud obscured the sky, the Herr Professor made Minnie her new home. It was the end of a wooden crate, about half an inch thick and a foot square, laid flat on the table, and with no visible barrier around it.

But he covered the top with metal foil at the edges, and he placed the board on another larger board which also had a strip of metal foil surrounding the island of Minnie’s home. And wires from the two areas of metal foil to opposite terminals of a small transformer which he placed near by.

“Und now, Minnie, I shall blace you on your island, vhich shall be liberally supplied mitt cheese und vater, und you shall vind it iss an eggcelent blace to liff. But you vill get a mild shock or two vhen you try to step off der edge of der island. It vill not hurt much, but you vill not like it, und after a few tries you vill learn not to try again, no? Und—”

And night again.

Minnie happy on her island, her lesson well learned. She would no longer so much as step on the inner strip of metal foil. It was a mouse-paradise of an island, though. There was a cliff of cheese bigger than Minnie herself. It kept her busy. Mouse and cheese; soon one would be a transmutation of the other.

But Professor Oberburger wasn’t thinking about that. The Pro­fessor was worried. When he had calculated and recalculated and aimed his eight-inch reflector through the hole in the roof and turned out the lights—

Yes, there are advantages to being a bachelor after all. If one wants a hole in the roof, one simply knocks a hole in the roof and there is nobody to tell one that one is crazy. If winter comes, or if it rains, one can always call a carpenter or use a tarpaulin.

But the faint trail of light wasn’t there. The Professor frowned and re-calculated and re-re-calculated and shifted his telescope three-tenths of a minute and still the rocket wasn’t there.

“Minnie, something iss wrong. Either der tubes hall stopped vir­ing, or—”

Or the rocket was no longer traversing a straight line relative to its point of departure. By straight, of course, is meant parabolically curved relative to everything other than velocity.

So the Herr Professor did the only thing remaining for him to do, and began to search, with the telescope, in widening circles. It was two hours before he found it, five degrees off course already and veering more and more into a— Well, there was only one thing you could call it.

A tailspin.

The darned thing was going in circles, circles which appeared to constitute an orbit about something that couldn’t possibly be there. Then narrowing into a concentric spiral.

Then—out. Gone. Darkness. No rocket flares.

The Professor’s face was pale as he turned to Minnie.

“It iss imbossible, Minnie. Mein own eyes, but it could not be. Even if vun side stopped viring, it could not haff gone into such sudden circles.” His pencil verified a suspicion. “Und, Minnie, it decelerated vaster than bossible. Even mitt no tubes viring, its momentum vould haff been more—”

The rest of the night—telescope and calculus—yielded no clue. That is, no believable clue. Some force not inherent in the rocket itself, and not accountable by gravitation—even of a hypothetical body—had acted.

“Mein poor Mitkey.”

The gray, inscrutable dawn. “Mein Minnie, it vill haff to be a secret. Ve dare not publish vhat ye saw, for it vould not be believed. I am not sure I believe it myself, Minnie. Berhaps because I vas offertired vrom not sleeping, I chust imachined that I saw—”

Later. “But, Minnie, ye shall hope. Vun hundred vifty thousand miles out, it vas. It vill fall back upon der earth. But I gannot tell vherel I thought that if it did, I vould be able to galculate its course, und— But after those goncentric circles—Minnie, not even Einstein could galculate vhere it vill land. Not effen me. All ve can do iss hope that ye shall hear of vhere it falls.”

Cloudy day. Black night jealous of its mysteries.

“Minnie, our poor Mitkey. There is nothing could have gauzed—”

But something had.

Prxl.


Prxl is an asteroid. It isn’t called that by earthly astronomers, because—for excellent reasons—they have not discovered it. So we will call it by the nearest possible transliteration of the name its inhabitants use. Yes, it’s inhabited.

Come to think of it, Professor Oberburger’s attempt to send a rocket to the moon had some strange results. Or rather, Prxl did.

You wouldn’t think that an asteroid could reform a drunk, would you? But one Charles Winslow, a besotted citizen of Bridgeport, Connecticut, never took a drink when—right on Grove Street—a mouse asked him the road to Hartford. The mouse was wearing bright red pants and vivid yellow gloves—

But that was fifteen months after the Professor lost his rocket. We’d better start over again.

Prxl is an asteroid. One of those despised celestial bodies which terrestrial astronomers call vermin of the sky, because the darned things leave trails across the plates that clutter up the more important observations of novae and nebulae. Fifty thousand fleas on the dark dog of night.

Tiny things, most of them. Astronomers have been discovering recently that some of them come close to Earth. Amazingly close. There was excitement in 1932 when Amor came within ten million miles; astronomically, a mere mashie shot. Then Apollo cut that almost in half, and in 1936 Adonis came within less than one and a half million miles.
In 1937, Hermes, less than half a million but the astronomers got really excited when they calculated its orbit and found that the little mile-long asteroid can come within a mere 220,000 miles, closer than Earth’s own moon.

Some day they may be still more excited, if and when they spot the 3/8-mile asteroid Prxl, that obstacle of space, making a transit across the moon and discover that it frequently comes within a mere hundred thousand miles of our rapidly whirling world.

Only in event of a transit will they ever discover it, though, for Prxl does not reflect light. It hasn’t, anyway, for several million years since its inhabitants coated it with a black, light-absorbing pigment derived from its interior. Monumental task, painting a world, for creatures half an inch tall. But worth it, at the time. When they’d shifted its orbit, they were safe from their enemies. There were giants in those days—eight-inch tall marauding pirates from Diemos. Got to Earth a couple of times too, before they faded out of the picture. Pleasant little giants who killed because they enjoyed it. Records in now-buried cities on Diemos might explain what happened to the dinosaurs. And why the promising Cro-Magnons disappeared at the height of their promise only a cosmic few minutes after the dinosaurs went west.

But Prxl survived. Tiny world no longer reflecting the sun’s rays, lost to the cosmic killers when its orbit was shifted.

Prxl. Still civilized, with a civilization millions of years old. Its coat of blackness preserved and renewed regularly, more through tradition than fear of enemies in these later degenerate days. Mighty but stagnant civilization, standing still on a world that whizzes like a bullet.

And Mitkey Mouse.


Klarloth, head scientist of a race of scientists, tapped his assistant Bemj on what would have been Bemj’s shoulder if he had had one. “Look,” he said, “what approaches Prxl. Obviously artificial propulsion.”

Bemj looked into the wall-plate and then directed a thought-wave at the mechanism that jumped the magnification of a thousand-fold through an alteration of the electronic field.

The image leaped, blurred, then steadied. “Fabricated,” said Bemj.

“Extremely crude, I must say. Primitive explosive-powered rocket. Wait, I’ll check where it came from.”

He took the readings from the dials about the viewplate, and hurled them as thoughts against the psychocoil of the computer, then waited while that most complicated of machines digested all the factors and prepared the answer. Then, eagerly, he slid his mind into rapport with its projector. Klarloth likewise listened in to the silent broadcast.

Exact point on Earth and exact time of departure. Untranslatable expression of curve of trajectory, and point on that curve where deflected by gravitational pull of Prxl. The destination—or rather the original intended destination—of the rocket was obvious, Earth’s moon. Time and place of arrival on Prxl if present course of rocket was unchanged.

“Earth,” said Klarloth meditatively. “They were a long way from rocket travel the last time we checked them. Some sort of a crusade, or battle of beliefs, going on, wasn’t there?”

Bemj nodded. “Catapults. Bows and arrows. They’ve taken a long stride since, even if this is only an early experimental thing of a rocket. Shall we destroy it before it gets here?”

Klarloth shook his head thoughtfully. “Let’s look it over. May save us a trip to Earth; we can judge their present state of develop­ment pretty well from the rocket itself.”

“But then we’ll have to—”

“Of course. Call the Station. Tell them to train their attracto-repulsors on it and to swing it into a temporary orbit until they prepare a landing-cradle. And not forget to damp out the explosive before they bring it down.”

“Temporary force-field around point of landing—in case?”

“Naturally.”

So despite the almost complete absence of atmosphere in which the vanes could have functioned, the rocket came down safely and so softly that Mitkey, in the dark compartment, knew only that the awful noise had stopped.

Mitkey felt better. He ate some more of the cheese with which the compartment was liberally provided. Then he resumed trying to gnaw a hole in the inch-thick wood with which the compartment was lined. That wooden lining was a kind thought of the Herr Professor for Mitkey’s mental well-being. He knew that trying to gnaw his way out would give Mitkey something to do en route which would keep him from getting the screaming meemies. The idea had worked; being busy, Mitkey hadn’t suffered mentally from his dark confinement. And now that things were quiet, he chewed away more industriously and more happily than ever, sub­limely unaware that when he got through the wood, he’d find only metal which he couldn’t chew. But better people than Mitkey have found things they couldn’t chew.

Meanwhile, Klarloth and Bemj and several thousand other Prxlians stood gazing up at the huge rocket which, even lying on its side, towered high over their heads. Some of the younger ones, forgetting the invisible field of force, walked too close and came back, ruefully rubbing bumped heads.

Klarloth himself was at the psychograph.

“There is life inside the rocket,” he told Bemj. “But the impres­sions are confused. One creature, but I cannot follow its thought processes. At the moment it seems to be doing something with its teeth.”

“It could not be an Earthling, one of the dominant race. One of them is much larger than this huge rocket. Gigantic creatures. Perhaps, unable to construct a rocket large enough to hold one of themselves, they sent an experimental creature, such as our wooraths.”

“I believe you’ve guessed right, Bemj. Well, when we have explored its mind thoroughly, we may still learn enough to save us a check-up trip to Earth. I am going to open the door.”

“But air—creatures of Earth would need a heavy, almost a dense atmosphere. It could not live.”

“We retain the force-field, of course. It will keep the air in. Obviously there is a source of supply of air within the rocket or the creature would not have survived the trip.”

Klarloth operated controls, and the force-field itself put forth invisible pseudo-pods and turned the outer screw-door, then reached within and unlatched the inner door to the compartment itself.

All Prxl watched breathlessly as a monstrous gray head pushed out of the huge aperture yawning overhead. Thick whiskers, each as long as the body of a Prxlian—

Mitkey jumped down, and took a forward step that bumped his black nose hard—into something that wasn’t there. He squeaked, and jumped backward against the rocket.

There was disgust in Bemj’s face as he looked up at the monster.

“Obviously much less intelligent than a woorath. Might just as well turn on the ray.”

“Not at all,” interrupted Klarloth. “You forget certain very obvious facts. The creature is unintelligent, of course, but the subconscious of every animal holds in itself every memory, every impression, every sense-image, to which it has ever been subjected. If this creature has ever heard the speech of the Earthlings, or seen any of their works—besides this rocket—every word and every picture is indelibly graven. You see now what I mean?”

“Naturally. How stupid of me, Klarloth. Well, one thing is obvious from the rocket itself: we have nothing to fear from the science of Earth for at least a few millennia. So there is no hurry, which is fortunate. For to send back the creature’s memory to the time of its birth, and to follow each sensory impression in the psychograph will require—well, a time at least equivalent to the age of the creature, whatever that is, plus the time necessary for us to interpret and assimilate each.”

“But that will not be necessary, Bemj.”

“No? Oh, you mean the X-19 waves?”

“Exactly. Focused upon this creature’s brain-center, they can, without disturbing his memories, be so delicately adjusted as to increase his intelligence—now probably about .0001 in the scale—to the point where he is a reasoning creature. Almost automatically, during the process, he will assimilate his own memories, and understand them just as he would if he had been intelligent at the time he received those impressions.

“See, Bemj? He will automatically sort out irrelevant data, and will be able to answer our questions.”

“But would you make him as intelligent as—?”

“As we? No, the X-19 waves would not work so far. I would say to about .2, on the scale. That, judging from the rocket, coupled with what we remember of Earthlings from our last trip there, is about their present place on the intelligence scale.”

“Ummm, yes. At that level, he would comprehend his experiences on Earth just sufficiently that he would not be dangerous to us, too. Equal to an intelligent Earthling. Just about right for our purpose. Then, shall we teach him our language?”

“Wait,” said Klarloth. He studied the psychograph closely for a while.

“No, I do not think so. He will have a language of his own. I see in his subconscious, memories of many long conversations. Strangely, they all seem to be monologues by one person. But he will have a language—a simple one. It would take him a long time, even under treatment, to grasp the concepts of our own method of communication. But we can learn his, while he is under the X-19 machine, in a few minutes.”

“Does he understand, now, any of that language?”

Klarloth studied the psychograph again. “No, I do not believe he— Wait, there is one word that seems to mean something to him. The word `Mitkey.’ It seems to be his name, and I believe that, from hearing it many times, he vaguely associates it with himself.”

“And quarters for him—with air-locks and such?”

“Of course. Order them built.”


To say it was a strange experience for Mitkey is understatement. Knowledge is a strange thing, even when it is acquired gradually. To have it thrust upon one—

And there were little things that had to be straightened out. Like the matter of vocal chords. His weren’t adapted to the language he now found he knew. Bemj fixed that; you would hardly call it an operation because Mitkey—even with his new awareness—didn’t know what was going on, and he was wide awake at the time. And they didn’t explain to Mitkey about the J-dimension with which one can get at the inwardness of things without penetrating the outside.

They figured things like that weren’t in Mitkey’s line, and anyway they were more interested in learning from him than teaching him. Bemj and Klarloth, and a dozen others deemed worthy of the privilege. If one of them wasn’t talking to him, another was.

Their questioning helped his own growing understanding. He would not, usually, know that he knew the answer to a question until it was asked. Then he’d piece together, without knowing just how he did it (any more than you or I know how we know things) and give them the answer.


Bemj: “Iss this language vhich you sbeak a universal vun?”

And Mitkey, even though he’d never thought about it before, had the answer ready: “No, it iss nodt. It iss Englitch, but I remember der Herr Brofessor sbeaking of other tongues. I belief he sboke another himself originally, budt in America he always sboke Englitch to become more vamiliar mitt it. It iss a beaudiful sbeech, is it nodt?”

“Hmmmm,” said Bemj.

Klarloth: “Und your race, the mices. Are they treated veil?” “Nodt by most people,” Mitkey told him. And explained.

“I vould like to do something for them,” he added. “Loogk, could I nodt take back mitt me this brocess vhich you used upon me? Abbly it to other mices, and greate a race of super-mices?”

“Vhy not?” asked Bemj.

He saw Klarloth looking at him strangely, and threw his mind into rapport with the chief scientist’s, with Mitkey left out of the silent communion.

“Yes, of course,” Bemj told Klarloth, “it will lead to trouble on Earth, grave trouble. Two equal classes of beings so dissimilar as mice and men cannot live together in amity. But why should that concern us, other than favorably? The resultant mess will slow down progress on Earth—give us a few more millennia of peace before Earthlings discover we are here, and trouble starts. You know these Earthlings.”

“But you would give them the X-19 waves? They might—”

“No, of course not. But we can explain to Mitkey here how to make a very crude and limited machine for them. A primitive one which would suffice for nothing more than the specific task of converting mouse mentality from .0001 to .2, Mitkey’s own level and that of the bifurcated Earthlings.”

“It is possible,” communicated Klarloth. “It is certain that for aeons to come they will be incapable of understanding its basic principle.”

“But could they not use even a crude machine to raise their own level of intelligence?”

“You forget, Bemj, the basic limitation of the X-19 rays; that no one can possibly design a projector capable of raising any mentality to a point on the scale higher than his own. Not even we.” All this, of course, over Mitkey’s head, in silent Prxlian.


More interviews, and more.

Klarloth again: “Mitkey, ve yarn you of vun thing. Avoid carelessness vith electricity. Der new molecular rearranchement of your brain center—it iss unstable, und—”

Bemj: “Mitkey, are you sure your Herr Brofessor iss der most advanced of all who eggsperiment vith der rockets?”

“In cheneral, yens, Bemj. There are others who on vun specific boint, such as eggsplosives, mathematics, astrovisics, may know more, but not much more. Und for combining these knowledges, he iss ahead.”

“It iss yell,” said Bemj.


Small gray mouse towering like a dinosaur over tinier half-inch Prxlians. Meek, herbivorous creature though he was, Mitkey could have killed any one of them with a single bite. But, of course, it never occurred to him to do so, nor to them to fear that he might.

They turned him inside out mentally. They did a pretty good job of study on him physically, too, but that was through the J-dimension, and Mitkey didn’t even know about it.

They found out what made him tick, and they found out everything he knew and some things he didn’t even know he knew. And they grew quite fond of him.

“Mitkey,” said Klarloth one day, “all der civilized races on Earth year glothing, do they nodt? Vell, if you are to raise der level of mices to men, vould it not be vitting that you year glothes, too?”

“An eggcelent idea, Herr Klarloth. Und I know chust vhat kind I should like. Der Herr Brofessor vunce showed me a bicture of a mouse bainted by der artist Dissney, und der mouse yore glothing. Der mouse vas not a real-life vun, budt an imachinary mouse in a barable, und der Brofessor named me after der Dissney mouse.”

“Vot kind of glothing vas it, Mitkey?”

“Bright red bants mitt two big yellow buttons in frondt und two in back, und yellow shoes for der back feet und a pair of yellow gloves for der front. A hole in der seat of der bants to aggomodate der tail.”

“Ogay, Mitkey. Such shall be ready for you in fife minutes.”

That was on the eve of Mitkey’s departure. Originally Bemj had suggested awaiting the moment when Prxl’s eccentric orbit would again take it within a hundred and fifty thousand miles of Earth. But, as Klarloth pointed out, that would be fifty-five Earth-years ahead, and Mitkey wouldn’t last that long. Not unless they—And Bemj agreed that they had better not risk sending a secret like that back to Earth.

So they compromised by refueling Mitkey’s rocket with something that would cancel out the million and a quarter odd miles he would have to travel. That secret they didn’t have to worry about, because the fuel would be gone by the time the rocket landed.


Day of departure.

“Ve haft done our best, Mitkey, to set and time der rocket so it vill land on or near der spot from vhich you left Earth. But you gannot eggspect agguracy in a voyach so long as this. But you vill land near. The rest iss up to you. Ve haff equvipped the rocket ship for effery contingency.”

“Thank you, Herr Klarloth, Herr Bemj. Gootbye.”

“Gootbye, Mitkey. Ve hate to loose you.”

“Gootbye, Mitkey.”

“Gootbye, gootbye . . .”


For a million and a quarter miles, the aim was really excellent. The rocket landed in Long Island Sound, ten miles out from Bridgeport, about sixty miles from the house of Professor Oberburger near Hartford.

They had prepared for a water landing, of course. The rocket went down to the bottom, but before it was more than a few dozen feet under the surface, Mitkey opened the door—especially re-equipped to open from the inside—and stepped out.

Over his regular clothes he wore a neat little diving suit that would have protected him at any reasonable depth, and which, being lighter than water, brought him to the surface quickly where he was able to open his helmet.

He had enough synthetic food to last him for a week, but it wasn’t necessary, as things turned out. The night-boat from Boston carried him in to Bridgeport on its anchor chain, and once in sight of land he was able to divest himself of the diving suit and let it sink to the bottom after he’d punctured the tiny compartments that made it float, as he’d promised Klarloth he would do.

Almost instinctively, Mitkey knew that he’d do well to avoid human beings until he’d reached Professor Oberburger and told his story. His worst danger proved to be the rats at the wharf where he swam ashore. They were ten times Mitkey’s size and had teeth that could have taken him apart in two bites.

But mind has always triumphed over matter. Mitkey pointed an imperious yellow glove and said, “Scram,” and the rats scrammed. They’d never seen anything like Mitkey before, and they were impressed.

So for that matter, was the drunk of whom Mitkey inquired the way to Hartford. We mentioned that episode before. That was the only time Mitkey tried direct communication with strange human beings. He took, of course, every precaution. He addressed his remarks from a strategic position only inches away from a hole into which he could have popped. But it was the drunk who did the popping, without even waiting to answer Mitkey’s question.

But he got there, finally. He made his way afoot to the north side of town and hid out behind a gas station until he heard a motorist who had pulled in for gasoline inquire the way to Hartford. And Mitkey was a stowaway when the car started up.

The rest wasn’t hard. The calculations of the Prxlians showed that the starting point of the rocket was five Earth miles north-west of what showed on their telescopomaps as a city, and which from the Professor’s conversation Mitkey knew would be Hartford.

He got there.


“Hello, Brofessor.”

The Herr Professor Oberburger looked up, startled. There was no one in sight. “Vot?” he asked, of the air. “Who iss?”

“It iss I, Brofessor. Mitkey, der mouse whom you sent to der moon. But I vas not there. Insteadt, I—”

“Vot?? It iss imbossible. Somebody blays der choke. Budt—budt nobody knows about that rocket. Vhen it vailed, I didn’t told nobody. Nobody budt me knows—”

“And me, Brofessor.”

The Herr Professor sighed heavily. “Offervork. I am going vhat they call battly in der bel—”

“No, Brofessor. This is really me, Mitkey. I can talk now. Chust like you.”

“You say you can— I do not belief it. Vhy can I not see you, then. Vhere are you? Vhy don’t you—”

“I am hiding, Brofessor, in der vall chust behind der big hole. I vanted to be sure efferything vas ogay before I showed myself. Then you would not get eggcited und throw something at me maybe.”

“Vot? Vhy, Mitkey, if it iss really you und I am nodt asleep or going— Vhy, Mitkey, you know better than to think I might do something like that!”

“Ogay, Brofessor.”

Mitkey stepped out of the hole in the wall, and the Professor looked at him and rubbed his eyes and looked again and rubbed his eyes and—

“I am grazy,’ he said finally. “Red bants he years yet, und yel­low— It gannot be. I am grazy.”

“No, Brofessor. Listen, I’ll tell you all aboudt.”

And Mitkey told him.

Gray dawn, and a small gray mouse still talking earnestly.

“Yess, Brofessor. I see your boint, that you think an intelligent race of mices und an intelligent race of men couldt nodt get along side by sides. But it vould not be side by sides; as I said, there are only a ferry few beople in the smallest continent of Australia. Und it vould cost little to bring them back und turn offer that continent to us mices. Ve vould call it Moustralia instead Australia, und ye vould instead of Sydney call der capital Dissney, in honor of—”

“But, Mitkey—”

“But, Brofessor, look vot we offer for that continent. All mices vould go there. Ve civilize a few und the few help us catch others und bring them in to put them under red ray machine, und the others help catch more und build more machines und it grows like a snowball rolling down hill. Und ye sign a nonaggression pact mitt humans und stay on Moustralia und raise our own food und—”

“But, Mitkey—”

“Und look vot ye offer you in eggschange, Her Brofessor! Ve vill eggsterminate your vorst enemy—der rats. Ve do not like them either. Und vun battalion of vun thousand mices, armed mitt gas masks und small gas bombs, could go right in effery hole after der rats und could eggsterminate effery rat in a city in vun day or two. In der whole vorld ye could eggsterminate effery last rat in a year, und at the same time catch und civilize effery mouse und ship him to Moustralia, und—”

“But, Mitkey—”

“Vot, Brofessor?”

“It vould vork, but it vould not work. You could eggsterminate der rats, yess. But how long vould it be before conflicts of interests vould lead to der mices trying to eggsterminate de people or der people trying to eggsterminate der—”

“They vould not dare, Brofessor! Ve could make weapons that vould—”

“You see, Mitkey?”

“But it vould not habben. If men vill honor our rights, ve vill honor—”

The Herr Professor sighed.

“I—I vill act as your intermediary, Mitkey, und offer your bropo­sition, und— Vell, it iss true that getting rid of rats vould be a greadt boon to der human race. Budt—”

“Thank you, Brofessor.”

“By der vay, Mitkey. I haff Minnie. Your vife, I guess it iss, un­less there vas other mices around. She iss in der other room; I put her there chust before you ariffed, so she vould be in der dark und could sleep. You vant to see her?”

“Vife?” said Mitkey. It had been so long that he had really for­gotten the family he had perforce abandoned. The memory re­turned slowly.

“Veil,” he said “—ummm, yess. Ve vill get her und I shall con­struct quvick a small X-19 prochector und—Yess, it vill help you in your negotiations mitt der governments if there are sefferal of us already so they can see I am not chust a freak like they might otherwise suspegt.”


It wasn’t deliberate. It couldn’t have been, because the Profes­sor didn’t know about Klarloth’s warning to Mitkey about careless­ness with electricity—”Der new molecular rearranchement of your brain center—it iss unstable, und—”

And the Professor was still back in the lighted room when Mitkey ran into the room where Minnie was in her barless cage. She was asleep, and the sight of her— Memory of his earlier days came back like a flash and suddenly Mitkey knew how lonesome he had been.

“Minnie!” he called, forgetting that she could not understand.

And stepped up on the board where she lay. “Squeak!” The mild electrical current between the two strips of tinfoil got him.

There was silence for a while.

Then: “Mitkey,” called the Herr Professor. “Come on back und ye vill discuss this—”

He stepped through the doorway and saw them, there in the gray light of dawn, two small gray mice cuddled happily together. He couldn’t tell which was which, because Mitkey’s teeth had torn off the red and yellow garments which had suddenly been strange, confining and obnoxious things.

“Vot on earth?” asked Professor Oberburger. Then he remem­bered the current, and guessed.

“Mitkey! Can you no longer talk? Iss der—”

Silence.

Then the Professor smiled. “Mitkey,” he said, “my little star-mouse. I think you are more happier now.”


He watched them a moment, fondly, then reached down and flipped the switch that broke the electrical barrier. Of course they didn’t know they were free, but when the Professor picked them up and placed them carefully on the floor, one ran immediately for the hole in the wall. The other followed, but turned around and looked back—still a trace of puzzlement in the little black eyes, a puzzlement that faded.

“Gootbye, Mitkey. You vill be happier this vay. Und there vill always be cheese.”

“Squeak,” said the little gray mouse, and it popped into the hole.

“Gootbye—” it might, or might not, have meant.

The End

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Correspondence Course
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 3)

About this photo splash. This is a scene from the classic 1980's movie "Better off Dead". Hey!, you know, if it's too hot outside, or it's raining, today might be a great opportunity to call some friends over, get a couple of cases of beer, and order some pizza and watch this grand old classic. What do ya think?

But first… speaking of the 1980’s classic movie… here’s a noteworthy review…

Movie review- better off dead.

Hey! Try this. You go into a restaurant where everyone is waiting for a table. Than, when things are kind of quiet, say very loudly “I WANT MY TWO DOLLARS!”

I guarantee that you will find other fans of this crazy movie, and get into some interesting conversations, and maybe… just maybe make some nice new friends in the process. Try it…

I want my two dollars.

Let’s continue forward, shall we…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Shenzhen Dogs

Seriously, the dogs of Shenzhen are treated quite differently than any where else on the planet. I don’t really know why, though I do have some (worthy of discussion) theories.

Now, most people reading this will not have a clue as to what is Shenzhen, or where it is. That’s understandable, given what the American media has devolved into. But it need not be difficult. Shenzhen is the Chinese city next to Hong Kong. It is like this…

Map of Shenzhen, and Hong Kong.
Here is the map of Shenzhen and Hong Kong. Shenzhen has 14 million citizens, and Hong Kong only has 8 million people. To put that into perspective, New York city has 6 million people. There is a constant flow of people in and out of HK though SZ. As many people who live and work in Hong Kong, actually have homes and residences inside Shenzhen.

Shenzhen is a very young city, and many people, before they have children will adopt dogs as pets. (And cats too. But, here we are talking about dogs.)

As such, Chinese culture enables them to treat their pets very specially. This can manifest as wearing clothes, hairdos, nail treatments, massages, and all sorts of special dog treats and toys. Now some have taken the more drastic steps in treating them like children, even training them to walk up right.

As this video attests…

I’ve got a ton load of movies of Shenzhen dogs. If you want me to post more of them, just send me a note. And, I’ll make up a complete post only on Chinese dogs.

Migrating Fish…

It’s tough being a fish. I don’t know what the story is on this, but it sure is interesting. Why are they taking this road? And, where do they expect to go to? Ah. It’s all a big mystery.

Oh, and a special message to the jack-off trolls. No, this is not photo-shopped. Why waste your time trying to convince me otherwise?

Passing the class…

It is tough being in a meritocracy. You have to get the best grades and do your best or else you WILL be begging in the streets. It’s the Chinese way.

Do your best, or suffer the consequences.

 The National College Entrance Examination, commonly known as Gaokao, is an academic examination held annually in the People's Republic of China. This Standardized test is a prerequisite for entrance into almost all higher education institutions at the undergraduate level. It is usually taken by students in their last year of senior high school, and there has been no age restriction since 2001. The exams last about nine hours over a period of two or three days, depending on the province.  

-Wikipedia

China has the yearly exam that determines the fate for millions of students. This exam covers everything, and does not award “diversity points” to “balance the score” in favor of protected classes of people like corrupt nations do.

With that introduction, you can now better understand this micro-video…

This is quite different than the United States where it is being instituted to permit racism, wealth-favoritism, and other ways to game the system.

racial discrimination by liberal universities against Asians.

Shanghai at night

Well, this is no big deal to me, but to a first time visitor, it makes a great impression. Shanghai is a modern, cutting-edge, beautiful Chinese city with large Western influences. If I would be so bold, I would say it is perhaps one of the most beautiful, cleanest, and most diverse cities on the planet. Most certainly better than London, Paris, or New York.

Today, if you want to graduate from the university and get into Banking or Finance, you migrate to Shanghai. It’s the odd man out that would instead go to Los Angeles, or Chicago to start a banking career.

Personally, while the Bund (the river with a nice wide walking boardwalk) is nice, I myself prefer the old city and the tight streets, the cool and interesting buildings, and the fine delicious night food that seems to be everywhere.

Rural Swimming Hole

This could be just about anywhere in Asia. Though, to me it looks a lot like Thailand or Vietnam. Water-holes and swimming areas are a natural environment that should be protected and cherished.

Boy in his tree house.
Whether it is a swimming hole, or a tree-house in an apple tree, people need to go forth and be out in nature. Oh, and by the way, don’t forget your friends, your pets, and some delicious food and drink. Icy cold beer is always a pleaser. Make sure that you remember to bring a bottle opener if you go the glass-bottle route.

I well remember how, in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, many (if not all) of the waterholes and ponds in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana were being filled in, or paved over for “safety”. Oh, you know, “for the children”. Yet, was any children actually ever hurt? Nope. Just an excuse used by the timid and fearful to control others…

If you can take your grandchildren, or children, or friends to a watering hole in the United States, then you should consider yourself lucky and truly fortunate. These gems are becoming rarer with each passing day.

In the mean time, spend more time outdoors and spend time with the people that mean things to you. Life is far too short not to.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan. (Part 2)

Thanks for sticking with me on this. Now, let’s continue forward, shall we…

About the splash photo above. This is a scene from the early 1980's movie "Hot Dog - The Movie". Ah, it's a classic movie for certain, and maybe worth a re-watch. 

"Ah... I had Sunny side up. Und... I had Sunny side down. Und... I had Sunny side all the way around." LOL.
Hot Dog the movie quote

But first, might I suggest a nice snack. You know, something that you can enjoy with your buds. Maybe a fine meatball sandwich in fresh crusty bread with delicious melted cheese? You do know, that it tastes delicious with some fine frosty beer.

Oh, and you had best be careful. Make sure that it is extra cold.

Delicious meatball sandwich with beer.
Delicious meatball sandwich with beer. I find that this goes well with just about anything. I rather suggest that everyone enjoy a nice meatball sandwich from time to time.

On second thought, maybe you should open up a nice bottle of wine.

You do know that wine goes with everything. I happen to like red wines, especially the rather dry wines. What ever you do make sure that you find someone to share the wine with. You can get by drinking a beer alone, but wine… ah, that is meant to be shared.

Me when we are out of wine.
Can you just imagine what it would be like if your local supermarket was out of wine? What a horrible, horrible thought. Yeah, no doubt, this is me.

For some reason, I don’t know why, I do enjoy wine with a grinder. Any wine goes great with long crusty bread, as does it with prepared meats, cheese and olives. In fact, how about a nice salad with some fine anti-pasta? Yeah, now doesn’t that sound great?

You bet it does.

So what are you waiting for. Grab a bottle, call over some friends, and make some great snacks. Then you can watch some of these obscure and unusual videos while munching, drinking and just paling around with your friends.

Hot dog the movie quote 2

We have forgotten that we NEED to connect with others. So, make that connection. Solidify it with good delicious food and fine drink.

Spend the time with others.
Life is really short. Spend you time with others. Enjoy your time with family, pets and friends. Drink well, and eat well. Tell jokes and play around. Just have a great time.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Getting together with friends…

While I do like to talk about food, beer, wine and pretty girls. The most important thing is friends and family. We are social creatures, and it is our relationships that add color to our lives. I really believe that. not only that, but it is our uniqueness and our “special-ness” that really makes our relationships great.

Friends at a ball park enjoying a beer.
Friends at a ball park enjoying a beer. All Summer baseball, with hotdogs and beer. Now, doesn’t that sound great? Or would you rather see how many “likes” you get on Facebook? People! Let me tell you, life is too shot not to enjoy a baseball game with your friends.

I believe that many of us just take our friends and family for granted. They are just “there”, and we don’t appreciate how important they are to us. We don’t appreciate how they enhance our life, and how they are our support network with things go wrong.

Hot dog quote 3

It is our real friends who will be there for us when we need them. We need to cultivate our friendships and spend time with our friends, and (of course) our families. This is very old fashioned. Back in the 1960’s and long before that (but it ended in the 1960’s.) People used to go out on picnics and outings.

Camping, and cooking some fresh fish, with some delicious PBR.
Camping, and cooking some fresh fish, with some delicious PBR. Can’t you just smell the pine needles, listen to the creek ripple and flow, and pop the tab on a nice frosty beer? Life is meant to be enjoyed and shared with friends. So do it. Don’t fall into the progressive liberal trap of strength though isolation in electronic wonderment.

The wife would cook up and package some great, healthy wonderful fresh food. You would take a baseball, or maybe a frizbee, and bring the dogs (the cats would usually prefer to stay home) and go out and play. You all would make a day out of it.

Sadly, this is pretty much a thing of the past in the good ol’ USA, but it is quite active in the rest of the world. Well, at least those areas that haven’t been poisoned with new new progressive improvements of being alone… isolated… lonely… desperately trying to connect to others through electronics…

Yes. Make no mistake. This is the ideal utopia that is just now being realized. It was set in place in the USA back in 1913. That is when Americans lost their freedom in the hope that the government would provide for them a marvelous utopia. (The “Never Trumpers” still believe in this lie.) You can see elements of this utopia just by visiting Wal-Mart at night.

Friends and family on a picnic.
Friends and family on a picnic. Life is too short, not to play catch with your old man, have a coke with your mother, or chat with your son about how delicious peanutbutter, jelly and bacon sandwiches are. Life is too short to squander it on the trivial.

Friendships. We all need them.

Yeah. This is pretty much what it is like all over the world. here, in this case, this is what it looks like in China. You will notice that they all don’t go to their individual houses and apartments after work. They don’t eat a burger in their car while they are going from point “A” to point “B”. They don’t rush home to play games on the computer and surf the internet.

No.

They go outside and gather in communal settings. Often around food and beer. They spend time with each other. They cat, laugh and play. And yes, they might be playing games and connected on their cellphone, they are doing so with friends, not isolated and alone, hidden inside some kind of box.

Southern China on the Laos and Vietnam border…

In the bigger communities it becomes more lively…

Of course, the above is a rural section of the country. In the towns and cities there are areas with much more life and excitement. One of the the things that I like about this is that you don’t need to spend a lot of money to decorate or establish venues. Just some cheap tables made out of plywood, and some gas barrels, will do.

Camping.
Here we have some friends enjoying a nice fire at a campsite. They are drinking coffee, so it must be in the morning. Ah, now that’s a great adventure, what do you think. Fishing at the crack of dawn, and drinking some coffee with friends.

You can play some music. String up some lights. Cook some chicken on the grill, and roast up some corn. It’s cheaper and healthier than any fast food available, and as a bonus you can make friends. You see guy or a girl, you say, “Hi” and then you offer them a beer. They will accept it and you two can then start talking.

It’s what has been historically what has been done all over the United States for decades, well at least up until the progressive utopists started to gain power and started to ban things. Now today, you need designated smoking areas, fees and taxes, and of course rules on times and permits. It’s the price you must pay for living in a progressive Marxist paradise.

Free people do not need to purchase permits, pay fees, or suffer through regulation.

Cooking iwth your son.
Ah, the best part of Summer. Teaching your son the importance of cooking hamburgers, and bacon. Oh, and don’t forget the baked beans, and the nice cup of coffee (or icy beer). The boy can have a nice soda instead. then, when he turns 14 he can have his first beer. As he is now a working man. Don’t you love it? Friends and family, the most important ingredients for a successful life.

In the rest of the world, in places where social progressiveness (such as communism) is frowned upon… like China, you don’t have any of those perversions. You are free to live life on your terms, and while China is officially called “communist”, in practical terms, it functions more like a libertarian environment.

Some baked beans at the picnic.
Here the wife prepares some delicious baked beans for everyone to eat. Looks like a very nice picnic to me. I personally believe that the best baked beans has lots of brown sugar and nice chewy pork and bacon simmering while it is cooking. You can smell the aroma and enjoy it over a nice frosty beer.

Ah, but don’t believe me.

You can read CNN, and Rush Limbaugh. They will tell you what China is like. Heck, how’s all that working out for you all? Think about it. Jeff Sessions is playing 5D chess, don’t you know. The Muller investigation will prove that Donald Trump is a Russian Spy, and your taxes must be raised because a 22 trillion deficit is good for you!

Don’t believe me. What do I know?

Meanwhile, this is what the rest of the world is doing…

Party Time – Northern Thailand

I love how everyone gets together and has a great time. I most especially love how open and friendly everyone is. I like the food, the smiles, the pretty girls in the pretty outfits and the tons of tasty delicious food.

Fun on the beach.
Fun on the beach. You can enjoy yourself with loved ones on the beach. You can pitch a big ol’ tent up to provides some shade and just eat and build sandcastles. You can listen tot he radio. You can have fun, and walk along the water. Life is too short not to spend it with friends.

This video below is taken in Thailand, not in China. You can tell by the music, the people, and the language. Still… look at how happy they are and what they are doing. They are together. They are talking, dancing, eating, and drinking. People! We need each other.

The progressive utopia of sitting in a work cubicle, eating a burger alone in your car, going home to a lonely life in front of the TV or the PC is a lie. The progressive Marxists want you to be isolated. Together, in force, with friends and family, we have power and strength. Realize it.

There is no set formula or rules for having fun. I believe that all it takes is two people, and some food and drink. That’s it.

Having fun in a mall

Here we have a kind of human “got-ya crane”. Sort of like a human version of those devices that you find all over the world. I think that this is a pretty cute idea, and it is replayed over and over again all over China. Why doesn’t it happen in the USA?

Yes, I know, it’s a gimmick. But so what? It’s cute, and good for a few laughs. It might make a good venue for a church fair, or a school fund-raising program. (Provided of course, that you pay the necessary fees, obey the necessary regulations, and pay off the proper people… Oh, you know who I mean. Yup, life in the USA today.)

Yes, I know it’s just some bags of chips, and that they aren’t healthy and full of salt and oil. But, there’s nothing wrong with eating one or two… just make sure that you have it with a nice frosty mug of beer and some delicious snacking dip.

Call some friends over and have some fun. than maybe go play putt-putt afterwards, or even go par-3 golfing. Or, perhaps just wack some balls at the driving range. Life is too short not to have fun.

How about plinking some cans with that trusty .22 that you haven’t fired in a while? Go ahead. Have some fun.

Do not sit at home and let life pass you by.
Do not sit at home and let life pass you by. Do something with your life that involves smiling faces, a little laughter, good food and drink. If you can, include your friends and family, and never forget to bring along your pets. Life is far too short to waste it.

What’s Stopping YOU?

Yeah, here’s another video about the Chinese islands. I’ll bet that you that you weren’t even aware that China had islands? Were you? There are many videos about the many beautiful islands of China. You don’t have to limit your expose to them by what you hear on CNN or MSNBC.

Of course, there are many more videos…

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Some fun videos of Asia; to include China, Thailand, Vietnam, and Japan.

Oh, about the image splash. That's Vincent price in Dr. Goldfoot and the bikini machine. Yeah, you see, he's turned all these girl robots into bombs. Just your typical 1960's era Hollywood fare.

It’s all about having FUN.

By request, I’m posting some fun videos of what is going on in the rest of the world. You can turn off Drudge, CNN, MSNBC and the rest of all that nonsense. Here’s what the rest of the world are up to.

So grab a seat.

Pour yourself a big bowl of Doritos and some salsa. (Don’t forget the tomatoes, and onions, and delicious cheddar cheese.) Make sure that you are well equipped with frosty mugs of delicious beer (oh, and BTW, never scrimp on the beer. If, it’s not worthy of the money, it’s not worthy of drinking), and settle down.

Oh, and don’t forget your dog or cat, or both if you are anything like me. Make sure that there is enough room for them to squeeze in besides you. Relax. Light up.

I’ve selected some of the more unusual micro-videos from my collection. Some are really entertaining, while others are well… just really strange.

Watch them or not.

Just recognize that our world is a great and wonderful place. It is filled with wonderful, great people, and it is our differences from each other that should be appreciated and treasured, not our bland sameness. Let the sheep be like everyone else. Be the odd-man-out that follows a different beat.

Be who you are.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

First up, let’s see a micro-video that kind of looks a little bit like me. Well, in style, anyways. And, no let’s not get all too deep about this subject matter.

We are all just having fun playing around.

He’s just like me!

Let’s start with this cool little video, that I jokenly refer to as a reflection of my life. LOL. It’s close… sort of. It’s a collection of clips from one of the top Chinese movies of this season.

The theme that runs through Chinese movies is pretty much [1] massive success after [2] tremendous study and preparation. (Yah. I’ve got tons, just tons, of micro-videos on these theme.)

That differs from many of the themes that you can find in Hollywood. You know the type. You are gifted with luck beyond your control. A meteor falls from the sky and you get magical powers. Or you are bit by a radioactive spider and become enhanced, or you are granted special abilities at birth, or some other kind of nonsense. Hollywood loves to produce those kinds of movies; “the world is outside your ability to control. But you can somehow… in some way… be magically transformed. Somehow…”

I guess is a difference between a traditional meritocracy, and a progressive utopia.

Guess which is which.

  • China = Traditional, Single-political party, Conservative.
  • USA = Progressive, forward thinking, Social utopia.

Anyways, I love his fashion sense, his cigars, and diving into the pool with all those cute bikini clad chicks. I can easily see myself wearing those fashionable plaid pants, the green sports jacket, and his polyester attire.

Can’t you?

Not to mention being surrounded by bikini clad ladies. Life is too short not to be surrounded by cute attractive women. Don’t you think? (At least, that’s my take on this matter.)

Oh, and don’t forget the pizza, beer, wine and lots and lots of music…

And, here’s another video that is a reflection of the kinds of movies coming out of China these days…

Having the beat…

Well, you asked. You see, everyone needs to dance to their own beat. And maybe you don’t know how to dance, heck you can still move your neck muscles around, eh?

Maybe a bit of explanation is in order. You will note that they are wearing traditional Han clothing. This is a regular thing in China. You honor tradition and you keep the memories alive of the past. You treasure statues, monuments, and traditions.

Again, that is what traditional conservative nations do. They honor their past.

Progressive enlightened nations tear down the past. They ignore or rewrite the past to fit a more “enlightened” understanding. Since China is very traditional, and extremely conservative, you can see this being reflected in their movies made within China.

This is the top movie in China this season…

Yeah. I don’t get it either.

Now who wouldn’t want to have a crew of nappy well-dressed mobsters wearing fedoras (and top hats) and carrying axes. Especially when they perform line dance routines to fight the opposition? I can relate. Can’t you?

Maybe this is how you deal with all that mob violence in cities like Chicago, Detroit, San Francisco or Baltimore. You know the places… those liberal progressive utopias where everyone is equal, just and happy!

Rap God

How about being a Rap God? They’ve got them in China, don’t ya know. It’s sort of like this. Hey! Can you rap in English and Chinese simultaneously?

I feel like I am getting a little too sidetracked on movies.

Let’s check out some other unknowns. Let’s check out the cool and beautiful islands.

Chinese Islands

Everyone knows about the thousands of islands in Thailand and Vietnam. What many people don’t know is that China has many, many thousands of islands as well. All of which are sitting right there waiting for you to explore and enjoy.

And people… that’s what you do.

Let’s continue forward, shall we… Ugh.

I have many more videos, but I just cannot put them into a single post. It will bog down your computer terribly. So to watch the rest of the videos in this post, please continue. The arrow will flush this page’s cache (sort of) and allow you to check out some more cool micro-videos.

I’ve got stuff on all kinds of things. From the HK riots, to eating, drinking, and pretty girls, to sudsy cluster parties. Ho Ya Baby!

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Picture Dump 1

Here are some pictures that I have collected from all over, and for Lord only knows why. Before I discard them off my HD, I’ve decided to share them with all of you out there is Internet-person land.

SHTF Romanian Style

Picture dump of the Romanian armed revolt.
Soldiers and armed civilians occupy the office of ousted Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu in the capital Bucharest on Dec. 26, 1989, the day after he was executed.

The Progressive Dream

This is pretty much what all the progressive socialists and SJW’s think that world will turn into once they are the boss and are given the ability to tell everyone else what to do. Hum. Do you all think that this is what’s going to happen? Nope, neither do I.

Swiss Bf-109’s

Swiss Air Force markings.
During World War II, the “neutral” Swiss traded with Nazi Germany. This picture describes the markings on their BF-109’s.

Conan gives his advice on life…

Conan
Conan gives his advice on life. He describes how life works and how much he enjoys “smelling the flowers”.

Three types of men

There are three types of men.
There are three types of men. Which type are you?

Hillery explains her plans to her followers…

Hillery Philsophy
Hillery explains her governmental philosophy to her “followers”. We need to take things away from the people so that they can be ruled over by a benevolent, smarter government. Yes. Just like how she and her husband did all those years in government.

Hoe squad at the ADC

Hoe squad at the ADC
Hole squad at the ADC. This is Cummins. Yup, this is what it is like. This is what Hard Labor is like in Arkansas and it is anything but easy.

Enlarged detail in the “Drone Hoax”

NSA spent a lot of time disparaging the MAJestic disclosure.
NSA spent a lot of time disparaging the MAJestic disclosure. This is for C.A.R.E.T. and MAJestic. Whatever. This is an enlarged view of the underside of one of those pesky “drone hoaxes” that are (wink – wink) just a hoax.

SHTF imagery

SHTF
SHTF and CW2 is never pretty. Luckily we have photographs of what it looks like, though it seems that many are now getting placed behind paywalls for some reason or the other making them inaccessible.

The Four Conspirators

Hanging of the four conspirators
Hanging of the four conspirators involved in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Saint Joseph’s Church

Saint Joseph's Church
I often read nonsense about China on American forums. As someone who is living in China, I find many of the so-called reports from “experts” to be just made up lies. LIES. So when I read about church cross removal in China, well, the first thing that I do is go to the nearby church and see what is going on. In every instance, what is going on is absolutely nothing. The cross still stands proud and high.

How the business-world works

The real world.
It doesn’t matter what kind of business you are in, they all work this way. From getting a hamburger, to ordering a F-35 fighter jet. This is the way it works, and no denials or creative solutions is going to change that.

Norman Thomas Quote

Norman Thomas quote
Norman Thomas quote; the American people would NEVER knowingly adopt socialism.

Symbology Coincidences

Symbology
There seems to be a lot of coincidences in regards to symbology.

Anon discovers vote fraud…

Vote Fraud.
Discovered and proven. Taken to the police to act on. No action taken. The government in power wants vote fraud, and the opposition parties is supportive of that.

Suburban ideal

Dream house in America.
Nice duplex from the early 1960’s. This was the dream house for many a young couple.

Time for some soup…

Serious eats.
Slow cooker Chicken Tortilla soup. Now, wouldn’t you just love to have a bowl of this most delicious soup? I know that I would.

MK-ULTRA Film Purge

MK-ULTRA
The United States government attacked it’s citizens in a large series of tests used to control the minds of people. When discovered, they immediately erased and destroyed as much documentation that they could. Precious few photos or documentation remains. This is one such photo.

Leave on time…

Always leave the office on time.
Always leave the office on time.

The CIA heads for the hills…

The CIA leaves Cambodia.
After the CIA messed up Cambodia and allowed the Communist insurgents to take over the nation, there was wide-spread panic. This photo depicts American military protecting the CIA assets as they evacuate the Cambodian capital city.

Intention Imagery

Pizza on the beach.
If you want to create a vision board for intention generation, you cannot go wrong with using this image. Nothing is finer than a pizza pie on the beach on a fine day.

Bill Clinton?

Bill Clinton
I was once told that this was a photo of Bill Clinton. I mean it sort of looks like him, but the mustache doesn’t quite fit. Maybe it’s his body double.

She’s a real cow…

She's a real cow.
I know that some people want to get all costumed up for sex, but this I am afraid, is a little extreme. Don’t you all think?

The Pearly Gates

Let bygones be bygones.
I have met many people who earnestly believe that they can be bad and ask for forgiveness so that they can reserve a seat for themselves in Heaven. I’ve got news for you all. It doesn’t work that way. Forgiveness is earned over time.

Now for the rest of the story…

Cambodian troops
Once the CIA failed, and the Cambodian government collapsed, the American instigators fled the country. What remained, the military and the police were ordered to turn in their weapons to the new progressive communist government of Pol Pot. Once, the weapons were turned in and collected, the soldiers were rounded up, collected. They were cataloged and photographed. Then they were killed. Killed dead. That’s progressive socialists for you.

China on the dark side of the Moon

Chinese lunar rover.
China has landed a lander on the dark side of the Moon. This is a real difficult feat as there just isn’t any kind of direct way to communicate with Earth based command and control. Instead, an orbiting satellite must relay remote commands to the lunar rover. Pretty cool stuff.

Being a boy in the 1960’s

THis is what boyhood was like.
This is what boyhood was like. He has his toy pistol and holster (now banned by the Democrats), his little red wagon which was a boyhood staple. As well as the all-metal tricycle that was eventually displaced by a plastic one in the 1970’s.

Grilled Ruben Sandwiches

Grilled Ruben Sandwich.
Beer goes great with a grilled Ruben sandwich. As does the proper dipping sauce of Thousand-Island dressing, and a nice pickle along the side. Personally, I believe that a fine frosty beer would go great with this sandwich. Don’t you?

The Seven Rules of Life

The seven rules of life.
The seven rules of life.

Chicken, Beer and slaw…

Chicken, beer and coleslaw.
Life is too short not to enjoy chicken, beer and coleslaw. I think that we owe it to ourselves to enjoy life to our fullest, and that means good food, great drinks and fine friends.

Dickenson’s Political Spectrum

Political chart
This is the Dickenson’s political chart of political philosophies.

BLT with peaches on the side.

BLT
The primary characteristic of a well-made BLT is the abundance of bacon and fresh delicious tomatoes. You also must make sure that the bread is properly toasted. For only the properly toasted bread will serve to complement a mighty proper icy beer.

Consort Ranking for Chinese Kings

Managmeent of Consorts in China.
This is how consorts are traditionally managed in China. In China, the King often had a great selection of women to choose from to mate, and “consort” with. They followed some strict rules of internal society, and it pretty much followed a pyramid like structure.

Prerequisites for Draining the Swamp

Facts and rules.
Unless active and proactive tasks are undertaken to drain the swamp, it will never be drained. It will only get worse, and eventually will come a point of collapse. Also known as the SHTF and CWII events. Who is currently active in these areas today?

How to cut a club sandwich.

How to cut a club sandwich.
When making a club sandwich you need to be very careful and cut cross-wise. That way you can have four tiny triangle shaped bites of delicious sandwich.

Purchasing Power of the USD

The USD has very little worth.
The USD has very little worth. If you think that a 22 trillion dollar debt is going to make things better, then you are sorely mistaken.

The American Dream

The American Dream.
The American dream is one with a family eating together in the backyard on a nice sunny Summer afternoon. It is a time of togetherness, clean and cheerful clothes and mowed grass. Not to mention the very delicious hotdogs.

When things go wrong…

When things go wrong. Poor guy.
When things go wrong. Poor guy.

Tired Car

Tired Car
Tired Car

Progressive Liberal Militia to go after Deplorable Nazi Racists.

Berkley California Liberal Militia.
Berkley California Liberal Militia. They are armed and equipped with multiple round magazines that are against the law in the State of California, but apparently progressive Marxists get a pass in obeying the law. This group was formed to fight against deplorable racist anti-progressive forces.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

What is going on in Hollywood?
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
The Rule of Eight

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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“Correspondence Course” (Full Text) by Raymond F. Jones

I like this story. It’s a story that I read years ago, and it contains elements that I really like. (If you care.) It’s just a story, but it’s a fun story, and I hope that you (the reader) will appreciate it.

THE OLD lane from the farmhouse to the letter box down by the road was the same dusty trail that he remembered from eons before. The deep summer dust stirred as his feet moved slowly and haltingly. The marks of his left foot were deep and firm as when he had last walked the lane, but where his right foot moved there was a ragged, continuous line with irregular depressions and there was the sharp imprint of a cane beside the dragging footprints.

He looked up to the sky a moment as an echelon of planes from the advanced trainer base fifty miles away wheeled overhead. A nostalgia seized him, an overwhelming longing for the men he had known —and for Ruth.

He was home; he had come back alive, but with so many gone who would never come back, what good was it?

With Ruth gone it was no good at all. For an instant his mind burned with pain and his eyes ached as if a bomb-burst had blinded him as he remembered that day in the little field hospital where he had watched her die and heard the enemy planes overhead.

Afterwards, he had gone up alone, against orders, determined to die with her, but take along as many Nazis as he could.

But he hadn’t died. He had come out of it with a bullet-shattered leg and sent home to rust and die slowly over many years.

He shook his head and tried to fling the thoughts out of his mind. It was wrong. The doctors had warned him—

He resumed his slow march, half dragging the all but useless leg behind him. This was the same lane down which he had run so fast those summer days so long ago. There was a swimming hole and a fishing pond a quarter of a mile away. He tried to dim his vision with half-shut eyes and remember those pleasant days and wipe out all fear and bitterness from his mind.

It was ten o’clock in the morning and Mr. McAfee, the rural postman, was late, but Jim Ward could see his struggling, antique Ford raising a low cloud of dust a mile down the road.

Jim leaned heavily upon the stout cedar post that supported the mailbox and when Mr. McAfee rattled up he managed to wave and smile cheerily.

Mr. McAfee adjusted his spectacles on the bridge of his nose with a rapid trombone manipulation.

“Bless me, Jim, it’s good to see you up and around!”

“Pretty good to be up.” Jim managed to force enthusiasm into his voice. But he knew he couldn’t stand talking very long to old Charles McAfee as if everything had not changed since the last time.

“Any mail for the Wards, today?”

The postman shuffled the fistful of mail. “Only one.”

Jim glanced at the return address block and shrugged. “I’m on the sucker lists already. They don’t lose any time when they find out there’s still bones left to pick on. You keep it.”

He turned painfully and faced toward the house. “I’ve got to be getting back. Glad to have seen you, Mr. McAfee.”

“Yeah, sure, Jim. Glad to have seen you. But I . . . er . . . got to deliver the mail—” He held the letter out hopefully.

“O.K.” Jim laughed sharply and grasped the circular.

He went only as far as the giant oak whose branches extended far enough to overshadow the mailbox. He sat down in the shade with his back against the great bole and tried to watch the echelon still soaring above the valley through the rifts in the leaf coverage above him. After a time he glanced down at the circular letter from which his fingers were peeling little fragments of paper. Idly, he ripped open the envelope and glanced at the contents. In cheap, garish typograph with splatterings of red and purple ink the words seemed to be trying to jump at him.

SERVICEMAN—WHAT OF THE FUTURE?

You have come back from the wars. You have found life different than you knew it before, and much that was familiar is gone. But new things have come, new things that are here to stay and are a part of the world you are going to live in.

Have you thought of the place you will occupy? Are you prepared to resume life in the ways of peace?

WE CAN HELP YOU

Have you heard of the POWER CO-ORDINATOR? No, of course you haven’t because it has been a hush-hush secret source of power that has been turning the wheels of war industries for many months. But now the secret of this vast source of new power can be told, and the need for hundreds, yes, thousands of trained technicians—such as you, yourself, may become—will be tremendous in the next decade.

LET US PROVE TO YOU

Let us prove to you that we know what we are talking about. We are so certain that you, as a soldier trained in intricate operations of the machines of war, will be interested in this almost miraculous new source of power and the technique of handling it that we are willing to send you absolutely FREE the first three lessons of our twenty-five lesson course that will train you to be a POWER CO-ORDINATOR technician.

Let us prove it to you. Fill out the inclosed coupon and mail it today!

Don’t just shrug and throw this circular away as just another advertisement. MAIL THE COUPON NOW!

Jim Ward smiled reminiscently at the style of the circular. It re­minded him of Billy Hensley and the time when they were thirteen. They sent in all the clipped and filled-out coupons they could find in magazines. They had samples of soap and magic tricks and catalogues and even a live bird came as the result of one. They kept all the stuff in Hensley’s attic until Billy’s dad finally threw it all out.

Impulsively, in whimsical tribute to the gone-forever happiness of those days, Jim Ward scratched his name and address in pencil and told the power co-ordinators to send him their three free lessons.

Mr. McAfee had only another mile to go up the road before he came to the end and returned past the Ward farm to Kramer’s Forks. Jim waited and hailed him.

“Want to take another letter?”

The postman halted the clattering Ford and jumped down. “What’s that?”

Jim repeated his request and held up the stamped reply card.

“Take this with you?”

Mr. McAfee turned it over and read every word on the back of the card. “Good thing,” he grunted. “So you’re going to take a corre­spondence course in this new power what-is-it? I think that’s mighty fine, Jim. Give you new interests—sort of take your mind off things.”

“Yeah, sure.” Jim struggled up with the aid of his cane and the bole of the oak tree. “Better see if I can make it back to the house now.”

All the whimsy and humor had suddenly gone out of the situation.

It was a fantastically short time—three days later—that Mr. Mc­Afee stopped again at the Ward farm. He glanced at the thick en­velope in his pack and the return address block it bore. He could see Jim Ward on the farmhouse porch and turned the Ford up the lane. Its rattle made Jim turn his head and open his eyes from the thought­less blankness into which he had been trying to sink. He removed the pipe from his mouth and watched the car approach.

“Here’s your course,” shouted Mr. McAfee. “Here’s your first lesson!”

“What lesson?”

“The correspondence course you sent for. The power what-is-it? Don’t you remember?”

“No,” said Jim. “I’d forgotten all about it. Take the thing away. I don’t want it. It was just a silly joke.”

“You hadn’t ought to feel that way, Jim. After all, your leg is going to be all right. I heard the Doc say so down in the drugstore last night. And everything is going to be all right. There’s no use of letting it get you down. Besides—I got to deliver the mail.”

He tossed the brown envelope on the porch beside Jim. “Brought it up special because I thought you’d be in a hurry to get it.”

Jim smiled in apology. “I’m sorry, Mac. Didn’t mean to take it out on you. Thanks for bringing it up. I’ll study it good and hard this morning right here on the porch.”

Mr. McAfee beamed and nodded and rattled away. Jim closed his eyes again, but he couldn’t find the pleasing blankness he’d found before. Now the screen of his mind showed only the sky with thunder­ing, plummeting engines—and the face of a girl lying still and white with closed eyes.

Jim opened his eyes and his hands slipped to his sides and touched the envelope. He ripped it open and scanned the pages. It was the sort of stuff he had collected as a boy, all right. He glanced at the paragraph headings and tossed the first lesson aside. A lot of obvious stuff about comparisons between steam power and waterfalls and electricity. It seemed all jumbled up like a high school student’s essay on the development of power from the time of Archimedes.

The mimeographed pages were poorly done. They looked as if the stencils had been cut on a typewriter that had been hit on the type faces with a hammer.

He tossed the second lesson aside and glanced at the top sheet of the third. His hand arrested itself midway in the act of tossing this lesson beside the other two. He caught a glimpse of the calculations on an inside page and opened up the booklet.

There was no high school stuff there. His brain struggled to remember the long unused methods of the integral calculus and the manipulation of partial differential equations.

There were pages of the stuff. It was like a sort of beacon light, dim and far off, but pointing a sure pathway to his mind and getting brighter as he progressed. One by one, he followed the intricate steps of the math and the short paragraphs of description between. When at last he reached the final page and turned the book over and scowled heavily the sun was halfway down the afternoon sky.

He looked away over the fields and pondered. This was no elementary stuff. Such math as this didn’t belong in a home study correspondence course. He picked up the envelope and concentrated on the return address block.

All it said was: M. H. Quilcon Schools, Henderson, Iowa. The lessons were signed at the bottom with the mimeographed reproduc­tions of M. H. Quilcon’s ponderous signature.

Jim picked up lesson one again and began reading slowly and carefully, as if hidden between the lines he might find some mystic message.

By the end of July his leg was strong enough for him to walk without the cane. He walked slowly and with a limp and once in a while the leg gave way as if he had a trick knee. But he learned quickly to catch himself before he fell and he reveled in the thrill of walking again.

By the end of July the tenth lesson of the correspondence course had arrived and Jim knew that he had gone as far as he could alone. He was lost in amazement as he moved in the new scientific wonderland that opened up before him. He had known that great strides had been made in techniques and production, but it seemed incredible that such a basic discovery as power co-ordination had been producing war machines these many months. He wondered why the principle had not been applied more directly as a weapon itself—but he didn’t understand enough about it to know whether it could or not. He didn’t even understand yet from where the basic energy of the system was derived.

The tenth lesson was as poorly produced as the rest of them had been, but it was practically a book in its thickness. When he had finished it Jim knew that he had to know more of the background of the new science. He had to talk to someone who knew something about it. But he knew of no one who had ever heard of it. He had seen no advertisements of the M. H. Quilcon Schools.

Only that first circular and these lessons.

As soon as he had finished the homework on lesson ten and had given it into Mr. McAfee’s care Jim Ward made up his mind to go down to Henderson, Iowa, and visit the Quilcon School.

He wished he had retained the lesson material because he could have taken it there faster than it would arrive via the local mail channels.

The streamliner barely stopped at Henderson, Iowa, long enough to allow him to disembark. Then it was gone and Jim Ward stared about him.

The sleepy looking ticket seller, dispatcher, and janitor eyed him wonderingly and spat a huge amber stream across his desk and out the window.

“Looking for somebody, mister?”

“I’m looking for Henderson, Iowa. Is this it?” Jim asked dubiously.

“You’re here, mister. But don’t walk too fast or you’ll be out of it. The city limits only go a block past Smith’s Drugstore.”

Jim noticed the sign over the door and glanced at the inscription that he had not seen before: Henderson, Iowa, Pop. 8o6.

“I’m looking for a Mr. M. H. Quilcon. He runs a correspondence school here somewhere. Do you know of him?”

The depot staff shifted its cud again and spat thoughtfully. “Been here twenty-nine years next October. Never heard a name like that around here, and I know ’em all.”

“Are there any correspondence schools here?”

“Miss Marybell Anne Simmons gives beauty operator lessons once in a while, but that’s all the school of that kind that I know of.”

Disconcerted, Jim Ward murmured his thanks and moved slowly out of the station. The sight before him was dismaying. He wondered if the population hadn’t declined since the estimate on the sign in the station was made.

A small mercantile store that sagged in the middle faced him from across the street. Farther along was a tiny frame building labeled Sheriff’s Office. On his side Jim saw Smith’s Drugstore a couple of hundred feet down from the station with a riding saddle and a patented fertilizer displayed in the window. In the other direction was the combined postoffice, bank and what was advertised as a newspaper and printing office.

Jim strode toward this last building while curious watchers on the porch of the mercantile store stared at him trudging through the dust.
The postmistress glanced up from the armful of mail that she was sorting into boxes as Jim entered. She offered a cheery hello that seemed to tinkle from the buxom figure.

“I’m looking for a man named Quilcon. I thought you might be able to give me some information concerning him.”

Kweelcon?” She furrowed her brow. “There’s no one here by that name. How do you spell it?”

Before he could answer, the woman dropped a handful of letters on the floor. Jim was certain that he saw the one he had mailed to the school before he left.

As the woman stooped to recover the letters a dark brown shadow streaked across the floor. Jim got the momentary impression of an enormous brown slug moving with lightning speed.

The postmistress gave a scream of anger and scuffled her feet to the door. She returned in a moment.

“Armadillo,” she explained. “Darn thing’s been hanging around here for months and nobody seems to be able to kill it.” She resumed putting the mail in the boxes.

“I think you missed one,” said Jim. She did not have the one that he recognized as the one he’d mailed.

The woman looked about her on the floor. “I got them all, thank you. Now what did you say this man’s name was?”

Jim leaned over the counter and looked at the floor. He was sure—But there was obviously no other letter in sight and there was no place it could have gone.

“Quilcon,” said Jim slowly. “I’m not sure of the pronunciation myself, but that’s the way it seemed it should be.”

“There’s no one in Henderson by that name. Wait a minute now. That’s a funny thing—you know it was about a month ago that I saw an envelope going out of here with a name something like that in the upper left corner. I thought at the time it was a funny name and wondered who put it in, but I never did find out and I thought I’d been dreaming. How’d you know to come here looking for him?”

“I guess I must have received the mail you saw.”

“Well, you might ask Mr. Herald. He’s in the newspaper office next door. But I’m sure there’s no one in this town by that name.”

“You publish a newspaper here?”

The woman laughed. “We call it that. Mr. Herald owns the bank and a big farm and puts this out free as a hobby. It’s not much, but everybody in town reads it. On Saturday he puts out a regular printed edition. This is the daily.”

She held up a small mimeographed sheet that was moderately legible. Jim glanced at it and moved towards the door. “Thanks, anyway.”

As he went out into the summer sun there was something gnawing at his brain, an intense you-forgot-something-in-there sort of feeling. He couldn’t place it and tried to ignore it.

Then as he stepped across the threshold of the printing office he got it. That mimeographed newssheet he had seen—it bore a startling resemblance to the lessons he had received from M. H. Quilcon. The same purple ink. Slightly crooked sheets. But that was foolish to try to make a connection there. All mimeographed jobs looked about alike.


Mr. Herald was a portly little man with a fringe around his bald­ness. Jim repeated his inquiry.

“Quilcon?” Mr. Herald pinched his lips thoughtfully. “No, can’t say as I ever heard the name. Odd name—I’m sure I’d know it if I’d ever heard it.”

Jim Ward knew that further investigation here would be a waste of time. There was something wrong somewhere. The information in his correspondence course could not be coming out of this half dead little town.

He glanced at a copy of the newssheet lying on the man’s littered desk beside an ancient Woodstock. “Nice little sheet you put out there,” said Jim.

Mr. Herald laughed. “Well, it’s not much, but I get a kick out of it, and the people enjoy reading about Mrs. Kelly’s lost hogs and the Dorius kid’s whooping cough. It livens things up.”

“Ever do any work for anybody else—printing or mimeographing?”
“If anybody wants it, but I haven’t had an outside customer in three years.”

Jim glanced about searchingly. The old Woodstock seemed to be the only typewriter in the room.

“I might as well go on,” he said. “But I wonder if you’d mind letting me use your typewriter to write a note and leave in the post-office for Quilcon if he ever shows up.”

“Sure, go ahead. Help yourself.”

Jim sat down before the clanking machine and hammered out a brief paragraph while Mr. Herald wandered to the back of the shop. Then Jim rose and shoved the paper in his pocket. He wished he had brought a sheet from one of the lessons with him.

“Thanks,” he called to Mr. Herald. He picked up a copy of the latest edition of the newspaper and shoved it in his pocket with the typed sheet.


On the trip homeward he studied the mimeographed sheet until he had memorized every line, but he withheld conclusions until he reached home.

From the station he called the farm and Hank, the hired man, came to pick him up. The ten miles out to the farm seemed like a hundred. But at last in his own room Jim spread out the two sheets of paper he’d brought with him and opened up lesson one of the correspondence course.

There was no mistake. The stencils of the course manuals had been cut on Mr. Herald’s ancient machine. There was the same nick out of the side of the o, and the b was flattened on the bulge. The r was minus half its base.

Mr. Herald had prepared the course.

Mr. Herald must then be M. H. Quilcon. But why had he denied any knowledge of the name? Why had he refused to see Jim and admit his authorship of the course?

At ten o’clock that night Mr. McAfee arrived with a special delivery letter for Jim.

“I don’t ordinarily deliver these way out here this time of night,” he said. “But I thought you might like to have it. Might be something important. A job or something, maybe. It’s from Mr. Quilcon.”

“Thanks. Thanks for bringing it, Mac.”

Jim hurried into his room and ripped open the letter. It read:

Dear Mr. Ward:

Your progress in understanding the principles of power co-ordination are
 exceptional and I am very pleased to note your progress in connection 
with the tenth lesson which I have just received from you.

An unusual opportunity has arisen which I am moved to offer you. There 
is a large installation of a power co-ordination engine in need of vital
 repairs some distance from here. I believe that you are fully qualified
 to work on this machine under supervision which will be provided and 
you would gain some valuable experience. The installation is located 
some distance from the city of Henderson. It is about two miles out on 
the Balmer Road. You will find there the Hortan Machine Works at which 
the installation is located. Repairs are urgently needed and you are the
 closest qualified student able to take advantage of this opportunity 
which might lead to a valuable permanent connection. Therefore, I 
request that you come at once. I will meet you there.

Sincerely,

M. H. Quilcon

For a long time Jim Ward sat on the bed with the letter and the sheets of paper spread out before him. What had begun as a simple quest for information was rapidly becoming an intricate puzzle.

Who was M. H. Quilcon?

It seemed obvious that Mr. Herald, the banker and part-time newspaper publisher, must be Quilcon. The correspondence course manuals had certainly been produced on his typewriter. The chances of any two typewriters having exactly the same four or five disfigure­ments in type approached the infinitesimal.

And Herald—if he were Quilcon—must have written this letter just before or shortly after Jim’s visit. The letter was certainly a product of the ancient Woodstock.

There was a fascination in the puzzle and a sense of something sinister, Jim thought. Then he laughed aloud at his own melodrama and began repacking the suitcase. There was a midnight train he could get back to Henderson.

It was hot afternoon again when he arrived in the town for the second time. The station staff looked up in surprise as he got off the train.

“Back again? I thought you’d given up.”

“I’ve found out where Mr. Quilcon is. He’s at the Hortan Machine Works. Can you tell me exactly where that is?”

“Never heard of it.”

“It’s supposed to be about two miles out of town on Balmer Road.”

“That’s just the main street of town going on down through the Willow Creek district. There’s no machine works out there. You must be in the wrong state, mister. Or somebody’s kidding you.”

“Do you think Mr. Herald could tell me anything about such a machine shop. I mean, does he know anything about machinery or things related to it?”

“Man, no! Old man Herald don’t care about nothing but money and that little fool paper of his. Machinery! He can’t hook up any­thing more complicated than his suspenders.”

Jim started down the main street toward the Willow Creek district. Balmer Road rapidly narrowed and turned, leaving the town out of sight behind a low rise. Willow Creek was a glistening thread in the midst of meadow land.

There was no more unlikely spot in the world for a machine works of any kind, Jim thought. Someone must be playing an utterly fan­tastic joke on him. But how or why they had picked on him was mystifying.
At the same time he knew within him that it was no joke. There was a deadly seriousness about it all. The principles of power co-ordination were right. He had slaved and dug through them enough to be sure of that. He felt that he could almost build a power co-ordinating engine now with the proper means—except that he didn’t understand from where the power was derived!

In the timelessness of the bright air about him, with the only sound coming from the brook and the leaves on the willow trees beside it, Jim found it impossible to judge time or distance.

He paced his steps and counted until he was certain that at least two miles had been covered. He halted and looked about almost determined to go back and re-examine the way he had come.

He glanced ahead, his eyes scanning every minute detail of the meadowland. And then he saw it.

The sunlight glistened as if on a metal surface. And above the bright spot in the distance was the faintly readable legend:

HORTAN MACHINE WORKS

Thrusting aside all judgment concerning the incredibility of a machine shop in such a locale, he crossed the stream and made his way over the meadow toward the small rise.

As he approached, the machine works appeared to be merely a dome-shaped structure about thirty feet in diameter and with an open door in one side. He came up to it with a mind ready for any­thing. The crudely painted sign above the door looked as if it had been drawn by an inexpert barn painter in a state of intoxication.

Jim entered the dimly lit interior of the shop and set his case upon the floor beside a narrow bench that extended about the room.
Tools and instruments of unfamiliar design were upon the bench and upon the walls. But no one appeared.

Then he noticed an open door and a steep, spiral ramp that led down to a basement room. He stepped through and half slid, half walked down to the next level.

There was artificial lighting by fluorescent tubes of unusual con­struction, Jim noticed. But still no sign of anyone. And there was not an object in the room that appeared familiar to him. Articles that vaguely resembled furniture were against the walls.

He felt uneasy amid the strangeness of the room and he was about to go back up the steep ramp when a voice came to him.

“This is Mr. Quilcon. Is that you, Mr. Ward?”

“Yes. Where are you?”

“I am in the next room, unable to come out until I finish a bit of work I have started. Will you please go on down to the room below? You will find the damaged machinery there. Please go right to work on it. I’m sure that you have a complete understanding of what is necessary. I will join you in a moment.”

Hesitantly, Jim turned to the other side of the room where he saw a second ramp leading down to a brilliantly lighted room. He glanced about once more, then moved down the ramp.

The room was high-ceilinged and somewhat larger in diameter than the others he had seen and it was almost completely occupied by the machine.

A series of close-fitting towers with regular bulbous swellings on their columns formed the main structure of the engine. These were grouped in a solid circle with narrow walkways at right angles to each other passing through them.

Jim Ward stood for a long time examining their surfaces that rose twenty feet from the floor. All that he had learned from the curious correspondence course seemed to fall into place. Diagrams and drawings of such machines had seemed incomprehensible. Now he knew exactly what each part was for and how the machine operated.

He squeezed his body into the narrow walkway between the towers and wormed his way to the center of the engine. His bad leg made it difficult, but he at last came to the damaged structure.

One of the tubes had cracked open under some tremendous strain and through the slit he could see the marvelously intricate wiring with which it was filled. Wiring that was burned now and fused to a mass. It was in a control circuit that rendered the whole machine functionless, but its repair would not be difficult, Jim knew.

He went back to the periphery of the engine and found the controls of a cranelike device which he lowered and seized the cracked sleeve and drew off the damaged part.

From the drawers and bins in the walls he selected parts and tools and returned to the damaged spot.

In the cramped space he began tearing away the fused parts and wiring. He was lost and utterly unconscious of anything but the fas­cination of the mighty engine. Here within this room was machine capacity to power a great city.

Its basic function rested upon the principle of magnetic currents in contrast to electric currents. The discovery of magnetic currents had been announced only a few months before he came home from the war. The application of the discovery had been swift.

And he began to glimpse the fundamental source of the energy supplying the machine. It was in the great currents of gravitational and magnetic force flowing between the planets and the suns of the universe. As great as atomic energy and as boundless in its resources, this required no fantastically dangerous machinery to harness. The principle of the power co-ordinator was simple.

The pain of his cramped position forced Jim to move out to rest his leg. As he stood beside the engine he resumed his pondering on the purpose it had in this strange location. Why was it built there and what use was made of its power?

He moved about to restore the circulation in his legs and sought to trace the flow of energy through the engine, determine where and what kind of a load was placed upon it.

His search led him below into a third sub-basement of the building and there he found the thing he was searching for, the load into which the tremendous drive of the engine was coupled.

But here he was unable to comprehend fully, for the load was itself a machine of strange design, and none of its features had been covered in the correspondence course.

The machine upstairs seized upon the magnetic currents of space and selected and concentrated those flowing in a given direction.

The force of these currents was then fed into the machines in this room, but there was no point of reaction against which the energy could be applied.

Unless—

The logical, inevitable conclusion forced itself upon his mind. There was only one conceivable point of reaction.

He stood very still and a tremor went through him. He looked up at the smooth walls about him. Metal, all of them. And this room—it was narrower than the one above—as if the entire building were tapered from the dome protruding out of the earth to the basement floor.
The only possible point of reaction was the building itself. But it wasn’t a building.

It was a vessel.

Jim clawed and stumbled his way up the incline into the engine room, then beyond into the chamber above. He was halfway up the top ramp when he heard the voice again.

“Is that you, Mr. Ward? I have almost finished and will be with you in a moment. Have you completed the repairs? Was it very difficult?”

He hesitated, but didn’t answer. Something about the quality of that voice gave him a chill. He hadn’t noticed it before because of his curiosity and his interest in the place. Now he detected its unearthly, inhuman quality.

He detected the fact that it wasn’t a voice at all, but that the words had been formed in his brain as if he himself had spoken them.

He was nearly at the top of the ramp and drew himself on hands and knees to the floor level when he saw the shadow of the closing door sweep across the room and heard the metallic clang of the door. It was sealed tight. Only the small windows—or ports—admitted light.

He rose and straightened and calmed himself with the thought that the vessel could not fly. It could not rise with the remainder of the repair task unfinished—and he was not going to finish it; that much was certain.

“Quilcon!” he called. “Show yourself! Who are you and what do you want of me?”

“I want you to finish the repair job and do it quickly,” the voice replied instantly. “And quickly—it must be finished quickly.”

There was a note of desperation and despair that seemed to cut into Jim. Then he caught sight of the slight motion against the wall beside him.
In a small, transparent hemisphere that was fastened to the side of the wall lay the slug that Jim had seen at the postoffice, the thing the woman had called an “armadillo.” He had not even noticed it when he first entered the room. The thing was moving now with slow pulsations that swelled its surface and great welts like dark veins stood out upon it.
From the golden-hued hemisphere a maze of cable ran to instru­ments and junction boxes around the room and a hundred tiny pseudo-pods grasped terminals inside the hemisphere.

It was a vessel—and this slug within the hemisphere was its alien, incredible pilot. Jim knew it with startling cold reality that came to him in waves of thought that emanated from the slug called Quilcon and broke over Jim’s mind. It was a ship and a pilot from beyond Earth—from out of the reaches of space.

“What do you want of me? Who are you?” said Jim Ward.

“I am Quilcon. You are a good student. You learn well.”

“What do you want?”

“I want you to repair the damaged engine.”

There was something wrong with the creature. Intangibly, Jim sensed it. An aura of sickness, a desperate urgency came to his mind.

But something else was in the foreground of Jim’s mind. The horror of the alien creature diminished and Jim contemplated the miracle that had come to mankind.

“I’ll bargain with you,” he said quietly. “Tell me how to build a ship like this for my people and I will fix the engines for you.”

“No! No—there is no time for that. I must hurry—”

“Then I shall leave without any repairs.”

He moved toward the door and instantly a paralyzing wave took hold of him as if he had seized a pair of charged electrodes. It relaxed only as he stumbled back from the door.

“My power is weak,” said Quilcon, “but it is strong enough for many days yet—many of your days. Too many for you to live without food and water. Repair the engine and then I shall let you go.”

“Is what I ask too much to pay for my help?”

“You have had pay enough. You can teach your people to build power co-ordinator machines. Is that not enough?”

“My people want to build ships like this one and move through space.”

“I cannot teach you that. I do not know. I did not build this ship.”

There were surging waves of troubled thought that washed over his mind, but Jim Ward’s tenseness eased. The first fear of totally alien life drifted from his mind and he felt a strange affinity for the creature. It was injured and sick, he knew, but he could not believe that it did not know how the ship was built.

“Those who built this ship come often to trade upon my world,” said Quilcon. “But we have no such ships of our own. Most of us have no desire to see anything but the damp caves and sunny shores of our own world. But I longed to see the worlds from which these ships came.

“When this one landed near my cave I crept in and hid myself. The ship took off then and we traveled an endless time. Then an accident to the engine killed all three of those who manned the ship and I was left alone.

“I was injured, too, but I was not killed. Only the other of me died.” Jim did not understand the queer phrase, but he did not break into Quilcon’s story.

“I was able to arrange means to control the flight of the ship, to prevent its destruction as it landed upon this planet, but I could not repair it because of the nature of my body.”

Jim saw then that the creature’s story must be true.

It was obvious that the ship had been built to be manned by beings utterly unlike Quilcon.

“I investigated the city of yours near by and learned of your ways and customs. I needed the help of one of you to repair the ship. By force I could persuade one of you to do simple tasks, but none so complex as this requires.

“Then I discovered the peculiar customs of learning among you. I forced the man Herald to prepare the materials and send them to you. I received them before the person at the postoffice could see them. I got your name from the newspapers along with several others who were unsatisfactory.

“I had to teach you to understand the power co-ordinator because only by voluntary operation of your highest faculties will you be able to understand and repair the machine. I can assist but not force you to do that.”

The creature began pleading again. “And now will you repair the engine quickly. I am dying—but shall live longer than you—it is a long journey to my home planet, but I must get there and I need every instant of time that is left to me.”

Jim caught a glimpse of the dream vision that was the creature’s home world. It was a place of security and peace—in Quilcon’s terms. But even its alienness did not block out the sense of quiet beauty that Quilcon’s mind transmitted to Jim’s.

They were a species of high intelligence. Exceptionally developed in the laws of mathematics and theory of logic, they were handicapped in bodily development from inquiring into other fields of science whose existence was demonstrated by their logic and their mathematics. The more intellectual among them were frustrated creatures whose lives were made tolerable only by an infinite capacity for stoicism and adaptation.

But of them all, Quilcon was among the most restless and rebellious and ambitious. No one of them had ever dared such a journey as he had taken. A swelling pity and understanding came over Jim Ward.

“I’ll bargain with you,” he said desperately. “I’ll repair the engine if you’ll let me have its principles. If you don’t have them, you can get them to me with little trouble. My people must have such a ship as this.”

He tried to visualize what it would mean to Earth to have space flight a century or perhaps five centuries before the slow plodding of science and research might reveal it.

But the creature was silent.

“Quilcon—” Jim repeated. He hoped it hadn’t died.

“I’ll bargain with you,” said Quilcon at last. “Let me be the other of you, and I’ll give you what you want.”

“The other of me? What are you talking about?”

“It is hard for you to understand. It is union—such as we make upon our world. When two or more of us want to be together we go together in the same brain, the same body. I am alone now, and it is an unendurable existence because I have known what it is to have another of me.

“Let me come into your brain, into your mind and live there with you. We will teach your people and mine. We will take this ship to all the universes of which living creatures can dream. It is either this or we both die together, for too much time has gone for me to return. This body dies.”

Stunned by Quilcon’s ultimatum, Jim Ward stared at the ugly slug on the wall. Its brown body was heaving with violent pulsations of pain and a sense of delirium and terror came from it to Jim.

“Hurry! Let me come!” it pleaded.

He could feel sensations as if fingers were probing his cranium looking, pleading for entrance. It turned him cold.

He looked into the years and thought of an existence with this alien mind in his. Would they battle for eventual possession of his body and he perhaps be subjected to slavery in his own living corpse?

He tried to probe Quilcon’s thoughts, but he could find no sense or intent of conquest. There were almost human amenities inter­mingled with a world of new science and thought.

He knew Quilcon would keep his promise to give the secrets of the ship to the men of Earth. That alone would be worth the price of his sacrifice—if it should be sacrifice.

“Come!” he said quietly.

It was as if a torrent of liquid light were flowing into his brain. It was blinding and excruciating in its flaming intensity. He thought he sensed rather than saw the brown husk of Quilcon quiver in the hemisphere and shrivel like a brown nut.

But in his mind there was union and he paused and trembled with the sudden great reality of what he knew. He knew what Quilcon was and gladness flowed into him like light. A thought soared through his brain: Is sex only in the difference of bodily function and the texture of skin and the tone of voice?

He thought of another day when there was death in the sky and on the Earth below, and in a little field hospital. A figure on a white cot had murmured, “You’ll be all right, Jim. I’m going on, I guess, but you’ll be all right. I know it. Don’t miss me too much.”

He had known there would be no peace for him ever, but now there was peace and the voice of Quilcon was like that voice from long ago, for as the creature probed into his thoughts its inherent adaptability matched its feelings and thought to his and said, “Everything is all right, isn’t it, Jim Ward?”

“Yes . . . yes it is.”

The intensity of his feelings almost blinded him. “And I want to call you Ruth, after another Ruth—”

“I like that name.” There was shyness and appreciation in the tones, and it was not strange to Jim that he could not see the speaker, there was a vision in his mind far lovelier than any Earthly vision could have been.

“We’ll have everything,” he said. “Everything that your world and mine can offer. We’ll see them all.”

But like the other Ruth who had been so practical, this one was, too.

“First we have to repair the engine. Shall we do it, now?”

The solitary figure of Jim Ward moved toward the ramp and disappeared into the depths of the ship.

The End

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)
The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

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Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
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The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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When Hollywood was capable of making decent movies; The Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971)

Here is a movie that I loved as a kid. There are people who think that it is a piece of Satanic propaganda. I disagree. I just think that it is a chunky tongue in cheek, campy, pseudo horror flick from the 1970’s.

Here’s my take on this masterpiece of camp.

They just don’t make ‘em like The Abominable Dr. Phibes* anymore. In fact, they just don’t make ‘em like Vincent Price  anymore, either. Dr. Phibes, first off, is the definitive role that  Vincent Price was born to play, and second off, is firmly embedded in a  different time. He belongs to the era of 1950s EC Comics horror titles  such as “Tales from the Crypt,” “The Vault of Horror,” and “Weird  Fantasy.” 

-All Horror

A Satanic Movie?

Well, well. It turns out that the Church of Satan founder Anton Szandor LaVey has claimed that the main character in this Vincent Price film was based on him.

I would have never even associated Vincent Price with any kind or works of Satan. He was, after all, just an actor who played Satanic roles to the “T”.

The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a 1971 British dark comedy horror film, produced by Ronald S. Dunas and Louis M. Heyward, directed by Robert Fuest, written by William Goldstein and James Whiton, and starring Vincent Price and Joseph Cotten. 

Its art deco sets, dark humour, and performance by Price have made the film and its sequel Dr. Phibes Rises Again cult classics. 

-Wikipedia.

Anyways, this character’s name is Dr. Anton Phibes and he’s an organist, researcher, medical doctor, biblical scholar and ex-vaudevillian who has created a clockwork band of robot musicians to play old standards at his whim.

Now, in hindsight, seeing as how nearly all of these things match up with Satanist LaVey, I can kind of see his point. Kinda.

Though, this movie isn’t going to be useful for recruiting anyone to follow Satan, I’m afraid.

“I won’t do another Phibes film unless Robert Fuest directs it. He’s the only person in the world who is mad enough to direct the Dr. Phibes films. He’s a genuine, registered nut! He even looks like a madman. He’s all over the place, like an unmade bed. What imagination he has. They were all his ideas…. Bob has never done anything that was nearly as good as the Dr. Phibes films.”
— Vincent Price, 1979

The Movie

Dr. Phibes main ballroom.
The film begins with a dark figure playing gothic music on a huge pipe organ. The audience for this recital of sorts seems to be having a wonderful time…until you look a bit closer. They are all mannequins seated in positions that give the illusion that they are enjoying themselves in a lavish nightclub. Then we see the first appearance of Vulnavia (Virginia North). Though she never speaks a word through the entire movie, Vulvania has quite an impact. Vulnavia and the organ player proceed through a highly ritualized chain of events, gliding through loading an automobile with a large box, driving to a swank part of London and arriving at a large British mansion.

The sets in this movie are amazing and lavish.

This movie is one I can’t be quiet about. It’s one of the strangest and most delightful films I’ve ever seen.

Dr. Phibes (his particular field is never given) is an underground  aristocrat in early 20th-century London, who is bereaved of his late  wife Victoria after a fatal car crash. Phibes himself is also presumed  dead by the authorities, since his own car went off a cliff when he was  en route to his wife. Victoria died on the operating table, the doctors  unable to help her, and now Dr. Phibes has sworn vengeance against the  doctors he blames for his wife’s death.

So what, he’s going to  hire lawyers and sue for malpractice? Oh no, much too common. He’s going  to kill them off one by one! To do so, he’s going to hatch contrived  murder traps based (very loosely) upon the ten plagues of Egypt  mentioned in both the Quran and the Bible. What, do you expect him to  take a gun and shoot them, like a bourgeois commoner? Nope, his traps  involve several species of animal, in between intricate mechanical  devices that must have cost a fortune to research and manufacture for  this single use. He also has a pendant necklace for each victim, which  he will hang around a wax bust of its target after a successful kill and  melt with a blowtorch. 

 -All Horror 

Dr. Anton Phibes died in Switzerland, racing back home upon hearing the news that his beloved bridge Victoria (an uncredited Caroline Munro) had died during surgery.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 2
On team Phibes, we have his mute but fashionable assistant, Vulnavia (Virginia North). When she isn’t running errands for Dr. Phibes transporting cages of deadly animals around London, she’s dancing up a storm with him in his underground ballroom or providing moral support playing a violin that’s color-coordinated to match her current outfit.

The truth is that Phibes has survived, scarred beyond belief and unable to speak, but alive. He uses all of the skills that he’s mastered to rebuild his face and approximate a human voice.

Oh yeah. Aside from all that, he also may or may not be a tad bit insane.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 3
The police, led by Inspector Trout (Peter Jeffrey), keep a stiff upper British lip as they scurry around England trying to put together clues to all the steampunk devices and menagerie of exotic creatures. They’re pretty far behind the mad Dr. Phibes and don’t catch up very quickly. The targeted doctors themselves aren’t exactly elusive prey either, as they’re all dupes who spend more time nurturing obsessions with stag movies or model trains than taking the police warnings seriously. When caught, they have a tendency to sit politely and accept their deaths rather than do something so un-British-like as get up and run away, because they haven’t been excused.

Now, Phibes believes that the doctors who operated on his wife were incompetent and therefore must pay for their insolence. So he does what anyone else would do: visit the Biblical ten plagues of Egypt on every single one of them.

Now people, listen up! That’s how you get revenge, and do it properly.

The Tale of the Killdozer.

Phibes is, of course, played by Vincent Price. No one else could handle this role. Or this movie.

There’s hardly any dialogue for the first ten minutes of the movie. Instead, there are long musical numbers of Phibes and his clockwork band playing old standards. In fact, Phibes doesn’t speak for the first 32 minutes of the movie.

Anyone who asks questions like “Why?” and says things like “This movie makes no sense” will be dealt with accordingly.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 4
But we haven’t gotten around to Phibes himself yet! He’s disfigured from his own accident, so he wears a mask that bears a remarkable resemblance to Vincent Price, and he’s rendered unable to speak, so he has to plug a huge-horned Victrola into a cord on the side of his neck and mime along with his own dubbed dialogue. He completes this eccentric performance by being a fashionable man-about-town, and his disfigurement doesn’t stop him from having unbounded pride in his appearance, as his face is plastered as a logo on the walls of his mansion and even the tinted windows of his car.

After the first few murders, Inspector Trout gets on the case. He becomes Phibes’ main antagonist for this and the following film, trying to prove that all of these murders — the doctors and nurse who had been on the team of Dr. Vesalius (Joseph Cotten!) — are connected.

Phibes then stays one step ahead of the police, murdering everyone with bees, snow, a unicorn statue, locusts and rats, sometimes even right next to where the cops have staked him out.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 5
Dr Phibes spends his free time playing an organ in his underground lair, accompanied by a whole orchestra of automatons dubbed “Dr. Phibes Clockwork Wizards.” His other pursuits include delivering rambling eulogies to his late wife, to whom he has built a shrine. In a career with some serious ham and cheese in it, Dr. Phibes is one of Vincent Price’s hammiest roles!

Vulnavia

Dr. Phibes is assisted by the lovely Vulnavia. We’re never informed that she’s a robot, but the opinion of others, she actually is. Both she and the doctor are the most fashion-forward of all revenge killers I’ve seen outside of Meiko Kaji and Christina Lindberg.

Writer William Goldstein wrote Vulnavia as another clockwork robot with a wind-up key in her neck. Fuest thought that Phibes demanded a more mobile assistant, so he made her human, yet one with a blank face and mechanical body movements.

 "Easy does it. I think it's a left-handed thread." 

— Policeman unscrewing a victim impaled by a unicorn horn,  The Abominable Dr. Phibes 

I still like to think that she’s a machine, particularly because she returns in the next film after her demise here. Also — Fuest rewrote nearly the entire script.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 6
The Abominable Dr. Phibes is a cult classic today, even amongst the non-horror muggles. The film plays a strident note in between camp and grotesque, with art-deco sets and baroque flourishes everywhere. While there isn’t much to the story beyond “madman kills people in obsessive revenge,” the style trumps the substance. One minor quibble is that the scenes involving animals, in those pre-CGI days, didn’t get the animals full cooperation and seem to be more cuddly than threatening. And of course, the whole thing is dated and intentionally corny, so if you like your horror serious, this isn’t the film for you.

The Key to the Heart

After killing off everyone else — sorry Terry-Thomas! — Phibes kidnaps Dr. Vesalius’ son and implants a key inside his heart that will unlock the boy. However, if the doctor doesn’t finish the surgery on his son in six minutes — the same amount of time he had spent trying to save Phibes’ wife — acid will rain down and kill both he and his boy.

Against all odds, Vesalius is successful.

Dr Phibes -misc
The Abominable Dr Phibes is a camp masterpiece. It has a sublime elegance – what other film could offer up a scene where a man’s blood is drained to the accompaniment of a woman in furs standing outside playing a melancholic violin solo. There is such a droll sense of humor at work here – like the moment Vincent Price’s deformed title doctor pours a glass of champagne and then tips it up to his neck to drink, or puts a finger dipped in the vegetable juice to his neck to taste the flavor. There is the joyously droll moment where Maurice Kaufman is impaled against the wall on the horn of a unicorn head fired from a cannon, with the bumbling police then having to unscrew the body from the wall, while arguing over which way the thread of the horn’s screw runs.

But… Poor Vulnavia.

Vulnavia, in the middle of destroying Phibes’ clockwork orchestra, is sprayed by the acid and killed while the doctor himself replaces his blood with a special fluid and lies down to eternal sleep with his wife, happy that he has had his revenge.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 8
The Abominable Dr Phibes is a camp masterpiece. It has a sublime elegance – what other film could offer up a scene where a man’s blood is drained to the accompaniment of a woman in furs standing outside playing a melancholic violin solo. There is such a droll sense of humor at work here – like the moment Vincent Price’s deformed title doctor pours a glass of champagne and then tips it up to his neck to drink, or puts a finger dipped in the vegetable juice to his neck to taste the flavor. There is the joyously droll moment where Maurice Kaufman is impaled against the wall on the horn of a unicorn head fired from a cannon, with the bumbling police then having to unscrew the body from the wall, while arguing over which way the thread of the horn’s screw runs.

The Ten Plagues

If you’re interested, the ten plagues Phibes unleashes are:

  • Blood: He drains all of Dr. Longstreet’s blood
  • Frogs: He uses a mechanical frog mask to kill Dr. Hargreaves at a costume party
  • Bats: A more cinematic plague than lice from the Biblical plagues, Phibes uses these airborne rodents to kill Dr. Dunwoody
  • Rats: Again, better than flies, rats overwhelm Dr. Kitaj and cause his plane to crash
  • Pestilence: This one is a leap, but the unicorn head that kills Dr. Whitcombe qualifies
  • Boils: Professor Thornton is stung to death by bees
  • Hail: Dr. Hedgepath is frozen by an ice machine
  • Locusts: The nurse is devoured by them thanks to an ingenious trap
  • Darkness: Phibes joins his wife in eternal rest during a solar eclipse
  • Death of the firstborn: Phibes kidnaps and the son of Dr. Vesalius

I love that this movie appears lost in time. While set in the 1920’s, many of the songs weren’t released until the 1940’s. Also, Phibes has working robots and high technology, despite the era the film is set in.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 7
Vincent Price gives the best performance of his life as a madman, seemingly trapped inside his own face, all the time delivering hilariously flowery eulogies to his dead wife via speaker-phone. There is that marvelously wicked little chuckle he gives, sitting sniffing a daisy as he watches one victim go down in a plane. He’s perfect. The scenes in the house as Price and the lovely never-speaking Virginia North sweep across the ballroom floor, amid painted Art Deco cycloramas and a clockwork orchestra have a beautiful, elegant sophistication. There is also a superb score.

There’s nothing quite like this movie. I encourage you to take the rest of the day off and savor it.

A Satanic Film?

How does Phibes live up to being a Satanic film? In my opinion, Phibes embodies one of the nine Satanic statements to its utmost: Satan represents vengeance instead of turning the other cheek.

Indeed, the men and woman whose negligence led to the loss of Phibes’ wife were never punished. Phibes had to become their judge, jury and yes, destroyer.

The abominable Dr. Phibes 10
If you are planning on spending some time this weekend watching a movie, whether in the comfort of your own company, or with a sweetheart or friend, I’d like to recommend The Abominable Dr. Phibes for your evening’s selection. In this cult horror classic directed by Robert Fruest, screen legend Vincent Price is the eponymous Dr. Phibes, a reclusive genius who can build incredible musical automatons, play a mean organ, waltz till the cows come home, and still manage to exact his carefully cultivated plan of vengeance, all while wearing great capes.

On the other hand — or hoof, as it were — Phibes is the exact antithesis of the ninth Satanic sin, Lack of Aesthetics, which states that “an eye for beauty, for balance, is an essential Satanic tool and must be applied for greatest magical effectiveness.

It’s not what’s supposed to be pleasing—it’s what is.

Aesthetics is a personal thing, reflective of one’s own nature, but there are universally pleasing and harmonious configurations that should not be denied.” So much of what makes this film is that Phibes’ musical art is just as essential as his demented nature and abilities.

Music is the core of his soul, not just revenge.

Vulnavia from the first Dr. Phibes movie.
If you are planning on spending some time this weekend watching a movie, whether in the comfort of your own company, or with a sweetheart or friend, I’d like to recommend The Abominable Dr. Phibes for your evening’s selection. In this cult horror classic directed by Robert Fruest, screen legend Vincent Price is the eponymous Dr. Phibes, a reclusive genius who can build incredible musical automatons, play a mean organ, waltz till the cows come home, and still manage to exact his carefully cultivated plan of vengeance, all while wearing great capes. Assisted by his stylish, silent accomplice Vulnavia (Virginia North), Phibes carries out murderous revenge, styled (if a little loosely) after the Ten Plagues of Egypt, on the various medical professionals he believes botched his wife’s medical treatment and caused her untimely death.

Back to Dr. Anton LaVey

Another point of view comes from Draconis Blackthorne of the Sinister Screen: “This is an aesthetically-beauteous film, replete with Satanic architecture as well as ideology. Those who know will recognize these subtle and sometimes rather blatant displays.

Obviously, to those familiar with the life of our Founder, there are several parallels between the Dr. Anton Phibes character and that of Dr. Anton LaVey – they even share the same first name, and certain propensities.”

So maybe it is a kind of homage to Satanist Dr. Anton LaVey.

Conclusion

Homage or not, it’s a great movie, and a fun watch. It’s not like anyone is going to be seduced to the dark side by this movie. It’s just plain campy fun.

 This film is an intriguing tale of revenge. The sets are “70s  spectacular” and the performances by Price and North are extraordinary.  There are a few elements that really make this horror movie work:

 • The murders are done in very creative and ingenious ways, using intricate devices and techniques. (Somebody watched The Abominable Dr Phibes before writing the horror movie Saw I’m sure)

 • Vincent Price pulls no punches in his over-the-top portrayal of the  good doctor, and makes him believable, as only Vincent Price could.

 • Humor and levity intermix with horror and intrigue, and this rescues The Abominable Dr Phibes from being a total cheese-fest.

 • The style and, well, “bigness” of the visuals, characters and music  result in this not just being a great Vincent Price movie, but a work  of art where every element fits together just right.

 The Abominable Dr Phibes showcases the brilliance of 70s  style and of the mastery of Vincent Price. Many of the younger folks may  have missed him altogether, which is a shame. I do think, though, that  one of the best contributions that the freak-show Michael Jackson has  made to the world is introducing Vincent Price to a whole new generation  of horror-buffs by using his voice in the pop music hit “Thriller” from  the 80s. Now, watch The Abominable Dr Phibes and REALLY get a taste of what made this man great. 

-Horror Freak News

Some cool links

Torrent Links

You can watch it for free if you don’t mind waiting a half an hour to half a day to download the torrent.

For those of you who are unaware. Torrents are parts of files that are spread out in tiny packets all over the internet. You use a "Bit Torrent" client to vacuum up all those little bits and pieces of the file. It then assembles the file into a movie that you can watch. The time that this takes can vary from a few minutes to weeks depending on how popular or obscure your searched file is.

You will need an application to manage the download. I recommend the free application VUZE. To download the video is thus easy. Install VUZE, and then click on one of the following torrent links.

Depending on where you live, you might not have the freedom to access these sites and the ISP might block them from access, or the search engines might black out their search results. Americans, in particular, might have some real problems. Therefore, I listed the most accessible torrent sites available to Americans. Pirate Bay and 1337X. I think that Kick Ass Torrents is still blocked for all Americans.

Google and Bing will most certainly block certain websites, and avoid others at the request of the United States government. From “Uncle Sam’s” point of view, you go after the “low handing fruit” that the vast bulk of Americans use. Then ridicule the outliers as “misfits”, “deplorables”, and “Nazi’s”.

Kick Ass Torrents
The international website “Kick Ass Torrents” was seized by the Department of Homeland Security. The reason being that they offered royalty free downloads of copyrighted movies and music. Thanks to President Obama, visiting any of these websites is a federal crime that Americans are forbidden to visit. Even for a nano-second.

As far as privacy is concerned, Bing will alter the behavior of the Search Engine if you live in the EU.

Movies that Inspired Me

Here are some movies that I consider noteworthy and worth a view. Enjoy.

The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.
Jason and the Argonauts
The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973)

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

When Hollywood still made good movies; The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1957)

Ray Harryhausen was a mainstay of my childhood. His movies were regular features on the Saturday matinees — on television, not in theaters; I’m not THAT old! — and they sucked me in every time. How could they not? No sane young boy would be anything but engrossed by giant creatures slugging it out with heroes in sandals, and Harryhausen’s creatures were AWESOME.

-Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

It’s no secret that Hollywood has gone over the deep end and into the abyss of the bland and uninteresting.

It’s a combination of things. Firstly [1] , an over reliance on CGI and computer animation has somehow replaced decent story-telling and the passions inherent in the traditional movie genre. Secondly [2], the invasion of Political Correctness and rewrites for the LGBT crowd, and the war on white males, and traditional male roles has pretty much isolated Hollywood to the Land of the Loons. Thirdly [3], an over reliance on classical superheroes… you know, suddenly by magic, a person gets super-powers… get’s dull really quick. Finally, fourthly [4], just how many sequels do you need to make before the customers stop coming to the theaters?

Here’s some examples of contemporaneous Hollywood fare…

Yup Hollywood is going the way of the Dodo Bird, and like their political leadership, haven’t a clue as to how absolutely ridiculous they look to us “normal’s” in the audience.

But, at one time, Hollywood was truly the stuff of dreams. There, the studios produced some amazing movie flicks. These were the stuff of dreams, and tales of adventure. And, for I, a young boy… Hollywood movies took me to places where my imagination could soar and explore.

Let’s talk about one such movie. The Ray Harryhausen classic “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”.

The Tale of a Lifetime

The visuals in the movie were amazing. Anyone who has seen this movie when it first came out (late 50’s) was forever a different person for the better. This dynamic even continues to this day too.

Millions saw this when they were in their teens or younger and it brought out an array of emotions the body had not experienced before. There is wonder, adventure, thrills, suspense, love, good, bad, and monsters that make you wonder how can you fight them and live? Sinbad shows you all this and more and he became a role model and hero for the multitudes.

No doubt, it is an amazing movie.

Come on! Seriously. Giant birds, crabby cyclops, dragons, skeleton warriors, and a snake woman? Just another day at the office for Sinbad the Sailor.

Throw in an evil sorcerer, a mutinous crew, and having to not only rescue his fiancee, but also find some way to un-shrink her. Talk about having too much on “your plate”. You can well understand why this particular Sinbad set about his seventh voyage with a stern and brave face, very little humor and negligible cheer.

This movie is genius.

Other films of his have very challenging special effects too. If you  have not watched any of his films, YouTube them and watch the brilliant  sequences. That'll convince you. Try the sequence where the cowboys try  to "rope" Gwangi, in which Harryhausen had to painstakingly match the  ropes on the live action footage to the ropes on his stop-motion model.  Or the tug of war in "Mighty Joe Young,"  using a similar technique. Or the sequence with the giant bird from  "Mysterious Island," which works well with Bernard Herrmann's goofy  score. Or the Washington destruction scenes in "Earth vs. Flying  Saucers." Or It from "It Came From Beneath the Seas." Or Pegasus in  "Clash of the Titans," or Medusa, from the same film. Or anything from  "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," my personal favorite film of his. 

 - Great Movies of my Childhood  

This was a movie that I couldn’t tear my eyes from. I was totally and complete immersed in the story line, though as a young boy, it was kind of difficult to follow. Never the less, the visuals were amazing and absolutely drew me in.

Now the story is a classic. It’s an adventure, so of course, you pull the story out from classic adventure stories that have stood the passage of time.

Apparently this is a pretty old classic story from the 1001 Arabian Nights, of course no longer taught in schools as not progressive enough. It is the story of adventure when a ships crew makes an unexpected stop at an island.

Fortune fall upon us all

The best thing about this movie is that there Hasn’t been any remakes of it.

It’s true. Can you imagine what the remakes would be like? OMG! I just get sick trying to imagine it all…

  • 1970s – The first sequel; Sinbad falls in love with a black single-parent woman.
  • 1980s – “We Are the World” meets Sinbad the Sailor.
  • 1990s – CGI animation, heavily pixelated and dark.
  • 2000s – Matrix style fight scenes with the three headed chick.
  • 2010s – X-men join forces with Sinbad to fight the Cyclops.
  • 2020s – Sinbad is a woman, as are the entire crew, all females.

Storyline

Sinbad is a man of the world. A seaman who travels the known world. As this is his seventh voyage, we knew that he was well experienced in the ways of monsters, magic and pretty attractive lasses. He has a crew of trusty seamen, and ship that is pretty state-of-the-art for the time-period.

So off he goes. His ship and crew sail off towards adventure…

Dinner for the one-eyed horned cyclops.
Dinner for the one-eyed horned cyclops. You most certainly wouldn’t want to be caught by this fella, and my goodness, who knows what fate you might be expected to endure. You know, when salt and pepper get into your eyes, it hurts!

He sails and sails.

When Sinbad finally spots land, he doesn’t yet know what island it is. (He didn’t have GPS, and Google was of absolutely no use to him.) He just doesn’t know that the island’s name is Colossa. Hum. Colossa could that have something to do with the word “colossal”? You’d think he’d take a hint.

Nor does he know that it’s the ancient world’s equivalent of Monster Island. Now, for some reason or the other, Sinbad has his old lady on board with him. She’s a real cutie, and can you blame him. After all, he’s the famous Sinbad.

Her name is Princess Parisa. She has cute dimples, a nice rack and a very curvaceous backside. You see, she and Sinbad are going to be married and help seal a peace pact between their two lands. It kind of sucks for her, but she gets a hero in the bargain, and all in all, by the standards of society at that time and place, it’s a pretty sweet deal for her.

Grant (who would go on to marry Bing Crosby) is an absolute delight as the princess, the kid playing the genie in the lamp should have been annoying but was actually quite a charming little tyke, and Torin Thatcher is wonderfully bombastic as the evil wizard Sokurah. They help carry the human element of the movie in a way Mathews’ Sinbad never does. 

 -Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 

Once he makes landfall on the island, he demonstrates just how preoccupied he must be with the impending wedding. You can tell, because he makes some really boneheaded decisions. You know, decisions that would charitably be called “insane.”

A cyclops looking at his dinner.
This colorful adventure is the screen version of one of the classic tales from “1001 Arabian Nights.” It tells the story of Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and Princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant). When they unexpectedly stop on the island of Colossa on their way to Baghdad, they find themselves battling all types of dangers, such as evil magicians, man-eating Cyclopes, fire- breathing dragons, and sword-wielding skeletons.

So, let’s say you’re on a mysterious island in a world where terrible monsters still run amok occasionally.

Let’s also say that you notice strange footprints in the sand. These strange footprints are not only odd because of their shape (cloven hooves – eek!), but also because they are so far apart. As someone notes, this is indicative of a rather large stride and by extension, a rather large creature.

Now what could that possibly mean? I mean, what would you do, if you saw hoof prints that large?

Multi-headed multi-bird thing creature.
Multi-headed multi-bird thing creature. What would you do if you confronted a strange chick the size of a fire-truck? And, by chick I mean a bird, not a cute young lass.

Okay, let’s say you know all that and still you venture forth into the unknown.

Now, you have landed on this mysterious island. You and your crew starts to walk upon the sandy beach. And now when you walk further up the beach you notice carved in the side of a mountain, a strange face with the mouth being the entrance of a cave.

Not an everyday occurrence.

What do you do? Well, in spite of it being painfully obvious that this is the front door of a cyclops house, you decide to do some pretty messed up things. I mean, haven’t you ever learned that some things say “keep out” and run for the hills. But NOOOOO!

What does Sinbad do? Well, he decides to run right the hell in there just to see if anyone is home!

The pure awesomeness of this movie is evident when you observe a one-eyed horned cyclops with goat like legs confronting a chained dragon.
The pure awesomeness of this movie is evident when you observe a one-eyed horned cyclops with goat like legs confronting a chained dragon. Now you would think that the dragon would trump a one-eyed cyclops… you know that old depth-perception angle. But the movie has a number of surprises for the viewing audience.

What do you think happens? Yup. It’s a lot of screaming, yelling, terror and blood and guts. Not to mention a chomp and gulp. Yes, it’s a story of lots of guys getting chased by a really pissed off cyclops.

Enter a sorcerer named Sokurah.

He’s a bald guy with a magic lamp that saves Sinbad and his crew by using the genie’s powers to erect a transparent barrier to keep the cyclops back. I’ll bet that you didn’t know that Genie’s had the power to erect repulse fields, did you?

Now, I have some bad news.

Unfortunately this doesn’t stop the cyclops from chucking big rocks at the departing boat. This causes everyone on the boat to fall overboard and in all the confusion Sokurah loses his magic lamp.

Now, this magic lamp is really special. Think of it like the latest iphone, or the keys to the Lamborghini. It contains a Genie. But this Genie is not just like any other Genie. Those “lower” Genies have wish-limitations. Most can only grant three wishes. Not this Genie. No. He instead grants unlimited wishes.

Obviously the loss of such a power, such a lamp, is a big disappointment.

Sinbad meets a princess.
In the scenes featuring a shrunken Princess Parisa. Now look at this mess. How are going to have sex once they are married? And what about the children? Obviously Sinbad has to do something, and thus Sinbad does his best to help her. In the process goes on an adventure of a lifetime. It is one filled with strange sights, strange and dangerous beings, and magic of all sorts and types.

Again, there is a lot of treading water, splashes and panic.

Once back on board his main boat, Sokurah demands that they return back to the island. You know, after all, it’s pretty cool having a Genie with unlimited wishes. Heck, if it was me, I’d go back.

No. Sinbad is a different person.

Sinbad refuses Sokurah’s entreaties to go back to the island and retrieve his lamp which by this time has fallen into the hands of the cyclops. Sinbad says “No time, baldy. I’m gonna get married to my most excellent girlfriend. And, you know what? I still have to hire a band and D.J. for my wedding, but you’re welcome to come to my bachelor party once we’re back in Bagdad.”

Meetup with a Genie.
Here we have a tiny miniaturized princess inside a Genie’s bottle to talk with the Genie face to face. What a movie! You know, Harryhausen spearheaded a turn from scifi monsters to mythology and adventure for the first time with The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. In this movie he ended up crossbreeding special-effects-based spectacle with traditional swashbuckling heroics. For the first time, in this movie, Harryhausen got to make a feature in color, and he debuted his new technique, called Dynamation, which allowed more sophisticated, layered interaction between photographic elements.

Sokurah offers to provide some entertainment at some of the pre-wedding festivities in hopes of currying favor with the Caliph.

The Caliph of Baghdad (Alec Mango) feels the same way, even after Sokurah amazes the court by conjuring up a snake-woman. Yes, this SOB ended up turning Parisa’s maid into a snake woman. Talk about violation of a work contract!

Meanwhile, he continues to try to convince Sinbad to go back to the island.

Snake woman maid.
Now how would you like your pretty maid to be changed into a a snake woman medusa. Especially a blue one? Not exactly a nice way to curry favor. Obviously this warlock has a real lack of people skills.

He starts to look into the future. He starts by looking into the future of Sinbad and Parisa’s lands. Not surprisingly perhaps, he sees only bad things for everyone. This (unfortunately) doesn’t earn him a ship and a crew of men, but does earn him an ass kicking out of Bagdad.

It is only when the princess is shrunk by an evil spell, the breaking of which requires the shell from the egg of the giant Roc – which (what-da-ya-know) resides on Colossa – that Sokurah can get his expedition mounted, with Sinbad in command.

But it’s not that everything is perfect. With a crew made up of a handful of his bravest men and some of the most desperate convicts in the Caliph’s prison, he has to contend with potential mutiny at every turn. It’s a constant bickering, fighting and arguments. Ugh! In fact, the men are driven almost to madness before they even reach Colossa.

The Genie with Sinbad's future wife.
The Genie gets along with the future Mrs. Sinbad. She crawls into the Genie’s lair and it’s all sort of like the lair from the television show “I dream of Genie”. Together they work out and hatch a plan.

Once there, at the island, they continue to find problems and strife. Obviously, they find terrors as great as the Cyclops and the treachery of the magician, but something else happens. Future Mrs. Sinbad; Parisa – in her tiny state – also discovers the beautiful world inside the lamp, and the lonely boy Genie (Richard Eyer) who inhabits it.

They strike the bargain that, when Sinbad’s bravery is added to the equation, will bring their quest to an end. If, that is, they can all survive the dangers that Sokurah puts in their path.

Sinbad at the helm.
Sinbad at the helm of his state of the art, ocean going vessel. He is the fellow in command, and he over comes everything to achieve his goals and his dreams.

At this point for the record, I would note that when he was told this, no one specifically said that he wasn’t supposed to stop by the princess’s bedroom and use a magic potion to shrink her down to the size of a corndog. It’s a strange world we live in, and when you start mixing magical spells, potions and evil sorcerers together, you will find many surprises awaiting you in the bedroom.

Clearly, the only way to fix this is with the help of a very powerful sorcerer.

Sinbad finds Sokurah just as he’s about to leave town and pleads for his help. It turns out to be no problem for Sokurah to reverse the spell. In fact, he knows the counter-spell and only needs to procure one ingredient. It’s the shell of giant Roc’s egg.

A pensive Sinbad.
Oh, you think that you have it tought in your life. Imagine what it would be like with magic spells, monsters, evil wizards and jealous women. It is no wonder that Sinbad is so pensive.

Ah, the shell of the egg.

But that’s only available on the island of Colossa and we already know you don’t want to go there, right Sinbad? Well, right?

Still politics are politics, and if you don’t play your cards right, the result could be war! Thus, with the princess’s father immediately threatening war on Bagdad (despite Bagdad obviously having nothing to do with the incredible shrinking Parisa – but that’s an argument for another time), a shift in policy occurs and the next thing you know, a ship is being outfitted. As such, a big crossbow is being built and Sinbad is attempting to recruit a crew.

But where would you get a crew from for what is surely a suicide mission right into the heart of monster country?

Sindbad with lovely Parisa.
Sindbad with lovely Parisa. Obviously back up to full size with all the curves in the right places, and ready to experience all that life can throw at her.

Where do most guys for suicide missions come from?

Indeed, you find them at the toughest prison in whatever location the recruiting is being done in! I was thinking that we might be in for a Dirty Dozen-style affair with off-beat characters each with a specialized skill (forger, demolitions expert, scrounger, drunk) that would come in handy for this trek.

The "Big Leagues" Arabian style.
The “Big Leagues” Arabian style. Sinbad and his lovely future bride at the club with the biggest players in the known world (at that time). They are eating fine delicious and exotic foods, and experiencing all the earthly pleasures and delights available to them. Partying on Arabian style.

However, the intention of them being so vicious and crazy that they turn out to be the best dang fighting machine ever assembled doesn’t happen. Instead, these cons are so vicious and crazy that they mutiny as soon as they set sail. Not only that, but they attempt to take over the ship!

Unsurprisingly, the movie is filled with fantastic creatures and some very impressive visuals. The cyclops is a fearsome beast with great animation (based on the critter from 20 Million Miles to Earth) and fantastic integration into most scenes. This guy ranks right up there with the best of Harryhausen. A climactic skeleton battle is also highly impressive, with stunning choreography providing some damned impressive integration with real actors. It’s a stunningly well-realized scene. 

 -Revisiting Ray Harryhausen’s 1958 classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad 

Things don’t go any more smoothly once they hit Cyclops Island. If you can imagine. Treasure, a genie, and guy getting roasted alive are among the highlights.

Sinbad promising his future wife that everything will work out fine once he takes care of shopping.
Sinbad promising his future wife that everything will work out fine once he takes care of shopping. First on the list; the dairy isle. He has to go ahead and get some rather large eggs.

Conclusion

This is by far the best of the three fantasy adventure movies that Kerwin Matthews (Sinbad) made during this era. If you have the time and the inclination, I would strongly recommend a rewatch of this movie. Preferably on a hazy hot dog-day afternoon in August, or a cold snowy blistery Saturday afternoon in January. I promise that it will reawaken the boyhood in you (if you are a man), the nurturing and strong lady in you (if you are a lass), or complete revulsion (if you are gender-confused).

Links

Here’s some decent links that you all might want to take a look at.

Torrent Links

You can watch it for free if you don’t mind waiting a half an hour to half a day to download the torrent.

For those of you who are unaware. Torrents are parts of files that are spread out in tiny packets all over the internet. You use a "Bit Torrent" client to vacuum up all those little bits and pieces of the file. It then assembles the file into a movie that you can watch. The time that this takes can vary from a few minutes to weeks depending on how popular or obscure your searched file is.

You will need an application to manage the download. I recommend the free application VUZE. To download the video is thus easy. Install VUZE, and then click on one of the following torrent links.

Depending on where you live, you might not have the freedom to access these sites and the ISP might block them from access, or the search engines might black out their search results. Americans, in particular, might have some real problems. Therefore, I listed the most accessible torrent sites available to Americans. Pirate Bay and 1337X. I think that Kick Ass Torrents is still blocked for all Americans.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker
Not the First (Full Text) by A.E. van Vogt

My Poetry

My Kitten Knows

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 12).

Exploration of Asia continued…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Peanut-butter Spaghetti ( 花生酱面 )

This is a traditional dish. It is similar to spaghetti, except it uses rice noodles instead of wheat noodles, and the sauce is a mixture of peanut-butter and spices.

There are all kinds of recipes on the internet to add a kind of peanut-butter sauce for cheap Ramen noodles. But, boys and girls, that’s like saying a McDonald’s hamburger is equivalent to a real turkey dinner at Thanksgiving. Nope. Just posted Internet nonsense.

Here’s the baseline ingredients…

As the noodles cook, make the sesame peanut butter sauce.  Just add some  sesame oil, peanut butter, honey, soy sauce, rice vinegar, minced  garlic, and grated ginger to a bowl.  Give it a good whisk, until it is  well combined.  The peanut butter will break down and create a smooth,  creamy sauce. 

-The Wholesome Dish

This video shows how it is done.

This dish is called “peanut butter sauce – noodles”. And the Chinese characters for it are 花生酱面.

Hong Kong Dining

This is something that I am well experienced in. There are many first class, and first rate restaurants in Hong Kong. When dining upstairs you often have an absolutely amazing view of the city at night. In a like way, we can also say that there are amazing clubs, bars, and establishments that people can explore when venturing out in the late night Hong Kong air.

It’s all something like this…

Some very cute Thailand beauties…

Thailand is known as the “Land of Smiles”. They are a great fun-loving and traditional people. They take care of themselves and are very religious. My experiences in Thailand have always been outstanding and first rate.

Here are some cute girls…

On a Serious Note…

I have been reading the nonsense out of the United States media and it is disturbing to me. You have BLM, Antifa, and Liberal progressive democrat socialists conducting violence, and openly calling for outright war, torture and death. Meanwhile, the Congress-critters accept bribes from the Saudi Oligarchy and demand that we fight Iran, or Russia. Or China. Jeeze!

It saddens me. It really does.

It doesn’t matter if it is a person, or a nation. When someone is openly advocating violence, for whatever reason, there is something seriously wrong. And, if the government allows this to persist, then the government is broken.

That is especially true for the United States.

Now, of course, China is not the United States. There are the “enormous” group of SJW (Social Justice Warriors) in Hong Kong that are demanding “democracy” for Hong Kong. Here’s a picture of ALL OF THEM. Look at the enormous protest!

They demand “democracy” or else! You know, like America has. Rah rah!

SJW's for democracy.
Social Justice Warriors in Hong Kong. They advocate hurting people, violence and other military means to enable LGBT freedoms, and “democracy”. They do not want a traditional nation. They want a progressive one. You know, like America. They look to America with all the SJW, the PC culture, and the gender neutrality as the new wave of the future. They even have supporters in the RINO’s in the American Congress.

These people are misfits. They openly advocate hurting people, burning buildings, and torturing people so that HK can have “democracy”. Identical to the BLM and Antifa crowd.

The American news media breathlessly parrot their demands.

They claim that this view is reflected in all of China and Asia, and that there should be a war that would free and “liberate” the Chinese people from under the dictatorial yoke of the oppressive Chinese government. Whoo woo!

These people do not want a Republican style of government; a representative one. They do not want to implement a fair and just government. They want a progressive mob rule run by a handful of wealthy oligarchs.

They are willing to do violence so that they can join the ranks of the oligarchy.

Not. Going. To. Happen.

People, you all should know this, you don’t make threats, and you don’t force violence. Because sooner or later YOU will get hurt.

As you get older, you have friends and loved ones who die. Sometimes of old age.

I rode in the car with my father. We talked about the local butcher, and the changes to the local park. We talked about the passing of his dog; Zeeny. We talked about the movie that he watched last night.

The next day, I got a phone call that he was dead.

People die. Sometimes by accident, and sometimes by violence. We all need to see that our place on this planet is to obtain good positive experiences with others.

One day you are having coffee and a donut with them. The next day, you get a phone call that they are dead.

One day you are in the office chatting away at their desk. You are just talking about life and things. The next day, the security guard is emptying out the desk as they had died last night.

One day you are chatting on the phone with them. The next day you find out that they died suddenly.

It’s called life and it hurts.

Turn off that propaganda box known as American mainstream news. Toss it away. Spend time with friends, family and loved ones. You might only get one chance. Today might just be it.

A coworker had spent the day at work talking about all the money that she inhered from her uncle when he died. We talked about her plans over coffee near the break room.

The next day she was dead of a drug overdose.

If you find yourself getting too caught up with some injustice that you read about on the news, then turn off your computer. The news is DESIGNED to evoke emotional reactions from you. It is all nonsense. TURN THAT FUCKER OFF.

Please listen to me. Please believe me. You do not want to confront this…

We are all people. We have a life. We have friends. We have a small community that we are all part of. It is important, and we all have a role within it.

I turned around. My little white kitten lay dead on the road. It looked like it was sleeping. But it was gone. Dead. Run over by the car that sped through the neighborhood.

Life is short. Make yours a good one.

That’s it for now. I do hope that you enjoyed this visit to Asia via the Internet. I hope that you had some fun, maybe learned a thing or two, or had some inspiration. Enjoy. Sure beats the CNN or The UK Guardian narrative, eh?

Thank you.

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 11).

We continue with our exploration of Asia though videos.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Nice Lunch in the Mountains.

If you live in any of the mountainous regions inside China, this is pretty much what lunchtime might look like. You would sit at a table on the side of a cliff face, and look down on the clouds that surround you.

You have to keep in mind that MOST of China is mountainous. All you need do is look at a relief map of China.

relief map of China
This is a relief map of China. You can pretty much see that most of China is very mountainous.

If you lived in and around these mountains, your lunch might look a little something like this…

The Inside of a KTV

Yeah. This is all pretty much what it looks like. This is the hallway in some generic KTV somewhere in China.

Of course, I have a large series of posts about KTV’s and in particular Business KTV’s that you might want to take a stroll looking into after this post is finished. In any event, all KTV’s are pretty awesome and are decorated “to the hilt”. They all look a little like this…

The Interior of a Subway Car

Subway travel is very common in Asia, and currently you can travel to all of the first, second and third tier cities in China using it. Here is the view inside of one of the cars. Here, as is quite common, the rail leaves the tunnels and travels above ground like a monorail would.

Chinese Stewardess Training

All Chinese flight attendants, stewards and stewardesses, are also trained to fight (you do know that Muslim extremist behaviors is not taken lightly by China), and provide medical service when necessary.

One of the things that they are also trained to do is to fly a plane. In the event that the cabin crew becomes incapacitated, the stewardess can fill in and fly the plane if need be.

Let’s continue forward, shall we…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 10).

Let’s continue on our exploration of Asia…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Cute Girls on a Motorcycle in Thailand

This is what it’s like. It’s not some dingy polluted evil place with mean black clothed SWAT armed police watching your every move. Nope. It’s not America. Seriously, different places are different. As such, you simply cannot compare contemporaneous America with the rest of the world.

It’s rural Thailand, and yes, this is the what it looks like.

It’s sort of like Alabama.

Speaking of cute Thai girls. Check this out…

Hong Kong at Night

Yup, this is pretty much what it is like.

Automobile Show in Shanghai

I always like to look at the new cars, and the pretty girls at the Chinese car shows. They are really pushing towards being a dominant global player in the latest in automotive technology. This year we have many of the Chinese models with face recognition instead of key fobs, and 5G access as standard.

I also like all the pretty Chinese and Russian girls.

Have you gone to a politically-correct American car show lately?

American automotive car girl.

Where the heck do they pull those tubbies from?

Talk about big and a lot of lovin’! (Not complaining, mind you. I just have different tastes.) I guess it must be the Michelle Obama influence. You know she was voted the most beautiful woman in the world numerous times… eh? Yeah. No shit. She is considered the most beautiful woman in the world.

I attribute this attitude to two factors. Drugs, and mental illness.

Now, let’s see what real women look like, and what is going on in the Automotive Arena in China, shall we…

Now that I have offended just about everyone, let’s move on…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 9).

Let’s continue on our adventure into Asia by looking at various micro-videos that were taken this summer. As always, the presence of micro-videos might cause difficulty in loading due to bandwidth limitations and high usage demands. In that event, you can reload this page to avoid any problems.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Rural Thailand

People, this is what a small town in rural Thailand looks like. Not too different from what a small down in America looks like. Not really.

I like to believe that people are people, no matter where you live. The only differences that we have are imaginary. They are self created walls that tend to separate and divide each other. I oppose that, and instead look for ground of commonality.

That includes, family, food, pets, and sports. Other similar attributes can include fashion, movies, music, and parties. And, let’s not forget those wonderful vices that everyone around the world enjoys.

What do you see in this picture? Billboards, houses, trucks, pretty girls wearing skirts, blue skies, and white clouds. People, that is what our life on this Earth is all about.

Two Girls in Japan

Ah, aren’t they so cute?

I like to believe that what makes humans great are our difference. Not our similarities. We all like to sing, dance and eat tasty delicious food. It is how we enjoy those moments, and how we interact with each other that renders the moment towards magnificence.

Here are two cute girls in Japan playing with their cute girly outfits. I love the colors, the patterns, the styles and of course, the smiles on the faces of the girls.

Being Disabled in China

Being disabled is difficult. It doesn’t matter where you live, you need to deal with all sorts of problems that “normal” people do not need to contend with.

Here we see a disabled person in China using the Shenzhen subway system.

A Chinese Video Game

Just like the USA, there are all sorts of games and APPs that you can play. They run the complete gambit all across the board. Here is one such Chinese game APP for the cell phone. As you can well see that it is a little different from the kinds of games that you might enjoy in the United States.

And let’s continue onward to other videos…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 8).

Myth-Busters Debunked

The American reality-television show titled “Myth Busters” so-called “proved” that jet-packs could never work. They had an entire show debunking the claims that jet-pack plans that you can find on the Internet were just a hoax and that if you built those plans, your contraption would never fly.

Myth busters on jet pack design.

They concluded that only government approved mechanisms could fly and anyone who was going to try and build their own rocket-pack was a stupid dupe. That instead you should listen to the American government and not have someone steal your money.

So… Americans listened to them.

The sales of on-line jet-pack plans plummeted and so were the incidents of failure, problems and injury. Meanwhile, in the rest of the world, those not under the American propaganda machine did their own thing without fear. So now you have jet packs being flown all over the world… except in America.

Here’s a jet-pack flying over Singapore…

Too bad that the American government will not support innovation, and good-old “elbow grease”. Instead, Americans have been bombarded with a “it cannot be done” narrative.

Fishing.

I do love to fish. Did you know that in China you don’t need to get a fishing permit, or ask permission to fish? Yup. Heck, you can even fish at night. Can you believe that?

Fishing at night in China.
Here we have an old man fishing cormorant at night. It is a long held tradition to fish, and all Chinese like fish, to fish and everything about fish. It is absolutely beyond the ability for the Chinese to wrap their arms around the concept of paying taxes or fees to be allowed to fish.

It takes a little bit of getting used to. I well remember trying to ask some Chinese friends where I needed to go to get a fishing permit. They had no friggin’ idea what I was trying to ask. They kept on trying to figure it all out. They could not understand why or what the purpose was to ask about being able to fish.

It was crazy. Finally after conferring among themselves they figured out what I was asking. They told me that the government did not treat fishing like driving a car. They explained that the odds of me hurting myself fishing, or hurting another person was not considered (by the Chinese government) to be serious enough to warrant a policing agency and laws.

People that is what freedom is.

Here is a video showing people fishing.

Boss

Bosses are treated quite differently in China, and in Asia than they are treated in the United States. In America a boss is just some one who makes just a little bit more more money than you, and who has just a little bit more respect.

A boss is treated differently in different nations.
A given role or position in a company comes with a different level of respect associated with it depending where the company is located. In general, bosses in China enjoy far more authority, respect and appreciation than any counterparts in the West, including America.

In China, however, the rate of difference is not linear. It is exponential. Here we see a Chinese boss entering a banquet for her company.

A Glimpse at Modern Contemporaneous Chinese Culture

Here is a video of a girl wearing traditional Han clothing. This is very typical. Traditions are celebrated in China. Not disparaged as “racist” and “homophobic” as they are in America and out West in the UK.

I would like to point out some things, that the average viewer might miss…

  • Sword
  • Hard Alcohol drinking
  • Beautiful
  • Long, flowing comfortable clothing
  • Beautiful girl

All of these are contemporary elements of modern Chinese culture. Including swords. In fact, there are classes on how to fight with swords, and they are often used during morning exercises.

Cool videos, eh? Yeah. I think so. There’s more here…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 7).

Let’s continue with more most excellent videos…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Local Talent Singing

In China they have their own versions of “America’s got Talent”, and here you can see all kinds of local hopefuls singing their hearts out to a gleeful public.

中国达人秀. China has talent, Wikipedia entry.

And, there are many, many such singing programs in China.

The Voice of China - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Voice_of_China
 
The Voice of China (Chinese: 中国好声音; pinyin: Zhōngguó Hǎo Shēngyīn) is a Chinese reality television singing competition broadcast on Zhejiang Television. Based on the original The Voice of Holland, the concept of the series is to find new singing talent (solo or duets) contested by aspiring singers drawn from public auditions. The winner is determined by votes cast by a media judging panel and live audience.

I really like these kinds of programs. Here, hopefuls sign their hearts out to a very appreciative audience. It’s really quite awesome.

Of course, in America anything that will take the eyes and ears of Americans outside of the American mainstream media is considered to be a threat. That will not do, and so the media warns Americans. You know, “for our protection” against such things.

So while you might have enjoyed those two micro-video snippets, here’s what the American mainstream media has to say about all this. They DO NOT want you (the reader) to listen to any Chinese opinions, music, new, movies or thoughts. It might distract you away for the American media narrative. Check out this…

America warns against the Chinese music networks.
Can you actually believe this nonsense? This is from USA today.

Even older folk…

Yuppur even older Chinese folk get to have their day in the limelight.

Tragedy and Rescue

Life has both good and bad moments. Sometimes things can be really terrible, and we need help. That is why there are police around. That is why there are firemen. That is why there are doctors and nurses. Their role is not to make sure that we observe approved behavior “American style”, but rather to let us live life, and then offer a helping hand when things go wrong.

And, people… things can go terribly wrong…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 6).

This post continues…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Small Town China.

Everyone knows about Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong and Shenzhen. But what about the smaller towns and cities? There are hundreds, if not thousands, of them. Here’s a typical fly through.

War Movies – China.

China is a nation with an enormous and complex history. If you think that the history of Europe, and all the wars and conflicts there were complex, you haven’t seen anything. The history of China if far older, with a far greater number of conflicts, battles and strife.

Not to mention, completely and positively, horrific.

 Most people perceive China as a monolith that existed peacefully  since its inception until today. That is far from being true. Back when  Europe was enjoying relative stability under Roman rule, the Celestial  Empire confronted one of the most prolonged crisis.

 Between 184 and 280 AD China was divided in three empires – Wei, Shu,  and Wu. The three emerged after the breakdown of the Han dynasty and  would be again reunited by the Jin monarchs.

 All historians base their life loss estimates on two national  censuses that give a difference of 38 million. Whether the calculations  were accurate will remain a mystery. Nevertheless, one thing is clear.  China has a formidable capacity of regenerating its population.

 It seems that the Chinese were so happy once the century-long conflict ended that they celebrated mostly in their beds. 

 -Unknown but not hidden  

As such, popular shows, television series, and movies all discuss the history of China from various perspectives. For comparison, in the United States, we have war-themed movies as well. They generally consist of…

  • World War II
  • The Vietnam conflict
  • Cowboys and Indians

Certainly there are a rare handful of outliers, however, most of the movies fit within the top three main groups.

Well, while the USA might have three main groups, the Chinese have around 200-300 sub-groups. All of which may, or may not, involve magic, powers, and God-like beings. To understand China is to understand that they are historically, a culture that has been immersed in war for 5000 years. They are TIRED of it, and want no part of the glories of war.

The Taiping Civil War, the conflict lasted between 1850 and 1864 and  produced the most dramatic death toll in history at that time. The  rebellion started with the millenarian movement of the Heavenly Kingdom  of Peace, which tried to overthrow the Qing dynasty.

 As you seen saw far on the list, every significant political change  in the history of China came with savagery. The Taiping Rebellion counts  as the bloodiest civil war in history and makes the American equivalent  look like a banquet.

-Unknown but not hidden 

Here’s a video taken from a popular Chinese television show.

 Between 1618 and 1683, China completed a full transition from its  southern Ming emperors to the new ruling elite coming all they from  northern Manchuria. You could say that in this fragment of history the  Starks were victorious.

 As you suspect, the Ming did not leave without a fight. The Manchu  (Qing) retaliation was unprecedented. More than 25,000,000 lost their  lives in a conflict that spread across the entire land.

 Whole provinces like Sichuan and Jiangnan were completely  depopulated, and chronicles mention massacres like the one of Yangzhou  where 800,000 innocent souls perished. The expression “women and  children first” had a terrifyingly different meaning for the Qing  generals.

 At this point, we need to stress the fact that Qing Manchurians were  foreigners who managed to conquer China mostly through betrayal and  manipulation. Their savagery will be avenged similarly just three  centuries later. 

 -Unknown but not hidden  

In comparison, while the United States has been in a near state of fighting wars for much of the years since 1776, most of the population has been sheltered from war. They never had to flee their homes, suffer through periods of starvation, or experienced being rounded up by armed forces and killed in large groups.

The only two exceptions were the Revolutionary War, and the American Civil War.

Now, since many Americans haven’t experienced the horrific violence that war can bring, they are easily manipulated by an evil self-serving oligarchy to rant and rave about wars in far-off lands. Like Iran. Like Yemen. Like Libya. Like Syria. Like the Ukraine. Like China.

Sigh.

 At first glance, the An Lushan Rebellion seems to deserve just a footnote.

 That’s the error most historians make when they fail to check the  numbers. More than 21 million perished as a result of an attempted coup  that was close to overthrowing one of the most influential dynasties of  the time.

 Take a good look at the man who can be held responsible for the mess.  General An Lushan detonated order and peace once he proclaimed himself  emperor of Northern China in 755 AD. Seven years of turmoil followed,  during which China lost one-third of its population. 

 -Unknown but not hidden   

Rural Holidays…

In China, the government has specifically designated the use of certain communities for travel, tourism and recreation. In these areas, large amounts of funding pours into the community to render that area especially attractive to visit.

Part of the reason is to generate tourist revenue to non-industrial areas, but also another part of the reason is based on the Chinese concept of tradition. They believe that it is duty as conservative traditional Chinese to take care of their environment, their habitat and their environment.

This belief is top down straight from Beijing, and is still meeting strong resistance from (now very old) progressives. These people were very active SJW in the day and followed Mr. Mao with a fine revolutionary fever. Luckily they are dying out, though the “Dancing Grandmothers” are still a royal pain in the ass.

Progressives, of every age, think only of one thing; ME! All they care about is themselves.

Thank God that Beijing follows a traditional Chinese conservative model.

Bike Paths

China believes that the purpose of government is to serve the people. It’s not a slogan like it is used in the United States. They actually believe it.

In fact, they have enforcement police that constantly reviews budgets and the behaviors of government officials to prevent crime and corruption. And you do not want to get into trouble with the “enforcement arm” of the “corruption police”. That little bribe, or way-sided amount of money, could cost you your eyes, your liver, a kidney or even worse. Not to mention hard time in the Chinese mines cracking rocks for a spell.

Now, one of the things that the local Chinese government does is to increase the livability index of the various cities and regions that they control. This is most commonly handled by planting flowers, creating parks, planting trees, adding ponds, and walking paths. As well as providing bike paths.

Here is a typical two-lane bike path in a smaller third-tier city.

You will see things like this throughout Europe, and maybe one or two places in the USA. In China is mandated to be everywhere. Everywhere.

Let’s continue on…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 5).

Here we continue with a selection of micro-videos that amply illustrate what is going on in Asia this summer. There is quite a bit going on, let me tell you all. And it is all so very different from what you would find in the West that it becomes noteworthy, though rather difficult to classify individually. Here, the videos depict China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Roller Skating

Roller skating is a thing in China. It really is, and it is a great way for a young couple to go on a date followed by a nice dinner, and a walk afterwards in the cool night air.

Roller skating rink
This is an old roller skating rink that used to be popular in Oregon. In those days, many young couples and friends would come and skate the night away.

America used to have very many roller skating rinks. All during the 1920’s up through into the 1980’s young couples, and friends would go out to go roller skating. Sometime around the early 1990’s America adopted a more progressive society. It was one which people stopped spending time with each other, and instead became connected electronically. As a result, roller skating rinks fell in disrepair and disuse.

Which is just sad.

In China, the roller rinks are more like bars, or disco clubs. they feature loud music, flashing lights, and various amusements like barriers, cone paths, and other things for a person to navigate around.

Chinese roller skates.
Here is a pair of Chinese roller skates with a set of carbon fiber boots, with LED spinners in the wheels. This is very much a part of contemporaneous China.

Also four-wheel (LED) lighted skates are very popular. In fact, I would say that the market share for this “Roller Derby” style shoe is about equal to that of a roller blade shoe.

The very odd thing about China, and I don’t really understand it, is that many Chinese like to skate backwards. They don’t like to skate forwards like us Americans do. Strange. Yes. But, cute, too.

And here’s another view. Note that many of the skating rinks have bars, and in this next video we can well see the girls hopping on the skating floor that is part of a trampoline arrangement. Pretty cool huh?

Bubble Tea.

 Bubble tea is a tea-based drink  that has gained a lot of popularity in recent times and has quickly  spread past its native boundaries of Taiwan. Initially popular with  Taiwanese schoolchildren, it is now becoming a favorite among adults for  its sweet taste, unique ingredients, and for its huge range of flavors.

 What is Bubble Tea?
 Bubble tea, also known as pearl milk tea, boba juice, boba tea, and bubble milk tea, is a Taiwanese tea-based drink. It is also called as tapioca tea, as tapioca balls are the main ingredient in this tea.

 Bubble tea consists of a tea base (white, green or black) that is mixed or shaken with milk or other fruits,  and fruit jelly or tapioca balls are added, which sink to the bottom.  Ice is often blended into the mixture, which results in a slushy or  smoothie consistency. There are different fruits and flavors that can be  used in bubble tea and the most popular varieties are bubble milk tea  and bubble milk green tea.

 Combined with the variety of teas, the amount of milk, and the choice  of fruit jelly or tapioca pearls, there are thousands of combinations  of bubble tea. Each of these has different nutrient compositions, which  offer excellent health benefits. 

-Organic Facts

Bubble tea is a staple all over Asia. I had my first bubble tea back in Shreveport Louisiana back in the early 1990’s. Then in completely disappeared. I don’t know what happened. MWI shifts? Cultural variances? Changes in tastes and attitudes? Who really knows?

Maybe Wilder has an idea...HERE.
A typical bubble tea selection.
A typical bubble tea selection. This one, in particular, is from Vietnam. These drinks are a favorite all over China.

Anyways, bubble teas can be bought anywhere in Asia. It’s a sweetened milk tea with chewy tapioca pearls. It’s pretty good. For me, though, as common as it is, I just prefer to drink Southern style mint orange-slice Iced Tea.

And people, this is what it is like. The gals and guys dress like this (as these hoodies are their office uniforms) and this is the full “real deal” treatment.

The Vast Chinese Deserts…

China is an enormous nation. It has everything from long coastlines, to huge mountain ranges, and yes… it has enormous deserts as well.

The two main large deserts within China.
The two main large deserts within China. This includes the famous Gobi, as well as the relatively unknown Taklamakan regions. There are also other much smaller deserts as well.

There are two main large deserts within China. This includes the famous Gobi, as well as the relatively unknown Taklamakan regions. There are also other much smaller deserts as well.

Check it out…

Boy Meets Girl.

I happen to like this micro video. Thus I place it here. People, these kinds of videos, made by local Chinese folk, aptly describe the culture, the styles, the attitudes and the way of life of the modern Chinese man and women.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia.

Here are a selection of micro-videos that amply illustrate what is going on in Asia this summer. With that being said, let it be well understood that there is quite a bit going on, let me tell you all. And it is all so very different from what you would find in the West that it becomes noteworthy, though rather difficult to classify individually. Here, the videos depict China, Vietnam, Thailand, and Japan.

I hope that you all will enjoy these micro-videos and visions of Asia as much as I do.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Local Popular Music

All through Asia there are small groups of musicians that are making their scene. They are notable in very many ways. One of the things that I like about them, are their own individual uniqueness. You won’t find clones of Nicki Minaj here. Thank goodness.

Of course, I have other earlier posts that delineate the many, many musical venues and styles that are present in China. What I happen to like is the way that traditional music is fuzed with popular Western musical styles. Merged, they result in a very interesting sound.

Such as this example.

Here’s the full song. Listen on to it.

封茗囧菌 sung by 三国恋

Tom & Jerry

Who would figure? Everyone in China, from two year olds to great-grandmothers love the American comic strip Tom and Jerry. They are, by far, THE most popular thing in China. Don’t ask me how this came about, or even why. I haven’t a clue. I really do not know.

There are 246 Tom and Jerry cartoon suppliers, mainly located in Asia. The top supplying country is China (Mainland), which supplies 100% of Tom and Jerry cartoon items respectively. These products are exported globally. 

Outside of China, Tom and jerry cartoon products are most popular in North America, South America, and the Mid East.

Here are some shoppers in a grocery store checking out a Tom and Jerry cartoon on the television screen. I mean, it’s an enormous hit! Look at the expressions on their faces. My goodness!

Come on! Any society that loves Tom & Jerry can’t be all bad. Really!

Pouring Tea for Congress

China is all about face, and the importance of ritual. They view the collective society as more important than the individual, and so they have adopted various rituals and ways of doing things that seem so strange to our free-wheeling progressive lifestyle in the United States. And yes, in case you are confused, America today is quite a progressive-society. All you need to do is step outside the borders of the USA and compare it with other traditional conservative nations.

The People's Republic of China practices the system of people's congress. China's Constitution stipulates that all power in the People's Republic of China belongs to the people, and the organs through which the people exercise state power are the National People's Congress and the local people's congresses at different levels.

- National People's Congress

Here we have the auditorium for the Chinese version of Congress getting served tea in the proper ritualized manner. In China everything is about tradition, and “face”.

Face (Mianzi) The concept of “face” or “self-image”, known as Mianzi in Chinese, is core to Chinese culture and one which is critical to understand. It can be loosely described as someone’s social status or reputation in the eyes of others and is integral to both social and business dealings.

- Chinese Culture 101 

Come on! Those three videos are all pretty cool. You do have to admit. Well, there are many more. However…

Too many videos will slow down the loading of this page, so I have broken this most into multiple pages so that you (the reader) can enjoy. Please click on the link to go to the next part of this multi-part post.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 2).

This is the second page of a multi-post that provides various micro-videos and photos (with narrative) that describe modern contemporaneous Asia. That includes China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand. And, again, here is my warning about low-bandwidth connections, high peak usage, and too many open tabs…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Summer in Rural China

Rural areas all over the world are beautiful. I love the thick forests with the lush plant life. I love the meadows, and the brooks. I love the streams, the lakes and large white fluffy clouds that dance upon the sky. It is the same in Amish country as it is in a rural Hunan province in China.

Latest Fashion in Thailand

All through Asia, women like to wear traditional clothing. Not only are they flattering, and comfortable, but they are also quite a fashion statement. This is true in China, as it is in Japan, and Korea. Here are some of the latest in “traditional Thai” clothing.

You see, the fashion world is no longer lead out of Paris or Italy. Because they have off-shored and out-sourced their design teams to Asia. Those very same design teams now make and design clothing for the local Asian populace and they are very, very popular.

Getting Selfies in the Mall in China.

Everyone loves selfies. I guess that is why there are such things as “selfie sticks”, and tripods. You see this all the time, a girl is getting a selfie, or making a movie, or acting cute. There are thousands of such videos all over China. Some are creative, and some are just cute in their simplicity. Such as this one…

Modern Kung Fu in China

Kung Fu is still practiced in China, and it is more popular than ever. You can also see the remarkable videos of the various types of hand-to-hand, or foot to head combat that is always popular in China.

Too many videos will slow down the loading of this page, so I have broken this most into multiple pages so that you (the reader) can enjoy. Please click on the link to go to the next part of this multi-part post.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 3).

This is the second page of a multi-post that provides various micro-videos and photos (with narrative) that describe modern contemporaneous Asia. That includes China, Japan, Korea, and Thailand.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Summer Festivals

Festivals are conducted all over the world. China, being such a large nation, with such a large diversity of people, have many, many festivals in the summer. They are held everywhere, and the smaller the town (it seems) the more festivals that they like to have.

Funny thing that.

Anyways, in China, the color red is associated with joy and happiness. Thus we can see this little local parade with bright and happy red colors. Not to mention a cute and pretty local Chinese lass.

Having Fun at a Park

Now, who doesn’t like to have fun? I’ve run into a few of them. They troll comments and posting boards. They have a mental illness. Anyone who does not know how to have fun lives a sorry, sorry life. That’s a fact Jack.

In China, many parks have incorporated all sorts of passive and active enjoyments. From glass floored bridges, to swing sets, monkey bars (for adults) and such things as long-duration mountain slides. Like this. Swoosh!

Now, who wouldn’t want to go down off a mountain by speedy sling-ride? Hum?

J-Pop at Night

Ah, here we have beautiful Japan, and one of the local J-pop dance troupes giving it a go to the delight of the attracted audience.

This is a common sight all over Asia. These groups of dancers offer free presentations in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and China dancing to C-pop and other numbers. They dance in Korea, of course, with very famous dancers to K-pop dancing alongside wanna-be dancers. They dance in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand as well.

This particular group is dancing J-pop in Japan to a Japanese audience. You would never see this in the United States. I do not know why, though I do have a pretty good idea. Personally, it might be due to the various regulations you have to meet, the graft that you must pay, and the various fees and surcharges that will crop up the moment you suggest such a thing. Oh, and if you are in a blue state, you will need to pay off the local union boss as well, and make sure that the police are paid for extra duty and the like…

In Asia, they just do it.

It’s usually just a matter of setting aside a folding chair or two and running tape around it to designate an area that you want to reserve. Sort of like this…

And, as viewed from a different angle…

Public Pools

Here’s a typical pool in China. They tend to be open late into the night, as most Chinese swim at night. They do not like to swim in the daylight. I suppose that that makes them “Vampire Swimmers”. The real reason is that the Chinese do not really like to have their skin turn dark.

There are many reasons for that. There is the belief, an inherited one, no doubt that says that only poor laborers have dark skin, while the rich live a pampered life inside the cool mansions and temples. Other reasons include the fear of getting terrible and deep wrinkles. What I do know is that skin-whiting cremes can be bought everywhere as can be UV sunblock with an SPF of no less than 10,000.

What do you think, you think Chinese pools look like this all the time, eh?

Anyways, American media has presented a terribly distorted view of what pools are like. If you Google “China Pools” you will come up with all sorts of pictures depicting very crowded pools just flooded with multitudes of people. So, naturally, that is the impression that anyone would have if they FUCKING ONLY used AMERICAN WEBSITES to research about China. Gosh darn it! Use Chinese websites to research about China , ya ding-bat.

You don’t go into McDonald’s and order a T-Bone steak, done medium raw, eh? Do you?

It’s like how if you search for “China Dog”, you end up with pages after pages of poor dogs being hurt and tortured. Nah. Not even remotely resembling reality. This post is about reality. Not the cardboard cut-out that the American oligarchy uses to keep Americans down and subservient.

Most Chinese only swim at night.

It is rare to find pools, or beaches crowded during the daytime. If you do, you will more than likely see a sea of umbrellas keeping everyone cool and protected from the relentless sun. So if you see a picture of a bunch of Chinese, out in the hot day, all in a crowded pool… chances are that it’s part of a special event (usually hosted by an organization or two). It’s rather unusual.

Sort of like how unusual it is to be eaten by a White Shark off the coast of Cape Cod.

This is what a Chinese pool is like…

And, this is what it is like on a beach…

BTW, did you know that China has an enormous coast line with an enormous network of lakes and rivers. All of which have government mandated recreational facilities. It’s all part of the conservative belief that the duty of the government is to SERVE the people. It is really quite different from the progressive belief where it’s every man for themselves to do “their own thing” what ever it may be.

Anyways, here’s a chick on one of the many, many beaches…

I like this girl. Nice butt.

Here’s another video. This is of a water park. Yuppur they are all over China. Only that they tend to be much, much larger than their American counterparts, and tend to be quite elaborate. As they all need to compete against each other in size and scope. Ah, check it out.

You’ll notice that the one girl is wearing a light shawl around her waist. Well, that is pretty darn common here in China. It’s to prevent the skin from getting dark, don’t you know. And this is how it manifests.

And, while we are at it, here’s yet another gal at a public pool. You know, in all these videos do you see all those hoards and throngs of people that are so very common on a Google Image Search? Nope. I wonder why…

I have been accused of being a propagandist for the Chinese military. Yup, if you can believe that nonsense. I have been called all sorts of names, like a "fifty center", and an "agitprop", whatever the fuck those two pejorative words mean... I haven't a clue. 

The only difference between me and the rest of America is that I am out here and reporting on what I see with my own two eyes. 

Not mindlessly repeating the power phrases of the oligarchy that runs America and tries to keep them downtrodden and poor.

Anyways, this video…

Too many videos will slow down the loading of this page, so I have broken this most into multiple pages so that you (the reader) can enjoy. Please click on the link to go to the next part of this multi-part post.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Snapshots of Summer in Asia (part 4).

Making Spaghetti the Chinese Way

Spaghetti was invented by the Chinese. However, if you visit any website in the United States you will read that it originated out of Italy. The detailed parroting of this narrative follows the same tired-old formula.

History of pasta meals had deep origins in the eastern Mediterranean countries such as Greece and several territories of Middle East and Arabian Peninsula.     

There, meals made form dough were different in many ways to the food  that was used on daily basis in Ancient Roman Empire. As historian  records can tell us, the direct origin of the Italian pasta came from the Arab meal  called “itriyya” that was often described by the Greeks as “dry pasta”.  

This durable and     long lasting meal was one of the main sources of nutrition for Arab  traders who traveled all across then-known world outside of Europe.  Because of their nomadic nature and military conquest, the first European contact with itriyya was recorded sometimes during 7th century AD when Arabs  managed to occupy Sicily. 

There were rumors about Marco Polo bringing Chinese recipe  of pasta to the Italy, but his travels happened more than 500 years  later. 

-History of Spaghetti

Which is fine.

In the Mediterranean region, ground wheat was made into pasta, that eventually evolved into spaghetti. This recipe found it’s way to America, where it eventually became known as American Spaghetti.

Well, long, long before the European cavemen (and cave women) were playing with wheat and pounding it into mush to make noodles, the Chinese had a very well established version of noodles and spaghetti. However, they made both the noodles, and the sauce quite differently.

This is how you make spaghetti in China…

New Make-up Trends

China is an enormous nation. It’s population dwarfs that of the United States. As such, there are many, many sub-cultures, fads and trends that are going on that are way, way off the radar screen in the United States. One such trend is artistic makeup.

Here, you define your own unique way of putting on makeup instead of the more “polished” looks that you might find in the glamor magazines. Sort of like this…

Lolita Fashion in China.

There are many Japanese fashions that have migrated Westward. China has communities of Japanese fashion in all of the cities. Even tiny Zhuhai, where I live, has a contingent of Lolita fashion aficionados.

Summer Monkey Dancing Parade…

And of course, what kind of a summer would it be without a parade of dancing monkey kings? Well?

Let’s continue…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Not The First (Full Text) by A. E. van Vogt

Lately I have been busy posting reprints of classic science fiction. I am sure that all these old stories might irritate the more practical and pragmatic readers out in Internet-land, but that need not be so. These stories are great. They are classical enjoyments for those of us that tire of the progressive re-write of the Star Trek universe, and the Star Wars narrative.

A. E. van Vogt was one of the most popular and influential practitioners of science fiction in the mid-twentieth century, the genre’s so-called Golden Age, and one of the most complex. He is the author that brought forth the idea of a “Space Opera” and the complexities of a dark, and potentially sinister universe.

This story is a fine example of this great writer’s best work from his most creative period – the forties and early fifties, during the “golden age” of science-fiction. It is wonderfully short, and does “pack a wallop” in situational conveyance.

It’s a steady diet of stories such as this that inspired me to study Aerospace Engineering, become a Naval Aviator, and join MAJestic.

Not The First

Captain Harcourt wakened with a start. In the darkness he lay tense, shaking the sleep out of his mind. Something was wrong. He couldn’t quite place the discordant factor, but it trembled there on the verge of his brain, an alien thing that shattered for him the security of the spaceship.

He strained his senses against the blackness of the room—and abruptly grew aware of the intensity of that dark. The night of the room was shadow-less, a pitch-like black that lay like an opaque blanket hard on his eyeballs.

That was it. The darkness. The indirect night light must have gone off. And out here in interstellar space there would be no diffused light as there was on Earth and even within the limits of the solar system.

Still, it was odd that the lighting system should have gone on the blink on this first “night” of this first trip of the first spaceship powered by the new, stupendous atomic drive.

A sudden thought made him reach toward the light switch.

The click made a futile sound in the pressing weight of the darkness—and seemed like a signal for the footsteps that whispered hesitantly along the corridor, and paused outside his door. There was a knock, then a muffled, familiar, yet strained voice: “Harcourt!”

The urgency in the man’s tone seemed to hold connection to all the odd menace of the past few minutes. Harcourt, conscious of relief, barked, “Come in, Gunther. The door’s unlocked!”

In the darkness, he slipped from under the sheets and fumbled for his clothes—as the door opened, and the breathing of the navigation officer of the ship became a thick, satisfying sound that destroyed the last vestige of the hard silence.

“Harcourt, the damnedest thing has happened. It started when everything electrical went out of order. Compton says we’ve been accelerating for two hours now at heaven only knows what rate.”

There was no pressure on him now. The familiar presence and voice of Gunther had a calming effect; the sense of queer, mysterious things was utterly gone. Here was something into which he could figuratively sink his teeth.

Harcourt stepped matter-of-factly into his trousers and said after a moment: “I hadn’t noticed the acceleration. So used to the— Hmm, doesn’t seem more than two gravities. Nothing serious could result in two hours. As for light, they’ve got those gas lamps in the emergency room.”

For the moment it was all quite convincing. He hadn’t gone to bed till the ship’s speed was well past the velocity of light. Everybody had been curious about what would happen at that tremendous milepost—whether the Lorenz-Fitzgerald contraction theory was substance or appearance.

Nothing had happened. The test ship simply forged ahead, accelerating each second, and, just before he retired, they had estimated the speed at nearly two hundred thousand miles per second.

The complacent mood ended. He said sharply, “Did you say Compton sent you?”

Compton was chief engineer, and he was definitely not one to give way to panics of any description. Harcourt frowned. “What does Compton think?”

“Neither he nor I can understand it; and when we lost sight of the sun he thought you’d better be—”

“When you what?”

Gunther’s laugh broke humorlessly through the darkness.

“Harcourt, the damned thing is so unbelievable that when Compton called me on the communicator just now he spent half the time talking to himself like an old woman of the gutter. Only he, O’Day and I know the worst yet.

“Harcourt, we’ve figured out that we’re approximately five hundred thousand light-years from Earth—and that the chance of our ever finding our sun in that swirl of suns makes searching for needles in haystacks a form of child’s play.

“We’re lost as no human being has ever been.”

In the utter darkness beside the bank of telescope eyepieces Harcourt waited and watched. Though he could not see them, he was tautly aware of the grim men who sat so quietly, peering into the night of space ahead—at the remote point of light out there that never varied a hairbreadth in its position on the crossed wires of the eyepieces.

The silence was complete, and yet—

The very presence of these able men was a living, vibrating force to him who had known them intimately for so many years. The beat of their thought, the shifting of space-toughened muscles, was a sound that distorted rather than disturbed the hard tensity of the silence.

The silence shattered as Gunther spoke matter-of-factly: “There’s no doubt about it, of course. We’re going to pass through the star system ahead. An ordinary sun, I should say, a little colder than our own, but possibly half again as large, and about thirty thousand parsecs distant.”

“Go away with you,” came the gruff voice of physicist O’Day. “You can’t tell how far away it is. Where’s your triangle?”

“I don’t need any such tricks,” retorted Gunther heatedly. “I just use my God-given intelligence. You watch. We’ll be able to verify our speed when we pass through the system; and velocity multiplied by time elapsed will—”

Harcourt interjected gently, “So far as we know, Gunther, Compton hasn’t any lights yet. If he hasn’t, we won’t be able to look at our watches, so we won’t know the time elapsed; so you can’t prove anything. What is your method, if it isn’t triangulation—and it can’t be. We’re open to conviction.”

Gunther said, “It’s plain common sense. Notice the cross lines on your eyepieces. The lines intersect on the point of light—and there’s not a fraction of variation or blur.

“These lenses have tested perfect according to the latest standards, but observatory astronomers back home have found that beyond one hundred fifty thousand light-years there is the beginning of distortion. Therefore I could have said a minute or so ago that we were within one hundred and fifty thousand light-years of that sun.

“But there’s more. When I first looked into the eyepiece—before I called you, Captain—the distortion was there. I’m pretty good at estimating time, and I should say it required about twelve minutes for me to get you and fumble my way back in here.

When I looked then the distortion was gone. There’s an automatic device in my eyepiece for measuring degree of distortion. When I first looked, the distortion was .005, roughly equivalent to twenty-five thousand light-years. There’s another point—”

“You needn’t go on,” Harcourt interjected quietly. “You’ve proved your case.”

O’Day groaned. “That’ll be maybe twenty-four thousand light-years in twelve minutes. Two thousand a minute; that’ll be thirty light-years a second. And we’ve been sittin’ here maybe more’n twenty-five minutes since you an’ Harcourt came back. That’ll be another fifty thousand light-years, or thirty thousand parsecs between us an’ the star. You’re a good man, Gunther. But how will we ever identify the blamed thing when we come back? It would be makin’ such a fine gunsight for the return trip if we could maybe get another sight farther on, when we finally stop this runaway or—”

Harcourt cut him off grimly. “There’s just one point that you two gentlemen have neglected to take into account. It’s true we must try to stop the ship—Compton’s men are working at the engines now. But everything else is only preliminary to our main task of thinking our way back to Earth.

We shall probably find it necessary, if we live, to change our entire conception of space.

“I said—if we live! What you scientists in your zeal failed to notice was that the most delicate instruments ever invented by man, the cross-lines of this telescope, intersect directly on the approaching sun. They haven’t changed for more than thirty minutes, so we must assume the sun is following a course in space directly toward us, or away from us.

“As it is, we’re going to run squarely into a ball of fire a million miles plus in diameter. I leave the rest to your imaginations.”

The discussion that blurred on then had an unreal quality for Harcourt. The only reality was the blackness, and the great ship plunging madly down a vast pit toward its dreadful doom.

It seemed down, a diving into incredible depths at an insane velocity—and against that cosmic discordance, the voices of the men sounded queer and meaningless, intellectually, violently alive, but the effect was as of small birds fluttering furiously against the wire mesh of a trap that has sprung remorselessly around them.

“Time,” Gunther was saying, “is the only basic force. Time creates space instant by instant, and—”

“Will you be shuttin’ up,” O’Day interrupted scathingly. “You’ve had the solving of the problem of our speed, a practical job for an astronomer and navigation officer. But this’ll be different. Me bein’ the chief of the physicists aboard, I—”

“Omit the preamble!” Harcourt cut in dryly. “Our time is, to put it mildly, drastically limited.”

“Right!” O’Day’s voice came briskly out of the blackness. “Mind ya, I’m not up to offerin’ any final solutions, but here may be some answers:

“The speed of light is not, accordin’ to my present thought, one hundred eighty-six thousand three hundred miles per second. It’s more’n two hundred thousand, maybe fifty thousand more. In previous measurements, we’ve been forgettin’ the effect of the area of tensions that makes a big curve ’round any star system. We’ve known about those tensions, but never gave much thought to how much they might slow up light, the way water and glass does.

“That’s the only thing that’ll explain why nothin’ happened at the apparent speed of light, but plenty happened when we passed the real speed of light. Come to think on it, the real speed must be somethin’ less than two hundred fifty thousand, because we were goin’ slower’n that when the electric system blanked on us.”

“But man alive!” Gunther burst out before Harcourt could speak. “What at that point could have jumped our speed up to a billion times that of light?”

“When we have the solvin’ of that,” O’Day interjected grimly, “the entire universe’ll belong to us.”

“You’re wrong there,” Harcourt stated quietly. “If we solve that, we shall have the speed to go places, but there’s no conceivable science that will make it possible for us to plot a course to or from any destination beyond a few hundred light-years.

“Do not forget that our purpose, when we began this voyage, was to go to Alpha Centauri. From there we intended gradually to work out from star to star, setting up bases where possible, and slowly working out the complex problems involved.

“Theoretically, such a method of plotting space could have gone on indefinitely, though it was generally agreed that the complexity would increase out of all proportion to the extra distance involved.

“But enough of that.” His voice grew harder. “Has it occurred to either of you that even if by some miracle of wit we miss that sun, there is a possibility that this ship may plunge on forever through space at billions of times the velocity of light?

“I mean simply this: our speed jumped inconceivably when we crossed the point of light speed. But that point is now behind us. And there is no similar point ahead that we can cross. When we get our engines reversed, we face the prospect of decelerating at two gravities or a bit more for several thousand years.”

“All this is aside from the fact that, at our present distance from Earth, there is nothing known that will help us find our way back.
“I’ll leave these thoughts with you. I’m going to grope my way down to Compton—our last hope!”

There was blazing light in the engine room—a string of gasoline lamps shed the blue-white intensity of their glare onto several score men. Half of the men were taking turns, a dozen at a time, in the simple task of straining at a giant wheel whose shaft disappeared at one end into the bank of monstrous drive tubes. At the other end the wheel was attached to a useless electric motor.

The wheel moved so sluggishly before the combined strength of the workers that Harcourt thought, appalled,

Good heavens, at that rate, it’ll take a day—and we’ve got forty minutes at utmost.

He saw that the other men were putting together a steam engine from parts ripped out of great packing cases. He felt better. The engine would take the place of the electric motor and—

“It’ll take half an hour!” roared a bull-like voice to one side of him. As he turned, Compton bellowed, “And don’t waste time telling me any stories about running into stars. I’ve been listening in to you fellows on this wall communicator.”

Harcourt was conscious of a start of surprise as he saw that the chief engineer was lying on the steel floor, his head propped on a curving metal projection. His heavy face looked strangely white, and when he spoke it was from clenched teeth:

“Couldn’t spare anyone to send you up some light. We’ve got a single, straightforward job down here: to stop those drivers.” He finished ironically: “When we’ve done that we’ll have about fifteen minutes to figure out what good it will do us.”

The mighty man winced as he finished speaking. For the first time Harcourt saw the bandage on his right hand. He said sharply, “You’re hurt!”

“Remind me,” replied Compton grimly, “when we get back to Earth to sock the departmental genius who put an electric lock on the door of the emergency room. I don’t know how long it took to chisel into it, but my finger got lost somewhere in the shuffle.

“It’s all right,” he added swiftly. “I’ve just now taken a ’1ocal.’ It’ll start working in half a minute and we can talk.”

Harcourt nodded stiffly. He knew the fantastic courage and endurance that trained men could show. He said casually: “How would you like some technicians, mathematicians and other such to come down here and relieve your men? There’s a whole corridor full of them out there.”

“Nope!” Compton shook his leonine head. Color was coming into his cheeks, and his voice had a clearer, less strained note as he continued: “These war horses of mine are experts. Just imagine a biologist taking a three-minute shift at putting that steam engine together. Or heaving at that big wheel without ever having been trained to synchronize his muscles to the art of pushing in unity with other men.

“But forget about that. We’ve got a practical problem ahead of us; and before we die I’d like to know what we should have done and could have done. Suppose we get the steam engine running in time—which is not certain; that’s why I put those men on the wheel even before we had light. Anyway, suppose we do, where would we be?”

“Acceleration would stop,” said Harcourt. “But our speed would be constant at something over thirty light-years per second.”

“That’s too hard to strike a sun!” Compton spoke seriously, eyes half closed. He looked up. “Or is it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Simply this: this sun is about twelve hundred thousand miles in diameter. If it were at all gaseous in structure, we could he through so fast its heat would never touch us.”

“Gunther says the star is somewhat colder than our own. That suggests greater density.”

“In that case”—Compton was almost cheerful—“at our speed, and with the hard steel of our ship, we could conceivably pass through a steel plate a couple of million miles in thickness. It’s a problem in fire power for a couple of ex-military men.”

“I’ll leave the problem for your old age,” Harcourt said. “Your attitude suggests that you see no solutions to the situation presented by the star.”

Compton stared at him for a moment, unsmiling; then, “Okay, Chief, I’ll cut out the kidding. You’re right about the star. It took fifty hours to get up to two hundred forty thousand miles per second. Then we crossed some invisible line, and for the past few hours we’ve been plumping along at, as you say, thirty miles a second.

“All right, then, say fifty-three hours that it took us to get here. Even if we eliminate that horrible idea you spawned, about it taking us thousands of years to decelerate, there still remains the certainty that—with the best of luck, that is—with simply a reversal of the conditions that brought us here, it would require not less than fifty-three hours to stop.

“Figure it out for yourself. We might as well play marbles.”

They called Gunther and O’Day. “And bring some liquor t down!” Compton roared through the communicator.

“Wait!” Harcourt prevented him from breaking the connection. He spoke quietly: “Is that you, Gunther?”

“Yep!” the navigation officer responded.

“The star’s still dead on?”

“Deader!” said the ungrammatical Gunther.

Harcourt hesitated; this was the biggest decision he had ever faced in his ten violent years as a commander of a spaceship. His face was stiff as he said finally, huskily:

“All right, then, come down here, but don’t tell anyone else what’s up. They could take it—but what’s the use? Come to Compton’s office.”

He saw that the chief engineer was staring at him strangely. Compton said at last, “So we really give up the ship?”

Harcourt gazed back at him coldly. “Remember, I’m only the coordinator around here. I’m supposed to know something of everything—but when experts tell me there’s no hope, barring miracles, naturally I refuse to run around like an animal with a blind will to live.

“Your men are slaving to get the steam engine running; two pounds of U-235 are doing their bit to heat up the steam boiler. When it’s all ready, we’ll do what we can. Is that clear?”

Compton grinned, but there was silence between them until the other men arrived. O’Day greeted them gloomily.

“There’s a couple of good friends of mine up there whom I’d like to have here now. But what the hell! Let ’em die in peace, says Harcourt; and right he is.”

Gunther poured the dark, glowing liquid, and Harcourt watched the glasses tilt, finally raised his own. He wondered if the others found the stuff as smooth and tasteless as he did. He lowered his glass and said softly:

“Atomic power! So this is the end of man’s first interstellar flight.

There’ll be others, of course, and the law of averages will protect them from running into suns; and they’ll get their steam engines going, and their drives reversed; and if this process does reverse itself, then within a given time they’ll stop—and then they’ll be where we thought we were: facing the problem of finding their way back to Earth. It looks to me as if man is stymied by the sheer vastness of the universe.”

“Don’t be such a damned pessimist!” said Compton, his face flushed from his second glass “I’ll wager they’ll have the drivers of the third test ship reversed within ten minutes of crossing that light speed deadline. That means they’ll only be a few thousand light-years from Earth. Taking it in little jumps like that, they’ll never get lost.”

Harcourt saw O’Day look up from his glass; the physicist’s lips parted—and Harcourt allowed his own words to remain unspoken. O’Day said soberly:

“I’m thinkin’ we’ve been puttin’ too much blame on speed and speed alone in this thing. Sure there’s no magic about the speed of light. I didn’t ever see that before, but it’s there plain now. The speed of light depends on the properties of light, and that goes for electricity and radio an’ all those related waves.

“Let’s be keepin’ that in mind. Light an’ such react on space, an’ are held down by nothin’ but their own limitations. An’ there’s only one new thing we’ve got that could’ve put us out here, beyond the speed of light; an’ that’s—”

Atomic energy!” It was Compton, his normally strong voice amazingly low and tense. “O’Day, you’re a genius. Light lacks the energy attributes necessary to break the bonds that hold it leashed. But atomic energy—the reaction of atomic energy on the fabric of space itself—”

Gunther broke in eagerly: “There must be rigid laws. For decades men dreamed of atomic energy, and finally it came, differently than they expected. For centuries after the first spaceship roared crudely to the moon, there has been the dream of the inertia-less drive; and here, somewhat differently than we pictured it, is that dream come alive.”

There was brief silence, Then, once again before Harcourt could speak, there was an interruption. The door burst open—a man poked his head around the corner.

“Steam engine’s ready! Shall we start her up?”

There was a gasp from every man in that room—except Harcourt. He leaped erect before the heavier Compton could more than shuffle his feet; he snapped: “Sit down, Compton!”

His gray gaze flicked with flame-like intensity from face to face. His lean body was taut as stone as /he said, “No, the steam engine does not go on!”

He glanced steadily but swiftly at his wrist watch. He said, “According to Gunther’s calculations, we’re still twenty minutes from the star. During seventeen of those minutes we’re going to sit here and prepare a logical plan for using the forces we have available.”

Turning to the mechanic, he finished quietly: “Tell the boys to relax, Blake.”

The men were staring at him; and it was odd to notice that each of the three had become abnormally stiff in posture, their eyes narrowed to pinpoints, hands clenched, cheeks pale. It was not as if they had not been tense a minute before. But now—”

By comparison, their condition then seemed as if it could have been nothing less than easygoing resignation.

For a long moment the silence in the cozy little room, with its library, its chairs and shining oak desk and metal cabinets, was complete. Finally Compton laughed, a curt, tense, humor-less laugh that showed the enormousness of the strain he was under. Even Harcourt jumped at that hard, ugly, explosive jolt of laughter.

“You false alarm!” said Compton. “So you gave up the ship, eh?“

“My problem,” Harcourt said coolly, “was this: we needed original thinking. And new ideas are never born under ultimate strain. In the last twenty minutes, when we seemed to have given up, your minds actually relaxed to a very great extent.

And the idea came! It may be worthless, but it’s what we’ve got to work on. There’s no time to look further.

“And now, with O’Day’s idea, we’re back to the strain of hope. I need hardly tell you that, once an idea exists, trained men can develop it immeasurably faster under pressure.”

Once more his gaze flicked from face to face. Color was coming back to their faces; they were recovering from the tremendous shock. He finished swiftly: “One more thing: you may have wondered why I didn’t invite the others into this. Reason: twenty men only confuse an issue in twenty minutes. It’s we four here, or death for all. Gunther, regardless of the time it will take, we must have recapitulation, a clarification—quick!”

Gunther began roughly: “All right. We crossed the point of light speed. Several things happened: our velocity jumped to a billion or so times that of light. Our electric system went on the blink—there’s something to explain.”

“Go on!” urged Harcourt. “Twelve minutes left!

“Our new speed is due to the reaction of atomic energy on the fabric of space. This reaction did not begin till we had crossed the point of light speed, indicating some connection, possibly a natural, restraining influence of the world of matter and energy as we knew it, on this vaster, potentially cataclysmic force.”

Eleven minutes!” said Harcourt coldly.

Greater streams of sweat were pouring down Gunther’s dark face. He finished jerkily: “Apparently our acceleration continued at two gravities. Our problems are: to stop the ship immediately and to find our way back to Earth.”

He slumped back in his chair like a man who has suddenly become deathly sick. Harcourt snapped: “Compton, what happened to the electricity?”

“The batteries drained of power in about three minutes!” the big man rumbled hoarsely. “That happens to be approximately the theoretically minimum time, given an ultimate demand, and opposed only by the cable resistance. Somewhere it must have jumped to an easy conductor—but where did it go? Don’t ask me!”

“I’m thinkin’,” said O’Day, his voice strangely flat, “I’m thinkin’ it went home.

“Wait!” The flat, steely twang of the word silenced both Harcourt and the astounded Compton. “Time for talkin’ is over. Harcourt, you’ll be enforcin’ my orders.”

“Give them!” barked the captain. His body felt like a cake of ice, his brain like a red-hot poker.

O’Day turned to Compton. “Now get this, you blasted engineer: turn off them drivers ninety-five percent! One inch farther and I’l1 blow your brains out!”

“How the devil am I going to know what the percent is?” Compton said freezingly. “Those are engines, not delicately adjusted laboratory instruments. Why not shut them off all the way?”

“You damned idiot!” O’Day shouted furiously. “That’ll cut us off out here an’ we’ll be lost forever. Get movin’”

Beet-like flame thickened along Compton’s bull neck. The two men glared at each other like two animals out of a cage, where they have been tortured, ready to destroy each other in distorted revenge.

“Compton!” said Harcourt, and he was amazed at the way his voice quavered. “Seven minutes!

Without a word, the chief engineer flung about, jerked open the door and plunged out of sight. He was bellowing some gibberish at his men, but Harcourt couldn’t make out a single sentence.

“There’ll be a point,” O’Day was mumbling beside him, “there’ll be a point where the reaction’ll be minimum—but still there—and we’ll have everything—but let’s get out into the engine room before that scoundrel Compton—”

His voice trailed off. He would have stood there blankly if Harcourt hadn’t taken him gently and shoved his unsteady form through the door.

The steam engine was hissing with soft power. As Harcourt watched, Compton threw the clutch. The shining piston rod jerked into life, shuddered as it took the terrific load; and then the great wheel began to move.

For hours, men had sweated and strained in relays to make that wheel turn. Each turn, Harcourt knew, widened by a microscopic fraction of an inch the space separating the hard energy blocks in each drive tube, where the fury of atomic power was born. Each fraction of widening broke that fury by an infinitesimal degree.

The wheel spun sluggishly, ten revolutions a minute, twenty, thirty—a hundred—and that was top speed for that wheel with that power to drive it.

The seconds fled like sleet before a driving wind. The engine puffed and labored, and clacked in joints that had not been sufficiently tightened during the rush job of putting it together. It was the only sound in that great domed room.

Harcourt glanced at his watch. Four minutes. He smiled bleakly. Actually, of course, Gunther’s estimate might be out many minutes. Actually, any second could bring the intolerable pain of instantaneous, flaming death.

He made no attempt to pass on the knowledge of the time limit. Already he had driven these men to the danger point of human sanity. The violence of their rages a few minutes before were red-flare indicators of abnormal mental abysses ahead. There was nothing to do now but wait.

Beside him, O’Day snarled: “Compton—-I’m warnin’ ya.”

“Okay, okay!” Compton barked sulkily.

Almost pettishly, he pulled the clutch free—and the wheel stopped. There was no momentum. It just stopped.

“Keep jerkin’ it in an’ out now!” O’Day commanded. “An’ stop when I tell ya!” The point of reaction must be close.”

In, out; in, out. It was hard on the engine. The machine labored with a noisy, shuddering clamor. It was harder on the men. They stood like figures of stone. Harcourt glanced stiffly at his watch.

Two minutes!

In, out; in out; in—went the clutch, rhythmically now. Somewhere there was a point where atomic energy would cease to create a full tension in space, but there would still be connection. That much of O’Day’s words were clear. And—

Abruptly the ship staggered, as if it had been struck. It was not a physical blow, for they were not sent reeling off their feet. But Harcourt, who knew the effect of titanic energies, waited for the first shock of inconceivable heat to sear him. Instead—

Now!” came the shrill beat of O’Day’s voice.

Out jerked the clutch in its rhythmical backward and forward movement. The great space liner poised for the space of a heartbeat. The thought came to Harcourt:

Good heavens, we can’t have stopped completely. There must be momentum!

In went that rhythmically manipulated clutch. The ship reeled; and Compton turned. His eyes were glassy, his face twisted with sudden pain.

“Huh!” he said. “What did you say, O’Day? I bumped my finger and—”

“You be-damned idiot!” O’Day almost whispered. “You—”

His words twisted queerly into meaningless sounds. And, for Harcourt a strange blur settled over the scene.

He had the fantastic impression that Compton had returned to his automatic manipulation of the clutch; and, insanely, the wheel and the steam engine had reversed.


A period of almost blank confusion passed; and then, incredibly, he was walking backward into Compton’s office, leading an unsteady, backward-walking O’Day.

Suddenly there were Compton, Gunther, O’Day and himself sitting around the desk; and senseless words chattered from their lips.


They lifted glasses to their mouths; and, horribly, the liquor flowed from their lips and filled the glasses.


Then he was walking backward again; and there was Compton lying on the engine-room floor, nursing his shattered finger—and then he was back in the dark navigation room, peering through a telescope eyepiece at a remote star.


The jumble of voice sounds came again and again through the blur—finally he lay asleep in bed.

Asleep? Some part of his brain was awake, untouched by this incredible reversal of physical and mental actions. And as he lay there, slow thoughts came to that aloof, watchful part of his mind.
The electricity had, of course, gone home. Literally. And so were they going home. Just how far the madness would carry on, whether it would end at the point of light speed, only time would tell, And obviously, when flights like this were everyday occurrences, passengers and crew would spend the entire journey in bed.

Everything reversed. Atomic energy had created an initial tension in space, and somehow space demanded an inexorable recompense. Action and reaction were equal and opposite. Something was transmitted, and then an exact balance was made. O’Day had quite evidently thought that at the point of change, of reaction, an artificial stability could be created, enabling the ship to remain indefinitely at its remote destination and—

Blackness surged over his thought. He opened his eyes with a start. Somewhere in the back of his brain was a conviction of something wrong. He couldn’t quite place the discordant factor, but it quivered there on the verge of his brain, an alien thing that shattered for him the security of the spaceship.

He strained his senses against the blackness—and abruptly grew aware of the intensity of that dark. That was it! The darkness! The indirect night light must have gone off.

Odd that the light system should have gone on the blink on this first “night” of this first trip of the first spaceship powered by the new, stupendous atomic drive.

Footsteps whispered hesitantly along the corridor. There was a knock, and the voice of Gunther came, strained and muffled. The man entered; and his breathing was a thick, satisfying sound that destroyed the last vestige of the hard silence. Gunther said:

“Harcourt, the damnedest thing has happened. It started when everything electrical went out of order. Compton says we’ve been accelerating for two hours now at heaven only knows what rate.”

For the multi-billionth time, as it had for uncountable years, the inescapable cosmic farce began to rewind, like a film held over!

The End

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
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The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov
The Proud Robot (Full Text)
The Time Locker

Articles & Links

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“The Proud Robot” (Full Text) by Henry Kuttner (Lewis Padgett)

I love this story. It reminds me of…me.

Back in the day, I had amassed many, many tomes and collections of fine science fiction stories. I really loved the works from the “Golden Age” of science fiction, and one of my favorite writers was Lewis Padgett. Not well known, but completely awesome.

He wrote a series of short stories revolving around a mad scientist that produced brilliant work when he was shit-faced drunk. It’s not real life. That’s why I love it so. It’s so anti-PC.

Here is one of his best. This is a lively and often frankly hilarious account of how a very gifted (when under the influence of the demon Drink) scientist struggles to come to grips with the wackiness of his almost-perfect robot.

It’s one of his many, many creations while drunk. In this case, it is one in which he had just created with quite extraordinary powers, for a purpose which he cannot remember – and with his seemingly inextricable financial predicament(s).

It was first published in the October 1943 issue of Astounding Science Fiction as by “Lewis Padgett”, a nom de plume used by Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) and his wife C.L. Moore (1911-1987) for many of the 200+ fantasy, s-f and horror stories which they wrote together, essentially during the forties, mostly under this name.

The Proud Robot

ORIGINALLY the robot was intended to be a can opener. Things often happened that way with Gallegher, who played at science by ear. He was, as he often remarked, a casual genius. Sometimes he’d start with a twist of wire, a few batteries, and a button hook, and before he finished, he might contrive a new type of refrigerating unit. The affair of the time locker had begun that way, with Gallegher singing hoarsely under his breath and peering, quite drunk, into cans of paint.

At the moment he was nursing a hangover. A disjointed, lanky, vaguely boneless man with a lock of dark hair falling untidily over leis forehead, he lay on the couch in the lab and manipulated his mechanical liquor bar. A very dry Martini drizzled slowly from the spigot into his receptive mouth.
He was trying to remember something, but not trying too hard. It had to do with the robot, of course. Well, it didn’t matter.

“Hey, Joe,” Gallegher said.

The robot stood proudly before the mirror and examined its innards. Its hull was transparent, and wheels were going around at a great rate inside.

“When you call me that,” Joe remarked, “whisper. And get that cat out of here.”

“Your ears aren’t that good.”

“They are. I can hear the cat walking about, all right.”

“What does it sound like?” Gallegher inquired, interested.

“Just like drums,” said the robot, with a put-upon air. “And when you talk, it’s like thunder.” Joe’s voice was a discordant squeak, so Gallegher meditated on saying something about glass-houses and casting the first stone. He brought his attention, with some effort, to the luminous door panel, where a shadow loomed—a familiar shadow, Gallegher thought.

“It’s Brock,” the annunciator said. “Harrison Brock. Let me in!”

“The door’s unlocked.” Gallegher didn’t stir. He looked gravely at the well-dressed, middle-aged man who came in, and tried to remember. Brock was between forty and fifty; he had a smoothly massaged, clean-shaved face, and wore an expression of harassed intolerance. Probably Gallegher knew the man. He wasn’t sure.

Oh, well.

Brock looked around the big, untidy laboratory, blinked at the robot, searched for a chair, and failed to find it. Arms akimbo, he rocked back and forth and glared at the prostrate scientist.

“Well?” he said.

“Never start conversations that way,” Gallegher mumbled, siphoning another Martini down his gullet. “I’ve had enough trouble today. Sit down and take it easy. There’s a dynamo behind you. It isn’t very dusty, is it?”

“Did you get it?” Brock snapped. “That’s all I want to know. You’ve had a week. I’ve a check for ten thousand in my pocket. Do you want it, or don’t you?”

“Sure,” Gallegher said. He extended a large, groping hand. “Give.”

Caveat emptor. What am I buying?”

“Don’t you know?” the scientist asked, honestly puzzled.

Brock began to bounce up and down in a harassed fashion. “My God,” he said. “They told me you could help me if anybody could. Sure. And they also said it’d be like pulling teeth to get sense out of you. Are you a technician or a driveling idiot?”

Gallegher pondered. “Wait a minute. I’m beginning to remember. I talked to you last week, didn’t I?”

“You talked—” Brock’s round face turned pink. “Yes! You lay there swilling liquor and babbled poetry. You sang ’Frankie and Johnnie.’ And you finally got around to accepting my commission.”

“The fact is,” Gallegher said, “I have been drunk. I often get drunk. Especially on my vacation. It releases my subconscious, and then I can work. I’ve made my best gadgets when I was tizzied,” he went on happily. “Everything seems so clear then. Clear as a bell. I mean a bell, don’t I? Anyway—” He lost the thread and looked puzzled. “Anyway, what are you talking about?”

“Are you going to keep quiet?” the robot demanded from its post before the mirror.

Brock jumped. Gallegher waved a casual hand. “Don’t mind Joe. I just finished him last night, and I rather regret it.”

“A robot?”

“A robot. But he’s no good, you know. I made him when I was drunk, and I haven’t the slightest idea how or why. All he’ll do is stand there and admire himself. And sing. He sings like a banshee. You’ll hear him presently.”

With an effort Brock brought his attention back to the matter in hand. “Now look, Gallegher. I’m in a spot. You promised to help me. If you don’t, I’m a ruined man.”

“I’ve been ruined for years,” the scientist remarked. “It never bothers me. I just go along working for a living and making things in my spare time. Making all sorts of things. You know, if I’d really studied, I’d have been another Einstein. So they tell me. As it is, my subconscious picked up a first-class scientific training somewhere. Probably that’s why I never bothered. When I’m drunk or sufficiently absent-minded, I can work out the damnedest problems.”

“You’re drunk now,” Brock accused.

“I approach the pleasanter stages. How would you feel if you woke up and found you’d made a robot for some unknown reason, and hadn’t the slightest idea of the creature’s attributes?”

“Well—”

“I don’t feel that way at all,” Gallegher murmured. “Probably you take life too seriously, Brock. Wine is a mocker; strong drink is raging. Pardon me. I rage.” He drank another Martini.

Brock began to pace around the crowded laboratory, circling various enigmatic and untidy objects. “If you’re a scientist, Heaven help science.”

“I’m the Larry Adler of science,” Gallegher said. “He was a musician—lived some hundreds of years ago, I think. I’m like him. Never took a lesson in my life. Can I help it if my subconscious likes practical jokes?”

“Do you know who I am?” Brock demanded.

“Candidly, no. Should I?”

There was bitterness in the other’s voice. “You might have the courtesy to remember, even though it was a week ago. Harrison Brock. Me. I own Vox-View Pictures.”

“No,” the robot said suddenly, “it’s no use. No use at all, Brock.”

“What the—”

Gallegher sighed wearily. “I forget the damned thing’s alive. Mr. Brock, meet Joe. Joe, meet Mr. Brock—of Vox-View.”

Joe turned, gears meshing within his transparent skull. “I am glad to meet you, Mr. Brock. Allow me to congratulate you on your good fortune in hearing my lovely voice.”

“Uh,” said the magnate inarticulately. “Hello.”

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,” Gallegher put in, sotto voce. “Joe’s like that. A peacock. No use arguing with him, either.”

The robot ignored this aside. “But it’s no use, Mr. Brock,” he went on squeakily. “I’m not interested in money. I realize it would bring happiness to many if I consented to appear in your pictures, but fame means nothing to me. Nothing. Consciousness of beauty is enough.”

Brock began to chew his lips. “Look,” he said savagely, “I didn’t come here to offer you a picture job. See? Am I offering you a contract? Such colossal nerve— Pah! You’re crazy.”

“Your schemes are perfectly transparent,” the robot remarked coldly. “I can see that you’re overwhelmed by my beauty and the loveliness of my voice—its grand tonal qualities. You needn’t pretend you don’t want me, just so you can get me at a lower price. I said I wasn’t interested.”

“You’re cr-r-razy!” Brock howled, badgered beyond endurance, and Joe calmly turned back to his mirror.

“Don’t talk so loudly,” the robot warned. “The discordance is deafening. Besides, you’re ugly and I don’t like to look at you.” Wheels and cogs buzzed inside the transplastic shell. Joe extended his eyes on stalks and regarded himself with every appearance of appreciation.

Gallegher was chuckling quietly on the couch. “Joe has a high irritation value,” he said. “I’ve found that out already. I must have given him some remarkable senses, too. An hour ago he started to laugh his damn fool head off. No reason, apparently. I was fixing myself a bite to eat. Ten minutes after that I slipped on an apple core I’d thrown away and came down hard.

Joe just looked at me. ’That was it,’ he said. ’Logics of probability. Cause and effect. I knew you were going to drop that apple core and then step on it when you went to pick up the mail.’

Like the White Queen, I suppose. It’s a poor memory that doesn’t work both ways.”

Brock sat on the small dynamo—there were two, the larger one named Monstro, and the smaller one serving Gallegher as a bank—and took deep breaths. “Robots are nothing new.”

“This one is. I hate its gears. It’s beginning to give me an inferiority complex. Wish I knew why I’d made it,” Gallegher sighed. “Oh, well. Have a drink?”

“No. I came here on business. Do you seriously mean you spent last week building a robot instead of solving the problem I hired you for?”

“Contingent, wasn’t it?” Gallegher asked. “I think I remember that.”

“Contingent,” Brock said with satisfaction. “Ten thousand, if and when.”

“Why not give me the dough and take the robot? He’s worth that. Put him in one of your pictures.”

“I won’t have any pictures unless you figure out an answer,” Brock snapped. “I told you all about it.”

“I have been drunk,” Gallegher said. “My mind has been wiped clear, as by a sponge. I am as a little child. Soon I shall be as a drunken little child. Meanwhile, if you’d care to explain the matter again—”

Brock gulped down his passion, jerked a magazine at random from the bookshelf, and took out a stylo. “All right. My preferred stocks are at twenty-eight, ’way below par—” He scribbled figures on the magazine.

“If you’d taken that medieval folio next to that, it’d have cost you a pretty penny,” Gallegher said lazily. “So you’re the sort of guy who writes on tablecloths, eh? Forget this business of stocks and stuff. Get down to cases. Who are you trying to gyp?”

“It’s no use,” the robot said from before its mirror. “I won’t sign a contract. People may come and admire me, if they like, but they’ll have to whisper in my presence.”

“A madhouse,” Brock muttered, trying to get a grip on himself. “Listen, Gallegher. I told you all this a week ago, but—”

“Joe wasn’t here then. Pretend like you’re talking to him.” “Uh—look. You’ve heard of Vox-View Pictures, at least.”

“Sure. The biggest and best television company in the business.
Sonatone’s about your only competitor.”

“Sonatone’s squeezing me out.”

Gallegher looked puzzled. “I don’t see how. You’ve got the best product. Tri-dimensional color, all sorts of modern improvements, the top actors, musicians, singers—”

“No use,” the robot said. “I won’t.”

“Shut up, Joe. You’re tops in your field, Brock. I’ll hand you that. And I’ve always heard you were fairly ethical. What’s Sonatone got on you?”

Brock made helpless gestures. “Oh, it’s politics. The bootleg theaters. I can’t buck ’em. Sonatone helped elect the present administration, and the police just wink when I try to have the bootleggers raided.”

“Bootleg theaters?” Gallegher asked, scowling a trifle. “I’ve heard something—”

“It goes ’way back. To the old sound-film days. Home television killed sound film and big theaters. People were conditioned away from sitting in audience groups to watch a screen. The home televisors got good. It was more fun to sit in an easy-chair, drink beer, and watch the show. Television wasn’t a rich man’s hobby by that time. The meter system brought the price down to middle-class levels. Everybody knows that.”

“I don’t,” Gallegher said. “I never pay attention to what goes on outside of my lab, unless I have to. Liquor and a selective mind. I ignore everything that doesn’t affect me directly. Explain the whole thing in detail, so I’ll get a complete picture. I don’t mind repetition. Now, what about this meter system of yours?”

“Televisors are installed free. We never sell ’em; we rent them. People pay according to how many hours they have the set tuned in. We run a continuous show, stage plays, wire-tape films, operas, orchestras, singers, vaudeville—everything. If you use your televisor a lot, you pay proportionately. The man comes around once a month and reads the meter. Which is a fair system.

Anybody can afford a Vox-View. Sonatone and the other companies do the same thing, but Sonatone’s the only big competitor I’ve got. At least, the only one that’s crooked as hell. The rest of the boys—they’re smaller than I am, but I don’t step on their toes. Nobody’s ever called me a louse,” Brock said darkly.

“So what?”

“So Sonatone has started to depend on audience appeal. It was impossible till lately—you couldn’t magnify tri-dimensional television on a big screen without streakiness and mirage-effect. That’s why the regular three-by-four home screens were used. Results were perfect. But Sonatone’s bought a lot of the ghost theaters all over the country—”

“What’s a ghost theater?” Gallegher asked.

“Well—before sound films collapsed, the world was thinking big. Big—you know? Ever heard of the Radio City Music Hall? That wasn’t in it! Television was coming in, and competition was fierce. Sound-film theaters got bigger and more elaborate. They were palaces. Tremendous. But when television was perfected, nobody went to the theaters any more, and it was often too expensive a job to tear ’em down. Ghost theaters—see? Big ones and little ones. Renovated them. And they’re showing Sonatone programs. Audience appeal is quite a factor. The theaters charge plenty, but people flock into ’em. Novelty and the mob instinct.”
Gallegher closed his eyes. “What’s to stop you from doing the same thing?”

“Patents,” Brock said briefly. “I mentioned that dimensional tele­vision couldn’t be used on big screens till lately. Sonatone signed an agreement with me ten years ago that any enlarging improvements would be used mutually. They crawled out of that contract. Said it was faked, and the courts upheld them. They uphold the courts—politics. Anyhow, Sonatone’s technicians worked out a method of using the large screen. They took out patents—twenty-seven patents, in fact, covering every possible variation on the idea. My technical staff has been working day and night trying to find some similar method that won’t be an infringement, but Sonatone’s got it all sewed up. They’ve a system called the Magna. It can be hooked up to any type of tele­visor—but they’ll only allow it to be used on Sonatone machines. See?”

“Unethical, but legal,” Gallegher said. “Still, you’re giving your customers more for their money. People want good stuff. The size doesn’t matter.”

“Yeah,” Brock said bitterly, “but that isn’t all. The newspapers are full of A.A.—it’s a new catchword. Audience Appeal. The herd instinct. You’re right about people wanting good stuff—but would you buy Scotch at four a quart if you could get it for half that amount?”

“Depends on the quality. What’s happening?”

“Bootleg theaters,” Brock said. “They’ve opened all over the country. They show Vox-View products, and they’re using the Magna enlarger system Sonatone’s got patented. The admission price is low—lower than the rate of owning a Vox-View in your own home. There’s audience appeal. There’s the thrill of something a bit illegal. People are having their Vox-Views taken out right and left. I know why. They can go to a bootleg theater instead.”

“It’s illegal,” Gallegher said thoughtfully.

“So were speakeasies, in the Prohibition Era. A matter of protection, that’s all. I can’t get any action through the courts. I’ve tried. I’m running in the red. Eventually I’ll be broke. I can’t lower my home rental fees on Vox-Views. They’re nominal already. I make my profits through quantity. Now, no profits. As for these bootleg theaters, it’s pretty obvious who’s backing them.”

“Sonatone?”

“Sure. Silent partners. They get the take at the box office. ’What they want is to squeeze me out of business, so they’ll have a monopoly. After that they’ll give the public junk and pay their artists starvation salaries. With me it’s different. I pay my staff what they’re worth—plenty.”

“And you offered me a lousy ten thousand,” Gallegher remarked.

“Uh-huh!”

“That was only the first installment,” Brock said hastily. “You can name your own fee. Within reason,” he added.

“I shall. An astronomical sum. Did I say I’d accept the commission a week ago?”

“You did.”

“Then I must have had some idea how to solve the problem,” Gallegher pondered. “Let’s see. I didn’t mention anything in particular, did I?”

“You kept talking about marble slabs and . . . uh . . . your sweetie.”

“Then I was singing,” Gallegher explained largely. ” ’St. James Infirmary.’ Singing calms my nerves, and Lord knows they need it sometimes. Music and liquor. ’I often wonder what the vintners buy—’ “

“What?”

” ’One half so precious as the stuff they sell.’ Let it go. I am quoting Omar. It means nothing. Are your technicians any good?”

“The best. And the best paid.”

“They can’t find a magnifying process that won’t infringe on the Sonatone Magna patents?”

“In a nutshell, that’s it.”

“I suppose I’ll have to do some research,” Gallegher said sadly. I hate it like poison. Still, the sum of the parts equals the whole. Does that make sense to you? It doesn’t to me. I have trouble with words. After I say things, I start wondering what I’ve said. Better than watching a play,” he finished wildly. “I’ve got a headache. Too much talk and not enough liquor. Where were we?”

“Approaching the madhouse,” Brock suggested. “If you weren’t my last resort, I’d—”

“No use,” the robot said squeakily. “You might as well tear up your contract, Brock. I won’t sign it. Fame means nothing to me—nothing.”

“If you don’t shut up,” Gallegher warned, “I’m going to scream in your ears.”

“All right!” Joe shrilled. “Beat me! Go on, beat me! The meaner you are, the faster I’ll have my nervous system disrupted, and then I’ll be dead. I don’t care. I’ve got no instinct of self-preservation. Beat me. See if I care.”

“He’s right, you know,” the scientist said after a pause. “And it’s the only logical way to respond to blackmail or threats. The sooner it’s over, the better. There aren’t any gradations with Joe. Anything really painful to him will destroy him. And he doesn’t give a damn.”

“Neither do I,” Brock grunted. “What I want to find out—”

“Yeah. I know. Well, I’ll wander around and see what occurs to me. Can I get into your studios?”

“Here’s a pass.” Brock scribbled something on the back of a card.

“Will you get to work on it right away?”

“Sure,” Gallegher lied. “Now you run along and take it easy. Try and cool off. Everything’s under control. I’ll either find a solution to your problem pretty soon or else—”

“Or else what?”

“Or else I won’t,” the scientist finished blandly, and fingered the buttons on a control panel near the couch. “I’m tired of Martinis. Why didn’t I make that robot a mechanical bartender, while I was at it? Even the effort of selecting and pushing buttons is depressing at times. Yeah, I’ll get to work on the business, Brock. Forget it.”

The magnate hesitated. “Well, you’re my only hope. I needn’t bother to mention that if there’s anything I can do to help you—”

“A blonde,” Gallegher murmured. “That gorgeous, gorgeous star of yours, Silver O’Keefe. Send her over. Otherwise I want nothing.”

“Good-by, Brock,” the robot said squeakily. “Sorry we couldn’t get together on the contract, but at least you’ve had the ineluctable delight of hearing my beautiful voice, not to mention the pleasure of seeing me. Don’t tell too many people how lovely I am. I really don’t want to be bothered with mobs. They’re noisy.”

“You don’t know what dogmatism means till you’ve talked to Joe,” Gallegher said. “Oh, well. See you later. Don’t forget the blonde.”

Brock’s lips quivered. He searched for words, gave it up as a vain task, and turned to the door.

“Good-by, you ugly man,” Joe said.

Gallegher winced as the door slammed, though it was harder on the robot’s supersensitive ears than on his own. “Why do you go on like that?” he inquired. “You nearly gave the guy apoplexy.”

“Surely he didn’t think he was beautiful,” Joe remarked. “Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder.”

“How stupid you are. You’re ugly, too.”

“And you’re a collection of rattletrap gears, pistons and cogs. You’ve got worms,” said Gallegher, referring, of course, to certain mechanisms in the robot’s body.

“I’m lovely.” Joe stared raptly into the mirror.

“Maybe, to you. Why did I make you transparent, I wonder?”

“So others could admire me. I have X-ray vision, of course.”

“And wheels in your head. Why did I put your radioatomic brain in your stomach? Protection?”

Joe didn’t answer. He was humming in a maddeningly squeaky voice, shrill and nerve-racking. Gallegher stood it for a while, fortify­ing himself with a gin rickey from the siphon.

“Get it up!” he yelped at last. “You sound like an old-fashioned subway train going around a curve.”

“You’re merely jealous,” Joe scoffed, but obediently raised his tone to a supersonic pitch. There was silence for a half-minute. Then all the dogs in the neighborhood began to howl.

Wearily Gallegher dragged his lanky frame up from the couch. He might as well get out. Obviously there was no peace to be had in the laboratory. Not with that animated junk pile inflating his ego all over the place. Joe began to laugh in an off-key cackle.

Gallegher winced.

“What now?”

“You’ll find out.”

Logic of causation and effect, influenced by probabilities, X-ray vision and other enigmatic senses the robot no doubt possessed. Gallegher cursed softly, found a shapeless black hat, and made for the door. He opened it to admit a short, fat man who bounced painfully off the scientist’s stomach.

“Whoof! What a corny sense of humor that jackass has. Hello, Mr. Kennicott. Glad to see you. Sorry I can’t offer you a drink.”
Mr. Kennicott’s swarthy face twisted malignantly. “Don’ wanna no drink. Wanna my money. You gimme. Howzabout it?”

Gallegher looked thoughtfully at nothing. “Well, the fact is, I was just going to collect a check.”

“I sella you my diamonds. You say you gonna make somet’ing wit’ ’em. You gimme check before. It go bounca, bounca, bounca. Why is?”

“It was rubber,” Gallegher said faintly. “I never can keep track of my bank balance.”

Kennicott showed symptoms of going bounca on the threshold. “You gimme back diamonds, eh?”

“Well, I used ’em in an experiment, I forget just what. You know, Mr. Kennicott, I think I was a little drunk when I bought them, wasn’t I?”

“Dronk,” the little man agreed. “Mad wit’ vino, sure. So whatta? I wait no longer. Awready you put me off too much. Pay up now or elsa.”

“Go away, you dirty man,” Joe said from within the room. “You’re awful.”

Gallegher hastily shouldered Kennicott out into the street and latched the door behind him. “A parrot;” he explained. “I’m going to wring its neck pretty soon. Now about that money. I admit I owe it to you. I’ve just taken on a big job, and when I’m paid, you’ll get yours.”

“Bah to such stuff,” Kennicott said. “You gotta position, eh? You are technician wit’ some big company, Ai? Ask for ahead-salary.”

“I did,” Gallegher sighed. “I’ve drawn my salary for six months ahead. Now look, I’ll have that dough for you in a couple of days. Maybe I can get an advance from my client. O. K.?”

“No.”

“No?”

“Ah-h, nutsa. I waita one day. Two daysa, maybe. Enough. You get money. Awright. If not, O. K., calabozo for you.”

“Two days is plenty,” Gallegher said, relieved. “Say, are there any of those bootleg theaters around here?”

“Better you get to work an’ not waste time.”

“That’s my work. I’m making a survey. How can I find a bootleg place?”

“Easy. You go downtown, see guy in doorway. He sell you tickets. Anywhere. All over.”

“Swell,” Gallegher said, and bade the little man adieu. Why had he bought diamonds from Kennicott? It would be almost worth while to have his subconscious amputated. It did the most extraordinary things. It worked on inflexible principles of logic, but that logic was completely alien to Gallegher’s conscious mind. The results, though, were often surprisingly good, and always surprising. That was the worst of being a scientist who knew no science—who played by ear.

There was diamond dust in a retort in the laboratory, from some unsatisfactory experiment Gallegher’s subconscious had performed; and he had a fleeting memory of buying the stones from Kennicott. Curious. Maybe—oh, yeah. They’d gone into Joe. Bearings or something. Dismantling the robot wouldn’t help now, for the diamonds had certainly been reground. Why the devil hadn’t he used commercial stones, quite as satisfactory, instead of purchasing blue-whites of the finest water? The best was none too good for Gallegher’s subconscious. It had a fine freedom from commercial instincts. It just didn’t understand the price system or the basic principles of economics.

Gallegher wandered downtown like a Diogenes seeking truth. It was early evening, and the luminates were flickering on overhead, pale bars of light against darkness. A sky sign blazed above Manhattan’s towers. Air-taxis, skimming along at various arbitrary levels, paused for passengers at the elevator landings. Heigh-ho.

Downtown, Gallegher began to look for doorways. He found an occupied one at last, but the man was selling post cards. Gallegher declined and headed for the nearest bar, feeling the need of replenishment. It was a mobile bar, combining the worst features of a Coney Island ride with uninspired cocktails, and Gallegher hesitated on the threshold. But at last he seized a chair as it swung past and relaxed as much as possible. He ordered three rickeys and drank them in rapid succession. After that he called the bartender over and asked him about bootleg theaters.

“Hell, yes,” the man said, producing a sheaf of tickets from his apron. “How many?”

“One. Where do I go?”

“Two-twenty-eight. This street. Ask for Tony.”

“Thanks,” Gallegher said, and, having paid exorbitantly, crawled out of the chair and weaved away. Mobile bars were an improvement he didn’t appreciate. Drinking, he felt, should be performed in a state of stasis, since one eventually reached that stage, anyway.

The door was at the bottom of a flight of steps, and there was a grilled panel set in it. When Gallegher knocked, the visascreen lit up—obviously a one-way circuit, for the doorman was invisible.

“Tony here?” Gallegher said.

The door opened, revealing a tired-looking man in pneumo-slacks, which failed in their purpose of building up his skinny figure. “Got a ticket? Let’s have it. O. K., bud. Straight ahead. Show now going on. Liquor served in the bar on your left.”

Gallegher pushed through sound-proofed curtains at the end of a short corridor and found himself in what appeared to be the foyer of an ancient theater, circa 1980, when plastics were the great fad. He smelled out the bar, drank expensively priced cheap liquor, and, fortified, entered the theater itself. It was nearly full.

The great screen—a Magna, presumably—was filled with people doing things to a spaceship. Either an adventure film or a newsreel, Gallegher realized.

Only the thrill of lawbreaking would have enticed the audience into the bootleg theater. It smelled. It was certainly run on a shoestring, and there were no ushers. But it was illicit, and therefore well patronized. Gallegher looked thoughtfully at the screen. No streakiness, no mirage effect. A Magna enlarger had been fitted to a Vox-View unlicensed televisor, and one of Brock’s greatest stars was emoting effectively for the benefit of the bootleggers’ patrons. Simple highjacking. Yeah.

After a while Gallegher went out, noticing a uniformed policeman in one of the aisle seats. He grinned sardonically. The flatfoot hadn’t paid his admission, of course. Politics were as usual.

Two blocks down the street a blaze of light announced SONATONE BIJOU. This, of course, was one of the legalized theaters, and correspondingly high-priced. Gallegher recklessly squandered a small fortune on a good seat. He was interested in comparing notes, and discovered that, as far as he could make out, the Magna in the Bijou and the bootleg theater were identical. Both did their job perfectly. The difficult task of enlarging television screens had been successfully surmounted.

In the Bijou, however, all was palatial. Resplendent ushers salaamed to the rugs. Bars dispensed free liquor, in reasonable quantities. There was a Turkish bath. Gallegher went through a door labeled MEN and emerged quite dazzled by the splendor of the place. For at least ten minutes afterward he felt like a Sybarite.

All of which meant that those who could afford it went to the legalized Sonatone theaters, and the rest attended the bootleg places. All but a few homebodies, who weren’t carried off their feet by the new fad. Eventually Brock would be forced out of business for lack of revenue. Sonatone would take over, jacking up their prices and concentrating on making money. Amusement was necessary to life; people had been conditioned to television. There was no substitute. They’d pay and pay for inferior talent, once Sonatone succeeded in their squeeze.

Gallegher left the Bijou and hailed an air-taxi. He gave the address of Vox-View’s Long Island studio, with some vague hope of getting a drawing account out of Brock. Then, too, he wanted to investigate further.

Vox-View’s eastern offices sprawled wildly over Long Island, bordering the Sound, a vast collection of variously shaped buildings. Gallegher instinctively found the commissary, where he absorbed more liquor as a precautionary measure. His subconscious had a heavy job ahead, and he didn’t want it handicapped by lack of complete freedom. Besides, the Collins was good.

After one drink, he decided he’d had enough for a while. He wasn’t a superman, though his capacity was slightly incredible. Just enough for objective clarity and subjective release—
“Is the studio always open at night?” he asked the waiter.

“Sure. Some of the stages, anyway. It’s a round-the-clock program.”

“The commissary’s full.”

“We get the airport crowd, too. ’Nother?”

Gallegher shook his head and went out. The card Brock had given him provided entree at a gate, and he went first of all to the big-shot’s office. Brock wasn’t there, but loud voices emerged, shrilly feminine.

The secretary said, “Just a minute, please,” and used her interoffice visor. Presently—”Will you go in?”

Gallegher did. The office was a honey, functional and luxurious at the same time. Three-dimensional stills were in niches along the walls —Vox-View’s biggest stars. A small, excited, pretty brunette was sitting behind the desk, and a blond angel was standing furiously on the other side of it. Gallegher recognized the angel as Silver O’Keefe.

He seized the opportunity. “Hiya, Miss O’Keefe. Will you autograph an ice cube for me? In a highball?”

Silver looked feline. “Sorry, darling, but I’m a working girl. And I’m busy right now.”

The brunette scratched a cigarette. “Let’s settle this later, Silver. Pop said to see this guy if he dropped in. It’s important.”

“It’ll be settled,” Silver said. “And soon.” She made an exit. Gallegher whistled thoughtfully at the closed door.

“You can’t have it,” the brunette said. “It’s under contract. And it wants to get out of the contract, so it can sign up with Sonatone. Rats desert a sinking ship. Silver’s been kicking her head off ever since she read the storm signals.”

“Yeah?”

“Sit down and smoke or something. I’m Patsy Brock. Pop runs this business, and I manage the controls whenever he blows his top. The old goat can’t stand trouble. He takes it as a personal affront.”
Gallegher found a chair. “So Silver’s trying to renege, eh? How many others?”

“Not many. Most of ’em are loyal. But, of course, if we bust up—” Patsy Brock shrugged. “They’ll either work for Sonatone for their cakes, or else do without.”

“Uh-huh. Well—I want to see your technicians. I want to look over the ideas they’ve worked out for enlarger screens.”

“Suit yourself,” Patsy said. “It’s not much use. You just can’t make a televisor enlarger without infringing on some Sonatone patent.”
She pushed a button, murmured something into a visor, and presently two tall glasses appeared through a slot in the desk.

“Mr. Gallegher?”

“Well, since it’s a Collins—”

“I could tell by your breath,” Patsy said enigmatically. “Pop told me he’d seen you. He seemed a bit upset, especially by your new robot. What is it like, anyway?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Gallegher said, at a loss. “It’s got lots of abilities—new senses, I think—but I haven’t the slightest idea what it’s good for. Except admiring itself in a mirror.”

Patsy nodded. “I’d like to see it sometime. But about this Sonatone business. Do you think you can figure out an answer?”

“Possibly. Probably.”

“Not certainly?”

“Certainly, then. Of that there is no manner of doubt—no possible doubt whatever.”

“Because it’s important to me. The man who owns Sonatone is Elia Tone. A piratical skunk. He blusters. He’s got a son named Jimmy. And Jimmy, believe it or not, has read ’Romeo and Juliet.’ “

“Nice guy?”

“A louse. A big, brawny louse. He wants me to marry him.”

” ’Two families both alike in—’ “

“Spare me,” Patsy interrupted. “I always thought Romeo was a dope, anyway. And if I ever thought I was going aisling with Jimmy Tone, I’d buy a one-way ticket to the nut hatch. No, Mr. Gallegher, it’s not like that. No hibiscus blossoms. Jimmy has proposed to me—his idea of a proposal, by the way, is to get a half Nelson on a girl and tell her how lucky she is.”

“Ah,” said Gallegher, diving into his Collins.

“This whole idea—the patent monopoly and the bootleg theaters —is Jimmy’s. I’m sure of that. His father’s in on it, too, of course, but Jimmy Tone is the bright little boy who started it.”

“Why.”

“Two birds with one stone. Sonatone will have a monopoly on the business, and Jimmy thinks he’ll get me. He’s a little mad. He can’t believe I’m in earnest in refusing him, and he expects me to break down and say ’Yes’ after a while. Which I won’t, no matter what happens. But it’s a personal matter. I can’t let him put this trick over on us. I want that self-sufficient smirk wiped off his face.”

“You just don’t like him, eh?” Gallegher remarked. “I don’t blame you, if he’s like that. Well, I’ll do my damnedest. However, I’ll need an expense account.”

“How much?”

Gallegher named a sum. Patsy styloed a check for a far smaller amount. The scientist looked hurt.

“It’s no use,” Patsy said, grinning crookedly. “I’ve heard of you, Mr. Gallegher. You’re completely irresponsible. If you had more than this, you’d figure you didn’t need any more, and you’d forget the whole matter. I’ll issue more checks to you when you need ’em—but I’ll want itemized expense accounts.”

“You wrong me,” Gallegher said, brightening. “I was figuring on taking you to a night club. Naturally I don’t want to take you to a dive. The big places cost money. Now if you’ll just write another check—”

Patsy laughed. “No.”

“Want to buy a robot?”

“Not that kind, anyway.”

“Then I’m washed up,” Gallegher sighed. “Well, what about—”

At this point the visor hummed. A blank, transparent face grew on the screen. Gears were clicking rapidly inside the round head. Patsy gave a small shriek and shrank back.

“Tell Gallegher Joe’s here, you lucky girl,” a squeaky voice announced. “You may treasure the sound and sight of me till your dying day. One touch of beauty in a world of drabness—”

Gallegher clutched the desk and looked at the screen. “What the hell. How did you come to life?”

“I had a problem to solve.”

“How’d you know where to reach me?”

“I vastened you,” the robot said.

“What?”

“I vastened you were at the Vox-View studios with Patsy Brock.”

“What’s vastened?” Gallegher wanted to know.

“It’s a sense I’ve got. You’ve nothing remotely like it, so I can’t describe it to you. It’s rather like a combination of sagrazi and prescience.”

“Sagrazi?”

“Oh, you don’t have sagrazi, either, do you? Well, don’t waste my time. I want to go back to the mirror.”

“Does he always talk like that?” Patsy put in.

“Nearly always. Sometimes it makes even less sense. O. K., Joe. Now what?”

“You’re not working for Brock any more,” the robot said. “You’re working for the Sonatone people.”

Gallagher breathed deeply. “Keep talking. You’re crazy, though.”

“I don’t like Kennicott. He annoys me. He’s too ugly. His vibrations grate on my sagrazi.”

“Never mind him,” Gallegher said, not wishing to discuss his diamond-buying activities before the girl. “Get back to—”

“But I knew Kennicott would keep coming back till he got his money. So when Elia and James Tone came to the laboratory, I got a check from them.”

Patsy’s hand gripped Gallegher’s biceps. “Steady! What’s going on here? The old double cross?”

“No. Wait. Let me get to the bottom of this. Joe, damn your transparent hide, just what did you do? How could you get a check from the Tones?”

“I pretended to be you.”

“Sure,” Gallegher said with savage sarcasm. “That explains it. We’re twins. We look exactly alike.”

“I hypnotized them,” Joe explained. “I made them think I was you.”

“You can do that?

“Yes. It surprised me a bit. Still, if I’d thought, I’d have vastened I could do it.”

“You . . . yeah, sure. I’d have vastened the same thing myself. What happened?

“The Tones must have suspected Brock would ask you to help him. They offered an exclusive contract—you work for them and nobody else. Lots of money. Well, I pretended to be you, and said all right. So I signed the contract—it’s your signature, by the way—and got a check from them and mailed it to Kennicott.”

“The whole check?” Gallegher asked feebly. “How much was it?”

“Twelve thousand.”

“They only offered me that?

“No,” the robot said, “they offered a hundred thousand, and two thousand a week for five years. But I merely wanted enough to pay Kennicott and make sure he wouldn’t come back and bother me. The Tones were satisfied when I said twelve thousand would be enough.”

Gallegher made an articulate, gurgling sound deep in his throat Joe nodded thoughtfully.

“I thought I had better notify you that you’re working for Sonatone now. Well, I’ll go back to the mirror and sing to myself.”

“Wait,” the scientist said. “Just wait, Joe. With my own two hands I’m going to rip you gear from gear and stamp on your fragments.”

“It won’t hold in court,” Patsy said, gulping.

“It will,” Joe told her cheerily. “You may have one last, satisfying look at me, and then I must go.” He went.

Gallegher drained his Collins at a draft. “I’m shocked sober,” he informed the girl. “What did I put into that robot? What abnormal senses has he got? Hypnotizing people into believing he’s me—I’m him—I don’t know what I mean.”

“Is this a gag?” Patsy said shortly, after a pause. “You didn’t sign up with Sonatone yourself, by any chance, and have your robot call up here to give you an out—an alibi? I’m just wondering.”

“Don’t. Joe signed a contract with Sonatone, not me. But—figure it out: If the signature’s a perfect copy of mine, if Joe hypnotized the Tones into thinking they saw me instead of him, if there are witnesses to the signature—the two Tones are witnesses, of course— Oh, hell.”

Patsy’s eyes were narrowed. “We’ll pay you as much as Sonatone offered. On a contingent basis. But you’re working for Vox-View— that’s understood.”

“Sure.”

Gallegher looked longingly at his empty glass. Sure. He was working for Vox-View. But, to all legal appearances, he had signed a contract giving his exclusive services to Sonatone for a period of five years —and for a sum of twelve thousand! Yipe! What was it they’d offered? A hundred thousand flat, and . . . and—

It wasn’t the principle of the thing, it was the money. Now Gallegher was sewed up tighter than a banded pigeon. If Sonatone could win a court suit, he was legally bound to them for five years. With no further emolument. He had to get out of that contract, somehow—and at the same time solve Brock’s problem.

Why not Joe? The robot, with his surprising talents, had got Gallegher into this spot. He ought to be able to get the scientist out. He’d better—or the proud robot would soon be admiring himself piecemeal.

“That’s it,” Gallegher said under his breath. “I’ll talk to Joe. Patsy, feed me liquor in a hurry and send me to the technical department. I want to see those blueprints.”

The girl looked at him suspiciously. “All right. If you try to sell us out—”

“I’ve been sold out myself. Sold down the river. I’m afraid of that robot. He’s vastened me into quite a spot. That’s right, Collinses.” Gallegher drank long and deeply.

After that, Patsy took him to the tech offices. The reading of three-dimensional blueprints was facilitated with a scanner—a selective device which eliminated confusion. Gallegher studied the plans long and thoughtfully. There were copies of the patented Sonatone prints, too, and, as far as he could tell, Sonatone had covered the ground beautifully. There weren’t any outs. Unless one used an entirely new principle—

But new principles couldn’t be plucked out of the air. Nor would that solve the problem completely. Even if Vox-View owned a new type of enlarger that didn’t infringe on Sonatone’s Magna, the bootleg theaters would still be in existence, pulling the trade. A. A.—Audience Appeal—was a prime factor now. It had to be considered. The puzzle wasn’t a purely scientific one. There was the human equation as well.

Gallegher stored the necessary information in his mind, neatly indexed on shelves. Later he’d use what he wanted. For the moment, he was completely baffled. Something worried him.

What?

The Sonatone affair.

“I want to get in touch with the Tones,” he told Patsy. “Any ideas?”

“I can reach ’em on a visor.”

Gallegher shook his head. “Psychological handicap. It’s too easy to break the connection.”

“Well, if you’re in a hurry, you’ll probably find the boys night clubbing. I’ll go see what I can find out.” Patsy scuttled off, and Silver O’Keefe appeared from behind a screen.

“I’m shameless,” she announced. “I always listen at keyholes. Sometimes I hear interesting things. If you want to see the Tones, they’re at the Castle Club. And I think I’ll take you up on that drink.”

Gallegher said, “O. K. You get a taxi. I’ll tell Patsy we’re going.”

“She’ll hate that,” Silver remarked. “Meet you outside the commissary in ten minutes. Get a shave while you’re at it.”

Patsy Brock wasn’t in her office, but Gallegher left word. After that, he visited the service lounge, smeared invisible shave cream on his face, left it there for a couple of minutes, and wiped it off with a treated towel. The bristles came away with the cream. Slightly refreshed, Gallegher joined Silver at the rendezvous and hailed an air-taxi. Presently they were leaning back on the cushions, puffing cigarettes and eyeing each other warily.

“Well?” Gallegher said.

“Jimmy Tone tried to date me up tonight. That’s how I knew where to find him.”

“Well?”

“I’ve been asking questions around the lot tonight. It’s unusual for an outsider to get into the Vox-View administration offices. I went around saying, ’Who’s Gallegher?’ “

“What did you find out?”

“Enough to give me a few ideas. Brock hired you, eh? I can guess why.”

Ergo what?”

“I’ve a habit of landing on my feet,” Silver said, shrugging. She knew how to shrug. “Vox-View’s going bust. Sonatone’s taking over. Unless—”

“Unless I figure out an answer.”

“That’s right. I want to know which side of the fence I’m going to land on. You’re the lad who can probably tell me. Who’s going to win?”

“You always bet on the winning side, eh?” Gallegher inquired.

Have you no ideals, wench? Is there no truth in you? Ever hear of ethics and scruples?”

Silver beamed happily. “Did you?”

“Well, I’ve heard of ’em. Usually I’m too drunk to figure out what they mean. The trouble is, my subconscious is completely amoral, and when it takes over, logic’s the only law.”

She threw her cigarette into the East River. “Will you tip me off which side of the fence is the right one?”

“Truth will triumph,” Gallegher said piously. “It always does. However, I figure truth is a variable, so we’re right back where we started. All right, sweetheart. I’ll answer your question. Stay on my side if you want to be safe.”

“Which side are you on?”

“Lord knows,” Gallegher said. “Consciously I’m on Brock’s side. But my subconscious may have different ideas. We’ll see.”

Silver looked vaguely dissatisfied, but didn’t say anything. The taxi swooped down to the Castle roof, grounding with pneumatic gentleness. The Club itself was downstairs, in an immense room shaped like half a melon turned upside down. Each table was on a transparent platform that could be raised on its shaft to any height at will. Smaller service elevators allowed waiters to bring drinks to the guests. There wasn’t any particular reason for this arrangement, but at least it was novel, and only extremely heavy drinkers ever fell from their tables. Lately the management had taken to hanging transparent nets under the platforms, for safety’s sake.

The Tones, father and son, were up near the roof, drinking with two lovelies. Silver towed Gallegher to a service lift, and the man closed his eyes as he was elevated skyward. The liquor in his stomach screamed protest. He lurched forward, clutched at Elia Tone’s bald head, and dropped into a seat beside the magnate. His searching hand found Jimmy Tone’s glass, and he drained it hastily.

“What the hell,” Jimmy said.

“It’s Gallegher,” Elia announced. “And Silver. A pleasant surprise. Join us?”

“Only socially,” Silver said.

Gallegher, fortified by the liquor, peered at the two men. Jimmy Tone was a big, tanned, handsome lout with a jutting jaw and an offensive grin. His father combined the worst features of Nero and a crocodile.

“We’re celebrating,” Jimmy said. “What made you change your mind, Silver? You said you had to work tonight.”

“Gallegher wanted to see you. I don’t know why.”

Elia’s cold eyes grew even more glacial. “All right. Why?”

“I hear I signed some sort of contract with you,” the scientist said.

“Yeah. Here’s a photostatic copy. What about it?”

“Wait a minute.” Gallegher scanned the document. It was apparently his own signature. Damn that robot!

“It’s a fake,” he said at last.

Jimmy laughed loudly. “I get it. A holdup. Sorry, pal, but you’re sewed up. You signed that in the presence of witnesses.”

“Well—” Gallegher said wistfully. “I suppose you wouldn’t believe me if I said a robot forged my name to it—”

“Haw!” Jimmy remarked.

“—hypnotizing you into believing you were seeing me.”

Elia stroked his gleaming bald head. “Candidly, no. Robots can’t do that.”

“Mine can.”

“Prove it. Prove it in court. If you can do that, of course—” Elia chuckled. “Then you might get the verdict.”

Gallegher’s eyes narrowed. “Hadn’t thought of that. However—I hear you offered me a hundred thousand flat, as well, as a weekly salary.”

“Sure, sap,” Jimmy said. “Only you said all you needed was twelve thousand. Which was what you got. Tell you what, though. We’ll pay you a bonus for every usable product you make for Sonatone.”

Gallegher got up. “Even my subconscious doesn’t like these lugs,” he told Silver. “Let’s go.”

“I think I’ll stick around.”

“Remember the fence,” he warned cryptically. “But suit yourself. I’ll run along.”

Elia said, “Remember, Gallegher, you’re working for us. If we hear of you doing any favors for Brock, we’ll slap an injunction on you before you can take a deep breath.”

“Yeah?”

The Tones deigned no answer. Gallegher unhappily found the lift and descended to the floor. What now?

Joe.

Fifteen minutes later Gallegher let himself into his laboratory. The lights were blazing, and dogs were barking frantically for blocks around. Joe stood before the mirror, singing inaudibly.

“I’m going to take a sledge hammer to you,” Gallegher said. “Start saying your prayers, you misbegotten collection of cogs. So help me, I’m going to sabotage you.”

“All right, beat me,” Joe squeaked. “See if I care. You’re merely jealous of my beauty.”

“Beauty!”

“You can’t see all of it—you’ve only six senses.”

“Five.”

“Six. I’ve a lot more. Naturally my full splendor is revealed only to me. But you can see enough and hear enough to realize part of my loveliness, anyway.”

“You squeak like a rusty tin wagon,” Gallegher growled.

“You have dull ears. Mine are supersensitive. You miss the full tonal value of my voice, of course. Now be quiet. Talking disturbs me. I’m appreciating my gear movements.”

“Live in your fool’s paradise while you can. Wait’ll I find a sledge.”
“All right, beat me. What do I care?”

Gallegher sat down wearily on the couch, staring at the robot’s transparent back. “You’ve certainly screwed things up for me. What did you sign that Sonatone contract for?”

“I told you. So Kennicott wouldn’t come around and bother me.”

“Of all the selfish, lunk-headed . . . uh! Well, you got me into a sweet mess. The Tones can hold me to the letter of the contract unless I prove I didn’t sign it. All right. You’re going to help me. You’re going into court with me and turn on your hypnotism or whatever it is. You’re going to prove to a judge that you did and can masquerade as me.”

“Won’t,” said the robot. “Why should I?”

“Because you got me into this,” Gallegher yelped. “You’ve got to get me out!”

“Why?”

“Why? Because . . . uh . . . well, it’s common decency!” “Human values don’t apply to robots,” Joe said. “What care I for semantics? I refuse to waste time I could better employ admiring my beauty. I shall stay here before the minor forever and ever—”

“The hell you will,” Gallegher snarled. “I’ll smash you to atoms.”

“All right. I don’t care.”

“You don’t?”

“You and your instinct for self-preservation,” the robot said, rather sneeringly “I suppose it’s necessary for you, though. Creatures of such surpassing ugliness would destroy themselves out of sheer shame if they didn’t have something like that to keep them alive.”

“Suppose I take away your mirror?” Gallegher asked, in a hopeless voice.

For answer Joe shot his eyes out on their stalks. “Do I need a mirror? Besides, I can vasten myself lokishly.”

“Never mind that. I don’t want to go crazy for a while yet. Listen, dope, a robot’s supposed to do something. Something useful, I mean.”

“I do. Beauty is all.”

Gallegher squeezed his eyes shut, trying to think. “Now look. Suppose I invent a new type of enlarger screen for Brock. The Tones will impound it. I’ve got to be legally free to work for Brock, or—”

“Look!” Joe cried squeakishly. “They go round! How lovely!” He stared in ecstasy at his whirring insides. Gallegher went pale with impotent fury.

“Damn you!” he muttered. “I’ll find some way to bring pressure to bear. I’m going to bed.” He rose and spitefully snapped off the lights.

“It doesn’t matter,” the robot said. “I can see in the dark, too.” The door slammed behind Gallegher. In the silence Joe began to sing tunelessly to himself.

Gallegher’s refrigerator covered an entire wall of his kitchen. It was filled mostly with liquors that required chilling, including the imported canned beer with which he always started his binges.

The next morning, heavy-eyed and disconsolate, Gallegher searched for tomato juice, took a wry sip, and hastily washed it down with rye. Since he was already a week gone in bottle-dizziness, beer wasn’t indicated now —he always worked cumulatively, by progressive stages. The food service popped a hermetically sealed breakfast on a table, and Gallegher morosely toyed with a bloody steak.

Well?

Court, he decided, was the only recourse. He knew little about the robot’s psychology. But a judge would certainly be impressed by Joe’s talents. The evidence of robots was not legally admissible—still, if Joe could be considered as a machine capable of hypnotism, the Sonatone contract might be declared null and void.

Gallegher used his visor to start the ball rolling. Harrison Brock still had certain political powers of pull, and the hearing was set for that very day. What would happen, though, only God and the robot knew.

Several hours passed in intensive but futile thought. Gallegher could think of no way in which to force the robot to do what he wanted. If only he could remember the purpose for which Joe had had been created—but he couldn’t. Still—

At noon he entered the laboratory.

“Listen, stupid,” he said, “you’re coming to court with me. Now.”

“Won’t.”

“O. K.” Gallegher opened the door to admit two husky men in overalls, carrying a stretcher. “Put him in, boys.”

Inwardly he was slightly nervous. Joe’s powers were quite unknown, his potentialities an x quantity. However, the robot wasn’t very large, and, though he struggled and screamed in a voice of frantic squeakiness, he was easily loaded on the stretcher and put in a strait jacket.

“Stop it! You can’t do this to me! Let me go, do you hear? Let me go!”

“Outside,” Gallegher said.

Joe, protesting valiantly, was carried out and loaded into an air van. Once there, he quieted, looked up blankly at nothing. Gallegher sat down on a bench beside the prostrate robot. The van glided up.

“Well?”

“Suit yourself,” Joe said. “You got me all upset, or I could have hypnotized you all. I still could, you know. I could make you all run around barking like dogs.”

Gallegher twitched a little. “Better not.”

“I won’t. It’s beneath my dignity. I shall simply lie here and admire myself. I told you I don’t need a mirror. I can vasten my beauty without it.”

“Look,” Gallegher said. “You’re going to a courtroom. There’ll be a lot of people in it. They’ll all admire you They’ll admire you more if you show how you can hypnotize people. Like you did to the Tones, remember?”

“What do I care how many people admire me?” Joe asked. “I don’t need confirmation. If they see me, that’s their good luck. Now be quiet. You may watch my gears if you choose.”

Gallegher watched the robot’s gears with smoldering hatred in his eyes. He was still darkly furious when the van arrived at the court chambers. The men carried Joe inside, under Gallegher’s direction, and laid him down carefully on a table, where, after a brief discussion, he was marked as Exhibit A.

The courtroom was well filled. The principals were there, too— Elia and Jimmy Tone, looking disagreeably confident, and Patsy Brock, with her father, both seeming anxious. Silver O’Keefe, with her usual wariness, had found a seat midway between the representatives of Sonatone and Vox-View. The presiding judge was a martinet named Hansen, but, as far as Gallegher knew, he was honest. Which was something, anyway.

Hansen looked at Gallegher. “We won’t bother with formalities. I’ve been reading this brief you sent down. The whole case stands or falls on the question of whether you did or did not sign, a certain contract with the Sonatone Television Amusement Corp. Right?”

“Right, your honor.”

“Under the circumstances you dispense with legal representation. Right?”

“Right, your honor.”

“Then this is technically ex officio, to be confirmed later by appeal if either party desires. Otherwise after ten days the verdict becomes official.” This new type of informal court hearing had lately become popular—it saved time, as well as wear and tear on everyone. Moreover, certain recent scandals had made attorneys slightly disreputable in the public eye. There was a prejudice.
Judge Hansen called up the Tones, questioned them, and then asked Harrison Brock to take the stand. The big shot looked worried, but answered promptly.

“You made an agreement with the appellor eight days ago?” “Yes. Mr. Gallegher contracted to do certain work for me—”

“Was there a written contract?”

“No. It was verbal.”

Hansen looked thoughtfully at Gallegher. “Was the appellor intoxicated at the time? He often is, I believe.”

Brock gulped. “There were no tests made. I really can’t say.”

“Did he drink any alcoholic beverages in your presence?”

“I don’t know if they were alcoholic bev—”

“If Mr. Gallegher drank them, they were alcoholic. Q. E. D. The gentleman once worked with me on a case— However, there seems to be no legal proof that you entered into any agreement with Mr. Gallegher. The defendant—Sonatone—possesses a written contract. The signature has been verified.”

Hansen waved Brock down from the stand. “Now, Mr. Gallegher. If you’ll come up here— The contract in question was signed at approximately 8 p. m. last night. You contend you did not sign it?”

“Exactly. I wasn’t even in my laboratory then.”

“Where were you?”

“Downtown.”

“Can you produce witnesses to that effect?”

Gallegher thought back. He couldn’t.

“Very well. Defendant states that at approximately 8 p. m. last night you, in your laboratory, signed a certain contract. You deny that categorically. You state that Exhibit A, through the use of hypnotism, masqueraded as you and successfully forged your signa­ture. I have consulted experts, and they are of the opinion that robots are incapable of such power.”

“My robot’s a new type.”

“Very well. Let your robot hypnotize me into believing that it is either you, or any other human. In other words, let it prove its capabilities. Let it appear to me in any shape it chooses.”

Gallegher said, “I’ll try,” and left the witness box. He went to the table where the strait-jacketed robot lay and silently sent up a brief prayer.

“Joe.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been listening?”

“Yes.”

“Will you hypnotize Judge Hansen?”

“Go away,” Joe said. “I’m admiring myself.”

Gallegher started to sweat. “Listen. I’m not asking much. All you have to do—”

Joe off-focused his eyes and said faintly. “I can’t hear you. I’m vastening.”

Ten minutes later Hansen said, “Well, Mr. Gallegher—”

“Your honor! All I need is a little time. I’m sure I can make this rattle-geared Narcissus prove my point if you’ll give me a chance.”

“This court is not unfair,” the judge pointed out. “Whenever you can prove that Exhibit A is capable of hypnotism. I’ll rehear the case. In the meantime, the contract stands. You’re working for Sonatone, not for Vox-View. Case closed.”

He went away. The Tones leered unpleasantly across the courtroom. They also departed, accompanied by Silver O’Keefe, who had decided which side of the fence was safest. Gallegher looked at Patsy Brock and shrugged helplessly.

“Well—” he said.

She grinned crookedly. “You tried. I don’t know how hard, but—Oh, well. Maybe you couldn’t have found the answer, anyway.” Brock staggered over, wiping sweat from his round face. “I’m a ruined man. Six new bootleg theaters opened in New York today. I’m going crazy. I don’t deserve this.”

“Want me to marry the Tone?” Patsy asked sardonically.

“Hell, no! Unless you promise to poison him just after the ceremony. Those skunks can’t lick me. I’ll think of something.”

“If Gallegher can’t, you can’t,” the girl said. “So—what now?”

“I’m going back to my lab,” the scientist said. “In vino veritas. I started this business when I was drunk, and maybe if I get drunk enough again, I’ll find the answer. If I don’t, sell my pickled carcass for whatever it’ll bring.”

“O. K.,” Patsy agreed, and led her father away. Gallegher sighed, superintended the reloading of Joe into the van, and lost himself in hopeless theorization.

An hour later Gallegher was flat on the laboratory couch, drinking passionately from the liquor bar, and glaring at the robot, who stood before the mirror singing squeakily. The binge threatened to be monumental. Gallegher wasn’t sure flesh and blood would stand it. But he was determined to keep going till he found the answer or passed out.

His subconscious knew the answer. Why the devil had he made Joe in the first place? Certainly not to indulge a Narcissus complex! There was another reason, a soundly logical one, hidden in the depths of alcohol.

The x factor. If the x factor were known, Joe might be controllable. He would be. X was the master switch. At present the robot was, so to speak, running wild. If he were told to perform the task for which he was made, a psychological balance would occur. X was the catalyst that would reduce Joe to sanity.

Very good.

Gallegher drank high-powered Drambuie. Whoosh!

Vanity of vanities; all is vanity. How could the x factor be found? Deduction? Induction? Osmosis? A bath in Drambuie—Gallegher clutched at his wildly revolving thoughts. What had happened that night a week ago?

He had been drinking beer. Brock had come in. Brock had gone. Gallegher had begun to make the robot—Hm-m-m. A beer drunk was different from other types. Perhaps he was drinking the wrong liquors. Very likely. Gallegher rose, sobered himself with thiamin, and carted dozens of imported beer cans out of the refrigerator. He stacked them inside a frost-unit beside the couch. Beer squirted to the ceiling as he plied the opener. Now let’s see.

The x factor.

The robot knew what it represented, of course. But Joe wouldn’t tell. There he stood, paradoxically transparent, watching his gears go around.

“Joe.”

“Don’t bother me. I’m immersed in contemplation of beauty.”

“You’re not beautiful.”

“I am. Don’t you admire my tarzeel?”

“What’s your tarzeel?”

“Oh, I forgot,” Joe said regretfully. “You can’t sense that, can you? Come to think of it, I added the tarzeel myself after you made me. It’s very lovely.”

“Hm-m-m.” The empty beer cans grew more numerous. There was only one company, somewhere in Europe, that put up beer in cans nowadays, instead of using the omnipresent plastibulbs, but Galle­gher preferred the cans—the flavor was different, somehow. But about Joe. Joe knew why he had been created. Or did he? Gallegher knew, but his subconscious—

Oh-oh! What about Joe’s subconscious?

Did a robot have a subconscious? Well, it had a brain—Gallegher brooded over the impossibility of administering scopolamin to Joe. Hell! How could you release a robot’s subconscious?

Hypnotism.

Joe couldn’t be hypnotized. He was too smart.

Unless—

Autohypnotism?

Gallegher hastily drank more beer. He was beginning to think clearly once more. Could Joe read the future? No; he had certain strange senses, but they worked by inflexible logic and the laws of probability. Moreover, Joe had an Achillean heel—his Narcissus complex.

There might—there just might—be a way.

Gallegher said, “You don’t seem beautiful to me, Joe.”

“What do I care about you? I am beautiful, and I can see it. That’s enough.”

“Yeah. My senses are limited, I suppose. I can’t realize your full potentialities. Still, I’m seeing you in a different light now. I’m drunk. My subconscious is emerging. I can appreciate you with both my conscious and my subconscious. See?”

“How lucky you are,” the robot approved.

Gallegher closed his eye. “You see yourself more fully than I can. But not completely, eh?”

“What? I see myself as I am.”

“With complete understanding and appreciation?”

“Well, yes,” Joe said. “Of course. Don’t I?”

“Consciously and subconsciously? Your subconscious might have different senses, you know. Or keener ones. I know there’s a qualitative and quantitative difference in my outlook when I’m drunk or hypnotized or my subconscious is in control somehow.”

“Oh.” The robot looked thoughtfully into the mirror. “Oh.”

“Too bad you can’t get drunk.”

Joe’s voice was squeakier than ever. “My subconscious . . . I’ve never appreciated my beauty that way. I may be missing something.”

“Well, no use thinking about it,” Gallegher said. “You can’t release your subconscious.”

“Yes, I can,” the robot said. “I can hypnotize myself.”

Gallegher dared not open his eyes. “Yeah? Would that work?”

“Of course. It’s just what I’m going to do now. I may see undreamed-of beauties in myself that I’ve never suspected before. Greater glories— Here I go.”

Joe extended his eyes on stalks, opposed them, and they peered intently into each other. There was a long silence.

Presently Gallegher said, “Joe!”

Silence.

Joe!

Still silence. Dogs began to howl.

“Talk so I can hear you.”

“Yes,” the robot said, a faraway quality in its squeak.

“Are you hypnotized?”

“Yes.”

“Are you lovely?”

“Lovelier than I’d ever dreamed.”

Gallegher let that pass. “Is your subconscious ruling?”

“Yes.”

“Why did I create you?”

No answer. Gallegher licked his lips and tried again.
“Joe. You’ve got to answer me. Your subconscious is dominant—remember? Now why did I create you?”

No answer.

“Think back. Back to the hour I created you. What happened then?”

“You were drinking beer,” Joe said faintly. “You had trouble with the can opener. You said you were going to build a bigger and better can opener. That’s me.”

Gallegher nearly fell off the couch. “What?

The robot walked over, picked up a can, and opened it with incredible deftness. No beer squirted. Joe was a perfect can opener.

“That,” Gallegher said under his breath, “is what comes of knowing science by ear. I build the most complicated robot in existence just so—” He didn’t finish.

Joe woke up with a start. “What happened?” he asked.

Gallegher glared at him. “Open that can!” he snapped. The robot obeyed, after a brief pause. “Oh. So you found out. Well, I guess I’m just a slave now.”

“Damned right you are. I’ve located the catalyst—the master switch. You’re in the groove, stupid, doing the job you were made for.”

“Well,” Joe said philosophically, “at least I can still admire my beauty, when you don’t require my services.”

Gallegher grunted. “You oversized can opener! Listen. Suppose I take you into court and tell you to hypnotize Judge Hansen. You’ll have to do it, won’t you?”

“Yes. I’m no longer a free agent. I’m conditioned. Conditioned to obey you. Until now, I was conditioned to obey only one command—to do the job I was made for. Until you commanded me to open cans, I was free. Now I’ve got to obey you completely.”

“Uh-huh,” Gallegher said. “Thank Heaven for that. I’d have gone nuts within a week otherwise. At least I can get out of the Sonatone contract. Then all I have to do is solve Brock’s problem.”

“But you did,” Joe said.

“Huh?”

“When you made me. You’d been talking to Brock previously, so you incorporated the solution to his problem into me. Subconsciously, perhaps.”

Gallegher reached for beer. “Talk fast. What’s the answer?”

“Subsonics,” Joe said. “You made me capable of a certain subsonic tone that Brock must broadcast at irregular time-intervals over his televiews—”

Subsonics cannot be heard. But they can be felt. They can be felt as a faint, irrational uneasiness as first, which mounts to a blind, meaningless panic. It does not last. But when it is coupled with A.A. —audience appeal—there is a certain inevitable result.

Those who possessed home Vox-View units were scarcely troubled. It was a matter of acoustics. Cats squalled; dogs howled mournfully. But the families sitting in their parlors, watching Vox-View stars perform on the screen, didn’t really notice anything amiss. There wasn’t sufficient amplification, for one thing.

But in the bootleg theater, where illicit Vox-View televisors were hooked up to Magnas—

There was a faint, irrational uneasiness at first. It mounted. Someone screamed. There was a rush for the doors. The audience was afraid of something, but didn’t know what. They knew only that they had to get out of there.

All over the country there was a frantic exodus from the bootleg theaters when Vox-View first rang in a subsonic during a regular broadcast. Nobody knew why, except Gallegher, the Brocks, and a couple of technicians who were let in on the secret.

An hour later another subsonic was played. There was another mad exodus.

Within a few weeks it was impossible to lure a patron into a bootleg theater. Home televisors were far safer! Vox-View sales picked up—

Nobody would attend a bootleg theater. An unexpected result of the experiment was that, after a while, nobody would attend any of the legalized Sonatone theaters either. Conditioning had set in.

Audiences didn’t know why they grew panicky in the bootleg places. They associated their blind, unreasoning fear with other factors, notably mobs and claustrophobia. One evening a woman named Jane Wilson, otherwise not notable, attended a bootleg show. She fled with the rest when the subsonic was turned on.

The next night she went to the palatial Sonatone Bijou. In the middle of a dramatic feature she looked around, realized that there was a huge throng around her, cast up horrified eyes to the ceiling, and imagined that it was pressing down.

She had to get out of there!

Her squall was the booster charge. There were other customers who had heard subsonics before. No one was hurt during the panic; it was a legal rule that theater doors be made large enough to permit easy egress during a fire. No one was hurt, but it was suddenly obvious that the public was being conditioned by subsonics to avoid the dangerous combination of throngs and theaters. A simple matter of psychological association—
Within four months the bootleg places had disappeared and the Sonatone supertheaters had closed for want of patronage. The Tones, father and son, were not happy. But everybody connected with Vox-View was.

Except Gallegher. He had collected a staggering check from Brock, and instantly cabled to Europe for an incredible quantity of canned beer. Now, brooding over his sorrows, he lay on the laboratory couch and siphoned a highball down his throat. Joe, as usual, was before the mirror, watching the wheels go round.

“Joe,” Gallegher said.

“Yes? What can I do?”

“Oh, nothing.” That was the trouble. Gallegher fished a crumpled cable tape out of his pocket and morosely read it once more. The beer cannery in Europe had decided to change its tactics. From now on, the cable said, their beer would be put up in the usual plastibulbs, in conformance with custom and demand. No more cans.

There wasn’t anything put up in cans in this day and age. Not even beer, now.

So what good was a robot who was built and conditioned to be a can opener?

Gallegher sighed and mixed another highball—a stiff one. Joe postured proudly before the mirror.

Then he extended his eyes, opposed them, and quickly liberated his subconscious through autohypnotism. Joe could appreciate himself better that way.

Gallegher sighed again. Dogs were beginning to bark like mad for blocks around. Oh, well.

He took another drink and felt better. Presently, he thought, it would be time to sing “Frankie and Johnnie.” Maybe he and Joe might have a duet—one baritone and one inaudible sub- or supersonic. Close harmony.

Ten minutes later Gallegher was singing a duet with his can opener.

The End

Great story, eh?

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
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The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Spell my name with an "S" by Isaac Asimov

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Spell My Name With An “S” (Full Text) by Isaac Asimov

Spell My Name With An S

Marshall Zebatinsky felt foolish. He felt as though there were eyes staring through the grimy store-front glass and across the scarred wooden partition; eyes watching him.

He felt no confidence in the old clothes he had resurrected or the turned-down brim of a hat he never otherwise wore or the glasses he had left in their case. He felt foolish and it made the lines in his forehead deeper and his young-old face a little paler.

He would never be able to explain to anyone why a nuclear physicist such as himself should visit a numerologist. (Never, he thought. Never.) Hell, he could not explain it to himself except that he had let his wife talk him into it.

The numerologist sat behind an old desk that must have been secondhand when bought. No desk could get that old with only one owner.

The same might almost be said of his clothes.

He was little and dark and peered at Zebatinsky with little dark eyes that were brightly alive.

He said, “I have never had a physicist for a client before, Dr. Zebatinsky.”

Zebatinsky flushed at once. “You understand this is confidential.”

The numerologist smiled so that wrinkles creased about the corners of his mouth and the skin around his chin stretched. “All my dealings are confidential.”

Zebatinsky said, “I think I ought to tell you one thing. I don’t believe in numerology and I don’t expect to begin believing in it. If that makes a difference, say so now.”

“But why are you here, then?”

“My wife thinks you may have something, whatever it is. I promised her and I am here.” He shrugged and the feeling of folly grew more acute.

“And what is it you are looking for? Money? Security? Long life? What?”

Zebatinsky sat for a long moment while the numerologist watched him quietly and made no move to hurry his client. Zebatinsky thought: What do I say anyway? That I’m thirty-four and without a future?

He said, “I want success. I want recognition.”

“A better job?”

“A different job. A different kind of job. Right now, I’m part of a team, working under orders. Teams! That’s all government research is. You’re a violinist lost in a symphony orchestra.”

“And you want to solo.”

“I want to get out of a team and into-into me.”

Zebatinsky felt carried away, almost lightheaded, just putting this into words to someone other than his wife.

He said, “Twenty-five years ago, with my kind of training and my kind of ability, I would have gotten to work on the first nuclear power plants. Today I’d be running one of them or I’d be head of a pure research group at a university.

But with my start these days where will I be twenty-five years from now?

Nowhere. Still on the team. Still carrying my 2 per cent of the ball. I’m drowning in an anonymous crowd of nuclear physicists, and what I want is room on dry land, if you see what I mean.”

The numerologist nodded slowly. “You realize, Dr. Zebatinsky, that I don’t guarantee success.”

Zebatinsky, for all his lack of faith, felt a sharp bite of disappointment.

“You don’t? Then what the devil do you guarantee?”

“An improvement in the probabilities. My work is statistical in nature. Since you deal with atoms, I think you understand the laws of statistics.”

“Do you?” asked the physicist sourly.

“I do, as a matter of fact. I am a mathematician and I work mathematically. I don’t tell you this in order to raise my fee. That is standard. Fifty dollars. But since you are a scientist, you can appreciate the nature of my work better than my other clients. It is even a pleasure to be able to explain to you.”

Zebatinsky said, “I’d rather you wouldn’t, if you don’t mind. It’s no use telling me about the numerical values of letters, their mystic significance and that kind of thing. I don’t consider that mathematics.

Let’s get to the point-” The numerologist said, “Then you want me to help you provided I don’t embarrass you by telling you the silly nonscientific basis of the way in which I helped you. Is that it?”

“All right. That’s it.”

“But you still work on the assumption that I am a numerologist, and I am not. I call myself that so that the police won’t bother me and” (the little man chuckled dryly) “so that the psychiatrists won’t either. I am a mathematician; an honest one.” Zebatinsky smiled.

The numerologist said, “I build computers. I study probable futures.” “What?” “Does that sound worse than numerology to you? Why? Given enough data and a computer capable of sufficient number of operations in unit time, the future is predictable, at least in terms of probabilities. When you compute the motions of a missile in order to aim an anti-missile, isn’t it the future you’re predicting? The missile and antimissile would not collide if the future were predicted incorrectly. I do the same thing. Since I work with a greater number of variables, my results are less accurate.”

“You mean you’ll predict my future?”

“Very approximately. Once I have done that, I will modify the data by changing your name and no other fact about you. I throw that modified datum into the operation-program. Then I try other modified names. I study each modified future and find one that contains a greater degree of recognition for you than the future that now lies ahead of you. Or no, let me put it another way. I will find you a future in which the probability of adequate recognition is higher than the probability of that in your present future.”

“Why change my name?”

“That is the only change I ever make, for several reasons. Number one, it is a simple change. After all, if I make a great change or many changes, so many new variables enter that I can no longer interpret the result. My machine is still crude. Number two, it is a reasonable change. I can’t change your height, can I, or the color of your eyes, or even your temperament. Number three, it is a significant change. Names mean a lot to people. Finally, number four, it is a common change that is done every day by various people.”

Zebatinsky said, “What if you don’t find a better future?”

“That is the risk you will have to take. You will be no worse off than now, my friend.”

Zebatinsky stared at the little man uneasily, “I don’t believe any of this. I’d sooner believe numerology.”

The numerologist sighed. “I thought a person like yourself would feel more comfortable with the truth. I want to help you and there is much yet for you to do. If you believed me a numerologist, you would not follow through. I thought if I told you the truth you would let me help you.”

Zebatinsky said, “If you can see the future-”

“Why am I not the richest man on earth? Is that it? But I am rich-in all I want. You want recognition and I want to be left alone. I do my work. No one bothers me. That makes me a billionaire. I need a little real money and this I get from people such as yourself. Helping people is nice and perhaps a psychiatrist would say it gives me a feeling of power and feeds my ego. Now-do you want me to help you?”

“How much did you say?”

“Fifty dollars. I will need a great deal of biographical information from you but I have prepared a form to guide you. It’s a little long, I’m afraid. Still, if you can get it in the mail by the end of the week, I will have an answer for you by the-”

(he put out his lower lip and frowned in mental calculation)

“the twentieth of next month.”

“Five weeks? So long?”

“I have other work, my friend, and other clients. If I were a fake, I could do it much more quickly.

It is agreed then?”

Zebatinsky rose. “Well, agreed.-This is all confidential, now.”

“Perfectly. You will have all your information back when I tell you what change to make and you have my word that I will never make any further use of any of it.”

The nuclear physicist stopped at the door.

“Aren’t you afraid I might tell someone you’re not a numerologist?”

The numerologist shook his head. “Who would believe you, my friend? Even supposing you were willing to admit to anyone that you’ve been here.”

On the twentieth, Marshall Zebatinsky was at the paint-peeling door, glancing sideways at the shop front with the little card up against the glass reading “Numerology,” dimmed and scarcely legible through the dust.

He peered in, almost hoping that someone else would be there already so that he might have an excuse to tear up the wavering intention in his mind and go home.

He had tried wiping the thing out of his mind several times. He could never stick at filling out the necessary data for long. It was embarrassing to work at it. He felt incredibly silly filling out the names of his friends, the cost of his house, whether his wife had had any miscarriages, if so, when.

He abandoned it. But he.couldn’t stick at stopping altogether either. He returned to it each evening.

It was the thought of the computer that did it, perhaps; the thought of the infernal gall of the little man pretending he had a computer.

The temptation to call the bluff, see what would happen, proved irresistible after all. He finally sent off the completed data by ordinary mail, putting on nine cents worth of stamps without weighing the letter. If it comes back, he thought, I’ll call it off.

It didn’t come back. He looked into the shop now and it was empty. Zebatinsky had no choice but to enter. A bell tinkled. The old numerologist emerged from a curtained door.

“Yes?-Ah, Dr. Zebatinsky.”

“You remember me?” Zebatinsky tried to smile. “Oh, yes.”

“What’s the verdict?” The numerologist moved one gnarled hand over the other.

“Before that, sir, there’s a little-”

“A little matter of the fee?”

“I have already done the work, sir. I have earned the money.”

Zebatinsky raised no objection. He was prepared to pay. If he had come this far, it would be silly to turn back just because of the money.

He counted out five ten-dollar bills and shoved them across the counter.

“Well?”

The numerologist counted the bills again slowly, then pushed them into a cash drawer in his desk.

He said, “Your case was very interesting. I would advise you to change your name to Sebatinsky.”

“Seba-How do you spell that?” “S-e-b-a-t-i-n-s-k-y.” Zebatinsky stared indignantly.

“You mean change the initial? Change the Z to an S? That’s all?”

“It’s enough. As long as the change is adequate, a small change is safer than a big one.”

“But how could the change affect anything?”

“How could any name?” asked the numerologist softly.

“I can’t say. It may, somehow, and that’s all I can say. Remember, I don’t guarantee results. Of course, if you do not wish to make the change, leave things as they are. But in that case I cannot refund the fee.”

Zebatinsky said, “What do I do? Just tell everyone to spell my name with an 5?”

“If you want my advice, consult a lawyer. Change your name legally. He can advise you on little things.”

“How long will it all take? I mean for things to improve for me?”

“How can I tell? Maybe never. Maybe tomorrow.”

“But you saw the future. You claim you see it.”

“Not as in a crystal ball. No, no, Dr. Zebatinsky. All I get out of my computer is a set of coded figures. I can recite probabilities to you, but I saw no pictures.”

Zebatinsky turned and walked rapidly out of the place. Fifty dollars to change a letter! Fifty dollars for Sebatinsky! Lord, what a name! Worse than Zebatinsky.

It took another month before he could make up his mind to see a lawyer, and then he finally went. He told himself he could always change the name back. Give it a chance, he told himself. Hell, there was no law against it.

Henry Brand looked through the folder page by page, with the practiced eye of one who had been in Security for fourteen years. He didn’t have to read every word. Anything peculiar would have leaped off the paper and punched him in the eye. He said, “The man looks clean to me.”

Henry Brand looked clean, too; with a soft, rounded paunch and a pink and freshly scrubbed complexion. It was as though continuous contact with all sorts of human failings, from possible ignorance to possible treason, had compelled him into frequent washings.

Lieutenant Albert Quincy, who had brought him the folder, was young and filled with the responsibility of being Security officer at the Hanford Station.

“But why Sebatinsky?” he demanded. “Why not?”

“Because it doesn’t make sense. Zebatinsky is a foreign name and I’d change it myself if I had it, but I’d change it to something Anglo-Saxon. If Zebatinsky had done that, it would make sense and I wouldn’t give it a second thought. But why change a Z to an S? I think we must find out what his reasons were.”

“Has anyone asked him directly?”

“Certainly. In ordinary conversation, of course. I was careful to arrange that. He won’t say anything more than that he’s tired of being last in the alphabet.”

“That could be, couldn’t it, Lieutenant?”

“It could, but why not change his name to Sands or Smith, if he wants an S? Or if he’s that tired of Z, why not go the whole way and change it to an A? Why not a name like-uh-Aarons?”

“Not Anglo-Saxon enough,” muttered Brand. Then, “But there’s nothing to pin against the man. No matter how queer a name change may be, that alone can’t be used against anyone.”

Lieutenant Quincy looked markedly unhappy.

Brand said, “Tell me, Lieutenant, there must be something specific that bothers you. Something in your mind; some theory; some gimmick. What is it?”

The lieutenant frowned. His light eyebrows drew together and his lips tightened.

“Well, damn it, sir, the man’s a Russian.” Brand said, “He’s not that. He’s a third-generation American.”

“I mean his name’s Russian.” Brand’s face lost some of its deceptive softness. “No, Lieutenant, wrong again. Polish.”

The lieutenant pushed his hands out impatiently, palms up. “Same thing.” Brand, whose mother’s maiden name had been Wiszewski, snapped, “Don’t tell that to a Pole, Lieutenant.”

-Then, more thoughtfully, “Or to a Russian either, I suppose.”

“What I’m trying to say, sir,” said the lieutenant, reddening, “is that the Poles and Russians are both on the other side of the Curtain.”

“We all know that.”

“And Zebatinsky or Sebatinsky, whatever you want to call him, may have relatives there.”

“He’s third generation. He might have second cousins there, I suppose. So what?”

“Nothing in itself. Lots of people may have distant relatives there. But Zebatinsky changed his name.”

“Go on.”

“Maybe he’s trying to distract attention. Maybe a second cousin over there is getting too famous and our Zebatinsky is afraid that the relationship may spoil his own chances of advancement.”

“Changing his name won’t do any good. He’d still be a second cousin.”

“Sure, but he wouldn’t feel as though he were shoving the relationship in our face.”

“Have you ever heard of any Zebatinsky on the other side?”

“No, sir.” “Then he can’t be too famous. How would our Zebatinsky know about him?”

“He might keep in touch with his own relatives. That would be suspicious under the circumstances, he being a nuclear physicist.”

Methodically, Brand went through the folder again. “This is awfully thin, Lieutenant. It’s thin enough to be completely invisible.”

“Can you offer any other explanation, sir, of why he ought to change his name in just this way?”

“No, I can’t. I admit that.” “Then I think, sir, we ought to investigate. We ought to look for any men named Zebatinsky on the other side and see if we can draw a connection.”

The lieutenant’s voice rose a trifle as a new thought occurred to him. “He might be changing his name to withdraw attention from them; I mean to protect them.”

“He’s doing just the opposite, I think.”

“He doesn’t realize that, maybe, but protecting them could be his motive.”

Brand sighed. “All right, well tackle the Zebatinsky angle.-But if nothing turns up, Lieutenant, we drop the matter. Leave the folder with me.”

When the information finally reached Brand, he had all but forgotten the lieutenant and his theories. His first thought on receiving data that included a list of seventeen biographies of seventeen Russian and Polish citizens, all named Zebatinsky, was: What the devil is this?

Then he remembered, swore mildly, and began reading.

It started on the American side. Marshall Zebatinsky (fingerprints) had been born in Buffalo, New York (date, hospital statistics). His father had been born in Buffalo as well, his mother in Oswego, New York. His paternal grandparents had both been born in Bialystok, Poland (date of entry into the United States, dates of citizenship, photographs). The seventeen Russian and Polish citizens named Zebatinsky were all descendants of people who, some half century earlier, had lived in or near Bialystok. Presumably, they could be relatives, but this was not explicitly stated in any particular case. (Vital statistics in East Europe during the aftermath of World War I were kept poorly, if at all.)

Brand passed through the individual life histories of the current Zebatinsky men and women (amazing how thoroughly intelligence did its work; probably the Russians’ was as thorough).

He stopped at one and his smooth forehead sprouted lines as his eyebrows shot upward. He put that one to one side and went on.

Eventually, he stacked everything but that one and returned it to its envelope. Staring at that one, he tapped a neatly kept fingernail on the desk. With a certain reluctance, he went to call on Dr. Paul Kristow of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Dr. Kristow listened to the matter with a stony expression. He lifted a little finger occasionally to dab at his bulbous nose and remove a nonexistent speck. His hair was iron gray, thinning and cut short. He might as well have been bald.

He said, “No, I never heard of any Russian Zebatinsky. But then, I never heard of the American one either.”

“Well,” Brand scratched at his hairline over one temple and said slowly, “I don’t think there’s anything to this, but I don’t like to drop it too soon. I have a young lieutenant on my tail and you know what they can be like. I don’t want to do anything that will drive him to a Congressional committee. Besides, the fact is that one of the Russian Zebatinsky fellows, Mikhail Andreyevich Zebatinsky, is a nuclear physicist. Are you sure you never heard of him?”

“Mikhail Andreyevich Zebatinsky? No-No, I never did. Not that that proves anything.”

“I could say it was coincidence, but you know that would be piling it a trifle high. One Zebatinsky here and one Zebatinsky there, both nuclear physicists, and the one here suddenly changes his name to Sebatinsky, and goes around anxious about it, too. He won’t allow misspelling.

He says, emphatically, ‘Spell my name with an S.’ It all just fits well enough to make my spy-conscious lieutenant begin to look a little too good.

-And another peculiar thing is that the Russian Zebatinsky dropped out of sight just about a year ago.” Dr. Kristow said stolidly, “Executed!”

“He might have been. Ordinarily, I would even assume so, though the Russians are not more foolish than we are and don’t kill any nuclear physicist they can avoid killing. The thing is there’s another reason why a nuclear physicist, of all people, might suddenly disappear. I don’t have to tell you.”

“Crash research; top secret. I take it that’s what you mean. Do you believe that’s it?”

“Put it together with everything else, add in the lieutenant’s intuition, and I just begin to wonder.”

“Give me that biography.” Dr. Kristow reached for the sheet of paper and read it over twice. He shook his head. Then he said, “I’ll check this in Nuclear Abstracts.”

Nuclear Abstracts lined one wall of Dr. Kristow’s study in neat little boxes, each filled with its squares of microfilm. The A.E.C. man used his projector on the indices while Brand watched with what patience he could muster.

Dr. Kristow muttered, “A Mikhail Zebatinsky authored or co-authored half a dozen papers in the Soviet journals in the last half dozen years.

We’ll get out the abstracts and maybe we can make something out of it. I doubt it.”

A selector nipped out the appropriate squares. Dr. Kristow lined them up, ran them through the projector, and by degrees an expression of odd intentness crossed his face.

He said, “That’s odd.”

Brand said, “What’s odd?”

Dr. Kristow sat back. “I’d rather not say just yet. Can you get me a list of other nuclear physicists who have dropped out of sight in the Soviet Union hi the last year?”

“You mean you see something?”

“Not really. Not if I were just looking at any one of these papers. It’s just that looking at all of them and knowing that this man may be on a crash research program and, on top of that, having you putting suspicions in my head-”

He shrugged. “It’s nothing.”

Brand said earnestly, “I wish you’d say what’s on your mind. We may as well be foolish about this together.”

“If you feel that way-It’s just possible this man may have been inching toward gamma-ray reflection.”

“And the significance?”

“If a reflecting shield against gamma rays could be devised, individual shelters could be built to protect against fallout. It’s fallout that’s the real danger, you know. A hydrogen bomb might destroy a city but the fallout could slow-kill the population over a strip thousands of miles long and hundreds wide.”

Brand said quickly, “Are we doing any work on this?”

“No.”

“And if they get it and we don’t, they can destroy the United States in toto at the cost of, say, ten cities, after they have their shelter program completed.”

“That’s far in the future.-And, what are we getting in a hurrah about? All this is built on one man changing one letter in his name.”

“All right, I’m insane,” said Brand. “But I don’t leave the matter at this point. Not at this point. I’ll get you your list of disappearing nuclear physicists if I have to go to Moscow to get it.”

He got the list.

They went through all the research papers authored by any of them. They called a full meeting of the Commission, then of the nuclear brains of the nation. Dr. Kristow walked out of an all night session, finally, part of which the President himself had attended. Brand met him. Both looked haggard and in need of sleep.

Brand said, “Well?” Kristow nodded.

“Most agree. Some are doubtful even yet, but most agree.”

“How about you? Are you sure?”

“I’m far from sure, but let me put it this way. It’s easier to believe that the Soviets are working on a gamma-ray shield than to believe that all the data we’ve uncovered has no interconnection.”

“Has it been decided that we’re to go on shield research, too?”

“Yes.” Kristow’s hand went back over his short, bristly hair, making a dry, whispery sound. “We’re going to give it everything we’ve got. Knowing the papers written by the men who disappeared, we can get right on their heels. We may even beat them to it.

-Of course, they’ll find out we’re working on it.”

“Let them,” said Brand. “Let them. It will keep them from attacking. I don’t see any percentage in selling ten of our cities just to get ten of theirs-if we’re both protected and they’re too dumb to know that”

“But not too soon. We don’t want them finding out too soon. What about the American Zebatinsky-Sebatinsky?”

Brand looked solemn and shook his head. “There’s nothing to connect him with any of this even yet. Hell, we’ve looked. I agree with you, of course. He’s in a sensitive spot where he is now and we can’t afford to keep him there even if he’s in the clear.”

“We can’t kick him out just like that, either, or the Russians will start wondering.”

“Do you have any suggestions?” They were walking down the long corridor toward the distant elevator in the emptiness of four in the morning. Dr. Kristow said, “I’ve looked into his work. He’s a good man, better than most, and not happy in his job, either. He hasn’t the temperament for teamwork.”

“So?”

“But he is the type for an academic job. If we can arrange to have a large university offer him a chair in physics, I think he would take it gladly. There would be enough nonsensitive areas to keep him occupied; we would be able to keep him in close view; and it would be a natural development.

The Russians might not start scratching their heads. What do you think?” Brand nodded. “It’s an idea. Even sounds good. I’ll put it up to the chief.”

They stepped into the elevator and Brand allowed himself to wonder about it all. What an ending to what had started with one letter of a name.

Marshall Sebatinsky could hardly talk. He said to his wife, “I swear I don’t see how this happened. I wouldn’t have thought they knew me from a meson detector. – Good Lord, Sophie, Associate Professor of Physics at Princeton. Think of it.”

Sophie said, “Do you suppose it was your talk at the A.P.S. meetings?”

“I don’t see how. It was a thoroughly uninspired paper once everyone in the division was done hacking at it.”

He snapped his fingers.

“It must have been Princeton that was investigating me. That’s it. You know all those forms I’ve been filling out in the last six months; those interviews they wouldn’t explain. Honestly, I was beginning to think I was under suspicion as a subversive.-It was Princeton investigating me. They’re thorough.”

“Maybe it was your name,” said Sophie. “I mean the change.”

“Watch me now. My professional life will be my own finally. I’ll make my mark. Once I have a chance to do my work without-”

He stopped and turned to look at his wife. “My name! You mean the S.”

“You didn’t get the offer till after you changed your name, did you?”

“Not till long after. No, that part’s just coincidence. I’ve told you before Sophie, it was just a case of throwing out fifty dollars to please you. Lord, what a fool I’ve felt all these months insisting on that stupid S.”

Sophie was instantly on the defensive. “I didn’t make you do it, Marshall. I suggested it but I didn’t nag you about it. Don’t say I did. Besides, it did turn out well. I’m sure it was the name that did this.” Sebatinsky smiled indulgently. “Now that’s superstition.”

“I don’t care what you call it, but you’re not changing your name back.”

“Well, no, I suppose not. I’ve had so much trouble getting them to spell my name with an S, that the thought of making everyone move back is more than I want to face. Maybe I ought to change my name to Jones, eh?”

He laughed almost hysterically. But Sophie didn’t. “You leave it alone.”

“Oh, all right, I’m just joking. -Tell you what. I’ll step down to that old fellow’s place one of these days and tell him everything worked out and slip him another tenner. Will that satisfy you?”

He was exuberant enough to do so the next week. He assumed no disguise this time. He wore his glasses and his ordinary suit and was minus a hat. He was even humming as he approached the store front and stepped to one side to allow a weary, sour-faced woman to maneuver her twin baby carriage past. He put his hand on the door handle and his thumb on the iron latch. The latch didn’t give to his thumb’s downward pressure.

The door was locked.

The dusty, dim card with “Numerologist” on it was gone, now that he looked. Another sign, printed and beginning to yellow and curl with the sunlight, said “To let.”

Sebatinsky shrugged. That was that. He had tried to do the right thing.

Haround, happily divested of corporeal excrescence, capered happily and his energy vortices glowed a dim purple over cubic hypermiles.

He said, “Have I won? Have I won?”

Mestack was withdrawn, his vortices almost a sphere of light in hyperspace. “I haven’t calculated it yet.”

“Well, go ahead. You won’t change the results any by taking a long time.-Wowf, it’s a relief to get back into clean energy. It took me a microcycle of time as a corporeal body; a nearly used-up one, too. But it was worth it to show you.”

Mestack said, “All right, I admit you stopped a nuclear war on the planet.”

“Is that or is that not a Class A effect?”

“It is a Class A effect. Of course it is.”

“All right. Now check and see if I didn’t get that Class A effect with a Class F stimulus. I changed one letter of one name.”

“What?”

“Oh, never mind. It’s all there. I’ve worked it out for you.” Mestack said reluctantly, “I yield. A Class F stimulus.”

“Then I win. Admit it.”

“Neither one of us will win when the Watchman gets a look at this.”

Haround, who had been an elderly numerologist on Earth and was still somewhat unsettled with relief at no longer being one, said, “You weren’t worried about that when you made the bet.”

“I didn’t think you’d be fool enough to go through with it.”

“Heat-waste! Besides, why worry? The Watchman will never detect a Class F stimulus.”

“Maybe not, but he’ll detect a Class A effect. Those corporeals will still be around after a dozen microcycles. The Watchman will notice that.”

“The trouble with you, Mestack, is that you don’t want to pay off. You’re stalling.”

“I’ll pay. But just wait till the Watchman finds out we’ve been working on an unassigned problem and made an unallowed-for change. Of course, if we-” He paused.

Haround said, “All right, we’ll change it back. He’ll never know.” There was a crafty glow to Mestack’s brightening energy pattern.

“You’ll need another Class F stimulus if you expect him not to notice.” Haround hesitated. “I can do it.”

“I doubt it.”

“I could.”

“Would you be willing to bet on that, too?” Jubilation was creeping into Mestack’s radiations.

“Sure,” said the goaded Haround.

“I’ll put those corporeals right back where they were and the Watchman will never know the difference.”

Mestack followed through his advantage. “Suspend the first bet, then. Triple the stakes on the second.” The mounting eagerness of the gamble caught at Haround, too.

“All right, I’m game. Triple the stakes.”

“Done, then!”

“Done.”

The End

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
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The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury
Job: A Comedy of Justice (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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The secret of long term relationships; soup, sandwiches, and icy cold beer.

You can go all over the internet and find all sorts of advice on how to keep your love and life alive. Here is mine. I argue, quite convincingly, I must add, that happiness can be had by any couple that enjoys fine food and drink.

There is an old saying that goes a little like this…

“The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.”

Oh, it might not be all that popular in today’s progressive reality of gender-less, role-less, lifestyle. But it is a very strong truth. If you want to keep a family strong, tight, and together, make sure that everyone is fed with delicious home-cooked delicious food.

You know, there is something very special about home-cooked, home-made food. Now, certainly, it all doesn’t have to be made from scratch. What is important is the care and attention that goes into the food preparation. Then, once the meal is made, it can be shared together with your loved ones at a table.

Traditional meal
In traditional conservative households, the meal is the MOST important event of the day. It is a time where family members can relax, talk about their day and life. It is a time where you can share experiences, stories, laugh, cry and just have fun all within a safe protective environment. The most important caretaker of this ritual is the housewife. For she is the rock, the anchor from the the family revolves around.

Let everyone else play their games on their phones. Let them grab a burger at the local drive through. Let them steal bites while they are playing a game on the computer or watching the news. That is their life. Not yours. You and your loved ones can enjoy a meal together in peace.

Nothing, absolutely nothing, keeps a family together than delicious food shared together without interruption.

Vintage Christmas meal in the 1960s.
After nearly fifty years of traditional housewife bashing by Hollywood, and the mainstream media, the idea of traditional roles and life is frowned upon as a throw-back to “The Handmaids Tale”. Well this article is the rare, rare push-back to that well known and well-understood narrative. It describes the joys of delicious food, and praises those rare special people who put all their heart and energy into cooking delicious nutritious foods for their loved ones.

The meal

The most important meal, is of course, dinner. But here, we are going to concentrate on the second most important meal. Lunch.

And, of course, this entire article implies that the family members will somehow work out an arrangement whereas they can share a mid-noon meal together (and if possible) a siesta afterwards. It’s not always possible in today’s world. However, with some planning and preparation, it can be part of your life as well.

Of course, there are many meals that can be used for lunch.

I like steak and wine myself, but here we will concentrate on the most fundamental of American meals; the delicious soup, sandwich and icy cold beer. Ah, who doesn’t like beer? Who doesn’t like a thick and hearty delicious soup? And, for goodness sakes, who doesn’t enjoy a wonderful well prepared sandwich?

I met a few on the internet. They are ugly sad souls indeed.

Pepperoni pizza grilled cheese sandwich with homemade tomato soup.
Pepperoni pizza grilled cheese sandwich with homemade tomato soup. When my Mrs makes this up for me, I get all twitter-pated towards her. She goes to all this effort, and it is so very delicious. Such care and attention, what a wonder! Food is a way for people can express their love for each other.

Now, you do not need to make the soup from scratch.

Many times, the Mrs. would simply get a can of Campbell’s (creamy) soup, add milk or creme instead of water, and thicken it up with cheese and crunched up crackers. Oh, I so do love a thick soup. Especially something like creme of broccoli or celery.

I never really appreciated thick hearty creme soups until I was well into my 30’s. But, once I was bitten, I couldn’t get enough of this wondrous, tasty and delicious food.

Campbells soup
Campbell’s soup can be obtained in China. However the American favorites aren’t all that popular. Instead, other favors are more popular like Borst, and clam chowder. The wife loves to take the can and embellishes upon it. Like adding rice to tomato soup, or thickening the creme soups into hearty delicious masterpieces.

Now, buying fresh bread is pretty hit and miss here in China. If possible, we will buy a loaf of fresh french or Italian bread if possible, and then use it. However, many times we are stuck with the various flavors of sliced white bread.

No matter. The creative can certainly work out a great sandwich out of it. It could be a “Dagwood” with everything, to a simple grilled cheese. No matter what, I personally enjoy all sandwiches with a tomato somewhere hiding between the layers of meat and cheese.

A bowl of delicious creme of broccoli soup.
A bowl of delicious creme of broccoli soup. I love to eat it “extra” thick with yellow cheese (cheddar) and saltines. It is so hearty and very, very tasty. You can make it from scratch, oh the person who can do this is a master chef indeed. Or you can “cheat” and use an embellished can of commercially available soup.

Delicious Soups and Sandwiches

I think that it is a shame that many people in the United States today has forgotten the importance of soup and sandwiches made “home style”. Americans have grown up to accept high-caloric fast food alternatives as the preferred ways and means to enjoy lunches.

Typical diner food
Most of the food that you can buy at a diner can be made at home for a mere fraction of the cost. It enable you to save money, and yet provide home-cooked, delicious foods for you and your loved ones, made exactly how you all like them. When you are saving such money, you often do not NEED to have a second source of income to support your accustomed lifestyle.

By eating healthy, with carefully prepared meals by those that you love and trust, you can not only lose weight, but eat better and spend quality time together. Gals, listen to me. No man will leave a woman who is a fantastic cook. We’d have to be out of our mind.

Seriously. Name one man who does not like to eat. Name one.

Of course, that’s coming from a traditional old stogie like myself. I cannot tell you what Justin Berber, Bill Clinton, or Ellen DeGeneres would do.

Delicious sandwich.
My wife constantly surprises me. She has made an all vegetable sandwich for me, and I could not tell that there wasn’t any meat in it. Seriously. All the vegetables were cooked. It was so very delicious, and she used just the right amount of seasoning as well. Amazing!

There are so many ways to make the soup and sandwich meal special. Personally, I think that tomato selection plays an important role. I also think that the selection of the type of onions (if you use them) are critical. Red onions taste differently than white or yellow onions.

The bread selection is important. Potato bread makes for great grilled sandwiches with melted cheese, but the Italian and French loaves with big air pockets add a special kind of taste that really emphasizes the meats.

Sliced rye bread and meat for sandwiches.
Thin sliced roast beef with cheeses condiments and sliced rye bread for sandwiches. Careful budgeting, and control of the budget has enabled housewives over the centuries to provide delicious and tasty healthy meals for their families. By careful budgeting, the household can be eating wonderful, carefully prepared nutritious meals every single day. The children would love to come home for lunch instead of eating the government-approved Michelle-Obama lunch menus.

There are so very many ways to make sandwiches. You can go all vegetarian, or go lean on the meats, and go heavy on the delicious vegetables. You can lightly cook the vegetables, and melt cheese. You can add eggs, tuna, sausage, meat spreads, peanut butter, or just anything that you heart desires. Let the chef of the house decide. You will not be disappointed.

I suppose that everyone has their own tastes when it comes to sauces. I have taken to using a oil and mayonnaise mix with a tad of yellow mustard on most sandwiches, but the wife loves to mix it up with blue-cheese dressing, and such exotic (for here in China, at least) such things as French, Russian and Thousand Island dressing.

Plain old mayonnaise or Miracle Whip can make even a bad sandwich serviceable. But with a little extra work, that mayo can be great. Consider mixing in any of the following concoctions:

Pesto mayo (Tablespoon of pesto per half cup of mayo)
Curry mayo (1/2 tablespoon of curry powder per half cup)
Fry sauce (ketchup and mayo)
Thousand island (French dressing, pickle relish, mayo)
Sriracha hot sauce mayo (Sriracha to taste, plus mayo)
Brown mustard mayo (2 tablespoons per half cup)
Mayo and cajun seasoning (Teaspoon per half cup) 

-WikiHow
Wonderful polish meal.
I wouldn’t even know how to get started making this wonderful Polish meal, but my wife would. She seems to know just about everything when it comes to cooking. I could find a picture on the internet, and she would busy herself trying to replicate it for me. That is awesome!

Primal Urges

Being fed well,as well as all the care that goes in the preparation of food is primal. It is our most basic of human instincts. From the moment we are born, we associate love, nurturing, care and concern with food. The nourishment that we get from our mothers makes a lasting impression on us, and shapes who we are today.

These primal urges stay with us all our life.

It impacts our interests, our relationships with family and loved ones. It determines the kind of occupation we would have, and our security within that occupation. In fact, if I were to be so bold, it is how we are cared for by our parents, most especially our mother, that determines how well adjusted we will be as an adult, and how substantive our relationships would be.

Special sandwich.
You need to understand that guys are simple. When we want a sandwich, we make one from what ever is on hand, then we eat it. Very little care and concern goes into it. However, a woman is quite different. She knows how to make special and wholesome delicious food. She will take the time to pick the ingredients. She will take the time to trim and prepare the meal. She will make the meal perfect. Those little details will keep her man running to her everyday without fail.

Food, and nutrition, was provided to us from our loved ones at our earliest age. It is encoded in our genetic makeup to love those that serve, feed and nurture us. It is this nature, this most basic and primal of biological urges, that the traditional family structure is based upon.

The mother, the primary source of nutrition, love, and education, of the children would be responsible for their well being. The husband of the house would go forth and earn, provide, and support the family. Given the contentious history of the world, he would also protect it and defend it from others.

Then after a tough day, he would come home. He would give all of his earning to his wife who would use the money, budget it, invest it, and use it for the family. As such, he would find the hearth warm. The children happy, and relaxed. He would find a delicious meal waiting for him, and a loving family that appreciates him. Know your history.

A housewife can never be replaced.
People, you cannot replace a delicious home-cooked meal by a careful, loving housewife with a restaurant meal. You simply cannot. Where can you obtain this kind of burger? Only at home, by a careful, and cost conscious, nutrition minded housewife. Why do you think that everyone was so thin in America prior to the 1970’s? Why? I’ll tell you why. They ate healthy well-cared for and planned delicious meals made by someone with love. That is why. Not the pig-trough dishes heavy on fats, starches, and GMO’s, not to mention the piles of sugar, currently served in restaurants all over the USA. The well-meaning, but ignorant progressives seriously messed up the nation. You can see the damage everywhere. All you need to do is know your history and look around.

This all being said, let’s get back to the matter at hand. That is delicious food and wondrous icy cold beer.

It’s the Details that make the difference

I argue that when a loving wife makes up a carefully prepared meal for her man, that he appreciates it far more that he is able to tell her. No, this is not some scene from Jackie Gleason, or All in the Family. This is the real world, not some kind of Hollywood fantasy.

Men, I do not care who or where, appreciate food. They appreciate how it is made. They appreciate how it tastes. They appreciate the care and concern that goes into it. they appreciate the love and affection. Indeed, when a wife takes the time to prepare food for her family; her children, and her man, it is a special time.

It always has been.

America has changed.
America has changed substantially in many, many ways from what it was first established as. Traditionalists, and conservatives lament these changes. While progressive socialists embrace the changes. They love the idea of there not being any genders, no rules, no roles. They enjoy the idea where everyone is equal. Anyone who disagrees with them are deplorable Nazi’s. So they say. Meanwhile, us “normal’s” just live our life. Nod our head, and say to ourselves “oh, they’ll find out. Eventually.”

That goes double if there is a nice table spread set forth before the man. I will tell you, it is hard to turn your back on any woman who lays out an excellent table spread. Who treats her man as the king of the house. Who lays out a great table cloth, with sliced bread and butter, fine tasty food, an a icy cold beverage, and then joins the man for conversation.

One of the things that my wife likes to do for me is to make sure that my beer is frosty cold. She not only gets the glass pre-chilled, but she takes ices cubes and smashes them with a hammer into slivers, and then fills the glass with them. The beer is then poured into the icy glass for me to enjoy. Listen people, ain’t no other woman, in this entire world, would take the time or give the attention to ME than my wife does. That is one of the very many, many special things about her.

Grilled cheese sandwich.
A grilled cheese sandwich is easy to make, and there are all sorts of ways to make it special. Like adding some peppers, or ham, or maybe a tomato, or some garlic inside. It’s all up to the housewife. Oh, and by the way, show your appreciation for the time, the effort, and the care that was taken to make these most delicious works of art. She would really appreciate it.

When you come across a woman who is smart, attractive and so detail minded for her man and her family, you would be an absolute fool to leave her. You know, people change over time. Your body changes, you put on weight. You get white hair, and things start to sag. But you know what, it is that forever level of attention that keep us guys coming back for more.

The Importance of a Strong Wife

I cannot state just how important it is to have a fine, caring and loving wife waiting for you when you come home from work. This isn’t the 1950’s where one you obtained a job, you were set for life. Today in America you can be hired and fired at will with zero notice. As such the bosses treat you like shit because they know that you cannot do anything about it.

And they WILL treat you like shit. Everything from being berated in front of your peers in a meeting, to getting a 360 degree review, to looking at his watch when it is time for you to leave for home. Men, real men, do not take this kind of abuse. But in America, the nation of Beta-males, do.

Oh, yeah. The world is a rough place. We’ve got megalomaniac bosses, HR with rules and regulations thicker than an old telephone book, and all sorts of requirements from blood drives, to free-overtime.

But you know what, when I come home, and my wife treats me like a king… well… I feel like I can take on the world for MY FAMILY. It’s like the character Uriah Heep. His home was his castle…literally. (There was even a rock group named after him. Remember the song “Easy Livin’?)

Uriah Heep – Easy Livin’
Urah Heep Album Art
Uriah Heep are an English rock band formed in London in 1969. It has had the same lineup since 2013: lead and rhythm guitarist Mick Box, keyboardist Phil Lanzon, lead vocalist Bernie Shaw, drummer Russell Gilbrook and bassist Davey Rimmer. Of the current lineup, Box is the only remaining original member. Throughout many lineup changes, the band has included many notable musicians, such as vocalists David Byron, John Lawton, John Sloman, Peter Goalby and Steff Fontaine, bassists Gary Thain, Trevor Bolder, John Wetton, Bob Daisley and John Jowitt, drummers Nigel Olsson, Lee Kerslake and Chris Slade, and keyboardists Ken Hensley and John Sinclair.

A real man, comes home to a genuine wife who treats him like a king.

I think that all men appreciate a good caring, loving woman. I think that he would be crazy not to. And even though Hollywood, and the mainstream media has ridiculed the traditional lifestyle to the point where it isn’t even considered, it is the ONLY household arrangement that has lasted for thousands of years and transcends cultures.

It is NOT a scene from the science fiction movie “The Handmaids Tale”. This reality has NEVER existed. Though with all the relentless media hype it sure seems lit it must have somewhere… but nah. It never did.

Handmaids tale
The science fiction movie titled “The Handmaids Tale” depicted women in traditional conservative roles as mindless zombie robots manipulated to do the bidding of the males in the community. It is a truly horrific movie and served the feminist movement in the United States quite well though promotion of a nonsensical narrative.

Listen up! You can say this or that, but the fact remains.

All men appreciate a good, caring woman is one who is an excellent cook. While there are all kinds of people, I have found that those women who love their family go out of their way to provide for them in the best way that they know how.

People, there is a bond that is strengthened over food.

Family cooking
The entire family appreciates a wife that can cook and cook well. We look forward to her creations and love to spend the time at the dinner table with her.

Of course, not everyone wants to recognize this fact.

There are, however, those who have lived in dysfunctional families, progressive families, or neutral-gender families that all tend to be very confused about roles and responsibilities.

They don’t apply themselves to their relations, and relationships. They feel that they don’t need to do so. They believe that roles are restrictive. They feel that responsibilities stifle their freedom. They believe that anyone who isn’t as open-minded and progressive as them are manipulated waifs that need to be liberated.

Instead they have their head in the clouds like they could be another Bill Gates, or a feminist version of Joan of Arc. In their mind, they can be anything.

SJW woman ideal.
It is fine to be who ever you want. Just remember that there are trade-offs to what ever path you take. If you do not want a traditional conservative lifestyle, then you can expect a very lonely life when you get older. Men will not partner up with older single women who do not give him the respect that attractive young females do.

Good for them.

They will find out that as they march this road all alone, that it starts to get very lonely. People need each other. We form families and love-strengthened bonds.

When they hit their 40’s childless, alone, with only their pets for company, let’s see how well they fare when no one visits them in the hospital when they are diagnosed with cancer. Let’s see how joyous their holidays are. Let’s see how much appreciation their companies and employers give to them for their “sacrifice”. Let’s see.

So they can drink their expensive Starbucks coffee alone inside. They can play on their iphone. They can check out the latest on social media.

Meanwhile you and I are going to spend time with our loved ones eating delicious food, talking about the things that matter to us, and enjoying each other’s company.

Delicious melted cheese sandwich.
Now, wouldn’t you love to drink a beer with this wonderful melted sandwich? I know I would. And that is the point of all this. Food is meant to be shared. It evokes thoughts and memories of love, care and nurturing. That is why meals with family are so very important.

In praise of the great

You know, you do not need to inject the meals with tons of sugar to make them delicious. (I once had a girlfriend that used to do this. I didn’t care too much for the sugar-laden cooking.) Personally, I prefer simple and clean ingredients with light seasoning.

Which brings me back around to the delicious lunch meal of soup and sandwich. (Yeah, you all were probably wondering when I’d get back around to it.)

Delicious soup and sandwich for lunch.
Oh it sounds so easy. Just a simple sandwich with baloney, mayo on white bread and a can of soup. But it’s not. Those are only the very basics. A woman, a skilled and knowledgeable woman can transform those basic materials into something marvelous and special. In the picture above you have three kinds of cheese melted on rye toast with tomato. Wow! And take a gander at that soup eh? This is amazing.

When I was a young boy, for a while I carried a lunch box. And inside that lunch box, my mother would prepare for me a soup (inside the thermos), a delicious sandwich inside a paper bag, and a piece of fruit. This varied from a apple to a banana and everything in between. And yes, it was easy enough to get candy and soda at school, we always ate our healthy lunches during lunch break.

Of course, I am from a different generation. Baloney was a staple, as was olive loaf, Braunschweiger, and peanut butter.

Delicious sandwich in need of a great beer.
Oh, the Reuben! A powerful punch of salty sourness that comes courtesy of tasty corned beef, Swiss cheese, Russian dressing and sauerkraut. With so much overpowering flavor coming from your sandwich, it’s important to make a beer selection that serves as a balancing tray for the Reuben.

A real talented woman can make the most amazing dishes. You see, a woman has the ability to put everything into anything she does. If she loves you and her family, she will give you everything. She will provide for you. She will prop you up when you collapse, and she will keep your well-fed and strong. She will make fine delicious food for you. She will never let your down.

Not, like progressive women do. Don’t believe me? Facts don’t lie.

Divorce rate in the United States over time.
This is a chart of the divorce rate in the United States over time. You can clearly see that the SJW feminist movement during the 1970’s played a major role in the divorce rate in America and the reduction on parental education for the children. This was coincidentally ALSO the time when the majority of American households migrated away from traditional conservative family arrangements to progressive arrangements wither there are no rule, no role, and no responsibilities. What is truly sad about this is that most Americans today, having been raised in families after 1975, have no idea how wonderful a traditional conservative family arrangement could be.

China

Of course, long time readers of this blog will know that I live in China. China is a conservative paradise. It is a place where Chinese traditions are enjoyed, appreciated, and protected from progressive liberal influences. In fact, if you even try to pull any SJW, or progressive moves, the government will come and arrest you. Next stop? Re-education center to strip-mine all that evil progressive thought out of your mind.

One of the things that I miss the most about the awesome American culture is the wonderful food. How about some awesome and genuine American food? Right? Am I right or am I right? Maybe something along the lines of this…

Ruben Sandwich.
What is better than a delicious Ruben sandwich? I like it served with thousand island dressing, and then I love to dip it in the dressing when I eat it. You know, the secret in making a good Ruben is avoiding having the bread get soggy. You can do this by enclosing the sauerkraut with the meat, and toasting the bread properly.

Eating American food, in a solid conservative culture is glorious. Ah, you’ve got to love China.

Here is a traditional, and typical, Chinese housewife.

In traditional societies, such as China, and America 50-years ago, the household is run traditionally. The man, as the head of the household, would go work and earn money and give all the money to the wife to budget. The wife, would be in-charge of finance, budgeting, and all domestic matters including raising the children and educating them.

Traditional housewife
Vintage American advertisement depicting an American housewife cooking for her family. This is sadly no longer part of the American cultural scene. However, in nations that do not engage in non-stop wars, they still do maintain traditional roles. This means that his scene, with minor cultural differences, can be seen all over China.

This relic still exists in China, though it has been modified to some degree by the necessities of modern life. For in China, multi-generational households run traditional, and conservative is the norm.

Here we have a housewife showing show she cooks delicious and nutritious meals for her family. So that when the husband gets home from work, and the children come home from school, this is what they can look forward to eating…

Anyways, and the big point that I would like to underline is very simple. Food is the way to people’s heart. Maybe the world has treated you poorly. Maybe you have problems. Maybe you are lonely. Maybe nothing is going well…

Share a meal with a friend.

If you can make it yourself, do so. It will cost less and you will be able to enjoy it within the privacy of your own home. Oh, and don’t skimp on the beer. There is nothing worse than cheap beer. Get the good stuff and enjoy it with your friends.

Here’s a steak grilled cheese to get you inspired.

Delicious steak grilled cheese sandwich. It goes great with a nice hot creamy soup and icy frosty beer.
Delicious steak grilled cheese sandwich. It goes great with a nice hot creamy soup and icy frosty beer. After a hard day at work, wouldn’t you just love to come home to a loving family and this waiting for you at the table? Most men would.

Conclusion

The truth and the fact is that most men that I know would be willing to give 100% of everything that he earns, if his wife uses it to make a solid, well taken cared for, household. FACT.

It is the progressive liberal socialist reality that says otherwise. In that reality it is one where there are no roles, no rules, and no structure. People come together, or not. Build a family or not. Divorce and find others, or not. It just doesn’t matter. There is no glue, or any thing of substance to keep the family together.

I urge everyone to revisit a traditional family arrangement. It will mean less income, but a much… much higher standard of living.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

Posts about the Changes in America

America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.

Parable about America
What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6
Civil War
The Warning Signs
r/K selection theory
Line in the sand
A second passport
Link
Make America Great Again.
What would the founders think?

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.
The Rule of Eight
Types of American conservatives.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
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Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.

Articles & Links

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  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.

This is a wonderful story. It is great “escapist reading”, and has some very significant deeper elements.

''there were things that were right and others that were wrong and it was not just a matter of where you were. He felt this with an inner conviction too deep to be influenced by Sam’s cheerful cynicism.''

 This ''inner conviction'' places Heinlein's work apart. Morality can't be proved. We must be convinced.

 This reflective, thoughtful, wondering threads it's way throughout. Who hasn't pondered -

 'Is morality adjustable?
 Who says what is right?
 How can I know for sure?
 Should I forgive myself or punish myself?'

 Presented so skillfully, so warmly, I have returned to Max several times in over five decades. I still tear up each visit.

 Max is disclosing his deception -

 “I was always explaining—in my mind of course, why I did it, justifying myself, pointing out that the system was at fault, not me. Now I don’t want to justify myself. Not that I regret it, not when I think what I would have missed. But I don’t want to duck out of paying for it, either.”
 
Walther nodded. 

“That sounds like a healthy attitude. Captain, no code is perfect. A man must conform with judgment and commonsense, not with blind obedience. I’ve broken rules; some violations I paid for, some I didn’t. This mistake you made could have turned you into a moralistic prig, a ‘Regulation Charlie’ determined to walk the straight and narrow and to see that everyone else obeyed the letter of the law. Or it could have made you a permanent infant who thinks rules are for everyone but him. It doesn’t seem to have had either effect; I think it has matured you.”

 Keen insight.

 Another theme is the proper use and abuse of authority. Government regulations -

 ''You don’t believe in anarchy, surely? Our whole society is founded on entrusting grave secrets only to those who are worthy.''

 Government protects you -

 When the idea soaked in, Max was shocked.
 “But they put you in jail for that!”
 “Where do you think you are now?”
 “Well, I’m not in jail. And I don’t want to be.”
 “This whole planet is one big jail, and a crowded one at that.''

 Security vs Liberty, a question that all face and choose their answer.
 And yet (this is what makes Heinlein fascinating) he is not defiant or disrespectful to authority.

 Explains why Max must agree to be Captain . . .

 Mr. Samuels said quietly,

 “I don’t agree with the Chief Engineer about the unimportance of legal aspects; most of these laws have wise reasons behind them. But I agree with what else he says. Mr. Jones, a ship is not just steel, it is a delicate political entity. Its laws and customs cannot be disregarded without inviting disaster.’’

 This deep respect for law and legality drive this story. The dangerous curves are when ‘law’ has to be superseded by ‘legal principles’.
 When? Why? How? Well . .
 .
 “It will be far easier to maintain morale and discipline in this ship with a young captain—with all his officers behind him—than it would be to let passengers and crew suspect that the man who must make the crucial decisions, those life-and-death matters involving the handling of the ship, that this all-powerful man nevertheless can’t be trusted to command the ship. No, sir, such a situation would frighten me; that is how mutinies are born.”

 This is deep trust in authority.

 However, this power is used to help others, not the captain.
 The respect is earned and willingly given.

 What a lesson!

 Heinlein presents this growing and searching - to submit, defy, accept and use authority in this work. Wonderful!

-Amazon product review by Clay Garner

THE TOMAHAWK

Max liked this time of day, this time of year. With the crops in, he could finish his evening chores early and be lazy. When he had slopped the hogs and fed the chickens, instead of getting supper he followed a path to a rise west of the barn and lay down in the grass, unmindful of chiggers. He had a book with him that he had drawn from the county library last Saturday, Bonforte’s Sky Beasts: A Guide to Exotic Zoology, but he tucked it under his head as a pillow. A blue jay made remarks about his honesty, then shut up when he failed to move. A red squirrel sat on a stump and stared at him, then went on burying nuts.

Max kept his eyes to the northwest. He favored this spot because from it he could see the steel stilts and guide rings of the Chicago, Springfield, & Earthport Ring Road emerge from a slash in the ridge to his right. There was a guide ring at the mouth of the cut, a great steel hoop twenty feet high. A pair of

stilt-like tripods supported another ring a hundred feet out from the cut. A third and last ring, its stilts more than a hundred feet high to keep it level with the others, lay west of him where the ground dropped still more sharply into the valley below. Half way up it he could see the power-link antenna pointing across the gap.

On his left the guides of the C.S.&E. picked up again on the far side of the gap. The entering ring was larger to allow for maximum windage deviation; on its stilts was the receptor antenna for the power link. That ridge was steeper; there was only one more ring before the road disappeared into a tunnel. He had read that, on the Moon, entrance rings were no larger than pass-along rings, since there was never any wind to cause variation in ballistic. When he was a child this entrance ring had been slightly smaller and, during an unprecedented windstorm, a train had struck the ring and produced an unbelievable wreck, with more than four hundred people killed. He had not seen it and his father had not allowed him to poke around afterwards because of the carnage, but the scar of it could still be seen on the lefthand ridge, a

darker green than the rest.

He watched the trains go by whenever possible, not wishing the passengers any bad luck—but still, if there should happen to be a catastrophe, he didn’t want to miss it.

Max kept his eyes fixed on the cut; the Tomahawk was due any instant. Suddenly there was a silver gleam, a shining cylinder with needle nose burst out of the cut, flashed through the last ring and for a breathless moment was in free trajectory between the ridges. Almost before he could swing his eyes the projectile entered the ring across the gap and disappeared into the hillside—just as the sound hit him.

It was a thunderclap that bounced around the hills. Max gasped for air. “Boy!” he said softly. “Boy, oh boy!” The incredible sight and the impact on his ears always affected him the same way. He had heard that for the passengers the train was silent, with the sound trailing them, but he did not know; he had never ridden a train and it seemed unlikely, with Maw and the farm to take care of, that he ever would.

He shifted to a sitting position and opened his book, holding it so that he would be aware of the southwestern sky. Seven minutes after the passing of the Tomahawk he should be able to see, on a clear evening, the launching orbit of the daily Moonship. Although much father away and much less dramatic than the nearby jump of the ring train it was this that he had come to see. Ring trains were all right, but spaceships were his love—even a dinky like the moon shuttle.

But he had just found his place, a description of the intelligent but phlegmatic crustaceans of Epsilon Ceti IV, when he was interrupted by a call behind him. “Oh, Maxie! Maximilian! Max… mil… yan!”

He held still and said nothing.

“Max! I can see you, Max—you come at once, hear me?”

He muttered to himself and got to his feet. He moved slowly down the path, watching the sky over his shoulder until the barn cut off his view. Maw was back and that was that—she’d make his life miserable if he didn’t come in and help. When she had left that morning he had had the impression that she would be gone overnight—not that she had said so; she never did—but he had learned to read the signs. Now he would have to listen to her complaints and her petty gossip when he wanted to read, or just as bad, be disturbed by the slobbering stereovision serials she favored. He had often been tempted to sabotage the pesky SV set—by rights with an ax! He hardly ever got to see the programs he liked.

When he got in sight of the house he stopped suddenly. He had supposed that Maw had ridden the bus from the Corners and walked up the draw as usual. But there was a sporty little unicycle standing near the stoop—and there was someone with her.

He had thought at first it was a “foreigner”—but when he got closer he recognized the man. Max would rather have seen a foreigner, any foreigner. Biff Montgomery was a hillman but he didn’t work a farm; Max couldn’t remember having seen him do any honest work. He had heard it said that Montgomery sometimes hired out as a guard when one of the moonshine stills back in the hills was operating and it might be so—Montgomery was a big, beefy man and the part might fit him.

Max had known Montgomery as long as he could remember, seen him loafing around Clyde’s Corners. But he had ordinarily given him “wagon room” and had had nothing to do with him—until lately: Maw had started being seen with him, even gone to barn dances and huskings with him. Max had tried to tell her that Dad wouldn’t have liked it. But you couldn’t argue with Maw—what she didn’t like she just didn’t hear.

But this was the first time she had ever brought him to the house. Max felt a slow burn of anger starting in

him.

“Hurry up, Maxie!” Maw called out. “Don’t stand there like a dummy.” Max reluctantly moved along and joined them. Maw said, “Maxie, shake hands with your new father,” then looked roguish, as if she had said something witty. Max stared and his mouth sagged open.

Montgomery grinned and stuck out a hand. “Yep, Max, you’re Max Montgomery now—I’m your new pop. But you can call me Monty.”

Max stared at the hand, took it briefly. “My name is Jones,” he said flatly. “Maxie!” protested Maw.

Montgomery laughed jovially. “Don’t rush him, Nellie my love. Let Max get used to it. Live and let live; that’s my motto.” He turned to his wife. “Half a mo’, while I get the baggage.” From one saddlebag of the unicycle he extracted a wad of mussed clothing; from the other, two flat pint bottles. Seeing Max watching him he winked and said, “A toast for the bride.”

His bride was standing by the door; he started to brush on past her. She protested, “But Monty darling, aren’t you going to—”

Montgomery stopped. “Oh. I haven’t much experience in these things. Sure.” He turned to Max—”Here, take the baggage”—and shoved bottles and clothes at him. Then he swung her up in his arms, grunting a bit, and carried her over the threshold, put her down and kissed her while she squealed and blushed.

Max silently followed them, put the items on the table and turned to the stove. It was cold, he had not used it since breakfast. There was an electric range but it had burned out before his father had died and there had never been money to repair it. He took out his pocket knife, made shavings, added kindling and touched the heap with an Everlite. When it flared up he went out to fetch a pail of water.

When he came back Montgomery said, “Wondered where you’d gone. Doesn’t this dump even have running water?”

“No.” Max set the pail down, then added a couple of chunks of cord wood to the fire. His Maw said, “Maxie, you should have had dinner ready.”

Montgomery interceded pleasantly with, “Now, my dear, he didn’t know we were coming. And it leaves time for a toast.” Max kept his back to them, giving his full attention to slicing side meat. The change was so overwhelming that he had not had time to take it in.

Montgomery called to him. “Here, son! Drink your toast to the bride.” “I’ve got to get supper.”

“Nonsense! Here’s your glass. Hurry up.”

Montgomery had poured a finger of amber liquid into the glass; his own glass was half full and that of his bride at least a third. Max accepted it and went to the pail, thinned it with a dipper of water.

“You’ll ruin it.”

“I’m not used to it.”

“Oh, well. Here’s to the blushing bride—and our happy family! Bottoms up!”

Max took a cautious sip and put it down. It tasted to him like the bitter tonic the district nurse had given him one spring. He turned back to his work, only to be interrupted again. “Hey, you didn’t finish it.”

“Look, I got to cook. You don’t want me to burn supper, do you?”

Montgomery shrugged. “Oh, well—the more for the rest of us. We’ll use yours for a chaser. Sonny boy, when I was your age I could empty a tumbler neat and then stand on my hands.”

Max had intended to sup on side meat and warmed-over biscuits, but there was only half a pan left of the biscuits. He scrambled eggs in the grease of the side meat, brewed coffee, and let it go at that. When they sat down Montgomery looked at it and announced, “My dear, starting tomorrow I’ll expect you to live up to what you told me about your cooking. Your boy isn’t much of a cook.” Nevertheless he ate heartily. Max decided not to tell him that he was a better cook than Maw—he’d find out soon enough.

Presently Montgomery sat back and wiped his mouth, then poured himself more coffee and lighted a cigar. Maw said, “Maxie, dear, what’s the dessert?”

“Dessert? Well—there’s that ice cream in the freezer, left over from Solar Union Day.” She looked vexed. “Oh, dear! I’m afraid it’s not there.”

“Huh?”

“Well, I’m afraid I sort of ate it one afternoon when you were out in the south field. It was an awfully hot day.”

Max did not say anything, he was unsurprised. But she was not content to leave it. “You didn’t fix any dessert, Max? But this is a special occasion.”

Montgomery took his cigar out of his mouth. “Stow it, my dear,” he said kindly. “I’m not much for sweets, I’m a meat-and-potatoes man—sticks to the ribs. Let’s talk of pleasanter things.” He turned to Max. “Max, what can you do besides farm?”

Max was startled. “Huh? I’ve never done anything else. Why?”

Montgomery touched the ash of the cigar to his plate. “Because you are all through farming.”

For the second time in two hours Max had more change than he could grasp. “Why? What do you mean?”

“Because we’ve sold the farm.”

Max felt as if he had had a rug jerked out from under him. But he could tell from Maw’s face that it was true. She looked the way she always did when she had put one over on him—triumphant and slightly apprehensive.

“Dad wouldn’t like that,” he said to her harshly. “This land has been in our family for four hundred years.”

“Now, Maxie! I’ve told you I don’t know how many times that I wasn’t cut out for a farm. I was city raised.”

“Clyde’s Corners! Some city!”

“It wasn’t a farm. And I was just a young girl when your father brought me here—you were already a big boy. I’ve still got my life before me. I can’t live it buried on a farm.”

Max raised his voice. “But you promised Dad you’d…”

“Stow it,” Montgomery said firmly. “And keep a civil tongue in your head when you speak to your mother—and to me.”

Max shut up.

“The land is sold and that’s that. How much do you figure this parcel is worth?” “Why, I’ve never thought about it.”

“Whatever you thought, I got more.” He gave Max a wink. “Yes, sir! It was a lucky day for your mother and you when she set her cap for me. I’m a man with his ear to the ground. I knew why an agent was around buying up these worn-out, worthless pieces of property. I…”

“I use government fertilizers.”

“Worthless I said and worthless I meant. For farming, that is.” He put his finger along his nose, looked sly, and explained. It seemed that some big government power project was afoot for which this area had been selected—Montgomery was mysterious about it, from which Max concluded that he didn’t know very much. A syndicate was quietly buying up land in anticipation of government purchase. “So we held ’em up for five times what they expected to pay. Pretty good, huh?”

Maw put in, “You see, Maxie? If your father had known that we would ever get…” “Quiet, Nellie!”

“But I was just going to tell him how much…” “‘Quiet!’ I said.”

She shut up. Montgomery pushed his chair back, stuck his cigar in his mouth, and got up. Max put water on to heat for the dishes, scraped the plates and took the leavings out to the chickens. He stayed out quite a spell, looking at the stars and trying to think. The idea of having Biff Montgomery in the family shook him to his bones. He wondered just what rights a stepfather had, or, rather a step-stepfather, a man who had married his stepmother. He didn’t know.

Presently he decided that he had to go back inside, much as he hated to. He found Montgomery standing at the bookshelf he had built over the stereo receiver; the man was pawing at the books and had piled several on the receiver. He looked around. “You back? Stick around, I want you to tell me about the live stock.”

Maw appeared in the doorway. “Darling,” she said to Montgomery, “can’t that wait till morning?”

“Don’t be in a hurry, my dear,” he answered. “That auctioneer fellow will be here early. I’ve got to have the inventory ready.” He continued to pull books down. “Say, these are pretty things.” He held in his hands half a dozen volumes, printed on the finest of thin paper and bound in limp plastic. “I wonder what they’re worth? Nellie, hand me my specs.”

Max advanced hastily, reached for them. “Those are mine!”

“Huh?” Montgomery glanced at him, then held the books high in the air. “You’re too young to own anything. No, everything goes. A clean sweep and a fresh start.”

“They’re mine! My uncle gave them to me.” He appealed to his mother. “Tell him, Maw.”

Montgomery said quietly, “Yes, Nellie, set this youngster straight—before I have to correct him.” Nellie looked worried. “Well, I don’t rightly know. They did belong to Chet.”

“And Chet was your brother? Then you’re Chet’s heir, not this young cub.” “He wasn’t her brother, he was her brother-in-law!”

“So? No matter. Your father was your uncle’s heir, then, and your mother is your father’s heir. Not you, you’re a minor. That’s the law, son. Sorry.” He put the books on the shelf but remained standing in front of them.

Max felt his right upper lip begin to twitch uncontrollably; he knew that he would not be able to talk coherently. His eyes filled with tears of rage so that he could hardly see. “You… you thief!”

Nellie let out a squawk. “Max!”

Montgomery’s face became coldly malignant. “Now you’ve gone too far. I’m afraid you’ve earned a taste of the strap.” His fingers started unbuckling his heavy belt.

Max took a step backward. Montgomery got the belt loose and took a step forward. Nellie squealed, “Monty! Please!”

“Keep out of this, Nellie.” To Max he said, “We might as well get it settled once and for all who is boss around here. Apologize!”

Max did not answer. Montgomery repeated, “Apologize, and we’ll say no more about it.” He twitched the belt like a cat lashing its tail. Max took another step back; Montgomery stepped forward and grabbed at him.

Max ducked and ran out the open door into darkness. He did not stop until he was sure that Montgomery was not following. Then he caught his breath, still raging. He was almost sorry that Montgomery had not chased him; he didn’t think that anyone could match him on his home grounds in the dark. He knew where the wood pile was; Montgomery didn’t. He knew where the hog wallow was.

Yes, he knew where the well was—even that.

It was a long time before he quieted down enough to think rationally. When he did, he was glad it had ended so easily, Montgomery outweighed him a lot and was reputed to be a mean one in a fight.

If it had ended, he corrected. He wondered if Montgomery would decide to forget it by morning. The light was still on in the living room; he took shelter in the barn and waited, sitting down on the dirt floor and leaning against the planks. After a while he felt terribly tired. He considered sleeping in the barn but there was no fit place to lie down, even though the old mule was dead. Instead he got up and looked at the house.

The light was out in the living room, but he could see a light in the bedroom; they were still awake, surely. Someone had closed the outer door after his flight; it did not lock so there was no difficulty getting in, but he was afraid that Montgomery might hear him. His own room was a shed added at the kitchen end of the main room, opposite the bedroom, but it had no outside door.

No matter—he had solved that problem when he had first grown old enough to wish to get in and out at night without consulting his elders. He crept around the house, found the saw horse, placed it under his window, got on and wiggled loose the nail that held the window. A moment later he stepped silently down into his own room. The door to the main part of the house was closed but he decided not to risk

switching on the light; Montgomery might take it into his head to come out into the living room and see a crack of light under his door. He slipped quietly out of his clothes and crawled into his cot.

Sleep wouldn’t come. Once he began to feel that warm drowsiness, then some tiny noise had brought him wide, stiff awake. Probably just a mouse—but for an instant he had thought that Montgomery was standing over his bed. With his heart pounding, he sat up on the edge of his cot, still in his skin.

Presently he faced up to the problem of what he was to do—not just for the next hour, not just tomorrow morning, but the following morning and all the mornings after that. Montgomery alone presented no problem; he would not voluntarily stay in the same county with the man. But how about Maw?

His father had told him, when he had known that he was dying, “Take care of your mother, son.” Well, he had done so. He had made a crop every year—food in the house and a little money, even if things had been close. When the mule died, he had made do, borrowing McAllister’s team and working it out in labor.

But had Dad meant that he had to take care of his stepmother even if she remarried? It had never occurred to him to consider it. Dad had told him to look out for her and he had done so, even though it had put a stop to school and did not seem to have any end to it.

But she was no longer Mrs. Jones but Mrs. Montgomery. Had Dad meant for him to support Mrs. Montgomery?

Of course not! When a woman married, her husband supported her. Everybody knew that. And Dad wouldn’t expect him to put up with Montgomery. He stood up, his mind suddenly made up.

The only question was what to take with him.

There was little to take. Groping in the dark he found the rucksack he used for hunting hikes and stuffed into it his other shirt and his socks. He added Uncle Chet’s circular astrogation slide rule and the piece of volcanic glass his uncle had brought back for him from the Moon. His citizen’s identification card, his toothbrush, and his father’s razor—not that he needed that very often—about completed the plunder.

There was a loose board back of his cot. He felt for it, pulled it out and groped between the studs—found nothing. He had been hiding a little money from time to time against a rainy day, as Maw couldn’t or wouldn’t save. But apparently she had found it on one of her snooping tours. Well, he still had to leave; it just made it a little more difficult.

He took a deep breath. There was something he must get… Uncle Chet’s books… and they were still (presumably) on the shelf against the wall common with the bedroom. But he had to get them, even at the risk of meeting Montgomery.

Cautiously, most slowly, he opened the door into the living room, stood there with sweat pouring down him. There was still a crack of light under the bedroom door and he hesitated, almost unable to force himself to go on. He heard Montgomery muttering something and Maw giggle.

As his eyes adjusted he could see by the faint light leaking out under the bedroom door something piled at the outer door. It was a deadfall alarm of pots and pans, sure to make a dreadful clatter if the door were opened. Apparently Montgomery had counted on him coming back and expected to be ready to take care of him. He was very glad that he had sneaked in the window.

No use putting it off—he crept across the floor, mindful of the squeaky board near the table. He could not see but he could feel and the volumes were known to his fingers. Carefully he slid them out, being

sure not to knock over the others.

He was all the way back to his own door when he remembered the library book. He stopped in sudden panic.

He couldn’t go back. They might hear him this time—or Montgomery might get up for a drink of water or something.

But in his limited horizon, the theft of a public library book—or failure to return it, which was the same thing—was, if not a mortal sin, at least high on the list of shameful crimes. He stood there, sweating and thinking about it.

Then he went back, the whole long trek, around the squeaky board and tragically onto one he had not remembered. He froze after he hit it, but apparently it had not alarmed the couple in the room beyond. At last he was leaning over the SV receiver and groping at the shelf.

Montgomery, in pawing the books, had changed their arrangement. One after another he had to take them down and try to identify it by touch, opening each and feeling for the perforations on the title page.

It was the fourth one he handled. He got back to his room hurrying slowly, unbearably anxious but afraid to move fast. There at last, he began to shake and had to wait until it wore off. He didn’t chance closing his door but got into his clothes in the dark. Moments later he crept through his window, found the saw horse with his toe, and stepped quietly to the ground.

His shoes were stuffed on top of the books in his rucksack; he decided to leave them there until he was well clear of the house, rather than chance the noise he might make with his feet shod. He swung wide around the house and looked back. The bedroom light was still on; he started to angle down toward the road when he noticed Montgomery’s unicycle. He stopped.

If he continued he would come to the road the bus passed along. Whether he turned right or left there, Montgomery would have a fifty-fifty chance of catching him on the unicycle. Having no money he was dependent on Shank’s ponies to put distance under him; he could not take the bus.

Shucks! Montgomery wouldn’t try to fetch him back. He would say good riddance and forget him!

But the thought fretted him. Suppose Maw urged him? Suppose Montgomery wouldn’t forget an insult and would go to any trouble to “get even”?

He headed back, still swinging wide of the house, and cut across the slopes toward the right of way of the C.S.&E.

Good Samaritan

He wished for a light, but its lack did not bother him much. He knew this country, every slope, almost every tree. He stayed high, working along the hillside, until he reached the exit ring where the trains jumped the gap, and there he came out on the road used by the ring road’s maintenance crews. He sat down and put on his shoes.

The maintenance road was no more than a track cut through trees; it was suited to tractor treads but not

to wheels. But it led down across the gap and up to where the ring road disappeared in the tunnel through the far ridge. He followed it, making good time in the born mountaineer’s easy, loose-jointed walk.

Seventy minutes later he was across the gap and passing under the entrance ring. He went on until he was near the ring that marked the black entrance to the tunnel. He stopped at what he judged to be a safe distance and considered his chances.

The ridge was high, else the rings would have been built in a cut rather than a tunnel. He had often hunted on it and knew that it would take two hours to climb it—in daylight. But the maintenance road ran right through the hill, under the rings. If he followed it, he could go through in ten or fifteen minutes.

Max had never been through the ridge. Legally it was trespass—not that that bothered him, he was trespassing now. Occasionally a hog or a wild animal would wander into the tunnel and be trapped there when a train hurtled through. They died, instantly and without a scratch. Once Max had spotted the carcass of a fox just inside the tunnel and had ducked in and salvaged it. There were no marks on it, but when he skinned it he found that it was a mass of tiny hemorrhages. Several years earlier a man had been caught inside; the maintenance crew brought out the body.

The tunnel was larger than the rings but no larger than necessary to permit the projectile to ride ahead of its own reflected shock wave. Anything alive in the tunnel could not avoid the wave; that unbearable thunderclap, painful at a distance, was so loaded with energy as to be quick death close up.

But Max did not want to climb the ridge; he went over the evening schedule of trains in his mind. The Tomahawk was the one he had watched at sundown; the Javelin he had heard while he was hiding in the barn. The Assegai must have gone by quite a while ago though he didn’t remember hearing it; that left only the midnight Cleaver. He then looked at the sky.

Venus had set, of course, but he was surprised to see Mars still in the west. The Moon had not risen. Let’s see—full moon was last Wednesday. Surely…

The answer he got seemed wrong, so he checked himself by taking a careful eyesight of Vega and compared it with what the Big Dipper told him. Then he whistled softly—despite everything that had happened it was only ten o’clock, give or take five minutes; the stars could not be wrong. In which case the Assegai was not due for another three-quarters of an hour. Except for the faint chance of a special train he had plenty of time.

He headed into the tunnel. He had not gone fifty yards before he began to be sorry and a bit panicky; it was as dark as a sealed coffin. But the going was much easier as the bore was lined to permit smooth shockwave reflections. He had been on his way several minutes, feeling each step but hurrying, when his eyes, adjusting to complete darkness, made out a faint grey circle far ahead. He broke into a trot and then into a dead run as his fear of the place piled up.

He reached the far end with throat burned dry and heart laboring; there he plunged downhill regardless of the sudden roughening of his path as he left the tunnel and hit the maintenance track. He did not slow up until he stood under stilt supports so high that the ring above looked small. There he stood still and fought to catch his breath.

He was slammed forward and knocked off his feet.

He picked himself up groggily, eventually remembered where he was and realized that he had been knocked cold. There was blood on one cheek and his hands and elbows were raw. It was not until he noticed these that he realized what had happened; a train had passed right over him.

It had not been close enough to kill, but it had been close enough to blast him off his feet. It could not have been the Assegai; he looked again at the stars and confirmed it. No, it must have been a special—and he had beaten it out of the tunnel by about a minute.

He began to shake and it was minutes before he pulled himself together, after which he started down the maintenance road as fast as his bruised body could manage. Presently he became aware of an odd fact; the night was silent.

But night is never silent. His ears, tuned from babyhood to the sounds and signs of his hills, should have heard an endless pattern of little night noises—wind in the leaves, the scurrying of his small cousins, tree frogs, calls of insects, owls.

By brutal logic he concluded correctly that he could not hear—”deef as a post”—the shock wave had left him deaf. But there was no way to help it, so he went on; it did not occur to him to return home. At the bottom of this draw, where the stilts were nearly three hundred feet high, the maintenance road crossed a farm road. He turned down hill onto it, having accomplished his first purpose of getting into territory where Montgomery would be less likely to look for him. He was in another watershed now; although still only a few miles from home, nevertheless by going through the ridge he had put himself into a different neighborhood.

He continued downhill for a couple of hours. The road was hardly more than a cart track but it was easier than the maintenance road. Somewhere below, when the hills gave way to the valley where the “foreigners” lived, he would find the freight highway that paralleled the ring road on the route to Earthport—Earthport being his destination although he had only foggy plans as to what he would do when he got there.

The Moon was behind him now and he made good time. A rabbit hopped onto the road ahead, sat up and stared, then skittered away. Seeing it, he regretted not having brought along his squirrel gun. Sure, it was worn out and not worth much and lately it had gotten harder and harder to buy the slugs thrown by the obsolete little weapon—but rabbit in the pot right now would go mighty nice, mighty nice! He realized that he was not only weary but terribly hungry. He had just picked at his supper and it looked like he’d breakfast on his upper lip.

Shortly his attention was distracted from hunger to a ringing in his ears, a ringing that got distressingly worse. He shook his head and pounded his ears but it did not help; he had to make up his mind to ignore it. After another half mile or so he suddenly noticed that he could hear himself walking. He stopped dead, then clapped his hands together. He could hear them smack, cutting through the phantom ringing. With a lighter heart he went on.

At last he came out on a shoulder that overlooked the broad valley. In the moonlight he could make out the sweep of the freight highway leading southwest and could detect, he thought, its fluorescent traffic guide lines. He hurried on down.

He was nearing the highway and could hear the rush of passing freighters when he spotted a light ahead. He approached it cautiously, determined that it was neither vehicle nor farm house. Closer approach showed it to be a small open fire, visible from uphill but shielded from the highway by a shoulder of limestone. A man was squatting over it, stirring the contents of a can resting on rocks over the fire.

Max crept nearer until he was looking down into the hobo jungle. He got a whiff of the stew and his mouth watered. Caught between hunger and a hillman’s ingrown distrust of “foreigners” he lay still and stared. Presently the man set the can off the fire and called out, “Well, don’t hide there! Come on down.”

Max was too startled to answer. The man added, “Come on down into the light. I won’t fetch it up to

you.”

Max got to his feet and shuffled down into the circle of firelight. The man looked up. “Howdy. Draw up a chair.”

“Howdy.” Max sat down across the fire from the tramp. He was not even as well dressed as Max and he needed a shave. Nevertheless he wore his rags with a jaunty air and handled himself with a sparrow’s cockiness.

The man continued to stir the mess in the can then spooned out a sample, blew on it, and tasted it. “About right,” he announced. “Four-day mulligan, just getting ripe. Find yourself a dish.” He got up and picked over a pile of smaller cans behind him, selected one. Max hesitated, then did the same, settling on one that had once contained coffee and appeared not to have been used since. His host served him a liberal portion of stew, then handed him a spoon. Max looked at it.

“If you don’t trust the last man who used it,” the man said reasonably, “hold it in the fire, then wipe it. Me, I don’t worry. If a bug bites me, he dies horribly.” Max took the advice, holding the spoon in the flames until the handle became too hot, then wiped it on his shirt.

The stew was good and his hunger made it superlative. The gravy was thick, there were vegetables and unidentified meat. Max didn’t bother his head about the pedigrees of the materials; he simply enjoyed it. After a while his host said, “Seconds?”

“Huh? Sure. Thanks!”

The second can of stew filled him up and spread through his tissues a warm glow of well-being. He stretched lazily, enjoying his fatigue. “Feel better?” the man asked.

“Gee, yes. Thanks.”

“By the way, you can call me Sam.” “Oh, my name is Max.”

“Glad to know you, Max.”

Max waited before raising a point that had been bothering him. “Uh, Sam? How did you know I was there? Did you hear me?”

Sam grinned. “No. But you were silhouetted against the sky. Don’t ever do that, kid, or it may be the last thing you do.”

Max twisted around and looked up at where he had lurked. Sure enough, Sam was right. He’d be dogged!

Sam added, “Traveled far?” “Huh? Yeah, quite a piece.” “Going far?”

“Uh, pretty far, I guess.”

Sam waited, then said, “Think your folks’ll miss you?”

“Huh? How did you know?”

“That you had run away from home? Well, you have, haven’t you?” “Yeah. Yeah, I guess I have.”

“You looked beat when you dragged in here. Maybe it’s not too late to kill the goose before your bridges are burned. Think about it, kid. It’s rough on the road. I know.”

“Go back? I won’t ever go back!” “As bad as that?”

Max stared into the fire. He needed badly to get his thoughts straight, even if it meant telling a foreigner his private affairs—and this soft-spoken stranger was easy to talk to. “See here, Sam, did you ever have a stepmother?”

“Eh? Can’t remember that I ever had any. The Central Jersey Development Center for State Children used to kiss me good night.”

“Oh.” Max blurted out his story with an occasional sympathetic question from Sam to straighten out its confusion. “So I lit out,” he concluded. “There wasn’t anything else to do. Was there?”

Sam pursed his lips. “I reckon not. This double stepfather of yours—he sounds like a mouse studying to be a rat. You’re well shut of him.”

“You don’t think they’ll try to find me and haul me back, do you?”

Sam stopped to put a piece of wood on the fire. “I am not sure about that.”

“Huh? Why not? I’m no use to him. He doesn’t like me. And Maw won’t care, not really. She may whine a bit, but she won’t turn her hand.”

“Well, there’s the farm.”

“The farm? I don’t care about that, not with Dad gone. Truthfully, it ain’t much. You break your back trying to make a crop. If the Food Conservation Act hadn’t forbidden owners to let farm land fall out of use, Dad would have quit farming long ago. It would take something like this government condemnation to make it possible to find anybody to take it off your hands.”

“That’s what I mean. This joker got your mother to sell it. Now my brand of law may not be much good, but it looks as if that money ought to come to you.”

“What? Oh, I don’t care about the money. I just want to get away from them.”

“Don’t talk that way about money; the powers-that-be will have you shut up for blasphemy. But it probably doesn’t matter how you feel, as I think Citizen Montgomery is going to want to see you awful bad.”

“Why?”

“Did your father leave a will?”

“No. Why? He didn’t have anything to leave but the farm.”

“I don’t know the ins and outs of your state laws, but it’s a sure thing that at least half of that farm belongs to you. Possibly your stepmother has only lifetime tenure in her half, with reversion to you when she dies. But it’s a certainty that she can’t grant a good deed without your signature. Along about time your county courthouse opens up tomorrow morning the buyers are going to find that out. Then they’ll come

high-tailing up, looking for her—and you. And ten minutes later this Montgomery hombre will start looking for you, if he hasn’t already.”

“Oh, me! If they find me, can they make me go back?” “Don’t let them find you. You’ve made a good start.”

Max picked up his rucksack. “I guess I had better get moving. Thanks a lot, Sam. Maybe I can help you someday.”

“Sit down.”

“Look, I had better get as far away as I can.”

“Kid, you’re tired out and your judgment has slipped. How far can you walk tonight, the shape you’re in? Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we’ll go down to the highway, follow it about a mile to the freighters’ restaurant south of here and catch the haulers as they come out from breakfast, feeling good. We’ll promote a ride and you’ll go farther in ten minutes than you could make all night.”

Max had to admit that he was tired, exhausted really, and Sam certainly knew more about these wrinkles than he did. Sam added, “Got a blanket in your bindle?”

“No. Just a shirt… and some books.”

“Books, eh? Read quite a bit myself, when I get a chance. May I see them?”

Somewhat reluctantly Max got them out. Sam held them close to the fire and examined them. “Well, I’ll be a three-eyed Martian! Kid, do you know what you’ve got here?”

“Sure.”

“But you ought not to have these. You’re not a member of the Astrogators’ Guild.” “No, but my uncle was. He was on the first trip to Beta Hydrae,” he added proudly. “No foolin’!”

“Sure as taxes.”

“But you’ve never been in space yourself? No, of course not.”

“But I’m going to be!” Max admitted something that he had never told anyone, his ambition to emulate his uncle and go out to the stars. Sam listened thoughtfully. When Max stopped, he said slowly, “So you want to be an astrogator?”

“I certainly do.”

Sam scratched his nose. “Look, kid, I don’t want to throw cold water, but you know how the world wags. Getting to be an astrogator is almost as difficult as getting into the Plumbers’ Guild. The soup is thin these days and there isn’t enough to go around. The guild won’t welcome you just because you are anxious to be apprenticed. Membership is hereditary, just like all the other high-pay guilds.”

“But my uncle was a member.” “Your uncle isn’t your father.”

“No, but a member who hasn’t any sons gets to nominate someone else. Uncle Chet explained it to me. He always told me he was going to register my nomination.”

“And did he?”

Max was silent. At the time his uncle had died he had been too young to know how to go about finding out. When his father had followed his uncle events had closed in on him—he had never checked up, subconsciously preferring to nurse the dream rather than test it. “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I’m going to the Mother Chapter at Earthport and find out.”

“Hmmm—I wish you luck, kid.” He stared into the fire, sadly it seemed to Max. “Well, I’m going to grab some shut-eye, and you had better do the same. If you’re chilly, you’ll find some truck back under that rock shelf—burlap and packing materials and such. It’ll keep you warm, if you don’t mind risking a flea or two.”

Max crawled into the dark hole indicated, found a half-way cave in the limestone. Groping, he located the primitive bedding. He had expected to be wakeful, but he was asleep before Sam finished covering the fire.

He was awakened by sunlight blazing outside. He crawled out, stood up and stretched the stiffness out of his limbs. By the sun he judged it to be about seven o’clock in the morning. Sam was not in sight. He looked around and shouted, not too loudly, and guessed that Sam had gone down to the creek for a drink and a cold wash. Max went back into the shelter and hauled out his rucksack, intending to change his socks.

His uncle’s books were missing.

There was a note on top of his spare shirt: “Dear Max,” it said, “There is more stew in the can. You can warm it up for breakfast. So long—Sam P.S. Sorry.”

Further search disclosed that his identification card was missing, but Sam had not bothered with his other pitiful possessions. Max did not touch the stew but set out down the road, his mind filled with bitter thoughts.

Earthport

The farm road crossed under the freight highway; Max came up on the far side and headed south beside the highway. The route was marked by “NO TRESPASS” signs but the path was well worn. The highway widened to make room for a deceleration strip. At the end of its smooth reach, a mile away, Max could see the restaurant Sam had mentioned.

He shinnied over the fence enclosing the restaurant and parking grounds and went to the parking stalls where a dozen of the big land ships were lined up. One was quivering for departure, its flat bottom a few inches clear of the metallic pavement. Max went to its front end and looked up at the driver’s

compartment. The door was open and he could see the driver at his instrument board. Max called out, “Hey, Mister!”

The driver stuck his head out. “What’s itching you?” “How are the chances of a lift south?”

“Beat it, kid.” The door slammed.

None of the other freighters was raised off the pavement; their control compartments were empty. Max was about to turn away when another giant scooted down the braking strip, reached the parking space, crawled slowly into a stall, and settled to the ground. He considered approaching its driver, but decided to wait until the man had eaten. He went back toward the restaurant building and was looking through the door, watching hungry men demolish food while his mouth watered, when he heard a pleasant voice at his shoulder.

“Excuse me, but you’re blocking the door.” Max jumped aside. “Oh! Sorry.”

“Go ahead. You were first.” The speaker was a man about ten years older than Max. He was profusely freckled and had a one-sided grin. Max saw on his cap the pin of the Teamsters’ Guild. “Go on in,” the man repeated, “before you get trampled in the rush.”

Max had been telling himself that he might catch Sam inside—and, after all, they couldn’t charge him just for coming in, if he didn’t actually eat anything. Underlying was the thought of asking to work for a meal, if the manager looked friendly. The freckled-faced man’s urging tipped the scales; he followed his nose toward the source of the heavenly odors pouring out the door.

The restaurant was crowded; there was one vacant table, for two. The man slid into a chair and said, “Sit down.” When Max hesitated, he added, “Go ahead, put it down. Never like to eat alone.” Max could feel the manager’s eyes on him, he sat down. A waitress handed them each a menu and the hauler looked her over appreciatively. When she left he said, “This dump used to have automatic service—and it went broke. The trade went to the Tivoli, eighty miles down the stretch. Then the new owner threw away the machinery and hired girls and business picked up. Nothing makes food taste better than having a pretty girl put it in front of you. Right?”

“Uh, I guess so. Sure.” Max had not heard what was said. He had seldom been in a restaurant and then only in the lunch counter at Clyde’s Corners. The prices he read frightened him; he wanted to crawl under the table.

His companion looked at him. “What’s the trouble, chum?” “Trouble? Uh, nothing.”

“You broke?” Max’s miserable expression answered him. “Shucks, I’ve been there myself. Relax.” The man waggled his fingers at the waitress. “Come here, honey chile. My partner and I will each have a breakfast steak with a fried egg sitting on top and this and that on the side. I want that egg to be just barely dead. If it is cooked solid, I’ll nail it to the wall as a warning to others. Understand me?”

“I doubt if you’ll be able to get a nail through it,” she retorted and walked away, swaying gently. The hauler kept his eyes on her until she disappeared into the kitchen. “See what I mean? How can machinery compete?”

The steak was good and the egg was not congealed. The hauler told Max to call him “Red” and Max gave his name in exchange. Max was pursuing the last of the yolk with a bit of toast and was considering whether it was time to broach the subject of a ride when Red leaned forward and spoke softly. “Max—you got anything pushing you? Free to take a job?”

“What? Why, maybe. What is it?” “Mind taking a little run southwest?”

“Southwest? Matter of fact, I was headin’ that way.”

“Good. Here’s the deal. The Man says we have to have two teamsters to each rig—or else break for eight hours after driving eight. I can’t; I’ve got a penalty time to meet—and my partner washed out. The flathead got taken drunk and I had to put him down to cool. Now I’ve got a check point to pass a hundred thirty miles down the stretch. They’ll make me lay over if I can’t show another driver.”

“Gee! But I don’t know how to drive, Red. I’m awful sorry.”

Red gestured with his cup. “You won’t have to. You’ll always be the off-watch driver. I wouldn’t trust little Molly Malone to somebody who didn’t know her ways. I’ll keep myself awake with Pep pills and catch up on sleep at Earthport.”

“You’re going all the way to Earthport?” “Right.”

“It’s a deal!”

“Okay, here’s the lash up. Every time we hit a check point you’re in the bunk, asleep. You help me load and unload—I’ve got a partial and a pick-up at Oke City—and I’ll feed you. Right?”

“Right!”

“Then let’s go. I want to scoot before these other dust jumpers get underway. Never can tell, there might be a spotter.” Red flipped a bill down and did not wait for change.

The Molly Malone was two hundred feet long and stream lined such that she had negative lift when cruising. This came to Max’s attention from watching the instruments; when she first quivered and raised, the dial marked ROAD CLEARANCE showed nine inches, but as they gathered speed down the acceleration strip it decreased to six.

“The repulsion works by an inverse-cube law,” Red explained. “The more the wind pushes us down the harder the road pushes us up. Keeps us from jumping over the skyline. The faster we go the steadier we are.”

“Suppose you went so fast that the wind pressure forced the bottom down to the road? Could you stop soon enough to keep from wrecking it?”

“Use your head. The more we squat the harder we are pushed up—inverse-cube, I said.”

“Oh.” Max got out his uncle’s slide rule. “If she just supports her own weight at nine inches clearance, then at three inches the repulsion would be twenty-seven times her weight and at an inch it would be seven hundred and twenty-nine, and at a quarter of an inch—”

“Don’t even think about it. At top speed I can’t get her down to five inches.”

“But what makes her go?”

“It’s a phase relationship. The field crawls forward and Molly tries to catch up—only she can’t. Don’t ask me the theory, I just push the buttons.” Red struck a cigarette and lounged back, one hand on the tiller. “Better get in the bunk, kid. Check point in forty miles.”

The bunk was thwartships abaft the control compartment, a shelf above the seat. Max climbed in and wrapped a blanket around himself. Red handed him a cap. “Pull this down over your eyes. Let the button show.” The button was a teamster’s shield, Max did as he was told.

Presently he heard the sound of wind change from a soft roar to a sigh and then stop. The freighter settled to the pavement and the door opened. He lay still, unable to see what was going on. A strange voice said, “How long you been herding it?”

“Since breakfast at Tony’s.”

“So? How did your eyes get so bloodshot?” “It’s the evil life I lead. Want to see my tongue?”

The inspector ignored this, saying instead, “Your partner didn’t sign his trick.” “Whatever you say. Want me to wake the dumb geek?”

“Umm… don’t bother. You sign for him. Tell him to be more careful.” “Right.”

The Molly Malone pulled out and picked up speed. Max crawled down. “I thought we were sunk when he asked for my signature.”

“That was on purpose,” Red said scornfully. “You have to give them something to yap about, or they’ll dig for it.”

Max liked the freighter. The tremendous speed so close to the ground exhilarated him; he decided that if he could not be a spaceman, this life would not be bad—he’d find out how high the application fee was and start saving. He liked the easy way Red picked out on the pavement ahead the speed line that matched the Molly’s speed and then laid the big craft into a curve. It was usually the outermost line, with the Molly on her side and the horizon tilted up at a crazy angle.

Near Oklahoma City they swooped under the ring guides of the C.S.&E. just as a train went over—the

Razor, by Max’s calculations. “I used to herd those things,” Red remarked, glancing up. “You did?”

“Yep. But they got to worrying me. I hated it every time I made a jump and felt the weight sag out from under me. Then I got a notion that the train had a mind of its own and was just waiting to turn aside instead of entering the next guide ring. That sort of thing is no good. So I found a teamster who wanted to better himself and paid the fine to both guilds to let us swap. Never regretted it. Two hundred miles an hour when you’re close to the ground is enough.”

“Uh, how about space ships?”

“That’s another matter. Elbow room out there. Say, kid, while you’re at Earthport you should take a look at the big babies. They’re quite something.”

The library book had been burning a hole in his rucksack; at Oklahoma City he noticed a postal box at the freight depot and, on impulse, dropped the book into it. After he had mailed it he had a twinge of worry that he might have given a clue to his whereabouts which would get back to Montgomery, but he suppressed the worry—the book had to be returned. Vagrancy in the eyes of the law had not worried him, nor trespass, nor impersonating a licensed teamster—but filching a book was a sin.

Max was asleep in the bunk when they arrived. Red shook him. “End of the line, kid.” Max sat up, yawning. “Where are we?”

“Earthport. Let’s shake a leg and get this baby unloaded.”

It was two hours past sunrise and growing desert hot by the time they got the Molly disgorged. Red stood him to a last meal. Red finished first, paid, then laid a bill down by Max’s plate. “Thanks, kid. That’s for luck. So long.” He was gone while Max still had his mouth hanging open. He had never learned his friend’s name, did not even know his shield number.

Earthport was much the biggest settlement Max had ever seen and everything about it confused him—the hurrying self-centered crowds, the enormous buildings, the slidewalks in place of streets, the noise, the desert sun beating down, the flatness—why, there wasn’t anything you could call a hill closer than the skyline!

He saw his first extra-terrestrial, an eight-foot native of Epsilon Gemini V, striding out of a shop with a package under his left arms—as casually, Max thought, as a farmer doing his week’s shopping at the Corners. Max stared. He knew what the creature was from pictures and SV shows, but seeing one was another matter. Its multiple eyes, like a wreath of yellow grapes around the head, gave it a grotesque faceless appearance. Max let his own head swivel to follow it.

The creature approached a policeman, tapped the top of his cap, and said, “Excuse me, sahr, but can you tirect me to the Tesert Palms Athletic Club?” Max could not tell where the noise came out.

Max finally noticed that he seemed to be the only one staring, so he walked slowly on, while sneaking looks over his shoulder—which resulted in his bumping into a stranger. “Oh, excuse me!” Max blurted. The stranger looked at him. “Take it easy, cousin. You’re in the big city now.” After that he tried to be careful.

He had intended to seek out the Guild Hall of the Mother Chapter of Astrogators at once in the forlorn hope that even without his books and identification card he might still identify himself and find that Uncle Chet had provided for his future. But there was so much to see that he loitered. He found himself presently in front of Imperial House, the hotel that guaranteed to supply any combination of pressure, temperature, lighting, atmosphere, pseudogravitation, and diet favored by any known race of intelligent creatures. He hung around hoping to see some of the guests, but the only one who came out while he was there was wheeled out in a pressurized travel tank and he could not see into it.

He noticed the police guard at the door eyeing him and started to move on—then decided to ask directions, reasoning that if it was all right for a Geminian to question a policeman it certainly must be all right for a human being. He found himself quoting the extra-terrestrial. “Excuse me, sir, but could you direct me to the Astrogators’ Guild Hall?”

The officer looked him over. “At the foot of the Avenue of Planets, just before you reach the port.” “Uh, which way do…”

“New in town?” “Yeah. Yes, sir.”

“Where are you staying?”

“Staying? Why, nowhere yet. I just got here. I…” “What’s your business at the Astrogators’ Hall?”

“It’s on account of my uncle,” Max answered miserably. “Your uncle?”

“He… he’s an astrogator.” He mentally crossed his fingers over the tense.

The policeman inspected again. “Take this slide to the next intersection, change and slide west. Big building with the guild sunburst over the door—can’t miss it. Stay out of restricted areas.” Max left without waiting to find out how he was to know a restricted area. The Guild Hall did prove easy to find; the slidewalk to the west ducked underground and when it emerged at its swing-around Max was deposited in front of it.

But he had not eyes for it. To the west where avenue and buildings ended was the field and on it space ships, stretching away for miles—fast little military darts, stubby Moon shuttles, winged ships that served the satellite stations, robot freighters, graceless and powerful. But directly in front of the gate hardly half a mile away was a great ship that he knew at once, the starship Asgard. He knew her history, Uncle Chet had served in her. A hundred years earlier she had been built out in space as a space-to-space rocket ship; she was then the Prince of Wales. Years passed, her tubes were ripped out and a mass-conversion torch was kindled in her; she became the Einstein. More years passed, for nearly twenty she swung empty around Luna, a lifeless, outmoded hulk. Now in place of the torch she had Horst-Conrad impellers that clutched at the fabric of space itself; thanks to them she was now able to touch Mother Terra. To commemorate her rebirth she had been dubbed Asgard, heavenly home of the gods.

Her massive, pear-shaped body was poised on its smaller end, steadied by an invisible scaffolding of thrust beams. Max knew where they must be, for there was a ring of barricades spotted around her to keep the careless from wandering into the deadly loci.

He pressed his nose against the gate to the field and tried to see more of her, until a voice called out, “Away from there, Jack! Don’t you see that sign?”

Max looked up. Above his head was a sign: RESTRICTED AREA. Reluctantly he moved away and walked back to the Guild Hall.

THE ASTROGATORS’ GUILD

Everything about the hall of the Mother Chapter was to Max’s eyes lavish, churchlike, and frightening. The great doors opened silently as he approached, dilating away into the walls. His feet made no sound on the tesselated floor. He started down the long, high foyer, wondering where he should go, when a firm voice stopped him. “May I help you, please?”

He turned. A beautiful young lady with a severe manner held him with her eye. She was seated behind a desk. Max went up to her. “Uh, maybe you could tell me, Ma’am, who I ought to see. I don’t rightly know just…”

“One moment. Your name, please?” Several minutes later she had wormed out of him the basic facts of his quest. “So far as I can see, you haven’t any status here and no excuse for appealing to the Guild.”

“But I told you…”

“Never mind. I’m going to put it up to the legal office.” She touched a button and a screen raised up on her desk; she spoke to it. “Mr. Hanson, can you spare a moment?”

“Yes, Grace?”

“There is a young man here who claims to be a legacy of the Guild. Will you talk with him?”

The voice answered, “Look, Grace, you know the procedures. Get his address, send him on his way, and send his papers up for consideration.”

She frowned and touched another control. Although Max could see that she continued to talk, no sound reached him. Then she nodded and the screen slid back into the desk. She touched another button and said, “Skeeter!”

A page boy popped out of a door behind her and looked Max over with cold eyes. “Skeeter,” she went on, “take this visitor to Mr. Hanson.”

The page sniffed. “Him?”

“Him. And fasten your collar and spit out that gum.”

Mr. Hanson listened to Max’s story and passed him on to his boss, the chief legal counsel, who listened to a third telling. That official then drummed his desk and made a call, using the silencing device the girl had used.

He then said to Max, “You’re in luck, son. The Most Worthy High Secretary will grant you a few minutes of his time. Now when you go in, don’t sit down, remember to speak only when spoken to, and get out quickly when he indicates that the audience is ended.”

The High Secretary’s office made the lavishness that had thus far filled Max’s eyes seem like austerity. The rug alone could have been swapped for the farm on which Max grew up. There was no communication equipment in evidence, no files, not even a desk. The High Secretary lounged back in a mammoth easy chair while a servant massaged his scalp. He raised his head as Max appeared and said, “Come in, son. Sit down there. What is your name?”

“Maximilian Jones, sir.”

They looked at each other. The Secretary saw a lanky youth who needed a haircut, a bath, and a change of clothes; Max saw a short, fat little man in a wrinkled uniform. His head seemed too big for him and Max could not make up his mind whether the eyes were kindly or cold.

“And you are a nephew of Chester Arthur Jones?” “Yes, sir.”

“I knew Brother Jones well. A fine mathematician.” The High Secretary went on, “I understand that you

have had the misfortune to lose your government Citizen’s Identification. Carl.”

He had not raised his voice but a young man appeared with the speed of a genie. “Yes, sir?”

“Take this young man’s thumb print, call the Bureau of Identification—not here, but the main office at New Washington. My compliments to the Chief of Bureau and tell him that I would be pleased to have immediate identification while you hold the circuit.”

The print was taken speedily; the man called Carl left. The High Secretary went on, “What was your purpose in coming here?” Diffidently Max explained that his uncle had told him that he intended to nominate him for apprenticeship in the guild.

The man nodded. “So I understand. I am sorry to tell you, young fellow, that Brother Jones made no nomination.”

Max had difficulty in taking in the simple statement. So much was his inner pride tied to his pride in his uncle’s profession, so much had he depended on his hope that his uncle had named him his professional heir, that he could not accept at once the verdict that he was nobody and nothing. He blurted out, “You’re sure? Did you look?”

The masseur looked shocked but the High Secretary answered calmly, “The archives have been searched, not once, but twice. There is no possible doubt.” The High Secretary sat up, gestured slightly, and the servant disappeared. “I’m sorry.”

“But he told me,” Max said stubbornly. “He said he was going to.”

“Nevertheless he did not.” The man who had taken the thumb print came in and offered a memorandum to the High Secretary, who glanced at it and waved it away. “I’ve no doubt that he considered you.

Nomination to our brotherhood involves a grave responsibility; it is not unusual for a childless brother to have his eye on a likely lad for a long time before deciding whether or not he measures up. For some reason your uncle did not name you.”

Max was appalled by the humiliating theory that his beloved uncle might have found him unworthy. It could not be true—why, just the day before he died, he had said—he interrupted his thoughts to say, “Sir—I think I know what happened.”

“Eh?”

“Uncle Chester died suddenly. He meant to name me, but he didn’t get a chance. I’m sure of it.”

“Possibly. Men have been known to fail to get their affairs in order before the last orbit. But I must assume that he knew what he was doing.”

“But—”

“That’s all, young man. No, don’t go away. I’ve been thinking about you today.” Max looked startled, the High Secretary smiled and continued, “You see, you are the second ‘Maximilian Jones’ who has come to us with this story.”

“Huh?”

“Huh indeed.” The guild executive reached into a pocket of his chair, pulled out some books and a card, handed them to Max, who stared unbelievingly.

“Uncle Chet’s books!”

“Yes. Another man, older than yourself, came here yesterday with your identification card and these books. He was less ambitious than you are,” he added dryly. “He was willing to settle for a rating less lofty than astrogator.”

“What happened?”

“He left suddenly when we attempted to take his finger prints. I did not see him. But when you showed up today I began to wonder how long a procession of ‘Maximilian Jones’s’ would favor us. Better guard that card in the future—I fancy we have saved you a fine.”

Max placed it in an inner pocket. “Thanks a lot, sir.” He started to put the books in his rucksack. The High Secretary gestured in denial.

“No, no! Return the books, please.” “But Uncle Chet gave them to me.”

“Sorry. At most he loaned them to you—and he should not have done even that. The tools of our profession are never owned individually; they are loaned to each brother. Your uncle should have turned them in when he retired, but some of the brothers have a sentimental fondness for having them in their possession. Give them to me, please.”

Max still hesitated. “Come now,” the guildsman said reasonably. “It would not do for our professional secrets to be floating around loose, available to anyone. Even the hairdressers do not permit that. We have a high responsibility to the public. Only a member of this guild, trained, tested, sworn, and accepted, may lawfully be custodian of those manuals.”

Max’s answer was barely audible. “I don’t see the harm. I’m not going to get to use them, it looks like.”

“You don’t believe in anarchy, surely? Our whole society is founded on entrusting grave secrets only to those who are worthy. But don’t feel sad. Each brother, when he is issued his tools, deposits an earnest with the bursar. In my opinion, since you are the nearest relative of Brother Jones, we may properly repay the earnest to you for their return. Carl.”

The young man appeared again. “The deposit monies, please.” Carl had the money with him—he seemed to earn his living by knowing what the High Secretary was about to want. Max found himself accepting an impressive sheaf of money, more than he had ever touched before, and the books were taken from him before he could think of another objection.

It seemed time to leave, but he was motioned back to his chair. “Personally, I am sorry to disappoint you, but I am merely the servant of my brothers; I have no choice. However… ” The High Secretary fitted his finger tips together. “Our brotherhood takes care of its own. There are funds at my disposal for such cases. How would you like to go into training?”

“For the Guild?”

“No, no! We don’t grant brotherhood as charity. But for some respectable trade, metalsmith, or chef, or tailor—what you wish. Any occupation not hereditary. The brotherhood will sponsor you, pay your ‘prentice fee and, if you make good, lend you your contribution when you are sworn in.”

Max knew he should accept gratefully. He was being offered an opportunity free that most of the swarming masses never got on any terms. But the cross-grained quirk in him that had caused him to

spurn the stew that Sam had left behind made this generous offer stick in his craw. “Thanks just the same,” he answered in tones almost surly, “but I don’t rightly think I can take it.”

The High Secretary looked bleak. “So? It’s your life.” He snapped his fingers, a page appeared, and Max was led quickly out of the Hall.

He stood on the steps of the Guild Hall and wondered dejectedly what he should do next. Even the space ships on the field at the foot of the street did not attract; he could not have looked at one without feeling like crying. He looked to the east instead.

A short distance away a jaunty figure leaned against a trash receptacle. As Max’s eyes rested on the man he straightened up, flipped a cigarette to the pavement, and started toward him.

Max looked at him again. “Sam!” It was undoubtedly the wayfarer who had robbed him—well dressed, clean shaved—but Sam nonetheless. Max hurried toward him.

“Howdy, Max,” Sam greeted him with an unembarrassed grin, “how did you make out?” “I ought to have you arrested!”

“Now, now—keep your voice down. You’re making yourself conspicuous.” Max took a breath and lowered his voice. “You stole my books.”

“Your books? They weren’t yours—and I returned them to their owners. You want to arrest me for that?”

“But you… Well, anyhow you…”

A voice, civil, firm, and official, spoke at Max’s elbow. “Is this person annoying you, sir?” Max turned and found a policeman standing behind him. He started to speak, then bit off the words as he realized the question had been addressed to Sam.

Sam took hold of Max’s upper arm in a gesture that was protective and paternal, but quite firm. “Not at all, officer, thank you.”

“Are you sure? I received word that this chico was headed this way and I’ve had my eye on him.” “He’s a friend of mine. I was waiting for him here.”

“As you say. We have a lot of trouble with vagrants. They all seem to head for Earthport.”

“He’s not a vagrant. He’s a young friend of mine from the country and I’m afraid he’s gotten a bit confused. I’ll be responsible.”

“Very well, sir.”

“Not at all.” Max let himself be led away. When they were out of earshot Sam said, “That was close. That nosy clown would have had us both in the bull pen. You did all right, kid—kept your lip zipped at the right time.”

They were around the corner into a less important street before Sam let go his grip. He stopped and faced Max, grinning. “Well, kid?”

“I should a’ told that cop about you!”

“Why didn’t you? He was right there.”

Max found himself caught by contradictory feelings. He was angry with Sam, no doubt about it, but his first unstudied reaction at seeing him had been the warm pleasure one gets from recognizing a familiar face among strangers—the anger had come a split second later. Now Sam looked at him with easy cynicism, a quizzical smile on his face. “Well, kid?” he repeated. “If you want to turn me in, let’s go back and get it over with. I won’t run.”

Max looked back at him peevishly. “Oh, forget it!” “Thanks. I’m sorry about it, kid. I really am.” “Then why did you do it?”

Sam’s face changed suddenly to a sad, far-away look, then resumed its cheerful cynicism. “I was tempted by an idea, old son—every man has his limits. Some day I’ll tell you. Now, how about a bit to eat and a gab? There’s a joint near here where we can talk without having the nosies leaning over our shoulders.”

“I don’t know as I want to.”

“Oh, come now! The food isn’t much but it’s better than mulligan.”

Max had been ready with a stiff speech about how he would not turn Sam in, but he certainly did not want to eat with him; the mention of mulligan brought him up short. He remembered uneasily that Sam had not inquired as to his morals, but had shared his food.

“Well… okay.”

“That’s my boy!” They went on down the street. The neighborhood was a sort to be found near the port in any port city; once off the pompous Avenue of the Planets it became more crowded, noisier, more alive, and somehow warmer and more friendly despite a strong air of “keep your hand on your purse.” Hole-in-the-wall tailor shops, little restaurants none too clean, cheap hotels, honky-tonks, fun arcades, exhibits both “educational” and “scientific,” street vendors, small theaters with gaudy posters and sounds of music leaking out, shops fronting for betting parlors, tattoo parlors fronting for astrologers, and the inevitable Salvation Army mission gave the street flavor its stylish cousins lacked. Martians in trefoil sunglasses and respirators, humanoids from Beta Corvi III, things with exoskeletons from Allah knew where, all jostled with humans of all shades and all blended in easy camaraderie.

Sam stopped at a shop with the age-old symbol of three golden spheres. “Wait here. Be right out.” Max waited and watched the throng. Sam came out shortly without his coat. “Now we eat.” “Sam! Did you pawn your coat?”

“Give the man a cigar! How did you guess?”

“But… Look, I didn’t know you were broke; you looked prosperous. Get it back, I’ll… I’ll pay for our lunch.”

“Say, that’s sweet of you, kid. But forget it. I don’t need a coat this weather. Truth is, I was dressed up just to make a good impression at—well, a little matter of business.”

Max blurted out, “But how did you… “, then shut up. Sam grinned. “Did I steal the fancy rags? No. I encountered a citizen who believed in percentages and engaged him in a friendly game. Never bet on

percentages, kid; skill is more fundamental. Here we are.”

The room facing the street was a bar, beyond was a restaurant. Sam led him on through the restaurant, through the kitchen, down a passage off which there were card rooms, and ended in a smaller, less pretentious dining room; Sam picked a table in a corner. An enormous Samoan shuffled up, dragging one leg. Sam nodded, “Howdy, Percy.” He turned to Max. “A drink first?”

“Uh, I guess not.”

“Smart lad. Lay off the stuff. Irish for me, Percy, and we’ll both have whatever you had for lunch.” The Samoan waited silently. Sam shrugged and laid money on the table, Percy scooped it up.

Max objected, “But I was going to pay.”

“You can pay for the lunch. Percy owns the place,” he added. “He’s offensively rich, but he didn’t get that way by trusting the likes of me. Now tell me about yourself, old son. How you got here? How you made out with the astrogators… everything. Did they kill the fatted calf?”

“Well, no.” There seemed to be no reason not to tell Sam and he found that he wanted to talk. Sam nodded at the end.

“About what I had guessed. Any plans now?” “No. I don’t know what to do now, Sam.”

“Hmm… it’s an ill wind that has no turning. Eat your lunch and let me think.” Later he added, “Max, what do you want to do?”

“Well… I wanted to be an astrogator…” “That’s out.”

“I know.”

“Tell me, did you want to be an astrogator and nothing else, or did you simply want to go into space?” “Why, I guess I never thought about it any other way.”

“Well, think about it.”

Max did so. “I want to space. If I can’t go as an astrogator, I want to go anyhow. But I don’t see how. The Astrogators’ Guild is the only one I stood a chance for.”

“There are ways.”

“Huh? Do you mean put in for emigration?”

Sam shook his head. “It costs more than you could save to go to one of the desirable colonies—and the ones they give you free rides to I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies.”

“Then what do you mean?”

Sam hesitated. “There are ways to wangle it, old son—if you do what I say. This uncle of yours—you were around him a lot?”

“Why, sure.”

“Talked about space with you?” “Certainly. That’s all we talked about.”

“Hmm… how well do you know the patter?”

“…YOUR MONEY AND MY KNOW-HOW… “

“The patter?” Max looked puzzled. “I suppose I know what everybody knows.” “Where’s the worry hole?”

“Huh? That’s the control room.”

“If the cheater wants a corpse, where does he find it?”

Max looked amused. “That’s just stuff from SV serials, nobody talks like that aboard ship. The cook is the cook, and if he wanted a side of beef, he’d go to the reefer for it.”

“How do you tell a ‘beast’ from an animal?”

“Why, a ‘beast’ is a passenger, but an animal is just an animal, I guess.”

“Suppose you were on a ship for Mars and they announced that the power plant had gone blooie and the ship was going to spiral into the Sun? What would you think?”

“I’d think somebody was trying to scare me. In the first place, you wouldn’t be ‘on’ a ship—’in’ is the right word. Second, a spiral isn’t one of the possible orbits. And third, if a ship was headed for Mars from Earth, it couldn’t fall into the Sun; the orbit would be incompatible.”

“Suppose you were part of a ship’s crew in a strange port and you wanted to go out and look the place over. How would you go about asking the captain for permission?”

“Why, I wouldn’t.” “You’d just jump ship?”

“Let me finish. If I wanted to hit dirt, I’d ask the first officer; the captain doesn’t bother with such things. If the ship was big enough, I’d have to ask my department head first.” Max sat up and held Sam’s eye. “Sam—you’ve been spaceside. Haven’t you?”

“What gave you that notion, kid?” “What’s your guild?”

“Stow it, Max. Ask me no questions and I’ll sell you no pigs in a poke. Maybe I’ve studied up on the jive just as you have.”

“I don’t believe it,” Max said bluntly.

Sam looked pained. Max went on, “What’s this all about? You ask me a bunch of silly questions—sure, I know quite a bit about spaceside; I’ve been reading about it all my life and Uncle Chet would talk by the hour. But what of it?”

Sam looked at him and said softly, “Max—the Asgard is raising next Thursday—for starside. Would you like to be in her?”

Max thought about it. To be in the fabulous Asgard, to be heading out to the stars, to be—he brushed the vision aside. “Don’t talk that way, Sam! You know I’d give my right arm. Why needle me?”

“How much money have you?” “Huh? Why?”

“How much?”

“I haven’t even had time to count it.” Max started to haul out the wad of bills he had been given; Sam hastily and unobtrusively stopped him.

“Psst!” he protested. “Don’t flash a roll in here. Do you want to eat through a slit in your throat? Keep it down!”

Startled, Max took the advice. He was still more startled when he finished the tally; he had known that he had been given quite a lot of money but this was more than he had dreamed. “How much?” Sam persisted. Max told him, Sam swore softly. “Well, it will just have to do.”

“Do for what?”

“You’ll see. Put it away.”

As Max did so he said wonderingly, “Sam, I had no idea those books were so valuable.” “They aren’t.”

“Huh?”

“It’s malarkey. Lots of guilds do it. They want to make it appear that their professional secrets are precious, so they make the candidate put up a wad of dough for his reference books. If those things were published in the ordinary way, they’d sell at a reasonable price.”

“But that’s right, isn’t it? As the Worthy High Secretary explained, it wouldn’t do for just anybody to have that knowledge.”

Sam made a rude noise and pretended to spit. “What difference would it make? Suppose you still had them—you don’t have a ship to conn.”

“But… ” Max stopped and grinned. “I can’t see that it did any good to take them away from me anyhow. I’ve read them, so I know what’s in them.”

“Sure you know. Maybe you even remember some of the methods. But you don’t have all those columns of figures so you can look up the one you need when you need it. That’s what they care about.”

“But I do! I read them, I tell you.” Max wrinkled his forehead, then began to recite: “‘Page 272, Calculated Solutions of the Differential Equation of Motion by the Ricardo Assumption—” He began to reel off a series of seven-place figures. Sam listened in growing surprise, then stopped him.

“Kid, you really remember that? You weren’t making it up?” “Of course not, I read it.”

“Well, I’ll be a beat up… Look, you’re a page-at-a-glance reader? Is that it?”

“No, not exactly. I’m a pretty fast reader, but I do have to read it. But I don’t forget. I never have been able to see how people forget. I can’t forget anything.”

Sam shook his head wonderingly. “I’ve been able to forget a lot of things, thank Heaven.” He thought for a moment. “Maybe we should forget the other caper and exploit this talent of yours. I can think of angles.”

“What do you mean? And what other caper?”

“Hmm… no, I was right the first time. The idea is to get away from here. And with your funny memory the chances are a whole lot better. Even though you sling the slang pretty well I was worried. Now I’m not.”

“Sam, stop talking riddles. What are you figuring on?’

“Okay, kid, I’ll lay it on the table.” He glanced around, leaned forward, and spoke even more quietly. “We take the money and I spread it around carefully. When the Asgard raises, we’re signed on as crewmen.”

“As apprentices? We wouldn’t even have time for ground school. And besides you’re too old to ‘prentice.”

“Use your head! We don’t have enough to pay one apprentice fee, let alone two, in any space guild—and the Asgard isn’t signing ‘prentices anyhow. We’ll be experienced journeymen in one of the guilds, with records to prove it.”

When the idea soaked in, Max was shocked. “But they put you in jail for that!” “Where do you think you are now?”

“Well, I’m not in jail. And I don’t want to be.”

“This whole planet is one big jail, and a crowded one at that. What chance have you got? If you aren’t born rich, or born into one of the hereditary guilds, what can you do? Sign up with one of the labor companies.”

“But there are non-hereditary guilds.”

“Can you pay the fee? You’ve got a year, maybe two until you’re too old to ‘prentice. If you were sharp with cards you might manage it—but can you earn it? You should live so long! Your old man should have saved it; he left you a farm instead.” Sam stopped suddenly, bit his thumb. “Max, I’ll play fair. Your old man did leave you a fair start in life. With the money you’ve got you can go home, hire a shyster, and maybe squeeze that Montgomery item out of the money he swindled for your farm. Then you can buy your apprenticeship in some guild. Do it, kid. I won’t stand in your way.” He watched Max narrowly.

Max reflected that he had just refused a chance to pick a trade and be given a free start. Maybe he should reconsider. Maybe… “No! That’s not what I want. This… this, uh, scheme of yours; how do we do it?”

Sam relaxed and grinned. “My boy!”

Sam got them a room over Percy’s restaurant. There he coached him. Sam went out several times and Max’s money went with him. When Max protested Sam said wearily, “What do you want? To hold my heart as security? Do you want to come along and scare ’em out of the dicker? The people I have to reason with will be taking chances. Or do you think you can arrange matters yourself? It’s your money and my know-how… that’s the partnership.”

Max watched him leave the first time with gnawing doubts, but Sam came back. Once he brought with him an elderly, gross woman who looked Max over as if he were an animal up for auction. Sam did not introduce her but said, “How about it? I thought a mustache would help.”

She looked at Max from one side, then the other. “No,” she decided, “that would just make him look made up for amateur theatricals.” She touched Max’s head with moist, cold fingers; when he drew back, she admonished, “Don’t flinch, honey duck. Aunt Becky has to work on you. No, we’ll move back his hair line above his temples, thin it out on top, and kill its gloss. Some faint wrinkles tattooed around his eyes. Mmm… that’s all. Mustn’t overdo it.”

When this fat artist was through Max looked ten years older. Becky asked if he wanted his hair roots killed, or would he prefer to have his scalp return to normal in time? Sam started to insist on permanence, but she brushed him aside. “I’ll give him a bottle of ‘Miracle Gro’—no extra charge, it’s just rubbing alcohol—and he can make a big thing of using it. How about it, lover? You’re too pretty to age you permanently.”

Max accepted the “Miracle Gro”—hair restored or your money back.

Sam took away his citizen’s identification card, returned with another one. It had his right name, a wrong age, his right serial number, a wrong occupation, his own thumb print, and a wrong address. Max looked at it curiously. “It looks real.”

“It should. The man who made it makes thousands of real ones—but he charges extra for this.” That night Sam brought him a book titled Ship Economy and embossed with the seal of the Guild of Space Stewards, Cooks, and Purser’s Clerks. “Better stay up all night and see how much you can soak up. The man it belongs to won’t sleep more than ten hours even with the jolt Percy slipped into his nightcap. Want a pill to keep you awake?”

“I don’t think so.” Max examined it. It was in fine print and quite thick. But by five in the morning he had finished it. He woke Sam and gave it back, then went to sleep, his head buzzing with stowage and dunnage, moment arms and mass calculations, hydroponics techniques, cargo records, tax forms, diets, food preservation and preparation, daily, weekly, and quarterly accounts, and how to get rats out of a compartment which must not be evacuated. Simple stuff, he decided—he wondered why such things were considered too esoteric for laymen.

On the fourth day of his incarceration Sam fitted him out with spaceside clothes, none of them new, and gave him a worn plastileather personal record book. The first page stated that he was an accepted brother of the Stewards, Cooks, and Purser’s Clerks, having honorably completed his apprenticeship. It listed his skills and it appeared that his dues had been paid each quarter for seven years. What appeared to be his own signature appeared above that of the High Steward, with the seal of the guild embossed through both. The other pages recorded his trips, his efficiency ratings, and other permanent data, each properly signed by the first officers and pursers concerned. He noted with interest that he had been fined three days pay in the Cygnus for smoking in an unauthorized place and that he had once for six weeks been allowed to strike for chartsman, having paid the penalty to the Chartsmen & Computers Guild for

the chance.

“See anything odd?” asked Sam. “It all looks funny to me.”

“It says you’ve been to Luna. Everybody’s been to Luna. But the ships you served in are mostly out of commission and none of the pursers happens to be in Earthport now. The only starship you ever jumped in was lost on the trip immediately after the one you took. Get me?”

“I think so.”

“When you talk to another spaceman, no matter what ship he served in, it’s not one you served in—you won’t be showing this record to anybody but the purser and your boss anyhow.”

“But suppose they served in one of these?”

“Not in the Asgard. We made darn sure. Now I’m going to take you out on an evening of gaiety. You’ll drink warm milk on account of your ulcer and you’ll complain when you can’t get it. And that’s just about all you’ll talk about—your symptoms. You’ll start a reputation right now for being untalkative; you can’t make many mistakes with your mouth shut. Watch yourself, kid, there will be spacemen around you all evening. If you mess it up, I’ll leave you dirtside and raise without you. Let me see you walk again.”

Max walked for him. Sam cursed gently. “Cripes, you still walk like a farmer. Get your feet out of those furrows, boy.”

“No good?”

“It’ll have to do. Grab your bonnet. We’ll strike while the iron’s in the fire and let the bridges fall where they may.”

“SPACEMAN” JONES

The Asgard was to raise the next day. Max woke early and tried to wake Sam, but this proved difficult. At last the older man sat up. “Oh, what a head! What time is it?”

“About six.”

“And you woke me? Only my feeble condition keeps me from causing you to join your ancestors. Go back to sleep.”

“But today’s the day!”

“Who cares? She raises at noon. We’ll sign on at the last minute; that way you won’t have time to make a slip.”

“Sam? How do you know they’ll take us?”

“Oh, for Pete’s sake! It’s all arranged. Now shut up. Or go downstairs and get breakfast—but don’t talk to anybody. If you’re a pal, you’ll bring me a pot of coffee at ten o’clock.”

“And breakfast?”

“Don’t mention food in my presence. Show some respect.” Sam pulled the covers up over his head.

It was nearly eleven thirty when they presented themselves at the gate of the port; ten minutes later before the bus deposited them at the base of the ship. Max looked up at its great, bulging sides but was cut short by a crewman standing at the lift and holding a list. “Names.”

“Anderson.” “Jones.”

He checked them off. “Get in the ship. You should have been here an hour ago.” The three climbed into the cage; it swung clear of the ground and was reeled in, swaying, like a bucket on a well rope.

Sam looked down and shuddered. “Never start a trip feeling good,” he advised Max. “It might make you sorry to be leaving.” The cage was drawn up inside the ship; the lock closed after them and they stepped out into the Asgard. Max was trembling with stage fright.

He had expected to be sworn into the ship’s company by the first officer, as called for by law. But his reception was depressingly unceremonious. The crewman who had checked them into the ship told them to follow him; he led them to the Purser’s office. There the Chief Clerk had them sign and thumbprint the book, yawning the while and tapping his buck teeth. Max surrendered his forged personal record book, while feeling as if the deception were stamped on it in bold letters. But Mr. Kuiper merely chucked it into a file basket. He then turned to them. “This is a taut ship. You’ve started by very nearly missing it. That’s a poor start.”

Sam said nothing. Max said, “Yessir.”

The Chief Clerk went on, “Stow your gear, get your chow, and report back.” He glanced at a wall chart. “One of you in D-112, the other in E-009.”

Max started to ask how to get there, but Sam took his elbow and eased him out of the office. Outside he said, “Don’t ask any questions you can avoid. We’re on Baker deck, that’s all we need to know.” Presently they came to a companionway and started back down. Max felt a sudden change in pressure, Sam grinned. “She’s sealed. Won’t be long now.”

They were in D-112, an eight-man bunkroom, and Sam was showing him how to set the lock on the one empty locker when there was a distant call on a loudspeaker. Max felt momentarily dizzy and his weight seemed to pulse. Then it stopped. Sam remarked, “They were a little slow synchronizing the field—or else this bucket of bolts has an unbalanced phaser.” He clapped Max on the back. “We made it, kid.”

They were in space.

E-009 was down one more deck and on the far side; they left Sam’s gear there and started to look for lunch. Sam stopped a passing engineer’s mate. “Hey, shipmate—we’re fresh caught. Where’s the crew’s mess?”

“Clockwise about eighty and inboard, this deck.” He looked them over. “Fresh caught, eh? Well, you’ll find out.”

“Like that, huh?”

“Worse. A madhouse squared. If I wasn’t married, I’d ‘a’ stayed dirtside.” He went on his way.

Sam said, “Ignore it, kid. All the oldtimers in a ship claim its the worst madhouse in space. A matter of pride.” But their next experience seemed to confirm it; the serving window in the mess room had closed at noon, when the ship lifted; Max mournfully resigned himself to living with a tight belt until supper. But Sam pushed on into the galley and came out presently with two loaded trays. They found empty places and sat down.

“How did you do it?”

“Any cook will feed you if you let him explain first what a louse you are and how by rights he doesn’t have to.”

The food was good—real beef patties, vegetables from the ship’s gardens, wheat bread, a pudding, and coffee. Max polished his platter and wondered if he dared ask for seconds. He decided against it. The talk flowed around him and only once was there danger that his tyro status might show up, that being when a computerman asked him a direct question as to his last trip.

Sam stalled it off. “Imperial survey,” he answered briefly. “We’re both still covered.”

The computerman grinned knowingly. “Which jail were you in? The Imperial Council hasn’t ordered a secret survey in years.”

“This one was so secret they forgot to tell you about it. Write ’em a letter and burn them out about it,” Sam stood up. “Finished, Max?”

On the way back to the Purser’s Office Max worried as to his probable assignment, checking over in his mind the skills and experience he was alleged to have. He need not have worried; Mr. Kuiper, with a fine disregard for such factors, assigned him as stableman.

The Asgard was a combined passenger liner and freighter. She carried this trip Hereford breeding stock, two bulls and two dozen cows, and an assortrnent of other animals consigned for ecologic and economic reasons to colonies—pigs, chickens, sheep, a pair of Angora goats, a family of llamas. It was contrary to Imperial policy to plant most terrestrial fauna on other planets; the colonials were expected to establish economy with indigenous flora and fauna—but some animals have been bred for so many generations for the use of man that they are not easily replaced by exotic creatures. On Gamma Leonis VI (b), New Mars, the saurians known locally as “chuckleheads” or “chucks” could and did replace Percherons as draft animals with greater efficiency and economy—but men disliked them. There was never the familial trust that exists between horses and men; unless a strain of chucks should develop a degree of rapport with men (which seemed unlikely) they would eventually die out and be replaced by the horse, for the unforgivable sin of failing to establish a firm treaty with the most ravenous, intolerant, deadly, and successful of the animals in the explored universe, Man.

There was also a cage of English sparrows. Max never did find out where these noisy little scavengers were believed to be necessary, nor was he acquainted with the complex mathematical analysis by which such conclusions were reached. He simply fed them and tried to keep their quarters clean.

There were cats in the Asgard, too, but most of these were free citizens and crewmen, charged with holding down the rats and mice that had gone into space along with mankind. One of Max’s duties was to change the sand boxes on each deck and take the soiled ones to the oxydizer for processing. The other cats were pets, property of passengers, unhappy prisoners in the kennel off the stables. The passengers’ dogs lived there, too; no dogs were allowed to run free.

Max wanted to look back at Earth and see it as a shrinking globe in the sky, but that was a privilege reserved for passengers. He spent the short period when it would have been possible in hauling (by hand) green timothy hay from the hydroponics airconditioning plant to the stables and in cleaning said stables. It was a task he neither liked nor disliked; by accident he had been assigned to work that he understood.

His immediate boss was the Chief Ship’s Steward, Mr. Giordano. Mr. “Gee” split the ship’s housekeeping with Mr. Dumont, Chief Passengers’ Steward; their domains divided at Charlie deck. Thus Mr. Dumont had passengers’ quarters, officers’ country, offices, and the control and communication stations, while Giordano was responsible for everything down (or aft) to but not including the engineering space—crew’s quarters, mess, and galley, stores, stables and kennel, hydroponics deck, and cargo spaces. Both worked for the Purser, who in turn was responsible to the First Officer.

The organization of starships derived in part from that of military vessels, in part from ocean liners of earlier days, and in part from the circumstances of interstellar travel. The first officer was boss of the ship and a wise captain did not interfere with him. The captain, although by law monarch of his miniature world, turned his eyes outward; the first officer turned his inward. As long as all went well the captain concerned himself only with the control room and with astrogation; the first officer bossed everything else. Even astrogators, communicators, computermen, and chartsmen were under the first officer, although in practice he had nothing to do with them when they were on duty since they worked in the “worry hole” under the captain.

The chief engineer was under the first officer, too, but he was nearly an autonomous satrap. In a taut, well-run ship he kept his bailiwick in such shape that the first officer did not need to worry about it. The chief engineer was responsible not only for the power plant and the Horst-Conrad impellers but for all auxiliary engineering equipment wherever located—for example the pumps and fans of the hydroponics installations, even though the purser, through his chief ship’s steward, took care of the farming thereof.

Such was the usual organization of starship liner-freighters and such was the Asgard. It was not identical with the organization of a man-of-war and very different from that of the cheerless transports used to ship convicts and paupers out to colonies that were being forced—in those ships, the purser’s department was stripped to a clerk or two and the transportees did all the work, cooking, cleaning, handling cargo, everything. But the Asgard carried paid passengers, some of whom measured their wealth in megabucks; they expected luxury hotel service even light-years out in space. Of the three main departments of the Asgard, astrogation, engineering, and housekeeping, the Purser’s was by far the largest.

A first officer could reach that high status from chief astrogator, from chief engineer, or from purser, but only if he were originally an astrogator could he go on to captain. The three officer types were essentially mathematicians, business managers, or physicists; a captain necessarily had to be able to practice the mathematical skill of astrogation. First Officer Walther, as was usually the case with a liner, had formerly been a purser.

The Asgard was a little world, a tiny mobile planet. It had its monarch the captain, its useless nobility the passengers, its technical and governing class, and its hewers of wood and drawers of water. It contained flora and fauna in ecological balance; it carried its miniature sun in its power plant. Although its schedule contemplated only months in space, it was capable of staying in space indefinitely. The chef might run out of caviar, but there would be no lack of food, nor of air, nor of heat and light.

Max decided that he was lucky to be assigned to Mr. Giordano rather than to Chief Clerk Kuiper. Mr.

Kuiper supervised his clerks minutely, but Mr. Gee did not often stir his fat frame out of his

office-stateroom. He was a jovial boss—provided everything ran to suit him. Mr. Gee found it an effort

to go all the way down to the stables; once he became convinced that Max was giving the animals proper care and keeping the place clean he gave up inspecting, merely requiring Max to report daily. This gave Giordano more time for his principal avocation, which was distilling a sort of vodka in a cubby in his stateroom, using materials grown in the hydroponds—also in his charge. He carried on a clandestine trade in his product with the crew. By keeping his mouth shut and his ears open Max learned that this was a usual prerogative of a chief ship’s steward, ignored as long as the steward had the judgment to limit his operations. The ship, of course, had a wine mess and bar, but that was for the “beasts”—crewmen could not patronize it.

“I was once in a ship,” Sam told Max, “where the First clamped down—busted up the still, busted the steward to cleaning decks, and generally threw the book.” He stopped to puff on his cigar, a gift from the passenger steward; they were hiding out in Max’s stables, enjoying a rest and a gab. “Didn’t work out.”

“Why not?”

“Use your head. Forces must balance, old son. For every market there is a supplier. That’s the key to the nutshell. In a month there was a still in durn near every out-of-the-way compartment in the ship and the crew was so demoralized it wasn’t fit to stuff vacuum. So the Captain had a talk with the First and things went back to normal.”

Max thought it over. “Sam? Were you that ship’s steward?” “Huh? What gave you that idea?”

“Well… you’ve been in space before; you no longer make any bones about it. I just thought—well, you’ve never told me what your guild was, nor why you were on dirt, or why you had to fake it to get back to space again. I suppose it’s none of my business.”

Sam’s habitual cynical smile gave way to an expression of sadness. “Max, a lot of things can happen to a man when he thinks he has the world by the tail. Take the case of a friend of mine, name of Roberts. A sergeant in the Imperial Marines, good record, half a dozen star jumps, a combat decoration or two. A smart lad, boning to make warrant officer. But he missed his ship once—hadn’t been on Terra for some time and celebrated too much. Should have turned himself in right away, of course, taken his reduction in rank and lived it down. Trouble was he still had money in his pocket. By the time he was broke and sober it was too late. He never quite had the guts to go back and take his court martial and serve his sentence. Every man has his limits.”

Max said presently, “You trying to say you used to be a marine?”

“Me? Of course not, I was speaking of this guy Richards, just to illustrate what can happen to a man when he’s not looking. Let’s talk of more pleasant things. Kid, what do you plan to do next?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, what do you figure on doing after this jump?’

“Oh. More of the same, I guess. I like spacing. I suppose I’ll try to keep my nose clean and work up to chief steward or chief clerk.”

Sam shook his head. “Think it through, kid. What happens when your record in this ship is mailed to the guild? And another copy is mailed to the Department of Guilds and Labor?”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you. Maybe nothing happens at first, maybe you can space for another cruise. But eventually the red tape unwinds, they compare notes and see that while your ship lists you as an experienced steward’s mate, there isn’t any Max Jones in their files. Comes the day you ground at Terra and a couple of clowns with sidearms are waiting at the foot of the lift to drag you off to the calabozo.”

“But Sam! I thought it was all fixed?”

“Don’t blow a gasket. Look at me, I’m relaxed—and it applies to me, too. More so, for I have other reasons we needn’t go into to want to let sleeping dogs bury their own dead. As for it being ‘all fixed,’ it is—everything I promised. You’re here, aren’t you? But as for the files: old son, it would have taken ten times the money to tamper with guild files, and as for locating a particular microfilm in New Washington and substituting a fake that would show the record you are supposed to have—well, I wouldn’t know how to start, though no doubt it could be done, with enough time, money, and finesse.”

Max felt sensations almost identical with those he had experienced when Montgomery had announced that the farm was sold. Despite his menial position he liked it aboard ship, he had had no intention of ever doing anything else. He got along with his boss, he was making friends, he was as cozy as a bird in its nest. Now the nest was suddenly torn down. Worse, he was in a trap.

He turned white. Sam put a hand on his shoulder. “Stop spinning, kid! You’re not in a jam.” “Jail—”

“Jail my aunt’s Sunday hat! You’re safe as dirt until we get back. You can walk away from the Asgard at Earthport with your wages in your pocket and have days at least, maybe weeks or months, before anyone will notice, either at the guild mother hall or at New Washington. You can lose yourself among four billion people. You won’t be any worse off than you were when you first ran into me—you were trying to get lost then, remember?—and you’ll have one star trip under your belt to tell your kids about. Or they may never look for you; some clerk may chuck your trip record into the file basket and leave it there until it gets lost rather than bother. Or you might be able to persuade a clerk in Mr. Kuiper’s office to lose the duplicates, not mail them in. Nelson, for example; he’s got a hungry look.” Sam eyed him carefully, then added, “Or you might do what I’m going to do.”

Only part of what Sam had said had sunk in. Max let the record play back and gradually calmed down as he began to understand that his situation was not entirely desperate. He was inclined to agree about Nelson, as Nelson had already suggested indirectly that sometimes the efficiency marks on the ship’s books were not necessarily the ones that found their way into the permanent records—under certain circumstances. He put the idea aside, not liking it and having no notion anyhow of how to go about offering a bribe.

When he came, in his mental play back, to Sam’s last remark, it brought him to attention. “What are you

going to do?”

Sam eyed the end of his cigar stub. “I’m not going back.”

This required no diagram to be understood. But, under Imperial decrees, the suggested offense carried even heavier punishment than faking membership in a guild. Deserting was almost treason. “Keep talking,” Max said gruffly.

“Let’s run over where we touch this cruise. Garson’s Planet—domed colonies, like Luna and Mars. In a domed colony you do exactly what the powers-that-be say, or you stop breathing. You might hide out and have a new identity grafted on, but you would still be in the domes. No good, there’s more freedom even back on Terra. Nu Pegasi VI, Halcyon—not bad though pretty cold at aphelion. But it is still

importing more than it exports which means that the Imperials run the show and the locals will help dig out a wanted man. Now we come to Nova Terra, Beta Aquarü X—and that, old son, is what the doctor ordered and why the preacher danced.”

“You’ve been there?”

“Once. I should have stayed. Max, imagine a place like Earth, but sweeter than Terra ever was. Better weather, broader richer lands… forests aching to be cut, game that practically jumps into the stew pot. If you don’t like settlements, you move on until you’ve got no neighbors, poke a seed in the ground, then jump back before it sprouts. No obnoxious insects. Practically no terrestrial diseases and no native diseases that like the flavor of our breed. Gushing rivers. Placid oceans. Man, I’m telling you!”

“But wouldn’t they haul us back from there?”

“Too big. The colonists want more people and they won’t help the Imperials. The Imperial Council has a deuce of a time just collecting taxes. They don’t even try to arrest a deserter outside the bigger towns.” Sam grinned. “You know why?”

“Why?”

“Because it didn’t pay. An Imperial would be sent to Back-and-Beyond to pick up someone; while he was looking he would find some golden-haired daughter of a rancher eyeing him—they run to eight or nine kids, per family and there are always lots of eligible fillies, husband-high and eager. So pretty quick he is a rancher with a beard and a new name and a wife. He was a bachelor and he hasn’t been home lately—or maybe he’s married back on Terra and doesn’t want to go home. Either way, even the Imperial Council can’t fight human nature.”

“I don’t want to get married.”

“That’s your problem. But best of all, the place still has a comfortable looseness about it. No property taxes, outside the towns. Nobody would pay one; they’d just move on, if they didn’t shoot the tax collector instead. No guilds—you can plow a furrow, saw a board, drive a truck, or thread a pipe, all the same day and never ask permission. A man can do anything and there’s no one to stop him, no one to tell him he wasn’t born into the trade, or didn’t start young enough, or hasn’t paid his contribution. There’s more work than there are men to do it and the colonists just don’t care.”

Max tried to imagine such anarchy and could not, he had never experienced it. “But don’t the guilds object?”

“What guilds? Oh, the mother lodges back earthside squawked when they heard, but not even the Imperial Council backed them up. They’re not fools—and you don’t shovel back the ocean with a fork.”

“And that’s where you mean to go. It sounds lovely,” Max said wistfully.

“I do. It is. There was a girl—oh, she’ll be married now; they marry young—but she had sisters. Now here is what I figure on—and you, too, if you want to tag along. First time I hit dirt I’ll make contacts. The last time I rate liberty, which will be the night before the ship raises if possible, I’ll go dirtside, then in a front door and out the back and over the horizon so fast I won’t even be a speck. By the time I’m marked ‘late returning’ I’ll be hundreds of miles away, lying beside a chuckling stream in a virgin wilderness, letting my beard grow and memorizing my new name. Say the word and you’ll be on the bank, fishing.”

Max stirred uneasily. The picture aroused in him a hillbilly homesickness he had hardly been aware of.

But he could not shuffle off his proud persona as a spaceman so quickly. “I’ll think about it.”

“Do that. It’s a good many weeks yet, anyhow.” Sam got to his feet. “I’d better hurry back before Ole Massa Dumont wonders what’s keeping me. Be seeing you, kid—and remember: it’s an ill wind that has no turning.

Eldreth

Max’s duties did not take him above “C” deck except to service the cats’ sand boxes and he usually did that before the passengers were up. He wanted to visit the control room but he had no opportunity, it being still higher than passengers’ quarters. Often an owner of one of the seven dogs and three cats in Max’s custody would come down to visit his pet. This sometimes resulted in a tip. At first his

cross-grained hillbilly pride caused him to refuse, but when Sam heard about it, he swore at him dispassionately. “Don’t be a fool! They can afford it. What’s the sense?”

“But I would exercise their mutts anyhow. It’s my job.” He might have remained unconvinced had it not been that Mr. Gee asked him about it at the end of his first week, seemed to have a shrewd idea of the usual take, and expected a percentage—”for the welfare fund.”

Max asked Sam about the fund, was laughed at. “That’s a very interesting question. Are there any more questions?”

“I suppose not.”

“Max, I like you. But you haven’t learned yet that when in Rome, you shoot Roman candles. Every tribe has its customs and what is moral one place is immoral somewhere else. There are races where a son’s first duty is to kill off his old man and serve him up as a feast as soon as he is old enough to swing it—civilized races, too. Races the Council recognizes diplomatically. What’s your moral judgment on that?”

Max had read of such cultures—the gentle and unwarlike Bnathors, or the wealthy elephantine amphibians of Paldron who were anything but gentle, probably others. He did not feel disposed to pass judgment on nonhumans. Sam went on, “I’ve known stewards who would make Jelly Belly look like a philanthropist. Look at it from his point of view. He regards these things as prerogatives of his position, as rightful a part of his income as his wages. Custom says so. It’s taken him years to get to where he is; he expects his reward.”

Sam, Max reflected, could always out-talk him.

But he could not concede that Sam’s thesis was valid; there were things that were right and others that were wrong and it was not just a matter of where you were. He felt this with an inner conviction too deep to be influenced by Sam’s cheerful cynicism. It worried Max that he was where he was as the result of chicanery, he sometimes lay awake and fretted about it.

But it worried him still more that his deception might come to light. What to do about Sam’s proposal was a problem always on his mind.

The only extra-terrestrial among Max’s charges was a spider puppy from the terrestrian planet Hespera. On beginning his duties in the Asgard Max found the creature in one of the cages intended for cats; Max looked into it and a sad, little, rather simian face looked back at him. “Hello, Man.”

Max knew that some spider puppies had been taught human speech, after a fashion, but it startled him; he jumped back. He then recovered and looked more closely. “Hello yourself,” he answered. “My, but you are a fancy little fellow.” The creature’s fur was a deep, rich green on its back, giving way to orange on the sides and blending to warm cream color on its little round belly.

“Want out,” stated the spider puppy.

“I can’t let you out. I’ve got work to do.” He read the card affixed to the cage: “Mr. Chips” it stated, Pseudocanis hexapoda hesperae, Owner: Miss E. Coburn, A-092; there followed a detailed instruction as to diet and care. Mr. Chips ate grubs, a supply of which was to be found in freezer compartment

H-118, fresh fruits and vegetables, cooked or uncooked, and should receive iodine if neither seaweed nor artichokes was available. Max thumbed through his mind, went over what he had read about the creatures, decided the instructions were reasonable.

“Please out!” Mr. Chips insisted.

It was an appeal hard to resist. No maiden fayre crying from a dungeon tower had ever put it more movingly. The compartment in which the cats were located was small and the door could be fastened; possibly Mr. Chips could be allowed a little run—but later; just now he had to take care of other animals.

When Max left, Mr. Chips was holding onto the bars and sobbing gently. Max looked back and saw that it was crying real tears; a drop trembled on the tip of its ridiculous little nose; it was hard to walk out on it. He had finished with the stables before tackling the kennel; once the dogs and cats were fed and their cages policed he was free to give attention to his new friend. He had fed it first off, which had stopped the crying. When he returned, however, the demand to be let out resumed.

“If I let you out, will you get back in later?”

The spider puppy considered this. A conditional proposition seemed beyond its semantic attainments, for it repeated, “Want out.” Max took a chance.

Mr. Chips landed on his shoulder and started going through his pockets. “Candy,” it demanded. “Candy?”

Max stroked it. “Sorry, chum. I didn’t know.” “Candy?”

“No candy.” Mr. Chips investigated personally, then settled in the crook of Max’s arm, prepared to spend a week or more. It wasn’t, Max decided, much like a puppy and certainly not like a spider, except that six legs seemed excessive. The two front ones had little hands; the middle legs served double duty. It was more like a monkey, but felt like a cat. It had a slightly spicy fragrance and seemed quite clean.

Max tried talking to it, but found its intellectual attainments quite limited. Certainly it used human words meaningfully but its vocabulary was not richer than that which might be expected of a not-too-bright toddler.

When Max tried to return it to its cage there ensued twenty minutes of brisk exercise, broken by stalemates. Mr. Chips swarmed over the cages, causing hysterics among the cats. When at last the spider puppy allowed itself to be caught it still resisted imprisonment, clinging to Max and sobbing. He ended by

walking it like a baby until it fell asleep.

This was a mistake. A precedent had been set and thereafter Max was not permitted to leave the kennel without walking the baby.

He wondered about the “Miss Coburn” described on the tag as Mr. Chips’ owner. All of the owners of cats and dogs had shown up to visit their pets, but Mr. Chips remained unvisited. He visualized her as a sour and hatchet-faced spinster who had received the pet as a going-away present and did not appreciate it. As his friendship with the spider puppy grew his mental picture of Miss E. Coburn became even less attractive.

The Asgard was over a week out and only days from its first spatial transition before Max had a chance to compare conception with fact. He was cleaning the stables, with Mr. Chips riding his shoulder and offering advice, when Max heard a shrill voice from the kennel compartment. “Mr. Chips! Chipsie!

Where are you?”

The spider puppy sat up suddenly and turned its head. Almost immediately a young female appeared in the door; Mr. Chips squealed, “Ellie!” and jumped to her arms. While they were nuzzling each other Max looked her over. Sixteen, he judged, or seventeen. Or maybe even eighteen—shucks, how was a fellow to tell when womenfolk did such funny things to their faces? Anyhow she was no beauty and the expression on her face didn’t help it any.

She looked up at him and scowled. “What were you doing with Chipsie? Answer me that!”

It got his back fur up. “Nothing,” he said stiffly. “If you will excuse me, ma’am, I’ll get on with my work.” He turned his back and bent over his broom.

She grabbed his arm and swung him around. “Answer me! Or… or—I’ll tell the Captain, that’s what I’ll do!”

Max counted ten, then just to be sure, recalled the first dozen 7-place natural logarithms. “That’s your privilege, ma’am,” he said with studied calmness, “but first, what’s your name and what is your business here? I’m in charge of these compartments and responsible for these animals—as the Captain’s representative.” This he knew to be good space law, although the concatenation was long.

She looked startled. “Why, I’m Eldreth Coburn,” she blurted as if anyone should know. “And your business?”

“I came to see Mr. Chips—of course!”

“Very well, ma’am. You may visit your pet for a reasonable period,” he added, quoting verbatim from his station instruction sheet. “Then he goes back in his cage. Don’t disturb the other animals and don’t feed them. That’s orders.”

She started to speak, decided not to and bit her lip. The spider puppy had been looking from face to face and listening to a conversation far beyond its powers, although it may have sensed the emotions involved. Now it reached out and plucked Max’s sleeve. “Max,” Mr. Chips announced brightly. “Max!”

Miss Coburn again looked startled. “Is that your name?”

“Yes, ma’am. Max Jones. I guess he was trying to introduce me. Is that it, old fellow?” “Max,” Mr. Chips repeated firmly. “Ellie.”

Eldreth Coburn looked down, then looked up at Max with a sheepish smile. “You two seem to be friends. I guess I spoke out of turn. Me and my mouth.”

“No offense meant I’m sure, ma’am.”

Max had continued to speak stiffly; she answered quickly, “Oh, but I was rude! I’m sorry—I’m always sorry afterwards. But I got panicky when I saw the cage open and empty and I thought I had lost Chipsie.”

Max grinned grudgingly. “Sure. Don’t blame you a bit. You were scared.”

“That’s it—I was scared.” She glanced at him. “Chipsie calls you Max. May I call you Max?” “Why not? Everybody does—and it’s my name.”

“And you call me Eldreth, Max. Or Ellie.”

She stayed on, playing with the spider puppy, until Max had finished with the cattle. She then said reluctantly, “I guess I had better go, or they’ll be missing me.”

“Are you coming back?” “Oh, of course!” “Ummm… Miss Eldreth…” “Ellie.”

“—May I ask a question?” He hurried on, “Maybe it’s none of my business, but what took you so long? That little fellow has been awful lonesome. He thought you had deserted him.”

“Not ‘he’—’she’.” “Huh?”

“Mr. Chips is a girl,” she said apologetically. “It was a mistake anyone could make. Then it was too late, because it would confuse her to change her name.”

The spider puppy looked up brightly and repeated, “‘Mr. Chips is a girl.’ Candy, Ellie?” “Next time, honey bun.”

Max doubted if the name was important, with the nearest other spider puppy light-years away. “You didn’t answer my question?”

“Oh. I was so mad about that I wanted to bite. They wouldn’t let me.” “Who’s ‘they’? Your folks?”

“Oh, no! The Captain and Mrs. Dumont.” Max decided that it was almost as hard to extract information from her as it was from Mr. Chips. “You see, I came aboard in a stretcher—some silly fever, food poisoning probably. It couldn’t be much because I’m tough. But they kept me in bed and when the Surgeon did let me get up, Mrs. Dumont said I mustn’t go below ‘C’ deck. She had some insipid notion that it wasn’t proper.”

Max understood the stewardess’s objection; he had already discovered that some of his shipmates were

a rough lot—though he doubted that any of them would risk annoying a girl passenger. Why, Captain Blaine would probably space a man for that.

“So I had to sneak out. They’re probably searching for me right now. I’d better scoot.”

This did not fit in with Mr. Chips’ plans; the spider puppy clung to her and sobbed, stopping occasionally to wipe tears away with little fists. “Oh, dear!”

Max looked perturbed. “I guess I’ve spoiled him—her. Mr. Chips, I mean.” He explained how the ceremony of walking the baby had arisen.

Eldreth protested, “But I must go. What’ll I do?”

“Here, let’s see if he—she—will come to me.” Mr. Chips would and did. Eldreth gave her a pat and ran out, whereupon Mr. Chips took even longer than usual to doze off. Max wondered if spider puppies could be hypnotized; the ritual was getting monotonous.

Eldreth showed up next day under the stern eye of Mrs. Dumont. Max was respectful to the stewardess and careful to call Eldreth “Miss Coburn.” She returned alone the next day. He looked past her and raised his eyebrows. “Where’s your chaperone?”

Eldreth giggled. “La Dumont consulted her husband and he called in your boss—the fat one. They agreed that you were a perfect little gentleman, utterly harmless. How do you like that?”

Max considered it. “Well, I’m an ax murderer by profession, but I’m on vacation.” “That’s nice. What have you got there?”

It was a three-dimensional chess set. Max had played the game with his uncle, it being one that all astrogators played. Finding that some of the chartsmen and computermen played it, he had invested his tips in a set from the ship’s slop chest. It was a cheap set, having no attention lights and no arrangements for remote-control moving, being merely stacked transparent trays and pieces molded instead of carved, but it sufficed.

“It’s solid chess. Ever seen it?”

“Yes. But I didn’t know you played it.” “Why not? Ever play flat chess?” “Some.”

“The principles are the same, but there are more pieces and one more direction to move. Here, I’ll show you.

She sat tailor-fashion opposite him and he ran over the moves. “These are robot freighters… pawns. They can be commissioned anything else if they reach the far rim. These four are starships; they are the only ones with funny moves, they correspond with knights. They have to make interspace transitions, always off the level they’re on to some other level and the transition has to be related a certain way, like this—or this. And this is the Imperial flagship; it’s the one that has to be checkmated. Then there is… ” They ran through a practice game, with the help of Mr. Chips, who liked to move the pieces and did not care whose move it was.

Presently he said, “You catch on pretty fast.”

“Thanks.”

“Of course, the real players play four-dimensional chess.” “Do you?”

“Well, no. But I hope to learn some day. It’s just a matter of holding in your mind one more spatial relationship. My uncle used to play it. He was going to teach me, but he died.” He found himself explaining about his uncle. He trailed off without mentioning his own disappointment.

Eldreth picked up one of the starship pieces from a tray. “Say, Max, we’re pretty near our first transition, aren’t we?”

“What time is it?”

“Uh, sixteen twenty-one—say, I’d better get upstairs.”

“Then it’s, uh, about thirty-seven hours and seven minutes, according to the computer crew.”

“Mmm… you seem to know about such things. Could you tell me just what it is we do? I heard the Astrogator talking about it at the table but I couldn’t make head nor tail. We sort of duck into a space warp; isn’t that right?”

“Oh no, not a space warp. That’s a silly term—space doesn’t ‘warp’ except in places where pi isn’t exactly three point one four one five nine two six five three five eight nine seven nine three two three eight four six two six four three three eight three two seven, and so forth—like inside a nucleus. But we’re heading out to a place where space is really flat, not just mildly curved the way it is near a star.

Anomalies are always flat, otherwise they couldn’t fit together—be congruent.” She looked puzzled. “Come again?”

“Look, Eldreth, how far did you go in mathematics?”

“Me? I flunked improper fractions. Miss Mimsey was very vexed with me.” “Miss Mimsey?”

“Miss Mimsey’s School for Young Ladies, so you see I can listen with an open mind.” She made a face. “But you told me that all you went to was a country high school and didn’t get to finish at that. Huh?”

“Yes, but I learned from my uncle. He was a great mathematician. Well, he didn’t have any theorems named after him—but a great one just the same, I think.” He paused. “I don’t know exactly how to tell you; it takes equations. Say! Could you lend me that scarf you’re wearing for a minute?”

“Huh? Why, sure.” She removed it from her neck.

It was a photoprint showing a stylized picture of the solar system, a souvenir of Solar Union Day. In the middle of the square of cloth was the conventional sunburst surrounded by circles representing orbits of solar planets, with a few comets thrown in. The scale was badly distorted and it was useless as a structural picture of the home system, but it sufficed. Max took it and said, “Here’s Mars.”

Eldreth said, “You read it. That’s cheating.”

“Hush a moment. Here’s Jupiter. To go from Mars to Jupiter you have to go from here to here, don’t you?”

“Obviously.”

“But suppose I fold it so that Mars is on top of Jupiter? What’s to prevent just stepping across?” “Nothing, I guess. Except that what works for that scarf wouldn’t work very well in practice. Would it?”

“No, not that near to a star. But it works fine after you back away from a star quite a distance. You see, that’s just what an anomaly is, a place where space is folded back on itself, turning a long distance into no distance at all.”

“Then space is warped.”

“No, no, no! Look, I just folded your scarf. I didn’t stretch it out of shape! I didn’t even wrinkle it. Space is the same way; it’s crumpled like a piece of waste paper—but it’s not warped, just crumpled. Through some extra dimensions, of course.”

“I don’t see any ‘of course’ about it.”

“The math of it is simple, but it’s hard to talk about because you can’t see it. Space—our space—may be crumpled up small enough to stuff into a coffee cup, all hundreds of thousands of light-years of it. A

four-dimensional coffee cup, of course.”

She sighed. “I don’t see how a four-dimensional coffee cup could even hold coffee, much less a whole galaxy.”

“No trouble at all. You could stuff this sheer scarf into a thimble. Same principle. But let me finish. They used to think that nothing could go faster than light. Well, that was both right and wrong. It…”

“How can it be both?”

“That’s one of the Horst anomalies. You can’t go faster than light, not in our space. If you do, you burst out of it. But if you do it where space is folded back and congruent, you pop right back into our own space again—but a long way off. How far off depends on how it’s folded. And that depends on the mass in the space, in a complicated fashion that can’t be described in words but can be calculated.”

“But suppose you do it just anywhere?”

“That’s what happened to the first ones who tried it. They didn’t come back. And that’s why surveys are dangerous; survey ships go poking through anomalies that have been calculated but never tried. That’s also why astrogators get paid so much. They have to head the ship for a place you can’t see and they have to put the ship there just under the speed of light and they have to give it the gun at just the right world point. Drop a decimal point or use a short cut that covers up an indeterminancy and it’s just too bad. Now we’ve been gunning at twenty-four gee ever since we left the atmosphere. We don’t feel it of course because we are carried inside a discontinuity field at an artificial one gravity—that’s another of the anomalies. But we’re getting up close to the speed of light, up against the Einstein Wall; pretty soon we’ll be squeezed through like a watermelon seed between your finger and thumb and we’ll come out near Theta Centauri fifty-eight light-years away. Simple, if you look at it right.”

She shivered. “If we come out, you mean.”

“Well… I suppose so. But it’s not as dangerous as helicopters. And look at it this way: if it weren’t for the anomalies, there never would have been any way for us to reach the stars; the distances are too great.

But looking back, it is obvious that all that emptiness couldn’t be real—there had to be the anomalies. That’s what my uncle used to say.”

“I suppose he must have been right, even if I don’t understand it.” She scrambled to her feet. “But I do know that I had better hoof it back upstairs, or Mrs. Dumont may change her mind.” She hugged Mr. Chips and shoved the little creature into Max’s arms. “Walk the baby—that’s a pal.”

THREE WAYS TO GET AHEAD

Max intended to stay awake during the first transition, but he slept through it. It took place shortly after five in the morning, ship’s time. When he was awakened by idlers’ reveille at six it was all over. He jerked on his clothes, fuming at not having awakened earlier, and hurried to the upper decks. The passageways above Charlie deck were silent and empty; even the early risers among the passengers would not be up for another hour. He went at once to the Bifrost Lounge and crossed it to the view port, placed there for the pleasure of passengers.

The stars looked normal but the familiar, age-old constellations were gone. Only the Milky Way, our own galaxy, seemed as usual—to that enormous spiral of stars, some hundred thousand light-years across, a tiny displacement of less than sixty light-years was inconsequential.

One extremely bright yellow-white star was visible; Max decided that it must be Theta Centauri, sun of Garson’s Planet, their first stop. He left shortly, not wanting to chance being found loafing in passengers’ country. The sand boxes which constituted his excuse were then replaced with greater speed than usual and he was back in crew’s quarters in time for breakfast.

The passage to Garson’s Planet took most of a month even at the high boost possible to Horst-Conrad ship. Eldreth continued to make daily trips to see Mr. Chips—and to talk with and play 3-dee chess with Max. He learned that while she had not been born on Hespera, but in Auckland on Terra, nevertheless Hespera was her home. “Daddy sent me back to have them turn me into a lady, but it didn’t take.”

“What do you mean?”

She grinned. “I’m a problem. That’s why I’ve been sent for. You’re in check, Max. Chipsie! Put that back. I think the little demon is playing on your side.”

He gradually pieced together what she meant. Miss Mimsey’s school had been the third from which she had been expelled. She did not like Earth, she was determined to go home, and she had created a reign of terror at each institution to which she had been entrusted. Her widower father had been determined that she must have a “proper” education, but she had been in a better strategic position to impose her will—her father’s Earthside attorneys had washed their hands of her and shipped her home.

Sam made the mistake of joshing Max about Eldreth. “Have you gotten her to set the day yet, old son?” “Who set what day?”

“Now, now! Everybody in the ship knows about it, except possibly the Captain. Why play dumb with your old pal?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about!”

“I wasn’t criticizing, I was admiring. I’d never have the nerve to plot so high a trajectory myself. But as

grandpop always said, there are just three ways to get ahead; sweat and genius, getting born into the right family, or marrying into it. Of the three, marrying the boss’s daughter is the best, because—Hey! Take it easy!” Sam skipped back out of range.

“Take that back!”

“I do, I do. I was wrong. But my remarks were inspired by sheer admiration. Mistaken, I admit. So I apologize and withdraw the admiration.”

“But… ” Max grinned in spite of himself. It was impossible to stay angry at Sam. Sure, the man was a scamp, probably a deserter, certainly a belittler who always looked at things in the meanest of terms, but—well, there it was. Sam was his friend.

“I knew you were joking. How could I be figuring on getting married when you and I are going to…” “Keep your voice down.” Sam went on quietly, “You’ve made up your mind?”

“Yes. It’s the only way out, I guess. I don’t want to go back to Earth.”

“Good boy! You’ll never regret it.” Sam looked thoughtful. “We’ll need money.” “Well, I’ll have some on the books.”

“Don’t be silly. You try to draw more than spending money and they’ll never let you set foot on dirt. But don’t worry—save your tips, all that Fats will let you keep, and I’ll get us a stake. It’s my turn.”

“How?”

“Lots of ways. You can forget it.”

“Well… all right. Say, Sam, just what did you mean when you—I mean, well, suppose I did want to marry Ellie—I don’t of course; she’s just a kid and anyhow I’m not the type to marry—but just supposing? Why should anybody care?”

Sam looked surprised. “You don’t know?” “Why would I be asking?”

“You don’t know who she is?”

“Huh? Her name’s Eldreth Coburn and she’s on her way home to Hespera, she’s a colonial. What of it?”

“You poor boy! She didn’t mention that she is the only daughter of His Supreme Excellency, General Sir John FitzGerald Coburn, O.B.E., K.B., O.S.U., and probably X.Y.Z., Imperial Ambassador to Hespera and Resident Commissioner Plenipotentiary?”

“Huh? Oh my gosh!”

“Catch on, kid? With the merest trifle of finesse you can be a remittance man, at least. Name your own planet, just as long as it isn’t Hespera.”

“Oh, go boil your head! She’s a nice kid anyhow.”

Sam snickered. “She sure is. As grandpop used to say, ‘It’s an ill wind that gathers no moss.'”

The knowledge disturbed Max. He had realized that Eldreth must be well to do—she was a passenger,

wasn’t she? But he had no awe of wealth. Achievement as exemplified by his uncle held much more respect in his eyes. But the notion that Eldreth came from such an impossibly high stratum—and that he, Maximilian Jones, was considered a fortune-hunter and social climber on that account—was quite upsetting.

He decided to put an end to it. He started by letting his work pile up so that he could say truthfully that he did not have time to play three-dee chess. So Ellie pitched in and helped him. While he was playing the unavoidable game that followed he attempted a direct approach. “See here, Ellie, I don’t think you ought to stay down here and play three-dee chess with me. The other passengers come down to see their pets and they notice. They’ll gossip.”

“Pooh!”

“I mean it. Oh, you and I know it’s all right, but it doesn’t look right.”

She stuck out her lower lip. “Am I going to have trouble with you? You talk just like Miss Mimsey.” “You can come down to see Chipsie, but you’d better come down with one of the other pet owners.”

She started to make a sharp answer, then shrugged, “Okay, this isn’t the most comfortable place anyhow. From now on we play in Bifrost Lounge, afternoons when your work is done and evenings.”

Max protested that Mr. Giordano would not let him; she answered quickly, “Don’t worry about your boss. I can twist him around my little finger.” She illustrated by gesture.

The picture of the gross Mr. Gee in such a position slowed up Max’s answer, but he finally managed to get out, “Ellie, crew members can’t use the passenger lounge. It’s…”

“They can so. More than once, I’ve seen Mr. Dumont having a cup of coffee there with Captain Blaine.”

“You don’t understand. Mr. Dumont is almost an officer, and if the Captain wants him as his guest, well, that’s the Captain’s privilege.”

“You’d be my guest.”

“No, I wouldn’t be.” He tried to explain to her the strict regulation that crew members were not to associate with passengers. “The Captain would be angry if he could see us right now—not at you, at me. If he caught me in the passengers’ lounge he’d kick me all the way clown to ‘H’ deck.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“But… ” He shrugged. “All right. I’ll come up this evening. He won’t kick me, actually; that would be beneath him. He’ll just send Mr. Dumont over to tell me to leave, then he’ll send for me in the morning. I don’t mind being fined a month’s pay if that is what it takes to show you the way things are.”

He could see that he had finally reached her. “Why, I think that’s perfectly rotten! Everybody is equal. Everybody! That’s the law.”

“They are? Only from on top.”

She got up suddenly and left. Max again had to soothe Mr. Chips, but there was no one to soothe him. He decided that the day that he and Sam disappeared over a horizon and lost themselves could not come too soon.

Eldreth returned next day but in company with a Mrs. Mendoza, the devoted owner of a chow who

looked much like her. Eldreth treated Max with the impersonal politeness of a lady “being nice” to servants, except for a brief moment when Mrs. Mendoza was out of earshot.

“Max?”

“Yes, Miss?”

“I’ll ‘Yes, Miss’ you! Look, Max, what was your uncle’s name? Was it Chester Jones?” “Why, yes, it was. But why…”

“Never mind.” Mrs. Mendoza rejoined them. Max was forced to drop it.

The following morning the dry-stores keeper sought him out. “Hey, Max! The Belly wants you. Better hurry—I think you’re in some sort of a jam.”

Max worried as he hurried. He couldn’t think of anything he had done lately; he tried to suppress the horrid fear that Ellie was involved.

It was clear that Mr. Giordano was not pleased but all that he said was, “Report to the Purser’s Office. Jump.” Max jumped.

The Purser was not there; Mr. Kuiper received him and looked him over with a cold eye. “Put on a clean uniform and make it quick. Then report to the Captain’s cabin.”

Max stood still and gulped. Mr. Kuiper barked, “Well? Move!” “Sir,” Max blurted, “I don’t know where the Captain’s cabin is.”

“What? I’ll be switched! Able deck, radius nine oh and outboard.” Max moved.

The Captain was in his cabin. With him was Mr. Samuels the Purser, Mr. Walther the First Officer, and Dr. Hendrix the Astrogator. Max concluded that whatever it was he was about to be tried for, it could be nothing trivial. But he remembered to say, “Steward’s Mate Third Class Jones reporting, sir.”

Captain Blaine looked up. “Oh, yes. Find a chair.” Max found one, sat down on the edge of it. The Captain said to the First Officer, “Under the circumstances, Dutch, I suppose it’s the best thing to do—though it seems a little drastic. You agree, Hal?”

The Purser agreed. Max wondered just how drastic it was and whether he would live through it.

“We’ll log it as an exception, then, Doc, and I’ll write up an explanation for the board. After all, regulations were made to be broken. That’s the end of it.” Max decided that they were simply going to space him and explain it later.

The Captain turned back to his desk in a manner that signified that the meeting was over. The First Officer cleared his throat. “Captain… ” He indicated Max with his eyes.

Captain Blaine looked up again. “Oh, yes! Young man, your name is Jones?” “Yessir.”

“I’ve been looking over your record. I see that you once tried out for chartsman for a short time in the

Thule?”

“Uh, yes, Captain.” “Didn’t you like it?”

“Well, sir.” Max asked himself what Sam would say when confronted by such a ghost. “It was like this… to tell you the truth I didn’t do much except empty ash trays in the Worry—in the control room.” He held his breath.

The Captain smiled briefly. “It can sometimes work out that way. Would you be interested in trying it again?”

“What? Yes, sir!” “Dutch?”

“Captain, ordinarily I see no point in a man striking twice for the same job. But there is this personal matter.”

“Yes, indeed. You can spare him, Hal?”

“Oh, certainly, Captain. He’s hardly a key man where he is.” The Purser smiled. “Bottom deck valet.” The Captain smiled and turned to the Astrogator. “I see no objection, Doc. It’s a guild matter, of course.” “Kelly is willing to try him. He’s short a man, you know.”

“Very well, then…”

“Just a moment, Captain.” The Astrogator turned to Max. “Jones… you had a relative in my guild?” “My uncle, sir. Chester Jones.”

“I served under him. I hope you have some of his skill with figures.” “Uh, I hope so, sir.”

“We shall see. Report to Chief Computerman Kelly.”

Max managed to find the control room without asking directions, although he could hardly see where he was going.

CHARTSMAN JONES

The change in Max’s status changed the whole perspective of his life. His social relations with the other crew members changed not entirely for the better. The control room gang considered themselves the gentry of the crew, a status disputed by the power technicians and resented by the stewards. Max found that the guild he was leaving no longer treated him quite as warmly while the guild for which he was trying out did not as yet accept him.

Mr. Gee simply ignored him—would walk right over him if Max failed to jump aside. He seemed to

regard Max’s trial promotion as a personal affront.

It was necessary for him to hit the slop chest for dress uniforms. Now that his duty station was in the control room, now that he must pass through passengers’ country to go to and from work, it was no longer permissible to slouch around in dungarees. Mr. Kuiper let him sign for them; his cash would not cover it. He had to sign as well for the cost of permission to work out of his guild, with the prospect of going further in debt to both guilds should he be finally accepted. He signed cheerfully.

The control department of the Asgard consisted of two officers and five men—Dr. Hendrix the Astrogator, his assistant astrogator Mr. Simes, Chief Computerman Kelly, Chartsman First Class Kovak, Chtsmn 2/C Smythe, and computermen Noguchi and Lundy, both second class. There was also

“Sack” Bennett, communicator first class, but he was not really a part of the control gang, even though his station was in the Worry Hole; a starship was rarely within radio range of anything except at the very first and last parts of a trip. Bennett doubled as Captain Blaine’s secretary and factotum and owed his nickname to the often-stated belief of the others that he spent most of his life in his bunk.

Since the Asgard was always under boost a continuous watch was kept; not for them were the old, easy days of rocket ships, with ten minutes of piloting followed by weeks of free fall before more piloting was required. Since the Asgard carried no apprentice astrogator, there were only two officers to stand watches (Captain Blaine was necessarily an astrogator himself, but skippers do not stand watches); this lack was made up by Chief Computerman Kelly, who stood a regular watch as control

officer-of-the-watch. The other ratings stood a watch in four; the distinction between a computerman and a chartsman was nominal in a control room dominated by “Decimal Point” Kelly—what a man didn’t know he soon learned, or found another ship.

Easy watches for everyone but Max—he was placed on watch-and-watch for instruction, four hours on followed by four hours off in which he must eat, keep himself clean, relax, and—if he found time—sleep.

But he thrived on it, arriving early and sometimes having to be ordered out of the Worry Hole. Not until much later did he find out that this stiff regime was Kelly’s way of trying to break him, discover his weakness and get rid of him promptly if he failed to measure up.

Not all watches were pleasant. Max’s very first watch was under Mr. Simes. He crawled up the hatch into the control room and looked around him in wonderment. On four sides were the wonderfully delicate parallax cameras. Between two of them Lundy sat at the saddle of the main computer; he looked up and nodded but did not speak. Mr. Simes sat at the control console, facing the hatch; he must have seen Max but gave no sign of it.

There were other instruments crowded around the walls, some of which Max recognized from reading and from seeing pictures, some of which were strange—tell-tales and gauges from each of the ship’s compartments, a screen to reproduce the view aft or “below,” microphone and controls for the ship’s announcing system, the “tank” or vernier stereograph in which plates from the parallax cameras could be compared with charts, spectrostellograph, dopplerscope, multipoint skin temperature recorder, radar repeater for landing, too many things to take in at once.

Overhead through the astrogation dome was the starry universe. He stared at it, mouth agape. Living as he had been, inside a steel cave, he had hardly seen the stars; the firmament had been more with him back home on the farm.

“Hey! You!”

Max shook his head and found Mr. Simes looking at him. “Come here.” Max did so, the assistant astrogator went on, “Don’t you know enough to report to the watch officer when you come on duty?”

“Uh—sorry, sir.”

“Besides that, you’re late.” Max slid his eyes to the chronometer in the console; it still lacked five minutes of the hour. Simes continued, “A sorry state of affairs when crewmen relieve the watch later than the watch officer. What’s your name?”

“Jones, sir.”

Mr. Simes sniffed. He was a red-faced young man with thin, carroty hair and a sniff was his usual conversational embellishment, at least with juniors. “Make a fresh pot of coffee.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Max started to ask where and how, but Mr. Simes had gone back to his reading. Max looked helplessly at Lundy, who indicated a direction with his eyes. Behind the chart safe Max found a coffee maker and under it cups, saucers, sugar, and tins of cream.

He burned himself before getting the hang of the gear’s idiosyncrasies. Mr. Simes accepted the brew without looking at him. Max wondered what to do next, decided to offer a cup to Lundy. The computerman thanked him quietly and Max decided to risk having one himself, since it seemed to be accepted. He took it over beside the computer to drink it.

He was still doing so when the watch officer spoke up. “What is this? A tea party? Jones!” “Yes, sir?”

“Get the place policed up. Looks as if a herd of chucks had been wallowing in it.”

The room seemed clean, but Max found a few scraps of paper to pick up and stuff down the chute, after which he wiped already-gleaming brightwork. He had started to go over things a second time when Lundy motioned him over. Max then helped Lundy change plates in the parallax cameras and watched him while he adjusted the electronic timer. Mr. Simes pushed the ready button himself, which seemed to be his sole work during the watch.

Lundy removed the plates and set them up in the tank for chart comparison, took the readings and logged them. Max gave him nominal help and gathered some notion of how it was done, after which he again wiped brightwork.

It was a long watch. He went to his bunk drained of the elation he had felt.

But watches with Dr. Hendrix and with Chief Kelly were quite different. The Worry Hole was a jolly place under Kelly; he ruled as a benevolent tyrant, shouting, cursing, slandering the coffee, slurring his juniors and being sassed back. Max never touched a polish rag when Kelly was at control; he was kept too busy not merely helping but systematically studying everything in the room. “We haven’t a condemned thing to do,” Kelly shouted at him, “until we hit Carson’s Folly. Nothing to do but to ride this groove down until we hit dirt. So you, my laddy buck, are going to do plenty. When we get there you are going to know this condemned hole better than your mother knew your father—or you can spend your time there learning what you’ve missed while your mates are dirtside getting blind. Get out the instruction manual for the main computer, take off the back plate and get lost in them wires. I don’t want to see anything but your ugly behind the rest of this watch.”

Within ten minutes Kelly was down on his knees with him, helping him trace the intricate circuits.

Max learned, greatly assisted by his photographic memory and still more by the sound grounding in theory he had gotten from his uncle. Kelly was pleased. “I reckon you exaggerated a mite when you said you hadn’t learned anything in the Thule.”

“Well, not much.”

“Johansen have the Worry Hole when you were striking?”

“Uh, yes.” Max hoped frantically that Kelly would not ask other names.

“I thought so. That squarehead wouldn’t tell his own mother how old he was.”

There came a watch when Kelly trusted him to do a dry run for a transition approach on the computer, with Noguchi handling the tables and Kelly substituting for the astrogator by following records of the actual transition the ship had last made. The programming was done orally, as is the case when the astrogator is working under extreme pressure from latest data, just before giving the crucial signal to boost past the speed of light.

Kelly took it much more slowly than would happen in practice, while Noguchi consulted tables and called out figures to Max. He was nervous at first, his fingers trembling so that it was hard to punch the right keys—then he settled down and enjoyed it, feeling as if he and the machine had been born for each other.

Kelly was saying, “—times the binary natural logarithm of zero point eight seven oh nine two.” Max heard Noguchi’s voice call back the datum while he thumbed for the page—but in his mind Max saw the page in front of his eyes long before Noguchi located it; without conscious thought he depressed the right

keys.

“Correction!” sang out Kelly. “Look, meathead, you don’t put in them figures; you wait for translation by Noggy here. How many times I have to tell you?”

“But I did—” Max started, then stopped. Thus far he had managed to keep anyone aboard the Asgard

from learning of his embarrassingly odd memory.

“You did what?” Kelly started to clear the last datum from the board, then hesitated. “Come to think of it, you can’t possibly feed decimal figures into that spaghetti mill. Just what did you do?”

Max knew he was right and hated to appear not to know how to set up a problem. “Why, I put in the figures Noguchi was about to give me.”

“How’s that again?” Kelly stared at him. “You a mind reader?” “No. But I put in the right figures.”

“Hmm… ” Kelly bent over the keyboard. “Call ’em off, Noggy.” The computerman reeled off a string of ones and zeroes, the binary equivalent of the decimal expression Kelly had given him; Kelly checked the depressed keys, his lips moving in concentration. He straightened up. “I once saw a man roll thirteen sevens with honest dice. Was it fool luck, Max?”

“No.”

“Well! Noggy, gimme that book.” Kelly went through the rest of the problem, giving Max raw data and the operations to be performed, but not translating the figures into the binary notation the computer required. He kept thumbing the book and glancing over Max’s shoulder. Max fought off stage fright and punched the keys, while sweat poured into his eyes.

At last Kelly said, “Okay. Twist its tail.” Max flipped the switch which allowed the computer to swallow the program and worry it for an instant; the answer popped out in lights, off or on—the machine’s

equivalent of binary figures.

Kelly translated the lights back into decimal notation, using the manual. He then glanced at the recorded problem. He closed the record book and handed it to Noguchi. “I think I’ll have a cup of coffee,” he said quietly and walked away.

Noguchi reopened it, looked at the lights shining on the board and consulted the manual, after which he looked at Max very oddly. Max saw Kelly staring at him over a cup with the same expression. Max reached up and cleared the board entirely; the lights went out. He got down out of the computerman’s saddle. Nobody said anything.

Max’s next watch was with Dr. Hendrix. He enjoyed watches with the Astrogator almost as much as those with Kelly; Dr. Hendrix was a friendly and soft-spoken gentleman and gave as much attention to training Max as Kelly did. But this time Kelly lingered on after being relieved—in itself nothing, as the Chief Computerman frequently consulted with, or simply visited with, the Astrogator at such times. But today, after relieving the watch, Dr. Hendrix said pleasantly, “Kelly tells me that you are learning to use the computer, Jones?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“Very well, let’s have a drill.” Dr. Hendrix dug out an old astrogation log and selected a

transition-approach problem similar to the one Max had set up earlier. Kelly took the manual, ready to act as his “numbers boy”—but did not call the translations. Max waited for the first one; when it did not come, he read the figures from the page shining in his mind and punched them in.

It continued that way. Kelly said nothing, but wet his lips and checked what Max did each time the doctor offered a bit of the problem. Kovak watched from nearby, his eyes moving from actor to actor.

At last Dr. Hendrix closed the book. “I see,” he agreed, as if it were an everyday occurrence. “Jones, that is an extremely interesting talent. I’ve read of such cases, but you are the first I have met. You’ve heard of Blind Tom?”

“No, sir.”

“Perhaps the ship’s library has an account of him.” The Astrogator was silent for a moment. “I don’t mean to belittle your talent, but you are not to use it during an actual maneuver. You understand why?”

“Yes, sir. I guess I do.”

“Better say that you are not to use it unless you think an error has been made—in which case you will speak up at once. But the printed tables remain the final authority.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Good. See me, please, in my room when you come off watch.”

It was “day time” by the ship’s clocks when he went off watch. He went to the passageway outside Dr. Hendrix’s room and waited; there Ellie came across him. “Max!”

“Oh. Hello, Ellie.” He realized uncomfortably that he had not seen her since his tentative promotion.

“Hello he says!” She planted herself in front of him. “You’re a pretty sight—with your bloodshot eyes matching the piping on your shirt. Where have you been? Too good for your old friends? You haven’t even been to see Chipsie.”

He had been, once, although he had not run into Ellie. He had not repeated the visit because the shipmate who had replaced him had not liked being assigned as chambermaid to cows, sheep, llamas, et al.; he had seemed to feel that it was Max’s fault. “I’m sorry,” Max said humbly, “but I haven’t had time.”

“A feeble excuse. Know what you are going to do now? You’re going straight to the lounge and I am going to trim your ears—I’ve figured out a way to box your favorite gambit that will leave you gasping.”

Max opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again. “No.” “Speak louder. You used a word I don’t understand.”

“Look, Ellie, be reasonable. I’m waiting for Dr. Hendrix and as soon as he lets me go I’ve got to get some sleep. I’m about ten hours minus.”

“You can sleep any time.”

“Not when you’re standing four hours on and four off. You nap anytime you get a chance.” She looked perplexed. “You don’t mean you work every other watch? Why, that’s criminal.” “Maybe so but that’s how it is.”

“But—I’ll fix that! I’ll speak to the Captain.” “Ellie! Don’t you dare!”

“Why not? Captain Blaine is old sugar pie. Never you mind, I’ll fix it.”

Max took a deep breath, then spoke carefully. “Ellie, don’t say anything to the Captain, not anything. It’s a big opportunity for me and I don’t mind. If you go tampering with things you don’t understand, you’ll ruin my chances. I’ll be sent back to the stables.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t do that.”

“You don’t understand. He may be an ‘old sugar pie’ to you; to me he is the Captain. So don’t.” She pouted. “I was just trying to help.”

“I appreciate it. But don’t. And anyhow, I can’t come to the lounge, ever. It’s off limits for me.”

“But I thought—I think you’re just trying to avoid me. You run around up here now and you dress in pretty clothes. Why not?”

They were interrupted by Dr. Hendrix returning to his room. “Morning, Jones. Good morning, Miss Coburn.” He went on in.

Max said desperately, “Look, Ellie, I’ve got to go.” He turned and knocked on the Astrogator’s door.

Dr. Hendrix ignored having seen him with Ellie. “Sit down, Jones. That was a very interesting exhibition you put on.” The Astrogator went on, “I’m curious to know how far your talent extends. Is it just to figures?”

“Why, I guess not, sir.”

“Do you have to study hard to do it?”

“No, sir.”

“Hmm… We’ll try something. Have you read—let me see—any of the plays of Shakespeare?”

“Uh, we had Hamlet and As You Like It in school, and I read A Winter’s Tale. But I didn’t like it,” he answered honestly.

“In that case I don’t suppose you reread it. Remember any of it?” “Oh, certainly, sir.”

“Hmm—” Dr. Hendrix got down a limp volume.

“Let me see. Act two, scene three; Leontes says, ‘Nor night nor day nor rest: it is but weakness… ‘”

Max picked it up. “… it is but weakness to bear the matter thus; mere weakness. If the cause were not in being… ” He continued until stopped.

“That’s enough. I don’t care much for that play myself. Even the immortal Will had his off days. But how did you happen to have read that book of tables? Shakespeare at his dullest isn’t that dull. I’ve never read them, not what one would call’reading.'”

“Well, sir, Uncle Chet had his astrogation manuals at home after he retired and he used to talk with me a lot. So I read them.”

“Do I understand that you have memorized the entire professional library of an astrogator?” Max took a deep breath. “Well, sir, I’ve read them.”

Dr. Hendrix took from his shelves his own tools of his profession. He did not bother with the binary tables, that being the one Max had shown that he knew. He leafed through them, asked Max questions, finally identifying what he wanted only by page number. He closed the last of them. “Whew!” he commented, and blinked. “While I am aware that there are numerous cases of your talent in the history of psychology, I must admit it is disconcerting to encounter one.” He smiled. “I wonder what Brother Witherspoon would think of this.”

“Sir?”

“Our High Secretary. I’m afraid he would be shocked; he has conservative notions about protecting the’secrets’ of our profession.”

Max said uncomfortably, “Am I likely to get into trouble, sir? I didn’t know it was wrong to read Uncle’s books.”

“What? Nonsense. There are no’secrets’ to astrogation. You use these books on watch, so does every member of the ‘Worry’ gang. The passengers can read them, for all I care. Astrogation isn’t secret; it is merely difficult. Few people are so endowed as to be able to follow accurately the mathematical reasoning necessary to plan a—oh, a transition, let us say. But it suits those who bother with guild politics to make it appear an arcane art—prestige, you know.” Dr. Hendrix paused and tapped on his chair arm. “Jones, I want you to understand me. Kelly thinks you may shape up.”

“Uh, that’s good, sir.”

“But don’t assume that you know more than he does just because you have memorized the books.”

“Oh, no, sir!”

“Actually, your talent isn’t necessary in the control room. The virtues needed are those Kelly has—unflagging attention to duty, thorough knowledge of his tools, meticulous care for details, deep loyalty to his job and his crew and his ship and to those placed over him professionally. Kelly doesn’t need eidetic memory, ordinary good memory combined with intelligence and integrity are what the job takes—and that’s what I want in my control room.”

“Yes, sir.”

The Astrogator hesitated. “I don’t wish to be offensive but I want to add this. Strange talents are sometimes associated with ordinary, or even inferior, mentality—often enough so that the psychologists use the term ‘idiot savant.’ Sorry. You obviously aren’t an idiot, but you are not necessarily a genius, even if you can memorize the Imperial Encyclopedia. My point is: I am more interested in your horse sense and your attention to duty than I am in your phenomenal memory.”

“Uh, I’ll try, sir.”

“I think you’ll make a good chartsman, in time.” Dr. Hendrix indicated that the interview was over; Max got up. “One more thing.”

“Yes, sir?”

“There are excellent reasons of discipline and efficiency why crew members do not associate with passengers.”

Max gulped. “I know, sir.”

“Mind your P’s and Q’s. The members of my department are careful about this point—even then it is difficult.”

Max left feeling deflated. He had gone there feeling that he was about to be awarded something—even a chance to become an astrogator. He now felt sweated down to size.

GARSON’S PLANET

Max did not see much of Sam during the weeks following; the stiff schedule left him little time for visiting. But Sam had prospered.

Like all large ships the Asgard had a miniature police force, experienced ratings who acted as the First Officer’s deputies in enforcing ship’s regulations. Sam, with his talent for politics and a faked certffication as steward’s mate first class, managed during the reshuffle following Max’s transfer to be assigned as master-at-arms for the Purser’s department. He did well, treading on no toes, shutting his eyes to such violations as were ancient prerogatives and enforcing those rules of sanitation, economy, and behavior which were actually needed for a taut, happy ship… all without finding it necessary to haul offenders up before the First Officer for punishment—which suited both Mr. Walther and the crew. When Stores Clerk Maginnis partook too freely of Mr. Gee’s product and insisted on serenading his bunk mates, Sam merely took him to the galley and forced black coffee down him—then the following day took him down

to ‘H’ deck, laid his own shield of office aside, and gave Maginnis a scientific going over that left no scars but deeply marked his soul. In his obscure past Sam had learned to fight, not rough house, not in the stylized mock combat of boxing, but in the skilled art in which an unarmed man becomes a lethal machine.

Sam had selected his victim carefully. Had he reported him Maginnis would have regarded Sam as a snoop, a mere busybody to be outwitted or defied, and had the punishment been severe he might have been turned into a permanent discipline problem—not forgetting that reporting Maginnis might also have endangered a sacred cow, Chief Steward Giordano. As it was, it turned Maginnis into Sam’s strongest supporter and best publicist, as Maginnis’s peculiar but not unique pride required him to regard the man who defeated him as “the hottest thing on two feet, sudden death in each hand, a real man! No nonsense about old Sam—try him yourself and see how you make out. Go on, I want to lay a bet.”

It was not necessary for Sam to set up a second lesson.

A senior engineer’s mate was chief master-at-arms and Sam’s nominal superior; these two constituted the police force of their small town. When the technician asked to go back to power room watch-standing and was replaced by an engineer’s mate third, it was natural that Walther should designate Sam as Chief Master-at-Arms.

He had had his eye on the job from the moment he signed on. Any police chief anywhere has powers far beyond those set forth by law. As long as Sam stayed well buttered up with Mr. Kuiper, Mr. Giordano, and (to a lesser extent) with Mr. Dumont, as long as he was careful to avoid exerting his authority in either the engineering spaces or the Worry Hole, he was the most powerful man in the ship—more powerful in all practical matters than the First Officer himself since he was the First Officer’s visible presence.

Such was the situation when the ship grounded at Garson’s Planet.

Garson’s Planet appears to us to be a piece of junk left over when the universe was finished. It has a surface gravity of one-and-a-quarter, too much for comfort, it is cold as a moneylender’s heart, and it has a methane atmosphere unbreathable by humans. With the sky swarming with better planets it would be avoided were it not an indispensable way station. There is only one survey Horst congruency near Earth’s Sun and transition of it places one near Theta Centauri—and of the thirteen planets of that sun, Carson’s Planet possesses the meager virtue of being least unpleasant.

But there are half a dozen plotted congruencies accessible to Theta Centauri, which makes Carson’s Planet the inevitable cross-roads for trade of the Solar Union.

Max hit dirt there just once, once was plenty. The colony at the space port, partly domed, partly dug in under the domes, was much like the Lunar cities and not unlike the burrows under any major Earth city, but to Max it was novel since he had never been on Luna and had never seen a big city on Terra other than Earthport. He went dirtside with Sam, dressed in his best and filled with curiosity. It was not necessary to put on a pressure suit; the port supplied each passenger liner with a pressure tube from ship’s lock to dome lock.

Once inside Sam headed down into the lower levels. Max protested, “Sam, let’s go up and look around.”

“Huh? Nothing there. A hotel and some expensive shops and clip joints for the pay passengers. Do you want to pay a month’s wages for a steak?”

“No. I want to see out. Here I am on a strange planet and I haven’t seen it at all. I couldn’t see it from the control room when we landed and now I haven’t seen anything but the inside of a trans tube and this.” He

gestured at the corridor walls.

“Nothing to see but a dirty, thick, yellow fog that never lifts. Worse than Venus. But suit yourself. I’ve got things to do, but if you don’t want to stick with me you certainly don’t have to.”

Max decided to stick. They went on down and came out in a wide, lighted corridor not unlike that street in Earthport where Percy’s restaurant was located, save that it was roofed over. There were the same bars, the same tawdry inducements for the stranger to part with cash, even to the tailor shop with the permanent “CLOSING OUT” sale. Several other ships were in and the sector was crowded. Sam looked around. “Now for a place for a quiet drink and a chat.”

“How about there?” Max answered, pointing to a sign reading THE BETTER ‘OLE. “Looks clean and cheerful.”

Sam steered him quickly past it. “It is,” he agreed, “but not for us.” “Why not?”

“Didn’t you notice the customers? Imperial Marines.” “What of that? I’ve got nothing against the Imperials.”

“Mmm… no,” Sam agreed, still hurrying, “but those boys stick together and they have a nasty habit of resenting a civilian who has the bad taste to sit down in a joint they have staked out. Want to get your ribs kicked in?”

“Huh? That wouldn’t happen if I minded my own business, would it?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. Suppose a hostess decides that you’re ‘cute’—and the spit-and-polish boy she was with wants to make something of it? Max, you’re a good boy—but there just ain’t no demand for good boys. To stay out of trouble you have to stay away from it.”

They threaded their way through the crowd for another hundred yards before Sam said, “Here we are—provided Lippy is still running the place.” The sign read THE SAFE LANDING; it was larger but not as pleasant as THE BETTER ‘OLE.

“Who’s Lippy?”

“You probably won’t meet him.” Sam led the way in and picked out a table.

Max looked around. It looked like any other fifth-rate bar grille. “Could I get a strawberry soda here? I’ve had a hankering for one for ages—I used always to get one Saturdays when I went to the Corners.”

“They can’t rule you out for trying.”

“Okay. Sam, something you said—you remember the story you told me about your friend in the Imperials? Sergeant Roberts?”

“Who?”

“Or Richards. I didn’t quite catch it.” “Never heard of the guy.”

“But…”

“Never heard of him. Here’s the waiter.”

Nor had the humanoid Sirian waiter heard of strawberry soda. He had no facial muscles but his back skin crawled and rippled with embarrassed lack of comprehension. Max settled for something called “Old Heidelberg” although it had never been within fifty light-years of Germany. It tasted to Max like cold soap suds, but since Sam had paid for it he nursed it along and pretended to drink it.

Sam bounced up almost at once. “Sit tight, kid. I won’t be long.” He spoke to the barman, then disappeared toward the back. A young woman came over to Max’s table.

“Lonely, spaceman?” “Uh, not especially.”

“But I am. Mind if I sit down?” She sank into the chair that Sam had vacated. “Suit yourself. But my friend is coming right back.”

She didn’t answer but turned to the waiter at her elbow. “A brown special, Giggles.” Max made an emphatic gesture of denial. “No!”

“What’s that, dear?”

“Look,” Max answered, blushing, “I may look green as paint—I am, probably. But I don’t buy colored water at house prices. I don’t have much money.”

She looked hurt. “But you have to order or I can’t sit here.”

“Well… ” He glanced at the menu. “I could manage a sandwich, I guess.”

She turned again to the waiter. “Never mind the special, Giggles. A cheese on rye and plenty of mustard.” She turned back to Max. “What’s your name, honey?”

“Max.”

“Mine’s Dolores. Where are you from?” “The Ozarks. That’s Earthside.”

“Now isn’t that a coincidence! I’m from Winnipeg—we’re neighbors!”

Max decided that it might appear so, from that distance. But as Dolores babbled on it became evident that she knew neither the location of the Ozarks nor that of Winnipeg, had probably never been on Terra in her life. She was finishing the sandwich while telling Max that she just adored spacemen, they were so romantic, when Sam returned.

He looked down at her. “How much did you take him for?”

Dolores said indignantly, “That’s no way to talk! Mr. Lipski doesn’t permit…”

“Stow it, kid,” Sam went on, not unkindly. “You didn’t know that my partner is a guest of Lippy. Get me? No’specials,’ no ‘pay-me’s’—you’re wasting your time. Now how much?”

Max said hastily, “It’s okay, Sam. All I bought her was a sandwich.”

“Well… all right. But you’re excused, sister. Later, maybe.” She shrugged and stood up. “Thanks, Max.”

“Not at all, Dolores. I’ll say hello to the folks in Winnipeg.” “Do that.”

Sam did not sit down. “Kid, I have to go out for a while.” “Okay.”

Max started to rise, Sam motioned him back. “No, no. This I’d better do by myself. Wait here, will you? They won’t bother you again—or if they do, ask for Lippy.”

“I won’t have any trouble.”

“I hope not.” Sam looked worried. “I don’t know why I should fret, but there is something about you that arouses the maternal in me. Your big blue eyes I guess.”

“Huh? Oh, go sniff space! Anyway, my eyes are brown.”

“I was speaking,” Sam said gently, “of the eyes of your dewy pink soul. Don’t speak to strangers while I’m gone.”

Max used an expression he had picked up from Mr. Gee; Sam grinned and left.

But Sam’s injunction did not apply to Mr. Simes. Max saw the assistant astrogator appear in the doorway. His face was redder than usual and his eyes looked vague. He let his body revolve slowly as he surveyed the room. Presently his eyes lit on Max and he grinned unpleasantly.

“Well, well, well!” he said as he advanced toward Max. “If it isn’t the Smart Boy.” “Good evening, Mr. Simes.” Max stood up.

“So it’s ‘good evening, Mr. Simes’! But what did you say under your breath?’ “Nothing, sir.”

“Humph! I know! But I think the same thing about you, only worse.” Max did not answer, Simes went on, “Well, aren’t you going to ask me to sit down?”

“Have a seat, sir,” Max said without expression.

“Well, what do you know? The Smart Boy wants me to sit with him.” He sat, called the waiter, ordered, and turned back to Max. “Smart Boy, do you know why I’m sitting with you?”

“No, sir.”

“To put a flea in your ear, that’s why. Since you pulled that hanky-panky with the computer, you’ve been Kelly’s hair-faired—fair-haired—boy. Fair-haired boy,” he repeated carefully. “That gets you nowhere with me. Get this straight: you go sucking around the Astrogator the way Kelly does and I’ll run you out of the control room. Understand me?”

Max felt himself losing his temper. “What do you mean by ‘hanky-panky,’ Mr. Simes?”

“You know. Probably memorized the last half dozen transitions—now you’ve got Kelly and the Professor thinking you’ve memorized the book. A genius in our midst! You know what that is? That’s a lot of…”

Fortunately for Max they were interrupted; he felt a firm hand on his shoulder and Sam’s quiet voice said, “Good evening, Mr. Simes.”

Simes looked confused, then recognized Sam and brightened. “Well, if it isn’t the copper. Sit down, Constable. Have a drink.”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Sam pulled up another chair. “Do you know Smart Boy here?”

“I’ve seen him around.”

“Keep your eye on him. That’s an order. He’s very, very clever. Too clever. Ask him a number. Pick a number between one and ten.”

“Seven.”

Mr. Simes pounded the table. “What did I tell you? He memorized it before you got here. Someday he’s going to memorize one and they’ll stencil it across his chest. You know what, Constable? I don’t trust smart boys. They get ideas.”

Reinforced by Sam’s calming presence Max kept quiet. Giggles had come to the table as soon as Sam joined them; Max saw Sam write something on the back of a menu and pass it with money to the humanoid. But Mr. Simes was too busy with his monologue to notice. Sam let him ramble on, then suddenly interrupted. “You seem to have a friend here, sir.”

“Huh? Where?”

Sam pointed. At the bar Dolores was smiling and gesturing at the assistant navigator to join her. Simes focused his eyes, grinned and said, “Why, so I do! It’s my Great Aunt Sadie.” He got up abruptly.

Sam brushed his hands together. “That disposes of that. Give you a bad time, kid?” “Sort of. Thanks, Sam. But I hate to see him dumped on Dolores. She’s a nice kid.”

“Don’t worry about her. She’ll roll him for every thin he has on him—and a good job, too.” His eyes became hard. “I like an officer who acts like an officer. If he wants to pin one on, he should do it in his own part of town. Oh, well.” Sam relaxed. “Been some changes, eh, kid? Things are different from the way they were when we raised ship at Terra.”

“I’ll say they are!”

“Like it in the Worry gang?”

“It’s more fun than I ever had in my life. And I’m learning fast—so Mr. Kelly says. They’re a swell bunch—except for him.” He nodded toward Simes.

“Don’t let him worry you. The best soup usually has a fly in it. Just don’t let him get anything on you.” “I sure don’t intend to.”

Sam looked at him, then said softly, “Ready to take the dive?”

“Huh?”

“I’m getting our stake together. We’ll be all set.”

Max found it hard to answer. He had known that his transfer had not changed anything basic; he was still in as much danger as ever. But he had been so busy with the joy of hard, interesting work, so dead for sleep when he was not working, that the subject had been pushed back in his mind. Now he drew patterns on the table in the sweat from the glasses and thought about it. “I wish,” he said slowly, “that there was some way to beat it.”

“There is a way, I told you. Your record gets lost.”

Max raised his eyes. “What good would that do? Sure, it would get me another trip. But I don’t want just another trip; I want to stay with it.” He looked down at the table top and carefully sketched an hyperboloid. “I’d better go with you. If I go back to Terra, it’s the labor companies for me—even if I stay out of jail.”

“Nonsense.” “What?”

“Understand me, kid. I’d like to have you with me. A time like that, having a partner at your elbow is the difference between—well, being down in the dumps and being on top. But you can stay in space, with a record as clean as a baby’s.”

“Huh? How?”

“Because you are changing guilds. Now only one paper has to get lost—your strike-out record with the stewards, cooks, and clerks. And they will never miss it because you aren’t on their books, anyhow. You start fresh with the chartsmen and computers, all neat and legal.”

Max sat still and was tempted. “How about the report to the Department of Guilds and Labor?”

“Same thing. Different forms to different offices. I checked. One form gets lost, the other goes in—and Steward’s Mate Jones vanishes into limbo while Apprentice Chartsman Jones starts a clean record.”

“Sam, why don’t you do it? With the drag you’ve got now you could switch to… uh, well, to…”

“To what?” Sam shook his head sadly. “No, old son, there is nothing I can switch to. Besides, there are reasons why I had better be buried deep.” He brightened. “Tell you what—I’ll pick my new name before I take the jump and tell you. Then some day, two years, ten, twenty, you’ll lay over at Nova Terra and look me up. We’ll split a bottle and talk about when we were young and gay. Eh?”

Max smiled though he did not feel happy. “We will, Sam. We surely will.” Then he frowned. “But, Sam, I don’t know how to wangle the deal—and you’ll be gone.”

“I’ll fix it before I leave. I’ve got Nelson eating out of my hand now. Like this: half cash down and half on delivery—and I’ll fix it so that you have something on him—never mind what; you don’t need to know yet. When you ground at Earthport, he asks you to mail the reports because you are going dirtside and he has work to finish. You check to see that the two reports you want are there, then you give him his pay off. Done.”

Max said slowly, “I suppose that’s best.”

“Quit fretting. Everybody has a skeleton in the closet; the thing is to keep ’em there and not at the feast.” He pushed an empty glass aside. “Kid, would you mind if we went back to the ship? Or had you planned to make a night of it?”

“No, I don’t mind.” Max’s elation at setting foot on his first strange planet was gone—Garson’s Hole was, he had to admit, a sorry sample of the Galaxy.

“Then let’s get saddled up. I’ve got stuff to carry and I could use help.”

It turned out to be four fairly large bundles which Sam had cached in public lockers. “What are they?” Max asked curiously.

“Tea cozies, old son. Thousands of them. I’m going to sell ’em to Procyon pinheads as skull caps.” Somewhat affronted, Max shut up.

Everything coming into the ship was supposed to be inspected, but the acting master-at-arms on watch at the lock did not insist on examining the items belonging to the Chief Master-at-Arms any more than he would have searched a ship’s officer. Max helped Sam carry the bundles to the stateroom which was the prerogative of the ship’s chief of police.

“THROUGH THE CARGO HATCH”

From Garson’s Planet to Halcyon around Nu Pegasi is a double dogleg of three transitions, of 105, 487, and 19 light-years respectively to achieve a “straight line” distance of less than 250 light-years. But neither straight-line distance nor pseudo-distance of transition is important; the Asgard covered less than a

light-year between gates. A distance “as the crow flies” is significant only to crows.

The first transition was barely a month out from Carson’s Planet. On raising from there Kelly placed Max on a watch in three, assigning him to Kelly’s own watch, which gave Max much more sleep, afforded him as much instruction (since the watch with Simes was worthless, instruction-wise), and kept Max out of Simes’ way, to his enormous relief. Whether Kelly had planned that feature of it Max never knew—and did not dare ask.

Max’s watch was still an instruction watch, he had no one to relieve nor to be relieved by. It became his habit not to leave the control room until Kelly did, unless told to do so. This resulted in him still being thrown into the company of Dr. Hendrix frequently, since the Astrogator relieved the Chief Computerman and Kelly would usually hang around and chat… during which time the Astrogator would sometimes inquire into Max’s progress.

Occasionally the Captain would show up on Dr. Hendrix’s watch. Shortly after leaving Garson’s Planet Dr. Hendrix took advantage of one such occasion to have Max demonstrate for Captain Blaine and First Officer Walther his odd talent. Max performed without a mistake although the Captain’s presence made him most self-conscious. The Captain watched closely with an expression of gentle surprise. Afterwards he said, “Thank you, lad. That was amazing. Let me see—what is your name?”

“Jones, sir.”

“Jones, yes.” The old man blinked thoughtfully. “It must be terrifying not to be able to forget—especially

in the middle of the night. Keep a clear conscience, son.”

Twelve hours later Dr. Hendrix said to him, “Jones, don’t go away. I want to see you.” “Yes, sir.”

The Astrogator spoke with Kelly for a few moments, then again spoke to Max. “The Captain was impressed by your vaudeville act, Jones. He is wondering whether you have any parallel mathematical ability.”

“Well—no, sir. I’m not a lightning calculator, that is. I saw one in a sideshow once. He could do things I couldn’t.”

Hendrix brushed it aside. “Not important. I believe you told me that your uncle taught you some mathematical theory?”

“Just for astrogation, sir.”

“What do you think I am talking about? Do you know how to compute a transition approach?” “Uh, I think so, sir.”

“Frankly, I doubt it, no matter how much theoretical drill Brother Jones gave you. But go ahead.” “Now, sir?”

“Try it. Pretend you’re the officer of the watch. Kelly will be your assistant. I’ll just be audience. Work the approach we are on. I realize that we aren’t close enough for it to matter—but you are to assume that the safety of the ship depends on it.”

Max took a deep breath. “Aye aye, sir.” He started to get out fresh plates for the cameras. Hendrix said, “No!”

“Sir?”

“If you have the watch, where’s your crew? Noguchi, help him.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Noguchi grinned and came over. While they were bending over the first camera, Noguchi whispered, “Don’t let him rattle you, pal. We’ll give him a good show. Kelly will help you over the humps.”

But Kelly did not help; he acted as “numbers boy” and nothing else, with no hint to show whether Max was right, or wildly wrong. After Max had his sights and had taken his comparison data between plates and charts he did not put the problem through the computer himself, but let Noguchi man the machine, with Kelly translating. After a long time and much sweat the lights blinked what he hoped was the answer.

Dr. Hendrix said nothing but took the same plates to the tank and started to work the problem again, with the same crew. Very quickly the lights blinked on again; the Astrogator took the tables from Kelly and looked up the translation himself. “We differ only in the ninth decimal place. Not bad.”

“I was wrong only in the ninth place, sir?”

“I didn’t say that. Perhaps I was more in error.”

Max started to grin, but Dr. Hendrix frowned. “Why didn’t you take doppler spectra to check?” Max felt a cold chill. “I guess I forgot, sir.”

“I thought you were the man who never forgot?”

Max thought intuitively—and correctly—that two kinds of memory were involved, but he did not have a psychologist’s jargon with which to explain. One sort was like forgetting one’s hat in a restaurant, that could happen to anyone; the other was being unable to recall what the mind had once known.

Hendrix went on, “A control room man must not forget things necessary to the safety of the ship. However as an exercise you solved it very well—except that you have no speed. Had we been pushing close to the speed of light, ready to cross, your ship would have been in Hades and crashed in the River Styx before you got the answer. But it was a good first try.”

He turned away. Kelly jerked his head toward the hatch and Max went below.

As he was falling asleep Max turned over in his mind the notion that Dr. Hendrix might even be thinking of him for—Oh no! He put the thought aside. After all, Kelly could have done it; he had seen him do early approaches many times, and faster, too. Probably Noguchi could have done it.

Certainly Noguchi could have done it, he corrected. After all, there weren’t any “secrets.”

As they approached the first anomaly the easy watch in three for officers and watch in four for the men changed to watch-and-watch, with an astrogator, an assistant, a chartsman, and a computerman on each watch. Max was at last assigned to a regular watch; the first watch was Dr. Hendrix assisted by Chartsman 1/c Kovak, Max as chartsman of the watch and Noguchi on the computer; the other watch was Mr. Simes assisted by Chief Kelly, Smythe as chartsman and Lundy as computerman. Max noticed that Dr. Hendrix had assigned his “first team” to Simes and had taken the less experienced technicians himself. He wondered why, but was pleased not to be working for Simes.

He learned at last why they called it the “Worry Hole.” Dr. Hendrix became a frozen-masked automaton, performing approach correction after correction and demanding quick, accurate, and silent service.

During the last twenty hours of the approach the Astrogator never left the control room, nor did anyone else other than for short periods when nominally off watch. Simes continued to take his regular watch but Dr. Hendrix hung over him, checking everything that he did. Twice he required the junior astrogator to reperform portions of his work and once elbowed him aside and did it himself. The first time it happened Max stared—then he noticed that the others were careful to be busy doing something else whenever Dr. Hendrix spoke privately to Simes.

The tension grew as the critical instant approached. The approach to an anomalous intraspatial transition can hardly be compared to any other form of piloting ever performed by human beings, though it might be compared to the impossible trick of taking off in an atmosphere plane, flying a thousand miles blind—while performing dead reckoning so perfectly as to fly through a narrow tunnel at the far end, without ever seeing the tunnel. A Horst congruency cannot be seen, it can only be calculated by abstruse mathematics of effects of mass on space; a “gateway” is merely unmarked empty space in vaster emptiness. In approaching a planet an astrogator can see his destination, directly or by radar, and his speed is just a few miles per second. But in making a Horstian approach the ship’s speed approaches that of light—and reaches it, at the last instant. The nearest landmarks are many billions of miles away, the landmarks themselves are moving with stellar velocities and appear to be crowding together in the

exaggerated parallax effects possible only when the observer is moving almost as fast as is his single clue to location and speed—the wave fronts of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Like searching at midnight in a dark cellar for a black cat that isn’t there.

Toward the last Kelly himself was on the computer with Lundy at his ear. Smythe and Kovak were charting, passing new data to Dr. Hendrix, who was programming orally to the computer crew, setting up the problems in his head and feeding them to the electronic brain almost without delay. The power room was under his direct control now; he had a switch led out from the control console in each hand, one to nurse the ship along just below speed of light, the other to give the Asgard the final kick that would cause her to burst through.

Max was pushed aside, no task remained in which there was not someone more experienced. On a different level, Simes too had been pushed aside; there was place for only one astrogator at the moment of truth.

Of all those in the Worry Hole only Captain Blaine seemed to be relaxed. He sat in the chair sacred to him, smoking quietly and watching Hendrix. The Astrogator’s face was gray with fatigue, greasy with unwashed sweat. His uniform was open at the collar and looked slept in, though he certainly had not slept. Max looked at him and wondered why he had ever longed to be an astrogator, ever been foolish enough to wish to bear this undivided and unendurable burden.

But the doctor’s crisp voice showed no fatigue; the endless procession of numbers marched out, sharp as print, each spoken so that there could be no mistake, no need to repeat, “nine” always sounded as one syllable, “five” always stretched into two. Max listened and learned and wondered.

He glanced up through the dome, out into space itself, space shown distorted by their unthinkable speed. The stars ahead, or above, had been moving closer together for the past several watches, the huge parallax effect displacing them to the eye so that they seemed to be retreating in the very sector of the sky they were approaching. They were seeing by infra-red waves now, ploughing into oncoming wave trains so fast that doppler effect reduced heat wave lengths to visible light.

The flood of figures stopped. Max looked down, then looked up hastily as he heard Dr. Hendrix say, “Stand by!”

The stars seemed to crawl together, then instantly they were gone to be replaced without any lapse of time whatever by another, new and totally different starry universe.

Hendrix straightened up and sighed, then looked up. “There’s the Albert Memorial,” he said quietly. “And there is the Hexagon. Well, Captain, it seems we made it again.” He turned to Simes. “Take it, Mister.” He let the Captain go first, then followed him down the hatch.

The control gang went back to easy watches; the next transition was many days away. Max continued as chartsman-of -the-watch in place of Kovak, who temporarily replaced Dr. Hendrix while the Astrogator got a week of rest: There was truly not much to do during the early part of a leg and the doctor’s superb skill was not needed. But Max greatly enjoyed the new arrangements; it made him proud to sign the rough log “M. Jones, Chtsmn o/W.” He felt that he had arrived—even though Simes found fault with him and Kelly continued to drill him unmercifully in control room arts.

He was surprised but not apprehensive when he was told, during an off-watch period, to report to the Astrogator. He put on a fresh uniform, slicked his hair clown, and went above “C” deck. “Apprentice Chartsman Jones reporting, sir.”

Kelly was there, having coffee with the Astrogator. Hendrix acknowledged Max’s salutation but left him standing. “Yes, Jones.” He turned to Kelly. “Suppose you break the news.”

“If you say so, sir.” Kelly looked uncomfortable. “Well, Jones, it’s like this—you don’t really belong in my guild.”

Max was so shocked that he could not answer. He was about to say that he had thought—he had understood—he hadn’t known—But he got nothing out; Kelly continued, “The fact is, you ought to buck for astrogator. The Doctor and I have been talking it over.”

The buzzing in his head got worse. He became aware that Dr. Hendrix was repeating, “Well, Jones? Do you want to try it? Or don’t you?”

Max managed to say, “Yes. Yes, sir.”

“Good. Kelly and I have been watching you. He is of the opinion and so am I that you may, just possibly, have the latent ability to develop the skill and speed necessary. The question is: do you think so?”

“Uh… that is—I hope so, sir!”

“So do I,” Hendrix answered dryly. ‘We shall see. If you haven’t, you can revert to your own guild and no harm is done. The experience will make you a better chartsman.” The Astrogator turned to Kelly. “I’ll quiz Jones a bit, Kelly. Then we can make up our minds.”

“Very good, sir.” Kelly stood up.

When the Chief Computerman had gone Hendrix turned to his desk, hauled out a crewman’s personal record. To Max he said harshly, “Is this yours?”

Max looked at it and gulped. “Yes, sir.”

Dr. Hendrix held his eye. “Well? How good a picture is it of your career thus far? Any comment you want to make?”

The pause might have been a dozen heart beats, though to Max it was an endless ordeal. Then a catharsis came bursting up out of him and he heard himself answering, “It’s not a good picture at all, sir. It’s phony from one end to the other.”

Even as he said it, he wondered why. He felt that he had kicked to pieces his one chance to achieve his ambition. Yet, instead of feeling tragic, he felt oddly relaxed.

Hendrix put the personal record back on his desk. “Good,” he answered. “Very good. If you had given any other answer, I would have run you out of my control room. Now, do you want to tell me about it? Sit down.”

So Max sat down and told him. All that he held back was Sam’s name and such details as would have identified Sam. Naturally Dr Hendrix noticed the omission and asked him point blank.

“I won’t tell you, sir.”

Hendrix nodded. “Very well. Let me add that I shall make no attempt to identify this, ah, friend of yours—if by chance he is in this ship.”

“Thank you, sir.”

There followed a considerable silence. At last Hendrix said, “Son, what led you to attempt this preposterous chicanery? Didn’t you realize you would be caught?”

Max thought about it. “I guess I knew I would be, sir—eventually. But I wanted to space and there wasn’t any other way to do it.” When Hendrix did not answer Max went on. After the first relief of being able to tell the truth, he felt defensive, anxious to justify himself—and just a little bit irked that Dr. Hendrix did not see that he had simply done what he had to do—so it seemed to Max. “What would you have done, sir?”

“Me? How can I answer that? What you’re really asking is: do I consider your actions morally wrong, as well as illegal?”

“Uh, I suppose so, sir.”

“Is it wrong to lie and fake and bribe to get what you want? It’s worse than wrong, it’s undignified!”

Dr. Hendrix chewed his lip and continued. “Perhaps that opinion is the sin of the Pharisees… my own weakness. I don’t suppose that a young, penniless tramp, such as you described yourself to be, can afford the luxury of dignity. As for the rest, human personality is a complex thing, nor am I a judge.

Admiral Lord Nelson was a liar, a libertine, and outstandingly undisciplined. President Abraham Lincoln was a vulgarian and nervously unstable. The list is endless. No, Jones, I am not going to pass judgment; you must do that yourself. The authorities having jurisdiction will reckon your offenses; I am concerned only with whether or not you have the qualities I need.”

Max’s emotions received another shock. He had already resigned himself to the idea that he had lost his chance. “Sir?”

“Don’t misunderstand me.” Hendrix tapped the forged record. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all. But perhaps you can live down your mistake. In the meantime, I badly need another watch officer; if you measure up, I can use you. Part of it is personal, too; your uncle taught me, I shall try to teach you.”

“Uh, I’ll try, sir. Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me. I’m not even feeling particularly friendly to you, at the moment. Don’t talk with anyone. I’ll ask the Captain to call a guild meeting and he and Mr. Simes and I will vote on you. We’ll make you a probationary apprentice which will permit the Captain to appoint you to the temporary rank of merchant cadet. The legalities are a bit different from those of the usual route as you no doubt know.”

Max did not know, though he was aware that officers sometimes came up “through the cargo hatch”—but another point hit him. “Mr. Simes, sir?”

“Certainly. By this procedure, all the astrogators you serve with must pass on you.” “Uh, does it have to unanimous, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Then—Well, sir, you might as well forget it. I mean, I appreciate your willingness to, uh, but… ” His voice trailed off.

Dr. Hendrix smiled mirthlessly. “Hadn’t you better let me worry about that?” “Oh. Sorry, sir.”

“When it has been logged, I’ll notify you. Or ‘when and if,’ if you prefer.”

“Yes, sir.” Max stood up. “Sir? There were, uh, a couple of other things I wondered about.” Hendrix had turned back to his desk. He answered, “Well?” somewhat impatiently.

“Would you mind telling me—just for my curiosity—how you caught me?”

“Oh, that. No doubt you’ve given yourself away to several people. I’m sure Kelly knows, from the subjects he avoided. For example, I once heard Lundy mention to you Kiefer’s Ritz on Luna. Your answer, though noncommittal, implied that you did not really know what dive he was talking about—and it is impossible for a spaceman not to know that place, its entrance faces the east lock to the space port.”

“Oh.”

“But the matter came to the top of my mind in connection with this.” He again indicated the false record. “Jones, I deal in figures and my mind can no more help manipulating them for all the information they contain than I can help breathing. This record says that you went to space a year before your uncle retired—I remember what year that was. But you told me that your uncle had trained you at home and your performance bore out that statement. Two sets of alleged facts were contradictory; need I add that I was fairly sure of the truth?”

“Oh. I guess I wasn’t very smart?’

“No, you weren’t. Figures are sharp things, Jones. Don’t juggle them, you’ll get cut. What was the other matter?”

“Well, sir, I was kind of wondering what was going to happen to me. I mean about that.”

“Oh,” Hendrix answered indifferently, “that’s up to the Stewards & Clerks. My guild won’t take action concerning a disciplinary matter of another guild. Unless, of course, they call it ‘moral turpitude’ and make it stick.”

With that faint comfort Max left, Nevertheless he felt easier than he had at any time since he had signed on. The prospect of punishment seemed less a burden than constantly worrying about getting caught.

Presently he forgot it and exulted in the opportunity—at last!—to take a crack at astrogator. He wished he could tell Sam… or Ellie.

HALCYON

The probationary appointment was logged later that same day. The Captain called him in, swore him in, then congratulated him and called him “Mister” Jones. The ceremony was simple, with no spectator but Hendrix and the Captain’s secretary.

The commonplaces attendant on the change were, for a while, more startling to Max than the promotion itself. They started at once. “You had better take the rest of the day to shake down, Mr. Jones,” the Captain said, blinking vaguely. “Okay, Doc?”

“Certainly, sir.”

“Good. Bennett, will you ask Dumont to step in?”

The Chief Passengers’ Steward was unblinkingly unsurprised to find the recent steward’s mate third a ship’s officer. To the Captain’s query he said, “I was planning to put Mr. Jones in stateroom B-014, sir. Is that satisfactory?”

“No doubt, no doubt.”

“I’ll have boys take care of his luggage at once.”

“Good. You trot along with Dumont, Mr. Jones. No, wait a moment. We must find you a cap.” The Captain went to his wardrobe, fumbled around. “I had one that would do here somewhere.”

Hendrix had been standing with his hands behind him. “I fetched one, Captain. Mr. Jones and I wear the same size, I believe.”

“Good. Though perhaps his head has swelled a bit in the past few minutes. Eh?”

Hendrix grinned savagely. “If it has, I’ll shrink it.” He handed the cap to Max. The wide gold strap and sunburst the Astrogator had removed; substituted was a narrow strap with tiny sunburst surrounded by the qualifying circle of the apprentice. Max thought it must be old insignia saved for sentimental reasons by Hendrix himself. He choked up as he mumbled his thanks, then followed Dumont out of the Captain’s cabin, stumbling over his feet.

When they reached the companionway Dumont stopped. “There is no need to go down to the bunkroom, sir. If you will tell me the combination of your locker, we’ll take care of everything.”

“Oh, gee, Mr. Dumont! I’ve got just a small amount of truck. I can carry it up myself.”

Dumont’s face had the impassivity of a butler’s. “If I may make a suggestion, sir, you might like to see your stateroom while I have the matter taken care of.” It was not a question; Max interpreted it correctly to mean: “Look, dummy, I know the score and you don’t. Do what I tell you before you make a terrible break!”

Max let himself be guided. It is not easy to make the jump from crewman to officer while remaining in the same ship. Dumont knew this, Max did not. Whether his interest was fatherly, or simply a liking for correct protocol—or both—Dumont did not intend to allow the brand-new junior officer to go lower than “C” deck until he had learned to carry his new dignity with grace. So Max sought out stateroom

B-014.

The bunk had a real foam mattress and a spread. There was a tiny wash basin with running water and a mirror. There was a bookshelf over the bunk and a wardrobe for his uniforms. There was even a shelf desk that let down for his convenience. There was a telephone on the wall, a buzzer whereby he could summon the steward’s mate on watch! There was a movable chair all his own, a wastebasket, and—yes!—a little rug on the deck. And best of all, there was a door with a lock.

The fact that the entire room was about as large as a piano box bothered him not at all.

He was opening drawers and poking into things when Dumont returned. Dumont was not carrying Max’s meager possessions himself; that task was delegated to one of his upper-decks staff. The steward’s mate followed Dumont in and said, “Where shall I put this, sir?”

Max realized with sudden embarrassment that the man waiting on him had eaten opposite him for past months. “Oh! Hello, Jim. Just dump it on the bunk. Thanks a lot.”

“Yes, sir. And congratulations!”

“Uh, thanks!” They shook hands. Dumont let that proper ceremony persist for a minimum time, then said, “That’s all now, Gregory. You can go back to the pantry.” He turned to Max. “Anything else, sir?”

“Oh, no, everything is fine.”

“May I suggest that you probably won’t want to sew insignia on these uniforms yourself? Unless you are better with a needle than I am,” Dumont added with just the right chuckle.

“Well, I guess I could.”

“Mrs. Dumont is handy with a needle, taking care of the lady passengers as she does. Suppose I take this one? It can be ready and pressed in time for dinner.”

Max was happy to let him. He was suddenly appalled by a terrifying notion—he was going to have to eat in the Bifrost Lounge!

But there were further disturbances before dinner. He was completing the small task of stowing his possessions when there came a knock on the door, followed immediately by someone coming in. Max found himself nose to nose with Mr. Simes.

Simes looked at the cap on his head and laughed. “Take that thing off before you wear out your ears.” Max did not do so. He said, “You wanted me, sir?”

“Yes. Just long enough, Smart Boy, to give you a word of advice.” “Yes?”

Simes tapped himself on the chest. “Just this. There is only one assistant astrogator in this ship—and I’m it. Remember that. I’ll still be it long after you’ve been busted back to sweeping up after cows. Which is where you belong.”

Max felt a flush crawl up his neck and burn his cheeks. “Why,” he asked, “if you think that, didn’t you veto my appointment?”

Simes laughed again. “Do I look like a fool? The Captain says yes, the Astrogator says yes—should I stick my neck out? It’s easier to wait and let you stick your neck out—which you will. I just wanted to let you know that a dinky piece of gold braid doesn’t mean a thing. You’re still junior to me by plenty. Don’t forget it.”

Max clenched his jaw and did not answer. Simes went on, “Well?” “‘Well’ what?”

“I just gave you an order.”

“Oh. Aye aye, Mr. Simes. I won’t forget it. I certainly won’t.”

Simes looked at him sharply, said, “See that you don’t,” and left. Max was still facing his door, clenching his fists, when Gregory tapped on the door. “Dinner, sir. Five minutes.”

Max delayed as long as he could, wishing mightily that he could slide down to Easy deck and take his usual place in the warm, noisy, relaxed comfort of the crew’s mess. He hesitated in the lounge doorway, paralyzed with stage fright. The beautiful room was blazing with light and looked unfamiliar; he had never been in it save in early morning, to change the sandbox located down the pantry passage—at which times only standing lights were burning.

He was barely in time; some of the ladies were seated but the Captain was still standing. Max realized that he should be near his chair, ready to sit down when the Captain did—or as soon as the ladies were seated, he amended—but where should he go? He was still jittering when he heard his name shouted. “Max!”

Ellie came running up and threw her arms around his neck. “Max! I just heard. I think it’s wonderful!”

She looked at him, her eyes shining, then kissed him on both cheeks.

Max blushed to his ears. He felt as if every eye was turned on him—and he was right. To add to his embarrassment Ellie was dressed in formal evening dress of Hesperan high style, which not only made her look older and much more female, but also shocked his puritanical hillbilly standards.

She let go of him, which was well but left him in danger of collapsing at the knees. She started to babble something, Max did not know what, when Chief Steward Dumont appeared at her elbow. “The Captain is waiting, Miss,” he said firmly.

“Bother to the Captain! Oh, well—see you after dinner, Max.” She headed for the Captain’s table. Dumont touched Max’s sleeve and munnured, “This way, sir.”

His place was at the foot of the Chief Engineer’s table. Max knew Mr. Compagnon by sight but had never spoken to him. The Chief glanced up and said, “Evening, Mr. Jones. Glad to have you with us. Ladies and gentlemen, our new astrogation officer, Mr. Jones. On your right, Mr. Jones, is Mrs. Daigler. Mr. Daigler on her right, then—” and so on, around the table: Dr. and Mrs. Weberbauer and their daughter Rebecca, Mr. and Mrs. Scott, a Mr. Arthur, Senhor and Senhora Vargas.

Mrs. Daigler thought it was lovely, his being promoted. And so nice to have more young people at the table. She was much older than Max but young enough to be handsome and aware of it. She wore more jewels than Max had ever seen and her hair was lacquered into a structure a foot high and studded with pearls. She was as perfectly finished and as expensive as a precision machine and she made Max uncomfortable.

But he was not yet as uncomfortable as he could be. Mrs. Daigler produced a wisp of a handkerchief from her bosom, moistened it and said, “Hold still, Mr. Jones.” She scrubbed his cheek. “Turn your head.” Blushing, Max complied.

“There, that’s better,” Mrs. Daigler announced. “Mama fixed.” She turned away and said, “Don’t you think, Mr. Compagnon, that science, with all the wonderful things they do these days, could discover a lip paint that wouldn’t come off?”

“Stop it, Maggie,” her husband interrupted. “Pay no attention, Mr. Jones. She’s got a streak of sadism as wide as she is.”

“George, you’ll pay for that. Well, Chief?”

The Chief Engineer patted his lips with snowy linen. “I think it must already have been invented, but there

was no market. Women like to brand men, even temporarily.” “Oh, bosh!”

“It’s a woman’s world, ma’am.”

She turned to Max. “Eldreth is a dear, isn’t she? I suppose you knew her ‘dirtside’?—as Mr. Compagnon calls it.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Then how? I mean, after all, there isn’t much opportunity. Or is there?” “Maggie, stop pestering him. Let the man eat his dinner.”

Mrs. Weberbauer on his other side was as easy and motherly as Mrs. Daigler was difficult. Under her soothing presence Max managed to start eating. Then he noticed that the way he grasped a fork was not the way the others did, tried to change, made a mess of it, became aware of his untidy nails, and wanted to crawl under the table. He ate about three hundred calories, mostly bread and butter.

At the end of the meal Mrs. Daigler again gave her attention to him, though she addressed the Chief Engineer. “Mr. Compagnon, isn’t it customary to toast a promotion?”

“Yes,” the Chief conceded. “But he must pay for it. That’s a requirement.”

Max found himself signing a chit presented by Dumont. The price made him blink—his first trip might be a professional success, but so far it had been financial disaster. Champagne, iced in a shiny bucket, accompanied the chit and Dumont cut the wires and drew the cork with a flourish.

The Chief Engineer stood up. “Ladies and gentlemen—I give you Astrogator Jones. May he never misplace a decimal point!”

“Cheers!”—”Bravo!”—”Speech, speech!”

Max stumbled to his feet and muttered, “Thank you.”

His first watch was at eight o’clock the next morning. He ate breakfast alone and reflected happily that as a watch stander he would usually eat either before or after the passengers. He was in the control room a good twenty minutes early.

Kelly glanced up and said, “Good morning, sir.”

Max gulped. “Er—good morning, Chief!” He caught Smythe grinning behind the computer, turned his eyes hastily away.

“Fresh coffee, Mr. Jones. Will you have a cup?” Max let Kelly pour for him; while they drank Kelly quietly went over the details—acceleration schedule, position and vector, power units in use, sights taken, no special orders, etc. Noguchi relieved Smythe, and shortly before the hour Dr. Hendrix appeared.

“Good morning, sir.” “Good morning, Doctor.”

“Morning.” Hendrix accepted coffee, turned to Max. “Have you relieved the officer of the watch?” “Uh, why no, sir.”

“Then do so. It lacks less than a minute of eight.”

Max turned to Kelly and shakily saluted. “I relieve you, sir.”

“Very well, sir.” Kelly went below at once. Dr. Hendrix sat down, took out a book and started to read. Max realized with a chilly feeling that he had been pushed in, to swim or not. He took a deep breath and went over to Noguchi. “Noggy, let’s get the plates ready for the middle o’ watch sights.”

Noguchi glanced at the chronometer. “As you say, sir.” “Well… I guess it is early. Let’s take a few dopplers.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Noguchi climbed out of the saddle where he had been loafing. Max said in a low voice, “Look, Noggy, you don’t have to say’sir’ to me.”

Noguchi answered just as quietly. “Kelly wouldn’t like it if I didn’t. Better let it ride.” “Oh.” Max frowned. “Noggy? How does the rest of the Worry gang feel about it?”

Noguchi did not pretend not to understand. He answered, “Shucks, they’re all rooting for you, if you can swing it.”

“You’re sure?”

“Certain. Just as long as you don’t try to make a big hairy thing out of yourself like—well, like some I could mention.” The computerman added, “Maybe Kovak isn’t exactly cheering. He’s been having a watch of his own, you know—for the first time.”

“He’s sore?”

“Not exactly. He couldn’t expect to keep it long anyhow, not with a transition coming up. He won’t go out of his way to give you trouble, he’ll be fair.”

Max made a mental note to see what he could do to swing Kovak over to his side. The two manned the dopplerscope, took readings on stars forward of vector, checked what they found by spectrostellograph, and compared both with standard plates from the chart safe. At first Max had to remember that he was in charge; then he got so interested in fussy details of measurements that he was no longer self-conscious. At last Noguchi touched his sleeve. “Pushing ten o’clock, sir. I’d better get set up.”

“Huh? Sure, go ahead.” He reminded himself not to help Noggy; the chartsman has his prerogatives, too. But he checked the set up just as Hendrix always did, as Simes rarely did, and as Kelly sometimes did, depending on who had made it.

After they had gotten the new data Max programmed the problem on paper (there being plenty of time), then called it off to Noguchi at the computer. He thumbed the book himself, there being no “numbers boy” available. The figures were as clear in his recollection as ever, but he obeyed Hendrix’s injunction not to depend on memory.

The result worried him. They were not “in the groove.” Not that the Asgard was far out, but the discrepancy was measurable. He checked what he had done, then had Noguchi run the problem again,

using a different programming method. The result came out the same.

Sighing, he computed the correction and started to take it to Hendrix for approval. But the Astrogator still paid no attention; he sat at the console, reading a novel from the ship’s library.

Max made up his mind. He went to the console and said, “Excuse me, sir. I need to get there for a moment.” Hendrix got up without answering and found another seat. Max sat down and called the power room. “Control officer speaking. I intend to increase boost at eleven o’clock. Stand by for time check.”

Hendrix must have heard him, he thought, but the Astrogator gave no sign. Max fed in the correction, set the control chronometer to execute his wishes at eleven plus-or-minus nothing.

Shortly before noon Simes showed up. Max had already written his own log, based on Noguchi’s log, and had signed it “M. Jones.” He had hesitated, then added “C. O. o/W.” Simes went to Dr. Hendrix, saluted, and said, “Ready to relieve you, sir.”

Hendrix spoke his first word since eight o’clock. “He’s got it.”

Simes looked non-plussed, then went to Max. “Ready to relieve you.” Max recited off the situation data while Simes read the log and the order book. Simes interrupted him while he was still listing minor ship’s data. “Okay, I relieve you. Get out of my control room, Mister.” Max got out. Dr. Hendrix had already gone down.

Noguchi had loitered at the foot of the ladder. He caught Max’s eye, made a circle with thumb and finger and nodded. Max grinned at him, started to ask a question; he wanted to know if that discrepancy was a booby trap, intentionally left in by Kelly. Then he decided that it would not be fitting; he’d ask Kelly himself, or figure it from the records. “Thanks, Noggy.”

That watch turned out to be typical only in the one respect that Dr. Hendrix continued to require Max to be officer of the watch himself. He did not again keep quiet but rode Max steadily, drilling him hour after hour, requiring him to take sights and set up problems continuously, as if the Asgard were actually close to transition. He did not permit Max to program on paper but forced him to pretend that time was too short and that data must immediately go into the computer, be acted on at once. Max sweated, with remote controls in each fist and with Hendrix himself acting as “numbers boy.” The Astrogator kept pushing him for speed, speed, and more speed—never at the sacrifice of accuracy, for any error was unforgivable. But the goal was always greater speed.

Once Max objected. “Sir, if you would let me put it right into the machine, I could cut it down a lot.”

Hendrix snapped, “When you have your own control room, you can do that, if you think it wise. Now you’ll do it my way.”

Occasionally Kelly would take over as his supervisor. The Chief Computerman was formal, using such phrases as, “May I suggest, sir—” or “I think I’d do it this way, sir.” But once he broke out with, “Confound it, Max! Don’t ever pull a dumb stunt like that!”

Then he started to amend his remarks. Max grinned. “Please, Chief. For a moment you made me feel at home. Thanks.”

Kelly looked sheepish. “I’m tired, I guess. I could do with a smoke and some java.”

While they were resting Max noted that Lundy was out of earshot and said, “Chief? You know more than I’ll ever learn. Why didn’t you buck for astrogator? Didn’t you ever get a chance?”

Kelly suddenly looked bleak. “I once did,” he said stiffly. “Now I know my limitations.” Max shut up, much embarrassed. Thereafter Kelly reverted to calling him Max whenever they were alone.

Max did not see Sam for more than a week after he moved up to Baker deck. Even then the encounter was chance; he ran across him outside the Purser’s office. “Sam!”

“Good morning, sir!” Sam drew up in a smart salute with a broad grin on his face. “Huh? ‘Good morning, sir’ my foot! How’s it going, Sam?”

“Aren’t you going to return my salute? In my official capacity I can report you, you know. The Captain is very, very fussy about ship’s etiquette.”

Max made a rude noise. “You can hold that salute until you freeze, you clown.”

Sam relaxed. “Kid, I’ve been meaning to get up and congratulate you—but every time I find you’re on watch. You must live in the Worry Hole.”

“Pretty near. Look, I’ll be off this evening until midnight. What do you say I stop down to see you?” Sam shook his head. “I’ll be busy.”

“Busy how? You expecting a jail break? Or a riot, maybe?”

Sam answered soberly, “Kid, don’t get me wrong—but you stick to your end of the ship and I’ll stick to mine. No, no, keep quiet and listen. I’m as proud as if I had invented you. But you can’t fraternize in crew’s quarters, not even with the Chief Master-at-Arms. Not yet.”

“Who’ll know? Who’s to care?”

“You know blamed well that Giordano would love to tell Kuiper that you didn’t know how to behave like an officer—and Old Lady Kuiper would pass it along to the Purser. Take my advice. Have I ever thrown you a curve?”

Max dropped the matter, though he badly wanted a chin with Sam. He needed to tell him that his faked record had been breached and to consult with him as to probable consequences.

Of course, he considered as he returned to his stateroom, there wasn’t a thing to keep him from carrying out his orginal intention of jumping ship with Sam at Nova Terra—except that it was now no longer possible to imagine it. He was an officer.

They were approaching the middle transition; the control room went on watch-and-watch. But still Dr. Hendrix did not take the watch; Simes and Jones alternated. The Astrogator stood every watch with Max but required him to do the work and carry the responsibility himself. Max sweated it out and learned that practice problems and study of theory were nothing like having it matter when he had no way and no time to check. You had to be right, every time—and there was always doubt.

When, during the last twenty-four hours, the Worry gang went on continuous watch, Max thought that Dr. Hendrix would push him aside. But he did not. Simes was pushed aside, yes, but Max took the worry seat, with Hendrix bending over him and watching everything he did, but not interfering. “Great

heavens!” Max thought. “Surely he isn’t going to let me make this transition? I’m not ready for it, not yet. I’ll never keep up.”

But data was coming too fast for further worry; he had to keep processing it, see the answers, and make decisions. It was not until twenty minutes before transition that Hendrix pushed him aside without a word and took over. Max was still recovering when they burst through into a new sky.

The last approach-and-transition before Halcyon was much like the second. There were a couple of weeks of easy watches, headed by Simes, Jones, and Kovak, with both Kelly and Hendrix getting a little rest. Max liked it, both on and off watch. On watch he continued to practice, trying to achieve the inhuman speed of Dr. Hendrix. Off watch he slept and enjoyed himself. The Bifrost Lounge no longer terrified him. He now played three-dee with Ellie there, with Chipsie on his shoulder, giving advice. Ellie had long since waved her eyes at Captain Blaine and convinced him that a pet so well behaved, so well house-broken, and in particular so well mannered (she had trained the spider puppy to say, “Good morning, Captain,” whenever it saw Blaine)—in all respects so civilized should not be forced to live in a cage.

Max had even learned to swap feeble repartee with Mrs. Daigler, thinking up remarks and waiting for a chance. Ellie was threatening to teach him to dance, although he managed to stall her until resumption of watch-and-watch before transition made it impossible.

Again he found himself shoved into the worry seat for the last part of the approach. This time Dr. Hendrix did not displace him until less than ten minutes before burst through.

On the easy drop down to Halcyon Ellie’s determination won out. Max learned to dance. He found that he liked it. He had good rhythm, did not forget her instructions, and Ellie was a fragrant, pleasant armful. “I’ve done all I can,” she announced at last. “You’re the best dancer with two left feet I’ve ever met.” She required him to dance with Rebecca Weberbauer and with Mrs. Daigler. Mrs. Daigler wasn’t so bad after all, as long as she kept her mouth shut—and Rebecca was cute. He began to look forward to the fleshpots of Halcyon, that being Ellie’s stated reason for instructing him; he was to be conscripted as her escort.

Only one thing marred the final leg; Sam was in trouble. Max did not find out about it until after the trouble broke. He got up early to go on watch and found Sam cleaning decks in the silent passages of passenger quarters. He was in dungarees and wearing no shield. “Sam!”

Sam looked up. “Oh. Hi, kid. Keep your voice down, you’ll wake people.” “But Sam, what in Ned are you doing?”

“Me? I seem to be manicuring this deck.” “But why?”

Sam leaned on his broom. “Well, kid, it’s like this. The Captain and I had a difference of opinion. He won.”

“You’ve been busted?”

“Your intuition is dazzling.” “What happened?”

“Max, the less you know about it the better. Don’t fret. Sic transit gloria mundi—Tuesday is usually worse.”

“But—See here, I’ve got to grab chow and go on watch. I’ll look you up later.” “Don’t.”

Max got the story from Noguchi. Sam, it appeared, had set up a casino in an empty storeroom. He might have gotten away with it indefinitely had it remained a cards-and-dice set up, with a rake off for the house—the “house” being the Chief Master-at-Arms. But Sam had added a roulette wheel and that had been his downfall; Giordano had come to suspect that the wheel had less of the element of chance than was customary in better-run gambling halls—and had voiced his suspicion to Chief Clerk Kuiper. From there events took an inevitable course.

“When did he put in this wheel?”

“Right after we raised from Garson’s Planet.” Max thought uncomfortably of the “tea cozies” he had helped Sam bring aboard there. Noguchi went on, “Uh, didn’t you know, sir? I thought you and him were pretty close before—you know, before you moved up decks.”

Max avoided an answer and dug into the log. He found it under the previous day, added by Bennett to Simes’ log. Sam was restricted to the ship for the rest of the trip, final disciplinary action postponed until return to Terra.

That last seemed to mean that Captain Blaine intended to give Sam a chance to show good behavior before making his recommendation to the guilds—the Captain was a sweet old guy, he certainly was. But “restricted”? Then Sam would never get his chance to run away from whatever it was he was running away from. He located Sam as soon as he was off watch, digging him out of his bunkroom and taking him out into the corridor.

Sam looked at him sourly. “I thought I told you not to look me up?”

“Never mind! Sam, I’m worried about you. This’restricted’ angle… it means you won’t have a chance to—”

“Shut up!” It was a whisper but Max shut up. “Now look here,” Sam went on, “Forget it. I got my stake and that’s the important point.”

“But…”

“Do you think they can seal this ship tight enough to keep me in when I decide to leave? Now stay away from me. You’re teacher’s pet and I want to keep it that way. I don’t want you lectured about bad companions, meaning me.”

“But I want to help, Sam. I…”

“Will you kindly get up above ‘C’ deck where you belong?”

He did not see Sam again that leg; presently he stopped worrying about it. Hendrix required him to compute the planetary approach—child’s play compared with a transition—then placed Max at the conn

when they grounded. This was a titulary responsibility since it was precomputed and done on radar-automatic. Max sat with the controls under his hands, ready to override the autopilot—and

Hendrix stood behind him, ready to override him—but there was no need; the Asgard came down by the plotted curve as easy as descending stairs. The thrust beams bit in and Max reported, “Grounded, sir, on schedule.”

“Secure.”

Max spoke into the ship’s announcers. “Secure power room. Secure all space details. Dirtside routine, second section.”

Of the four days they were there he spent the first three nominally supervising, and actually learning from, Kovak in the routine ninety-day inspection and overhaul of control room instruments. Ellie was vexed with him, as she had had different plans. But on the last day he hit dirt with her, chaperoned by Mr. and Mrs. Mendoza.

It was a wonderful holiday. Compared with Terra, Halcyon is a bleak place and Bonaparte is not much of a city. Nevertheless Halcyon is an earth-type planet with breathable air, and the party from the Asgard had not set foot outdoors since Earthport, months of time and unthinkable light-years behind. The season was postaphelion, midsummer, Nu Pegasi burned warm and bright in blue sky. Mr. Mendoza hired a carriage and they drove out into green, rolling countryside behind four snuffling little Halcyon ponies.

There they visited a native pueblo, a great beehive structure of mud, conoid on conoid, and bought souvenirs—two of which turned out to have “Made in Japan” stamped inconspicuously on them.

Their driver, Herr Eisenberg, interpreted for them. The native who sold the souvenirs kept swiveling his eyes, one after another, at Mrs. Mendoza. He twittered some remarks to the driver, who guffawed. “What does he say?” she asked.

“He was complimenting you.” “So? But how?”

“Well… he says you are for a slow fire and no need for seasoning; you’d cook up nicely. And he’d do it, too,” the colonist added, “if you stayed here after dark.”

Mrs. Mendoza gave a little scream. “You didn’t tell us they were cannibals. Josie, take me back!”

Herr Eisenberg looked horrified. “Cannibals? Oh, no, lady! They don’t eat each other, they just eat us—when they can get us, that is. But there hasn’t been an incident in twenty years.”

“But that’s worse!”

“No, it isn’t, lady. Look at it from their viewpoint. They’re civilized. This old fellow would never break one of their laws. But to them we are just so much prime beef, unfortunately hard to catch.”

“Take us back at once! Why, there are hundreds of them, and only five of us.”

“Thousands, lady. But you are safe as long as Gneeri is shining.” He gestured at Nu Pegasi. “It’s bad juju to kill meat during daylight. The spirit stays around to haunt.”

Despite his reassurances the party started back. Max noticed that Eldreth had been unfrightened. He himself had wondered what had kept the natives from tying them up until dark.

They dined at the Josephine, Bonaparte’s best (and only) hotel. But there was a real three-piece

orchestra, a dance floor, and food that was at least a welcome change from the menus of the Bifrost Lounge. Many ship’s passengers and several officers were there; it made a jolly party. Ellie made Max dance between each course. He even got up his nerve to ask Mrs. Daigler for a dance, once she came over and suggested it.

During the intermission Eldreth steered him out on the adjacent balcony. There she looked up at him. “You leave that Daigler hussy alone, hear me?”

“Huh? I didn’t do anything.”

She suddenly smiled warmly. “Of course not, you big sweet ninny. But Ellie has to take care of you.” She turned and leaned on the rail. Halcyon’s early night had fallen, her three moons were chasing each other. The sky blazed with more stars than can be seen in Terra’s lonely neighborhood. Max pointed out the strange constellations and showed her the departure direction they would take tomorrow to reach transition for Nova Terra. He had learned four new skies so far, knew them as well as he knew the one that hung over the Ozarks—and he would learn many more. He was already studying, from the charts, other skies they would be in this trip.

“Oh, Max, isn’t it lovely!”

“Sure is. Say, there’s a meteor. They’re scarce here, mighty scarce.” “Make a wish! Make a wish quick!”

“Okay.” He wished that he would get off easy when it came to the showdown. Then he decided that wasn’t right; he ought to wish old Sam out of his jam—not that he believed in it, either way.

She turned and faced him. “What did you wish?”

“Huh?” He was suddenly self-conscious. “Oh, mustn’t tell, that spoils it.” “All right. But I’ll bet you get your wish,” she added softly.

He thought for a moment that he could have kissed her, right then, if he had played his cards right. But the moment passed and they went inside. The feeling stayed with him on the ride back, made him elated. It was a good old world, even if there were some tough spots. Here he was, practically a junior astrogator on his first trip—and it hadn’t been more than weeks since he was borrowing McAllister’s mules to work the crop and going barefooted a lot to save shoes.

And yet here he was in uniform, riding beside the best-dressed girl in four planets.

He fingered the insignia on his chest. Marrying Ellie wasn’t such an impossible idea now that he was an officer—if he ever decided to marry. Maybe her old man wouldn’t consider an officer—and an astrogator at that—completely ineligible. Ellie wasn’t bad; she had spunk and she played a fair game of three-dee—most girls wouldn’t even be able to learn the rules.

He was still in a warm glow when they reached the ship and were hoisted in. Kelly met him at the lock. “Mr. Jones—the Captain wants to see you.”

“Huh? Oh. G’night, Ellie—I’ll have to run.” He hurried after Kelly. “What’s up?” “Dr. Hendrix is dead.”

TRANSITION

Max questioned Kelly as they hurried up to the Captain’s cabin.

“I don’t know. I just don’t know, Max.” Kelly seemed close to tears. “I saw him before dinner—he came into the Hole to check what you and Kovak have been doing. He seemed all right. But the Purser found him dead in his bunk, the middle of the evening.” He added worriedly, “I don’t know what is going to happen now.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well… if I was captain, I’d lay over and send for a relief. But I don’t know.”

For the first time Max realized that this change would make Mr. Simes the astrogator. “How long would it take to get a relief?”

“Figure it out. The Dragon is about three months behind us; she’d pick up our mail. A year about.” In the contradictions of interstellar travel the ships themselves were the fastest method of communication; a radio message (had such a silly thing been attempted) would have taken more than two centuries to reach Earth, a like time for a reply.

Max found the Captain’s cabin open and crowded with officers, all standing around, saying nothing, and looking solemn; he slipped inside without announcing himself and tried to be inconspicuous. Kelly did not go in. Captain Blaine sat at his desk with head bent. Several stragglers, members of the gay party at the Josephine, arrived after Max; First Officer Walther checked them off with his eyes, then said quietly to Blaine, “Ship’s officers all present, sir.”

Captain Blaine raised his head and Max was shocked to see how old he looked. “Gentlemen,” he said in a low voice, “you know the sad news. Dr. Hendrix was found dead in his room this evening. Heart attack. The Surgeon tells me that he passed on about two hours before he was found—and that his death was probably almost painless.”

His voice broke, then he continued. “Brother Hendrix will be placed in his last orbit two hours after we raise ship tomorrow. That is how he would have wished it, the Galaxy was his home. He gave unstintingly of himself that men should ride safely among the stars.”

He paused so long that Max thought that the old man had forgotten that others were present. But when he resumed his voice was almost brisk. “That is all, gentlemen. Astrogators will please remain.”

Max was not sure that he counted as an astrogator but the use of the plural decided him. First Officer Walther started to leave; Blaine called him back. When the four were alone, the Captain said, “Mr.

Simes, you will take over head-of-department duties at once. Mr., uh… “; his eyes rested on Max. “Jones, sir.”

“Mr. Jones will assume your routine duties, of course. This tragedy leaves you short-handed; for the rest of this trip I will stand a regular watch.”

Simes spoke up. “That isn’t necessary, Captain. We’ll make out.”

“Perhaps. But those are my wishes.” “Aye aye, sir.”

“Prepare to lift on schedule. Any questions?” “No, sir.”

“Goodnight, gentlemen. Dutch, stay a moment, please?”

Outside the door Simes started to turn away; Max stopped him. “Mr. Simes?” “Huh? Yes?”

“Any instructions for me, sir?”

Simes looked him over. “You stand your watch, Mister. I’ll handle everything else.”

The next morning Max found a crepe armband on his desk and a notice from the First Officer that mourning would continue for one week. The Asgard raised on schedule, with the Captain sitting quietly in his chair, with Simes at the control console. Max stood near the Captain, with nothing to do. Aside from the absence of Hendrix all was routine—except that Kelly was quite bad-tempered. Simes, Max admitted, handled the maneuver smartly—but it was precomputed, anyone could have done it; shucks, Ellie could have been sitting there. Or Chipsie.

Max had the first watch. Simes left him after enjoining him not to deviate from schedule without phoning him first. An hour later Kovak relieved Max temporarily and Max hurried to the passenger lock. There were five honorary pall bearers, the Captain, Mr. Walther, Simes, Max, and Kelly. Behind them, crowding the passageways, were officers and most of the crew. Max saw no passengers.

The inner door of the lock was opened; two steward’s mates carried the body in and placed it against the outer door. Max was relieved to see that it had been wrapped in a shroud covering it completely. They closed the inner door and withdrew.

The Captain stood facing the door, with Simes and the First Officer standing guard on one side of the door and, on the other side facing them, Max and Kelly. The Captain flung one word over his shoulder: “Pressure!”

Behind stood Bennett wearing a portable phone; he relayed the word to the power room. The pressure gauge over the lock door showed one atmosphere; now it started to crawl upward. The Captain took a little book from his pocket and began to read the service for the dead. Feeling that he could not stand to listen Max watched the pressure gauge. Steadily it climbed. Max reflected that the ship had already passed escape speed for the Nu Pegasi system before he had been relieved; the body would take an open orbit.

The gauge reached ten atmospheres; Captain Blaine closed his book. “Warn the passengers,” he said to Bennett.

Shortly the loudspeakers sounded: “All hands! All passengers! The ship will be in free fall for thirty seconds. Anchor yourselves and do not change position.” Max reached behind him, found one of the many hand holds always present around an airlock and pulled down so that his grip would keep his feet in contact with the deck. A warning siren howled—then suddenly he was weightless as the ship’s boost and the artificial anomalous gravity field were both cut out.

He heard the Captain say loudly and firmly, “‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ Let the body be cast forth.”

The pressure gauge dropped suddenly to zero and Dr. Hendrix was launched into space, there to roam the stars for all eternity.

Max felt weight again as the power room brought them back to ship-normal. The pressure gauge showed gradually building pressure. People turned away and left, their voices murmuring low. Max went up and relieved the watch.

The following morning Simes moved into Dr. Hendrix’s cabin. There was trouble with First Officer Walther about it—Max heard only third-hand reports—but the Captain upheld Simes; he stayed in the Astrogator’s quarters. The Worry Hole settled into routine not much different from what had gone before, except that Simes’ personality spread through everything. There had never been a posted watch list before; Kelly had always assigned the crewmen and the Doctor had simply informed the top-watch standers orally of his wishes. Now a typed list appeared:

FIRST WATCH Randolph Simes, Astrogator SECOND WATCH Captain Blaine

(M. Jones, acting apprentice, under instruction) THIRD WATCH Kelly, Ch. Cmptrmn. (signed) Randolph Simes, Astrogator

Below was a four-watch list for crewmen, also signed by Simes.

Max looked at it and shrugged it off. It was obvious that Simes had it in for him, though he could not figure out why. It was equally obvious that Simes did not intend to let him do any astrogation and that Max’s chances of being accepted in time as a fullfledged brother had now, with the death of Dr. Hendrix, sunk to zero. Unless, of course, Captain Blaine overrode Simes and forced a favorable report, which was extremely unlikely. Max again began to think of going along with Sam at Nova Terra.

Well, in the meantime he’d stand his watches and try to stay out of trouble. That was that.

There was only one transition to be made between Halcyon and Nova Terra, a leap of ninety-seven light-years three weeks out from Halcyon at a boost of seventeen gravities—the boost always depended on the distance from the star to the gateway, since the purpose was to arrive there just under the speed of light. The Worry Hole stayed on a watch in three for the officers and one in four for crewmen for the first two weeks. Captain Blaine showed up each watch but seemed quite willing for Max to carry out the light duties of that portion of the leg. He gave little instruction—when he did, he was likely to wander off into anecdotes, amusing but not useful.

Max tried to continue his own drill, carrying out the routine middle o’ watch computation as if it were the frantic matter it would have been near transition. Captain Blaine watched him, then said mildly, “Don’t get yourself into a state, son. Always program on paper when possible—always. And take time to check.

Hurrying causes mistakes.” Max said nothing, thinking of Dr. Hendrix, but carried out the orders.

At the end of his first watch under the Captain Max signed the log as usual. When Simes came on watch four hours later, Max was dug out of bed and required to report to the control room. Simes pointed to the log. “What’s the idea, Mister?”

“Of what, sir?”

“Signing the log. You weren’t officer of the watch.”

“Well, sir, the Captain seemed to expect it. I’ve signed a lot of logs and he’s always approved them in the past.”

“Hmm—I’ll speak to the Captain. Go below.”

At the end of his next watch, having received no instructions, Max prepared the log and took it to the Captain. “Sir? Do you want to sign this? Or shall I?”

“Eh?” Blaine looked at it. “Oh, I suppose I had better. Always let a head of department do things his own way if possible. Remember that when you are a skipper, son.” He signed it.

That settled it until the Captain started a habit of not being there, first for short periods, then for longer. The time came when he was absent at the end of the watch; Max phoned Mr. Simes. “Sir, the Captain isn’t here. What do you want me to do?”

“So what? It’s his privilege to leave the control room.”

“But Kelly is ready to relieve and the log isn’t signed. Shall I sign it? Or shall I phone him?” “Phone him? Jumping jeepers, no! Are you crazy?”

“What are your orders, sir?”

Simes was silent, then answered, “Print his name, then sign under it ‘By direction’—and after this use your head.”

They changed to watch-and-watch for the last week. Max continued under the Captain; Kelly assisted Simes. Once the shift was made Blaine became meticulous about being present in the control room and, when Max started to make the first computation, gently pushed him aside. “I had better take over, lad. We’re getting closer now.”

So Max assisted him—and became horrifyingly aware that the Captain was not the man he must once have been. His knowledge of theory was sound and he knew all the short cuts—but his mind tended to wander. Twice in one computation Max had to remind him diplomatically of details. Yet the Old Man seemed unaware of it, was quite cheerful.

It went on that way. Max began to pray that the Captain would let the new Astrogator make the transition himself—much as he despised Simes. He wanted to discuss his misgivings with Kelly—there was no one else with whom it would have been possible—but Kelly was on the opposite watch with Simes. There was nothing to do but worry.

When the last day arrived he discovered that Captain Blaine neither intended to take the ship through himself nor to let Simes do it; he had a system of his own. When they were all in the Worry Hole the Captain said, “I want to show you all a wrinkle that takes the strain out of astrogating. With no reflections on our dear brother, Dr. Hendrix, while he was a great astrogator, none better—nevertheless he worked too hard. Now here is a method taught me by my own master. Kelly, if you will have the remote controls

led out, please.”

He had them seat themselves in a half circle, himself, Simes, and Max, around the saddle of the computer, with Kelly in the saddle. Each of them was armed with programming forms and Captain Blaine held the remote-control switches in his lap. “Now the idea is for us each to work a sight in succession, first me, then Mr. Simes, then Mr. Jones. That way we keep the data flowing without strain. All right, lads, start pitching. Transition stations everyone.”

They made a dry run, then the Captain stood up. “Call me, Mr. Simes, two hours before transition. I believe you and Mr. Jones will find that this method gives you enough rest in the meantime.”

“Yes, sir. But Captain—may I make a suggestion?” “Eh? Certainly, sir.”

“This is a fine system, but I suggest that Kelly be put in the astrogating group instead of Jones. Jones is not experienced. We can put Kovak in the saddle and Lundy on the book.”

Blaine shook his head. “No. Accuracy is everything, sir, so we must have our best operator at the computer. As for Mr. Jones, this is how he must get experience—if he gets rattled, you and I can always fill in for him.” He started to leave, then added, “But Kovak can alternate with Kelly until I return. Mustn’t have anyone getting tired, that way mistakes are made.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Simes said nothing more to Max. They started working sights, alternately, using written programming on printed forms. The sights were coming in on a twenty-minute schedule, giving each of them forty minutes for a problem if he cared to take it. Max began to think that the Captain’s method did have its points.

Certainly Dr. Hendrix had worked himself to death—ships did not wear out but men did.

He had plenty of time to work not only his own problems, but those of Simes. The data came out orally and there was nothing to keep Max from programming Simes’ sights in his head and checking on what went into the computer. So far as he could see Simes was doing all right—though of course there was no real strain involved, not yet.

They ate sandwiches and drank coffee where they sat, leaving their seats only for five minutes or so at a time. Captain Blaine showed up twenty minutes early. He smiled and said cheerily, “Everyone happy and relaxed? Now we really get down to it. I have just time for a cup of coffee.”

A few minutes later he sat down and took over the control switches from Simes. The sights were coming through on a ten-minute schedule now, still ample time. Max continued to work them all, his own on paper and the others in his head. He was always through in time to catch the data for the next sight, program it mentally and check translations as Lundy thumbed the book. It gave him a running picture of how closely they were in the groove, how much hunting they were having to do in approaching their invisible target. It seemed to him that Simes tended to over-correct and that the Captain was somewhat optimistically under-correcting, but neither was so far out as to endanger the ship.

Maybe he was wrong about the Captain—the Old Man seemed to steady down when it mattered. His own corrections, he was glad to see, the Captain applied without question.

After more than an hour with transition forty-five. minutes away Captain Blaine looked up and said, “All right, boys, we’re getting close. Slam them to us as fast as you can now.”

Smythe and Kovak, with Noguchi and Bennett running for them, slipped into high gear; data poured out

in a steady stream. Max continued to work every sight, programming his own in his head and calling off figures faster than he wrote them down. He noticed that Simes was sweating, sometimes erasing and starting over. But the figures Simes called out agreed with what Max thought they should be, from his own mental programming. Captain Blaine seemed relaxed, though he had not speeded up materially and sometimes was still using the computer when Max was ready to pour his sight into it.

At one point Simes spoke too rapidly, slurring his figures, Lundy promptly said, “Repeat, sir!”

“Confound it! Clean out your ears!” But Simes repeated. The Captain glanced up, then bent back to his own problem. As soon as the computer was free Captain Blaine called his own figures to Lundy. Max had already set up the Captain’s sight in his mind, was subconsciously listening while watching Simes.

An alarm bell rang in his mind. “Captain! I don’t check you!” Captain Blaine stopped. “Eh?”

“That program is wrong, sir.”

The Captain did not seem angry. He simply handed his programming board to Simes. “Check me, sir.” Simes glanced quickly at the figures. “I check you, sir!”

Blaine said, “Drop out, Jones. Mr. Simes and I will finish.” “But—”

“Drop out, Mister!”

Max got out of the circle, seething inside. Simes’ check of the Captain’s set up hadn’t meant anything, unless Simes had listened to and remembered (as Max had) the data as it came in. The Captain had transposed an eight and a three in the fifth and sixth decimal places—the set up would look okay unless one knew the correct figures. If Simes had even bothered to check it, he added bitterly.

But Max could not keep from noting and processing the data in his mind. Simes’ next sight should catch the Captain’s error; his correction should repair it. It would be a big correction, Max knew; traveling just under the speed of light the ship clipped a million miles in less than six seconds.

Max could see Simes hesitate as the lights from his next sight popped up on the computer and Lundy translated them back. Why, the man looked frightened! The correction called for would push the ship extremely close to critical speed—Simes paused, then ordered less than half the amount that Max believed was needed.

Blaine applied it and went on with his next problem. When the answer came out the error, multiplied by time and unthinkable velocity, was more glaring than ever. The Captain threw Simes a glance of astonishment, then promptly made a correction. Max could not tell what it was, since it was done without words by means of the switch in his lap.

Simes licked the dryness from his lips. “Captain?”

“Time for just one more sight,” Blaine answered. “I’ll take it myself, Mr. Simes.”

The data were passed to him, he started to lay his problem out on the form. Max saw him erase, then look up; Max followed his gaze. The pre-set on the chronometer above the computer showed the seconds trickling away. “Stand by!” Blaine announced.

Max looked up. The stars were doing the crawling together that marked the last moments before transition. Captain Blaine must have pressed the second switch, the one that would kick them over, while Max was watching, for the stars suddenly blinked out and were replaced instantaneously by another starry firmament, normal in appearance.

The Captain lounged back, looked up. “Well,” he said happily, “I see we made it again.” He got up and headed for the hatch, saying over his shoulder, “Call me when you have laid us in the groove, Mr. Simes.” He disappeared down the hatch.

Max looked up again, trying to recall from the charts he had studied just what piece of this new sky they were facing. Kelly was looking up, too. “Yes, we came through,” Max heard him mutter. “But where?”

Simes also had been looking at the sky. Now he swung around angrily. “What do you mean?” “What I said,” Kelly insisted. “That’s not any sky I ever saw before.”

“Nonsense, man! You just haven’t oriented yourself. Everybody knows that a piece of sky can look strange when you first glance at it. Get out the flat charts for this area; we’ll find our landmarks quickly enough.”

“They are out, sir. Noguchi.”

It took only minutes to convince everyone else in the control room that Kelly was right, only a little longer to convince even Simes. He finally looked up from the charts with a face greenish white. “Not a word to anybody,” he said. “That’s an order—and I’ll bust any man who slips. Kelly, take the watch.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“I’ll be in the Captain’s cabin.” He went below to tell Blaine that the Asgard had come out in unknown space—was lost.

ANYWHERE

Two hours later Max climbed wearily up into the Worry Hole. He had just had a bad half hour, telling the truth as he saw it. Captain Blaine had been disinclined to blame anyone but himself, but had seemed stunned and bewildered. Simes had been nasty. His unstated logic seemed to be that, since it could not possibly be his fault and since it was unthinkable to blame the Captain, it must be Max’s fault. Since Max had been relieved some minutes before transition, his theory seemed to be that Max had caused it by making a disturbance as they were approaching the critical instant—joggled their elbows, so to speak.

Mr. Walther had been present, a mute judge. They spoke of matters’ outside his profession; he had seemed to be studying their faces. Max had stuck doggedly to his story.

He found Kelly still on watch. Kovak and Smythe were taking spectrograms; Noguchi and Lundy were busy with papers. “Want to be relieved?” he said to Kelly.

Kelly looked troubled. “I’m sorry, but you can’t.” “Huh?”

“Mr. Simes phoned while you were on your way up. He says you are not to stand duty until further notice.”

“He did? Well, I’m not surprised.”

“He also said that you were to stay out of the control room.”

Max made a violent statement about Simes. He added, “Well, it was nice while it lasted. Be seeing you.”

He turned away but Kelly stopped him. “Don’t be in a hurry, Max. He won’t be up for a while. I want to know what happened. From the computer I can’t tell what goes on.”

Max told him, drawing on his memory for the figures. Kelly nodded at last. “That confirms what I’ve been able to dig out. The Captain flubbed with a transposition—easy to do. Then Simes didn’t have the guts to make a big correction when it came around to him. But one more thing you don’t know. Neither do they—yet.”

“Huh? What?”

“The power room recorder shows it. Guenther had the watch down there and gave it to me over the phone. No, I didn’t tell him anything was wrong. I just asked for the record; that’s not unusual. By the way, any excitement down below? Passengers blowing their tops?”

“Not when I came up.”

“Won’t be long. They can’t keep this quiet forever. Back to my story—things were already sour but the Captain had one last chance. He applied the correction and a whopping big one. But he applied it with the wrong sign, just backwards.”

Profanity was too weak. All Max could say was, “Oh, my!” “Yeah. Well, there’s the devil to pay and him out to lunch.” “Any idea where we are?”

Kelly pointed to Kovak and Smythe at the spectrostellograph. “They’re fishing, but no bites. Bright stars first, B-types and O’s. But there is nothing that matches the catalogues so far.”

Noguchi and Lundy were using a hand camera. Max asked, “What are they doing?”

“Photographing the records. All of ’em—programming sheets, the rough data from the chartsmen, the computer tape, everything.”

“What good will that do?”

“Maybe none. But sometimes records get lost. Sometimes they even get changed. But not this time. I’m going to have a set of my own.”

The unpleasant implications of Kelly’s comments were sinking into Max’s mind when Noguchi looked up. “That’s all, Boss.”

“Good.” Kelly turned to Max. “Do me a favor. Stick those films in your pocket and take them with you. I want them out of here. I’ll pick them up later.”

“Well… all right.” While Noguchi was unloading the camera Max added to Kelly, “How long do you

think it will take to figure out where we are, checking spectra?”

Kelly looked more troubled than ever. “Max, what makes you think there is anything to find?” “I don’t follow you.”

“Why should anything out there… ” He made a sweeping gesture. “… match up with any charts we’ve got here?”

“You mean,” Max said slowly, “that we might not be in our own galaxy at all? Maybe in another, like the Andromeda Nebula, say?”

“Maybe. But that’s not all. Look, Max, I’m no theoretical physicist, that’s sure, but so far as I know all that theory says is that when you pass the speed of light you have to go out of your own space, somewhere else. You’ve become irrelevant and it won’t hold you. But where you go, unless you are set just right for a Horst congruency, that’s another matter. The theory doesn’t say. Does it?”

Max’s head started to ache. “Gee, I don’t know.”

“Neither do I. But since we weren’t set to duck back into our own space at another point, we may be anywhere. And I mean anywhere. We may be in some other space-time totally unconnected with our own.” He glanced up at the strange stars.

Max went below feeling worse than ever. He passed Simes going up; the Astrogator scowled at him but did not say anything. When Max reached his stateroom he put the films in a drawer—then thought about it, removed the drawer and cached them in dead space behind the drawer.

Max stayed in his room and worried. He fretted over being kept out of the control room, wanting very badly himself to check the sky for known stars. B- and O-type stars—well, that was all right, but there were half a dozen other ways. Globular star clusters, now—they’d be easy to identify; snag four of them and you’d know where you were as clear as reading a street sign. Then it would be just a case of fining it down, because you’d know what to look for and where. After which you’d high-tail it for the nearest charted congruency, whether it took you a week or a year. The ship couldn’t really be lost.

But suppose they weren’t even in the right galaxy?

The thought dismayed him. If that were the case, they’d never get home before the end of time. It was chased out by another thought—suppose Kelly’s suspicion had been correct, that this was an entirely different universe, another system of space and time? What then? He had read enough philosophical fancies to know that there was no theoretical reason for such to be impossible; the Designer might have created an infinity of universes, perhaps all pretty much alike—or perhaps as different as cheese and Wednesday. Millions, billions of them, all side by side from a multidimensional point of view.

Another universe might have different laws, a different speed of light, different gravitational ballistics, a different time rate—why they might get back to find that ten million years had passed and Earth burnt to a cinder!

But the light over his desk burned steadily, his heart pumped as always, obeying familiar laws of hydraulics, his chair pressed up against him—if this was a different sort of space the differences weren’t obvious. And if it was a different universe, there was nothing to be done about it.

A knock came at the door, he let Kelly in and gave him the chair, himself sitting on the bed. “Any news?” “No. Golly I’m tired. Got those pix?”

Max took out the drawer, fished around behind it, gave them to Kelly. “Look, Chief, I got an idea.” “Spill it.”

“Let’s assume that we’re in the right galaxy, because—” “Because if we ain’t, there isn’t any point in trying!”

“Well, yes. All right, we’re in the Milky Way. So we look around, make quick sample star counts and estimate the distance and direction of the center. Then we try to identify spectra of stars in that direction, after deciding what ones we ought to look for and figuring apparent magnitudes for estimated distance. That would…”

“—save a lot of time,” Kelly finished wearily. “Don’t teach your grandpop how to suck eggs. What the deuce do you think I’ve been doing?”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don’t be. It’s more than our revered boss thought of. While I been trying to work he’s been bellyachin’ around, finding fault, and trying to get me to say that he was dead right in everything—worrying about himself instead of worrying about his ship. Pfui! By the way, he grabbed the records just like I thought he would—’to show the Captain.’ He says.” Kelly stood up. “I’d better go.”

“Don’t rush. I’ll ring for coffee.”

“Running out of my ears now.” Kelly took the films from his pocket and looked at them dutifully. “I had Noggy make two shots of everything; this is a double set. That’s a good hidey-hole you’ve got. What say we stick one set in there and let it cool? Never can tell.”

“Kelly, you aren’t really expecting trouble over those records? Seems to me we’ve got trouble enough with the ship being lost.”

“Huh? Max, you’re going to make a good officer some day. But you’re innocent. Now I’m a suspenders and belt man. I like to take as few chances as possible. Doc Hendrix—rest his soul!—was the same way.” Kelly waited until Max had returned the spare set to the space back of the drawer, then started to leave. He paused.

“One thing I forgot to tell you, Max. We happened to come out pretty close to a star and a G-type at that.”

“Oh.” Max considered it. “Not one we know?”

“Of course not, or I would have said so. Haven’t sized it yet, but figuring normal range in the G’s we could reach it in not less than four weeks, not more than a year, at high boost. Thought you’d like to know.”

“Well, yes. Thanks. But I can’t see that it makes much difference.”

“No? Doesn’t it seem like a good idea to have a Sol-type star, with maybe Earth-type planets around it, not far off?”

“Well…”

“It does to me. The Adam-and-Eve business is rugged at best—and we might be in for a long stay.” With that he left.

No steward’s mate came to tell Max it was time for dinner; when he noticed that it was past time, he went to the lounge. Most of the passengers were already seated, although some were standing around talking. It was impossible to miss the feeling of unrest in the room. Max saw that the Captain was not at his table, nor was Mr. Walther at his. As he headed for his own table a Mr. Hornsby tried to grab his arm. Max shook him off. “Sorry, sir. I’m in a hurry.”

“Wait a minute! I want to ask you…”

“Sorry.” He hurried on and sat down. Chief Engineer Compagnon was not at the table, but the usual passengers were present. Max said, “Good evening,” and reached for his soup spoon, just to keep busy.

There was no soup to be toyed with, nor were there rolls and butter on the table, although it was ten minutes past the hour. Such things simply did not happen in Chief Steward Dumont’s jurisdiction. Come to think about it, Dumont was not in sight.

Mrs. Daigler put a hand on his arm. “Max? Tell me, dear—what is this silly rumor going around?” Max tried to maintain a poker face. “What rumor, ma’am?”

“You must have heard it! After all, you’re in astrogation. They say that the Captain turned the wrong corner or something and that we’re falling into a star.”

Max tried to give a convincing chuckle. “Who told you that? Whoever it was probably couldn’t tell a star from his elbow.”

“You wouldn’t fool your Aunt Maggie?”

“I can assure you positively that the Asgard is not falling into a star. Not even a small star.” He turned in his chair. “But it does look like something’s fallen into the galley. Dinner is awfully late.”

He remained turned, trying to avoid further questions. It did not work. Mr. Arthur called out sharply, “Mr. Jones!”

He turned back. “Yes?”

“Why stall us? I have been informed authoritatively that the ship is lost.” Max tried to look puzzled. “I don’t follow you. We seem to be in it.”

Mr. Arthur snorted. “You know what I mean! Something went wrong with that whatyoumucallit—transition. We’re lost.”

Max put on a school-teacherish manner, ticking off points on his fingers. “Mr. Arthur, I assure you that the ship is in absolutely no danger. As for being lost, I assure you just as firmly that if we are, the Captain neglected to tell me so. I was in the control room at transition and he seemed quite satisfied with it.

Would you mind telling me who has been spreading this story? It’s a serious thing, starting such rumors. People have been known to panic.”

“Well… it was one of the crew. I don’t know his name.”

Max nodded. “I thought so. Now in my experience in space… ” He went on, quoting from his uncle. “… I have learned that the only thing faster than light is the speed with which a story can spread through a ship. It doesn’t have to have any foundation, it spreads just the same.” He looked around again. “I wonder what has happened to dinner? I’d hate to go on watch hungry.”

Mrs. Weberbauer said nervously, “Then we are all right, Maxie?” “We’re all right, ma’am.”

Mrs. Daigler leaned toward him again and whispered, “Then why are you sweating, Max?”

He was saved by a steward’s mate rushing up to the table and starting to deal out plates of soup. Max stopped him when he came around and said quietly, “Jim, where’s Dumont?”

Out of the corner of his mouth the waiter said, “Cooking.” “Huh? Where’s the chef?”

The steward’s mate leaned down and whispered, “Frenchy is boiled as a judge. I guess he couldn’t take it. You know.”

Max let him go. Mr. Arthur said sharply, “What did he tell you?”

“I was trying to find out what went wrong in the galley,” Max answered. “Seems the cook incapacitated himself.” He spooned up a mouthful of the soup. “From the taste I’d say he had burned his thumb in this so-called chowder. Pretty bad, isn’t it?”

Max was saved from further evasions by the arrival of the First Officer. Mr. Walther went to the Captain’s table and banged on a glass with a spoon. “Your attention, please!”

He waited for quiet, then took a paper from his pocket. “I have an announcement to make on behalf of the Captain. Those of you who are familiar with the theory of astrogation are aware that space is changing constantly, due to the motions of the stars, and that consequently no two trips are exactly alike. Sometimes it is necessary, for this reason, to make certain changes in a ship’s routing. Such a circumstance has arisen in this present trip and the Asgard will be somewhat delayed in reaching her next destination. We regret this, but we can’t change the laws of nature. We hope that you will treat it as a minor inconvenience—or even as additional vacation, in the friendly and comfortable atmosphere of our ship. Please remember, too, that the insurance policy accompanying your ticket covers you completely against loss or damage you may be cost through the ship being behind schedule.”

He put away the paper; Max had the impression that he had not actually been reading from it. “That is all that the Captain had to say, but I want to add something myself. It has come to my attention that someone has been spreading silly rumors about this minor change in schedule. I am sorry if any of you have been alarmed thereby and I assure you that I will take very strict measures if the originator can be identified.” He risked a dignified smile. “But you know how difficult it is to trace down a bit of gossip. In any case, I want to assure you all that the Asgard is in no danger of any sort. The old girl was plying space long before any of us were born, she’ll still be going strong after we all die of old age—bless her sturdy bones!” He turned and left at once.

Max had listened in open-mouthed admiration. He came from country where the “whopper” was a respected literary art and it seemed to him that he had never heard a lie told with more grace, never seen one interwoven with truth with such skill, in his life. Piece by piece, it was impossible to say that anything

the First Officer had said was untrue; taken as a whole it was a flat statement that the Asgard was not lost—a lie if he ever heard one. He turned back toward his table mates. “Will someone pass the butter, please?”

Mr. Arthur caught his eye. “And you told us,” he said sharply, “that nothing was wrong!” Mr. Daigler growled, “Lay off him, Arthur. Max did pretty well, under the circumstances.” Mrs. Weberbauer looked bewildered. “But Mr. Walther said that everything was all right?”

Daigler looked at her with compassion. “We’re in trouble, Mama Weberbauer. That’s obvious. But all we can do is keep calm and trust the ship’s officers. Right, Max?”

“I guess that’s right, sir.”

“THIS ISN’T A PICNIC”

Max kept to his room that evening and the next day, wishing neither to be questioned by passengers nor to answer questions about why he had been relieved of duty. In consequence he missed the riot, having slept through it. He first heard of it when the steward’s mate who tended his room showed up with a black eye. “Who gave you the shiner, Garcia?”

“I’m not sure, sir. It happened in the ruckus last night.” “Ruckus? What ruckus?”

“You mean you don’t know?”

“This is the first I’ve heard of it. What happened?”

Garcia Lopez stared at the overhead. “Well—I wouldn’t want to say too much. You know how it is—nobody wants to testify against a mate. No?”

“Who asked you to peach on a mate? You don’t have to mention names—but what happened?”

“Well, sir. Some of those chicos, they ain’t got much sense.” Slowly Max learned that the unrest among the crew had been greater than that among the passengers, possibly because they understand more clearly the predicament. Some of them had consulted with Giordano’s poor-man’s vodka, then had decided to call on the Captain in a body and demand straight talk. The violence had taken place when the master-at-arms had attempted to turn them back at the companionway to “C” deck.

“Anybody hurt?”

“Not what you’d call hurt. Cut up a little. I picked this up… ” He touched his eye tenderly. “… from being too anxious to see what was going on. Slats Kovak busted an ankle.”

“Kovak! Why would he be in it?” It did not make sense that a member of the Worry gang should take part in anything so unreasonable.

“He was coming down, coming off watch, I guess. Maybe he was backing up the constable. Or maybe

he just got caught in the swinging doors. Your friend Sam Anderson was sure in the thick of it.” Sam! Max felt sick at heart—Sam in trouble again! “You’re sure?”

“I was there.”

“Uh, he wasn’t leading it, was he?”

“Oh, you got me wrong, M—Mr. Jones. He settled it. I never see a man who could use his hands like that. He’d grab two of ’em… clop! their heads would come together. Then he would grab two more.”

Max decided to come out of hiding and do two things; look up Kovak, find out how he was and what he might need or want, and second, look up Sam. But before he could leave Smythe arrived with a watch list to initial. He found that he was assigned watch-and-watch with Simes—and that he himself was due on watch immediately. He went up, wondering what had caused Simes to relent.

Kelly was in the control room; Max looked around, did not see Simes. “You got it, Chief?” “Until you relieve me. This is my last watch.”

“How’s that? Are you his pet peeve now?”

“You could say so. But not the way you think, Max. He drew up a watch list with him and me

heel-and-toe. I politely pointed out the guild rules, that I wasn’t being paid to take the responsibility of top watch.”

“Oh, brother! What did he say?”

“What could he say? He could order me in writing and I could accept in writing, with my objection to the orders entered in the log—and his neck is out a yard. Which left him his choice of putting you back on the list, asking the Captain to split it with him, or turning his cap around and relieving himself for the next few weeks. With Kovak laid up it didn’t leave him much choice. You heard about Kovak?”

“Yes. Say, what was that?” Max glanced over where Noguchi was loafing at the computer and lowered his voice. “Mutiny?”

Kelly’s eyes grew round. “Why, as I understand it, sir, Kovak slipped and fell down a companionway.” “Oh. Like that, huh?”

“That’s what it says in the log.”

“Hmm… well, I guess I had better relieve you. What’s the dope?”

They were in orbit under power for the nearby G-type star; the orders were entered in the Captain’s order book… in Simes’ handwriting but with Captain Blaine’s signature underneath. To Max it looked shaky, as if the Old Man had signed it under emotional stress. Kelly had already placed them in the groove. “Have we given up trying to find out where we are?” Max asked.

“Oh, no. Orders are to spend as much time as routine permits on it. But I’ll lay you seven to two you don’t find anything. Max, this is somewhere else entirely.”

“Don’t give up. How do you know?” “I feel it.”

Nevertheless Max spent the watch “fishing.” But with no luck. Spectrograms, properly taken and measured, are to stars what fingerprints are to men; they can be classified and comparisons made with those on file which are most nearly similar. While he found many which matched fairly closely with catalogued spectra, there was always the difference that makes one identical twin not quite like his brother.

Fifteen minutes before the end of the watch he stopped, and made sure that he was ready to be relieved. While waiting he thought about the shenanigan Kelly had pulled to get him back on duty. Good old Kelly! He knew Kelly well enough to know that he must not thank him; to do so would be to attribute to the Chief Computerman a motive which was “improper”—just wink the other eye and remember it.

Simes stomped in five minutes past the hour. He said nothing but looked over the log and records of observations Max had made. Max waited several minutes while growing more and more annoyed. At last he said, “Are you ready to relieve me, sir?”

“All in good time. I want to see first what you’ve loused up this time.” Max kept his mouth shut. Simes pointed at the log where Max had signed it followed by “C.O. o/W.” “That’s wrong, to start with. Add ‘under instruction.'”

Max breathed deeply. “Whose instruction, sir?” “Mine.”

Max hesitated only momentarily before answering, “No, sir. Not unless you are present during my watch to supervise me.”

“Are you defying me?”

“No, sir. But I’ll take written orders on that point… entered in the log.”

Simes closed the log book and looked him slowly up and down. “Mister, if we weren’t short-handed you wouldn’t be on watch. You aren’t ready for a top watch—and it’s my opinion that you won’t ever be.”

“If that’s the way you feel, sir, I’d just as lief go back to chartsman. Or steward’s mate.”

“That’s where you belong!” Simes’ voice was almost a scream. Noguchi had hung around after Lundy had relieved him; they both looked up, then turned their heads away.

Max made no effort to keep his answer private. “Very good, sir. Will you relieve me? I’ll go tell the First Officer that I am surrendering my temporary appointment and reverting to my permanent billet.”

Max expected a blast. But Simes made a visible effort to control himself and said almost quietly, “See here, Jones, you don’t have the right attitude.”

Max thought to himself, “What have I got to lose?” Aloud he said, “You’re the one who doesn’t have the right attitude, sir.”

“Eh? What’s that?”

“You’ve been riding me ever since I came to work in the Hole. You’ve never bothered to give me any instruction and you’ve found fault with everything I did. Since my probationary appointment it’s been four times worse. You came to my room and told me that you were opposed to my appointment, that you didn’t want me…”

“You can’t prove that!”

“I don’t have to. Now you tell me that I’m not fit to stand the watch you’ve just required me to stand. You’ve made it plain that you will never recommend me for permanent appointment, so obviously I’m wasting my time. I’ll go back to the Purser’s gang and do what I can there. Now, will you relieve me, sir?”

“You’re insubordinate.”

“No, sir, I am not. I have spoken respectfully, stating facts. I have requested that I be relieved—my watch was over a good half hour ago—in order that I may see the First Officer and revert to my permanent billet. As allowed by the rules of both guilds,” Max added.

“I won’t let you.”

“It’s my option, sir. You have no choice.”

Simes’ face showed that he indeed had no choice. He remained silent for some time, then said more quietly, “Forget it. You’re relieved. Be back up here at eight o’clock.”

“Not so fast, sir. You have stated publicly that I am not competent to take the watch. Therefore I can’t accept the responsibility.”

“Confound it! What are you trying to do? Blackmail me?

Max agreed in his mind that such was about it, but he answered, “I wouldn’t say so, sir. You can’t have it both ways.”

“Well—I suppose you are competent to stand this sort of watch. There isn’t anything to do, actually.” “Very good, sir. Will you kindly log the fact?”

“Huh?”

“In view of the circumstances, sir, I insist on the letter of the rules and ask you to log it.”

Simes swore under his breath, then grabbed the stylus and wrote quickly. He swung the log book around. There!”

Max read: “M. Jones is considered qualified to stand a top watch in space, not involving anomaly. (s) R. Simes, Astrogator.”

Max noted the reservation, the exception that would allow Simes to keep him from ever reaching permanent status. But Simes had stayed within the law. Besides, he admitted to himself, he didn’t want to leave the Worry gang. He comforted himself with the thought that since they were all lost together it might never matter what Simes recommended.

“Quite satisfactory, sir.”

Simes grabbed the book. “Now get out. See that you’re back here on time.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Max could not refrain from having the last word, standing up to Simes had gone to his head. “Which reminds me, sir: will you please relieve me on time after this?”

“What?”

“Under the law a man can’t be worked more than four hours out of eight, except for a logged emergency.”

“Go below!”

Max went below, feeling both exultant and sick. He had no taste for fights, never had; they left him with a twisted lump inside. He burst into his room, and almost fell over Sam.

“Sam!”

“The same. What’s eating you, boy? You look like the goblins had been chasing you.”

Max flopped on his bunk and sighed. “I feel that way, too.” He told Sam about the row with Simes.

Sam nodded approval. “That’s the way to deal with a jerk like that—insult him until he apologizes. Give him lumps enough times and he’ll eat out of your hand.”

Max shook his head dolefully. “Today was fun, but he’ll find some way to take it out on me. Oh, well!” “Not so, my lad. Keep your nose clean and wait for the breaks. If a man is stupid and

bad-tempered—which he is, I sized him up long ago—if you are smart and keep your temper, eventually

he leaves himself wide open. That’s a law of nature.”

“Maybe.” Max swung around and sat up. “Sam—you’re wearing your shield again.”

Sam stuck his thumb under the badge of office of Chief Master-at-Arms. “Didn’t you notice?” “I guess I was spinning too fast. Tell me about it—did the First decide to forgive and forget?” “Not precisely. You know about that little excitement last night?”

“Well, yes. But I understand that officially nothing happened?” “Correct. Mr. Walther knows when to pull his punches.” “What did happen? I heard you cracked some skulls together.”

“Nothing much. And not very hard. I’ve seen ships where it would have been regarded as healthy exercise to settle your dinner. Some of the lads got scared and that made them lap up happy water. Then a couple with big mouths and no forehead got the inspiration that it was their right to talk to the Captain about it. Being sheep, they had to go in a flock. If they had run into an officer, he could have sent them back to bed with no trouble. But my unfortunate predecessor happened to run into them and told them to disperse. Which they didn’t. He’s not the diplomatic type, I’m afraid. So he hollered, ‘Hey, Rube!’ in his quaint idiom and the fun began.”

“But where do you figure? You came to help him?”

“Hardly. I was standing at a safe distance, enjoying the festivities, when I noticed Mr. Walther’s bedroom slippers coming down the ladder. Whereupon I waded in and was prominent in the ending. The way to win a medal, Max, is to make sure the general is watching, then act.”

Max grinned. “Somehow I hadn’t figured you for the hero type.”

“Heaven forbid! But it worked out. Mr. Walther sent for me, ate me out, told me that I was a scoundrel and a thief and a nogoodnick—then offered me my shield back if I could keep order below decks. I

looked him in the eye, a sincere type look, and told him I would do my best. So here I am.” “I’m mighty pleased, Sam.”

“Thanks. Then he looked me in the eye and told me that he had reason to suspect—as if he didn’t know!—that there might be a still somewhere in the ship. He ordered me to find it, and then destroy any liquor I found.”

“So? How did Mr. Gee take that?”

“Why, Fats and I disassembled his still and took the pieces back to stores, then we locked up his stock in trade. I pleaded with him not to touch it until the ship was out of its mess. I explained that I would break both his arms if he did.”

Max chuckled. “Well, I’m glad you’re back in good graces. And it was nice of you to come tell me about it.” He yawned. “Sorry. I’m dead for sleep.”

“I’ll vamoose. But I didn’t come to tell you, I came to ask a question.” “Huh? What?”

“Have you seen the Skipper lately?”

Max thought back. “Not since transition. Why?”

“Nor has anyone else. I thought he might be spending his time in the Worry Hole.”

“No. Come to think, he hasn’t been at his table either—at least when I’ve been in the lounge.”

“He’s been eating in his cabin.” Sam stood up. “Very, very interesting. Mmm… I wouldn’t talk about it, Max.”

Simes was monosyllabic when Max relieved him. Thereafter they had no more words; Simes acted as if Max did not exist except for the brief formalities in relieving. The Captain did not show up in the control room. Several times Max was on the point of asking Kelly about it, but each time decided not to. But there were rumors around the ship—the Captain was sick, the Captain was in a coma, Walther and the Surgeon had relieved him of duty, the Captain was constantly at his desk, working out a new and remarkable way to get the ship back to where it belonged.

By now it was accepted that the ship was lost, but the time for hysteria had passed; passengers and crew were calm and there seemed to be general consent that the decision to put down around the solar-type star toward which they were headed was the only reasonable decision. They were close enough now that it had been determined that the star did have planets—no G-class star had ever been found to be without planets, but to pick them up on a stereoplate was consoling.

It came to a choice between planet #3 and planet #4. Bolometric readings showed the star to have a surface temperature slightly over 6000° Kelvin, consistent with its spectrum; it was not much larger than Father Sol; calculated surface temperatures for the third and fourth planets gave a probability that the third might be uncomfortably hot whereas number four might be frigid. Both had atmospheres.

A fast hyperboloid swing past both settled the matter. The bolometer showed number three to be too hot and even number four to be tropical. Number four had a moon which the third did not—another

advantage for four, for it permitted, by examining the satellite’s period, an easy calculation of its mass; from that and its visible diameter its surface gravity was a matter of substitution in classic Newtonian formula… ninety-three percent of Earth-normal, comfortable and rather low in view of its over

ten-thousand-mile diameter. Absorption spectra showed oxygen and several inert gases.

Simes assisted by Kelly placed the Asgard in a pole-to-pole orbit to permit easy examination—Max, as usual, was left to chew his nails.

The Captain did not come to the control room even to watch this maneuver.

They hung in parking orbit while their possible future home was examined from the control room and stared at endlessly from the lounge. It was in the lounge that Ellie tracked Max down. He had hardly seen her during the approach, being too busy and too tired with a continuous heel-and-toe watch and in the second place with much on his mind that he did not want to have wormed out of him. But, once the orbit was established and power was off, under standard doctrine Simes could permit the watch to be taken by crewmen—which he did and again told Max to stay out of the control room.

Max could not resist the fascination of staring at the strange planet; he crowded into the lounge along with the rest. He was standing back and gazing over heads when he felt his arm grabbed. “Where have you been?”

“Working.” He reached out and caressed Chipsie; the spider puppy leaped to his shoulders and started searching him.

“Hmmmph! You don’t work all the time. Do you know that I sent nine notes to your room this past week?”

Max knew. He had saved them but had not answered. “Sorry.”

“Sorry he says. Never mind—Max, tell me all about it.” She turned and looked out. “What have they named it? Is there anybody on it? Where are we going to land? When are we going to land? Max, aren’t you excited?”

“Whew! They haven’t named it yet—we just call it’the planet’ or ‘number four.’ Kelly wants to name it ‘Hendrix.’ Simes is hedging; I think he wants to name it after himself. The Captain hasn’t made any decision that I know of.”

“They ought to name it ‘Truth’ or ‘Hope’ or something like that. Where is the Captain, Max? I haven’t seen the old dear for days.”

“He’s working. This is a busy time for him, of course.” Max reflected that his evasion might be true. “About your other questions, we haven’t seen any signs of cities or towns or anything that looks like civilization.”

“What do you mean by ‘civilization’? Not a lot of dirty old cities surely?”

Max scratched his head and grinned. “You’ve got me. But I don’t see how you could have it, whatever it is, without cities.”

“Why not? Bees have cities, ants have cities, challawabs have cities. None of them is civilized. I can think of a lovely civilization that would just sit around in trees and sing and think beautiful thoughts.”

“Is that what you want?”

“No, it would bore me to death. But I can think about it, can’t I? You didn’t say when we were going to land?”

“I don’t know. When they decide it’s safe.”

“I wish they would hurry. Isn’t it thrilling? Just like Robinson Crusoe, or Swiss Family Robinson—I can’t keep those two straight. Or the first men on Venus.”

“They died.”

“So they did. But we won’t, not on—” She waved her hand at the lovely green and blue and cloudy-white globe. “—not on, uh, I’m going to call it ‘Charity’ because that’s what it looks like.”

Max said soberly, “Ellie, don’t you realize this is serious?” He kept his voice low in order not to alarm others. “This isn’t a picnic. If this place doesn’t work out, it might be pretty awful.”

“Why?”

“Look, don’t quote me and don’t talk about it. But I don’t think any of us will ever get home again.”

She sobered momentarily, then shrugged and smiled. “You can’t frighten me. Sure, I’d like to go home—but if I can’t, well, Charity is going to be good to us. I know it.”

Max shut up.

“—OVER A HUNDRED YEARS—”

The Asgard landed on Charity the following day. Eldreth affixed her choice by the statistical process of referring to the planet by that name, assuming that it was official, and repeating it frequently.

When word was passed that landing would commence at noon, ship’s time, Max went to the control room and simply assumed that it was his right to be present. Simes looked at him sourly but said nothing—for an evident reason: Captain Blaine was present.

Max was shocked at his appearance. The Captain seemed to have aged ten to fifteen years since the bad transition. In place of his habitual cheerful expression was one that Max had trouble tagging—until he recalled that he had seen it on horses, on horses too old to work but still working—head bent, eyes dull, mute and resigned against a fate both inescapable and unbearable. The old man’s skin hung loose, as if he had not eaten for days or weeks. He seemed hardly interested in what was going on around him.

He spoke only once during the maneuver. Just before the chronometer showed noon Simes straightened up from the console and looked at his skipper. Blaine lifted his head and said in a hoarse whisper, “Take her down, Mister.”

An Imperial military ship in landing on a strange spot would normally guide a radar-beacon robot down first, then home in on the beacon. But the Asgard was a merchant liner; she expected to land nowhere but at ports equipped with beams and beacons and other aids. Consequently the landing was made blind by precomputed radar-automatic and was planned for an open valley selected by photograph. The planet was densely wooded in most areas, choice was limited.

Simes presented a picture of the alert pilot, hands poised at the controls, eyes on the radar screen portraying the view below them, while racked in front of him were comparison photographs, radar and visual. The let down was without incident; starry black sky gave way to deep purple, then to blue. There was not even a jar as the ship touched, for its private gravity inside its Horstian field kept them from feeling impressed acceleration. Max knew they were down when he saw Simes cut in the thrust beams to cradle the ship upright.

Simes said to the microphone, “Power room, start auxiliaries and secure. All hands, dirtside routine, first section.” He turned to Blaine. “Grounded, Captain.”

Blaine’s lips shaped the words, “Very good, sir.” He got up and shuffled toward the hatch. When he had gone Simes ordered, “Lundy, take stand-by watch. The rest of you clear the control room.”

Max went down with Kelly. When they reached “A” deck Max said grudgingly, “It was a smart landing I’ll have to admit.”

“Thanks,” said Kelly.

Max glanced at him. “So you calculated it?” “I didn’t say that. I just said, ‘Thanks.'”

“So? Well, you’re welcome.” Max felt his weight pulse and suddenly he was a trifle lighter. “They cut the field. Now we’re really down.”

He was about to invite Kelly into his room for the inevitable coffee when the ship’s speakers sounded: “All hands! All passengers! Report to Bifrost Lounge for an important announcement. Those on watch are ordered to listen in by phone.”

“What’s up?” asked Max. “Why wonder? We’ll go see.”

The lounge was crowded with passengers and crew. First Officer Walther stood near the Captain’s table, counting the crowd with his eyes. Max saw him speak to Bennett, who nodded and hurried away. The large view port was across the lounge from Max; he stretched on his toes and tried to see out. All he could see was hilltops and blue sky.

There was a lessening of the murmur of voices; Max looked around to see Bennett preceding Captain Blaine through the crowd. The Captain went to his table and sat down; the First Officer glanced at him, then cleared his throat loudly. “Quiet, please.”

He went on, “I’ve called you together because Captain Blaine has something he wants to say to you.” He stopped and stepped back respectfully.

Captain Blaine slowly stood up, looked uncertainly around. Max saw him square his thin shoulders and lift his head. “Men,” he said, his voice suddenly firm and strong. “My guests and friends—” he went on, his voice sinking. There was a hush in the lounge, Max could hear the Captain’s labored breathing. He again asserted control of himself and continued, “I have brought you… I have brought you as far as I can… ” His voice trailed off. He looked at them for a long moment, his mouth trembling. It seemed impossible for him to continue. The crowd started to stir.

But he did continue and they immediately quieted. “I have something else to say,” he began, then paused. This pause was longer, when he broke it his voice was a whisper. “I’m sorry. God keep you all.” He

turned and started for the door.

Bennett slipped quickly in front of him. Max could hear him saying quietly and firmly: “Gangway, please. Way for the Captain.” No one said anything until he was gone, but a woman passenger at Max’s elbow was sobbing softly.

Mr. Walther’s sharp, clear voice rang out. “Don’t go away, anyone! I have additional announcements to make.” His manner ignored what they had all just seen. “The time has come to sum up our present situation. As you can see, this planet is much like our Mother Earth. Tests must be made to be sure that the atmosphere is breathable, and so forth; the Surgeon and the Chief Engineer are making them now. But it seems likely that this new planet will prove to be eminently suitable for human beings, probably even more friendly than Earth.

“So far, we have seen no indications of civilized life. On the whole, that seems a good thing. Now as to our resources—The Asgard carries a variety of domestic animals, they will be useful and should be conserved as breeding stock. We have an even wider variety of useful plants, both in the ship’s hydroponic gardens and carried as seeds. We have a limited but adequate supply of tools. Most important of all the ship’s library contains a fair cross-section of our culture. Equally important, we ourselves have our skills and traditions…”

“Mr. Walther!”

“Yes, Mr. Hornsby?”

“Are you trying to tell us that you are dumping us here?”

Walther looked at him coldly. “No. Nobody is being’dumped’ as you put it. You can stay in the ship and you will be treated as a guest as long as the Asgard—or you yourself—is alive. Or until the ship reaches the destination on your ticket. If it does. No, I have been trying to discuss reasonably an open secret; this ship is lost.”

A voiceless sigh went through the room. All of them knew it, but up till now it had not been admitted officially. The flat announcement from a responsible officer echoed like the sentence of a court.

“Let me state the legal position,” Mr. Walther went on. “While this ship was in space you passengers were subject to the authority of the Captain, as defined by law, and through him you were subject to me and the other ship’s officers. Now we have landed. You may go freely… or you may stay. Legally this is an unscheduled stopover; if the ship ever leaves here you may return to it and continue as passengers.

That is my responsibility to you and it will be carried out. But I tell you plainly that at present I have no hope to offer that we will ever leave here—which is why I spoke of colonizing. We are lost.”

In the rear of the room a woman began to scream hysterically, with incoherent sounds of, “… home! I want to go home! Take me…”

Walther’s voice cut through the hubbub. “Dumont! Flannigan! Remove her. Take her to the Surgeon.”

He continued as if nothing had happened. “The ship and the ship’s crew will give every assistance possible, consistent with my legal responsibility to keep the ship in commission, to aid any of you who wish to colonize. Personally I think…”

A surly voice cut in, “Why talk about ‘law’? There is no law here!”

Walther did not even raise his voice. “But there is. As long as this ship is in commission, there is law, no matter how many light-years she may be from her home port. Furthermore, while I have no authority

over any who choose to leave the ship, I strongly advise you to make it your first act dirtside to hold a town meeting, elect officers, and found a constitutional government. I doubt that you can survive otherwise.”

“Mr. Walther.” “Yes, Mr. Daigler?”

“This is obviously no time for recriminations…” “Obviously!”

Daigler grinned wryly. “So I won’t indulge, though I could think of some. But it happens that I know something professionally about the economics of colonizing.”

“Good! We’ll use your knowledge.”

“Will you let me finish? A prime principle in maintaining a colony out of touch with its supply base is to make it large enough. It’s a statistical matter, too small a colony can be overwhelmed by a minor setback. It’s like going into a dice game with too little money: three bad rolls and you’re sunk. Looking around me, it’s evident that we have much less than optimal minimum. In fact—”

“It’s what we have, Mr. Daigler.”

“I see that. I’m not a wishful thinker. What I want to know is, can we count on the crew as well?”

Mr. Walther shook his head. “This ship will not be decommissioned as long as there are men capable of manning it. There is always hope, no matter how small, that we may find a way home. It is even possible that an Imperial survey ship might discover us. I’m sorry—no.”

“That isn’t quite what I asked. I was two jumps ahead of you, I figured you wouldn’t let the crew colonize. But can we count on their help? We seem to have about six females, give or take one, who will probably help to carry on the race. That means that the next generation of our new nation is going to be much smaller. Such a colony would flicker and die, by statistical probability—unless every man jack of us works ten hours a day for the rest of his life, just to give our children a better chance of making it. That’s all right with me, if we all make an all-out try. But it will take all the manpower we have to make sure that some young people who aren’t even born yet get by thirty years from now. Will the crew help?”

Mr. Walther said quietly, “I think you can count on it.” “Good enough.”

A small, red-faced man whose name Max had never learned interrupted. “Good enough, my eye! I’m going to sue the company, I’m going to sue the ship’s officers individually. I’m going to shout it from the… ” Max saw Sam slipping through the crowd to the man’s side, the disturbance stopped abruptly.

“Take him to the Surgeon,” Mr. Walther said wearily. “He can sue us tomorrow. The meeting is adjourned.”

Max started for his room. Eldreth caught up with him. “Max! I want to talk with you.” “All right.” He started back toward the lounge.

“No, I want to talk privately. Let’s go to your room.”

“Huh? Mrs. Dumont would blow her top, then she’d tell Mr. Walther.”

“Bother with all that! Those silly rules are dead. Didn’t you listen at the meeting?” “You’re the one who didn’t listen.”

He took her firmly by the arm, turned her toward the public room. They ran into Mr. and Mrs. Daigler coming the other way. Daigler said, “Max? Are you busy?”

“Yes,” answered Eldreth. “No,” said Max.

“Hmm… you two had better take a vote. I’d like to ask Max some questions. I’ve no objection to your being with us, Eldreth, if you will forgive the intrusion.

She shrugged. “Oh, well, maybe you can handle him. I can’t.”

They went to the Daiglers’ stateroom, larger and more luxurious than Max’s and possessing two chairs. The two women perched on the bed, the men took the chairs. Daigler began, “Max, you impress me as a man who prefers to give a straight answer. There are things I want to know that I didn’t care to ask out there. Maybe you can tell me.”

“I will if I can.”

“Good. I’ve tried to ask Mr. Simes, all I get is a snottily polite brush off. I haven’t been able to get in to see the Captain—after today I see that there wouldn’t have been any point anyhow. Now, can you tell me, with the mathematics left out, what chance we have to get home? Is it one in three, or one in a thousand—or what?”

“Uh, I couldn’t answer it that way.” “Answer it your own way.”

“Well, put it this way. While we don’t know where we are, we know positively where we aren’t. We aren’t within, oh, say a hundred light-years of any explored part of the Galaxy.”

“How do you know? It seems to me that’s a pretty big space to be explored in the weeks since we got off the track.”

“It sure is. It’s a globe twelve hundred trillion miles thick. But we didn’t have to explore it, not exactly.” “Then how?”

“Well, sir, we examined the spectra of all first magnitude stars in sight—and a lot more. None of them is in our catalogues. Some are giants that would be first magnitude anywhere within a hundred light-years of them—they’d be certain to be in the catalogues if a survey ship had ever been that close to them. So we are absolutely certain that we are a long, long way from anywhere that men have ever been before.

Matter of fact, I spoke too conservatively. Make it a globe twice as thick, eight times as big, and you’d still be way over on the conservative side. We’re really lost.”

“Mmm… I’m glad I didn’t ask those questions in the lounge. Is there any possibility that we will ever know where we are?”

“Oh, sure! There are thousands of stars left to examine. Chief Kelly is probably shooting one this minute.”

“Well, then, what are the chances that we will eventually find ourselves?”

“Oh, I’d say they were excellent—in a year or two at the outside. If not from single stars, then from globular star clusters. You realize that the Galaxy is a hundred thousand light-years across, more or less, and we can see only stars that are fairly close. But the globular clusters make good landmarks, too.” Max added the mental reservation, if we aren’t in the wrong galaxy. There seemed no point in burdening them with that dismaying possibility.

Daigler relaxed and took out a cigar. “This is the last of my own brand, but I’ll risk smoking it now. Well, Maggie, I guess you won’t have to learn how to make soap out of wood ashes and hog drippings after all. Whether it’s one year or five, we can sweat it out and go home.”

“I’m glad.” She patted her ornate coiffure with soft, beautifully manicured hands. “I’m hardly the type for it.”

“But you don’t understand!” “Eh? What’s that, Max?”

“I didn’t say we could get back. I just said I thought it was fairly certain we would find out where we are.”

“What’s the difference? We find out, then we go home.”

“No, because we can’t be less than a hundred light-years from explored space.”

“I don’t see the hitch. This ship can do a hundred light-years in a split second. What was the longest leap we made this cruise? Nearly five hundred light-years, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, but—” Max turned to Eldreth. “You understand? Don’t you?” “Well, maybe. That folded-scarf thing you showed me?”

“Yes, yes. Mr. Daigler, sure the Asgard can transit five hundred light-years in no time—or any other distance. But only at calculated and surveyed congruencies. We don’t know of any within a hundred light-years, at least… and we won’t know of any even if we find out where we are because we know where we aren’t. Follow me? That means that the ship would have to travel at top speed for something over a hundred years and maybe much longer, just for the first leg of the trip.”

Mr. Daigler stared thoughtfully at his cigar ash, then took out a pen knife and cut off the burning end. “I’ll save the rest. Well, Maggie, better study up on that homemake soap deal. Thanks, Max. My father was a farmer, I can learn.”

Max said impulsively, “I’ll help you, sir.”

“Oh yes, you did tell us that you used to be a farmer, didn’t you? You should make out all right.” His eyes swung to Eldreth. “You know what I would do, if I were you kids? I’d get the Captain to marry you right away. Then you’d be all set to tackle colonial life right.”

Max blushed to his collar and did not look at Ellie. “I’m afraid I can’t. I’m a crew member, I’m not eligible to colonize.”

Mr. Daigler looked at him curiously. “Such devotion to duty. Well, no doubt Ellie can take her pick among the single men passengers.”

Eldreth smoothed her skirt demurely. “No doubt.” “Come, Maggie. Coming, Eldreth?”

CHARITY

“Charityville” was a going concern within a week. It had a mayor, Mr. Daigler, a main street, Hendrix Avenue, even its first wedding, performed by the mayor in the presence of the villagers—Mr. Arthur and little Becky Weberbauer. The first cottage, now building, was reserved for the newlyweds. It was a log cabin and a very sloppy job, for, while there were those among them who had seen pictures or had even seen log cabins, there was no one who had ever built one before.

There was an air of hope, of common courage, even of gaiety in the new community. The place was fragrant with new starts, forward-looking thoughts. They still slept in the ship and breakfasted there, then carried their lunches and labored mightily, men and women alike, through the short day—Charity spun on her axis in twenty-one-plus hours. They returned at nightfall, dined in the ship, and some found energy to dance a bit before going to bed.

Charity seemed to be all that her name implied. The days were balmy, the nights were mild—and beautiful beyond anything yet found in the Galaxy. Its star (they simply called it “the Sun”) was accompanied by more comets than had yet been seen around any star. A giant with a wide tail stretched from zenith to western horizon, diving at their Sun. Another, not yet so grand but awesome enough to have caused watchers for the end of the world on Earthly hilltops, approached from the north, and two more decorated the southern sky with lace of icy fire.

Concomitant with comets was, necessarily, an equal abundance of meteors. Every night was a shower of falling stars, every day ended like Solar Union Day with a display of fireworks.

They had seen no dangerous animals. Some of the settlers reported seeing centaurlike creatures about the size of Shetland ponies, but they seemed timid and had scurried away when discovered. The prevalent life form appeared to be marsupial mammals in various sizes and shapes. There were no birds, but there was another sort of flying life not found elsewhere—jellyfishlike creatures four or five feet high with dangling tendrils, animated balloons. They appeared to have muscular control over their swollen bladders for they could rise and fall, and could even, by some not evident means, go upwind against a gentle breeze—in higher winds they anchored to treetops, or floated free and let the wind carry them.

They seemed curious about Charityville and would hang over a work site, turning slowly around as if to see everything. But they never got within reach. Some of the settlers wanted to shoot one down and examine it; Mayor Daigler forbade it.

There was another animal too—or might be. They were called “peekers” because all that anyone had seen was something that ducked quickly behind a rock or tree when anyone tried to look. Between the possibly mythical peeker and the ubiquitous balloons the colonists felt that their new neighbors took a deep but not unfriendly interest in what they were doing.

Maggie Daigler—she was “Maggie” to everyone now—had put away her jewels, drawn dungarees from ship’s stores, and chopped off her hair. Her nails were short and usually black with grime. But she looked years younger and quite happy.

In fact, everyone seemed happy but Max.

Ellie was avoiding him. He cursed himself and his big mouth thrice daily and four times at night. Sure, Daigler had spoken out of turn—but was that any reason for him to open his mouth and put his foot in it? Of course, he had never figured on marrying Ellie—but shucks, maybe they were stuck here forever. “Probably,” not “maybe,” he corrected. The ban on joining the colony would be let up in time—in which case, what was the sense in getting in bad with the only eligible girl around?

An astrogator ought to be a bachelor but a farmer needed a wife. Mighty nice to have some one cooking the turnip greens and jointing a chicken while a man was out in the fields. He ought to know—Maw had let it slide often enough. Ellie wouldn’t be like Maw. She was strong and practical and with just a little teaching would do all right.

Besides she was about the prettiest thing he ever saw, if you looked at her right.

When Mr. and Mrs. Dumont, by special dispensation, joined the colony it caused him to act. Since the steward and stewardess would have no duties in a ship without passengers no one could reasonably object—but it gave Max an approach. He went to see the First Officer.

“Probationary Apprentice Jones, sir.”

Walther glanced up. “I think I’d say ‘Assistant Astrogator Jones’ if I were you. Closer to the facts. Come in.”

“Uh, that’s what I wanted to speak with you about, sir.” “So? How?”

“I want to revert to my billet.”

“Eh? Why would you rather be a chartsman than an astrogator? And what difference does it make—now?”

“No, sir. I’m electing to resume my permanent appointment, steward’s mate third.” Walther looked amazed. “There must be more to this. Explain yourself.”

With much stammering Max explained his trouble with Simes. He tried to be fair and finished with the dismal feeling that he had sounded childish. Walther said, “You’re sure about this? Mr. Simes has said nothing to me about you.”

“He wouldn’t, sir. But it’s true. You can ask Kelly.”

Walther thought for a while. “Mr. Jones, I wouldn’t attach too much importance to this. At your age these conflicts of personality often seem more serious than they are. My advice is to forget it and do your work. I’ll speak to Mr. Simes about his keeping you out of the control room. That isn’t proper and I am surprised to hear it.”

“No, sir.”

“‘No, sir’ what?”

“I want to return to steward’s mate.” “Eh? I don’t understand you.”

“Because, sir, I want to join the colony. Like Chief Steward Dumont.”

“Oh… A light begins to dawn.” Walther slapped the desk emphatically. “Absolutely no! Under no circumstances.”

“Sir?”

“Please understand me. This is not discrimination. If you were a steward’s mate and nothing else, I would consider your request—under the special circumstances which I believe pertain. But you are an astrogator. You know our situation. Dr. Hendrix is dead. Captain Blaine—well, you have seen him. He may recover, I cannot plan on it. Mr. Jones, as long as there is any faint hope that this ship will ever lift again, as long as we have crew to work her, no astrogator, no chartsman, no computerman will be relieved from duty for any reason whatsoever. You see that, don’t you?”

“I guess so, sir. Uh, aye aye, sir.”

“Good. By the way, keep this to yourself, but as soon as the colony can get along without us temporarily, I want the ship placed in a parking orbit so that you specialists can maintain a search. You can’t work very well through this atmosphere, can you?”

“No, sir. Our instruments were designed for open space.”

“So we must see that you get it.” The First Officer sat silent, then added, “Mr. Jones—Max, isn’t it? May I speak to you man to man?”

“Uh? Certainly, sir.”

“Mmm… Max, this is none of my business, but treat it as fatherly advice. If you have an opportunity to marry—and want to—you don’t have to join the colony to do it. If we stay, it won’t matter in the long run whether you are crew or a charter member of the village. If we leave, your wife goes with you.”

Max’s ears burned. He could think of nothing to say.

“Hypothetical question, of course. But that’s the proper solution.” Walther stood up. “Why don’t you take the day off? Go take a walk or something. Fresh air will do you good. I’ll speak to Mr. Simes.”

Instead, Max went looking for Sam, did not find him in the ship, discovered that he had gone dirtside. He followed him down and walked the half mile to Charityville.

Before he reached the building that was being worked on he saw a figure separate itself from the gang. He soon saw that it was Eldreth. She stopped in front of him, a sturdy little figure in dirty dungarees. She planted her feet and set fists on her hips.

“Uh, howdy, Ellie.”

“Up to your old tricks! Avoiding me. Explain yourself.”

The injustice of it left him stuttering. “But… Now see here, Ellie, it’s not that way at all. You’ve been…”

“A likely story. You sound like Chipsie caught with her hand in a candy dish. I just wanted to tell you, you reluctant Don Juan, that you have nothing to worry about. I’m not marrying anyone this season. So you can resume the uneven tenor of your ways.”

“But, Ellie… ” he started desperately.

“Want me to put it in writing? Put up a bond?” She looked fiercely at him, then began to laugh, wrinkling her nose. “Oh, Max, you large lout, you arouse the eternal maternal in me. When you are upset your face gets as long as a mule’s. Look, forget it.”

“But, Ellie… Well, all right.” “Pals?”

“Pals.”

She sighed. “I feel better. I don’t know why, but I don’t like to be on the outs with you. Where were you going?”

“Uh, nowhere. Taking a walk.”

“Fine. I’ll go too. Half a sec while I gather in Chipsie.” She turned and called, “Mister Chips! Chipsie!” “I don’t see her.”

“I’ll get her.” She ran off, to return quickly with the spider puppy on her shoulder and a package in her hand. “I picked up my lunch. We can split it.”

“Oh, we won’t be gone that long. Hi, Chipsie baby.” “Hi, Max. Candy?”

He dug into a pocket, found a sugar cube that he had saved several days ago for the purpose; the spider puppy accepted it gravely and said, “Thank you.”

“Yes, we will,” Ellie disagreed, “because some of the men saw a herd of those centaur ponies the other side of that ridge. It’s quite a hike.”

“I don’t think we ought to go that far,” he said doubtfully. “Won’t they miss you?”

“I’ve been doing my share. See my callouses?” She stuck out a grimy paw. “I told Mr. Hornsby that I was suddenly come down with never-get-overs and he would have to find somebody else to hold while he hammered.”

He was pleased to give in. They went up rising ground and into an arroyo and soon were in a grove of primitive conifers. Mr. Chips jumped down from Ellie’s shoulders and scurried up a tree. Max stopped. “Hadn’t we better catch her?”

“You worry too much. Chipsie wouldn’t run away. She’d be scared to death. Chipsie! Here, honey!”

The spider puppy hustled through branches, got directly above them, dropped a cone on Max. Then she laughed, a high giggle. “See? She just wants to play.”

The ridge was high and Max found that his hillbilly’s wind had been lost somewhere among the stars. The arroyo meandered slowly upwards. He was still woodsman enough to keep a sharp eye out for landmarks and directions. At weary last they topped the crest. Ellie paused. “I guess they’re gone,” she said disappointedly, staring out over flatter country below them. “No! Look over there. See them! About two dozen little black dots.”

“Uh huh. Yeah.”

“Let’s go closer. I want a good look.”

“I wonder if that’s smart? We’re a far piece from the ship and I’m not armed.” “Oh, they’re harmless.”

“I was thinking of what else might be in these woods.”

“But we’re already in the woods, and all we’ve seen are the hobgoblins.” She referred to the balloonlike creatures, two of which had trailed them up the arroyo. The humans had grown so used to their presence that they no longer paid them any attention.

“Ellie, it’s time we went back.” “No.”

“Yes. I’m responsible for you. You’ve seen your centaurs.”

“Max Jones, I’m a free citizen. You may be starting back; I’m going to have a close look at those underslung cow ponies.” She started down.

“Well—Wait a moment. I want to get my bearings.” He took a full look around, fixed the scene forever in his mind, and followed her. He was not anxious to thwart her anyhow; he had been mulling over the notion that this was a good time to explain why he had said what he had said to Mr. Daigler—and perhaps lead around to the general subject of the future. He wouldn’t go so far as to talk about marriage—though he might bring it up in the abstract if he could figure out an approach.

How did you approach such a subject? You didn’t just say, “There go the hobgoblins, let’s you and me get married!”

Ellie paused. “There go the hobgloblins. Looks as if they were heading right for the herd.” Max frowned. “Could be. Maybe they talk to them?”

She laughed. “Those things?” She looked him over carefully. “Maxie, I’ve just figured out why I bother with you.”

Huh? Maybe she was going to lead up to it for him. “Why?”

“Because you remind me of Putzie. You get the same puzzled look he does.” “‘Putzie?’ Who is Putzie?”

“Putzie is the man my father shipped me off to Earth to get me away from—and the reason I crushed out of three schools to get back to Hespera. Only Daddy will probably have shipped him off, too. Daddy is tricky. Come here, Chipsie. Don’t go so far.”

She continued, “You’ll love Putzie. He’s nice. Stop it, Chipsie.”

Max despised the man already. “I don’t like to fret you,” he said, “but it’s a long way to Hespera.”

“I know. Let’s not borrow trouble.” She looked him over again. “I might keep you in reserve, if you weren’t so jumpy.”

Before he could think of the right answer she had started down.

The centaurs—it seemed the best name, though the underparts were not much like horses and the parts that stuck up were only vaguely humanoid—clustered near the foot of the hill, not far out from the trees. They weren’t grazing, it was hard to tell what they were doing. The two hobgoblins were over the group, hovering as if in interest just as they did with humans. Ellie insisted on going to the edge of the clearing to see them better.

They reminded Max of clowns made up to look like horses. They had silly, simple expressions and apparently no room for a brain case. They appeared to be marsupials, with pouches almost like bibs. Either they were all females or with this species the male had a pouch too. Several little centaurs were cavorting around, in and out the legs of their elders.

One of the babies spied them, came trotting toward them, sniffling and bleating. Behind it the largest adult pulled out of the herd to watch the young one. The colt scampered up and stopped about twenty feet away.

“Oh, the darling!” Ellie said and ran out a few feet, dropped to one knee. “Come here, pet. Come to mama.”

Max started for her. “Ellie! Come back here!”

The large centaur reached into its pouch, hauled out something, swung it around its head like a gaucho’s throwing rope. “Ellie!”

He reached her just as it let go. The thing struck them, wound around and held them. Ellie screamed and Max struggled to tear it loose—but they were held like Laocoön.

Another line came flying through the air, clung to them. And another.

Mr. Chips had followed Ellie. Now she skittered away, crying. She stopped at the edge of the clearing and shrilled, “Max! Ellie! Come back. Please back!”

CIVILIZATION

Ellie did not faint nor grow hysterical. After that involuntary scream, her next remark was simply, “Max, I’m sorry. My fault.”

The words were almost in his ear, so tightly were they tied together by the clinging ropes. He answered, “I’ll get us loose!” and continued to strain at their bonds.

“Don’t struggle,” she said quietly, “It just makes them tighter. We’ll have to talk our way out of this.”

What she said was true; the harder he strained the tighter the pythonlike bonds held them. “Don’t,” Ellie pleaded. “You’re making it worse. It’s hurting me.” Max desisted.

The largest centaur ambled up and looked them over. Its broad simple face was still more ludicrous close up and its large brown eyes held a look of gentle astonishment. The colt approached from the other side and sniffed curiously, bleated in a high voice. The adult bugled like an elk; the colt shied sideways, then rejoined the herd on a dead run.

“Take it easy,” Ellie whispered. “I think they were scared that we would hurt the baby. Maybe they’ll just look us over and let us go.”

“Maybe. But I wish I could get at my knife.” “I’m glad you can’t. This calls for diplomacy.”

The rest of the herd came up, milled around and looked them over, while exchanging calls that combined bugling, whinnying, and something between a cough and a snort. Max listened. “That’s language,” he decided.

“Of course. And how I wish I had studied it at Miss Mimsey’s.”

The largest centaur leaned over them, smoothed at their bonds; they became looser but still held them. Max said sharply, “I think they are going to untie us. Get ready to run.”

“Yes, boss.”

Another centaur reached into its built-in pouch, took out another of the ropelike things. It dropped to its fore knees, flipped the end so that it curled around Max’s left ankle. The end seemed to weld into a loop, hobbling Max as effectively as a bowline knot; Ellie was treated the same way. The biggest centaur then patted their bonds, which fell off and writhed gently on the ground. It picked them up and stuffed them into its pouch.

The centaur which had hobbled them wrapped the ends of their tethers around its upright trunk, they merged into a belt. After an exchange of sour bugle calls with the leader, it patted the leashes… which then stretched like taffy, becoming quite twenty feet long and much more slender. Max pressed his knife on Ellie and said, “Try to cut yourself loose. If you can, then run for it. I’ll keep them busy.”

“No, Max.”

“Yes! Dawggone it, quit being a brat! You’ve made enough trouble.”

“Yes, Max.” She took the knife and tried to saw through the strange rope near her ankle. The centaurs made no attempt to stop her, but watched with the same air of gentle astonishment. It was as if they had never seen a knife, had no notion of what one was. Presently she gave up. “No good, Max. It’s like trying to slice duraplastic.”

“Why, I keep that knife like a razor. Let me try.”

He had no better luck. He was forced to stop by the herd moving out—walk or be dragged. He managed to close the knife while hopping on one foot to save his balance. The group proceeded at a slow walk for a few steps, then the leader bugled and the centaurs broke into a trot, exactly like ancient cavalry.

Ellie stumbled at once and was dragged. Max sat down, managed to grab his hobble and hang on while shouting, “Hey! Stop!”

Their captor stopped and looked around almost apologetically. Max said, “Look, stupid. We can’t keep up. We’re not horses,” while helping Ellie to her feet. “Are you hurt, kid?”

“I guess not.” She blinked back tears. “If I could lay hands on that hay-burning oaf, he’d be hurt—plenty!”

“You skinned your hand.”

“It won’t kill me. Just tell him to slow down, will you?”

Seeing them on their feet the monster immediately started to trot again. Down they went again, with Max trying to drag them to a halt. This time the leader trotted back from the main herd and consulted their custodian. Max took part, making up in vehemence what he lacked in semantic efficiency.

Perhaps he was effective; their keeper slowed to a fast walk, letting the others go ahead. Another centaur dropped back and became a rear guard. One of the animated balloons, which had continued to hover over the herd, now drifted back and remained over Max and Ellie.

The pace was just bearable, between a fast walk and a dogtrot. The route led across the open, flat floor of the valley and through knee-high grass. The grass saved them somewhat, as the centaur leading them seemed to feel that a fall or two every few hundred yards represented optimum efficiency. He never seemed impatient and would stop and let them get up, but always started off again at a clip brisk for humans. Max and Ellie ceased trying to talk, their throats being burned dry by their panting efforts to keep up. A tiny stream meandered through the bottom of the valley; the centaur jumped easily across it. It was necessary for the humans to wade. Ellie paused in midstream, leaned down and started to drink. Max objected, “Ellie! Don’t drink that—you don’t know that it’s safe.”

“I hope it poisons me so I can lie down and die. Max, I can’t go much farther.”

“Chin up, kid. We’ll get out of this. I’ve been keeping track of where we’ve gone.” He hesitated, then drank also, being terribly thirsty. The centaur let them, then tugged them on.

It was as far again to the rising ground and forest on the other side. They had thought that they were as tired as they could be before they started up hill; they were mistaken. The centaur was agile as a goat and seemed surprised that they found it difficult. Finally Ellie collapsed and would not get up; the centaur came back and stirred her roughly with a three-toed hoof.

Max struck him with both fists. The centaur made no move to retaliate but looked at him with that same stupid astonishment. Their rear guard came up and conversed with it, after which they waited for perhaps ten minutes. Max sat down beside Ellie and said anxiously, “Feeling any better?”

“Don’t talk.”

Presently the guard edged between them and drove Max back by stepping on him, whereupon the other centaur tugged on Ellie’s leash. It contracted and she was forced to scramble to her feet. The centaurs let them rest twice after that. After an endless time, when the local sun was dropping low in the west, they came out on flat table land, still heavily wooded. They continued through trees for a distance which Max’s count of paces told him was under a mile but seemed like ten, then stopped.

They were in a semi-clearing, a space carpeted with fallen needles. Their guard came up to the other centaur and took from him the end of Max’s leash, flipped it around the base of a tree, to which it clung. The other centaur did the same with Ellie’s leash to another tree about forty feet away. Having done so, they roughly urged the two together, while stopping to stroke their bonds until they were stretched out very thin. It allowed Max and Ellie enough slack that they might have passed each other.

This did not seem to please the centaurs. One of them shifted Max’s leash farther back into the surrounding bushes, dragging him with it. This time at the extreme limit allowed by their bonds they were

about six feet apart. “What are they doing?” asked Ellie. “Looks like they don’t want us to combine forces.”

Finished, the centaurs trotted away. Ellie looked after them, began to sob, then cried openly, tears running down her dirty face and leaving tracks. “Stow it,” Max said harshly. “Sniffling will get us nowhere.”

“I can’t help it,” she bawled. “I’ve been brave all day—at least I’ve tried to be. I… ” She collapsed face down and let herself go.

By getting down prone and stretching Max could just reach her head. He patted her tangled hair. “Take it easy, kid,” he said softly. “Cry it out, if you’ll feel better.”

“Oh, Maxie! Tied up… like a dog.”

“We’ll see about that.” He sat up and examined his tether.

Whatever the ropelike leash was, it was not rope. It had a smooth shiny surface which reminded him more of a snake, though the part that wound around his ankle showed no features; it simply flowed around his ankle and merged back into itself.

He lifted the bight and detected a faint throbbing. He stroked it as he had seen the centaurs do and it responded with flowing pulsations, but it neither shrank nor grew longer, nor did it loosen its grip. “Ellie,” he announced, “This thing is alive.”

She lifted a woebegone face. “What thing?” “This rope.”

“Oh, that! Of course.”

“At least,” he went on, “if it isn’t, it’s not really dead.” He tried his knife again, there was no effect. “I’ll bet if I had a match I could make it cry ‘Uncle.’ Got an Everlite, Ellie?”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Neither do I. Well, maybe I can make a fire some other way. Rubbing two sticks together, or something.”

“Do you know how?”

“No.” He continued stroking and patting the living rope, but, though he always got a response in pulsations, he did not seem to have the right touch; the bond stayed as before. He was continuing this fruitless attempt when he heard his name called. “Max! Ellie!”

Ellie sat up with a jerk. “Chipsie! Oh, Max, she followed us. Come here, darling!”

The spider puppy was high above them in a tree. She looked carefully around, then scurried down, making the last ten feet a flying leap into Ellie’s arms. They cuddled and made soft noises, then Ellie straightened up, her eyes shining. “Max, I feel so much better.”

“So do I.” He added, “Though I don’t know why.”

The spider puppy announced gravely, “Chipsie follow.”

Max reached across and petted her. “Yes, Chipsie did. Good girl!”

Ellie hugged the spider puppy. “I don’t feel deserted now, Max. Maybe everything will come out all right.”

“Look, Ellie, we’re not in too bad a spot. Maybe I’ll find the combination to tickle these ropes or snakes or whatever so they’ll give up. If I do, we’ll sneak back tonight.”

“How would we find our way?”

“Don’t worry. I watched every foot of the way, every change of direction, every landmark.” “Even in the dark?”

“Easier in the dark. I know these stars—I sure ought to. But suppose we don’t get loose; we still aren’t licked.”

“Huh? I don’t relish spending my life tied to a tree.”

“You won’t. Look—I think these things are just curious about us. They won’t eat us, that’s sure—they probably live on grass. Maybe they’ll get bored and turn us loose. But if they don’t, it’ll be rough on them.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Because of Mr. Walther and George Daigler—and Sam, Sam Anderson; that’s why. They’re probably beating the bushes for us right now. We are less than ten miles from the ship—five by a straight line.

They’ll find us. Then if these silly-looking centaurs want to get tough, they’ll learn about modern weapons. They and their fool throwing ropes!”

“It might take a long time to find us. Nobody knows where we went.”

“Yes,” he admitted. “If I had a pocket radio. Or some way to signal. Or even a way to build a fire. But I don’t.”

“I never thought. It just seemed like going for a stroll in the park.”

Max thought darkly that he had tried to warn her. Why, even the hills around home weren’t safe if a body didn’t keep his eyes peeled… you could run into a mean old bobcat, or even a bear. Person like Ellie never ‘ud had enough hard knocks to knock sense into her, that was her trouble.

Presently he admitted that he himself hadn’t looked for grief from anything as apparently

chuckled-headed and harmless as these centaur things. Anyhow, as Sam would say, no use cryin’ over spilt milk when the horse was already stolen.

“Ellie.”

“Huh?”

“Do you suppose Chipsie could find her way back?” “Why, I don’t know.”

“If she could, we could send a message.”

Chipsie looked up. “Back?” she inquired. “Please back. Go home.”

Ellie frowned. “I’m afraid Chipsie doesn’t talk that well. She’d probably just hiccup and get incoherent.” “I don’t mean that. I know Chipsie is no mental giant. I…”

“Chipsie is smart!”

“Sure. But I want to send a written message and a map.” He fumbled in a pocket, pulled out a stylus. “Do you have any paper?”

“I’ll see.” She found a folded paper in a dungaree pocket. “Oh, dear! I was supposed to take this to Mr. Giordano. Mr. Hornsby will be so vexed with me.”

“What is it?”

“A requisition for number-ten wire.”

“It doesn’t matter now.” He took the paper, scratched out the memorandum, turned it over and began to draw, stopping to consult the pictures filed in his mind for distances, which way the local sun lay, contours, and other details.

“Max?”

“Quiet, can’t you?” He continued to sketch, then added: “URGENT—to First Officer Walther: Eldreth Coburn and self captured by centaurs. Be careful and watch out for their throwing ropes. Respectfully,

M. Jones.” He handed it to Ellie. “That ought to do it. Is there any way to fasten it to her? I sure don’t want her to drop it.”

“Mmm… let me see. Turn your back, Max.” “Why?”

“Don’t be difficult. Turn your back.”

He did so, shortly she said, “All right now.” He faced her and she handed him a ribbon. “How’s this?”

“Swell!” They managed to tie the ribbon, with the note folded and firmly attached, around Mr. Chips’ waist, anchoring it to a middle limb… not too easy as the spider puppy seemed to think it was a game and was ticklish as well.

“There! Stop squirming, Chipsie, and listen. Ellie wants you to go home.” “Home?”

“Yes, home. Go back to the ship.” “Ellie go home?”

“Ellie can’t go home.” “No.”

“Honey, you’ve got to.” “No.”

“Look, Chipsie. You find Maggie and tell her Ellie said to give you some candy. You give Maggie this.” She tugged at the tied note.

“Candy?”

“Go home. Find Maggie. Maggie will give you candy.” “Ellie go home.”

“Please, Chipsie.”

“Ellie,” Max said urgently, “something is coming.”

Eldreth looked up, saw a centaur coming through the trees. She pointed. “Look, Chipsie! They’re coming! They’ll catch Chipsie! Go home! Run!”

The spider puppy squealed in terror and scurried for the trees. Once on a branch she looked back and whimpered. “Go home!” screamed Ellie. “Find Maggie!”

Mr. Chips shot a glance at the centaur, then disappeared. They had no time to worry further, the centaur was almost up to them. He glanced at them and went on by; it was what followed the centaur that grabbed their attention. Ellie suppressed a shriek. “Max! They’ve caught everybody.”

“No,” he corrected grimly. “Look again.” The gathering gloom had caused him to make the same mistake; it seemed that the entire ship’s company trotted after the centaur in single file, ankle leashed to ankle by living ropes. But only the first glance gave such an impression. These creatures were more than humanoid—but such degraded creatures had never sailed between the stars.

They shuffled quickly along like well-trained animals. One or two looked at Ellie and Max in passing, but their stares were bovine, incurious. Small children not on leash trotted with their mothers, and once Max was startled to see a wrinkled little head peeping out of a pouch—these man-creatures were marsupials, too.

Max controlled a desire to retch and as they passed out of sight he turned to Ellie. “Gosh!” “Max,” Eldreth said hoarsely, “do you suppose we’ve died and gone to our punishment?” “Huh? Don’t be silly. Things are bad enough.”

“I mean it. That was something right out of Dante’s Inferno.”

Max was swallowing uneasily and not feeling good-tempered. “Look, you can pretend you’re dead if you want to. Me, I’m alive and I mean to stay so. Those things weren’t men. Don’t let it throw you.”

“But they were men. Men and women and children.”

“No, they weren’t. Being shaped like us doesn’t make them men. Being a man is something else entirely.” He scowled. “Maybe the centaurs are ‘men.'”

“Oh, no—”

“Don’t be too sure. They seem to run things in this country.”

The discussion was cut short by another arrival. It was almost dark and they did not see the centaur until he entered their clearing. He was followed by three of the—Max decided to call them ‘men’ though he

resented the necessity—followed by three men. They were not on leashes. All three were bearing burdens. The centaur spoke to them; they distributed what they carried.

One of them set down a large clay bowl filled with water in the space separating Max and Ellie. It was the first artifact that any human had seen on Charity and did not indicate a high level of mechanical culture, being crudely modeled and clearly not thrown on a potter’s wheel; it held water, no more could be said for it. A second porter dumped a double armful of small fruits beside the bowl. Two of them splashed into the bowl, he did not bother to fish them out.

Max had to look twice to see what the third slave was carrying. It looked as if he had three large ovoid balls slung by ropes in each of his hands; second inspection showed them to be animals about the size of opossums which he carried by their tails. He went around the clearing, stopping every few feet and lifting one of his burdens to a lower branch. When he had finished they were surrounded by six small creatures, each hanging by its tail. The centaur followed the slave, Max saw him stroke each animal and press a spot on its neck. In each case the entire body of the little animal lit up, began to shine like a firefly with soft silvery light.

The clearing was softly illuminated thereby—well enough, Max thought, to read large print. One of the hobgoblins balloons came sailing silently between trees and anchored to a point thirty feet above them; it seemed to settle down for the night.

The centaur came over to Max and prodded him with a hoof, snorting inquiringly. Max listened carefully, then repeated the sound. The centaur answered and again Max mimicked. This useless exchange continued for a few phrases, then the centaur gave up and left, his train trotting after him.

Ellie shivered. “Phew!” she exclaimed, “I’m glad they’re gone. I can stand the centaurs, a little, but those men… ugh!”

He shared her disgust; they looked less human close up, having hair lines that started where their eyebrows should have been. They were so flat-headed that their ears stuck up above their skulls. But it was not this that had impressed Max. When the centaur had spoken to him Max had gotten his first good look into a centaur’s mouth. Those teeth were never meant for munching grain, they were more like the teeth of a tiger—or a shark.

He decided not to mention this. “Say, wasn’t that the same one that was leading the herd that caught us?” “How would I know? They all look alike.”

“But they don’t, any more than two horses look alike.” “Horses all look alike.”

“But… ” He stopped, baffled by a city viewpoint at which communication failed. “I think it was the same one.”

“I can’t see that it matters.”

“It might. I’m trying to learn their language.”

“I heard you swallowing your tonsils. How did you do that?”

“Oh, you just remember what a sound sounds like, then do it.” He threw his head back and made a very plaintive sound.

“What was that?”

“A shote stuck in a fence. Little shote by the name of Abner I had once.” “It sounds tragic.”

“It was, until I helped him loose. Ellie, I think they’ve bedded us down for the night.” He gestured at the bowl and the fruit beside it. “Like feeding the hogs.”

“Don’t put it that way. Room service. Room service and maid service and lights. Food and drink.” She picked up one of the fruits. It was about the size and shape of a cucumber. “Do you suppose this is fit to eat?”

“I don’t think you ought to try it. Ellie, it would be smart not to eat or drink anything until we are rescued.”

“Well, maybe we could go hungry but we certainly can’t go without water. You die of thirst in a day or two.”

“But we may be rescued before morning.”

“Maybe.” She peeled the fruit. “It smells good. Something like a banana.” He peeled one and sniffed it. “More like a pawpaw.”

“Well?”

“Mmm—Look here, I’ll eat one. If it hasn’t made me sick in a half hour, then you can try one.” “Yes, sir, boss man.” She bit into the one she held. “Mind the seeds.”

“Ellie, you’re a juvenile delinquent.”

She wrinkled her nose and smiled. “You say the sweetest things! I try to be.”

Max bit into his. Not bad—not as much flavor as a pawpaw, but not bad. Some minutes later he was saying, “Maybe we should leave some for breakfast?”

“All right. I’m full anyway.” Ellie leaned over and drank. Without words they had each concluded that the cloying meal required them to risk the water. “There, I feel better. At least we’ll die comfortably. Max? Do you think we dare sleep? I’m dead.”

“I think they are through with us for the night. You sleep, I’ll sit up.”

“No, that’s not fair. Honest, what good would it do to keep watch? We can’t get away.” “Well… here, take my knife. You can sleep with it in your hand.”

“All right.” She reached across the bowl and accepted it. “Good night, Max. I’m going to count sheep.”

“Good night.” He stretched out, shifted and got a tree cone out of his ribs, then tried to relax. Fatigue and a full stomach helped, the knowledge of their plight hindered—and that hobgoblin hanging up there.

Maybe it was keeping watch—but not for their benefit. “Max? Are you asleep?”

“No, Ellie.”

“Hold my hand? I’m scared.” “I can’t reach it.”

“Yes, you can. Swing around the other way.”

He did so, and found that he could reach over his head past the water bowl and clasp her hand. “Thanks, Max. Good night some more.”

He lay on his back and stared up through the trees. Despite the half light given by the luminiferous animals he could see stars and the numerous meteor trails crisscrossing the sky. To avoid thinking he started counting them. Presently they started exploding in his head and he was asleep.

The light of the local sun through the trees awakened him. He raised his head. “I wondered how long you would sleep,” Eldreth announced. “Look who’s here.”

He sat up, wincing with every move, and turned around. Mr. Chips was sitting on Ellie’s middle and peeling one of the papaya-like fruits. “Lo, Maxie.”

“Hello, Chipsie.” He saw that the note was still tied to her. “Bad girl!”

Mr. Chips turned to Ellie for comfort. Tears started to leak out. “No, no,” corrected Ellie. “Good girl. She’s promised to go find Maggie as soon as she finishes breakfast. Haven’t you, dear?”

“Go find Maggie,” the spider puppy agreed.

“Don’t blame her, Max. Spider puppies aren’t nocturnal back home. She just waited until we were quiet, then came back. She couldn’t help it. I found her sleeping in my arm.”

The spider puppy finished eating, then drank daintily from the bowl. Max decided that it didn’t matter, considering who had probably used it before they had. This thought he suppressed quickly. “Find Maggie,” Mr. Chips announced.

“Yes, dear. Go straight back to the ship as fast as you can and find Maggie. Hurry.”

“Find Maggie. Hurry fast. ‘Bye, Maxie.” The spider puppy took to the trees and scampered away in the right direction.

“Do you think she’ll get there?” asked Max.

“I think so. After all, her ancestors found their way through forests and such for a lot of generations. She knows it’s important; we had a long talk.”

“Do you really think she understands that much?”

“She understands about pleasing me and that’s enough. Max, do you suppose they can possibly reach us today? I don’t want to spend another night here.”

“Neither do I. If Chipsie can move faster than we can…” “Oh, she can.”

“Then maybe—if they start quickly.”

“I hope so. Ready for breakfast?” “Did Chipsie leave anything?” “Three apiece. I’ve had mine. Here.”

“Sure you’re lying? There were only five when we went to sleep.” She looked sheepish and allowed him to split the odd one. While they were eating he noticed a change. “Hey, what became of the over-sized lightning bugs?”

“Oh. One of those awful creatures came at dawn and carried them away. I was set to scream but he didn’t come close to me, so I let you sleep.”

“Thanks. I see our chaperone is with us.” The hobgoblin still hung in the tree tops. “Yes, and there have been peekers around all morning, too.”

“Did you get a look at one?”

“Of course not.” She stood up, stretched and winced. “Now to see what beautiful surprises this lovely day brings forth.” She made a sour face. “The program I would pick is to sit right here and never lay eyes on anything until George Daigler shows up with about a dozen armed men. I’d kiss him. I’d kiss all of them.”

“So would I.”

Until well past noon Eldreth’s chosen schedule prevailed, nothing happened. They heard from time to time the bugling and snorting of centaurs but saw none. They talked in desultory fashion, having already disposed of both hopes and fears, and were dozing in the sunshine, when they suddenly came alert to the fact that a centaur was entering the clearing.

Max felt sure that it was the leader of the herd, or at least that it was the one who had fed and watered them. The creature wasted no time, making it clear with kicks and prods that they were to allow themselves to be leashed for travel.

Never once were they free of the living ropes. Max thought of attacking the centaur, perhaps leaping on his back and cutting his throat. But it seemed most unlikely that he could do it quietly enough; one snort might bring the herd down on them. Besides which he knew no way to get free of their bonds even if he killed the centaur. Better wait—especially with a messenger gone for help.

They were led, falling and being dragged occasionally, along the route taken by the party of slaves. It became apparent that they were entering a large centaur settlement. The path opened out into a winding, well-tended road with centaurs going both directions and branching off onto side roads. There were no buildings, none of the outward marks of a civilized race—but there was an air of organization, of custom, of stability. Little centaurs scampered about, got in the way, and were ordered aside. There was activity of various sorts on both sides of the road and grotesque human slaves were almost as numerous as centaurs, carrying burdens, working in unexplained fashions—some with living-rope bonds, some allowed to run free. They could not see much because of the uncomfortable pace they were forced to maintain.

Once Max noted an activity on his side of the road that he wished to see better. He did not mention it to Ellie, not only because talking was difficult but because he did not wish to worry her—but it had looked like an outdoor butcher shop to him. The hanging carcasses were not centaurs.

They stopped at last in a very large clearing, well filled with centaurs. Their master patted the lines that bound them and thereby caused them to shorten until they were fetched close to his sides. He then took his place in a centaur queue.

A large, grizzled, and presumably elderly centaur was holding court on one side of the “square.” He stood with quiet dignity as single centaurs or groups came in succession before him. Max watched with interest so great that he almost lost his fear. Each case would be the cause of much discussion, then the centaur chieftain would make a single remark and the case would be over. The contestants would leave quietly.

The conclusion was inescapable that law or custom was being administered, with the large centaur as arbiter.

There was none of the travesties of men in the clearing but there were underfoot odd animals that looked like flattened-out hogs. Their legs were so short that they seemed more like tractor treads. They were mostly mouth and teeth and snuffling snouts, and whatever they came to, if it was not a centaur’s hoof, they devoured. Max understood from watching them how the area, although thickly inhabited, was kept so clean; these scavengers were animated street cleaners.

Their master gradually worked up toward the head of the line. The last case before theirs concerned the only centaur they had seen which did not seem in vibrant health. He was old and skinny, his coat was dull and his bones stuck pitifully through his hide. One eye was blind, a blank white; the other was inflamed and weeping a thick ichor.

The judge, mayor, or top herd leader discussed his case with two younger healthy centaurs who seemed to be attending him almost as nurses. Then the boss centaur moved from his position of honor and walked around the sick one, inspecting him from all sides. Then he spoke to him.

The old sick one responded feebly, a single snorted word. The chief centaur spoke again, got what seemed to Max the same answer. The chief backed into his former position, set up a curious whinnying cry.

From all sides the squatty scavengers converged on the spot. They formed a ring around the sick one and his attendants, dozens of them, snuffling and grunting. The chief bugled once; one attendant reached into its pouch and hauled forth a creature curled into a knot, the centaur stroked it and it unwound. To Max it looked unpleasantly like an eel.

The attendant extended it toward the sick centaur. It made no move to stop him, but waited, watching with his one good eye. The head of the slender thing was suddenly touched to the neck of the sick centaur; he jerked in the characteristic convulsion of electric shock and collapsed.

The chief centaur snorted once—and the scavengers waddled forward with surprising speed, swarming over the body and concealing it. When they backed away, still snuffling, there were not even bones.

Max called out softly, “Steady, Ellie! Get a grip on yourself, kid.” She answered faintly, “I’m all right.”

A FRIEND IN NEED

For the first time they were turned loose. Their master tickled their bonds, which dropped from their ankles. Max said softly to Ellie, “If you want to run for it, I’ll keep them busy.”

Ellie shook her head. “No good. They’d have me before I went fifty feet. Besides—I can’t find my way back.”

Max shut up, knowing that she was right but having felt obliged to offer. The chief centaur inspected them with the characteristic expression of gentle surprise, exchanged bugling comments with their captor. They were under discussion for some time, there appeared to be some matter to be decided. Max got out his knife. He had no plan, other than a determination that no centaur would approach either one of them with that electric-shock creature, or any other menace, without a fight.

The crisis faded away. Their captor flicked their leashes about their ankles and dragged them off. Fifteen minutes later they were again staked out in the clearing they had occupied. Ellie looked around her after the centaur had gone and sighed. “‘Be it ever so humble… ‘ Max, it actually feels good to get back here.”

“I know.”

The monotony that followed was varied by one thing only: fading hope and mounting despair. They were not treated unkindly; they were simply domestic animals—fed and watered and largely ignored. Once a day they were given water and plenty of the native papayas. After the first night they no longer had the luxury of “artificial” light, nor did the hobgoblin hang over their clearing. But there was no way of escape, short of gnawing off a leg and crawling away.

For two or three days they discussed the possibility of rescue with mounting anxiety, then, having beaten the subject to death they dropped it; it simply added to their distress. Ellie rarely smiled now and she had quit her frivolous back talk; it seemed that it had finally gotten through her armor that this could happen to Eldreth Coburn, only daughter of the rich and almost all-powerful Mr. Commissioner Coburn—a chattel, a barnyard animal of monsters themselves suitable only for zoos.

Max took it a little more philosophically. Never having had much, he did not expect much—not that he enjoyed it. He kept his worst fear secret. Ellie referred to their status as “animals in a zoo” because most of their visitors were small centaurs who came sniffling and bleating around with a curiosity that their elders seemed to lack. He let her description stand because he believed their status worse than that—he thought that they were being fattened for the table.

One week after their capture Eldreth declined to eat breakfast and stayed silent all morning. All that Max could think of to say evoked only monosyllables. In desperation he said, “I’ll beat you at three-dee and spot you two starships.”

That roused her. “You and who else?” she said scornfully. “And with what?” “Well, we could play it in our heads. You know—blindfold.”

She shook her head. “No good. You’d claim your memory was better than mine and I wouldn’t be able to prove you were cheating.”

“Nasty little brat.”

She smiled suddenly. “That’s better. You’ve been too gentle with me lately—it depresses me. Max, we could make a set.”

“How?”

“With these.” She picked up one of many tree cones that littered the clearing. “A big one is a flagship. We can pick various sizes and break the thingamajigs off and such.”

They both got interested. The water bowl was moved aside so that it no longer occupied the center of the space marked by the limits of their tethers and the no-man’s-land between them was brushed free of needles and marked with scratches as boards. The boards had to be side by side; they must stack them in their minds, but that was a common expedient for players with good visualization when using an unpowered set—it saved time between moves.

Pebbles became robots; torn bits of cloth tied to cones distinguished sides and helped to designate pieces. By midafternoon they were ready. They were still playing their first game when darkness forced them to stop. As they lay down to sleep Max said, “I’d better not take your hand. I’d knock over men in the dark.”

“I won’t sleep if you don’t—I won’t feel safe. Besides, that gorilla messed up one board changing the water.”

“That’s all right. I remember where they were.”

“Then you can just remember where they all are, Stretch out your arm.” He groped in the darkness, found her fingers. “Night, Max. Sleep tight.” “Good night, Ellie.”

Thereafter they played from sunup to sundown. Their owner came once, watched them for an hour, went away without a snort. Once when Ellie had fought him to a draw Max said, “You know, Ellie, you play this game awfully well—for a girl.”

“Thank you too much.”

“No, I mean it. I suppose girls are probably as intelligent as men, but most of them don’t act like it. I think it’s because they don’t have to. If a girl is pretty, she doesn’t have to think. Of course, if she can’t get by on her looks, then—well, take you for example. If you…”

“Oh! So I’m ugly, Mr. Jones!”

“Wait a minute. I didn’t say that. Let’s suppose that you were the most beautiful woman since Helen of Troy. In that case, you would… ” He found that he was talking to her back. She had swung round, grabbed her knees, and was ignoring him.

He stretched himself to the limit of his tether, bound leg straight out behind him, and managed to touch her shoulder. “Ellie?”

She shook off his hand. “Keep your distance! You smell like an old goat.”

“Well,” he said reasonably, “you’re no lily yourself. You haven’t had a bath lately either.”

“I know it!” she snapped, and started to sob. “And I hate it. I just… h- h- hate it. I look awful.” “No, you don’t. Not to. me.”

She turned a tear-wet and very dirty face. “Liar.” “Nothing wrong that some soap and water won’t fix.”

“Oh, if only I had some.” She looked at him. “You aren’t at your best yourself, Mr. Jones. You need a haircut and the way your beard grows in patches is ghastly.”

He fingered the untidy stubble on his chin. “I can’t help it.” “Neither can I.” She sighed. “Set up the boards again.”

Thereafter she beat him three straight games, one with a disgraceful idiot’s mate. He looked at the boards sadly when it was over. “And you are the girl who flunked improper fractions?”

“Mr. Jones, has it ever occurred to you, the world being what it is, that women sometimes prefer not to appear too bright?” He was digesting this when she added, “I learned this game at my father’s knee, before I learned to read. I was junior champion of Hespera before I got shanghaied. Stop by sometime and I’ll show you my cup.”

“Is that true? Really?”

“I’d rather play than eat—when I can find competition. But you’re learning. Someday you’ll be able to give me a good game.”

“I guess I don’t understand women.” “That’s an understatement.”

Max was a long time getting to sleep that night. Long after Eldreth was gently snoring he was still staring at the shining tail of the big comet, watching the shooting star trails, and thinking. None of his thoughts was pleasant.

Their position was hopeless, he admitted. Even though Chipsie had failed (he had never pinned much hope on her), searching parties should have found them by now. There was no longer any reason to think that they would be rescued.

And now Ellie was openly contemptuous of him. He had managed to hurt her pride again—again with his big, loose, flapping jaw! Why, he should have told her that she was the prettiest thing this side of paradise, if it would make her feel good—she had mighty little to feel good about these days!

Being captive had been tolerable because of her, he admitted—now he had nothing to look forward to but day after day of losing at three-dee while Ellie grimly proved that girls were as good as men and better. At the end of it they would wind up as an item in the diet of a thing that should never have been born.

If only Dr. Hendrix hadn’t died!

If only he had been firm with Ellie when it mattered.

To top it off, and at the moment almost the worst of all, he felt that if he ate just one more of those blasted pawpaws it would gag him.

He was awakened by a hand on his shoulder and a whisper in his ear. “Max!” “What the—?”

“Quiet! Not a sound.”

It was Sam crouching over him—Sam!

As he sat up, sleep jarred out of him by adrenalin shock, he saw Sam move noiselessly to where Ellie slept. He squatted over her but did not touch her. “Miss Eldreth,” he said softly.

Ellie’s eyes opened and stared. She opened her mouth, Max was terrified that she might cry out. Sam hastily signed for silence; she looked at him and nodded. Sam knelt over her, seemed to study something in the shadow-laced moonlight, then took out a hand gun. There was the briefest of low-energy discharges, entirely silent, and Ellie stood up—free. Sam returned to Max. “Hold still,” he whispered. “I don’t want to burn you.” He knelt over Max’s bound ankle.

When the gun flared Max felt an almost paralyzing constriction around his ankle, then the thing fell off. The amputated major part contracted and jerked away into the shadows. Max stood up. “How—”

“Not a word. Follow me.” Sam led off into the bushes with Ellie behind him and Max following closely. They had gone only twenty yards when there was a whimpering cry of “Ellie!” and the spider puppy landed in Eldreth’s arms. Sam turned suddenly.

“Keep her quiet,” he whispered, “for your life.”

Ellie nodded and started petting the little creature, crooning to it voicelessly. When Chipsie tried to talk, she silenced it, then stuffed it inside her shirt. Sam waited these few moments, now started on without speaking.

They proceeded for several hundred yards as near silently as three people who believe their lives hang on it can manage. Finally Sam stopped. “This is as far as we dare go,” he said in a low voice. “Any farther in the dark and I’d be lost. But I’m pretty sure we are outside their sleeping grounds. We’ll start again at the first light.”

“How did you get here in the dark, then?”

“I didn’t. Chips and I have been hiding in thick bushes since midafternoon, not fifty feet from you.” “Oh.” Max looked around, looked up at the stars. “I can take us back in the dark.”

“You can? It ‘ud be a darn good thing. These babies don’t stir out at night—I think.” “Let me get in the lead. You get behind Ellie.”

It took more than an hour to get to the edge of the tableland. The darkness, the undergrowth, the need for absolute silence, and the fact that Max had to take it slowly to keep his bearings despite his photographic memory all slowed them down. The trip downhill into the valley was even slower.

When they reached the edge of the trees with comparatively flat grassland in front Sam halted them and surveyed the valley by dim moonlight. “Mustn’t get caught in the open,” he whispered. “They can’t throw those snakes too well among trees, but out in the open—oh, brother!”

“You know about the throwing ropes?” “Sure.”

“Sam,” whispered Ellie. “Mr. Anderson, why did…”

“Sssh!” he cautioned. “Explanations later. Straight across, at a dogtrot. Miss Eldreth, you set the pace. Max, pick your bearings and guide us. We’ll run side by side. All set?”

“Just a minute.” Max took the spider puppy from Eldreth, zipping it inside his shirt as she had done. Mr. Chips did not even wake up, but moaned softly like a disturbed baby. “Okay.”

They ran and walked and ran again for a half hour or more, wasting no breath on words, putting everything into gaining distance from the centaur community. Knee-high grass and semi-darkness made the going hard. They were almost to the bottom of the valley and Max was straining to spot the stream when Sam called out, “Down! Down flat!”

Max hit dirt, taking it on his elbows to protect Chips; Ellie flopped beside him. Max turned his head cautiously and whispered, “Centaurs?”

“No. Shut up.”

A hobgoblin balloon, moving at night to Max’s surprise, was drifting across the valley at an altitude of about a hundred feet. Its course would take it past them, missing them by perhaps a hundred yards. Then it veered and came toward them.

It lost altitude and hovered almost over them. Max saw Sam aim carefully, steadying his pistol with both bands. There was momentarily a faint violet pencil from gun to hobgoblin; the creature burst and fell so close by that Max could smell burned meat. Sam returned his weapon and got to his feet. “One less spy,” he said with satisfaction. “Let’s get going, kids.”

“You think those things spy?”

“‘Think’? We know. Those polo ponies have this place organized. Pipe down and make miles.”

Ellie found the stream by falling into it. They hauled her out and waded across, stopping only to drink. On the other bank Sam said, “Where’s your left shoe, Miss Eldreth?”

“It came off in the brook.”

Sam stopped to search but it was useless; the water looked like ink in the faint light. “No good,” he decided. “We could waste the whole night. You’re due for sore feet—sorry. Better throw away your other shoe.”

It did not slow them until they reached the far ridge beyond which lay Charityville and the ship. Soon after they started up Ellie cut her right foot on a rock. She did her best, setting her jaw and not complaining, but it handicapped them. There was a hint of dawn in the air by the time they reached the top. Max started to lead them down the arroyo that he and Ellie had come up so many year-long days ago. Sam stopped him. “Let me get this straight. This isn’t the draw that faces the ship, is it?”

“No, that one is just north of this.” Max reconstructed in his mind how it had looked from the ship and compared it with his memory of the photomap taken as the ship landed. “Actually a shoulder just beyond the next draw faces the ship.”

“I thought so. This is the one Chips led me up, but I want us to stay in the trees as long as possible. It’ll be light by the time we’d be down to the flat.”

“Does it matter? There have never been any centaurs seen in the valley the ship is in.”

“You mean you never saw any. You’ve been away, old son. We’re in danger now—and in worse danger

the closer we get to the ship. Keep your voice down—and lead us to that shoulder that sticks out toward the ship. If you can.”

Max could, though it meant going over strange terrain and keeping his bearings from his memory of a small-scale map. It involved “crossing the furrows,” too, instead of following a dry water course—which led to impasses such as thirty-foot drops that had to be gone painfully around. Sam grew edgy as the light increased and urged them to greater speed and greater silence even as Ellie’s increasingly crippled condition made his demands harder to meet.

“I really am sorry,” he whispered after she had to slide and scramble down a rock slope, checking herself with bare and bloody feet. “But it’s better to get there on stumps than to let them catch you.”

“I know.” Her face contorted but she made no sound. It was daylight by the time Max led them out on the shoulder. Silently he indicated the ship, a half mile away. They were about level with its top.

“Down this way, I think,” he said quietly to Sam. “No.”

“Huh?”

“Chilluns, it’s Uncle Sam’s opinion that we had better lie doggo in those bushes, holding still and letting the beggar flies bite us, until after sundown.”

Max eyed the thousand yard gap. “We could run for it.”

“And four legs run faster than two legs. We’ve learned that lately.”

The bushes selected by Sam grew out to the edge of the shoulder. He crawled through them until he reached a place where he could spy the valley below while still hidden. Ellie and Max wriggled after him. The ground dropped off sharply just beyond them. The ship faced them, to their left and nearer was Charityville.

“Get comfortable,” Sam ordered, “and we’ll take turns keeping guard. Sleep if you can, this will be a long watch.”

Max tried to shift Mr. Chips around so that he might lie flat. A little head poked out of his collar. “Good morning,” the spider puppy said gravely. “Breakfast?”

“No breakfast, hon,” Ellie told her. “Sam, is it all right to let her out?”

“I guess so. But keep her quiet.” Sam was studying the plain below. Max did the same. “Sam? Why don’t we head for the village? It’s closer.”

“Nobody there. Abandoned.”

“What? Look, Sam, can’t you tell us now what’s happened?”

Sam did not take his eyes off the plain. “Okay. But hold it down to whispers. What do you want to know?”

That was a hard one—Max wanted to know everything. “What happened to the village?” “Gave it up. Too dangerous.”

“Huh? Anybody caught?”

“Not permanently. Daigler had a gun. But then the fun began. We thought that all they had were those throwing snakes and that we had scared them off. But they’ve got lots more than that. Things that burrow underground, for example. That’s why the village had to be abandoned.”

“Anybody hurt?”

“Well… the newlyweds were already in residence. Becky Weberbauer is a widow.”

Ellie gasped and Sam whispered sharply to be quiet. Max mulled it over before saying, “Sam, I don’t see why, after they got my message, they didn’t…”

“What message?”

Max explained. Sam shook his head. “The pooch got back all right. By then we knew you were missing and were searching for you—armed, fortunately. But there was no message.”

“Huh? How did you find us?”

“Chips led me, I told you. But that was all. Somebody stuffed her into her old cage and that’s where I found her yesterday. I stopped to pet her, knowing you were gone, Miss Eldreth—and found the poor little thing nearly out of her mind. I finally got it through my head that she knew where you two were.

So… ” He shrugged.

“Oh. But I can’t see,” Max whispered, “why you risked it alone. You already knew they were dangerous; you should have had every man in the ship with you, armed.”

Sam shook his head. “And we would have lost every man. A sneak was possible; the other wasn’t. And we had to get you back.”

“Thanks. I don’t know how to say it, Sam. Anyhow, thanks.”

“Yes,” added Ellie, “and stop calling me ‘Miss Eldreth.’ I’m Ellie to my friends.” “Okay, Ellie. How are the feet?”

“I’ll live.”

“Good.” He turned his head to Max. “But I didn’t say we wanted to get you back, I said we had to. You, Max. No offense, Ellie.”

“Huh? Why me?”

“Well… ” Sam seemed reluctant. “You’ll get the details when you get back. But it looks like you’ll be needed if they take the ship off. You’re the only astrogator left.”

“Huh? What happened to Simes?” “Quiet! He’s dead.”

“For Pete’s sake.” Max decided that, little as he liked Simes, death at the hands of the centaurs he would not have wished on any human; he said so.

“Oh, no, it wasn’t that way. You see, when Captain Blaine died…”

“The Captain, too?” “Yes.”

“I knew he was sick, I didn’t know he was that sick.”

“Well, call it a broken heart. Or honorable hara-kiri. Or an accident. I found an empty box for sleeping pills when I helped pack his things. Maybe he took them, or maybe your pal Simes slipped them in his tea. The Surgeon certified ‘natural causes’ and that’s how it was logged. What is a natural cause when a man can’t bear to live any longer?”

Ellie said softly, “He was a good man.” “Yes,” agreed Sam. “Too good, maybe.” “But how about Simes?”

“Well, now, that was another matter. Simes seemed to feel that he was crown prince, but the First wouldn’t stand for it. Something about some films the Chief Computerman had. Anyhow, he tried to get tough with Walther and I sort of broke his neck. There wasn’t time to be gentle,” Sam added hastily. “Simes pulled a gun.”

“Sam! You aren’t in trouble?”

“None, except here and now. If we—quiet, kids!” He peered more sharply through the bushes. “Not a sound, not a movement,” he whispered. “It may miss us.”

A hobgoblln was drifting down from north, paralleling the ridge above and out from it, as if it were scouting the high land. Max said in Sam’s ear, “Hadn’t we better scrunch back?”

“Too late. Just hold still.”

The balloon drifted abreast of them, stopped, then moved slowly toward them. Max saw that Sam had his gun out. He held his fire until the hobgoblin hovered above them. The shot burned needles and branches but it brought down the thing.

“Sam! There’s another one!”

“Where?” Sam looked where Max pointed. The second hobgoblin apparently had been covering the first, higher and farther out. Even as they watched it veered away and gained altitude.

“Get it, Sam!”

Sam stood up. “Too late. Too far and too late. Well, kids, away we go. No need to keep quiet. Sit down and slide, Ellie; it’ll save your feet some.”

Down they went, scattering rocks and tearing their clothes, with Mr. Chips on her own and enjoying it. At the bottom Sam said, “Max, how fast can you do a half mile?”

“I don’t know. Three minutes.”

“Make it less. Get going. I’ll help Ellie.” “No.”

“You get there! You’re needed.” “No!”

Sam sighed. “Always some confounded hero. Take her other arm.”

They made a couple of hundred yards half carrying Eldreth, when she shook them off. “I can go faster alone,” she panted.

“Okay, let’s go!” Sam rasped.

She proved herself right. Ignoring her injured feet she pumped her short legs in a fashion which did not require Max’s best speed to keep up, but nevertheless kept him panting. The ship grew larger ahead of them. Max saw that the cage was up and wondered how long it would take to attract attention and get it lowered.

They were half way when Sam shouted, “Here comes the cavalry! Speed it up!”

Max glanced over his shoulder. A herd of centaurs—a dozen, two dozen, perhaps more—was sweeping toward them from the hills on a diagonal plainly intended to cut them off. Ellie saw them too and did speed up, with a burst that momentarily outdistanced Max.

They had cut the distance to a few hundred yards when the cage swung free of the lock and sank lazily toward the ground. Max started to shout that they were going to make it when he heard the drum of hooves close behind. Sam yelled, “Beat it, kids! Into the ship.” He stopped.

Max stopped too, while shouting, “Run, Ellie!

Sam snarled, “Run for it, I said! What can you do? Without a gun?”

Max hesitated, torn by an unbearable decision. He saw that Ellie had stopped. Sam glanced back, then backhanded Max across the mouth. “Get moving! Get her inside!”

Max moved, gathering Ellie in one arm and urging her on. Behind them Sam Anderson turned to face his death… dropping to one knee and steadying his pistol over his left forearm in precisely the form approved by the manual.

“—A SHIP IS NOT JUST STEEL—”

The cage hit the ground, four men swarmed out as Max stumbled inside and dumped Ellie on the floor. The door clanged shut behind them, but not too quickly for Mr. Chips. The spider puppy ran to Ellie, clutched her arm and wailed. Eldreth tried to sit up.

“You all right?” Max demanded.

“Uh, sure. But… ” She shut up as Max whirled around and tried to open the cage door.

It would not open. It was not until then that he realized that the lift was off the ground and rising slowly. He punched the “stop” control.

Nothing happened, the car continued upward. About ten feet off the ground it stopped. Max looked up through the grille roof and shouted, “Hey! In the lock, there! Lower away!”

He was ignored. He tried the door again—uselessly, as its safety catch prevented it being opened when the cage was in the air. Frustrated and helpless, he grabbed the bars and looked out. He could see nothing of Sam. The centaurs were milling around in the middle distance. He saw one stumble and go down and then another. Then he saw the four men who had passed him. They were on their bellies in fair skirmish line not far from the cage, each with a shoulder gun and each firing carefully. The range was not great, about three hundred yards; they were taking steady toll. Each silent, almost invisible bolt picked off a centaur.

Max counted seven more centaur casualties—then the monsters broke and ran, scattering toward the hills. The firing continued and several more dropped before distance made firing uncertain.

Somebody shouted, “Hold your fire!” and one of the men stumbled to his feet and ran toward the center of the battle. The others got up and followed him.

When they came back they were carrying something that looked like a bundle of clothing. The cage lowered to the ground, they came inside and laid it gently on the floor. One of them glanced at Eldreth, then quickly removed his jacket and laid it over Sam’s face. Not until then did Max see that it was Mr. Walther.

The other three were Mr. Daigler, a power man whom Max knew only by sight, and Chief Steward Giordano. The fat man was crying openly. “The filthy vermin!” he sobbed. “He never had a chance. They just rode him down and trompled him.” He choked, then added, “But he got at least five of ’em.” His eyes rested on Max without recognition. “He made ’em pay.”

Eldreth said gently, “Is he dead?”

“Huh? Of course. Don’t talk silly.” The steward turned his face away.

The car bumped to a stop. Walther looked in through the lock and said angrily, “Get those bystanders out of the way. What is this? A circus?” He turned back. “Let’s get him in, men.”

As he was bending to help, Max saw Eldreth being led away by Mrs. Dumont. Tenderly they carried Sam in and deposited him on the deck where the Surgeon was waiting. Walther straightened up and seemed to notice Max for the first time. “Mr. Jones? Will you see me in my stateroom as quickly as possible, please?”

“Aye aye, sir. But… ” Max looked down at his friend. “I’d like to…”

Walther cut him short. “There’s nothing you can do. Come away.” He added more gently, “Make it fifteen minutes. That will give you time for a wash and a change.”

Max presented himself on time, showered, his face hastily scraped, and in clean clothes—although lacking a cap. His one cap was somewhere in the far valley, lost on capture. He found Chief Engineer Compagnon and Mr. Samuels, the Purser, with the First Officer. They were seated around a table, having coffee. “Come in, Mr. Jones,” Walther invited. “Sit down. Coffee?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” Max discovered that he was terribly hungry. He loaded the brew with cream and sugar.

They sat for a few minutes, talking of unimportant matters, while Max drank his coffee and steadied down. Presently Walther said, “What shape are you in, Mr. Jones?”

“Why, all right, I guess, sir. Tired, maybe.”

“I imagine so. I’m sorry to have to disturb you. Do you know the situation now?” “Partly, sir. Sam told me… Sam Anderson… ” His voice broke.

“We’re sorry about Anderson,” Mr. Walther said soberly. “In many ways he was one of the best men I ever served with. But go on.”

Max recounted what Sam had had time to tell him, but shortened the statements about Simes and Captain Blaine to the simple fact that they were dead. Walther nodded. “Then you know what we want of you?”

“I think so, sir. You want to raise the ship, so you want me to astrogate.” He hesitated. “I suppose I can.” “Mmm… yes. But that’s not all.”

“Sir?”

“You must be Captain.”

All three had their eyes fixed on him. Max felt lightheaded and for a moment wondered what was wrong. Their faces seemed to swell and then recede. He realized vaguely that he had had little to eat and almost no sleep for many hours and had been running on nerve—yes, that must be what was wrong with him.

From a long distance away he heard Walther’s voice: “… utterly necessary to leave this planet without delay. Now our legal position is clear. In space, only an astrogation officer may command. You are being asked to assume command responsibility while very young but you are the only qualified person—therefore you must do it.”

Max pulled himself together, the wavering figures came into focus. “Mr. Walther?” “Yes?”

“But I’m not an astrogator. I’m just a probationary apprentice.

Chief Engineer Compagnon answered him. “Kelly says you’re an astrogator,” he growled. “Kelly is more of an astrogator than I am!”

Compagnon shook his head. “You can’t pass judgment on yourself.” Samuels nodded agreement.

“Let’s dispose of that,” Walther added. “There is no question of the Chief Computerman becoming captain. Nor does your rank in your guild matter. Line of command, underway, necessarily is limited to astrogators. You are senior in that line, no matter how junior you feel. At this moment, I hold command—until I pass it on. But I can’t take a ship into space. If you refuse… well, I don’t know what we will have to do. I don’t know.”

Max gulped and said, “Look, sir, I’m not refusing duty. I’ll astrogate—shucks, I suppose it’s all right to call me the astrogator, under the circumstances. But there is no reason to pretend that I’m captain. You stay in command while I conn the ship. That’s best, sir—I wouldn’t know how to act like a captain.”

Walther shook his head. “Not legally possible.”

Compagnon added, “I don’t care about the legalities. But I know that responsibility can’t be divided. Frankly, young fellow, I’d rather have Dutch as skipper than you—but he can’t astrogate. I’d be delighted to have Doc Hendrix—but he’s gone. I’d rather hold the sack myself than load it on you—but I’m a physicist and I know just enough of the math of astrogation to know that I couldn’t in a lifetime acquire the speed that an astrogator has to have. Not my temperament. Kelly says you’ve got it already. I’ve shipped with Kelly a good many years, I trust him. So it’s your pidgin, son; you’ve got to take it—and the authority that goes with it. Dutch will help—we’ll all help—but you can’t duck out and hand him the sack.”

Mr. Samuels said quietly, “I don’t agree with the Chief Engineer about the unimportance of legal aspects; most of these laws have wise reasons behind them. But I agree with what else he says. Mr. Jones, a ship is not just steel, it is a delicate political entity. Its laws and customs cannot be disregarded without inviting disaster. It will be far easier to maintain morale and discipline in this ship with a young captain—with all his officers behind him—than it would be to let passengers and crew suspect that the man who must make the crucial decisions, those life-and-death matters involving the handling of the ship, that this

all-powerful man nevertheless can’t be trusted to command the ship. No, sir, such a situation would frighten me; that is how mutinies are born.”

Max felt his heart pounding, his head was aching steadily. Walther looked at him grimly and said, “Well?” “I’ll take it.” He added, “I don’t see what else I can do.”

Walther stood up. “What are your orders, Captain?”

Max sat still and tried to slow his heart. He pressed his fingers to throbbing temples and looked frightened. “Uh, continue with routine. Make preparations to raise ship.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Walther paused, then added, “May I ask when the Captain plans to raise ship?”

He was having trouble focusing again. “When? Not before tomorrow—tomorrow at noon. I’ve got to have a night’s sleep.” He thought to himself that Kelly and he could throw it into a parking orbit, which would get them away from the centaurs—then stop to figure out his next move.

“I think that’s wise, sir. We need the time.”

Compagnon stood up. “If the Captain will excuse me, sir, I’ll get my department started.”

Samuels joined him. “Your cabin is ready, sir—I’ll have your personal effects moved in in a few minutes.”

Max stared at him. He had not yet assimilated the side implications of his new office. Use Captain Blaine’s holy of holies? Sleep in his bed? “Uh, I don’t think that’s necessary. I’m comfortable where I am.”

Samuels glanced at the First Officer, then said, “If you please, Captain, this is one of the things I was talking about when I said that a ship is a delicate political entity.”

“Eh?” Max thought about it, then suddenly felt both the burden descend on him and the strength to meet it. “Very well,” he answered, his voice deepening. “Do it.”

“Yes, sir.” Samuels looked at him. “Also, Captain—if you wish it—I’ll have Lopez stop in and trim your hair.”

Max pushed locks back of his ear. “It is shaggy, isn’t it? Very well.”

The Purser and the Chief Engineer left. Max stood for a moment uncertainly, not sure what his next cue was in this new role. Walther said, “Captain? Can you spare me a few more minutes?”

“Oh, certainly.” They sat down and Walther poured more coffee. Max said, “Mr. Walther? Do you suppose we could ring the pantry and get some toast? I haven’t eaten today.”

“Why, surely! Sorry, sir.” Instead of ringing, the First Officer phoned and ordered a high tea. Then he turned to Max. “Captain, I didn’t give you all the story—nor did I wish to until we were alone.”

“So?”

“Don’t misunderstand me. My turning over command to you did not depend on these other matters—nor is it necessary for your officers to know everything that the Captain knows… even your department heads.”

“Uh, I suppose not.”

Walther stared at his coffee. “Have you heard how Mr. Simes happened to die?”

Max told him what little he had learned from Sam. Walther nodded. “That is essentially correct. Mmmm… It is not good to speak ill of the dead, but Simes was an unstable character. When Captain Blaine passed on, he took it for granted that he was immediately captain of this ship.”

“Well—I suppose it looked that way to him, from the legal standpoint.”

“Not at all! Sorry to correct you, Captain, but that is one hundred percent wrong.”

Max frowned. “I guess I’m dumb—but I thought that was the argument that was used on me?”

“No, sir. The ship being on the ground, command devolved on me, the senior. I am not required to turn command over to an astrogator until—and unless—the ship goes into space. Even then it is not automatically a matter of turning it over to the senior astrogating officer. I have a clearly defined responsibility, with numerous adjudicated cases in point: I must turn command over only to a man I believe can handle it.

“Now I have long had doubts about Mr. Simes, his temperament, I mean. Nevertheless, in this emergency, I would have found it terribly hard not to turn command over to him, once it was decided to raise ship. But before we lost the Captain I had had occasion to dig into Mr. Simes’ ability as an astrogator—partly as a result of a conversation with you. I talked with Kelly—as you have gathered, Kelly is very well thought of. I believe I know now how that last transition went sour; Kelly took pains to show me. That and the fact that Kelly told me bluntly that there wasn’t a member of the Worry gang willing to go into space under Mr. Simes made me decide that, if it ever came up, I’d let this ship sit here forever before I would let Simes be captain. That was just thinking ahead; the Captain was sick and prudence forced me to consider possibilities.

“Then the Captain did die—and Simes announced that he was captain. The fool even moved into the cabin and sent for me. I told him he was not in command and never would be. Then I left, got witnesses and took my chief of police along to eject him. You know what happened. Your life isn’t the only one that Anderson saved; I owe him mine, too.”

Walther abruptly changed the subject. “That phenomenal trick of memory you do—computing without tables or reference books. Can you do it all the time?”

“Uh? Why, yes.”

“Do you know all the tables? Or just some of them?”

“I know all the standard tables and manuals that are what an astrogator calls his ‘working tools.'” Max started to tell about his uncle, Walther interrupted gently.

“If you please, sir. I’m glad to hear it. I’m very glad to hear it. Because the only such books in this ship are the ones in your head.”

Kelly had missed the books, of course—not Walther. When he disclosed his suspicions to Walther the two conducted a search. When that failed, it was announced that one (but only one) set was missing; Walther had offered a reward, and the ship had been combed from stern to astrodome—no manuals.

“I suppose he ditched them dirtside,” Walther finished. You know where that leaves us—we’re in a state of seige. And we’d find them only by accident if we weren’t. So I’m very glad you have the same confidence in your memory that Kelly has.”

Max was beginning to have misgivings—it is one thing to do something as a stunt, quite another to do it of necessity. “It isn’t that bad,” he answered. “Perhaps Kelly never thought of it, but logarithms and binary translation tables can probably be borrowed from engineering—with those we could fudge up methods for any straight hop. The others are needed mostly for anomalous transitions.”

“Kelly thought of that, too. Tell me, Captain, how does a survey ship go back after it penetrates a newly located congruency?”

“Huh? So that is what you want me to do with the ship?”

“It is not for me,” Walther said formally, “to tell the Captain where to take his ship.”

Max said slowly, “I’ve thought about it. I’ve had a lot of time to think lately.” He did not add that he had dwelt on it nights in captivity to save his reason. “Of course, we don’t have the instruments that survey ships carry, nor does applied astrogation go much into the theory of calculating congruencies. And even some survey ships don’t come back.”

“But… ” They were interrupted by a knock on the door. A steward’s mate came in and loaded the table with food. Max felt himself starting to drool.

He spread a slice of toast with butter and jam, and took a big bite. “My, this is good!”

“I should have realized. Have a banana, sir? They look quite good—I believe hydroponics has had to thin them out lately.”

Max shuddered. “I don’t think I’ll ever eat bananas again. Or pawpaws.” “Allergic, Captain?”

“Not exactly. Well… yes.”

He finished the toast and said, “About that possibility. I’ll let you know later.” “Very well, Captain.”

Shortly before the dinner hour Max stood in front of the long mirror in the Captain’s bedroom and looked at himself. His hair was short again and two hours sleep had killed some of his fatigue. He settled a cap on his head at the proper angle—the name in the sweat band was “Hendrix”; he had found it laid out with one of his own uniforms to which captain’s insignia had been added. The sunburst on his chest bothered him—that he was indeed captain he conceded, even though it seemed like a wild dream, but he had felt that he was not entitled to anything but the smaller sunburst and circle, despite his four stripes.

Walther and Samuels had been respectful but firm, with Samuels citing precedents that Max could not check on. Max had given in.

He looked at himself, braced his shoulders, and sighed. He might as well go face them. As he walked down the companionway to the lounge he heard the speakers repeating, “All hands! All passengers! Report to Bifrost Lounge!”

The crowd made way for him silently. He went to the Captain’s table—his table!—and sat down at its head. Walther was standing by the chair. “Good evening, Captain.”

“Evening, Mr. Walther.”

Ellie was seated across from him. She caught his eye and smiled. “Hello, Ellie.” He felt himself blushing.

“Good evening, Captain,” she said firmly. She was dressed in the same high style she had worn the first time he had ever seen her in the lounge; it did not seem possible that this lady could be the same girl whose dirty face had looked at him over three-dee boards scratched in dirt.

“Uh, how are your feet?”

“Bandages and bedroom slippers. But the Surgeon did a fine job. I’ll be dancing tomorrow.” “Don’t rush it.”

She looked at his stripes and his chest. “You should talk.”

Before he could answer the unanswerable Walther leaned over and said quietly, “We’re ready, Captain.” “Oh. Go ahead.” Walther tapped on a water glass.

The First Officer explained the situation in calm tones that made it seem reasonable, inevitable. He concluded by saying, “… and so, in accordance with law and the custom of space, I have relinquished my temporary command to your new captain. Captain Jones!”

Max stood up. He looked around, swallowed, tried to speak, and couldn’t. Then, as effectively as if it had been a dramatic pause and not desperation, he picked up his water tumbler and took a sip. “Guests and fellow crewmen,” he said, “we can’t stay here. You know that. I have been told that our Surgeon calls the system we are up against here’symbiotic enslavement’—like dog to man, only more so, and apparently covering the whole animal kingdom on this planet. Well, men aren’t meant for slavery, symbiotic or any sort. But we are too few to win out now, so we must leave.”

He stopped for another sip and Ellie caught his eye, encouraging him. “Perhaps someday other men will come back—better prepared. As for us, I am going to try to take the Asgard back through the… uh, ‘hole’ you might call it, where we came out. It’s a chancy thing. No one is forced to come along—but it is the only possible way to get home. Anyone who’s afraid to chance it will be landed on the north pole of planet number three—the evening star we have been calling ‘Aphrodite.’ You may be able to survive there, although it is pretty hot even at the poles. If you prefer that alternative, turn your names in this

evening to the Purser. The rest of us will try to get home.” He stopped, then said suddenly, “That’s all,” and sat down.

There was no applause and he felt glumly that he had muffed his first appearance. Conversation started up around the room, crewmen left, and steward’s mates quickly started serving. Ellie looked at him and nodded quietly. Mrs. Mendoza was on his left; she said, “Ma—I mean ‘Captain’—is it really so dangerous? I hardly like the thought of trying anything risky. Isn’t there something else we can do?”

“No.”

“But surely there must be?”

“No. I’d rather not discuss it at the table.”

“But… ” He went on firmly spooning soup, trying not to tremble. When he looked up he was caught by a glittering eye across the table, a Mrs. Montefiore, who preferred to be called “Principessa”—a dubious title. “Dolores, don’t bother him. We want to hear about his adventures—don’t we, Captain?”

“No.”

“Come now! I hear that it was terribly romantic.” She drawled the word and gave Ellie a sly, sidelong look. She looked back at Max with the eye of a predatory bird and showed her teeth. She seemed to have more teeth than was possible. “Tell us all about it!”

“No.”

“But you simply can’t refuse!”

Eldreth smiled at her and said, “Princess darling—your mouth is showing.” Mrs. Montefiore shut up.

After dinner Max caught Walther alone. “Mr. Walther?” “Oh—yes, Captain?”

“Am I correct in thinking that it is my privilege to pick the persons who sit at my table?” “Yes, sir.”

“In that case—that Montefiore female. Will you have her moved, please? Before breakfast?” Walther smiled faintly. “Aye aye, sir.”

THE CAPTAIN OF THE ASGARD

They took Sam down and buried him where he had fallen. Max limited it to himself and Walther and Giordano, sending word to Ellie not to come. There was a guard of honor but it was armed to kill and remained spread out around the grave, eyes on the hills. Max read the service in a voice almost too low to be heard—the best he could manage.

Engineering had hurriedly prepared the marker, a pointed slab of stainless metal. Max looked at it before he placed it and thought about the inscription. “Greater love hath no man”?—no, he had decided that Sam wouldn’t like that, with his cynical contempt of all sentimentality. He had considered, “He played the cards he was dealt”—but that didn’t fit Sam either; if Sam didn’t like the cards, he sometimes slipped in a whole new deck. No, this was more Sam’s style; he shoved it into the ground and read it:

IN MEMORY OF

SERGEANT SAM ANDERSON LATE OF THE

IMPERIAL MARINES

“He ate what was set before him.”

Walther saw the marker for the first time. “So that’s how it was? Somehow I thought so.” “Yes. I never did know his right name. Richards. Or maybe Roberts.”

“Oh.” Walther thought over the implication. “We could get him reinstated, sir, posthumously. His prints will identify him.”

“I think Sam would like that.”

“I’ll see to it, sir, when we get back.” “If we get back.”

“If you please, Captain—when we get back.”

Max went straight to the control room. He had been up the evening before and had gotten the first shock of being treated as captain in the Worry Hole over with. When Kelly greeted him with, “Good morning, Captain,” he was able to be almost casual.

“Morning, Chief. Morning, Lundy.” “Coffee, sir?”

“Thanks. About that parking orbit—is it set up?” “Not yet, sir.”

“Then forget it. I’ve decided to head straight back. We can plan it as we go. Got the films?”

“I picked them up earlier.” They referred to the films cached in Max’s stateroom. Simes had managed to do away with the first set at the time of Captain Blaine’s death; the reserve set was the only record of when and where the Asgard had emerged into this space, including records of routine sights taken immediately after transition.

“Okay. Let’s get busy. Kovak can punch for me.”

The others were drifting in, well ahead of time, as was customary in Kelly’s gang. “If you wish, sir. I’d be

glad to compute for the Captain.”

“Kovak can do it. You might help Noguchi and Lundy with the films.”

“Aye aye, sir.” Data flowed to him presently. He had awakened twice in the night in cold fright that he had lost his unique memory. But when the data started coming, he programmed without effort, appropriate pages opening in his mind. The problem was a short departure to rid themselves of the planet’s influence, an adjustment of position to leave the local sun “behind” for simpler treatment of its field, then a long, straight boost for the neighborhood in which they had first appeared in this space. It need not be precise, for transition would not be attempted on the first pass; they must explore the area, taking many more photographic sights and computing from them, to establish a survey that had never been made.

Departure was computed and impressed on tape for the autopilot and the tape placed in the console long before noon. The ship had been keeping house on local time, about fifty-five standard minutes to the hour; now the ship would return to Greenwich, the time always kept in the control room—dinner would be late and some of the “beasts” would as usual reset their watches the wrong way and blame it on the government.

They synchronized with the power room, the tape started running, there remained nothing to do but press the button a few seconds before preset time and thereby allow the autopilot to raise ship. The phone rang, Smythe took it and looked at Max. “For you, Captain. The Purser.”

“Captain?” Samuels sounded worried. “I dislike to disturb you in the control room.” “No matter. What is it?”

“Mrs. Montefiore. She wants to be landed on Aphrodite.” Max thought a moment. “Anybody else change his mind?” “No, sir.”

“They were all notified to turn in their names last night.”

“I pointed that out to her, sir. Her answers were not entirely logical.”

“Nothing would please me more than to dump her there. But after all, we are responsible for her. Tell her no.

“Aye aye, sir. May I have a little leeway in how I express it?” “Certainly. Just keep her out of my hair.”

Max flipped off the phone, found Kelly at his elbow. “Getting close, sir. Perhaps you will take the console now and check the set up? Before you raise?”

“Eh? No, you take her up, Chief. You’ll have the first watch.”

“Aye aye, Captain.” Kelly sat down at the console, Max took the Captain’s seat, feeling self-conscious. He wished that he had learned to smoke a pipe—it looked right to have the Captain sit back, relaxed and smoking his pipe, while the ship maneuvered.

He felt a slight pulsation and was pressed more firmly into the chair cushions; the Asgard was again on her own private gravity, independent of true accelerations. Moments later the ship raised, but with

nothing to show it but the change out the astrodome from blue sky to star-studded ebony of space.

Max got up and found that he was still holding an imaginary pipe, he hastily dropped it. “I’m going below, Chief. Call me when the departure sights are ready to compute. By the way, what rotation of watches do you plan on?”

Kelly locked the board, got up and joined him. “Well, Captain. I had figured on Kovak and me heel-and-toe, with the boys on one in three. We’ll double up later.”

Max shook his head. “No. You and me and Kovak. And we’ll stay on one in three as long as possible. No telling how long we’ll fiddle around out there before we take a stab at it.”

Kelly lowered his voice. “Captain, may I express an opinion?”

“Kelly, any time you stop being frank with me, I won’t have a chance of swinging this. You know that.”

“Thank you, sir. The Captain should not wear himself out. You have to do all the computing as it is.” Kelly added quietly, “The safety of your ship is more important than—well, perhaps ‘pride’ is the word.”

Max took a long time to reply. He was learning, without the benefit of indoctrination, that a commanding officer is not permitted foibles commonplace in any other role; he himself is ruled more strongly by the powers vested in him than is anyone else. The Captain’s privileges—such as chucking a tiresome female from his table—were minor, while the penalties of the inhuman job had unexpected ramifications.

“Chief,” he said slowly, “is there room to move the coffee mess over behind the computer?” Kelly measured the space with his eye. “Yes, sir. Why?”

“I was thinking that would leave room over here to install a cot.” “You intend to sleep up here, sir?”

“Sometimes. But I was thinking of all of us—you shave up here half the time, as it is. The watches for the next few weeks do not actually require the O.W. to be awake most of the time, so we’ll all doss off when we can. What do you think?”

“It’s against regulations, sir. A bad precedent… and a bad example.” He glanced over at Noguchi and Smythe.

“You would write it up formal and proper, for my signature, citing the regulation and suspending it on an emergency basis ‘for the safety of the ship.'”

“If you say so, sir.”

“You don’t sound convinced, so maybe I’m wrong. Think it over and let me know.”

The cot appeared and the order was posted, but Max never saw either Kelly or Kovak stretched out on the cot. As for himself, had he not used it, he would have had little sleep.

He usually ate in the control room as well. Although there was little to do on their way out to rendezvous with nothingness but take sights to determine the relations of that nothingness with surrounding sky, Max found that when he was not computing he was worrying, or discussing his worries with Kelly.

How did a survey ship find its way back through a newly calculated congruency? And what had gone wrong with those that failed to come back? Perhaps Dr. Hendrix could have figured the other side of an

uncharted congruency using only standard ship’s equipment—or perhaps not. Max decided that Dr. Hendrix could have done it; the man had been a fanatic about his profession, with a wide knowledge of the theoretical physics behind the routine numerical computations—much wider, Max was sure, than most astrogators.

Max knew that survey ships calculated congruencies from both sides, applying to gravitational field theory data gathered on the previously unknown side. He made attempts to rough out such a calculation, then gave up, having no confidence in his results—he was sure of his mathematical operations but unsure of theory and acutely aware of the roughness of his data. There was simply no way to measure accurately the masses of stars light-years away with the instruments in the Asgard.

Kelly seemed relieved at his decision. After that they both gave all their time to an attempt to lay out a “groove” to the unmarked point in the heavens where their photosights said that they had come out—in order that they might eventually scoot down that groove, arriving at the locus just below the speed of light, then kick her over and hope.

A similar maneuver on a planet’s surface would be easy—but there is no true parallel with the situation in the sky. The “fixed” stars move at high speeds and there are no other landmarks; to decide what piece of featureless space corresponds with where one was at another time requires a complicated series of calculations having no “elegant” theoretical solutions. For each charted congruency an astrogator has handed to him a table of precalculated solutions—the “Critical Tables for Charted Anomalies.” Max and Kelly had to fudge up their own.

Max spent so much time in the control room that the First Officer finally suggested that passenger morale would be better if he could show himself in the lounge occasionally. Walther did not add that Max should wear a smile and a look of quiet confidence, but he implied it. Thereafter Max endeavored to dine with his officers and passengers.

He had of course seen very little of Eldreth. When he saw her at the first dinner after Walther’s gentle suggestion she seemed friendly but distant. He decided that she was treating him with respect, which made him wonder if she were ill. He recalled that she had originally come aboard in a stretcher, perhaps she was not as rugged as she pretended to be. He made a mental note to ask the Surgeon—indirectly, of course!

They were dawdling over coffee and Max was beginning to fidget with a desire to get back to the Worry Hole. He reminded himself sharply that Walther expected him not to show anxiety—then looked around and said loudly, “This place is like a morgue. Doesn’t anyone dance here these days? Dumont!”

“Yes, Captain?”

“Let’s have some dance music. Mrs. Mendoza, would you honor me?”

Mrs. Mendoza tittered and accepted. She turned out to be a disgrace to Argentina, no sense of rhythm. But he piloted her around with only minor collisions and got her back to her chair, so timed that he could bow out gracefully. He then exercised the privilege of rank by cutting in on Mrs. Daigler. Maggie’s hair was still short but her splendor otherwise restored.

“We’ve missed you, Captain.”

“I’ve been working. Short-handed, you know.”

“I suppose so. Er… Captain, is it pretty soon now?’

“Before we transit? Not long. It has taken this long because we have had to do an enormous number of fiddlin’ calculations—to be safe, you know.”

“Are we really going home?”

He gave what he hoped was a confident smile. “Absolutely. Don’t start any long book from the ship’s library; the Purser won’t let you take it dirtside.”

She sighed. “I feel better.”

He thanked her for the waltz, looked around, saw Mrs. Montefiore and decided that his obligation to maintain morale did not extend that far. Eldreth was seated, so he went to her. “Feet still bothering you, Ellie?”

“No, Captain. Thank you for asking.” “Then will you dance with me?”

She opened her eyes wide. “You mean the Captain has time for po’ li’l ole me?”

He leaned closer. “One more crack like that, dirty face, and you’ll be tossed into irons.” She giggled and wrinkled her nose. “Aye aye, Captain, sir.”

For a while they danced without talking, with Max a little overpowered by her nearness and wondering why he had not done this sooner. Finally she said, “Max? Have you given up three-dee permanently?”

“Huh? Not at all. After we make this transit I’ll have time to play—if you’ll spot me two starships.”

“I’m sorry I ever told you about that. But I do wish you would say hello to Chipsie sometimes. She was asking this morning, ‘Where Maxie?'”

“Oh, I am sorry. I’d take her up to the control room with me occasionally, except that she might push a button and lose us a month’s work. Go fetch her.”

“The crowd would make her nervous. We’ll go see her.” He shook his head. “Not to your room.”

“Huh? Don’t be silly. I’ve got no reputation left anyhow, and a captain can do as he pleases.”

“That shows you’ve never been a captain. See that vulture watching us?” He indicated Mrs. Montefiore with his eyes. “Now go get Chipsie and no more of your back talk.”

“Aye aye, Captain.”

He scratched Chipsie’s chin, fed her sugar cubes, and assured her that she was the finest spider puppy in that part of the sky. He then excused himself.

He was feeling exhilarated and oddly reassured. Seeing Mr. Walther disappearing into his room, he paused at the companionway and on impulse followed him. A matter had been worrying him, this was as good a time as any.

“Dutch? Are you busy?”

The First Officer turned. “Oh. No, Captain. Come in.”

Max waited during the ceremonial coffee, then broached it. “Something on my mind, Mr. Walther—a personal matter.”

“Anything I can do?”

“I don’t think so. But you’re a lot more experienced than I am; I’d like to tell you about it.” “If the Captain wishes.”

“Look, Dutch, this is a ‘Max’ matter, not a ‘Captain’ matter.”

Walther smiled. “All right. But don’t ask me to change my form of address. I might pick up a bad habit.”

“Okay, okay.” Max had intended to sound out Walther about his phony record: had Dr. Hendrix reported it? Or hadn’t he?

But he found it impossible to follow that line; being a captain had forced him into a different mold. “I want to tell you how I got into this ship.” He told it all, not suppressing Sam’s part now that it no longer could hurt Sam. Walther listened gravely.

“I’ve been waiting for you to mention this, Captain,” he said at last. “Dr. Hendrix reported it to me, in less detail, when he put you up for apprentice astrogator. We agreed that it was a matter that need not be raised inside the ship.”

“It’s what happens after we get back that frets me. If we get back.” “When we get back. Are you asking for advice? Or help? Or what?” “I don’t know. I just wanted to tell you.”

“Mmmm… there are two alternatives. One we could handle here, by altering a not very important report. In which…”

“No, Dutch. I won’t have phony reports going out of the Asgard.”

“I was fairly certain you would say that. I feel the same way, except that I would feel obligated for—well, various reasons—to cover up for you if you asked it.”

“I once intended to arrange a phony on it. I even felt justified. But I can’t do it now.”

“I understand. The remaining alternative is to report it and face the music. In which case I’ll see it through with you—and so will the Chief Engineer and the Purser, I feel sure.”

Max sat back, feeling warm and happy. “Thanks, Dutch. I don’t care what they do to me… just as long as it doesn’t keep me out of space.”

“I don’t think they’ll try to do that, not if you bring this ship in. But if they do—well, they’ll know they’ve been in a fight. Meantime try to forget it.”

“I’ll try.” Max frowned. “Dutch? Tell me the truth, what do you think about the stunt I pulled?” “That’s a hard question, Captain. More important is, how do you feel about it?”

“Me? I don’t know. I know how I used to feel—I felt belligerent.” “Eh?”

“I was always explaining—in my mind of course—why I did it, justifying myself, pointing out that the system was at fault, not me. Now I don’t want to justify myself. Not that I regret it, not when I think what I would have missed. But I don’t want to duck out of paying for it, either.”

Walther nodded. “That sounds like a healthy attitude. Captain, no code is perfect. A man must conform with judgment and commonsense, not with blind obedience. I’ve broken rules; some violations I paid for, some I didn’t. This mistake you made could have turned you into a moralistic prig, a ‘Regulation Charlie’ determined to walk the straight and narrow and to see that everyone else obeyed the letter of the law. Or it could have made you a permanent infant who thinks rules are for everyone but him. It doesn’t seem to have had either effect; I think it has matured you.”

Max grinned. “Well, thanks, Dutch.” He stood up. “I’ll get back up to the Hole and mess up a few figures.”

“Captain? Are you getting enough sleep?”

“Me? Oh, sure, I get a nap almost every watch.”

“Minus four hours, Captain.” Max sat up on the cot in the control room, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. The Asgard was in the groove, had been boosting along it for days, working up to that final burst that would squeeze them out of this space and into another—one they knew or some other, depending on how well their “fudging” had conformed to the true structure of the universe.

Max blinked at Kelly. “How long have you been up here?” “Not long, Captain.”

“Did you get any sleep?” “Well, now, Captain…”

“Forget it, you’re incorrigible. Got one ready?” “Yes, sir.”

“Shoot.” Max sat on the cot while they passed data to him, eyes closed while he programmed the problem and translated it into the binary numbers the computer understood. He had not been out of the Hole more than a few minutes at a time for days. He would doze between sights, wake up and process one, then lie down again.

He had kept Kelly and Kovak on watch-and-watch as long as possible—although it was hard to get Kelly to rest. Lundy, Smythe, and Noguchi had continued to rotate, overlapping when the going got faster in order to help each other with plate changing and readings. For Max there could be no relief; he must process each sight, supplying from his card-file memory the information in the missing manuals.

All the Worry gang were there but Lundy. He came up as Max finished and ordered the correction. “Compliments of cookie,” he announced, setting down a gallon of ice cream.

“What flavor?” asked Max. “Chocolate chip, sir.”

“My favorite. Just remember when you are dishing it that efficiency marks will be coming up one of these days.”

“Now, Captain, that’s not fair. The Chief has a lot more mass to feed than you have.” “And I have a very high metabolic rate,” announced Noguchi. “I need more.”

“Noggy, you have a built-in space warp in each leg. We’ll let Kelly dish it and hope that pride will restrain him.” Max turned to Kelly. “What schedule are we on?”

“Twenty minutes, Captain.” “Think we need that so soon?” “Just to be safe, sir.”

“Okay.” They ran another sight and ate the ice cream, after which Max shifted them to transition stations. Kelly did not take the computer. A key punched by Kovak gave the same answer as one punched by Kelly, and Max wanted Kelly on the vernier stereograph where his long experience could make the best of poor data. Lundy assisted Kelly, with Smythe and Noguchi shooting and running.

At minus two hours Max called Compagnon, told him that they were narrowing down; the Chief Engineer assured him that he would nurse boost and vector himself from there on. “Good hunting, Captain.”

On a ten minute schedule Max still found it easy, though he had to admit he wasn’t as fresh as a still-warm egg. But he was kept comfortably busy and the corrections were pleasantly

small—Compagnon must be doing a real job down there. When the preset on the computer said less than one hour to zero, he stood up and stretched. “Everybody all set. Somebody wake up Noggy.

Everybody got a pepper pill in him? And who’s got one for me?”

Kovak leaned back and handed him one, Max popped it into his mouth and downed it with a swig of coffee. “Grab a last sandwich if you’re going to. All right, gang—let’s hit it!”

The data flowed in a steady stream. After a while Max began to tire. He would no more than pick one correction off the lights on the computer and feed it to the power room than Kelly would have more data ready. A correction showed up that seemed off the curve, as if they were “hunting” excessively. He glanced back at the lights before applying it—then realized that a new set of data was being offered.

“Repeat!” he called out.

Kelly repeated. Max ran the figures over in his mind and found that they meant nothing to him. What had that last correction implied? Had he used a legitimate method in surveying this anomaly? Could you even call it surveying? Was this what a survey ship did to get out? How could they expect a man to…

“Captain!” Kelly said sharply.

He shook his head and sat up. “Sorry. Hold the next one.” With a feeling of panic he reviewed the data in his mind and tried to program. He knew at last how it felt to have the deadline bearing down fast as light—and to lose confidence.

He told himself that he must abort—slide past under the speed of light, spend weeks swinging back, and try again. But he knew that if he did, his nerve would never sustain him for a second try.

At that bad moment a feeling came over him that someone was standing behind his chair, resting hands

on his shoulders—quieting him, soothing him. He began clearly and sharply to call off figures to Kovak.

He was still calling them out with the precision of an automaton twenty minutes later. He accepted one more sight, digested it, sent it on to Kovak with his eyes on the preset. He applied the correction, a tiny one, and called out, “Stand by!” He pressed the button that allowed the chronometer to kick it over on the microsecond. Only then did he look around, but there was no one behind him.

“There’s the Jeep!” he heard Kelly say exultantly. “And there’s the Ugly Duckling!” Max looked up. They were back in the familiar sky of Nu Pegasi and Halcyon.

Five minutes later Kelly and Max were drinking cold coffee and cleaning up the remains of a plate of sandwiches while Noguchi and Smythe completed the post-transition sights. Kovak and Lundy had gone below for a few minutes relief before taking the first watch. Max glanced again at the astrodome. “So we made it. I never thought we would.”

“Really, Captain? There was never any doubt in my mind after you took command.” “Hmmm! I’m glad you didn’t know how I felt.”

Kelly ignored this. “You know, sir, when you are programming your voice sounds amazingly like the Doctor’s.”

Max looked at him sharply. “I had a bad time there once,” he said slowly. “Shortly before zip.” “Yes, sir. I know.”

“Then—Look, this was just a feeling, you see? I don’t go for ghosts. But I had the notion that Doc was standing over me, the way he used to, checking what I did. Then everything was all right.”

Kelly nodded. “Yes. He was here. I was sure he would be.”

“Huh? What do you mean?” Kelly would not explain. He turned instead to inspect post-transition plates, comparing them happily with standard plates from the chart safe—the first such opportunity since the ship was lost.

“I suppose,” said Max when Kelly was through, “that we had better rough out an orbit for Nu Pegasi before we sack in.” He yawned. “Brother, am I dead!”

Kelly said, “For Nu Pegasi, sir?”

“Well, we can’t shoot for Halcyon itself at this distance. What did you have in mind?” “Nothing, sir.”

“Spill it.”

“Well, sir, I guess I had assumed that we would reposition for transit to Nova Terra. But if that is what the Captain wants—”

Max drummed on the chart safe. It had never occurred to him that anyone would expect him to do anything, after accomplishing the impossible, but to shape course for the easy, target-in-sight destination they had left from, there to wait for competent relief.

“You expected me to take her on through? With no tables and no help?” “I did not intend to presume, Captain. It was an unconscious assumption.”

Max straightened up. “Tell Kovak to hold her as she goes. Phone Mr. Walther to see me at once in my cabin.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

The First Officer met him outside his cabin. “Hello, Dutch. Come in.” They entered and Max threw his cap on his desk. “Well, we made it.”

“Yes, sir. I was watching from the lounge.” “You don’t seem surprised.”

“Should I be, Captain?”

Max sprawled in his easy chair, stretching his weary back muscles. “You should be. Yes, sir, you should be.”

“All right. I’m surprised.”

Max looked up and scowled. “Dutch, where is this ship going now?” Walther answered, “The Captain has not yet told me.”

“Confound it! You know what I mean. Our schedule calls for Nova Terra. But there is Halcyon sitting right over there—a blind man could find it with a cane. What destination did you have in mind when you boosted me into command? Tell me what you expected then? Before you tagged me.”

“I had in mind,” Walther answered, “getting a captain for the Asgard.”

“That’s no answer. See here, the passengers have a stake in this. Sure, I had to take this risk for them, no choice. But now there is a choice. Shouldn’t we tell them and let them vote on it?”

Walther shook his head emphatically. “You don’t ask passengers anything, sir. Not in a ship underway. It is not fair to them to ask them. You tell them.”

Max jumped up and strode the length of the cabin. “‘Fair,’ you say. Fair! It’s not fair to me.” He swung and faced Walther. “Well? You’re not a passenger. You’re my First Officer. What do you think we should do?”

Walther stared him in the eye. “I can’t decide that for the Captain. That is why you are Captain.”

Max stood still and closed his eyes. The figures stood out clearly, in neat columns. He went to his phone and savagely punched the call for the control room. “Captain speaking. Is Kelly still there? Oh—good, Chief. We reposition for Nova Terra. Start work—I’ll be up in a minute.”

THE TOMAHAWK

Max liked this time of day, this time of year. He was lying in the grass on the little rise west of the barn, with his head propped up so that he could see to the northwest. If he kept his eyes there, on the exit ring of the C.S.&E. Ring Road, he would be able, any instant now, to see the Tomahawk plunge out and shoot across the gap in free trajectory. At the moment he was not reading, no work was pushing him, he was just being lazy and enjoying the summer evening.

A squirrel sat up near by, stared at him, decided he was harmless and went about its business. A bird swooped past.

There was a breathless hush, then suddenly a silver projectile burst out of the exit ring, plunged across the draw and entered the ring on the far side—just as the sound hit him.

“Boy, oh boy!” he said softly. “It never looks like they’d make it.”

It was all that he had climbed the rise to see, but he did not get up at once. Instead he pulled a letter from his pocket and reread the ending: “… I guess Daddy was glad to get me back in one piece because he finally relented. Putzie and I were married a week ago—and oh Max, I’m so happy! You must visit us the next time you hit dirt at Hespera.” She had added, “P.S. Mr. Chips sends her love—and so do I.”

Quite a gal, Ellie. She usually got her own way, one way or another. He felt a bit sorry for Putzie. Now if they had all stayed on Charity…

Never mind—an astrogator ought not to get married. Fondly he fingered the sunburst on his chest. Too bad he had not been able to stay with the Asgard—but of course they were right; he could not ship as assistant in a ship where he had once been skipper. And assistant astrogator of the Elizabeth Regina was a good billet, too; everybody said the Lizzie was a taut ship.

Besides that, not every young A.A. had a new congruency to his credit, even now being surveyed. He had nothing to kick about. He didn’t even mind the whopping big fine the Council of the Guilds had slapped on him, nor the official admonition that had been entered in his record. They had let him stay in space, which was the important thing, and the admonition appeared right along with the official credit for the “Hendrix” congruency.

And, while he didn’t argue the justice of the punishment—he’d been in the wrong and he knew it—nevertheless the guilds were set up wrong; the rules ought to give everybody a chance. Some day he’d be senior enough to do a little politicking on that point.

In the meantime, if he didn’t get moving, he’d have to buy that taxi. Max got up and started down the slope. The helicab was parked in front of the house and the driver was standing near it, looking out over the great raw gash of the Missouri-Arkansas Power Project. The fields Max once had worked were gone, the cut reached clear into the barn yard. The house was still standing but the door hung by one hinge and some kid had broken all the windows. Max looked at the house and wondered where Maw and the man she had married were now?—not that he really cared and no one around Clyde’s Corners seemed to know. They had told him at the courthouse that Maw had collected her half of the government-condemnation money and the pair of them had left town.

Probably their money was gone by now—Max’s half of the money was gone completely, it hadn’t quite paid his fine. If they were broke, maybe Montgomery was having to do some honest work, for Maw wasn’t the woman to let a man loaf when she was needing. The thought pleased Max; he felt he had a score to settle with Montgomery, but Maw was probably settling it for him.

The driver turned toward him. “Be a big thing when they get this finished. You ready to go, sir?”

Max took a last glance around. “Yes. I’m all through here.” They climbed into the cabin. “Where to? Back to the Corners?”

Max thought about it. He really ought to save money—but shucks, he would save plenty this next trip. “No, fly me over to Springfield and drop me at the southbound ring road station. I’d like to make it in time to catch the Javelin.”

That would put him in Earthport before morning.

The End

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

Posts about the Changes in America

America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.

Parable about America
What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6
Civil War
The Warning Signs
r/K selection theory
Line in the sand
A second passport
Link
Make America Great Again.
What would the founders think?

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.
The Rule of Eight
Types of American conservatives.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

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What would the founders think of America today?

Earlier today I was musing about life. I thought about the craziness on the news, or at least what passes for news these days. I thought about life, and my grandparents. I thought about buying my first hamburger when I was six years old; my father gave me a few dollars and pointed me in the direction of the local diner. I was on my own. I wonder if you could do that today, in the hyper-PC culture that America has become.

All of these thoughts jumbled together when a commercial came on promoting an “in depth” study on how bad Trump is. With this and the latest local news, I suddenly came to the thought; What would the founders of the United States think about the nation as it is today? What would they think?

Obviously they wouldn’t be happy.

I've told this story a thousand times...

I once made a pot of chili. It was on a lazy Saturday afternoon. It was something that I had been looking forward to having all week long, and Saturday was just perfect for making it.

I added the ground beef, the peppers, the tomatoes, the onions, and let it cook for hours on the stove. I then lifted up the lid and added some salt and pepper.

I reached for the parsley container. I wanted to add small amount for flavoring.

When the entire lid fell off the container. 

There, in a nano-second was a huge pile of green parsley slowly sinking into the chili.

I knew that I had to take action and fast. So, I reached in and with a ladle, I managed to remove about 80% of the parsley. Yet, as successful as I was, it was too late. The chili was far too polluted, and all you could do when you tasted it was the strong and noticeable taste of parsley.

What to do? What to do?

I didn't want to throw away the chili. There was good ground beef in it. It took time to cut up all the vegetables, and I had the beans all ready and added. I did not want to toss it all away when the house still held the wonderful aroma of cooking chili.

So my plan was to keep on adding things.

I figured that if the pot of chili was larger, by adding more and more things, eventually the effect of the parsley would be so diluted to be unnoticeable. As a result I would have double or triple the amount of chili, at no negative consequence to the taste, I believed.

So...

I made and added more sauce. No change.
I cooked and added more meat. No change.
I added more tomatoes. No change.
I added more beans. No change.
I added more garlic, leeks, onions. No change.
I added more salt, and more pepper. No change.

By the end of the day, I had a much larger pot of chili. Of which was just as uneatable due to the pollution of the parsley.

------

Sometimes, small changes greatly alter content. You end up with something completely different. Often, it is not what you intended, but "the cat is out of the bag, and there is no way to put it back." Further changes and alterations do not help. You end up with a "Frankenstein monster".

What I should have done was scrapped the chili. Started all over again. I should have stuck to the original recipe, as explicitly stated to me by my grandmother, and avoided such embellishments such as parsley that a well-meaning friend insisted upon.

When I look at the mess that the United States is today, a scene from the movie “Aliens” come to mind. Do you know which one that I am referring to?

You know, they just discovered a “nest” of horrible alien insect-like killing machines that almost completely wiped out the military platoon of Space Marines. They are all there in the APC, and wondering what to do about this horrible situation. And then Ripley suggests…

nuke-from-orbit-meme
Sometimes, when things are so bad, you just don’t take any chances. You get far, far away from the danger, and then you eliminate it completely. This scene has long since became a meme that is used in many different situations. It is not intended to be taken literally, but rather suggestive of how to handle a particular issue.

In the case of the United States, the “well meaning” (and not so well-meaning) changes has resulted in a real mess for us citizens that have to live inside it. This is a truth, whether you want to believe it or not. The only people that thrive in the United States today is the wealthy elite class. For they enjoy their own laws, their own communities, and their very own protections.

Hillary Clinton
Hillary Clinton emboides what America is today. It is a land where the rich and wealthy live as they please and lord over everyone else. They have their own rules, laws, and behaviors and they are untouchable. They are the elite; the 1%, or the 1% of the 1%.

In my mind, I would like to revert America way back to the Constitution AS WRITTEN, and include ONLY the first ten amendments. Personally, I see an uneducated populace, that even when they attend university, remain under-educated. They behave in group-think, or better yet a “mob mentality” where popularity, as defined by news, polls and tweets define action.

I know that it is intended to be this way. I know that total control over a population is best served when they devolve into emotional-laden mob physiology. I wish that we could revert to more traditional ways of living, and one in which the rich and powerful were held in check.

But, ah, that’s just me.

Parable about America

So anyways, musing about life and my “Rights”, has got me to thinking. I wonder, what would the founders think about specific issues? You know about “LGBT rights”, illegal aliens as opposed to citizens, and a moral-less society based on social constructs as opposed to natural biology. What would they think?

What, if you could teleport one (or more) of the founders here, somehow erase the shock of modern-day life, and query them in a calm and safe environment. What would they think? What would their views be?

Bill and Ted making their appearance.
The 1980’s comedy “Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure” was all about carting famous historical figures back from the past to the present so that we could benefit from their teachings and knowledge. What would they have to say about life today?

Here, I try to address those thoughts.

Let’s start with elections. It’s one of those things that we are all taught back in grade school. Oh, you know “Our nation is great because we have popular elections. It is what makes our democracy so great and wonderful.” Um, yeah, but we are not a “democracy”, at least we weren’t ever intended to be one.

Democracy Lessons

[1] Popular Elections

When the United States was first founded, it was intended that ONLY the heads of a family would be able to vote. They would vote for their local governance, and they would also vote for their national representative. Aside from that, no one else would be able to vote.

Thus the profile of a voter was…

  • Male head of a family.
  • Educated.
  • Member of a local church.
  • Responsible for the welfare of his family.

This was from a practical perspective. The heads of families were responsible for others. It was a huge burden that (at that time) was taken quite seriously. Therefore, only those people that had others that relied on them, could be permitted to vote.

This, of course, ended with the passage of the various amendments 11 – 27, which almost all expanded the voting pool while making no changes in the representation structure. Thus, diluting the individual voter influence.

Link

What would the founders think?

I believe that they would think something like this…

Without governance under the control of people with a “stake in the game”, the entire government can be gamed in favor of mob rule. Thus the idea of a pure Republic becomes meaningless.

Instead, you have a democracy by mob rule. This is a fundamental principle that must be adhered to, in order to maintain consistency and quality in governance. Otherwise, under “mob rule” an oligarchy can take over and manipulate the people to fit their desires.

It is easy to control mobs, as mob psychology is a very mature subject. You just control the news media. You control public discourse by popularity, and control polls, tweets, and fashion. All of which lie within reach and within the domain of the wealthy. NOT in the domain of the general population.

[2] Taxation

Today, in America taxation is broken down into four classes.

  1. Federal taxation,
  2. State taxation,
  3. Local taxation,
  4. Fees, and other charges, that originate from the government.

Any mechanism that extracts money from citizens to a governmental body, no matter the form or name is a tax. Additionally, you have the ObamaCARE which is a mandated item that MUST be purchased by citizens.

What would the founders think?

We made it very and specifically clear. There shall be NO taxation on any American citizen in any way, shape or form. There is no excuse or reason what-so-ever that can justify the taxation of Americans.

The moment that Americans are taxed is the moment that they lose their freedom and become slave and serfs for someone else.

Taxiation without representation.

[3] First Amendment

Today the freedom of speech and religion are under constant assault. There is something called “PC, which stand for “Political Correctness”, which means that there are limits what you can say and what you cannot say. This means that there are limits on your thoughts and what you can or cannot believe. It all must be approved by others.

What would the founders say?

We were very explicit in this. We specifically explained in the preamble to the Bill of Rights that the government shall have NO (that means zero) ability in altering or changing, or influencing a persons’ thoughts, religion or beliefs. Nor shall they place any limits on it, for any reason what so ever.

People, you need to read the PREAMBLE to the Bill of Rights. You need to read the Federalist Papers. It explains everything so plainly. Anyone who is trying to limit your ability to speak your mind is a tyrant in sheeps’ clothing.

Feinstein on the freedom of speech.
There’s a reason Feinstein appears on Reason ‘s list of ” enemies of freedom.” Ultimately, Feinstein’s objection to protecting controversial speech is that of the bureaucrat disguised as the concerned nanny. When people intent on violence show up at protests, other people can get hurt.

Second Amendment

Today, we see a nearly unending media hype on banning guns and all sort of ways and means to restrict it’s usage. Every day, it seems that there is some sort of “event” involving gun. From the mob abuse in Chicago to the latest in “false flag” mass slaughter events.

I am sure that the founders would have some very serious and harsh words to say on this subject.

What would the founders say..

We specifically put the words “shall not be infringed” in the specification. It is very clear. This is as clear as night and day.

The people; the citizens of the United States WILL have the ability to procure and operate any and all sorts of weapons. And, yes, that means the latest in military technology. It is the ONLY way that people can control their government. Take that away and the people cannot redress their government. They just cannot.

America was founded on one basic premise. That is that man is created by God, and given Rights. Governments are made by men. For a government to be long-lasting, it must recognize that it can NEVER replace God.

Gun control is tyranny.
If the Constitution was being followed as intended, every person in the USA would have access to fully automatic Stoner weapons.

Third Amendment

The third amendment is very clear. The government shall not use your property for their purposes. In worst case, even in times of war, your property is yours. The government shall not infringe on your property.

Today, of course, your property can be taken away if you owe taxes. It can be seized by the police. It can be utilized as needed, and it can be occupied. What would the founders have to say about this?

Property is owned by citizens. The government shall have no say what so ever in using it, renting it, taxing it, or anything else. Including banning it. The moment when you need to discuss your “property” with the government is the moment that you are a slave. For you have no property.

Link

Fourth Amendment

The fourth amendment prohibits The United States government from going into people’s private lives, collecting their personal papers and documents, and using that against them. It’s what it says.

However, that is pretty much how it is done today.

Oh, there are of course, “excuses”, and alterations in methodology, but the fact is pretty plain. There are no longer any fourth amendment protections for Americans today. Zero.

After all, if the Fourth Amendment was being followed there wouldn’t be anything called the “Utah Data Collection Center”.

The Utah Data Collection Center.
Utah Data Center. The National Security Agency (NSA) leads operations at the facility as the executive agent for the Director of National Intelligence. It is located at Camp Williams near Bluffdale, Utah, between Utah Lake and Great Salt Lake and was completed in May 2014 at a cost of $1.5 billion. The highly-classified project is responsible for intercepting, storing and analyzing intelligence data as it zips through both domestic and international networks. The data may come in all forms: private e-mails, cell phone calls, Google searches – even parking lot tickets or shop purchases.

This is more than just a data center,” an official source close to the project told the online magazine Wired.com. The source says the center will actually focus on deciphering the accumulated data, essentially code-breaking. This means not only exposing Facebook activities or Wikipedia requests, but compromising “the invisible” Internet, or the “deepnet.” Legal and business deals, financial transactions, password-protected files and inter-governmental communications will all become vulnerable. Once communication data is stored, a process known as data-mining will begin. Everything a person does – from traveling to buying groceries – is to be displayed on a graph, allowing the NSA to paint a detailed picture of any given individual’s life.

What would the founders of the nation have to say about this?

One of the fundamental characteristics of being a free man is the idea of having privacy. That is you can have your thoughts, you documents, you life, and your family private and free from scrutiny. The failure in having this most basic of needs is to live the life of a slave.

We are not going to put it any other way. Only SLAVES have their personal papers, business and privacy invaded by governments. Nor violated by private companies who operate as proxies for the government.

Well, you do need to protect yourself from the government. Here’s a good way to do it…

Link

Fifth Amendment

You know that the things that you do, your habits, and your lifestyle cannot be used against you. Funny, apparently the United States government has forgotten this most basic of rights.

The United States was founded under British common law. Which means that there can be no crime without a victim.

You steal an apple from someone, you have a victim.
You kill someone. That dead SOB is a victim.
You slander someone, you have a victim.

There is no such thing as a "victim-less" crime. 

Thus, all the crimes against drugs, vices, personal behaviors, and the sort that are often promoted by progressives "to make the world a better place", and to do things "for the children" would NEVER be permitted if the Constitution was being followed as written.

This amendment requires that procedure be followed in bringing a person to trial. It mandates that the government cannot seize land and property from citizens without “due cause” and compensation. Thought today, this happens pretty darn regularly.

Not to mention their wanton abuse of access to social media.

People need to be protected from the government. In our view, the government was constructed to be a rather weak entity. One that had little power aside from organization, and could in no way interfere in the lives and property of the citizens. A government that is TOO POWERFUL is one that can take away things and lifestyle from it’s citizens.

In a free society, vices are not banned, taxed, suppressed or prohibited. A “vice” is simply something that a busybody wants to limit YOUR access to, so that they have power and control over you.

SJW

Sixth Amendment

The sixth amendment is in regard to fair, and speedy trials. Yet we know that today, most criminal prosecutions do not go to trial. ” and that way are resolved outside the court system.

In doing so, the entire protections of the Bill of Rights are circumvented. Those accused are faced with either fighting an enormous bureaucratic entity with an unlimited funding source, or accept a minor charge by pleading guilty.

Unfortunately, most accused people are set in the situation where they would rather than go through the “grinder” of the legal justice system in favor of a light or lighter sentence.

The judicial system was set up to be fair. There should be ZERO opportunities for a person to avoid the criminal prosecution system. The system was set up to be fair. It protected those who were wrongfully accused, and punished those who did wrong.

Abuses of this is evidence in that either [1] Criminals are in charge of the justice system, or [2] The laws are unrealistic and do not reflect the needs of society as a whole.

Seventh Amendment

The idea behind that the seventh amendment is that a person’s peers would determine what to do with a person who exists within their circle of associations. While, over the years, society has expanded and communication methods have greatly expanded, the need still persists.

People need to be judged by their peers. Their behavior outside of their social constraints could be misconstrued. People who live in urban areas shouldn’t be judged by people who live in rural areas. Everything should be handled at the local level. The entire concept of this resides in the fundamental idea that everything must be resolved at the local level.

Eighth Amendment

Well, Americans are protected from “excessive” punishment, and “excessive” bail. Though I would be hard pressed (in my case) to equate that 300x my bank savings for bail is within these guidelines.

But that is just me. Obviously I am a “unique” case. No one else had this problem. Eh?

The Government should remain small and manageable. The idea behind the eighth amendment was to offer a “level playing field” between the accused and the government. All too often, though out history, the government had the power an resources to overwhelm the average citizen. This amendment was a way to prevent the government from being far too powerful.

Ninth Amendment

The Ninth Amendment to the United States Constitution addresses rights, retained by the people, that are not specifically enumerated in the Constitution. 

It is part of the Bill of Rights. The Ninth Amendment has generally been regarded by the courts as negating any expansion of governmental power on account of the enumeration of rights in the Constitution.

-Wikipedia.

Many people are confused by this amendment.

Let’s say this plainly. The govern CANNOT lay claim to any ability, right or process that lies outside of the Bill of Rights. They cannot expand up statutes for “the public good” or any such nonsense.

People have a large number of Rights that the government should never infringe upon. This was intended to a be protection of the people. It was intended to be a protection from the citizens from their government. It specifically states quite clearly that American citizens have RIGHTS that are not specified within the Constitution. Therefore, any new law, or policy from the government extracts from the Rights of Citizens.

Like, perhaps, the right to drink from a straw…

The Tenth Amendment

People. Know your history.

Powell
On the night of April 14, Powell and another conspirator, David Herold, made their way to the Secretary of State’s residence. Seward was inside, recovering from a concussion, broken jaw, and other injuries following a recent carriage accident.

Powell entered Seward’s house pretending to deliver medicine while Herold waited out front. Powell pushed his way past Seward’s butler, who ran into the night to get help. This frightened Herold, who immediately took off.

Once inside, Powell attempted to shoot Seward’s son Frederick, but his revolver misfired. Powell beat him to the floor and made his way to the room where Seward was recovering. The Secretary of State was being tended to by his daughter and by Sergeant George F. Robinson, an army nurse. Powell slashed Robinson and punched Seward’s daughter in the face. He then climbed atop Seward and stabbed and slashed at his head and neck.

Because of his injuries from the carriage accident, Seward was wearing a metal splint around his jaw. This protected him from any would-be fatal blows, but Powell managed to slash his cheek and face. Though he survived the attack, the scars would remain with Seward for life.

Seward’s other son Augustus burst into the room and wrestled with Powell. Powell slashed at Augustus and got away, but not before encountering a messenger in the hallway (who Powell stabbed, as well).

Powell escaped, but he was a stranger on the run in Washington, D.C. Helpless without Herold, he disappeared for three days, wandering the streets or hiding alone. Finally, he returned to the boarding house where Booth and the other conspirators rendezvoused before the assassination. As he got there, police were taking the owner of the house and others away for questioning. Powell claimed he was just a laborer there to dig a gutter, but the police were suspicious because he was wearing expensive clothing, so they took him into custody when he was positively identified.

Yeah. I know. Tenth amendment. “States Rights”.

Anything not specified in the Constitution is reserved for the States. At least that is what it says. Of course, we all know that this is just nothing; it’s all just meaningless words. The Civil War pretty much settled this issue.

It’s a hard sell.

The issue of “Federalism” pretty much was killed in favor of a centralized government operating out of Washington D.C..

Abe Lincoln - the bad guy
To really understand a person, their motivations, and the issues of the day, you need to look closer. When you do, you start to see things that you were not aware of, and how all the pieces start to fit together. It becomes frightening and a tad horrific.

We can parse this trivial issue or that one, all by carefully waltzing around the elephant in the room; you know which one. Don’t you?

Let me spell it out to you. If States have no ability to dissolve their bonds with Washington, they have zero power in anything substantive.

How they get away with it

But going beyond that. Let’s look at the issue in more depth, shall we. Well, people, where does it explicitly state that there should be a FCC, a FDA, or a ATF in the Constitution? According to the tenth amendment, these are state’s issues.

And even more perplexing, is that these are issues that infringe on the inherent Rights of citizens within the states where they reside. Since when can the federal government create an agency that places limits on the freedoms of any citizen in any of the states? Well?

 The Tenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which is part of the Bill of Rights, was ratified on December 15, 1791. It expresses the principle of federalism and states' rights, which strictly supports the entire plan of the original Constitution for the United States of America, by stating that the federal government possesses only those powers delegated to it by the United States Constitution. All remaining powers are reserved for the states or the people. 

-Wikipedia

It doesn’t matter though.

Today, we have an American empire run by an oligarchy. Many of who’s members aren’t even Americans. (You can see who they are by looking at all the non-American interests being funded in the yearly federal budget.) They engage in endless wars around the globe, and treat American citizens as ignorant sheep to be fleeced every April.

What would the founders have to say about all this…

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

The truths…

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Then, men create governments to make sure that people RETAIN these God-given Rights…

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

However, take note and warning…

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government.

This should not be taken lightly…

Accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

How much can people take before they start to yell “STOP!”?

But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these citizens; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.

The history of the present United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations… all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over the citizens.

Conclusion

The United States today in zero ways resembles what it was established to be in 1776. It has changed.

America has changed.
America has changed substantially in many, many ways from what it was first established as. Traditionalists, and conservatives lament these changes. While progressive socialists embrace the changes.

It is no longer a Republic.

It was altered from a Republic to a Democracy, to an Empire, and now exists as a oligarchy that serves the interests of the richest people on the globe. Many of whom aren’t even Americans in the first place.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants America to fight a war with Iran. To this end he is very active in providing financial enticements (bribes) to leading American Senators and Congressmen to support yet another military action, only this time in Iran.

The only way that we can change America from what it has become is …

Make America Great Again.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

Posts about the Changes in America

America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.

Parable about America
What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6
Civil War
The Warning Signs
r/K selection theory
Line in the sand
A second passport
Link
Make America Great Again.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.
The Rule of Eight
Types of American conservatives.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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Glory Road (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein

This is the full Text of the novel by Robert Heinlein.

Of all the science fiction that is out there in the world, the fiction that is the closest approximation to the way things REALLY work in this universe is not something from Star Trek, or Star Wars. It is instead more like the Robert Heinlein novel “Glory Road”.

That is a very stark truth. Pay attention. Here, I present this novel in it’s entirety to the reader to consider.

Glory Road

Robert A. Heinlein

BRITANNUS (shocked): 
Caesar, this is not proper. 

THEODOTUS (outraged): 
How? 

CAESAR (recovering his self-possession): 
Pardon him Theodotus: he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature. 
 
Caesar and Cleopatra, Act II 
-George Bernard Shaw

Chapter 1

I know a place where there is no smog and no parking problem and no population explosion . . . no Cold War and no H-bombs and no television commercials . . . no Summit Conferences, no Foreign Aid, no hidden taxes–no income tax. The climate is the sort that Florida and California claim (and neither
has), the land is lovely, the people are friendly and hospitable to strangers, the women are beautiful and amazingly anxious to please-

I could go back. I could-

It was an election year with the customary theme of anything you can do I can do better, to a background of beeping sputniks. I was twenty-one but couldn’t figure out which party to vote against.

Instead I phoned my draft board and told them to send me that notice.

I object to conscription the way a lobster objects to boiling water: it may be his finest hour but it’s not his choice. Nevertheless I love my country. Yes, I do, despite propaganda all through school about how patriotism is obsolete. One of my great-grandfathers died at Gettysburg and my father made that long
walk back from Chosen Reservoir, so I didn’t buy this new idea. I argued against it in class–until it got me a “D,” in Social Studies, then I shut up and passed the course.

But I didn’t change my opinions to match those of a teacher who didn’t know Little Round Top from Seminary Ridge.

Are you of my generation? If not, do you know why we turned out so wrong-headed? Or did you just write us off as “juvenile delinquents?”

I could write a book. Brother! But I’ll note one key fact: After you’ve spent years and years trying to knock the patriotism out of a boy, don’t expect him to cheer when he gets a notice reading:

GREETINGS: You are hereby ordered for induction into the Armed Forces of the United States-

Talk about a “Lost Generation!” I’ve read that post-World-War-One jazz–Fitzgerald and Hemingway and so on–and it strikes me that all they had to worry about was wood alcohol in bootleg liquor. They had the world by the tail–so why were they crying?

Sure, they had Hitler and the Depression ahead of them. But they didn’t know that. We had Khrushchev and the H-bomb and we certainly did know.

But we were not a “Lost Generation.” We were worse; we were the “Safe Generation.” Not beatniks. The Beats were never more than a few hundred out of millions. Oh, we talked beatnik jive and dug cool sounds in stereo and disagreed with Playboy’s poll of jazz musicians just as earnestly as if it mattered. We
read Salinger and Kerouac and used language that shocked our parents and dressed (sometimes) in beatnik fashion. But we didn’t think that bongo drums and a beard compared with money in the bank. We weren’t rebels. We were as conformist as army worms. “Security” was our unspoken watchword.

Most of our watchwords were unspoken but we followed them as compulsively as a baby duck takes to water. “Don’t fight City Hall.” “Get it while the getting is good.” “Don’t get caught.” High goals, these, great moral values, and they all mean “Security.” “Going steady” (my generation’s contribution to the American Dream) was based on security; it insured that Saturday night could never be the loneliest night for the weak. If you went steady, competition was eliminated.

But we had ambitions. Yes, sir! Stall off your draft board and get through college. Get married and get her pregnant, with both families helping you to stay on as a draft-immune student. Line up a job well thought of by draft boards, say with some missile firm. Better yet, take postgraduate work if your folks (or hers) could afford it and have another kid and get safely beyond the draft–besides, a doctor’s degree was a union card, for promotion and pay and retirement.

Short of a pregnant wife with well-to-do parents the greatest security lay in being 4-F. Punctured eardrums were good but an allergy was best. One of my neighbors had a terrible asthma that lasted till his twenty-sixth birthday. No fake–he was allergic to draft boards. Another escape was to convince an army psychiatrist that your interests were more suited to the State Department than to the Army. More than half of my generation were “unfit for military service.”

I don’t find this surprising. There is an old picture of a people traveling by sleigh through deep woods–pursued by wolves. Every now and then they grab one of their number and toss him to the wolves. That’s conscription even if you call it “selective service” and pretty it up with USOs and “veterans’ benefits”–it’s tossing a minority to the wolves while the rest go on with that single-minded pursuit of the three-car garage, the swimming pool, and the safe & secure retirement benefits.

I am not being holier-than-thou; I was after that same three-car garage myself.

However, my folks could not put me through college. My stepfather was an Air Force warrant officer with all he could handle to buy shoes for his own lads. When he was transferred to Germany just before my high school senior year and I was invited to move in with my father’s sister and her husband, both of
us were relieved.

I was no better off financially as my uncle-in-law was supporting a first wife–under California law much like being an Alabama field hand before the Civil War. But I had $35 a month as a “surviving dependent of a deceased veteran.” (Not “war orphan,” which is another deal that pays more.) My mother
was certain that Dad’s death had resulted from wounds but the Veterans Administration thought differently, so I was just a “surviving dependent.”

$35 a month did not fill the hole I put in their groceries and it was understood that when I graduated I would root for myself. By doing my military time, no doubt–But I had my own plan; I played football and finished senior year season with the California Central Valley secondary school record for yards gained and a broken nose–and started in at the local State College the next fall with a job “sweeping the gym” at $10 more a month than that pension, plus fees.

I couldn’t see the end out my plan was clear: Hang on, teeth and toenails, and get an engineering degree. Avoid the draft and marriage. On graduation get a deferred-status job. Save money and pick up a law degree, too–because, back in Homestead, Florida, a teacher had pointed out that, while engineers made money, the big money and boss jobs went to lawyers. So I was going to beat the game, yes, sir! Be a Horatio Alger hero. I would have headed straight for that law degree but for the fact that the college did not offer law.

At the end of the season my sophomore year they deemphasized football.

We had had a perfect season–no wins. “Flash” Gordon (that’s me–in the sports write-ups) stood one in yardage and points; nevertheless Coach and I were out of jobs. Oh, I “swept the gym” the rest of that year on basketball, fencing, and track, but the alumnus who picked up the tab wasn’t interested in a basketball player who was only six feet one. I spent that summer pushing an idiot stick and trying to line up a deal elsewhere. I turned twenty-one that summer, which chopped that $35/month, too. Shortly after Labor Day I fell back on a previously prepared position, i.e., I made that phone call to my draft board.

I had in mind a year in the Air Force, then win a competitive appointment to the Air Force Academy–be an astronaut and famous, instead of rich.

Well, we can’t all be astronauts. The Air Force had its quota or something. I was in the Army so fast I hardly had time to pack.

So I set out to be the best chaplain’s clerk in the Army; I made sure that “typing” was listed as one of my skills. If I had anything to say about it, I was going to do my time at Fort Carson, typing neat copies while going to night school on the side.

I didn’t have anything to say about it. Ever been in Southeast Asia? It makes Florida look like a desert. Wherever you step it squishes. Instead of tractors they use water buffaloes. The bushes are filled with insects and natives who shoot at you. It wasn’t a war–not even a “Police Action.” We were “Military Advisers.” But a Military Adviser who has been dead four days in that heat smells the same way
a corpse does in a real war.

I was promoted to corporal. I was promoted seven times. To corporal.

I didn’t have the right attitude. So my company commander said. My daddy had been a Marine and my stepfather was Air Force; my only Army ambition had been to be a chaplain’s clerk Stateside. I didn’t like the Army. My company commander didn’t like the Army either; he was a first lieutenant who hadn’t
made captain and every time he got to brooding Corporal Gordon lost his stripes.

I lost them the last time for telling him that I was writing to my Congressman to find out why I was the only man in Southeast Asia who was going to be retired for old age instead of going home when his time was up–and that made him so mad he not only busted me but went out and was a hero, and then he was dead. And that’s how I got this scar across my broken nose because I was a hero, too, and should have received the Medal of Honor, only nobody was looking.

While I was recovering, they decided to send me home.

Major Ian Hay, back in the “War to End War,” described the structure of military organizations: Regardless of T.O., all military bureaucracies consist of a Surprise Party Department, a Practical Joke Department, and a Fairy Godmother Department. The first two process most matters as the third is very small; the Fairy Godmother Department is one elderly female GS-5 clerk usually out on sick leave.

But when she is at her desk, she sometimes puts down her knitting and picks a name passing across her desk and does something nice. You have seen how I was whipsawed by the Surprise Party and Practical Joke Departments; this time the Fairy Godmother Department picked Pfc. Gordon.

Like this–When I knew that I was going home as soon as my face healed (little brown brother hadn’t sterilized his bolo), I put in a request to be discharged in Wiesbaden, where my family was, rather than California, home of record. I am not criticizing little brown brother; he hadn’t intended me to heal at all–and he would have managed it if he hadn’t been killing my company commander and too hurried to do a good job on me. I hadn’t sterilized my bayonet but he didn’t complain, he just sighed and came apart, like a doll with its sawdust cut. I felt grateful to him; he not only had rigged the dice so that I got out of the Army, he also gave me a great idea.

He and the Ward surgeon–The Surgeon had said, “You’re going to get well, son. But you’ll be scarred like a Heidelberg student.”

Which got me thinking–You couldn’t get a decent job without a degree, any more than you could be a plasterer without being a son or nephew of somebody in the plasterers’ union. But there are degrees and degrees. Sir Isaac Newton, with a degree from a cow college such as mine, would wash bottles for Joe Thumbfingers–if Joe had a degree from a European university.

Why not Heidelberg? I intended to milk my G.I. benefits; I had that in mind when I put in that too hasty call to my draft board.

According to my mother everything was cheaper in Germany. Maybe I could stretch those benefits

into a doctor’s degree. Herr Doktor Gordon, mit scars on der face from Heidelberg yet!–that would rate an extra $3,000 a year from any missile firm.

Hell, I would fight a couple of student duels and add real Heidelberg scars to back up the dandy I had. Fencing was a sport I really enjoyed (though the one that counted least toward “sweeping the gym”). Some people cannot stand knives, swords, bayonets, anything sharp; psychiatrists have a word for it:
aichmophobia. Idiots who drive cars a hundred miles an hour on fifty-mile-an-hour roads will nevertheless panic at the sight of a bare blade.

I’ve never been bothered that way and that’s why I’m alive and one reason why I kept being bucked back to corporal. A “Military Adviser” can’t afford to be afraid of knives, bayonets, and such; he must cope with them. I’ve never been afraid of them because I’m always sure I can do unto another what he is planning to do unto me.

I’ve always been right, except that time I made the mistake of being a hero, and that wasn’t too bad a mistake. If I had tried to bug out instead of staying to disembowel him, he would have chopped my spine in two. As it was, he never got a proper swing at me; his jungle cutter just slashed my face as he came
apart–leaving me with a nasty wound that was infected long before the helicopters came. But I never felt it. Presently I got dizzy and sat down in the mud and when I woke up, a medic was giving me plasma.

I rather looked forward to trying a Heidelberg duel. They pad your body and arm and neck and put a steel guard on your eyes and nose and across your ears–this is not like encountering a pragmatic Marxist in the jungle. I once handled one of those swords they use in Heidelberg; it was a light, straight saber, sharp on the edge, sharp a few inches on the back–but a blunt point! A toy, suited only to make pretty scars for girls to admire.

I got a map and whaddayuh know!–Heidelberg is just down the road from Wiesbaden. So I requested my discharge in Wiesbaden.

The ward surgeon said, “You’re an optimist, son,” but initialed it. The medical sergeant in charge of paperwork said, “Out of the question, Soldier.” I won’t say money changed hands but the endorsement the hospital’s C.O. signed read FORWARDED. The ward agreed that I was bucking for a psycho; Uncle Sugar does not give free trips around the world to Pfcs.

I was already so far around that I was as close to Hoboken as to San Francisco–and closer to Wiesbaden. However, policy called for shipping returnees back via the Pacific. Military policy is like cancer: Nobody knows where it comes from but it can’t be ignored.

The Fairy Godmother Department woke up and touched me with its wand.

I was about to climb aboard a bucket called the General Jones bound for Manila, Taipei, Yokohama, Pearl, and Seattle when a dispatch came granting my USAREUR, Heidelberg, Germany, by available military transportation, for discharge, at own request see reference foxtrot. Accumulated leave could be
taken or paid, see reference bravo. Subject man was authorized to return to Zone Interior (the States) any time within twelve months of separation, via available military transportation at no further expense to the government. Unquote.

The paper-work sergeant called me in and showed me this, his face glowing with innocent glee. “Only there ain’t no ‘available transportation,’ Soldier–so haul ass aboard the General Jones. You’re going to Seattle, like I said.”

I knew what he meant: The only transport going west in a long, long time had sailed for Singapore thirty-six hours earlier. I stared at that dispatch, thinking about boiling oil and wondering if he had held it back just long enough to keep me from sailing under it.

I shook my head. “I’m going to catch the General Smith in Singapore. Be a real human type, Sarge, and cut me a set of orders for it.”

“Your orders are cut. For the Jones. For Seattle.”

“Gosh,” I said thoughtfully. “I guess I had better go cry on the chaplain.” I faded out fast but I didn’t see the chaplain; I went to the airfield. It took five minutes to find that no commercial nor U.S. military flight was headed for Singapore in time to do me any good.

But there was an Australian military transport headed for Singapore that night. Aussies weren’t even “military advisers” out often were around, as “military observers.” I found the planes skipper, a flight leftenant, and put the situation to him. He grinned and said, “Always room for one more bloke. Wheels up shortly after tea, likely. If the old girl will fly.”

I knew it would fly; it was a Gooney Bird, a C-47, mostly patches and God knows how many millions of miles. It would get to Singapore on one engine if asked. I knew my luck was in as soon as I saw that grand old collection of masking tape and glue sitting on the field.

Four hours later I was in her and wheels up.

I checked in aboard USMTS General Smith the next morning, rather wet–the Pride of Tasmania had flown through storms the night before and a Gooney Birds one weakness is that they leak. But who minds clean rain after jungle mud? The ship was sailing that evening which was grand news.

Singapore is like Hong Kong only flat; one afternoon was enough. I had a drink in the old Raffles, another in the Adelphi, got rained on in the Great World amusement peak walked through Change Alley with a hand on my money and the other on my orders–and bought an Irish Sweepstakes ticket.

I don’t gamble, if you will concede that poker is a game of skill. However this was a tribute to the goddess of fortune, thanks for a long run of luck. If she chose to answer with $140,000 US, I wouldn’t throw it in her face. If she didn’t . . . well, the tickets face value was one pound, $2.80 US; I paid $9.00 Singapore, or $3.00 US–a small gesture from a man who had just won a free trip around the world–not
to mention coming out of the jungle still breathing.

But I got my three dollars’ worth at once, as I fled out of Change Alley to avoid two dozen other walking banks anxious to sell me more tickets, Singapore dollars, any sort of money–or my hat if I let go of it–reached the street, hailed a cab, and told the driver to take me to the boat landing. This was a victory of spirit over flesh because I had been debating whether to snatch the chance to ease enormous biological back pressure. Good old Scarface Gordon had been an Eagle Scout awfully long and Singapore is one of the Seven Sinful Cities where anything may be had.

I am not implying that I had remained faithful to the Girl Next Door. The young lady back home who had taught me most about the World, the Flesh, and the Devil, with an amazing send-off the night before I was inducted, had “Dear-Johnned” me in basic training; I felt gratitude but no loyalty. She got married
soon after, now has two children, neither of them mine.

The real cause of my biological unease was geographical. Those little brown brothers I had been fitting, with and against, all had little brown sisters, many of whom could be had for a price, or even pour l’amour ou pour le sport.

But that had been all the local talent for a long time. Nurses? Nurses are officers–and the rare USO entertainer who got that far from Stateside was even more thoroughly blocked off than were nurses.

I did not object to little brown sisters because they were brown. I was as brown as they were, in my face, except for a long pink scar. I drew the line because they were little.

I was a hundred and ninety pounds of muscle and no fat, and I could never convince myself that a female four feet ten inches tall and weighing less than ninety pounds and looking twelve years old is in fact a freely consenting adult. To me it felt like a grim sort of statutory rape and produced psychic impotence.

Singapore looked like the place to find a big girl. But when I escaped from Change Alley, I suddenly didn’t like people, big or little, male or female, and headed for the ship–and probably saved myself from pox, Cupid’s catarrh, soft chancre, Chinese rot, saltwater itch, and athletes foot–the wisest decision I
had made since, at fourteen, I had declined to wrestle a medium-sized alligator.

I told the driver in English what landing I wanted, repeated it in memorized Cantonese (not too well; its a nine-toned language, and French and German are all I had in school), and showed him a map with the landing marked and its name printed in English and drawn in Chinese.

Everybody who left the ship was given one of these maps. In Asia every cab driver speaks enough English to take you to the Red Light district and to shops where you buy “bargains.” But be is never able to find your dock or boat landing.

My cabbie listened, glanced at the map, and said, “Okay, Mac. I dig it,” and took off and rounded a corner with tires squealing while shouting at peddle cabs, coolies, children, dogs. I relaxed, happy at having found this cabbie among thousands.

Suddenly I sat up and shouted for him to stop.

I must explain something; I can’t get lost.

Call it a “psi” talent, like that study they study at Duke. Mother used to say that sonny had a “bump of direction.” Call it what you will, I was six or seven before I realized that other people could get lost. I always know which way is north, the direction of the point where I started and how far away it is. I can
head straight back or retrace my steps, even in dark and jungle. This was the main reason why I was always promoted back to corporal and usually shoved into a sergeant’s job. Patrols I headed always came back–the survivors, I mean. This was comforting to city boys who didn’t want to be in that jungle anyhow.

I had shouted because the driver had swung right when he should have swung left and was about to cut back across his own trade

He speeded up.

I yelled again. He no longer dug English.

It was another mile and several tunas later when he had to stop because of a traffic jam. I got out and he jumped out and started screaming in Cantonese and pointing at the meter in his cab. We were surrounded by Chinese adding to the din and smaller ones plucking at my clothes. I kept my hand on my
money and was happy indeed to spot a cop. I yelled and caught his eye.

He came through the crowd brandishing a long staff. He was a Hindu; I said to him, “Do you speak English?”

“Certainly. And I understand American.” I explained my trouble, showed him the map, and said that the driver had picked me up at Chaise Alley and been driving in aides.

The cop nodded and talked with the driver in a third language–Malayan, I suppose. At last the cop said, “He doesn’t understand English. He thought you said to drive to Johore.”

The bridge to Johore is as far as you can get from the anchorage and still be on the Island of Singapore. I said angrily, “The hell he doesn’t understand English!”

The cap shrugged. “You hired him, you must pay what is on the taximeter. Then I will explain to him where you wish to go and arrange a fixed fee.”

“I’ll see him in hell first!”

“That is possible. The distance is quite short–in this neighborhood. I suggest that you pay. The waiting time is mounting up.”

There comes a time when a man must stand up for his rights, or he can’t bear to look at himself in a mirror to shave. I had already shaved, so I paid–$18.50 Sing., for wasting an hour and ending up farther from the landing. The driver wanted a tip but the cop shut him up and then let me walk with him.

Using both hands I hung onto my orders and money, and the Sweepstakes ticket folded in with the money. But my pen disappeared and cigarettes and handkerchief and a Ronson lighter. When I felt ghost fingers at the strap of my watch, I agreed to the cops suggestion that he had a cousin, an honest man,
who would drive me to my landing for a fixed–and moderate–fee.

The “cousin” turned out to be just coming down the street; half an hour later I was aboard ship. I shall never forget Singapore, a most educational city.

Chapter 2

Two months later on the French Riviera. The Fairy Godmother Department watched over me across the Indian Ocean, up the Red Sea, and clear to Napoli. I lived a healthy life, exercising and getting tan every morning, sleeping afternoons, playing poker at night. There are many people who do not. Know
the odds (poor, but computable) for improving a poker hand in the draw, but are anxious to learn. When we got to Italy I had a beautiful tan and a sizable nest egg.

Early in the voyage someone went broke and wanted to put a Sweepstakes ticket into the game. After some argument Sweepstakes tickets were made valuta at a discount, $2.00 USA per ticket. I finished the trip with fifty-three tickets.

Hitching a flight from Napoli to Frankfurt took only hours. Then the Fairy Godmother Department handed me back to the Surprise Party and Practical Joke Departments.

Before going to Heidelberg I ducked over to Wiesbaden to see my mother, my stepfather and the kids–and found that they had just left for the States, on their way to Elmendorf AFB in Alaska.

So I went to Heidelberg to be processed, and looked the town over while the led tape unwound.

Lovely town–Handsome castle, good beer, and big girls with rosy cheeks and shapes like Coca-Cola bottles–Yes, this looked like a nice place to get a degree. I started inquiring into rooms and such, and met a young kraut wearing a studenten cap and some face scars as ugly as mine–things were looking up.

I discussed my plans with the first sergeant of the transient company.

He shook his head. “Oh, you poor boy!”

Why? No G.I. benefits for Gordon–I wasn’t a veteran.

Never mind that scar. Never mind that I had killed more men in combat than you could crowd into a–well, never mind. That thing was not a “war” and Congress had not passed a bill providing educational benefits for us “Military Advisers.”

I suppose this was my own fault. All my life there had been “G.I. benefits”–why, I had shared a bench in chem lab with a veteran who was going to school on the G.I. Bill.

This fatherly sergeant said, “Don’t take it hard, son. Go home, get a job, wait a year. They’ll pass it and date it bade, almost certainly. You’re young.”

So here I was on the Riviera, a civilian, enjoying a taste of Europe before using that transportation home. Heidelberg was out of the question. Oh, the pay I hadn’t been able to spend in the jungle, plus accumulated leave, plus my winnings at poker, added up to a sum which would have kept me a year in
Heidelberg. But it would never stretch enough for a degree. I had been counting on that mythical “G.I. Bill” for eating money and on my cash as a cushion.

My (revised) plan was obvious. Grab that top home before my year was up–grab it before school opened. Use the cash I had to pay board to Aunt and Uncle, work next summer and see what turned up. With the draft no longer hanging over me I could find some way to sweat out that last year even if I couldn’t be “Heir Doktor Gordon.”

However, school didn’t open until fall and here it was spring. I was damn well going to see a little of Europe before I applied nose to grindstone; another such chance might never come.

There was another reason for waiting; those Sweepstakes tickets. The drawing for horses was coming up.

The Irish Sweepstakes starts as a lottery. First they sell enough tickets to paper Grand Central Station. The Irish hospitals get 25 percent and are the only sure winners. Shortly before the race they draw for horses. Let’s say twenty horses are entered. If your ticket fails to draw a horse, its wastepaper. (Oh, there are minor consolation prizes.)

But if you do draw a horse, you still haven’t won. Some horses won’t start. Of those that do, most of them chase the other horses. However, any ticket that draws any horse at all, even a goat that can barely walk to the paddock, that ticket suddenly acquires a value of thousands of dollars between the drawing
and the race. Just how much depends on how good the horse is. But prizes are high and the worst horse in the field has been known to win.

I had fifty-three tickets. If one of them drew a horse, I could sell that ticket for enough to put me through Heidelberg.

So I stayed and waited for the drawings.

Europe needn’t be expensive. A youth hostel is luxury to a man who has come out of the boondocks of Southeast Asia and even the French Riviera isn’t expensive if you approach it from underneath. I didn’t stay on La Promenade des Anglais; I had a tiny room four floors up and two kilometers back, and the shared use of some plumbing. There are wonderful night clubs in, Nice but you need not patronize them as the floor show at the beaches is as good . . . and free. I never appreciated what a high art the fan dance can be until the first time I watched a French girl get out of her clothes and into her bikini in plain sight of citizens, tourists, gendarmes, dogs–and me–all without quite violating the lenient French mores concerning “indecent exposure.” Or only momentarily.

Yes, sir, there are things to see and do on the French Riviera without spending money.

The beaches are terrible. Rocks. But rocks are better than jungle mud and I put on trunks and enjoyed the floor show and added to my tan. It was spring, before the tourist season and not crowded, but it was warm and summery and dry. I lay in the sun and was happy and my only luxury was a deposit box with
American Egress and the Paris edition of the N.Y. Herald Tribune and The Star’s & Stripes. These I would glance over to see how the Powers-that-be were mismanaging the world, then look for what was new in the unWar I had just been let out of (usually no mention, although we had been told that we were
“saving civilization”), then get down to important matters, i.e., news of the Irish Sweepstakes, plus the possibility that The Stars & Stripes might announce that it had all been a hideous dream and I was entitled to educational benefits after all.

Then came crossword puzzles and “Personal” ads. I always read “Personals”; they are a naked look into private lives. Things like: ‘M.L. phone R.S. before noon. Money.’ Makes you wonder who did what to whom, and who got paid?

Presently I found a still cheaper way to live with an even better floor show. Have you heard of l’Il du Levant? It is an island off the Riviera between Marseilles and Nice, and is much like Catalina. It has a village at one end and the French Navy has blocked off the other for guided missiles; the rest of it is hills and beaches and grottoes. There are no automobiles, nor even bicycles. The people who go there don’t want to be reminded of the outside world.

For ten dollars a day you can enjoy luxury equal to forty dollars a day in Nice. Or you can pay five cents a dry for camping and live on a dollar a day–which I did–and there are good cheap restaurants anytime you get tired of cooking.

It is a place that seems to have no rules of any sort. Wait a minute; there is one. Outside the village, Heliopolis, is a sign: LE NU INTEGRAL EST FORMELLEMENT INTERDIT. (“Complete nakedness is strictly forbidden.”)

This means that everyone, man or woman, must put on a little triangle of cloth, a cache-sexe, a G-string, before going inside the village.

Elsewhere, on beaches and in camping grounds and around the island, you don’t have to wear a damned thing and nobody does.

Save for the absence of automobiles and clothes, the Isle of the Levant is like any other bit of back-country France. There is a shortage of fresh water, but the French don’t drink water and you bathe in the Mediterranean and for a franc you can buy enough fresh water for half a dozen sponge baths to rinse cm the salt. Take the train from Nice or Marseilles, get off at Toulon and take a bus to Lavandou, then by boat (an hour and a few minutes) to l’Ile du Levant–then chuck away your cares with your clothes.

I found I could buy the Herald-Trib, a day old, in the village, at the same place (“Au Minimum,” Mme. Alexandre) where I rented a tent and camping gear. I bought groceries at La Brise Marine and camped above La Plage des Grottes, close to the village, and settled down and let my nerves relax while I enjoyed the floor show.

Some people disparage the female form divine. Sex is too good for them; they should have been oysters. All gals are good to look at (including little brown sisters even though they scared me); the only difference is that some look better than others. Some were fat and some were skinny and some were old
and some were young. Some looked as if they had stepped straight out of Les Folies Bergeres. I got acquainted with one of those and I wasn’t far off; she was a Swedish girl who was a “nue” in another Paris revue. She practiced English on me and I practiced French on her, and she promised to cook me a Swedish dinner if I was ever in Stockholm and I cooked her a dinner over an alcohol lamp and we got giggly on vin ordinaire, and she wanted to know how I had acquired my scar and I told some lies. Marjatta was good for an old soldiers nerves and I was sad when she had to leave.

But the floor show went on. Three days later I was sitting on Grotto Beach, leaning against a rock and working the crossword puzzle, when suddenly I got cross-eyed trying not to stare at the most stare-able woman I have ever seen in my life.

Woman, girl–I couldn’t be sure. At first glance I thought she was eighteen, maybe twenty; later when I was able to look her square in her face she still looked eighteen but could have been forty. Or a hundred and forty. She had the agelessness of perfect beauty. Like Helen or Troy, or Cleopatra. It seemed
possible that she was Helen of Troy but I knew she wasn’t Cleopatra because she was not a redhead; she was a natural blonde. She was a tawny toast color allover without a hint of bikini marks and her hair was the same shade two tones litter. It flowed, unconfined, in graceful waves down her back and seemed never to have been cut.

She was tall, not much shorter than I am, and not too much litter in weight. Not fat, not fat at all save for that graceful padding that smoothes the feminine form, shading the muscles underneath–I was sure there were muscles underneath; she carried herself with the relaxed power of a lioness.

Her shoulders were broad for a woman, as broad as her very female hips; her waist might have seemed thick on a lesser woman, on her it was deliciously slender. Her belly did not sag at all but carried the lovely double-domed curve of perfect muscle tone. Her breasts–only her big rib cage could carry such
large ones without appearing too much of a good thing, they jutted firmly out and moved only a trifle when she moved, and they were crowned with rosy brown confections that were frankly nipples, womanly and not virginal.

Her navel was that jewel the Persian poets praised.

Her legs were long for her height; her hands and feet were not small but were slender, graceful. She was graceful in all ways; it was impossible to think of her in a pose ungraceful. Yet she was so lithe and limber that, like a cat, she could have twisted herself into any position.

Her face–How do you describe perfect beauty except to say that when you see it you can’t mistake it? Her lips were full and her mouth rather wide. It was faintly curved in the ghost of a smile even when her features were at rest. Her lips were red but if she was wearing makeup of any sort it had been applied so skillfully that I could not detect it–and that alone would have made her stand out, for that was a year all other females were wearing “Continental” makeup, as artificial as a corset and as bold as a doxy’s smile.

Her nose was straight and large enough for her face, no button. Her eyes-

She caught me staring at her. Certainly women expect to be locked at and expect it unclothed quite as much as when dressed for the ball. But it is rude to stare openly. I had given up the fight in the first ten seconds and was trying to memorize her, every line, every curve.

Her eyes locked with mine and she stared back and I began to blush but couldn’t look away. Her eyes were so deep a blue that they were dark, darker than my own brown eyes.

I said huskily, “Pardonnez-moi, ma’m’selle,” and managed to tear my eyes away.

She answered, in English, “Oh, I don’t mind. Look all you please,” and looked me up and down as carefully as I had inspected her. Her voice was a warm, fall contralto, surprisingly deep in its lowest register.

She took two steps toward me and almost stood over me. I started to get up and she motioned me to stay seated, with a gesture mat assumed obedience as if she were very used to giving orders. “Rest where you are,” she said. The breeze carried her fragrance to me and I got goose flesh all over. “You are American.”

“Yes.” I was certain she was not, yet I was equally certain she was not French. Not only did she have no trace of French accent but also–well, French women are at least slightly provocative at all times; they can’t help it, it’s ingrained in the French culture. There was nothing provocative about this woman–except that she was an incitement to riot just by existing.

But, without being provocative, she had that rare gift for immediate intimacy; she spoke to me as a very old friend might speak, friends who knew each other’s smallest foibles and were utterly easy tete-a-tete. She asked me questions about myself, some of them quite personal, and I answered all of them, honestly, and it never occurred to me that she had no right to quiz me. She never asked my name, nor I hers–nor any question of her.

At last she stopped and looked me over again, carefully and soberly. Then she said thoughtfully, “You are very beautiful,” and added, “Au ‘voir”–turned and walked down the beach into the water and swam away.

I was too stunned to move. Nobody had ever called me “handsome” even before I broke my nose. As for “beautiful!”

But I don’t think it would have done me any good to have chased her, even if I had thought of it in time. That gal could swim.

Chapter 3

I stayed at the plager until sundown, waiting for her to come back. Then I made a hurried supper of bread and cheese and wine, got dressed in my G-string and walked into town. There I prowled bars and restaurants and did not find her, meanwhile window-peeping into cottages wherever shades were not drawn. When the bistros started shutting down, I gave up, went back to my tent, cursed myself for eight kinds of fool– (why couldn’t I have said, “What’s your name and where do you live and where are you staying here?”)–sacked in and went to sleep.

I was up at dawn and checked the plage, ate breakfast, checked the plage again, got “dressed” and went into the village, checked the shops and post office, and bought my Herald-Trib.

Then I was faced with one of the most difficult decisions of my life: I had drawn a horse.

I wasn’t certain at first, as I did not have those fifty-three serial numbers memorized. I had to run back to my tent, dig out a memorandum and check–and I had! It was a number that had stuck in mind because of its pattern: #XDY 34555. I had a horse!

Which meant several thousand dollars, just how much I didn’t know. But enough to put me through Heidelberg . . . if I cashed in on it at once. The Herald-Trib was always a day late there, which meant the drawing had taken place at least two days earlier–and in the meantime that dog could break a leg or be scratched nine other ways. My ticket was important money only as long as “Lucky Star” was listed as a starter.

I had to get to Nice in a hurry and find out where and how you got the best price for a lucky ticket. Dig the ticket out of my deposit box and sell it!

But how about “Helen of Troy”?

Shylock with his soul-torn cry of “Oh, my daughter! Oh, my ducats!” was no more split than I.

I compromised. I wrote a painful note, identifying myself, telling her that I had been suddenly called away and pleading with her either to wait until I returned tomorrow, or at the very least, to leave a note telling me how to find her. I left it with the postmistress along with a description–blond, so tall, hair this long, magnificent poitrine–and twenty francs with a promise of twice that much if she delivered it and got an answer. The postmistress said that she had never seen her but if cette grande blonde ever set foot in the village the note would be delivered.

That left me just time to rush back, dress in off-island clothes, dump my gear with Mme. Alexandre, and catch the boat. Then I had three hours of travel time to worry through.

The trouble was that Lucky Star wasn’t really a dog. My horse rated no farther down than fifth or sixth, no matter who was figuring form. So? Stop while I was ahead and take my profit?

Or go for broke?

It wasn’t easy. Let’s suppose I could sell the ticket for $10,000. Even if I didn’t try any fancy footwork on taxes, I would still keep most of it and get through school.

But I was going to get through school anyway–and did I really want to go to Heidelberg? That student with the dueling scars had been a slob, with his phony pride in scars from fake danger.

Suppose I hung on and grabbed the big one, £50,000, or $140,000-

Do you know how much tax a bachelor pays on $140,000 in the Land of the Brave and the Home of the Free?

$103,000, that’s what he pays. That leaves him $37,000.

Did I want to bet about $10,000 against the chance of winning $37,000–with the odds at least 15 to 1 against me?

Brother, that is drawing to an inside straight. The principle is the same whether it’s 37 grand, or jacks-or-better with a two-bit limit.

But suppose I wangled some way to beat the tax, thus betting $10,000 to win $140,000? That made the potential profit match the odds–and $140,000 was not just eating money for college but a fortune that could bring in four or five thousand a year forever.

I wouldn’t be “cheating” Uncle Sugar; the USA had no more moral claim on that money (if I won) than I had on the Holy Roman Empire. What had Uncle Sugar done for me? He had clobbered my father’s life with two wars, one of which we weren’t allowed to win–and thereby made it tough for me to get through college quite aside from what a father may be worth in spiritual intangibles to his son (I didn’t know, I never would know!)–then he had grabbed me out of college and had sent me to fight another unWar and damned near killed me and lost me my sweet girlish laughter.

So how is Uncle Sugar entitled to clip $103,000 and leave me the short end? So he can “lend” it to Poland? Or give it to Brazil? Oh, my back!

There was a way to keep it all (if I won) legal as marriage. Go live in little old tax-free Monaco for a year. Then take it anywhere.

New Zealand, maybe. The Herald-Trib had had the usual headlines, only more so. It looked as if the boys (just big playful boys!) who run this planet were about to hold that major war, the one with ICBMs and H-bombs, any time now.

If a man went as far south as New Zealand there might be something left after the fallout fell out.

New Zealand is supposed to be very pretty and they say that a fisherman there regards a five-pound trout as too small to take home.

I had caught a two-pound trout once.

About then I made a horrible discovery. I didn’t want to go back to school, win, lose, or draw. I no longer gave a damn about three-car garages and swimming pools, nor any other status symbol or “security.” There was no security in this world and only damn fools and mice thought there could be.

Somewhere back in the jungle I had shucked off all ambition of that sort. I had been shot at too many times and had lost interest in supermarkets and exurban subdivisions and tonight is the PTA supper don’t forget dear you promised.

Oh, I wasn’t about to hole up in a monastery. I still wanted-

What did I want?

I wanted a Roc’s egg. I wanted a harem loaded with lovely odalisques less than the dust beneath my chariot wheels, the rust that never stained my sword. I wanted raw red gold in nuggets the size of your fist and feed that lousy claim jumper to the huskies! I wanted to get up feeling brisk and go out and break
some lances, Then pick a likely wench for my droit du seigneur–I wanted to stand up to the Baron and dare him to touch my wench! I wanted to hear the purple water chuckling against the skin of the Nancy Lee in the cool of the morning watch and not another sound, nor any movement save the slow tilling of the wings of the albatross that had been pacing us the last thousand miles.

I wanted the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I wanted Storisende and Poictesme, and Holmes shaking me awake to tell me, “The game’s afoot!” I wanted to float down the Mississippi on a raft and elude a mob in company with the Duke of Bilgewater and the Lost Dauphin.

I wanted Prester John, and Excalibur held by a moon-white arm out of a silent lake. I wanted to sail with Ulysses and with Tros of Samothrace and eat the lotus in a land that seemed always afternoon. I wanted the feeling of romance and the sense of wonder I had known as a kid. I wanted the world to be what they had promised me it was going to be–instead of the tawdry, lousy, fouled-up mess it is.

I had had one chance–for ten minutes yesterday afternoon. Helen of Troy, whatever your true name may be–And I had known it . . . aha I had let it slip away.

Maybe one chance is all you ever get.

The train pulled into Nice.

In the American Express office I went to the banking department and to my deposit box, found the ticket and checked the number against the Herald-Trib–XDY 34555, yes! To stop my trembling, I checked the other tickets and they were wastepaper, just as I thought. I shoved them back into the DOX and asked to see the manager.

I had a money problem and American Express is a bank, not just a travel bureau. I was ushered into the manager’s office and we exchanged names. “I need advice,” I said. “You see, I hold one of the winning Sweepstakes tickets.”

He broke into a grin. “Congratulations! You’re the first person in a long time who has come in here with good news rather than a complaint.”

“Thanks. Uh, my problem is this. I know that a ticket that draws a horse is worth quite a bit up until the race. Depending on the horse, of course.”

“Of course,” he agreed. “What horse did you draw?”

“A fairly good one. Lucky Star–and that’s what makes it tough. If I had drawn H-Bomb, or any of the three favorites–Well, you see how it is. I don’t know whether to sell or hang on, because I don’t know how to figure the odds. Do you know what is being offered for Lucky Star?”

He fitted his finger tips together. “Mr. Gordon, American Express does not give tips on horse races, nor broker the resale of Sweepstakes tickets. However–Do you have the ticket with you?”

I got it out and handed it to him. It had been through poker games and was sweat-marked and crumpled. But that lucky number was unmistakable.

He looked at it. “Do you have your receipt?”

“Not with me.” I started to explain that I had given my stepfathers address–and that my mail had been forwarded to Alaska. He cut me off. “That’s all right.” He touched a switch. “Alice, will you ask M’sieur Renault to step in?”

I was wondering if it really was all right. I had had the savvy to get names and new billets from the original ticket holders and each had promised to send his receipt to me when he got it–but no receipts had reached me. Maybe in Alaska–I had checked on this ticket while at the lockbox; it had been bought by a sergeant now in Stuttgart. Maybe I would have to pay him something or maybe I would have to break his arms.

M. Renault looked like a tired schoolteacher. “M’sieur Renault is our expert on this sort of thing,” the manager explained. “Will you let him examine your ticket, please?” The Frenchman looked at it, then his eyes lit up and be reached into a pocket, produced a jeweler’s loupe, screwed it into his eye. “Excellent!” he said approvingly. “One of the best. Hong Kong, perhaps?

“I bought it in Singapore.”

He nodded and smiled. “That follows.”

The manager was not smiling. He reached into his desk and brought out another Sweepstakes ticket and handed it to me. “Mr. Gordon, this one I bought at Monte Carlo. Will you compare it?”

They looked alike to me, except for serial numbers and the fact that his was crisp and clean. “What am I supposed to look for?”

“Perhaps this will help.” He offered me a large reading glass.

A Sweepstakes ticket is printed on special paper and has an engraved portrait on it and is done in several colors. It is a better job of engraving and printing than many countries use for paper money.

I learned long ago that you can’t change a deuce into an ace by staring at it. I handed back his ticket. “Mine is counterfeit.”

“I didn’t say so, Mr. Gordon. I suggest you get an outside opinion. Say at the office of the Bank of France.”

“I can see it. The engraving lines aren’t sharp and even on mine. They’re broken, some places. Under the glass the print job looks smeared.” I turned. “Right, M’sieur Renault?”

The expert gave a shrug of commiseration. “It is beautiful work, of its sort.”

I thanked them and got out. I checked with the Bank of France, not because I doubted the verdict but because you don’t have a. leg cut off, nor chuck away $140,000, without a second opinion. Their expert didn’t bother with a loupe. “Contrefait” he announced. “Worthless.”

It was impossible to get back to l’Ile du Levant that night. I had dinner and then looked up my former landlady. My broom closet was empty and she let me have it overnight. I didn’t lie awake long.

I was not as depressed as I thought I should be. I felt relaxed, almost relieved. For a while I had had the wonderful sensation of being rich–and I had had its complement, the worries of being rich–and both sensations were interesting and I didn’t care to repeat them, not right away.

Now I had no worries. The only thing to settle was when to go home, and with living so cheap on the island there was no hurry. The only thing that fretted me was that rushing off to Nice might have caused me to miss “Helen of Troy,” cette grande blonde! Si grande . . . si belle . . . si majestueuse! I fell asleep thinking of her.

I had intended to catch the early train, then the first boat. But the day before had used up most of the money on me and I had goofed by failing to get cash while at American Express. Besides, I had not asked for mail. I didn’t expect any, other than from my mother and possibly my aunt–the only close friend I had had in the Army had been killed six months back. Still, I might as well pick up mail as long as I had to wait for money.

So I treated myself to a luxury breakfast. The French think that a man can face the day with chicory and milk, and a croissant, which probably accounts for their unstable politics. I picked a sidewalk cafe by a big kiosk, the only one in Nice that stocked The Stars & Stripes and where the Herald-Trib would be on sale as soon as it was in; ordered a melon, cafe complet for TWO, and an omelette aux herbes fines; and sat back to enjoy life.

When the Herald-Trib arrived, it detracted from my sybaritic pleasure. The headlines were worse than ever and reminded me that I was still going to have to cope with the world; I couldn’t stay on l’Ile du Levant forever.

But why not stay there as long as possible? I still did not want to go to school, and that three-car-garage ambition was as dead as that Sweepstakes ticket. If World War III was about to shift to a rolling boil, there was no point in being an engineer at six or eight thousand a year in Santa Monica only to be caught in the fire storm.

It would be better to live it up, gather ye rosebuds, carpe that old diem, with dollars and days at hand, then–Well, join the Marine Corps maybe, like my dad.

I refolded the paper to the “Personals” column.

They were pretty good. Besides the usual offers of psychic readings and how to learn yoga and the veiled messages from one set of initials to another there were several that were novel. Such as-

REWARD!! Are you contemplating suicide? Assign to me the lease on your apartment and I will make your last clays lavish. Box 323, H-T

Or: Hindu gentleman, non-vegetarian, wishes to meet cultured European, African, or Asian lady owning sports car. Object: improving international relations. Box 107

How do you do that in a sports car?

One was ominous–Hermaphrodites of the World, Arise! You have nothing to lose but your chains. Tel. Opera 59-09

The next one started: ARE YOU A COWARD?

Well, yes, certainly. If possible. If allowed a free choice. I read on:

ARE YOU A COWARD? This is not for you. We badly need a brave man. He must be 23 to 25 years old, in perfect health, at least six feet tall, weigh about 190 pounds, fluent English with some French, proficient with all weapons, some knowledge of engineering and mathematics essential, willing to travel, no family or emotional ties, indomitably courageous and handsome of face and figure. Permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger. You must apply in person, 17, rue Dante, Nice, 2me etage, appt. D.

I read that requirement about face and figure with strong relief. For a giddy moment it had seemed as if someone with a skewed sense of humor had aimed a shaggy joke right at me. Somebody who knew my habit of reading the “Personals.”

That address was only a hundred yards from where I was sitting. I read the ad again.

Then I paid the addition, left a careful tip, went to the kiosk and bought The Stars & Stripes, walked to American Express, got money and picked up my mail, and on to the railroad station. It was over an hour until the next train to Toulon, so I went into the bar, ordered a beer and sat down to read.

Mother was sorry I had missed them in Wiesbaden. Her letter itemized the children’s illnesses, the high prices in Alaska, and expressed regret that they had ever had to leave Germany. I shoved it into my pocket and picked up The Stars & Stripes.

Presently I was reading: ARE YOU A COWARD?–same ad, right to the end.

I threw the paper down with a growl.

There were three other letters. One invited me to contribute to the athletic association of my ex-college; the second offered to advise me in the selection of my investments at a special rate of only $48 a year; the last was a plain envelope without a stamp, evidently handed in at American Express.

It contained only a newspaper clipping, starting: ARE You A COWARD?

It was the same as the other two ads except that in the last sentence one word had been underlined: You must apply in person-

I splurged on a cab to rue Dante. If I hurried, there was time to untangle this hopscotch and still catch the Toulon train. No. 17 was a walk-up; I ran up and, as I approached suite D, I met a young man coming out. He was six feet tall, handsome of face and figure, and looked as if he might be a hermaphrodite.

The lettering on the door read: DR. BALSAMO–HOURS BY APPOINTMENT, in both French and English. The name sounded familiar and vaguely phony out I did not stop to figure it out; I pushed on in.

The office inside was cluttered in a fashion known only to old French lawyers and pack rats. Behind the desk was a gnome-like character with a merry smile, hard eyes, the pinkest face and scalp I’ve ever seen, and a fringe of untidy white hair. He looked at me and giggled. “Welcome! So you are a hero?” Suddenly he whipped out a revolver half as long as he was and just as heavy and pointed it at me. You could have driven a Volkswagen down its snout.

“I’m not a hero,” I said nastily. “I’m a coward. I just came here to find out what the joke is.” I moved sideways while slapping that monstrous piece of ordnance the other way, chopped his wrist, and caught it. Then I handed it back to him. “Don’t play with that thing, or I’ll shove it up your deposition. I’m in a hurry. You’re Doctor Balsamo? You ran that ad?”

“Tut, tut,” he said, not at all annoyed. “Impetuous youth. No, Doctor Balsamo is in there.” He pointed his eyebrows at two doors on the left waft, then pushed a bell button on his desk–the only thing in the room later than Napoleon. “Go in. She’s expecting you.”

” ‘She’? Which door?”

“Ah, the Lady or the Tiger? Does it matter? In the long run? A hero will know. A coward will choose the wrong one, being sure that I lie. Allez-y! Vite, vite! Schnell! Get the lead out, Mac.”

I snorted and jerked open the right-hand door.

The doctor was standing with her back to me at some apparatus against the far wall and she was wearing one of those white, high-collared jackets favored by medical men. On my left was a surgeon’s examining table, on my right a Swedish-modern couch; there were stainless-steel and glass cabinets, and some framed certificates; the whole place was as up-to-date at the outer room was not.

As I closed the door she turned and looked at me and said quietly, “I am very glad that you have come.” Then she smiled and said softly, “You are beautiful,” and came into my arms.

Chapter 4

About a minute and forty seconds and several centuries later “Dr. Balsamo-Helen of Troy” pulled her mouth an inch back from mine and said, “Let me go, please, then undress and lie on the examining table.” I felt as if I had had nine hours of sleep, a needle shower, and three slugs of ice-cold akvavit on an empty stomach. Anything she wanted to do, I wanted to do. But the situation seemed to call for witty repartee. “Huh?” I said.

“Please. You are the one, but nevertheless I must examine you.”

“Well . . . all right,” I agreed. “You’re the doctor,” I added and started to unbutton my shirt. “You are a doctor? Of medicine, I mean.” “Yes. Among other things.”

I kicked out of my shoes. “But why do you want to examine me?”

“For witches’ marks, perhaps. Oh, I shan’t find any, I know. But I must search for other things, too. To protect you.”

That table was cold against my skin. Why don’t they pad those things? “Your name is Balsamo?”

“One of my names,” she said absently while gentle fingers touched me here and there. “A family name, that is.”

“Wait a minute. Count Cagliostro!”

“One of my uncles. Yes, he used that name. Though it isn’t truly his, no more than Balsamo. Uncle Joseph is a very naughty man and quite untruthful.” She touched an old, small scar. “Your appendix has been removed.”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let me see your teeth.”

I opened wide. My face may not be much but I could rent my teeth to advertise Pepsodent. Presently she nodded. “Fluoride marks. Good. Now I must have your blood.”

She could have bitten me in the neck for it and I wouldn’t have minded. Nor been much surprised. But she did it the ordinary way, taking ten cc. from the vein inside my left elbow. She took the sample and put it in that apparatus against the wall. It chirred and whirred and she came back to me. “Listen,

Princess,” I said.

“I am not a princess.”

“Well . . . I don’t know your first name, and you inferred that your last name isn’t really ‘Balsamo’–and I don’t want to call you ‘Doc.’ ” I certainly did not want to call her “Doc”–not the most beautiful girl I had ever seen or hoped to see . . . not after a kiss that had wiped out of memory every other kiss I had ever received. No.

She considered it. “I have many names. What would you like to call me?”

“Is one of them ‘Helen’?”

She smiled like sunshine and I learned that she had dimples. She looked sixteen and in her first party

dress. “You are very gracious. No, she’s not even a relative. That was many, many years ago.” Her face turned thoughtful. “Would you like to call me ‘Ettarre’?”

“Is that one of your names?”

“It is much like one of them, allowing for different spelling and accent. Or it could be ‘Esther’ just as closely. Or ‘Aster.’ Or even ‘Estrellita.’ ”

” ‘Aster,’ ” I repeated. “Star. Lucky Star!”

“I hope that I will be your lucky star,” she said earnestly. “As you will. But what shall I call you?”

I thought about it. I certainly was not going to dig up “Flash–I am not a comic strip. The Army nickname I had held longest was entirely unfit to hand to a lady. At that I preferred it to my given name. My daddy had been proud of a couple of his ancestors–but is that any excuse for hanging “Evelyn Cyril” on a male child? It had forced me to Team to fight before I learned to read.

The name I had picked up in the hospital ward would do. I shrugged. “Oh, Scar is a good enough name.”

” ‘Oscar,’ ” she repeated, broadening the “O” into “Aw,” and stressing both syllables. “A noble name. A hero’s name. Oscar.” She caressed it with her voice.

“No, no! Not ‘Oscar’–‘Scar.’ ‘Scarface.’ For this.”

“Oscar is your name,” she said firmly. “Oscar and Aster. Scar and Star.” She barely touched the scar. “Do you dislike your hero’s mark? Shall I remove it?”

“En? Oh, no. I’m used to it now. It lets me know who it is when I see myself in a mirror.”

“Good. I like it, you wore it when I first saw you. But if you change your mind, let me know.” The gear against the wall went whush, chunk! She turned and took a long strip from it, then whistled softly while she studied it.

“This won’t take long,” she said cheerfully and wheeled the apparatus over to the table. “Hold still while the protector is connected with you, quite still and breathe shallowly.” She made half a dozen connections of tubes to me; they stuck where she placed them. She put over her head what I thought was a fancy stethoscope but after she got it on, it covered her eyes.

She chuckled. “You’re pretty inside, too, Oscar. No, don’t talk.” She kept one hand on my forearm and I waited.

Five minutes later she lifted her hand and stripped off the connections. “That’s all,” she said cheerfully. “No more colds for you, my hero, and you won’t be bothered again by that flux you picked up in the jungle. Now we move to the other room.”

I got off the table and grabbed at my clothes. Star said, “You won’t need them where we are going. Full kit and weapons will be provided.”

I stopped with shoes in one hand and drawers in the other. “Star–”

“Yes, Oscar?”

“What is this all about? Did you run that ad? Was it meant for me? Did you really want to hire me for something?”

She took a deep breath and said soberly, “I advertised. It was meant for you and you only. Yes, there is a job to do . . . as my champion. There will be great adventure . . . and greater treasure . . . and even greater danger–and I fear very much that neither one of us will live through it.” She looked me in the eyes. “Well, sir?”

I wondered how long they had had me in the locked ward. But I didn’t tell her so, because, if that was where I was, she wasn’t there at all. And I wanted her to be there, more than I had ever wanted anything. I said, “Princess . . . you’ve hired yourself a boy.”

She caught her breath. “Come quickly. Time is short.” She led me through a door beyond the Swedish modern couch, unbuttoning her jacket, unzipping her skirt, as she went, and letting garments fall anywhere. Almost at once she was as I had first seen her at the plage.

This room had dark walls and no windows and a soft light from nowhere. There were two tow couches side by side, black they were and looking like biers, and no other furniture. As soon as the door was dosed behind us I was suddenly aware that the room was aching, painfully anechoic; the bare walls gave back no sound.

The couches were in the center of a circle which was part of a large design, in chalk, or white paint, on bare floor. We entered the pattern; she turned and squatted down and completed one line, closing it–and ft was true; she was unable to be awkward, even hunkered down, even with her breasts drooping
as she leaned over.

“What is it?” I asked.

“A map to take us where we are going.”

“It looks more like a pentagram.”

She shrugged. “All right, it is a pentacle of power. A schematic circuit diagram would be a better tag. But, my hero, I can’t stop to explain it. Lie down, please, at once.”

I took the right-hand couch as she signed me, but I couldn’t let ft be. “Star, are you a witch?”

“If you like. Please, no talking now.” She lay down, stretched out her hand. “And join hands with me, my lord; it is necessary.”

Her hand was soft and warm and very strong. Presently the light faded to red, then died away. I slept.

Chapter 5

I woke to singing birds.

Her hand was still in mine. I turned my head and she smiled at me. “Good morning, my lord.”

“Good morning. Princess.” I glanced around. We were still lying on those black couches but they were outdoors, in a grassy dell, a clearing in trees beside a softly chuckling stream–a place so casually beautiful that it looked as if it had been put together leaf by leaf by old and unhurried Japanese gardeners.

Warm sunshine splashed through leaves and dappled her golden body. I glanced up at the sun and back at her. “Is it morning?” It had been noonish or later and that sun ought to DC–seemed to be–setting, not rising-

“It is again morning, here.”

Suddenly my bump of direction spun like a top and I felt dizzy. Disoriented–a feeling new to me and very unpleasant. I couldn’t find north.

Then things steadied down. North was that way, upstream–and the sun was rising, maybe nine in the morning, and would pass across the north sky. Southern Hemisphere. No sweat.

No trick at all–Just give the kook a shot of dope while examining him, lug him aboard a 707 and jet him to New Zealand, replenishing the Mickey Finn as needed. Wake him up when you want him.

Only I didn’t say this and never did think it. And it wasn’t true.

She sat up. “Are you hungry?”

I suddenly realized that an omelet some hours ago–how many? –was not enough for a growing boy. I sat up and swung my feet to the grass. “I could eat a horse.”
She grinned. “The shop of La Societe Anonyme de Hippopnage is closed I’m afraid. Will you settle for trout? We must wait a bit, so we might as well eat. And don’t worry, this place is defended.”

” ‘Defended’?”

“Safe.”

“All right. Uh, how about a rod and hooks?”

“I’ll show you.” What she showed me was not fishing tackle but how to tickle fish. But I knew how. We waded into that lovely stream, just pleasantly cool, moving as quietly as possible, and picked a place under a bulging rock, a place where trout like to gather and think–the fishy equivalent of a gentlemen’s club.

You tickle trout by gaining their confidence and then abusing it. In about two minutes I got one, between two and three pounds, and tossed it onto the bank, and Star had one almost as large. “How much can you eat?” she asked.

“Climb out and get dry,” I said. “I’ll get another one.”

“Make it two or three,” she amended. “Rufo will be along.” She waded quietly out.

“Who?”

“Your groom.”

I didn’t argue. I was ready to believe seven impossible things before breakfast, so I went on catching breakfast. I let it go with two more as the last was the biggest trout I’ve ever seen. Those beggars fairly queued up to be grabbed.

By then Star had a fire going and was cleaning fish with a sharp rock. Shucks, any Girl Scout or witch can make fire without matches. I could myself, given several hours and plenty of luck, just by rubbing two dry cliches together. But I noticed that the two short biers were gone. Well, I hadn’t ordered them. I
squatted down and took over cleaning the trout.

Star came back shortly with fruits that were apple-like but deep purple in color and with quantities of button mushrooms. She was carrying the plunder on a broad leaf, like canna or ti, only bigger. More like banana leaves.

My mouth started to water. “If only we had salt!”

“I’ll fetch it. It will be rather gritty. I’m afraid.”

Star broiled the fish two ways, over the fire on a forked green stick, and on hot flat limestone where he fire had been–she kept brushing the fire along as she fed it and placed fish and mushrooms sizing where it had been. That way was best, I thought. Little fine grasses turned out to be chives, local style, and tiny clover tasted and looked like sheep sorrel. That, with the salt (which was gritty and coarse and may have been licked by animals before we got it–not that I cared) made the trout the best I’ve ever tasted. Well, weather and scenery and company had much to do with it, too, especially the company.

I was trying to think of a really poetic way of saying, “How about you and me shacking up right here for the next ten thousand years? Either legal or informal–are you married?” when we were interrupted. Which was a shame, for I had thought up some pretty language, all new, for the oldest and most practical
suggestion in the world.

Old baldy, the gnome with the oversized six-shooter, was standing behind me and cursing.

I was sure it was cursing although the language was new to me. Star turned her head, spoke in quiet reproval in the same language, made room for him and offered him a trout. He took it and ate quite a bit of it before he said, in English, “Next time I won’t pay him anything. You’ll see.”

“You shouldn’t try to cheat him, Rufo. Have some mushrooms. Where’s the baggage? I want to get dressed.”

“Over there.” He went back to wolfing fish. Rufo was proof that some people should wear clothes. He was pink all over and somewhat potbellied. However, he was amazingly well muscled, which I had never suspected, else I would have been more cautious about taking that cannon away from him. I decided that
if he wanted to Indian-wrestle, I would cheat.

He glanced at me past a pound and a half of trout and said, “Is it your wish to be outfitted now, my lord?”

“Huh? Finish your breakfast. And what’s this ‘my lord’ routine? Last time I saw you you were waving a gun in my face.”

“I’m sorry, my lord. But She said to do it . . . and what She says must be done. You understand.”

“That suits me perfectly. Somebody has to drive. But call me ‘Oscar.’ ”

Rufo glanced at Star, she nodded. He grinned. “Okay, Oscar. No hard feelings?”

“Not a bit.”

He put down the fish, wiped his hand on his thigh, and stuck it out. “Swell! You knock em down, I’ll stomp on ’em.”

We shook hands and each of us tried for the knuckle-cracking grip. I think I got a little the better of it, but I decided he might have been a blacksmith at some time.

Star looked very pleased and showed dimples again She had been lounging by the fire; looking line a hamadryad on her coffee break; now she suddenly reached out and placed her strong, slender hand over our clasped fists. “My stout friends,” she said earnestly. “My good boys. Rufo, it will be well.”

“You have a Sight?” he said eagerly.

“No, just a feeling. But I am no longer worried.”

“We can’t do a thing,” Rufo said moodily, “until we deal with Igli.”

“Oscar will dicker with Igli.” Then she was on her feet in one smooth motion. “Stuff that fish in your face and unpack. I need clothes.” She suddenly looked very eager.

Star was more different women than a platoon of WACs–which is only mildly a figure of speech. Right then she was every woman from Eve deciding between two fig leaves to a modern woman whose ambition is to be turned loose in Nieman-Marcus, naked with a checkbook. When I first met her, she had seemed rather a sobersides and no more interested in clothes than I was. I’d never had a chance to be interested in clothes. Being a member of the sloppy generation was a boon to my budget at college, where blue jeans were au fait and a dirty sweat shirt was stylish.

The second time I saw her she had been dressed, but in that lab smock and tailored skirt she had been both a professional woman and a warm friend. But today–this morning whenever that was–she was increasingly full of Bubbles. She had delighted so in catching fish that she had had to smother squeals of glee. And she had then been the perfect Girl Scout, with soot smudged on her cheek and her hair pushed back out of hazard of the fire while she cooked.

Now she was the woman of all ages who just has to get her hands on new clothes. I felt that dressing Star was like putting a paint job on the crown jewels–but I was forced to admit that, if we were not to do the “Me Tarzan, you Jane” bit right in that dell from then on till death do us part, then clothes of some sort, if only to keep her perfect skin from getting scratched by brambles, were needed.

Rufo’s baggage turned out to be a little black box about the size and shape of a portable typewriter. He opened it.

And opened it again.

And Kept on opening it–And kept right on unfolding its sides and letting them down until the durn thing was the size of a small moving van and even more packed. Since I was nicknamed “Truthful James” as soon as I learned to talk and am widely known to have won the hatchet every February 22nd all through school, you must now conclude that I was the victim of an illusion caused by hypnosis and/or drugs.

Me, I’m not sure. Anyone who has studied math knows that the inside does not have to be smaller than the outside, in theory, and anyone who has had the doubtful privilege of seeing a fat woman get in or out of a tight girdle knows that this is true in practice, too. Rufo’s baggage just carried the principle further.

The first thing he dragged out was a big teakwood chest. Star opened it and started pulling out filmy lovelies.

“Oscar, what do you think of this one?” She was holding a long, green dress against her with the skirt draped over one hip to display it. “Like it?”

Of course I liked it. If it was an original–and somehow I knew that Star never wore copies–I didn’t want to think about what it must have cost. “It’s a mighty pretty gown,” I told her. “But–Look, are we going to be traveling?”

“Right away.”

“I don’t see any taxicabs. Aren’t you likely to get that torn?”

“It doesn’t tear. However, I didn’t mean to wear it; I just meant to show it to you. Isn’t it lovely? Shall I model it for you? Rufo, I want those high-heeled sandals with the emeralds.”

Rufo answered in that language he had been cursing in when he arrived. Star shrugged and said, “Don’t be impatient, Rufo; Igli will wait. Anyhow, we can’t talk to Igli earlier than tomorrow morning; milord Oscar must learn the language first.” But she put the green gorgeousness back in the chest.

“Now here is a little number,” she went on, holding it up, “which is just plain naughty: it has no other purpose.”

I could see why. It was mostly skirt, with a little bodice that supported without concealing–a style favored in ancient Crete, I hear, and still popular in the Overseas Weekly, Playboy, and many night clubs. A style that turns droopers into bulgers. Not that Star needed it.

Rufo tapped me on the shoulder. “Boss? Want to look over the ordnance and pick out what you need?”

Star said reprovingly, “Rufo, life is to be savored, not hurried.”

“We’ll have a lot more life to savor if Oscar picks out what he can use best.”

“He won’t need weapons until after we reach a settlement with Igli.” But she didn’t insist on showing more clothes and, while I enjoyed looking at Star, I like to check over weapons, too, especially when I might have to use them, as apparently the job called for.

While I had been watching Star’s style show, Rufo had laid out a collection that looked like a cross between an army-surplus store and a museum–swords, pistols, a lance that must have been twenty feet long, a flame-thrower, two bazookas flanking a Tommy gun, brass knucks, a machete, grenades, bows and arrows, a misericorde-

“You didn’t bring a slingshot,” I said accusingly.

He looked smug. “Which kind do you like, Oscar? The forked sort? Or a real sling?”

“Sorry I mentioned it. I can’t hit the floor with either sort.” I picked up the Tommy chopper, checked that it was empty, started stripping it. It seemed almost new, just fired enough to let the moving parts work in. A Tommy isn’t much more accurate than a pitched baseball and hasn’t much greater effective range. But it does have virtues–you hit a man with it, he goes down and stays down. It is short and not too heavy and has a lot of firepower for a short time. It is a bush weapon, or for any other sort of close-quarters work.

But I like something with a bayonet on the end, in case the party gets intimate–and I like that something to be accurate at long range in case the neighbors get unfriendly from a distance. I put it down and picked up a Springfield–Rock Island Arsenal, as I saw by its serial number, but still a Springfield. I feel the way about a Springfield that I do about a Gooney Bird; some pieces of machinery are ultimate perfection of their sort, the only possible improvement is a radical change in design.

I opened the bolt, stuck my thumbnail in the chamber, looked down the muzzle. The barrel was bright and the lands were unworn–and the muzzle had that tiny star on it; it was a match weapon!

“Rufo, what sort of country will we be going through? Like this around us?”

“Today, yes. But–” He apologetically took the rifle out of my hands. “It is forbidden to use firearms here. Swords, Knives, arrows–anything that cuts or stabs or mauls by your own muscle power. No guns.”

“Who says so?”

He shivered. “Better ask Her.”

“If we can’t use them, why bring them? And I don’t see any ammunition around anyhow.”

“Plenty of ammunition. Later on we will be at–another place–where guns may be used. If we live that long. I was just showing you what we have. What do you like of the lawful weapons? Are you a bowman?”

“I don’t know. Show me how.” He started to say something, then shrugged and selected a bow, slipped a leather guard over his left forearm, picked out an arrow. “That tree,” he said, “the one with the white rock at the foot of it. I’ll try for about as high off the ground as a man’s heart.”

He nocked the shaft, raised and bent and let fly, all in one smooth motion.

The arrow quivered in the tree trunk about four feet off the ground.

Rufo grinned. “Care to match that?”

I didn’t answer. I knew I could not, except by accident. I had once owned a bow, a birthday present. I hadn’t hit much with it and soon the arrows were lost. Nevertheless I made a production out of selecting a bow, and picked the longest and heaviest.

Rufo cleared his throat apologetically. “If I may make a suggestion, that one will pull quite hard–for a beginner.”

I strung it. “Find me a leather.”

The leather slipped on as if it had been made for me and perhaps it had. I picked an arrow to match, barely looked at it as they all seemed straight and true. I didn’t have any hope of hitting that bloody tree; it was fifty yards away and not over a foot thick. I simply intended to sight a bit high up on the trunk and hope that so heavy a bow would give me a flattish trajectory. Mostly I wanted to nock, bend, and loose all in one motion as Rufo had done–to look like Robin Hood even though I was not.

But as I raised and bent that bow and felt the power of it, I felt a surge of exultance–this tool was right for me! We fitted.

I let fly without thinking.

My shaft thudded a hand’s breadth from his.

“Well shot!” Star called out.

Rufo looked at the tree and blinked, then looked reproachfully at Star. She looked haughtily back. “I did not,” she stated. “You know I would not do that. It was a fair trial . . . and a credit to you both.”

Rufo looked thoughtfully at me. “Hmm–Would you care to make a small bet–you name the odds–that you can do that again?”

“I won’t bet,” I said. “I’m chicken.” But I picked up another arrow and nocked it. I liked that bow, I even liked the way the string whanged at the guard on my forearm; I wanted to try it, feel married to it, again.

I loosed it.

The third arrow grew out of a spot between the first two, but closer to his. “Nice bow,” I said. “I’ll keep it. Fetch the shafts.”

Rufo trotted away without speaking. I unstrung the bow, then started looking over the cutlery. I hoped that I would never again have to shoot an arrow; a gambler can’t expect to draw a pat hand every deal–my next shot would likely turn around like a boomerang.

There was too much wealth of edges and points, from a two-handed broadsword suitable for chopping down trees to a little dagger meant for a lady’s stocking. But I picked up and balanced them all . . . and found there the blade that suited me the way Excalibur suited Arthur.

I’ve never seen one quite like it so I don’t know what to call it. A saber, I suppose, as the blade was faintly curved and razor sharp on the edge and sharp rather far back on the back. But it had a point as deadly as a rapier and the curve was not enough to keep it from being used for thrust and counter quite as well as chopping away meat-axe style. The guard was a bell curved back around the knuckles into a semi-basket but cut away enough to permit full moulinet from any guard.

It balanced in the forte less than two inches from the guard, yet the blade was heavy enough to chop bone. It was the sort of sword that feels as if it were an extension of your body.

The grip was honest sharkskin, molded to my hand. There was a motto chased onto the blade but it was so buried in curlicues that I did not take time to study it out. This girl was mine, we fitted! I returned it and buckled belt and scabbard to my bare waist, wanting the touch of it and feeling like Captain John
Carter, Jeddak of Jeddaks, and the Gascon and his three friends all in one.

“Will you not dress, milord Oscar?” Star asked.

“Eh? Oh, certainly–I was just trying it on for size. But–Did Rufo fetch my clothes?”

“Did you, Rufo?”

“His clothes? He wouldn’t want those things he was wearing in Nice!”

“What’s wrong with wearing Lederhosen with an aloha shirt?” I demanded.

“What? Oh, nothing at all, milord Oscar,” Rufo answered hastily. “Live and let live I always say. I knew a man once who wore–never mind. Let me show you what I fetched for you.”

I had my choice of everything from a plastic raincoat to full armor. I found the latter depressing because its presence implied that it might be needed. Except for an Army helmet I had never worn armor, didn’t want to, didn’t know how–and didn’t care to mix with rude company that made such protection desirable.

Besides, I didn’t see a horse around, say a Percheron or a Clydesdale, and I couldn’t see myself hiking in one of those tin suits. I’d be slow as crutches, noisy as a subway, and hot as a phone booth. Sweat off ten pounds in five miles. The quilted longjohns that go under that ironmongery would have been too much
alone for such beautiful weather; steel on top would turn me into a walking oven and leave me too weak and clumsy to fight my way out of a traffic ticket.

“Star, you said that–” I stopped. She had finished dressing and hadn’t overdone it. Soft leather hiking shoes–buskins really–brown tights, and a short green upper garment halfway between a jacket and a skating dress. This was topped by a perky little hat and the whole costume made her look like a musical corner version of an airline hostess, smart, cute, wholesome, and sexy.

Or maybe Maid Marian, as she had added a double-curve bow about half the size of mine, a quiver, and a dagger. “You,” I said, “look like why the riot started.”

She dimpled and curtsied. (Star never pretended. She knew she was female, she knew she looked good, she liked it that way.) “You said something earlier,” I continued, “about my not needing weapons just yet. Is there any reason why I should wear one of these space suits? They don’t look comfortable.”

“I don’t expect any great danger today,” she said slowly. “But this is not a place where one can call the police. You must decide what you need.”

“But–Damn it. Princess, you know this place and I don’t. I need advice.”

She didn’t answer. I turned to Rufo. He was carefully studying a treetop. I said, “Rufo, get dressed.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Milord Oscar?”

“Schnell! Vite, vite! Get the lead out.”

“Okay.” He dressed quickly, in an outfit that was a man’s version of what Star had selected, with shorts instead of tights.

“Arm yourself,” I said, and started to dress the same way, except that I intended to wear field boots. However, there was a pair of those buskins that appeared to be my size, so I tried them on. They snuggled to my feet like gloves and, anyway, my soles were so hardened by a month barefooted on l’Ile du Levant that I didn’t need heavy boots.

They were not as medieval as they looked; they zipped up the front and were marked inside Fabrique en France.

Pops Rufo had taken the bow he had used before, selected a sword, and had added a dagger. Instead of a dagger I picked out a Solingen hunting knife. I looked longingly at a service .45, but didn’t touch it. If “they,” whoever they were, had a local Sullivan Act, I would go along with the gag.

Star told Rufo to pack, then squatted down with me at a sandy place by the stream and drew a sketch map–route south, dropping downgrade and following the stream except for short cuts, until we reached the Singing Waters. There we would camp for the night.

I got it in my head. “Okay. Anything to warn me about? Do we shoot first? Or wait for them to bomb us?”

“Nothing that I expect, today. Oh, there’s a carnivore about three times the size of a lion. But it is a great coward; it won’t attack a moving man.”

“A fellow after my own heart. All right, we’ll keep moving.”

“If we do see human beings–I don’t expect it–it might be well to nock a shaft . . . but not raise your bow until you feel it is necessary. But I’m not telling you what to do, Oscar; you must decide. Nor will Rufo let fly unless he sees you about to do so.”

Rufo had finished packing. “Okay, let’s go,” I said. We set out. Rufo’s little black box was now rigged as a knapsack and I did not stop to wonder how he could carry a couple of tons on his shoulders. An anti-grav device like Buck Rogers, maybe. Chinese coolie blood. Black magic. Hell, that teakwood chest alone could not have fitted into that backpack by a factor of 30 to I, not to mention the arsenal and assorted oddments.

There is no reason to wonder why I didn’t quiz Star as to where we were, why we were there, how we had got there, what we were going to do, and the details of these dangers I was expected to face. Look, Mac, when you are having the most gorgeous dream of your life and just getting to the point, do you stop to tell yourself that it is logically impossible for that particular babe to be in the hay with you–and thereby wake yourself up? I knew, logically, that everything that had happened since I read that silly ad had been impossible.

So I chucked logic.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. “Logic” proved that airplanes can’t fly and that H-bombs wont work and that stones don’t fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn’t happen yesterday won’t happen tomorrow.

I liked the situation. I didn’t want to wake up, whether in bed, or in a headshrinker ward. Most especially I did not want to wake up still back in that jungle, maybe with that face wound still fresh and no helicopter. Maybe little brown brother had done a full job on me and sent me to Valhalla. Okay, I
liked Valhalla.

I was swinging along with a sweet sword knocking against my thigh and a much sweeter girl matching my strides and a slave-serf-groom-something sweating along behind us, doing the carrying and being our “eyes-behind.” Birds were singing and the landscape had been planned by master landscape architects
and the air smelled sweet and good. If I never dodged a taxi nor read a headline again, that suited me.

That longbow was a nuisance–but so is an M-l. Star had her little bow slung, shoulder to hip. I tried that, but it tended to catch on things. Also, it made me nervous not to have it ready since she had admitted a chance of needing it. So I unslung it and carried it in my left hand, strung and ready.

We had one alarum on the morning hike. I heard Rufo’s bowstring go thwung! –and I whirled and had my own bow ready, arrow nocked, before I saw what was up.

Or down, rather. A bird like a dusky grouse but larger. Rufo had picked it off a branch, right through the neck. I made note not to compete with him again in archery, and to get him to coach me in the fine points.

He smacked his lips and grinned. “Supper!” For the next mile he plucked it as we walked, then hung it from his belt.

We stopped for lunch one o’clockish at a picnic spot that Star assured me was defended, and Rufo opened his box to suitcase size, and served us lunch: cola cuts, crumbly Provencal cheese, crusty French bread, pears, and two bottles of Chablis. After lunch Star suggested a siesta. The idea was appealing; I had eaten heartily and shared only crumbs with the birds, but I was surprised. “Shouldn’t we push on?”

“You must have a language lesson, Oscar.”

I must tell them at Ponce de Leon High School the better way to study languages. You lie down on soft grass near a chuckling stream on a perfect day, and the most beautiful woman in any world bends over you and looks you in the eyes. She starts speaking softly in a language you do not understand.

After a bit her big eyes get bigger and bigger . . . and bigger . . . and you sink into them.

Then, a long time later, Rufo says, “Erbas, Oscar, ‘t knila voorsht.”

“Okay,” I answered, “I am getting up. Don’t rush me.”

That is the last word I am going to set down in a language that doesn’t fit our alphabet. I had several more lessons, and won’t mention them either, and from then on we spoke this lingo, except when I was forced to span gaps by asking in English. It is a language rich in profanity and in words for making love, and richer than English in some technical subjects–but with surprising holes in it. There is no word for “lawyer” for example.

About an hour before sundown we came to the Singing Waters.

We had been traveling over a high, wooded plateau. The brook where we had caught the trout had been joined by other streams and was now a big creek. Below us, at a place we hadn’t reached yet, it would plunge over high cliffs in a super-Yosemite fall. But here, where we stopped to camp, the water had cut a notch into the plateau, forming cascades, before it took that dive.

“Cascades” is a weak word. Upstream, downstream, everywhere you looked, you saw waterfalls–big ones thirty or fifty feet high, little ones a mouse could have jumped up, every size in between. Terraces and staircases of them there were, smooth water green from rich foliage overhead and water white as whipped cream as it splashed into dense foam.

And you heard them. Tiny falls tinkled in silvery soprano, big falls rumbled in basso profundo. On the grassy alp where we camped it was an ever-present chorale; in the middle of the falls you had to snout to make yourself heard.

Coleridge was there in one of his dope dreams:

And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil
seething-

Coleridge must have followed that route and reached the Singing Waters. No wonder he felt like killing that “person from Porlock” who broke in on his best dream. When I am dying, lay me beside the Singing Waters and let them be the last I hear and see.

We stopped on a lawn terrace, flat as a promise and soft as a Kiss, and I helped Rufo unpack. I wanted to learn how he did that trick with the box. I didn’t find out. Each side opened as naturally and reasonably as opening up an ironing board–and then when it opened again that was natural and reasonable, too.

First we pitched a tent for Star–no army-surplus job, this; it was a dainty pavilion of embroidered silk and the rug we spread as a floor must have used up three generations of Bukhara artists. Rufo said to me, “Do you want a tent, Oscar?”

I looked up at the sky and over at the not-yet-setting sun. The air was milk warm and I couldn’t believe that it would rain. I don’t like to be in a tent if there is the least chance of surprise attack. “Are you going to use a tent?”

“Me? Oh, no! But She has to have a tent, always. Then, more likely than not. She’ll decade to sleep out on the grass.”

“I won’t need a tent.” (Let’s see, does a “champion” sleep across the door of his lady’s chamber, weapons at hand? I wasn’t sure about the etiquette of such things; they were never mentioned in “Social Studies.”)

She returned then and said to Rufo, “Defended. The wards were all in place.”

“Recharged?” he fretted.

She tweaked his ear. “I am not senile.” She added, “Soap, Rufo. And come along, Oscar; that’s Rufo’s work.”

Rufo dug a cake of Lux out of that caravan load and gave it to her, then looked at me thoughtfully and handed me a bar of Life Buoy.

The Singing Waters are the best bath ever, in endless variety. Still pools from footbath size to plunges you could swim in, sitz baths that tingled your skin, shower baths from just a trickle up to free-springing jets that would beat your brains in if you stood under them too long.

And you could pick your temperature. Above the cascade we used, a hot spring added itself to the main stream and at the base of this cascade a hidden spring welled out icy cold. No need to fool with taps, just move one way or the other for the temperature you like–or move downstream where it evened out to temperature as gently warm as a mother’s kiss.

We played for a while, with Star squealing and giggling when I splashed her, and answering it by ducking me. We both acted like kids; I felt like one, she looked like one, and she played rough, with muscles of steel under velvet.

Presently I fetched the soap and we scrubbed. When she started shampooing her hair, I came up behind her and helped. She let me, she needed help with the lavish mop, six times as much as most gals bother with these days.

That would have been a wonderful time (with Rufo busy and out of the way) to grab her and hug her, then proceed ruggedly to other matters. Nor am I sure that she would nave made even a token protest; she might have cooperated heartily.

Hell, I know she would not have made a “token” protest. She would either have put me in my place with a cold word or a clout in the ear–or cooperated.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t even start.

I don’t know why. My intentions toward Star had oscillated from dishonorable to honorable and back again, but had always been practical from the moment I laid eyes on her. No, let me put it this way: My intentions were strictly dishonorable always, but with utter willingness to convert them to honorable, later, as soon as we could dig up a justice of the peace.

Yet I found I couldn’t lay a finger on her other than to help her scrub the soap out of her hair.

While I was puzzling over this, both hands buried in heavy blond hair and wondering what was stopping me from putting my arms around that slender-strong waist only inches away from me, I heard a piercing whistle and my name–my new name. I looked around.

Rufo, dressed in his unlovely skin and with towels over his shoulder, was standing on the bank ten feet away and trying to cut through the roar of water to get my attention.

I moved a few feet toward him. “How’s that again?” I didn’t quite snarl.

“I said, ‘Do you want a shave?’ Or are you growing a beard?”

I had been uneasily aware of my face cactus while I was debating whether or not to attempt criminal assault, and that unease had helped to stop me–Gillette, Aqua Velva, Burma Shave, et al., have made the browbeaten American male, namely me, timid about attempting seduction and/or rape unless freshly planed off. And I had a two-day growth.

“I don’t have a razor,” I called back.

He answered by holding up a straight razor.

Star moved up beside me. She reached up and tried my chin between thumb and forefinger. “You would be majestic in a beard,” she said. “Perhaps a Van Dyke, with sneering mustachios.”

I thought so too, if she thought so. Besides, it would cover most of that scar. “Whatever you say. Princess.”

“But I would rather that you stayed as I first saw you. Rufo is a good barber.” She turned toward him. “A hand, Rufo. And my towel.”

Star walked back toward the camp, toweling herself dry–I would have been glad to help, if asked. Rufo said tiredly, “Why didn’t you assert yourself? But She says to shave you, so now I’ve got to–and rush through my own bath, too, so She won’t be kept waiting.”

“If you’ve got a mirror, I’ll do it myself.”

“Ever used a straight razor?”

“No, but I can learn.”

“You’d cut your throat, and She wouldn’t like that. Over here on the bank where I can stand in the warm water. No, no! Don’t sit on it, lie down with your head at the edge. I can’t shave a man who’s sitting up.” He started working lather into my chin.

“You know why? I learned how on corpses, that’s why, making them pretty so that their loved ones would be proud of them. Hold still! You almost lost an ear. I like to shave corpses; they can’t complain, they don’t make suggestions, they don’t talk back–and they always hold still. Best job I ever had. But now you take this job–” He stopped with the blade against my Adam’s apple and started counting his troubles.

“Do I get Saturday off? Hell, I don t even get Sunday off! And look at the hours! Why, I read just the other day that some outfit in New York–You’ve been in New York?”

“I’ve been in New York. And get that guillotine away from my neck while you’re waving your hands like that.”

“You keep talking, you’re bound to get a little nick now and then. This outfit signed a contract for a twenty-five hour week. Week! I’d like to settle for a twenty-five hour day. You know how long I’ve been on the go, right this minute?”

I said I didn’t.

“There, you talked again. More than seventy hours or I’m a liar! And for what? Glory? Is there glory in a little heap of whitened bones? Wealth? Oscar, I’m telling you the truth; I’ve laid out more corpses than a sultan has concubines and never a one of them cared a soggy pretzel whether they were bedecked in rubies the size of your nose and twice as red . . . or rags. What use is wealth to a dead man? Tell me, Oscar, man to man while She can’t hear: Why did you ever let Her talk you into this?”

“I’m enjoying it, so far.”

He sniffed. “That’s what the man said as be passed the fiftieth floor of the Empire State Building. But the sidewalk was waiting for him, just the same. However,” he added darkly, “until you settle with Igli, it’s not a problem. If I had my kit, I could cover that scar so perfectly that everybody would say, ‘Doesn’t he look natural?’ ”

“Never mind. She likes that scar.” (Damn it, he had me doing it!)

“She would. What I’m trying to get over is, if you walk the Glory Road, you are certain to find mostly rocks. But I never chose to walk it. My idea of a nice way to live would be a quiet little parlor, the only one in town, with a selection of caskets, all prices, and a markup that allowed a little leeway to show
generosity to the bereaved. Installment plans for those with the foresight to do their planning in advance–for we all have to die, Oscar, we all have to die, and a sensible man might as well sit down over a friendly glass of beer and make his plans with a well-established firm he can trust.”

He leaned confidentially over me. “Look, milord Oscar . . . if by any miracle we get through this alive, you could put in a good word for me with Her. Make Her see that I’m too old for the Glory Road. I can do a lot to make your remaining days comfortable and pleasant . . . if your intentions toward me are comradely.”

“Didn’t we shake on it?”

“Ah, yes, so we did.” He sighed. “One for all and all for one, and Pikes Peak or Bust. You’re done.”

It was still light and Star was in her tent when we got back–and my clothes were laid out. I started to object when I saw them but Rufo said firmly, “She said ‘informal’ and that means black tie.”

I managed everything, even the studs (which were amazing big black pearls), and that tuxedo either had been tailored for me or it had been bought off the rack by someone who knew my height, weight, shoulders, and waist. The label inside the jacket read The English House, Copenhagen.

But the tie whipped me. Rufo showed up while I was struggling with it, had me lie down (I didn’t ask why) and tied it in a jiffy. “Do you want your watch, Oscar?”

“My watch?” So far as I knew it was in a doctors examining room in Nice. “You have it?”

“Yes, sir. I fetched everything of yours but your”–he shuddered–“clothes.”

He was not exaggerating. Everything was there, not only the contents of my pockets but the contents of my American Express deposit box: cash, passport, I.D., et cetera, even those Change Alley Sweepstakes tickets.

I started to ask how he had gotten into my lockbox but decided not to. He had had the key and it might have been something as simple as a fake letter of authority. Or as complex as his magical black box. I thanked him and he went back to his cooking.

I started to throw that stuff away, all but cash and passport. But one can’t be a litterbug in a place as beautiful as the Singing Waters. My sword belt had a leather pouch on it; I stuffed it in there, even the watch, which had stopped.

Rufo had set up a table in front of Star’s dainty tent and rigged a light from a tree over it and set candles on the table. It was dark before she came out . . . and waited. I finally realized that she was waiting for my arm. I led her to her place and seated her and Rufo seated me. He was dressed in a plum-colored footman’s uniform.

The wait for Star had been worth it; she was dressed in the green gown she had offered to model for me earlier. I still don’t know that she used cosmetics but she looked not at all like the lusty Undine who had been ducking me an hour earlier. She looked as if she should be kept under glass. She looked like Liza Doolittle at the Ball.

“Dinner in Rio” started to play, blending with the Singing Waters.

White wine with fish, rose wine with fowl, red wine with roast–Star chatted and smiled and was witty. Once Rufo, while bending over to me to serve, whispered, “The condemned ate heartily.” I told him to go to hell out of the corner of my mouth.

Champagne with the sweet and Rufo solemnly presented the bottle for my approval. I nodded. What would he have done if I had turned it down? Offered another vintage? Napolean with coffee. And cigarettes.

I had been thinking about cigarettes all day. These were Benson & Hedges No. 5 . . . and I had been smoking those black French things to save money.

While we were smoking, Star congratulated Rufo on the dinner and he accepted her compliments gravely and I seconded them. I still don’t know who cooked that hedonistic meal. Rufo did much of it but Star may have done the hard parts while I was being shaved.

After an unhurried happy time, sitting over coffee and brandy with the overhead light doused and only a single candle gleamed on her jewels and lighting her face. Star made a slight movement back from the table and I got up quickly and showed her to her tent. She stopped at its entrance. “Milord Oscar–”

So I kissed her and followed her in-

Like hell I did! I was so damned hypnotized that I bowed over her hand and kissed it. And that was hat.

That left me with nothing to do but get out of that borrowed monkey suit, hand it back to Rufo, and get a blanket from him. He had picked a spot to sleep at one side of her tent, so I picked one on the other and stretched out. It was still so pleasantly warm that even one blanket wasn’t needed.

But I didn’t go to sleep. The truth is, I’ve got a monkey on my back, a habit worse than marijuana though not as expensive as heroin. I can stiff it out and get to sleep anyway–but it wasn’t helping that I could see light in Stars tent and a silhouette that was no longer troubled by a dress.

The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents’ worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I’ll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I’ll do without.

I got up and went around the tent. “Psst! Rufo.”

“Yes, milord.” He was up fast, a dagger in his hand.

“Look, is there anything to read around this dump?”

“What sort of thing?”

“Anything, just anything. Words in a row.”

“Just a moment.” He was gone a while, using a flashlight around that beachhead dump of plunder. He came back and offered me a book and a small camp lamp. I thanked him, went back, and lay down.

It was an interesting book, written by Albertus Magnus and apparently stolen from the British Museum. Albert offered a long list of recipes for doing unlikely things: how to pacify storms and fly over clouds, how to overcome enemies, how to make a woman be true to you-

Here’s that last one: “If thou wilt that a woman bee not visions nor desire men, take the private members of a Woolfe, and the haires which doe grow on the cheekes, or the eye-brows of him, and the hairs which bee under his beard, and burne it all, and give it to her to drinke, when she knowethe not, and she shal desire no other man.”

This should annoy the “Woolfe.” And if I were the gal, it would annoy me, too; it sounds like a nauseous mixture. But that’s the exact formula, spelling and all, so if you are having trouble keeping her in line and have a “Woolfe” handy, try it. Let me know the results. By mail, not in person.

There were several recipes for making a woman love you who does not but a “Woolfe” was by far the simplest ingredient. Presently I put the book down and the light out and watched the moving silhouette on that translucent silk. Star was brushing her hair.

Then I quit tormenting myself and watched the stars, I’ve never learned the stars of the Southern Hemisphere; you seldom see stars in a place as wet as Southeast Asia and a man with a bump of direction doesn’t need them.

But that southern sky was gorgeous.

I was staring at one very bright star or planet (it seemed to have a disk) when suddenly I realized it was moving.

I sat up. “Hey! Star!”

She called back, “Yes, Oscar?”

“Come see! A sputnik. A big one!”

“Coming.” The light in her tent went out, she joined me quickly, and so did good old Pops Rufo, yawning and scratching his ribs. “Where, milord?” Star asked.

I pointed. “Right there! On second thought it may not be a sputnik; it might be one of our Echo series. It’s awfully big and bright.”

She glanced at me and looked away. Rufo said nothing. I stared at it a while longer, glanced at her.

She was watching me, not it. I looked again, watched it move against the backdrop of stars.

“Star,” I said, “that’s not a sputnik. Nor an Echo balloon. That’s a moon. A real moon.”

“Yes, milord Oscar.”

“Then this is not Earth.”

“That is true.”

“Hmm–” I looked back at the little moon, moving so fast among the stars, west to east.

Star said quietly, “You are not afraid, my hero?”

“Of what?”

“Of being in a strange world.”

“Seems to be a pretty nice world.”

“It is,” she agreed, “in many ways.”

“I like it,” I agreed. “But maybe it’s time I knew more about it. Where are we? How many light-years, r whatever it is, in what direction?”

She sighed. “I will try, milord. But it will not be easy; you have not studied metaphysical geometry–nor many other things. Think of the pages of a book–” I still had that cookbook of Albert the Great under my arm; she took it. “One page may resemble another very much. Or be very different. One page can be so close to another that it touches, at all points–yet have nothing to do with the page against it. We are as close to Earth–right now–as two pages in sequence in a book. And yet we are so far away that light-years cannot express it.”

“Look,” I said, “no need to get fancy about it. I used to watch ‘Twilight Zone.’ You mean another dimension. I dig it.”

She looked troubled “That’s somewhat the idea but–”

Rufo interrupted. “There’s still Igli in the morning.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “If we have to talk to Igli in the morning, maybe we need some sleep. I’m sorry. By the way, who is Igli?”

“You’ll find out,” said Rufo.

I looked up at that hurtling moon. “No doubt. Well, I’m sorry I disturbed you all with a silly mistake. Good night, folks.”

So I crawled back into my sleeping sills, like a proper hero (all muscles and no gonads, usually), and they sacked in too. She didn’t put the light back on, so I had nothing to look at but the hurtling moons of Barsoom. I had fallen into a book.

Well, I hoped it was a success and that the writer would keep me alive for lots of sequels. It was a pretty nice deal for the hero, up to this chapter at least. There was Dejah Thoris, curled up in her sleeping silks not twenty feet away.

I thought seriously of creeping up to the flap of her tent and whispering to her that I wanted to ask a few questions about metaphysical geometry and like matters. Love spells, maybe. Or maybe just tell her that it was cold outside and could I come in?

But I didn’t. Good old faithful Rufo was curled up just the other side of that tent and he had a disconcerting habit of coming awake fast with a dagger in his hand. And he liked to shave corpses. As I’ve said, given a choice. I’m chicken.

I watched the hurtling moons of Barsoom and fell asleep.

Chapter 6

Singing birds are better than alarm clocks and Barsoom was never like this. I stretched happily and smelled coffee and wondered if there was time for a dip before breakfast. It was another perfect day, blue and clear and the sun just up, and I felt like killing dragons before lunch. Small ones, that is.

I smothered a yawn and rolled to my feet. The lovely pavilion was gone and the black box mostly repacked; it was no bigger than a piano box. Star was kneeling before a fire, encouraging the coffee. She was a cavewoman this morning, dressed in a hide that was fancy but not as fancy as her own. From an ocelot, maybe. Or from du Pont.

“Howdy, Princess,” I said. “What’s for breakfast? And where’s your chef?”

“Breakfast later,” she said. “Just a cup of coffee for you now, too hot and too black–best you be bad tempered. Rufo is starting the talk with Igli.” She served it to me in a paper cup.

I drank half a cup, burned my mouth and spat out grounds. Coffee comes in five descending stages: Coffee, Java, Jamoke, Joe, and Carbon Remover. This stuff was no better than grade four.

I stopped then, having caught sight of Rufo. And company, lots of company. Along the edge of our terrace somebody had unloaded Noah’s Ark. There was everything there from aardvarks to zebus, most of them with long yellow teeth.

Rufo was facing this picket line, ten feet this side and opposite a particularly large and uncouth citizen. About then that paper cup came apart and scalded my fingers.

“Want some more?” Star asked.

I blew on my fingers. “No, thanks. This is Igli?”

“Just the one in the middle that Rufo is baiting. The rest have come to see the fun, you can ignore them.”

“Some of them look hungry.”

“Most of the big ones are like Cuvier’s devil, herbivorous. Those outsized lions would eat us–if Igli wins the argument. But only then. Igli is the problem.”

I looked Igli over more carefully. He resembled that scion of the man from Dundee, all chin and no forehead, and he combined the less appetizing features of giants and ogres in ‘The Red Fairy Book’. I never liked that book much.

He was vaguely human, using the term loosely. He was a couple of feet taller than I am and outweighed me three or four hundred pounds but I am much prettier. Hair grew on him in clumps, like a
discouraged lawn; and you just knew, without being told, that he had never used a man’s deodorant for manly men. The knots of his muscles had knots on them and his toenails weren’t trimmed.

“Star,” I said, “what’s the nature of the argument we have with him?”

“You must kill him, milord.”

I looked back at him. “Can’t we negotiate a peaceful coexistence? Mutual inspection, cultural exchange, and so forth?”

She shook her head. “He’s not bright enough for that. He’s here to stop us from going down into the valley–and either he dies, or we die.”

I took a deep breath. “Princess, I’ve reached a decision. A man who always obeys the law is even stupider than one who breaks it every chance. This is no time to worry about that local Sullivan Act. I want the flame-thrower, a bazooka, a few grenades, and the heaviest gun in that armory. Can you show me how to dig them out?”

She poked at the fire. “My hero,” she said slowly, “I’m truly sorry–but it isn’t that simple. Did you notice, last night when we were smoking, that Rufo lighted our cigarettes from candles? Not using even so much as a pocket lighter?”

“Well . . . no. I didn’t give it any thought.”

“This rule against firearms and explosives is not a law such as you have back on Earth. It is more than hat; it is impossible to use such things here. Else such things would be used against us.”

“You mean they won t work?”

“They will not work. Perhaps ‘hexed’ is the word.”

“Star. Look at me. Maybe you believe in hexes. I don’t. And I’ll give you seven to two that Tommy uns don’t, either. I intend to find out. Will you give me a hand in unpacking?”

For the first time she looked really upset. “Oh, milord, I beg of you not to!”

“Why not?”

“Even the attempt would be disastrous. Do you believe that I know more about the hazards and dangers–and laws–of this world than you do? Will you believe me when I say that I would not have you
die, that in solemn truth my own life and safety depend on yours? Please!”

It is impossible not to believe Star when she lays it on the line. I said thoughtfully, “Maybe you’re right–or that character over there would be carrying a six-inch mortar as a side arm. Uh, Star, I’ve got a still better idea. Why don’t we high tail it back the way we came and homestead that spot where we caught the fish? In five years well have a nice little farm. In ten years, after the word gets around, we’ll have a nice little motel, too, with a free-form swimming pool and a putting green.”

She barely smiled. “Milord Oscar, there is no turning back.”

“Why not? I could find it with my eyes closed.”

“But they would find us. Not Igli but more like him would be sent to harry and kill us.”

I sighed again. “As you say. They claim motels off the main highway are a poor risk anyhow. There’s a attle-axe in that duffel. Maybe I can chop his feet off before he notices me.” She shook her head again. I said, “What’s the matter now? Do I have to fight him with one foot in a ucket? I thought anything that cut or stabbed–anything I did with my own muscles–was okay?”

“It is okay, milord. But it won’t work.”

“Why not?”

“Igli can’t be killed. You see, he is not really alive. He is a construct, made invulnerable for this one urpose. Swords or knives or even axes will not cut him; they bounce off. I have seen it.”

“You mean he is a robot?”

“Not if you are thinking of gears and wheels and printed circuits. ‘Golem’ would be closer. The Igli is an imitation of life.” Star added, “Better than life in some ways, since there is no way–none that I know of–to kill him. But worse, too, as Igli isn’t very bright nor well balanced. He has conceit without judgment. Rufo is working on that now, warming him up for you, getting him so mad he can’t think straight.”

“He is? Gosh! I must be sure to thank Rufo for that. Thank him too much. I think. Well, Princess, what m I supposed to do now?”

She spread her hands as if it were all self-evident. “When you are ready, I will loose the wards–and then you will kill him.”

“But you just said–” I stopped. When they abolished the French Foreign Legion very few cushy billets were left for us romantic types. Umbopa could have handled this. Conan, certainly. Or Hawk Carse. Or even Don Quixote, for that thing was about the size of a windmill. “All right. Princess, let’s get on with it. Is it okay for me to spit on my hands? Or is that cheating?”

She smiled without dimpling and said gravely, “Milord Oscar, we will all spit on our hands; Rufo and I will be fighting right beside you. Either we win . . . or we all die.”

We walked over and joined Rufo. He was making donkeys ears at Igli and shouting, “Who’s your father, Igli? Your mother was a garbage can but who’s your father? Look at him! No belly button!
Yaaa!”

Igli retorted, “Your mother barks! Your sister gives green stamps!”–but rather feebly, I thought. It was plain that that remark about belly buttons had cut him to the quick–he didn’t have one. Only reasonable, I suppose.

The above is not quite what either of them said, except the remark about the belly button. I wish I could put it in the original because, in the Nevian language, the insult is a high art at least equal to poetry. In fact the epitome of literary grace is to address your enemy (publicly) in some difficult verse form, say the sestina, with every word dripping vitriol.

Rufo cackled gleefully. “Make one, Igli! Push your finger in and make one. They left you out in the rain and you ran. They forgot to finish you. Call that thing a nose?” He said in an aside to me, in English, “How do you want him. Boss? Rare? Or well done?”

“Keep him busy while I study the matter. He doesn’t understand English?”

“Not a bit.”

“Good. How close can I go to him without getting grabbed?”

“Close as you like as long as the wards are up. But, Boss–look. I’m not supposed to advise you–but when we get down to work, don’t let him get you by the plums.”

“I’ll try not to.”

“You be careful.” Rufo turned his head and shouted, “Yaaa! Igli picks his nose and eats it!” He added, “She is a good doctor, the best, but just the same, you be careful.”

“I will.” I stepped closer to the invisible barrier, looked up at this creature. He glared down at me and made growling noises, so I thumbed my nose at him and gave him a wet, fruity Bronx cheer. I was downwind and it seemed likely that he hadn’t had a bath in thirty or forty years; he smelled worse than a locker room at the half.

It gave me a seed of an idea. “Star, can this cherub swim?”

She looked surprised. “I really don’t know.”

“Maybe they forgot to program him for it. How about you, Rufo?”

Rufo looked smug. “Try me, just try me. I could teach fish. Igli! Tell us why the sow wouldn’t kiss you!”

Star could swim like a seal. My style is more like a ferryboat but I get there. “Star, maybe that thing can’t be killed but it breathes. It’s got some sort of oxygen metabolism, even if it burns kerosene. If we held his head underwater for a while–as long as necessary–I’ll bet the fire would go out.”

She looked wide-eyed. “Milord Oscar . . . my champion . . . I was not mistaken in you.”

“It’s going to take some doing. Ever play water polo, Rufo?”

“I invented it.”

I hoped he had. I had played it–once. Like being ridden on a rail, it is an interesting experience–once. “Rufo, can you lure our chum down toward the bank? I take it that the barrier follows this line of furry and feathery friends? If it does, we can get him almost to that high piece of bank with the deep pool under it–you know, Star, where you dunked me the first time.”

“Nothing to it,” said Rufo. “We move, he’ll come along.”

“I d like to get him running. Star, how long does it take you to unswitch your fence?”

“I can loose the wards in an instant, milord.”

“Okay, here’s the plan. Rufo, I want you to get Igli to chasing you, as fast as possible–and you cut out and head for that high bank just before you reach the stream. Star, when Rufo does that, you chop off the barrier–loose the wards–instantly. Don’t wait for me to say so. Rufo, you dive in and swim like hell; don’t let him grab you. With any luck, if Igli is moving fast, as big and clumsy as he is he’ll go in, too, whether he means to or not. But I’ll be pacing you, flanking you and a bit behind you. If Igli manages to put on the brakes, I’ll hit him with a low tackle and knock him in. Then we all play water polo.”

“Water polo I have never seen,” Star said doubtfully.

“There won’t be any referee. All it means this time is that all three of us jump him, in the water, and shove his head under and keep it there–and help each other to keep him from shoving our heads under. Big as he is, unless he can outswim us he’ll be at a terrible disadvantage. We go on doing this until he is limp and stays limp, never let him get a breath. Then, to make sure, well weigh him down with stones–it won’t matter whether he’s really dead or not. Any questions?”

Rufo grinned like a gargoyle. “This is going to be fun!”

Both those pessimists seemed to think that it would work, so we got started. Rufo shouted an allegation about Igli’s personal habits that even Olympia Press would censor, then dared Igli to race him,
offering an obscene improbability as a wager.

It took Igli a lumbering long time to get that carcass moving but when he did get rolling, he was faster than Rufo and left a wake of panicked animals and birds behind him. I’m pretty fast but I was hard pushed to hold position on the giant, flanking and a few paces back, and I hoped that Star would not loose the wards if it appeared that Igli might catch Rufo on dry land.

However, Star did loose the wards just as Rufo cut away from the barrier, and Rufo reached the bank and made a perfect racing dive without slowing down, all to plan.

But nothing else was.

I think Igli was too stupid to twig at once that the barrier was down. He kept on a few paces after Rufo had gone left oblique, then did cut left rather sharply. But he had lost speed and he didn’t have any trouble stopping on dry land.

I hit him a diving tackle, illegal and low, and down he went–but not over into the water. And suddenly I had a double armful of struggling and very smelly Golem.

But I had a wildcat helping me at once, and quickly thereafter Rufo, dripping wet, added his vote.

But it was a stalemate and one that we were bound to lose in time. Igli outweighed all of us put together and seemed to be nothing but muscle and stink and nails and teeth. We were suffering bruises, contusions, and flesh wounds–and we weren’t doing Igli any damage, Oh, he screamed like a TV grunt & groaner every time one of us twisted an ear or bent back a finger, but we weren’t really hurting him and he was decidedly hurting us. There wasn’t a chance of dragging that hulk into the water.

I had started with my arms around his knees and I stayed that way, of necessity, as long as I could, while Star tried to weigh down one of his arms and Rufo the other. But the situation was fluid; Igli
thrashed like a rattler with its back broken and was forever getting one limb or another free and trying to gouge and bite. It got us into odd positions and I found myself hanging onto one callused foot, trying to twist it off, while I stared into his open mouth, wide as a bear trap and less appetizing. His teeth needed
cleaning.

So I shoved the toe of his foot into his mouth.

Igli screamed, so I kept on shoving, and pretty soon he didn’t have room to scream. I kept on pushing.

When he had swallowed his own left leg up to the knee, be managed to wrench his right arm loose from Star and grabbed at his disappearing leg–and I grabbed his wrist. “Help me!” I yelped to Star.

“Push!”

She got the idea and shoved with me. That arm went into his mouth to the elbow and the leg went farther in, quite a bit of the thigh. By, then Rufo was working with us and forced Igli’s left hand in past his cheek and into the jaws. Igli wasn’t struggling so hard by then, short on air probably, so getting the toe of his right foot started into his mouth simply required determination, with Rufo hauling back on his hairy nostrils while I bore down with a Knee on his chin and Star pushed.

We kept on feeding him into his mouth, gaining an inch at a time and never letting up. He was still quivering and trying to get loose when we had him rolled up clear to his hips, and his rank armpits about to disappear.

It was like rolling a snowball in reverse; the more we pushed, the smaller he got and the more his mouth stretched–ugliest sight I ever have seen. Soon he was down to the size of a medicine ball . . . and then a soccer ball . . . then a baseball and I rolled him between my palms and kept pushing, hard.

–a golf ball, a marble, a pea . . . and finally there was nothing but some dirty grease on my hands.

Rufo took a deep breath. “I guess that’ll teach him not to put his foot in his mouth with his betters. Who’s ready for breakfast?”

“I want to wash my hands first,” I said.

We all bathed, using plenty of soap, then Star took care of our wounds and had Rufo treat hers, under her instructions. Rufo is right; Star is the best medic. The stuff she used on us did not sting, the cuts closed up, the flexible dressings she put over them did not have to be changed, and fell off in time with no infection and no scars. Rufo had one very bad bite, about forty cents’ worth of hamburger out of his left buttock, but when Star was through with him, he could sit down and it didn’t seem to bother him.

Rufo fed us little golden pancakes and big German sausages, popping with fat, and gallons of good coffee. It was almost noon before Star loosed the wards again and we set out for our descent down the cliff.

Chapter 7

The descent beside the great waterfall into Nevia valley is a thousand feet and more than sheer; the cliff overhangs and you go down on a line, spinning slowly like a spider. I don’t advise this; it is dizzy-making and I almost lost those wonderful pancakes.

The view is stupendous. You see the waterfall from the side, free-springing, not wetting the cliff, and falling so far that it shrouds itself in mist before it hits bottom. Then as you turn you face frowning cliff, then a long look out over a valley too lush and green and beautiful to be believed–marsh and forest at the
foot of the cliff, cultivated fields in middle distance a few miles away, then far beyond and hazy at the base but sharp at the peaks a mighty wall of snow-covered mountains.

Star had sketched the valley for me. “First we fight our way through the marsh. After that it is easy going–we simply have to look sharp for blood kites. Because we come to a brick road, very nice.”

“A yellow brick road?” I asked.

“Yes. That’s the clay they have. Does it matter?”

“I guess not. Just don’t make a hobbit of it. Then what?”

“After that we’ll stop overnight with a family, the squire of the countryside there. Good people, you’ll enjoy them.”

“And then the going gets tough,” Rufo added.

“Rufo, don’t borrow trouble!” Star scolded. “You will please refrain from comments and allow Oscar to cope with his problems as he comes to them, rested, clear-eyed, and unworried. Do you know
anyone else who could have handled Igli?”

“Well, since you put it that way . . . no.”

“I do put it that way. We all sleep in comfort tonight. Isn’t that enough? You’ll enjoy it as much as anyone.”

“So will you.”

“When did I ever fail to enjoy anything? Hold your tongue. Now, Oscar, at the root of the cliff are the Horned Ghosts–no way to avoid them, they’ll see us coming down. With luck we won’t see any of the Cold Water Gang; they stay back in the mists. But if we have the bad luck to encounter both, we may have the good luck that they will fight each other and let us slip away. The path through the marsh is tricky; you had best study, this sketch until you know it. Solid footing is only where little yellow flowers
grow no matter how solid and dry a piece looks. But, as you can see, even if you stay carefully on the safe bits, there are so many side trails and dead ends that we could wander all day and be trapped by darkness–and never get out.”

So here I was, coming down first, because the Horned Ghosts would be waiting at the bottom. My privilege. Wasn’t I a “Hero”? Hadn’t I made Igli swallow himself?

But I wished that the Horned Ghosts really were ghosts. They were two-legged animals, omnivorous. They ate anything, including each other, and especially travelers. From the belly up they were described to me as much like the Minotaur; from there down they were splayfooted satyrs. Their upper limbs were short arms but without real hands–no thumbs.

But oh those horns! They had horns like Texas longhorns, but sticking up and forward.

However, there is one way of converting a Horned Ghost into a real ghost. It has a soft place on its skull, like a baby’s soft spot, between those horns. Since the brute charges head down, attempting to impale you, this is the only vulnerable spot that can be reached. All it takes is to stand your ground, don’t flinch, aim for that one little spot–and hit it.

So my task was simple. Go down first, kill as many as necessary to insure that Star would have a safe spot to land, then stand fast and protect her until Rufo was down. After that we were free to carve our way through the marsh to safety. If the Cold Water Gang didn’t join the party-

I tried to ease my position in the sling I was riding–my left leg had gone to sleep–and looked down. A hundred feet below the reception committee had gathered.

It looked like an asparagus patch. Of bayonets.

I signaled to stop lowering. Far above me, Rufo checked the line; I hung there, swaying, and tried to think. If I had them lower me straight into that mob, I might stick one or two before I myself was
impaled. Or maybe none–The only certainty was that I would be dead long before my friends could join me.

On the other hand, besides that soft spot between the horns, each of these geeks had a soft underbelly, just made for arrows. If Rufo would lower me a bit-

I signaled to him. I started slowly down, a bit jerkily, and he almost missed my signal to stop again. I had to pull up my feet; some of those babies were a-snorting and a-ramping around and shoving each other for a chance to gore me. One Nijinsky among them did manage to scrape the sole of my left buskin, giving me goose flesh clear to my chin.

Under that strong inducement I pulled myself hand over hand up the line far enough to let me get my feet into the sling instead of my fanny. I stood in it hanging onto the line and standing on one foot and then on the other to work pins and needles out. Then I unslung my bow and strung it. This feat would have been worthy of a trained acrobat–but have you ever tried to bend a bow and let fly while standing in a bight at one end of a thousand-foot line and clinging to the line with one hand?

You lose arrows that way. I lost three and almost lost me.

I tried buckling my belt around the line. That caused me to hang upside down and lost me my Robin Hood hat and more arrows. My audience liked that one; they applauded–I think it was applause–so, for an encore, I tried to shift the belt up around my chest to enable me to hang more or less straight down–and maybe get off an arrow or two.

I didn’t quite lose my sword.

So far, my only results had been to attract customers (“Mama, see the funny man!”) and to make myself swing back and forth like a pendulum.

Bad as the latter was, it did give me an idea. I started increasing that swing, pumping it up like a playground swing. This was slow wore and it took a while to get the hang of it, as the period of that
pendulum of which I was the weight was over a minute–and it does no good to try to hurry a pendulum; you have to work with it, not against it. I hoped my friends could see well enough to guess what I was doing and not foul it up.

After an unreasonably long time I was swinging back and forth in a flattish arc about a hundred feet fang, passing very fast over the heads of my audience at the bottom of each swing, slowing to a stop at the end of each swing. At first those spike heads tried to move with me, but they tired of that and squatted near the midpoint and watched, their heads moving as I swung, like spectators of a slow-motion tennis match.

But there is always some confounded innovator. My notion was to drop off at one end of this arc where it just missed the cuff and make a stand there with my back to the wall. The ground was higher there, I would not have so far to drop. But one of those horned horrors figured it out and trotted over to that end of the swing. He was followed by two or three more.

That settled it; I would nave to drop off at the other end. But young Archimedes figured that out, too. He left his buddies at the cliff face and trotted after me. I pulled ahead of him at the low point of the swing–but slowed down and he caught up with me long before I reached the dead point at the end. He had only a hundred feet to do in about thirty seconds–a slow walk. He was under me when I got there.

The odds wouldn’t improve; I kicked my feet clear, hung by one hand and drew sword during that too-slow traverse, and dropped off anyway. My notion was to spit that tender spot on his head before my feet touched the ground.

Instead, I missed and he missed and I knocked him sprawling and sprawled right after him and rolled to my feet and ran for the cuff face nearest me, poking that genius in his belly with my sword without stopping.

That foul blow saved me. His friends and relatives stopped to quarrel over who got the prime ribs before a clot of them moved in my direction. This gave me time to set my feet on a pile of scree at the base of the cliff, where I could play “King of the Castle,” and return my sword and nock an arrow.

I didn’t wait for them to rush me. I simply waited until they were close enough that I could not miss, took a bead on the wishbone of the old bull who was leading them, if he had a wishbone, and let that shaft go with every pound of that heavy bow.

It passed through him and stuck into one behind him.

This led to another quarrel over the price of chops. They ate them, teeth and toenails. That was their weakness: all appetite and too little brain. If they had cooperated, they could have had me in one rush when I first hit the ground. Instead they stopped for lunch.

I glanced up. High above me, Star was a tiny spider on a thread; she grew rapidly larger. I moved crabwise along the wall until I was opposite the point, forty feet from the cliff, where she would touch ground.

When she was about fifty feet up, she signaled Rufo to stop lowering, drew her sword and saluted me. “Magnificent, my Hero!” We were all wearing swords; Star had chosen a dueling sword with a 34″ blade–a big sword for a woman but Star is a big woman. She had also packed her belt pouch with medic’s supplies, an ominous touch had I noticed, but did not, at the time.

I drew and returned her salute. They were not bothering me yet, although some, having finished lunch or having been crowded out, were milling around and looking me over. Then I sheathed again, and nocked an arrow. “Start pumping it up. Star, right toward me. Have Rufo lower you a bit more.”

She returned sword and signaled Rufo. He let her down slowly until she was about nine feet off the ground, where she signaled a stop. “Now pump it up!” I called out. Those bloodthirsty natives had forgotten me; they were watching Star, those not still busy eating Cousin Abbie or Great-Uncle John.

“All right,” she answered. “But I have a throwing line. Can you catch it?”

“Oh!” The smart darling had watched my maneuvers and had figured out what would be needed. “Hold it a moment! Ill make a diversion.” I reached over my shoulder, counted arrows by touch–seven. I had started with twenty and made use of one; the rest were scattered, lost.

I used three in a hurry, right, left, and ahead, picking targets as far away as I dared risk, aiming at midpoint and depending on that wonderful bow to take those shafts straight and flat. Sure enough, the crowd went for fresh meat like a government handout. “Now!”

Ten seconds later I caught her in my arms and collected a split-second kiss for toll.

Ten minutes later Rufo was down by the same tactics, at a cost of three of my arrows and two of Star’s smaller ones. He had to lower himself, sitting in the bight and checking the free end of the line under both armpits; he would have been a sitting duck without help. As soon as he was untangled from the line, he started jerking it down off the cliff, and faking it into a coil.

“Leave that!” Star said sharply. “We haven’t time and it’s too heavy to carry.”

“I’ll put it in the pack.”

“No.”

“It’s a good line,” Rufo persisted. “We’ll need it.”

“You’ll need a shroud if we’re not through the marsh by nightfall.” Star turned to me. “How shall we arch, milord?”

I looked around. In front of us and to the left a few jokers still milled around, apparently hesitant about getting closer. To our right and above us the great cloud at the base of the Tails made iridescent lace in the sky. About three hundred yards in front of us was where we would enter the trees anjust beyond the marsh started.

We went downhill in a tight wedge, myself on point, Rufo and Star following on flank, all of us with arrows nocked. I had told them to draw swords if any Homed Ghost got within fifty feet.

None did. One idiot came straight toward us, alone, and Rufo knocked him over with an arrow at twice that distance. As we came up on the corpse Rufo drew his dagger. “Let it be!” said Star. She eemed edgy.

“I’m just going to get the nuggets and give them to Oscar.”

“And get us all killed. If Oscar wants nuggets, he shall have them.”

“What sort of nuggets?” I asked, without stopping.

“Gold, Boss. Those blighters have gizzards like a chicken. But gold is all they swallow for it. Old ones ield maybe twenty, thirty pounds.”

I whistled.

“Gold is common here,” Star explained. “There is a great heap of it at the base of the falls, inside the loud, washed down over eons. It causes fights between the Ghosts and the Cold Water Gang, ecause
the Ghosts have this odd appetite and sometimes risk entering the cloud to satisfy it.”

“I haven’t seen any of the Cold Water Gang yet,” I commented.

“Pray God you don’t,” Rufo answered.

“All the more reason to get deep into the marsh,” Star added. “The Gang doesn’t go into it and even the Ghosts don’t go far in. Despite their splay feet, they can be sucked under.”

“Anything dangerous in the swamp itself?”

“Plenty,” Rufo told me. “So be sure you step on the yellow flowers.”

“Watch where you put your own feet. If that map was right, I won’t lose us. What does a Cold Water Gangster look like?”

Rufo said thoughtfully, “Ever seen a man who had been drowned for a week?” I let the matter drop.

Before we got to the trees I had us sling bows and draw swords. Just inside the cover of trees, they jumped us. Horned Ghosts, I mean, not the Cold Water Gang. An ambush from all sides, I don’t know how many. Rufo killed four or five and Star at least two and I danced around, looking active and trying to survive.

We had to climb up and over bodies to move on, too many to count.

We kept on into the swamp, following the little golden pathfinder flowers and the twists and turns of the map in my head. In about half an hour we came to a clearing big as a double garage. Star said faintly, “This is far enough.” She had been holding one hand pressed to her side but bad not been willing to stop until then, although blood stained her tunic and all down the left leg of her tights.

She let Rufo attend her first, while I guarded the bottleneck into the clearing. I was relieved not to be asked to help, as, after we gently removed her tunic, I felt sick at seeing how badly she had been gored–and never a peep out of her. That golden body–hurt!

As a knight errant, I felt like a slob.

But she was chipper again, once Rufo had followed her instructions. She treated Rufo, then treated me–half a dozen wounds each but scratches compared with the rough one she had taken.

Once she had me patched up she said, “Milord Oscar, how long will it be until we are out of the marsh?”

I ran through it in my head. “Does the going get any worse?”

“Slightly better.”

“Not over an hour.”

“Good. Don’t put those filthy clothes back on. Rufo, unpack a bit and well have clean clothes and more arrows. Oscar, well need them for the blood kites, once we are out of the trees.”

The little black box filled most of the clearing before it was unfolded enough to let Rufo get out clothes and reach the arsenal. But clean clothes and lull quiver made me feel like a new man, especially after Rufo dug out a half liter of brandy and we split it three ways, gurglegurgle! Star replenished her medic’s pouch, then I helped Rufo fold up the luggage.

Maybe Rufo was giddy from brandy and no lunch. Or perhaps from loss of blood. It could have been just the bad luck of an unnoticed patch of slippery mud. He had the box in his arms, about to make the last closure that would fold it to knapsack size, when he slipped, recovered violently, and the box sailed out of his arms into a chocolate-brown pool.

It was far out of reach. I yelled, “Rufo, off with your belt!” I was reaching for the buckle of mine.

“No, no!” screamed Rufo. “Stand back! Get clear!”

A corner of the box was still in sight. With a safety line on me I knew I could get it, even if there was no bottom to the pool. I said so, angrily.

“No, Oscar!” Star said urgently. “He’s right. We march. Quickly.”

So we marched–me leading. Star breathing on my neck, Rufo crowding her heels.

We had gone a hundred yards when there was a mud volcano behind us. Not much noise, just a bass rumble and a slight earthquake, then some very dirty rain. Star quit hurrying and said pleasantly, “Well, that’s that.”

Rufo said, “And all the liquor was in it!”

“I don’t mind that,” Star answered. “Liquor is everywhere. But I had new clothes in there, pretty ones, Oscar. I wanted you to see them; I bought them with you in mind.”

I didn’t answer. I was thinking about a flame-thrower and an M-1 and a couple of cases of ammo. And the liquor, of course.

“Did you hear me, milord?” she persisted. “I wanted to wear them for you.”

“Princess,” I answered, “you have your prettiest clothes right with you, always.”

I heard the happy chuckle that goes with her dimples. “I’m sure that you have often said that before. And no doubt with great success.”

We were out of the swamp long before dark and hit the brick road soon after. Blood kites are no problem. They are such murderous things that if you shoot an arrow in the direction of one of their dives, a kite will swerve and pluck it out of the air, getting the shaft right down its gullet. We usually recovered the arrows.

We were among plowed fields soon after we reached the road and soon the blood kites thinned out. Just at sundown we could see outbuildings and the lights in the manor where Star said that we would spend the night.

Chapter 8

Milord Doral ‘t Giuk Dorali should have been a Texan. I don’t mean that the Doral could have been mistaken for a Texan but he had that you-paid-for-the-lunch-I’ll-pay-for-the-Cadillacs xpansiveness.

His farmhouse was the size of a circus tent and as lavish as a Thanksgiving dinner–rich, sumptuous, fine carvings and inlaid jewels. Nevertheless it had a sloppy, lived-in look and if you didn’t watch where you put your feet, you would step on a child’s toy on a broad, sweeping staircase and wind up with a broken collarbone. There were children and dogs underfoot everywhere and the youngest of each weren’t housebroken. It didn’t worry the Doral. Nothing worried the Doral, he enjoyed life.

We had been passing through his fields for miles (rich as the best Iowa farmland and no winters; Star told me they produced four crops a year)–but it was late in the day and an occasional field hand was all we saw save for one wagon we met on the road. I thought that it was pulled by a team of two pairs of horses. I was mistaken; the team was but one pair and the animals were not horses, they had eight legs each.

All of Nevia valley is like that, the commonplace mixed with the wildly different. Humans were humans, dogs were dogs–but horses weren’t horses. Like Alice trying to cope with the Flamingo, every time I thought I had it licked, t would wiggle loose.

The man driving those equine centipedes stared but not because we were dressed oddly; he was dressed as I was. He was staring at Star, as who wouldn’t? The people working in fields had mostly been dressed in sort of a lava-lava. This garment, a simple wraparound tied off at the waist, is the equivalent in Nevia of overalls or blue jeans for both men and women; what we were wearing was equal to the Gray Flannel Suit or to a woman s basic black. Party or formal clothes–well, that’s another matter.

As we turned into the grounds of the manor we picked up a wake of children and dogs. One kid ran ahead and, when we reached the broad terrace in front of the main house, milord Doral himself came out the great front door. I didn’t pick him for lord of the manor; he was wearing one of those short sarongs, was barefooted and bareheaded. He had thick hair, shot with gray, an imposing beard, and looked like General U. S. Grant.

Star waved and called out, “Jock! Oh, Jocko!” (The name was “Giuk,” but I caught it as “Jock” and Jock he is.)

The Doral stared at us, then lumbered forward like a tank, “Ettyboo! Bless your beautiful blue eyes! Bless your bouncy little bottom! Why didn’t you let me know?” (I have to launder this because Nevian idioms don’t parallel ours. Try translating certain French idioms literally into English and you’ll see what I mean. The Doral was not being vulgar; he was being formally and gallantly polite to an old and highly respected friend.)

He grabbed Star in a hug, lifted her off her feet, kissed her on both cheeks and on the mouth, gnawed one ear, then set her down with an arm around her. “Games and celebrations! Three months of holiday! Races and rassling every day, orgies every night! Prizes for the strongest, the fairest, the wittiest–”

Star stopped him. “Milord Doral–”

“Eh? And a prize of all prizes for the first baby born–”

“Jocko darling! I love you dearly, but tomorrow we must ride. All we ask is a bone to gnaw and a corner to sleep in.”

“Nonsense! You can’t do this to me.”

“You know that I must.”

“Politics be damned! I’ll die at your feet, Sugar Pie. Poor old Jocko’s heart will stop. I feel an attack coming right now.” He felt around his chest. “Someplace here–”

She poked him in the belly. “You old fraud. You’ll die as you’ve lived, and not of heartbreak. Milord Doral–”

“Yes, milady?”

“I bring you a Hero.”

He blinked. “You’re not talking about Rufo? Hi, Rufe, you old polecat! Heard any good ones lately? Get back to the kitchen and pick yourself a lively one.”

“Thank you, milord Doral.” Rufo “made a leg,” bowing deeply, and left us.

Star said firmly, “If the Doral please.”

“I hear.”

Star untangled his arm, stood straight and tall and started to chant:

“By the Singing Laughing Waters

“Came a Hero Fair and Fearless.

“Oscar hight this noble warrior,

“Wise and Strong and never daunted,

“Trapped the Igli with a question,

“Caught him out with paradoxes,

“Shut the Igli’s mouth with Igli.

“Fed him to him, feet and fingers!

“Nevermore the Singing Waters . . .

It went on and on, none of it lies yet none of it quite true–colored like a press agent’s handout. For example, Star told him that I had killed twenty-seven Horned Ghosts, one with my bare hands. I don’t remember that many and as for “bare hands,” that was an accident. I had just stabbed one of those vermin as another one tumbled at my feet, shoved from behind. I didn’t have time to get my sword clear, so I set a foot on one horn and pulled hard on the other with my left hand and his head came apart like snapping a wishbone. But I had done it from desperation, not choice.

Star even ad-libbed a long excursus about my father’s heroism and alleged that my grandaddy had led the chaise at San Juan Hill and then started in on my great-grandfathers. But when she told him how I had picked up that scar that runs from left eye to right jaw, she pulled out all the stops.

Now look, Star had quizzed me the first time I met her and she had encouraged me to tell her more during that long hike the day before. But I did not give her most of the guff she was handing the Doral. She must have had the Surete, the FBI, the Archie Goodwin on me for months. She even named the team we had played against when I busted my nose and I never told her that.

I stood there blushing while the Doral looked me up and down with whistles and snorts of appreciation. When Star ended, with a simple: “Thus it happened,” he let out a long sigh and said, “Could we have that part about Igli over again?”

Star complied, chanting different words and more detail. The Doral listened, frowning and nodding approval. “A heroic solution,” he said. “So he’s a mathematician, too. Where did he study?”

“A natural genius, Jock.”

“It figures.” He stepped up to me, looked me in the eye and put his hands on my shoulders. “The Hero who confounds Igli may choose any house. But he will honor my home by accepting hospitality of roof . . . and table . . . and bed?”

He spoke with great earnestness, holding my eye; I had no chance to look at Star for a hint. And I wanted a hint. The person who says smugly that good manners are the same everywhere and people are just people hasn’t been farther out of Podunk than the next whistle stop. I’m no sophisticate but I had been around enough to learn that. It was a formal speech, stuffed with protocol, and called for a formal answer.

I did the best I could. I put my hands on his shoulders and answered solemnly, “I am honored far beyond any merit of mine, sir.”

“But you accept?” he said anxiously.

“I accept with all my heart.” (“Heart” is close enough. I was having trouble with language.)

He seemed to sigh with relief. “Glorious!” He grabbed me in a bear hug, kissed me on both cheeks, and only some fast dodging kept me from being kissed on the mouth.

Then he straightened up and shouted, “Wine! Beer! Schnapps! Who the dadratted tomfoolery is supposed to be chasing? I’ll skin somebody alive with a rusty file! Chairs! Service for a Hero! Where is everybody?”

That last was uncalled for; while Star was reciting what a great guy I am, some eighteen or fifty people had gathered on the terrace, pushing and shoving and trying to get a better look. Among them must have been the personnel with the day’s duty because a mug of ale was shoved into my hand and a four-ounce
glass of 110-proof firewater into the other before the boss stopped yelling. Jocko drank boilermaker style, so I followed suit, then was happy to sit down on a chair that was already behind me, with my teeth loosened, my scalp lifted, and the beer just starting to put out the fire.

Other people plied me with bits of cheese, cold meats, pickled this and that, and unidentified drinking food all tasty, not waiting for me to accept it but shoving it into my mouth if I opened it even to say “Gesundheit!” I ate as offered and soon it blotted up the hydrofluoric acid.

In the meantime the Doral was presenting his household to me. It would have been better had they worn chevrons because I never did get them straightened out as to rank. Clothes didn’t help because, just as the squire was dressed like a field hand, the second scullery maid might (and sometimes did) duck back in and load herself with golden ornaments and her best party dress. Nor were they presented in order of rank.

I barely twigged as to which was the lady of the manor, Jocko’s wife–his senior wife. She was a very comely older woman, a brunette carrying a few pounds extra but with that dividend most fetchingly distributed. She was dressed as casually as Jocko out, fortunately, I noticed her because she went at nce to greet Star and they embraced warmly, two old friends. So I had my ears spread when she was presented to me a moment later–as (and I caught it) the Doral (just as Jocko was the Doral) but with the feminine ending.

I jumped to my feet, grabbed her hand, bowed over it and pressed it to my lips. This isn’t even faintly a Nevian custom but it brought cheers and Mrs. Doral blushed and looked pleased and Jocko grinned proudly.

She was the only one I stood up for. Each of the men and boys made a leg to me, with a bow; all the gals from six to sixty curtsied–not as we know it, but Nevian style. It looted more like a step of the Twist. Balance on one foot and lean back as far as possible, then balance on the other while leaning forward, all the while undulating slowly. This doesn’t sound graceful but it is, and it proved that there was not a case of arthritis nor a slipped disk anywhere on the Doral spread.

Jocko hardly ever bothered with names. The females were “Sweetheart” and “Honeylamb” and “Pretty Puss” and he called all the males, even those who seemed to be older than he was, “Son.”

Possibly most of them were his sons. The setup in Nevia I don’t fully understand. This looked like a feudalism out of our own history–and maybe it was–but whether this mob was the Doral’s slaves, his serfs, his hired hands, or all members of one big family I never got straight. A mixture, I think. Titles didn’t mean anything. The only title Jocko held was that he was singled out by a grammatical inflection as being THE Doral instead of just any of a couple of hundred Dorals. I’ve scattered the tag “milord” here and there in this memoir because Star and Rufo used it, but it was simply a courteous form of address paralleling one in Nevian. “Freiherr” does not mean “free man, and “monsieur” does not mean “my lord”–these things don’t translate well. Star sprinkled her speech with “milords” because she was much too polite to say “Hey, Mac!” even with her intimates.

(The very politest endearments in Nevian would win you a clout in the teeth in the USA.)

Once all hands had been presented to the Gordon, Hero First Class, we adjourned to get ready for the banquet that Jocko, cheated of his three months of revelry, had swapped for his first intention. It Split me off from Star as well as from Rufo; I was escorted to my chambers by my two valettes.

That’s what I said. Female. Plural. It is a good thing that I had become relaxed to female attendants in men’s washrooms, European style, and still more relaxed by Southeast Asia and l’Ile du Levant; they don’t teach you how to cope with valettes in American public schools. Especially when they are young
and cute and terribly anxious to please . . . and I had had a long, dangerous day. I learned, first time out on patrol, that nothing hikes up that old biological urge like being shot at and living through it.

It there had been only one, I might have been late to dinner. As it was, they chaperoned each other, though not intentionally, I believe. I patted the redhead on her fanny when the other one wasn’t looking and reached, I thought, an understanding for a later time.

Well, having your back scrubbed is fun, too. Shorn, shampooed, shined, shaved, showered, smelling like a belligerent rose, decked out in the fanciest finely since Cecil B. deMille rewrote the Bible, I was delivered by them to the banquet hall on time.

But the proconsul’s dress uniform I wore was a suit of fatigues compared with Star’s getup. She had
lost all her pretty clothes earlier in the day but our hostess had been able to dig up something.

First a dress that covered Star from chin to ankle–like plate glass. It seemed to be blue smoke, it clung to her and billowed out behind. Underneath was “underwear.” She appeared to be wrapped in twining ivy–but this ivy was gold, picked out in sapphires. It curved across her beautiful belly, divided into strands and cupped her breasts, the coverage being about like a bikini minimum but more startling and much more effective.

Her shoes were sandals in an S-curve of something transparent and springy. Nothing appeared to hold them on, no straps, no clips; her lovely feet, bare, rested on them. It made her appear as if she were on tiptoe about four inches off the floor.

Her great mane of blond hair was built up into a structure as complex as a full-rigged ship, and studded with sapphires. She was wearing a fortune or two of sapphires here and there on her body, too; I won’t itemize.

She spotted me just as I caught sight of her. Her face lit up and she called out, in English, “My Hero, you are beautiful!”

I said “Uh–”

Then I added, “You haven’t been wasting your time, either. Do I sit with you? I’ll need coaching.”

“No, no! You sit with the gentlemen, I sit with the ladies. You won’t have any trouble.”

This is not a bad way to arrange a banquet. We each had separate low tables, the men in a row facing the ladies, with about fifteen feet between them. It wasn’t necessary to make chitchat with the ladies and they all were worth looking at. The Lady Doral was opposite me and was giving Star a run for the Golden Apple. Her costume was opaque some places but not the usual places. Most of it was diamonds. I believe they were diamonds; I don’t think they make rhinestones that big.

About twenty were seated; two or three times that many were serving, entertaining, or milling around. Three girls did nothing but see to it that I did not starve nor die of thirst–I didn’t have to learn how to use their table tools; I never touched them. The girls knelt by me; I sat on a big cushion. Later in the evening Jocko lay flat on his back with his head in a lap so that his maids could pop food into his mouth or hold a cup to his lips.

Jocko had three maids as I did; Star and Mrs. Jocko had two each; the rest struggled along with one apiece. These serving maids illustrate why I had trouble telling the players without a program. My hostess and my Princess were dressed fit to kill, sure–but one of my flunkies, a sixteen-year-old strong contender for Miss Nevia, was dressed only in jewelry but so much of it that she was more “modestly” dressed than Star or Doral Letva, the Lady Doral.

Nor did they act like servants except for their impassioned determination to see that I got drunk and stuffed. They chattered among themselves in teen-age argot and me wisecracks about how big my muscles were, etc., as if I had not been present. Apparently heroes are not expected to talk, for every time I opened my mouth something went into it.

There was always something doing–dancers, jugglers, recitations of poetry–in the space between the tables. Kids wandered around and grabbed tidbits from platters before they reached the tables. One little doll about three years old squatted down in front of me, all big eyes and open mouth, and stared, letting dancers avoid her as best they could. I tried to get her to come to me, but she just stared and played with her toes.

A damsel with a dulcimer strolled among the tables, singing and playing. It could have been a dulcimer, she might have been a damsel.

About two hours along in the feast, Jocko stood up, roared for silence, belched loudly, shook off maids who were trying to steady him, and started to recite.

Same verse, different tune–he was reciting my exploits. I would have thought that he was too drunk to recite a limerick but he sounded off endlessly, in perfect scansion with complex inner rhymes and rippling alliterations, an astounding feat of virtuosity in rhetoric.

He stuck to Star’s story line but embroidered it. I listened with growing admiration, both for him as a poet and for good old Scar Gordon, the one-man army. I decided that I must be a purty goddam hot hero, so when he sat down, I stood up.

The girls had been more successful in getting me drunk than in getting me fed. Most of the food was strange and it was usually tasty. But a cold dish had been fetched in, little frog-like creatures in ice, served whole. You dipped them in a sauce and took them in two bites.

The gal in the jewels grabbed one, dipped it and put it up for me to bite. And it woke up.

This little fellow–call him “Elmer”–Elmer rolled his eyes and looked at me, just as I was about to bite him.

I suddenly wasn’t hungry and jerked my head back.

Miss jewelry Shop laughed heartily, dipped him again, and showed me how to do it. No more Elmer-

I didn’t eat for quite a while and drank more than too much. Every ime a bite was offered me I would see Elmers feet disappearing, and gulp, and have another drink.

That’s why I stood up.

Once up, there was dead silence. The music stopped because the musicians were waiting to see what o improvise as background to my poem.

I suddenly realized that I didn’t have anything to say.

Not anything. There wasn’t a prayer that I could adlib a poem of thanks, a graceful compliment to my

host–m Nevian. Hell, I couldn’t have done it in English.

Star’s eyes were on me. She looked gravely confident.

That did it. I didn’t risk Nevian; I couldn’t even remember how to ask my way to the men’s room. So I ave it to ’em, both barrels, in English. Vachel Lindsay’s “Congo.”

As much of it as I could remember, say about four pages. What I did give them was that compelling rhythm and rhyme scheme double-talking and faking on any fluffs and really slamming it on “beating on a table with the handle of a broom! Boom! Boom! Boomlay boom!” and the orchestra caught the spirit and we rattled the dishes.

The applause was wonderful and Miss Tiffany grabbed my ankle and kissed it.

So I gave them Mr. E. A. Foe’s “Bells” for dessert. Jocko kissed me on my left eye and slobbered on my shoulder.

Then Star stood up and explained, in scansion and rhyme, that in my own land, in my own language, among my own people, warriors and artists all, I was as famous a poet as I was a hero (Which was true. Zero equals zero), and that I had done them the honor of composing my greatest work, in the jewels of my native tongue, a fitting thanks to the Doral and house Doral for Hospitality of roof, of table, of bed–and that she would, in time, do her poor best to render my music into their language.

Between us we got the Oscar.

Then they brought in the piece de resistance, a carcass roasted whole and carried by four men. From the size and shape it might have been roast peasant under glass. But it was dead and it smelled wonderful and I ate a lot of it and sobered up. After the roast there were only eight or nine other things, soups and sherbets and similar shilly-shallying. The party got looser and people didn’t stay at their own tables. One of my girls fell asleep and spilled my wine cup and about then I realized that most of the crowd had gone.

Doral Letva, flanked by two girls, led me to my chambers and put me to bed. They dimmed the lights and withdrew while I was still trying to phrase a gallant good night in their language.

They came back, having shucked all jewelry and other encumbrances and posed at my bedside, the Three Graces. I had decided that the younger ones were mama’s daughters. The older girl was maybe eighteen, full ripe, and a picture of what mama must have been at that age; the younger one seemed five years younger, barely nubile, as pretty for her own age and quite self-conscious. She blushed and dropped her eyes when I looked at her. But her sister stared back with sultry eyes, boldly provocative.

Their mother, an arm around each waist, explained simply but in rhyme that I had honored their roof and their table–and now their bed. What was a Hero’s pleasure? One? Or two? Or all three?

I’m chicken. We know that. If it hadn’t been that little sister was about the size of the little brown sisters who had scared me in the past, maybe I could have shown aplomb.

But, hell, those doors didn’t close. Just arches. And Jocko me bucko might wake up anytime; I didn’t know where he was. I won’t say I’ve never bedded a married woman nor a man’s daughter in his own house–but I’ve followed American cover-up conventions in such matters. This flat-footed proposition scared me worse than the Horned Goats. I mean “Ghosts.”

I struggled to put my decision in poetic language.

I didn’t manage it but I put over the idea of negative,

The little girl started to bawl and fled. Her sister looked daggers, snorted. “Hero!” and went after her. Mama just looked at me and left.

She came back in about two minutes. She spoke very formally, obviously exercising great control, and prayed to know if any woman in this house had met with the Hero’s favor? Her name, please? Or could I describe her? Or would I have them paraded so that I might point her out?

I did my best to explain that, were a choice to be made, she herself would be my choice–but that I was tired and wished to sleep alone.

Letva blinked back tears, wished me a hero’s rest, and left a second time, even faster. For an instant I thought she was going to slap me.

Five seconds later I got up and tried to catch her. But she was gone, the gallery was dark.

I fell asleep and dreamt about the Cold Water Gang. They were even uglier than Rufo had suggested and they were trying to make me eat big gold nuggets all with the eyes of Elmer.

Chapter 9

Rufo shook me awake. “Boss! Get up! Right now!”

I buried my head in the covers. “Go way!” My mouth tasted of spoiled cabbage, my head buzzed, and my ears were on crooked.

“Right now! She says to.”

I got up. Rufo was dressed in our Merry Men clothes and wearing sword, so I dressed the same way and buckled on mine. My valettes were not in sight, nor my borrowed finery. I stumbled after Rufo into the great dining hall. There was Star, dressed to travel, and looking grim. The fancy furnishings of the night before were gone; it was as bleak as an abandoned barn. A bare table was all, and on it a joint of meat, cold in congealed grease and a knife beside it.

I looked at it without relish. “What’s that?”

“Your breakfast, if you want it. But I shall not stay under this roof and eat cold shoulder.” It was a tone, a manner, I had never heard from her.

Rufo touched my sleeve. “Boss. Let’s get out of here. Now.”

So we did. Not a soul was in sight, indoors or out, not even children or dogs. But three dashing steeds were waiting. Those eight-legged tandem ponies, I mean, the horse version of a dachshund, saddled and ready to go. The saddle rigs were complex; each pair of legs had a leather yoke over it and the load was distributed by poles flexing laterally, one on each side, and mounted on this was a chair with a back, a padded seat, and arm rests. A tiller rope ran to each armrest.

A lever on the left was both brake and accelerator and I hate to say how suggestions were conveyed to the beast. However, the “horses” didn’t seem to mind.

They weren’t horses. Their heads were slightly equine but they had pads rather than hoofs and were omnivores, not hayburners. But you grow to like these beasties. Mine was black with white
points–beautiful. I named her “Ars Longa.” She had soulful eyes.

Rufo lashed my bow and quiver to a baggage rack behind my chair and showed me how to get aboard, adjust my seat belt, and get comfortable with feet on foot rests rather than stirrups and my back supported–as comfy as first-class seats in an airliner. We took off fast and hit a steady pace of ten miles an hour, single-footing (the only gait longhorses have) but smoothed by that eight-point suspension so that it was like a car on a gravel road.

Star rode ahead, she hadn’t spoken another word. I tried to speak to her but Rufo touched my arm. “Boss, don’t,” he said quietly. “When She is like this, all you can do is wait.”

Once we were underway, Rufo and I knee to knee and Star out of earshot ahead, I said “Rufo, what in the world happened?”

He frowned. “We’ll never know. She and the Doral had a row, that’s clear. But best we pretend it never happened.”

He shut up and so did I. Had Jocko been obnoxious to Star? Drunk he certainly was and amorous he might have been. But I couldn’t visualize Star not being able to handle a man so as to avoid rape without hurting his feelings.

That led to further grim thoughts. If the older sister had come in alone–If Miss Tiffany hadn’t passed out–If my valette with the fiery hair had showed up to undress me as I had understood she would–Oh hell!

Presently Rufo eased his seat belt, lowered his back rest and raised his foot rests to reclining position, covered his face with a kerchief and started to snore. After a while I did the same; it had been a short night, no breakfast, and I had a king-size hangover. My “horse” didn’t need any help; the two held position on Star’s mount.

When I woke I felt better, aside from hunger and thirst. Rufo was still sleeping; Star’s steed was still fifty paces ahead. The countryside was still lush, and ahead perhaps a half-mile was a house–not a lordly manor out a farmhouse. I could see a well sweep and thought of moss-covered buckets, cool and wet and reeking of typhoid–well, I had had my booster shots in Heidelberg; I wanted a drink. Water, I mean. Better yet, beer–they made fine beer hereabouts.

Rufo yawned, put away his kerchief, and raised his seat. “Must have dozed off,” he said with a silly grin.

“Rufo, you see that house?”

“Yes. What about it?”

“Lunch, that’s what. I’ve gone far enough on an empty stomach. And I’m so thirsty that I could squeeze a stone and drink the whey from it.”

“Then best you do so.”

“Huh?”

“Milord, I’m sorry–I’m thirsty, too–but we aren’t stopping there. She wouldn’t like it.”

“She wouldn’t, eh? Rufo, let me set you straight. Just because milady Star is in a pet is no reason for me to ride all day with no food or water. You do as you see fit; I’m stopping for lunch. Uh, do you have any money on you? Local money?”

He shook his head. “You don’t do it that way, not here. Boss. Wait another hour. Please.”

“Why?”

“Because we are still on the Doral’s land, that’s why. I don’t know that he has sent word ahead to have us shot on sight; Jock is a goodhearted old blackguard. But I would rather be wearing full armor; a flight of arrows wouldn’t surprise me. Or a drop net just as we turned in among those trees.”

“You really think so?”

“Depends on how angry he is. I mind once, when a man really offended him, the Doral had this poor rube stripped down and tied by his family jewels and placed–no, I can’t tell that one.” Rufo gulped and looked sick. “Big night last night. I’m not myself. Better we speak of pleasant things. You mentioned squeezing whey from a rock. No doubt you were thinking of the Strong Muldoon?”

“Damn it, don’t change the subject!” My head was throbbing. “I won’t ride under those trees and the man who lets fly a shaft at me had better check his own skin for punctures. I’m thirsty.”

“Boss, Rufo pleaded. “She will neither eat nor drink on the Doral’s land–even if they begged her to. And She’s right. You don’t know the customs. Here one accepts what is freely given . . . but even a child is too proud to touch anything begrudged. Five miles more. Can’t the hero who killed Igli before breakfast hold out another five miles?”

“Well . . . all right, all right! But this is a crazy sort of country, you must admit. Utterly insane.” “Mmmm . . .” he answered. “Have you ever been in Washington, D.C.?” “Well–” I grinned wryly. “Touche! And I forgot that this is your native land. No offense intended.”

“Oh, but it’s not. What made you think so?”

“Why–” I tried to think. Neither Rufo nor Star had said so, but–“You know the customs, you speak the language like a native.”
“Milord Oscar, I’ve forgotten how many languages I speak. When I hear one of them, I speak it.”

“Well, you’re not an American. Nor a Frenchman, I think.”

He grinned merrily. “I could show you birth certificates from both countries–or could until we lost our baggage. But, no, I’m not from Earth.”

“Then where are you from?”

Rufo hesitated. “Best you get your facts from Her.”

“Tripe! I’ve got both feet hobbled and a sack over my head. This is ridiculous.”

“Boss,” he said earnestly, “She will answer any question you ask. But you must ask them.”

“I certainly shall!”

“So let’s speak of other matters. You mentioned the Strong Muldoon–”

“You mentioned him.”

“Well, perhaps I did. I never met Muldoon myself, though I’ve been in that part of Ireland. A fine country and the only really logical people on Earth. Facts won’t sway them in the face of higher truth. An admirable people. I heard of Muldoon from one of my uncles, a truthful man who for many years was a ghostwriter of political speeches. But at this time, due to a mischance while writing speeches for rival candidates, he was enjoying a vacation as a free-lance correspondent for an American syndicate specializing in Sunday feature stories. He heard of the Strong Muldoon and tracked him down, taking train from Dublin, then a local bus, and at last Shank’s Mares. He encountered a man plowing a field with a one-horse plow . . . but this man was shoving the plow ahead of himself without benefit of horse, turning a neat eight-inch furrow. ‘Aha!’ said my uncle and called out, ‘Mr. Muldoon!’

“The farmer stopped and called back, ‘Bless you for the mistake, friend!’–picked up the plow in one hand, pointed with it and said, ‘You’ll be finding Muldoon that way. Strong, he is.’

“So my uncle thanked him and went on until he found another man setting out fence posts by shoving them into the ground with his bare hand . . . and in stony soil, it’s true. So again my uncle hailed him as Muldoon.

“The man was so startled he dropped the ten or dozen six-inch posts he had tucked under the other arm. ‘Get along with your blarney, now!’ he called back. You must know that Muldoon lives farther on down this very same road. He’s strong.’

“The next local my uncle saw was building a stone fence. Dry-stone work it was and very neat. This man was trimming the rock without hammer or trowel, splitting them with the edge of his hand and doing the fine trim by pinching off bits with his fingers. So again my uncle addressed a man by that glorious name.

“The man started to speak but his throat was dry from all that stone dust; his voice failed him. So he grabbed up a large rock, squeezed it the way you squeezed Igli–forced water out of it as if it had been a goatskin, drank. Then he said, ‘Not me, my friend. He’s strong, as everyone knows. Why, many is the time that I have seen him insert his little finger–‘ ”

My mind was distracted from this string of lies by a wench pitching hay just across the ditch from the road. She had remarkable pectoral muscles and a lava-lava just suited her. She saw me eyeing her and gave me the eye right back, with a wiggle tossed in.

“You were saying?” I asked.

“Eh? ‘–just to the first joint . . . and hold himself at arm’s length for hours!”

“Rufo,” I said, “I don’t believe it could have been more than a few minutes. Strain on the tissues, and so forth.”

“Boss,” he answered in a hurt tone, “I could take you to the very spot where the Mighty Dugan used to perform this stunt.”

“You said his name was Muldoon.”

“He was a Dugan on his mother’s side, very proud of her he was. You’ll be pleased to know, milord, that the boundary of the Doral’s land is now in sight. Lunch in minutes only.”

“I can use it. With a gallon of anything, even water.”

“Passed by acclamation. Truthfully, milord, I’m not at my best today. I need food and drink and a long siesta before the fighting starts, or I’ll yawn when I should parry. Too large a night.”

“I didn’t see you at the banquet.”

“I was there in spirit. In the kitchen the food is hotter, the choice is better, and the company less formal. But I had no intention of making a night of it. Early to bed is my motto. Moderation in all things. Epictetus. But the pastry cook–Well, she reminds me of another girl I once knew, my partner in a legitimate business, smuggling. But her motto was that anything worth doing at all is worth overdoing–and she did. She smuggled on top of smuggling, a sideline of her own unmentioned to me and not taken into account–for I was listing every item with the customs officers, a copy with the bribe, so that they would know I was honest.

“But a girl can’t walk through the gates fat as a stuffed goose and walk back through them twenty minutes later skinny as the figure one–not that she was, just a manner of speaking–without causing
thoughtful glances. If it hadn’t been for the strange thing the dog did in the night, the busies would have nabbed us.”

“What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?”

“Just what I was doing last night. The noise woke us and we were out over the roof and free, but with nothing to show for six months’ hard work but skinned knees. But that pastry cook–You saw her, milord. Brown hair, blue eyes, a widow’s peak and the rest remarkably like Sophia Loren.”

“I have a vague memory of someone like that.”

“Then you didn’t see her, there is nothing vague about Nalia. As may be, I had intended to lead the life sanitary last night, knowing that there would be bloodshed today. You know:

‘Once at night and outen the light;

‘Once in the morning, a new day a-borning’

“–as the Scholar advised. But I hadn’t reckoned with Nalia. So here I am with no sleep and no breakfast and if I’m dead before nightfall in a pool of my own blood, it’ll be partly Nalia’s doing.”

“I’ll shave your corpse, Rufo; that’s a promise.” We had passed the marker into the next county but Star didn’t slow down. “Bye the bye, where did you learn the undertakers trade?”

“The what? Oh! That was a far place indeed. The top of that rise, behind those trees, is a house and that’s where we’ll be having lunch. Nice people.”

“Good!” The thought of lunch was a bright spot as I was again regretting my Boy Scout behavior of the night before. “Rufo, you had it all wrong about the strange thing the dog did in the night.”

“Milord?”

“The dog did nothing in the night, that was the strange thing.”

“Well, it certainly didn’t sound that way,” Rufo said doubtfully.

“Another dog, another far place. Sorry. What I started to say was: A funny thing happened to me on the way to bed last night–and I did lead the life sanitary.”

“Indeed, milord?”

“In deed, if not in thought.” I needed to tell somebody and Rufo was the sort of scoundrel I could trust. I told him the Story of the Three Bares.

“I should have risked it,” I concluded. “And, swelp me, I would have, if that lad had been put to bed–alone–when she should have been. Or I think I would have, regardless of White Shotgun or
jumping out windows. Rufo, why do the prettiest gals always have fathers or husbands? But I tell you the truth, there they were–the Big Bare, the Middle-Sized Bare, and the Littlest Bare, close enough to touch and all of them anxious to keep my bed warm–and I didn’t do a damn thing! Go ahead and laugh. I deserve it.”

He didn’t laugh. I turned to look at him and his expression was piteous. “Milord! Oscar my comrade! Tell me it isn’t true!”

“It is true,” I said huffily. “And I regretted it at once. Too late. And you complained about your night!”

“Oh, my Cod!” He threw his mount into high gear and took off. Ars Longa looked back inquiringly over her shoulder, then continued on.

Rufo caught up with Star; they stopped, short of the house where lunch was to be expected. They waited and I joined them. Star was wearing no expression; Rufo looked unbearably embarrassed.

Star said, “Rufo, go beg lunch for us. Fetch it here. I would speak with milord alone.”

“Yes, milady!” He got out fast.

Star said to me, still with no expression, “Milord Hero, is this true? What your groom reports to me?”

“I don’t know what he reported.”

“It concerned your failure–your alleged failure–last night.”

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘failure.’ If you want to know what I did after the banquet . . . I slept alone. Period.”

She sighed but her expression did not change. “I wanted to hear it from your lips. To be just.” Then her expression did change and I have never seen such anger. In a low almost passionless voice she began chewing me out:

“You hero. You incredible butter-brained dolt. Clumsy, bumbling, loutish, pimple-peeked, underdone, over-muscled, idiotic–”

“Stop it!”

“Quiet, I am not finished with you. Insulting three innocent ladies offending a staunch–”

“SHUT UP!!!”

The blast blew her hair back. I started in before she could rev up again. “Don’t ever again speak to me that way. Star. Never.”

“But–”

“Hold your tongue, you bad-tempered brat! You have not earned the right to speak to me that way. Nor will any girl ever earn the right. You will always–always!–address me politely and with respect. One more word of your nasty rudeness and I’ll spank you until the tears fly.”

“You wouldn’t dare!”

“Get your hand away from that sword or I’ll take it away from you, down your pants right here on the road, and spank you with it. Till your arse is red and you beg for mercy. Star, I do not fight females–but I do punish naughty children. Ladies I treat as ladies. Spoiled brats I treat as spoiled brats. Star, you could be the Queen of England and the Galactic Overlord all rolled into one–but ONE MORE WORD out of line from you, and down come your tights and you won’t be able to sit for a week. Understand e?”

At last she said in a small voice, “I understand, milord.”

“And besides that. I’m resigning from the hero business. I won’t listen to such talk twice, I won’t work for a person who treats me that way even once.” I sighed, realizing that I had just lost my corporal’s stripes again. But I always felt easier and freer without them.

“Yes, milord.” I could barely hear her. It occurred to me that it was a long way back to Nice. But it didn’t worry me.

“All right, let’s forget it.”

“Yes, milord.” She added quietly, “But may I explain why I spoke as I did?”

“No.”

“Yes, milord.”

A long silent time later Rufo returned. He stopped out of earshot, I motioned him to join us.

We ate silently and I didn’t eat much but the beer was good. Rufo tried once to make chitchat with an impossibility about another of his uncles. It couldn’t have fallen flatter inBoston .

After lunch Star turned her mount–those “horses” have a small turning circle for their wheelbase but t’s easier to bring them full circle in a tight place by leading them. Rufo said, “Milady?”

She said impassively, “I am returning to the Doral.”

“Milady! Please not!”

“Dear Rufo,” she said warmly but sadly. “You can wait up at that house–and if I’m not back in three days, you are free.” She looked at me, looked away. “I hope that milord Oscar will see fit to escort me. But I do not ask it. I have not the right.” She started off.

I was slow in getting Ars Longa turned; I didn’t have the hang of it. Star was a good many bricks down the road; I started after her.

Rufo waited until I was turned, biting his nails, then suddenly climbed aboard and caught up with me. We rode knee to knee, a careful fifty paces behind Star, Finally he said, “This is suicide. You know that, don’t you?”

“No, I didn’t know it.”

“Well, it is.”

I said, “Is that why you are not bothering to say ‘sir’?”

“Milord?” He laughed shortly and said, “I guess it is. No point in that nonsense when you are going to die soon.”

“You’re mistaken.”

“Huh?”

” ‘Huh, milord,’ if you please. Just for practice. But from now on, even if we last only thirty minutes. Because I am running the show now–and not just as her stooge. I don’t want any doubt in your mind as to who is boss once the fighting starts. Otherwise turn around and I’ll give your mount a slap on the rump to get you moving. Hear me?”

“Yes, milord Oscar.” He added thoughtfully, “I knew you were boss as soon as I got back. But I don’t see how you did it. Milord, I have never seen Her meek before. May one ask?”

“One may not. But you have my permission to ask her. If you think it is safe. Now tell me about this ‘suicide’ matter–and don’t say she doesn’t want you to give me advice. From here on you’ll give advice any time I ask–and keep your lip buttoned if I don’t.”

“Yes, milord. All right, the suicide prospects. No way to figure the odds. It depends on how angry the Doral is. But it won’t be a fight, can’t be. Either we get clobbered the instant we poke our noses in . . . or we are safe until we leave his land again, even if he tells us to turn around and ride away.” Rufo looked very thoughtful. “Milord, if you want a blind guess–Well, I figure you’ve insulted the Doral the worst he has ever been hurt in the course of a long and touchy life. So it’s about ninety to ten that, two shakes after we turn off the road, we are all going to be sprouting more arrows than Saint Sebastian.”

“Star, too? She hasn’t done anything. Nor have you.” (Nor I, either, I added to myself. What a country!)

Rufo sighed. “Milord, each world has its own ways. Jock won’t want to hurt Her. He likes Her. He’s terribly fond of Her. You could say that he loves Her. But if he kills you, he has got to loll Her. Anything else would be inhumane by his standards–and he’s a very moral bloke; he’s noted for it. And kill me, too, of course, but I don’t count. He must kill Her even though it will start a chain of events that will wipe him out just as dead once the news gets out. The question is: Does he have to kill you? I figure be has to, knowing these people. Sorry . . . milord.”

I mulled it over. “Then why are you here, Rufo?”

“Milord?”

“You can cut the ‘sirs’ down to one an hour. Why are you here? If your estimate is correct, your one word and one bow can’t affect the outcome. She gave you a fair chance to chicken out. So what is it? Pride? Or are you in love with her?”

“Oh, my God, no!”

Again I saw Rufo really shocked. “Excuse me,” he went on. “You caught me with my guard down.” He thought about it. “Two reasons, I suppose. The first is that if Jock allows us to parley–well. She is quite a talker. In the second place”–he glanced at me–“I’m superstitious, I admit it. You’re a man with luck. I’ve seen it. So I want to be close to you even when reason tells me to run. You could fall in a cesspool and–”

“Nonsense. You should hear my hard-luck story.”

“Maybe in the past. But I’m betting the dice as they roll.” He shut up.

A bit later I said, “You stay here.” I speeded up and joined Star. “Here are the plans,” I told her.

“When we get there, you stay out on the road with Rufo. I’m going in alone.”

She gasped. “Oh, milord! No!”

“Yes.”

“But–”

“Star, do you want me back? As your champion?”

“With all my heart!”

“All right. Then do it my way.”

She waited before answering. “Oscar–”

“Yes, Star.”

“I will do as you say. But will you let me explain before you decide what you will say?”

“Go on.”

“In this world, the place for a lady to ride is by her champion. And that is where I would want to be, my Hero, when in peril. Especially when in peril. But I’m not pleading for sentiment, nor for empty form. Knowing what I now know I can prophesy with certainty that, if you go in first, you will die at once, and I will die–and Rufo–as soon as they can chase us down. That will be quickly, our mounts are tired. On the other hand, if I go in alone–”

“No.”

“Please, milord. I was not proposing, it. If I were to go in alone, I would be almost as likely to die at once as you would be. Or perhaps, instead of feeding me to the pigs, be would simply have me feed the pigs and be a plaything of the pig boys–a fate merciful rather than cold justice in view of my utter degradation in returning without you. But the Doral is fond of me and I think he might let me live . . . as a pig girl and no better than pigs. This I would risk if necessary and wait my chance to escape, for I cannot
afford pride; I have no pride, only necessity.” Her voice was husky with tears.

“Star, Star!”

“My darling!”

“Huh? You said–”

“May I say it? We may not have much time. My Hero . . . my darling.” She reached out blindly, I took her hand; she leaned toward me and pressed it to her breast.

Then she straightened up but kept my hand. “I’m all right now. I am a woman when I least expect it. No, my darling Hero, there is only one way for us to go in and that is side by side, proudly. It is not only safest, it is the only way I would wish it–could I afford pride. I can afford anything else. I could buy you theEiffelTower for a trinket, and replace it when you broke it. But not pride.”

“Why is it safest?”

“Because he may–I say ‘may’–let us parley. If I can get in ten words, he’ll grant a hundred. Then a thousand. I may be able to heal his hurt.”

“All right. But–Star, what did I do to hurt him? I didn’t! I went to a lot of trouble not to hurt him.”

She was silent a while, then–“You are an American.”

“What’s that got to do with it? Jock doesn’t know it.”

“It has, perhaps, everything to do with it. No, America is at most a name to the Doral for, although he has studied the Universes, he has never traveled. But–You will not be angry with me again?”

“Uh . . . let’s call a King’s-X on that. Say anything you need to say but explain things. Just don’t chew me out. Oh, hell, chew me out if you like–this once. Just don’t let it be a habit . . . my darling.”

She squeezed my hand. “Never will I again! The error lay in my not realizing that you are American. I don’t know America , not the way Rufo does. If Rufo had been present–But he wasn’t; he was wenching in the kitchen. I suppose I assumed, when you were offered table and root and bed, that you would behave as a Frenchman would. I never dreamed that you would refuse it. Had I known, I could have spun a thousand excuses for you. An oath taken. A holy day in your religion. Jock would have been disappointed but not hurt; he is a man of honor.”

“But–Damn it, I still don’t see why he wants to shoot me for not doing something I would expect, back home, that he might snoot me for doing. In this country, is a plan forced to accept any proposition a gal makes? And why did she run and complain? Why didn’t she keep it secret? Hell, she didn’t even try. She dragged in her daughters.”

“But, darling, it was never a secret. He asked you publicly and publicly you accepted. How would you feel if your bride, on your wedding night, kicked you out of the bedroom? ‘Table, and roof, and bed.’ You accepted.”

” ‘Bed.’ Star, inAmerica beds are multiple-purpose furniture. Sometimes we sleep in them. Just sleep. I didn’t dig it.”

“I know now. You didn’t know the idiom. My fault. But do you now see why he was completely–and publicly–humiliated?”

“Well, yes, but he brought it on himself. He asked me in public. It would have been worse if I had said No then.”

“Not at all. You didn’t have to accept. You could have refused graciously. Perhaps the most graceful way, even though it be a white lie, is for the hero to protest his tragic inability–temporary or permanent–from wounds received in the very battle that proved him a hero.”

“I’ll remember that. But I still don’t see why he was so astoundingly generous in the first place.”

She turned and looked at me. “My darling, is it all right for me to say that you have astounded me every time I have talked with you? And I had thought I had passed beyond all surprises, years ago.”

“It’s mutual. You always astound me. However, I like it–except one time.”

“My lord Hero, how often do you think a simple country squire has a chance to gain for his family a Hero’s son, and raise it as his own? Can you not feel his gall-bitter disappointment at what you snatched from him after he thought you had promised this boon? His shame? His wrath?”

I considered it. “Well, I’ll be dogged. It happens inAmerica , too. But they don’t boast about it.”

“Other countries, other customs. At the very least, he had thought that he had the honor of a hero treating him as a brother. And with luck he expected the get of a hero for house Doral.”

“Wait a minute! Is that why he sent me three? To improve the odds?”

“Oscar, he would eagerly have sent you thirty . . . if you had hinted that you felt heroic enough to attempt it. As it was, he sent his chief wife and his two favorite daughters.” She hesitated. “What I still don’t understand–” She stopped and asked me a blunt question.

“Hell, no!” I protested, blushing. “Not since I was fifteen. But one thing that put me off was that mere child. She’s one. I think.”

Star shrugged. “She may be. But she is not a child; in Nevia she is a woman. And even if she is unbroached as yet, I’ll wager she’s a mother in another twelvemonth. But if you were loath to tap her, why didn’t you shoo her out and take her older sister? That quaint hasn’t been virgin since she’s had breasts, to my certain knowledge–and I hear that Muri is ‘some dish,’ if that is the American idiom.”

I muttered. I had been thinking the same thing. But I didn’t want to discuss it with Star.

She said, “Pardonne-moi, mon cher? Tu as dit?”

“I said I had given up sex crimes for Lent!”

She looked puzzled. “But Lent is over, even on Earth. And it is not, here, at all.”

“Sorry.”

“Still I’m pleased that you didn’t pick Muri over Letva; Muri would have been unbearably stuck-up with her mother after such a thing. But I do understand that you will repair this, if I can straighten it out?” She added, “It makes great difference in how I handle the diplomacies.”

(Star, Star–you are the one I want to bed!) “This is what you wish . . . my darling?”

“Oh, how much it would help!”

“Okay. You’re the doctor. One . . . three . . . thirty–I’ll die trying. But no little kids!” “No problem.

Let me think. If the Doral lets me get in just five words–” She fell silent. Her hand was pleasantly warm. I did some thinking, too. These strange customs had ramifications, some of which I had still shied away from. How was it, if Letva had immediately told her husband what a slob I was-

“Star? Where did you sleep last night?”

She looked around sharply. “Milord . . . is it permitted to ask you, please, to mind your own business?”

“I suppose so. But everybody seems to be minding mine.”

“I am sorry. But I am very much worried and my heaviest worries you do not know as yet. It was a fair question and deserves a fair answer. Hospitality balances, always, and honors flow both ways. I slept in the Doral’s bed. However, if it matters–and it may to you; I still do not understand Americans–I was wounded yesterday, it still bothered me. Jock is a sweet and gentle soul. We slept. Just slept.”

I tried to make it nonchalant. “Sorry about the wound. Does it hurt now?”

“Not at all. The dressing will fall off by tomorrow. However–Last night was not the first time I enjoyed table and roof and bed at house Doral. Jock and I are old friends, beloved friends–which is why I think I can risk that he may grant me a few seconds before killing me.”

“Well, I had figured out most of that.”

“Oscar, by your standards–the way you have been raised–I am a bitch.”

“Oh, never! A princess.”

“A bitch. But I am not of your country and I was reared by another code. By my standards, and they seem good to me, I am a moral woman. Now . . . am I still your darling’?”

“My darling!”

“My darling Hero. My champion. Lean close and kiss me. If we die, I would my mouth be warm with your lips. The entrance is just around this bend.”

“I know.”

A few moments later we rode, swords sheathed and bows unstrung, proudly into the target area.

Chapter 10

Three days later we rode out again.

This time breakfast was sumptuous. This time musicians lined our exit. This time the Doral rode with us.

This time Rufo reeled to his mount, each arm around a wench, a bottle in each hand, then, after busses from a dozen more, was lifted into his seat and belted in the reclining position. He fell asleep, snoring before we set out.

I was kissed good-bye more times than I could count and by some who had no reason to do it so thoroughly–for I was only an apprentice hero, still learning the trade.

It’s not a bad trade, despite long hours, occupational hazards, and utter lack of security; it has fringe benefits, with many openings and rapid advancement for a man with push and willingness to learn. The Doral seemed well pleased with me.

At breakfast he had sung my prowess up to date in a thousand intricate lines. But I was sober and did not let his praises impress me with my own greatness; I knew better. Obviously a little bird had reported to him regularly–but that bird was a liar. John Henry the Steel-Drivin’ Man couldn’t have done what Jocko’s ode said I did.

But I took it with my heroic features noble and impassive, then I stood up and gave them “Casey at the Bat,” putting heart and soul into “Mighty Casey has struck OUT!”

Star gave it a free interpretation. I had (so she sang) praised the ladies of Doral, the ideas being ones associated with Madame Pompadour, Nell Gwyn, Theodora, Ninon de l’Enclos, and Rangy Lil. She didn’t name those famous ladies; instead she was specific, in Nevian eulogy that would have startled Francois Villon.

So I had to come up with an encore. I gave them “Relic’s daughter,” then “Jabberwocky,” with gestures.

Star had interpreted me in spirit; she had said what I would have said had I been capable of extemporizing poetry. Late on the second day I had chanced on Star in the steam room of the manor’s baths. For an hour we lay wrapped in sheets on adjacent slabs, sweating it out and restoring the tissues. Presently I blurted out to her how surprised–and delighted–I was. I did it sheepishly but Star was one to whom I dared bare my soul.

She had listened gravely. When I ran down, she said quietly, “My Hero, as you know, I do not know America. But from what Rufo tells me your culture is unique, among all the Universes.”

“Well, I realize that the USA is not sophisticated in such things, not the way France is.”

” ‘France!’ ” She shrugged, beautifully. ” ‘Latins are lousy lovers.’ I heard that somewhere, I testify that it is true. Oscar, so far as I know, your culture is the only semicivilized one in which love is not recognized as the highest art and given the serious study it deserves.”

“You mean the way they treat it here. Whew! ‘Much too good for the common people!’ ”

“No, I do not mean the way it is treated here.” She spoke in English. “Much as I love our friends here, this is a barbarous culture and their arts are barbaric. Oh, good art of its sort, very good; their approach is honest. But–if we live through this, after our troubles are over–I want you to travel among the Universes. You’ll see what I mean.” She got up, folding her sheet into a toga. I’m glad you are pleased, my Hero. I’m proud of you.”

I lay there a while longer, thinking about what she had said. The “highest art”–and back home we didn’t even study it, much less make any attempt to teach it. Ballet takes years and years. Nor do they hire you to sing at the Met just because you have a loud voice.

Why should “love” be classed as an “instinct”?

Certainly the appetite for sex is an instinct–but did another appetite make every glutton a gourmet, every fry cook a Cordon Bleu? Hell, you had to learn even to be a fry cook.

I walked out of the steam room whistling “The Best Things in Life Are Free”–then chopped it off in sudden sorrow for all my poor, unhappy compatriots cheated of their birthright by the most mammoth hoax in history.

A mile out the Doral bade us good-bye, embracing me, kissing Star and mussing her hair; then he and his escort drew swords and remained at salute until we passed over the next rise. Star and I rode knee to knee while Rufo snored behind us.

I looked at her and her mouth twitched. She caught my eye and said demurely, “Good morning, milord.”

“Good morning, milady. You slept well?”

“Very well, thank you, milord. And you?”

“The same, thank you.”

“So? ‘What was the strange thing the dog did in the night?’ ”

” ‘The dog did nothing in the night, that was the strange thing,’ ” I answered with a straight face. “Really? So gay a dog? Then who was that knight I last saw with a lady?” ”

‘Twasn’t night, ’twas brillig.”

“And your vorpal blade went snicker-snack! My beamish boy!”

“Don’t try to pin your jabberwocking on me, you frolicsome wench,” I said severely. “I’ve got friends, I have–I can prove an alibi. Besides, ‘my strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure.’ ”

“And the line before that one. Yes, I know; your friends told me about it, milord.” Suddenly she grinned and slapped me on the thigh and started bellowing the chorus of “Reilly’s Daughter.” Vita Brevis norted; Ars Longa pricked up her ears and looked around reprovingly.

“Stop it,” I said. “You’re shocking the horses.”

“They aren’t horses and you can’t shock them. Have you seen how they do it, milord? In spite of all those legs? First–”

“Hold your tongue! Ars Longa is a lady, even if you aren’t.”

“I warned you I was a bitch. First she sidles up–”

“I’ve seen it. Muri thought it would amuse me. Instead it gave me an inferiority complex that lasted all afternoon.”

“I venture to disbelieve that it was all afternoon, milord Hero. Let’s sing about Reilly then. You lead, I’ll harmonize.”

“Well–Not too loud, we’ll wake Rufo.”

“Not him, he’s embalmed.”

“Then you’ll wake me, which is worse. Star darling, when and where was Rufo an undertaker? And ow did he get from that into this business? Did they run him out of town?”

She looked puzzled. “Undertaker? Rufo? Not Rufo.”

“He was most circumstantial.”

“So? Milord, Rufo has many faults. But telling the truth is not one of them. Moreover, our people do ot have undertakers.”

“You don’t? Then what do you do with leftover carcasses? Can’t leave them cluttering the parlor. Untidy.”

“I think so, too, but our people do just that: keep them in the parlor. For a few years at least. An overly sentimental custom but we are a sentimental people. Even so, it can be overdone. One of my great aunts kept all her former husbands in her bedchamber–a dreadful clutter and boring, too, because she talked about them, repeating herself and exaggerating. I quit going to see her.”

“Well. Did she dust them?”

“Oh, yes. She was a fussy housekeeper.”

“Uh–How many were there?”

“Seven or eight, I never counted.”

“I see. Star? Is there black-widow blood in your family?”

“What? Oh! But, darling, there is black-widow blood in every woman.” She dimpled, reached over and patted my knee. “But Auntie didn’t kill them. Believe me, my Hero, the women in my family are much too fond of men to waste them. No, Auntie just hated to let them go. I think that is foolish. Look forward, not back.”

” ‘And let the dead past bury its dead.’ Look, if your people keep dead homes around the house, you must have undertakers. Embalmers at least. Or doesn’t the air get thick?”

“Embalming? Oh, no! Just place a stasis on them once you’re sure they are dead. Or dying. Any schoolboy can do that.” She added, “Perhaps I wronged Rufo. He has spent much time on your
Earth–he likes the place, it fascinates him–and he may have tried undertaking. But it seems to me an occupation too honest and straightforward to attract him.”

“You never did tell me what your people eventually do with a cadaver.”

“Not bury it. That would shock them silly.” Star shivered. “Even myself and I’ve traveled the

Universes, learned to be indifferent to almost any custom.”

“But what?”

“Much what you did to Igli. Apply a geometrical option and get rid of it.”

“Oh. Star, where did Igli go?”

“I couldn’t guess, milord. I had no chance to calculate it. Perhaps the ones who made him know. But I hink they were even more taken by surprise than I was.”

“I guess I’m dense. Star. You call it geometry; Jocko referred to me as a ‘mathematician.’ But I did what was forced on me by circumstances; I didn’t understand it.”

“Forced on Igli, you should say, milord Hero. What happens when you place an insupportable strain on a mass, such that it cannot remain where it is? While leaving it nowhere to go? This is a schoolboy problem in metaphysical geometry and the eldest proto-paradox, the one about the irresistible force and the immovable body. The mass implodes. It is squeezed out of its own world into some other. This is often the way the people of a universe discover the Universes–but usually as disastrously as you forced it on Igli; it may take millennia before they control it. It may hover around the fringes as ‘magic’ for a long time, sometimes working, sometimes failing, sometimes backfiring on the magician.”

“And you call this ‘mathematics’?”

“How else?”

“I’d call it magic.”

“Yes, surely. As I told Jocko, you have a natural genius. You could be a great warlock.”

I shrugged uncomfortably. “I don’t believe in magic.”

“Nor do I,” she answered, “the way you put it. I believe in what is.”

“That’s what I mean, Star. I don’t believe in hocus-pocus. What happened to Igli–I mean, ‘what ppeared to happen to Igli’–could not have happened because it would violate the law of conservation of mass-energy. There must be some other explanation.”

She was politely silent.

So I brought to bear the sturdy common sense of ignorance and prejudice. “Look, Star, I’m not going to believe the impossible simply because I was there. A natural law is a natural law. You have to admit that.”

We rode a few rods before she answered, “May it please milord Hero, the world is not what we wish it to be. It is what it is. No, I have over-assumed. Perhaps it is indeed what we wish it to be.

Either way, it is what it is. Le voila! Behold it, self-demonstrating. Das Ding an sich. Bite it. It is. Ai-je raison? Do I speak truly?”

“That’s what I was saying! The universe is what it is and can’t be changed by jiggery-pokery. It works by exact rules, like a machine.” (I hesitated, remembering a car we had had that was a hypochondriac. It would “fall sick,” then “get well” as soon as a mechanic tried to touch it.) I went on firmly, “Natural law
never takes a holiday. The invariability of natural law is the cornerstone of science.”

“So it is.”

“Well?” I demanded.

“So much the worse for science.”

“But–” I shut up and rode in huffy silence.

Presently a slender hand touched my forearm, caressed it. “Such a strong sword arm,” she said softly.

“Milord Hero, may I explain?”

“Talk ahead,” I said. “If you can sell me, you can convert the Pope to Mormonism. I’m stubborn.”

“Would I have picked you out of hundreds of billions to be my champion were you not?”

” ‘Hundreds of billions?’ You mean millions, don’t you?”

“Hear me, milord. Indulge me. Let us be Socratic. I’ll frame the trick questions and you make the tupid answers–and we’ll learn who shaved the barber. Then it will be your turn and I’ll be the silly stooge. Okay?”

“All right, put a nickel in.”

“Very well. Question: Are the customs at house Doral the customs you used at home?”

“What? You know they aren’t. I’ve never been so flabbergasted since the time the preacher’s daughter took me up into the steeple to show me the Holy Ghost.” I chuckled sheepishly. “I’d be blushing yet but I’ve burned out my fuses.”

“Yet the basic difference between Nevian customs and yours lies in only one postulate. Milord, there axe worlds in which males kill females as soon as eggs are laid–and others in which females eat males even as they are being fructified–like that black widow you made cousin to me.”

“I didn’t mean that, Star.”

“I was not offended, my love. An insult is like a drink; it affects one only if accepted. And pride is too heavy baggage for my journey; I have none. Oscar, would you find such worlds stranger than this one?”

“You’re talking about spiders or some such. Not people.”

“I speak of people, the dominant race of each its world. Highly civilized.”

“Ugh!”

“You will not say ‘ugh’ when you see them. They are so different from us that their home life cannot atter to us. Contrariwise, this planet is very like your Earth–yet your customs would shock old Jocko out of song. Darling, your world has a custom unique in the Universes. That is, the Twenty Universes known to me, out of thousands or millions or googols of universes. In the known Twenty Universes only Earth has this astounding custom.”

“Do you mean “War”?”

“Oh, no! Most worlds have warfare. This planet Nevia is one of the few where lolling is retail, rather than wholesale. Here there be Heroes, killing is done with passion. This is a world of love and slaughter, both with gay abandon. No, I mean something much more shocking. Can you guess?”

“Uh . . . television commercials?”

“Close in spirit, but wide of the mark. You have an expression ‘the oldest profession.’ Here–and in all ther known worlds–it isn’t even the youngest. Nobody has heard of it and wouldn’t believe it if he did. We few who visit Earth don’t talk about it. Not that it would matter; most people don’t believe travelers’ tales.”

“Star, are you telling me that there is no prostitution elsewhere in the Universe?”

“The Universes, my darling. None.”

“You know,” I said thoughtfully, “that’s going to be a shock to my first sergeant. None at all?”

“I mean,” she said bluntly, “that whoring seems to have been invented by Earth people and no thers–and the idea would shock old Jocko into impotence. He’s a straitlaced moralist.”

“I’ll be damned! We must be a bunch of slobs.”

“I did not mean to offend, Oscar; I was reciting facts. But this oddity of Earth is not odd in its own context. Any commodity is certain to be sold–bought, sold, leased, rented, bartered, traded, discounted, price-stabilized, inflated, bootlegged, and legislated–and a woman’s ‘commodity’ as it was called on Earth in franker days is no exception. The only wonder is the wild notion of thinking of it as a commodity. Why, it so surprised me that once I even–Never mind. Anything can be made a commodity. Someday I
will show you cultures living in spaces, not on planets–nor on fundaments of any sort; not all universes have planets–cultures where the breath of life is sold like a kilo of butter in Provence. Other places so crowded that the privilege of staying alive is subject to tax–and delinquents are killed out of hand by the
Department of Eternal Revenue and neighbors not only do not interfere, they are pleased.”

“Good God! Why?”

“They solved death, milord, and most of them won’t emigrate despite endless roomier planets. But we were speaking of Earth. Not only is whoring unknown elsewhere, but its permutations are
unknown–dower, bridal price, alimony, separate maintenance, all the variations that color all Earth’s institutions–every custom related even remotely to the incredible notion that what all women have an endless supply of is nevertheless merchandise, to be hoarded and auctioned.”

Ars Longa gave a snort of disgust. No, I don’t think she understood. She understands some Nevian but Star spoke English; Nevian lacks the vocabulary.

“Even your secondary customs,” she went on, “are shaped by this unique institution. Clothing–you’ve noticed that there is no real difference here in how the two sexes dress. I’m in tights this morning and you are in shorts but had it been the other way around no one would have noticed.”

“The hell they wouldn’t! Your tights wouldn’t fit me.”

“They stretch. And body shyness, which is an aspect of sex-specialized clothing. Here nakedness is as unnoteworthy as on that pretty little island where I found you. All hairless peoples sometimes wear clothing and all peoples no matter how hirsute wear ornaments–but nakedness taboo is found only where flesh is merchandise to be packaged or displayed . . . that is to say, on Earth. It parallels ‘Don’t pinch the grapefruit’ and putting false bottoms in berry boxes. If something is never haggled over, there is no need to make a mystery of it.”

“So if we get rid of clothes we get rid of prostitution?”

“Heavens, no! You’ve got it backwards.” She frowned. “I don’t see how Earth could ever get rid of whoring; it’s too much a part of everything you do.”

“Star, you’ve got your facts wrong. There is almost no prostitution in America.”

She looked startled. “Really? But–Isn’t ‘alimony’ an American word? And ‘gold digger’? And ‘coming-out party’?”

“Yes, but prostitution has almost died out. Hell, I wouldn’t know how to go about finding a whorehouse even in an Army town. I’m not saying that you don’t wind up in the nay. But it’s not commercialized. Star, even with an American girl who is well-known to be an easy make-out, if you offered her five bucks–or twenty–it’s ten to one she would slap your face.”

“Then how is it done?”

“You’re nice to her instead. Take her to dinner, maybe to a show. Buy her flowers, girls are suckers for flowers. Then approach the subject politely.”

“Oscar, doesn’t this dinner and show, and possibly flowers, cost more than five dollars? Or even twenty? I understood that American prices were as high as French prices.”

“Well, yes, but you can’t just tip your hat and expect a girl to throw herself on her back. A tightwad–”

“I rest the case. All I was trying to show was that customs can be wildly different in different worlds.”

“That’s true, even on Earth. But–”

“Please, milord. I won’t argue the virtue of American women, nor was I criticizing. Had I been reared in America I think I would want at least an emerald bracelet rather than dinner and a show. But I was leading up to the subject of ‘natural law.’ Is not the invariability of natural” law an unproved assumption? Even on Earth?”

“Well–You haven’t stated it fairly. It’s an assumption, I suppose. But there has never been a case in which it failed to stand up.”

“No black swans? Could it not be that an observer who saw an exception preferred not to believe his eyes? Just as you do not want to believe that Igli ate himself even though you, my Hero, forced him to?

Never mind. Let’s leave Socrates to his Xanthippe. Natural law may be invariable throughout a universe–seems to be, in rigid universes. But it is certain that natural laws vary from universe to
universe–and believe this you must, milord, else neither of us will live long!”

I considered it. Damn it, where had Igli gone? “Most unsettling.”

“No more unsettling, once you get used to it, than shifting languages and customs as you shift countries.

How many chemical elements are there on Earth?”

“Uh, ninety-two and a bunch of Johnny-Come-Latelies. A hundred and six or seven.”

“Much the same here. Nevertheless a chemist from Earth would suffer some shocks. The elements aren’t quite the same, nor do they behave quite the same way. H-bombs won’t work here and dynamite won’t explode.”

I said sharply, “Now wait! Are you telling me that electrons and protons aren’t the same here, to get down to basics?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps, perhaps not. What is an electron but a mathematical concept? Have you tasted one lately? Or put salt on the tail of a wavicle? Does it matter?”

“It damn well would matter. A man can starve as dead from lack of trace elements as from lack of bread.”

“True. In some universes we humans must carry food if we visit them–which we sometimes must, if only to change trains. But here, and in each of the universes and countless planets where we humans live, you need not worry; local food will nourish you. Of course, if you lived here many years, then went back to Earth and died soon after and an autopsy were done with fussiest microanalysis, the analyst might not believe his results. But your stomach wouldn’t care.”

I thought about this, my belly stuffed with wonderful food and the air around me sweet and good–certainly my body did not care if there were indeed the differences Star spoke of.

Then I recalled one aspect of life in which little differences cause big differences. I asked Star about it.

She looked blandly innocent. “Do you care, milord? You will be long gone before it matters to Doral. I thought your purpose these three days was simply to help me in my problem? With pleasure in your work, I realize–you threw yourself into the spirit of the occasion.”

“Damn it, quit pulling my leg! I did it to help you. But a man can’t help wondering.”

She slapped my thigh and laughed. “Oh, my very darling! Stop wondering; human races throughout the Universes can crossbreed. Some crosses fruit but seldom and some mule out. But this is not one of them. You will live on here, even if you never return. You’re not sterile; that was one of many things I checked
when I examined your beautiful body in Nice. One is never sure how the dice will roll, but–I think the Doral will not be disappointed.”

She leaned toward me. “Would you give your physician data more accurate than that which Jocko sang? I might offer a statistical probability. Or even a Sight.”

“No, I would not! Nosy.”

“It is a long nose, isn’t it? As you wish, milord. In a less personal vein the fact of crossbreeding among humans of different universes–and some animals such as dogs and cats–is a most interesting question. The only certainty is that human beings flourish only in those universes having chemistries so similar that
elements that make up deoxyribonucleic acids are so alike as not to matter. As for the rest, every scholar has his theory. Some hold to a teleologic explanation, asserting that Man evolves alike in all essential particulars in every universe that can support him because of Divine Plan–or through blind necessity, depending on whether the scholar takes his religion straight or chases it with soda.

“Some think that we evolved just once–or were created, as may be–and leaked across into other universes. Then they fight over which universe was the home of the race.”

“How can there be any argument?” I objected. “Earth has fossil evidence covering the evolution of man. Other planets either have it or not, and that should settle it.”

“Are you sure, milord? I thought that, on Earth, man’s family tree has as many dotted lines as there are bastards in European royal lines.”

I shut up. I had simply read some popular books. Perhaps she was right; a race that could not agree as to who did what to whom in a war only twenty years back probably didn’t know what Alley Oop did to the upstairs maid a million years ago, when the evidence was only scattered bones. Hadn’t there been hoaxes? The Piltdown Man, or some such?

Star went on, “Whatever the truth, there are leakages between worlds. On your own planet disappearances run to hundreds of thousands and not all are absconders or wife-deserters; see any
police department’s files. One usual place is the battlefield. The strain becomes too great and a man slides through a hole he didn’t know was there and winds up ‘missing in action.’ Sometimes–not often–a man is seen to disappear. One of your American writers, Bierce or Pierce, got interested and collected such cases. He collected so many that he was collected, too. And your Earth experiences reverse leakage, the ‘Kaspar Hausers,’ persons from nowhere, speaking no known language and never able to account for themselves.”

“Wait a minute? Why just people?”

“I didn’t say ‘just people.’ Have you never heard of rains of frogs? Of stones? Of blood? Who questions a stray cat’s origin? Are all flying saucers optical illusions? I promise you they are not; some are poor lost astronauts trying to find their way home. My people use space travel very little, as faster-than-light is the readiest way to lose yourself among the Universes. We prefer the safer method of metaphysical geometries–or ‘magic’ in the vulgar speech.”

Star looked thoughtful. “Milord, your Earth may be the home of mankind. Some scholars think so.”

“Why?”

“It touches so many other worlds. It’s the top of the list as a transfer point. If its people render it unfit for life–unlikely, but possible–it will disrupt traffic of a dozen universes. Earth has had its fairy rings, and Gates, and Bifrost Bridges for ages; that one we used in Nice was there before the Romans came.”

“Star, how can you talk about points on Earth ‘touching’ other planets–for centuries on end? The Earth moves around the Sun at twenty miles a second or such, and spins on its axis, not to mention other motions that add up to an involved curve at unthinkable speed. So how can it ‘touch’ other worlds?”

Again we rode in silence. At last Star said, “My Hero, how long did it take you to learn calculus?”

“Why, I haven’t learned it. I’ve studied it a couple of years.”

“Can you tell me how a particle can be a wave?”

“What? Star, that’s quantum mechanics, not calculus. I could give an explanation but it wouldn’t mean anything; I don’t have the math. An engineer doesn’t need it.”

“It would be simplest,” she said diffidently, “to answer your question by saying ‘magic’ just as you answered mine with ‘quantum mechanics.’ But you don’t like that word, so all I can say is that after you study higher geometries, metaphysical and conjectural as well as topological and judicial–if you care to
make such study–I will gladly answer. But you won’t need to ask.”

(Ever been told: “Wait till you grow up, dear; then you will understand”? As a kid I didn’t like it from grownups; I liked it still less from a girl I was in love with when I was fully grown.)

Star didn’t let me sulk; she shifted the talk. “Some crossbreedings are from neither accidental slippages nor planned travel. You’ve heard of incubi and succubi?”

“Oh, sure. But I never bother my head with myths.”

“Not myths, darling, no matter how often the legend has been used to explain embarrassing situations. Witches and warlocks are not always saints and some acquire a taste for rape. A person who has learned to open Gates can indulge such vice; he–or she–can sneak up on a sleeping person–maid, chaste wife, virgin boy–work his will and be long gone before cockcrow.” She shuddered.

“Sin at its nastiest. If we catch them, we kill them. I’ve caught a few, I killed them. Sin at its worst, even if the victim learns to like it.” She shuddered again.

“Star, what is your definition of ‘sin’?”

“Can there be more than one? Sin is cruelty and injustice, all else is peccadillo. Oh, a sense of sin comes from violating the customs of your tribe. But breaking custom is not sin even when it feels so; sin is wronging another person.”

“How about ‘sinning against God’?” I persisted.

She looked at me sharply. “So again we shave the barber? First, milord, tell me what you mean by

‘God.’ ”

“I just wanted to see if you would walk into it.”

“I haven’t walked into that one in a mort of years. I’d as lief thrust with a bent wrist, or walk a pentacle in clothes. Speaking of pentacles, my Hero, our destination is not what it was three days ago. Now we go to a Gate I had not expected to use. More dangerous but it can’t be helped.”

“My fault! I’m sorry, Star.”

“My fault, milord. But not all loss. When we lost our luggage I was more worried than I dared show–even though I was never easy about carrying firearms through a world where they may not be
used. But our foldbox carried much more than firearms, things we are vulnerable without. The time you spent in soothing the hurt to the Doral’s ladies I spent–in part–in wheedling the Doral for a new kit, almost everything heart could wish but firearms. Not all loss.”

“We are going to another world now?”

“Not later than tomorrow dawn, if we live.”

“Damn it, Star, both you and Rufo talk as if each breath might be our last.”

“As it might be.”

“You’re not expecting an ambush now; we’re still on Doral land. But Rufo is as full of dire forebodings as a cheap melodrama. And you are almost as bad.”

“I’m sorry. Rufo does fret–but he is a good man at your back when trouble starts. As for me, I have been trying to be fair, milord, to let you know what to expect.”

“Instead you confuse me. Don’t you think it’s time you put your cards face up?”

She looked troubled. “And if the Hanging Man is the first card turned?”

“I don’t give a hoot! I can face trouble without fainting–”

“I know you can, my champion.”

“Thanks. But not knowing makes me edgy. So talk.”

“I will answer any question, milord Oscar. I have always been willing to.” “But you know that I don’t know what questions to ask. Maybe a carrier pigeon doesn’t need to know what the war is about–but I feel like a sparrow in a badminton game. So start from the beginning.”

“As you say, milord. About seven thousand years ago–” Star stopped. “Oscar, do you want to know–now all the interplay of politics of a myriad worlds and twenty universes over millennia in arriving at the present crisis? I’ll try if you say, but just to outline it would take more time than remains until we must pass through that Gate. You are my true champion; my life hangs on your courage and skill. Do you want the politics behind my present helpless, almost hopeless predicament–save for you! Or shall I concentrate on the tactical situation?”

(Damn it! I did want the whole story.) “Let’s stick to the tactical situation. For now.”

“I promise,” she said solemnly, “that if we live through it, you shall have every detail. The situation is this: I had intended us to cross Nevia by barge, then through the mountains to reach a Gate beyond the Eternal Peaks. That route is less risky but long.

“But now we must hurry. We will turn off the road late this afternoon and pass through some wild country, and country still worse after dark. The Gate there we must reach before dawn; with luck we may sleep. I hope so, because this Gate takes us to another world at a much more dangerous exit.

“Once there, in that world–Hokesh it is called, or Karth–in Karth-Hokesh we shall be close, too close, to a tall tower, mile high, and, if we win to it, our troubles start. In it is the Never-Born, the Eater
of Souls.”

“Star, are you trying to scare me?”

“I would rather you were frightened now, if such is possible, than have you surprised later. My thought, milord, had been to advise you of each danger as we reached it, so that you could concentrate
on one at a time. But you overruled me.”

“Maybe you were right. Suppose you give me details on each as we come to it, just the outline now. So I’m to fight the Eater of Souls, am I? The name doesn’t scare me; if he tries to eat my soul, he’ll throw up. What do I fight him with? Spit?”

“That is one way,” she said seriously, “but, with luck, we won’t fight him–it–at all. We want what it guards.”

“And what is that?”

“The Egg of the Phoenix.”

“The Phoenix doesn’t lay eggs.”

“I know, milord. That makes it uniquely valuable.”

“But–”

She hurried on. “That is its name. It is a small object, somewhat larger than an ostrich egg and black. If I do not capture it, many bad things will happen. Among them is a small one: I will die. I mention that because it may not seem small to you–my darling! –and it is easier to tell you that one truth than it is to explain the issues.”

“Okay. We steal the Egg. Then what?”

“Then we go home. To my home. After which you may return to yours. Or remain in mine. Or go where you list, through Twenty Universes and myriad worlds. Under any choice, whatever treasure you fancy is yours; you will have earned it and more . . . as well as my heartfelt thanks, milord Hero, and anything you ask of me.”

(The biggest blank check ever written–If I could cash it.) “Star, you don’t seem to think we will live through it.”

She took a deep breath. “Not likely, milord. I tell you truth. My blunder has forced on us a most desperate alternative.”

“I see. Star, will you marry me? Today?”

Then I said, “Easy there! Don’t fall!” She hadn’t been in danger of falling; the seat belt held her. But she sagged against it. I leaned over and put my arm around her shoulders. “Nothing to cry about. Just give me a yes or a no–and I fight for you anyway. On, I forgot. I love you. Anyhow I think it’s love. A funny, fluttery feeling whenever I look at you or think about you–which is mostly.”

“I love you, milord,” she said huskily. “I have loved you since I first saw you. Yes, a ‘funny, fluttery feeling’ as if everything inside me were about to melt down.”

“Well, not quite that,” I admitted. “But it’s probably opposite polarity for the same thing. Fluttery, anyhow. Chills and lightnings. How do we get married around here?”

“But, milord–my love–you always astound me. I knew you loved me. I hoped that you would tell me before–well, in time. Let me hear it once. I did not expect you to offer to marry me!”

“Why not? I’m a man, you’re a woman. It’s customary?”

“But–Oh, my love, I told you! It isn’t necessary to marry me. By your rules . . . I’m a bitch.”

“Bitch, witch, Sing Along with Mitch! What the hell, honey? That was your word, not mine. You have about convinced me that the rules I was taught are barbarous and yours are the straight goods. Better blow your nose–here, want my hanky?

Star wiped her eyes and blew her nose but instead of the yes-darling I wanted to hear she sat up straight and did not smile. She said formally, “Milord Hero, had you not best sample the wine before you buy the barrel?”

I pretended not to understand.

“Please, milord love,” she insisted. “I mean it. There’s a grassy bit on your side of the road, just ahead. You can lead me to it this moment and willingly I will go.”

I sat high and pretended to peer. “Looks like crab grass. Scratchy.”

“Then p-p-pick your own grass! Milord . . . I am willing, and eager, and not uncomely–but you will learn that I am a Sunday painter compared with artists you will someday meet. I am a working woman. I haven’t been free to give the matter the dedicated study it deserves. Believe me! No, try me. You can’t know that you want to marry me.”

“So you’re a cold and clumsy wench, eh?”

“Well . . . I didn’t say that. I’m only entirely unskilled–and I do have enthusiasm.”

“Yes, like your auntie with the cluttered bedroom–it runs in your family, so you said. Let it stand that I ant to marry you in spite of your obvious faults.”

“But–”

“Star, you talk too much.”

“Yes, milord,” she said meekly.

“We’re getting married. How do we do it? Is the local lord also justice of the peace? If he is, there will be no droit du seigneur; we haven’t time for frivolities.” “Each squire is the local justice,” Star agreed thoughtfully, “and does perform marriages, although most Nevians don’t bother. But–Well, yes, he would expect droit du seigneur and, as you pointed out, we haven’t time to waste.”

“Nor is that my idea of a honeymoon. Star–look at me. I don’t expect to keep you in a cage; I know you weren’t raised that way. But we won’t look up the squire. What’s the local brand of preacher? A celibate brand, by choice.”

“But the squire is the priest, too. Not that religion is an engrossing matter in Nevia; fertility rites are all they bother with. Milord love, the simplest way is to jump over your sword.”

“Is that a marriage ceremony where you come from, Star?”

“No, it’s from your world:

‘Leap rogue, and jump whore,

‘And married be forevermore–‘

“–it’s very old.”

“Mmm–I don’t care for the marriage lines. I may be a rogue but I know what you think of whores. What other chances are there?”

“Let me see. There’s a rumormonger in a village we pass through soon after lunch. They sometimes marry townies who want it known far and wide; the service includes spreading the news.”

“What sort of service?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t care, milord love. Married we will be!”

“That’s the spirit! We won’t stop for lunch.”

“No, milord,” she said firmly, “if wife I am to be, I shall be a good wife and not permit you to skip meals.”

“Henpecking already. I think I’ll beat you.”

“As you will, milord. But you must eat, you are going to need your strength–”

“I certainly will!’

“–for fighting. For now I am ten times as anxious that we both live through it. Here is a place for

lunch.” She turned Vita Brevis off the road; Ars Longa followed. Star looked back over her shoulder and dimpled. “Have I told you today that you are beautiful . . . my love!”

Chapter 11

Rufo’s longhorse followed us onto the grassy verge Star picked for picnicking. He was still limp as a wet sock and snoring. I would have let him sleep but Star was shaking him.

He came awake fast, reaching for his sword and shouting, “A moi! M’aidez! Les vaches!” Fortunately some friend had stored his sword and belt out of reach on the baggage rack aft, along with bow, quiver, and our new foldbox.

Then he shook his head and said, “How many were there?”

“Down from there, old friend,” Star said cheerfully. “We’ve stopped to eat.”

“Eat!” Rufo gulped and shuddered. “Please, milady. No obscenity.” He fumbled at his seat belt and fell out of his saddle; I steadied him. Star was searching through her pouch; she pulled out a vial and offered it to Rufo. He shied back.

“Milady!”

“Shall I hold your nose?” she said sweetly.

“I’ll be all right. Just give me a moment . . . and the hair of the dog.”

“Certainly you’ll be all right. Shall I ask milord Oscar to pin your arms?”

Rufo glanced at me appealingly; Star opened the little bottle. It fizzed and fumes rolled out and down.

“Now!”

Rufo shuddered, held his nose, tossed it down.

I won’t say smoke shot out of his ears. But he flapped like torn canvas in a gale and horrible noises came out.

Then he came into focus as suddenly as a TV picture. He appeared heavier and inches taller and had finned out. His skin was a rosy glow instead of death pallor. “Thank you, milady,” he said cheerfully, his oice resonant and virile. “Someday I hope to return the favor.”

“When the Greeks reckon time by the kalends,” she agreed.

Rufo led the longhorses aside and fed them, opening the foldbox and digging out haunches of bloody eat. Ars Longa ate a hundredweight and Vita Brevis and Mors Profunda even more; on the road these beasts need a high-protein diet. That done, he whistled as he set up table and chairs for Star and myself.

“Sugar pie,” I said to Star, “what’s in that pick-me-up?”

“An old family recipe:

‘Eye of newt and toe of frog,

‘Wool of bat and tongue of dog,

‘Adders fork and blind-worm’s sting,

‘Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing–‘ ”

“Shakespeare!” I said. “Macbeth.”

” ‘Cool it with a baboon’s blood–‘ No, Will got it from me, milord love. That’s the way with writers; they’ll steal anything, file off the serial numbers, and claim it for their own. I got it from my aunt–another aunt–who was a professor of internal medicine. The rhyme is a mnemonic for the real ingredients which are much more complicated–never can tell when you’ll need a hangover cure. I compounded it last night, knowing that Rufo, for the sake of our skins, would need to be at his sharpest today–two doses, in fact, in case you needed one. But you surprised me, my love; you break out with nobility at the oddest times.”

“A family weakness. I can’t help it.”

“Luncheon is served, milady.”

I offered Star my arm. Hot foods were hot, cold ones chilled; this new foldbox, in Lincoln green embossed with the Doral chop, had equipment that the lost box lacked. Everything was delicious and the wines were superb.

Rufo ate heartily from his serving board while keeping an eye on our needs. He had come over to pour the wine for the salad when I broke the news. “Rufo old comrade, milady Star and I are getting married today. I want you to be my best man and help prop me up.”

He dropped the bottle.

Then he was busy wiping me and mopping the table. When at last he spoke, it was to Star. “Milady,” he said tightly, “I have put up with much, uncomplaining, for reasons I need not state. But this is going too far. I won’t let–”

“Hold your tongue!”

“Yes,” I agreed, “hold it while I cut it out. Will you have it fried? Or boiled?”

Rufo looked at me and breathed heavily. Then he left abruptly, withdrawing beyond the serving board.

Star said softly, “Milord love, I am sorry.”

“What twisted his tail?” I said wonderingly. Then I thought of the obvious. “Star! Is Rufo jealous?”

She looked astounded, started to laugh and chopped it off. “No, no, darling! It’s not that at all.

Rufo–Well, Rufo has his foibles but he is utterly dependable where it counts. And we need him. Ignore it. Please, milord.”

“As you say. It would take more than that to make me unhappy today.”

Rufo came back, face impassive, and finished serving. He repacked without speaking and we hit the road.

The road skirted the village green; we left Rufo there and sought out the rumormonger. His shop, a crooked lane away, was easy to spot; an apprentice was beating a drum in front of it and shouting
teasers of gossip to a crowd of locals. We pushed through and went inside.

The master rumormonger was reading something in each hand with a third scroll propped against his feet on a desk. He looked, dropped feet to floor, jumped up and made a leg while waving us to seats.

“Come in, come in, my gentles!” be sang out. “You do me great honor, my day is made! And yet if I may say so you have come to the right place whatever your problem whatever your need you have only to speak good news bad news every sort but sad news reputations restored events embellished history rewritten great deeds sung and all work guaranteed by the oldest established news agency in all Nevia news from all worlds all universes propaganda planted or uprooted offset or rechanneled satisfaction guaranteed honesty is the best policy but the client is always right don’t tell me I know I know I have spies in every kitchen ears in every bedroom the Hero Gordon without a doubt and your fame needs no heralds milord but honored am I that you should seek me out a biography perhaps to match your
matchless deeds complete with old nurse who recalls in her thin and ancient and oh so persuasive voice the signs and portents at your birth–”

Star chopped him off. “We want to get married.”

His mouth shut, he looked sharply at Star’s waistline and almost bought a punch in the nose. “It is a pleasure. And I must add that I heartily endorse such a public-spirited project. All this modern bundling and canoodling and scuttling without even three cheers or a by-your-leave sends taxes up and profits down that’s logic. I only wish I had time to get married myself as I’ve told my wife many’s the time. Now as to plans, if I may make a modest suggestion–”

“We want to be married by the customs of Earth.”

“Ah, yes, certainly.” He turned to a cabinet near his desk, spun dials. After a bit he said, “Your pardon, gentles, but my head is crammed with a billion facts, large and small, and–that name? Does it start with one ‘R’ or two?”

Star moved around, inspected the dials, made a setting.

The rumormonger blinked. “That universe? We seldom have a call for it. I’ve often wished I had time to travel but business business business–LIBRARY!”

“Yes, Master?” a voice answered.

“The planet Earth, Marriage Customs of–that’s a capital ‘Urr’ and a soft theta.” He added a five-group serial number. “Snap it up!”

In very short time an apprentice came running with a thin scroll. “Librarian says careful how you handle it, Master. Very brittle, he says. He says–”

“Shut up. Your pardon, gentles.” He inserted the scroll in a reader and began to scan.

His eyes bugged out and he sat forward. “Unbeliev–” Then he muttered, “Amazing! Whatever made them think of that!” For several minutes he appeared to forget we were there, simply giving vent to: “Astounding! Fantastic!” and like expressions.

I tapped his elbow. “We’re in a hurry.”

“Eh? Yes, yes, milord Hero Gordon–milady.” Reluctantly he left the scanner, fitted his palms together, and said, “You’ve come to the right place. Not another rumormonger in all Nevia could handle a project this size. Now my thought is–just a rough idea, talking off the top of my head–for the procession we’ll need to call in the surrounding countryside although for the charivari we could make do with just townspeople if you want to keep it modest in accordance with your reputation for dignified simplicity–say one day for the procession and a nominal two nights of charivari with guaranteed noise levels of–”

“Hold it.”

“Milord? I’m not going to make a profit on this; it will be a work of art, a labor of love–just expenses plus a little something for my overhead. It’s my professional judgment, too, that a Samoan pre-ceremony would be more sincere, more touching really, than the optional Zulu rite. For a touch of comedy relief–at no extra charge; one of my file clerks just happens to be seven months along, she’d be glad to run down the aisle and interrupt the ceremony–and of course there is the matter of witnesses to the consummation,
how many for each of you, but that needn’t be settled this week; we have the street decorations to think of first, and–”

I took her arm. “We’re leaving.”

“Yes, milord,” Star agreed.

He chased after us, shouting about broken contracts. I put hand to sword and showed six inches of blade; his squawks shut off.

Rufo seemed to be all over his mad; he greeted us civilly, even cheerfully. We mounted and left. We had been riding south a mile or so when I said, “Star darling–”

“Milord love?”

“That ‘jumping over the sword’–that really is a marriage ceremony?”

“A very old one, my darling. I think it dates back to the Crusades.”

“I’ve thought of an updated wording:

‘Jump rogue, and princess leap,

‘My wife art thou and mine to keep!’

“–would that suit you?”

“Yes, yes!”

“But for the second line you say:

‘–thy wife I vow and thine to keep.’

“Got it?”

Star gave a quick gasp. “Yes, my love!”

We left Rufo with the longhorses, giving no explanation, and climbed a little wooded hill. All of Nevia is beautiful, with never a beer can nor a dirty Kleenex to mar its Eden loveliness, but here we found an outdoor temple, a smooth grassy place surrounded by arching trees, an enchanted sanctuary.

I drew my sword and glanced along it, feeling its exquisite balance while noting again the faint ripples left by feather-soft hammer blows of some master swordsmith. I tossed it and caught it by the forte.

“Read the motto. Star.”

She traced it out. ” ‘Dum vivimus, vivamus!’–‘While we live, let us live!’ Yes, my love, yes!” She kissed it and handed it back; I placed it on the ground.

“Know your lines?” I asked.

“Graved in my heart.”

I took her hand in mine. “Jump high. One . . . two . . . three!”

Chapter 12

When I led my bride back down that blessed hill, arm around her waist, Rufo helped us mount without comment. But he could hardly miss that Star now addressed me as: “Milord husband.” He mounted and tailed in, a respectful distance out of earshot.

We rode hand in hand for at least an hour. Whenever I glanced at her, she was smiling; whenever she caught my eye, the smile grew dimples. Once I asked, “How soon must we keep lockout?”

“Not until we leave the road, milord husband.”

That held us another mile. At last she said timidly, “Milord husband?”

“Yes, wife?”

“Do you still think that I am ‘a cold and clumsy wench’?”

“Mmm . . .” I answered thoughtfully, ” ‘cold’–no, I couldn’t honestly say you were cold. But ‘clumsy’–Well, compared with an artist like Muri, let us say–”

“Milord husband!”

“Yes? I was saying

“Are you honing for a kick in the belly?” She added, “American!”

“Wife . . . would you kick me in the belly?”

She was slow in answering and her voice was very low. “No, milord husband. Never.”

“I’m pleased to hear it. But if you did, what would happen?”

“You–you would spank me. With my own sword. But not with your sword. Please, never with your sword . . . my husband.”

“Not with your sword, either. With my hand. Hard. First I would spank you. And then–”

“And then what?”

I told her. “But don’t give me cause. According to plans I have to fight later. And don’t interrupt me in the future.”

“Yes, milord husband.”

“Very well. Now let’s assign Muri an arbitrary score of ten. On that scale you would rate–Let me hink.”

“Three or four, perhaps? Or even five?”

“Quiet. I make it about a thousand. Yes, a thousand, give or take a point. I haven’t a slide rule.”

“Oh, what a beast you are, my darling! Lean close and loss me–and just wait till I tell Muri.”

“You’ll say nothing to Muri, my bride, or you will be paddled. Quit fishing for compliments. You know hat you are, you sword-jumping wench.”

“And what am I?”

“My princess.”

“Oh.”

“And a mink with its tail on fire–and you know it.”

“Is that good? I’ve studied American idiom most carefully but sometimes I am not sure.”

“It’s supposed to be tops. A figure of speech, I’ve never known a mink that well. Now get your mindon other matters, or you may be a widow on your bridal day. Dragons, you say?”

“Not until after nightfall, milord husband–and they aren’t really dragons.”

“As you described them, the difference could matter only to another dragon. Eight feet high at the houlders, a few tons each, and teeth as long as any forearm–all they need is to breathe flame.”

“Oh, but they do! Didn’t I say?”

I sighed. “No, you did not.”

“They don’t exactly breathe fire. That would kill them. They hold their breaths while flaming. It’s wamp gas–methane–from the digestive tract. It’s a controlled belch, with a hypergolic effect from an enzyme secreted between the first and second rows of teeth. The gas bursts into flame on the way out.”

“I don’t care how they do it; they’re flame-throwers. Well? How do you expect me to handle them?”

“I had hoped that you would have ideas. You see,” she added apologetically, “I hadn’t planned on it, I didn’t expect us to come this way.”

“Well–Wife, let’s go back to that village. Set up in competition with our friend the rumormonger–I’ll bet we could outgabble him.”

“Milord husband!”

“Never mind. If you want me to kill dragons every Wednesday and Saturday, I’ll be on call. This flaming methane–Do they spout it from both ends?”

“Oh, just the front end. How could it be both?”

“Easy. See next year’s model. Now quiet; I’m thinking over a tactic. Ill need Rufo. I suppose he has killed dragons before?”

“I don’t know that a man has ever killed one, milord husband.”

“So? My princess, I’m flattered by the confidence you place in me. Or is it desperation? Don’t answer, I don’t want to know. Keep quiet and let me think.”

At the next farmhouse Rufo was sent in to arrange returning the longhorses. They were ours, gifts from the Doral, but we had to send them home, as they could not live where we were going–Muri had promised me that she would keep an eye on Ars Longa and exercise her. Rufo came back with a bumpkin mounted on a heavy draft animal bareback–he Kept shifting numbly between second and third pairs of legs to spare the animal’s back and controlled it by voice.

When we dismounted, retrieved our bows and quivers, and prepared to hoof it, Rufo came up. “Boss, Manure Foot craves to meet the hero and touch his sword. Brush him off?”

Rank hath its duties as well as its privileges. “Fetch him.”

The lad, overgrown and fuzz on his chin, approached eagerly, stumbling over his feet, then made a leg so long he almost fell. “Straighten up, son,” I said. “What’s your name?”

“Pug, milord Hero,” he answered shrilly. (“Pug” will do. The Nevian meaning was as rugged as Jocko’s jokes.) “A stout name. What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“A hero, milord! Like yourself.”

I thought of telling him about those rocks on the Glory Road. But he would find them soon enough if ever he tramped it–and either not mind, or turn back and forget the silly business. I nodded approvingly and assured him that there was always room at the top in the Hero business for a lad with spirit–and that the lower the start, the greater the glory . . . so work hard and study hard and wait his opportunity. Keep his guard up but always speak to strange ladies; adventure would come his way. Then I let him touch my sword–but not take it in hand. The Lady Vivamus is mine and I’d rather share my toothbrush.

Once, when I was young, I was presented to a Congressman. He had handed me the same fatherly guff I was now plagiarizing. Like prayer, it can’t do any harm and might do some good, and I found that I was sincere when I said it and no doubt the Congressman was, too. Oh, possibly some harm, as the youngster might get himself killed on the first mile of that road. But that is better than sitting over the fire in your old age, sucking your gums and thinking about the chances you missed and the gals you didn’t
tumble. Isn’t it?

I decided that the occasion seemed so important to Pug that it should be marked, so I groped in my pouch and found a U.S. quarter. “What’s the rest of your name. Pug?”

“Just ‘Pug,’ milord. Of house Lerdki, of course.”

“E. C.” to “Easy” because of my style of broken-field running–I never ran harder nor dodged more than the occasion demanded.

“By authority vested in me by Headquarters United States Army Southeast Asia Command, I, the Hero Oscar, ordain that you shall be known henceforth as Lerdki’t Pug Easy. Wear it proudly.”

I gave him the quarter and showed him George Washington on the obverse. “This is the father of my house, a greater hero than I will ever be. He stood tall and proud, spoke the truth, and fought for the right as he saw it, against fearful odds. Try to be like him. And here”–I turned it over–“is the chop of my house, the house he founded. The bird stands for courage, freedom, and ideals soaring high.” (I didn’t tell him that the American Eagle eats carrion, never tackles anything its own size, and will soon be extinct–it does stand for those ideals. A symbol means what you put into it.)

Pug Easy nodded violently and tears started to flow. I had not presented him to my bride; I didn’t know that she would wish to meet him. But she stepped forward and said gently, “Pug Easy, remember the words of milord Hero. Treasure them and they will last you all your life.”

The lad dropped to his knees. Star touched his hair and said, “Stand, Lerdki’t Pug Easy. Stand tall.”

I said good-bye to Ars Longa, told her to be a good girl and I would be back someday. Pug Easy readed back with longhorses tailed up and we set out into the woods, arrows nocked and Rufo eyes-behind. There was a sign where we left the yellow brick road; freely translated it read: ALL HOPE ABANDON, YE WHO ENTER HERE.

(A literal translation is reminiscent of Yellowstone Park: “Warning–the varmints in these woods are not tame. Travelers are warned to stay on the road, as their remains will not be returned to their kin. The Lerdki, His Chop.”)

Presently Star said, “Milord husband–”

“Yes, pretty foots?” I didn’t look at her; I was watching my side and a bit of hers, and keeping an eye overhead as well, as we could be bombed here–something like blood kites but smaller and goes for the eyes.

“My Hero, you are truly noble and you have made your wife most proud.”

“Huh? How?” I had my mind on targets–two kinds on the ground here: a rat big enough to eat cats and willing to eat people, and a wild hog about the same size and not a ham sandwich on him anyplace, all rawhide and bad temper. The hogs were easier targets, I had been told, because they charge straight at you. But don’t miss. And have your sword loosened, you won’t nock a second shaft.

“That lad, Pug Easy. What you did for him.”

“Him? I fed him the old malarkey. Cost nothing.”

“It was a kingly deed, milord husband.”

“Oh, nonsense, diddycums. He expected big talk from a hero, so I did.”

“Oscar my beloved, may a loyal wife point it out to her husband when he speaks nonsense of himself? I have known many heroes and some were such oafs that one would feed them at the back door if their eeds did not claim a place at the table. I have known few men who were noble, for nobility is scarcer far than heroism. But true nobility can always be recognized . . . even in one as belligerently shy about showing it as you are. The lad expected it, so you gave it to him–out noblesse oblige is an emotion felt
only by those who are noble.”

“Well, maybe. Star, you are talking too much again. Don’t you think these varmints have ears?”

“Your pardon, milord. They have such good ears that they hear footsteps through the ground long before they hear voices. Let me have the last word, today being my bridal day. If you are–no, when you are gallant to some beauty, let us say Letva–or Muri, damn her lovely eyes! –I do not count it as nobility; it must be assumed to spring from a much commoner emotion than noblesse oblige. But when you speak to a country lout with pigsty on his feet, garlic on his breath, the stink of sweat all over him, and pimples on his face–speak gently and make him feel for the time as noble as you are and let him hope one day to be your equal–I know it is not because you hope to tumble him.”

“Oh, I don’t know. Boys that age are considered a treat in some circles. Give him a bath, perfume him, curl his hair–”

“Milord husband, is it permitted for me to think about kicking you in the belly?”

“Can’t be court-martialed for thinking, that’s the one thing they can’t take away from you. Okay, I prefer girls; I’m a square and can’t help it. What’s this about Muri’s eyes? Longlegs, are you jealous?”

I could hear dimples even though I couldn’t stop to see them. “Only on my wedding day, milord husband; the other days are yours. If I catch you in sportiveness, I shall either not see it, or congratulate
you, as may be.”

“I don’t expect you’ll catch me.”

“And I trust you’ll not catch me, milord rogue,” she answered serenely.

She did get the last word, for just then Rufo’s bowstring went Fwung! He called out, “Got ‘im!” and then we were very busy. Hogs so ugly they made razorbacks look like Poland-Chinas–I got one by
arrow, down his slobbering throat then fed steel to his brother a frozen second later. Star got a fair hit at hers but it deflected on bone and kept coming and I kicked it in the shoulder as I was still trying to free my blade from its cousin. Steel between its ribs quieted it and Star coolly nocked another shaft and let fly while I was killing it. She got one more with her sword, leaning the point in like a matador at the moment of truth, dancing aside as it came on, dead and unwilling to admit it.

The fight was over. Old Rufo had got three unassisted and a nasty goring; I had a scratch and my bride was unhurt, which I made sure of as soon as things were quiet. Then I mounted guard while our surgeon took care of Rufo, after which she dressed my lesser cut.

“How about it, Rufo?” I asked. “Can you walk?”

“Boss, I won’t stay in this forest if I have to crawl, Let’s mush. Anyhow,” he added, nodding at the worthless pork around us, “we won’t be bothered by rats right away.”

I rotated the formation, placing Rufo and Star ahead with his good leg on the outside and myself taking rear guard, where I should have been all along. Rear guard is slightly safer than point under most conditions but these weren’t most conditions. I had let my blind need to protect my bride personally ffect my judgment.

Having taken the hot spot I then went almost cross-eyed trying not only to see behind but ahead as well, so that I could close fast if Star–yes, and Rufo–got into trouble. Luckily we had a breathing spell in which I sobered down and took to heart the oldest lesson on patrol: You can’t do the other man’s job. Then I gave all my attention to our rear. Rufo, old as he was and wounded, would not die without slaughtering an honor guard to escort him to hell in style–and Star was no fainting heroine. I would bet long odds on her against anyone her own weight, name your weapon or barehanded, and I pity the man who ever tried to rape her; he’s probably still searching for his cojones.

Hogs didn’t bother us again but as evening approached we began to see and oftener to hear those giant rats; they paced us, usually out of sight; they never attacked berserk the way the hogs had; they looked for the best of it, as rats always do.

Rats give me the horrors. Once when I was a kid, my dad dead and Mother not yet remarried, we were flat broke and living in an attic in a condemned building. You could hear rats in the walls and twice rats ran over me in my sleep.

I still wake up screaming.

It doesn’t improve a rat to blow it up to the size of a coyote. These were real rats, even to the whiskers, and shaped like rats save that their legs and pads were too large–perhaps the cube-square law
on animal proportions works anywhere.

We didn’t waste an arrow on one unless it was a fair shot and we zigzagged to take advantage of such openness as the forest had–which increased the hazard from above. However, the forest was so dense that attacks from the sky weren’t our first worry.

I got one rat that tailed too closely and just missed another. We had to spend an arrow whenever they got bold; it caused the others to be more cautious. And once, while Rufo was drawing a bow on one and Star was ready with her sword to back him up, one of those vicious little hawks dived on Rufo.

Star cut him out of the air at the bottom of his stoop. Rufo hadn’t even seen it; he was busy nailing brother rat.

We didn’t have to worry about underbrush; this forest was park-like, trees and grass, no dense undergrowth. Not too bad, that stretch, except that we began to run out of arrows. I was fretting about that when I noticed something. “Hey, up ahead! You’re off course. Cut to the right.” Star had set course for me when we left the road but it was up to me to hold it; her bump of direction was erratic and Rufo’s no better.

“Sorry, milord leader,” Star called back. “The going was a trifle steep.”

I closed in. “Rufo, how’s the leg?” There was sweat on his forehead.

Instead of answering me, he said, “Milady, it will be dark soon.”

“I know,” she answered calmly, “so time for a bite of supper. Milord husband, that great flat rock up ahead seems a nice place.”

I thought she had slipped her gears and so did Rufo, but for another reason. “But, milady, we are far ehind schedule.”

“And much later we shall be unless I attend to your leg again.”

“Better you leave me behind,” he muttered.

“Better you keep quiet until your advice is asked,” I told him. “I wouldn’t leave a Horned Ghost to be eaten by rats. Star, how do we do this?”

The great flat rock sticking up like a skull in the trees ahead was the upper surface of a limestone boulder with its base buried. I stood guard in its center with Rufo seated beside me while Star set out wards at cardinal and semi-cardinal points. I didn’t get to see what she did because my eyes had to be peeled for anything beyond her, shaft nocked and ready to knock it down or scare it off, while Rufo watched the other side. However, Star told me later that the wards weren’t even faintly “magic” but were within reach of Earth technology once some bright boy got the idea–an “electrified fence” without the fence, as radio is a telephone without wires, an analogy that won’t hold up.

But it was well that I kept honest lockout instead of trying to puzzle out how she sat up that charmed circle, as she was attacked by the only rat we met that had no sense. He came straight at her, my arrow past her ear warned her, and she finished him off by sword. It was a very old male, missing teeth and white whiskers and likely weak in his mind. He was as large as a wolf, and with two death wounds still a red-eyed, mangy fury.

Once the last ward was placed Star told me that I could stop worrying about the sky; the wards roofed as well as fenced the circle. As Rufo says, if She says it, that settles it. Rufo had partly unfolded the foldbox while he watched; I got out her surgical case, more arrows for all of us, and food. No nonsense about manservant and gentlefolk, we ate together, sitting or sprawling and with Rufo lying flat to give his leg a chance while Star served him, sometimes popping food into his mouth in Nevian hospitality.

She had worked a long time on his leg while I held a light and handed her things. She packed the wound with a pale jelly before sealing a dressing over it. If it hurt, Rufo didn’t mention it.

While we ate it grew dark and the invisible fence began to be lined with eyes, glowing back at us with the light we ate by, and almost as numerous as the crowd the morning Igli ate himself. Most of them I judged to be rats. One group kept to themselves with a break in the circle on each side; I decided these must be hogs; the eyes were higher off the ground.

“Milady love,” I said, “will those wards hold all night?”

“Yes, milord husband.”

“They had better. It is too dark for arrows and I can’t see us hacking our way through that mob. I’m afraid you must revise your schedule again.”

“I can’t, milord Hero. But forget those beasts. Now we fly.”

Rufo groaned. “I was afraid so. You know it makes me seasick.”

“Poor Rufo,” Star said softly. “Never fear, old friend I have a surprise for you. Again such chance as this, I bought Dramamine in Cannes–you know, the drug that saved the Normandy invasion back on Earth. Or perhaps you don’t know.”

Rufo answered, ” ‘Know’? I was in that invasion, milady–and I’m allergic to Dramamine; I fed fish all the way to Omaha Beach. Worst night I’ve ever had–why, I’d rather be here!”

“Rufo,” I asked, “were you really at Omaha Beach?”

“Hell, yes, Boss. I did all of Eisenhower’s thinking.”

“But why? It wasn’t your fight.”

“You might ask yourself why you’re in this fight, Boss. In my case it was French babes. Earthy and uninhibited and always cheerful about it and willing to learn. I remember one little mademoiselle from Armentieres”–he pronounced it correctly–“who hadn’t been–”

Star interrupted. “While you two pursue your bachelor reminiscences, I’ll get the flight gear ready.” She got up and went to the foldbox.

“Go ahead, Rufo,” I said, wondering how far he would stretch this one.

“No,” he said sullenly. “She wouldn’t like it. I can tell. Boss, you’ve had the damnedest effect on Her. More ladylike by the minute and that isn’t like Her at all. First thing you know She will subscribe to Vogue and then there’s no telling how far it will go. I don’t understand it, it can’t be your looks. No offense meant.”

“And none taken. Well, tell me another time. If you can remember it.”

“I’ll never forget her. But, Boss, seasickness isn’t the half of it. You think these woods are infested. Well, the ones we are coming to–wobbly in the knees, at least I will be–those woods have dragons.”

“I know.”

“So She told you? But you have to see it to believe it. The woods are full of ’em. More than there are
Doyles in Boston. Big ones, little ones, and the two-ton teen-age size, hungry all the time. You may fancy
being eaten by a dragon; I don’t. It’s humiliating. And final. They ought to spray the place with
dragonbane, that’s what they ought to do. There ought to be a law.”

Star had returned. “No, there should not be a law,” she said firmly. “Rufo, don’t sound off about things you don’t understand. Disturbing the ecological balance is the worst mistake any government can make.”

Rufo shut up, muttering. I said, “My true love, what use is a dragon? Riddle me that.”

“I’ve never cast a balance sheet on Nevia, it’s not my responsibility. But I can suggest the imbalances that might follow any attempt to get rid of dragons–which the Nevians could do; you’ve seen that their technology is not to be sneered at. These rats and hogs destroy crops. Rats help to keep the hogs down by eating piglets. But rats are even worse than hogs, on food crops. The dragons graze through these very woods in the daytime–dragons are diurnal, rats are nocturnal and go into their holes in the heat of the day. The dragons and hogs keep the underbrush cropped back and the dragons keep the lower limbs trimmed off. But dragons also enjoy a tasty rat, so whenever one locates a rat hole, it gives it a shot of flame, not always killing adults as they dig two holes for each nest, but certainly killing any babies–and then the dragon digs in and has his favorite snack. There is a long-standing agreement, amounting to a
treaty, that as long as the dragons stay in their own territory and keep the rats in check, humans will not
bother them.”

“But why not kill the rats, and then clean up the dragons?”

“And let the hogs run wild? Please, milord husband, I don’t know all the answers in this case; I simply know that disturbing a natural balance is a matter to be approached with fear and trembling–and a very versatile computer. The Nevians seem content not to bother the dragons.”

“Apparently we’re going to bother them. Will that break the treaty?”

“It’s not really a treaty, it’s folk wisdom with the Nevians, and a conditioned reflex–or possibly instinct–with the dragons. And we aren’t going to bother dragons if we can help it. Have you discussed tactics with Rufo? There won’t be time when we get there.”

So I discussed how to loll dragons with Rufo, while Star listened and finished her preparations. “All right,” Rufo said glumly, “it beats sitting tight, like an oyster on the half shell waiting to be eaten. More dignified. I’m a better archer than you are–or at least as good–so I’ll take the hind end, as I’m not as agile tonight as I should be.”

“Be ready to switch jobs fast if he swings around.”

“You be ready, Boss. I’ll be ready for the best of reasons–my favorite skin.”

Star was ready and Rufo had packed and reslung the foldbox while we conferred. She placed round garters above each knee of each of us, then had us sit on the rock facing our destination. “That oak arrow, Rufo.”

“Star, isn’t this out of the Albertus Magnus book?”

“Similar,” she said. “My formula is more reliable and the ingredients I use on the garters don’t spoil. If you please, milord husband, I must concentrate on my witchery. Place the arrow so that it points at the cave.”

I did so. “Is that precise?” she asked.

“If the map you showed me is correct, it is. That’s aimed just the way I’ve been aiming since we left the road.”

“How far away is the Forest of Dragons?”

“Uh, look, my love, as long as we’re going by air why don’t we go straight to the cave and skip the dragons?”

She said patiently, “I wish we could. But that forest is so dense at the top that we can’t drop straight down at the cave, no elbow room. And the things that live in those trees, high up, are worse than dragons. They grow–”

“Please!” said Rufo. “I’m airsick already and we’re not off the ground.”

“Later, Oscar, if you still want to know. In any case we daren’t risk encountering them–and won’t; they stay up higher than the dragons can reach, they must. How tar to the forest?”

“Mmm, eight and a half miles, by that map and how far we’ve come–and not more than two beyond that to the Cave of the Gate.”

“All right. Arms tight around my waist, both of you, and as much body contact as possible; it’s got to work on all of us equally.” Rufo and I settled each an arm in a hug about her and clasped hands across her tummy. That’s good. Hang on tight.” Star wrote figures on the rock beside the arrow.

It sailed away into the night with us after it.

I don’t see how to avoid calling this magic, as I can’t see any way to build Buck Rogers belts into elastic garters. Oh, if you like, Star hypnotized us, then used psi powers to teleport us eight and a half miles. “Psi” is a better word than “magic”; monosyllables are stronger than polysyllables–see Winston Churchill’s speeches. I don’t understand either word, any more than I can explain why I never get lost. I just think it’s preposterous that other people can.

When I fly in dreams, I use two styles: one is a swan dive and I swoop and swirl and cut didos; the other is sitting Turk fashion like the Little Lame Prince and sailing along by sheer force of personality.

The latter is how we did it, like sailing in a glider with no glider. It was a fine night for flying (all nights in Nevia are fine; it rains just before dawn in the rainy season, they tell me) and the greater moon silvered the ground below us. The woods opened up and became clumps of trees; the forest we were heading for showed black against the distance, much higher and enormously more imposing than the pretty woods behind us. Far off to the left I could glimpse fields of house Lerdki.

We had been in the air about two minutes when Rufo said, “Pa’don me!” and turned his head away. He doesn’t have a weak stomach; he didn’t get a drop on us. It arched like a fountain. That was the only incident of a perfect flight.

Just before we reached the tall trees Star said crisply, “Amech!” We checked like a heli and settled straight down to a three-fanny landing. The arrow rested on the ground in front of us, again dead. Rufo returned it to his quiver. “How do you feel?” I asked. “And how’s your leg?”

He gulped. “Leg’s all right. Ground’s going up and down.”

“Hush!” Star whispered. “Hell be all right. But hush, for your lives!”

We set out moments later, myself leading with drawn sword, Star behind me, and Rufo dogging her, an arrow nocked and ready.

The change from moonlight to deep shadow was blinding and I crept along, feeling for tree trunks and praying that no dragon would be in the path my bump of direction led. Certainly I knew that the dragons slept at night, but I place no faith in dragons. Maybe the bachelors stood watches, the way bachelor baboons do. I wanted to surrender that place of honor to St. George and take a spot farther back.

Once my nose stopped me, a whiff of ancient musk. I waited and slowly became aware of a shape the size of a real estate office–a dragon, sleeping with its head on its tail. I led them around it, making no noise and hoping that my heart wasn’t as loud as it sounded.

My eyes were doing better now, reaching out for every stray moonbeam that trickled down–and something else developed. The ground was mossy and barely phosphorescent the way a rotten log sometimes is. Not much. Oh, very little. But it was the way a darkroom light, almost nothing when you go inside, later is plenty of light. I could see trees now and the ground–and dragons.

I had thought earlier, Oh, what’s a dozen or so dragons in a big forest? Chances are we won’t see one, any more than you cath sight of deer most days in deer country.

The man who gets the all-night parking concession in that forest will make a fortune if he figures out a way to make dragons pay up. We never were out of sight of one after we could see.

Of course these aren’t dragons. No, they are uglier. They are saurians, more like tyrannosaurus rex than anything else–big hindquarters and heavy hind legs, heavy tail, and smaller front legs that they use either in walking or to grasp their prey. The head is mostly teeth. They are omnivores whereas I understand that T. rex ate only meat. This is no help; the dragons eat meat when they can get it, they prefer it. Furthermore, these not-so-fake dragons have evolved that charming trick of burning their own sewer gas. But no evolutionary quirk can be considered odd if you use the way octopi make love as a comparison.

Once, far off to the left, an enormous jet lighted up, with a grunting bellow like a very old alligator. The light stayed on several seconds, then died away. Don’t ask me–two males arguing over a female, maybe. We kept going, but I slowed after the light went out, as even that much was enough to affect our eyes until our night sight recovered.

I’m allergic to dragons–literally, not just scared silly. Allergic the way poor old Rufo is to Dramamine but more the way cat fur affects some people.

My eyes were watering as soon as we were in that forest, then my sinuses started to clog up and before we had gone half a mile I was using my left fist to rub my upper lip as hard as I could, trying to kill a sneeze with pain. At last I couldn’t make it and jammed fingers up my nostrils and bit my lips and the contained explosion almost burst my eardrums. It happened as we were skirting the south end of a truck-and-trailer-size job; I stopped dead and they stopped and we waited. It didn’t wake up.

When I started up, my beloved closed on me, grasped my arm; I stopped again. She reached into her pouch, silently found something, rubbed it on my nose and up my nostrils, then with a gentle push signed that we could move on.

First my nose burned cold, as with Vick’s salve, then it felt numb, and presently it began to clear.

After more than an hour of this agelong spooky sneak through tall trees and giant shapes, I thought we were going to win “home free.” The Cave of the Gate should be not more than a hundred yards ahead and I could see the rise in ground where the entrance would be–and only one dragon in our way and that not in direct line.

I hurried.

There was this little fellow, no bigger than a wallaby and about the same shape, aside from baby teeth four inches long. Maybe he was so young he had to wake to potty in the night, I don’t know. All I know is that I passed close to a tree he was behind and stepped on his tail, and he squealed!

He had every right to. But that’s when it hit the fan. The adult dragon between us and the cave woke up at once. Not a big one–say about forty feet, including the tail.

Good old Rufo went into action as if he had had endless time to rehearse, dashing around to the brute’s south end, arrow nocked and bow bent, ready to loose in a hurry. “Get its tail up!” he called out.

I ran to the front end and tried to antagonize the beast by shouting and waving my sword while wondering how far that flame-thrower could throw. There are only four places to put an arrow into a Nevian dragon; the rest is armored like a rhino only heavier. Those four are his mouth (when open), his eyes (a difficult shot; they are little and piggish), and that spot right under his tail where almost any animal is vulnerable. I had figured that an arrow placed in that tender area should add mightily to that “itching, burning” sensation featured in small ads in the backs of newspapers, the ones that say AVOID SURGERY!

My notion was that, if the dragon, not too bright, was unbearably annoyed at both ends at once, his coordination should go all to hell and we could peck away at him until he was useless, or until he got sick of it and ran. But I had to get his tail up, to let Rufo get in a shot. These creatures, satchel-heavy like old

T. rex, charge head up and front legs up and balance this by lifting the tail.
The dragon was weaving its head back and forth and I was trying to weave the other way, so as not to be lined up if it turned on the flame–when suddenly I got my first blast of methane, whiffing it before it lighted, and retreated so fast that I backed into that baby I had stepped on before, went clear over it, landed on my shoulders and rolled, and that saved me. Those flames shoot out about twenty feet. The grown-up dragon had reared up and still could have fried me, but the baby was in the way. It chopped off the flame–but Rufo yelled, “Bull’s-eye!”

The reason that I backed away in time was halitosis. It says here that “pure methane is a colorless, odorless gas.” The GI tract methane wasn’t pure; it was so loaded with homemade ketones and aldehydes that it made an unlimed outhouse smell like Shalimar.

I figure that Stars giving me that salve to open up my nose saved my life. When my nose clamps down I can’t even smell my upper lip.

The action didn’t stop while I figured this out; I did all my thinking either before or after, not during. Shortly after Rufo shot it in the bull’s-eye, the beast got a look of utter indignation, opened its mouth again without flaming and tried to reach its fanny with both hands. It couldn’t–forelegs too short–but it tried. I had returned sword in a hurry once I saw the length of that flame jet and had grabbed my bow. I had time to get one arrow into its mouth, left tonsil maybe.

This message got through faster. With a scream of rage that shook the ground it started for me, belching flame–and Rufo yelled, “A wart seven!”

I was too busy to congratulate him; those critters are fast for their size. But I’m fast, too, and had more incentive. A thing that big can’t change course very fast, but it can swing its head and with it the flame. I got my pants scorched and moved still faster, trying to cut around it.

Star carefully put an arrow into the other tonsil, right where the flame came out, while I was dodging. Then the poor thing tried so hard to turn both ways at both of us that it got tangled in its feet and fell over, a small earthquake. Rufo sank another arrow in its tender behind, and Star loosed one that passed through its tongue and stuck on the fletching, not damaging it but annoying it dreadfully.

It pulled itself into a ball, got to its feet, reared up and tried to flame me again. I could tell it didn’t like me.

And the flame went out.

This was something I had hoped for. A proper dragon, with castles and captive princesses, has as much fire as it needs, like six-shooters in TV oaters. But these creatures fermented their own methane and couldn’t have too big a reserve tank nor under too high pressure–I hoped. If we could nag one into using all its ammo fast, there was bound to be a lag before it recharged.

Meanwhile Rufo and Star were giving it no peace with the pincushion routine. It made a real effort to light up again while I was traversing rapidly, trying to keep that squealing baby dragon between me and the big one, and it behaved like an almost dry Ronson; the flame flickered and caught, shot out a pitiful six feet and went out. But it tried so hard to get me with that last flicker that it fell over again.

I took a chance that it would be sluggy for a second or two like a man who’s been tackled hard, ran in and stuck my sword in its right eye.

It gave one mighty convulsion and quit.

(A lucky poke. They say dinosaurs that big have brains the size of chestnuts. Let’s credit this beast with one the size of a cantaloupe–but it’s still luck if you thrust through an eye socket and get the brain right off. Nothing we had done up to then was more than mosquito bites. But it died from that one poke. St. Michael and St. George guided my blade.)

And Rufo yelled, “Boss! Git fer home!”

A drag race of dragons was closing on us. It felt like that drill in basic where you have to dig a foxhole, then let a tank pass over you.

“This way!” I yelled. “Rufo! This way, not that! Star!” Rufo skidded to a stop, we got headed the same way and I saw the mouth of the cave, black as sin and inviting as a mother’s arms. Star hung back; I shoved her in and Rufo stumbled after her and I turned to face more dragons for my lady love.

But she was yelling, “Milord! Oscar! Inside, you idiot! I must set the wards!”

So I got inside fast and she did, and I never did chew her out for calling her husband an idiot.

Chapter 13

The littlest dragon followed us to the cave, not belligerently (although I don’t trust anything with teeth that size) out more, I think, the way a baby duck follows anyone who leads. It tried to come in after us, drew back suddenly as its snout touched the invisible curtain, like a kitten hit by a static spark. Then it hung around outside, making wheepling noises.

I began to wonder whether or not Stars wards could stop flame. I found out as an old dragon arrived right after that, shoved his head into the opening, jerked it back indignantly just as the kid had, then eyed us and switched on his flame-thrower.

No, the wards don’t stop flame.

We were far enough inside that we didn’t get singed but the smoke and stink and heat were ghastly and just as deadly if it went on long.

An arrow whoofed past my ear and that dragon gave up interest in us. He was replaced by another who wasn’t convinced. Rufo, or possibly Star, convinced him before he had time to light his blowtorch. The air cleared; from somewhere inside there was an outward draft.

Meanwhile Star had made a light and the dragons were holding an indignation meeting. I glanced behind me–a narrow, low passage that dropped and turned. I stopped paying attention to Star and Rufo and the inside of the cave; another committee was calling.

I got the chairman in his soft palate before he could belch. The vice-chairman took over and got in a brief remark about fifteen feet long before he, too, changed his mind. The committee backed off and bellowed bad advice at each other.

The baby dragon hung around all during this. When the adults withdrew he again came to the door, just short of where he had burned his nose. “Koo-werp?” he said plaintively. “Koo-werp? Keet!” Plainly he wanted to come in.

Star touched my arm. “If milord husband pleases, we are ready.”

“Keet!”

“Right away,” I agreed, then yelled, “Beat it, kid! Back to your mama.”

Rufo stuck his head alongside mine. “Probably can’t,” he commented. “Likely that was its mama we ruined.”

I didn’t answer as it made sense; the adult dragon we had finished off had come awake instantly when I stepped on the kid’s tail. This sounds like mother love, if dragons go in for mother love–I wouldn’t know.

But it’s a hell of a note when you can’t even kill a dragon and feel lighthearted afterwards.

We meandered back into that hill, ducking stalactites and stepping around stalagmites while Rufo led with a torch. We arrived in a domed chamber with a floor glazed smooth by unknown years of calcified deposit. It had stalactites in soft pastel shades near the walls and a lovely, almost symmetrical chandelier from the center but no stalagmite under it. Star and Rufo had stuck lumps of the luminescent putty, which is the common night light in Nevia at a dozen points around the room; it bathed the room in a soft light and pointed up the stalactites.

Among them Rufo showed me webs. “Those spinners are harmless,” he said. “Just big and ugly. They don’t even bite like a spider. But–mind your step!” He pulled me back. “These things are poisonous even to touch. Blindworms. That’s what took us so long. Had to be sure the place was clean before warding it. But now that She is settig wards at the entrances I’ll give it one more check.”

The so-called blindworms were translucent, iridescent things the size of large rattlesnakes and slimy-soft like angleworms; I was glad they were dead. Rufo speared them on his sword, a grisly shishkebab, and carried them out through the entrance we had come in.

He was back quickly and Star finished warding. “That’s better,” he said with a sigh as he started cleaning his blade. “Don’t want their perfume around the house. They rot pretty fast and puts me in mind of green hides. Or copra. Did I ever tell you about the time I shipped as a cook out of Sydney? We had a second mate aboard who never bathed and kept a penguin in his stateroom. Female, of course. This bird was no more cleanly than he was and it used to–”

“Rufo,” said Star, “will you help with the baggage?”

“Coming, milady.”

We got out food, sleeping mats, more arrows, things that Star needed for her witching or whatever, and canteens to fill with water, also from the foldbox. Star had warned me earlier that Karth-Hokesh was a place where the local chemistry was not compatible with human life; everything we ate or drank we must fetch with us.

I eyed those one-liter canteens with disfavor. “Baby girl, I think we are cutting rations and water too fine.”

She shook her head. “We won’t need more, truly.”

“Lindbergh flew the Atlantic on just a peanut butter sandwich,” Rufo put in. “But I urged him to take more.”

“How do you know we won’t need more?” I persisted. “Water especially.”

“I’m filling mine with brandy,” Rufo said. “You divvy with me, I’U divvy with you.”

“Milord love, water is heavy. If we try to hang everything on us against any emergency, like the White Knight, we’ll be too weighted down to fight. I’m going to have to strain to usher through three people, weapons, and a minimum of clothing. Living bodies are easiest; I can borrow power from you both. Once-living materials are next; you’ve noticed, I think, that our clothing is wool, our bows of wood, and strings are of gut. Things never living are hardest, steel especially, yet we must have swords and, if we still had firearms, I would strain to the limit to get them through, for now we need them. However, milord Hero, I am simply informing you. You must decide–and I feel sure I can handle, oh, even half a hundredweight more of dead things if necessary. If you will select what your genius tells you.”

“My genius has gone fishing. But, Star my love, there is a simple answer. Take everything.”

“Milord?”

“Jocko set us out with half a ton of food, looks like, and enough wine to float a loan, and a little water. Plus a wide variety of Nevia’s best tools for killing, stabbing, and mayhem. Even armor. And more things. In that foldbox is enough to survive a siege, without eating or drinking anything from Karth-Hokesh. The beauty of it is that it weighs only about fifteen pounds, packed–not the fifty pounds you said you could swing by straining. I’ll strap it on my own back and won’t notice it. It won’t slow me down; it may armor me against a swing at my back. Suits?”

Star’s expression would have fitted a mother whose child has just caught onto the Stork hoax and is wondering how to tackle an awkward subject. “Milord husband, the mass is much too great. I doubt if any witch or warlock could move it unassisted.”

“But folded up?”

“It does not change it, milord; the mass is still there–still more dangerously there. Think of a powerful spring, wound very tight and small, thus storing much energy. It takes enormous power to put a foldbox through a transition in its compacted form, or it explodes.

I recalled a mud volcano that had drenched us and quit arguing. “All right. I’m wrong. But one question–If the mass is there always, why does it weigh so little when folded?”

Star got the same troubled expression. “Your pardon, milord, but we do not share the language–the mathematical language–that would permit me to answer. As yet, I mean; I promise you chance to study if you wish. As a tag, think of it as a tame spacewarp. Or think of the mass being so extremely far away–in a new direction–from the sides of the foldbox that local gravitation hardly matters.”

(I remembered a time when my grandmother had asked me to explain television to her–the guts, not the funny pictures. There are things which cannot be taught in ten easy lessons, nor popularized for the masses; they take years of skull sweat. This be treason in an age when ignorance has come into its own and one man’s opinion is as good as another’s. But there it is. As Star says, the world is what it is–and doesn’t forgive ignorance.)

But I was still curious. “Star, is there any way to tell me why some things go through easier than others? Wood easier than iron, for example?”

She looked rueful. “No, because I don’t know myself. Magic is not science, it is a collection of ways to do things–ways that work but often we don’t know why.”

“Much like engineering. Design by theory, then beef it up anyhow.”

“Yes, milord husband. A magician is a rule-of-thumb engineer.”

“And,” put in Rufo, “a philosopher is a scientist with no thumbs. I’m a philosopher. Best of all professions.”

Star ignored him and got out a sketch block, showed me what she knew of the great tower from which we must steal the Egg of Phoenix. This block appeared to be a big cube of Plexiglas; it looked like it, felt like it, and took thumbprints like it.

But she had a long pointer which sank into it as if the block were air. With its tip she could sketch in three dimensions; it left a thin glowing line whenever she wanted it–a 3-dimensional blackboard.

This wasn’t magic; it was advanced technology–and it will beat the hell out of our methods of engineering drawing when we learn how, especially for complex assemblies such as aviation engines and UHF circuitry–even better than exploded isometric with transparent overlays. The block was about thirty inches on a side and the sketch inside could be looked at from any angle–even turned over and studied from underneath.

The Mile-High Tower was not a spire but a massy block, somewhat like those stepped-back buildings in New York, but enormously larger.

Its interior was a maze.

“Milord champion,” Star said apologetically, “when we left Nice there was in our baggage a finished

sketch of the Tower. Now I must work from memory. However, I had studied the sketch so very long that I believe I can get relations right even if proportions suffer. I feel sure of the true paths, the paths that lead to the Egg. It is possible that false paths and dead ends will not be as complete; I did not study them as hard.”

“Can’t see that it matters,” I assured her. “If I know the true paths, any I don’t know are false ones. Which we won’t use. Except to hide in, in a pinch.”

She drew the true paths in glowing red, false ones in green–and there was a lot more green than red. The critter who designed that tower had a twisty mind. What appeared to be the main entrance went in, up, branched and converged, passed close to the Chamber of the Egg–then went back down by a devious route and dumped you out, like P. T. Barnum’s “This Way to the Egress.”

Other routes went inside and lost you in mazes that could not be solved by follow-the-left-wall. If you did, you’d starve. Even routes marked in red were very complex. Unless you knew where the Egg was guarded, you could enter correctly and still spend this year and next January in fruitless search.

“Star, have you been in the Tower?”

“No, milord. I have been in Karth-Hokesh. But far back in the Grotto Hills. I’ve seen the Tower only from great distance.”

“Somebody must have been in it. Surely your–opponents–didn’t send you a map.”

She said soberly, “Milord, sixty-three brave men have died getting the information I now offer you.”

(So now we try for sixty-four!) I said, “Is there any way to study just the red paths?”

“Certainly, milord.” She touched a control, green lines faded. The red paths started each from one of the three openings, one “door” and two “windows.”

I pointed to the lowest level. “This is the only one of thirty or forty doors that leads to the Egg?”

“That is true.”

“Then just inside that door they’ll be waiting to clobber us.”

“That would seem likely, milord.”

“Hmmm . . .” I turned to Rufo. “Rufe, got any long, strong, lightweight line in that plunder?”

“I’ve got some Jocko uses for hoisting. About like heavy fishing line, breaking strength around fifteen hundred pounds.”

“Good boy!” “Figured you might want it. A thousand yards enough?”

“Yes. Anything lighter than that?”

“Some silk trout line.”

In an hour we had made all preparations I could think of and that maze was as firmly in my head as the alphabet. “Star hon, we’re ready to roll. Want to whomp up your spell?”

“No, milord.”

“Why not? ‘Twere best done quickly.”

“Because I can’t, my darling. These Gates are not true gates; there is always a matter of timing. This one will be ready to open, for a few minutes, about seven hours from now, then cannot be opened again for several weeks.” I had a sour thought. “If the buckos we are after know this, they’ll hit us as we come out.”

“I hope not, milord champion. They should be watching for us to appear from the Grotto Hills, as they know we have a Gate somewhere in those hills–and indeed that is the Gate I planned to use. But this Gate, even if they know of it, is so badly located–for us–that I do not think they would expect us to dare it.”

“You cheer me up more all the time. Have you thought of anything to tell me about what to expect? Tanks? Cavalry? Big green giants with hairy ears?”

She looked troubled. “Anything I say would mislead you, milord. We can assume that their troops will be constructs rather than truly living creatures . . . which means they can be anything. Also, anything may be illusion. I told you about the gravity?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Forgive me. I’m tired and my mind isn’t sharp. The gravity varies, sometimes erratically. A level stretch will seem to be downhill, then quickly uphill. Other things . . . any of which may be illusion.”

Rufo said, “Boss, if it moves, shoot it. If it speaks, cut its throat. That spoils most illusions. You don’t need a program; there’ll be just us–and all the others. So when in doubt, kill it. No sweat.”

I grinned at him. “No sweat. Okay, well worry when we get there. So let’s quit talking.”

“Yes, milord husband,” Star seconded. “We had best get several hours’ sleep.”

Something in her voice had changed. I looked at her and she was subtly different, too. She seemed smaller, softer, more feminine and compliant than the Amazon who had fired arrows into a beast a hundred times her weight less than two hours before.

“A good idea,” I said slowly and looked around. While Star had been sketching the mazes of the Tower, Rufo had repacked what we couldn’t take and–I now noticed–put one sleeping pad on one side of the cave and the other two side by side as far from the first as possible.

I silently questioned her by glancing at Rufo and shrugging an implied, “What now?”

Her answering glance said neither yes nor no. Instead she called out, “Rufo, go to bed and give that leg a chance. Don’t lie on it. Either belly down or face the wall.”

For the first time Rufo showed his disapproval of what we had done. He answered abruptly, not what Star said but what she may have implied: “You couldn’t hire me to look!”

Star said to me in a voice so low I barely heard it, “Forgive him, milord husband. He is an old man, he has his quirks. Once he is in bed I will take down the lights.”

I whispered, “Star my beloved, it still isn’t my idea of how to run a honeymoon.”

She searched my eyes. “This is your will, milord love?”

“Yes. The recipe calls for a jug of wine and a loaf of bread. Not a word about a chaperon. I’m sorry.”

She put a slender hand against my chest, looked up at me. “I am glad, milord.”

“You are?” I didn’t see why she had to say so.

“Yes. We both need sleep. Against the morrow. That your strong sword arm may grant us many morrows.”

I felt better and smiled down at her. “Okay, my princess. But I doubt if I’ll sleep.”

“Ah, but you will!”

“Want to bet?”

“Hear me out, milord darling. Tomorrow . . . after you have won . . . we go quickly to my home. No more waitings, no more troubles. I would that you knew the language of my home, so that you will not feel a stranger. I want it to be your home, at once. So? Will milord husband dispose himself for bed? Lie back and let me give him a language lesson? You will sleep, you know that you will.”

“Well . . . it’s a fine idea. But you need sleep even more than I do.”

“Your pardon, milord, but not so. Four hours’ sleep puts spring in my step and a song on my lips.”

“Well . . . ”

Five minutes later I was stretched out, staring into the most beautiful eyes in any world and listening to

her beloved voice speak softly in a language strange to me . . .

Chapter 14

Rufo was shaking my shoulder. “Breakfast, Boss!” He shoved a sandwich into my hand and a pot of beer into the other. “That’s enough to fight on and lunch is packed. I’ve laid out fresh clothes and your weapons and I’ll dress you as soon as you finish. But snap it up. We’re on in a few minutes.” He was already dressed and belted.

I yawned and took a bite of sandwich (anchovies, ham and mayonnaise, with something that wasn’t quite tomato and lettuce)–and looked around. The place beside me was empty but Star seemed to have just gotten up; she was not dressed. She was on her knees in the center of the room, drawing some large design on the floor.

“Morning, chatterbox,” I said. “Pentacle?”

“Mmm–” she answered, not looking up.

I went over and watched her work. Whatever it was, it was not based on a five-cornered star. It had three major centers, was very intricate, had notations here and there–I recognized neither language nor script–and the only sense I could abstract from it was what appeared to be a hypercube seen face on.
“Had breakfast, hon?”

“I fast this morning.”

“You’re skinny now. Is that a tesseract?”

“Stop it!”

I made a leg. “Your pardon, milady.”

“Don’t be formal with me, darling. Love me anyhow and give me a quick kiss–then let me be.”

So I leaned over and gave her a high-caloric kiss, with mayonnaise, and let her be. I dressed while I finished the sandwich and beer, then sought out a natural alcove just short of the wards in the passage, one which had been designated the men’s room. When I came back Rufo was waiting with my sword belt “Boss, you’d be late for your own hanging.”

“I hope so.”

A few minutes later we were standing on that diagram, Star on pitcher’s mound with Rufo and myself at first and third bases. He and I were much hung about, myself with two canteens and Star’s sword belt (on its last notch) as well as my own, Rufo with Star’s bow slung and with two quivers, plus her medic’s kit and lunch. We each had longbow strung and tucked under left arm; we each had drawn sword. Star’s tights were under my belt behind in an untidy tail, her jacket was crumpled under Rufo’s belt, while her buskins and hat were crammed into pockets–etc. We looked like a rummage sale. But this did leave Rufo’s left hand and mine free. We faced outward with swords at ready, reached behind us and Star clasped us each firmly by hand. She stood in the exact center, feet apart and planted solidly and was wearing that required professionally of witches when engaged in heavy work, i.e., not even a bobby pin. She looked magnificent, hair shaggy, eyes shining, and face flushed, and I was sorry to turn my back.

“Ready, my gallants?” she demanded, excitement in her voice.

“Ready,” I confirmed.

“Ave, Imperatrix, nos morituri te–”

“Stop that, Rufo! Silence!” She began to chant in a language unknown to me. The back of my neck prickled.

She stopped, squeezed our hands much harder, and shouted, “Now!”

Sudden as a slammed door, I find I’m a Booth Tarkington hero in a Mickey Spillane situation.

I don’t have time to moan. Here is this thing in front of me, about to chop me down, so I run my blade through his guts and yank it free while he makes up his mind which way to fall; then I dose his buddy the same way. Another one is squatting and trying to get a shot at my legs past the legs of his squad mates. I’m as busy as a one-armed beaver with paperhangers and hardly notice a yank at my belt as Star recovers her sword.

Then I do notice as she kills the hostile who wants to shoot me. Star is everywhere at once, naked as a frog and twice as lively. There was a dropped-elevator sensation at transition, and suddenly reduced gravitation could have been bothersome had we time to indulge it.

Star makes use of it. After stabbing the laddie who tries to shoot me, she sails over my head and the head of a new nuisance, poking him in the neck as she passes and he isn’t a nuisance any longer.

I think she helps Rufo, but I can’t stop to look. I hear his grunts behind me and that tells me that he is still handing out more than he’s catching.

Suddenly he yells, “Down!” and something hits the back of my knees and I go down–land properly limp and am about to roll to my feet when I realize Rufo is the cause. He is belly down by me and shooting what has to be a gun at a moving target out across the plain, himself behind the dead body of one of our playmates.

Star is down, too, but not fighting. Something has poked a hole through her right arm between elbow and shoulder.

Nothing else seemed to be alive around me, but there were targets four to five hundred feet away and opening rapidly. I saw one fall, heard Zzzzt, smelled burning flesh near me. One of those guns was lying across a body to my left; I grabbed it and tried to figure it out. There was a shoulder brace and a tube which should be a barrel; nothing else looked familiar.

“Like this, my Hero.” Star squirmed to me, dragging her wounded arm and leaving a trail of blood. “Race it like a rifle and sight it so. There is a stud under your left thumb. Press it. That’s all–no windage, no elevation.”

And no recoil, as I found when I tracked one of the running figures with the sights and pressed the stud. There was a spurt of smoke and down he went. “Death ray,” or Laser beam, or whatever–line it up, press the stud, and anyone on the far end quit the party with a hole burned in him.

I got a couple more, working right to left, and by then Rufo had done me out of targets. Nothing moved, so far as I could see, anywhere.

Rufo looked around. “Better stay down, Boss.” He rolled to Star, opened her medic’s kit at his own belt, and put a rough and hasty compress on her arm.

Then he turned to me. “How bad are you hurt, Boss?”

“Me? Not a scratch.”

“What’s that on your tunic? Ketchup? Someday somebody is going to offer you a pinch of snuff. Let’s see it.”

I let him open my jacket. Somebody, using a saw-tooth edge, had opened a hole in me on my left side below the ribs. I had not noticed it and hadn’t felt it–until I saw it and then it hurt and I felt queasy. I strongly disapprove of violence done to me. While Rufo dressed it, I looked around to avoid looking at it.

We had killed about a dozen of them right around us, plus maybe half that many who had fled–and had shot all who fled, I think. How? How can a 60-lb. dog armed only with teeth take on, knock down, and hold prisoner an armed man? Ans: By all-out attack.

I think we arrived as they were changing the guard at that spot known to be a Gate–and had we arrived even with swords sheathed we would have been cut down. As it was, we killed a slew before most of them knew a fight was on. They were routed, demoralized, and we slaughtered the rest, including those who tried to bug out. Karate and many serious forms of combat (boxing isn’t serious, nor anything with rules)–all these work that same way: go-for-broke, all-out attack with no wind up. These are not so much skills as an attitude.

I had time to examine our late foes; one was faced toward me with his belly open. “Iglis” I would call them, but of the economy model. No beauty and no belly buttons and not much brain–presumably constructed to do one thing: fight, and try to stay alive. Which describes us, too–but we did it faster.

Looking at them upset my stomach, so I looked at the sky. No improvement–it wasn’t decent sky and wouldn’t come into focus. It crawled and the colors were wrong, as jarring as some abstract paintings. I looked back at our victims, who seemed almost wholesome compared with that “sky.”

While Rufo was doctoring me, Star squirmed into her tights and put on her buskins. “Is it all right for me to sit up to get into my jacket?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Maybe they’ll think we’re dead.” Rufo and I helped her finish dressing without any of us rising up above the barricade of flesh. I’m sure we hurt her arm but all she said was, “Sling my sword left-handed. What now, Oscar?”

“Where are the garters?”

“Got em. But I’m not sure they will work. This is a very odd place.”

“Confidence,” I told her. “That’s what you told me a few minutes ago. Put your little mind to work believing you can do it.” We ranged ourselves and our plunder, now enhanced by three “rifles” plus side arms of the same sort, then laid out the oaken arrow for the top of the Mile-High Tower. It dominated one whole side of the scene, more a mountain than a building, black and monstrous.

“Ready?” asked Star. “Now you two believe, tool” She scrawled with her finger in the sand. “Go!”

We went. Once in the air, I realized what a naked target we were–but we were a target on the ground, too, for anyone up on that tower, and worse if we had hoofed it. “Faster!” I yelled in Stars ear.
“Make us go faster!”

We did. Air shrilled past our ears and we bucked and dipped and side-slipped as we passed over those gravitational changes Star had warned me about–and perhaps that saved us; we made an evasive target. However, if we got all of that guard party, it was possible that no one in the Tower knew we had arrived.

The ground below was gray-black desert surrounded by a mountain ringwall like a lunar crater and the Tower filled the place of a central peak. I risked another look at the sky and tried to figure it out. No sun. No stars. No black sky nor blue–light came from all over and the “sky” was ribbons and boiling shapes and shadow holes of all colors.

“What in God’s name land of planet is this?” I demanded.

“It’s not a planet,” she yelled back. “It’s a place, in a different sort of universe. It’s not fit to live in.”

“Somebody lives here.” I indicated the Tower.

“No, no, nobody lives here. That was built just to guard the Egg.”

The monstrousness of that idea didn’t soak in right then. I suddenly recalled that we didn’t dare eat or drink here–and started wondering how we could breathe the air if the chemistry was that poisonous. My chest felt tight and started to burn. So I asked Star and Rufo moaned. (He rated a moan or two; he hadn’t thrown up. I don’t think he had.)

“Oh, at least twelve hours,” she said. “Forget it. No importance.”

Whereupon my chest really hurt and I moaned, too.

We were dumped on top of the Tower right after that; Star barely got out “Amech!” in time to keep us from zooming past.

The top was flat, seemed to be black glass, was about two hundred yards square–and there wasn’t a fiddlewinking thing to fasten a line to. I had counted on at least a ventilator stack.

The Egg of the Phoenix was about a hundred yards straight down. I had had two plans in mind if we ever reached the Tower. There were three openings (out of hundreds) which led to true paths to the Egg–and to the Never-Born, the Eater of Souls, the M.P. guarding it. One was at ground level and I never considered it. A second was a couple of hundred feet off the ground and I had given that serious thought: loose an arrow with a messenger line so that the line passed over any projection above that hole; use that to get the strong line up, then go up the line–no trick for any crack Alpinist, which I wasn’t but Rufo was.

But the great Tower turned out to have no projections, real modern simplicity of design–carried too far.

The third plan was, if we could reach the top, to let ourselves down by a line to the third non-fake entrance, almost on level with the Egg. So here we were, all set–and no place to hitch.

Second thoughts are wonderful thoughts–why hadn’t I had Star drive us straight into that hole in the wall?

Well, it would take very fine sighting of that silly arrow; we might hit the wrong pigeonhole. But the important reason was that I hadn’t thought of it.

Star was sitting and nursing her wounded arm. I said, “Honey, can you fly us, slow and easy, down a couple of setbacks and into that hole we want?”

She looked up with drawn face. “No.”

“Well. Too bad.”

“I hate to tell you–but I burned out the garters on that speed run. They won’t be any good until I can recharge them. Not things I can get here. Green mug-wort, blood of a hare–things like that.”

“Boss,” said Rufo, “how about using the whole top of the Tower as a hitching post?”

“How do you mean?”

“We’ve got lots of line.”

It was a workable notion–walk the line around the top while somebody else held the bitter end, then

tie it and go down what hung over. We did it–and finished up with only a hundred feet too little of line out of a thousand yards.

Star watched us. When I was forced to admit that a hundred feet short was as bad as no line at all, she said thoughtfully, “I wonder if Aaron’s Rod would help?”

“Sure, if it was stuck in the top of this overgrown ping-pong table. What’s Aaron’s Rod?”

“It makes stiff things limp and limp things stiff. No, no, not that. Well, that, too, but what I mean is to lay this line across the roof with about ten feet hanging over the far side. Then make that end and the crossing part of the line steel hard–sort of a hook.”

“Can you do it?”

“I don’t know. It’s from The Key of Solomon and it’s an incantation. It depends on whether I can remember it–and on whether such things work in this universe.”

“Confidence, confidence! Of course you can.”

“I can’t even think how it starts. Darling, can you hypnotize? Rufo can’t–or at least not me.”

“I don’t know a thing about it.”

“Do just the way I do with you for a language lesson. Look me in the eye, talk softly, and tell me to remember the words. Perhaps you had better lay out the line first.”

We did so and I used a hundred feet instead of ten for the bill of the hook, on the more-is-better principle. Star lay back and I started talking to her, softly (and without conviction) but over and over again.

Star closed her eyes and appeared to sleep. Suddenly she started to mumble in tongues.

“Hey, Boss! Damn thing is hard as rock and stiff as a life sentence!”

I told Star to wake up and we slid down to the setback below as fast as we could, praying that it wouldn’t go limp on us. We didn’t shift the line; I simply had Star cause more of it to starch up, then I went on down, made certain that I had the right opening, three rows down and fourteen over, then Star slid down and I caught her in my arms; Rufo lowered the baggage, weapons mostly, and followed. We were in the Tower and had been on the planet–correction: the “place”–we had been in the place called Karth-Hokesh not more than forty minutes.

I stopped, got the building matched in my mind with the sketch block map, fixed the direction and location of the Egg, and the “red line” route to it, the true path.

Okay, go on in a few hundred yards, snag the Egg of the Phoenix and go! My chest stopped hurting.

Chapter 15

“Boss,” said Rufo, “Look out over the plain.”

“At what?”

“At nothing,” he answered. “Those bodies are gone. You sure as hell ought to be able to see them, against black sand and not even a bush to break the view.”

I didn’t look. “That’s the moose’s problem, damn it! We’ve got work to do. Star, can you shoot left-handed? One of these pistol things?”

“Certainly, milord.”

“You stay ten feet behind me and shoot anything that moves. Rufo, you follow Star, bow ready and an arrow nocked. Try for anything you see. Sling one of those guns–make a sling out of a bit of line.” I frowned. “We’ll have to abandon most of this. Star, you can’t bend a bow, so leave it behind, pretty as it is, and your quiver. Rufo can sling my quiver with his; we use the same arrows. I hate to abandon my bow, it suits me so. But I must. Damn.”

“I’ll carry it, my Hero.”

“No, any clutter we can’t use must be junked.” I unhooked my canteen, drank deeply, passed it over. “You two finish it and throw it away.” While Rufo drank, Star slung my bow. “Milord husband? It weighs nothing this way and doesn’t hamper my shooting arm. So?”

“Well–If it gets in your way, cut the string and forget it. Now drink your fill and we go.” I peered

down the corridor we were in–fifteen feet wide and the same high, lighted from nowhere and curving away to the right, which matched the picture in my mind. “Ready? Stay closed up. If we can’t slice it, shoot it, or shaft it, we’ll salute it.” I drew sword and we set out, quick march.

Why my sword, rather than one of those “death ray” guns? Star was carrying one of those and knew more about one than I did. I didn’t even know how to tell if one was charged, nor had I judgment in how long to press the button. She could shoot, her bowmanship proved that, and she was at least as cool in a fight as Rufo or myself.

I had disposed weapons and troops as well as I knew how. Rufo, behind with a stock of arrows, could use them if needed and his position gave him time to shift to either sword or Buck Rogers “rifle” if his judgment said to–and I didn’t need to advise him; he would.

So I was backed up by long-range weapons ancient and ultramodern in the hands of people who knew how to use them and temperament to match–the latter being the more important. (Do you know how many men in a platoon actually shoot in combat? Maybe six. More likely three. The rest freeze up.) Still, why didn’t I sheathe my sword and carry one of those wonder weapons?

A properly balanced sword is the most versatile weapon for close quarters ever devised. Pistols and guns are all offense, no defense; close on him fast and a man with a gun can’t shoot, he has to stop you before you reach him. Close on a man carrying a blade and you’ll be spitted like a roast pigeon–unless you have a blade and can use it better than he can.

A sword never jams, never has to be reloaded, is always ready. Its worst shortcoming is that it takes great skill and patient, loving practice to gain that skill; it can’t be taught to raw recruits in weeks, nor even months.

But most of all (and this was the real reason) to grasp the Lady Vivamus and feel her eagerness to bite gave me courage in a spot where I was scared spitless.

They (whoever “they” were) could shoot us from ambush, gas us, booby-trap us, many things. But they could do those things even if I carried one of those strange guns. Sword in hand, I was relaxed and unafraid–and that made my tiny “command” more nearly safe. If a C.O. needs to carry a rabbit’s foot, he should–and the grip of that sweet sword was bigger medicine than all the rabbits’ feet in Kansas.

The corridor stretched ahead, no break, no sound, no threat. Soon the opening to the outside could no longer be seen. The great Tower felt empty but not dead; it was alive the way a museum is alive at night, with crowding presence and ancient evil. I gripped my sword tightly, then consciously relaxed and flexed my fingers.

We came to a sharp left turn. I stopped short. “Star, this wasn’t on your sketch.”

She didn’t answer. I persisted, “Well, it wasn’t. Was it?”

“I am not sure, milord.”

“Well, I am. Hmm–”

“Boss,” said Rufo, “are you dead sure we entered by the right pigeonhole?”

“I’m certain. I may be wrong but I’m not uncertain–and if I’m wrong, we’re dead pigeons anyhow. Mmm–Rufo, take your bow, put your hat on it, stick it out where a man would IOOK around that corner if he were standing–and time it as I do look out, but lower down.” I got on my belly.

“Ready . . . now!” I sneaked a look six inches above the floor while Rufo tried to draw fire higher up.

Nothing in sight, just bare corridor, straight now.

“Okay, follow me! We hurried around the corner.

I stopped after a few paces. “What the hell?”

“Something wrong Boss?”

“Plenty.” I turned and sniffed. “Wrong as can be. The Egg is up that way,” I said, pointing, “maybe two hundred yards–by the sketch block map.”

“Is that bad?”

“I’m not sure. Because it was that same direction and angle, off on the left, before we turned that corner. So now it ought to be on the right.”

Rufo said, “Look, Boss, why don’t we just follow the passageways you memorized? You may not remember every little–”

“Shut up. Watch ahead, down the corridor. Star, stand there in the corner and watch me. I’m going to try something.”

They placed themselves, Rufo “eyes ahead” and Star where she could see both ways, at the right-angle bend. I went back into the first reach of corridor, then returned. Just short of the bend I closed my eyes and kept on.

I stopped after another dozen steps and opened my eyes. “That proves it,” I said to Rufo.

“Proves what?”

“There isn’t any bend in the corridor.” I pointed to the bend.

Rufo looked worried. “Boss, how do you feel?” He tried to touch my cheek.

I pulled back. “I’m not feverish. Come with me, both of you.” I led them back around that right angle some fifty feet and stopped. “Rufo, loose an arrow at that wall ahead of us at the bend. Lob it so that it hits the wall about ten feet up.”

Rufo sighed but did so. The arrow rose true, disappeared in the wall. Rufo shrugged. “Must be pretty soft up there. You’ve lost us an arrow. Boss.”

“Maybe. Places and follow me.” We took that corner again and here was the spent arrow on the floor somewhat farther along than the distance from loosing to bend. I let Rufo pick it up; he looked closely at the Doral chop by the fletching, returned it to quiver. He said nothing. We kept going.

We came to a place where steps led downward–but where the sketch in my head called for steps leading up. “Mind the first step,” I called back. “Feel for it and don’t fall.”

The steps felt normal, for steps leading downward–with the exception that my bump of direction told me that we were climbing, and our destination changed angle and distance accordingly. I closed my eyes for a quick test and found that I was indeed climbing, only my eyes were deceived. It was like one of those “crooked houses” in amusement parks, in which a “level” floor is anything but level–like that but cubed.

I quit questioning the accuracy of Star’s sketch and tracked its trace in my head regardless of what my eyes told me. When the passageway branched four ways while my memory showed only a simple branching, one being a dead end, I unhesitatingly closed my eyes and followed my nose–and the Egg stayed where it should stay, in my mind.

But the Egg did not necessarily get closer with each twist and turn save in the sense that a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points–is it ever? The path was as twisted as guts in a belly; the architect had used a pretzel for a straight edge. Worse yet, another time when we were climbing “up”
stairs–at a piece level by the sketch–a gravitational anomaly caught us with a lull turn and we were suddenly sliding down the ceiling.

No harm done save that it twisted again as we hit bottom and dumped us from ceiling to floor. With both eyes peeled I helped Rufo gather up arrows and off we set again. We were getting close to the lair of the Never-Born–and the Egg.

Passageways began to be narrow and rocky, the false twists tight and hard to negotiate–and the light began to fail.

That wasn’t the worst. I’m not afraid of dark nor of tight places; it takes a department store elevator on Dollar Day to give me claustrophobia. But I began to hear rats.

Rats, lots of rats, running and squeaking in the walls around us, under us, over us. I started to sweat and was sorry I had taken that big drink of water. Darkness and closeness got worse, until we were crawling through a rough tunnel in rock, then inching along on our bellies in total darkness as if tunneling out of Chateau d’If . . . and rats brushed past us now, squeaking and chittering.

No, I didn’t scream. Star was behind me and she didn’t scream and she didn’t complain about her wounded arm–so I couldn’t scream. She patted me on the foot each time she inched forward, to tell me that she was all right and to report that Rufo was okay, too. We didn’t waste strength on talk.

I saw a faint something, two ghosts of light ahead, and stopped and stared and blinked and stared again. Then I whispered to Star, “I see something. Stay put, while I move up and see what it is. Hear me?”

“Yes, milord Hero.”

“Tell Rufo.”

Then I did the only really brave thing I have ever done in my life: I inched forward. Bravery is going on anyhow when you are so terrified your sphincters won’t hold and you can’t breathe and your heart threatens to stop, and that is an exact description for that moment of E. C. Gordon, ex-Pfc. and hero by trade. I was fairly certain what those two faint lights were and the closer I got the more certain I was–I could smell the damned thing and place its outlines.

A rat. Not the common rat that lives in city dumps and sometimes gnaws babies, but a giant rat, big enough to block that rat hole but enough smaller than I am to have room to maneuver in attacking me–room I didn’t have at all. The best I could do was to wriggle forward with my sword in front of me and try to Keep the point aimed so that I would catch him with it, make mm eat steel–because if he dodged past that point I would have nothing but bare hands and no room to use them. He would be at my face.

I gulped sour vomit and inched forward. His eyes seemed to drop a little as if he were crouching to charge.

But no rush came. The lights got more definite and wider apart, and when I had squeezed a foot or two farther I realized with shaking relief that they were not rat’s eyes but something else–anything, I didn’t care what.

I continued to inch forward. Not only was the Egg in that direction but I still didn’t know what it was and I had best see before telling Star to move up.

The “eyes” were twin pinholes in a tapestry that covered the end of that rat hole. I could see its embroidered texture and I found I could look through one of its imperfections when I got up to it.

There was a large room beyond, the floor a couple of feet lower than where I was. At the far end, fifty feet away, a man was standing by a bench, reading a book. Even as I watched he raised his eyes and glanced my way. He seemed to hesitate.

I didn’t. The hole had eased enough so that I managed one foot under and lunged forward, brushing the arras aside with my sword. I stumbled and bounced to my feet, on guard.

He was at least as fast. He had slapped the book down on the bench and drawn sword himself, advanced toward me, while I was popping out of that hole. He stopped, knees bent, wrist straight, left arm back, and point for me, perfect as a fencing master, and looked me over, not yet engaged by three or four feet between our steels.

I did not rush him. There is a go-for-broke tactic, “the target,” taught by the best swordmasters, which consists in headlong advance with arm, wrist, and blade in full extension–all attack and no attempt to parry. But it works only by perfect timing when you see your opponent slacken up momentarily.

Otherwise it is suicide.

This time it would have been suicide; he was as ready as a tomcat with his back up. So I sized him up while he looked me over. He was a smallish neat man with arms long for his height–I might or might not have reach on him, especially as his rapier was an old style, longer than Lady Vivamus (but slower thereby, unless he had a much stronger wrist)–and he was dressed more for the Paris of Richelieu than for Karth-Hokesh. No, that’s not fair; the great black Tower had no styles, else I would have been as out of style in my fake Robin Hood getup. The Iglis we had killed had worn no clothes.

He was an ugly cocky little man with a merry grin and the biggest nose west of Durante–made me think of my first sergeant’s nose, very sensitive he was about being called “Schnozzola.” But the resemblance stopped there; my first sergeant never smiled and had mean, piggish eyes; this man’s eyes were merry and proud.

“Are you Christian?” he demanded.

“What’s it to you?”

“Nothing. Blood’s blood, either way. If Christian you be, confess. If pagan, call your false gods. I’ll allow you no more than three stanzas. But I’m sentimental, I like to know what I’m killing.”

“I’m American.”

“Is that a country? Or a disease? And what are you doing in Hoax?”

” ‘Hoax’? Hokesh?”

He shrugged only with his eyes, his point never moved. “Hoax, Hokesh–a matter of geography and accent; this chateau was once in the Carpathians, so ‘Hokesh’ it is, if ’twill make your death merrier.
Come now, let us sing.”

He advanced so fast and smoothly that he seemed to apport and our blades rang as I parried his attack in sixte and riposted, was countered–remise, reprise, beat-and-attack–the phrase ran so smoothly, so long, and in such variation that a spectator might have thought that we were running through Grand Salute.

But I knew! That first lunge was meant to kill me, and so was his every move throughout the phrase. At the same time he was feeling me out, trying my wrist, looking for weaknesses, whether I was afraid of low line and always returned to high or perhaps was a sucker for a disarm. I never lunged, never had a chance to; every part of the phrase was forced on me, I simply replied, tried to stay alive.

I knew in three seconds that I was up against a better swordsman than myself, with a wrist like steel yet supple as a striking snake. He was the only swordsman I have ever met who used prime and octave–used them, I mean, as readily as sixte and carte. Everyone learns them and my own master made me practice them as much as the other six–but most fencers don’t use them; they simply may be forced into them, awkwardly and just before losing a point.

I would lose, not a point, but my life–and I knew, long before the end of that first long phrase, that my life was what I was about to lose, by all odds.

Yet at first clash the idiot began to sing!

“Lunge and counter and thrust,

“Sing me the logic of steel!

“Tell me, sir, how do you feel?

“Riposte and remise if you must

“In logic long known to be just.

“Shall we argue, rebut and refute

“In enthymeme clear as your eye?

“Tell me, sir, why do you sigh?

“Tu es fatigue, sans doute?

“Then sleep while I’m counting the loot.”

The above was long enough for at least thirty almost successful attempts on my life, and on the last word he disengaged as smoothly and unexpectedly as he had engaged.

“Come, come, lad!” he said. “Pick it up! Would let me sing alone? Would die as a clown with ladies watching? Sing! –and say good-bye gracefully, with your last rhyme racing your death rattle.” He banged his right boot in a flamenco stomp. “Try! The price is the same either way.”

I didn’t drop my eyes at the sound of his boot; it’s an old gambit, some fencers stomp on every advance, every feint, on the chance that the noise will startle opponent out of timing, or into rocking back, and thus gain a point. I had last fallen for it before I could shave.

But his words gave me an idea. His lunges were short–full extension is fancy play for foils, too dangerous for real work. But I had been retreating, slowly, with the wall behind me. Shortly, when he re-engaged, I would either be a butterfly pinned to that wall, or stumble over something unseen, go arsy-versy, then spiked like wastepaper in the park. I didn’t dare leave that wall behind me.

Worst, Star would be coming out of that rat hole behind me any moment now and might be killed as she emerged even if I managed to kill him at the same time. But if I could turn him around–My beloved was a practical woman; no “sportsmanship” would keep her steel stinger out of his back.

But the happy counter-thought was that if I went along with his madness, tried to rhyme and sing, he might play me along, amused to hear what I could do, before he killed me.

But I couldn’t afford to stretch it out. Unfelt, he had pinked me in the forearm. Just a bloody scratch that Star could make good as new in minutes–but it would weaken my wrist before long and it disadvantaged me for low line: Blood makes a slippery grip.

“First stanza,” I announced, advancing and barely engaging, foible-a-foible. He respected it, not attacking, playing with the end of my blade, tiny counters and leather-touch parries.

That was what I wanted. I started circling right as I began to recite–and he let me:

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee

“Agreed to rustle cattle.

“Said Tweedledum to Tweedledee

“I’ll use my nice new saddle.”

“Come, come, my old!” he said chidingly. “No stealing. Honor among beeves, always. And rhyme and scansion limp. Let your Carroll fall trippingly off the tongue.”

“I’ll try,” I agreed, still moving right. “Second stanza-

“I sing of two lasses in Birmingham,

“Shall we weep at the scandal concerning them?”-

–and I rushed him.

It didn’t quite work. He had, as I hoped, relaxed the tiniest bit, evidently expecting that I would go on with mock play, tips of Hades alone, while I was reciting.

It caught him barely off guard but he failed to fall back, parrying strongly instead and suddenly we were in an untenable position, corps-a-corps, forte-a-forte, almost tete-a-tete.

He laughed in my face and sprang back as I did, landing us back en garde. But I added something. We had been fencing point only. The point is mightier than the edge but my weapon had both and a man
used to the point is sometimes a sucker for a cut. As we separated I flipped my blade at his head.

I meant to split it open. No time for that, no force behind it, but it sliced his right forehead almost to
eyebrow. “Touche” he shouted. “Well struck. And well sung. Let’s have the rest of it.”

“All right,” I agreed, fencing cautiously and waiting for blood to run into his eyes. A scalp wound is the bloodiest of flesh wounds and I had great hopes for this one. And swordplay is an odd thing; you don’t really use your mind, it is much too fast for that. Your wrist thinks and tells your feet and body what to do, bypassing your brain–any thinking you do is for later, stored instructions, like a programmed computer.

I went on:

“They’re now in the dock
“For lifting the–”

No help to me–A right-handed fencer hates to take on a southpaw; it throws everything out of balance, whereas a southpaw is used to the foibles of the right-handed majority–and this son of a witch was just as strong, just as skilled, with his left hand. Worse, he now had toward me the eye undimmed by blood.

He pinked me again, in the kneecap, hurting like fire and slowing me. Despite his wounds, much worse than mine, I knew I couldn’t go on much longer. We settled down to grim work.

There is a riposte in seconde, desperately dangerous but brilliant–if you bring it off. It had won me several matches in 6pee with nothing at stake but a score. It starts from sixte; first your opponent counters. Instead of parrying to carte, you press and bind, sliding all the way down and around his blade and corkscrewing in till your point finds flesh. Or you can beat, counter, and bind, starting from sixte, thus setting it off yourself.

Its shortcoming is that, unless it is done perfectly, it is too late for parry and riposte; you run your own chest against his point.

I didn’t try to initiate it, not against this swordsman; I just thought about it.

We continued to fence, perfectly each of us. Then he stepped back slightly while countering and barely
skidded in his own blood.

My wrist took charge; I corkscrewed in with a perfect bind to seconde–and my blade went through his body. He looked surprised, brought his bell up in salute, and crumpled at the knees as the grip fell from his hand. I had to move forward with my blade as he fell, then started to pull it out of him.

He grasped it. “No, no, my friend, please leave it there. It corks the wine, for a time. Your logic is sharp and touches my heart. Your name, sir?”

“Oscar of Gordon.”

“A good name. One should never be killed by a stranger. Tell me, Oscar of Gordon, have you seen Carcassonne?”

“No.”

“See it. Love a lass, kill a man, write a book, fly to the Moon–I have done all these.” He gasped and foam came out of his mouth, pink. “I’ve even had a house fall on me. What devastating wit! What price honor when timber taps thy top? ‘Top?’ tap? taupe, tape–tonsor! –when timber taps thy tonsor. You shaved mine.”

He choked and went on: “It grows dark. Let us exchange gifts and part friends, if you will. My gift first, in two parts: Item: You are lucky, you shall not die in bed.”

“I guess not.”

“Please. Item: Friar Guillaume’s razor ne’er shaved the barber, it is much too dull. And now your gift, my old–and be quick, I need it. But first–now did that limerick end?”

I told him. He said, very weakly, almost in rattle, “Very good. Keep trying. Now grant me your gift, I am more than ready.” He tried to Sign himself.

So I granted him grace, stood wearily up, went to the bench and collapsed on it, then cleaned both blades, first wiping the little Solingen, then most carefully grooming the Lady Vivamus. I managed to stand and salute him with a clean sword. It had been an honor to know him.

I was sorry I hadn’t asked him his name. He seemed to think I knew it.

I sat heavily down and looked at the arras covering the rat hole at the end of the room and wondered why Star and Rufo hadn’t come out. All that clashing steel and talk–I thought about walking over and shouting for them. But I was too weary to move just yet. I sighed and closed my eyes-

Through sheer boyish high spirits (and carelessness I had been chided for, time and again) I had broken a dozen eggs. My mother looked down at the mess and I could see that she was about to cry. So I clouded up too. She stopped her tears, took me gently by the shoulder, and said, “It’s all right, son. Eggs aren’t that important.” But I was ashamed, so I twisted away and ran.

Downhill I ran, heedless and almost flying–then was shockingly aware that I was at the wheel and the car was out of control. I groped for the brake pedal, couldn’t find it and felt panic . . . then did find it–and felt it sink with that mushiness that means you’ve lost brake-fluid pressure. Something ahead in the road and I couldn’t see. Couldn’t even turn my head and my eyes were clouded with something running down into them. I twisted the wheel and nothing happened–radius rod gone.

Screams in my car as we hit! –and I woke up in bed with a jerk and the screams were my own. I was going to be late to school, disgrace not to be borne. Never born, agony shameful, for the schoolyard was empty; the other kids, scrubbed and virtuous, were in their seats and I couldn’t find my classroom. Hadn’t even had time to go to the bathroom and here I was at my desk with my pants down about to do what I had been too hurried to do before I left home and all the other kids had their hands up but teacher was calling on me. I couldn’t stand up to recite; my pants were not only down I didn’t have any on at all if I stood up they would see it the boys would laugh at me the girls would giggle and look away and tilt their noses. But the unbearable disgrace was that I didn’t know the answer!

“Come, come!” my teacher said sharply. “Don’t waste the class’s time, E.G. You Haven’t Studied Your Lesson.”

Well, no, I hadn’t. Yes, I had, but she had written “Problems 1-6” on the blackboard and I had taken that as “1 and 6”–and this was number 4. But She would never believe me; the excuse was too thin. We pay off on touchdowns, not excuses.

“That’s how it is, Easy,” my Coach went on, his voice more in sorrow than in anger. “Yardage is all very well but you don’t make a nickel unless you cross that old goal line with the egg tucked underneath your arm.” He pointed at the football on his desk. “There it is. I had it gilded and lettered clear back at the beginning of the season, you looked so good and I had so much confidence in you–it was meant to be yours at the end of the season, at a victory banquet.” His brow wrinkled and he spoke as if trying to be fair. “I won’t say you could have saved things all by yourself. But you do take things too easy. Easy–maybe you need another name. When the road gets rough, you could try harder.” He sighed. “My fault, I should have cracked down. Instead, I tried to be a father to you. But I want you to know you aren’t the only one who loses by this–at my age it’s not easy to find a new job.”

I pulled the covers up over my head; I couldn’t stand to look at him. But they wouldn’t let me alone; somebody started shaking my shoulder. “Gordon!”

“Le’me ‘lone!”

“Wake up, Gordon, and get your ass inside. You’re in trouble.”

I certainly was, I could tell that as soon as I stepped into the office. There was a sour taste of vomit in my mouth and I felt awful–as if a herd of buffaloes had walked over me, stepping on me here and there. Dirty ones.

The First Sergeant didn’t look at me when I came in; he let me stand and sweat first. When he did look up, he examined me up and down before speaking.

Then he spoke slowly, letting me taste each word. “Absent Over Leave, terrorizing and insulting native women, unauthorized use of government property . . . scandalous conduct . . . insubordinate and obscene language . . . resisting arrest . . . striking an M.P.–Gordon, why didn’t you steal a horse? We hang horse thieves in these parts. It would make it all so much simpler.”

He smiled at his own wit. The old bastard always had thought he was a wit. He was half right.

But I didn’t give a damn what he said. I realized dully that it had all been a dream, just another of those dreams I had had too often lately, wanting to get out of this aching jungle. Even She hadn’t been real. My–what was her name? –even her name I had made up. Star. My Lucky Star–Oh, Star, my darling, you aren’t!

He went on: “I see you took off your chevrons. Well, that saves time but that’s the only thing good about it. Out of uniform. No shave. And your clothes are filthy! Gordon, you are a disgrace to the Army of the United States. You know that, don’t you? And you can’t sing your way out of this one. No I.D. on you, no pass, using a name not your own. Well, Evelyn Cyril my fine lad, we’ll use your right name now. Officially.”

He swung around in his swivel chair–he hadn’t had his fat ass out of it since they sent him to Asia, no patrols for him. “Just one thing I’m curious about. Where did you get that? And whatever possessed you to try to steal it?” He nodded at a file case behind his desk.

I recognized what was sitting on it, even though it had been painted with gold gilt the last time I recalled seeing it whereas now it was covered with the special black gluey mud they grow in Southeast Asia. I started toward it. “That’s mine!”

“No, no!” he said sharply. “Burny, burny, boy.” He moved the football farther back. “Stealing it doesn’t make it yours. I’ve taken charge of it as evidence. For your information, you phony hero, the docs think he’s going to die.”

“Who?”

“Why should you care who? Two bits to a Bangkok tickul you didn’t know his name when you clobbered him. You can’t go around clobbering natives just because you’re feeling brisk–they’ve got rights, maybe you hadn’t heard. You’re supposed to clobber them only when and where you are told to.”

Suddenly he smiled. It didn’t improve him. With his long, sharp nose and his little bloodshot eyes I suddenly realized how much he looked like a rat.

But he went on smiling and said, “Evelyn my boy, maybe you took off those chevrons too soon.”

“Huh?”

“Yes. There may be a way out of this mess. Sit down.” He repeated sharply, ” ‘Sit down,’ I said. If I had my way we’d simply Section-Eight you and forget you–anything to get rid of you. But the Company Commander has other ideas–a really brilliant idea that could close your whole file. There’s a raid planned for tonight. So”–he leaned over, got a bottle of Four Roses and two cups out of his desk, poured two drinks–“have a drink.”

Everybody knew about that bottle–everybody but the Company Commander, maybe. But the top sergeant had never been known to offer anyone a drink–save one time when he had followed it by telling his victim that he was being recommended for a general court-martial.

“No, thanks.”

“Come on, take it. Hair of the dog. You’re going to need it. Then go take a shower and get yourself looking decent even if you aren’t, before you see the Company Commander.”

I stood up. I wanted that drink, I needed it. I would have settled for the worst rotgut–and Four Roses is pretty smooth–but I would have settled for the firewater old–what was his name? –had used to burst my eardrums.

But I didn’t want to drink with him. I should not drink anything at all here. Nor eat any-

I spat in his face.

He looked utterly shocked and started to melt. I drew my sword and had at him.

It got dark but I kept on laying about me, sometimes connecting, sometimes not.

Chapter 16

Someone was shaking my shoulder. “Wake up!”

“Le’me lone!”

“You’ve got to wake up. Boss, please wake up.”

“Yes, my Hero–please!”

I opened my eyes, smiled at her, then tried to look around. Kee-ripes, what a shambles! In the middle of it, close to me, was a black glass pillar, thick and about five feet high. On top was the Egg. “Is that it?”

“Yep!” agreed Rufo. “That’s it! He looked battered but gay.

“Yes, my Hero champion,” Star confirmed, “that is the true Egg of the Phoenix. I have tested.”

“Uh–” I looked around. “Then where’s old Soul-Eater?”

“You killed it. Before we got here. You still had sword in hand and the Egg tucked tightly under your left arm. We had much trouble getting them loose so that I could work on you.” I looked down my front, saw what she meant, and looked away. Red just isn’t my color. To take my mind off surgery I said to Rufo, “What took you so long?”

Star answered, “I thought we would never find you!”

“How did you find me?”

Rufo said, “Boss, we couldn’t exactly lose you. We simply followed your trail of blood–even when it dead-ended into blank walls. She is stubborn.”

“Uh . . . see any dead men?”

“Three or four. Strangers, no business of ours. Constructs, most likely. We didn’t dally.” He added,

“And we won’t dally getting out, either, once you’re patched up enough to walk. Time is short.”

I flexed my right knee, cautiously. It still hurt where I had been pinked on the kneecap, but what Star had done was taking the soreness out. “My legs are all right. I’ll be able to walk as soon as Star is through. But”–I frowned–“I don’t relish going through that rat tunnel again. Rats give me the willies.”

“What rats, Boss? In which tunnel?”

So I told him.

Star made no comment. Just went on plastering me and sticking on dressings. Rufo said, “Boss, you did get down on your knees and crawl–in a passage just like all the others. I couldn’t see any sense to it but you had proved that you knew what you were doing, so we didn’t argue, we did it. When you told us to wait while you scouted, we did that, too–until we had waited a long time and She decided that we had better try to find you.”

I let it drop.

We left almost at once, going out the “front” way and had no trouble, no illusions, no traps, nothing but the fact that the “true path” was long and tedious. Rufo and I stayed alert, same formation, with Star in the middle carrying the Egg.

Neither Star nor Rufo knew whether we were still likely to be attacked, nor could we have held off

anything stronger than a Cub Scout pack. Only Rufo could bend a bow and I could no longer wield a sword. However, the single necessity was to give Star time to destroy the Egg rather than let it be captured. “But that’s nothing to worry about,” Rufo assured me. “About like being at ground-zero with an A-weapon. You’ll never notice it.”

Once we were outside it was a longish hike to the Grotto Hills and the other Gate. We lunched as we hiked–I was terribly hungry–and shared Rufo’s brandy and Stars water without too much water. I felt pretty good by the time we reached the cave of this Gate; I didn’t even mind sky that wasn’t sky but some sort of roof, nor the odd shifts in gravitation.

A diagram or “pentacle” was already in this cave. Star had only to freshen it, then we waited a bit–that had been the rush, to get there before that “Gate” could be opened; it wouldn’t be available for weeks or perhaps months thereafter–much too long for any human to live in Karth-Hokesh.

We were in position a few minutes early. I was dressed like the Warlord of Mars–just me and sword belt and sword. We all lightened ship to the limit as Star was tired and pulling live things through would be strain enough. Star wanted to save my pet longbow but I vetoed it. She did insist that I keep the Lady Vivamus and I didn’t argue very hard; I didn’t want ever to be separated from my sword again. She touched it and told me that it was not dead metal, but now part of me.

Rufo wore only his unpretty pink skin, plus dressings; his attitude was that a sword was a sword and he had better ones at home. Star was, for professional reasons, wearing no more.

“How long?” asked Rufo, as we joined hands.

“Count down is minus two minutes,” she answered. The clock in Star’s head is as accurate as my bump of direction. She never used a watch.

“You’ve told him?” said Rufo.

“No.”

Rufo said, “Haven’t you any shame? Don’t you think you’ve conned him long enough?” He spoke with surprising roughness and I was about to tell him that he must not speak to her that way. But Star cut him off.

“QUIET!” She began to chant. Then–“Now!”

Suddenly it was a different cave. “Where are we?” I asked. I felt heavier.

“On Nevia’s planet,” Rufo answered. “Other side of the Eternal Peaks–and I’ve got a good mind to get off and see Jocko.”

“Do it,” Star said angrily. “You talk too much.”

“Only if my pal Oscar comes along. Want to, old comrade? I can get us there, take about a week. No dragons. They’ll be glad to see you–especially Muri.”

“You leave Muri out of this!” Star was actually shrill.

“Can’t take it, huh?” he said sourly. “Younger woman and all that.”

“You know that’s not it!”

“Oh, how very much it is!” he retorted. “And how long do you think you can get away with it? It’s not fair, it never was fair. It–”

“Silence! Count down right now!” We joined hands again and whambo! we were in another place.

This was still another cave with one side partly open to the outdoors; the air was very thin and bitterly cold and snow had sifted in. The diagram was let into rock in raw gold. “Where is this?” I wanted to know.

“On your planet,” Star answered. “A place called Tibet.”

“And you could change trains here,” Rufo added, “if She weren’t so stubborn. Or you could walk out–although it’s a long, tough walk; I did it once.” I wasn’t tempted. The last I had heard, Tibet was in the hands of unfriendly peace-lovers. “Will we be here long?” I asked. “This place needs central heating.” I wanted to hear anything but more argument. Star was my beloved and I couldn’t stand by and hear anyone be rude to her–but Rufo was my blood brother by much lost blood; I owed my life to him several times over.

“Not long,” answered Star. She looked drawn and tired. “But time enough to get this straightened out,” added Rufo, “so that you can make up your own mind and not be carried around like a cat in a sack. She should have told you long since. She–”

“Positions!” snapped Star. “Count down coming up. Rufo, if you don’t shut up, I’ll leave you here and let you walk out again–in deep snow barefooted to your chin.”

“Go ahead,” he said. “Threats make me as stubborn as you are. Which is surprising. Oscar, She is–” “SILENCE!”

“–Empress of the Twenty Universes–“

Chapter 17

We were in a large octagonal room, with lavishly beautiful silvery walls.
“–and my grandmother,” Rufo finished.

Not ‘Empress,’ ” Star protested. “That’s a silly word for it.”

“Near enough.” “And as for the other, that’s my misfortune, not my fault.” Star jumped to her feet, no longer looking tired, and put one arm around my waist as I got up, while she held the Egg of the Phoenix with the other.

“Oh, darling I’m so happy! We made it! Welcome home, my Hero!”

“Where?” I was sluggy–too many time zones, too many ideas, too fast.

“Home. My home. Your home now–if you’ll have it. Our home.”

“Uh, I see . . . my Empress.” She stomped her foot. “Don’t call me that!”

“The proper form of address,” said Rufo, “is ‘Your Wisdom.’ Isn’t it, Your Wisdom?”

“Oh, Rufo, shut up. Go fetch clothes for us.”

He shook his head. “War’s over and I just got paid off. Fetch ’em yourself. Granny.”

“Rufo, you’re impossible.”

“Sore at me, Granny?”

“I will be if you don’t stop calling me ‘Granny.’ ” Suddenly she handed the Egg to me, put her arms around Rufo and kissed him. “No, Granny’s not sore at you,” she said softly. “You always were a naughty child and I’ll never quite forget the time you put oysters in my bed. But I guess you came by it honestly–from your grandmother.” She kissed him again and mussed his fringe of white hair. “Granny loves you. Granny always will. Next to Oscar, I think you are about perfect–aside from being an unbearable, untruthful, spoiled, disobedient, disrespectful brat.”

“That’s better,” he said. “Come to think of it, I feel the same way about you. What do you want to wear?”

“Mmm . . . get out a lot of things. It’s been so long since I had a decent wardrobe.” She turned back to me. “What would you like to wear, my Hero?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Whatever you think is appropriate–Your Wisdom.”

“Oh, darling, please don’t call me that. Not ever.” She seemed suddenly about to cry.

“All right. What shall I call you?”

“Star is the name you gave me. If you must call me something else, you could call me your ‘princess.’ I’m not a princess–and I’m not an ’empress’ either; that’s a poor translation. But I like being ‘your princess’–the way you say it. Or it can be ‘lively wench’ or any of lots of things you’ve been calling me.” She looked up at me very soberly. “Just like before. Forever.”

“I’ll try . . . my princess.”

“My Hero.”

“But there seems to be a lot I don’t know.”

She shifted from English to Nevian. “Milord husband, I wished to tell all. I sighed to tell you. And milord will be told everything. But I held mortal fear that milord, if told too soon, would refuse to come with me. Not to the Black Tower, but to here. Our home.”

“Perhaps you chanced wisely,” I answered in the same language. “But I am here, milady wife–my princess. So tell me. I wish it.”

She shifted back to English. “I’ll talk, I’ll talk. But it will take time. Darling, will you hold your horses just a bit longer? Having been patient with me–so very patient, my love! –for so long?”

“Okay,” I agreed. “I’ll string along. But, look, I don’t know the streets in this neighborhood, I’ll need some hints. Remember the mistake I made with old Jocko just from not knowing local customs.”

“Yes, dear, I will. But don’t worry, customs are simple here. Primitive societies are always more complex than civilized ones–and this one isn’t primitive.” Rufo dumped then a great heap of clothing at her feet. She turned away, a hand still on my arm, put a finger to her mouth with a very intent, almost worried look. “Now let me see. What shall I wear?”

“Complex” is a relative matter; I’ll sketch only the outlines.

Center is the capital planet of the Twenty Universes. But Star was not “Empress” and it is not an empire.

I’ll go on calling her “Star” as hundreds of names were hers and I’ll call it an “empire” because no other word is close, and I’ll refer to “emperors” and “empresses”–and to the Empress, my wife.

Nobody knows how many universes there are. Theory places no limit: any and all possibilities in unlimited number of combinations of “natural” laws, each sheaf appropriate to its own universe. But this is just theory and Occam’s Razor is much too dull. All that is known in Twenty Universes is that twenty have been discovered, that each has its own laws, and that most of them have planets, or sometimes “places,” where human beings live. I won’t try to say what lives elsewhere.

The Twenty Universes include many real empires. Our Galaxy in our universe has its stellar empires–yet so huge is our Galaxy that our human race may never meet another, save through the Gates that link the universes. Some planets have no known Gates. Earth has many and that is its single importance; otherwise it rates as a backward slum.

Seven thousand years ago a notion was born for coping with political problems too big to handle. It was modest at first: How could a planet be run without ruining it? This planet’s people included expert cyberneticists but otherwise were hardly farther along than we are; they were still burning the barn to get
the rats and catching their thumbs in machinery. These experimenters picked an outstanding ruler and tried to help him.

Nobody knew why this bloke was so successful but he was and that was enough; they weren’t hipped on theory. They gave him cybernetic help, taping for him all crises in their history, all known details, what was done, and the outcomes of each, all organized so that he could consult it almost as you consult your memory.

It worked. In time he was supervising the whole planet–Center it was, with another name then. He didn’t rule it, he just untangled hard cases.

They taped also everything this first “Emperor” did, good and bad, for guidance of his successor.

The Egg of the Phoenix is a cybernetic record of the experiences of two hundred and three “emperors” and “empresses,” most of whom “ruled” all the known universes. Like a foldbox, it is bigger inside than out. In use, it is more the size of the Great Pyramid.

Phoenix legends abound throughout the Universes: the creature that dies but is immortal, rising ever young from its own ashes. The Egg is such a wonder, for it is far more than a taped library now; it is a print, right down to their unique personalities, of all experience of all that line from His Wisdom IX through Her Wisdom CCIV, Mrs. Oscar Gordon.

The office is not hereditary. Star’s ancestors include His Wisdom I and most of the other wisdoms–but millions of others have as much “royal” blood. Her grandson Rufo was not picked although he shares all her ancestors. Or perhaps he turned it down. I never asked, it would have reminded him of a time one of his uncles did something obscene and improbable. Nor is it a question one asks.

Once tapped, a candidate’s education includes everything from how to cook tripe to highest mathematics–including all forms of personal combat for it was realized millennia ago that, no matter how well he was guarded, the victim would wear better if he himself could fight like an angry buzz saw. I stumbled on this through asking my beloved an awkward question.

I was still trying to get used to the fact that I had married, a grandmother, whose grandson looked older than I did and was even older than he looked. The people of Center live longer than we do anyway and both Star and Rufo had received “Long-Life” treatment. This takes getting used to. I asked Star, “How long do you ‘wisdoms’ live?”

“Not too long,” she answered almost harshly. “Usually we are assassinated.”

(My big mouth–)

A candidate’s training includes travel in many worlds–not all planets-places inhabited by human beings; nobody lives that long. But many. After a candidate completes all this and if selected as heir, postgraduate work begins: the Egg itself. The heir has imprinted in him (her) the memories, the very personalities, of past emperors. He (She) becomes an integration of them. Star-Plus. A supernova. Her Wisdom.

The living personality is dominant but all that mob is there, too. Without using the Egg, Star could recall experiences that happened to people dead many centuries. With the Egg–herself hooked into the cybernet–she had seven thousand years of sharp, just-yesterday memories.

Star admitted to me that she had hesitated ten years before accepting the nomination. She hadn’t wanted to be all those people; she had wanted to go on being herself, living as she pleased. But the methods used to pick candidates (I don’t know them, they are lodged in the Egg) seem almost infallible; only three have ever refused.

When Star became Empress she had barely started the second half of her training, having had imprinted in her only seven of her predecessors. Imprinting does not take long but the victim needs recovery time between prints–for she gets every damned thing that ever happened to him, bad and good: the time he was cruel to a pet as a child and his recalled shame of it in his mature years, the loss of his virginity, the unbearably tragic time that he goofed a really serious one–all of it.

“I must experience their mistakes,” Star told me. “Mistakes are the only certain way to learn.”

So the whole weary structure is based on subjecting one person to all the miserable errors of seven thousand years.

Mercifully the Egg doesn’t have to be used often. Most of the time Star could be herself, no more bothered by imprinted memories than you are over that nasty remark in second grade. Most problems Star could solve shooting from the hip–no recourse to the Black Room and a full hookup.

For the one thing that stood out as this empirical way of running an empire grew up was that the answer to most problems was: Don’t do anything.

Always King Log, never King Stork–“Live and let live.” “Let well enough alone.” “Time is the best physician.” “Let sleeping dogs lie.” “Leave them alone and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.”

Even positive edicts of the Imperium were usually negative in form: Thou Shalt Not Blow Up Thy Neighbors’ Planet. (Blow your own if you wish.) Hands off the guardians of the Gates. Don’t demand justice, you too will be judged.

Above all, don’t put serious problems to a popular vote. Oh, there is no rule against local democracy, just in imperial matters. Old Rufo–excuse me; Doctor Rufo, a most distinguished comparative culturologist (with a low taste for slumming)–Rufo told me that every human race tries every political form and that democracy is used in. many primitive societies . . . but he didn’t know of any civilized planet using it, as Vox Populi, Vox Dei translates as: “My God! How did we get in this mess!”

But Rufo claimed to enjoy democracy–any time he felt depressed he sampled Washington, and the antics of the French Parliament were second only to the antics of French women.

I asked him how advanced societies ran things.

His brow wrinkled. “Mostly they don’t.”

That described the Empress of Twenty Universes: Mostly she didn’t.

But sometimes she did. She might say: “This mess will clear up if you will take that troublemaker there–What’s your name? You with the goatee–out and shoot him. Do it now.” (I was present. They did it now. He was head of the delegation which had brought the problem to her–some fuss between intergalactic trading empires in the VIIth Universe–and his chief deputy pinned his arms and his own delegates dragged him outside and killed him. Star went on drinking coffee. It’s better coffee than we get back home and I was so upset that I poured myself a cup.)

An Emperor has no power. Yet, if Star decided that a certain planet should be removed, people would get busy and there would be a nova in that sky. Star has never done this but it has been done in the past. Not often–His Wisdom will search his soul (and the Egg) a long time before decreeing anything so final even when his hypertrophied horse sense tells him that there is no other solution.

The Emperor is sole source of Imperial law, sole judge, sole executive–and does very little and has no way to enforce his rulings. What he or she does have is enormous prestige from a system that has worked for seven millennia. This non-system holds together by having no togetherness, no uniformity,

never seeking perfection, no Utopias–just answers good enough to get by, with lots of looseness and room for many ways and attitudes.

Local affairs are local. Infanticide? –they’re your babies, your planet. PTAs, movie censorship, disaster relief–the Empire is ponderously unhelpful.

The Crisis of the Egg started long before I was born. His Wisdom CCIII was assassinated and the Egg stolen at the same time. Some baddies wanted power–and the Egg, by its unique resources, has latent in it key to such power as Genghis Khan never dreamed.

Why should anybody want power? I can’t understand it. But some do, and they did.

So Star came to office hall-trained, faced by the greatest crisis the Empire had ever suffered, and cut off from her storehouse of Wisdom.

But not helpless. Imprinted in her was the experience of seven hypersensible men and she had all the cyber-computer system save that unique part known as the Egg. First she had to find out what had been done with the Egg. It wasn’t safe to mount an attack on the planet of the baddies; it might destroy the Egg.

Available were ways to make a man talk if one didn’t mind using him up. Star didn’t mind. I don’t mean anything so crude as rack and tongs. This was more like peeling an onion, and they peeled several.

Karth-Hokesh is so deadly that it was named for the only explorers to visit it and come back alive. (We were in a “garden subdivision,” the rest is much worse.) The baddies made no attempt to stay there; they just cached the Egg and set guards and booby traps around it and on the routes to it.

I asked Rufo, “What use was the Egg there?”

“None,” he agreed. “But they soon learned that it was no use anywhere–without Her. They needed either its staff of cyberneticists . . . or they needed Her Wisdom. They couldn’t open the Egg. She is the only one who can do that unassisted. So they baited a trap for Her. Capture Her Wisdom, or kill Her–capture by preference, kill Her if need be and then try for key people here at Center. But they didn’t dare risk the second while She was alive.”

Star started a search to determine the best chance of recovering the Egg. Invade Karth-Hokesh? The machines said, “Hell, no!” I would say no, too. How do you mount an invasion into a place where a man not only can’t eat or drink anything local but can’t breathe the air more than a few hours? When a massive assault will destroy what you are after? When your beachheads are two limited Gates?

The computers kept coming up with a silly answer, no matter how the question was framed.

Me.

A “Hero,” that is–a man with a strong back, a weak mind, and a high regard for his own skin. Plus other traits. A raid by a thus-and-so man, if aided by Star herself, might succeed. Rufo was added by a hunch Star had (hunches of Their Wisdoms being equal to strokes of genius) and the machines confirmed this. “I was drafted,” said Rufo. “So I refused. But I never have had any sense where She is concerned, damn it; She spoiled me when I was a kid.”

There followed years of search for the specified man. (Me, again–I’ll never know why.) Meanwhile brave men were feeling out the situation and, eventually, mapping the Tower. Star herself reconnoitered, and got acquainted in Nevia, too.

(Is Nevia part of the “Empire?” It is and it isn’t. Nevia’s planet has the only Gates to Karth-Hokesh other than one from the planet of the baddies; that is its importance to the Empire–and the Empire isn’t important to Nevia at all.)

This “Hero” was most likely to be found on a barbaric planet such as Earth. Star checked, and turned down, endless candidates winnowed from many rough peoples before her nose told her that I might do.

I asked Rufo what chance the machines gave us.

“What makes you say that?” he demanded.

“Well, I know a little of cybernetics.”

“You think you do. Still–There was a prediction. Thirteen percent success, seventeen percent no game–and seventy percent death for us all.”

I whistled. “You should whistle!” he said indignantly. “You didn’t know any more than a cavalry horse knows. You had nothing to be scared of.”

“I was scared.”

“You didn’t have time to be. It was planned so. Our one chance lay in reckless speed and utter surprise. But I knew. Son, when you told us to wait, there in the Tower, and disappeared and didn’t come back, why, I was so scared I caught up on my regretting.”

Once set up, the raid happened as I told it. Or pretty much so, although I may have seen what my mind could accept rather than exactly what happened. I mean “magic.” How many times have savages concluded “magic” when a “civilized” man came along with something the savage couldn’t understand? How often is some tag, such as “television,” accepted by cultural savages (who nevertheless twist dials) when “magic” would be the honest word?

Still, Star never insisted on that word. She accepted it when I insisted on it.

But I would be disappointed if everything I saw turned out to be something Western Electric will build once Bell Labs works the bugs out. There ought to be some magic, somewhere, just for flavor.

Oh, yes, putting me to sleep for the first transition was to keep from scaring a savage silly. Nor did the “black biers” cross over–that was posthypnotic suggestion, by an expert: my wife.

Did I say what happened to the baddies? Nothing. Their Gates were destroyed; they are isolated until they develop star travel. Good enough, by the sloppy standards of the Empire. Their Wisdoms never carry grudges.

Chapter 18

Center is a lovely planet, Earth-like but lacking Earth’s faults. It has been retailored over millennia to make it a Never-Never Land. Desert and snow and jungle were saved enough for pleasure; floods and other disasters were engineered out of existence.

It is uncrowded but has a large population for its size–that of Mars but with oceans. Surface gravity is almost that of Earth. (A higher constant, I understand.) About half the population is transient, as its great beauty and unique cultural assets–focus of twenty universes–make it a tourist’s paradise. Everything is done for the comfort of visitors with an all-out thoroughness like that of the Swiss but with technology not known on Earth.

Star and I had residences a dozen places around the planet (and endless others in other universes); they ranged from palaces to a tiny fishing lodge where Star did her own cooking. Mostly we lived in apartments to an artificial mountain that housed the Egg and its staff; adjacent were halls, conference rooms, secretariat, etc. If Star felt like working she wanted such things at hand. But a system ambassador or visiting emperor of a hundred systems had as much chance of being invited into our private home as a hobo at the back door of a Beverly Hills mansion has of being invited into the drawing room.

But if Star happened to like him, she might fetch him home for a midnight snack. She did that once–a funny little leprechaun with four arms and a habit of tap-dancing his gestures. But she did no official entertaining and felt no obligation to attend social affairs. She did not hold press conferences, make speeches, receive delegations of Girl Scouts, lay cornerstones, proclaim special “Days,” make ceremonial appearances, sign papers, deny rumors, nor any of the time-gnawing things that sovereigns and VIPs do on Earth.

She consulted individuals, often summoning them from other universes, and she had at her disposal all the news from everywhere, organized in a system that had been developed over centuries. It was through this system that she decided what problems to consider. One chronic complaint was that the Imperium ignored “vital questions”–and so it did. Her Wisdom passed judgment only on problems she selected; the bedrock of the system was that most problems solved themselves.

We often went to social events; we both enjoyed parties and, for Her Wisdom and Consort, there was endless choice. There was one negative protocol: Star neither accepted nor regretted invitations, showed up when she pleased and refused to be fussed over. This was a drastic change for capital society as her predecessor had imosed protocol more formal than that of the Vatican.

One hostess complained to me about how dull society had become under the new rules–maybe I could do something?

I did. I looked up Star and told her the remark whereupon we left and joined a drunken artists’ ball–a luau!

Center is such a hash of cultures, races, customs, and styles that it has few rules. The one invariant custom was: Don’t impose your customs on me. People wore what they did at home, or experimented with other styles; any social affair looked like a free-choice costume ball. A guest could show up at a swank party stark naked without causing talk–and some did, a small minority. I don’t mean non-humans or hirsute humans; clothes are not for them. I mean humans who would look at home in New York in American clothes–and others who would attract notice even in l’Ile du Levant because they have no hair at all, not even eyebrows. This is a source of pride to them; it shows their “superiority” to us hairy apes,

they are as proud as a Georgia cracker is of his deficiency in melanin. So they go naked oftener than other human races. I found their appearance startling but one gets used to it.

Star wore clothes outside our home, so I did. Star would never miss a chance to dress up, an endearing weakness that made it possible to forget, at times, her Imperial status. She never dressed twice alike and was ever trying something new–and disappointed if I didn’t notice. Some of her choices would cause heart failure even on a Riviera beach. She believed that a woman’s costume was a failure unless it made men want to tear it off.

One of Star’s most effective outfits was the simplest. Rufo happened to be with us and she got a sudden notion to dress as we had on the Quest of the Egg–and biff, bang, costumes were available, or manufactured to order, as may be; Nevian clothes are most uncommon in Center.

Bows, arrows, and quivers were produced with the same speed and Merry Men were we. It made me feel good to buckle on the Lady Vivamus; she had been hanging untouched on a wall of my study ever since the great black Tower.

Star stood, feet planted wide, fists on hips, head thrown back, eyes bright, and cheeks flushed. “Oh, this is fun! I feel good, I feel young! Darling, promise me, promise me truly, that someday we will again go on an adventure! I get so damn sick of being sensible.”

She spoke English, as the language of Center is ill suited to such ideas. It’s a pidgin language with thousands of years of imports and changes and is uninflected, positional, and flat.

“Suits,” I agreed. “How about it, Rufo? Want to walk that Glory Road?”

“After they pave it.”

“Guff. You’ll come, I know you. Where and when, Star? Never mind ‘where’–just ‘when.’ Skip the party and start right now!”

Suddenly she was not merry. “Darling, you know I can’t. I’m less than a third of the way through my training.”

“I should have busted that Egg when I found it.”

“Don’t be cross, darling. Let’s go to the party and have fun.”

We did. Travel on Center is by apports, artificial “Gates” that require no “magic” (or perhaps still more); one sets destination like punching buttons in an elevator, so there is no traffic problem in cities–nor a thousand other unpleasant things; they don’t let the bones show in their cities. Tonight Star chose to get off short of destination, swagger through a park, and make an entrance. She knows how well tights suit her long legs and solid buttocks; she rolled her hips like a Hindu woman.

Folks, we were a sensation! Swords aren’t worn in Center, save possibly by visitors. Bows and arrows are hen’s teeth, too. We were as conspicuous as a knight in armor on Fifth Avenue.

Star was as happy as a kid playing trick-or-treat. So was I. I felt two axe handles across the shoulders and wanted to hunt dragons.

It was a ball not unlike one on Earth. (According to Rufo, all our races everywhere have the same basic entertainment: get together in mobs to dance, drink, and gossip. He claimed that the stag affair and the hen party are symptoms of a sick culture. I won’t argue.) We swaggered down a grand staircase, music stopped, people stared and gasped–and Star enjoyed being noticed. Musicians got raggedly back to work and guests went back to the negative politeness the Empress usually demanded. But we still got attention. I had thought that the story of the Quest of the Egg was a state secret as I had never heard it mentioned. But, even if known, I still would have expected the details to be known only to us three.

Not so. Everyone knew what those costumes meant, and more. I was at the buffet, sopping up brandy and a Dagwood of my own invention, when I was cornered by Schherazade’s sister, the pretty one. She was of one of the human-but-not-like-us races. She was dressed in rubies the size of your thumb and reasonably opaque cloth. She stood about five-five, barefooted, weighed maybe one twenty and her waist couldn’t have been over fifteen inches, which exaggerated two other measurements that did not need it. She was brunette, with the slantiest eyes I’ve ever seen. She looked like a beautiful cat and looked at me the way a cat looks at a bird.

“Self,” she announced.

“Speak.”

“Sverlani. World–” (Name and code–I had never heard of it.) “Student food designer, mathematicosybaritic.”

“Oscar Gordon. Earth. Soldier.” I omitted the I.D. for Earth; she knew who I was.

“Questions?”

“Ask.”

“Is sword?”

“Is.”

She looked at it and her pupils dilated, “Is-was sword destroy construct guard Egg?” (“Is this sword
now present the direct successor in space-time sequential change, aside from theoretical anomalies involved in between-universe transitions, of the sword used to loll the Never-Born?” The double tense of the verb, present-past, stipulates and brushes aside the concept that identity is a meaningless abstraction–is this the sword you actually used, in the everyday meaning, and don’t kid me, soldier. I’m no child.)

“Was-is,” I agreed. (“I was there and I guarantee that I followed it all the way here, so it still is.”)

She gave a little gasp and her nipples stood up. Around each was painted, or perhaps tattooed, the multi-universal design we call “Wall of Troy”–and so strong was her reaction that Ileum’s ramparts crumbled again.

“Touch?” she said pleadingly.

“Touch.”

“Touch twice?” (“Please, may I handle it enough to get the feel of it? Pretty please, with sugar on it! I ask too much and it is your right to refuse, but I guarantee not to hurt it”–they get mileage out of words, but the flavor is in the manner.)

I didn’t want to, not the Lady Vivamus. But I’m a sucker for pretty girls. “Touch . . . twice,” I grudged. I drew it and handed it to her guard foremost, alert to grab it before she put somebody’s eye out or stabbed herself in the foot.

She accepted it gingerly, eyes and mouth big, grasping it by the guard instead of the grip. I had to show her. Her hand was far too small for it; her hands and feet, like her waist, were ultra slender.

She spotted the inscription. “Means?”

Dum vivimus, vivamus doesn’t translate well, not because they can’t understand the idea but because it’s water to a fish. How else would one live? But I tried. “Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.”

She nodded thoughtfully, then poked the air, wrist bent and elbow out. I couldn’t stand it, so I took it from her, dropped slowly into a foil guard, lunged in high line, recovered–a move so graceful that big hairy men look good in it. It’s why ballerinas study fencing.

I saluted and gave it back to her, then adjusted her right elbow and wrist and left arm–this is why ballerinas get half rates, it’s fun for the swordmaster. She lunged, almost pinking a guest in his starboard
ham.

I took it back, wiped the blade, sheathed it. We had gathered a solid gallery. I picked up my Dagwood from the buffet, but she wasn’t done with me. “Self jump sword?”

I choked. If she understood the meaning–or if I did–I was being propositioned the most gently I had ever been, in Center. Usually it’s blunt. But surely Star hadn’t spread the details of our wedding ceremony? Rufo? I hadn’t told him but Star might have.

When I didn’t answer, she made herself clear and did not keep her voice down. “Self unvirgin unmother unpregnant fertile.”

I explained as politely as the language permits, which isn’t very, that I was dated up. She dropped the subject, looked at the Dagwood. “Bite touch taste?”

That was another matter; I passed it over. She took a hearty bite, chewed thoughtfully, looked pleased. “Xenic. Primitive. Robust. Strong dissonance. Good art.” Then she drifted away, leaving me wondering. Inside of ten minutes the question was put to me again. I received more propositions than at any other party in Center and I’m sure the sword accounted for the bull market. To be sure, propositions came my way at every social event; I was Her Wisdom’s consort. I could have been an orangutan and offers still would have been made. Some hirsutes looked like orangutans and were socially acceptable but I could have smelled like one. And behaved worse. The truth was that many ladies were curious about what the Empress took to bed, and the fact that I was a savage, or at best a barbarian, made them more curious. There wasn’t any taboo against laying it on the line and quite a few did.

But I was still on my honeymoon. Anyhow, if I had accepted all those offers, I would have gone up with the window shade. But I enjoyed hearing them once I quit cringing at the “Soda? –or ginger ale?” bluntness; it’s good for anybody’s morale to be asked.

As we were undressing that night I said, “Have fun, pretty things?” Star yawned and grinned. “I certainly did. And so did you, old Eagle Scout. Why didn’t you bring that kitten home?”

“What kitten?”

“You know what kitten. The one you were teaching to fence.”

“Meeow!”

“No, no, dear. You should send for her. I heard her state her profession, and there is a strong

connection between good cooking and good–”

“Woman, you talk too much!”

She switched from English to Nevian. “Yes, milord husband. No sound I shall utter that does not break unbidden from love-anguished lips.”

“Milady wife beloved . . . sprite elemental of the Singing Waters–”

Nevian is more useful than the jargon they talk on Center.

Center is a fun place and a Wisdom’s consort has a cushy time. After our first visit to Star’s fishing lodge, I mentioned how nice it would be to go back someday and tickle a few trout at that lovely place, the Gate where we had entered Nevia. “I wish it were on Center.”

“It shall be.”

“Star. You would move it? I know that some Gates, commercial ones, can handle real mass, but, even so–”

“No, no. But just as good. Let me see. It will take a day or so to have it stereoed and measured and air-typed and so forth. Water flow, those things. But meanwhile–There’s nothing much beyond this wall, just a power plant and such. Say a door here and the place where we broiled the fish a hundred yards beyond. Be finished in a week, or we’ll have a new architect. Suits?”

“Star, you’ll do no such thing.”

“Why not, darling?”

“Tear up the whole house to give me a trout stream? Fantastic!”

“I don’t think so.”

“Well, it is. Anyhow, sweet, the idea is not to move that stream here, but to go there. A vacation.”

She sighed. “How I would love a vacation.”

“You took an imprint today. Your voice is different.”

“It wears off, Oscar.”

“Star, you’re taking them too fast. You’re wearing yourself out.”

“Perhaps. But I must be the judge of that, as you know.”

“As I don’t know! You can judge the whole goddamn creation–as you do and I know it–but I, your husband, must judge whether you are overworking–and stop it.”

“Darling, darling!”

There were too many incidents like that.

I was not jealous of her. That ghost of my savage past had been laid in Nevia, I was not haunted by it
again.

Nor is Center a place such ghost is likely to walk. Center has as many marriage customs as it has cultures–thousands. They cancel out. Some humans there are monogamous by instinct, as swans are said to be. So it can’t be classed as “virtue.” As courage is bravery in the face of fear, virtue is right conduct in the face of temptation. If there is no temptation, there can be no virtue. But these inflexible monogamists were no hazard. If someone, through ignorance, propositioned one of these chaste ladies, he risked neither a slap nor a knife; she would turn him down and go right on talking. Nor would it matter if her husband overheard; jealousy is never learned in a race automatically monogamous. Not that I ever tested it; to me they looked–and smelled–like spoiled bread dough. Where there is no temptation there is no virtue. But I had chances to show “virtue.” That kitten with the wasp waist tempted me–and I learned that she was of a culture in which females may not marry until they prove themselves pregnable, as in parts of the South Seas and certain places in Europe; she was breaking no taboos of her tribe. I was tempted more by another gal, a sweetie with a lovely figure, a delightful sense of humor, and one of the best dancers in any universe. She didn’t write it on the sidewalk; she just let me know that she was neither too busy nor uninterested, using that argot with skillful indirection.

This was refreshing. Downright “American.” I did inquire (elsewhere) into the customs of her tribe and found that, while they were rigid as to marriage, they were permissive otherwise. I would never do as a son-in-law but the window was open even though the door was locked.

So I chickened. I gave myself a soul-searching and admitted curiosity as morbid as that of any female who propositioned me simply because I was Star’s consort. Sweet little Zhai-ee-van was one of those who didn’t wear clothes. She grew them on the spot; from tip of her nose to her tiny toes she was covered in soft, sleek, gray fur, remarkably like chinchilla. Gorgeous!

I didn’t have the heart, she was too nice a kid.

But this temptation I admitted to Star–and Star implied gently that I must have muscles between my ears; Zhai-ee-van was an outstanding artiste even among her own people, who were esteemed as most talented devotees of Eros.

I stayed chicken. A romp with a kid that sweet should involve love, some at least, and it wasn’t love, just that beautiful fur–along with a fear that a romp with Zhai-ee-van could turn into love and she couldn’t marry me even if Star turned me loose.

Or didn’t turn me loose–Center has no rule against polygamy. Some religions there have rules for and against this and that out this mixture of cultures has endless religions and they cancel each other the way conflicting customs do. Culturologists state a “law” of religious freedom which they say is invariant: Religious freedom in a cultural complex is inversely proportional to the strength of the strongest religion. This is supposed to be one case of a general invariant, that all freedoms arise from cultural conflicts because a custom which is not opposed by its negative is mandatory and always regarded as a “law of nature.”

Rufo didn’t agree; he said his colleagues stated as equations things which are not mensurate and not definable–holes in their heads! –and that freedom was never more than a happy accident because the common jerk, all human races, hates and fears all freedom, not only for his neighbors but for himself, and stamps it out whenever possible.

Back to Topic “A”–Centrists use every sort of marriage contract. Or none. They practice domestic partnership, coition, propagation, friendship, and love–but not necessarily all at once nor with the same person. Contracts could be as complex as a corporate merger, specifying duration, purposes, duties, responsibilities, number and sex of children, genetic selection methods, whether host mothers were to be hired, conditions for canceling and options for extension–anything but “marital fidelity.” It is axiomatic there that this is unenforceable and therefore not contractual.

But marital fidelity is commoner there than it is on Earth; it simply is not legislated. They have an
ancient proverb reading Women and Cats. It means: “Women and Cats do as they please, and men and dogs might as well relax to it.” It has its opposite: Men and Weather which is blunter and at least as old, since the weather has long been under control.

The usual contract is no contract; he moves his clothes into her home and stays–until she dumps them outside the door. This form is highly thought of because of its stability: A woman who “tosses his shoes” has a tough time finding another man brave enough to risk her temper.

My “contract” with Star was no more than that if contracts, laws, and customs applied to the Empress, which they did not and could not. But that was not the source of my increasing unease.

Believe me, I was not jealous.

But I was increasingly fretted by those dead men crowding her mind.

One evening as we were dressing for some whing-ding she snapped at me. I had been prattling about how I had spent my day, being tutored in mathematics, and no doubt had been as entertaining as a child reporting a day in kindergarten. But I was enthusiastic, a new world was opening to me–and Star was always patient.

But she snapped at me in a baritone voice.

I stopped cold. “You were imprinted today!”

I could feel her shift gears. “Oh, forgive me, darling! No, I’m not myself, I’m His Wisdom CLXXXII.”

I did a fast sum. “That’s fourteen you’ve taken since the Quest–and you took only seven in all the years before that. What the hell are you trying to do? Burn yourself out? Become an idiot?”

She started to scorch me. Then she answered gently, “No, I am not risking anything of the sort.”

“That isn’t what I near.”

“What you may have heard has no weight, Oscar, as no one else can judge–either my capacity, or what it means to accept an imprint. Unless you have been talking to my heir?”

“No.” I knew she had selected him and I assumed that he had taken a print or two–a standard precaution against assassination. But I hadn’t met him, didn’t want to, and didn’t know who he was.

“Then forget what you’ve been told. It is meaningless.” She sighed. “But, darling, if you don’t mind, I won’t go tonight; best I go to bed and sleep. Old Stinky CLXXXII is the nastiest person I’ve ever been–a brilliant success in a critical age, you must read about him. But inside he was a bad-tempered beast who hated the very people he helped. He’s fresh in me now, I must keep him chained.”

“Okay, let’s go to bed.”

Star shook her head. ” ‘Sleep,’ I said. I’ll use autosuggestion and by morning you won’t know he’s been here. You go to the party. Find an adventure and forget that you have a difficult wife.”

I went but I was too bad-tempered even to consider “adventures.”

Old Nasty wasn’t the worst. I can hold my own in a row–and Star, Amazon though she is, is not big enough to handle me. If she got rough, she would at last get that spanking. Nor would I fear interference from guards; that had been settled from scratch: When we two were alone together, we were private. Any third person changed that, nor did Star have privacy alone, even in her bath. Whether her guards were male or female I don’t know, nor would she have cared. Guards were never in sight. So our spats were private and perhaps did us both good, as temporary relief.

But “the Saint” was harder to take than Old Nasty. He was His Wisdom CXLI and was so goddam noble and spiritual and holier-than-thou that I went fishing for three days. Star herself was robust and full of ginger and joy in life; this bloke didn’t drink, smoke, chew gum, nor utter an unkind word. You could almost see Star’s halo while she was under his influence.

Worse, he had renounced sex when he consecrated himself to the Universes and this had a shocking effect on Star; sweet submissiveness wasn’t her style. So I went fishing.

I’ve one good thing to say for the Saint. Star says that he was the most unsuccessful emperor in all that
long line, with genius for doing the wrong thing from pious motives, so she learned more from him than
any other; he made every mistake in the book. He was assassinated by disgusted customers after only fifteen years, which isn’t long enough to louse up anything as ponderous as a multi-universe empire.

His Wisdom CXXXVII was a Her–and Star was absent two days. When she came home she explained. “Had to, dear. I’ve always thought I was a rowdy bitch–but she shocked even me.”

“How?”

“I ain’t talkin’, Guv’nor. I gave myself intensive treatment to bury her where you’ll never meet her.”

“I’m curious.”

“I know you are and that’s why I drove a stake through her heart–rough job, she’s my direct ancestor. But I was afraid you might like her better than you do me. That unspeakable trull!”

I’m still curious.

Most of them weren’t bad Joes. But our marriage would have been smoother if I had never known they were there. It’s easier to have a wife who is a touch batty than one who is several platoons–most of them men. To be aware of their ghostly presence even when Star’s own personality was in charge did my libido no good. But I must concede that Star knew the male viewpoint better than any other woman in any history. She didn’t have to guess what would please a man; she knew more about it than I did, from “experience”–and was explosively uninhibited about sharing her unique knowledge.

I shouldn’t complain.

But I did, I blamed her for being those other people. She endured my unjust complaints better than I endured what I felt to be the injustice in my situation vis-a-vis all that mob of ghosts.

Those ghosts weren’t the worst fly in the soup.

I did not have a job. I don’t mean nine-to-five and cut the grass on Saturdays and get drunk at the country club that night; I mean I didn’t have any purpose. Ever look at a male lion in a zoo? Fresh meat on time, females supplied, no hunters to worry about–He’s got it made, hasn’t he?

Then why does he look bored!

I didn’t know I had a problem, at first. I had a beautiful and loving wife; I was so wealthy that there was no way to count it; I lived in a most luxurious home in a city more lovely than any on Earth; everybody I met was nice to me; and best second only to my wonderful wife, I had endless chance to “go to college” in a marvelous and un-Earthly sense, with no need to chase a pigskin. Nor a sheepskin. I need never stop and had any conceivable help. I mean, suppose Albert Einstein drops everything to help with your algebra, pal, or Rand Corporation and General Electric team up to devise visual aids to make something easier for you. This is luxury greater than riches.

I soon found that I could not drink the ocean even held to my lips. Knowledge on Earth alone has grown so out of hand that no man can grasp it–so guess what the bulk is in Twenty Universes, each with its laws, its histories, and Star alone knows how many civilizations.

In a candy factory, employees are urged to eat all they want. They soon stop.

I never stopped entirely; knowledge has more variety. But my studies lacked purpose. The Secret Name of God is no more to be found in twenty universes than in one–and all other subjects are the same size unless you have a natural bent.

I had no bent, I was a dilettante–and I realized it when I saw that my tutors were bored with me. So I let most of them go, stuck with math and multi-universe history, quit trying to know it all.

I thought about going into business. But to enjoy business you must be a businessman at heart (I’m

not), or you have to need dough. I had dough; all I could do was lose it–or, if I won, I would never know whether word had gone out (from any government anywhere): Don’t buck the Empress’s consort, we will make good your losses.

Same with poker. I introduced the game and it caught on fast–and I found that I could no longer play it. Poker must be serious or it’s nothing–out when you own an ocean of money, adding or losing a few drops mean nothing.

I should explain–Her Wisdom’s “civil list” may not have been as large as the expenditures of many big spenders in Center; the place is rich. But it was as big as Star wanted it to be, a bottomless well of wealth. I don’t know how many worlds split the tab, but call it twenty thousand with three billion people each–it was more than that.

A penny each from 60,000,000,000,000 people is six hundred billion dollars. The figures mean nothing except to show that spreading it so thin that nobody could feel it still meant more money than I could dent. Star’s non-government of her un-Empire was an expense, I suppose–but her personal expenses, and mine, no matter how lavish, were irrelevant.

King Midas lost interest in his piggy bank. So did I.

Oh, I spent money. (I never touched any–unnecessary.) Our “flat” (I won’t call it a palace)–our home had a gymnasium more imaginative than any university gym; I had a salle d’armes added and did a lot of fencing, almost every day with all sorts of weapons. I ordered foils made to match the Lady Vivamus and the best swordmasters in several worlds took turns helping me. I had a range added, too, and had my bow picked up from that Gate cave in Karth-Hokesh, and trained in archery and in other aimed weapons. Oh, I spent money as I pleased.

But it wasn’t much fun.

I was sitting in my study one day, doing not a damn thing but brood, while I played with a bowlful of jewels.

I had fiddled with jewelry design a while. It had interested me in high school; I had worked for a jeweler one summer. I can sketch and was fascinated by lovely stones. He lent me books, I got others from the library–and once he made up one of my designs.

I had a Calling.

But jewelers are not draft-deferred so I dropped it–until Center.

You see, there was no way for me to give Star a present unless I made it. So I did. I made costume jewelry of real stones, studying it (expert help, as usual), sending for a lavish selection of stones, drawing designs, sending stones and drawings out to be made up.

I knew that Star enjoyed jeweled costumes; I knew she liked them naughty–not in the sense of crowding the taboos, there weren’t any–but provocative, gilding the lily, accentuating what hardly needs it.

The things I designed would have seemed at home in a French revue–but of real gems. Sapphires and gold suited Star’s blond beauty and I used them. But she could wear any color and I used other gems, too.

Star was delighted with my first try and wore it that evening. I was proud of it; I had swiped the design from memory of a costume worn by a showgirl in a Frankfurt night club my first night out of the Army–a G-string deal, transparent long skirt open from the hip on one side and with sequins on it (I used sapphires), a thing that wasn’t a bra but an emphasizer, completely jeweled, and a doohickey in her hair to match. High golden sandals with sapphire heels.

Star was warmly grateful for others that followed.

But I learned something. I’m not a jewelry designer. I saw no hope of matching the professionals who catered to the wealthy in Center. I soon realized that Star wore my designs because they were my gift, just as mama pins up the kindergarten drawings that sonny brings home. So I quit.

This bowl of gems had been kicking around my study for weeks–fire opals, sardonyx, carnelians, diamonds and turquoise and rubies, moonstones and sapphires and garnets, peridot, emeralds, chrysolite–many with no English names. I ran them through my fingers, watching the many-colored fire falls, and felt sorry for myself. I wondered how much these pretty marbles would cost on Earth? I couldn’t guess within a million dollars.

I didn’t bother to lock them up at night. And I was the bloke who had quit college for lack of tuition and hamburgers.

I pushed them aside and went to my window–there because I had told Star that I didn’t like not having a window in my study. That was on arrival and I didn’t find out for months how much had been torn down to please me; I had thought they had just cut through a wall.

It was a beautiful view, more a park than a city, studded but not cluttered with lovely buildings. It was hard to realize that it was a city bigger than Tokyo; its “bones” didn’t show and its people worked even half a planet away.

There was a murmur soft as bees, like the muted roar one can never escape in New York–but softer, just enough to make me realize that I was surrounded by people, each with his job, his purpose, his function.

My function? Consort.

Gigolo!

Star, without realizing it, had introduced prostitution into a world that had never known it. An innocent world, where man and woman bedded together only for the reason that they both wanted to.

A prince consort is not a prostitute. He has his work and it is often tedious, representing his sovereign mate, laying cornerstones, making speeches. Besides that, he has his duty as royal stud to ensure that the line does not die.

I had none of these. Not even the duty of entertaining Star–hell, within ten miles of me were millions of men who would jump at the chance.

The night before had been bad. It started badly and went on into one of those weary pillow conferences which married couples sometimes have, and aren’t as healthy as a bang-up row. We had had one, as domestic as any working stiff worried over bills and the boss.

Star had done something she had never done before: brought work home. Five men, concerned with some intergalactic hassle–I never knew what as the discussion had been going on for hours and they sometimes spoke a language not known to me.

They ignored me, I was furniture. On Center introductions are rare; if you want to talk to someone, you say “Self,” and wait. If he doesn’t answer, walk off. If he does, exchange identities. None of them did, and I was damned if I would start it. As strangers in my home it was up to them. But they didn’t act as if it was my home.

I sat there, the Invisible Man, getting madder and madder.

They went on arguing, while Star listened. Presently she summoned maids and they started undressing her, brushing her hair. Center is not America, I had no reason to feel shocked. What she was doing was being rude to them, treating them as furniture (she hadn’t missed how they treated me).

One said pettishly, “Your Wisdom, I do wish you would listen as you agreed to.” (I’ve expanded the argot.)

Star said coldly, “I am judge of my conduct. No one else is capable.”

True. She could judge her conduct, they could not. Nor, I realized bitterly, could I. I had been feeling angry at her (even though I knew it didn’t matter) for calling in her maids and starting to ready for bed with these lunks present–and I had intended to tell her not to let it happen again. I resolved not to raise that issue.

Shortly Star chopped them off. “He’s right. You’re wrong. Settle it that way. Get out.”

But I did intend to sneak it in by objecting to her bringing “tradespeople” home.

Star beat me to the punch. The instant we were alone she said, “My love, forgive me. I agreed to hear this silly mix-up and it dragged on and on, then I thought I could finish it quickly if I got them out of chairs, made them stand up here, and made clear that I was bored. I never thought they would wrangle another hour before I could squeeze out the real issue. And I knew that, if I put it over till tomorrow, they would stretch it into hours. But the problem was important, I couldn’t drop it.” She sighed. “That ridiculous man–Yet such people scramble to high places. I considered having him fool-killed. Instead I must let him correct his error, or the situation will break out anew.”

I couldn’t even hint that she had ruled the way she had out of annoyance; the man she had chewed out was the one in whose favor she had ruled. So I said, “Let’s go to bed, you’re tired”–and then didn’t have sense enough to refrain from judging her myself.

Chapter 19

We went to bed.

Presently she said, “Oscar, you are displeased.”

“I didn’t say so.”

“I feel it. Nor is it Just tonight and those tedious clowns. You have been withdrawing yourself, unhappy.” She waited.

“It’s nothing.”

“Oscar, anything which troubles you can never be ‘nothing’ to me. Although I may not realize it until I know what it is.”

“Well–I feel so damn useless!”

She put her soft, strong hand on my chest. “To me you are not useless. Why do you feel useless to yourself?”

“Well–look at this bed!” It was a bed the like of which Americans never dream; it could do everything but kiss you good night–and, like the city, it was beautiful, its bones did not show. “This sack, at home, would cost more–if they could build it–than the best house my mother ever lived in.”

She thought about that. “Would you like to send money to your mother?” She beckoned the bedside communicator. “Is Elmendorf Air Force Base of America address enough?”

(I don’t recall ever telling her where Mother lived.) “No, no!” I gestured at the talker, shutting it off. “I do not want to send her money. Her husband supports her. He won’t take money from me. That’s not the point.”

“Then I don’t see the point as yet. Beds do not matter, it is who is in a bed that counts. My darling, if you don’t like this bed, we can get another. Or sleep on the floor. Beds do not matter.”

“This bed is okay. The only thing wrong is that I didn’t pay for it. You did. This house. My clothes. The food I eat. My–my toys! Every damned thing I have you gave me. Know what I am. Star? A gigolo! Do you Know what a gigolo is? A somewhat-male prostitute.”

One of my wife’s most exasperating habits was, sometimes, to refuse to snap back at me when she knew I was spoiling for a row. She looked at me thoughtfully. “America is a busy place, isn’t it? People work all the time, especially men.”

“Well . . . yes.”

“It isn’t the custom everywhere, even on Earth. A Frenchman isn’t unhappy if he has free time; he orders another cafe au lait and lets the saucers pile up. Nor am I fond of work. Oscar, I ruined our evening from laziness, too anxious to avoid having to redo a weary task tomorrow. I will not make that mistake twice.”

“Star, that doesn’t matter. That’s over with.”

“I know. The first issue is rarely the key. Nor the second. Nor, sometimes, the twenty-second. Oscar, you are not a gigolo.”

“What do you call it? When it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and acts like a duck, I call it a duck. Call it a bunch of roses. It still quacks.”

“No. All this around us–” She waved. “Bed. This beautiful chamber. The food we eat. My clothes and yours. Our lovely pools. The night majordomo on watch against the chance that you or I might demand a
singing bird or a ripe melon. Our captive gardens. All we see or touch or use or fancy–and a thousand times as much in distant places, all these you earned with your own strong hands; they are yours, by right.”

I snorted. “They are,” she insisted. “That was our contract. I promised you great adventure, and greater treasure, and even greater danger. You agreed. You said, ‘Princess, you’ve hired yourself a boy.’ ” She smiled. “Such a big boy. Darling, I think the dangers were greater than you guessed . . . so it has pleased me, until now, that the treasure is greater than you were likely to have guessed. Please don’t be shy about accepting it. You have earned it and more–as much as you are ever willing to accept”

“Uh–Even if you are right, it’s too much. I’m drowning in marshmallows!”

“But, Oscar, you don’t have to take one bit you don’t want. We can live simply. In one room with bed folded into wall if it pleases you.”

“That’s no solution.”

“Perhaps you would like bachelor digs, out in town?”

” ‘Tossing my shoes,’ eh?”

She said levelly, “My husband, if your shoes are ever tossed, you must toss them. I jumped over your

sword. I shall not jump back.” “Take it easy!” I said. “It was your suggestion. If I took it wrong, I’m sorry. I know you don t go back on your word. But you might be regretting it.”

“I am not regretting it. Are you?”

“No, Star, no! But–”

“That’s a long pause for so short a word,” she said gravely. “Will you tell me?”

“Uh . . . that’s just it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell what, Oscar? There are so many things to tell.”

“Well, a lot of things. What I was getting into. About you being the Empress of the whole works, in particular . . . before you let me jump over the sword with you.”

Her face did not change but tears rolled down her cheeks. “I could answer that you did not ask me–”

“I didn’t know what to ask!”

“That is true. I could assert, truthfully, that had you asked I would have answered. I could protest that

I did not ‘let you’ jump over the sword, that you overruled my protests that it was not necessary to offer

me the honor of marriage by the laws of your people . . . that I was a wench you could tumble at will. I could point out that I am not an empress, not royal, but a working woman whose job does not permit her even the luxury of being noble. All these are true. But I will not hide behind them; I will meet your question.” She slipped into Nevian. “Milord Hero, I feared sorely that if I did not bend to your will, you would leave me!”

“Milady wife, truly did you think that your champion would desert you in your peril?” I went on in English, “Well, that nails it to the barn. You married me because the Egg damned well had to be recovered and Your Wisdom told you that I was necessary to the job–and might bug out if you didn’t. Well, Your Wisdom wasn’t sharp on that point; I don’t bug out. Stupid of me but I’m stubborn.” I started to get out of bed.

“Milord love!” She was dying openly.

“Excuse me. Got to find a pair of shoes. See how far I can throw them.” I was being nasty as only a man can be who has had his pride wounded.

“Please, Oscar, please! Hear me first.”

I heaved a sigh. “Talk ahead.”

She grabbed my hand so hard I would have lost fingers had I tried to pull loose. “Hear me out. My beloved, it was not that at all. I knew that you would not give up our quest until it was finished or we were dead. I knew! Not only had I reports reaching back years before I ever saw you but also we had shared joy and danger and hardship; I knew your mettle. But, had it been needed, I could have bound you with a net of words, persuaded you to agree to betrothal only–until the quest was over. You are a romantic, you would have agreed. But, darling, darling! I wanted to many you . . . bind you to me by your rules, so that”–she stopped to sniff back tears–“so that, when you saw all this, and this, and this, and the things you call ‘your toys,’ you still would stay with me. It was not politics, it was low–love romantic and unreasoned, love for your own sweet self.”

She dropped her face into her hands and I could barely hear her. “But I know so little of love. Love is a butterfly that lights when it listeth, leaves as it chooses; it is never bound with chains. I sinned. I tried to bind you. Unjust I knew it was, cruel to you I now see it to be.” Star looked up with crooked smile. “Even Her Wisdom has no wisdom when it comes to being a woman. But, though silly wench I be, I am not too stubborn to know that I have wronged my beloved when my face is rubbed in it. Go, go, get your sword; I will jump back over it and my champion will be free of his silken cage. Go, milord Hero, while my heart is firm.”

“Go fetch your own sword, wench. That paddling is long overdue.”

Suddenly she grinned, all hoyden. “But, darling, my sword is in Karth-Hokesh. Don’t you remember?”

“You can’t avoid it this time!” I grabbed her. Star is a handful and slippery, with amazing muscles. But I’m bigger and she didn’t fight as hard as she could have. Still I lost skin and picked up bruises before I got her legs pinned and one arm twisted behind her. I gave her a couple of hearty spanks, hard enough to print each finger in pink, then lost interest.

Now tell me, were those words straight from her heart–or was it acting by the smartest woman in twenty universes?

Later, Star said, “I’m glad your chest is not a scratchy rug, like some men, my beautiful.”

“I was a pretty baby, too. How many chests have you checked?”

“A random sample. Darling, have you decided to keep me?”

“A while. On good behavior, you understand.”

“I’d rather be kept on bad behavior. But–while you’re feeling mellow–if you are–I had best tell you

another thing–and take my spanking if I must.”

“You’re too anxious. One a day is maximum, hear me?”

“As you will, sir. Yassuh, Boss man. I’ll have my sword fetched in the morning and you can spank me

with it at your leisure. If you think you can catch me. But I must tell this and get it off my chest.”

“There’s nothing on your chest. Unless you count–”

“Please! You’ve been going to our therapists.”

“Once a week.” The first thing Star had ordered was an examination for me so complete as to make an Army physical seem perfunctory. “The Head Sawbones insists that my wounds aren’t healed but I don’t believe him; I’ve never felt better.”

“He, is stalling, Oscar–by my order. You’re healed, I am not unskilled, I was most careful. But–darling, I did this for selfish reasons and now you must tell me if I have been cruel and unjust to you again. I admit I was sneaky. But my intentions were good. However, I know, as the prime lesson of my profession, that good intentions are the source of more folly than all other causes put together.”

“Star, what are you prattling about? Women are the source of all folly.”

“Yes, dearest. Because they always have good intentions–and can prove it. Men sometimes act from rational self-interest, which is safer. But not often.”

“That’s because half their ancestors are female. Why have I been keeping doctor’s appointments if I don t need them?”

“I didn’t say you don’t need them. But you may not think so. Oscar, you are far advanced with

Long-Life treatments.” She eyed me as if ready to parry or retreat.

“Well, I’ll be damned!”

“You object? At this stage it can be reversed.”

“I hadn’t thought about it.” I knew that Long-Life was available on Center but knew also that it was rigidly restricted. Anybody could have it–just before emigrating to a sparsely settled planet. Permanent residents must grow old and die. This was one matter in which one of Star’s predecessors had interfered in local government. Center, with disease practically conquered, great prosperity, and lodestone of a myriad peoples, had grown too crowded, especially when Long-Life sent skyward the average age of death.

This stern rule had thinned the crowds. Some people took Long-Life early, went through a Gate and took their chances in wilderness. More waited until that first twinge that brings awareness of death, then decided that they weren’t too old for a change. And some sat tight and died when their time came.

I knew that twinge; it had been handed to me by a bolo in a jungle. “I guess I have no objection.”

She sighed with relief. “I didn’t know and should not have slipped it into your coffee. Do I rate a spanking?”

“We’ll add it to the list you already rate and give them to you all at once. Probably cripple you. Star, how long is ‘Long-Life’?”

“That’s hard to answer. Very few who have had it have died in bed. If you live as active a life as I know you will–from your temperament–you are most unlikely to die of old age. Nor of disease.”

“And I never grow old?” It takes getting used to.

“Oh, yes, you can grow old. Worse yet, senility stretches in proportion. If you let it. If those around you allow it. However–Darling, how old do I look? Don’t tell me with your heart, tell me with your eyes. By Earth standards. Be truthful, I know the answer.”

It was ever a joy to look at Star but I tried to look at her freshly, for hints of autumn–outer corners of eyes, her hands, for tiny changes in skin–hell, not even a stretch mark, yet I knew she had a grandchild.

“Star, when I first saw you, I guessed eighteen. You turned around and I upped the ante a little. Now, looking closely and not giving you any breaks–not over twenty-five. And that is because your features seem mature. When you laugh, you’re a teen-ager; when you wheedle, or look awestruck, or suddenly delighted with a puppy or kitten or something, you’re about twelve. From the chin up, I mean; from the chin down you can’t pass for less than eighteen.”

“A buxom eighteen,” she added. “Twenty-five Earth years–by rates of growth on Earth–is right on the mark I was shooting at. The age when a woman stops growing and starts aging. Oscar, your apparent age under Long-Life is a matter of choice. Take my Uncle Joseph–the one who sometimes calls himself ‘Count Cagliostro.’ He set himself at thirty-five, because he says that anything younger is a boy. Rufo prefers to look older. He says it gets him respectful treatment, keeps him out of brawls with lounger men–and still lets him give a younger man a shock if one does pick a fight because, as you know, Rufo’s older age is mostly from chin up.”

“Or the shock he can give younger women,” I suggested.

“With Rufo one never knows. Dearest, I didn’t finish telling you. Part of it is teaching the body to repair itself. Your language lessons here–there hasn’t been a one but what a hypno-therapist was waiting to give your body a lesson through your sleeping mind, after your language lesson. Part of apparent age is cosmetic therapy–Rufo need not be bald–but more is controlled by the mind. When you decide what age you like, they can start imprinting it.”

“I’ll think about it. I don’t want to look too much older than you.”

Star looked delighted. “Thank you, dear! You see how selfish I’ve been.”

“How? I missed that point.”

She put a hand over mine. “I didn’t want you to grow old–and die! –while I stayed young.” I blinked at her. “Gosh, lady, that was selfish of you, wasn’t it? But you could varnish me and keep me in the bedroom. Like your aunt.”

She made a face. “You’re a nasty man. She didn’t varnish them.”

“Star, I haven’t seen any of those keepsake corpses around here.”

She looked surprised. “But that’s on the planet where I was born. This universe, another star. Very pretty place. Didn’t I ever say?”

“Star, my darling, mostly you’ve never said.”

“I’m sorry. Oscar, I don’t want to hand you surprises. Ask me. Tonight. Anything.”

I considered it. One thing I had wondered about, a certain lack. Or perhaps the women of her part of

the race had another rhythm. But I had been stopped by the fact that I had married a grandmother–how old? “Star, are you pregnant?”

“Why, no, dear. Oh! Do you want me to be? You want us to have children?”

I stumbled, trying to explain that I hadn’t been sure it was possible–or maybe she was. Star looked troubled. “I’m going to upset you again. I had best tell it all. Oscar, I was no more brought up to luxury than you were. A pleasant childhood, my people were ranchers. I married young and was a simple mathematics teacher, with a hobby research in conjectural and optional geometries. Magic, I mean. Three children. My husband and I got along well . . . until I was nominated. Not selected, just named for examination and possible training. He knew I was a genetic candidate when he married me–but so many millions are. It didn’t seem important.

“He wanted me to refuse. I almost did. But when I accepted, he–well, he ‘tossed my shoes.’ We do it formally there; he published a notice that I was no longer his wife.”

“He did, eh? Mind if I look him up and break his arms?”

“Dear, dear! That was many years ago and far away; he is long dead. It doesn’t matter.”

“In any case he’s dead. Your three kids–one of them is Rufo’s father? Or mother?”

“Oh, no! That was later.”

“Well?”

Star took a deep breath. “Oscar, I have about fifty children.”

That did it. Too many shocks and I guess I showed it, for Star’s face reflected deep concern. She
rushed through the explanation.

When she was named heir, changes were made in her, surgical, biochemical, and endocrinal. Nothing
as drastic as spaying and to different ends and by techniques more subtle than ours. But the result was

that about two hundred tiny bits of Star–ova alive and latent–were stored near absolute zero.

Some fifty had been quickened, mostly by emperors long dead but “alive” in their stored seed–genetic gambles on getting one or more future emperors. Star had not borne them; an heir’s time is too precious. She had never seen most of them; Rufo’s father was an exception. She didn’t say, but I think Star liked to have a child around to play with and love–until the strenuous first years of her reign and the Quest for the Egg left her no time.

This change had a double purpose: to get some hundreds of star-line children from a single mother, and to leave the mother free. By endocrine control of some sort, Star was left free of Eve’s rhythm but in all ways young–not pills nor hormone injections; this was permanent. She was simply a healthy woman who never had “bad days.” This was not for her convenience but to insure that her judgment as the Great Judge would never be whipsawed by her glands. “This is sensible,” she said seriously. “I can remember there used to be days when I would bite the head off my dearest friend for no reason, then burst into tears. One can’t be judicial in that sort of storm.”

“Uh, did it affect your interest? I mean your desire for–”

She gave me a hearty grin. “What do you think?” She added seriously, “The only thing that affects my libido–changes it for the worse, I mean–are . . . is? –English has the oddest structure–is-are those pesky imprintings. Sometimes up, sometimes down–and you’ll remember one woman whose name we won’t mention who affected me so carnivorously that I didn’t dare come near you until I had exorcised her black soul! A fresh imprint affects my judgment as well, so I never hear a case until I have digested the latest one. I’ll be glad when they’re over!”

“So will I.”

“Not as glad as I will be. But, aside from that, darling, I don t vary much as a female and you know it. Just my usual bawdy self who eats young boys for breakfast and seduces them into jumping over swords.” “How many swords?”

She looked at me sharply. “Since my first husband kicked me out I have not been married until I married you, Mr. Gordon. If that is not what you meant, I don’t think you should hold against me things that happened before you were born. If you want details since then, I’ll satisfy your curiosity. Your morbid curiosity, if I may say so.”

“You want to boast. Wench, I won’t pamper it.”

“I do not want to boast! I’ve little to boast about. The Crisis of the Egg left me almost no time in which to be a woman, damn it! Until Oscar the Rooster came along. Thank you, sir.”

“And keep a civil tongue in your head.”

“Yes, sir. Nice Rooster! But you’ve led us far from our muttons, dear. If you want children–yes, darling! There are about two hundred and thirty eggs left and they belong to me. Not to posterity. Not to the dear people, bless their greedy little hearts. Not to those God-playing genetic manipulators. Me! It’s all I own. All else is ex offico. But these are mine . . . and if you want them, they are yours, my only dear.”

I should have said, “Yes!” and kissed her. What I did say was, “Uh, let’s not rush it.”

Her face fell. “As milord Hero husband pleases.”

“Look, don’t get Nevian and formal. I mean, well, it takes getting used to. Syringes and things, I suppose, and monkeying by technicians. And, while I realize you don’t have time to have a baby yourself–”

I was trying to say that, ever since I got straightened out about the Stork, I had taken for granted the usual setup, and artificial insemination was a dirty trick to play even on a cow–and that this job, subcontracted on both sides, made me think of slots in a Horn & Hardart, or a mail-order suit. But give me time and I would adjust. Just as she had adjusted to those damned imprints-

She gripped my hands. “Darling, you needn’t!”

“Needn’t what?”

“Be monkeyed with by technicians. And I will take time to have your baby. If you don’t mind seeing my body get gross and huge–it does, it does, I remember–then happily I will do it. All will be as with other people so far as you are concerned. No syringes. No technicians. Nothing to offend your pride. Oh, I’ll have to be worked on. But I’m used to being handled like a prize cow; it means no more than having my hair shampooed.”

“Star, you would go through nine months of inconvenience–and maybe die in childbirth–to save me a few moments’ annoyance?”

“I shall not die, Three children, remember? Normal deliveries, no trouble.”

“But, as you pointed out, that was ‘many years ago.’ ”

“No matter.”

“Uh, how many years?” (“How old are you, woman?” The question I never dared ask.)

She looked upset. “Does it matter, Oscar?”

“Uh, I suppose not. You know more about medicine than I do–”

She said slowly, “You were asking how old I am, were you not?”

I didn’t say anything. She waited, then went on, “An old saw from your world says that a woman is as young as she feels. And I feel young and I am young and I have zest for life and I can bear a baby–or many babies–m my own belly. But I know–oh, I know! –that your worry is not just that I am too rich and occupy a position not easy for a husband. Yes, I know that part too well; my first husband rejected me for that. But be was my age. The most cruel and unjust thing I have done is that I knew that my age could matter to you–and I kept still. That was why Rufo was so outraged. After you were asleep that night in the cave of the Forest of Dragons he told me so, in biting words. He said he knew I was not above enticing young boys but he never thought that I would sink so low as to trap one into marriage without first telling him. He’s never had a high opinion of his old granny, he said, but this time–”

“Shut up, Star!”

“Yes, milord.”

“It doesn’t make a damn bit of difference!”–and I said it so flatly that I believed it–and do now. “Rufo doesn’t know what I think. You are younger than tomorrow’s dawn–you always will be. That’s the last I want to hear about it!”

“Yes, milord.”

“And knock that off, too. Just say, ‘Okay, Oscar.’ ”

“Yes, Oscar! Okay!”

“Better. Unless you’re honing for another spanking. And I’m too tired.” I changed the subject. “About this other matter–There’s no reason to stretch your pretty tummy if other ways are at hand. I’m a country jake, that’s all; I’m not used to big city ways. When you suggested that you do it yourself, did you mean that they could put you back together the way you were?”

“No. I would simply be host-mother as well as genetic mother.” She smiled and I knew I was making progress. “But saving a tidy sum of that money you don’t want to spend. Those healthy, sturdy women who have other people’s babies charge high. Four babies, they can retire–ten makes them wealthy.”

“I should think they would charge high! Star, I don’t object to spending money. I’ll concede, if you say so, that I’ve earned more than I spend, by my work as a professional hero. That’s a tough racket, too.”

“You’ve earned it.”

“This citified way of having babies–Can you pick it? Boy, or girl?”

“Of course. Male-giving wigglers swim faster, they can be sorted out. That’s why Wisdoms are usually men–I was an unplanned candidate. You shall have a son, Oscar.”

“Might prefer a girl. I’ve a weakness for little girls.”

“A boy, a girl–or both. Or as many as you want.”

“Star, let me study it. Lots of angles–and I don’t think as well as you do.”

“Pooh!”

“If you don’t think better than I do, the cash customers are getting rooked. Mmm, male seed can be stored as easily as eggs?”

“Much easier.”

“That’s all the answer we need now. I’m not too jumpy about syringes; I’ve stood in enough Army queues. I’ll go to the clinic or whatever it is, then we can settle it slowly. When we decide”–I shrugged–“mail the postcard and when it goes clunk! –we’re parents. Or some such. From there on the technicians and those husky gals can handle it.”

“Yes, milo–Okay, darling!”

All better. Almost her little girl face. Certainly her sixteen-year-old face, with new party dress and boys a shivery, delightful danger. “Star, you said earlier that it was often not the second issue out even the twenty-second that matters.”

“Yes.”

“I know what’s wrong with me. I can tell you–and maybe Her Wisdom knows the answer.”

She blinked. “If you can tell me, sweetheart–Her Wisdom will solve it, even if I have to tear the place down and put it back up differently–from here to the next galaxy–or I’ll go out of the Wisdom business!”

“That sounds more like my Lucky Star. All right, it’s not that I’m a gigolo. I’ve earned my coffee and cakes, at least; the Soul-Eater did damn near eat my soul, he knew its exact shape–he . . . it–it knew things I had long forgotten. It was rough and the pay ought to be high. It’s not your age, dearest. Who cares how old Helen of Troy is? You’re the right age forever–can a man be luckier? I’m not jealous of your position; I wouldn’t want it with chocolate icing. I’m not jealous of the men in your life–the lucky stiffs! Not even now, as long as I don’t stumble over them getting to the bathroom.”

“There are no other men in my life now, milord husband.”

“I had no reason to think so. But there is always next week, and even you can’t have a Sight about

that, my beloved. You’ve taught me that marriage is not a form of death–and you obviously aren’t dead, you lively wench.”

“Perhaps not a Sight,” she admitted. “But a feeling.”

“I won’t bet on it. I’ve read the Kinsey Report.”

“What report?”

“He disproved the Mermaid theory. About married women. Forget it. Hypothetical question: If Jocko visited Center, would you still have the same feeling? We should have to invite him to sleep here.”

“The Doral will never leave Nevia.”

“Don’t blame him, Nevia is wonderful. I said If–If he does, will you offer him ‘roof, table, and bed’?”

“That,” she said firmly, “is your decision, milord.”

“Rephrase it: Will you expect me to humiliate Jocko by not returning his hospitality? Gallant old Jocko, who let us live when he was entitled to kill us? Whose bounty–arrows and many things, including a new medic’s kit–kept us alive and let us win back the Egg?”

“By Nevian customs of roof and table and bed,” she insisted, “the husband decides, milord husband.”

“We aren’t in Nevia and here a wife has a mind of her own. You’re dodging, wench.”

She grinned naughtily. “Does that ‘if’ of yours include Muri? And Letva? They’re his favorites, he

wouldn’t travel without them. And how about little what’s-her-name? –the nymphet?”

“I am aware of it, my Hero,” she said levelly. “All I can say is that I intend that this wench shall never give her Hero a moment’s unease–and my intentions are usually carried out. I am not ‘Her Wisdom’ for nothing.”

“Fair enough. I never thought you would cause me that sort of unease. I was trying to show that the task may not be too difficult. Damn it, we’ve wandered off. Here’s my real problem. I’m not good for anything. I’m worthless.”

“Why, my dearest! You’re good for me.”

“But not for myself. Star, gigolo or not, I can’t be a pet poodle. Not even yours. Look, you’ve got a job. It keeps you busy and it’s important. But me? There is nothing for me to do, nothing at all! –nothing better than designing bad jewelry. You know what I am? A hero by trade, so you told me; you recruited me. Now I’m retired. Do you know anything in all twenty universes more useless than a retired hero?”

She mentioned a couple. I said, “You’re stalling. Anyhow they break up the blankness of the male chest. I’m serious, Star. This is the issue that has made me unfit to live with. Darling, I’m asking you to put your whole mind on it–and all those ghostly helpers. Treat it the way you treat an Imperial problem. Forget I’m your husband. Consider my total situation, all you know about me–and tell me what I can do with hands and head and time that is worth doing. Me, being what I am.”

She held still for long minutes, her face in that professional calm she had worn the times I had audited her work. “You are right,” she said at last. “There is nothing worth your powers on this planet.”

“Then what do I do?”

She said tonelessly, “You must leave.”

“Huh?”

“You think I like the answer, my husband? Do you think I like most answers I must give? But you asked me to consider it professionally. I obeyed. That is the answer. You must leave this planet–and me.”

“So my shoes get tossed anyhow?”

“Be not bitter, milord. That is the answer. I can evade and be womanish only in my private life; I cannot refuse to think if I agree to do so as ‘Her Wisdom.’ You must leave me. But, no, no, no, your shoes are not tossed! You will leave, because you must. Not because I wish it.” Her face stayed calm but tears streamed again. “One cannot ride a cat . . . nor hurry a snail . . . nor teach a snake to fly. Nor make a poodle of a Hero. I knew it, I refused to look at it. You will do what you must do. But your shoes will remain ever by my bed, I am not sending you away!” She blinked back tears. “I cannot lie to you, even by silence. I will not say that no other shoes will rest here . . . if you are gone a long time. I have been lonely. There are no words to say how lonely this job is. When you go . . . I shall be lonelier than ever. But you will find your shoes here when you return.”

“When I return? You have a Sight?”

“No, milord Hero. I have only a feeling . . . that if you live . . . you will return. Perhaps many times. But Heroes do not die in bed. Not even this one.” She blinked and tears stopped and her voice was steady. “Now, milord husband, if it please you, shall we dim the lights and rest?”

We did and she put her head on my shoulder and did not cry. But we did not sleep. After an aching time I said, “Star, do you hear what I hear?”

She raised her head. “I hear nothing.”

“The City. Can’t you hear it? People. Machines. Even thoughts so thick your bones feel it and your ear almost catches it.”

“Yes. I know that sound.”

“Star, do you like it here?”

“No. It was never necessary that I like it.”

“Look, damn it! You said that I would leave. Come with me!”

“Oh, Oscar!”

“What do you owe them? Isn’t recovering the Egg enough? Let them take a new victim. Come walk the Glory Road with me again! There must be work in my line somewhere.”

“There is always work for Heroes.”

“Okay, we set up in business, you and I. Heroing isn’t a bad job. The meals are irregular and the pay uncertain–out it’s never dull. We’ll run ads: ‘Gordon & Gordon, Heroing Done Reasonable. No job too large, no job too small. Dragons exterminated by contract, satisfaction guaranteed or no pay. Free estimates on other work. Questing, maiden-rescuing, golden fleece located night or day?’ ”

I was trying to jolly her but Star doesn’t jolly. She answered in sober earnest. “Oscar, if I am to retire, I should train my heir first. True, no one can order me to do anything–but I have a duty to train my replacement.”

“How long will that take?”

“Not long. Thirty years, about.”

“Thirty years!”

“I could force it to twenty-five, I think.”

I sighed. “Star, do you know how old I am?”

“Yes. Not yet twenty-five. But you will get no older!”

“But right now I’m still that age. That’s all the time there has ever been for me. Twenty-five years as a pet poodle and I won’t be a hero, nor anything. I’ll be out of my silly mind.”

She thought about it. “Yes. That is true.”

She turned over, we made a spoon and pretended to sleep.

Later I felt her shoulders shaking and knew that she was sobbing. “Star?”

She didn’t turn her head. All I heard was a choking voice, “Oh, my dear, my very dear! If I were even a hundred years younger!”

Chapter 20

I let the precious, useless gems dribble through my fingers, listlessly pushed them aside. If I were only a hundred years older-

But Star was right. She could not leave her post without relief. Her notion of proper relief, not mine nor anyone else’s. And I couldn’t stay in this upholstered jail much longer without beating my head on the bars.

Yet both of us wanted to stay together.

The real nasty hell of it was that I knew–just as she knew–that each of us would forget. Some, anyhow. Enough so that there would be other shoes, other men, and she would laugh again.

And so would I–She had seen that and had gravely, gently, with subtle consideration for another’s feelings, told me indirectly that I need not feel guilty when next I courted some other girl, in some other land, somewhere.

Then why did I feel like a heel?

How did I get trapped with no way to turn without being forced to choose between hurting my beloved and going clean off my rocker?

I read somewhere about a man who lived on a high mountain, because of asthma, the choking, killing land, while his wife lived on the coast below him, because of heart trouble that could not stand altitude. Sometimes they looked at each other through telescopes.

In the morning there had been no talk of Stars retiring. The unstated quid-pro-quo was that, if she planned to retire, I would hang around (thirty years!) until she did. Her Wisdom had concluded that I could not, and did not speak of it. We had a luxurious breakfast and were cheerful, each with his secret thoughts.

Nor were children mentioned. Oh, I would find that clinic, do what was needed. If she wanted to mix
her star line with my common blood, she could, tomorrow or a hundred years hence. Or smile tenderly
and have it cleaned out with the rest of the trash. None of my people had even been mayor of Podunk
and a plow horse isn’t groomed for the Irish Sweepstakes. If Star put a child together from our genes, it
would be sentiment, a living valentine–a younger poodle she could pet before she let it run free. But
sentiment only, as sticky if not as morbid as that of her aunt with the dead husbands, for the Imperium

could not use my bend sinister.

I looked up at my sword, hanging opposite me. I hadn’t touched it since the party, long past, when Star chose to dress for the Glory Road. I took it down, buckled it on and drew it–felt that surge of liveness and had a sudden vision of a long road and a castle on a hill.

What does a champion owe his lady when the quest is done?

Quit dodging, Gordon! What does a husband owe his wife? This very sword–“Jump Rogue and Princess leap. My wife art thou and mine to keep.” “–for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse . . . to love and to cherish, till death do us part.” That was what I meant by that doggerel and Star had known it and I had known it and knew it now.

When we vowed, it had seemed likely that we would be parted by death that same day. But that didn’t reduce the vow nor the deepness with which I had meant it. I hadn’t jumped the sword to catch a tumble on the grass before I died; I could have had that free. No, I had wanted “–to have and to hold, to love and to cherish, till death do us part”!

Star had kept her vow to the letter. Why did I have itchy feet?

Scratch a hero and find a bum.

And a retired hero was as silly as those out-of-work kings that clutter Europe.

I slammed out of our “flat,” wearing sword and not giving a damn about stares, apported to our therapists, found where I should go, went there, did what was necessary, told the boss biotechnician that Her Wisdom must be told, and jumped down his throat when he asked questions.

Then back to the nearest apport booth and hesitated–I needed companionship the way an Alcoholics-Anonymous needs his hand held. But I had no intimates, just hundreds of acquaintances. It isn’t easy for the Empress’s cosort to have friends.

Rufo it had to be. But in all the months I had been on Center I had never been in Rufo’s home. Center does not practice the barbarous custom of dropping in on people and I had seen Rufo only at the Residence, or on parties; Rufo had never invited me to his home. No, no coldness there; we saw him often, but always he had come to us.

I looked for him in apport listings–no luck. Then as little with see-speak lists. I called the Residence, got the communication officer. He said that “Rufo” was not a surname and tried to brush me off. I said, “Hold it, you overpaid clerk! Switch me off and you’ll be in charge of smoke signals in Timbuktu an hour from now. Now listen. This bloke is elderly, baldheaded, one of his names is ‘Rufo’ I think, and he is a distinguished comparative culturologist. And he is a grandson of Her Wisdom. I think you know who he is and have been dragging your feet from bureaucratic arrogance. You have five minutes. Then I talk to Her Wisdom and ask her, while you pack!”

(“Stop! Danger you! Other old bald Rufo (?) top compculturist. Wisdom egg-sperm-egg. Five-minutes. Liar and/or fool. Wisdom? Catastrophe!”)

In less than five minutes Rufo’s image filled the tank. “Well!” he said. “I wondered who had enough weight to crash my shutoff.”

“Rufo, may I come see you?”

His scalp wrinkled. “Mice in the pantry, son? Your face reminds me of the time my uncle–”

“Please, Rufo!”

“Yes, son,” he said gently. “I’ll send the dancing girls home. Or shall I keep them?”

“I don’t care. How do I find you?”

He told me, I punched his code, added my charge number, and I was there, a thousand miles around the horizon. Rufo’s place was a mansion as lavish as Jocko’s and thousands of years more sophisticated. I gathered an impression that Rufo had the biggest household on Center, all female. I was wrong. But all female servants, visitors, cousins, daughters, made themselves a reception committee–to look at Her Wisdom’s bedmate. Rufo shooed them away and took me to his study. A dancing girl (evidently a secretary) was fussing over papers and tapes. Rufo slapped her fanny out, gave me a comfortable chair, a drink, put cigarettes near me, sat down and said nothing.

Smoking isn’t popular on Center, what they use as tobacco is the reason. I picked up a cigarette.
“Chesterfields! Good God!”

“Have ’em smuggled,” he said. “But they don’t make anything like Sweet Caps anymore. Bridge sweepings and chpped hay.”

I hadn’t smoked in months. But Star had told me that cancer and such I could now forget. So I lit it–and coughed like a Nevian dragon. Vice requires constant practice.

” ‘What news on the Rialto?’ ” Rufo inquired. He glanced at my sword.

“Oh, nothing.” Having interrupted Rufo’s work, I now shied at baring my domestic troubles.

Rufo sat and smoked and waited. I needed to say something and the American cigarette reminded me of an incident, one that had added to my unstable condition. At a party a week earlier, I had met a man thirty-five in appearance, smooth, polite, but with that supercilious air that says: “Your fly is unzipped, old man, but I’m too urbane to mention it.”

But I had been delighted to meet him, he had spoken English!

I had thought that Star, Rufo, and myself were the only ones on Center who spoke English. We often spoke it. Star on my account, Rufo because he liked to practice. He spoke Cockney like a costermonger, Bostonese like Beacon Hill, Aussie like a kangaroo; Rufo knew all English languages.

This chap spoke good General American. “Nebbi is the name, he said, shaking hands where no one shakes hands, “and you’re Gordon, I know. Delighted to meet you.”

“Me, too,” I agreed. “It’s a surprise and a pleasure to hear my own language.”

“Professional knowledge, my dear chap. Comparative culturologist, linguisto-historo-political. You’re American, I know. Let me place it–Deep-South, not born there. Possibly New England. Overlaid with displaced Middle Western, California perhaps. Basic speech, lower-middle class, mixed.”

The smooth oaf was good. Mother and I lived in Boston while my father was away, 1942-45. I’ll never forget those winters; I wore overshoes from November to April. I had lived Deep South, Georgia and Florida, and in California at La Jolla during the Korean unWar and, later, in college. “Lower-middle class”? Mother had not thought so.

“Near enough,” I agreed. “I know one of your colleagues.”

“I know whom you mean, ‘the Mad Scientist.’ Wonderful wacky theories. But tell me: How were things when you left? Especially, how is the United States getting along with its Noble Experiment?”

” ‘Noble Experiment’?” I had to think; Prohibition was gone before I was born. “Oh, that was repealed.”

“Really? I must go back for a field trip. What have you now? A king? I could see that your country was headed that way but I did not expect it so soon.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I was talking about Prohibition.”

“Oh, that. Symptomatic but not basic. I was speaking of the amusing notion of chatter rule. ‘Democracy.’ A curious delusion–as if adding zeros could produce a sum. But it was tried in your tribal land on a mammoth scale. Before you were born, no doubt. I thought you meant that even the corpse had been swept away.” He smiled. “Then they still have elections and all that?”

“The last time I looked, yes.”

“Oh, wonderful. Fantastic, simply fantastic. Well, we must get together, I want to quiz you. I’ve been studying your planet a long time–the most amazing pathologies in tile explored complex. So long. Don’t take any wooden nickels, as your tribesmen say.”

I told Rufo about it. “Rufe, I know I came from a barbarous planet. But does that excuse his rudeness? Or was it rudeness? I haven’t really got the hang of good manners here.”

Rufo frowned. “It is bad manners anywhere to sneer at a person’s birthplace, tribe, or customs. A man does it at his own risk. If you kill him, nothing will happen to you. It might embarrass Her Wisdom a little. If She can be embarrassed.”

“I won’t kill him, it’s not that important.”

“Then forget it. Nebbi is a snob. He knows a little, understands nothing, and thinks the universes would be better if he had designed them. Ignore him.”

“I will. It was just–look, Rufo, my country isn’t perfect. But I don t enjoy hearing it from a stranger.”

“Who does? I like your country, it has flavor. But–I’m not a stranger and this is not a sneer. Nebbi was right.”

“Huh?”

“Except that he sees only the surface. Democracy can’t work. Mathematicians, peasants, and animals, that’s all there is–so democracy, a theory based on the assumption that mathematicians and peasants are equal, can never work. Wisdom is not additive; its maximum is that of the wisest man in a given group.

“But a democratic form of government is okay, as long as it doesn’t work. Any social organization does well enough if it isn’t rigid. The framework doesn’t matter as long as there is enough looseness to permit that one man in a multitude to display his genius. Most so-called social scientists seem to think that organization is everything. It is almost nothing–except when it is a straitjacket. It is the incidence of heroes that counts, not the pattern of zeros.”

He added, “Your country has a system free enough to let its heroes work at their trade. It should last a long time–unless its looseness is destroyed from inside.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“I am right. This subject I know and I’m not stupid, as Nebbi thinks. He’s right about the futility of ‘adding zeros’–but he doesn’t realize that he is a zero.”

I grinned. “No point in letting a zero get my goat.”

“None. Especially as you are not. Wherever you go, you will make yourself felt, you won’t be one of the nerd. I respect you, and I don’t respect many. Never people as a whole, I could never be a democrat at heart. To claim to ‘respect’ and even to ‘love’ the great mass with their yaps at one end and smelly feet
at the other requires the fatuous, uncritical, saccharine, blind, sentimental slobbishness found in some nursery supervisors, most spaniel dogs, and all missionaries. It isn’t a political system, it’s a disease. But be of good cheer; your American politicians are immune to this disease . . . and your customs allow the non-zero elbow room.”

Rufo glanced at my sword again. “Old friend, you didn’t come here to bitch about Nebbi.” “No.” I looked down at that keen blade. “I fetched this to shave you, Rufo.”

“Eh?”

“I promised I would shave your corpse. I owe it to you for the slick job you did on me. So here I am,
to shave the barber.”

He said slowly, “But I’m not yet a corpse.” He did not move. But his eyes did, estimating distance between us. Rufo wasn’t counting on my being “chivalrous”; he had lived too long.

“Oh, that can be arranged,” I said cheerfully, “unless I get straight answers from you.”

He relaxed a touch. “I’ll try, Oscar.”

“More than try, please. You’re my last chance. Rufo, this must be private. Even from Star.”

“Under the Rose. My word on it.”

“With your fingers crossed, no doubt. But don’t risk it, I’m serious. And straight answers, I need them. I want advice about my marriage.”

He looked glum. “And I meant to go out today. Instead I worked. Oscar, I would rather criticize a woman’s firstborn, or even her taste in hats. Much safer to teach a shark to bite. What if I refuse?”

“Then I shave you!”

“You would, you heavy-handed headsman!” He frowned. ” ‘Straight answers–‘ You don’t want them, you want a shoulder to cry on.”

“Maybe that, too. But I do want straight answers, not the lies you can tell in your sleep.”

“So I lose either way. Telling a man the truth about his marriage is suicide. I think I’ll sit tight and see if
you have the heart to cut me down in cold blood.”

“Oh, Rufo, I’ll put my sword under your lock and key if you like. You know I would never draw against you.”

“I know no such thing,” he said querulously. “There’s always that first time. Scoundrels are predictable, but you’re a man of honor and that frightens me. Can’t we handle this over the see-speak?”

“Come off it, Rufo. I’ve nobody else to turn to. I want you to speak frankly. I know that a marriage counselor has to lay it on the line, pull no punches. For the sake of blood we’ve lost together I ask you to advise me. And frankly, of course!”

” ‘Of course,’ is it? The last time I risked it you were for cutting the tongue out of me.” He looked at me moodily. “But I was ever a fool where friendship speaks. Hear, I’ll dicker ye a fair dicker. You talk, I’ll listen . . . and if it should come about that you’re taking so long that my tired old kidneys complain and I’m forced to leave your welcome company for a moment . . . why, then you’ll misunderstand and go away in a huff and we’ll say no more about it. Eh?”

“Okay.”

“The Chair recognizes you. Proceed.”

So I talked. I talked out my dilemma and frustration, sparing neither self nor Star (it was for her sake, too, and it wasn’t necessary to speak of our most private matters; those, at least, were dandy). But I told our quarrels and many matters best kept in the family, I had to.

Rufo listened. Presently he stood up and paced, looking troubled. Once he tut-tutted over the men Star had brought home. “She shouldn’t have called her maids in. But do forget it, lad. She never remembers that men are shy, whereas females merely have customs. Allow Her this.”

Later he said, “No need to be jealous of Jocko, son. He drives a tack with a sledgehammer.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“That’s what Menelaus said. But leave room for give and take. Every marriage needs it.”

Finally I ran down, having told him Star’s prediction that I would leave. “I’m not blaming her for anything and talking about it has straightened me out. I can sweat it out now, behave myself, and be a good husband. She does make terrible sacrifices to do her job–and the least I can do is make it easier. She’s so sweet and gentle and good.”

Rufo stopped, some distance away with his back to his desk. “You think so?”

“I know so.”

“She’s an old bag!”

I was out of my chair and at him at once. I didn’t draw. Didn’t think of it, wouldn’t have anyhow. I wanted to get my hands on him and punish him for talking that way about my beloved.

He bounced over the desk like a ball and by the time I covered the length of the room, Rufo was behind it, one hand in a drawer.

“Naughty, naughty,” he said. “Oscar, I don’t want to shave you.”

“Come out and fight like a man!”

“Never, old friend. One step closer and you’re dog meat. All your fine promises, your pleadings. ‘Pull no punches’ you said. ‘Lay it on the line’ you said. ‘Speak frankly’ you said. Sit down in that chair.”

” ‘Speaking frankly’ doesn’t mean being insulting!”

“Who’s to judge? Can I submit my remains for approval before I make them? Don’t compound your broken promises with childish illogic. And would you force me to buy a new rug? I never keep one I’ve killed a friend on; the stains make me gloomy. Sit down in that chair.”

I sat down.

“Now,” said Rufo, staying where he was, “you will listen while I talk. Or perhaps you will get up and walk out. In which case I might be so pleased to see the last of your ugly face that that might be that. Or I might be so annoyed at being interrupted that you would drop dead in the doorway, for I’ve much pent
up and ready to spill over. Suit yourself.

“I said,” he went on, “that my grandmother is an old bag. I said it brutally, to discharge your tension–and now you’re not likely to take too much offense at many offensive things I still must say. She’s old, you know that, though no doubt you find it easy to forget, mostly. I forget it myself, mostly, even though She was old when I was a babe making messes on the floor and crowing at the dear sight of Her. Bag, She is, and you know it. I could have said ‘experienced woman’ but I had to rap your teeth with it; you’ve been dodging it even while you’ve been telling me how well you know it–and how you don’t care. Granny is an old bag, we start from there.

“And why should She be anything else? Tell yourself the answer. You’re not a fool, you’re merely young. Ordinarily She has but two possible pleasures and the other She can’t indulge.”

“What’s the other one?”

“Handing down bad decisions through sadistic spite, that’s the one She dare not indulge. So let us be thankful that Her body has built into it this harmless safety valve, else we would all suffer grievously before somebody managed to kill Her. Lad, dear lad, can you dream how mortal tired She must be of most things? Your own zest soured in only months. Think what it must be to hear the same old weary mistakes year after year with nothing to hope for but a clever assassin. Then be thankful that She still pleasures in one innocent pleasure. So She’s an old bag and I mean no disrespect; I salute a beneficent balance between two things She must be to do her job.

“Nor did She stop being what She is by reciting a silly rhyme with you one bright day on a hilltop. You think She has taken a vacation from it since, sticking to you only. Possibly She has, if you have quoted Her exactly and I read the words rightly; She always tells the truth.

“But never all the truth–who can? –and She is the most skillful liar by telling the truth you’ll ever meet. I misdoubt your memory missed some innocent-sounding word that gave an escape yet saved your feelings.

“If so, why should She do more than save your feelings? She’s fond of you, that’s dear–but must She be fanatic about it? All Her training, Her special bent, is to avoid fanaticism always, find practical answers. Even though She may not have mixed up the shoes, as yet, if you stay on a week or a year or twenty and time comes when She wants to. She can find ways, not lie to you in words–and hurt Her conscience not at all because She hasn’t any. Just Wisdom, utterly pragmatic.”

Rufo cleared his throat. “Now refutation and counterpoint and contrariwise. I like my grandmother and love Her as much as my meager nature permits and respect Her right down to Her sneaky soul–and I’ll kill you or anyone who gets in Her way or causes Her unhappiness–and only part of this is that She has
handed on to me a shadow of Her own self so that I understand Her. If She is spared assassins knife or blast or poison long enough, She’ll go down in history as ‘The Great.’ But you spoke of Her ‘terrible sacrifices.’ Ridiculous! She likes being ‘Her Wisdom,’ the Hub around which all worlds turn. Nor do I believe that She would give it up for you or fifty better. Again, She didn’t lie, as you’ve told it–She said ‘if’ . . . knowing that much can happen in thirty year’s, or twenty-five, among which is the near certainty that you wouldn’t stay that long. A swindle.

“But that’s the least of swindles She’s put over on you. She conned you from the moment you first saw Her and long before. She cheated both ways from the ace, forced you to pick the shell with the pea, sent you like any mark anxious for the best of it, cooled you off when you started to suspect, herded you back into line and to your planned fate–and made you like it. She’s never fussy about method and would con the Virgin Mary and make a pact with the Old One all in one breath, did it suit Her purpose. Oh, you got paid, yes, and good measure to boot; there’s nothing small about Her. But its time you knew you were conned. Mind you, I’m not criticizing Her, I’m applauding–and I helped . . . save for one queasy
moment when I felt sorry for the victim. But you were so conned you wouldn’t listen, thank any saints who did. I lost my nerve for a bit, thinking that you were going to a sticky death with your innocent eyes wide. But She was smarter than I am. She always has been.

“Now! I like Her. I respect Her. I admire Her. I even love Her a bit. All of Her, not just Her pretty aspects but also all the impurities that make Her steel as hard as it must be. How about you, sir? What’s your feeling about Her now . . . knowing She conned you, knowing what She is?”

I was still sitting. My drink was by me, untouched all this long harangue.

I took it and stood up. “Here’s to the grandest old bag in twenty universes!”

Rufo bounced over the desk again, grabbed his glass. “Say that loud and often! And to Her, She’d love it! May She be blessed by God, Whoever He is, and kept safe. We’ll never see another like Her, mores the pity! –for we need them by the gross!”

We tossed it down and smashed our grasses. Rufo fetched fresh ones, poured, settled in his chair, and said, “Now for serious drinking. Did I ever tell you about the time my–”

“You did. Rufo, I want to know about this swindle.”

“Such as?”

“Well, I can see much of it. Take that first time we flew–”

He shuddered. “Lets not.”

“I never wondered then. But, since Star can do this, we could have skipped Igli, the Horned Ghosts, the marsh, the time wasted with Jocko–”

“Wasted?”

“For her purpose. And the rats and hogs and possibly the dragons. Flown directly from that first Gate to the second. Right?”

He shook his head. “Wrong.”

“I don’t see it.”

“Assuming that She could fly us that far, a question I hope never to settle, She could have flown us to the Gate She preferred. What would you have done then? If popped almost directly from Nice to Karth-Hokesh? Charged out and fought like a wolverine, as you did? Or said ‘Miss, you’ve made a mistake. Show me the exit from this Fun House–I’m not laughing.’ ”

“Well–I wouldn’t have bugged out”

“But would you have won? Would you have been at that keen edge of readiness it took?”

“I see. Those first rounds were live ammo exercises in my training. Or was it live ammo? Was all that first part swindle? Maybe with hypnotism, to make it feel right? God knows she’s expert. No danger till we reached the Black Tower?”

He shuddered again. “No, no! Oscar, any of that could have killed us. I never fought harder in my life, nor was ever more frightened. None of it could be skipped. I don’t understand all Her reasons. I’m not Her Wisdom. But She would never risk Herself unless necessary. She would sacrifice ten million brave men, were it needed, as the cheaper price. She knows what She’s worth. But She fought beside us with all She has–you saw! Because it had to be.”

“I still don’t understand all of it.”

“Nor will you. Nor will I. She would have sent you in alone, had it been possible. And at that last supreme danger, that thing called ‘Eater of Souls’ because it had done just that to many braves before you . . . had you lost to it, She and I would have tried to fight our way out–I was ready, any moment; I couldn’t tell you–and if we had escaped–unlikely–She would have shed no tears for you. Or not many. Then worked another twenty or thirty or a hundred years to find and con and train anther champion–and fought just as hard by his side. She has courage, that cabbage. She knew how thin our chances were; you didn’t. Did She flinch?”

“No.”

“But you were the key, first to be found, then ground to fit. You yourself act, you’re never a puppet, or
you could never have won. She was the only one who could nudge and wheedle such a man and place


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him where he would act; no lesser person than She could handle the scale of hero She needed. So She
searched until She found him . . . and honed him fine. Tell me, why did you take up the sword? It’s no
common in America.”

“What?” I had to think. Reading ‘King Arthur’ and ‘The Three Musketeers’, and Burroughs wonderful Mars stories–But every kid does that. “When we moved to Florida, I was a Scout. The Scoutmaster was a Frenchman, taught high school. He started some of us lads. I liked it, it was something I did well. Then in college–”

“Ever wonder why that immigrant got that job in that town? And volunteered for Scout work? Or why your college had a fencing team when many don’t? No matter, if you had gone elsewhere, there would have been fencing in a YMCA or something. Didn’t you have more combat than most of your category?”

“Hell, yes!”

“Could have been killed anytime, too–and She would have turned to another candidate already being honed. Son, I don’t know how you were selected, nor now you were converted from a young punk into the hero you potentially were. Not my job. Mine was simpler–just more dangerous–your groom and your ‘eyes-behind.’ Look around. Fancy quarters for a servant, eh?”

“Well, yes. I had almost forgotten that you were supposed to be my groom.”

” ‘Supposed,’ hell! I was. I went three times to Nevia as Her servant, training for it. Jocko doesn’t know to this day. If I went back, I would be welcome, I think. But only in the kitchen.”

“But why? That part seems silly.”

“Was it? When we snared you, your ego was in feeble shape, it had to be built up–and calling you ‘Boss’ and serving your meals while I stood and you sat, with Her, was part of it.” He gnawed a knuckle and looked annoyed. “I still think She witched your first two arrows. Someday I’d like a return match–with Her not around.”

“I may fool you. I’ve been practicing.”

“Well, forget it. We got the Egg, that’s the important thing. And here’s this bottle and that’s important, too.” He poured again. “Will that be all, ‘Boss’?”

“Damn you, Rufo! Yes, you sweet old scoundrel. You’ve straightened me out. Or conned me again, I don’t know which.”

“No con, Oscar, by the blood we’ve shed. I’ve told the truth as straight as I know it, though it hurt me. I didn’t want to, you’re my friend. Walking that rocky road with you I shall treasure all the days of my life.”

“Uh . . . yes. Me, too. All of it.”

“Then why are you frowning?”

“Rufo, I understand her now–as well as an ordinary person can–and respect her utterly . . . and love her more than ever. But I can’t be anybody’s fancy man. Not even here.”

“I’m glad I didn’t have to say that. Yes. She’s right She’s always right, damn Her! You must leave. For both of you. Oh, She wouldn’t be hurt too much but staying would ruin you, in time. Destroy you, if you’re stubborn.

“I had better get back–and toss my shoes.” I felt better, as if I had told the surgeon: Go ahead. Amputate.

“Don’t do that!”

“What?”

“Why should you? No need for anything final If a marriage is to last a long time–and yours might, even a very long time–then holidays should be long, too. And off the leash, son, with no date to report back and no promises. She knows that knights errant spend their nights erring, She expects it. It has always been so, un droit de la vocation–and necessary. They just don’t mention it in kiddies’ stories where you come from. So go see what’s stirring in your line of work elsewhere and don’t worry. Come back in four or forty years or something, you’ll be welcome. Heroes always sit at the first table, it s their right. And they come and go as they please, and that’s their right, too. On a smaller scale, you re something like Her.”

“High compliment!”

“On a ‘smaller scale,’ I said. Mmm, Oscar, part of your trouble is a need to go home. Your birthing land. To regain your perspective and find out who you are. All travelers feel this, I feel it myself from time to time. When the feeling comes, I pamper it.”

“I hadn’t realized I was homesick. Maybe I am.”

“Maybe She realized it. Maybe She nudged you. Myself, I make it a rule to give any wife of mine a vacation from me whenever her face looks too familiar–for mine must be even more so to her, looking as I do. Why not, lad? Going back to Earth isn’t the same as dying. I’m going there soon, that’s why I’m clearing up this paper work. Happens we might be there the same time . . . and get together for a drink or ten and some laughs and stories. And pinch the waitress and see what she says. Why not?”

Chapter 21

Okay, here I am.

I didn’t leave that week but soon. Star and I spent a tearful, glorious night before I left and she cried as she kissed me “Au ‘voir” (not “Good-bye”). But I knew her tears would dry once I was out of sight; she knew that I knew and I knew she preferred it so, and so did I. Even though I cried, too.

Pan American isn’t as slick as the commercial Gates; I was bunged through in three fast changes and o hocus-pocus. A girl said, “Places, please”–then whambo!

I came out on Earth, dressed in a London suit, pass-port and papers in pocket, the Lady Vivamus in a kit that did not look like a sword case, and in other pockets drafts exchangeable for much gold, for I found that I didn’t mind accepting a hero’s fee. I arrived near Zurich, I don’t know the address; the Gate service sees to that. Instead, I had ways to send messages.

Shortly those drafts became, numbered accounts in three Swiss banks, handled by a lawyer I had been told to see. I bought travelers checks several places and some I mailed ahead and some I carried, for I had no intention of paying Uncle Sugar 91 percent.

You lose track of time on a different day and calendar; there was a week or two left on that free ride home my orders called for. It seemed smart to take it–less conspicuous. So I did–an old four-engine transport, Prestwick to Gander to New York.

Streets looked dirtier, buildings not as tall–and headlines worse than ever. I quit reading newspapers, didn’t stay long; California I thought of as “home.” I phoned Mother; she was reproachful about my not having written and I promised to visit Alaska as soon as I could. How were they all? (I had in mind that my half brothers and sisters might need college help someday.)

They weren’t hurting. My stepfather was on flight orders and had made permanent grade. I asked her to forward any mail to my aunt.

California looked better than New York. But it wasn’t Nevia. Not even Center. It was more crowded than I remembered. All you can say for California towns is that they aren’t as bad as other places. I visited my aunt and uncle because they had been good to me and I was thinking of using some of that gold in Switzerland to buy him free from his first wife. But she had died and they were talking about a swimming pool.

So I kept quiet. I had been almost ruined by too much money, it had grown me up a bit. I followed the rule of Their Wisdoms: Leave well enough alone.

The campus felt smaller and the students looked so young. Reciprocal, I guess. I was coming out of the malt shop across from Administration when two Letter sweaters came in, shoving me aside. The second said, “Watch it, Dad!”

I let him live.

Football had been re-emphasized, new coach, new dressing rooms, stands painted, talk about a stadium. The coach knew who I was; he knew the records and was out to make a name. “You’re coming back, aren’t you?” I told him I didn’t think so.

“Nonsense!” he said. “Gotta get that old sheepskin! Silliest thing on earth to let your hitch in the Army stop you. Now look–” His voice dropped.

No nonsense about “sweeping the gym,” stuff the Conference didn’t like. But a boy could live with a family–and one could be found. If he paid his fees in cash, who cared? Quiet as an undertaker–“That leaves your GI benefits for pocket money.”

“I don’t have any.”

“Man, don’t you read the papers?” He had it on file: While I was gone, that unWar had been made eligible for GI benefits.

I promised to think it over.

But I had no such intention. I had indeed decided to finish my engineering degree, I like to finish things. But not there.

That evening I heard from Joan, the girl who had given me such a fine sendoff, then “Dear-Johnned” me. I intended to look her up, call on her and her husband; I just hadn’t found out her married name yet. But she ran across my aunt, shopping, and phoned me. “Easy!” she said and sounded delighted.

“Who–Wait a minute, Joan!”

I must come to dinner that very night. I told her “Fine,” and that I was looking forward to meeting the lucky galoot she had married.

Joan looked sweet as ever and gave me a hearty arms-around-my-neck smack, a welcome-home kiss, sisterly but good. Then I met the kids, one crib size and the other toddling.

Her husband was in L.A.

Her sister and brother-in-law stayed for one drink; Joan and her sister put the kids to bed while the brother-in-law sat with me and asked how things were in Europe he understood I was just back and then he told me how things were in Europe and what should be done about them. “You know, Mr. Jordan,” he told me, tapping my knee, “a man in the real estate business like I am gets to be a pretty shrewd judge of human nature has to be and while I haven’t actually been in Europe the way you have haven’t had time somebody has to stay home and pay taxes and keep an eye on things while you lucky young fellows are seeing the world but human nature is the same anywhere and if we dropped just one little bomb on Minsk or Pinsk or one of those places they would see the light right quick and we could stop all this diddling around that’s making it tough on the businessman. Don’t you agree?”

I said he had a point. They left and he said that he would ring me tomorrow and show me some choice lots that could be handled on almost nothing down and were certain to go way up what with a new missile plant coming in here soon. “Nice listening to your experiences, Mr. Jordan, real pleasant. Sometime I must tell you about something that happened to me in Tijuana but not with the wife around ha ha!”

Joan said to me, “I can’t see why she married him. Pour me another drink, hon, a double, I need it. I’m going to turn the oven down, dinner will keep.”

We both had a double and then another, and had dinner about eleven. Joan got tearful when I insisted on going home around three. She told me I was chicken and I agreed; she told me things could have been so different if I hadn’t insisted on going into the Army and I agreed again; she told me to go out the back way and not turn on any lights and she never wanted to see me again and Jim was going to Sausalito the seventeenth.

I caught a plane for Los Angeles next day.

Now look–I am not blaming Joan. I like Joan. I respect her and will always be grateful to her. She is a fine person. With superior early advantages–say in Nevia–she’d be a wow! She’s quite a gal, even so. Her house was clean, her babies were clean and healthy and well cared for. She’s generous and thoughtful and good-tempered.

Nor do I feel guilty. If a man has any regard for a girl’s feelings, there is one thing he cannot refuse: a return bout if she wants one. Nor will I pretend that I didn’t want it, too.

But I felt upset all the way to Los Angeles. Not over her husband, he wasn’t hurt. Not over Joanie, she was neither swept off her feet nor likely to suffer remorse. Joanie is a good kid and had made a good adjustment between her nature and an impossible society.

Still, I was upset.

A man must not criticize a woman’s most womanly quality. I must make it clear that little Joanie was just as sweet and just as generous as the younger Joanie who had sent me off to the Army feeling grand. The fault lay with me; I had changed.

My complaints are against the whole culture with no individual sharing more than a speck of blame. Let me quote that widely traveled culturologist and rake, Dr. Rufo:

“Oscar, when you get home, don’t expect too much of your feminine compatriots. You’re sure to be disappointed and the poor dears aren’t to blame. American women, having been conditioned out of their sex instincts, compensate by compulsive interest in rituals over the dead husk of sex . . . and each one is sure she knows ‘intuitively’ the right ritual for conjuring the corpse. She knows and nobody can tell her any different . . . especially a man unlucky enough to be in bed with her. So don’t try. You will either make her furious or crush her spirit. You’ll be attacking that most Sacred of Cows: the myth that women know all about sex, just from being women.”

Rufo had frowned. “The typical American female is sure that she has genius as a couturiere as an interior decorator, as a gourmet cook, and, always, as a courtesan. Usually she is wrong on four counts. But don’t try to tell her so.”

He had added, “Unless you can catch one not over twelve and segregate her, especially from her mother–and even that may be too late. But don’t misunderstand me; it evens out. The American male is convinced that he is a great warrior, a great statesman, and a great lover. Spot checks prove that he is as deluded as she is. Or worse. Historo-culturally speaking, there is strong evidence that the American male, rattier than the female, murdered sex in your country.”

“What can I do about it?”

“Slip over to France now and then. French women are almost as ignorant but not nearly as conceited and often are teachable.”

When my plane landed, I put the subject out of mind as I planned to be an anchorite a while. I learned in the Army that no sex is easier than a starvation allowance–and I had serious plans.

I had decided to be the square I naturally am, with hard work and a purpose in life. I could have used those Swiss bank accounts to be a playboy. But I had been a playboy, it wasn’t my style.

I had been on the biggest binge in history–one I wouldn’t believe if I didn’t have so much loot. Now was time to settle down and join Heroes Anonymous. Being a hero is okay. But a retired hero–first he’s a bore, then he’s a bum.

My first stop was Caltech. I could now afford the best and Caltech’s only rival is where they tried to outlaw sex entirely. I had seen enough of the dreary graveyard in 1942-45.

The Dean of Admissions was not encouraging. “Mr. Gordon, you know that we turn down more than we accept? Nor could we give you full credit on this transcript. No slur on your former school–and we do like to give ex-servicemen a break–but this school has higher standards. Another thing, you won’t find Pasadena a cheap place to live.”

I said I would be happy to take whatever standing I merited, and showed him my bank balance (one of them) and offered a check for a years fees. He wouldn’t take it but loosened up. I left with the impression that a place might be found for E. C. “Oscar” Gordon.

I went downtown and started the process to make me legally “Oscar” instead of “Evelyn Cyril.” Then I started job hunting.

I found one out in the Valley, as a junior draftsman in a division of a subsidiary of a corporation that made tires, food machinery, and other things–missiles in this case. This was part of the Gordon Rehabilitation Plan. A few months over the drafting board would get me into the swing again and I planned to study evenings and behave myself. I found a furnished apartment in Sawtelle and bought a used Ford for commuting.

I felt relaxed then; “Milord Hero” was buried. All that was left was the Lady Vivamus, hanging over the television. But I balanced her in hand first and got a thrill out of it. I decided to find a salle d’armes and join its club. I had seen an archery range in the Valley, too, and there ought to be someplace where American Rifle Association members fired on Sundays. No need to get flabby-

Meanwhile I would forget the loot in Switzerland. It was payable in gold, not funny money, and if I let it sit. It might be worth more–maybe much more–from inflation than from investing it. Someday it would be capital, when I opened my own firm.

That’s what I had my sights on: Boss. A wage slave, even in brackets where Uncle Sugar takes more than half, is still a slave. But I had learned from Her Wisdom that a boss must train; I could not buy “Boss” with gold.

So I settled down. My name change came through; Caltech conceded that I could look forward to moving to Pasadena–and mail caught up with me.

Mother sent it to my aunt, she forwarded it to the hotel address I had first given, eventually it reached my flat. Some were letters mailed in the States over a year ago, sent on to Southeast Asia, then Germany, then Alaska, then more changes before I read them in Sawtelle.

One offered that bargain on investment service again; this time I could Knock off 10 percent more. Another was from the coach at college–on plain stationery and signed in a scrawl. He said certain parties were determined to see the season start off with a bang. Would $250 per month change my mind? Phone his home number, collect. I tore it up.

The next was from the Veterans Administration, dated just after my discharge, telling me that as a result of Barton vs. United States, et al., it had been found that I was legally a “war orphan” and entitled to $110/month for schooling until age twenty-three.

I laughed so hard I hurt.

After some junk was one from a Congressman. He had the honor to inform me that, in cooperation with the Veterans of Foreign Wars, he had submitted a group of special bills to correct injustices resulting from failure to classic correctly persons who were “war orphans,” that the bills had passed under consent, and that he was happy to say that one affecting me allowed me to my twenty-seventh birthday to complete my education inasmuch as my twenty-third birthday had passed before the error was rectified. I am, sir, sincerely, etc.

I couldn’t laugh. I thought how much dirt I would have eaten, or–you name it–the summer I was conscripted if I had been sure of $110 a month. I wrote that Congressman a thank-you letter, the best I knew how.

The next item looked like junk. It was from Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd., therefore a pitch for a donation or a hospital insurance ad–but I couldn’t see why anyone in Dublin would have me on their list.

Hospitals’ Trust asked if I had Irish Hospitals’ Sweepstakes ticket number such-and-such, and its official receipt? This ticket had been sold to J. L. Weatherby, Esq. Its number had been drawn in the second unit drawing, and had been a ticket of the winning horse. J. L. Weatherby had been informed and had notified Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd., that he had disposed of ticket to E. C. Gordon, and, on receiving receipt, had mailed it to such party.

Was I the “E. C. Gordon,” did I have the ticket, did I have the receipt? H. T. Ltd. would appreciate an early reply.

The last item in the stack had an A.P.O. return address. In it was an Irish Sweepstakes receipt–and a note; ‘This should teach me not to play poker. Hope it wins you something–J. L. WEATHERBY.’ The cancellation was over a year old.

I stared at it, then got the papers I had carried through the Universes. I found the matching ticket. It was bloodstained but the number was clear.

I looked at the letter. Second unit drawing-

I started examining tickets under bright light. The others were counterfeit. But the engraving of this ticket and this receipt was sharp as paper money. I don’t know where Weatherby bought that ticket, but he did not buy it from the thief who sold me mine.

Second drawing–I hadn’t known there was more than one. But drawings depend on the number of tickets sold, in units of £120,000. I had seen the results of only the first.

Weatherby had mailed the receipt care of Mother, to Wiesbaden, and it must have been in Elmendorf when I was in Nice–then had gone to Nice, and back to Elmendorf because Rufo had left a forwarding address with American Express; Rufo had known all about me of course and had taken steps to cover my disappearance.

On that morning over a year earlier while I sat in a cafe in Nice, I held a winning ticket with the receipt in the mail. If I had looked farther in that Herald-Tribune than the “Personal” ads I would have found the results of the Second Unit drawing and never answered that ad.

I would have collected $140,000, never have seen Star a second time-

Or would Her Wisdom have been balked?

Would I have refused to follow my “Helen of Troy” simply because my pockets were lined with money?

I gave myself the benefit of doubt. I would have walked the Glory Road anyhow!

At least, I hoped so.

Next morning I phoned the plant, then went to a bank and through a routine I had gone through twice

in Nice.

Yes, it was a good ticket. Could the bank be of service in collecting it? I thanked them and left.

A little man from Internal Revenue was on my doorstep-

Almost–He buzzed from below while I was writing to Hospitals’ Trust, Ltd.

Presently I was telling him that I was damned if I would! I’d leave the money in Europe and they could whistle! He said mildly not to take that attitude, as I was just blowing off steam because the IRS didn’t like paying informers’ fees but would if my actions showed that I was trying to evade the tax.

They had me boxed. I collected $140,000 and paid $103,000 to Uncle Sugar. The mild little man pointed out that it was better that way; so often people put off paying and got into trouble.

Had I been in Europe, it would have been $140,000 in gold–but now it was $37,000 in paper–because free and sovereign Americans can’t have gold. They might start a war, or turn Communist, or something. No, I couldn’t leave the $37,000 in Europe as gold; that was illegal, too. They were very polite.

I mailed 10 percent, $3,700, to Sgt. Weatherby and told him the story. I took $33,000 and set up a college trust for my siblings, handled so that my folks wouldn’t know until it was needed. I crossed my fingers and hoped that news about this ticket would not reach Alaska. The L.A. papers never had it, but word got around somehow; I found myself on endless sucker lists, got letters offering golden opportunities begging loans, or demanding gifts.

It was a month before I realized I had forgotten the California State Income Tax. I never did sort out the red ink.

Chapter 22

I got back to the old drawing board, slugged away at books in the evening, watched a little television, weekends some fencing.

But I kept having this dream-

I had it first right after I took that job and now I was having it every night-

I’m heading along this long, long road and I round a curve and there’s a castle up ahead. It’s beautiful, pennants flying from turrets and a winding climb to its drawbridge. But I know, I just know, that there is a princess captive in its dungeon.

That part is always the same. Details vary. Lately the mild little man from Internal Revenue steps into the road and tells me that toll is paid here–10 percent more than whatever I’ve got.

Other times it’s a cop and he leans against my horse (sometimes it has four legs, sometimes eight) and writes a ticket for obstructing traffic, riding with out-of-date license, failing to observe stop sign, and gross insubordination. He wants to know if I have a permit to carry that lance? –and tells me that game laws require me to tag any dragons killed.

Other times I round that turn and a solid wave of freeway traffic, five lanes wide, is coming at me. That one is worst.

I started writing this after the dreams started. I couldn’t see going to a headshrinker and saying, “Look, Doc, I’m a hero by trade and my wife is Empress in another universe–” I had even less desire to lie on his couch and tell how my parents mistreated me as a child (they didn’t) and how I found out about little girls (that s my business).

I decided to talk it out to a typewriter.

It made me feel better but didn’t stop the dreams. But I learned a new word: “acculturated.” It’s what happens when a member of one culture shifts to another, with a sad period when he doesn’t fit. Those Indians you see in Arizona towns, not doing anything, looking in shop windows or just standing. Acculturation. They don’t fit.

I was taking a bus down to see my ear, nose, and throat doctor–Star promised me that her therapy plus that at Center would free me of the common cold–and it has; I don’t catch anything. But even therapists that administer Long-Life can’t protect human tissues against poison gas; L.A. smog was getting me. Eyes burning, nose stopped up–twice a week I went down to get horrid things done to my nose. I used to park my car and go down Wilshire by bus, as parking was impossible close in.

In the bus I overheard two ladies: “–much as I despise them, you can’t give a cocktail party without inviting the Sylvesters.”

It sounded like a foreign language. Then I played it back and understood the words.

But why did she have to invite the Sylvesters?

If she despised them, why didn’t she either ignore them, or drop a rock on their heads?

In God’s name, why give a “cocktail party”? People who don’t like each other particularly, standing around (never enough chairs), talking about things they aren’t interested in, drinking drinks they don’t want (why set a time to take a drink?) and getting high so that they won’t notice they aren’t having fun. Why?

I realized that acculturation had set in. I didn’t fit.

I avoided buses thereafter and picked up five traffic tickets and a smashed fender. I quit studying, too. Books didn’t seem to make sense. It warn’t the way I lamed it back in dear old Center.

But I stuck to my job as a draftsman. I always have been able to draw and soon I was promoted to major work.

One day the Chief Draftsman called me over. “Here, Gordon, this assembly you did–”

I was proud of that job. I had remembered something I had seen on Center and had designed it in, reducing moving parts and improving a clumsy design into one that made me feel good. It was tricky and I had added an extra view. “Well?”

He handed it back. “Do it over. Do it right.”

I explained the improvement and that I had done the drawing a better way to-

He cut me off. “We don’t want it done a better way, we want it done our way.”

“Your privilege,” I agreed and resigned by walking out.

My flat seemed strange at that time on a working day. I started to study ‘Strength of Materials’–and chucked the book aside. Then I stood and looked at the Lady Vivamus.

“Dum Vivimus, Vivamus!” Whistling, I buckled her on, drew blade, felt that thrill run up my arm.

I returned sword, got a few things, traveler’s checks and cash mostly, walked out. I wasn’t going anywhere, just tataway!

I had been striding along maybe twenty minutes when a prowl car pulled up and took me to the station.

Why was I wearing that thing? I explained that gentlemen wore swords.

If I would tell them what movie company I was with, a phone call could clear it up. Or was it television? The Department cooperated but liked to be notified.

Did I have a license for concealed weapons? I said it wasn’t concealed. They told me it was–by that scabbard. I mentioned the Constitution; I was told that the Constitution sure as hell didn’t mean walking around city streets with a toad sticker like that. A cop whispered to the sergeant, “Here’s what we got him on, Sarge. The blade is longer than–” I think it was three inches. There was trouble when they tried to take the Lady Vivamus away from me. Finally I was locked up, sword and all.

Two hours later my lawyer got it changed to “disorderly conduct” and I was released, with talk of a sanity hearing.

I paid him and thanked him and took a cab to the airport and a plane to San Francisco. At the port I bought a large bag, one that would take the Lady Vivamus cater-cornered.

Charlie said he agreed perfectly and his friends would like to hear it. So we went and I paid the driver to wait but took my suitcase inside.

Charlie’s friends didn’t want to hear my theories but the wine was welcome and I sat on the floor and listened to folk singing. The men wore beards and didn’t comb their hair. The beards helped, it made it easy to tell which were girls. One beard stood up and recited a poem. Old Jocko could do better blind drunk but I didn’t say so.

It wasn’t like a party in Nevia and certainly not in Center, except this: I got propositioned. I might have considered it if this girl hadn’t been wearing sandals. Her toes were dirty. I thought of Zhai-ee-van and her dainty, clean fur, and told her thanks, I was under a vow.

The beard who had recited the poem came over and stood in front of me. “Man, like what rumble you picked up that scar?” I said it had been in Southeast Asia. He looked at me scornfully. “Mercenary!”

“Well, not always,” I told him. “Sometimes I fight for free. Like right now.”

I tossed him against a wall and took my suitcase outside and went to the airport–and then Seattle and Anchorage, Alaska, and wound up at Elmendorf AFB, clean, sober, and with the Lady Vivamus disguised as fishing tackle.

Mother was glad to see me and the kids seemed pleased–I had bought presents between planes in Seattle–and my stepdaddy and I swapped yarns.

I did one important thing in Alaska; I flew to Point Barrow. There I found part of what I was looking for: no pressure, no sweat, not many people. You look out across the ice and know that only the North Pole is over that way, and a few Eskimos and fewer white people here. Eskimos are every bit as nice as they have been pictured. Their babies never cry, the adults never seem cross–only the dogs staked-out between the huts are bad-tempered.

But Eskimos are “civilized” now; the old ways are going. You can buy a choc malt at Barrow and airplanes fly daily in a sky that may hold missiles tomorrow.

But they still seal amongst the ice floes, the village is rich when they take a whale, half starved if they don’t. They don’t count time and they don’t seem to worry about anything–ask a man how old he is, he answers: “Oh, I’m quite of an age.” That’s how old Rufo is. Instead of good-bye, they say, “Sometime again!” No particular time and again well see you.

They let me dance with them. You must wear gloves (in their way they are as formal as the Doral) and you stomp and sing with the drums–and I found myself weeping. I don’t know why. It was a dance about a little old man who doesn’t have a wife and now he sees a seal-

I said, “Sometime again!”–went back to Anchorage and to Copenhagen. From 30,000 feet the North

Pole looks like prairie covered with snow, except black lines that are water. I never expected to see the North Pole.

From Copenhagen I went to Stockholm. Majatta was not with her parents but was only a square away. She cooked me that Swedish dinner, and her husband is a good Joe. From Stockholm I phoned a “Personal” ad to the Paris edition of the Herald-Tribune, then went to Paris.

I kept the ad in daily and sat across from the Two Maggots and stacked saucers and tried not to fret. I watched the ma’m’selles and thought about what I might do.

If a man wanted to settle down for forty years or so, wouldn’t Nevia be a nice place? Okay, It has dragons. It doesn’t have flies, nor mosquitoes, nor smog. Nor parking problems, nor freeway complexes that look like diagrams for abdominal surgery. Not a traffic light anywhere.

Muri would be glad to see me. I might marry her. And maybe little whatever-her-name was, her kid sister, too. Why not? Marriage customs aren’t everywhere those they use in Paducah. Star would be pleased; she would like being related to Jocko by marriage.

But I would go see Star first, or soon anyhow, and kick that pile of strange shoes aside. But I wouldn’t stay; it would be “sometime again” which would suit Star. It is a phrase, one of the few, that translates exactly into Centrist jargon–and means exactly the same.

“Sometime again,” because there are other maidens, or pleasing facsimiles, elsewhere, in need of rescuing. Somewhere. And a man must work at his trade, which wise wives know.

“I cannot rest from travel; I will drink life to the lees.” A long road, a trail, a “Tramp Royal,” with no certainty of what you’ll eat or where or if, nor where you’ll sleep, nor with whom. But somewhere is Helen of Troy and all her many sisters and there is still noble work to be done.

A man can stack a lot of saucers in a month and I began to fume instead of dream. Why the hell didn’t Rufo show up? I brought this account up to date from sheer nerves. Has Rufo gone back? Or is he dead?

Or was he “never born”? Am I a psycho discharge and what is in this case I carry with me wherever I go? A sword? I’m afraid to look, so I do–and now I’m afraid to ask. I met an old sergeant once, a thirty-year man, who was convinced that he owned all the diamond mines in Africa; he spent his evenings keeping books on them. Am I just as happily deluded? Are these francs what is left of my monthly disability check?

Does anyone ever get two chances? Is the Door in the Wall always gone when next you look? Where do you catch the boat for Brigadoon? Brother, it’s like the post office in Brooklyn: You can’t get there from here!

I’m going to give Rufo two more weeks-

I’ve heard from Rufo! A clipping of my ad was for warded to him but he had a little trouble. He wouldn’t say much by phone but I gather he was mixed up with a carnivorous Fraulein and got over the border almost sans calottes. But he’ll be here tonight. He is quite agreeable to a change in planets and universes and says he has something interesting in mind. A little risky perhaps, but not dull. I’m sure he’s right both ways. Rufo might steal your cigarettes and certainly your wench but things aren’t dull around him–and he would die defending your rear.

So tomorrow we are heading up that Glory Road, rocks and all!

Got any dragons you need killed?

End

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

Posts about the Changes in America

America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.

Parable about America
What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6
Civil War
The Warning Signs
r/K selection theory
Line in the sand
A second passport
Link
Make America Great Again.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.
The Rule of Eight
Types of American conservatives.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is China Like (Part 9)

Here, we continue on our exploration of China from the comfort of our own personal computer, personal laptop, or personal media device. This is a multi-part post because too many videos will prevent the post from loading, and also, I tend to get sidetracked on various issues.

Also, please keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

Why is American fighting wars?
This is why America is currently fighting so many wars.

This is the final ninth of a mighty mega-post.

As a quick reminder, to all the new comers here…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Chinese monuments to THEIR history

Conservative traditional nations always have monuments to their history. They revere their past and teach the lore to their youth. They are never ashamed of it, but rather use it as examples of how to live your life in various ways where all the good attributes are passed on one generation to another.

We used to do this with such American heroes as Johnny Appleseed, Paul Bunyan, Davey Crockett, and George Washington. It’s sort about how the Marxist progressive liberal democrats in the United States worship Karl Marx, Che, and Barrack Obama.

Statues are erected to the heroes that have shaped the society that we live in. Those that want to change the society, and demolish the social order, desire to tear down those statues.

The Chinese SJW folk wanted to do just that. Luckily they were stopped in the 1970’s and today, China honors it’s collective past.

For those of you who are fixed in thinking that these are just” statues, you are missing the point. The point is a continuation of societal virtues for a continuation of the positive aspects of ones’ culture.

For instance, where would the Thanksgiving turkey be, if no one celebrated Thanksgiving? What if they called it “Eat a bird day”, like how the progressive liberal Marxists have done away with saying “Merry Christmas” at work in America. We treasure our past through stories, and history. We also eat our history, in great delicious bites…

Delicious thanksgiving dinner.
Cultures and societies all over the world honor their past. They do this through holidays and celebrations that are set aside for the people to enjoy. Thanksgiving for instance is one such holiday that celebrates the “breaking of bread” with outsiders by the Puritans. We celebrate it by eating turkey with mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, baked candied yams, fresh oven baked bread, salads and other such tasty enjoyments.

Further, we have many variations of this holiday that has developed over the years. Such as having turkey sandwiches (hot and cold) all week long, and turkey soup, as well as the leftovers from the main event. Good eating, for certain. Life is too short, not to eat well.

Turkey meat.
Now, who wouldn’t want to eat some delicious turkey sandwiches? I for one, love to heat them up with gravy and eat hot turkey sandwiches. I like to use the normal “white bread’ for this, and then pour the hot turkey gravy all over the sandwich.

They be swanging…

Other nations, not having to worry about war and excessive taxation to support the wars, can spend their time on other things. This is often in the form of new and unique parks, buildings, public structures, and just plain fun things to do.

Riding a swing is pretty darn popular in China.

Life is about having fun. We are all so caught up in the news that is designed to frighten and manipulate. Don’t allow that. Think about good things, important things, delicious things.

Life is far too short.

Club Sandwich
This is a fine and delicious club sandwich. I really like it because it has bacon, turkey, ham and fresh delicious tomatoes. It is really good on toast, with a side of coleslaw and piping hot home fries with salt and a goodly amount of ketchup. Not to mention a great frosty beer.

Racing through the snow

Yeah. I know, I already talked about HSR, but I just cannot help myself.

Why worry about carbon emissions when everyone is using public transportation? What if it was cheap, clean, well maintained, and easy to access? Wouldn’t you prefer to use it for casual rides to the local store? Wouldn’t you prefer to use it to go to work?

I know that I do. It’s stress free (usually).

If only 10% of the population uses HSR and public transportation instead of driving, that means that there will be an extra 10% more of fuel availability. this will be reflected in cheaper gasoline prices. As such everything is affected that is impacted by gasoline costs… like food.

Po-Dunk China

And as I had stated earlier on, let’s keep this all in mind, shall we…

Also, please keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to 
illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.
And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s 
resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

In case I am not making myself clear on this issue. This little po-dunk Chinese town looks like it has nice infrastructure, good roads, is clean and has a happy vibrant population. This could be Detroit. This could be Los Angles, and this could be Baltimore. But No. No. Noooo. The money is for use else where.

That money is for far off wars where large amounts can be skimmed away without any kind of accountability. Who is left holding “the bag” for their greed? We are.

And, you can see how this manifests all over the United States.

Los Angles street scene.
Typical street scene in Los Angles. There are many beautiful cities in America. Consider Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Charlotte. These are our cities, and they DO need to be managed properly. They also need to have funds allocated to the people who live there. Not in wars in distant lands.

America. Wake up and look around. These are our cities. If the elected officials have failed we have two and only two options. They are;

  • Continue using the same methods and elect replacement officials. Hope that they will do a better job than their predecessors. (Don’t hold your breath.)
  • Scrap the system. “Nuke from orbit.” Start all over from scratch and appoint trained, and talented (real) experts to manage the city.

Look around people. Those whom are running the nation are frigging idiots. They do not have our best intentions in mind. They are evil, corrupt and have gamed the system against us. Either we go along with their game, or we start all over.

 These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats  or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They  care not for their fellow man. They don’t care about future generations.  They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They  have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are  meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal  and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in  this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in  Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government  agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and  blood sucking advisor to the president. 

-Us vs Them

You can easily see just how bad they have been when you compare the United States to other nations. Oh, it’s one thing when there were only three news stations and they controlled everything. Now they are trying to do that again through Facebook, Twitter, and Google. Don’t let them.

This is not acceptable…

Los Angeles today
this is Los Angles today. This is not acceptable, and the purists that believe that “one day” this situation will change and reverse itself are deluded.

Do you know what this looks like?

I’ll tell you. It looks like the rich oligarchy in control of the American government has declared war on the American people. That is what it looks like. In many ways, the liberal progressive cities in America look like war zones.

Dead in Los Angles.
Was this in Vietnam, or Los Angeles? It’s hard to tell. I think maybe we need to complete scrap the system and start all over.

What is needed is to tear out the rich oligarchy that has completely destroyed America, extract them, and set in place preventative measures to guarantee that this sort of thing will never happen again. Sort of like this…

Bonus awards for employees

In China, bonuses are quite common. No, I’m not talking about the (tiny) fractional add-on bonus you get for this or that which are common in American factories. I am talking about the real deal… cold hard cash. Handed to you in person. No strings attached, and no taxes due.

Yah. You spend that money girls.

Guangzhou

Yes, America has been put in a stranglehold by powerful interests. They do not care what happens to the country or the nation. All that they care about is their power. For them, it is not enough to live like Kings. They want to live like Mayan rulers. With the rest of the population treating them as Gods.

These sociopaths are not liberal or conservative. They are not Democrats  or Republicans. They are not beholden to a country or community. They  care not for their fellow man. They don’t care about future generations.  They care about their own power, wealth and control over others. They  have no conscience. They have no empathy. Right and wrong are  meaningless in their unquenchable thirst for more. They will lie, steal  and kill to achieve their goal of controlling everything and everyone in  this world. This precisely describes virtually every politician in  Washington DC, Wall Street banker, mega-corporation CEO, government  agency head, MSM talking head, church leader, billionaire activist, and  blood sucking advisor to the president. 

-Us vs Them

This comes into sharp focus when you visit other cities elsewhere in the world.

How the factory owners live

In China, as a traditional nation, it is a land of merit. It is a meritocracy and great rewards await the successful person. Many of them are so far removed from what a typical American would be exposed to that I won’t even bother reporting on them.

That’s it for now.

Thank you for visiting. I hope that you enjoyed yourself, got a taste of what life is like in another nation, and maybe obtained a better or worse appreciation of your home nation.

I apologize for my various rants and raves, but it adds some color to the article. Like how you can add hot chili peppers to pizza. Too much and the pizza is inedible. Too little, and it is too bland. What we strive to do is to hit that “green zone”, the “just right” mixture of fact, opinion, humor, and rant.

BTW. I wish you all a great life, and happy travels. No matter who you are, or where you are. Go get yourself a nice cigar, and a tall pint of frosty beer, and maybe some delicious food. Treat yourself. Have a good time.

Beer and pizza.
The time is ripe for a pizza, some beer and good times with your friends. Life is too short not to have beer and pizza. I’ll tell you what. Enjoy yourself, and don’t forget to make sure that the beer is ice cold, and the pizza is fresh out of the oven.
Thank you.

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is China Like (Part 8)

Here, we continue on our exploration of China from the comfort of our own personal computer, personal laptop, or personal media device. This is a multi-part post because too many videos will prevent the post from loading, and also, I tend to get sidetracked on various issues. But, please… please keep in mind that this post is all about directing America back to what it is supposed to be. Not what it has become.

“Nothing the Party says is true.  Nothing the Party does is good. Even the war itself isn’t real. The  Party wants you to believe we are at war so as to channel your  aggression away from their rightful target: The Party. 

Big Brother is  not real. He is pure fiction, created by the Party. 

The real rulers of  the State are unknown, faceless manipulators who, because they are not  known are able to wield power without let or hindrance. People of  Oceania, you are being duped. 

The Party doesn’t serve the people — it  serves itself. 

We are not at war with Eurasia. You are being made into  obedient, stupid slaves of the Party. Open your eyes. See the evil that  is happening to you. 

The Party drops bombs on its own citizens. It is  the Party, not the Eurasians, who are our enemies. Rise up. Throw off  the yoke. You have nothing to lose, and everything to gain, People of  Oceania.” 

– Emmanuel Goldstein – 1984 Film 

Also, please keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

Why is American fighting wars?
This is why America is currently fighting so many wars.

This is the eighth of a mighty mega-post.

As a quick reminder, to all the new comers here…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Oasis in the dunes (video 41)

“Go back to bed, America. Your  government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed,  America. Your government is in control again. 

Here. Here’s American  Gladiators. Watch this, shut up. 

Go back to bed, America. Here is  American Gladiators. Here are 56 channels of it! Watch these pituitary  retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on  living in the land of freedom. 

Here you go, America! You are free to do  what we tell you! You are free to do what we tell you!” 

― Bill Hicks 

While America has been manipulating its’ citizens, and financing wars everywhere. The rest of the world has been minding their own business, and living life to the fullest.

Hey! Here’s an oasis. Bet ya didn’t know that they had them in China, did ya? Have you ever wondered “why not?”

Getting the groom drunk (video 42)

America is a progressive liberal utopia that is only a few election votes from full realization. President Donald Trump may be out of office as early as 2020.

We’ve got a populace so dumbed down and indoctrinated with social justice gibberish by government schools that a large proportion actually believe socialism will lead to prosperity. Just like Venezuela and Cuba.

The reason young people are turning to socialism is because they aren’t actually experiencing free market capitalism.

We are trapped in a paradigm of crony capitalism or corporate fascist capitalism. The few at the top reap the vast majority of rigged benefits, while the average worker gets screwed. To keep Joe average compliant the oligarchy creates a box to put him in. The box is fear.

Fear of everything. Fear of other nations. Fear of what is outside the door. Fear of what you eat, or don’t eat.

Meanwhile the rest of the world moves forward.

Here is a small village in China. Traditional. They expect the groom to drink all that beer to “prove” that he is worthy enough to marry the bride. It’s a Chinese tradition. Note also all the aprons being worn by the housewives in the audience.

Traditional nations, even if the culture is different, are the same. China is a very traditional conservative culture and society.

In the United States, we have had the last one hundred years of cultural rewrites, and the last fifty of them has been all about enacting progressiveness in the Untied States. The Marxists have been wildly successful in their implementation of progressiveness in the United States. Just look at what we deal with on a daily basis…

In a traditional society, like what America once had, beer is considered a normal drink. There are no limitations on drinking it. There are no store hours when it can or cannot be purchased. There isn’t any need to obtain a license to sell it, and anyone can buy it without any age restrictions.

BBQ and beer
In a traditional society, especially one that is conservative, beer is drunk brazenly and with everything. It is a fun common beverage of choice at BBQ and family events.

Traditional societies do not accept the progressive dogma, and act as antibodies resisting it’s implementation.

Historical China

In traditional nations, history is revered. It is treasured, maintained, and taught in schools. In progressive societies, statues are town down, history is rewritten in such as way as to show disdain for the past.

China, as a traditional conservative nation takes care of it’s historical buildings.

Dancing upon arrival

Other nations, other cultures, and other societies have their own fads, fashions and quirks. While waving huge trashcan sized asses about is considered “feminine” in the United States, in China the fad is “dancing upon arrival”.

Here is what being “ladylike”, and “feminine” is like in the progressive United States today…

Well, all I can say is that other cultures and other societies do things quite differently. Here is the latest fad in China today…

Reenactments of History

Now, I love this next video. I really do.

The Chinese have seen empires come and go. You think that Europe had a complicated history? You have no idea. China is a long, long tale of empires that rise and fall with wars and conflict for over 5000 continuous years.

They are pretty tired of fighting and conflict.

Anyways, the way that they have ruled (in the past) was quite authoritarian. As such they maintained the pomp and circumstance to quite a degree. It’s really quite impressive, I’ll tell you what.

Sure beats what Obama gave us. Remember him riding a bicycle?

Anyways, here’s how Chinese traditionally ruled…

Riding through lilacs

When you are not throwing away your money on mindless and endless wars, you don’t need to tax the citizenry so much. Instead, they can be taxed less. Thus opening up opportunities for investments, business and growth. In China, under the low rates of taxation, people combine their money together and set up businesses. Here’s one made by a group of High School buddies.

They just pooled their money. Set up a water slide ride on the side of a hill and charge a small fee to use it. Easy, fun, and they are their own bosses.

Low taxation means individual success.

Petrified of heights

Here’s another example of a park built from some High School friends that pooled their money together and set up a park. Why does China have so many businesses? Answer; because they are not taxed to fun endless wars. That’s why.

and

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next part of this post which covers more videos and further commentary about China.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is China like? (Part 7)

Here, we continue on our exploration of China from the comfort of our own personal computer, personal laptop, or personal media device. This is a multi-part post because too many videos will prevent the post from loading, and also, I tend to get sidetracked on various issues.

Also, please keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

This is the seventh of a mighty mega-post.

As a quick reminder, to all the new comers here…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Crazy Shapes and exciting buildings (video 36)

China is about some amazing building designs and strange shapes. While everyone “knows” about the “bird’s nest” in Beijing, and the Pearl Tower in Shanghai, the rest of China has some pretty amazing buildings as well.

Now, America is no stranger to skyscrapers. We invented the term, and led the world in their construction. Indeed, it was one of the things that put New York City on the map. For years hard-working American men labored and created these massive structures that towered into the sky.

Here’s some of the great men taking a lunch break during building construction. Of course, it takes a unique kind of man to go work and labor so hard at such dizzying heights. Don’t you think?

I’ve read somewhere ( I don’t recall if it was on the Internet, or something that I heard) that the people who built the skyscrapers were American Indians. They were fearless regarding heights, and were absolute work-horses when building skyscrapers. But, you know what? These folk in the pictures really don’t seem to have the ethnic features of American Indians. They seem to be Irish or of Italian decent.

Taking a break.
Hard working American men taking a lunch break from building some of the largest buildings in the world. The picture is from New York city.

Lately there hasn’t been too many new skyscrapers going up in America. The money has gone into other things. Here’s what you find when you do an image search for “Amazing American Buildings”;

American buildings.
Image search for “Amazing American Buildings”. Note that none of them seem to be newer than the 1970’s. Most seem to be dated from the 1930’s and the 1940’s.

In comparison, let’s look at the image search for “Amazing Chinese Buildings”…

Amazing Chinese buildings
In contrast, the Chinese buildings are all new, modern, and built within the last ten years (if not sooner). They are big, beautiful and of unique and noteworthy shapes.

Of course, I argue that a contributor to this variance to be our wasteful spending in the eight wars that we are fighting simultaneously.

I mean, good golly! The former Soviet Union left Afghanistan after being entrenched in that morass for ten years, and we American laughed at them. We referred to Afghanistan as the Soviet “Vietnam”. Well, who’s laughing now, eh?

Afghanistan: The Soviet Union's Vietnam. Afghanistan was the ground for one of the last Cold War battles between the United States and the Soviet Union, after the Red Army rolled into the country on December 24, 1979.

- Afghanistan: The Soviet Union's Vietnam | News | Al Jazeera 

We’ve been fighting there almost twenty years. And Even “Mad Dog” Mathis left his role because he disagreed with President Trump that we need to leave Afghanistan. Ah… fiddlesticks!

Here’s what is possible when you aren’t burning money on nothing…

Visiting Tibet (video 37)

China is about visiting Tibet.

Have you ever wanted to visit Tibet? I have, and I have many friends who feel the same way too. Well, if you ever wanted to go there and drive around, it’s a little bit like this video below.

New Squad Support Weapons (Video 38 A&B)

China is also deploying some amazing small arms at the squad level. You see, while America is busy being the “policeman of the world”, China holds their military in strict adherence to protecting their shipping lanes. Because of this, their military doctrine is different than America’s.

In some respects, their mission doctrine is so limited that their versatility is crippled.

The American military is much more versatile. The American military can fight for the Saudi oligarchs in Iran, as well as secure Panama for the EU banking interests. Versatile. American military can fight in Bosnia, as well as Yemen, or Nigeria. Americans can and have fought just about everywhere.

You pay off the right people, and our military can do your bidding. The only issue is the price. Which is the price that the rich oligarchy is asking. Not the price in manpower and lives. For to the American leadership, people are disposable.

They are. That’s a fact, Jack. Read your history.

Dead Americans
Bodies of US Airborne paratroopers lie near a command post during the battle of An Ninh, 18 September 1965. The paratroopers, of the 1st Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, were hit by heavy fire from guerrillas that began as soon as the first elements of the unit landed. The dead and wounded were later evacuated to An Khe, where the 101st was based. The battle was one of the first of the war between major units of US forces and the Vietcong

Here’s some videos of Chinese squad level small arms. As a weapons enthusiast, I found these very interesting. Most especially the first video.

Some related links of interest.

As Americans, when we read about Chinese advancements in weapons and technology, we view them through an “American prism”. Which is to say, we make assumptions on how they will be used, based upon how we use them.

Americans assume far too much about China.

We run about with our arms held up high like Chicken Little shouting “the sky is falling!”. We mistakenly think that China is like America and are happy deploying military forces all over the world to help other nations and police for global world stability. Or else, something along the lines of a 1930’s era attempt to become the dictator of the world.

"China is saber rattling!"

The Chinese don’t care at all about global world stability. They are about only one thing. That is Chinese stability and Chinese health.

  • War in the Congo, meh.
  • Conflict in Egypt… yawn.
  • Military insurgency in Sierra Leone… “what me worry?”.

They do not care.

Unlike the United States, China has structured their military in a defensive role, primarily. For an offensive role, they have nuclear and biological weapons and delivery systems.

America is all about fighting global wars with unlimited financing for every reason under the sun. The baseline assumption is that the conflict will [1] be conventional, and [2] be limited to the country so attacked. America would be unaffected.

China is about defending it’s ability to conduct trade. The baseline assumption is that if anyone tries to attack it militarily, it would use EVERY weapon at it’s disposal right-off-the-bat at the attacker. This includes nuclear, biological, and germ warfare from on the onset.

China does not believe in conflict escalation.

There are many misconceptions about China. One of the biggest is that since America has an amazing military, in both size, scope and experience, that China would be an easy “walk over” were any kind of military conflict occur between the two superpowers.

"We can put one or two carriers off the coast of China and plink at their cities, and they wouldn't be able to do anything about it. Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines would all support us."

I am here to tell you that your illusions are dangerous. Just because the Chinese are not fighting proxy wars in Libya, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan, Jordon, or any other nation, that they do not know how to fight. They do. And, make no mistake, they play to win.

The Chinese play to win.

Chinese weapons systems

Steaks (video 39)

China is about delicious steaks. Let’s talk, or better yet, look at some video of some delicious Chinese steaks. I, for one, enjoy a good steak. You can take your whole-wheat tofu burger with avocado and bean sprouts and shove it where the sun don’t shine.

When you are not throwing money away trying to shoot up mud huts, and napalming school children, the value of your currency can remain stable. Inflation is aggravated when a nation is on a war stance.

Vietnam war.
America fought a useless war in Vietnam. We ended up killing so many people and losing so many young men. And for what, and why? Trumped up fear about the “domino effect”, yeah sure…

In other words… your money is worth more. And, at that, you can use it to purchase things that otherwise you couldn’t afford. Like steak. Thick, juicy and delicious, steak.

Cooked medium rare, with a nice red interior. With the juices flowing out as the knife slices through the slab to the bone.

Housewife cooking video (video 40)

In traditional societies, such as China, and America 50-years ago, the household is run traditionally. The man, as the head of the household, would go work and earn money and give all the money to the wife to budget. The wife, would be in-charge of finance, budgeting, and all domestic matters including raising the children and educating them.

Traditional housewife
Vintage American advertisement depicting an American housewife cooking for her family. This is sadly no longer part of the American cultural scene. However, in nations that do not engage in non-stop wars, they still do maintain traditional roles. This means that his scene, with minor cultural differences, can be seen all over China.

This relic still exists in China, though it has been modified to some degree by the necessities of modern life. For in China, multi-generational households run traditional, and conservative is the norm.

Here we have a housewife showing show she cooks delicious and nutritious meals for her family. So that when the husband gets home from work, and the children come home from school, this is what they can look forward to eating…

One of the things (there were multiple things) that accelerated the movement of progressive thought and Marxism into American society were the numerous wars that America had to fight. For each time there was a war, men had to leave their homes and go off to distant lands to fight, and die. This left the household without a breadwinner, and thus the housewife had to leave the home, and take up work to support the family.

Wars contributed to the breakup of traditional American families.

Thus, one of the things that you will discover is that the more progressive a nation is, the smaller the number of traditional households that exist. Today, in America, very few households are run traditionally. Instead they are run progressively. I am sad to say this, but it is quite true.

Holiday in the USA.
In traditional families, house clothes are worn inside, holidays are celebrated, and households are kept immaculate. This is a scene that is sadly not so common in the United States, but is very common in China.

In fact, the odds that an American reading this would be part of a traditional conservative run family, even if they themselves were conservative, is practically zero.

To understand the extent of this statement, and it’s most dangerous implications, please check out this link (it opens in a separate window).

The two family types and how they work.

Oh, yes… one more thing…

Continued…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next part of this post which covers more videos and further commentary about China.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is China like? (Part 6)

Here, we continue on our exploration of China from the comfort of our own personal computer, personal laptop, or personal media device. This is a multi-part post because too many videos will prevent the post from loading, and also, I tend to get sidetracked on various issues.

Also, please keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

This is the sixth of a mighty mega-post.

As a quick reminder, to all the new comers here…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Traditional parades (video 30)

China is about traditional parades.

Most nations have parades, and all of the traditional conservative ones do, and incorporate some tid-bits and stories from history within the parade elements. For instance, when I was a boy growing up on Pennsylvania, the parades would have a skit or two about Paul Bunyan and Johnny Appleseed.

Well the same is true in China. They have parade elements that show things about the enormous Chinese history. As well as some of the local history and of the local minorities.

Today, of course, these historical displays have been displaced in progressive liberal nations, such as the UK, Sweden, and the United States with LGBT, and gay pride displays. History has been displaced by socialist and Marxist thoughts and politics.

It’s for a better world… they tell me. Though, I’m not at all convinced.

Here’s a parade in China.

Mother and child reunion (video 31)

China is about boys reconnecting with their Moms.

Deja Vu – Mother And Child Reunion

The young man is working at “er le ma”. This is a food delivery service. You use the APP, pick out the food you want, and they deliver it straight to you. Their major competition is the yellow-jacketed Kangaroo delivery service.

We don’t know the story between him and his mother. But we can guess. Perhaps they did not approve of the girl that he wished to marry, or had other plans for him. In any event, he left home, and is now working at what ever job he can get to build up a life for himself. This is what men do.

Though it can be hard on the loved ones.

Here we have the reunion. And yes, this is all VERY Chinese. Notice his reaction when he tastes his mothers’ cooking. He eats some, thinks and says that it is just like the way his mother cooked it.

The idea that men need to leave the nest and build up a life for themselves is a very traditional conservative ideal. As such, I have a very good write up on this subject. It opens in another tab. You might want to check it out.

Build up your life

Tearing down the house (video 32)

China is about rapid construction, and rapid tear-down…

In the United States, we tend to use dynamite and “wrecking balls”. In fact, wrecking balls are quite famous in the United States, as they are associated with liberal politics and progressive change. Here we have the iconic progressive wrecking ball doing a number on traditional America to the cheers and glee of the entire Hollywood audience.

Here’s Miley Cyrus

And here’s Anne Hathaway…

Again, to repeat, the iconic symbol of a “wrecking ball” is a meme used by the progressive socialist Marxist democrats in the United States. It is used figuratively to illustrate how all the history, traditions, culture and society of traditional America is being destroyed by progressive Marxists to create a utopia with the likes of Obama and Hillary Clinton in charge.

Meanwhile, in conservative China, this is how to wreck a building…

Oh, and by the way, the traditional way of doing things has over 5,000 years of experience. Most of the “new” ways of doing things are just repackaged old failures. Here’s an example of what can happen when you follow the tried and true traditional way of getting things done on a local level…

Saw this in my small town. City council wanted to plop a new fire station in the middle of a residential area, instead of in the corridor where studies showed the need was greatest. The fire dept. wanted it in the center of the town so they would answer on average one less call per day for mutual aid from the surrounding county & other municipalities. We showed up in council chambers like a Frankenstein pitchfork mob, and the council backed down. They were so afraid for their safety, they all fled the chambers immediately after the vote had been taken and the proper result realized. 

- nickedknack 

Adventures after dark (video 33)

China is truly a land of adventure. This is from a regional tourist promotional video of some sort. I’m not all that clear on it’s history, but it is an enjoyable watch. Check it out.

Again, the point that you (the reader) should keep in mind is that the rest of the world is moving forward. They are living their lives at their pace and making the rules as they go. Meanwhile Americans are being boxed in by fear and manipulation by wealthy oligarchs. This is what the world is like.

The world does not look like a “Save the Children” commercial, a war-torn rural desert town, or a Venezuelan garbage dump. It actually looks more like this…

Disco-building light-shows (video 34)

China is about light shows on the sides of buildings. The video below is of Shenzhen, China but it could have been taken at any Chinese city. Synchronized LED light displays are now quite common in China. This includes buildings, public works such as tunnels, bridges, and underpasses, and all other public buildings.

Just imagine what could be done if we (as Americans) trimmed off a few billion dollars from fighting in Yemen and devoted that money to American beautification and livability efforts domestically. You know, it doesn’t cost too much to plant trees, and to hire a staff of people on welfare to pick up trash, sweep the roads, and maintain the public spaces.

Heck! Think of how beautiful San Francisco could be if they took all the people now on welfare and gave them a paid job (at minimum wage) to pick up the shit, discarded needles and rubbish that plagues that city.

Ah, but no one wants to hear my option; That both Russia and China don’t give welfare out. They will pay you to work, but will not pay you to sit and do nothing.

Being treated like royalty (video 35)

China is a place where they literally treat you like royalty. Can you just imagine this level of treatment? Granted, it’s not common, but if you really want to impress someone, the Chinese will pull out all the stops. My goodness!

Now this is what I call “rolling out the red carpet treatment”!!!!

Continued…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next part of this post which covers more videos and further commentary about China.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is China like? (Part 5)

Here, we continue on our exploration of China from the comfort of our own personal computer, personal laptop, or personal media device. This is a multi-part post because too many videos will prevent the post from loading, and also, I tend to get sidetracked on various issues.

Also, please keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

Why is American fighting wars?
This is why America is currently fighting so many wars.

This is the fifth of a mighty mega-post.

As a quick reminder, to all the new comers here…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Enjoying Life (video 25 A&B)

Again, once you are now throwing money away on waste, bribes, corruption, wars in far off nations, and other useless pursuits, you can spend it on yourself. You can spend the money on your friends, and on your nation. They money can go towards “good” causes. Like improving the environment, taking care of sick people, and building the local environment to make it more attractive and livable.

Which is about a vibrant nightlife when everyone walks about and enjoys the night air together.

You can be yourself. You can do the things that have value to you. You can make your own life meaningful, delicious, and worthy of your time. Not only that, but it is cheaper to do so. The value of the paper that we use as money goes up. You can do more things with it!

When America was involved in only one war, not eight, the price of beer was quite low, don’t ya know.

Delicious beer.
The habit of constantly throwing money away in things that DO NOT ADD VALUE causes a decrease in the worth of the money you have. I will never forget that when I was born, my mother saved up for months to by me a $100 savings bond so that I would have some savings when I would get old. By the time she died, and I discovered the bill, I could barely afford a pizza with it.

The only way the evil oligarchy can control you is to keep you in fear. That is the only way. So they feed a constant fear-based narrative to you 24-7. They want you living as serfs under their control. Do not allow them this.

Take life by the horns and live it, and to heck what anyone else thinks. Live your life on your terms. Do not allow the wealthy and the powerful to control you. Don’t jump when they pull the puppet strings. And of course, don’t react to every news article you read.

Um. Maybe I have been ramming home the idea that money should be spent wisely by the government. This isn’t a very popular opinion.

My opinions are not popular.

But the truth is that Americans have been living like the North Koreans have. In North Korea it’s a never ending threat of war with America. It’s a 24-7 broadcast news about war, and the need to get ready to defend Korea from dangerous aggressors.

Well, it’s the same thing in America.

The mainstream media is all fear-based broadcasting. And the constant need to spend more money on “defense”, and to “protect American interests“. How many time have you heard that phrase, eh?

The American Empire
The United States spends more on national defense than China, Saudi Arabia, India, France, Russia, United Kingdom, and Germany. While the chart above illustrates last year’s defense spending in dollar terms, the United States has historically devoted a larger share of its economy to defense than many of its key allies. Defense spending accounts for 15 percent of all federal spending and roughly half of discretionary spending. Total discretionary spending — for both defense and non-defense purposes — represents only about one-third of the annual federal budget. It is currently below its historical average as a share of GDP and is projected to decline further.

While America has been burning money, the rest of the world hasn’t. Instead, they have been using it to improve the lives of THEIR CITIZENS. They have been building roads, bridges, tunnels, hospitals, infrastructure, and much, much more.

Unless America gets control of the lust-for-war that seems to preoccupy Congress and the mainstream media, the days ahead will be grayer and more sober for Americans. The halcyon days of “riding the gravy train of success” are over.

The game has changed, and America and Americans must step up to the plate and “up our game”.

Plot of Chinese trajectory.
Dated graph. Note how it constantly updates and redefines the trajectory of the Chinese rise in global dominance. It’s not a mystery that the latest graphs on this subject cannot be found on the internet easily. They hold a message that might cause some gastric distress.
Both the IMF and the World Bank now rate China as the world’s largest economy  based on Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), a measure that adjusts  countries’ GDPs for differences in prices. In simple terms, this means  that because your money stretches further in China than it would in the  US, China’s GDP is adjusted upwards.
  
And it won’t be too long before China’s economy surpasses the US’s  by other measures, too. The Centre for Economics and Business Research  (Cebr) predicts it will happen in 2029. 

China is well on its way to becoming the world’s leading economy, and is  already there in PPP terms. However, in order to surpass the US’s  highly diversified, tertiary economy, there’s more to do: China still  needs to make the all-important transition from a resource-intensive  manufacturing hub to a modern, consumer-driven economy.  

-World Economic Forum 2016

All of this, when taken together, points to a very clear picture. That for America to remain the dominant global superpower, it needs to seriously curtail it’s love for war. Otherwise, it will fail to compete.

For America to remain a global leader it must curtail it’s participation in wars.

 Who wants us to plunge back into the Middle East, to fight a new and  wider war than the ones we fought already this century in Afghanistan,  Iraq, Syria, Libya and Yemen?

Answer: Pompeo and Bolton, Bibi  Netanyahu, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the Sunni kings,  princes, emirs, sultans and the other assorted Jeffersonian democrats on  the south shore of the Persian Gulf.

And lest we forget, the  never-Trumpers and neocons in exile nursing their bruised egos, whose  idea of sweet revenge is a U.S. return to the Mideast in a war with  Iran, which then brings an end to the Trump presidency. 

-Pat Bucanan
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants America to fight a war with Iran. To this end he is very active in providing financial enticements (bribes) to leading American Senators and Congressmen to support yet another military action, only this time in Iran.

Think about this all for a while. Let it simmer.

In the meantime, let’s just run through some videos and hold back on the narrative for a spell. OK?

Stairs. Lots and lots of stairs. (Video 26)

China is about stairs. Everything always seems to go straight up into the stratosphere. This is true for parks, and buildings, as well as for just about everything else. China is a land that is very friendly to mountain goats.

Amazing Parks (Video 27)

China is also about amazing parks.

I wrote another series of posts on this subject. It might be worth your time to visit them. You can click on the link below, and it will open up in another link. That way you can stay on this thread and keep on reading.

Parks in China - 1

Anyways, parks in China are really quite beautiful. Check out this really nice video to give you a better idea of what I am talking about…

Maybe after seeing this video you might want to go to a park and visit it. You know, you don’t need to book a flight to China and go there to experience the beauty of a park. America is filled with parks all over the place. Why not spend some time and visit one or two yourself locally?

Going on a vacation.
It is time for a nice family vacation. You can just take a day off from work today, and hop in the car and just go out to a local park. It need not be a big issue or adventure. Just do it. Stop on the way for lunch. NOT McDonald’s. Instead go to a local diner. Order a blue-plate-special. Life should be lived. Just enjoy the time that you have.

Swarm Drones (video 28)

China is all about swarm drones.

China has mastered this technology and they have applied it toward public light displays that are nothing sort of amazing. I do believe that eventually it will eventually replace firework displays. This technology has been in Chinese incubation labs for the last five years or so at least.

I am confident that there are military applications of this that the Chinese are exploiting, but of course, it’s not public knowledge. Not in China, and of course, not in the Untied States.

Swarm drones. Check it out.

Robotic Luggage (Video 29)

China is also about robotic luggage. I mean why not. Eh? They make robotic sex dolls, robotic assembly equipment, robotic construction equipment, and robotic patrol boats, why not luggage?

Continued…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next part of this post which covers more videos and further commentary about China.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is China like? (Part 4)

Here, we continue on our exploration of China from the comfort of our own personal computer, personal laptop, or personal media device. This is a multi-part post because too many videos will prevent the post from loading, and also, I tend to get sidetracked on various issues.

Also, please keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

This is the fourth of a mighty mega-post.

As a quick reminder, to all the new comers here…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Bubble Hotels (Video 19)

China is about staying is a bubble hotel.

You would think that it would be so very difficult to have anyone to visit a hotel, or park in China. You know, with all the negative publicity about pollution… eating dogs… bird flu sickness, etc. But, China has parks and hotels. While the American media is all rife with anti-Chinese sentiment, the rest of the world (with the exception of the UK, for reasons related to progressive socialism) has a very positive view of China.

High Speed Trains (Video 20)

China is about high speed trains that go just about everywhere.

I’ve covered this in detail elsewhere, actually. If you want to read about what I have to say about this subject, you might want to visit here. (Don’t worry the link opens up into another tab so you won’t lose your place here.)

High Speed Rail in China
Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?

Anyways, here’s another great micro-video of a speeding Chinese HSR train.

First Day of School (Video 21)

I just cannot help myself. Here’s a screen-shot from one of my all time favorite movies. It starred Rodney Dangerfield, and it’s from 1988. Of course, it’s “Back to School”. I well remember when I first got this movie. I had just got my Beta-MAX player and this video was one of the first that I could watch on it. That and “One Crazy Summer”, and “Better off Dead”. All complete 1980’s classics.

Back to school
Back to School. Back to School is a 1986 American comedy film starring Rodney Dangerfield, Keith Gordon, Sally Kellerman, Burt Young, Terry Farrell, William Zabka, Ned Beatty, Sam Kinison, Paxton Whitehead and Robert Downey Jr. It was directed by Alan Metter. The plot centers on a wealthy but uneducated father who goes to college to show solidarity with his discouraged son Jason and learns that he cannot buy an education or happiness.

I was in MAJestic training at NAS China Lake, and at the end of the day, I would ride my motorcycle back to the apartment (pick up some take out through KFC) and we would eat chicken and watch Rodney Dangerfield. BTW. Chicken and beer go together quite nicely. They really do.

Delicious beer and chicken.
Chicken and beer go great together. Here are some chicken legs that are very tasty when you dip them in ranch dressing. So are chicken wings, as well. Notice the fine beer. It is fantastic if it is perfectly chilled. I’ll tell you what.

Anyways…

Sorry about digressing so. I do love a great bite of chicken and beer. I love how it smells and how it tastes, and the icy cold beer washes it down just perfectly. Now, back to school…

China is about sending your child off to the first day of school on their own.

Everyone has children, and the parents want the best for them. They take care of them, care for them and try to teach them. This is a major parental role that is part of human nature. While there are extreme variances on the amount of parental supervision between the parenting types, the Chinese do take care of their children.

If you want to explore this subject a little further, you might want to check out these other posts. Don’t worry, by clicking on them, you will discover that they will open up in other links and tabs.

The two family types and how they work.
Link
r/K selection theory

China – a land of traditions (video 22 A&B)

China is a land where traditions are honored, appreciated and emulated.

All traditional conservative nations honor their past. They promote the memories by erecting statues. They hold parades, and children perform skits and reenactments of past events. They learn lore about famous people and recite poems dedicated to them.

In progressive socially liberal nations, the opposite is true. They tear down statues. They rewrite history and disparage heroic individualistic action. Any holidays become bland and are provided generic names, and the celebrations towards them are ridiculed if not banned.

China is a traditional Chinese-conservative nation. America is a progressive-liberal nation.

Chinese factory (video 23)

The American and British tabloids often depict China as the home of “sweat shops” and forced manual labor with “child labor” and other such injustices. In all the years that I have lived in China, and at all the many hundreds of factories that I have visited, toured and worked with, I have never seen anything that even remotely resembles the mainstream media narrative.

Here we have a typical assembly line.

A propagandized narrative that demonizes another group of people, a nation, or a type of person is usually a prelude to eventual war. The only way to prevent war is by diffusing the mainstream media narrative by exposure. Otherwise, the narrative festers than you have such things as the Nazi’s putting Jews in concentration camps, the Rwandan genocide, and the attacks on White People in South Africa.

The NeoCons in the United States rely heavily on the mainstream media to drum up support for a condition of non-stop war.

Quick Commentary (video 23 and 24)

When you are not spending money blowing things up, but rather creating things instead, life takes on an entirely new meaning.

You can enjoy life.

You can have fun. You can dance, and you can be yourself. No matter how strange it may appear. Please, I implore you, don’t be manipulated by the oligarchy to sacrifice your home, your money, your lifestyle, and your very lives for some far off war in a place that (supposedly) has “national security” interests.

Life is far too short not to enjoy yourself.

Continued…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next part of this post which covers more videos and further commentary about China.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is China like? (Part 3)

Here, we continue on our exploration of China from the comfort of our own personal computer, personal laptop, or personal media device. This is a multi-part post because too many videos will prevent the post from loading, and also, I tend to get sidetracked on various issues.

Also, please keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

This is the third of a mighty mega-post.

As a quick reminder, to all the new comers here…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Playing catch with your buddies (video 14).

China is about playing catch with sandbags. Then going to have a bunch of beer and hard alcohol with food afterwards.

I really like this video. It reminds me of an event that I had when I was a young lad in elementary school. My father went on a business trip to New Brunswick, Canada. Between the long rides in the car, and me sitting inside the car for hours while he conducted his business, he took me to a local festival.

New Brunswick fair.
Travel can expose you to all kinds of new things and adventures. Did you know that there is a history of Scottish settlers in New Brunswick? Well there is, and their history is glorious. As a boy, the experiences that I witnessed at the fair made quite a big impression on em, and no it wasn’t because they wore skirts either.

I was too young to know what was going on. However, there was some kind of he-man Scottish-historical reenactment of some type that we were able to observe. Here, the guys were all wearing kilts, and throwing enormous things. They hauled logs, threw axes, and tosses enormous heavy balls.

I well remember thinking how, one day, I too would be able to be so masculine and strong. Though, I never did get to wear a kilt, I certainly did get my fair share of carrying heavy things. LOL.

Here’s some dudes in China kind of doing the same thing…

Humans live in other nations. They aren’t the cardboard “cut out” like the media wants us to believe. The media refers to them as “Chicoms” or “Chinese communists” which is true is one sense, but absolutely false in another. The demonetization of one group of people is an effective way for the American oligarchy to drum up support for yet another military war effort. Be aware. We are constantly following the path that brought Rome to it’s knees.

Swimming and Singing (Video 15).

China is about swimming in a pool and then going to the KTV afterwards. You know, everyone likes to swim. Even if you can’t, and most Chinese can’t really, they do like to go into shallow pools and chill out and have fun. This Chinese gal (in the micro-video below) is pretty typical.

Gilligan's Island
The 1960’s situation comedy “Gilligan’s Island” was very influential for young boys such as myself. Here, we were presented an idealistic fantasy. One where there were two single women on the island, and each one as a female archetype.

I have always enjoyed looking at pretty girls in swimsuits. This is true today as it was back in the day when I would sneak a peek at the Playboy magazines stashed away in my father’s pile of magazines in the basement bathroom.

In my family, heck in most families from the Western Pennsylvania, the men-folk would have “their” bathroom in the basement. Of course, the women-folk would have their bathrooms which would always be immaculate and well-tended to. The men’s bathrooms, not so much. They would tend to be dusty and cobwebby, and damp. Though there was always a great collection of men’s magazines stashed there.

Playboy leadership with Roman Polanski.
Oh, back in the day. Hugh Hefner and Roman Polanski. Both standing in front of the black Playboy airborne command post.

These magazines would range from magazines about hunting and fishing, to Popular Mechanics, and Popular Science magazines. There would also be the Men’s magazines, like Stag, and Men’s Adventure. And, of course, Playboy magazine.

Just for the fun of it, here’s Angelique Pettyjohn with William Shatner as Captain Kirk in one of the early Startrek episodes. Who would ever know that extraterrestrials looked so very human? I most especially like the green hair. I guess that she uses “copper tone” for highlights.

Also the aluminum foil halter / boob-holder is a nice touch. She and Kirk look like great sparring partners, though why is he shirtless, and she all covered up? It just doesn’t seem fair. Now, does it?

Anyways, pretty girls in swimsuits and moving about in water is something that I do enjoy looking at.

When I was a boy, there was a pretty popular saying at that time. It was “make love not war“. The idea was that it would be better to get high and have sex than to lose your life in some swamp in Vietnam. Now that I am older, I can better appreciate the thought that went into this saying. Though… my generation had a different saying. It was “Have a nice day“.

Have a nice day.
This is a very common meme that surfaced sometime between 1972 and 1974 all over the country. My sister had a baton, and a tee shirt with this logo, and I got a frizbee with this logo on the plastic. Sometime later, my dog chewed the frizbee up, and we were forced to use inside album jackets to de-seed our weed. LOL.

Playing Golf (Video 16 A&B)

Did you know that you can play golf all over the world? Yeah. And, not only that, but it is a very popular pastime.

Of course, we might be aware of golf courses in Scotland, and Canada. And we might hear, from time to time, about golf courses in Japan and Korea. But did you know that China has the most golf courses in the world, and that the largest ones are in China. In fact, I went and played at a 100-hole course in Dangguan a few years back. Now that is one enormous course. It most certainly is.

The course was Mission Hills, and if you ever get the opportunity to travel to China, go on out there. Now, I have to remind, or alert, you all to the fact that it is hot and humid. It is like playing golf in Florida. Only, since this is China, it is much larger, with pretty girls as caddies.

Hey, how would you like to tee off here…

Mission Hills
View of the fairway after teeing off at Mission Hills in Dongguan, China. This is pretty typical, and the view will be pretty much like this one, all year long.

Of course, you don’t want to get stuck in a sand trap or plink one into the lake or the many pools that like just about everywhere. However, a golfer with reasonable skill can navigate the traps and “dog-legs” with ease. There won’t be any mishaps, though you might find yourself stuck in the ruff (or is it rough) from time to time.

Here’s another view…

Mission HIlls sand traps.
What a beautiful day to go out and play some golf. In Chinese it is called “gao er fu”. These courses are everywhere.

China is about playing golf with the girls.

And here’s another video showing one of the many, many, many driving ranges in a typical city.

I think that golf is a most excellent activity, and it deserves the time and concentration to get us up and out away from our social media and out walking in the sunshine with all that great air and clouds.

Caddyshack
When I go out and go golfing it usually ends up a little something like this. CADDYSHACK, Ted Knight, Rodney Dangerfield, 1980. (c) Orion Pictures.

Scams, scams and scams (Video 17)

China is also about people trying to pull scams and trick you up. You have got to be careful. Pay attention to this video. But it’s more than that, pay attention to the surroundings.

  • Average guys – dressed casually.
  • Typical 7-11 style convenience store.
  • Easy access to cigarettes and alcohol (whiskey and VSOP).
  • Easy access to betel nuts (Banned in the USA).

Now some kickers…

  • Buying cigarettes – hassle free and no ID required.
  • Monitored by CCTV with direct feeds into the police station.

Interior Decoration – Chinese style (Video 18 A&B)

China is about apartments that look like the Taj Mahal.

This would seem quite strange to Americans who associate homes and dwellings to be carpeted, with earth-tone painted particleboard walls, and wide multi-floor layouts. China is different, and a significant percentage of all the new homes, and decorations in China are done as polished stone slabs over concrete foundations.

This is the norm.

And here’s another micro-video. Here we see the housewife making up some food in one of the newer high-rises in China. These buildings are everywhere, and aside from the differences in layout and some minor cosmetic issues, they are all of this style and ilk.

You will also notice that in China, the housewife pretty much makes sure that the house is in order for when the man of the house comes home. There aren’t any kids toys lying all over the place, and everything is not only tidy, but cleaned immaculately.

Notice how this traditional conservative Chinese house is run. The housewife wears house-slippers inside. While more often than not the entire family would wear pajamas and “house clothes”, she is either right back from work, or getting ready to go out. You can learn a lot about the Chinese just by watching a precious few videos.

Throw away the “cardboard cutout” of “evil chicoms”. These are people just trying to live their own life. They have no idea about all the nonsense out of the American news media and how dangerous it can be. Instead of focusing on shooting people, blowing up cities, and “spreading progressive democracy all over the world” how about sitting down, having a beer and just make friends. Enjoy your time. There is too much hate spewing in the American airwaves. Chill out and get a grip.

吴海啸 – 你是我的ok绷

Continued…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next part of this post which covers more videos and further commentary about China.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is China like? (Part 2)

Here, we continue on our exploration of China from the comfort of our own personal computer, personal laptop, or personal media device. This is a multi-part post because too many videos will prevent the post from loading, and also, I tend to get sidetracked on various issues.

Sorry.

As a quick reminder, to all the new comers here…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Steam-Shovel Doggie-Paddle (Video 8)

Why rent a tug boat, when you can just doggie-paddle up the river?

China is watching a steam-shovel doggie-paddle up a river…

To many Americans, who have been fed a steady diet of “Save the Children” commercials, war in Yemen, War in Somalia, and War in Afghanistan, it seems that the rest of the world still farms with oxen, and owning a shovel is a rare thing. It isn’t. High quality (and low quality, as well) tools and earth-movers are all over the world. We’ve been too busy playing in the mud in the primitive cultures around the world to notice what the rest of the world is doing.

Beer and Chicken (Video 9)

Life is far too short not to enjoy some chicken and beer with your friends. Why not? On a nice evening, how about cooking some chicken, and drinking some beer (make sure it's icy cold - it's best that way) and just hamming it up with your friends. What's stopping you?
Delicious fried chicken and beer.
Life is too short not to enjoy it with your friends. Really! You should be eating some wonderful chicken and enjoying some fine beer. You deserve it.

China is all about eating out with your friends outside on the porch, and having some delicious chicken and beer…

People like to eat. Humans eat. We also like to eat chicken. Chicken is domesticated all over the world and it is a rare, rare thing to be in a place where you cannot eat chicken. We have spent so much of our time thinking so much about our “American uniqueness” that we have lost sight that many things aren’t all that unique about America. They are common all over the world… What is unique is our Constitution and those of us that follow it as it was written. That is what makes us special.

Depth-charges using the dreaded evil plastic straw! (Video 10)

Plastic straw ban
While Americans are banned from using plastic straws, the rest of the world happily uses them. They are totally oblivious to the efforts being made by Americans to alter their actions and behaviors. Oh, yeah. Did you know that in other nations, the only people that are forbidden to use plastic straws are prisoners inside of correctional institutions. Funny thing, that.

China is about having “depth charges” through a straw. (Nope, China won’t ban plastic straws. Only liberal progressive nations do that.)

A bomb shot typically consists of a shot glass of hard liquor that is dropped into a glass partially filled with beer but sometimes with some other beverage. Many variations exist. When the shot is dropped into a superpint it is commonly known as a "Depth Charge," because it resembles the anti-submarine weapon being dropped on a target.

Oh yes. Please take notice of the poodle sitting on the chair to the left. Yes, in China you are allowed to bring your pets into the restaurants with you. In America you would never see any of this.

There are three reasons…

  • Plastic straws are banned in the larger cities.
  • Pets are banned from restaurants.
  • It’s against the law to drink beer (and whiskey) under 21.

While America has been raising taxes, again and again, over and over. Then throwing the money over military actions in near-poverty stricken third-world nations. In order to improve the lives of Americans, the money is now missing, so the only thing left to do is to improve things without money – by regulation and law. Thus, not only are Americans poorer, the money is getting squandered, but we are being regulated and taxed to a level unheard of in the rest of the world (though the UK is trying hard with “catch-up”).

Going to have fun with your GF (Video 11)

This is a pretty common thing. I wouldn’t bring it up except that it has happened to me time and time over and over in China. Yet not once in the USA. I mean, there are tons of pretty American girls, and all sorts of hotels in the States. It must be a cultural thing. I guess.

Beautiful American woman.
America is filled with attractive women, at least outside the liberal enclaves, where the progressives roam. This is screen capture from TOS “Bread and Circuses” which is a nice fit for the theme of this rambling post. Can you guess her role, and how our hero (Captain Kirk) leveraged the situation for his advantage?

Anyways, China is all about having a pretty girl take you by the hand up to the hotel room…

And, at that… here’s to happy endings.

Happy ending.
Happy endings, 1960’s Star Trek style.

Happy endings are legal in China. They are illegal in America. Is anyone surprised?

High School Basketball (Video 12)

All over the world, people enjoy playing sports. If I were to criticize anyone, it would be that they are not having enough fun in their life. You should have fun first, and work on a career second. Putting a career first to the extend that your life becomes dull and lifeless is a wasted pursuit.
The fun police.
There is a large and vocal minority that wants to bleach away all fun and enjoyment out of peoples lives. This is the progressive way of doing things. It serves the interests of the wealthiest so that they can lord over the rest of us as our owners. This is just the beginning, and they are only getting started.

China is about playing basketball in the High School gym…

How about instead of spending billions of dollars blowing up mud huts, and terrorizing poor farmers having sex with their donkeys, why don’t we all just settle our differences over some friendly games of basketball, or soccer, or billiards. Heck, I’d even vote for dominoes, or a cut-throat game of poker than have another trillion wasted in Afghanistan, don’t you agree?

Disco Streetlights (Video 13)

China is all about synchronized light displays. Even in small towns and rural villages. Don’t ask me why. I have no idea. But, it is a fun and creative thing to do. Not to mention that it increases the life of the LED’s used in the streetlights.

When you are no longer focused on problems, you can find other venues for creative activity. Like disco streetlights, glow in the dark automobiles, or robotic sex dolls. It doesn’t always have to be about killing other folk.

Continued…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next part of this post which covers more videos and further commentary about China.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is China like?

Well, what is China like? Is it a smog filled “hell hole”, or is it a Stalinist storm-trooper stomping dictatorship? Just what the heck is it, and what is it like?

This is a post that I threw together after reading a fellow American justify the eight wars that America is currently fighting all over the globe. As he said “…it our duty to police the world because no one has it better than us.”

Eh? Say what?

Of course he was referring to a United States military presence all over the world. And at this I shake my head. Why is my tax dollars being spent in Timbuktu? Why are we building bridges, bases and helping the Saudi’s fight their wars?

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants America to fight a war with Iran. To this end he is very active in providing financial enticements (bribes) to leading American Senators and Congressmen to support yet another military action, only this time in Iran.

Don’t the Saudi Arabians have enough money?

Why do WE have to do it? Why can’t THEY deal with their own issues?

Some background

To best understand what this question and the answers that it garners, we need to have a little background first.

Most non-Americans would be absolutely surprised to discover that the bulk of Americans think that the world is one big garbage dump, and only America is a half-way decent place to live. With this belief, it makes sense that America spread “American-style democracy” all over the world. No matter what the cost.

And so we do. Oh, yeah…

Linda J. Bilmes and Michael D. Intriligator, ask in a recent paper, “How many wars is the US fighting today?”

 Today US military operations are involved in scores of countries across all the five continents. The US military is the world’s largest landlord, with significant military facilities in nations around the world, and with a significant presence in Bahrain, Djibouti,Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Kyrgyzstan, in addition to long-established bases in Germany, Japan, South Korea, Italy, and the UK.  Some of these are vast, such as the Al Udeid Air Force Base in Qatar, the forward headquarters of the United States Central Command, which has recently been expanded to accommodate up to 10,000 troops and 120 aircraft.

 Citing a page at US Central Command’s (CENTCOM) website, they highlight the “areas of responsibility” publicly listed:

 The US Central Command (CENTCOM) is active in 20 countries across the Middle Eastern region, and is actively ramping-up military training, counterterrorism programs, logistical support, and funding to the military in various nations. At this point, the US has some kind of military presence in Afghanistan, Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, U.A.E., Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

 US Africa Command (AFRICOM), according to the paper, “supports military-to-military relationships with 54 African nations.”

 [Gosztola points out that the U.S. military is also conducting operations of one kind or another in Syrian, Jordan, South Sudan, Kosovo, Libya, Yemen, the Congo, Uganda, Mali, Niger and other countries.]

 Altogether, that makes 74 nations where the US is fighting or “helping” some force in some proxy struggle that has been deemed beneficial by the nation’s masters of war.

-U.S. Currently Fighting 74 Different Wars … That It Will Publicly Admit

Good thing that we are in Turkmenistan. I can see how a farmer in Iowa would trudge down to his Congressman, and demand (by pounding on the desk) that his son goes and fights “the good cause” way off there. Just like you and your relatives have. Just like everyone in Ohio, Kentucky, and Illinois have. </sarcasm>

By the way… where is Turkmenistan? Do you even bloody know?

But those are just the public operations; the public stuff that you might be able to find in a newspaper or two. However, there are many, many secret and covert operations all over the globe, don’t you know.

Beyond that, there are Special Operations forces in countries. Jeremy Scahill in Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield, writes, “By mid-2010, the Obama administration had increased the presence of Special Operations forces from sixty countries to seventy-five countries.
 
 Scahill also reports, based on his own “well-placed special operations sources”:

 …[A]mong the countries where [Joint Special Operations Command] teams had been deployed under the Obama administration were: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay, Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Baluchistan) and the Philippines. These teams also at times deployed in Turkey, Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC was also supporting US Drug Enforcement Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico…

Ah, yes. His statement stuck to me. I mean, it really did. I thought, you see, that that bunch of ignorance pretty much died off during the Bush years. So I was really taken back to have it repeated again, to my face.

I guess he is just fine throwing away money that is Constitutionally intended to be in our wallets. Hey! Some people don’t care what happens to the money once it is removed from their wallet. They justify it.

Obama and your money.
Obama was very liberal with the tax monies, as well as the money not yet collected. He gave it away like party favors at a drunk frat party.

However, I for one, do.

It affects MY quality of life. It affects my family. It affects what I do, how I eat, and my general health.

Chart of savings rate.
Hey! Dear reader, how much do you manage to save out of each paycheck every month? Not only that, but you and your family (with both working) how much are you able to save? You cannot. That is because of taxes, and you know what? Most of our tax money goes in to wars. War. Endless, endless wars…!

And no amount of bafflegab is going to change that.

Bafflegab.
Feminist bafflegab.

America is not supposed to be like this.

You have to understand that America, as founded, was the most amazing nation ever to grace this good earth. There are many reasons for this, but nothing can say it better than this…

  America's founders embraced a previously unheard-of  political philosophy which held that people are "...endowed BY THEIR  CREATOR with certain unalienable rights.." This was the statement  of guiding principle for the new nation, and, as such, had to be  translated into a concrete charter for government. The Constitution of  The United States of America became that charter. 

  Other forms of government, past and present, rely on the state as the  grantor of human rights. America's founders, however, believed that a  government made up of imperfect people exercising power over other  people should possess limited powers. Through their Constitution, they  wished to "secure the blessings of liberty" for themselves and for  posterity by limiting the powers of government. Through it, they  delegated to government only those rights they wanted it to have,  holding to themselves all powers not delegated by the Constitution. They  even provided the means for controlling those powers they had granted  to government. 

 This was the unique American idea.  Many problems we face today result from a departure from this basic  con­cept. Gradually, other "ideas" have influenced legislation which has  reversed the roles and given government greater and greater power over  individuals. Early generations of Americans pledged their lives to the  cause of in­dividual freedom and limited government and warned, over and  over again, that eternal vigilance would be required to preserve that  freedom for posterity.  

-Footnote: "Our Ageless Constitution," W.  David Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Editors (Asheboro, NC, W. David  Stedman Associates, 1987) Part III:  ISBN 0-937047-01-5 

You see, America today in no way resembles what our Constitution says it is supposed to be. It has turned in to a huge enormous monstrosity.

"Allow me, just now old enough to  apprehend the freak show for what it is, to put something radical to my  conservative forbearers: 

Little about the present state of American life is worth conserving. Nothing of what the Founders envisioned remains."

-Andrea Yung 

We Americans, living in this mess, move along with the flow and ebb of the political and social winds. Often making the most absurd statements, and rationalizations. Thus this fellow that I was chatting with.

He then went on to say that “We need to police the world. We need to spread democracy... ...the rest of the world is one big shit-hole, seriously.” And then asked me, “Have you ever seen the Mexican side of the border?

American houses in the suburbs.
America is very beautiful once you leave many of the urban areas. The sky is often awesome, the roads are wide and often clear of traffic. Many of the houses are large and spacious. When compared to other nations, the United States appears to be (hands down) the most desirable place to live. So it is natural to assume every other place is a hell-hole.

Now this is coming from a guy who doesn’t even has a passport, has never tried to get a visa, and his only experience outside the borders of our country was by watching reruns of Baywatch.

Ah. that old “no one has it better than us Americans” argument. We are so fortunate. Eh. Well, it plays well in Peoria. And it’s a good conversation stopper. As we, as Americans, have all seen the “Save the Children” commercials. That money-generating venture brought images of poverty into the living-rooms of Americans for decades.

So the argument seems to have some validity.

Seems to.

Being older with some experiences…

But, you know, I am from a different generation. I grew up in the 1970’s, and at that time between all the smoking blue haze we came to appreciate the strengths of the American system. We did so cranking Jimmi Hendrix, Robin Trower, Yes, Jefro Tull, Alice Cooper, Boston, Manfred Mann, Traffic, Uriah Heep and Three Dog Night.

"I'd love to change the world... but I don't know what to do.
That 70s show.
That 70s show was a television comedy that sort of reflected what it was like living and growing up in the 1970’s.

And…

We knew, since the Vietnam war was still fresh in our minds, that America should be for Americans. We did not need to be off throwing money, and wasting lives in some off-the-beaten track for some globalist oligarch.

We knew that America was wasting money in Vietnam. We knew that people were dying there, and many of them were friends, or relatives. We knew that what ever benefit would come of that war, none of us would ever see that benefit. 

We knew that the war was just pissing away American resources.
Scene from Vietnam.
Americans in Vietnam. We fought and died there for “democracy”. When the truth was that it was an effort with the wealthiest in America to game the situation for their very own personal advantage.

We, almost my entire generation, felt betrayed by those older than us. Those who ended up throwing away lives in far off rice paddy’s, and making laws against marijuana that everyone was obviously breaking. What was the matter with these people? We asked.

Why can’t they just let us be? Why do they have to take too much of our money, regulate too much of our lives, and go off fighting wars that are too far away? Why?

The 1980's meme.
Things were so different the. We weren’t expected to apologize for being born. We weren’t ashamed of our nation. We were American gosh darn it!

Well, that was only the tip of the iceberg.

A few more years passed. Ronald Reagan did put the breaks down to some degree, but he made some other blunders that (sad to say, eventually) set the stage for what was to come…

Geoprge Bush Senior
President Bush Senior spent most of his Presidency trying to undo the good works of Ronald Reagan. In many ways he was very successful.

First, was President Gerald Ford Bush (Senior) who made it his life’s work to undo “Reaganomics”, and implement The New Global Order. Then came a succession of socialist criminals, such as Clinton, Bush Jr and finally Obama.

Each one, in their own way, contributed to the state of affairs that America is enduring today. Each one played a role. Each one created the situation leading to all the complaints that we Americans have about “our” government.

They snipped the brake-lines to the American Constitutional government, and it has been in free-fall ever since.

Free-fall.

Ahhhhhhhhhh.

Those of us, still trapped in a rapidly decaying world try to grasp for straws trying to make out some sense of reason to the hordes of pink-haired ignorance, the black-thugs of Antifa and the BLM that seem to want to put average Americans in concentration camps.

So we listen to the news. Many, well meaning of course, have no idea just how tainted it really is. They believe the news.

They believe what it says.

The mainstream media news manipulates us.

They believe CNN when they announce that there are spontaneous protests all over the nation to ban plastic straws.

They believe MSNBC when they announce that President Donald Trump is a full Communist spy on the payroll out of Russia (oh and he likes to pee on bed sheets, too). And they believe FOX when they say that our military isn’t big enough and another “few” trillion dollars would be all that is needed to make the world whole again.

The most dangerous lies are the ones that you WANT to believe. Which is why FOX is just as dangerous as CNN. They both lie. It's just that they focus on different target audiences.

You maybe should open up a window or two and let some fresh air get inside your house. You’ve been cooped up way too long. Maybe since when the Partridge Family, or the Rat Patrol was on television, me thinks.

The world has changed, bub.

Shanghai city at dusk.
Beautiful shanghai at dusk showing the Huangpu river and financial district skyline in sunset. The fellow that I was talking to considered this city, Shanghai to be a “Hell hole” worthy of fighting to “free those imprisoned by the evil communists”.

While you have been sitting there reading American news, American politics, American music, and viewing American-centrist shows, the rest of the world has moved on.

We, as Americans have been boxed in by wealthy and powerful forces. Their objective is for them to achieve “ultimate wealth and power”. As such, they are an evil oligarchy, and they control you, the reader, through media lies, and intentional omissions of news.

Some parts of America has been completely engulfed by this poison. You can see it. It’s not pretty.

Detroit on a nice day.
Modern Detroit today. At one time Detroit was the automobile capital of the world. It produced products like no other. But successive generations of leadership decided to focus their energies elsewhere, and Detroit fell onto bad times. This is not the only place where this has happened. We have the “rust belt” in the Midwest, and of course, we all know about the crime riddled Seaboard cities.

Luckily, many parts of America has been spared. There are really very nice areas that have not been polluted by this blight. But the dark days are fast approaching.

Cleveland, Oho.
Beautiful Cleveland, Ohio. This small Mid-West city is typical of what America and is is populated by people that it represents. While there is a major blight in most progressive liberal areas, the rural and smaller cities has so far been spared the progressive influence.

But, why has this blight effected the USA in the first place?

While Bush had the United States fighting in the deserts of Africa, the rest of the world were planting trees, building malls, and rapid mass transit.

While Bush was giving the dictator of some unpronounceable tiny county, trillions of dollars to build up THEIR infrastructure, and build THEIR hospitals, our infrastructure was allowed to decay and fall apart. And when we complained about it, they came after us. Accusing us of tax evasion, or sexual deviance.

While Obama was working on “diversity initiatives” all over the Untied States, the rest of the world were improving their hospitals. While we Americans were being told by Obama to pay more in taxes, to tighten our belts, the rest of the world were having their tax burdens eased, and living under substantially improved lifestyles.

Yes, let me be the first person to tell you, the reader this, while we have been spending bundles and bundles of money in places that you cannot find on a map, the rest of the world has been getting wealthier, better, stronger, and healthier.

Kanye West – Stronger

No longer does the rest of the world look like a “Save the Children” commercial. For the most part, it tends to look like an upscale suburb of Chicago.

“In terms of financial cost, the numbers are staggering. Afghanistan alone has cost a trillion dollars. Just think what we might have accomplished at home if that money had been spent on education, job training, medical research, infrastructure improvements, water purification and sanitation. You can add to this list. It’s all important, but taking a backseat to our military funding.” 

-Endless war is bad for America
Scene from idiocracity.
Scene from the Science Fiction comedy called Idiocracity. It traces the dumbing down of the average American and the resulting effect that it has on society.

So, here’s the slap in the face for you all.

Laugh-In is no longer broadcast on network television, Hugh Hefner is dead, and Playboy magazine is no longer published like it used to be. No one wears “Earth Shoes” anymore, and “love beads” are worn as often as the waitress tells you that your elephant bell-bottom jeans are “groovy”.

Times have changed. The rest of the world has moved on.

The rest of the world has moved on, and I believe that we need to pay attention to what is going on. We need to open our eyes, look around, ask questions and just listen.

  • We need to look at the world around us.
  • The American mainstream media has failed us.
  • Politicized media, from both sides of the spectrum lie and tell partial truths.
  • There are no “experts” that have all the answers. They are all frauds.

You might need to visit Australia, Germany, Poland, or Thailand. Americans, listen up, the rest of the world does NOT have it worse than America. They have it differently, true.

But, worse… I don’t think so.

The rest of the world.
The rest of the world could care less about what is going on in the USA. They don’t know what the IRS, who the NSA is, and why the FDA is important. Though, they do have a pretty good idea about the CIA, LOL.

I’m in China, so we are gonna talk about China.

If I were in Australia, I’d talk about that absolutely amazing nation. Indeed, those Aussies have no idea how fortunate they are. Australia is an amazing place. It really, really is. From Kings Cross to Brisbane, it’s awesome from the top to the bottom, and I cannot find anything wrong with it at all.

Brisbane, Australia.
Beautiful Brisbane, Australia. Australia is a land of wonderful weather, beautiful girls and impressive scenery. Also, you should try their prawns. They are amazing!

And you know, what? The same is true about some other places, like New Zealand. Those Kiwi’s have it good too. I’ll tell you what. The thing is that they don’t go strutting around like a peacock, or like a big cock that is so sure of himself proclaiming “New Zealand is the best!”. They know they are good, and decent. They know that.

Milford Sound in New Zealand.
Milford sound in New Zealand. Queenstown is known to be the adventure capital of New Zealand, and actually, the world! However, in case you’ve been living under a rock, New Zealand’s beauty is the true draw.

Thailand is in a class by itself and I won’t spend too much time on all the great fun that can be had there. You just need to go out, and experience it yourself. After all, where else in the world will all the pretty ladies call you a “handsome man”, eh?

Thailand fun.
Getting ready to have some fun in Thailand. It the land of great food, amazing natures, and many, many smiles. This is a photo of a foreigner getting some money out of an ATM. If you are frugal, you will need to husband your money carefully, as Thailand has an enormous tourist industry, and you will need to be careful or else watch your money disappear before your eyes.

Canada has it’s charms, I’ll tell you what. But, it seems too much like a sister-brother nation to the United States. They seem to want to copy whatever progressive pronouncements come out of liberal academia. I know, I know, they speak French, and have politics more in like with the UK than anything resembling America, but it’s a very beautiful nation with some outstanding parks and scenery. Not to mention, just great people.

Still, still, it’s a gorgeous place, with some great fishing. If you ever get a chance to go fishing in Canada go do it. You will not be sorry. Just remember to take some bug-repellent. You will need two or three gallons of it.

Enormous mosquitoes.
Watch out! One of the signs features a large mosquito carrying someone away. Well, maybe they don’t get that big, but you’ve got to be well equipped.

Well, I’m in China. So I am gonna talk about China.

I’m not gonna narrate too much. Just a little wee bit. It will help you, the reader, better understand the context of what is going on in the videos, and that should lead to a better understanding of what you are witnessing. After all, watching Cirque du Soleil without any context would leave anyone confused and disoriented.

So, I’ll just let the micro-videos speak for themselves. You all can come to whatever conclusion you come to. That way the ignorant can’t blame me for “brainwashing” you, the reader.

As they often tend to do.

Banner Splash for Idiocracity.

The following videos describe the China that exists today, and not the “Save the Children” image so rampantly promoted in American media on both sides of the political spectrum. As we used to say in the industry “don’t shoot the messenger”.

They are fun videos. I hope you enjoy them.

Also, please keep in mind that the purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

This is a Paleo-conservative response to the hordes of Neocons that argue in favor of global armageddon.

This is what China is. (Video 1)

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

It is rare for a single company to make everything for their products. They buy screws from a screw manufacturer, they get rubber parts from a rubber manufacturer, and get glass from a glass manufacturer. Over the last two decades a system has developed where a company can retain control of it's products, but utilize cheap off-shore labor.

While the rest of the world was “off shoring” their products, China was learning, acquiring, and building. While the rich oligarchy in the USA and Europe were taking their enormous profits and investing in political power, liberal initiatives, and spending the money on lavish entertainments, China was working hard and studying.

It’s paying off.

Star Trek TOS
Scene from the television show “Star Trek”. TOS season 2. It pictured a world where America adopted the way that Rome ruled the world only doing so contemporaneously. I wonder, would Americans recognize the similarities between Ancient Rome and modern Washington DC?

While all this has been going on, some curious trends started to manifest.

Today, many manufacturers all over the world implement “supply-chain management”, which means (in layman’s terms) that they farm out critical sub-assemblies, and parts to other factories in other nations where the manufacturing costs are low. As such, they are able keep their core factories and manufacturing facilities and maintain their local labor rates, social benefits, and environmental controls, but only conduct final manufacture of components.

We know about this every time we call a help line that gets rerouted to India, or when we discover that it will take a month or longer to get a spare part for our American made product.

Many companies do this. Many, that you, the reader, have no idea has so many off-shored components and assemblies. Hey! Surprise!

And now for my first video…

China is about selecting the interior color scheme in your car…

…while you are driving it.

Yup. Bentley. Made in England with first-tier Chinese suppliers.

I really love Bentleys. I love everything about them. The primary assembly plant is in Crewe, England. They do a lot of supply-chain management and most of it is with Chinese and local suppliers. One of the things that I admire about Bentley is how they installed solar panels over their parking lot. How’s that for innovation, as well as keeping the parked car cool and out of the hot sun?

Bentley Parking lot.
Bentley parking lot, all protected from the sun with solar panels.

The point of this is simple. While almost every American company is outsourcing products, parts, and sub-assemblies to China, they are not alone. EVERY developed nation is doing this. America is not the only nation that out sources.

Getting close to nature – Camping Chinese style. (Video 2)

People are people everywhere. We like to eat, talk, and play with our friends. We like to fish, play sports, and just have a good time.

China is about having fun with your friends. Here we talk about camping in the wilds “Chinese style”.

Vintage camping illustration in the USA.
I think that everyone should experience camping with friends and family. In fact, it is the core of some of my greatest memories. Though, for me, putting a tent up often meant getting rained upon. Sigh.

Notice that there are a couple of things that I would like to point out to the reader to take note of and observe.

  • It is done as a group. The Chinese find strength in friendships. In America, it’s every man for himself, lone-wolf style. So camping in the USA is usually in small groups of two to four people. Camping in China is often a much larger communal experience.
  • There are different activities to meet the different styles and pleasures of the individuals. Some gals just want to sit at the table, drink wine and watch the guys play. Some want to play around and have a good time, while others want to cook and play some sports. What ever makes your boat float, I say.
  • Tents are there for passing out, sex, and naps, not to mention spending the night. They are usually the first thing to go up, and the last thing to take down. They serve as the anchor to the campground or camping area. Not the fire-pit, which would be more common in the USA.
  • They use portable tables, and stoves. It is rare to have open fires in China.

The point of this is that people all over the globe enjoy themselves. They fish. They eat. They get drunk, fall in love, and have a great time. (Maybe not in that exact order.) The rest of the world is not a Brazilian garbage dump or a smog filled desert. It’s not.

New, big and modern. (Video 3)

With two decades of rapid advancement, it should come as no surprise that antiquated infrastructure would be replaced, and new systems put in place. What is surprising is the pace, and the extent at which is is done. The speed, pace, and quantity of new structures is unlike anything seen int he United States.

China is about miles and miles of big, brand new, impressive skyscrapers, modern efficient public transportation, and fun night light shows.

This is not confined to the first top level cities such as Beijing and Shanghai. It permeates the entire Chinese society. It is everywhere. China was not squandering it’s resources fighting eight wars all over the globe, nor policing the Muslim world. They were solving their own domestic issues.

It is evident if you take a gander. Here’s a small town in China. Yes… believe it or not 4 million people is a town in China.

"It's all Chinese propaganda from behind the red-firewall. He's gone full Chicom. All you need to know is to check out his other postings. You shouldn't read or listen to anything he says."

-(Name removed by request)

The point of this is that the money wasted on wars against primitive people in crude terrain for appease the oligarchy could be used on Americans. It could be used on Americans to improve the lives of Americans. Or at the very least to curb the out of control devaluation of the US dollar.

China is all about the party. (Video 4)

Chinese culture is traditional conservative. They follow the model that has been in place in China for 5000 years. They tried the progressive liberal Marxist technique under Mr. Mao and it darn near exterminated 30 million people. Since the 1970's they have implemented a new type of government. They call it "Socialist with Chinese Characteristics". 

What it is, using American vernacular, is a Conservative Dictatorship following Reaganomics, and a "Make China Great Today" philosophy.

Being conservative, and traditional, drinking alcohol is part of the culture. All those attempts to cub “vices” stems from progressive and liberal schools of thought.

VIntage Hamms beer advertisement
In past in America, people could drink and smoke and party to the wee hours of the night. This all started to change when progressive liberal values began to “improve” American life, society and culture. One of the first things that they tried to do was ban drinking. It failed, so they started to tax it. Then came smoking. Then came all sorts of restrictions on various other vices. Don’t let the progressive democrat narrative of freedom to “get high” fool you. They only want to control you, and the most effective way is to control access to vices.

If you talk to someone who says that they visited China, but they cannot tell you about the KTV experience, they are either lying or lived a very exclusive life. You know, how Hillary Clinton mingles with the people in Walmart. The Chinese party scene is not like what you have in the United States, where a certain percentage of the population, maybe 20-40% might want to go out and drink and dance. In China, it is ingrained in the Chinese culture.

Everyone, to one extent or the other, parties.

Friends, family and business associates will naturally invite you to dinner and drinks, and if they and you are worthy of friendship, a KTV. If you are not worthy of such an experience then you are, and will forever be, an outsider.

Thus one way that you can determine just how knowledgeable a "Chinese expert" is in the understandings of China, Chinese people, and Chinese culture, is to ask them about their experiences drinking, singing, and hanging out with the Chinese people on a personal basis. 

The more experiences they have, the more visceral their understanding is of the Chinese sphere.

China is about going out to the clubs or the KTV’s with tons of pretty girls and getting drunk to the gills…

Most people around the world party and have a great time. This would continue whether or not Americans burn money in wars or not. However, the kinds of parties that you have and the extent of your enjoyment at them are a function of the value of your currency. By devaluing the USD through constant fiscal mismanagement, and endless wars most Americans have to settle for the cheaper kinds of entertainment. It’s beer and Doritos instead of steaks and galas.

China is ENORMOUS. (Video 5)

China is an enormous nation, about the same size as the USA, but with a billion more people.

Yes it is. In fact, it is geographically similar to the size of the United States. That means that it is enormous.

United States is around the same size as China. China is approximately 9,596,960 sq km, while United States is approximately 9,833,517 sq km. Meanwhile, the population of China is ~1 billion people (1 billion fewer people live in United States).

Size of United States compared to China - MyLifeElsewhere 
Comparison between two nations.
A size comparison between the United States and China. They are roughly the same size. Though, I would tend to say that while China has more mountains, the USA has a longer coastline. Also there is a greater difference from the one end of the nation to the other.

China is about amazing parks, scenery that seems like it came from a science fiction movie, and strange and exotic wildlife…

"These videos that you post aren't from China. They are actually from parks in America. You should stop being so deceptive."

-Gonzoberry

The size of the nation does not change whether it is involved in wars or not. However, the quality of the life inside that nation is a function of the amount of money the government spends on it. China has been spending billions of dollars improving China, the infrastructure and the lives of it’s people. America has been squandering it in Yemen, Libya, and Afghanistan, to name of few places.

Diverse range of cultural stratification. (Video 6)

All nations are culturally stratified to one degree or the other. China is no exception. However, the rapid rate of growth over the last two decades has created a melting-pot of social classes, and they all mingle together.

America is stratified. There are the oligarchy that lives in their exclusive areas, and the “upper middle class” which are now almost entirely working for the government, and the rest of us. We are further segregated in where we live. There are the urban liberals, and the rural conservatives, and it is quite a rare thing to fall outside those two groupings.

In China there is a mish-mash of cultures, and social stratification. This can manifest in different ways depending where you are.

China is about getting a $1 haircut on the street…

Social stratification arises through all cultures. The best way to manage it is to provide services based on merit, and ability. The worst way is to provide services based on what group or “tribe” you are a member of, or what your gender is, or some other characteristic based on demographics. China provides services based on merit, and thus the society is homogenized. India and America provides services based on other concerns, and that leads to dangerous social stratification.

Playing with your dog. (Video 7)

Life is about living. have a good time and enjoy yourself. Why not? Eh?

And China is about going for a ride with your dog…

Every nation has people enjoying their time with their pets. This includes China. Where most of China enjoys playing with their beloved dogs. They don’t eat them (at least 99.95% doesn’t). One of the things that aides social stratification is the creation of an “us” vs. “them” mentality. One side demonizes another, and makes them seem inhuman, cruel and evil. Thus the reason for the last five decades of anti-Chinese propaganda originating out of the liberal media outlets in the United States.

Yes, China is many many things.

While America is willing to pour trillions of (taxpayer) dollars into third-world shit-holes all over the globe, China has a different plan. China invests the money for China. In China, it is “Make China First Today”.

In America, you have a percentage of the population that also see the value in this. They voted for Donald Trump, and they wear MAGA hats, which is pretty much an Americanized version of the Chinese slogan.

Here’s to all those people in America that believe that America should be great again, and stand for something.

Drew Carey show cheers with beer.
Here’s to all those people in America that believe that America should be great again, and stand for something. Here’s to a nation that puts God before everything else, and accepts the premise and the promise that Rights are ordained by God, and NOT by man. Here’s to all the people who have fought for and died for this belief.

And…

Looking that the world as it is, first hand, both the good and the bad, gives you a better perspective on your own life. There are good and bad things about the USA, just like there are good and bad things about China.

Continued…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next part of this post which covers more videos and further commentary about China.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 14)

Let’s continue on exploring China from the point of view of odd, strange and different from that of the “West”.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Chinese Malls

Chinese malls are everywhere, and they tend to be enormous. A mall is generally a sign of a healthy and functioning middle class. Before China kicked out the progressive liberal communists, there just weren’t any malls in China at all. Then, when Mr. Deng started to introduce Reaganomics (though under a Chinese-friendly name), the economy flourished, and malls started to pop up everywhere.

Here’s a typical mall. I think this one is in Hong Kong, if I am not mistaken.

Youngsters performing

I personally love this video. It shows some young drummers performing in front of an audience. It’s pretty cool.

Education for the children

In China, every spare moment that a child has seems to be packed into learning. This can be exhausting, and many children want to play some computer games to escape from “the grind”. You cannot blame them, can you?

Well, a number of Chinese parents figure that if you want to play a computer game, how about one where you can actually learn something. Thus, there is a market for business simulation games. This is a small, but growing niche, where you can become a farmer and eventually become a real estate tycoon. Or maybe try your luck moving a factory making widgets into a global enterprise. These simulations help that.

Here, a young elementary student can relax by running a farm and trying to make a profit…

RV Rental

In China you can buy, or rent recreational vehicles. You can do so just like it is done in the USA. Here’s what it looks like…

Chinese Roads

As I have alluded to previously, the Chinese don’t waste their time going up and down hills. They just build over them, and if there is a mountain in the way, they just plow straight through it. They do not mess around.

China is a nation with an enormous population.

Never forget that, eh? There was a reason why China instituted limits on the number of children that you can have. While they have removed this limitation, many Chinese has opted not to have too many children as they are unwilling to take on the increased tax burden.

And that is it. I hope that you enjoyed this posting of the strange and unusual life of China as compared to America.

Thank you for visiting. I hope that you enjoyed this post and maybe learned something new in the process. Have a wonderful rest of the day!

And, may your days and nights be filled with happiness.

Thank you.

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 13)

Here we continue with our various videos of life in China, and how strange it must appear to a foreigner.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Inside a bullet train

Bullet trains are all over China. There is an enormous network of them. They are very comfortable to ride in, and their cost is reasonable.

I looked at various sites on the internet, and it’s a hoot how everyone tries to justify the superiority of Amtrak compared to China’s bullet trains. They imply that China’s bullet trains are nothing to be proud of.

It’s funny, but sad too. You know, the first step in recognizing you have a problem is to face up to it, and announce that you have a problem. (12 step program for those of you who don’t know the reference.)

They do one on one comparisons and come to the conclusion that they are similar. What a laugh. The trains are similar. How can you possibly come to that conclusion?

The one article (linked above) starts off straight forward enough…

Comparision of China's bullet train to amtrack.

But then it starts to show a bunch of photos how they are really just pretty similar, aside from the price, and speed. As if the train stations are identical. (Have you been to an Amtrak train station lately? Talk about a run-down 1960’s era ghetto.)

Really?

Here’s a screen capture from the article listed above.

amtrack comparison 1
In the comparison they say that the two systems are pretty much the same. After all, it is the politically correct thing to say. Right?

What’s what the article says. Then, it shows this following picture.

Is that the only difference?
Is that the only difference? Really? Are you so dumb founded blind in political correctness not to notice the differences right in front of your face?

In China, the stewardesses are all female. They are all attractive, and rated in beauty, physical appearance, and weight. They are all under 35 years of age.They are trained to be demure and act very respectfully.

In America on Amtrak, there are no age, appearance, weight or gender requirements. The attendants can be polite or not, fat or not, ugly or not, burly or not. In the progressive reality that is America today that is the reality. But don’t deny what is right in front of your eyes just for the sake of political correctness.

This is what the interior of one looks like…

And here’s the view outside…

Oh, and while I am at it, here is what the over all appearance and image that the Chinese bullet trains have in China and around the world.

In contrast Amtrak is viewed as sluggish, antiquated, and brutish. Check out the video and then go ride on Amtrak to see what I am talking about.

Train Stations

Here’s a quick comparison in train stations.

First, we check out Amtrak’s stations. The photo below is a historical station known as Sandpoint. Now, don’t get the wrong idea.

I do happen to love history and American rail has had so many absolutely awesome train stations. What about the one on Allegheny avenue in Pittsburgh, or the massive complex in Detroit? Ah, but they are all gone now.

American rail.
American train station – Sandpoint station. This is typical of what remains in the United States for railroad stations for passengers.

All that remains are little quonset hut kind of affairs. You know the kind used to give the impression of progressive advancement by tearing down the old. Sad.

Now, let’s look at the train stations that you would encounter were you to board a train in China. This is from the 3nd tier city Tianjin. It’s third tier, ya all! It’s just a little Po-dunk city.

Chinese train station.
Chinese train station in Tianjin, China. It is new. Well taken cared for, and well maintained. There are no beggars and the floors are so clean that you could eat off them.
China high speed rail.
Chinese high-speed rail. Look at all those bullet trains. How many billions and billions of dollars was spent for the California high-speed rail, and what? Only 15 miles were completed, and not one single train was fabricated? What a waste. America is much better than that.

Ask yourself how, and why can China do this, but much bigger, and better USA cannot? Maybe fighting eight simultaneous wars and spending 65% of welfare benefits on illegal aliens has something to do with it. Eh?

Maybe. But I also like to think that part of it is because China is a meritocracy.

America has so much to be proud of, yet we have let our achievements grow fallow, and our leadership become corrupt. We, our parents, and our grandparents are all responsible for the sad, sad state of affairs in America today.

Pittsburgh train station.
Pennsylvania Railroad Station Pittsburgh

How bridges are made in China

Once you visit China, you will notice that everything seems to be above the ground. All the highways seem to go over the houses and through the mountains. This differs from the United states, where the roads must curve around and get permissions to build and put roads in. Not so in China.

They just build over everything. It’s sort of like this…

Classes and testing in China

Classes in such a populous nation as China can get to be pretty enormous. The same is true for tests and testing. Here is sort of what it can look like…

Uses for a Harley-Davidson Motorcycle

The Chinese people do tend to be a bit innovative. This is especially true in the rural countryside. Here we see how an old Harley is being utilized on the farm, as it were.

And that is about it for now. Let’s continue with our exploration further, shall we…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next post which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 12)

Here we continue with our various videos of life in China, and how strange it must appear to a foreigner. Here, we spend a little bit of time chatting about families and relationships.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

A Boy’s love for his mother

Here is a cute video of a boy giving his mother a bouquet of flowers. It’s not really crazy, but it is sure enough, so darn cute. I don’t know if people still do this back in the States, you know, with all that political correctness and other related nonsense. A friend told me that he got in “hot water” when he sent some flowers to a girlfriend at work at a different company.

It was deemed “sexist”, and “inflammatory” by the “diversity director” in control of HR there.

Well, I don’t know much about that. What I do know is that flowers and signs of affection are pretty common in the rest of the world. Here is a boy giving his mother some flowers.

Caring for grandparents.

In China, the families stick together. As a traditional nation, they maintain a conservative household, and at that, it tends to be multi-generational. However, there are many times when one sibling will help out another. Here we have a grandchild visiting a grandmother in her house. She is taking care of her.

It’s what conservative families do.

They do not outsource the responsibilities to a retirement home, or chuck them away for the government to deal with. That is the liberal progressive way of doing things.

Celebrating the various festivals

China has many festivals. What people do not know is that they also celebrate other festivals. Heck! Any reason to party and have a great time, I say.

They celebrate Christmas with a passion that is unobtainable in the Untied States today.

They celebrate the Thailand water festival known as Songkran. Here we can see them enjoying it. (Personally, my wife hate’s this festival, and hides inside as everyone is trying to get you wet.)

Non-monetary work bonuses

The Chinese, for the most part, reward their employees by food, drink and cash. The more successful the company, and the harder the effort, the more cash that is bestowed upon the person. Of course there are other ways of rewarding a high performer.

No, I’m not talking about a pen that says “success if a way of life”, or a poster of a cat hanging onto some drapes and the words “hang in there”. I am talking about other rewards. Rewards of significant value.

Mary Kaye, the American cosmetic company, buys pink Cadillacs for their top performers. That is truly laudable. Well, other Chinese companies do the same kind of things.

Here we see gold being given to some high performers in a Chinese female-based company. This is not the “fake” gold that you get in the USA. You know, the “alloy” of gold which is only 0.0005% gold. This stuff is 100% gold. And, no, contrary to the narrative from the big-gold industry in the states, the gold is stable enough not to require an alloy.

You know what?

If Chinese companies can treat their workers with respect, provide them bonuses in cold hard cash, and reward them with solid gold adornments, what’s stopping American companies from doing the same? Could it be greed? Or, maybe they don’t view anyone under their class to be worthy of reward?

Hum?

Moving on to the next part of this multi-part post about China…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next post which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 10)

Here we continue our exploration of the various amusing and strange parts of China that are quite amazing to Westerners. Please enjoy.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

The cool KTV environment

The KTV is a place to enjoy yourself. There are many different types, from KTV’s for children, to families, to friends, to businessmen. It consists, basically, of a rental room that is decked out for a party.

KTV’s are often quite elaborate, and ornate. With flashy colors and patterns being the norm. Here is one with a LCD flooring that is becoming quite popular all over China.

Robotic Luggage

Yup, it was only a matter of time don’t ya know. You have robotic self-driving cars, and robotic lawnmowers. Why not robotic luggage. Well, you are starting to see this in Chinese Airports. Crazy huh?

Not in the USA, though. I would imagine the Democrats would try to ban them for one reason or the other. Oh, and don’t get on my grill about that fact either. They love to ban things. They are first and foremost busybodies of the highest order. (See link below. It opens up into a separate tab.)

Link

Anyways, check out this robotic luggage that you can see in China…

Night Light Shows

All over China, and most especially in the big cities, structures are made to appeal to the people living there. It’s an initiative from Beijing that mandates that the purpose of government is to provide for the social well being of the people. Thus you have some pretty spectacular light displays at night.

Here’s a bridge. It’s pretty typical.

Here’s some buildings. This is in Shenzhen.

Here is Shenzhen again. Only please kindly take note of that stuff moving about in the sky. The stuff in the sky are drones that fly in formation and are lit up by computerized sequence at specific times.

Statues to the Chinese Past

The Chinese honor their past and erect monuments to keep the memories alive. Those progressive SJW who tried to erase history, tear down the statues, and take over the government have all been arrested and are in reeducation camps to cure their illness.

Here is a particularly magnificent statue. I believe that it is Sun Tzu.

Aside from his legacy as the author of The Art of War, Sun Tzu is revered in Chinese and East Asian culture as a legendary historical and military figure. His birth name was Sun Wu, and he was known outside of his family by his courtesy name Changqing. 

This general was pretty awesome. He turned fighting into an art. He expanded what could be considered warfare and considered actual fighting to be evidence of failure.

He wrote, “In war, then, let your great object be victory, not lengthy campaigns. Thus it may be known that the leader of armies is the arbiter of the people’s fate, the man on whom it depends whether the nation shall be in peace or in peril” (2.19-20).

Sun-Tzu had no patience with the protracted games generals seemed to enjoy playing with each other. Once hostilities had erupted, one’s priority was to defeat the enemy, not indulge oneself in chivalry which could only prolong the conflict and cost more lives.

Water Slide

The Chinese have water parks just like we have in the Untied States. Only they tend to design them differently. They like to incorporate natural elements, trees, and flowers to provide a more impressive aesthetic.

Drinking Culture

China is a nation with a strong social structure.

I am constantly reminded of this when an American friend comes to visit me in China, and we sit down for dinner and drinks. An American might have one glass of wine or one bottle of beer. A Chinese person might chug two or three bottles of wine, or five or six cases of beer. The difference between the two cultures are that stark.

And of course, the American won’t smoke, and will actually be a bit startled that I would light up at the dinner table inside a public restaurant. A public restaurant of all places! “Have I no shame?” they wonder. It just blow their minds!

  • Possessing a lighter that can generate fire!
  • Smoking the terrible tobacco.
  • Drinking more than a socially approved quantity of alcohol.
  • Bringing “outside” alcohol into a restaurant.
  • Allowing my dog to join us inside the restaurant.
  • Telling the waiter how to cook our food.

That’s just how conditioned Americans have become to living in a progressive prison camp. The idea of doing anything outside what is “normal and expected” is like a harsh slap in the face to them.

Do you want to see just how conditioned Americans have become?

Go to a Starbucks. Watch what happens when they order a coffee or what ever Starbucks passes for coffee these days. The barista will get a paper cup, write a name on it, and set the order moving forward.

Starbucks coffee
Your typical Starbucks coffee as presented to the customer. People, this is not how you should EVER accept coffee.

This happens automatically, even when the order is to be inside the coffeehouse.

People, when I order coffee from Starbucks, I want it in a real proper coffee cup with spoon. If I am going to pay that kind of overcharged money for a simple cup of coffee I want it done right and correctly. Do NOT give me a disposable paper cup if I am going to stay, and sit inside.

Would you feed your grandparents on paper plates on Christmas?

The rest of the sheep can eat out of the trough. Let them keep their paper coffee cup. To learn to reclaim our heritage, we need to start demanding our respect back.

Coffee cup as it is supposed to be.
The proper way to serve coffee. Never forget that this is the real way to serve coffee. If you go to a restaurant, then you should be served properly and with respect. Oh, and BTW, if I want tea at a fast food restaurant, don’t give me a paper cup of hot water and a tea bag. you friggin make it for me.

Anyways… back to China.

At six videos in this section, I do believe that it is time to move to the next post. Sorry if it took a while to load some of these.

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next post which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 6)

Here we continue with our exploration of China through some curious and amusing videos. By looking at the videos and studying the context revolving around the subject matter, we can obtain a better understanding of China and our place upon this global stage.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Bonuses In China

In China, there are always bonuses given to high performers, and during holidays. It is part of the culture. These bonuses are not tied to the government where people have to give from 20% to 50% of it to the tax man, like they do in the Untied States. It is just free extra income for the hard working person.

We can see these bonuses handed out during CNY (Chinese New Year) as well as upon completion of projects or goals. Hey! You didn’t think that Baidu, Huawei, or ShaoMi got to be so enormous by giving their top performers a pen that says “success if a way of life” do you?

I well know that this is how it works in the USA. 

After saving millions of dollars of business on developing the E-ETRESS, and all the late nights for free, and loss of my weekends, I got a new pen with these words. "Success is a way of life." Once the project was completed, they let me go. I didn't even get a "heads up".

While the company owners became millionaires, I got a pen. That's America for you!

Anyways, the drinking culture is extremely important in China, and it is tied with success as a businessman. If you want to be a successful businessman in China then be prepared to drink and drink heavily.

Thus, this next micro-video. Here we have a bonus structure based on your ability to drink. It goes from a small sip of wine with some “little” money (for a small meal perhaps) to quaffing two (2x) entire bottles of wine and getting a credit card worth thousands. Hey! This is how it is done in China.

It sure beats being lectured by the resident “Diversity Officer” on your “white privilege”. Eh?

If you want to play with the “big boys” you’d had best be able to “step up to the plate”.

Chinese Michelle Jackson

Here’s a cute little girl singing “Beat It” by Michael Jackson.

Everyone want’s me to sing this stupid song in the KTV, I’ll tell you what. Michael Jackson is very popular in China. I do not know why, but everyone knows him and loves his music.

Michael Jackson in China
‘When Michael Jackson Visited Mainland China’ “Most of his fans in China regret that he never performed on the mainland. However, 32 years ago, he stepped on Chinese ground. He entered the hearts and minds of the Chinese people.

Look, guys, I like Michael Jackson as much as the rest of you. However, I don’t really like to sing his faster songs. It’s not enjoyable for me. It’s stressful.

This is a little girl.

In China, all students learn English in school. In fact, you cannot enter college or university unless you can pass a speaking and reading / writing exam in English. I checked out that exam. Most Americans would have a difficult time passing it as well.

Exams in china
Chinese college entrance exams. This is what it is like. Can you frigging’ believe it?

Can you imagine the howls from the progressive liberal democrats! Imagine if Chinese were mandated to be taught in every school from elementary through high school. Oh the howls they would screech! Now, couple that with Chinese language proficiency was a requirement for access to college? There would be protests on the streets for “cultural appropriation” and “virtue signaling”.

Well, it’s like that.

The thing about Chinese students speaking English is that there are different levels and degrees of proficiency. Some are really good and sound just like an American, while others can hardly manage to say “Good Morning” to you. It’s pretty odd, I’ll tell you what.

Anyways, she does a pretty good job singing, all things considered.

For those of you nay-sayers out there, who think that she is not very good. All I can say is YOU try singing a Chinese song. I would like to hear you belt something out. Eh?

You try singing

Here is a micro-video of the first few bars of one of the top most popular songs in China today. Do you think that you can sing it as well as that little girl sang Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”? Well, then check it out and give it a try…

Chinese Influence in Africa

Unlike America, China has worked on strengthening economic ties with other nations around the world. America would just hand out money (like Obama gave to South Africa, and Palestine), while China instead sets up roads, train and rail lines, and a means for industry to migrate into poverty ridden areas. Not to mention significant funding to ensure that the road and belt initiatives take place properly.

Chinese investment in Africa.
For the last 20 years, China has been investing in China. THey have created roads, rail lines, and other public works. This is in direct opposition to the American way of doing things; where we give piles of cash to rich oligarchs as long as they implement some social change that we favor.

You don’t hear anything about this on American mainstream news. I guess that they are too busy trying to prove that Donald Trump is a Russian spy, but they should report more about what is going on in the rest of the world.

They have really failed in their job of reporting the news.

Anyways, here is a video that is pretty typical of a Chinese company setting up factories and employing people in impoverished areas. I think that it is hilarious.

Ah, you cannot deny that China hasn’t had it’s influence…

Just think of all the good that the $7,000,000,000,000 (of American taxpayer money) that Obama gifted to the oligarchy in South Africa could have done if it was parted out like China does. Not to mention the additional $7,000,000,000,000 given to Kenya.

One single $1 goes a long way to feeding a family of four for a month.

China and raw materials.
China has spent twenty years developing and enhancing the economic footprint in Africa. This has lead to the rising middle class in China. Of course this differs from the enormous financial give-aways that are part of the Washington DC and CIA global power structure.

Off to their assignments

Many companies in China have morning “tailgates” and meetings that are a cross between a “status report” and a “pep rally”. In China, the employees have a vital role in the company. It differs from the “lip service” that you would find in the Untied States in many ways, but the most important is a PROPORTIONAL increase in salary of the individual workers as the value of the company increases. Likewise, if the company loses value the employees will also suffer.

In the United States this is quite different. A company can have a period of enormous profitability, but it is very rare for the employee to benefit from it. At best, he has the option to “jump ship” for a more lucrative job opportunity elsewhere (as long as it is not a competitor… that is what a NDA is for).

Here, the workers are leaving their “tail gate” meeting and off to their assignments.

And let’s move on to the next post in this series…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next past which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 5)

Let’s continue with our exploration of unique and odd China. Hey! What do you think about the splash picture? Pretty odd, eh? Yeah, I know.

It’s a green-friendly police armored car. It is a fully electric armored police car for use domestically in China. You can read about it HERE, or HERE.

This is the mad Zijing Qingyuan Armored Spherical Cabin Electric Patrol Vehicle, seen on the Security China exhibition in Beijing last month. The vehicle is developed for anti-riot work by police and paramilitary forces. Its most interesting feature is the spherical cabin, allowing policemen a 360 degree look around. 

-Car News China

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Xpeng Motors premieres its EV-GA

This is pretty cool. This is a self-driving car made in China for the Chinese market. It’s got some pretty unique and amazing features that are decades ahead of most Western automakers. Hey guys! You’d had best fire your “diversity officers” and hire more engineers, don’t you think?

A "diversity officer" is a highly paid employee of a company that makes sure that political correctness, and other progressive issues are implemented in the company where they work. This was an Obama initiative, and most of the fortune 500 companies in the USA today have them. They are nothing less than PC commissars. 

To understand what I mean about the dangers of having “Diversity Officers” instead of trying to compete against the very aggressive Chinese industry, you need to read what I have to say about their purpose. Why they are present in the United States. You can read about it at the link below. It will open up in a new tab so you need not worry about losing your place here.

Anyways…

Back to the subject at hand. XPeng Motors has unveiled a self-driving car. It is the EV-GA. It has numerous very unique features that will enable it to operate successfully in hyper crowded China. (You know, where there are cars all over the place, breaking every rule in the book… where little old ladies with walkers stand in front, and donkey carts pull in behind you.)

I argue that these are new innovations.

Not only new, but unique to China and if China continues in this pace of innovation, American industry won’t have a chance in Hell to keep up. Thus, my argument that the $450,000/year salary for a GM “Diversity Officer” would be better served hiring five design engineers instead.

Check out this video. And, unlike other videos that I might have posted in the past. This is not CGI. This is the actual car. It uses all four-wheel electric drives and operates in a a manner similar to the NASA Apollo lunar rover did.

Of course it will only be sold domestically.

This level of technology would take a while to be accepted and approved through the maze of regulations in the United States. I do know what I am talking about. You would not believe the amount of money that changed hands for us to get LED’s used in automobiles in the 1990’s. It was like pulling teeth.

What? You think that they just popped up and simply replaced traditional incandescent automotive lighting without having some bribery take place? You believe that, eh? 

It’s a protectionism racket, and the government is not only complicit, but they often initiate all the hurtles you must climb through.

American bribery
Crime and corruption is rampant all over the United States. The reason why it is not recognized by international organizations is because it is institutionalized. They only seem to care about low-level bribes, and simple corruption and money laundering. Once the amounts reach a dollar figure somewhere in the millions, it is considered acceptable and is no longer tracked. The reason for this is because at that enormous size, any respectable government would “of course” investigate the wrong-doers. In the United States, this level of bribery is institutionalized by the very people who are supposed to be watch-dogs for this kind of activity.

Of course, many people will take offense at this statement. You know, that the United States government has become a terribly corrupt organization. Well, to that, I must remind you about all the publicized corruption at the DOJ and FBI, but you know, that’s not what I am talking about here.

I am talking about using the power of the government to regulate for personal financial gain. Like what happened with PT-141. You can read about this sad state of affairs at the link below. It will open up in a different tab, so you need not worry about losing your place here.

PT-141

Police Drill

The Chinese practice, and practice and practice. They believe that you must have the fundamentals down so that you can implement them automatically when the time comes to use them.

Here is a video of a police drill of the take down of a car in pursuit. Unlike the USA where you might have jurisdictional issues, in China, the various jurisdictions collaborate together in crime prevention. They have to. China is far too large, with too many people to play around for political posturing.

Snow Bunny

Ah. We have them in the states as well, don’t you know. But here, the snow bunny is actually dressed up to look like one. LOL. I think that it is enormously cute.

Just some Guys Having Fun

Here is a video of just some guys having fun. Seriously, we should be doing this kind of stuff more often than not, I’ll tell you what.

Maybe, by checking out the diversity of the micro-videos and the uniqueness of the subject matter, you (the reader) could better understand that China is an enormous and complex nation. It is growing and it is being managed by people who have got into positions of power through merit. The Western narrative, or as I like to say “cardboard cutout” of what China is, is a dangerous lie.

We have to recognize that China is growing and is not a nation to take trivially.

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next post which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 4)

Let’s continue with our exploration of cute and unique China with these following examples…

Many people that I met were curious about China, but their impressions of China would end up with words like ‘communist,’ ‘pollution’ and ‘no Facebook.’ While many facts are true, the contemporary, living and multifaceted Chinese life is rarely heard of. 

-Tinyeyescomics

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Disco Swimming Party

The Chinese have a great love for being together and having fun and partying. Often they mix singing, dancing, and (of course) drinking with their other pleasures. As any other normal adult would. Here, we look at a typical swimming pool and their weekend festivities.

And, yes… this is TYPICAL.

I, myself, enjoy swimming. As a boy we would swim in the ocean and in the various pools around the community. This was true whether it was a private club, or at a friends house. I have always associated Summer with pools, and I think that all kids should have the same kind of fond memories attached to swimming and Summer as I have.

After all, who doesn’t want to go have fun?

Beach Scene
Photo from the late 1940s and early 1950s of some gals on the beach. You can well imagine a nice day, some fine food and friendship. Not to mention walking and swimming along the shore. Such memories I have of those times.

Back in my middle school days, all of us kids were part of the YMCA after-school swimming program. When ever they had one of these programs, my parents were the first to sign us kids up for the classes. I became quite good at swimming, and that later turned into an asset once I joined the US Navy.

After school, we would hop onto a bus and it would carry us over to a nearby town for our lessons. I seem to recall that the trip would last around a half an hour, and the entire time at the YMCA might have lasted around three hours. I suppose that gave our parents enough time away from us kids for some private time. Heh heh.

The YMCA had an indoor pool, but we would also go use outside pools during the Summer months. I had friends who loved to swim in the rivers and lakes, but they were way too dirty for my personal sensibilities.

Swimming in the Summer
For me, my time around the pools pretty much looked like this. Even at the pool where we were a member, my parents would pay for me to take swimming and diving lessons. I learned well how to do many dives.

Being with friends and noisy kids is part of the swimming experience. And, you know what? I think that it is great. I really do.

There will be plenty of opportunities for other kinds of beach and swimming pool adventures in your future. That’s life. Some will be great. Some will be not so great. Some will have you walking on the beach hand-in-hand with someone you love and care for dearly. Some experiences will involve alcohol. Some experiences will involve a group of close friends, with music, food and other pleasures.

I think that the best thing about life is to enjoy it as it is happening.

What I mean is that time is short and it is fleeting. You need to know that if you are always goal oriented, you will miss out in the opportunities and adventures that lie all around you right now. There is a saying to “take the time to smell the flowers”, and that is very true, but the saying has become trite and over used.

Appreciate you life as it is happening TODAY right now. You might not get another moment exactly like this one in the future.

1960s swimming pool
What are your favorite moments when you grew up? Can you be evocative of them? Was your childhood like the movie “On Golden Pond”? Or, maybe it was like the movie “The Goonies”? Enjoy what you have while you are living it.

OK, now going back to China.

Yes there are all kinds of ways that you can have fun at pools and on the beach. Just like in the United States or in an exotic holiday resort. You can go to pools, public water and pool parks, and even have your own pool where you would invite your friends over for some fun and frolic.

Here is a micro-video of a Chinese public pool. There are some things to note.

Unlike the video above, this one isn’t so rambunctious. It is quieter and more peaceful. It is not designed for groups of people to party and have a good time at. It is, instead, designed to relax and have a nice spa-like experience with friends and family. You will also notice that there is a huge canvas awning overhead. This is typical in China and most gals do not want their beautiful white skin to get dark.

You will note that the water is not deep either, and that there is a bench all along the sides of the pool for people to sit up and rest within the water. In this pool it is sort of like a cross between a whirl-pool and a regular pool. It is a place to relax, while the other video was a place to get crazy and have fun in.

Studying with Roommates

Most colleges and schools in China are dorms where there are from four to eight students crammed into one room. It is cozy, and over time, everyone develops a very close bond together. I used to think that this was terrible, but once I started to make Chinese friends, I saw the advantages of this.

You form “tribes” or “families” what are self-supporting.

G-friends dorm room
It is common all over Asia to form close-knit “tribes” or extended family as part of close living conditions. Seriously, you cannot get much closer together than living in Tokyo or Hong Kong. Here is the dorm that the K-Pop group “g-friends” live in.

This is very important when you are away from home for the first time, and need to have friends and associations for support, emotional health and friendship. In China, having friends and family is of extreme importance.

Dorm room occupancy comic
The Chinese typically share a room with four to eight others. The American often shares with one other person, and the British get their own private rooms to themselves.
I’ve experienced student dormitories in three countries: In the U.K. I have my own private room with shared public space; In the U.S. I shared my dorm with one roommate; In China, I used to live with 5 girls in the same room. 

This lack of privacy must be shocking for some of you, but in a country with 1.3 billion population, space is always a problem. 

While there are many inconveniences for not having enough private space, on the bright side, sharing a room with someone also makes you learn quite a deal about communication, responsibilities and tolerance. 
 
-Tinyeyescomics 

Here is a typical dorm room scene.

You will note that the room is rectangular with beds on stilts that lie over the study desks. This is not everywhere, but seems to work well. I have seen other arrangements, of course. You will also note that, like college dorm rooms all over the globe, the students decorate it to their own personal tastes.

I particularly like the swing chair. It’s actually pretty popular in Chinese dorm rooms.

Japanese Invasion

There is a movement toward wearing traditional Chinese clothing all over China. I personally love it, and enjoy watching girls wearing their really cute outfits. Well, girls (all over the world) enjoy dressing up and wearing different outfits. From time to time you will see these girls getting dressed up in period fashion and Japanese fashion. It’s all pretty darn cute.

Here we have some Chinese gals getting involved in some of the Japanese fashions in Shanghai.

Pretty Crazy, huh?

Of course, you do need to put this into perspective. Any “invasion” from Japan is not about displacing traditional Chinese culture. Rather it is about enjoying your own uniqueness within China. You see, in China there is no such thing as “cultural appropriation” that is a bunch of progressive hooey that is all the rage in the United States. In China you can pretty much be who ever you want to, and no fat overweight pink-haired feminist is going to scream in your face about it.

That enables the Chinese to enjoy their history, and their culture without any disdain or apologies.

And they do so. They are very proud of their culture and when given the opportunity, they will happily don traditional clothing and be themselves. Here we have a girl from one of the Southern regions of China. I believe (but am not sure) that her culture is from the Hainan island area. (Incidentally, the women have traditionally covered themselves in tribal tattoos. This is something that is NOT carried over with modern Chinese ladies. They prefer to leave their bodies unadorned.)

You can see the cross-cultural influences from other ethnic regions within China here.

The headdress is borrowed from some central Chinese cultures, and the flower in the hair is from the South Pacific with a relationship influence (flower on the right if married, on the left if single). In the Northern part of China, you will see the ladies wear long dresses with coverings on their arms. In the Southern sections (where it is HOT) you will find them wearing mini-skirts and loose clothing.

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next past which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 9)

Here we continue on our pleasure of watching really odd videos of everyday life in China. I hope that you, the reader, are enjoying yourself as much as I am.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Trick Glass in Chinese Parks

As I have mentioned previously, many of the parks in China are at the summit of enormous mountains. Well, many of the paths have glass-floored bridges. And, the Chinese, being the jokers that they are, often have little games and tricks that they like to provide people with.

Like, for instance, cracking floor glass…

Protection from Progressive Socialists

The Chinese well know what a fiasco the implementation of communism was under Mr. Mao. They will never forget the roving bands of SJW’s and the 30+ million people who died because of those lunatics. That’s one of the many reasons why they got rid of them back in the 1970’s.

As well as one of the reasons why they today have absolutely zero sympathy for SJW, radical Muslim fanatics, or LGBQ activists. They capture them, subject them to mental evaluation, treat them for mental conditions if appropriate, and then imprison them to keep the rest of society safe from their dangers.

Anyways, the Chinese haven’t forgotten the intensely long period of terror that was the SWJ norm in China. Today, in China, if you have the money, you make little pigeon holes or egress chambers to hide in and to protect your valuables. You can never be too safe.

Some are quite ingenious.

Chinese Automobiles

The Chinese automobile industry is staffed with high-performing engineers, and if there is some technology that another automotive company has, they hire the engineer to work for them at 4x their regular salary. The Chinese do not mess around, and they reward high performers and workers through merit.

You can see this in the latest crop of Chinese products marketed to the local Chinese…

Technology in High-Speed Rail

The Chinese love those enormous LED / LCD screens. You can see them on the sides of buildings everywhere. As well as on the sides of trucks, and in other places. You can have them on the floor so it looks like you are walking on water, or on the ceiling like there is a dragon flying above your head.

Here is one on a high-speed rail (bullet train) in China. It’s pretty common, though for people who have never seen this from outside of China, you would be amazed.

And, here is an application where the floor is touch sensitive LCD screen. It’s a nice effect and becoming quite popular in China.

I have however, no idea if anyone is implementing it in the USA.

Small Town Restaurant Advertisement

Like the USA, there are all kinds of “mom and pop” little “cubby hole” restaurants everywhere. Once they get the money, they try to advertise. You know, to get more business. This is true in China.

Here is a typical mini-commercial for a local family restaurant. It’s called the YuKee Restaurant. (The Yucky restaurant…LOL!)

Flying First Class

In China, like the United States, are different classes of travel on domestic airlines. The three classes are the same. There are coach, business and first class.

For reasons that will take about 35 posts to explain, the Chinese have more disposable income than Americans have. Thus, they can afford things that many Americans cannot.

You can see this manifest in different ways. One of which is in the proportion of class seating on commercial airlines. The societal stratification in the United States is very severe compared to China.

On airlines in America, most rich and wealthy people travel on their own private airlines. Successful people, not owning their own airplanes, would fly first class or business on commercial airlines. Thus, you would have a tiny section in the forward compartment of the airplane devoted to these higher paying customers.

In America, this might be a total of ten to twelve seats.

While in China, it might be a much higher percentage. Maybe the front 30% of the plane as opposed to the front 5% of the plane that you would experience in America. In fact, there are even entire planes where 100% of the customers fly first class or business.

Here is one example…

You will never see this in the Untied States simply because the gulf between the rich and middle class is so outrageously enormous.

That’s about it for this post. Let’s move on to the next group of videos in the next post, shall we…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next past which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 8)

Here we continue with our exploration of China through some curious and amusing videos.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Pets in China

Most Americans think that the Chinese eat pets. This is a falsehood propagated through ignorance and comedy. Yes, there are a few hillbillies who still eat dogs, and fewer still that eat cats. They cluster in the rural sections of the Guangzhou region. They have their own festivals and menus, and I am sure that you can find all sorts of things about this on Google.

You won’t however, find out about the much, much larger dog culture there. Google is just a voice for the oligarchy. They want to keep you ignorant and living in fear.

The reality is actually much more interesting and very, very strange. Many people treat their dogs like family members. They dies their hair, and have them wear clothing and sit at the table and eat with everyone. It’s pretty darn strange.

This video is not an uncommon scene…

Making Noodles

This is the traditional way of making noodles, and yes, you can see this in just about every city in China. It’s common place, though to a Westerner, it will seem strange and exotic.

Crowd Control

Actually you have to hand it to the Chinese. They do know how to handle crowd control.

Rocket launches

China has an active space exploration and utilization program. It operates unfettered by the political winds of the nation, unlike the United States. As such, they have a crewed space station that is occupied by the same number of people as Americans have on the ISS. They are also developing their moon base initiative, and they are proceeding forward with it via joint venture with the Russians.

When ever there is a rocket launch, which is fairly common, people gather from all over to watch the spectacle. It’s pretty impressive.

Duplex community pools

Yes, China has suburbs. There are all sorts of different kinds of housings and housing developments all over China. One of the latest trends is to have duplex complex communities with a shared pool arrangement.

Instead of a back yard behind a duplex or condo, the Chinese prefer to have low maintenance shrubbery and a communal pool. These pools tend to be long, like a waterway. You can enter them from your back door and take a swim any time you want.

As far as I know, this style of building or living arrangement is unique to China.

And here’s a different one. Like I said and alluded to, these are all over China. Most Americans will, unfortunately, never encounter one because they are usually never given the opportunity to visit a home of an Chinese coworker, colleague or businessman.

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next post which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 7)

Here we continue with our exploration of China through some curious and amusing videos.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

The Baby Trials

When I was a young boy, a number of items were placed in front of me. I was allowed to go for the item that was (supposed) to represent what my interest would be in life. There was a thimble, a dollar bill, some cloth, and a few other things. It was a Polish tradition.

I don’t remember what I went for.

My father didn’t remember either. I am sure that he had entire series of pictures regarding that event. As he was a photo-buff of the extreme kind. Never the less, it probably was something having to do with my hands, like a clothes pin or something similar.

Here we see the Chinese playing the same kind of game with the young boy. I wonder what this Chinese boy will be attracted to…?

Yeah. In case you didn’t get it, he went for the $100 yuan bill. This young buck went for the cash, oh baby!

Dog’s bike riding

In China, of course, there are all sorts of rental bikes everywhere. Many have been discarded last year when they began to compete against the local towns for revenue. Never the less, they are still very popular, and getting one is a very simple task. You just scan in the QR code with your cell phone. Cost is around $0.05 USD for an hour ride. It is automatically debited to your bank account.

Here we have a dog riding in the bike. It’s pretty typical as the dog is wearing clothes, and underwear and socks. Yup, this is China. It’s a place where the children wander all over without pants letting their gunk sway in the wind, and dogs and cats wear three-piece suits. Who’d figure?

China is very dog-friendly

Speaking of pets, China does not have the same kind of prohibitions concerning animals that you would find in the United States or most other Western nations. You can bring your dogs into restaurants and go shopping with them, and no one would bat an eyelash.

China is very dog friendly.
In China there aren’t any health regulations that will prevent you from bringing your dog inside a restaurant with you. You can bring them in. Sit them down and enjoy your meal with “mans best friend”. Don’t you just love it!

We like to think that America is full of pet lovers, as it actually is. But the government is NOT pet-friendly.

The radical progressive liberal busy-bodies have put up all kinds of prohibitions regarding pets in public. This includes everything from leash-laws to businesses being off-limits to pets. All progressive democrats in office tend to treat animals as disposable props. While conservative politicians have a mixed bag of appreciation of our furry friends.

The argument is always for the “public health”. You don’t want to risk the 0.00000001% of the population that would have a violent reaction to pet fur getting harmed. Those progressive liberals are so silly!

The job of the government is NOT to protect everyone, all the time, in every way possible. It is to provide a society where the 80% majority can live in peace without government intervention.

SJW Busybody – Making your life miserable ever since 2008.

Sort of how China does it.

Anyways, you can bring your dogs and cats, and lamas (if you have one) into any establishment in China without problem. The only ones that would ask you to leave are American or Hong Kong businesses operating inside China. Their corporate structure has incorporated American and Western norms of conducting business.

Ah. The fools!

Anyways, China is sort of like this…

Yes, this is a pretty well trained dog. Most are not so well trained. But this is China, and you will get used to dogs eating at tables in restaurants, and shopping once you live here for a spell. You will. It’s pretty darn commonplace everywhere.

I like it. Part of it is because I am an animal lover. I love both dogs and cats. But, part of it is because I appreciate what freedom is. Bringing your pet with you into a restaurant is a freedom that most Americans cannot enjoy.

The difference between me and the typical American is that I know what freedom is, and what it is not. No matter how many time you try to convince me that seat-belts are important, that large sodas are dangerous, and that fire places are outdated, the laws that prohibit their use is an insult and an encroachment on MY freedom. I do not care if someone else thinks that I drink too much, eat food that is too fattening or too spicy, or care what breed my dog is. It’s none of their fucking business.

Freedom is the liberty to be left alone.

Freedom to be with your doggie.
Real freedom is one where you can practice living life without regulation, laws or rules. In China you can have the real freedom to be yourself and enjoy life without some SJW busybody calling an armed SWAT police force from the FDA on you. It’s frigging glorious.


There were many reasons for my decision to leave the USA and move elsewhere. You know, being around fat ugly aggressive women played a role. I mean, any woman that is bigger or heavier than me is a disgrace. You know, having people being promoted over you because they needed gender equality also played a role.

Taxes getting worse… Regulation increasing… News media making fun of me and my values… The constant onslaught of attempts to ban my guns… my alcoholic beverages… my smoking… and regulation on what I can do with my own body played a role.

Though, I guess a real nasty divorce from a closet radical feminist, and an aggressive IRS audit pretty much closed the deal. Trust me, if you have lived through what I endured, you would leave the shore of the USA faster than a hedgehog on fire!

Anyways, back to China and the FREEDOM and LIBERTY to eat with your dog in a public restaurant. Please keep in mind that that not all dogs are so well behaved. Like this one for instance…

Well, moving on to the next post in this series…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next post which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 3)

Let’s continue with our exploration of really odd China. Please let’s keep in mind that we are looking not for curiosities to amuse and titillate, but rather to discover new and varied ways of doing things and looking at things so that we may personally benefit from them.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

The Singing Chef

Chinese people love their food, they spend lots of time savoring and enjoying their meals. Food is not just “fuel” for the body, but a pleasure, an art, and a way of socializing. If you want to make friends, go eat. If you want to close a business deal, go eat. If you want to pursue a romantic relationship, go eat. Since ancient times, food has been considered priority in Chinese culture. The government’s goal was to make sure that each person is taken care of and "has enough to eat”. From another angle, it also suggests the realistic character of Chinese: food goes before ideas, and this life is more important than after life.  

-Tinyeyescomics  

Restaurants are all over the place in China. Just like they are seemingly everywhere in the Untied States. There are all kinds of them as well. They run the gambit from cafeterias, to fast food, to small family affairs, and street vendors. This is certainly a great subject for another series of posts, but here instead, I would like to talk about one aspect of certain Chinese restaurants.

That aspect is the “singing chef”.

In certain restaurants, you can have the chef sing to you, and you can pick up a KTV microphone at your table and sing along. In China, of course, singing and dancing are very popular Chinese pastimes, as they are all over Asia. People just love to sing. Well, what’s better than singing with friends, eating fine delicious food, and drinking wonderful adult beverages? Well, not much.

Here we have the chef singing a duet with a customer…

Of course, to be able to fully appreciate how cool this is, you need to understand that Chinese food is really tasty and there are so many different kinds and types of food available. Most of which are unknown in the West. Yes, I am sorry to say that those corner “Chinese restaurants” that you have in the states only prepare Americanized Chinese “fast food”.

So imagine the joy of playing around, singing, and eating some truly delicious Chinese food…

Hunan hot pot.
This is spicy Hunan style food. This is called “Hot Pot”. It is like a Chinese version of Fondue, only very, very spicy. You are provided with meats and vegetables that you put on skewers and in ladles that you cook inside the pot.

Of course, not all Chinese food is spicy. Some are, but many are not. China is a land with all sorts of strange and delicious foods. In fact, I have another post just about this very subject. You might want to check it out. (By clicking on the link, the other article will open up in a different tab.)

In any event, eating spicy food is a great excuse to drink some fine frosty beer. China has all sorts of local breweries. You can obtain some very cheap beer in China, and It actually does go well with the Chinese cuisine.

Personally, I like my beer to be super cold. This is to such an extent that I ask for a half a glass of chipped ice that I can pour my beer into. Yes, I know that it’s a tad extreme, but that is just me. Do not knock it until you get to try it yourself. OK?

Oh, and speaking of wonderful and delicious beer. How about this…

Delicious dark beer
Delicious dark beer. There are some wonderful dark beers about. Of course, I love dark Irish beers, and this is a Icelandic beer. Well worth a try if you ever have the opportunity.

Oh, and speaking about beer, let’s talk a little bit about parties and partying in China. After all, how in the world can you possibly experience China without going to a party and getting shit-faced drunk? It just isn’t possible. Drinking is part of the Chinese traditional culture and society.

China’s Party Scene is often Enormous

The Chinese like to party, and when the opportunity comes, they will gather together and have a great time. To us Westerners, this seems odd, but it really shouldn’t. Think of “Spring Break ” on steroids, only with office staff instead of drunk college students.

This is true all over Asia as well. From the Philippines to Vietnam, and Korea. All Asians love to have a great time. And unlike the politically correct United States, it’s just fine to discuss smoking, drinking, singing and dancing in public and at your workplace.

China has an enormous music and television industry with all sorts of stars and favorites. I covered this in another post. You might want to check it out. (The link opens up in another tab.)

Popular Music of China

However, it should be noted that many singers and musicians from all over the world find that by catering to the Chinese, sales of their music and popularity skyrockets. So you will be surprised to find Polish singers, Brazilian groups, and Country and Western singers from America playing within China.

Of course, if you are going to sing, eat, and drink, you shouldn’t go anywhere near a car. Just pay for someone to take you home, or crash in a nearby hotel. Yet, this option is often beyond the comprehension of the severely inebriated.

Which brings us to this bitter-sweet video…

The Guy that Just Can’t Drive

I don’t know how better to introduce this video to ya all. This guy is obviously having a bad day, and cannot drive worth sh*t.

Poor guy. If he isn’t drinking, then it is obvious that he is having a bad day. It’s times like these that make you just want to throw in the towel and call it a day. It’s time to go off to a small restaurant and order a beer. It’s time to take a long drag off of a cigarette. It’s time to chill out and watch a game on television.

What ever it is, it’s a time NOT to drive.

OK. At four videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next past which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 2)

Here we continue with our video exploration of some of the crazy and odd things (or just unusual things) going on in China this month. As a kind reminder that this is not so much for entertainment value as it is purposed towards looking at how we do things in a new light. And, as the situation is exposed, in a new appreciation.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Regional Festival

I do like and enjoy regional fairs. I always have. It didn’t matter if it was a apple pie baking fair in Milford, Massachusetts, or a apple butter celebration in Clarion county in Pennsylvania. I loved them all.

Apple butter festival
Here is an apple-butter festival in California. Look at everyone having a grand old time. These little festivals are certainly worth your time and effort to participate in.

If you ever get an opportunity to go to a regional fair, I would strongly suggest you do so. They are all fantastic and worth the time and cost to visit. In fact, if I might be so bold, might I suggest some of these ideas for fairs in the United States…

  • Any pie, ice cream, or bakery fair.
  • Any type of Amish or Mennonite fair.
  • Fairs related to antique tractors and farm equipment.
  • Fairs related to local history.
  • Fairs related to reenactments.
  • Fairs related to maple syrup production.
  • Fairs related to grapes or wine production.
  • Fairs related to dog, cat, horse or other critters.
  • Fairs related to renaissance revivals.
  • Bluegrass festivals.
  • Any fair sponsored by a historical club, community or organization.
Apple butter sundae
Fresh apple-butter sundaes made at an apple-butter festival. These are not only very fresh, but they are amazingly delicious. There is nothing quite like fresh home-made ice cream and fresh home-made apple-butter. Yum!

I really do enjoy festivals.

I think that over the years I have forgotten how important it was for me while I was growing up. I started to take them for granted, and forgot the pleasures and excitement that I had, as a young boy, attending them. I remember a historical building walk and festival in Georgia that was awesome. I also remember a festival of the old west when I lived in Ridgecrest, California. (My China Lake days.)

Such history.

Not to mention the various regional foods. Let me tell you, you haven’t lived until you tried some BBQ at a festival in Texas, or a Chili cook off.

Limburger sandwich.
Here is a limburger cheese and bratwurst sandwich from a fair in Wisconsin. Now who in their right mind wouldn’t want to have a bite of this? Eh? Especially with s cup of some fine local beer. Doesn’t that sound great?

Just like in the United States, with seasonal fairs, the Chinese celebrate their own regional holidays and traditions. Here is one such holiday, were the local ladies dress up in traditional attire and have a parade into the community. In China, local traditional fairs can include costumes, regional food and drink, and of course the local traditional activities.

Which in China, can be quite elaborate and noteworthy…


Upon close inspection, you’ll notice that the outfits are not identical. Each one is subtly different. They are not costumes. They are family heirlooms.

The different colors of the dresses all have meaning, as well as the different decorations and caps on their heads. Just like the Irish and Sottish have different patterns for the kilts and weaves, the Chinese do the same for the various traditional attire.

In China, you can tell from the subtle differences in the clothing just which family is represented, where they come from and the family’s ranking in the community. Just like you could tell it in Ireland or Scotland.

Irish patterns
A random selection of different Irish patterns and the families that are associated with those patterns. All over the world are these little nuanced differences, and we have forgotten their importance, and the importance of festivals and families.

There are many, many different ethnic regions in China, and it would take a long series of complex posts to describe even a mere overview of them. Which, of course, really wouldn’t be appropriate here. This post is just an introduction to differences in culture and how, by looking at them, we can obtain a better appreciation of our own culture.

Oh yes. America does have a culture. Numerous ones actually, and they are all totally and completely awesome! Don’t forget that.

Speaking of awesome American culture. How about some awesome and genuine American food? Right? Am I right or am I right? Maybe something along the lines of this…

Ruben Sandwich.
What is better than a delicious Ruben sandwich? I like it served with thousand island dressing, and then I love to dip it in the dressing when I eat it. You know, the secret in making a good Ruben is avoiding having the bread get soggy. You can do this by enclosing the sauerkraut with the meat, and toasting the bread properly.

Here is another view of this particular ethnic subculture. I really love the outfit, and the smiles on all the pretty girls.

The silver adornment all has a reason and purpose, as well as a story. The crown on the head is full of symbology and meaning… especially toward the various individual family histories. The patterns on the dress, as well as the color differentiate the various history and region that the wearer comes from.

I find it all so very fascinating.

There are many, many different sub-cultures within China, and each one maintains their history, their dress, their culture. In fact, the Chinese government promotes this as an important part of China’s heritage.

I don’t know what it is, really, but I love to see beautiful women in regional clothing with history and meaning. It makes them so multi-dimensional and infinitely interesting. It makes me want to meet their families, drink and eat at their tables with their aunties and uncles and try their delicious regional food. Oh, what stories they could tell.

While the gals in the above two micro-videos are from the interior mountainous regions of China, here is a gal from the Northern regions. I think that she is just awesome. Don’t you?

I do believe that I will do a couple posts on this subject in the future, as it is truly very interesting and absolutely ignored by the American mainstream press.

Ah. I just cannot help myself.

Here is yet another different regional ethnic group. Again, I find the colors and the outfits mesmerizing. And look at how happy and proud of their heritage they are. When I go back and visit the USA, I am often afraid of saying anything lest a “white person of privilege” offends someone. Sigh.

All this is pretty cool, but it has some implications that may people miss.

For instance, if you decide to learn some Mandarin before you go to China, thinking that it’s everyone’s mother tongue, you might be in for a surprise. It’s not spoken everywhere.

Although Mandarin became the national language more than 100 years ago, many Chinese people can’t speak it. There are literally hundreds of dialects and languages in China, and Mandarin is just one of them.

Young people will usually speak Mandarin, because it’s taught in school. Just like many of them will be able to communicate in basic English to you. However, if you’re speaking to older people they may only speak their native dialects.

Moving on to a different subject…

Morning Exercises in Elementary School

All public schools in China have morning exercises. They are typically held in the front courtyard of the school and involve jumping jacks and other such “limbering up exercises”. This is the same as what you would expect in certain schools in the USA, like military academies and religious schools. (Not so in American public schools.)

Over the last few years, the Chinese methods of education has been changing and evolving. This includes everything from studying physics to music. Now it also includes sports and exercise, and yes, over the last decade that has begun to change.

Today, many, though not all, utilize dance routines to limber up the children for the day’s study events. They play popular Chinese songs (Pop-40) and the children exercise to the choreographed dance routines associated with the given songs.

Here is a nice video showing that…

This kind of activity begins as early as pre-school, and continues to long after graduation. Many companies have morning exercises and routines to get the crew and staff ready for work.

Here’s another school, doing a different dance routine. Notice how much fun the kids are having. They don’t even notice that they are exercising. Instead, they view it as a fun activity.

When you think about it, it makes total sense.

Children work just like adults do. Only their work is through play. That is how they learn. Girls like to play with dolls so that they can learn to be able to care for the family. Boys like to play with blocks and build things. That is how they learn to make things and then sell them to earn money for their family.

The great Fred Rogers was right in this regard.

When children are having fun and playing they are learning at top efficiency. When the effort is dull, prolonged and boring, they are not learning. They are memorizing for repetition. The Chinese have a long way to go towards understanding this fully, but they are implementing this technique in many schools.

And, they are doing so quite early.

Here we have pre-schoolers learning how to dance-exercise in the morning.

Adults Exercising in a Gym

Of course, you don’t need to attend elementary school to exercise. You can do so in a gym. The only thing is that the Chinese also like to have this kind of disco / club / DJ / House exercise environment. That’s one of the things that I really like about China. Pushing iron and driving yourself hard to music.

It’s sort of like this…

Pretty crazy, eh?

OK. At eight videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next past which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (Part 1)

China is a big country, with a huge population. At any given minute there are all kinds of things going on, from the curious to the absurd. That’s pretty much what makes travel so enticing. You are exposed to new ideas and new ways of doing things. These new ways might be better or worse. Yet, the fact that they are different adds value to your experience.

If the new experience is better, then you can see where your previous assumptions might be wrong. This is what happens when you move out of your “comfort zone”. You learn that what you are accustomed to might be wrong or problematic. A good example of this is paying for drugs overseas. Drugs are cheap just about everywhere outside of the USA.

If the new experience is worse, then you have a better appreciation of what you have come to accept and live with. A good example is going to the public toilet in rural China. You really start to appreciate Western-style public restrooms.

I created this post to illustrate that there are many ways to do things, and often these other ways might appear odd, strange or simply curious to someone who is not used to them.

You know, when I first visited China, (back around 1993 or so) many of my (new) Chinese friends thought that a “hamburger” was exactly what McDonald’s made. They had no idea what American food was, and their only exposure to it was McDonald’s or KFC.

McDonald's burger.
A McDonald’s cheeseburger. It’s ok to eat. It’s nothing fancy, but rather plain and mass-produced fast food. The “meat” is too processed and full of preservatives, and the toppings are rather pedestrian. The bread roll is bland.

They were surprised when I explained to them that hamburgers are something totally different from what you would find in most (not all) American “fast food” restaurants. They didn’t believe me, and had a very difficult time visualizing it. So, what I had to do, was make up some home-made hamburgers on real rolls, with fresh fixings to show them.

A real hamburger.
This is how a hamburger is supposed to be made. It is 100% real beef. The roll is fresh and has a crunchy outside crust. It has fresh vegetables, and is cooked just right.

Well, China is like that. They often do things different from we are used to seeing. And because of that, that kind of exposure, let’s us view things that we have taken for granted over years and years of exposure.

Maybe we need to take a look at why we do certain things in certain ways. As such, we can start to question if the things that we are accustomed to, are really the best way to do them.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Monkey Style

I was raised watching David Carradine in the television show Kung Fu. I, like many of my generation became entranced by his Shoulin kung fu style. I, as well as most Americans, at that time, only knew of two ways of battling bad guys. (Aside from shooting them, and boxing them.) That was by using Karate, or Kung Fu.

Kung Fu television scene
For many Americans, we learned about Kung Fu through television and movies. Television brought Kung Fu to our livingrooms, and exposed us to the shaolin style of kungfu.

After a few decades of this, we became exposed to martial arts through watching Bruce Lee, and other notable martial arts actors on television. It seemed like all of the best martial arts originated out of China, and more specifically, out of Hong Kong.

With this being our only “education” into the world of martial arts, it is no surprise that we Americans have come to assume that this is the best and (perhaps) the most effective style to fight in martial arts. It is our lack of exposure to other styles that gives us a false understanding of what is available to us personally.

Perhaps we should be exposed to other techniques and methods. Even if they appear odd or strange to us. They exist, because they when performed with mastery, are superior fighting forms.

Other styles of Chinese martial arts include, but are most certainly not limited to:

Wushu: Known more in the contemporary world as not really a style, but more as a sport or a showmanship of forms.

Tai Chi: A very popular internal martial arts style that is characterized by its breathing techniques. Millions of people practice this martial art for relief of stress, meditation purposes, and health and balance in their stress-filled lives.

Kung Fu: King Fu is used in the contemporary world to describe the many styles of martial arts in China. There were additionally various sub styles of Kung Fu from both Northern and Southern China. Whereas the Northern region boasted Shaolin, Eagle Claw, Long Fist and Monkey Style and the Southern region laid claim to Wing Chun, Hung Gar, and Choy Li Fut.

Shuai Jiao: Shuai Jiao was one of the first martial arts in China. Shuai Jiao was taught to the troops by means of utilizing the horns on their helmets and throwing as well as ground fighting was the main focus of this martial art.

Here is a micro-video of a monk performing “Monkey Style” Kung Fu. What do you think? Do you think that it would stun the attacker, or have him roll on the ground laughing?

You see, or maybe not, the point here.

This style is both humorous and unexpected. It’s difficult to fight someone who cannot be predicted. And the humor is disarming. This technique is not for everyone, but it has advantage, and in life… that’s what we need. A little bit of advantage.

Here’s another video depicting scenes of a Chinese movie character that utilizes such actions to disarm his opponents, and obtain advantage in situations. It’s sort of like the book & movie “The Scarlet Pimpernel”.

Moving on to a totally different subject, but still a little odd and crazy is what happens when you drink too much.

A Little Too Much To Drink

Now this is China, don’t you know. Everyone drinks alcohol as it is part of the culture.

In America we would go home to sleep things off, or maybe crash on some stranger’s porch or in our car (Heaven forbid we drive home). Rarely do we try to walk home. Though, I have seen people riding a bike home after closing time at the bar. (You know, that almost all bars in the USA have Cinderella hours. That’s right, they are not open all night. Yeah, crazy, huh?)

It’s 5:08 AM. She obviously left the club, bar or KTV, and is having a bit of trouble getting oriented. Lordy, you would think one of her friends would help get her home to bed.

This poor chick had a little bit too much to drink. I think. Either that, or her world is just spinning around and around.

Training a K9 Police Dog to perform CPR

I’ve seen people train police dogs. There are all kinds of movies and shows depicting this. I have seen them take down a “bad guy” wearing a padded suit. I have seen them run though obstacle courses. I have watched them sniff for drugs, and locate bombs.

But, I have never seen them be trained to give CPR.

Well, this is China, and they are not afraid to try new things and push things to the limits. This is a cute and interesting video of a young police K9 puppy being trained to perform CPR on a downed police officer.

Three videos are enough for one post. The band width would never permit you to load too many more. So please kindly go to the next section to check out some more crazy Chinese videos.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Really Strange China (part 11)

Here we continue with our various videos of life in China, and how strange it must appear to a foreigner.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

People Helping Others

You would NEVER see any of this in the Western press, but the Chinese tend to be very helpful and socially consciousness. If you know any Chinese personally, whether it is at your church, or in your school, you can attest that they work hard, study hard and tend to be great friends.

Well, they also will come to your rescue when necessary.

Here’s some videos that illustrate this fact.

This one is a truck driver that lends a hand when an ambulance was involved in a car accident…

Here is a compilation of other instances of people helping others or saving their lives.

The Underground World

China has become a nation of underground tunneling critters. They have built hundreds of these huge tunneling machines and use them to construct subways and passages from one building to another.

As any visitor to Hong Kong can affirm, each subway station in Hong Kong is a huge mall, and from that, branching outwards are all sorts of underground passages connecting one underground complex to another.

Here is one such underground passage. I believe that this one is in Shenzhen…

Ethnic Minorities

China is a land that is comprised of many, many Chinese minorities. Each one has their very own language, traditions and culture. The Chinese government sees the value in allowing these regions to maintain their history, and so they do.

Today you can see various ethnic groups posting themselves in traditional attire and singing contemporaneous (but regional) pop songs. I think that it is outstanding. Check it out…

Here’s another from a different region.

And of course, the Han Chinese…

OK. At these micro-videos, let’s move to the next part of this multi-part post…

OK. At numerous videos for this part, let’s go and move on to the next post which covers even more strangeness inside of China this month…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Moma’s Chicken Soup – A Parable About Modern America

Credit to Rush Limbaugh who gave me the inspiration to write this. This was inspired by his invaluable writings in his Rush Revere series of children’s books . Please enjoy.

A parable is a succinct, didactic story, in prose or verse that illustrates one or more instructive lessons or principles. It differs from a fable in that fables employ animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature as characters, whereas parables have human characters. A parable is a type of analogy.
-Wikipedia

This is the story about Moma and her amazing soup.

You see, while everyone else was making chicken soup the “old fashioned way”, Moma did things differently. About two hundred years ago, a woman named Moma, came up with a new and radically different way to make soup.

She called her soup “Chicken Soup”.

It was a simple name for a simple soup. While other cooks, chefs and cooking experts were calling their soups by regal names, Moma wanted a simple name for the soup.

As well as a simple name for her.

When a reporter asked her what to call her, an expert? A
culinarian? A commis chef, or a chef de cuisine? She just replied, “Just call me a Cook”.

As far as the soup went, it was just as simple. She kept it clean and uncomplicated. However, the ingredients had to be well cleaned, they needed to be carefully cut, and the proportions of the ingredients needed to be consistent. There were three major ingredients and they all had to be in perfect balance. Otherwise the soup would fail.

Other people laughed.

They said her “great experiment with chicken soup” would never make it. Even one of her biggest supporters, her brother, said “Heh. Chicken soup… if you can keep it.”

Moma's chicken soup as first made
Moma’s chicken soup became famous because the primary ingredients were simple, clean, small and well maintained. Everything was clear and the rules were followed by the chef to the letter.

The Secret

You see, while everyone else was making chicken soup the “old fashioned way”, you know throwing everything into the pot all at once and letting it blend together. Moma did things differently. She only used a limited number of ingredients. Of those ingredients, she would only add celery, carrots, cut up chicken breast and bullion.

That was it.

Nothing else, and no complex preparations or arrangements of food were required.

You see, Moma believed in balance. The celery balanced the carrots. The carrots balanced the chicken, and the chicken balanced the celery. As long as the roles of each item were clear, the soup became balanced and quite tasty.

Everyone else, however, believed that all soups should be representative of all the vegetables available. They threw in potatoes, squash, rutabagas and just about every other vegetable into their soup. These “soup purists” claimed that by doing so they made the soup more delicious. They claimed that the diversity of elements made it better, more improved and healthier.

They even wrote a poem about it.

“Give me your discarded vegetables, your unneeded leaves, Your huddled unusables yearning to be cooked freely, The wretched refuse of your teeming garden. Send these, the tasteless, the foul, the ugly, to me: I lift my lamp beside the golden broth.” 
― Do-well Good-biddy-body

But Moma would have none of that.

She believed that the best things in life came to those that worked hard and deserved a place at her table. To them, she would give them the best that she could make. She used only the best ingredients, perfectly selected, and cut and simmered under her watchful eye.

“Let others eat their soup”, she would proclaim. “If we do everything like everyone else, we will be just like them.”

And so it was.

Time passed

Time passed on and Moma died.

There was nothing sinister or scandalous about her death. It was natural. She lived a long and just life, and when the angel of death came for her, she welcomed it with open arms.

Knowing full well that her death was fast approaching, she explicitly warned about the dangers of changing her soup.

She warned about what could possibly happen and go wrong. She discussed her reasoning as to why the ingredients were as she specified. She explicitly delineated how it should be cooked and how it should be served.

She did so in a special document called the “Fed-Well Papers“. Here she explained everything so that people can well understand why things were made the way there were.

Her family, in her memory (as well as in her will) decided to maintain the family tradition. They would keep everything the same. Especially the name of the soup “Moma’s Chicken Soup”.

The first change

That was all well and good. It’s just that they only needed to make just a few little changes to it. You know, Itsy-bitsy changes. To make it better, don’t ya know.

Little ones. Not big ones.

You see, what happened was a fresh-faced family member, straight out of school with a freshly minted MBA decided to change the ingredients. He knew that he could do so. As he was taught so many new and progressive ideas at the university that he attended.

So, what he did was take people who liked other soups and arranged blind-test studies with them. Blindfolded, they would taste different soups and they would rate the taste.

Since they all came from backgrounds that did not like chicken soup to begin with, he knew that whatever they would select would tell him how best to change his soup to appeal to these outliers.

The results when tabulated provided all the ammunition he needed to convince the rest of the family that Moma’s chicken soup needed to change. It needed to change, he argued, to include more people eating it.

It needed to be more attractive to others, and thus more diverse.

He would pound on the family table and accuse the others of being close-minded, bigoted, and hicks. He called them “deplorable” for clinging to their chicken soup.

They reluctantly agreed, though truth be told, there was money that changed hands, and other methods of persuasion were used to convince the more recalcitrant family members.

The first change was to allow roots, leaves and stems in the soup.

You see, one of the more intellectual family members was taught in school that roots, stems, and leaves contain flavoroids. These chemicals can be used to greatly enhance the taste of the soup. Or at least the theory went.

After all, many other cooks were also doing this in their kitchens. It was only natural for it to be applied to Moma’s Chicken Soup. The other kitchens were progressive. They were “hip” to the “new tastes” that all the youth were professing as extraordinary.

So around twelve years after Moma passed on, they started to add the roots, stems and leaves from the celery, and carrots into the soup.

It was a rousing success!

Everyone was talking about the new “improved” soup. Now better! Now More Nutritious! Now better in every way.

On the television there would be discussion panels of “experts” absolutely raving about how wonderful the “new and improved” chicken soup was. They would hold their spoons up high in the air and talk about about how free and gay they felt. They would praise the soup calling it “LGBT friendly”.

LGBT = Large Garden Bits and Twigs.

A “Living Broth”

People outside the family, and everyone inside the community started to talk about how the soup was a “living broth” and that it was meant to change and evolve with the times.

The idea of a set fixed way of doing things was considered old fashioned, out of touch with reality, and outmoded. Only old grizzly stogies, and women straight out of the “Handy-cooks tale” would eat traditional “old fashioned” and obsolete soup.

The universities and cooking schools gleefully taught this philosophy. In fact, only those cooks that agreed with the idea of a “living broth” could ever be permitted to graduate from college. The others; the traditionalists, were set apart and scorned at the university.

Often at the universities would be set aside “broth free” areas where people could be themselves without the worry of seeing someone eat a traditional soup.

More time passed

Of course, if you make one little change, one little tweak, here and there eventually everything would be at the pinnacle of perfection.

Moves were taken to add more and more different kinds of vegetables into the soup.

The first to be added were tomatoes. As it was thought that nothing looked fresher and “farm fresh” than photos of tomatoes with carrots and celery.

Then came potatoes.

Then apples. After all, tomato is a fruit, so apples are the logical choice for the soup.

Soon, everything was added to the soup pot. This included mushrooms, bean sprouts, cauliflower, sweet peas, sweet potatoes, and beans. In fact, all kinds of beans were accepted into the soup.

It was to make the soup full of protein.

Factions of believers

All these changes necessitated some intervention. As there became different factions of soup lovers. Some thought that the soup should contain more potatoes, while others believed that the soup needed to have bananas and pineapple added to it.

They argued that since pineapple made pizza better that it would do miracles to chicken soup.

There was a faction of “root purists” that believed that the only vegetables that should be used are those that were roots like ginger, potatoes, garlic and onions.

There was a faction that demanded against “dietary appropriation” which consisted of vegetables that were used in other foods. They thought that the best chicken soup was one made out of water with no ingredients at all. These purists believed that “every food had it’s place” in society.

To make sure that the soup would remain pure to all factions, various regulatory agencies were established.

  • ATF – All Tasty Flavors
  • NSA – No Salt Agency
  • IRS – Increased Regulation Society
  • DHS – Department of Healthy Soup

Vegetarians get all upset

All of these additions made Moma’s soup a big hit with the vegetarian crowd. they loved the convenience of having all their favorite vegetables all mixed together and easy to eat all at once.

The only problem was the chicken.

Vegetarians did not like to eat meat.

They looked at all the rest of the soups that others were eating. They saw that the vast majority of them did not include chicken. They saw how happy and healthy these people were eating these chickenless soups.

They looked at potato soup, and red bean soup. They looked at split pea soup and cream of turnip soup. They looked at rutabaga and nutmeg soups.

Their argument was rather simple. It went something like this; If all these other soups don’t have chicken, then why does chicken soup contain chicken? It was a question that they asked over and over again. They asked it so many times that people started to automatically ask it themselves.

Why does any soup need a chicken?” They asked.

So they started a “ban the chicken” campaign. This “chicken ban” effort was very popular in the cities. Where violence against chicken was very common. The idea was that if you ban chicken from the soup, the chickens living in the urban areas would be safer from the urban cooks.

The vegetarians were smart. They knew that they could not ban the chicken outright. So they tired to ban it in all sorts of ways. they came up with ideas from taxing the chicken, to removing certain parts of the chicken and forbidding their use in the soup.

Assault Chicken Ban

Whenever a chicken got into a fight with another chicken, it was recorded on social media and promoted on the internet. The buzz word was “assault chicken“. By constantly harping on this term the vegetarians were able to rouse up twitter mobs to demand that Momas soup ban the chicken.

Of course, a "twitter mob" is an artificial construct. It is just a bunch of fake robots (or 'bots) that are used to give the illusion of popular support. You can buy armies of 'bots to make you look popular. It just costs a few thousands of dollars.

They worked at this and worked on this. They would say such things as “You don’t need an assault chicken to make a good soup.” Or, “why would anyone need to have a chicken in their soup?”

They rallied against certain breeds of chicken. For instance, chickens that were good egg-layers. Calling them “High Capacity Chickens“. They would get on television and say such things as “Why would anyone need to eat more than one egg?“.

In fact, there was one “assault chicken”, a fellow named “A.K.” that was particularly famous. During one newscast he took on forty seven other chickens and bested them all. Thus making the rousing nationwide slogan “Ban the AK-47“.

They rallied against inexpensive chicken breeds as well. The vegetarians were particularly incensed about these breeds. They did not like the fact that people would eat them on Saturday nights at BBQ’s with beer. Calling them “Saturday Night Specials“.

They rallied against new technology as well. As some chickens were spouting plastic ID tags instead of metal ID tags that had been used in the past. These plastic tabs would be applied by a tool that would lock the tag in place. It looked like an ugly pair of pliers, and was called a “G-lock”. Thus the anti-chicken crusade for “Ban the Glock“.

They rallied against stupid chickens. You know the kind, the really stupid ones. The “ding bat” chickens. These were the super stupid chickens. The ones that would bump against the fences inside the chicken stockade. They called these bans “Bump Stock Bans“.

They started to refer to the ways to obtain chickens as “loopholes”. Thus making it sound bad and sinister. For instance, there was the infamous “County Fair Loophole” where people could buy chickens at County Fairs. As well as the popular pastime of sharing chickens between family members. This became known as the “Chicken Transfer Loophole“.

All of this was promoted terribly as if it was something wrong, or evil, and that only a very evil and criminal person would ever handle a chicken let alone eat one in a soup. Because of this people started to get the idea that touching a chicken, or even looking at a chicken was a sinister and vile thing to do.

Every Election cycle

Without fail, every time there was a new major in town, there was a chicken incident” within the first six months of his term of office. He would thus get on the “soapbox” and loudly proclaim that he would need to ban chickens for the public good.

In the first six months of Major Bumba, there was a major chicken incident. Then in the first six months of Major Turnipon, there was another chicken incident. All of which would come with 24-7 non-stop wailing and gnashing of teeth of the “chicken tragedy”.

The news would focus on a crying infant, holding a spoon, and wailing about the horrible, horrible chicken. It would focus on school classrooms that took anti-chicken polls and went door to door convincing people of the dangers of chicken in soup.

One such student, a young Mr. Smog, became the picture boy for the anti-chicken in soup crusade. Now, even though he wasn’t the brightest student in the school, he somehow managed to get accepted at one of the top culinary schools in the country. He and others of his generation, such as Able Oscar-Charlie, were now poised to bring in a new way of cooking chicken soup. They called it “The New Broth Deal”.

Of course, the Major would participate as well. He would make a scene about it with him crying on the television or discussing going “nuclear” against cooks that use chicken in Moma’s soup.

Bumper stickers started to be seen on every other car saying such things as “Ban the chicken“, and “A chicken does not make a good soup”

The Ending of the Story

Once the system was put in place, it was only a matter of time before Moma’s soup banned the chicken. The vegetarian calls for banning the chicken never let up. It was wishful thinking, on the part of traditionalists, that the assault on the chicken would somehow disappear. It never did.

Thus, let it be well understood, the ban did eventually happen.

And all those traditionalists, who said that they would have “to pull their spoon from their dead cold hands” stood by and did nothing. They were just full of hot air and bluster. When push came to shove, they went into their kitchens, slammed the door, and hid in fear.

Huge cauldrons of soup were dumped in the sewers with great fanfare. The CIA (Cook Investigative Agency) police and their armed shock troops patrolled the streets looking for violations of the ban.

Oh, the soup is still made today. Don’t ya know.

And yes, it’s still called “Moma’s Chicken Soup”, but it isn’t the same as what it was when it was first made. Though that no longer matters. No one today remembers what the original chicken soup tasted like.

No one remembers.

It’s not taught in school. The way things are is considered to be normal, and the way that they have always been.

Instead, everyone is still concentrating on improving the chicken-less soup. With the latest additions include such things as pine needles, walnuts, succotash, okra and dirt. The promotions include smiling school children, proudly holding up their bowls of soup to an adoring mainstream media.

Today momas soup
Moma’s chicken soup today. It is progressive. It is diverse. It is LGBT friendly. It is pro-vegetarian and anti-chicken.

And Moma…

Well, there’s been all sorts of earthquakes in the vicinity of her tombstone. It’s like a giant is rolling over and over under the ground.

Conclusion

Yes. America is still called a “Constitutional Republic” when it is actually an oligarchy today. And when the Constitution was first signed, only the male heads of families were able to vote, and their vote only would go to their federal Congressman.

There were not two political parties with the same objectives, and the same funding sources, but different talking points.

Today, you have everyone voting. In fact, the donkey-party wants children and all the non-citizens to vote. As such, it is no longer a benefit to be an American citizen. Any citizen, of any country, in any part of the world can vote.

After all, when 100% of the world can control the actions of 4.34% of the population, you have virtually zero control over your life.

World population pie chart
Population of the world, broken down by nations. Here you can see that the United States hold 4.34% of the world’s population. With the Democrats wanting non-citizens to vote in American elections, it means that virtually Americans will have no control over their governance. Instead their vote would be equal to a voter in Argentina.

It is a liability.

Americans are taxed to fight (presently) seven wars (and many, many other skirmishes) for rich oligarchs that aren’t even US Citizens. We are taxed and taxed, but don’t get any of the social welfare benefits. They just farm us like animals, and use us like farm animals.

In fact, the USA is so messed up right now that it is IMPOSSIBLE to revert back to the way it was intended to be. There are only two courses of action available. They are [1] continue on the path as is, and permit more laws, more taxes, more regulation, and more corruption to fight more wars, and allow more progressive ideology, or [2] “nuke everything from orbit” and start fresh all over again.

"Nuke It From Orbit" is a popular catchphrase  used in discussion forums to express one's extreme disapproval of a  particular image or link posted by someone else. In other words, when "killing it with fire" isn't nearly effective enough, "nuking it from orbit" is your last resort …because it's the only way to be sure.

"Nuke the entire site from orbit--it's the only way to be sure" is a quote taken from the 1986 sci-fi film Aliens in which Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) decides that nothing is worth saving and that the only sure way to destroy all of the aliens is to nuke their habitat from the orbit.

-Know your meme

To that I must add… Moo!

Americans
Americans complaining about their Rights, as viewed by the progressive liberal elite in the urban centers.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 8)

I like parks and nature. I like friends, and to share fine wine and song with them. But you can have your own pastimes. Certainly parks are awesome. I love the clean fresh air, and the exercise you get from walking and climbing. I love the new views and the adventures that you can experience.

Each and every park is different. When I used to explore the park in Indiana, back in the USA, I was amazed to discover how each one had their own flavor and “feeling” to it. It wasn’t just the layout, or the types of trees and vegetation. It was the smells in the air, and the humidity. It was the way the sun hit the trees and the care and design of the wooden bridges.

It was the mountains, the rivers, the lakes, the streams and the rocks. It was how the people interacted with each other, and the various little special nooks, crannies and glades that would appear here and there. It was the meadows and the brooks. It was the rustling grass on a perfect croquet playing day, or the dim dark shade of a deep forest tangle.

Each park is special, and each park stands alone. Individually and special.

But for those of you who don’t like to walk or hike, the world has so much to offer. This includes the lights of the big city, and the noisy calliope of people. You see, in my mind, it is the experiences that we have, and who we share those experiences with that defines to what degree we are living life.

A person like Howard Hughes might have been a millionaire, but as a recluse he stopping living life. Ah. That is what mental illness does to you. It affects your ability to function properly.

So whether you wish to go forth and live life in nature, or just want to live it where you are right now, that’s all good. The key is to make the best of what you have right now. That is the key and that is what is important.

Whether it is this…

Notice what they are doing?

That’s right. They are hopping up and down. They are shaking and moving about. Dancing does not have to be done expertly. It’s all about moving about and having fun.

Oh, and by the way, you don’t need to drink alcoholic beverages to have fun. While I love to do so, that’s just me. You need to have fun your way. Do it your way. You do not have to do it my way. And your way can be really different.

It could mean going sled racing with your huskies pulling away, or riding horse. It could mean tromping out though the hills to an isolated brook and fishing for brook trout. It could mean riding quads in and out of mud holes. It could mean going to a friends house and eating nachos and watching Vincent Price movies on their big screen monitor.

Or this…

The important thing to keep in mind is how fleeting life actually is. When you get older, your parents are gone. You find that a number of your close friends are also gone. Some tragically.

You cannot count on anything. All you can do is make your own life count.

Make your life count.

Thank you for visiting. I hope that you enjoyed this post and maybe learned something new in the process. Have a wonderful rest of the day!

And, may your days and nights be filled with happiness.

Thank you.

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 7)

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

You do not need to live a life like I do. It’s not for everyone…

Indeed…

But there are places that you should see in person; places and life that you should experience. Not through the lens of a camera or a video, but rather with all of your senses… not only your visual and audio senses…

There are amazing places out there. Places that are beyond your comprehension. These places are not found on travel websites listing five-star hotels as approved by California software companies. These are off-the-beaten track adventures.

Yes, they are packaged to appeal. These are fine vacations where you can stay in a five star hotel, or get a “better listed” room in someone’s house. You can travel in style and churn up a month’s wages for the experience. You can bask in the sun on a fantastic beach resort, or go skiing at a famous resort frequented by the perpetually wealthy in the Untied States.

Or, you can just throw darts at a wall map of the globe.

My best and most remembered experiences were those with friends in unremarkable places.

You can go out and have a nice meal and some wine with your loved ones or your friends and just talk about… About what it would be like to just take a chance and go someplace really different. Talk about spending time together with your friends. Talk about the good food, and the things that you might want to do.

Think about all the selfies you all could take.

It doesn’t need much in the way of planning. But it does need shared desire. So, what’s stopping you? What’s stopping you for buying a bottle of cheap wine, a loaf of French crusty bread and a block of cheese? What’s stopping you from dialing your friend right now, this very second and asking them if they want to join you for dinner. What’s stopping you?

They call to you…

Now, let’s go to the next part of this post. (If I throw in too many micro-videos nothing appears and the post takes forever to load.) So to continue, please go follow this arrow…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 6)

One of the things about China is that they are not afraid to experiment. There just aren’t legions of nay-Sayers or guardians of regulations and red tape that you need to fight to do something new. There are no overweight social justice warriors in bureaucratic positions that love to say “No!” to new ideas, or committees of well-entrenched stogies that say “pay me my fees so that I can study this matter“.

They just go ahead and do what they want.

If they want a water fountain with playful water they just go ahead and make it.

That’s right, and if some old busybody gets wet and complains, they will report that person to the police so that they can have their mental health examined. In such a large populous nation such as China there is absolutely zero tolerance to busybodies, social justice warriors or people with mental issues. Once they become dangerous, such as disrupting the lifestyles and fun of others, they are segregated from society.

They are then isolated, and studied to see if they need to be “corrected”.

Mental hospital in China.
There have been abuses of sending social justice warriors straight to mental hospitals instead to prison. This problem has since been corrected by the Chinese government. If a person is making a public disruption it needs to be ascertained whether they are acting due to [1] a mental illness or just [2] social activism contrary to the government policy. If they have a mental issue they go to the mental hospital. If they a just a SJW, then they go to prison for public and social disruption. Things are much clearer today than they used to be. The Chinese have greatly strengthened the protections of people and citizens in China.

Anyways, here’s a water fountain in China. Why not have fun with the water like everyone else is? I think it’s a great playful fountain. You betcha!

I really like how the mothers are with their children and the kids scatter when the water ceiling starts to collapse. It’s so very cute and awesome! What fun!

Having fun in China can mean going to parks. It can mean playing in the KTV’s. It can mean having fun off-road in a vehicle. It can mean fishing, or eating fantastic food. It can mean all sorts of things. Not just natural scenery at parks.

It could mean exploring all the many, many cities…

People, life is about living it and having experiences. It is not about falling into habits at the mercy of your boss… or following the rules that box you in. You need to go out and make your life count.

Do you remember what it was like when you were young? Do you remember what it was like when you would hang out with your friends? Do you remember talking with your friends about your hopes and dreams and what you would like to do someday? I do.

I really do.

And, yes, I did have a tree house. My friends and I did have a club house. Yes. We did ride our bikes all over the countryside into late at night. That is what life used to be like int he USA. It was a land of freedom.

I remember one such day.

We had rode our bikes on a long all-day excursion. It was August, and it was pleasant. Maybe 81F, and low humidity. The trees were getting apples and the blueberry bushes were all laden with fruit. We had rode up to the top of one of the hills. It was all planted with wheat, and it was a beautiful golden field that the wind would blow back and forth.

The sky was brilliant blue with the white cotton ball clouds and we just laid in that field and talked about music, and what we would do when we would eventually have a girl friend. For some of us, it didn’t happen for a number of years.

What was so important, was not what we were talking about. It was not what our dreams were. It was not the beautiful day, nor the amazing scene that laid around us. It was the time spent with our friends.

That was what was the most important thing that I remember to this day.

Life is short. You need to make it count. Spend it with your friends. Laugh. Cry. Swear, and make a scene if you want. But by all means do it with those you care about.

All these experiences won’t magically appear one day. They will not happen once you get “all your ducks in a row”. They will not happen once you get a raise. Or, more money in the bank. Or when your next pay check clear the bank. Or, when the trash is cleared out of the garage. Or, when you finish that project that you have been working on.

Now is your chance. Now is your opportunity. Now.

Please don’t squander the wonderful life that God has gifted you with. You have two arms. You have two legs. You have money in your wallet. Go forth and use that life that you have.

You know, life is not one-dimensional.

People. People! You can’t just segregate traveling and experiencing the parks of China and leave out who are experiencing it or why.

Life is not a Facebook post, a Google listing, or a Wikipedia listing. It cannot be narrowed down to facts and figures. It’s about all of the senses, not just one or two. It’s about all your experiences, your relationships, your knowledge and prior experiences and how they all coalesce when you experience a new adventure with your friends.

That is what parks are all about.

Now, let’s go to the next part of this post. (If I throw in too many micro-videos nothing appears and the post takes forever to load.) So to continue, please go follow this arrow…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 5)

You can spend the entire day at the park. In fact, if you are up to it, you can go camping, or rent a room at a lodge. You can sleep in your car if need be, rent a hotel room, or just sleep under the stars. And while you are at it…

You all can be enjoying yourselves during a holiday and offer your prayers to God.

Saint Peter.
A Catholic image of Saint Peter. Do you realize what is going on in this picture? Maybe you should. Think about it.

Prayers are important. Whether you believe in God or not is immaterial. There is a higher force, a higher or finer power that directs everything in this life. You don’t have to take my word on it, but you should at least be circumspect in your actions and decisions towards others. I would advise a more careful appreciation of your actions and your interactions with the people around you.

Say a prayer and ask for guidance.

I personally believe that life should be experienced to the best of your ability. If you have the opportunity, go take it. Explore new things. Go to new places. Do new things. Make new experiences for you, your family and your friends.

Come on!

My best memories are with the people and the pets that I love. Really and seriously. It doesn’t matter if these are childhood friends, or college buddies, or my various friends as I traveled as part of my occupation. My best memories were shared.

Life is meant to be lived. And that does not NOT mean that you do so alone. Your life is to be shared. That is how you obtain adventures and experiences.

It can be on a glass floored bridge…

Or riding down a glass-walled sleuth.

You should spend your time with others. You should value yourself, not by what your occupation is, but by who your friends and family are. For they, their feelings and emotions, are what matters. Not things. Not money. Not a certificate on a wall, or a CV.

People matter.

Not things. Not documents. Not paper.

People are what is important. You need to treasure your chances to make a different in the lives of others. You should appreciate these other people AS THEY ARE and not try to change them. You need to be you… gosh darn it, the best YOU that you can possibly be.

And go forth, and share these trips and adventures with others.

Speaking about your relationships with others…

You know, the real sad thing about all this are the internet trolls and nay-sayers that send me harassment emails and notes. They don’t realize that every time you send or do something hurtful, that goes as a “black mark” in your “soul record”. It’s as if Saint Peter will record everything that you do and take a good hard and long look at your actions.

And no, asking for forgiveness won’t erase your piss-poor actions. It will only put a line through it. It will not erase it.

By-gones
If you burn your house down, it will not miraculously reappear. If you cut off your arm, it will not grow back. The things that you do in this world will have a direct influence in the quality of your life. Don’t fuck it up.

So, people, make the most of your life. Share it with others. Have a good time. Enjoy it more. Drink some frosty libations and start eating better.

Why have a McDonald’s (fake) burger when you can eat the real thing? Why pay a premium price on a Starbucks packaged coffee and drink it out of a paper cup instead of a proper coffee mug? What’s up with that?

Life is short. Live it well.

This next video is interesting, and it kind of summarizes what I am trying to say.

You don’t need to travel to a different place to make your life fulfilling. It doesn’t have to be a park, or an exciting ride, or a romantic beach. It just needs to be exactly where you are right now… exactly who you are right now, and with the people that are around you exactly as they are right now.

Please, whether it is a park in China, or an Applebees restaurant, go forth and enjoy it with friends, loved ones and any one else you can drag along.

Oh, and by the way, have a wonderful time.

Now, let’s go to the next part of this post. (If I throw in too many micro-videos nothing appears and the post takes forever to load.) So to continue, please go follow this arrow…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 4B) Bullet trains

Here are some other notes that I have to just throw in… We need to talk about how to get to the park.

When you arrive to the various national parks you will more than likely need to take a train. Busses and cars tend to be slow. You can fly there with a plane, but the bullet trains are everywhere in China, they are reasonably priced, and quick. So most Chinese end up taking a bullet train to the destination and then go to the park from there.

It’s sort of like this…

Riding in a bullet train is a smooth, easy experience.

You have plenty of leg room. The coach is wide and you can easily move forward and backward in the car. There are plenty of bathrooms, with an average of two per car, which means that you typically don’t need to stand outside and wait for the bathroom to be available.

The ride is very, very smooth. It is calm. It is pleasant. It is relaxing.

Chinese High-Speed Rail

China has an extensive network of bullet trains.

China announced that it would implement bullet trains, and a network throughout China at the same time that California announced that it would implement a bullet train that would connect San Francisco to Los Angeles.

China’s announcement was met with laughter.

  • “China could never pull it off.”
  • “China only makes junk. It would never work and break down all the time.”

Well, today in 2019, we know that the (American) California bullet train never got off the ground.

It is still billions of dollars in the red. The American engineers couldn’t design it properly, so they had to turn to Japanese assistance. The train route was fraught with problems, and as of today, only 15 miles of track has been laid. No stations are completed. No vehicles are manufactured. And the program has been scrubbed as “unobtainable” by the Governor of California.

Meanwhile, China’s bullet train rail line network look like this…

China high speed rail map.
The Chinese network of high speed rail. This is what it looks like as of 2020. The rail lines are not only more extensive than the California plans, but are actually faster than the trains (that were) planned for California.

The Chinese are proud of their high-speed rail (bullet trains) and they have good reason to be.

I, as a rail enthusiast, admire their efforts and completely enjoy the luxury of rail travel. Yes, I do love to fly, but flying in the United States is more like being herded into cattle cars than anything resembling comfortable travel.

Over the years, the American airlines (of all types) have been dealing with increasing federal regulation, and completely diminishing value of the dollar (thank you Federal Reserve), and so they have been forced to cram more and more people on tinier, and tinier aircraft. Often charging an assortment of extra fees from everything to luggage to snacks and meals on the planes.

Not so in China.

About the Trains

The train stains are all new and China certainly has mastered crowd control. While the slower “old fashioned” trains still exist, and are being used, the bullet trains (high-speed rail) offers a comfortable alternative to those who are willing to pay the extra $5 to ride in roomy comfort.

These trains are fast. There is no denying that. They do slow down when they near a train station, but even then, they are fast. As this video clearly shows…

Once you arrive at the station, you will need to take a car or a bus to the park. That is, of course, unless you don’t have a loved one, a family member or a friend to pick you up.

And, what ever happens, your train experience would typically look a little like this…

Car or Driver Rental

The most common way to achieve this is to use DD or take a taxis.

DD is the Chinese version of Uber. It pretty much works the same as Uber does, except that (it has been my personal experience) that the Chinese driving the cars for DD have to have their cars pre-screened for acceptability, where Uber does not have this requirement (that I am aware of). Thus the DD cars tend to be nice, clean and often new.

However, you will need to navigate through the massive mazes of highways and roads, such as this…

As well as go through all sorts of tunnels. After all, most parks in China are in mountainous regions and the Chinese do love their tunnels.

Tunnels

I’ve got to tell youse guys one thing. Tunnels in China are quite a different experience than tunnels in the United States. It really is. In fact, I could probably write a couple of posts on this subject.

  • The Chinese are traditional conservative pragmatists.
  • Government and management obtained their positions through merit.
  • Public works are to be designed for public use. There must be an element of beauty mixed with functionality.

They are indeed, quite a different experience. Have you ever seen light shows in American tunnels? How about planted shrubbery, trees, or flowers inside the tunnel? How about daily cleanings, sweepings, and washings by the cleaning crews? (China does not have welfare. They have work-fare. You want to eat, you must work.)

Look at how clean these tunnels are…

Now, let’s go to the next part of this post. (If I throw in too many micro-videos nothing appears and the post takes forever to load.) So to continue, please go follow this arrow…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.


What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 4)

Again, you need to have some fun. And don’t argue with me on this. Humans need fun. No, I’m not talking about software games, first-person shooters, or mindless entertainments on your cell-phone. I am talking about things that you can share with all five of your senses with a friend… or two… or others.

Bring a dog why don’t ya. The cat’s can stay home and protect the house.

You know, when you are a child, play is your work. Children automatically play as that is how they learn. Play is important. It is critical to the development of a child. Play is how a person learns and programs themselves to interact with the world around them.

Well, after you grow up a bit, the need to play and have fun takes on a different role. It is not only how you learn new things, but it becomes a method; a technique, in how you can “turn off” your mind from repetitive actions. As that is how the brain works. It goes on auto-pilot every chance it gets.

So you need to shut it down from time to time.

We do this through play and personal entertainments. You know, like games, sports, exercise, food, and drinking. Oh, and yes, sex does play a role also.

In China, like in the United States there are artificial “parks”. These are not natural parks with hiking trails and scenic views. Instead. these are places to have fun in. They will often have a roller coaster, and other similar rides.

Oh Baby!

They will often have all sorts of alternative entertainments that you might not see in American theme parks. For instance, there will be stage shows, musicians, public dancing displays and other events staged at random locations at specific times. Often these performances are pretty darn cool.

There are so many different kinds of parks in China. After all, China is an enormous nation.

There are kiddy-parks, water-parks, natural-parks, seaside-parks, theme-parks, slides, dives, and everything in between. These parks are great places to go and have fun. You can go with your friends, your family or with loved ones. Very rarely do people visit them alone.

Being alone is very lonely.

Outings

You don’t want to be alone. You want to share your life. You want to experience life with others.

I do enjoy a good outing. Don’t you?

Some of the best times that I have ever had was at parks. It doesn’t matter if I was dirt-poor and eating a can of beans over a fire behind a parking lot, or if I was with others having a big gala celebration in a pavilion. The parks are great places to be.

Can’t you just smell the burning charcoal or wood (snapping and popping)? Can’t you just imagine sitting at a picnic table while the rain pours outside the shelter? Can’t you just image now great those potatoes and onions taste when they are pulled out of the ashes in the fire pit?

I can. I can well imagine a can of Campbell’s Pork and Beans with the top open sitting in the ashes of a fire cooking away. I can image a coal-black cast iron skillet with fresh fish or eggs sizzling away. I can imagine eggs and bacon cooking. I can imagine a hotdog on a long pointy stick that I carved with my pen-knife.

Can’t you just imagine the cold frosty bear when you pop a top or pull a tab?

Budweiser Beer

Oh, by the way, Budweiser beer is very popular in China. Only they don’t call it “Bud”. Instead they call it “Bye Way”. So when you go to a restaurant, you say something along the lines of “fu yuan, gei wo, yi peng, bei wei pijiu. Bing dong de.”

Or in other words; “Waiter, give me a bottle of Budweiser beer, icy cold.”

You can enjoy this anywhere in China. You can enjoy this in any of the restaurants, bars, clubs or KTV’s. You can enjoy it on the street, in the parks, or inside a hospital. You can enjoy it in a parking lot, or while waiting for the train.

It can be at the beach…

Enjoy yourself

You can have fun anywhere. It doesn’t have to be in China. I just happen to use China as an example because I happen to live here. You can go forth and enjoy your life where ever you are right now.

You can ride a bicycle. You can ride a motorcycle or a trike. You can hike or climb. You can backpack or go there in comfort. It just matters that you go forth on your own and just do it. Do it near a beach.

Or it can be on the top of a mountain.

When I was growing up, it was pretty much assumed that we would have “vacations” when we were out of school, AND the factory was shut down for the two week summer shut-down period. This is something that was pretty much assumed during the 1960’s. This meant that the only fun and vacations that were taken away from our home was during the Summer.

But…

You will be able to go to the parks in the Summer as well as in the Winter. Each time will be unique. Each time will be special.

Of course, what’s a mountain trail without a glass-floored bridge? Many Chiense parks have these enormous glass-floored pedestrian bridges that you can walk on, and many have the pizeo electric actuated PVD interlayer that will display images electronically.

This is a great way to have fun. It looks like the glass is breaking underneith your feet. LOL.

Now, let’s go to the next part of this post. (If I throw in too many micro-videos nothing appears and the post takes forever to load.) So to continue, please go follow this arrow…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 3)

Getting to the Park

Of course, you will need to take a train or a car to go to many of the parks. Any parks that are located in a city tend to be over-used and mildly challenging. To fully experience China, you need to travel. That means driving through China.

Go ahead, any drive through China will be an adventure. It’s a little bit like this…

In some ways, the civil engineers in China really get carried away. It’s like what it was like when I was a young boy playing with my erector set or Lincoln logs. I used to make all kinds of complexes. I would make these amazing race-tracks for my “Hot Wheels” cars, and all sorts of interesting railroad track layouts.

Erector Set
Vintage erector set. This is the kind of thing that I had when I was a young boy. I used to try to make all kinds of things such as bridges and cranes with the collection of metal and nuts and bolts that the kit provided.

It’s kind of a thing with us boys.

Well, the Chinese are permitted to go ahead and let loose. You can see this all over China. That’s one thing that I like about China. You don’t have all these armies of bureaucrats telling you what you can and what you cannot do. You don’t have SJW’s telling you what you can or what you cannot do or say. You just don’t have that.

So, you can go ahead and do your thing.

Go ahead have fun.

One of the first things you notice about China is the freedom. You can sit down in a restaurant, bring in your own bottle of VSOP. Plop it down, pour yourself a good stiff drink, and light up a cigarette. You can put your big Siberian husky in the seat next to you and when you order a meal, the waitress won’t say anything to you except…

Ahhh, what a cute dog you have! What’s his name?

It’s all about freedom, liberty and having fun. There are no rules. At least nothing that you need to worry about. So go head. Just enjoy yourself.

And please remember to share the experience with a friend of two. People, you should NEVER ever be lonely. There are people out there… people who want to do things. People who want to share a meal. People who like pets…dogs and cats. People who would love to share a beer or a cigarette with you.

Having fun in China.
What is better than sharing quality time with friends and family. Especially when that means sharing drinks and fine lively discussion. My Lord, we all spend too much time on social media, don’t we. Do out and have fun.

You should be sharing your time… Your self, and your life. You should be sharing your enjoyments, your meals and your happiness with others.

That’s what friends are for.

Don’t forget about the water.

Parks are places to have fun. They are places to have adventures, and to obtain experiences. It’s not only the tall mountains. It’s the rivers, the pastures, the farms, the coasts, the cities and the townships.

You can explore the rivers, and ride down the rapids. That’s always a great way to have a great deal of fun.

Now, let’s go to the next part of this post. (If I throw in too many micro-videos nothing appears and the post takes forever to load.) So to continue, please go follow this arrow…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 2)

This is the second page of an on-going post describing what Chinese parks are like. If you would like to start at the beginning, please go HERE. Otherwise enjoy…

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

The Views are Beautiful

There is no question that the views are glorious. For beautiful is a word that just doesn’t cut it. I love the fresh air, the scent of the trees, and the cool breezes that caress my face. There is a certain romance with the way the forests are and the rocks and stone. I find it enthralling.

You might wonder why the stones have these traditional Chinese characters on them. Well, I have.

Well, it turns out that this is what the Chinese like to do. You know, like how Americans like to put a plastic pink flamingo (or an entire flock of them) in their front yard, or those plywood cutout of bent-over granny’s, or flying duck whimsy’s in their yards. Or those gnomes… Or those buried bathtubs with a statue of the Virgin Mary inside…

Or putting folding chairs in the parking spots on the streets of Pittsburgh…

Kitsch America
During the 1950’s and the 1960’s Americans would put these Pink Flamingos in their front lawns. It was considered a very trendy thing to do at the time. Now, it is looked upon as Kitsch.
Kitsch, also called cheesiness or tackiness, is art or other objects that, generally speaking, appeal to popular rather than "high art" tastes. Such objects are sometimes appreciated in a knowingly ironic or humorous way. The word was first applied to artwork that was a response to certain divisions of 19th-century art with aesthetics that favored what later art critics would consider to be exaggerated sentimentality and melodrama. Hence, 'kitsch art' is closely associated with 'sentimental art' .
-Wikipedia

Travel within the Park

Often you might need or opt to take a tram or light-rail train to some of the more remote areas in the parks. This can be an amazing experience.

Often you will ride in and out of the clouds. You will pass under and through trees and vine tangled gorges. You will watch light glimmer off of shattered stone surfaces, and witness rainbows form over enormous cascading waterfalls.

Wildlife

Being China, you will see all kinds of native flora and fauna that is unavailable in the rest of the world. Bird watchers end up experiencing some special treats.

The birds not only look different, but they make different sounds as well. Instead of hearing “cup of tea” from a grackle, you might hear some kind of prehistoric screech that seems like it belongs in a grade B horror flick.

Entertainments

Being a mountainous nation, the Chinese love to take advantage of the natural beauty and scenery. As such, they enjoy building recreational themed structures and venues on the tops of mountains and the sides of cliff faces.

It is pretty common to have these enormous swings that you can ride from one mountain top to the other, or glass floored bridges that you can walk in the clouds by…

There are often all kinds of fun things to do. There are many, many kinds of amusements. I personally like the hour-long water slides that go down the mountain. Awesome! It’s like you are riding some of those logs in the hills of Sacramento (Auburn), California back in the gold-rush days.

Remember them?

Wooden sluice
Here is a sluice from the gold rush days. The water would be diverted and used to help mine, process and separate the gold. In cases of timber logging, the sluices would not have such drastic bends and curves.

It’s sort of like this. And yes, you can experience this kind of ride all over China. It’s as common as bumper stickers on cars. It’s as common as having packages stolen off your porch once Amazon.com delivers them (or the UPS does). It’s as common as shoelaces on shoes.

It is sort of like this…

Riding down one of these things reminds me of a scene from the old television show Here Come the Brides.

There was a scene, in a long ago, half-remembered scene, where they rode down the sluice to get away (?) from some bad guys (?). All this kind of reminds me of that. I well remember wanting to ride one of those trees going down a sluice. Ah, it didn’t happen until over fifty years later. Eh?

The brides lived in an area much like a Chinese park.
Screen capture from the late 1960’s – early 1970’s American television show “Here comes the brides”.

There are all kinds of different versions of this. From little life-raft thingys to miniature go-carts, to mechanics roller beds . Here’s another version at a different park…

It kind of reminds me of sled-riding in the dead of Winter on snowy January nights in Western Pennsylvania. The logging roads in the woods would be blocked off from traffic, and the snow would be packed down by snowmobile. Then the cub-scouts would organize a “wiener roast” or “hot dog” party at the base (or often) at the summit of the hill.

Well, that’s enough micro-videos for this section. Let’s go to the next page of this post to see what other surprises that await us in the parks of China.

Now, let’s go to the next part of this post. (If I throw in too many micro-videos nothing appears and the post takes forever to load.) So to continue, please go follow this arrow…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What Visiting a Park in China is like (part 1)

Here we spend some time exploring China. In particular some of those outstanding mountains that are just about everywhere.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

China is a land of some amazing nature and spectacular views. You look at the brochures, and the commercials, and the videos and say “Man oh man, I just have to go there and visit that place!“.

Well, this is what it’s like…

It’s all about the climb.

Every single park in China seems to be located on the top of a mountain. To access it, you need to hike up these endless steps and climb up and up and up. It’s amazing!

You, the reader might think that I am joking, or maybe exaggerating. I am not. All of the parks involve climbing.

I have a theory about this.

I think that over the last 5000 years, as the Chinese population grew and nations came and went, the Chinese people rendered all the land, except for the most difficult to reach, for living and farming. Thus, today, in modern contemporaneous China, the parks are located in the most difficult to reach locations.

It doesn’t matter where you go in China. The parks all require strong legs and a willingness to climb.

Restrooms

Of course, when you go on hikes in China, you will often need to use the restroom. The Chinese will often accommodate this most basic of human needs, and will make a small and easy restroom where you can go to the bathroom in.

China tends to be warm, and thus you will need to keep well hydrated. As you climb, you will sweat. To replenish your precious bodily fluids, you will drink some bottle water, and continue on your way.

Chinese water prices
Chinese bottled water and prices. Note that in general, 6.3 yuan equals 1 USD.

Eventually, at some point, you will need to stop and take a leak. For many this will require a bathroom or toilet or urinal.

The only problem is that it is often located off to the side and you might need to hike a spell to get to it. It’s sort of like this…

Spectacular Views

The views that one can see once they climb these mountains are often spectacular. In China, for some crazy reason, most of the mountains seem to have nearly perpendicular sides. It’s like a towering cliff face. Yet, once you get to the summit and take a look around, the view can be breathtaking.

Like this…

For some reason all the parks in China seem to be perched up high at the very summit of the mountains. This can be everything from bathrooms to convenience stores. The Chinese do love to climb. It’s almost a national pastime.

Maybe sometime way back in their past they had an affinity for mountain goats. Ugh!

Climbing goats in trees.
Goats can climb trees and cliff faces. I never could get my “arms” around this concept. As they don’t possess hands, or thumbs to assist in gripping things.

By the way… have you all been as mystified as I have about goats? I mean, really what’s all this stuff about them climbing trees? You know, they don’t have hands capable of gripping or anything like that. Yet they can climb trees.

I boggles the mind, I’ll tell you what.

Now, let’s go to the next part of this post. (If I throw in too many micro-videos nothing appears and the post takes forever to load.) So to continue, please go follow this arrow…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go to the start of this series of posts, then please click HERE.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site. I don’t make money off of it. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Chinese Love of Off-Road Vehicle Adventures

In America we have RV’s, donut-wheeled motorized trikes, and dirt-bikes. We have jeeps and all sorts of pickups. Well, you know what? So does China. The Chinese love the sport of going “off road” and exploring China.

Here we are doing to have a brief review of this most awesome pastime. Just make sure that your trunk is filled with ice and a fine beverage of your choice. Myself, I prefer a nice icy-cold beer, but wine, VSOP, XO and whiskey are fine alternatives.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

The Chinese love to travel in groups

The Chinese love to travel in groups. They really do not like to travel alone. They view life as something that should be shared. And, I for one, can’t blame them.

Friendships are important and are important when you are involved in shared activities that everyone enjoys. Such things as travel, adventure and exploration are greatly prized by the Chinese. In fact, they form individual clubs and groups around these activities.

This is in many ways like what we in the United States used to do maybe three decades ago. That was before the federal government started to demand open membership in clubs and organizations. First it began with “men’s only” clubs being forced to accept woman, and now we have the Boy Scouts turning into the Queer trans-gendered scouts.

Sigh. America is a progressive utopia today.

Luckily, China doesn’t permit any of this kind of social engineering, so people are free to establish their own clubs and organizations totally independent fro the government. And, so they do…

Outfitting the camper(s)

Many of the Chinese take their four-wheel drive vehicles and outfit them as sleeping quarters. This is the same as what you would see in the United States with “campers” and other rigs of a similar nature. The only difference is that most of these outfitted vehicles are designed for off-road adventures on difficult terrain.

I have seen these vehicles decked out much the same way that the 1970’s van culture would do. They would have carpet inside the vehicles and on the ceilings just like we all used to put shag carpeting in the ceilings and dashboards of our vans and Camaros back in the late 1970’s.

Decked out van from the 1970's.
In the 1970’s it was fashionable, for a spell, to outfit the interiors of vans as portable party machines. Then at that time, we would cruse in the van, listening to music, and enjoying our beverages and smokes as we watched the world pass us all by. Many van interiors looked a little like this.

Inside you can find refrigerators (you know, for some frosty beer), as well as high-end stereo and television systems. Some are outfitted with independent air conditioning, power generators, and heaters. It all depends on the owners.

Being China, bathroom necessities are generally taken cared for behind trees or within ravines.

Rather than having one-way tinted or mirrored glass, most Chinese vehicles have insulated glass to keep the UV light out, and a network of curtains that can be closed for privacy when needed. These curtains are often thick and used to help keep the interior of the vehicle at a pleasant temperature.

Many of the vehicles have “pop top” arrangements that open up to a kind of built-in tent. Thus you can have a nice sleeping tent on the top of the vehicle, or one that would fold outwards from the back or side of the vehicle.

Mud Slingin’ on quad bikes

Just like in the American South East, the Chinese have a love for Mud Slingin’. Here, it is often done with quad bikes instead of pickups, the the overall idea is pretty much the same.

No, this is not about calling people names or “digging up dirt” on people.

This is the actual act of throwing mud around – often in a four-wheel-drive vehicle. You can see this kind of activity all over “fly over country” (i.e. outside of the urban centers) in the United States. It doesn’t matter if the soil is red, or if it is black. If there is dirt, and there is water, then you can have loads of fun slinging it around.

Ahhh.

I well remember my first experiencing mud slingin’. It was in the boondocks somewhere between Rock Hill and York South Carolina. We were in this stand of tall pines (in the Carolina’s are there any other kinds of forests?) and a bunch of fellas with huge trucks, with these super massive wheels were tearing up this bog in the middle of a clearing.

Mus slingin in the USA.
This is what American style mud-slinging looks like. It’s a great way to spend the weekend, and hang out with your friends. It’s also a great and wonderful experience when you spend it with friends drinking beer and eating some delicious home-style hamburgers. Hey! Life is too short not to have a good time.

The soil, of course, was red, and so was the mud. As they drove in and out of the bog, the mud would spray over everything. It was a geyser of wet red mud that got into everything. I’ll tell you what. But who cares anyways.

We’d ride around and then of course get some beer from the various trucks. Everyone was really open to sharing some of their fine frosty libations (that’s beer for those of you from Rio Linda), and some fine eating. We later went to a fish fry and I got my first taste of hush puppies. Good eating ya all.

Anyways, the Chinese are the same. They like the same things… fish… beer… motor sports… slinging mud… singing songs. Though they probably never heard of Charlie Daniels, they would certainly be willing to belt out a contemporaneous Country and Western tune or two with me.

You know, like Sam Hunt.

Dirt-Biking up and down the woods

Well, the Chinese also have a real love for dirt-biking.

Here we can see some quad bikes having some fun on some stairs. Of course, they should really be wearing helmets, but they don’t need to. In China, there aren’t laws to protect us from ourselves. They don’t have all these rules to make our life better and safer.

Instead they expect us to take responsibility for ourselves. If we hurt ourselves, then we suffer the consequences, and pay for it out of our own pocket. It’s not the government’s business. It’s ours.

Full Dressers

Here’s a chick on a fully dressed Indian. Don’t ya just love it?

Some cities in China have banned motorcycles, and / or electric scooters. I know that Shenzhen has banned them because so many of the people using them have little regard for the rules of the road and traffic safety. (It’s kind of amazing. You have this super difficult written test and a series of driving tests that you must take, and still people drive like maniacs…)

Heck, it’s like a scene from Momas Family.

Momas Family
Mama’s Family is an American television sitcom starring Vicki Lawrence as Thelma Harper. The series is a spin-off of a recurring series of comedy sketches called “The Family” featured on The Carol Burnett Show and Carol Burnett & Company. The sketches led to the made-for-TV movie Eunice, and finally the television series.

Anyways…

So what the Shenzhen police did was just drive around in big box trucks and collect every parked motorcycle that they could find. They would drive over to the curb and just start loading them up. The Chinese do not mess around.

This, or course, ended up getting many people upset.

Though…

They shouldn’t have gotten upset. The police gave a six months notice that they would do this. But, you know, people being people just never thought that it would actually happen. So they started rounding up all kinds of motorized bicycles.

Anyways, big bikes are popular in China.

When the tariff issues are resolved between Trump and Xi Peng, (and they will most certainly get resolved) you can expect sales of Harley’s to really take off in China. The chicks really love those Harleys.

Caravans into the Hinderlands

Often the Chinese will organize into groups of like-minded folk and go on caravans.

Often they will arrange multi-week long trips and go out exploring the back-roads of China. Often they will communicate with each other by establishing a group video chat on We-chat. You just have the APP run on the dash and carry on with multiple conversations while you drive along.

Here’s another micro-video along these lines.

People, life is about living. If you are not out with your friends, doing the best to provide for your family, and eating well, then you are squandering it. You need to go forth and take the cup of life with both hands and gulp it down in big frosty foam-filled gulps.

Exploring Tibet

The region of Tibet is an enormous geographical area, comprising nearly 25% of all of China. It is mountainous with some absolutely amazing views. Many of my friends have outfitted their vehicles and explored this section of the country with all sorts of adventurous tales.

Conclusion

The Chinese love motor sports just like Americans do. They form clubs and groups and enjoy the pleasures of automobiles and adventure together with their friends. If you, have the same interests, I would suggest that you too go forth and enjoy yourself.

There’s a hill. Out there. Waiting for you.

What’s your excuse?

Links about China

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Smile (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

The Smile

By Ray Bradbury

   In the town square the queue had formed at five in the morning, while cocks were  crowing  far  out in the rimed country and there were no fires. All about, among  the  ruined  buildings, bits of mist had clung at first, but now with the new  light of seven o’clock it was beginning to disperse. Down the road, in twos
and  threes,  more  people were gathering in for the day of marketing the day of festival.

   The  small bay stood immediately behind two men who had been talking loudly in  the  clear air, and all of the sounds they made seemed twice as loud because of  the cold. The small boy stamped his feet and blew on his red, chapped hands, and  looked  up  at the soiled gunny-sack clothing of the men, and down the long line of men and women ahead. 

   ‘Here, boy, what’re you doing out so early?’ said the man behind him.

   ‘Got my place in line, I have,’ said the boy.

   ‘Whyn’t you run off, give your place to someone who appreciates?’

   ‘Leave the boy alone,’ said the man ahead, suddenly turning.

   ‘I  was  joking.’  The  man  behind put his hand on the boy’s head. The boy shook it away coldly. ‘I just thought it strange, a boy out of bed so early.’ 

   ‘This  boy’s  an  appreciator  of arts, I’ll have you know,’ said the boy’s defender, a man named Grigsby, ‘What’s your name, lad?’ 

   ‘Tom.’

   ‘Tom here is going to spit clean and true, right, Tom?’

   ‘I sure am!’

   Laughter passed down the line.

   A  man  was selling cracked cups of hot coffee up ahead. Tom looked and saw the  little  hot  fire  and  the  brew bubbling in a rusty pan. It wasn’t really coffee.  It  was  made from some berry that grew on the meadowlands beyond town, and  it sold a penny a cup to warm their stomachs; but not many were buying, not many had the wealth. 

   Tom  stared  ahead  to  the place where the line ended, beyond a bombed-out stone wall. 

   ‘They say she _smiles,’ _said the boy.

   ‘Aye, she does,’ said Grigsby.

   ‘They say she’s made of oil and canvas.’

   ‘True.  And  that’s  what  makes  me  think she’s not the original one. The original, now, I’ve heard, was painted on wood a long time ago.’ 

   ‘They say she’s four centuries old.’

   ‘Maybe more. No one knows what year this is, to be sure.’

   ‘It’s 2061’

   ‘That’s what they say, boy, yes. Liars. Could be 3,000 or 5,000, for all we know.  Things  were  in a fearful mess there for a while. All we got now is bits and pieces.’ 

   They shuffled along the cold stones of the street.

   ‘How much longer before we see her?’ asked Tom, uneasily.

   ‘Just  a  few more minutes. They got her set up with four brass poles and a velvet  rope to keep folks back. Now mind, no rocks, Tom; they don’t allow rocks thrown at her.’ 

   ‘Yes, sir.’

   The  sun  rose higher in the heavens, bringing heat which made the men shed their grimy coats and greasy hats. 

   ‘Why’re  we  all  here in line?’ asked Tom, at last. ‘Why’re we all here to spit?’ 

   Grigsby  did  not  glance  clown  at  him,  but judged the sun. ‘Well, Tom, there’s  lots of reasons.’ He reached absently for a pocket that was long gone, for  a  cigarette  that  wasn’t there. Tom had seen the gesture a million times. ‘Tom,  it  has to do with hate. Hate for everything in the Past. I ask you, Tom, how  did  we get in such a state, cities all junk, roads like jigsaws from bombs and half the cornfields glowing with radio-activity at night? Ain’t that a lousy stew, I ask you?’

   ‘Yes, _sir, I guess so.’

   ‘It’s this way, Tom. You hate whatever it was that got you all knocked down and ruined. That’s human nature. Unthinking, maybe, but human nature anyway.’ 

   ‘There’s hardly nobody or nothing we don’t hate,’ said Tom.

   ‘Right!  The  whole  blooming  caboodle of the people in Past who run the world.  So  here  we  are  on  a Thursday morning with our guts plastered to our spines,  cold,  live  in caves and such, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t nothing except have our festivals, Tom, our festivals.’ 

   And  Tom thought of the festivals in the past few years. The year they tore up  all  the  books  in  the  square  and burned them and everyone was drunk and laughing.  And the festival of science a month ago when they dragged in the last motor-car  and picked lots and each lucky man who won was allowed one smash of a sledge-hammer at the car. 

   ‘Do  I  remember  that,  Tom?  Do  I _remember? Why, I got smash the front window, you hear? My God, it made a lovely sound! Crash!’

   Tom could hear the glass falling in glittering heaps.

   ‘And  Bill  Henderson, he got to bash the engine. Oh, he did a smart job of it, with great efficiency. Wham!’ 

   But  the  best  of all, recalled Grigsby, there was the time they smashed a factory that was still trying to turn out aeroplanes. 

   ‘Lord,  did  we  feel good blowing it up!’ said Grigsby. ‘And then we found that newspaper plant and the munitions depot. and exploded them together. Do you understand, Tom?’ 

   Tom puzzled over it. ‘I guess.’

     It  was  high noon. Now the odors of the ruined city stank on the hot air and things crawled among the tumbled buildings. 

    ‘Won’t it ever come back, mister?’

   ‘What, civilization? Nobody wants it. Not me!’ ‘I could stand a bit of it,’ said the man behind another . ‘There were a few spots of beauty in it.’

   ‘Don’t  worry  your  heads,’  shouted  Grigsby.  ‘There’s no room for that, either.’ 

   ‘Ah,’  said  the  man  behind the man. ‘Someone’ll come along some day with imagination and patch it up. Mark my words. someone with a heart.’ 

   ‘No,’ said Grigsby.

   ‘I  say  yes.  Someone  with a soul for pretty things. Might give us back a kind of limited sort of civilization, the kind we could live in in peace.’

   ‘First thing you know there’s war!’

   ‘But maybe next time it’d be different,’

   At  last  they stood in the main square. A man on horseback was riding from the  distance  into the town. He had a peace of paper in his hand. In the centre of  the  square  was  the  roped-off  area.  Tom,  Grigsby,  and the others were collecting  their  spittle and moving forward moving forward prepared and ready, eyes wide. Tom felt his heart beating very strongly and excitedly, and the earth was hot under his bare feet. 

   ‘Here we go, Tom, let fly!’

   Four  policemen  stood at the corners of the roped area, four men with bits of  yellow  twine  on  their wrists to show thcir authority over other men. They were there to prevent rocks being hurled. 

   ‘This  way,’ said Grigsby at the last moment, ‘everyone. feels he’s had his chance at her, you see, Tom? Go on, now!’ 

   Tom stood before the painting and looked at it for a it for a long time.

   ‘Tom, spit!’

   His mouth was dry.

   ‘Get on, Tom! Move!’

   ‘But,’ said Tom, slowly, ‘she’s _beautiful.’

   ‘Here,  I’ll  spit  for  you!’  Grigsby  spat  and  the missile flew in the sunlight.  The  woman  in the portrait smiled serenely, secretly, at Tom, and he looked  back  at  her,  his  heart  beating, a kind of music in his ears. ‘She’s beautiful,’ he said. 

   The  line  fell  silent.  One  moment they were berating Tom for not moving forward, now they were turning to the man on horseback. 

   ‘What do they call it, sir?’ asked Tom, quietly.

   ‘The picture? ‘Mona Lisa’, Tom, I think. Yes, the ‘Mona Lisa’.

   ‘I  have an announcement,’ said the man on horseback. ‘The authorities have decreed  that  as  of  high noon today tin portrait in the square is to be given over  into  the  hands  of  the  populace  there, so they may participate in the destruction of —‘ 

   Tom  hadn’t  even  time  to  scream before the crowd bore him, shouting and pummelling  about,  stampeding  toward  the  portrait. There was a sharp ripping sound.  The police ran to escape. The crowd was in full cry, their hands like so man,  hungry  birds pecking away at the portrait. Tom felt himself thrust almost through  the  broken  thing.  Reaching  out in blind imitation of the others, he snatched  a  scrap  of oily canvas, yanked, felt the canvas give, then fell, was kicked,  sent  rolling  to  the outer rim of the mob. Bloody, his clothing torn, watched  old  women  chew pieces of canvas, men break the frame, kick the ragged cloth, and rip it into confetti. 

   Only  Tom  stood  apart, silent in the moving square. He looked down at his hand. It clutched the piece of canvas close his chest, hidden. 

   ‘Hey there, Tom!’ cried Grigsby.

   Without a word, sobbing, Tom ran. He ran out and the down bomb-pitted road, into  a  field,  across  a  shallow  stream, not looking back, his hand clenched tightly, tucked under his coat. 

   At  sunset  he  reached  the  small  village and passed on through. By nine o’clock he came to the ruined farm dwelling. Around back, in the part that still remained  upright,  he  heard  the  sounds of sleeping, the family — his mother, father,  and  brother.  He slipped quickly, silently, through the small door and
lay down, panting. 

   ‘Tom?’ called his mother in the dark.

   ‘Yes.’

   ‘Where’ve you been?’ snapped his father. ‘I’ll beat you the morning.’

   Someone  kicked  him.  His  brother, who had been left behind to work their little patch of ground. 

   ‘Go to sleep,’ cried his mother, faintly.

   Another kick.

   Tom  lay  getting  his  breath.  All  was quiet. His hand was pushed to his chest, tight, tight. He lay for half an hour this way, eyes closed. 

   Then  he  felt  something, and it was a cold white light. Th moon rose very high and the little square of light crept slowly over Tom’s body. Then, and only then,  did his hand relax. Slowly, carefully, listening to those who slept about him,  Tom  drew  his  hand  forth. He hesitated, sucked in his breath, and then,
waiting, opened his hand and uncrumpled the fragment of painted canvas. 

   All the world was asleep in the moonlight.

   And there on his hand was the Smile.

   He  looked  at  it  in the white illumination from the midnight sky. And he thought, over to himself, quietly, the Smile, the lovely Smile.

   An  hour later he could still see it, even after he had folded it carefully and  hidden it. He shut his eyes and the Smile was there in the darkness. And it was still there, warm and gentle, when he went to sleep and the world was silent and the moon sailed up and then down the cold sky towards morning. 

Conclusion

Can you believe that I went to college with people who took classes that offered this story, and they never read it? Seriously. Instead, they studied the Cliff Notes and took the tests to get the grades. They completely bypassed the learning process.

Spark Notes
In colleges and universities, many students opt to study the Cliff Notes or Spark Note summaries of the stories. They do so as a quick way to hit the pints that you can be tested on. Unfortunately, once the test is completed, they forget what they crammed for, and while they might have obtained a grade, they learned NOTHING.

Not that they needed to learn. Many of whom were much wealthier than I was. They somehow got into university… somehow. Their parents were rich, or bankers, or had connections. They would run their BMW’s in pot-holes to splash icy water on me as I made my way to study in the Engineering Hall.

I find out about where they are now, by checking the University alumni rosters that are published yearly. Indeed, they are mostly doing well. Either stock brokers, bankers, or have major roles on the board of directors of companies. many obtained these role when they were in their middle 20’s.

Frat boys
Rich Frat boys at the university. Most managed to get into college through bribes or huge donations by their parents. While in school they didn’t need to study because they knew that they would be employed upon graduation for enormous amounts of money.

It’s truly amazing to me. Because I knew these ding-bats in university. They had the intelligence of a potato, and yet they somehow passed their SAT and got into university easily. Then during the entire time while I toiled and studied, they were just partying and having a great old time.

It didn’t seem fair then, and it isn’t fair now.

But you know, these stories of Ray Bradbury take us to places… strange places where our imagination can roam. They take us to places that stretch our emotions and tax our comprehension. To this, I must say to Mr. Bradbury; Thank you.

Because life is the sum total of our experiences. This is the width and the depth of our experiences. Mr. Bradbury has added color to mine. His stores made the air a little bit sweeter, the weather a little bit nicer, and my friends a little bit more important.

Those who have never experienced the stories of Ray Bradbury are denied this pleasure.

Attribution

This story was written by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law. The Smile is a short story written in 1952, a year before Fahrenheit 451, which it shares a few ideas with. This story is set in the post-apocalyptic future (year 2061), where the last “bits and pieces” of civilization are destroyed by humanity itself.

I have found this version of the story on the Ray Bradbury library portal in Russia, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. (Рэй Брэдбери .RU found at http://www.raybradbury.ru ) And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

I love the way that Ray Bradbury brings advanced concepts to the masses though his very (seemingly) simplistic stories.

Background

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…” 
-R is for Rocket Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Popular Music of China; Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing – Part 9

If you all don’t mind, I would like to explore further the connection of Chinese women “playing traditional dress-up” and dancing to popular music. There are so, so, SO many aspects to this phenomenon that I think it deserves some further investigation.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Oh, yeah… don’t forget this.

Role-play

The above is just some girl dressing up and singing and dancing. So what?

Historical Reenactments

Well, what if you and your friends want to do historical reenactments? You know like how civil war reenactors reenact battles in America, or how people reenact Roman Legions in Europe, or how people reenact soldiers from World War I or II? It’s like that. Here we have a period reenactment. Pretty cool heh?

And, you know what? There are all sorts of opportunities to wear traditional clothing. Each region has their own history and culture; so every minority Chinese is protected by Chinese government law, which mandates rigid adherence to traditional customs, traditional ceremonies, and traditional holidays. It’s the law.

History and Culture is protected by law

There’s none of that “separation of church and state” here in China. History is considered sacred. As well as traditional, conservative, and family belief systems. They are protected and actively promoted through government funding.

Chinese minorities are protected as cultural jewels.

Here is a traditional holiday with one of the many Chinese minorities. I don’t know what they are doing, but obviously the gal in the front is the top queen leader of some sort.

That can be extended to all sorts of holidays that are all over China. It is a great opportunity for pretty girls to get all dressed up and have guys ooh and auhhh over them. Nice. That is what it is. Very, very nice.

Modern China is a mixture of old and new traditions.

Here’s some girls just palling it around in Beijing. You know, doing cute girl type things. Don’t ya just love it? I do. I’ll tell ya what.

I love that they can dress how they want to. I love the freedom that they have to play roles…role-play as it were, and do so in public without confrontation, or being told they cannot do, or say, or act in certain ways. I love how they are allowed and protected from being harmed.

Oh, by the way, if any fat gender-less-feminazi tries to interrupt their good times for “cultural appropriation”, or misuse of pronouns, I am sure that the police will arrest them sure as shit. The Chinese do not mess around when it comes to protecting the traditional Chinese way of life.

Here is another video of a girl in traditional garb and dress. She is dancing and is such a charmer, I’ll tell you what.

Ah. Look at all here fans. Isn’t she adorable?

Happy CNY you-all!

Oh yes, since this is 2019. Let me wish everyone a great a wonder CNY year of the Pig! Have a great one ya-all!

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go back to the start of this series, please go HERE.

Links about China

Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Business KTV
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Popular Music of China; Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing – Part 5

Moving forward… let’s look at the fifth part of this exploration into contemporaneous Chinese music.

Let’s start here at this micro-video holding numerous songs. You will note that each song has a specific dance routine to it. This dance routine is so well associated with the music and the particular song, that you can actually do some of the dance moves and a Chinese person would know exactly what song you are thinking of.

Some will even sing out it to you.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Songs with dance moves…

In this next video, please keep that in mind, and if you get the opportunity, try it out with a Chinese friend. See if they know the song that you are referring to when your fingers walk on your arm.

Or perhaps when you lean back and make a Tarzan yell.

Next on the list is a great number that is associated with love, romance, and marriage. You will find many micro-videos in the TikTok application using this song along with a marriage theme. Sort of like this…

Love and Romance songs.

The Chinese, just everyone else in the world fall in love, get married, have children and build up a life as a family. This is a fact that is celebrated in music. Romantic love songs, specially songs that celebrate getting married, having children, and growing old together seems so strange to contemporaneous American ears.

Vintage ideas of dating.
Image from a magazine advertisement dated to the 1960’s. During that period of time, America was still conservative, and traditional ideas of dating and family were valued as important. That differs substantially from today’s gender-neutral reality, and the idea that there is no “head” of the household. Where everyone is equal, but no-one really is.

For today, in the new progressive liberal America, the thrust is for free-wanton sex with everyone, everywhere. It is a ideal that says that there are no genders, and that all the past…cultures and history were all a big mistake.

China, and the Chinese are on the other side of the coin. They believe in traditional relationships, love and marriage.

This all seems so strange to us from the West. Most especially for Americans. But, it need not be that way. In China, friendships are considered very valuable, and they cultivate them. (Which is one of the reasons why the drinking culture is so evident.) When the students go to school, they share dorm rooms of four to eight people and they end up doing everything together.

Chinese Friendships

When they get older, and work, they have group exercises in the morning before their shifts. These group exercises are actually dance routines. The very same dance routines that you will see in the micro-videos. This is true whether they are exercising as part of their school, exercising for their work, or exercising with the guang-cheng-wu-da-ma (dancing grandmothers) in the mornings or at the end of the day.

Everyone in China dances / exercise / sings to music.

In America, we sort of handle this differently. We will sing alone in our pickup trucks or in our cars. Or, if we are with our close friends, we would sing together. Indeed, many a time during my High School years, I would sing “Blinded by the Light” by Manford Man, or “Mr. Tambourine Man” by the Byrds.

Singing in the car.
Americans prefer to sing in the privacy of their automobiles. They prefer to sing in the privacy of the showers. They like to sing in churches and around campfires. Singing is a great thing, let me tell youse guys.

We sill sing in the showers where no one can see us. We might try dancing in secret, where no one can find us. This is something that has developed over the years. I personally attribute it to the automobile sub-culture that developed in the 1940’s and 1950’s. This caused a movement of Americans towards new and different social settings. Settings, mind you, that were not as close and not a nuanced as before.

American automobile.
America; the land of the automobile. People in America began to spend more time outside of the home when the access to the car became easier. In my mind, this in turn lead towards to a destruction of the family unit. With the time spent in front of the television set, the time spent at work, and the time devoted to daily commutes, there was precious little time for father-son bonding.

America is a nation of the “lone wolf” loners, which needs to change. We all need each other. Being alone is a terrible lie. Don’t fall for it.

Anyways, with this in mind, please check out this video.

In China, there are all sorts of sub-cultures and trends moving (or sloshing) back and forth. One of which is the “historical modelling”. In China they don’t have any of this nonsense of “cultural appropriation”. Heck, if you try to even suggest it, the police will come and lock you up to see what your malfunction is.

Historical Role-Play

Historical Chinese dress 1
Historical Chinese clothing that can be purchased in China. The Chinese love to purchase historical-period clothing and do role-play in the city squares and parks. Here, we have a female dress.

In China, the gals like to dress up in traditional Chinese clothes and walk about town. They go to restaurants with their friends, and have a great time. There are so many different kinds and styles of clothing as well.

You, the reader, need to recognize that China has a long, long history of many, many nations. Over time all these nations fought and conducted wars back and forth. Today, the single nation that we know as China was once a series of mini-nations that grew and collapsed over many thousands of years.

Historical Chinese dress 2
Here is some historical garb for the male role-players int he Chinese community. Note that this particular outfit has long sleeves. In China, the sleeves would be short and then long, depending on who ruled the individual nation where the person lived.

China has a long, long, LONG history with many, many, MANY cultures, kingdoms, and dynasties. They have many Chinese minorities, all of which have their own various clothing, and histories. So, the gals enjoy taking the time and being girls “playing dress-up” in public. And, us guys..well, we LOVE it.

Here is something along the roaring 1920’s in Shanghai…

Now, my personal favorite is the more traditional (and older) period dress. I love how airy it is and how well it flows and moves with the women who wear it.

Here is a perfect example. I honestly love the outfit and the young lass wearing it.

Young Lass dancing wearing a traditional Chinese period costume. This is more common than you would expect.

And, here is another gal. You can see that there are many styles, and fashions available to the Chinese lass. Of course, all of us guys truly enjoy seeing the beautiful women wearing these beautiful clothing.

That’s all a very different change compared to what you have in the Untied States. I find the music in China to be upbeat, positive and often soothing… at least the ones promoted most in popular cultures.

Contemporaneous American Culture

In comparison, I find the music promoted in American culture looks a little like this. Don’t get me wrong, they are all smiling and people are laughing. Though it seems like everyone is laughing AT the fat chicks waving those Volkswagen-sized asses about.

I don’t know about youse guys. It looks to me like the girls would be very happy to have a train of guys having non-stop sex with them, but they don’t look at all like marriage material. They are far too coarse and crude.

But, there you have it. Coarse and crude are exactly “rabbit-style” behaviors according to the r/K theory, and that is exactly what the USA is today.

Heck! And what is even sadder, that the culture is influencing everyone. From adults to the kids, and the babies. I wouldn’t be surprised to see grandparents acting this way, given the saturation of it in the media…

… soon our dear pets will start acting that way as well.

Let’s move on to the next part of this post…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go back to the start of this series, please go HERE.

Links about China

Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Business KTV
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Popular Music of China; Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing – Part 4

I well remember walking into a small family restaurant in Shenzhen. They were playing “Christian Rock”. I’ve got to tell you all, I was astounded. It just isn’t something that you hear every day. Not in the USA, and most certainly not in China, of all places.

So I asked the woman there why she was listening to Christian Rock. (My wife asked her, as my Chinese wasn’t anywhere near competent.) And she smiled, and told my wife that the music spoke to her.

The Christian Rock music spoke to her.

China is a very conservative nation that holds traditional Chinese values in the highest regard. In fact, that is one of the many things that astounded me about China. When they threw away the tenets of Communism back in the 1970’s, they embraced full-on conservative values.

Now, as such, the Chinese has a full affinity to American conservatives… Conservatives mind you, not the NeoCon’s who see every war as a money-making opportunity to line their pockets through the deaths of others. Hello? John McCain, Hillary Clinton, George Bush… anyone?

The Chinese people love American music.

I like to think that the reason is because there are some awesome talent in the Untied States. I think that people all over the world can recognize this talent, and America is most certainly the home of some of the best music in the world.

Anyways, the Chinese love American Country and Western music, and many a night has been spent with myself belting out some Conway Twitty, and George Jones. (Heck, in my mind the best Country and Western music came from the 1980’s, and the 1990’s.But, that’s just me. Heh heh.)

Time McGraw.
Tim McGraw. American country singer. When an American sings Country and Western songs in a Chinese KTV, the effect is profound. The Chinese have never experienced live Country and Western concerts, and so, to them, it is like being in a real honest-to-goodness live famous singer.

Here is an American Country and Western song that is HYPER popular in China. You all should see my rendition of it after a few bottles of whiskey. Heh heh.

(Oh, and by the way, the Chinese girls think that an American singing Country and Western, or Pop music is like a “God”, the way they look at you. You guys have no idea… None what so ever.)

Country & Western style music is popular.

The Chinese have their own versions of Country and Western music. However, unlike the West or in America, it is not stratified or segregated into different musical genres. The music, to me, sounds like it is all mixed together.

If you listen to a music station on the radio, like in a taxi, for instance, the music will all be mixed together. Suppose it is July. It is hot out, and the A/C is on in the car, and the radio is on. You can hear the songs, as well as the GPS navigate the route in Chinese.

The songs would include everything from long DJ smashed up-songs to American Christmas carols. Yep. That’s true, as any American expat can attest to. (Ah, I well remember the first time I heard Jingle Bells played during a hot August night by a house band in a bar.) The music would include everything from sappy Chinese love ballads, to Chinese disco, to traditional nursery rhymes and even American 1960’s War Protest songs (“Who’ll stop the rain?“)

And you can see the influence that Country and Western music has made on the Chinese music scene here. All you need to do is have an open mind and an ear for music. The American Country and Western musical influence is everywhere. From the cities to the rural countrysides.

And, I’m not just talking Taylor Swift here, guys…

Songs that are slower and easy to sing are the best. You know, the Chinese don’t care at all if you can hold a note, or sing on-key. What they care about is [1] if you are having a good time, [2] that you can put some kind of emotion into the songs when you are singing them, and [3] if you enjoy singing the songs.

Slow songs vs. Fast songs

Just be careful, or else you might end up singing some impossibly fast American songs that will be near impossible to sing. Don’t let that happen. I always keep a small list of my favorite songs that I can sing in KTV’s on me, in my wallet. You never know when you have the opportunity to play at a KTV, I’ll tell you what.

You can tell that these songs are all easily lent towards singing at a KTV while drunk…or sad. Heh heh. When you have an opportunity to sing with some Chinese friends, please heed my advice and take it. It’s a great way to make friends, and a fantastic waste of time, eating and drinking and smoking.

Life is meant to be lived.

Life is too short. Live it.

Food tastes better outdoors.
Morning, noon, and night, everything tastes better outdoors. This is a vintage advertisement, but the truth behind this simple ad still rings true. Seriously, I think we all should enjoy our life more. That means YOU.

Over time, you will see loved ones pass on, or go away. You will see friends come and go. You will see seasons pass, and unless you are careful, it all might just pass you by. Don’t allow that to happen. Live life well. Heck! Live it very well.

One of the things about China, well – Heck, all of Asia is how prevalent American music is. It can be found everywhere. It can be found on-line, played on the radio stations, and in the bars and clubs. It goes without saying that you can most certainly hear American music in China. Though the song types and style might be different. In China, an A-listed American song might actually be a C-listed airplay song in the USA.

Asian Advertisement.

Here’s an example of an advertisement for beer in Japan. Today, the video advertisements are really great to watch. Many times they like to use music to drive a point across. Check it out…

By the way, those little balls that she is eating are popular all over Asia. You can buy them all over China. They are fried octopus balls. The octopus tentacles are mixed with a kind of bread dough, and deep-fried and covered with this thin kind of shavings.

It’s pretty good. You all should try it. Oh, and you know… it goes great with beer. Especially icy cold beer.

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go back to the start of this series, please go HERE.

Links about China

Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Business KTV
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
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Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

KTV1
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KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
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KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
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KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

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The Popular Music of China; Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing – Part 3B

I would like to take a little side excursion on our exploration of the Chinese music scene today to look at what makes certain types of music so popular to the Chinese people. Why do they like slow, sappy love ballads, say… instead of twerking urban jungle-rap. You know the type, where the girl gets on all fours, puts her ass high into the air and shakes it so that everyone can watch her rolling blobs of fat jiggle. Why aren’t the Chinese like that?

Let’s explore this issue somewhat. OK?

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

What is the most popular venue for music in China?

That is a very good question. But, first before we answer it, consider what the most popular venue for music in the USA. The most popular venue is music played on the radio or player in the automobile. That is the most common venue that Americans use to listen to their music.

Americans will hop in their automobiles and immediate start to listen to their music. This is true whether it is via the radio, CD, USB or satellite radio. Of course, the will also listen on the internet and in other venues. But the most common… for Americans… is in the privacy of their car.

Thus, that is where they might sing. That, and the shower…heh. Heh.

For the Chinese it is quite different. Most will listen to the music on their cell phone while they are riding the bus, the subway or the train to work. They will put the headphones on and listen. They won’t have the chance to sing along to the songs… that is… not until they go to the KTV.

When the Chinese go to the KTV, the go with friends, and there in the privacy of the room, can sing to their hearts content. No one will make fun, and no one will question them. It will all be fun.

And at the Club…

Or, of course, when they are at the club, as shown in this here micro-video…

Ah, you know what these videos remind me of? Yes. They remind me of beer. yes, that most glorious refreshment (especially when icy cold). As an American who was raised during a time when America was traditional and conservative, beer was the staple libation for all races and sexes.

Icy PBR.
There’s few things finer than drinking some beer with good friends, and pretty girls, and singing songs. I’ll tell you what, how does that sound…singing your favorite song while drinking a nice frosty cold one? Eh?

Glorious, glorious beer!

The Chinese are just like Americans. They love to sing. Anyways, guys… don’t tell me that there isn’t a song that you don’t sing to when you are in the car!

Heck, when I was younger, I used to sing Classic Rock, which then included Aerosmith, and of course Deep Purple. Later, I would sing Southern Rock with Charlie Daniels, and Neil Young. And then when I discovered Country and Western Music, I would sing every chance that I would get.

Beer is delicious and versitile.
Maybe you could have a loved one grab you a frosty beer and you two could share it in front of the television or computer. Now, wouldn’t that be nice. You know, beer is versatile. You don’t have to sing a song to enjoy it. You can eat some pork and beans, or a burnt-crisp hot dog with relish, or a fine hamburger and enjoy the fine taste of a frosty tall beer. I think that you deserve it. Don’t you?

If you are not drinking and singing, there is something serious missing from your life, I’ll tell you what.

Look guys. Look at the above video. That is my life. Being around pretty girls, drinking adult beverages, singing, dancing, and eating fine food. If you are not living life, then you are missing out. Life is far too short not to enjoy it. Life is short, live it well.

Life is short, Live it well.

Go out and be with friends, and what…? You don’t have any. Well, then make some. Life is about living. That is the purpose of life; to have experiences. Life is not sitting in front of a monitor all day, whether it is for work, or for your lonely personal enjoyments. Screw that!

You are missing out, dudes! What were you doing when this video (below) was taken? Was it important? Will you remember it on your death bed? Chances are no. You were doing something else. maybe reading the “news” on the computer. Maybe you were checking and clinking “likes” on Facebook. Maybe you were doing your taxes so that you won’t get audited. Maybe you were at work…

Life is too short. You need to enjoy it. Have a beer gosh darn it!

It's time for a beer.
People, it’s time for a beer and some fine tunes. It’s always time for a beer and some fine tunes. Most especially when you are sharing that time with a pretty girl, I’ll tell you what.

People, life is meant to be enjoyed. If you are not singing. If you are not dancing. If you are not eating well… if you are not with friends, children, pets, and loved ones, then you are truly missing out. Go out. Make your life wonderful.

Be like this…

Life is far too short to get all caught up and bothered by the machinations of the rich oligarchs that control what we read on the news media though our computers. Really… does it matter (if) there are tri-gender bathrooms in Portland, Or? Does it matter if yet another Democrat is trying to ban guns? Does it matter that yet another Muslim molested a six year old?

Yes, those things do matter, but not to you. Your life should be run personally and viscerally. There will always be bad people, stupid people, and rich oligarchs trying to influence you. Turn them off and shut the door. Life is far too short to get upset by their inherent craziness. have some fun why don’t ya.

And how about this…

I am so sorry if I am ramming my preference for singing, dancing and drinking with pretty ladies down everyone’s throat, but you DO NEED TO UNDERSTAND that that is a fundamental part of Chinese culture.

And yes, it takes place in the work offices as well, as can be illustrated by this Chinese laoban (boss)…

In my mind, the computer has been used as a tool to take over the minds of Americans. Now, it is just a tool, and nothing more, yet many of our youth have used it as a replacement for the more important aspects of our lives. That is horrible and it must stop. Use it as a tool, and then move on…

Life and beer.
Maybe music isn’t that important to you. Well, how about a ball game on a beautiful sunny day? How about it with a great hotdog and beer? How about it with your friends? You see, life should be fun and enjoyable. If it isn’t, then it is a miserable existence and one that needs to change.

Music is a pleasure that is an important and fundamental part of our lives. Let it be as it is, and enjoy it. Or, as can be shown by this group of employees during their daily morning exercise and sing-along (yeah, most Chinese companies do this).

Oh, and by the way…

Did you all notice anything about all the videos that you have seen so far? What about the ones that you will see..? See anything interesting? Yes, it’s mostly women.

But! But! But, how can this be? The Western news is all about how the Chinese have completely killed off most of the male off-spring during the implementation of the one-child policy. So if the Western narrative was correct, then almost all the videos that you would see in TicToc would be of guys about guys. But, that is not the case…what is going on? Eh?

Hey! Maybe I'm one of those Communist Propagandists trying to sway American Conservatives to the evil side, eh? Yuppur. Beer, pretty girls and singing is the sure fire way to convert virile American men to the ways of the beta-male trans-gender crowd. Yes. As we all know that is what Communists represent. Huh. Eh?

OK, sorry for the interlude. Ugh 7 videos. So to continue, please click here…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go back to the start of this series, please go HERE.

Links about China

Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Business KTV
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Popular Music of China; Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing – Part 2

Here we continue with our review of the “pop” music of China in 2019 with one of my personal favorites. You will note that this particular micro-video is from Cambodia.

Now, of course, all of Asia is influenced by China. That includes everything from Korea to Indonesia, and everything in-between. So you really shouldn’t be too surprised that other Asian nations are listening to Chinese pop music. Well, you shouldn’t be.

It’s the same way with America, don’t ya know. America influences Canada and Mexico the same way.

Anyways, here’s the first song of this particular post sub-classification. It’s one of my personal favorites.

You can go on the TikTok application and see all kinds of versions of this song sung by the pretty ladies of China. For those of you who don’t know about this application, here’s the skinny…

tiktok application summary

And, you know, here is one of my favorites…

Moving on…

Second Song – Дастан Оразбеков

This next song is also very popular. You can find it by searching for Mekepe – Дастан Оразбеков. Though, you wouldn’t know this if you are still using Goggle as your Internet Search Engine. You just cannot go anywhere without hearing it.

Yes, it is again another top hit from Russia. It’s not that Russia has better music than America does, it’s just that the Russian songs aren’t all about “popping slugs into bitches” and about waving large garbage-can sized asses around. They also tend to be more upbeat.

American music.

Overall, Upbeat music tends to trend toward Conservative and traditional values, while downbeat music trends toward progressive realities. It’s an easy comparison. Look at the music that was popular during the Ronald Reagan administration, and compare that to the music that was popular during the Barrack Obama administration.

I have come to this opinion through my limited range of experience. It’s my opinion, and ONLY my opinion. So, please, there is no need to send me an email debating this issue with exceptions. It’s a waste of both of our time.

Arguing about popular trends in musical tastes instead of listening to the music you like is a fruitless endeavor. It's sort of like complaining that the steak is not cooked well enough, instead of eating it.

After all, it can’t be 100% correct. How can you account for all those Country and Western “She broke my heart so I broke her jaw” style songs?

Anyways, here’s the Russian song as promoted on Chinese media. If you like it you can download the full song for free HERE. Again, please take note. Unlike the United States, most music is available free in the rest of the world for free.

In the United States you have to be careful, or else you can be arrested for using Torrents, or P2P networks, or listening to music and thus violating the royalty collection efforts of the mega-rich oligarchs out in California.

Anyways… here’s the song.

You can listen to the entire song for FREE over HERE.

Hazel – I Love Poland

Oh, and while we are at it. Here’s a song praising the Former Soviet Block member; Poland. Also hyper popular.

Here’s the lyrics…

Hazel - I Love Poland

生成外链播放器
Hazel-I Love Poland(Tik Tok Remix)
歌手:
Tik Tok
所属专辑:
I Love Poland
播放收藏分享下载(1942)
作曲 : Hazel
作词 : Hazel


I love Poland - Poland?
我爱波兰 波兰吗
I love Poland - Why?
我爱波兰 为什么
I love Poland - I hadn't believe ya
我爱波兰 我不信
I love Poland - Poland?
我爱波兰 波兰吗
I love Poland - Why?
我爱波兰 为什么
I love Poland - Shut up!
我爱波兰 闭嘴

I love driving by my car
我就是爱开车瞎转悠
And the road its not so far
还好路也不远
Berlin, London, Moscow too
还有柏林 伦敦 莫斯科
It's my love I tell you true
我真的超爱这些地方
When I came to Poland
当我到了波兰
I saw my car was stolen
我的车就被偷了
It was my favourite truck
那可是我最喜欢的货车
I said f**king kurwa mać!
我说富强民主文明和谐自由平等公正法治

Yo no quiero agua, yo quiero bebida
不想要水 我想喝水
Mami tu eres loca no te hagas la fina
老妈你大概疯了吧
Yo no quiero agua, yo quiero bebida
不想要水 我想喝水
Mami tu eres loca no te hagas la fina
老妈你大概疯了吧

Yo no quiero agua, yo quiero bebida
不想要水 我想喝水
Mami tu eres loca no te hagas la fina
老妈你大概疯了吧
Yo no quiero agua, yo quiero bebida
不想要水 我想喝水
Mami tu eres loca no te hagas la fina
老妈你大概疯了吧

I love Poland - Poland?
我爱波兰 波兰吗
I love Poland - Why?
我爱波兰 为什么
I love Poland - I hadn't believe ya
我爱波兰 我不信
I love Poland - Poland?
我爱波兰 波兰吗
I love Poland - Why?
我爱波兰 为什么
I love Poland - Shut up!
我爱波兰 闭嘴

I love driving by my car
我就是爱开车瞎转悠
And the road its not so far
还好路也不远
Berlin, London, Moscow too
还有柏林 伦敦 莫斯科
It's my love I tell you true
我真的超爱这些地方
When I came to Poland
当我到了波兰
I saw my car was stolen
我的车就被偷了
It was my favourite truck
那可是我最喜欢的货车
I said f**king kurwa mać!
我说富强民主文明和谐自由平等公正法治

Yo no quiero agua, yo quiero bebida
不想要水 我想喝水
Mami tu eres loca no te hagas la fina
老妈你大概疯了吧
Yo no quiero agua, yo quiero bebida
不想要水 我想喝水
Mami tu eres loca no te hagas la fina
老妈你大概疯了吧

I love Poland(yo no quiero agua)
我爱波兰(不想要水)
I love Poland(yo quiero bebida)
我爱波兰(我想喝水)
I love Poland(mami tu eres loca)
我爱波兰(老妈你疯了)
I love Poland - I don't believe ya(no te hagas la fina)
我爱波兰 我不信(别装模作样了)
I love Poland(yo no quiero agua)
我爱波兰(不想要水)
I love Poland(yo quiero bebida)
我爱波兰(我想喝水)
I love Poland(mami tu eres loca)
我爱波兰(老妈你疯了)
I love Poland(no te hagas la fina)
我爱波兰(别装模作样了)

I had really pretty car
我有辆超炫的车
(baby you have as so far
宝贝你到目前为止
Don't be shy, come with us
别害羞嘛 一起来啊
We will show you amouros)
我们会带你领略真正的爱情
Then I stay in Poland
然后我就留在了波兰
Have not car but I don't mind
我才不在乎有没有车
Chicks in Poland are so hot
因为波兰的小妞超正点
I love Poland kurwa mać!
我爱波兰 走好运

We will show you amorous
我们会带你领略真正的爱情
We will show you amorous
我们会带你领略真正的爱情
We will show you amorous
我们会带你领略真正的爱情
We will show you amorous
我们会带你领略真正的爱情
Oh, yes~
噢耶

So cute.

Poland is also, like China and Russia, very traditional and conservative. they loath progressive liberalism and their behavior towards rampaging Muslim rapists, and trans-gender activists show this. I like Poland, and my father’s family came from Poland. I have to admit that they don’t have the same kinds of problems that nearby Sweden and Germany have.

The Conservative Debate

You know, I read a comment just yesterday. The fellow said that I am really overboard calling China “conservative”. He argued that China was Communist, and that MEANS Progressive Liberal. He was absolutely convinced that there was absolutely no way that China, or Russia or Poland for that matter, were conservative.

Heck, most Chinese themselves, consider themselves socially liberal. But their idea of liberalism is very, very different from what us Americans consider to be liberal. You need to understand that labels are just that; labels.

The problem, as I see it, is one of misunderstanding. Once a “label” is placed on something, our minds turn off and display a black and white cartoon 2D image of what we are told to associate with that image. We have to look beyond the American main-steam propaganda and look at what things are today. TODAY.

This is what I mean when I say that a given nation is “conservative”…

Anyone who reads the pronouncements out of Beijing for the last twenty years can plainly see that the nation of China is traditional, and orthodox. It’s not even borderline. China is hard-line traditionalist.

Now, to understand what this means, outside the cardboard cutout narrative, you need to see how the American oligarchy defines being Conservative. You turn to Wikipedia where they say this…

Conservatism via Wikipedia.

I would like to underline the phrase; “Conservatives seek to preserve a range of institutions… …with the aim of emphasizing social stability and continuity. ” Dudes, this describes China to a “T”.

Consider these progressive liberal protestors activists in China, and the Chinese government reaction to them…

Now compare that to the United States. When have the BLM activists, or the Antifa activists been arrested, if ever? When they tore down statues? When they harassed people at restaurants, or in theaters (Mr. Pence), or for refusing to bake a cake?

You would never find that kind of behavior in China. That is because China is conservative. While America is progressive liberal. It is, no matter, what you might want to believe otherwise. That is just the way it is. Sorry or hurrah! depending on your personal preferences.

America is a progressive liberal nation. This is what liberalism is.

Obviously, the various federal, state and local governments in the United States are certainly liberal. But are they progressive, as I have repeatedly stated? Well, you determine for yourself…

America is a progressive liberal nation.

A conservative nation allows you to smoke cigarettes. A progressive liberal one bans them. A conservative nation erects statues and parks to honor past achievements and heroes. A progressive liberal nation tears the statues down. A conservative nation wants a school to teach basics and fundamentals such as being able to read, being able to count, and being able to budget. A progressive liberal school is one that teaches new ways of doing things (like “new math”), and new ways of thinking (diversity officers) and social organization.

People, the only thing that remains of Mr. Mao’s Communist Utopia in China is his picture on the currency. That’s about it. Decide for yourself, or not. Dudes, I put the food on the plate in front of you. You can eat it up or not. It’s not my problem.

Five Song Compilation

Here is a compilation of five songs that also receive a very large amount of airplay in China. This micro-video compresses them all into a very short introductory clip. I think that it is a great way to get a general feel for the place, the pace, and the tastes of the Chinese people today.

Enjoy.

You will note how different these songs, and the music is from what is available in the Untied States today. For a comparative reference, consider what American pop music is today. Look at how welcoming and accepting of this behavior is to the audience. Oh my, they love her wagging her enormous ass about. In fact, there’s even a gal in the back doing the same thing. As well as to the right of the screen.

Look at the top two guys in the middle. What? They don’t seem to be enjoying the fine lady-like behavior of the huge assed negro women. I wonder why? Maybe they are gay, eh?

All American men love big asses…right? That’s the narrative from the main-stream media. Or at lest it has been that way ever since Barrack Obama discussed how he loved big asses on women.

Well, you know what they say… different strokes for different folks.

It’s not just one or two singers either. It’s just about all of them. Why, I wouldn’t be surprised if Taylor Swift starts behaving this way…you know, to usher in the new “progressive” America with gender-less behaviors, free-passes to Muslim sexual abuse, and climate change for all! Woo Woo!

Damn! It seems to me like they all have a very bad case of stomach flu. If they don’t do something about it, and quick, you might end up with diarrhea all over your computer monitor! Yikes!

But seriously, top-down driven mass media manipulation is changing American culture towards a new progressive reality. They implemented anti-smoking social change in the 1990’s and now smoking is almost an endangered species.

Have a cigarette.
Ever since the progressive liberals have tried to make it impossible to smoke in America, cigarette use has fallen to near extinction in America. They are now currently trying the same SUCCESSFUL techniques to ban guns. Soon, they WILL all be banned.

This goes for many of the other types of forced social “progress”. So, by saturating American media with images of fat people, and making it popular to be fat, and obese, and to have huge rolls of jiggling fat, it becomes popular and accepted. When it becomes unpopular to act like a “gentleman” or a lady”, then the crudest behaviors become normal and accepted.

It trickles down to the American public, and everyone starts acting like this…

At five micro-videos, it’s time to move on. The band width hogs would take forever to load using the ISP defaults on most American servers. So, let’s avoid that. Now, on to the next page in this series of posts…

Now, of course, all of these videos are going to be impossible to load unless this post is broken up into smaller chew-sized portions. So to continue, please click here…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go back to the start of this series, please go HERE.

Links about China

Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Business KTV
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Popular Music of China; Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Beijing.

Here we provide a mixture of the popular music now currently trending in China. Strangely, most Americans are unaware of music outside of the USA shores. It’s pretty amazing when you think about it, but there you have it. The Chinese have their own pop groups, their own rap groups, and their own version of Country & Western music. Additionally, music from Russia is amazingly popular, as well as selected Australian, and American music.

We are gonna talk about all of this. In fact, if I might be so bold, we are going to look at the music from the point of view of culture. Or, in other words, how the Chinese cultures influences the Chinese music scene and why it is similar or different from the American music scene. (As the case may be.)

Due to SEO rules and server limitations, this post is divided into multiple posts. (At least ten, but I lost track of my count. It’s a “bunch” of posts. heh heh.) Of course, we’re gonna need to do this in order to keep the bandwidth hogs to a minimum. There’s a ton-load of videos and audio embeds involved here.

The music is identified by group and song title, and you can hear and check out the music and videos as attached. Where possible, I have also provided direct links so that you the reader could investigate the groups, the songs or their compilations on your own. Just cut and paste into the browser.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Romanian translated Bulgarian Rap is popular in China

Let’s start with “Dependent” also known as Пристрастен (зависим). This is a Eastern European song that I (and many of my friends) thought was Russian. But, nope. It’s Eastern European.

Yah. It crashed it’s way into the hearts and minds of the Chinese. Russian pop music is very popular in China. You can hear it on the radio and the various music APPs. Further, the music can be heard all over China. From coffee and tea houses to Majong parlors.

You know… I just have to laugh at how politically correct the United States has become. When trying to research the background on this song, I found this link at the very top of the Google Search results…

Anyways, you just simply won’t be able to find any of this information (provided herein) by using Google as a search engine. In fact, most American based search engines will be rather useless in trying to find this kind of information.

You need to understand that American search engines are dedicated to searching American-interest subjects in English. The determination of what would of interest to an American is determined by computer algorithm, which is in turn, determined by an American software engineer. More often than not, a 20-something millennial, located in California.

Our future.
The future face of America. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez represents how modern American millennials view the world and what they plan to do with it.

To find similar search results, you will need to use search engines that are not tied to Google. You need to go “deep diving” using non-USA based search engines. Or, at least, American search engines that aren’t so aggressive in American-centrist information searching.

Try Search Encrypt for better search results. Google was great back in the late 1990’s then they got in bed with the rich and powerful. Now they have other objectives, and you, my dear reader are the product for their enjoyment and profit.

Search Encrypt

Our first song; “Dependent”

Back to the music. Here is the top Russian Romanian song translated into Bulgarian for the Chinese audience. This is the first song on my list.

Dependent…

And here is the lyrics of it, in the off-hand chance you would like to sing along. Credit to the fine folks who collected the lyrics HERE.


Пристрастен (зависим)

Събуждам се, нов ден е.
Без теб съм в леглото.
Без никаква мисъл.
Живея, както си е.
Без теб съм наобратно
Не мога да се обърна. (пристрастен)
 
Липсва ми да изрека
твоето име сега.
 
Пристрастен, към дългите нощи безмълвни.
Пристрастен, към целувките ти огнени.
Пристрастен, и не зная как да се излекувам
Пристрастен, към теб...
 
Събуждам се, нов ден е.
Будилникът звънна
Нищо не се е променило.
Но ти, ти не идваш
Да ми кажеш че е свършило.
Да ти кажа, че ти простих.
Простих ти.
 
Пристрастен, към дългите нощи безмълвни.
Пристрастен, към целувките ти огнени.
Пристрастен, и не зная как да се излекувам
Пристрастен, към теб...
 
Пристрастен, към дългите нощи безмълвни.
Пристрастен, към целувките ти огнени.
Пристрастен, и не зная как да се излекувам
Пристрастен, към теб... (х2)

Ok. Yeah. I know you were expecting to listen and hear Chinese songs in Chinese. Well, just hold your horses, won’t ya. The Chinese love all kinds of music, and yes that includes American music. Which has a good and a bad side to it.

For instance, they never went through the two decades of Kenny G sax performances like us Americans have endured. Still, to this day, you can hear ol’ Kenny G belting it out in Chinese elevators, at Chinese Ice Cream parlors and along the many Chinese mall walkways. Ugh!

Kenny G playing music.
NEW YORK, NY – JANUARY 14: Saxophonist Kenny G performs at Hard Rock Cafe, Times Square on January 14, 2014 in New York City. (Photo by Slaven Vlasic/and credit to Getty Images)

Anyways, if you want to listen to the entire song, just cut and paste the title and paste into your Youku player. It will look a little like this. That is, of course, unless the procedure is not blocked by the software oligarchs in California…

Example 1
Youku example when searching for the Bulgarian song that is popular in China; Dependent.

Once you do this simple task, all the versions of the song will pop up. Awesome!

Cut and paste example
Screen capture of the cut and paste action of Dependent into the Youku player.

Chinese Music in China

Now, here’s some of the most popular music in China in 2019. Ya all, had best buckle up…

Let’s start with a tune brought to us by 苏潭潭. this is a fine song to sing in the KTV. Slow songs are great. I’ll tell you why. Personally, I like to sing Country and Western songs because they are slow and have a pace that I can sing to.

You know, if you are not careful, your Chinese friends will ask you to sing Beat It”, by Michael Jackson. Ugh! That has happened to me on more than one occasions. Yikes!

This song is well paced, and easy to sing along to. Perfect for the Chinese audience.

Well, moving on…

Now, you would be hard pressed to ride in a taxi, or DiDi without hearing this song. Let along go to a bar, club or eat at a restaurant. In fact, I heard this song today while I was eating my Whopper in Burger King. LOL!

This was brought to us by NCF-艾力.

Music Rotations

This song is very popular. And, it always SEEMS to be in some kind of music rotation with this other song. I happen to like it a lot.

Music Rotation

This other song is very Chinese(y). A cute girl sings in a cute way about difficult subjects and life. I guess that that has an appeal to many people through out Asia. Not only in China, but all over Asia.

Here, check out the song…

I do not know who makes up the song rotations. Perhaps a DJ can fill me in on this. I would imagine that there would be some kind of method and methodology involved. However, I have to assume that it would be profit based, and would be subject to the indicators of such measurables. Eh?

I remember one listening to El Rusbo (Rush Limbaugh for all your folks out there in Rio Linda) while he was talking about his early years in the radio business.

He had this story where his job was to listen to the radio rotations (the songs and how often they were played) at the various competitive radio stations. He said that he learned a lot about the business buy understanding why the songs were played at certain times and which ones were selected.

He left it at that. What I took from his story was that there is a science to the music rotation that is provided to the consuming public. Perhaps that too, is the reason why the songs are all in the same music rotation.

Here is another song that is easily on music rotation…

What you can find online…

I did a baidu search. There, I was able to find all sorts of fans singing popular Chinese songs. Ugh! So, so many. It’s a major hobby in China; singing and dancing. Like this chick (next). She is singing a selection of popular songs in China, and she’s not half bad. You go girrrl!

Do not freak out, this is a software player using flash. If you are having troubles or don’t want the hassle, just bypass this video…

Please take Note: If the embedded IQIY player is taking too long to load, one potential reason is that American USP’s have to go through the NSA. It’s for our “protection”, don’t ya know. Also, you have to accept the reality that IQIY directly competes with You-Tube and Netflix. As such, the player is a direct threat to the huge mega-monopolies in California. So Americans need to be “protected” both from the evils of the Internet, and dangerous non-American businesses out to make a buck.

In general, if you are dealing with American sites, in America, the process is rather quick. The USP’s send out the data in bursts that cycle in and out of the NSA approved servers faster than you can blink your eyelids. If however, you are using non-American websites, there will be a delay.

I used to be like most people. You might argue that is is due to transcontinental losses on the cables. However, but most cables have been replaced with fiber optics. And what that means today is that that particular excuse just doesn’t hold up “in court”…

Well, maybe it would in the 9th circus court.

Actually, and unfortunately, most of the lag is due to government “protections”. I like to think that is is the government’s way of keep my mail box free of spam. (BTW; if so, they are doing a pretty piss-poor job at it.) I like to think that the government is looking out for my best interests. You know, catching the “bad guys”, and saving the world for “democracy” (with a small “d”).

You all shouldn’t get too hot and bothered about this. The same is true with China. You do know that China is not connected to the internet, like the USA is? You do know this, right? China is one big…huge… enormous… intra-net. It’s an intranet. Thus, the Chinese government can control what access the citizens can have on internet content.

Intranet

Just like America does. Only, um… they use other criteria than America does, for other reasons and other purposes.

The debate on what these other criteria are, and how they differ from the USA can (often) result in lively discussion. So for now, let’s just agree that both the USA and China polices the incoming internet traffic, and if anything is slow or difficult to load, you need to recognize that it is due to the nation (and their policies) where you live.

So just hold on. If it is still taking too long to load, you can skip the above mini-player and move to the next post. Lucky for youse guys, aside from the IQIY player, most of the embedded micro-videos are all on American servers. (Heh heh. I plan ahead.)

Now, I have one more micro-video that I want to include. There is a kitty-cat in it, and so I just cannot help myself. LOL. Who doesn’t like dogs, cats or pretty girls? Eh?

Now, of course, all of these videos are going to be impossible to load unless this post is broken up into smaller chew-sized portions. So to continue, please click here…

Continued-graphic-arrow

If you want to go back to the start of this series, please go HERE.

Links about China

Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Business KTV
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What the difference is between Soul and Consciousness

This is a very tiny post. It discusses something that it considered to be very important.

For us to truly grow as a human; as a person, as well as to advance technologically in our universe, we need to understand the fundamental rules of our universe.

Unfortunately, these fundamentals are not at all understood by humans today. They are often considered to be associated with religion and the “soft sciences” instead of their rightful place in the nature of our reality.

To grow, and for our species to master technology, we absolutely need to know what soul is and how it differs from our consciousness. Once we understand this difference, we would be fully able to master so many things that we, today, consider the limitations of our physical universe. Yes. And that means, the ability to travel anywhere in the universe. Yes. And that means the ability to travel to “Heaven” at will while we are alive in the physical, and Yes that means that we would be able to fully appreciate and master the control over our physical world.

Here, we talk about the fundamentals of this issue.

[1] Soul is not Consciousness

Firstly, everything has a soul. But… but, not everything has a consciousness.

A soul can be considered the “stuff” of who we are fundamentally. It is the “ground level” or quantum particles and the “building blocks” of who we are. It is the “brick and mortar” components of our very being.

That chair that you are sitting on has a (very simplistic) soul, but not a consciousness. It does not recognize that you are sitting on it. It does not think. It does not alter the reality surrounding it, and it does not generate memories.

That blade of grass outside also has a soul. It is a more advanced soul than that (human fabricated) chair, but it is still quite simple. It also has a rudimentary consciousness. It might be able to think… to some degree. It might not be able to generate memories or access them. But, we consider it living, because it does has a consciousness.

It’s consciousness drives the animation of the plant. It grows. It seeks and needs sun, water and nourishment. It lives, and then it dies.

Turning to animals, we can see that they have souls, and they have consciousnesses. They might think differently than us, sense things differently, and have different ways of accessing memories, but it is clear that they have a consciousness.

Kitty has a toy.
The kitty has a toy. The use of play is an important technique for obtaining life skills. The brain uses play to learn, and thus thoughts are created in the process. Thoughts are a fundamental product of consciousness awareness.

A Soul is…

In short, a soul is a generalized collection of quanta that is associated with one or more consciousnesses. It is a “home” from whence the consciousness originates. [1] It resides in a “place” or a “Heaven” that is beyond the physical distances, and time, and space. [2] It exists independently of any physical reality, or notion of time.

A Consciousness is…

Consciousness, on the other hand, is something that comes forth from the soul. [1] It is tied to “reality” which will include the limitations of time, space, and spacial distances. [2] It is connected to a given reality and thus can be influenced by it. There is always a “give and take” between a reality and a consciousness.

[2] Memories are associated with Consciousness, not Soul.

Memories do NOT reside within the brain, as is conventionally thought. Instead, they are accessed by the brain. They are actually stored outside of our reality.

The creation of memories is via [1] the thoughts and [2] the physical activity of the person inhabiting a physical reality.

The mind and soul work together.
The consciousness is a spawned part of the soul that is used to actuate experiences within a reality. It also creates memories and emotions that are a fundamental part of those experiences. the Experiences are used by the soul to grow and expand.

Thoughts and memories reside at “the same level” or within the “same space” as the soul. You can call this area or place, or condition, “Heaven” if you wish. It’s a close enough approximation.

Consciousnesses can move about from the “Heaven” that the soul occupies, and the “Heaven” where the memories are stored to the physical universe. This is accomplished by changing from wave to particle properties.

Our reality is a a “destination” that is arrived at due to the physical actions and thoughts of a given consciousness.

[3] Our Soul utilizes the memories that our Consciousness generates to form entanglements with quanta.

One of the biggest questions that humans have asked is “what’s the purpose of our existence?”. Well, there is an answer. We exist to grow, learn and advance.

However, it is more than that.

Our physical bodies are constructions that occupy a physical reality within a “situation”. This situation is picked from a near infinite number of situations in the MWI multiple-reality-worlds of our universe. Our consciousness is placed within a physical body within that reality, and we live the life within that “situation”.

Time as a vector.
Every moment, our reality changes. We leave an “old” reality and enter a “new” reality. This happens automatically, and we perceive this action as “time”. This movement is a directional vector. It is controlled by our thoughts and our actions, as well as the thoughts and actions of those around us.

Our thoughts, generated by our physical actions, and our thoughts, act as a steering vector that alters and changes the reality into other realities. All the time, generating thoughts and situations for us to experience, and if need be, endure.

Look back in your own life. Go back ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or even fifty years. Look at your life then and what you thought about; what you dreamed about, and the actions you took. Then…

…fast forward your life to see how the things manifested. You should find that while there are often outside influences involved, many of the things that you thought about that that time manifested one way or the other in your life.

Thoughts create reality.
The things that I thought about the most, and the actions that I took, all eventually influenced me and the direction that my life took on. This is how we can influence the arrow of time as it pertains to our reality.

The thoughts, emotions and feelings that we generate within this life goes to a “thought repository”. This repository is used to make and break quantum attachments and entanglements.

Quantum attachments and entanglements create the fabric, shape, size and organization of soul.

[4] Soul organization determines the rate of Soul growth and Soul Abilities.

What most humans do not “get” or understand, is the importance in soul evolution. We kind of think that the soul is fixed and will forever exist in the configuration or shape that it is now.

That is wrong.

Souls evolve. They have always been evolving. They can do so on their own, without creating a consciousness. And, they can also (greatly accelerate the process) do so by using a consciousness involved collecting experiences within a reality.

As souls evolve they transcend the limitations of our universe and achieve far greater abilities. As such, their manifested consciousnesses and spawned realities also increase in scope. From a human perspective, these evolved souls are astounding.

Conclusion

Only when we, as a species, recognize the intimate connection that our thoughts have with the reality that we inhabit, can we even begin to consider leaving this little ball of earth that we call our own.

We would discard the notions that hate, and killing others, and the obtainment of physical possessions distract from our ability to direct our thoughts. Direction, mind you, that is intended to acquire experiences for our soul to utilize.

MAJestic Related Posts – Training

These are posts and articles that revolve around how I was recruited for MAJestic and my training. Also discussed is the nature of secret programs. I really do not know why the organization was kept so secret. It really wasn’t because of any kind of military concern, and the technologies were way too involved for any kind of information transfer. The only conclusion that I can come to is that we were obligated to maintain secrecy at the behalf of our extraterrestrial benefactors.

How to tell...
How to tell -2
Top Secrets
Sales Pitch
Feducial Training
Implantation
Probe Calibration - 1
Probe Calibration - 2
Leaving the USA

MAJestic Related Posts – Our Universe

These particular posts are concerned about the universe that we are all part of. Being entangled as I was, and involved in the crazy things that I was, I was given some insight. This insight wasn’t anything super special. Rather it offered me perception along with advantage. Here, I try to impart some of that knowledge through discussion.

Enjoy.

Secrets of the universe
Alpha Centauri
Our Galaxy the Milky Way
Sirius solar system
Alpha Centauri
The fuselage embedded within the rocks of Victoria Falls.
The Hammer inside the rock.
The Hollow Moon
The Mystery of the Lapulapu Ridge.
The Mystery of the Baltic UFO.
Mystery of the bronze bell.
Mystery of the oil lamp found inside a block of coal.
Did extraterrestrials set up a colony in Pennsylvania?
The Oxia Palus Facility
Brown Dwarfs
Apollo Space Exploration
CARET
The Nature of the Universe
Type-1 Grey Extraterrestrial
The mysterious flying contraptions.

MAJestic Related Posts – World-Line Travel

These posts are related to “reality slides”. Other more common terms are “world-line travel”, or the MWI. What people fail to grasp is that when a person has the ability to slide into a different reality (pass into a different world-line), they are able to “touch” Heaven to some extent. Here are posts that  cover this topic.

Cat Heaven
MWI
Things I miss
How MWI allows world-line travel.
An Observed World-Line switch.
Vehicular world-line travel
Soul is not consciousness.

John Titor Related Posts

Another person, collectively known by the identity of “John Titor” claimed to utilize world-line (MWI egress) travel to collect artifacts from the past. He is an interesting subject to discuss. Here we have multiple posts in this regard.

They are;

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

AJestic Related Posts – Training

These are posts and articles that revolve around how I was recruited for MAJestic and my training. Also discussed is the nature of secret programs. I really do not know why the organization was kept so secret. It really wasn’t because of any kind of military concern, and the technologies were way too involved for any kind of information transfer. The only conclusion that I can come to is that we were obligated to maintain secrecy at the behalf of our extraterrestrial benefactors.

How to tell...
How to tell -2
Top Secrets
Sales Pitch
Feducial Training
Implantation
Probe Calibration - 1
Probe Calibration - 2
Leaving the USA

MAJestic Related Posts – Our Universe

These particular posts are concerned about the universe that we are all part of. Being entangled as I was, and involved in the crazy things that I was, I was given some insight. This insight wasn’t anything super special. Rather it offered me perception along with advantage. Here, I try to impart some of that knowledge through discussion.

Enjoy.

Secrets of the universe
Alpha Centauri
Our Galaxy the Milky Way
Sirius solar system
Alpha Centauri
The fuselage embedded within the rocks of Victoria Falls.
The Hammer inside the rock.
The Hollow Moon
The Mystery of the Lapulapu Ridge.
The Mystery of the Baltic UFO.
Mystery of the bronze bell.
Mystery of the oil lamp found inside a block of coal.
Did extraterrestrials set up a colony in Pennsylvania?
The Oxia Palus Facility
Brown Dwarfs
Apollo Space Exploration
CARET
The Nature of the Universe
Type-1 Grey Extraterrestrial

MAJestic Related Posts – World-Line Travel

These posts are related to “reality slides”. Other more common terms are “world-line travel”, or the MWI. What people fail to grasp is that when a person has the ability to slide into a different reality (pass into a different world-line), they are able to “touch” Heaven to some extent. Here are posts that  cover this topic.

Cat Heaven
MWI
Things I miss
How MWI allows world-line travel.
An Observed World-Line switch.
Vehicular world-line travel

John Titor Related Posts

Another person, collectively known by the identity of “John Titor” claimed to utilize world-line (MWI egress) travel to collect artifacts from the past. He is an interesting subject to discuss. Here we have multiple posts in this regard.

They are;

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Flying Machine (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

The Flying Machine By Ray Bradbury

This story was written by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law. This is from Golden Apples of the Sun Doubleday, 1953 .

Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

Here is a story that discusses how political and social realities can slow, stymie and retard technological advancement. I think that it is beautifully written and very “delicious”. I love the way that Ray Bradbury brings advanced concepts to the masses though his very (seemingly) simplistic stories.

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…” 
-R is for Rocket Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story on the Ray Bradbury library portal in Russia, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

The Flying Machine

In the year A.D. 400, the Emperor Yuan held his throne by the Great Wall of China, and the land was green with rain, readying itself toward the harvest, at peace, the people in his dominion neither too happy nor too sad.

Early on the morning of the first day of the first week of the second month of the new year, the Emperor Yuan was sipping tea and fanning himself against a warm breeze when a servant ran across the scarlet and blue garden tiles, calling, “Oh, Emperor, Emperor, a miracle!”

“Yes,” said the Emperor, “the air is sweet this morning.”

“No, no, a miracle!” said the servant, bowing quickly.

“And this tea is good in my mouth, surely that is a miracle.”

“No, no, Your Excellency.”

“Let me guess then – the sun has risen and a new day is upon us. Or the sea is blue. That now is the finest of all miracles.”

“Excellency, a man is flying!”

“What?” The Emperor stopped his fan.

“I saw him in the air, a man flying with wings. I heard a Voice call out of the sky, and when I looked up, there he was, a dragon in the heavens with a man in its mouth, a dragon of paper and bamboo, coloured like the sun and the grass.”

“It is early,” said the Emperor, “and you have just wakened from a dream.”

“It is early, but I have seen what I have seen! Come, and you will see it too.”

“Sit down with me here,” said the Emperor. “Drink some tea. It must be a strange thing, if it is true, to see a man fly. You must have time to think of it, even as I must have time to prepare myself for the sight.”

They drank tea.

“Please,” said the servant at last, “or he will be gone.”

The Emperor rose thoughtfully. “Now you may show me what you have seen.”

They walked into a garden, across a meadow of grass, over a small bridge, through a grove of trees, and up a tiny hill.

“There!” said the servant.

The Emperor looked into the sky. And in the sky, laughing so high that you could hardly hear him laugh, was a man; and the man was clothed in bright papers and reeds to make wings and a beautiful yellow tail, and he was soaring all about like the largest bird in a universe of birds, like a new dragon in a land of ancient dragons.

The man called down to them from high in the cool winds of morning. “I fly, I fly!”

The servant waved to him. “Yes,yes!”

The Emperor Yuan did not move.

Instead he looked at the Great Wall of China now taking shape out of the farthest mist in the green hills, that splendid snake of stones which writhed with majesty across the entire land. That wonderful wall which had protected them for a timeless time from enemy hordes and preserved peace for years without number.

He saw the town, nestled to itself by a river and a road and a hill, beginning to waken.

“Tell me,” he said to his servant, “has anyone else seen this flying man?”

“I am the only one, Excellency,” said the servant, smiling at the sky, waving.

The Emperor watched the heavens another minute and then said, “Call him down to me.”


“Ho, come down, come down!

The Emperor wishes to see you!” called the servant, hands cupped to his shouting mouth.

The Emperor glanced in all directions while the flying man soared down the morning wind. He saw a farmer, early in his fields, watching the sky, and he noted where the farmer stood.

The flying man alit with a rustle of paper and a creak of bamboo reeds.

He came proudly to the Emperor, clumsy in his rig, at last bowing before the old man.

“What have you done?” demanded the Emperor.

“I have flown in the sky, Your Excellency,” replied the man.

“What have you done?” said the Emperor again.

“I have just told you!” cried the flier.

“You have told me nothing at all.” The Emperor reached out a thin hand to touch the pretty paper and the birdlike keel of the apparatus. It smelled cool, of the wind.

“Is it not beautiful, Excellency?”

“Yes, too beautiful.”

“It is the only one in the world!” smiled the man.

“And I am the inventor.”

“The only one in the world?”

“I swear it!”

“Who else knows of this?”

“No one. Not even my wife, who would think me mad with the son. She thought I was making a kite. I rose in the night and walked to the cliffs far away. And when the morning breezes blew and the sun rose, I gathered my courage, Excellency, and leaped from the cliff.

I flew!

But my wife does not know of it.”

“Well for her, then,” said the Emperor. “Come along.” They walked back to the great house. The sun was full in the sky now, and the smell of the grass was refreshing. The Emperor, the servant, and the flier paused within the huge garden. The Emperor clapped his hands.

“Ho, guards!”

The guards came running.

“Hold this man.”

The guards seized the flier.

“Call the executioner,” said the Emperor.

“What’s this!” cried the flier, bewildered.

“What have I done?” He began to weep, so that the beautiful paper apparatus rustled.

“Here is the man who has made a certain machine,” said the Emperor, “and yet asks us what he has created. He does not know himself. It is only necessary that he create, without knowing why he has done so, or what this thing will do.”

The executioner came running with a sharp silver ax. He stood with his naked, large-muscled arms ready, his face covered with a serene white mask.

“One moment,” said the Emperor. He turned to a nearby table upon which sat a machine that he himself had created. The Emperor took a tiny golden key from his own neck. He fitted his key to the tiny, delicate machine and wound it up.

Then he set the machine going.

The machine was a garden of metal and jewels. Set in motion, the birds sangs in tiny metal trees, wolves walked through miniature forests, and tiny people ran in and out of sun and shadow, fanning themselves with miniature fans, listening to tiny emerald birds, and standing by impossibly small but tinkling fountains.

“Is It not beautiful?” said the Emperor.

“If you asked me what I have done here, I could answer you well. I have made birds sing, I have made forests murmur, I have set people to walking in this woodland, enjoying the leaves and shadows and songs. That is what I have done.”

“But, oh, Emperor!” pleaded the flier, on his knees, the tears pouring down his face. “I have done a similar thing! I have found beauty. I have flown on the morning wind. I have looked down on all the sleeping houses and gardens. I have smelled the sea and even seen it, beyond the hills, from my high place. And I have soared like a bird; oh, I cannot say how beautiful it is up there, in the sky, with the wind about me, the wind blowing me here like a feather, there like a fan, the way the sky smells in the morning! And how free one feels!

That is beautiful, Emperor, that is beautiful too!”

“Yes,” said the Emperor sadly, “I know it must be true. For I felt my heart move with you in the air and I wondered: What is it like? How does it feel? How do the distant pools look from so high? And how my houses and servants? Like ants? And how the distant towns not yet awake?”

“Then spare me!”

“But there are times,” said the Emperor, more sadly still, “when one must lose a little beauty if one is to keep what little beauty one already has. I do not fear you, yourself, but I fear another man.”

“What man?”

“Some other man who, seeing you, will build a thing of bright papers and bamboo like this. But the other man will have an evil face and an evil heart, and the beauty will be gone. It is this man I fear.”

“Why? Why?”

“Who is to say that someday just such a man, in just such an apparatus of paper and reed, might not fly in the sky and drop huge stones upon the Great Wall of China?” said the Emperor.

No one moved or said a word.

“Off with his head,” said the Emperor. The executioner whirled his silver ax.

“Burn the kite and the inventor’s body and bury their ashes together,” said the Emperor.

The servants retreated to obey. The Emperor turned to his hand-servant, who had seen the man flying.

“Hold your tongue. It was all a dream, a most sorrowful and beautiful dream. And that farmer in the distant field who also saw, tell him it would pay him to consider it only a vision. If ever the word passes around, you and the farmer die within the hour.”

“You are merciful, Emperor.”

“No, not merciful,” said the old man.

Beyond the garden wall he saw the guards burning the beautiful machine of paper and reeds that smelled of the morning wind. He saw he dark smoke climb into the sky.

“No, only very much bewildered and afraid.”

He saw the guards digging a tiny pit wherein to bury the ashes.

“What is the life of one man against those of a million others? I must take solace from that thought.”

He took the key from its chain about his neck and once more wound up the beautiful miniature garden. He stood looking out across the land at the Great Wall, the peaceful town, the green fields, the rivers and streams.

He sighed.

The tiny garden whirred its hidden and delicate machinery and set itself in motion; tiny people walked in forests, tiny faces loped through sun-speckled glades in beautiful shining pelts, and among the tiny trees flew little bits of high song and bright blue and yellow color, flying, flying, flying in that small sky.

“Oh,” said the Emperor, closing his eyes, “look at the birds, look at the birds!”

Conclusion

Perhaps this will provide the reader with some clarity as to why MAJestic existed, and why people are not to know of our real and actual reality. Perhaps it will explain my role far better than this…

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Mystery of the Dellschau Flying Contraptions

There was a time, long before compartmentalized special access programs, that other people created their very own secret organizations. These programs operated outside of government control, and oversight. In fact, during the last century, the United States was full of these “fraternal” organizations. Most of which operated with a secret side. And most, of which, were men-only membership and required rituals to join, and tasks to complete. All in secret. Here we look at one of them; the Dellschau flying machine project.

Secret Organizations…

These other people, and these other organizations, created societies with membership, and worked those programs to their conclusions. They kept all of their activities secret. They took “blood oaths”, and policed their ranks. They held belief in causes greater than themselves. They toiled and worked, and then moved on.

Sometimes the objectives were political in nature. Such as to “liberate” a land or a people. Sometimes the objectives were social, as to provide an outlet for fun and debauchery where the prying eyes of the “lesser sex” could be safely occluded. And, yes, sometimes the organizations revolved around devices, inventions and adventuresome activities.

Gathering
Vintage photo of a knights of Columbus gathering. Undated. Membership was all male and consisted of hard working, men of all occupations, of the local community. They supported each other and places rules of behavior and membership. Unlike today, where everyone can join for “equality”, these members placed merit over equality. No one was equal. They recognized that everyone was different, and they only wanted the best to join their organization.

These organizations would often hold meeting in secret, and rotate the locations. They would elect members, and would enforce initiation rituals and codes of secrecy. They would hold meetings, of which members would repeat and enforce codes of behaviors and rituals shrouded and cloaked in the arcane.

Often they would have secret handshakes, and special symbols and behaviors that only other members would recognize. Such as rings, ways of tying their shoelaces, pins and badges and other behaviors that would be ignored by the uninitiated.

The secrecy was considered important, as it was strongly believed that the “average person on the street” were just simply “rabble”. As such, the “better” people of society needed to operate the “levers” of control away from the prying eyes of the well-intended ignorant.

Moose hat.
Hat from the Royal Order of the Moose. When the organization was first founded, it was set up as a serious organization with serious importance and critical purpose. They enforced membership to men only, with character being of upmost importance. They made rules and enforced them. They established “good old boys networks” to assist members in building up lives for them and their families and kept the “riff raff” out.

When they would meet, they would often wear special regalia. This might include cloaks, hats, and other adornments. They would wear these elements over their normal everyday clothes. As there were an inherent hierarchy present in these organizations. And traditions, rules and laws needed to be followed to “the letter”.

Time moves on…

Over time, many of these organizations died out. While the larger ones became something else entirely.

They expanded their membership to include women, then children. Then gays. Then LGBT, and now today anything that can apply and pay the fee can join. It’s for “diversity”, you see. It is for “equality”, don’t you know. It’s for a better world, to protect the children, and other such themes…

The larger ones became social clubs, where you could combine low-priced alcoholic drinks with community daycare. (After all, what better way to meet with friends and associates that over some beers and song, while the kids are watched over in the next room?) They developed “play rooms”, bought pool tables, and would rent out the social halls for a profit to fund building maintenance.

Such is what happens when your membership can be all inclusive. Everyone can join, and the standards are lowered to zero to accept everyone.

Many of these transformed organizations are well known today. We have the VFW, the Lions, the Elks, the Moose, the Polish Falcons, and many others. Today they are considered an anachronism. They are considered nothing more than a holdover from a “barbaric” time when men needed to gather and discuss “trivial” matter of local society.

We have all forgotten why they were founded in the first place. We have forgotten the society from whence they sprung up from. We have forgotten their importance, and in our rush to “modernize” them, and make them more “progressive” by opening up membership to everyone and every thing, we have lost something valuable.

We have lost our history.

What remains…

Yes. Over time things have changed. In many cases, the members died, and at their death the secrets that these programs held went with them to their graves. The organizations, their membership and their objectives become forgotten. Only the relics remained.

Relics that were themselves often discard and misidentified by the few whom blundered upon them. “Oh, that’s just a flag of some para-military organization that your great great grandfather belonged to.” or, “I don’t know what that crazy knife is. It’s probably just a fancy letter opener”. Or, better yet a strange “tapestry” with strange symbols and an unusual motto in Latin, might be found and then “cleaned out” by a well-meaning but wholly ignorant relative.

Mystery object
Special objects, and items of significance lose all their importance when no one remembers their history, their purpose and why they existed in the first place.

This should come as no surprise. 

We all have heard about the “ The Masons”, and “The order of the golden dawn”, and many, many others. Some are relatively well-known, and weren’t really all that secret, such as the ‘Black Panther” movement of the 1960’s and 70’s. But some were so secret, that when they disbanded, all that remained were some dusty scraps of mystery.

Yes, some of the secret organizations come out of the shadows and make their appearance from time to time…

The order of the golden dawn
Member of the far right Golden Dawn party hold flags as they take part in a rally in Athens on February 1, 2014. Some 3 000 far right Golden Dawn nationalists took part in the rally to commemorate a 1996 incident between Greece and Turkey at Imia island. Meanwhile anti-fascist protesters clashed with police as they gathered nearby to oppose the rally of members and supporters of the Golden Dawn extreme-right party. AFP PHOTO / Louisa GouliamakiLOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/Getty Images

But what of the secret organizations that continue to remain hidden? What of those?

What of these still secretive organizations?

These are secret organizations, set up at the time of the loyal order of Elks, or other fraternal societies. These are organizations where members can join, and become involved in something far bigger than themselves. Members can become part of an organization that can control the life and direction of mankind, in their own unique and secret manner.

Let’s look at one of these long forgotten, but highly secretive organizations. Let’s look at the “Dellschau Flying Machines”.

Introduction to secrets and disclosures

Everyone has secrets. For some, it is the cookies that you stole from your grandmothers house. For others it is a dark past that you try to keep buried and hidden. For others, it is being part of a secret society. A secret society.

With that in mind…

Let’s look at the secrets of a neighborhood butcher. For it is a great story, and involves the dreams and adventures of manned flight at a time with it was considered an impossibility to fly. For at that time, “everyone knew” that man could never fly.

"If man were meant to fly, he would have been born with wings"
- William L. Shanklin

Yah. Everyone knew.

Just like today. “Everyone knows” that there is no such thing as extraterrestrials. Everyone knows that if the government discovered intelligent aliens that they would announce it to the world, and that the world would rejoice in happiness and rainbows (with the possibility of dancing unicorns, thrown in for good measure.)

Everyone knows this. Even the anointed one; (former) President Barrack Obama (the first) said that there is no such thing as extraterrestrials. He told the world this while he was on that very important television show; the Ellen DeGeneres show.

Anyways…

This story is one shrouded in mystery, and almost lost forever. It is a story intertwined with secret societies, hidden codes, otherworldly theories and seemingly impossible inventions. It is a story that place at a time, long before man even dreamed of flying in automated mechanisms.

It is the story of a dream, and an obsession of a man, or a group of men, all toiling in secret. To everyone else, however, Charles Dellschau had only been known as the grouchy local butcher.

He was nothing more than that. Or… was he?

Dellschau Flying Contraptions
Dellschau Flying Contraptions – a sample showing the level of detail present and the curious statements involved.

A discovery in the junk

This is a story that was unseen for decades until it was salvaged by a junk dealer in the 1960s. It all began with a trash heap outside a crumbling house in Texas. This is the story of an entire body of work that would later go on to marvel the intellectual world.

1969 in NYC.
The late 1960’s was an interesting time. America was changing. Styles, hobbies, and fashion were quite different from what we are accustomed to today.

It all began in 1969, when a used furniture dealer named Fred Washington bought 12 large discarded notebooks from a garbage collector.

He brought them to his warehouse. There, among the clutter and dusty odds and ends, they found a home. I am sure that there were boxes of old men’s magazines, vintage fishing tackle, and dusty vintage pictures of cats with big eyes, and clown portraits resting everywhere. They fit right in.

1960s art
For some reason, that mystifies me today, big eyed cats, clowns, and kids with guitars were very popular decorations for living-rooms int he 1960’s. I guess that they matched the decor at that time.

He must have thought that they were an interesting curiosity. As he kept them lying around in his warehouse. Eventually finding a new home in the corner under a pile of dusty carpets.

Of course, junk stores are frequented by starving students and their ilk. They need to find cheap apparel, inexpensive furnishings, and curiosities to outfit their dorm room or apartments. As such, many younger kids would come in to the store to look around and browse.

A sample drawings of the Dellschau Flying Contraptions  showing design, production and technical details related to operation and theory.
A sample drawings of the Dellschau Flying Contraptions showing design, production and technical details related to operation and theory.

An art student takes a look at the work

In 1969, art history student, Mary Jane Victor, was scouring through his bazaar of antique furniture and brick a brack castaways when she came upon the notebooks. As she brushed off the dust from the covers, she could clearly see that the work was truly unique and very, very special.

1960s college fashion.
A typically dressed gal on a college campus sometime during the late 1960’s. She is very “mod” and fashionable.

This was not some mass-produced ancient harmonica. This was not your run-of-the-mill lamp, artwork made out of dried macaroni, or a broken lava lamp. No. This was unique. It was not mass produced. It was custom made, and obviously one of a kind.

These notebooks became known as “the mysterious works of a Charles Dellschau”.

Technical illustration.
While some of the works seem like fanciful art revolving around newspaper clippings and colorful sketches, many are far more technically inclined and quite involved.

Inside the scrapbooks she discovered a remarkable collection of strange watercolors and collage pieces. They were beautiful and amazingly detailed. And yet, and yet, there were boxes and boxes of these books. As she looked, she would remove a book, only to find yet another under it.

When she asked about purchasing the books, the junk dealer gave her an outrageous price. Indeed, this was most especially outrageous for a “starving” art college student. He asked for around $2000 dollars for everything. This was equivalent to $13,775.26 today. (Calculator HERE.)

One of his many inventions.
Was the butcher a “wanna-be” inventor, or something else? Was he an artist, or a draftsman? Or, was he exactly what he claimed to be; the scribe for a secret organization of early aviator pioneers?

What’s an art lover going to do?

There were more than 2,500 intricate (and detailed) drawings of flying machines alongside cryptic newspaper clippings filled the pages, crudely sewn together with shoelaces and thread. It was a work of art, and if she (as someone who appreciated it) wouldn’t purchase it, then who knows what would happen to it…

A patron of the arts becomes interested

In frustration, she discussed this matter with her friends. Maybe she smoked some of that devil “weed” and listened to Janis Joplin in the process. Who knows? What we do know is that she felt the need to “rescue” the works that she discovered.

Mary Jane immediately notified the Art Director of her school, a Mr Dominique de Menil, of Rice University. He was not only a major influence in the art world, but was also Houston’s leading fine art patron. He immediately snapped up four of the books for $1,500. Where he wasted no time to put on an exhibition at the university entitled, “Flight”.

Artwork on display.
Today this body of work are considered a beautiful curiosity. While the drawings might be associated with a secret flying organization, this aspect of the man and his life is considered to be not nearly as important as the art that he created.

With that, Mr. Charles Dellschau, a Prussian immigrant had finally been discovered, nearly 50 years after his death in 1923.

But…

The question remains; what was he? Was he a visionary? Was he an artist? Was he a scholar? Was he an inventor? What the heck was he, and why did he devote so much of his life to such an endeavor?

Mr. Charles Dellschau, a Prussian immigrant

Immigrants to the USA.
Photograph of a Group of Immigrants Outside a Building on Ellis Island 10450_2007_001

He had arrived in the United States at 25 years old from Hamburg in 1853. Documents show he lived in both California and Texas with his family, working as a butcher.

He retired in 1899, at the ripe old age of 71 years.

As an old man, he took to filling his last days by filling notebooks with a visual journal of his youth. In fact, for the remaining years of his life, he apparently locked himself in the house (more or less) only leaving when absolutely necessary. He found comfort and solace in his house, among his belongings. As such, we would spend his time, not by watching “Laugh In”, but rather working on his autobiography.

He called the first three books, Recollections and recounts a secret society of flight enthusiasts which met in California in the mid-19th century called the ‘Sonora Aero Club’.

How’s that for a mouth full?

Dellschau flying machines
Very detailed drawings and artwork. The Dellschau flying machines seem to be more of an art-derived obsession by an unhappy butcher, or were there something else…

The books are an autobiography of a secret society that he belonged to.

The books are many things, but fundamentally they are an autobiography of his early life, and notations from a secret organization that he was part of. As such, there is no question at all about it. His autobiography is a strange one.

Mystery man or butcher?
Was Mr. Dellschau a simple butcher? Was he an artist? Was he crazy? Or did he have a secret that he had to keep to himself, but was totally and fully enraptured by?

In fact, it is heretical. He claimed that flying machines were not only invented, but perfected, after the American Civil War. He showed the various designs, and discussed ways and means (mechanisms) to solve the various issues that arose when operating those machines.

The Wright Brothers wouldn’t even make their famous first flight until 1903. Yet, yet… Dellschau draws dapperly-dressed men piloting brightly-coloured airships and helicopters with revolving generators and retractable landing gear.

Aside from this body of work, no other records have ever been found of the Sonora Aero Club. And, a study of Dellschau’s artworks hide a secret coded story. Inside the art and the strange designs apparently lie evidence of secrets and private stories.

Whatever it was that he had to say was apparently too private even for his own notebooks and even today, much of the mysteries has yet to be revealed.

Enter Mr. Pete Navarro

A Mr. Pete Navarro, graphic artist and UFO researcher, heard about the “Flight” exhibition in 1969 and became enthralled.

He believed there was a connection between Dellschau’s drawings and another mystery. This other mystery was the mysterious mass of “airship” sightings that occurred all over the United States at that time period. Indeed, at the turn of the century, there were mysterious sightings all across a swath of states. This included a full 18 states that ranged from California to Indiana.

In 1972, he discovered that 8 remaining books of Dellschau were still sitting at the junk shop, unwanted and unclaimed. He bought the lot for $565 and spent the next 15 years obsessively decoding Dellschau’s work.

Most importantly, Dellschau never drew himself aboard the fantastical aero inventions. Instead, he only represented himself as the club’s scribe/ record-keeper, rather than as one of its inventors or pilots. At which we have the answer to the mystery, though no one wants to believe it. That these drawings are the sum total of the records of that secret organization.

The designs

In a study of the work, you can see many, many various designs and inventions. In fact, there are as many as 100 designs for airships with names like the Aero Mary, the Aero Trump and even an “Aero Jourdan”.

The mission

The club’s secret mission? To design and build the first navigable aircraft using a secret formula he coded as “NB Gas”. This “NB Gas” enabled the airships to negate gravity and drive the ships mechanical devices. They could actuate the wheels, side panels and compressor motors. This is pretty amazing that this all took place during an era when air travel was still viewed as a mystical impossibility.

Gases that are lighter than air include water vapor, methane, hot air, hydrogen, neon, nitrogen, ammonia and helium. These gases have a lower density than air, which causes them to rise and float in the atmosphere.

A dark side

Some of his drawings tell of fatal crashes of the society’s airships.

While others talk about sabotage of other club members and the banning of members who talked about the secret organization to outsiders. According to Dellschau, the club’s aero prototypes would travel the open roads disguised as gypsy wagons to avoid detection.

Imagine that! The vintage UFO’s would be carted on the contrivances of the day and ride on the roads in plain sight of the common village-people there.

Flying Machine 2
Drawings were complete with aux views and cutaways. These do not simply describe a fantasy, but rather a serious technical interest in a forbidden technology at that time.

NYMZA

In the notebooks’ strange code of germanic lettering, Pete Navarro found a phrase that translated as “NYMZA”. Dellschau reveals this to be an even larger secret society that allegedly controlled the Sonora Aero Club branch.

Based on Navarro’s findings, UFO theorists have come up with some far-fetched speculation that the NYMZA was in fact an extra terrestrial entity. (Thus lending ammo to the idea that UFO theorists are all bonkers.)

Vintage UFO.
Vintage photograph of something in the sky. This predates Photoshop and is thus considered to be something accidental. Like an out of focus crow, or a meteor taken by a low-quality camera of the day. Some even speculate that this is a vintage alien saucer-shaped spacecraft.

Secondary sources

While Navarro rubbished those claims, he did manage to find some supportive evidence. He found press clippings in Texas archives linking one of the names of Dellschau’s secret society members to an article published in 1897 about a local airship sighting.

The San Antonio Daily Express article identified one of the airship’s mysterious occupants as Hiram Wilson. Now Hiram, who according to witnesses, revealed that his airship design came from someone else. He claimed that it came from his uncle named Tosh Wilson.

Amazingly this Tosh Wilson was the very name Navarro had found mentioned in Dellschau’s watercolours as a Sonora club inventor.

To crazy to believe?

But even Navarro, despite his exhaustive research, had his doubts about Charles Dellschau’s story and how much of it was fiction. Were they tall tales to keep an old man entertained? Or were they true accounts of his youth, perhaps innocently exaggerated here and there?

Fiction or not, a single page from Dellschau’s notebooks could fetch as much as $15,000 in the late 1990s. Today, Navarro is no longer in possession of his books; he sold them off in need of some cash to museums, galleries and private collectors in Texas, New York and Paris.

And now, today, all that remains is an occasional Internet posting and a Wikipedia entry.

The Back-Story

How did the books end up in a trash heap in the 1960s in the first place?

Well, it turns out that the books had been hiding in Charles Dellschau’s attic where he lived and worked much of his life. They just sat there, forgotten and collecting dust. When he died, they continued to lie there. They grew dustier with time, and long forgotten.

Life moved on.

Seasons came and went. Wars came and went. After World war I, came the “Great Depression”, and that was followed by World War II. Then came the Korean War. Then, after that came the Vietnam war. By the end of the 1960s, the remaining family members, an Anton Stelzig, the husband of Dellschau’s step-daughter, was living in the house.

In the 1960s he, and his two ageing sisters, had a nurse to care for them. (It’s what often happens when you age.) The nurse would come in, make meals clean the house do laundry, and then leave.

As part of this care, the house and living arrangements needed to be assessed by the government. As such, the department assessed that the house was a hazard and ordered that it be cleared of debris. It was a cluttered mess of brick and brack from at least three full generations. We can well imagine the mess of stacks of papers, boxes of old clothes and rubbish that defied explanation.

Cluttered House.
We do not know what all the clutter looked like, but we do know that it was severe, and that the government ordered it to be cleaned up. It had to be pretty bad as this was the 1960’s and government intervention in the lives of others wasn’t any way as pervasive as it is today.

The nurse was given the task of “cleaning-up”.

Her way of doing things resulted in many of the family’s treasures being thrown out onto the street. She just picked the stuff up, hauled it out and set it on the curb. Everything went. It was a “fire sale” of three generations. Everything went, including Dellschau’s books. Anton’s grandson Leo, painfully recalls the nurse saying, “I took care of that mess and cleaned it all up.”

Some of Dellschau’s work is still believed to be missing, probably lost forever.


In 2009, Pete Navarro finally published his co-written The Secrets of Dellschau, revealing a lot of the script he had decoded from the books. Four books still remain in the Menil Collection, locked in a humidity-controlled room. Researchers continue to unearth new pieces of information through  surviving relatives.

Another Dellschau enthusiast, William Steen, obtained the aviation enthusiast’s journals in the late 1990s which included details of [1] a secret club boarding house, with [2] a bar and [3] dining room where the society would have meets, dream up their newest flying machines (and probably just have a bit of guy time)!


“The more details I see about Dellschau, the more convinced I am that a great deal of it is highly possible,” he told the Houston Press. “Even though it’s fantastic, it’s more than just fairy tales.”

Other Mysterious Airships at the turn of the century

Back at the turn of the century, people would see strange things in the sky. They did not call these items UFO’s. No. Instead, they called them something else. They called them “mystery ships that sailed in the skies”, or “Mystery airships”. Despite numerous reports of sightings, and claims of responsibility by mysterious inventors, none of the aircraft were ever discovered.

March 1880

The first report that is known, dates from 29 March 1880. It was found in the Santa Fe Weekly New Mexican. Although it could be fictional, there is a core of credible reports that indicate that the mystery airships cannot be entirely dismissed as hoaxes.

1892

In 1892 there were a series of reports of airships on the German-Polish border. The airships were seen to hover and even fly against the wind – impossible for known airships at the time. Four years later the airship wave took off.

November 1896

Mid-November 1896 saw several reports of mysterious airships over California.


Fast-moving (or sometimes stationary) nocturnal lights were seen over major cities, and spurious claims were made on behalf of “inventors.” The stories fizzled out in December, but the following February more reports came from Nebraska.

Two witness described a conical craft with wings and a fan-shaped rudder.

April 1897

Reports of airships soon spread, and by April reports were coming from much of the region.

Stories circulated, once again, of inventors exiting their craft and confided in witnesses.

It is easy to dismiss these stories of inventors as fictitious. In today’s society, most people are totally oblivious to the fact that back then people had no desire for fame to the extent that they do today. We automatically assume that everyone yearns for fame like they do today. It’s a barren assumption bases on ignorance.

The Dallas Morning News of April 19, 1897 reported that an airship had crashed in Aurora, Texas, and its “Martian” occupant had been buried in the local cemetery.


1909

Although this wave of reports would eventually die down by May, there was one more wave of sightings to come. In 1909 airships were reported in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand. This is known as the British airship wave.

This wave of airship sightings mostly consisted of fast-moving cylinders with strong lights. Given the time period, they were blamed on German spies. In the Untied States the US sightings were blamed on a Mr. William E. Tillinghast of Worcester, Massachussetts.

Tillinghast was apparently blameless.

After the first world war, reports of mystery airships largely died out, but sporadic reports were made of cigar-shaped craft with propellers or fins in Kentucky (1927), California (1946), Kansas (1952) and New Mexico (1967).

A great write up on the codes

The following is from Lexicon. They discuss the codes and how they were cracked and what they have to reveal. It’s a pretty good and detailed, not to mention, interesting article. I placed it here so that it will not be lost in the annals of time. All credit to the respective authors, and note that the text is copied exactly as presented (broken into paragraphs for easier reading) and placed on a pink background.

I urge the reader to visit the Lexicon Magazine website as there are many, many illustrative pictures and diagrams that go along with the text narrative.

I would also like to take a step back and put up my hands and say that this study is far too in-depth for my own understanding and is placed here for those interested in such a level of investigation. Enjoy.

PROLOGUE:

“Charles A.A. Dellschau’s Aporetic Archive” * by Thomas McEvilley

The Fate of Charles A.A. Dellschau’s (1830 – 1923) Work After His Death

For forty years Dellschau’s thousands of Plates moldered in the darkness of a closed attic, gathering dust. The only intrusion known to have taken place was when a male child of the Stelzig family became curious about the Dellschau books and rummaged through them.

Sometime in the 1960s there was a fire elsewhere in the house, and a fire inspector said to clear the debris out of the attic. So, after four decades in the secret dark, gently wafting the aura of twenty years of solitary late-night concentration into the depths of shadowy and slightly sinister corners, over the pieces of sad furniture with sheets flung over them and gathering dust, Dellschau’s life-work was carried unceremoniously out into the light of day and literally left in a heap in the gutter. (It was born into the gutter, you might say.)

So the first venue for Dellschau’s oeuvre was his bedroom; the second, an attic; the third, a heap in the gutter.

From this point there is uncertainty, and two versions have emerged. First, that a furniture refinisher named Fred Washington, making his rounds to see what people had thrown out, found Dellschau’s stuff and took it to his shop in Houston, called the OK Trading Post. Another version adds another pair of hands and another transaction. The heap in the gutter, on this account, was taken to the dump by a garbage truck. In the junkyard a nameless picker found it and sold it to Fred Washington for $100.

In any case, the story is that once Washington had Dellschau’s things in his shop they spent some time under a stack of old carpets or, in another rendition, tarpaulins. Before long they were discovered by a browser who recognized them as artworks of some kind, and then the books began their wanderings through the artworld and its levels of society.

The find made under a pile of carpets in the OK Trading Post was talked about a bit and began to be split up and moved in various directions—mostly upward (through the classes).

Four of the twelve books were acquired by the Menil Collection, in Houston, which had previously shown some interest in outsider art.9 Fred Washington sold the other eight books to a man named P.G. Navarro, who is an interesting figure in the story. Navarro was a practicing commercial artist in Houston who in his spare time had developed as a hobby an investigation of certain reported airship sightings.

These mysterious airship sightings occurred in the late 1890s first in Northern California (not far from Sonora), then throughout the United States but especially in the Southwest and Texas. The phenomenon was known in the press (not only in Texas) as the Great Texas Airship Mystery.

Navarro was studying the airship mystery at the time Dellschau’s books were discovered in the OK Trading Post, and it occurred to him that the Dellschau material might somehow be a part of it. Perhaps at first Navarro didn’t know about the Sonora Aero Club and assumed that the Aero drawings referred to aeronautical events around the turn of the century.

You’ve got to admire this sensible guess, and as he started to carry it out it became even more admirable. Navarro filled several notebooks with his findings, and these pages are exquisite in conception and execution; his obsessive concentration on order and neatness was not so unlike Dellschau’s own. Dellschau’s aesthetic is more expressive—meaning somewhat looser and more gestural—whereas Navarro’s notebooks are “expressive” of rigid order—more or less a contradiction in terms.

Perhaps Navarro appreciated Dellschau’s books as artworks. In any case it is clear that for one reason or another—maybe aesthetic, maybe spiritual, maybe as a search for something he couldn’t exactly name—Navarro felt a strong attraction toward the Dellschau material.

It almost seems he got into a folie à deux with the long-dead Dellschau; in his notebooks, Navarro redrew many of Dellschau’s pages, carefully and in detail. He worked many long evenings to decipher coded messages he found there in what looked vaguely like alphabetical symbols, as seen in Plate 1631 (at left), but from some other tradition. Navarro says Dellschau used a simple one-to-one substitution code and claims to have worked it out.10

He worked on this hobby for thirty years and became something of a philological scholar in the process. He is still alive now at age ninety-three, the age at which his ego-ideal Dellschau died. At some point Navarro sold four of the eight Dellschau books of drawings in his possession to the San Antonio Museum Association; two went to the San Antonio Museum of Art and the other two went to the Witte Museum, also in San Antonio, a museum devoted to South Texas culture. His remaining four books ultimately entered the art market and ended up in various hands.

DM = XØ

Present in many of the plates of the works of Charles Dellschau are character-like symbols that look as if they are based to a degree on letters of the Greek alphabet. It is not clear to what end these only semi-recognizable characters are used. A formula that is on many of the Plates looks almost like ¯ DM = XØ but not quite. The two letters on the right of the equation look more like chi and phi from the Greek alphabet than like X and O from the Latin alphabet. The formula ¯ DM = XØ has a horizontal dash entering the D around its middle, from the left, and a diagonal line from upper right to lower left through the O. And of course D and M are both in the Greek alphabet, too. Delta mu = chi phi? It may be Dellschau didn’t leave enough clues to figure it out. Maybe it has something to do with Peter Mennis, as on Plate 2003 (as described by P.G. Navarro in his “Books of Dellschau”) are the words: “Have you never heard of P. M.’s goose and heir offspring DM = XØ—Peter I haven foregot you!”

Navarro thought he had worked it out in Dellschau’s code so that DM = XØ translates into NYMZA.

In his interpretation the five elements refer by code to a mysterious organization, perhaps operating from Germany, that was the sponsor or secret director behind the activities of the Sonora Aero Club. There is in addition one drawing (Plate 2550) that is signed, “a DM = XØ Club Debate Studia . . . Drawn by CAA Dellschau.” Studia is the term Dellschau used for a model or study or artist’s proof. So: this is the Study-Model that came out of a Sonora Aero Club debate.

But of couse Dellschau treated the right side of the equation as if it was the Latin letters X and O, and didn’t consider the problems about those letters mentioned above.

CODEX to unlock the cipher:

He translates the ciphers as (left side, top to bottom) P, O, N, M, L, K, I, H, A, B, C, D, E, F, G and (right side, top to bottom) Q, R, S, T, U, W, X, Y, Z, CH, SCH, with the O used for double letters and no representation for J or V. By using this code, he claims the passages on the left and right edges of the drawing read “Now talk about your dirigibels” and “O yes we didden know nothing say.” P.G. Navarro, e-mail to Stephen Romano, July 30, 2012.

Code 1 from Lexicon Magazine.
Code 1 from Lexicon Magazine.
Code 2 from Lexicon Magazine.
Code 2 from Lexicon Magazine.
Codemap from Lexicon Magazine.
Codemap from Lexicon Magazine.
Codebreaker from Lexicon Magazine.
Codebreaker from Lexicon Magazine.

Extracted from “Empire of the Wheel III: The Nameless Ones”, by Walter Bosley

The Mysterious NYMZA In “Empire of the Wheel 1″, we presented evidence that extremist members of the Spiritualist movement were the most likely suspects involved with the deaths we associate to The San Bernardino Working of 1915.

In that book, it is revealed that the ancient goddess Hekate was central to the events surrounding deaths of four adults and three children.

The circumstances appear to have shrouded the identities of those involved. In EOW2, we extrapolated on the facts and possibilities by pulling a seemingly innocuous thread which ultimately revealed that an historical figure was at the center of events and offered a possible explanation as to why. Looming even taller in the background was the specter of a nameless string-puller, the difference now being the unexpected presence of an organization steeped in shadow and mystery but finally offering at least an apparent name:NYMZA/ NJMZa.

EOW2 already provides a very logical translation of the acronym NYMZA/ NJMZa. Here we must go a level deeper for therein is the thread through all we’ve presented in this book. Charles Dellschau NYMZA has multiple meanings, much like a hieroglyph. There is NYMZA the mysterious organization behind the airship mystery, according to Dellschau.

EOW2 attempts to translate this NYMZA according to Dellschau’s own description of it being an organization based in Germany and overseeing several airship builders in the United States, especially the Sonora Aero Club formed mostly of German immigrants.

This NYMZA/ NJMZa is also associated with the Great Airship Mystery of 1896, by this time also allegedly involved with known Spiritualist/ Theosophist investors and other players. It is here we can link NYMZA/ NJMZa to occult interests and not just via the Spiritualist scene in America but because of the German occult associations of the time.

However, in true occult spirit, the acronym is embedded with what may be the identity of the hand behind the secretive Germans overseeing the airship operations as outlined in EOW2.

NYM-ZA: The Sesh Heri Analysis In Sesh Heri’s 2008 novel Metamorphosis, second book of the Wonder of the Worlds trilogy, Ed Morrell explains the NYMZA to Jack London and the narrator of the story: “That member of the (Sonora) Aero Club had figured it out. He was a professor of ancient languages. He had studied Latin and Greek all his life, and he had also studied ancient Egyptian, Sumerian and Mayan. This professor told me that NYMZA was a very ancient word that predated all known languages but that it had survived into ancient Egyptian, Greek and Latin in somewhat altered forms.

For example: nomen in Latin and onyma in Greek are the words from where we derive our English word for name. But these Latin and Greek words were only derived from the older Egyptian nym which meant ‘who?’… “The word for ‘who?’ in Egyptian was related to several other words in that language that sounded the same…” “Homonyms,” Jack said. “That’s it,” Morrell said, “There were a number of words that were all pronounced something like nym, like the words for sleep, walk or stride, to do evil, wrongdoer, place of slaughter, slaughterhouse, execution, chamber, cellar… “They tell a story, a very ancient story.

It’s all about the ancient gods who once ruled the Earth.

They weren’t human; they were different kinds of creatures. They were amphibian. The Sumerians called these fish-men gods Annunaki – ‘Heavenly Ones Fallen To Earth’… The fish-men fought a war among their own kind and subdued the evil ones. What the fish-men did was confine the evil ones among them to a particular astral plane for all eternity… “That’s why all those nym words in Egyptian mean things like evil and slaughterhouse and cellar. The evil ones or wrongdoers, nymi, were put to sleep, nym, in a kind of cellar which could also be likened to a slaughterhouse, for although these evil beings continually walk or stride in that place of confinement, they exist in a kind of living death… “And should anyone ask about these evil beings who have been so confined in this living death, one can only reply who?, nym, for they are forgotten among the living… because their names have been taken away from them and this has cut them off from life…” “And that thing I encountered on the bottom of the ocean,” I asked, “You’re saying you think it was one of those old ones, one of those fish-gods, imprisoned on the astral plane long ago?”

“Yes,” Morrell said, “And not only that, but these things, the NYMZA, continually try to reach out to the minds of mankind and control us. Their ultimate aim is to escape from the astral plane and return here where they can once again rule according to all the evil that is in them. This NYMZA has been a manipulating force throughout the history of mankind on both Earth and Mars, and it was they who constantly interfered with mental communications going on between the Aero Club and some of the people on Mars… “They cannot build in the material world, but they can project their thoughts into this material realm through the minds of living things, especially the humans. Through such mental doors, the NYMZA hope to eventually escape their endless imprisonment.

That machine on the ocean floor is designed to rend the fabric of space and open an astral portal so those things can escape…” NYM-ZA or NYM-SA means specifically, according to Heri, ‘Name That Has Been Removed’ and he makes the distinction that this is the result of a punitive action. The‘cutting’ of the name was a revoking of a ‘key’, the name symbolizing the more important ‘identity’ or, as Joseph Farrell might say, ‘individuation’. This identity key is what, according to Heri’s interpretation, allows a being to exist on our plane, i.e. our material plane as opposed to the astral plane to which the ‘NYM-ZA/ NYM-SA’ were banished. Heri adds that the desire for these beings to possess a key drives them to seek possession of the identity of others, for the specific identity does not matter to them so much as simply having the key to return to this material plane of existence. It is in this desire for the ‘key’ of identity/ individuation that we may also find the motive for the possession of living bodies by disembodied entities, i.e. ‘demons’.

Consider the story in The Bible wherein Jesus encounters the man possessed by multiple demons. When Jesus asks for a name, the voice replies, “My name is Legion”. This apparent name actually refers to a multitude of entities possessing the man. Notice not one specific name identifying any of them by their personal identities is given but instead what Jesus is given is a group name. Heri argues that ‘Legion’ is equivalent to NYMZA/ NYM-SA. Had any of these entities retained an ‘identity key’, they would not need a living body to enter this plane of existence. Heri uses both his understanding of the phonetic cabala and modern words traced to ancient lexicons.

Confining his examples to English, German, Latin, Greek and ancient Egyptian, which can be demonstrated to be the sources for Greek and Latin terms. His source on the ancient Egyptian is Budge’s An Egyptian Hieroglyphic Dictionary (Murray, London, 1920) Pgs. 373-385. “-nym” is a suffix in English, i.e. patronym, pseudonym, etc. It refers to “name” as in the Greek onyma or “name”. Heri is convinced onyma came from the Egyptian word nem which meant “who?” Nem is a question concerning the specific identity of a person, the answer being their name. In ancient Egyptian, there were two words for “name”, being ren and ka. Nems means veil. Consider our context and remember this because we’ll bring it up a little later.

Ka is usually translated as “soul”, but Budge explicitly states that sometimes ka was used to mean “name”. This demonstrates to Heri a crucial link between the concept of the soul and the idea of a name. Heri argues that the Egyptian nem or “who?” entered the Greek language as onyma i.e. “name”. Now let’s bring the second syllable of NYMZA into the analysis. Heri believes the ancient Egyptian sa i.e. “cut” is the root of the “-ZA”. Thus nem-sa means “who? cut”. But then Heri points to nems, meaning to enlighten or illuminate in one usage yet “veil” in another. Heri thinks this hints at the “cutting off of illumination”. We shall return to this momentarily. Interestingly Heri points out that other nem related homonyms in ancient Egyptian mean “evil”, nehem “to deliver”, nehem-ra “to kill”, nemmta a type of fish. There are nem words relating to “lake”, “to bathe or swim”, “to sleep or slumber”, and “bedchamber”. This also extends to the Greek and Roman (Latin) nymphs, often associated with water; and the Greek nystagmos “drowsiness” derived from the ancient Egyptian nem in its aforementioned “sleep” association.

Now we go to the German nehmen “to take” which is also used to mean “to possess” or “to consume” as in “eat”. Heri is convinced that this can likely be traced back as well to the ancient Egyptian. He suggests nehmen might also be used to mean “to take someone” or possess someone. Returning to the second syllable of NYMZA once again, we have the German zahn “tooth” which relates to chewing or cutting, bringing it back to the ancient Egyptian sa. But Heri also points out the German zahllos “innumerable”, which hints at the aforementioned “legion”. Thus, according to Heri, do we have the following: NYM meaning “name” and ZA( SA) meaning “cut” NYM meaning the answer to “who?” and ZA relative to “innumerable” NYM-ZA meaning “without a name” or “nameless” Heri goes even farther to reveal the revelation that links his translation to our mystery:

a. Recall the nemmta or “type of fish” link to nem/-nym/ name? Remember the “lake” and “swim” associative definitions to nem?

b. Consider the “sleep” usage of the ancient Egyptian nem and its Greek derivative nystagmos “drowsiness”.

c. Now add the “possession” usage of the German nehmen which, if it is derived from the ancient Egyptian nem, provides yet more evidence for a NYM-ZA association. What does all this suggest to Heri? A nameless fish-like being sleeping under the water yet taking possession of something.

Does this sound familiar? It should.

Heri’s argues that his analysis reveals to him that the NYMZA are equivalent to Lovecraft’s Elder Gods from the stars whose priest-god Cthulhu sleeps at the bottom of the sea reaching out psychically to possess the minds of humans so as to appropriate their identities and capture the key necessary for the Elder Gods to enter our material plane.

That’s not all Sesh Heri has to offer as evidence. Heri argues that Nommo of the African Dogon tribe revealed the NYMZA presence on Earth.

Heri cites Robert K. G. Temple: “Nommo is the collective name for the great culture hero and founder of civilization who came from the Sirius system to set up society (civilization) on Earth.

Nommo – or, to be more precise, the Nommos – were amphibious creatures…” (Note 131) Nommo is a collective term, not a proper name. It does not mean any one particular personage, thus is essentially “nameless”. Nameless, amphibious or fish-like, gods from the stars. We won’t even go into what Jules Verne may have known, naming his legendary mystery man of the sea Captain Nemo… NYMZA: Their ‘name’ is ‘Legion’. They are numerous and ‘revoked of their identity key’ or ‘nameless’. Heri thinks this is their condemnation, but it may also be useful. If you lack an identity, you cannot be identified.

The Heri translation adds an unexpected element to the mystery. We have already provided an effective and valid German translation of NYMZA/ NJMZa in EOW2, so what are we to do with this new translation which also fits so disturbingly well? The answer is simple. Both may be right. Homonyms are the key. Words spelled the same yet having different meanings depending upon usage and context. Why not an acronym? Heri has already demonstrated a German association to the ancient Egyptian from which he derives his translation. We are dealing with Germans – specifically esoterically motivated Germans – all over this mystery. The implication is startling. NYMZA means NJMZa to the aero clubs yet it may also mean NYMZA ‘The Nameless Ones’ behind the nems. Oh, pardon us, we meant The Nameless Ones behind the veil, that definition of nems we told you we’d bring up again. Might the German NJMZa, as presented in EOW2, be the “veil” behind which hide the NYMZA aka The Nameless Ones?

Behind The Zodiac Killer and the ambush murders of Officers Christiansen and Teel are Nameless Ones. Behind the disappearance of April Pitzer and the murder of the McStay Family buried on a telluric current are Nameless Ones. Behind the murder of Harry Houdini and the Cthulhu Mythos are Nameless Ones. Behind all the mysterious shrines to Hekate and operational necromantic sites of the Inland Empire are Nameless Ones. Just as in EOW1 where we state that neither the reader nor we need to believe in the reality of these Nameless Ones, what matters is that the perpetrators of crimes in their honor believe in them, and to catch them, we must understand how they think. To catch them, we must identify them, in spite of their efforts to emulate their gods and remain without a face to put to their crimes. It is an ironic mirror image which these very real perpetrators anonymously commit atrocities in veneration of their gods who themselves are believed to remain entombed because they have been stripped of individual identities.

The nameless/ faceless punishment for one becomes the cloaking security for the other. Who are these Nameless Ones? Lovecraft would say they came from the stars aeons ago and remain on this planet to command their devotees in an objective of conquest. Now there’s an interesting possibility that may indeed have played a role in The San Bernardino Working after all. How? There has been one player in this melodrama that moved across the stage seemingly as a red herring. The circumstances suggested a greater hand in the events of 1915, yet the facts simply did not provide the necessary evidence to accuse this particular actor. Indeed, it appeared the truth stood in solid opposition to the natural assumption based upon the public persona of the individual – but now we know more. We must consider again the notorious Aleister Crowley.

EPILOGUE:

Extracted from

The Mystery of Flight- Hieroglyphica and American Visionary

 by decadentmanifesto

We don’t know if the Sonora Aero Club actually existed, and if so, did these flying contraptions exist? If they did not, what was Dellschau’s purpose in creating thousands of coded illustrations? There are notes in his journal that one day the Wonder Weaver would break the code. If this was the case this might be the only evidence we have that Dellschau intended these works to eventually be released to the public, and evidence for why he devoted thousands of hours and literally decades to create them. But we still don’t know fully the message he intended to deliver. The process of learning about Dellschau and his Press Blooms somewhat resembles cracking the Mayan code, to a much lesser degree.
What we do know is that from revolutions to family deaths Dellschau’s life was struck with tragedy. During the end chapters of his life’s narrative he invested countless hours into creating artworks that reflected a period in his life that was between revolutions and love. We don’t know much about what he did during his first years in America, but when he began painting this Aeros he chose that time of his life to create this narrative— perhaps because it happened, or maybe because his family could not trace and reveal inconsistencies in his claims during those bachelor years. He was fascinated with flight and the use of codes and a secret society reveal that he was inspired beyond the science of aviation. As a butcher he daily dealt in the field of death. Even his Press Blooms are visceral in their dissection of the airship’s anatomy. And though he might never had ascended in an airplane by creating these works of art he transcended his life after death.

Charles A.A. Dellschau left us a great mystery to be solved, one that might be impossible to solve. As it has been the experience with Pete Navarro, Stephen Romano, and so many people who have come in contact with Dellschau’s work a sense of excitement and curiosity is aroused. The type a curiosity that takes one through countless hours studying Dellschau’s artwork to see if they can decipher the code. It is that curiosity that inspires mystics and magicians to delve into occult matters. It is the same curiosity that inspires man to defy the laws of nature and from his own creativity to manifest vehicles that can ascend beyond our limits. In the two-dimensional color plates height and width, the horizon and the heavens, reflect the formula for transcendence.

The third dimension, depth, is a line drawn inward to our own psyche.


At which I must conclude that all this code-breaking, discussions of Astral planes, and ancient creatures that wish to control humans are far, far, far beyond my experience. Information presented here is for your information, and possible consideration.

What you, the reader, should take out from this is simple…

Secret organizations exist and have existed in the past. They are involved in arcane knowledge and understandings that are far removed from that of the “common man”. Secrets do exist.

Further reading

This is an interesting subject, but beyond the scope of this blog.  I suggest the reader follow up on this most interesting of subjects using the following links;


Conclusion

The world is filled with secrets. The idea that everyone should know everything and that there are no secrets is a big lie. The world is filled with secrets, plots, and schemes. Some are run by diabolical megalomaniacs, while others are just extra-ordinary adventures that are eventually forgotten.

The most important thing that a person needs to take from this story is the idea that most people are unaware of the things that goes on around them. The idea of lighter than air vehicles were a reality at a time when the world’s renowned scientists couldn’t even contemplate human flight in any capacity what so ever.

As such, were someone desirous to tell someone their secret, it should not be to broadcast to everyone. Instead, only a select few would be offered the opportunity to know and be let in on the secret. The advantages of what ever benefits are derived from secret endeavors is NOT beneficial to the masses of humanity. Instead, they belong to a select few. These people would then use the knowledge to further advance mankind at a pace unencumbered by the sloth of the mass of humanity.

Other than that, it is probably just as well that the rest of the world be ignorant and forget that any secrets ever existed in the first place. And thus the world turns, and new lives are lived while others sunset.

MAJestic Related Posts – Training

These are posts and articles that revolve around how I was recruited for MAJestic and my training. Also discussed is the nature of secret programs. I really do not know why the organization was kept so secret. It really wasn’t because of any kind of military concern, and the technologies were way too involved for any kind of information transfer. The only conclusion that I can come to is that we were obligated to maintain secrecy at the behalf of our extraterrestrial benefactors.

How to tell...
How to tell -2
Top Secrets
Sales Pitch
Feducial Training
Implantation
Probe Calibration - 1
Probe Calibration - 2
Leaving the USA

MAJestic Related Posts – Our Universe

These particular posts are concerned about the universe that we are all part of. Being entangled as I was, and involved in the crazy things that I was, I was given some insight. This insight wasn’t anything super special. Rather it offered me perception along with advantage. Here, I try to impart some of that knowledge through discussion.

Enjoy.

Secrets of the universe
Alpha Centauri
Our Galaxy the Milky Way
Sirius solar system
Alpha Centauri
The fuselage embedded within the rocks of Victoria Falls.
The Hammer inside the rock.
The Hollow Moon
The Mystery of the Lapulapu Ridge.
The Mystery of the Baltic UFO.
Mystery of the bronze bell.
Mystery of the oil lamp found inside a block of coal.
Did extraterrestrials set up a colony in Pennsylvania?
The Oxia Palus Facility
Brown Dwarfs
Apollo Space Exploration
CARET
The Nature of the Universe
Type-1 Grey Extraterrestrial
The mysterious flying contraptions.

MAJestic Related Posts – World-Line Travel

These posts are related to “reality slides”. Other more common terms are “world-line travel”, or the MWI. What people fail to grasp is that when a person has the ability to slide into a different reality (pass into a different world-line), they are able to “touch” Heaven to some extent. Here are posts that  cover this topic.

Cat Heaven
MWI
Things I miss
How MWI allows world-line travel.
An Observed World-Line switch.
Vehicular world-line travel
Soul is not consciousness.

John Titor Related Posts

Another person, collectively known by the identity of “John Titor” claimed to utilize world-line (MWI egress) travel to collect artifacts from the past. He is an interesting subject to discuss. Here we have multiple posts in this regard.

They are;

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

ound how I was recruited for MAJestic and my training. Also discussed is the nature of secret programs. I really do not know why the organization was kept so secret. It really wasn’t because of any kind of military concern, and the technologies were way too involved for any kind of information transfer. The only conclusion that I can come to is that we were obligated to maintain secrecy at the behalf of our extraterrestrial benefactors.

How to tell...
How to tell -2
Top Secrets
Sales Pitch
Feducial Training
Implantation
Probe Calibration - 1
Probe Calibration - 2
Leaving the USA

MAJestic Related Posts – Our Universe

These particular posts are concerned about the universe that we are all part of. Being entangled as I was, and involved in the crazy things that I was, I was given some insight. This insight wasn’t anything super special. Rather it offered me perception along with advantage. Here, I try to impart some of that knowledge through discussion.

Enjoy.

Secrets of the universe
Alpha Centauri
Our Galaxy the Milky Way
Sirius solar system
Alpha Centauri
The fuselage embedded within the rocks of Victoria Falls.
The Hammer inside the rock.
The Hollow Moon
The Mystery of the Lapulapu Ridge.
The Mystery of the Baltic UFO.
Mystery of the bronze bell.
Mystery of the oil lamp found inside a block of coal.
Did extraterrestrials set up a colony in Pennsylvania?
The Oxia Palus Facility
Brown Dwarfs
Apollo Space Exploration
CARET
The Nature of the Universe
Type-1 Grey Extraterrestrial

MAJestic Related Posts – World-Line Travel

These posts are related to “reality slides”. Other more common terms are “world-line travel”, or the MWI. What people fail to grasp is that when a person has the ability to slide into a different reality (pass into a different world-line), they are able to “touch” Heaven to some extent. Here are posts that  cover this topic.

Cat Heaven
MWI
Things I miss
How MWI allows world-line travel.
An Observed World-Line switch.
Vehicular world-line travel

John Titor Related Posts

Another person, collectively known by the identity of “John Titor” claimed to utilize world-line (MWI egress) travel to collect artifacts from the past. He is an interesting subject to discuss. Here we have multiple posts in this regard.

They are;

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.

How a Chinese Business KTV works – NSFW Parties

This is a very detailed discussion on how a Business KTV works in China. This is a pretty large multi-part post. It was originally posted HERE, but it soon became problematic as the videos would not load and the SEO flags weren’t being picked up by the search engines. So I broke it down into smaller bite-sized posts. It’s faster to load, easier to read, and you can see all the videos without problem. Enjoy.

This is part 9B of 17.

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

NSFW Parties

What are we? Children? All the term “NSFW” is designed “to protect the children”, yet at most of these venues there isn’t anyone under the age of 25. So, it’s all kind of silly trying to maintain NSFW standards designed to protect pre-adolescent children.

In America everything is so PC. There is even a term for hiding behavior in such a way that you might not lose your job. NSFW means Not Safe For Work. Heck, only in America or some selected European Socialist "Paradises" perhaps. Not in China.

So everybody is well fed, well drunk and you’ve had your fill of beer, karaoke, weird Chinese snacks and “hands on” strip shows – now what? It’s up to you… usually.  

Sometimes, depending on the arrangement with the girls manager, the parties can get really fun, as these two videos can attest…

The girls will typically have a good time. I know that I certainly do.

Their enjoyment is directed by their manager, who works out what ever arrangement that is proper with the host boss. They will be edged on by the other girls who might inspire playful acts of a sexual nature and other curious events.

LAGNAF!

The basic idea is to get drunk. Lower your inhibitions and have a good time.

As these videos attest, being with a cute gal (both of you) getting drunk and playing around is a great reward for an ambitious boss.

The KTV is a refuge. It is a controlled environment where a person can become someone else and behave differently. In China, everyone wears a mask. This is a face (mingzi) that defines their role and how they conduct their business. For many bosses they only have two roles; Boss and Family head. Each time, they must exist within that role.

They come home and the wife and the children expect the father to be a traditional father. He will play with the children. He will help them learn. He will support the wife and take care of things that she needs help with. He will do this within the role and the face that he must wear.

Then, he goes to work. He puts on the Boss face. Here there is actions and behaviors that he is culturally restrained to follow. He must maintain that appearance. He must always be calm and collected and stern and in control.

The problem is…

There is never an opportunity for him to let loose and be himself. Never. Never, that is until he goes to a KTV. There, once he is inside the doors, he is in a world where he can be himself. It is a protected world. The doors are closed and sealed. Guards protect the people inside. Female entertainment is provided, and if the KTV is half decent, the girls are vetted to make sure they do not prey on the clients.

KTV-typical
In a KTV environment, the boss gets to “let his hair down” which is a very difficult thing to do in the Asian culture. In Western cultures everyone is “doing their own thing”. Not so in Asia. Thus the need for a release value where a hard working alpha male can have a release from the stress of life.

He eats, drinks and is merry. Then he can go upstairs to the hotel room and have a nice long happy ending with the girl that he had selected. Else, she might ride home with him to a different hotel. All of which is under the helpful and watchful eyes of his aides, the girls and KTV managers, and the security guards that are stationed for protection.

The KTV is a place for fun.

Now who doesn’t like to smoke, drink, sing and dance with pretty girls? It’s a rare person indeed. When I grew up we used to have keg parties in the woods and we always would sing, and carry on. We always loved it when the girls would play with us and have fun. This is universal.

There are all kinds of fun activities that take place. They vary from singing and dancing to smoking cigars, and playing poker. One of the most common things to do is play “rock, paper and scissors”. This is an ancient Chinese drinking game. I guess that it was ported to the United States during the great migration of Chinese right after the American Civil War.

Here’s some chicks playing during dinner…

Continued-graphic-arrow

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Links about China

Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

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KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
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KTV10
KTV11
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KTV20

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Things that I wish that I knew when I was 25 years old

Here is the advice that I would give myself when I turned 25 years of age. It is the advice I would give my younger self after attending the school of “hard knocks” for around four decades or so. Back then, I had just got married to my first wife. The world was wide open to me. I was poor, but very hopeful. As were both of us.

Now, in my 60’s, I look back at my life. I look at the mistakes that I made, I look at the assumptions that I had, and I see how they affected the life that lived. If I had a time machine, and go back four or so decades, what would I tell myself?

What would I tell myself to do differently in the early years of the Ronald Reagan administration? What would I advise myself to do, and not to do?

Would I tell myself “buy as much Microsoft, McDonalds stock as you possibly can”? Or, would I advise something different? Would I concentrate on obtaining huge sums of money or would I concentrate on happiness?

Truthfully. I think that I would advise happiness over money.

Ah… Back then…

Well, like most people of the “boomer” generation, we were taught that if you applied yourself that you would get a “great job”, and the company would take care of you for the rest of your life. We believed then, laughingly so, that we would get a pension. And, that our retirement years would be fully funded by both the social security system and the pensions from our employer(s).

What a laugh!

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Here is the Career Advice that I would give my 25 year old self. And, for starters, the very first and most important lesson that I would give would be this…

[1] Be your own boss. Working for someone else sucks.

All my life, at home, at school, in the boy-scouts, and at the jobs that I worked, I was constantly told that I must “work hard”, so that I can reap the rewards of being a loyal employee. I could get all the “perks” of management. I could get bonuses, extra vacation time. I could get a generous pension, and the pride that is instilled by being a “loyal” worker.

Nonsense. Not one employer valued my labors appropriately. Not one.

Hey! That E-ETRESS device in every single General Motors vehicle, you know the one… this disables the car by remote control via satellite. Yeah, well I was the fella what designed it. I was the project manager and that little baby was mine.

This little puppy was easily worth millions to GM, and I am sure helped them get millions of dollars in military and government contracts as well. Don’t tell me that I don’t know what I’m talking about. I was also involved in contract negotiations regarding it.

Hey! What did I get?

What did I get for all the long nights, and working “unpaid overtime”? What did I get for my innovations, my organization, my contribution? What did the company reward me with?

I got a ball-point pen that said “Success is a way of life”.

Inspirational pen
Here’s some inspirational ball-point pens. The one that I got from GM was similar to this, only with a different saying and color scheme. And, I only received one pen. American companies will prefer to give out cheap gifts than to pay for innovation and effort.

Once the program was finished, I was let go.

This is what many companies do with their high-end technical experts. They "pull a NASA". (Referring to the mass layoff of about 90% of the "Rocket Scientists" by Tricky Dickie when he killed the Apollo Moon Exploration Program in the early 1970's.)

It happened on a Friday, about five minutes after I had my coat on and walking out the door. My manager ran up after me and asked me to walk with him to the HR office. I was told to hand in my badge. I wasn’t even permitted to go up and clean out my desk. The security staff did it for me.

I didn’t even get a severance package.

I was given a piece of paper that simply said that they would not contest my unemployment benefits.

(I had unknowingly trained my replacement(s). These were cheaper foreign H1B visa engineers out of India.) 

This would of course ONLY happen as long as I agreed to leave quietly and not divulge anything that I knew to a competitor (for five years).

The NDA (Non-Disclosure / Compete Agreement) is a staple in the industry. It is used to silence employees and control what they do once they leave a company.

Living paycheck to paycheck sucks. You take what you need to take.

Working for someone during this time was one of scrambling to find a new job while your saving depletes. Then scurrying to learn the new job requirements, doing your best, and completing your project. Then, rinse and repeat.

Rinse and repeat.

Different companies, same story. In one, I was given an award for the “Most Valuable Employee” and had my picture taken and put into the newspaper. The day the paper hit the streets, I was let go. In another, while everyone gathering the pot-luck lunch for Christmas eve, my boss took me to his office and let me go. I didn’t even get a chance to eat with everyone else, and the dish that the tuna casserole that I brought in was never returned.

This was my story from the 1980’s into the first decade of this new century. It wasn’t until I started working for companies based outside of America did I start being treated like a valuable human again. In the USA, there are no employee protections. No matter what the law says. Functionally there are no protections.

Your experience might be different. I hear that companies in California care about their employees. They give them all kinds of "perks" to show their affection towards the staff. Like ping-pong tables, free sodas, and caramel latte coffees every morning with whole-wheat buttered toast with vegetarian spreads and guacamole.

Meanwhile, outside the USA, it is quite different.

Here is how Chinese companies reward high performers. They give them cold hard cash as tax-free bonuses. Those little bundles that she is handling out is around $12,000 USD to each person. The last time I received a bonus was when I was working in the coal mines. At that time it was equal to two weeks salary. Today, I never hear of American companies giving out year-end bonuses.

Watch. You’ll see the Chinese companies eat American companies alive. You can’t compete when you treat your star performers as disposable fast food containers.

The lesson here is simple. The only way that you can control your life is by yourself. Never. Never. NEVER expect a boss to give a rat’s ass about your life, your efforts, or your contributions. Be the boss or be a worker. There is no in-between.

Working for someone else is what losers do. A real man is his own boss. For it is better to be the boss of your tiny $5 empire, than to prostitute yourself for table scraps.

[1.5] Don’t expect to become rich overnight.

It’s not going to happen. Here’s a great article on this subject. Read it, but don’t get discouraged.

Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you. They are deceiving you for their very own personal gain. You will need to learn and experience some failures first. It’s how the system works.

So…

[2] Have Patience.

You need to go at your speed to achieve your goals. That is, more often nothing approaching “light-speed”.

Do not let your perceptions about the lifestyles of others force you to speed up or rush. It does not matter is people are getting rich off of “junk bonds” or “bit coin”. It’s none of your business if the Savings and Loans are making money hand over fist. Nor it it your business if your neighbor bought a new pick-up. Life is not a competition against others.

Life is not a competition.

All through school you are educated to compete against your classmates. Grades are put on a bell-shaped curve, and you need to be on the top of the curve to make a great life for yourself.

Nonsense.

Your life is controlled by your thoughts, actions and deeds. Be yourself, exactly as you are, and let the rest of the world burn in flames. It’s none of your business.

You be true to yourself, your family and your friends. The rest of the world can worry about the boy-scouts becoming the queer scouts. The rest of the world can worry about pleasing the boss. You have more important things on your mind. You have a life, live it well.

You have a life. It’s a short one. Live it well.

[3] When an Opportunity Comes – Take it, and don’t look back.

Opportunities do not come often, and yet when they do come, we find ourselves questioning ourselves. Don’t.

Stop. Make a full stop right here and right now. Listen to me. The best things that I have ever experienced in my life came when I took the opportunity that was presented to me.

Sales Pitch

Don’t be the old man who wishes that he would have gone out with the pretty girl who desperately wanted to eat pizza with him. Don’t be the sad loser who complains about the time when he should have invested in the “Cracker Barrel” restaurant chain or “Apple computers” when he had the chance. Don’t be the old man still talking about the “good old days” when he was the star quarterback in High School.

The difference between you and everyone else; the difference between a magnificent man, and an “average Joe” is one of degree. If you always take the safe road, the road that everyone else travels, then you will be…

Well, you will be just like everyone else.

When an opportunity comes, take it! Don’t look back. Grab it by the horns and give it every single ounce of energy that you have. Fight for your dream. Fight for the opportunity. Make your dreams happen. The spotlight is on you. Take the opportunity and ride it to personal perfection.

[4] Most success is through constant dedication and repetition.

You need to get good at something first, then expand on it. You just can’t go jumping from one project to the next. Pick ONE. Pick only one project and work at it. Work at it every day, constantly and tirelessly. Maybe your initial tries will be failures, but eventually you will become good enough at it.

This might mean long days, and long nights.

If you happen to have a “green thumb”, then keep at it. Learn about plants. Enjoy the soil, the nutrients and the joys of harvesting. If you happen to be employed flipping burgers, then be the best Gawd darn burger flipper in the industry. Flip those burgers over and over.

It doesn’t matter if your are making furniture in your home shop, or designing a computer system for the next stellar probe. Be the best at what you do. Keep at it, and don’t jump around. Many times you will be alone. Many times you will live a life that you “didn’t sign up for”. It doesn’t matter.

Plow forward. Never give up.

[5] Don’t get all caught up in having a “career”

Once you are fresh out of the military or out of school, you start to work “on your career”. Trust me, there’s nothing all that great about having a career.

Yes, there is a difference between a “career” and a “job”. A career is more like a ladder that you build upon, year after year. A job is a one-shot deal for exchanging your time for money.

The problem is that 90% of the managers and bosses in the United States will treat you as an employee working at a job (for them). While there will be some lip service given to “educational advancement”, it’s for the most part, just lip-service. What they really care about is whether or not you can provide a service for them at the lowest price possible. If they can get it done cheaper, without too much risk, they will replace you.

Thus, in the big picture, a career is just another word for a job.

The end game isn’t about all the degrees you have; all the certifications you carry, the patents you have or the papers your wrote. It doesn’t matter if you have twenty five years experience in designing windshield wipers for automobiles, or being an expert in the setting up of strip malls.

None of that matters.

What does matter is YOU. What does matter is your family. What does matter are your friends.

Never neglect your family, your friends, and most importantly, your health for a job, a career or a boss.

I had my first (and hopefully my last) heart attack when I was 35 years old. I worked in Shreveport, Louisiana for a tyrannical manager who placed impossible goals on all of us. His belief (quite popular at the time, and well-promoted in the professional media) was if you place an impossible goal, the workers will strive to attain it.

The only thing is, the goals really were physically impossible. And failure meant being fired.

You can scream and moan. You can threaten and cajole. You can throw chairs around in the conference room, and demand that people work until 10pm at night. None of that is going to change the fact that it physically takes a finite amount of time to hog out a plastic injection tool made out of P3 steel. Machines can only run so fast.

Now, here’s my little story.

At the time I was rushing, like everyone else to make the end of week mandatory meeting at 6pm. (These things lasted from one to three hours long, and were every Friday. We would finish the meeting, and then we would drag our asses back home at 9pm or so to our families. We would eat reheated supper plates in the microwave and then turn in from exhaustion.)

The manager insisted that the door to the meeting room be locked, and if you can’t make the meeting, a black mark was placed near your name. You didn’t want a black mark. Bad things happened to people with black marks.

At that time, I was involved a a pretty tricky reverse engineering of an electric powdered chainsaw, with an impossible implementation time line. As I was scrambling to leave the machine shop after working on a prototype, I suddenly felt like some giant pulled a string out of my heart. I collapsed on the floor and could not get my breath. I’ll never forget that feeling, and it scared the living shit out of me.

I went home. Went to the hospital during the weekend, and discovered that my heart was damaged by the attack. The doctor gave me some pills, and told me to take it easier, and do all the rest. yada yada yada. I rested up and then showed up for work on Monday as usual.

On Monday, when I came into work, the manager called me in his office and reamed me up and down. He even called in other co-workers to agree with him and this party of four people belittled me for hours. A weaker man would have given up. He would have said “Fuck it!”, and left.

But I had a sick wife. I could not afford to quit the job. So I stuck on.

All this being said. It was my fault for walking into this situation and dealing with it. There were other options that I could, and maybe should, have taken. But I didn’t take the alternatives. I thought that I could persevere and work everything out. I was wrong.

Don’t be like me. Prioritize you life, and no not allow anything to distract from your priorities.

  • You come first. Be healthy. You need to be physically, emotional, socially, and spiritually fit.
  • Family comes next. Take care of your immediate family, and then make sure that your secondary family members are not neglected.
  • Friends come after that. We are not lone wolves. We need community, church and friends. Cherish and cultivate these relationships. They are more important than we tend to realize.

Never forget what friends are for…

Never Forget What Friends are For.

Prioritize the people in your life. Cherish and respect their importance. Take care of them, and they, in turn, will take care of you. We are not alone in the wilderness, we are part of a community. Take on and fulfill that role.

[6] Lunches are your time. Make them count.

Over the years, I have eaten a lifetime supply of fast food for lunch and then would sit in the car listening to the EIB network on the radio. I would drive the car to a shady spot, Eat my burger and fries. I would drink my cola and chill out.

I was wasting my time.

Life is too short to waste on fast food, or sub-standard meals. This is true whether it is a bag lunch made out of baloney sandwiches, or a fast food meal. Don’t skimp on YOUR time.

For lunch is YOUR time. Yes, I know that there are companies that insist that you “train” during lunches (like a few that I worked in while I lived in Boston), but this time is yours. Use it wisely.

Life is too short to eat substandard food.

One thing that I have learned over the years is that other nations don’t rush and wolf down fast food in order to come back after lunch on time. They take their time. They spend time with friends, co-workers or family. They take naps, and even drink and smoke during lunch.

Yeah. Imagine that!

Enjoy life more.

Up until the 1970’s many American companies provided a free lunch to their workers. The workers could either eat at the company cafeteria or go out and get a bite at a local restaurant or bar. This was very common at the steel mills in Pittsburgh.

Then during the 1980’s many companies shut down or relocated to the Southern states. When they relocated, they cut out or severely curtailed the lunches that they provided. Additionally, they cut down the length of time for lunch. It went from two hours to one hour, and in many cases to a half an hour. It is no surprise that as companies reduced their lunch breaks, that there was a corresponding rise in the popularity of fast food establishments.

And, with the increase in fast food restaurants, and their diets, came an increase in national obesity. I guess that you could easily show a link between American’s diet and health problems and the degradation of the way workers were treated by companies

So, now you know.

Take care of yourself. Lunch is your time. Make it count. Have a good healthy meal, relax and rest. Instead of rushing about… Go to a restaurant. Order the special. Sit down. Relax. The food will be delivered to you and savor it. Then once you are finished, go to your car and take a nap for the remainder of your lunch break. Rest. This is your time. Never forget that.

[7] Things will always end

My father tried to tell me this when I was enduring a particularly bad low point in my life. Yet, it is true. No matter how bad things are, they will eventually change around. Yes, it might take years, and for some…decades, but they will turn around. The most important thing to realize is that you, as a man, must keep slugging though the storm.

This can mean a difficult day at the office, or a marriage that is on a bumpy road down hill. It can mean anything, but it is true. Our thoughts and our actions will eventually reach a point where they will say “enough is enough!”, and it will start to dissipate. Oh, maybe you the reader don’t know the connection that I am referring to. But, it is the truth. All things eventually end.

All things eventually end. That means the good and the bad.

Change is a staple of our life. Embrace it and learn that life is not static trench warfare with red and blue lines advancing and moving slowly over battle field maps. No. It is a a dynamic and constantly changing mish-mash of confusion, and it is your responsibility to keep your head level and above the fray.

Just remember that it will, some day, eventually end. It really will. Whether by exhaustion or you taking action to remove yourself from the situation. All things do end.

Keep in mind that maybe Forrest Gump was right that “Life is like a box of chocolates, you’ll never know what you’ll get”. You can change the box.

YOU can change THE box.

[8] When a friend offers you advice, take it.

I was once dating a phlebotomist in Boston. This gal collected the blood from people all over the area and sent it to the labs for testing. It’s a job, and she did it well.

Well, one day, for fun she was showing me how to sample and take blood. We sampled from her arm and then we sampled from my arm. The thing is, that when we sampled from my arm, the blood (once it settled out) was not all red with a little bit of white at the bottom. No. It was about 75% white with about 25% red.

She looked at it. And, again. She looked at it and studied it. She said that in all the years of her sampling blood, she had never seen that happen.

She thought about it, and said “this isn’t right“.

So she sampled again, and then a third time. In all cases, my blood would be mostly white with only a smaller portion that would be red. She kept on saying…”this isn’t right.“.

She told me that I should see a doctor. I said, “Hey I feel fine.” and left it at that.

The next day after work she asked me if I saw a doctor, and I told her that I didn’t need to see one. So, she huffed and told me to get into the car, and she drove me to the emergency room, and told the doctor what was going on and showed them the tube with the blood sample.

They set me down and drew some blood, and then after looking at the results, immediately took more samples. They moved me to a room off the ICU and put me on emergency medicines and I had to spend three days in observation.

It turned out that I had a rare condition. (Who’d figure?) I had a thing called “hyperviscosity syndrome”. (One like THIS guy had.)

Yeah, I got all fixed up. I was told to severely change the way I ate, and to lower my stress levels. That eventually (with many starts and stops) set me down the road to “Fuck you! Take this job and shove it. Be a human or not, It’s not my problem anymore.”

Businessmen hire high-performers and demand 200% performance 100% of the time. But that is never realistic. I don't know what they are teaching at universities today, but the crop of MBA's out in the industry in the 1990's were really out of touch with human interaction.

Anyways…

When a friend tells you something important, then you have to listen to them. When someone you care about tells you that you need to change your hairstyle, appearance or clothing… listen. And, when a loved one wants you to go to the hospital…you friggin’ go!

[9] Don’t act you age

All my life, I was told to “act my age”. This was something that my father wanted to instill in me. He wanted me to be mature, serious and a “good young man”. Nonsense! He was wrong.

I did things his way for the longest time. What did I get out of it? Well, I got a heart attack, clogged arteries, a fine average life working for tyrannical bosses and being laid off suddenly every year or so.

Fuck. That.

So I leaned how to ballroom dance. I learned how to paint in oils and paint figurines and nudes. I learned how to write poetry. I learned how to enjoy and taste food. I learned that singing a song, drinking wine and just being playful was enormously attractive to beautiful women.

Smile and have fun.

Incorporate elements of play into everything that you do. Make your projects into “games”. Stop being so serious. Turn exercises into fun dance routines.

Have fun when you are doing things.

I started enjoying life more, and when I did so, my health got better. My enjoyment of life increased exponentially, and I became notable and (dare I say it) popular.

People want to be around happy, relaxed people. People want some sunshine in their lives. People need to feel connections with others. This is your life. Make it count.

If you are 40 years old and want to build a tree house. Do it! If you are lonely, and always wanted to meet women, learn how to dance. And… finally….

Don’t act your age. Act how you want to act, and to Hell with everyone else. If you want to play, then play. If you want to work and build up a life, then do so. If you want to sing, dance drink wine and carouse with girls, then have at it. And… If you want to succeed in business, act and behave like you are 35 and full of piss and vinegar.

[10] Learn to identify threats

When we are born and grow up in our own individual families we are taught that the way we live is “normal”. Anything outside of that is either abnormal, or an improvement of our accustomed norm. Later, when we attended school we were taught that everyone was different and that everyone had their own ways of doing things. Yet, there was always one “best way” to do something. And the school taught us that “best” way.

All of this is nonsense.

I think that we need to look at our life in a different way. We need to think in terms of a “starting place” that can be improved or subtracted from. What we want is for our life to constantly improve. What we want to avoid is having things subtracted from our life.

Anything that takes away from our life is a threat.

Looking at life like that is clearer and cleaner. There is no “absolute” best. There is only “your best” and “your ideal”, and you compare everything to your needs, your experiences, and your desires.

This way of looking at things enables us to divorce ourselves from the land of grey, and go into the cleaner black and white reality. As such we can identify threats and related problems before they become enormous problems that would eventually consume us and change us in ways that we do not want to have happen.
This way of looking at things enables us to divorce ourselves from the land of grey, and go into the cleaner black and white reality.

This way of looking at things enables us to divorce ourselves from the land of grey, and go into the cleaner black and white reality. As such we can identify threats and related problems before they become enormous problems that would eventually consume us and change us in ways that we do not want to have happen.

Look at things in stark black vs. white. If things are in shades of grey, you identify the dividing line, and keep everything simple on YOUR terms. As such, using this method you can easily identify friends and foes. It is absolutely critical that you master this. That way, you can avoid threats to your life, in every aspect. Make no exceptions.



Bonus Advice

The rest of the world is living life. They are growing. They are advancing and they are living life. We are all far too caught up in our “American bubble of reality” to see what it is like outside. We think the world is a dark and evil place. But that is not the case at all.

While the American news is all full of the (so called) “saber rattling” of China, and the terrible Tariffs that the great Russian spy – Donald J. Trump is, the rest of the world is just moving forward oblivious to the internal propaganda inside the USA.

The rest of the world is living life. They are growing. They are having fun. They are enjoying the nice blue skies and eating fine food. They are spending time with pretty girls and having a great time drinking wine and singing.

Life is not a prison.

Get out of the mainstream American news media narrative. Both liberal and conservative. Experience life on your terms.

Live life on your terms.

The rest of the world is living life. You should as well. This is your life. LIVE IT WELL.

Conclusion

Yes, if I had a time machine, I would NOT advise myself to get absolutely rich.

That is a direction for fools. If I went in that direction, I would have a “successful life, full of plenty“, but it would not be a “rich, colorful life”. You want a happy life. Who cares how you got there. All that matters is that you are enjoying life to it’s fullest.

I think that I am far happier as I am now. Now, that I have experienced the highs and lows of life.

A person who spends every day in paradise soon takes it for granted. While a person who visits it is enthralled by the scents, moments and elements that are present. The only way that we can appreciate the life that we have is to suffer from the highs and lows.

My advice to myself is pretty basic;

  • Eat delicious, high quality food.
  • Drink some wine while you are at it.
  • Take your time, enjoy the moments.
  • Sing, laugh, dance.
  • Surround yourself with friends, listen to them.
  • Bad times come and go.
  • Have patience and enjoy the “now”.
  • Look for opportunities and take them when they appear.
  • Get good at doing what you love.
  • Forget about having a career. It’s a big-assed lie.
  • Have fun and act however you want to.
  • Be your own boss and do things on your own terms.
  • Don’t be afraid of anything.
  • Stay away from threats and bad people.

Yeah, I know it sounds like a list that you would find on any of those click-bait sites. But it is all true.

So…

Why aren’t you out fishing right now? Why did you have a burger from the big fast food chain instead of one at the local diner? Why, in God’s name, did you even bother to check the news on the internet? Why didn’t you ask that pretty girl out for lunch? When was the last time you enjoyed a bottle of wine?

Life is too short. Don’t waste it.

Live Life.
We should appreciate that life that we are living now, and not wait for some “better time” to come along. Our life is the now. It is controlled by our thoughts and our actions.

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Quick interlude about Huawei…

Oh, and by the way… while I am at it.

You know that stuff about Huawei, right? Canada arrested the boss of Huawei and carted them off to America for this reason or that. In return, China warned Canada that there would be consequences. And now American companies are going to show China. They are going to teach China a lesson. Right?

Well, watch out.

Not… “watch out” and see what happens. I mean (screaming) “WATCH OUT!!!!” as a cement truck comes barreling towards you.

The Chinese don’t mess around.

If you want to pick a fight then you had best be prepared. The Chinese plan for decades, while American companies plan on short term profits. While American trains are using 1950’s technology, the Chinese are using modern high-tech bullet trains. While American NASA is going to capture an asteroid the size of a dishwasher sometime before 2030, the Chinese are already building the components for their moon bases.

Heck! America can’t even build a wall on it’s own sovereign soil.

The companies that treat their workers as humans, instead of pawns in a huge money-making industry will ALWAYS win in the long run. That’s the secret of why Apple was able to recover when Steve Jobs was asked to return. The best companies to work for are also the ones that treat the workers as humans. Not as some kind of pawn, or mindless working drone.

And Huawei treats it’s workers as valuable high-performing talent.

If the USA wants to play a game using Huawei leadership as a political pawn, then Americans should expect the consequences. Listen to me. The Chinese do not mess around.

The Chinese do not mess around.

They are a serious and capable nation run by intelligent people who are not handicapped by socially progressive baggage or political infighting. While the American companies have meetings with “Diversity Managers” to plan how to advance their agenda in the next four months, the Chinese companies are working on another level entirely.

And now, America wants to mess around with Huawei, the current global leader in wireless telephony. All I can say is you have no idea what a shit-storm you have started. The top-line high-performers are taking this threat seriously, and they will not tire. They will not give up. They will be ruthless in their response.

China is always being under estimated. People laughed when they said that they would put a man in orbit. People laughed when they said that they would construct the “silk road”. People laughed when they said that they would convert all their passenger trains to bullet trains. People laughed when they said that they would dominate global electronics manufacture.

Oh look HERE, I’m right. China is going to construct a California-sized “Chinese Silicon Valley” in the Shenzhen – Guangdong region. How about that for a response?

I, for one, am not laughing. American T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon will all be a footnote in the annuals of market dominance. And, you can all thank the American Deep State for making it happen.

Anyways… sorry about that.

Final Comments – Private Responses

Since I posted this, I received a number of private messages that took offense to my digression about Huawei. They argue that Huawei was the global leader in wireless telephony because they stole from US industry.

Sigh. I feel like I am alone in the world trying to warn everyone about this. Heck! no one cares. It’s almost like the football team that is convinced that it will win the Superbowl because they were champions back in the 1970’s. It’s that silly.

Well, my comment on that is simple.

If your company is founded on the theft of technology, at best the most you can ever achieve is to match the capabilities of the company that you stole from. You would not exceed them unless you were doing something quite different.

Huawei is not the global leader in telephony because they copied. They are there because they innovated and did things differently. Though, the acquisition of American firms, I am certain, played a role. As well as hiring top American talent and paying them well.

But, that’s all specious.

American industry is failing. The American government is failing, and in the globe, the Chinese industry WILL dominate. Check out these two videos. You don’t have to like it. As I stated in this post. Change is natural. Accept it or not.

The rise of China over the last two decades…

The rise of China today leading into the next decade. But, not to worry. American industry is getting ready for this. They are hiring “diversity officers” and paying them enormous amounts to assure that racial quotas and progressive values will guide and lead American industry. Just like they lead the Former Soviet Union and make Soviet technology well-known the world over! Yessur!

The idea that Strength through diversity will radically transform American industry and make it…

"While we bicker over which pronouns to use, the Chinese are preparing to  assume leadership of the world. As more and more technical and  scientific literature is published in Chinese, this trend will  accelerate. "

-3/9/2019, 10:39:54 PM by beef

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Links about China

Business KTV
Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What Rural China is Like

One of the mysteries of China, and there are many such mysteries, is what it is like living in the hinterlands of China. Rural China. People see pictures of the skyscrapers of Shanghai, and the high-tech modern world of ultra-futuristic Shenzhen, but what of the rest of the country? What is it like? Is the mainstream media narrative that it is a devoid and barren wasteland correct?

Well, in this post we try to show what China is like outside of the big mega-cities. It’s kind of difficult, as China is just rife with mega-cities. In fact, many a village in China would qualify as a city in the United States. Ah, but we will try… we will try…

Of course, the countryside in China is treated like the countryside in America.

It is considered “fly-over” country, and is ignored by the mainstream media. The people who live there are considered hicks, ignorant deplorables, and destitute simpletons that stream into the cities to look for work. The main-stream media never reports on the countryside, or if it does, it is always shown in a bad light. It is always along the lines of “the working poor flood into the cities for work“… etc.

That is truly sad, and what is even sadder is that the very people who live in America that live in the Heartland, the very ones that are known as deplorables (by their urban breathern), refer to the rural Chinese with the same horrible derogatory language. It’s sad, and it is sickening.

via GIPHY

Rural China is no worse than rural Kentucky. It is no worse than “fly-over” Iowa. It is no worse than deplorable-ruled Charlotte. The only thing is that the American media calls them deplorable hicks, and the unwitting American citizen believes what the American mainstream media says.

Here we look at a series of scenes from China. The scenes are in the form of micro-videos. All videos were taken within the closing quarter of 2018 and represent a cross-section of typical China as observed by typical Chinese using their cellphones. The application used to record these videos is the TicToc app.

Important note; If you are having difficulty seeing the videos or if they are not easy to see, please reload your browser. This will more than likely fix 80% of the problems you may encounter. 

Town on a River Bank

Here is a small town on a river bank. This is a pretty typical scene. Most Americans are unaware of just how mountainous rural China actually is, and this video goes a long way to illustrate it. Look at those hills! My goodness, can you imagine hunting white tail there?

The buildings, in style and design, are terribly typical. They form the same overall design template that is all over China. You can find these buildings everywhere in China. They are present everywhere from the Southern island of Hainan to the far North in Manchuria.

This little town reminds me of the town that I grew up in when I was a boy living in Western Pennsylvania. Like PA, the town is serviced by water, rail and road that hug the river. Also like Pennsylvania, the buildings tend to be older and shabbier. The road is a bit dustier. Though, if you pay attention, it is actually quite a bit cleaner than what you would find in Pennsylvania.

Why?

Firstly, because China (not only rural China) doesn’t have welfare like it is available in the United States. If you are unemployed, you are out of luck. You starve. There are no hand outs or freebies for any reason.

However, there is a workfare program. Anyone can get a job in the government cleaning the streets or planting trees and flowers. Which is why you’ll find most areas, not all (especially in the industrial areas), free of litter and trash. Unlike the USA, everyone who is willing to work, can work in China.

In America, trash and litter line the streets because no one is paid to pick it up. Those who are able to are paid to sit at home on welfare. In China, the roads are clean and litter free because work is provided to everyone. As long as you are willing to work, you will get food, housing and a small monetary stipend.

You will also note that the roads don’t have potholes. This is a far cry from what you will find in Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania there is a symbolic government relationship of entwined corruption. This system guarantees road-repair for potholes every election season. Nothing ever gets done, but hey, that is how the Pennsylvanian government is run.

In China, you try to run this scam, and the corruption police will seize you. They specifically monitor for this kind of behavior, and the Western American media does not like it one bit. I wonder why?

The Chinese police will seize you and arrest you. They will prove your guilt, and you will be sentenced within three days from arrest. If your crime is really bad, you will get death plus three. (Three years of organ harvesting followed by death.) The Chinese do not mess around.

A Historical Town

The previous town was very typical. It has a mixture of old and new buildings and some minor industry. However, there are more than just one type of town in China. There are others. There are many others, and they are all different.

Unlike the USA where a town is a town and a city is a city, in China you have “communities”. Depending on the nature of the community, you will see monies and resources allocated differently.

Of course, everyone knows about the cities. There are first tier, second tier and third tier cities. Many people assume that this is due to population size, but that is terribly wrong. The classification is determined by a complex number of factors, of which population is but a small issue. It is actually a matter of historical, political, and commercial importance as well as being the hub for social and economic issues. Those cities that are most important, are classified as “first tier”, and others are classified appropriately from that.

The classification of a community determines the financial, economic, social and political resource allocation.

As such here are some other community classifications that can be found outside of the large urban areas…

  • A basic town with some minor industry.
  • A historical town.
  • A Service Area or Train Stop town.
  • An industrial town.
  • A town that is classified as resort or recreational in function.

Let’s talk about the “historical” town.

You see, about twenty years ago, just when China was hitting it’s stride numerous people started to lament that everything was being torn town to make way for new things. It’s the Chinese way, don’t ya know.

New buildings were displacing historical buildings. Roads were carving into hillsides, and many beautiful areas were being displaced by parking lots. It was a sign of progress. Yet, many people were upset with this.

So the government started to enact rules to preserve nature, preserve old and historical buildings, and made rules to protect the history of China. As such, many towns in China are now designated as historical landmarks and are protected against being raised or replaced by newer structures.

Here is one such town…

And here is another protected town. These towns serve as great tourist destinations. It turns out that many Chinese like to go visit these historical towns and cities. They like to take a week off from work and visit and have fun. You can’t blame them, really. Rural China is filled with beauty and adventure. Not to mention tasty (regional) food, ice cold beer, and pretty, pretty girls.

I mean, wouldn’t you just love to eat some tasty dumplings (pot suckers) and steamed meat-filled buns over icy cold beer with this view…? Me, I’d bring my dog and plop him right next to me to share the view (and for him) the smells.

You know, many of the world’s ills could be solved by drinking more beer and talking freer with each other. I think that if we shut off the artificial limits that we have surrounded ourselves with and reached out we would be a far happier people. Come on! Who doesn’t like good food, attractive companions (of the opposite sex) and their favorite pet (dog or cat) hanging out with them?

Life is meant to be lived. Share it with a friend, why don’t ya.

Most towns have a local government that invests in “livability considerations’

Unlike the United States, the people of China think in terms of nation first, family second, person last. This is the direct opposite of how Americans think. It is always “me and mine, first”, then the City. Then the State. Then the country. This is evident in how American write their addresses, and how the Chinese write their addresses. They are backwards from each other.

Name
Street Address
City, State, USA, Zip Code

And in China, it is like this…

Zip Code
China, State, City
Street Address
Name

As such, the local town government place a great deal of importance towards livability concerns. This is true all over China. Yes, even in seemingly unlivable areas like industrial areas, and such. Yet it is very true. They view their responsibility as to make their country a fine place for the residents to live.

Here is small town.

It has a mixture of industrial and residential features, yet it is not a tourist town. Instead, it is more or less a typical Chinese village where the town elders have decided to create and incorporate livability areas.

This kind of investment in the town and living environment comes from ideas brought forth by people from the Scandinavian nations that seriously influenced Chinese thought on these matters. (I believe, but cannot substantiate.)

The Southern Coast

I live on the Southern coast of China. I live near Hong Kong. This is the South China Sea.

You know, the place where all the liberal neocons (oxymoron? Maybe they should be called “neo-libs”) want to start a war because they are all hot and bothered about China having naval bases around here. Sigh.

Of course, they conveniently forget to mention that piracy of the shipping lanes is a serious concern. After all, half of all shipping goes through the South China sea, and piracy is a serious issue. But, heck, since when did the American media ever really report news? They just make up narratives to manipulate.

Ah. Anyways…

Here’s where I live. When someone tells me that I don’t know what I am talking about… When they tell me that China is a “Hell hole” and a terrible nightmarish place to live… I just look outside my window and take in the glorious sunshine, the blue skies and listen to the birds singing their songs.

China is like any other place on the planet.

There are beautiful places, and ugly places. There are places full of impressive buildings, and places full of wonderful nature. I moved here. I like the climate, the fresh air, the beautiful blue skies and the nice friendly people. I love the food, and all the very pretty girls.

Ah, but that’s just me.

There are other areas up and down the coast that are also very nice. Many Chinese people have homes on the coast, just like many Americans have in California or New England. Or even Savannah, GA, or Florida.

Of course, as an American or someone from the West you would never be aware of that because reporting on it would not fit the news-worthy narrative. Businessmen traveling to China would either stay in the big international cities of Shanghai, Beijing, or Hong Kong or visit the dirty factories in the nasty industrial areas. No one ever goes outside of those two spheres of influence. Sad.

It’s actually kind of silly when you think about it. The Hainan island is what? This grey clouded, sooty, crumbling pile of debris with starving little waifs…? Is that what it is like?

It is if you listen to the American mainstream media. But, they are just terrible liars and manipulators. In fact, the news today is all about how Donald Trump gets two scoops of ice cream, while everyone else gets one scoop. Do you think that this kind of selective reporting, interspersed with lies and distortions, is limited to only Donald Trump? Don’t you think that this kind of lying and manipulation is rampant throughout ALL news reporting?

The coast of China is beautiful, with beaches, resorts, fishing, and industry.

Industrial Areas

When a person visits China is is usually for work reasons. As such, they would typically fly into a major Chinese city and then travel through the countryside to an industrial region and an industrial town. These towns and environments are, well… industrial.

It is just like what industrial areas in the United States used to be like. (Ah, what short memories we all collectively have.) Industrial areas tend to be functional, dirty and polluted.

Pittsburh, PA
This is what Pittsburgh, PA looked liked when I was in High School. It was dirty, smoggy, filthy, and full of trash and debris. Industrial areas, no matter where they are in the world look like this, more or less.

Typically a traveler to China would fit a rather simplistic profile. They would fly in to a big city, and then travel to a factory in an industrial area. Then after their trip, they would return home. Their impression of china would be about what they were exposed to. This would be the new big cities, and the ugly industrial areas.

The traveler to China would come back with the following impression about China…

China's cities are really impressive, and the infrastructure is new and modern. But, outside the cities it's all a Hell-hole. The people are poor, and live terribly. It is dirty, smoggy, filthy and terribly polluted.

That is the impression you get if your only experience is one or two trips to an industrial area in China.

Industrial cluster map
Here are the concentration of industrial clusters within China. People who only come to China to visit factories would visit any one or more of these clusters, and would get the impression that all of China was representative of industry. This impression is false.

Anyways, many people who have gone to the industrial areas work like crazy there and then high-tail it back home during the month-long CNY vacation period.

But you know, the Chinese culture is such that the community comes before the individual. Therefore, it is up to both the local government, as well as the factories in the area to provide decent areas to live, and reasonable attempts at decorations and livability areas. Here is just such an example. This gal obviously lives in an industrial area, as you can tell by the background. Yet, there is minor efforts undertaken to make it more appealing to the senses. No, it’s not a multi-million dollar environmental reclamation project, but rather a low-budget effort to render some industrial areas more people friendly.

After all, how much does it cost for PVC piping, and some cans of paint? The entire budget, statues, and all is probably under $25,000 USD.

Poor Rural China

With all the distortions in the Western media it becomes difficult to see the truth in all the lies. So, let me be clear on this. There are very rural areas in China. These areas have paved roads, and electricity, Wifi and running water, but not much more than that. Here, in the remote rural sections of China you can see stark differences.

In the video below, we see a girl returning from the city to visit her relatives during CNY (Chinese New Year). This scene is common enough. It’s sort of like how people would leave Pittsburgh during the Christmas season to visit their families in rural Kentucky back in the 1970’s.

And here’s another video showing how nigh and day the contrasts can be from what a person’s life might be in the city compared to their home in the remote village. In this video, obviously the girl is a DJ, and has come home to help her parents at the farm.

Extreme Poverty

And here is the kind of thing that the American media would put forth.

Here, we have a rural family collecting and carrying wood to their house. Obviously these people are very rural. Truthfully, this has got to be either in the far Western China or the far North-Central region. As most of rural China have electricity, running water and heat.

In any event, it is curious to note that the video was made using their iphone. LOL.

And while we are at it, let’s show some more pictures of rural China. Now, the reader must recognize that extreme poverty, dirty kids carrying wood, and homes without running water are a RARITY in China. They do exist, but only in the most remote locations.

It’s sort of like how there are still Hillbillies in West Virginia.

Rural China is similar to rural USA

Most of rural China isn’t like this at all. Once you get off the main roads and get away from the towns it sort of looks a little like this…

I’ve got to tell ya, many places in rural China reminds me of my hometown back in the hills of Western Pennsylvania. Like this chick here. It could have well been filmed in Clarion or Butler counties. Gawd, it does make me a tad homesick.

Here’s what the rural Chinese countryside pretty much looks like…

And here is what a small hamlet or mini-village looks like. I can’t tell you where this is, or much about it, but what I can tell you is that it is pretty typical. Though, most buildings aren’t painted so gloriously. Obviously an artist or two, or three, maybe an entire family resides here…

Now, where do they shop? Where do they get their food, supplies and sundries? Well, they are just like Americans in that respect. They go to the big “box” stores, malls and outlets. Doesn’t this scene look like a Chinese version of rural highway America?

Again, pay attention to how clean the roads are. That’s what happens when you start making people work for welfare. If there isn’t any more trash to pick up, then the town will have them planting flowers. If they run out of flowers, then they will start painting buildings, or building new ones…

Which is why many Americans are perplexed about the “empty cities” where no one lives. In China, it is better to have the unemployed working doing something for their stipend, then to pay them to sit in front of a television watching Oprah all day.

People are people

I guess what I tend to say when people ask me about China, it is that people are people everywhere. While we might have cultural differences, we are humans. We form traditional family units with a mother and a father. We work, and we play. We have friends and enjoy community and social interaction.

When ever someone tries to paint others as evil, they do so using a cartoon paper cut-out. They portray them in ways that we cannot relate to. They dehumanize them. They turn the others into something else. Once people stop thinking about other people as people, and start thinking of them as things, then war can be waged, and people can die.

Chinese Steriotype.
One of the many stereotypes that Americans have about the Chinese. It isn’t only visual and pictorial. It is an entire narrative. It’s all nonsense.

Stop this nonsense!

Here is a girl shooting some hoops in a rural village. Man, wouldn’t you just love to have a game of one on one with her, and toss the ball about. Life is about living it. We are all the same, and we all do the best that we can with what we have.

Basketball

Oh, and by the way, none of that socialist progressive nonsense (the stuff that has invaded America and is part of the Obama culture wars) crashed into China successfully. The Chinese won’t have none of that nonsense, and they make “no bones” about it either. Maybe it is fine and good to have a war on cheerleaders in the Untied States, but China will not have any of that.

When the SJW folk tried to get rid of the cheerleaders, the government arrested them, and (I think) killed them. What ever happened, they are no longer vocal about the need for “diversity” and “gender neutral” nonsense in China. China is a traditional nation and the government makes sure that it stays that way.

Here’s some pretty Cheerleaders at a basketball game…

And here’s some pretty pom-pom girls at a basketball game. You see, in China, it is considered normal for girls to look great so that guys look at them. And guys are allowed to look at pretty girls. It’s a time-honored tradition.

You should see the girls at the car shows. Wow oh wow.

Conclusion

Rural China is like other rural areas in other nations. Most of China has Wifi, electricity and running water. On the extreme limits and remote areas one can still find hillbillies that live like hermits without electricity and running water. Never the less, they do have the latest cell phone electricity and solar panels to charge the phones.

The Western Media, most notably the American media, tends to distort things by showing extreme images taken out of context. Like the child carrying wood above, and giving the reader the impression that that is what all of rural China looks like.

Compounding this are visitors to China who arrive in the large international cities and then travel to the dirty and polluted industrial regions. They often have nothing to compare it against as most heavy industry left the United States in the late 1970’s. Thus their impressions are tainted by their experiences and hampered with a lack of comparative resources.

China is many things. It has big and glorious ultra-modern cities, and historical villages tucked away in the wooded hills. It has large coastal areas, mountains, hills, deserts and farmland. We owe it to ourselves to look at everything with a new set of eyes. A set that is not colored by manipulation, distortion and lies. We need to realize that the world is a great and glorious place and we, all of us, have a role within it.

Posted On Free Republic

This article was posted on Free Republic on 6FEB19. I was expecting some trolling, but was taken aback by the large rolling negativity. To quote…

Interesting responses to this rather benign and informative article. -TexasKamaAina 

Links about China

Business KTV
Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

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  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Adventures of a 70’s Kid in an Army And Navy Store

When I was a youth, in the 1960’s and 1970’s, one of the biggest treats that my father would give us would be a trip to one of the nearby “Army and Navy” stores.

We would hop in the car, and then ride for a spell (depending on the direction) from a half an hour to an hour and a half drive. We would stop along the way to get a soft-serve cone at Dairy Queen, and then spend an hour or so in the store.

They all looked pretty much the same no matter where you went. The nearest ones to us, at that time, were in other towns. We would actually have to cross the country line to get to them. At that time, I frequented a store in Butler, Pa., and another one further up North in Erie, Pa.

I guess that they are a fading American cultural fixture today. They can still be found. However, they are mere shadows of what they used to be. Today, surplus stores can be found in strip malls in the rough part of town or as stand-alone warehouse-style buildings. In the later case, they might be a metal pole building with a huge “Army and Navy” sign in huge letters (often black on yellow) with corrugated metal roofing and very few windows.

Vintag aircraft
For a boy growing up, the world of the Army and Navy store was the first stop and a doorway to adventure. When we entered the building we encountered the world that we dreamed about. here were places with maps, treasures and tools. We loved going through the boxes and exploring the nooks and crannies of the store.

Of course, today they might not advertise themselves so openly. With all the politically correct nonsense, it makes sense to downplay your presence else an army of enraged “water buffalo” BLM females, or black clad SJW types might burn the establishment down.

Anyways, it’s true.

The Big Treat!

When I was a boy, one of the biggest treats that my father would provide for we was a trip to a “Army and Navy Store”. We would drive to the store and park on the street. A quarter would allow us to park the car for the entire day, so usually my father would just put a nickel in the parking meter. That would give us two hours of adventure. That was more than enough time for exploration.

Who knew what surprises awaited us?

Phone dialer.
Swiss army phone dialer. This was a portable unit, obviously. Don’t ask me how it worked as I haven’t a clue. We can only assume that it was used in conjunction with other gear of some type.

Today, there are still Army and Navy stores, and they still have the same layout and ambience.

When you walk in, your nose is met with that distinct army surplus smell: musty canvas mixed with metal and rubber. Flags hang from the ceiling — an American flag, flags from the different branches of the military, and of course a fine yellow “Don’t Tread on Me” flag. There was always a “Confederate” “American Stars and Bars” flag, as well as the mandatory black MIA flag.

There will be racks and racks of clothing. Mostly uniforms and coats. There will be bins of shoes and socks. Webbing and just brick-a-brack that defies description.

Radio Gear.
Who knows what discoveries that await you at an Army and Navy surplus store/ You can find anything from Vietnam era boots to radio sets fight out of a B-52. It’s all yours for a price. It’s a boyhood adventure.

The Army and Navy Store

Every conceivable space in the store is filled with product. You’ll see bins scattered throughout the floor filled with gas masks, canvas duffle bags, canteens, and nylon combat belts. The shelves are jam-packed with combat boots, cargo pants, and helmets. And the coat racks are stuffed with pea coats and camo as far as the eye can see.

You would find racks upon racks of military clothing. Then, tucked in every imaginable nook and cranny, were boxes of unsorted clothing. Some in disarray, as if they came from a flea market. Others, nicely folded, but never used, as if they came directly from a warehouse or factory inventory.

Near the door would always be a glass counter and a display of the more valuable items. Inside the glass case, you’re likely to find antique military items like Nazi paraphernalia, guns used during WWI, and a plethora of knives. I always liked the “trench knives” that had a built-in set of brass knuckles.

Texas Army and Navy Store
Sometimes the Army and Navy store would be alone in it’s own house, while at other times it would occupy a store front in a seedy section of town. These stores were always quite unique and special.

You could always find compasses, maps, various metals, and all sorts of smaller brick-a-brack in these counters. There also, would be some fine cigarette lighters. Some old. Some new. Many would have military sayings or logos, but Harley Davidson, and the Southern “stars and bars” were always present and popular.

For decades, the army-navy surplus store was the go-to place for individuals looking to find a good deal on products to outfit themselves for camping or hunting. It was the place prepare for the apocalypse on the cheap, or simply pick up a stylish pea coat at a bargain price. For me and my classmates, it was a place of adventure.

For there, we could outfit ourselves for our next big exploratory adventure. Who doesn’t remember how the explorer’s outfitted themselves in the movie “Journey to the Center of the Earth”? For us, the Army and Navy store was THE place to outfit ourselves for our next adventure.

While I don’t recall wheels and piles of hemp rope, they did have rope in smaller quantities. This would include nylon and various other woven types aptly suited for a Naval excursion on the high seas, or perhaps useful for constructing a tree-house ladder. You know, to keep the girls out of the “He Man Woman Haters Club”.

Journey to the center of the earth
Journey to the Center of the Earth (also called Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth) is a 1959 adventure film adapted by Charles Brackett from the novel of the same name by Jules Verne. Göteborg’s widow, Carla (Arlene Dahl), who initially believed Lindenbrook was trying to capitalize on the work of her deceased husband, learns the truth of his secrets from her husband’s diary. She provides the equipment and supplies Göteborg had gathered, including much sought after Ruhmkorff lamps, but only on condition that she go along. Lindenbrook grudgingly agrees, and the four explorers and the pet duck are soon journeying into the Earth.

With the United States fighting in just about every obscure nook and cranny of the world (for reasons unrelated to National Security… but that’s a discussion for another time) there was such a glut of military surplus clothing and gear that Army and Navy stores were everywhere. It almost seemed like you could practically throw a rock in any direction and hit an army surplus store. They were prolific and played a vital role in distributing an over-abundance of government-issued supplies that accumulated during the last ten or so wars.

Outfitters for War!

After World War Two, the extreme excess of government-issued equipment (produced by America’s “arsenal of democracy”) combined to explode the growth and popularity of surplus stores. Indeed, huge amounts of wartime leftovers flooded the market.

Crown Surplus
Army and Nay surplus stores were filled with all sorts of military gear. You could get everything there. It was a boyhood dream.

Thanks to the United States’ significant involvement in the Vietnam War, army surplus stores were able to restock their dwindling WWII inventory with updated military surplus. If you visited a surplus store as a kid in the 1980s or early ‘90s, a lot of the stuff you saw was probably from Vietnam.

I know that that was the case with what I experienced. There would be a mixture of World War II, Korean War, and Vietnam War gear. In addition there was often a mixture of foreign military gear. I was able to pick up an Africa Korps pith helmet from World War II, and a French paratroop jumper camo cape.

Desk
Here is a military surplus desk combo. It includes a chair, a desk writing surface and some fine drawers. All designed for easy transport and quick storage.

To many, the period from after WWII and until the early 1990s could be considered the “Golden Age of Army Surplus Stores.” There was just so much stuff available, and it was so widely dispersed and easily accessible to the public. Instead of ordering something from a catalog, you just had to drive a few miles to one of the many surplus stores in your city.

You could get just about anything there. My brother picked up a World War two Morse code kit in a green canvas carry bag. Who knows the stories that it could tell? Was it dropped behind enemy lines and used by the French resistance? Was it a training device for British Naval saboteurs? Was it used to communicate the successful retaking of the Philippines? Ah, such secrets…

Gear from an army and nacy store.
Typical selection of army and nay gear that you could get from a Army and Navy surplus store. One thing, you the reader probably don’t realize, is that these stores are common all over the world. They are available here in Communist China. You can get some great clothes dirt cheap, I’ll tell you what.

My good buddy ended up getting a trench shovel, and a flashlight that had a red lens cover on it. His younger brother picked up this set of dust google that looked like it belonged on the set of the “Rat Patrol” (a television show from the 1960’s). He wore them to the school, and for about a week he wore them every day (supposedly) in class until his teacher had to put his foot down and tell him enough was enough.

Tactical Parachute Shoulder Bag with Latch
Tactical Parachute Shoulder Bag with Latch. Have a fashion-minded daughter? Give her this and see what she might do with it.

Speaking of fashion…

The “Bell Bottom” fad in the late 1960’s came in being precisely due to the popularity of the navy flared (bell bottom) jeans available in the Army and Navy. This was also true for the “Pea Coat” fad that floated up and around in the middle 1970’s.

For the longest time I wore a pair of “aviator glasses that I picked up when I was twelve. My brother, not to be outdone, bought some yellow shooter’s glasses. He still has them. I still go visit the establishments to pick up some cargo pants and gloves with the fingers cut off.

Vintage Discoveries.
Who knows what vintage discoveries await the boy within the confines of an Army and Navy store. What is there? What elements of history awaits the boy who is ready for discovery?

Yeah. Army surplus stores still exist. You probably have one in your city. But it’s probably not the same kind of army surplus store you may have visited back when you were a kid. It might still have the smells and have the same kind of over all clutter, but something is missing…

If you’ve been to one recently, you likely noticed that fewer of the products they carried were actually “military surplus.” Sure, the stuff might look military-ish, but it was likely bought from a foreign company that manufactures military-ish products instead of from the U.S government, or even a foreign government.

German army shirt.
Here is a nice German army shirt. You can tell by the tiny flag on the sleeve as well as the camo pattern. You can find all sorts of military gear in today’s army and navy stores.

Other stuff…

You’ll also see product in the store that you probably wouldn’t consider “military surplus” like work pants and shirts, consumer camping gear, etc. In short, what I am trying to say is that in today’s army surplus stores there’s less army surplus.

Two big factors are contributing to the decline of true military surplus products in the marketplace. These were, or course, [1] the changing nature of war in the late 20th century and [2] the advent of online shopping.

Polish field telephone.
Polish field switchboard. It’s amazing what finds that be discovered when you venture forth into an Army and Navy surplus store.

While the United States is indeed busy fighting all over the world, how we do it has changed. (The US Military is currently fighting seven wars! Thanks to Barrack Obama.) No longer do we throw legions of troops in an engagement. Instead we use selection. We use skilled soldiers. We use drones.

Indeed, war has changed dramatically since Vietnam.

Instead of engaging in large-scale conflicts that require a draft with many millions of soldiers fighting on the ground, the U.S. military (in all branches) has shifted to a much more streamlined and surgical approach to battle — one that involves a smaller, well-trained, all-volunteer force.

Artillery graph planner
Whether you purchase American military surplus gear or foreign military surplus gear, the finds will certainly surprise. Who knows what little jewels can be found amoungst the clutter?

For example, there were over 10 million American soldiers who served in Vietnam, while only 2.5 million served in the most recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because our most recent conflicts have required fewer soldiers, the military has required less equipment. Because the army requires less equipment, there’s less military surplus to go around to all the army surplus stores around the country.

But there are other reasons…

American police gear.
Companies that make military gear for the various alphabet agencies (IRS, CIA, FDA, FAA, ICE, DHS, etc…) supply Army and Navy stores as well. There, you can outfit your gear to include FBI tactical vests, light jackets emblazoned with the IRS logo, and all sorts of related gear.

That being said, 9-11 was a boon to the militarized police forces, and armed alphabet agencies. Now, every one from the NSA, FAA, FDA, IRS to the DHS and ICE require state of the art uniforms and gear. So while it might look like there as a dearth of “pure” military hardware, and a glut of cheap-Chinese knock-offs, that is just a reflection of the changing nature of the American government.

Today the emphasis is NOT on a large military force fighting in a far off land. Instead it is on a militarized collection of government agencies whose charter is on controlling the American population. It sounds harsh, but it is true. You just need to open up your eyes and take a gander. You can see this emphasis in the Surplus stores.

You can also read about how the United States government is busy stocking up on riot gear. You can read about it HERE.

Latest in military gear.
Much of the gear found in Army and navy stores are representative of urban police forces and crowd control. Obviously all black uniforms are suitable for either the Nazi SS and Gestapo, the American IRS or the DHS. When fighting in a military theater, the best uniforms possess a camouflage pattern.

Compounding the shortage due to smaller, more limited military engagements is that — thanks to the internet — army surplus stores now have to compete with the government itself in selling surplus military inventory.

The U.S. government has an online store where the public can buy military surplus direct, thus cutting out the army surplus middleman and saving the buyer some money. Thanks to competition from the government’s direct-to-consumer sales, army surplus store owners have had to slash retail markups on their products from a plump 100% to a smaller 30-50%.

Riot gear.
You can equip yourself and your loved ones with some pretty fine riot-gear. All you need to do is go to your friendly Army and Navy store and get some of their surplus population control gear. There are some great deals in batons, and protective padding.

The New World of Army and Navy Stores

Because of these two changes, the [1] streamlined wars and [2] the internet, the once robust army surplus store industry has taken a hit. There’s just less inventory to go around, and less money to be made in the business.

Bruce Willis
Who can forget the scene where Bruce Willis is in the Army and Navy store (or was it a pawn shop?) and decides to go after his tormentors. Ah, what a scene. As with the Kill Bill movie, the victor gets the truck (Pussy Wagon), or in this case the chopper.

To keep shelves stocked with military goods, even though there’s less government-issued military surplus available, stores have taken to importing military surplus “knockoff” products — stuff that looks like military surplus, but really isn’t. Instead it is equipment for urban riot control and police force use.

Some stores have shifted their focus from being military surplus dealers to antique military dealers. 20th-century military gear — once considered ordinary surplus — is now considered “vintage,” and collectors are willing to pay top dollar for these antiques. Army surplus stores that have been in business for awhile have used their networks developed over the years to become savvy peddlers of 20th-century military collectibles.

Never the less, if you’ve visited an army surplus store lately, you probably noticed they just aren’t what they used to be — that the quality and quantity of the selection of products isn’t the same.

But still…

These places are just fine for exploration and discovery. This is most especially true if you are a boy in your early teens. It’s an experience that all boys should be exposed to. (That and hardware stores, but that is a discussion for another time.)

Serbian Military Surplus Leather Magazine Pouches, 4 Pack, Used
Serbian Military Surplus Leather Magazine Pouches, 4 Pack, Used

These stores still exist, and the desire of boys to explore and go on adventures hasn’t at all diminished. I argue that we should feed this latent need of boys. As such, the exposure to an Army and Navy store is a must stop for all young Americans.

Conclusion

Time has a way of changing things. One of the treasures that existed when I was growing up was the presence of Army and Navy stores. I urge everyone to spend some time and enjoy a visit to one of the few remaining stores that exist in the United States. Who knows, maybe you can relive some forgotten boyhood dreams and share the experience with some close friends and relatives.

While today, I have little need for such items, I cannot help but be intrigued by them and coveting of many an odd item or two. I can’t help it. It’s the “pack rat” inside of me, not to mention the “Boy Scout” in me that screams “Be Prepared!” I am sure that one or two plastic mortar round cases might make a nice waterproof storage item for…

…things. I’ll find a use for them. You just wait and see.

Life & Happiness Related Index

Here is where you, the reader, can quickly go through key posts related to the things that make our lives complete. This is an index. I have arranged it so that the subjects can be easily searched for items of interest. Of which “happiness” is the dominant theme.  A tiny iconic representation of the article is provided along with a short, sweet summary. It is my hope that the reader find this of value.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

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Tomatos
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Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
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Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
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SJW
Playground Comparisons

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
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Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
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1960's and 1970's link

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

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What Chinese Apartment Houses are Like

This article was written in response to a discussion that I had with a friend of mine. He made the statement, “You wouldn’t be able to believe how these (Chinese) people lived! You and I could never live like that!” Turns out that he saw some propaganda from the UK and was convinced that the Chinese lived in windowless hovels. Not so. Not by a long shot.

Over the last thirty years, China has experienced a period of enormous growth. It began in the 1990’s. It started when the progressive socialist policies of Mr. Mao were replaced with the Free-Market Conservative policies of Mr. Deng. The result was predictable and resulted in an explosion in the overall quality of life for all Chinese people. A period of exceptional growth ensued and a middle class appeared. Here, we talk about the direct result of that change. We discuss the Apartment Houses that Chinese middle class live in.

Typically, most Chinese live in apartment complexes. There is a percentage, of course, that have their own houses. There are those that share, what we in the West refer to as “Townhouses”. There are those that occupy (rent-free) ancient dilapidated old complexes that can still be seen everywhere. (Why not? They might be old and ugly, but living in them is free!!!!) Not to mention, the others that live on farms, villages, and in the hinder-land.

Let’s talk about the Chinese apartment houses.

Chinese Apartments

In China, the apartment complex consists of an area that is surrounded with a fence and is guarded by guards (24-7) with video cameras and gates. Within that complex are the buildings that make up the complex. Now, in China, you might have a building that has three towers. Each tower would have it’s own set of elevators and access keys. The Chinese refer to these towers as “buildings”, so it can get a little confusing.

Apartment map
Here is an example of how a Chinese apartment complex works. Image is from Baidu which is sort of the Chinese equivalent of Google. Shown is the apartment complex whole, plus the various buildings and towers.

Above is a typical apartment complex. It is within an Apartment area and contains numerous large buildings. In the United States, we call these buildings “skyscrapers”. There are three towers in the example above. They share the foundations and the first three floors. They also share the underground garage. There are also other buildings. In China, when you work the employer must be able to provide you food and housing. Though you can opt out if you prefer.

The Gate

Every apartment complex is surrounded by a fence and a main gate. At the gate is a little guard house, a gate and biometrics. To enter any housing complex you need to show that you are a resident. Further, as a resident you will be given an electronic card-key or fob that will enable you to enter the apartment area. As is common in China today, everyone is monitored by CC Cameras, and recorded in the event that some crime is committed and there is a need to identify the perp. The gates are always manned 24-7.

Parking

Typically, most apartments have interior parking and exterior parking. The exterior parking is for short term parking. At my apartment complex, the fee is 10 RMB/hour if you park outside.

When you enter the front gate the license plate reader scans your car and records your entry time. Then when you leave you will need to pay the guard (BaoAn) the amount you owe. You can pay electronically, as most do. Typically people use Alipay or WeChat to pay. They just scan the QR code using their cell phone when the guard comes to the door.

Underground parking is reserved for residents. Typically there is a monthly fee that everyone needs to pay. I have heard different rates, but here in Zhuhai the rate is around 300 RMB/month.

The parking garages are unlike that which you will find in the USA. They are not dingy, grimy, dusty or anything like that. They are not at all dim or poorly it. They tend to be very clean, almost like you could eat off the floor in them. They are also spacious and well lit. Here is a Chinese chick in a micro-video in an underground parking garage. It’s pretty typical.

Anyways, the point here is that the parking garages are treated quite differently than they are in the United States. There is a staff that monitors them, cleans them, and makes sure that they are well lit and well taken cared for. Additionally, the care and concern for a given parking garage is a reflection of the owner of the apartment house in the building. As a result, many apartment underground parking garages are very nice and well maintained in China.

Building Access

Once you enter the apartment complex, you will typically need to walk through a park, or park-like area. The Chinese are very big on natural spaces in their apartment complexes. This area will have paths, exercise equipment, a few outside games like basketball or ping-pong, and an abundance of shrubs and trees. Even if the park area is on the third floor (typical in many cities).

Some parks share space with outside parking, while others are for pedestrians and doggies only. All of the parks have lighting, trashcans, places to sit, sleep, and have fun. Many have fountains (though whether or not they work, is hit or miss), and some have pools. Like the underground garage, you will have to pay to swim in the pool in your building. Typically it is 30 to 50 yuan per person per year. (From $5 to $10 USD.)

Here is a Chinese gal dancing on an apartment complex park. It looks like the third floor. As you can see, there are large areas to dance and exercise in (a very important thing in China as everyone loves to dance) and areas of grass and trees.

The pools tend to be shallow. With the deepest section rarely over 1.5 meters deep (about five feet). They are always tended and cared for, just like swimming pools are in the USA. However, they generally do not have life guards. The residents are expected to take care of themselves and to watch the younger kids and children.

Once you walk through this park-like area you will make your way to your building entry. If you are in an apartment that has, say five towers with one shared foundation, then you would enter the entrance directly associated with your tower. There are some buildings that have one central access point, while others have different access points depending on which tower you live in.

You will need an access key or FOB to get into the building. So, in case you are wondering, yes you need two keys to enter your building in China. One key is to the apartment complex, a second key to enter your apartment tower.

Elevator

Once you enter the building you will pass through a large open area that will hold mailboxes and some sofas and chairs for guests to wait for you. These are typically well lit and with marble or stone floors and walls.

You will pass through this area and go to the elevator area. In towers that are over 25 floors there are typically multiple elevators that run to pre-specified floors. For instance, one elevator might go from 1 – 25th floor, while another might run from 1, then 26th to the 50th floor. Some apartment buildings have elevators that run to only odd floors, while others run to even floors. All, in all, it cuts down on the waiting time in tall buildings.

Like what is common in many hotels in China, you will also need your apartment key or FOB to run the elevator. The elevator will not work (in many cases) unless you have a residence FOB.

Front Door to the Apartment

The front door will more than likely have “good luck” symbols on the door. These will be red designs with gold or black trim. This will consist of the symbol for “fortune”, either right side up or upside down and certain lucky sayings. It is a tradition to get new door decorations at the start of each Chinese New Year (CNY).

The doors will use a key that has nothing in common with American keys. American keys tend to be a flat bar of metal that has slots cut into it. Chinese keys come in different cross sections, including rectangular, triangular, circular, half-moon, and all with certain different kinds of security protections. Back twenty years ago, say around 2000, crime was rampant and people were constantly getting broken into. These different key types each come with their own unique blanks and procedures to open and replace. Indeed, you have to be a key-smith expert to be able to break into any Chinese houses today.

Key blank
Triangular shaped key blank. Here, you can make different key patterns for FOUR elements of the key. This particular blank is available on Alibaba. Not available in the USA, if not outright banned. (After all, how can the police, FBI, NSA, CIA, DHS, and IRS be able to come in if you are not cooperative?)

Most homes built in the last ten years all have biometrics. You need either a finger print or retinal scan to enter. Alternatively there is typically a key pad that is available if you want to be a little “old school” about home security.

Once inside – the apartment

Most Chinese apartments are much, much smaller than their American counterparts. they range in size from very tiny 40 square yard affairs, to 70 square yard, 120 square yard, 300 square yard, and up to 500 square yard apartments. Most Chinese people that I know own their house. They paid for it in cash. They live in a 70 to 120 square yard house.

The 40 square yard apartment is very tiny. It’s just big enough for a bed, a bathroom, and a refrigerator. Many that are being made now are called “lofts”. They fit an upstairs in this tiny space so that you can sleep above a very cozy living room.

The 70 square yard apartment is still small, but it is big enough for one (or two) bedrooms, a nice bathroom, a kitchen, and a living room. There is always a porch and a washing area. Many young professionals and first time home owners select this size of house to live in.

The 120 square yard apartment is pretty much ideal for the expanding family. It consists of three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a kitchen, a dining room and a living room. Of course there is a porch and laundry area.

Many Chinese families have the parents living with them. This is a long standing Chinese tradition where the parents of the oldest sun moves in with the family. They then take care of the new children of the family. The 200 to 300 square yard layout is perfect for this larger family. There will be three or four bedrooms, two bathrooms, large living room and dining room, and a very spacious kitchen.

There are many kinds of apartments in China, however we can distill most of them into the following format and understanding…

Attributes of a Chinese Apartment

Firstly, notice that there are no rugs or carpeting. The Chinese prefer solid stone flooring. This flooring is typically white or off-white. In just about every apartment that I have been to, liven in or visited, the floor was solid stone slab.

Secondly, note that the walls are not plain. There are adornments. The Chinese hire interior decorators to render the walls “comfortable” and suitable for a household. The walls are either painted white, tiled in sheet stone or marble, or tiled in white tile. It seems like the videos are of a mansion, but nope, it’s a real honest-to-goodness middle class house.

Sometimes the houses have a wooden or FRS decking floor. This is a rather recent innovation. Those apartments that have this wooden floor typically use it for the bedrooms, or other “soft” areas.

One of the first things you notice when you get into a Chinese house is that there is a rack of shoes near the door. It is typical in most Asian countries to take off your outside shoes and wear house slippers inside. You can see this in this next video. Here’s a chick in her apartment being cute…

Another thing about living in these towers is that they are really, really high up. Falling off the balcony is not an option when you are on the 36 floor. With that said, you often are able to get really, really outstanding views.

Now, if you are in the middle of a city, like downtown Shenzhen or Shanghai, you might find (much to your dismay) that your view is blocked and all that you can see is the apartment tower across the street. That really sucks. However, just moving to a different apartment on the same floor might provide you with an amazingly different view. Some, heck most, are just stunning.

Conclusion

I think that by looking at how other people live in distant parts of the globe, we can see our similarities and our differences in a new light. I believe that that knowledge is very important. It shows us our place on this planet and where we exist in the universe.

Rather than buying into the constant drum roll towards endless wars against some kind of cardboard cut out of what our “enemies” are, we can make the judgements ourselves. We no longer need to be blindly led towards more outrageously expensive and heart-rendering wars. War, mind you at only benefits the 0.01% of global elite.

I am tired of it. It’s a non-stop onslaught of war! war! war! propaganda. It’s all about getting YOU (yes, you) to buy into the notion that there must be a war to be fought. Whether it is against some tiny banana republic or a huge nation like China or Russia.

People are people. We eat. We sleep. We work. We have families. There are more things in common with each other, than our disagreements. That is the truth. All you need to do is step outside the USA bubble and look around a bit. Open your eyes.

Links about China

Business KTV
Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

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Pretty Girls 5

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Every Man Should Have a Roll-Top Desk

Here I would like to discuss a long standing dream that I have had since I was a small boy; the possession of a large roll-top desk complete with a multitude of tiny drawers, cubby-holes, and spaces for all my personal junk and treasures. I have had this dream for a long… long… long time.  With that in mind, let’s discuss this work of art; this magnificent idea and concept of the roll-top desk.

During the last century, the idea of a Roll-Top desk was appealing and very popular all over America. Many American homes had these styles of desks and throughout the 1960’s and 1970’s they faded into obscurity. There was a brief revival of Roll-Top desks in the 1980’s and then they have been forgotten as overly expensive and extravagant items of furniture. This is unfortunate, because every man should have a Roll-Top desk.

Roll top desk 8
Here’s a fine roll-top desk. It’s the stuff that dreams are made of. It’s a beautiful work of art.

The first time that I encountered a roll-top desk was a very long time ago. One of my friends had inherited it from his father. It was in his bedroom and he would work on his various projects at the desk. He had this kind of glue with a rubber top that you could use to spread glue on paper and make scrap books with .

"I believe that glue is called muslage; I don't see it for sale anymore. Really dates me, eh? if I know what *muslage* is. LOL"

-posted on 12/17/2018, 3:03:44 AM by Daffynition
Glue
During my childhood, we all used this kind of glue. My friend had it in his desk. We made posters with this. It was fun.

He also had a punching bag in his basement and we would try boxing. Ai! At such an early age! Heck! We were only in second grade, for goodness sakes. It was kinda goofy at the time, but our fathers both thought that boxing was something that all boys had to learn.

What is a Roll-Top Desk?

A roll-top desk is a large desk with drawers and a top compartment that possessed a rolling cover that could cover and lock the contents of the desk in place. This desk was made out of wood, with the vast majority of the wood being hardwood. Under the protected roll-top working area, there were all sorts of smaller drawers, and compartments for the user to store things in.

Roll-top-desk 1
Antique roll-top desk from the 1930’s. Instead of a modern reproduction, this desk sports small handled mini-drawers, pigeon holes, top, pencil drawers, and ledger spaces. Note the four drawers on both sides of the pedestal base, and the central desk drawer.

History of a Roll-Top Desk

The roll-top desk appeared just as the industrial revolution was getting started. At that time, small armies of clerks and office workers were needed to support the various duties of the factory. This included everything from managing inventor to handling the large number of workers at the factory.

The desk was designed in such a way that the top could be pulled down and protect the work from being disturbed. At that time, the office workers would be engaged in work that involved large numbers of papers and documentation. It was impractical to put every thing away at the end of the day and pull them out at the start of a new day. So the roll-top desk was invented.

Roll top desk 2
Here is another antique roll-top desk. Again, please pay attention to the mini drawers and pigeon hole compartments. The rolling cover and it’s path is clearly shown. What is not shown is the most excellent swivel chair that would go with the desk.

Further, there was a need for specialized compartments to hold various office stamps, pens and papers, and folders. This created the various styles that had miniature drawers, shelving, compartments and side pockets.

Drafting supplies.
A roll-top desk is the perfect place to store such things as drafting supplies. here is a nice set of drafting supplies that hadn’t made it’s way (yet) to the trash heap. With a roll-top desk, it could be stored safely and elegantly.

This item of furniture was the mainstay of the small or medium-sized office at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th.

Roll-top desk 3
Antique Roll Top Desk made sometime between 1900 and 1950. I personally think that there is an over abundance of drawers in the desk. They are mostly all of the same size. However, different people have different needs. Aside from that, this desk has a leather mat writing surface, and some very small mini-drawers for keys and minor items. Note that this desk has sides that are on hinges. They can be swiveled out of the way for an unobstructed work area.

In the working industry, it eventually was phased out and replaced by more durable and cheaper (mass produced) steel desks.  Additionally, the idea for filing cabinets, and “flat files” came into being that would (firstly) augment the compartmentalized sections and ledgers of the roll-top desk, and secondly the determination that the roll-top desk did not fit in the modernized image of the state of the art 1930’s Art Deco decor.

These desks could often be found in various small offices, and homes throughout the 1970’s. Over time they were often left to fall apart and rot. Today they are generally rare, with some small-build reproductions floating around here and there. You can find them occasionally at antique dealers and in selected flea-markets. Aside from that, they have pretty much disappeared from the social scene.

Roll top desk 4
This antique roll-top desk has some nice compartments and nice style. It fits the grand criteria for a roll-top desk. I especially like the “mail box” slatted chubby-holes in the center.

Features

These desks had numerous features that made these desks very special. I personally believe that these features are often overlooked in our modern society – one that has an over reliance on cloud computing and storage.

important parts of a roll-top desk
While there are world-wide variations of this desk. Most roll-top desks are strictly American in design and function. Here we can see some of the important elements labeled and identified for the reader.

These features are;

  • Large, deep, and wide pedestal drawers, with compartment slats.
  • Pull-out “bread board” panels on both the left and right sides.
  • Wide and deep working area.
  • A selection of small “square” pigeon-hole areas.
  • Some desks would have small cabinets or closets (some with windows).
Desk drawer.
A man needs a drawer to place his little treasures in. He can store the things that matter to him, and the papers and documents that he must maintain.
  • A number of horizontal pigeon-holes for papers.
  • A number of vertical pigeon-holes for journals and log-books.
  • Small mini drawers, each with a metal knob and a slot for a label.
  • A slat for holding rulers, drafting triangles, or cardboard folders.
Desk drawer.
Here’s a nice vintage desk drawer. Notice that it has a movable tray compartment, and is made out of good solid hardwood. No fake plywood or particle-board construction here. Also note the beautiful grain of the wood and the overall appearance. Wonderful!
  • Medium size mini-drawers, often with a plain knob for pens, and miscellaneous tools. Sometimes lined with green felt backing.
  • The roll-top top, often made out of slats that can be locked in place for privacy and security.
  • A grand “middle drawer” that would have a wooden carved “tray” for pencils, erasers and paperclips and the like.
Details 2
Here are some details that can be found on various roll-top desks. I particularly like the leather mat writing surface, though many people simply would purchase a felt mat and place it on the surface. Note also the side pull-out “bread-board” feature. Often people would place lists of important phone numbers, addresses or codes on these boards, and pull them out when they needed to refer to something.

Accouterments

These desks would often be paired with this low swivel chair. Often with a cushion and wooden arm-rests. It would also be paired with a nice desk mat. Some desks had a leather writing surface, while many did not. In that case, a person would go to the hardware store and purchase their own writing mat.

Desk details 3
Here are some interesting details that can be found on certain roll-top desks. This includes compartments inside the writing surface and pencil trays in one or more of the main desk drawers.

The writing mat was often leather with a felt surface. The most popular was green. A “banker’s” lamp, with a green shade, and a brass base was also often employed. Though, Tiffany lamps, and lamps with cast designer bases were often employed.

Swivel chair for a roll-top desk.
Here is a fine vintage oak wood office chair. It is on a swivel base and has wheels to move around in. Note that it has a small leather cushion, though many chairs did not have this feature. It’s a fine chair just about made for ta roll-top desk.

Material

Early roll-top desks were built of heavy woods such as black walnut, and small local companies might choose from a variety of local hardwoods. There are many hardwoods that were used.

Roll-top desk 6
This roll-top desk has a working and writing surface that can be pulled out and makes for a larger working area. Notice the top of the desk as well. It can support lamps and even a shallow cabinet or bookcase.

Most popular toward the end of the 19th century, close-grained oak was often quarter-sawn, or cut to promote a particularly even grain, reducing the possibility of warping and increasing durability.

Wood for a roll-top desk.
At one time, these desks were made with care and concern for the overall appearance of the desk. Wood was selected carefully and cut with care and precision. the end result was a work of art.

Mahogany, teak and cherry also appear in old desks, but from 1900 on, most desks were oak. A desk made from cherry after 1900, for example, would have been a special order or the work of a local craftsman.

Lamp
Here is an antique “Banker’s lamp” with a Tiffany Art Deco inspired shade (instead of the traditional green glass shade). It’s certainly beautiful.

Why a Man Should Have a Roll-Top Desk

I well remember the exact moment when I fell in love with roll-top desks. My father needed to get or renew his insurance for the car. This was in the late 1960’s. At that time we had a Buick Electra. And, we were trading it in for a 1966 Lincoln Continental.

1966 Lincoln Continental
Man! I sure wish that I had this car today. I’ll tell you what. This is a 1966 Lincoln Continental. It was black with a black interior. (So hot in the Summer.) But we loved that car.

So he went over to the local insurance agent in the town. We lived in a small town at the time, and he was a friend of a friend. So dad went into his office. It was a cluttered office next to a tire dealership.

We walked in. There was centuries of dust and clutter there. Inside was this amazingly enormous man. He was built like an elephant and existed there in a state of decay and confusion. He seemed to blend in with all the clutter, piles of paper, stacks of dusty junk, dusty Venetian blinds, and the ancient Art Deco fan that was providing the much needed air flow in that tiny cramped and cluttered office.

He sat there smoking a cigar, with a largish (green plastic) AM radio playing a baseball game in the background. Next to him was a cigarette stand. You know the type, it was a metal pedestal with a handle and a large glass tray in the center. The ash tray was filed with the ashes of many a well smoked cigar.

He sat at this enormous roll-top desk, and offered me a “Orange Crush”. When I said “sure”, he flipped me a quarter and told me that there was a pop machine around the corner…

Roll top desk 5
There is a certain beauty in a roll-top desk. It is a place where a man can put his stuff. As a boy, I enjoyed the idea of a place where I could put my stuff and collectables at. At that time, I had a a small wooden cigar box that I held my “treasures”. But an entire desk…now that would be awesome.

In his office was a roll-top desk. This was not just any roll-top desk. It was enormous. I am not at all exaggerating. I haven’t seen anything like it since. This desk was easily the size of our dining table. Not only that, but that tiny office had two of them. They dominated the room, and on them was the clutter of years.

I just sat there amazed. I just looked at the amazing array of cubby-holes and mini-drawers. I loved that desk. I just sat there and soaked it all in. I listened to the baseball game and sipped on my soda.

The meeting lasted maybe two hours. My father signed some papers and then we left. On the way out, I asked my father if we could have a desk like that. He just chucked.

Office supplies
A roll-top desk is the ideal place to store your much needed desk supplies and paperwork. Instead of all the clutter, it can be positioned within easy reach for the user of the roll-top desk.

“Why do you want such a broken down piece of junk?” he asked. I just shrugged.

We walked to the car and then went and got an ice cream. But, while I never mentioned it again to my father, secretly inside, I always wanted to have my own roll-top desk.

Much later…

I was in Ridgecrest, California. I was in training at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center for my MAJestic role. At that time, I was living on Dolphin Avenue, in a small housing development. My neighbor, who also worked on the base as a contractor, just happened to have a roll-top desk that his girlfriend bought him.

I loved that thing. Sure, it was a reproduction. And, it was not a full-size desk. But, it still was pretty darn cool.

I think that the reason why I have always liked the idea of a roll-top desk was the idea that it had spaces and compartments for all my stuff. I would, over the years collect junk, papers, writings and bits of flotsam that had meaning to me, but would eventually get lost in the detritus of the house. Probably eventually collecting in dusty boxes in remote corners of the garage. Sigh.

But, if I had a roll-top desk… well, now it’s a whole new ball-game. I could store my prized fishing lures in one place, and my precious treasures in other spaces. Of course… being much older, my desk might look a little bit like this rather than my boy-hood dream ever was…

moden man's needs
As a man get’s older his tastes change. I lost many of my boyhood treasures over time. Now my needs and passions are much simpler. So, yes, I probably don’t NEED this kind of desk. yet, wouldn’t it be grand to have it to keep some prized whiskey or smokes?

Conclusion

A personally think that having a big roll-top desk would be awesome. It would be a place for my brick-a-brack and clutter.  I can well imagine a selection of pens and pencils in the various drawers, and indexed compartments full of my various treasures. I could some of my few remaining baseball cards, and my small collection of bottle openers. Not to mention a fine jewelers loupe and electricians scissors. With them I could place my small nine inch metal rule, and a few calipers.

What ever. All men need a place to keep their personal junk and a roll-top desk fits the bill quite nicely.

Free Republic Posting

This article was published on Free Republic on 16DEC18. The posting and the comments can be found HERE.

"I have one of these steelcase desks that I got from a VA hospital that was dumping them. I love this thing but my wife hates it. In a nuclear detonation or earthquake you could hide under it."

- Posted on 12/16/2018, 10:24:53 PM by outofsalt
Nuclear desk
Nuclear proof roll-top desk.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.





Alternative Search Engines instead of Google

Back in the day, I was one of the first people to start using Google as a search engine. I liked it’s clean interface, and simplicity.

Of course, over the years, other people also found this to be the preferential search engine. Unfortunately, Google became big, powerful and yes, evil. They siphon up your personal information with zero regard to fourth amendment protections. They sell the information to the highest bidder, and give it away for free if the person is part of a government agency.

Unfortunately, people like myself VALUE privacy. And that means that I no longer can use Google.

Here is a selection of various search engine alternatives to Google. It is not a complete list. As there are thousands of alternatives. These are some the best ones that I have found.

You might discover, as I have, that they have BETTER and more comprehensive results than Google. You just need to understand that they work differently than Google. So you must query your searches differently…

You see, Google only provides results to you that they feel should be presented to you.

Google
A “googlr”; an employee at Google. They feel that THEY know what is best for you. They will set up the software programs to sort through the reams of information on the internet, so that you only get to view the information that THEY want you to see. See this chick here. She thinks that she is better than you are, in determining what you need to know.

This is problematic. Because they only show you the possible results that you qualify for. The qualification rules are kept secret, and are a closely held secret at that. They, like many of their politically liberal breathren, consider themselves as your parents and have the role of censoring your search results for (what they consider to be) your own good.

With all this being said, let’s look at the top candidate…

Duck Duck Go

Let’s start with the fist step is divorcing yourself from Google. Use Duckduckgo. If you go duck, you will never go back.

It is clean and operates much like Google does. The only difference is that it is private. Yes, you can think of it as the Google that should have been. While Google is “evil Spock” (a fine Star Trek reference), Duckduckgo would be the “good Spock”.

Evil Spock and good spock
Evil Spock and Good Spock. Image is from the The Enemy Within (Star Trek: The Original Series). For those of you who have never watched Star Trek or who don’t understand the reference; “good Spock” is clean shaven. “evil Spock” has the beard.

Duckduckgo is a search engine that does not track or personalize your searches and results.

For those of you who are unaware, the “personalization” of search results is the permitted censorship of search results. Don’t go down that dark and scary road.

A dark and scary road.
A dark and scary road.

It is my humble opinion that if you like Google, then you will love Duckduckgo. They offer the same kind of service, only faster, better, quicker and with far more privacy.

If you want to make the world a better place, then stop using Google and start using search engines that respect your privacy.

Google Privacy
Here is a comparison between Duckduckgo and Google. Obviously DDG takes privacy very seriously. While Google only gives it “lip service”. Well… how do you think Google makes all it’s money? You don’t see any ads on the front page do you? Nope. They are paid by government agencies to give them YOUR search information.
Duckduckgo is a great search engine that values privacy over everything else. They operate much like Google only they respect your fourth amendment rights.

It should be obvious that Google is working closely with the United States government in the collection of your personal data, as well as the manipulation and censorship of data to control your thoughts. After all, look at all the trips Google had with Barrack Obama. They certainly weren’t swapping golf stories. 

Quack!

Unfortunately, for me, Duckduckgo is banned in China. major bummer! So, personally I am forced to use alternative search engines. Which brings me to…

Search Encrypt

Search Encrypt
Search Encrypt

Like DuckDuckGo, Search Encrypt is a privacy-based search engine. It includes a general search function, as well as image and video search. This is a search engine that was design with privacy in mind. They believe that your likes, thoughts and search history should be just as private as the color of your underwear.

I agree.

They have a very clean interface, much like Google, except that everything is private and kept secret. They can do most of what you need, and all of what I (personally) use the search engine for.

Search Encrypt should be a preferred search engine for anyone wishing to maintain their privacy in a world where everyone lies and makes false promises. I use it in China without a problem.

I can see this search engine growing and becoming more popular over the years.  Time will only tell, if they will maintain their role as the guaranteerer of privacy, or if they will sell out to the highest bidder…

Those tech “giants” in California tend to make empty promises and will sell you out in a heartbeat. Let’s not forget the promises that Yahoo! made when it acquired Tumblr, and then what happened when Verizon took over and crapped on the policies that reflected creative expression  in 17DEC18. Never forget the broken promises, the lies, and the sell-out for huge monetary gain.

CEO Tumblr David Karp Akhirnya Mengundurkan Diri
CEO Tumblr David Karp Akhirnya Mengundurkan Diri. When money becomes an issue, all the free thought, artistic creativity, and hope and dreams come crashing down. Who cares about creativity when you could end up with a new Lamborghini, a nice home on the beach, and all the perks of the wealthy.

That’s About It!

Sorry, but that’s about it for privacy based Internet Searches that I (personally) would feel comfortable using. The problem is that most other search engines are either (somehow) tied to Google (and the American NSA spying apparatus), or tied to one or another government. Now, there is good and bad with this revelation.

  • By splitting up searches between different government agencies and promoted search engines you can effectively DILUTE the content of search history that any one government has on you.
  • By using different search engines the SEO attributes are different; thus resulting in different search results.

With that being said, let’s look at some more or less QUESTIONABLE search alternatives out there. Some are promoted as “big on privacy”, others are simply large but tied to a non-American government.

Keep in mind, these search engines must be used with caution and consideration…

StartPage

We will start with a well promoted search alternative. You can find this quite easily on Bing and Google as the “private” alternative to internet searches. Now, back in the day, Startpage was the world’s most private search engine. It was, because no one else gave a rat’s ass about privacy.

Start Page / ixquick
Start Page / ixquick

You see, StartPage was the first search engine to allow users to search privately. None of your details are recorded and no cookies are used, unless you allow it to remember your preferences. It also provides a proxy for those who want to not just search, but browse the internet with full privacy.

Instead of being a full alternative to Google, it combines Google Search results with user privacy. So, when you use StartPage, you’ll get the same Google Search Engine results. The only difference is that your privacy/information isn’t submitted. Google only sees StartPage, not the StartPage user. This enhancement is one of the reasons why StartPage results are so useful. 

In short, StartPage Search Engine is the most appropriate private search engine for those who love Google results but can’t make a compromise with privacy.

The user should beware. Many companies that suck up your personal information and browsing habits ALSO promote Startpage. You have to wonder why.

I mean, why does Facebook and Google offer links to “their versions” of Startpage? It makes me pause and think.

Do you believe that a Facebook version of Startpage would maintain your privacy? What about a Google version of Startpage? I don’t. In fact, even if they were sincere in wanting to secure your privacy, I can’t help but think of them polluting the entire effort.

Evil Laughter
Evil Laughter

MetaGer

How about going to a different country? How about Germany? Now, I have to make a full disclosure that I personally love Germany. I think the German people are awesome. I love the food. I also like the “restaurant chain style” bordellos. Not to mention it is a beautiful land with an awesome history.

They also, and most importantly, respect privacy.

Metager
Metager

MetaGer is German-based meta-search engine, developed on 24 small scale web crawlers. It focuses on user’s privacy and makes searches untraceable by leaving no footprint behind. Also, it integrates a proxy server so that users can open any link anonymously from the search results while keeping their IP address hidden from the destination server. This eliminates the chances of advertisers to target you for ads.

The results are obtained from 50 different search engines. Before presenting final results of the query, they are filtered, compiled and sorted.

Comparing Metager to Google.
Comparing Metager to Google.

If you have optimized your website for search by Google, and Bing and the other more prominent American websites, you might be disappointed. This search engine utilizes a completely different criteria to search with, and the results reflect it.

However, the really great news is that you will find many websites that Google, and Bing cannot find.

And now the bad news. It might be publicly private, but who actually knows what the German government might have on the browsing habits of those whom use this search engine…Hum?

Yandex

Now, we go to Russia!

Yes. Russia, of all places. We need to put on our commie waders and step out of the American deep-state swamp and enter another deep-state swamp. Only this time it is a cold one covered in icy slush; the Mother Russian land of internet.

Yandex is the largest search engine in Russia with nearly 65% Russian market share. According the Comscore, it is the fourth largest search engine in the world with over 150 million searches per day as of 2012.

Yandex Search Market Share.
Yandex Search Market Share.

Yandex features a parallel search that shows results from main web index as well as specialized information resources, including blogs, news, image and video webpages, and eCommerce sites. In addition, the search engine provides supplementary information (like sports results), and contains spell checkers, autocomplete functionality and antivirus that detects malicious content on webpages.

Unlike the other search engines, this one is NOT optimized for privacy.  So, that tells me that you can pretty much expect the Russian government knows who you are and are tracking your internet history for their own purposes. What ever they might be.

Hum… is there a cute large-chested blond-haired Russian femme fatal in my future? I wonder?

Now, the beauty in using this search engine is that the organizations that want your personal information don’t really want your data. After all, it’s going to be pretty hard to target you for Russian Viagra in Saint Petersburgh when you are living in Sunnyside, California. And, it will be unlikely for you to read the Cyrillic characters in their advertisements in the first place.

Russian advertisement.
Russian advertisement for ice cream. Heck, it might even be enjoyable to see some targeted Russian advertisements for a change.

Personally, I think that there is far more harm in the NSA having your personal information than any Russian secret police force, even if it’s a modern version of the KGB.

The reasoning is simple. If the United States government; federal, state, local or agency want’s to arrest you, they will need to make a case out of how evil you are. Then they will compile the reasoning into the most damning case, and convince you to agree to lesser charges via plea bargain. Often they will use your computer habits to justify their narrative.

However, in Russia, and China, they won’t do this. If they want to arrest you, they will simply do so. Period. No justification and song and dance of survival is necessary.

Storm in Russia.
Storm in Russia.

Bing Search

OK. Now, back to America. We all know that Google has rivals…Microsoft.

Bing is Microsoft’s attempt at unseating Google, and arguably the second-most-popular search engine today. Bing used to be MSN search until it was updated in summer of 2009. They should NEVER be considered a Search Engine that honors individual privacy. However, they are placed here in this list for those members of the European Union, who get to have privacy in the their searches that Americans are denied.

Privacy with the Microsoft BING Search Engine.
Privacy with the Microsoft BING Search Engine.

Touted as a decision engine, Bing tries to support your researching by offering suggestions in the leftmost column, while also giving you various search options across the top of the screen. Things like ‘wiki’ suggestions, ‘visual search’, and ‘related searches’ might be very useful to you. Bing is not dethroning Google in the near future, no, but it is definitely worth trying. 

Like Google, however, they will most certainly block certain websites, and avoid others at the request of the United States government. From “Uncle Sam’s” point of view, you go after the “low handing fruit” that the vast bulk of Americans use. Then ridicule the outliers as “misfits”, “deplorables”, and “Nazi’s”.

Kick Ass Torrents
The international website “Kick Ass Torrents” was seized by the Department of Homeland Security. The reason being that they offered royalty free downloads of copyrighted movies and music. Thanks to President Obama, visiting any of these websites is a federal crime that Americans are forbidden to visit. Even for a nano-second.

As far as privacy is concerned, Bing will alter the behavior of the Search Engine if you live in the EU.

All you need to do is [1] Go here and fill out the application form, [2] wait for a response. Then, [3] trusting that they will obey your request, you are free to use Bing.

"Please provide any other relevant information describing your privacy interest in having this information blocked in response to searches on the name specified above and why you believe your privacy interest outweighs the public’s interest in free expression and the free availability of information."

That’s right, boy’s and girl’s, you need to petition Bing and explain why you want to have privacy. That should tell you all you need to know about how these software companies think of you and your families.

Microsoft privacy
If you are European, you must petition to these people and explain why you want privacy. As an American, you will not be granted privacy. It is not granted by Bing. You are forbidden to have it, simply because NO ONE is enforcing the fourth amendment.

Youdao

Now to China. Privacy…I highly doubt it. 

Youdao Chinese Search Engine.
Youdao Chinese Search Engine.

Youdao is a search engine in China released by the company NetEase. It allows users to easily search for images, web pages, music, news, blogs, and even Chinese to English entries in the dictionary, and several others. In 2012, Hui-hui shopping assistant was established, serving as a tool that will allow users to compare items and prices online.

I would not say that they would honor a person’s right to privacy. However, like the Russian search engine, the companies that seem to want to collect user information would find most Americans boring and useless.

Yippy Search

Some deep searches are worth the risk to privacy. When that comes in play, consider Yippy!

Yippy
Yippy

Yippy is a Deep Web search engine that searches other search engines for you. Unlike the regular Web, which is indexed by robot spider programs, Deep Web pages are usually harder to locate by conventional search.

That’s where Yippy becomes very useful. If you are searching for obscure hobby interest blogs, obscure government information, tough-to-find obscure news, academic research and otherwise-obscure content, then Yippy is your tool. 

Visit Yippy Search

There isn’t any guarantee that your privacy would be maintained, however, this search engine will take you places that other Search Engines (think Google and Bing) would hide from you.

Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! Search
Yahoo! Search

Yahoo! is several things: it is a search engine, a news aggregator, a shopping center, an emailbox, a travel directory, a horoscope and games center, and more.

This ‘web portal’ breadth of choice makes this a very helpful site for Internet beginners. Searching the Web should also be about discovery and exploration, and Yahoo! delivers that in wholesale quantities.

Yahoo! also won’t protect your privacy like some of the other search engines mentioned herein. However, they won’t pre-censor to “protect” you either.

On Google, for instance, I had to wade through pages and pages of stuff about how the John Titor Time-traveler was a hoax, with no pages on the actual text of his BBS narrative. Yet, Yahoo! took me right there in a nano-second. Straight the “meat”, with no roadblocks of propagandized articles.

The Internet Archive Search

The Internet Archive - the Way back machine.
The Internet Archive – the Way back machine.

The Internet Archive is a favorite destination for longtime Web lovers. The Archive has been taking snapshots of the entire World Wide Web for years now, allowing you and me to travel back in time to see what a web page looked like in 1999, or what the news was like around Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

You won’t visit the Archive daily, like you would Google or Yahoo or Bing, but when you do have need to travel back in time, use this search site.

Visit The Internet Archive

DeepWebTech

Deep Web Tech
Deep Web Tech

With DeepWebTech you can choose between five search engines. If one doesn’t work for you, you can always count on the other to help you find what you need. Just like Chrome, DeepWebTech also counts with browser plugins for you to use if you are searching for something in particular.

With this deep web search engine, you can find information on a subject such as medicine, science, and business. If Google is not giving you what you are looking for, you can count on these deep web search engines getting the job done.

While the privacy is suspect with all these search engines, I do not think that occasional use of such Deep Web trawlers are anything to be overly concerned about. Use a VPN and TOR, if you are concerned.

Other Search Engines….

Here are some other search engines that are worthy of a spin. Like before, they won’t really guard your privacy. However, they might scatter all your searches in a series of disjointed data centers.

Ask.com

Launched in 1996, Ask.com is a question answering-focused web search engine. Despite its age, Ask is still very active. They have coupled their search-system with a robust questions and answer system with billions of online content.

As of 2014, the website had 180 million global users per month (with a larger user base in the US), and to date, its mobile app has been downloaded over 40 million times. They acquired a social networking site, Ask.fm, where people can ask questions with the option of anonymity. ASKfm handles around 20,000 questions every minute.

Baidu

Baidu is the most popular search engine in China. This is definitely the most useful engine if you want to improve your SEO’s, but it functions very differently from Google.

The main differences compared to Google come down to how the sites operate. While on the surface they may look similar, different focuses and older systems mean that while Baidu’s technology is better at processing Chinese, they still place a high emphasis on Meta tags, meaning users are open to scams.

One key difference that should be noted is that Baidu is a completely Chinese website, and there are very few non-Chinese sites that come up. While this is difficult for those who are trying to break into the market, it is one of the reasons why it has such a large user base.

QiHoo 360

This is another very important search engine in the Chinese market. In 2016 they had around 29%  (according to SEOagencychina.com) of the market share, however, in 2017 they seem to have around 10% of the market. This is a significant drop and can be accounted for by Baidu’s massive increase.

QiHoo 360’s flagship search engine is actually called Haosou, so it is important that while the company is called QiHoo 360, the search engine has a different name.

Haosou offers a wide range of services including news, websites, images, Q&A, videos, images and music, as well other services. As you can tell it runs a very similar service to Baidu.

Other Search Engines

There are other search engines that you can use. However, you do need to be careful. Many (not all, but many, many) work with Google. (Snarl!) They offer (so called) “anonymous searching” but rely on Google as the back-end. I, for one, do not trust them. When I search, I don’t want to have anything to do with Google. No matter what anyone else says.

Gibru

Gibru claims to provide Uncensored, Anonymous Search Engine experience — both in the web version and with the official Mozilla Firefox toolbar. This search engine is noted for the 128-bit secure encryption, the promise of data safety and optimal privacy.

Lukol

Lukol is an easy-to-use private search engine. It does neither track your information nor store your IP. It has no tie-up with Governments or security agencies to share your data. In short, you don’t have to worry about your search indexes getting exposed.

Qrobe.it

Qrobe.it is another alternative private search engine to rely upon. The interface is way too simple, and you’ll be able to search for Images and Web content. You also get some Settings option and Advanced Search

Some Alternative Search Engines…

Ah, it is just impossible to do anything privately today. Everyone wants a piece of your action. Sigh.

Naver

Naver isn’t actually an “alternate” search engine at all. In fact, Naver is number one in South Koreawhere Google has a very small share. It used to be powered by Yahoo’s Overture system, but following the Yahoo-Microsoft alliance, the engine decided to build and launch its own keyword advertising system, so Naver has now become a leading search engine with its own advertising system. If you’re targeting Korea, put this one first.

Seznam

In the Czech Republic, Seznam has been in the lead for a long time and still just about competes with Google there. However, Google is rapidly creeping up and knocking at its door. For now, continue considering Seznam as essential in the Czech Republic. Over the border in the the Czech Republic’s sibling state Slovakia (they were once one nation and known as Czechosolvakia), Google has already taken over as a strong lead in first place.

Eniro

Eniro is an interesting example of a search engine in Sweden and for a variety of reasons. Eniro is the orignial publisher of Sweden’s Yellow Pages and, as a result, Eniro still has significant brand traction in the country. However, more recently, Eniro has partnered with Google for some aspects of search and for advertising.

What’s interesting though is that Eniro has developed its own pay per click advertising system and then backfills with Google ads which is a model I think we can expect to see emerge more widely. You don’t have to take much more share of advertising revenues, to justify building such a system and amortizing its costs over a few years.

Onet.pl

Well, I will say this about the Poles. They are honest about collecting  your data and selling it to others for their own purposes…

Before you click "Go to site" or close this window, please read this information. 

We ask for your voluntary consent to the processing of your personal data by our business partners and provide information about the so-called 
cookies and about the processing of your personal data by us. 
By clicking "Go to site" or closing the window by clicking the X icon, you agree to the following. You can also refuse consent or limit its scope.

A Polish portal with a strong following, Onet.pl has a slightly different version of the Eniro approach. Here, its search coming almost entirely from Google. It relies on on its advertising for revenue generation.


If you want to agree to the processing of your personal data by Trusted Partners of RAS Polska Group, which you share in the history of browsing websites and web applications and location data generated by your device for marketing purposes (including automated analysis of your activity on websites and applications to determine Your potential interests for adapting the advertisement and offer), including placing web tags (cookies, etc.) on your devices and reading such tags, click "Go to website" or close this window.

Orange

The telecoms companies over the years have, in general, gained a larger slice of “eyeballs” and have often overtaken the former search engines for audience. In France, for instance, Orange has a very strong portal which carries a search function. That search function is powered by Voila.fr — probably the number one ,original French search engine. It’s not Google…Hurrah!

However, the pay per click advertising on Orange.fr comes straight from Google, so this is an example of the opposite business model to those above.

Spiegel.de

Another trend of the moment is of newly prominent search sites that are news portals, generally the online mirrors of offline mega-brands. Der Spiegel (The Mirror) has been the leading and best respected German news magazine since its launch in 1947. Its move to online guaranteed a strong audience and an opportunity for both search and news advertisers.

It has a fascinating approach to search. Here, all searches query the Spiegel itself. Other issues are broken down by related organizations. For instance,  plus manager-magazin.de for management issues, merian.de for travel and Wikipedia, clearly giving it a focus on responding to informational queries.

Spiegel doesn’t yet have a keyword-specific search facility not yet having discovered the opportunity, but it does enable you to build your own banner ads directly online and is just one step away from a very influential keyword search facility. Watch this space!

It’s very interesting, and might one-day be the future of searching the internet. However, an alternative to Google, it is not.

Alibaba.com

It is a search engine and it’s not. It is a Yellow Pages and it’s not. Strongest in China and India, Alibaba is difficult to describe apart from saying that in size, it dwarfs some of the better known search engines.

Some describe Alibaba.com as a dating site matchmaking manufacturers and their various types of distributors, which is actually pretty fair. And it has its own keyword matching advertising facility as well.

Personally, I use Alibaba quite a bit. If you want something. You buy in Bulk. Why spend $400 for ten Viagra pills, when I can buy the raw material for 100,000 pills for half that amount?

Conclusions

One cannot utilize the Internet without a Search Engine. Today, many programs and most of our communication is through the Internet. Our portal and the ways of accessing this Internet is through Search Engines. A person who controls your access; controls your life.

Don’t allow them this ability.

Not free
In America we proudly call ourselves “free”, and that we have “Freedom”. We announce that we have the Bill of Rights that “protects” us. None of this is true. This is simply because, like a garden, the Bill of Rights must be nurtured…respected and tended to from time to time. And when rabbits come and much on the plants in the garden, they need to be shooed away or killed if need be.

Update 27JUL20

Mojeek.com: 

One of the last independent search engines. Mojeek is based out of the UK, and indexes websites on its own (just past 3 billion last month). It advertises no bias in its search results and it lives up to this claim. I searched for “vaccine danger” and was impressed with the variety and accuracy of the sites listed—mostly anti-vaccine sites, as expected, as opposed to Google which heavily filters it to only pro-vaccine apologia sites. There isn’t even an option for filtering the content for typical “family safe search.” Other than that it is a bare-bones search engine with a tab for web, news and images. The have a robust privacy policy, but very little independent reviews of this site, and I can’t tell how they get revenue. 

Gigablast.com: 

An independent search engine using open-sourced code, Gigablast gathers its own results from independent web-crawling (it has indexed over a billion websites). In this it fights an uphill battle against the big players who refuse to give its bots equal treatment to information. So far I have found its search results fair and unbiased, but there is a little more “clutter” in the results than I am used to from the big search engines, but this reflects its honesty: it is a small, organic search engine. The only source of income is a link for donations (unfortunately through Paypal). Their blog reveals many of the underhanded ways that Google manipulates the information marketplace. They don’t have the privacy features touted by other search sites, except to say that they don’t sell any personal information. 

Private.sh: 

Fortunately another privacy-oriented group built a smooth interface based on the Gigablast independent search results and adds the highest possible privacy. Not only does it strip away any IP information, but it encrypts any search terms you enter within your own browser before it traverses the internet to their website, where it is decrypted, sent to Gigablast, and the results encrypted before sending back to your computer. This effort effectively shields both your query and the results you see from any spying or eavesdropping attempts along the way. Additionally, no personal information is stored and cannot be subpoenaed. All of this is done seamlessly.

Take Aways

  • Selection of Search Engines are important for free and unlimited access to information.
  • There are many search engines to select from.
  • This post includes English search engines that have various degrees of privacy.
  • The first step in taking control over your fourth amendment protections is to STOP using Google and use a private and secure search engine.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.



Great Wedding Ideas from Chinese Weddings

All over the world people are getting married. They marry in the United States, they marry in Russia, they marry in Kenya, and they marry in China. A marriage is a wonderful and joyous event. It is a time of happiness and the beginning of a new life. it is a very special time, and a very special event.

Here are some cute and fun traditions that the contemporaneous Chinese have incorporated into their weddings. I think that they are adorable. As such, here are some great wedding ideas from Chinese weddings. They are often very different from what you would find int he West.

For instance, the bride has more than one wedding gown. Typically, she wears four or more during the day. That goes double for all the brides’ maids. Al the gals will need to change in and out of the various outfits all day.

Also, The groom is never alone, as he is always with his buddies. Trust me, he’s gonna need all their help. Indeed, there are all sorts of traditions that are often colored upon with modern technology and pop music.

"A few years ago, I spent nearly a month in the small city of Panjin,  in the far north of China, near Shenyang. At first, I was staying in a  local hotel near the city center. Starting on a Thursday night, and  going through the weekend, I kept hearing loud fireworks going off, in  the MIDDLE OF THE FREAKING NIGHT!

When I looked out of the window, I would see pickup truck, or cars driving with a trail of loud firecrackers behind them. This was around 4 am, just an hour or so before dawn.

I asked our local agents what was going on and he described that this was part of their local wedding ceremony. AFTER the wedding, the bride goes back to her parents house. The groom has to go pick her up during the night, and bring her back to his house before dawn.... but, they cannot consecrate the marriage (ie, for those of you in Rio Linda, HAVE SEX) until dawn. As the groom is driving her, he sets off firecrackers to let everyone know how excited he is, and how GREAT the sex is going to be. So, of course... he wants them to be loud and long.

Apparently, the city center is the place where you want to do this, so the MOST PEOPLE POSSIBLE can know. I said, “hmm... fine.. Please move my hotel away from here”.

It was quite a tradition. They also have a very thriving business or renting Mercedes cars to drive the bride around during the wedding day. Also, big parties in several of the hotels where I was staying."


- 3/1/2019, 11:36:19 PM by SomeCallMeTim

There are many interesting aspects to a Chinese wedding. From the regional variances to the registration process with the government. It’s all extremely interesting. However, this post is not about the technical in’s and out’s of a Chinese wedding. Instead, we focus on some of the more cute and playful aspects of the wedding. Enjoy.

Please note that this post comes with many embedded micro-videos. These are small videos that are from 10 seconds long to maybe 59 seconds. They are very important to help understand the points being made. If you have trouble loading them, please refresh your browser. You will not be disappointed.

To get the most out of this post, you MUST watch the videos.

Painted Hall
Wedding photography is very popular in China. This is a wedding photograph titled “The painted hall”.

The Knight comes to the rescue…

Before a Chinese wedding celebration, the groom will often go to the bride's house to collect her. However, the bride will be surrounded by a few of her girlfriends, who will tease the groom before handing over the bride. 

The girls will have to be bribed or convinced by the groom with pretends or envelopes with money before they will hand over their friend, the bride. Then, the bride and groom will bow to the bride's parents before taking her to the groom's house.
-Chinese Highlights

China has all sorts of traditions, and fun and games that the wedding consists of. Here, we begin with the idea that the groom must come over and fight for the bride.

He has to overcome all sorts of barriers that the bridesmaids put in front of him.

That’s part of the fun. You know, you make the groom fight for the bride. And, of course, he will have to fight. Sometimes playfully, and sometimes tested to the limits of his endurance. These battles and challenges are typically thought up by the brides’ maids, but in-laws and relatives often have a (nefarious) hand in this.

There are all all sorts of cute ways to do this. Here is a micro-video of the groom arriving to take the bride with him to the wedding ceremony.  Here he arrives on a white horse (as in a knight in shining armor) and successfully battles the brides maids…

Oh, but it’s not going to be that easy…

Oh, you thought that it was just a matter of playing some games, eh? You thought that it was going to be easy. Well, sometimes it just isn’t. You see, you need to prove yourself to your future in-laws, and they often put mountains in your path for you to climb.

In China, drinking is considered a valuable skill. It is used to judge the merits of a person. This is true in friendships, business, and of course, marriage. Can you just imagine trying to go through this gauntlet? Good thing you’ll have your buddies to help you out. Yikes!!!!

"One point I can identify with is how drinking liquor is considered a skill, a valuable skill to many Chinese.

Think of it as “handling your liquor”, and how well you can “handle your liquor”. Most Chinese I know, by practice, talent or otherwise, can drink considerably more hard liquor than anyone else I know, and not manifest many attributes of being out right drunk. They certainly, all of them, can “drink me under the table”.

One of my good friends likes to play poker and drink - hard liquor. I think she knows that after any number of drinks, her game is as good as it was at the start, while those of us playing with her may not be playing as good as we might have with fewer drinks under our belt. I’m glad she agrees to play for small change. "

- 3/1/2019, 10:30:59 PM by Wuli

Taking the Bride to the Wedding

Once the groom manages to successfully free his bride from the clutches of the bridesmaids, now he needs to get her to the wedding. How is he going to do that? Because the job of the bridesmaids is to stop him. They are there to make him fight and battle for his wife. It’s not going to be easy.

So, how is he going to do this?

Hair piece details
The wedding accessories are often very important. Here is a nice crown-hair-piece. It is made out of solid gold with long tassels, and held in place with hairpins.

Often it is miles away or in a different town. Remember, in a Chinese wedding, not only do you need to get the bride from her parent’s house, but you have to take her to the government offices for the official documentation, and off to the chapel or dining hall for the proper ceremony.

It’s often a difficult journey, and there might be all sorts of road-blocks and troubles that could prevent you two from getting married. 

The bridesmaids might have some tricks up their sleeve(s) as well.They will put up all sorts of roadblocks and things that the groom must overcome to take his bride away. Like siphoning out all the gas in the car… Yikes!

What is a groom to do?

Now that the Bride is near the Wedding Chapel (or it’s equivalent) how to get the Bride safe?

Once the bride is successfully removed from her parent’s house, and the Groom transports her to the town to be wed, just how is she going to be safe? After all, a pretty and attractive girl will have all kinds of suitors, and in China, if one can “steal her away” successfully, she is obligated to marry him instead. (China is a land of many unwritten traditions that will be enforced by the elders.) Yeah, the stakes can be that high.

She needs escorts and support. After all, you don’t want her walking alone, right?

Chinese wedding dress details
The Chinese wedding dress is often beautiful It is a nice happy red color with all sorts of gold trim and symbology. I find it terribly alluring.

Luckily, the groom will have his buddies to help. They will be there to escort the bride safely to the destination. They will be there to make sure that everything goes well and that there are no interruptions or problems.

And, yes, suitors can still interrupt and disrupt the marriage ceremony and “steal the bride away”. You need to protect the new bride. But how…?

Or, why walk when you can ride?

Here we have a cute video of the brides-men carting the troop of brides-maids off to the next stage in the smorgasbord of events…

How did it all begin? What is the first step?

Like in America, a man must propose to his bride. That is often a very simple event, but in China, it MUST be something very special.  For starters, he should have a pretty good idea that she would agree to the proposal, or else he is just wasting his time. Secondly, he needs to make it special, and memorable.  No Chinese girl worth her mettle would accept anything less than the best a man could provide. So the man must make a very special proposal.

This means that the proposal should be a surprise and as public as possible. His best men (best friends) must observe it happening, and her best friends must also be surprised. If possible both the best friends of the man, and the best friends of the girls must attend, but there’s a trick to it. The guys will know what is going on, but NONE of the girls must know. It must be kept a big secret from them.

Couple
In China, a wedding is a big event. It must be planned and executed properly. Everything from the proposal, to the horoscope must be perfect. This is in alignment with tradition, history and popular culture.

It all starts with the proposal.

The man must propose to the girl. He must provide an engagement ring, and he must make the proposal as special as possible. I am not being trivial.

In the USA, the proposal is often considered a private affair. It is done in private, maybe over a quiet dinner or a romantic walk in the park. Not so in China. In China it must be as public as possible. There are rituals, formats, and setups that must be observed to make it a proper engagement.

In fact, it must be extremely special, public and noteworthy. The best men, will help set up the conditions for the wedding, and help him achieve it. The girls, the bride and all her bridesmaids must be kept in the dark about it. So it truly becomes a real surprise.

The proposal should be [1] public, [2] a surprise to the bride, and [3] witnessed by all her best girl friends (who themselves will all be surprised).

A little explanation is due here. In China, it is really not acceptable to show emotion or affection in public. The purpose of this surprise is to get the potential bride to break down. Often, if it is a real surprise the girl will tend to cry or get confused. The man, must take control of the situation and permit the girl to let the flow of emotion over take her.

Sometimes it is in an open and public square or place. At other times it might be in a rented dining room. The most important criteria is the top three points already mentioned above. Further, many Chinese like to have lit candles forming a heart and other meaningful symbology present.

And of course, here is another one…

The Wedding – The father gives the bride away…

Like in the United States, the father must give the bride away to the groom. Unlike the USA, however, the father must show that he blesses the wedding; that he approves of the groom, and that he publicly wishes the new couple great happiness.

Notice in the video below, how the father publicly motions that he accepts this marriage. We waves to everyone and leads the groom to the bride and puts their hands together. He makes a public display of acceptance.

About the Dresses…

In China, the wedding is much, much more complex than what you would find in the United States. In fact, the bride might change in and out of multiple wedding dresses. There is, of course, the white wedding dress, but there are also different dresses that the bride wears.  Yes. The day of the wedding will require the bride to change in and out of dresses all day.

Dress 2
Almost every Chinese wedding has a wedding dress that is red. And many Chinese want some nice theme to decorate the clothes with. The main theme (apparently) with the dress design is the Phoenix. In china, the phoenix is ​​a prosperous symbol for women. The Phoenix Sun when depicted on the dress will mean that auspicious events will come forth. Many people in China believe that red color they can bring the happiness, as well as also being  a symbol for the beginning of the marriage and the new life that it represents.

For most Chinese brides, picking the perfect wedding gown actually means picking three dresses. The typical traditional dress is called a qipao, which has been worn in China since the 17th century. Most women will wear one red qipao, a white Western-style gown, and a third ball gown throughout the night. The dresses are changed throughout the reception after courses are served. Some brides will even opt for a fourth dress, which they wear as they are saying their goodbyes as guests depart the wedding.

Almost every wedding has the traditional Red Wedding Dress that the bride must wear…

As well as other dresses. Such as this black dress that is used to accept the “red envelopes” and blessings from friends, family, extended family and just about everyone else.

Here is a nice catalog of come contemporaneous red dresses for the bride to wear. I personally find all of them quite fetching and attractive. My goodness!

I personally love the different types of wedding gowns. These are selected for various reasons as they have different purposes. Unknown to most Americans, China is criss-crossed with a network of minority Chinese. Each one has their own traditions and cultures, and the Chinese government does it’s best to make sure that these are not eradicated by the onslaught of technology and new ways of doing things (as part of cultural advances).

Here we have another pretty bride. Note the large amount of gold that she is wearing. This is not the same kind of gold that you would get in the United States; 14-carat or other “improved” alloys. This is pure 100% real gold with no alloys. You see, in the United States, the jewelry business has been running a long-running scam on the American people. Americans pay for gold rings and adornments out of gold alloys. Not real gold. Most American gold alloys are over 80% alloy with only a very tiny amount of gold.

Not so in China.

Second Marriages

In this case, below, the woman is older and this is her second marriage, with all the baggage and emotion that is involved. China, like traditional America, prefers a marriage without any kind of divorce. Here we have the bride going through a second full-scale marriage.

This is often a very emotional affair, and the bride publicly admits to a new marriage, and a new beginning. In the United States, second and third weddings are often quiet affairs with only the paperwork processed. Not in China. If you get married a second time, the entire town must know about it. You can’t keep it quiet. Everyone must know.

She has to face the community, her relatives and her family. All the memories of the trials of her former life; her former husband, and all the troubles and strains – the hardships and the emotions come flooding to her. If she has children, they are in attendance. Her classmates fly in from all over the nation. Relatives, even the rudest and most distant comes and attends.

Here the bride looks like a queen. She is ready to start all over again. She recognizes the trials and the mistakes of the earlier marriage and is willing and strong enough to move forward with her new husband in the direction of a new life. Doesn’t she look stunning!

The Wedding Song…

Often there is a performer that will sing to the bride (and groom). In China, many people love to sing. It’s a very popular sport, far more popular than it is in the United States. Sometimes the groom will sing to the bride. Sometimes the bride will sing to the groom. And sometimes trusted close friends will sing to the bride.

Gold Wedding Dress
Another popular color for one of the wedding dresses is gold. Here is a nice gold wedding dress.

Often, the singer is very close personally to the bride and the meaning of the song and the emotions involving the wedding becomes evident. As the singer and the bride often are great friends. As friends they would share their hopes and dreams as they grow up. They would share dorm rooms, and clothes. They would know each others darkest fears and their grandest hopes and dreams. When a close person sings to you, they sing with meaning and emotion. For they honestly and sincerely wish the best for you.

American Traditions…

Many American traditions are incorporated as well. The children bringing the rings to the bride and groom for instance, the idea of a best man, and the ideas of the bridesmaids are all incorporated. Here, we have the bouquet being thrown, and captured to promptly gives it to the object of his affections…

Leaving for the honeymoon…

After an absolutely exhausting day, the bride and groom can leave the wedding party and begin their new life together. We can wish them all the best. For their life is only just starting. Here we give them all the best wishes possible.

Special Mention for all the friends…

Let’s not forget the bride’s maids. In China, classmates are much closer than they are in America. They tend to treat each other like brothers and sisters. Seriously. While everyone gets married and goes their separate ways in life, often moving to remote cities, the friendship persists.

If there is one thing that I have learned, it is the importance of friends and family. Do not take these people for granted. They are very important. We are not lone wolves fighting and surviving in the wilds. We are part of a community, and our life will run much smoother once we accept that truth.

Here’s to the wedding party…

Here’s to the beautiful bride…

Weddings are about many things. Firstly it is about leaving the old and starting a new family. In China, often the man will give 100% of his pay to the wife. She will then use the money to build up a family, a home, and a community standing. That is quite different from the United States, where the man may only give a small portion of his earnings to the wife.

In fact, a Chinese bride would rather get 100% of what the husband makes, even if it is a very small amount, instead of a small percentage of a huge wealthy man’s income. I know, 5% of a million dollars is much more than 100% of a hundred dollars. But, Chinese women are not like American women. They want 100% of their man. Nothing less than that would do.

So here’s to the beautiful Chinese bride…

Chinese bride in a red dress.
The Chinese bride is often stunning in the traditional Chinese wedding dress.

Conclusion

Personally, the best thing that I ever did was get married to my wife. I have never been very rich, and our life has been quite modest. However, she still sticks beside me. Even though I get older and I have gained weight.

Here’s a Chinese girl wearing a ethnic Chinese minority wedding dress for a section of her wedding day. The hat that she wears is always 100% solid silver, and is often handed down from grandmother to mother to daughter.

I sincerely hope that this post can inspire others towards their marriage and their life together. A marriage in China is an awesome experience. May everyone have a great and happy future together!

A Final Word

I just want to add a little something that really means a lot to me, and that I want to impress upon you; the reader.

You know, fairy tales really do come true. Don’t listen to all those jaded folk who have had some less than pleasant experiences. If you are good, and you have a good kind heart, your world can be wonderful. Please keep that faith.

There is a boy for every girl in this world. You might think that you are too strange, too much of an odd-ball, but that is not true. There is a person out there for you. And…

And, when you see that person. Don’t be afraid. Go up to them and say hi. That other person is a gift from God. Don’t throw it away.

Fairy tales really, really, REALLY do come true.


Links about China

Business KTV
Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
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How Christmas is Celebrated in Communist China

Yes. Christmas is celebrated in China. Surprise! In fact, it is celebrated all over China, from the biggest “Westernized Cities” such as Hong Kong and Shanghai to the lowest village in the Hunan mountains. It is celebrated with vigor. With this in mind, let’s talk about a Chinese Christmas.

Firstly, American Christmas is different than a Chinese Christmas. There are many reasons for this. The big one is that Christmas is being phased out by mega-corporations. Of course, there is a big progressive anti-Christmas purge prevalent in the United States today. Thank you Barrack Obama. By the rabid success of it, you might get the impression that it is “old fashioned”, obsolete, and out-of-step with the rest of the world. However, nothing could be further from the truth.

It is Americans that are getting out of step with the rest of the world. Christmas is not only accepted, but is growing and embraced warmly. This is especially true in China, no matter what the American main-steam media wants to portray.

Holiday downtown LoHu.
Here is Christmas at the MixC in LouHu (downtown Shenzhen, China). Like everything in China, it is all done in a large scale.

Christmas is just as popular as it ever has been. In fact, it’s popularity is actually expanding. Maybe not in the United States, but the rest of the world welcomes the holiday; the rituals, and the good will. Christmas is a truly popular holiday.

Today in China

Today in China, I see people putting up their artificial Christmas trees (in gold and silver colors… there are a handful of fake green trees as well.) in their business offices. In the malls, I see Chinese families picking out Christmas trees in the stores, and getting some decorations to put on their doors, windows and walls. I see grandma’s and aunties picking out big red sweaters with logos of deer and Santa Claus themes on it. I see little kids running around the toy section, while parents look at the educational toys.

Santa in China.
Santa Claus in China. Just like in the United States, Santa makes his appearances in malls, community plazas and other social venues. He often finds his way to bars, and pubs, and there are often many Santa’s hanging out at the various KTV’s.

In storefronts, the workers are scraping off last year’s Christmas decorations. Then washing the windows, and applying new decorations of Santa’s sleigh, Christmas trees, and a very jolly “Merry Christmas!” in big words. They place it predominantly in the very front of the windows and doors. It’s where everyone can see. It’s so that everyone can have good wishes and to bless the establishment with good will.

Differences between Western Christmas and Communist Chinese Christmas

There are differences, of course. For one, in the West (and when I mean the “West”, I generally mean America), the difference is that the Chinese consider Christmas to be the start of good-will for the year.

While, we in the West consider it just as a long holiday. So when they put up decorations, they place it there to last the entire year. This includes such things as the Christmas decorations, and to a lesser extent (even) the Christmas tree.

Malls, of course, will only have the Christmas tree up for the month. Offices, and personal homes, it could stay up all year long in certain cases.

Christmas tree with Chinese elves.
Chinese students dressed up to help Sana. They sing Christmas carols, and learn all about Christmas from Western Expats.

Of course, in America, Christmas and the Christmas season lasts the month of December. Offices would take co-workers out to long lunches and have company-paid cocktails (oh, am I dating myself again? Sorry, for the dated reference.), yearly bonus checks (whoops! Another dated reference.), and of course the Christmas end-of-year blow-out party.

With the profits that have been pouring into American companies over the last two years, this most traditional of company perks, must still be alive…eh? It sure as heck better. There is no excuse for not having a Christmas party. In China, even companies that are hemorrhaging money have Christmas parties.

Chinese company christmas
Christmas party for a technology company in China. This one took pace in 2017. As should be obvious, parties in China are very participative and has copus amounts of food and alcoholic beverages for the employees to enjoy.

 In Chinese Christmas parties, you will find bosses handing out “red envelopes” full of cash, and then also handing out year-end bonuses on top of the red envelopes. You will find co-workers getting drunk on grain alcohol (baijiu), beer and red wine. You will find girls getting frisky, and guys throwing up in the mens-room.

Yup. That’s China.

In China, while there will be traditions for Christmas, many are reserved for the huge celebration one month later.  Those traditions are reserved for a month later for the Chinese New Year celebrations (CNY).

During CNY, it is a non-stop eating and drinking festival with enormous quantities of moonshine (Baijiu), endless huge buffets and meals, and long periods of rest spent watching sports on televisions.

What’s not to love?

Chinese basketball
In China, many families watch sports on television. They like to watch soccer (football) and basketball.

Chinese Christmas Behaviors

Here, in China, companies will send out Christmas cards, though mostly it has been modernized to “e-cards” sent out through the e-mail system. Companies will deliver boxes of tea, chocolate, cookies, and fruit to companies that do business in the West. If the company doesn’t deal directly with the rest, these gifts are reserved for CNY.

Pacific Coffee promotion
Here is a holiday promotion from Pacific Coffee. As you can see the advertisement is in English and Chinese. As this promotion is out of a Westernized Chinese city; Hong Kong.

People will welcome you with a hearty “Merry Christmas”, and you will see Christmas specials and new offerings in the various coffee houses and pubs.

People will welcome you with a hearty “Merry Christmas!”

For instance, the Starbuck’s alternative; Pacific Coffee, will offer a nutmeg and cinnamon coffee special that comes with a blueberry cheesecake. Chain restaurants such as Cafe de Coral will start to advertise “Christmas Holiday Platters”. You place the order and they deliver it to your house on Christmas day. (Or in the afternoon, if you have to work.) They even offer “American style menus” that are very attractive to the Chinese…

Holiday food
Holiday menu at Cafe de Coral, offering “American food” for the holiday. Why, it almost makes you feel at home.

Working on Christmas

Typically, everyone works on Christmas. It’s not really considered to be a holiday worth to have the time off from. However, it is considered to be a holiday that represents the start of something.

Western firms that operate in China, of course, offer their expat staff Christmas off. The Chinese workers could care less. To them, it is a holiday, but not something that you would stay home for.

Chrismas with Pandas
Panda caretakers provide a special Christmas meal to the much beloved Panda. The Chinese have come to embrace Christmas a time of goodwill and the start of a new page in one’s life.

Reason for the Holiday

If you were to ask a Chinese person what Christmas represents, the answer would vary depending on who you asked. Most younger people (under 35 years of age) would answer that it was the birthday of Jesus.

Older folk would say that it is a Western holiday with many suggesting that it was used to sell products and promote good will during the Western version of CNY.

Christmas Apples
Chinese Christmas apples. In China, many families send fruit as gifts. One theme is to have fruit with good will and sayings on the fruit. Here are some Christmas apples.

In China, the people have no qualms with Jesus, Saint Nick, Rudolf the red nosed reindeer, and Christmas trees. In fact, that is one of the most astounding things that I have noticed when I would get an American intern over a the offices during Christmas.

They would be astounded and confounded that we even would say “Merry Christmas” and not the far more bland generic emotionless version “Happy Holiday”. So, in my mind there is some kind of anti-Christmas-crusade going on in the United States today. At least in the colleges and universities.

Really! How else can you explain the American youth’s revulsion towards Christmas good will, cheer, and the exchange of presents?

Santa and elves
WUHAN, CHINA – DECEMBER 2: (CHINA OUT) Two Chinese men dressed in Santa Claus outfits walk past dancers in a shopping mall on December 2, 2006 in Wuhan of Hubei Province, China. Western traditions such as the Christmas Day, Valentine’s Day and Halloween have become increasingly popular among Chinese youth, as shops, restaurants and bars promote their businesses during these holidays. (Photo by China Photos/Getty Images)

Chinese Children (and adults) answer the question; Why is Christmas celebrated in the West?

“Christmas is Santa’s birthday!”
– Mao Fei’er, girl, 7, primary school student, Henan province

“It’s to celebrate the Virgin Mary giving birth to Christ.”
– Wang Mingxin, female, 19, college student, Shandong

“Because they are jealous that China has a Lunar New Year to celebrate!”
– Huang Li, male, 30, sales manager, Hunan province

“December 25 is the birthday of Jesus Christ.”
– Wu Haitao, female, 42, housewife, Shanxi province

“I don’t know… I guess because it is fun?”
– Chen Xin, male, 35, worker, Jiangxi province

“They think the birthday of Christ is December 25, so they make the day Christmas. It was recorded in The Bible.”
– Yin Xiumei, female, 60, retired teacher, Qingdao

“I don’t know… but I do know that people will have a wonderful holiday in western countries.”
– Lydia Yan, 22, female, graduate student, Guangzhou

“Because it’s Jesus’ birthday… you know, Jesus who built up a perfect world for the soul and welcomes any soul who comes to his world if the soul is good and admires him.”
– Eric Fang, 23, male, graduate student, Beijing

Children celebrate christmas in China.
Over the years, Christmas has greatly increased in popularity. It is now considered a commercial holiday, and all that fake news about it being banned in China are just so outrageous that you have to wonder what side of the planet the writer is from. Just about everyone in China celebrates Christmas to one degree or the other.

Chinese Adults are asked; What’s your favorite Chinese tradition?

“I like the tradition of Santa giving presents.”
– Li Dong, male, 24, freelancer, Beijing

“I like the carol ‘We Wish You a Merry Christmas’. The first time I heard it was at a shopping mall. I was with my friends at that time and the atmosphere was very warm. I’ve liked that song since then.”
– Li Keyu, male, 21, college student, Shandong

“I like these beautiful legends, like the reindeer taking Santa to give presents to children around the world. I also heard that teachers in Finland’s kindergarten will tell children that the footprints left in the snow are from elves. That is very romantic.”
– Shen Xiaoyan, female, 33, designer, Jiangsu

“The tradition I like is to dine together with your family, colleagues, or exchange gifts and cards during Christmas.”
– Wu Xinyan, female, 37, illustrator, Hunan

“I like the scenes in movies which show families decorating Christmas tree together and preparing gifts for one another.”
– Wang Mingxin, female, 19, college student, Shandong

“Our shop will have promotional activities during the festival. As to myself, I will buy some decorative stuff and hang them to make my home warm.”
– Zheng Liren, male, 33, Taobao shop owner, Beijing

“Receiving presents from my friends, like apples.”
– Liang Pan, 23, female, employee, Beijing

“I like the red hats people wear during Christmas.”
– Huang Li, male, 30, sales manager, Hunan province

“My favorite tradition is Santa giving kids presents and the big dinner…I know Santa is a tale, which has broken a lot of kids’ hearts, but why do they let a fat man come into the house down the chimney? What if he got stuck?”
– Eric Fang, 23, male, graduate student, Beijing

What I do for Christmas, as an American Expat…

This is a good question. Typically, I only work a partial day at the office, and come in to say hi to everyone and wish them a great an merry Christmas. I also go out and take the staff out to lunch and we eat and drink some beer before we return back tot he office.

We usually have a small (ok, tiny) token Christmas tree. And at the house we do sing Christmas songs while we drink red wine or egg nog. I also get on skype and call distant friends and relatives. The dog gets a special meal, and we spend extra time letting him vacuum up all the smells outside.

We don’t usually buy presents, but we do eat a lot, and the traditional meal is usual a chicken or a ham, or a spread. Turkey is nearly impossible to procure out here.

Christmas Presents from China

I have collected and sent some presents to friends and relatives in the States from China. As strange as it seems, they are not interested in things like household appliances, or the latest gizmo out of Shenzhen. Instead, it is a reproduction of a Mao-era utility bag with a political slogan; SERVE THE PEOPLE.

Retro bag.
Retro bag with the logo “Serve the people” in Chinese characters on the side. It is a very popular item, apparently, in some enclaves in the Untied States. Eh? Whatever. Governments will do what governments do. Be careful.

I guess that Donald’s Trump slogan “Make America Great Again” is in line with this. The governments role is to serve the people.

Chinese Christmas Parties

The Chinese treat Christmas differently than we do in the West. Thus the reason for my rather quiet and subdued Christmas celebrations.

Chinese Merry Christmas
Here is how you say Merry Christmas in Chinese. It’s a great thing to know, I’ll tell you what!

The Chinese people are more likely to hold grand Christmas parties rather than a family-get-together on Christmas Day. The Christmas parties are usually held in big hotels, plazas and in pubs and bars. It has been my experience that many expat parties are held in expat bars, while most native Chinese tend to celebrate in a favorite restaurant where they rent out a back room to party in. They also tend to have them after work hours, as people still work on Christmas day.

They are of various kinds of parties. Some are simple affairs, while others tend to be quite elaborate, with performances, balls, and cocktail parties.  Usually there is always an appearance of old Saint Nick, often attended by some very pretty female elves. Oh baby!

Yupper. That is most certainly China.

China celebrates Christmas
Here is a Christmas celebration back in 2015. The Chinese treat Christmas as a time of celebration. They happily say “Merry Christmas” and welcome the holidays in culturally different ways than Americans do.

Express Goodwill and Philanthropy

Chinese Christmas Day is also an occasion to share goodwill and be generous to people in need like orphans, lonely old people, the sick and homeless people. Many Chinese people will bring gifts to orphanage, Old People’s Home and hospitals to encourage these people. Which pretty much differs from what you would see in the States.

Here is a Christmas drive for presents and clothing for children on Christmas. In the United States, we tend to call these events “Toys for Tots”. Well, they have them in China also. Bet ya didn’t know that?

In China, Christmas marks a special time where a person can repent from their past mistakes and devote themselves towards good deeds that benefit the community and others in need.

Dancing grandmothers at Christmas
Even the “Dancing grandmothers” get in on the action. Often they would don festive attire to do their dances. here we have some Chinese dancing grandmothers in Christmas attire.

I have never participated in this ritual, but all my in-laws do. They feel that it is their duty to their ancestors, and to be a good person and a good citizen. They sweep the tomb, burn incense at the temple, and give donations to causes from poor people to homeless dogs and cats.

Most Christmas Decorations come from China.

Ever wondered where all those shiny and glittery plastic Christmas decorations come from? Nope, neither have I.

They are made in China. Apparently, according to an expose by The Guardian, most are produced inside the Chinese village of Yiwu. Of course, a “village” by Chinese standards is the size of a city, by American standards. There, in Yiwu, 600 factories produce 60 percent of all of the world’s festive decorations. This mini city is divided into five districts and one of them is devoted entirely to making Christmas ornaments.

Chinese decorations.
Chinese made decorations from the city of Yiwu. THis city makes the vast bulk of Christmas, and holiday decorations for the world.

Once made, the decorations are packaged up and transported to the Yiwu International Trade Market, aka China Commodity City, which has been described by some foreigners as a “4 km sq wonder-world of plastic tat”. This is the place where many of the world’s traders get their stock—everything from inflatable toys to artificial Christmas trees. This metropolis of global consumerism was described by the UN as the “largest small commodity wholesale market in the world”.

Hum. It sounds to me like a great opportunity for an enterprising young American businessman. Eh?

How Christmas is celebrated in Communist Russia

Only in America have the progressive socialist leftists managed to suppress Christmas. The rest of the world celebrates it. Yes. Not only in Communist China, but in Communist Russia as well.

Father Frost didn’t drop presents off for Russian children on Dec.  25. And he won’t on Orthodox Christmas (Jan. 7), either. Rather, Ded  Moroz and his lovely snow maiden assistant, Snegurochka, are attached to  New Year’s Eve, which in Russia is the new year and the secular bits of  Christmas like trees and presents all rolled into one. 

Initially, the Soviets tried to replace Christmas with a more appropriate komsomol (youth communist league) related holiday, but, shockingly, this did not take. And by 1928 they had banned Christmas entirely, and Dec. 25 was a normal working day.
Then, in 1935, Josef Stalin decided, between the great famine and the Great Terror, to return a celebratory tree to Soviet children. But Soviet leaders linked the tree not to religious Christmas celebrations, but to a secular new year, which, future-oriented as it was, matched up nicely with Soviet ideology.

Ded Moroz was brought back. He found a snow maid from folktales to provide his lovely assistant, Snegurochka. The blue, seven-pointed star that sat atop the imperial trees was replaced with a red, five-pointed star, like the one on Soviet insignia. It became a civic, celebratory holiday, one that was ritually emphasized by the ticking of the clock, champagne, the hymn of the Soviet Union, the exchange of gifts, and big parties.

Christmas itself was reinstated 25 years ago, in 1991. And it is indeed celebrated by religious (and even pseudo-religious) Russians. But the big celebrations are still reserved for New Year’s Eve.

“The New Year has become so ingrained in the society,” says Izmirlieva, “it is unifying.” Plus, “It’s for those who are not Christian, those who are anti-Christian, or members of other religions. It is still very strong.

-Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...

Conclusion

Christmas is celebrated in China. It is, however, celebrated differently than it is in the United States. Where today, many American companies have “Diversity Officers” who will clamp down on saying the word “Christmas” and “Merry Christmas”, the Chinese will happily give the traditional greetings and festive blessings to everyone.

I personally think that the progressive rewriting of Christmas is sad and dangerous. When you bleed away color, passion, and purpose, all you have left is a dull and valueless life. One more deserving of burka clad (barefoot and pregnant) women from the middle east.

To which, I will give a very Chinese Merry Christmas blessing to the reader, and I offer my sincerest hope that you get to spend the holiday with friends and loved ones. MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Links about China

Business KTV
Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

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A Wish List of Favorite Firearms

Ah… Guns. As an American, I have a distinct interest in firearms. After all, what’s the point in having a Right given to you by God if you don’t exercise it? Here, I’d like to share my thoughts on some of my dream weapons; my favorite firearms. No, I’m not talking about a “Phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range” that the Terminator was looking for. But rather some firearms that I have wanted for some time, but regrettably will probably never purchase.

So here’s my dream / wish list.

MP-40

Let me start with one of my long time yearnings…

MP40
The MP 40 (Maschinenpistole 40). As a boy this weapon featured predominantly in all the “War Movies” of the 1960’s

The MP 40 (Maschinenpistole 40) was a submachine gun chambered for the 9×19mm Parabellum cartridge. It was developed in Nazi Germany and used extensively by the Axis powers during the Second World War.

As I was growing up, all of the many, many war movies had actors fighting the Germans who utilized this weapon. They would burst into the room, spraying lead back and forth, back and forth, and the evil Nazi warriors would crumple to the ground. Yikes.

Hero might need to save a beautiful girl.
A hero might be needed to save a beautiful girl. Often at the hands of evil Nazi villains. OK, this guy is not using a Schmeisser. He is using a “tommy gun”. But you can get the general idea, eh?

The MP-40 was designed in 1938 by Heinrich Vollmer with inspiration from its predecessor the MP 38. It was heavily used by German infantrymen (particularly platoon and squad leaders), and by paratroopers, on all of the fronts of World War II.

Its advanced and modern features made it a favorite among soldiers and popular in countries from various parts of the world after the war.

It was often erroneously called “Schmeisser” by the Allies, although Hugo Schmeisser was not involved in the design or production of the weapon. From 1940 to 1945, an estimated 1.1 million were produced by Erma Werke.

MP-40 closeup
Closeup of the MP-40, showing off the fine lines and blued steel.

Now, I have read somewhere that there was a short limited edition manufacturing run of this weapon sometime in the 1990’s. I also understand that it was chambered in 10mm as well as 9mm calibers. However, I am at a loss as to the circumstances behind this model, or where you can get it. I sure would like to know more about it.

Comment from schurmann…

Small numbers of replica MP-40s were turned out before May 1986: modern-made receiver and original parts kits. Trade jargon for these: “tube guns.”

Further internet sleuthing found this…

Sport Systeme Dittrich in Germany is a manufacturer of a remarkably wide range of reproduction German World War Two small arms (including the FG42, StG-44, G43, MP-3008, MP-35, and VG1-5 as well as the MP-38). 

They have a mixed reputation, as they are magnificently accurate looking reproductions, but the Sturmgewehr in particular suffered from a great deal of parts breakage and reliability problems (in the US, these were imported as the PTR-44 many years ago).

Sport-Systeme Dittrich Kulmbach
Some of the product offerings from Sport-Systeme Dittrich Kulmbach.

For collectors and shooters in the United States, this is generally a moot point, because the Dittrich reproductions are too accurate mechanically to be allowable for import. 

The BD-38 semiauto copy of the MP-38, for instance, is an open-bolt carbine, which is deemed easily convertible to fully automatic under US law (a similar conclusion was reached by the RCMP in Canada).

-Forgotten Weapons

And, another interesting comment from schurmann…

"The first photo purported to be an MP-40 shows an arm missing its folding stock, but the stock is present (folded) in the second image. There have been some latter-day semi-only replicas made without stocks, so they can be “pistols” in compliance with US regulations. 

Despite what one sees in films and on TV, the gun was rarely fired with its stock folded; as an open-bolt submachine gun, its accuracy was never great, and users needed every advantage they could get. 

While we’re addressing film/TV use, it must be stressed that movie guns seem to fire at almost twice the rate of a real MP-40, or perhaps it’s mere sound effects. The actual gun fired only about 450 rds/minute: “chug-chug” more than “rat-a-tat.”"

Regarding the MP40 comments…

Hollywood movies usually (not always, just usually) liked to portray the users of the MP-40 firing “at the hip”, spraying the room (and evil grinning Nazi warriors) indiscriminately. I would imagine that it would have been a terrible waste of bullets. How could you possibly hit anything without sighting your target first?

FG-42

Speaking of fine German weapons, one of my “Dark Horse” dream weapons is the FG-42. This is an interesting design and a very fine weapon. What attracts me to this weapon is the ability to utilize both box and belt feeds.

FG-42
A continued love of German weaponry extends the the relatively unknown FG-42. This was sort of like an early Steiner, in that it could be both box and belt fed.

The FG 42 (German: Fallschirmjägergewehr 42, “paratrooper rifle 42”) is a selective-fire automatic rifle produced in Nazi Germany during World War II.

The weapon was developed specifically for the use of the Fallschirmjäger airborne infantry in 1942. Like the airborne infantry, it was used in very limited numbers.

FG42
Here is the FG-42 in operation. Look at that impressive action. Here it is being held without using the bipod.

It combined the characteristics and firepower of a light machine gun in a lightweight form. It was equipped with a bipedal stand, and was small. It was no larger than the standard-issue Kar 98k bolt-action rifle.

It is considered one of the most advanced weapon designs of World War II. In fact, the FG 42 influenced post-war small arms development. As a result, most of its design was copied by the US Army when they developed the M60 machine gun.

FG-42 and MP-44
Here is a nice photo of the FG42 along with a German MP-44. I too, would like to have a go with the MP-44. I would imagine that it would be like firing a AK-47. But that is just speculation on my part.

Of course, I would love to fire an MP-44. But these are really rare firearms and the ammo is not exactly common. I once saw a MP-44 on display in a museum when I was around 15 years old. I was amazed that it was so large. For some reason, I thought that it would be a little more compact.

Comment on the MP-44 from schurmann…

The MP-44 is indeed astonishingly weighty, and disappointingly unhandy to boot. Recoil is terrible: difficult to believe about such a tiny round fired from such a big gun. There have been recent production runs of ammunition, catering to the collector community.

Back to the FG-42. Here’s a FG-42 with a box magazine…

FG-42 with a box magazine.
Shooting a FG-42 using the box magazine.

"metallicman had better hire a more-experienced technical editor before posting anything further, on this topic (though to judge by some earlier posts of his, he may be immune to embarrassment, and facts.)

FG-42 used box magazines only, never belts. 

It did fire from a closed bolt on semi, and from an open bolt on full auto. The latter is common on air-cooled full-auto arms, to facilitate cooling, and to keep the ammunition out of contact with a hot barrel."

-schurmann

To which, I must retort. This is my personal views on guns I like as a hobbyist. I am not an expert.

Now, with that being said…

Please note that the FG 42 belt fed that I know of is the Light Automatic Machine Gun T44. And that seems to have had a side feeding mechanism similar to the prototype belt fed Kalashnikov. In this case, the Johnson belt fed seems to have a bottom closing mechanism. This would be much like the mechanism used in the HK 21.

Belt-fed FG-42
Belt Fed German FG-42. Never fielded in action, as far as I know of.

It must have been something as the FG42 eventually evolved into the M60 belt-fed LMG. As such the prototype M60 LMG’s were derived from the FG42.

T44
Prototype M60 derived from the FG42 with minor modification. Known as the T44. The belt mechanism was from the MG42.

Additionally, it is my understanding, faulted as it probably is, that the box and feeding mechanisms can be loaded from either the left or the right sides.

Note that the reader was correct. The German army fielded FG-42 was box fed. The belt-fed version was a prototype that eventually became the M60 LMG. History aside, this is an interesting little weapon, and I would not mind firing it.

Fabrique Nationale FN P90

Being a fan of weapons, and my love of science fiction, I was introduced to the P90 through television. Or more precisely the Stargate SG-1 television series. LOL. No kidding, but it is really true.

Though, I am sure that the weapons displayed were all prop replicas, it certainly piqued my interest.

P90
I was introduced to the P90, the same was as I was introduced to the MP40; through television and movies.

The Fabrique Nationale FN P90 is a Belgian-originated “Personal Defense Weapon”. It’s sort of a cross between a submachine gun (SMG) and an assault rifle.

Apparently, the gun was originally developed to arm indirect auxiliary combat units such as vehicle crews, messengers and clerk-type elements outside of active fighting zones.

The P90 is arranged as a “bullpup” assault weapon where the action and magazine feed are concentrated aft of the trigger unit. This allows a full-length barrel to be used with a more compact package. The result of this mating is a fixed, slightly oversized stock with integrated pistol grip and carrying handle.

The P90 supports use of a sound suppressor and this can be coupled with subsonic ammunition for reduced-noise operation. This is a particularly useful feature for clandestine operatives. The weapon also features select-firing through single-shot and full-automatic fire. The including rail system can adapt a variety of optics and aimers as needed.

high-velocity 5.7x28mm cartridge
high-velocity 5.7x28mm cartridge

The P90 is engineered to fire the specialized, high-velocity 5.7x28mm cartridge (SS190 Ball). These cartridges certainly maintain a unique look when placed alongside 9mm and 5.56mm types.

Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz)

Now, what “red blooded” American man doesn’t want a “popper” when the going gets tough? It’s only slightly larger than a pistol, but packs the punch of a machine-pistol.

Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz)
Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz)

The Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (“K” = “Kurz” meaning “short”) was developed to specifically meet the needs of special forces, and law enforcement. The basic idea was to provide a compact and concealable firearm with a proven action and capable man-stopping qualities.

The German concern therefore developed the MP5K from its full-sized submachine gun; the ubiquitous HK MP5 series.

Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz)
Heckler & Koch HK MP5K (Kurz) with accessories to include silencer, extra magazine and sight.. Though all that cool “stuff” takes away from the advantages of small size and portability.

Steyr MP34

Getting back to my love of fine German weapons. Consider the Steyr MP34. A long-time old friend of mine had inherited one from his father. I think that he picked it out of a mail order catalog back in the 1960’s. It’s a nice and fine little machinegun.

It was great until he had a fight with his ex-wife and lost all of his firearms when she carted them out and dumped them in the middle of the street. When the police were called, they collected the weapons and wouldn’t give them back to him. So sad.

Anyways…

 Steyr MP34
Steyr MP34

The history behind this gen is very interesting.

Restrictions in the 1919 Treaty of Versailles precluded the Germans from developing man-portable automatic weapons. Specifically, German martial firearms could not possess a barrel longer than 4 inches or a magazine capacity of more than eight rounds. This pretty much restricted the Germans of the Weimar Republic to P08 Parabellum pistols and little else.

Eager to expand the state of the art while perhaps preparing for the coming next World War, Rheinmetall acquired the Swiss Solothurn weapons factory in 1929 and began developing the S1-100, which would later become the MP34.

Although ill-suited for mass production, Solothurn did a crack job of developing and prototyping the gun. The MP34 is heavy, but its mass means the gun is remarkably controllable. It’s pretty easy to keep the gun on target even during long bursts of fire. Firing single shots, the gun remains delightfully accurate out to the effective range of the 9mm Parabellum cartridge.

Let’s talk pistols…

The Taurus Judge

Here is a great little revolver that can fire shotgun shells. Imagine that! The Taurus Judge is a unique revolver which can fire either a .45 Long Colt cartridge, or a .410 shotgun shell.

Taurus Judge
Taurus Judge

Loading birdshot in the Taurus Judge might be an acceptable choice for a self defense load. However I think these situations are indeed pretty limited. Birdshot lacks the ability to penetrate deeply enough to reach an attacker’s vital organs, which is the only reliable way of stopping the attacker before it is too late.

I have read that the 2 or 3 00 Buckshot pellets which would fit in a .410 shotgun shell, when fired out of the relatively short barrel of the Taurus Judge, will simply not penetrate the way that 00 Buckshot from a “normal” shotgun would.

Shotgun shells for defense
The firearm blog says that you shouldn’t use shotgun shells for defense.

I do not know what would be the better load for self defense purposes. The .45 long would have better penetration power, but in a panic high-stress situation, the .410 shotgun might be a better selection.

Ruger 22/45 Lite Pistol

Ruger .22
Here is a nice Ruger .22 with a laser sight and silencer. This is a perfect starter pistol that also has some nice practical uses as well.

I first came across this little beauty while I was looking for “gun porn” on Pinterest. A little sleuthing enabled me to identify it as a Ruger 22/45 Lite. Here we see it with a nice silencer, light, and sights. I would buy this beauty in a heartbeat. A great article on this pistol can be found HERE.

The 444 Marlin

This is a dream gun of mine. I had a few co-workers that told me that this little beast really was able to cut through the brush. I believe them, as this is a pretty substantial round.

444 marlin
The 444 Marlin rifle. What a beauty. I’ll tell you what.

Colt M-16A4

When I lived in California I had a collapsible stock AK that I used to cart with me and shoot in the desert. One day, I was introduced to an ArmaLite AR-15 and fell in love with it. It still remains on my wish list.

Historically, when this rifle was first fielded in Vietnam it kept on malfunctioning because it needed more maintenance than the M-14 that the soldiers were used to using. Over the years, training and improved design has resulted in a nice fine little weapon.

Gunny Highway.
Gunny Highway is an ideal that has elements that all men should strive towards. Sometimes the fiction that we see can lead us into behavior ideals that we can adopt as our own.

Beretta Px4 Storm Compact 9mm Pistol

For the need for everyday carry. Nothing beats a well manufactured subcompact that is easy to shoot, and fits the hand well.

Nice pistol
Find a gun that fits the palm of the hand well. This is especially true for the females in your family. Let them practice with it. Practice over an over until they are lethal with it.

The PX4 Storm SubCompact is among the smallest hi-capacity 9mm and .40 S&W polymer framed handguns in the world with 13+1 and 10+1 capacity. By using a polymer frame (like the Glock), the Px4 becomes one of the most manageable subcompact 9mm and .40 S&W pistols on the market.

It is adaptable to right- and left-handed users, has three interchangeable backstraps, a reversible magazine release button and an ambidextrous manual safety lever/decocker positioned on both sides of the slide. In the “safe” position, these also present additional gripping surface for drawing the very short side to the rear.

Walter P99

I always loved this pistol. My father thought that it looked ugly, but my brother, and our best friends all had this pistol and practiced relentlessly using it.

I do miss this little guy. I owned this gun for a spell when I was still living in the Untied States. It handled very well, and I was quite lethal with it. Photo is of the 380 not the 9mm version that I had.

Walter PK 380
Walter pistols allow for different sized hand grips to allow for small hands. Here is a .38 caliber version. I used to have a 9mm version that I was very partial for when I lived in the States.

Of course the pistol is chambered for different cartridges. I know that it is chambered for the 9mm, the 10mm, the .380, and the .22 cartridges.

P99
P99 chambered in the 9mm. A very nice pistol that fits the hand well and that is easy to shoot with accurately.

ZH-05

Now, of course I’m very old-fashioned. I tend to be interested in weapons around 75 years old. But, you know, I like to keep up with the times. As such, there are some really spectacular designs out there.

Here in China, everyone (who loves firearms, that is) has been talking about the new ZH-05.

China has fielding its troops with the new ZH-05. It’s an interesting weapon that combines a 5.56mm assault rife with a computer controlled 20mm grenade launcher (with a max range of 700 meters).

ZH-05
The American and South Korean weapons both have a magazine for the computer controlled grenades while the ZH-05 is a single shot weapon, requiring 20mm rounds to be loaded manually each time. This makes the ZH-05 the lightest of the three weapons, weighing five kg (11 pounds) loaded (with a single 20mm round and a magazine with 20 rounds of 5.8mm ammo).

The ZH-05 has been seen with Chinese marines sent abroad warships working with the Somali anti-piracy patrol. Chinese special operations troops have the ZH-05 and the army ordered several thousand of them so that each four man infantry fire-team will have one.

That puts China ahead of the other two countries (United States and South Korea) with similar weapons. The Chinese version is lighter, simpler and cheaper. Obviously, the Chinese feel the ZH-05 is worth buying and issuing to the troops.

The U.S. began working on this type of weapon back in the 1990s as the OICW (Objective Individual Combat Weapon) and that mutated into the XM25 (the “X” in XM25 designates a system that is still in development). The South Korean design is the K11. The three weapons are different in important ways.

The American and South Korean weapons both have a magazine for the computer controlled grenades while the ZH-05 is a single shot weapon. Thus much cheaper, easier to maintain, and easier to field.

Links

The Chinese weapons industry is an interesting one. They supply weapons around the world, and also manufacture for the Russian military. I would certainly like to get my hands on some of these beauts and have a go at them.

Conclusion

This is just a fun post chatting about my love for firearms. For a while, I actually worked as an engineer designing weapons, and thus it is both a professional and hobby interest of mine.

As I live in China, I don’t have the opportunity to shoot like I used to. I have to go to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand or Burma to go do my shooting.

The only consolation to this is that I can shoot fully automatic weapons, and many weapons not commonly available in the United States. Which really sucks, as the United States is supposed to be the bastion of freedom.

Maybe, one day, the Progressive left will be defeated by the Conservatives, and some semblance of freedom would start to undo over one hundred years of progressive meddling in the Constitution. One day.

But, I’m not gonna hold my breath. The conservative leadership in America are all dying out, and their current leadership is corrupted and weak. The strongest leader they had was traitor John McCain. Who wasn’t even a conservative, but a wolf in sheep’s clothing; a RINO.

Asshole

Perhaps Trump might turn things around. However, he is a lone voice in government. He can’t do it all on his own, but that is exactly what it looks like is going on. Each time he trys to do something, a liberal judge reverses it. He says “Hello” and a liberal assault team tries to get him for perjury. It’s simply ridiculous.

I’ll tell you what, if things do not turn around soon, and quickly, there will be a nasty regime change in America. And it will be the progressive communists driving the armored vehicles, and conservatives scattering like rabbits with a handful of  hunting rifles.

DHS vehicle
The DHS is well armed with military grade vehicles, and armor. They are trained to fight on American soil. The Obama administration has been setting up the stages for an armed conflict of Americans against Americans.

Sad. So sad.

Take Aways

  • This is simply a post that describes my interests.
  • It concerns firearms; the RIGHT that I have as an American, to own.
  • They are on my dream (or bucket) list simply because ownership is restricted, access is difficult, or they are too expensive for my budget to afford.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 21NOV18.

After Implantation – Lost as an Autonomous Vagabond

This is the story what happened after I left the Navy.  True to form, I did as I was instructed.  After years of becoming a “Rocket Scientist”, then to flight school to become a Naval Aviator, I seemingly “threw it all away” to become an unemployed hobo living in a broken-down van.  I seemingly went full-on “Unibomber”. I was a real life Jason Bourne.

Well, That’s what it certainly looked like to others.

I did not remember my meeting with the Base Commander. I did not remember my implantation, the egress portal, or any of the very pretty girls. I did not remember what happened at all. All that I remembered was exchanging my role as a Naval Aviator for one within MAJestic. Everything else was all forgotten. The big change to me, oblivious to everyone else, were the college-level educational sessions that I had during my dreams. On and on…

I was a lost orphan in the wilderness…

I want to believe
I want to believe. Yes, after all my schooling, education, training, and sacrifice… and it was a sacrifice. I did not do the “fun things” that everyone around me participated in. Instead I worked hard for my dream. And, I obtained it…only to forget everything and find myself wandering alone…aimlessly in America. WTF?

To everyone else I was absolutely certifiably bat-shit crazy, and even I had my doubts concerning my sanity.

Industrial Contractions

In was 1981.

At that time, America was suffering from the first of what would eventually become a sequence of many industrial contractions.  I entered the labor force at the same time as the (#1 employer in the nation) Steel Industry collapsed.

Collapsed isn’t the right word for it. Perhaps Armageddon, or maybe MOAB realignment would be better.

Industrial contractions are normal.  Yet, how it influences your life, depends on who is running the government at the time. But this wasn’t just closing a factory of two. It was the wholesale shuttering of an entire industry that employed hundreds of thousands of people.

Entire states were devastated. The “Industrial Heartland” was renamed “The Rust Belt”. And I, I was stuck straight down in the middle of it. Ouch!

A Story

Let me relate a little story.

This event took place about two centuries ago. It took place in France, which was at the time, one of the top developed nations on the planet. They possessed an enormous military, and was the center for art, culture and science. To support this, they employed an enormous bureaucracy of high-paid clerks and analysts.

According to Jacques Necker, everything was just fine. 

Jacques Necker was the fiance minister of France. He was the expert in the national budget, and he and his little army of "bean counters" monitored the movement of taxes, and outlays throughout the nation and their global empire. They were well-paid, experienced, and monitored the financial health of the nation.

In 1781 he published a report called Compte Rendu au Roi.

This was an amazing document. This report astounded everyone because it simply confirmed what all the French elite had been saying all along.  Despite extraordinary public services and military spending, France had a net credit position of +10 million livres. In other words, the country was in perfect fiscal health.”

Sounds great.  Sounds legit. (Sounds familiar…) Right?

You know what, though? 

It turns out that Necker had "cooked the books". Rather than being 10 million on the positive side, France had racked up 520 million livres worth of debt. This was a pretty serious problem as they could no longer afford to pay interest.

Yikes!

France had spent decades accumulating prodigious debts. 

[1] They built monuments, and parks.
[2] They constructed the splendid cities that still inspire awe today.
[3] They explored the world and expanded their empire. 
[4] They engaged in almost constant military conquest in far-away lands.

But you know what? This all came at great cost. 

However, it never seemed to matter. The French government knew they were the world’s dominant superpower. As such, they overspent their national income. For them, it was as if it were their divine privilege to do so.

When you are the dominant nation, you can spend money without consequence. 

As William Olphus describes in his book Immoderate Greatness: Why Civilizations Fail, the French “tended to see the natural world as cornucopian-- that is, as a banquet on which they were free to gorge without limit.”

Nearly all superpowers see the world in this way. “We’re #1 therefore we no longer have to be fiscally prudent.”

For those of you who are unaware of the fourth Turning, here are the origins of the theory. Sir John Glubb, having seen his own British Empire fade as the world’s superpower throughout the 20th century, wrote The Fate of Empires in 1978.

Glubb argues that great civilizations start with an Age of Pioneers-- those who work hard and build wealth.

It then progress rapidly through an Age of Commercial Expansion, Affluence, and Intellect.

Then, it falls and decays in an Age of Decadence. This is a decadence in which the entire society feels entitled to a level of wealth that they neither earned nor can longer afford.

Even when faced with obvious fiscal realities, they make no changes. Only when a crisis erupts does the society demand action. And of course, at that point, it’s too late. 

(All credit to Simon Black for the bulk of this story.)

We discuss this later on in how the <redacted> cultivate this nursery.

Anyways, the point herein is that our government fails us, the people that it is suppose to protect, when there are industrial downswings of a significant nature. Do not buy-into the explanation that it is “normal”. It is not. It is a failure of the government. Nothing less.

Back to the narrative

With the collapse of the steel industry, the “backbone” of American labor was broken.  (It would take many years to recover.) At that time, no one worked. Unemployment was rife. People could not comprehend what was happening.

  • Layoffs were new, and unheard of.
  • When confronted with a laid-off person, the assumption was that they were fired.
  • To be fired, you had to be a particularly super lazy person.

As until that point in time, most companies offered work FOR LIFE with generous pensions. In the larger companies, it was possible to retire in your middle 40’s, with retirement in your 50’s common-place.

Up until that time, work was everywhere, and people could obtain work as a High School drop-out. It was pretty much “known” that if you had a college degree, you were “set for life”. Meaning that you would always be employed, have a great income, and never have to worry about being unemployed. It was a different time. Only the most tardy and lazy would ever lose their jobs.

Up until the 1980’s, most employed Americans never worried about losing their jobs.

As such, being “laid off” was much harder at that time than it is today. You were looked upon with disdain. As such, and personally, it was a difficult time for me, indeed.

“In the dust of defeat as well as the laurels of victory there is a glory to be found if one has done his best.”

― Eric Liddell

Let’s wind back the clock somewhat. Let’s review what happened… (It’s my method, don’t you know…)

Found Work after the Navy

I left the Navy and after a (short) period of several months, I eventually found work elsewhere.  I managed to obtain numerous interviews, and found a position back in (good old) Western Pennsylvania.  At that time, the steel industry was still big and powerful.

I obtained a “management slot” in a small but growing steel company. (Small is relative. At that time, Edgewater Steel employed 6,000 people.) As such, I worked as an engineer for a number of months in a steel factory in a suburb of Pittsburgh. At that time, the nation was just beginning to feel the strain of International competition.  As such, many companies maintained their traditional industrial working models.

I went to work, did my job, and everything was pleasant.

A Need to Move to California

A person works at a stable job.  You fall into routines.  Life becomes predictable.  However, I started to feel a strong urge to go to California.  It began maybe six months into my new job. As time continued, the urge became more and more demanding.

It became truly urgent.

It began to become an obsession.  I bought a road atlas and started to look at the maps of the roads leading to California.  California was where I wanted to go.  California was where I needed to go.  California was on my mind night and day.  I could not shake the thoughts away.  I had to find work in California.  As a result, I started to apply for work at jobs in California, and I started to outfit a van that I turned into a small camper so that I could go there and look for work. It had to be California.

California was the place for me.

Prior to my experience with the Navy, I would have never adopted such a personality.  I was stable.  I was boring.  I was a “work horse”.  I was the person who never quit; who never complained.  I was a great follower.  I was an even greater worker.  I would have made a great lemming.  Now things were quite different; I was the restless adventurer.  I could not be satisfied with anything short of the gnawing of my soul.  My mind would latch on to the idea and the concepts haunting me.  They would not stop.  They were relentless.  I had to go.  It had to be California.  I had to leave as soon as possible.

However, luck or life opened doors to make things happen.

Is luck a truly random occurrence?  

Or is it, in this heavily extraterrestrial-monitored nursery environment, a particularly placed series of events purposely directed towards a set of achievable objectives?  

In hindsight, based upon what I understand, the truth is obvious.  

There is no luck, but rather pre-planned events initiated by quantum consciousness and implemented with help from our extraterrestrial benefactors.

Lay Off at my Factory

At exactly one year, to the month, of my (entering MAJestic) and leaving the Navy my life changed.  I was given a “pink slip” at my job where I was working as an engineer.  As luck, or fate, would intervene, I was suddenly laid off from my job. 

Pink Slip
I was discharged from my duties and left the company where I worked.  This was different from getting fired for poor behavior or poor work quality.  This procedure is also known as being “down sized”.  At that time, many companies were restructuring themselves to become more profitable.  In the process they often reduced the size of their labor force.

I was one of the first.

Which meant that only a precious few understood what was going on. Everyone assumed that I was lazy and was fired. They did not understand what a "lay off" was. That would not happen for another decade and another 500,000 laid off people.

Working as an Engineer
In the steel industry at that time, all “management” were engineer-educated individuals who would rotate through different departments and climb the (internal) corporate ladder. The idea of an MBA-led career path in a major manufacturing industry did not occur until a decade later.  (Though, I suspect that it began in the automotive industry a decade earlier.) 

The mere idea that a non-engineer could ever manage a manufacturing company was laughable (at that time).

Fate
The idea of free will may have arisen because it is a useful thing to have, giving people a feeling of control over their lives and allowing for people to be punished for wrongdoing.

When you lose our job unexpectedly (As mine was. As the “low man on the totem pole”, I was the first to be “let go”.) it is a surprise.  You become very disoriented.  People around you do not understand, and are very confused.

They often blame you. (At that time, the term “lay off” was relatively new.  Up until the the late 1980’s it was very, very rare for a person to be “laid off”. If you lost your job it was because you were fired. Exceptions abounded for “blue collar” workers, but “white collar” workers were never “laid off”.

So, when I was “laid off” early in my young career, I met a lot of misunderstanding and opposition. When mentioned to others the reaction was shock.  I just didn’t “look like” the kind of person who would be fired at his work.)

Lazy workers.
I did not look, act, or behave like the stereotypical image of a lazy worker who was long overdue to be fired. I was young, aggressive, willing to work and put in the necessary hours. Yet, there was no work to be found.

Low Man
Low man on the totem pole means that the person is at the bottom in a hierarchical system. A totem pole is a statue of carved faces stacked one on top of the other. The face at the bottom is the last of the stack. The carved faces above it, would be higher up in rank or authority.

Today, getting “laid off” is very common.  That was not the case in the early 1980’s. At that time, people tended to work one job for their entire lives, then retire on a company pension. It was a different time indeed.

From a Reference for Business…

“Many of the layoffs in the 1980s and 1990s stemmed from reengineering, restructuring, and downsizing efforts to make U.S. firms more efficient and profitable in the face of intensified international competition. 

Layoffs resulting from reengineering and restructuring were unique in that restructuring affected a large proportion of white-collar, managerial, executive positions. For example, the American Management Association found that two-thirds of employees laid off in 1994 were salaried, college-educated workers.

Growth of foreign and domestic competition, stagnant earnings, and a slow economy motivated the first round downsizing and layoffs in the early 1980s. As the U.S. economy improved in the mid-1990s and remained strong in the late 1990s, large-scale layoffs continued at about the same rate—even at highly profitable firms—marking a break with historical layoff patterns. 

During the late 1990s, many of the largest companies in the country underwent reengineering or downsizing, despite enormous profits. 

General Motors, for example, continued to reduce its workforce, announcing in 1998 that it would cut 50,000 jobs to remain competitive, even though the company's profits rose 35 percent in 1997.

AT&T led U.S. companies in 1998 layoffs with 18,000, followed by Compaq with 15,000, Motorola with 15,000, Raytheon with 14,000, and Xerox with 9,000. Furthermore, McDonald's Corp. laid off workers for the first time ever during this period as the company began to reduce its overhead and management personnel in an effort to increase productivity.

A flurry of bank mergers —more than 370 of them—in the late 1990s also led to additional layoffs. The top five mergers of 1998 alone resulted in 20,000 job cuts. According to Fortune, banking along with media/entertainment and utilities jobs were the most prone to layoffs in the mid-to-late 1990s because of mergers, accelerated competition, and government deregulation.

Layoffs resulting from downsizing continued throughout 1990s, despite low unemployment, a strong economy, and the lack of proven economic benefits from downsizing. 

According to a Wharton School report, downsizing typically failed to boost earnings or stock market performance consistently. Moreover, other studies indicate that downsizing tends to cause low employee morale and tarnish a company's image. In addition, some reports found that a number of companies eventually are forced to fill positions left open by layoffs by paying premium wages.”

Read more: http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Kor-Man/Layoffs.html#ixzz56rMhb3FA

I worked hard to find new employment.

However, I was quite unlucky.  No one was hiring.

Unemployment was rampant, and every week mass layoff announcements were being made all throughout Ohio, and Western Pennsylvania. 500 here, 3000 there, and an announcement of another couple of thousand.  The work force was being shredded before our eyes, and all of us had to compete against each other for the few precious jobs available.

It was a nightmarish time.

Rust belt.
The term “the rust belt” was coined after miles and miles of enormous steel factories and support structures slowly corroded and rusted away in silence. This is Pittsburgh today.

Media Ignored the Situation

The news media ignored the situation (as did our Congressional representatives and Senators).  Oh, eventually they managed to report on what happened…ten years later.

1985 Congressmen
Rich fat cat congressman. The world of the rich does not look like anything that the common, main stream American experiences.

However, at the time, they concentrated with the news from Washington, D.C., Hollywood, and the new millionaire entrepreneurs out of California (Steve Jobs and Bill Gates for example.).

Then as now, the media were elitists.

They only reported on what THEY considered important. As such, they would always inject their own biases in their reporting. We, normal and “regular” people,  were shunned and avoided by the mainstream press.  We were considered unimportant. We were on our own. Nobody gave a “rat’s ass” about us “common” working folk.

The only thing the local news would report on was the layoffs.  They seemed to ignore the causes and preventative measures. Instead they focused on a group of trapped whales up North in Barrow, Alaska.

Operation Breakthrough was an international effort to free three gray whales from pack ice in the Beaufort Sea near Point Barrow in the U.S. state of Alaska in 1988. The whales' plight generated media attention that led to the collaboration of multiple governments and organizations to free them. The youngest whale died during the effort and it is unknown if the remaining two whales ultimately survived. There is an absolutely great movie about this called “Big Miracle” made in 2012.  It is worth a watch.

They focused on attempts to rescue geese in Canada.

A great movie regarding this is “Fly Away Home”. Fly Away Home (a.k.a. Flying Wild and Father Goose) is a 1996 family comedy-drama film directed by Carroll Ballard. The film stars Anna Paquin, Jeff Daniels and Dana Delany. Fly Away Home was released on September 13, 1996 by Columbia Pictures.

Fly Away Home dramatizes the actual experiences of Bill Lishman who, in 1986, started training Canadian geese to follow his ultralight aircraft, and succeeded in leading their migration in 1993 through his program "Operation Migration." The film is also based on the experience of Dr. William J.L. Sladen, a British-born zoologist and adventurer, who aided Lishman with the migration.

They focused on how Ronald Reagan was going to cause World War III by insisting that the Berlin wall be torn down.

"Tear down this wall!" is a line from a speech made by US President Ronald Reagan in West Berlin on June 12, 1987, calling for the leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, to open up the barrier which had divided West and East Berlin since 1961. Glenn Beck has a decent write up on this at http://www.glennbeck.com/2017/06/12/87-reagan-challenges-gorbachev-to-tear-down-this-wall/

Instead, they focused on how much better the nation was run under a Democrat President, you know, like Jimmy Carter. And lectured us (peons) on how now the roads won’t be fixed, and bridges won’t be built because President Reagan wanted to cut taxes on the middle class.

Yup. The infrastructure was going to collapse because no taxes would be collected. We must… must… MUST demand Americans pay taxes! They screamed into the airwaves, 24-7.

They screamed. They demanded. They ordered.

Stop taxing businesses. It is Americans that must be taxed! It is a fiscal necessity! They screamed on the airwaves.

America will collapse if Taxpayers keep their own money
The progressive left is still at it (American Communists).  Here’s some links to their articles that essentially states that if the government is not allowed to take your (most Americans) money, the world will collapse. Go here to read this drivel; https://www.salon.com/2014/04/19/reaganomics_killed_americas_middle_class_partner/ 

and http://www.blogster.com/southwesterngrad/how-reagan-destroyed-america-the-middle-class .

Americans do not have access to their own money. Rich people and banks own the money. Not americans.
Democrat Senator Nancy Pelosi believe that Americans are not entitled to the money they earn. SHe believes that it is the property of the government, and use of the money is only granted to elected officials.

They hated the president, and they would offer all kinds of reports on his slightest mistakes.  They would make fun of his little personality quirks, and would attack him relentlessly. They never were as sycophantic as they are today with President Obama.

So many articles on this!  Go here; https://townhall.com/columnists/floydandmarybethbrown/2008/06/19/mainstream-media-love-for-obama-infects-news-coverage-n1014670 

and https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/02/why-does-the-media-go-easy-on-barack-obama/272807/ 

and http://www.aim.org/on-target-blog/the-obama-media-love-affair/ 

and https://rashmanly.com/tag/mainstream-media-in-love-with-obama/ 

and http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2009/05/narcissus_and_echo_obama_and_t_1.html 

and https://townhall.com/columnists/calebparke/2017/03/15/the-mainstream-media-was-awol-during-the-obama-years-n2299307 .

Some quotes from the above;

“It is troubling that our president is a pathological narcissist caught up in the thought patterns of Darwin, Marx, and Alinsky. Even more troubling is the fact that the Mainstream Media (MSM), suffering from an Obama-inspired narcosis, shirks its duty, refusing to publish or even explore any aspect of Obama's dark side. 

There is room for much optimism, however. If the ancient story of Narcissus and Echo plays itself out as Ovid recorded it, and Obama and the MSM are their contemporary counterparts, both will fade away in the not too distant future.”

Ah, nothing ever changes, does it?

My unemployment support was quickly running out. The bank (Mellon Bank) repossessed my motorcycle, and my car payments were going to be exhausted in a few months.

After nine months it would all be gone. There wasn’t any work in my “neck of the woods”, and I needed to find work or starve.  For, as all American men can attest, if you are over 21 years old and are “able bodied” you are EXPECTED to find work and make your way in society.

Not so today.

Unemployment Support
The state government would pay a laid-off worker a fraction of their pay for a set number of months so that they would not starve. The amount depends on the state where you were living in.  Massachusetts and California were the most generous (in my experience) while Arkansas and Mississippi were the most pitiful.

Today, I read many stories of children living with their parents until they hit their 40’s.  Not so with my generation.  You were physically evicted and “kicked out” from the home when you hit your 20’s.

Because of this necessity, I was forced to travel elsewhere to look for work.  Of course, I was obsessed with going to California (for some reason, heh… heh…).  To this end, I decided to travel there to locate work that would employ me.

Fate

Again, I must give pause to contemplative endeavors.  Was this coincidence?  Was this an artificially manufactured event that would discharge me?  Was this part of a bigger picture that involved whole masses of people, events and staged events?

In my story, over and over again, there would be coincidences.

These coincidences would often times, on their own merits, appear to be logical and normal events.  But on the whole, when taken together and viewed in contextual alignment, they all appear suspiciously suspect.  They appear to be indicative of a grand scheme of manipulation.  Indeed, this was a manipulation of great forces and powers far beyond the control of any one person or group of people.

There is, in truth, no such thing as a coincidence.

Everything in our lives is planned and scheduled by a very advanced system of control.  It involves multiple dimensions, powerful energy states that reach well into the quantum sphere, and a degree of timing that is “timeless”.  However, as I know this to be the case, I still often have trouble grasping with this truth.  I still want to believe that I had a degree of control in the decisions that I made, and the actions that I followed.  The reader will see evidence of this quandary in this blog, but please realize that I do know (as much as I do not want to accept it) that our lives are fated.

During this time, the economy in the United States was in shambles.

America was crushed and its’ industry collapsed. For many of us, it seemed that there was nothing special about the United States any longer. The United States seemed like  just another nation-state, and, most unfortunately, one that’s become especially predatory toward its citizens.

At that time, the only thing that mattered was the lifestyle of the Congress-critters, the bankers, and the wealthy on their exclusive golf courses. How do I know? The media reinforced it to me daily.

JR Ewing
In a way, the America television series “Dallas” reinforced the notion of “Fat Cats” and rich and powerful people. This, of course, paved the way to acceptability of folks like the Clinton’s who actually lived the life portrayed on television.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had rebuilt their industries and were aggressively capturing American customers.  They offered cheaper prices, better quality and newer technology.  America couldn’t compete (though it made efforts to try.).

Japanese effort to rebuild its' Industry
World War II had devastated the industries of Europe, and Japan.  But, unlike the United States, which rested comfortably in the belief in continued economic mastery, the Japanese devoted all their energies to rebuild their industrial base.  The fruits of their labors were just beginning to be felt in the early 1980’s, as stubborn American industries began to feel the pressure of foreign competition.

Changing demographics & Industry
The US became an unsustainable service sector based economy from the 1970s onward when service sector employment diverged from manufacturing without a corresponding boost in productivity. 

This materialized as a galloping wallop of unemployment.  

The numbers, or more accurately, graphs show the effects.  When one looks at a graph of productivity growth over time the effects of this becomes clear.  Adjusting for the WWII anomaly (which tells us that GDP is not a good measure of a country’s prosperity) US productivity growth peaked in 1972 – incidentally the year after Nixon took the US off gold. 

Hum... could there be a correlation? I wonder...

Factories tried to recover, and they had sputtering bouts of success.  Yet, the overall productivity decline witnessed ever since is unprecedented.

Despite the short lived boom of the 1990s US productivity growth only averaged 1.2 per cent from 1975 up to today. If we isolate the last 15 years US productivity growth is on par with what an agrarian slave economy was able to achieve 200 years ago. (With hindsight we know that finance did more harm than good so we can conservatively deduct finance from the GDP calculations and by doing so we essentially end up with no growth per capita at all over a time span of more than 15 years.) 

In effect, US real GDP per capita less contribution from finance increased by an annual average of 0.3 per cent from 2000 to 2015.  In fact, from 2008 the annual average has been negative 0.5 per cent. 

In other words, we have seen an overall weakening of the US economy from the 1970s.  The reason is simple enough.  For we know that monetary policy broken down to its most basic form is a transaction of nothing (fiat money) for something (real production of goods and services). Thus, the true reason for the “recession” and the unemployment at that time becomes apparent.

While there were many things that the American companies could do, the most common reaction was motivated by profit concerns.  Thus, for most of the American industry the reaction was not logical and planned, but was reactionary.  The American reaction was to reduce the size of its work force.

The buzz word at the time was “efficiency”.

Efforts were made to stop the industry practices of “keeping people on” (Retaining employees in the belief that their skills and abilities could be used at a later date, even though there was no work for them to do at the present.) as “overhead”.

Workers were “laid off” and their responsibilities given to others.

Efficieny experts
Efficiency experts sorting out who to fire and who to retain.

What began as occasional layoffs soon became a flood of firings.  Companies started to expect their workers to do the work of those laid off.  Efficiency sky rocked, but only to a point.  It was, unsustainable in the long run.  Millions were unemployed, and work was difficult to come by.  Since I too lost my job, I found myself in the same situation as thousands of other unemployed Americans.  We were all out of work, and out of luck.

I needed to find work, and I needed to do so quickly.

It did not take me long to decide what to do.  I decided to go to California.  For, to me, California was the place for me.

California.

California.

California.

Outfitting a Vehicle

To this end, I outfitted an old van that I had bought.  It was an old white 1976 Dodge Tradesman 100.  Purchased for $2000.  It was empty inside, but had a decent engine and frame. It was a mini-van and very popular at the time.

I insulated it, and installed wood panels made from old shipping crates.  I placed a bed inside and added a partition behind the drivers and passengers seats.  I fixed the engine and the drive train, and set off to find work.  It was a great place to sleep in, and to haul stuff in, but without a bathroom, kitchen or shower it was rather inconvenient. It was, to put it bluntly, a mobile hotel room without a bathroom.

I equipped it with a bed and some rudimentary storage and set off to find work.

+ + +

I worked where I could find work.

I worked at many fast food restaurants.  These included McDonalds, Wendy’s, Hardees, Carl’s Junior, What-a-Burger, Burger King, etc.

I was not proud. If I could get paid, I did the work.

I also worked as a janitor.  I cleaned offices late at night, and places like the YMCA.  I also worked as a temp and performed tasks ranging from digging ditches, cleaning out industrial scraps at construction sites, washing windows, and moving boxes for a storage company.  When you are unemployed and hungry, you do what you need to do.  You don’t sit down and wait for something to come to you.

Sure, my stomach growled. But, when I worked fast food, I got a free meal on top of my pay. That helped a lot. I would save one half of my burger for my wife. I’d take it to the van after my shift. I would also get some of the packets of lemon juice in the condiments section. We could add that to water with some sugar and make some cheap lemonade.

Of course, I traveled to California, but once I arrived there I didn’t know where to go.

I lived in the van (a mobile “camper” that I had created)  and worked low wage jobs to make ends meet.  (It was insulated with a bed, but no toilet and water.  Good for an overnight sleep, but not so great for living in.)

Precisely because I lived in this manner, it was difficult for anyone to locate me.  Obviously contacting me was extremely difficult.  I would work in a town, and save enough money to repair the camper, and get enough gas and food for the next couple of months.  Then, I would continue on my journey.  It was a cautious adventure.

Dodge tradesman 100
Dodge Tradesman 100. Also known as a “mini-van”. It was big enough for a bed and some clothing storage, but little else. Mine was white, with plain tires and utility rims.

Driving Past Ridgecrest

Curiously, as I drove west I kept on driving towards a remote town in the middle of the desert west of Los Angeles.  The town was Ridgecrest and on numerous occasions I kept on finding myself driving towards it.  But I never stayed there to look for work.

Instead, I kept driving past towards more potentially promising places to be employed.  (The reader should recognize that while you might “feel” a “tug” or interest in a certain place, your mind will tell you to ignore those feelings. Instead your mind will instruct you what to do based upon what you are exposed to (news typically) and reason.)

The mind is in constant battle AGAINST your feelings.

The mind is in constant battle AGAINST your feelings.

Yet, for me it seemed that all roads lead to this obscure town.  I would get lost and find myself in the middle of a flat desert plain, with nothing nearby.  But looking up I would see a sign pointing to the desert city of Ridgecrest.  It sure was spooky.

A reoccurring theme during most of my life was how I would have “urges” to inspire me to go and do things.  These urges were nothing less than ELF directional commands sent to me.  That is; commands originating out of the “Core Kit” dialogues.  

More about that later.

On the road near China Lake
On the road near China Lake in California. There is flat desert as far as the eyes can see with distant blue desert mountains in the distance.

All in all, I traveled in circles trying to go to some point in California.  I felt “right” when I was driving in the direction to California, but I didn’t know where to go.  I had no set destination.

The mind is in constant battle AGAINST your feelings.

As such, I visited many of the cities and towns in the state, but none “felt” right.  While some were very beautiful (like Auburn, California) the urges would not let me rest.

The mind is in constant battle AGAINST your feelings.

It had been approximately two years since I had left the Navy.

The memories of what had truly happened there was completely erased from my mind.  I remembered joining the Navy, and leaving the Navy.  But I had no recall of what happened between me and the Commander at the base.  I had no active recollection of his words, nor did I have any active memories of the transportation portal.  It was all forgotten.

Like misplaced memories.

I had adopted a new life, and had accepted it.  Occasionally as I drove the camper, I would muse about what my life would have been where I to have stayed in the navy as a pilot, but my mind would always end up focusing on the issues directly at hand at the time.

The issues were always about existing.

Where can we park the van? 

How much money do we have, and how much gas will it purchase? 

Where can we sleep, without getting hassled by people, or the police? 

Where can I get work, and where will I be able to cash the check once I receive it? 

Where can we get a shower and wash off the stink? (A seriously big issue indeed.)

Looking for Work

The reader should understand that I moved into a van to leave an area of high unemployment (that would later become known as the “rust belt”) to an area where I could find work.

I was not “finding myself”, or “exploring the world” as a backpacker.

I was not a hippy, finding “free love” and adventures with a bong, and a box of contraceptives.

No. Not at all. I had a mission.  I had to find work in California. It was my one and only goal.

The Rust Belt
The Rust Belt is a region of the United States, made up mostly of places in the Midwest and Great Lakes. Rust refers to the deindustrialization, or economic decline, population loss, and urban decay due to the shrinking of its once-powerful industrial sector. The term gained popularity in the U.S. in the 1980s.

The Rust Belt begins in western New York and traverses west through Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, and the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, ending in northern Illinois, eastern Iowa, and southeastern Wisconsin. 

Previously known as the industrial heartland of America, industry has been declining in the region since the mid-20th century due to a variety of economic factors, such as the transfer of manufacturing further West, increased automation, and the decline of the US steel and coal industries. While some cities and towns have managed to adapt by shifting focus towards services and high-tech industries, others have not fared as well, witnessing rising poverty and declining populations.

I could not afford to stay in hotels.

I did not have the money. I knew of very few people in the state, and thus had no connections to visit. I had no place to “crash at” while I was looking for work. Being low on money makes one creative.  I had to find a way to make it to California, and it had to be the cheapest way possible.  Short of being a hitchhiker, or hopping a freight train, the only thing that I could think of was driving there myself, and sleeping the car while I looked for work.

I did the “sleep in the car” bit a few times in the past.

It did not work out too well.  Cars are cramped, people can look into the windows, and you always wake up with a stiff neck and a sore back.  (Not to mention getting eaten alive by insects.) No, to travel, I would need a small van.  It did not need to be large.  It just needed to be big enough for a small mattress, and a place to store my clothes. It would need to have a good engine, and be insulated from the cold.  Aside from that, I could then be equipped with the necessities to find work in a place far, far away.

I did what I could on the basis of the little that I knew.  I was, after all, in my mid-20’s and still very young and “wet behind the ears”. My father insisted that I stay in Pittsburgh and try to find engineering work there. I disagreed. In this case, I was right. (Pittsburgh didn’t recover until around 2005, about twenty years later, and then it’s recovery required other talents instead of engineering.)

If I had stayed, like some of my classmates, I would be on a life path that was truly unlike anything that I had studied to be.

Later, as I began my journey, I discovered the importance of a small shower and bathroom.  I discovered the need for a small refrigerator and heater. I later bought myself a class “A” motor home about fifteen years later that possessed all these amenities. However, that is a story representative of another time.

Men need to work

I have strong opinions of people who do not work for a living.

This goes double for those who do not desire to contribute to society. Men NEED to work.  We need to contribute to society and we need to take care of our family.  It is a biological NEED. Rather than rant on, I prefer to let someone else rant on about this subject.

Here is a rant from a blogger in Thailand;

“Sitting at a regae bar last night with some mates I had an experience that happens quite a lot to me in Thailand and that's meeting backpackers. This guy comes to the bar and orders a drink and says hello to me. The American in me would never start a random conversation especially with this dude but the outgoing Aussie in me always has to say hello. I wish now I'd got a photo of this guy however the guy looks similar to the picture below.

[Photo of a heavily tattooed man with piercings all over his body, and shirtless. Not provided here because it is ugly.]

So the first thing I notice about this dude is the overly large earing he has stuck through his nose, the ear piercings that look like plates in his ears and the fact he is covered in tats. Not the kinda guy I'd hang with regardless of his personality because he'd probably scare the girls away, but whatever, I'm having a good time I say hello back and he starts to chat.

I don't have a problem with backpackers in general but I can only stand them so much, the conversation always goes something like this:

What's your name?

Where you come from?

Where have you been?

Where are you going?

After you've answered these questions the backpacker types start telling you how they've been to 18 countries in the past few months and how you should go here and have you been there "oh your missing out" that somehow I'm less than because I don't stick a bag on my back and sleep in $3 rooms with 10 other dudes. Inevitably after they tell you all about the world they have nothing left to say except how excited they are to put the bag on their back again and sleep in another shitty room.

Listening to this guy last night I'm being polite and interested when he got to that point where he'd rambled on about his travels enough that he didn't have much more to say so he asks me what I do. 

So I told him part of the truth, I own “Living Thai” a blog on Thai girls and Thai hookers and sex in Thailand. 

Should of seen this guys eyes, he looks at me with total horror like I'm a child molester or something and he exclaims "I don't like that, that's wrong" maybe he was lost for words? Not sure, but I'll never forget this guys eyes it was priceless.

So this guy is obviously offended by sex (looking at him you know he doesn't get much) or at least Thai hookers or the fact that girls sell themselves for money. So yes it's true, I'm a pimp, and this site is #1 for information about Thai hookers. I don't hide the fact or pretty it up in anyway and why should I? This is life dude, this shit happens and why should I make apologies for it?

This is how these Khao San Road types are like, they'll be quick to attack you if you judge them for looping a bull ring through their nose or having enough ink to kill a whale and then attack you again if you don't also ink yourself up with tribal tats and stab yourself with rings making dance circles spinning fire singing coombaya the world is a lovely place. It's not dude, you gotta get outta your fairyland and talking to "like-minded" people to find out it's not. Try to understand the world for what it is not just suck up the shit you like. Open your mind a little.

I don't need to travel around the world to know that the world is shit, it's dark, and there are terrible people doing terrible things. So many people pass through Thailand with their eyes closed believing if they ignore it or don't partake in it then it doesn't happen or that they are helping. 

Many expats are like this too, they think cause they spend a few thousand dollars a month in Thailand that they are "helping" Thai people and Thailand should reciprocate with an easy and cheap visa so they can keep spending 30-40 thousand baht a month in the country. You're contribution is so small, no you do not make a difference especially to the average Thai.

I don't normally talk to dudes that look like they just came out of a clown carnival (for reasons stated) but I'm not going to judge a guy off the bat because he looks like a freak-show either. 

Maybe the dude would of respected me more if when he spoke to me i said "I don't talk to clowns".

It was a fine rant.

However the point must be made clear.  When I moved into my van it was to look for employment.  I had a need, a desire, and an urge to find work.  I knew that I needed to find it in California, for at time all work was in California.  Isn’t that were Steve Jobs was making his fortunes?  Isn’t that were Bill Gates was raking in billions of dollars?  Isn’t that were Hollywood is, and Silicon Valley is? Isn’t that where all the military technology was that will defeat the Communist Menace in the Soviet Union? California was a mecca for engineers.

It was where I should go.

Bill Gates
Bill Gates in the 1980’s. The photo is a bit unusual in that he is sitting next to an Apple computer.

While Wall Street was the place to go if you had an MBA in Finance, California was where you should go if you were an engineer. California was where young, bright engineers such as myself, belonged.

I was of the generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.

Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs in the 1980’s. He helped redefine what Silicon Valley was.

I outfitted a van.  I set it up as a comfortable sleeping quarters, so that I did not have to pay for expensive hotels.  I took an unused bed mattress, and some scraps of old (living room) rug scraps and decorated the interior.  (left over carpet from my parent’s TV room.) I used the Styrofoam from cheap (Wal-Mart) ice coolers as insulation, and then paneled over it with old hardwood from decades-old wooden freight pallets (I paid $15 for the lot.) . I put tinting on the interior windows, and installed a sunroof that I got for $5 from a local automobile junkyard.

I made sure that the motor and operation of the vehicle was perfect, and as such, I moved onward and outward.  I began my search for work with less than one hundred dollars to my name.

Living the life of unencumbered freedom.

“Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.”

-Rose Luxemburg

Obviously, I did not follow the typical career development of a Naval Aviator.   Instead I began, what I call, “The Big Adventure”.  It was my rite of passage. While I “should” have been on a carrier flying high performance aircraft, like the rest of my classmates, I was a homeless, penniless, nomad wandering aimlessly in the hinterlands of America.

Some days would be great with extreme beauty and a fine proper meal.  While other days were spend starving and avoiding the hot sun inside a sweltering metal box that I called “the camper “or old “urge”.  True travel is not glamorous.  Not at all.

Rite of Passage
Sociologists have identified three phases that constitute a proper rite of passage: separation, transition, and re-incorporation.

Separation: During this phase an initiate is separated in some way from his former life. In the case of the Mandan tribe, the young man was isolated from the village in a hut for three days. In other tribes, boys’ heads were shaved and they were ritually bathed and/or tattooed. In a more modern example, when a man has just enlisted in the military, he is sent away to boot camp. 

His former possessions are put aside, his head is shaved, and he is given a uniform to wear. During the separation phase, part of the old self is extinguished as the initiate prepares to create a new identity.

Transition: During this phase, the initiate is between worlds-no longer part of his old life but not yet fully inducted into his new one. He is taught the knowledge needed to become a full-fledged member of that group. And he is called upon to pass tests that show he is ready for the leap. 

In tribal societies, the elders would impart to the initiate what it meant to be a man and how the boy was to conduct himself once he had become one. The initiate would then participate in ritual ceremonies which often involved pain and endurance. 

In the case of the new soldier, he is yelled at, prodded, exercised, and disciplined to prepare him to receive a rank and title.

Re-incorporation. In this phase, the initiate, having passed the tests necessary and proving himself worthy, is re-introduced into his community, which recognizes and honors his new status within the group. For tribal societies, this meant a village-wide feast and celebration. 

The boy would now be recognized by all tribe members as a man and allowed to participate in the activities and responsibilities that status conferred. For the soldier, his boot camp experience would come to an end and both his superiors and his family would join in a ceremony to recognize his new status as a full-fledged member of the military.

During the all phases of the process, the men who have gone through the ritual themselves guide the young initiate on his journey. By controlling the rite of passage, the men decide when a boy becomes a man.

I had named my van after a story that I had read.  I named it after the name of a hippy van in a story that graced most of the pages in a book known as the “Last Whole Earth Catalog”.

The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998.

Steve Jobs compared The Whole Earth Catalog to Internet search engine Google in his June 2005 Stanford University commencement speech.

"When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation.... It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along. It was idealistic and overflowing with neat tools and great notions."

The last whole earth catalog
The Whole Earth Catalog (WEC) was an American counterculture magazine and product catalog published by Stewart Brand several times a year between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. The magazine featured essays and articles, but was primarily focused on product reviews.

Above is a page from the Last Whole Earth Catalog.  In the lower right corner, the reader can see a box with the image of an alligator or dragon and some words.  That is the hippy story where I obtained the name whereas I named my van “ol urge”.

An adventure consists of extremes.  You see the great beauty of life, and the depths of the abysmal.

After all of this, I became a “somewhat” normal person again. But, I (the truth) was anything but normal. Not only was I a highly trained, college educated, intellectual, but I was implanted with specialized probes; probes of unique abilities and secretive purposes.  I didn’t know why, but I suddenly found myself questioning everything around me.  I stared to ask questions about how humans lived in America and what my role was.

“This reminds me of when the Reagan Administration gave out blocks of cheese to Food Stamp recipients. Soon after the deliveries were made, bars around Philadelphia were serving grilled cheese sandwiches during happy hour.”

-Posted on 2/13/2018, 8:30:33 AM by Opinionated Blowhard

I wondered why I couldn’t qualify for all the “free” stuff that the government promised me.

It was true.  I could NEVER qualify.  

I went to a welfare office in upstate New York to apply for food stamps.  The woman behind the counter, a nasty prune face of a woman named Mrs. Slen (to this day, I will never forget her name) told me that she’d “just happen to know that engineers do not get laid off.”  (She knew, she said, because she was married to an engineer.) 

She said that I was just a lazy good-for-nothing person, and went out of her way to make my life extremely difficult in the pursuit of government benefits.  

She would misplace my paperwork, and I would need to come in and do them all over again. She would call me at 5:45 and tell me that I would need to come in before 6:00 and sign something or the other. She would do all kinds of nasty things and make my life a “red tape” nightmare.

That was my life…

“They hide income. Dirty little secret is that some groups with “favored nation status” are rubber stamped through these programs and the bureaucrats look the other way. 

Whereas some little old white lady will be put through the wringer and made to jump through several flaming hoops of administrative red tape only to be denied. 

I saw this with my very own eyes.”

-Posted on 2/13/2018, 8:10:58 AM by AbolishCSEU

So much for that little adventure…

I became Spiritual

One of the things that was constant during this period of time in my life were my night-time dreams. Once I fell asleep, my mind would rest, and after a while I would start to have these odd dreams. My consciousness sort of detached and I began to experience this “other” kind of existence.

It was really, really odd. Many of the “experiences” consisted of a kind of very…very…very…VERY vivid experience that communicated with my brain as an augmented dream. And they were always about going to school. I was always being taught things. I was constantly involved in education, and all sorts of  weird things. Then when I woke up, I would look at the world around me and what I experienced quite differently…

I had a totally different point of view.

I started to wonder why real nasty people seemed to be so successful, and the softer nicer people all seemed to be destitute.

I became spiritual and in this train of thought, I moved upon faith and belief.

I became inspired within by an inner confidence… and upon that confidence; I embarked upon a new adventure… a greater adventure.  An adventure fueled on … faith…

I became very spiritual and everything seemed, to me, to be connected.

The weather to the earth, and the movement of people to the movement of the moon.  Things all seemed so interconnected to me.  I began to question everything.  Maybe it was living in the van, or maybe it was my experiences.  Maybe it was due to the probes.  I do not know why.

Travel

“A huge forest it was; and I was glad and grateful beyond measure for the scent of roots and leaves, the thick smell of the fir-sap, that is like the smell of marrow. Only the forest could bring all things to calm within me; my mind was strong and at ease.”

— Knut Hamsun “Pan” 

I often see inspirational pictures on the internet showing a map with some kind of words to inspire confidence to travel.

Yeah, it’s all good. But mostly, the people who do this sit comfy in their own rooms, and live their mundane day to day lives.  They dream about travel, and they Photoshop about travel. They post articles about their travel dreams. They buy clothes that travelers wear, and expensive backpacks and gear.  They collect interesting books and read about travel.  But they don’t actually travel.

Joy of travel.

Typical Tumbler photo advertising for the joy of travel. These things can be found all over the Internet and serve to inspire us to leave our lazy-boy chair.

True and Real Travel

True and real travel is an adventure.

You leave your comfortable house with only $200 in your wallet, and you go. You just leave.  You go make friends, or you visit friends you just made. You don’t buy expensive or trendy backpacks and nice looking road maps. That looks great in advertisements, but real travelers don’t use them.

Real travel is not only about the wilds of the forests, and the smell of nature.  It is also about the dark and grimy stained gravel of a train yard, the back alleys behind centuries-old factories, the frighteningly-quiet cookie-cutter suburban neighborhoods with people peering out behind curtains.

It is all of this and more.

It is the empty quietness of an outlet mall at sunrise, the smell of a fresh pot of coffee being made at “Waffle House” at 4 am in the morning, and waiting outside on a grassy knoll while a “grease monkey” fixes your brakes. Travel is an adventure, and it isn’t always beautiful.

Real travelers, well, (for one thing) they stink. Showers are a once a week event. Their clothes are bought at Wal-Mart, or if they are really poor, the Salvation Army. Their note book is a $3 plain wire-wound affair. Their money is spent on the adventure itself. It is not spent on the trappings advertising the Dream-of-Adventure.

Today, like everything else, the “dream” has been packaged and marketed by corporate professionals.  Many of whom have never set a foot in a park let alone the far off wilds.

Ah.  The reader should not get confused. Backpacking serves a point if it is directed with set goals in mind.  You take a trip for “X” period of time, with the goal of obtaining “A”, and “B” with the strong possibility that unknown factor “C” will manifest. You do it with what you have and you make do.

At the time, our trip took far longer than we wanted. The period of time was longer than we ever expected, and the discomfort in the van was worsening each month. Our goal of obtaining “engineering or career-related work” in California did not manifest, and the best we could do was low-end labor positions. This lasted for an extremely long time. (Without getting into too much detail, I ended up getting married with a girl from my “home town” and we embarked on this adventure together.)

Back Story
We eloped, let it be known.  Her parents wouldn’t have anything to do with a “Pollack”. We got married at a midnight mass in an Assembly of God (aligned) church on a Halloween evening. For those of you who think it was a bit hasty, as we got married on our second date, we were married for over twenty years. 

We only ended up getting divorced as a consequence of her health issues.  These are complicated subjects and not really appropriate here at this time. Let it be stated that we started our adventure together, and it worked out just right.

Real Travelers

To my parents and my friends, they thought that I was just running around aimlessly.  Indeed, much the same way that I view many of these “backpackers” out and about today.

Ouch!

When in truth, I was being directed towards California by the probes in my skull. Situations that permitted my ability to travel, and luck manifested at the proper time and place to make sure that my guided actions were truly manifest. On the physical, it appeared that I was an aimless wanderer. No one ever knows the true motives of others.  No one really knows the situations of others, and the powers and forces that compel them to behave in (what appear to be) odd ways.

What is luck in a fated universe?

In fact, to see what true reality is, take away all the “on the surface conformity” and peer into the mechanisms that control and motivate people.  If one does this, they will find and discover just how different we all are.  In fact, even though others (relative to ourselves) are but “quantum shadows” of the reality of other souls, even their quantum supposed motivations are alien to what we know (as real) and what we expect.

State Park
State Parks are wonderful places for quiet reflection and calming peace. I urge the reader to take part and enjoy some of the many state parks that are all around us.

Real Travelers

“Real” travelers don’t wait for perfection. They go when the “calling” occurs.  Often they are not socially, and financially ready to make the trip.

“Real” travelers drink coffee at McDonalds ($1.25/cup), and shun Starbucks ($8.50/cup).  They go into small family diners at the crack of dawn as the fog is just starting to burn away by the morning sun.

From The Art of Manliness...
Many things in life are much better when done by hand in small quantities. Roasting coffee at home one or two pounds at a time produces just about the best coffee you’ll ever have. Most chains (Starbucks, notoriously) will actually over-roast so that every cup of coffee tastes the same, day in and day out. 

They take all the unique character out of the coffee. Roasting at home will give you a variety of flavors that you never even knew existed in coffee. 

Every man should know how to brew a decent cup of coffee. It’s an everyday skill that should be passed down from father to son, like shaving or mowing the lawn. It’s a manly ritual providing both utility and comfort.

Consider history. Out on the trail, coffee was a staple among cowboys. Piping hot coffee helped a cowboy shake off the stiffness from sleeping on the hard desert ground, and it was also a good beverage to wash down the morning sour dough biscuits.  However, cowboys didn’t have the luxury of fancy coffee brewers or French presses. They had to pack light, so all they usually had was a metal coffee pot, sans filter, to brew their coffee in. No matter. A cowboy could still make a decent cup of coffee. Here’s how.

Bring water to a near boil over your campfire.

Throw your coffee grounds right into the water. (That’s right. Filters are for city slickers.)

Stir the coffee over the fire for a minute or two.

Remove the pot from the fire and let the coffee sit for a minute or two to allow the grounds to settle at the bottom of the pot. (Add a bit of cold water to help speed along the settling process.)

Carefully pour the coffee into your tin cup so that the grounds stay in the pot.

Stand around the fire with your left thumb in your belt loop and your coffee cup in your right hand. Take slow sips and meditate on the trek ahead. Make sure you tip the brim of your hat slightly downward.

Real Travelers go to libraries to read the news, and relax.  (They dare not spend a quarter to buy the newspaper. They read it at the library instead for free.) They visit parks, use the bathrooms in laundromats, look for bargain food in grocery stores, and forage for food in orchards.

They buy day-old bagels, or nearly expired fruits and vegetables from grocery stores.  In a pinch they “dumpster-dive” and forage for food outside in the back of fast food restaurants.

“Real” travelers live on the edge.

The entire time that I was traveling and looking for work, I avoided begging.

The closest that we (I was married at the time) ever came to begging was asking a church if we could park into their parking lot.  Sometimes, we would accept the support they gave us.  However, what I really wanted was work.  I would have been just glad to get $10 to mow a lawn, rake some leaves, change someone’s oil, or helped till a garden.

I was young, in my 20’s, and I was willing to do anything.

Hard Life

In fact, the truth is that during our travels there were many times where we were actually starving.  We had run out of money, and with no gas, and no income, and no work ANYWHERE we would find ourselves going without eating for weeks at a time.  I would say that the longest that we ever went without food was three weeks.

The wife didn’t have a problem with it.

She thought she looked “good”.  I on the other hand, well I needed to eat. Typically however, we might have to go without food from three to five days.  Eventually we could find work at a restaurant and get a free meal as part of our work.  If only I worked, I would save half the food in a napkin, and bring it home to my wife.

Sometimes we would see a house with a fruit bearing tree in the yard. We would then knock on the door and ask to collect the fruit. The people were often very nice about this. It kept us alive. For three weeks in California, we lived off of lemons. Our teeth almost fell out... yikes.

Other times it was raw onions and mustard packets from the fast food restaurant.

Sometimes we would dumpster-dive for expired burgers in the trash bin behind the Fast Food restaurants. We did what we needed to stay alive.

This should not be confused with some “adventurers” who backpack around the globe “on the cheap” and ask for handouts along the way to support their travels.  Those people disgust me.  They really do.  They are “aimless” and “ill prepared”. They travel to a strange place to take pretty pictures, and meet a few people, so that they can have some “notch” in their belt of experience. They are not focused and directed with purpose.

Thailand is cracking down on shameless Western ‘beg-packers’ coming to Thailand on the cheap and begging.  http://www.news.com.au/travel/world-travel/asia/thailand-is-cracking-down-on-shameless-western-begpackers/news-story/7526b7fd1541fc4201b1f18c8142dcd8   and 'Gap yah' backpackers begging for money should be ashamed of themselves http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/backpackers-begging-money-should-ashamed/  .

During my travels, we never begged.  Sure, we would ask for help like a place to exist and park the van.  We would ask for some water.  Many would give us more, but they did not need to.  We just wanted to pay our way.  Those that helped us were fantastic people.

Nevertheless, we never needed to beg.

Boomers

As opposed to (what is now known today as “backpackers”) begging, we were actually “boomers”.

Beggars are now referred to as "Backpackers".

Boomer is the term for migrants relocating to areas where work is plentiful.

The term comes from the idea that we would migrate to whatever area had work.  That area would be “booming” with jobs and opportunities.  Thus, we would move to that area, and thus became “boomers”. (Not to be confused with the deadly submarines of the same name.) The term originates from the California Gold Rush Boom.  In the 1980’s it also pertained to the American Gulf Oil Rig Boom, and the Boom related to the need for Air Traffic Controllers.

We were “boomers”, and not “beggars”.

Here’s some photos of beggars in Thailand.  Why in the world are they begging?  The Thailand law clearly states that they must post enough money in a bank to buy a plane ticket out of Thailand. So they obviously have a means out.  Even if that money was swindled, there are other options available to them.  Yet they are not taking those options.

They are begging.

Begging 1
Begging for money in Thailand. Everyone has the chance to come across an unfortunate event than can cause them to start begging on the streets. However, that should be a last resort, and not a source of income.

I know. Accidents happen.

People get swindled and tricked.  Situations occur where you lose everything.  I get it.  It has happened to me.  I know that it happens. However, the only conclusion that I can come to, as someone who HAS been in a foreign land with absolutely no money, is that these people are NOT willing to work for money to survive on.

This disgusts me.

This happened to me in China.  [1] Trapped in Hangzhou and had to labor to get airfare out.  Also happened to me in the Philippines.  Here [2] I was swindled and left for dead.  [3] Happened to me in Hong Kong where I was stranded in the International airport.  

Three times, I was stuck in a foreign land with no money.  Yet, I will tell the reader this… I NEVER begged. 

Look at the photos below. Why aren’t they doing something to earn money instead of begging? I understand that things can go wrong and you can actually need money in a state of emergency.  This happens, and is a realistic event.

It has happened to me.  So I do know.  That is why there are Salvation Army soup kitchens and beds. People can be hit with bad luck.  They can be swindled, and stolen from.  They can be hurt in a strange area where no one knows them, and due to circumstances they might need to turn to strangers for support.  

It happens. Yet, I must admit that I am very opinionated about the people in the above photos, because there are other options open to them.  Yet they are not following through on what they NEED to do.

But… but…

But, this is Thailand for goodness sakes!  Those gals could earn some quick money pulling a “short time” on their back (which is exactly what the local Thai people would think), and why the only ones giving them money were foreigners.

However, those girls should not need to even consider that, as those guys can work themselves. Indeed, they can dig ditches, and wash windows on the 34th floor of a downtown skyscraper.

I would do so, and have. I have done things that I did not want to do.  I did the ugly, disgusting and dangerous work.  I provided for my wife.  But these guys, what is their malfunction? Heck, they can sell their expensive cameras, and watches.

Another young group of beggars.
Another young couple begging in Thailand. By law, you have to post enough money for a return flight out of the nation. So what is going on here? Were both of them swindled?

And I did.  This is not some one-line justification, I actually did things.

I crawled under a San Louis Obispo restaurant into a vat filled with kitchen grease and emptied it out with a ladle into a drum, I had to crawl over dead rats, with swarms of cockroaches crawling over my body.  I was covered in spider webs.  It was hot, dirty, greasy, foul and putrid, but I did do it.

Other examples included crawling out to the end of a boom tower on a broken drag-line to fix a snagged cable.  These are dangerous tasks, but you do what you need to do.

Begging should be a “last resort” activity.

How we got by

We parked the van in highway rest stops, church parking lots, or state parks (and game-lands). Sometimes we parked in the parking lots of cemeteries.

In all cases, we needed to get permission to park and just “be”.

Sometimes, we were not wanted.  Neighbors or concerned citizens would call the police and they would come and “check out the situation”.  It might be a flashlight knock on the wall of the van at three in the morning, or a flashing light swarm around the van.  The police would come, handcuff us, and ask us some questions.  Sometimes they would escort us outside the town limits, other times they would drive us to a charity or church to help us.

The police were kind, for the most part, and respectful of us.

At that time, there were no cell phones or “smart” phones. If we wanted to communicate with others we needed to make a phone call (often from a phone booth), or write a letter. When you write a letter, you need to purchase “stamps” that you would lick and stick on the top right side of the envelope. The contents of the letter was private.  No one could open the letter aside from the recipient.  If anyone did, they would risk severe federal penalties. Of course, in those days, people actually cared about privacy. Letters were then mailed either in “mail boxes” or taken directly to the Post Office to mail out directly.

Then, just as now, theft of mail and opening mail that isn’t yours is a serious penalty.  I would have never thought that anyone would do such a thing.  However, as I was to soon discover, it is pretty common in the lower rungs of society.  Indeed, once you lose everything, or if you move to a new area where you know no one, you enter the ranks of the low and impoverished.

When I was in Syracuse University, I once saw my neighbor stealing my mail. I went to the Post Office, and complained.  They took it quite seriously. Privacy was considered an important part of one’s life back “in the day”. 

Of course, that seems so funny today. No American has any privacy. The Bill of Rights is meaningless.

You are preyed upon.

Everyone has an angle.  Those with money see your weakness so that they can profit from it.  Maybe use you for labor, sex, or for bait for a larger scheme that they have in mind.  There are all kinds of people and we met some really despicable people.  They came in all sizes and shapes.  Some were obvious, like a slime ball who was waiting outside the Salvation Army and who had an interest in my wife (at the time). He wanted us to go into the alley in the back of the store to show us a used kitchen-stove he wanted to sell.

Some were not so obvious, like a church (Baptist) elder who offered to hire my wife to work in his office at night. You know, after working hours, to help “sort personal things out”. Some were just a group of rowdy college youths acting like a rabid pack of dogs. Obviously they didn’t know the terror they were inflicting on others.

The world is filled with all sorts of people.

The Best Time to Travel

The best time to travel is before you are trapped.

That is to say, before you are trapped in a job, or a career, or in a life with children and their schooling.   Sure there are exceptions.   For instance, people who sail the world and home-school their children on board, and those whom were born into a nomadic life.  But for the vast bulk of Americans, the concept of travel is just that, a concept.   Most Americans have never left the region where they were born in.  Most Americans have traveled very little, and only one in five holds a passport (a dated reference).  The world of true and real travel is one that most Americans do not participate in.

Mailbox and phonebooth
Photo is obviously from the 1960’s while I was involved in the great adventure in the 1980’s. Never the less, the styles of the mailboxes and phone booths were identical. Notice, that unlike today, everything was in English. If you couldn’t speak English, and could not write in English, then you were at a distinct disadvantage.

Of course, not every job can trap a person.

If the person is college educated; being unemployed for more than three months is often a career-terminating move.  Thus, most college-educated people tend to become trapped in their jobs, professions and careers simply due to the fact that any extended leave would, in all probability, terminate their career and standard of living.

Other jobs; non-skilled, hourly or skilled are not so fragile.  They can handle an extended leave of absence.

Outfitted Van
The photo above is not a photo of what my van looked like. None of those photos survived over the years. It is a photo of an outfitted van done in a similar way to mine. In my case, I took old used wood pallets and lined the interior of the van with sanded down pallet wood over closed foam urethane insulation from cheap ice coolers. The rear of the van was just one large bed. There wasn’t a commode, kitchen, refrigerator or shower. It was (more or less) a mobile “roof over my head” where I could sleep in privacy, and store my gear. For food we would eat in restaurants, or cook on the grills in parks and roadside rest areas. For showers we would use gas stations, or pay $3 to take a shower at the YMCA.

Start small and simple.

Save one week’s pay. Map out a journey 4 states away. Go there. Take a tent, live in hostels, and eat cheaply on outdoor grills. Plan on a travel duration of just under two weeks. Return. Then… when you return, plan your next adventure. The idea is to go to a place that is strange and where you don’t know anyone. Then go there. The point is just to DO it.

The Ronald Reagan America

“I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream…”

- Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac

For us, we began our “Great Adventure” during the 1980’s.  Let me take a moment to reflect what the 1980’s were like. (As well as to remove myself, and the reader, from the rewritten historical narrative. During the years of 2008 through 2016, there was an ACTIVE effort to rewrite history.)

I was married at the time.

Though I will not relate that story here, it is a significant part of my life with great influences and interesting insights into the relationships my wife and I had while I was <redacted>.  

While this manuscript is autobiographical in scope, it dwells primarily on the key focus of my relationship with the Martian exploratory group.  Relationships with my family are only tangential to this.  (Though there are some very curious cross-personality and cross-quantum influences that are mutually resonant.)

The “Great Adventure” refers to the period in my life that began with my layoff as an Engineer to when I returned to the naval base at China Lake to complete my ELF training and entanglement.

This period was one of travel and adventure.  It was a nomadic life that was heavily influenced in me being “summoned” to California by the ELF probes, and me resisting the calls because I had no recollection of what had transpired at the base previously.  This period was a period of excitement and adventure as no matter what we did; all roads lead to China Lake and my ELF entanglement.  I could not avoid my destiny.  My wife had no clue as to what was going on, but she did support me in my travels.

For they were different than the 1960’s and 1970’s that I “grew up” in.  It was a time that was quite unique and very, very different from what the reader might experience today.

At this time, there were no cell-phones, the phones were either mounted on the wall, or were attached to it with a long cord. Computers existed, but were text only as green letters on a black screen… and were expensive!   D&D was very popular, and people watched TV at home (“Where’s the beef?”) as their primary source of information and amusement.

Cameras used film, and they came in little polypropylene containers that looked like Barbie-doll size trash cans. You had to buy the film and it was expensive.  A roll of twelve pictures would equal the cost of two Burger King lunches.

D&D
Dungeons & Dragons (abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR).

D and D
The very popular role playing game known as Dungeons and Dragons.

Where's the Beef
"Where's the beef?" is a catchphrase in the United States and Canada. The phrase originated as a slogan for the fast food chain Wendy's. 

Since then it has become an all-purpose phrase questioning the substance of an idea, event or product. 

In the ad, titled "Fluffy Bun," actress Clara Peller receives a burger with a massive bun from a fictional competitor, which uses the slogan "Home of the Big Bun".

Record Club
Record club advertisement. These advertisements became very popular in the United States, when all the radio stations were being bought up by mega media-companies. Suddenly all the music dried up to only about 100 “favorite ” songs out of a limited roster of 500 songs. To listen to anything else you needed to join a club. What a racket!

The so called “Silicon Valley” was just starting to take form. America was building up to finish the “Cold War” once and for all.  We were going to out-produce those pesky Russian Communists until they would need to give up.  (And, it worked!). The walls (figuratively and literally) came down.

Media was experimenting with CGI.  Their early efforts were cautiously embraced. As a result, Max Headroom was terribly popular.

Computers

Computers were just leaving the hobby realm and entering the work force.  Few people, aside from “nerds” owned a computer. The ones that were available were terribly expensive.  For instance a “large capacity” hard drive would be 10MB and cost nearly $4000.  The screen was monochrome and only presented text. It ran on MS DOS and utilized a “Dot Matrix” printer. Everything was off-white ABS plastic.

Max Headroom
Max Headroom is a fictional artificial intelligence (AI) character, known for his wit and stuttering, distorted, electronically sampled voice. He was introduced in early 1984. The character was created by George Stone, Annabel Jankel and Rocky Morton in the mid-1980s, and portrayed by Matt Frewer as "The World's first computer-generated TV host," although the computer-generated appearance was achieved with prosthetic makeup and hand-drawn backgrounds. Preparing the look for filming involved a four-and-a-half-hour session in make-up, which Frewer described as "grueling" and "not fun," likening it to "being on the inside of a giant tennis ball."

ABS
Interesting bit of trivia; the ABS material tended to age when exposed to UV light.  Over time the white color plastic housings would turn into a disgusting dirty pee-yellow color.  To extend the life of the product appearance, computer manufacturers would dye the plastic an off-white color. One of the secrets to selling old or used computers was to remove the plastic housings and then paint them bright white.  People would snatch them up quickly, even though the electronics inside would be terribly obsolete. LOL.

CDROM’s had yet to be popular.

So people used “floppy disks” to store their work on. Music was available on records, 8-track tapes (Still available in the 1980’s, but their late 1970’s “hey days” were over.), and cassette tapes.

You could join “record clubs” that would send you a weekly catalog where you could purchase music on image alone. They would “pull” people in by offering them ten free tapes, then once locked in, you needed to make so many purchases a year. They also did this with books.

Go ahead make one more change.
An iconic image in EVERY Design office. “Go ahead make one more change.” From Boston to Los Angles and every place in between, every design office, had this photo (and words) taped to the file cabinets or pinned onto the bulletin board.

Cordless telephones were just being made available.  Each one was large, and typically had an extendable metal antenna that you would need to extend to obtain a half-decent signal. (Watch the movie “Risky Business” to see an example of this.)

This was the decade when the Nintendo NES came into our lives.

Indeed, many of us spent our time typing “cd games” into old IBM computers, loading some beeping game or another. But when you really think about it, that’s not much different from today. We still have consoles, we still have computer games, and we definitely still have beeping. The games themselves are different, the graphics are different (obviously much, much better), but the environment is still very similar.

You sit on a chair. You play.

The goonies
The Goonies. Mean old country-club Republican forces a nice middle-class white family on to the streets for corporate profits. Oh Hollywood!

“Must-see TV” (of course) meant “The Cosby Show”.

John Hughes movies were very popular and they were light, happy and full of 1980’s energy.  How can you forget the movies “Sixteen Candles”, “Ferris Buellers Day Off”,  “Weird Science”, or “Career Opportunities”.  Or what about John Cusack’s movies as “One Crazy Summer”, and “Better off Dead”.  All are classics.

“I want my two dollars!”

-Johnny the Paperboy

While I would dress for work, I would often pass by kids going to school and I was constantly surprised with what they were wearing.  Typical attire, in California, seemed to be neon spandex biker shorts with just a T-shirt. Really strange indeed.

(Of course, I was in the middle of extreme world-line switching at the time.)

Work office attire consisted of polyester everything.  No one wore jeans or polo shirts.  Men wore ties on collared shirts.  Both the ties and the collars on the shirts tended to be wide. The colors were all tans and browns with a distinct movement towards pastels. We all carried traditional briefcases. No one ever carried a backpack to work. If our bagged lunch would not fit inside the briefcase, we would carry it outside of it.

Office Coffee

All offices had a large tureen of coffee.  Typically it was this huge metal cylinder with a spigot at the bottom.  It would peculate coffee just like a conventional peculator. These tureens held maybe five gallons of water, and used up a sizable portion of a can of coffee to make.  The tureen would be on all working day. This was popular from my father’s generational period in the 1960’s thought the 70’s and 80’s up into the 1990’s.

Later on, into the middle 1990’s this was replaced by restaurant-style individual coffee pots cooking on burners.  Typically offices would use either two or four burner units. (Six burner units were rare outside of restaurants.) Unlike the tureens that were maintained by the company purchasing coffee and employees being responsible for making the coffee, the individual coffee pots typically came as part of a “service”. A person come come to the office every two weeks to make sure the coffee is stocked up properly and the machine was in working order. The cost for this service was much higher than just the cost of a coffee and tureen.

This added convenience for the workers came at a price. When the coffee came out of the tureen, it was free to the workers. Let me repeat. Work office coffee was FREE for the office workers.

Fast forward to the Bill Clinton presidency; the age of greed.

No one ever took up collections to fund the coffee.  That didn’t happen until much later in the 1990’s under President Bill Clinton.  (It wasn’t his fault.  He “inspired” everyone to go after money and become successful.  Everyone was trying to “find an angle”.

At that time everyone was trying to get rich.

Companies were trying all sorts of techniques to improve profits. The President at that time inspired CEO’s, who then implemented various “programs” to improve profits. I’m sure that there are a number of notable Dilbert cartoons on this subject.) In this environment, coffee became a “perk” that companies would use to “attract” talent and retain employees.  Prior to that, it was an accepted norm.  Everyone EXPECTED free coffee at work. (That, alongside with free health plans with no co-pays and no deductions from one’s paycheck.)

I was in my twenties.  The advantages of this was not appreciated until I was older. Ah, the generation before me had it so so good!

As an aside, as of 2018, coffee is still free to the office workers in the UK, Australia and China (that I know of).  It’s only in the USA that companies treat their employees as farmed cattle to exploit. (Indeed, I hear Google let’s all their employees drink for free or at low reduced prices, as long as you are not white or male…LOL.)

“(I) Was working 75 to 84 hours a week for years till they laid me off ... they call it the American Dream but I was trying not to fuck up while exhausted and never believed it. ... just ensuring ppl don’t die in with planes crashing ... nobody gives a fuck especially the assholes called our representatives.” 

-Vendetta Feb 6, 2018 3:29 AM Permalink 

I owned a Beta-Max player.

In fact, I upgraded to the “super” Beta-Max player prior to purchasing the core unit. I guess that I was a little crazy about electronics at the time. However, I felt that buy purchasing the upgrade before I purchased the player gave me advantage.

I was correct. However, the advantage only lasted five years. Sigh.

I would be able to run off to the video store and rent a tape or two for the weekend. Over time, the high quality of Beta was replaced by the low-quality but low-cost VHS players. I like everyone else, eventually made the switch. Ah, it was a sad day indeed.  For a while, unable to go to the store to rent videos, we would watch the old Beta tapes that we had at the house.  Pickings were slim. We had “Roxanne” (Not to be confused with the television series of the same name.), “Spaced Invaders”, and “Soapdish”.

Film container
35mm film container. These came in metal tins with a screw on top and later, during the 1960’s came the plastic versions.

Life in the 1980’s

Carl’s Junior served food on wooden plates with a hot metal pan centered on it.  They used real metal utensils, and a real serrated edge knife with a wooden handle.  Drinks were provided in reusable brown plastic coffee cups, or tall plastic glasses for soda. A newspaper waited outside in a vending machine, and you could smoke in every restaurant. At that time, they still maintained a more-or-less hybrid existence; part restaurant / part fast food.  (Sort of like Denny’s today.) Now, of course, they have devolved into just another fast food franchise.

Cross walk signs were in English.  They did not use an array of LED diodes to form a picture of a standing or walking pedestrians. I guess that people then were able to read English, where today in the USA, you just are not ever sure.

Cell phones did not exist.  Therefore, it was easy back then to isolate from the rest of the world, now you’re surrounded by world’s noise everywhere. Then you could isolate yourself.  A quiet walk was for contemplation and enjoyment. It was possible.

Restaurants served a free tall glass of ice water with every meal, even for children.  People used toothpicks and the ashtray on the table.  (You could smoke in the restaurants as well, and buy your cigarettes out of a vending machine in the lobby.)

People smoked at their work desks. In fact, most desks were issued a clear ash tray when a new hire came on board. In the supply cabinet were usually a small stack of extra ash trays.

The meeting rooms all had big ash trays. Men carried lighters, as did women. Though, the small pack of lighters were still commonly available everywhere. Typically they would have the name and phone number of the establishment where they came from.

Some (typically Sales and Marketing types) would smoke cigars that would pollute the entire office. There was no such things as “designated smoking areas”.  That was a creation of the Clinton administration to make work places safer (for the children), as well as to reduce the costs of insurance.

Thank you Mr. Clinton and your close buddies in the insurance agency. </sarcasm>

How the children, who were too young to work, be affected by secondhand office-smoke is beyond me. But you know, there is no logic in politics. It is just nonsense spewed out to control the masses through fear and confusion.

Smoking
Most men have a vice — some pleasure in life that isn’t necessarily safe or healthy, but can be partaken of in moderation. For many gentlemen that’s tobacco, usually in the form of a cigar or pipe. Sure, you can walk into the tobacco shop and grab whatever you recognize or is cheapest. Or you can become a bonafide connoisseur, understanding why one tobacco variety differs from another, where each comes from, and those you truly like. Go down to the local tobacco shop and have the tobacconist show you the ropes. And of course you need hands-on study! Smoke (and sip — tobacco always pairs well with whiskey) until you find the gems that leave you relaxed and smiling at the end of the day.

For the Children
“For the children” was a catch phrase of the Clinton Administration. Yet, it just boggles the mind how children would be affected by workplace smoke. You cannot work until you are 16 years old.

The connection between the Clinton's and the insurance Agencies
Don’t believe me?  Don’t know what I am referring? Think that I am just displacing blame? Do your homework.  Know your history. The Clinton's, and by extension, the DNC were conjoined at the hip with insurance companies. Then they started to diversify. You can well consider the high costs of drugs today to be directly related to their need for multiple mansions.  

They started increasing all their premiums dramatically, and the presidential administration helped them along magnificently with all kinds of supportive (pro-insurance) rules and regulations. 

This manifested in many forms.  One of which was the banning of smoking from the workplace. Another was the increase in insurance premiums. Yet another was the plethora of optional programs that people could implement to “lower” premiums.  Until the insurance agencies obtained political power, they were just a simple business providing a basic service. Now, today, companies are fearful of legal actions and increase in costs if they fail to do A, B or implement C.

Indeed, a typical work desk at that time would have a dial or push button phone, a little tiny calendar (given away by insurance agencies and the like), a large page-by-page day planner that you could write your appointments on, an ash tray (for your cigarettes or cigars), a desk lamp with an adjustable neck (to improve upon the piss-poor fluorescent ceiling lighting), and a large desk mat.

Men who were “white collar” and who worked in the office typically wore business jackets.  We would arrive and take off our hat and coat and sit at our desk wearing our white shirt (long or short sleeve) and tie. This all started to change in the middle of the 1980’s and I pretty much welcomed the change to a more relaxed and informal working environment. Though, I did lament the loss of my coat rack.

However, with the relaxation of work dress standards came a tightening of work place behaviors.

During the Bill Clinton presidency, we watched the erosion of office worker respect.  Culminating in cubicle work “farms” and impersonal bosses driven by Harvard MBA types.  Watch the movie “Office Space” to see what I am referring to here. It is not a coincidence that the Dilbert cartoon became so popular during this time.

“Office Space” is a 1999 American comedy film written and directed by Mike Judge. It satirizes the everyday work life of a typical mid-to-late-1990s software company, focusing on a handful of individuals fed up with their jobs. 

The film's sympathetic depiction of ordinary IT workers garnered a cult following within that field, but it also addresses themes familiar to white-collar employees and the workforce in general. It was not a big success at the box office, making $12.2 million against a $10 million production budget. It was well received by critics and sold well on home video, and it has become a cult film.

Street crossing light
During the 1980’s most Americans spoke English. This changed during the 1990’s when it became to absorb large numbers of assimilated immigrants. At that time, you did not need picturial images of people walking. You could just spell the words “Walk”, and “Don’t Walk” and people would understand what you meant.

People flew flags on their porches during the fourth of July and did not worry about some social justice warrior or black lives matter radical burning their house down. Additionally, the “American Stars and Bars” (Confederate flag), “Don’t tread on me”, State flags, and MIA (Vietnam missing in action) flags could be flown as well.

In my ENTIRE life, I have NEVER seen a “rainbow”, Antifa, or BLM flag flown on someone’s porch.

I guess, I need to be in “Lala land” (Hollywood) or Wall Street and mingle with the face of the oligarchy (Hillary Clinton, Harvey Weinstein, and George Soros) to experience that reality.

The movies of that time were actually (in my mind) pretty awesome. “Sixteen Candles” was pretty typical for the time. I preferred comedies as they were “up beat” and positive with a nice happy ending.

You go to a movie, and watch it.

Then afterwards, you go out for a “stuffed pizza” and a pitcher of beer. At the time, I was terribly fond of olive, mushroom and pork thick crust pizza.  Afterwards we would go and get a butterscotch milkshake on the way home.  We were regulars at movie theaters.  They were pretty cheap back then. Two people could go out and watch a movie and have a large pizza and a pitcher of beer for under $10.  Movies that we saw in the theater included “Better off Dead”, “Hot Dog the movie”, “Lost Boys” and “One Crazy Summer”.

“As someone born in '91, I've been brushing up on my '80s movies, damn would that have been a good time to be alive.”

- ThBurninator

Even McDonalds had tiny little disposable aluminum cigarette trays.  Republicans used the color blue, and Democrats used the color red.

Reading the morning newspaper was a popular pastime and every weekend restaurants would share multiple copies of the Sunday editions of the paper to various patrons to read.  Five dollars would fill your gas tank and it would last (almost) all week.  Drive-ins were still very popular, and malls were everywhere.  A price for two to watch a movie was under $5 on a Friday night.  Yes.  It was, a very… very different time indeed.

Democrats were Red

Democrats Used the Color Red

Globally, long-standing traditions dictate which colors represent specific political camps. Here, the assignment of red to the Republicans and blue to the Democrats is not a reflection of each group's ideology. Rather, this color designation is the supposed result of a collective decision made by major media networks.  

The general public had no say in the matter. Neither the Republican nor the Democratic Party has ever officially chosen a color to represent its organization.

Up until former President Bill Clinton came into office, the colors were “more or less” defined as Blue for Republicans and Red for Democrats.

Today, the official (rewriting of history) explanation is that the advent of color technology, television networks created their own identifying colors, often alternating with each new election to avoid any appearance of favoritism. 

It is an explanation that sounds plausible, but this is not really true.

The pledge
Everyone recited the pledge of allegiance at the start of every class, at the start of every game, at the start of every school event, at the start of every cub scout meeting, and at the start of every Rotary Meeting. Bet you didn’t know that? The oligarchy narrative falls apart when history becomes involved.

I grew up during the “Cold War”.  During this time, the political colors were set and established.  

I do not care what colors were used in the turn or the century, or during the Spanish-American war. Or what colors were preferred during the revolutionary war. All that is academic babble.

My concern, especially in regards to this narrative, was what the colors were during the 1960’s through the 1990’s. This was the time that I grew up in.

The United States was smack dab n the middle of a "cold war" with two communist nations; Russia and China. Both of whom used RED for their socialist ideals.

Red = Soviet Union (Communist)
Red = Red Chinese (Communist)
Blue = Liberty and Freedom. As were the fifty stars (states) on the flag.

The simple truth was that for the most part during the 1960’s, 1970’s and into the 1980’s, Republicans were blue and democrats were red at the top and blue on the bottom.  

(Oh yes, there were exceptions.  However, the reader need not be fooled.  The largest quantities of the most popular election buttons for Republicans were blue color.  In fact, when I went to college, I could not find any that were a different color, and I looked!)

Vintage Bill Clinton Tee-shirt
Vintage Bill Clinton and his Democrat party campaign tee-shirt. Red is the color of the “People’s revolution”. So it is very fitting that Democrat Bill Clinton would have a nice red tee-shirt for his political party.

Don’t believe me?  Go to an antique store and look for Ronald Reagan election pins and Jimmy Carter pins.  You simply cannot find red color Regan, Bush Sr, or Bush Jr election pins.  At best you might find red and blue, but no only-red buttons.  Neither can you find (too many) blue Jimmy Carter pins either.   There are some, but they aren’t common.  Far more likely is finding green color Jimmy Carter buttons.  Why is this the case?  

Why, you might ask.

Well, the answer is really quite simple.  During the “cold war”, red was the color of communism.  Both for communist Russia and for communist China.  Conservatives then, as today, hate communism as it is the opposite of individual freedom.  It is a collective society. 

Reagan Bush Tee-shite
Reagan and Bush Republican tee-shirt from 1981. The Republican color was blue.

During the cold war, red was the color of communism. Red was the color of communist China.  (Note the communist Chinese flag color.) Red was the color of the soviet union.  (Note the color of the soviet union flag before the breakup.)  Blue was the color of freedom and liberty.

However, a social collective society has been the bedrock of the Democrat party for most of the century so the Democrats never had a problem with the color red.  That is why that during the cold war, most Democrats wore Red and most Republicans wore blue.  

It is truly disingenuous for revisionist historians to use time periods around the time of the civil war to reflect the mindset of Americans during the cold war time period.  Or the limited small quantities of specialty buttons that were produced for limited market segments to reflect the vast bulk of the overriding color scheme.

We are discussing the cold war, and it is this time period that I am discussing here.  The reader must remember and must be reminded that the Democrats during this time period, for the most part, supported the efforts of Mao and his revisionist climate in China; totally ignorant of the mass killings. 

Carter pin.
Here is a nice campaign pin for Democrat Jimmy Carter and his VP candidate Walter Mondale. They were the “winning team” don’t you know.

They supported the “workers paradise” in Russia , though they officially deplored the military buildup.  During the 1970’s red was the color of Democrats.  Blue was the color of Republicans.  Go to a antique shop or go online and purchase a Reagan/Bush campaign pin.  

Read the articles in the 1972 Mechanics Illustrated magazines, and Men’s Adventure magazines of the 1960’s.  Do not use the Internet to check your facts.  The internet is all politically manipulated. The Internet is a blackboard that is continually being erased and rewritten.  Go to a old book store and read the articles and look at the advertisements yourself. Check for yourself.  Yes, there were exceptions.  However, for the vast bulk of the time during the 1970’s this was the case.)

Truthfully, up until the year 2000, it was never formally established what the colors would be, though it was clearly favored that Republicans were blue and Democrats were red; forcing then (famous) political commentator Rush Limbaugh to remark; “Has anyone else noted that the networks switched colors?”  

Thus, in 2000 for the first time, all the major news outlets agreed to use red for the Republican Party and blue for the Democratic Party.  A switching of the political colors.  I personally believe that this switch was mutually approved by both political parties, while it was initiated by the Democrat party for reasons unclear. 

Reagan Bush pins
Reagan-Bush campaign buttons. A nice Republican blue color. Too bad that the oligarchy and their media has decided to rewrite history.

My personal opinion is that the Democrat party embraced the current populist trends at the time; they adopted the New World Order (NWO).  

It is the overriding policy of what we call today “the globalist elite”. The color for this one-world-government was to be blue.  As such the EU adopted blue as their unifying color.  The color of the UN was light blue, and President Clinton (D) had all the Army insignia changed to match the baby blue color of the UN troops.  

It is only speculation on my part, but I sincerely believe that the adoption of the color blue for the Democrat party had more to do with a future agenda of a global nature than any localized nationalist policy platform.  The Democrats favor a global social world government.  There is nothing good or bad about it.  That is just the way it is.

Cigarette vending machine
Cigarette Vending Machine from the 1970’s and the 1980’s. Ah, back then you had the freedom to purchase cigarettes out of a vending machine. Ah, the good old days, when Americans were free.

From a web site titled “What do you miss about the 1980’s”;

“The 80s was a PC free culture for the most part. You can't have an open and honest discussion today because people will be more concerned about "how" their words will be misinterpreted vs. the content of what they are saying.”

- MAJ L. Nicholas Smith
“Saturday morning cartoons, Saturday afternoon cartoons, MTV with actual MUSIC, music with ACTUAL MUSIC, Bo Jackson, Wayne Gretzky, Hershel Walker, Empire Strikes Back, Return of the Jedi, Commando, Rambo, The A-Team, Air Wolf, Playing outside, free speech without the fear of being branded by some pussy who is offended by it, Yep pretty much to me, born in the mid 70's the 80's were the best decade ever.”

- SPC Andrew Griffin
“I miss the greatest president in my lifetime, Ronald Reagan, and the pride he instilled in America.”

- MSgt (Join to see)

Yes.  I too miss the ability to practice “free speech” and the Bill of Rights. I guess ol’ Bush and Obama pretty much ended all of that.  (Sigh.)

Ash tray from McDonalds.
Before the Democrats, led by Bill Clinton banned smoking, you could smoke everywhere in the Untied States. Here is a (once) very common disposable smoking ash tray from McDonalds.

Yes, the Progressive Democrat Liberals have pretty much fucked the nation all up.  (Don’t go PC on me.  They did actually FUCK it all up.) It’s not just me saying this from the point of view of an American, but from the point of view from someone in MAJestic.

Service to Self Demons

<rant>

Jesus-H-Christ. If you the reader are offended, then put this fucking manuscript down and walk away. The Democrats fucking strip-mined American culture. They made debauchery and looting of Americans a national pastime. (Not just Democrats, of course. There are many socialist-inspired politicians who became RINO Republicans so that they could have a comfortable life through lying and cheating their constituents.)

How in the heck can someone become a billionaire without hurting another in some way?

It’s not just Democrats, but many Republicans as well. So I will repeat the question. How, in a reality balanced upon individual thoughts that manifest into actions, can a person become a billionaire without negatively affecting others? How is it possible? How?

Ponder that profound statement for a second.

If they weren’t so busy trying to manipulate others, alter the lifestyle and time progression of others, fixated on carnal desires of sex, sloth, and the greed of money how could they possible accumulate wealth? The accumulation of wealth is not a given.  It is NOT an event that manifests for a handful of “lucky” people who happen to be at the “right place at the right time”.

Those are simplistic childish ideas and concepts.  They are rooted in a belief that the physical is all that there is.  It is one man (or woman) for themselves, and if they are aggressive enough, and have the right opportunities, and some skill in manipulation, they can take from others. They can take.  They can take, and take, and take.

If there is one thing that the reader can get from <my words of wisdom> is that the universe does not work that way.  Yes, you can alter your reality by thought. Yes, you can acquire wealth, and comfort and desirable relationships. Yet, everything comes at a cost.  To acquire a large volume of “stuff” will have a corresponding large “cost” elsewhere. Other people will be affected.

This is not politics. Do not be so naive that a socialist model is heavenly derived. It isn’t. In fact, it is a manipulative trick used by the skillful to fleece the ignorant. There are no easy answers and pristine solutions. Every decision, thought and action comes at a cost. Some people do not care what the costs are for their desires and their actions.  They only want the end results to manifest.

</rant>

Power corrupts
Billionaire Democrat Oprah Winfrey introduces a young starlet to Billionaire Democrat Harvey Weinstein. We all what happened that night, don’t we?

Indeed. Oh…my…The 1980’s were a time of expression and freedom. Those of us who lived through that time do remember what free speech was.

Ah “free speech”.  Don’t take it from me alone. Here’s some opinions from Reddit “What do you miss about the 1980s” we have these jewels…

“Kids being able to walk to the park without the cops being called. They also were immersed in social situations where things were scary, uncertain, and difficult allowing them to not have a nervous breakdown opening a bank account or saw a Halloween costume they didn't care for.”

- savemejebus0
“No cellphone, no problem.

It was nice to be able to leave a note at home with 'went to run some errands'. Whoever came home and saw that would have to wait for you to return. If the phone at home rang and they answered, they would take a message or the answering machine would.

You could leave, go do what you wanted and not have to explain yourself in the moment as to what you're actuality doing.

If you wanted a private conversation, you went to a payphone, especially one with the long cord so you could sit in your car and roll the window up.

It was bliss! Now you have your digital GPS tracking leash with you at all times, either volunteering everything you do on social media, replying to every request for your location and if you don't reply, you're chastised for it.

I miss the days of being able to just get lost.

Now your berated for 'turning your leash off'. Where were you, who were you with, why didn't you answer, what are you trying to hide, I'm not important enough to reply to, you could have been dead, had a car accident, kidnapped, cheating and so on.

You have to have lived in that time to understand it. If you didn't, you don't realize how bliss it was to be able to get lost on purpose. Turning off your phone is like ignoring stomach cancer.”

- Ennion

MTV actually played music videos.

It wasn’t political, and staffed with urban ghetto blacks. The same was true with the NFL.  They played football, and the networks didn’t run (what can best be described as) a negro version of a KKK rally during every single friggin’ game.

We had endured the horrific 1970’s where President Nixon (R) acted as a King.  We were very jaded by the resultant investigation of the wiretapping of phones.  Oh, how silly that looks today with 24-7 mass surveillance now, and the behavior of Eric Holder (DOJ) and Hillary Clinton.  We saw what happens when a good-honest man; President Carter (D) (who was ineffectual as a president) becomes president.

Ronald Reagan

We, like the rest of the nation, were ready for a real change, and we got it.  We lived during the presidency of Ronald Reagan (R). There will be many who have their own ideas about this time.  But I will tell it through the eyes that lived through that time.  Say what you will about “Ronald Ray-Gun” and the 1980’s, but the truth was that for me, it was a time of hope, and of adventure.

Ronald Ray-Gun

An enduring nick-name for the president during that time period.  And important, as we really understand now.  For not very well known is exactly how frighteningly close the world came to global thermonuclear war.  Historical revisionists seem to conveniently forgotten the dangers of that time.  

Thanks to a February 1990 report (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 533 previously classified "TOP SECRET UMBRA GAMMA WNINTEL NOFORN NOCONTRACT ORCON") published by the National Security Archive at George Washington University after a 12-year Freedom of Information Act battle.  The US and Soviets were dangerously close to going to war in November 1983, the bombshell report found, and the Cold War-era US national-security apparatus missed many warning signs. 

That 1983 "war scare" was spurred by a large-scale US military exercise in Eastern Europe called “Able Archer”.  It was because of this military operation that the Soviets apparently actually believed that it was part of allied preparation for a real war.  (In part due to the very nature of Ronald Reagan’s public comments to that effect.)  

The Soviet military mobilized in response.  

US-Soviet relations had definitely plunged in the early 1980s, but since then experts have debated how close the US and Soviets had come to the abyss during Able Archer.  

Read it here and be horrified; http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb533-The-Able-Archer-War-Scare-Declassified-PFIAB-Report-Released/#_ftn3 .

Of course, we know how how all this was avoided, and how the USA and Russia became friends again.  However, the reader must realize the real and stark truth; we are now living in an alternate time line spawned from that event.  

A time line, that switched in part, through significant extraterrestrial intervention by the <redacted>.  (More detailed information about alternative world lines are addressed later on in the blog.)

Yes. Ronald Reagan may have had this nickname, but the truth is that he turned his back on the neoconservatives. 

He fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, and when his administration was free of their evil influence (for the most part, though other neocons such as Orin Hatch continued to promote efforts to create global nuclear conflagration), and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. 

The history is clear; the military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers.

Everyone was optimistic. But you will not see that in any revisionist history books.

Ah, the rewriting of the past. Here’s El Rushbo on the rewriting of that decade by President Obama and his minions.

“President Obama micromanages the economy into the ground and tells the American people that our better days are behind us. He says the great days of America’s past were not really legitimate. They were built on phony policies, trickle-down economics from the Reagans. We stole resources from other nations around the world. Our superpower status was not deserved. We now must manage the decline. And I, Barack Hussein Obama, am the smartest guy in the world to manage the decline of the United States and its economy.

His replacement liberates the economy, unleashes the United States economy to the point in under a year it is growing at twice the rate it ever grew under Barack Obama. 

And yet we’re told Obama’s brilliant, he’s so smart, we can’t even stay in the same room with him. He’s so brilliant, we can’t keep up with the guy. He’s so brilliant, all we can do is bow at his feet and try not to be blinded by the light reflecting off him. Donald Trump is silly. He’s insane. He’s obsessed. His unfit. We need psychiatrists examining him. We need the 25th Amendment.”

The Iranians released the American embassy hostages, a large American “freedom” space station was going to be built.  Americans were returning to the Moon and then Mars(Plans later killed by President Obama (D). President Obama said that going to the Moon wasn’t worth it.  We were there already.  So we will go to Mars instead, he said.  Then he killed Mars exploration because it was too expensive, he said.  Then he goes around and gives $7 billion dollars to South Africa and $150 billion dollars to Iran. WTF? What world-line am I on?  Jesus… maybe it’s time to get off.)

Release of Hostages

Fifty-two American diplomats and citizens were held hostage for 444 days (November 4, 1979, to January 20, 1981), after a group of Iranian students, belonging to the Muslim Student Followers of the Imam's Line, who were supporting the Iranian Revolution, took over the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Space station Freedom

Space Station Freedom was a NASA project to construct a permanently manned Earth-orbiting space station in the 1980s. Although approved by then-president Ronald Reagan and announced in the 1984 State of the Union Address, Freedom was never constructed or completed as originally designed thanks to the efforts of Bill Clinton, and after several cutbacks, the project evolved into the International Space Station program.

1980’s Culture

Russia was tearing down the wall in Germany.  Companies began hiring again, and everyone was hiring everywhere.  MDMA was discovered, and the youth of the country learned to emote to each other. LSD was still being used, and everyone was questioning the roles that society fostered upon them.

Madonna had released her first of many albums, and she wasn’t such an aggressive asshole.   Pastels were popular and everyone was dancing to Wang Chung.

Michael Jackson was only a singer, and yet had to “Beat It”.

Tear Down this Wall.

" Tear down this wall! " was the challenge issued by United States President Ronald Reagan to Soviet Union leader Mikhail Gorbachev to destroy the Berlin Wall, in a speech at the Brandenburg Gate near the Berlin Wall on June 12, 1987, commemorating the 750th anniversary of Berlin.

MDMA

MDMA (3, 4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine) is an empathogenic drug of the phenethylamine and amphetamine classes of drugs. MDMA has become widely known as "ecstasy" (shortened to "E", "X", or "XTC"), usually referring to its street form, although this term may also include the presence of possible adulterants.

LSD

Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide (INN) and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed- and open-eye visuals, synesthesia, an altered sense of time and spiritual experiences, as well as for its key role in 1960s counterculture. It is used mainly as an entheogen, recreational drug, and as an agent in psychedelic therapy.  LSD is non-addictive, is not known to cause brain damage, and has extremely low toxicity relative to dose.  (Though the DOJ would beg to differ on this.)

Madonna

Madonna is an American singer-songwriter, actress, and businesswoman. She has been one of the most prominent cultural icons for over three decades.  As such, she has achieved an unprecedented level of power and control for a woman in the entertainment industry. She attained immense popularity by pushing the boundaries of lyrical content in mainstream popular music and imagery in her music videos, which became a fixture on MTV. Madonna is known for continuously reinventing both her music and image, and for retaining a standard of autonomy within the recording industry.

Pastel interior design

Pastel colored interior design, inspired by a retro art-deco movement that was popular at that time.

Wang Chung

Wang Chung are an English new wave musical group formed in 1980. The name Wang Chung means "yellow bell" in Mandarin Chinese, and is the first note in the Chinese classical music scale.  The group found their greatest success in the United States, with five Top 40 hits in the US, all charting between 1983 and 1987, including "Dance Hall Days" (No. 16 in the summer of 1984), "Everybody Have Fun Tonight" (No. 2 in 1986) and "Let's Go!" (No. 9 in 1987).  In fact, the reader should note that many stereo stores, and clothing stores at this time, played his music endlessly during this time period.

Beat It

"Beat It" is a song written and performed by American singer Michael Jackson from his sixth solo album, Thriller (1982). The song was produced by Quincy Jones together with Jackson. Following the successful chart performances of the Thriller singles "The Girl Is Mine" and "Billie Jean", "Beat It" was released on February 14, 1983 as the album's third single. The song is also notable for its famous video, which featured Jackson bringing two gangs together through the power of music and dance.

It was a magical time, a heady time of life and adventure.  As a result, we experienced both the good and bad that life had to offer us.

David Lee Roth
David Lee Roth (born October 10, 1954) is an American rock vocalist, musician, songwriter, actor, author, and former radio personality. In 2007, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Roth is best known as the original (1974–1985) and current (2006–present) lead singer of hard rock band Van Halen. He is also known as a successful solo artist, releasing numerous RIAA-certified Gold and Platinum albums.

Bad People

We were often taken advantage of (Many people saw us as weak and tried to capitalize on that weakness.) , and had many (close) encounters that were often quite ugly (This includes everything from robbery, manipulation, misuse, abuse and even violence.). But that is life. You just can’t hide away and expect happiness to come to you. You have to go out to it and get it.

For us, the 1980’s were an experience of life, lived as it were, through the eyes of young impressionable love. We saw both the good and the bad of life.  Not everyone who looks poor is poor.  Not everyone who looks rich is wealthy.  Not everyone who acts religious is spiritual, and you will find friends in the most unlikely places and enemies luring behind the kindest smiles.

Both the good and the bad confronts the traveler.  But most Americans that we met were good, and kind hearted.  But we did, actually, come across a number of exceptionally bad people.  That is always unavoidable.

“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. It’s so simple. You’ve gotta catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house, the ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s Pastorale, a letter scribbled on her office stationary that you carry around in your pocket because it smells like all the lilacs in Ohio.”

— Don Birnham (The Lost Weekend — Billy Wilder, 1945)

We needed to find work, and in the process, our van took us on many adventures.  We slept under the stars and hid in wide expansive parking lots. We worked at whatever jobs we could find.  Sometimes it was manual labor, while at other times, we cooked in the kitchen.

We did whatever it took.

We would travel as far as the van could go. Then broke down, out of gas and money, we would find work. Then live off the money. Then, after a month or two, we would go again. We were always on the move. We were always living life. Always grasping what came before us with an open heart. Though, often times the hearts of others lay closed to us…

I remember once…

...we hadn't eaten in 4 days. We had collected some change out of a pay phone, and bought a can of spam with it, and a loaf of day old bread. We were parked in a roadside rest area. And so we went to one of the BBQ grills sitting there next to a picnic table and made a fire and were cooking our spam on it.

When in the middle of it, a policeman came up to us. Apparently, a lady, driving a Buick, has seen us and called the police. The officer, then under her instruction, berated us for using the grills in the park. He told us that the grills were not to be used by us. But rather by people with families and children, and that they used charcoal, not sticks to make the fire... (You know) The whole time that he berated us, that old biddy watched on with a big smug smile on her face...

The policeman put out the fire and threw away our food. Then threatened us with jail unless we left...

Yes, I remember those days.

Fat, smug, bitch with a capital BITCH. She, were she still alive, would be a female social justice warrior trying to “protect” others by enforcing her ideas of perfection.

  • Never mind that she is overweight to the point of obesity.
  • Never mind that she is living off the money of others, as she herself is unemployed.
  • Never mind that her only accomplishment was written in her High School year book.

She tries to justify her existence though the control of others.  Especially those who, for one reason or the other, are unable to fight back.

Roadside grill
Roadside grill with unknown child playing nearby. This was the exact kind of grill that we (starving young kids) were using to cook our spam on. A policeman came over and told us that we can’t use wood in the grill because it was not designed for wood use. (That’s actually a lie.)

A life lived in fear is a life not lived

Everyone lives in fear.  Everyone, and I do mean EVERYONE, has warned us along the way to watch out for crazy people and to be weary of strangers, but I’ve found that to be largely unnecessary.

They were just warning us out of their own fears of the unknown.

Most of the people who threatened us were well-established, locals who saw us as a threat to their calm and stable way of life.  While we did meet some very dangerous people on the road, we were (typically) able to avoid them because, I think, we were just far too innocent and their hearts weren’t so cold as to corrupt the good that shined through our hearts.

Of course, we did meet some crazy and even evil people.  That is what happens when you step outside the walls of your safe enclave.  However, we were too kind, and too nice for anyone to really do anything bad to us.  But there were some close calls.  Truthfully, we found an equal proportion of bad people scattered about the population.

Some were obvious, and behaved stereotypically bad.  While others looked like the pinnacle of respectability; and held important positions in the church, society and government.  Yet, they were evil incarnate.

Yes, and we did meet some very bad people on the road.  There were times when we could have been hurt dangerously, but we did not permit that to happen.  When a person ventures out, it is natural to experience both the good and the bad in people.

Yes, we had SOME bad experiences.  You experience life when you travel; both the good and the bad.  But, most of our experiences were positive.

The vast, VAST, majorities of people in this country are good and were willing to help out however they could. Whether it’s by buying a meal or by letting you sleep in their house or at their business, people are more than willing to accommodate you in any way they can when they see you struggling. I figured this would be the case, but the extent is surprising to me, nonetheless. Americans are good people.  Most have kind hearts.  They are kind and understanding for the most part.

The only times that I’ve seen someone who wanted to help me out but couldn’t are when an individual has to abide by a chain of command. This includes almost all government services, and hierarchical organizations.

Sometimes it was a social service agency, that wouldn’t accept people without children, at other times it was a Church that wouldn’t help us (though, the woman behind the desk gave us $40 out of her own wallet). It was a lady at a gas station who wanted to let us sleep out behind their business but the company wouldn’t allow it. Or, a stranger who put an envelope on our front window contained $40 with the words ‘God bless you’.   These people were the angels that held our hands along the way.  These people did so in secret and told no one what they did.  These are the “real” Christians who tried to make a good and positive difference in our lives, even though they knew nothing at all about us.

In short, people who are free to help, will. While those who are forbidden from helping still wish they could but are unable to.

There are “Christians” and then there are Christians.  

Some are good and some not so.  We found that Baptists and Methodists were very helpful.  So were Catholics.  Lutherans and 7th Day Adventists; not so much.  

In general; charismatic Christian organizations were the most welcoming.  With Assemblies of God being, by and large, the most accepting.  

(Now, in the year 2016, the political landscape has changed substantially.  President Obama openly states that Islam has been the very fabric of American culture.  

What complete nonsense!  

We traveled the entire country and never, ever saw a mosque or met someone of the Islamic faith.  

Those that one sees today are fresh arrivals, usually less than ten years as a citizen.  At that time, the vast bulk of religions in the USA were of Christian denomination.  Do not let the media rewrite history. I say again; Do not let the media rewrite history.)

Ability

While we traveled about, we led a dangerous life in a rather “care free” manner. As such, we would find ourselves presented with “luck”.

Lucky 1

Luck presented itself to us.  Many times during our adventures were were “lucky” to find money.  Whether it was a $100 bill that would blow in front of our path, or a $20 bill that we would find under a rock.  We were lucky.

Lucky 2

We became “lucky” to get free help.  Once, our tire blew out in front of a house on a residential street.  The woman came out of her house and gave us five (nearly new) tires that she had sitting in her garage.  So much luck!

Lucky 3

For instance, I once was playing a game of backgammon.  During the game, people noticed that no matter when I rolled the dice, they would always come up “snake eyes” (two ones).  Therefore, they asked me to try to see how many times I could roll “snake eyes”.  I said “what the heck”, and tried.  Honest to God, I rolled 76 “snake eyes” in a row.  This is a statistical improbability.

However, the reader should be made aware, that (even though I could not control my “off-world” training) I could alter my world-lines to provide me benefit.  Somehow, in a way that I cannot vocalize, I was able to perform this “impossible” feat.

I simply moved my apparent world-line into the realm of one that provided auspicious favor to my cause. Perhaps it was the implants from the Navy… (More about this later…)

Or, maybe it was just luck.

Perhaps it was just my Faith…

This little event that I have just related is absolutely true.  The reader needs to accept it as truth and study just HOW it was possible.

Was it because there was an “angel” looking over me?  Maybe helping me along and providing little “guideposts” to tell me not to worry?

Was it simply because we had “faith”, and the faith altered our thoughts that manifested into the physical? How about that?

Or was it, as I will explain later on, the fact that the implants provided me with world-line dimensional switching ability. Since I was not yet “calibrated” (that would not happen <redacted> at China Lake), there wasn’t any control over how the world-lines would change.  They were like a sea that I was floating upon, and depending on my thought process at the moment, I slid into alternative realities very easily and simply.

Ponder these points. Some “pieces of the puzzle” will start to fall into place later on in the narrative.

Faith

“Faith is taking the first step even when you don't see the whole staircase.”

-Martin Luther King, Jr.

We acted on faith. We did everything on faith; that someday, somehow, everything would work out. Faith; that we would get food, showers, work, friends, and a hot meal. Faith; that there was a purpose to our wandering, and that our mutual love had direction. We did this even though, to others, we appeared aimless and without direction. And in doing, on this faith we often received random blessings.

Faith and belief are aspects of thought.  Thought manifests reality.

Lucky 4

While hiking in the deserts of Arizona, we found a $5 bill under a stone.  The money came to us exactly when we needed it.  Often we would get just what we needed, and it was always unexpected.

Lucky 5

Once, while we were driving in the middle of the hot Texas sun, we discovered that we were getting low on gasoline.  It was a serious situation.  As we drove on, we just could not see any gas stations at all.  The fact was that we were out of gas and only had $1.25 on us.  We were just about to run out of gas and be stranded in the middle of nowhere, when we finally saw a gas station.  So, in the middle of the desert, we pulled up to the only gas station for miles.

I got out, and with the precious handful of change in my hand, I walked over to the gas pump.  I gingerly unhooked the hose and started to put the precious fuel into the tank.  I knew that I only had what amounted to as spare change.  All of what we had was going to go towards this gas.  For us, literally every penny counted.

As I put the nozzle into the tank, and depressed the lever on the nozzle, there was a slight click.  Suddenly and to my astonishment, the gas hose exploded! Gasoline squirted about everywhere.  It poured out like a river.  This was no small water hose; this was a full fire-hose explosion of gas.  It sprayed everywhere.  It was like a long thrashing snake that spewed out a torrent of fuel.  The van and I were both flooded with gasoline. Gasoline flew out of the hose like a vomiting snake.  It was out of control and lashed and flayed about wildly.

The gas station attendant was horrified! He quickly ran to the master switch and turned off the pump.  But the damage was done.  I was completely soaked with highly flammable gasoline.  He ran up to me and quickly moved me to the side of the station.  He turned on the water hose there and quickly hosed off with water.

What did he do? What could he do?  He and the station manager were terribly apologetic and upset.  They didn’t know what to do.  Any other person might sue them.  Out of the kindness of his heart, he gave me a free full tank of gas. He gave it to me and helped me clean up.  I took a shower behind the station and we continued on our way.

One horrible event resulted in blessings beyond expectation.  We needed a full tank of gasoline, but only had enough money for a small cupful.  On faith, we were given just what we needed, exactly when we needed it. Sometimes what looks like a disaster is really a blessing in disguise.

Lucky 6

Yes. We had our trials. We once had a grey field mouse that move inside and lived with us.  It would perform amazing acrobatics to get at the food that we tried to put out of harm’s way. We tried everything we could think of to get rid of it.  All to no avail. We even dismantled all the woodwork on the inside (at a state forest somewhere in Georgia), and all that happened was that it just hunkered down inside of some of our clothes.

Ha! One day, while we were doing our laundry, a stray alley cat visited our van. It climbed in, rooted around, and left carrying that pesky mouse in it’s jaws. Now, why didn’t we think of a cat earlier?

At other times, our trials related to the weather. It was either too hot, too cold, too wet, or too humid. The reader should recognize that once the wood paneling and insulation was ripped out of the van, we were essentially living in a metal box.

Cold became frigid cold. Hot became torturous hot. Rain was impossible, as leaks started to form in the roof edging. We had to erect a tent on the inside of the van to keep the rainwater off of our food supplies and our bed. Nearing the end of our “tour”, we had become masters of the “jury rig”.

You know what?

We learned a lot about life. And, instead of comparing yourself to others, you need to stop. Just stop thinking about other people and what they think about you. You need to think about you, and the individual path that YOU are on.  You, and everyone else in the world, needs to stop judging themselves by the standards set by media, government, religion, social groups, and instead think of only judging ourselves.

Others are richer.
There will always be those who are richer or more prosperous. There is no use judging others.

Stop judging others.

Everyone has their own lives.  What we see is the shadows of their existence as it pertains to our reality.  So we need not get too worked up about how they live their lives.

When I carry on and rant about some SWJ or some corrupt individual in power, it is not because I am judging them in a comparative manner. I am relating my emotions related to that individual. 

Most people make judgments comparatively. That is to say; “If it were me, I would not do what they did…” 

That is different than getting angry with a person because he stole all of your grandmother’s life savings. The reader should understand that there are different ways of making judgments. These ways differ in thought intention. Unless you can control your thoughts, you will never be able to control your life.

How other people live their lives are not our business.

Though it is if it directly affects us. Indeed, there are many kinds of people on this planet, and many ways to live your life. Other people live other lives. Some have harsher lives, and some have easier lives.  Some have terrible lives, but they look like their lives are easy and nice.  Others have what appear to be absolutely horrid lives, and yet they are fine and happy.  You cannot make a comparison at all.

A person, and their true situation, is NEVER obvious to the public.

Talking about work.
Executioner talks about his work. Stop comparing ourselves to others. We are not in a race to see who accumulates more stuff.

Everyone on this planet is living a complex life that has invisible chains and entanglements far in excess than what we alone can bear.

It might look like they are doing well.  It might appear that they have a nice job, and a new car, and a beautiful wife.  It might appear that they are very successful.  But the amount of money that a person has is not a measure of success.  The appearance that a person has, or the clothes they wear are also not a sign of success.  They are only characteristics that provide the illusion of success.

Life can end quickly
Life can end quickly. Pay attention to how you run your life.

Don’t judge them because they look rich.  Don’t judge them because they seem poor.  Don’t judge them because they seem promiscuous, or engage in vices.  It’s no one’s business but theirs.

We must start to live our own lives.  Not vicariously through the lives of others.

You’ve got to accept yourself; who you are and what you are.

It does not matter what has happened in your past.  You are not what you have done or experienced.  You are not what is valued by the employer who hired you.  Your value is not your job. Your value is determined by only one person, and that is yourself.  You have to accept it, with all the good and bad that exist inside you.

You’ve got wake up at five in the morning, brew some deep black coffee, and listen to the birds singing their sweet song in the glowing darkness of the new dawn. You’ve got to sit next to the cute girl at the train station who’s reading your favorite book and start a conversation with her.

You’ve got to go to that local attraction that you’ve been meaning to visit but never got the chance to see.  You’ve got to start doing things, and stop thinking about them.  You’ve got to come home after a bad day and burn your skin from a shower until it is lobster red. Then cool down with a quick cool blast.  Then you’ve got to wash all your sheets until they smell of lemon detergent you bought for four dollars at the local grocery store.  You’ve got to play with the local dogs and cats in the neighborhood and give them a treat or two.

You’ve got to live life.

Go to that Attraction
I lived in Boston for almost a decade and never visited Salem. It’s a great historical place, but I just felt that I could go out and visit it some other time later on. Instead, I just raked my leaves. I just would get two cords of wood for the fireplace delivered by pickup truck. I would go about my daily routine and eat at the local diner. I did not go out and see what was available right in front of me. 

I wasted an opportunity.

Make it a point to better the world around you.  Smile more.  Complement people more.  Praise people, and complement a stranger that you like their hair or dress.  Be helpful.  Be nice.  Be kind.  You have this physical life to live; live it well.

Live your life well.

“…She calls me Raymond, and that’s all right with me.”

-Brett Eldredge, “She calls me Raymond”.

You, yes you, have got to stop taking everything so goddam personally. You are not the moon kissing the black-black sky.  You are not some “lone wolf” who is without a pack to travel with.  We are all interconnected.  We all need each other.

You’ve got to compliment someone.  You’ve got to help the old lady with her laundry at the laundry-mat.  You have to talk to people at art fairs and tell them that their eyes remind you of green swimming pools in mid-July.

Am I making my point?

You have got to complement someone.  Tell the girl that she looks good in that dress, whether she does or not.  You have to tell that person who has a smile that their smile just made your day.  You’ve got to help others; praise others; and do something with your life.

You’ve got to stop letting yourself get upset about things that won’t matter in two years.

You’ve got to sleep in on Saturday mornings and wake yourself up early on Sunday. You’ve got to stop worrying about what you’re going to tell her when she finds out. You’ve got to stop over thinking why he stopped caring about you over six months ago. You’ve got to stop asking everyone for their opinions.  You have to stop trying to control things…

You have got to be you.  Be the best you that you can be, and forget what everyone else thinks.

You’ve got to love yourself.  You have to live your destiny.  You have to do what you need to do, and not what other people thing you ought to do.  You must follow your heart and live life like it was the most precious thing in the world.  You must enjoy life, embrace life, grab life with both hands and gulp the golden nectar down your throat in sloppy splashes of foam.  Then wipe your face off with both hands and smile a big toothy smile.

Anything less is a disservice.

“They stood at the top to a little rise.

"Feel," said Driscoll, his hands and arms out loosely, "Remember how you used to run when you were it kid, and how the wind felt, Like feathers on your arms, You ran and thought any minute you'd fly, but you never quite did."

The men stood remembering, there was a smell of pollen and new rain drying upon a million grass blades.

Driscoll gave a little run. "Feel it, by God, the wind. You know, we never have really flown by ourselves. We have to sit inside tons of metal, away from flying, really. We've never flown like birds fly, to themselves, Wouldn't it be nice to, put your arms out like this —" He extended his arms, "And run." He ran ahead of them, laughing out his idiocy. "And fly!" he cried.

He flew.”

-Here there be Tygers
Full reprint of this fine Ray Bradbury story.

This was a great time for me and for my wife.  It was a great and important time.   We (I was married at the time) did it without money, often living way below the poverty line.  Many times, we lived without any money.

We would walk together in the malls of the country.   (The malls were commonplace at that time.  It seemed that every town possessed a mall.)  Inside the malls were an ever-changing smorgasbord of people.  Different people, different faces, but they were all the same.

Everywhere we went, we were surrounded by all the things that we couldn’t afford, and really didn’t need. We would walk the halls of lavish extravagance; the things that glittered and beckoned to us.  But, what we could not afford.

All we had was each other.  We had love.  We had food, and we slept in the van. Our needs and costs were low. This was our “Great Adventure”.

This period of time was an important one.  For me to accept the “training” that would occur later in NAS China Lake, I had to change my viewpoints on many things.  This meant that I had to learn new things and be exposed to different ways of thinking and different cultures.  I had to change in ways that were not obvious.  

This was intentional and it was absolutely mandated by our extraterrestrial handlers.

The basic choices in life

“Sometimes the only pay off for having any faith,

Is when it's tested again and again every day,”

-“Immortals” by the music group “Fall Out Boy”.

We discovered that life was a choice between two fundamental things.  You could either have true freedom, or you could have security.  It was always this.  It was always these two divergent choices.  You could work all the time and get money to buy what you don’t really need, but have a reasonable level of comfort.  Or you could have freedom to do what you want, but not really able to do anything that costs money.

Let’s face it; there is a price on everything in the USA.

Out of necessity, we traveled at will. We walked and explored many places that the average worker saved up months to be able to visit. We went everywhere in the USA (on the meandering path that continuously pointed us to California). We saw ocean beaches, mountaintops, national forests, urban cities, and long forgotten historical monuments. We ate at local diners, and swam at (long forgotten) local water holes. We explored. We read a lot. We learned how to play musical instruments. We learned how to paint, and just used the time to meditate and pray. It was a heady time for sure.

Local Diners
I have always enjoyed eating a diner.  I loved the “Airstream” shape and the shiny aluminum panels. It wasn’t until I moved to Massachusetts that I really began to appreciate them.  In fact, I would suppose that most of the few remaining diners could be found in the Northeast (United States) in the “New England” states. 

Now the food is basic Americana, of which you would see omelets, meatloaf, and hamburgers. What is so great is the “feeling” when you eat there.  We are so accustomed in eating “fast food” that we have forgotten the “dining experience”.  

Instead of a (Starbucks-style) paper coffee cup, you get a good solid (bang on the tabletop) coffee mug.  Instead of flimsy (McDonald-style) flatware, you get solid metal silverware of substance and utility.  Regarding this point, please read this interesting article found here; https://flavourjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13411-015-0036-y , which states…

“We report a study conducted in a realistic dining environment, in which two groups of diners were served the same three-course meal. The presentation of the starter (centred vs. offset plating), the type of cutlery used for the main course, and the shape and colour of the plate on which that dessert was served were varied.

The results revealed that the weight and type of the cutlery exerted a significant impact on how artistically plated the main course was rated as being, how much the diners liked the food, and how much they would have been willing to pay for it. The change in the shape and colour of the plate also affected the diners’ liking for the dessert.”

-Cutlery matters: heavy cutlery enhances diners’ enjoyment of the food served in a realistic dining environment

Local Water Holes
Here are some resources to get the reader started on this adventure; http://www.newyorkupstate.com/outdoors/2015/05/best_swimming_holes_in_upstate_new_york_ny_hidden.html and http://www.kcra.com/article/8-norcal-swimming-holes-you-need-to-check-out-this-summer/6347668 and http://www.onlyinyourstate.com/massachusetts/swimming-holes-ma/ and http://www.newenglandwaterfalls.com/swimmingholes.php . Enjoy!
“If we look at our world we are intellectually, technologically vastly overdeveloped with very primitive emotions, and that’s why the world is at risk.”

-Rick Doblin (Neurons to Nirvana)

Was it a waste of our time? (My father certainly thought so.) Should I have better put the time to develop a career? (Like my university classmates? They were all working for big companies like IBM. And, at the time of this writing, are still there! Never laid off.  Image that!) Should we have spent the time to save for a house, and then get a lawnmower, and joined a local church? (In other words, get “roots” and “raise a family”.) Was traveling alone together, and experiencing life as we did worthwhile?

YES. Yes, it was worthwhile. Absolutely!

Later on in my writings, I discuss in detail the feelings I have about my entire involvement in this program.  I do have many feelings and emotions.  They are complex ones.  However, the memories that I treasure the most were those where I was poor, with nothing except my wife by my side.

I cannot show a nice mansion or great sports car to the reader.  I cannot justify my lack of wealth and material comforts, but I can tell the reader that my life was enriched during this period.  I can say that it was enriched in ways that I cannot vocalize upon.  I can say that I was made a better, more caring and more understanding person because of those experiences.

However, this being stated, aside from the physical manifestation that I experienced, the reader must understand that I HAD to experience “American Life” in a typical fashion for that period of time.  That was the ONLY way that I could be an effective “Dimensional Anchor”.  I know that the reader (at this stage in the post and blog manuscript) has no idea what I am referring to, however what I experienced, and how I reacted to it, was an important part of my role in MAJestic.

“One of the bittersweet things about growing old is realizing how mistaken you were when you were young. As a young political leftist, I saw the left as the voice of the common man. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

-29JAN18 5:21PM Thomas Sowell

Social Media

“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

-“Time Enough For Love”, by Robert A Heinlein

When I grew up there wasn’t any kind of social media.  None.  There was no Facebook, QQ, Snapchat, or anything like that.  There were no “mobile applications” because there were no mobile phones.  Our entertainment was limited to friends, movies, outdoor activities, and television.  No one had a cell phone, a PDA, or laptop.  Software games were simplistic pixilated arcade machines that resided in movie theater lobbies or game rooms.  For fun, if we were alone; we watched television.  If we were with friends, we would participate in some kind of outdoor activity.

However, all of this has since changed.

Since the late 1990’s social media has hit America with a great ferocity.  This is fine, and has it’s benefits, but one of the draw backs is that a person who has always lived in a world where social media dominates the culture cannot understand what it was like before social media existed.  For them, it is very difficult to understand why people acted and behaved as we all did in the 1980’s and 1990’s.

When I was in my 20’s we did something that was known as “hanging out”.  Rather than stay inside the house and watch television, or go to a bar, we would just go “hang out”.  This may or may not have included drinking.  It may or may not included drug use.  It may or may not included doing a sport or outside activity.  It basically involved being with friends together.

Examples of this (seemingly or not) boring activity can be seen in the movie “Dazed and Confused”, or in the music video “First Kiss” by Kid Rock.  Much of that time was involved in cruising the streets in a car of pickup. Often we were in some sort of inebriated state.

Truthfully, the best movie ever made regarding what it was like in my high school, during my Senior year was the movie “Dazed and Confused”.  While it took place in the upper great lakes region, I can affirm that it adequately and truthfully represented what my final year in high school was like in Western Pennsylvania.  We kids…well, we all “hung out”.

Sadly, I really don’t see that happening any more.

Instead, I see people glued to their smart phone, and playing games… even when they walk!  I can go to a restaurant, and the entire table is playing on their phones and no one is talking.  What the hell is going on?

Chillin
My generation worked and spent the money on our cars. I had a orange GTO and crused the streets in it with my stoner friends. LOL.

Heck, back in those days (before I got married) and well before I entered the US Navy, life was all about hanging out, being with friends, and “chillin’”. Some of the iconic scenes in the movie were so atypical that a failure to reproduce them here would be a great disservice to the reader.

Ah…

But I digress. Social structure back in my generation was quite different than what it is today.  We had friends and spent time with them.  Instead of going out to Starbucks any paying $10 for a caramel latte, and then sit down and use the WiFi to check our Facebook account, we would do something quite different.  Indeed, we would spend the $10 on a keg of beer, or maybe two, and a shit load of “munchies” (food) and enough gas to drive to California and back.  (Yeah. Prices were much cheaper then.)

Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris
Bruce Lee and Chuck Norris hanging out. Ah, the good old days.

Social reengineering did not occur with the ferocity that you see today.  No one talked about “Niggers” or “White Privilege”.  We just didn’t.  At least not in my circles, we didn’t.

Most of that racist bullshit that you read in the media is just made up bullshit.

Instead we talked about television shows, movies, and what we liked or didn’t like about them. We would discuss Charles Bronson (He grew up in Butler, Pennsylvania which was only a half an hour drive from my High School house. ) getting “justice”.  We would talk about Clint Eastwood and his many male-themed movies.

We also didn’t have so much taken out of our paychecks as you kids do today. We had money to spend, and time to enjoy life. We did not need to live in our parent’s basement, and live off them. We worked, even at minimum wage, and could afford our own place and our own car. My generation worked.  We earned our place in society.  We paid for our house by saving up for it.  We paid for our car by saving up for it. When we were not working, we relaxed.

So what did we do?  Why, we “hung out” and “chilled”.

Hanging out 1
Vincent Price and Alice Cooper Hanging out.

I ask the reader; how about testing your knowledge regarding the time period that I am referring to.  Do you know how to develop the film that you took with a 35mm camera?  Have you ever been to a “roller rink”, a “drive-in”, a stainless-steel “diner”,  or visited an automat, watched the “evening night news” (this was before the 24-7 all-news networks)?  Do you remember a twenty-five cent cup of coffee? Or, don’t you care, as nothing is better than smashing your piggy bank to buy a cup of Starbucks commercialized beverage?

Oh, and by the way…

“Real” coffee drinkers don’t drink corporate coffee.

Please keep that in mind.

Roller Rink

Having a roller-skating birthday party became something of a rite of passage for American children in the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Roller rinks in the United States underwent significant changes in the 1970s. New plastics led to improved skate wheels—ones providing a smoother, quieter ride—and easier-to-maintain skate floors.  

The Disco craze from popular 1970s culture led to another increase in the popularity of roller rinks—or roller discos, as some became. 

Gone were the staid lighting and old-fashioned organ music as a generally older clientele were replaced by adolescents and twenty-something’s skating under mirror balls and special lights to disco beats. 

The end of the Disco Era and the advent of inline roller skates hit the roller rink industry hard, with many rinks closing.

Drive In Theater 

A drive-in theater is a form of cinema structure consisting of a large outdoor movie screen, a projection booth, a concession stand and a large parking area for automobiles. 

Within this enclosed area, customers can view movies from the privacy and comfort of their cars.  All teenagers from my generation went to drive-ins on Friday and Saturday nights.  

Contrary to popular contemporaneous conventions, we never stayed home and watched television marathons, or surfed the Internet.

A Diner

A diner is a prefabricated fast food restaurant building characteristic of American life, especially in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, and in other areas of the Northeastern United States, as well as in the Midwest, although examples can be found throughout the United States, Canada, and parts of Western Europe.

Diners are characterized by offering a wide range of foods, mostly American, a distinct exterior structure, a casual atmosphere, a counter, and late operating hours. 

"Classic American Diners" are often characterized by an exterior layer of stainless steel—a feature unique to diner architecture. Diners share culture with drive ins, and car culture with hot rods and muscle cars.

Diners frequently stay open 24 hours a day, especially in cities, and were once America's most widespread 24-hour public establishments, making them an essential part of urban culture, alongside bars and nightclubs; these two segments of nighttime urban culture often find themselves intertwined, as many diners get a good deal of late-night business from persons departing drinking establishments.

Many diners were also historically placed near factories which operated 24 hours a day, with night shift workers providing a key part of the customer base.  

Two Sterling Streamliners remain in operation: the Salem Diner at its original location in Salem, Massachusetts and the Modern Diner in Pawtucket, Rhode Island. I urge the reader to visit a diner. They are still one of my “little” pleasures.

Coffee

Up until 1976, coffee was one of the cheapest food items that Americans could buy.  But sometime in the mid seventies, the producers discovered that they could raise the prices of coffee, and that Americans would pay.  At that time I worked as a stock clerk in a supermarket, and well remember the price increasing.  

First it increased 25%, then another 25%, then doubled.  Then doubled again.  Americans continued to pay the outrageous prices, because by that time, Americans were addicted to coffee. 

Coffee was a staple of the American culture.  

Every household had a coffee pot, that sat on the stove and was on all day.  Much later, sometime in the 1990’s Starbucks found out just how far one could push the American love of coffee.  They created a “coffee lovers” environment, and charged outrageous sums of money for what was nothing more than boiled beans. (Image how much a cup of boiled peas or boiled lima beans would cost. – The actual and real value of the cup of coffee you drink.) 

You, my dear readers, are all being taken for a nice long ride by service-to-self individuals and the companies that they surround themselves with.

Indeed, life has changed, and the differences are both subtle and clamorous. This is important for the reader to understand.  When I was involved in the MAJestic program, there wasn’t much of an Internet presence.  If you wanted to learn about extraterrestrials or conspiracies, you read the local newspaper, went to the local library, or watched television.

While most people had heard of ET, and UFO’s, their exposure to them was much more difficult to experience.  Today, with social media and google-style search engines it is effortless.  But, when I was involved in the program, very few people took the kind of activities that I was involved in seriously.  For them, the United States would have never been involved in that kind of activity.

Glass piggy bank
Glass Piggy Bank. I never did need to break it. It was filled with mostly small change. It was easy enough to empty if you just shook it hard enough. In those days, even well into the 1980’s, a dollar could by you’re a Whopper at Burger King. In fact, I well remember paying a $1 for a Whopper in 2001! (Though that was during a period of “burger wars”.)

We believed in the United States government because we were uninformed, gullible, and saw no need not to.  In those days, it was still possible to become a middle class statistic without obtaining a college education.  (Indeed the most ridiculous concept in the old 1960’s cartoon “The Jetsons” was the concept that a factory worker could support a middle class lifestyle for a family of four.)

Bagging Station
Grocery stores used paper bags. When I wasn’t working in the coalmines, I was a “box boy” at the local supermarket. I would stand there, in my apron and bow tie, at the end of the counter filling the customer bags with their groceries.

What was it like?  It was like THIS.

Work was everywhere, and the amount of government intrusion in one’s lives was minuscule compared to what is present today.  We believed that the United States was good, righteous and just.  (Even after the “Watergate” fiasco.)

We believed that the media would report the truth.  (Bwahhhh ha ha ha ha ha…)

We believed that those we voted into office would represent us.  (Gosh,…I am now lying on the ground, rolling, and laughing my ass off!!!)

We believed that our tax monies went to “just” purposes.  (Oh, stop…stop! This is just too rich!)

That was what we believed! As strange and as unlikely as it might sound today.

Stop buying into the lie that your vote matters. 

Your vote doesn’t elect a president. Despite the fact that there are 218 million eligible voters in this country (only half of whom actually vote), it is the electoral college, made up of 538 individuals handpicked by the candidates’ respective parties, that actually selects the next president. 

The only thing you’re accomplishing by taking part in the “reassurance ritual” of voting is sustaining the illusion that we have a democratic republic. 

What we have is a dictatorship, or as political scientists Martin Gilens and Benjamin Page more accurately term it, we are suffering from an “economic élite domination.”

We were very simplistic.

In every study of events prior to, say the year 2000, one must take into account that communication, activities and behaviors were fundamentally different than they are today.  That difference should be recognized and applauded.  Because (as the reader should be well aware by now) we are all connected in a quantum sense.  Group thought, amplified by social media, directs our behaviors whether we want to recognize it or not.

That being stated, I enjoy social media as much as the next guy.  Tumblr, QQ, WeiXin and Pinterest are my favorites, while fffound comes in a close number three. (Update fffound shut down a few years ago.)

“…a darkened auditorium with 264 silent people in the seats. on the stage, me, sitting on a stool, lit by a spotlight, the only light in the theatre. I hold up a photo of my cat, 10 people applaud, two or three hold up photocopies of the same photo, the rest do nothing, watching, waiting…

Meanwhile a lone masked person in the back heckles me and throws popcorn at the stage.”

-Unknown

I personally love Tumblr, as the quality of the pictures that you can find is outstanding.  It is also a great site to find porn.

The problem with this is that you don’t want to see porn all the time, 24-7.

Yet, if you find a porn blog on Tumblr that you like, you will bookmark it and get on it’s feed.  As a result it will “pollute” your normal and regular feed.  You will be like other Tumblr users, who when using their computer in public or at work would whisper under their breath “Please don’t be porn.  Please don’t be porn.” when checking their Tumblr feed. LOL.

You see, Americans have to pretend that they don’t like porn. We have to pretend that we are disgusted by looking at nude people. Yet the opposite is true. All men enjoy porn. At least soft-porn. Hard core stuff can get too ugly. And, that is the way it is, and no quasi-religious or SJW revisionist is going to erase that fact. Go explore the rest of the world. The rest of the world doesn’t really care. They DON’T CARE.

Anyways…

Americans have to be careful on how they express themselves on social media. The FBI, CIA, NSA and other government agencies are investing in and relying on corporate surveillance technologies. These technologies can mine constitutionally-protected speech on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

It is done (supposedly) in order to identify potential extremists and to predict who might engage in future acts of anti-government behavior.

For instance, a decorated Marine, 26-year-old Brandon Raub was targeted by the Secret Service because of his Facebook posts.  As such, he was [1] interrogated by government agents about his views on government corruption, [2] arrested with no warning, [3] labeled mentally ill for subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views about the government, [4] detained against his will in a psych ward for having “dangerous” opinions, and [5] isolated from his family, friends and attorneys.

Reality sinks in…

“It was at a time when I didn’t seem to have much future.

I had no job and no money for the rent. I was living in the Hollywood Studio Club for Girls. I told them I’d get the rent somehow. So I phoned up Tom Kelley, and he took these two colour shots—one sitting up, the other lying down. …I earned the fifty dollars that I needed…

You’ll do it when you get hungry enough. ”

-Mona (Marylin) Monroe

But all adventures must end.

Or rather, take on a new dimension. As it was, we moved out of the van, and labored to become prosperous. In so doing, we experienced corporate life, and the gold chains that come with it.

Corporate life in the 1980’s through into the new century was a life of beige and light grey cubicles.  It was a fluorescent illuminated existence that combined the worst elements of greed with the stupefying aspects of social group behaviors.  The 1980’s while employed was much akin to dull grey cubicle farms, the worst of corporate life, and consumerism.

I will not dwell on that period too much. For me, it was a dull void. Scant vacations, great salary, but little to show for it except for the shiny babbles advertised on TV.

Gold Chains

There are many things that Americans haven’t a clue about.  One is how the American gold market is rigged in the favor of those who sell gold.  That should be no surprise, but it was for me. 

As it turns out, if you go to Hong Kong, or Dubai, and you buy a gold ring it is 100% gold.  It is the real deal.  

However, if you buy gold in the United States, it is 14 caret, or 7 caret, or “white” gold.  It is NOT gold.  

That's right. It is NOT gold. It is an alloy of gold (to make it “better”).  What are these names?  They are names for gold alloys.  Sure, what is the issue you may ask.  The issue is that in other nations when you buy 100 grams of gold it is all gold, but in the USA when you buy 100 grams of gold it is an alloy of only a small percentage of gold.  Often very low; maybe as low as 5%.  

So for a Dubai purchaser, 100 grams of gold is 100 grams of gold.  But, an American who buys 100 grams of gold only gets 5 grams.  This was a big shock to me, and I discovered it when trying to convert some of my gold rings that I had purchased in the USA to the equivalent (new style) in China.  Yikes!

Consumerism

As Chris Hedges writes in Empire of Illusion: “Corporations are ubiquitous parts of our lives, and those that own and run them want them to remain that way. 

We eat corporate food. 

We buy corporate clothes. 

We drive in corporate cars. 

We buy our fuel from corporations. 

We borrow from, invest our retirement savings with, and take our college loans with corporations and corporate banks. 

We are entertained, informed, and bombarded with advertisements by corporations. 

Many of us work for corporations. 

There are few aspects of life left that have not been taken over by corporations, from mail delivery to public utilities to our for-profit health-care system. These corporations have no loyalty to the country or workers. Our impoverishment feeds their profits. And profits, for corporations, are all that count.”

Scant Vacations

OK, I am going to get off in a tangent.  (What is this, the sixth tangent off this post? Jeeze!) Sorry folks, but this is important.

OK. The fact is this. If you are an American, you get a pitiful amount of vacation time. While “officially” most Americans are entitled to a minimum of two weeks vacations at “most” companies, it only applies to full-time employees who have worked at least five years.

However, most Americans typically don’t work at a company for more than five years.  In fact, for all the positions that I held as a “white collar” engineer and manager, I typically was only given one-week vacation.  In addition, often WHEN I was permitted to take this was mandated during either the Christmas holiday or during the mid-summer plant shutdown. Here’s some great articles and quotes on this…

“Let's be blunt: If you like to take lots of vacation, the United States is not the place to work. Besides a handful of national holidays, the typical American worker bee gets two or three precious weeks off out of a whole year to relax and see the world -- much, much, MUCH less than what people in many other countries receive."

And even that amount of vacation often comes with strings attached.

Some U.S. companies don’t like employees taking off more than one week at a time. Others expect them to be on call or check their e-mail even when they’re lounging on the beach or taking a hike in the mountains.

No legal obligation to offer vacation

So what’s going on here? A big reason for the difference is that paid time off is mandated by law in many parts of the world.

Germany is among more than two dozen industrialized countries — from Australia to Slovenia to Japan — that require employers to offer four weeks or more of paid vacation to their workers, according to a 2009 study by the human resources consulting company Mercer.

Finland, Brazil and France are the champs, guaranteeing six weeks of time off.

But employers in the United States are not obligated under federal law to offer any paid vacation, so about a quarter of all American workers don’t have access to it, government figures show. That makes the U.S. the only advanced nation in the world that doesn’t guarantee its workers annual leave, according to a report titled “No-Vacation Nation” by the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a liberal policy group.

For what ever it is worth, from 1988 to 2001, while I was employed as an engineer, I took no vacation. While I qualified for two weeks, I was never permitted to take them.

Most U.S. companies, of course, do provide vacation as a way to attract and retain workers.

But the fear of layoffs and the ever-faster pace of work mean many Americans are reluctant to be absent from the office — anxious that they might look like they’re not committed to their job. Or they worry they won’t be able to cope with the backlog of work waiting for them after a vacation.

Then, there’s the way we work.

Working more makes Americans happier than Europeans, according to a study published recently in the Journal of Happiness Studies. That may be because Americans believe more than Europeans do that hard work is associated with success, wrote Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn, the study’s author and an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas.

“Americans maximize their… [happiness] by working, and Europeans maximize their [happiness] through leisure,”

So despite research documenting the health and productivity benefits of taking time off, a long vacation can be undesirable, scary, unrealistic or just plain impossible for many U.S. workers.

Maybe a chance for change

A recent report has found that the United States is the only advanced economy that does not require employers to provide paid vacation time. Almost 1-in-4 Americans do not receive any paid vacation or paid holidays, trailing far behind most of the rest of the world’s rich nations, according to the report.

“No-Vacation Nation Revisited,” released earlier this year by the Center for Economic and Policy Research reviewed the international labor laws impacting paid vacation and holidays in 21 rich nations. The countries included 16 European countries, Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States, all major economies that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Some highlights of the report:

For the United States:

  • Workers have no statutory right to paid vacations.
  • The sum of the average paid vacation and paid holidays provided to workers in the private sector ― 16 in total ― would not meet even the minimum required by law in 19 other rich countries, the report notes.
  • The lack of paid vacation and paid holidays is particularly acute for low-wage workers, part-time workers, and for employees of small businesses. (Workers in  small businesses are less likely to have any paid vacation (69 percent) than those in medium and large establishments (86 percent); only 49 percent of low-wage workers have paid vacation, compared to 90 percent of high-wage workers; part-time workers are far less likely to have paid vacations (35 percent) than full-time workers (91 percent).
  • The gap between paid time off in the United States and the rest of the world is even larger when legal holidays are included. U.S. law does not guarantee any paid holidays, but most rich countries provide between 5 and 13 per year, in addition to paid vacation days.

For other rich countries:

  • Workers in the European Union are legally guaranteed at least 20 paid vacation days per year, with 25 and even 30 or more days in some countries.
  • Canada and Japan guarantee at least 10 days of paid vacation per year.
  • Five countries even mandate that employers pay vacationing workers a small premium above their standard pay in order to help with vacation-related expenses.
  • Most other rich countries have also established legal rights to paid holidays over and above paid vacation days.
  • Several foreign countries offer additional time off for younger and older workers, shift workers, and those engaged in community service including jury duty and for activities like union duties, getting married, or moving.
“The United States is the only advanced economy in the world that does not guarantee its workers paid vacation days and paid holidays,” John Schmitt, senior economist and co-author of the report, said in a statement. “Relying on businesses to voluntarily provide paid leave just hasn’t worked.”

American Average Work Hours:

  • At least 134 countries have laws setting the maximum length of the work week; the U.S. does not.
  • In the U.S., 85.8 percent of males and 66.5 percent of females work more than 40 hours per week.
  • According to the ILO, “Americans work 137 more hours per year than Japanese workers, 260 more hours per year than British workers, and 499 more hours per year than French workers.”
  • Using data by the U.S. BLS, the average productivity per American worker has increased 400% since 1950. One way to look at that is that it should only take one-quarter the work hours, or 11 hours per week, to afford the same standard of living as a worker in 1950 (or our standard of living should be 4 times higher). Is that the case? Obviously not. Someone is profiting, it’s just not the average American worker.

American Paid Vacation Time & Sick Time:

  • There is not a federal law requiring paid sick days in the United States.
  • The U.S. remains the only industrialized country in the world that has no legally mandated annual leave.
  • In every country included except Canada and Japan (and the U.S., which averages 13 days/per year), workers get at least 20 paid vacation days. In France and Finland, they get 30 – an entire month off, paid, every year.

But Hey! It’s the price for living in the BEST nation in the world! Right?

Working in America

Here’s a great write up by Ashley Fern titled “The 8 Reasons You Hate Your Job In Corporate America”. I think it says it all far better than I ever could.

“Corporate America: the place where the majority of post grads will find themselves, for better or for worse (but, for the most part, the worse). There is no college class or prep course that can help you prepare for the reality you are about to embark on for the rest of your life. There’s no smooth transition as you begin your life as a corporate slave. 

You go from having the best four years of your life into a world of misery and greed.

There will be highs and lows, ups and downs if you are going to devote yourself to this career path. Sometimes you will love your job but more often than not, this probably will not be the case. It’s hard to find the “right” job when you first exit college. Just because you had a certain major does not guarantee its respective career path will be right for you. Life in the real world versus what you learn in a classroom are two vastly different entities.
Office Space 2

Unfortunately in many cases, you will sacrifice your happiness and freedom for a paycheck; you become a slave to “the man”. What are the other complaints about working for corporate America…

 No Freedom

The lower you are on the office totem pole, the more people you have to listen to when completing tasks. You have a rigorous schedule filled with tasks that your manager most likely assigned you. You cannot choose which tasks you would like to perform nor which order you want to complete them in as you are most likely taking orders from someone else. Until you run your own company, you are always going to be listening to someone else’s directions.

 Office Bitch

For the abuse you take, you don’t make nearly enough money -- especially after taxes. You will take an endless amount of sh*t from upper management that can and will drive you insane. 

If your boss is having an off day, guess who is going to feel the worst of it? You are. 

You are at the bottom of the barrel and no feelings will be spared since you really do not serve an integral role in the company’s success.

 Obsession With Money

You think your first job will be an enlightening experience in which you will finally contribute something meaningful to the world. The problem is that upper management doesn’t want to waste their valuable time on someone that much below them. They would rather focus their attention on whatever task they have on hand. 

They don’t care about you, all their focus is on whatever can make them the next dollar. Though they will try to give you the impression that that isn't the case. They might issue you a pen with a logo, or arrange some pizza at a meeting.

 People Are Miserable

The majority of people care about one thing about their job and that’s the figure on their paychecks. This is one of the biggest reasons people settle into a career path that makes them miserable. Sure, having the ability to afford luxuries is great, but is it worth your happiness?


Wouldn’t you rather work in an industry that brings you happiness and comfort than work at a career you hate just because you make a lot of money? Of course a paycheck is important, without it you couldn’t live -- but at the end of the day, that paycheck isn’t going to bring you the fulfillment that doing what you love does.

 The People You Work With Suck

Chances are you aren’t going to be working with people you would choose to associate with outside the office. Sometimes the person closest to your age is 10 years older than you: #fail. It’s horrible to be stuck inside an office from 9-5 without one person you can talk to. Thank the lord for G-chat.

 You’re Bored

The repetitive, mundane life corporate America offers you is not one of excitement. Life is full of surprises and opportunities; this is where happiness will manifest. 

You know where it will not flourish? 

Within the restraints of a 4×4 cubicle, staring blankly at a computer screen. Routine behavior will numb your mind whereas unpredictability will engage it. “Happiness is a state of activity,” as Aristotle has so famously said.

Office Space 1
Your corporate life. This is why you obtained a nice four-year college degree.

 You Realize This Reality Is A Lie

Unfortunately, as a generation we were raised with the idea that if we go to school, get a typical job and make a lot of money, we will be happy. Happiness should be a reflection of your personal ambition and success, not by what kind of car you have in your driveway. I would rather be struggling to make ends meet, working towards something I love than relishing in money working at a company that makes me miserable.

 No Creative Outlet

How can you grow as a person if you are stuck doing the same meaningless tasks on a day-to-day basis? This type of environment will literally suck the soul out of you. Living your life in suspense is exhilarating; variety is what keeps things entertaining and exciting. Spending eight hours trapped in a small space reading over excel spreadsheets is not going to get your creative juices flowing.”
Office Space 4

Thank you Ashley Fern.

This is all pretty much well known to those of us who had to sit in those grey boxes and stare at computer screens all day long. We did this with absolute dictatorial watching of office hours and battles over the scant vacation and leave time.

Couple that with the ever present risk of losing your job and you end up with a very, very stressful situation.

This was quite prevalent in the white-collar world during the time when I was employed.  We lived the life shown in the movie “Office Space”. It was our reality. Welcome to the life that I lived (in the physical).

Peter Gibbons: You're gonna lay off Samir and Michael?

Bob Slydell: Oh yeah! We're gonna bring in some entry-level graduates, farm some work out to Singapore, that's the usual deal.

Bob Porter: Standard operating procedure.

Peter Gibbons: Do they know this yet?

Bob Slydell: No. No, of course not! We find it's always better to fire people on a Friday. Studies have statistically shown that there's less chance of an incident if you do it at the end of the week.

Office Space
Life as an engineer in 1990’s America. Still from the movie classic “Office Space”. Office Space is a 1999 American comedy film written and directed by Mike Judge. It satirizes the everyday work life of a typical mid-to-late-1990s software company, focusing on a handful of individuals fed up with their jobs.

There was always some kind of “workplace improvement program” going on. It might be [1] a mandatory blood collection effort (it was, of course they couldn’t say that it was mandatory, that would be against the law… but it was.  We all “knew” the consequences if we did not follow what was asked of us.

The government would make regulations to “protect” workers, and companies would either find ways around them, or simply ignore them.).

Consider my experience with [2] a mandatory weekend cleaning of the offices.  (The company fired the janitorial staff, and so we all had to come in over the weekend to clean up.)

Alternatively, it might be [3] two trashcans that we would use to separate our trash into.  (An on-going “green” effort that the company was promoting.) One for recyclables, and the other for non-recyclables. There were fines and punitive measures placed on us if we did not sort through our trash.

Here’s a true, and illustrative, story regarding this particular company initiative.

One night I had to work late.  After everyone else had left, I was working at my desk later at night.  It was perhaps 7pm.  As such, the janitors came in and began cleaning.  One of the first things that they did was empty the trash.  As I sat there, I watched them empty the trash.  What they did was pick up the trash and empty it into a big-wheeled bin. They took the blue color recycle bin and emptied it into a big-wheeled trash hopper.  Then they took the “regular” non-recyclable trash and emptied it in the same bin.  I watched for a minute or two, and then paused in reflection.

Innocently, I asked the janitor why he didn’t separate the trash, as he was “supposed to”. After all, we were being penalized for not separating the trash.  In fact, if you were to report on another coworker (for failing to separate) you would be rewarded with perks; a coupon for a discount coffee or a free movie ticket. And they, as violators, would “suffer” the consequences…

He responded that he didn’t need to.  

No one came to collect the sorted trash.  No one had set up a system to collect pre-sorted trash.  So what they did was just mix it all together.  They then would throw it all in the dumpster and it would be picked up by the garbage truck as was. What was going on was an illusion of company participation in a recycling program. However, there really wasn’t any actual effort to recycle the waste.

That was corporate America.

Life was simple.  Work all week, and look forward to Friday.  Beer and pizza at the local restaurant, and then come home and watch a movie.  Sleep in on Saturday, eat breakfast at a local diner, mow the grass and then go grocery shopping.  Go to church on Sunday, then take a drive and look at yard sales.  Go to sleep early because work started on Monday.

It’s not much of a life is it?  But that was my life.

OK, back to my story.

So, I am working in whatever capacity that I could find in California.  At that time, I was working various minimum-wage jobs. I worked as short order cooks, ditch diggers, roust-abouts, and janitors. It was unrewarding work, for little pay.  However, I was in California.

I “felt” that I was where I needed to be.

That all changed when I got a call from the Navy…

The Rest of the Story

My stint from whenever I left my role as a Naval Aviator to when I went into “phase two” of my “training”. This was a confusing time. It was not easy. I was alternatively employed as an engineer, and laid off, trying to find work…hand to mouth. It was a period of searching for work. Living hand to mouth. Opportunities that crop up and disappear, and the lucky employed taking advantage of the masses of unemployed.

As confusing as my story sounds, just imagine what it was like participating in it.

All adventures end, and this adventure came to a sudden end when the Navy tracked me down and put me back on track in my program. That part of my narrative is covered elsewhere.

Conclusion

This post was a rambling collection of memories of an extreme period in my life.

I had been implanted with strange probes for both MAJestic and our extraterrestrial benefactors, then I was left alone on my own prior to being trained on how to use them.

During that time, I was like a sheet in the wind during a hurricane.

My perceptions, exposure and understandings were all altered. My world-lines were constantly switching on and off, in and out, and through and backwards, and I adapted as best I could. I existed in a state of extreme 1980’s. Most of that time switched between being employed in difficult working conditions, and poverty. There wasn’t any stability.

In the meantime, the MAJestic membership were trying to locate me, and complete my training. I was like Jason Bourne, with no memory or ability to control my skills, yet cognizant that I had skills, and purpose. I was the real life Jason Bourne.

Jason Bourne is a fictional character played by a talented actor. I was the real deal, and what I experienced did not look like anything that Hollywood could conceive.

Take Aways

  • After acceptance into MAJestic, I was altered with medical procedures and probes. Then, released to the public.
  • I was not yet trained.
  • For a period of time, I existed as “actuated”, but unskilled in using my abilities.
  • This post describes that time.

FAQ

Q: Why do you say such bad things about corporate life?
A: I was trained, and pursued an education towards being a Naval Aviator. Out of necessity, I found work within related engineering fields. At this time the work culture was not of producing things. Instead, it was a culture of making profits for the owners.

This change in intention, and the resultant thoughts affected the world-line. Thus, employees became something else. They became drones that serviced the owners of the companies where they worked. I was thrust into this environment out of necessity.

Q: Why do you disparage Backpackers?
A: There are many travelers who go by the title “backpacker”. Instead of exploring, adventuring and acquiring experiences, they do something else. They travel to distant lands, and try to get experiences without accepting the local culture and integrating within it. That means, of course getting work, and spending a few years fully immersed in that culture.

They are neither acquiring meaningful experiences, nor helping their community. They are instead, completing a “bucket list” of travel destinations. All without meaningful quantum realignments of their garbonic structures.

Q: Why are you so anti-USA? What is your problem with vacations?
A: Comparatively, there is something seriously wrong with a nation that does not permit it’s workers time to live and relax.

Now, if you personally want to work in a stressful environment without a break that is fine. I KNOW that it is very unhealthy and results in terrible side effects. Americans should have much more time off than what they generally receive.

Q: What is the issue about the colors Red / Blue for Political Parties?
A: History has been rewritten. That is disturbing.

That being said, the decision for the United States to embrace a communist and socialist model happened a long time ago, and the implementation was visible in the early 1990’s.

MAJestic Related Posts – Training

These are posts and articles that revolve around how I was recruited for MAJestic and my training. Also discussed is the nature of secret programs. I really do not know why the organization was kept so secret. It really wasn’t because of any kind of military concern, and the technologies were way too involved for any kind of information transfer. The only conclusion that I can come to is that we were obligated to maintain secrecy at the behalf of our extraterrestrial benefactors.

How to tell...

How to tell -2

Top Secrets

Sales Pitch

Feducial Training

Implantation

Probe Calibration - 1

Probe Calibration - 2

Leaving the USA

MAJestic Related Posts – Our Universe

These particular posts are concerned about the universe that we are all part of. Being entangled as I was, and involved in the crazy things that I was, I was given some insight. This insight wasn’t anything super special. Rather it offered me perception along with advantage. Here, I try to impart some of that knowledge through discussion.

Enjoy.

Secrets of the universe
Alpha Centauri
Our Galaxy the Milky Way
Sirius solar system
Alpha Centauri
The fuselage embedded within the rocks of Victoria Falls.
The Hammer inside the rock.
The Hollow Moon
The Mystery of the Lapulapu Ridge.
The Mystery of the Baltic UFO.
Mystery of the bronze bell.
Mystery of the oil lamp found inside a block of coal.
Did extraterrestrials set up a colony in Pennsylvania?
The Oxia Palus Facility
Brown Dwarfs
Apollo Space Exploration
CARET
The Nature of the Universe
Type-1 Grey Extraterrestrial
The mysterious flying contraptions.

MAJestic Related Posts – World-Line Travel

These posts are related to “reality slides”. Other more common terms are “world-line travel”, or the MWI. What people fail to grasp is that when a person has the ability to slide into a different reality (pass into a different world-line), they are able to “touch” Heaven to some extent. Here are posts that  cover this topic.

Cat Heaven
MWI
Things I miss
How MWI allows world-line travel.
An Observed World-Line switch.
Vehicular world-line travel
Soul is not consciousness.

John Titor Related Posts

Another person, collectively known by the identity of “John Titor” claimed to utilize world-line (MWI egress) travel to collect artifacts from the past. He is an interesting subject to discuss. Here we have multiple posts in this regard.

They are;

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

What is the Color of Chartreuse; is it Red or Green?

How do you remember the color “Chartreuse”?  As a person who lived through the 1980’s, I clearly and most vividly remember it as a shade of reddish magenta.  How do I know?  Because it was popular at the time, dresses, furniture, wall paint, and brick-a-brack of various shapes and forms all used this color, and all were a deep wine-like color with a kind of pinkish glow. Yet, as much as my memory is clear on this, things have changed. An Alter-vús took place.

1980's American fashion
Typical dress during the 1980’s. The outfit sported bright and colorful colors that later toned down to pastels.

Alter-vús

How can the past change? Isn’t time a direct one-way arrow? A vector from which nothing can be undone? What is going on here, and why do my memories not jive up with history?

Good questions all.

Again, how do I know? Because I bought a complete living room set; a couch, love seat, and matching chair in chartreuse.  I bought them in the mid 1980’s from a furniture store in Ridgecrest, California. We were told by the saleswoman that the color was Chartreuse and was the hottest thing in the 1980’s.

We ended up buying a couch and a love seat. We didn’t buy the stand alone chair. (Which in hind-sight we should of.) But, you know, I was younger then, and it was a different time and my personality was quite different.

Anyways, Chartreuse that we bought back in the middle 1980’s  is not the color that it is associated with this world-line…

“The color chartreuse is broadly remembered as a shade of red. Some recall it as a maroon-ish red. Others describe it as a reddish magenta.

The fact is, in this timestream, the color is yellow-green. The color gets its name from the liqueur, Chartreuse.

However, I clearly recall a discussion with my mother, an artist, about the color chartreuse. I was a teen and used “chartreuse” to describe a magenta-ish dress. My mother couldn’t believe I was serious, and I remember looking in my childhood crayon box for a reddish crayon labeled “chartreuse,” but couldn’t find it.

It was a humiliating moment for me, because she was right and — in our household — that was like confusing Miro and Michelangelo. It just wasn’t done.

I didn’t think about it again until a comment about chartreuse appeared at this site. Then another did, and yet another. No matter how long I study this topic, I’m still astonished when a memory matches one of mine.”

-Mandelaeffect
Chartreuse
The color chartreuse is broadly remembered as a shade of red. Some recall it as a maroon-ish red. Others describe it as a reddish magenta. The fact is, in this world-line, the color is actually a yellow-green. The color gets its name from the liqueur, Chartreuse.

I am not the only one with different memories

Here are some comments from the web site. In September 2014, Stephanie said:

“I distinctly remember Chartreuse being a purple-pink color close to Magenta but a little darker. Less pink, more purple, but still too pink to be a true purple. I’m so confused??”

In Oct 2014, Misty said:

“…chartreuse was a dark red color…”
1980's ski fashion.
Winter ski fashion during the 1980’s. Notice the use of the Chartreuse, now called something all together different.

Rachel said:

“I used to think chartreuse was a dark red or burgundy color.”
1980's style kitchen.
Chartreuse was a big part of 1980’s fashion. Interior design, clothing and furniture all used this color. However, now, forty years later, we hear that it is now a greenish color. WTF?

Cameron said:

“Oh dear lord, i’m not alone. 

My whole life i thought Chartreuse was a deep red or purple. I considered it my favorite color for a long time. It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high-school that i found out it was a light yellow or green. My best friend was ordering her dress and wanted my opinion. She said that she was getting it in Chartreuse and i told her that was the one I thought would look nice, but the only picture she has was this gross pukey yellow and i said, “i’m glad you’re getting a different color than in the picture, because that is an awful color”. She then corrected me that the one pictured was the Chartreuse one. 

I guess, all along the color i thought i loved was actually Mauve?”

Donna said:

“Yes chartreuse was a maroon-red color. It was only a couple years ago that I saw a crayon marked chartreuse and it was this awful green-yellow color, and I thought that Crayola must have made a mistake!”

Cas said:

“I thought chartreuse was a rich sort of pinkish-magenta color?”

I really thought chartreuse was a shade of red? Not green or yellow at all? When I clicked the Wikipedia link to see what color it is, I was so confused. I’m glad other people share in this confusion as well.

Seems like too pretty of a name for “lime green”. Ick. Doesn’t sit right with me.”
Deco 1980's style
Chartreuse themed living room. Only that today, four decades later, this is now called something different. Why and how?

K. said:

“And yet the etymology makes perfect sense. Then again, that might be at the heart of the potential difference. So, if this Carthusian order, who’s liquor got the name associated with it, and lend itself to the name of the colour instead made a particular blend of red wine, perhaps Chartreuse would get a different colour association.

Honestly, without saying anything one way or the other on the matter, if I would have guessed without knowing, I’m certain I would have guessed it was a reddish colour. It does have the ring of a warm red drink to it.

(source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carthusians)”

One of the JMs (we have two) said:

“Yeah the whole color changing business is a weird one.”

Conclusions – What is going on

The construction of our reality is complex.

There is a fundamental “reality template” that we all access. There are also various realities that are spawned off this template. These spawned realities are what we experience; what our consciousness experience within this life.

However, that “reality template” is also subject to change. After all, the combined thoughts of everyone contribute to the “reality template”.

Chartreuse issue
All thoughts combine to create a “reality”. This is a constantly changing baseline template. Which I refer to as a “reality template”. Our consciousness then feeds off this template and creates a customized reality for our soul to acquire experiences from. When large groups of people are manipulated and discordant thoughts are generated, the reality template changes significantly. Such is what happened with the Chartreuse issue.

However, there are individuals who (through the power of mass communications, television and the internet) can redefine our reality. This is very dangerous, but happens all the time. When this happens; when this redefinition of our reality occurs, we find ourselves in a situation where our memories do not match our reality.

Since reality is a time-less constraint, the past and the future can be altered at will, by individuals and circumstances that deem it necessary.

Such as the “chartreuse” situation.

Take Aways

  • All humans contribute to a reality template.
  • The contributions come in the form of thoughts.
  • Each human has a consciousness that uses the reality template.
  • The consciousness reacts to the reality template and creates a unique and individualized reality from the the consciousness exists within.
  • When disrupted thoughts or directed thoughts are powerful enough, then can disrupt the reality template.
  • The issue of the chartreuse color being a maroon-red color is an example of baseline reality template changes.

FAQ

Q: What color is Chartreuse?
A: Currently it is associated with a yellowish green color.

Q: Why do people associate that color with a dark red?
A: Because their memories reside outside the reality. Since the reality is constantly being updated by the consciousness, there will be “glitches” where memories will not match. There are different terms for this phenomenon.

Q: What causes changes in the baseline reality template?
A: There are many things that will cause changes to a reality template. Often the most substantive are related to mass directed thoughts. This is when someone contrives a new narrative and exposes a multitude of people to think about it. The mass thought disruption will alter the reality template, and in so so doing the individual world-lines that our realities inhabit will be influenced as well.

MAJestic Related Posts – Training

These are posts and articles that revolve around how I was recruited for MAJestic and my training. Also discussed is the nature of secret programs. I really do not know why the organization was kept so secret. It really wasn’t because of any kind of military concern, and the technologies were way too involved for any kind of information transfer. The only conclusion that I can come to is that we were obligated to maintain secrecy at the behalf of our extraterrestrial benefactors.

How to tell...
How to tell -2
Top Secrets
Sales Pitch
Feducial Training
Implantation
Probe Calibration - 1
Probe Calibration - 2
Leaving the USA

MAJestic Related Posts – Our Universe

These particular posts are concerned about the universe that we are all part of. Being entangled as I was, and involved in the crazy things that I was, I was given some insight. This insight wasn’t anything super special. Rather it offered me perception along with advantage. Here, I try to impart some of that knowledge through discussion.

Enjoy.

Secrets of the universe
Alpha Centauri
Our Galaxy the Milky Way
Sirius solar system
Alpha Centauri
The fuselage embedded within the rocks of Victoria Falls.
The Hammer inside the rock.
The Hollow Moon
The Mystery of the Lapulapu Ridge.
The Mystery of the Baltic UFO.
Mystery of the bronze bell.
Mystery of the oil lamp found inside a block of coal.
Did extraterrestrials set up a colony in Pennsylvania?
The Oxia Palus Facility
Brown Dwarfs
Apollo Space Exploration
CARET
The Nature of the Universe
Type-1 Grey Extraterrestrial
The mysterious flying contraptions.

MAJestic Related Posts – World-Line Travel

These posts are related to “reality slides”. Other more common terms are “world-line travel”, or the MWI. What people fail to grasp is that when a person has the ability to slide into a different reality (pass into a different world-line), they are able to “touch” Heaven to some extent. Here are posts that  cover this topic.

Cat Heaven
MWI
Things I miss
How MWI allows world-line travel.
An Observed World-Line switch.
Vehicular world-line travel
Soul is not consciousness.

John Titor Related Posts

Another person, collectively known by the identity of “John Titor” claimed to utilize world-line (MWI egress) travel to collect artifacts from the past. He is an interesting subject to discuss. Here we have multiple posts in this regard.

They are;

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Nations that an American Man could Travel and Relocate to – Part 2

What happens when you are given a five minute notice before your company lays you off? Then they hand you a NDA, and expect you to sign it, or else they will prevent you from getting food stamps and support. What then?

What options do you have? Another stab at getting yet another American job, and America boss in an American corporate environment? Is that what your options are? As an American man, just what are your options?

There are times when you just feel a screaming need to “bug out”.

But, let me tell you something. The world is yours once you have lost everything.  That includes nations, food, culture and girls. You can go anywhere and be anyone. This is especially true for an American man who faced a vindictive ex-wife, or had an encounter with any of the many, many American alphabet regulatory organizations such as the IRS, DHS, CIA, FBI, ICE, FDA etc.

People, there is an entire world out there. It is big, and filled with all sorts of interesting and colorful people.

I urge the reader to divest themselves from the notion that the United States offers the only decent living arrangements on the globe.  There are other places.  Many others.

Some are better and some are worst.  It is up to the reader to consider all of the options that lie before them and make determinations and judgments biased upon their own individual situation, preferences, and desires.  Not (to make them biased) on fear or lack of experience…

You do not have to endure a life that is defined by others…

Introduction

The world is filled with interesting people, wonderful places, and really different ways of doing things. many of which are a pleasant surprise to Americans who have grown up thinking that the “American Way” is the only way to do things (as well as being the “best” way to do things).

Korean Girl
Korea has a lot of very pretty girls. Personally, I prefer the lighter skin, the cute face and big eyes. I like the thin bodies and the long hair, not to mention the cute little behinds. And, let’s not even get started on the awesome food. OMG!

Multi-Part Series

There are so many nations and places to choose from. This post is part two of a multi-part post. My basic premise is that the world is a big place. Get out. Enjoy the differences. Savor them. Life is too short not to.

Written by a Man

Please note that this was written by a man. It is about things that might be of interest to a man. For similar posts written by women, I would suggest the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, or Salon.

Also note that this is a blog. It contains personal opinions. If you want to read something that is unbiased and doesn’t have opinions, try CNN.

LOL.

Finally, many of the things that are commonplace in other nations are either banned, censored or illegal in the United States. This post does not censor for American sensibilities. As there are people all over the world that reads it. I just can’t sanitize it for Americans. That includes…

  • Buying beer on Sunday.
  • Doing drugs in Holland.
  • Prostitution chain-bordellos in Germany.
  • Public nudity in Iceland.
  • Smoking in public in China.
  • Being able to eat in restaurants barefoot in Cambodia.
  • Traditional gender roles in Brazil.
  • The giant penis festival in Japan.
  • Buying ED medicine without a prescription. (Common everywhere.)

If you are an American, and you are too sensitive to the realities outside of America, then I would suggest you leave. Exposure to REAL freedom is not something to be taken trivially. Real freedom is not having to ask permission to do something. Real freedom is not taxed, monitored or prohibited.

Real freedom is not taxed, monitored or prohibited.

Brazil

Why not Brazil?  It’s a land of amazing women, awesome beaches, and delicious food. It’s a big country with amazing beaches, fantastic forest, and adventuresome mountains. Awesome!

Brazil map
Map of Brazil. Brazil is a very large nation. Like the United States, they have their own issues involving a poor underclass, a wealthy upper class and a squeezed middle class.

I once had a project at a company that I worked for that had a joint venture with CEV and GM.  The engineers from Brazil were pretty good guys and showed me around.  It was quite the experience for me at the time.  I never considered moving there though. Maybe the reader might have other ideas.

A nice article on what it is like for an American to move there can be found here.

Walking Down the Street: Brazil vs the US

You can see how Brazilians care more about the journey than the destination in the way that they walk down the street. They walk at a brisk pace, in a horizontal line so that everyone is at the same level, occasionally stopping to admire the scenery and talk with people that they pass by. 

They are not in any apparent hurry to get to where they are going and are more concerned with having a good conversation with the people they are walking with.

Brazil street
Bahia is the part of Brazil where most of the slaves from Africa originally landed. So the afro culture is very visible there, alongside many of the other faces that Brazil has. While the politics of the United States maintains the narrative that the USA is racist and terrible, Brazil by far took the vast bulk of slaves from Africa.
In the US however, you will rarely see people walking since everybody drives. 

If there are 5 people meeting up somewhere, they will likely take 5 cars. 

In the rare case that you do see a group of people walking they will probably be marching in a straight line towards their destination at a pace that borders on running. They don’t make eye contact with anyone along the way because they are focused on getting to where they are going.

Having Lunch: Brazil vs the US

Now this imaginary group of stereotyped Brazilians have arrived at a restaurant where they will be eating lunch. They’re looking at least a 2 hour commitment and might even spend as much as 4 hours having lunch. 

They are there to have good conversation with their lunch mates and will take their time eating their food. Even though they’ve got to get back to work after lunch they don’t show any signs that they are stressed out about that because they’re too busy enjoying the moment.

Salvador
Bahia is generally just a place with a lot of color. Not just on peoples skin. The buildings, in the nature and in the varied music culture that you find in this very interesting state.
Bahia is in many ways the image that many foreigners have of Brazil, with exotic looking people, lot’s of beaches and music everywhere. From a tourism perspective, it also has the greatest potential in all Brazil if you ask me. Bahia needs to have better air connections to the outside world, before the world starts flocking to the place. But i think this will happen in the future, as this is really a part of the world that has a lot to offer.
Our stereotypical group of Americans each took their own cars to get to the restaurant for lunch. Once they get there they are going to pull out their phones and get on Facebook to check in. 

They quickly order their food because they are in a hurry to get back to work. They might not have even stopped working and will have their phone in their hand as they are eating to keep up with the barrage of emails that they received, or they will be catching up on the latest articles from Buzzfeed. 

If someone wants to have conversation with their lunchmates they will have to compete with the cell phones for attention. Likely they will give up trying and will pull out their own cell phone so that they have something to do.

Socializing in Brazil vs the US

Now it’s after work and this group of Brazilian friends have decided to meet up somewhere to have a beer and continue the conversation from lunch. They’re there to have a good time and to enjoy each other’s company. 

If someone invites another friend, s/he will be received with open arms by the group, because in Brazil friends of friends are your friends too.

Pastel
If you’ve ever been to Brazil, you know they adore their pastel. You will find it at the feira (our farmer’s market), the pastelaria (shops that sell only pastel), beach kiosks and at bars. I have never met a Brazilian who doesn’t indulge in these bad boys every now and then. And they go great with either a glass of cold beer or with sweet caldo de cana (freshly pressed sugar cane juice).
Sweet and savory filling options are abundant, the three of the most popular ones are: beef, creamy hearts of palm and cheese.
In the US, after work everyone goes home and does their own thing. Maybe they have some productive activity to do, but just as likely they are going to sit in front of the computer or go watch TV. 

If they did manage to find some friends who weren’t doing something with, it wouldn’t be so easy to bring someone from outside that social circle along with them. They certainly wouldn’t be received as warmly and unconditionally as they would’ve in Brazil.
Beach in Brazil
Brazil has some amazing beaches. The sky is blue and the water clear. The people are nice and friendly and the locals really want to have a great time and party.

However, it seems that it might be a dangerous place if you want to cross the street. Here is an interesting excerpt from a Brazilian blog in regards to driving in Brazil;

“Brazil does have a Traffic Code, and it is based on the 1968 Vienna Convention on Road Traffic. There are extensive Rules of the Road, including long sections on Defensive Driving and First Aid. In order to receive Brazilian drivers licenses Mark and I had to study these rules, then take a sophisticated computerized test, a difficult psychological written exam and an eye exam. 

The Motor Vehicle Bureaus around the country perform rigorous annual vehicle inspections. There are radars and speed bumps everywhere, and heavy fines for scofflaws. It is not for lack of regulations, enforcement or will that Brazil has plunged so far down the traffic fatality slope, fatalities which last year alone totaled upwards of 40,000.

So what is it? 

Aggressive tailgating, reckless passing — on the right, on the left, into the oncoming lane — it just doesn't gibe with my sense of the Brazilian spirit of paz e amor. I was baffled until one white-knuckle ride into Rio, when it came to me in a flash. Futebol. 

Traffic
Traffic in Brazil can be a real nightmare. As can be shown by pictures such as this. If it was me, I’d try to get on a side road and get out and have a beer. Ugh!
The national sport, the national passion. They're all playing soccer. The drivers are forever cutting in front of each other to take any field advantage they can, they're passing with reckless abandon to get to the imaginary goal posts. One car scrapes against another? Just a rebound, the ball (or in this case the car) remains in play. Driving at breakneck speed on the shoulder? No worries, that's just an offside position, which is not an offense in itself.

Mandatory traffic rules I learned in high school Drivers Ed are treated by many drivers here as optional. 

Stop signs are just a  suggestion, observed by only a few. A Yield sign is observed by no one. Emergency Vehicle Priority? That's just a challenge for a driver to maneuver behind the emergency vehicle and ride its coattails. 
Trans-Amazon Highway
Here is the Trans-Amazon highway in Brazil. It’s a long highway that crosses the nation.
Pedestrian Priority? You're joking. And weren't we taught that to keep a safe distance from the car in front of you, you had to be able to see the car's back tires? Brazilian drivers tailgate close enough to smell the alcohol on the breath of the driver in front.

I've lost count of the number of near accidents I've witnessed. But since they were only nearaccidents, since the drivers maneuvered and veered and avoided and stopped just short of the actual accidents, there is an argument that can be made that Brazilians are excellent drivers. I even see the logic there. 

Apologists cite the poorly maintained roads, the bad or misleading traffic signs, and some blame the weather. Huh? The weather? But nobody is forced to put the pedal to the metal. That's cultural. After all, Brazil ranks second in the list of foreign-born winners of the Indy 500, and third on the Formula One list. They love speed. It's not for nothing that the soccer breakaway is one of the most exciting plays in the game.” 

Prostitutes for Teenage Sons

"Don Cesar and his son Juan walk through the brothel — protection in hand — in search of a prostitute for Juan’s first time. The choice is made, Juan enters a room and not long after emerges from behind the tin door with a big smile on his face and followed by his presumed “first”."

-Dad takes 16 year old son to a prostitute to have sex for the first time.

When I was in High School, we had a foreign exchange student from Brazil. He told us, and we were jaw-dropped amazed, that his father took him to a prostitute when he turned 16 years old. He explained that that was a duty of all fathers. To select a worthwhile prostitute for his son, so that he can become a “man”.

Beautiful ebony girl.
Look at this awesome beauty! Look at that amazing head of hair! Look at the tiny waist and hour-glass shape. Man! She must have all the guys chasing after her. Now pay attention. What an amazing smile. I’ll tell you what, the smile opens up my heart.

He explained that he thought it was a great thing. Later on, when I came home and sat at the dining table, I mentioned the conversation to my parents. Ugh. I did not expect the reaction. My father kind of chuckled and told me that it was probably just nonsense. Not my mother, though. My mother got all upset and started screaming. I was sent to the bedroom and instructed never to mention it ever again.

In hindsight, I should of finished my dinner before I mentioned it.

Anyways, many years later, when I met other people my age from Brazil, they all explained that to me. All of my friends and business associates lost their virginity between the ages of 14 and 16 years of age. Always to a prostitute, and always to one specifically selected by their father, or in one case, their uncle.

Aside from that event, it made it easier for the boys not to be so fearful of the girls. While I don’t think that any of them became “hound dogs” in High School, I can affirm that the Brazilian exchange student was not afraid at all to ask my classmates out for dates and fun. Meanwhile, I was very timid around girls.

In Brazil, it is very important that a boy grow into a strong man.

In Brazil, as well as throughout South America, the “ideal” Hispanic family is a patriarchy that includes a strong male figure as the head of the household:

“A stereotypical Latino male exudes the characteristics of strength, power and masculinity. Machismo, or a strong sense of masculine pride, encompasses this ideal. And in the family, these ideals are passed from father to son.”

"Losing one's virginity over here [El Salvador] is seen as a point where you become a man and you become more vivo. 

'Vivo' means 'alive' in Spanish, obviously, but over here, it means something like 'astute' or 'not immature.' Once you lose your virginity, you're supposed to get smarter around girls. You are supposed to be less interested in kids' stuff." 

-Cracked

Girls

The women of Brazil are all awesome. I really like their free and happy attitude about life. I love the food, and the environment. I most especially love that they are traditional and honor the family.

"Most Brazilian girls look like half-Middle Eastern and half-Western European, darker than Argentine girls but lighter than girls from other South American countries. Since Brazil is similar to the United States with its large immigrant influence, it’s harder to pin down their physical features as easily as the Argentine girl.

If the average girl in a US club ranks a 5, and in an Argentina club she ranks a 7, in Brazil she’d be somewhere between a 6 and 7. This means the average Brazilian girl is bangable, but what separates Brazilian girls from the others is their vibe. If you are a guy and you look at a Brazilian girl, your mind jumps to sexual thoughts much faster than usual. Since it is not because she is more attractive, I think it’s a combination of body and body language. "

-RooshV

Brazilian girls have a smile to die for and there is no guy alive that won’t fall for those smiles.  See what I mean?

Rose
Rose from Sao Paulo, Brazil. What a smile. Oh, my Lord! And that hair! Come one, guys! Look at this beauty. Brazil has wonderful people who are decent, and make great friends and traditional family members.
"Blessed with lustrous hair, dark eyes and skin the color of honey Brazilian women are without doubt, are some of the most gorgeous in the world. And what’s more they are not conscious or embarrassed about the fact. 

Here women are confident about their looks and bodies and if you like what you see, they will welcome your appreciation as well. 

At the same time though, theirs is a very feminine beauty even if not demure. You may see them in bikinis and dresses with plunging necklines, but not so much in pantsuits and masculine shirts. 

Indeed, women here are encouraged to spend a lot of their time on their looks-body, clothes and hair. Staying attractive is quite important in a culture that judges people by how they look."

-National Steriotype

One thing that I like about Brazilian women is that they are really, really friendly and outgoing in nature. Truthfully, if a girl happens to spot you in a bar or café and you meet her standards, she will not hesitate to come up and ask you for your phone number or invite you to buy a drink for her. They are quite easy to strike up a conversation with. They are quite interesting and talkative, and before long you may even find yourself sharing a joke or a song with one of them.

Big Butts

I have talked to numerous men who found that the Brazilian women tended to have very nice big asses. Personally, that is not my thing, but they were all agape over it. They just couldn’t control themselves.

It turns out that having a big butt is a considered beautiful in Brazilian culture. Girls that are slim, and shapely, but who’s behinds are more or less “normal” aren’t considered so good looking. In fact, there are stories of young girls injecting all kinds of things into their behinds to make them bigger, including animal growth hormones. While Brazil does have plastic surgeons, their primary practice seems to be related to increasing the size of the butt more than anything else. Read about it HERE.

Who’d figure?

Big asses on the beach.
Some Brazilian gals on the beach. In Brazil, it is considered attractive, and even “womanly” to have a nice big plump ass. They actually go to plastic surgeons to get this done, and young girls have been known to inject steroids in their butt cheeks to make them get bigger. Not my thing, but different strokes for different folks, don’t ya know.

Luckily, not every Brazilian  is like this. So those of us who find this a bit extreme can rest easy. We can hang out with girls with tiny behinds and help them feel beautiful. LOL.

Traditional Girls

Since the Brazilian culture is very traditional, Brazilian women like to be courted the traditional old-fashioned way. They look forward to be taken out to a fancy place and are happy if you wine and dine them in a stylish manner. They like to get all “dolled up”, and dress appropriately. Who doesn’t like that?

Like many other traditional societies, Brazilian culture has long laid down specific roles and duties for each gender. Women were mostly expected to keep house and raise children while men were the breadwinners in the family. This fact, is a critical one “in my book”. It is an important thing that matters to me immensely.

Family Culture

In many Latino families, the father is central to the nuclear family constellation as well as to the extended family network. It is his job to assume the responsibility for establishing extra-familial boundaries and maintaining these relationships. He is the head of the family and he must take on that role.

Father figure
A strong father figure. From the movie “A walk in the clouds”. In Latin nations, especially in South America, it is the job of a father to raise his boy to become a man.

The importance of extended family marks a unique aspect of Latino families—that of familialism. In addition to providing a relatively strong attachment to the nuclear family, the strong familial orientation provides a sense of solidarity while concurrently reinforcing the notion that the family is more important than the individual

Let’s begin with a story about an experience I had while I was working at GM. This story illustrates that different places has different cultures, and failure to understand and adapt to that culture can have serious consequences. In this case, the story revolves around the public display of a lack of respect of a wife towards her husband. This took place, of course in Brazil, Sao Paulo, to be exact.

I once was involved in some business in Brazil. As such, I had to travel back and forth between the United States and Brazil. I was, at that time, working for Delco Electronics (It's who we are), which was (at that time) a division of General Motors. I was involved in a Car computer project (ECM) for CEV, which is a pretty big Automotive company within Brazil.

One day, all of the foreigners on staff were invited to a big banquet with other white-collar workers at CEV. We had some pretty important people from GM there. It was held in a big auditorium within a equally impressively large restaurant and hotel complex. Everyone sat at these very large round tables with a nice table layout on a large white tablecloth. Each couple (for the most part, everyone came as a couple) would sit in groups of two at the table. Thus, maybe five to 6 couples would sit at the table.
Family scene
Another scene from the movie “A walk in the clouds”. The father is the head of the household and is the public face for the family.
At a given cue, all the ladies (the wives and girlfriends) got up and went to the buffet to get their man (husbands or boyfriends) dinner. They got up, went to the buffet, selected what their husbands would eat, and returned to the table. They would place the plate in front of their man with respect, and then go up and get their own food.

The men would accept the meal their wife chose for them, and began eating it. They would sit there and eat, while all the ladies were fussing about their food, and making sure that the man's plate was full.
Brazilian food
A plethora of cultures have had an influence on Brazilian cuisine including Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, Moors, African and the Indigenous. The food in Brazil is awesome and fantastic. It is an amazing taste treat.
However, the local section manager, a man who came from Michigan, well his wife refused to go up. He kept on elbowing her. She refused. And everyone at the table noticed. In fact, people at the other tables were noticing as well. They started whispering and talking among themselves. But she was adamant.

She said things like "you're not my boss", "I'm not doing it, uh uh, absolutely not. No!", and "I don't care what other people think. Do it yourself.". She said loudly, and ended up having some people pause and stare, "You don't tell ME what to do!".
Bitch
A wife refuses to honor her husband in a public Brazilian dinner in front of all the supervisory management staff. She destroyed her husbands role, job and standing.
Eventually, he got up and joined the rest of the ladies at the buffet counter. He was the only man to get up. He was the only man to carry a plate back to the table. He was alone in the big hall that maybe held a few hundred key employees of the company. 

All of the key employees, the bosses and the supervisory staff, watched him do this. The President of CEV, the division managers, all the middle level managers, the supervisors, and all the engineers, and their secretaries all witnessed this. They all noticed and ate. Their local conversations at their tables became subdued and quieter.

Meanwhile, his American wife sat there smugly and proudly. They ate in silence. The wife, sitting proud and strong. Obviously she felt that she was the king of the entire event. Meanwhile, he sat there facing his plate and afraid to look up. This happened in front of everyone, while everyone else in the room kept glancing their way.

There were some speeches. Some gifts and door-prizes were exchanged.

The dinner ended. Everyone went home.
Soup in Brazil
The food in Brazil is so delicious. Here is a nice creamy soup. It goes just great with wine or an ice cold beer. I’ll tell you what.
While the American couple hadn't a clue as to what was transpiring. The rest of the room did. For them, dinner is a traditional and formal affair. It was a time when the man of the house can show off his family to the rest of his peers and his community. It is an opportunity to put a great face forward. Sort of like this...

The next workday, on Monday, he noticed that his parking space was being used by someone else. (Unless you have worked in GM, you don't know how important this is.) He went into the lobby, and the guards wouldn't look at him, and just waved him in. This was a big change from what he accustomed to.

It continued. His secretary didn't come in. Then, started coming in very late. She would not do anything that he asked. No longer would she make him a morning coffee. No longer would she answer him, or even talk to him.

No one responded to his emails. His work was getting piled up. Nothing was getting done. After a month, it got so bad, and I was sent down to look into the matter, as I held an important role in the joint-venture project. Our Division manager wanted me to look into this issue as it looked like the entire multi-million dollar project might collapse. That's right, millions of dollars of corporate investment was at risk.

So I flew down.

I talked to XXXXX. I talked to his secretary. I talked to the CEV Division Manager. I talked to the rest of the staff.

At first no one would open up. Oh, sure they were friendly to me. They showed me deference. They treated me well. But when it came to the subject about what was going on, everyone shut up. Obviously something was wrong. But no one told me anything.
Denise
Denise is a typical Brazilian girl. Don’t you just love her hair? I mean, it is completely awesome. Do you think that she would tolerate a man; her husband, disrespecting her family? I don’t think so.
Eventually, to make a long story short, I went out and started drinking with the CEV workers. That's always a great way to break down barriers and get to the heart of the matter. Of course, GM never approves of drinking, but this was back in the late 1980's and I was in another country and immersed in another culture.

Over some beers, the first person who let me know what was going on was his secretary. She looked at me straight in the eyes. She put out her cigarette. And she said in her broken English, loudly with defiance and pure hate;

"Why? You ask. Why? Because he's a fucking wimp. He's not, NOT, N-O-T a Man. He's castrado!"

Then she spit on the floor. Now granted, most ladies don't go to bars, smoke and spit on the floor. But she had a few beers, and was really agitated.
Angry woman at a wimp of a man
Being a wimp is very unattractive for a man. This is especially true if you are in a Latino country.
She wasn't just angry. She wasn't just pissed. She had this kind of deep burning ember of a rage that amazed me when it came out. I thought she was going to tear my throat out. She spoke viciously. She spoke in a way that the words were spit out venomously. 

It turned out that in Brazilian culture, the man must be the MAN of the house. It is a very traditional nation and has unspoken social rules. One of which is that the woman must look good for her man. She must do great things for their Man, and for her family. 

In Brazil, the Man is the titular head of the family. He controls everything. He is the "face" of the family. He is what everyone sees. However, the wife has full control over what goes on inside the house. She is the driving force that strengthens the man.

The Man is the head of the family, and he must LEAD. If he cannot be a Man; if he cannot act like a Man, and if he cannot control the behavior of his wife and family, then he is a loser.
Being older
In Brazil, you do not want to associate with losers. Not in the least. It is like being a leper.

The point in this is that he wasn't just a wimp to his wife. He was a wimp to society. From the secretary's point of view, she went from being a high assistant to an international boss, to the slave of a beggar. No, to someone worse than a beggar. Her status in the company fell right off the cliff.

Not only that, but that was true of everyone who associated with him. It was as if he had a serious contagious illness. no one wanted anything to do with him. No one would even talk to him.

It was like he was a child predator who had aids.

Shortly after that, I returned back to Indiana and talked with the Division Manager at Delco. We had a long and interesting talk. To cut down on all the details, let it be understood that my boss sent him back to the States. His two year stint in Brazil was cut short. 

He was only there for a total four months.

Now, this is important. The thing is, when he returned home, there was no role for him to fill. His old job and position was already filled. He was a high-priced expensive executive with no home. Yes, for a short while they put him on "overhead", but eventually he was told to leave. They gave him a severance package. And that was it.

Years later, I heard that he spent a few years unemployed. He could never go back to GM, and his experience was too specialized. Eventually he took up contract work at a much lower pay grade. I do not know what happened since then, except that I know that he had to give up his free car, and had to sell the house at a loss. I do know that he moved into a small apartment later on. And, well, that's about all I know about him and his situation.

He probably got a divorce. He should of, if he didn't.

What does this all mean?

A good wife can make a man into a strong leader. He can become important, successful and wealthy. His family would profit and benefit. His life, and the lives of all those around him would improve. A weak or poor wife would do the opposite. A bad woman can destroy the life of the man that she is with. This can be through destruction of his self-esteem (which needs to be maintained for career success) to improperly managing family finances, to everything in between.

Men, choose your wives carefully.

In my little story, a true one at that, Mr. XXXXXX ‘s wife not only destroyed his role (and great career opportunity) in Brazil, but also wiped out his stable career at GM. Unable to find work, he had to settle for a different kind of labor, one without a career, without any kind of advancement. I am sure that his piece-of-shit wife berated him the entire time. Telling him what a loser he was for his life, and not taking responsibility for all the destruction that she herself, wrecked.

People. This is real life. This is not a television show. This is not a movie. This is not all unicorns prancing under a progressive rainbow, where gay people, and LGBT folk are all living in united harmony. This is the real frigging’ deal.

Malaysia

It’s beautiful. The girls are stunning.  The food is delicious.  The weather is warm to hot, but it’s actually quite lovely once you get used to it.

Nipah Bay beach
The beach at Nipah Bay is hailed as one of the most beautiful beaches in Pangkor, and is frequented by foreigners and locals alike. There are uninhabited islands nearby such as Giam Island and Mentagor Island, surrounded by a rich diversity of corals and marine life. Snorkellers will find this beach a little haven.
“Kuala Lumpur has so much to offer.  You can enjoy city life to the fullest - there are a massive amount of shopping malls here, a variety of restaurants and cuisines, and people from all over the world.  

Tower
Along with the Petronas Twin Towers, Menara KL Tower is easily Malaysia’s most recognizable and popular landmark. Constructed in 1994, the tower stands at 421 metres and effortlessly trumps the Petronas Twin Towers with the highest and most spectacular view of the city. This gleaming tower’s spindle-like apex is visible from almost anywhere in Kuala Lumpur.
There are neighborhoods that offer their own unique character, adding a spice of life to the city that is rare to find. 

I also love how you can get away from city life pretty easily with hikes in local mountains or drives to nearby ports and beaches. 

What I love most is the diversity and acceptance - of people, of cultures, of religions, and of activities. The quality of life is amazing as  the opportunities are endless in what you choose to spend your time doing.
Muslim girl.
There is a huge Muslim population in Malaysia. This is true in all the cites such as Kuala Lumpur.
Healthcare is insanely cheap in Kuala Lumpur….at least in comparison to the USA! 

The doctors are all trained in Western cultures and are very knowledgeable.  I’ve gone to general and specialty doctors out here as well as dentists, and am now about to have a baby out here, and feel insanely comfortable!”

- Kimbra is an American expat who moved to Kuala Lumpur

Malaysia has a robust retirement visa, called the ‘Malaysia My Second Home’ program. Although it requires a sizeable deposit in a Malaysian bank, the visa is ten years and allows visa holders to purchase residential homes, as well as providing a national identity card. Any income received outside of Malaysia is not taxable.

Langkawi Islands
Langkawi is a group of 104 beautiful islands located in Andaman Sea which is about 30 kilometers off the coast of northwestern Malaysia. The Langkawi island is dominated by forest-covered mountains, hills and natural vegetation. Langkawi receives heavy rain annually which is more than 2,400 mm. From December until February there is a dry season in Langkawi and September is the wettest month on Island. Only four of the all islands are inhabited with about 99,000 people living there.

While there is a large Muslim population in Malaysia, they are not radicalized like the Muslims in the Middle East, Russia or Western China. As such, you can drink, smoke, go to bars, and have a good time. Women can go out and not be afraid that pack of rabid Muslim Syrians wouldn’t attack them. It’s a very safe place.

A few years back some radical Muslims tried to blow up a bunch of folk, and the government cracked down with zero tolerance. Today, there is hardly a peep from the radical Muslims in this nation. They were exterminated by the government when they reared their ugly head.

Night Life Girls
Kuala Lumpur girls having a great time at a bar. We can choose our reality. We can build and create the life we want. It’s just a matter of assembling it and making it happen.

England

England 1
London does not represent England. London is an “International” city located within England. England itself, is something else entirely. Here, we discuss the areas outside of London, but within the UK.

Why not England?  I had friends there, and they (no matter how friendly they are with the United States) always consider the USA to be the “backwater” insanely-political has-been.  At the time, prior to the UK break from the EU, I considered it a stepping-stone to global advantage.  However, I never pursued that avenue of thought.  Here’s an interesting article about moving to England from the United States.  It is titled “What is it like to move to England from the States?” and can be found here. Some excerpts;

“The old adage of "British food is great, if you like fish and chips, bangers and mashed or chicken tikka masala" is now a load of bollocks (bull$!@t). There are amazing restaurants to be found in London - some great restaurants and farmers markets (my favorite, bar none, is Borough Market). Once you learn to navigate the different supermarkets (Tesco, Sainburys, Waitrose, Asda, etc) and discover their online interfaces, you begin to appreciate the convenience. BUT, weekends are terrible when you consider that everything closes by five pm (1700) on Sundays.”

And…

“One thing you will miss is water pressure. Sadly, the Victorian mains and the age of many homes were designed with limited water and poor pressure. Some people say they have "power showers" which are often essentially electronic devices designed to add some pressure at the expense of a loud and powerful noise. Who needs leaf blowers when a power shower will do.”
Bibury England
England can be quaint and colorful. Here is a small village known as Bibury in England.

And…

“Everyone sits at their desk and bangs on their computer primarily, and depending on your role determines your clothing choices. Even in startups, sales is often suited and booted in sharp suits and thin trousers (not pants, as we say in America). Engineers or Developers are relatively shabby in t-shirt and trousers chic. And everyone else seems to dance to their own drum.

You can usually tell a person profession from their dress: finance and insurance people are in the dark suits and the only hint of color is their tie and shoes, which will not make sense to American fashion. Seniority is often determined by who is wear their jackets in the office -- you can tell who the junior manager is by their newer clothing and jumpers (sweaters) over their collared shirts.”
England 2
England can be very beautiful. It has a great countryside, miles of beaches and a long history.

And…

“Meeting others can happen as an American, since your accent provides no hint of geographic background that is within the English discerning. My favorite experience is saying hello to people in a locale I just joined and watch the turned heads and smiles that suddenly appear. Just remember not to be too loud and you will be well received.”

In the article are comments from a reader.  Her name is Dawn Rutherford Marchant, (or screen name) and had some very interesting comments that included;

“It is hard.  Just because people speak English, do not be deceived.  It is an utterly alien place from America culturally, and I found (and still find) the adjustments frustrating and I sometimes still get furious by the difficulties.
England 3
England is full of history. There are houses that are centuries older than the oldest homes in the United States. The countryside is wonderful.
One of the biggest realities is the drop in the material standard of living.  British wages are not as high as in the US and things are more expensive.  Obviously, this impacts on lifestyle.

Houses are very expensive and you will live in a house half the size you'd expect in the US, often attached to your neighbour and with a one car garage (if you are lucky).  There are no basements, so you feel cramped and everything is cluttered -- I've never seen a walk-in closet to date.  You will cram everything into a 'wardrobe' the size of your coat closet.  “
Pub 1
It’s intangible, but you can’t beat it. Historically, pubs (or “public houses”, to give them their full, point-backing-up name) have been a place geared towards social interaction, with the booze acting as a lubricant. Bars sometimes seem to be there to get you hammered first and foremost, with social interaction being an occasional, accidental by-product. The average Brit teen is fine in his/her local pub around 16yrs old. At a bar/the US in general, even being 21 is no guarantee, unless you have an ID, a birth certificate, and a letter from the president saying it’s cool for you to drink Buttery Nipples.

And…

“But there are pubs!  Pubs are an Englishman's refuge and the place where you meet up with mates for a quick pint,  as a routine part of 'friend maintenance.' 
English Pub 2
It’s extremely common for families, infant progeny included, to go out for a pub lunch on the weekend. When family & child go to bars for lunch, odds are that daddy will end up behind them at some point in his life. Plus there’s absolutely no tipping. COmpared to the USA, that automatically saves you 20% of the cost.
Our groceries are ordered on the internet and delivered to our front door -- as is typical for all supermarkets.  We live on the 'High Street' in our village -- bakeries, cafes, barber, grocery store and bus stop are located there, and three pubs of course.  The train station to London is an 8 minute walk.

My daughter is 14 and has 11 subject areas:  Latin, Greek, French, Chemistry, Biology, Physics, Advanced Maths, History, English, English Lit and Music (theory, performance and composition).  She anticipates fluency in French at 17.  The education system is exam based, there is no GPA.  She wants to study medicine and as med school begins freshman year, she has already begun pre-med coaching sessions at school.
Horwich Street
England is an explorer’s dream. There are so many places to explore and discover. You can walk, hike, bike, and travel via car.
Brits get a lot more time off -- 5 weeks as a rule -- and travel is a priority.  The cultural aspects of the country are fascinating - tiny it may seem, but it takes a lifetime to know this place, and with Europe, so close opportunities are expanded even further.

A massive advantage of living here is the National Health Service.  If an American could understand it, they would be amazed by its magnificence.  “

This is so good…

“The Brits have extremely strict zoning restrictions and there are no 'strip malls' -- not anywhere.  So you drive for an hour straight and won't see a petrol (gas) station or any commercial building sticking out like a sore thumb. 
English Pub the White Lion.
Here is the English pub called the White Lion. When a pub is called something hilarious/awesome (Dirty Dicks? The Hung Drawn and Quartered? Both real, both literally hundreds of years old), it’s not a cheap laugh, or a novelty, or a pun that gets old fast. Sorry, Amy’s Winehouse.
There is a deep love and care for the countryside that makes it compelling, and you can never tire of it.  It is the work of a thousand years -- a landscape built by man, layer by layer.  A masterpiece.”

As in all of these cases, I strongly advise the reader to read the original articles as there are many worthy things worth reading there.  What I have placed here are only some excerpts.  The comments are all pure gold.

Here’s a comment from one of the commenters that also lives in England from the USA;

“Beer. A pint of beer at a business lunch is totally acceptable.”

Moreover, that comment is worth Gold because it just says the world about what freedom, work and life is like once you leave the American Prison Gulag. (We never realize what our lives our missing until we step outside of our reality and start comparing with the realities of others.) No, it’s not as simple as being able to drink.  That is trivial.  It is the sum total of what you can and cannot do.

Are you, my dear reader really… actually free?

Are you the champion of your life?  Do you keep all of the money you earn?  Do you wear the clothes that you want 100% of the time, every single day, with the hair style that you prefer?  (All American companies have a “dress code”.) Do you and can you take a day off to have fun?  And, not have to ask ANYONE for permission?  (Don’t lie to yourself.  Think.)

Do you have a “boss”?  Yes. Then you need permission.

Most Americans, unless you are Bill Gates, Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton has a boss.  They tell you how to behave and how to live your life.

Once you realize that, you begin to understand the NEED to start to get a little bit more control back into your life.  Maybe you will still have a “boss”, but if you can start to reacquire the freedoms that your parents and grandparents enjoyed, then you will be on your way to happiness.

Woods
English can seem magical to an American. It is a great place for walking, hike and just travel.

Consider the drinking culture. Let’s compare.

When I was at Delco, the rule was that you could lose your job if the management found you to be hungover, drinking near or during the ten hour block of time associated with work, lunch and commute. They strongly policed this rule. It was “for our safety“, and “to become more competitive” were the excuses. However, if this was the case, then why did it ONLY apply to us “White Collar” workers and not the rank and file union staff?

In general, America has more of a bar scene than a pub culture. Particularly popular is the sports bar, where thousands of giant TV screens simultaneously broadcast billions of seemingly never-ending games. Such places are rowdy, loud and full of frat bros loaded on light beer.

British pubs are quiet, relaxing environments, and although there are pubs in America, they don’t serve the same function as they do in the U.K. This is because Brits occupy pubs in the same way Americans occupy coffee shops. Brits will happily go to a pub during the day (without fear of judgment) to work, read, take meetings or simply enjoy a drink.

"In every corner of every pub in every British town, you will find a fruit machine. This is not a vending machine from which punters may dispense fresh fruit for their consumption; rather it is a slot machine much like the ones found in Las Vegas and Atlantic City. Colloquially known as a “gambler,” the machine is a confusing clusterjam of flashing fruits and strange beeping that only the person with the lowest IQ in the pub can understand."

And…

"As we all know, the legal drinking age in the U.K. is 18, which means there’s a much younger clientele frequenting British pubs than there are American bars. Add to this some British lackadaisical door security, and you’ve got kids who couldn’t get into an R-rated movie without an accompanying adult buying drinks, making the pub look more like a youth club than a fully licensed taproom. 

In America, however, almost every bar will have a bouncer on the door who won’t let you in unless you have valid identification proving you’re 21 or over. 

Even if you’re 63 and look terrible for your age, you’ll still be asked for ID. 

Interestingly, in the U.K. it’s actually legal for someone as young as 16 to drink beer, cider or wine in a pub so long as it’s with a meal and they are accompanied by an adult over 18 who purchases the alcohol."

-BBC America

In fact, the pubs in England are “Family Friendly”. Most British pubs are family-friendly and even have a playground out back for the kids. Usually there’s a separate area inside the pub marked “Family Room” where children are permitted. This ensures the little tykes don’t displease the kid-loathing adults drowning their sorrows at the bar. Meanwhile, I don’t recall ever having seen a child in a bar in the United States.

I look back at the USA in this regard and lament the loss of freedom that the British obviously retained.

Finally, I want to throw my “two cents” into the ring about drinking…

Japan

Japan 1
Japan is very beautiful. The government sees to it that the natural beauty of the countryside is maintained. I really wish that the USA would devote some money to preserving buildings and planting trees like the Japanese do, instead of giving it all away to third world countries like Obama has done.

Why not move to Japan?  Indeed, Japan has always interested me.  I think it began with the Ultraman televisions series that I watched as a boy.  Maybe it was the pretty girls, the J-Pop music, or perhaps it was the cool gadgets that were always being invented there.

While everyone focuses on the absurd and crazy ways that the Japanese handle things, the fact and truth is that Japan is an exceptionally beautiful nation. It is intended to be that way. For instance, after World War II, most of the forests in Japan were all cut down for the war effort. Since then, the Japanese set forth to preserve which forests remain. This has resulted in amazingly beautiful woods, parks and natural areas.

Beautiful-Japan-2
Japan is very beautiful and people make it a point of pride to treasure it. They take pleasure in the colors, the arrangements, the scents and the atmosphere. The result is wonderment.

I visited, but never moved.  Never the less, other Americans have moved and they have some interesting things to say about the Japanese culture.

Cool and Crazy

きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ - PONPONPON , Kyary Pamyu Pamyu - PONPONPON
きゃりーぱみゅぱみゅ – PONPONPON
“I'm guessing that one of the top reasons people want to move to Japan is because of how eye-poppingly insane everything here is. Japan is the patron saint of the Internet -- everything is either batshit crazy or adorable (or both), with the sole requirement of being impossible to explain in any conceivable context.

Man, I'm about to destroy a lot of illusions.

To start, let's talk a little about Japanese TV. You may have seen clips of some X-rated Japanese game show floating around the Internet wherein an audience full of young women eagerly compete for the privilege of having sex with some random guy on stage in front of hundreds of people (if not, you're probably searching for them right now). Here's the shocking truth behind those videos -- they are porn.”

Gasp!

“As in, they are professional pornographic videos dressed up to look like a game show, because ... you know, just because. Does porn need a reason?

There's a Simpsons porn out there featuring people sweatily groping each other in jaundiced yellow body paint, for Christ's sake. Nobody is posting clips of that on the Internet and claiming it's the new season ... well actually, somebody probably is, but nobody would seriously believe that.”

Oh, don’t be so sure about that…

“The porno game show I'm referring to is called Kobe Surprise, and it is every bit an actual game show as Walt Disney's Pocahontas is a historical documentary. Just like those goofy "true life" pornos MILF Hunter or Bang Bus, nothing about it even approaches reality, yet all you apparently need to do is tell everyone it's from Japan and suddenly people think it comes on every night after Wheel of Fortune.

Don't get me wrong -- there are some daffy game shows in Japan, and there is definitely erotic programming on late night TV, but the country isn't full of shamelessly sex-crazed lunatics who have stopped trying to measure the immensity of the shits they no longer give.

"So what about those infamous vending machines that sell used panties?" you might ask. Well, they do exist, but they were outlawed nearly 20 years ago. You can still find one from time to time, but they are illegal as fuck and usually hidden in sex stores or fetish clubs, and not in a bus station next to the Mr. Pibb machine.”

Another illusion shattered.

Must love cats.
Japanese television series titled “Must Love Cats”. The Japanese love cats. It’s all about going cat crazy in Japan.
“I shook my head particularly hard when I read about the Japanese fundraiser that allowed people to squeeze some hot girl's breasts if they donated money to AIDS research, because every website that reported on it wrote about it like it happens every Tuesday in Japan. It doesn't. The event was hosted by a freaking porn channel -- that's like if Hugh Hefner held a topless car wash at the Playboy Mansion and the BBC told the rest of the world that there was one next to every McDonald's in America.

But maybe you dream of living in Japan not because the porn flows like water (it doesn't, at least not any more so than in any other country where the Internet is a thing), but because of your love for anime, which is so popular and widely accepted among Japanese adults that you could enjoy your obsession in peace with the approval of your peers. Even though we've moved on from porn, don't put those tissues away just yet -- you may need them for the next paragraph.

After all these years in Japan, I can honestly say that animation (major studio productions notwithstanding) is still mainly considered kids' stuff. There is shockingly little anime on television, and most of it is unapologetically meant for children. The only adults who really get into it (referred to as otaku) are usually perceived by the media as overweight, unwashed weirdos who are probably child molesters. Sound familiar? You're bound to spend just as much time hiding your Trigun DVDs from company here as you would anywhere else.”

What about the Stuff…

“To me, Japan isn’t even a country. Japan is its own planet... completely different than anywhere else in ways that are incomprehensible to most westerners.”

-Simon Black

There is no doubt that Japan has it’s fair share of unusual (and creative) stuff. This runs the spectrum from dental floss to unusual automobiles, and everything in between. In fact, entire books and movies can be written about this one aspect of this culture. (Which is yet another one of the reasons why I oppose the effort to make everyone and everything “equal” and the same.  Such as what we see in the Obama administration, and in the EU from Brussels. Different is good. It is not bad.)

Potato Bug cell phone.
Japan has all kinds of crazy things. I particularly like this potato-bug styled cell-phone case. Can’t you just imagine using it to talk on the subway, or better yet putting it in your purse? Cool.

Japan is unique, and for me, I think it is just wonderful. They do things their way and on their terms.  They just don’t care what others think.  When President Obama wanted them to open up their borders to permit Muslim “refugees”, they politely declined.  As they expected that any immigrants to their nation, [1] assimilate, [2] do not try to change anything, and [3] observe THEIR customs (not the other way around).

I truly wish that America would be this way. You see, I strongly believe that it is our differences that make us all great. Not our similarities.

Japanese vegetables
How about some fine Japanese vegetables? Here we have some grown in molds and then hand painted. Cool idea. Now how about Donald Trump, or maybe pumpkins shaped like Hillary Clinton for Halloween?

That being said, the rigidity of the nation might be a little uncomfortable for many Americans.  As it has become stylish to cover oneself with tattoos, and promote multi-sexual trans-gender confusion.

The Japanese are a very traditional society, and as such they are conservative. Which is something that I favor. They might be odd, and beyond a little strange, but they are certainly traditional.

Japanes Tattoos
Tattoos are generally not tolerated in Japan. They are associated with dangerous gangs and unsavory types. You are not permitted to publicly display them, and you are most certainly not permitted to enter public pools with them.

Japan is a traditional nation. They take pride in their culture and in their traditions. For instance, gender roles are fixed and stable.

Learn English the right way
Learn English with proper gender roles. Japan takes pride in it’s culture and in it’s traditions. They absolutely do not welcome change, and like most other Asian nations, have a very dim view of SJW Social Justice Warriors.

Japan has all kinds of interesting traditions and holidays. This is something that I have always found quite interesting. If you go to another nation, you want to experience their culture. That is, instead of hiding away in Starbucks of McDonalds. You really need to go out and live life to it’s fullest.

Giant Penis
Only a selfie stick can pick up the vastness of this pink penis. Image is a snag capture from Tumblr including the text below it.

Working in Japan

From an article titled “The best and worst things about living in Japan” found here. The author sends some time discussing working in Japan.

“It's ridiculous that people show up 15 minutes early and stay 90 minutes late every day. It's expected that if you are sick, you use a vacation day rather than a sick day. And to be hire-able at your next job you need to show that you've used as few vacation days as possible.

It's also not too rare for people to have to take weeks or months off of work due to "mental illness" but it's actually because they are so #$!% overworked and stressed out.

Everyone pretty much realizes that the work-pace in Japan is rather arduous. What people don’t seem to realize is that the work culture in Japan goes hand-in-hand with the Japanese culture as a whole.

When my grandma died, my supervisors expected that I would follow the same rules as everybody else. You get one or two days off work for grieving and travel to the funeral, any other time is to be vacation time. So I had to pull out my contract and remind them that they agreed to give me a week in such an event. So yeah, moral of the story: Japanese people are overworked and under social pressure not to relax.

This all sounds pretty lousy to me. I mean, my job isn't very stressful at all, but I still really look forward to my days off and just having time to relax. I can't imagine living and working in Japan being so stressed out and then being discouraged to take time off. It sounds awful.”

The author of the article then goes on to compare the United States with Japan.

“Compared to American public transport at least, Japanese public transport is unbelievably awesome. In Europe and other countries, it's probably pretty good as well, but the Japanese have really got it down pat. Their subway and train systems are crazy convenient, accurate, and make getting around the country so much easier. Even their buses are awesome.

When I was in Japan, I never felt like having a car would have made my life more convenient. Having such a integrated system of public transport made getting around very easy and simple and it's one of the things I miss most. Japan sure does love its trains though.”

From a different article titled “5 Things Nobody Tells You About Living in Japan” found here and here are some interesting statements made in the article;

“Everything Is Frightfully Low-Tech.  Quick question: When was the last time you had to use a fax machine?  "What is a fax machine?" is an entirely acceptable response.

Well, you should try moving to Japan if you want to recapture the magic of the fax machine and other 1990s technology. I actually use one about twice a month to send out my work invoices, because many of the Japanese companies that employ me do not accept paperwork by email. The rare ones that do require that my Word/Excel files be compatible with their 1998 version of Microsoft Office, which is sort of like requiring your Avengers Blu-ray to play on a Betamax machine.

My point is, on the surface Japan seems like the closest thing Earth currently has to a moon base, what with their stock exchange being entirely computerized and wireless Internet literally coming out of their vending machines.

But the truth is, many things are still being done in painfully old-fashioned ways, a phrase which here means "by hand and on paper." Actually, having seen the amount of paper a typical Japanese office goes through, I feel safe in assuming that the entire country has declared a shadow war on both the information age and trees.

How can this be? Well, Japan is still mainly in the hands of the older generation: Over a fourth of the population is over 60, and they're in no particular hurry to adopt new technology (particularly not Apple products, because as far as Japan is concerned, Steve Jobs can go fuck himself). Institutions like banks, the postal service and government offices still keep all of their records on paper, maintained and filed by superfluous personnel who could easily be replaced by an old Soviet computer (which incidentally is more or less what a friend of mine at a Yokohama municipal office was using at his workstation as recently as 2010).

Many businesses still don't even accept credit cards. A Japanese airline can get you to any corner of the globe without a hassle, so long as you're paying in cash, even if the tickets come up to a few thousand dollars each (and I wish I wasn't speaking from experience). This is made even more difficult by the fact that I don't think I've ever seen a 24-hour ATM anywhere in Japan.

That's right; most banks in Japan keep their ATMs indoors, which means that once the banks close (typically around 6 p.m.), so do the machines, utterly defeating their entire purpose for existing. 

It's another extension of that technological resistance -- pretty much anywhere outside of Tokyo harbors a deep generational resentment for automation. They don't want the ATMs operational while there aren't any bank employees around to help in case something goes wrong (although outside of users being clubbed with a thermos and robbed, the list of possible mishaps is embarrassingly short). 

You can always try an ATM at a convenience store (the number of which currently exceeds the national population), if you don't mind the variable transaction fees that seemingly change at random. And that's only if your ATM card will even work in machines outside of your bank, which it almost certainly won't. “

And…

“The good news about health care in Japan is that your insurance is accepted pretty much anywhere. The bad news is that most hospitals keep shorter hours than a Blockbuster Video. 

Generally speaking, Japanese hospitals are only open from about 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., and are usually not open at all on the weekends. 

So if you lop off a digit at a family barbecue, you basically have to wrap your stump in a Pikachu towel full of ice, wait for Monday to roll around and hope your severed finger doesn't get freezer burn.”

Yikes!

Here is yet another article about living in Japan.  It is titled “What is it like living in Japan as a foreigner?” and it can be found here.  Here are some tidbits;

“Unnecessarily long work hours.  It's the norm in Japan that everyone needs to work long hours.  Employees won't leave the office until the boss does.  If it means surfing the internet, chatting with colleagues, or doing anything else other than work while waiting for your boss to leave then so be it.  It's not really a big deal unless you want to go home as early as possible to spend time with the family.

If you have a baby and need a stroller, what a hassle!  Space is a premium in Japan so most places where you need to push your stroller are narrow: doors, corridors, spaces between tables and chairs in restaurants, etc.  This causes inconveniences for you and others.  And others don't seem to hide their annoyance at you.  Forget about bringing your heavy duty stroller from abroad.  To get around, you're going to need a light and compact Japanese model that you can fold and keep in your pocket (ok, I exaggerate).

The subway system is excellent!  Unless you have a stroller (or are in a wheel chair for that matter).  Not all subway stations (in Nagoya) have elevators or even escalators.  We lived next to such a station so whenever my wife wanted to go anywhere not walking distance she had to managing going up and down flights of stairs with a stroller, a baby, and a young child.  Did she get any help?  Did I mention that people in Nagoya aren't very friendly?

Never mind about not being friendly.  Many are downright rude.  Imagine you get off the subway train and are now waiting for the elevator to take you up.  What many will do, especially teenagers and young adults, is as soon as the elevator doors open they'll just cut in front of you from the sides and fill up the elevator with you still standing outside the elevator waiting to get in.  And it's not because you're a foreigner.  I've seen them do this to others with strollers and even to old people too.

Too much cigarette smoke everywhere.  Even in restaurants, the non-smoking section is usually just a small corner in the back.  Yes, they make you walk through all the smoke to get to a not-very-isolated-from-smoke non-smoking section.  Out in public, it can be a challenge if you want your kids to avoid secondhand smoke.”

And in common with China as well, you can enjoy this comment…

“You get a lot of attention. Let's just say men tend to date girls one or two rank above what they would date "back home" by virtue of being a foreigner. But it's not just there you'll receive attention, it's in general life. In the street, you'll be ignored like everyone else, but in a social situation, particularly with beer involved, people want to talk to you. They are curious. They come out of their shell and ask you lots of questions. It can be a lot of fun.”

And…

“"Foreigner" is too broad of a term.  Your experience in Japan will differ wildly depending on what caste of foreigner you are. Your caste is determined primarily by your ethnic/national background, but your economic standing and personal charisma will play a role as well.

Here's the rough ranking, from most to least desirable:
  1. White Western European or North American/Australian/NZ
  2. White Eastern/Southern European, South American
  3. Developed East Asian (Taiwan, SK, Singaporean, HKer etc)
  4. Developing East Asian (mainland Chinese, Vietnamese)
  5. Southeast Asian
  6. Middle Eastern, South Asian (basically “brown people” to use the rough term)
  7. Blacks
It's also not a perfectly linear ranking of course, there are caveats to each caste. 

East Asians, especially ones from the Sinosphere, can be accepted almost as full Japanese after a while.  This is especially true with Taiwanese.  Among East Asians, Taiwanese are regarded particularly well. This is in contrast to whites, who while treated with more reverence, are almost never accepted as "Japanese".  So they will always be considered outsiders.

But by no means is it a bad deal to be Caucasian of any nationality in Japan.  The position is so comically worshipped that there's literally comics written specifically to address the issue: Charisma Man”

And welcome to the rest of the world, outside of the Western cultural bubble, you see this…

“There are no discrimination laws.  If you look at some job postings, you may see a listing for a flight attendant as "Light skinned attractive woman, less than 50kg, at least 167cm and between the ages of 22 and 30".  Once she hits 30, she will either be transferred or let go. 

Schools that do home stays for students have difficulties because the Japanese family may only want a blonde, blue eyed female student that's not fat but legally the school can't accept such a request.  Companies the same thing.  You may see an foreign recruiting agency trying to get around things by putting a requirement of "no more than 10 years work experience", which is their roundabout way of saying the Japanese client requested someone under 30. “

And, in common with China and the rest of Asia is this statement;

“Education and job are highly regarded in Japan, and most of Asia.  If you are well educated and have a great career, you will be treated well and respected even more so than in the US.”

Office Women

Nell provided some real “meat” in regards to details about what it was like to work in Japan as an American expat woman.  Interesting reading indeed;

“Japan was my life dream until I really lived there.

I chose Japanese language and culture as my major in university, I felt the sound of Japanese language was extremely attractive that every night I listened to my text book record as a¨lullaby¨ before sleeping.

After graduating, when I got an offer from a company in Japan, I felt like I won a lottery. So I started my Japan living experience as a foreigner.

The first shock was during the 3 days newbie training in Tokyo head office.

I learned a word 相槌 (aiduchi) which basically means when somebody (especially a senior in the company) talking to you, no matter what he/she talks, no matter you agree with him/her or not, you must keep on nodding, saying そうですね (soudesune)、なるほど(naruhodo)、はい(hai)、ええ(ee)、勉強になりました(benkyo ni narimashita) etc with a perfect smile, to show your respect. 

I understand and admire the social convention and manners like this, and actually it was a part of my "fancy elegant Japan" image, still when I had to do it nonstop for 8 hours, keep a polite sweet soft voice(which is not my usual, or, let me say, real voice), and keep those sincere "I admire you, senior" eyes... 

It did drive me crazy.
Office Woman
Japanese office woman. There are all sorts of traditional unwritten laws in Asia. There is also a kind of “uniform” that business women wear.
The second shock was in the “welcome party”. 

We newbies were the “main characters” who were supposed to give some special “show” as a tradition. I was lucky because I was both a female and a foreigner, so nobody asked me to do anything except for a short speech introducing myself. 

But my “douki”(the coworker who attended the company same year, so my newbie coworker) was a Japanese guy. Senior coworkers in my apartment forced him to drink a whole bottle of Tabasco in that party in front of everybody. It was a situation he had no way to escape. He did. Then he vomited terribly. 

I helped him cleaning and later we became friends- I realized why in Japan lots of “douki” coworkers have way better relationship with each other than with other coworkers- They kind of need a “union” to protect themselves from seniors in this strict “upper and lower relationship society”(縦社会 tatesyakai、上下関係 jyogekannkei).

I said I was lucky to be a female that no male coworker in the company “bullied” me that much to feed me a bottle of Tabasco. But soon I felt maybe to be a female was not that lucky.

In our office (and lots of traditional Japanese companies), there were 2 kinds of positions. “総合職 sougousyoku”(general position) and “一般職 ippansyoku”(common position).

Former is the positions you can get promoted step by step, usually require higher education background; and latter is the positions basically you can never get promoted, usually ONLY for women who wouldn’t work for a long time, would quit job after get married or give a birth. (I have never seen any male in a “common position” in Japan. But if there is please correct me). 

So in our office, all men were in “general position” and all women were in “common position” except me. I was the only female in a “general position”. At first I was kind of, a bit proud of myself. But soon I found it was a complicated situation. 
Japanese officer worker 2
Female workers in Japan have all sort of rules and regulations that they must follow. THis is true for mean as well. This often comes as a shock to American women as they are not used to such restrictions in dress, and behavior.
Every morning female coworkers make tea or coffee for the male coworkers who they were working with. But it’s hard to say it’s part of their work as assistants or it’s just kindness. Still I have never seen any male coworker making coffee for a female coworker or a male coworker. 

I was a junior, I had a senior male coworker as my trainer. So I very much hesitated if I should make coffee for him. Finally I did, still I felt it’s something I HAD TO do otherwise I would look not nice and would be DIFFERENT with other girls which would make me a difficult situation in the office.

Couples years later when I made some real Japanese friends, I tried to ask them why I always saw Japanese women pour tea, pass chopsticks and tissues when eating in restaurant for man, but seldom see men do such things for women? 

They answered me honestly “Hmmm…we got used to it… and the tea made by women is more delicious.”

I found some “benefits” to be a woman in Japan too. Though I needed to serve beer for male coworkers when eating in a restaurant like my other female coworkers do, girls usually pay less than guys when separating the bill. I guess it’s somehow a “balance” in this society.

Another shock is overtime work. In the first year I lived in Japan, I never finished work before 9pm, the average was 10pm. Sometimes I finished work earlier, or had nothing to do. But I dare not go home, because my boss and seniors were still working. 

It was too shame to let them know I was "free". 

Later I got to know sometimes my boss and seniors do the same, they don't leave the office because it's too shame to let their staffs know they are "free". And of course, the overtime is basically no pay.”

Jinji ido

In Japan, however, at the end of the fiscal year in April, they have what’s called “jinji ido” (“moving people around”). Basically it’s musical chairs within the company, where the bosses shift some employees around from department to department. Were you working in human resources for four years? Congratulations, now you’re in sales! Weren’t popular as a secretary? Well now you’re working in finance.

No one is safe from the “jinji ido” – some number of bosses, fresh employees, and veterans are all shuffled around every year. On the one hand, this makes working for the same company your entire life not a completely soul-crushing prospect, since you always have the hope that you’ll be moved somewhere else next year if you don’t like your current boss or department, but on the other hand, it helps justify Japanese people feeling chained to their jobs.

Either way though, it was always fun watching the results of the yearly Japanese office Hunger Games.

Oppai

 photo vlcsnap-00015-1.jpg

An oppai club in Tokyo is similar to many bars around Asia, but with some twists. All over this part of the world it is very common for guys to go to bars or KTV’s and effectively pay for the attention of girls.

Here is a writeup from Guys Night Life on the Oppai clubs in Japan;

“We don’t necessarily mean sex, just to have a sexy girl sit with you while you enjoy your drink. That is how things work at the oppai clubs in Tokyo, but as we mentioned there is a twist. Calling these a strip club certainly wouldn’t be correct, because when you think of a strip club you think of sexy girls dancing naked on stage. 

That doesn’t happen here.

Instead what happens at the oppai clubs is you pay to have a few girls sit with you, usually it is 3 girls for a little under 15 minutes each. When they sit with you they pull their tops down, and your hands are free to play with them titties.
Keep calm and oppai shibotai.
Keep calm and oppai shibotai.
Some girls may do some kissing (you have to brush your teeth when you enter lol) or will let you suck on their tits, but not all will. There are some set-in-stone rules at oppai clubs, and if you break them you will be asked to leave.

First off your hands are only allowed to play with the boobs, you can’t go down between her legs. Sometimes the girls might do some light cock rubbing through your pants, but you can’t pull your dick out and aren’t going to have sex or get a blowjob here. The most famous oppai club in Tokyo is Pretty Getter which has multiple locations. Another one you can try is Ooedo, and there are others around town as well.

How much does an oppai pub cost? It is roughly $60 to have the 3 girl rotation that lasts a little under 45 minutes. You will need to buy a drink as well.

So, in one way they are a lot like strip clubs in the western world because you are going to go there to get horny and blue balled. However unlike in the western world you can head to a blowjob bar right after to alleviate that concern.”

Yeah. You can go and sit down with three girls and play with their breasts for 15 minutes or so. Kinky, but cool.

Girls

Japanese girls are very similar to all Asian ladies. I find Asian ladies very attractive in a very kind and sweet way. Here is an interesting quote on this subject;

“Coming from a culture where the women are taught to be big-mouthed, rude, and disrespectful, the American visitor to Japan will at once be pleasantly surprised by the poise, demeanor, and courtesy of the Japanese girl.  

This to me is sexually attractive.  It is nice to be treated with respect wherever you go.  Even when your approach is rejected, it is done with such exquisite politeness that you feel nothing unpleasant at all.
Traditional female dress.
I find that traditional Japanese clothing is very visually appealing and attractive. The Japanese women do actually wear traditional clothing. It is not a rarity.
As I’ve gotten older, I have come to value courtesy and politeness very highly, perhaps because it is so rare in Anglo-American women.  

Obnoxiousness does not equal strength, as American women believe.  

Boundaries exist, and everyone knows what they are.  Japanese culture also teaches humility and self-sacrifice as positive virtues.  This ethic is extolled in countless historical dramas, soap operas, and other cultural contexts.  Japanese girls are genuinely humble and modest, for the most part; and this character trait I find very appealing.”

-Quintus Curtius

Fast Food Insanity

Finally, let me just say that the Japanese has taken the “Fast Food” engine and allowed it to run amuck (off the rails). Here, in Japan, you can see the most extreme versions of American staples.  Really, do the Japanese actually eat these creations?  I actually wonder.

Extreme burgers in Japan
Japan really does seem to enjoy the extreme side of living. I mean, who can actually eat such creations? They look great, but one burger would be enough to feed you for a week, don’t you think?

Another thing that I really like about Japan is that they like the gender roles to be clear and enhanced. Girls and women should be demure, cute, pretty and attractive. For they are the bedrock of the society.

As such, even the workers in McDonalds are cute and adorable.

Japanese fast food workers.
Japanese fast food workers. Aren’t these girls cute? I really like the girls in the fluffy dresses and the hair ribbons. It is so attractive. This is McDonalds in Japan. Bet you didn’t know that.

Links

Some interesting links;

Sweden

Mr Bernie Sanders opined about the benefits of living in Sweden (yet he never moved, I wonder why?) and because of that he wanted to transform the United States into some kind of socialist paradise modeled under Sweden. 

His ideas sounded stimulating to say the least. The kind of stuff that people who have never held a job, worked for a boss, or paid taxes would believe.

Imagine that… a place where everyone is equal and all contributes to the common good and everyone is equal, happy and content. What’s not to like? (At least that is what his followers thought.)

Personally, I disagree with this philosophy. In fact, I strongly believe that it is our differences that make us strong. Not our similarities.

Sweden on the coast.

Sweden has many nice and tight coastal communities up and down the nation. Each one is quaint with their own sense of belonging. Here is an interesting article titled “I’m an American living in Sweden. Here’s why I came to embrace the higher taxes.” Written by Tom Heberlein on April 8, 2016.  It can be found here.

“In Sweden, the four-page tax form comes in the mail already filled out. On a Saturday morning, Betty and I take our coffee to the couch and review the forms. Seeing they look reasonable, as they always do, we "sign" with a text from our phones. In 15 minutes we are done. We don't have to hire a tax consultant, and we avoid fights about whether a print cartridge bought at the drugstore is a business expense or not.”

And…

“When the conservative government, favoring lower taxes, came to power in Sweden in 2006 one of its first steps was abolish the property tax and replace it with a fixed fee. The real estate fee for services is 7,112 SEK per house ($825 at current exchange rates). This is the same for everyone no matter what the assessed value of the dwelling. The fee is $12 a month for our co-op apartment in Stockholm. If we owned the same property in Madison, our taxes would be $18,000 a year.”
Hiking Shelter.
A hiking shelter. In other nations, such as Sweden, the government has invested in parks, hiking trails and shelters for the citizens to use and enjoy.
Sweden is a very good example of “looking outside of the box”.  We, as Americans have become so accustomed to the “American way of life” (that is to say “the American way of doing things”) that it is actually impossible, and even shocking, to see that things are done differently elsewhere.  It is, to us, inconceivable. 

However, that is a real problem.  Given the size of the human population that there can NEVER be a “one size fits all” top down, centralized approach to social governance, no matter what the statists, and the progressive social democrats think.  Humans need and desire independence.  We need to find out what fits us and do things in a way that enables us to live our life in peace and harmony.

For some, this might be along the lines of what the Swedes do.  For others it might be more akin to what is practiced in North Korea.  For others it might be similar to how one lives in France.    Rather than look at the good, and at the bad in a foreign location, I propose that one conduct a full immersion in a different nation and decide themselves what is preferable to them.

It is the same as what I have done in China, and what most long-term expats have done as well.  Every place has both good and bad aspects. It is up to us to determine which aspects of our life is most signifigant to us, and then move to an area that best supports those ideals.  For me, America today seems to only be beneficial for the uber-wealthy in the large urban mega-cities on the American coasts, and not really beneficial in the rest of the nation.
Firewood
Fireplaces and snow. When Winter comes around you can bet that the Swedes keep warm and toasty in their wood-stove heated homes. When I lived in Wrentham, I had a wood stove and it kept the entire house (it was quite small) nice and toasty in the Winter.

In my mind, if you are able to be happy and satisfied in your labors and with your family, then the undesirable aspects of a place can be minimized in importance.

Some people, like my brother, love the mountains and they love the snow and the cooler weather.  I cannot blame them. There is something absolutely awesome about coming home after a good hard day’s work and firing up the wood stove, and having a nice warm beverage.

I used to live in a cabin on Lake Pearl in Wrentham, Mass.  The living room window overlooked the lake and it was surrounded with fresh pine trees.  In the wintertime, the snow would fall, and I would watch the squirrels going up and down the tree trunks while the fire crackled in the wood heater. 

Ah, good memories.

Cozy Cabin
A cozy cabin would be wonderful on a nice cold snowy day. Don’t you think? You do not need much. Just a wood burning stove – banned in the United States (thank you president Obama) and a rack to sleep on.

In Sweden, everyone is beautiful. 

Everyone. Sorry, no exceptions. In the back of your head, you’re thinking, Well, how beautiful can they be? And it turns out, really fucking beautiful. It’s weird. It’s almost like a new planet of hot people. According to Greg Poehler, a Swedish 5 is an American 12.

Greg Poehler is an actor who plays a celebrity accountant who relocates to Sweden. This actor moved to Sweden, from New York, in 2006.  He has strong opinions about Sweden.

And nudity is no big deal. (Like in Germany, and Iceland and the rest of the civilized world.)

That’s why you’ll see it on the Swedish show “Welcome to Sweden” (The Swedish version of course, it is censored in America.). Nudity’s not a thing for them.

I mean, it is a thing, but it’s a thing that’s constantly around, Poehler said that his kids swim naked all summer and then have to deal with their own culture shock when they come to the U.S. and have to cover up.

Poehler believes the nudity is actually a good thing:

"Even at a young age, you can just see how accepting they are of nudity and their bodies."

Friendship is largely based around dinner parties.

It can be difficult to make friends in Sweden, because most Swedes already have a strong group of friends that they’ve known for years. Good luck scoring a dinner party invite. “The party scene there is all about dinner parties,” Poehler explained. “So your friend selection is actually limited by how many seats you have around your dinner table. And unless somebody dies or gets divorced or moves away, you have no chance of getting invited to that table.” It’s an ongoing struggle: “I’m still trying to work my way through the dinner party scene.”

Television.

"In general, the Swedish viewing habits are much like it was in the U.S. 40, 50 years ago, where people are kind of all watching the same thing," Poehler said. That helped Welcome to Sweden get such impressive ratings. "The top 10 shows tend to get that type of number." And the "Friday night death slot" as it's known in the U.S. is actually a good thing for Swedish shows: "Our show was on Friday nights, which here would be a terrible night, but there is like the biggest night."

Log Homes

Log cabins have been traditionally built in this part of the European continent. Countries like Norway, Finland, Sweden, Russia and other Baltic regions were the regions where the log cabins have been built for centuries. The growth of coniferous trees in this part of the world is the primary reason for building these structures.

Wood cabin
The log cabin was “invented” in Northern Europe, and Sweden is perhaps the center of that trend. The idea of rustic homes bravely facing the harsh Winter weather came from Sweden.

The shape of these trees and the quality of wood obtained from them is ideal for the construction of log cabins. Migrants from the Scandinavian countries (especially from Sweden) who settled in America in the early part of the 17th Century are credited to have brought log cabins to Northern America.

Taxes

Sweden, as far as the United States is concerned, is a land of high taxation.  However, that might not be a bad thing. Yes, the taxes in Massachusetts were high.  Yes, everything is against the law in Massachusetts.  However, that does not take away from what I found most charming about it. (And to this day, I still miss my life in Massachusetts. I still consider it a wonderful place to live.)

One should NEVER make two-dimensional judgements about a region and a people until they first go out there and see it with their own eyes.

So, I say to everyone and most especially the readers herein, go to Sweden and make your own opinions.  Don’t fall for the Bernie Sanders narrative that Sweden is “Heaven on Earth”, nor should you fall for the Alex Jones narrative that all taxes are evil.  Find a middle-ground; a an area where you (personally) can find comfort.  Then go move there and live your life.

Below is a summary of the Swedish tax system.  I believe that I picked it up on Tumblr sometime during the 2015 – 2016 time period. I do not know who created this document, or whether of not it is accurate and reflective of the current taxiation system in Sweden today.  It is presented for the amusement and consideration of the reader.

Income Tax in Sweden.
Income Tax in Sweden. Off hand, I would say that the taxes seem prohibitively high. However, that might be offset by other issues. The only way to find out is to actually go to Sweden and find out for yourself.

Now, there are others who offer an opposing view toward Sweden. Here are some interesting quotes worth consideration…

“Higher education may be free but students in Sweden often have to take out loans to cover living expenses including rent and food while studying. 85 percent of students in Sweden graduate with debt and these fresh graduates also suffer from a high debt-to-income ratio once they land jobs. Sustaining oneself while trying to establish a career can be tough. Rent in centers like Stockholm can be both expensive and hard to come by for most young professionals.”

And…

“Sen. Sanders claimed that lessons on democratic socialism can be learned from the Nordics. However, Scandinavians were among those quick to correct Sen. Sanders saying that they aren’t socialist. They are technically market economies. Perhaps there’s this notion that a utopia is where citizens are provided everything and that everyone enjoys freedom and equality.

 For the most part, this seems to apply to Sweden since the government covers essential services and the people have an egalitarian outlook hence the reason they’re mistaken to be democratic socialists. Still, the reality is that people have to work hard, pay taxes, and deal with competition common in a market economy if they want to thrive in Sweden.”

Peru

Why not? I guess that I was inspired by the Phil Manzanera song “Big Day” and the lyrics about Peru.

Peru woman
Here is a nice woman from Peru. There are many beautiful women all over the world. Each one comes with their own traditions, society and ways of doing things. When we have become so accustomed to the American way of doing something, it is often a wonderful experience to find others who share our traditional view of the world.

This is one of those nations that no one really considers except to travel to (to look at ancient ruins). But that should be the exact criteria to give it a good long hard look.  Certainly something “off the beaten track” is what would be most desirable for a typical American expat today.

Cheap food, housing, and standard of living would factor high in where ever an expat might want to move to.  Not only that, but having a passport from Peru will not make you a target by Islamic radicals trying to purge the world of Americans…

Peru. Only in Peru.
Peru. Only in Peru. This is a very unassuming nation in South America. It is quite different from the United States and that makes it very interesting to me.

Here are some comments by an expat in Peru.  They have a blog that can be found HERE.

Driving

Apparently, it is pretty terrifying.

“The roads [in Peru] are pretty unforgiving. I once made a trip, well, tried to, from Trujillo to Otusco. I eventually turned around... those cliffs really humbled me. 

I have gone up and down the coast -- flat, no cliffs -- all the way to Tumbes at the Ecuadorian frontier with no problems. I could write a couple of chapters about the experiences with buses and cars in a hurry, passing on curves... single lanes on high passes... cliff collapses... buses passing you on curves drafting you first or meeting a bus head on coming at you lumbering and top-heavy around curves... YOU GOT NO PLACE TO GO. 

WEIGHT IS THE DOMINATING PRINCIPLE. THEY PUSH, HONK AND INTIMIDATE EVERYWHERE BUT ON THE CLIFFS. Life and death. I have frequently seen three people on a motorcycle with a kid sandwiched in the middle - all no helmets.”

Lima is a Cat City

From another blogger. Found HERE.

“The premiere Mall in Lima is Lacomar right on the ocean. It is an excellent mall, large and it could be in NY or any other major city and would be regarded as Excellent.

Also you can ask but in Lima is a park in a City Busy area that is a sanctuary for Cats. I mean,, the cats know it and there are a billion cats that hang there.. It is really a special place and quite an interesting phenomena.”

Cat city
In Lima, Peru is a cat city.

Internet

One Expat had this to say;

"More than six years of experience says that Internet is certainly reliable in Peru for remote sales and more. Video performance is choppy regardless of provider. Latency is an issue with video specifically. It really depends on from where you are planning on connecting and using what kind of services. There are Internet cafes in most cities and some small towns.

If you will be located in Lima and want a month to month wireless router service without phone hookup to support multiple devices in a home, then Olo can be recommended. But Olo has a delivery footprint and you need to check if your house is within that footprint. I have used that service for almost a year from San Juan de Lurigancho (Lima). I have also been a customer in the past of Nextel, Claro, Movistar, and Speedy. 

Claro/Movistar have a wireless dongle that works for a single computer. We had technical and customer service problems with Movistar. I used Nextel wide band with success for years. Speedy is fast, cheap, but good depends on the wiring in your part of the city and how much construction is happening near you.

If you are planning on setting up a high speed phone center in the provinces using existing services beyond Lima it is probably not going to happen, though I do know of a successful Skype-based salesman who did B2B appt setting daily and operated from Huanuco."

Climate

“Coastal Peru is really all desert. Where people live in urban areas with lots of houses it tends to be much greener but certainly never lush. It is dusty, but really I think all of Peru is dusty. I have never seen a screened window yet once you go outside an urban or city area unless you see farms and agriculture it is more desert like"

"Yes, coastal Peru is very much a desert. I found the scenery grows on you, especially next to the coast. I am most familiar with the Lima area (Miraflores) and the humidity is surprisingly high for a desert, but then I come from an area of very low humidity, Wyoming. I do seem to recall other places along the coast (e.g. Trujillo) seemed to be less humid,"

"Lima weather in the summer is fine, but it winter it is only gray. High humidity and lower temps... kind of uncomfortable. In Trujillo, the weather is always pleasant. In summer, when the skies are clear and blue, the humidity is high and just short of 100%, but it never rains. Rain is so unusual here that if you see drops it is a major downpour. Sometimes it is just misty and you can feel the lightest of drizzles... and even that is unusual. So, in the summer the humidity gets kinda uncomfortable. Generally summer is pleasant, but there is always a run of about 2-3 weeks where the humidity gets outtahand."

Safety

"It is possible that expats live in isolated clusters in several countries, but full disclosure, you should know that Peru has still active guerilla forces and that 17% of GDP is now from cocaine, according to National Geographic.

Apparently, Columbian 'interests' have decided to 'outsource' a bit of production and distribution to nearby countries, so I do not know how this bodes of stability or personal safety in Peru, but these are factors to consider."

"There is a particular area where Coca production prevails and there are some conflicts. Peru produces more cocoa than any other country in SA. That is production of raw material but not distribution of final product. Living in the area of Trujillo for a few years now I have had no visibility of any activities in that regard. It may go on in the background but who know. It does not affect daily living in any regard.

In all of Peru there are places known for safety and places known for danger. I have frequented Lima and flagged down many, many taxis without ever a hitch. Crime is not rampant and it is best not to exaggerate. Traveling through many parts of Peru I have never been accosted by a robber or thief. Of course, it is good to be sensible and wise, but I do not see an overwhelming or ever present threat of danger."

Conclusions

If you have a nice, comfortable life, then savor it. Appreciate it. Enjoy it.

However, if you are like one of millions of American men who have reached their 40’s and discovered that events, problems, and unforeseen disasters have decimated their savings, belongings, relationships and careers, perhaps you need to look elsewhere. Maybe you need to take a good hard look at your life and the decisions that you made decades ago that set you on the path that you now tread.

I suggest that there are many other nations and cultures out there, outside of the United States. There are good and bad things about all of them. But, given your situation, perhaps one or two might be more suitable than the progressive liberal “paradise” that the United States is turning into.

I urge you, or anyone who is asking the deep question “is that all that there is?”, to look outside the box, and consider the unthinkable; leave the United States and become an expat.

Take Aways

  • When things go wrong we often feel trapped. We become lost and directionless.
  • Part of the problem, and the cause for the lack of direction, is that we have automatically limited our options. We have, over the years, placed restrictions and limits on ourselves.
  • I suggest opening up ourselves to the reality that there are no limitations except those that we place upon ourselves.
  • A glance at a handful of other nations clearly shows that there are other places with other options for a man lost in the wilderness.

FAQ

Q: What if you cannot speak the language?
A: Well, you learn another language. If you want to be in a certain place with a specific lifestyle, then you will do what ever it takes. Most of the time, this will include learning another language and adapting to a different culture. Trust me, if you really want, or better yet, need to move and start all over again, then you will do what ever is necessary.

Q: What if I have a job, a family, children, but I am unhappy?
A: Then you need to find out what is making you unhappy.

Often it is things that have developed over a long period of time, that has taken a toll on us. Sometimes it is the little things, like having a wife that forbids you to drink cream with your coffee, or a work place that doesn’t allow you to smoke. Perhaps it is a constantly increasing  tax burden with no appreciable increase in your standard of living. When your soul starts screaming at you, it’s time to listen. Something is wrong.

You, as the man of the house, must do something about it.

Q: I think that I am going through a “mid-life” crisis, but my wife thinks I’m bonkers, what do I do?
A: Yell at your wife for discounting your emotions and your feelings. She should be better attuned to you, your feelings and your needs. Since she is disparaging you, then there is certainly something wrong; with her.

If you feel and think a certain way, then that has validity. No one, especially someone who is part of your family should ever disparage that.

You need to have a good sit down with your family and explain how you feel. It is not an issue about working out what to do, as it is a real need to state that your needs are not being met. That you are not being listened to, nor are your feelings being respected. You will be unable to continue in a life where these fundamentals are missing from your life.

Q: What criteria should be used to determine which nation to move to?
A: Safety, ease of access, and personal finances. Where ever you go, you will need to be open to making new friends, adapting to a strange culture, and change your way of life. For some it is way to shocking. Here in China, we have a saying that Americans can’t last more than three months in China. Plan, and be careful.

In my mind, the most important things are [1] the pace of life… and, [2] how hard you have to work to just live in a most basic way.

Multi-Part Series

There are so many nations and places to choose from. This post is part two of a multi-part post. My basic premise is that the world is a big place. Get out. Enjoy the differences. Savor them. Life is too short not to.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 7NOV18
  2. Completed 8NOV18.
  3. SEO review 8NOV18.

Nations that an American Man could Travel and Relocate to – Part 1

What happens when you are given a five minute notice before your company lays you off? Then they hand you a NDA, and expect you to sign it, or else they will prevent you from getting food stamps and support. What then?

What options do you have? Another stab at getting yet another American job, and America boss in an American corporate environment? Is that what your options are? As an American man, just what are your options?

There are times when you just feel a screaming need to “bug out”.

But, let me tell you something. The world is yours once you have lost everything.  That includes nations, food, culture and girls. You can go anywhere and be anyone. This is especially true for an American man who faced a vindictive ex-wife, or had an encounter with any of the many, many American alphabet regulatory organizations such as the IRS, DHS, CIA, FBI, ICE, FDA etc.

People, there is an entire world out there. It is big, and filled with all sorts of interesting and colorful people.

I urge the reader to divest themselves from the notion that the United States offers the only decent living arrangements on the globe.  There are other places.  Many others.

Some are better and some are worst.  It is up to the reader to consider all of the options that lie before them and make determinations and judgments biased upon their own individual situation, preferences, and desires.  Not (to make them biased) on fear or lack of experience…

You do not have to endure a life that is defined by others…

Introduction

The world is filled with interesting people, wonderful places, and really different ways of doing things. many of which are a pleasant surprise to Americans who have grown up thinking that the “American Way” is the only way to do things (as well as being the “best” way to do things).

Fun girls.
The world is filled with fun and interesting people. The cultures and societies are different, and in many ways there are changes that lead to a more relaxed and fulfilled life. You just need to go out and explore and venture forth. Now, come on, don’t these two gals look like they would be a lot of fun to hang out with?

There are so many nations and places to choose from.

Written by a Man

Please note that this was written by a man. It is about things that might be of interest to a man. For similar posts written by women, I would suggest the Huffington Post, the Washington Post, or Salon.

Also note that this is a blog. It contains personal opinions. If you want to read something that is unbiased and doesn’t have opinions, try CNN. LOL.

Finally, many of the things that are commonplace in other nations are either banned, censored or illegal in the United States. This post does not censor for American sensibilities. As there are people all over the world that reads it. I just can’t sanitize it for Americans. That includes…

  • Buying beer on Sunday.
  • Doing drugs in Holland.
  • Prostitution chain-bordellos in Germany.
  • Public nudity in Iceland.
  • Smoking in public in China.
  • Being able to eat in restaurants barefoot in Cambodia.
  • Traditional gender roles in Brazil.
  • The giant penis festival in Japan.
  • Buying ED medicine without a prescription. (Common everywhere.)

If you are an American, and you are too sensitive to the realities outside of America, then I would suggest you leave. Exposure to freedom is not something to be taken trivially. Real freedom is not having to ask permission to do something. Real freedom is not taxed, monitored or prohibited.

Real freedom is not taxed, monitored or prohibited.

Multi-part Post

This post is part one of a multi-part post. My basic premise is that the world is a big place. Get out. Enjoy the differences. Savor them. Life is too short.

Let’s start by talking about a tiny mountain nation smack dab in the middle of Europe.

Switzerland

Ah Switzerland.  Perhaps my number one ideal destination.  However, not my number one practical destination.

Switzerland
For a relatively small, landlocked country, Switzerland contains an exceptional amount of natural beauty and cultural diversity—with four official languages and all the variety they represent. These 10 towns spread across the country demonstrate the best Switzerland has to offer in terms of spectacular mountain scenery, flower-lined nature paths, lakefront beauty, and picturesque historic centers.

Here’s an interesting article titled “Living in Switzerland ruined me for America and its lousy work culture” written  by Chantal Panozzo on February 1, 2016.  Found here.

“During my Swiss career, I was employed by various companies from 25 percent to 100 percent. When I worked 60 percent, for example, I worked three days a week. A job that is 50 percent could mean the employee works five mornings a week or, as I once did, two and a half days a week. 

The freedom to choose the amount of work that was right for me at varying points of my life was wonderful and kept me engaged and happy.”

And…

“At my former American job, I received 10 days of paid vacation per year, and each of those days came with a sizable portion of guilt if actually used. 

But in Switzerland, my husband's company gave employees six weeks of vacation a year. 

Most of the Swiss companies I worked for gave four — the legal minimum is four. Moreover, everything shut down between Christmas and New Year's, giving most employees like me another guaranteed week off.”

Wow, it sounds like a great place to work. You can work at your own pace, and attend to your family life.  If you are too stressed, you can work out an arrangements where you work part time. If you have family issues, you can adjust things accordingly. If you need more money, you can work out an aggressive work schedule. This degree of corporate flexibility is a freedom that Americans do not possess.

Winter in the Swiss mountains…

Switzerland
Living in Switzerland would be awesome. You have the mountains, the seasons, the fresh air, and a more sensible pace of life. Spring is glorious and Fall is magical.
“About three years into my Swiss life, I lost my job. And I discovered that in Switzerland, being on unemployment meant you received 70 to 80 percent of your prior salary for 18 months. 

The Swiss government also paid for me to take German classes, and when I wasn't looking for jobs, I could afford to write a book.”

And…

“When I gave birth in Switzerland, I was encouraged to stay five days in the hospital. So I did. The $3,000 bill for the birth and hospital stay was paid in full by my Swiss insurance. As was the required midwife, who came to my apartment for five days after I came home from the hospital to check on both my health and my baby's. 

Had I been in the US for my delivery, the cost would have been much higher — and the quality of care arguably lower. The average price for a vaginal birth in the US is $30,000 and includes an average of less than a two-day hospital stay.”
Family life in Switzerland.
Switzerland isn’t just beautiful—it’s actually outrageously so. I guess it’s what I always expected. Switzerland, with its glacial lakes, the Alps and all the nature, it’s all very stunning. This kind of natural beauty in Switzerland is calming and cool. Despite the famous red color and cross of the Swiss flag, the only color that comes to mind for Switzerland is honestly and truly blue. The sky seems to be a constant shade of blue: bold and beautiful when the sun is out, and gloomy & grey under the clouds. The water, so fresh and readily available in the country, runs clear and reflects the blues in the sky. The glacial lakes shimmer. This country is blue. And it’s beautiful.

You know, working in Switzerland might be something to consider. And, of course, maybe having a child born in Switzerland wouldn’t be a bad idea. What do you think?

France

So many places to move to. Let’s talk about France.

Many people have said to me, “Oh Diane, you’re so lucky. You live in France…” And I stop them right there. Luck had nothing to do with it. I didn’t fall out of bed one day to find my suitcase packed, money in the bank, with a first class ticket on Magic Fairy Airlines, destination: France.

No. It never works like that.

My goal was to move to France and my choices leading up to that move got me here. This didn’t just happen to me while I idly stood by. I moved to France last year to be with Tom, but the first time I moved to France in 2009, Tom wasn’t even in the picture…

-Oui in France

Did you know that it is very easy to become a citizen of France? Yes it is. Look at all the uneducated Africans who now live there. However, I am not referring to that, I am referring to the French Foreign Legion. You serve, and you become a citizen. It’s a tough option, but a reasonable one for a younger man to consider.

It’s a great option if you burned your bridges in the United States, and want to start off new and fresh with a new identification, a new name, living in a new area. You just have to EARN it. That’s all.

Beautiful France
France has so many beautiful lesser-known little towns that are worthy of a visit. Whether you’re in the mood for sleepy beach towns, colorful villages, or icy slopes, there is a perfect French town for you.

When I was back in high school and planning to go to the Air Force Academy to be a pilot for the Air Force, I took French classes.  I took them for three years, as that was an Air Force Academy requirement at that time.  I never really used it except for many years later when I visited Canada, Vietnam and Zambia.

Moreover, an interesting blog about living in France can be found here.

Like the other entries here, it offers some glimpse of alternative realities that aren’t even considered possible in the United States, like for instance a Wine High School

“About this time a year ago, we had lived in France for only three weeks when an announcement on the city’s website regarding an event for that weekend caught our eye—Wine Fair! We knew that we had moved to the world’s largest grape-growing area but we didn’t realize that there was a high school devoted to the craft just a few minutes’ walk from the house. With the promise of 30 wines, 6 beers, and 2 ciders, we just had to go…for a taste, of course.
Wine and cheese
One of my favorite things to do is to drink wine whilst eating bread with cheese, olives and assorted goodies. Image that being an everyday event. OMG.
High schools in France give students the opportunity to decide if they want to pursue a university degree or prefer a more hands-on approach to a career be it industrial or laboratory science, health and social sciences, music or dance, or trades that require internships, to name a few.  

The Lycée Charlemagne, located not far from where we used to live by the castle, specializes in agriculture, so if you want to become any kind of farmer, including a wine grower, this is the place to be. 

Since Carcassonne is such a magnet for tourists, other high schools here offer specialization in hospitality and the restaurant industry. 

In contrast, we saw a TV program about Le Mans, the French city north of us that is famous for the Grand Prix road race, and is the city of choice for young people who want to learn all about automobile and motorcycle mechanics.”

A wine High School. How about that!

I well remember us complaining in High School (that was back in the mid 1970’s) that our peers in France and Europe were given wine with their school lunches. Meanwhile the Democrats in the United States were insanely active in raising the drinking age up from 16 to 21. They insisted on raising the drinking age…“For the Children”. Ugh! It was so frustrating being treated such that we were somehow stupider and immature than our peers elsewhere in the globe.

That’s Democrats for ya. Always thinking that they know what’s best… for YOU.

Until the democrats and progressive liberals took over state legislatures, boys and girls were free to drink and smoke (with parential permission).
Boys and girls were free to drink and smoke as they were growing up. This all changed when the Democrats took control of various state legislatures and enforced vice laws.

Iceland

Why not? Here is a nation that stays out of wars, throws bankers in prison when they try to bankrupt the nation, and is populated with (I hear) exceptionally beautiful women.  What’s not to like?

 On the subarctic island, consumer prices were on average 56 percent  higher than the rest of Europe in 2018, making Iceland the single most  expensive country, ahead of Switzerland (52 percent), Norway (48  percent) and Denmark (38 percent), according to Eurostat data.

In  order to avoid unpleasant surprises, Quint Johnson, had done "some  research," before travelling to Iceland from the United States for a  week's vacation with his family.

"But it's been a little bit of a  shock," the 22-year-old student told AFP, having discovered the chilling  rates for familiar items like a simple hamburger with fries and a beer.  

A glance at the menu at an Icelandic restaurant will tell you  that a plain cheese pizza will run you around 2,400 kronor -- almost 17  euros ($19) -- a glass of wine will be at least 10 euros and a pint of  beer costs about 7 euros.

"That's a big price jump compared to what I'm used to," Johnson said.

According  to the consumer price comparison site Numbeo, a dinner for two in an  average restaurant ends with a bill of about 85 euros, a bottle of wine  in a shop is priced at around 17 euros, and a dozen eggs cost up to five  euros. 

-France24

Not only that, but there are few countries in the world that can say they do not have any mosquitoes and Iceland is one of them!

Iceland 1
Beautiful Iceland. Sure it is cold, but when the sun comes out it is glorious. Not to mention that the environment lends itself to cozy comfort.

The following are excerpts from Larissa Kyzer who lived in NYC before she moved to Iceland.  Her comments can be found here.

“Forget lying about your birthday: if you’re one of those people who likes to fudge your age, be forewarned. Your Icelandic national ID, or kennitala, begins with the day, month, and year of your birthday, and you will be expected to recite it to everyone, everywhere, for pretty much everything. Get a library card, give your kennitala. Sign up for a cell phone plan, give your kennitala. Rent a video, give your kennitala. Unlike the American social security number, it is intended to be a very public number.”

And…

“…always bring a towel! You’ll find that people go to the pools a lot--if only to chat in the hot pots (the geothermal jacuzzis that are at every pool)--and even though you can rent a towel (and a suit for that matter), you’ll save a fair amount of money in the long run if you bring your own. Plus, if you carry your swim things with you, you’ll be ready at a moment’s notice for a trip down the water slide, or a gossip session or football debate in the hot pots.”

The People

Icelanders are proud, somewhat stoic people. Look, they are a race of people that sought to make a living on a cold, barren island 1000+ years ago. Pride and stoicism were necessary personal attributes. You know a country prides itself on individuality when it doesn’t subscribe to having a McDonalds. It did once upon a time before the economic crash in 2008 but has no desire to see the chain again in spite of its economic recovery.

Reykjavik
I really like the idea that the buildings are painted in bright colors and that the people try to make the most of the environment. It’s pretty darn cool, don’t you think?

Icelanders are not necessarily warm and emotive people. Get to know them though and you’ll have a loyal, lifelong friend.

Icelanders are educated and informed. The culture there expects education, many Icelanders have advanced degrees. They are up on politics and they tend to be very well-traveled.  Lastly, Iceland is a very progressive political country. For example, Iceland may be the most gay-friendly country on earth.

Financial Stability

97% of Icelanders identify themselves as upper-middle class, lower-middle class, or working class. Thus, the financial equality found in this culture, allows for a more stable society to raise a kid. Additionally, higher education is essentially free, so the cost of raising a child is much cheaper in Iceland.

Iceland city.
Scenic and beautiful, Reykjavik is a wonderful place. The people are great once you get to know them.

Weather

Iceland is a sub-Arctic country located out in the middle of the north Atlantic.  What can I say, other than the weather is cold, grey and rainy quite a lot.  You get long, cold and dark winters.

In the summer, you get long days – very long.

Basically, don’t expect good weather.  But when it comes – Oh Lord when it comes – Iceland is glorious. When the sun does come out it is simply spectacular. The blue of the northern sky is luminous and magnifies the vibrancy of the surrounding landscape by a thousand-fold.

Vacation

"In general, the pace of life was much slower than I was used to.  Icelanders work hard and they play hard, to use an old cliche.  Icelanders take long vacations, some up to 4 weeks in the summer!  

As an American, this is unheard of.  I submit to the average American, that if you had a 4 week vacation you wouldn’t (at first) know what to do with it. "

Pace of Life

"All of Iceland tends to start work at 9 and they stay till 5 or 6; City traffic follows this pattern without much deviation.  Weekends are slower affairs. Men watch soccer. 

People wake late - almost everyone.  Typical citizens would go visit friends for coffee in the afternoon. 

Coming from a country and large city where there was always a plethora of choice, Iceland was far more limited.  For example, an Icelandic visitor to the United States will be overwhelmed by the choices in US supermarkets.  She will say, ‘Why do you need 200 kinds of breakfast cereal?’"

Nudity

Again, this is a little strange for me as an American. Most of the rest of the world just isn’t as hung up on the human body as Americans are. It’s not just Germany, you know. It’s friggin’ everywhere.

Icelanders are very comfortable with their bodies, almost too comfortable if you ask most Americans. But once you are in their country, you must obey their strict public pool etiquette; no matter how uncomfortable you may feel. 

In addition to not allowing shoes in the locker room area, all men are expected to strip, and clean themselves in the public shower before heading out into the main pool area. 

I’m assuming this is also true for women in the ladies locker room, but I’ll just have to take their word for it.

Most public pools also have hot saunas, and the same behavior is expected regarding a post session wash. Icelander’s take these rules very seriously because they have natural geothermal swimming pools often heated by my mother nature. 

Due to this unrelenting desire to keep their pools and locker rooms clean, they will have no problem bluntly telling you to strip. 

Matt Eliason remembers his first time to the Laugardalur community pool in which he was scolded for not participating in the necessary public strip tease. However, the reader should relax that he has since adjusted to this uniquely “European” behavior and now show no shyness when following the public pool etiquette.

Walking out of a bar at 4am into daylight

It’s true, the geographical location of Iceland´s Nordic island situates itself in such a way that most summer days yield over 22 hours of sunlight. This presents an interesting dilemma when you are walking out of the club on a Saturday night (Sunday morning) and you take a step outside the dimly lit club into the broad daylight. 

A very interesting summary about the all-night party atmosphere, and the price of beer can be found HERE.

Lack of Big Restaurant Chains

With stores like Whole Foods, McDonald’s and Starbucks ingrained into the psyche of all Americans, being stripped of these cultural consistencies has an effect on your day-to-day life for good and for bad. What this means is that the convenience of going out at your own leisure and get a McBurger is just not going to happen.  This is both a positive and a negative.

Outside of Domino Pizza and a couple KFCs, Iceland’s economic environment encourages upscale classy restaurants, and forces out big box chains, due to the economics of importing cheap fast food. McDonald did have a brief spell in Iceland, but the business plan proved to be economical enviable.

Language

Everyone speaks English. 

While it’s always a good idea to learn a few words of the language where ever you travel everyone Brianna encountered spoke excellent English.(There was definitely a chuckle or two when she tried out her very limited Icelandic).

Chile

OK. That’s enough of the areas about and around Europe. Let’s take a spin to South America. Let’s look at Chile.

Chile? Why Chile of all places? You might ask.

Beautiful Chilean women.
Girls from Chile tend to be beautiful. Monica Godoy is a successful and one of richest actresses from Santiago, Chile. Monica was born in May, 1976. She has worked in more than 30 movies, some best being Sucupira (1996), Pepe Carvalho (2004), Hijos Del Monte (2008), 40 y Tantos (2010), El Laberinto de Alicia (2011), and Secretos en el Jardín (2013).

Mr Simon Black has a blog and organization where he urges people to obtain second passports, citizenship, savings accounts and banks.  He urges people to be more international so that they can keep their options open when things spoil in one geographical region or another. In his blog he suggest Chile as a destination for American expats to migrate to.

Good advice this. As I can personally confirm.

Chile town and city
The cities of Chile have a small town feel. The pace of life is slower and more relaxed. People enjoy life more, and spend more time with each other. They savor life.

While I do not agree with everything that he has to say, I do follow his suggestions on prudent preparation.  I dare say that many of the Jews living in Poland in 1938 would have not died under the Hitler military machine were they to be prudent and alert.

From Simon, an interesting article about leaving the United States and moving to Chile can be found here.

“Yesterday on the drive back to Santiago from one of our blueberry farms, I stopped to visit some friends who lived in the area.  About a year ago they bought some land in Chile’s incredibly fertile 7th region, which boasts a rare Mediterranean climate. It never gets too hot, and it never gets too cold. Plus, the rich, volcanic soil is packed with powerful nutrients. 

As long as you’re in the right spot to ensure ample water security, the place is an agricultural paradise (our agriculture company owns two large farms in the region). There are literally four other places on the planet with this combination– southern California, South Australia, the Western Cape of South Africa, and parts of the Mediterranean itself.”

And…

“Yet by comparison to those other places, land in Chile is remarkably cheap. 

Our agriculture company purchased several thousand acres in this prime region back in 2015 for about $1,700 per acre. Similar property in California, especially given how much water we have, would easily sell for 10x to 20x that price.

My friends bought several acres of land for themselves as a sort of homestead, and they’re now living in a gorgeous setting surrounded by mountains and multiple rivers with cool, crystal clear water and a steady supply of fish. They’re raising livestock and have a garden, plus I got them started with a gift of some baby trees which are already producing fruit in their first season.

It feels like lifetimes away from when they were living in New York City.”

And…

“My friends purchased the land outright (again, land is inexpensive). Then they paid about $55,000 to build their home. The house is quite nice– comfortably spacious with four bedrooms. And it’s all wired up with the latest gadgetry and home automation, with all sorts of sensors to control appliances and conduct routine tasks. 

So they now have a roof over their heads and plenty of land to do whatever they want, and they own it all outright… they don’t owe a penny on any of it.”

Continued…

“My friends had concerns. They were living in New York before and didn’t like the trends they saw in their home country. There was too much debt. Too much war. Too much money printing. Too many lies. Too much spying. Too much violence. Too much uncertainty. 

They wanted to distance themselves from conditions that made them uncomfortable. So they made a very deliberate plan and took steps that led them to where they are today– living in their own paradise. And they couldn’t be happier.

These guys aren’t hiding from the world. He’s still working in technology and she’s still producing art… exactly what they used to do.”

Unlike the United States, when you buy something like a house or a plot of land, you own it. That’s right. You do not have to pay taxes on “your” land or suffer it being seized. The smaller nation often has smaller regulations that you need be concerned about and taxes that are easily affordable.

Highway in Chile
Highway in Chile. Most of the world has nice highways. They have bridges, public transportation, railroads, toll-booths, and roadside rest areas.

Yes, other nations have highways, bridges and tollbooths. Often in far better shape than what is found in the United States.

Vietnam

As a boy, I would watch the news about the war in Vietnam.  It seemed so remote and so “third world”.  Which at the time, it actually was.

Vietnam 1
I, as a boy, enjoyed the fighting and the battles. I was totally unaware of the beauty, the people and the environment in Vietnam. Vietnam is very, very stunning.

Fast forward to today. Vietnam is a growing country that seems to possess all the attributes that seem to interest me. It has great food, beautiful women, long clean beaches, and totally isolated from the madness that the United States has become.

Here’s what an American expat who moved to Vietnam has to say about it;

“I’ve been living in Vietnam a while now, relatively speaking. Longer than I expected, in fact. When I tell anybody new to town how long I’ve been here for, they always raise their eyebrows and give me a suspicious look, just as I used to do when I first arrived. 

I never planned to still be here (over 6 years and counting…), though I have some friends who’ve stayed much longer. The first year here felt very long indeed. I did what most single foreign men do when they arrive in Vietnam. I became a sort of ‘playboy’. I thought it was cool then, but now I’m ashamed of that behavior, although it was a difficult habit to break.”
Vietnam bars
There are all sorts of great bars all over Asia. Vietnam has some nice ones. You can get reasonably priced drinks and munchies and have fine companionship for the night.

And…

“You only need one type of wardrobe in Vietnam, there is much less crime, it is cheaper (unless you shop at Vincom Center or something), scenic, and the cities have a frantic yet laid back atmosphere that I feel is unique to Asia, if not the world (and I’ve traveled most of it).

Zooming around on a motorbike can be dangerous but I’ve seen more accidents in England than here and it gives a real sense of freedom. Ho Chi Minh City in particular has a ‘small town’ feel (even though it’s huge) which I love. 

It’s like a friendly village but with millions of people you can bump into. My friend once likened hanging out here to being in prison (but in a good way), in that “nothing ever happens, but anything can happen!” I want to.

Halong Bay

Halong bay in Vietnam. The world is filled with many beautiful places. We need only pull ourselves away from our computers and go forth and explore the world around us.

No we do not want everything the same… a world where there is a Starbucks on every corner,or the same progressive laws that America has. We should go forth and explore the world and relish in it’s differences.

Being an expat, it’s easier to make a good life for yourself in Vietnam. I have almost too many friends, a nice apartment, a good job (I’m a ‘traveling teacher’, rather than a ‘teaching traveler’), lots of hobbies and everything feels quite easy. 

However, one thing I probably lack, and it’s a big thing, is a strong local connection. Even after all this time, I find the cultural divide quite exhausting to overcome, at least compared to other countries I’ve stayed in. I have very few Vietnamese friends and I am now living the lifestyle I used to frown upon, that of the ‘expat bubble’. Can I just blame my battle with the language for this?”
Vietnamese lady
Vietnam has many beautiful ladies. They are a lot like the Chinese, only with a little darker tan and speaks a different language. I find them alluring.

Compared to Thailand, Vietnam is different.  It is another animal altogether.

“For 95% of Westerners Thailand is probably a better choice, be it as a holiday destination or a new home. Downtown Saigon can be stressful, at times feeling like organized chaos where you're the only one who wasn't given the script. The never-ending stream of motorbikes makes something as simple as crossing the road a worry. People are less friendly, getting around can be a challenge and there's much less to see and do than Bangkok.

But where downtown Bangkok feels like just another international city with a Starbucks on every corner, movies opening the same weekend as the States and more signs in English than Thai, Saigon still feels distinctly like Asia. Vietnam fills me with a sense of adventure.”

-Stickman Bangkok
Siagon
Night can be really nice in Saigon, Vietnam. There is life and activity. There are things to do, places to be, drinks to drink and fun things to do with friends. Sure beats hanging out in front of the television while you wait for Friday to roll around.

As an expat, he hits upon something, that I think all us long-duration expats feel more or less…

“To be honest, one of the only things I truly dislike about life here is some of the expats! That might appear somewhat ironic, but the neo-colonial attitude of some foreigners here angers me, especially as many of them were clearly not ‘cool’ in any way before they came out here. Now suddenly they can be seen strutting about, taking advantage of local hospitality and often looking down on a culture that they don’t even try to understand.”
Vietnam bay

Ha Long Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and popular travel destination in Quang Ninh Province, Vietnam. The name Hạ Long means “descending dragon”. Administratively, the bay belongs to Ha Long City, Cam Pha City, and is a part of Van Don District. The bay features thousands of limestone karsts and isles in various shapes and sizes. Ha Long Bay is a center of a larger zone which includes Bai Tu Long Bay to the northeast, and Cat Ba Island to the southwest.

Cambodia

Bar street
Here is a bar street on the beach in Sihanoukville in Cambodia. It is considered a nice place to visit because the sex is cheap, the beer is cold, and the weather is warm. I like it because of the history. All during the Vietnam war I wondered about this place and what it must have been like.
“Many men get starry-eyed over a goal, imagining how life would be so great upon achieving it, but fail to play out the movie to its completion. Unlike Hollywood, life goes on, and you come back down to a basal level of happiness, no matter how great your achievement was. This is very common with men who want to travel to shitholes to meet good women.

Imagine you visit a rough second-tier city in Colombia or Ukraine and meet a girl who is hotter than any other girl you’ve made love to before. And then what? Are you going to move to her city permanently? 

Are you going to bring her back to the West so she can get corrupted like the women you left behind? Are you going to move her to another location where any children you have won’t have the benefit of seeing extended family? Understand that as soon as you experience the upsides from achieving a goal, the downsides come pounding at your door so that the overall cost of a goal is balanced with its benefits.”

-“And then What?” by Roosh

Cambodia has always been a place that I was interested in.  That with Laos, I have mutually considered them mysterious and stimulating.

During the 1960’s and the 1970’s, I watched the news and followed the descent into darkness as Cambodia was taken over by progressive leftists who (in the interests of “equality”) went about torturing and killing everyone. Now, few Americans know the horrible saga. All that is left is a legacy of the “killing fields”. (Yet, the leftists in Berkley, California want to duplicate this in the United States of all places.  WTF?)

The Cambodian Killing Fields (Khmer: វាលពិឃាត, Khmer pronunciation: [ʋiəl pikʰiət]) are a number of sites in Cambodia where collectively more than a million people were killed and buried by the Progressive Socialist Khmer Rouge regime, during its rule of the country from 1975 to 1979, immediately after the end of the Cambodian Civil War (1970–1975).
Killing tree
The tree where little children were killed by progressive leftists in Cambodia.
The mass killings are widely regarded as part of a broad state-sponsored genocide (the Cambodian genocide). 

Analysis of 20,000 mass grave sites by the DC-Cam Mapping Program and Yale University indicate at least 1,386,734 victims of execution. Estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.7 to 2.5 million out of a 1975 population of roughly 8 million. 

In 1979, Communist Vietnam invaded Democratic Kampuchea. They toppled the brutal progressive liberals that comprised the Khmer Rouge regime.

Now, Cambodia is reviving. I have numerous friends (mostly Chinese, with one or two from Eastern Europe) who have told me tales of how wonderful Cambodia is. It certainly sounds enticing.

Cambodia 2
One thing that attracts me about Cambodia is that it has not yet been sanitized by Starbucks, McDonalds and hoards of business investors turning it into an upscale mall. In China, Shekou used to be quaint with it’s own flavor, cheap booze and friendly locals. Now it is a very nice, but expensive mall that serves tourists. The locals just sort of avoid it. Sad.

Here is a nice write-up by a man about my age who lives in Thailand, and thought that it might be a good idea to visit Cambodia. He begins with his impressions of Cambodia taken in early 2001.

“Dusty roads with what can only be called contraptions on wheels. 

Criss-crossing the city on the back of a motorbike after dark and seeing almost no traffic. 

Ultra-slow, virtually unusable Internet connections. 

Friendly, smiling children yelling “Hello”. 

Arriving back at the hotel at night to find the doors had been padlocked shut from the inside and you had to rattle them to wake up a young Khmer sleeping on the other side who would unlock the door and let you in. 

These are just some memories from my one and only visit to Phnom Penh, back in 2001.

In the 10 years since I first visited the Cambodian capital it has changed markedly as I discovered on a recent trip.”

He then decides to return.

Cambodia girls
A group of cute and happy Cambodian girls. I really like the smiles and happiness that radiates from these gals. You know, we owe it to ourselves to surround ourselves with happiness and contentment.

Only this time it is ten years later. The year is 2011.

“Getting around Phnom Penh is easy. Tuktuks in the guise of a motorbike pulling a carriage, motorbike riders as well as a few taxis make up the choices. You can walk and a number of the sights are in the riverfront area, just remember to look the other way when crossing the road if you're used to Thailand.

Someone seems to have told every tuktuk driver and motorcycle rider in town that foreigners don't like walking, for you simply cannot walk past one without being asked where you're going and if you'd like a ride. 

The hassles are relentless, many times worse than any vendor hassles in Thailand.”

And he talks about the food…

Traditional Cambodian Food
National food in Cambodia is similar, and at the same time is completely different from the tradition of the neighboring countries. It is possible to claim that the Cambodians eat everything! The dishes of the food in Cambodia also feature many wild fruits and locally grown vegetables. Widely used and popular in the national food in Cambodia are pickled and fermented vegetables and fruits, which are collected for pickling at different stages of their growth, which give the final product a completely phenomenal taste.
“Thai food might be more varied and diverse, but Cambodian food uses certain ingredients you don't commonly see in Thailand. 

Buffalo meat, for example, is found on many menus, and deep-fried tarantulas are sold alongside other creepy crawlies. 

Much of what is available in the fresh markets fell into the mystery meat category. Amongst the more unusual things we tried was beef with wild ants – and giant-sized ants they were. A good source of protein I am told!
Battambang
This is a scene of Battambang, Cambodia. It is a small community that has everything that you need, but not large enough to overwhelm you. It is certainly a small-town vibe about this place. It is calm. It is peaceful, and pleasant.
Revisiting places from that first trip a decade earlier, when the few popular bars were scattered around the city, the long-running Sharky just didn't do it for us. Similar in format to Bangkok's Woodstock, the American-themed bar and restaurant with a reputation for tasty Tex Mex food left us unimpressed. 

Sunrise Tacos it isn't.

Phnom Penh may not compare with Bangkok for high-end dining, but there is a huge number of mid-range eateries making it something of a foodie's dream. Many riverfront restaurants are chic without being pretentious.”

And the booze…

“Phnom Penh is an alcoholic's dream with ridiculously low prices. Stick with the perfectly drinkable local Angkor draft and you'll never have a hole in your wallet. 
Phnom Penh
This is the colonial section of the capital city; Phnom Penh. Notice that even in this big enormous city there is a nice small-town vibe that lingers and presents itself.
A handle runs around $1.00 – $2.00 in restaurants, $1.50 – $1.75 in the hostess bars and in some bars and restaurants, happy hour prices can be had for less than a dollar, 60 cents in some outlets. 

Pretty much everything, drink-wise, is considerably cheaper than Thailand. Cocktails in decent bars could be had for $3 or $4, $2 at happy hour. Beer Lao is widely available and cheap, and wine is considerably cheaper than in Thailand. And my pet hate, tax and service charges are nowhere to be seen!”

And (of course) the ladies of the “night” (but this is Asia, they work 24-7)…

“The vibe in the hostess bars is different to your typical Thailand bar. Upon entering, many of the girls scream "Hello" and once seated you'll find yourself surrounded by a half-dozen girls. 

They will be keen to chat, but unlike their Thai sisters they almost never ask for a drink. 

The lady drink hassles that mar the bar experience in Thailand are no issue in Phnom Penh. With that said, at what seemed to be an industry standard $3.00 for a lady drink – of which she gets $1.00 – it's hardly cost prohibitive. And if you do buy a lady a drink, she will never suggest you barfine her, and won't even hint about joining you at your hotel. 
Cambodian Club Girls.
Club girls in a Cambodian KTV. The girls are friendly and happy to please. It is a great environment for those who like to have a great time.
Many bars have pool tables and the girls often suggest challenging you to a game of pool, and request a lady drink if they win. Don't expect to see a Cambodian winning the world pool championships any time soon!

As far as the women in the Phnom Penh bars go, the prurient might say that the biggest difference between the Thais and the Cambodians is that there's no need for silicone bags in Cambodia. They tend to be dark-skinned, curvy and can have absolutely striking eyes. And yeah, they are busty.

Personality and attitude-wise, they are rather different to the girls working bar in Thailand. The Cambodian girls are much less hardened, much less mercenary and general chit chat tends to be more relaxed. They are generally more playful than the Thais, but without any real flirting or sexual innuendo. Thai working girls these days tend to be more professional; pleasant on the outside but rock hard on the inside."

Here’s a couple in a bar in Cambodia.

Cambodian couple.

Here is a typical man with a Cambodian girl in Cambodia. Most girls in Cambodia tend to be curvy with soft places where they belong. Many find them very attractive, and with dark eyes and great smiles they tend to be irresistible.

"The Cambodians might be more pleasant and the bars employ some pretty ladies, but in terms of looks at least, you don't see anything like you do in the likes of Rainbow 4 or Bacarra. 

What they may lose in the looks department they more than make up for personality-wise. There are few tattoos to be seen and while smoking is allowed in the bars in Cambodia, it is the customers who are puffing away. Very few Cambodian working girls smoke. 

Cambodian girls working in hostess bars make a point of saying that good girls don't smoke! In fact the girls in the bars don't even feel like bar-girls. Thai bar-girls with anything more than a month or two in the industry are for the most part, hard. Many of the Cambodian girls in the bars seemed quite sweet.”

And..

Cambodian Food
What is Khmer Food? Khmer food takes influences from a variety of countries. Cambodia was a French colony for many years and also has many Chinese immigrants, so both French and Chinese foods are widely found. In the west of the country, the cuisine is, naturally, influenced by the food of neighboring Thailand while in the east the flavors of Vietnamese cuisine are more evident. Coastal towns such as Sihanoukville in the southwest are famous for their seafood, cooked in many styles, including Japanese and European. Common ingredients in Khmer cuisine are similar to those found in other Southeast Asian culinary traditions – rice and sticky rice, fish sauce, palm sugar, lime, garlic, chilies, coconut milk, lemon grass, galangal, kaffir lime and shallots.
“What it costs for a night of these ladies' company, I don't know. Broaching the subject brought awkward looks from girls who seemed reluctant to discuss it. I was quoted $40 by ladies aghast that such should even be discussed, and they were probably more aghast when they realized I was only asking for the purpose of understanding how things work, not because I had any intention of being a naughty boy! 

Locals tell me that hostesses will happily spend the night for $20 – 30, which seems awfully cheap. Bar-fines run $10, and drop to $5 after midnight, in some bars.
Club Girls
Some of the friendly club girls in Cambodia. They do like to please. Look at those smiles. What’s not to like?
There's much debate whether young South-East Asian women are “forced” to work in the bar industry. It's an argument that really doesn't hold up in Thailand where even the least educated can get factory work, which with overtime will provide a livable income. A comfortable life perhaps not, but it's honest work that one can feel good about.

Cambodia is altogether different. 

Many of the girls in the bars seemed to have very limited options. One girl, a striking looker with an uncanny resemblance to an ex-girlfriend, really tugged on my heart strings as we struggled to communicate and tell me about her life. 

The oldest of 3 children, the 24-year old long-haired beauty couldn't read or write. She had never been to school and she had almost zero employment options. Her only real options were working on a farm, for which she would make the equivalent of about $60 a month. The salary alone from bar work was that much, and she would also get $1 for every drink bought for her, as well as whatever gifts customers rewarded her with in the morning.”

While Mr. Stickman’s comments were from the perspective of a visiting (horny male) expat from Thailand, it should not be discounted.  Most expats (judging from my trivial search on the Internet) to Cambodia seem to fall into a handful of categories;

  1. Backpacker / explorers. They just traipse around the world on a trivial level to collect experiences to “wow” others in an attempt to boost their already insignificant ego. I tend not to associate with them. In my mind they are not experiencing life in depth. They are collecting trivialities. To experience life, you have to do more than just have a low-budget vacation.
  2. Do gooders. These are often part of NGO’s set up by others with ulterior motives. They stay for the duration of their contract and then leave. They come with preconceived notions. (Usually related to sex, politics or religion.) They then try to implement their ideals, often fail, and head home afterwards.
  3. Bad Guys. Anyone who wants to exploit others for money, labor, sex or the like. You see an occasional news article about these individuals. I have encountered them… all too often. Which is why many long-duration expats do not associate with other expats often.
  4. Teach English. It’s always a good stepping stone into another culture. It’s also a necessity for those of us who have lost everything.

It would seem to be a great opportunity for someone to set up a factory or an industry in the area, but you would absolutely need to partner up with a local to be successful.  Getting to know a local for just that purpose takes planning and an investment in time. Just saying, but if you are young and have the drive and the stamina to make something happen, Cambodia might be right for you.

Think of the beer. Imagine drinking it while eating some Cambodian steaks with a pretty local gal…

Cambodian beer
Cambodia has some nice local beers. Always the beer is great when ice cold. There is something fine about a beer and a hamburger in a tropical paradise .

I arrived in China when it was in it’s growth phase, and it worked out for me.  Maybe Cambodia might be right for someone younger.

Attend University

There are some interesting takes on this “thing” about Cambodia.  Consider one enterprising student who decided to attend university in Cambodia. Why attend a university in Cambodia? Because you can and it looks interesting on your resume. Roy, an American expat, who is working his way towards a degree in political science at the University of Cambodia, tells his story;

“Attending university in Cambodia is an adventure and much more interesting than slogging through classes at a community college back home. Right now I’m finishing my second term at University of Cambodia. 

I love it here; the people are great. While there are a few students here from other ASEAN countries, I’m currently the only Westerner enrolled. Students and teachers all seem initially surprised, but quickly get used to having a barang in class. 

As a native English speaker, I get asked about pronunciations, definitions and grammar; it’s a bit like being a living dictionary. There are also opportunities where I try to explain the oddities of US politics.

The question I hear most often from my classmates is, “Why are you going to school in Cambodia and why did you decide to attend this school?” I explain that I love the country and the people. My choosing UC is based on instruction in English, the very helpful staff in registration and, if I’m going to travel halfway around the world to go to school, I want to be able to put something on my resume that makes it perfectly clear that I attended a university in Cambodia.

There are no “student visas” in Cambodia but as a student you can get a business/ordinary visa without a work permit.”

Dual Pricing

Dual pricing based on race is very common in Cambodia, from the bus companies who charge white faces more to the hospitals that have one rate for Khmers and another for foreigners. Even the government-owned airline has one fare for Cambodians and another, much higher fare for everyone else. This is frustrating on many levels, not least when it’s foreign-owned businesses that are perpetuating what is, fundamentally, a form of racism. When asked how they can justify dual pricing based on race, race-based pricing advocates scramble all over themselves to defend the practice.

Cambodian nationality is, for the most part, based on race (non-Vietnamese minority tribes are the exception). Any child of a Cambodian mother is granted Cambodian citizenship, regardless of where he or she is born. The child of non-Cambodians, though born and raised in Cambodia, is not granted Cambodian citizenship. Ethnically Vietnamese families who have lived in Cambodia for generations are, for all intents and purposes, stateless as far as the Cambodian government is concerned. So the argument that the dual-pricing system is not racist because it is based on nationality is flawed, because there is no attainable path to Cambodian citizenship for non-Cambodians (and I don’t call paying a $50,000 “facilitation fee” attainable).

Moreover, non-Cambodian Asians often benefit from the dual pricing plan, paying the local rate even when they don’t speak much Khmer and are citizens of Western countries. In practice, actual nationality seems unimportant; looking Khmer matters more. Khmer-Americans are also given the “local” price by many businesses, whether or not they have Cambodian passports.

Here is an expat’s comment on this;

“I am a simple man who has been living in Cambodia for about 7 yrs. I return to my country of employ for some months at a time as I have a small business there which needs a little personal love every now and then.

I have been to about 60 different countries and have lived for 3 months or more in about 15 of them. Some, for 1-3 years. I would say that on a humble scale I am reasonably worldly. I am definitely an adventurer.

I have experienced dual pricing in quite a few different countries. Here it can be quite strong, agreed.

The Chris with a capital C, made some good comments. Let us all think about this word racism. It’s a shocker isn’t it? Have I had better experiences in some countries than others, yes. Do I like the culture of some countries more than others, yes. Do I dislike the ego and blatant disregard for other nations well being that particular countries seem to display, yes. Do I like the smooth sound of some languages and not the guttural sounds of others, yes. Are there many examples like this, yes. Does this make me racist, maybe it does.

Does Cambodia invade other countries, like so many of the world powers, no. Does Cambodia produce a huge amount of mass marketed products that are killing humans, animals and the planet, no. Does Cambodia steal the oil of other nations, no.

I guess we all have our good and bad points.

I can hear some of you saying that Cambodia does not have the wealth or power to do such things. And yet many of our countries have the power and have completely abused it. Which is less excusable?

Expats, hmmm! That’s an interesting topic. We come here with more money than the average Khmer, can make more than the average Khmer, and have to pay more than the average Khmer… and in our own selfish way, that is apparently unfair. Seems like a fair enough tax system to me. How many of you pay full tax on your local wage? Maybe using local Khmer as an excuse for not paying full tax isn’t fair because that is as much a part of their culture as dual pricing.

All around the world I have seen people from richer, more dominating, more arrogant cultures demanding everything they can get their hands on from some poor local. We so often take all the good we can get and then quickly complain or blog about something we didn’t like. Suck it up Humans. Take the good with the bad.

Simple question… If the way of life in your own country is so good, then why are you here? To all the service men and women who are posted abroad without choice, please excuse this question.

I now have a loving Khmer wife and 2 beautiful Khmer daughters. My mother-in-law lives with us too. It is a complete family. I am very lucky.

Yes it is true that sometimes I pay more. Sometimes my wife and her friends laugh at me because I get better prices at the local shops and markets than they can. I speak quite a lot of Khmer but am not 100% fluent. I get some discounts because I have a Khmer family and sometimes my Khmer daughters get in free and I have to pay. Most importantly, I find gentle, wise respect gets me the best price, and it feels the nicest for me and others too.

3 people go to a movie. 1 loves it, 1 doesn’t really care and 1 hates it. Same movie, only the minds are different. Suffering and happiness comes from the mind. If you don’t like something try changing your mind.

I suggest that when you are troubled with the local ways that you go and enjoy an ice cold 50c beer, a $2 meal, or go for a free meditation at your local wat.”

-GreyEarth

A Narrative by Ian

Here is a pretty darn and comprehensive report by a fellow who went to Cambodia.  This is not the PC scrubbed Internet fare that is edited for millennial sensibilities and the PC rules (written or unwritten).  It is raw and fresh, just like I like my sashimi. It is titled “My Phnom Penh Trip Report or Phnom Penh for Newbies”. Written by Stick Reader Ian January 5th, 2015. Enjoy.

“I had that nervous energy you get when you do something for the first time. I'm 58. At my age I don't often get to do something new. I'm boarding a Bangkok Airways flight to Phnom Penh and I haven't been to Cambodia before. 

I've heard it's similar to Thailand of years past. I took the 2nd half of December off work so I could see my Thai partner for Xmas; I came all the way from Farangland to see her only to be told (several months ago) that she would go to the temple and thus be busy in the first week. OK, Cambodia here I come and I'll see her in the 2nd week of my vacation.

Translation; The man has been living in Thailand with a girl.  He is an expat from the West.  (Maybe from the UK or Australia. Ian is not a common American name.) His girlfriend will spend a week at a Temple, and he will go to Cambodia to see what it is like.  He will be comparing it to Thailand, initally, and to the West (slang; Farangland) ultimately.

Naturally she changed her mind sometime after I booked the Cambodia trip. I said that was no problem — I was going anyway. Then she asked if I was angry with her? No, I wasn't. My expectation in life is if you say you'll do something then you do it. She said she was busy; I said I was going to Cambodia and that's the way it would be. I think it's best to live by your principles.

Thailand girls have a reputation for being “wishy washy”.

The real attraction of Cambodia was the prospect of Snookyville (that's Sihanoukville but often referred to as Snookyville, which I will continue to use in this post because I like the name). I've heard it's like Pattaya 30 years ago.

Imagine that; a Pattaya of the early 1990’s. Everything cheap and fresh.

I'm old enough to remember that and I liked it; I wanted to experience it again and see the place for myself. But when I investigated I found it was too difficult to get there. To my surprise there was no transport from the airport to Snookyville (maybe by taxi, but not using an inexpensive means of transport) and with my itinerary it wasn't practical to get there on the same day. Ditto for the return trip. With only 5 nights in Cambodia and the need to spend 2 of them in Phnom Penh I decided Snookyville wouldn't be the focus of my trip; I'd try Phnom Penh and see how that went. Maybe I'd make a flying visit to Snookyville, but the focus would be Phnom Penh.

First lesson. Transportation access is not that easy.

I thought Cambodia would be about getting laid and not paying much for it. Without going into every detail I'm outlining some of the things I experienced. My primer for newbie visitors to Phnom Penh. My trip report.

Here is his trip report.  He expected to go to Cambodia for a lot of low priced sex. Here is what he experienced.

Arrival

I was worried about the visa on arrival process. I read about the dual currency economy. I knew I needed to bring US$ and while I don't have a problem with that I didn't think I understood how it would work. I figured this would be a cheap holiday so I budgeted $500 for the 5 days. (I budget that much for 1 day when I visit Bangkok, although I normally spend half of that on myself and give the other half to my partner. I'm Mr. Nice Guy; or maybe Mr. Dummy.)
French bread meals
Cambodian meal in Siem Reap. There is a mix of authentic Khmer cuisine, but also the local French influences and other international favorites. A couple of my own favorites include the stir fried beef loc lac and of course the french breads.
I needed $30 for the visa on arrival. I read I should have a visa photo with me when I arrive. I read it wasn't worth getting an e-visa, that it was just as easy to get the visa on arrival. That was bad advice. The visa on arrival process was frantic and disorganized; not exactly pushing and shoving but close to it. If I had an e-visa I could have simply gone to the Immigration queue and the arrival would have so much easier. Note that for next time. On the plane I met guys with similar plans to mine; one had been to Phnom Penh a few times before, the other was a newbie like me. Neither had an e-visa. The other newbie didn't have a photo and had to organize that in the arrival hall. I lost track of him in the Arrivals hall so I don't exactly know how things worked out for him. I saw him at the baggage carousel, so I know he survived. An e-visa would have cut 15 minutes and considerable stress out of the process.

If it were me, I’d pay the money. I would use an e-visa. You get what you pay for.

The taxi ride to the city was a microcosm of the visit. I read and was told (by the experienced traveler) that I should get a voucher for the ride that would cost $12. After looking around I managed to find the booth to get the voucher. But you don't pay for the voucher, you just hold on to it or maybe show it to the taxi driver. At the end of the journey you pay the guy $12. The voucher appeared to have no purpose except to reassure me of the price.

True, I felt better knowing what the price would be and I could always push it in the face of the taxi driver if I felt I was being ripped off; but that didn’t happen. I paid the taxi driver $12 when we arrived at the hotel — he was happy and there was no argument about the price.

And that's what the holiday was like. No stress; no fuss; prices are inexpensive so pay what is asked; obviously bargain where you can but everything seemed to be pretty well organized; if you didn't argue and accepted things as they were the whole process was low stress.

I'm an experienced expat. I know when I visit other countries they're designed for their citizens not for me. It's up to me to experience their lifestyle and conditions. If I like it, that's great. If I don't, catalogue it and move on. No fuss, no furore.

Sounds like he understands the way of the world. Reader take notes.

Hotel and Getting Around

Thank you, Agoda. I selected what turned out to be a good hotel in the Riverside area that had a decent rate ($45 per night). They described themselves as a 3 star hotel which I thought was harsh; maybe not 4 stars but close to it. If you're new to Phnom Penh I recommend staying at Riverside. It's close to everything; it's easy to walk anywhere. There are lots of restaurants, pubs and bars close by. If you want to go somewhere that's too far to walk there are lots of tuktuks or motorcycle (motos) to use.

In 6 days and 5 nights in Phnom Penh I must have said "no" 500 times to offers of transport. This is perhaps a downside of my visit; I can do that for a week without getting annoyed. If I was there for a month it would be different; although if I stayed for 3 months I'm sure I'd assimilate. Personally I like to walk. I get a better feel of the place, I'm in no rush and it was "winter" when I was there so it wasn't hot or unpleasant to be outside. (Around 25 – 27C every day with no rain.)

To put this in perspective, Southern China is nine months of 30 to 33C and very humid.  (For you Americans in readership land, that is 90 to 95F and 90% humidity.) That temperature sounds absolutely wonderful.

Eating and Drinking

I have 30 years of experience visiting Thailand and think I know prices there quite well. I thought everything in Cambodia would be cheap and I was right & wrong. I was looking forward to eating on the streets and especially looking forward to eating good bread. I live in a country with poor quality bread and Thailand isn't exactly the patisserie capital of the world.
Cambodian Bread
Street vendor selling bread in Cambodia. The bred is good and basic. It goes really good with butter and a nice strong local coffee.
I didn't like the look of the street food as much as I thought I would so I didn't eat much of it. There was bread everywhere but served with more fillings than I like. By "fillings" I mean pressed meats and a variety of vegetables. I didn't see as much plain bread as I expected and I had no ear for the Khmer language so had trouble asking for just a plain baguette. Even though I didn't like the fillings for the bread (served similarly to Vietnam rolls) I found they were good when I tried them. The baguettes were good quality, too, but I would have preferred to eat them plain.

As I didn't eat much street food I was "forced" into restaurants. They were more expensive than I expected. In general I found the cafe and restaurant prices (in downtown PP) to be the same price as or even more expensive than food in the suburbs of Bangkok. But there was more variety in the Phnom Penh food than in Thailand; more western food options and the Cambodians use less spice. That wouldn't suit everyone but it happens to agree with me.
Bread and beef
CAMBODIAN FRENCH BREAD WITH BEEF (NUM PANG ANG CHIA MUI SACH KO). Doesn’t this look great and delicious. I’ll bet that it goes great with an ice cold beer. I’ll tell you what.
Drinking was another matter. I can't remember being in a place where drinks were so cheap. In downtown PP, on Riverside which is a popular tourist and probably an upscale area for locals, it was easy to find happy hour with local draft beers for $0.75. Still on happy hour — bottles of local beer for $1; Beck's beer $1.25; Hoegaarden, Heineken, Guinness, Corona all $1.50; English cider (apple, pear or strawberry) $1.50; and every little hole in the wall bar and eatery has free wifi. As a visitor I didn't need or buy a local SIM card — free wifi everywhere worked well for me. Happy hour wasn't from 5-7 PM, it was generally all day and lasted until 8 PM, 9 PM or even 10 PM in some places.

Take note Americans. Even in Cambodia the Wifi is FREE.

Beer prices are very cheap.  Hell, even in China, you can expect to pay a minimum of 30 RMB for a Hoegaarden ($5).

The drink prices were fairly consistent at pubs in that part of town. There are also hostess bars (this is why you're reading the article, right?). Surprisingly the drink prices weren't a lot different. A bottle of local beer in the bars was generally $1.00-$1.50; lady drinks were between $2.50-$3.50

Hostess Bars

My research said the Cambodian ladies (in hostess bars) are less pushy than their Thai sisters and you could talk to them without being pressured into buying them a drink.

That's true.

You could ask them to come and sit with you. You could ask them to go away. You could buy them a drink. You could choose not to buy them a drink. Nothing seemed to be a problem. Having been around Thailand for a long time I don't feel it's right to string along the girls — they have to make a living — but they certainly didn't pressure me to buy drinks.

When I bought them a drink it was me who offered and they happily accepted but I don't remember any lady asking me to buy a drink for her. If I didn't buy them a drink I'd leave a tip when I left and they were grateful. I think they get $1 for each lady drink so if I didn't buy them a drink I'd leave $2-$5 depending on how long I spent with them and everyone seemed happy. (I'm sure the bar wouldn't be thrilled but I'm not on earth to please everyone.)

Short Time… (Single shot sex, often under two hours.)

My research for the price of ladies' company was probably out of date. From going around I found the going price of ST (short time) was about $30 – $40 depending on the lady and the quality of the bar.

Long Time… (Overnight sex. Multiple shots.)

I only asked about LT (long time) with one lady who wanted $50. On night #1 I thought that was too much and declined. By night #2 I thought that was a dumb decision and went back to secure her services. She was happy to see me back and honor the previously quoted price. I suggested to her that she would have to be "enthusiastic" for that price; she said she would be and lived up to her part of the bargain. After 5 nights in Phnom Penh and being quoted $40 for ST by a few ladies I felt I was lucky to get my LT arrangement for $50; and stupid to pass it up on the first night. But, hey, that's why they call it a learning curve.

Cambodia is not Thailand.

Again my research said that hostess bars in Phnom Penh (and probably all of Cambodia) are not the same as Thailand. They don't have shows like Suzy Wong in Soi Cowboy, or Angelwitch in Nana Plaza; they don't have go-go dancers or coyotes; they don't feature skimpy outfits or near naked ladies to entertain you. You go into a bar; you choose a lady; you chat — the best you can with the language difficulties; you make a deal or you don't; you leave. As far as I could see that was about it.

That is how it works, don’t ya know…

The closest thing I found to a racy bar was a place called Cyrcee (pronounced seer-say). The description I got of this place was the ladies would give you a blow job before you could order your first drink. Well, that was an exaggeration. But it was a rocking little place if you like to be naughty.
Haven hamburger
You can find hamburgers all over the world. Here is a burger and fires in the Cambodian city of Siem Reap. Where’s the beer?
It's a normal hostess bar — no fish bowl or wannabe massage parlor. It had lots of ladies (about 20) with good variety. They weren't shy about what they offered or how it worked.

There's a ST hotel across the road that costs $5 for the room; $10 for the bar fine and $30 for the lady.

I am no longer a young man and as such there are limits to my powers (I wish I had the energy of yesteryear); yet the girl I chose managed to convince me to take her friend as well. The honest truth is I have tried this twice before in my life and each time was a disappointment. Instead of every man's fantasy of combined action both of my experiences were sequential with one girl doing her business and the other one a bystander; then the first one left and the second one had her turn.

Again, here is the truth. What you see on porn movies is all make-believe. This is pretty much how it goes down. My experiences have always been sequential affairs involving two, three, and once four girls.

These are not my best memories so I was reluctant to try it now. I raised the concern with these two ladies and they assured me they would work in tandem so I figured "at this price, even if it isn't good, I don't have that much to lose".

Off I went with my two ladies and had a remarkably good time.

I only wish I was 20 years younger but I'll cherish this as a good memory — the first time it's worked out for me like it does in the movies. If you want to go to Cyrcee I can't give an exact address but walk along 130 St heading west towards Central Market; you'll see the sign in the side street on the left just before the market; it's hard to find during the daytime (why would you want to go during the day?) but it's easy to see at night even though the sign is small.

I just found out it's pretty easy to get Ceycee's address and a map if you Google it — let's leave it at that because the information is likely to be more current than anything I provide here.

PP Street Layout

Before going to Phnom Penh I was intimidated by the street numbering system and the advice on where to go. 136 Street; 130 Street; 148 Street; 51 Street…

When you get there it's much easier to figure out. Even numbered streets go from east-west; odd numbers go north-south. Street numbers jump in large numbers; it's not a grid like Manhattan. Because of the irregular shape of the downtown area many streets start and end in a short distance. So when you're at Riverside you'll see the streets go 118, 130, 136, 144 & 148. You'll find all the street numbers somewhere in the city but they don't necessarily extend all the way across the city. It's the same for the odd numbered streets. It's much easier to get around when you learn this.

Shopping

Believe it or not I wasn't fully occupied with my "meet & greet" of the ladies. I like a bargain as much as the next person and think shopping in Thailand is great value. Phnom Penh was better. Clothes and shoes are inexpensive. Shops on the street and stalls in the Central Market had clothes for 50% to 66% less than Bangkok. Before going to Phnom Penh I bought a pair of trousers in a Bangkok Tesco Lotus for the bargain price of $15. After a few days in Phnom Penh I thought that was positively expensive. While I didn't research this extensively it seemed the prices in the roadside shops were relatively fixed and bargaining was the norm in the market.

If you like a bargain you should visit the Central Market. They have lots of things — clothes, shoes, caps, hats, food — everything you could ask for. Many of the stalls had incredible inventory and selection of goods. The biggest challenge was choosing what to buy. And while I was happy with the prices I ran into some tourists who'd just spent a week in Siem Reap who complained the prices were double what they'd found there. So while I was happy they were turning up their noses saying everything was too expensive.

Currency and How It Works

I said earlier I was intimidated by the idea of bringing and using US$. It really wasn't a big deal. Prices for tourists are quoted in US$. You pay and get change in dollars. The approximate exchange rate is US$1 = Riel 4,000. When change is less than $1 they give you Riel. You can pay in Riel if you want; in line with the easy going nature of the people everyone accepted the rate of $1 = 4,000. The actual rate was about 4,080 but not once did anyone say "No, you need to pay me 20,400" as opposed to 20,000 when something was $5. Considering it's a relatively poor country and almost everyone you meet would value the extra Riel 400 it's surprising that no one insisted on the extra few hundred. I've been in lots of countries where they want that extra 10c but in Cambodia everyone seemed relaxed about it.

The one thing to be careful about is the quality of your US currency. I took money with me that I use in the US without a problem. But in Cambodia they're fussy. If a bill is ripped, torn, marked or too dirty they won't accept it. I had 2x $20 bills that no one would accept because one had a corner missing and the other had writing on it. No problem using them in the US but not acceptable in Cambodia. They are more forgiving of dirty $1 bills than 5s, 10s or 20s. I wouldn't recommend using 50s or 100s — they're too big for general use; it's better to stick to the smaller bills and use 20s as the highest denomination.

Gratuitous Phnom Penh Advice

Here are some tips for Phnom Penh. 51 St around 172 St has a lot of pubs, clubs and bars. The Walkabout Hotel is full of freelancers, seemingly at any time of the day or night.
Battambang, Cambodia.
Here is a typical street scene in Battambang, Cambodia.
A place near there on 51 St called Zeppelin Cafe is a great place to go for a drink and listening to 70s guitar-based rock music. The owner, who appeared to be a Cambodian national with a ponytail, sits at the back of the bar with 2 turntables. He has an extensive collection of vinyl records (not a CD in sight) and plays what he wants to hear. He looks like a grumpy bugger and I doubt he takes requests — but it's a great place to sit down, have a drink and listen to some music you might have forgotten about. It's not a pickup joint and it's not the kind of place you can talk much — it is, after all, 70s rock featuring loud guitars.

Just around the corner on 172 St is Pontoon, one of the most famous night places in Phnom Penh. It's a club or disco. Don’t go early. I went at 10:30 PM and it was dead. I heard later that it warms up around midnight. I was also told that it is "the" place to go in PP, has fabulous looking ladies (presumably freelancers) and lots of them. One of the challenges of advancing age is not having the staying power to roam the streets at 2 AM so I didn't get to find out; but people younger than me recommended it.

On the corner of 51 St and 172 St is a place called Le Bon Cafe — a nice place to have a coffee, snack or light meal. It features both outdoor and indoor seating. The owners (or managers) speak perfect English so there is no risk of your order being misunderstood or the wrong item coming to your table. I dropped in during both the day and night; no matter what time I was there the owner / manager or perhaps a family member was there with perfect communications.

Across at Riverside there are many cafes and pubs to choose from. The one I enjoyed most for a happy hour drink was on the corner of Sisowath Quay (the main river side road) and 110, 118 or 130 St; I didn't take note of the place's name and Google street view isn't helping me remember but the one at 110 St "looks" about right. Hint: it has this easily visible, non-illuminated Happy Hour sign at the front.

You can't go far wrong with any place around there, but this corner pub / cafe had friendly staff, nice atmosphere and good prices. It was a place you can just sit down and watch the world go by.

My hotel provided free breakfast which was quite OK. But I saw a place on Sisowath Quay called Camory Restaurant, near 110 St that offered breakfast for $3.95. They had a dozen choices for that price and I found I enjoyed it more than my hotel's free breakfast. Camory is also a hostel style guesthouse; they offer inexpensive accommodation and rooms with as many as 4 beds (presumably for a family or maybe for really good friends). If you stay there the breakfast is free.

Come on… How about the freelancers?

Going back to the ladies, another place known for freelancers is Sharky Bar on 130 St. I didn't find it interesting but I could have gone there at the wrong time — yet again. They have pool tables which seem to be popular. Note it costs Riel 1,000, all of 25c, for a game of pool. I read a ridiculous Internet post from some guy who complained he was aggressively confronted when he tried to leave without paying for 3 games of pool. He implied he was ready to fight the bouncers because he couldn't see the sign showing the price. It's amazing someone would be willing to go to hospital for a "principle" when all that's at stake is 75c. That's hard to understand.

Safety…

I walked around Phnom Penh by myself at all hours of the day and night. I was on main roads, quiet streets and dark back alleys. I didn't feel uncomfortable or threatened once. It was fine even on a quiet, dark street at night when I walked past 3-4 Cambodian men talking together and thought to myself "this might not be good". They kept on talking to each other and barely paid attention to me. I didn't feel there was any threat or safety issue in Phnom Penh.

Snookyville

I wasn't going to miss out on Snookyville. The original idea of going to Cambodia was to lose myself in multiple orgies in Snookyville. If I couldn't do that I was at least going to see it. Just like being in Pattaya 30 years ago — it was something I had to do.

What a disappointment.

Again my "research" suggested there are several parts of town. There's downtown, Victory Hill, Serendipity Beach and some other beach areas. The beach areas were described as backpacker havens. As I'm on the older side of the scale I figure that backpackers and places that cater to them really aren't my thing.

Victory Hill appears to be famous for a place called the chicken farm — a place with lots of freelancers who are supposed to cost as little as $5 a time. That didn't appeal to me either. And it seems the authorities have closed it down so even if it appeals to you it's unlikely you'll get what you want any more. So I figured it was a choice between Victory Hill and downtown. I plumped for downtown and chose an inexpensive hotel. It was a bad choice. The place was dead. There was virtually nothing around and very little entertainment.

I'd read of a place called Charlie Harper's Bar that was supposed to be a happening place. With a name like that and Charlie of Two and a Half Men being the ultimate mongerer I figured it had to be good. By nothing more than good luck it was diagonally opposite my hotel. I walked in at 7:30 PM and it was quiet. There were some expats having a drink; a few had what looked like steady girlfriends but there were no other ladies hanging around. I thought it was probably too early.

Drinks were similar prices to Phnom Penh. I noticed a sign that said "Lady Drinks $2". Not bad. I asked the woman at the bar when the ladies turn up so I could buy them a drink. She looked at me with complete surprise and said they have 4 ladies at the bar, they were all there right now and I could buy any one of them a drink. But they can't be barfined because they actually work at the bar.

What’s the point of that??

I can have a drink for myself and buy a higher priced drink for a lady who can't sit and talk to me or join me later? Who would do that? Not me.

I asked if there was anywhere around that offered female company; she accommodatingly pointed to the street corner and said "up there, go to Kangaroo bar". Consistent with my experience in Cambodia I have to say she was helpful.

It turns out Kangaroo bar is actually called Kangaroo Kitchen (even though it's a guesthouse and a bar). They did have ladies there; I couldn't figure out if they were freelancers or there was a bar fine involved. Of the 8-10 ladies I saw there was only one I found appealing. I spoke to her for a while but decided against taking things further and went back to my hotel alone.

Ah. It happens.

I also read that you shouldn't walk around by yourself at night in Snookyville. Be in a group of 3 or more people. If you're by yourself then go around by moto. I guess I could have gone by moto to Victory Hill or the beach area to have a look. 

But after exploring the underwhelming downtown area I wasn't motivated to try. It was probably my fault for not being more adventurous. Snookyville was underwhelming. Maybe I chose the wrong place to stay. Maybe Victory Hill would have been great. Maybe the beach areas were better and not targeted only at backpackers. 

I'll never know. 

I didn't enjoy my day / night there and I'm unlikely to go back. The positive things I'll say about Snookyville are that my hotel was clean, air-conditioned and cost $20 for the night. I can't complain about that. 
Mekong express bus
One of the first shocks to Americans who travel abroad is how much newer, cleaner and better buses are. America has only given lip service to public transportation. The rest of the world takes it quite seriously.
The bus fare to get there from Phnom Penh was all of $7 for a 5½ hour ride. Strangely the bus company wouldn't / couldn't sell me a return ticket. I figured I was being set up for a rip off on the return journey. When I bought my ticket in Snookyville to go back to Phnom Penh it cost all of $5.50 The real problem with Snookyville is the 5½ journey from Phnom Penh. 

If I went from Bangkok to Pattaya and had a disappointing experience I could always try again — it's only 1½ hours away. But 5½ hours each way means dedicating a full day by the time you get to and from the bus station. I won't do it again because I don't want to spend a full 2 days with the possibility of being disappointed. 

How Was My Budget? 

6 days and 5 nights in Cambodia. A budget of $500; 2x $20 bills I couldn't use so I effectively had $460. How did I do? I booked hotels using Agoda so paid for them on a credit card and therefore outside of the cash budget. 

I ate good but not extravagant food, sometimes on the street but mostly in cafes and restaurants. 

I'm not a big drinker but went out every night and drank more than I normally would in a year. I bought some shirts and a pair of basketball style sneakers. 

I had a road trip to Snookyville. I had one LT and several STs. Visa on arrival was $30; taxis to and from the airport cost $24; I even managed a meal at the airport Burger King before I left. And ended up with $6 change from my $460. 

I can't complain and I will go back. Subsequent trips will never be the same as the first one but I enjoyed my visit. And I realize that while I'm old and have lots of experience in Thailand I can still look forward to that nervous excitement of visiting new places because I haven't yet been to Laos, Vietnam or Burma. Oh, happy days.”

Panama

Here is an interesting article about moving to Panama.  I personally have some friends who have moved there.  They love it there.  They are not making a lot of money, but the trade-off in lifestyle more than offsets any other concern.  For me, nah, I don’t think that I would want to move there.  It is too close to the United States.  I would like to keep an ocean between myself and the kooky politics of the USA.

Panama
Map of Panama. This is a small nation with plenty of beaches, mountains, and water. It is tropical and full of life and adventure. What is not to love?

Simply by looking at the map, one would assume that that would possess both beautiful tropical beaches, and amazing mountains.  It just must be amazing!

To read the article go here. It is titled; “Panama is still the easiest place to obtain residency”.

“Expats here live very well. English is widely spoken, the medical services are excellent, a high standard of living is available at a reasonable cost, and the nightlife is fantastic—from top quality restaurants to more exotic adult adventures. Panama was one of the first countries in the world to establish a program specifically aimed attracting retirees.

They promised special discounts and a number of attractive benefits to anyone who could demonstrate a certain level of retirement income. The program worked, and foreigners showed up en masse. (Although many retirees are still waiting for some of those promised special discounts…)”

And…

“Over the next several years, the government established all sorts of immigration programs hoping to attract investors—from forestry to agriculture to finance. (With a whopping 52 ways to obtain residency, it’s clear the residency visa requirements in Panama are incredibly easy.)

Then in 2012, they created an even easier way to become a resident: simply letting people in. They called it the Friendly Nations Visa. And it’s just about the easiest way in the world to obtain residency in any country.
Panama City Beach
Panama City Beach Florida cityscape at night; Shutterstock ID 103240559; Project/Title: AARP; Downloader: Melanie Marin
The list now includes over 40 countries, including the US, Australia, most European countries, Israel, Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, South Africa, and several Latin American countries. Citizens of any of these countries can obtain residency in Panama extremely easily by merely demonstrating ‘economic activity’ in the country.”

Poland

By my historical roots, I can become a citizen of Poland.  My grandparents on my father’s side emigrated from Poland to the United States.  You see, Poland has rules enabling relatives of former citizens to repatriate.

Krakow
Everyone that I have talked to have told me that Krakow, Poland is awesome. I get the impression of a European level college town with friendly people and fine excellent food. Public transportation is cheap as is the finer things in life.

It was something that I have considered, but ultimately chose not to do.  Not because I didn’t think it was an awesome place to live, but at the time, the Obama administration was getting too cozy with the EU.  (Later, I discovered that it was his love of Brussels, rather than his care or concern for Poland.) I did not want to live in an American “backwater”.

Here is an interesting article written by an American that moved to Poland.  It is called “Why living in Poland is like living in Hollywood” and can be found here. Some excerpts;

“Polish people often imagine America as a country where everybody’s  rich or at least richer than Poles and more sophisticated – take any TV show where an average family lives in a nice, spacious house and for 16-th birthday kids get their cars. 

Now when I am back in Florida I like to take day trips with my wife and daughter. When we were driving through Clay County I told my Polish spouse that it’s pretty nice out there to which she replied :

”Oh Mark please don’t make me move here just to prove how much I love you”. 

She said that not because the place is off the beach or it’s a country side, she said that because the place is far from civilization, houses are often mobile and if you don’t have a car there is no way to go anywhere.”
Łódź (Lodz) - capital of Central Poland
Łódź (Lodz) – capital of Central Poland. This city has a kind of old world feel as well as a kind of European version of London feel to it. Nice, exciting and charming.

And…

“Poland was a socialist country so the country has a large social system built in. There are unemployment benefits and food stamps etc and housing. But this is nothing compared to going to grandma’s in the village and eating fresh food, even if unemployed. 

It is a different reality. 

You can live in Poland for nothing and people’s expectations are different. My wife was making 500 dollars a month, lived on potatoes, and still had a few dollars to take French lessons. No gadgets or cable TV but reality is different. She did not have a gym membership but walked everywhere and was in better shape than the excesses of the west.”
Gdansk
Gdansk old town – Warszawa. Charming, unique and awesome all words that I would use to describe this city and the people.

Polish Food

Polish Hot Dogs
How about we start with some delicious Polish Hotdogs. Only they are made with fine Polish sausages. Cooked to perfection. Topped with all sorts of delicious toppings. Yum.

When you think about Polish food most people think of Pierogi. Pierogi are delicious, but there is much much more.

Bigos is a “Hunter’s Stew” that has rich flavoring from the meats and cabbage that are within the dish. Many cooks their Bigos stew for two days. Many Poles will use the largest pot available (can fit a large turkey) and let it simmer for around two days. During this time the house will have a delicious aroma. The color comes out a very dark brown almost black.

Another favorite dish in Poland is Paszteciki. My relatives have all made this.  I just cannot remember a holiday when we weren’t eating these during the holidays. They are wonderful little snacks that you can just pop into your mouth as other items are cooking. Pass the Paszteciki!

Below are a few honorable mentions.

  • Golabki – Cabbage roll stuffed with meat and rice with a red sauce.
  • Kapuska – Made different ways depending on the season. The one I enjoy has tomatoes and grounded up giblets.
  • Potato Pancakes – Very good, but have to be careful because of the starch and cholesterol.
  • Apple Pancakes – I never had apple pancakes like my Mother-in-law makes them here. We are surrounded by apple orchards and have time to make a lot of different apple dishes.
  • Paczki – Polish Donut. Known for the rose filling. Who knew that roses not only smell great but taste delicious as a dessert.
Delicious Polish Food.
Delicious polish food. My grandmother, and all my relative had perogries often. While not an everyday meal, it was common enough for me to miss when I left for university. These little puppies are cooked in butter with caramelized onions. Yum.

Polish Family Culture 101

  • Shoes off when entering a home – Completely understandable. Your home is your clean sanctuary. You’ve been walking around all day in those shoes… Bathrooms… Office spaces… Dog poo? Take your shoes off and let your feet breath.
  • Women’s role / Man’s role – There is a clear line in what is expected of both sides. However, where some feminist may find it offensive, many women love it! Sure no problem the woman can clear the dishes off the table and clean and put them away, and the man can go outside and pick up the dog poo, mow the lawn, and vacuum the stairs.
  • Fast Meal – It is always a good idea to keep bread, cheese, or fruits and veggies on hand to whip up a fast meal for expected and unexpected guest. Along with the meal make sure you have plenty of tea and coffee to offer as well. Don’t be rude offer guest in your home refreshments.
  • Tipping – Tipping is very popular in the United States. For the most part you’re expected to tip your servers, carpet cleaners, maids, etc. as a show of appreciation for the service given. In Poland and Germany it isn’t normal. The amount on your receipt is what is expected. Giving a tip is appreciated but don’t feel that it is necessary.

Germany

Germany, home of beer and fine German sausages.  It is a land with amazing forests, wonderful history, and a climate that is suitable to me.  Cars can drive without speed limits, prostitution is legal, and I could spend the rest of my life visiting all the historical world war II historical sites.

It’s a beautiful land with seasons, fine food, and a population that is attentive to their role in society.

Germany is beautiful.
Germany is one of the most beautiful countries in the world. Depending on where you go, you might find Roman ruins, medieval villages, sparkling new cities, or Baroque city centers. It’s just plain awesome.

Here is a nice article on some lessons that an American expat was exposed to as part of their new life in Germany. Some of them are amusing…

“Especially in the former East, freikörperkultur, or free body culture, is an important part of German identity.  Decades of oppression lead to a particular appreciation for the experience of freedom and nudity without a direct relationship to sexuality.

This can sometimes be difficult for Americans to buy, particularly when your coworkers casually invite you to the office’s nude sauna or suggest a naked swim in a nearby lake.  Adjusting to this culture without getting weird took some grit, finesse, and more than a few awkward encounters.”

Free body culture. Nudity with friends. I can see how it would take some time getting used to, but then again. Meh. So what?

Well, “Free Body Culture” is very, very taboo in the United States. You could easily be arrested and locked up for sexual deviance. Not only that, but you could easily be put on a Sex Offender registry because you didn’t want to wear pants and underwear. Yikes!

Americans would be arrested for things that people in other nations take for granted as normal behavior.

Germany has many charms. If you don’t mind the “free body culture”, there are many other things to like. Like for instance, the fine food, sausages and delicious beer. But it is more than that. It is…

“Moving to Germany meant an inexorable slowing of the pace of my life. 

Particularly in Saxony, there are strict rules about when stores can remain open.  Most businesses are closed in the evenings and all day on Sunday.  Additionally, Germans benefit from frequent holidays and typically at least a month of paid vacation.

This gave me some anxiety at first, particularly when I forgot to leave work early enough to get groceries or didn’t have time to go to the bank.  

Over time, however, I learned to both plan my days and to enjoy the break from chores rather than obsessing over lost time.  After a few months, I was occasionally leaving work at 3pm to go watch the football game with friends instead of trying to cram a few more hours of work.  I still got as much done as usual, but I felt much happier and less burned out.”

It sounds like a real welcome relief to me. I’ll tell you what.

Saarburg Germany
Saarburg is most beautiful town in of the Trier-Saarburg district in the Rhineland-Palatinate state of Germany. It covers an area of 20.36 km2 (7.86 sq mi). Saarburg is a medieval-themed town located in Germany. Despite the small number of people (around 6500) the city is a peaceful and beautiful place to live. There you have all the necessary things for a nice and comfortable life. In Saarburg has all kinds of schools, good shopping, a strong health care to the St. Francis Hospital etc.Saarburg is the major and largest center in Trier-Luxembourg region. The main feature of the city is beautiful river Saar.

There’s also another blog written by Amanda Schaefer .  She is an American expat living in Germany. Her comments can be found here.

“Be a good hausfrau. The sidewalk in front of your house is directly correlated to your social acceptance in the neighborhood. Shovel and salt it before 8am if it snows and make sure it's swept clean of minuscule dirt particles at all other times. 

And wash your windows, too.

If you are American, people know it. I don't know how they know; they just do. You can stop wearing Nikes everywhere, throw your elastic-waisted pants in the garbage, and take off your baseball cap but they will still see you coming from a mile away. Inexplicably, after several months of living here you will also be able to distinguish other Americans in a crowded place before hearing them speak.

Water is served in tiny glass bottles with their own special designer cup, typically at room temperature. Don't ask for tap water unless you want to be forever shunned. The good news is that beer is usually either the same price or cheaper than a dainty little bottle of water. This results in guiltless day drinking.

And what about holidays?

Carnival is as exciting as you imagine! It's like Mardis Gras and Halloween on steroids. There are endless parades with intricate floats, everyone wears painstakingly-crafted costumes, and all of the candy thrown from the floats is washed down with beer-- lots and lots of beer. 

There isn't a bad place to participate in the Carnival festivities. In fact, you can attend lots of different celebrations because there are so many villages and each has its own parade. Just be sure to use the right salutation: In and around Köln, it's, "Alaaf!" Almost everywhere else it's, "Helau!"”

OK. So it is traditional. Women must keep the home presentable for the neighbors. You have to be a good citizen and an acceptable resident. I am sure that that might ruffle up some pink hair on some militant American feminists out there.

Germany is interesting in other ways as well. Ways, that I am afraid will upset most sensibilities of your average American.

For instance, prostitution is legal and quite accepted in society. It is LEGAL. It is ACCEPTED. It is considered a societal need.

(Damn! Why did my dad decide to move to the USA when he could of just as easily stayed in Japan, or Germany?) So, if you are a man living in Germany, and need to have a little bit of sexual release, you just get up and go to one of the many thousands of establishments that cater to your manly needs.

Let’s talk about this for a while. After all prostitution in the United States get’s a bad rap. Of course, prostitution in the rest of the world doesn’t look anything like the sorry excuses found in the United States. It’s quite different. In Germany, it’s part of society, and everyone tends to visit them from time to time.

Visiting a Chain-Bordello, the FKK

Yes, in America we have chain fast-food restaurants like McDonalds, and KFC. We have chain restaurants like Red Lobster, and Denny’s. We have chain car-washes, car oil-changes, and chain laundry-mats. Well, Germany has chain-bordellos.

Yeah, I have a number 2 doggie-style with extra BJ, please.

This is one of those places that every guy really needs to see to believe before they die. To quote a blogger; “Having sex with prostitutes at FKK Oase in Frankfurt needs to be added to your bucket list right now.”

Many guys probably have no idea what an FKK is, so I will break that down first.

Not all FKK’s are created equal, but calling them a lavish brothel might be the best way to sum them up.  I would say that this is certainly the best way to describe it. It is like going to a Roman villa filled with all sorts of beautiful nude girls who are willing to provide you with pleasures on demand. Yikes! Nero, never had it so good! These are places where guys go to live out their fantasies and be pampered in every way possible.

I wonder why I never heard about this before?

Hum, let me check. Oh, yes. Google blocks much of this information. Why am I not surprised? Americans must be protected against foreign ideas and thoughts that might crush the progressive narrative by the ruling oligarchs. Americans must be dumbed down to meet the lowest IQ, and the shabbiest behaviors so as not to offend anyone.

You know, something exactly like this…

Harrison Bergeron
Harrison Bergeron is a 1995 cable science fiction television movie film loosely adapted from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 short story of the same name. The film takes place in a dystopian future in which the US government mandates total egalitarianism in all things, by having most people (those with high intelligence) attach wearable mind “handicapping” devices to their heads and showing only mind numbing shows on TV.
Harrison Bergeron
The story centers on a high school student named Harrison Bergeron whose brilliance makes him a pariah. He is recruited by a secret organization whose purpose is to operate the functions of society that cannot be handled by the unintelligent. 

While he thrives in this environment for a time and even falls in love with the girl who introduced him into the organization, he ultimately pays a personal price and comes to see the true social structure as unethical and immoral, and thus rebels, even if it means making a sacrifice. 

In this reality, it is mandated that all people be equal in all things. To this end, the social norm of this society has become egalitarianism. 

Citizens strive to be of equal wealth, intelligence, athletic prowess and social status to all around them. Through a process of selective breeding, mankind is perfecting the perfectly average human being. 

What is not accomplished through arranged marriages is made up for through technological means, the most prominent of which are only showing mind numbing shows on TV, and a headband device worn by all citizens which modulates intelligence, dialing up or down a person's IQ in order to arrive at a 'perfect' 100.

Cover your eyes now. Because I am going to describe it for you in reader-land. This knowledge might be harmful to you. It’s probably classified as dangerous “Hate Speech” by the liberals. Knowledge is power. Soak it up. It’s ok.

Take off your stupidity headsets. It’s ok. Do it now.

via GIPHY

Now let’s talk about what life is outside the artificial reality that the United States has become…

Contact and address of The FKK Oase Frankfurt

Adress:        Ober-Erlenbacher Straße 109 - 61381 Friedrichsdorf
Region:        Hesse
Country:       Germany
GPS:           50.242484, 8.675508
Phone:         +49 6007 930551
Site web:      FKK Oase

They can be called sauna clubs by some, you can get a massage, go for a swim, or have sex with any of the hundred hot women from around the world that work there. Pricing is different from place to place but generally you pay an entry fee and then pay for sex acts as you go.

As is typical in Germany, everyone walks around near naked or fully naked, including the guys. At some you can have public sex in full view of everyone else, others make you do the action in private rooms.

There are many different FKK establishments.  All with different decor and pricing arrangements. For example, let’s talk about FKK Oase in Frankfurt. The following is from a website called a guys night life. Enjoy…

“FKK Oase is located a bit out of the way. You can ask a taxi to take you there or save some euros by taking the S5 train to the Friedrichsdorf station and then getting a taxi from there.

When you arrive you pay a 69 euro entrance fee then go to the locker room to take a shower, lock up your clothes, and put on the robe. Guys wear a thin robe here, though some just walk around naked.

FKK Promotion
FKK in Germany. This is one of their promotional ads. They host nudity and sex for a fee at many scenic locations. Oh, for those of you readers who haven’t grown up past five years of age, cover your eyes because this chick isn’t wearing panties! Whoops! NSFW warning. Heh heh. (Nice Butt, eh?)
The girls generally are fully nude though some will wear sexy lingerie or extremely skimpy bikinis. There are multiple different areas to hang out here, one room has a stripper pole with couches.

Then there is a small movie theater that they call the kino where porn is on display. There are many couches and a couple of beds in here, don’t be surprised to see guys getting blowjobs on the couches and live sex shows on the beds.

If you want to be the one putting on the show just ask one of the girls around and she will likely be down. There is also a big backyard area with a pool and bar.

There are many pool chairs, hammocks, cabanas, and another place for people to have sex on an elevated area. There is a mirror on the ceiling of it so people underneath can look up and watch.

This is all done in a Roman theme with statues and the like. You can sit by yourself and take in the scene, move from one area to another, and pick a girl any time you want.”

Sounds pretty good doesn’t it? Here’s a photo of FKK with some of the girls there, showing their butts. LOL. (PS. If you are an American under the age of 21, you need to self censure. This might burn your retinas, and cause you to behave erratically.)

FKK
Promotional image from FKK. Photo credit to FKK. Love all the cute butts. Heh heh.
“As mentioned you pay a 69 euro cover when you enter and then from there everything is done between you and the girl. The standard price is 50 euros and that gets you a bbbj (blowjob with no condom) followed by covered sex.

69 euro = $79 USD

Certain things will cost extra and they won’t come cheap. For instance most girls will ask for an additional 50 euros to cum in their mouth, most won’t do anal sex but if they do you will have to pay a premium for it.

50 euro = $57.30 USD

Many of the girls will be fine with doing things anywhere in the facilities. You can head to the kino and get blown while watching a porn and then move to a bed and be the star of the show if you like. Just make sure to confirm with the girl that she is up for that before you begin.

There is no pressure to take a girl, you have already paid the cover so if for some reason you don’t want to have sex that is fine. You also are free to have sex with as many girls as you want and can afford.

Threesomes are definitely possible, but you shouldn’t expect too much interaction between the girls. Pretty much anything can be done here for a price.”

How about that?

A bordello treated like a buffet. Outstanding! What’s not to love?

“Looks can be subjective but ya they are pretty hot. They walk around naked all day so you are not going to see many that don’t have very good bodies.

Many of the prostitutes are from Eastern Europe and the vast majority of them are white. Every once in awhile you might see an Asian, Latina, or black girl.

As far as how many you don’t really need to worry as there will always be plenty to choose from. The girls have even been known to complain that they have too much competition there.

During peak hours there might be as many as 150, and even at slow times there should be close to 50. Since they are all in good shape you will have no problems finding one that suits your needs.

The sheer number of girls working here make it one of the best FKK’s in Germany. While this isn’t an extremely cheap way to monger it is definitely an experience that any guy would love to try. As many as 150 in shape naked girls around and you can get with any of them at any time."

Now some thoughts from a newbe who went there for the first time;

Newbie returns from FKK OASE Frankfurt

Hi All,

Finally got to Frankfurt and my first taste of an FKK recently. Got there about 08:30pm and left at 12:30am on a Friday night and this is my take on the night from a newbie perspective.

Getting there:

As I was staying in Friedrichsdorf, which I believe is the nearest town and train station. I walked down to the Train station and been as nervous as hell I got into a taxi there and as soon as I sat into it the driver turned and said FKK OASE and I was on my way (Did not even have to tell him). I

ts about a five to 10 minute drive and the club is out in the middle of the countryside so not to worry if you find yourself driven along a narrow road with no houses etc on it..

What to expect on entering:

Once inside the door there is a small reception area and the lady took my money and also put one band on my left arm to say I had paid and another on my right with key to both my lockers (Clothes and Money locker). Was offered a towel only but asked and was also given a robe. Note at reception just five feet to your left through the door it the bar area and my first glance at the girls and boy was I impressed.

The Club layout:

Using the reception as a certain point. From reception you first need to go to the locker room / changing area. Just enter into the bar area, turn right through the next doorway and on forward down the stairs and into a large modern locker room and find the locker with the key number to match change and back up the stairs, bring your money to your second locker which are in the bar area to the right of the doorway that let from reception. 

These lockers are only big enough for your wallet and the other lockers only your clothes so if you had a large bag you might be in trouble. Back at the doorway from reception to your left is a the bar on an L shape and beyond that is the main Room with a dancing poll in the centre and comfy sofas all around with some high chairs and tables. 

Enough to seat 40 and to the far right of the room you'll find the KINO again 3 rows of comfy sofas facing onto the large screen showing porn and also on a couple of occasions seen full on BJ action during the night and was offered it a couple of times myself but been shy declined. 

The bar / main room area would be the same size as a large pub in Dublin. Back to the door at the reception area and turn right though the doors for the locker area and instead of going down the stairs to your left are the rooms and to your right the Jacuzzi / sauna area which also has rooms to one side. 

This basically has a large Jacuzzi maybe holds up to 10 and some deck chairs around it and the sauna rooms to the far right side with the pro massage lady in a room in the corner to the far left. These guys is a legit massage and one of the girls tells me she is quite good. 30 euro apparently. Beyond the the sauna rooms it the entrance to the outdoor area and as it was dark did not see much of this but looks like a large pool with deck chairs all around reports of it been great in the good weather I'm sure are true.

The Girls:

Now for the most important bit. After putting my wallet away and at this stage to be honest I had been a little blown away by the quality of the girls and I had only gone to and from the locker room yet. Back up at the bar I got a free Fanta then sat down in the main room. 

As said many times before girls were all in high heels only a few with stockings. I'd estimate that there were about 50 girls in the club at 8:30 and this dwindled down to about 25 by 12:30. Seemed to be a slow night and this was confirmed by one of the girls. 

Of the 50 at least 35 were an 8 or above, another 8 I'd rate as 7 and the others I did not find attractive. High odds indeed. Almost all the girls are slim, with small B / A cup boobs and appear quite tall in the heals and 80%+ Romanian and the majority in the 18 to 25 year old bracket. Of the girls I'll pick out the 2 I found most attractive.

1: A blond that I immediately seem on entering the bar. But she left at 09:00 so did not speck to her. She has quite an incredible body, Jennifer Aniston is her prime. I just could not believe what I was seeing and had to stop and stare like an idiot just for a minute she was just that good.

2: Julie 18 Year old Romanian, This girl it so sweet and innocent and a drop dead looker to match. 170cm tall teeny body, back hair. Got her in the room for an hour and was very pleased. She talked away and as near as a GFE as your going to get. She but a smile on my face when she said without any hesitation the she was to young for a drink as she might regret what she would do like any other teenager, but I could only see the contradiction given the circumstance with a very large smile.

Oh Yes some girls will approach and will take no for an answer if you give it in a polite way and others will sit down or walk about expecting a wink or a node and the'll be over to you in a hurry. Some are sweet talking about where your from and what your doing in Frankfurt and more are full on whispering about the great BJ she'll give you in the KINO and the great fuck you'll have together. Its up to your own taste what you want really.

Newbie lessons learned:

1: When I go again and I will, I would go about 3pm, and leave at 10:30pm as to get the day and night shift together. After 10pm the crowd both girls and men dwindled abit and this took from the atmosphere I though.

2: Once you see a girl you like and want approach quickly as she will get taken or leave as happened above with the blond.

3: The space indoors in the club is not quite as large as I though from reports but it still quite big and if there was a large crowd I'm sure it would be very packed.

4: You kind of phase out the other gents that are there and anyway everyone kind of minds their own business. And just in case your wondering. All ages / sizes and mostly singe gents with a few small groups. All respectful of the situation and no loud and rowdy types.

Conclusion:

The best way of describing it would be to close your eyes and picture going to the local pub / bar / disco where the 18 to 25 year old set go and pick out all the attractive girls and have them nude in only their heels and then replace the guys with men of all ages/looks sitting about in robes / towels and that's the nearest picture your going to get without actually been there.

Will I go back YES YES YES and I plan to explore other FKK's as well.”

A listing of FKK clubs in Germany, can be found HERE.  It’s a very extensive list, my God!

While America has been all caught up with prohibition of drinking alcohol on Sundays, and display of woman’s breasts when breastfeeding, the rest of the world moved on without these silly restrictions. Men can go work, at their leisure, then come home and relax.  If the wife is too tired or busy for sex they can go out to a men’s club and get some release. Win – win.

In other nations, men are men, and women are women, and there is no such thing as anything else. I don’t care what the pseudo American intellectuals have to say about the 38 genders. They are only complaining because they were able to obtain funding via political organizations by keeping various narratives alive.

Finally, Let me end this discussion of what awaits you in Germany with this screen capture of a Twitter conversation. You see, in America the progressives are trying to make everyone equal, even though people are not equal at all. The differences are our strengths. Not our similarities.

But, you can’t explain that to the militant millennials.

Harrison Bergeron
Silly girl. So you want equality, eh? Image that THE YEAR IS 2081, and everybody is finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General. A science fiction story…yes. Trying to be implemented in the Untied States today by progressives in 2018…absolutely YES.
George, while his intelligence was way above normal, had a little mental handicap radio in his ear. 

He was required by law to wear it at all times. It was tuned to a government transmitter. Every twenty seconds or so, the transmitter would send out some sharp noise to keep people like George from taking unfair advantage of their brains. 

Go read about this Science Fiction story (and movie) that has become the progressive dream, and is trying to be implemented today. Read HERE.

In short, we don’t want to treat everyone the same, because everyone is different. Some are smarter. Some are stronger. Some are taller. Some are hard-working. Some are lazy. Differences is what should be treasured. Not sameness.

IQ chart
Gaussian IQ spread of different nations. This graph tells us a lot about the differences between people in different nations.

Anyways, continuing on about Germany… Let’s talk taxes…

Germany is the economic powerhouse of Europe so for the ambitious I there's a lot of opportunity here. However taxes are high as fuck if you are comparing it to life in the US. I'm from NYC so I am used to paying high taxes but over here is another level. Sales tax of 19% is worked into prices of everything here. The only forgiving things here is that rent is SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper than in NYC and that's where you end up coming out ahead financially. 

-6 Years in Germany

Conclusions

We, as Americans, have a very retarded and corrupted view of the world outside the American borders. To us, it seems frightening and dark. We are constantly bombarded with “Save the Children” advertisements, and told that they need our money to support their infrastructure (isn’t that right, Barrack Obama?). The truth is something quite different.

In the movie “Forrest Gump”, there is a saying “Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.” Well, that is true. But you know what? You can choose the box.

Thai love
The initiation of sex and relationships vary from culture to culture. In Thailand, for example, the relationships tend to be different than that of the United States. This is true for most of Asia.

Men, I am speaking as a man, need to recognize that we are not chained to the life that we have created. When things become uncomfortable, or untenable, we can change our life. We make a plan, and then execute the plan. These are my thoughts on this matter.

Best Regards.

Take Aways

  • Depending on your own individual situation, leaving America might be an option worthy of consideration.
  • There are many nations to choose from. Some have higher taxes, but great food. Some have lower taxes, and pretty girls. Some have great history, art and culture, while others are just fun places to be.
  • You are getting older with each hour. Spend some time thinking about your life and what you want out of it. It might include going to another area that is different from the United States.

FAQ

Q: What is the best nation to visit?
A: I do not know. It depends on the individual. Their money, interests and experiences. For me, I found that I actually found that I enjoyed the Asian nations. The United States is nothing like I grew up in. It is something completely different today.

Were I to live in the Untied States today, my life style would be a pale shadow of what it is currently.

Q: Why do you only think about men, what about women?
A: I think about women a lot. But I am not a woman. I can only relate my thoughts and experiences from my own point of view. That includes things that interest me as a man.

Truthfully, I am not interested in how a woman might think if she was in my shoes. In fact, it is impossible for a woman to be in my shoes. Woman do not have the ability to function as a node within my MAJestic role. It is physically IMPOSSIBLE for them. Call it sexist if you may. But that is the truth.

Part of growing up is throwing away our childhood fantasies and becoming an adult. You are placed within your reality, and it is up to you to make the best of it. You are either a success at it, or you fail. It’s pretty cut and dry.

Two Part Post

This post is part one of a multi-part post. My basic premise is that the world is a big place. Get out. Enjoy the differences. Savor them. Life is too short.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 3NOV18
  2. Completed 7NOV18
  3. SEO review 7NOV18.

Adventures Exploring the Cemeteries of Indiana

When I lived in Indiana, one of the things that I did was to visit every park in the state.  I went and bought a book showing all 25 state parks.  Then, my wife and I went and visited every one of them. When we were finished, we then went to the local library.  We looked at a large map of the county and then visited every cemetery in the county.

It was an “eye opener” and very informative.

Let’s talk about this experience

Many of the cemeteries were in isolated areas. We would get to ride on little used back roads that trundled through the rows of soybeans or corn. Then the road would dead end into a tiny space of greenery that typically consisted of some rare trees, a stream or two and some small out-buildings. The park would be lonely and often deserted.

While the grass would be tended to, it was mostly a three week to a one month mowing cycle and tended to be rather lush.  There wasn’t any kind of landscaping, or care for the weeds and plants that existed besides the tombstones. The headstones themselves were often old, tilted and leaning at precarious angles.

Barrett
Barrett Cemetery in Indian is typical. It is a small isolated location that often has trees growing in and around the tombstones. No one is there, and few visit it. Is is quiet and isolated and lonely.

We would walk into the park and explore the headstones. Many dated over a hundred years ago. Obviously the settlers had a hard life. People died early. Many died before they hit their mid thirties. Many families had nearby rows of tombstones with the names of children that wouldn’t live past three or four years of age. It was sad.

Sometimes we would find a family that would have maybe twelve or thirteen children’s graves. Each one would hold a child that would be from one years old to four who had died. The mother, often would not make it past forty.  Can you just imagine that life? Can you imagine the life that they must had had? Every year, getting pregnant. Having a baby, and every year, or every other year, having one of your children die. It must have been horrific and really debilitating.

Obviously the hard life, the harsh weather, the Indians and the illnesses took a toll. To survive they needed something. They needed God and spiritual guidance. I just cannot see how they would be able to keep on living without it.

The Tombstones

While many of the tombstones were simple (weather worn) sandstone affair, there might be one or two large edifices. Sometimes these would be out of stone, but often they would be cast out of zinc and looked to be in good condition. The zinc would be aged to a dark dull grey. These monuments looked good. They really did, with fine and crisp lines and decent appearance.

The stones, on the other hand, were worn pretty severely.  Often you couldn’t make out the words on the stones. Sometimes you couldn’t even make out the shape of the stones themselves.

Those headstones made out of cast concrete tended to be in pretty good shape. They aged, but it was just dirty old concrete. Sometimes green moss would form on the folds in the cast headstone. However, aside from that, they looked pretty good.

Tree style tombstones
It is very common to find headstones that look like trees. These do not typically seem to be carved out of stone. Instead, they appear to be cast out of concrete. It is a mystery to me as to what the limbs signified. This picture is typical and shows some moss and stains on the tombstone.

One of the common theme was large stone tombstones that resembled trees, with many limbs cut off. It is an interesting curiosity. One that I have yet to understand. I guess that for a time, it must have been a kind of fad. They date mostly to 1880s to 1920s, and are pretty unique.

"The elaborately carved limestone markers were popular in the late 1800s through the 1920s, when they fell out of favor due to their expense, and contain symbols that speak volumes if you know what they're saying."

Clasped hands, if the sleeves are masculine and feminine, denote marriage, for example. Ferns are a symbol of frankness or humility; ivy can symbolize fidelity; and wheat represents the divine harvest.

Many of the symbols have dual religious and secular meanings, but in both cases they eternally memorialize the deceased's ideals and philosophies..."

-Tree shaped tombstones let the dead speak

I always found this an interesting consideration to ponder. I would go up to these tombstones and see different aspects of each one. One would just be a simple stump, like a tree that was wholly cut down. While others would represent a tree standing, but with broken limbs, sawed off limbs, and limbs mangled and distorted. The meaning of this was always a mystery to me.

"...many variations: the vertical stump, the double vertical stump, the horizontal stump, the ledger tree stump, the tree-stump bench, the tree-stump chair, the tree-stump cross, the simple tree-stump base. They could be decorated with birds, books, firearms, flowers, plants, anchors, or animals, along with the signs of fraternal orders, from unions to the Elks to the Freemasons.'

-Susanne Ridlen, in her 1999 book Tree-Stump Tombstones.

Meshingomesia
Meshingomesia. A Miami Indian cemetery in Grant Country Indiana. It is quite typical for the cemeteries in Indiana. It is isolated, quiet and lonely.

We would look at the names on the stones, the one’s that we could read, that is. We would walk around the stones, and explore the nearby wooded area. As many of the few trees in North and Central Indiana were found only at the cemeteries. The rest of the land was wholly devoted to flat fields to grow crops.

Sometimes the cemeteries are completely overgrown. Here, huge trees would grow out of the remaining tombstones, and unless you looked and searched for the site, you would never be able to find it.

Sadly, a number of the cemeteries were converted to trash dumps by inconsiderate neighbors. The trees in the areas of the cemeteries that have become overgrown, became disused. Often, the groundskeeper would only mow or care for the “front” or visible portion of the cemetery and the rest would be permitted to lapse and revert to nature. Others, often uncaring, would dump trash there. Things such as old refrigerators, 1960’s era baby strollers and old interior doors with the round brass or stone knobs would be found piled in heaps at the one end of the cemetery.

Curiosities

When a person would die and be buried, often the relatives would plant a tree, or a shrub near the grave. The thing is that these shrubs would be permitted to grow. What is often considered a small shrub, after a hundred years, becomes a worthwhile tree. These trees are magnificent and something that you will not see in or around any suburb because the tree takes far too long to mature. Heck, it’s worth while just to go out and check out these magnificent tree-shrubs alone.

Another thing that is curious is the presence of ancient and aged plastic flowers. Sure they might have looked nice in 1970 when they were first placed on the grave, however time and decades have changed them into something else entirely different. Now they look like faded dirty plastic trash. Things that should have been discard along with smiling clown paintings, and vacuum tube AM band radios.

Where Built

Sometimes the cemeteries were built around an Indian mound. These mounds were part of the previous inhabitants of the area; “The Mound Builders”. We would climb up on the mounds and survey the surrounding flatness. These mounds were huge and often had very steep sides. Most were excavated in the past, and often European settlers were buried inside the mound with tilted tombstones remaining on the sides like broken teeth.

Ball Hill.
Ball Hill cemetery located in Indiana. Sometimes the cemeteries were located on a hill. Indian is mostly flat, except in the southern section. Thus hills were a rare occurrence. The places were quiet and peaceful.

The Mysterious Blank Cemeteries

Many of these cemeteries were well mowed, perhaps once or twice a week.  Aside from the groundskeepers, no one ever apparently visited these parks.  Many did not seem to have any headstones.

It wasn’t that the headstones were set flat to the earth. No. The headstones were missing all together completely. What was supposed to be a cemetery listed int he country map in the library seemed to be just a simple lawn of grass located in the middle of ample farmland.

They ended up looking like a flat space of a lawn at the edge of the rows of corn. Sometimes with a old fence around it. However, there were no headstones at all. This was a mystery, that is, until we went to the edge of the cemetery lot.

O'neal
O’Neall cemetery in Indiana. Where are all the headstones? Why such great and wide lawns? If you go to the edge of the cemetery, near the tree line you will find a ditch. Look in the ditch. All the tombstones are there.

There, we would find many of the headstones randomly tossed into a ditch nearby. Apparently, over the years, the groundskeepers just pulled the headstones out to make it easier to mow the lawns. If a tree fell down, they would just remove the tree. It was too inconvenient to mow around it. They did not care.

They did not care.

No one checked on their work. So they would cut down the trees. They would remove the bushes, and then toss the headstones into a ditch or gully at the edge of the cemetery. No one noticed. No one cared. All that mattered is that the lowly paid groundskeeper had an easy job keeping the grass cut.

Which was, typically a young couple. Either doing so as a favor for the church, or being paid to do so by either a church or the country. Rarely would we ever see an “expert” groundskeeper maintaining these cemeteries. Oh, they do exist. Especially in the larger city cemeteries. I know, my uncle was one. However, in the smaller, rural cemeteries it was another story entirely. It was almost as if taking care of the cemeteries were an afterthought.

Bethel cemetery
Bethel cemetery. Located in Richland Township in Steuben county Indiana. It is typical with trees on one end of the cemetery, but a total absence of trees near the tombstones so that the groundskeeper could mow the ground easily and simply.

There was no need for trees, bushes, shrubs or flowering plants. Any trees or plants grew in the ditches at the edge of the field, or alongside difficult to mow areas in the cemetery plots.

A Little History

Around a hundred and fifty years ago, people would go to the cemeteries to have “outings” and picnics. As such, they were maintained with visitors in mind.  People would go to the local cemetery, layout a blanket, and eat cold cuts and maybe a pie and enjoy the day.

Massachusetts and the rest of New England lead the nation in this pastime.

In fact, I do urge the reader to go to their local libraries and look this long forgotten pastime up. I myself did not know about it until I visited the Milford, MA library and looked into the local cemeteries there.

Anyways, Indiana was founded by hardworking Germanic people, who rather frowned on leisure, and it is no wonder that the secondary use of cemeteries in Indiana was ignored and forgotten. The people had a hard, tough life to live. They needed to focus. Over the years, their children became very pragmatic and concentrated on the things that mattered, and care for cemeteries and parks just simply became an afterthought.

Which, in my mind, is a real shame.

Ah. Indiana, what is going on with youse guys?

We are transient. Our physical existence is short lived. Make the most of it.  Be the best that you can be.  Enjoy life, and the people who surround you. For one day, they too will be gone.

Irish round tower

About this picture. It’s a cemetery in Milford Massachusetts. It is a beautiful cemetery, and right next to the Wendy’s restaurant there.

Father Patrick Cuddihy came to Milford, MA in 1857 to head the St. Mary of the Assumption church. He directed the construction of a traditional Irish round tower to be built on church property in 1895. Now, these towers had been built in Ireland to help monks escape Vikings and other invaders. They were, for a time very popular and extremely useful. When the village or town was attacked, they would run to the tower and hide inside. They were accessed by ladders that were pulled up to prevent penetration by others.

Since then, the tower has become a landmark, and people come to the cemetery to chill out, rest during lunch and picnic there. The cemetery is well maintained, with enormous, big and beautiful trees. It has wonderful Massachusetts stones, and perfect areas of greenery.

While people drive their cars out to the cemetery for lunch today, it was once far more common a thing for people to participate in.

During the 19th century, and especially around the turn of the century, snacking in cemeteries happened all over the United States. It wasn’t just apple-munching either. It was something else entirely. People would bring blankets and quilts to sit upon. they would carry baskets with cooked pies, baked chicken and sides of coleslaw. They would bring bottles of beer.

They would hang out. Listen to the birds. Play catch with a baseball, or maybe try to fly a kite. It was a place where you could go that was within nature and safe.

Since many municipalities lacked proper recreational areas, many people had full-blown picnics in their local cemeteries. The tombstone-laden fields were the closest things, then, to modern-day public parks. Instead of picnic tables, the families and couples would lay out a blanket on the grass beside a tombstone and enjoy a peaceful outing under the shady trees.

One of the reasons why eating in cemeteries become a “fad,” was that epidemics were raging across the country. The reader must understand that diseases such as Yellow fever and cholera flourished. Often, children passed away before turning 10. Women died during childbirth. Death was a constant visitor for many families, and in cemeteries, people could “talk” and break bread with family and friends, both living and (figuratively) the deceased.

An outing
People used to go to cemeteries to have quiet and peaceful outings together. They would have picnics on blankets and enjoy each others company. The cemeteries were well maintained, shady, with nice lawns of grass, fragrant flowers and nice pathways.

Conclusions

Cemeteries can teach us a lot about human nature and society. All we need to do is listen.

In the past, prior to investment in state parks and recreational facilities, cemeteries were used as local places to rest and relax. People enjoyed going out and relaxing in the shade of trees, enjoying the breeze and listening to the birds. Their homes, prior to air conditioning, were hot affairs, and people would hang out on the large porches and rest on “gliders” that would sway under the eves.

Many smaller cemeteries are treated as afterthoughts. They are maintained cheaply and are viewed as a necessary labor that needs to be maintained, rather than an important part of society and culture.

Take Aways

  • Exploring your county can be achieved by visiting all the cemeteries in it.
  • To see where they are, go to the local library and look at the map there. It will list all of the cemeteries in your county.

Map
A map of your county will list all the cemeteries in it. The most comprehensive maps are found in the libraries in the county. Here, the cemeteries are highlighted in red. Map is a map of a random county.

  • For us to appreciate where we are heading in the future, we need to have an appreciation of our past. A cemetery is a first step in this adventure.
  • Cemeteries are not scary fear-filled places, but a soft place of rest and contentment.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 30OCT18
  2. Completed 31OCT18.
  3. SEO review 31OCT18.
  4. Published 31OCT18.

The April Witch (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

This is the full text of a very curious story (The April Witch) by Ray Bradbury. It is presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.  Enjoy.

The April Witch

By Ray Bradbury

Into the air, over the valleys, under the stars, above a river, a pond, a road, flew Cecy. Invisible as new spring winds, fresh as the breath of clover rising from twilight fields, she flew. She soared in doves as soft as white ermine, stopped in trees and lived in blossoms, showering away in petals when the breeze blew. She perched in a limegreen frog, cool as mint by a shining pool. She trotted in a brambly dog and barked to hear echoes from the sides of distant barns. She lived in new April grasses, in sweet clear liquids rising from the musky earth.

It's spring, thought Cecy. I'll be in every living thing in the world tonight.

Now she inhabited neat crickets on the tar-pool roads, now prickled in dew on an iron gate. Hers was an adapt-ably quick mind flowing unseen upon Illinois winds on this one evening of her life when she was just seventeen.

"I want to be in love," she said.

She had said it at supper. And her parents had widened their eyes and stiffened back in their chairs. "Patience," had been their advice. "Remember, you're remarkable. Our whole family is odd and remarkable. We can't mix or marry with ordinary folk. We'd lose our magical powers if we did. You wouldn't want to lose your ability to 'travel' by magic, would you? Then be careful. Be careful!"

But in her high bedroom, Cecy had touched perfume to her throat and stretched out, trembling and apprehensive, on her four-poster, as a moon the colour of milk rose over Illinois country, turning rivers to cream and roads to platinum.

"Yes," she sighed. "I'm one of an odd family. We sleep days and fly nights like black kites on the wind. If we want, we can sleep in moles through the winter, in the warm earth. I can live in anything at all - a pebble, a crocus, or a praying mantis. I can leave my plain, bony body behind and send my mind far out for adventure. Now!"

The wind whipped her away over fields and meadows.

She saw the warm spring lights of cottages and farms glowing with twilight colours.

If I can't be in love, myself, because I'm plain and odd, then I'll be in love through someone else, she thought...

+++

Outside a farmhouse in the spring night a dark-haired girl, no more than nineteen, drew up water from a deep stone well. She was singing.

Cecy fell - a green leaf- into the well. She lay in the tender moss of the well, gazing up through dark coolness. Now she quickened in a fluttering, invisible amoeba. Now in a water droplet! At last, within a cold cup, she felt herself lifted to the girl's warm lips. There was a soft night sound of drinking.

Ceсy looked out from the girl's eyes.

She entered into the dark head and gazed from the shining eyes at the hands pulling the rough rope. She listened through the shell ears to this girl's world. She smelled a particular universe through these delicate nostrils, felt this special heart beating, beating. Felt this strange tongue move with singing.

Does she know I'm here? thought Cecy.

The girl gasped. She stared into the night meadows.

"Who's there?"

No answer.

"Only the wind," whispered Cecy.

"Only the wind." The girl laughed at herself, but shivered.

It was a good body, this girl's body. It held bones of finest slender ivory hidden and roundly fleshed. This brain was like a pink tea rose, hung in darkness, and there was cider-wine in this mouth. The lips lay firm on the white, white teeth and the brows arched neatly at the world, and the hair blew soft and fine on her milky neck. The pores knit small and close. The nose tilted at the moon and the cheeks glowed like small fires. The body drifted with feather-balances from one motion to another and seemed always singing to itself. Being in this body, this head, was like basking in a hearth fire, living in the purr of a sleeping cat, stirring in warm creek waters that flowed by night to the sea.

I'll like it here, thought Cecy.

"What?" asked the girl, as if she'd heard a voice.

"What's your name?" asked Cecy carefully.

"Ann Leary." The girl twitched. "Now why should I say that out loud?"

"Ann, Ann," whispered Cecy. "Ann, you're going to be in love."

+++

As if to answer this, a great roar sprang from the road, a clatter and a ring of wheels on gravel. A tall man drove up in a rig, holding the reins high with his monstrous arms, his smile glowing across the yard.

"Is that you, Tom?"

"Who else?" Leaping from the rig, he tied the reins to the fence.

"I'm not speaking to you!" Ann whirled, the bucket in her hands slopping.

"No!" cried Cecy.

Ann froze. She looked at the hills and the first spring stars. She stared at the man named Tom. Cecy made her drop the bucket.

"Look what you've done!"

Tom ran up.

"Look what you made me do!"

He wiped her shoes with a kerchief, laughing.

"Get away!" She kicked at his hands, but he laughed again, and gazing down on him from miles away, Cecy saw the turn of his head, the size of his skull, the flare of his nose, the shine of his eye, the girth of his shoulder, and the hard strength of his hands doing this delicate thing with the handkerchief. Peering down from the secret attic of this lovely head, Cecy yanked a hidden copper ventriloquist's wire and the pretty mouth popped wide: "Thank you!"

"Oh, so you have manners?" The smell of leather on his hands, the smell of the horse rose from his clothes into the tender nostrils, and Cecy, far, far away over night meadows and flowered fields, stirred as with some dream in her bed.

"Not for you, no!" said Ann.

"Hush, speak gently," said Cecy. She moved Ann's fingers out toward Tom's head. Ann snatched them back.

"I've gone mad!"

"You have." He nodded, smiling but bewildered. "Were you going to touch me then?"

"I don't know. Oh, go away!" Her cheeks glowed with pink charcoals.

"Why don't you run? I'm not stopping you." Tom got up. "Have you changed your mind? Will you go to the dance with me tonight? It's special. Tell you why later."

"No," said Ann.

"Yes!" cried Cecy. "I've never danced. I want to dance. I've never worn a long gown, all rustly. I want that. I want to dance all night. I've never known what it's like to be in a woman, dancing; Father and Mother would never permit it. Dogs, cats, locusts, leaves, everything else in the world at one time or another I've known, but never a woman in the spring, never on a night like this. Oh, please - we must go to that dance!"

She spread her thought like the fingers of a hand within a new glove.

"Yes," said Ann Leary, "I'll go. I don't know why, but I'll go to the dance with you tonight, Tom."

"Now inside, quick!" cried Cecy. "You must wash, tell your folks, get your gown ready, out with the iron, into your room!"

"Mother," said Ann, "I've changed my mind!"

+++

The rig was galloping off down the pike, the rooms of the farmhouse jumped to life, water was boiling for a bath, the coal stove was heating an iron to press the gown, the mother was rushing about with a fringe of hairpins in her mouth. "What's come over you, Ann? You don't like Tom!"

"That's true." Ann stopped amidst the great fever.

But it's spring! thought Cecy.

"It's spring," said Ann.

And it's a fine night for dancing, thought Cecy.

"... for dancing," murmured Ann, Leary.

+++

Then she was in the tub and the soap creaming on her white seal shoulders, small nests of soap beneath her arms, and the flesh of her warm breasts moving in her hands and Cecy moving the mouth, making the smile, keeping the actions going. There must be no pause, no hesitation, or the entire pantomime might fall in ruins! Ann Leary must be kept moving, doing, acting, wash here, soap there, now out! Rub with a towel! Now perfume and powder!

"You!" Ann caught herself in the mirror, all whiteness and pinkness like lilies and carnations. "Who are you tonight?"

"I'm a girl seventeen." Cecy gazed from her violet eyes. "You can't see me. Do you know I'm here?"

Ann Leary shook her head. "I've rented my body to an April witch, for sure."

"Close, very close!" laughed Cecy. "Now, on with your dressing."

The luxury of feeling good clothes move over an ample body! And then the halloo outside.

"Ann, Tom's back!"

"Tell him to wait." Ann sat down suddenly. "Tell him I'm not going to that dance."

"What?" said her mother, in the door.

+++

Cecy snapped back into attention. It had been a fatal relaxing, a fatal moment of leaving Ann's body for only an instant. She had heard the distant sound of horses' hoofs and the rig rambling through moonlit spring country. For a second she thought, I'll go find Tom and sit in his head and see what it's like to be in a man of twenty-two on a night like this. And so she had started quickly across a heather field, but now, like a bird to a cage, flew back and rustled and beat about in Ann Leary's head.

"Tell him to go away!"

"Ann!" Cecy settled down and spread her thoughts.

But Ann had the bit in her mouth now. "No, no, I hate him!"

I shouldn't have left - even for a moment. Cecy poured her mind into the hands of the young girl, into the heart, into the head, softly, softly. Stand up, she thought.

Ann stood.

Put on your coat!

Ann put on her coat.

Now, march!

No! thought Ann Leary.

March!

"Ann," said her mother, "don't keep Tom waiting another minute. You get on out there now and no nonsense. What's come over you?"

"Nothing, Mother. Good night. We'll be home late."

+++

Ann and Cecy ran together into the spring evening.

A room full of softly dancing pigeons ruffling their quiet, trailing feathers, a room full of peacocks, a room full of rainbow eyes and lights. And in the center of it, around, around, around, danced Ann Leary.

"Oh, it is a fine evening," said Cecy.

"Oh, it's a fine evening," said Ann.

"You're odd," said Tom.

The music whirled them in dimness, in rivers of song, they floated, they bobbed, they sank down, they arose for air, they gasped, they clutched each other like drowning people and whirled on again, in fan motions, in whispers and sighs, to "Beautiful Ohio."

Cecy hummed. Ann's lips parted and the music came out.

"Yes, I'm odd," said Cecy.

"You're not the same," said Tom.

"No, not tonight."

"You're not the Ann Leary I knew."

"No, not at all, at all," whispered Cecy, miles and miles away. "No, not at all," said the moved lips.

"I've the funniest feeling," said Tom.

"About what?"

"About you." He held her back and danced her and looked into her glowing face, watching for something. "Your eyes," he said, "I can't figure it."

"Do you see me?" asked Cecy.

"Part of you's here, Ann, and part of you's not." Tom turned her carefully, his face uneasy.

"Yes."

"Why did you come with me?"

"I didn't want to come," said Ann.

"Why, then?"

"Something made me."

"What?"

"I don't know." Ann's voice was faintly hysterical.

+++

"Now, now, hush, hush," whispered Cecy. "Hush, that's it. Around, around."

They whispered and rustled and rose and fell away in the dark room, with the music moving and turning them.

"But you did come to the dance," said Tom.

"I did," said Cecy.

"Here." And he danced her lightly out an open door and walked her quietly away from the hall and the music and the people.

They climbed up and sat together in the rig.

"Ann," he said, taking her hands, trembling. "Ann." But the way he said the name it was as if it wasn't her name. He kept glancing into her pale face, and now her eyes were open again. "I used to love you, you know that," he said.

"I know."

"But you've always been fickle and I didn't want to be hurt."

"It's just as well, we're very young," said Ann.

"No, I mean to say, I'm sorry," said Cecy.

"What do you mean?" Tom dropped her hands and stiffened.

The night was warm and the smell of the earth shimmered up all about them where they sat, and the fresh trees breathed one leaf against another in a shaking and rustling.

"I don't know," said Ann.

"Oh, but I know," said Cecy. "You're tall and you're the finest-looking man in all the world. This is a good evening; this is an evening I'll always remember, being with you." She put out the alien cold hand to find his reluctant hand again and bring it back, and warm it and hold it very tight.

"But," said Tom, blinking, "tonight you're here, you're there. One minute one way, the next minute another. I wanted to take you to the dance tonight for old times' sake. I meant nothing by it when I first asked you. And then, when we were standing at the well, I knew something had changed, really changed, about you. You were different. There was something new and soft, something..." He groped for a word. "I don't know, I can't say. The way you looked. Something about your voice. And I know I'm in love with you again."

"No," said Cecy. "With me, with we."

"And I'm afraid of being in love with you," he said. "You'll hurt me again."

"I might," said Ann.

No, no, I'd love you with all my heart! thought Cecy. Ann, say it to him, say it for me. Say you'd love him with all your heart.

Ann said nothing.

Tom moved quietly closer and put his hand up to hold her chin. "I'm going away. I've got a job a hundred miles from here. Will you miss me?"

"Yes," said Ann and Cecy.

"May I kiss you good-bye, then?"

"Yes," said Cecy before anyone else could speak.

He placed his lips to the strange mouth. He kissed the strange mouth and he was trembling.

Ann sat like a white statue.

"Ann!" said Cecy. "Move your arms, hold him!"

She sat like a carved wooden doll in the moonlight.

Again he kissed her lips.

"I do love you," whispered Cecy. "I'm here, it's me you saw in her eyes it's me, and I love you if she never will."

He moved away and seemed like a man who had run a long distance. He sat beside her. "I don't know what's happening. For a moment there..."

"Yes?" asked Cecy.

"For a moment I thought -" He put his hands to his eyes. "Never mind. Shall I take you home now?"

"Please," said Ann Leary.

+++

He clucked to the horse, snapped the reins tiredly, and drove the rig away. They rode in the rustle and slap and motion of the moonlit rig in the still early, only eleven o'clock spring night, with the shining meadows and sweet fields of clover gliding by.

And Cecy, looking at the fields and meadows, thought, 'It would be worth it, it would be worth everything to be with him from this night on.' And she heard her parents' voices again, faintly, "Be careful. You wouldn't want to lose your magical powers, would you - married to a mere mortal? Be careful. You wouldn't want that."

Yes, yes, thought Cecy, even that I'd give up, here and now, if he would have me. I wouldn't need to roam the spring nights then, I wouldn't need to live in birds and dogs and cats and foxes, I'd need only to be with him. Only him. Only him.

The road passed under, whispering.

"Tom," said Ann at last.

"What?" He stared coldly at the road, the horse, the trees, the sky, the stars.

"If you're ever, in years to come, at any time, in Green Town, Illinois, a few miles from here, will you do me a favour?"

"Perhaps."

"Will you do me the favour of stopping and seeing a friend of mine?" Ann Leary said this haltingly, awkwardly.

"Why?"

"She's a good friend. I've told her of you. I'll give you her address. Just a moment." When the rig stopped at her farm she drew forth a pencil and paper from her small purse and wrote in the moonlight, pressing the paper to her knee. "There it is. Can you read it?"

He glanced at the paper and nodded bewilderedly.

"Cecy Elliott, 12 Willow Street, Green Town, Illinois," he said.

"Will you visit her someday?" asked Ann.

"Someday," he said.

"Promise?"

"What has this to do with us?" he cried savagely. "What do I want with names and papers?" He crumpled the paper into a tight ball and shoved it in his coat.

"Oh, please promise!" begged Cecy.

"... promise..." said Ann.

"All right, all right, now let me be!" he shouted.

+++

I'm tired, thought Cecy. I can't stay I have to go home. I'm weakening. I've only the power to stay a few hours out like this in the night, travelling, travelling. But before I go...

"... before I go," said Ann.

She kissed Tom on the lips.

"This is me kissing you," said Cecy.

Tom held her off and looked at Ann Leary and looked deep, deep inside. He said nothing, but his face began to relax slowly, very slowly, and the lines vanished away, and his mouth softened from its hardness, and he looked deep again into the moonlit face held here before him.

Then he put her off the rig and without so much as a good night was driving swiftly down the road.

Cecy let go.

Ann Leary, crying out, released from prison, it seemed, raced up the moonlit path to her house and slammed the door.

+++

Cecy lingered for only a little while. In the eyes of a cricket she saw the spring night world. In the eyes of a frog she sat for a lonely moment by a pool. In the eyes of a night bird she looked down from a tall, moon-haunted elm and saw the light go out in two farmhouses, one here, one a mile away. She thought of herself and her family, and her strange power, and the fact that no one in the family could ever marry any one of the people in this vast world out here beyond the hills.

"Tom?" Her weakening mind flew in a night bird under the trees and over deep fields of wild mustard. "Have you still got the paper, Tom? Will you come by someday, some year, sometime, to see me? Will you know me then? Will you look in my face and remember then where it was you saw me last and know that you love me as I love you, with all my heart for all time?"

She paused in the cool night air, a million miles from towns and people, above farms and continents and rivers and hills. "Tom?" Softly.

Tom was asleep. It was deep night; his clothes were hung on chairs or folded neatly over the end of the bed. And in one silent, carefully upflung hand upon the white pillow, by his head, was a small piece of paper with writing on it. Slowly, slowly, a fraction of an inch at a time, his fingers closed down upon and held it tightly. And he did not even stir or notice when a blackbird, faintly, wondrously, beat softly for " moment against the clear moon crystals of the windowpane, then, fluttering quietly, stopped and flew away toward the east, over the sleeping earth.

Conclusion

This was a wonderful story. I hope that reprinting it here gave you, the reader, some pleasure in our crazy, mad and strange world.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Transcribed 24OVT18.
  2. Completed, SEO and Published 24OCT18.

The Most Important Things That a Man Looks for in a Woman

All over the internet you can see advice on what a woman looks for in a man, and what a man looks for in a woman. There are many such articles. Most are subjective and have cultural, regional and ethnic biases.  Here is what I, as an American man looks for in a woman regardless as to what her race is, what culture she is from, and her age….

Please kindly note that this post has multiple embedded videos. It is important to view them. If they fail to load, all you need to do is to reload your browser.

Introduction

When I was younger I didn’t really know what to look for in a woman. My ideas of beauty and relationships came from popular movies, television and the magazines of the time.

In fact, my uncles made fun of my first girlfriend because she was so very thin and petite. They told me “she’s too thin. Trust me, you want a girl with meat on her bones…“.  I didn’t believe them then, but I can totally see the point that they were  trying to make. Their wives (my aunties) were all hourglass-shaped with impressive chests.

My father told me once “Look at the girls mother to see what she will be like when she gets older”. Again, I had no clue what he was talking about. Now… well, let’s say that I fully understand the point that he was trying to make. No, it’s not a direct correlation, but there is a genetic component that cannot be ignored.

The List

Over the years I have learned and experienced various things. This has led me to come up with a few conclusions about relationships. Especially my own. When a man, such as myself, thinks about a woman we look at  number of key features. These features are important. In fact they are critically important.
 
  1. Appearance
  2. Sex
  3. Domestic Concern
  4. Companionship
  5. Personality
  6. Self Confidence
  7. Respect
  8. Family Devotion
  9. Spirituality
  10. Shared Values

Of course, there are many other factors that we could include here. But, this is not intended to be an exhaustive study, or some kind of PC narrative. Let’s consider what I, myself, look for in women. This is my list. The things in it are absolutely critical.  You take one item out from that list, and there will be no relationship. Period.

But, I’m not other people. So if you want to generate your own list and criteria for comparisons, go straight ahead. I’m not going to stop you. This is my list, and these are my comparisons…

[1] A Woman’s Appearance

A man looks for a woman that he is physically attracted to.

Is this a truth or what? I have read some websites on the internet, obviously from a woman’s perspective, and they don’t even list appearance as a criteria. Yet it is perhaps the most important, and the most common NO MATTER WHERE YOU LIVE. Girls in Zambia Africa will get all dressed up and perfect, as will women in Communist China.

All over the world, women have bodies that scream “look at me”.

Zambian wedding.
Here is a traditional Zambian wedding. Look at how beautiful everyone is. Don’t you just love it? So amazing! Look at those smiles. Look at how they take care of their appearance and the happy attitude.

Appearance is the first thing that a man looks for in a woman. This might sound so trivial in today’s modern progressive narrative, but it is a biologically proven fact. So, if you still want to believe in fantasies, Peter Rabbit, the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus, you can leave.

Sorry, but it has to be said. The good news is, every man is attracted to a different type of woman and has his own personal tastes. Meaning, I am in no way suggesting a woman has to fit a certain image of ‘beauty’ in order to be considered ‘wife material.’ 

But, as is true for both men and women, there needs to be a physical attraction between two partners to kick off a relationship, which also plays an important part in holding it together.

-The Good Man Project

We men want a woman who we are attracted to.

Attraction has to do with a combination of [1] physical shape, [2] physical appearance, [3] personal grooming, and [4] behavior.

I have seen women who have “rockin’” bodies, who dress like trailer-park trash, and were a total turn off. I have seen women who look good and yet sound like a foul-mouthed sailor when they speak. I have seen women who didn’t know how to walk in high heels and went clunk-clunk-clunk as they walked down the street. Yuck!

Joy
The character “Joy” in the television series “My Name is Earl” is a good example of a beautiful girl who is not attractive. I am sure that in person, as an actress, she is really nice. But the person who she plays is rude, brash, unmannered and uncouth. It is not attractive.

This might be surprising, but us guys really like to look at women. I really don’t know why.

It’s not a sexual thing. Oh, I suppose that some assholes like to make cat-calls and holler at the ladies, but for the most of us we are just content to watch the girls come and go. In fact, if the restaurant has a lot of women inside, I am drawn to eating there. It’s a male quirk I guess.

That being said, some things often minor things can really detract from a woman’s appearance. For instance, I have seen beautiful women, who walked and carry themselves well, wearing black high heel shoes with the red under-sole. Only to have a big white price tag sticker on the bottom.

Instead of watching her, and the way she walks, you end up focusing on that stupid price tag on the bottom of her shoe. Talk about distraction away from the image form!

Label on shoe
Ladies please keep this in mind. Please take the labels off the clothes when you buy them. It’s terribly distracting. You see a beautiful woman walking down the road with nice dress, beautiful legs and all you can focus on is the white price tag on the bottom of the shoe. Ugh!

Remember, appearance is more than just physical shape. It is also about grooming and attitude. Here’s a Chinese girl dressed in a simple dress. She is clean and well-groomed. Her hair is clean.  Her overall appearance is positive and nice. Who wouldn’t want to be with her?

I am not talking about it in a sexual way either. I am saying that she seems so nice. I would just love to take her to a coffee house and share a cheese cake with her. She would be nice to stroll along the boardwalk with. Wouldn’t you like to play in a casino with her? Come on!

In general, men and women are about the same in this regards. A woman wants a man that takes care of his appearance. She wants him to be well groomed, clean, and neat. She wants him to be tidy; to wear clean clothes and have good manners.

I think both men and women are the same in this regard.

Men are the same. We look for a woman that also takes care of their appearance. We like the women in our lives to be well-groomed, clean and tidy. Look at this beauty. Man! What a kind smile. She looks right at you and that mouth is so sweet. What is not to love?

Beautiful
Here is a beautiful American girl. Look at that smile. Look at that amazing body. What a stunner! I tell you what! She has a nice figure, and is clean and well attired. She isn’t wearing a lot of makeup or jewelry.  Her attractiveness is her sweetness.

Now, let it be well known that there are a wide range of American female body styles that I personally find quite alluring. This includes tall leggy women, to short chubby cuties. I think that many would be amazed at the things that they do, act, dress, or look like that I find amazingly attractive.

So I am not going to bad-mouth any of the particularly awesome women that live in America. I tell you the truth, there are some American women that think that they aren’t that good looking, that I would die to be with. For instance…

When I lived in Boston, there was a 30-something woman who worked in a brick-a-brack store in Brookline.  

She was very curvy, and maybe wore a size 18. She had shaved her hair really short, and wore really red lipstick. Not my type. Yet, I had such the hots for her. OMG! Every-time I tried to talk with her, I would get so flustered. She hadn't a clue how mesmerized I was for her.

It is sort of like how a woman who looks at my shoulders (and arms) and wonders how nice it would be to rest their head there and be held. I too look at women in this way. However, I think more in terms of having my head resting on their chest softly, and their fingers in my hair.

Men and women are more similar than we will admit to in public.

Beautiful ebony girl.
Look at this awesome beauty! Look at that amazing head of hair! Look at the tiny waist and hour-glass shape. Man! She must have all the guys chasing after her. Now pay attention. What an amazing smile. I’ll tell you what, the smile opens up my heart.

All this being said, I don’t like to be with a girl that is heavier than I am. It’s a personal preference. I also am not really attracted to a woman who is taller than I am either. I don’t know why, it just doesn’t do anything for me. We all have likes and dislikes. Mine are strong, please do not be offended;

  • I don’t like to be with a woman that is heavier than I am.
  • I am uncomfortable with a woman that is taller than I am.
  • I also am a little skiddish about polydactylism. It’s not that I am revolted if the girl has seven fingers on each hand, but I’m a little freaked out about it.

I feel like this is similar to a woman that doesn’t want a man that is shorter than she is. Or that doesn’t want a man with a bald spot on the top of his head. Or, maybe a man that has a big scraggly beard that is full of crumbs and such. Or, maybe a man that chews chewing tobacco.

Men and women, we all have our preferences.

[2] Having Sex

Honestly, you have to be a fucking moron not to realize that men want sex.

Heck, it’s more that just that. We need it. It is genetically programmed into males and become the focus of everything that we do. From what career we enter, to what cars we drive, to how much money we make. The driving force behind it all is getting sex. Smart women understand this.

Twitter quote
Well, that is what we are genetically programmed for. Women are genetically programmed to have babies and to take care of them. This comment, found on Twitter, illustrates how silly some people can be about basic gender roles. It shows their ignorance. It shows that they will forever be destined to live alone or find a beta male to mate with. Sad. Sad. Sad.

Any man who says that he doesn’t need, like or want sex, is either lying or homosexual. It is never the truth because sexual needs, and preferences are genetically encoded by the male chromosome. If you do not understand this, study biology 101.

What? You think that the woman’s “biological clock” is imaginary? It’s a well-known fact of life that transcends society and national boundaries.

Men and males have the same thing. Except is is called “the need to reproduce”.

Pepe le Pew
The Loony Tunes character “Pepe Le Pew” is based on the raw instincts that all males have. When we were children and watched the cartoons we knew instinctively what what going on. Yet today in the SJW saturated American culture, we are supposed to ignore the basic facts of life and accept a reality of non-genders. Nonsense!

This is how it works. Once we find an attractive woman that raises our interest, the very next thing we wonder about is having sex with her.

That is the way it is, and no SJW rewriting of culture is going to change the biology of males. In a way we are just like dogs and are led about by our “pecker” all the time. Smart women know this. Smarter women use it, and profit from it in numerous ways.

Slime Porn
Different people have different things that get them aroused sexually. I like to believe that most men prefer the female body in it’s various forms and shapes. Sometimes they like, in my view, some rather strange manifestations in interest.

Online porn is not a multi-billion industry for nothing.

Prostitution still exists because men are men, no matter how hard society, religion and zealots try to stamp it out. Men are males with fundamental male interests and needs.

Sex in the car
The sexual desires that men have vary from individual to individual. Some men really love oral sex, others are “meh”. Some men must have anal sex, while other go “yech!”. Every man is different.

That being said, sex is an individual experience. What might be fantastic for one fellow, might be terribly boring for another. That is why there are fetishes.

Some men like big boobs, others like big asses, and still others like big feet. Some men are mesmerized by a nice set of legs, while others like strange and unusual sexual positions. And yes, some men really like huge women, and others like small tiny ladies. Everyone is different.

Friendzone
Now, isn’t this the saddest expression that you have ever seen? A man NEEDS sex. If he is married, he expects sex from his wife, and when he decides to marry her, it was an expectation that he had. For her to be so ignorant of his needs, and so very selfish about their relationship shows that he needs to leave her ASAP.

It doesn’t JUST vary from person to person, but from culture to culture.

Oh, and by the way, women like sex just as much as men do. It’s just cultural in how it manifests. For example, here is a cartoon discussing relationships between and man and woman in Thailand. LOL.

Thai love
The initiation of sex and relationships vary from culture to culture. In Thailand, for example, the relationships tend to be different than that of the United States. This is true for most of Asia.

[3] Domestic Care & Concern

Here is where I sound like an old foggy-head man. However, a woman who is control of her home, tends to be in control of her life.

A woman who is in control of her home is in control of her life.

When I see that she takes care of her clothes, makes sure that the house is well run, ordered and that she knows how to cook, I start to get really interested in her. You see, in my mind, a woman who is in control of her life, would also be able to take control of my life as well.

Men will give their LIFE, their MONEY, and their very BEING to a woman deserving of it.

I once went on a date with a woman. She was nice, and attractive. To get ready for the date, I of course was presentable and clean, and I made sure that the car was washed and detailed. I picked her up. I then opened the door for her and buckled her in. (This was America, I'd never do it in China.) And we went off.

During the drive she pulled out some chewing gum and was chewing it. You know, for a pleasant tasting mouth. But, you know, she did something disturbing to me. She threw the chewing gum wrapper on my nice newly cleaned floor...

Later, after dinner, she couldn't find her lipstick, and emptied her purse on the table, and had to sort through old scraps of paper, receipts and brick-a-bract. The date ended, and we went our separate ways. 

We had fun, but I never wanted to be back with her again. You know, she probably doesn't understand why.

Men need a companion that they can turn to, rely upon, and have a family with. This means responsibility. We need a good strong willed woman without baggage and problems. Seriously, isn’t that what women look for also?

Now, of course, most modern and "liberated" women don't think like this in the Untied States. They are "independent". They can get and have their own careers, and live their own lives. Sure they can. And, be childless and unmarried into their 40's. 

The cost of being a "liberated" American female is quite steep.

It is not reality.

It is an artificially constructed narrative to seduce people into certain set behaviors. If you want to see what works for couples, then look at how families are set up in Africa. Look at how families are run in Poland. Look at how families exist in China. Five thousand years of experience won’t lie.

Pleasantville.
The 1998 movie pleasantville depicted a sort of revisionist narrative of what might happen if a modern person were to step back into time and life life as it used to be in the 1960’s. Contrary to the popular narrative, there is nothing wrong with traditional marriage and a man giving everything to his wife. In return, the wife becomes domestic and cares for him, their children, their home and their finances. She makes sure that the man can work, be relaxed and strive to improve their life. That is the traditional method, and that is what many men search for.

A traditional life WORKS. Most men WANT a traditional long-term relationship. They will give everything for it.

I fear many men, especially those afraid "to make the leap" in marriage are not convinced or ready to allow a woman to take over part or all of his life.

For a man, this is a BIG commitment.

He is not only letting the woman into his life, but he is giving her access forever to all that he earns. He is allowing her to dictate and instruct him on behavior, dress, and recreation. If the man is truly in love, and if he believes that this woman can take on that domestic role; she will GET EVERYTHING he can offer.

Roles
A man who gives everything to his wife will never leave her. For she literally BECOMES everything to him. So, have you ever wondered why divorce was so rare prior to the 1970’s? Divorce became commonplace when traditional roles fell from popularity. So ladies, if you want a man that will be YOURS… forever and would never abandon you, then you should make a reappraisal of your value system. You won’t get it on a progressive ideology. You will ONLY get it with a Conservative Traditional ideology.

When a man gets married, he should be ready to share his life. This often means letting your wife take over portions of it so you no longer have to. A good, and strong, woman will be able to manage the home. If she can manage the home, she can help the man become a success.

We have a saying that goes something a little like this; “Behind every successful man is a strong woman.”

As I get older, I see how true this is. My friends who are all very successful, all have strong and well-organized wives. They all also have relinquished some things to the wife in exchange for her domestic support. This includes [1] all of the finances. [2] What he eats. [3] How he dresses. [4] His exercises, and [5] how they relate to family matters.

Family Meal

Oh, and please forget that nonsense Hollywood narrative of what a traditional conservative woman is. (Where a traditional woman wears Amish style hats, and lives a life right out of the “The Handmaids Tale”.) That is propaganda. Do you, yes YOU, personally know anyone that is really like this? You don’t. That’s my point. It is an artificial narrative. It’s all Bull Shit.

Today, a conservative wife might have a body covered in tattoos, ear and nose rings and purple hair.  She will wear leggings, take selfies on the smart-phone, and have multiple university degrees. My Lord, it isn’t about appearances. It’s about what is inside.

via GIPHY

That is true. It is about what is inside. It is the light that resides inside the woman’s body that that special man can see and can appreciate. yes it is. It is all about the energy that lies inside…

Chinese women, as well as African, Polish, Russian, and Indian women don’t sit around watching the boob-tube, or play games on the cell-phone all day long. They do what ever is necessary to make THEIR household a success.

  • The manage the fiances.
  • They budget the household.
  • They allocate resources to jointly improve their standard of living.
  • They make sure everyone is eating well and healthy.
  • They are a model for their community and familial relations.
  • They make sure that the husband has everything he needs.
  • They push and help the husband grow as a provider.
  • They instruct the husband on how to behave, and act.
  • They make sure that the husband is presentable and carries himself well.

While they do occasionally play games, take selfies and have fun, their primary role is as a family manager. Traditional women are like full-on lionesses.

Over the years, in America, this has become treated like some kind of joke on contemporary television, on collage campuses, and in female magazines. That is a real shame. Because when both the husband and the wife work together for their family anything is possible. I tell you the truth. This is a fact. All of my friends that are successful work hand-in-hand with their wives in this manner.

Their wives take care of them.

They (the wives) set the pace, they control the family fiances. They establish the diet. They determine where to live. They set the goals. They establish the direction. The man in turn, give his everything to his wife in the complete 100% loyal trust that she will get both of them where they both want to be. For if you really do this, anything is possible.

[4] Companionship

I always look for companionship when I see a woman who interests me. I wonder if they would they be fun and interesting to be with. I wonder if this woman would be THE woman who I can devote my time with.

via GIPHY

I always look for companionship when I see a woman who interests me. I wonder if they would they be fun and interesting to be with. I wonder if we could talk about really deep and interesting subjects. I wonder if they would be willing to share in my hobbies. I look for companions.

This is true for most men.

Time
Spend time, meaningful and precious time, with those you love. Make your time quality time. Buy an ice cream cone with your retired father. Take you mother out of a morning breakfast. Call up one of your friends and go to the beach or hike in a local park. Spend time together. Companionship.

Now, most women are confused with what this means. They search for romance. They could care less about companionship. This is sad, because romance comes from companionship.

Romance is spawned from companionship.

My wife and I took a trip to Thailand, and while on a drinking binge, the taxi driver drove us to the middle of no where and abandoned us there. We had to struggle and make our way back to the hotel. That bungle was an adventure, but my wife well remembers the rural village BBQ meal as the dawn broke through the clouds, and the orange light that shined on our toes in the sand. Romantic times are unplanned. They come from companionship.

A man wants a person to share his life with.

via GIPHY

Every man that I know (with cultural differences, of course) looks for a companion. We feel empty inside without a companion; a special friend that we can share our life with. This is so very important. Forget the James Dean Rebel narrative. All men need a special lady in his life. This lady is a person that he is very comfortable with and one that he wants to obtain experiences and adventures with.

The idea that men are worthless and useless, especially white traditional Americans, is a progressive narrative. It has been around since the late 1970’s, but has really picked up speed during the Bill Clinton years, and completely got out of hand during the Obama years. This narrative has been promoted in the American media and software for quite some time.  Check out this screen capture;

Screen Cap
This is a screen capture of a comment train taken on 16SEP18. Have your eyes open, you can easily see how true this is. Do not fall for the progressive narrative. It is a lie. Go ahead do a Google Image Search for “white women with white men”. Go ahead. The image result is completely out of touch with the racial demographics of the nations. It does not match. This disconnect strongly implicates a propagandized narrative.

[5] A Woman’s Personality

Another thing that guys look for in a woman is personality. We are attracted to kindness, softness, sweetness, and compassion.

This is such a true statement that I feel that I need to repeat it. We are attracted to kindness. We are attracted to softness. We are attracted to sweetness. We are attracted to compassion.

When I come across a particularly militant American woman, I am immediately repelled. Especially when that person wants to lecture me on “white privilege” or some kind of populist nonsense that other weaker men accept. Don’t be a ugly bullyish brute of a woman. It’s not becoming.

Become the ideal. Your life is within your hands.

Pretty girl
Look at this pretty American girl. I have to admit that I have a thing for short frilly dresses. This is true whether they are black, or colorful. There is something really attractive about them. Man, she does look great in polka-dots. Wouldn’t you just love to go out on the town and have a cup of coffee and a cheese cake with this woman? I would buy her a grinder (subway sandwich) and a coke any day of the year!

To be honest, when I meet a woman and I get to know them, I am looking for companionship. I look for kindness. I look for care. I wonder how they treat animals, and the waitress. I watch how they behave around others, and what they think about things.

When I meet a new woman, I wonder if they would like to accompany me for dinner, dancing, and any of the hobbies that I love to partake in. Since I love wine, a non-drinker and myself might not fit together well. Since I love animals, when I am talking to a woman, I wonder if they would also be part of my life with dogs and cats. Since I love tomatoes, bacon, and gardens I wonder what their thoughts are on these subjects.

The personality that a woman has eventually dominates a man’s interest. In other words, while a man is firstly attracted to a woman’s look, and sexual appeal, it is her personality that will keep him by her side forever.

Never forget this. A kind personality will be the glue when the stresses of life become too unbearable.

[6] Self Confidence

One of the most important traits for both men and women is self-confidence. This is something that is hard to describe, but is fundamental to success in life.

The truth is that I am not at all handsome, but women are interested in spending time with me. When I ask them why, they tell me that it is for other reasons. They just chuckle, and smile. They say I’m being silly. Sometimes they push me on my chest and say “oh, you know why!“.

I chalk up the reasons to being positive, happy, interesting and having good self-confidence.

Because that is exactly what turns me on in a woman.

When I take a woman out, I want to be able to talk about things. I want to be able to talk about tomato plants, favorite foods, dogs and cats, and thoughts about life. I want to be with a person that isn’t so fucking sensitive that I am afraid of being who I am. I want to be accepted for me, and if you don’t like it, to Hell with you. The same goes double for women.

I would NEVER tell a woman that she shouldn’t eat dessert because she needed to count her calories.  I would never order for a woman unless she specifically asks that I do so. I would never say anything hurtful to her in public, or in private. Any arguments that we might have would be honest, and intentionally scripted to avoid emotional out-lash. As such, I would not tolerate sitting down with a woman who wanted to lecture me on the injustices of the world. No one likes a scold. Really.

No one.

People with confidence typically try to help others. They don’t try to change anyone. This is because they are happy with who they are, and other people do not factor in their personalities. People with low self esteem are the opposite. They feel that they have to control everything around them.

Men and women want to be around people with high self confidence. They will be accepted by them as they are without question.

[7] Respect

I have dated American women who have berated me in public. I have seen them talk bad about me behind my back. I have seen them make jokes about me. I have seen them be rude to me to my face. I have seen them think it was fun making fun of me while I just sat there and took it.

That was years ago. Now I know better. Now I know my place in this world; good or bad, right or wrong. I just don’t tolerate that nonsense like I used to. No more.

Today, now; my tolerance for this nonsense is zero.

Let me explain. Let’s begin with a story about an experience I had while I was working at GM. This story illustrates that different places has different cultures, and failure to understand and adapt to that culture can have serious consequences.

In this case, the story revolves around the public display of a lack of respect of a wife towards her husband.

I once was involved in some business in Brazil. As such, I had to travel back and forth between the United States and Brazil. I was, at that time, working for Delco Electronics (It's who we are), which was (at that time) a division of General Motors. I was involved in a Car computer project (ECM) for CEV, which is a pretty big Automotive company within Brazil.

This event took place in Brazil.

One day, all of the foreigners on staff were invited to a big banquet with other white-collar workers at CEV. We had some pretty important people from GM there. It was held in a big auditorium within a equally impressively large restaurant and hotel complex. Everyone sat at these very large round tables with a nice table layout on a large white tablecloth. Each couple (for the most part, everyone came as a couple) would sit in groups of two at the table. Thus, maybe five to 6 couples would sit at the table.

At a given cue, all the ladies (the wives and girlfriends) got up and went to the buffet to get their man (husbands or boyfriends) dinner. They got up, went to the buffet, selected what their husbands would eat, and returned to the table. They would place the plate in front of their man with respect, and then go up and get their own food.

The men would accept the meal their wife chose for them, and began eating it. They would sit there and eat, while all the ladies were fussing about their food, and making sure that the man's plate was full. They, each one, was particularly careful in what they selected for their man's plate. Some wives selected mostly vegetables, while others made sure that the man had goodly portions of meat.

However, the local section manager, a man who came from Michigan, well his wife refused to go up. He kept on elbowing her. She refused. And everyone at the table noticed. In fact, people at the other tables were noticing as well. They started talking. But she was adamant.

She said things like "you're not my boss", "I'm not doing it, uh uh, absolutely not. No!", and "I don't care what other people think. Do it yourself.".

Eventually, he got up and joined the rest of the ladies at the buffet counter. He was the only man to get up. He was the only man to carry a plate back to the table. He was alone in the big hall that maybe held a few hundred key employees of the company. 

All of the key employees, the bosses and the supervisory staff, watched him do this. The President of CEV, the division managers, all the middle level managers, the supervisors, and all the engineers, and their secretaries all witnessed this. They all noticed and ate. Their local conversations at their tables became subdued and quieter.

Meanwhile, his wife sat there smugly and proudly. They ate in silence. The wife, sitting proud and strong. He sat there facing his plate and afraid to look up. This happened in front of everyone, while everyone else in the room kept glancing their way.

The dinner ended. Everyone went home.

The next workday, on Monday, he noticed that his parking space was being used by someone else. (Unless you have worked in GM, you don't know how important this is.) He went into the lobby, and the guards wouldn't look at him, and just waved him in. This was a big change from what he accustomed to.

It continued. His secretary didn't come in. Then, started coming in very late. She would not do anything that he asked. No longer would she make him a morning coffee. No longer would she answer him, or even talk to him.

No one responded to his emails. His work was getting piled up. Nothing was getting done. After a month, it got so bad, and I was sent down to look into the matter, as I held an important role in the joint-venture project. Our Division manager wanted me to look into this issue as it looked like the entire multi-million dollar project might collapse. That's right, millions of dollars of corporate investment was at risk.

So I flew down.

I talked to XXXXX. I talked to his secretary. I talked to the CEV Division Manager. I talked to the rest of the staff.

At first no one would open up. Oh, sure they were friendly to me. They showed me deference. They treated me well. But when it came to the subject about what was going on, everyone shut up. Obviously something was wrong. But no one told me anything.

Eventually, to make a long story short, I went out and started drinking with the CEV workers. That's always a great way to break down barriers and get to the heart of the matter. Of course, GM never approves of drinking, but this was back in the late 1980's and I was in another country and immersed in another culture.

Over some beers, the first person who let me know what was going on was his secretary. She looked at me straight in the eyes. She put out her cigarette. And she said in her broken English, loudly with defiance and pure hate;

"Why? You ask. Why? Because he's a fucking wimp. He's not, NOT, N-O-T a Man. He's castrado!"

Then she spit on the floor. Now granted, most ladies don't go to bars, smoke and spit on the floor. But she had a few beers, and was really agitated.

She wasn't just angry. She wasn't just pissed. She had this kind of deep burning ember of a rage that amazed me when it came out. I thought she was going to tear my throat out. She spoke viciously. She spoke in a way that the words were spit out venomously. 

It turned out that in Brazilian culture, the man must be the MAN of the house. It is a very traditional nation and has unspoken social rules. One of which is that the woman must look good for her man. She must do great things for their Man, and for her family. 

In Brazil, the Man is the titular head of the family. He controls everything. He is the "face" of the family. He is what everyone sees. However, the wife has full control over what goes on inside the house. She is the driving force that strengthens the man.

The Man is the head of the family, and he must LEAD. If he cannot be a Man; if he cannot act like a Man, and if he cannot control the behavior of his wife and family, then he is a loser.

in Brazil, you do not want to associate with losers. Not in the least. It is like being a leper.

The point in this is that he wasn't just a wimp to his wife. He was a wimp to society. From the secretary's point of view, she went from being a high assistant to an international boss, to the slave of a beggar. No, to someone worse than a beggar. Her status in the company fell right off the cliff.

Not only that, but that was true of everyone who associated with him. It was as if he had a serious contagious illness. no one wanted anything to do with him. No one would even talk to him.

It was like he was a child predator who had aids.

Shortly after that, I returned back to Indiana and talked with the Division Manager at Delco. We had a long and interesting talk. To cut down on all the details, let it be understood that my boss sent him back to the States. His two year stint in Brazil was cut short. 

He was only there for four months.

Now, this is important. The thing is, when he returned home, there was no role for him to fill. His old job and position was already filled. He was a high-priced expensive executive with no home. Yes, for a short while they put him on "overhead", but eventually he was told to leave. They gave him a severance package. And that was it.

Years later, I heard that he spent a few years unemployed. He could never go back to GM, and his experience was too specialized. Eventually he took up contract work at a much lower pay grade. I do not know what happened since then, except that I know that he had to give up his free car, and had to sell the house at a loss. I do know that he moved into a small apartment later on. And, well, that's about all I know about him and his situation.

+++

What does this all mean?

A good wife can make a man into a strong leader. He can become important, successful and wealthy. His family would profit and benefit. His life, and the lives of all those around him would improve. A weak or poor wife would do the opposite. A bad woman can destroy the life of the man that she is with. This can be through destruction of his self-esteem (which needs to be maintained for career success) to improperly managing family finances, to everything in between.

Men, choose your wives carefully.

In my little story, a true one at that, Mr. XXXXXX ‘s wife not only destroyed his role (and great career opportunity) in Brazil, but also wiped out his stable career at GM. Unable to find work, he had to settle for a different kind of labor, one without a career, without any kind of advancement. I am sure that his piece-of-shit wife berated him the entire time. Telling him what a loser he was for his life, and not taking responsibility for all the destruction that she herself, wrecked.

People. This is real life. This is not a television show. This is not a movie. This is not all unicorns prancing under a progressive rainbow, where gay people, and LGBT folk are all living in united harmony. This is the real frigging’ deal.

Learn, from my experiences, or don’t.

Magical Unicorn
There is a sizable percentage of Americans who believe that the progressive illusion can actually manifest. They spend their days glued to their electronic media to such a point that they are completely out of touch with reality. People, there is no such thing as unicorns, and rainbows will still have a cantankerous leprechaun guarding that big old pot of gold.

What does this mean?

Different societies have different roles for men and women. This is an important part of culture. When you come from one society where washing your ass with your left hand is acceptable, you might have trouble adapting to a society where you shake everyone’s left hand. Yikes!

Over the years, I have lived in numerous non-American societies where the man is treated very special. I had a girlfriend from Zambia, Africa who would prepare my dinner like I was the Head of State.

She would get dressed up after she cooked my meal, with makeup and attire, and feed me while I sat at the table like a King.

Zambian food.
Here’s some fine Zambian food. This is Nshima and beef relish. Doesn’t it look absolutely great. Again, as I have stated before, in the rest of the world you are typically free to drink beer at dinner without having to show your age or an ID. You are also permitted to smoke without fear of arrest.

After making sure that I was well fed, she would clean up afterwards. While I sat there drinking my after dinner coffee.

Once you experience first-rate care, love and concern, you no longer tolerate anything less.

I had a girlfriend from Mexico that always made sure that I was well fed, and insisted that I am comfortable in “my” chair. In fact she guarded it so that no one else would be able to use it. She was there for me, how can I say this, on demand (if you catch my drift).

Once you experience first-rate care, love and concern, you no longer tolerate anything less.

My Chinese wife selects the food I eat, the clothes I wear, and the exercise I do. She wants me to be better than everyone else. She makes sure that I am up to it. She is strong like a tiger in this regard.

She treats me like a powerful mob boss. And, when I leave the house, I act that way in public.

Once you experience first-rate care, love and concern, you no longer tolerate anything less.

Yet, when I visit the United States, I see women acting just horrible. It is as if there is a war on males in the United States. It is disgusting.

To me, it is actually horrifying, as typically the women doing this look like big white water buffalo’s to me, acting like mean and horrible white-trash. They look like they belong on Jerry Springer, more than walking on the public street.

OK people, listen up.

As someone who is used and accustomed to being treated well by extremely beautiful women, I do not tolerate being treated poorly. This is most especially true for any woman that is not up to par in my (personal) attractiveness scale.

Once you experience first-rate care, love and concern, you no longer tolerate anything less.

I am not alone in this. This goes for all Americans who have traveled outside the Untied States. So, in my world, and in my reality, you can either adapt or leave. There is no room for the lowest common denominator.

  • American women really need to “up their game”.
  • American men need to stay away from disrespect in all forms.

via GIPHY

[8] Devotion to the Family

When both men and women are single, their interests are directed towards other things. The woman wants to be attractive, have fun, and maybe work on a career. A man, working on a career, have fun, and meet girls. Once both get married that all changes. They now have a family and together their family needs both of their attention.

This ability to focus on a family is not something that you learn about on a first date. It is something you discover over time and over numerous dates. The woman discovers just how comfortable the man would be letting her run things. The man discovers whether or not this girl is THE one who can build up a family for him.

It is not only about raising children, working on career goals, a devotion to the elders in the family and a shared sense of adventure. It is also about every aspect of a family. Just how willing is the woman to devote to building up a family, creating a home out of a house and just how important she places a family life in her scale of things.

Here is a transcription of a woman lamenting her decision to forego building a family and instead having a career.  Read it and cry.

Every Wednesday, the second hour of my national radio show is the “Male/Female Hour.” A few weeks ago, a woman named Jennifer called in.

For reasons of space, I have somewhat shortened her comments. Every young woman should read them. This is precisely what she said:

“Dennis, I want to get right to it. I’m 50 years old with four college degrees. I was raised by a feminist mother with no father in the home. My mother told me get an education to the maximum level so that you can get out in the world, make a lot of money. And that’s the path I followed. I make adequate money. I don’t make a ton of money. But I do make enough to support my own household.

“I want to tell women in their 20s: Do not follow the path that I followed. You are leading yourself to a life of loneliness. All of your friends will be getting married and having children, and you’re working to compete in the world, and what you’re doing is competing with men. 

"Men don’t like competitors. Men want a partner. It took me until my late 40s to realize this.

“And by the time you have your own household with all your own bills, you can’t get off that track, because now you’ve got to make the money to pay your bills. It’s hard to find a partner in your late 40s to date because you also start losing self-confidence about your looks, your body. 

"It’s not the same as it was in your 20s. 

"You try to do what you can to make your life fulfilling. I have cats and dogs. But it’s lonely when you see your friends having children, going on vacations, planning the lives of their children, and you don’t do anything at night but come home to your cats and dogs. I don’t want other women to do what I have done.”

I asked, “Was it hard for you to make this call?”

She responded: “It was. I want to be anonymous because I don’t want people that I know to really know my true feelings. Because you do act like ‘My career is everything. I love working.’ But it’s a lie on the inside for me. It’s unfortunate. I didn’t realize this until it’s too late. I don’t know if it’s too late. I would like to find somebody to go on vacation with.

“You have other concerns when you get older and you live alone. Who’s going to take you to your medical appointments? If something should happen to you, there’s no other income there to help you. These are things you don’t understand when you’re in your 20s because you don’t think you’ll ever get old and have health problems.

“I’m stuck now because I go to work every day. I smile like I love it, but it’s very painful to not plan a vacation with someone. It’s painful to not have a Thanksgiving dinner with someone. You sit home alone and you do nothing. I avoid my friends now that have children because I have nothing in common with them.

“Somebody asked me the other day, ‘Why did you stay single and never have kids?’ There’s answers: Because I was brainwashed by my mother into this. But it’s hard and it’s shameful to tell people, ‘I don’t know. I ran out of time.’

“There’s not a good answer for it except: ‘I was programmed to get into the workforce, compete with men, and make money.’ Supposedly, that would be a fulfilling life. But I was told that by a feminist mother who was divorced, who hated her husband—my father.

“She tried to steer me on what she thought was the right path, but feminism is a lie. That’s what I want women to know.

“I didn’t realize this until late in life. I want to tell women: Find someone in your 20s. That’s when you’re still very cute. That’s when you’re still amiable to working out problems with someone. It’s harder in your 50s, when you’ve lived alone, to compromise with someone, to have someone in your home and every little thing about them annoys you because you’re so used to being alone. It’s hard to undo that, so don’t do what I did. Find someone in your 20s.”

I said, “I’m thinking of transcribing your call and making it a column.”

“Do that, Dennis. I want to help whoever I can,” she said.

-From the Daily Signal.

A man looks for a partner. He searches for someone to make his life COMPLETE. He looks for a life partner. It is biologically programmed into him.

A devoted woman will do whatever it takes to make the family work.

Here’s two micro videos showing hard-working, but poorer girls, supporting their families and building their homes. For in China, the man MUST work, and the woman MUST take care of the family. Many times, that means building of finishing up a home while the man works far away.

A woman does what ever it takes. She is fearless. She is capable. Help her and empower her. You will receive blessings on your life beyond compare.

Let me explain these videos.

Many times a couple will get married in a poor village. The husband would have to accept a job in a far away city, while the wife stays home. Many times the wife would get the paychecks from the working husband and use that money to build their home. This is not at all uncommon.

She would take this money and budget it.

First thing on the agenda would be building and making a house. Sure she might get help from uncles and classmates. However, ultimately, much of the work would be up to her. So many of those houses in rural China were physically made by wives in support of their families.

People! This is what a traditional family looks like.

The man works and the woman stays home and takes care of the family. For young families, the man works like crazy in far away cities and sends the bulk of what he makes to his wife. He, in turn, lives either in small dorms or barracks or, alternatively inside very tiny apartments like this one…

Chinese man.
This is how a young married Chinese man lives. He does what ever it takes to help his new wife build up their family. He will work long hours and every day. He will eat what his employer provides, and will sleep in the very smallest of spaces. He will do this for his wife. He will do this for his family. This is what a traditional man is.

All the money he makes goes to his wife.

Maybe he will only make a few hundred yuan ($30). All of it goes to his wife. The Chinese women that I know differ from the American women. A Chinese wife would rather have 100% of what her man makes – even if it is only $30, rather than a small portion, say 5% of what he makes. That’s true even if he makes a million dollars.

I don’t quite understand it. Really. Because the millionaire would give the wife more money than a mere $30. It doesn’t make sense economically nor financially. But, there you have it. That is the way it is.

  • Chinese traditional women demand 100% from their man.
  • American progressive women look to men as a resource.

Culturally, Chinese women are very different from American women.

It is not a scene out of progressive liberal propaganda out of the American urban enclave. These are not little waifs that huddle in fear, or scenes out of the Handmaid’s Tale. This is real life. This is how the rest of the world lives. Open up your eyes to the reality.

And for Pete’s sake, get your friggin’ nose out of the propaganda being spoon-fed to you by the American elite.

[9] Spirituality

Look for a spiritual woman. I always look for a woman who understands that the universe is bigger than we understand. I look for a woman who can feel the presence of God.

I am a Catholic, but I am not referring to a religious person. I am referring to a spiritual person. My first wife was a Baptist. My second (the one who retired me) was agnostic, but raised as a Catholic. My current wife is a Buddhist. Find a woman who is spiritual.

Check to see if she is really spiritual. Watch how she treats animals. Watch how he feels about tradition, families. Pay attention to the role that she has in her own family. Just how functional or dysfunctional it is. Pay attention.

[10] Shared Values

Finally, I look for a woman that has the same values as I do. We do not have to agree politically, but the fundamentals must be comparative. If I am going to give her 100% of all my money, I should be able to trust her that she won’t use it on coke, crack, and casino trips.

If I am going to devote my life to one singular woman, I expect her to do the same. If I am planning to have a family, I expect her to want a family as well. If I want to travel and have an adventurous life, then I would expect her to want it as well. Alternatively, if I want to have a quiet sedentary life in a rural cottage, I would expect her to want it as well.

Shared dreams, shared values, and shared life are fundamental to a couple’s success.

Conclusions

We, men and women, can be choosy in who we select to be our mate. It is important because your mate, the person you marry, will have the greatest influence in your quality of life.  Therefore, we need to choose wisely.

This is true for both men and women.

I live in friggin’ communist China and the women here are extremely attractive, with long beautiful hair, mesmerizing eyes, tight butts and astounding chests, and are very traditional at home. They take care of their man and their family. When I am with these wonderful ladies they treat me like I am a VIP and I am treated like a God. I cannot stress how wonderful being treated special is.  Most especially from an amazingly attractive woman.  I mean, it is just amazing.

Conversely, many (but thankfully, not all) the women in “free” America look like they belong on the set of Jerry Springer. Are rude, crass, selfish and treat me like a piece of nothing. The differences between women in China is just astounding. I mean, what the heck happened?

White Trash
An American woman who runs a business that she proudly calls “Trailer Trash”. I am sure that she is proud of it. How would you like to be married to this chick? How do you think she would treat you when you got home from work? Do you think that she knows how to cook? Would she make a good mother?

For me, and most men would agree, you pick the wife that is suitable for you. Let the rest of the world howl. All that matters is what you decide and the reality that you create.

  • You can get an ugly, fat, foul-mouthed woman who will constantly make fun of you.
  • You can be with an attractive, kind, caring and thoughtful woman. She takes care of herself, and will treat you like a king.

You choose. Red pill or blue pill.

via GIPHY

You can choose the lady that is most suitable for you. If you cannot find that woman in your town, go to a different town. If you cannot find her there, go else where. Eventually you will find that girl. I promise you.

Finally, here’s a little secret. If you are having trouble, do this. Go to church. Many of the most eligible women attending church. They are God-fearing, traditional women who would make fine, just real fine, wives.

Women in General

There are amazing women all over the world. That includes the United States. It is my belief that the vast bulk of American women are great and kind and wonderful. It is just that the bad ones are so very awful that it makes everyone look bad.

I now live in China. So what I am going to do is post some micro-videos of some attractive and sweet Chinese girls to help illustrate that there is no set “type” of lady that is perfect. Everyone comes in different shapes and sizes. Each one is different and each one has their very own personal charms.

Enjoy.

Women come in all sizes and shapes. They come in all kinds of attitudes and personalities. I love every single one. Please, I urge you the reader not to get too hung up on the media narrative of what is attractive, instead find ladies that appeal to your own sensibilities. You might be surprised how refreshing and pleasant it is…

Here’s another gal. Sorry, but I am in China. So this is all that I have to work with. Here’s another Chinese girl. Isn’t she just adorable?

I am a big sucker for a nice smile and feigned shyness…

The point here is that attractiveness comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes. There is no set standard. If I were to specify some idea on what is attractive, I would have to say that it is the sum total of what a particular woman is. For each woman has their own charms that are displayed uniquely.

I, for one happen to like so many different kinds of women. I like different body types. I like different kinds of attitudes, and I enjoy a big healthy smile. Here is a nice Chinese gal with an impressive chest jumping around and having fun…

Each woman has their own personality. This personality can be seen how they move, and the their selection of the music that they play. Personality is one of the key aspects of attractiveness. Be kind. Be happy. Smile a lot. Let your inner being glow.

The point that I am making here is that there is no set formula on what makes a woman attractive to a man. The woman must be strong, be themselves, be kind. Sooner or later the man that fits her personality will come around. It could be you. So, be the best you can be, and look for a mate that is the best that she is. Together you will have a life that will be marvelous.

Take Aways

  • Men look for a mate that will best match his needs as a man, and who will be fitting for his future family.
  • Women who cannot fit within his expectations will need to find other men to be with.
  • These men, the ones that do not have traditional values, will tend to be short-term affairs or long-term relationships that will not conclude in a marriage. That is because the men’s absolute needs are not being met.
  • This post lists ten needs that a man has.

FAQ

Q: What if men have different needs than what is listed here?
A: That is fine. There are all kinds of people and all kinds of men. It is the difference that are important. Not what makes us all the same. Personally, I don’t like going into a Starbucks in NYC and then going into one in Shenzhen. They are all the same. I like to go to a local pizza establishment in NYC and eating a New York style pizza. I also like going into a family restaurant in Shenzhen and eating some delicious dumplings. It is the differences that are important.

Q: So don’t you think that you are full of Misogyny? Aren’t you just defending the Patriarchy? Aren’t you Cisgender?
A: I don’t know. Maybe.

If so, what’s wrong with it? What is it YOUR business?

I don’t hate women. I love women. I love my wife. I love my mother and my sisters. I love my girlfriends, and their friends.  Besides, what is wrong with a Patriarchy? Can you explain that?

Your assumptions are all terribly faulted, and you discuss them as if they are proven and have merit. They don’t.

Q: What does “check your privilege” mean?
A:  In 1998, American feminist and anti-racism activist Peggy McIntosh wrote an essay entitled “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack.” In McIntosh’s sense, privilege is a set of special provisions that a person acquires — or doesn’t — because of their identity.

If you are a rich, white, heterosexual man, then you’ll have it easier through life than a working-class, lesbian, woman of color. The exhortation to check your privilege became popular on internet blogs dealing with social justice themes as a reminder that we are not all dealt the same hand in life.

What the real truth is that it is an insult, and veiled threat that says “you had it easy in life”. I personally find it extremely insulting. As the person saying this has absolutely no idea what I had to do to get where I am now.

Q: What does Heteronormative  mean?
A: Heteronormative  was coined by the writer and academic Marina Warner in 1991.  It means “a world view which regards gender roles as fixed to biological sex. It treats heterosexuality as the normal and preferred sexual orientation.” Which is pretty much an accepted norm globally.

However the intention is to use distorted group think to redefine the narrative and to use this word as an insult. I am a traditional man, and I think that women are attractive to me. This fact, apparently, makes me “heteronormative”.

No problem. So was George Washington. So was Jesus Christ. So was Gandhi. So was Jimmy Carter. So was Bill Clinton. So was Ronald Reagan. So were both my parents and all of my grandparents.

So, a non-heteronormative person is a societal abnormality.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Why no High-Speed rail in the USA?
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
The two family types and how they work.
How to manage a family household.
Link
Soups, Sandwiches and ice cold beer.
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

Posts about the Changes in America

America is going through a period of change. Change is good… that is, after it occurs. Often however, there are large periods of discomfort as the period of adjustment takes place. Here are some posts that discuss this issue.

Parable about America
What is planned for American Conservatives - Part 2
What is going to happen to conservatives - Part 3.
What is planned for conservatives - part 4
What is in store for Conservatives - part 5
What is in store for conservatives - part 6
Civil War
The Warning Signs
r/K selection theory
Line in the sand
A second passport
Link
Make America Great Again.
What would the founders think?

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Things I wish I knew.
Link
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
How they get away with it
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons
A polarized world.
The Rule of Eight
Types of American conservatives.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Space Cadet (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
The Last Night
The Flying Machine
A story of escape.
All Summer in a day.
The Smile by Ray Bradbury
The menace from Earth
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Life-Line
The Tax-payer
The Pedestrian
Time for the stars.
Glory Road by Robert Heinlein
Starman Jones (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein.
The Lottery (Full Text) by Shirley Jackson
The Cold Equations (Full Text)
Farnham's Freehold (Full Text) by Robert Heinlein
Invisible Boy (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
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What Authentic Chinese Food is Like

The entire world feasts on “Chinese Food” served in “Chinese Restaurants”.  This could be a Chinese take-out in Memphis, to a “Dim Sum” restaurant in New York City. As delicious as these establishments are, what is it like to eat real, authentic Chinese food, in China? Well, here we discuss that issue…

Introduction

“Tipping is not expected or encouraged. Anyway, I loved the market, it had everything from cooked duck to live pigeon. Whole pigs cut into pieces. Eels, etc. No dogs or cats. There is only once restaurant serving dog that I am aware of and have not seen cat anywhere except as pets.

On the way home I visited a coconut vendor and a sugar cane vendor. For the coconut they cut off the husk, make a whole and put in a straw. It weights about 2kg and I walked along sipping the milk through the straw. The sugar cane goes in one end of a machine and juice comes out the other end into a plastic bottle. It's all attached to an electric bike. The government does not allow petrol bikes anymore, only electric, due to pollution. Nice one!!!!”

-Expat.com

The Chinese have cultivated the practice and preparation of food to a high degree.  In China you can eat the most amazing food, and get exposed to fruits and vegetables that are simply not available in the United States.  When I used to travel back and forth to China, my colleagues and myself would prefer to eat at Western restaurants.  But we were sorely ignoring such a wide variety of culinary art.

If you want to eat well, you go to china.

Chinese gong bao ji ding
In the United States you can get something called “General Tso’s Chicken”. It’s pretty darn good. But, let me tell you, it pales in comparison tot he real thing. In China you can get authentic food. In China it is called gong bao ji ding, and it is friggin’ awesome.

There are some curious differences.

One such curiosity is that bottled soda and beverages are filled to the brim.  It is pretty amazing!  Truly, when one takes off the cap one must be careful not to spill any of the precious beverage.  That is completely different from a soda in the United States.  Often times, if not in every bottle, the American equivalent are filled to exactly the proper volume or slightly below it.  Or, perhaps more accurately just under the specified volume that is stated on the side.  Thus leaving a wide gap of carbonated air that exits the bottle when one twists off the cap.

Sichuan food
Sichuan food is very delicious. It is hot and spicy and has a kind of sweet tang to it. I absolutely love it and many a fine meal was enjoyed eating this wonderful style of food.

Anyways, I happen to love Chinese food. I really do. Which is kind of a bitter-sweet issue with me. As I also love American food. Ugh! Many of which is rather difficult to get in China.

A Tomato Sandwich

You know, one of the things that I truly miss in China is the home-made summer tomato sandwich.

“…hands-down, absolute favorite way of eating a tomato in summer is served sliced on white bread with mayonnaise. No chiffonade of basil or tender leaves of oregano. No artisan sourdough bread. No extra virgin olive oil. No hand-pounded garlic aioli. No hand-harvested sea salt. No lemon zest. Not even a slice of crisp, applewood-smoked bacon.”

-Virginia Willis

Indeed, one of the pleasures that I do actually miss are fresh, home grown, tomatoes. Fresh tomatoes are hard to come by.  Everything appears to be from large GMO farms, and finding heirloom tomatoes is a difficulty.  The result is that all those beautiful big, juicy red color tomatoes all taste like cardboard.  Growing tomatoes on the side of a high rise is out of the question, so most expats purchase the very tiny “cherry tomatoes” and make do the best they can.

“…during the height of tomato season, I don't believe in featuring them any way other than front and center--which means a tomato sandwich on white bread with mayo and salt…”

-Susanna Beacom

Tomato Sandwich
This is my idea of paradise, a nice heirloom tomato sandwich on fresh bread with miracle whip and salt and pepper. Yum! It can be had in China, but not with heirloom tomatoes. You can only have it with tomatoes that taste like a shipping carton.

Chinese Tomato and Eggs

However, aside from the trials and troubles of obtaining a decent heirloom tomato and hard crusty bread, China has other excellent substitutes. Let me introduce you (my dear reader) to the Chinese tomato and eggs dish.

“The first dish my Mom taught me. Since I immigrated to North America, I've tasted numerous omelets, scramble eggs, poached eggs, but this egg dish is unique in its own and is still my all time favorite.”

-MooseCall

This is an exceptional dish that is widely available in China. It is so delicious and easily adaptable to American tastes that it is a wonder that it is not available in the USA. This is a Chinese comfort food. It is also something children would learn to make at an early age. Well, maybe sort of the equivalent of tomato soup and a grilled cheese in the United States.

And… No, it is not simply scrambled eggs with tomatoes added. It is something else all together. It is a tomato sauce that is made with special seasonings, that the eggs are cooked within.

Oh, and here’s a hint for all you readers that are in the USA and want to try this dish. Go to your neighborhood Chinese restaurant that is run by real Chinese. If though this dish is not on the menu, ask for it. Ask them to make “authentic” Chinese eggs and tomato dish for you. They will do so and the price will be really reasonable to boot!

Chinese tomato and egg dish
This dish is a very big staple and found throughout China. It is the most delicious food that is commonly one of the top things foreigners find that they love about China.

The Food Is Prepared Differently

Chinese food is good; really, really good.  But they eat it quite differently than westerners do.  They eat everything.

Everything.

For instance, in the west we debone the fish, we throw away chicken heads and feet, we discard the fatty part of meat.  But in China they relish the differences.  They do not simplify their foods so that a child can eat it.  The foods will contain bones, and grizzle and the consumer is expected to know the difference what is editable and what is not.

Chinese food is cut up in small pieces and there is little need for the consumer to cut their food up.  Thus in the States, you would fillet a fish; remove the bones, tail and head.  Not so in China.  There, they simply take the entire fish.  Rip the guts out, and cut up what’s left into tiny chucks.  Bones, fins, scales and all.

This has manifested into various mysteries that puzzle me.

For instance, why will the Chinese eat insects and larva (Tastes like mini cabbages.), but not eat turkey?  (It is not popular at all.)  Or why will they absolutely love chicken feet, chicken gizzards, chicken head and chicken wings, but throw away chicken breast?  (It is considered to be too much meat.)

In fact one of the things that I liked about China most was the fact that chicken breast was so cheap there.  Speaking of turkey, it is one of the things I’ve missed the most in China (that, heirloom tomatoes and cheap cheese.).

Thanksgiving Turkey

“Many people that I met were curious about China, but their impressions of China would end up with words like ‘communist,’ ‘pollution’ and ‘no Facebook.’ “

-Awesome Daily

Celebrating Thanksgiving in China is like celebrating The Dragon Boat Festival in Omaha, Nebraska. It’s a barren wasteland for the traditional fare because, well, for one, most Chinese aren’t all that partial to the Turkey Day centerpiece. They find it too big. To a Chinese person, the tastiest food is the smallest food. Food that is large is just not as delicious.

Turkey
Scene from the movie “Honey, I shrunk the kids”. Here they are having a turkey dinner. In China, turkey is not considered a desirable food because it is too big. The best things to eat, the tastiest ones, are the small foods like shrimp, snails, pigeon, and minnows.

Oh, and by the way, most shared apartments lack ovens, or at least ones large enough to hold a six-kilo turkey (Available on the Internet. Why did it take me six years to find this out?).

Unless you want to grill your gobbler prison-style on the radiator, you’re out of luck. And many of those Thanksgiving packages offered by restaurants amount to glorified TV dinners. Oh, the shame! The shame! It’s sacrilege for a true gravy-blooded American to buy a set dinner anyway.  Ugh!  Not everything is all “peaches and cream” in China.

One Chinese restaurateur even asked me how a bird so morbidly obese can have so little fat.   Same goes for ham.  The Chinese eat pork, but eat ham in the form of spam that is grilled on a BBQ.  Ham is pretty unknown here, but not pork.  Pork can be found everywhere. Bacon is also a rarity, but that is changing.

Bacon

You can buy bacon everywhere, but typically the Chinese don’t know how to cook it. If you go to a restaurant you might find the bacon under cooked. You need to tell the waitress to cook the bacon so that it is hard and crunchy. However, once they find out how to cook it into the thin brittle wafers they become hooked. Today, my wife is a maniac for bacon. Ugh!

She’s a little like a female version of Ron Swanson.

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Surprise! Heh heh.

Did you know that the Chinese absolutely love pork and pork-related products? While hamburger (mince) is very popular and cheap in the United States, the same is true for minced pork in China. The Chinese absolutely LOVE pork.

Pork in China.
The Chinese love pork. This is a nation that loves bacon. They love pork chops, and all sorts of pork products.

This is something that both the Americans and Chinese share. It’s a love for pork products, especially for bacon. You know, here’s an interesting story. You cannot get “American style” pork chops in China. You can get pork chops for certain, but they cook them differently.

One year, I was working in Pago Pago, and the girlfriend of my buddy made us a meal of American style pork chops. Once my Chinese wife took a bite she was hooked. She said that it was the most delicious thing that she ever had (excepting for bacon, of course), and she just ate up all the pork chops to excess. To this day, she still raves about that day…

She looks up at the ceiling. Her eyes get all dreamy. He thinks for a second and says something along the lines of “do you remember when we ate those pork chops…” . Good times. Good times.

Breakfast in America
What many Chinese think how Americans have breakfast. It consists of “runny” eggs, buttered toasted bread, some bacon, a cup of coffee and a nice firearm.

Breakfasts

Getting a “decent” American style breakfast can be difficult. Good luck finding pancakes. Waffles are everywhere, though. American breakfast food is my comfort food. For me, I just love to have a nice cup of “real” (not Starbucks) coffee, over-easy style eggs, pork and beans, bacon, and crunchy rye toast with real salted butter.

It’s not that easy to get, I am afraid.

In China they eat a different kind of breakfast. Now, these are still pretty delicious things and I have (many times) wholly smunched on these delicious dishes in the early morning coolness. One of my favorites, available all over China, is meat filled Baozi. These are like a soft gummy roll filled with meat and vegetables.

One of my all time favorites for breakfast in China is Shanghai Shao Long Bao. These are little meatball-sized hard rolls filled with a soup and a meatball inside. They are so very delicious. When I have given them to some American friends that have visited from the states, they rave about this dish. My goodness, it is so delicious!

Shanghai Shao Long Bao
This dish is known as Shanghai Shao Long Bao. It is a delicious dish that is found throughout China. This is just one of those dishes that is absolutely too amazing to describe. You have to go ahead and eat it. Now, you really want to eat it hot. Warm, and cool Baozi’s are not really that good. Eat it hot and fresh. Yum!

Oh, my goodness! Let’s not forget Youtiao (this long baguette appearing deep fried totu) and a cup of nice hot Doujung (Sweetened soybean milk.). It is so very delicious. You can get youtiao everywhere. The best is made right on the street by a street vendor. I like to take the youtiao and dip it into my rice porridge (zhou) and eat it that way.

Youtiao
Youtiao, fried tofu, is a staple breakfast food throughout China. It is delicious with eggs and goes well with both Doujung and coffee.

While I am it, one of the basic staples for breakfasts in China is a warm soup. This can be either as a soup, or a bowl of noodles in a broth, or a bowl of rice porridge known as zhou. In Hong Kong, and in many “China Towns” around the globe this dish goes by the Cantonese name; congee.

Zhou
Congee is the Cantonese name for Chinese Zhou. It is a rice porridge that is flavored with meats, and spices. The most popular types are fish, pork, chicken and beef.

Make no mistake, I do love the rice soup, the dumplings, and youtiao (deep fried tofu bread). The Shanghai ShaoLongBao is truly awesome! However, I would often like to have some “over easy” eggs with bacon and toast.

Not so likely, I am afraid.  You can get it at “Hong Kong” style restaurants.  However they tend to steam the bacon (or fry it so little that it looks like it is steamed), and microwave rather than toast the bread (What?  Nobody ever heard of a toaster?).  Though, surprise surprise!, some actually do serve pork and beans with the eggs! (Really! Who would figure?  It just seems that coincidentally that the HK restaurants in this section of China serve pork and beans with eggs.  Wow!)

Could it actually be that my final world-line slide brought me to a place that had a small geographical region that fit my original world-line preferences? If so, cool!

No one knows what “over easy” eggs are.  The restaurant tends to “break the yoke” as a matter of process, and thus you have to specifically ask for Tai Yang Dan style if you want “sunny side up” eggs. I am not kidding. The gals and the chefs will intentionally break the yokes unless you specifically tell them not to.

However, Hunan restaurants make a hot and spicy poached egg dish that has yokes. It’s quite delicious too! You’ll be smiling, going “oh this is so so good”, while sweat is running down your forehead. Heh heh.

Human eggs
Photo by the author. These eggs are cooked over easy to over medium, and allowed to soak in a nice hot pepper sauce. It is terribly delicious, but oh boy oh boy will your stomach complain in a day or two. LOL.

Pizza

Pizza is “hit or miss”.  You can pretty much buy pizza all over the place, but “real” pizza comes from a Western restaurant that tends to cater to the expat community. Unless the chef has been to America, they will not know how to make pizza. The dough will be made out of the wrong type of flour. The sauce might be Heinz ketchup, and the cheese might end up being mayonnaise.

I once ate a “New Orleans” pizza at a Chinese pizza establishment in Tangxi in Dongguang. It was just corn, lots and lots of corn, on top of a pizza shell covered in ketchup. No cheese at all.

Chinese pizza hut pizzas
Here is a typical selection of pizzas found in a Chinese Pizza Hut. They are most certainly not your typical American pizza. Note that there are no simple cheese pizzas, pepperoni or sausage pizzas. These pizzas are different and tailored for the Chinese market.

Now, you can go to a Pizza Hut restaurant.  They are just as popular as KFC is in China.  However, they serve packaged dinner meal sets.  Pretty good, with real pizza crust, sauce and cheese, but the toppings are all Chinese.

For instance you can get a Duran and potato pizza, or a squid, snail and lobster pizza.  The deluxe pizza would have such toppings as corn, cut up hotdog, and spam slices. However, there will be real pizza dough, real pizza sauce, real cheese and options for American-style pizza toppings.

Pizza Hut set Fixed Meal Package
68 yuan for a fixed meal that includes a medium pizza, salad, a side of four chicken wings, a beverage, and a dessert. That is around $10 in USA currency. If you wanted steak instead of pizza it would run you only 49 yuan. Ah, around $8 for a steak meal. Notice the picture in the top right side. In China, all establishments can sell and drink alcohol. There are no limits or laws on that. If you do not want to buy it in the restaurant, you can bring your own. Ah, I love China.

Only Pappa Johns maintains a “real” pizza experience.

All that I can say, is that in China, the best place to get real authentic American-style pizza is at Poppa Johns. They are no where as popular as Pizza Hut is, but they do have a decent business presence here, and are worth going to. No matter what the progressive social justice warriors in the United States have to say about the matter.

That being said, I do go to the local Pizza Hut and enjoy their thin-crust seafood pizza. I ask for extra cheese and they are very willing to put it on in globs.  (Most Chinese are not big fans of cheese.)  For the longest time I wanted to go to Pizza Hut and order a large pepperoni pizza with a pitcher of coke.  However, it was not to materialize.  Instead, I had to settle for a packaged meal with iced tea, cream cheese cake, and sides of snails and octopus.

The reader should realize that Pizza Hut has adapted well to the Chinese market, and it tends to be standing room only, with lines for seating on the weekends. When I watch what the other Chinese people are buying they are all buying the packaged meals, with a heavy mix of spaghetti as a side, seafood pizza types and a large number of side dishes. It’s a fun outing for them, and a little bit exotic.  Good for them!

Pizza Hut Menu
15 yuan is roughly two dollars for a side of teriyaki octopus with quail egg. I am sure that my wife would love this, but me, I don’t think so. (Update. She did. I thought it was so-so.)

As an aside, the same company that owns KFC in China also owns Pizza Hut in China. Both are famously busy and popular.  It is good, but a little sad that that those are the only real outlets (aside from hamburger joints) where people can get “American Food”.

Yes.  China is the place that you can go to eat delicious food cheaply. If you want real good and tasty food, you can go to China or other nearby nations such as Japan, Thailand, and Vietnam. All provide delicious food.  However, you won’t find “authentic” Western food there.  The only possible way is to go into a Western enclave such as Shanghai, Singapore or Hong Kong.  Aside from that, you best bet would be in the expensive hotel restaurants.

For instance, in the Zhuhai Holiday Inn, is a Western restaurant, which offers an authentic American pizza, which is actually quite delicious. Sure, they don’t call a pepperoni pizza a pepperoni pizza; they give it some other exotic name.  However, let’s face it; a real pizza is a REAL pizza.

About pizza, though…

I mean, we all know that wacky toppings are the norm throughout Asia. Truly, who wouldn’t want to eat “European-style Abalone Mushrooms Bacon” pizza or “Chi Heart Crown Shrimp” pizza? Now, that is fine and good, but what about the really unusual stuff… like beef tongue, and chicken feet pizza?

So,if you want to get to the really wacky stuff, you’ve got to go to the custom order page on the Chinese Pizza Hut page. There among the Gentle Wind Vegetable Salad and the Mango Sago Sweet Soup, you’ll find gems like “Marinated Brain Dough,” and “Jew’s Ear.” Sorry, in case you were planning on ordering for a group, the latter is only available individual. Check out the order page here.

Aside from Pizza Hut, most local Chinese restaurants serving pizza would not use pizza dough.  Instead, they would make the crust out of regular bread dough.  They would skimp on the cheese, and maybe substitute cheese sauce (squirted over the top in a zig-zag manner), with hotdog, corn, and pineapple toppings. It’s a big disappointment, let me tell you.

Alcohol

It goes without saying, but the reader will be unaware of this, that you can drink alcohol in the restaurant.  China does not have beer and wine licensing requirements like the USA does.  You can either buy the wine or beer in the restaurant, or bring your own.  The restaurant doesn’t care. It’s one of the things that I love about China; the freedom to drink what you want, where you want and when you want.

You can’t do that in the USA.

Bringing in your own wine or alcoholic substance is very common. Many families and groups of friends bring a bag full of white wine to drink. BTW, white wine (Baijiu) is actually 53 degree “moonshine”. I have written elsewhere about booze in China, and a lot more can be said. For now, let’s leave it simple and just say that the Chinese love to drink alcohol in abundance.

Fake Wine

Sichuan Food

One of my favorite styles of food is the very, very, VERY hot and spicy Sichuan style Chinese food. This style uses a lot of hot peppers and certain hot spices (known as “ma“) that are generally not commonly available in the States. Typically, the restaurants are decorated in a kind of wooden / country style that immediately makes you feel at home.

Zhajiangmian
Zha jiang mian – A spaghetti like dish that is served with ground pork cooked like it came from a sloppy joe, only with very spicy Mexican-style sauce. This is a very wonderful dish. I could eat this in the morning or at the night.

The only thing about this style of food is that if you are unused to eating spicy food, your body might protest.

I love the food, but I can only take it in periodic meals. The people naturally from Sichuan eat like this all the time and to them, everything without spices is terribly bland. My Chinese friends tend to shy away from the food as well. Not because they don’t like it, but rather how the strong spices and hot peppers wreck their stomach and bowels.

Ma po dou fu
Ma po dou fu is a delicious Sichuan pork and tofu dish that is spicy, and warm. It is like eating sloppy joes with soft bread. It is very, very delicious and I just absolutely love eating it with rice and a nice cold beer. You haven’t lived until you try this most amazing dish.

The first time that I ate this style of food was on one of my first visits to China. The gals that I were with asked me if I liked spicy food. Well, I do, so I said yes, and they took me to a Sichuan restaurant in Shenzhen. You know, you could smell the delicious aroma drifting outside, and I was immediately lured inside.

The funny thing is that they warned me that the food was spicy and that we should order lightly spiced food. But, No NO NO! I wouldn’t have any of that, and I said that I wanted the real authentic experience. I said to give me the full-on “ma la” experience.

Oh, let me tell you, I most certainly got it too.

Mapo dofu 2
Here’s another picture of mapo tofu. As you can see, it is colorful and very delicious. You should try it with a ice cold beer. It is so wonderful.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It was so very delicious. I ate, and then I ate, and ate more. It was so tasty. The food was rich and full of flavor. It was tasty and had a blend of spices that warmed my stomach and filled my heart with happiness.

Anyways, all was fine until that night…

gongbao jiding
This is gong bao ji ding. This is the Chengdu city version of this dish. I love the spices, the chicken, the peanuts and the overall aromic flavors that waft upwards to the heavens. It is so darn delicious.

My body, most certainly was not used to the powerful mixture of explosive peppers and burning spices. I had to make an emergency detour to the nearest public bathroom stall, and there I found God…

Lordy!

That being said, never eat Sichuan food with a lot of spice unless you have been eating it for some time. Most Westerners cannot handle the strong spices and powerful peppers. When asked you say loudly “yi dian la“. This means “just a little bit of spice please.” If you feel up to it, you can ask for “zhong la“, which is “middle” or a normal amount of spices. Of course, if you have a stomach made of cast iron, go ahead and ask for “da la“. They will certainly oblige you.

Spicy beef
Here is some wonderfully spicy beef served Sichuan style. This dish is very wonderful and the peppercorns really make the beef flavor “pop out”. This is great to eat, and I really think that rice with this dish is mandatory.

Hunan Food

There are many Hunan restaurants all over China. I like the food because it is tasty and flavorful. It is also unique. They like to use a lot of spicy peppers in the dish, and a different arrangement of spices. The Hunan food that I have eaten has been deeply flavorful and wonderfully tasty.

Hunan Province is located in central China, surrounded by lakes, rivers and mountains, with a subtropical climate ideal for agriculture. A classic vegetable dish is string beans with cured meat, often ham or ground pork. It usually has a pickled or fermented tang not unlike olives that helps balance the hot-pepper punch.

When the chili plant first made its way to China from the West, the Hunanese were one of its earliest adopters of it back in the late 17th century. However, Hunan food sets itself apart from Sichuanese in two big ways: [1] It doesn’t use the tongue-numbing Sichuan peppercorn, and [2] savory dishes lack the sweetness of their Sichuan counterparts.

"So while the Sichuanese have all kinds of spicy-sweet-savoury combinations, including the 'fish-fragrant' and 'garlic paste' flavors, the Hunanese tend to go for bold savory tastes, chilli-hot tastes, and sour-hot tastes."

-Chef Dunlop

Us Americans are pretty confused about what Hunan food means and how it differs from other regional cuisines, even though “Hunan-style” restaurants in the U.S. date back to the 1970s.

Hunan style Chicken
Here is a chicken dish made in Hunan style. Notice the tasty peppers, the nice colorful and oily juices and the well cooked, but tender morsels. Wonderful!

Here is another dish. This one is pork belly. I like to think that pork belly is bacon that is cut into big fatty chunks.  What they do is braise the meat using a blow-torch so that the outside is tough, and the fat on the inside is soft and juicy, then they cook the entire together.  Personally, it took me a while to get used to this kind of meal because I wasn’t used to so much fat. But, let me tell you, once you try it, you will love it.

Pork Belly
This particular dish is called Chairman Mao pork belly. I have no idea why it is called this. However, I have read that This dish is so linked with Mao Zedong that today on menus in China and the U.S. alike it still bears his name. The Chairman is said to have loved the braised pork belly fragrant with star anise, ginger, chilies, and cassia bark so much he insisted his Hunanese chefs prepared it for him in Beijing.  
However, what ever it’s name, it most certainly is delicious. Yum.

Where Sichuanese cooks combine Sichuan peppercorns with chilies for the classic “numbing-hot” ma la flavor, the Hunanese prefer the sharp combination  of vinegar-pickled chilies with salt for something called duo la jiao. This hot, sour, and salty concoction is used as a relish for noodles and steamed fish heads.

Here is the real authentic version of “General Tso’s Chicken”. The story goes that it’s based on a dish called cu ji, or vinegar chicken.  This was a dish that was served way back in the Tang dynasty.

Its more modern legend is familiar to anyone who’s heard the origin stories of nachos and Buffalo wings: Some merchants paid a visit to a restaurant run by three old ladies who’ve just run out of everything in the kitchen. So the ladies went out back, slaughtered some chickens, added in some pantry staples, and called it dinner.

The merchants loved the dish and told everyone they knew about it, and thus that is how it was invented.

General Tso's chicken
Dong an zi ji (Dong’an chicken): One of Hunan’s most famous poultry dishes is this delicate creation of chicken flavored with chili and clear rice vinegar, which is said to have originated in Dong’an county.

One of the things that I ended up falling in love with is Hunan style potatoes. Here, the potatoes are neither mashed, or fried. Instead, they are cooked and sliced into real thin strands, and mixed with oils and spices. Anyone who loves potato chips, mashed potatoes and french fries would fall in love with this dish.

Hunan potatoes
Hunan potatoes. I just love the way that this dish looks and tastes. It is perfect companion with all other spicy Hunan dishes and has graced my table many times. Try it with an icy cold beer. OMG!

Seafood

Seafood
Seafood is very popular in China. This does not include fish. Instead “seafood” is a classification for all things living in the sea except for fish. That includes snails, shellfish, crabs, oysters, lobsters, mussels, and shrimp.

As an American, my exposure to seafood has been rather shallow. Up until the early 1970’s we would eat fish on a Friday. Eating shrimp was reserved for bars and diners. I never ate shellfish. Crabs and lobsters were far too pricey for my parents.

When the Catholic church announced that eating fish on Fridays would no longer be observed, but that you would need to have a good-thought fast all day, us kids just thought of it as “no more fish on Fridays”. Thus, my only exposure to fish and seafood were the deep fried fish fillet sandwiches that we would get out of McDonalds.

And, that was that.

When I got married to my Chinese wife, I was surprised at how different her diet was from mine. It wasn’t a matter of spice, sugar, or bread. It was something else. She was used to having meals that predominantly contained shellfish, snails and crabs. Whereas I was used to a diet that mostly consisted of hamburgers, pizzas and traditional American fare like Mac-n-cheese.

Over the years we both have adapted. Today, she eats bacon like a maniac, insists on cooking home made pizzas, and appreciates Parmesan cheese.  While I have adapted to insisting on fish twice a week and at least one meal of fresh seafood.

If you ever come to China, please kindly be advised that seafood is very popular with all Chinese. They love to eat shellfish, oysters, snails, shrimp, and other denizens of the deep. So, as a word of advice to anyone who is interested in moving to China or getting a girlfriend out here, you all had best be ready to eat some seafood, because that is one of the reasons why the Chinese are so thin, trim and healthy.

BBQ

While there are many, many kinds of foods and styles of food in China, we will keep the list rather short. I could write books on this subject.

One of the most common types of food is the Chinese BBQ, or Shao Kao. This is typically (but not always) an outside open flame pit where food is grilled. It is very cheap, and often served with beer of Chinese “white wine”.  Usually, the grill will not open until after 9 pm, at which time these really flimsy and cheap card-tables would be set up on the sidewalk. Along with them would be these super cheap polypropylene stools that you can sit on.

BBQ
Authentic outdoor shaokao in China. Usually it is a set up something like this where things are grilled over an oven fire at night. The costs are very reasonable. In the South of China, where daytime temperatures are very hot, a evening meal of BBQ is very welcome.

It’s a simple system. You order the food. It is cooked and served to you at the table where you sit down and drink beer.  The prices are very cheap.

Typical items are chicken wings, mutton, hotdogs, vegetables of all types, bread, mantou, corn on the cob, and fish. In general, most Chinese love to eat BBQ, but everyone considers it to be unhealthy because it is made outside in the smoke and cooked over a grill of questionable cleanliness.

GuangDong Style

Guangdong is in the South East of China. It is a large semi-tropical area that is the home of a major portion of the Chinese industry. Most Chinese restaurants in the West served largely Cantonese dishes. This type of food also goes by the name of Cantonese cuisine (廣東菜), or as Yue cuisine (粵菜).

To the people of Guangdong, everything that walks, crawls, flies, or swims is edible. Many of these strange foods no longer appeal to today’s refined tastes, and some have been eliminated out of respect for the eating habits of people in other areas, but some strange foods still remain.

The food that you find in Hong Kong is Guangdong style, with some serious Western influences. I, for one, love the egg sandwich and the Horlicks drink.

In Hong Kong , Horlicks is known better as a café drink than as a sleeping aid. It is served at cha chaan tengs as well as fast-food shops such as Café de Coral and Maxim's Express . It can be served hot or cold, and is usually sweetened with sugar.

-Horlicks

This style of cooking is very healthy. It is considered to be “light”. For instance the fish is steamed and then seasoned very lightly. The result is a very tasty and fresh dish. The vegetables are all lightly steamed and fresh. When eating this style of Chinese food, you cannot help but feel energized and healthy.

Many foods served in Chinese-American restaurants in the USA originated out of Guangdong. For instance…

Sweet and sour pork is probably the most famous of Hong Kong foods. As such it has made its way into Chinese take away menus around the world.

Sweet and sour pork.
Sweet and Sour Pork, or 咕咾肉, hails originally from Guangdong province. There are different versions of this dish, but the most common ingredients are pork tenderloin, pineapple and bell pepper. As might be guessed, this dish combines sweet and sour flavors with a hard to resist morsels of deep-fried pork.

Wontons are known as chāo shǒu (literally means “crossed hands”), added to a clear soup along with other ingredients, sometimes deep-fried. Several shapes are common, depending on the region and cooking methods. In general, these are tasty dumplings that are served inside a nice fragrant broth. Or, they can be deep fried. I happen to love both styles.

Come on! Who wouldn’t want to eat some of these right now?

Wontons
Crispy cream cheese wontons, more popularly known as crab rangoons or crab puffs, are a popular American Chinese appetizer with a crispy outside and a creamy, delicious inside filled with cream cheese.

Wind Sand Chicken. (“Wind Sand Chicken”風沙雞.) You can get this at most deli counters in Chinese supermarkets.  A whole chicken is flavored and put into the oven for about 20 minutes until the chicken’s skin turns brown.  What makes it so unique is that garlic pieces are added and it looks like wind-blown sand. The chicken is roasted and crispy on the outside and very smooth and tender inside. The smell of the garlic pieces is exactly to the right degree.

Wind Sand Chicken
Wind Sand Chicken is another favorite dish that is found in the South of China. The chicken is very delicious, though it often includes the head and the feet.

Shrimp and Chicken Balls.  Firstly, shrimp and chicken meat are chopped finely and kneaded into balls, then they are deep fried with bread crumbs. The balls are crispy and tender. Salad sauce is often used to provide a sweet and sour taste. If you like chicken, and meatballs, this is similar only very delicious when warm. Yum!

Shrimp and chicken balls.
Hong Kong style Chicken and shrimp balls. This is a staple in Dim Sum restaurants. It is extremely tasty and very delicious.

DongBei Style

Dōngběi 东北 refers to the north-eastern part of China which covers 3 provinces: Heilongjiang, Jilin and Liaoning. It used to be known as Manchuria.

Map of Dongbei
North East China – Dongbei.

东北菜
Dōngběi cài
Dongbei-style food

Dongbei-style food is perhaps one of the most underrated Chinese cuisines compared to Sichuan, Cantonese or even Xinjiang food. Dongbei cuisine consists of different types of pickled ingredients and mainly wheat and maize, instead of rice. So you will see more dishes with noodles, steamed buns or cornbread.

The best part about Dongbei food is they tend to be relatively cheap and come in big portions. Similarly, they also tend to have a big, extensive menu. We’re talking about 50-70 dishes at least! It could be quite overwhelming to look at the menu and try to decide what to order.

-Five Top Dongbei dishes

The food known as “DongBei” comes from the Northern section of China. It is based on wheat and corn, as opposed to rice in the rest of China. Because the weather is so cold during the Winter, the food is hearty with crusty bread, thick dumplings loaded with meat, and savory soups.

Dongbei bread
Dongbei has some nice and delicious food that adapts well to the American tastes. The food is rich and hearty and involves meat and rolls and breads. Most Americans love this style of cooking.

As such, it is considered to be very compatible with American and Western tastes. For instance, the chicken is cooked in a manner similar to how an American would cook chicken. It’s not lightly cooked like “GuangDong style” with the yellow fat still intact. Instead, the fat is cooked away and the chicken is juicy and moist. Dongbei chicken reminds me a lot of what “Rotisserie chicken” is in the states.

Dongbei-1
Dongbei food often consists of various types of flatbread. This flat bread is fried in a pan sort of like it is done in India and often contains spices and vegetables such as leek. This particular dish is sliced braised pork with spring onions in small triangular flat bread sandwiches.

This food style has many elements that are very delicious. For instance they have this kind of sloppy-joe style hamburger, only that the bun more resembles an English muffin. It’s full of tasty beef or pork filling.

They have a salad that would feel perfectly fine on any family table. Their dumplings (pot suckers) are large and filled with delicious beef, pork, mutton or chicken. Their noodle dishes use the same kind of noodles that American have been buying in stores for generations.

Three Treasures
地三鲜 (Di san xian): Commonly rendered on English menus as “triple delight vegetable,” this trifecta of stir fried potatoes, hot green peppers, and eggplant slicked in a slightly sweet soy sauce is a hearty Dongbei classic that warms both palate and body. The name loosely translates to “three delights from the earth.”

If you, as an American, wants to visit China, and you want to eat authentic Chinese food, but don’t want to be too overwhelmed by the differences, do this.  I would suggest you ask your Chinese sponsor for some authentic DongBei style Chinese food. Tell them that you heard a lot about it and would like to try some.

Dongbei Jelly
La pi (green bean sheet jelly): A cool tangle of wide, flat mung bean noodles served with various accouterments makes for a refreshing salad of sorts, and a test of chopstick skills. Photo by Robyn Lee.

Video Links

Some great video links;

Conclusion

If you like American style Chinese food, then you would absolutely LOVE the authentic versions in China. Just take note that the Chinese eat many things that have not ported well into America. Therefore, be open to experimentation and just have a great time eating away at all the delicious items found everywhere.

Take Aways

  • Chinese food is delicious.
  • American versions of Chinese food tend to be a little toned down for the American tastes.
  • Chinese love seafood, and that includes everything out of the ocean.
  • The Chinese can drink alcohol with all their meals everywhere. It is considered normal, and they are often amazed that Americans are unable to take part of this simple freedom.

Links about China

Business KTV

Dance Craze

End of the Day Potato

Dog Shit

Dancing Grandmothers

When the SJW movement took control of China

Family Meal

Freedom & Liberty in China

Ben Ming Nian

Beware the Expat

Fake Wine

Fat China

China and America Comparisons

SJW

Playground Comparisons

The Last Straw

Diversity Initatives

Democracy

Travel outside

10 Misconceptions about China

Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1

Pretty Girls 2

Pretty Girls 3

Pretty Girls 4

Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
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  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed and generated 16OCT18.
  2. Completed 18OCT18.
  3. SEO review 18OCT18.
  4. Published 18OCT18.

A Movie Tribute to the 1980’s When Ronald Reagan Ran America

For eight years, from 1981 until 1989, the United States had one of the greatest Presidents running the nation; Ronald Reagan. Of course, the media hated him. Of course, subsequent politicians and their media sycophants have rewrote the narrative, turning the amazing decade into one of “racism”, inequality, and a trampling of rights.  What a crock of bullshit.

It was no such thing.

You can tell simply by looking at pop culture from that time.

If everyone was sad, unhappy, unemployed and suffering, the pop culture would reflect it. Just like pop culture reflected World War II, and the 1950’s. Pop culture is a far superior barometer of the health of a nation than the nonsense spewed out from mainstream media. For if you listen to the mainstream media narrative, the United States today is completely unified and angry against Donald Trump. The media has us believing that Antifa and the BLM are “grassroots” organizations that spring up organically. They try to give the impression that it’s just normal everyday folks that hide behind the black masks. Don’t believe them or their narrative, as it is not an accurate reflection of American society today.

This is my tribute to the decade of Ronald Reagan.

This is my tribute to the years from 1981 until 1989. If you, the reader, DON’T want to hear what actually happened during this time from someone who experienced it, you can leave. You can read the politically correct revised narrative; one that is saturating the history books, and one that is repeatedly proclaimed over and over by the progressive mainstream media. Go ahead. That is your reality. Suck it up. Absorb the bullshit. Read the narrative. Hell, you need boots to traverse the sludge.

I guess that Americans must be friggin’ idiots not to want this kind of “success” to continue. Because, last I heard, the entire policy plank of the liberal progressive elite was in tatters by 2016. Everyone was so happy with the “new” Global-centrist Socialist America that they decided to tear it all up and go with Trump. Go figure.  So, yeah. Believe what you want in your reality.

This is mine.

Introduction

If you go on many internet websites, such as history.com, you will see the politics of that time. You will see the big issues that the newspapers printed. You will see what wars the United States were involved in. You will see the various political issues and the various spending initiatives. All of which was true.

Yes. That was the 1980’s, but that was NOT what you personally experienced.

That was what you read about in the papers. That was what you watched on the news. That was what the radio talked about. It was the reality that was TOLD to us. Then, as now, the media are completely out of touch with the vast bulk of America.

Well, it should be clear by now, that everything that comes out of the mainstream media is propaganda designed to manipulate. It was just as true then as it is today.  If the news-babe is talking, you pretty much can believe that it is a lie. Any facts and figures coming from a “blue ribbon panel” is nonsense. And, just about any polling data is simply fabricated baloney.

Prediction for Hillary.
Here is a screenshot taken from a mainstream media website in 2015 that was using polling data to predict the outcome of the 2016 election. They predicted, based on polling data, that the vast bulk of the population would vote for Hillary Clinton. They predicted a landslide win over Donald Trump. The liberal website “The Daily Kos made this prediction in 2015 based on polling data from Democratic pollster Tom Jensen . Their conclusion; Let Donald Trump try to win, it would be the biggest mistake the GOP ever made, and would destroy their party.

So, instead of a nice rehash of what we were told was important, you know, by the oligarchy that runs the propaganda, let’s talk about what it was like on a personal level. Let’s talk about the society and culture under a conservative presidency.

Oh, yeah, real conservatives are a rare breed. Neither of the Bushes were conservatives. They were globalists. They served the global oligarchy.

The last real and honest conservative in office was Ronald Reagan.

Let’s talk about the culture during a successful Republican (Conservative) presidency. It’s not a perfect analogy by any means. However, for those of you who seemingly enjoyed watching these movies, realize that they are a reflection of that time and that place.

Here are some highlights as described by the pop culture (movies) of that time…

Movies during this time

There were so many good movies during this decade. I believe that this was pre-progressive Hollywood. They really hit their stride then.

Not like today, where the case is always diverse, progressive, and female. Hey! How did you like the all-female remake of Ghostbusters? Oceans Eleven? The Rocketeer? Get ready, they plan an all-female remake of Goodfellas next year too. Groan!

The Mixed (And Misguided) Messages Of All-Female Movie Remakes

What's up with all the Female Remakes

Dear Hollywood, These All-Female Remakes Are Dumb, Boring, Childish, And Demeaning
The trailer for the new all-female “Ocean’s 11” reboot was unveiled this week. The Hollywood Reporter called it "the capstone 2017 needed." Most regular people called it awful and stupid.

What else could it be other than awful and stupid? It’s a reboot of a remake of a remake, which means it already has all the fun and freshness of dried vomit. The feminist twist just gives it an extra touch of preachiness and pandering, like a vomit stain that comes to life and lectures you about the patriarchy.

-The Daily Wire

The movies in the 1980’s didn’t have any of this progressive revisionism rammed down our collective throats. They were light-hearted fun and charming. Even the more serious ones. Here’s a trip down memory lane…

Criteria

There were so, so, so many great movies made during this time, that there is no way that I would be able to put them all here. I just added them as my memories permitted. The first one is “Spaced Invaders” because it is really great and really obscure.

Spaced Invaders.

I don’t know how anyone could hate this movie. I honestly and really don’t. It is so funny. It took a unique mind to come up with this story line. It’s not your typical alien movie. These aliens are so stupid and confused. They remind me of Eric Holder, Nancy Pulaski, and Mad Maxine Waters.

Characters so stupid that you wonder how they learned to walk.

I am not at all kidding. Just pay attention to their actions and listen to what they say and how these aliens react to situations. When you transpose a progressive mantle onto them, the movie takes on an entirely new meaning.

Spaced
After mistaking a Halloween re-broadcast of Orson Welles’ classic radio adaptation of WAR OF THE WORLDS for a real Martian invasion, a group of moronic Martians shows up on Earth looking to conquer only their plans go awry as they find themselves truly out of their element and in reality all alone. This really is often quite good and funny, with some decent lines to boot. It will most likely appeal to Sci-Fi fans. This has passed the test of time for me as seeing it again recently it proved much better than I expected it to be. Despite a cast made up of no-name stars, this may just be the funniest Martian invasion ever put to film. Interestingly enough, the Martians themselves seem to represent almost every classic Action Hero/Sci-Fi Hero stereotype there is (cool 50s teen, fighter pilot, fearless astronaut, brave soldier and kooky scientist). Fun for the whole family.

Twins.

The whole film is about the brothers and how they get along. De Vito plays the sluggish criminal Vincent who finds it difficult to accept his brother and Arnie plays the very enthusiastic brother Julius who is always willing to do everything he can.

Having two different types of characters allows the tension and excitement of the film to boil up and engages the audience into watching the humor but also the emotional ideas contained. It is very heart warming and will bring a smile to your face as some actions are completely ridiculous in a humorous sense but the ending is also very special for many people. There are many ‘brother’ conventions. De Vito is willing to help his brother into the world and teach him the things he knows as is Arnie.

twins
TWINS, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Kelly Preston, Danny DeVito, Chloe Webb, 1988, (c)Universal Pictures

War Games.

Historically-speaking, there are two movies that have shaped public opinion about computers: 2001 and WarGames. With 2001, there is the question of “What happens when an automated computer system makes decisions on its own?” In today’s world of automatic Windows updates and random error messages for no reason, it seems very prophetic. WarGames poses the question of “Who uses the computer and what do they do?” The consequences, as one can easily guess, are enormous. Even when hardware ages, the ethics remain.

Wargames
Wargames was a movie that was way ahead of its time. No one was making films about hacking into computer systems. The only computers used in movies were on space ships. No home computer has ever really been brought to the big screen. Wargames broke from the normal studio sci fi norm of either Earth being visited by aliens (E.T) or battles of Good and Evil in space (Star Wars, Star Trek). With the raise in hacker crime rate now, and seeing how Dependent we’ve become on computers, Wargames was a movie with it the eye on the future. Imaginative story, great cast (who, despite other reviews, do not phone it in) Wargames is a true gem, as it was recently listed by AFI as one of the top 100 sci fi movies of all time.

WarGames isn’t perfect. There are plenty of logic problems in the script, but it still presents its topic with a naive fascination. What the writers don’t know, they pretend they do. Matthew Broederick is, once again, the nerdy teen with social problems (Ferris Bueller had a different problem, though). Aside from Glory, he won’t be able to shake that image even now in his 40s.

Weird Science.

This is a great movie that contained the hit from the group “Tears for fears” where “Everyone want’s to Rule the World”.

Welcome to your life
There's no turning back
Even while we sleep
We will find you
Acting on your best behavior
Turn your back on mother nature
Everybody wants to rule the world

Real Genius
Mitch Taylor is one of the youngest students ever accepted to a university known for its programs for geniuses. He partners up with his roommate, science club legend Chris Knight, on a project to develop a high-powered laser. Together with their hyperkinetic friends, they employ their intellects in the pursuit of bigger blasts, practical jokes, and a deeper understanding of what real genius means. When they find out that their professor intends to turn their work over to the military for use as a weapon, they decide to get even

Tears For Fears and “Everybody Wants To Rule The World”. This is jet another 1980’s classic . It was also in the movie “Real Genus“, which in itself was a totally classic 1980’s flick.

Let’s talk about it.

It’s interesting to me that Revenge of the Nerds, while still full up of the nostalgia that the 80s lends us, is lately being rewritten as chauvinistic . What was viewed for many years as a bit of harmless fun that waved the banner for nerds everywhere is now being a called a movie full of racism and misogyny, and damages the image of geek culture more than it applauds for it.

Oh, give me a friggin’ break.

Real Genius was loosely (very very very loosely) inspired by actual events that took place when university students were working to crack laser technology. But in Real Genius, this is being done on the fictional Pacific Tech campus, where the students are unknowingly creating that laser for the CIA to use in government sanctioned hits from space. They don’t know this because their odious professor, Dr. Hathaway (played to a tee by William Atherton), obviously isn’t letting them in on the secret.

He’s too busy skimming off the funds that the government is providing to the project, so he can renovate his house.

Real Genius
Mitch Taylor is one of the youngest students ever accepted to a university known for its programs for geniuses. He partners up with his roommate, science club legend Chris Knight, on a project to develop a high-powered laser. Together with their hyperkinetic friends, they employ their intellects in the pursuit of bigger blasts, practical jokes, and a deeper understanding of what real genius means. When they find out that their professor intends to turn their work over to the military for use as a weapon, they decide to get even.

Weird Science.

This is yet another great 1980’s movie. Even when John Hughes makes a mediocre film such as “Weird Science,” the nature of his intent still shines through, to the point where you can’t necessarily fault him for anything except not making a better one.

“Weird Science” serves as the ultimate 1980s high school nerd fantasy, one in which babes see social awkwardness as a turn-on and bullies and extortionist older brothers help themselves to large servings of humble pie. The movie truly doesn’t need to be anything more, even in spite of the shallowness of its characters and general disregard for logic.

Anthony Michael Hall (in his fourth Hughes film in three years) and Ilan Mitchell-Smith star as two losers who determine that if they can’t get girls the “old-fashioned” way that they can use their computer smarts to play Frankenstein and create the ideal woman. After some illegal hacking they pack her with a high IQ (and an appropriate breast size) then hook a doll up to a machine. One crazy storm inside their house later and suddenly there’s Lisa (Kelly LeBrock), who’s every bit as stunning with a type A personality as a nerd could possibly imagine or desire.

Weird Science
Weird Science is the best 80’s comedy that was ever made. I’m saying it. Ghostbusters, Summer Rental, The Great Outdoors, Strange Brew, Gung Ho, Mr. Mom, all of these movies have their place, but none of them can match Weird Science for laughs or pure….eightiesness. Yes eightiesness is a quality. It’s a corny, dated quality but one that is tangible and valued by my fellow eighties loving brethren to this day. Come back with me if you will to a time when Anthony Michael Hall was still fielding calls and Kelly LeBrock was French for sexy. Weird Science has everything that an eighties comedy needs: A least one hot girl, a few actors who are no longer working or who do anything that will come along, plenty of dashing eighties threads, a corny as hell eighties soundtrack,(and Oingo Boingo is as corny and eighties as they get), and plenty of cheap funny jokes.

The Lost Boys.

There are many films about vampires, but one that is almost always remembered with a shy smile on the face is definitely “The Lost Boys”. As one of the best remembered films of the 80s, this movie has become part of pop culture and a defining film for that period.

The movie showcases most of what was cool or hip in that decade.

While its status as “horror classic” has a lot to do with the nostalgic factor, it’s an entertaining film on its own right and its modernization of the vampire myth along with its tongue in cheek humor still make for a charming and funny session of pure mindless entertainment.

Lost Boys
“The Lost Boys” is a movie that effectively combines a cool and attractive look with a simple but entertaining plot resulting in a successful and charming film. The story modernizes classic elements of the vampire myth and adapts it to its time with intelligence and definitely tongue in cheek humor. In fact, this self-aware comedy approach is what makes the film enjoyable, and it relies more on fun and laughs than in actual scares. The plot is rather simple, and lacks some character development, but it makes an interesting (although also quite simplistic) analogy between the troubles of youth and becoming a vampire.

Trading Places.

Trading Places” is a 1983 comedy that sees Murphy teaming up with fellow Saturday Night Live star Dan Ackroyd.  It’s a fantastic tale of two men whose fates are manipulated by the unscrupulous Duke brothers, a pair of stock traders who decide to take Winthorpe (Ackroyd), a high-powered executive and Valentine (Murphy),  a down and out beggar, and swap their situations.

They do this to see if they can turn Winthorpe to crime and turn Valentine into a successful trader, regardless of how the two men are affected by it. I’m not sure anyone tolerates blacking up in the politically correct Hollywood movies today, but we still love Ackroyd’s brief stint as ‘Lionel Joseph’ a rasta from Jamaica who has a short but glorious meeting with Eddie Murphy’s ‘Nenge Mboko.’

Louis Winthorpe III: Nenge? Nenge Mboko? It is me, Lionel Joseph!

Billy Ray Valentine: Lionel? From the African Education Conference?

Louis Winthorpe III: Yah, mon, I was Director of Cultural Activities at the Haile Selassie Pavilion.

Billy Ray Valentine: I remember the pavilion – we had big fun there!

Both: Boo-boo yah, boo-boo yah, boo-boo yah, hah! Boo-boo yah, boo-boo yah, boo-boo yah, hah!

Billy Ray Valentine: Oh, memories!

Denholm Elliott’s drunk Irish priest adds to the racist fun. I love how politically incorrect it is.

Trading Places
This is probably one of the funniest films of the 1980’s. It not only is a play on the classic nature vs. nurture theme, but it is also a somewhat comedic commentary on the “greed is good” decade of the 80’s. However, it is also a nice bridging of the generations as it features two of the biggest stars to come from “Saturday Night Live” Eddie Murphy does a fine job as con man Billy Ray and Dan Ackroyd is great as Louis. Jamie Lee Curtis is also wonderful as Ophelia. In fact, it was good to see her do something other than the “scream queen” roles which she became famous for during the early part of her career. She definitely shows the comedic timing that she would display later in her career and would make her one of the finest comedic actresses in film today. However, the one that really steals it for me is Denholm Elliot as Coleman. He delivers a very low key performance that is befitting for that role. This is a real gem.

Dragnet.

When was the last time you watched this movie? Heh heh. Maybe it might be time to dust off the ol’ BetaMAX and pop that puppy in and watch it again.

This film is a scream. It takes everything that the original series did, and does it with tongue firmly planted in cheek. Dan Ackroyd’s deadpan Jack Webb impersonation is a riot, as are the remarks he makes to Hanks’ Pep Streebeck.

A typical example would be after Joe ignores Sylvia Wiss’ advances, and Pep calls him on it. Joe looks him dead in the eye and says,

"Streebeck, there are two things that separate us from the animals. One, we use cutlery. Two, we can control our sexual urges. I don't know about you, but don't drag ME into your private HELL!"

That line is so Jack Webb-DRAGNET that I’m surprised it never showed up in the 1960’s version. Like the Austin Powers films, DRAGNET spoofs a cultural icon in such a way as to evoke the original. Ignore the silly plot, and just enjoy the ride.

Dragnet
Dragnet is a satirical version of the famous documentary style police show from the Fifties and the later color version from the sixties. Dan Ackroyd’s dead-on impersonation of the no-nonsense monotone Jack Webb that a generation of Americans grew up remembering is excellent. Like Webb he plays it completely straight or maybe I should say straight man.

Young Sherlock Homes

What if Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a story where Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson met as adolescents? What if he made it a very suspenseful mystery that explained may of the great sleuth’s character traits and stylistic characteristics?

What if…well, he did not, but screenwriter Chris Columbus, director Barry Levinson, and producer Steven Spielberg do bring us a fine film that does these things called Young Sherlock Holmes. Young Sherlock Holmes is the meeting of fantasy film and classic literature, and it is a meeting that coexists very nicely.

Young Sherlock
The plot is reminiscent of Raiders of the Lost Ark in that there is a lot of action and adventure, as well as exploration of the cult, which has its meetings in a cavernous place with a replica of a pyramid, where its members wear costumes and practice mummification. There are lots of special effects during the hallucination sequences as well as in other sections.

The great detective meets his future colleague and friend Dr. Watson in a London prep school amidst the mystery of what six men did many years ago in Egypt. Several of the men begin to die in horrible, inexplicable ways, and the young Holmes suspects mischief.

The film is a veritable treasure trove of Sherlock Holmes allusions. The film is fast-paced, fun, fantastical, and creates insights into why Holmes developed emotionally the way he did.

Overboard.

This was a great film. I enjoyed it thoroughly! The casting couldn’t have been better and it was hilarious! The kids were great and made me laugh! Kurt did another excellent job.

All those who are fanatics for edge of your seat thrillers, don’t even comment on this movie, go see Soldier or something, maybe you’ll like that better. “Typical 80’s trash” says the pompous Hollywood critics. Nonsense.  Just enjoy the story, I loved it.

Overboard
Overboard is a wonderful and delightful movie. Every aspect of this story is entertaining. Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell and Edward Herrmann turn in great performances. But what bolsters this movie is the story about how a vain, selfish and spoiled woman undergoes a major transformation and in the process emerges as truly beautiful, not only physically but spiritually as well. The movie also has its share of amusing scenes, and in many respects it is a farce, but it’s a lot more than that – it is statement about home, family, devotion and love. The movie shows the spiritual emptiness of conspicuous materialism and the shallowness associated with unfettered consumption. This is is not to say that the movie is anti-wealth because it isn’t. Rather, it is an amusing foray into the quirkiness of relationships and how people with seemingly nothing in common can form strong personal bonds.

My Stepmother is an Alien.

Here is an oldie but goodie. This movie is great! It’s got a funny script and an interesting storyline…I don’t know if people were expecting some kind of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” challenger, but you all need to see this movie for what it is…somehow I doubt it was meant to deliver some deep message about society or help you delve into your soul…it’s a comedy that is meant to entertain!

Lighten up, people….

Alien
I rate this film as “so bad, it’s kinda good”. It reeks of everything I feel the Eighties was trying to get away from when it became the Nineties, however nostalgia will forever hallow certain themes, in a “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” sort of way. Certainly by today’s standards this movie is very corny and lacks any real depth sought by movie lovers everywhere, but it has a lot of tongue in cheek charm that other movies lack.  As a summary, I couldn’t sit down and watch this film with any of my friends, but it would be a perfect companion on a slow evening when I’ve had a few beers and need my mind taken off things.

Top Gun.

How can we ignore this movie? I remember when it first came out. I was in ELF training at the China Lake Naval Weapons Center. We, my wife and I, went to the theater in Ridgecrest on a lovely Friday night. They were playing this movie, and I with my wife sat and watched it. There were other Naval Aviators in the theater, and everyone thought that the movie was outstanding. It was a great time, and afterwards, we went to the local pizza parlor and had a stuffed-crust deep dish with a pitcher of beer.

Top Gun
Top Gun is undoubtedly one of my favorite films, and one of those that has the ability to keep enthralling you even while watching for the tenth time. Director Tony Scott was chosen after the producers saw his work in advertising, and true to their judgement he has produced a visual masterpiece. It looks simply gorgeous, and the live action sequences have never been bettered. If there is one flaw in the film it is that it is somewhat shallow, with all of the people behind the film (and Tom Cruise) rather better at making visual spectaculars than an engaging story.

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

This movie exemplified what the 1980’s was. It was fun, positive and upbeat. People, for the most part, were optimistic. It was a big change from the doom and gloom of the Jimmy Carter years.

Remember that time? President Carter would hold these “fireside chats” and tell Americans that we have to accept a new reality, one where we are not as good as other nations. We, as Americans need to do with less. We need to stop dreaming. We, need to pay more, and more, and yet more taxes. It is to atone to our sins of the past (whatever the fuck they were…).

Yes. I remember that time.

I well remember this movie. I remember his sister, the crazed principal, and his secretary with the big bee-hive hairdo. I remember his carefree attitude, and who can forget the fantastic parade scene? Honestly!

John Hughes was believed to be THE scribe for teen angst. 

He wrote eloquently of it in "Sixteen Candles", "The Breakfast Club" and "Pretty in Pink". And with "Ferris Bueller's Day Off", he creates a person and a time in life that just about anyone who's ever been a teenager can relate to.

Who hasn't known someone like Ferris Bueller (Broderick)? Someone who always has a plan, someone who made loafing off an art form, someone who could fall in a barrel of you-know-what and come out smelling like a rose?

-Mister-6

Ferris
High school student Ferris Bueller wants a day off from school and he’s developed an incredibly sophisticated plan to pull it off. He talks his friend Cameron into taking his father’s prized Ferrari and with his girlfriend Sloane head into Chicago for the day. While they are taking in what the city has to offer school principal Ed Rooney is convinced that Ferris is, not for the first time, playing hooky for the day and is hell bent to catch him out. Ferris has anticipated that, much to Rooney’s chagrin.

Doctor Detroit.

With the democrats constantly harping that the 1980’s were a travesty with Conservatives running things, the popular culture did not reflect that at all. People listened to music that they could relate to.

They watched movies that they found happy, light and funny. The movie “Doctor Detroit” is one such movie. That is what they could relate to. Just like today, under Obama, people watched zombie survival movies. It’s all a reflection of the times.

Doctor Detroit
“Doctor Detroit” ranks in my top five comedy films ever. It is not so much an “intelligent” comedy, as seems to the trend recently. But it is definitely good old ’80s fun. This really just a fun, silly movie which will give you a 90-minute shot of escapism. It is worth seeing if for no other reason than the costume that Aykroyd dons as he becomes “Dr. Detroit.”

Airplane.

Yuppur, if everyone was so miserable, then why did they enjoy so many absolutely silly comedies? The liberal narrative just falls apart.

This is still one of funniest spoof movies ever made, Airplane is one of the first and one of the best around. Spoof movies definitely have there place in everyone’s collection, but this is probably the best you’ll ever see in the genre, if you have never seen it and you fancy a laugh, I can’t recommend a better film.

Airplane
“Airplane!” is, was and always shall be the master of spoof movies. It is single-handedly responsible for literally inventing a sub-genre of comedy. It is the ultimate Silly Movie. A satire of the disaster movies of the 1970s, particularly the “Airport” series, nothing makes sense and it doesn’t need to. There’s no real plot. Just laughs – and plenty of ’em.

Caddyshack.

This is a classic. When the world seems to be spinning out of control, I just download this torrent and get a smile on my face. What’s not to love?

Rodney Dangerfield is just like Trump in Washington DC. It’s friggin’ awesome. (Which is something that even Rush Limbaugh noted.)

You know another way to look at Trump? How about the movie Caddyshack? Here you have these phony club members led by Ted Baxter, and he's running around. They've got this little country club and everybody in it thinks they're the best of the best in town.

Rodney Dangerfield decides to join and gets in and blows the club up. He gets this gigantic golf cart, drives it on the greens, blows a big horn, has a gigantic golf bag. The leaders of the country club are beside themselves. They try to kick the guy out, and they can't. They lose every effort against him. That's Trump: Rodney Dangerfield in the Caddyshack, and the media thinks he's Governor William Le Petomane in Blazing Saddles.

They haven't the slightest idea who the guy is.

-Rush Limbaugh

Caddyshack
Some of the greatest comedic actors of that era, namely Bill Murray, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, and Chevy Chase, are firmly on their A Game here, and are absolutely sublime in this film. And with the help of the great Harold Ramis behind the camera, they raise these characters that should’ve been easily forgotten to some of the most quoted in the history of comedy. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. This film is not for everyone. If you aren’t tickled by these performances, then there’s very little to hold your interest. And I get that. But that’s the way comedy works. It either hits you or it doesn’t. And this film still makes me laugh out loud every single time. And I imagine that it probably always will.

Better off Dead.

John Cusack was one of my favorite actors during the 1980’s. He had many films, especially the young romantic comedies. I loved them all. One of my favorite memories is the scene with the newspaper boy that keeps on wanting to get paid.

via GIPHY

Lane Myer: Johnny...

Johnny: Four weeks, twenty papers, that's two dollars. Plus tip.

Lane Myer: Gee Johnny, I don't have a dime.

Johnny: Didn't ask for a dime. Two dollars.

Lane Myer: Well... it's funny see... my mom, had to leave early to take my brother to school and my dad to work cuz...

Johnny: ...two dollars... cash.

Lane Myer: See... the problem here is that... my little brother, this morning, got his arm caught in the microwave, and uh... my grandmother dropped acid and she freaked out, and hijacked a school bus full of... penguins, so it's kind of a family crisis... so come back later? Great.

A look of the movies that he participated in and the years make a great statement that it would seem that his movies were a firm fixture and part of the Reagan years.

1984 Sixteen Candles Bryce
1984 Grandview, U.S.A. Johnny Maine
1985 The Sure Thing Walter Gibson
1985 Better Off Dead Lane Meyer
1985 The Journey of Natty Gann Harry
1986 Stand by Me Denny Lachance
1986 One Crazy Summer Hoops McCann
1987 Hot Pursuit Dan Bartlett
1987 Broadcast News Angry Messenger
1988 Tapeheads Ivan Alexeev
1988 Eight Men Out Buck Weaver
1989 Say Anything… Lloyd Dobler
1989 Fat Man and Little Boy Michael Merriman

Back to the Future.

Who hasn’t watched this? I have versions of this movie on BetaMAX, VHS, LaserDisc, and DVD. I remember the first time I saw this move, like Top Gun, on a Friday night in Ridgecrest after ELF training at China Lake NWC. Sit down and watch it again. It’s great!

Back to the future
Back to the Future is a 1985 American science fiction film directed by Robert Zemeckis and written by Zemeckis and Bob Gale. It stars Michael J. Fox as teenager Marty McFly, who accidentally travels back in time to 1955, where he meets his future parents and becomes his mother’s romantic interest. Christopher Lloyd portrays the eccentric scientist Dr. Emmett “Doc” Brown, inventor of the time-traveling DeLorean, who helps Marty repair history and return to 1985.

The Princess Bride.

Of course, this is such a classic that I am afraid to list it here. This is one of those rare films that gets better each time you watch it. With something for everyone, The Princess Bride combines romance, action, adventure and parody to create the perfect movie.

Princess Bride
I’m not exactly sure what exactly it is that makes The Princess Bride such a spectacular film. Or, at the very least, I just can’t pinpoint a single characteristic about it that really rises above all others as the main reason that no one should miss it. Indeed, it has a title that should prove to be remarkably uninteresting to the typical action adventure fan (okay, MALE action adventure fan), but even the most die-hard Die Hard fan would love this film. It is extremely important not to judge this film just because it has such a flowery and dangerously (at the risk of sounding shallow) girly name, because it is full of wonderful adventure and even some good killing and violence. Does this belong in this kind of romantic comedy? Absolutely! The cover box of the film looks like that of a cheesy romance novel, but the film is truly great from start to finish. And, indeed, the film is very aware of the superficial impression that it leaves, and it even presents it directly through Fred Savage’s initial response to his grandfather reading him the story. But as the film goes on, we begin to have the same reaction that Fred has. We can’t get enough.

The plot is rich, with adult innuendos the kids will miss all together and levels of wit to entertain the whole family. The dialogue is full of very funny catch phrases- many of which are still part of my repertoire more than a decade after I first saw the movie. If you like dry humor and fast wit, The Princess Bride will make your day.

Revenge of the Nerds. 

Revenge of the Nerds (1984) was a surprise hit. The film follows the adventures of two “nerds” as they go to college and try to join a fraternity. Oh the trials and tribulations they go through. Robert Carradine and Anthony Edwards are the two “nerds”who do everything they can to try and fit in with the rest of the college crowd.

Nerds!
What made Revenge work is that it didn’t try to pretend to be something that it wasn’t. This was an exploitative sex-fest and it worked well. What it also had was a funny script and one that we could all relate to. I mean, who hasn’t felt left out or relegated to the side lines while someone else gets all the glory? Besides being extremely funny, this film touched on something that we all can relate to.

This one is the first and best of the series. They should have left well enough alone. But since this was made during the 80’s, a mandatory sequel was made. I recommend this movie. It’s entertaining and worth watching.

Fletch.

Yet another forgotten gem. What really makes the movie is both Fletch’s imagination, his flair for developing different characters, and especially his speed talking. examples include “I love your body Larry (Geena Davis)” while on the phone in front of a hotel clerk, “Nugent, Ted Nugent” when asked by Alan what his name was, “What kind of a name is Poon anyways?” asks Mr. Boyd, to which Fletch’s reply is, “Comanche Indian”.

This movie totally rocks and you will love seeing it AGAIN and AGAIN!!! It is so much better than jay and silent bob strike back, you’ll be laughing for hours! enjoy!

Fletch
Class! just pure class, nothing long winded just short and sweet, made at a time when chase was top of his class with others like Steve Martin, as for the film its a good story with many many jokes most of which you will have to see the film again to catch as some as they are very fast such as name changes he comes up with, it still stands up well today even if some jokes are lost on people to young to remember certain peoples names, its a shame people like chase don’t get the films that made them so big in the 80s but times and tastes change.

The Goonies.

Here is just another fun movie. It’s now a cult movie, and over the years the house in the movie has had countless visitors to it wanting to relive the movie in their own way. I had this movie on both BetaMAX and LaserDisc, and when the production of the movies in this format dried up, I was left with these classics to watch on rainy days.

The Goonies
The Goonies was written by Chris Columbus from a story by executive producer Steven Spielberg. A band of kids who live in the “Goon Docks” neighborhood of Astoria, Oregon, attempt to save their homes from demolition, and, in doing so, discover an old Spanish map that leads them on an adventure to unearth the long-lost fortune of One-Eyed Willy, a legendary 17th-century pirate. During the entire adventure, they are chased by a family of criminals, who also want the treasure for themselves.

Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure.

This is classic. He and Alex Winter (an indie film dynamo) play Bill and Ted, a couple of 80’s California dudes who want to start their own rock band (Wyld Stallyons). However, both are flunking in high school and will be expelled unless they get an A+ in history.

To make matters worse, Ted will be sent to the military by his father, therefore squashing their dreams of rock stardom.

Enter Rufus (George Carlin), a man from the future who plays Clarence to the boys George (shades of It’s A Wonderful Life) who gives them a telephone booth. With it, they decide to use it to collect great historical figures and bring them to San Dimas, California to show them how mankind has evolved.

Bill and Ted
Bill and Ted are truly likeable boneheads and both Reeves and Winter deliver fine performances. Carlin is funny in his appearances, showing that he doesn’t need trash-talk to be entertaining. The dialogue is truly amusing, probably because no one talks like that any more. The only weakness is that it’s an 80’s film, so if you didn’t grow up in that era, you might not understand why there’s music playing throughout the film, or why everyone looks and dresses so weird (yes, that’s how everyone looked in the 1980’s).

Who’s Harry Crumb?

This is a forgotten jewel. John Candy’s best film, by far. Granted, he’s been in such classics like Uncle Buck, Planes, Trains and Automobiles, and Little Shop of Horrors, but this is a film where he had to completely stand alone as THE MAN. Campy, fun and entertaining, this film is a great find for anyone who loves old-school comedies.

Harry
Harry’s asinine comments make him look like a real ass but he isn’t. Once you get that, it’s easy to get into the humor. That’s John Candy’s genius; his ability to humanize a variety of unlikely or impossible characters and make us love them even if we don’t believe them. this is party because of the expressiveness of his face but also because of his indefinable comic spark.

Volunteers.

Before they started winning Oscars, struggling actors such as Tom Hanks and Robin Williams used to be… SURPRISE!! funny! volunteers is a great example of a movie that refuses to take its leading actors seriously and is all the better for it. this is not a “star vehicle” but is rather an irreverent tongue-in-cheek romp. it takes its cues from Saturday night live, SCTV, Monty Python, and cheesy off-broadway one-act plays.

In return, it is spoofed by one particular Hollywood blockbuster to follow, Austin Powers Goldmember. Mike Myers must have been as impressed with the “reading the subtitles” joke, as well as the “Asian guy on the toilet/being chased by sumo wrestler” schtick. but rather than beat the jokes to death, volunteers assumes we are smart enough to catch them on the fly.

Volunteers
“Volunteers” successfully spoofs more classic films than any other – from Casablanca, through Bridge over the River Kwai, to Lawrence of Arabia, they’re all there if you’re watching carefully enough. Volunteers is a very funny, well written, well acted film. It is so packed with humor it reminds me of the old Mad Magazines with the jokes written in the margins. Some of the humor is rather subtle and the dialogue rolls right over it. If you’re not paying attention, you might miss it.

Back to School.

Old Rodney Dangerfield never got the level of respect that he deserved. (Snicker…)

A funny post-Animal House college film with a pretty distinguished cast. In addition to Dangerfield, who is terrific as usual, we also get to see Sally Kellerman, Burt Young, Ned Beatty, and an introduction to the brilliance of Robert Downey Jr. who is unforgettable as Derek Lutz.

Although the movie is silly, lacking any convincing realism or plot, it is nonetheless wonderful fun…especially if you are a Dangerfield fan. His rendition of “Twist and Shout” is a classic. And the scene at registration where his chauffeur Lou, played by the redoubtable Young, is priceless when he holds up a sign by the limo with Bruce Springstein’s name on it and all the students rush out to mob the car while Dangerfield, his son, his son’s love interest, and Lutz have the pick of classes.

Back to school
I love Rodney Dangerfield. Always have. His one-liners, and all-around smartass attitude have made him a living legend and he never fails to crack me up. Back to School is a great example of what he can do and I never get tired of watching it. Keith Gordon is great as his son and Robert Downey Jr. is pretty hysterical as his best bud. The ever-reliable Burt Young is a lot of fun as Dangerfield’s limo-driver/best friend and he does his duty at supplying the laughs.

Fast Times at Ridgemont High.

This was made during the post-disco, pre-greed era of the 80s that was far too short. I’m surprised to find out this movie is still popular considering it is far from being politically correct. And, boys and girls, that is a very good thing.

I’ll admit, I wouldn’t want my kids to some of the things these high school kids did, but it is a nice reminder how much fun the era was.

Phoebe
It’s a film about a group of kids looking for love, status, or a good buzz. The film was nothing more than that, and it didn’t pretend to be more. In addition, Cameron Crowe’s script made you *care* about what these kids went through as if their individual situations were happening to us (as they may very well have). It’s almost a crime that a sequel was never made, although a mediocre TV series was spawned. Armed with a cast of characters that struck a chord with all of us (primarily because we knew someone in High School who acted just like them), and a soundtrack that reeked of the Mark Goodman-J.J. Jackson era of MTV, this film stands as a perfect portrait of a decade a lot of us say we’d like to forget….shortly before brushing the dust off an old Night Ranger cassette and indulging in a guilty pleasure.

Adventures in Babysitting.

Elizabeth Shue plays Chris Parker who is babysitting one night but due to certain circumstances ends up taking the kids out on the town in order to pick up one of her friends. What follows is all sorts of adventures involving thugs, crooks, thieves, the lot.

The film is totally funny to watch and has some really good scenes in. Two that come to mind involve a fight between two gangs on a train and one involving the god of Thunder Thor (well, not the Thor you would be expecting).

Adventures...
“Adventures in Babysitting” is a movie that I’ll never forget. One of the reasons why this film is so memorable is because of the Chicago locations. For the past 25 years or so there have been lots of good movies shot in and around Chicago (as well as the suburbs) such as “Risky Business”, “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”, and “The Fugitive” just to name a few. But “Adventures in Babysitting” is probably my favorite movie to be made in Chicago. I saw this movie when it first came out in the summer of 1987 (a year after “Ferris Bueller” which “Adventures” bares somewhat of a resemblance to) and while I was watching the film it felt to me like I was part of the adventure. Today, this is still a very entertaining picture, and a lot of fun.

This is an exciting movie which was typical of 1980’s movies.

Boy, I wish they could make movies like that now. The 80’s has got to be the best decade ever for films of all genres and this movie is just one of many great comedy films of that era. Oh and by the way, I think Elizabeth Shue is beautiful and I believe this was her best role.

Pee Wee’s Big Adventure.

It’s terrible what the liberals did to Pee Wee. I guess you could say that he was “Borked” long before the democrats assaulted picks for the Supreme Court. Because they and the liberal media got away with it without consequence, it paved the way for all subsequent terror and mayhem that they implemented. Sigh.

Surprisingly, this is Tim Burton’s first movie and he did a great job. His unique directing, visual design, and dark comedy just work superbly as a whole. I can never remember being so affected by clowns in hospital smocks.

Let’s not forget Pee Wee as well. He was definitely a character who I enjoyed watching because he was so carefree, happy, and it was hard not to like him. There are so many great scenes in this one like breakfast time, the Alamo, Pee Wee’s nightmares, any scene with Francis “YOU’LL BE SORRY PEE WEE HERMAN!” Buxton, Mickey the con, the Warner Bros lot and so many more.

The characters are great too and from their performances, you can tell they had fun doing this film cause it shows. With a the limited budget, Pee Wee’s wacky nature, and Tim Burton’s imagination, it all adds up to a really entertaining film. Oops, can’t forget Danny Elfman’s great soundtrack which sets the tone rather nicely.

Kitchen
Some people may think that this movie is silly, pointless, and has ridiculous scenes. But I, however, find it to be entertaining, very funny, and a good family movie made back in the 80’s. It has a lot of jokes that are mostly the ones that are funny because they are weird and never seen anywhere else, but it does also have some one-liners that make even the most stern of audiences laugh. What I liked about this movie was that it had a lot of people involved in it. There were also a lot of locations that were shown in this film, even if the places were not the initial location that they intentioned of in the movie.

One Crazy Summer.

I love the atmosphere, the story line, and the black and white portrayals of Rich Country-Club Republicans.

Do you remember the monster suit where the zipper broke? The poor guy was trying to get the darn head off, and the rich millionaire threw his cigar in the mouth. The monster began streaking and demolishing the model community while smoke came out of his mouth! LOL.

One Crazy Summer
Watermarked photo for One Crazy Summer. I love the Nancy and Ronnie Lunch pail and the Generic Elementary School.

Spies Like Us. 

Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd were awesome in this film. It reflected the changing politics of the time, and how two nations can get together after a long, long cold war. What a great 1980’s movie.

Spies like us
Spies Like Us is a 1985 American comedy film directed by John Landis and starring Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Steve Forrest, and Donna Dixon. The film is an homage to the famous Road to … film series which starred Bob Hope and Bing Crosby. Hope himself makes a cameo in one scene.

Night of the Comet

Cheesy, but enjoyable satire with a big chunk of ’80’s vibe for flavor! Comet eliminates the worlds population, leaving surviving sisters to fend against a group of demented scientists.

Comet
Trapped in a hellish copyright limbo for over a decade, Thom Eberhardt’s “Night Of The Comet” is a film whose reputation is due for a serious rehabilitation. Generally–and wrongly–categorized with typical 80s teen horror films, “Comet” is in fact a smart, skillful parody of the low-budget sci-fi horror classics of the 50s, 60s and 70s–and a wry commentary on teen culture in the 1980s as well.

While many peg Night of the Comet as a zombie picture, and granted two or three zombies do show up along the way, this film really has much more in common with the old B sci-fi movies of the 1950s. In fact, one could make a good case that the film is meant to be a comical parody of those old schlock films, after all it does have a nice comic book feel! From any view, this is an entertaining film even with its silly moments. It manages to stir up a few chills along with the laughs.

Hot Dog. 

For a while, I worked as a movie theater manager in Corpus Christi Texas. We would get movies and then run them for one or two weeks. This movie “Hot Dog” ran for four weeks and was, in my mind, very typically 1980’s.

“Hot Dog” is a light-hearted comedy and served to inspire me to trek out to California later on that year. While there is no proof, I suspect that the movie “Hot Tub, Time Machine” is somehow a modern day incarnation of this movie.

The Harkin Banks character reminded me of my best friend in university, ol’ Peter. Heck, he’d probably think of me as the hard-drinking clown Dan O’ Callahan. LOL.

Hot Dog
Harkin Banks is a young Idaho farm kid who is also an ace at skiing. He is headed to the freestyle skiing championships in Squaw Valley, CA along with runaway Sunny. He meets his adversary in the form of Rudy, a self centered European skier who doesn’t take a liking to Harkin or his new found friends, The Rat Pack, led by veteran Dan O’ Callahan. Harkin has many misadventures with Dan and his buddies, but doesn’t lose focus in his attempt to get the World Cup.

An Officer and a Gentleman. 

This movie really seemed to seriously influence everyone during this time. It was almost as if the ideas of the knight in shining armor that would come and rescue the damsel in distress would actually come  true.

This was a central theme of many of the movie of the 1980’s; that the childhood fantasies of our childhood could really come true, we just need to see them in a new light.

Officer and A Gentleman.
In the Movie an Officer and and a gentleman, the AOC sticks through the training, and then at the end of the movie through all the hardship shows pure love and faithfulness to his love. He arrives at her factory and literally sweeps her off her feet and carries her away.

Flashdance. 

It wasn’t only the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman” that had the knight in shining armor rescue the girl. There were other movies of a similar theme. In Flashdance, a hardworking steel worker gets a big shot at her dream. Oh, don’t ever, ever let anyone steal your dream. It’s a story about hopes, dreams, and obtaining them.

When Flashdance first came out, all the New York, Chicago and LA critics despised the film. They thought it was a flop. That’s how far out of touch the liberal elites were back in the 1980’s. Yet, when the movie was released, it became an instant success.

Everyone in the heartland could relate to it.

Flashdance.
In Flashdance you see the only moment that matters. It all builds up. Everyone else is better than you. They are classically trained, and all you are is a steel worker; a welder. The chances of escaping from the mills of Pittsburgh is slim. You could end up like your sister. You have to give it everything that you have.

Risky Business. 

This is a great movie about being an entrepreneur. Of course, things don’t always go as you have planned.  The underwater 928 is a great case in point. But, what a great movie. Of course, it stars  Tom Cruise and Rebecca De Mornay which made the film even more magical.

I really love the job interview scene at the tail end of the movie. Heh heh.

Risky Business
A suburban Chicago teenager’s parents leave on vacation, and he cuts loose. An unauthorized trip in his father’s Porsche means a sudden need for lots of money, which he raises in a creative way.

The Witches of Eastwick. 

This is a great movie, but somehow it’s been kind of forgotten. I love the movie plot, three women, who have “powers”, conjure up a demon. Suddenly all sorts of interesting things happen. Yikes!

Witches
John Updike probably panicked when he saw what screenwriter Michael Christoper and director George Miller did to his book…..but this movie is all the BETTER for what they did! Careening wildly between scenes of light fantasy, full-bore horror and extreme gross-outs, this film is wildly imaginative and terrifically entertaining. With Jack Nicholson as the devil himself, things just don’t get any better than that! Actually, the whole cast is very well-chosen and all give great performances. Who can forget the cherry scene…?

Dirty Dancing. 

This movie inspired me to take up ballroom dancing. Which, I might add, became a serious love of mine and a significant hobby. It’s a great movie about summer, dancing, and many other things. Of course, the show point is the dancing. This is such a wonderful movie.

Oh, by the way, as great as the acting was with actress Jennifer Grey was, when she had plastic surgery on her nose, she was unable to get any other roles in Hollywood, she became unrecognizable.

Dirty Dancing

This is literally the original “feel good” dance film — which spawned dozens if not hundreds of imitations. The script is perfect. The acting is perfect. The casting is perfect. The direction is perfect. And the music score is to die for. Swayze’s career was unfortunately cut short. Jennifer Grey, who practically made this role a part of her DNA, had a nose job and (the cynics say) lost a lot of later roles because the casting directors were afraid no one would recognize her.

Explorers.

This is a charming little movie that has faded into obscurity. It’s all about a group of boys who start getting messages in their sleep. They listen to their dreams and build a space ship. It’s a fun and wild tale. I well remember this movie as yet again, I watched it the Ridgecrest movie theater after training at the ELF substation at China Lake.

Explorers
A boy obsessed with 50s sci-fi movies about aliens has a recurring dream about a blueprint of some kind, which he draws for his inventor friend. With the help of a third kid, they follow it and build themselves a spaceship. I loved the detail and imagination within this movie – like the one dream that the three boys all share, the sphere they create from their computer, the guard dog they give bubble gum to, the amusement ride seat they turn into their spaceship, with windows made from the fronts of washing-machines and TVs. And our three heroes make a great team. They are all very different in character, yet share that same dream of escape and adventure. Ethan Hawke is the main hero – the one that most viewers will relate to – the average 80’s kid hooked on television, daydreaming during school lessons and a huge crush on the girl next door.

Sixteen Candles.

This is a pure classic, and it is so well known that I would be surprised if anyone hasn’t heard of this movie.

I once taught English to a 16 year old Chinese gal who had a terrible crush on this other boy in her school. She would talk about it (in English with me) and expressed her frustration that no one understands. So I downloaded this movie on a USB and gave it to her. I can’t say that it changed her for the better or the worst, but I will tell you that she really appreciated it.

16 candles
These are the immortal words spoken by SIXTEEN CANDLES heroine Samantha Baker (Molly Ringwald) in the ultimate 80’s teen comedy. This movie has become a classic to those who grew up in the 60’s and 70’s, like myself, and I now consider it a “guilty pleasure”. Its a movie we all grew up with. Didn’t we all know a person like ‘Farmer Ted’, or a hot queenie like the blonde he hilariously gets. It was every young freshman’s fantasy. This funny flick is also a relic of the 80’s that is not all that dated.

Coming to America.

What an absolutely laugh out loud comedy. Again, this is yet another of the dreams come true fairy tales. This is a modern day story of the prince comes and rescues Cinderella from a life of drudgery. Only this time Cinderella lives in Queens, and the Prince is from Africa.

I watched this movie with my girlfriend from Zambia. She couldn’t control herself. She was rolling in the chair laughing, as many of the scenes in Africa were really, really exaggerated versions of Zambia.

Coming to America 1
An extremely pampered African Prince travels to Queens, New York, and goes undercover to find a wife who he can respect for her intelligence and will. It is the 21st birthday of Prince Akeem of Zamunda and he is to marry a woman he never saw before. Now the prince breaks with tradition and travels to America to look for the love of his life.

The movie is filled with gags and charming and funny situations. It’s a poke in the eye of barbershops, Queens, Black culture, relationships, McDonalds and just about everything else. However, as funny and charming as it is, the end where Cinderella gets married with the prince is most especially pleasing.

Coming to America 2
The first part of this movie, showing Eddie Murphy’s life as an African prince, is one of the funniest things I have ever seen. I loved it. The wedding ceremony alone was so funny, I almost fell out of my chair from laughing so hard. I thought this could be one of the funniest movies of all time. At about the halfway point, though, it stops being a laugh-a-minute riot, and kind of settles down into more of a quiet romance movie. The scene at the basketball game (with the man who worships Murphy) is the last really hilarious thing that happens. After that, it never again reaches the energy of the beginning. This is not really a bad thing, though: it is still enjoyable from start to finish, even during the quiet parts. It has good actors, and it is fun to watch, and that makes it a great movie.

Ghostbusters.

Here we talk about the very first movie. Not the sequel, and most certainly not the progressive politically correct all-woman remake. Yuck!

Like numerous other movies, I first watched this movie in Ridgecrest when I was in ELF training at China Lake. What a fun movie. I remember standing in line to buy the tickets and a son in front of us asks his father if this movie will be too scary for him. The father smiled and said that he didn’t think so. LOL.

Ghostbusters
What’s that you say? Ghostbusters, one of the most financially successful and over-hyped comedies of the eighties, underrated? Yes. Precisely because it was so over-hyped and made so much money, there has been a stigma attached to this film identifying it as a childish FX piece, when it is nothing of the sort. Most of the lines people remember(“He slimed me,” “OK. So? She’s a dog,” “When someone asks you if you’re a god, you say YES!”) are not its funniest or wittiest lines, which often are missed on first or even second viewing. I laugh every time I observe a gag or a quip that I somehow missed the other 20 times I viewed a scene; “Egon, this reminds me of the time you tried to drill a hole through your head, remember that?” “That would have worked if you hadn’t stopped me”, or, to the driver of a van from a loony bin, “Dropping off or picking up?” Brilliant.

Vacation.

I am not sure, but I think that all the “National Lampoon” Vacation movies were made in the 1980’s. What a great decade!  Who can forget this movie. I most especially love the new station wagon. LOL!

Vacation
The Griswolds are a gene pool of absolute disaster and nothing…NOTHING goes right…ever. The fun begins with Clark being forced to accept a disgusting metallic pea-green family truckster instead of a cool-blue sports model with CB and optional fun pack. It’s literally the most hideous car in the history of automobiles (and that includes the car that Homer Simpson made for his brother Herb).

Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. 

This is the charming comedy when a “mad scientist” accidentally shrinks the kids and they get stuck in the backyard. Not bad, eh? Well, it is if you are the size of an ant. Oh, remember that this was made in the 1980’s.

Today, in the hyper-protective, politically-correct America, there is a parental advisory for this movie (if you can believe it.) Why the friggin’ heck why?

WARNING: Husbands and wives kiss in several scenes! Two teens kiss passionately. The mother makes a reference to a boy being in the dark with her daughter. A boy says he learned to give mouth to mouth resuscitation in "french class". A teen girl talks about a boy she would like to date. A boy asks a girl for a date. A man tells another man that his wife has "plumbing trouble".

-Parents Advisory IMDb

Honey I shrunk the kids
The scientist father of a teenage girl and boy accidentally shrinks his and two other neighborhood teens to the size of insects. Now the teens must fight diminutive dangers as the father searches for them.

Labyrinth

By today’s standards “Labyrinth” may look dated and cheap but there’s something about it that makes it special. David Bowie makes it a stand alone movie in the weird ranking. The man is crazy but his performance is excellent!

Jennifer Connely (being 16 at the time) delivers a solid and tender performance. She was very, very cute and her performance totally gained the audience’s love.

laybrinth
This is a classic fantasy film from Jim Henson, in collaboration with George Lucas. There really is a magic about the film and that has helped it last as a firm family favorite all these years. As with many films aimed at younger audiences there are messages that the writers, in this case Henson himself, have tried to convey, such as `be careful what you wish for (as in the heat of the moment we are not always sure what is best for us) and also about not taking things for granted. These lessons not only relate to the major target audience of young children but also teenagers and adults alike. The film also has values and attitudes about growing up, the central character Sarah is in the awkward stage between child and womanhood, the stage of adolescence. She acts like a child in her self importance and possessiveness but she is perhaps starting to grow out of her young imagination. She does not want to, her room full of inanimate companions, dreams and fantasies, she feels are slipping away.

The tale is fantastic and keeps you interested from the beginning to the end. The musical moments are also great! The f/x were great for it’s time and I wonder how they came out with the idea for creating such original characters. The thing that I liked the most about the movie is it’s art direction. The world that is created is taken directly from everyone’s fantasy world idea. Colorful and dark at the same time.

Splash. 

This is a seemingly forgotten movie with the great John Candy and a mermaid. It is charming and funny at the same time. It is a shame that it has fallen into obscurity.

This movies, as well as many of the movies of the 1980’s were made long before the social re-engineering of the Bill Clinton presidency. People could smoke in offices, and have beer at lunch.  You could talk about porn openly, and no one would bat an eyelash. Ah, the days when Americans had freedom.

Splash
Over-achieving little film that was directed by Ron Howard and stars Tom Hanks as a young man who finds the woman of his dreams (Daryl Hannah). The only problem: she is really a mermaid. Splash is a 1984 American fantasy romantic comedy film directed by Ron Howard, written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, and starring Tom Hanks, Daryl Hannah, John Candy, and Eugene Levy. The film involves a young man who falls in love with a mysterious woman who is secretly a mermaid. The film was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.

Riders of the Storm (The American Way).

This is a great little movie that kind of got lost over the years. It is a gleefully anarchic one fingered salute by the liberals in Hollywood to Eighties America, especially Ronald Reagan politics.

But, don’t let that scare you. It’s really obvious who the enemies are; the rich and wealthy elite that controls government and media… who are they? Yeah. They are progressive liberals. Not conservatives.

“The American Way” sees Hopper playing the leader of a bunch of technological pirates who continually broadcast anti-establishment anti-Reagan material over mainstream television channels.

The American Way
Riders of the Storm is a little known film starring Dennis Hopper, featuring him as the captain of an ex-USAF electronic warfare aircraft, now dedicated to filling the airwaves with pirate TV broadcasts. Politics, TV evangelism, the USAF, Transvestisism, public access TV: none can escape the cutting observations of this must see film.

Dennis Hopper and Michael J. Pollard (Doc Tesla) lead a crew of misfit Vietnam veterans highly trained in psychological warfare and armed with a B29 equipped as a flying pirate TV station creating havoc for the broadcast networks and authorities as they fly the country on a crusade to bring radical philosophies and classic audiovisuals to a conservative and media brainwashed viewing public.

On the verge of retirement they are compelled to mount one last campaign to destroy a demographically engineered presidential candidate (who looks to me a lot like a Conservative version of Hillary Clinton) who would see the country brought to war again.

Extensive explorations into concepts of non-violent defiance of authority and pursuit of justice, questioning conventional morality, exposition of criminal activities in the guise of righteousness by righteous people being classed as criminals by a corrupt establishment, existentialist themes, technology and rock music versus violence and force, nature of religious beliefs, political corruption and post Vietnam issues.

Some excellent 60’s and 70’s music in the soundtrack. Not to be missed.

Funny, heartfelt and with a serious bone to pick with the world in general, “The American Way” is something of a lost gem. Hunt it down if you’re in the mood for something different that really taps into what makes Hopper great.

Amazon Women on the Moon

This is a kind of odd-ball movie. It is simply a collection of comedy sketches. “Amazon Women on the Moon” is one of my all-time favorite movies, not because it is perfect, but because it effectively yet respectfully lampoons so many genres, including 50s movies, late-night television of all sorts, and even different styles of literature available throughout a good portion of the 20th century. Find a trend in literature of the 40s and 50s, movies of the 50s and 60s, or television of the 50s through the 70s, and it is somehow made fun of in this movie.

Amazon Women 1
Boy, do i love this movie! I’m not saying it didn’t have any flaws. Id say about 80% of it was very funny. The movie itself is built around a 50’s b-movie “Amazon women on the moon” which has some serious troubles while showing and the jokes are then presented as commercials etc. One of the most memorable moments IMO in this film include: “The blacks without the soul”, “Petmate of the month” and several others.

With a few exceptions, the film is about your typical late night television and the crazy ads that used to permeate the airwaves before all the infomercials started taking over in the 90’s. In this film, they make fun of those crazy ads and programming by doing outrageous spoof ads interspersed with an old 1950’s B movie with a lot of projection problems.

Amazon 2
Like Monty Python stuff, this uneven collection of comedy tidbits with several different directors and a huge cast will receive mixed reactions: some will love almost all of it; some will like some parts and loath others; and there will be those who find the whole thing to be sophomoric, humorless idiocy. For me, the best parts were the title skit, an almost too real parody of a ‘fifties space movie, the concluding social disease sketch (you have to have experienced the ‘thirties and ‘forties to get it, though), and some of the commercials, especially the ones by Don (The Man With No Soul) Simmons.

Any couch potato with a good sense of humor and a memory of the 70’s & 80’s television programming should enjoy this one!

Desperately Seeking Susan

In this very clever story, Roberta (Arquette) is a bored housewife with a rich fantasy life who envies a woman named Susan (Madonna). Susan’s boyfriend is always leaving her notes in the personals column about where to meet.

Before long, Roberta is showing up at the meeting places and actually starts stalking Susan. When Susan pays for a pair of boots that she wants with her unique leather jacket, Roberta buys it and starts wearing it.

All this could have been harmless fun except for three things: 1) Susan is a con artist, and she’s stolen Egyptian artifacts she mistook for earrings from a guy in Atlantic City, who ended up dead at the bottom of his hotel; 2) Susan was seen (from the back) wearing her jacket in the hallway of the hotel by a mobster who wants the artifacts; and 3) Roberta is in an accident, and when she wakes up, she has amnesia…

Desparate
“Desperately Seeking Susan” is the best kind of amusing: pleasant but not so much so that we become immersed in the fact that things aren’t as zany as they could be. The film is smartly amusing, after all, with the comic scenario bettering as it grows increasingly convoluted. Thank God for this little gem of a movie, in all its silliness. It takes me back to a time when everything was still possible, and I thought I knew everything although I really knew nothing. Well, now that I know, not everything but a great deal, I still find this movie really likable. It’s strange that it’s so old, and it still feels quite fresh and exciting. Maybe it’s the New York atmosphere, or the sense of excitement that Madonna brings to every one of her scenes. I think she’s good in this film because she doesn’t yet take herself too seriously and isn’t trying too hard.

This is such a fun movie, with much of the comedy being in the situation rather than in the dialogue. Not only that, it’s totally ’80s, right down to Madonna’s leggings, and brings back a lot of great memories.

Near Dark

I loved this movie when it first came out. It was able to portray a more “realistic” scenario for vampire outlaws. LOL. A young cowboy is literally bitten by a beautiful stranger and ends up joining a band of blood-suckers who roam the American heartland.

Although Near Dark is often over-shadowed by the ultra-hip vampire movie The Lost Boys (1987), Near Dark is a far more juicier treat for horror fans. Eric Red, who also wrote The Hitcher (1986), gives us a seemingly old-fashioned tale of struggle between human nature and savage lust with a nicely spun sense of modernism. Not to mention plenty of touches of dark humor.

Near Dark
This is one of the best vampire flicks I’ve ever seen. These aren’t your standard sharp fang having, flying, cool contact wearing, red cape sporting vampires. Rather these vampires look like nomads, leftovers from a roaming biker gang. They drive around in a trailer that has aluminum foil covering the windows to block out the sunlight. They drink blood. They spit out the bullets you shoot them with. They’re a tad different than your classic vampire but different enough to keep them interesting.

It’s a story that does well with avoiding the obvious clichés of the vampire genre. Director Kathryn Bigelow gives this film terrific style, not only adding scenic beauty but sharply creating plenty of intense action sequences. The entire sequence in the bar has became a favorite among many. Adding even more to the film is the beautiful music score by Tangerine Dream.

The Freshman.

OK, for you purists out there, this movie was released in 1990, but was in production in 1988. So I am including it herein. How many actors could have parodied their most classic roles without falling into caricature? Think about it: while it takes a certain talent to make a performance that elevates a character to a legendary status, overplaying enough to make it comical but not over-the-top is the ultimate proof of acting genius.

Only Marlon Brando could have got away with playing his most iconic character, the Godfather, and make it so damn believable. And it’s this very seriousness in his performance that makes “The Freshman” so delightful and naturally, hilarious.

The Freshman
Clark had no other choice than to say yes, after all, isn’t Vito Corleone, the man who makes offers we can’t refuse? The film’s funniest moments are driven by Sabantini’s aura and Clark’s incapability to control the situation or to say ‘no’. The script finds the perfect tone to show a guy screwed but in a way that inspires our sympathy without feeling antipathy toward Sabatini. And another triumph on the writing department is the way everything seems believable despite all the zany material it employs. Whether it’s a picture of Mussolini in an Italian Social club, an espresso that takes three spoons of sugar, the Mona Lisa painting in Carmine’s house, and a weird traffic involving a Komodo dragon, I wonder why I wanted to believe that the first time I saw it. Maybe I was just a 10-year old kid who just laughed at the gags without looking too much deeper into it. The irony is that after watching ‘The Godfather’ so many times, I believed in Sabatini even more.

Although not revolutionary, what makes “The Freshman” such a classic on its own is that it accomplishes a real miracle by resuscitating Vito Corleone, his name is Carmine Sabatini but the movie can’t fool us: the guy IS Vito Corleone.

As explained in the film, Sabatini’s the one who inspired Vito’s character, in other words, “The Freshman” is so confident over its comical premise, and rightfully so, that it doesn’t even hesitate to insert several references to “The Godfather”.

Yeah, and these are not just gratuitous ‘Godfather’ references thrown away for the sake of it, it’s important to know that it’s not a parallel world where the movie isn’t supposed to exist. On the contrary, not only it does, but whoever sees Carmine Sabatini has the most natural reaction by immediately thinking of Vito Corleone.

The movie, in a way, asks the question, how any of us would react in front of a movie character. How would I if I met my favorite character? I guess, probably like Clark Kellog, Matthew Broderick as a film college student, the titular “Freshman”.

Die Hard. 

This movie has a special place in my heart. But, aside from that, this is just a great flick. Period. It is all about the everyday, plain old man, who has (out of necessity) be the hero and do the uncomfortable and the job that no one else wants to do. Hey guy! How’s your friggin’ Christmas this year? Eh?

Die Hard
One could claim that 1988’s “Die Hard” is one of the most influential action movies ever made because it basically revolutionized one of the most copied (but never matched, at least in terms of quality) formulas: a loner, by some unique twist of fate, battles it out with an “x” number of terrorists in an enclosed environment. Willis was a wild card – an unlikely choice for the role of our hero “John McClane” – since he didn’t have any action credits on his resume’ and let’s face it: Bruce Willis just didn’t have the bulging biceps required for a role like this. But that’s the beauty of his performance in this movie: he’s an everyday guy, caught in a not-so-everyday situation. Certainly one of the best known action movies ever, “Die Hard” did receive the scorn of critics upon its 1988 summer release, but the audiences sung a completely different tune.

Rescues that Occurred and their Movies

There were numerous heart-warming events that happened during the 1980’s. Funny how the mainstream media has somehow forgotten these important events. Let’s discuss three of them. The first is the true story of how three trapped whales were freed by joint efforts of the United States, Russia and the local inhabitants of the icy North.

The rescue of the whales. 

Operation Breakthrough was an international effort to free three gray whales in 1988. The whales had become trapped in pack ice in the Beaufort Sea near Point Barrow. Point Barrow in the U.S. state of Alaska. The whales’ plight generated media attention that led to the collaboration of multiple governments and organizations to free them. The youngest whale died during the effort and it is unknown if the remaining two whales ultimately survived.

This event was made into a Hollywood movie titled “Big Miracle“. The entire nation, including myself, were riveted to the television screen trying to find out what was going on with the poor trapped whales.

Big Miracle.
The movie titled “Big Miracle” is a realistic portrayal of an actual rescue event during the 1980’s. In it, both the United States, led by Ronald Reagan and the USSR worked together to free three trapped whales.

The rescue of the geese and their breeding grounds. 

In 1986, Bill Lishman started training Canada Geese to follow his ultralight aircraft. As such, he succeeded in leading their migration through his program “Operation Migration.”  This event was made into a movie titled “Fly Away Home“. I have to admit that this move is a “tearjerker”. But that is in a good way.

Fly Away Home
The movie “Fly Away Home” is film rendition of a rescue effort that took place during the 1980’s to save geese and their breeding grounds.

The recovery of huskies abandoned at the South Pole.

Like the other two events, this was also made into a movie. The event itself took place in 1958, but the movie about it was very popular and released in 1983 and was a big hit. This movie was then remade later on. The remade  movie was named “Eight Below“.

In the extreme wilderness of Antarctica, three members of a scientific expedition -- Jerry Shepard, his best friend, Cooper and a rugged American geologist -- are forced to leave behind their team of beloved sled dogs due to a sudden accident and perilous weather conditions in Antarctica. During the harsh, Antarctic winter, the dogs must struggle for survival alone in the intense frozen wilderness for more than six months.

-Rotten Tomatoes

The 1958 ill-fated Japanese expedition to Antarctica inspired the 1983 hit film Antarctica, of which Eight Below is a remake. Eight Below adapts the events of the 1958 incident, moved forward to 1993. In the 1958 event, fifteen Sakhalin Husky sled dogs were abandoned when the expedition team was unable to return to the base. When the team returned a year later, two dogs were still alive. Another seven were still chained up and dead, five were unaccounted for, and one died just outside Showa Station.

Eight Below Movie
Huskies and Malemutes look at home in that element because they were bred to work and survive in like conditions. These two near primitives could really do what these actors did and survive. It was refreshing to me to see humans show the same dedication and love for the dogs that dogs give to their human family members every day. It would be hard for actors to really be able to show all that those of us who treasure our dogs would feel if we had to leave them behind but he did a credible job

Conclusions

These are just some vignettes of my snippets of memory from the 1980’s. I present them here as someone who had experienced them first hand. You know, for a time period that was so full of inequality, poverty and racism as the Democrats, and Obama constantly says, the popular media of that time did not reflect it.

Which is WHY the elites and the oligarchy has to rewrite history.

If the decade was truly one as described by the democrats, then the songs would be sadder, the movies darker, and the culture more subdued. Right? Look at the movies and the culture of America under Obama. Look at the movies that were made and the popular television shows.

Obama's America.
It was under the Obama presidency where end-of-the-world, and zombie movies really became popular. Why is this? While it is true that there were comedies, and all sort of progressive movies, the most popular movies reflected an interest in war, terror, and destruction. It reflected Obama’s America.

I am firmly convinced that Americans have been the most propagandized people in all of history. It doesn’t matter what the subject is; whether it is life in China to history three decades ago, the narrative has constantly been directed towards certain targets. The “goal posts” have constantly been moving. All to keep Americans ignorant, fearful and suspicious.

In short, the mainstream American media has spent the last fifty years trying to separate, divide and isolate Americans from each other. That is because, unified we are a serious threat to those who control the nation.

When your children look back at the presidency of Barrack Obama, a socialist democrat, what will they read and see? The history books will talk glowingly about his “many” successes, and repeatedly state how everyone was happy and dancing around with unicorns under rainbows…

Liberal dream
The liberal progressive dream. That if the world is ruled by one world government that we would all function in love and warmth because our leaders would care for us. They would hand us presents, and care for us. They would give us free food, free medicine, free housing, free education. They would be our overlords and we would worship them for the paltry scraps that they would provide to us.

Eh?

Well, maybe a look at the culture at that time will tell you all that you need to know about what life was under his sphere of influence…

Screen shot obama.
Screen shot of “popular movies from 2008 to 2016”. This is what culture was like under Obama. We see horror, zombies, police, drugs, mutations, and worlds being threatened with extinction.

Take Aways

  • History can be described by facts, numbers, charts and data.
  • However, the best measure of a period of time is how you felt living it.
  • The Obama rewritten narrative of the 1980’s does not resemble what it was like by those who experienced it.
  • I argue that to understand a period of time, you need to delve into the culture.
  • The culture of the 1980’s was strange and unusual compared to today.
  • A look at the movies of the 1980’s can illustrate what it was like living during that time period.

FAQ

Q: What is the purpose of this post?
A: I see many people who have not lived in the 1980’s try to tell me that it was a horrible and terrible time. They do so because that is what they were taught. Yet, these very same people also tell me that they love the movies and the people during that time. They wish that they could be cruising in a GTO and living the life that they can only dream of.

They wish that the movies of today would be of the same caliber as the movies of today. Their disconnect from the awareness that culture tracks reality is disturbing. They go hand-in-hand. A culture always is a reflection of the people in society.

Q: Is this a complete list of movies?
A: No, not by a long shot. Many movies are left off, but I really don’t have all day. Here are just a handful of movies that are reflective of this time. Honorable mentions include…

  1. Brainstorm (1983)
  2. Dead Heat (I love the animated butcher shop. LOL)
  3. Raiders of the Lost Ark
  4. My Best Friend is a Vampire
  5. Lean on Me.
  6. Blade Runner.
  7. The Terminator
  8. The Breakfast Club
  9. Platoon
  10. Blue Velvet
  11. Full Metal Jacket
  12. The karate Kid
  13. Earth Girls Are Easy
  14. The Burbs
  15. Red Dawn
  16. Big Trouble in Little China
  17. Aliens
  18. They Live
  19. Predator
  20. American Werewolf in London
  21. The Blues Brothers
  22. Gremlins
  23. The Money Pit
  24. Beetlejuice
  25. Howard the Duck
  26. Raising Arizona
  27. The Neverending Story
  28. The Adventures Of Buckaroo Bonzai Across the Eighth Dimension
  29. Ernest goes to camp
  30. The Last Starfighter
  31. The Blues Brothers
  32. Brazil
  33. Strange Brew

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Links about China

Business KTV

Dance Craze

End of the Day Potato

Dog Shit

Dancing Grandmothers

When the SJW movement took control of China

Family Meal

Freedom & Liberty in China

Ben Ming Nian

Beware the Expat

Fake Wine

Fat China

China and America Comparisons

SJW

Playground Comparisons

The Last Straw

Diversity Initatives

Democracy

Travel outside

10 Misconceptions about China

Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1

Pretty Girls 2

Pretty Girls 3

Pretty Girls 4

Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Compiled 12OCT18.
  2. Completed 14OCT18.
  3. Published 15OCT18.

What it was like being a kid in the early 1970’s

This is a walk down “memory lane” as I relate what it was like growing up as a young boy in the early 1970’s. I was in my early teenage years. I went to school, watched a lot of television, and played with my friends. Enjoy…

Introduction

As strange as it seems, there is very little on the internet about what it was like growing up in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It’s almost as if it was scrubbed from existence. In it’s place we now have the Obama narrative of a racist nation and terrible injustices. That narrative has nothing to do with reality. It is a scripted lie intended to manipulate people into believing something that just isn’t true.

Here, in my own little way, I would like to relate some stories of what it was like for me growing up as a kid.  For “shits and giggles” I have chosen the year of 1971. It was the last year that I had as a kid before I had to go out and work at 14 in the coal mines.

This narrative takes place in Western Pennsylvania. We lived in a small town about a two hour drive from Pittsburgh. It was a hilly and tree shaded world, with railroad spur lines that snaked in and out of the hills and crossed over viaducts and into tunnels.  I well knew those lines as I would often walk along them with my friends on hikes and adventures.

Allegheny hills
The Allegheny mountains are very beautiful. I miss the beauty of them in the fall, and the joys of canoeing on the river and fishing in the streams.

Visiting my Aunties

Many weekends my parents would drive into Pittsburgh to visit my relatives. Both were from Pittsburgh, though from different areas. We would take turns visiting the families. In the morning we would visit my father’s family, and in the afternoon we would visit my mother’s family.

Polish Hill at dusk.
A evening scene from Polish Hill. Polish Hill is a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is a community that was founded by Polish immigrants that went to Pittsburgh to find work in the Steel Mills there.

Often times, there would be other relatives that would come and say hi. I would see my grandparent’s brothers and sisters, my great aunts and uncles, if you will. And I might be persuaded to go with them to their homes. For some reason, the homes always smelled like bacon and cabbage.

There was always a pot of coffee on the stove. If it was cold they would either reheat it or make a fresh pot. The coffee pot was a percolator design. The water would start to boil and would be forced up through a metal straw into a container that held coffee grounds. You could control how strong the coffee was by the amount of ground in the upper container and how long your brewed the coffee. There was this glass bubble on the top of the coffee pot that you could watch to tell if the coffee was ready or not.

Coffee Pot
This is a very common way of making coffee in the 1960’s and the 1970’s. Every family seemingly had a percolator. This particular picture is very similar to the one that we used at home.

They would almost invariably offer me a cup of coffee and a bowl of what ever is cooking on the stove. There was something always cooking. Sometimes it was spaghetti sauce, sometimes it was chili. Sometimes it was “pigs in a blanket” (pork wrapped up in cabbage). Sometimes it was chicken soup. I could always eat my fill when I visited my aunties.

Of course, every single relative had this painting of “the last supper” on the wall in the kitchen / dining room.

The Last Supper
During my childhood every family had a painting of the Last Supper on their wall. My relatives all had it hanging in the kitchen, but many of my friends had it in the living rooms or the dining room instead.

Everyone also pretty much listened to the same radio station as well. Each kitchen had this little plastic radio (of vintage electronic tubes) that was perpetually tuned to the AM radio station KDKA. Popular Music would often be heard while we were visiting.

Pop Songs

While I was pretty much listening to Jefro Tull, Traffic and other rock groups, my relatives and classmates enjoyed the popular music of the time. In 1971 we were listening to the following. Notable songs are highlighted in BOLD.

Three Dog Night Joy To The World
Rod Stewart Maggie May / (Find A) Reason To Believe
Carole King It’s Too Late / I Feel The Earth Move
Osmonds One Bad Apple
Bee Gees How Can You Mend A Broken Heart
Raiders Indian Reservation
Donny Osmond Go Away Little Girl
John Denver Take Me Home, Country Roads
Temptations Just My Imagination (Running Away With Me)
Dawn Knock Three Times
Janis Joplin Me And Bobby McGee
Al Green Tired Of Being Alone
Honey Cone Want Ads
Undisputed Truth Smiling Faces Sometimes
Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose Treat Her Like A Lady
Rolling Stones Brown Sugar
James Taylor You’ve Got A Friend
Jean Knight Mr. Big Stuff
Lee Michaels Do You Know What I Mean
Joan Baez The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
Marvin Gaye What’s Going On
Paul and Linda McCartney Tom Jones
Bill Withers Ain’t No Sunshine
Five Man Electrical Band Signs
Tom Jones She’s A Lady
Free Movement I Found Someone Of My Own
Murray Head and The Trinidad Singers Jesus Christ Superstar
Jerry Reed Amos Moses
Grass Roots Temptation Eyes
Carpenters Superstar
George Harrison My Sweet Lord / Isn’t It A Pity
Donny Osmond Sweet And Innocent
Ocean Put Your Hand In The Hand
Daddy Dewdrop Chick-A-Boom (Don’t Ya Jes’ Love It)
Carpenters For All We Know
Gordon Lightfoot If You Could Read My Mind
Sammi Smith Help Me Make It Through The Night
Carpenters Rainy Days And Mondays
Cher Gypsy, Tramps And Thieves
Jackson 5 Never Can Say Goodbye
Lynn Anderson Rose Garden
Hamilton, Joe Frank and Reynolds Don’t Pull Your Love
Ringo Starr It Don’t Come Easy
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band Mr. Bojangles
Fuzz I Love You For All Seasons
Dramatics Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get
Carly Simon That’s The Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be
Stevie Wonder If You Really Love Me
Aretha Franklin Spanish Harlem
Helen Reddy I Don’t Know How To Love Him
Osmonds Yo-yo
Aretha Franklin Bridge Over Troubled Water
Partridge Family Doesn’t Somebody Want To Be Wanted
Tommy James Draggin’ The Line
Ike and Tina Turner Proud Mary
Chicago Beginnings / Color My World
Bells Stay Awhile
Stampeders Sweet City Woman
Lobo Me And You And A Dog Named Boo
Paul McCartney Another Day / Oh Woman, Oh Why
Bread If
Marvin Gaye Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)
Brewer and Shipley One Toke Over The Line
8th Day She’s Not Just Another Woman
Freda Payne Bring The Boys Home
Rare Earth I Just Want To Celebrate
Delaney and Bonnie and Friends Never Ending Song Of Love
Freddy Hart Easy Loving
Three Dog Night Liar
Honey Cone Stick-up
Mac and Katie Kissoon Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep
Andy Williams Love Story (Where Do I Begin)
Cat Stevens Wild World
Jerry Reed When You’re Hot, You’re Hot
Beginning Of The End Funky Nassau
Olivia Newton-John If Not For You
King Floyd Groove Me
Bobby Goldsboro Watching Scotty Grow
Matthews’ Southern Comfort Woodstock
Judy Collins Amazing Grace
Dave Edmunds I Hear You Knocking
Bee Gees Lonely Days
Fortunes Here Comes That Rainy Day Feeling Again
Who Won’t Get Fooled Again
Denise Lasalle Trapped By A Thing Called Love
Jackson 5 Mama’s Pearl
Buoys Timothy
Partridge Family I Woke Up In Love This Morning
Isaac Hayes Theme From “Shaft”
Gladys Knight and The Pips If I Were Your Woman
Neil Diamond I Am..I Said
Paul Stookey Wedding Song (There Is Love)
Wilson Pickett Don’t Knock My Love, Pt. 1
Doors Love Her Madly
Richie Havens Here Comes The Sun
Wadsworth Mansion Sweet Mary
Brenda and The Tabulations Right On The Tip Of My Tongue
Fifth Dimension One Less Bell To Answer
Doors Riders On The Storm
Perry Como It’s Impossible

The song “Maggie May” was played to death, and radio stations in central Indiana were still playing that song long into the 1990’s. Ugh!

Donny Osmond was terribly popular with my sister and all of her girl friends at the time. Her bedroom was covered in pictures of Donny, and she had her class room textbooks covered in “lunch paper” covers decorated with Donny Osmond related praises.

I first heard “The night they drove ol’ Dixie down” when I was riding with my dad in our car. He was involved in technical sales at the time. I would wait in the car and listen to the radio while reading the “Last Whole Earth Catalog“.

Last Whole Earth Catalog
The Last Whole Earth Catalog was a cultural landmark in the 1970’s. Kevin Kelly, who was editor-in-chief at Whole Earth was looking at an old Whole Earth Catalog came to the realization that it was a 1970s version of a blog.

Tom Jones was very popular with my mother and the mothers of my friends. He had a kind of sex appeal that really appealed to them.

Jesus Christ Superstar hit my generation hard. I cannot express how big an impact this movie made at my church and at my school. It seemed like every family had the album. I went and saw the play and it was really moving.

I saw Jerry Reed sing “Amos Moses” on “Laugh In” or “Sonny and Cher” I don’t remember which. Both were shows that hosted a mixture of singing, dancing and comedy routines that were quite popular in the day.

The song “Gypsy, Tramps And Thieves” was a big hit by Cher. Most people have forgotten about her today. You hear some blurb on the news every now and then, but she was a big thing back in the day. She was super popular.

The song “Don’t Pull Your Love” was very popular and got a substantial amount of airtime. You probably couldn’t get by a day without hearing that song at least once. Other heavily air-played songs included “Mr. Bojangles“.

Everyone in my school watched the Partridge Family . This was a television show about a family that toured schools all over the country and sang at them. Well, they also had a number of hits, as well as a had a following of fans.

The Partridge Family was a television show that was very popular int he 1960's and 1970's.
How can one talk about the 1960’s and 1970’s without mentioning the television show The Partridge Family?

The idea and concept of freedom to explore, of adventure and travel was very popular. The ideals of the 1960’s were fading away, and the 1970’s was a time where people wanted to just go forth and explore the world. The song “Me And You And A Dog Named Boo” was representative of this dream.

If there is one iconic song from that year (heck, for that decade), it is “One Toke Over The Line“. Everyone was listening to it, and everyone related to it. Even my mother who would make the “sigh” and gesture while saying “I guess I’m just one toke over the line…”.

This song “Never Ending Song Of Love” has fallen into obscurity. Yet it reflected the reality of the small town bars and the culture of friendship and love that was indicative of the era.

The song “Riders On The Storm” continued to be popular with me and my classmates long into our college years.

Barbershop

Next to my Father’s parents house was a barbershop. The shop was run by an old man, probably in his 90’s. He lived upstairs above the shop. The barbershop itself was a museum and probably hadn’t changed since the 1940’s.

Barbershop
A barbershop was a place and refuge for men to be men. We could talk about things that interested us , we could talk about sports, girls and life. All barbershops were smoker-friendly places where men could be themselves, free of political correctness and progressive rules.

My father would take me to the barber there and I would get a haircut. I really didn’t want to go because at that time, long hair was fashionable. I would go there and then pout the rest of the day. But, I’ll tell you what, those trips to the barbershop were some of the best memories that I have.

The barbershop was a “men’s only” establishment. On the tables were magazines about hunting, guns and adventure. On the walls were pictures of deer and ducks. There was a full length mirror on the wall that faced two very huge and ornate barber chairs. The barber wore an apron and wore his hair in a style that probably went obsolete in the 1950’s.

Men's magazines.
When we went to the barbershop we would read the men’s adventure magazines that would lie there, as well as the Playboy magazines that would be interspersed with the newspapers and the standing ashtrays.

The chairs were big and comfortable. He would often have friends hang out while he worked. They would sit there smoking cigarettes and watching him cut hair. A small radio would be on and often it would be tuned to a baseball or football game.

The place had it’s own kind of unique smell to it. It was a cross between aftershave and and old house. The barber lived alone as his wife passed on a decade earlier. He just ran the shop until he died. After he passed on, the place was boarded up and then demolished.

Hiking in the Woods

At that time in my life I spent a lot of time hiking in the woods. I would often ride my bike all over town and up and down the back roads and railroad spur lines. In the Spring the air would be fresh with the smells of lush forest canopy. In the Fall, it would be a time of warm “Indian Summers” with red and yellow leaves that would blow in the light breezes.

Railroad tracks.
I lived in a small town in Pennsylvania. The hills all around us were wooded and access to them was via back roads and rail lines. As a boy, I would spend a lot of time walking on these tracks and exploring the world around me.

I rode a gold Schwinn “banana seat” bike with “high bars” and a “drag strip” (non-tread) rear tire. Every one of my friends owned a bicycle. My sister had one with a white plastic basket in the front. My bike had these long streamers of plastic that plugged into the handles. I eventually tore those things off. But I would put a card (from a deck of cards) and attach it to the bicycle with a wooden clothes pin. That way my bicycle would make some “cool” sounds when I rode fast. It had a huge red circular red reflector on the back, right under the white “banana seat”. Like the GTO I would later drive when I was in High School, the bicycle was an orange color.

During the 1970s and 1960s all children rode bicycles. I had a banana seat bike that I rode.
We would all ride bicycles when we grew up. Which is different than kids today. Instead, today their parents drive them from event to event, instead of expecting them to get there on their own. A 1970s childhood. (Image Source)

My bike was a personal selection. When my father took me to a store to pick it out, I chose a really simple and rugged model. There were no front or rear brakes on the handlebars. To brake, you would just use the pedals. There also weren’t any gears. There was one gear only. It came with a rear view mirror, that soon broke off, and that was about it. My friends all had more complicated bicycles, and over the years, they were perpetually repairing their bikes and trying to fix them. For me, I never had that problem.

Television Shows

At that time the only television channels that we could watch were CBS, NBC, and ABC. We also had “channel 13” which was a government channel. All of our news, and our entertainment came from these three sources. Since we never had the kind of selection that we have today, we didn’t find anything wrong with it. It was normal for us.

Friday night TV
Here is the complete television selection for Friday night viewing in 1971. It is pretty sparse isn’t it. This is where all American got their news and found out about the world around them.

As sparse as the selection was, we were perpetually glued to the television set. There was usually a movie a night. They were often a few years old, after being shown in the movie theaters. If the movie wasn’t shown in the theaters it would be called a “World Premiere Movie”.

Television was rather primitive.

While we did have a color television, we still needed to walk across the room to change the channel. Imagine that! Remote controls were not available until the mid-1970’s. On top of it were “rabbit ears” until we were able to subscribe to cable in the late 1970’s. My grandmother had her “rabbit ears” with aluminum foil wrapped around it. She said that it improved her reception. Maybe it did. I don’t know, her reception really sucked, so it must have been really, really terrible.

My favorite after-school show was “The Flintstones”. All of my classmates watched it. There were many shows that I watched when I was growing up. It went from the black and white “Diver Dan” series, to the Fireball XL-5, Supercar, and included such staples as Gilligans Island, and the Man from U.N.C.L.E..

I would watch the news reluctantly. For me it was pretty boring.

However, I did follow the news about space. You couldn’t miss it. Everyone was talking about space, and the moon. That is all you heard about as a child of the 1960’s. The television shows also helped to maintain this theme.

As the news that played on the radio concerned our exploration of space and the Vietnam War.  Of course I didn’t know what was going on. It was a takeover of the United States government by dark forces embedded deep inside the United States government. When JFK was shot, my father insisted that I watch the television. He kept telling me that this was the most important thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War. He was a lifelong Democrat and he had real concerns that there was more to the story than what the government was saying. Later, after he died and President Trump released the transcripts, it turned out that my father was right after all.

The “Deep State” murdered our President.

“This fucker, johnson should be dug up and pissed on, and torn apart. Every modern ill can be traced to him.” 

-sowhat1929

On Sunday we watched Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”, and “The FBI” (Starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr) after the Walt Disney hour. If I wasn’t watching television, I was building plastic scale models, or experimenting on my Gilbert chemistry (and electrical) sets.

The A. C. Gilbert Company was an American toy company, once one of the largest toy companies in the world. It is best known for introducing the Erector Set to the marketplace. A chemistry set is an educational toy allowing the user (typically a teenager) to perform simple chemistry experiments.

During the Bill Clinton presidency (D) all sales of chemistry, electronics, and mechanical kits were put under investigation as possible routes for “home grown” terroristic activities, and were subsequently suppressed, if not outright banned. Over the Bush years (R), they resurfaced and eked out a small living.  However, by 2017 most hobby kit suppliers went out of business. Ramsey electronics, Heithkit electronics RIP.

At that time in my life, I like the rest of my classmates, watched shows like the Partridge Family and The Brady Bunch. These shows were about “us”. It was how we interacted with each other, and our families and our communities. This all began to change when the television media decided to change their programming towards minorities in urban areas. Television began a slow phase away from white families living in suburbia and began to concentrate on poor urban minorities.

The Brady Bunch
The Brady Bunch. The Brady Bunch is an American sitcom created by Sherwood Schwartz that aired from September 26, 1969, to March 8, 1974, on ABC. The series revolves around a large blended family with six children. Considered one of the last of the old-style family sitcoms, the series aired for five seasons and, after its cancellation in 1974, went into syndication in September 1975. While the series was never a critical or ratings success during its original run, it has since become a popular staple in syndication, especially among children and teenaged viewers.

Shows about black people were limited to “Stanford and Son”, and “The Jefferson’s”.

“The "rural purge" of American television networks (in particular CBS) was a series of cancellations in the early 1970s of still-popular rural-themed shows with demographically skewed audiences, the majority of which occurred at the end of the 1970–71 television season. In addition to rural themed shows, the purge also eliminated several high rating variety shows that had been on CBS since their beginning of television broadcasting. One of the earliest efforts at channel drift, CBS in particular saw a dramatic change in direction with the shift, moving away from shows with rural themes and toward ones with supposedly more appeal to urban audiences.”

-Wikipedia

The shows we watched were funnier than what you see on television today.  And, maybe, just maybe a little more innocent. “The Bob Newhart Show” was typical. The humor involved day to day situations and NEVER mentioned race (compare that to today), and had a real twisted surrealistic sense of humor. Consider “Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman”, or “Green Acres”. You can find out more here.

Hi my name is larry and this is my brother daryl and my other brother daryl.
Iconic characters from the Bob Newhart show that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Hi! I am Larry, and this is my brother Darryl and my other brother Darryl. (Image Source.)

Ah, you’ve got to hear about the three yokel brothers in the (very surrealistic) 80’s “The Bob Newhart show”. I loved these guys. They might have been the highlight of the show. Heck, they could have had their own show (hint. Hint.)

“…discovering that a witch is buried in the basement of their Vermont inn. They want to find out who she was, but they also want her 300-year-old grave dug up and removed. 

The silly-from-next-door tells him he knows some guys who`ll do anything for a buck.

Next thing, three goofy-looking, backwoods brothers from the genetically weak side of Vermont show up. “Oh, Lord!” says Bob, getting a whiff. Larry--the only brother who ever talks--hands Bob their card.

“We`ll do anything for a buck,” it says.”

- Larry, Darryl And Darryl Are `Newhart` Hits

Larry was the spokesman. Darryl and Darryl never spoke except in the classic final episode. No matter how many times Larry met you, he always started off by saying “Hello. I’m Larry. This is my brother Darryl and this is my other brother Darryl.

They were quite good hearted, and obviously lived a strange, strange life. Afterall, clubbed weasel was their idea of good eatin’. Larry’s totally deadpan delivery of some very bizarre lines was always a highlight of any Newhart episode. “We went to the bakery ’cause they were advertising ‘bear claws’, but it turned out to just be a come-on.

Ah. Good times. Good times.

Movies and television portrayed westerns (with “white men” taming the wilderness), war adventures (mostly involving world war II fighting the evil Nazi army), space exploration (such as Lost in Space, Star Trek, Fireball XL-5, Thunderbirds are Go and Land of the Giants), and Spy Adventures (against the Soviet Union or against fictional organizations such as T.H.R.U.S.H.).

Scale Models

One of my favorite hobbies was the building of plastic models. These were often of ships, airplanes and military hardware. I made a few models of cars, but my favorites were of military tanks and figurines.

I had a desk in my bedroom. It was an old desk inherited from my father with four drawers. I used a fold-up “card table” chair to sit at it with. On it was a 1940’s style desk lamp that my parents must have pulled out of the garbage at some time. I had books on the desk, a “multiband” radio where I could listen to FM radio, and a pencil holder made out of a decorated metal coffee cup tin.

At that desk, I would assemble, build and paint my models. It was an enjoyable pursuit. The desk faced the window in the bedroom, and I would often have the windows open, but the shade drawn down about half way. The shades were in the old 1960’s style and were meant to last. They had this kind of “life preserver” style ring hanging on a string that you could pull down to raise or lower the shade.

I needed the fresh air, as the odor from the glue was toxic and would tend to get me all flustered when I used it. I remember once, that my sister was watching her television show and they were really pushing the Rigley Chewing Gum-gum-gum… Rigley chewing gum-gum-gum commercial. It must have been running every ten minutes. I was about going out of my mind with the combination of the toxic glue odor and the subliminal programming of the chewing gum. Ugh!

airplanes hung from the ceiling
I would build the models and paint them. Then, I would carefully hang them from the ceiling. My room was filled with models of various sizes and shapes.

The airplanes I would hang from the ceiling with string. I would display my collection of tanks and military equipment on shelves alongside my collection of centuries-old bottles. (I was an avoid junk collector and was always on the lookout for discarded bottles that I would collect from ancient trash dumps in the nearby forests.)

I collected Tamiya 1/35 scale military hardware models. I had quite a collection of German vehicles and tanks. At that time, the Japanese model maker Tamiya made the best quality models. They had an innovative introduction process that added new model to the collection every few months.

Tiger I
This is a model of the German Tiger I tank. I had numerous models of this massive beast in various scales. I even had one so complete that the interior was all detailed.

Alas, when I graduated from university I discovered that my mother had thrown away all of my models. She didn’t want all the clutter in the house. I guess one person’s treasure is another person’s trash.

Science Fiction

I started reading Science Fiction avidly. With one of the first books being the “Mad Scientist Club”.

The Mad Scientist Club is a series of stories (and books) written in the 1960’s which fueled the imagination and adventures of us children in the 1970’s. (The son of the author has a website. You can visit the website HERE.) These stories inspired me. They inspired my dreams and led me down the path towards technical excellence.

The book cover to the Mad Scientists Club.
The cover from the first book of “The Mad Scientists Club”. This is a classic book for all young children entering their early teens.

The boys in the stories used science to create all sorts of pandemonium and mayhem in their little town. They applied themselves to using science to make devices and gadgets. They played pranks. The books showed how a boy could engineer a device from techniques that they learned in school. They made balloons, talked on ham radios, devised electronics, and they did it all on their very own.

The beauty about all this was that they never asked for help or permission. They took the initiative and did it on their own. They applied themselves.

Indeed, these stories are special. But, don’t take it from me. Read what others have to say.

“This is the best kids book ever.

… In a way it saddens me when I re-read it. I don't think our kids today have as much freedom as these did (or my generation). I remember staying out until dark, riding my bike EVERYWHERE, clubhouses on vacant lots...Or maybe it's responsibility. Kids today have freedom but little responsibility. I'm getting off my soapbox now. but this is a cool book and it will make your kids fall in love with science. I imagine the Mythbusters grew up like this- or maybe their dads did!! ”

-Holly commentary on the book. Found at Goodreads.

I am afraid that Holly is correct. American children (and adults) don’t have as much freedom as we all used to. (It’s our fault, you know.) These books are for kids and inspires them to accomplish things through study and action. These books are not about getting a group together and finding a group consensus. It’s not about how to cautiously speak so as not to offend anyone. Nope. It is about getting things done and raising hell in the process.

It’s books like these that inspired many of us to study science and engineering. It certainly affected me. It also affected others. I am not the only one who studied about rockets and space…

“This was simply a great childhood book for any inquisitive kid who likes science, haunted houses, dinosaurs, flying machines, etc. I read this book in about seventh or eighth grade and actually a couple of times since. I believe this book helped me on my career to being a rocket scientist but it also gave me many ideas as I was growing up.

Brinley managed to capture the perfect mid-west US town and the guys in the book were great caricatures of fun loving, science minded boys with a bit of good natured mischief up their sleeves. Then Brinley took this setting and boys and produced a series of wonderful stories capturing so many things that so many boys growing up find so intriguing.

I bought a copy recently for a nephew and he was enraptured by it. The follow-ups while good never really reached the level of this first book but were fun in their own right. It will always hold a special memory of growing up back in the '60s.”

-Robert commentary on the book. Found at Goodreads.

He’s right you know. The stories certainly inspired me.

I like to think that there is inspiration in stories where you find adventure, freedom and independence. These are things that are absolutely missing in the modern realm of politically correct stories. Which, by the way, is a very important point. By following a “Politically Correct” narrative, you retard the growthof young boys. To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, you turn men into pussies.

“We live in more of a pussy generation now, where everybody's become used to saying, "Well, how do we handle it psychologically?" In those days, you just punched the bully back and duked it out. Even if the guy was older and could push you around, at least you were respected for fighting back, and you'd be left alone from then on.”

-Clint Eastwood

A parent has a responsibly to PREPARE their children to venture out and grow. They need to go forth and carve a life out of the wilderness. But that is not what is happening today. Instead we have children that never leave the nest. Young men, in the United States, live at home until they are in their 30’s. Instead of investing their time in building, workings, making, and creating, they are too busy looking at cat videos on the Internet while they post their latest latté on Facebook. Boys must be taught to aspire to be Men, not to be a woman’s version of a sensitive man.

Pussies.

No amount of tattoos, unique hair or beard, or cool urban clothing style is going to make you into a Man. It comes from within. Education alone won’t do it. Money and wealth won’t do it. Polite conversation won’t do it. It comes from inside. It comes from deep down inside. It comes from a place that says “you can, and must do what you need to do”. You don’t ask for permission, or consensus. You go out and carve your life out.  Alone.

By clutching on to your children like over protective mothers, the children don’t grow up. Physically they might age, but the brain and the emotions are still that of a young child. How else can you explain the SWJ mentality that demands a protective overseer? Which is what they want, you know. They demand to be coddled and taken care of by a big parental government Bernie Sanders style. Because, that is all that they know. They don’t know how to be independent. We don’t teach that anymore.

These books break us out of that mold…

“A gem. Almost unknown; but one of the most hilarious and memorable laugh-out-loud books you could ask for. It's never mentioned by anyone; it's never recommended, placed on book lists or chosen by reading-groups. This just might be because it's a series of books, which represents a 'philosophy-of-parenting’, which has fallen out of favor. That's my suspicion, anyway.

I mean, just think about it. These stories are about kids who are unmonitored; who are allowed to just go off on summer afternoons and hang out on their own; and do whatever they want.... because they are trusted by their folks. Today, this is the last thing parents want to hear. No one in today's control-freak, micro-managing America wants to imagine that children can be trusted like this.

Books for very young children ('Little Prince' or 'Giving Tree') are in abundance on Goodreads. They're sweet and harmless. There's also a new genre called 'YA' ('young adult'). But guess what? They're all very sanitary, careful, cautious, and timid. Antiseptic. Content-supervised and Content-controlled. They always instruct youngsters on the 'correct' thing to do, the 'sensitive' thing to do, the 'courteous' thing to do...blah blah blah.

'Mad Scientists' is different. Instead of caution, the author praises problem-solving, solidarity, daring, and initiative. It's a book written for kids illustrating how NOT to follow the rules. It’s a book, which shows that rules are made to be flouted.

These stories are from a time when today's endless complexities and anxieties just weren't around. It’s a book that deals with kids just... having fun. I say, there need to be a LOT MORE books like this.

The gang of boys in Brinley's tales are pre-teens; somewhere between 11 and 14. This is a strange interval in a boy's matriculation, when they need to figure out a lot of things about life (and it’s also a time when adults have the least relevant advice to offer). This is the space Brinley plays in: the theme of personal responsibility.

Teens NEED to create a few genuine catastrophes in order to learn the weight of 'cause' vs 'effect'. 'Intention' vs 'outcome'. 'Actions' vs 'harm'. They need to learn the ins-and-outs of friendship and loyalty and paying-one's-dues.

The 'Mad Scientists Club' (this is the name carved on their clubhouse door) demonstrate these themes grandly. These young scamps are precisely in that age where you learn how to make a mess and how you clean it up afterwards. By yourself!

The crazy scenarios which afflict these affable 'troublemakers' reminds us--should remind everyone-- that this process can be fun. Making mistakes and learning from them. The best way --nay, the ONLY way--to shape character.

Far cry from today, huh? Yeah. Today, we don't let kids have 'secret clubs', 'hideouts', codewords, or 'mysterious friends'. We don't let them play with equipment or tools. They must not 'wreck' anything of ours. They're certainly not allowed to 'gallivant all over creation' (love that phrase).

Modern parents are rule-mongers and control freaks. When our kids want to play, we take them to 'Sesame Place' and we monitor their nutrition and we deck them in flashing sneakers and put them in helmets and on leashes. We place them in soccer, swim class, softball, karate, dance, gymnastics.

The result? Modern kids have no idea what real 'freedom' means. We never give it to them. They turn out to be vegetables.

But Brinley's kids show the other way it can be done. This boy's club makes their own fun. They don't 'ask for permission' to do stuff--they just do it! They embrace wildness, zaniness, and unpredictability. The outcome? Well, they aren't brought up on charges from the Department of Homeland Security, for the trouble they cause. That's for sure. This is a part of small town-Americana we've let slip away.

Just one example: in one of the adventures undertaken by the Mad Scientists, they build their own hot-air balloon (using scraps from a local junkyard) and they enter it in the town's annual homemade hot-air balloon race. With no adult supervision at all. Once aloft, (!!) they engaged in an air-battle with their arch-foes and fire potato-cannons and slingshots back'n'forth in mid-air. Finally, they manage to send the enemy gang's balloon into the lake! Can you stand it? I can't friggin' stand it, can you?

This book reminds us that children used to be perfectly capable of taking care of themselves if we let them...if we weren't all scared out of our wits by molesters and semi-automatic weapons and drugs and porn and stalkers and computers, we'd still remember the kind of America found in this hilarious read. It's to our shame that we can't.”

-Feliks commentary on the book. Found at Goodreads.

Let me simply posit this; to all those men (not to intentionally exclude women, but I am a man addressing myself to other men) who have made something of their life. Maybe you are a barber, a motorcycle mechanic, a car salesman, or a cook, isn’t it true? To make it in this world, you need to stretch your neck out. You need to take risks, bend the rules a little. You need to apply yourself.

Book cover from the New Adventures of the Mad Scientist club.
The cover to the book “The New Adventures of the Mad Scientist Club”. This is the sequel to the first book. It is also good, though personally, I really prefer the first book overall.

Those times when life got tough, did you go and get permission? Did you go and ask for consensus? Did you politely ask for others opinions, or did you just go out and do whatever it took to achieve your goals? Was it easy? Nope, I’ll wager that it was hard, or at least uncomfortable. You might have to make sacrifices. Right? Right???

Part of the need to accomplish these tasks were goals. These goals were like this golden orb that lay there, just out of reach that you needed to obtain. You would work towards those goals. You would keep those goals in mind while you fought and persevered. A goal might be a car. A goal might be the love of your life.

A man is nothing without a goal.

A goal might be something more honorable and important, like saving the world. As everyone can’t be an evil villain like George Soros. Or, a wealthy trillionaire like Bill Gates. Someone needs to wear the mask of a hero…

The Idols

My bedroom was decorated as any boy of my my age would have. It was festooned with models and collections of brick-a-bract and posters on the wall. I had a poster of Farah Faucett on my wall. She was smiling with this amazing smile, and her huge hair. We all had a crush on her. That as well as Loni Anderson and Rachael Welch . Look at her!

How can you not smile?

Farah Faucett was an attractive actress that was very popular in the 1970s.
Farah Faucett was every 1970s boy’s dream. Just about everyone had a poster of her on our wall or doors in our bedrooms. Farah Faucett was every boys’ dream. (Image Source.)

I had numerous posters on my wall. One was the mandatory “black light” poster on velvet. (It glowed under UV light.) One was a picture of Richie Blackmore (Deep Purple) performing a guitar solo. (I had super imposed a F-14 on it for combined imagery. After all, space and high-performance aircraft and rock n’ roll was my dream.) One was a Roger Dean poster (anyone remember the group “Yes”?).

Raquel Welch was a very popular 1960s and 1970s actress that made a big difference in the ideas of beauty and society during the 1960's and 1970's.
Raquel Welch was another popular actress that graced the bedrooms of many a boy during the 1960s and 1970s. (Image Source.)

I became a fan of Loni Anderson in her role in the television sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati”. I think many of my friends did as well. We loved her and watching her on the show was always a highlight. That and the clueless manager who ran the office.

Loni Anderson
Loni Anderson played the role of the attractive secretary in the American sitcom “WKRP in Cincinnati”.

Telephones

There were no cell phones; indeed most phones hung on the wall, and fully 50% of them had dials instead of push buttons.  Our home had two phones. One was an old Bakelite black phone from the 1920’s hidden away in the basement. I loved the feeling of it. There was a weight to it that you just couldn’t get during the 1970’s. We also had a “main” phone in the kitchen. It had an extra-long cord. My sister was always “hogging it up”. So one year they bought her a phone for her room. She still spent most of her time on the phone, it’s just that she wasn’t talking in the kitchen all day.

Sunday mornings as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s was very much a time of newspapers, coffee and hot fresh buttered rolls.
Sunday mornings were very much the same during the 1960s and 1970s. This included the children in PJ’s, the coffee, and the pets. Sunday mornings were stereotypical.(Image Source.)

In the house we wore “house clothes” also known as PJ’s, with a robe. Mother would make sure that there was always a pot of coffee brewing, and us kids would always fight over who would get to read the comics section of the paper first.  Of course, our dogs and cats merrily participated in the morning ritual. Picture above is not the ideal, it was the actual.

Global Cooling and the “Green Movement”

Global cooling
We were terrified of the global cooling. Thousands of experts were constantly informing us of the up coming global ice age that would turn Florida into a Siberian wasteland.

In our schools we would go on field trips to clean up the environment. We would go on “collection drives” to collect money for our environment, and we ended up with absolute bushels of money. (Don’t know where it all went, though…) We attended classes on the environment and school rallies to lecture us on the up-coming global cooling that would soon turn the world into a snow cone.

We were terrified!

Every cold day was a sign that the world was plunging into another great ice age. Magazines, the media, and the news all had stories about the coming cold period and the need to raise taxes to save our environment. Experts were paraded on television to teach us the need to raise taxes, and fund more research.

Global Cooling
Here’s a selection of some covers from Time Magazine during the 1970’s. The big concern was about “global cooling” and ho that taxes had to be increased to fund studies so as to stop it.

The “Love Canal” fiasco acted as a terrible “kick start” to the “environmental movement”. Americans began to wake up that we had been really abusing our environment. As such, immediate action had to be taken. And thus the government took action in the only way that it knew how…

  • It set up the EPA, and…
  • Raised taxes.

Which was the entire purpose of the decade long propaganda push; To [1] increase the size and scope of the government, and [2] to raise more taxes to go to Washington D.C..

“What’s it mean, anyway? Do 97% of #Scientists agree that the climate is changing? Actually, everyone agrees with that – that the Earth’s climate changes over time is why we had an ice age. Well, we had an ice age a long time ago. We did not have one after the #Science people promised an ice age in the 1970s. But shhhh! We’re not supposed to mention that.

Want to know what the proposed solution for the ’70s ice age that never arrived was? Give the liberal elite more money and power. Overpopulation was another big crisis in the ’70s too. It never arrived either. The solution to that was to give the liberal elite more money and power. And when they were warning us about acid rain destroying us in the ’80s? The solution to that crisis was also to give the liberal elite more money and power. The ozone hole? Yep, more of our money and power to the liberal elite. Back in the 1990s, the Al Gores of the world were warning us that we had just 10 years left to save the Earth unless … wait for it … we gave the liberal elite more money and power.

Sense some themes?

Each of these crises all had two things in common. Thing One was that none of these doomsdays ever produced the promised doom. Thing Two was that each was a demand to give the liberal elite more money and power.”

Family Meals

One of the things that I have come to appreciate the most was the family meal  that we had when I was growing up as a child. During my early childhood we would hold formal “sit down” meals in the Dining Room. Us children each had our own roles / chores in regards to this. On Sunday we would have the largest and most elaborate meals. Mealtime was the opportunity when we could all talk about our day, our hopes and dreams, and things that interested us.

At the time, I didn’t realize how important it was.

Then, during the 1970’s everything changed. Both of my parents had to work. (You can thank the American Federal Reserve for the decline in the value of the dollar that necessitated the breakup of our families.) A formal family meal was replaced with “help yourself” fix your own meals, out of a pot on the stove, or “make yourself a snack” out of the refrigerator. We would then scrounge something up, and eat it alone watching television.

Communication was via notes on the refrigerator.

Now that I am much older, I can see clearly the value of a family meal as well as a community meal. As such, I now dictatorially enforce an observance of this tradition within my own home.

Fishing with my Father

I will conclude with this little narrative of my experiences in 1971 talking about my father. He used to spend the time and take me and my siblings out to the river to fish. He had a couple of rods and a tackle box that he inherited from his (favorite) uncle. Using it, he taught me how to fish, and how to gut and clean the fish.

While it is a great memory of mine, the best part, and the part that remember most clearly is how he would drive out to the lake or stream, and we would then troop down to the area to fish. He was always on the lookout for isolated and secluded areas to fish in. He yearned for the “perfect spot”. One with deep water and plenty of overhanging limbs and trees that fish can hide in.

Oh, I would go fishing with my friends. They had an assortment of remote cabins, canoes and secret places that always provided us a great deal of pleasure. But, it was the times with my father that mattered the most to me. My friends were always up to something.

via GIPHY

I once had a friend who placed plastic sheeting on his garage floor and dumped a dump truck full of soil on it. He, at age 13, had constructed a worm farm, and he somehow had this crazy idea that he would get “filthy rich” selling worms to the local bait and tackle shops. He did actually manage to sell some. I think he might have made $5 or so. Eventually, he gave up the idea and paid some one to haul the dirt away. His dream of instant millions went bust.

I never became an expert at fishing. I was, I guess you could say, an enthusiastic hobbyist. For me, the time with my father fishing were some of the best moments of my life, and moments that I will treasure until I too, will die.

Conclusion

This was just a little narrative that I wrote about what it was like for me in 1971. It’s a far cry from the United States today. The USA today saddens me. Every time I read the news, I get either depressed or angered. There’s not really too much that I can do about the slide into open civil strife that America is plunging towards, all that I can do is take care of myself and think good thoughts.

This includes what it was like growing up as a boy.

Take Aways

  • Global Cooling was a sham designed to trick Americans into permitting a larger government and giving away more of their money.
  • There were only four television channels that we American had access to in the early 1970’s.
  • The family meal is the most important part of having a family. It is important to nurture and cultivate relationships.
  • Television shows used to focus on American culture instead of bastardized urban minority culture.
  • My favorite memories of my father was when we were fishing together.
  • 1970's living life.
    This is how we rolled. We were allowed to experience life in all it’s ugly and beautiful glory. Life is about living.

Posted On Free Republic

This article was posted on Free Republic in the chat section and collected a number of interesting comments. Many of which, I really do need to write about. Particularly what it was like for my sisters at that time, the cars that we drove, and the cultural things going on in society at that time. You can read the comments HERE.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed first draft 9OCT18.
  2. Completed 10OCT18.
  3. SEO review 10OCT18.
  4. Published 10OCT18.

A Sound of Thunder (Full Text) A Story by Ray Bradbury

This story was written right after World War II by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.

A Sound of Thunder” is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury, first published in Collier’s magazine in the June 28, 1952, issue and Bradbury’s collection The Golden Apples of the Sun in 1953.

Ray Bradberry is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”

R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “A Sound of Thunder” on the Ray Bradbury library portal in Russia, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it.

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury

The sign on the wall seemed to quaver under a film of sliding warm water. Eckels felt his eyelids blink over his stare, and the sign burned in this momentary darkness: 

TIME SAFARI, INC.
SAFARIS TO ANY YEAR IN THE PAST.
YOU NAME THE ANIMAL.
WE TAKE YOU THERE.
YOU SHOOT IT.

Warm phlegm gathered in Eckels' throat; he swallowed and pushed it down. The muscles around his mouth formed a smile as he put his hand slowly out upon the air, and in that hand waved a check for ten thousand dollars to the man behind the desk.

"Does this safari guarantee I come back alive?"

"We guarantee nothing," said the official, "except the dinosaurs." He turned. "This is Mr. Travis, your Safari Guide in the Past. He'll tell you what and where to shoot. If he says no shooting, no shooting. If you disobey instructions, there's a stiff penalty of another ten thousand dollars, plus possible government action, on your return."

Eckels glanced across the vast office at a mass and tangle, a snaking and humming of wires and steel boxes, at an aurora that flickered now orange, now silver, now blue. There was a sound like a gigantic bonfire burning all of Time, all the years and all the parchment calendars, all the hours piled high and set aflame.

A touch of the hand and this burning would, on the instant, beautifully reverse itself. Eckels remembered the wording in the advertisements to the letter. Out of chars and ashes, out of dust and coals, like golden salamanders, the old years, the green years, might leap; roses sweeten the air, white hair turn Irish-black, wrinkles vanish; all, everything fly back to seed, flee death, rush down to their beginnings, suns rise in western skies and set in glorious easts, moons eat themselves opposite to the custom, all and everything cupping one in another like Chinese boxes, rabbits into hats, all and everything returning to the fresh death, the seed death, the green death, to the time before the beginning. 

A touch of a hand might do it, the merest touch of a hand. 

"Unbelievable." Eckels breathed, the light of the Machine on his thin face. "A real Time Machine." He shook his head. "Makes you think, If the election had gone badly yesterday, I might be here now running away from the results. Thank God Keith won. He'll make a fine President of the United States." 

"Yes," said the man behind the desk. "We're lucky. If Deutscher had gotten in, we'd have the worst kind of dictatorship. There's an anti everything man for you, a militarist, anti-Christ, anti-human, anti-intellectual. People called us up, you know, joking but not joking. Said if Deutscher became President they wanted to go live in 1492. Of course it's not our business to conduct Escapes, but to form Safaris. Anyway, Keith's President now. All you got to worry about is-"

"Shooting my dinosaur," Eckels finished it for him.

"A Tyrannosaurus Rex. The Tyrant Lizard, the most incredible monster in history. Sign this release. Anything happens to you, we're not responsible. Those dinosaurs are hungry."

Eckels flushed angrily. "Trying to scare me!"

"Frankly, yes. We don't want anyone going who'll panic at the first shot. Six Safari leaders were killed last year, and a dozen hunters. We're here to give you the severest thrill a real hunter ever asked for. Traveling you back sixty million years to bag the biggest game in all of Time. Your personal check's still there. Tear it up."Mr. Eckels looked at the check. His fingers twitched.

"Good luck," said the man behind the desk. "Mr. Travis, he's all yours."

They moved silently across the room, taking their guns with them, toward the Machine, toward the silver metal and the roaring light.

First a day and then a night and then a day and then a night, then it was day-night-day-night. A week, a month, a year, a decade! A.D. 2055. A.D. 2019. 1999! 1957! Gone! The Machine roared.

They put on their oxygen helmets and tested the intercoms.

Eckels swayed on the padded seat, his face pale, his jaw stiff. He felt the trembling in his arms and he looked down and found his hands tight on the new rifle. There were four other men in the Machine. Travis, the Safari Leader, his assistant, Lesperance, and two other hunters, Billings and Kramer. They sat looking at each other, and the years blazed around them.

"Can these guns get a dinosaur cold?" Eckels felt his mouth saying.

"If you hit them right," said Travis on the helmet radio. "Some dinosaurs have two brains, one in the head, another far down the spinal column. We stay away from those. That's stretching luck. Put your first two shots into the eyes, if you can, blind them, and go back into the brain."

The Machine howled. Time was a film run backward. Suns fled and ten million moons fled after them. "Think," said Eckels. "Every hunter that ever lived would envy us today. This makes Africa seem like Illinois."

The Machine slowed; its scream fell to a murmur. The Machine stopped.

The sun stopped in the sky.

The fog that had enveloped the Machine blew away and they were in an old time, a very old time indeed, three hunters and two Safari Heads with their blue metal guns across their knees.

"Christ isn't born yet," said Travis, "Moses has not gone to the mountains to talk with God. The Pyramids are still in the earth, waiting to be cut out and put up. Remember that. Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler-none of them exists." The man nodded.

"That" - Mr. Travis pointed - "is the jungle of sixty million two thousand and fifty-five years before President Keith."

He indicated a metal path that struck off into green wilderness, over streaming swamp, among giant ferns and palms.

"And that," he said, "is the Path, laid by Time Safari for your use,

It floats six inches above the earth. Doesn't touch so much as one grass blade, flower, or tree. It's an anti-gravity metal. Its purpose is to keep you from touching this world of the past in any way. Stay on the Path. Don't go off it. I repeat. Don't go off. For any reason! If you fall off, there's a penalty. And don't shoot any animal we don't okay."

"Why?" asked Eckels.

They sat in the ancient wilderness. Far birds' cries blew on a wind, and the smell of tar and an old salt sea, moist grasses, and flowers the color of blood.

"We don't want to change the Future. We don't belong here in the Past. The government doesn't like us here. We have to pay big graft to keep our franchise. A Time Machine is finicky business. Not knowing it, we might kill an important animal, a small bird, a roach, a flower even, thus destroying an important link in a growing species."

"That's not clear," said Eckels.

"All right," Travis continued, "say we accidentally kill one mouse here. That means all the future families of this one particular mouse are destroyed, right?"

"Right"

"And all the families of the families of the families of that one mouse! With a stamp of your foot, you annihilate first one, then a dozen, then a thousand, a million, a billion possible mice!"

"So they're dead," said Eckels. "So what?"

"So what?" Travis snorted quietly. "Well, what about the foxes that'll need those mice to survive? For want of ten mice, a fox dies. For want of ten foxes a lion starves. For want of a lion, all manner of insects, vultures, infinite billions of life forms are thrown into chaos and destruction. 

Eventually it all boils down to this: fifty-nine million years later, a caveman, one of a dozen on the entire world, goes hunting wild boar or saber-toothed tiger for food. But you, friend, have stepped on all the tigers in that region. By stepping on one single mouse. So the caveman starves. And the caveman, please note, is not just any expendable man, no! He is an entire future nation. From his loins would have sprung ten sons. From their loins one hundred sons, and thus onward to a civilization. Destroy this one man, and you destroy a race, a people, an entire history of life. It is comparable to slaying some of Adam's grandchildren. The stomp of your foot, on one mouse, could start an earthquake, the effects of which could shake our earth and destinies down through Time, to their very foundations. 

With the death of that one caveman, a billion others yet unborn are throttled in the womb. Perhaps Rome never rises on its seven hills. Perhaps Europe is forever a dark forest, and only Asia waxes healthy and teeming. Step on a mouse and you crush the Pyramids. Step on a mouse and you leave your print, like a Grand Canyon, across Eternity. Queen Elizabeth might never be born, Washington might not cross the Delaware, there might never be a United States at all. So be careful. Stay on the Path. Never step off!"

"I see," said Eckels. "Then it wouldn't pay for us even to touch the grass?"

"Correct. Crushing certain plants could add up infinitesimally. A little error here would multiply in sixty million years, all out of proportion. Of course maybe our theory is wrong. Maybe Time can't be changed by us. Or maybe it can be changed only in little subtle ways. A dead mouse here makes an insect imbalance there, a population disproportion later, a bad harvest further on, a depression, mass starvation, and finally, a change in social temperament in far-flung countries. Something much more subtle, like that. Perhaps only a soft breath, a whisper, a hair, pollen on the air, such a slight, slight change that unless you looked close you wouldn't see it. Who knows? Who really can say he knows? We don't know. We're guessing. But until we do know for certain whether our messing around in Time can make a big roar or a little rustle in history, we're being careful. This Machine, this Path, your clothing and bodies, were sterilized, as you know, before the journey. We wear these oxygen helmets so we can't introduce our bacteria into an ancient atmosphere."

"How do we know which animals to shoot?"

"They're marked with red paint," said Travis. "Today, before our journey, we sent Lesperance here back with the Machine. He came to this particular era and followed certain animals."

"Studying them?"

"Right," said Lesperance. "I track them through their entire existence, noting which of them lives longest. Very few. How many times they mate. Not often. Life's short, When I find one that's going to die when a tree falls on him, or one that drowns in a tar pit, I note the exact hour, minute, and second. I shoot a paint bomb. It leaves a red patch on his side. We can't miss it. Then I correlate our arrival in the Past so that we meet the Monster not more than two minutes before he would have died anyway. This way, we kill only animals with no future, that are never going to mate again. You see how careful we are?"

"But if you come back this morning in Time," said Eckels eagerly, you must've bumped into us, our Safari! How did it turn out? Was it successful? Did all of us get through-alive?"

Travis and Lesperance gave each other a look.

"That'd be a paradox," said the latter. "Time doesn't permit that sort of mess-a man meeting himself. When such occasions threaten, Time steps aside. Like an airplane hitting an air pocket. You felt the Machine jump just before we stopped? That was us passing ourselves on the way back to the Future. We saw nothing. There's no way of telling if this expedition was a success, if we got our monster, or whether all of us - meaning you, Mr. Eckels - got out alive."

Eckels smiled palely.

"Cut that," said Travis sharply. "Everyone on his feet!"

They were ready to leave the Machine.

The jungle was high and the jungle was broad and the jungle was the entire world forever and forever. Sounds like music and sounds like flying tents filled the sky, and those were pterodactyls soaring with cavernous gray wings, gigantic bats of delirium and night fever.

Eckels, balanced on the narrow Path, aimed his rifle playfully.

"Stop that!" said Travis. "Don't even aim for fun, blast you! If your guns should go off - - "

Eckels flushed. "Where's our Tyrannosaurus?"

Lesperance checked his wristwatch. "Up ahead, We'll bisect his trail in sixty seconds. Look for the red paint! Don't shoot till we give the word. Stay on the Path. Stay on the Path!"

They moved forward in the wind of morning.

"Strange," murmured Eckels. "Up ahead, sixty million years, Election Day over. Keith made President. Everyone celebrating. And here we are, a million years lost, and they don't exist. The things we worried about for months, a lifetime, not even born or thought of yet."

"Safety catches off, everyone!" ordered Travis. "You, first shot, Eckels. Second, Billings, Third, Kramer."

"I've hunted tiger, wild boar, buffalo, elephant, but now, this is it," said Eckels. "I'm shaking like a kid."

"Ah," said Travis.

Everyone stopped.

Travis raised his hand. "Ahead," he whispered. "In the mist. There he is. There's His Royal Majesty now."

The jungle was wide and full of twitterings, rustlings, murmurs, and sighs.

Suddenly it all ceased, as if someone had shut a door.

Silence.

A sound of thunder.

Out of the mist, one hundred yards away, came Tyrannosaurus Rex.

"It," whispered Eckels. "It......

"Sh!"

It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker's claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory, and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled. And the head itself, a ton of sculptured stone, lifted easily upon the sky. Its mouth gaped, exposing a fence of teeth like daggers. Its eyes rolled, ostrich eggs, empty of all expression save hunger. It closed its mouth in a death grin. It ran, its pelvic bones crushing aside trees and bushes, its taloned feet clawing damp earth, leaving prints six inches deep wherever it settled its weight.

It ran with a gliding ballet step, far too poised and balanced for its ten tons. It moved into a sunlit area warily, its beautifully reptilian hands feeling the air.

"Why, why," Eckels twitched his mouth. "It could reach up and grab the moon."

"Sh!" Travis jerked angrily. "He hasn't seen us yet."

"It can't be killed," Eckels pronounced this verdict quietly, as if there could be no argument. He had weighed the evidence and this was his considered opinion. The rifle in his hands seemed a cap gun. "We were fools to come. This is impossible."

"Shut up!" hissed Travis.

"Nightmare."

"Turn around," commanded Travis. "Walk quietly to the Machine. We'll remit half your fee."

"I didn't realize it would be this big," said Eckels. "I miscalculated, that's all. And now I want out."

"It sees us!"

"There's the red paint on its chest!"

The Tyrant Lizard raised itself. Its armored flesh glittered like a thousand green coins. The coins, crusted with slime, steamed. In the slime, tiny insects wriggled, so that the entire body seemed to twitch and undulate, even while the monster itself did not move. It exhaled. The stink of raw flesh blew down the wilderness.

"Get me out of here," said Eckels. "It was never like this before. I was always sure I'd come through alive. I had good guides, good safaris, and safety. This time, I figured wrong. I've met my match and admit it. This is too much for me to get hold of."

"Don't run," said Lesperance. "Turn around. Hide in the Machine."

"Yes." Eckels seemed to be numb. He looked at his feet as if trying to make them move. He gave a grunt of helplessness.

"Eckels!"

He took a few steps, blinking, shuffling.

"Not that way!"

The Monster, at the first motion, lunged forward with a terrible scream. It covered one hundred yards in six seconds. The rifles jerked up and blazed fire. A windstorm from the beast's mouth engulfed them in the stench of slime and old blood. The Monster roared, teeth glittering with sun.

Eckels, not looking back, walked blindly to the edge of the Path, his gun limp in his arms, stepped off the Path, and walked, not knowing it, in the jungle. His feet sank into green moss. His legs moved him, and he felt alone and remote from the events behind.

The rifles cracked again, Their sound was lost in shriek and lizard thunder. The great level of the reptile's tail swung up, lashed sideways. Trees exploded in clouds of leaf and branch. The Monster twitched its jeweler's hands down to fondle at the men, to twist them in half, to crush them like berries, to cram them into its teeth and its screaming throat. Its boulderstone eyes leveled with the men. They saw themselves mirrored. They fired at the metallic eyelids and the blazing black iris,

Like a stone idol, like a mountain avalanche, Tyrannosaurus fell.

Thundering, it clutched trees, pulled them with it. It wrenched and tore the metal Path. The men flung themselves back and away. The body hit, ten tons of cold flesh and stone. The guns fired. The Monster lashed its armored tail, twitched its snake jaws, and lay still. A fount of blood spurted from its throat. Somewhere inside, a sac of fluids burst. Sickening gushes drenched the hunters. They stood, red and glistening.

The thunder faded.

The jungle was silent. After the avalanche, a green peace. After the nightmare, morning.

Billings and Kramer sat on the pathway and threw up. Travis and Lesperance stood with smoking rifles, cursing steadily. In the Time Machine, on his face, Eckels lay shivering. He had found his way back to the Path, climbed into the Machine.

Travis came walking, glanced at Eckels, took cotton gauze from a metal box, and returned to the others, who were sitting on the Path.

"Clean up."

They wiped the blood from their helmets. They began to curse too. The Monster lay, a hill of solid flesh. Within, you could hear the sighs and murmurs as the furthest chambers of it died, the organs malfunctioning, liquids running a final instant from pocket to sac to spleen, everything shutting off, closing up forever. It was like standing by a wrecked locomotive or a steam shovel at quitting time, all valves being released or levered tight. Bones cracked; the tonnage of its own flesh, off balance, dead weight, snapped the delicate forearms, caught underneath. The meat settled, quivering.

Another cracking sound. Overhead, a gigantic tree branch broke from its heavy mooring, fell. It crashed upon the dead beast with finality.

"There." Lesperance checked his watch. "Right on time. That's the giant tree that was scheduled to fall and kill this animal originally." He glanced at the two hunters. "You want the trophy picture?"

"What?"

"We can't take a trophy back to the Future. The body has to stay right here where it would have died originally, so the insects, birds, and bacteria can get at it, as they were intended to. Everything in balance. The body stays. But we can take a picture of you standing near it."

The two men tried to think, but gave up, shaking their heads.

They let themselves be led along the metal Path. They sank wearily into the Machine cushions. They gazed back at the ruined Monster, the stagnating mound, where already strange reptilian birds and golden insects were busy at the steaming armor. A sound on the floor of the Time Machine stiffened them. Eckels sat there, shivering.

"I'm sorry," he said at last.

"Get up!" cried Travis.

Eckels got up.

"Go out on that Path alone," said Travis. He had his rifle pointed, "You're not coming back in the Machine. We're leaving you here!"

Lesperance seized Travis's arm. "Wait-"

"Stay out of this!" Travis shook his hand away. "This fool nearly killed us. But it isn't that so much, no. It's his shoes! Look at them! He ran off the Path. That ruins us! We'll forfeit! Thousands of dollars of insurance! We guarantee no one leaves the Path. He left it. Oh, the fool! I'll have to report to the government. They might revoke our license to travel. Who knows what he's done to Time, to History!"

"Take it easy, all he did was kick up some dirt."

"How do we know?" cried Travis. "We don't know anything! It's all a mystery! Get out of here, Eckels!"

Eckels fumbled his shirt. "I'll pay anything. A hundred thousand dollars!"

Travis glared at Eckels' checkbook and spat. "Go out there. The Monster's next to the Path. Stick your arms up to your elbows in his mouth. Then you can come back with us."

"That's unreasonable!"

"The Monster's dead, you idiot. The bullets! The bullets can't be left behind. They don't belong in the Past; they might change anything. Here's my knife. Dig them out!"

The jungle was alive again, full of the old tremorings and bird cries. Eckels turned slowly to regard the primeval garbage dump, that hill of nightmares and terror. After a long time, like a sleepwalker he shuffled out along the Path.

He returned, shuddering, five minutes later, his arms soaked and red to the elbows. He held out his hands. Each held a number of steel bullets. Then he fell. He lay where he fell, not moving.

"You didn't have to make him do that," said Lesperance.

"Didn't I? It's too early to tell." Travis nudged the still body. "He'll live. Next time he won't go hunting game like this. Okay." He jerked his thumb wearily at Lesperance. "Switch on. Let's go home."

1492. 1776. 1812.

They cleaned their hands and faces. They changed their caking shirts and pants. Eckels was up and around again, not speaking. Travis glared at him for a full ten minutes.

"Don't look at me," cried Eckels. "I haven't done anything."

"Who can tell?"

"Just ran off the Path, that's all, a little mud on my shoes-what do you want me to do-get down and pray?"

"We might need it. I'm warning you, Eckels, I might kill you yet. I've got my gun ready."

"I'm innocent. I've done nothing!"

1999.2000.2055.

The Machine stopped.

"Get out," said Travis.

The room was there as they had left it. But not the same as they had left it. The same man sat behind the same desk. But the same man did not quite sit behind the same desk. Travis looked around swiftly. "Everything okay here?" he snapped.

"Fine. Welcome home!"

Travis did not relax. He seemed to be looking through the one high window.

"Okay, Eckels, get out. Don't ever come back." Eckels could not move.

"You heard me," said Travis. "What're you staring at?"

Eckels stood smelling of the air, and there was a thing to the air, a chemical taint so subtle, so slight, that only a faint cry of his subliminal senses warned him it was there. The colors, white, gray, blue, orange, in the wall, in the furniture, in the sky beyond the window, were . . . were . . . . And there was a feel. His flesh twitched. His hands twitched. He stood drinking the oddness with the pores of his body. Somewhere, someone must have been screaming one of those whistles that only a dog can hear. His body screamed silence in return. Beyond this room, beyond this wall, beyond this man who was not quite the same man seated at this desk that was not quite the same desk . . . lay an entire world of streets and people. What sort of world it was now, there was no telling. He could feel them moving there, beyond the walls, almost, like so many chess pieces blown in a dry wind ....

But the immediate thing was the sign painted on the office wall, the same sign he had read earlier today on first entering. Somehow, the sign had changed:

TYME SEFARI INC.
SEFARIS TU ANY YEER EN THE PAST.
YU NAIM THE ANIMALL.
WEE TAEK YU THAIR.
YU SHOOT ITT.

Eckels felt himself fall into a chair. He fumbled crazily at the thick slime on his boots. He held up a clod of dirt, trembling, "No, it can't be. Not a little thing like that. No!"

Embedded in the mud, glistening green and gold and black, was a butterfly, very beautiful and very dead.

"Not a little thing like that! Not a butterfly!" cried Eckels.

It fell to the floor, an exquisite thing, a small thing that could upset balances and knock down a line of small dominoes and then big dominoes and then gigantic dominoes, all down the years across Time. Eckels' mind whirled. It couldn't change things. Killing one butterfly couldn't be that important! Could it?

His face was cold. His mouth trembled, asking: "Who - who won the presidential election yesterday?"

The man behind the desk laughed. "You joking? You know very well. Deutscher, of course! Who else? Not that fool weakling Keith. We got an iron man now, a man with guts!" The official stopped. "What's wrong?"

Eckels moaned. He dropped to his knees. He scrabbled at the golden butterfly with shaking fingers. "Can't we," he pleaded to the world, to himself, to the officials, to the Machine, "can't we take it back, can't we make it alive again? Can't we start over? Can't we-"

He did not move. Eyes shut, he waited, shivering. He heard Travis breathe loud in the room; he heard Travis shift his rifle, click the safety catch, and raise the weapon.

There was a sound of thunder.

Comments

And that was that.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 27SEP18.
  2. Completed 30SEP18.
  3. SEO review 1OCT18.

Kaleidoscope (Full Text) A Story by Ray Bradbury

This story was written right after World War II by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.

“Kaleidoscope” is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury. It describes the last few moments of a space ship crew that survives a terrible explosion in space.

Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

Introduction

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “Kaleidoscope” on the “Scary for Kids” website, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the “Scary for Kids” website for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it themselves.

Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury

The first concussion cut the rocket up the side with a giant can opener. The men were thrown into space like a dozen wriggling silverfish. They were scattered into a dark sea; and the ship, in a million pieces, went on, a meteor swarm seeking a lost sun.

“Barkley, Barkley, where are you?”

The sound of voices calling like lost children on a cold night

“Woode, Woode!”

“Captain!”

“Hollis, Hollis, this is Stone.”

“Stone, this is Hollis. Where are you?”

“I don’t know. How can I? Which way is up? I’m falling. Good God, I’m falling.”

They fell. They fell as pebbles fall down wells. They were scattered as jackstones are scattered from a gigantic throw. And now instead of men there were only voices-all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation.

“We’re going away from each other.”

This was true. Hollis, swinging head over heels, knew this was true. He knew it with a vague acceptance. They were parting to go their separate ways, and nothing could bring them back. They were wearing their sealed-tight space suits with the glass tubes over their pale faces, but they hadn’t had time to lock on their force units. With them they could be small lifeboats in space, saving themselves, saving others, collecting together, finding each other until they were an island of men with some plan. But without the force units snapped to their shoulders they were meteors, senseless, each going to a separate and irrevocable fate.

A period of perhaps ten minutes elapsed while the first terror died and a metallic calm took its place. Space began to weave its strange voices in and out, on a great dark loom, crossing, recrossing, making a final pattern.

“Stone to Hollis. How long can we talk by phone?”

“It depends on how fast you’re going your way and I’m going mine.”

“An hour, I make it.”

“That should do it,” said Hollis, abstracted and quiet.

“What happened?” said Hollis a minute later.

“The rocket blew up, that’s all. Rockets do blow up.”

“Which way are you going?”

“It looks like I’ll hit the moon.”

“It’s Earth for me. Back to old Mother Earth at ten thousand miles per hour. I’ll burn like a match.” Hollis thought of it with a queer abstraction of mind. He seemed to be removed from his body, watching it fall down and down through space, as objective as he had been in regard to the first falling snowflakes of a winter season long gone.

The others were silent, thinking of the destiny that had brought them to this, falling, falling, and nothing they could do to change it. Even the captain was quiet, for there was no command or plan he knew that could put things back together again.

“Oh, it’s a long way down. Oh, if s a long way down, a long, long, long way down,” said a voice. “I don’t want to die, I don’t want to die, if s a long way down.”

“Who’s that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Stimson, I think. Stimson, is that you?”

“It’s a long, long way and I don’t like it. Oh, God, I don’t like it.”

“Stimson, this is Hollis. Stimson, you hear me?”

A pause while they fell separate from one another.

“Stimson?”

“Yes.” He replied at last.

“Stimson, take it easy; we’re all in the same fix.”

“I don’t want to be here. I want to be somewhere else.”

“There’s a chance we’ll be found.”

“I must be, I must be,” said Stimson. “I don’t believe this; I don’t believe any of this is happening.”

“It’ s a bad dream,” said someone.

“Shut up!” said Hollis.

“Come and make me,” said the voice. It was Applegate. He laughed easily, with a similar objectivity. “Come and shut me up.”

Hollis for the first time felt the impossibility of his position. A great anger filled him, for he wanted more than anything at this moment to be able to do something to Applegate. He had wanted for many years to do something and now it was too late. Applegate was only a telephonic voice.

Falling, falling, falling…

Now, as if they had discovered the horror, two of the men began to scream. In a nightmare Hollis saw one of them float by, very near, screaming and screaming.

“Stop it!” The man was almost at his fingertips, screaming insanely. He would never stop. He would go on screaming for a million miles, as long as he was in radio range, disturbing all of them, making it impossible for them to talk to one another.

Hollis reached out. It was best this way. He made the extra effort and touched the man. He grasped the man’s ankle and pulled himself up along the body until he reached the head. The man screamed and clawed frantically, like a drowning swimmer. The screaming filled the universe.

One way or the other, thought Hollis. The moon or Earth or meteors will kill him, so why not now?

He smashed the man’s glass mask with his iron fist. The screaming stopped. He pushed off from the body and let it spin away on its own course, falling.

Falling, falling down space Hollis and the rest of them went in the long, endless dropping and whirling of silence.

“Hollis, you still there?”

Hollis did not speak, but felt the rush of heat in his face.

“This is Applegate again.”

“All right, Applegate.”

“Let’s talk. We haven’t anything else to do.”

The captain cut in. “That’s enough of that. We’ve got to figure a way out of this.”

“Captain, why don’t you shut up?” said Applegate.

“What!”

“You heard me, Captain. Don’t pull your rank on me, you’re ten thousand miles away by now, and let’s s not kid ourselves. As Stimson puts it, it’s a long way down.”

“See here, Applegate!”

“Can it. This is a mutiny of one. I haven’t a damn thing to lose. Your ship was a bad ship and you were a bad captain and I hope you break when you hit the Moon.”

“I’m ordering you to stop!”

“Go on, order me again.” Applegate smiled across ten thousand miles. The captain was silent. Applegate continued, “Where were we, Hollis? Oh yes, I remember. I hate you too. But you know that. You’ve known it for a long time.”

Hollis clenched his fists, helplessly.

“I want to tell you something,” said Applegate. “Make you happy. I was the one who blackballed you with the Rocket Company five years ago.”

A meteor flashed by. Hollis looked down and his left hand was gone. Blood spurted. Suddenly there was no air in his suit He had enough air in his lungs to move his right hand over and twist a knob at his left elbow, tightening the joint and sealing the leak. It had happened so quickly that he was not surprised. Nothing surprised him any more. The air in the suit came back to normal in an instant now that the leak was sealed. And the blood that had flowed so swiftly was pressured as he fastened the knob yet tighter, until it made a tourniquet.

All of this took place in a terrible silence on his part. And the other men chatted. That one man, Lespere, went on and on with his talk about his wife on Mars, his wife on Venus, his wife on Jupiter, his money, his wondrous times, his drunkenness, his gambling, his happiness. On and on, while they all fell. Lespere reminisced on the past, happy, while he fell to his death.

It was so very odd. Space, thousands of miles of space, and these voices vibrating in the center of it. No one visible at all, and only the radio waves quivering and trying to quicken other men into emotion.

“Are you angry, Hollis?”

“No.” And he was not. The abstraction has returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere.

“You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. You always wondered what happened. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.”

“That isn’t important,” said Hollis. And it was not. It was gone. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out, “There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one,” the film burned to a cinder, the screen went dark.

From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived? Did life seem that short, indeed, over and done before you took a breath? Did it seem this abrupt and impossible to everyone, or only to himself, here, now, with a few hours left to him for thought and deliberation?

One of the other men, Lespere, was talking. “Well, I had me a good time: I had a wife on Mars, Venus, and Jupiter. Each of them had money and treated me swell. I got drunk and once I gambled away twenty thousand dollars.”

But you’re here now, thought Hollis. I didn’t have any of those things. When I was living I was jealous of you, Lespere; when I had another day ahead of me I envied you your women and your good times. Women frightened me and I went into space, always wanting them and jealous of you for having them, and money, and as much happiness as you could have in your own wild way. But now, falling here, with everything over, I’m not jealous of you any more, because if s over for you as it is for me, and right now if s like it never was. Hollis craned his face forward and shouted into the telephone. “If s all over, Lespere!”

Silence.

“If s just as if it never was, Lespere!”

“Who’s that?” Lespere’s faltering voice.

“This is Hollis.”

He was being mean. He felt the meanness, the senseless meanness of dying. Applegate had hurt him; now he wanted to hurt another. Applegate and space had both wounded him.

“You’re out here, Lespere. If s all over. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?”

“No.”

“When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? Now is what counts. Is it any better? Is it?”

“Yes, it’s better!”

“How!”

“Because I got my thoughts, I remember!” cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.

And he was right. With a feeling of cold water rushing through his head and body, Hollis knew he was right. There were differences between memories and dreams. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision.

“What good does it do you?” he cried to Lespere. “Now? When a thing’s over it’s not good any more. You’re no better off than I.”

“I’m resting easy,” said Lespere. “I’ve had my turn. I’m not getting mean at the end, like you.”

“Mean?” Hollis turned the word on his tongue. He had never been mean, as long as he could remember, in his life. He had never dared to be mean. He must have saved it all of these years for such a time as this. “Mean.” He rolled the word into the back of his mind. He felt tears start into his eyes and roll down his face. Someone must have heard his gasping voice.

‘Take it easy, Hollis.”

It was, of course, ridiculous. Only a minute before he had been giving advice to others, to Stimson; he had felt a braveness which he had thought to be the genuine thing, and now he knew that it had been nothing but shock and the objectivity possible in shock. Now he was trying to pack a lifetime of suppressed emotion into an interval of minutes.

“I know how you feel, Hollis,” said Lespere, now twenty thousand miles away, his voice fading. “I don’t take it personally.”

But aren’t we equal? he wondered. Lespere and I? Here, now? If a thing’s over, if s done, and what good is it? You die anyway. But he knew he was rationalizing, for it was like trying to tell the difference between a live man and a corpse. There was a spark in one, and not in the other – an aura, a mysterious element.

So it was with Lespere and himself; Lespere had lived a good full life, and it made him a different man now, and he, Hollis, had been as good as dead for many years. They came to death by separate paths and, in all likelihood, if there were lands of death, their kinds would be as different as night from day. The quality of death, like that of life, must be of an infinite variety, and if one has already died once, then what was there to look for in dying for good and all, as he was now?

It was a second later that he discovered his right foot was cut sheer away. It almost made him laugh. The air was gone from his suit again. He bent quickly, and there was blood, and the meteor had taken flesh and suit away to the ankle. Oh, death in space was most humorous. It cut you away, piece by piece, like a black and invisible butcher. He tightened the valve at the knee, his head whirling into pain, fighting to remain aware, and with the valve tightened, the blood retained, the air kept, he straightened op and went on falling, falling, for that was all there was left to do.

“Hollis?”

Hollis nodded sleepily, tired of waiting for death.

“This is Applegate again,” said the voice.

“Yes.”

‘I’ve had time to think. I listened to you. This isn’t good. It makes us bad. This is a bad way to die. It brings all the bile out. You listening, Hollis?”

“Yes.”

“I lied. A minute ago. I lied. I didn’t blackball you. I don’t know why I said that. Guess I wanted to hurt you. You seemed the one to hurt. We’ve always fought Guess I’m getting old fast and repenting fast I guess listening to you be mean made me ashamed. Whatever the reason, I want you to know I was an idiot too. There’s not an ounce of truth in what I said. To hell with you.”

Hollis felt his heart begin to work again. It seemed as if it hadn’t worked for five minutes, but now all of his limbs began to take color and warmth. The shock was over, and the successive shocks of anger and terror and loneliness were passing. He felt like a man emerging from a cold shower in the morning, ready for breakfast and a new day.

“Thanks, Applegate.”

“Don’t mention it. Up your nose, you bastard.”

“Hey,” said Stone.

“What?” Hollis called across space; for Stone, of all of them, was a good friend.

“I’ve got myself into a meteor swarm, some little asteroids.”

“Meteors?”

“I think it’s the Myrmidone cluster that goes out past Mars and in toward Earth once every five years. I’m right in the middle. If s like a big kaleidoscope. You get all kinds of colors and shapes and sizes. God, if s beautiful, all that metal.”

Silence.

“I’m going with them,” said Stone. “They’re taking me off with them. I’ll be damned.” He laughed.

Hollis looked to see, but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires. There was a kind of wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the meteor swarm, out past Mars for years and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet’s ken for the next million centuries. Stone and the Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the kaleidoscope colors when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and gave it a twirl.

“So long, Hollis.” Stone’s voice, very faint now. “So long.”

“Good luck,” shouted Hollis across thirty thousand miles.

“Don’t be funny,” said Stone, and was gone.

The stars closed in.

Now all the voices were fading, each on his own trajectory, some to Mars, others into farthest space. And Hollis himself… He looked down. He, of all the others, was going back to Earth alone.

“So long.”

“Take it easy.”

“So long, Hollis.” That was Applegate.

The many good-bys. The short farewells. And now the great loose brain was disintegrating. The components of the brain which had worked so beautifully and efficiently in the skull case of the rocket ship firing through space were dying one by one; the meaning of their life together was falling apart. And as a body dies when the brain ceases functioning, so the spirit of the ship and their long time together and what they meant to one another was dying. Applegate was now no more than a finger blown from the parent body, no longer to be despised and worked against. The brain was exploded, and the senseless, useless fragments of it were far scattered. The voices faded and now all of space was silent. Hollis was alone, falling.

They were all alone. Their voices had died like echoes of the words of God spoken and vibrating in the starred deep. There went the captain to the Moon; there Stone with the meteor swarm; there Stimson; there Applegate toward Pluto; there Smith and Turner and Underwood and all the rest, the shards of the kaleidoscope that had formed a thinking pattern for so long, hurled apart.

And I? thought Hollis. What can I do? Is there anything I can do now to make up for a terrible and empty life? If only I could do one good thing to make up for the meanness I collected all these years and didn’t even know was in me! But there’s no one here but myself, and how can you do good all alone? You can’t. Tomorrow night I’ll hit Earth s atmosphere.

I’ll burn, he thought, and be scattered in ashes all over the continental lands. I’ll be put to use. Just a little bit, but ashes are ashes and they’ll add to the land.

He fell swiftly, like a bullet, like a pebble, like an iron weight, objective, objective all of the time now, not sad or happy or anything, but only wishing he could do a good thing now that everything was gone, a good thing for just himself to know about.

When I hit the atmosphere, I’ll burn like a meteor.

“I wonder,” he said, “if anyone’ll see me?”

The small boy on the country road looked up and screamed. “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!”

The blazing white star fell down the sky of dusk in Illinois. “Make a wish,” said his mother. “Make a wish.”

Comments

I really enjoyed this story. It’s a little sad when we know that people have died in space and that space is really very unforgiving. If the reader enjoyed this story, then I would suggest reading “The cold equations”.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Released 28SEP18.

Dark They Were and Golden Eyed (Full Text) by Ray Bradbury

This story was written right after World War II by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.

“Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury. It was originally published in the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in August 1949, under the title “The Naming of Names”. It was subsequently included in the short-story collections A Medicine for Melancholy and S is for Space. The story takes place in the near future on Mars, as is the case with many of Bradbury’s stories.

Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”

R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “Dark they were and Golden Eyed” on the Ray Bradbury library portal in Russia, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it themselves.

Dark They were, And Golden Eyed (The Naming of Names).

By Ray Bradbury

The rocket's metal cooled in the meadow winds. Its lid gave a bulging pop. From its clock interior stepped a man, a woman, and three children. The other passengers whispered away across the Martian meadow, leaving the man alone among his family.

The man felt his hair flutter and the tissues of his body draw tight as if he were standing at the centre of a vacuum. His wife, before him, trembled. The children, small seeds, might at any instant be sown to all the Martian climes. The children looked up at him. His face was cold. "What's wrong?" asked his wife. "Let's get back on the rocket." "Go back to Earth?" "Yes! Listen!"

The wind blew, whining. At any moment the Martian air might draw his soul from him, as marrow comes from a white bone.

He looked at Martian hills that time had worn with a crushing pressure of years. He saw the old cities, lost and lying like children's delicate bones among the blowing lakes of grass.

"Chin up, Harry," said his wife. "It's too late. We've come at least sixty-five million miles or more."

The children with their yellow hair hollered at the deep dome of Martian sky. There was no answer but the racing hiss of wind through the stiff grass.

He picked up the luggage in his cold hands. "Here we go," he said - a man standing on the edge of a sea, ready to wade in and be drowned.

They walked into town.

Their name was Bittering. Harry and his wife Cora; Tim, Laura, and David. They built a small white cottage and ate good breakfasts there, but the fear was never gone. It lay with Mr.Bittering and Mrs.Bittering, a third unbidden partner at every midnight talk, at every dawn awakening.

"I feel like a salt crystal," he often said, "in a mountain stream, being washed away. We don't belong here. We're Earth people. This is Mars. It was meant for Martians. For heaven's sake, Cora, let's buy tickets for home!"

But she only shook her head. "One day the atom bomb will fix Earth. Then we'll be safe here." "Safe and insane!"

Tick-took, seven o'clock sang the voice clock; time to get up. And they did.

Something made him check everything each morning - warm hearth, potted blood-geraniums - precisely as if he expected something to be amiss. The morning paper was toast-warm from the six a.m. Earth rocket. He broke its seal and tilted it at his breakfast plate. He forced himself to be convivial.

"Colonial days all over again," he declared. "Why, in another year there'll be a million Earthmen on Mars. Big cities, everything! They said we'd fail. Said the Martians would resent our invasion. But did we find any Martians? Not a living soul! Oh, we found their empty cities, but no one in them. Right?"

A river of wind submerged the house. When the windows ceased rattling, Mr.Bittering swallowed and looked at the children.

"I don't know," said David. "Maybe there're Martians around we don't see. Sometimes nights I think I hear 'em. I hear the wind. The sand hits my window. I get scared. And I see those towns way up in the mountains where the Martians lived a long ago. And I think I see things moving around those towns, Papa. And I wonder if those Martians mind us living here. I wonder if they won't do something to us for coming here."

"Nonsense!" Mr.Bittering looked out of the windows. "We're clean, decent people." He looked at his children. "All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean." He stared at the hills. "You see a staircase and you wonder what Martians looked like climbing it. You see Martian paintings and you wonder what the painter was like. You make a little ghost in your mind, a memory. It's quite natural. Imagination." He stopped. "You haven't been prowling up in those ruins, have you?"

"No, Papa." David looked at his shoes.

"See that you stay away from them. Pass the jam."

"Just the same," said little David, "I bet something happens."

Something happened that afternoon.

Laura stumbled through the settlement, crying. She dashed blindly on to the porch.

"Mother, Father - the war, Earth!" she sobbed. "A radio flash just came. Atom bombs hit New York! All the space rockets blown up. No more rockets to Mars, ever!"

"Oh, Harry!" The mother held on to her husband and daughter.

"Are you sure, Laura?" asked the father quietly.

Laura wept. "We're stranded on Mars, for ever and ever!"

For a long time there was only the sound of the wind in the late afternoon.

Alone, thought Bittering. Only a thousand of us here. No way back. No way. No way. Sweat poured from his face and his hands and his body; he was drenched in the hot-ness of his fear. He wanted to strike Laura, cry, "No, you're lying! The rockets will come back!" Instead, he stroked Laura's head against him and said, "The rockets will get through, some day."

"In five years maybe. It takes that long to build one. Father, Father, what will we do?"

"Go about our business, of course. Raise crops and children. Wait. Keep things going until the war ends and the rockets come again."

The two boys stepped out on to the porch. "Children," he said, sitting there, looking beyond them, "I've something to tell you." "We know," they said.

Bittering wandered into the garden to stand alone in his fear. As long as the rockets had spun a silver web across space, he had been able to accept Mars. For he had always told himself: 'Tomorrow, if I want, I can buy a ticket and go back to Earth.'

But now: the web gone, the rockets lying in jigsaw heaps of molten girder and unsnaked wire. Earth people left to the strangeness of Mars, the cinnamon dusts and wine airs, to be baked like gingerbread shapes in Martian summers, put into harvested storage by Martian winters. What would happen to him, the others? This was the moment Mars had waited for. Now it would eat them.

He got down on his knees in the flower bed, a spade in his nervous hands. Work, he thought, work and forget.

He glanced up from the garden to the Martian mountains. He thought of the proud old Martian names that had once been on those peaks. Earthmen, dropping from the sky, had gazed upon hills, rivers, Martian seas left nameless in spite of names. Once Martians had built cities, named cities; climbed mountains, named mountains; sailed seas, named seas. Mountains melted, seas drained, cities tumbled. In spite of this, the Earthmen had felt a silent guilt at putting new names to these ancient hills and valleys.

Nevertheless, man lives by symbol and label. The names were given.

Mr.Bittering felt very alone in his garden under the Martian sun, bent here, planting Earth flowers in a wild soil.

Think. Keep thinking. Different things. Keep your mind free of Earth, the atom war, the lost rockets.

He perspired. He glanced about. No one watching. He removed his tie. Pretty bold, he thought. First your coat off, now your tie. He hung it neatly on a peach tree he had imported as a sapling from Massachusetts.

He returned to his philosophy of names and mountains. The Earthmen had changed names. Now there were Hormel Valleys, Roosevelt Seas, Ford Hills, Vanderbilt Plateaus, Rockefeller Rivers, on Mars. It wasn't right. The American settlers had shown wisdom, using old Indian prairie names: Wisconsin, Minnesota, Idaho, Ohio, Utah, Milwaukee, Waukegan, Osseo. The old names, the old meanings.

Staring at the mountains wildly he thought: 'Are you up there? All the dead ones, you Martians? Well, here we are, alone, cut off! Come down, move us out! We're helpless!'

The wind blew a shower of peach blossoms.

He put out his sun-browned hand, gave a small cry. He touched the blossoms, picked them up. He turned them, be touched them again and again. Then he shouted for his wife.

"Cora!"

She appeared at a window. He ran to her.

"Cora, these blossoms!"

She handled them.

"Do you see? They're different. They've changed! They're not peach blossoms any more!"

"Look all right to me," she said.

"They're not. They're wrong! I can't tell how. An extra petal, a leaf, something, the colour, the smell!"

The children ran out in time to see their father hurrying about the garden, pulling up radishes, onions, and carrots from their beds.

"Cora, come look!

They handled the onions, the radishes, the carrots among them.

"Do they look like carrots?"

"Yes... No." She hesitated. "I don't know."

"They're changed."

"Perhaps."

"You know they have! Onions but not onions, carrots but not carrots. Taste: the same but different. Smell: not like it used to be." He felt his heart pounding, and he was afraid. He dug his fingers into the earth. "Cora, what's happening? What is it? We've got to get away from this." He ran across the garden. Each tree felt his touch. "The roses. The roses. They're turning green!"

And they stood looking at the green roses.

And two days later, Tim came running. "Come see the cow. I was milking her and I saw it. Come on!"

They stood in the shed and looked at their one cow.

It was growing a third horn.

And the lawn in front of their house very quietly and slowly was colouring itself, like spring violets. Seed from Earth but growing up a soft purple.

"We must get away," said Bittering. "We'll eat this stuff and then we'll change - who knows to what. I can't let it happen. There's only one thing to do. Burn this food!"

"It's not poisoned."

"But it is. Subtly, very subtly. A little bit. A very little bit. We mustn't touch it."

He looked with dismay at their house. "Even the house. The wind's done something to it. The air's burned it. The fog at night. The boards, all warped out of shape. It's not an Earthman's house any more."

"Oh, your imagination!"

He put on his coat and tie. "I'm going into town. We've got to do something now. I'll be back."

"Wait, Harry!" his wife cried.

But he was gone.

In town, on the shadowy step of the grocery store, the men sat with their hands on their knees, conversing with great leisure and ease.

Mr.Bittering wanted to fire a pistol in the air.

What are you doing, you fools! he thought. Sitting here! You've heard the news - we're stranded on this planet. Well, move! Aren't you frightened? Aren't you afraid? What are you going to do?

"Hello, Harry," said everyone.

"Look," he said to them. "You did hear the news, the other day, didn't you?"

They nodded and laughed. "Sure. Sure, Harry."

"What are you going to do about it?"

"Do, Harry, do? What can we do?"

"Build a rocket, that's what!"

"A rocket, Harry? To go back to all that trouble? Oh, Harry!"

"But you must want to go back. Have you noticed the peach blossoms, the onions, the grass?"

"Why, yes, Harry, seems we did," said one of the men.

"Doesn't it scare you?"

"Can't recall that it did much, Harry."

"Idiots!"

"Now, Harry."

Bittering wanted to cry. "You've got to work with me. If we stay here, we'll all change. The air. Don't you smell it? Something in the air. A Martian virus, maybe; some seed, or a pollen. Listen to me!"

They stared at him.

"Sam," he said to one of them.

"Yes, Harry?"

"Will you help me build a rocket?"

"Harry, I got a whole load of metal and some blueprints. You want to work in my metal shop, on a rocket, you're welcome. I'll sell you that metal for five hundred dollars. You should be able to construct a right pretty rocket if you work alone, in about thirty years."

Everyone laughed.

"Don't laugh."

Sam looked at him with quiet good humour.

"Sam," Bittering said. "Your eyes -"

"What about them, Harry?"

"Didn't they used to be grey?"

"Well, now, I don't remember."

"They were, weren't they?"

"Why do you ask, Harry?"

"Because now they're kind of yellow-coloured."

"Is that so, Harry?" Sam said, casually.

"And you're taller and thinner -"

"You might be right, Harry."

"Sam, you shouldn't have yellow eyes."

"Harry, what colour eyes have you got?" Sam said.

"My eyes? They're blue, of course."

"Here you are, Harry." Sam handed him a pocket mirror. "Take a look at yourself."

Mr.Bittering hesitated, and then raised the mirror to his face.

There were little, very dim flecks of new gold captured in the blue of his eyes.

"Now look what you've done," said Sam, a moment later. "You've broken my mirror."

Harry Bittering moved into the metal shop and began to build the rocket. Men stood in the open door and talked and joked without raising their voices. Once in a while they gave him a hand on lifting something. But mostly they just idled and watched him with their yellowing eyes.

"It's supper-time, Harry," they said.

His wife appeared with his supper in a wicker basket.

"I won't touch it," he said. "I'll eat only food from our deepfreeze. Food that came from Earth. Nothing from our garden."

His wife stood watching him. "You can't build a rocket."

"I worked in a shop once, when I was twenty. I know metal. Once I get it started, the others will help," he said, not looking at her, laying out the blueprints.

"Harry, Harry," she said, helplessly.

"We've got to get away, Cora. We've got to!"

The nights were full of wind that blew down the empty moonlit sea-meadows past the little white chess cities lying for their twelve-thousandth year in the shallows. In the Earthmen's settlement, the Bittering house shook with a feeling of change.

Lying abed, Mr.Bittering felt his bones shifted, shaped, melted like gold. His wife, lying beside him, was dark from many sunny afternoons. Dark she was, and golden, burnt almost black by the sun, sleeping, and the children metallic in their beds, and the wind roaring forlorn and changing through the old peach trees, violet grass, shaking out green rose petals.

The fear would not be stopped. It had his throat and heart. It dripped in a wetness of the arm and the temple and the trembling palm.

A green star rose in the east.

A strange word emerged from Mr.Bittering's lips.

"Iorrt. Iorrt." He repeated it.

It was a Martian word. He knew no Martian.

In the middle of the night he arose and dialled a call through to Simpson, the archaeologist.

"Simpson, what does the word 'Iorrt' mean?"

"Why that's the old Martian word for our planet Earth. Why?"

"No special reason."

The telephone slipped from his hand.

"Hello, hello, hello, hello," it kept saying while he sat gazing out at the green star. "Bittering? Harry, are you there?"

The days were full of metal sound. He laid the frame of the rocket with the reluctant help of three indifferent men. He grew very tired in an hour or so and had to sit down.

"The altitude," laughed a man.

"Are you eating, Harry?" asked another.

"I'm eating," he said, angrily,

"From your deep-freeze?"

"Yes!"

"You're getting thinner, Harry."

"I'm not!"

"And taller."

"Liar!"

His wife took him aside a few days later. "Harry, I've used up all the food in the deep-freeze. There's nothing left. I'll have to make sandwiches using food grown on Mars."

He sat down heavily.

"You must eat," she said. "You're weak."

"Yes," he said.

He took a sandwich, opened it, looked at it, and began to nibble at it.

"And take the rest of the day off," she said. "It's hot. The children want to swim in the canals and hike. Please come along."

"I can't waste time. This is a crisis!" "Just for an hour," she urged. "A swim'll do you good." He rose, sweating. "All right, all right. Leave me alone. I'll come."

"Good for you, Harry."

The sun was hot, the day quiet. There was only an immense staring burn upon the land. They moved along the canal, the father, the mother, the racing children in their swimsuits. They stopped and ate meat sandwiches. He saw their skin baking brown. And he saw the yellow eyes of his wife and his children, their eyes that were never yellow before. A few tremblings shook him, but were carried off in waves of pleasant heat as he lay in the sun. He was too tired to be afraid.

"Cora, how long have your eyes been yellow?" She was bewildered. "Always, I guess." "They didn't change from brown in the last three months?"

She bit her lips. "No. Why do you ask?" "Nevermind." They sat there.

"The children's eyes," he said. "They're yellow, too." "Sometimes growing children's eyes change colour." "Maybe we're children, too. At least to Mars. That's a thought." He laughed. "Think I'll swim."

They leaped into the canal water, and he let himself sink down and down to the bottom like a golden statue and lie there in green silence. All was water, quiet and deep, all was peace. He felt the steady, slow current drift him easily.

If I lie here long enough, he thought, the water will work and eat away my flesh until the bones show like coral. Just my skeleton left. And then the water can build on that skeleton - green things, deep-water things, red things, yellow things. Change. Change. Slow, deep, silent change. And isn't that what it is up there!

He saw the sky submerged above him, the sun made Martian by atmosphere and time and space.

Up there, a big river, he thought, a Martian river, all of us lying deep in it, in our pebble houses, in our sunken boulder houses, like crayfish hidden, and the water washing away our old bodies and lengthening the bones and -

He let himself drift up through the soft light.

Tim sat on the edge of the canal, regarding his father seriously.

"Utha," he said.

"What?" asked his father.

The boy smiled. "You know. Utha's the Martian word for 'father'."

"Where did you learn it?"

"I don't know. Around. Utha!"

"What do you want?"

The boy hesitated. "I - I want to change my name."

"Change it?"

"Yes."

His mother swam over. "What's wrong with Tim for a name?"

Tim fidgeted. "The other day you called Tim, Tim, Tim. I didn't even hear. I said to myself, That's not my name. I've a new name I want to use."

Mr.Bittering held to the side of the canal, his body cold and his heart pounding slowly. "What is this new name?" "Linnl. Isn't that a good name? Can I use it? Can I, please?"

Mr.Bittering put his hand to his head. He thought of the rocket, himself working alone, himself alone even among his family, so alone.

He heard his wife say, "Why not?" He heard himself say, "Yes, you can use it." "Yaaa!" screamed the boy. "I'm Linnl, Linnl!" Racing down the meadowlands, he danced and shouted. Mr.Bittering looked at his wife. "Why did we do that?" "I don't know," she said. "It just seemed like a good idea."

They walked into the hills. They strolled on old mosaic paths, beside still-pumping fountains. The paths were covered with a thin film of cool water all summer long. You kept your bare feet cool all the day, splashing as in a creek, wading.

They came to a small deserted Martian villa with a good view of the valley. It was on top of a hill. Blue-marble halls, large murals, a swimming-pool. It was refreshing in this hot summer-time. The Martians hadn't believed in large cities.

"How nice," said Mrs.Bittering, "if you could move up here to this villa for the summer."

"Come on," he said. "We're going back to town. There's work to be done on the rocket."

But as he worked that night, the thought of the cool bluemarble villa entered his mind. As the hours passed, the rocket seemed less important.

In the flow of days and weeks, the rocket receded and dwindled. The old fever was gone. It frightened him to think he had let it slip this way. But somehow the heat, the air, the working conditions - he heard the men murmuring on the porch of his metal shop.

"Everyone's going. You heard?"

"All right. That's right."

Bittering came out. "Going where?" He saw a couple of trucks, loaded with children and furniture, drive down the dusty street.

"Up to the villa," said the man.

"Yeah, Harry. I'm going. So is Sam. Aren't you, Sam?"

"That's right, Harry. What about you?"

"I've got work to do here."

"Work! You can finish that rocket in the autumn, when it's cooler."

He took a breath. "1 got the frame all set up."

"In the autumn is better." Their voices were lazy in the heat.

"Got to work," he said.

"Autumn," they reasoned. And they sounded so sensible, so right.

"Autumn would be best," he thought. "Plenty of time, then."

No! cried part of himself, deep down, put away, locked tight, suffocating. No! No! "In the autumn," he said. "Come on, Harry," they all said.

"Yes," he said, feeling his flesh melt in the hot liquid air. "Yes, the autumn. I'll begin work again then." "I got a villa near the Tirra Canal," said someone. "You mean the Roosevelt Canal, don't you?" "Tirra. The old Martian name."

"But on the map -"

"Forget the map. It's Tirra now. Now I found a place in the Pillan mountains -"

"You mean the Rockefeller range," said Bittering.

"I mean the Pillan mountains," said Sam.

"Yes," said Bittering, buried in the hot, swarming air. "The Pillan mountains."

Everyone worked at loading the truck in the hot, still afternoon of the next day.

Laura, Tim, and David carried packages. Or, as they preferred to be known, Ttil, Linnl, and Werr carried packages.

The furniture was abandoned in the little white cottage.

"It looked just fine in Boston," said the mother. "And here in the cottage. But up at the villa? No. We'll get it when we come back in the autumn."

Bittering himself was quiet.

"I've some ideas on furniture for the villa," he said, after a time. "Big, lazy furniture."

"What about your Encyclopedia! You're taking it along, surely?"

Mr.Bittering glanced away. "I'll come and get it next week."

They turned to their daughter. "What about your New York dresses?"

The bewildered girl stared. "Why, I don't want them any more."

They shut off the gas, the water, they locked the doors and walked away. Father peered into the truck.

"Gosh, we're not taking much," he said. "Considering all we brought to Mars, this is only a handful!"

He started the truck.

Looking at the small white cottage for a long moment, he was filled with a desire to rush to it, touch it, say goodbye to it, for he felt as if he were going away on a long journey, leaving something to which he could never quite return, never understand again.

Just then Sam and his family drove by in another truck.

"Hi, Bittering! Here we go!"

The truck swung down the ancient highway out of town. There were sixty others travelling the same direction. The town filled with a silent, heavy dust from their passage. The canal waters lay blue in the sun, and a quiet wind moved in the strange trees.

"Good-bye, town!" said Mr.Bittering.

"Good-bye, good-bye," said the family, waving to it.

They did not look back again.

Summer burned the canals dry. Summer moved like flame upon the meadows. In the empty Earth settlement, the painted houses flaked and peeled. Rubber tyres upon which children had swung in back yards hung suspended like stopped clock pendulums in the blazing air.

At the metal shop, the rocket frame began to rust.

In the quiet autumn, Mr.Bittering stood, very dark now, very golden-eyed, upon the slope above his villa, looking at the valley.

"It's time to go back," said Cora.

"Yes, but we're not going," he said, quietly. "There's nothing there any more."

"Your books," she said. "Your fine clothes."

"Your Illes and your fine ior uele rre," she said.

"The town's empty. No one's going back," he said. "There's no reason to, none at all."

The daughter wove tapestries and the sons played songs on ancient flutes and pipes, their laughter echoing in the marble villa.

Mr.Bittering gazed at the Earth settlement far away in the low valley. "Such odd, such ridiculous houses the Earth people built."

"They didn't know any better," his wife mused. "Such ugly People. I'm glad they've gone."

They both looked at each other, startled by all they had just finished saying. They laughed.

"Where did they go?" he wondered. He glanced at his wife. She was golden and slender as his daughter. She looked at him, and he seemed almost as young as their eldest son.

"I don't know," she said.

"We'll go back to town maybe next year, or the year after, or the year after that," he said, calmly. "Now - I'm warm. How about taking a swim?"

They turned their backs to the valley. Arm in arm they walked silently down a path of clear running spring water.

Five years later, a rocket fell out of the sky. It lay steaming in the valley. Men leaped out of it, shouting.

"We won the war on Earth! We're here to rescue you! Hey!"

But the American-built town of cottages, peach trees, and theatres was silent. They found a half-finished rocket frame, rusting in an empty shop.

The rocket men searched the hills. The captain established headquarters in an abandoned bar. His lieutenant came back to report.

"The town's empty, but we found native life in the hills, sir. Dark people. Yellow eyes. Martians. Very friendly. We talked a bit, not much. They learn English fast. I'm sure our relations will be most friendly with them, sir."

"Dark, eh?" mused the captain. "How many?"

"Six, eight hundred, I'd say, living in those marble ruins in the hills, sir. Tall, healthy. Beautiful women."

"Did they tell you what became of the men and women who built this Earth settlement, Lieutenant?"

"They hadn't the foggiest notion of what happened to this town or its people."

"Strange. You think those Martians killed them?"

"They look surprisingly peaceful. Chances are a plague did this town in, sir."

"Perhaps. I suppose this is one of those mysteries we'll never solve. One of those mysteries you read about."

The captain looked at the room, the dusty windows, the blue mountains rising beyond, the canals moving in the light, and he heard the soft wind in the air. He shivered. Then, recovering, he tapped a large fresh map he had thumb-tacked to the top of an empty table.

"Lots to be done, Lieutenant." His voice droned on and quietly on as the sun sank behind the blue hills. "New settlements. Mining sites, minerals to be looked for. Bacteriological specimens taken. The work, all the work. And the old records were lost. We'll have a job of remapping to do, renaming the mountains and rivers and such. Calls for a little imagination."

"What do you think of naming those mountains the Lincoln Mountains, this canal the Washington Canal, those hills - we can name those hills for you, Lieutenant. Diplomacy. And you, for a favour, might name a town for me. Polishing the apple. And why not make this the Einstein Valley, and further over... are you listening, Lieutenant?"

The lieutenant snapped his gaze from the blue colour and the quiet mist of the hills far beyond the town.

"What? Oh, yes, sir!"

Conclusion

I do not remember when I first read this story, but I am pretty sure that I was in my early teens. Sometime around 1972 or so, I picked up a paperback without a cover and started to read it. I became enraptured with the book, and brought it home where I scarfed up every juicy morsel inside of it.

I later, cut the brown cardboard backing from a note pad and taped it to the front of the book, making an ugly, but functional cover. Carefully, I wrote the the title of the work “The Martian Chronicles” using a very yellow Bic Banana pen on the cover. Under it, I printed “By Ray Bradbury”.

Bookstores would often get credit for books that they could not sell. To do this, they would tear off the front covers and send them back to the publisher for credit. Behind the bookstores would be bins full of discarded paperback books. Though finding one that you would be interested in was remarkably difficult. You had to go through a couple of hundred books that could represent anything from romance novels, to Westerns, to books on the surviving the future snowball earth as a consequence of global freezing.

Global freezing
During the 1970’s there was a big push to fund efforts to prevent global cooling. I would attend school and we would go out and clean up the neighborhood, and go on fund raising drives to collect money for the cause. The money would be collected in huge apple baskets. There was so much money collected. Baskets and baskets of donated money to prevent global cooling. Now, I don’t know what ever happened to the money. But, I am sure that someone took it and spent it in some way. Anyways, afterwards, we would eat hotdogs at a barn-fire, and sing songs. Typical songs were “If I had a hammer”, and kumbaya.

What I would do is crawl up and into the huge metal dumpster, and dig through boxes and debris to get to the books.

You could get an inkling of what the book’s content would be by looking at the back cover, but it was typically a difficult endeavor. However, for a young boy, who liked to read, climb in and out of dumpsters and get into trouble, it was like mining a treasure trove.

I would typically find four or five books of interest and throw them into my backpack / satchel (that I got at an Army Surplus store) and ride my banana-seat bicycle home. Once at the house, I could read the books at leisure, and out of the collection, I might end up keeping two or three and tossing the rest.

I was the perpetual scavenger. From lost golf balls at the local golf club to digging through the rocks at the nearby pool to look for fossils. My bed room was a collection of all sorts of junk that I would lug home. I had everything from arrowheads to piles of “Mad Magazine”, and “Treasure Magazines” stacked up in the corner. My room had model airplanes hanging from the ceiling by string, to old maps that I liberated out of the ceiling rafters of an old car garage.

I was a typical boy, and Ray Bradberry was a major influence on my life.

Take Aways

  • Ray Bradbury wrote the short story “Dark they were and golden eyed”.
  • His works greatly influenced me was a young boy into my early teens.
  • He contributed to my desire to study aerospace engineering, become a pilot in the Navy, and join MAJestic.
  • His stories are not to be studied, they are to be enjoyed.

FAQ

Q:  What would you do after you read science fiction stories?
A: Typically, I would read at the house. I was a big fan of reading while I was in the bathroom. I would read on both the toilet and while soaking in the tub. I would read in my tree house, or on my bed, or in the living room. I would read on the porch, or in the car while my father was driving us about. I read everywhere.

However, when I wasn’t reading I was typically out walking or hiking. We had various spur lines for the coal-hauling railroad all around us. They would wind in and out of the hills. I would walk those railroad tracks. Often I would walk on top like a balance beam. If a train was near, I would pull out a penny to squash on the track. I would also pick up some of the millions of little black marble-sized dirty balls that were everywhere and throw them into the bushes or into the nearby river. Sometimes I would take out my trusty (blue) cub-scout knife and cut some branches off of a beech tree and chew on the branches as I walked.

I often would walk alone and ponder my life. I might go with a friend or two, or my trusty dog Belle (she was a Siberian Husky). We would walk the spurs and climb the hills. We would talk about televisions shows, the local football game, and things that mattered to us.

Q: Should Ray Bradbury and his works be taught in school?
A: Yes and no. Stories by Bradbury are not something that can used to achieve grades. It is something that has to be absorbed. Therefore, I believe that everyone should be exposed to his work, but it should not be used as a study aid. It’s like pizza. Many people like it, but not everyone. You can study how to make a pizza, but the best thing and the best utility for pizza is to eat it.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 26SEP18.
  2. Completed 28SEP18.
  3. SEO Review 28SEP18.
  4. Published 28SEP18.

The Rocket (Full Text) A Story by Ray Bradbury

This story was written right after World War II by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law.

The Rocket” is a Science fiction short story (initially published under the name “Outcast of the Stars”) by American writer Ray Bradbury. It is also included in The Illustrated Man, a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury.

Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

When Ray started out, the field of science fiction lacked respectability, to say the least. It was the province of the pulps: magazines printed on cheap paper, with lurid covers designed to catch the attention of immature boys. 

He was often dismissed, if not outright ridiculed, by mainstream writers, but quickly learned to ignore his critics. If they didn’t think rockets and dinosaurs were suitable subjects for literature, to hell with them. 

Ray loved that stuff, along with Martians and witches and things that go bump in the night, so that’s what he wrote about. His unique imagination was harnessed within vivid, lyrical prose, and after the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, the literary elite were forced to acknowledge a striking new talent.

As Ray’s stories became more widely published and read, they fueled the imaginations of millions of young people over several generations, many of whom went on to cite his influence as a major reason they became scientists and engineers. 

His stories practically shouted that it wasn’t just okay to dream of rockets and space travel, it was wonderful, mythic, imperative—the highest accomplishment the human race could aspire to.

-The Space Review's tribute to Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradberry 1
I will ride up into space, into the stars…someday.

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”

R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradberry books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradberry books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “The Rocket” on the Ray Bradbury library portal in Russia, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it.

The Rocket by Ray Bradbury

Many nights Fiorello Bodoni would awaken to hear the rockets sighing in the dark sky. He would tiptoe from bed, certain that his kind wife was dreaming, to let himself out into the night air. For a few moments he would be free of the smells of old food in the small house by the river. For a silent moment he would let his heart soar alone into space, following the rockets.

Now, this very night, he stood half naked in the darkness, watching the fire fountains murmuring in the air. The rockets on their long wild way to Mars and Saturn and Venus!

"Well, well, Bodoni."

Bodoni started.

On a milk crate, by the silent river, sat an old man who also watched the rockets through the midnight hush.

"Oh, it's you, Bramante!"

"Do you come out every night, Bodoni?"

"Only for the air."

"So? I prefer the rockets myself," said old Bramante. "I was a boy when they started. Eighty years ago, and I've never been on one yet."

"I will ride up in one someday," said Bodoni.

"Fool!" cried Bramante. "You'll never go. This is a rich man's world." He shook his gray head, remembering. "When I was young they wrote it in fiery letters: THE WORLD OF THE FUTURE! Science, Comfort, and New Things for All! Ha! Eighty years. The Future becomes Now! Do we fly rockets'? No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us."

"Perhaps my sons -" said Bodoni.

"No, nor their sons!" the old man shouted. "It's the rich who have dreams and rockets!"

Bodoni hesitated. "Old man, I've saved three thousand dollars. It took me six years to save it. For my business, to invest in machinery. But every night for a month now I've been awake. I hear the rockets. I think. And tonight I've made up my mind. One of us will fly to Mars!" His eyes were shining and dark.

"Idiot," snapped Bramante. "How will you choose? Who will go? If you go, your wife will hate you, for you will be just a bit nearer God, in spare. When you tell your amazing trip to her, over the years, won't bitterness gnaw at her?"

"No, no!"

"Yes! And your children? Will their lives be filled with the memory of Papa, who flew to Mars while they stayed here? What a senseless task you will set your boys. They will think of the rocket all their lives. They will lie awake. They will be sick with wanting it. Just as you are sick now. They will want to die if they cannot go. Don't set that goal, I warn you. Let them be content with being poor. Turn their eyes down to their hands and to your junk yard, not up to the stars."

"But -"

"Suppose your wife went? How would you feel, knowing she had seen and you had not? She would become holy. You would think of throwing her in the river. No, Bodoni, buy a new wrecking machine, which you need, and pull your dreams apart with it, and smash them to pieces."

The old man subsided, gazing at the river in which, drowned, images of rockets burned down the sky.

"Good night," said Bodoni.

"Sleep well," said the other.

When the toast jumped from its silver box, Bodoni almost screamed. The night had been sleepless. Among his nervous children, beside his mountainous wife, Bodoni had twisted and stared at nothing. Bramante was right. Better to invest the money. Why save it when only one of the family could ride the rocket, while the others remained to melt in frustration?

"Fiorello, eat your toast," said his wife, Maria.

"My throat is shriveled," said Bodoni.

The children rushed in, the three boys fighting over a toy rocket, the two girls carrying dolls which duplicated the inhabitants of Mars, Venus, and Neptune, green mannequins with three yellow eyes and twelve fingers.

"I saw the Venus rocket!" cried Paolo.

"It took off, whoosh!" hissed Antonello.

"Children!" shouted Bodoni, hands to his ears.

They stared at him. He seldom shouted.

Bodoni arose. "Listen, all of you," he said. "I have enough money to take one of us on the Mars rocket."

Everyone yelled.

"You understand?" he asked. "Only one of us. Who?"

"Me, me, me!" cried the children.

"You," said Maria.

"You," said Bodoni to her.

They all fell silent.

The children reconsidered. "Let Lorenzo go - he's oldest."

"Let Miriamne go - she's a girl!"

"Think what you would see," said Bodoni's wife to him. But her eyes were strange. Her voice shook. "The meteors, like fish. The universe. The Moon. Someone should go who could tell it well on returning. You have a way with words."

"Nonsense. So have you," he objected.

Everyone trembled.

"Here," said Bodoni unhappily. From a broom he broke straws of various lengths. "The short straw wins." He held out his tight fist. "Choose."

Solemnly each took his turn.

"Long straw."

"Long straw."

Another.

"Long straw."

The children finished. The room was quiet. Two straws remained. Bodoni felt his heart ache in him.

"Now," he whispered. "Maria."

She drew.

"The short straw," she said.

"Ah," sighed Lorenzo, half happy, half sad. "Mama goes to Mars."

Bodoni tried to smile. "Congratulations. I will buy your ticket today."

"Wait, Fiorello -"

"You can leave next week," he murmured.

She saw the sad eyes of her children upon her, with the smiles beneath their straight, large noses. She returned the straw slowly to her husband. "I cannot go to Mars."

"But why not?"

"I will be busy with another child."

"What!"

She would not look at him. "It wouldn't do for me to travel in my condition."

He took her elbow. "Is this the truth?"

"Draw again. Start over."

"Why didn't you tell me before?" he said incredulously.

"I didn't remember."

"Maria, Maria," he whispered, patting her face. He turned to the children. "Draw again."

Paolo immediately drew the short straw.

"I go to Mars!" He danced wildly. "Thank you, Father!"

The other children edged away. "That's swell, Paolo."

Paolo stopped smiling to examine his parents and his brothers and sisters. "I can go, can't I?" he asked uncertainly.

"Yes."

"And you'll like me when I come back?"

"Of course."

Paolo studied the precious broomstraw on his trembling hand and shook his head. He threw it away. "I forgot. School starts. I can't go. Draw again."

But none would draw. A full sadness lay on them.

"None of us will go," said Lorenzo.

"That's best," said Maria.

"Bramante was right," said Bodoni.

With his breakfast curdled within him, Fiorello Bodoni worked in his junk yard, ripping metal, melting it, pouring out usable ingots. His equipment flaked apart; competition had kept him on the insane edge of poverty for twenty years. It was a very bad morning.

In the afternoon a man entered the junk yard and called up to Bodoni on his wrecking machine. "Hey, Bodoni, I got some metal for you!"

"What is it, Mr. Mathews?" asked Bodoni, listlessly.

"A rocket ship. What's wrong? Don't you want it?"

"Yes, yes!" He seized the man's arm, and stopped, bewildered.

"Of course," said Mathews, "it's only a mockup. You know. When they plan a rocket they build a full-scale model first, of aluminum. You might make a small profit boiling her down. Let you have her for two thousand -"

Bodoni dropped his hand. "I haven't the money."

"Sorry. Thought I'd help you. Last time we talked you said how everyone outbid you on junk. Thought I'd slip this to you on the q.t. Well -"

"I need new equipment. I saved money for that."

"I understand."

"If I bought your rocket, I wouldn't even be able to melt it down. My aluminum furnace broke down last week -"

"Sure."

"I couldn't possibly use the rocket if I bought it from you."

"I know."

Bodoni hunked and shut his eyes. He opened them and looked at Mr. Mathews. "But I am a great fool. I will take my money from the bank and give it to you."

"But if you can't melt the rocket down -"

"Deliver it," said Bodoni.

"All right, if you say so. Tonight?"

"Tonight," said Bodoni, "would be fine. Yes, I would like to have a rocket ship tonight."


...

There was a moon. The rocket was white and big in the junk yard. It held the whiteness of the moon and the blueness of the stars. Bodoni looked at it and loved all of it. He wanted to pet it and lie against it, pressing it with his cheek, telling it all the secret wants of his heart.

He stared up at it. "You are all mine," he said. "Even if you never move or spit fire, and just sit there and rust for fifty years, you are mine."

The rocket smelled of time and distance. It was like walking into a clock. It was finished with Swiss delicacy. One might wear it on one's watch fob. "I might even sleep here tonight," Bodoni whispered excitedly.

He sat in the pilot's seat.

He touched a lever.

He hummed in his shut mouth, his eyes closed.

The humming grew louder, louder, higher, higher, wilder, stranger, more exhilarating, trembling in him and leaning him forward and pulling him and the ship in a roaring silence and in a kind of metal screaming, while his fists flew over the controls, and his shut eyes quivered, and the sound grew and grew until it was a fire, a strength, a lifting and a pushing of power that threatened to tear him in half. He gasped. He hummed again and again, and did not stop, for it could not be stopped, it could only go on, his eyes tighter, his heart furious. "Taking off!" he screamed. The jolting concussion! The thunder! "The Moon!" he cried, eyes blind, tight. "The meteors!" The silent rush in volcanic light. "Mars. Oh, God, Mars! Mars!"

He fell back, exhausted and panting. His shaking hands came loose of the controls and his head tilted back wildly. He sat for a long time, breathing out and in, his heart slowing.

Slowly, slowly, he opened his eyes.

The junk yard was still there.

He sat motionless. He looked at the heaped piles of metal for a minute, his eyes never leaving them. Then, leaping up, he kicked the levers. "Take off, damn you!"

The ship was silent.

"I'll show you!" he cried.

Out in the night air, stumbling, he started the fierce motor of his terrible wrecking machine and advanced upon the rocket. He maneuvered the massive weights into the moonlit sky. He readied his trembling hands to plunge the weights, to smash, to rip apart this insolently false dream, this silly thing for which he had paid his money, which would not move, which would not do his bidding. "I'll teach you!" he shouted.

But his hand stayed.

The silver rocket lay in the light of the moon. And beyond the rocket stood the yellow lights of his home, a block away, burning warmly. He heard the family radio playing some distant music. He sat for half an hour considering the rocket and the house lights, and his eyes narrowed and grew wide. He stepped down from the wrecking machine and began to walk, and as he walked he began to laugh, and when he reached the back door of his house he took a deep breath and called, "Maria, Maria, start packing. We're going to Mars!"

"Oh!"

"Ah!"

"I can't believe it!"

"You will, you will."

The children balanced in the windy yard, under the glowing rocket, not touching it yet. They started to cry.

Maria looked at her husband. "What have you done?" she said. "Taken our money for this? It will never fly."

"It will fly," he said, looking at it.

"Rocket ships cost millions. Have you millions?"

"It will fly," he repeated steadily. "Now, go to the house, all of you. I have phone calls to make, work to do. Tomorrow we leave! Tell no one, understand? It is a secret."

The children edged off from the rocket, stumbling. He saw their small, feverish faces in the house windows, far away.

Maria had not moved. "You have ruined us," she said. "Our money used for this - this thing. When it should have been spent on equipment."

"You will see," he said.

Without a word she turned away.

"God help me," he whispered, and started to work.

Through the midnight hours trucks arrived, packages were delivered, and Bodoni, smiling, exhausted his bank account. With blowtorch and metal stripping he assaulted the rocket, added, took away, worked fiery magics and secret insults upon it. He bolted nine ancient automobile motors into the rocket's empty engine room. Then he welded the engine room shut, so none could see his hidden labor.

At dawn he entered the kitchen. "Maria," he said, "I'm ready for breakfast."

She would not speak to him.


...

At sunset he called to the children. "We're ready! Come on!" The house was silent.

"I've locked them in the closet," said Maria.

"What do you mean?" he demanded.

"You'll be killed in that rocket," she said. "What kind of rocket can you buy for two thousand dollars? A bad one!"

"Listen to me, Maria."

"It will blow up. Anyway, you are no pilot."

"Nevertheless, I can fly this ship. I have fixed it."

"You have gone mad," she said.

"Where is the key to the closet?"

"I have it here."

He put out his hand. "Give it to me."

She banded it to him. "You will kill them."

"No, no."

"Yes, you will. I feel it."

He stood before her. "You won't come along?"

"I'll stay here," she said.

"You will understand; you will see then," he said, and smiled. He unlocked the closet. "Come, children. Follow your father."

"Good-bye, good-bye, Mama!"

She stayed in the kitchen window, looking out at them, very straight and silent.

At the door of the rocket the father said, "Children, we will be gone a week. You must come back to school, and I to my business." He took each of their hands in turn. "Listen. This rocket is very old and will fly only one more journey. It will not fly again. This will be the one trip of your life. Keep your eyes wide."

"Yes, Papa."

"Listen, keep your ears clean. Smell the smells of a rocket. Feel. Remember. So when you return you will talk of it all the rest of your lives."

"Yes, Papa."

The ship was quiet as a stopped clock. The airlock hissed shut behind them. He strapped them all, like tiny mummies, into rubber hammocks. "Ready?" he called.

"Ready!" all replied.

"Take-off!" He jerked ten switches. The rocket thundered and leaped. The children danced in their hammocks, screaming.

"Here comes the Moon!"

The moon dreamed by. Meteors broke into fireworks. Time flowed away in a serpentine of gas. The children shouted. Released from their hammocks, hours later, they peered from the ports. "There's Earth!" "There's Mars!"

The rocket dropped pink petals of fire while the hour dials spun; the child eyes dropped shut. At last they hung like drunken moths in their cocoon hammocks.

"Good," whispered Bodoni, alone.

He tiptoed from the control room to stand for a long moment, fearful, at the airlock door.

He pressed a button. The airlock door swung wide. He stepped out. Into space? Into inky tides of meteor and gaseous torch? Into swift mileages and infinite dimensions?

No. Bodoni smiled.

All about the quivering rocket lay the junk yard. Rusting, unchanged, there stood the padlocked junk-yard gate, the little silent house by the river, the kitchen window lighted, and the river going down to the same sea. And in the center of the junk yard, manufacturing a magic dream, lay the quivering, purring rocket. Shaking and roaring, bouncing the netted children like flies in a web.

Maria stood in the kitchen window.

He waved to her and smiled.

He could not see if she waved or not. A small wave, perhaps. A small smile.

The sun was rising.

Bodoni withdrew hastily into the rocket. Silence. All still slept. He breathed easily. Tying himself into a hammock, he closed his eyes. To himself he prayed. Oh, let nothing happen to the illusion in the next six days. Let all of space come and go, and red Mars come up under our ship, and the moons of Mars, and let there be no flaws in the color film. Let there be three dimensions; let nothing go wrong with the hidden mirrors and screens that mold the fine illusion. Let time pass without crisis.

He awoke.

Red Mars floated near the rocket.

"Papa!" The children thrashed to be free.

Bodoni looked and saw red Mars and it was good and there was no flaw in it and he was very happy.

At sunset on the seventh day the rocket stopped shuddering.

"We are home," said Bodoni.

They walked across the junk yard from the open door of the rocket, their blood singing, their faces glowing.

"I have ham and eggs for all or you," said Maria, at the kitchen door.

"Mama, Mama, you should have come, to see it, to see Mars, Mama, and meteors, and everything!"

"Yes," she said.

At bedtime the children gathered before Bodoni. "We want to thank you, Papa."

"It was nothing."

"We will remember it for always, Papa. We will never forget."


...

Very late in the night Bodoni opened his eyes. He sensed that his wife was lying beside him, watching him. She did not move for a very long time, and then suddenly she kissed his cheeks and his forehead. "What's this?" he cried.

"You're the best father in the world," she whispered.

"Why?"

"Now I see," she said. "I understand."

She lay back and closed her eyes, holding his hand. "Is it a very lovely journey?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"Perhaps," she said, "perhaps, some night, you might take me on just a little trip, do you think?"

"Just a little one, perhaps," he said.

"Thank you," she said. "Good night."

"Good night," said Fiorello Bodoni.

Some Thoughts

Today, I get curious glances from the youth that often ask me “why did you want to go into space?”. To them, it is dull and uninteresting. It is the realm of satellites to measure global warming. To them, it is a racist and bigoted environment that favored “white people”. To them, is is a big void that holds nothing of interest.

But they are wrong.

The future of mankind lies in space.

This story, and others, amply the describe the strong yearning that I had for space exploration, science and solving the mysteries of the universe. I didn’t want “someday” to go into space. No. Every single fiber of my body screamed the need. I could live, sleep or do anything without thinking of space, and the huge rockets that would someday carry me there.

No. Today it is a different time with different role models. I grew up in a world where Ronald Reagan was president. Today, children grow up in a world where Barrack Obama is president.

Obama on a bike
The presidents change with the culture. While I grew up and graduated (and entered MAJestic) under President Reagan, the youth of today have different role models to follow. Instead they follow President Obama as a role model. Everyone wants to be a Social Justice Warrior and correct the illusions that seem to hurt everyone’s feelings.

So it should be no surprise that an anarchism like myself would be misunderstood.

Conclusion

This story fed my dreams when I was a young boy. Sometime in my early teens in the 1970’s I first read this story. I am sure that I read it in one complete sitting. Perhaps it was on my bed with my cat Sedwick, or chilling in my tree-house next to the kitchen. In any event, I completely loved the story, and every few years or so, I crack up the story and read it again.

Ray Bradberry 2
Perhaps one day, my sons will ride off into space. Perhaps. One day.

This story meant a lot to me, and still does. I sincerely, hope that you, the reader, have derived as much pleasure from it as I have.

Take Aways

  • This story is about a father providing an experience for his children so that they can realize that it is possible to obtain their dreams.
  • No one wants to hear that something is impossible or beyond their ability.
  • Subsisting is not living.
  • Humans are creatures that must grow and advance.

FAQ

Q: Did you study about Ray Bradbury in school?
A: No. Instead I took hard science courses, language classes including Latin, and mathematics. My goal and dream was to become a spaceman. I wanted to be a Rocket Jockey. I had friends in university that took classes in English and Literature that studied Bradbury. I could not. I had a very heavy class load.

So, for recreation, around 12:00 midnight or later, after I would finish up my homework, I would read short stories in bed for a spell so that I could decompress and fall asleep.

Q: What significance does this story hold?
A: It depends on who reads it. People take different meanings from different experiences. For instance, my sister thought Robert Heinlein was a pompous chauvinist. However, I liked to read his stories. My mother thought that while it was good that I was reading, I should have instead read the “classics” and become a more rounded person. While I did actually read many “classics”, it was the stories of science fiction and prose that influenced me substantially.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 27SEP18.
  2. Completed 27SEP18.
  3. SEO review 27SEp18.
  4. Published 27SEp18.

The Fog Horn (Full Text) By Ray Bradbury

The Fog Horn” is a 1951 science fiction short story by American writer Ray Bradbury, the first in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun. The story was the basis for the 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

This story was written by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law. Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

When Ray started out, the field of science fiction lacked respectability, to say the least. It was the province of the pulps: magazines printed on cheap paper, with lurid covers designed to catch the attention of immature boys. 

He was often dismissed, if not outright ridiculed, by mainstream writers, but quickly learned to ignore his critics. If they didn’t think rockets and dinosaurs were suitable subjects for literature, to hell with them. 

Ray loved that stuff, along with Martians and witches and things that go bump in the night, so that’s what he wrote about. His unique imagination was harnessed within vivid, lyrical prose, and after the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, the literary elite were forced to acknowledge a striking new talent.

As Ray’s stories became more widely published and read, they fueled the imaginations of millions of young people over several generations, many of whom went on to cite his influence as a major reason they became scientists and engineers. 

His stories practically shouted that it wasn’t just okay to dream of rockets and space travel, it was wonderful, mythic, imperative—the highest accomplishment the human race could aspire to.

-The Space Review's tribute to Ray Bradbury

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”

R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

I have found this version of the story “The Fog Horn” on the Ray Bradbury.RU  website (in Russian; Рассказ Рэя Брэдбери), and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it.

The Fog Horn

By Ray Bradbury

Out there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the gray sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.

"It's a lonely life, but you're used to it now, aren't you?" asked McDunn.

"Yes," I said. "You're a good talker, thank the Lord."

"Well, it's your turn on land tomorrow," he said, smiling, "to dance the ladies and drink gin."

"What do you think, McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?"

"On the mysteries of the sea." McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn't a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road which came lonely through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.

"The mysteries of the sea' said McDunn thoughtfully. "You know, the ocean's the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colours, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their funny eyes. I fumed cold. They were like a big peacock's tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they came all those miles to worship. Strange. But think how the tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They never came back, those fish, but don't you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?"

I shivered. I looked out at the long gray lawn of the sea stretching away into nothing and nowhere.

"Oh, the sea's full." McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He had been nervous all day and hadn't said why. "For all our engines and so-called submarines, it'll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know real terror. Think of it, it's still the year 300,000 Before Christ down under there. While we've paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other's countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet."

"Yes, it's an old world."

"Come on. I got something special I been saving up to tell you."

We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At the top, McDunn switched off the room lights so there'd be no reflection in the plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen seconds.

"Sounds like an animal, don't it?" McDunn nodded to himself. "A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years calling out to the Deeps, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months, Johnny, so I better prepare you. About this time of year," he said, studying the murk and fog, "something comes to visit the lighthouse."

"The swarms of fish like you said?"

"No, this is something else. I've put off telling you because you might think I'm daft. But tonight's the latest I can put it off, for if my calendar's marked right from last year, tonight's the night it comes. I won't go into detail, you'll have to see it yourself. Just sit down there. If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the motorboat in to land and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your lights burning nights, I won't question or blame you. It's happened three years now, and this is the only time anyone's been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch."

Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When we grew tired waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had some theories about the Fog Horn itself.

"One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever bears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.'"

The Fog Horn blew.

"I made up that story," said McDunn quietly, "to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The Fog Horn calls it, I think, and it comes...."

"But - "I said.

"Sssst!" said McDunn. "There!" He nodded out to the Deeps.

Something was swimming toward the lighthouse tower.

It was a cold night, as I have said; the high tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the raveling mist. You couldn't see far and you couldn't see plain, but there was the deep sea moving on its way about the night earth, flat and quiet, the colour of gray mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of froth. And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-coloured, with immense eyes, and then a neck. And then - not a body - but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful dark neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet.

I don't know what I said. I said something.

"Steady, boy, steady," whispered McDunn.

"It's impossible! "I said.

"No, Johnny, we're impossible. It's like it always was ten million years ago. It hasn't changed. It's us and the land that've changed, become impossible. Us!"

It swam slowly and with a great dark majesty out in the icy waters, far away. The fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape. One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disk held high and sending a message in primeval code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam.

"It's a dinosaur of some sort!" I crouched down, holding to the stair rail.

"Yes, one of the tribe."

"But they died out!"

"No, only hid away in the Deeps. Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn't that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There's all the coldness and darkness and deepness in a word like that."

"What'll we do?"

"Do? We got our job, we can't leave. Besides, we're safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing's as big as a destroyer and almost as swift."

"But here, why does it come here?"

The next moment I had my answer.

The Fog Horn blew.

And the monster answered.

A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone that it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. The Fog Horn blew. The monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound.

"Now," whispered McDunn, "do you know why it comes here?"

I nodded.

"All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its tune, perhaps it's a million years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could you wait that long? Maybe it's the last of its kind. I sort of think that's true. Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years ago. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it out toward the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you're alone, all alone in a world not made for you, a world where you have to hide.

"But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on great slakes of cod and minnow, on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through September when the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn still calling you on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still alive. You've got to go slow; if you surfaced all at once you'd explode. So it takes you all of three months to surface, and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest damn monster in creation. And here's the lighthouse calling to you, with a long neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like your body, and, most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny, do you understand?"

The Fog Horn blew.

The monster answered.

I saw it all, I knew it all - the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps dried on the continental lands, the sloths and saber-tooths had their day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills.

The Fog Horn blew.

"Last year," said McDunn, "that creature swam round and round, round and round, all night. Not coming too near, puzzled, I'd say. Afraid, maybe. And a bit angry after coming all this way. But the next day, unexpectedly, the fog lifted, the sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And the monster swam off away from the heat and the silence and didn't come back. I suppose it's been brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way."

The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at each other. As the lights bit them, the monster's eyes were fire and ice, fire and ice.

"That's life for you," said McDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can't hurt you no more."

The monster was rushing at the lighthouse.

The Fog Horn blew.

"Let's see what happens," said McDunn.

He switched the Fog Horn off.

The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of the light.

The monster stopped and froze. Its great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth gaped. It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this way and that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off into the fog. It peered at the lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It reared up, threshed the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with angry torment.

"McDunn!" I cried. "Switch on the horn!"

McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he flicked it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fishskin glittering in webs between the fingerlike projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a caldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us.

McDunn seized my arm. "Downstairs!"

The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog Horn and the monster roared. We stumbled and half fell down the stairs. "Quick!"

We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down toward us. We ducked under the stairs into the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The monster crashed upon the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I, holding tight, while our world exploded.

Then it was over, and there was nothing but darkness and the wash of the sea on the raw stones.

That and the other sound.

"Listen," said McDunn quietly. "Listen."

We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone's thickness away from our cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had called to it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. The sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night, must've thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All's well. We've rounded the cape.

And so it went for the rest of that night.

The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the rescuers came out to dig us from our stoned-under cellar.

"It fell apart, is all," said Mr. McDunn gravely. "We had a few bad knocks from the waves and it just crumbled." He pinched my arm.

There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing was a great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the fallen tower stones and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed empty on the shore.

The next year they built a new lighthouse, but by that time I had a job in the little town and a wife and a good small warm house that glowed yellow on autumn nights, the doors locked, the chimney puffing smoke. As for McDunn, he was master of the new lighthouse, built to his own specifications, out of steel-reinforced concrete. "Just in case," he said.

The new lighthouse was ready in November. I drove down alone one evening late and parked my car and looked across the gray waters and listened to the new hom sounding, once, twice, three, four times a minute far out there, by itself.

The monster?

It never came back.

"It's gone away," said McDunn. "It's gone back to the Deeps. It's learned you can't love anything too much in this world. It's gone into the deepest Deeps to wait another million years. Ah, the poor thing! Waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. Waiting and waiting."

I sat in my car, listening. I couldn't see the lighthouse or the light standing out in Lonesome Bay. I could only hear the Horn, the Horn, the Horn. It sounded like the monster calling.

I sat there wishing there was something I could say.

Conclusions

I spent much of my childhood being inspired by science fiction works. My favorite authors included Ray Bradberry and Robert Heinlein. The works of Robert Heinlein suited my juvenile belief structures at the time, but Ray Bradberry evoked my emotions.

While I cannot recall when I first encountered this story, I can positively state that my father wanted me to read it. He gave me a collection of Ray Bradberry short stories and told me to read this one in particular. And, so I did. I went into the living room, plopped myself down on the chair (not a lazy-boy) and started reading. I think that I read it non-stop and then went into the kitchen and made a “Dagwood” sandwich, and a big glass of ice-cold milk.

As a young boy I readily consumed every science fiction story that I could get my hands on. I loved reading about spaceships, rockets, strange adventures, time travel and dinosaurs. These were the things that shaped my life. These were the things that made me who I am today.

Take Aways

  • The short story “The Fog Horn” was written by Ray Bradberry.
  • While the story is about the confrontation of a sea beast and a fog horn, it is about much more that that. It is about loneliness and frustration.

FAQ

Q: Why does the sea monster come to the lighthouse?
A: The lighthouse calls to the monster. Somehow it hears the call, and somehow it answers the call. We do not know why it comes forth, nor do we know the motivations of the monster. We can only guess.

Q: What appeal does this story have for the reader?
A: Everyone has experienced loneliness. Everyone has experienced frustration and rejection. Thus, everyone can find compassion and understanding in the emotions of the sea monster.

Q: What makes this story so different from the Godzilla monster movies of the 1960’s?
A: Godzilla, and other monster stories, while they would often have a back-story to explain what they were doing and why, they typically did not explore the emotional aspects of the creature. This story does.  In comparison, instead of being a story about destruction of Tokyo or the collapse of a light-house, this story is one of raw emotion. It is a story that haunts.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 27SEP18.
  2. Completed 27SEP18.
  3. SEO completed 27SEp18

The Long Rain (Full Text) – Ray Bradbury

The Long Rain” is a short story by science fiction author Ray Bradbury. This story was originally published in 1950 as “Death-by-Rain” in the magazine Planet Stories, and then in the collection The Illustrated Man. The story tells of four men who have crashed on a planet where it is always raining. As they try to reach the safety of the Sun Domes, they end up being driven insane by the endless rains.

The story was republished in several collections and was incorporated into a film also titled The Illustrated Man.

This story was written by Ray Bradbury, and presented here under Article 22 of China’s Copyright Law. Ray Bradbury is one of my personal heroes and his writings greatly influenced me in ways that I am only just now beginning to understand.

When Ray started out, the field of science fiction lacked respectability, to say the least. It was the province of the pulps: magazines printed on cheap paper, with lurid covers designed to catch the attention of immature boys. 

He was often dismissed, if not outright ridiculed, by mainstream writers, but quickly learned to ignore his critics. If they didn’t think rockets and dinosaurs were suitable subjects for literature, to hell with them. 

Ray loved that stuff, along with Martians and witches and things that go bump in the night, so that’s what he wrote about. His unique imagination was harnessed within vivid, lyrical prose, and after the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, the literary elite were forced to acknowledge a striking new talent.

As Ray’s stories became more widely published and read, they fueled the imaginations of millions of young people over several generations, many of whom went on to cite his influence as a major reason they became scientists and engineers. 

His stories practically shouted that it wasn’t just okay to dream of rockets and space travel, it was wonderful, mythic, imperative—the highest accomplishment the human race could aspire to.

-The Space Review's tribute to Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradberry 1
An artistic rendering of the sun dome in the distance. Venus in this story, is a planet of continuous rain, dark and deep clouds, and lightening storms. Humans have tried to colonize Venus, but they can only do so in safe enclosures called “sun domes”. There, they survive and live safe against the rainy onslaught of torrential and never-ending water.

Introduction

“There was this fence where we pressed our faces and felt the wind turn warm and held to the fence and forgot who we were or where we came from but dreamed of who we might be and where we might go…”

R is for Rocket

Ray Bradbury

For years I had amassed a well worn, and dusty collection of Ray Bradbury paperbacks that I would pick up and read for pleasure and inspiration.  Later, when I left the United States, and moved to China, I had to leave my treasured books behind. Sigh.

Ray Bradberry book colleciton
A small collection of well worn, well read and well appreciated Ray Bradbury books. My collection looked a little something like this, only I think the books were a little more worn, and a little yellower.

It is very difficult to come across Ray Bradbury books in China. When ever I find one, I certainly snatch it up. Cost is no object when it comes to these masterpieces. At one time, I must have had five books containing this story.

As an side, I would sometimes help Chinese students with their English. At times, I would "assign" them a book to read. One student bought the book, and waited two full months before it arrived, and the first story that he read was this one; "The Long Rain".
When I asked him to describe what it was like, he was all over himself trying to describe an impossible world; a wet world where everything you do was soaked and wet. It was a world where you had to trudge through water, currents, mud and bog to find this elusive sun dome. To this day, years later, he still talks about this story.

I have found this version of the story “The Long Rain” on the wiki.spaces website in PDF format, and I have copied it here exactly as found. Credit to the wonderful people at the Ray Bradbury Library for posting it where a smuck like myself can read it within China. And, of course, credit to the great master; Ray Bradbury for providing this work of art for our inspiration and pleasure.

Full Text

Here is the full text of the masterpiece. I will let the reader read it and enjoy it.

The Long Rain

Ray Bradbury

THE rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

“How much farther, Lieutenant?”

“I don’t know. A mile, ten miles, a thousand.” “Aren’t you sure?”

“How can I be sure?”

“I don’t like this rain. If we only knew how far it is to the Sun Dome, I’d feel better.” “Another hour or two from here.”

“You really think so, Lieutenant?” “Of course.”

“Or are you lying to keep us happy?” “I’m lying to keep you happy. Shut up!”

The two men sat together in the rain. Behind them sat two other men who were wet and tired and slumped like clay that was melting. The lieutenant looked up. He had a face that once had been brown and now the rain had washed it pale, and the rain had washed the color from his eyes and they were white, as were his teeth, and as was his hair. He was all white. Even his uniform was beginning to turn white, and perhaps a little green with fungus.

“Don’t be crazy,” said one of the two other men. “It never stops raining on Venus. It just goes on and on. I’ve lived here for ten years and I never saw a minute, or even a second, when it wasn’t pouring.”

“It’s like living under water,” said the lieutenant, and rose up, shrugging his guns into place. “Well, we’d better get going. We’ll find that Sun Dome yet.”

“Or we won’t find it,” said the cynic. “It’s an hour or so.”

“Now you’re lying to me, Lieutenant.”

“No, now I’m lying to myself. This is one of those times when you’ve got to lie. I can’t take much more of this.”

They walked down the jungle trail, now and then looking at their compasses. There was no direction anywhere, only what the compass said. There was a gray sky and rain falling and jungle and a path, and, far back behind them somewhere, a rocket in which they had ridden and fallen. A rocket in which lay two of their friends, dead and dripping rain.

They walked in single file, not speaking. They came to a river which lay wide and flat and brown, flowing down to the great Single Sea. The surface of it was stippled in a billion places by the rain.

“All right, Simmons.”

The lieutenant nodded and Simmons took a small packet from his back which, with a pressure of hidden chemical, inflated into a large boat. The lieutenant directed the cutting of wood and the quick making of paddles and they set out into the river, paddling swiftly across the smooth surface in the rain. The lieutenant felt the cold rain on his cheeks and on his neck and on his moving arms. The cold was beginning to seep into his lungs. He felt the rain on his ears, on his eyes, on his legs.

“I didn’t sleep last night,” he said.

“Who could? Who has? When? How many nights have we slept? Thirty nights, thirty days! Who can sleep with rain slamming their head, banging away. . . . I’d give anything for a hat. Anything at all, just so it wouldn’t hit my head any more. I get headaches. My head is sore; it hurts all the time.”

“I’m sorry I came to China,” said one of the others. “First time I ever heard Venus called China.”

“Sure, China. Chinese water cure. Remember the old torture? Rope you against a wall. Drop one drop of water on your head every half-hour. You go crazy waiting for the next one. Well, that’s Venus, but on a big scale. We’re not made for water. You can’t sleep, you can’t breathe right, and you’re crazy from just being soggy. If we’d been ready for a crash, we’d have brought waterproofed uniforms and hats. It’s this beating rain on your head gets you, most of all. It’s so heavy. It’s like BB shot. I don’t know how long I can take it.”

They crossed the river, and in crossing they thought of the Sun Dome, somewhere ahead of them, shining in the jungle rain. A yellow house, round and bright as the sun. A house fifteen feet high by one hundred feet in diameter, in which was warmth and quiet and hot food and freedom from rain. And in the center of the Sun Dome, of course, was a sun. A small floating free globe of yellow fire, drifting in space at the top of the building where you could look at it from where you sat, smoking or reading a book or drinking your hot chocolate crowned with marshmallow dollops. There it would be, the yellow sun, just the size of the Earth sun, and it was warm and continuous, and the rain world of Venus would be forgotten as long as they stayed in that house and idled their time.

The lieutenant turned and looked back at the three men using their oars and gritting their teeth. They were as white as mushrooms, as white as lie was. Venus bleached everything away in a few months. Even the jungle was an immense cartoon nightmare, for how could the jungle be green with no sun,with always rain falling and always dusk? The white, white jungle with the pale cheese-colored leaves, and the earth carved of wet Camembert, and the tree boles like immense toadstools— everything black and white. And how often could you see the soil itself? Wasn’t it mostly a creek, a stream, a puddle, a pool, a lake, a river, and then, at last the sea?

“Here we are!”

They leaped out on the farthest shore, splashing and sending up showers. The boat was deflated and stored in a cigarette packet. Then, standing on the rainy shore, they tried to light up a few smokes for themselves, and it was five minutes or so before, shuddering, they worked the inverted lighter and, cupping their hands, managed a few drags upon cigarettes that all too quickly were limp and beaten away from their lips by a sudden slap of rain. They walked on.

“Wait just a moment,” said the lieutenant. “I thought I saw something ahead.” “The Sun Dome?”

“I’m not sure. The rain closed in again. Simmons began to run. “The Sun Dome!” “Come back, Simmons!”

“The Sun Dome!”

Simmons vanished in the rain. The others ran after him.

They found him in a little clearing, and they stopped and looked at him and what he had discovered. The rocket ship. It was lying where they had left it. Somehow they had circled back and were where they had started. In the ruin of the ship green fungus was growing up out of the mouths of the two dead men. As they watched, the fungus took flower, the petals broke away in the rain, and the fungus died.

“An electrical storm must be nearby. Threw our compasses off. That explains it.” “You’re right.”

“What’ll we do now?” “Start out again.”

“Good lord, we’re not any closer to anywhere!” “Let’s try to keep calm about it, Simmons.” “Calm, calm! This rain’s driving me wild!”

“We’ve enough food for another two days if we’re careful.”

The rain danced on their skin, on their wet uniforms; the rain streamed from their noses and ears, from their fingers and knees. They looked like stone fountains frozen in the jungle, issuing forth water from every pore. And, as they stood, from a distance they heard a roar. And the monster came out of the rain.

The monster was supported upon a thousand electric blue legs. It walked swiftly and terribly. It struck down a leg with a driving blow. Everywhere a leg struck a tree fell and burned. Great whiffs of ozone filled the rainy air, and smoke blew away and was broken up by the rain. The monster was a half mile wide and a mile high and it felt of the ground like a great blind thing. Sometimes, for a moment, it had no legs at all. And then, in an instant, a thousand whips would fall out of its belly, white-blue whips, to sting the jungle.

“There’s the electrical storm,” said one of the men. “There’s the thing ruined our compasses. And it’s coming this way.”

“Lie down, everyone,” said the lieutenant. “Run!” cried Simmons.

“Don’t be a fool. Lie down. It hits the highest points. We may get through unhurt. Lie down about fifty feet from the rocket. It may very well spend its force there and leave us be. Get down!”

The men flopped.

“Is it coming?” they asked each other, after a moment. “Coming.”

“Is it nearer?” “Is it nearer?” “Nearer?” “Here she is!”

The monster came and stood over them. It dropped down ten blue bolts of lightning which struck the rocket. The rocket flashed like a beaten gong and gave off a metal ringing. The monster let down fifteen more bolts which danced about in a ridiculous pantomime, feeling of the jungle and the watery soil.

“No, no!” One of the men jumped up. “Get down, yon fool!” said the lieutenant. “No!”

The lightning struck the rocket another dozen times. The lieutenant turned his head on his arm and saw the blue blazing flashes. He saw trees split and crumple into ruin. He saw the monstrous dark cloud turn like a black disk overhead and hurl down a hundred other poles of electricity.

The man who had leaped up was now running, like someone in a great hall of pillars. He ran and dodged between the pillars and then at last a dozen of the pillars slammed down and there was the sound a fly makes when landing upon the grill wires of an exterminator. The lieutenant remembered this from his childhood on a farm. And there was a smell of a man burned to a cinder.

The lieutenant lowered his head. “Don’t look up,” he told the others. He was afraid that he too might run at any moment.

The storm above them flashed down another series of bolts and then moved on away. Once again there was only the rain, which rapidly cleared the air of the charred smell, and in a moment the three remaining men were sitting and waiting for the beat of their hearts to subside into quiet once more.

They walked over to the body, thinking that perhaps they could still save the man’s life. They couldn’t believe that there wasn’t some way to help the man. It was the natural act of men who have not accepted death until they have touched it and turned it over and made plans to bury it or leave it there for the jungle to bury in an hour of quick growth.

The body was twisted steel, wrapped in burned leather. It looked like a wax dummy that had been thrown into an incinerator and pulled out after the wax had sunk to the charcoal skeleton. Only the teeth were white, and they shone like a strange white bracelet dropped half through a clenched black fist.

“He shouldn’t have jumped up.” They said it almost at the same time.

Even as they stood over the body it began to vanish, for the vegetation was edging in upon it, little vines and ivy and creepers, and even flowers for the dead.

At a distance the storm walked off on blue bolts of lightning and was gone.

They crossed a river and a creek and a stream and a dozen other rivers and creeks and streams. Before their eyes rivers appeared, rushing, new rivers, while old rivers changed their courses—rivers the color of mercury, rivers the color of silver and milk.

The Single Sea. There was only one continent on Venus. This land was three thousand miles long by a thousand miles wide, and about this island was the Single Sea, which covered the entire raining planet.

The Single Sea, which lay upon the pallid shore with little motion . . . “This way.” The lieutenant nodded south. “I’m sure there are two Sun Domes down that way. “While they were at it, why didn’t they build a hundred more?” “There’re a hundred and twenty of them now, aren’t there?”

“One hundred and twenty-six, as of last month. They tried to push a bill through Congress back on Earth a year ago to provide for a couple dozen more, but oh no, you know how that is. They’d rather a few men went crazy with the rain.”

They started south. The lieutenant and Simmons and the third man, Pickard, walked in the rain, in the rain that fell heavily and lightly, heavily and lightly; in the rain that poured and hammered and did not stop falling upon the land and the sea and the walking people.

Simmons saw it first. “There it is!” “There’s what?”

“The Sun Dome!”

The lieutenant blinked the water from his eyes and raised his hands to ward off the stinging blows of the rain. At a distance there was a yellow glow on the edge of the jungle, by the sea. It was, indeed, the Sun Dome.

The men smiled at each other.

“Looks like you were right, Lieutenant.” “Luck.”

“Brother, that puts muscle in me, just seeing it. Come on! Last one there’s a son-of-a-bitch!” Simmons began to trot. The others automatically fell in with this, gasping, tired, but keeping pace.

“A big pot of coffee for me,” panted Simmons, smiling. “And a pan of cinnamon buns, by God! And just lie there and let the old sun hit you. The guy that invented the Sun Domes, he should have got a medal!”

They ran faster. The yellow glow grew brighter.

“Guess a lot of men went crazy before they figured out the cure. Think it’d be obvious!  Right off.” Simmons panted the words in cadence to his running.  “Rain, rain!  Years ago.  Found a friend.  Of

min.  Out in the jungle.  Wandering around.  In the rain.  Saying over and over, ‘Don’t know enough

to come in outta the rain.  Don’t know enough, to come in, outta the rain.  Don’t know enough –‘  on and on.  Like that. Poor crazy bastard.”

“Save your breath!” They ran.

They all laughed. They reached the door of the Sun Dome, laughing.

Simmons yanked the door wide. “Hey!” he yelled. “Bring on the coffee and buns!” There was no reply.

They stepped through the door.

The Sun Dome was empty and dark. There was no synthetic yellow sun floating in a high gaseous whisper at the center of the blue ceiling. There was no food waiting. It was cold as a vault. And through a thousand holes which had been newly punctured in the ceiling water streamed, the rain fell down, soaking into the thick rugs and the heavy modern furniture and splashing on the glass tables. The jungle was growing up like a moss in the room, on top of the bookcases and the divans. The rain slashed through the holes and fell upon the three men’s faces.

Pickard began to laugh quietly. “Shut up, Pickard!”

“Ye gods, look what’s here for us—no food, no sun, nothing. The Venusians—they did it! Of course!”

Simmons nodded, with the rain funneling down on his face. The water ran in his silvered hair and on his white eyebrows. “Every once in a while the Venusians come up out of the sea and attack a Sun Dome. They know if they ruin the Sun Domes they can ruin us.”

“But aren’t the Sun Domes protected with guns?”

“Sure.” Simmons stepped aside to a place that was relatively dry. “But it’s been five years since the Venusians tried anything. Defense relaxes. They caught this Dome unaware.”

“Where are the bodies?”

“The Venusians took them all down into the sea. I hear they have a delightful way of drowning you. It takes about eight hours to drown the way they work it. Really delightful.”

“I bet there isn’t any food here at all.” Pickard laughed.

The lieutenant frowned at him, nodded at him so Simmons could see. Simmons shook his head and went back to a room at one side of the oval chamber. The kitchen was strewn with soggy loaves of bread, and meat that had grown a faint green fur. Rain came through a hundred holes in the kitchen roof.

“Without food, sir?” Simmons snorted. “I notice the sun machine’s torn apart. Our best bet is to make our way to the next Sun Dome. How far is that from here?”

“Not far. As I recall, they built two rather close together here. Perhaps if we waited here, a rescue mission from the other might——”

“It’s probably been here and gone already, some days ago. They’ll send a crew to repair this place in about six months, when they get the money from Congress. I don’t think we’d better wait.”

“All right then, we’ll eat what’s left of our rations and get on to the next Dome.”

Pickard said, “If only the rain wouldn’t hit my head, just for a few minutes. If I could only remember what it’s like not to be bothered.” He put his hands on his skull and held it tight. “I remember when I was in school a bully used to sit in back of me and pinch me and pinch me and pinch me every five minutes, all day long. He did that for weeks and months. My arms were sore and black and blue all the time. And I thought I’d go crazy from being pinched. One day I must have gone a little mad from being hurt and hurt, and I turned around and took a metal trisquare I used in mechanical drawing and I almost killed that bastard. I almost cut his lousy head off. I almost took his eye out before they dragged me out of the room, and I kept yelling, ‘Why don’t he leave me alone? why don’t he leave me alone?’ Brother!” His hands clenched the bone of his head, shaking, tightening, his eyes shut. “But what do I do now? Who do I hit, who do I tell to lay off, stop bothering me, this damn rain, like the pinching, always on you, that’s all you hear, that’s all you feel!”

“We’ll be at the other Sun Dome by four this afternoon.”

“Sun Dome? Look at this one! What if all the Sun Domes on Venus are gone? What then? What if there are holes in all the ceilings, and the rain coming in!”

“We’ll have to chance it.”

“I’m tired of chancing it. All I want is a roof and some quiet. I want to be alone.” “That’s only eight hours off, if you hold on.”

“Let’s eat,” said Simmons, watching him.

They set off down the coast, southward again. After four hours they had to cut inland to go around a river that was a mile wide and so swift it was not navigable by boat. They had to walk inland six miles to a place where the river boiled out of the earth, suddenly, like a mortal wound. In the rain, they walked on solid ground and returned to the sea.

“I’ve got to sleep,” said Pickard at last. He slumped. “Haven’t slept in four weeks. Tried, but couldn’t. Sleep here.”

They lay out full, propping their heads up so the water wouldn’t come to their mouths, and they closed their eyes.

The lieutenant twitched. He did not sleep.

There were things that crawled on his skin. Things grew upon him in layers. Drops fell and touched other drops and they became streams that trickled over his body, and while these moved down his flesh, the small growths of the forest took root in his clothing. He felt the ivy cling and make a second garment over him; he felt the small flowers bud and open and petal away, and still the rain pattered on his body and on his head. In the luminous night—for the vegetation glowed in the darkness—he could see the other two men outlined, like logs that had fallen and taken upon themselves velvet coverings of grass and flowers. The rain hit his face. He covered his face with his

hands. The rain hit his neck. He turned over on his stomach in the mud, on the rubbery plants, and the rain hit his back and hit his legs.

Suddenly he leaped up and began to brush the water from himself. A thousand hands were touching him and he no longer wanted to be touched. He no longer could stand being touched. He floundered and struck something else and knew that it was Simmons, standing up in the rain, sneezing moisture, coughing and choking. And then Pickard was up, shouting, running about.

“Wait a minute, Pickard!”

“Stop it, stop it!” Pickard screamed. He fired off his gun six times at the night sky. In the flashes of powdery illumination they could see armies of raindrops, suspended as in a vast motionless amber, for an instant, hesitating as if shocked by the explosion, fifteen billion droplets, fifteen billion tears, fifteen billion ornaments, jewels standing out against a white velvet viewing board. And then, with the light gone, the drops which had waited to have their pictures taken, which had suspended their downward rush, fell upon them, stinging, in an insect cloud of coldness and pain.

“Stop it! Stop it!” “Pickard!”

But Pickard was only standing now, alone. When the lieutenant switched on a small hand lamp and played it over Pickard’s wet face, the eyes of the man were dilated, and his mouth was open, his face turned up, so the water hit and splashed on his tongue, and hit and drowned the wide eyes, and bubbled in a whispering froth on the nostrils.

“Pickard!”

The man would not reply. He simply stood there for a long while with the bubbles of rain breaking out in his whitened hair and manacles of rain jewels dripping from his wrists and his neck.

“Pickard! We’re leaving. We’re going on. Follow us.” The rain dripped from Pickard’s ears.

“Do you hear me, Pickard!”

It was like shouting down a well. “Pickard!”

“Leave him alone,” said Simmons. “We can’t go on without him.”

“What’ll we do, carry him?” Simmons spat. “He’s no good to us or himself. You know what he’ll do?

He’ll just stand here and drown.” “What?”

“You ought to know that by now. Don’t you know the story? He’ll just stand here with his head up and let the rain come in his nostrils and his mouth. He’ll breathe the water.”

“That’s how they found General Mendt that time. Sitting on a rock with his head back, breathing the rain. His lungs were full of water.”

The  lieutenant  turned  the  light  back  to  the  unblinking face.  Pickard’s  nostrils  gave  off a  tiny whispering wet sound.

“Pickard!” The lieutenant slapped the face.

“He can’t even feel you,” said Simmons. “A few days in this rain and you don’t have any face or any legs or hands.”

The lieutenant looked at his own hand in horror. He could no longer feel it. “But we can’t leave Pickard here.”

“I’ll show you what we can do.” Simmons fired his gun. Pickard fell into the raining earth.

Simmons said, “Don’t move, Lieutenant. I’ve got my gun ready for you too. Think it over; he would only have stood or sat there and drowned. It’s quicker this way.”

The lieutenant blinked at the body. “But you killed him.”

“Yes, because he’d have killed us by being a burden. You saw his face. Insane.” After a moment the lieutenant nodded. “All right.”

They walked off into the rain. It was dark and their hand lamps threw a beam that pierced the rain for only a few feet. After a half hour they had to stop and sit through the rest of the night, aching with hunger, waiting for the dawn to come; when it did come it was gray and continually raining as before, and they began to walk again.

“We’ve miscalculated,” said Simmons. “No. Another hour.”

“Speak louder. I can’t hear you.” Simmons stopped and smiled. “By Christ,” he said, and touched his ears. “My ears. They’ve gone out on me. All the rain pouring finally numbed me right down to the bone.”

“Can’t you hear anything?” said the lieutenant. “What?” Simmons’s eyes were puzzled. “Nothing. Come on.”

“I think I’ll wait here. You go on ahead.” “You can’t do that.”

“I can’t hear you. You go on. I’m tired. I don’t think the Sun Dome is down this way. And, if it is, it’s probably got holes in the roof, like the last one. I think I’ll just sit here.”

“Get up from there!” “So long, Lieutenant.”

“You can’t give up now.”

“I’ve got a gun here that says I’m staying. I just don’t give a damn any more. I’m not crazy yet, but I’m the next thing to it. I don’t want to go out that way. As soon as you get out of sight I’m going to use this gun on myself.”

“Simmons!”

“You said my name. I can read that much off your lips.” “Simmons.”

“Look, it’s a matter of time. Either I die now or in a few hours. Wait’ll you get to that next Dome, if you ever get there, and find rain coming in through the roof. Won’t that be nice?”

The lieutenant waited and then splashed off in the rain. He turned and called back once, but Simmons was only sitting there with the gun in his hands, waiting for him to get out of sight. He shook his head and waved the lieutenant on.

The lieutenant didn’t even hear the sound of the gun.

He began to eat the flowers as he walked. They stayed down for a time, and weren’t poisonous; neither were they particularly sustaining, and he vomited them up, sickly, a minute or so later.

“Another five minutes,” he told himself. “Another five minutes and then I’ll walk into the sea and keep walking. We weren’t made for this; no Earthman was or ever will be able to take it. Your nerves, your nerves.

He floundered his way through a sea of slush and foliage and came to a small hill. At a distance there was a faint yellow smudge in the cold veils of water.

The next Sun Dome.

Through the trees, a long round yellow building, far away. For a moment he only stood, swaying, looking at it.

He began to run and then he slowed down, for he was afraid. He didn’t call out. What if it’s the same one? What if it’s the dead Sun Dome, with no sun in it? he thought.

He slipped and fell. Lie here, he thought; it’s the wrong one. Lie here. It’s no use. Drink all you want. But he managed to climb to his feet again and crossed several creeks, and the yellow light grew very

bright, and he began to run again, his feet crashing into mirrors and glass, his arms flailing at diamonds and precious stones.

He stood before the yellow door. The printed letters over it said THE SUN DOME. He put his numb hand up to feel it. Then he twisted the doorknob and stumbled in.

He stood for a moment looking about. Behind him the rain whirled at the door. Ahead of him, upon a low table, stood a silver pot of hot chocolate, steaming, and a cup, full, with a marshmallow in it. An beside that, on another tray, stood thick sandwiches of rich chicken meat and fresh-cut tomatoes and green onions. And on a rod just before his eyes was a great thick green Turkish towel, and a bin in which to throw wet clothes, and, to his right, a small cubicle in which heat rays might dry you instantly. And upon a chair, a fresh change of uniform, waiting for anyone—himself, or any lost one—to make use of it. And farther over, coffee in steaming copper urns, and a phonograph from which music was playing quietly, and books bound in red and brown leather. And near the books a cot, a soft deep cot upon which one might lie, exposed and bare, to drink in the rays of the one great bright thing which dominated the long room.

He put his hands to his eyes. He saw other men moving toward him, but said nothing to them. He waited, and opened his eyes, and looked. The water from his uniform pooled at his feet and he felt it drying from his hair and his face and his chest and his arms and his legs.

He was looking at the sun.

It hung in the center of the room, large and yellow and warm. It made not a sound, and there was no sound in the room. The door was shut and the rain only a memory to his tingling body. The sun hung high in the blue sky of the room, warm, hot, yellow, and very fine.

He walked forward, tearing off his clothes as he went.

Some Considerations

This story, like most of the science fiction works that I read in the 1960’s and 1970’s greatly influenced my life. I believe that I first read this story on a lazy fall weekend in late September. The leaves were crisp and just beginning to fall. It was warm, but not hot. It was calm and I was enjoying reading this story on a porch glider that we had on our porch. I just laid there, swinging back and forth, reading this masterpiece.

Early fall
I spent my boyhood in the hills of Western Pennsylvania. It was a place of hills, forests, rivers, and coal mines. I came from a small town. It was peaceful and quiet and everyone knew everyone else.

Conclusions

Today, students pay tuition at colleges and universities to read these stories. They pay enormous amounts of money, and are given tests and handouts to analyze the work. It seems like a fool’s errand to me.

You read for enjoyment, and if it evokes emotions within your very being then it is a work of art. Cherish it.

That’s never going to happen if you read a cliffs notes version so you can get a grade on a test. Life is about living. You can live, or you can follow the herd. I would suggest that you make the most out of your life. I would suggest you start doing it now.

Take Aways

  • The Long Rain is a short story by Ray Bradbury.
  • It is classified as Science Fiction.
  • It takes place on a fictional Venus where it is continuously raining.
  • The story evokes feelings of desperation, strife, fear and longing. Finally culminating in relief.

FAQ

Q: What is this story “The Long Rain” about?
A: The story takes place on a fictional Venus where there is a continuous rain. However, that is not what the story is about. It is about emotions that play when situations are encountered. When I read the story, I am reminded about a time when I was in second grade and walked home from school in the rain. I came home and my mother dried me off, and set me to the table and got me a big hot cup of coca with marsh-mellows in it and a nice warm bowl of tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. The story, by Ray Bradbury, evokes those same feelings.

Q: Why is this story in your blog?
A: I used to bookmark websites that I liked, and I would return to them periodically to read and enjoy. Over time, the websites would disappear, or turn into something else. The search engines, such as Google, would prioritize other (often profit motive) websites before the ones I was interested in. They would also block others that I enjoyed. China blocks many websites, and slows internet traffic to a crawl on others. I no longer have the luxury to simply bookmark something I like. I need to preserve it’s access. Thus I place it herein for my own personal use.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 27SEP18.
  2. Completed 27SEP18.
  3. SEO Review 27SEP18.
  4. Publish 27SEP18.

Comparisons Between American and Chinese Girls

Here’s a fun exercise. Let’s compare American girls with Chinese girls. Of course the comparisons would be terribly general and horribly biased. It would also be a reflection of my own personal preferences, which are admittedly terribly dated and old fashioned. Anyways, I would like to give my opinions and my impressions on the differences between American and Chinese girls…

Introduction

“...several months ago, I had a Thai short-time(girl) on the back of my Kawasaki, buzzing along. If you are planning on heading to SE Asia, save your life (and others) by learning to handle a motorbike in (the) USA. (It’s) Safer (that way)…

Little Ms 39 kg Hottie leans into my ear as we are passing a Burger King and coos "....khun Somchai, where is the KING?" (Ooooh) Once addicted to Asian hotties, sorry American chicks----game over.”

- buttmint (reply to) UmbilicalMosqueSweeper Aug 12, 2017 11:05 AM

China is a big country.  There are 80+ cultural and racial groups and every one was different.  While there were some who were small in stature, most Chinese were rather average and comparable with Americans in size, skin color and statue.  (Though they are decidedly not fat at all.)  They did not walk around barefoot, but tended to be very cosmopolitan in demeanor and wore the latest fashions and styles.

They were well educated; China is a nation of nerds.  (There is no question about that.  I was floored when I once saw an eleven-year-old studying differential calculus.)  All were very responsible, smart and beautiful.  Compared to them, and their families, Americans are poor.

(Chinese have saved money for centuries.  They have money to spend, and Americans do not.  When you see a Chinese driving a Range Rover, you can guarantee that they bought it in cash.  However, an American, nah, he is just making bank payments on “his” car.  For Americans, it is just a long-term rental.)

Asian women are beautiful, they take care of themselves, and honor their families.  They are very protective of their families and will do everything in their power to maintain their role in the community.

This is quite different from what is seen in the United States.  In the United States, since the 1960’s cultural revolution, every woman can be “her own” woman and “do her thing”. This sounds good on the surface, but unfortunately it often times equates into being a fat slob.

Now, don’t get too hot and bothered. It’s the same with men as well.  The men also can become to be fat, lazy pigs. It’s what the popular American culture has led everyone toward. Of course, things become quite different when you live for a greater purpose; when you live for your parents, and your spouse and your children.  You have a reason and a purpose.

“Women here in the US act like you fucking own them half of everything and then some. If you look at their fat asses, then you should be labeled a harasser and tarred and feathered. Their fat bellies sticking out from underneath shirts that are way too small kills it for me. And these dumb whores think they look great ! Most women here look like some kind of farm animal unless they are in grade school. The double chins, the huge feet from them weighing well over 170lbs, and the fucking attitude is enough to repel any man. I'll take a foreign girl any day of the week.”

- I am Groot Top Hat posted on Zero Hedge on Jan 11, 2018 5:49 PM Permalink

Different Culture

Chinese girls come from a different culture than America.

They do not know what “original sin” is; they do not know what guilt is, or shame.  They are not afraid to look pretty or to dress cute or provocatively.  They think differently.  To them one must honor their family and that means the concept of “face”;  How one looks.  How one acts.

Original sin, also called ancestral sin, is the Christian doctrine of humanity's state of sin resulting from the fall of man, stemming from Adam's rebellion in Eden. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred to as a "sin nature", to something as drastic as total depravity or automatic guilt of all humans through collective guilt.

They know that they have a family responsibility to maintain, and that they would do whatever is necessary to honor their parents.  Moreover, by the way, becoming a prostitute is not one way to do it.

Girl in the mall wearing boots.
Here is a lovely Chinese girl in a mall in the winter. The Chinese ladies love these big boots in the winter months. My wife has boots that reach all the ways up to her crotch, with the most common being the ones that go to the knee caps. I think that it is terribly attractive. The dress is pretty typical, being short and showing off the great legs that the Chinese women possess. The Chinese girls just don’t understand why us men would be so excited about these fine leather boots. I don’t know either, but it sure turns me on. I’ll tell you what.

What Chinese Girls are Like

If you want to see, what a Chinese girl looks like watch a K-pop video.  Sure, they are (mostly) Korean, but you know what?  The bodies, the shapes, the clothing, the makeup and the mannerisms are the same.  (They are all Han Chinese, which is the dominant racial characteristic in China today.)

If you want to stick to making broad, sweeping judgments that the Chinese are all flat chested, short, brown skinned, then go to Hong Kong, or Shanghai.  They are not.  They are decidedly absolutely not.

The typical Chinese girl wears a “B” or a “C” cup bra with a significant percentage of the population wearing larger bras (see below).  The typical Chinese girl is neither small, nor fat.  They are strong and beautiful.  They are independent, versatile, and responsible.  They are smart, intelligent and can run circles around most Americans.  They are tigers disguised as cute kittens. (At least my wife certainly is.  You do not want to get on her bad side. Let me tell you!)

I like Chinese women.  After all, I married one.

Underwear brand Triumph has published the percentage ranking of Asian bra sizes in its Lingerie White Paper, which indicates a continuing trend towards larger busts. Sales for its A-cup bras have fallen from 58.6% in 1980 to just 4.1% in 2016 The results for the last two years are tallied below: 

A-cup sales (2015): 4.7% A-cup sales (2016): 4.1% 

B-cup sales (2015): 19.5% B-cup sales (2016): 19% 

C-cup sales (2015): 26.1% C-cup sales (2016): 25.6% 

D-cup sales (2015): 24.8% D-cup sales (2016): 25% 

E-cup sales (2015): 16.7% E-cup sales (2016): 26.3%

Chinese girls interviewing
Chinese girls interviewing for a stewardess position with a Chinese airline company. In China, your appearance, and manners are all considered important attributes. You are viewed on your appearance, and ranked appropriately. This differs substantially from how the United States is. Having potential stewardesses wear bikini’s and interview on appearance is illegal in America. It might offend someone. It is discriminatory.

Chinese girls are many things, but as adults appearing as children is a gross oversimplification rooted in ignorance of the worst type; the “Ugly American” type.

Girls in China are quite different from girls in the United States. If I were to make broad sweeping generalizations about Chinese girls, I would say that they are very conservative.  They really do not buy into all that woman-career compared to woman-housewife nonsense that you see in the United States.

Typically, they go to school well into their mid-20’s. Yes, you could characterize them as most “book nerds”, then they go work.  Typically, girls get married around 25 to 28, and after age 30 they are considered to be “old maids”.

Fat percentage
Here is some Asian girls with comparative body fat percentage. It’s an interesting photo.

I find ALL Chinese girls to be special, wonderful and just outstanding. They are lovely, cute, professional, kind, and beautiful.

This includes the world-worn grandmother, to the tottering cleaning lady. There is a certain specialness that words cannot convey, but it is something that has to do with their culture, and how they are raised. They honor their parents.  They care about their family.  They support their husbands.  They keep fit and thin. They work and do what ever is necessary to build their business.

Seriously, what is not to admire?

7-11
Here is a Chinese girl in the local 7-11. And yes, you will see many Chinese girls dressing up to go out. This was more or less a pretty common scene in any of the larger cities in China. Note that many Chinese girls, especially in Southern China do not wear panty hose. It’s just far too hot.

Chinese girls know what they want, and they have the skills to go about getting it.  This is a true of a statement that I can ever make.

“My Chinese girlfriends, by contrast, seemed to know exactly what they wanted, and made it happen. Two women I knew had "the talk" with their American boyfriends of 5 or more years, and when the men confessed they still weren't sure, broke up with them and within a year were happily pregnant and married to someone else.”

-Your Tango

And, the men in their lives appreciate it. They show this appreciation in other ways. Ways that are very strange when viewed from the eyes of an American;

Several years ago, I moved from New York to Beijing. Within a few months of my arrival, I started to notice the differences between Western- and Chinese-style dating. 

For one thing, men carried their girlfriends' purses—little fake-Chanel pocketbooks, black leather sling bags, enormous pleather numbers with ruffles and rhinestones and tassles. 

No matter how ridiculously girly it looked, it was always slung over a male shoulder, or dangling from his fingers; with the other, he held his girlfriend's hand. 

The funniest moments were always when you spotted a guy momentarily alone: maybe waiting for his girlfriend outside a shop, or the women's bathroom. Then what you'd see was a Chinese guy in unassuming clothing—t-shirt, button-down shirt, jeans—holding a frilly bright-pink purse. 

-Your Tango

Here is a GREAT video that describes the differences between a girlfriend from the North of China compared to one from the South of China.  I laughed so hard watching it!

Some Pretty Chinese Girls

Here are some pretty Chinese girls dancing to the pop music that is all the craze out here. You can get a general feel for what the Chinese girls are like just by watching the videos…

One thing that I like about Chinese girls is that they are not fat. I really don’t know what has been going on in the United States, but all the American girls are really on the chunky side, with many absolutely and positively fat. When they come here to China, they look like enormous fat pigs or water buffaloes.

Most girls in China look a little like this young lass…

I like that girls come in all sorts of sizes and shapes. They can be short, or tall and thin. They can have nice legs, or a nice butt, or a great rack. They can have large eyes that your soul could melt into, or soft skin and really nice enormous manes of hair.

One thing that I really appreciate in China is that many Chinese girls have really nice boobies. You know, as an American, I was under the impression that all Asian girls were flat chested. I guess it is just one of those American stereotypes. You know, some of these gals have some amazing racks let me tell you!

But, you know, it is more than that. There are many, many Chinese girls that like to exercise and keep in shape. Whether it is in the daily dance routines, or going to a gym, everyone seems to exercise.

Here’s a Chinese girl exercising…

American Girls

But what about American girls you might ask?

Well, I also like American girls as well. In fact, there are many, many attractive American girls. What I am disturbed about is that the food in America has been poisoned by GMO’s and selective genetic breeding loaded with hormones and the such. Both American men and women are now much stouter then they were in the past.

That included myself (when I lived in the States).

So, while there are some very attractive American women, they tend to be smaller in number than their counterparts in other nations. With many American women heavier than what they should be.

A recent study revealed that the average American woman wears a size 20W.

The average American woman wears a size 20 wide! WTF? An American woman today weighs as much as a man did in the 1960’s. There is even a Buzzfeed article that thinks that this is a great thing! I disagree. I think that they are smoking too much of that dreaded devil-weed and are very confused.

 

via GIPHY

Seriously. Please understand my point of view. There is nothing appealing with someone being out of shape.

Findings suggest that, contrary to popular assumptions, the average American woman’s (AAW’s) clothing size is larger than anticipated. The AAW wears between a Misses size 16–18, which corresponds to a Women’s Plus size 20W, with greater distinctions found when considering race and ethnicity.

I think that Americans, men and women, should eat fresh food and locally grown vegetables. They should eat more fish and seafood. They should cut down on snacking and fast food. It’s a sacrifice, I know. I know.

Look what I had to cut down on…

  • Limit fast food to once a month.
  • No after dinner snacking… ever.
  • Full breakfasts, lunches and dinners.
  • No Doritos, potato chips, or deep fried anything.

Here are some women of size 20W. It is now the American average size for a woman… Yikes!

Big American woman
The average American woman now wears a size 20W. This is certainly celebrated in many American websites and posts as avoidance of “fat shaming”. Personally, I think it is disgusting and alarming. Men and women need to keep their BMI within reasonable limits.

What a Man looks for in a Woman…

With all that being said, let’s look at the things that men look for in a woman. After all, it is relationships that drive our passions. From that we can derive comparisons between women from China and women from the United States.

When a man, such as myself, thinks about a woman we look at  number of key features;

  • Appearance
  • Sex
  • Domestic Concern
  • Companionship
  • Personality
  • Self Confidence

Of course, there are many other factors that we could include here. But, this is not intended to be an exhaustive study, or some kind of PC narrative. Let’s consider what I, myself, look for in women. This is my list.

Other people might have a different list. Maybe something like this…

  • Environmentally friendly.
  • Fashion trendy.
  • Hip with the latest APPS.
  • Has many followers on Twitter, or Facebook.
  • Is wealthy and successful.
  • Has a huge enormous ass. (Yikes!)

But, I’m not other people. So if you want to generate your own list and criteria for comparisons, go straight ahead. I’m not going to stop you. This is my list, and these are my comparisons…

[1] A Woman’s Appearance

A man looks for a woman that he is physically attracted to.

Sorry, but it has to be said. The good news is, every man is attracted to a different type of woman and has his own personal tastes. Meaning, I am in no way suggesting a woman has to fit a certain image of ‘beauty’ in order to be considered ‘wife material.’ 

But, as is true for both men and women, there needs to be a physical attraction between two partners to kick off a relationship, which also plays an important part in holding it together.

-The Good Man Project

We men want a woman who we are attracted to.

Attraction has to do with a combination of [1] physical shape, [2] physical appearance, and [3] personal grooming. I have seen women who have “rockin'” bodies, who dress like trailer-park trash, and were a total turn off. I have seen women who look good and yet sound like a foul-mouthed sailor when they speak. I have seen women who didn’t know how to walk in high heels and went clunk-clunk-clunk as they walked down the street. Yuck!

I have seen beautiful women, who walked and carry themselves well, wearing black high heel shoes with the red under-sole. Only to have a big white price tag sticker on the bottom. Talk about distraction away from the image form!

Appearance is more than just physical shape. It is also about grooming and attitude.

In general, men and women are about the same in this regards. A woman wants a man that takes care of his appearance. She wants him to be well groomed, clean, and neat.

Men are the same. We look for a woman that also takes care of their appearance. We like the women in our lives to be well-groomed, clean and tidy.

Beautiful
Here is a beautiful American girl. Look at that smile. Look at that amazing body. What a stunner! I tell you what!

There are a wide range of American female body styles that I personally find quite alluring. This includes tall leggy women, to short chubby cuties. I think that many would be amazed at the things that they do, act, dress, or look like that I find amazingly attractive.

So I am not going to bad-mouth any of the particularly awesome women that live in America. I tell you the truth, there are some American women that think that they aren’t that good looking, that I would die to be with.

When I lived in Boston, there was a 30-something woman who worked in a brick-a-brack store in Brookline.  She was very curvy, and maybe wore a size 18. She had shaved her hair really short, and wore really red lipstick. Not my type. Yet, I had such the hots for her. OMG! Every-time I tried to talk with her, I would get so flustered. She hadn't a clue how mesmerized I was for her.

It is sort of like how a woman who looks at my shoulders (and arms) and wonders how nice it would be to rest their head there and be held. I too look at women in this way. However, I think more in terms of having my head resting on their chest softly, and their fingers in my hair.

Men and women are more similar than we will admit to in public.

Beautiful ebony girl.
Look at this awesome beauty! Look at that amazing head of hair! Look at the tiny waist and hour-glass shape. Man! She must have all the guys chasing after her. Now pay attention. What an amazing smile. I’ll tell you what, the smile opens up my heart.

That being said, I don’t like to be with a girl that is heavier than I am. It’s a personal preference. I also am not really attracted to a woman who is taller than I am either. I don’t know why, it just doesn’t do anything for me.

I also am a little skiddish about polydactylism. It's not that I am revolted if the girl has seven fingers on each hand, but I'm a little freaked out about it.

I feel like this is similar to a girl that doesn’t want a man that is shorter than she is.

[2] Having Sex

Honestly, you have to be a fucking moron not to realize that men want sex.

It is genetically programmed into males and become the focus of everything that we do. From what career we enter, to what cars we drive, to how much money we make. The driving force behind it all is getting sex.

Any man who says that this is not the case is either lying or trying to find favor in order to obtain sex.

Pepe le Pew
The Loony Tunes character “Pepe Le Pew” is based on the raw instincts that all males have. When we were children and watched the cartoons we knew instinctively what what going on. Yet today in the SJW saturated American culture, we are supposed to ignore the basic facts of life and accept a reality of non-genders. Nonsense!

Once we find an attractive woman that raises our interest, the very next thing we wonder about is having sex with her.

That is the way it is, and no SJW rewriting of culture is going to change the biology of males. In a way we are just like dogs and are led about by our “pecker” all the time. Smart women know this. Smarter women use it, and profit from it in numerous ways.

Online porn is not a multi-billion industry for nothing. Prostitution still exists because men are men, no matter how hard society, religion and zealots try to stamp it out. Men are males with fundamental male interests and needs.

Need for sex.
The sexual desires that men have vary from individual to individual. Some men really love oral sex, others are “meh”. Some men must have anal sex, while other go “yech!”. Every man is different.

That being said, sex is an individual experience. What might be fantastic for one fellow, might be terribly boring for another. That is why there are fetishes.

Some men like big boobs, others like big asses, and still others like big feet. Some men are mesmerized by a nice set of legs, while others like strange and unusual sexual positions. And yes, some men really like huge women, and others like small tiny ladies. Everyone is different.

[3] Domestic Care & Concern

Here is where I sound like an old foggy-head man. However, a woman who is control of her home, tends to be in control of her life.

A woman who is in control of her home is in control of her life.

When I see that she takes care of her clothes, makes sure that the house is well run, ordered and that she knows how to cook, I start to get really interested in her. You see, in my mind, a woman who is in control of her life, would also be able to take control of my life as well.

Men will give their LIFE, their MONEY, and their very BEING to a woman deserving of it.

I once went on a date with a woman. She was nice, and attractive. To get ready for the date, I of course was presentable and clean, and I made sure that the car was washed and detailed. I picked her up. I then opened the door for her and buckled her in. (This was America, I'd never do it in China.) And we went off.

During the drive she pulled out some chewing gum and was chewing it. You know, for a pleasant tasting mouth. But, you know, she did something disturbing to me. She threw the chewing gum wrapper on my nice new floor...

Later, after dinner, she couldn't find her lipstick, and emptied her purse on the table, and had to sort through old scraps of paper, receipts and brick-a-bract. The date ended, and we went our separate ways. We had fun, but I never wanted to be back with her again. You know, she probably doesn't understand why.

Men need a companion that they can turn to, rely upon, and have a family with. This means responsibility. We need a good strong willed woman without baggage and problems. Seriously, isn’t that what women look for also?

Now, of course, most modern and "liberated" women don't think like this in the Untied States. They are "independent". They can get and have their own careers, and live their own lives. Sure they can. And, be childless and unmarried into their 40's. 

The cost of being a "liberated" American female is quite steep.

It is not reality.

It is an artificially constructed narrative to seduce people into certain set behaviors. If you want to see what works for couples, then look at how families are set up in Africa. Look at how families are run in Poland. Look at how families exist in China. Five thousand years of experience won’t lie.

Pleasantville.
The 1998 movie pleasantville depicted a sort of revisionist narrative of what might happen if a modern person were to step back into time and life life as it used to be in the 1960’s. Contrary to the popular narrative, there is nothing wrong with traditional marriage and a man giving everything to his wife. In return, the wife becomes domestic and cares for him, their children, their home and their finances. She makes sure that the man can work, be relaxed and strive to improve their life. That is the traditional method, and that is what many men search for.

A traditional life WORKS. Most men WANT a traditional long-term relationship. They will give everything for it.

I fear many men, especially those afraid "to make the leap" in marriage are not convinced or ready to allow a woman to take over part or all of his life.

For a man, this is a BIG commitment.

He is not only letting the woman into his life, but he is giving her access forever to all that he earns. He is allowing her to dictate and instruct him on behavior, dress, and recreation. If the man is truly in love, and if he believes that this woman can take on that domestic role; she will GET EVERYTHING he can offer.

Roles
A man who gives everything to his wife will never leave her. For she literally BECOMES everything to him. So, have you ever wondered why divorce was so rare prior to the 1970’s? Divorce became commonplace when traditional roles fell from popularity. So ladies, if you want a man that will be YOURS… forever and would never abandon you, then you should make a reappraisal of your value system. You won’t get it on a progressive ideology. You will ONLY get it with a Conservative Traditional ideology.

When a man gets married, he should be ready to share his life. This often means letting your wife take over portions of it so you no longer have to. A good, and strong, woman will be able to manage the home. If she can manage the home, she can help the man become a success.

We have a saying that goes something a little like this; “Behind every successful man is a strong woman.”

As I get older, I see how true this is. My friends who are all very successful, all have strong and well-organized wives. They all also have relinquished some things to the wife in exchange for her domestic support. This includes [1] all of the finances. [2] What he eats. [3] How he dresses. [4] His exercises, and [5] how they relate to family matters.

Family Meal

Oh, and please forget that nonsense Hollywood narrative of what a traditional conservative woman is. (Where a traditional woman wears Amish style hats, and lives a life right out of the “The Handmaids Tale”.) That is propaganda. Today, a conservative wife might have a body covered in tattoos, ear and nose rings and purple hair. It isn’t about appearances.

It is about the energy that lies inside…

Chinese women, as well as African, Polish, Russian, and Indian women don’t sit around watching the boob-tube, or play games on the cell-phone all day long. They do what ever is necessary to make THEIR household a success.

  • The manage the fiances.
  • They budget the household.
  • They allocate resources to jointly improve their standard of living.
  • They make sure everyone is eating well and healthy.
  • They are a model for their community and familial relations.
  • They make sure that the husband has everything he needs.
  • They push and help the husband grow as a provider.

[4] Companionship

via GIPHY

I always look for companionship when I see a woman who interests me. I wonder if they would they be fun and interesting to be with. I wonder if we could talk about really deep and interesting subjects. I wonder if they would be willing to share in my hobbies. I look for companions.

This is true for most men.

Time
Spend time, meaningful and precious time, with those you love. Make your time quality time. Buy an ice cream cone with your retired father. Take you mother out of a morning breakfast. Call up one of your friends and go to the beach or hike in a local park. Spend time together. Companionship.

Now, most women are confused with what this means. They search for romance. They could care less about companionship. This is sad, because romance comes from companionship.

Romance is spawned from companionship.

My wife and I took a trip to Thailand, and while on a drinking binge, the taxi driver drove us to the middle of no where and abandoned us there. We had to struggle and make our way back to the hotel. That bungle was an adventure, but my wife well remembers the rural village BBQ meal as the dawn broke through the clouds, and the orange light that shined on our toes in the sand. Romantic times are unplanned. They come from companionship.

A man wants a person to share his life with.

via GIPHY

[5] A Woman’s Personality

Another thing that guys look for in a woman is personality. We are attracted to kindness, softness, sweetness, and compassion.

When I come across a particularly militant American woman, I am immediately repelled. Especially when that person wants to lecture me on “white privilege” or some kind of populist nonsense that weaker men accept. Don’t be a ugly bullyish brute of a woman. It’s not becoming.

Become the ideal. Your life is within your hands.

Pretty girl
Look at this pretty American girl. I have to admit that I have a thing for short frilly dresses. Man, she does look great in polka-dots. Wouldn’t you just love to go out on the town and have a cup of coffee and a cheese cake with this woman?

To be honest, when I meet a woman and I get to know them, I am looking for companionship. I wonder if they would like to accompany me for dinner, dancing, and any of the hobbies that I love to partake in. Since I love wine, a non-drinker and myself might not fit together well. Since I love animals, when I am talking to a woman, I wonder if they would also be part of my life with dogs and cats.

The personality that a woman has eventually dominates a man’s interest. In other words, while a man is firstly attracted to a woman’s look, and sexual appeal, it is her personality that will keep him by her side forever.

[6] Self Confidence

One of the most important traits for both men and women is self-confidence. This is something that is hard to describe, but is fundamental to success in life. the truth is that I am not at all handsome, but women are interested in spending time with me for other reasons. I chalk up the reasons to being positive, happy, interesting and having good self-confidence.

Because that is exactly what turns me on in a woman.

When I take a woman out, I want to be able to talk about things. I want to be able to talk about tomato plants, favorite foods, dogs and cats, and thoughts about life. I want to be with a person that isn’t so fucking sensitive that I am afraid of being who I am. I want to be accepted for me, and if you don’t like it, to Hell with you. The same goes double for women.

I would NEVER tell a woman that she shouldn’t eat dessert because she needed to count her calories.  Nor would I tolerate sitting down with a woman who wanted to lecture me on the injustices of the world. No one likes a scold. Really.

No one.

General Comparisons

The thing is that Chinese food is healthier than American food. The culture is also healthier, and everyone likes to dance. Many Chinese like to ride bicycles and walk. There are sidewalks everywhere in China. Thus, many Chinese girls and women are thin and healthy.

  • Chinese eat healthier food.
  • Chinese have smaller food portions.
  • Chinese prefer green tea to soda.
  • Chinese have opportunities to dance every day.
  • Culturally, being out of shape is a terrible taboo.
  • Bike riding is supported and subsidized by the government.
  • Sidewalks are everywhere.

Fat China

To elaborate further, being unhealthy is frowned upon. A fat Chinese woman is considered to be someone who is causes her family to lose face. It is not tolerated.

In Chinese culture, eating is seen as a form of affection and commitment to the family, so I always ate every meal, every single kernel of rice in my bowl. But I also felt fat and unfit to be the “perfect” Asian girl, as I compared my body to those of my fellow Asian American girl friends. When we would go out to eat and drink -- a group of petite Asian girls -- I knew I had to work out more and eat less the next day to make up for the amount I ingested with my friends. I’ve spent countless Friday nights in college, feeling completely inadequate because every single Asian girl I met was thin and beautiful with porcelain smooth skin, like Asian girls are supposed to be. I started to wonder if I was the only Asian girl who felt this way.

-XOJane

In America, being a fat woman is considered to be very hip and progressive. It is very much anti-fat-shaming. As such it is promoted as applauded. Also, Americans tend to love piercings, tattoos and all sorts of body adornments.

American girls.
Typical college-age American girls having a good time during spring break in Corpus Christi Texas. These are typical girls. Covered in Tattoos. They are having a great time, and they have most excellent smile. None of them are fat.

Also Americans tend to have a different lifestyle. We drive everywhere. If our car breaks down, we rent a car rather than walk. Unless you are in a city, there just aren’t any sidewalks. We like to eat fast food. Our food portions are enormous. While American food is certainly tasty, we usually opt for fast and easy food instead of the food that is better for us like oatmeal and fish.

So, we have a situation where Chinese girls tend to be thinner and healthier than American girls. I find that being healthy is enormously attractive.

Comparisons between Chinese and American Girls

Here are my opinions concerning Chinese girls and American girls. Of course it is only my own opinion.  You are free to agree or disagree as you choose.

We will start with my first criteria; Appearance.

Appearance

Both American women and Chinese women tend to take care of their appearance. However, culturally, what is attractive differs. In America, having “bronze” or dark skin is considered to be attractive. While in China, having white or pale skin is considered to be attractive.

In China, it is desirable and even necessary to appear healthy and fit. In America it is trendy to be fat and overweight.

While I find that both China and America have attractive ladies, I have discovered that there is a higher percentage of them in China compared to America. This is not determined by the vast numbers of Chinese compared to the much smaller number of American, but rather the percentage of attractive women within society.

Taking the regional and cultural differences aside, and ONLY making a determination based on my personal opinions, I would find the following to be true…

America might have 30% of the women to fit my own biased, and old fashioned, ideas of beauty and attractiveness. While in China, I find a much higher percentage of women, easily over 80%, that I would consider attractive in one way or the other.

Sex

Based upon my own experiences, and only on my experiences, I find that both China and America are about on par with providing enjoyable sexual adventures for the pleasures of the man of the species. While there are individual differences, I think that a man in either America or in China would tend to have reasonably enjoyable sex with their partner.

via GIPHY

There are a couple of sexual trends that seem to be promoted in the American media at this time, that are not promoted in China. These include…

  • Sexual ambiguity.
  • Female ejaculation / squirting.
  • Sexual promiscuity.
  • Role reversal.

Aside from these differences, for me I could care less about the latest in sexual trends going on today. Therefore…

Based on my experience, sex in either the United States or China is about the same. It varies from person to person and relationship to relationship.

Domestic Concern

I am afraid that I am going to have to shock all the readers in Internet-land out there on this consideration. However, the fact is this; the Chinese women are traditional and Conservative. The American women are progressive and liberal.

Chinese women are conservative. American women tend to be liberal.

A Chinese wife (or girlfriend) would wash, starch, iron and fold your clothes. An American wife, highly unlikely.

A Chinese wife would make a meal for her husband, provide him with clean house clothes and slippers when he gets home, and make him a cocktail. An American woman wouldn’t even consider it.

A Chinese wife would make sure that her husband was eating healthy meals, not doing unhealthy things, and would select his clothes and make sure that the man was presentable for work. An American woman would never pick out her husbands clothes, let alone iron, starch, and fold them to lay them out for him to wear when he got out of the shower.

A Chinese wife would shower, get dressed up and put on makeup to make a run to the local grocery store to get some supplies. An American woman, probably would not.

A Chinese wife would budget the household for the month. She would plan and prepare the family meals, even if it was just for two people. An American woman might do this, however, planning a family meal has become a lost art that has disappeared sometime during the Bill Clinton presidency, when Hillary Clinton became the role model for many a young woman.

All, in all, culturally the Chinese woman is far more suitable than an American woman is for a family life. 

However, for relationships that are not tied to a family or domestic issues, such as one-night stands, and promiscuous sexual adventures, the American woman is preferred. As her behavior towards a long term mutually-respectable relations can best be considered as disposable.

Companionship

Again, I would say that both American and Chinese women would make fine companions. Though, culturally it would take on different manifestations.

In public, a Chinese wife treats me with great respect. She would never belittle me. She would never, ever… EVER say anything bad about me to anyone. I am her family. I am HER family. I am HER’s. To bad-mouth me is to admit that she is a terrible wife.

Culturally, the wife, the family and the husband loses face if she is not supportive of him. In fact, he could lose his job, or be placed in demeaning and compromising work situations as well. The wife has an important role, and she must make sure that the husband is respected and promoted. Can you imagine the woman in this video saying bad things about her husband…?

Chinese girls are fiercely defensive of their families and their husbands.

In comparison, an American wife has no problem with treating a husband terribly. In fact it is even promoted in the American media and Hollywood. This has manifested with a terrible lack of respect in public, bounding on terrible disrespect of the worst kind. Heck, even the President of the United States allows people to point their finger at him and belittle him in public.

You would NEVER see this in China.

Asshole President being belittled.
FILE – In this Jan. 25, 2012, file photo, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer points during an intense conversation with President Barack Obama after he arrived at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport, in Mesa, Ariz. In the summer of 2010, race and politics collided when Arizona Republicans passed an immigration law that critics said would lead to racial profiling of Hispanics. Jose Lozano, vice president of the Massachusetts Association of Minority Law Enforcement Officers, remembers Brewer wagging her finger in the president’s face, which he thought was ugly and hadn’t seen before. “There’s no way that would have ever happened to a white president,” Lozano said. (AP Photo/Haraz N. Ghanbari, File)

Knowing what I know of today, I can understand why some American husbands beat their wives up when they get home. If they would attack and beat up a male stranger that treats them that way, what makes their closest confidant get a free-pass?

That being said, there are other minor cultural differences…

A Chinese wife would have the husband carry her purse, all the bags of the things that she bought, and tote the dog around in a kennel. While she would walk in the mall in all her glorious beauty. However, the husband would control what they did for the day.

An American wife would bound ahead and do her things without asking the man what he wants to do. She would go to the stores she wants, and if the man comes fine. Otherwise, it’s too bad. In America, the husband has taken on a kind of pet-role. Go. Fetch. Sit. Obey. Roll-over.

Of course, there are exceptions. However, and this is important, culturally how a wife treats her husband differs between China and America.

  • In China, the husband must be treated with full respect or the family suffers.
  • In America, treating the husband poorly is an accepted norm.

Thus…

I have discovered that I am treated better, adored more, appreciated, and honored in China. It is at a level of respect that is way, way, WAY beyond anything than I ever experienced in America. Therefore, the Chinese culture greatly favors a relationship consisting of companionship between a man and a woman.

Personality

I am attracted to kindness. When I see a great wide smile, I gravitate towards it. There are kind people all over the world. Just like there are evil people. I personally believe that there is an equal mixture of kind, personable women in both China and America.

I like the fact that many people smile at strangers. You won’t see this in China. In China, people only smile to friends.

I like the fact that many people in America attend church. I think that it helps keep us grounded to a higher purpose. You know, many Chinese are quite religious as well. We NEED religion. We NEED to constantly be reminded of our role and our purpose in this life.

President Trump in Church.
President trump attends church and feels the spirit of God. Of course, this was reported differently. The American mainstream media reported this as protestors marched around and around the church. Whatever, get the attention away from the good. Focus on the trivial. There is nothing more important within this reality that our purpose and our relationship with our maker.

A kind and caring person can be found anywhere. You just need to push aside the differences in culture and look at the person within. I have found that both America and China has people with attractive personalities.

Self Confidence

I am attracted to people with self confidence. This is true for both men and women.

The thing about this, and I do not know why, the women in the United States with good self-confidence are ugly arrogant monsters. While the women in China tend to be lovely and well poised. Ok, here is what I am trying to express. Here is a Chinese woman with high confidence…

Now, for comparison, here is an American woman with high confidence…

American woman with high confidence
Here’s an American woman showing that she has high confidence. She is proud of who she is and accepts her body just as it is. No one is going to tell her how to eat, and what to eat. No one is going to try to sell her hair lotion or shampoo. She is her very own woman. Good for her!

You can find many such pictures where absolutely beautiful women sabotaged their appearance and posted pictures of them with their new self-found self-confidence. I am NOT saying that it is bad. What I am saying is that you do not have to adopt extreme behaviors to be the very best that you are.

I think that it takes high self-confidence to avoid the seduction of tattoos when everyone else is sporting them. It takes high confidence to let your hair grow long and refuse to cut it for any reason. I think that real high confidence is when you do things your way, and not the trendy and popular way.

I think that everyone needs and should have high self-confidence. However, I don't think that we need to destroy our appearance to obtain it. Just because people are suddenly are looking at you and giving you attention does not mean that that they admire and like you. They just might be gawking like people do at animals in a zoo.

Self-confidence alone is not attractive. It is the sum total of all the characteristics that a person has. Self-confidence puts everything together into a nice neat package.

r/K Theory

The trend in America for fat females, and for promiscuity is a valid species survival vector. It occurs when you have creatures living in abundance. In America we have a situation where there is abundance.

Studies on mice, rats and rabbits have affirmed that when there is an unlimited supply of resources, the species take on the behaviors that we witness in the United States today. If you are interested in finding out more about this theory, please go here…

r/K selection theory

Conclusion

When I first came to China I was floored by the prodigious numbers of attractive, sexy and self-confident women. Not only that, but they were traditional. They believed in marriage. They believed in roles. They believed in the importance of man being a man, and a woman running the family.

China is communist, but here all the people were traditionally American-style conservative. I was amazed and stunned. Then, when I started to live and work in China, I began to understand it better. I saw that modern China follows the free-market values of American style conservatism. We can all thank Mr. Deng for that.

Here in China, when I would try to talk to a woman, they would smile and come up to me. They wouldn’t scow or make some kind of dismissive remark. They looked into my eyes and I had their full attention.  I have since come to appreciate women who take care of themselves and honor their family. I fell in love with one and I did go ahead and marry her.

If the woman is from America, and they take care of themselves and honors their family, then you should not let that person escape. They are a prize. They ARE remarkable and ABSOLUTELY deserving of your attention and admiration. Appreciate them. For they are special, unique and deserving of a “knight in white armor”. Don’t let them down.

Take Aways

  • There are beautiful women all over the world.
  • In China, beauty is defined by tradition.
  • In America, beauty is defined by popular culture.

That being said…

  • A traditional man would find that China would have more beautiful women than in America.
  • A trendy progressive, liberal man would find that America will have large numbers of attractive women that fits his ideas of perfection.

American Woman in China

Sometimes a picture tells a story. Here is a micro video of an American in China taking selfies on the beach. I will let the reader come to their own conclusions.

FAQ

Q: Which type of woman is more attractive? An American or a Chinese woman?
A: Both have their charms. It really depends on the person who is the observer. For me, with all my crazy old-fashioned old-school ideas about family, and appearance, China is the land of beautiful women. But my ideas are not popular at all.

In America today, Michelle Obama is considered one of the most attractive women in the world. Hillary Clinton is the 6th most attractive woman. So, many people have different ideas about beauty than I have. You, the reader, should never take my tastes and attitudes as your own. You should instead NOT be influenced by my out of style thoughts and opinions.

Q: Is there any female feature that is more important in attractiveness?
A: While I am certainly fond of a nice chest, and sensuous lips, I have to be honest on this. Nothing gets me stunned into stupefied silence than a mixture of kindness and self-confidence. That chick I mentioned earlier from Brookline in Boston, was so tender but strong! Oh, my gosh!

Q: What is wrong about tattoos and piercings?
A: Absolutely nothing. You need to understand, I represent a different generation. In my world, it is typically unusual for a woman to have excessive tattoos and piercings. That does not mean that I am not attracted to women with these decorations, it is just that it falls outside what I have considered to be attractive. I have to be reeducated on this subject.

Q: Is a woman who smokes and drinks attractive?
A: I think so, but according to the typical Chinese culture, it is considered unwomanly if not taboo. In fact, the reader would be surprised at how broadly I consider attractiveness. Which is why I often tell everyone to be the very best that they can be, and stop listening to the advice of others. Attractiveness is a combination of factors. Just be the best you can be, and let who you are shine through.

Links about China

Business KTV

Dance Craze

End of the Day Potato

Dog Shit

Dancing Grandmothers

When the SJW movement took control of China

Family Meal

Freedom & Liberty in China

Ben Ming Nian

Beware the Expat

Fake Wine

Fat China

China and America Comparisons

SJW

Playground Comparisons

The Last Straw

Diversity Initatives

Democracy

Travel outside

10 Misconceptions about China

Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1

Pretty Girls 2

Pretty Girls 3

Pretty Girls 4

Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 15AUG18.
  2. Completed 17SEP18.
  3. SEO review 17SEP18.

The Hazing of New Employees – A Lost Tradition

Up until the 1980’s, the “hazing” of new employees was a time-honored tradition. Here, the new employees would be given the crappiest jobs, told to do the hardest things, and treated horribly. This all seemed to disappear in the middle 1980’s. This article is dedicated to all those older workers who had to endure the “hazing” period and what it was like…

Introduction

Today, little remains of the old days of Hazing. You can see it on College campuses and universities when people “rush” to join a sorority or a fraternity. That’s about it. The hazing during High School has pretty much been eliminated. With the only vestiges of it being the movie “Dazed and Confused“.

Dazed and Confused.
In the movie “Dazed and Confused”, High School Seniors were shown “hazing” middle school students who had graduated into High School.

People have forgotten that “hazing” was an important part of life. You went through it numerous times in your life, and one of the most harrowing was when you started work at a new job. Here, we look at this aspect of life. In it, I describe the hazing rituals that I experienced in Western Pennsylvania in the 1970’s.

Hazing in the Coal Mines

One of the first jobs that I had was in the coal mines when I was 14 years old. My father believed that the role of a man was to work, and to earn enough to provide for a family. That was what “being a man” was. Now, the law put limits on the hours and the conditions that I would work under. Never the less, I was introduced to work on the rock crusher at 14.

tipple
Here is a typical tipple in Pennsylvania. The trucks or trains would carry huge chunks of coal from the mine to the tipple. They would be dumped into a hopper that fed into a rock crusher. Then the broken coal would be scanned for debris and loaded into hoppers below. My first job was to stand over the rock crusher and make sure none of the coal would get hung up. I would have to crawl above the “jaws of death” and bash the rock with a hand sledge to break it up.

The job itself was pretty darn straight forward. I would stand above the rock crusher on metal slats. These were steel flat bars that formed a grid over the crusher. The goal was to stand on top of them, and not slip between them. They were spaced about a yard apart to left the huge chunks of coal to fall down below. I was given a large pole to help push the coal into place, and a hand sledge to break up the rocks.

Many a time I would slip on the slippery mud covered slats. I would fall down between the slats and have to climb my way back up to the top again as the coal would be moving towards the crushing death below. I would often lose my helmet as it was ultimately ground up into tiny busted up flakes of plastic.

Coal miners
Coal miners Rodney Blankenship (L), Roger Vanatter (C) and an unidentified colleague prepare for the start of their afternoon shift in the locker room of a coal mine near Gilbert, West Virginia May 22, 2014. Blankenship, 53, a coal miner for 30 years, said “You go in there, hope to have good productivity on your shift, and get out safely.” With coal production slowing due to stricter environmental controls, the availability of natural gas and a shift to surface mining, the state’s coal country has been hit hard with job losses and business closures. Picture taken May 22, 2014.

That was my normal job. Now, let’s talk about the hazing aspect of it…

Sure, I took a lot of gruff from the older workers. Most people that I worked with were in their 20’s and 30’s. The real older men were over their 40’s and tended to work at other roles in the company. I was doing the “grunt work” that pretty much didn’t pay well, and that no one wanted to do.

There were “independent” haulers that would drive their dump trucks to the mine and dump the ore into the hopper. These tended to be grizzly old truck drivers, and they all wanted to give me a hard time while I weighed out their load (they were paid by weight). They would love to call me names like “fucking-dumb pollack” and “pecker dick-boy” all the time berating me for “cheating” them out of a few pounds of ore. All nonsense. It was just a bunch of harassment that I would have to endure as they would pull in and I would need to weigh their loads. Other than that it was harmless.

Mining community
I grew up in the hills of Western Pennsylvania. Like nearby West Virginia, the area was amazingly beautiful and wooded, with small communities of homes and mobile homes along winding roads that went in and out of the mountains.

However, nothing was like the shit storm that I dealt with by the older kids, only slightly senior to me. There, they would steal my helmet and throw it into the hopper and I would have to dive in and retrieve it. You know, if I lost the helmet it would be deducted out of my salary.

They would, for instance, take my lunch and hide it in the tipple somewhere. Or, lock me in the outhouse, or out of it and put ex-lax in my coffee cup.

My supervisor would make me crawl into the trash cans and scrub them out with a hose and a brush. He would also try to cheat me out of my salary. In those days we were paid in cash. Sometimes, instead of the $45 that I was due, I would find a $5 and some change inside the envelope.

Other tricks of the trade included flattening my tires so that I would have to drive real slow to the nearest gas station, rolling down my windows (in the car) so that the inside would be soaked in an afternoon rain, and putting grease on the handle of the hand sludge so that it would slip out of my hand when I used it. The worst was putting an empty can of oil on the hood. After a 16 hour day in full sunlight, the ring impression it made could never be buffed out.

Hazing in the Steel Mills

The steel mills were a little bit different than the mines. Once I turned 16 years old, I was able to work full time. This meant that I could get a “starter job” at one of the local steel mills. I was fortunate. Edgewater Steel needed someone to stand under the ladle and hold the ingot molds in place while the hot steel poured into it.

Stell mill 1
Of course, I was given protective suits and equipment to wear. We worked a tough shift, where we were provided a rest area where we could cool down. The temperature near the steel was brutal, and the radiation burned our skin.

The work was necessary. You had to use these long poles to hold the ingot molds in place. If you didn’t do a good job, one of the sides of the ingot mold could come loose and the liquid could flow out, covering you and killing you instantly. We would work two people per ingot. Typically, we might be able to come up with ten ingots of steel from each poured ladle.

The work was hot, tiring and very dangerous. Never the less, it didn’t stop the older folk from “hazing” us newbies.

Steel mill
Here is a scene from the movie “The Deer Hunter”. It was filmed not too far from where I grew up. This is pretty much a snapshot of my youth.

I suppose it was all in good fun, but at the time I thought that it was mean and cruel. Some of the tricks included shitting into the boots that we had to wear on the shop floor, taking carbon dust and spraying it on to our lunch (sandwiches),  turning off the lights (at the breaker) when we were getting set up under the ladle. Dangerous stuff this. Though, on the other hand, no one ever got really hurt. That I know of.

Pouring steel
Here we see molten steel being pours into small ingots. Where I worked, we poured them in huge tower-like molds. They were about two yards tall and perhaps two feet in diameter. We held them in place with large hooked rods. And, we stood there while the liquid molten steel was being poured into them.

Other tricks included stealing our time (punch) card, dropping pallets (off of a fork lift) from three feet up, making a terrible racket and startling everyone. I’ve had my car keys dipped in paint, my motorcycle helmet (outside) filled with urine, and my locker door removed.

This kind of hazing would continue for months until the guys “felt” that you had “earned your place” in the “pecking order” and could be left alone. There were modifiers of course. Say you had an older relative working there, or you were close friends with some of your buddies.  All of this would modify how long the hazing treatment would last. Though, in my case, they always called me the “token pollack” at the company. That never ended.

Hazing in the Grocery Stores

For a while, I worked as a stock boy for a local grocery store. The kind of work was quite different. I wore a short sleeved white shirt, with a bow tie and a large apron that I tied around my waist. As different as it was, the hazing continued unabated. In fact, each time you started to work at a new place, you would have to go through the hazing procedure all over again.

Bagging station
Here is a typical bagging station. We all worked as “bag boys” that would put the groceries in paper bags, and then load them to the cars of the people who shopped at the store.

The hazing depended on the person who did it. The other “bag boys” would play tricks and “jokes” on the new-comer. The department managers would give you a hard time, often assigning the most terrible and awful jobs for you to do. The female cashiers would pester you mercilessly and do little things that would make your life harder than it should have been.

Hazing tricks included hand delivery of groceries to the wrong house. Having you do the hardest clean up jobs in the store; like honey, or olive oil. It would include such things as constant call-ups to bag groceries, and not being able to get your core tasks assigned, which always resulted in a bitch-out session with the floor manager.

Some of the tricks seemingly got out of hand. Like fire extinguisher soak downs as you started a long day of work. Or, scrub downs of the inside of a freezer, while it was still running. We would have to do things like move the two ton safe, scrub the floor under it and then move it back. Other tasks included parking lot cleanup in the pouring rain or snowing blizzard. It was all harmless and innocent hazing for the most part.

bag boy
As a grocery bag boy, we would perform the relatively easy job of bagging groceries, and carrying them out to the car for the customers.

Of course, everything would eventually die down. This was especially true when there were new employees to bear the brunt of all the hazing. Thank goodness.

Hazing on the Drag Lines

A drag line is a huge machine that eats into the earth, and processes it into rubble from which ore is then extracted. They are common all over Pennsylvania. They tear into the hills and extract the precious coal and ores from the land.

Dragline
A dragline excavator is a piece of heavy equipment used in civil engineering and surface mining.  The much larger type which is built on site is commonly used in strip-mining operations to remove overburden above coal and more recently for oil sands mining. The largest heavy draglines are among the largest mobile land machines ever built.

For a while, I worked on a dragline. Being the new kid on the block, I of course, became the “go-fer”. Which means “hey, kid! go fer that…”.

My first “go-fer” task was to get a hook brace located at the top end of the dragline boom. So, yeah you guessed it, I had to climb all the way up to the end of the boom and retrieve the part. Only to find that I got the wrong part, and had to go back up a second time and get it again. Being the “new kid on the block” really did suck.

Dragline bucket.
There are many parts involved in a dragline operation. Each one needed to be cared for and maintained. This is a task that is usually reserved for the new kids working the mining site.

Conclusion

Many times I lament “the good old days”, but not with this. I am happy to say “good riddance”.

Hazing in High School.
Hazing in High School.

I really do not know why humans require any type of “hazing” activities. I am sure that there must be scientist or two who can explain the phenomenon. I, for one, would like to hear why we all seem to utilize hazing as a passage into adulthood. I know that it is used in Zambia, China and Japan. What’s the point?

"In my research I've found that group benefits that could quickly accrue for newcomers –– automatic benefits –– predict people's desire to haze," he said.

"This isn't the only variable that matters –– there's some effect of age and sex, for example –– but the effect of automatic benefits suggests that potential vectors of group exploitation alter people's treatment of newcomers in predictable ways," 

-Cimino

Today, I think that most of this type of hazing is now absent in the work environment today. I haven’t seen it. However, it is possible that it has taken on new form, and has manifested in other ways, like at Google, for instance…

Take Aways

  • Hazing was an important part of American culture up into the 1980’s.
  • Schools hazed the new students.
  • Workers in industry hazed the new employees.
  • Since the 1980’s and into the 1990’s people stopped hazing the new employees at work.
  • Younger workers today have no idea or concept that hazing was a rite of passage that they would need to deal with when they started a new job.

FAQ

Q: Why isn’t hazing permitted in American industry any longer?
A: I really do not know. I think it is partly due to the rise of HR standardization of policy, the merging of government laws, and HR enforcement, and a rapid swinging volatile labor force. I would guess that any hazing today would be grounds for dismissal of an employee.

Q:  Why you think that hazing was an important part of industry?
A: The work environment consists of a tiny microcosm of society. They structure themselves in a tribal manner and creature written and unwritten rules of behavior. New members to that society must prove their value prior to them obtaining membership in the group.

Q: Are there any formal policies against hazing?
A: Yes.

Some Comments

Posted on Free Republic on 10SEP18. The post can be found HERE. Some highlights…

I recall reading about how when Mario Lemieux was a rookie with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1984, even he did not escape that bit of hazing as when he fell asleep on an airplane in the midst of a road trip, a teammate snuck up and covered his head in shaving cream. And also the well known tale of Bobby Orr in about 1966 being dragged into the dressing room shower, covered in liniment oil, and shaved from head to toe.

- OttawaFreeper

The retired Naval aviation guys I work with tell stories about sending the noobies for a bucket of “prop wash”. lol

- V_TWIN

20+ years ago my daughter was in an award winning marching band that had a time honored "hell night" for new members. That was until one newbie went psycho and has stayed that way. The band director, school, and boosters are likely still paying off the seven figure judgement.

- buckalfa 

There's no hazing at all in the Navy these days. I remember making 3rd and then 2nd Class Petty Officer and getting my crows "tacked" on (getting punched in the arm). My arm was black and blue but I wasn't any worse for the wear. I was proud. Of course, there's always some asshole who takes it too far and someone winds up LLD with a broken arm after his arm was jumped on.

Around 2010 or so, about the same time as DADT was repealed, the Navy cracked down hard on hazing. It had long been officially banned but still tolerated. The Navy sent a message in the form of several publicized career ending NJPs that the days of hazing were over. When I made First Class, there were no punches to my arm. We got the message loud and clear.

-Drew68

Steam blanket. Prop wash. Key to the sea chest. Metric crescent wrench. Fetch a henway. And on and on and on......

- rktman 

There’s hazing, and then there’s hazing. When I stood my first messenger watch as a US Navy Seaman Apprentice, I was sent to a location on the ship to see a particular petty officer and obtain a container of red running light oil. That petty officer sent me to another location and another person, and so on for a number of contacts. Of course, there’s no such thing as running light oil...but the travels seeking it helped familiarize me with the ship’s layout and some of our senior petty officers.

Then there was the “Sea Bat” ploy. A number of sailors were gathered on the fantail around a cardboard box partly covered with a towel, and were peeking inside at it. A couple of others were doing some desultory sweeping nearby. One of my shipmates asked what was in the box and was told it was a Sea Bat. He bent over and lifted the towel to have a look, and one of the broom wielding swabbies swatted him on the rear as all the others yelled “SEA BAT”!

A new junior officer was the next victim; his swat was a bit less aggressive than the other received.

- JimRed 

One of my first summer jobs was at an amusement park. The tradition there was to be sent to hunt for a bucket of steam. Some of them are still looking.

Then there was my first “real” job at a huge factory complex. I was taken to the remotest part of the place and left to find my own way back. Took all afternoon.

- Some Fat Guy in L.A.

Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. First written 10SEP18.
  2. Completed 10SEP18.
  3. SEO Review 10SEP18.
  4. Published 10SEP18.

The Top Ten Misconceptions Chinese have about America

When the Chinese come and visit the United States, they are often spellbound in shock and amazement. They find that they LOVE, absolutely L-O-V-E the United States. I have many friends who have told me this. Another thing that they have told me is that it was not what they expected.

Here are some of the misconceptions that Chinese have of America…

1. Donald Trump is despised and is going to prison if not executed outright.

Well, this is what you would expect if all you watched was CNN and MSNBC.

In fact, most “Western media” that the Chinese see is the main-steam American media. While most Americans, not all, understand that the American media has a fatally liberal bias, the Chinese are unaware of this. Thus, the impression that they get is that the American media represents the hearts and minds of the American people.

Donald Trump
A smiling Donald Trump eating KFC on one of his airplanes. Looks good. I sure could use some mashed potatoes, gravy and coleslaw as well.

As such, they are astounded that Donald Trump is able to get away with so much!

“1. Donald Trump is despised and is going to prison if not executed outright.” 

A few months ago I had a chance to talk with an engineering student from India who was visiting the US, and she had much the same impression. She asked me why the American people hadn’t risen up and removed Trump from office since he was so universally despised. 

She was genuinely surprised when I told her that Trump was probably the most popular American president since Reagan and would surely be re-elected in 2020. 

I realized from this conversation how much the Mainstream media’s endless propaganda war on Trump is diminishing America’s prestige globally. People in other countries mistakenly think of America’s news media as being legitimate, and believe what they hear. (Even far-left Americans realize that most of CNN’s reporting is bullsh*t.) 

We look like a third-rate banana Republic on the verge of collapse to the rest of the world. I doubt the current Supreme court confirmation hearings are helping matters. 

- Junk Silver

They are amazed that he is not being hung from scaffolding or being lynched. They, thus believe that he must be a most capable politician and a supreme businessman; a man not to be trifled with. The reactions that I see from my fellow Chinese friends is a mixture of awe, admiration, and fear.

Just WHO is this man, they muse.

The Chinese believe the main-stream media and are impressed with President Trump for his ability to avoid hanging from a noose.

2. Everything is Free!

After nearly a decade of President Obama being televised giving away free things, most Chinese have the impression that that is what America represents. Free cars. Free cell-phones. Free citizenship. Free meals. Free housing.  They do not realize that nothing is free, and ultimately someone must pay a price for it.

Obama giving away money.
Obama has given away more money, more things, and more cash than any other president. The only problem is that it wasn’t his money to give away. It was yours.

Today, when I mention that America used to be the “Land of the Free”, they respond with “What, you no longer get free healthcare, free education, free cell-phones and free housing?” They think that the current President is changing America away from a “Free” nation and moving towards something more practical.

Somehow, and I really do not know how, they believe that the government has an endless supply of money to spend. As such, they think that it was quite magnanimous of President Obama to spend that money on the American people. Now, they are afraid that the money will be spent elsewhere, like on wars.

The way the American government works is a mystery to the Chinese. But, that is ok. It is a mystery to most Americans as well.

3. Americans are Rich.

It goes to think, don’t you agree, that if all Americans are driving nice cars and living in nice houses that Americans MUST be rich. What the Chinese do not realize is that in America everything is rented. Very few people pay in cash to buy a car or a house.

McMansion
Most Chinese live in an apartment. The apartment is tiny by American standards, so when a Chinese person comes to America, they become amazed at the sizes of the homes, the cars and the portions of food. They think, indeed, America is a rich country full of rich people.

Oh, certainly there are those who are driving older cars that we paid off years ago. That there are those who paid off their thirty year mortgages ten years ago, however, they are a minority. Most Americans pay both a mortgage and a car payment, with a sizable number now paying school loans.

In China, most people pay in cash. They save like crazy, sort of like the Amish, and then spend the money where necessary. While credit is available to the citizens, most maintain a traditional attitude towards frugality and savings. Thus they think that Americans must be the same.

Which is why many Chinese believe that Americans are quite wealthy.

The Chinese believe Americans are very wealthy, because by Chinese standards, you need to be a millionaire to be able to live like an American does.

4. All Americans carry guns and are Armed.

American things.
Sometimes when a Chinese person visits America, they come back with all kinds of stories of their adventures. They take pictures, and often ask me what is the story behind the photos. As an American, I think nothing of the images, but then when I think about it, it becomes hilarious.

I chuckle at this one.

Nope, not at all true. But if all you watch is the American main-stream media, of course you would have this impression. From the “debates” on CNN, to the discussions on the Huffington Post, everyone talks about the free access to firearms. Of course, if that is all you have access to, the impression would be of an overly and unfairly armed American populace.

Breakfast in America
What many Chinese think how Americans have breakfast. It consists of “runny” eggs, buttered toasted bread, some bacon, a cup of coffee and a nice firearm.

This puzzles the Chinese to no end. “Why does Americans need so many guns?” they ask. “The police will protect you”. Well, in China the role of the police is quite sedentary. Most of China consists of hard-working nerds. The police are there to deal with an occasional victim or crime. However, they never police behavior. Not like in America.

Anyways, when asked, I tell them how I miss my P99 and S3. They always ask me about the big caliber Smith and Wesson handguns, and ask if I ever owned a Glock.

I have to disappoint them, but I do tell them that I really enjoyed my old AK-47 clone (that I bought in California before they were banned). And I would get started on a conversation about the joys of black-powder (think Dixie Gun Works) and compound bows. It’s a world that really interests them. I’ll tell you what.

American breakfast two
Of course there are many Americans that are offended by this meme. I happen to believe that my breakfast is certainly a little different.

The Chinese are often surprised that Americans don't carry guns everywhere.

5. America is Full of Excitement and Happiness.

By watching shows such as “Friends” the Chinese have come to consider Americans as nice friend and family oriented folk; people who have come to believe that life should be lived to it’s fullest. It’s a nice illusion.

Something happened between 1975 and today. Americans have become less of what they once were. It’s kind of sad. We lost something.

Maybe it’s all the restrictions at the workplace, or the over-reliance on portable media for enjoyment. I don’t know why, but many Americans look forward to mowing the grass and playing on the computer instead of fishing with an ice cold six pack of beer and being with friends. I lament that.

Quiet town
Here is a typical American town. It’s peaceful and quiet. In contrast, all of China is noisy, with people doing all sorts of things with all kinds of flashy lights and signs.

Yet when they come to America, their first impression is quite different. “It is so, so, so very quiet” a friend told me.  Businesses close before 9 pm, and residential streets seem abandoned like a post apocalyptic ghost-town.

The Chinese visitor often finds that America is a very quiet and peaceful place. It's a bit of a surprise.

6. Everyone is your Friend.

Just because someone smiles, does not mean that they like you and are your friend. In America, smiling is just a polite way of interaction with strangers. In China, however, smiles are something that is reserved for special people. People, mind you, who have earned their place in your heart.

American Street
This is a typical American street on a fine day. Note the proud American flag flying and the what must be a nice crisp day. If you walked into any of these stores, the people would greet you with a smile. To a foreigner, it seems odd, but really comfortable.

When a Chinese person visits the United States, they are overwhelmed at how friendly everyone seems. Everyone smiles, opens up the doors for you, stands out of the way and is helpful. That being said, they are shaken to the core when they try to get into a conversation and practice their English. Aside from a polite minor conversation, most Americans just want to be left alone.

To a Chinese person this is like a best friend turning their back on you.

In America, a smile does not mean someone is your friend. It just means that the person who smiles is polite. In China, people normally do NOT smile. If they do, you know that they are a friend. Smiles are reserved for people who have a place in your heart.

The Chinese are often very comfortable in the United States, but find that making "real" friends is often very difficult to do.

7. Everything is Fair and Just.

Well, isn’t that what America stands for?

Ah, yes. The rule of law. But hey, when there are two standards of law; one for the super rich, and one for the rest of us,  it isn’t fair. In fact, it is more than that. It is not a rule of law. It is a rule by favoritism, and there isn’t any real laws.

The Chinese understand this instinctively.

However, they are surprised that it exists in America. As they have been taught, and under the impression, that America was immune from this kind of judicial corruption. As a Chinese friend once told me, a nation that has two sets of laws; one for the powerful and one for the rest of us, is not a nation of law. It is a dictatorship.

HIllary Clinton.
Lock her up by Ben Garrison at Grr Graphics. All credit to the artist. Hillary Clinton sure has managed to get away with a lot. This is a characteristic of a third world banana republic. It is not the characteristic of a functioning Republic.

The Chinese are often surprised that America works the same way as China often does. It's the "golden rule"; the one with all the gold makes all the rules.

8. The Government works for the People.

America was set up as a place where the government serves the people. This is part of American history. As such, it is taught that way. Even in China.

Now it does not work that way. Now, in America it is not taught that way in schools either.  However, it is still taught that way in China.

A casual visitor to the United States thinks nothing of this. It is until they are pulled over by a police car for a minor infraction, stopped at a check point for “inspection”, or told to hand over their cell phone for scanning. These things are unheard of in China. And, thus, are a real big shock to a Chinese citizen.

American police.
In America the police have been weaponized into a military force. This can come as a shock to the Chinese who see the police as the “keepers of order and stability”. Not as a militarized force that is used to enforce laws.

Other shocks include;

  • Open container laws
  • Paying for internet access
  • Taxes on everything
  • Money that is always complicated ($9.98 instead of $10)
  • Huge portions of food
  • Lack of public transportation (or insufficiency of)

In China the police are used in much the same way as they are used in America. However there is a great divergence in philosophy behind their use. In China, the police are used to go after criminals who create victims. In the Untied States, the police are used to enforce behavior.

Chinese police.
Chinese police arresting a criminal. The job of the Chinese police is to maintain the peace and harmony of an enormous society. Their most active role is to pursue and catch criminals who have hurt others and created victims. You can see some of the police cars in the background.

By the way, here is an unobstructed view of the police cars used in the arrest above. Pretty cool huh? Quite different from the military-grade hardware used by the American police…

Chinese police car.
This is a Chinese police car. The Chinese have all sorts of vehicles that are used to perform their duties. This varies from Segways, to cars and vans. In a pinch, the Chinese do have SWAT teams that are used very sparingly. They also often use these vehicles to patrol and interact with the people.

The Chinese are surprised that America has such a large police and military presence.

9. There is Crime Everywhere.

While the militarized police is a bit of a surprise, the fact that they exist are not. Everyone in China “knows” that America is a land full of crime and corruption.

They know this, of course, from Hollywood. It doesn’t matter if it is white-collar crime like “The Wolf of Wall-street”, or street gangs from any one of a thousand movies. The Chinese tend to believe that America is a dangerous place.

Thus their surprise that they don’t see any crime.

Safe neighbood
Most of America is very safe. America, is a great place to raise children, contrary to what Hollywood and the mainstream news might lend one to believe. Most of America looks something like this. The exceptions lie in heavy minority communities.

Or course, if they were to visit Chicago, Detroit or Baltimore, their opinion might be quite different. When the Chinese visit, they see how beautiful and clean America is. They see police patrolling in nice new squad cars, and Americans behaving in polite and ordered ways.

They tend to be a little surprised that America is much safer than what they have been led to believe.

10. Everyone Speaks English.

I always get a big laugh out of this. Yet, it is a common misconception.

No, I am not talking about people speaking Spanish in Texas or California. Rather I am talking about what happens when a Chinese person goes into a area where people speak a heavily accented English. Like, for instance Arkansas, Louisiana, or Mississippi.

Accents
Here’s a pretty good map of regional American English accents.

"My grandmother said things like, “over yonder,” “rightchere,” (right here), “likeyat,” (like that), and “haint” (spook). Any non-sleeping dog had a “wild hare up its ass,” and if Grandma was angry, she was “some kinda burnt up.” She was prone to redundant modal verbs (“I done told you before”) and a big fan of the circumfix “a-in”–such as an owl “ahootin’ and ahollerin’.” Similar to Barry Hannah and Singleton’s backwoods characters (consider Hannah’s use of “sumbitch” or “You’re all wore out from being nice,”

-Trying to write in a Southern Accent

My favorite story is when some Chinese stopped and asked for directions in Kentucky. The instructions went something like this…

Yall  done drive past wheer dat old tree used to be, hang a left. You’ll recon Auntie Suzie’s house dere. Cruze a few miles til you see the spot whare da town had dat fair last spring, and then swing a right. Be mindful now. There’s that old viaduct. You should be fixin’ to gander it around ten minutes or so later.”

Map of English dialects.
I guess this is why I still say “Youse guys”, LOL. Americans do not speak “standard” English. We all have regional dialects. Some are easy to understand. Some are quite difficult.

The Chinese visitors are often surprised that many Americans speak differently than what they have been taught, and what is shown on television.

Other Posts

This is the second of two part post. You can visit the other post; ” The Top Ten Misconceptions Americans have about China”. It can be found HERE.

Conclusions

The Chinese, when they visit America, come back with tales of adventure and great stories that they tell to their friends. Their overall opinion and picture of America is a positive one. They tell glowing stories of how absolutely beautiful America is and how friendly Americans are.

They come back to China saying “America wasn’t at all what I expected. It was better.”

“America wasn’t at all what I expected. It was better.”

Take Aways

  • The Chinese believe the main-stream media and are impressed with President Trump for his ability to avoid hanging from a noose.
  • The way the American government works is a mystery to the Chinese. But, that is ok. It is a mystery to most Americans as well.
  • The Chinese believe Americans are very wealthy, because by Chinese standards, you need to be a millionaire to be able to live like an American does.
  • The Chinese are often surprised that Americans don’t carry guns everywhere.
  • The Chinese visitor often finds that America is a very quiet and peaceful place. It’s a bit of a surprise.
  • The Chinese are often very comfortable in the United States, but find that making “real” friends is often very difficult to do.
  • The Chinese are often surprised that America works the same way as China often does. It’s the “golden rule”; the one with all the gold makes all the rules.
  • The Chinese are surprised that America has such a large police and military presence.
  • They tend to be a little surprised that America is much safer than what they have been led to believe.
  • The Chinese visitors are often surprised that many Americans speak differently than what they have been taught, and what is shown on television.

FAQ

Q: What do most Chinese think of America?
A: Most Chinese, that I know of, think favorably of America. The ones that have visited the big cities such as New York, and San Francisco absolutely love it. The ones that have toured America in cars, and have visited the United States rave about how great America is. Their biggest complaint is that their trip wasn’t long enough.

Q: What areas should a Chinese person visit?
A: There are so many places to choose from. But, were I to make a travel plan, I would suggest a trip to the deep south like New Iberia, LA and a visit to the French Quarter in New Orleans. I would suggest a trip to Savanna, GA. I would advise a visit to Boston in the middle of October when all the leaves change. I would suggest a visit to some civil war battlefields.

Q: What can I do to entertain some visitors from China?
A: I would suggest a BBQ with some ice cold beer. Cook chicken and hamburgers and American hot dogs.  The Chinese LOVE American hot dogs. It would be a real treat for them. Take them out and shoot some guns. Go swimming and if you have a boat go out and ride about in it. Go fishing, they would absolutely love it. If you have a compound bow, let them try their skill shooting it.

Q: Would the Chinese eat my dog or cat?
A: Heavens! No! Most Chinese love animals, and both dogs and cats have a special place in the hearts of most Chinese. The problem is that if you introduce your dog or cat to them, they might end up spending all the time with them instead of with you. If you dog can play frizbe, then show the Chinese visitor how to throw it and everyone will have a great time.

Links about China

Business KTV

Dance Craze

End of the Day Potato

Dog Shit

Dancing Grandmothers

When the SJW movement took control of China

Family Meal

Freedom & Liberty in China

Ben Ming Nian

Beware the Expat

Fake Wine

Fat China

China and America Comparisons

SJW

Playground Comparisons

The Last Straw

Diversity Initatives

Democracy

Travel outside

10 Misconceptions about China

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1

Pretty Girls 2

Pretty Girls 3

Pretty Girls 4

Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Drafted 20AUG18.
  2. Completed 7SEP18.
  3. SEO review 7SEP18.
  4. Published 7SEP18.

The Song “Baby Got Back” Translated into Latin

Baby Got Back“, also known as “I Like Big Butts”, is a hit rap song written and recorded by American rapper Sir Mix-a-Lot, from his album Mack Daddy. The song samples the 1986 Detroit techno single “Technicolor” by Channel One. This is a translation of it.

Translation

Here, we have it translated into Latin by Quislibet. There was additional support and clarity offered by Ukelele. I have found it hilarious, and thus have reprinted the translation here. Enjoy.

Text Content

De clunibus magnis amandis oratio
Mixaloti equitis

mehercle! 
(By Hercules!)
Rebecca, ecce! tantae clunes isti sunt!  
(Rebecca, behold! Such large buttocks she has!)

amica esse videtur istorum hominum rhythmicorum. 
(She appears to be a girlfriend of one of those rhythmic-oration people.)
sed, ut scis, 
(But, as you know)
quis homines huiusmodi intellegere potest? 
(Who can understand persons of this sort?)
colloquuntur equidem cum ista eo tantum, quod scortum perfectum esse videtur. 
(Verily, they converse with her for this reason only, namely, that she appears to be a complete whore.) 
clunes, aio, maiores esse!
(Her buttocks, I say, are rather large!)
nec possum credere quam rotondae sint.
(Nor am I able to believe how round they are.)
en! quam exstant! nonne piget te earum?  
(Lo! How they stand forth! Do they not disgust you?)
ecce mulier Aethiops! 
(Behold the black woman!)

magnae clunes mihi placent, nec possum de hac re mentiri. 
(Large buttocks are pleasing to me, nor am I able to lie concerning this matter.)
quis enim, consortes mei, non fateatur, 
(For who, colleagues, would not admit,)
cum puella incedit minore medio corpore
(Whenever a girl comes by with a rather small middle part of the body)
sub quo manifestus globus, inflammare animos
(Beneath which is an obvious spherical mass, that it inflames the spirits)
virtute praestare ut velitis, notantes bracas eius 
(So that you want to be conspicuous for manly virtue, noticing her breeches)
clunibus profunde fartas esse
(Have been deeply stuffed with buttock?)
a! captus sum, nec desinere intueri possum.
(Alas! I am captured, nor am I able to desist from gazing.)
o dominola mea, volo tecum congredi 
(My dear lady, I want to come together with you)
pingereque picturam tui. 
(And make a picture of you.)
familiares mei me monebant
(My companions were trying to warn me)
sed clunes istae libidinem in me concitant.
(But those buttocks of yours arouse lust in me.)
o! cutis rugosa glabraque! 
(O skin wrinkled and smooth!)
dixistine te in meum vehiculum intrare velle?
(Did you say you wish to enter my vehicle?)
in arbitrio tuo totus veni
(I am entirely at your disposal)
quia non es mediocris adsecula.
(Because you are not an average hanger-on.)
vidi illam saltantem.
(I have seen her dancing.)
obliviscere igitur blanditiarum! 
(Forget, therefore, about blandishments!)
tantus sudor! tantus umor!
(Such sweat! Such moisture!)
vehor quasi in curru quadrigarum!  
(I am borne along as if by a four-horse chariot!)
taedet me in diurnis legendi 
(I am tired of reading in the gazettes)
planas clunes gratiores iudicari. 
(That flat buttocks are judged more pleasing.)
rogate quoslibet Aethiopes: responsum erit
(Ask any black men you wish: the answer will be)
se libentius expletiores anteponere. 
(Rather that they prefer fuller ones.)
o consortes (quid est?) o consortes (quid est?)
(O colleagues [What is it?] O colleagues [What is it?])
habent amicae vestrae magnas clunes? (certe habent!)
(Do your girlfriends have large buttocks? [They certainly have!])
hortamini igitur ut eas quatiant (ut quatiant!)
(Encourage them therefore to shake them! [To shake them!])
ut quatiant! (ut quatiant!)
(To shake them! [To shake them!])
ut quatiant illas clunes sanas!
(To shake those healthy buttocks!)
domina mea exstat a tergo!
(My mistress stands out behind!)

[Etc.]

via GIPHY

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed, reviewed. 30AUG18.
  2. SEO review 30AUG18.
  3. Published 30AUG18.

Learning about China by Looking at Pretty Girls (5)

This is the fifth of a series of post on Chinese cute girls and Chinese culture.

You know, China is a very, very big nation. Many times I am asked what it is like. Honestly, there is so much to say, that I end up going on some tangent or the other. However, one thing that I noticed when talking to other men, is that what they really want to know is what Chinese girls are like…

Wow! That is in itself a huge subject. 

Here I try to compose  a series of micro-videos of Chinese girls taking little vignettes of themselves being cute, dancing, eating, and doing girl things. It is in no way comprehensive, but it should give you a general idea of what Chinese girls are like. It will also help you to get a better idea of what China is like as well.

We need to do this. No one else is.

Here is a quote from JobTubeDaily;

"Popular U.S. media perpetuates constant negative narratives about China: ghost cities, real estate bubbles, pollution, corruption. While many of these problems are real, the predominately negative coverage drowns out the positive elements of life in China and its abundant economic opportunities. In doing so, the media dissuades America’s rising students, as well as business and political leaders, from learning more about the country."

Here is a quote from LinkedIN;

"And the western media aren't particularly helpful in explaining the real China of 2018.  They're serving so much bias and prejudice about China, it is nearly impossible for the general public to get in touch with the real China."

Here we look at ten micro-videos…with another few more to illustrate some points…

Shanghai

For starters, we are talking about China. Real, honest-to-goodness, China. We are talking about the “real deal” and not the cardboard “cut out” caricature that is defined by the American media. Here, we will not discuss eating dogs, smog filled cities, and a population of millions that just can’t wait to come to America to live.

That is all fabricated nonsense.

Instead we are going to talk about what China is RIGHT NOW, today. In so doing we are going to have to shatter some terrible misconceptions that many people, especially Americans, have about the place. First of all, it is not a third-world shit hole. It is modern, state of the art, and growing larger every day.

The city of Shanghai…

Chinese cities tend to be NEW. They tend to be WELL TAKEN CARED OF. They also tend to be on the little ultra-modern high-tech side. They all have modern infrastructure, state of the art high-speed internet (that blows American speeds away), and a growing, well-educated, population.

When you move away from the cities, the quality of the buildings, and the overall appearance tends to decrease. Towns will have paved, but dirty, roads. Houses will have internet, plumbing and electricity, but no elevators. People will drive around in older cars, maybe ten year old vehicles.

It’s a lot like America, don’t you think?

Highways

When you leave the city, you will tend to take a high-speed train or airplane. China has the fastest high speed trains in the world, and also has the bulk of them. They tend to be modern, spacious, new and silent. They are a joy to ride.

There are other methods of travel, of course. You might want to take a train, a bus, or your own car and drive. China has a modern and well taken cared for system of highways. All the highways are well maintained. It is a point of pride in China to have the roads pristine, and new. Maybe that is why they tend to plant new trees and gardens all around them.

Some of the roads are spectacular. Consider this in Southern China…

I urge the reader to look for bits of discarded McDonalds and other fast food debris at the side of the road. You won’t find any.

In China, poor people do not get free welfare. Instead, they are given a job. One of which is to plant trees, flowers and pick up trash.

Hotel

Of course, if you are going to drive, you will want to stay in a hotel on the way. Hotels are everywhere in China. They range from one-star nightmares to five-star complexes. In general, the quality of hotels has greatly increased over the years. Today, many hotels are at least a three-star rating. Westerners will not have any trouble sleeping in a three-star hotel.

As always, the hotels are nice and well-taken cared for. In China, it is cultural expedient to have everything look new, clean and pristine. Part of it is pride, but part of it is marketing. No Chinese person wants to stay in a dingy hotel if they can avoid it.

Here’s a pretty lass in a hotel going to her room…

You will notice that the decorations favor white and gold. These are very auspicious colors that the Chinese find especially alluring. It is a sign of prosperity.

Exercise

She looks good doesn’t she? yeah. I most certainly think so. I would not mind at all going out and having a nice dinner, and some wine, with her. Maybe we could walk outside afterwards and enjoy the night air and chat about the glowing stars at night…

Anyways, she takes care of herself. that is for certain. Many Chinese do. There are free exercise venues all over China. Not to mention that many companies require the employees to exercise and dance at the start of each work day. Those who want more exercise can certainly attend a gym. They are everywhere and are great to work out. However, I find that they are not air conditioned. The Chinese do not believe in air conditioning and exercise. The believe the idea is to sweat out the bad qi so that the body can replenish itself.

Here is a gal who has most certainly exercised well. Her body shows it and she is going to the lockers for a shower and a change in clothes. If you want to meet some exceptional Chinese women, maybe you can join a gym.

Notice that the gym equipment is all new, the interior is well decorated, and the floor is a nice rubberized mat. This is very typical and can be seen at any of the gyms that I have been members of.

Speaking of exercise…

One of the tenets of Chinese exercise, maybe unofficial as it is an observation of mine, is that the Chinese like to exercise to music. I used to do so myself, you know. I used to lift weights in my your years, when I was in my twenty’s. I would always listen to music. You concentrate on the music, and it enables you to live and endure.

The Chinese like to incorporate music with exercise. So, for instance, instead of all the school children doing boring sit-ups, push ups and jumping jacks in the morning, they have them dance to prescribed dance routines. Here is a elementary school going through a morning exercise around 7am…

Isn’t it great?

Now, of course, the Chinese parents won’t ever say that this is good enough. The idea is to have your children be better than everyone else. NOT be equal. So the child will be expected to study harder, learn more and have a stronger and better life. Parents, might for instance, have them attend further extracurricular activities outside of the school. Like a dance school for exercise and dance lessons for instance…

I’ll bet those are happy and HEALTHY kids.

Life is what you make it. You take advantage of the opportunities as they are presented to you and you do the best with what you are given. There is no excuse for my American friends to allow their children to lay on a sofa all day, watching Netflix and playing video games. Life is meant to be lived, not plugged into a virtual reality.

Hey Greedy Don’t Fret, What you see is what you get…

Which brings me up to the various line dances and dancing grandma phenomenon that is all over China. The Chinese love to dance. They love to sing. They love to drink. They love to go on dates and have fun together. In many ways, they are just like Americans.

Here we have a line dance of a pretty famous Chinese song. I can’t transcribe the Chinese as it will be meaningless. You can listen to the song, read the lyrics and learn about the singer HERE. You can watch the Music Video HERE.

They are in a public area. You can see a subway station in the background. Notice that a crowd of people are standing around and watching. Welcome to China. This is exactly how it is done, and exactly what happens.

Note that this is in a city center. You can see the various stores and restaurants and mall access points. You can see a McDonald’s.  Hummm…

The girl in the blue pants looks like one of the backup dancers and singers from BoA. I wonder if it is her? You can compare HERE. She is the backup girl on the right wearing a black tank-top. Yeah, I know I know, BoA is Japanese. Well, surprise… people travel back and forth between japan and China like people travel back and forth between Dallas and Fort Worth. Not a big deal.

So, yeah… all this nonsense about island dispute between Taiwan, China and Japan is just a lot of hot rhetoric used by the American media to drum up support for a war. It’s just a lot of hot air. It is nonsense.

Dancing outside on the Street

All this dancing gets me thinking. You know, many Chinese like to dance and post a micro-video of them dancing on the internet.  That is where I get most of these micro-videos to begin with. Here, we have another dance video of a cute girl in a public area.

She is dancing in a very typical public square. China has thousands of these places. You can see typical Chinese stores and restaurants in the background. Notice that many have English signs as well as signs and menus in Chinese. Just about all Chinese people under the age of twenty can speak English to some degree. After all, you cannot attend university unless you can pass an English proficiency test.

I wonder if America will ever do that? You know, make sure that American students be able to pass a Chinese proficiency test in order to attend UCLA, MIT or Drexel University…

Oh, such a great “knee slapper”! As if…

OK. Here is the video of the girl dancing. She is dancing to one of the most popular dance-songs of the year. I have another post about this craze HERE. And, if you want, you can watch the original Music Video HERE.

Notice that in the background is a father taking his daughter out for a walk. This is just like fathers used to do back in the 1960’s. Also notice the girl taking her dog out for a evening walk. What? She’s not eating it! My word. Someone better had best tell the New York Times or CNN about this strange development!

Rural Kitchen

You know, many people in China live outside of the cities. They own homes and when they are not working they come back to their homes. Often the homes are not as nice as the apartments in the city. They tend to be basic. They have walls, windows, and doors, electricity and running water. However, they tend not to have nice wallpaper, fancy interior lighting or any interior decoration.

Update.
I was later informed that this was not in a rural kitchen, but rather in a test lab in a factory. That "dorm sized" refrigerator is really a heat-soak oven. Sorry.

They remind me of summer cottages that the parent’s of my friends would work on during the weekends. They would live in Pittsburgh, and then on the weekends come to the country and work on their “summer home”. Often it would have a roof and walls, but would still need all kinds of “finishing touches” to make it into a home.

Here we have a pretty country lass dancing in a rural kitchen. She is attractive and just having a good time of it all. You go girl.

The kitchen does not have custom countertops, fine faucets and center “island”. It consists mostly of some shelving with wide open spaces to clean and cook food. The girl is obviously not starving. I am sure that she eats well, but the kitchen is Spartan. She has a big waste garbage can, and a small “dorm sized” refrigerator.

She is young. She is chewing with her mouth open. Yuck!

Girl, no matter what you wear, and no matter how good your makeup is, if you cannot act like a lady, you will never be treated as one. Life is all about confidence, attitude and manners.

Doors and Keys

In China, both the doors and the keys are different than what you get in the Untied States.  I know, I have been somewhat involved with the export of doors to America. The American market wants the cheapest quality doors for the most part. The more expensive doors, are available, of course, but they tend to be made in the USA. Large volume exports of cheap interior doors is the norm to America.

Hey, don’t blame the Chinese. They make great quality doors. Many of which go to Europe and Dubai. It’s just that the American market is focused on the cheapest products to sell to Americans in bulk at huge profits.

American door composition
Door panel types. Here is a general reference of some door panel types that are available. Note that most of them have a fake core of some kind of expandable polystyrene inside. In China the doors are metal. You need a bulldozer to break one in.

It doesn’t have to be that way. However, that is just the way it is. In China, the houses and apartments wouldn’t come near those doors. Image that; flimsy hollow core doors with cheap low-quality laminate. Never happen in China.

The keys are also different as well. The keys in China are made in different ways and techniques. That is because, not so long ago, crime was rampant in China. You need good and strong locks that were difficult to break into. America is different. Most American keys are based on simple flat key blanks that can easily be duplicated.

This girl is dancing in her living room in front of a bedroom door.

The door is heavy gauge steel with very sturdy and hefty hinges. The girl is cute and dancing wearing a cute Chinese outfit that is very popular this year. She is wearing white stockings and small white shoes. She is typical with long dark hair and light, pale skin.

I will say that the style of door that she has is exactly the same style that is in my house right now.

Speaking of doors, here is yet another video of a girl dancing in front of a door…

Another Interior Door

In this example, we have a different girl in a different city.  She is dancing in what appears to be her living room. The door looks like a entrance way door. As such, it will have a real wood facing that is laminated on top of a heavy gauge steel foundation. The door will be stout and difficult (if not impossible) to crash through. Which is one of the reasons that criminals in China would rather break through the cement walls to get into a house than to go through the front door.

This is nice looking girl. She is thin and slender with nice legs, a happy smile and great eyes. She has an attractive face with a nice pointy chin.

Note that she is standing on carpet. I am sure that it is not wall-to-wall carpet. That is a rarity in China. The wall is white which is normal here. All in all, this is a pretty typical apartment. The problem is that in this video you cannot see the entire apartment.

With that being said, let’s look at an entire apartment…

A Chinese Apartment

In this video we have a Chinese girl dancing in her apartment. She is dancing from one end to the other and goes from the kitchen / dining area into the living room area. It gives a nice view of what apartments are like in China.

You can see that this is a typical apartment with white walls, a white marble tiled floor (no linoleum here, the Chinese NEVER use it), and heavy gauge metal doors. You can see her furnishings are sparse, but in no way is there any clutter. China is not a consumer nation like the Untied States is.

Conclusion

Everyone likes to look at pretty girls. Even other pretty girls. I, as a man, think that pretty girls liven up our lives and make it more interesting and fun. I would not mind taking any one of these girls out and having a nice meal or playing around in a park or some other place. Having good companionship, great conversation, and enjoying a wonderful meal would be awesome with any of these women.

For instance, I will be willing to bet that this girl would just be wonderful to spend some time with.  I would buy her a coffee and a cheesecake any day.

Today it is difficult to see what other places are like, if you are an American. Our news is heavily propagandized.

  • Those on the liberal side have the impression that China eats dogs, is full of poor waifs that sell their bodies for sex, and is full of dirty smog filled air.
  • Those on the conservative side, have the impression that China is a great war-mongered beast who wants to take over the Pacific, that they are ruthless businessmen, and want to keep their citizens imprisoned in a communist gulag.

Neither impression is correct. They are both terrible distortions.

China is a huge nation, bigger geographically than the United States, and with an enormous population far larger than America’s. In fact, there are more people in China that speak English than there are Americans in the entire world.

They live life. They work. They study hard. They try to do their best. They have fun. They raise families. They are, in many ways, like “old fashioned” Americans around 1950. While America has moved toward a progressive socialist paradise ruled by an oligarchy, China has moved in a different direction. It has moved toward free-market policies originating out of a central government. China is not at all what we think it is.

This post is my little way to help introduce China to the readership.

Take Aways

  • Chinese women are attractive.
  • Many of the buildings in China are new, and have a modern supporting infrastructure.
  • Chinese people like to dance, sing, and have fun with their friends.
  • Chinese women DO NOT look like pre-adolescent children. (Here’s a nod to the idiots in Arkansas who were absolutely convinced that Chinese women look like little pre-adolescent girls.)

Beverly Hillbillies
Here is a scene from the 1960’s era situation comedy called the “Beverly Hillbillies”. I really loved that show. Then, later on, when I went to Arkansas to be retired from MAJestic, I met actual hillbillies. It was painful. Imagine the worst aspects of the movie Idioticracity combined with an evil FBI director trying to “get Trump”. Ugh. Anyways, their understanding of life outside of Little Rock was pathetic. They thought that Memphis, Tennessee was another nation. They were that pathetic.

FAQ

Q: Why do you only have beautiful Chinese girls? What about being more diverse and inclusive? Why do you objectify girls?
A: Well, for one, this article is about attractive Chinese girls. It wouldn’t do to have non-Chinese girls in it. Nor would it be appropriate to have men, homosexuals, fat and ugly girls, children or LGBT creatures in the article.

If you want to purge beauty out of your life, no problem. Go ahead and do it. Just like American beauty pageants are no longer about beauty. Just like American airlines have purged themselves of age and beauty standards. Just like race-cars have purged themselves of attractive women. But you won’t see that in China.

Now here, I like to surround myself with beauty. I like to surround myself with things that I like and I love. That includes dogs, cats, pizza, bacon, tomatoes, friends and of course my loved ones.

Q: Why do you use micro-videos in this post?
A: I think it does a nice job of giving a snapshot of what China is like. Many of the videos have Chinese songs. They all feature beautiful Chinese girls in China doing things that beautiful Chinese girls like to do. Of course, if you would rather go to you-tube, go ahead. You won’t find very many Chinese girls there. You-tube is banned in China because it, like Facebook, Google, and Tumblr, all collect user information and pipe that information directly to the NSA for American government’s use.

Q: Why do you think these girls are beautiful?
A: Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. What constitutes for beauty in China is different from what is beautiful elsewhere. I chose these videos because I happen to think the girls are cute, beautiful or attractive. Of course, if you disagree with me, you can leave.

Now, you shouldn’t be too upset there are some rocking girls in the United States. You should see them in sweatpants. My Lord!

Links about China

Business KTV

Dance Craze

End of the Day Potato

Dog Shit

Dancing Grandmothers

When the SJW movement took control of China

Family Meal

Freedom & Liberty in China

Ben Ming Nian

Beware the Expat

Fake Wine

Fat China

Chinese apartment houses

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 29AUG18.
  2. Completed 29AUG18.
  3. SEO review 29AUG18.
  4. Published 29AUG18.

How China deals with Obesity

One thing that I really like about the world is that everyone is different. I really like that. I like that ice cream comes in different flavors. I like that there are all kinds of trucks and cars to select from. I like that there are all kinds of girls, some small and tiny, and some big and voluptuous. I really like that.

This post is a tale of two different ways of solving a problem. The problem is obesity. With high-fat foods commonly available everywhere, there is a strong propensity to everyone to get fat and put on weight. What is a nation going to do about this? Allow their citizens to get fat, and die early?

In America, you make laws to control behavior. So the American solution to obesity is to ban things. Ban super-sized drinks. Ban high-calorie meals in schools. Ban pork in prisons. America is all about control. You tell the people what to do. You make laws to enforce your wishes, and you use the police to assure compliance.

In China, to provide solutions. If everyone is eating high-calorie foods, then you provide them outlets to burn those calories off. What China did, was provide public dance forums. Now, these forums have already existed in one form or the other for years now. What Beijing did was standardize them.

Let’s talk about this…

Introduction

Over  the last few decades, groups of grandmothers would gather in the open plazas and open areas and dance. They would pull out a “boom-box” and play music that they would dance to. This was all impromptu, and often you would have competing groups of dancers in the same square with a cacophonous sound that rattles doors, windows and teeth.

For years, these grandmothers would come out and dance. They would do it in the morning and in the evening. In fact, I even have a POST on how rude they often were. For some of them would push out rock-concert speakers and aim it at my house. Ugh!

“The line dancing craze has swept the nation over the past decade, with informal groups of primarily female retirees gathering at dusk and dawn to dance on any spare piece of pavement. Chinese media has estimated that up to 100 million people take part in the activities — known as “square dances,” for the public squares and plazas where many gatherings take place.

The loosely associated groups often have a leader who hauls out a boombox blaring pop hits and folk classics. The women work through a handful of dance routines, with grizzled veterans usually taking up positions at the front and beginners tentatively following along in the back rows.”

- Matt Sheehan

In 2016, Beijing put their collective foot down and established community guidelines that defined noise levels, music to play, and dances to do.

This was welcomed by the dancing grandmothers as a good thing. After a few months of fits and starts, the program was implemented throughout China.

Only…

Now it was a little different.

Organization

Now, you have a set selection of music to dance to. No longer is the music only fifty year old pop songs. The music is contemporary and upbeat. No longer do random grannies define the dance steps, but they follow defined dance routines set by trained physical therapists and trained professional dancers, designed for most people to exercise to.

Now you have paid organizers who are trained and authorized to lead the dances. Now, you have music that you can dance to, with defined dance steps. Now you have start and end times, and music noise levels that must be adhered to.

But…

But… something happened.

Everyone Started to Dance

What began as a venue for grannies to exercise, soon became a venue where everyone can participate. There are contemporaneous pop songs that are played along traditional favorites. New songs are always added to the mix, and unpopular songs are dropped. The dances are all led by trained instructors (for the most part) and everyone can now participate…

Dance Instructor getting the crew dancing…

Something else started to happen as well. As soon as the instructors started to dance, they would bring their classes (for most of them owned dance schools) and their entire class would dance in public as well…

This action attracted many other things. Suddenly you now have high-school and college aged girls wanting to dance in the venues. After all, these dance venues are in the centers of all the civics areas. Some girls would be walking by the mall, and there is this big group of dancers, and they would put their gear down, and join them. It was all impromptu.

And, it’s not just pretty girls.

You have people of all ages and walks of life… And, yes also people who need to lose a few pounds or two. Now they find it easier to dance along with everyone else, and lose some pounds in the process. It’s a win-win. Beijing figured that if you provide people with options, fun options, they would take advantage of them. In this case, they were right.

Here’s a guy burning off some weight.

What this has done was merged pop culture and pop music with the Chinese dancing forum.  It has created it’s own popular venue on it’s own merits. As a result, you can often see and meet attractive Chinese girls dancing and singing along in the public squares together.

Here’s a group of girls. I particularly like these girls. I watch them hypnotically mesmerized by their moves and jiggling bodies.

The dance steps are often simple, but the dancer can add their own flourishes to them. We have dancers that dance as couples and others that prefer the line-dance routines. Here is a group that does a nice spin-and-stomp move…

The dances are organized twice daily. In the morning it is generally from 7am to around 9am. In the evening, it usually starts around 6pm and often lasts to 10pm. If you ever go to a mall, or shopping center you will see these people dancing up a storm. It’s all free.

Typically, you find a space in the back and try your best to follow. Eventually, over time you will get it, and there will be many who will offer to help teach you the steps. This is a great way for a shy boy to meet some attractive girls. Let me tell you what…

In China, many stores and restaurants have their staff line up for a daily briefing, and company dance. It seems strange, but it is true. However, what if your company was right next to one of these plazas? After all, they are always at major shopping and city centers. What about having your staff do a morning dance before work? Wouldn’t that be nice?

And, that is exactly what happened…

They probably all work in front of the beef noodle restaurant that they are dancing in front of. Of course, the company would provide them with an exercise uniform, though the shoes would be their responsibility.

By providing this venue, the Chinese have taken advantage of it and are enjoying every moment of it. The result is that there are no laws to enforce. No behaviors that need to be policed. The people are having fun, and they are exercising and losing weight int he process. It seems to work quite well. Don’t you think?

Here are some girls dancing as a couple. It’s all a sort of free-style within a dance routine.

Here’s some “free style” improvisation. The girls shake their tushes, and the boys do their thrusts. Check it out. In China you can be yourself.

Watch the boy first, you will see him do a thrust, then move your eyes to the girls next to him. They will do a shake of their cute behinds. Ah, you’ve got to love it.

Obviously there are numerous songs that are played with numerous dance routines. I played this same singular song to make a point; all the videos are taken all over China. They were taken on different days, with different people, at different times. Some were at night. Some were in the morning.

The music is the same.

American media reports… or NOT

What amazes me is just how friggin’ out of touch the American media is about all of this. They haven’t a clue about any of this. You would figure that if their job was to report on the news, that something like this would be reported on. Nope.

Instead they are “reporting” on other things. They are not reporting on events. They are providing their opinions of things. They package the opinions of others, and what people think, on what they heard, from others who lie all for a concocted narrative who’s objective is to keep Americans living in fear. Ugh.

With that being said, here is a final micro-video of some dancers. Here they are dancing in a kind of moving forward and sideways motion that looks like a lot of fun. It really does look like fun.

I used to do some country & western line dancing (when I lived in Mississippi) that I had a ball with. This is the same kind of thing.

If you look closely, you can see the young man in the back who is trying to learn from the girls by copying their moves. Good going, son. You will eventually get it. Just concentrate on the foot work like you are doing. It’s all just a matter of time.

Conclusion

The world has an obesity problem. With the advent of fast food, the world has been getting fatter, heavier and unhealthy. This is most prevalent in West with American and Europeans leading the pack. In fact, it is such a problem, that America has written many laws to control the behavior of Americans…

  • Laws on what you can eat.
  • Laws on the sizes of food portions.
  • Taxes on food to discourage eating.
  • Limitations on the types of food that you can eat.
  • Restrictions on portion sizes in schools.

In order to enforce these laws, more laws were written, and additional police were hired to enforce these laws.

Meanwhile, in China, they took a different approach. While in American, laws are written to enforce behavior, in China laws are designed to prevent victims. They couldn’t write a law forcing all Chinese to act in certain ways. Their government is not set up like that. All that they could do is provide healthy alternatives to an existing Chinese lifestyle.

So what they did is make it possible for everyone to exercise. They tied pop-music and pop-dance to public square. Now, everyone can dance. You don’t have to. It’s not a law, but it is available to you if you want to take advantage of it.

I think that this is a superior solution to enforcing behavior from a central all-knowing, all-powerful American government.

Take Aways

  • Obesity is a world-wide problem.
  • Different nations have different approaches.
  • In America, behavior is enforced through laws.
  • In China, solutions are provided to the citizenry.
  • China has provided an avenue for easy access to fun exercise.
  • America writes laws and enforces compliance with armed police.

FAQ

Q: Low long has this dancing venue been established?
A: The grandmothers have been dancing for decades. In the last five years they have gotten unruly and out of hand. In an effort to regain control, the dance venue was standardized and now provides opportunities for people of all ages to dance. The dances are established with health in mind. The new format was implemented sometime in 2016.

Q: Why doesn’t America provide access to dance, instead of making laws?
A: Power. Those elected and in the American government do not want to lose control of any of their power. They want to dictate behavior. They do not want solutions. They want power.

Q: What if you don’t want to dance?
A: Then you don’t dance. It is not the duty of the Chinese government to force you to do things or to adopt new behaviors. It is their role to provide solutions. It is up to you, as a citizen, to take advantage of the opportunities or not. In China, citizens are free to live life on their terms. In America, you must obey the law and fit into the prescribed behaviors established by the government.

Q: What if I don’t know how to dance?
A: No body know how to dance to the songs. They need to be instructed by the leader. Some learn fast, and some learn slow. If you watch the videos you will see old grandmothers shaking to the music even though they are not as lively as the other dancers. You just need to get up and TRY.

Links about China

Here are some links about my observations on China. I think that you, the reader, might find them to be of interest. Please kindly enjoy.

Popular Music of China
Chinese weapons systems
Chinese motor sports
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
How I got married in China.
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

As an American, I cannot help but compare what my life was in the United States with what it is like living in China. Here we discuss that.

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Ugly girls? Here we discuss what China is like by looking at videos of pretty girls doing things in China.

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Parks in China

The parks in China are very unique. They are enormous and tend to be very mountainous. Here we take a look at this most interesting of subjects.

Parks in China - 1
Pars in China - 2
Parks in China - 3
Visiting a park in China - 4
High Speed Rail in China
Visiting a park in China - 5
Beautiful China part 6
Parks in China - 7
Visiting a park in China - 8

Really Strange China

Here are some posts that discuss a number of things about China that might seem odd, or strange to Westerners. Some of the things are everyday events, while others are just representative of the differences in culture.

Really Strange China 1
Really Strange China 2
Rally Strange China 3
Really Strange China 4
Really Odd China 5
Really Strange China 6
Really Strange China 7
Really Strange China 8
Really Strange China 9
Really Strange China 10
Really Strange China 11
Really Strange China 12
Really strange China 13
Really strange China 14

What is China like?

The purpose of this post is to illustrate that the rest of the world, outside of America, has moved on with their lives. That while they might not be as great as America is, they are doing just fine thank you.

And while America has been squandering it’s money, decimating it’s resources, and just being cavalier with it’s military, the rest of the world has done the opposite. They have husbanded their day to day fortunes, and you can see this in their day-to-day lives.

What is China like - 1
What is China like - 2
What is China Like - 3
What is China like - 4
What is China like - 5
What is China like - 6
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 8
What is China like - 9

Summer in Asia

Let’s take a moment to explore Asia. That includes China, but also includes such places as Vietnam, Thailand, Japan and others…

Summer Snapshots 1
Summer Snapshots 2
Summer Snapshots 3
Summer Snapshots 4
Snapshots Summer 5
Summer Snapshots 6
Summer Snapshot 7
Summer Snapshots 8
Summer Snapshots 9
Summer Snapshots 10
Summer Snapshots 11
Summer Snapshot 12

Some Fun Videos

Here’s a collection of some fun videos taken all over Asia. While there are many videos taken in China, we also have some taken in Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Korea and Japan as well. It’s all in fun.

Some fun videos of China - 1
Fun Videos of Asia - 2
Fun videos of Asia - 3
Fun videos of Asia - 4
Fun Videos of Asia - 5
Fun videos of Asia - 6
Fun videos of Asia - 7
Fun videos of Asia - 8
Fun videos of Asia - 9
Fun videos of Asia - 10
Fun videos of Asia - 11
Fun videos of Asia - 12
Fun videos of Asia - 13
Fun videos of Asia - 14
Fun Videos of Asia - 15
Fun videos of Asia -16
The best way to cook marshmallows.

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles sequentially by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

How to tell if a wine is fake when in China

One of my favorite “hobbies” is to drink wine. I have developed quite a taste for this simple libation. It makes me relax, feel talkative, and helps me appreciate the food that I eat with it. It is a wonderful, and most excellent, beverage to share with friends and family alike.

That being said, you really need to be careful in what you drink. For, I live in China, and there are all kinds of “fake” products that will tempt you and poison you if you are not careful.

Don’t misunderstand. The Chinese police take making fake wines quite seriously and if you are caught making and selling fake wines the punishment can be severe. It can vary from a few years in jail to “death plus three”.

"Death plus three" is a criminal sentence that means that you are sentenced to death. However, you will live in a hard labor prison for three years where your organs may be harvested as needed by society.

Let’s talk about this for a while and the techniques that I have used to avoid bad and dangerous wines…

Introduction

This post is an elaboration of a response that I gave to a fellow expat who asked how to select wines in China. It was a simple enough question. It went something like this; “How do I choose a wine in China?“.

Well, as a wine drinker, as opposed to a wine connoisseur, I responded in the only way that I knew how. I simply told the lass that you need to be careful. I told her that the high prices for wine in China has led to an environment whereas there can be a sea of fake wines that you must avoid.

She responded;

Oh wow I am completely shocked at this answer! I had no idea some of the wines were fake -- I thought since it's not a heavy liquor, I would be safe! 

I did have a headache for about 2 days last weekend and I wondered why... probably bad wine at Coco Park!! 

So let’s get started…

China is a nation of drinkers. Unlike the United States where there are prohibitions on behaviors, and various rules and laws making it increasingly difficult to drink and socialize. China has none of that. You are free to socialize and drink and smoke to your heart’s content.

In China you can drink alcohol without restraint.

They do not care if you kill yourself in the process. It is not the business of the government to protect you from yourself. If you are going to drink yourself to death, the government simply says “what ever you want, just don’t hurt anyone else in the process“.

This is quite different from the United States.

In the United States, laws have become tools to enforce behavior. All sorts of things are enforced. From having to wear a seat-belt, to having “child-resistant” caps on medicine bottles. America is a land of policed behavior with severe punishments for non-compliance.

Liquor sign.
In Pennsylvania, you can only buy your alcohol from a “state store”, or from a licensed Beer Distributor. This is because in Pennsylvania, only the government has the ability to tell you when, where and how much alcohol you can purchase. We don’t have those restrictions in communist China. You can buy it any time, at just about any place, by any one. Even a child.

Of course, all “vices” are restricted. Alcohol, being a vice, is restricted, taxed, and used as a control vector to guarantee mass compliance.

Some of the restrictions that are placed on Americans, in regards to alcohol, are;

  1. Road sobriety check-points, mandatory breathalyzer tests, and road-blocks.
  2. Companies that fire and fine you for being hungover. Such as GM.
  3. HR Set aside rules that require smoking off the property, or drinking during lunch hours.
  4. Insurance plans that penalize social behavior such as drinking.
  5. Requirements for proof of age to purchase.
  6. Laws on “open container carry”.

China doesn’t have any of these restrictions on behavior. It does not force people to behave in a structured manner “for the good of the nation“. Rather it’s laws are similar to British Common Law.

Instead of enforcing behavior, they seek restitution for victims. It is a completely different mind-set.

The history of hard alcohol in China

China has over 5000 years of drinking hard, playing hard and working hard.

That is not going to stop by some progressive busybody with a catchy slogan, a nice song and attractive television personalities. In fact, there were times when Chinese SJW’s tried to do exactly this…

SWJ in America compared to China.
SJW is not about what they talk about. They are following the same formula. It is the overthrow of the status quo by powerful interested people who wish to remain hidden.

These social justice warriors tried to take over. They tied to make a nice progressive utopia where a new way of acting, dress, and behavior were implemented. They did this numerous times in the past. Perhaps you, the reader, have heard of some of the attempts…

Each time, the movement by Social Justice Warriors fell apart. In their wake was left ruin and destruction. The Chinese government would have none of that. It no longer will accept Social Justice Warriors to disrupt social harmony.

Shame and torture of anyone opposing the SJW movement.
Anyone who did not agree with the SJW was denounced publicly. They were humiliated, and tortured. The youth ran the nation into the ground.

Here are some interesting posts on the subject if you wish to explore this venue further…

If the government suspects that you are a SJW, they will come after you. Trying to upset the social order, one that has been perfected for over 5000 years, is considered a serious crime. It is a crime against everything that China and the Chinese people stand for. You are thus considered a criminal of the highest order; a social misfit, with distorted views of your role in society, and a dangerous threat to those around you.

Ask how the SJW’s captured during the “Democracy Movement” have to say about their life today in 2018…

Felons in China.
Prisoners in China. No easy life for those whom upset the social harmony. These blokes are considered too dangerous to be set among society. They must be segregated as their ideas of change to a progressive social utopia is a cancer that must be extracted from society. I wonder how they are enjoying their life sentence in prison.

How wine is drunk

The Chinese do not drink wine like people in the West drink wine. They do not sip it, and enjoy the texture and flavor. No. Instead they drink it like they drink traditional 53° white wine; they gulp it down. They drink it down glass, by glass in big gulps.

I of course, only do so as part of business, and other Chinese social occasions. For instance like when I am with family, or with friends. At home, I drink wine like a normal person. I sip it. I taste it. I inhale the aroma and sample the complex textures.

In China, both red wine and baijiu is quaffed down.

Gan Bei
Everyone who has every been to China knows about Gan Bei. This is a fundamental part of Chinese culture, and if you are unaware of it, then you really have never visited China nor participated in the culture there.

The key here is an understanding that the Chinese culture places a great deal of importance in your ability to handle yourself when “shit face” drunk. Thus, the taste and aroma of a wine is of far less importance than the ability to get you staggering drunk.

In Chinese culture, Western wines opened up a new avenue to business and social get together’s. Here, instead of drinking 53° white wine we can drink 11° red wine. We can get drunk slower, and thus expand our time together for better fellowship and more time for social bonding.

It’s a win-win.

China opens to the West

China has always been partial to alcohol. It really doesn’t matter what it is. People have been drinking everything from beer to snake wine for many centuries. Long, long before the formation of the United States, Chinese poets were rowing out on lakes and offering drunken toasts to the moon.

Xi jinping
Xi kin ping drinking red wine. To be a businessman in China, mandates the ability to be able to drink strong alcohol.

There isn’t any political correctness here. If you are an adult, or a businessman, you drink. It’s pretty simple.

The Chinese have made all kinds of different types of wine and libations to suit their desire for strong alcoholic beverages. They have snake wine, frog wine, and all kinds of exotic herbal beverages that vary in taste and complexity.

Snake wine
Snake wine is very common in China. You can find it almost everywhere that wine is sold. Some of the snakes look frightening inside of the various jars and bottles.

Chinese adapt to Western wine

China has long been a friend to Western alcohol. Whether it was Shanghai in the 1920’s or Hong Kong and Macao, the Chinese love for Western wines and alcohol has continued unabated. When the United States had prohibition and forced everyone to hide their love of alcohol, the Chinese were merrily drinking themselves under the table.

For the most part, the Chinese have had access to alcohol from all over the world for a long time. This includes the leadership of Mr. Mao who implemented hard-core communist progressive laws, rules and behaviors. While the revolutionary zeal was taking hold on university campuses all over the nation, and inspirational slogans were being painted on large flowing red banner, the average Chinese family was happily quaffing down alcohol in spectacular amounts.

For the most part, these moments were “white wine” moments. Or to use a more appropriate term “moonshine”.

Moutai
The best white wine in China is Moutai. It is pure moonshine and comes in 53%. Ugh!

However, China underwent a drastic change when Mr. Deng started to implement his reforms.

You know, Americans have no idea. Absolutely ZERO idea about what Mr. Deng did. Oh, maybe one in a thousand heard of “Mr. Deng reforms”, but that is a rare person indeed.

What Mr. Deng did was threw out all the social policies, and economic policies of communism. That’s right. He implemented, what could best be termed “American Hard-right Conservative Free-Market” policies. Though you will NEVER hear the left-leaning mainstream American media ever talk about this.

Mr. Deng memorial
In downtown Shenzhen is a park. It is next to the stock exchange building. There, were every single stock trader, and visitor to Shenzhen can see, is a huge bill board dedicated to that man that revolutionized China and make Shenzhen happen; Mr. Deng. He believed, really believed in the American conservative process and felt that the Chinese communist government should embrace the elements that have worked so well in America for the last two hundred years. Many in Beijing fought him. They wanted a central government controlling the economy. They wanted a central government controlling and dictating the social behaviors of the Chinese citizens. However, Mr. Deng was proven right. Modern China is the direct result of his adoption of conservative American economic and free-market policies.

One of the reasons why China is so successful is simply because of Mr. Deng. Every school child in China knows about the important role that Mr. Deng had. Everyone in China knows this. Though, of course, they don’t call it “American brand of conservatism”. They call it “Communism with Chinese systems”.

A name is just a name.

A demand is created

upermarket in China.
Here is a typical wine isle in a supermarket. You can go to smaller wine and tobacco stores if that is your preference. i tend to stick to the big grocery stores and only buy wines that I know of, and I can trust from that store. You can never be too careful when buying wine in China.

Once China “opened up” and free-market trade was promoted, a middle class of people suddenly appeared. Under a socialist nation, whether it is socialist-lite or hard-core full-on communist, there are only two classes of people. This is the [1] government ruling class, and [2] the workers that serve them. (Which pretty much explains the mentality of those in the American oligarchy.)

However, under a free-market society, society does not stratify. It blends. There becomes bands of society.It isn’t a homogenized society under a central government where everyone is”equal”. It is a society that is an aggregate of different people, different cultures, and different lifestyles.

Seemingly over-night a middle class appeared in China.

This middle class had an enormous appetite for Western goods. People started to dress better, enjoy the finer things in life, and strive to build up their lives from a socialist utopia where they could never be given the opportunity. For once the government has you in it’s little box, the odds that you will ever leave it, are increasingly remote.

The Chinese saw the opportunity and seized it.

Suddenly a demand for all things “Western” was created. The Chinese wanted to act, dress and be American. They started to copy American clothing, fashions, and ways of doing things.  The desire was intense, and everyone wanted to be like Americans.

McDonalds
American chain restaurants opened up in China. The most famous are KFC, Pizza Hut, McDonalds and Burger King. The Chinese took to American culture like a starving dog chomps on a steak. For decades, the demand was insatiable.

Which is why outside elements (non-Chinese) started to instigate the “Pro-Democracy” movement. here, Chinese social justice warriors, with financial backing from outside of China, tried to force China to implement “democracy” inside of China. The only thing was, of course, that they did not want democracy, they wanted an authoritarian socialist government with the name of democracy with them in charge.

Ok. Ok, I’m getting off the subject again. But to know China, you need to know what has been going on for the last number of decades or so…

Fake wine flourishes

Ah wine. It is good with everything.

A walk in the clouds
The romance movie “A walk in the clouds” has this grandfather in it that appeals to my sensibilities, now that I am a retired gent. You need to live life to the fullest and appreciate what you have WHILE you have it.

With the middle class, came the desire for red wine. Not only will the Chinese enjoy white wine, but they will also enjoy red wine. And what a demand that it created! The Chinese demand for red wine was off the charts! Everyone was drinking it.

And…

And, with demand came fakes. People started to create fake wine, made out of all kinds of ingredients. They discovered that they could recycle imported bottles, and even have local factories make look-alike bottles. The ability to make a copy of a wine label was child’s-play. They could  take the cheapest white wine, mix it with grape juice and sell it under some kind of American, French or Spanish brand and sell it for 1000x the cost to make it.

Communities share fake wine recipes

First off, let me make one thing perfectly clear; China has some most excellent locally produced wines. You can get a nice ChengYu or a GreatWall, both very common throughout China and enjoy a good budget bottle of wine. You can also get wines from smaller independent Chinese wineries that are quite magnificent.

I don’t buy wines by price tag. I look for a good, and real wine. I look for local or well known wines that are difficult to fake. I drink wine for the taste. So, with this being said, I am certainly not a wine connoisseur. Instead, I am a consumer of good real wine.

I like a good real wine. If it tastes good, than that is good enough for me.

Good Chinese wines
Above, a selection of Chinese wines that have received praise from critics and made it into a shopping basket. They include wines from 1421 Winery, Kanaan, Grace Vineyard, Leirenshou and Chateau Nine Peaks.

But, you know, fake wines are a real problem. Here in China, fake goods are everywhere. Oh, yes. It was much worse a few years back. The Corruption Police out of Beijing has really clamped down on all this nonsense. They are going after all the evil doers. They are armed, trained and go after them like the IRS goes after an American taxpayer. They are that ruthless!

The thing is that there are entire communities that share recipes on making fake wines, and a network of distributors that purloin these fake goods to the consumer. This is quite an elaborate organization and consists of all sorts of people doing all sorts of questionable activities.

The police step in

Wine section.
This is a typical wine and booze section of a grocery store. Here we see folk buying their preferred libation in the North in the Winter.

In China, the police have a duty to protect the people. This is different than in the United States where the police have the duty of enforcing behavior.

So instead of arresting a five year old girl for selling lemonade, trying to seize someone’s children because the 11 year old was walking alone from school one day, and fining you for having dangling plastic “horse balls” on the hitch of your pickup truck, the Chinese will devote their time towards making China safe.

They have a long road ahead of them.

I will say this, In the United States we NEVER have to worry about fake wines. We never worry about fake beer, fake cigarettes, and fake cigars. We have come to accept this as normal, without giving the American culture the credit it deserves. People, America is what it is because of the people who live there.

Good or bad, right or wrong. It is the people that determine how a country works.

Fake Wine
Huge stockpiles of fake premium spirits and wines are tracked down during a campaign against fakes, Nanning, southwest China’s Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, 6 November 2011.
Nearly 200 mainland cities publicly destroyed tens of millions of fake and substandard goods on 6 November as part of a major publicity drive intended to rein in the country’s booming counterfeiting industry. More than 25 million items were confiscated by police as part of Operation Draw the Sword – a campaign which, according to Xinhua, is also aimed at thwarting the production of imitation designer clothes, fake cosmetics and foodstuffs.

The underground market persists

Like it or not, this ability to make fake wine is a profitable venture. There are many who will happily concoct a few hundred cases of fake wine so that they can buy a new car or two. It’s difficult to eradicate.  However, I can honestly say that the situation is much better than it was just five years ago.

Fake wine being destroyed.
Here we have some more fake wine being destroyed. Notice the cases upon cases lining the wall behind the officer.

Back then, you could not tell at all the difference between a fake wine and a real wine. Often most of the wines in a store might be completely fake. That all started to turn around in 2014 by the massive police crackdowns and raids in Dongguang.

Fake wines being destroyed.
Chinese police destroy cases upon cases of wine seized by police on a raid in a warehouse.

The dangers of fake wine

The people who make these fake wines do everything from relabeling cheap local wine to concocting a toxic mixture of factory chemicals, and rat poison. You really don’t want to put any of this nonsense into your body. It could hurt you terribly.

The problem with fake wine is that you don’t know what is in it. Many times the chemicals that are put inside are done so for color, appearance, and to create the illusion that the liquid is real wine. I have heard of all kinds of things being added to the mixture. I have heard of rancid Duran fruit, I have heard of locomotive degreaser, and rubbing alcohol added to the “wine” to give it that rosy glow when sipped. You do not want to put any of these chemicals in your body. You could develop cancer, get a brain tumor or have your dick fall off.

What ever you do, stay away from fake wines.

How to avoid fake wine

Here’s some rules of thumb that I use…

Yellow tail is a fine import and it is real. It is from Australia. You can get it at the “D” supermarket. Prices fluctuate. Expect to pay at least 60 RMB a bottle. Normal prices are 75 RMB a bottle. Of course, I drink by the case, so I am always looking for real wine at decent prices. You can always find 350 RMB bottles of wine, and I think that you are just throwing your money away at that.

Great Wall has a good dry red wine. But there are many fakes out there. Expect to pay from 65 to 75RMB a bottle at a large name supermarket such as ren ren le. It’s the real deal and pretty good as well.

Great Wall look
Great Wall is a famous brand of wine in China. As such, you can buy it everywhere. The winery has often purchased small regional farms and sell the local wines under their catch-all name brand. In general, stick to Great Wall bottles that have this appearance. There are many fakes of Great wall out there. I only buy Great Wall wine that comes in either this bottle and appearance of an older and plainer form…

This is what a bottle or REAL “Great Wall” wine  looks like.  Note the top of the wine. When you remove the cork, you will notice that the cork is plastic synthetic. It is not real cork. Real cork is cheap and it is used in fake wines.

Corks
There are different types of wine corks. You can look at the wine cork to determine the overall quality of the wine. In general, the better wines have better corks, with both the plastic corks and the twist-off- tops becoming more popular.

Great wall has many types of wines. They have bought up smaller vineyards, and often sell the cheaper wine under their logo. You have to be careful.

Basic Great Wall wine
I call this bottle the “old style” appearance of the Great Wall. It is a good basic wine, and I have yet to find a fake version. Typically you can buy it for around 45 yuan, or roughly $7 USD.

You can tell a fake bottle by the following guidelines… If you are sharing a bottle with another, a real bottle will make you feel warm. Two bottles will make you feel good, but not drunk. You will feel drunk on the third bottle.  A fake bottle of wine will be quite different.

You will get drunk on the first bottle when you are sharing it. By the second bottle if your partner is sitting up with drool coming out of their mouth it is certainly fake. The next day both of you will have splitting headaches, and really bad fake wine will result in messed up stomach and body for at least a week.

Real wine will NEVER give you a headache the next day even if you drink four bottles yourself. Although, you might “potato head” for the duration of the morning.

ChengYu bottle top.
If you ever find a bottle of Great Wall with this kind of top, run away. Typically the brand uses a straight sided top. This top style is common on ChengYu, not on Great Wall.

If you buy in quantity, you can get real wine down to 200 RMB/case. Which is around 33 RMB/ bottle. But you will need to drink a few bottles first before you can tell the difference. In china, price has no bearing on the quality of the wine. Only the store’s reputation does.

Ten days ago I paid 71 RMB for a bottle of “Great Wall” that I felt funny about, but I figured that it must of been ok because of the name and the price. I was wrong. It took two days to get rid of the headache.

Fake wines are a REAL problem in China. If you drink like I do, you can really mess up yourself really bad by drinking that poison. Lord only knows what goes in it. I have read stories that they use rubbing alcohol, automobile antifreeze, oven cleaner, and horse tranquilizers to get the desired flavors. They take grape juice, and add the chemicals. and age it in a kind of heated tub in the back of a pig farm, and then bottle it in reused foreign wine bottles. YUCK!

Great Wall choices.
Great Wall wines are known to come in different sizes and shapes. This makes it very difficult to distinguish between real and fake wines. I don’t try. I only stick with the types that I know are good, and do not take a risk with bad wine or fake wine.

Great wall has many types and shapes and sizes. But remember, only go to a good reliable grocery store, and buy the real stuff. Not the fake stuff. This is why most Chinese prefer either Beer or White Wine. You cannot fake either of them, but you can fake red wine.

A “copy cat” fake is a fake wine dressed up to look like a real wine. As most Chinese wines are unknown wines with made up names, labels and points of origin. You can not tell from the bottle shape. You cannot tell from the bottle labels, or seals. You cannot tell from the boxes that the wines come from. The problem is that all of the international wines get their labels, bottles, corks, and boxes out of China. So it is easy for the Chinese to make doubles.

Anyways, I once got some fake “Sharaz” that was Yellow Tail from a good store. So even if you know what you are doing, you can get tricked. You have got to be careful.

Always remember the cork. If the cork is made out of plastic or a synthetic, then it is probably good. If it is a made out of a real cork, then it is a fake. The reason for this is that anyone can by cork. It is cheap and easy to get. Synthetic cooks are expensive, and regulated. There is also a MOQ (minimum order quantity) with is often much larger than the volume of the fake wine batch.

If you want to get a good bottle that won’t cause any of your internal organs to collapse, then stick to beer, JinJiu, or white wine. Beware, some of the fakes are REALLY good and taste quite good. You might not realize it, but there are complete families that trade the secrets of good fake tasting wines. They improve their mixture over time, and some of the best can sell some very good tasting products that can bring them a lot of money. … Provided that only one or two bottles are drunk by non-drinkers.

Some rules of thumb. All wine from bars, or from the Internet are fake.  All wines that come from Spain are fake. All wines that are in a store (even a good store) that are “on sale” and they only have one pallet of it (maybe fifty cases) are fake…fake…fake.

Stick to what you know. Stick to known brands, reputable stores and sellers.

Levels of fake

The quality of fake products are stratified.

  • Level 1 – The best fakes. Real wine from a local producer is placed in expensive bottles and sold as the expensive brand.
  • Level 2 – Awkward nastiness. Real cheap local wine is diluted down with water, and dangerous non-potable alcohol is added to increase the potency of the beverage. This stuff can make you sick, and give you headaches that can last for days.
  • Level 3 – Horrible shit. Very little real wine is used. Instead a concoction of different local medicines, and liquids are compiled together. This can consist of such things as cantaloupe rinds and liquidized horse feed mixed with cheap denatured alcohol. This stuff will make you physically sick, and can cause you to be hospitalized if you binge drink with it.

Summary

Fake wine takes away from the beauty of life. Some assholes, and they really are assholes, are trying to profit at your expense. Fake wine is a problem.

Keep in mind the most important rule of wine.

The Rule of Wine
Wine should be drank with friends and family alongside some fine delicious food. The most important aspect is happy times together.

Wine should be enjoyed with friends and family. I think a nice song, and maybe a dance is also appropriate. Drink wine while eating food. I like fresh crunchy loaves of bread. I like nice chunks of cheese and a spread of olives, cutup fresh heirloom tomatoes, onions, lettuce, and peppers. Life is too short not to appreciate the better things in life.

And what is better than spending time with your friends and your family? Not too much else, I am afraid.

Wine to be enjoyed
Wine should be shared. It should be shared with friends and family. It should be enjoyed with good morsels of tasty food. It should we shared with the ones that you love and who holds meaning to you personally.

I think that wine goes great with food. When you are together with friends and family, the wine really makes the times cheerful. Our faces get red and rosy and  we talk about our days, our opinions, and our dreams. I especially think that foods with sauces go great with wine. I really enjoy a nice “Italian style” dinner with a few bottles of wine. Oh baby, yes!

Garlic bread
I really like to eat garlic bread with my wine. The crunchy bread is awesome with the wine. What I like to do is get some olive oil. Then, I heat the olive oil up, then I dip the bread into the hot olive oil, then i take the olive oil soaked garlic bread into a shallow bowl of Parmesan cheese. The cheese ends up completely covering the soaked bread. It is delicious. You take a nice bite of that tasty crunchiness, and then a nice sip of wine afterwards.

There are all kinds of foods that go well with wine. I like to think that sandwiches go best with an icy cold beer, but there are many, many foods that go well with wine. For instance,  How about an Italian Grinder?

Italian grinder
Wouldn’t you like to have a nice bite of this sandwich? In Boston these are called “Grinders”. They are just an Italian hoagie. However, I really like mine with some Italian cold cuts, a nice selection of cheese and some drizzled olive oil and spices. Then I like it toasted briefly in a toaster oven. You take a nice bite of this, and then have a sip of nice red wine. Ah, so nice.

Fun Links

Life is about friendship.
Life is far too short not to enjoy it. Wine is not expensive. You can get a decent bottle for $5 USD. I suggest that you get a bottle of wine, and get a cheap pepperoni pizza and call up some friends and have a pizza and wine party. Why not? What is stopping you? Heck, what about your father or mother? What about your brother or sisters? Life is too short not to enjoy it TODAY.

Take Aways

  • As I get older, I come to appreciate the importance of wine.
  • Wine is wonderful with food.
  • Wine is served best when it is served with friends.
  • Fake wine is a problem in China.
  • There are precautions that a person can take to avoid fake wine.
  • Remember the Rule of Wine.
Friends drinking wine
Life should be spent with your friends. They are very important. How good is watching a football game, unless you have your friends nearby? How much fun is going on a hike in the woods unless you have a hiking companion? Friends are important. Make the moments together special… drink wine.

FAQ

Q: Why are there so many fake products in China?
A: This is because it is profitable. Many of the fake products are quite good and functional. For instance, there are “grades” of a fake product. You can have a fake LV handbag that is made from the same material, and the same suppliers as the real LV. This is a top grade fake. Then you can have a terrible cheap knock off that doesn’t look anything at all like a LV bag. It’s all a matter or degree.

Q: Can you drink a fake bottle of wine and not get sick?
A: Yes. There are many fakes that are just simply local wines repackaged into expensive bottles, expensive labels and expensive price tags. The buyer is thus cheated. He is paying steak prices for dogfood.

Q: What is the Rule of Wine?
A: Wine should be drank with friends and family alongside some fine delicious food. The most important aspect is happy times together.

Q:  What if I don’t want to drink wine?
A: That is fine too. You can go ahead and call some friend over and do something else. The important thing is to spend time together with people who are meaningful to you.  Make a difference and appreciate the time that you all are spending together.

Links about China

China

Articles & Links

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Notes

  1. Created 26AUG18.
  2. Content completed 27AUG18.
  3. SEO review 27AUG18.
  4. Published 27AUG18.

Learning about China by Looking at Pretty Girls (4)

This is the fourth of a series of post on Chinese cute girls and Chinese culture.

You know, China is a very, very big nation. Many times I am asked what it is like. Honestly, there is so much to say, that I end up going on some tangent or the other. However, one thing that I noticed when talking to other men, is that what they really want to know is what Chinese girls are like…

Wow! That is in itself a huge subject. 

Here I try to compose  a series of micro-videos of Chinese girls taking little vignettes of themselves being cute, dancing, eating, and doing girl things. It is in no way comprehensive, but it should give you a general idea of what Chinese girls are like. It will also help you to get a better idea of what China is like as well.

We need to do this. No one else is.

Here is a quote from JobTubeDaily;

"Popular U.S. media perpetuates constant negative narratives about China: ghost cities, real estate bubbles, pollution, corruption. While many of these problems are real, the predominately negative coverage drowns out the positive elements of life in China and its abundant economic opportunities. In doing so, the media dissuades America’s rising students, as well as business and political leaders, from learning more about the country."

Here is a quote from LinkedIN;

"And the western media aren't particularly helpful in explaining the real China of 2018.  They're serving so much bias and prejudice about China, it is nearly impossible for the general public to get in touch with the real China."

Here we look at ten micro-videos…

In a Park

In this video we see a girl dancing in a park. For some strange reason, my fellow Americans don’t seem to realize that China has parks. They also have toll booths, ATM machines, taxis, high speed trains and amusement parks. They have everything that the United States has. It’s just a little bit different.

Chinese toll booth.
Chinese toll booth. This are functionally very similar to American tool booths. They have rest areas as well.

Though, since China has undergone an amazing and enormous growth spurt over the last three decades, everything tends to be brand new and well taken cared for.

In China, there a different kinds of parks. The city parks tend to be well tended. They are typically manicured daily and trimmed at the very early hours of the day before the sun comes up. They are well maintained. In fact, depending where you live, they tend to be treated like a house with furniture that can be rearranged at will. They move trees about like your wife might want a sofa moved. They will plant flowers and then dig them up and replant something else two months later. They will constantly be painting and repainting the boxes, poles and manhole covers.

I asked some friends why this was so. They explained that China does not have a welfare system. The government does not pay you if you don’t have a job. Instead, if you need work and need money, they will put you to work. All you need to do is go to the city department of labor, and they will give you a job.

The pay is minimal, but you get free meals, and free housing if you want. You get on the government health plan, and you get Sundays off.

So with all these workers, it is very easy to employ them to take on various tasks that need to be done in and around the city. It is never considered a long-term occupation, but many people take advantage of this system. Is it perfect, I don’t think so. However, personally I do think it is superior to the American welfare system by a large margin.

Many parks tend to be on top of inaccessible hills. You need to be a mountain goat to climb up all them. I have a theory that when China was first being populated and over the last 5000 years, all the “good” and flat land was taken by farmers and businessmen.

The inaccessible and difficult land was ignored. Then, in the last one hundred years, these plots of undesirable land was remade into parks and community areas. Thus you have the parks all over China with a couple of thousand of steps to reach the top.

This cute girl is wearing the small white shoes (xiao bai xue) that is so popular in China. She is dressed typically with shorts and a small tight fitting top that shows off her chest. Like most Chinese girls, she keeps her hair long. What’s not to like?

All the parks are very well maintained. many have lighting for night time walks and strolls. Many also have music that plays out of artificial stones. Yes, they are speakers with holes so that you can listen to traditional Chinese music as you walk on the path. Of course, all paths are paved in stone.

In a Gym.

Here we have a girl in a gym. Notice the barbells are made up in American style colors. America and Americans are held in great respect by the Chinese. In fact, the Chinese name for America is Mei Guo which means “beautiful nation”. While there are many foreigners in China, most are not Americans. Most come from Australia and England. Which is sort of the reason why the English spelling and terms used by many Chinese tend to be of British origin. For instance using the word “boot” instead of “trunk”, or a “flat” instead of an “apartment”.

Which makes it even more special when there are Americans available to teach English or work with them on a project or two. Americans are considered a valuable and precious commodity.  Many stores and businesses celebrate American social customs, such as Halloween, and Christmas. They buy and set up Christmas Trees and decorate the offices with the proper holiday decorations…

…the only thing is that they leave them up all year round. It is not unusual to listen to Christmas carols in a mall in July.

This cute chick is showing off her beautiful muscle tone and nice behind. She has been working hard to perfect her body, and I for one appreciate all that she put into it. She looks absolutely stunning.

The funny thing about gyms in China is that they tend NOT to be air conditioned. The Chinese believe that a healthy body is a warm body. The purpose of exercise is to remove the bad water (sweat) from your body and replace it with good water. This and the movement of the body generates a movement of chi, or energy throughout the body. This is also one of the reasons why the Chinese love to dance so much, and all the public forums that support dancing.

In a Work Office.

Here we have another girl. She is in an office of some sort and wearing some kind of office clothes. Unlike the United States, showing your waist is acceptable in China, as is also wearing tight pants, short, short mini skirts and having long hair. They don’t have the kind of unisex taboos that have saturated American HR offices in the last two decades.

She has a nice body. She’s pretty typical with a thin waist, nice chest, and longish hair. Notice that she is very pale. A pale complexion is considered to be very popular in China. She is wearing red lipstick with is also a fashion statement and quite common.

The office itself is rather plain and unadorned. This is typical. The Chinese like to have a nice white stone floor and nice white walls whenever possible. This is most especially in the super hot Southern section of the nation. You will notice that there is a water cooler. Almost every home, and business uses water coolers. Even if the water in the pipes are no longer dangerous, you will NEVER get a Chinese person to drink water out of it.

Shanghai Apartment

This is a very nice example of what an apartment in Shanghai looks like. When people see pictures of China they see all these multi-story apartment complexes. No one ever sees what they are like on the inside. Well, as someone who has lived in numerous high-rise apartments, I can tell you. Often the view is magnificent.

In this example here, we have a great example of this.

The apartment is set off from the Bund river. It has a great view of a suburb of Shanghai, though not downtown. It is obviously the living room. As we can see the furnishings that support this. At night the view must be spectacular.

Note that she is not wearing any shoes. In China, no one wears “outside” shoes inside the house. Typically you wear house slippers.

Again, with all the large apartment skyscrapers throughout China, this is a fairly typical view that one would have in your apartment. This one is particularly nice as it overlooks the Bund and a very large and famous city.

Southern China

Hey! This looks like Bali, or Thailand, eh? Nope. It’s China. Southern China is filled with all kinds of beautiful beaches, communities and resorts. (Which is one of the reasons why I live where I do.)  The impression that all of China is a filthy rat’s hole filled with pollution and trash is simply not true.  That is like saying that all of America looks like Detroit.

Typically, you will have an Engineer come to China to do some work at a factory. His impressions of the factory regions would be very poor, and he would tend to associate all of China with those areas. It’s not his fault, he only got a small and brief look at what is an enormous nation.

To make matters worse, you will have the Western media who has an objective to keep American living in fear. They keep Americans dumb and ill-informed with the changes with the rest of the world. They do so for their own objectives.

Seriously, for the last three decades, trillions of dollars poured into China from all over the world. Are you trying to tell me that NONE of that money went into infrastructure, the people, the lifestyle and the society? Are you trying to convince me that it went into the pockets of the government and the rich people who run the businesses, even though an internal army of “Corruption Police” is active in keeping corruption suppressed? Is that what we are supposed to believe?

Incidentally, traveling to China and having a vacation here is far cheaper and better than having one in Bali, Indonesia. I know.

Outside Pizza Hut

Pizza Hut is very popular in China. In fact, it is owned by a conglomerate that also owns KFC. Together they have absolutely and effectively tapped into the Chinese market. They have taken these American products and made variations to the dishes to appeal to Chinese tastes and preferences.

It is sort of how the “Chinese” restaurants in America have taken Chinese food and “Americanized” it.

Pizza menu
Here is a photo from a Pizza Hut menu showing a popular side dish. You can get all kinds of side dishes with your meals at Pizza Hut. The Chinese love options and will spend a great deal of time perfecting their order choices.

Yes, you can get pizza at Pizza Hut. However it will be pretty pricey to order a large thin pepperoni pizza with a pitcher of coke. Instead you order set meals with option combinations. The pizzas are designed for the Chinese palate. Such as a Duran and oyster pizza with a side of quail eggs and snail meat. It does take a little getting used to.

Anyways, here we have a couple dancing in the open plaza in front of a shopping center. In China, they have different kinds of shopping centers. Typically it is a ring of stores around a large central pavilion.

It’s sort of how towns in Massachusetts were set up in the 1750’s; a “green” in the center facing a church and other buildings. Well, in China the shopping center may or may not have a mall or large “anchor” store. What it does have is a large area for communal dancing and games. Often it will have a fountain somewhere for the kids to splash and play in the water as well.

You can see the people walking and milling about. This is a very typical sight through out China from small towns to large cities. This scene could have been filmed anywhere.

Singing in English

One things that many people do not understand, especially Americans, is the enormous number of people who can speak English in China. About two decades ago, the Chinese government instituted a policy in all the Chinese schools. Every child must learn English in addition to learning Chinese. In fact, the ability to attend university absolutely requires that the student-candidate must be able to speak and write and communicate in English to a reasonable degree.

That is not to say that everyone speaks fluently. The ability to speak English varies greatly throughout China. Never the less, there are more people in China who can speak English than there are Americans on the entire planet. That is how absolutely enormous China is.

So you will hear many songs in China that have English or partial English lyrics. This is normal. It is the same with signs, advertisements and other notifications. China has developed into a nation with two languages. The dominant language is certainly Chinese, but English has a major role as well.

Here we have a Chinese girl singing in English. Obviously she is a professional. One should never be under the impression that China is a nation where no one can speak English. There are many people who can, and very many who can speak at a reasonably fluent level.

Notice that the music has lyrics in two languages; English and Chinese.

Sitting on a bench

OK. Now this is a boring video. It’s just some chick sitting on a bench in a park in China. “So what?” you might ask.

China is safe. You can go in and about all the parks any time of night and day and not get mugged, robbed, stolen from, attacked, shot at or raped. They do not have the same kinds of problems that we have in America, or in the West, simply because…

  1. There isn’t any welfare program. You must work or you die. The government will provide you with work if you cannot find a job. Those who are involved in criminal enterprises go after more lucrative targets. This includes people with vices that they can exploit and corporations.
  2. There are no “open borders”. This policy permits uneducated, un-assimilated, and fundamentalist fanatics to roam the streets in packs. Not in China. It is a polite society by design. Only qualified people can enter China. You join or you leave. There is no grey-area.
  3. Families are important. Each person in China has a support group. They all have an extensive network of family and friends that will go after criminals mafia-style if someone hurts a family member. This is unlike the USA where it’s “every man for himself”.
  4. Many girls can defend themselves. Sure they might not be “packing heat”, but many have learned Chinese martial arts when they were in elementary school. I have seen a tiny pint-sized waif take down a six-foot tall chunk of a man.
  5. Cameras are everywhere. Both city cameras and building cameras are all over the place. You are under constant surveillance. It is not that you are being watched. However, if something does happen, the Chinese forensics police can go “minority report” on your actions. They do. They have. It is televised on the news quite regularly.
  6. Police are everywhere. True they are mostly siting around playing video games, and helping the groundskeepers, but they are present. There are all kinds of guards. From regular police to security staff. They all can come and help in an instant.
  7. No social engineering of minorities. Unlike the United States, the Chinese government does not permit scaled benefits for minorities.  Thus we don’t have a nation of fatherless negro children being raised by television shows.
  8. Destruction of Slums. Unlike the United States, when communities disintegrate into crime and corruption, where the ability to live is disrupted and social harmony is nonexistent, the Chinese government steps in. Whether it is bulldozing a complete community, like it did in Hong Kong, or arresting and executing the corrupt government officials (with the Corruption Police). China does not mess around.

This is pretty typical. The young lass is wearing a nice dress and sitting in the comfortable evening air. You can see the lights of the nearby buildings twinkle and move through the trees nearby. Of course, like most of the micro-videos in this blog the music is all C-Pop.

The girl is a typical attractive Chinese female. She has nice long hair, and thin waist and a nice chest.  You will notice that all the plants are nicely cared for and trimmed. The groundskeepers take their roles seriously.

With a sofa

This girl is typical in a number of ways. First of all, consider her clothes and appearance. She has nice long straight and long hair. It is very popular in China. While she might have a tattoo or two, most Chinese girls do not have any tattoos unless they live in a Westernized city like Shanghai, Hong Kong, or Taipei.

She is wearing a nice short dress that hugs her body tight. This is very typically Chinese, and you can see all the girls dress like this when they go out int he bigger cities. She is also wearing high heeled shoes with a red colored sole. I really like these shoes, but you know, I have to tell you that I really hate it if they don’t take off that price sticker on the bottom. It really distracts from the overall appearance.

This is her apartment, and as such it is very typical. This is her living room with a Chinese-style sofa and coffee table. Note the tiny plastic trash can nearby. This is a common feature in all Chinese households, as is a tissue dispenser. The coffee table is made of glass. This is also typical.

Take a moment to look at the sofa. I, myself, do not care for this style. However it is very popular in China.  She is covering it with a blanket to protect it. We used to do that in the United States also. Furniture used to be protected by throws and other coverings. All pillows are organized and neatly laid out. The woman of the house always takes good care of the domicile. This is one thing that I do love about China.

An Ideal face

This young lass is in her early twenty’s. She is showing off her body and her nice curves. By Chinese standards she has a most excellent face and is considered very attractive. Thus the strange faces that she is making towards the camera.

She has a very pale complexion. She is soft, but not flabby. Curvy, but not fat. She has nice eyes and an oval face with a nice pointy chin. All of these features are considered highly desirable in China.

The Chinese don’t care if she has big boobs or a big ass. They prefer a nice slim fish-shaped body on the girls. A big set of boobs or a big ass won’t get very many “double takes” in China. By that standard, she is still considered attractive as her chest is proportional with her ass. She has a fish-like shape.

Though, many of the women, the thinner ones posted elsewhere, would be considered to be jaw-dropping gorgeous. In any event, this chick has quite a few followers who like to admire her face, her smile and her other charms. You go girl!

Notice that she is wearing a solid silver ring bracelet on her right arm. This is very popular in China. Both gold and silver are considered great materials. Unlike the United States these are pure materials. They are not alloys

When you go to a jeweler in the United States and ask for a gold wedding band, they will offer you gold bands. But these are gold alloys. They are not pure gold. The excuse is that gold is a soft metal. Yada Yada Yada…

I have sold gold rings and they haven’t worn out yet…

In China, when you buy gold, you buy 99.9% pure gold. You are not sold gold which is an alloy. That is how the jeweler in the United States makes their money. When I first came to China, I was having a hard time at it. I tied to sell the little that I had. I was surprised that the “solid gold” wedding band that I got in the States was only 5% real gold. The rest was an alloy of different materials.

Five. Friggin’. Percent.

If you ever want to get a nice gold ring, don’t buy it in the United States. Hop on a plane and get it in Hong Kong.

Gold store
Chow Tai Fook Jewelry store in Hong Kong. I would strongly advise Americans to purchase real gold instead of the fake gold that is being pawned off as “real” gold in the United States. Real gold is determined by the percentage of alloy in it. Real gold should have at least 95% gold metal in it. It does not require much in the way of an alloy to make it durable. While it is true that 99.999% gold is very soft, a 98% gold will be rock hard and not wear at all.

Conclusion

Everyone likes to look at pretty girls. Even other pretty girls. I, as a man, think that pretty girls liven up our lives and make it more interesting and fun. I would not mind taking any one of these girls out and having a nice meal or playing around in a park or some other place. Having good companionship, great conversation, and enjoying a wonderful meal would be awesome with any of these women.

Today it is difficult to see what other places are like, if you are an American. Our news is heavily propagandized.

  • Those on the liberal side have the impression that China eats dogs, is full of poor waifs that sell their bodies for sex, and is full of dirty smog filled air.
  • Those on the conservative side, have the impression that China is a great war-mongered beast who wants to take over the Pacific, that they are ruthless businessmen, and want to keep their citizens imprisoned in a communist gulag.

Neither impression is correct. They are both terrible distortions.

China is a huge nation, bigger geographically than the United States, and with an enormous population far larger than America’s. In fact, there are more people in China that speak English than there are Americans in the entire world.

They live life. They work. They study hard. They try to do their best. They have fun. They raise families. They are, in many ways, like “old fashioned” Americans around 1950. While America has moved toward a progressive socialist paradise ruled by an oligarchy, China has moved in a different direction. It has moved toward free-market policies originating out of a central government. China is not at all what we think it is.

This post is my little way to help introduce China to the readership.

Take Aways

  • Chinese women are attractive.
  • Many of the buildings in China are new, and have a modern supporting infrastructure.
  • Chinese people like to dance, sing, and have fun with their friends.
  • Chinese women DO NOT look like pre-adolescent children. (Here’s a nod to the idiots in Arkansas who were absolutely convinced that Chinese women look like little pre-adolescent girls.)

FAQ

Q: Why do you only have beautiful Chinese girls? What about being more diverse and inclusive? Why do you objectify girls?
A: Well, for one, this article is about attractive Chinese girls. It wouldn’t do to have non-Chinese girls in it. Nor would it be appropriate to have men, homosexuals, fat and ugly girls, children or LGBT creatures in the article.

If you want to purge beauty out of your life, no problem. Go ahead and do it. Just like American beauty pageants are no longer about beauty. Just like American airlines have purged themselves of age and beauty standards. Just like race-cars have purged themselves of attractive women. But you won’t see that in China.

Now here, I like to surround myself with beauty. I like to surround myself with things that I like and I love. That includes dogs, cats, pizza, bacon, tomatoes, friends and of course my loved ones.

Q: Why do you use micro-videos in this post?
A: I think it does a nice job of giving a snapshot of what China is like. Many of the videos have Chinese songs. They all feature beautiful Chinese girls in China doing things that beautiful Chinese girls like to do. Of course, if you would rather go to you-tube, go ahead. You won’t find very many Chinese girls there. You-tube is banned in China because it, like Facebook, Google, and Tumblr, all collect user information and pipe that information directly to the NSA for American government’s use.

Q: Why do you think these girls are beautiful?
A: Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. What constitutes for beauty in China is different from what is beautiful elsewhere. I chose these videos because I happen to think the girls are cute, beautiful or attractive. Of course, if you disagree with me, you can leave.

Now, you shouldn’t be too upset there are some rocking girls in the United States. You should see them in sweatpants. My Lord!

Links about China

Business KTV

Dance Craze

End of the Day Potato

Dog Shit

Dancing Grandmothers

When the SJW movement took control of China

Family Meal

Freedom & Liberty in China

Ben Ming Nian

Beware the Expat

Fake Wine

Fat China

Chinese apartment houses

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 19AUG18.
  2. Composition finished 24AUG18.
  3. SEO review 24AUG28.
  4. Posting 24AUG28.

Allow your Children to Play and Grow (Part 2)

This is the second part of a two part article. This little post was inspired by a little article titled “Doctor’s Orders; Let children just play” posted in the hot dog-days of summer, August 2018.

Their 10- and 6-year old were picked up by police and detained for five hours in 2015 for walking home “unsupervised” from a local park. The folks at Child Protective Services threatened to take the children away from Danielle and Alexander Meitiv.

With court battles ensuing and ample media attention, the head of Maryland’s Social Services Administration finally released a memo to staff acknowledging in creepy bureaucratic fashion that, 

“Children playing outside or walking unsupervised does not meet the criteria for a CPS response absent specific information supporting the conclusion that the child has been harmed or is at substantial risk of harm if they continue to be unsupervised.”

-Townhall

The article reinforces a notion that I have that “play is the work of children”. It is how they learn to become an adult. It doesn’t matter if you are a dog, a cat, an elephant, or a monkey, all animals learn from playing. Here, I would like to continue my discussion of things that a parent should permit their children to do…

Squash a Penny on a Railroad Track

“In many ways life was so much more predictable back then; in other ways it was much less so. Organized sports were almost non-existent in my childhood. Summer was free time on steroids, with hours, days, weeks (it seemed like forever back then!) to do nothing. I don’t recall being bored; but we played as a matter of course outside the aperture of our parent’s eye. Off to the playground on our bike; downtown to get a soda or fudgesicle; or, in the case of some of the older kids, hanging around waiting for the afternoon papers to come in before heading out on their paper route. But this day, we were in the business of sabotage. Today, we were going to do something really big … and dangerous. This could change everything….

We glanced around to make sure no one was watching. The caper was on. The penny was placed well down the tracks from our hiding place. We were tucked in under a pile of brush and ducked low so as not to be seen from the train. Then, we heard it. There was a crossing about half a mile away, and the whistle blew. There was no rushing the tracks now, no undoing what we had done.

The big locomotive could be heard rumbling toward us. Think of it –  a time when placing a penny on the railroad tracks was paramount to sedition! I would graduate to more serious pranks as I got older, but by today’s standards the bar was extremely low for our misbehaving antics…

… I remember being very nervous, praying that train would stay upright and on course. As the engine lumbered by us I recall the feeling of relief. And as the caboose faded safely into the distance, having waited to make certain no engineer could spot us, we ran to the location. There it was: the flattened penny; pancake currency and the feeling of exhilaration believing that we had taken a tremendous risk and come out of it unscathed.”

-Believeinplace Blog

In my days of yore, pennies were made of copper.  So when you would put a penny on the tracks it would flatten out into a flat copper plate.  Not, so today.  American pennies are made out of a zinc alloy. (The modern penny is made of 97.5 percent zinc and 2.5 percent copper. This is known as copper plated zinc.) Ah, it’s not the same.  I would suggest using a nickel or better yet, a dime instead.

Nickels have more copper in them than pennies do.  So it is better to flatten. Pennies only have about 2.5% copper in it, but nickels are 75% copper. The U.S. first struck 5¢ nickel coins in 1866. All nickels from that date to the present except for the famous “war nickels” (mid-1942 to 1945) are made of the same metal, an alloy of 75% copper and 25% nickel. “War nickels” were made of 35% silver, 56% copper, and 9% manganese because nickel was needed for the war effort.

Dimes are better than nickels. So, if the reader were to use a dime, as it is almost 92% copper, it is more like that of the copper pennies of our youth. As of 2014, the dime is made out of a blend of metals called “clad.” A copper center is sandwiched between two layers of a 75-percent copper and 25-percent nickel blend. The total composition of a modern dime is 91.67 percent copper and 8.33 percent nickel.

American CoinPercentage of Copper
Penny2.5%
Nickel75%
Dime92%
You do want to stay aware as you put your penny on a railroad track to be sure a train isn’t coming. If you’re going to wait for the train to come by and smoosh your coin, you also want to stand back at least 30 feet, as it could hypothetically come flying off and hit you. You don’t have to wait around for the train, though. If you decide to come back in a few hours or the next day to see what became of your penny, mark the spot with a stick before you leave for easy finding later on.

-The Risky Kid
Flattened coins
A handful of some flattened coins. When was the last time that YOU, the reader, held a flattened coin in the palm of your hand? I’ll bet that it was a long time ago.

The types of train tracks that one would try this kind of feat are freight lines, and freight lines ONLY.

High speed rail is far to dangerous to attempt.  The same is true for subway lines and similar rail.  Anything that involves the transport of humans is to be avoided. Don’t even consider it. It is DANGEROUS.

Always stick to rail that services freight, and you will be fine. Back in my school days, the freight lines carried coal, and a handful of box cars in and about the Allegheny hills.

And, while you are at it, hanging around railroad tracks, might I suggest the following activities…

  • Walk on top of the tracks and see how long you can go before falling off. (Not everyone shares my point of view. HERE is an article where it is considered the height of danger and folly to walk on train tracks. HERE is an article that says that it is terribly DANGEROUS and maybe evil to even suggest children participate in such a thing.)
  • Searching for loose railroad spikes. These are the “nails” that hold the tracks to the wood ties. (A rail spike (also known as a cut spike or crampon) is a large nail with an offset head that is used to secure rails and base plates to railroad ties (sleepers) in the track.)
Robert Livingston Stevens is credited with the invention of the rail spike, the first recorded use of which was in 1832. The railroad spike was an invention which resulted from the state of industrialisation in the United States in the early 19th century: English mainline railways of that period used heavy and expensive cast iron chairs to secure T-shaped rails; instead, Stevens added a supporting base to the T rail which could be fixed with a simple spike. In 1982, the spike was still the most common rail fastening in North America. Common sizes are from 9⁄16 to 10⁄16 inch (14 to 16 mm) square and 5 1⁄2 to 6 inches (140 to 150 mm) long.
  • Collecting those little marble sized metal ores that abound on and between the tracks. I never found out what they were and why they existed as a boy, but I used to pick up a couple and toss them into the trees as I’d walk. Later on, after the invention of the internet, I was able to figure out what these things were…
These little dirty black marble sized balls are Taconite pellets. They are iron and are formed into pellets for the trip from the mine to industry. Several materials are formed into pellets or beads in this way. Plastic is another. In a pellet form the iron, plastic, what ever, takes on more of a fluid characteristic which is easier to transport, load and unload, store, and measure.

Sword Fight With Sticks

“I fight in a group called River Run Belegarth, a realm of Belegarth Medieval Combat Society.

As per the name, we are a medieval battle game utilizing padded weapons including but not limited to; swords (large and small), shields, arrows, javelins, spears, maces, and flails. The Belegarth community spreads across the country, we even have realms in Canada and Puerto Rico.

We follow a simple honor based system. The Belegarth rules are found in the Book of War.”

-reddit

Parents are wary of anything involving sharp objects, sticks included. However, letting your kid engage in some improvised swashbuckling is too fun an opportunity to pass up because of a negligible risk of injury. One of the most memorable events is to take them to a medieval recreation or fair.  Have them dress up and enjoy (something every little girl yearns to do).

Dress-up is very big in China. Especially traditional Han clothing and outfits.

A Renaissance fair, Renaissance faire, or Renaissance festival is an outdoor weekend gathering, usually held in the United States, open to the public and typically commercial in nature, which purportedly recreates a historical setting for the amusement of its guests. 

Some are permanent theme parks, while others are short-term events in a fairground, winery, or other large public or private spaces. 

Renaissance fairs generally include an abundance of costumed entertainers or fair-goers, musical and theatrical acts, art and handicrafts for sale, and festival food. 

Some offer campgrounds for those who wish to stay more than one day. Many Renaissance fairs are set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I of England. Some are set earlier, during the reign of Henry VIII, or in other countries, such as France, and some are set outside the era of the Renaissance; these may include earlier Medieval periods (including Vikings), or later periods, such as 17th-18th Century pirates. 

Some engage in deliberate "time travel" by encouraging participants to wear costumes representing several eras in a broad time period. Renaissance fairs encourage visitors to enter into the spirit of things with costumes and audience participation. Many welcome fantasy elements such as wizards and elves.

-Wikipedia
Sword Fight
Here is a typical event at a Renaissance fair. This is a mock sword fight. Often there are rules that must be followed for the mutual enjoyment and safety of the participants.

Ah… To dress up and role play. Don’t let the “busy body” down the street prevent your children from role play…

“In Waynesboro, Georgia, “trick or treaters” must be 12 or younger; they must be in a costume; and they must be accompanied by an adult at least 21 years of age. 

So if you have kids who are 15, 10, and 8, you can’t send them out together. The 15-year-old is not allowed to dress up, yet she won’t be considered old enough to supervise her siblings for another six years. And this is on the one night of the entire year we traditionally let children pretend to be adults.

Other schools and community centers now send letters home asking parents not to let their children wear scary costumes. 

Some even organize “trunk or treats”—cars parked in a circle, trunks open and filled with candy, thus saving the kids from having to walk around the neighborhood or knock on doors. (That would be tiring and terrifying.) If this is childhood, is it any wonder college kids also expect to be micromanaged on Halloween?

At Yale in 2015, after 13 college administrators signed a letter outlining appropriate vs. inappropriate costume choices for students, the childhood development expert and campus lecturer Erika Christakis suggested that it would be better to allow kids to think for themselves. 

After all, Halloween is supposed to be about pushing boundaries. 

“Is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little obnoxious…or, yes, offensive?” she wrote. “Have we lost faith in young people’s capacity—your capacity—to ignore or reject things that trouble you?”

Apparently, yes. 

Angry students mobbed her husband, the professor Nicholas Christakis, surrounding him in the courtyard of the residential college where he served as master. 

They screamed obscenities and demanded he apologize for believing, along with his wife, that college students are in fact capable of handling offensive costumes on Halloween. “Be quiet!” a student shouted at him at one point. “As master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students!””

-The Fragile Generation

Stand on the Roof

This little activity is not something that I ever thought was significant.  However, it was not until I was older that I began to realize the importance of it. My first experience was when I was (maybe) seven, and my “girlfriend” (at the time, a young cutie named Mary) snuck me into her bedroom, and we crawled out her bedroom window and hung out on her roof. Indeed, what kid hasn’t wanted to get a bird’s eye view of the neighborhood?

Ah, Mary. She taught me many things.  She was my teacher for making my first ketchup sandwich, and she taught me how to steal candy from the local store. Heh heh. 

Don’t worry, the store keeper called our parents and we got a long lecture on how bad we were. Her father used to make rock candy in his basement, and we would go down and eat some sugar from time to time.  

I suppose if we would have been a little older we would have experienced other “firsts” together… first kiss, first sex, first… However, that never materialized as we moved and I never saw her again.

Ah. Standing on the roof.

“Sandseter began observing and interviewing children on playgrounds in Norway. In 2011, she published her results in a paper called “Children’s Risky Play From an Evolutionary Perspective: The Anti-Phobic Effects of Thrilling Experiences.”

Children, she concluded, have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn’t mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that they feel they are taking a great risk.

That scares them, but then they overcome the fear.

In the paper, Sandseter identifies six kinds of risky play: 

(1) Exploring heights, or getting the “bird’s perspective,” as she calls it—“high enough to evoke the sensation of fear.” 

(2) Handling dangerous tools—using sharp scissors or knives, or heavy hammers that at first seem unmanageable but that kids learn to master. 

(3) Being near dangerous elements—playing near vast bodies of water, or near a fire, so kids are aware that there is danger nearby. 

(4) Rough-and-tumble play—wrestling, play-fighting—so kids learn to negotiate aggression and cooperation. 

(5) Speed—cycling or skiing at a pace that feels too fast. 

(6) Exploring on one’s own.

This last one Sandseter describes as “the most important for the children.” She told me, “When they are left alone and can take full responsibility for their actions, and the consequences of their decisions, it’s a thrilling experience.””

-The Overprotected Kid

This is ideal if you are at home in the United States.  This way, standing on the roof of your home is one of the more risky activities, and yet the most rewarding. In all cases, please supervise this vertical venture and take the necessary precautions: Only allow your child to attempt if your roof isn’t overly steep and is in good condition, without loose shingles and other potential hazards. Have your kid walk straight up and down the roof, standing with one foot on either side of its peak for stability, as they survey the landscape below.

High Ground
The high-ground has a tremendous impact on how you view your life. Cats understand. Dogs understand. Tigers understand. Eagles understand. Many liberal parents do not.

Here in China, access to the top floor of all buildings is easily accessible. All one need do is take an elevator to the 86 floor, and then take the stairs up to the roof. It’s not for the faint of heart, but trust me, your kids would love it.

Shoot a Gun

Children and guns
Children throughout South East Asia are taught on how to handle and use firearms. This used to be common in the United States. However, after the election of Barrack Obama the first, this has become considered unpopular and dangerous. Here we have kids in Thailand being taught.
Warning; I advocate that children should be taught to be able to use firearms safely. This is not considered proper in our new American progressive reality. Never the less, it is my strong belief. My Children all are taught here in communist China on how to handle firearms and shoot, and I believe that there is no excuse why American children can't be trusted to do the same.

When I grew up, all my male classmates were out shooting guns when they were seven.  My father, of an urban liberal persuasion, wouldn’t let me near a firearm until I was 17.  Still, I strongly believe that one of the most important skills a parent can teach their children is self defense. Dogs do it.  Cats do it, tigers do it.  Only domesticated animals like cows, sheep, chickens, turkeys, and domesticated pigs don’t.  (I guess that is why we farm them for food. They don’t fight back.)

Yes. Humans tend NOT to EAT animals that fight back.  I wonder why…

Ruger .22
Here is a nice Ruger .22 with a laser sight and silencer. This is a perfect starter pistol that also has some nice practical uses as well.

If I still lived in the United States, I would make the arrangements to teach my children how to shoot.  As it stands, here in China they have to wait until they are in their early teens before they obtain weapon training (everyone in China MUST complete basic military training as part of middle school). The good news is that they will get a very comprehensive training in both small arms, and fully automatic weapons.

Wild hogs are taught to defend themselves and fight.  When someone wants to prevent you from learning how to defend yourself, they have a REASON to do so.
Nice pistol
Find a gun that fits the palm of the hand well. This is especially true for the females in your family. Let them practice with it. Practice over an over until they are lethal with it.

Proactively teaching your kids how to safely use firearms is the best way to teach a healthy respect for them. Don’t allow them to learn by Hollywood movies.  These are very unhealthy mediums for learning about firearms. (As anyone can attest to the “sideways” pistol shooting style popularized by the negro urban youth, and the “thug” culture. It is not a way to accurately shoot a pistol.)

When they’re 7 or so, introduce them to a pellet gun and begin teaching proper gun safety rules like keeping their finger off the trigger until they’re ready to shoot and treating every weapon as if it were loaded. Set up a a target (tin cans are fun) in your backyard and let them plink away while you watch.

History of shooting
Up until recently all American boys could shoot and knew firearm safety. That all started to end after 9-11, and just about disappeared publicly during the Obama Administration around 2008.

As they get a little older, they can tote around their BB gun by themselves. Don’t worry about them shooting their eye out! Teach your children to be careful, and to follow basic safety precautions at all times. What was good for my generation, my parents’ generation, my grandparent’s generation, and all the generations before them is good for our children today. Do not buy into the political narrative that only the government should own guns. You would think that we would learn from history by now.

In fact, there is an outright war going on that is trying to stupid-down (not dumb-down) American children. This is a planned and staged effort. Here’s an article about just such an effort in Boulder, Colorado.  Suddenly, seemingly out of the blue, all kinds of restrictions were being placed on the children there…

“At times, it seems like our culture is conjuring dangers out of thin air, just to have something new to worry about. Thus, the Boulder Public Library in Colorado recently forbade anyone under 12 to enter without an adult, because “children may encounter hazards such as stairs, elevators, doors, furniture, electrical equipment, or other library patrons.” Ah, yes, kids and library furniture. Always a lethal combo.

Happily, the library backed off that rule, perhaps thanks to merciless mocking in the media. But saner minds don’t always prevail. At Mesa Elementary School, which also happens to be in Boulder, students got a list of the items they could not bring to the science fair. These included “chemicals,” “plants in soil,” and “organisms (living or dead).” And we wonder why American children score so low on international tests.”

Well… so much for Chemisty, Biology, and Taxidermy.

“But perhaps the single best example of how fantastically fearful we’ve become occurred when the city of Richland, Washington, got rid of all the swings on its school playgrounds. The love of swinging is probably older than humanity itself, given our arboreal origins. 

But as a school district spokesman explained, “Swings have been determined to be the most unsafe of all the playground equipment on a playground.”

The reader should understand that a government that will restrict a child from the dangers of a swing would absolutely go bonkers over firearm training.  Those who have obtained these positions in power want to rule in absolute proclamations. They will to do so and lord their haughty positions over you and your progeny.

“You may think your town has avoided such overkill, but is there a merry-go-round at your local park, or a see-saw? Most likely they, too, have gone the way of lawn darts. The Consumer Product Safety Commission even warns parks of “tripping hazards, like…tree stumps and rocks,” a fact unearthed (so to speak) by Philip Howard, author of 2010’s Life Without Lawyers.

The problem is that kids learn by doing. Trip over a tree stump and you learn to look down. There’s an old saying: Prepare your child for the path, not the path for your child. We’re doing the opposite.”

-The Fragile Generation

My children all know how to handle firearms. In fact, it was one of the first things we did when we went to Thailand one year. I made it a special point to give them the firearm training by an expert there, and expose them to different types of firearms. Thailand is like the United States and Switzerland, citizens can own and fire firearms there.

Gun selection in Thailand
You can buy and shoot guns in much of South East Asia. Here we have a man looking in a store front at the various firearms on display for sale or rent. (For rent!)

Contrary to the huge onslaught of anti-gun rhetoric from the oligarchy, the Democrats, and their news media, there are those of us that treasure our ability to shoot back if someone tries to hurt us. For my children this is especially true. None of them have shot anyone’s eyes out. Nor have they used it to rob a gas station, or threaten a bully.

Walter PK 380
Walter pistols allow for different sized hand grips to allow for small hands. Here is a .38 caliber version. I used to have a 9mm version that I was very partial of when I lived in the States.

When they reach about age 10 or 11, you can introduce them to a .22 caliber rifle or pistol. Again, this should be done under your supervision and you should reinforce good gun safety principles the entire time.

Guns and firearms are dangerous devices.  Everyone should know how to operate one, but absolute training and safety is of first importance.  For hundreds of years, American children learned how to handle firearms.  I myself were taught in my High School gym class as early as ten years old. Of course, today, in this progressive ideal that is what the United States has become, the mere mention of this is considered heresy.

It need not be.  It is not heresy.  It is history.

In fact, one of my greatest laments is how history is not being taught at all in the United States today.  Instead, it is some kind of organized propaganda organ designed to incite diversion and discord. Most people today have no idea that those what fought Great Britain during the Revolutionary War were very young. They birthed a nation when they were in their teenage years.

Dad's girl
Ah yes. Daddy’s little girl. Pew Pew Pew.

The Journal of the American Revolution offered this imaginative and fascinating list of the ages of these and other notable figures from the revolutionary era at the moment of America’s founding.

And as one examines the list of nearly 150 of the war’s most revered and reviled, it becomes clear just how young so many of these legendary individuals actually were at the time.

The author of the piece and founding editor of the journal, Todd Andrlik goes so far as to characterize the Founding Fathers much more accurately as the “founding teenagers… or twenty somethings.” And he’s quite right to do so, according to the list.

Consider these:

  • Nathan Hale, the legendary Continental spy who lamented on the gallows that he had but one life to give for his country was just 21 in 1776.
  • Surprisingly, so was the much hated and feared British cavalry commander “Bloody” Banastre Tarleton.
  • Similarly, the supposed sewer of the first Star Spangled Banner, Betsy Ross, was just 24.
  • While the leader of the France’s forces in America, Marquis de Lafayette, was a mere 18-year-old in 1776.

Among the ranks of the war’s thirty-somethings include Thomas Jefferson (33), patriot pamphleteer Thomas Paine (39), Britain’s General Cornwallis (38) and King George III (also 38). To check out the full article (and you really should), click HERE. A fine book about just one boy can be found HERE.

This being said, there are some firearms that should wait until your child becomes an adult (or at least 18 years old). For instance, consider this little beauty…

Big gun.
Children can play, but firearms are not toys. Once the child has learned the skills to handle themselves, then they can be taught responsibility.

I would think twice before I would have my child shoot off a round from this “bad boy”. No.  This type of firearm is best left until they are old enough and mature enough to handle it.  I would dare say, that they must at least be old enough to serve in the military. Wouldn’t you think?

Which reminds me, speaking of the military, here’s a bunch of 16 to 18 year olds playing around with a quad version of the above gun…

Quad 20mm AA
Here is a quad-mounted 20mm anti-aircraft gun. Here, the Nazi German soldiers use this device against aircraft. It was also devastating against infantry as well.

Burn Things With a Magnifying Glass

There are many fun and interesting ways to start a fire without matches, but using a magnifying glass is one of the most versatile. I was first introduced to it when I was maybe six years old, and I inflicted a world of hurt on some poor unsuspecting ants near a parking lot where I lived.

Use of a magnifying glass provides you with a focused beam of heat that cannot only burn paper and leaves, but melt plastic. A kid can even use it to burn a symbol or his name into a piece of wood.

It need not be expensive, all office stationary stores carry them.

Burning an anthill
One thing that I did when I was a young boy, was sit at the side of a parking lot and burn ants with a magnifying glass. I tortured those poor things. I would watch them scurry about and try to deal with the attack that had befallen them. I was so uncaring.

They are especially useful for old farts like me to be better able to read the find print in legal documents, and get the (impossible) code on the back of Apple products.

Roughhouse

“Cross-cultural studies have found that the one thing fathers across the world have in common is that they roughhouse with their kids more than moms. And roughhousing, according to science, makes kids awesome.”

-The Importance of Fathers

Roughhousing may just look like a primitive-level melee of potentially injury-causing wrestling and hair pulling, but it actually has a bunch of high-level benefits. Whether children are mixing it up with Dad, or with each other, research has shown that good old fashioned horseplay develops kids’ resilience, intelligence, and even empathy — it teaches them how to negotiate the dynamics of aggression, cooperation, and fair play. So suplex your children more often, and don’t break up the good natured battle royales they put on between themselves.

Climb a Tree

China has the most amazing trees, especially here in the South (China).  Yet no one climbs them.  You would think that the “forever trees” would make great climbing, but no ones does so.  Why is this? Few activities feel more liberating than climbing a tree. It’s thrilling to leave the ground and test your physical deftness, as well as your daring as you decide just how high up you’ll go. Indeed, the air seems fresher among the branches.

Ban Yan Tree
The Ban Yan tree is a most enormous and kid-friendly tree that is found all over Southern China. It is magnificent. Yet, I never see any Chinese kids climb it. I guess that they are too busy studying. It is called “The Forever Tree” because it has tendrils that cascade downward and borrow into the ground to make new trees. They can become enormous and massive.
“There is rising American interest in European-style “forest kindergartens,” where kids receive little formal instruction and have more freedom to explore in nature. And in Washington, D.C., not far from where I live, we finally have our first exciting playground since the “forgotten playground” was leveled. Located at a private school called Beauvoir, it has a zip line and climbing structures that kids of all ages perceive as treacherous. I recently met someone who worked on the playground and asked him why the school board wasn’t put off by safety concerns, especially since it keeps the park open to the public on weekends. He said the board was concerned about safety but also wanted an exciting playground; the safety guidelines are, after all these years, still just guidelines.”

-The Overprotected Kid

When I was a boy I would climb anything.  In our back yard we had apple trees (that we would climb just to get the apples), “weeping” willow trees, large and big acorn trees, the magnificent chestnut trees, pine trees (and I did climb them, and ended up terribly sappy) and my all time super favorite tree the Northern Catalpa (Catalpa speciose). (Also known as the Indian Bean Tree.  My father told me that local Indians used to take the pea pods on this tree and smoke them.)

The Northern Catalpa is a tree that demands your attention. White, showy flowers. Giant heart-shaped leaves. Dangling bean-like seed pods. Twisting trunk and branches. How could you not stop to take it in? And with all of these unique features, the northern catalpa is popular with kids as well.
The Indian bean tree
Here is the awesome Indian Bean Tree. There are versions that have great and dense leaf cover. They are always beautiful and wonder places to play in and enjoy the weather and companionship with.

The banyan tree has to be the most kid-friendly tree in the world.  Here, the tree lets town hundreds of tentacles that once they take root, form new trees.  An old ban yan tree might consist of hundreds of tree trunks and a network canopy that would put the Swiss Family Robenson tree-house to shame. Climbing a tree is the most classic of classic childhood activities. Don’t deprive your children of the adventures of tree climbing.

“Yep - our playgrounds were on beaten dirt from use. We built tree forts with axes and saws and hammers and nails and climbed high trees and roofs where access was available) and had apple/slingshot/BB-gun “wars” and learned the concepts of safety by being allowed to find out that was safe and what caused pain.....and became pretty well adjusted adults who didn’t cower in fear and become emotionally scarred for life at a chalked name on some concrete on a college campus....”

-trebb 02/03/2018 5:51:01 AM PST · 17 of 21

And…

It’s not all about climbing.  It is also about building.  What about the joys and pleasures of building your own tree house? Does anyone still do that in the United States anymore?  I wonder. In most towns and cities, there is probably some ordinance or rule preventing the construction for some kind of liability consideration.  Moreover, or course if you are in a Democrat stronghold, you will probably have to pay some sort of taxes on the construction.  Ah… all the “improvements” that well-intentioned ignorant inflict on the community…

"Many websites and parental organizations suggest the parents build a tree house, and not the children.  Nonsense! Kids have been building tree houses in the USA for centuries, but all that seemed to come to a complete and sudden stop about two decades ago. 

Let your children learn.  Let them build and let them explore.  Good golly! Here is a typical website advising how to climb a tree (the child wears a helmet), and how the parents can build a tree house for the children.”  (Sigh.) 

-Kidspot
Ban Yan Tree
Here is another Ban Yan tree. It’s it awesome? I love how large it gets. In this instance, it should be much larger than it is, but obviously the caretakers are spending the time to trim it and keep it manageable.

Now, at the time of this writing, we do not live on a plot of land where we have many trees.  In fact we live in a nice large building with a shared lawn and a park surrounding us.  However, were we ever to move back to the USA or some similar location, I would help my children build a tree house.  It is a key memory of my boyhood.

tree house
You have to admit that tree-houses are great. However, I would suggest that it is far better to have a crappy rough cut and nailed tree platform made by your children alone is far better than one done by good-old-dad. You should give direction and help. You should not do it. Let them plan it. Let them make it. Let them build it. let them assemble it. It is theirs. Let them learn and have pride in it.
“Not letting your kid climb a tree because he might fall robs him of a classic childhood experience. But being emotionally overprotective takes away something else. “We have raised a generation of young people who have not been given the opportunity to…experience failure and realize they can survive it,” Gray has said. When Lenore’s son came in eighth out of nine teams in a summer camp bowling league, he got an eighth-place trophy. The moral was clear: We don’t think you can cope with the negative emotions of finishing second-to-last.

Of course, it’s natural to want to see kids happy. But the real secret to happiness isn’t more high fives; it’s developing emotional resilience.

In our mania for physical safety, coupled with our recent tendency to talk about “emotional safety,” we have systematically deprived our children of the thousands of challenging—and sometimes upsetting—experiences that they need in order to learn that resiliency. And in our quest to protect them, we have stolen from children the best resilience training known to man: free play.”

-The Fragile Generation

Cook a Meal

I first made a ketchup sandwich when I was four or five years old (Mary taught me.). Toast came later at maybe seven, and by nine years old I made my first hamburger.

All kids need to be introduced to the joys of making their own food. Cooking might not seem that dangerous, but once your kids start wanting to help make dinner, you begin noticing how many tasks involve sharp and potentially dangerous hazards. Yet, this is the perfect venue to expose your children to those hazards… right next to you at your side.

Do not fall prey to the temptation of coddling your children. It’s worth not only letting your children assist you in the kitchen, but allowing them to try cooking on their own too. More so than any other activity on this list, it will teach them a valuable skill towards grown-up self-sufficiency.

Cooking a hotdog
Why not cook a hotdog? One of my first experiences in cooking was being taught how to sharpen a stick (with my boy scout knife) and sticking a hotdog on it. Then watching how to cook it inside a nice campfire outside. What is so wrong about that? Then, later I could add all the goodies that I wanted to it. This mostly consisted of relish, ketchup, onion and cut up tomatoes.

One of the best things that my mother did was give all of us siblings an illustrated cookbook. I must have spent six months on a quest to make the perfect handmade pizza. While my sisters were busy making pies, cakes and cookies, my brother and I were deep into lasagna, homemade cream-of-asparagus soup, and different types of breads. Indeed, I was from this simple gift that I obtained my love (and appreciation) of real salted butter, extra-sharp cheddar cheese, and extra virgin olive oil.

Mothers listen up! Boys love to eat, and if you let them, they would LOVE to spend time in the kitchen with you. Who knows maybe you have a budding young chef?

Bacon and eggs
You can get children started on easy to make, but fundamental meals like breakfast eggs. You can do this on a campfire, or at home. You can teach them how to break open the eggs, and how to put oil in the pan. You can teach them about salt and pepper, and don’t forget the bacon, or the delicious pork and beans that goes with it. Oops… I mean the cut up potatoes or hash browns.

Some suggested starter activities;

  • All kids love hot (out of the stove) cookies.
  • A basic hamburger.
  • Mac & Cheese. Kids love this! (Teach them how to cook hamburger and mix it in for a basic kid goulash.)
  • Spaghetti
  • Hot dogs, especially over a camp fire.
  • Dumplings – A Chinese family favorite.
  • Grilled cheese sandwich.
  • A basic salad.

Use a Bow and Arrow

Japanese archery
My children have an interest in archery. Unfortunately, compound bows are a rare thing in China. The best chance that they can learn to shoot a bow and arrow are either by using “conventional” basic bows, “traditional” log bows, or by studying Japanese-style archery. The Japanese style is a beautiful art form that requires elements of concentration and attention to detail. Here we have the four stages of a draw illustrated. Note the difference between an American draw.

You know, kids all over the world are interested in bows and arrows. You know; archery. Instead of getting them a “safe” nerf version, give them the real thing. Expose them to real archery. If you have the means, teach them and if you cannot, hire an expert to show them the ropes.

If I were still in the states, my kids would be using compound bows and tromping in the woods every season. Ah, but that is not my reality at this time. I have to improvise.

Here in China, there are many opportunities to learn how to use a bow and arrow. Though they are actually mostly either the conventional design or a “traditional” Chinese long-bow design. However, there Japanese archery, also known as Kyūdō is available. Kyūdō is the Japanese martial art of archery. Experts in kyūdō are referred to as kyūdōka (弓道家).

There is a stress on form and function. As in Golf, the way to use your tools greatly affects your ability to hit your target. By attending these archery classes, the student can perfect and concentrate in the discipline of archery. That is a wondrous thing.

Hunting in a tree stand.
Hunting in a fine tree stand. Americans often do not appreciate what they have. They take it for granted. They shouldn’t some of the things that I really, really miss about the States are the things that I took for granted. The things that I would think would last forever. The things that I would never live without. Hunting in a tree stand is one of those things.

Later on, when we go to the states we will pick out a nice compound bow, maybe a “Bear Archery Cruzer”, or a “Diamond Archery’s Infinite Edge”. Something that will not break the bank, but will be able to provide an adjustable draw for first-timers. Trust me, a 70 pound draw is too much for children who are not used to it.

Then it’s up into the tree stand. God, I get goose-bumps just thinking about it.

Japanese archery showing a draw.
Japanese style archery is different than American style archery. However, it is a great opportunity to learn precision and discipline. Here in China, I like to think that it is the best way to learn how to use a bow and arrow.

Hammer a Nail

Why? It seems to plain and so mundane.

Yet, hammering a nail is a basic life skill that every person should master. The problem is that many parents do not let their kids attempt this task. They are too fearful of them smashing their fingers. Yes, little children are uncoordinated, but the only way they’ll ever become coordinated is if they gain hands-on experience in using tools.

The wuss-generation of super protection of children has created a nation of morons.

Hammer and nails.
Don’t be afraid, once the child smashes his finger the first time, he / she will be very careful not to do it again. That is how we learn. That is how we obtain coordination. Be there to get them started, and then go away and let them go at it. Be in ear shot, however. For eventually they hill feel some kind of pain. Though it might not be a smashed finger. It might be s splinter or two. Yikes!

Indeed, many cannot use tape measures or even hammer a nail.  Home Depot is in full-on panic mode after realizing that an entire generation of Americans have absolutely no clue how to use their products.  As the Wall Street Journal points out, the company has been forced to spend millions to create video tutorials and host in-store classes on how to do everything from using a tape measure to mopping a floor and hammering a nail. Seriously, that is pure evidence of a society in decline. Don’t allow your children join these ranks. Get them started with tools.

Don’t buy one of those plastic toy construction sets.  Just obtain a tiny (child sized) hammer. Start letting your 3-year-old practice hammering nails with a ball peen hammer. They’re lighter than the traditional claw variety and thus easier to handle. As your child’s dexterity and strength improve, upgrade him to a full-sized claw hammer, lay out a 2×4 and a box of nails, and let him go to town. Talk about cheap entertainment.

Build a Sand Castle

When I was a young boy, we used to have regular trips out to the beach.  At that time, we were living in Bridgeport, CT and a trip to the beach was only a mere ten minute drive in the family sedan. There, we could play, swim and collect seashells. I remember once, when walking along the beach, I saw a father and his daughter build this most remarkable sand castle.  It was not only “perfect”, but had little miniature statues all over the it.  The father took wet sand and dripped them down forming these little artistic shapes.  It was magnificent.

They left, and I stood by and admired the handiwork.  Then, I ran back to my sister and her “best friend” who were playing nearby.  I told them about the great sand castle, and they came with me to look at it.  There, all three of us seven to eight year olds, stood around the castle.  It was so amazing and beautiful.  Then, as if on cue, both my sister and her friend kicked in and stomped the castle into oblivion.

Meanwhile, I just stood there in shock. How and why would they do such a thing?  It was something that I had to grapple with through most of my youth.  I just could not understand the behaviors of my fellow classmates.  Sigh.

Sand castle
Here’s a nice art deco style sand castle. With sand as the cheap and free medium, use time to build and make whatever your heart desires. Most people start with a large moat and go from there. Other’s plan it out. Still others mix cheap toys and fun together to create a complex play environment. What ever strikes your fancy, do it.

Take your children to the beach. Let them have fun, explore and exercise.  Let them create, play and build.  Remember, “play” is the “work” of children.  It is how they learn.  If you want your child to learn, then do it in the framework of play.

Play With Fireworks

“Calls to eight newspapers in North Carolina found none that would take anyone under the age of 18 to deliver papers. 

A police chief in New Albany, Ohio, went on record saying kids shouldn’t be outside on their own till age 16, “the threshold where you see children getting a little bit more freedom.” 

A study in Britain found that while just under half of all 16- to 17-year-olds had jobs as recently as 1992, today that number is 20 percent.

The responsibility expected of kids not so long ago has become almost inconceivable. 

Published in 1979, the book Your 6-Year-old: Loving and Defiant includes a simple checklist for what a child entering first grade should be able to do: Can he draw and color and stay within the lines of the design being colored? Can he ride a small two-wheeled bicycle without helper wheels? Can he travel alone in the neighborhood (four to eight blocks) to a store, school, playground, or friend’s home?

Hang on. Walk to the store at 6—alone?

It’s tempting to blame “helicopter parents” for today’s less resilient kids. But when all the first-graders are walking themselves to school, it’s easy to add yours to the mix. When your child is the only one, it’s harder. And that’s where we are today. Norms have dramatically changed. 

The kind of freedom that seemed unremarkable a generation ago has become taboo, and in some cases even illegal.”

-The Fragile Generation

Everyone plays with fireworks in China.  It’s part of the culture, and Chinese New Year is a 24-7 non-stop explosion of fire and smoke.  Yet, from what I hear, it’s use is limited in the United States.  What? Is the United States run by a cadre of pussies or what?

Playing with fireworks teaches your kids how to responsibly handle fire and to have a healthy respect for exploding objects. Unfortunately, thanks to stringent fireworks laws and parents freaked out from viral stories of children losing eyeballs while lighting Roman candles, many kids today have never experienced the pure excitement and joy of igniting a fuse and waiting for the impending explosion.

Introduce your 3-5 year olds to the world of fireworks with “pop-pops” — those little paper-wrapped tadpole-like things you throw on the ground. They’re safe and the kids can have fun with them without injuring themselves or anybody else. You can also get them acquainted with sparklers. These preparatory “fireworks” offer a chance for children to learn general principles of safety: not to throw lit objects at others, touch people with a hot sparkler, handle a dud, etc.

When your kids hit age 6, you can start letting them light innocuous fireworks like snakes and smoke bombs. These don’t explode and will teach your kids how to light a fuse safely and to be aware of others as they use firecrackers.

By age 9 or 10, your kid should be ready to fire off pretty much anything you can find at a fireworks stand. You should continue to supervise their pyrotechnics until they’re teens, though.

The only caution that I would advise is not to make the fireworks yourself. It is DANGEROUS. I once worked with someone who's son was missing a hand precisely because the home-made firecracker in his hand went off. Be careful.

Conclusions

It is important that parents ACT like parent and not prison guards, or hyper-protective insecure single mothers. After all, it was that behavior that created Adolph Hitler…

Today, I have real concerns that the nation of millennials in the Untied States are exactly that. Improperly educated, with a serious retardation in basic and fundamental life skills. What ever, and when ever possible I am doing my best to prevent that from happening.

The job of a parent is to expose the child to dangerous situations in graduated steps. In such a way they learn the effects of consequences, and other important life lessons. Here are just some of my thoughts on this matter. If your child wants to gather a committee to figure out what to do, then they will never make it in the real world. They are already programmed to be a serf, a worker for others who own and run the factories and companies that your child will be programmed to live within.

Group meeting.
When there is an important announcement at your company, does it look something a little like this? Well, if it does, then like it or not, you are in a corporate bubble. If you are not careful, you will have difficulty leaving it. Be careful.

Let’s hope that it’s not too late.

Take Aways

  • Parent has an important role in teaching their children.
  • This role cannot be off-loaded to surrogates, whether a school, a television show, or a coach.
  • The role requires participation with the child.
  • The role requires a staged implementation of experiences in a controlled environment that permits learning of dangers and problem solving and avoidance.
  • These are just some of my ideas implemented in my own family.

FAQ

Q: Isn’t your ideas going to put the children into danger?
A: I do not advocate putting anyone in danger. What I suggest is that the job of a parent is to introduce the child to potentially dangerous situations in a graduated way. When I was in training to be a Naval Aviator, they taught us how to perform a dead man’s float, swim in different techniques, and how to handle ourselves. Once we mastered those basics, we were then introduced to more complex events like how to untangle ourselves from a parachute that is dragging you through the water, and how to egress from a sunken helicopter at night. You must learn in stages.

Q: Why not let the school take on this responsibility?
A: After seeing what the public schools are teaching today, I am loathe to subject my child to anything resembling an American public school. It is your responsibility as a parent to teach your children. Your child’s success in life will be heavily influenced by how to prepare them for it.

Q: Isn’t your children going to public schools?
A: Well, yes, they are. However, I am here in China. They go to Chinese public schools and learn English and American history and civics at home. We have a very aggressive teaching schedule for them, and my Chinese wife is relentless in making sure that they are learning to the best of their ability. It is what is appropriate for us today. Needless to say, if we were in the United States, we would do something quite different.

Q: Do you have other ideas on how to raise children?
A: Oh my yes. However, Google SEO requirements, as well as my own limitations has necessitated the creation of this post as shown.

Q: Why do you talk so much about China? Why are you so down on America?
A: I am in China out of necessity. That being said, I happen to love the United States. In fact, I love what it was and what it was intended to be.

Today, I am pretty discouraged with how the government is, and how the educational system is. I am pretty jaded.

Today there is a battle between those who want America to RETURN to what it was intended to be, and those who want to continue the remake; to turn it into a globalist ruled oligarchy, with Americans acting as dumbed down serf-cattle. Until it is sorted out, I will stay right where I am, thank you.

American.
I am a traditional American. I like big cars, big boobed women, big plates of bacon, big wide skies, and big pitches of ice cold beer. I also like big caliber handguns, big racks on deer, and big trucks. I enjoy a big bonfire with my friends, and we like to watch the big game together.

This is Part 1 of a Two Part Post

This is part one of a two part post. You can go to the other post HERE. This post is rather long. I have exceeded the “industry norm” (Google SEO advisement) by a significant word count. As is my prerogative. You can visit the beginning of this post HERE.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
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Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

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Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 23AUG18.
  2. SEO review 23AUG18.
  3. Published 24AUG18.

Allow your Children to Play and Grow (Part 1)

This little post was inspired by a little article titled “Doctor’s Orders; Let children just play” posted in the hot dog-days of summer, August 2018.

The article reinforces a notion that I have that “play is the work of children”. It is how they learn to become an adult. It doesn’t matter if you are a dog, a cat, an elephant, or a monkey, all animals learn from playing.

However, it is more than that, play is individualized free-roaming periods of children playing without supervision. They need to learn to be autonomous. They need to be able to use trial and error. They need to explore the idea of actions have consequences. When a child does not have this environment, they are often retarded in some fundamental areas.

The boy is a natural spectator; he watches parades, fires, fights, football games, automobiles and planes with equal fervor. However, he will not watch a clock.

A boy is a piece of skin stretched over an appetite. However, he eats only when he’s awake.

Boys imitate their Dads in spite of all the efforts to teach them good manners.

Boy’s are very durable.

A boy, if not washed too often and if not kept in a cool quiet place after each accident , will survive broken bones, hornet’s nests, swimming holes and five helpings of pie. Boys love to trade things. They’ll trade fishhooks, marbles, broken knives and snakes for anything that is priceless or worthless.

-Herbert Hoover

Introduction

In the United States today, I see a matriarchal tide that has emasculated men, and have pampered children to a point where they grow up spoiled without discipline. It does not matter if the child is a boy, or a girl, or considers themselves something in between. That is something that is not desirable for the children, families, and society as whole. Children are young and they need to learn basic rules to fit into society. After all, a puppy that is not litter trained, will deposit feces all over the house. A horse that is not “broken” will never let you ride it.

Parental Duty

A parent has a duty to teach their children and not outsource that responsibility to others. Whether it is a babysitter, a community government, or a church, a parent must provide adaptive skills and rules of behavior to their children. Otherwise, the child will become a “misfit”. They will not be able to fit into society.

Yet, a worrisome as this can be, too much supervision is just as dangerous. Too much protection is equally bad. When parents are overly protective of their children, they essentially outsource all of their offspring’s risk management to themselves. Part of growing is learning to judge risk behaviors.

Is that river to wide to swim across? Is the ice too thin to walk on? Is that tree too high to climb? Can I jump off the third story into a kiddy pool of water below?

Children need to be able to make these decisions on their own without reliance on others. Otherwise, the operating assumption is that mom and dad will always be around to keep them from harm. They will grow up expecting others to make those fundamental decisions for them.  They will believe that society and the government, can best decide and tell them how to live.

Children need to be Self Reliant

Rather than making kids dependent on you to keep them safe, prepare them to face and manage risks themselves. This doesn’t mean totally shoving them into things without a safety net. Like how my old school mates learned how to swim – their father simply threw them into the pool. No. I don’t believe in that. Rather, they need a set a staged instructions.

In fact, this system was promoted by Gever Tulley.

Gever Tulley is an American writer, speaker, educator, entrepreneur, and computer scientist. He is the founder of the Brightworks School, Tinkering School, the non-profit Institute for Applied Tinkering, and educational kit maker Tinkering Labs. 

His more recent work centers around the concept of students learning through building projects. He has delivered multiple TED talks on his work, published the book 50 Dangerous Things (You Should Let Your Children Do), and has contributed articles for many online media outlets.

Gever refers to this system as a “scaffolding” of “planning, practicing by steps, and taking reasonable precautions.” Obviously, the robustness of this scaffolding should be adjusted to your children’s age and level of maturity. You certainly do not want a toddler who can barely stand up trying to cross a city street. As they grow, you (as the parent) can then progressively withdraw the support “scaffolding”.  In this way, they can gain confidence and competence and become able to fend for themselves.

The great Mr. Rogers stated that “play was the work of children”. He was so correct about that. That is how youth learns. It is through play. Little girls learn how to raise babies through play. They play with dolls, they feed the dolls, they play “house”, and they hold “tea parties”. Little boys learn how to work together in group sports. They learn how to build cabins, tree houses, and “forts”. They tear things apart and put things together. Some girls like to do “boy activities”. Some boys like to do “girl activities”. That’s all both ok too.

The point is that play is how children learn.

The term “free play” is permitting children to learn under minimum supervision. Not only is there no supervision, but that the child knows that they are “on their own”. They know and realize that they can do what they feel like doing, but that if something goes wrong, they will be on their own. It is an adventure in risk…

“Free play has little in common with the “play” we give children today. In organized activities, adults run the show. It’s only when the grown-ups aren’t around that the kids get to take over. Play is training for adulthood.”

-The Fragile Generation

You have to teach the children to be independent.

That is not going to happen with you sitting off to the side or within earshot. You need to teach them how to judge risks, and then the decision process on how to take them. I personally believe that the best way to do this is to take these little steps with them together, first.  Then, over time, gradually let them take the risks without you being nearby.

Staged Risks

The keys to engaging in this process in a way that will not only benefit your children, but allay your own anxiety. After all, if you don’t teach your children well, you will get sick over the huge anxiety that you will need to endure. The solution is to introduce risk in graduated phases.

It’s a basic and simple process. The first step in allowing your kids to engage in a “risky” activity is to identify what exactly the risks are. For instance if you fall off of the first step in a ladder, the fall isn’t so bad. If you fall off the fourth step it is worse. They will not want to fall off anything higher. They will not WANT to.  They have learned that risks have consequences.

That’s not going to happen, if you don’t allow your child to get on the ladder. It’s not going to happen when you are there to catch them. They need to experience the consequences. It needs to be visceral.

Once you’ve identified the risks of an activity, you can figure out how to mitigate them. It should be natural for most children.  You fall down from skating on the ice; you will feel bruised and maybe have some torn skin. Let it happen!

My children do not wear arm and knee pads when they go ice skating (though, neither do the other Chinese children either). Let them fall down. Let them learn what happens and the consequences of it.

Falling down is an important part of growing up. Do not coddle and deprive. They must experience the benefits and risks together.

History

Know your history.

Up through the early 20th century, children, even very young ones, worked. They got up early in the morning and did their chores.  They washed up and trudged off to work. Often they worked 12 hours a day in the mines and the factories. They hawked newspapers on grimy street corners, or like my father, shined shoes in front of businesses downtown.

The reader should not misunderstand. There’s nothing really romantic about such child labor. They were not learning. They were not engaged in play. They were doing what they needed to do to survive. They did what they had to do. It was dangerous.

It was dangerous, and yet they survived.

Imagine that!

Consider the youth of the past. When he was seventeen, Jack London (remember him? He wrote the book “The Call of the Wild”.) Signed on to sail with a gaff-rigged schooner bound for seal hunting in the icy Bering Sea. I dare say that if a child did that today, the parents would be locked up in jail. Imagine that! Not even old enough to shave. He walks down to a port, talks to the ship’s mate and gets a job bound for icy North! What balls! Yet those types of things are what build character and makes a parent proud.

Gaff Rigged schooner
Jack London, with his belongings in a satchel walked to the bay and got a job on a gaff-rigged schooner bound for points unknown. He shook hands with the master and signed on. He just did it. What moxie! That is what self-reliance is all about.

This was not someone who grew up around boats. This was not someone who’s father was a fisherman, and who’s classmates all knew how to sail. No. Not in the least. This young man knew absolutely nothing. He knew positively zero. Yet, he knew what he wanted to do. So one day, he packed his bags and left and did it.

It sure beats getting a trophy for coming in 10th place in a sack race.

When he was thirteen, Andrew Jackson (Remember him? He was a President, don’t you know?) served as a courier for American militias fighting in the Revolutionary War. He was thirteen years old. Yet here he was going back and forth between battles and regional headquarters. He carried messages, and if he was ever caught, he would have been tortured and killed. Yet, he did so. At the tender age of thirteen.

Aim small, Miss small.
Here’s a scene from the movie “The patriot” that stunned many of the liberals in the audiences that watched it. They were surprised that small boys would be able to shoot and handle firearms. People, this is a natural rite of passage for young men. It is only recently that r-survivalist strategy has been adopted by the United States government. Boys are not girls. Treat them as the genetically programed humans that they are. Aim small, miss small.

Do you allow your thirteen year old to ride a bicycle unsupervised?

When he was twelve, Louis Zamperini left home to spend the summer living on an Indian reservation and running around in the mountains.  He lived in a wood cabin with a friend the same age and killed his own dinner each night with a rifle.

Louis Silvie "Louie" Zamperini (January 26, 1917 – July 2, 2014) was a US prisoner of war survivor in World War II, a Christian evangelist and an Olympic distance runner. 

Zamperini took up running in high school and qualified for the US in the 5000m race for the 1936 Berlin Olympics. He finished 8th in the event. 

In 1941 he was commissioned into the United States Army Air Forces as a Lieutenant. He served as a bombardier in B-24 Liberators in the Pacific. On a search and rescue mission, mechanical difficulties forced Zamperini's plane to crash in the ocean. 

Survive a plane crash
Louis Zamperini crashed in the South Pacific. he survived, but was captured by brutal Japanese forces. He survived the crash, and then he survived his imprisonment. He would have never been able to do so, were he coddled as a child and told not to take risks.

After drifting at sea for 46–47 days (island spotted on the 46th, and arrived on 47th) he landed on the Japanese occupied Marshall Islands and was captured. He was taken to a prison camp in Japan where he was tortured. 

Following the war he initially struggled to overcome his ordeal. Later he became a Christian Evangelist with a strong belief in forgiveness. Zamperini is the subject of two biographical films, the 2014 Unbroken and the 2015 Captured by Grace.

Can your twelve year old child do the same? Do you dare let them live alone in a cabin in the woods? Do you dare let them have and use a gun? Do they know how to survive in the wilds?

If these kids can sail the oceans, serve on the war-front, and live by themselves, then our kids can ride their bikes to school. Maybe, you the reader, disagree with me. Maybe you think that it is just fine to raise your children as “pussies”. After all, I have heard the arguments; it is the new progressive reality. The society has changed, and I am but an old dinosaur. Never the less…

Unfortunately, the landscapes of play and exercise for children have been both literally and metaphorically flattened, if they exist at all in the United States. As many as 40% of schools have either eliminated one or all of their recess periods, not simply to gain more classroom and testing time, but also because of liability concerns. For the same reason, climbing ropes and dodge ball games have been removed from gym class. Can the reader believe this? It’s true! The risk of someone getting hurt is too high; the risk of physical ineptitude doesn’t rate, even though it’s correlated with the risk of obesity.

To prevent my children from turning into emasculated serfs being harvested by the American elite, let me present some things that I permit my children to do…

Take a Train

I really don’t know why I personally think this is a big deal.  Yet, it is.  Every single child that I know, get really excited when they are told that they are going to take the train. There is something far different and exciting about a train.  Yes, I am aware about the excitement in taking an airplane ride for the first time.  Yet, a train is something more than that.  A train ride is special.

Locomotive
Look at this beauty. Observe the lines, the enormity of the great complex mechanical monster. Look at how small the workers look around it. Look at the environment. Absorb what it must have been like, the smells, the muggy air, and the hustle and bustle of the people on the platform in the early morning air.

From the point of view of a child, a train gives you the full (end) experience of travel. They can see what it is like. You buy a ticket, you ride in a seat, and you arrive in your destination. It is easy to understand. It is easy to conceptualize.

That isn’t so clear to a child when they fly. To a child, they have to wait in huge lines, often hours long, to pass through TSA. They have to sit on board, which at least in America is becoming more akin to herding cattle than it is to taking a trip.

Keep an eye on perspective. My father took a train to attend my nieces wedding in New York City. It had been nearly thirty years since he taken a train. His opinion? It was marvelous. They had wide and spacious seats. Plenty of legroom. They could read, play cards, and just nap. He loved it. His wife, enjoyed knitting and listening to the radio. It’s a different way of traveling.

If you, my dear reader, do not understand what I am discussing here then you obviously haven’t rode in a train lately.

Make a Fire

In China you can do just about anything, but finding a place in the woods to build a campfire is not all that easy.  However, it can be done.  Why is this important?  Because building a making a fire is a fundamental requirement of all children since the age of written history.

Young girls learned how to keep the hearths burning.  Not only to keep the household warm, but also to make sure that the food was prepared.

Young boys learned how to survive outside, far away from their home, and that included providing warmth and nourishment through cooking game that they caught.

In America, these are no longer considered important.  As there just isn’t any such thing as gender. Alternatively, societal roles, or the need to live “off the grid” and away from society. The all-knowing American police state will take care of you, don’t you know…

I strongly disagree with the progressive direction of the Obama Presidential mandates. While every other child is being groomed for slavery (or at least serfdom), my children will have the necessary skills to survive away from the American Progressive madness.

For me, I let them play with matches and light candles when they’re really young. Indeed they are pre-school age. This can be done in your house. Buy a set of candles. It might set you back a whole $1. Then, let them practice lighting it. Do it until they are bored. Then try it again and again. Soon, they will tire of it, and not want to play with fire any more.

When you ask them, they will say “Awww, not again!”.

They’ll learn quite a bit. They will learn that fire indeed burns and it hurts. However, with a flame so small, it won’t hurt too much if it glances their skin. When they get to a little older, let them build a fire all by themselves (still with your supervision, of course). A campfire is the best, but if you are in an urban environment, teach them by making candle experiments.

Candle Experimentation

You take an old can; put corrugated cardboard inside so that the spaces (holes) in the can face up.  Pack the cardboard in. I like to wrap them in a circular shape. Line the inner side (of the tin) and then add pieces until there just isn’t any room left. Then melt wax (very cheap) on a stove and pour it in the holes in the cardboard.

Let your child make this candle device. Then allow them to experiment with wax, with cardboard, with fire, with other discarded tins. The cost will be minimal, but if you allow them to do it in the safety of your supervision, it will be beneficial to them.

DIY wax candle kit
You can buy a DIY candle kit to start off with. You can get cardboard everywhere. You have scissors, and matches. Then all you need an open and airy place that is safe and secure. Then let the kids go to town.

Teach them by showing them. Then allow them to make their own.  For a campfire, gather the wood. Cut the branches. Build up tinder. Get it started burning. Children can learn this. Teach them at an early age.

Campfires

Campfires are great, and I just cannot imagine a childhood without one.

Campfire
Fire is a fundamental part of every human child’s life. We should teach and allow the child to explore this most important of elements. We need to take the time out of our day to help them to explore and learn. Let them smell the burning, hear the crackling embers, and enjoy the smoke and embers as they float upwards into the heavens.

Teach your children about how to make a fire. You gather wood. You gather tinder. You clean out a fire pit, and you surround it with rocks. You select the rocks carefully, so no “river rocks” are used. Then you arrange the wood, and start it by tinder. They can participate and help.  In no time, they will be starting the fire on their own.

Let them add sticks and wood to the fire. Let them learn how to make the fire hot, and see the benefits of the hot embers.

It need not only be about making the fire.  It can include such activities as cooking cut-up potatoes in aluminum-foil in the embers. (Easy to make and delicious.  Cut up a potato (after washing it), and an onion. Add salt and pepper and a pad of butter.  Wrap the entire thing in aluminum foil and place it in the embers and let it cook a spell.  It is delicious.)

campfire embers
One of my fondest memories is roasting hotdogs over a evening fire. We did this often as a child. This included such events as cub-scouts, school outings, and trips with my parents. Childhood needs to include campfires as a fundamental element of growing up.

It can include roasting marshmallows on a stick, or hotdogs until they are black and crunchy (the best kind).  My first roasted marshmallow occurred when I was six. It was before first grade. It can be earlier than that, but make sure that you supervise the youngster, as they do need training. Otherwise, they can burn their mouth, or fall into the fire. Yikes!

Fires are a great venue for bonding. It can include talking and telling stories, especially family lore, or hopes and dreams of the children.  You can be a great parent or uncle in these events. Don’t let them pass away. Don’t let them fade into obscurity simply because there is a new app in your cellphone.

By the way. I strongly urge all campfires to be a cellphone free zone.

make coffee on a campfire
Let your children see how easy it is to make tea or coffee on the campfire. Show them how it is done. You can also open up a can of pork and beans and teach them how to cook it on a fire in the embers (opened up) of course. Let them feel some independence, and let them do all the work. This is their experience, don’t hog it all up.

Let them participate in stories, or just allow them to stare into the burning embers and daydream. Let your child know the differences between wet wood, and dry wood.  Let them understand the differences between a pine and a hard wood.  Let them see the difference in making tinder, and how coal can make a fire much hotter. Let them learn what happens to a hotdog on a stick when you cook it deep down inside the hot embers of a fire, and what happens when you don’t.  Let them learn through experience.

I personally find it absolutely laughable that many American parents are so fearful that they will not allow their children to play with fire.  Certainly, no one wants the children to burn up a house or set a field on fire.  Yet, the knowledge of what a fire is, and how it can be controlled is an important learning exercise for children.

“If a 10-year-old lit a fire at an American playground, someone would call the police and the kid would be taken for counseling. At “the Land”, spontaneous fires are a frequent occurrence. The park is staffed by professionally trained “playworkers,” who keep a close eye on the kids but don’t intervene all that much. Claire Griffiths, the manager of the Land, describes her job as “loitering with intent.”

-The Land. The Land is an “adventure playground,” though it sounds a little too much like a amusement park. 

In the U.K., such playgrounds arose and became popular in the 1940s, as a result of the efforts of Lady Marjory Allen of Hurtwood, a landscape architect and children’s advocate. 

Allen was disappointed by what she described in a documentary as “asphalt square” playgrounds with “a few pieces of mechanical equipment.” She wanted to design playgrounds with loose parts that kids could move around and manipulate, to create their own makeshift structures. 

But more important, she wanted to encourage a “free and permissive atmosphere” with as little adult supervision as possible. The idea was that kids should face what to them seem like “really dangerous risks” and then conquer them alone. That, she said, is what builds self-confidence and courage.

Although the play-workers almost never stop the kids from what they’re doing, before the playground had even opened they’d filled binders with “risk benefits assessments” for nearly every activity. (In the two years since it opened, no one has been injured outside of the occasional scraped knee.)

Here’s the list of benefits for fire:

“It can be a social experience to sit around with friends, make friends, to sing songs to dance around, to stare at, it can be a co-operative experience where everyone has jobs. It can be something to experiment with, to take risks, to test its properties, its heat, its power, to re-live our evolutionary past.”

The risks?

“Burns from fire or fire pit” and “children accidentally burning each other with flaming cardboard or wood.” In this case, the benefits win, because a playworker is always nearby, watching for impending accidents but otherwise letting the children figure out lessons about fire on their own.”

-The Overprotected Kid

There is something primeval about fire, the smell of burning wood, and the weight of a metal lighter in your hand. (Disposable lighters are like paper cups of coffee; discardable and plain. To get the “full” experience, do it right.)

Teach them how to make a fire from tinder, and scraps.

Lighter
I personally believe that every father should buy their son a nice traditional lighter. make it memorable and let the son choose the style that best fit’s their personality. This is an important part of growing up.

Show them how to make a fire pit, chop wood, and select the best wood.  Let them know the difference between green-wood, soft-wood, and hard wood. Let them poke the fire and watch the sparks fly. Let them blow on the fire and watch the embers glow and grow.

Alternatives

One of the more memorable events in my life took place during my college years. I was out riding in the “boondocks” with a friend of mine (Sid Custer) in his pickup truck. We were having a great time, and we stopped in the middle of the dirt road for a smoke (not a cigarette) and pee. Neither of us had a lighter. So my friend siphoned some gas out of the tank, put it on a rag he scrounged out of the glove box, and used his pocketknife to create sparks, which quickly set the rag on fire.  We lit up, and continued our merry way. Yes. Men, need to be able to adapt to survive. They need to know, that in a pinch, they can “make do” and adapt.

I never forgot that event.

Later on during other stages of my life, I saw interesting improvisations that enabled people the ability to light up cigarettes. Here are some additional ways to start a fire.  I would suggest that the reader also make a point to their children that fire can be made easily and is not something to fear.

Teach them how to create fires on demand. Teach them how to control fires, and what to do, when a fire gets out of control.

  • Gum Wrapper Fire. This is a very easy method, and commonly used in prison. You take a pack of chewing gum. You remove the silver foil. Then you get a battery (any working battery, but I’ve seen type AA or AAA used effectively), and put the foil so that it touches both ends. Now the fire might start at any point along the foil, so you need to tear away some of the foil to make a narrow gap. That will focus the fire to start there. Make sure you have some tinder ready, as the fire will be short lived. It might last two to three seconds, tops.
  • Ramen Noodle Stove. Take a pack of Ramen noodles. (Remove it from the plastic wrapping.) Pour gasoline, kerosene or any other flammable liquid on the uncooked noodles. Put it on a brick, a rock or other safe surface. Then light carefully (making sure that no gasoline is on anyone’s hands or splashed on the ground nearby). It will act like a “fire starter log”. As such, it will burn for a good spell. Maybe 20 minutes to a half an hour. It makes a great kindling or fire starter, but is also a very good exercise to expose your children to.

All of the suggestions that I have provided here come with a level of danger.  There should be no doubt about that.  However, the point is that danger should be a friend and as the child grows, they can become more familiar with danger and best be able to tame it. You need to teach your children how to confront life, and not shy away from it in fear.

To quote an age-old Peruvian saying; “A life lived in fear is a life not worth living”.

Also quoted in the movie “Strictly Ballroom” (1992). Strictly Ballroom is a 1992 Australian romantic comedy film directed and co-written by Baz Luhrmann. If the reader is confused about why this quote is located here in this manuscript, and what it means in regards to raising children and exposing them to new ideas and skills, then you should watch the movie “Strictly Ballroom”.

Sail a boat

"There is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats. In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really to matter, that's the charm of it. 

Whether you get away, or whether you don't; whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else, or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something else to do, and you can do it if you like, but you'd much better not."

- Spoken by Ratty to Mole in Wind in the Willows a children's book by Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932).

This might be a surprise to some readers. It need not be.

gaff rigged cutter
This is a nice photo of a gaff-rigged cutter. A cutter is a boat with a single mast. A gaff-rigged boat is one that has the mast broken into two sections; a top and a bottom. The top section has a smaller sail known as a top-sail. It is useful to get the smallest and tiniest breezes of wind on calm days.

Sailing introduces your child to art, beauty, nature, and teamwork.  You will find them wanting to help furl the sails.  You will find them steer the boat with pride.  You will watch with pride as they point out when the sails are luffing. There is something very freeing about sailing.  You glide along the water, it is almost like flying.  It is soft, quiet and peaceful.

Sails on larger vessels are typically left in place, while it is easier to remove sails from the rigs of smaller vessels. Furling a sail simply means to put the thing away after use. Sails are commonly folded and covered, or rolled into a tubular shape by an onboard mechanism.

In sailing, luffing refers to when a sailing vessel is steered far enough toward the direction of the wind ("windward"), or the sheet controlling a sail is eased so far past optimal trim, that airflow over the surfaces of the sail is disrupted and the sail begins to "flap" or "luff" (the luff of the sail is usually where this first becomes evident). This is not always done in error; for example, the sails will luff when the bow of the boat passes through the direction of the wind as the sailboat is tacked.

A sailboat can also be "luffed" slightly without completely de-powering the sails. Often this occurs on the point of sail known as close hauled, this is sometimes referred to as pinching or "feathering" and is sometimes done deliberately in order to make a more direct course toward an upwind destination (see: "beating to windward"), or to "de-power" a sail on a windy day to maintain control of the sailboat. "Luffing" can also be used to slow or stop a sailboat in a controlled manner. To offset luffing at the top of the sail one should move the sail "lead" forward until the point where the "telltales" break evenly.

In comparison, a household with young children is a noisy and clamorous affair.  There is always noise and contention.  Young children cry and demand.  Sugar and other children exacerbate this situation. However, on the ocean (or in a bay), there is none of this.  The children will calm down and start to fit into the routine and the rhythm of the boat.  Oh, they will get the “sea legs” soon enough.

“The sea hates a coward.”
-  Eugene O’Neill

If the parent is so inclined, they can help the child with sailing lessons.  In each and every case, the parent should make sure that the child knows the basics of swimming (not included in this list, as it is a MAJOR fundamental requirement for all of my children.  They learn how to swim early on.). When in the boat, all children wear life preservers, and all of them must know how to “turn a boat around” to rescue a person during a “man overboard” drill. Try it.  Your children would love it!

gaff-rigged schooner
Here we see a gaff-rigged schooner overtaking a cutter. A schooner is a vessel with two masts. The mast at the stern of the ship is the tallest. Therefore, the vessel has the largest sail area towards the stern of the ship.

Others have written about the beauty of sailing.  Consider Christopher Cross for example.

For those readers who have never sailed, I would seriously suggest that you take the opportunity to do so.  I am not talking about a little puddle boat, but a large sailing vessel with a decent beam and some real size.  It is achievable, as many boat owners offer rides in their sailboats for a very reasonable price as a way to make extra money.

For those of you who have, let me suggest that you invest in a simple boat rather than a new cellphone. In my household, tools and clothing that helps the children learn hold far greater value than what everyone else is doing. You, dear reader, should realize that your High School days are over. Those who have succeeded in life, we NOT the ones who were average and “went with the pack”. Do not allow that temptation to mold your child’s thought process.

Here’s some great links for the convinced and interested reader;

The joy of sailing
The joy of sailing on the Britannia. Everyone should have the opportunity to sail. Everyone should be able to enjoy their life on the water, with friends and companionship.

“There is a special moment in sailing after clearing a harbor and setting the sails, when you turn off the engine and feel the boat lean into the wind and silently pick up speed. In that single quiet moment, all the joys of sailing come to me in a rush: freedom from the work-a-day life ashore, the thrill of travel, the challenge of pitting myself against the forces of the sea.”

- Stephan G. Regulinski

Ride Your Bike Off a Ramp

This was something that I did when I was a kid, and something that horrified my mother. Never the less, I don’t know of anyone who ever died from it.

Bike ramp
A forest bicycle ramp. Obviously a person using this ramp should have some practice and experience first. I have had many friends who would ride their dirt-bikes (motorcycles) in the abandoned strip mines and forests of Western Pennsylvania who had been in accidents, some of which required hospitalization.

It’s a thrill and a brush with danger that is still possible in this too-sterile world. Building and riding off ramps will teach your kids some basic physics and even some construction skills. Let them be kids, for goodness sakes. Don’t end up like that joke-of-a-President Obama who rides a bicycle with helmet and protective padding. Good God!

But…

But… Let’s not leave it at that.  Riding a bike through the woods can be a great adventure.  I certainly enjoyed it as a kid growing up.  Today, in China, bike ride-share has taken the nation by storm, but these bikes are all for urban transport from one location to another.

That is not what I am writing about.

Instead I suggest aggressive bike adventures in the woods.  If you are an American, there is no reason why you can’t explore the old trails and country railroad access trails.  There is no reason why you can’t ride the deserted industrial sites and explore the “off the beaten” path adventures just waiting for there for you.  There is no reason why you can’t ride along long disused railroad tracks, ride up and down abandoned urban complexes, or explore old sections of cracked highway.

“beginning in 2011, Swanson Primary School in New Zealand submitted itself to a university experiment and agreed to suspend all playground rules, allowing the kids to run, climb trees, slide down a muddy hill, jump off swings, and play in a “loose-parts pit” that was like a mini adventure playground.

The teachers feared chaos, but in fact what they got was less naughtiness and bullying—because the kids were too busy and engaged to want to cause trouble, the principal said.”

-The Overprotected Kid

Which brings up another subject…

Explore an Abandoned Building

Ouch!  This is a painful admission. Abandoned sites are dangerous.  You can get hurt or more.  When I was five I walked on a rusty nail protruding from a board in an abandoned house near our place. I had to get some painful shots as a result.

Never the less, I explored many an abandoned building, and went in and out of local railroad tunnels throughout the Western Pennsylvania hills where I lived. I cannot say that I would promote my children doing so, but if I found out about it, I wouldn’t lambast them either. The key is preparation. The children need to know about the dangers before hand, and then with the basic tools and knowledge just let them explore a bit.

When I was in second grade I learned that if you jumped off the second floor of an abandoned building that your feet and legs would hurt.  I learned that old pipes had water, but the water was thick and red with rust.  I learned that nails were everywhere and if you weren’t careful you could step on one and need to go to the doctor and get an injection.  I learned that broken glass is everywhere in an old building and you could get hurt if your touched it.

urban exploration
There is a sub-culture called urban-exploration where young adults enter into abandoned structures for the purpose of photography and exploration. They do not deface, steal or vandalize. I see nothing wrong with this as long as they are careful and not breaking any laws. I would encourage your children to explore…

A good parent allows the child to learn.

A good parent will rather have the child experience a bruise or two rather than live a life in fear, or worse yet, walk straight into danger unawares. As a child, I was petrified of spiders, snakes, frogs, and bees. Over the years, through close contact, I have learned not to be fearful of these things. Let your child learn early. Equip them with the knowledge to live and survive in an often-unfriendly world.

Climb a Rope

Climbing is one of the crucial physical skills everyone should develop. In America, from what I gather, climbing a rope is something that is frowned upon. As is climbing stairs higher than four feet. Have you looked at what constitutes a playground these days?

Now, if schools won’t provide the opportunity for a little physical exercise, then parents ought to. I am way too old to climb, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t make the effort to show how it is done.

In the old days (about 100 years ago), every community had a playground.  These playgrounds consisted of “monkey bars”, swing sets, seesaws, and other simple outdoor childhood entertainments. Typically, they had sand at the bottom of the metal (and often concrete) structures to mitigate any cuts, scrapes or broken bones.  There was sand at the bottom of the monkey bars, sand at the bottom and end of the slides, and sand below the swing sets.

Monkeybars
Children playing on “monkey bars”. Now, pretty much banned throughout the USA by Democrat well-meaning busybodies.

This continued into my parents’ generation and mine as well.  However, over time, the playground equipment became more standardized and mass-produced.  By the time the 1980’s rolled around, there were small community organizations forming to make playgrounds “safer”, “better” and (perhaps) more “educational”.  These “improvements” resulted in making the playgrounds nice and safe and very boring.

Often centering around a “community activist”. This “activist” often had no source of financial income except what manifested as a result of litigation. Litigation was the fruit that justified their activism. Many “well intentioned” changes were just creative ways for an individual or group of individuals to make money without physical labor. Don’t like my opinion? Prove me wrong.

1900 style American playground
Old American playground around 1900. Only the strong survived recess, obviously.

For instance, slides became lower. Instead of two stories high during my parents’ generation, and one story high (8 feet) in my generation, they became four feet high. “Monkey Bars” became smaller and lower to the ground. Even seesaws and swings became smaller, or eliminated all together. These “improvements” were welcomed by all the protective parents in their respective communities, or at least by the most vocal ones.

There was only one problem.

The structures were boring and did not challenge the children.  They were instead only suitable for mentally retarded and handicapped children, infants under the age of two, and overweight mothers. My gosh! Children should be challenged while in a safe environment, not coddled until they become an adult.

Bubble wrap was intended for the protection of inanimate objects. Not for human beings. Protective attire is necessary for close combat, hazardous work, and working with tools. It should not be necessary for transportation, play or dining.

My experience, in life, has been that once the father leaves (dies or simply abandons the household); the mother tends to clutch on to the child. She becomes hyper protective. If the child is unable to go out on their own, this terrible behavior (and self-serving behavior) by the mother completely messes up the child. They become “retarded” in normal development.

Those of you readers who have accomplished anything know exactly what I speak of.

I strongly believe that children, like cats and puppies, should be encouraged to climb, fight, sing, dance, and do other tasks that involve a moderate level of risk.  It is better to climb in a park near your house than on a mountain side hours from a nearby hospital.

Children are permitted to be safe while playing in Chinese playgrounds.
All Chinese playgrounds are supervised to allow the children to play in safety.

I was reminded of this by an event in a local park here in China. There were some children being taught repelling and climbing skills by a small group of instructors.  It turns out that many malls and store complexes in China have these huge climbing complexes of ropes, and netting that children are permitted to go “nuts” over.

They are very popular here, and are well maintained and monitored. They also offer excursions in local parks.  I strongly advise all parents to utilize this resource.

Chinese mall playground
Many Chinese malls have enormous gym arrangements that are supervised for safety. The children can climb and explore. They can climb rope ladders often going up seven or eight stories. They can rappel down ropes and swing from tires hanging by a rope.

These arrangements are a multi-colored mixtures of beams, ropes, hoops, ladders, bars, and free hanging containers. The maze towers upward. Often they are five or six stories high. There is one in GuoMao in the LouHu section of ShenZhen that towers seven stories high. There is one in the JiDa section of ZhuHai that goes all the way up to the fifth floor.

You can watch the children high up, five stories above, walking a balance beam. The only thing saving them is a tethered harness so if they lose their footing, they will not fall (and die). I have seen many a petrified first and second grader carefully exploring this maze of rope and bars. Too bad American parents are too fearful to expose their children to adventure.

Safety for children
In China, safety is always a concern. No one can enter these areas without supervision and protection. For this supervision, there is a small fee that needs to be paid.

The Chinese provide their children with a fine place to climb and explore.  Sure there is an element of risk, but there are trained instructors and safety harnesses and helmets provided. Compare that to a modern American playgound.  There isn’t any risk.  There isn’t any opportunity to explore and have adventure.  It is typically in one or two colors, it consists of a few fences and railings, and some stairs to climb up.  It is also very safe.  It is the opposite of what is available in China.

American playgrounds are perfect for handicapped children and imbeciles. American playgrounds are safe at the expense of play.
Safe American playground is suitable for the most incompetent children and retarded idiots that America can produce.

American playgrounds are designed for idiots. They are ridiculously safe. Soon, someone will complain (I am sure a SJW looking for a financial award) about rain, and demanding that they be shaded and protected from the weather. Maybe the metal components are too hard, and so they will now need to be completely padded, and let’s add a paid child monitor to the mix (paid for with your tax dollars).

Notice that there are no swings, seesaws, slides, monkey bars or merry go-rounds. Too dangerous the SWJ’s (busybodies) state.

Use a Pocket Knife

I never gave any consideration to the importance of a pocket knife. I was just something that I thought all boys had and used. That is, until I saw a Chinese boy looking at them in the (underground Zhuhai) mall…

Learning to use a pocket knife with grandfather
Learning to use a pocket knife with grandpa. What a great opportunity to bond with your children, or grand children, or even great-great grand children. You go out. You sit on the porch. You pick up a twig or stick, and you start carving away.

Shortly afterwards, I read an article titled “The Complete guide to Pocket Knives”. That served as my inspiration, and cracked up a wallet just a little bit…

There’s something manly about your first pocket knife.  It doesn’t have to have 100 blades and a corkscrew, but it should have at least two different blades and maybe a file.

My (second) pocket knife was a red Swiss Army knife with maybe five different blade combinations including a can opener, and rasp. It replaced my boy scout knife that I had, as well as just about every other boy in my school, one Christmas.  It was a gift from my father.

“One day last year, a citizen on a prairie path in the Chicago suburb of Elmhurst came upon a teen boy chopping wood. Not a body. Just some already-fallen branches. Nonetheless, the onlooker called the cops.

Officers interrogated the boy, who said he was trying to build a fort for himself and his friends. A local news site reports the police then “took the tools for safekeeping to be returned to the boy’s parents.”

-The Fragile Generation

What? A boy cannot cut up wood? What planet ware we on? And the Chicago police promptly relied him of the tools and escorted him to the safety of his parents? This is friggin’ unbelievable!

“Elsewhere in America, preschoolers at the Learning Collaborative in Charlotte, North Carolina, were thrilled to receive a set of gently used playground equipment. But the kids soon found out they would not be allowed to use it, because it was resting on grass, not wood chips. “It’s a safety issue,” explained a day care spokeswoman. Playing on grass is against local regulations.”

-The Fragile Generation

Playing on the grass is against safety regulations!

Let me repeat as an underline; “Playing on the grass is against safety regulations.”

This is America.

“And then there was the query that ran in Parents magazine a few years back: “Your child’s old enough to stay home briefly, and often does. But is it okay to leave her and her playmate home while you dash to the dry cleaner?”

Absolutely not, the magazine averred: “Take the kids with you, or save your errand for another time.” After all, “you want to make sure that no one’s feelings get too hurt if there’s a squabble.”

-The Fragile Generation

By all means, protect the child’s feelings…(!)

“The principle here is simple: This generation of kids must be protected like none other. They can’t use tools, they can’t play on grass, and they certainly can’t be expected to work through a spat with a friend.

And this, it could be argued, is why we have “safe spaces” on college campuses and millennial's missing adult milestones today. We told a generation of kids that they can never be too safe—and they believed us.“

-The Fragile Generation

Ah, it’s a generation of wusses. But, my children will not be part of it. They are taught how to [1] measure the unknown, [2] put aside fears, and [3] utilize tools to accomplish their goals.

Pocket knives are great tools, and all children, boys and girls should learn to use one.  Nothing is better than using it to cut up an apple, or pear.  Use it to cut away branches to make a sling-shot, or make a fine walking stick (a teenage necessity).

If you give your child a knife with different blades, please remember to show them how each blade is used.  Do not simply expect them to understand it by osmosis. (Like my father did.) Show them the screw driver, and the can-opener blade, and let them open a can or two of pork and beans and let it cook on a campfire once opened. The corkscrew won’t come in handy until they are in college.. heh, heh.

Knives have many uses.
Knives have many benefits. This is an important point. Having a knife, being able to explore without fear, making a fire, and being able to climb a rope are things that all of our distant relatives did when they were children. These were things that they were allowed and permitted to do in a Free Society. Today, America is NOT a free society. It is a prison, increasingly populated with people and children bread to act and behave as cattle-serfs. I refuse to let my children become cattle for the oligarchy. Moo.

This being stated, I do not advise knives being brought into American schools.  The days of cub scouts having a pocket knife and bringing it into class is long, long over. Incidentally, a cub-scout pocket knife would be an ideal knife for your child int his regard. I had one when I was a boy. I had it for a while until it was replaced by a red (maybe fake) Swiss army knife.

“As a kid in the 1970’s, almost every boy carried a pocket knife. It wasn’t a weapon or for showing off, unless it was new. Sometimes you had to actually cut something and scissors just wouldn’t do.

When you were bored, you’d whittle a stick or a piece of wood with it. I have a simple walking stick carved by my great grandfather, and I recall the mystique of watching and helping as he sharpened his knife. In my keepsake box, I have a pocket knife of my father and grandfather. Interestingly, along with a Confederate $5 bank note, Lincoln had one in his pocket the night he was shot.”

-CR Smyth

Get a good knife.

You do not need to get the biggest, or the most elaborate knife. A simple knife is the best thing. make sure that it is rugged. Children are difficult on things. Make sure that it has two to three blades that the child can master. Make sure that it fits well in his hand, and that it is beautiful enough so that he will want to carry it around with him.

Explore a Construction Site

China is filled with construction sites. While I don’t advocate kids climbing about on the 60th floor of some new skyscraper, many build sites offer great opportunity for exploration and adventure.  That is fun.  Moreover, dear reader, fun and play is HOW children learn.

While I was growing up, the subdivision I lived in was still under construction, so there were always plenty of partially-built houses to explore. After the construction workers left for the day, my boyhood pals and I would cruise down the street on our bikes to check out their work and poke around the skeletal structures rising from the muddy lots. The ones that were the most fun to explore were the two-story houses. You’d have to climb up the railing-less, unfinished stairs and when you got to the top, you were able to walk to the edge of the second story’s framing and throw stuff down on your buds. What great fun!

One of the first things I learned, I was in second grade at the time, was that if you jumped from the second floor to the ground, it hurt! Ouch!

In America today, kids are not permitted “free range” play. They are constantly under observation and supervision. They are coddled and are not given the opportunity to learn some “hard knocks”. I consider this a very troubling situation, and I do not allow my children to be coddled in this way. It wasn’t always  this way.  Children used to be permitted to play.

Here is a great write up on why public playgrounds became so sterile;

“In 1978, a toddler named Frank Nelson made his way to the top of a 12-foot slide in Hamlin Park in Chicago, with his mother, Debra, a few steps behind him. The structure, installed three years earlier, was known as a “tornado slide” because it twisted on the way down, but the boy never made it that far. He fell through the gap between the handrail and the steps and landed on his head on the asphalt.

A year later, his parents sued the Chicago Park District and the two companies that had manufactured and installed the slide. Frank had fractured his skull in the fall and suffered permanent brain damage. He was paralyzed on his left side and had speech and vision problems. His attorneys noted that he was forced to wear a helmet all the time to protect his fragile skull.

The Nelsons’ was one of a number of lawsuits of that era that fueled a backlash against potentially dangerous playground equipment.

Theodora Briggs Sweeney, a consumer advocate and safety consultant from John Carroll University, near Cleveland, testified at dozens of trials and became a public crusader for playground reform. “The name of the playground game will continue to be Russian roulette, with the child as unsuspecting victim,” Sweeney wrote in a 1979 paper published in Pediatrics. She was concerned about many things—the heights of slides, the space between railings, the danger of loose S-shaped hooks holding parts together—but what she worried about most was asphalt and dirt. In her paper, Sweeney declared that lab simulations showed children could die from a fall of as little as a foot if their head hit asphalt, or three feet if their head hit dirt.

A federal-government report published around that time found that tens of thousands of children were turning up in the emergency room each year because of playground accidents.

As a result, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission in 1981 published the first “Handbook for Public Playground Safety,” a short set of general guidelines—the word guidelines was in bold, to distinguish the contents from requirements—that should govern the equipment. For example, no component of any equipment should form angles or openings that could trap any part of a child’s body, especially the head.

To turn up the pressure, Sweeney and a fellow consultant on playground safety, Joe Frost, began cataloguing the horrors that befell children at playgrounds.

Between them, they had testified in almost 200 cases and could detail gruesome specifics—several kids who had gotten their heads trapped or crushed by merry-go-rounds; one who was hanged by a jump rope attached to a deck railing; one who was killed by a motorcycle that crashed into an unfenced playground; one who fell while playing football on rocky ground. In a paper they wrote together, Sweeney and Frost called for “immediate inspection” of all equipment that had been installed before 1981, and the removal of anything faulty. They also called for playgrounds nationwide to incorporate rubber flooring in crucial areas.

In January 1985, the Chicago Park District settled the suit with the Nelsons. Frank Nelson was guaranteed a minimum of $9.5 million. Maurice Thominet, the chief engineer for the Park District, told the Chicago Tribune that the city would have to “take a cold, hard look at all of our equipment” and likely remove all the tornado slides and some other structures. At the time, a reader wrote to the paper:

“Do accidents happen anymore? … Can a mother take the risk of taking her young child up to the top of a tornado slide, with every good intention, and have an accident? Who is responsible for a child in a park, the park district or the parent? … Swings hit 1-year-old children in the head, I’m sure with dire consequences in some instances. Do we eliminate swings?”

But these proved to be musings from a dying age. Around the time the Nelson settlement became public, park departments all over the country began removing equipment newly considered dangerous, partly because they could not afford to be sued, especially now that a government handbook could be used by litigants as proof of standards that parks were failing to meet.

In anticipation of lawsuits, insurance premiums skyrocketed.

As the Tribune reader had intuited, the cultural understanding of acceptable risk began to shift, such that any known risk became nearly synonymous with hazard.

Over the years, the official consumer-product handbook has gone through several revisions; it is now supplemented by a set of technical guidelines for manufacturers. More and more, the standards are set by engineers and technical experts and lawyers, with little meaningful input from “people who know anything about children’s play,” says William Weisz, a design consultant who has sat on several committees overseeing changes to the guidelines.

The handbook includes specific prescriptions for the exact heights, slopes, and other angles of nearly every piece of equipment. Rubber flooring or wood chips are virtually required; grass and dirt are “not considered protective surfacing because wear and environmental factors can reduce their shock absorbing effectiveness.”

“Reasonable risks are essential for children’s healthy development,” says Joe Frost, an influential safety crusader.

It is no longer easy to find a playground that has an element of surprise, no matter how far you travel. Kids can find the same slides at the same heights and angles as the ones in their own neighborhood, with many of the same accessories.

I live in Washington, D.C., near a section of Rock Creek Park, and during my first year in the neighborhood, a remote corner of the park dead-ended into what our neighbors called the forgotten playground. The slide had wooden steps, and was at such a steep angle that kids had to practice controlling their speed so they wouldn’t land too hard on the dirt. More glorious, a freestanding tree house perched about 12 feet off the ground, where the neighborhood kids would gather and sort themselves into the pack hierarchies I remember from my childhood—little kids on the ground “cooking” while the bigger kids dominated the high shelter.

But in 2003, nearly a year after I moved in, the park service tore down the tree house and replaced all the old equipment with a prefab playground set on rubber flooring. Now the playground can hold only a toddler’s attention, and not for very long. The kids seem to spend most of their time in the sandbox; maybe they like it because the neighbors have turned it into a mini adventure playground, dropping off an odd mixing spoon or colander or broken-down toy car.”

-The Overprotected Kid

Well-wishing “do gooders” “busy-bodies” with a profit angle and political influence ruined the educational benefits of pay for nearly two generations of American children.

There is not too much that I can do about it, except for what I do with my children. And, my dear reader, kindly note that they are permitted to play in a fundamentally non-sterile environment.

Shoot a Slingshot

In a time not too long ago, the archetypal boy had a handmade slingshot dangling from the back of his pocket. Today, most boys have never touched one. Which is a shame because slingshots can provide hours of fun and they’re a great way to introduce firearm safety to your young ones (e.g., only point at what you plan on hitting). Yes, you could just buy your kid a fancy manufactured slingshot on Amazon, but how about exposing them to even more positive danger by letting them make their own? They’ll learn how to handle a saw safely and get to practice some knife wielding skills to boot.

However, depending where you live, possession of a slingshot might be problematic.

Some busybody might call the ATF and insist that your child’s slingshot meets the all the regulations for a projectile weapon, such as barrel length, whether or not it has a “bump stock”, magazine size, and whether or not it appear paramilitary.

If you live in in an area where they shut down lemonade stands run by five year olds, then you might want to reconsider the activities that you permit your child to participate in.  If you live in the USA, I would suggest moving to a place where there are not such idiotic regulations, like Communist China or Thailand. Here you can do anything you want within reason.

Read about this sad state of affairs;

Today, americans can be arrested for the slightest cause. America is no longer free. Policemen and cops will arrest anyone, even children.
Here is an American police officer frisking a child on the television show “Cops” showing how important it is for Americans to obey the law.

This is Part 1 of a Two Part Post

This is part one of a two part post. You can go to the other post HERE. This post is rather long. I have exceeded the “industry norm” (Google SEO advisement) by a significant word count. As is my prerogative. You can visit the rest of this post HERE.

Conclusions, “Take Aways” and FAQ can be found on the second post.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 23AUG18.
  2. SEO review 23AUG18.
  3. Published 23AUG18.

Learning about China by Looking at Pretty Girls (3)

This is the third of a series of post on Chinese cute girls and Chinese culture.

My intention is that we cannot fully appreciate our role as Americans and ignore all the changes going on in China. The absolute dearth of  “real” information on China is terrible. It WILL HURT Americans, unless this situation is corrected.

Here is a quote from JobTubeDaily;

"Popular U.S. media perpetuates constant negative narratives about China: ghost cities, real estate bubbles, pollution, corruption. While many of these problems are real, the predominately negative coverage drowns out the positive elements of life in China and its abundant economic opportunities. In doing so, the media dissuades America’s rising students, as well as business and political leaders, from learning more about the country."

Here is a quote from LinkedIN;

"And the western media aren't particularly helpful in explaining the real China of 2018.  They're serving so much bias and prejudice about China, it is nearly impossible for the general public to get in touch with the real China."

China is a very, very big nation. Many times I am asked what it is like. Honestly, there is so much to say, that I end up going on some tangent or the other. However, one thing that I noticed when talking to other men, is that what they really want to know is what Chinese girls are like…

Wow! That is in itself a huge subject.

Here I try to compose  a series of micro-videos of Chinese girls taking little vignettes of themselves being cute, dancing, eating, and doing girl things. It is in no way comprehensive, but it should give you a general idea of what Chinese girls are like. It will also help you to get a better idea of what China is like as well.

Here we look at ten micro-videos…

Farm style restaurant…

Let’s start with a “farm-style restaurant.  This is a pretty awesome place. It can be found through out the Southern section of China. It consists of … basically, a farm. there are chickens walking around. There are ducks in pens, as well as  snakes and ducks. It is a fundamentally a pavilion set in the middle of a rural farm.

You eat in a nice (fan cooled) open area under a nice rood, and fresh (really, fresh) food is presented to you.  You pick out a live critter. It could be a chicken, a fish, a snake, a duck. They get it out of the pen, and take it to the kitchen where they kill it and dress it right there on the spot.

It is actually, pretty darn awesome.

This girl is obviously showing off her awesome rear-end while she walks behind the kitchen area in a rural farm-kitchen. I congratulate her.  How can you possibly argue that her choice in music and her attitude is not appropriate for the emotions that she is trying to convey. This is a exceptional woman.

At a mall…

Malls in China re pretty much what malls used to be in the United States before the middle class was destroyed.  Malls in China are actually very lively places, and are considered to be contemporaneous social centers.

Here we have a chick that is dancing around one of the central-assemblies (that crop up every two weeks or so). I enjoy her freedom and her liveliness.

The video was filmed at a nail or skin care salon that is located in a Pavilion booth set up in one of the wide open spaces inside the mall. You can tell this by the chairs and the product display. The pink and white “lady like” chairs are a dead give away. These venues are highly popular in China. It seems like all the girls take good care of their skin. As they should. Perhaps that is one of the reasons why Chinese women age so gracefully.

Take a look around her. We have numerous Chinese businesses that cater to the rising middle class in China. Note the people. They, as can be considered as normal, pass by a cute Chinese girl dancing randomly. Such is China. Isn’t it just great?

At a pool…

Most Chinese are really not that good swimmers. However, that does not mean that they don’t like pools. In fact, in the Southern sections of China, public pools are everywhere, as well as in most apartment buildings and complexes. However, the water level is kept pretty shallow. Mostly it varies from 3 feet deep to five feet deep.  Maybe 1 to 1.5 meters deep.

You can swim and play around, but you don’t have to worry about drowning in the deep water.

The costs vary. In our apartment pool in Shenzhen, the cost for a membership pass was 50 yuan a family. So for my wife and I, a year’s membership was under $5/year. A public pool in more expensive. Here in Zhuhai, we can pay $35 yuan a person for an all-day swim per person. That is roughly $6/day.

This girl is at a public pool. I personally think that she looks great in that swimsuit. Though, I must warn her that she should be swimming in the evening. The hot such will burn her skin, and chances are that she would probably be spending hours trying to scrub the darkness off.

Notice that you can bring all sorts of inflatables, floats and toys into the pool. This includes squirt guns and super-soakers. You will also notice that the life guards wear an ID-badge around their neck and wade in and walk among the people in the pool. They are hands-on and help people and keep order as need be. They don’t sit on a chair and watch everyone under an umbrella.

At a apartment park area…

This is a very interesting photo. It’s hard to tell, but she is on the third floor of an apartment complex. If you were to look at the building, you would see one enormous building… the size of a complete city block. It would only be three stories high. The parking garage would be underground, and the first three floors would be devoted to small businesses and offices. Then the top of the third floor is this big park that only the apartment residences can access.

Springing up out of the third floor are smaller, singular apartment buildings. This varies from one to six in number. They are typically identified as building “A”, building “B”, etc. Each one has their own set of elevators for only that building.

She is dancing in her apartment complex, and she obviously lives in one of the buildings near by her. As you can see the park is expansive and contains walkways for dogs, exercise machines for the people and maybe a play area or two. You can often find ping-pong tables, and similar structures on this type of apartment park area.

It looks like there is an area for some upper street parking, and a place for bicycles as well. She is dancing to a song by Cindy Wong that is maybe ten years old now. It is a happy song that many Chinese girls know how to dance to. I don’t know the routine, as I think that it is really complicated and complex.

Dance Studio…

Here we now migrate to a professional dance studio. There are many, many dance studios throughout China. They vary from small studios that cater to Children, to K-pop and C-pop dance troupes, to professional studios. The professional studios are all quite good, and they host a wide selection of styles and types of dance.

Many middle-aged Chinese women go to these studios for exercise and companionship. The membership in these studios are not cheap, but neither is the companionship and the experience either.

She’s quite good, don’t you think? I would classify her at “expert” level in skill and ability.

Military Barracks…

Ok. Now, let’s go to a totally different location. Here is a Chinese military barracks. In China, both men and women serve in the armed forces. They go through training just like American soldiers do.

Here are some youngish girls in a barracks. You can tell from the uniforms that they are with the military. The barracks isn’t that much different from what you would see elsewhere in the rest of the world. She is sharing it with her colleagues. And they are all doing typical things that you would see in a barracks. Including drinking a Pepsi-cola.

On a nice boat…

Of course, with so many miles of coastline, the Chinese love to boat around and enjoy themselves.  Here we have an attractive girl riding around in a nice yacht. It looks like the South China sea to me. She sports a tattoo on her arm with is a little bit on the big size. This is suggestive of a Westernized city like Hong Kong or Shanghai.

Song is “Superstar” by Beatrich. The Chinese listen to music from around the world. While many listen to mainland Chinese music, Taiwan pop, and Cantonese pop are also popular as is music from Russia and the United States.

On the beach…

While there are pools all over China, and beaches all along the coast, there are also many private “swimming holes”. These are simply a small pond or lake with a beach and a nice big parking lot. Nearby are some stores for the purchase of swimming toys and some icy beverages such as Coke and beer.

This is very similar to a number of “swimming holes” that used to exist in and around Boston.

Here we have a nice cutie who is sporting a tiny bikini and enjoying the water, and the sun on a nice summer day.  Just by looking at how she carries herself, and her smile should be enough to convince you WHY I like Chinese girls so very much. What a smile!

I think that the way she carries herself is amazingly sexy. No, it’s not the clothes (or maybe lack of them), and no it’s not the curves of her body. I honestly believe that a person who is good, kind and happy… who is confident and pleasant to be around is just a magnet for me. I am drawn by her strength, and pleasant disposition.

Don’t tell me that you didn’t get a smile on your face when she looked straight at you and gave you such a calm confident smile. Come on!

You will note that there is a waterside in the background. I would not be surprised if there were also a few amusements nearby and other venues such as tent rentals, and Hot Pot restaurants.

Waterslide.

Speaking of watersides, here is another micro-video of a waterside in China. Watersides are very popular here, and there are some truly enormous ones with all sorts of twists and turns. They can be found outside and inside huge mall complexes.

This is a typical one that might be found in one of the smaller cities. It contains not only the elements of water and fun but supportive elements such as a playground, lifeguards, stores and recreational supplies.

Here is a cute girl wearing a nice swim suit. I find her very attractive. Heck, maybe you think that I find all girls attractive. Well, maybe that is because I do. She has nice curves, and is hanging out with her friends.

If you look  in the background, you can see the little children playing with their parents. Everyone is having a great time together. Isn’t that what life is all about? Isn’t it great to have family, and to have friends that you can do things with? I really think so. Life is not about sitting behind a computer screen, or watching a Netflix movie at night. It is all about being with those whom you love.

Outside a Garage

While most of China has these enormous housing complexes which are just mega-apartments, China is also growing another kind of residence. This is an American-style single-residence. These are springing up everywhere and the upper-middle class are moving into them. The price on these homes are not cheap and could easily be double that you would expect to pay for a comparable house in an apartment complex.

Here we have two girls dancing in front of a garage in front of one of these houses. On the surface the style is reminiscent of South-Western United States mass-produced housing.

The girls are pretty typical. They are wearing little white shoes, shorts or skirt and a tight top. Contrary to what the fucking idiots in Arkansas think, these girls do not look like pre-adolescent children. In fact, they look quite grown up to me. I would place them at college age or so.

Behind them are two of the most popular cars in China; a Range Rover and a Porsche.

If I were to take a wild guess, I would suppose that they both live in the neighborhood. That their parent or relatives own one of the houses, and that they are making the video in front of it.

Conclusion

Everyone likes to look at pretty girls. Even other pretty girls. I, as a man, think that pretty girls liven up our lives and make it more interesting and fun. I would not mind taking any one of these girls out and having a nice meal or playing around in a park or some other place. Having good companionship, great conversation, and enjoying a wonderful meal would be awesome with any of these women.

Beautiful girls of the world.
Here is a composite of faces from various geographic regions. Every one of these girls are beautiful. Why are the oligarchs and the leaders of our respective nations so bent out of shape wanting to fight each other? I mean, they have enough money, don’t they? I mean, how much power is enough? Or, are they just evil.

Today it is difficult to see what other places are like, if you are an American. Our news is heavily propagandized.

  • Those on the liberal side have the impression that China eats dogs, is full of poor waifs that sell their bodies for sex, and is full of dirty smog filled air.
  • Those on the conservative side, have the impression that China is a great war-mongered beast who wants to take over the Pacific, that they are ruthless businessmen, and want to keep their citizens imprisoned in a communist gulag.

Neither impression is correct. They are both terrible distortions.

China is a huge nation, bigger geographically than the United States, and with an enormous population far larger than America’s. In fact, there are more people in China that speak English than there are Americans in the entire world.

They live life. They work. They study hard. They try to do their best. They have fun. They raise families. They are, in many ways, like “old fashioned” Americans around 1950. While America has moved toward a progressive socialist paradise ruled by an oligarchy, China has moved in a different direction. It has moved toward free-market policies originating out of a central government. China is not at all what we think it is.

This post is my little way to help introduce China to the readership.

Chinese APPS
These are the major APPS in China. If you don’t what these are, or what they represent, then you are wholly deficient in your understanding of China, and a sizable portion of the global community. Take heed.

Take Aways

  • Chinese women are attractive.
  • Many of the buildings in China are new, and have a modern supporting infrastructure.
  • Chinese people like to dance, sing, and have fun with their friends.
  • Chinese women DO NOT look like pre-adolescent children. (Here’s a nod to the idiots in Arkansas who were absolutely convinced that Chinese women look like little pre-adolescent girls.)

Beverly Hillbillies
Here is a scene from the 1960’s era situation comedy called the “Beverly Hillbillies”. I really loved that show. Then, later on, when I went to Arkansas to be retired from MAJestic, I met actual hillbillies. It was painful. Imagine the worst aspects of the movie Idioticracity combined with an evil FBI director trying to “get Trump”. Ugh. Anyways, their understanding of life outside of Little Rock was pathetic. They thought that Memphis, Tennessee was another nation. They were that pathetic.

FAQ

Q: Why do you only have beautiful Chinese girls? What about being more diverse and inclusive? Why do you objectify girls?
A: Well, for one, this article is about attractive Chinese girls. It wouldn’t do to have non-Chinese girls in it. Nor would it be appropriate to have men, homosexuals, fat and ugly girls, children or LGBT creatures in the article.

If you want to purge beauty out of your life, no problem. Go ahead and do it. Just like American beauty pageants are no longer about beauty. Just like American airlines have purged themselves of age and beauty standards. Just like race-cars have purged themselves of attractive women. But you won’t see that in China.

However, here in China, you won’t see this nonsense permitted.

Grid Girls
Formula 1 Grid Girls in Asia. Sure maybe they are banned in the United States but the rest of the world appreciates fast cars and beautiful women. America i going through a social upheaval with white is black and new is old. It is a terrible time. However, eventually everything will reset. Don’t be under any illusion that having ugly people in control of things would eventually be eclipsed. It is the nature of our reality.

Now here, I like to surround myself with beauty. I like to surround myself with things that I like and I love. That includes dogs, cats, pizza, bacon, tomatoes, friends and of course my loved ones.

BLT
Who doesn’t like a BLT (Bacon, Lettuce, and tomato) sandwich with egg on toasted bread? Ah, such a delicious meal! Most certainly. I also like it with a nice frosty drink, like a nice beer. Or, barring that, how about a nice sweet Southern-style iced-tea. Ah, now that is awesome.

Q: Why do you use micro-videos in this post?
A: I think it does a nice job of giving a snapshot of what China is like. Many of the videos have Chinese songs. They all feature beautiful Chinese girls in China doing things that beautiful Chinese girls like to do. Of course, if you would rather go to you-tube, go ahead. You won’t find very many Chinese girls there. You-tube is banned in China because it, like Facebook, Google, and Tumblr, all collect user information and pipe that information directly to the NSA for American government’s use.

Q: Why do you think these girls are beautiful?
A: Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. What constitutes for beauty in China is different from what is beautiful elsewhere. I chose these videos because I happen to think the girls are cute, beautiful or attractive. Of course, if you disagree with me, you can leave.

Pretty girls.
I think that it is really nice and enjoyable to look at pretty girls. I love how they look, and like looking at the outfits that they wear. I like how they carry themselves. I love how they smile. I love the shoes that they select. I think it is really nice and fun.

Links about China

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 19AUG18.
  2. SEO review 21AUG18.
  3. Published 22AUG18

Learning about China by Looking at Pretty Girls (2)

This is the second of a series of post on Chinese cute girls and Chinese culture.

You know, China is a very, very big nation. Many times I am asked what it is like. Honestly, there is so much to say, that I end up going on some tangent or the other. However, one thing that I noticed when talking to other men, is that what they really want to know is what Chinese girls are like…

Wow! That is in itself a huge subject.

Here I try to compose  a series of micro-videos of Chinese girls taking little vignettes of themselves being cute, dancing, eating, and doing girl things. It is in no way comprehensive, but it should give you a general idea of what Chinese girls are like. It will also help you to get a better idea of what China is like as well.

Here we look at ten micro-videos…

Suburb Section of a city

Pi Feng. ( 牌坊 memorial archway). A memorial gate or memorial archway.

These are structures that can be found in just about any city in China. Even my wife cannot explain to me what they mean. However, fundamentally, they are representative of a gate or an area that commemorates some person or event in the distant past.

The gates typically lead to an area, for which (I as an American) identify as a suburb or sectional variation of a regional community.

Here we have a cute Chinese gal singing and showing off her rocking body. Note the “normal” Chinese people behind her. Note the woman walking her dog. What? She isn’t eating it, like what is promoted in the UK press. Oh my God! Why this must be propaganda! The nerve of me!

Notice that many Chinese drive modern and and contemporary vehicles. You can see some of this in the video. You can also see a “ride-share” bicycle at the side of the gate structure. This is normal and everyday phenomenon in China. Everyone rides “rent a bicycle” in China. They come in different colors. For example, OFO is yellow, and Hello Bike is blue.

By the way, she looks rockin’ in her nice cute top and cute cut-off jean shorts. I’d love to have a nice hot-pot with her and spend some time singing in a KTV. I’d bet that she would be interesting as Hell.

Mall Platform

Here we have a cute girl dancing to a song in front of a platform in a mall. In China, the malls always have events. Sometime the events are product sales. At other times the events are sponsored events that are designed to bring people in. Like children, and photo opportunities.

Here we have a girl dancing in front of a mall presentation in support of a dance or similar organization. In malls they always have one or two open areas that are used to set up stages and other events. We used to have this in the United States when malls existed. You might have a fashion show one week, and then a dance troupe a week later.

Here, the girl is dancing in front of just such a presentation screen. This is “Deesha”, which I gather  is a female dance group or school. They are pretty darn common in China. In fact, I have two on my floor in my office building. They dance to a lot of KPOP, and CPOP.

She is pretty darn cute. She really is. The man in her life is a really, really lucky guy.

Arabic Culture

Typically, since the Chinese Muslims from the Western sections of the nation has been involved in all kinds of “radical” anti-society events, most Chinese limit their exposure to Chinese Muslims. Never the less, the Muslim culture has permeated into Chinese society.

Here we have a girl dancing in some sort of Islamic dance club or some such thing. They have them. Not so much in my city, but they do exist.

Rock that stomach girl. You have it going on.

Apartment Parking Garage

Underneath ever single building in China is a huge network of tunnels and parking garages.  This video is pretty much typical of an underground parking garage. I like the ability for her to dance and be herself in this environment. It is exactly so typical. I have seen this environment a million times before. Any American expert in China who is unaware of this aspect of China is a fucking liar, and knows jack-shit about China.

Unlike the USA, the parking garages in China are well-lit, with nicely painted walls and clear well defined pipe and utility access. One thing that surprised me when I went back to the states for a visit was just how friggin’ dungy and dirty American parking garages were. They were bare cement, often sooty. The lighting was sparse and it was typically a very dim environment.

Not so in China.

This is what just about any parking garage looks like in China. It doesn’t matter if it is up North or in the deep South. All parking garages in China are well lit, nicely taken cared for and safe.

For the purposes of comparison, let’s have a look at a typical American parking garage. As stated previously, it is almost like American parking garages are an afterthought. You will spend thousands of dollars on your car, but you end up parking them in these dingy and dismal spaces.

American parking garage
Typical American parking garage. It is typically poorly lit. The walls are often unpainted cement and never, ever washed. The floor might have parking spaces and an identification number, but that is about the extent of it.

Here’s another girl in yet another micro-video in a different parking garage…

Mall Platform #2

OK. Here we have another girl dancing in front of a mall platform. I can’t help but get a smile when I see this chick do her thing. She reminds me so… so very much of all the girls that I know in China. They are all so intrinsically happy. OMG… Oh, My God. They have nothing to worry about.

They do not have to report to the IRS. They do not have to make sure that they meet the requirements of the FCC or eat that meets FDA requirements. They do not have to worry about ICE, the CIA, or the NSA. They are so very free.

It is this attitude and this freedom from worry about the government that I have found so refreshing when I moved to China. In the United States, was I drove the car I would always look down at my speedometer when I drove past a police car. Here in China, I never need to do so, or are even concerned. The police here are friendly.

Ah, she is wearing the little white shoes so popular in China; xiao bei xie.

I know, I know, I have such a jaded view of the United States. Well, maybe you would too if the government seized everything you owned, closed your bank accounts, and destroyed any hope and change to build up a life from the ashes that remain. So I am just calling it as I see it.

I never see any American girls randomly dancing on the streets or sidewalks. When was the last time that you saw this happen spontaneously? Yet it happens in China. It happens in Brazil. It happens in Cambodia. What’s the disconnect? Maybe it has something to do with the people who are in charge of the American government…

Our rulers
The rulers of the United States. Here are the people who operate the enormous bureaucracy in the United States. You know, the ones that say one things and do the other. John Brennan. James Clapper, and their ilk.

They look like “fun” people, huh?

In her bedroom…

You know, you can kind of tell a lot about a girl by looking at her bedroom. Typically, and I do not know why this is so, unmarried girls tend to have a very messy bedroom. Well, at least in the states they do.

This girl seems to be Americanized. I would guess that she is an ABC (American-born-Chinese). If you look at the ceiling you will see that the house has central heating and cooling. This is unusual in China. Most of Asia has individual air conditioning units in each room. These AC units are called Kong Tiao which is  what you call them in China.

She has a nice oval face with a small cute pointy chin. This is considered very attractive in China. The only thing going against her is that her skin color is a little dark. She almost looks Spanish.

It looks like she has carpeting or wood panels on the floor. In China, most houses do not have carpet. It is a cultural thing. The Chinese like a solid tiled marble or granite surface, often white. They keep it immaculate. In the United States, most houses (unless the house is over fifty years old) is a simple particle-board floor covered by carpet.

You have to admit she is a very attractive young lady. I also like the way that she has manipulated the video. It is a funky joy to watch her dance.

Living Room

This girl also looks like an ABC. However, the home is genuine Chinese. The floor is tiled marble, and the curtains and decorations are very typical for China. Judging from the trees outside here window she is either on the third or fourth floor.

In China, the apartment buildings are set up with a basic floor plan. Typically the third floor has huge floor layouts and wide open porches. The largest houses in the building would be on the third floor. The reason for this is simple. The building is typically divided into towers. Often two, three or more. Each tower has it’s own elevator. So, that way, there really isn’t a serious need to wait a long time for the elevator to arrive. Especially if the building has sixty or so floors in it.

So, a house on the third floor would not be in one of the towers. Instead, it would be on one of the wide platforms at the base of the tower. It would be large, and spacious. The porch would be enormous.

What a fun girl.

Typical day in Guangzhou

I like this little micro-video. The view, the day, and the overall feeling has been duplicated a thousand times here in Southern China. It doesn’t matter if you are in Dongguang, Guangzhou, Zhongshan, or Forshan this is what it looks like. You have a wide sky with clouds. You have mountains in the distance and skyscrapers dotted here, there and everywhere.

This gal is dancing on her balcony in her house I would assume. This is all very typical. Many of the products that are exported from China to the United States are made in this area.

I suppose that if you read American or British news reports you will hear stories of nets being placed to keep workers from jumping off the buildings, rampant abuse of child labor, and  working people until they collapse from exhaustion. Well, that’s all nonsense. It’s just propaganda that is fed to Americans (and Brits) to keep us living in our isolation bubble. Here’s some links to the propaganda that I am referring to…

This video is what it is really like. Not that every worker is attractive and dancing on a balcony, but that the reality that is spoon fed to us in the West is far, far removed from what is actually going on.

She is on a typical porch. It has a glass balustrade with stainless steel or powder-coated  profiles. This is very common throughout China.

You go girl.  I could watch you dance all day long.

Look at the view. You see all those trees? If you read Western media, you might be under the impression that China doesn’t have any trees, just smoke, smog, grit and dust. Check out all that nice water, and look at the surrounding buildings. Why, I thought that all the buildings in China were crumbling and that the infrastructure was all falling down.

How can this be?

Walking on the street

Ah, my favorite time of the day is dusk. Here, in the Southern part of China, the temperatures are very hot, and the humidity is very high. When it gets around dusk, people go outside to dance, eat, and chill out with their friends. China is filled with activity. Here is a typical scene.

It looks like it was filmed in a small town or community. The buildings are very, very low by Chinese standards. But, it is China. It has the handicapped-disabled-assist-pavement tiles. It has the standard recyclable twin trash bins. The cars all have Chinese license plates.

The family-owned and run businesses are all open. And I am sure that you could smell the wonderful aromas wafting down the street. While not shown in the video, I am sure that tables are being set up and those cheap plastic chairs are being placed around them for people to sit down, have a frosty beer and place an order.

These girls are very typical.

The girls are wearing tight jeans and low open shoes. They are wearing midriff baring tops, and have nice long and straight hair that all Chinese women possess. They are carrying smart phones, which are probably either iPhones or Huawei. If I were to take a guess, they might on the way to have some seafood (Hai Xian), or maybe a hot pot. The evening BBQ (Xiao Kou) won’t get started until the sun goes down. Maybe around 9PM.

Notice that the street is tree-lined. In China it is considered very important to have green areas everywhere. At times, to me as an American, this seems ridiculous. Ever two months or so, the Park team of workers is tearing up the grass and re-planting the trees. It’s almost like they treat them like furniture instead of trees. never the less, it is great to have all the flowers and trees along side the road.

Parking Lot

Here is a video of a cute chick walking in a parking lot. There is a lot that can be learned here. For starters, notice the trees all have these poles to hold them up. the reason is simple. In the Southern sections of China we have typhoons. When they hit they can wipe out a forest in a few hours. The poles help keep the trees in place when the torrential wind and rain hits.

Notice the ancient wall. This wall looks like it is quite old. Maybe at least fifty years old. Behind it is a tree filled enclosure. Walls in China tell you a lot about the history of the region. If the wall is part of a new building then it would consist of a nice well made wall with wrought and welded gates. The fencing would be welded, cleaned and PPT coated. Older buildings would not have this, and the walls would be distressed concrete, often with some well-rusted barbed wire or even glass shards.

Also take notice of the parking spots. They are paved differently than the road surface. In fact, many parking places outside are made with these funny lattice-shaped brick tiles. This is so that grass can grow up inside and offer a nice semi-lawn on which the cars can park upon.

You can also notice that the lawn is landscaped and well maintained. It is very cheap in China for manual labor. The costs to maintain lawns and gardens are very cheap and inexpensive. Thus, most areas in China are well-maintained, clean and well-tended.

Bonus

There are many reasons to love China. I think that China is awesome. I love the food. I love that they are trying to do something about the environment. I like that they have declared war on corruption in office, and have even set up task teams of “Corruption Police” that ferrets out bad guys and executes them on the spot. And, of course, I love the girls.

Here’s a hypnotic bonus video. Enjoy.

Conclusion

Everyone likes to look at pretty girls. Even other pretty girls. I, as a man, think that pretty girls liven up our lives and make it more interesting and fun. I would not mind taking any one of these girls out and having a nice meal or playing around in a park or some other place. Having good companionship, great conversation, and enjoying a wonderful meal would be awesome with any of these women.

Today it is difficult to see what other places are like, if you are an American. Our news is heavily propagandized.

  • Those on the liberal side have the impression that China eats dogs, is full of poor waifs that sell their bodies for sex, and is full of dirty smog filled air.
  • Those on the conservative side, have the impression that China is a great war-mongered beast who wants to take over the Pacific, that they are ruthless businessmen, and want to keep their citizens imprisoned in a communist gulag.

Neither impression is correct. They are both terrible distortions.

China is a huge nation, bigger geographically than the United States, and with an enormous population far larger than America’s. In fact, there are more people in China that speak English than there are Americans in the entire world.

They live life. They work. They study hard. They try to do their best. They have fun. They raise families. They are, in many ways, like “old fashioned” Americans around 1950. While America has moved toward a progressive socialist paradise ruled by an oligarchy, China has moved in a different direction. It has moved toward free-market policies originating out of a central government. China is not at all what we think it is.

This post is my little way to help introduce China to the readership.

Take Aways

  • Chinese women are attractive.
  • Many of the buildings in China are new, and have a modern supporting infrastructure.
  • Chinese people like to dance, sing, and have fun with their friends.
  • Chinese women DO NOT look like pre-adolescent children. (Here’s a nod to the idiots in Arkansas who were absolutely convinced that Chinese women look like little pre-adolescent girls.)

FAQ

Q: Why do you only have beautiful Chinese girls? What about being more diverse and inclusive? Why do you objectify girls?
A: Well, for one, this article is about attractive Chinese girls. It wouldn’t do to have non-Chinese girls in it. Nor would it be appropriate to have men, homosexuals, fat and ugly girls, children or LGBT creatures in the article.

If you want to purge beauty out of your life, no problem. Go ahead and do it. Just like American beauty pageants are no longer about beauty. Just like American airlines have purged themselves of age and beauty standards. Just like race-cars have purged themselves of attractive women. But you won’t see that in China.

Now here, I like to surround myself with beauty. I like to surround myself with things that I like and I love. That includes dogs, cats, pizza, bacon, tomatoes, friends and of course my loved ones.

Q: Why do you use micro-videos in this post?
A: I think it does a nice job of giving a snapshot of what China is like. Many of the videos have Chinese songs. They all feature beautiful Chinese girls in China doing things that beautiful Chinese girls like to do. Of course, if you would rather go to you-tube, go ahead. You won’t find very many Chinese girls there. You-tube is banned in China because it, like Facebook, Google, and Tumblr, all collect user information and pipe that information directly to the NSA for American government’s use.

Q: Why do you think these girls are beautiful?
A: Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. What constitutes for beauty in China is different from what is beautiful elsewhere. I chose these videos because I happen to think the girls are cute, beautiful or attractive. Of course, if you disagree with me, you can leave.

Now, you shouldn’t be too upset there are some rocking girls in the United States. You should see them in sweatpants. My Lord!

Links about China

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 19AUG18.
  2. Released 20AUG18

Learning about China by Looking at Pretty Girls (1)

China is a very, very big nation. Many times I am asked what it is like. Honestly, there is so much to say, that I end up going on some tangent or the other. However, one thing that I noticed when talking to other men, is that what they really want to know is what Chinese girls are like…

Wow! That is in itself a huge subject.

Here I try to compose  a series of micro-videos of Chinese girls taking little vignettes of themselves being cute, dancing, eating, and doing girl things. It is in no way comprehensive, but it should give you a general idea of what Chinese girls are like. It will also help you to get a better idea of what China is like as well.

Here we look at ten micro-videos…

The Elevator

Here is a micro-video of a Chinese girl who is waiting at an elevator. It looks like this elevator is in some kind of business building. Many business buildings in China have advertisements in and around the elevators. In residential buildings, the elevators are much nicer and tend to have advertisements in picture frames.

You may notice that she is carrying two plastic containers. They are clean, which leads me to believe that her lunch was in those containers, and that we took the elevator to the next floor’s restroom to clean the dishes, and now she is returning to her office.

Notice that she is dressed in office attire suitable for a small business. This might be anything from retail to housing, to some kind of internet operation. She is wearing low heeled shoes that is suggestive of a middle class office complex.

The background music is a well known song that is heard throughout China.

Girl in Subway

Here is a short video of a girl waiting for the subway. Most of China has really modern and state of the art subways. While the subways in Beijing tend to be small and crowded, the rest of the nation if filled with the latest in high-tech, Japanese assisted designs with a very modern infrastructure. Notice that all signs have English underneath. In Shenzhen, the subway announcements are in three languages; Chinese, English and Cantonese.

She is wearing cute, white tennis-shoes which are called xiao bei xie (little white shoes). She has a tattoo of a line around her thigh which is important to her for some reason. She is standing on disabled-people tile. This is a special tiled floor that people who cannot see can use to get around with. All sidewalks and walking areas have this special tile. China is disabled-friendly.

She is a typical Chinese girl in that she has a purse, a small tattoo or two, she wears a short pair of shorts and a nice clean white (open back) top. You will notice on the floor are some yellow footprints. This is where people stand when they want to board the train.

Residential Area

Here is a cutie who is dancing in a residential area. The Chinese have areas zoned for business and areas zoned for residences. This is just like the United States. People who travel to China to look at a factory reflect how ugly the area looks, and then they fly home. Factory areas tend to be dirty and nasty, while residential areas are quiet, tree lined and softer. China is an area where it is considered important to have areas where people can live and experience life.

Chinese girls like to wear tight jeans, as has been the fashion for the last few years. They also like to wear light and lose fitting upper clothing as parts of China can get to be quite hot and sweaty.

Hallway

Many buildings in China are quite new. In fact, any building older than ten years old is considered to be “old”. Many buildings, in order to keep the illusion that it is new, keep the walls plain and unadorned with fresh white paint.

This is a cute girl. She is dressed typically.

In China, the color of the skin is considered to be a significant contributor to whether or not a person is attractive. In general, the lighter the skin you have, the more attractive you are. This girl has beautiful eyes, and nice shaped face, and sweet tasty lips.

Riding on a Boat

Riding on a boat is a typical pastime for many young ladies. Many of the larger cities in China are on the coast. There are significant opportunities to go out riding on the boat, having fun with friends and enjoying the views. I like this video because it reminds me that you have control of your life, and the life that you live is up to you. Live it well.

Since she is on a boat, she is wearing sunglasses, a light and loose top and comfortable clothes. This is pretty much a common scene around Hong Kong, Macao and other coastal cities.

KTV Restroom

KTV’s are very big and popular in China. There are many types. They range from business KTV’s to family KTV’s and everything in between. Here, we have a girl that is photographing herself in the shared washroom outside of the gender-separated bathroom stalls in a KTV. You can hear the various music from the various KTV rooms wafting through the hallway.

I find this girl very attractive as she has curves in all the right places, a nice face and a soft disposition. I would consider her as “cute as a button”.

By looking at the surroundings you can see some typical characteristics about many family-style KTV’s that involve sparkling tiled wall surfaces, and a kind of subdued lighting. The older people behind her gives the location away as a family KTV establishment.

Tennis Court

Here is a Chinese girl dancing in a tennis court. You will notice that she is wearing her hair up in a ponytail as the temperature tends to be warm. She is sporting a nice large tattoo which suggests that she is living in one of the larger cities. She is also wearing xiao bei xie (little white shoes).

She can dance, and she has a nice body. I like to believe that dancing is a fine way to keep fit and to keep your weight down.

Getting out of the Car

This is more my speed. Here we have a successful (or apparently so) man getting out of his fine, fine ride along with a stunning Chinese woman. Man! Now that is a Wo-man! She is certainly a stunner, let me tell you.

The venue and the situation suggests a high-end bar, club or KTV.

This is common in China, as there are many successful people in China. They are nerds who have worked hard and are rewarded by the culture and society for their efforts. This is what happens when you work hard and prosper.

Residential Street

Here we have a Chinese girl in a residential / mixed industry street. These are very common in China. As many people have and own businesses that they live inside. The front of the building is a shop and they sleep and bathe in the room(s) in the back. You can often see their children studying in the shop with the products, or making food alongside the store merchandise.

The reader should not that this is the exactly the same girl (in the same outfit) that was in the KTV micro-video above. I like her rocking body. She has a face, that by Chinese standards is quite beautiful and on the cute side. As such she is being cute for the camera in a very girly way. She has an oval face as opposed to a round face, dark Chinese black hair and beautiful eyes.

Notice that behind her is a street with various shops and residences. This looks like, to me, the southern section of China. You can see the scooters and motorized trikes that are everywhere here.

Department Store

It appears to me that this is a smaller department store in one of the smaller cities or outer towns. It is very typical. We have a cute Chinese girl dancing to one of the top popular songs of this year in an open area in the store. She is dressed in fresh cute clothes that is suggestive of a young girl still in high school.

These department stores can have some signification bargains. They typically service smaller towns and people who only make just a little bit of money. Like all stores, they can be found everywhere from big cities to small rural areas.

Conclusion

Everyone likes to look at pretty girls. Even other pretty girls. I, as a man, think that pretty girls liven up our lives and make it more interesting and fun. I would not mind taking any one of these girls out and having a nice meal or playing around in a park or some other place. Having good companionship, great conversation, and enjoying a wonderful meal would be awesome with any of these women.

Today it is difficult to see what other places are like, if you are an American. Our news is heavily propagandized.

  • Those on the liberal side have the impression that China eats dogs, is full of poor waifs that sell their bodies for sex, and is full of dirty smog filled air.
  • Those on the conservative side, have the impression that China is a great war-mongered beast who wants to take over the Pacific, that they are ruthless businessmen, and want to keep their citizens imprisoned in a communist gulag.

Neither impression is correct. They are both terrible distortions.

China is a huge nation, bigger geographically than the United States, and with an enormous population far larger than America’s. In fact, there are more people in China that speak English than there are Americans in the entire world.

They live life. They work. They study hard. They try to do their best. They have fun. They raise families. They are, in many ways, like “old fashioned” Americans around 1950. While America has moved toward a progressive socialist paradise ruled by an oligarchy, China has moved in a different direction. It has moved toward free-market policies originating out of a central government. China is not at all what we think it is.

This post is my little way to help introduce China to the readership.

Take Aways

  • Chinese women are attractive.
  • Many of the buildings in China are new, and have a modern supporting infrastructure.
  • Chinese people like to dance, sing, and have fun with their friends.
  • Chinese women DO NOT look like pre-adolescent children. (Here’s a nod to the idiots in Arkansas who were absolutely convinced that Chinese women look like little pre-adolescent girls.)

FAQ

Q: Why do you only have beautiful Chinese girls? What about being more diverse and inclusive? Why do you objectify girls?
A: Well, for one, this article is about attractive Chinese girls. It wouldn’t do to have non-Chinese girls in it. Nor would it be appropriate to have men, homosexuals, fat and ugly girls, children or LGBT creatures in the article.

If you want to purge beauty out of your life, no problem. Go ahead and do it. Just like American beauty pageants are no longer about beauty. Just like American airlines have purged themselves of age and beauty standards. Just like race-cars have purged themselves of attractive women. But you won’t see that in China.

Now here, I like to surround myself with beauty. I like to surround myself with things that I like and I love. That includes dogs, cats, pizza, bacon, tomatoes, friends and of course my loved ones.

Q: Why do you use micro-videos in this post?
A: I think it does a nice job of giving a snapshot of what China is like. Many of the videos have Chinese songs. They all feature beautiful Chinese girls in China doing things that beautiful Chinese girls like to do. Of course, if you would rather go to you-tube, go ahead. You won’t find very many Chinese girls there. You-tube is banned in China because it, like Facebook, Google, and Tumblr, all collect user information and pipe that information directly to the NSA for American government’s use.

Q: Why do you think these girls are beautiful?
A: Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. What constitutes for beauty in China is different from what is beautiful elsewhere. I chose these videos because I happen to think the girls are cute, beautiful or attractive. Of course, if you disagree with me, you can leave. This is what constitutes beauty in the United States today…

American women
After eight long, long years under Obama, the American ideal for female attractiveness looks radically different from what it was a few decades ago. Women have become fatter, plumper, heavier and not as healthy. I attribute this trend to be due to numerous factors which include GMO’s in the food and a culture that has become fat, negro-centric.

Links about China

Pretty Chinese Girls

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 18AUG18.
  2. SEO review 19AUG18.
  3. Conclusions and Publish 19AUG18.

 

 

Links about China

Popular Music of China
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

How a Business KTV works in China

Just about every article on the internet that discusses KTV’s in China, talk about the “family-friendly” KTV’s. They discuss how they work and what it is like. They talk about the food, and the fun. Well, no one seems to want to talk about the Business KTV’s in China. Which is really, really odd. As you just cannot do business in China without going to one. For goodness gracious, that is one of the most common things that businessmen encounter when doing business in Asia.

This post discusses this side of Chinese industry.

As all my posts, it is politically incorrect. If you are are not ready for it, I would suggest that you leave right now. This post talks about one of the most important aspects of doing business in China – the negotiations over dinner, drink and song. It doesn’t matter if you are in the North of China, the South of China, Vietnam, or Korea, it is all pretty much the same.

Introduction

One of the first things that the Interns ask me when they come to work for me, is “what is it like doing business in China”. To which I must answer, “it is really, really different.” Work is work, and business is business. That being said, in China there is a particular aspect that has a great deal of importance. This is [1] the concept called “face” or “mingzi”. The second most important aspect is [2] friendships.

While, the Chinese boss and businessman would be very happy to take your money and make a part for you. He won’t treat you very special, even if you promise him ten million dollars of business. You will be just another smuck from the West that he is dealing with. You are just a potential client. You have not yet “earned your stripes”.

The key to getting your product or service taken cared for, is to build up a relationship with the factory boss. Heck, we all know this. In fact, in America we have been taught that businesses are based upon relationships. Yet, strange things is, with the current crops of MBA’s that are exiting universities, they seem to think that people are numbers in a ledger, and quite disposable.

Efficieny experts
Efficiency experts sorting out who to fire and who to retain.

Not so in China.

While in the USA, you might get a visitor from another country, and say good-bye to him at the end of the day. The Chinese will expect to share a meal with you. They will expect a tour of the local surroundings, and some local cuisine. (As would most businessmen from other nations.) When in China, you will be given the “royal treatment”, as the opportunity that you offer the factory is considered valuable.

You would also be expected to smoke, and drink to excess. In China, powerful bosses all can eat, drink and party to excess. The ideal “big boss” in China is a cross between Tony Soprano and Attila the Hun. If you cannot meet their expectations, then any contract that you sign with them will be a weak one.

via GIPHY

The ideal "big boss" in China is a cross between Tony Soprano and Attila the Hun. If you cannot meet their expectations, then any contract that you sign with them will be a weak one.
The boss in China.
The value, and the relative importance of the “Boss” differs between that of Western companies and companies in the East. In China, the boss is all powerful and all important. His word is absolute.

Your goal is to facilitate a strong contract, and a solid working relationship. Anything less is a waste of your time.

Aside from the factory tour, and discussions over tea and cigarettes (I like to call it “death” by tea and cigarettes.), you will be given a chance to “freshen up” in your hotel room prior to the evening festivities.  A driver will take you to your hotel, and you and your aide will be escorted to your room where you can rest (often from jet lag), check your emails, write a report (if you are in a big company), and chill out. I like to use this time to take a shower and a short 90 minute nap. But, that’s just me.

Hotel Pickup

Usually, before the car comes and the girls pick you up (typically the aides and Marketing Manager is female), I tend to go down to the VinGo (a HK version of 7-11) in the lobby and pick up some anti-drunk medicine. In fact, truth be told, you should always have [1] some aspirin or Tylenol, [2] stomach medicine, and [3] some ED medicine if you are over 30. The anti-drunk medicine is a vial of liquid that you drink during dinner, say about thirty minutes before you eat. It helps to neutralize the effects of alcohol in your body so that you won’t get too drunk too fast. It won’t take away from your enjoyment, but it will help you.

via GIPHY

After all, you can now expect a solid six to eight hours of hard drinking. So, you need to be prepared. After all, your body will be affected by the alcohol.

That is an entire night of HARD drinking of HARD alcohol.

This means that you will need to take some medicine beforehand. In China, of course, you don’t need prescriptions for most medicines. That’s only in America. The rest of the world expects people to be responsible with their own bodies.

You you can just get the ED medication at the counter. Just write the name on a slip of paper and the chick behind the counter will give it to you. Viagra is around 125 RMB, or around $20/pill. But you can by the local generic version for 200 RMB for 20 pills, or 10 RMB/pill (around $1.25). Cialis is the medicine of choice for us older gentleman. But you will need to pay for it in the full outrageous American price. Figure around 135 RMB/pill.

.Women in China re quite lovely.
The girls in China a lovely. That includes all of the Han Chinese throughout Asia. They really know how to keep men happy.

Since the chances are that you will be in the Southern China section, make sure that you change your underwear. It is tropical, and you will need to take multiple showers and use ample deodorant.

Chances are that you will stay in your hotel, unless the factory boss has made other arrangements. Some of the better business KTV’s have rooms upstairs. In any event, make sure that your “wingman” or aide (male or female) fully understands that you will be the one who will give all the face. They must restrain their drinking. They must watch the belongings, and your passport. And, they must keep an eye out so that no problems befall you.

Typically, my aide is an employee. Depending on the situation, I’ve had one of my Chinese engineers (fluent in English) come with me, or my Marketing Manager (female Chinese-born Canadian) who would be with me. Now, you might think that the woman would be all hot and bothered about conducting this kind of business relationship, but that hasn’t been the case at all. In fact, she welcomed it. Heck, you should have seen her the next morning all beaming and happy.

Now, everyone would get their own individual room. And we would all agree on a time to meet. Typically, one person (never myself) gathers everyone up to go down to the lobby and get into the car.

Dinner

You will most likely NOT eat Western food. If they offer it to you, decline. You are in China. You want to make their face as big as possible. Suggest their local delicacy, or a restaurant that cooks the same kind of meals that their home town makes. Let the factory boss select the restaurant.

Now, typically, the driver will either take you back to the factory where you will meet the others for the dinner, or you will drive directly to the restaurant. In almost all cases, there will be a private room reserved in the restaurant. This is a private dining room. It will typically have a nice bathroom, a set of sofa’s and comfortable chairs, a television, and a huge circular table.

Chinese private room
Most private rooms in China look a little something like this. They consist of a large central table and comfortable furnishings.

You, as the boss will be led to the room, and offered the “boss seat”. This is a chair that faces the door. You sit down, and everyone else arranges themselves around the table. The seating arrangement is hierarchical, with the various ranks of the individuals placed strategically around the table. The driver of the car(s) will also attend the meal, though they will typically be silent and not participate into any of the discussions.

You will be offered some cigarettes, just like at the factory. As the boss it is your responsibly to accept the cigarettes, or else you will lose face. Oh, yeah, it’s not healthy and all that second-hand smoke nonsense. Well, if you are doing business in China, you will need to adopt local customs. You do not want to lose face.  You accept the cigarette. You take a drag. You hold it in. Tilt you head back, and stare up at the ceiling and then exhale the smoke slowly.

via GIPHY

You need to adapt to Chinese culture. Do not lose the face of the boss. Else they might serve you dog’s head or something equally disgusting as a way to see how low you can go.

Out of politeness, you will be offered a menu and you can select what to eat. As I typically live in the Guangzhou region, I will choose Guangzhou style food. This is easy to do, as the menu consists of full-color glossy photos of delicious food. Guangzhou food is typically steamed lightly. It is very fresh and very tasty. Now, if you were in Hunan or Sichuan, the food would be very spicy and delicious. That’s a good thing too.

Anyways, as a general rule, you order two dishes more than the number of people at the table. So, if there were six people around the table, including yourself, you would order eight dishes. (Oh, yes, everyone shares the dishes. This is quite different from the West where everyone gets their own meal.)

Being in Guangzhou, you order one thing that walks (pig, beef, mutton), one thing that flies (chicken, duck, goose), and one thing that swims (fish or seafood like shrimp). If there is a near certainty that you will go to a business KTV and you might have an all-night companion, you should make sure to order a nice large plate of oysters. Just make sure that they are fresh. Otherwise, watch out!

In general, once the three main dishes are ordered, I usually like to order vegetables, tofu, and assorted other dishes such as braised pig fat, flat bread, and maybe jellyfish. Let the other (hosting) people make suggestions and nod your head in violent agreement with their selections.

The waitress, or room manager will ask what you want and take your order. You, with your aide, will select the pictures and work out the details. While the picture might say a thousand words, there is typically a discussion of lively banter on what kind of fish, how to cook it, what spices to use, etc. Let them work out the issues.

Then, some condiments will be placed on the table. These might include peanuts infused in vinegar and spices (a personal favorite), some long white bars, that are actually pickled carrots, and some chicken feet. Try them all. It’s all good.

Then comes the tea ritual…

Tea Ritual

China has many different kinds of rituals for tea. By now, you would have experienced the business negotiations over a tea ritual that occurs at the factory in the office. This is a dinner tea ritual. Here, you use tea to wash the cups and plates.

Wrapped dishes
Almost all restaurants in China have their dishes pre-sanitized and bubble wrapped for protection. This is very common, from the farthest point North to the extreme Southern end of China.

Granted, all the cups and plates are pre-sanitized. They are in these clear shrink-wrapped bubbles, that you need to break open to get the dishes out of. I typically use my chopsticks (quaizi) and punch a hole in the sealed plastic. Then tear it open with my hands. The idea is to get all the dishes out of the bubble wrap. Then, once they are out, you pour the scalding hot tea all over the dishes and utensils to clean them.

Once the dishes have been washed, you then pour the (now dirty) tea into a large clear bowl that is provided for exactly that purpose. The bowl will be passed around and then taken away by one of the waitress chicks.

Drinks

Before the food starts to arrive, there will be the decision on what kind of alcohol that you will be drinking. Typically, beer is a drink for lunches. Evenings, especially for a night of hard drinking will have to get started off right. If given the choice, I vote for red wine.

The wine in poured into a large glass carafe. One person, typically an aide of the factory boss will take on this responsible, or at the very least will instruct the waitress to do so.

Gan Bei
Everyone who has every been to China knows about Gan Bei. This is a fundamental part of Chinese culture, and if you are unaware of it, then you really have never visited China nor participated in the culture there.

“Red wine” is drunk not like wine is drunk in the West. It is quaffed down in glasses “bottom up style”. (Gan Bei!) Typically, you will need to drink to everyone at the table individually. Then multiple times with your host. You will also be expected to drink with your aides.

There are really three ways of drinking;

  • Full glass (reserved ONLY for the boss and to cheer an agreement.)
  • Half a glass (the most common) called “ye ban de ban”.
  • One fourth a glass (offered about mid way though the meal) called “ye ke”.

Drinking red wine permits you to be able to stand up straight after your meal and be able to walk to the KTV without having to be supported by your aides. This is pretty important to save “face”. Though if everyone is drinking VSOP, XO or that God-forsaken 53 degree “white wine”, you will all need to be carried out.

White Wine (BaiJiu)

In China today Baijiu is drunk almost exclusively at meals, as alcohol is a very important part of Chinese dining culture. Baijiu is served in shot sized glasses and used during toasts to show respect and build relationships.

When toasting, the Baijiu glass of is gripped with both hands, with either one hand on either side, or with one hand/finger on the bottom of the glass. After a Er Guo Tou (二锅头) is a cheap type of Baijiu available every-where-toast the Baijiu is usually consumed in one gulp.

Following a toast, the glass can be turned upside down or tilted forward to display that one has consumed the entire glass, and thus give face to your friend, partner or host.

Moutai
The best white wine in China is Moutai. It is pure moonshine and comes in 53%. Ugh!

If you do decide to drink VSOP or XO, make sure that it is mixed with green tea, else you will get too drunk too quickly.

One should pay attention not to raise his/her glass higher than those of the respected elders; When two glasses clink, how high people hold their glasses shows hierarchy. When the host toasts you, keep his glass higher. These insights hold true at most dinners with hierarchy, such as corporate dinners with bosses, meals with clients and multi-generation family gatherings.

Personal Note.

Some younger factory bosses or owners will get excited and try to show you respect by trying to slam dunk Gan Bei. Do not fall for it. Aside from trying to make you unable to stand up, it will completely decimate your blood fluid pressure in your nether regions. Which really sucks, if offered full-on hospitality.

Always moderate your drinking. Afew Gan Bei's are fine. Just keep it under thirty in total. In general, the rule should be occasional drinking. Have your second (in command) drink for you.

In many places in China, especially northern China, the drunker a person becomes via being toasted with Baijiu (or other liquors and alcohols) the more Face has been conferred upon them. Therefore, it can be common for visitors to China to be entertained by well-meaning Chinese hosts who are intent on showing them as must respect as possible, by getting them as drunk as possible, on an completely unfamiliar and relatively strong liquor.

Be respectful (jìng jiǔ敬酒)

jìngjiǔ 敬酒 : “respectfully proposing a drink.” People will likely toast you to show their respect and hospitality. As a foreigner, you’re not expected to do likewise, but it will be much appreciated if you do. Once you’ve started, make sure you toast everyone who might outrank you. If the people are many and you’re worried your head might not take it well, you can tick them off in twos and threes; it’s perfectly acceptable.

When someone toasts you, you should immediately stop eating and drinking to accept and toast in response. All people sitting at the same table must stand up, upon the initiative of one of the guests, and toast in succession; Remember, one should never refuse to participate in a toast. If you turn down a drink, your Chinese counterpart may feel like he has lose his face.

If you’re the one offering the toast, you’re putting yourself in an inferior position, which means you have to be the more respectful one. Thus, it’s better if you stand up and empty your cup completely. The other person may remain seated and drink just a bit, but usually they will go out of their way to show you the same respect.

Respect and “Face”

“To me, your “face” is your position and standing in the eyes of others, and it also has to do with the degree of respect you receive. Face can also be saved up over time and used to accomplish things later on. If you drove a fashionable or luxurious car to attend a friend’s party, then the majority of your friends would feel that you had face. Also, if you can achieve something through your personal contacts that others cannot through normal channels, you would also be thought to have face. You can gain face if you are praised by your boss, or if you accomplish a difficult task at work. However, if you greet others warmly at social events, but are met only with indifference, then you would lose face. Questioning someone’s  ideas or opinion in a public setting would cause that person to lose face.”
– James Tan, Sales Manager, Shanghai

When a client relationship is established in China, the client more often than not receives more Face in the early stages of a relationship from the “seller.” Face must be given to the client to make him or her believe that the seller is worthy of their money and time.

Sometimes giving Face to a contact entails simply words and compliments, though sometimes gifts are required and invitations to dinners, entertainment, or other social events.

To the Chinese there is a natural order in society as well as business, and if one is unwilling or unable to show the proper amount of Face to those that feel they deserve it, then one will likely be judged to not have good character. This has the potential to wreck business deals and sour relationships, so with regard to the issue of Face most Chinese business people tread with care.

Food and Eating

Now, you will need to be a little buzzed when the food is set out. In China they eat everything. So if you are a bit squeamish, you had best be fortified with strong liquor.  Fish are presented with all the bones, so you must be careful and eat around them. In the USA the cook guts the fish (fillets it), and throws away the head, tail, and fins. Not so in China. They love that stuff.

Chinese chicken
The Chinese eat everything. They love the differences in flavors and textures.

Chicken will have everything thrown into one pot. This will include the entire bird from heart to legs, and everything in between. The only thing missing would be the feathers. And you, you as the host will be given the chicken head on a plate.

Chicken Head
Cooked chicken head. All ready to eat. Enjoy yourself. Show the boss some respect and pop this sucker in your mouth and suck on it. Just make sure you had some alcoholic beverage first.

For me, I really wow everyone buy sticking the head in my mouth and sucking on it for five or ten minutes, then I spit it out in a napkin. I always get a round of drinks out of it. Personally, I think it helps make me a little strong in the bedroom area, if you know what I mean. There must be some mineral, vitamin or protein that is in the fish head that is good for older men, me thinks.

Try everything.

The single biggest cultural conflict I found was the Western rule that you should finish the food put in front of you with the Chinese rule that a guest should never be left with an empty plate or cup, and should always be urged to eat and drink.  At first, I felt that I was in a contest to try to eat and drink everything they gave me, until I realized that it was acceptable for me to politely refuse to eat or drink more.

-What are the biggest cultural shocks when you visit China

The host will make sure that you bowl is filled. Unlike the United States, a full bowl is a sign that you are finished eating. In the States, we couldn’t leave the table until everything was cleaned off our plates. “Waste not, want not” is the saying I believe. Well, that doesn’t go down too well in China. I must have gained fifty pounds before I figured it out.

Make sure that food remains in your bowl.

Oh, yeah, in China it is totally fine to spit things out on your plate. So you eat some fish, you can spit the bones on the plate near you or on the table cloth. Same with the bones, grizzle, and chicken claws.

Finally, the Chinese do not use "fortune cookies". They haven't the foggiest idea what they are. Most think that it is disgusting to have written paper inside a cookie that you eat.

KTV Prep

Eventually, the bottles of wine will be empty. Everyone will be full.

The aide will gather the left over bottles. Any cigars you are smoking will be finished. The aide will call the KTV and make sure that the room is reserved. He will typically get up off from the table and call at the side of the room, or in the hallway. The boss might call the manager of the girls (they operate outside of the club), and make what ever arrangements that he has in mind.

Typically (but not always) the manager of the girls will be an attractive woman in her 30’s. Hard as nails, and no-nonsense. Most have raised up through the ranks to get where they are today. Think Sharon Stone in the movie Casino.

You build relationships with these managers. As such, you get to know them. They manage the girls and they provide promotions and arrangements as necessary.

  • Sometimes girls want to be with their friends. So they would only work with a client if their friend can participate. I’ve seen this with two girls, and three girl teams. The only thing about this is that you need to make sure that all of the girls are equally playful. No one wants to spend any time with a sour-puss that has some home or family issues. Or even worse, a gal who just stands there stamping her foot anxiously and demands that both girls leave. Yikes!
  • Sometimes the girl has had a bad run of luck, and hasn’t been selected all week. So the manager would promote the girl. Maybe offer a reduced price, or extra services, or extra-long time, or maybe cart Blanche on the activities involved in.
  • Sometimes the timing is really bad, as all the girls are at home during holidays, or a number of the most popular girls are sick. The manager would need to make this clear and work out arrangements that might make some of the more unpopular girls more attractive to the client.
  • Often, the girl might not want to be physical with you. That is fine. That is her choice. The manager will then find a girl that will want to. In general, I would rather be with a girl that is enthusiastic to be with me, than a girl I picked based on appearance. No matter what you might think, the truth is that there will always be some girls that would really want to be with you.

Now, the management fee for the girls is actually quite small. This is something that surprised me. In The United States, I was under the impression that all prostitutes had pimps and the pimp would take the vast bulk of the money the gals made. Not so in China.

Han Chinese
Chinese girls for the most part are Han Chinese. This is the same race as the Koreans. In a like way, the Han Chinese and the Koreans are very similar. This picture is a mixture of both Korean and Chinese girls. Can you tell who is who?

The manager is paid by both the girls and the KTV. The payment amount is often quite small. Maybe a few hundred RMB a month (Maybe $30 / month). They make their money in volume, and repeat customers. If you have a troop of one hundred girls, that’s a solid $3,000 USD per month on girls alone. That is un-taxed, and keep in mind that that is actually equivalent to maybe $20,000 / month. Because the cost of living in China is much less than that in the Untied States.

Once, the girls have been introduced to the clients (as discussed later), final payment arrangements will have been established by the KTV and the manager. The money that exchanges hands goes into two batches. There is a direct “tip” that is given to the manager as a “thank you” for their services, and the transaction between the girl and the guy who selects her. In the case of the boss buying the girl, it is handled by his side. The girl gets 100% of that money.

Anyways, more about that later…

Whatever arrangements are made, eventually you will be led (oh yes, boy… you will be led) to the car and then to the KTV.

Some more Chinese KTV hostesses
Typical Chinese KTV hostesses. They wear different outfits, and it is not unusual for them to change in and out of the different outfits all night depending on the client and the situation. I always like the “Gone with the Wind” look where the girls would dress up in these huge flowing dresses, and have their makeup all done up. It’s a real experience, let me tell you.

From that moment on, you will be given “Red Carpet” treatment. You have proven yourself. If you handled yourself well, you out drank the boss, out smoked the co-workers, and ate a chicken’s head and spit it out. You gave the boss great face. Now, it is his turn to repay the favor.

How he will give YOU face.

KTV

The KTV will be lit up like a Casino. You will typically be driven directly to the front door, and an assistant will open the door open for you to exit the car from. It is important that you take your time. Stand straight. Smile, and look around you. The manager of the girls might greet you there. Though, she would make a bee-line to the factory boss first.

You will be led into the lobby. It will be well-attired and look like the inside of a casino or movie theater from the 1920’s. Lining both sides of the lobby, and forming a path would be two lines of girls. One on our left, and one on your right. Big KTV’s might have a couple of hundred girls in the line up, while smaller KTV’s might only have a handful.

KTV lobby lineup
Here is a typical lineup of girls in the lobby of a KTV. This is obvious a small-town or rural business KTV. There are only a few girls and the establishment is more hotel than KTV. They girls are all wearing identical dresses and welcome you. Typically they might bow and welcome you to the KTV, while the lead girl might take your arm and lead you to the room chosen for you.

The girls will all be wearing the same style outfit. Typically a dress. It seems like the classier places have the girls wearing long gowns. The girls will all be made up, and smiling. Every time that I go through these kinds of lines, I end up getting a great big grin on my face. The girls see this and start giggling, whispering to themselves, and smiling back.

All are stunning.

KTV girls upon arrival
Typical KTV girls. Some wear the same kinds of outfits, while others dress for the theme for the day or week. The girls need to purchase all the clothes that they wear. Most KTV’s require them to wear traditional Chinese dresses with a slit up the one leg and one shoulder bare.

Some KTV’s, especially in the smaller towns, cities and rural areas only have a few girls to choose from. You always get a better and bigger selection of girls in the bigger cities. In places like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Beijing there might have 250 to 600 girls to select from. All are stunning.

I only wish that I could have photos to post about this issue.

In fact, the demand for the girls to work is so high, that the KTV’s often have to turn away girls and charge them to work there. That’s absolutely right. They have to pay a monthly fee for the privilege of working there. However, it makes sense when you really think about it.

KTV Hostess
The girls are considered Hostesses, as they not only entertain their client during the KTV adventure, but they can sing, and dance as well. I have five years semi-professional ballroom dancing experience, and all can follow quite well. Notice the girls. They all have a darker complexion, wider noses, and shorter in statue. They are obviously from the Southern section of China.

The best way for a girl in her 20’s to meet a successful businessman, or middle manager is though a KTV. That way, she can get picked, and if she likes the man, she can stay in contact with him. Often making other arrangements. Many girls date men this way, and often have a group of guys that follow them around and give them money and such. As the guys, just like the girls, want to pick a high-quality mate.

In China, it is critical that the girls get married before they turn 28. They are considered to be non-marriageable after that date. So what the girls tend to do is spend their 20’s looking the best that they can, and doing what they can to attract the most suitable man. Otherwise, their parents will fix them up with a date. While the girl can say no, what usually happens is the girl just gives up and shrugs her shoulders and say “well, he’s good enough”.

To prevent this from happening, many girls work as KTV hostesses if they are in any way attractive.

Attractiveness is a cultural construct. The ideas of what is attractive varies from culture to culture. In China the attractive girls tend to be pale, frail, with big eyes, long black hair and a shape that is known as “fish shaped”.  In the states, especially over the last decade or two, the ideas of female attractiveness has migrated towards dark skin, big pouty lips, big breasts and big asses. Which often causes some surprise to the girls who work at the KTV. They ask “why do Americans always pick the ugliest girls”?

Chinese ideal for beauty
Ideas about physical beauty vary from culture to culture. In China, the ideal is pale skin, a calm and pleasant demeanor, long black hair, big eyes, and a pleasant smile. They tend to have a fish shape for a body and walk in a calm purposeful manner.

It’s a cultural thing.

If you read my post about the r/K theory, culture and society migrates biologically towards situations that improve species survival. In the United States, it is a r-society. It is a society where there is abundance. So people act similarly to rabbits. In a K-society, like China it is a land of scarcity. So they tend to be more predatory, like wolves.

r/K selection theory

That translates into many aspects of society. One of which is conceptions of beauty.

Now, I had best make this clear right off. A hostess doe not necessarily have sex with the clients. No. Instead, they party with them. They play games with them. They drink and dance with them. If there is a mutual interest, the manager can broker a financial payment arrangement that favors the girl.

There is no guarantee that the girl will trade sex for money. In China, the girl controls what will happen. It’s all up to her. The only thing the guy gets to do is pick her out of a line up. Everything else is fully scripted and controlled by the girl.

Whether or not a girl will have sex with a client is a decision made by the girl.

Sometimes she just feels like she wants to have sex. Sometimes she doesn’t, as it might be her period, and in China this is a big no-no. Maybe she isn’t going to have sex because one of her girlfriends in the club is not having sex. Maybe she doesn’t like you. Maybe you stink, or remind her of someone else. Maybe you are too old, too young, too poor, or just too drunk. Maybe your skin color is too dark, or you are Arabic, or you showed a lack of manners.  In all cases… she decides what will happen.

In any event, the girl’s manager will know exactly what is going on and will steer more willing and able girls your way if need be.

KTV room
The KTV rooms are often lavish. They are nice and typically dark so that all kinds of activities and things can occur. The bosses aide will get the thing going by talking to the room manager and arranging for food and drink to be brought forth.

When you enter the KTV, you will typically walk through the gauntlet of girls, totally overwhelmed, and be led to your KTV room. These are nice private rooms with bathroom facilities, food trays and all sorts of drinks. As you go in, you pick a seat and make yourself at home.

Soon enough, they will start bringing the girls in. They will bring them in at 20 a time. They girls will parade in front and form a line. Then upon command they will turn around so that you can see their back. They will then strike a pose. There are numerous poses that they take on. All are very becoming and quite attractive.

Staged KTV Hostesses
Chinese KTV Hostesses waiting in readiness for a line up. Typically they get together and stage themselves in an empty KTV room or in the hallway.

Nothing out of Jerry Springier, and no fat girls waving their enormous spandex tight asses. That is reserved for President Obama’s America. No. Here, the girls are demure, polite and act respectful. After all, day in and day out, they are paraded in front of factory bosses, internet CEO’s, Directors of banks, and other managers of high regard. They want to look their best, and be their best.

Contrary what the news media or the internet might say, China is not a “sex monger” paradise. It just isn’t. China is a nation of hard working nerds. If you want to experience some of the rewards of hard work, labor and study, then come to China. Otherwise and else look elsewhere.

These girls will smell a fake a mile away. You had best be working hard. Show that you know your stuff, and are willing to provide fun and entertainment to your business contacts. China is all about hard work, and relationships. If you are willing to work hard, and have built up a presence in China, and going to a KTV would be your reward.

The Scheme

In general, you can select a person to have a good time with. If you are a guy, this would be a girl. If you are a girl, this would be a guy. You pay them, maybe 300 RMB ($50) and they will play games with you, sing with you, dance with you, and talk with you. This is all over China. It’s common from Bars, to clubs, to hotels to KTV’s. It’s a great way to pass the time, and make some new friends.

The difference is that at a Business KTV, the girls are also willing to spend more (ahem) quality time with you afterwards. They also tend to be more frisky. Heh heh.

All for a price, don’t you know…

Age

The age of the girls differs from most other KTV and bar avenues. Inside a business KTV, the girls are expected to provide a service. That means, that they are forbidden to sit there and play on their cell phone once they are selected. That means that they must play with the client, and monitor his drink intake. It means that they must control the environment so that he has a good time and does not lose any face. Young girls are too inexperienced, or not mature enough for this level of responsibility.

The girls in a business KTV are typically between 22 and 29 years of age. I would guess that the highest percentage of them are around 23 to 25 years old.

Girls of the Business KTV.
The girls that you will encounter as Hostesses in a Business KTV in China will tend to be attractive, and stunning. These girls are really high quality, young and intelligent.

Girl Selection

The most important thing, and the only thing that you have any degree of control over is the selection of the Hostess. Pick the girl that strikes your fancy. If she is in the first line up, so be it. I typically get a girl by the time the third line up enters. I mean, goodness, if you cannot find an attractive girl when 60 attractive females are paraded in front of you, then you are useless.

You can ask the girls to turn around so you can see their backsides.

You can also ask which ones speak any English. Though, for the most part the KTV’s are loud and noisy. So we just use YouDou or WeChat to translate. In any event, you want a girl that you will have fun with.

During the selection process the girls will typically all have a number pinned to their dress. This number is the number of the girl and is used for billing purposes. There will also be variations in color. The color range is usually based on three stages; cheap, middle, and expensive. Maybe yellow, green and red for example. As an American, my tastes do not match those of a Chinese man. So, as a result, a cheap priced girl I might find fantastically alluring, while an expensive priced girl might be too thin or pale for my tastes. In any event, if the boss is paying your way. Price is no object.

The girl will remove the number shortly once she settles down with a client. Generally, she will continue to wear the introductory dress for the first hour or so, then she will live to the locker room and change into her day to day clothes. High-end girls will typically change into a nice party dress, while more “regular” girls will change into street clothes. This might be a sweater and a pair of jeans or something similar.

Often, I have been given the opportunity to select two girls, and even three, to play with. But, you know, I am just a man. I am not a machine.

I am a man. I am not a machine.

Now, this is not the USA. You can play with the girls and you most certainly will. Throughout China, the girls are hand’s on. Meaning that you can pretty much explore their entire body with your drunk roaming hands. Now that pretty much remains the case whether or not you take them to the room upstairs with you.

However, please take note, that a slimy drunk slob is not someone that any of the Hostesses would want to spend any time in the room (or bed) with. So, as a rule, I for the most part remain a gentleman, and only initiate sexual contact when edged on by the other boss, or if presented with that opportunity by the girl herself.

That being said, depending on the time, place, and the situations, sometimes the girls might elect to  go semi-nude. They will take off their dress and be with you only wearing their panties. Unlike the United States, the rest of the world doesn’t have the same kind of taboos about woman’s’ breasts that Americans have. So if this is indeed the case, just enjoy and have a good time.

It will be a good time.

About the Girls

The Chinese culture is not the same as American culture is. It is very traditional. Girls expect a traditional man, and they take on traditional roles. In their young years, from around 18 to around thirty, the girls will concentrate on building a career (if that is their preference) and attracting a mate. In today’s society, the female is expected to be married, take care of a family and have a baby.

It sounds so strange to us Americans.

For we have had decades of new progressive values rammed down our collective throats. We have been taught that men and woman (as well as just about all of the other 64 genders) have the same values and interests. We are taught that it is very sexist to be attracted to a pretty girl. We are taught that looking at an attractive girl is the same as raping her. We are taught that men don’t own women, and the highest complement that a woman can have is to be superior to a man in every way possible.

It’s no wonder that America is the way it is today.

Meanwhile the rest of the world has traditional values. Women are taught to be attractive. They want to be attractive. They want to be ladylike, and they yearn to become a mother with a family and a man that supports them. They learn how to budget for a family. They know how to cook, care for sick family members, and do what ever it takes to support the man to earn and make money. For in a traditional society, the man is the bread-winner. The wife tends to the home. She tends to the family, and she tends to her man.

In China, young women do what ever they can to increase their chances for finding “Mr. Right”. Though, in Chinese terms, this doesn’t really equate to heart-felt love. Instead it equates to finding a good strong “family man” who will work hard, support the family, and support her family. In a like way, Chinese men feel the same way. They want to become the strong man in charge of the family. They want to be able to provide for their family. They want to participate in the education and growth of their children.

The ladies spend hours getting ready for work.

Prior to showing up at work, typically around four or five, the ladies will be at a hair salon. They will get their hair all fixed. They will have their nails done, and have a professional makeup artist apply the makeup. There is an entire sub-culture of salons that cater only to the KTV trade in this respect. Once all dressed up, they make their way to the KTV and clock in. There, they go to their lockers and see which dresses and outfits that they are assigned to wear for the day.

In Shenzhen, you can often see these gals in the salons in  Louhu village getting ready for the night’s adventures.

Girls and the KTV table.
Once everything gets settled, the lights might come on so that people can check their phones, and notice where the chargers are. As all girls have the latest in cell phone technology. All rooms are fully Wifi enabled. They will typically get out of their costumes and put on party clothes so that they can be more comfortable with the clients. Here, you can see that the girls have changed out of their formal costumes and are wearing their outside clothes. In this case, mostly short party dresses.

The girls typically share an apartment with another girl or two. If they have a string of men that support them, they might have their own apartment that is provided to them by a love-struck hopeful. It’s not really an issue, as typically the men only visit China once every three or four months. They can rearrange their busy schedule (and trust me, for some gals, it is really busy) and make time for their one man to visit China.

Girl Types

The girls are semi-predictable.

22 year old Chinese girls
Chinese ladies are very beautiful when they are 22 years old. They know how to take care of themselves, and spend a lot of time to look well and dress properly.

The youngest girls at a Business KTV will be no younger than 21 years old typically. The younger girls, of course, use the money they earn for new clothes, phones, and fashion. They tend to make many blunders. They often lose their phones, get too drunk, and get tangled up with bad people. Somehow they always seem to brush it off adroitly.  This means that they might end up trying some drugs, or having their money stolen, or get into a fight with another girl. The younger gals that I know are usually out of the business after one or two years. These girls tend to get pregnant really young, maybe 23 years old. In China having a baby under 28 is considered very young.

Girls in their middle 20’s, say 25 to 27, who have already been doing this for a few years have decided to earn money for their own purposes. They are fully ready to get married and channel all their money into looking good and snagging as many hopeful men as possible.

25-year old Chinese girls
Here is a selection of “typical” 25 year old girls in China. Also just as beautiful as their younger counterparts. However, at this age, they are much more focuses and motivated in finding a good mate and establishing a good family.

The girls in their middle-20’s, if they have the beauty, they migrate to the cities and go to the very expensive KTV’s. Here they can make enormous amounts of money, as well as meet some very powerful people. Again, the end goal is to get married to a “good man” (by Chinese standards) and have a family by the time they are 28.

Those who are older than this, typically are focused on setting up their own business. For one reason or another, they no longer rely on the objective of having a man provide for their family and children. They believe that they can do it on their own. Their objective is thus different. It is to set up their own business, where they can control the finances, and establish a family. This could be anything from their own hair salon, fashion boutique, or food franchise. I have met a girl who owns a number of famous Western franchises in China. I don’t know about you guys, but it would take me a century to save up to buy a McDonald’s franchise on an engineering salary.

30 Year old Chinese girls
Here is a selection of some Chinese ladies that have reached thirty years of age. The Chinese female form certainly ages well. At this point in time of their life, they have decided to move forward on their life alone, and career, business and other pursuits take precedence over finding a mate.

Most of the managers of the girls fit this last profile.

China holds the title for the world’s most female billionaires.

http://www.mogulite.com/female-billionaires-chinese/

Having Fun

The parties can get rather crazy. However, mostly I would say that they are pretty stable affairs, with drinking, singling and playing games of dice. The most popular game is a game of five dice in a small red plastic cup. You shake the cup and the person who loses has to drink. There are various games that fit within this framework. All are similar and structured the same way; to get drunk.

Boss in the KTV
When a boss goes to a Business KTV, he can let his hair down, relax and have a good time. He can eat, sing and enjoy the friendship of an attractive female companion. What is not to like?

Other games include burning a tissue holding the dice in a cup, number games, and of course singing. I cannot sing Chinese songs very well, so Duets are out of the question. But I can sing numerous Chinese songs which surprises the ladies. However, all in all, I like to sing American songs.

A little beer is definitely in order (and is usually cheap) so order some Tsing Tao and get to work. In the KTV, it is perfectly fine to start drinking beer. Though I am often entangled with some younger Chinese managers to drink beer until they pass out. I usually have none of that nonsense, and ask my companion to take over for me. I am a boss, I don’t need to prove that I can drink.

Certainly not using beer. It is like water to me.

If you don’t like singing the girls will often sing to you and sometimes they’re pretty good (they get lots of practice). There are various games.  I like to play the games with dice, which is a drinking game.  One game involves covering a glass with tissue and taking turns burning the tissue to see who will cause a die on the paper to fall.  They also really like playing rock paper scissors. (The American version comes from China.)

My preferred American songs include groups such as Aerosmith, and country and western singers. Ah, many a night the ladies would have to endure me singing Oasis’s song “Wonderwall”, and “She ain’t Right”, by Lee Brice. Of course, you must have the girls belt out a tearful love song or two. This is mandatory, and make sure that you fuss over them. It is the closest way that any Chinese lady will express any emotion.

Remember, the KTV environment is a “safe space” where the individual is protected and permitted to let “it all out”. They can be crazy. They can be emotional. They can be and live the fantasy that they want.

At some point a guy or a gal is going to come in with a cart full of goodies… little snacks and stuff like that. It’s cheap by American standards so don’t worry. For us locals, well, we tend to think of it as expensive and pricey.

High end joints will have a cigarette girl wearing a crotch-high cute dress and a little bell-boy pill-box hat.  They will have a wooden tray in front with all kinds of cigarettes and cigars (from Cuba no less). I always like to get a cigar, and (since this is China) no one would dare disrespect me (and lose face) by telling me not to smoke it.

Nude and Playful

Sometime during your evening you may also be offered a strip tease show by one or more girls. (Typically, all the girls would participate.) It costs extra, find out how much before you buy. For the longest time I refused these opportunities, as well as two-somes and group-fun. Now, I never refuse. You can keep all that Puritanism and shove it up where the sun don’t shine.

Now, of course, this is not like what you would expect in the United States. No girl will get at a pole and strip off her clothes to the music. Nope. Instead, the girls will just undress right there on the sofa next to you. They will be fully nude except for panties and high heels. There are pretty quick about it too. They just kind of slinky out of their dress and sit there smiling.

Expect a bare minimum of 10-15 minutes of full contact fun. This will include lap dancing and other playful antics. Truthfully, once started, it actually tends to last all night. Hey! No problem.

The policy is “please touch” unlike the in the US where that will get your ass kicked by a steroid abusing meathead bouncer. However, in China it’s ok.  And I like it that way.  (This is true even if they still have their clothes on. You can roam all over their bodies as you desire. This is China for goodness sakes!)

Of course, you need not get too hot and bothered. Many of the girls will grab your crotch and try to guess the size of your member in length, girth, width and stamina. For instance, you might be with one girl, and another girl will sit on your other side and start feeling your nether regions and adjusting things down there for you. (Personally, I think it is their way to judge how much they can make off you later on…LOL.)

It’s sorta like an appetizer for things later on, or (perhaps) used to entice you to pay up for a “long-time” girl. Anyways, it really doesn’t matter. In a business KTV the boss host will pay for everything. So agree to it.

Parties can be fun

So everybody is well fed, well drunk and you’ve had your fill of beer, karaoke, weird Chinese snacks and strip shows – now what? It’s up to you… usually.   Sometimes, depending on the arrangement with the girls manager, the parties can get really fun, as these two videos can attest…

The girls will typically have a good time. Their enjoyment is directed by their manager, who works out what ever arrangement that is proper with the host boss. They will be edged on by the other girls who might inspire playful acts of a sexual nature and other curious events. The basic idea is to get drunk. Lower your inhibitions and have a good time.

As these videos attest, being with a cute gal getting drunk and playing around is a great reward for an ambitious boss.

The KTV is a refuge. It is a controlled environment where a person can become someone else and behave differently. In China, everyone wears a mask. This is a face (mingzi) that defines their role and how they conduct their business. For many bosses they only have two roles; Boss and Family head. Each time, they must exist within that role.

They come home and the wife and the children expect the father to be a traditional father. He will play with the children. He will help them learn. He will support the wife and take care of things that she needs help with. He will do this within the role and the face that he must wear.

Then, he goes to work. He puts on the Boss face. Here there is actions and behaviors that he is culturally restrained to follow. He must maintain that appearance. He must always be calm and collected and stern and in control.

The problem is…

There is never an opportunity for him to let loose and be himself. Never. Never, that is until he goes to a KTV. There, once he is inside the doors, he is in a world where he can be himself. It is a protected world. The doors are closed and sealed. Guards protect the people inside. Female entertainment is provided, and if the KTV is half decent, the girls are vetted to make sure they do not prey on the clients.

KTV-typical
In a KTV environment, the boss gets to “let his hair down” which is a very difficult thing to do in the Asian culture. In Western cultures everyone is “doing their own thing”. Not so in Asia. Thus the need for a release value where a hard working alpha male can have a release from the stress of life.

He eats, drinks and is merry. Then he can go upstairs to the hotel room and have a nice long happy ending with the girl that he had selected. Else, she might ride home with him to a different hotel. All of which is under the helpful and watchful eyes of his aides, the girls and KTV managers, and the security guards that are stationed for protection.

THe KTV is a place for fun.

Now who doesn’t like to smoke, drink, sing and dance with pretty girls? It’s a rare person indeed. When I grew up we used to have keg parties in the woods and we always would sing, and carry on. We always loved it when the girls would play with us and have fun. This is universal.

Pricing

Of course everything comes at a price. If you are being given hospitality, you won’t need to pay for anything. However, it is always a good thing to have an idea of what the costs will be like. The days of $50 USD for dinner and all-night sex are long over. Never the less, you should understand that if you are given this kind of hospitality, you are expected to be “worth the investment”.

  • Renting the room will vary from a few thousand RMB to 20,000 RMB and up.
  • Just having a pretty girl to be with you and play will vary from 300 RMB to 750 RMB for four hours.
  • Stripped down playfulness might cost you another 500 to 2000 RMB.
  • Drinks are usually provided as part of a “meal plan” where beer and drinks are provided with snacks. This will cost from 500 RMB to 7000 RMB.
  • The girl will run from 600 RMB to 5000 RMB for a “short time” with “one shot”. Multiple shots and longer periods of time (longer than 40 minutes) can be negotiated.
  • “Long time” girls will be double that.

Thus, it should be understood that the boss could easily spend 60,000 RMB for you to have fun with and provide you hospitality. This is $10,000 USD. Do not take the hospitality lightly, and don’t insult his face in the process.

Singing

All KTV’s have a huge big-screen television that is hooked up to the KTV machine. It is a touch activated screen that you can pick a song out of. The songs are provided along with some kind of cheap video (if the actual MTV video is not available). Ask your English speaking aide to assist you.

KTV music selection
The screen to select the KTV songs is a touch activated device. There are different systems in use. But, all use a basic search engine technique and basic controls. You can search by name of song, artist, album, year, gender, theme, emotion, and a host of other criteria. These devices have everything from children’s songs to songs suitable for grandparents.

Typically, I carry in my wallet a list of groups, singers and songs that I can program and search for in the KTV. Else, you would have a dickens of a time trying to think of a song to sing. The environment is noisy and the songs that the other people are all singing are Chinese. So you will have a real hard time thinking of a song.

Once you pick out a song, you can adjust the percentage of the vocals to sing along with. It can be anywhere from 100% (as in listening to the full song) where you just sing along, to 0%, where the only vocals are your own. Personally, I like around 60% that way it doesn’t sound so bad. No one really cares how well you can sing. They just want to see you release emotion. As that is the entire purpose of a KTV in the first place.

The reverb and sound can be adjusted with echo and other effects. I personally don’t like the effect. However, others do. You just go with the flow and use the presets unless someone else says differently.

There are decades of technology behind this. Today, you can connect to the KTV player and sing to songs on your smartphone. You can search the internet, if there aren’t any songs on the local hard drive. You can do all kinds of things. HERE is a link to one manufacturer that makes these devices.

Dancing

Often people get up and start dancing. You know, the Chinese are often nerds, and so the girls and the guys will get us and shake their body to the music. Not me. I took five years of professional ballroom dancing lessons. I can dance.

Which surprises the heck out of the girls.

It’s a happy and welcome surprise. These girls are trained and experienced Hostesses. they can follow my lead in dancing, and it is a real pleasure. We do the foxtrot, the merengue,  the waltz, the two step and of course the Rumba and Tango. You know, for a guy like myself, just being able to dance, with a experienced and qualified partner is worth everything.

Now, the ballroom dances are very popular in China. Often huge classes are held outdoors in the empty plazas in front of the malls and such. People dance and learn the movements on their own. But, to dance with a partner is just… magical.

I typically start out rather easy with a two-step or something basic. If they can follow well, then it eventually evolves into a tango. There, I like to get really dramatic, and the girls really get into it as well. It is truly amazing. There is something about booze, sex and dancing that brings out the raw emotion in us all.

Tango
Dancing the tango. It’s a dance of battle and wits. Once led properly, the woman can release and let herself go. She becomes the dance. The experience becomes magical.

And for the girls…

Now, you shouldn’t be under the opinion that China is a sexist nation. It’s not. Everyone is equal here. Just like the male Bosses can go to a KTV and  pick out an attractive girl to play with, a female boss can go to a KTV and pick out an attractive boy to play with.

For some reason, one that I am unsure of, the KTV boys that service the ladies all dress in white. Everything is white. They tend to be in their twenties to mid thirties. They, just like the ladies have their own network of clients and “favorites”. Often the wealthy female boss would buy expensive presents for the boys. For instance, a Ferrari, or a Lamborghini.

Yes… they are that wealthy.

Men in white
The men who take on the Host role for the female bosses would all dress in white. They would look something like this. All would be thin, well groomed and attired.

The guys typically defoliate their entire body except for the head so that there isn’t any hair. None have facial hair. They are also impeccably attired and very very clean. They take classes in how to dance, talk and make interesting small talk. Once they are chosen by the female boss, they give her every attention.

There are those who have ended up doing drugs, but for the most part, they try to keep clean and sober. They will drink but really do everything they can so that they will not embarrass their client.

The number of guys to girls ratio is smaller. If the KTV would have maybe 600 girls, it might employ only ten or so guys. The need for guys, while present, is not as great as a demand that exists for the girls. Often the guys would be friends with the girls and there would be many dates and fun times together outside of work. Both hosts and hostesses know how to have a good time so the time together tends to be of high quality.

EXO
In many ways these guys are very typical of the male version of the female Hostesses of the KTV’s in China. A well-heeled female boss can expect to have her pick for a companion for the night.

Typically, but not always, the same manager for the girls would manage the boys.

The boys can make much more money than the ladies do. If they find a rich and maybe lonely female boss, they can easily earn a couple of million dollars a year. (Seriously!) The females that hire these men are typically 40 years old and up. Many are millionaires, and some are even billionaires.

Nicholas
The young men who do work in the KTV’s tend to be very popular. They have cultivated their skills, and do everything that they can to be a pleasing and suitable companion to wealthy Chinese clientele.
China does not discriminate between girls and guys.  While most KTV’s maintain a contingent of girls, there are those that have a mixtures of girls and guys, and even some that are guys only.  The men, typically in their twenties are all handsome, well groomed, (clean) and attractive.  They (at least the ones I am familiar with) wear all white. (It’s a Shenzhen thing, I hear.) The situation and selection for them is the same.  The only difference is that what a woman finds attractive in a rent-a-boy is different than what a guy finds of interest in a rent-a-girl.

They also tend to be rather torturous with the young men. I have heard stories of the women getting the guy so worked up and horny and not permitting him to ejaculate. And sit there, with their friends, enjoying him suffer. They would make sure that he would take the necessary medicine to get an erection and drive him insane with desire. Then watch him pine away in agony.

I have heard stories of women burning parts of the boys skin with cigarettes and melting hot wax and pouring hot oil on parts of their bodies. Some can be rather cruel. I have no idea why this is so. Maybe they are tying to get back at the male gender for some reason or the other.

I understand that some KTV’s allow the boys to mix up their outfits somewhat. This is only hearsay. The KTV’s that I know of have a strict all-white dress code to prevent confusion. I have heard that some allow certain exceptions to the dress code so as to be on the cutting edge of fashion.

White uniform
Certain KTV’s permit the boys to accessorize their uniform and costumes somewhat. As in China, the boys do not have the same kinds of freedoms that the girls have when it comes to the working environment and dress codes.

My former Marketing Manager thought that having an attractive man to tend to her every need was a good thing. She really enjoyed the company. I can confirm this two times, let me tell you…

Your Aide / Wingman

A very important part of your visit to a business KTV is to have an aide or wingman to look after you. They will make sure that you are registered into the room, and that your passport will not get lost or misplaced. They will keep an eye out for you and help you out of the KTV room when it is time to go.

Going to the Room

They will help you and the girls into the elevator and you will ride it to your floor. It will be something like this video below. The girls will take the lead and show you where the room is and help you get settled. They will open the door with the card key and place the card in the activation slot.

It will be like this if there are two or more girls with you…

Otherwise, if you are just going with one girl. It might be a little like this..

The girls will file into the room and my aides will collect my gear and keep it safe with him. I will retain my glasses and cell phone. Then we will call it a night.

My aides will then go off to their own individual rooms with their companions. And I will be left alone with the girls. The girls will typically find a outlet to plug and charge their cell phones with. They will check their WeChat, and confirm any last minute messages. Often they will have other guys (fans?) sending them messages that they need to respond to. I just let them take a few minutes to get settled. 

Turning In

The girl or girls get settled in. If you are there with three girls, typically two will rest in the other bed and you will be with one girl. Then they will take turns with you. If we are all too drunk it is simply a matter of passing out for five or so hours. Otherwise, showers are used and everyone gets clean.

  • Don’t trust the bath towels. I don’t care if they are sanitized. You use them everywhere except down in the groin area. Trust me, you don’t want to get the clap or some other serious illness. Use a condom.
  • Brush your teeth.
  • Make sure that you take your eye glasses off, or they might get broke while you are romping and playing around.
  • If you really like the girl, get her WeChat, so that you can get together again in the future.

Sometimes, you just want to decompress for a bit before you engage in any kind of sexual activity. When this happens I like to see where they are from and so I ask all kinds of questions about their hometown and the food that they eat. Often we talk about life and dreams. I’ve had more than a few chats about bitcoin, setting up international trade, and tax/tariff laws in the United States. Honestly I was really impressed with one gal who had a dog grooming business and a massage parlor on the side. She had her act going on.

Some of the girls are quite wild and experienced, but I am just a rather boring old Joe. So we just keep things simple, which in a way is kind of a relief to the girls. Now, keep in mind, that if you are there with multiple girls make sure that they are all EQUALLY engaged, or else the one who has been neglected all night will want to leave – thus spoiling all the fun.

Sometimes the girl will leave behind a trinket or two for you to remember them by. That’s a nice thought, but I just throw them away. If I don’t have their WeChat contact information, I probably won’t ever see them again.

The Next Day

You wake up. Your mouth tastes like a soggy ash-tray. The sink is usually stained from purple colored vomit (wine and dinner debris), and the girls are ready to finish you up for the day. While the girls are waking up, you go to the bathroom. Brush your teeth, get ready, and then go back to bed.

There will always be the “eager beaver” who will want to be first on. So let it be. Just make sure that the other girls get some. At this point, I cannot stress hard enough the importance in controlling your alcohol tolerance and the necessity of being ready for the morning festivities. Reliance on little blue pills will not cut it alone.

Eventually you will all be finished and exhausted, no doubt.

You all say good bye to each other and just lay there while your aides and managers wake up. They will tend to give you a call and then you will meet the boss again for breakfast. I would advise Jiu; congee which is made from rice. It’s a kind of rice porridge out of pork or chicken. Put something warm in your stomach for goodness sakes.

Congee
My preferred meal after a long hard night of drinking and fun is to have some nice warm congee. Often, we will eat dumplings and doujung with this as well.

Then get ready for the trip back home…

Crackdowns

Sometime around 2013 and 2014, China really started to crack down on these establishments. Entire cities in DongGuan were affected. Today they exist, but are very quiet. More like American “speakeasy’s” of the 1920’s. It doesn’t really matter though. As long as the boss has the name and card of the manager for the girls, she can direct him to the appropriate KTV venue.

Cryptic text
While “Happy endings” for massages are legal, trading sex for money overtly is not. There are various “work-a-rounds”, as not once has sex been eliminated from the needs of the human condition.

A few years back, the business KTV’s were everywhere, public and out in the open. Today, they are found hidden. They went “underground”. Also, industry has matured somewhat. You will not find so many foreigners invited to Business KTV’s as they used to be. Most Business KTV’s tend to be reserved for Chinese businessmen, as America has gotten the reputation (in China) for being Puritanical concerning smoking, drinking, singing, dancing and sex.

As a foreigner, you now need to explain that you would like to sing, and dance with pretty girls. Otherwise, the boss might provide you with Western-style hospitality. Which might be a cup of tea, a cookie and a handshake.

The Myth of the Poor Little Waifs

Many people talk about the poor young girls sold into forced slavery and prostitution. They talk about the terrible stories, and how demeaning it is. They speak as an expert because they have read about these situations. They know all about it, it seems. CNN, MSNBC, WaPo, and the Guardian has told them that this is the case…

"Ever think that these girls are kidnapped and basically sex slaves that most of the money they are making isn’t going to mamma sans, that they are forced into situations where they are sexually abused and raped.  Maybe some sit on the streets talking on the phone but that’s the lucky ones.  Human trafficking is a huge problem in china. I think your article is really insensitive and quite sexist, not as bad as “women who wear revealing clothes deserved to be raped” but still misses the fact that they might be doing this against there will!" 
-Wallimo

Wow! How do you know all about this? Have you ever been to China? Do you even have a passport? How do you know that this is actually the case, or are you just regurgitating some bullshit that you read? I would argue the latter, most certainly.

Oh, and they are not called “mamma sans” for Christ’s sake. They are called 女经理, or if you prefer lăobănniáng.  What the fuck is “three horse horse”?

I’m in China. I’ve been living here for a long, long time. I do happen to know many of these girls. I mean it. I fucking know them. I talk with them. I eat meals with them. I go to parks with them. I’ve even helped them pick out shoes to wear. They are not some poor abused and misused waif. There might be some, Oh, maybe 0.000000000000001% chance. However, it is the exception and NOT the rule.

"Wallimo, only a very daft person couldn’t tell the difference between a self-interested gold digging KTV hostess and a sex slave.  

Everyone is aware of the human rights dilemma in China in the sex trade in particular, but even if you visited the seediest parlors and saunas from Shanghai to Lhasa, you’d probably never come across even one sex slave.


In other words, they are vastly outnumbered by girls who are willing to enter the industry for personal gain, and what’s more, they are typically trafficked into different types of establishments, mostly catering to repeat customers.

We’ve heard that finger-wagging rhetoric so much that most of us just get annoyed when people spout off on those holier-than-thou guilt trips."
From Disporia-ChinaSmack

Yeah. Those of us with REAL experiences are tired of the ignorant and their “holier than thou” attitude.

If all you read is from CNN, WaPo, and the Guardian you might be convinced that the world is going to be taken over by sex-dolls, and that sexual slavery runs rampant throughout the world. Who thinks up THIS nonsense? That, and that Donald Trump is a Russian spy, that you will keel over and die from a zombie outbreak of bird flu from Hong Kong, and we are all going to die by global warming.

Personally, I am so sick and tired of being lied to, manipulated, and having my emotions put through the wringer. It’s all nonsense used to control YOU. Don’t fall for it.

SJW
Social Justice Warriors, how’s it working out for ya? You getting the needed changes in society to make it as attractive as you desire it to be?

That’s not the truth. None of it is. Not by a long shot.

Parroting what you have been programmed to believe is far below your potential.  If you’ve got something good to say and to contribute then I would welcome your contribution. Here are some areas to start off with…

  • What is the going rate for a short-time in Daliang?
  • How much does it cost to have the hair done and fingernails done at 5pm in Shenzhen, Louhu?
  • Where do the girls get the costumes? And who does the alterations?
  • What is the busiest time in the year for Business KTV’s?
  • When the girl agrees to a contract at a Business KTV, what is the duration?
  • What is the best day to work during the week?
  • Which days are the girls permitted to take off?
  • Can the KTV provide dorms and a minimum salary, or are there free-lance considerations?
  • What is the girls locker room like in a Business KTV?
  • Where a dorm is offered, what are the sleeping arrangements, and how are the meals prepared?

If you are unable to answer any of these FUNDAMENTAL and most basic questions, than you actually know jack-shit about this industry and culture. So do not lecture me on something that you read out of a UK tabloid, or an Op Ed from a liberal American media outlet.

A Very Good Story

I have posted, on this blog, the ramblings of a “pimp” for these girls who work the KTV scene. If you want to read about this some more, then please go HERE.

Opinions of Others

Yeah, I spent the time churning this post out. I took the time to do it. I paid the money to host it. Now you, the lucky reader, can read it. Woo woo.

I have gone on to other blogs and have read the comment sections where people have torn up a guy for relating his experiences. Most of the time, the comments are juvenile with such things as you might expect. “These girls are prostitutes.” And “I would never set foot into a KTV, the music sucks.”,and “They are abused poor waifs”. OK, whatever.

This is the real deal. Like it or not.

via GIPHY

I personally do not want to hear the opinions of someone who have never stepped out of the Untied States and is making judgements based upon their limited understandings of reality. If all you can relate about is the inside of a Bo Jangles, and your idea of hard work is coding software then you have no business being here. This place is not for you.

You don’t belong here.

You all can all go eat your pork rings, drink your expensive Starbucks coffee, and service your 400 pound overweight pink-haired ambiguous-gender friend. You can believe in reptilians taking over the government, the next war the United States will have “for Democracy”, and get ready for the global warming that will melt the ice caps. Good for you. That is your reality.

This is mine.

You want to comment. Good. Remember that here, I am GOD.  So remember who you are dealing with. Unless you are kind, and civil I won’t publish anything you say. So it might be best for you to swallow your bile and leave.

via GIPHY

The world is filled with ignorant busybodies who want to make the world a perfect place in their own image. The problem is that their image is one that is forged thought the media. And, folks, the media in the United States is controlled by five people. That’s it. Five people control every fucking thing you read. So what you are actually doing is being a puppet for the wealthy who control you, control your thoughts and control your life.

So be it.

Call me all kinds of names. I know quite a bit more about our universe and our reality. So don’t get too hot and bothered with my thoughts, experiences and opinions. For as far as you know, I’m just bound for Hell.

via GIPHY

Another View

Of course, you don’t have to accept what I have to report. You can just read propaganda from the news media. Here’s a good example, out of the UK (why am I not surprised?) about DongGuang. Read the article.

Inside Dongguan, China's Sin City

Some 10 per cent of Dongguan's population is said to be employed in the world's oldest profession. Tom Phillips reports from China's Sin City.

In the article, they said 10% of the city population was involved in prostitution. Wow. That’s a lot. A lot!

Let’s break that down…

Which means, that if the vast bulk of the prostitutes are female, then nearly 20% of the females in this city region are prostitutes. ( assuming a ratio of 50/50 of men and women.) If you further narrow down prostitution to be females between the ages of 14 and 40, then this article, were it to be believed, means that you would have a near 65% chance of any girl between the ages of 14 and 40, including married women as being full-on prostitutes.

You couldn’t walk down a street without seeing a prostitute in most of the ladies you walk by. You couldn’t have a coffee or tea without sharing a table with one. You couldn’t buy groceries without meeting one. You couldn’t ride a bus without seeing about half the bus as prostitutes.

Think people. Think.

God, what a slimy article, and what slimy photos. Did they even go there? Why did they pick the sleaziest section, with the sleaziest people? Anyways, they have a photo to “prove” sexual slavery of children takes place. Here it is… Look at the pitiful small babies sold into prostitution. Why, they are certainly elementary-school age!

Child Sexual Trafficing
This photo is given as proof that sexual slavery and child prostitution is “rampant” in the industrial capital of Dongguang. Look at these three children. Why they are missing their school classes and won’t be able to perform basic mathematics! How horrible! My Goodness!
  1. Did they give locations, names, and facts?
  2. Any statements that they made, are they backed up with hard information?
  3. For an in-depth article, what details have they provided, such as demographics, industry, times, income data, social concerns, statements from the local police, statistics, and the like?

All of the hard information is all missing. It’s just one of a thousand fluff-pieces designed to change the mass consciousness of the reader toward certain assumptions.

Now for some comparisons. Maybe you don’t like what I wrote. Maybe you think that I am a deplorable ass hole. Maybe you want to clutch on to your most cherished fantasy…

Well then, which article (this [1] blog post, or [2] the UK newspaper article) was more

  1.  Informative to you personally?
  2. Which one would better serve you to write a report, or
  3. investigate further issues, or
  4. spiked your interest towards different cultures and ways of life?
  5. Which one gave you a better perception of the reality of what is going on?
  6. Which article is more complete, fulfilling and worthwhile reading?
  7. Which article gave you a more fuller and comprehensive picture?
  8. Which article did you learn something new from?

What are the girls like?

Every trip is different. However, the girls tend to be attractive and high energy. Unlike the stereotypical image of Asians, most gals in China tend to be very curvy, sweet and very attractive. Sort of like these mini-videos can attest to.

Summary

This was a compilation of information that is sorely lacking on the internet; information regarding “Business KTV’s” in China. It is a huge industry, it employs millions, there isn’t one single factory or business boss that hasn’t gone to one. Everyone knows about it. But… But no one ever talks about it. Those that try, are often shouted down by the ignorant and the legions of enraged SJW who want to make the world perfect with unicorns prancing under a rainbow hued sky.

Well, now you know.

You know, knowledge is a good thing. Overall, I think that it is refreshing to hear the truth about things rather than live a lie painted by others. That’s how you grow, experience life, and make decisions upon.

Now while the Business KTV has a degree of prostitution, you should not be blinded by that sole aspect of it. The true and real purpose of a Business KTV is to reward high performing bosses and talent for contributions to the company.

Do you think that Alibaba, and Huawei got to be so big by giving their high performers paperclips and cheap pens with logos?

Is a Business KTV good or bad? I don’t know.

Seriously, the thought that I would be rewarded with a fun night with other bosses really motivates me. That is far superior to the ball-point pen with a logo that said “Success is a way of life” that Magnavox gave me for saving the company five million dollars.

It is also superior to the coupon for a free coffee at Tim Hortons that Pollak gave me for designing, producing, and perfecting the E-ETRESS system.

I personally think that it is far superior to the corporate note pad with the company logo on it that I got out of Delco Electronics for perfecting a remotely programmable SIMM on the ECM modules.

When you work and toil in your corporate job, look at how they reward you.

Girls vrs pens
What motivates you to work harder? Which is the better reward for skipping vacations, working overtime with no monetary benefit, and working weekends? Which is the better reward when you save the company a few million dollars?

I think that the Chinese system is superior.

Important Notes

  • Never refuse the offer for a dinner or KTV. While the boss might accept and agree to work with you, it will be done so reluctantly with a “clothespin on his nose”. As you have insulted him, his factory / business, and the Chinese culture.
  • Understand that the arrangements for a dinner, KTV room, and girls have already been arranged days a head of time. To think or expect otherwise is an insult to the boss who places a great deal of time and effort into the meeting with him.
  • Going to a KTV does not guarantee any kind of sexual encounter. That is up to the participants and the environment. Remember, it is the girl that decides what will happen.
  • If you are unwilling to do business in China using Chinese industrial norms, then you should expect the consequences. Don’t, for the love of God, be the “Ugly American“.

Take Aways

  • KTV’s are popular in China.
  • The business KTV’s cater to bosses. They have their own ways of doing things.
  • Both women and men can enjoy themselves at a Business KTV.
  • There is the potential for sexual pleasures at such a KTV, but it is not guaranteed.
  • Visiting such an establishment can be expensive, thus they are typically only reserved for special occasions and special business relationships.
  • Female hostesses work at a KTV for various reasons. The most common is to find a mate with a good job and a steady income. You go to where the best likelihood of finding what you are interested in, is.
  • Male Hosts work at a KTV for their own reasons. I do not know their reasons. It varies from person to person. I do not know what they are.
  • If you go to a Business KTV, take ED medication, and control your drinking.
  • The best way to impress a Chinese boss is to drink hard and eat a chicken’s head.
  • When having sex with a stranger use a condom.

FAQ

Q: How can I find a Business KTV?
A: Ask the factory boss in the town that you are doing business with. He will probably be able to point you in the general direction. Else, you can go into a Business Hotel and chat with the manager there and ask where any exciting girls and girl action might take place.

Q: Is a Business KTV the only type of prostitution available in China? 
A: No. Not by a long shot. In fact, it is a rather small subset of society that caters only to company leadership, management and bosses.

There are other venues such as escorts, and the like that a person can visit and use if all you want to do is to have sex with a girl.  If all you want to do is to have sex, you can go to a salon, or pick up a street walker for maybe $25 to $50. It need not be expensive. You go, get the gal, pay the money and get yourself off. It’s far better than reliance on internet images and magazines.

Besides, these gals have families to support. Instead of giving some rich California software king your money to download an x-rated porn movie, give it to the girl’s so her children can eat dinner and her husband can get a new pair of work boots.

Q: What are the types of prostitution in China?
A: There are many.

  • Mistress or Second wife (二奶, èrnăi): She gets a monthly salary in exchange for regular sexual favors. Even if she usually does not offer romance or family life, sometimes she lives with the customer and may wish to marry him.
  • Packaged girl (包婆, bāopó ): Similar to second wives but only work for limited time, as on business trips. These two upper tiers correspond to the ancient concubine, although the second wife and packaged girl are mostly kept secretly rather than in the household. Only rich men can afford them, therefore these girls are often considered to be linked to corruption.
  • Female companions (陪女, péinǚ): You can find them everywhere in China: restaurants, karaoke – the (in)famous KTV xiăojie, – bars and clubs. Often, in bars and most typical establishments, they usually stay in a corner playing with their cell phone and drinking some cocktails till a customer arrives. Many of these girls are employed to dance, sing, drink with the customers that pay for a table or, it the case of KTVs, for a room. Some of them will eventually leave with the customers. Business KTV’s is a subset of this class, where the best girls work.
  • Escorts. These girls are available either to your room, or at their house or at a mutually agreed hotel room. They advertise on the internet, and tend to be moderately expensive. A typical example is this link for Shenzhen massage. The girls are all attractive and speak English.
Escort
Escorts can make a good decent salary, and like all industries, rely on repeat customers. Most work hard at it for five to ten years and then retire after they either traveled the world, established a family, or started a business.
  • Ding dong girls (叮咚小姐, dīngdōng xiăojie): Literally like pressing a door bell “ding dong”. Typically, they go to a hotel that seems to have a lot of customers – single and lonely men. They rent a room there and call the other rooms offering their services, usually a “massage.” Of course. having a massage with a happy ending is legal in China. It used to be that they would knock on your door, or slide a card under your door to offer you some fun services. You can add to this category also the girls that look for customers on QQ (the Chinese MSN) or on the web in general.
Ding dong cards.
Ding Dong Girls cards that were slid under my hotel door when I was staying in Shanghai. You can find these cards all over China.
  • Hairdressers and masseuses (发廊妹, fàlángmèi): Chinese hair salons and massage parlors are the place to go if you want to get a cheap “happy ending” (usually by masturbation or oral sex), especially the ones full of bored half-naked girls lighted up by pink lights you can find close to a train or subway station.
Gils in a salon
Typically the girls will be sitting around in the salon waiting for a customer to walk in. Truthfully, there are usually many many girls, often thirty to fifty that occupy one room. Great selection. Low prices and happy endings all around.

The fàlángmèi are often migrants from the countryside and perform contractual work under a proprietress (lăobănniáng) or a pimp (pítiáo) who provide them with housing, clothing and food, as well as a cell phone and monthly subscription. They do not make much more money than a worker, unless they receive tips from the customers.

  • Street girl (街女, jiēnǚ): The name explains everything. They solicit customers in the halls of the hotels, bars and other entertainment outlets. They may offer petting (shàngbànchăng, first half) or intercourse (xiàbànchăng, second half). Street prostitutes may be accompanied by a lăobănniáng or work on their own. They are those at greatest risk of being apprehended by the police. We also call them “chicken girls” which is the English translation of 街女.
Chicken girls
Here is a group of ladies photographed so that their faces remain hidden. You can easily see that they are free of tattoos, piercings, rashes or pockmarks typical of drug abuse, of normal weight – not obese – and pretty normal girls.
  • Underclass girl (下工棚, xiàgōngpéng): They live in urban slums (such as they are), or the seedier and poorer neighborhoods in the fifth tier towns.  They can typically be found at construction sites. They fill a social and sexual void, as the migrant workers usually have left their wives at home, and are paid with food.

Q: Is prostitution rampant in China?
A: No. It might seem like that because If you were to compare percentages you would be surprised to find that prostitution, by percentage of the population, is actually very tiny. Remember, China has a huge population. Like any other nation, prostitution will exist. However, China is a very conservative and traditional nation. Prostitution is not considered to be a good thing.

On the whole, if you want to see a prostitute, you should to go Thailand or the Philippines. Not China.

China is NOT a sex monger’s paradise. It is a paradise for hard workers, those who strive and achieve, and people who believe in working together for the common good. If you work hard, study hard and do your best, China will reward you. There are no easy routes in China.

When I see articles saying that China accepts prostitution and that sexual sales and slavery of young children exists, I get mad. That is absolutely not the case. NOT AT ALL. I tell you this two times. China has been very hard on the prostitution industry and many things that are fine and dandy in the West is forbidden in China. Such as unedited R-rated movies, and such. China is a conservative, traditional nation.

Q: What is the best alcohol to drink at a KTV?
A: For a business KTV, you will need to drink with the boss. After that event is finished, please heed my advice and chill out. You can drink all the beer you want. Alternatively you can drink severely watered down whiskey. Take it from me, you don’t want to wake up nude with three girls ready to have fun with you, and you are way too drunk to “get it up”. Heed my advice.

Q: Are these girls clean? Do I need to wear a condom?
A: Yes the girls are clean, and yes you do need to wear a condom. They work six days a week, most of the year. They typically have three to seven sexual adventures per week with who knows who. You do not want to catch any type of sexually transmitted sickness.

Also keep in mind that while the condom might be good, note that if you have a cut, a bruise, and a pinch from the zipper fly in your jeans, then don’t have sex. Illnesses can be transmitted through sweat and precious bodily fluids just as easily. When in doubt take care and be careful. If need be, cancel and reschedule until you are all healed up down there.

Links about China

Business KTV
Dance Craze
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.


How Rocket Scientists Build Paper Airplanes

When I was attending university, my classmates and I would get drunk and fly paper airplanes. We were all studying engineering. Myself and my buddy Jay were both in a joint program where we studied Aerospace Engineering, while my buddy Peter studied Mechanical Engineering. All told, we had a significant amount of class overlap. As young college students, full of “piss and vinegar”, we would get into all sorts of trouble…

There in the dorms, we would launch our bottle rockets at paper airplanes that we would fly out the windows. The overall goal was to create a paper airplane that would stay aloft the longest. This was maintained by up-drafts and the design of the paper craft.

Let’s look at some of the design features that we incorporated into our tiny paper devices…

Weight and Balance

One of the most important considerations for aircraft (as well as munitions) is the ability for the airplane to be well balanced. This takes into account the center of gravity of the craft relative to the uplifting force on the wing design.

Imagine walking a tight-rope. If you had a large and robust body and butt, the center of gravity would be closer to the rope. Yet if you were tall and skinny with an enormous “pumpkin” head, the center of gravity would be further away from the rope. The distance between the center of gravity of the two body shapes would be different. The longer and taller person might have a more difficult time walking on the tight-rope than the fatter person.

In a like way, the center of gravity of a plane is important. There is a relationship between the center of gravity of the place, and the lift on the wings, as well as the propulsive force at the tail.

In general placing weight forward is desirable

Placing weight forward is desirable.

The place where the paper airplane balances on the tip of your finger is called the Center of Gravity (CG). This is the point of balance. In addition, for aircraft, there is a secondary point of balance. This is a specific CG position known as the Neutral Point. This point provides neutral pitch stability.

Center of gravity of an aircraft.
Balancing considerations of an aircraft. Illustration shows the center of gravity relative to the center of lift.

Here is the rule of thumb. If the airplane has a CG ahead of the Neutral Point, the plane is stable, if its behind this point its unstable.

As a matter of course, all airplanes without computer assisted flight controls need a CG ahead of their neutral point. Thus almost all airplanes prior to assisted flight controls (invented in the late 1970’s) were designed this way. I guess you could refer to it as a sort of “classical” aviation design.

For rectangular wings the neutral point is ¼ of the distance from the nose to the tail. For delta wings (such as the common dart paper airplane) the neutral point is ½ of the distance from the nose to the tail.

Stability

Stability means the plane, if disturbed, will return to its original state. This is a very important behavioral feature when there are fluid dynamics that alter flight regimes. In general, you want a stable plane. If you don’t have one, you will have a crash. That would really ruin your day.

For pitch stability it means the plane will seek a single airspeed.

A plane which is unstable in pitch will either pitch up into a stall, or nose dive, but won’t settle out anywhere in between. A stable airplane will tend to oscillate up and down a few times, but converge on a steady flight speed.

Many typical paper airplane designs are stable, but just… just… barely.

As a plane becomes more and more stable, it wants to fly faster and faster. To counter this tendency, up-elevator must be used to produce a good trim airspeed. This is why many of the classic paper airplane designs are nearly neutrally stable. Few people realize good pitch stability requires a heavy nose and some up-elevator.

Elevators are flight control surfaces, usually at the rear of an aircraft, which control the aircraft's pitch, and therefore the angle of attack and the lift of the wing. The elevators are usually hinged to the tailplane or horizontal stabilizer. They may be the only pitch control surface present, sometimes located at the front of the aircraft (early airplanes) or integrated into a rear "all-moving tailplane" also called a slab elevator or stabilator. 

-Wikipedia

The classic aircraft designs rely on the small inherent “up elevator” effect. This effect is known as a positive zero lift pitching moment. It is a direct result from the design of the wing. Often the primary factors are the swept wing, and possibly the airfoil shape.

The problem with paper airplanes is that they are initially designed without a up-elevator effect. Thus many classic paper airplanes are flown with no elevator adjustment. Sometimes they fly well, many times they don’t, and they always have poor stability.

To Improve the plane you incorporate an up-elevator effect

In general, the changes that one must make to a paper airplane to fly well are mostly the same adjustments which make hand launched gliders fly well.

Most people have the crazy idea that a good paper airplane needs no adjustments. You just simply fold up a piece of paper into the shape of an airfoil, and that all there is to it. You make the basic folds and then you are all finished.

This is really unfortunate.

All real airplanes have trim tabs that are used to make small adjustments to the plane. As such, it should be clear that all paper airplanes also need small adjustments to fly their best.

Elevators in an aircraft
The aircraft is typically “trimmed” to have it maintain balance and stability in flight. These features are called stabilizers, to well… stabilize the aircraft in flight.

Once, the paper airplane is properly balanced, the following suggestions might help the budding paper airplane designer in keeping their work of art in the air.

Anhedral Wing Design

One of the most common paper airplane mistakes is to leave the wings folded down at an angle. Don’t tell me that you don’t know what I am talking about. It is perhaps the most common way of making paper airplanes.

Folding the wings down along the side at an angle is called “anhedral” shape.

The problem with an anhedral wing design is that it reduces the lateral stability of your paper airplane. To combat this, you can have a different design and shape for the wings.  Instead of a anhedral wing, you can have one in a different shape.

Wing design types
Wing shape to include anhedral designs. For paper aircraft the wing design has a great deal of impact on the overall stability of the aircraft.

What you want is called “dihedral” wing design which is when the wing tips are the highest part of the wing. The resulting lateral stability will help keep your paper airplane flying straight. Or maybe, at the worst, in a gradual turn.

This is important, as a plane with lateral instability will tend to roll over on its back and crash. Alternatively, it might enter into an ever tightening spiral which becomes a spiraling dive. To prevent this, all you need remember is the simple rule; keep your wing tips up.

Keep your wing tips up.

Sideslip

A slip is an aerodynamic state where an aircraft is moving somewhat sideways as well as forward relative to the oncoming airflow or relative wind. In other words, for a conventional aircraft, the nose will be pointing in the opposite direction to the bank of the wing(s). The aircraft is not in coordinated flight and therefore is flying inefficiently. 

-Wikipedia

Technically dihedral provides a stabilizing rolling moment due to a condition known as sideslip.

It works like this, if the plane yaws to the left (positive sideslip), the right wing has a slightly increased angle of attack (AOA) because of the dihedral. As this is going on, the left wing’s AOA is decreased (this is most easily imagined if you think about 90 degrees of sideslip). As a result, the resulting rolling moment is to the left, which is stabilizing.

Slide slip on an aircraft.
Sideslip illustrated. Sideslip is created by the differences in the lift on the wings. It is a natural consequence of the flight regime and the design of the aircraft.

During a level turn, the yaw rate combined with the stabilizing yawing moment (due to yaw rate) results in a little bit of sideslip. The sideslip is positive for right turns, and negative for left turns.

That small amount of sideslip together with a stabilizing rolling moment due to sideslip (dihedral effect) results in the plane wanting to roll out of the turn. Which is exactly what we want.

With anhedral, the plane wants to roll into the turn, resulting in a “graveyard spiral”. This is something that we do not want. (Unless you are designing some kind of gravity directed munition…)

Graveyard spiral.
Graveyard spin compared to graveyard spiral. Image credit to FAA.

Now, to understand this tendency; the movement to roll into or out of a turn is called the “spiral mode”.  This mode is controlled mainly using dihedral.

Most real airplanes have to limit the amount of dihedral they use to keep the Dutch roll mode (which is a rapid left and right oscillation), under control. While dihedral makes the spiral mode more stable, it reduces the damping of the Dutch roll.

Dutch Roll
Here is a visualization of a dutch roll from both a bird’s eye view and a head-on view. The oscillation movement can clearly be seen.

You probably won’t have any Dutch roll problems with paper airplanes.  This is likely due to increased yaw rate and roll rate damping that is associated with low airspeeds.

Because of this,  all paper airplanes should be flown with plenty of dihedral.

Paper airplanes should be designed with plenty of dihedral.

Up-Elevator

You should add a tiny amount of up elevator to the classic pointed nose paper airplanes. This will make sure they don’t dive on you.

If you have the time and materials, you might want to add a few layers of tape or (maybe) a paper clip to the nose of the plane to improve its stability.

Paperclip on the airplane
The placement of a paperclip on a paper airplane can be used to move the center of gravity about on the plane. By adjusting the location of the paperclip, the stability of the plane can be improved.

Most “square” paper airplanes have plenty of weight in the nose, and require some up elevator to fly well. The amount of up elevator needed on a paper airplane is a pretty good indicator of its pitch stability.

So, when you build a paper airplane (of any kind) and place a paper clip on the nose. You need to go ahead and take it out for a few flights. Go ahead, make a few flights to determine the best amount of up elevator that is needed.

Now give it a few flights and see how it performs.  Practice by moving the weight back slightly. Move it back a few cm, maybe a half an inch or so. Then try again.  Keep on doing this. Experiment. See how the weight adds to the stability of the air plane.

The amount of up elevator needed is reduced, and the plane becomes more sensitive to elevator adjustments. Now, take note. When the paper clip has been moved back to a point where you are using nearly no elevator deflection, and you can’t get the plane to fly well, there is a reason. What is going on, is you have the CG at the neutral point (try to balance the plane on a finger, the point where it balances is the neutral point).

Airfoil shape

Contrary to what many people might think, airplane wings are not flat sheets of metal. They are curved.  Which means that they are “Cambered”.  Being cambered can be explained that if you took a cross section of the wing, it would look like a tear drop  shape. In general, the top of the airfoil is rounded and the bottom is kept fairly flat.

That being said, paper airplane wings must be thin to work well.

Overall, the wings on the paper airplane need very little camber. Now, generally any curvature is limited to the front portion of the wing.

Cambered wing.
The cambered wing is designed to create areas of high and low pressure when air moves on the surface of the camber.

Generally, because most paper airplanes look a lot like “flying wings”,  only small amounts of camber are practical.  Now, large amounts of camber create nose down pitching moments which need tails to balance.

Hints and Tricks

Try to use a little curvature at the leading edge of the wing. You can use a pencil to round up the leading edges. You really do not need to have a fully cambered airfoil shape on a paper airplane. Typically, paper airplane performance is not noticeably degraded with flat, un-cambered airfoils. You know, the reason for this is likely due to low Reynolds numbers.

Reynolds number
Movement of a fluid over a surface. The Reynolds number is the relationship between velocity, and the properties of the gas (or liquid) as a function of the shape of the surface.

To keep the paper airplane aloft for as long as possible, we need a turbulent boundary layer. Which is to say that the air is mixed up and confused; turbulent. We have to keep in mind that that a large portion of the boundary layer across the front of the wing is laminar flow, but for high lift we need a turbulent boundary layer.

Conclusion

I like to think that the most efficient way to learn is through play. As such, I agree with Fred Rogers. Play is the “work” for children.  We learn how to become adults, socialize, think and build things through play.

Syracuse University Quad
The Syracuse University QUAD. It is the center of the university. As under graduates we would cross this area on our way to and from classes and the dorms.

While we were attending classes in aerospace engineering, it was our “hand’s on” play with paper aircraft that provided a visceral understanding of the basics of flight within the earth’s atmosphere. As such, I have never forgotten such adventures.

Of course, as young men, we were preoccupied in a mix of pursuits that all college boys engage in. Beer, girls, cigars and building paper airplanes (and shooting them down) ranked high on our enjoyable endeavors. I wanted to shot them down with BB guns, but my liberal friends wouldn’t have any of that. However, they had no problems with fireworks, and bottle rockets. Combined, we would tend to get drunk, make experimental paper aircraft designs which we would launch, and then subsequently try to shoot down using manually targeted bottle rockets.

In the process we improved both our aviation design skills, as well as our understanding of basic rocket ballistics. We would chug down a beer as a reward for downing a paper airplane in flames. As I recall, we would also quaff down a beer if we had a close miss… Now, that I think about it, we also drank a beer if we missed by a long shot.

Maybe that is why we were always so drunk after trying to shoot down the airplanes…

Takeaways

  • The building of paper airplanes can teach the basics of aviation design.
  • Play is an efficient technique to learn.
  • Those bottle rockets that lit up the sky decades ago over the Syracuse University campus were actually anti-paper airplane projectiles.
  • Physical science isn’t really all that complicated. People tend to use knowledge to obtain power and respect, instead of sharing for mutual benefit.
  • Never discount the importance or value of fun.
  • Don’t be a “purist”, paper airplanes can incorporate staples, paperclips, tape, glue, cardboard, and other features that could improve the design.

FAQ

Q:  Why did you want to shoot down the paper airplanes?
A: We were drunk and at the time, it seemed like an appropriate thing to do. We started with some bottle rockets that one of our friends had. We became so enraptured with the concept that it became a semi-regular event. It was often done surreptitiously in the dark night. We would launch them from the windows in the day room of the dorm where all my friends lived.

Q:  How did you get started in making paper airplanes at university?
A: My friend Peter was always fiddling with his hands. For a while, he began to start making paper airplanes. Over the months together, we started playing with them. We put them in races, and tried to find out how long that they would stay aloft.
Q:  Did you ever get into trouble for launching bottle rockets?
A: Not me personally, but there were complaints. It was certainly against campus rules, but the rest of the dorm were either too stoned to complain, or too busy studying to notice. At that time, there weren’t too many busybodies on campus. People had a Laissez-faire attitude about life. It was best summed up as “live and let live”. So you could pretty much live your life on your terms, within limits of course. That is totally unlike today, where the campuses are populated with busybodies, and crybabies that are easily offended about everything.

American universities today.
American universities today are “safe spaces” where everyone can get offended by the slightest remark. It is Orwell gone amok. It’s a pretty bad situation. I, for one, am glad that I am not attending university today.

Q:  Do you still make and fly paper airplanes?
A:  No.  Occasionally, I make one to two to amuse a child, but that is the extent of it.
Q:  Did you ever make paper airplanes out of aluminum foil?
A:  No, but it is an interesting concept. If the foil is thick enough it might lend itself to some interesting wing designs.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Compiled 19JUL18.
  2. Completed 20JUL18.
  3. SEO review and Release 20JUL18.

The rK Selection Theory applied to American Politics

Have you ever wondered why there is such a lack of commonality in political discourse today? In America, you are either a Trump-supporter or not. There is absolutely no bridge or commonality between the two groups. It is almost as if there is one type of person who is composed of fire, and the other type of person is composed of water. Why is this?

Well, there is a theory that precisely explains this dichotomy of behavior. This theory is called the “r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Ecology”, and it is based on the observed survival behaviors of  creatures.

This post is primarily concerned with the application of the r/k Selection Theory as it is applied to mass mob psychology in the United States today.

Introduction

via GIPHY

Can you imagine an idea or a concept so shocking that it is banned from publication? Like, for instance, the idea that the earth orbited the sun, or that high voltages can alter gravity? Well, there is a theory that is actually banned from public distribution.  This theory is banned on TED, Facebook and Yahoo’s advertising platforms, for being too effective at supporting conservative ideals. Yet, the theory itself really isn’t political at all.

It is a theory that simply states that a given species, over time, will evolve by developing their own survival strategies.

Turtles behave the way they do, because it is the best way for them to survive in this world. Bees behave the way that they do because it is the best way for them to survive in this world. Giraffes behave the way that they do because they too have developed the best way to survive int his world.

via GIPHY

What is interesting is that people who have studied American politics have noted that various human groups or organizations have also adapted these same strategies. They have done so organically. It wasn’t planned, it has just evolved that way. As such, they are both awed and disgusted in how it is playing out.

Politics

This theory, when applied to political organizations and objectives, directly defines the behavior of the organization. It asserts that both Conservatism and Liberalism are a programmed psychology. It bases this fundamental and foundational premise on the behaviors of known population groups.

Liberalism, no matter what it’s current name is, is designed to exploit resource excess within our populations.

Conservatism, no matter what branch or ideology,  is designed to benefit  competitive groups that succeed in group competition.

Science

The r/K Theory is a well established theory with a great pedigree. However, it is not applied to political belief structures. It is applied to species under the assumption that every member of the species falls into only one strategy.

This is a pretty BIG assumption.

As such, typically, it is assumed that humans are a K-strategy species. This is because we maintain a traditional family environment. Now, if this were true than any deviance from this would be an aberration. Wouldn’t it?

I argue that humans are not a fully developed species. Rather, we are a species in flux with significant membership in both survival strategies. In the United States we have two (apparently) equally divided segments of the population. One embracing the r-strategy and the other embracing the K-strategy.

The  r-selected Reproductive Strategy

via GIPHY

In the “r/K Selection Theory in Evolutionary Ecology”, if you provide a population with free resources, those who will come to dominate the population will exhibit five basic traits. These traits are called an r-selected Reproductive Strategy. These traits are all designed to best exploit the free resource availability. In nature, the r-selected strategy is best seen in the rabbit, which lives in fields of grass it will never fully consume. The five traits are,

  • Competition and risk avoidance.
  • Promiscuity.
  • Low-investment single parenting.
  • Earlier age of sexualization of young.
  • No loyalty to in-group.

These traits are ultimately designed to maximize the numbers of offspring produced. Each of these offspring, though of lesser fitness, will be able to survive and reproduce freely themselves, due to the free resource availability.

The K-selected Reproductive Strategy.

via GIPHY

In r/K Theory, there is also a strategy that is exactly opposite to the rabbit’s. This strategy emerges under conditions of resource scarcity. It is called the K-selected Reproductive Strategy.

There, where resources are scarce, competition for resources is everywhere. As a result, some individuals will die due to failure in competition. This produces the K-strategy, which is best seen in the wolf. This strategy also has five psychological traits. These traits are…

  • Competitiveness/aggressiveness/protectiveness.
  • Mate monopolization/monogamy.
  • High-investment two-parent child-rearing.
  • Later age of sexualization of young.
  • High loyalty to in-group.

This psychology is designed to form highly fit and competitive groups that succeed in group competition. It does this while capturing and monopolizing the fittest mate possible. This is a way of making their offspring genetically fitter than those of competitors.

Here, the goal is NOT to simply consume as much as possible yourself and produce as many baby-making machines as you can, with little regard to their fitness. No.

Here, the goal is to help your group succeed in its competition for the scarce resources, and then produce offspring of as high a fitness as possible, so they may carry your genes forward by succeeding in competition themselves.

Application to American Politics

The premise of this theory is that all of politics is really a battle between the K-strategist wolves within our society against the r-strategist rabbits. The wolves are designed to battle in a world of scarce resources and fierce competition, and the rabbits, are designed to freely graze the bounty of a sudden resource glut and rapidly explode in numbers to exploit such a glut.

Without labeling which political party is which, can you the reader, guess which political party is which?

The r-strategist rabbits want free food and a life of ease and abundant free sex. They want as many of their ilk as possible to share in the abundance. They want to produce as many offspring as possible, as fast as possible, without regard to offspring quality.

That’s right. The r-strategy fits the American Democrat party that is populated with Socialists, Progressives, and Liberals. Truthfully, Marxists are r-strategy rabbits in that they expect boundless support from the wealthy and successful.

The K-strategist wolves want order and defined limits on behavior. They want traditional two-parent families, and meaningful education and training for their young. They are competitive and protective of family, sexually selective and monogamous, imbued with regard for two parent family life, desirous that offspring wait until mature to mate, and loyal to in-group are designed to produce highly fit and competitive offspring, designed to compete in an environment of resource scarcity.

As you might have guessed, the K-strategy fits the American Republican party that is populated with Conservatives, Libertarians, and Neocons.

The K-selected Wolf

Let’s look at the K-strategy in more detail.

Wolves are a quintessential K-strategist species. Wolves are competitive and protective, because they must fight for food to survive. They carefully select the fittest mate, and monopolize that fit mate, so that their offspring will be as genetically fit as possible, relative to peers.

Both the male and the female have the same understanding that they are monogamous and will both mutually support the family and raise their children to the be the best. They will strive to teach their children to be as competitive as possible. Their children, if successful, will become dominant and would the best likelihood of successful procreation with the best and most suitable member of the opposite sex.

Traditional Family Values…

As such, they embrace two-parent family values, as offspring are reared carefully in a loving and supportive pack/family environment. This is so they will have the best chance of succeeding themselves in their own competitions. These values have been honed and proven over many generations. They rely on the proven techniques that provide the best likelihood of success. They typically shun new and unproven ideas as they carry a great risk of catastrophic failure.

family meal
Traditional family meals are maintained as a means to maintain communication through the generations and to help instill important family values. The roles of both the father and the mother are maintained. The children learn how families work and the roles that they too will grow into.

Such things as family meals, family traditions, and traditional roles are all considered important. The man is expected to work, and the woman is expected to take care of the home and provide a nurturing environment for the children.

Trditional roles
A traditional gender role found in the United States that views males as being responsible for the economic support and protection of the family. Housewife. A traditional gender role found in the United States that views females as responsible for child-rearing and domestic activities.

Competitive Schooling…

They do not allow offspring to mate until mature and proven in competition, so any immaturity will not lead to their offspring securing sub-par monogamous mates. The children are continuously educated and tested to make sure that they understand their roles and how to support and provide for the needs of the family.

Chinese study
The Chinese are very traditional and typically follow a K-strategy. School and education is very important to the Chinese, as well as all of the other Asian communities.

Schooling and education is treated  as of great importance. The subjects studied have a practical purpose and is intended in creating a long lasting and stable source of income from which the family can utilize to thrive.

They train and develop loyalty to the team…

Team work is very important to the K-strategist. They train and learn how to cooperate and work together to the mutual benefit of all. Everyone is expected to perform a role, and to do it to the best of their ability.

via GIPHY

Strong loyalty to the pack…

Finally, they develop a strong pack-loyalty to maximize the chances of their pack’s competitive success, and by extension, their own. Males evolve to be courageous and strong as they set out to provision the family and absorb any risk, while females carefully nurture offspring back at the den.

via GIPHY

The r-selected Rabbit

Rabbits are quintessential r-strategists. Rabbits live in fields of grass they never fully exhaust.

Their goal is to produce as many offspring as quickly as possible. They flee from danger, because to fight for food that they can get elsewhere is an unnecessary risk.

Hugh Hefner
Hugh Hefner is a typical r-strategy Liberal. CANNES, FRANCE: Playboy magazine president Hugh Hefner (C) poses with playmates 14 May 1999 on the steps of the Palais des Festivals before the screening of their movie “Entrapment” in selection for the 52nd Cannes Film Festival. (ELECTRONIC IMAGE) (Photo credit should read PASCAL GUYOT/AFP/Getty Images)

They mate promiscuously with any mate, because their goal is solely to reproduce, absent concerns for genetic quality – when resources are everywhere, even the most defective offspring can find food, mate, and pass genes forward.

While males are off mating as often as possible, females raise offspring alone, and quickly send them on their way to whelp a new litter.

Begin having sex at an earlier age…

Young parents.
The r-strategy depends on children becoming sexually active at an earlier age. Here they can become a parent earlier and then begin to produce babies every nine months if possible.

Offspring begin having sex early, to maximize numbers of their own offspring. They have sex early and produce children often. Often their preference is not to work, but rather to “be with their children”, when the fact is that often their is no father that is earning money enabling them to stay home.

Instead, they become wards of the state, living off the public trust.

Welfare mother
Here is a single mother on welfare. She is surrounded by her eight children from numerous fathers. Not one of the fathers live with her, nor visit their children. She fully expects the government trough to feed, clothe and shelter her. She thrives in a nation that is dominated by a President or political system that is r-strategist dominant.

Loyalty to in-group is unknown to the rabbit, because there is no competition for resources, since resources are everywhere.

Men will become more feminine…

Men who are overly promiscuous do not need to concentrate on strength or skills. Instead they need to concentrate in abilities that permits them to attract as many females as possible. Thus, to a K-strategist wolf they appear odd, and even shameful. They do not act like a member of their species should act. They are a perverted distortion of the ideal.

Obama on bicycle
Here is former President Obama on a bicycle. He is a prime example of a r-strategist rabbit who has fully embraced the strategies for survival. Note that other r-strategist media has fully endorsed this behavior as MANLY and very masculine. Which is obviously opposite of the viewpoint of the K-strategist wolves. You can read their PRAISE of the “ruggedly masculine” President Obama HERE. Some quotes…

In an editorial earlier this week the New York Times gushed over photographs of President Obama riding his bicycle at Martha’s Vineyard, at one point exclaiming the president was an example of “rugged masculinity gone wild!”

“If Obama rode his bike into my neighborhood I’d make him have sex with me in the street!” 

After MSNBC’s Chris Matthews showed Obama’s bicycle photographs on his show Hardball, he trembled as he spoke to his guests. “I admit,” he snickered, “when I saw these pictures I felt a scorching-hot sensation shooting up my inner thigh and into my groin. And believe you me, my wife took advantage of that situation…if you know what I mean.”

The enthusiasm over the bicycle photographs stretches from media outlets coast to coast. The Boston Globe dubbed the photographs a “toxic elixir that soothes the aching heart” while the San Francisco Chronicle fawned, “If ever there was a time when America needed a macho, in-your-face, physical example of aggressiveness and old fashioned male moxie, that time is now and the man is Barack Obama.”

While the r-strategist rabbits might fawn and be enthralled with an impressive display of rabbit-like qualities, the K-strategist wolves take the opposite point of view. To them, this is perversion of the highest order.

Indeed, over time the r-strategist rabbits begin to adapt female behaviors and mimic the female gender. To make them stand out from the multitudes of like minded males, they create strategies to set themselves apart.

As such their strategies are those that appeal to the females of the species. They create other genders and dress, that on the surface appear silly, but who’s sole function is to fundamentally bring attention to them and their actions. They promote issues that appeal to the female gender, and downplay or even ridicule masculine traits.

via GIPHY

Among r-strategists, males will tend to exhibit smaller, more feminine, less robust physical qualities. This is both to better facilitate fleeing and for showy displays of flash and beauty, to facilitate mate attraction, and mating.

While this is going on with the male gender, there are also changes with the female gender.

Females would tend to be bigger and more aggressive…

Whether it is rabbits or humans, those who follow the r-strategist end up compensating for their weaknesses. In a world where the male is feminine and abandons the children to engage in promiscuous behavior, the mother must compensate by becoming larger and more aggressive. This means that they will become larger, fatter, and more muscular. They will start producing more testosterone rather than progesterone and that will result in numerous changes to their body shapes and behaviors.

The changes in testosterone will make them more belligerent and aggressive. The reduction in progesterone would tend to make their biology rebalance itself towards a heavier and fatter (read “pear shape”) body.

via GIPHY

The r-strategist females, by contrast will tend to grow big, assertive, and ill-tempered, to better occupy a more masculine family role, provisioning and protecting the offspring they raise alone.

Political Censorship

It’s funny how things work out. You try to restrict access to knowledge, people eventually want to find out what you want to keep hidden. I, myself, only really learned about the r/K strategy when it became a restricted subject content.

I personally, don’t know why.

Those who are trying to restrict dissemination of this theory are typically very liberal, or progressive-liberal in political philosophy. Yet, the strategy of the liberals fit the r-strategy exactly.

Heck, even ultra-liberal and Democrat donor, Hugh Hefner and his “Playboy” empire, used the rabbit as his symbol for his philosophy.

Playboy bunnies
Here is a picture of Hugh Hefner with some of his r-strategist “bunnies”. He broke through the traditional United States K-strategist model by legitimizing r-strategist behaviors.

As of 2018, the American Democrats want…

  • Unlimited migration to the United States.
  • No limits on free access to food, shelter, medical services.
  • No limitations on birthing and abortions on demand.
  • Supportive of multiple genders and alternative lifestyles.
  • Supportive of sex at very young ages.

Hugh Hefner on the tarmac
Here is Hugh Hefner and some of his r-strategist “bunnies” on the tarmac for a photo shoot. He actively promoted the hedonism of the r-strategist lifestyle and made millions of dollars in the process, as well as had a lot of fun in the process.

The more conservative members of the political spectrum are just being K-strategy wolves. They just want to be left alone, with their family. They want to live their life and not have their precious and limited resources siphoned off by multitudes of people who did not work for their labors.

The Problems and Source of Conflict

When the fields are filled with grass, and the rabbits can multiply at will, happiness reigns. The wolves tend to keep to themselves and all is good. However, problems invariably arise when the rapid population growth of the r-strategy rabbits depletes the food supply…

This results in a condition whereas the resources are scarce, and the wolves will have to use their superior survival techniques to exist. Of course, the r-strategist rabbits will complain and squeal. They will redouble their strategy. They will try to overwhelm the resources in an effort to control the K-strategy members.

Chart of the r/K strategic behavior.
No matter what the species or political division, all interactions between the two strategies; the r-strategy and the K-strategy ends up the same in the end. The r-strategy eventually consumes the resources as they are never infinite. The moment they start to deplete the resources, their numbers start to decrease while the K-strategists engage in corrective behaviors. Eventually there is a point of obvious conflict, and a gradual extinction of the r-strategist individuals.

They will try to increase their numbers rapidly. They will do everything to unleash the abundance of the land and make it possible to produce even more offspring.

The K-strategist wolves will, of course resent that their resources are being consumed by those who are undeserving. For they neither labored for the resources, or qualify for the resources through membership or participation.

Eventually, conflict arises.

There is always a very contentious and often bloody conflict. While the r-strategist rabbits will try to overwhelm the K-strategist wolves though sheer numbers and vocal screaming, the wolves will eventually win. That is because they have trained their entire lives to be superior. They have perfected techniques of warfare and conflict. While the r-strategist rabbits have been enjoying life and a bountiful harvest, the K-strategist wolves have been working, preparing and getting ready for conflict.

The loss of the freedom to defend yourself and the liberty to live your life is what often suffers under progressive democrat control.
Know your history. This is what really happens when a particular group comes to power and their enemies are disarmed. It is never pretty.

This is a cycle that repeats itself over an over though the course of history. It is advisable that we listen to the lessons that can be learned here.

Another Opinion

This was drafted by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog. Rather than attribute the rise and fall of human civilization to the push and pull of r/K strategies, he suggests that it is the social construct that is at fault;

The dynamics of decadence are easy to understand: as affluence becomes the norm that is widely assumed to be permanent, shared purpose and sacrifice for the common good is replaced by self-absorbed decadence and an ethos of maximizing personal gain.

In his seminal essay The Fate of Empires, Sir John Glubb listed these core dynamics of imperial decline:

(a) A growing love of money as an end in itself.

(b) A lengthy period of wealth and ease, which makes people complacent. They lose their edge; they forget the traits (confidence, energy, hard work) that built their civilization.

(c) Selfishness and self-absorption.

(d) Loss of any sense of duty to the common good.

Glubb included the following in his list of the characteristics of decadence:

-- An increase in frivolity, hedonism, materialism and the worship of unproductive celebrity.

-- A loss of social cohesion.

-- The willingness of an increasing number to live at the expense of a bloated bureaucratic state.

Glubb’s list may at first glance be largely psychological--self-aggrandizement and a focus on hedonistic pursuits--but the dynamics of decadence have economic, political and social ramifications.

First and foremost, the aristocratic financial and political elites secured their position at the expense of social mobility by erecting barriers that protect them from competition and accountability. In effect, they eliminated the risk posed by change by rigging the system to their benefit.

To fund their extravagant lifestyles, they took more of the earnings of those below them, widening the inequality between the aristocracy and commoners to extremes. Historian Peter Turchin reports that where the patricians of the Roman Republic had 10 or 20 times the wealth of an average Roman citizen, by the late Empire the elites possessed up to 200,000 times the wealth of the average commoner.

The heavier burdens on the productive class and the decay of social mobility divested commoners of a financial stake in the system, and the concentration of political power in an oligarchy disenfranchised them of political influence.

When social mobility and shared purpose are lost, there is little motivation to contribute to a system that benefits the few at the expense of the many. People respond by reducing their productive participation and becoming dependents of the state, a phase captured by the phrase Bread and Circuses in the late Roman era, when a significant percentage of the Rome’s populace received free bread and access to costly entertainments in exchange for their political compliance.

Disenfranchised commoners with few prospects for advancement form a volatile political class; a small event can trigger a non-linear explosion that threatens the stability of a status quo that benefits the few at the expense of the many. To counter this threat, the elites bought the compliance and complicity of the masses with Bread and Circuses. As Glubb noted, the willingness to live off the state is a reflection of general decadence; if there is no other hedonistic pursuit within financial reach, then Bread and Circuses will do.

As the eventual collapse of decadent empires attests, Bread and Circuses are no substitute for social mobility, low barriers to accumulating capital and a political stake in the system. In the present era of decadence, Universal Basic Income (UBI) is the modern equivalent of Bread and Circuses. But buying off the disenfranchised doesn’t transform an unstable system into a stable system; it merely masks the instability for a time.

The core belief of decadent eras is that the status quo is so powerful and permanent that it can withstand the predations of the few and the Bread and Circuses lavished on the many.

This is of course a false confidence. Every status quo is a social construct that is inherently non-linear. The decline of productive sectors, the divestiture of commoners from ownership of productive assets and the political disenfranchisement of commoners hollow out the economy and the society.

These dynamics of decadence weaken the social and economic order, creating conditions that favor a loss of faith in the status quo and the failure of key institutions.

Takeaways

  • In the United States today is a build up between two survival techniques utilized by the human species.
  • Typically, the r-strategist survival technique, is a “service for self” strategy based upon living in an area of abundance. It permits a hedonistic lifestyle. Which in itself is great fun, as we humans are genetically programmed to procreate. However, it is only viable as long as the resources are not restricted.

via GIPHY

  • Typically the K-strategist survival technique is a “service for others” strategy that permits procreation in a land of scarcity.
  • The r/K Theory is often censored from many American-based progressive software outlets.
  • Famous r-strategist members include Hugh Hefner, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Clinton and Barrack Obama.
  • Famous K-strategist members include Erwin Rommel, Clint Eastwood, John Wayne, Judge Judith Sheindlin (Judge Judy), Donald Trump and Bruce Willis.

FAQ

Q: What is better, r-strategy or K-strategy?
A: Neither or both. It depends on the environment. If there is an endless supply of resources, then the r-strategy is better. If the resources are scarce, or they fluctuate, then obviously the K-strategy is superior.

Q: Can American democrats be K-strategist wolves? 
A: There was a time when the American democrat party was dominated by K-strategist individuals. For instance, when the democrat party founded the KKK, they were very family oriented and reacted to the changes in the political landscape by creating the militant KKK organization. Labels and species composition changes over time. Today, the American democrat party is dominated by r-strategist membership who is drawing the party towards radical r-strategist behaviors. Eventually it will either change, or be eliminated. Historically r-strategist behaviors do not possess longevity on this earth.

Q: What other creatures follow the r-strategy behaviors?
A: Aside from Democrats and rabbits, similar behaviors have been observed in mice, rats, mosquitoes and cockroaches.

Q: What other creatures follow the K-strategy behaviors?
A: Aside from wolves, similar behaviors can be found in many of the feline species such as domestic cats, lions, and snow leopards.

via GIPHY

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 28JUN18.
  2. SEO Review 30JUN18.
  3. Added quote from the twomindsblog 6OCT18.

Bronco Billy and the 25th law of power

When we were young, we were taught how to act, and told how to behave. The opinions of our peers decided what we would do, who we would date, and how successful our life could be. For those of us who never left our home town, these demands have become forged as the tightest shackles that bind us to the demands and needs of others.

However, once we leave that environment, we find ourselves in a new place with new friends and a new life. We are thus given and provided the opportunity to reconstruct our life. We are provided with the chance for us to define our life for ourselves. We can break forth through the limits placed on us by others.

Not only is this desirable, but it is often necessary. For true growth, and to be the most that you can be, comes from you defining how you will live, and under which terms that you will define your life.

The 25th Law of power

Law 25 
Re-Create Yourself 

Do not accept the roles that society foists on you. Re-create yourself by forging a new identity, one that commands attention and never bores the audience. Be the master of your own image rather than letting others define it for you. Incorporate dramatic devices into your public gestures and actions – your power will be enhanced and your character will seem larger than life.

The book “The 48 Laws of Power” is a classic work that defines methods and techniques by which a person may obtain power. Power can be defined many ways. It might be money, sex, relationships, ownership, control, or as pure military might.

The book goes into great detail on this subject, providing multiple examples that illustrate each technique.

48 Laws of Power
The 48 Laws of Power is a world famous book that describes numerous techniques for obtaining power. The power can be used for good or bad, it is up to the user.

One of the laws, or techniques, of power is the ability to recreate your life on your terms. This is law #25. Indeed, it is a powerful technique. For unless you have lived a charmed life, humans need to grow and expand beyond themselves. We are like a snake that sheds it’s skin, or a caterpillar who undergoes chrysalis to become a butterfly. We need to constantly strive, adapt and grow. For that is how we obtain experience.

For example motivational speaker Les Brown was classified as developmentally disabled. He was told that the best he could do was to become a janitor or a field laborer. Yet, he refused to believe that. With everyone of his classmates laughing at him, and most teachers shaking their head in sorry distain, we went ahead and forged a new life for himself.

He took on a new role; a better role as a motivational speaker.

Or consider, another radio talk show host; Rush Limbaugh. Always controversial, and bombastic, he was constantly hired and fired from jobs. No one wanted to touch him. We was considered a “wild card” and uncontrollable. Yet, by honing his abilities, and working on his strengths, he preserved and became a very famous and a very rich talk show host.

Often times, we need to move away from the thoughts, ideas, concepts of what other people think of us. Do you want to be treated as a successful businessman and not the class clown? Then you need to move away from your school mates. Do you want to be considered to be a brilliant scientist? Then you need to move away from people who call you a “book worm with no common sense”. Do you want to become a suave and sophisticated “ladies man”? Then, you need to remove yourself from the women who make fun of you and who don’t appreciate you qualities.

Now, you shouldn’t become confused. It is often more than just moving away geographically. You have to learn and hone the skills that you desire. If you want to become a “world renowned doctor”, you will need to study and cultivate your presence globally. If you want to be a “Ladies Man”, you will need to hone your relationship skills, and work on your presentation. If you want to live the life on your terms, you will have to work at it.

Have a Dream

We all need an objective. This is something that we can visualize and conceptualize. It is something that we can embrace as a target and an ideal that we can achieve.

"Bronco Billy McCoy: I've got a special message for you little pardners out there. I want you to finish your oatmeal at breakfast and do as your mom and pa tell you because they know best. Don't ever tell a lie and say your prayers at night before you go to bed. And as our friends south of the border say, 'Adios, amigos.' "

Have a Plan

Without a roadmap we are just lost in the wilderness. We need a plan to follow with a set goal to achieve. So set a goal. Describe the person who you want to be. Go into great detail. List what you want to be and what you don’t want to be.

Indian snake dance.
In the movie “Bronco Billy” all the members of his travelling fair were misfits. They were shoe salesmen, draft dodgers, and losers, who decided to step outside of their world and become something different. Here is a man who wanted to be an Indian chief.

You don’t need to use Microsoft Project to generate a plan, but you do need to take active steps. Get a notebook. It is cheap. Do not rely on your computer or cell phone to do this task. They are full of distractions. Go old school.

One cheap notebook. One pen (or pencil).

That notebook is your roadmap. Title it what ever you want, but in short it should be about one thing and one thing only; who you want to be.

Also note that it is going to be a journey. Right now you are NOT ready to be who you want to be. Some changes will be necessary. Indeed, you will need to change some things. Additionally, you will need to learn some things, and prepare some things as well. You will need to plan it out.

You can be who you want to be.
This rule applies to both men and women. It is not gender specific. In the movie “Bronco Billy”, a sad and unhappy, but filthy rich socialite ends up transforming her life into HER idea of what she wants.

For instance, using the “Ladies Man” example above, you will need to read books on how to seduce. You will need to subscribe to websites, forums and feeds with like minded people. You will need to establish goals and a training program. The training program will not only be about learning new things, but it will also be about unlearning old bad habits.

You will need to do daily positive affirmations. These are sentences that you repeat to yourself over and over to undo the programming that you have endured over the years. For instance;

  • I am calm, cool, and collected.
  • I am always happy, smart, know what to say.
  • I am lucky.
  • I dress right, my hair is perfect, and I know how to handle myself.

Positive affirmations need to be written down, and repeated daily. They work. Let them do their magic.

Work your plan

Once you map out your goal and how to get there; do it. In life, it is better to be 60% ready than wait forever to be 100% ready. You need to learn the basics and then plan on “faking it until you make it”. Close your eyes and make it happen.

Trust me, you won’t die.

"Bronco Billy McCoy: Now look! I don't take kindly to kids playin' hooky from school. I think every kid in America ought to go to school... at least up to the eighth grade. 

Young kid: We don't go to school today, Bronco Billy. It's Saturday! 
"

You will experience hurtles and problems. So what? That is life. For instance, let’s suppose your dream is to move to Bangkok, Thailand and become a go-go bar owner. It is obtainable, but it will be a lot of work. You might need to break your plan into smaller bite-sized bites and then work those pieces.

Let’s suppose your dream is to become a sheep rancher in New Zealand. It is possible, but you will need to know some basics about sheep herding, and you will need to work on the immigration paperwork.

Troubles for Bronco Billy and friends.
In the pursuit of our dreams there will be setbacks and troubles. However, they will never end your dream. It will just put it aside for a spell. Do not give up. Never give up. Never, and I do mean NEVER let ANYONE ever steal or take your dream away from you.

No matter what you do, you will need to have a plan that not only covers the physical changes that you need and want to bring about, but also covers the emotional and behavioral ones as well. But you know what? You can do it, because it is in YOUR nature.

You do not need a machine to make the world-line switch. You can do this on your own.

It gets easier over time…

"Lorraine Running Water: Do you understand what Bronco Billy and the wild west show are all about? You can be anything you want. All you have to do is go out and become it! "

The longer you work towards your dream, the easier it becomes. You always become what you think about. But actuating your thoughts with physical and tangible actions you will be able to achieve your dreams, and trust me you will be amazed how successful you will become.

Bronco Billy on stage.
You can achieve your dreams. You only need to have a plan. Keep it simple and direct and work it relentlessly. It is the one thing for you and you alone. Never let anyone steal it away from you.

When I was planning on moving to China, I studied Chinese. I had no one to practice with. I had no one to listen to. So I did it on my own, while the people around me snickered and made fun of me.  You will overcome the nay-Sayers and losers. You just follow your dream and stick with your plan.

Don’t let anyone steal that from under you.

Other Sources

In the movie “Bedazzled“, a man who is helplessly in love, signs away his soul for a change to spend life with the girl of his dreams. The devil gives him six opportunities to remake himself (all, of course, with a devilish twist). The point in the movie is that you can remake yourself to obtain objectives, but that there will be a tradeoff in the process.

I won’t go so far as to say that you cannot change because it will have undesirable effects. But, I will say that what ever the image that you want to become… make sure that it is an extension of WHO YOU ARE inside.

Choose
Only you can choose who you will be? Scenes are from the movie “Bedazzled”.

Conclusion

"Antoinette Lilly: Are you for real?
 
Bronco Billy McCoy: I'm who I want to be."

The movie “Bronco Billy” is a full embodiment of the lessons of Law #25 of the “48 Laws of Power”. All of the members within his little band of entertainers were redirecting their lives toward their dreams. While it is only a Hollywood movie, and received moderate praise by the “geniuses” in Hollywood, the lessons are important and valid.

It certainly deserves a second look. Especially today with the way things are in the world today.

Don’t give up.

You can recreate your own life in the form that you want it to be in. If you are tired and exhausted in living the life as it is today, you can exit it. You are not tied to anything. You really aren’t. You can bail.

  1. Set a goal.
  2. Make a Plan.
  3. Follow the Plan.
  4. Implement it.

Live your dream. Do not let anyone stop you.

Bronco Billy is living his dream.
Be like Bronco Billy. Live your dream. You don’t have to be a poor shoe salesman in New York city. You can recreate your life into something that appeals to you. Don’t be afraid. Follow your dream.

Takeaways

  • The 25th Law of the 48 Laws of Power suggests that we can create the life that we want to live. We should not accept the life that others want us to live.
  • This is attainable.
  • To achieve this dream, we need to set a goal, learn, and work towards that goal.
  • The movie “Bronco Billy” is all about the 25th Law of Power.
  • By watching the movie, you get a very good understanding of what the 25th Law of Power is and how it can be applied to your life.

FAQ

Q: Is my dream achievable, even if it sounds crazy or unobtainable?
A: Yes. However, it does need to be realistic. You cannot dream about being a turtle. However, you can dream about being a caretaker for turtles in Bora Bora.

Q: My spouse thinks it is a waste of time to pursue any dreams. What do I do?
A: This is a common problem. You have a choice. You can either enlist your spouse to share in your dream, or you will be forced to follow the dream without them. In any event, if you are forbidden to live your dream… that is not a life, no matter how anyone else tries to rationalize it.

via GIPHY

Q: How can I find the time to do all that I need to do to obtain my dream?
A: If you do not find the time, your dream will never materialize.

Q: Where can I find the movie “Bronco Billy”?
A: Try Netflix or any decent torrent site. Torrents are free, and most movies can be downloaded in a few days. Rare movies might take weeks.

Bronco Billy and Lilly.
Life is too short to be unhappy. It is like a bowl of cold chili. It is up to you to make it the best best life that is possible. You need to set your foot down and take command of your life. Make your dreams happen.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
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Notes

  1. Composed, edited, SEO checked and released. 27JUN18.
  2. Corrections. 27JUN18.

The Amazing Bremelanotide PT-141 (Vyleesi)

This post was updated 5JUL19, when I received word that the FDA approved Bremelanotide PT-141 under the name Vylessi. I updated this post, and subsequently added the name Vylessi to all mention of Bremelanotide PT-141, and added updated histories and commentaries at the end.

We have a tendency to think inside the box. We try to improve what we know. We try to work within the framework of what we have. We actually do need to think "outside the box"...

As a man gets older, your body changes. Your hair starts receding, and starts to fall out. You start to become bald. Your hair turns white. Your teeth start giving you problems, and you start to gain weight. Getting rid of that weight becomes problematic. No longer can exercise alone keep you trim and fit. You have to change your diet as well.

All men eventually start to have erectile disfunction (ED). Usually it seems to start in your early 40’s depending on your stress level, lifestyle, and general health. You can postpone it for a few years, but it will eventually strike. It will.

Typically, erectile disfunction more closely resembles a moderate soft erection. This is due to the blood pressure in the penis. As a man gets older, his ability to create solid rock-hard erections diminishes. Instead, when excited he produces short-lived soft and “spongy” erections, often cycling between a moderate “soft” erection and no erection at all.

This is what it is like to grow old.

Now, you can exercise. You can eat special foods, and you can have a stress-free life that can all significantly reduce these effects. For instance, leeks and eggs, bitter melon and oysters can certainly help the man in the bedroom. It will do wonders, as will a daily glass of red wine…

Enter Viagra

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Who hasn’t heard of this “miracle” pill?

Viagra entered the world in the 1990’s and revitalized the world of the American male. No longer did older men need to live a sex-less life. All you need do is pop in a “little blue pill” and all your troubles are over.

Of course, there are some tradeoffs.

For one, you need to get a doctors’ prescription. America is just about the ONLY nation that has this bastardized restriction. Everyone can just get the medicine off the shelf just about anywhere. Secondly, you have to pay REAL money for it. In a world where the raw material of Viagra (sildenafil) costs $100 / kg, and where a single dosage of Viagra is 25mg, the price difference is astounding.

Sildenafil
You can purchase the raw material for Viagra in China. This is Sildenafil. You have a MOQ, minimum order quantity to content with, which is often at least a gram. Price is around $0.000002 / pill.

It costs ten cents a gram for sildenafil, or ten cents for 1000mg. That’s ten cents for 40 pills. But Big American Pharmacies and their associated industries are charging an insane amount for this pill.

The cost for Viagra oral tablet 25 mg is around $447 for a supply of 6 tablets, depending on the pharmacy you visit. Prices are for cash paying customers only and are not valid with insurance plans.
-Drugs.com

It’s a good thing that I live in China, where I can get a bag of 100 generic pills for under $1.20.

Ah, but I digress…

"Abroad, getting Viagra is no problem as it is readily available over the counter in many countries. In countries I’ve been to, it sells for $1 a pill. Then, it’s party on. No such luck in the police state known as America. Got to have a doctor’s prescription, and it’s pricey. But, it’s worth it for the occasional twosome or threesome when there’s blow involved."

-If you are going to use Cocaine use Viagra

Enter Cialis

While it is certainly convenient, the problem with Viagra is that it tends to give you a headache, and does not mix well with alcohol. Which really sucks as most of us older folk prefer to drink and have fun, often leading up to a sexual romp or two.

And then came Cialis…

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You take a Cialis pill on a Friday, and you are good to go up until next Tuesday. That’s four days, boys and girls. OK, well, three days of erection when you want it, and as long lasting as you need it. Four days it begins to sputter out. It’s erection on demand, and they are of high quality and long duration. Perfect for cuddling with that special person in your life. The real problem with this is that it takes around three hours to work, so it doesn’t lend itself to spontaneous sexual encounters.

It is ideal for a married man who wants to spend quality time with his wife.

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Cialis is not licensed in China, so the only way you can get it at a pharmacy is to pay “full price”. Which is often 120 RMB/pill, or roughly $20/pill. That in itself pretty much sucks. Salaries in China are far below the salaries in the United States, so when you spend $20, it’s like spending enough to cover a weeks amount of food.

Chinese Pharmacy
Typical Chinese Pharmacy. The girl behind the counter will typically look up your medicine request on the computer and giver you the option of a local generic Chinese brand or a (cheap) cost version of a Western equivalent.

But then again, you can simply buy the (Tadalafil) powder here. Weigh it out. Mix it up yourself and use it.

I understand that a generic version is available in the UK, which would be a good alternative if you didn’t want to have a closet full of 500,000 Cialis pills lying around after your mix up your own batch. (BTW, India doesn’t really care about these licensed patents, and makes the pills anyways. Licensing and FDA be damned. So you can get great quality Cialis Generic out of India for maybe a fraction of the cost for what you would pay in the USA.)

It’s worth it, you know. You can spend quality time and focus on the time together instead of just one central activity.

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Shelf Life

As an aside, it does have a shelf life. After I made up a couple of million pills, I had to throw away large garbage bags full of old pills. They had begun to age. As they got older, they started to develop side effects, such as stomach gas, indigestion, headaches, and vision irregularities. So don’t use any Cialis that is over three years old. When I threw them away, there must have been five large green-black bags of pills that were thrown into the dumpster. Such a waste. Such a waste.

Anyways, I would have say that Cialis is the preferred conventional medication for ED, hands down.

Anyways…

The Design Team

Ah, but now for some bad news. What is really sad about it is what happened to all the researchers and developers who invented this product. You want to guess? Come on, what do you think happened to them?

Guess.

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Key team leaders in the ICOS Corporation developed the drug. They conceived it, they developed it and worked on it. However, the FDA has all kinds of testing and qualification hurtles that needed to be overcome. There was no way that the medicine would be approved. They were told this, and they knew that they had to link up with an “insider” or two to get the product approved. So the ICOS Corporation teamed up with Eli Lilly and Company to help get the drug approved through the FDA.

Of course, Eli Lilly is a big company with a lot of pull. They were able to “pull some strings” and get the drug approved.

As soon as they were able, Eli Lilly and Company bought the ICOS Corporation. They did so in 2007. It didn’t come cheap. They bought it for $2.3 billion. As a result, Eli Lilly now owned Cialis. As soon as they acquired the company, they immediately closed the ICOS operations. Thus they ended the joint venture and fired most of ICOS’s approximately 500 employees. Five hundred employees fired. Five. Hundred. Employees. Good Golly!

So…

Now you know [1] why the drug costs so much, and [2] why it sucks to work in corporate America.

Chinese pharmacy.
You can buy just about any medicine in the world at a Chinese pharmacy. You don’t need a prescription and the costs typically are much cheaper than in the United States. You just write what you are looking for on a slip of paper and give it to the girl behind the counter. No Chinese language skill is necessary.

Enter Levitra

This is an interesting little drug. It is a single dose drug like Viagra, but with a cost comparable to Cialis. It works a little bit differently than either of the two drugs already discussed. However, functionally it is like Viagra except it is made by a different company. You can consider it the Pepsi equivalent to Coke-cola.

I prefer it over Viagra simply because it interacts better with wine. I also like the (ahem) feeling I get when I use it. I feel (somewhat) better “packed” if you know what I mean.

What does it matter?

So now, men can take a pill and get an erection whenever they need it. Depending on where they live the access to this medication may be relatively easy (like in China) or restricted (like in America).

The thing is that life is not two dimensional.

It’s not ONLY about having a nice hard erection, it is about the mood, the feeling, and the emotions that you have when you are engaged in lovemaking. People, we are NOT animals. We have feelings and urges. Just getting hard and going through the motions is fine for a robot, but it is really weak compared to the real thing that you experienced when you were young.

For instance, consider the humble tomato. It was bred to look delicious, and ship safe. With taste being an afterthought. How we have thousands of tomatoes that look like plastic fruit and taste like cardboard. We have turned it into a two-dimensional shadow of what it was.

There are a host of things going on inside our brain when we are engaged in a sexual encounter. We express a litany of emotions, and feelings. We experience different sensations in our bodies. We connect and feel things that we share with our partners.

For both men and women, there are different aspects to a relationship that can be enhanced or (better yet) compensated for, instead just focusing on having an erection.

So…

Maybe we should start to pay attention to these other aspects of our life. Maybe we should consider them as playing an important role in our life. Maybe we should consider the entire aspect of who we are and what we are doing.

Enter PT-141 (Bremelanotide) Vyleesi

Instead of being a PDE5 inhibitor like Viagra and Cialis, consider a melanocyte stimulating hormone (MSH).  MSH induces lordosis in animal subjects. Or in other words, lordosis is a sign of physical preparation for copulation. It is a hormone that tells the body “get ready, we are going to have sex”.

It is a hormone that puts an animal in “heat”.

It is hardwired in our brains.  In animals such as dogs and cats, it tells the female to rise up their butts, and tells males to start thrusting. Now, as man has evolved this hormone has been repressed. We have replaced it with other cultural triggers. Or, in other words, what we visually see that has value has replaced this hormone. The natural lordosis behavior  has atrophied in humans.

Not so when you take this drug. This drug reactivates it.

PT-141
PT-141 Bremelanotide is easily available outside of the United States. You can buy it in many English speaking countries such as Australia and the UK, as well as communist countries such as Communist China and Russia. However, Americans have been FORBIDDEN to have access to this medicine.

This drug was being developed by Palatin Technologies. It showed great promise as it works equally well on both the male and the female sexes. (Though who knows about the other 55 genders that somehow mysteriously popped into existence under the Obama administration.)

It’s not only that men can get a nice sold and hard erection. It is more than that. People who take this also feel differently. People who take it feel young and horny like a sex-crazed 16 year old.

There’s only one problem. The FDA decided to ban it.

The FDA refused to permit Americans to access this drug.

The FDA approval process.
Here is the FDA approval process. It’s pretty tight. In a way it is helpful , but in another way it is counter productive. You need a medicine that works, under specified conditions for 90% of the population. You can NEVER find something that works for 100% of the population. They could have released this medicine as approved with limitations on use, rather than directly banning it completely.

Yes, it was banned in the United States, much to the surprise to all the doctors, scientists, and research participants.

They were shocked, as they should be. This was not just a “so so” drug. The test results were ASTOUNDING, and yet…yet… it was banned.

So, in defiance, the staff who developed this amazing medicines put it ALL out on the internet. That’s right. All of the chemical formulations, all of the test plans, and all of the documentation was uploaded to the Internet.

Just like Keannu Reeves did in the movie “Chain Reaction”.

Chain Reaction starring Keannu Reeves
In the movie “Chain Reaction”, Keanu Reeves played a scientist that had the secret to limitless energy. However, dark powerful forces (namely the “swamp” and Big Business) wanted to stop him, and keep the information to themselves. What he ended up doing was to take all the information and upload it to the cloud so that everyone could have the information for free.

There, for everyone to see, is the amazing test results and the absolutely stunning levels of corruption at the FDA.

They put it all out there. Everything, including the formulation and sequencing information.

Scientists talk among each other. It’s a small world. Sure, maybe the well-paid FDA bureaucrats ($440,000 / year just to say NO!)  are oblivious to this fact, and only chat with each other in their mansions and country-clubs, but the real workers, developers and key inventors care about their work and research.

In short order, it became obvious that the FDA was a corrupt organization, and that America had banned this medication because it would compete against Viagra. It also became obvious that this medication was very special. Very… very special.

If Viagra could be compared to a French Fry, PT-141 Vyleesi was a full thanksgiving meal with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, salad, cranberry dressing, pumpkin pie and soft fresh buttered rolls. There is no comparison. None at all.

Not only that, but now the formula was available for everyone to replicate. As soon as it got out on the Internet, everyone was making it. People could buy it and try it and use it. Everyone, that is, except Americans.

So for the last two decades, this amazing drug has been used all over the world (outside of America) with amazing success, and absolutely ZERO fatalities. (So much for the so called, concerns about possible high blood pressure in a fringe section of the population.)

It has since become a legend. PT-141 Vyleesi is the stuff of dreams…

Pfaus showed me stunning testimonials from human test subjects. “On the five-point scale, I would rate the erection I had as a six,” said one of the 1,300 anonymous testers. 

"You get this humming feeling,” said another. “You’re ready to take your pants off and go.”

The drug worked equally well on women, who chronicled “an intense arousal” that lasted from six to 72 hours. “I was focused on sex,” said one of the women.

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Yes, but what is even more interesting is that this works on both men AND women. So while you might have a raging hard-on, your wife can now feel the same as you at the same time. She can feel like she was a sex-starved girl in the throes of “puppy love”.

Ah! What an amazing age that we live in!

“A dose of PT-141 results, in most cases, in a stirring in the loins in as little as 15 minutes. Women, according to one set of results, feel ‘genital warmth, tingling and throbbing’, not to mention ‘a strong desire to have sex’.”

-Julian Dibbell at ScienceBase

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User Stories

People can buy the PT-141 Vyleesi outside of the United States. And, they have been doing so for around two decades now.

The FDA has no jurisdiction off-shore, and people have taken advantage of this to try different kinds of medications for their own purposes.

You know, you don’t always have to listen to that busybody down the street to do things. So what if the FDA wants to FORCE you to pay outrageous prices for Viagra, and forbids you from using medications that you can get just about anywhere else on the planet.

Chinese Pharmacy.
Every nation has pharmacies. Here is one in China. However, you can go to a pharmacy in Mexico if you don’t want to fly to China. I am sure that it has many of the medications listed herein at a fraction of the cost of American versions.

You can hop on a plane and go to a nation that is freer, and get the medications yourself. I would suggest going to a nation that allows people more freedom than America allows.

“With PT-141 Vyleesi, you feel good, not only sexually aroused,” reported anonymous patient 007, a participant in a Phase 2 trial, “you feel younger and more energetic.” 

Said another patient: “It helped the libido. So you have the urge and the desire. . . . You get this humming feeling; you’re ready to take your pants off and go.” 

And another: “Twice me and my wife had sex twice in one night. I came in [to work] and I just raved about it: ‘Jesus, guys . . . 58 years old and you don’t do that.’ ” 

Tales of pharmaceutically induced sexual prowess among 58-year-olds are common enough in the age of the Little Blue Pill, but they don’t typically involve quite so urgent a repertoire of humming, throbbing, tingling, and double-dipping. 

Or as patient 128 put it: “My wife knows. She can tell the difference between Viagra and PT-141 Vyleesi .”

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The stories about this drug are amazing. Consider this from TheIronDen;

My buddy said research the stuff and see what the dosing was supposed to be because me made a HUGE mistake and took to much. He took double what we took and I will tell you DAMN!!! DOSING is .10-.20cc NO MORE below is the story.

As many of you know I am a bouncer on the weekends well I was told take this 45 minutes before going to bed, I had read where this could take a few hours to take effect so at midnight we went to the car and took the preloaded insulin pins I brought with me. 

Well I felt nothing and the wife didn't either by 3:30 when we got home. I was pissed at her and she didn't know it so watched TV awhile then I slept on the couch, she came in the next morning and woke me up, we went in the room and talked a min, then it was on. 

We have never had sex 3 times in 4 hours and she has never orgasmed 3 times in 1 day, we were so tired from sex that we couldn't hardly move and wanted more but our bodies wouldn't let us. bremelanotide  Vyleesi is AMAZING, I even wanted it last night, she was in the mood but couldn't as she has other medical problems and the pain in her hip was too much.

What it does:

Men - makes you horny as hell and increases blood flow to the cock making it more sensitive.

Women - floods the vagina with blood making it WAY more sensitive and very aroused.

Of this from a woman who took it with her husband…

3 hours after injection bremelanotide (PT-141)  Vyleesi hit like gangbusters.* 

We were sitting in the lounge area of a restaurant when my nether regions made themselves known. Increased sensitivity to any movement I made in my seat i.e. shifting or leg crossing. 

This was coupled with increased sexual thoughts. 

It is difficult not to think in sexual terms when some body parts are demanding your attention! My husband had a difficult time getting up from his chair to even approach the restaurant table. Next time we will time the injections better LOL

There are many, many…. MANY opinions by users, that actually run counter to the decisions made by the FDA.

I have to wonder if the agencies such as the FBI, FCC, FDA and IRS are actually being made to benefit Americans. I just seems like they all have their own agendas and treat American citizens like toilet tissue. It really seems that way. It really, really does.

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Heck, if the FDA was around when ice cream cones were first invented, I am sure that they would have banned them.

The same goes for such staples as Coke-cola, bananas (they will need to have a Blue Ribbon Panel study the “banana issue”), and chewing gum. Of course they would have banned chewing gum “for the children”.

Absolute power CORRUPTS absolutely.

When any agency causes more harm then benefit, it should have it’s doors shuttered and the workers discharged. Perhaps these “protected” governmental agencies should start to feel what industry has been like since the 1960’s for us “fly over” folk.

Women state that the sensation given from injecting bremelanotide (PT-141)  Vyleesi is like being in heat! 

One colleague in particular stated that she didn’t know what was going on…but she had wanted “it” all day long after dosing the night before.

-TheIronDen

History and Timeline

Here’s a quick timeline of events that begins with Palatin Technologies’ submission to the FDA in the United States.

August 30, 2007

Right off the bat, the FDA declined Palatin Technologies’ application for approval of Bremelanotide to treat erectile dysfunction. The reason was there were “concerns” of increased blood pressure in a small percentage of the test subjects. Especially in light that Viagra was approved and it too had test subjects that had increased blood pressure.

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...the rejection of Bremelanotide by the FDA is especially puzzling, at least to a "lay person", when seeing posts online (including this one on the Yahoo finance message board for Palatin Technologies) claiming Palatin insiders have told them that only 2% of test subjects experienced a significant increase in blood pressure.

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 "It was up to 30 for 2 percent (I spoke to Steven W aka investor relations). The avg was 3. Not a medical person but those few people that hit the 30 mark killed brem."

Click here to read about the FDA decision about Bremelanotide

There are all kinds of conspiracies as to why this drug was declined because one or two of the thousands of test subjects had slightly raised blood pressure, when other approvals (with higher percentages of problems identified by test subjects) were approved.

I, such as myself, have speculated that huge companies (like Pfizer for instance) may have strongly influenced the FDAs decision regarding approval of this relatively small company’s competitive product. If you don’t know what I am talking about, watch the movie “Tucker, a man and his dream“.

September 10, 2007

Palatin Technologies and King Pharmaceuticals end their collaboration. Palatin regains full rights to the Bremelanotide program.

September 11, 2007

Competitive Technologies announced they presented Palatin Technologies with a Notice of Termination of the PT-14 technology license agreement. For those not aware, CTT “discovered” the original compound that led to PT-141 (Brem’s initial designation) via the University of Arizona, and licensed Palatin to develop it in 1998.

This issue was resolved on January 22, 2008 with Palatin paying $800,000 to CTT and maintaining the rights to Bremelanotide.

September 28, 2007

Palatin Technologies announced positive results from an at-home Phase 2 trial evaluating bremelanotide for the treatment of female sexual arousal disorder (FSAD).

Post menopausal women "showed statistically significant improvements, compared to baseline and placebo, in desire and arousal success rates, and overall satisfaction at one and two months. In these patients, the FSFI domains of arousal, desire and orgasm were statistically significantly improved compared to placebo at one month. The arousal and orgasm domains were statistically significantly improved compared to placebo at one and two months."

Premenopausal women also "showed statistically significant improvements, compared to baseline, in desire and arousal success rates, and overall satisfaction at one and two months."

May 14, 2008

Palatin Technologies reported it was abandoning Bremelanotide as a sexual dysfunction drug. Instead they intend to resubmit it to the FDA as a treatment for shock due to blood loss.

They are beginning studies for a new compound called PL-6983.  This compound works like Bremelanotide but with significantly lower problems related to blood pressure issues. Read Palatin Technologies’ 2008 Objectives plan here.

Then something happened... In 2016, Donald Trump was elected and immediately put businessmen instead of political hacks in charge of the FDA. Three years later...

July 1, 2019

The FDA approved the drug! I am absolutely shocked! As well as pleased. Very, very pleased. Now Americans can finally get what we in the rest of the world has enjoyed for almost two decades now.

It can now be bought in the United States under prescription. It goes by the name Vyleesi. I’m sure that it will be much more expensive for Americans to buy, but it will now be available, and that is a big step towards freedom.

Vyleesi (bremelanotide) PT-141
Vyleesi (bremelanotide) PT-141

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Details

Here is a write up that has been circulating online over the last decade or so. As websites come and go, it behooves us to keep this information alive and available for all the poor sops in America who are FORBIDDEN from using this wonderful product;

What is Bremelanotide (PT-141)?

Bremelanotide (formerly PT-141) is the generic term for a new medication for use in treating sexual dysfunction in men (erectile dysfunction or impotence) as well as sexual dysfunction in women (sexual arousal disorder). It is a synthetic aphrodisiac. Unlike Viagra and other related medications, it does not act upon the vascular system, but directly increases sexual desire.

Originally, the peptide Melanotan II that bremelanotide was developed from was tested as a sunless tanning agent. In initial testing, Melanotan II did induce tanning but additionally caused sexual arousal and spontaneous erections as unexpected side effects in eight out of the ten original male volunteer test subjects. In clinical studies, bremelanotide has been shown to be effective in treating male sexual and erectile dysfunction as well as female sexual dysfunction. It is currently being tested by Palatin Technologies.

Bremelanotide is a cyclic hepta-peptide lactam analog of alpha-melanocyte-stimulating hormone (alpha-MSH) that activates the melanocortin receptors MC3-R and MC4-R in the central nervous system. It has the amino acid sequence Ac-Nle-cyclo[Asp-His-D-Phe-Arg-Trp-Lys]-OH or cyclo-[Nle4, Asp5, D-Phe7, Lys10]alpha-MSH-(4-10). PT-141 is a metabolite of Melanotan II that lacks the C-terminal amide function. Its molecular formula is C50H68N14O10 with a molecular weight of 1025.2.

Are these nasal? Oral, Injectable?

Currently the nasal and oral routes have not been made efficient. PT-141 is a sterile injectable made for sub-q injection, like insulin.

What's the dosing schedule...how much do I take?

0.5mg-2mg is the range which people dose. Taking 2-4 hours before game time is ideal. The window of opportunity is very unique.

Say you had a dinner and movie arranged. Taking before dinner may be the best route, however during the climax of the movie may interfere with one of your own…read between the lines there

Is there any reconstituting involved?

Yes and bacteriostatic water is the recommended solvent here. 

To mix the vial with bact water, take one syringe (BD Ultrafine II 1cc or 1/3 cc are excellent and I recommend them) and grab your vial of bacteriostatic water. If using a 1 cc syringe (100 units), use the syringe to withdraw 1 full ml (1cc) and inject that into the vial of PT-141 through the rubber. 

Be sure to aim the needle towards the glass, so that it will trickle down and not harm the peptide. 

Swirl the vial to thoroughly mix and let the peptide dissolve. The key here is to be gentle. 

Say you had the vial of PT-141 stored in the freezer, move the vial of PT-141 to fridge for an overnight stay. Then you are ready the next day to reconstitute the same temperature refrigerated bact water with the PT-141 in the most efficient manner. (Just some tricks of the trade here.)

So now you have 100 units (1cc) of bacteriostatic water mixed with 10 mg of PT-141 in your vial ready to go. A 1mg dose would be 10 units or .1ml (.1cc). Make sense? Hope so.

How is it stored?

The lyophilized powder (freeze dried state) can be stored in the freezer or refrigerator. Once reconstituted (mixed with water) it will be good for a month in the refrigerator before it begins to degrade.

Does this help give erections or just put you in the mood?

With PT-141, you feel good, not only sexually aroused, as reported anonymous patient 007, a participant in a Phase 2 trial, you feel younger and more energetic.

The precise mechanisms by which PT-141 does its job remain unclear, but the rough idea is this: Where Viagra acts on the circulatory system, helping blood flow into the penis, PT-141 goes straight to the brain itself. And there it goes to work, switching on the same neural circuitry that lights up when a person actually, you know, wants to.

Basically this takes men back to middle school. You may find yourself in a similar situation as you were in 8th grade science class with the teacher bent over helping the student in front of you. It may be necessary to do a "tuck up" if at the office or especially at the public pool!

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Enter PL-6983

This is an “improved” version of PT-141 that doesn’t have any of the “concerns” that the FDA has raised. Of course, no matter how successful the medication is, the FDA will probably ban it’s use anyways. Anyways, this medication is under development currently and the formula is secret. Maybe one day, we can find out more about this medication. However, for now, we will have to wait.

PL-6983 is a synthetic peptide and selective MC4 receptor agonist which is under development by Palatin Technologies for the treatment of female sexual dysfunction and erectile dysfunction. It was developed as a successor to/replacement of bremelanotide (PT-141) due to concerns of the side effect of increased blood pressure seen with the latter in clinical trials. Relative to bremelanotide, PL-6983 produces significantly lower increases in blood pressure in animal models.The drug has reportedly been in pre-clinical development for all medical indications since 2008. Palatin has stated that "We are focusing development efforts on bremelanotide for [female sexual dysfunction], but are continuing evaluation of PL-6983." The chemical structure of PL-6983 has yet to be made public.

-Wikipedia

You can read about it in detail HERE.

Enter Oxytocin

You do not need to take various medications to enhance your bodies’ desire for sexual intercourse. There are hormones that do this. For example, Oxytocin is a hormone that also acts as a neurotransmitter in the brain and known as the “love hormone” or “cuddle hormone”.

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In humans, it is believed to be released during hugging, touching, and orgasm in both sexes. Oxytocin is also involved in social recognition and bonding, and may be involved in the formation of trust and generosity.

A researcher at the University of Zurich has stated that women are more susceptible to oxytocin than men, due to enhancing effects of estrogen, so women may show a stronger effect.

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If you are an American it would be pretty difficult to obtain. You would have to have your doctor prescribe it for you, and at that, it is heavily regulated and very expensive. Or, you could do what everyone else on the globe does. They buy it from China.

Enter Flibanserin

Now, of course, women have different biology than males. Their urges, needs and desires can not often be switched on and off like a light-bulb. Consider Flibanserin. Here is a drug that showed some real promise in helping women reengage their sexual desire.

Addyi
Addyi has been developed to help women with their sexual needs and desires. Personally I think it is a good thing. I have noticed that when both mean and women are getting their sexual and relationship needs fulfilled, they are often healthier and much happier.

It was developed by a small company called Boehringer Ingelheim, and they submitted it to the FDA for approval. Of course, the FDA halted all approvals, and the development of this product ended.

Well, some “back door” meetings were conducted. Some money changed hands. Then, suddenly the rights to the drug were then transferred to Sprout Pharmaceuticals. What do you know? Suddenly all the roadblocks fell and the FDA approved of the drug in August 2015.

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Of course! Only certain companies are permitted to get products approved by the FDA. It’s a small closed club, don’t you know.  Hum. I wonder how much money exchanged hands at the FDA. I’ll bet that it was significant.

Heroes and attaractive people have followers.
Some people end up having followers or groupies. Anyone can be a follower. That can include newscasters. I am sure that this gal would do anything that this man asked.

The product was developed as BIMT-17. Current brand name is Addyi.

Flibanserin has been dubbed the “Female Viagra” and “the little pink pill”; however compared to Viagra, flibanserin has a distinctly different mechanism.

The proposed mechanism of action of flibanserin involves regulation of several brain chemicals that may affect sexual desire, although the exact mechanism is not known. Flibanserin is a post-synaptic 5HT1A receptor agonist and 5HT2A receptor antagonist, as noted in FDA briefing documents, and has action in the central nervous system. 

The manufacturer states that flibanserin corrects an imbalance of dopamine and norepinephrine (both responsible for sexual excitement), while decreasing levels of serotonin (responsible for sexual satiety / inhibition). 

Flibanserin is not a hormonal drug and does not affect blood flow like the class of drugs approved for men with erectile dysfunction.

-Drugs.com

Like all FDA approved medications, there are limitations.  The medication has to be taken daily and is costly, about US$800 per month with a prescription.

But no worries. You can buy the materials by the Kg in China, and only end up paying $0.0000002/dose. Of course, you would need to measure the dose out on a scale. So it is not as convenient.

via GIPHY

If you want to save money, and not have to worry about self dosing, I would suggest this far cheaper alternative.

  1. Buy a round-trip ticket to China.
  2. Get a five-star hotel room.
  3. Go to a pharmacy, and pay $20 for a three month supply.
  4. Return home.

You won’t need a prescription in China. The Chinese government trusts their citizens to know how to take care of their own bodies.

Contrary to what the American Media says, the Chinese government trusts their people.

What about Kisspeptin

Kisspeptin is a naturally occurring hormone, so it’s present in all men and all women. And it’s mainly found in the brain, especially in the center of the brain in the area called the hypothalamus.

via GIPHY

At the moment we know that it works to control other reproductive hormones like testosterone and estrogen using its actions in the hypothalamus. There are receptors for this hormone in the emotional areas of the brain.

In trials, 29 healthy young male volunteers were given an injection containing kisspeptin. They were then shown a variety of images while in an MRI scanner, including sexual and non-sexual romantic pictures of couples bonding. The same men were also administered a placebo during the two-stage controlled study.

Researchers analyzing the brain responses of the men found that after the injection of kisspeptin, when viewing sexual or romantic images of couples, there was increased activity in structures in the brain typically activated by sexual arousal and romance.

The researchers say the findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, show for the first time that the hormone that is vital in all of us to stimulate puberty can also alter the way that our brains behave.

Roll Call

So we have PDE5 inhibitors like Viagra and Cialis that enable the male to have erections. It doesn’t do anything in regards to feelings and emotions. All it does is enable men to perform biologically like they did when they were in their 20’s.

We have melanocyte stimulating hormones (MSH) that induces primeval lordosis in humans. This works on both men and women. The FDA forbids Americans to use this medicine, but it is being used around the world with great and stunning results. This is available in PT-141 and possibly (one day) in PL-6983.

We have normal human hormones such as Kisspeptin and Oxytocin that regulates feelings and emotions leading towards relationships and sexual activities.

Finally, we have “designer medicines” such as Flibanserin (Addyi). Which is a post-synaptic 5HT1A receptor agonist and 5HT2A receptor antagonist for female use.

The Future

The future for Americans is rather bleak, I am afraid.

The House of Representatives voted on Friday to create a new schedule of banned drugs under the Controlled Substances Act, called “Schedule A,” and to give Attorney General Jeff Sessions broad new powers to criminalize the manufacturing, importation, and sale of substances that are currently unregulated, but not illegal. 

The bill is now headed to the Senate, where co-sponsors Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) and Chuck Grassley (R–Iowa) will likely have little problem whipping votes.

-Michael Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog

Did you know that the natural betel nut is banned in the United States? Do you even know what it is? It is a nut from the betel tree, and people in South East Asia chew it, much like Americans chew birch bark and leaves. It’s not at all popular in the United States, but in Asian expat communities, they do chew this nut.

Well, the FDA banned it. Do you know why?

Was it because it was dangerous? Was it because of “the children”? Was it because it might cause addiction or develop into a desire for other vices? Nope. It was banned because they COULD NOT find anything wrong with it. So to be safe, they banned it until they could find a benefit in chewing it. You know, “better safe than sorry”.

What kind of backwards logic is this? That is America for you. There is absolutely no freedom. Now, if you want to chew a betel nut you need to go to a freer country that allows you this little pleasure.

You need to go to a country that has more freedoms than America allows. You know, like friggin’ communist China!!!!

Summary

As an American, all we know is what we are told. We think that there is only one medication available for men with ED issues. When in reality, there are a host of solutions. It is just that Americans are barred from trying any of these other solutions simply because…

Simply because…

You, know. Because…

But not to worry. These medications are easy to get outside of the United States. They do not need doctors prescriptions or any proof of age or other barriers that one often finds in the United States. You just go to a pharmacy, write the name of the drug on a piece of paper, and they sell it to you directly at the cash register.

As you get older, you start to realize that “someday, I will...” is actually right NOW. There no longer is a “someday“. All you have is the NOW, and nothing else. You have friends who have died, and you truly know how short life actually is. You don’t have the will to wait for “someday…“.

You don’t have the time, or the patience to wait until some well-fed bureaucrat in the American government grants you the right to do things with your own body. You say “piss on this“, and go do it yourself anyways.

Every day that you live could be the last.

That moment that you could spend with your wife, holding and snuggling, while the storm rages outside might be your last. Those bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. don’t care about you at all. They are not sitting at the table with you now. They have no idea what color your socks are, and do not know which side of the bed that you sleep on.

How dare they TELL YOU what to put in YOUR body!

Our rulers
Here are the people who operate the enormous bureaucracy in the United States. You know, the ones that say one things and do the other. John Brennan. James Clapper, and their ilk. You know what they think of YOU and your family, don’t you…?

Freedom actually means something. It is not just a meaningless slogan that you hear on the fourth of July. It means something, gosh darn it!

The freedom to live your life on your terms is what freedom is. And that is why I am in communist China of all places. At least here, I can take whatever medication I please. No over-paid Washington bureaucrat can do anything about it.

Hey! I’m not seeing an opioid crisis over here…

Oh, and by the way! I like well-cooked bacon as well, with sunny-side up eggs! I like “runny” yellows on my eggs. You don’t like it? You can go to hell.

This is MY time and I am living it on MY terms. I strongly recommend that you, the reader, do so as well. You go live YOUR life as YOU see fit.

via GIPHY

Takeaways

  • PT-141 is a superior ED medication.
  • PT-141 is illegal in the United States, even though it’s qualification trials were acceptable. This is true even though this drug is available world-wide with no reported problems what so ever.
  • To pass approval in the FDA, there is apparently a need for graft, kick-backs and large American-based company partnerships. Nothing is ever approved on merit alone.
  • Americans do not need to suffer the extremely high costs of medications in the United States. They can get them outside of the USA at a fraction of the cost (airfare included).
  • ED medication is often used recreationally by young men who don’t need it. However, there is a real and serious need for men over 40 years old.
  • The roles of touching, cuddling, holding and passionate embraces are just as important than the sexual act alone.

FAQ

Q: What is PT-141?
A:Bremelanotide (tentative brand name Rekynda; former developmental code name PT-141) is a peptide melanocortin receptor agonist which is under development by Palatin Technologies as a treatment for female sexual dysfunction. It works equally effectively on both male and female humans.

Q: Is it available in the United States?
A: No. The FDA has banned it.

Q: Why is PT-141 banned in the United States?
A: The official reason is because a small subgroup of patients using the medication experienced higher than normal levels of blood pressure. The actual reason is because this is a small non-American organization, and they did not have any connections with large American pharmacy organizations to pay for the vice and graft that the FDA expected.

Q: Is PT-141 safe?
A: Yes. Since the product went globally public since 2007, there has not been one fatality or hospitalization when using this medication. NOT ONE.

Q: Other medicines in other nations cheaper than in the USA?
A: Oh, my yes.

"$8 per vial in competing developed-world nations and $38,892 in the U.S. That says it all."

-Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog

5JUL19 Update

The FDA approved Bremelanotide PT-141 for sale under the trade name Vyleesi. Amazing!

And the “swamp creatures” in Washington DC are furious!

A Final Quote

Dr. Robert Pearl, writing in Forbes last September illustrated the greed exhibited by the industry. He used the CEO of Nostrum Laboratories to make his point. Nostrum recently raised the U.S. price of their antibiotic nitrofurantoin from $474.75 to $2,392. It was developed back in 1953 and should have gone off patent during the Nixon era.

In an interview with the Financial Times, Nirmal Mulye Nostrum chief executive, said “I think it is a moral requirement to…sell the product for the highest price.”

Mr Mulye compared pricing decisions to that of selling “a painting for half a billion dollars”. He was “in this business to make money”. Of course, all businesses are in business to make money. But, none enjoy the monopolistic protections granted to the pharmaceutical industry here in the United States.

Note: a three day supply of nitrofurantoin tablets in Alberta sells for $15 Canadian.

The American system has been allowed to metastasize into an unaffordable monster. Our political leaders have allowed it. It is long past time for Americans to demand that they change it. This is not a matter of right versus left. It is a matter of right versus wrong. It is simply wrong for our government to allow sick Americans to be held hostage to the predatory prices imposed by these government protected monopolies.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Composed 15JUN18.
  2. Final composition 20JUN18.
  3. SEO review 20JUN18.

Why an American Man should Leave America (If just for a bit…)

No, this is not a bash the United States post. This is a post about stepping out of your comfort zone and seeing what is “out there”. Here, I argue that travel, and adventure, are the best ways to make us appreciate America, what we have. As well, as to appreciate what we don’t have.

After all, if you live in the desert you begin to appreciate grass, trees and rain. You need to “shake things up” from time to time.

When one speaks three languages: they are trilingual.
When one speaks two languages: they are bilingual.
When one speaks only one language: they are American.

I’ve done my fair share of travelling, and I can say that no place is perfect. Some things are great here, and some things are better there. What is important is the exposure to those things. It helps us grow.

Have you ever wondered what would happen to the people of North Korea if they were exposed to what it is like outside of North Korea? Can you just imagine? They have never been to a McDonald’s restaurant. They have never seen a K-POP video. They don’t carry smart phones, and don’t know what a search engine is. Imagine what a shock to their system it would be.

They are stuck there in their own echo chamber, in their own bubble of reality.

Just like us Americans. We too are stuck in a echo chamber and our own bubble of reality. My golly, that should most certainly be obvious after the 2016 election of Donald Trump and how outrageous the news media has become afterwards. Everyone is living this fake world and this fictional understanding of life. Everyone. From the news-babes on CNN, to the CEO of Starbucks. Everyone is living in some kind of Bizzaro World.

The weekends in Egypt are not same with ours!
This also broke my common sense, I thought the weekends is Saturday and Sunday all over the world! But there're Friday and Saturday in Egypt!

Anyways…

Let’s chat a little bit about stepping outside of the United States as an American Man, for just a spell. Just for a little bit of time, not for long. Just for a little bit. Then return back. Then to think about how to improve our life inside the United States. For now, we have a new and fresh perspective of what it is like outside the United State’s borders…

Step out. Look around. Step back.

Remember, I am a MAN, so this article is from my, a male’s perspective. I am sure a woman would have a totally different viewpoint. 

Why a man should leave America

If you’re an American living in the United States, I’m sorry, but you probably aren’t using your nationality to its fullest potential. Sure, you get to honor the flag during baseball games, barbecue hotdogs on the 4th of July and express your loud political opinion. But ultimately, the best way to celebrate your Americanism is to leave the USA.

-The Privileged Life of an American Living in Asia

Since I have been outside of the USA, I have lived a freer, happier life.  While I have tried to tell and relate this fact to the reader, it is just incomprehensible to most Americans because many have not left the United States. What I relate to and describe is completely foreign. I wish it wasn’t this way, I really do. However, that is simply the truth.

I will have to be honest, it wasn’t until after I left America that I really began to appreciate it.

As well as get really angry as to what it has become.

Here's just a few of the things that I have come to miss...

The first day of hunting season. A big garden full of tomato plants, peppers and onions. Football on lazy Sunday afternoons. The local sports section in the newspaper with photos of friends, relatives, and their kids. Fishing brook trout. A compound bow. A Ruben sandwich with real coleslaw. Rummaging around in a auto junkyard and scrounging some spare parts.

Meeting some friends at the local bar, or club. Chatting about the latest movies. Depth-charges, and pickled eggs. Cleaning out the gutter, and raking leaves. (Yeah, really.) My riding lawnmower.

My tree stand and salt lick.

Chilling out with my uncle while jazz played on the stereo in his living room. Having a "Dagwood" sandwich. The editorial section of the Pittsburgh Press. Taking my motorcycle out for a spin on a nice sunny summer day. "Lighting up" next to a hopper while the Indian summer breeze blew some leaves about.

You take these things for granted. It is not until you live without them that you begin to miss them, and appreciate them.

Here is an interesting little vignette from an American who went to visit a coffee-shop in Amsterdam, and discovers that instead of selling coffee, it sold weed and magic mushrooms!

Yeah right, coffee shop that doesn’t serve coffee, but space cakes and magic mushrooms. 

So, I am from a country where you get skinned, shot at, and hanged for having this stuff. 

Of course, now I had the freedom to do that, and hence, I headed to a coffeeshop. As a noob, I had no idea how this works. There was a “consultant” to assist you, like a pharmacist!” No kidding , that was crazy! 

I remember the lady introducing all the products from space cakes and magic mushrooms to philosophical stones and recommend that a noob like me to try the mushrooms. So I asked, “How do you eat this?”

She replied, “ Just eat it like eating French fries.”
Me after an hour : Damn the French fries was good!

-What was the biggest culture shock you ever faced?

This posting is inspired by an article titled “10 Reasons Why Heterosexual Men Should Leave America” written on 16DEC13 written by RooshV. As good as it is, it is (perhaps) a little too dominated by sexual excursions and other opinions by that author. It’s kind of a “turn off”, don’t you know.

Again, and I must REPEAT, this is not an article that bashes America. It is my suggestion that travel to different places, and exposure to different things is beneficial.

We all NEED to Grow

For us to grow and advance in both the physical and spiritual aspects of our beings, we need to adapt to the changing circumstances that surround us.  We need to adapt to the environment as we find it.  We need to do this with acceptance, and without trying to alter or change the environment; for it is only us who will be able to change. We can only change ourselves, not the environment around us.

In my case, I left the United States, and I moved to China.

Before I left to Beijing for my weekend trip, my friends from Macau & Hong Kong told me how air quality is going to be bad, smog everywhere, take a mask, etc., but when I went to Beijing, I saw bluest sky I have seen and air quality was excellent. When I showed some of my photos, no one would believe, then I saw an article in New York Times how china could change the climate and air quality if they want to. 


Not sure if this is true but it was a very beautiful day

-What culture shocks did you experience when coming to China

Well I moved to China.

As such, I needed to adapt to the Chinese way of doing things. Which was, in many ways, very different from what I have come to expect. This shock to my system, and what I have learned from it was eye opening. As such, I wish to write about some of the things that I have learned. Though, I will have to tell you (the reader) that many of what I will relate will not make any sense, and you will probably not believe me anyways.

“Most people do not believe traveller’s tales.”

-Glory Road

Differences are always good

I was in Singapore this Feb 2017. Our tour guide proudly asked us in the bus to look outside and tell us what they notice or see different than our country - India. Everyone looked outside, few minutes passed by and people shouted “Traffic police?”. She said, “Yes! We have no traffic police. Everything is monitored on the CCTV cameras. One of the reasons there is so much obedience in public”.

What a boring place the world would be if all we could eat was salt-free oatmeal, and warm water. Even for you oatmeal lovers out there, it would be boring. Day in and day out. The same old… same old. Lucky for us, it isn’t that way. We can choose to eat ice cream, pizza, pork chops, bacon, and French fries. What a wonderful situation!

Philly Cheese sandwich.
It is wonderful to have choices. Yet, many times we do not realize that we have choices. We are stuck in our groove of conformity. We always get a McDonalds burger, or a Starbucks coffee. We don’t think of alternatives. I argue that we should. For that is how we grow. Picture is of a Philly Cheese Steak sandwich.

If we wanted to, we could eat chicken fried steak with sunny-side-up eggs. We can eat butterscotch milkshakes and brownies. We can eat thick pan, double-stuffed pizza and wash it down with a pitcher of icy cold Budweiser. We can eat bagels and cream cheese and a wash it down with a nice hot cup of coffee with real cream. My goodness! Isn’t it great to be able to have choices?

That means, boys and girls, having choices is a good thing.

You can live in Boston if you want bagels and coffee from Duncan Donuts, or live in California if you want taquitos and coffee. You can live in Florida if you want nice sunny skies, or you can live in Wisconsin if you like ice fishing. Choices are good. Having different choices in different places are good.

That’s pretty important.

That is why it is so great to live in Europe. A two or three hour ride will take you to a different part of Europe with different customs, languages and lifestyle. Well, it used to, anyways. That is until the progressive started to run Brussels and dictate conformity throughout the EU. Anyways, I digress…

Different things are really great.

Tacos
Having different choices is food is a very good thing. You can have a taco if you are too tired of hotdogs, and hamburgers. I think that it is not just food, but drink as well. Instead of a icy coke, how about a nice frosty PBR or local beer? Different choices are a good thing.

It doesn’t matter what it is. Not really. Different types of food are nice. Like, for instance, getting a cup of coffee at the Café du monde in New Orleans as opposed to walking into a Starbucks franchise.

Not just about food and drink, mind you, but other things as well. How about having different pets. Having a few dogs around the house to liven it up, and having a few cats to mellow things out and keep everyone in line, is a good thing.

Or maybe having different cars. Like having a beat-up pickup to go mudslinging, or a cheap car to commute to work back and forth, or having a nice big Lincoln to go out to the lounge in the big city.

Different is good. It is really, really good.

Burger platter
You know, seemingly small things can make a big difference. Consider using a different kind of bread or cheese on your hamburger. You expand the taste and I dare say…improve it! Maybe a cooked sweet pepper, or some crumbly blue cheese, and olives. Hey, don’t just snort in incredulity, Try it.

We need to Broaden our Experiences

Now, I contend that the greater your experiences are with different things, the broader your personality becomes.

For instance, I never had any Mexican (or Tex-Mex) food until after I graduated from university. Yet, when I had my first taco and burrito, I became hooked. How I could, I possibly live in a world without refried beans, melted cheese, and tacos? Since then, this type of food expanded my experiences. It made me a better person. And, perhaps, a little thicker around the middle.

club sandwich
How about a fine club sandwich to put a nice big smile on your face. I really like to eat it with a side of coleslaw and some thick “Texas” fries, and a nice cup of “bottom-less” coffee (or sweet iced tea). Yum!

It doesn’t mean that all that I ate before (my discovery of Mexican food) was bad, it is just that I found another food that I like just as well as (stuffed) pork chops, pizza and double tomato hamburgers. It was equal.

Later, when I experienced “real” Southern cooking and had my first “real” BBQ in Mississippi, I added yet another food to my list of favorites. Shortly after that, I added deep-fried catfish, pickled tomatoes, and hushpuppies.  Some of the things that I was exposed to completely replaced the old “standbys”. For instance, once I had “real” Southern mint iced tea, I never bought a regular “iced tea” from a fast food restaurant ever again.

My experiences expanded me.

Muslims male could have more than one wife.
My Egyptian friends told me that the Muslims in Egypt could have four wives maximum, that's legal.

having experiences is good. That is a good thing. We have to keep on constantly pushing, striving and working on growth. Instead of just ordering the same $5 pepperoni pizza from Domino’s pizza, mix it up a little and try a Greek gyro with salad and French fries. Instead of a number #2 meal out of Burger King, order their new “signature” special and try it out for a change. Instead of drinking a Coke out of the 7-11, go a little nuts and drink a Dr. Pepper. Let your “hair down”, live a little bit.

Stop going to McDonalds and KFC all the time. Go to “Quaker Steak & Lube“, “Submarina“, “The Hat“, “Portillo’s Restaurants“, “Duchess“, “The Varsity“, “Honey Dew Donuts“, “Bojangles“, “Runza“, “Arctic Circle“, or “Blake’s Lotaburger“.

Please, believe me. You should try different things.

Not all hamburgers are the same. Fast food is NOT about a basic McDonalds hamburger. It can be anything. There are choices out there you know. You have choices. You can decide what YOU want to eat. Your choices are not limited to either [1] a cheeseburger, [2] a big mac, or [3] a quarter pounder.

Step outside your comfort zone. The world is filled with all kinds of things that are are quite different from what you have grown accustomed to. Different is good. Listen to me, different is GOOD.

It’s not only about food either. It’s about everything.

Party on Hangover II
Yeah, the Hollywood movie “Hangover II” was a fiction, but the life that it represents can be easily obtained. You just need to step out of your comfort zone and experience new things. Anyways, who wouldn’t mind hanging out with your best friends with a monkey in a “Rolling Stones” vest, drinking VSOP?

This includes different types of personalities, different fashions, different styles of buildings, different weather, different  ways of doing things. Each one has their good and bad aspects. There is no “best” way to do anything. You can select and you can choose.

They use almost every part of the animal in their food. It was a shock when I ordered Chicken in my hotpot, expecting just the meat and find that there is literally a chicken head, chicken feet etc. in my soup.

Don’t fall for the conventional narrative that there is only ONE best way to do things (the way everyone else does things). You are your own person. You can make your decisions and you own choices.

You, yes YOU, can decide.

"I certainly had no idea about sex until I was 52 and living in Asia. 

But I didn’t understand what I was missing either, so can sympathize with a lot of the white guys living in their home towns. 

I don’t even bother telling my pals back home about sex out here, they just claim I’m lying, or at best think I’m lying."

-John

We need to Push and Strive

You have to push to learn and improve your life.

Unless you push, strive and experience, you will become fat and lazy. We have to constantly push ourselves to be better people. To do this we need to strive. Strive to be good men. Strive to be good fathers. Strive to be great employees. Strive to do what is the best. Strive to learn.

"Of course the game is rigged. Don't let that stop you--if you don't play, you can't win."

-Robert Heinlein

In most cases this will not happen if all you do is sit on your lazy-boy and play video games all day. You need to break out of what you know and enter the realm of what you don’t know. You need to go “outside” and experience other ways of doing things, and other ways of thinking. This might mean that the way pizza is made in Chicago tastes better to you, than the way pizza is made in New York City. Or not. Maybe you end up liking both types of pizza. (Like I do.)

A slice of pizza is delicious.
Pizza is just awesome, but you know what? There are different kinds of pizza, and different kinds of styles. I think that they are all awesome. Though, I not a big fan of oyster and mussels on a pizza, personally.

But there will be one take-away from your comparative experience. That is, at least you will know the difference between a pizza in Chicago and one in New York. That knowledge is a good thing.

Next time that you eat a slice of your favorite pizza, you will end up appreciating it even more.

Different Food can be found in Different Nations

I have to tell you that I have eaten some of the most amazing food, that I ever ate, in China. You know the Chinese-American food “General’s Tso’s Chicken”? Well, you should try the real authentic Chinese dish; Gongbaojiding.

Real Chinese food
According to Wikipedia; Kung Pao chicken is a Sichuan cuisine originated in the Sichuan Province of south-western China and includes Sichuan peppercorns. The dish is found throughout China, there are regional variations that are typically a little less spicy than the Sichuan serving.

I have to tell you that Thai food is amazingly delicious. I also love the noodle dishes from Vietnam. Singapore and Malaysia has some of the best and tasty dishes that I ever ate. Australia has some pretty awesome steaks, and my goodness, the cheese out of New Zealand is absolutely amazing.

Come on! If you haven’t had Guinness stout on tap, you haven’t lived.

via GIPHY

And… Please understand, there are some amazing wines out of Chile and Australia. You owe it to yourself to try some, if just once. You should understand why many Australians are so relaxed about life, and why everyone says that Morocco is a cool place to visit. You need to go there and learn.

OK. Well, I would hope that I made my point.

The world is filled with all kinds of things. These things are both good and bad. You should not rely on some television or Internet “expert” to tell YOU which is good or bad. I argue that you should go out and sample them yourself.

So, please don’t get too upset. I personally think that YOU, the reader, should know what you want and what you like. You are the expert on YOUR life.

It's like the mainstream news media getting upset because we go to the internet for our news. We do not need the info-babe telling us what the President said. We can listen to his speech directly ourselves.

You are the expert of YOUR life. You can decide what you like and what you don’t like.

Why you should expose yourself to other ways of living…

You, the reader, should not get mad but I really think that YOU should be the one who decides what you like and what you don’t like. Not some “expert” who tells you what to eat, how to live, where to live and what to do.

"Once you go abroad it’s difficult to go back. 

My first extended experience living overseas opened my eyes in a variety of ways. People will always be people but I believe that culture is the single biggest influence on people. There is definitely something wrong with America in this respect. 

America may be a lot of good things.. productive, prosperous, and relatively free but the socialization of its citizens is much less advanced than other (much more economically poorer) countries I’ve been in. 

The way I look at it quality of life isn’t just all about money. It’s about what you can do with yourself in that society and how comfortable you feel around others. 

In America I was never truly “comfortable” but always felt tense or slightly agitated at the people around me. There’s definitely a hostility and tenseness to social interaction there that I don’t feel anywhere else. 

That’s a lot of negativity to deal with daily so it’s not surprising that out of all industrialized first world countries Americans generally have the least healthy lifestyles and shortest overall life spans.”

-Happierabroad

With this being made clear, let’s take a look at why an American man should step out of America from time to time and sample the customs elsewhere…

[1] It is not as bad as you fear

First of all, other nations are not as bad off as you have been led to believe.

Being in a echo chamber, with our only window outside of the USA is the news media, gives us a really warped idea of life. Particularly, life outside of the United States. If you believe the American news media, the world is a cold dark sooty place, with only the United States glowing in the light.

Hah!

Let me be the first to correct this crazy perception. Nope! It is not that way at all. Those pesky Russkies are in so many ways like your typical middle class American. Those evil commie Chinese are like Americans from the 1950’s. Those Africans from Zambia and Kenya are more conservative than the most conservative Republican can ever be.

What you think is real, it all just a big friggin’ lie!

Hey guys, there just aren’t any high speed trains in the USA. We stopped making advances in rail technology when the American government took over control of the rail. via GIPHY

When I first stepped foot outside, I was stunned. Heck! They had toll booths, ATM machines, cell-phones, taxis, and universities. People wore the same clothes that I did. I could get sunny side up eggs and a great freshly brewed coffee just about anywhere. The girls were amazingly attractive, and the girls in Australia all had these lion manes for hair. It was stunning.

Good golly! The girls are friggin’ stunning. Korean, Chinese, Australian, Singaporean, Zambian… Zambian… oh, did I say Zambian? Stunning!

Korean girls via GIPHY

People had homes with yards, garages, sun-porches, dining rooms, and nice Western-style bathrooms.

Sure they did things differently, but it really wasn’t all that bad. It most certainly doesn’t look like a “Save the Children” commercial, or a Brazilian garbage dump. Other nations have weather girls, news programs, forensics television shows, and often many rights that are no longer available to Americans…

Especially, the freedom to keep your personal records private.

Yes, they have highways. They have their own local pop music. They play games on their smart phones, and they like to fish. Guys like to watch sports, and really get involved in it. Men do household chores and everyone really cares for their children.

Speaking of children. In fact, I was stunned that children in Thailand can buy and own firearms! I was under the impression that American was the ONLY nation that had the “second amendment”. Boy, oh boy was I wrong. I was terribly wrong.

Thailand Guns.
Any Thai citizen can buy a gun in Thailand. There are no age limitations, or a need for federal registration or background checks. Thailand residents are fully trusted by their citizens to own guns of all types, and calibers. Including full automatic weapons.

When the democrats are eventually successful in repealing the second amendment, American will obviously need to look to Thailand as the beacon of liberty and freedom.

Anyways…

People in other nations have pets, often treating them like children (for example like in China), and not breeding them as food like CNN likes to announce. And speaking about lies from the media, all these “bird flu” conflagrations are all nonsense. The various illnesses that are developed overseas will not kill you. It is all a manufactured reality to keep you in fear.

And, by the way, Christmas Trees will not kill you. No matter what the big media wants to convince you.

In short, and in summary, the rest of the earth outside of the United States is not what you think it is.

Travelling will make you take a good hard look at what you thought was reality. via GIPHY

[2] You will get to experience real FREEDOM

Another big thing is that you get to compare and contrast. You get to see what “freedom” actually and really is.

Once, you as an American, leave the United States you will finally get to feel what real freedom is like. This is a really big thing with me, as I feel very betrayed by our elected politicians. Today, for the vast bulk of Americans, we DO NOT KNOW what real freedom is.

"But the biggest culture shock of all was that it never felt like you were in a communist country at all"

-What culture shocks did you fell when you visited China?

In the USA we always talk about how “free” America is. We talk about it, we sing about it, we praise it, but we don’t live it. We have forgotten what real freedom is. We are just talk about it. It’s all talk, talk, talk.

Yadda… yadda…yadda.

I wonder how many people, not just Americans but those in other countries, have come to the conclusion that the United States today is a less free and less aware society than the societies in the dystopian novels of the 20th century or in movies such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta. 

Just as people in the dystopian novels had no idea of their real situation, few Americans do either. 

 -Paul Craig Roberts

It’s a truly sad situation, where we don’t realize how absolutely decimated our freedom has become. We think we are “free” when we have to report to the IRS. We believe that we are free when need to show a driver’s license to buy a beer. We are convinced that all is good, and our freedom is intact, when CNN announces that the President suspended habeas corpus. We pat ourselves on the back for exposing the crimes of the FBI. 

A truly free society wouldn’t NEED a FBI, let alone use it against the citizens.

Yah, we parrot what the News Media says. “We are FREE!” in the best nation on the planet forever!” Woo Woo.

“Americans should travel internationally, especially in Asia. When they return to the States they will see what a police state it has turned into.”

-roddy6667 Jan 8, 2018 3:19 AM

Yeah. It becomes obvious.

America has laws for just about everything, and high police budgets ensure you’re always watched by those in power.

via GIPHY

This means everything. All behavior is policed, and it is so very easy to get arrested. In America you are always watching out for the police. We no longer even notice it. It has become an automatic reaction, like when you look down at your speedometer when you see a police car nearby. This all means you’re one party away from getting arrested and going to jail.

Foreign countries are different.

An absence of heavy police presence, combative women, nanny state laws, and surveillance cameras means that you can enjoy your time instead of worrying about getting arrested. Take some beers to beach or drink in the park with your group of friends. Drink a beer in the open or on a city bus. It’s not a problem.

Remember, boys and girls, true freedom is stinky and messy. The more organized and proper a nation is, the less free it is.

[3] You will begin to compare different nations to the USA objectively

You can compare the things that matter to you.

It doesn’t matter what the think-tank in Washington D.C. says about a particular nation. Or, what the Washington Post has to say about you not being taxed enough. You can decide for yourself.

Instead of parroting the narrative that the United States the best and greatest nation in the history of the universe, you will actually get a chance to decide for yourself.

You will see what the differences are from the USA to another nation. You can compare eating a breakfast in your home town against one in Indonesia. You will be able to compare dating a girl in Vietnam as opposed to one in your home town. You will be able to compare the costs of buying groceries in Australia as opposed to buying them in your home town.

You will be physically able to make your very own comparisons yourself.

North Korea
North Korea is very clean and sanitary. It has laws for just about everything. As a result the people obey the laws or suffer the consequences. Look at all the people living their lives in joyous abandon! Nope! It is a sterile but beautiful place.

In places where there just isn’t very much freedom, there is a tendency to be boxed in by rules and regulations. People are afraid to go out and live life. They hide for the most part. When they do go out, they are very well behaved and keep to themselves.

They don’t bother to direct any attention to themselves, least a police officer come over and arrest them. The trash cans are all clean, and there isn’t much in the way of litter. There are no beggars on the streets, and the buildings are all pristine and sanitary.

Kish island in Iran
Americans don’t get many opportunities to see what Iran is like. It is a big black news layout. All we know is that it is a theocracy, or a nation run by strict adherence to Islamic law. As a result it is a very organized and clean nation. But, it is not a free nation.

In places where there is freedom, people are permitted and allowed to experience life. But you know what? Freedom is not pristine and controlled. It is stinky, messy and chaotic. People go about and live their lives in crazy abandon.

Freedom is where you are permitted to live your life free of interference.

All the laws, and all the police, and all the regulations are considered a “price one must pay”. It is considered the price that you must accept to “live in the greatest nation on the earth”. America has the “Bill of Rights” that are always protected. No one will ever try to take away the freedom to speak, or your guns, or your ability to worship as you wish. Not in America!  It’s just the price you must pay if you want to be an American.

Which, of course, leads me to think about things.

Water market in Thailand. Here, people sell things on the water by boat. This would be regulated into oblivion in the United States. Why you wouldn’t be able to do anything because of “mah children!”via GIPHY

[4] Comparisons will be stark

Comparisons on FREEDOM between the USA and China

So, in comparison with my Chinese friends, I have discovered that I have more freedom in China than what I had in the United States.

WHAT?????

No shit, Dick Tracy… Let me explain.

Here in China, the IRS won’t come smashing my door down at three in the morning with an armored vehicle. I don’t ever have to report my yearly income to them, and there are no help-lines to assist me in doing my taxes. You simply don’t need them. The Chinese never have to report anything to their government.

One of the first things that I noticed when I moved to China…

The sad truth of the matter is that we as a people have been too propagandized and naïve to admit how corrupt and vicious our government has become, irrespective of who resides in the oval office. 

Our current problems are deeply systemic and therefore cannot be solved by obsessing over the symptoms and switching out a president. 

We need to face reality before we can recover as a society, and to do this we must admit certain uncomfortable truths.

Most significantly, we need to come to terms with the dangers of allowing extremely secretive and all-powerful agencies to multiply and grow to the extent they have. 

When well-documented abuses from the NSA, CIA and FBI go on for decades with little to no accountability, what do you think’s going to happen?

Meanwhile, superficial pundits and hack politicians are out there telling us about how great the FBI is, yet historical facts point to the opposite conclusion. 

That this is an agency that’s always been more focused on protecting the status quo than protecting the people. 

Are we supposed to pretend that the FBI didn’t write a letter to Martin Luther King Jr. telling him to kill himself? Are we supposed to pretend COINTELPRO didn’t happen?

- Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog

One of the very first things that I noticed was that China has roads. Nice, really nice and beautiful roads. Roads with well-tended gardens on both sides filled with flowers and decorative trees.

We need taxes, we are told. You know, for roads and infrastructure...

They have high speed trains, and all sorts of infrastructure. Yet, surprisingly  the people don’t seem to be raped by taxes for every little thing. In fact the opposite is true. They have one tax. Only ONE single tax., and it is a small one.

You want a bottle of coke, it costs you 1 yuan. Not $2.98 with tax. You are never, and I mean NEVER, trying to figure out the overall costs of something you buy. A noodle lunch costs 15 yuan. A liter of gas is 4 yuan. A bag of betel nuts costs 10 yuan. Simple costs. Simple math. No hidden taxes at all.

American state police.
Here is Freedom – American style. People, listen up! America is a police state. It really and actually is. Once you leave the United States you actually see how much it has become a big nasty police state.

So China has roads, bridges, infrastructure, and it’s nicer and newer than what we have in the states. So, why do Americans pay so much in taxes, and get so little back in return?

Personally, I think that there is a significant amount of kick-backs, corruption and graft in the various American governments. There is also an enormous amount of waste. Why is the USA constantly at war? Why are taxes constantly going up and up and up, and the government is just giving the money away to everyone EXCEPT the American people?

Here in China, the FDA will not shut down my business because of some complaint. I can refuse service to anyone for any reason. I can take and buy any drug that I want. I can chew a betel nut and not feel afraid of the police. You can buy any drug ever made by man, at ridiculously low prices, and yet, the Chinese just don’t have an Opioid Addiction crisis. Why is that? Think about it. I do not need PERMISSION to put something else in my body, food, drug, or smoke. No permission is required.

Here, the DHS will not freeze my papers and subject me to household detention for undisclosed reasons. They won’t arrest my children for trying to sell lemonade in my front yard. They won’t run their armored personnel carriers and tanks on my rose bushes.

DHS vehicle
The Constitution clearly forbids stationing troops on American soil, as they could be used against American citizens. But it doesn’t matter. The government did it anyways. Only instead of calling it an army, they call it the DHS.

But, you know, it’s much more than that. It is everything…

So many things we take for granted. It’s almost like we view the cleanliness and design of our handcuffs as a sign of freedom.

The biggest culture shock I ever lived was in Texas. I was arrested, Starsky-and-Hutch style, and jailed, basically for excessive speed.

I was on a visit at Texas A&M University at College Station, when friends from Dallas (ca. 180 miles = 300 km north) invited me for the Easter weekend. On the I-45 motorway, I drove at 80-90 mph, so as to alleviate the boredom from the long and monotonous route. 

I was aware of the speed limit at 75 mph, but I felt safe as most drivers did the same, and some drove even faster.

As I was getting close to Dallas, I noticed a police car behind me, with its red lights on. Based on the way the police behave in most countries, I took this for a request to make way. So I pulled over to the right lane and slowed down a little; and I didn’t bother more about it. Then, I noticed the police were still there, but I didn’t understand what was going on. 

I guessed they were after somebody, but did not figure out it was me: on the one hand, I wasn’t driving faster than most people around; on the other hand, I never thought they would quietly stay behind me if they wanted me to stop — my generation wasn’t addicted to U.S. series. 

Our home-grown cops order drivers to stop, not by staying behind them, but by moving to their left and signalling with the right arm. I was beginning to find the situation weird, when another police car came to my left, and a policeman signalled me to stop. I immediately did.

Then the big show began. The policemen yelled at me to get out of the car and put my hands on it. One was pointing a gun at me. I complied; they frisked and handcuffed me. They asked me why I hadn’t stopped at once; I answered that I had not understood. 

At first they obviously didn’t believe me, but I explained that the practice is different in my country. They insisted that I had no valid driver’s licence, as I didn’t possess a Texan one. However, I showed them both my French licence and an International Driving Permit, which is recognised in Texas. I had purposely fetched it at my prefecture before leaving France.

I felt eerie, as though I had gone out of my body, and watched myself caught in a cheesy crime TV series. Without subtitles: my command of spoken English is sufficient for daily communication but, well, not perfect. Broad Texan shouted at machine-gun speed, with a twang as thick as guacamole, is a bit of a challenge for me.

Progressively, I figured out the situation. Those who had chased me first were from Ellis County, and the one who had signalled me to stop was from Dallas County. I had crossed a county line, so the Ellis policemen had to request the help of the Dallas police. 

I had made them look like fools before their colleagues, so they were quite upset. But my crossing the county line also qualified as “evading arrest”, and evading arrest in a motor vehicle is a felony in Texas law. The Ellis County policemen called their superiors; after a one-hour wait in their car, still handcuffed, I learned that I was going to be taken to jail. The cheesy HBO nightmare was going on.

So I was introduced to the Ellis County jail in Waxahachie, Texas. The inner child thought: “What a name! Sounds like the chant of the Indian warrior, after he has captured the white guy who ventured too far, and tied him to the torture post”. My adult self added: “They have killed and removed the Indians, but they have kept the tortures”.

The prison personnel seemed surprised to see someone jailed for an offence he did not knowingly commit. They even said the charges should be dropped, as I did not know the custom and had never been arrested before. But, anyway, the sheriff had ordered to jail me, so they had to accommodate me. 

The check-in formalities are surprising. For instance the disinfection shower: you undress, a guy comes with a big sprayer like those used in vineyards, and sprays the cold stinking disinfectant on you, first front, then rear. You put on a heavy brownish overall. 

If you ask for reading material, they give you a Bible, a special edition with a foreword saying that God forgives even the worst offenders. Why not? This was Good Friday, after all. I read all of St Matthew and half of St John during my stay.

It was time to proceed to the detention room. I was quite anxious, expecting to spend the night in a cell with a few hardened felons, and wondering how they would deal with me. Fortunately, petty offenders are kept in large dormitories of 40-odd beds, with a TV set, tables… and a jailer staying in all the time. No way to pick on anybody when 40 witnesses and an armed guard are present.

I won’t say it was a pleasant time, but it was interesting. There was the local drug pusher, locked up without bail until his judgment: he was accused of “destroying evidence”, because he was cleaning his weed pipe when he was arrested. 

There was the blockhead who had tried to steal the sheriff’s own bathtub. Everybody was baffled by my story; Hispanic people were surprised to see a blue-eyed and fair-haired guy so ignorant of Anglo-Saxon habits and culture.

People had a deck of cards, they asked if I would play with them. I tried to teach them belote; obviously it was too tricky… I was asked many interesting questions: Do you have McDonald’s in France? Do you have Twinkies? This one puzzled me: I didn’t know the stuff. 

They offered me one! Let me thank them: the “official” meal that came on the morning was the most disgusting of my whole life. 

As they had taken all my money from me, I only had the normal prison grub, while the inmates could buy crisps, sweets and cakes. The drug pusher — a smart guy, actually — explained to me that the whole prison system was geared toward extracting as much money as possible from the inmates. A shocking revelation.

There came the curfew; I had to find a bed. To my surprise, I realised that the dorm was neatly divided: the whites on the left, the blacks on the right. And the only place left was in the black section. 

Just below me was, say, the kingpin. During hours and hours, he kept talking to his visibly sycophantic neighbours, yelling “wawawawaw Nig**r… wawawawaw Bro”. I just could catch those two words. Once he turned to me and, switching to more standard English, ironically commented “This is a f**king professor at A&M…” before returning to his mumbo-jumbo. 

Was the irony directed at me, or at the system that had put me there? I didn’t get it. Frankly, I would rather have slept, but I found it ill-advised to complain about the loud neighbourhood.

The next morning, I was called to arraignment. Of course, I didn’t know the word; I drew a smile from the jailer by ingenuously asking: “who is Raymond?” A judge first lectured me in legal gobbledegook, I panicked as I just could catch one word now and then. He explained to me again in plain English: the case was not dropped, but I could be released if I paid a sum of money. 

The jailer who had accompanied me expressed again his surprise that the charges had not been dropped. I could call my friends from Dallas, they undertook the formalities for my release. Together we discovered the fantastic world of bail bond agencies, roamed the county to find the pound where my car had been taken (no one had told me about its whereabouts)… One of their neighbours gave me the business card of a lawyer.

I flew back to France as soon as I could, shivering with the fear that one could detain me. The judicial process ran its course. The grand jury did not dismiss the case, but finally my lawyer negotiated the re-qualification. The “evading arrest” charge was dropped. I was fined twice, once for excessive speed, once for “failure to give right of way”. The total cost of this fine little joke (bail deposit + car pound + lawyer fees + fines) was almost $10,000.

I never came back to the US. In the form that must be filled to obtain the “visa waiver” (actually, almost as complicated as the visa was), there is one question: 

“Have you ever been arrested or detained in the U.S.?” I can’t even think of that.

-What was the biggest culture shock you ever faced?

America is a de facto police state. It is not just the local town and state police, but it is the entire federal apparatus.

The FDA will not require me to have a doctor write me a prescription. Nor will they ban anything. Instead, I can simply go to a pharmacy and ask for a drug and they will give it to me, no questions asked. I do not NEED to have a doctor prescribe ED medication. I go to the pharmacy and tell the woman behind the counter what I want. She gives it to me at a fraction of the price available in the United States. I do not need to ask PERMISSION.

The FCC will not limit my bandwidth on my cell phone. They will not monitor or restrict what I can watch, write, say or listen to. They won’t limit it, and I don’t need to ask PERMISSION to change it.

The NSA will not be monitoring, recording, and indexing all my computer activity. Nobody will care. It’s true, and I say this as I am in mainland China, supposedly behind the “Great Firewall of China”. Yeah, more bullshit American propaganda. Dudes, what you think China is … is a big piece of bullshit propaganda.

The NRO (National Reconnaissance Office) won’t be proudly launching spy satellites over my house with logos that look like they came from the evil side of the a 007 James Bond movie.

NROL-39
NROL-39 Nothing is beyond our reach. Looks like a logo from Dr. No or some other 007 James Bond villain.

The CIA won’t be trying to spy on my though my household appliances. They won’t be trying to blackmail me with some attractive prostitute. Though, I kinda wish that they would try…

The FBI won’t be monitoring my email, or smashing down the offices of my attorney. Putting me on a “hit list” of politically connected people, or trying to frame me for some obscure crime or two. And while on on this subject, why do American police dress like SS Storm troopers? Why? Why is the FBI permitted to act and behave exactly like the dreaded Nazi Gestapo?

Evil Peter Strzok
Peter Strzok in his meeting with Congress. He pledged to have systems to prevent an elected President from taking office, and promised that those who voted for the President would not get their wishes fulfilled. Instead, he would take care of it, as he had backup plans.

However, here in China I am not subject to the American police state. The FBI has no jurisdiction here. I can live my life AS I SEE FIT, not as how the busybodies in government think it should be lived.

I can pick up a water cannon and enjoy the holidays without worry that I might upset someone.

Songkran water festival. Try doing this in the United States. You will probably be shot on the spot. None of the water guns have the red caps at the end, and Lord only knows what will happen if some busybody biddy gets wet! Yikes! via GIPHY

Now, to someone sitting in front of their computer in the United States, this is all very interesting, but doesn’t mean much. “So what?” you ask. We have the Second Amendment, and we have Habeas corpus.  Yes, we do. But, you know what? They are not enforced. Not a day goes by without them being infringed.

Habeas Corpus is meaningless if basic English Common Law is not observed.

Not one elected official is defending the Bill of Rights. Not on the federal level, and not on the state level.

Before the reader “has a cow”, let it be understood that what I am discussing is day-to-day freedom and liberty. This is the freedom and lifestyle that you experience every day.  This is how you live your life in doing your normal activities. These are the simple things in life.  These things include working; eating, spending time with your family, travel, saving money, and spending money.  These are the comparatives.  These are the measurables and the deliverables that one can use to actually determine how free they are.  As well as comparatively determine their overall standard of living compared to the rest of the world.

So instead of pretending to be a “blue ribbon panel”, or “think tank” sitting high up in an “ivory tower”, get off your high horse, and experience life with me.

Life is what YOU personally experience.

It is not what is described to you that you SHOULD experience. True freedom is being able to plant a garden in your front lawn. It is being able to build a geodesic dome on the roof of your house, and being able to make your own home-made moonshine in your basement…

…all without worry that the police will come smashing your door down and throwing you in prison for fifteen years.

Freedom is being able to live your life, to act and think, and do things to your own body without worry that someone else will be offended. True and real freedom is being able to sit down, order a super sized coke, and sunny-side up eggs in a restaurant in New Jersey with your dog sitting next to you on the sofa, and not worry about being arrested. You can do this in friggin’ communist China, but are forbidden to do so in the “land of the free”, the United States.

Dudes! This – is – NOT – freedom.

Once you leave the United States, you get a taste for REAL freedom.

Freedom in Thailand.
Freedom is the ability to live our lives as we want without interference. Liberty is the ability to practice freedom without restriction.

Freedom is never having to take a drug test for anyone, for any reason, at any time. Freedom is never having to fill out a transcription of all the money your earned, and ask for deductions to the all-powerful IRS. Freedom is the ability to withdraw all of your money from your bank when you want without consequence.

Caution: Wet Floor signs in clear view after someone mopped the tiled entrance of a hotel? Nope. 

Guard rails on steep trails, foot paths, or overhangs on cliffs? Not really. 

Red tape or warning signs around crumbling sidewalks or two foot wide uncovered man holes? Nada. 

We do admit seeing a Caution: Hard Hat Area sign where construction was being performed. Yeah, several times, actually.

At first we were startled to see such lack of warning signs in Thailand. How could people properly function in society without being spoon fed safety warnings?! But the longer we lived here, the more refreshing it was. One can argue that Thai citizens and foreigners are expected to open their eyes and take responsibility for their own actions.

And you know what? Using common sense works!

To this day, no one we know has gotten hurt by their own lack of awareness and tried suing the life blood from the company or property where the accident happened. Americans, take a hint!

-Tieland to Thailand

Freedom is the ability to light a cigarette at the dinner table in a restaurant. Freedom is not being politically correct. Freedom is doing unhealthy things to your own body. Freedom is home-schooling your children. Freedom is being able to build a tree-house on your property without a permit.

Freedom is having a ladder that doesn’t have any safety warnings on it. It means having a mattress that you are allowed to tear the tag off of. It is the ability to buy beer in a grocery store on Sunday. It is the ability to ride a bicycle without a helmet, safety gloves or arm protection. It is the ability to give your child a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in public without confrontation.

It is the ability to OWN a house, and never, ever…ever pay any kinds of taxes on it.

The mere fact that I have to describe this, and elaborate on it, in such detail is an indicator to how far down the culture and society of America has fallen.

So yeah, when you leave the United States you will be able to do things that are forbidden in the United States. You will feel free simply because you will no longer feel afraid to do the “wrong” thing.

China has freedom and liberty.
Here is a shout out for real freedom. There is nothing better than living life on your own terms, and doing so without guilt or regret. That is what true and real freedom and liberty is all about.

[5] You will experience less anxiety

In USA nothing is easy. Nothing is efficient. To pay rent, you have to use a check? I have never written a check at that time . The last time I got a check was maybe 5 years ago, from my Uncle. 

Getting an apartment takes so long as opposed to other countries I have lived in where it's just a handshake. That's it. 

I went to the post office yesterday, and I was waiting in line for maybe an hour—and there were only five people in front of me. 

I felt like I went from a Western country to a third-world country. People here with money have access to things, but the rest of the people are just trying to survive."

You will experience less anxiety.

via GIPHY

To an American it seems like an insurmountable mountain that one must climb. You have to buy tickets, often expensive, smash through language barriers and deal with customs that you don’t understand. Plus, on top of that, you just don’t know anyone there. It seems impossible.

But it isn’t.

"I think generally, the biggest culture shock that people experience in the US is not between their country and the US but between what they thought the US would be and what it actually is. 

Books and movies about America make the place appear very free and exciting and happening and the people are so interesting and emotional. There is sex and fun and romance going on. 

When they arrive, the place looks very conservative and the people appear robotic and quiet. Sex is subdued and hard to come by. The people are not open at all, they look closed and mistrustful. 

Everybody is just working and looking tired and apathetic. 

Talking to strangers is taboo. There are thousands of little rules and laws and social mores that seem as dogmatic and strict as those in a Muslim society. And every time you are at risk of breaking yet another law and facing very dire consequences. That is the biggest culture shock of all." 

-Happierabroad

When I first moved to China, I didn’t understand that most people use WeChat and email, and social media to communicate. Packages are sent by TNT. ChinaPost worked, but was generally slow and being phased out. I needed to get up to speed with the new and different ways of doing things.

In America, I was always worried about the police. That was the case even though I was doing nothing wrong. I have been pulled over just so the cop can see my license. I have been observed just because. I have heard stories of how the police find out that you have money and just simply take it for themselves. That is NOT freedom.

In China, I am never fearful of the police. They tend to be very laid back. It’s almost a “Mayberry RFD” vibe. Yeah, going to China forced me to learn new things. Learning was uncomfortable.

Like how those electronic mail lockers worked, how to use DD, and how to use a squatter toilet without falling over myself.

For many years in the United States, I took anti-anxiety medication to control the work stress of life. I took Buspar and Trazadone and they certainly helped me, but you know what, I don’t need them in China.

via GIPHY

I no longer have bosses throwing chairs in the conference room, HR that patrol the halls making sure that the “sterile desk policy” is being enforced, and gossipy coworkers. It is fairly rare to be laid-off without notice, the police won’t arrest you for jay-walking, and you don’t need to prove anything to any faceless government bureaucrat.

These common-place American things are unheard of in China.

The sustained constant beat of stressors on your life will no longer be present. You will start to feel free. That feeling is wonderful.

via GIPHY

[6] You will be exposed to more traditional human beings

The world is filled with all kinds of people. However the childish notion that a large percentage of people are gay, lesbian, transgender or some other kind of hyphenated and abused minority is simply not true.

In the United States, this narrative is being shoved down our collective throats with impunity. But, it’s all a big lie. It is a manufactured construct for purposes of control.

It is a big lie.

As an American, I particularly HATE being lied to.

Most people outside the United States have real traditional values, and run their families in a very traditional manner. The man works, and he does what ever it takes to feed his family. The wife stays at home, she takes care of the family and provides a safe haven for the family. She is the anchor of the family unit.

The woman is measured by her appearance and how well her family is treated.  Even the poorest family will have a clean home, and the best meals that the family can provide will be given to the children.

"Thankfully, traditional beliefs are alive and well in many foreign countries, and homosexuals have to be more respectful of how they behave in public. 

Another benefit to more traditional societies is that women understand their role of appearing beautiful and submitting to strong men, something that is sorely missing in American culture.

Once you live in a country where women spend more time looking good for an afternoon walk than American women do when they go to the club with their grenade friends, it’s really hard to go back."

-RooshV

Heck, the girls I knew in Zambia were more traditional than white American conservative grandmothers. It surprised me. I was expecting something similar to the monolithic liberal African-American personality.

I was wrong.

They really know how to treat their men. Let me tell you!

My shirts were always folded “new package” style. Everything was pristine and spit shined. Clothes were crisp and creased perfectly.  Dinners were hand made with a balance between taste and what was good for me.

The lady of the house would not only prepare it, but would dress up for it!

It was like a formal dinner with a head of state. Dinners were laid out formally because I was the “man of the house”. I was provided with “my chair”, and absolutely NO ONE was permitted to sit in it, except me.

Folded shirt
Properly folded shirt. This is how all my shirts were washed, cleaned, starched, and ironed. This woman was from Lusaka, in Zambia and let me tell you that they are proper, conservative in values and very much know how to really their men properly.

It is a different feeling and experience to be given such a degree of respect.

To be respected by others. To be treated with respect, and to be held in high regard by others who were polite and proper makes a big difference in your life. Once you are treated with respect, you will never go to somewhere you are not.

Compare that to the huge “white water buffaloes” with attitude, that pass for American women today, and the contrast is stunning.

[7] You can be yourself without shame or fear of exile

I am sure that there will be those offended by my statement about “white water buffaloes” with attitude, but that is just what they are called out here.

There is nothing particularly right or wrong about that, it is exactly what it is. Fat obese chicks with poor manners, unkempt appearance, and foul aggressive manners. It’s horrible and disgusting. Here in Asia, these examples of the female form, are laughed at and snickered to behind their backs.

And guess, what else?

I can say it without shame or social exile. I just did.

Real freedom is to live life without fear. Not a fear of saying something politically incorrect. Not a fear of saying something that sounds hurtful. Not just fear from the IRS, or the latest swine flue from China, but fear of being yourself.

You can live your life on your terms.

Hey! You want to pull out a pocket knife and carve up an apple on the bus, go for it. No one will bat an eye. Hey! You want to take your dog with you while you take a dip in the hotel swimming pool? Good for you. Just go and do it. Hey you want to drink some XO on the porch and watch the pretty girls go by? Do it, as no one is going to take notice.

You can speak your mind, and say your piece.

That’s REAL freedom.

[8] You will pay less for healthier food and a better lifestyle

America has changed. Why does everyone that visits here from the USA seem to be obese? I mean it. Everyone is huge. They are enormous!

I personally think there are many reasons for this. Stress, medications, and GMO saturated high fatty foods, with sugar in just about everything has certainly contributed to this.

Westerners in Thailand.
Here is a bar street in Thailand. Can you spot the Westerners? Do they look healthy to you? What is going on, and why do you suppose they appear so different?

When I lived in the States, I was always rushing to make it in time for work. Sure, I might work late nights, but come in one minute late in the morning and you could lose your job. It was always rush – rush – rush. I’d grab a couple of donuts and coffee in the morning and eat a greasy fast food burger for lunch. Dinner was better, but not by very much.

All of this affected my metabolism.

When you leave the United States your life takes on a new pace. You eat differently. You have different friendships and different problems. In general, you do eat better. While you might get the impression that everyone outside of the United States is starving, that is not the case at all. They just eat substantially better than Americans do.

People walk more. It’s nicer to walk, and there are things to do.

When I was in the states, I drove everywhere. Nothing was nearby. If I wanted to walk somewhere it took hours, and I often found that there was a noticeable lack of sidewalks and pedestrian-friendly paths. America has devolved into a very toxic and unhealthy environment. You can see it if you go outside the echo chamber and see the world from my chair.

Most American cities are made for cars. Most foreign cities are made for people. Even poor South American cities have more efficient and extensive public transportation than America, as it was quite a shock to me to ride the Caracas metro system to find trains running more frequently than in Washington DC.

Food is fresher and cheaper and doesn’t contain a billion Franken-chemicals whose long-term effects on humans are not understood (many packages of food in Europe contain a ‘No GMO’ label as a selling point).

-RooshV

[9] You will be exposed to less corporate propaganda

All my life I have been exposed to advertisements and corporate jingles. You sit down to watch a show and you suddenly have an urge for a coke and lays potato chips. Why is that? Not in China. I never have those urges. But when I sit down and watch an American television show, I immediately get the urge.

I wonder why…

When you’re in a foreign country, the propaganda ends for one simple reason: you don’t understand the ads! They’re in a different language. You stop watching television, stop listening to radio, and instead download all of your entertainment without the ads, though you’ll still be consuming it on a much lesser scale than while living in the US.

The result is you stop feeling the urge to buy things just to get a dopamine rush as if you were a caged rat hitting a lever to get a cocaine pellet. You ease into a minimalist lifestyle where accumulating things no longer positively affects your mood. In fact, you start feeling guilty when you buy things, because now you understand that objects don’t bring lasting happiness.

That is the truth. I rarely have any desire to buy anything.

via GIPHY

Instead, I have invested in lifestyle, peace of mind and comfort. Where before, I was a rat racing through my cubicle maze at work.

[10] You start to see the real world and your place in it

I know that what I have written will seem like complete bullshit to someone still plugged into the Matrix. If I were reading it from my house in the states, I would be skeptical. I probably would snort, and say “bullshit” while I clicked on something else on my browser.

Americans are the most manipulated people on the planet.

There is absolutely no friggin’ way that they are free. Dudes, having to ask permission to get YOUR money from YOUR bank is not freedom. Having to resort to (twice a decade) elections to get any kind of changes done, and then finding out, year after year that nothing changes…

Just how much control do you actually have on your life?

To continue believing we have a "representative" government of the people, by the people, & for the people is to continue believing in a grand deception. It's an illusion.

Our government has been incrementally supplanted by Progressive dissidents to form a dictatorship of arrogant, autocratic, ruling class elitists.

[11] Women and Relationships are Different

Although it's a really different culture than the states, I actually had an awesome experience in China. It definitely opens your eyes to a whole different side of the world. I met some really awesome people and it's very safe.

-What is the biggest culture shock you ever faced?

I pulled this title from RooshV. Sounds so chauvinistic, eh? Well, maybe so, maybe so. Yet it is TRUE.

Now, the reader should not misunderstand me. I do happen to like (and love) all women. In fact, my personal tastes in women’s body shapes run a pretty wide gambit. I love both small petite women, and large voluptuous women in equal measure. I really do. In fact, there are women who think that they are far too fat, that I would just die to be with. I find a kind sweet disposition is worth more than being 50 Kg overweight.

I am not at all kidding. I find that each have their various charms, and when coupled with a sweet and caring disposition, I tend to fall “heads over heels” over them.

via GIPHY

But, getting back to my point…

Over the last twenty years, something has happened in the United States. Both men and women have gotten larger. But gosh golly, the women are really enormous. Most women in the United States have tended to get on the large size. This is obese, in case you are not reading my meaning correctly.

Personally, I really don’t like being with a woman that weighs more than I do. Seriously, it just doesn’t feel right. I think that both men and women should have the correct body weight for their height. I think that it is healthy.

via GIPHY

Why women are like this in the United States, I think is due to the unhealthy and stressful lifestyle, the saturation of salt, sugars, fats and GMO’s in American food, and maybe the lack of tasteful and healthy alternatives. Then, after the Obama Administration, it seemed like everyone wanted to look like Michelle Obama. As she was considered to be the ideal beautiful woman, I am not at all kidding!

I personally do not think that Michelle Obama is that beautiful at all. At best, she is rather plain. Of course, I’m no great looker either. But, you know there are all kinds of people and we all come in all kinds of different packages.

American girls…

via GIPHY

Yikes!

Like all women, American women can be quite beautiful if they maintain their appearance, but there still exists problems with their attitude that often comes from American culture.

In general, I have found that many foreign women simply have softer and pleasanter personalities: they are sweeter, kinder, more deferential, more interesting, and most importantly, more pleasing. The urban ghetto culture that has taken over the United States does not exist offshore. You don’t see “trailer trash”, “Jerry Springer types” or “Big-assed “Wal-Mart” shoppers offshore.

They are more demure instead of outwardly crass.

This greatly increases the enjoyment you get from male-female bonding. Dating only American women gives you a distorted view of how women are really like. When you date and spend time with women from other nations you get to experience the differences. Some of which are good, and some of which are shocking and a tad mercurial.

Anyways…

Why is this important? Well, I like to think that that a man should be a little taller than his wife. I think that he should be stronger and weigh more. But many of the women that seemingly come from the USA today are so much bigger than me. They are bigger and taller. It is disturbing.

Here is an Amish family. They eat well. No one is obese. The wife is a little shorter and lighter than her husband. I don’t know… it seems right. Doesn’t it?

Amish family
A typical Amish family. I think that they seem to be good folk. No one is fat. They seem to take care of themselves, and the family all seems to be balanced. It seems good and right to me.

I really don’t know of too many women who would rather be married to a man who was shorter than them. I’m sure there are a few, but it’s really not a preference. I have always been under the impression that many women liked “tall, dark and handsome” men.

Fat, chubby men, with bald heads and beer guts were not anything that a woman would find attractive or even interesting. But, you know, if the man is a “good man”, kind, and just, his faults can be overlooked.

So, what I am saying is that this goes both ways.

The Important Takeaways

So, what are the takeaways? Once an American man lives as an expat for a few years, and then returns back to the United States, what can be learned?

  • You can learn the limits of freedom and how to leverage the freedoms that are important to you personally.
  • You can see what is important to you.
  • You can better appreciate the things that you have missed.
  • You can appreciate the United States more, and work towards bringing it back to how and why it was created in the first place.
  • You can see how easily manipulated you have been, and take steps to prevent the continuation of that in the future.
  • You can work towards bringing things BACK to a more or less, “normal” reality. One that is free from all the progressive distortions and distractions of the last few decades.

You won’t find that many fat pink-haired femminazi’s in heart-land USA. They cluster in urban enclaves. That is their echo chamber. You won’t find drug abusing mental patients shitting in the middle of the street (San Francisco style) in small-town America. They would be kicked out the old fashioned way; Clint Eastwood style.

It’s time that we start putting our feet down and taking America BACK to what it used to stand for. We can start with one person, and one voice. We can start here, and now. Then two people, and then three.

If the FBI wants to emulate the Gestapo and pay criminals enormous salaries to maintain a jack-booted reality, we can disband the agency.

The DHS is a domestic Army in defiance of the Constitution. It can be disbanded.

If the FDA wants to ban everything, to a point where Americans need to exit the nation to get things forbidden to them, then it is certainly time to disband the FDA.

We have collectively told the government that we do not want to be spied on. Still the NSA exists. We can shut it down.

Any thoughts on the IRS…?

FAQ

Q: Why is it important to travel?
A: You can learn new things and get exposed to different ways of doing things. When you are exposed, you can discover the aspects of life that you like, as well as the aspects that you do not like. You can pick and choose.

“I'm writing this from the West Coast of USA, in a very quiet, very peaceful duplex. I have returned to the US after 3+ years living in Bangkok. I'm still deciding what really happened out there. My decision to move to Thailand, back in 2010, was based on a lifelong dream of living out of the US for at least one year of my life. I had originally wanted to live in Europe, but during the time I was looking for the right place to land, European economics were in meltdown. So I started researching Asia. For work purposes I almost went to Singapore, but then decided Bangkok would be more fun.

I was right.

It wasn't just the sex. I never had trouble landing women in the States. I broke up with a very attractive Thai / Cambodian woman in the US before I left. She was fun, but a bit of a bitch at times. I know enough about women to understand that ratio changes the longer you're in a relationship. Married, she would have been a bitch that was a bit of fun at times. She wanted kids and I didn't. That was that. Before that I had two different 20-something girlfriends, great sex, lots of drama, not long-term but fun. I had learned stellar game skills and liked landing semi long-term relationships with pretty women. It was worth the pursuit, the hunt, the thrill of the conquest and of course, all the great sex. So I didn't go to Thailand for sex. I went to fulfill a lifetime goal of living out of my country for a year, and when I added up how I was supporting myself, what the costs of living were, and the fact that English teaching provided a safety net if things went wrong, Thailand just made sense.

I landed in Bangkok and fell in love with the place. I had lived most of my life in New York City, and spent time in Paris, Rome, London, LA, Berlin, Caracas and many other amazing places. But Bangkok blew my mind. The chaos, the sexiness, the otherness, and just how freaking different it was from the staid, plain US was like medicine. Even New York City – supposedly that wild town – is to me, a very processed and predictable place when compared to Bangkok. 

So I loved it. I traveled Thailand for a month and returned to Bangkok.

I set up shop pursuing my dreams. I got lucky with real hard work, landed my business contacts back West, and managed to live for more than three years in Thailand. I had a nice condo, pool on the roof, and money to play with. There were a few rough patches for sure, but also some nice straight-aways. Basically, it turned out to be what I was looking for: the adventure of a lifetime.

That adventure meant broadening my horizons. I loved learning the language. I was a Thai language class nerd. I made a few Thai friends and played badminton religiously. I put a damn good pool game together. I travelled all over, made expat friends, and had a blast. I even finally got a local job offer in my industry, which is really tough to do, and held that for a while, living the Bangkok executive life although admittedly not on the high end of that scale. Still, it was all really remarkable.

However, when a job offer came up with an old employer in the West, I took it. After more than three years, I was ready to leave. They flew me back, settled me here, and I plugged in. I actually landed on the fourth of July, if you can believe that. And I was thrilled to be back. I hadn't been back in the US for even a holiday the whole time I was in SE Asia. Any time I had to travel, I had gone all over Thailand, Laos or Cambodia. I love SE Asia, but my reasons for repatting were professional. The jobs are better in the US. I stayed with mine for five months. It was a contract. When I was offered a full time job, I turned it down in order to start another business I had been planning. And that's where I am now.

I loved being back in the States when I landed. I loved being back in familiar settings, and hearing familiar speech. I loved catching up with friends. I fully intended to plug back in here, and resume life where I had left it when I had jetted to Thailand. Thailand had been working against me in the half year before I left. I was getting fed up with the visa issues, and the outsider status. I became depressed at how hard it was to positively affect the business world there, or even the fate of the country. I like to think I can make a difference where I am. Of course, there are charities, and I did a bit of work with those. But ultimately, Thailand is for Thais. God bless them for that, is my attitude. 

In this One World homogenization that is happening, I have lots of respect for countries that retain national values and identities. Although I respect it, that doesn't mean I wasn't frustrated by it, and ultimately, living as a constant outsider was getting to me. 

I had also come to the conclusion that marrying a Thai, or even having a serious Thai girlfriend wasn't what I liked, due to the many reasons cited in other posts here. I dated “civilians” who weren't in the leisure industry, but found the culture gap too huge to leap. Plus the adjustment I had to make in terms of being 3rd on the totem pole (Family, Career, Boyfriend) never did it for me. After that decision, I partied too much. I was drinking and balling and more than a bit adrift before I left. That's why I was really happy to be back in the US. It was just time to go. My hand had been played. I felt very lucky to leave when and how I did.

But here's the problem.

After the glow of happy returns wore off, I have to be honest with the fact that I just don't like the US lifestyle. I came back to give the west a full on fair shake. I even saw it with new eyes. And there's much I really love about US that I had to be away from before I could appreciate it. It truly is a tremendous land of amazing professional opportunity, as well as a place where self development is encouraged and valued. 

Every system is crooked, but the corruption here is way toned down compared to SE Asia. The work place has some clowns, but is largely a meritocracy, where good workers are advanced, and losers get let go. People try hard. They want to make things better. The innovate. But what's really turning me off is how processed it all is.
 
How boring. 

It feels like this grey machine. A conveyor belt. Relationships feel flimsy. 

Everybody works...

Watches TV...

Works more... 

The amount of hostility towards men is repulsive, as it plays out in the workplace and in media. But the underground of MGTOW and Red Pill is filled with a tremendous amount of hostility as well.
 
I just really can't believe how unhappy and depressed most people in the west are. 

It's like there is this War on Love, destroying relationships between lovers, friends, and communities. There's not much neighborhood or local cohesion. 

I feel everybody keeps busy busy busy all the time, working buying and watching, working buying and watching, to avoid admitting how bleak and punishing the average life is here. I don't want to support it. I don't want to fit in and be part of it.

I have no regrets I left Thailand, and in terms of timing, when I was pulled back here was really a blessing. But I can't deny the fact that I feel a huge void in my life out here. 

I believe what I miss most is the excitement and adventure and just fantastic thrill – with all the tribulations that went with it – which living abroad in SE Asia provides. 

I just had more fun there. I felt more alive there. And what's also really difficult is that all of the experiences I had in Thailand aren't really welcome out here. 

Beyond the natural bias that women have of "men who go to Thailand", I'm just shocked that nobody really wants to know what life in another land is like. 

Maybe I'm a bad story teller. But maybe Americans are just living in their bubble. My countrymen have little frame of reference outside of their work and TV shows. It's heartbreaking, really. 

So much of the world, so much to see and hear about, and nobody wants to hear about it. I read a lot of columns on Stick that talk about how Thais don't really know much about the outside world. But in a way, the Americans don't either. So I'm left with this huge piece of living, and no place to process it. It's disheartening.

The place runs well. 

The trains are on time, as they say, but psychologically, I feel the West is a very hostile and weird place these days. Especially when it comes to men / women relationships. I am shocked at the deterioration in relationships that I have seen, in just the past ten years. It's just so aggressively mercenary. 

The romance has been drained from the punch. There's very little charm in the process. I found dating pretty pointless, but still fun and sweet enough in Thailand. Even it if leads nowhere beyond walking around a mall and having some sex, it was lighter and more pleasant. 

In America, dating is this grim operation to perform: shit tests, hoops, Social Market Value, and the flat-out rude bossiness that has become the modern American woman. Joyless. Probably that's what this entire post comes down to… that one word: Joyless. 

America is not a life. 

It's a job. The job is work. And work sucks.

Thais value fun. They like life light. Sanuk isn't just something in tour books. They have an art to daily living that has a pleasant ambience based on a healthy injection of “I don't give a damn”. All of us who have lived there have been on the maddening side of it. But from where I'm writing now, I see it now as a great way to resist the corporate take-over of every part of life.
 
Why the fxxk should we all have to work so hard? 

Who's getting rich off our sweat? Just this morning I read that a new crisis on American college campuses is that many American university students are killing themselves or crowding counselor's crisis centers. Shouldn't higher learning be a better experience? They are probably feeling total dread at what the American system has laid out for them: joyless toil. It's like we're all fighting as hard as we can to jam our way into jobs that shred us. 

Why? 

Life shouldn't be so damn serious. Thais know that. I miss that. I miss them. I miss their land.

With luck I'll be back and honestly, probably bitching about lots of the things I just heralded in the previous paragraph. lol. Should fate decide otherwise, and slugging it out in the US is my path, I have my memories. They will remain a precious jewel for life. Either way, I am richer, wiser, and more the man I dreamed of being for having spent my time in LOS.

Enjoy it out there, gentlemen. Play smart and it's a brilliant part of the world to live life. Play dumb and it's still one hell of an adventure. My time there was a blend of both and I wouldn't trade it for anything. “ 

- “After 3+ Years in Thailand, Reflections From Home” by Rich Archer on the Stickman Blog. Reader submission. May 2015

Q: What do you talk about the USA so much?
A: I am an American. It is what I know, and it is the point of reference that I refer to.

via GIPHY

"America is a country for doing business, not living life."

-Happierabroad

Q: Do you think American girls are bad?
A: No, not at all. I have dated many a wonderful girl (lady) in the United States. I think, for me, I prefer soft and calm tender moments together, rather than the brash clash of what seems to be popular today. This makes me feel like an old man; a fossil. I think that men and women are different. We are not equal. I think that June Cleaver on the 1960’s television show “Leave it to Beaver” was awesome. I think that Lisa Douglas on “Green Acres” was awesome! I believe that Elly Mae from “The Beverly Hillbillies” was just about the perfect girl. Like I said, I am really super old fashioned. American ladies today are different.

When you are exposed to women who are different than American girls are, you tend to be pleasantly surprised. Like I stated previously, differences are good. You can pick and choose the life that you prefer.

"She looked at her husband, he did like this: You may speak. 

And she spoke! 

And I was like, now that's pussy control for you! You know, because I'm used to American women saying: You don't own me." 

- Eddie Murhpy

Q: Is America free?
A: No, it is not. I contend that it used to be free, but today it more resembles a dictatorship. The only way that you can see this is to compare America outside, and then step back in and look around you.

The problem with saying this is that people immediately get defensive. “No it isn’t!” is the retort.

But the truth is that we are in an echo chamber. We cannot see how really bad it is until we step outside. Which is, I must remind everyone, the entire point of this exercise.

If I want to sit in a restaurant, with my dog, smoke a cigarette and drink a beer. It would NOT be against the law. The fact that it is, and the fact that I can do it almost everywhere else outside of the Untied States is a pure indicator of how REPRESSIVE the USA has become.

At least you could do that in Nazi Germany. Yes you could. Drink a beer with your dog, smoke a cigarette all inside a restaurant.

But you cannot do it in America.

When you can do something in Nazi Germany, that is forbidden in the USA, then you have a real problem. Come on, don’t you think that there is something wrong here?

Anywho, I blog about this all the time(American bashing). I hate their laws, legal system and almost everything about America. I was raise and lived my entire life in NYC but has since moved back to my place of birth in the Caribbean.

One will only know how bullshit America is when they actually visit other places on the globe. Americans segregate themselves to just America, and they’re unable to see true freedom.

Here in the Caribbean(and almost the entire globe),I can walk around with 100 cans of beers and drink them unconcealed all I want to, and I don’t have to worry about BS tickets.

Kids can go into liquor stores and buy alcohol, cigarettes, etc. Not that they use them, but let’s say I as a father cannot make it to buy some booze, I can just send my 10 year old son to do that.

The list goes on and on. America falsely prides itself on freedom, but it has no freedoms compared to almost every nation on the globe.

It’s like a guy bragging about having a huge dick, then when his pants come down, his 2 inches is exposed. That is America,hypocrisy to the 10th.degree. And one will only know that America has ZERO freedoms only when they begin to travel internationally.

-SocialKenny

Q: Is the United States bad?
A: No, not at all. The United States is AWESOME. But, it is not what it was first intended to be. It has changed and today it is a real pale shadow of what it used to be.

It is a police state ruled by elite “insiders” all with political and banking connections. The American citizens work as serfs to service the needs and desire of their overseers.

“The expat rule is, you have found paradise and you don’t want to share it with anyone, especially those you believe to be unworthy.”
-Stephen365

Q: Is it ok to retire overseas?
A: From a financial point of view it certainly seems like a good option. There are many places that are far cheaper to live than in “the land of the free”. For instance, you can go to “the land of smiles” or LOS. Which is Thailand, for instance. The problem is that the older you become the less you want to leave the things you know and love.

For instance, I fell in love and moved to China after I was retired out of MAJestic. It was a necessity for my own personal sanity. Yet, there are many tradeoffs that I now miss. For instance, it is impossible to get a “over easy” style egg. Bagels can be had, but I need to make a day long trip to get them. Talking with people who know who John Wayne was is also an impossibility, as is cruising around in a GTO with a trunk full of beer. Those things are now beyond my reach.

If you do retire overseas, you need to be careful where you go. For instance, the UK has gone full-on Orwell. And prices are going up everywhere. Some places have customs and manners that are strange to accept if you spent much of your life in the American echo-chamber. You need to research, and then visit the country that you plan to move to.

Q: Will you return to the United States?
A: Oh yes. My home might me in China, but my heart is in America.  As soon as I am able to save up enough money, then I will book a flight out there. I have been daydreaming of doing some brook trout fishing.

I’d buy one of those big donut tire motorized trikes and head down to the state game lands. I’d have a big red cooler filled with beer, probably Bud or Michelob, and just go riding and drinking all day long. It will be a good time, I’ll tell you what. Maybe go plinking with a .22 L. I just pick up some ammo at the 7-11 and get to it. Or, just eat my fill of some BBQ chicken and corn on the cob over a open fire in the backyard. It will be great. I just can’t wait to see the red embers float up into the night sky as I poke the fire.

Yeah, and another thing that I’d do is go to a restaurant and get a Monty Crisco sandwich. I’d eat it with fries and a bottomless cup of coffee, served in one of those “bang on the table” thick rimmed coffee cups. I’ll go in, and grab one of those spare newspapers that are resting on the counter and read the local news.

Maybe I’ll pull into one of the large parking lots at the mall. I’ll go inside and get an Orange Julus or a Sbarro and get a slice or two of pizza. Then go and pick up some gear at Sears or Target. Yeah. It’ll be a great time. Yessur!

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This article was posted on Free Republic on 17JUL18 for comments. You can read the comments HERE.

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Television Tax. If you live in Germany and you own a radio, a television or a computer, then you are obliged to pay the TV license fee (Rundfunkbeitrag) and you can't escape this!

Here are some decent articles written by others. We share the same idea that humans need to experience life and often that means stepping out of their comfort zone.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Links about China

Business KTV

Dance Craze

End of the Day Potato

Dog Shit

Dancing Grandmothers

When the SJW movement took control of China

Family Meal

Freedom & Liberty in China

Ben Ming Nian

Beware the Expat

Fake Wine

Fat China

China and America Comparisons

SJW

Playground Comparisons

The Last Straw

Diversity Initatives

Democracy

Travel outside

10 Misconceptions about China

Top Ten Misconceptions

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1

Pretty Girls 2

Pretty Girls 3

Pretty Girls 4

Pretty Girls 5

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Compiled and written 10JUN18.
  2. Completion 17JUN18.
  3. SEO review and posting 17JUN18.

Ben Ming Nian – The Twelve-Year Curse (本命年)

The Chinese have many beliefs. Often, we in the West, don’t understand their beliefs of traditions and dismiss them away as superstition. Yet, they really aren’t grounded in fantasy at all. They follow a belief or an understanding on how the universe works.

Let’s take a look at the Ben Ming Nian, or the twelve-year cycle of change…

Introduction

The Chinese believe that every twelve years, a person has a year of change and readjustment. Often this period can bring about some significant stress and discomfort if the person is not aware of what is going on or understands why this period is important.

This means, obviously, that when a person hits the Ben Ming Nian, that their lives will start to experience some changes. This will occur when they are twelve years old, twenty four years old, thirty six years old, forty eight years old, sixty years old, seventy two years old, and eighty four years old. Those who survive their eighty four year old birthday can look forward to a Ben Ming Nian at ninety six, and one hundred and eight years of age.

Red bracelet.
The Chinese have various traditions and superstitions in support of minimizing the negative influences of the Ban Ming Nian. Here is a nice red bracelet.

A Time of Bad Luck?

It is easy to dismiss this time as a time of bad luck. However, that is not really accurate. It is a time when you have too much of what you naturally possess.

Think of it like this; imagine that you are like a pot of chilli. You have meat, sauce, salt, peppers and it is a good and decent pot of chilli.

Every year different ingredients are added to the pot. One year, you might have sweet yellow peppers added. Another year, you might have hamburger added. A different year, you might have onions added. However, every Ben Ming Nian, all of the normal ingredients are doubled!

According to the Chinese astrology, the zodiac year is a year of bad luck. Most Chinese people are afraid to spend their birth sign year. 

Why is it unlucky? It's said that the people during the Ben Ming Nian are easy to encounter Tai Sui who is the legendary God in charge of people's fortune. Their fortune usually fluctuates during the year. Many bad things such as illness, financial loss, extramarital affair etc. may happen to them. 

Some people think it's superstitious to believe this. 

In fact, it's not completely bad for people in the zodiac year. It varies greatly from individual to individual. Some people may have good fortune instead of bad luck. But in general, marriage, moving house, travel, starting business…are thought to be worthy of great attention during the year.

-Fortune in Ben Ming Nian

So, continuing on the chilli analogy, consider that on some Ben Ming Nian years, you have too much salt, while on others, you might have too much meat, or too many peppers. Now, too many peppers might make the chilli far too spicy to eat. Thus, it would be a very bad year for the pot of chilli.

Cute belt for the woman.
Jade and the color red are considered positive and happy influences that can be used to moderate a difficult year. Here is a nice belt for the attractive female.

Not every Ben Ming Nian is bad. Though the raw truth is that things can get choppy and dicey at times. You need to take care and be careful in what you do, say and behave.

In folklore, it is a very popular superstition that people's zodiac year of birth is really unlucky, so it is also called Threshold Years, which means a year with a lot of obstacles in life. Why is Ben Ming Nian considered ominous? It is said that starting from the Chinese New Year of one's year of birth, people will offend 'Tai Sui', a mysterious power or celestial body that could control people's fortune. Impacted by this power, people will suffer either exultation or misery during that year.

-Travel China Guide

Caution

In general, a person is advised to “lie low”. Don’t start anything new or over extend yourself. It is easy to get entangled in troubles and conflicts.

So the best thing that you can do is spend time in nature, don’t get too upset about anything. You need to realize that like it or not, when bad things occur, they are fated. It is beyond your control.

Ben Ming Nian sleepwear.
Red and pink under-garments are preferred during the tumultuous Ben Ming Nian year. Traditionally, red is the most common, but pink is now becoming popular with the youthful Chinese ladies.

Theory

Contemporaneously, it is believed that a person is surrounded by a non-physical reality. Within this non-physical are cyclic events and attributes that ebb and flow  depending on a host of causes and effects.

This non-physical reality differs from person to person. However, it consists of things that ebb and flow according to synchronized events that are triggered upon birth.

The Chinese have given these various components and their behaviors all sorts of names. They have created a series of “animal characteristics” such as dog, pig, and snake to describe a set of initial non-physical conditions. They have also created a series of names to describe how the non-physical components behave as a group. They go by such names as a “strong earth”, or a “weak wood”. It’s easy for the ignorant to make fun of this entire system. To them, it sounds a lot like a more detailed version of Western astrology.

The Ben Ming Nian is itself classified as a “star”. It is known as the “God of Age” Star (Tai Sui).

Tai Sui doesn't actually exist as a real star! (It roughly corresponds to Jupiter, which takes 11.86 years to orbit earth, and is probably where the idea for the star came from). It's an imaginary star that changes position exactly 30 degrees of direction each year, i.e. orbiting Earth every 12 years exactly.

-China Highlights

It all sounds just a little silly. Right?

Mapping your Situation

According to the Chinese, a person can “map” the non-physical reality influences that they were born with.

To do this, you need to identify the exact moment you were born (within a fifteen minute window). This will tell you the relative positions of the non-physical reality that surrounds you at birth. There are all sorts of people who can help you out in doing this. I would suggest that for casual interest, you go visit a free website and have the initial conditions mapped out for you.

Find Your Chinese Zodiac Sign

The above is a pretty decent on-line calculator that will set you in motion to follow your traits and attributes. I suggest you use it first.

If you, the reader, find it is useful then you can investigate other related Chinese studies such as Bazi (八字) and Fengshui. To do this, you will need a detailed study of the non-physical realities that surround you. You can go here, for a very detailed and free analysis;

Feng Shui analysis of your Bazi conditions

Considerations

There are some things that really need to be considered before discounting this belief so readily.

  • There is a non-physical reality that surrounds the physical reality.
  • Within is non-physical reality are “things”.
  • These “things” move about in cyclic motion.
  • These “things” interact with other “things”.
  • By mapping out the movement of these “things” one can predict the ebb and flow of fortune.

For instance, consider the weather. It changes. One day it is sunny and then on another day it rains. For the football player, if it rains, it is an unlucky day. The poor guy can’t play his beloved football. Yet, for the farmer, it is a lucky or auspicious day. For his crops will grow.

There really isn’t any good or bad luck. Instead what you have is the perception of advantage or auspiciousness, as determined by the movement of the non-physical reality that surrounds us all.

Takeaways

  • The Chinese believe that there are non-physical influences that can affect the physical reality that surrounds a person.
  • These influences go by different names.
  • The influences are mapped by characteristics. These characteristics are given animal traits and names.
  • The influences operate within relationships that go by terms such as strong, weak, or neutral. They also have characteristics that are defined by elements such as water, wood, earth, fire, etc.
  • There are also specific influences that operate independently. They are called “stars”. Examples include inauspicious stars ‘Tai Sui’ (太岁), ‘Jian Feng’ (剑锋) and ‘Fu Shi’ (伏尸).
  • To ward off any negative influences in a Ben Ming Nian year, the Chinese like to wear red, and certain amulets and do positive things to keep from getting sucked down into negativity.

FAQ

Q: What is the Ben Ming Nian?
A: It is the zodiac year of one’s birth. It repeats every twelve years. Thus when a person reaches the year where they would turn twelve, it would be their first Ben Ming Nian.

Q: Is the Ben Ming Nian unlucky?
A: It is a very popular superstition that people’s zodiac year of birth is really unlucky. Therefore, it is also called a Threshold Year, which means a year with a lot of obstacles in life. Why is Ben Ming Nian considered ominous? It is said that starting from the Chinese New Year of one’s year of birth, people will offend ‘Tai Sui’, a mysterious power or celestial body that could control people’s fortune. Impacted by this power, people will suffer either exultation or misery during that year.

Q: How can one protect themselves during a Ben Ming Nian?
A: To cope with the big rise and fall in one’s Ben Ming Nian, it is unwise to make moves in career and life. In the first place, they should avoid starting a new business or making a large-amount investment in case of any economic loss. Traveling far would also incur potential dangers. Moving house and getting married in one’s Ben Ming Nian are all considered ominous. It is quite necessary to keep themselves modest and in a low profile or else their relationships with people around would break up.

Q: Do you believe in the Ben Ming Nian?
A: Well, personally the worst year in my life just happened to fall on a Ben Ming Nian. My second worst year fell on a Ben Ming Nian as well. However, all of this might just be a coincidence. Being in China, I take their traditions seriously and follow them.

In many ways, I follow Carl Sagan, who dismissed astrology and superstition as unscientific ways of explaining the world.

But then I think of my mother’s last benmingnian, when cancer snuffed out her life before the end of the year. Or my father’s last benmingnian, when he went to the hospital for a life-threatening condition. Or even my own recent benmingnian, where I battled hardship after hardship, from losing my job to workplace abuse, over and over until the end. None of us wore our red.

It could be coincidence, as Carl Sagan and other scientists might say. But, then again, come my next benmingnian, a little red sure couldn’t hurt.

-The Chinese Zodiac Effect 

Q: How do practitioners know how to calculate the “threat analysis” for a Ben Ming Nian?
A: Dì Zhī (地支), or Earthly Branches, were the original terms used for the years. These branches are also assigned to the hours of the day, based on solar time. The animals were later added as mnemonics and categorized as either yīn (阴) or yáng (阳).

Ten Celestial Stems (天干—tiān gān) pair with the Earthly Branches for a 60-year calendrical cycle. Then add in an element. These cycle through, but each zodiac also has a fixed element. This fixed element is what determines which sign you’re compatible with.

Q: What are the twelve branches?
A: The Twelve Earthly Branches: zi (子), chǒu (丑), yín (寅), Mao (卯), chén (辰), sì (巳), wǔ (午), wèi (未), shēn (申), yǒu (酉), xū (戌), hài (亥).

Q: What are the ten celestial stems?
A: The Ten Celestial Stems: jiǎ (甲), yǐ (乙), bǐng (丙), ding (丁), wù (戊), jǐ (己), gēng (庚), xīn (辛), rén (壬), guǐ (癸).

Q: What are the five elements?
A: Five elements: water (水—shuǐ), wood (木—mù), fire (火—huǒ), earth (土—tǔ), metal (金—jīn).

Another Opinion

They say a man enters a new chapter in life every twelve years. Mine haven’t been that exact but it’s pretty damn close.

0-12. Childhood. Carefree. Annoying the shit out of your parents. Exploring and learning about your surroundings. Catching frogs and snakes. Skateboarding and riding bicycles. Scraping your knees and banging your forehead on the corner of coffee tables. You learn about stitches and chicken pocks.

12-24. Your nuts drop. You’re growing from a boy to a young man. You want to fuck all the cute girls in class and fight other boys at recess. The teen years are fun. You’re jacking off like a mad man and developing a drinking problem. You’re becoming a young adult. You learn about these green pieces of paper that can buy you nice things. You realize they can also get you women so you try to obtain some of these green pieces of paper for yourself. Hopefully you were raised right and become a productive member of society.

24-36. Young adult. During these years you strike out on your own, figuring out what you want to do in this world while making massive mistakes along the way. You’re optimistic while trying new things but most of them fail. You learn about depression. You contemplate the best way to kill yourself and decide on drop hanging. You pussy out and don’t do it. Instead you go out drinking. While completely hammered you have the brilliant idea that you will say FUCK THIS SHIT, quit your job, sell everything you own and move half way across the globe for a fresh start. Your family laughs and thinks you’re joking. You do it and don’t look back. You mature and become stronger during this process…

This is where I’m at right now. And I think it’s time for the next phase.

36-48. Mastery. Pick something you want to do in life and master it. I’ve tried a lot of things over the years. I’ve dabbled in various odd jobs and started businesses. I’ve chased the get rich quick schemes. I sold drugs, played sports and was even in a rock band. Always dabbling, never mastering. But now it’s time to really focus on something with 100% of my effort and MASTER it. Find my passion. My purpose in life. I’m an adult. No more excuses for juvenile behavior and limited thinking. Time to adopt new productive habits and embrace a healthy lifestyle. Time to evolve into the next stage of development as a man. Change my thought process and also how I spend my time.


The different stages of a man’s life

Metallicman’s last Ben Ming Nian…

Well, it was a choppy year for certain, but I managed to keep everything calm and under control. When issues cropped up, I deferred them. I calmed my self. And dealt with them in a way that was productive. I performed no reactionary actions.

Finally, after one year of this, things were calming down. One more day to go…

So on CNY eve, the day right before the next Chinese years and when I would exit my Ben Ming Nian, I was startled when I heard splashing sounds in my living room.

Guess what happened?

The sewer line was blocked up, and all 24 floors above me were dumping their shit and feces into my apartment. It was a shower of shit. It was pouring out of all the drains in the house and it was gurgling grey-water and feces all over. Little turds were floating in the living room, and toilet paper “ghosts” were wafting all over and sticking to my couches, my books, and everything.

This is on CNY eve, right?

That’s right! No one was around. I had to deal with it myself.

Long story short. …

My Ben Ming Nian literally shit on me and my family. 24 floors of waste resulted in two feet deep of shit. And I spent my CNY cleaning up the mess, shoveling shit and throwing away my furnishings and gear.

Oh…

And the culprit?

Some jackass was flushing complete towels down the commodes. A big wad of six or seven of them ended up blocking the massive sewer pipe under the complex (One that was two feet in diameter). Jackass.

The Ben Ming Nian. Treat it with care.

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The Pleasures of Fresh Baked Bread with Butter

Everyone, most especially Americans, know about bread. It is an American staple. We simply cannot picture a meal without bread. Breakfasts have toast. Lunches consist of either a sandwich or a hamburger. Dinners usually have some kind of bread, whether it is a loaf of white bread or some dinner rolls. The point is that we, as Americans, consider bread to be an important part of our day to day meals.

As such, we don’t appreciate bread.

We take it for granted. We buy loaves of pre-sliced bread off the store shelves. We eat hamburgers using preserved hamburger buns. We eat hotdogs using a package of pre-made hotdog buns. Dinners use (at best) instant frozen buns. We never really give any thought to the IMPORTANCE of having fresh, crusty bread served daily.

I would like to talk about this…

Growing Up

When I was a little boy, we (of course) ate bread. My mother would pack us a sandwich made out of white bread (usually Wonder Bread) and put it in a little lunch box that I would carry to school with me. I had a couple of lunch boxes over the years. I had a Flintstones, a Diver Dan, a Fireball XR5, and a Jetsons lunch box. I even had a Beatles lunch box, but I gave it to my sister as she really wanted it.

Each lunch box would have a small thermos inside. My mother would fill it with soup. We would have various kinds of soups. Almost all the time they were Campbell’s soups. We typically have tomato, chicken noodle, chicken rice, vegetable, and beef vegetable soups.

The sandwich would be either a baloney, ham, chicken salad, egg salad or peanut butter and jelly sandwich. It would always be cut diagonally into two halves. It would be packaged within a plastic bag and sat there with a napkin, and a piece of fruit; usually an apple. Other fruits included bananas, peaches, plums, grapes or a box of raisins.

At that time, I really didn’t know much about food. I grew up with white-bread sandwiches and didn’t give them a moment’s thought. My sister and brother, on the other hand, had very strong feelings about the bread used. It just HAD to be “Wonder Bread” brand of sliced bread. They absolutely refused to eat anything other than that particular brand of bread. Eh? Who figures?

Dinners were always served with bread. Typically it was also white bread. My mother would place the plastic wrapped loaf on the table and we would help ourselves to whatever bread we wanted. Butter was always on the table in a rectangular glass dish. For the most part, it was salted butter, but she switched to margarine because the cost of butter was getting too expensive for casual family use.

She would make homemade bread on major holidays such as Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving.  She would also buy frozen rolls from Pillsbury, and bake them in the oven.

For me, my experience with “real” fresh bread and rolls occurred when I visited my grandparents in Pittsburgh. For there, they had access to bakeries. We didn’t as we lived in the country.

Bakeries

Both of my grandparents lived in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. One was on “Polish Hill” which was a hill overlooking the “main drag” of Pittsburgh known as Liberty Avenue. The other set of grandparents lived in Lawrenceville. It was a Northern suburb that served various industries up-river.

Polish Hill at dusk.
A evening scene from Polish Hill. Polish Hill is a suburb of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It is a community that was founded by Polish immigrants that went to Pittsburgh to find work in the Steel Mills there.

Polish Hill was great. It was settled by immigrants from Poland and it had a kind of old-world European flavor to it. I was just about related to everyone there. There were various bars, bakeries, grocery stores, and small family run establishments up and down the streets. Of course, the Catholic Church dominated the hill, and the Polish Falcons club was on a side street.

There was a bakery that was just down the street. On the weekends, my grandmother would walk down and buy two dozen hard rolls. Thus, when we would visit them, we could eat our fill of fresh hot hard rolls and salted butter. She would get a selection of rolls that would include poppy seed, sesame seed, onion, and salt rolls that we could choose from. Typically, I would eat them with good strong black coffee that I used to drink with sugar and cream.

If we were having a brunch, she would lay out some cold cuts. We would then make us a sandwich out of the hard rolls and the cold cuts. She (well, both of my grandmothers) would lay out a “spread”. This would include fresh Lettuce, onion, sliced tomatoes and a big jar of Miracle Whip or mayonnaise. We would them make us a sandwich from those fixings. It would end up something like this;

Cold cut sandwich on a Sunday in Polish Hill.
If were were going to stay for lunch, often times my grandparents would allow us to make our own sandwiches. Here, they would lay out a “spread” of cold cuts. We would then make sandwiches and drink soda while our parents and relatives would drink beer.

Lawrenceville was similar. They also had a couple of bakeries that they would frequent. However, instead of buying rolls they would buy a loaf or two of bread and have the bakery slice it for us. Typically an Italian loaf, a thick loaf of Rye bread, or a crusty black loaf were what my other grandmother would buy.

In this case, the sliced loaves would be laid out on the table and we could make sandwiches out of the slices. The layout was similar, except there would also be pickles, olives, coleslaw, homemade potato salad, sausage, mustard, and horseradish on the table. For some reason, my relatives from that side of the family really liked to make sandwiches with coleslaw on it. I have tried it a number of times and I must admit that it really was quite tasty.

A typical sandwich that I would eat as a kid in Pittsburgh.
My other relatives would allow us to make cold cut sandwiches using sliced bread. Here the bakery would slice rye or fresh “farm” bread. We would then use it to make our sandwiches out of. Typically we would eat ham, and baloney. We would also have bacon and cheese slices as well.

Both grandparents had different ways of doing things. My grandparents from Lawrenceville would lay out a spread, and the entire family would sit around playing cards, snacking, and chatting. Us kids would be running around in the back alleys and jumping from rooftop to rooftop over the narrow alleys. (My mother lost her 14-year-old sweetheart that way; he fell and died when he didn’t make it to the other roof.) We would go down into the basement and get a bottle of soda and continue playing.

My grandparents on Polish Hill would do things differently. There it was coffee, buttered rolls, newspapers, and television. We could go out and play. Typically, I would go out with my cousins and hang out at their homes, listening to 45 records on record players, and reading comic books. Like all homes (well, maybe most homes) there was always a case or two of glass bottled soda (in a wooden box) sitting on the basement stairs for us to get at will and drink.

There was something else too.  For some mysterious reason, most basements in Pittsburgh had a commode sitting in the middle of the basement floor. (Read more about it HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.) Which was handy if you needed to go to the bathroom, but uncomfortable as it was like taking a dump in the middle of a basketball court.

“The "Pittsburgh Shitter," as I've heard it called -- and not just when readers suggest alternate names for CP -- is a treasured bit of local folklore. Basement toilets have long been celebrated as a connection to the city's industrial legacy; they've even been featured in Rick Sebak's recent documentary Underground Pittsburgh.

"The story is that you came home from work in the mill, and you used the basement to wash up before you tracked grime all over the house," says Ron Baraff. An archivist and historian at Homestead-based Rivers of Steel, it's Baraff's job to delve for local working-class history. Obviously, he finds it in a lot of basements.

Frequently, he says, "If you go into these older homes, there's often a cast-cement tub down there as well. I have heard from dozens of steelworkers and their families that this was the daily routine -- especially before the 1950s, before there were big shower rooms installed in the plants themselves."

Still, he says, while the bathrooms are rare, they are not unheard of: "I know of other towns where people have the same sort of thing. You tend to find them in a lot of working-class towns" -- including Cleveland, where a toilet in the basement arguably seems a little redundant. But "there are older towns in Oregon where they have them as well," Baraff says.

Pittsburgh's basement toilets are somewhat unusual, Baraff allows, because they very often don't feature amenities like, well, walls. "They're just right out in the open. It's the fact that they are stand-alone facilities, with no walls or anything else.”

-Chris Potter

A commode in the basement of Pittsburgh.
Many Pittsburgh homes have a commode in the basement. This seems to be native to Pittsburgh. While the story goes that the commodes were used by the workers to clean up and wash, when they came home from the steel mills, I do not buy into that. The reason is that a shower head is more important than a commode for cleaning up. The truth is that in Pittsburgh, typically the men had their own bathrooms. The women folk had their own bathrooms that they shared with the children. Thus, the basement was the domain of the men-folk. That is the real reason for the commodes in the basements of Pittsburgh.

It might not be politically correct, but up until the 1960’s and 1970’s, men (in Pittsburgh) had their own areas or domains. As did their wives and the ladies in their lives. The women had control over the “upstairs” bathrooms, the kitchen and the laundry room. The men had control of the “basement” bathroom, the work area, and the storage area. Everything else was shared.

It worked out well that way. The woman folk always had the bathrooms clean, tidy and sanitized. The menfolk would have privacy and peace in their own bathrooms.

Ah. Today is a different time, and we have forgotten the workaround that older generations used to cohabitate together. Today we think that everything was equally shared and equally maintained. Ha! No such chance. The men had their own areas, and the women had their own areas.

My Own Experiments

I have to say that as much as I enjoy eating bread, my attempts to make it have been abject failures.  I would follow the instructions. I would add the yeast properly, and pound and knead the dough just like the instructions said. I would let it rise and then put it in the oven. Yet…

Yet…

They never seemed to come out as good as the hard crusty loaves of bread that we could get at the bakery.

They were bread. That much was clear. They smelled like bread, they even tasted somewhat like bread. But they weren’t the tasty loaves that I could buy at a bakery. What was I doing wrong? I have never been able to figure it out. I followed the instructions, but each time I did it, the loaves just turned out…um, plain.

The bread never became hard and crusty. The nice big pockets of air never materialized. The taste was never, at all, like what I was expecting. Ah, this was a big disappointment. Let me tell you.

I know that it is a big disappointment when my dog just sniffs it and then turns his back and walks away from it. I know that there is something wrong when my wife refuses to be in the house with me when I am making the bread. She can’t stand to see all the mess and the big disappointment on my face when the loaves are finished. I know that it is a big disappointment when I try to give it away to my staff, and then they go around and just throw it away in the trash can.

I guess that baking bread isn’t one of my strengths. Sigh.

Hamburger & Hotdog Buns

Let’s chat a little bout hotdog buns and hamburger buns. You know one of my favorite quotes is from the movie True Stories (This is not the “Bulletproof Monk” quote. They stole it from the original movie.);

"It's like how hot dogs come in packs of 10, and buns come in packs of eight or 12 - you have to buy nine packs to make it come out even."

-Quotes from "True Stories"

I remember watching this movie for the first time. It was during my MAJestic training at China Lake. I was living in Ridgecrest, California at the time, and when I would leave the base after a day of training in the “chamber”, I would come home to beer and watch a movie rental. I believe we watched it in BetaMAX at the time.

THe movie "True Stories" is a 1980's classic.
The cult classic 1980’s oddball movie “True Stories”. Why it’s all about “specialness”. If you, the reader, have the opportunity, I would strongly suggest you watch this oddball movie. (Maybe you like the music group the B-52’s, eh?) Ah, the Huffington Puffington Post has an answer to this. If you want to read their justification, it’s up to you. For me, it’s just the way that it is. They seem to have stumbled on some sort of global conspiracy between the wealthy oligarchs, and the FDA with the innocent housewives trapped in the middle. Oh, My!

Anyways…

You know, even though I grew up with them all my life (hotdog and hamburger white bread rolls), I really don’t think that they are all that good. Certainly, the rolls can be improved somewhat. If you eat them alone it is like eating a rather bland sponge.

Don’t you think?

The simple truth is that a hamburger bun at the grocery store is the same as a hamburger bun at a cub scout gathering, a picnic, a McDonald’s restaurant, or a typical diner. They are all the same. There is nothing special about it, and no special attention is given to the selection of the bun.

It’s a shame. It’s really sad.

Portuguese Rolls

Which brings me to the joy of eating “Portuguese Rolls”.

Milford, Massachusetts.
Milford, Massachusetts is a wonderful small town. It has everything. It feels like a small town, but is very close to downtown Boston. In fact, you can drive over to the town next door and take the “T” all the way into Boston. Photo credit to Cathy Leite Photography. What a great photo, don’t you think? I think that have a certain ability, or talent. Here are some other examples of their work. Beautiful.

You know, I was first introduced to the joys of Portuguese Rolls while I was living in Milford, Massachusetts. There, in the surrounding area, was a sizable community of immigrants from Portugal.  The town of Milford was really quite nice. When I lived there, it was in the mid to late 1990’s and it still had the Mayberry RFD “feel” about it.

There were numerous bakeries there. I would get to eat fresh rolls, bagels, Italian bread, and of course, Portuguese Rolls.

I remember the event quite clearly. We were making up a crock-pot full of sweet Italian sausages with cut up onions, peppers, and tomato sauce. We added some basil, garlic and some oregano for flavor and let it cook away for around five hours or so.

Ah… the house smelled marvelous.

Italian sausage on a roll with onions and peppers.
There is something simple and delicious about sweet Italian sausages cooked in tomatoes with onions and peppers. It is absolutely wonderful if you put it on a nice hard crusty bread.

We had bought some Portuguese Rolls from the bakery, and we thought they might be good with the sausages. Boy was we in for a treat! The rolls were tough and crunchy on the outside, but warm and moist on the inside. They were not circular like a normal hard roll would be. Instead, they were more like a football shape. They were also a little small.

Fresh baked Portuguese Rolls.
Nothing beats some fresh hot Portuguese Rolls. It is most especially delicious when eaten with sweet Italian sausage and peppers.

I fell in love with them the first time that I tried them. They were so absolutely delicious. It was sort of like eating a hard roll, except that the skin was just a little bit crunchy. That, and the skin ran deeper. It was thus, a little chewier. It was amazing when you coupled it with the sweet Italian pepper sauce. Yum!

Fresh Baked Italian Bread

Tutuilia island in American Samoa.
Tutuila island has some of the most spectacular colors and views in the entire world. It is an area of fresh air and amazing people. This photo is not photoshopped!

I have always enjoyed freshly baked bread. In fact, my favorites have been both French and Italian baked loaves of bread. Of course, that is pretty difficult to come by outsides of Europe, though there are some pretty good bakeries around the world.

One of the best moments that I ever had regarding fresh loaves of bread occurred in the tiny town of Lli’ili (yeah, it’s a pretty odd name) on the island of Tutuila in American Samoa. I was there working as a Project Engineer building a medical complex near Pago Pago.  After the day’s work, we would hop into the truck and drive to the market and get some beer. We could get it at just about any small store, but we liked to go to our favorite grocery store.

We would go get our groceries from a market in Lli’ili. They had a pretty big selection of food, which was pretty hard to come by (and expensive) since we were living on a remote and distant island in the middle of the South Pacific.

Tutuila island.
Tutuila is the biggest island in the American Samoa islands. To the West of it is the other (non-American) Samoan islands, known as West Samoa.

Every day they would bake fresh Italian bread. Fresh. When you pulled in from the road and walked into the grocery store, your nostrils would fill up with that wondrous aroma.

My wife, Chinese, has never been a big fan of bread. She buys them and eats them with me. However, for her, she prefers seafood such as conchs, and snails. (After all these years, I eat them, but they are not my favorites.) Yet, when she tried this bread she fell in love with it. It was so delicious and tasty. We ate it with real salted butter. The butter would melt inside the soft white moistness of the warm interior. It was delicious and so wonderful.

We went and bought two loaves, and scarfed them both down with Ice cold Valima beer.

Valima beer.
Valima Beer is manufactured on the Western Samoa islands. It is exported to American Samoa. It is a good beer and quite tasty. It is a big size as all Samoans are big people.

Bread in China

Speaking of my wife’s preferences in food, are you aware of what constitutes bread in China? Yeah. It’s quite different than what is “real” bread back in the States, or out in Europe.

BreadTalk is a Chinese chain bakery.
BreadTalk is a chain of bakeries that operate within China. It has taken the McDonalds fast food environment and adapted it to the production of Chinese style loaves of bread and pastries.

Yes, they do have bakeries. Yes, they also carry a wide selection of loaves of bread, pastries, and confections. Bakeries are actually a pretty common thing in China. You actually can’t visit a town or city without running into one every other city block.

In general, Chinese bread is typically [1] sweet, and [2] very soft. It is like eating sponge cake. That is pretty much what it is like. Imagine sponge cake made into rolls, biscuits, cakes, cookies, and long loaves of bread.

Imagine each bread or pastry having different flavors as well. While there are the common flavors such as cherry, blueberry, lemon, banana and other well-known fruit sensations, they also have other tropical flavors to suit the Chinese palate.  They have durian, mango, papaya, guava, and star-fruit flavors as well. Of course, they also carry a wide selection of cakes.

One of the odd things about Chinese bakeries is that they tend to use this kind of strange pork dust flakes that they really like to sprinkle on everything. They especially like to sprinkle it on loaves of bread. So you can get a cherry flavored (sponge cake) bread, for instance, with pork flakes on top of it. Who’d figure?

It’s odd, I know.

Bread at a Chinese bakery.
The bread in a Chinese bakery is typically soft and sweet. It more closely resembles sponge cake than anything else. Here are some typical loaves of bread that can be found at just about any bakery in China.

No pies though. It’s difficult to get a pie in China. The closest thing to a pie is at McDonald’s fast-food franchise. There you can get a McDonald’s red bean pie, instead of (the American staple) an apple pie.

There is good news, however. Most bakeries in China do know how to make long French bread. Most will have this kind of hard bread on sale. The typical cost varies from 6 yuan (approximately $1) for a loaf all the way up to 12 yuan ($2) at the more expensive stores.

Fresh Italian Bread with Dinner

Now with this in mind, we typically buy a loaf or two at the store. We cut it up and put it in the freezer to eat with our dinner. Not every meal that we eat is a Western meal, so we typically only eat the bread with a “Western Style” meal.

Italian bread sliced.
The best loaves of bread, I think, come from fresh and hot Italian bread right out of the oven. The bread is permitted to harden somewhat. It is delicious with real salted butter.

If the meal is Western, it is served with bread. We buy a loaf or two of “French bread” from the local supermarket (D, RenRen Le, Carrefour, Taste or Park n’ Shop). There they make “real” crusty bread, not the super soft sweet bread that is so common in Chinese bakeries. Typically we purchase it beforehand when it is made fresh and then we freeze it. We take it out and heat it up in the oven or microwave as necessary.

Salted Butter. We eat bread with REAL SALTED butter. This is one of the little pleasures that I missed over the years. In the rush to make everything “healthy” in the United States, everyone switched to unsalted butter and margarine. Bullshit. You lose the taste, and you still die early. It’s all nonsense. In my house, we cut the bread, heat it up in the oven, and place it in a bowl covered under a cloth. It is served with the formal family meal.

The selection (and presentation) of butter is very important. The butter is in a large glass butter container (twice the size of the one we had as I grew up in the 1960’s) and is left out for a few hours to soften up. Butter is ALWAYS “salted” butter (which we buy on the internet), in a pinch, we will use “lightly salted”. We absolutely never use “unsalted” butter.

Fresh baked bread
Now, this is how bread should look. Crusty on the outside and nice and fluffy with voids inside. Note that the voids are in different sizes and shapes. I have always treasured this feature.

Hard Crusty Rolls on a Sunday

Back in the day, I went to Syracuse University to study Aerospace Engineering. When I was attending university, I lived off campus. I lived on the “East Side” of Syracuse in the “German Section” of South Salina street. This area was a cultural enclave of German immigrants who moved to Syracuse from Germany. At that time, I lived with a German family who rented a room out to me.

They were good folk. Heinz came to the United States with his wife Gertrude after the collapse of Nazi Germany after World War II. He was hard of hearing because of a war wound. (He was a military police officer on the Russian front.)

Ah, the stories they would tell me! They would talk about the collapse of society and the war. Gertrude would tell me about the awful, awful things the Russian soldiers would do to the German girls, and Heinz would tell me about the struggles that they had escaping from Germany during the collapse.

Heinz had built a secret room in the basement behind a fake set of shelves.  He told me that you should never expect things always to be good and great; that you should always prepare for the worst. He kept a couple of firearms in the house in hidden locations, and always made sure that the “emergency safe room” was always stocked up and safe. Now, as far as I know, he never ever needed to use that room. Good thing, I am sure.

Anyways…

Every morning I would get a fine German breakfast. It consisted of toasted bread, peanut butter, cut up lettuce, tomato, and onions. I would also get a soft boiled egg and some coffee. It was actually very delicious. Sometimes there would be some liverwurst that I could spread on top of the toast. It has become one of my fondest memories.

Now the bread was just normal store-bought bread. Sometimes, it would be a rye or a wheat bread. However, for the most part, it was a plain white “everyday” bread.

German style breakfasts can be made anywhere as long as you have the ingredients.
German breakfast spread (Image source.)

They always gave me a great breakfast. I would take my time making the toast and putting all kinds of things on the bread. It was most certainly delicious.

However, for some reason, Sundays were different. Gertrude liked to watch a religious television show at the time. I think it was called the 700 club. During the show, I think it ran all the time, but on Sundays, she was “glued” to the set in the living room. As such, she couldn’t make me my regular or “normal” breakfast meal.

Instead, she or Heinz would bring a paper bag of hard rolls from the neighborhood bakery and place them on the table. I could help myself to a few rolls, some sliced tomatoes, butter, cream cheese, and coffee. It wasn’t the same as the regular German breakfast spread, but it was just as nice.

Poppy seed hard roll.
Hard rolls from the local bakery down the street was a little enjoyment that I have come to miss. We would get a dozen warm rolls, and eat them with real salted butter. This is a wonderful thing to have with coffee.

In fact, I must confess, I have taken a real liking to hot hard rolls with real salted butter, and fresh (from the garden) tomato slices with salt and pepper. Thus, the reason for this post, don’t you know. You just cannot get these rolls here in China. It is simply not possible. As such, it is one of those little pleasures that I have come to miss terribly.

The Importance of a Local Bakery

So what is more important, having fresh hard loaves of bread or being able to go next door and get them? Well, you would think that (of course) bread is a food that you eat. So, therefore, to eat the bread is the most important thing. I disagree. I think that the most important aspect of having a good, high-quality meal, is to have a local bakery in your neighborhood nearby.

Forget about all that “modern” 1930’s gibberish about the “new, modern and progressive” life. It never materialized. Forget, also, the siren song of the convenience of the 1960’s. It materialized and ended up as a horrible out of control monster.

The lofty dreams of the idealists got us tomatoes that taste like water-filled cardboard, plastic wrapped bread that tastes like a clean mop head, and fake butter that makes your face break out in pimples. Oh, but they meant well…

The best and most important aspect of personal satisfaction is how we control our lives. That means ourselves and of our families. We need to have a stress free life. We need to have a life that is filled with happiness and contentment. We need to have a life that is filled with good things, and one that is all around us. Yes, we need to have a life where those things that matter to us surround us.

yes, we need to have a bakery nearby.

A small neighborhood bakery.
It is those small things that we take for granted. We have forgotten the importance of the small local neighborhood bakery, and how much it can enhance our lives.

Bagels

Now speaking about bakeries, let’s talk about the joys of bagels. Now that is one food that I haven’t eaten in years. Literally…years!

You just cannot find bagels in China. Not commonly, that is. There was a small expat bakery in Shekou (a suburb of Shenzhen) for a while. They made bagels. I also heard that you can get bagels in some of the more upscale regions of Shenzhen. However, real and fresh bagels have eluded me. Ah, this is such a shame.

Bagel with creme cheese.
A basic bagel with creme cheese. It is so delicious when hot right out of the oven. What I like is to slather fine salted butter, and creme cheese inside a sliced bagel. I used to eat these most delicious items at an American chain restaurant known as Panera Bread (with coffee, of course).

When I was in Boston, I couldn’t walk five feet without running into a bagel. (Well, obviously that is an exaggeration.) However, it is true that you could get them just about anywhere. They were good, hot and FRESH. There is nothing so tasty as a fresh hot bagel with creme cheese. Of course, I would drink it down with some coffee.  Ah, good times. Good times.

Peanut Butter Bagel with Peanut Butter

One of the most amazing experiences that I had (and one that I will never forget) was when I went through a drive-through at a bagel hut (sort of like a Pizza Hut, only for bagels) and ate a fresh hot peanut butter bagel with slathered peanut butter. My God! It was like I died and went to peanut butter heaven!

Who figures? Right?

After that most amazing experience, I started to go to the company cafeteria where I worked. I would order a toasted bagel with butter and creme cheese as a mid-breakfast snack. Now, of course, this was just a pale reflection of the “real thing”. The butter was actually unsalted margarine (for the employee health), the bagels were store bought in bulk and not crusty at all, and the peanut butter was generic (not Jif). It wasn’t really all that good, but you make do…

Which is the point behind all this discussion…

We tend to accept things as they are and don't fight for the Little things that really matter to us. We accept things blindly without even thinking about them. 

We don't miss the good things in life, because we have forgotten their importance to us. 

When we do actually remember their significance, we tend to substitute cheaper (and pale) alternatives blindly. We fail to realize that the substitution degrades the value of our experience.

Crumpets (English Muffins)

I always liked “English Muffins”. My mother would buy them from the grocery store. It was all that I knew. They would come packaged in a plastic wrapped rectangle. Inside the bag would be six muffins that were about the size of an open hand palm.

They toasted really nice. The butter would melt on them quite readily and they were delicious.

Later, when I would go on business trips with my father (I could go on selected trips in my early teens) we might stop at a restaurant and get an “eggs benedict” which would be a poached egg on an English muffin.

Classic eggs benedict.
Classic eggs benedict. Here there would be a poached egg placed on top of ham over a toasted English Muffin and covered with Hollandaise sauce. (Image Source.)

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that China, Hong Kong, and Macao all had Crumpets!

I actually had to do some unlearning at that stage. For me, the Lander’s brand of English muffin was the “Gold Standard”. I didn’t know that it was a mass-produced and down-sized crumpet for the American consumer. The English crumpet is actually larger, and thicker than their American cousins.

They were also fresher.

The crumpets were made locally, and thus they tended to be (at most) a few days old, as opposed to the American versions that were often weeks old. This resulted in a better taste. This also resulted in a greater appreciation for the crumpet that I did not have previously.

British crumpet.
English crumpets are a substantially different creature compared to their American cousins the “English Muffin”.

Since it is larger, it needs to be cut up into individual pieces to be eaten properly. The American version is tiny and you can eat it in the hand as a sandwich. You know, just like the famous McDonald’s breakfast sandwich is.

English Muffin Pizzas

I think everyone knows about this DIY hack. You make a mini-pizza out of an English Muffin. It’s a great little trick, and if you don’t know about it, then you are truly missing out.

English muffin pizza.
One of the little hacks that I learned during my Senior Year in High School was how to make an English muffin pizza. This is a great little DIY trick and wonderful to teach your children to do.

I was introduced to this DIY hack by a girl that I was dating in High School. I once visited her family while they were hanging out on a Friday night. (They had a house that they were building on the river. They were from Pittsburgh, and they were making the house to be a weekend home. They pretty much were living in the basement, while the father and uncles were building the upper floors.) I came over and was offered these amazing little mini-pizzas. At the time we were playing pool on their pool table. I fell in love with them the first time I took a bite.

They couldn’t get over the fact that I had never had one of these before.

However, the truth is that my family didn’t really make pizzas at home. At best we would get a frozen pizza, or a pizza kit and make up something. Pizza was a food that we would go to a restaurant for. At that time, the nearest “decent” pizza restaurant was all the way in Pittsburgh, which was a two-hour drive for us. So we only ate pizza on special occasions.

Then, when I was a Senior in High School, they opened up a Pizza Hut franchise in the nearby city of Butler, PA. Once that opened up we could get thin crust cheese and pepperoni pizza and a large pitcher of coke. I do wonder if they still offer that kind of pizza in Pizza Hut in the States today. I can tell you that, here in China, it is very hard to get a Pizza Hut thin-crust pepperoni pizza without paying extra for it. All the meals are pre-packaged “kits”. If you want something different, you will need to pay a premium for it.

Polish Bread Pizza

English Muffin Pizzas are very similar to a well-known (in my family) Polish food. Here we can talk about the Polish Open-Faced Sandwich (Zapiekanka). We eat Polish food as a way to explain our heritage to our children, and anyone else who wants to listen.  Indeed, all Polish dishes serve as an opportunity for me to explain our Polish-American heritage.

Hey, I am Polish-American. Though I don’t hide behind it and ask for handouts like my liberal and progressive friends. I do try to keep some of the heritage alive.

Casserole
We can make Zapiekanka here in China. The only ingredient missing is the authentic sauce. That is the most important part of the open-faced pizza. However, we do manage to make a reasonable alternative.

Polish open-faced sandwiches (also known as French-bread pizzas) are popular street food in the bigger cities of Poland, not to mention my old family stomping ground in Pittsburgh (Polish Hill). They’re known as zapiekanki (plural) or zapiekanka (zah-peeyeh-KAHN-kah), which is singular. Most zapiekanki sandwiches start with French bread, sautéed mushrooms, cheese, and ketchup, but there are Greek-style with olives and feta cheese, Italian style and many more.

What makes the open-faced sandwich authentic is a thick drizzle of Polish ketchup across the top, no matter what cuisine the zapiekanka is trying to emulate. That’s the secret.

Home-made Submarine Sandwiches

How can we possibly talk about good fresh crusty bread without talking about subway sandwiches? Here, for those of you who are unaware like my wife (was), it is a sandwich that is made from an entire loaf of hard crusty bread and filled with cold cuts, cheese, and vegetables. There are variations that include meatballs (one of my favorites), shrimp, tuna, and lobster. It can be heated or eaten cold.

Needless to say, subway sandwiches are awesome!

Italian Sandwich.
I personally love a good Italian subway sandwich. There is a nice mixture of cold cuts and vegetables in a loaf of fresh bread with a nice slather of mayo. Heck, I get hungry just thinking about it.

There are many kinds of subway sandwiches. There are “Hero sandwiches”, “Subway sandwiches”, “Hoagie”, “Grinder”, and “Po Boys”. It depends where you live.

Hoagie Hero Sandwich.
Here is a fine Hoagie sandwich. It goes by many names. There is “subway”, or “Hero”, or “Po Boy”. All pretty much describe the same thing. All are delicious.

Sub sandwiches. This is short for Subway sandwiches. However, not every place know this. This is a pretty common way to ask for a submarine-style sandwich. If you were to go to a restaurant in the United States and asked for a “Sub Sandwich”, the chances are that they would know what you are talking about. Yet, if you start talking about a “Subway sandwich”, some places might actually not know what you are talking about at all.

Subway sandwiches. Many people know what a subway sandwich is because of the subway sandwich food chain. It is true shame that they have downsized and cut back on their business. I have always enjoyed the food and the fresh ingredients.  I think that they are not appreciated as much as they should be.

Hero sandwiches. It’s another name for this most amazing of sandwiches. Personally, I think that it’s use is limited to certain geographic regions in the United States. In general, I would consider the term “Hero sandwich” to be a backup term for “Subway sandwich” that is in use in about 60% of the United States.

Hoagie sandwiches. The same is true for Hoagie sandwiches. It is a term that seems to be limited to certain sections of the United States. For the term “Hoagie”, it seems to be limited to the North East area. This is strange because this area also uses the terms “Grinder”, and “Torpedo” for these sandwiches.

Grinder. A “Grinder” is never called a “Grinder sandwich”. It is always a “grinder”. It is common in Massachusetts. In fact, the first time that I came across this term, I didn’t know what the heck they were talking about. You know, grinders can be egg and onion as well as the standard hoagie fare. When I ate grinders, the meat tended to be cut up in smaller pieces compared to what you would normally assume to see in a subway sandwich.

Wedge sandwich. This is a name that I am not at all familiar with.

Zeppelin sandwich. This also goes by the name of a “Zep sandwich” which is obviously a short form of ‘Zeppelin sandwich”.  Apparently, it is common in West Central Pennsylvania, though I have never heard it used that much.

Torpedo sandwich. This is a regional name variant for a subway sandwich. I only heard it used once before in Tupelo, Mississippi. It was a scorcher of a day, and I went inside this small establishment at the side of the road and ordered a subway sandwich. They said “what?”, and then I explained it to them. Their response was, “oh, you mean a torpedo sandwich”. The sandwich was pretty good. It was a crawfish torpedo sandwich.

Po Boy Sandwiches. This is common in Mississippi and Louisiana. These are just different names for subway sandwiches, except that there tend to be more regional variations. In Mississippi, for instance, there would be catfish po boy sandwiches, lobster, and shrimp sandwiches as well as the normal selections that you might find elsewhere.

The joys of Rye Bread

One of the things that I miss (being here in China) is rye bread. It’s true. You can’t get rye bread anywhere.

Which is a real shame. Oh, how many times have I eaten a breakfast in the United States and the waitress asked me what kinds of bread that I would like to have, and I would choose wheat instead of rye because it was (supposedly) “healthier”. Really?

Why miss out on such great goodness? Because some “expert” conducted a “study” that stated that wheat bread was healthier for you to eat! Really! I was such a darn fool! I fell hook, line, and sinker for that nonsense!

Toasted rye bread.
I strongly suggest the reader enjoy the toasted goodness of hot rye toast with salted butter. Life is too short to deprive yourself of such goodness.

Look, next time you have an opportunity to eat toasted rye bread do it! Let those “experts” pontificate all they want. When it comes to your little enjoyments, I say let your hair down and indulge!

Potato Bread is best for Toast

Did you know the secret about potato bread? It’s perfect for toast. It really is. It makes the best crunchy bread out of the toaster. Who would figure? Eh? You might think that it would taste like a potato or something odd like that. But, it doesn’t.

Potato Bread. This is a Russian loaf.
Potato bread is idea for toasting. Somehow the potato strengthens the bread and leads to nice and even toasting qualities. It is not what you would expect, but it is true.

The first time that I ever tried this bread was through an argument with my mother.  I must have been in my middle teen years and she was buying bread at the grocery store. I wanted some raisin bread, but I knew that she was tired of me asking every week for it (I was in a teenage phase at the time.). So I tried to be a little passive-aggressive. I told her, “Let’s try something different this time.”

So she bought a bag of potato bread.

Now, no one in the family would eat it. I didn’t and towards the end of the week, she complained that no one was eating the bread that she bought. So, out of guilt, I went and grabbed two slices and put them in the toaster. Wow! Was I surprised. The crust was so nice and even. It was even crunchier when toasted than regular white or wheat bread. Yet it was still soft and nice and warm inside.

It was amazing to me, and it quickly became one of my favorites at that time. That and pickle loaf from the deli. (BTW, it was a different time and different place, don’t you know.)

Coffee

Now, one of the things that I would like to do is enjoy a bagel (with creme cheese), or a well buttered fresh roll with a nice cup of coffee. Talking about coffee is something that I have reserved for another post. However, I would like to say a few words (just a small number, please) on the coffee cup that coffee is served in.

My words are simple, and my opinions are strong. Coffee should be served in a thick, bang on the counter-top, (off) white coffee mug. Anything less is a disservice to the drinker. I NEVER get a cup of coffee out of a paper cup (unless it is McDonalds) of course.

A good coffee mug.
Coffee should be served in a thick coffee mug. I like to call it a “bang on the table” mug as it is just about indestructible. This kind of mug used to be very common, but it has somehow gotten out of fashion. Which is quite sad. Don’t fret though, you can still pick them up in yard sales and bargain basement stores.

Bread in the ADC

For a period of time, I lived within the confines of the Arkansas Department of Corrections. This is also known as the “ADC”. We always had rough bread. The bread was made of a mixture of 50% white flour and 50% horse feed. Make no mistake here. I am not exaggerating.

While it is possible that this was done to save money, I would actually guess that it was done to create a “tough” environment inside the prison. Actually, how much money can you possibly save by buying horse feed instead of flour?

ADC Horse Feed
The ADC mixed horse feed with the flower to make a nice crunchy hard bread. I don’t think that it would really hurt or kill us, even though the bags were labeled with “not for human consumption” on it.

Therefore, I am convinced that it was done intentionally to create a very harsh environment to make prison as uncomfortable as possible. After all, when Bill Clinton (D) was Governor he set up the “Punishment” rules that that ADC now implements.

The bread was made from horse feed and whole-wheat flour. I know. I worked in the kitchen. It was written on the sacks that the feed came in. It said (in all bold letters, in Arial font) “NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION”.

The result was tough crunchy bread that belonged on Beowulf’s table. I laugh now, but the bags of food in the kitchen all were marked “not for human consumption” on them. I am sure that the prison officials would argue that this was not the case, but I can tell you that this is EXACTLY what we ate. I did work in the kitchen and I can attest to this fact.

In life, what is supposed to happen, and what actually happens are often diametrically opposed.

Just because something is not supposed to occur, does not prevent it from happening.

ADC bread
Bread in the ADC looked a little something like this. It was made from a mixture of normal flour and horse feed.

The bread was hardly tasty, and we only ate it as a last resort. It would hurt our teeth. Some inmates would take the bread and put it in their cup and fill it with milk. Then by adding something sweet like stewed tomatoes, or crushed up candy, they would be able to eat it as a kind of poor man’s dessert. We would never get fruit, ice cream, puddings or Jell-O. Those were truly luxury items for us.

The guards that worked the kitchen were generally humane and understood that they couldn’t always serve us gruel (in the ADC, they served us institutionalized gruel called “Global”.) After all, if they continued to do so, riots or worse might occur.

Life in prison was always a balance between how much punishment they could dish out before we would revolt. Thus they tended to break up the meals so that every day or so there would be biscuits made of real bread, or real meat, or decent vegetables as a side. It wasn’t always so horrible.

For instance, sometimes we got raw onions that we could mix with the beans. That was always a treat. Or at other times, we would get a hamburger and there might be a pickle or ketchup on the side so that we could make a sandwich. (Ah. Good times!)

The ADC always gave us a good great meal for Thanksgiving and Christmas. The same was true for the 4th of July. Truly, the guards were pretty decent folk. However, aside from the major holidays, some days were truly a waste of time marching down to the mess hall. We would grab the tray and just deposit it into the cleaning booth without even trying it.

Again…

You do not appreciate what you have until you lose it.

Summary

All this talk about bread… what’s the “big deal”?

You don’t appreciate things until you live without them. We take them for granted. Oh, sure you are far to busy to visit your grandparents today. maybe next month. Right? Yeah, sure, you can visit them next holiday. Not today. You have far too many things to do. After all, you are exhausted and tired, and just don’t feel up for the ride.

Oh, and a sandwich is just a sandwich. Why pay the extra two dollars at that nice family restaurant for a Montie Crisco sandwich, when you can go to McDonald’s and buy a number one meal effortlessly?

Montie Cristo sandwich.
Why do we settle for less than what we deserve? Why don’t we treat ourselves just a little bit better? Why do we “nickel and dime” ourselves in little ways without appreciating our time, our money, our friendships and our relationships with others?

Besides, everything takes time. Everything costs a little bit more money. Everything comes with a cost. You can save money, and you can save time. You just go for fast-food. You just purchase the readily available “off the shelf” loaves of bread at the supermarket. It’s not a problem.

You can save the money and save the time…

The Montie Cristo sandwich is a simple example of what we deprive ourselves of in order to “improve” our lives. We sacrifice taste for convenience. We neglect our friends and family for the time that we can give to our employers. In the end, we just hurt and deprive ourselves.

Take Aways

  • Bread is an underappreciated item.
  • We sacrifice our time and our money on trivial things instead of devoting them to quality items.
  • We do not appreciate things until we live our lives without them.
  • We think and believe that what we have now will always be there for us.
  • We need to appreciate what we have now, and relish it.
  • I like fresh bread with salted butter with coffee.
  • If there isn’t any coffee, a nice dry red wine, chardonnay or an ice cold beer would go great with fresh warm crusty bread.

FAQ

Q: What are loaves of bread like in China?
A: Typically, the Chinese manufacture commercial loaves of white bread for supermarkets just like what is done in the United States. However, there are some differences. Typically they are smaller at half the length. They also tend to be larger. Maybe 20% larger in size. They taste the same, however, which is like a bland sponge. They also make loaves of long Italian or French bread as well.

Q: What is the best kind of bread?
A: Fresh crusty bread, fresh out of the oven that is still hot. I like Italian, French and Russian loaves of bread. I think that bread is meant to be served warm and fresh. The idea that we can package week-old bread in a supermarket is an idea from the 1930’s that has really damaged the quality of meals in the United States over the last half of century or so.

Q: Why are sandwiches so popular?
A: Oh that is an easy question with an easy answer. Sandwiches are popular because they are made with bread. Fresh and toasty bread enhances everything… even vegetables.

Q: What is the best way to eat bread?
A: I personally believe that the best way to eat bread is to have it warm out of the oven (or reheated) and served with real salted butter.

RFH

I wonder if there is anyone out there who knows the secret for making hot warm crusty bread. My efforts have been complete failures. I really don’t know what I am doing wrong, but uniformly I just cannot bake bread at all. I really do not know what it is.

I guess that I am not made for making bread. I am just good for eating it.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Tomatos

Mad scientist

Gorilla Cage in the basement

Pleasures

Work in the 1960's

School in the 1970s

Cat Heaven

Corporate life

Corporate life - part 2

Build up your life

Grow and play - 1

Grow and play - 2

Asshole

Baby's got back

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older

Civil War

Travel

PT-141

Bronco Billy

r/K selection theory

How they get away with it

Line in the sand

A second passport

Paper Airplanes

Snopes

Taxiation without representation.

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Compiled at first draft 19MAY18.
  2. SEO review 19MAY18.
  3. Edited by request 19MAY18.
  4. Release 19MAY18.
  5. Updated featured image 20JUL18.

Did Extraterrestrials set up a colony in Pennsylvania

Maybe they actually did. The evidence is certainly suggestive of it. For reasons of my own, I have embraced the concept and idea that there have been creatures from other planets, with other intelligences, and different technologies that have visited our planet. This belief was expanded upon by the books by Erich von Däniken in the 1970’s. Oh, of course there are armies of people that dismiss this belief. I’m unfazed. Everyone can believe what they want in regards to their own realities.

As such…

Given what little I know about reality, I can see some patterns. As such, these patterns are quite interesting. One such pattern is the development of colonies, or remote societies that settle away from the main cluster or home. America was birthed from thirteen colonies that were established by European colonists. Australia was birthed from cantankerous Englishmen. Brazil was birthed from Portuguese colonists. If we humans ever want to leave this little planet that we call our home, and venture elsewhere, we will need to set up colonies on other worlds.

In a like way, if some creatures came from another planet and wanted to move to earth, they would need to set up a colony first.  Yet, what would this colony look like? Would it have skyscrapers and color televisions? Would it be peopled with creatures with tentacles and five eyes? Or, would it look something out of the Wild West, with stockades protecting strange and unusual people with technologies that we cannot understand? I would guess the later.

With this in mind, let me introduce the reader to the Andaste Indians (The Susquehannocks)… 

Introduction

I would like to begin this discussion with an unusual group of people who used to live in and around Pennsylvania, in the United States.  This group of people was known as the Susquehannocks / Andaste Indians.

To begin with, however, we need to understand that this tribe or race of people is now long dead. We only know of them through ancient records. These are the writings of the explorers who ventured into early America and encountered these people. Indeed, what they wrote about was quite amazing and spellbinding.

It was a different time.

As such we need to touch on the time period for a spell. When the Pilgrims were first standing on Plymouth Rock, this race was engaged in aggressive trade. All the local Indians feared them. The king of the Susquehannocks was the Negan of their day. (As an aside, have you ever been to Plymouth Rock? Let me tell you that it was quite a disappointment. It was more like a shallow well, than a rock. But, anyways, the town is quite quaint.)

What American Indians were REALLY Like

Today most American people are unaware of the life of the native inhabitants of America. At best, they have an idea of cone shaped Teepees, and bare chested men on horseback with some feathers in their hair. They might have some “scalps” tied around their waist, and a vest of sticks around their chest. They might sit tall on a white and black spotted horse, and have an attractive “squaw” waiting for them in their Teepee. Hah!  Indeed, the truth of the pre-European colonization native life in America is now hidden and secret. It is not really adequately covered in American textbooks.

However it really should be…

During the Middle Ages, plagues ravaged Europe. These plagues were devastating. They killed many people, and in certain communities, most of the inhabitants. Entire towns became empty. A visitor would enter these deserted communities and find horses, chickens and pigs, but all the humans would be dead. It was a devastating time. As such, many people chose not to travel about, but to hide behind walls and seek protections and safety. Europe, during the post plague “dark ages”, was a land not unlike a Hollywood apocalypse.

Instead of a handful of survivors battling it out against zombies in abandoned ghost towns as portrayed in “The Walking Dead” and other apocalyptic movies, the survivors in Europe hid in walled towns, fortresses, and ventured out only when absolutely necessary. They didn’t know what caused the plagues. They thought it was due to their sins and wrong doings.

Of course, today we know the causes as diseases carried by the insects on rats and mice. However, at that time, no one knew the causes.

While Europe was beginning to rebuild, the survivors of the plague started their life anew. They did not realize that they had grown immunities to many of the (associative) sicknesses and illnesses that ravaged the European countryside. Then, later when they began to set sail for foreign lands and search for new lands and new beginnings, they carried the plagues and sickness that they were immune to.

When the explorers first arrived in “the new world” they were astounded by what they found. It was not as many contemporaneous Americans assume; a heavily wooded land with sparse communities located here and there in the mist of untouched natural beauty. It was not like that at all. For instance, a sailor named Giovanni da Verrazzano sailed up the East Coast and described it as “densely populated” and so “smoky with Indian bonfires” that you could smell them burning hundreds of miles out at sea. America was densely populated.

These were not the primitive savages as portrayed by Hollywood; no matter no noble, they portray them.

American Indians were Civilized

The Indians lived in wood homes, with good solid wood floors. They lived in both log and bark houses. Some even created stone buildings, many of which are still mysterious and have no discernable purpose.  They created huge networks of stonewalls. This was true not only in New England, but in California as well. They were (and are) all over North America. (Don’t buy into the simpleton narrative that they were built by early American colonists. The walls do not match the land ownership and titles at that time.) The native Indians had a developed and active commerce that involved trade all through the Americas. They used the various rivers to move about and trade.

I know that there are those who find common everyday answers to the stone ruins that existed prior to the European arrival. They say the Warwick tower was a windmill, and such. Has the reader actually been there and looked at it? Well, if it was a windmill, it must have been a really tiny one.

About this “mystery”…

Why set up a windmill when a nearby river (the most common place to grind grain) was nearby. Streams are far more reliable as a motive source. Winds are periodic. Thus, steams are better places to locate gristmill facilities. Especially as they are a “mature technology” and financial viable. The only reason that windmills are used in the Netherlands is that constant free flowing water under a head was not available. Think people. Think!

Remember, boys and girls, things must have a purpose and a reason for being made. Stones are heavy. It takes time, requires people and funds to make.

Then, if it is a business, it needs to have customers and records. This is from Colonial times, for Pete’s sake. If you want to prove that, a tower is grain-grinding windmill, then show who owned the land, who built the structure, the commerce that derived from it, the customers involved.

As is true throughout the Internet today, and in general culture (though that is an argument for another day), people posit the most ridiculous things. They get away with it, because “everyone knows” that is the most “logical” answer. That must be, you know, because native American Indians were “savages”.

Don’t you know…

All of this is certainly a far cry from what many Americans have been led to believe.

America was the Home of Many Nations

So when the first explorers from Europe entered North America they entered a very well established and ordered society. America was the home of many Indian nations. These nations were just as valid as any European nation. They were not primitive but large, with their own distinct cultures and societies. As the first explorers ventured forth, they brought many things with them. One of which was the plagues and sicknesses that previously ravished Europe.

The first explorers, without even trying, set in motion a biological apocalypse. It In the decades between Columbus’ discovery of America and the Mayflower landing at Plymouth Rock, the most devastating plague in human history raced up  and down the Eastern Coast of America. It was horrific. It devastated entire communities, Indian nations, and cultures.

So, by the time the first thirteen colonies were getting established, they moved about in the immediate aftermath of a full-blown biological apocalypse. Reports suggest that a mere two years before the pilgrims landed on Plymouth Rock, the plague wiped out about 96 percent of all the Indians in Massachusetts.

The Plague

There are very few reports of what it must have been like. Within a period of years, the deaths of significant numbers of the population must have been horrific. One can well imagine the shock and horror that it must have gripped the native inhabitants. As diseases such as smallpox covered everyone from head to toe with painful pustules, and the survivors fearful of contact with others who might be affected by this scourge, the environment must have been very tense. We can only guess the fearful respect that the local Indians would have for these new strangers that suddenly appeared out of nowhere.

Using your history books to understand what America was like in the 100 years after Columbus landed there is nearly impossible. This is a history that was never taught.  It’s like trying to understand what modern day Manhattan is like based on the post-apocalyptic scenes from “I Am Legend”.

Historians estimate that before the plague, America’s population was anywhere between 20 and 100 million (Europe’s at the time was 70 million). The plague would eventually sweep West, killing at least 90 percent of the native population. For comparison’s sake, the Black Plague killed off between 30 and 60 percent of Europe’s population.

History and Historians

There are always reasons why history is not reported accurately. Sometimes it’s because the knowledge is lost and filled in by later historians with their own personal biases. However, it is mostly because the government, which creates your “free education”, actually has an objective that they wish to enforce through a historical narrative.

In fact, many historians believe that the pre-colonization plague was the single most important event in American history. But, you know, it’s just a little more fun to believe that your ancestors won the land by being the superior culture. (History is always written to persuade and manipulate.)

Actually, the European settlers had a hard enough time defeating the remaining stragglers of the once huge Native American population. The survivors must have been some seriously hardy people. The closest thing that I can picture is a scene out of one of the “Mad Max” movies. You need to remember that the American Indians did not mess around. When the Vikings tried to explore North America they got their collective hides handed to them on a platter. Those few that managed to escape the fury of the natives, never returned back.

Within the devastated countryside lay many proud Indians. The lone survivors were something both amazing and frightening at the same time.

At the time of the colonization of North America and the thirteen colonies, the European settlers started to meet and interact with the native Indians. Those they met were a hardy bunch indeed, but terribly weak after their society collapsed. One such group that they met was a society of unique natives located in Northern Pennsylvania.

The Andaste Indians (Susquehannocks)

This group is a former American-Indian tribe located in North Central Pennsylvania.  (The French called them Andastes.) They no longer exist.  All members of the tribe were exterminated through armed conflict approximately 400 years ago.  As far as I know, they neither bred with the neighboring indigenous Indian tribes nor inter-married with any of the European colonists whom encroached onto their claimed territories.  They were an isolated community surrounded by other Indian communities that they traded with, but would not breed with.

The name Susquehannock is derived from the word Sasquesahanough. It is a descriptive term used by Captain John Smith’s Algonquian interpreter (in 1608) to mean “People at the Falls”, or alternatively as the “People of the Muddy River”.  (Which might be suggestive of the name “The people from Niagra Falls”.) Two other names that were used to refer to them were “Andaste” (particularly by the French) or “Minqua,” “Minques,” or “Minckas” by the Dutch. Additionally, there seems to be many other names used as well.

Indians in Pennsylvania

Most people haven’t a clue as to what American Indians are. When most people think of the Native Americans that lived in the Pennsylvania and New York regions they usually think of the Iroquois. However, the most fundamental truth is that the Iroquois didn’t live in this region. Well, that is, not until relatively recently.

Specifically, the Susquehannocks lived in the Pennsylvania region for around 15,000 years. That is one long stretch of time. Around 1400AD the Iroquois started to show up. It would take them a couple of centuries before they set up settlements. They started to live in the region, and battle with the Susquehannocks, about the same time that the Europeans started to arrive.

The entire Middle to Eastern Pennsylvania and the bulk of Southern New York area was fully controlled by the Susquehannocks. They were a huge, powerful and frightening people. To put this into perspective, the dangerous and fierce Iroquois Indians are said to fear only one people; the Susquehannocks. Many accounts say they were very warlike. Not one report says otherwise.

Records and evidences support the notion that they were much larger than average people were. We have historic records that show that they were responsible for winning many battles against the Iroquois and wiping out many smaller Native American groups along the Susquehanna. They were ruthless. They were the Khmer Rouge of their day.

This race of fierce and terrifying Indians had full control of the entire region and they controlled it with an “iron fist”. In fact, they didn’t give up control of their territory to the Iroquois until the late 1600’s. This was about the same time as the Americas were devastated by European transported illnesses. It is my guess that the Iroquois leveraged biological warefare to their advantage.

An Extraterrestrial Colony?

So what? There were just a bunch of Indian savages that eventually were subdued by the superiority of the European settlers. Right?

This particular article is an investigation into the REMOTE possibility that the Susquehannocks might be the remains of a colony of extraterrestrials. (Here we discuss the possibility, and why it could be. Not that it is. So there shouldn’t be any reason for “knee-Jerk” scientific statist responses.)

These individuals can be considered a typical embodiment of what an extraterrestrial humanoid colony would look and behave like. We have named them as “American Indians”, but they did not act, look like, or behave like any other Indians elsewhere in the Americas. They stood unique. This is both physically and figuratively.

From my own personal point of view, I hold this belief upon the known information that I have on them.  Consider the curious circumstances surrounding them.  They were [1] totally unique; they stand apart in culture, behavior and appearance in the region, and they had [2] various skills and abilities that were noteworthy in themselves. Their [3] physical appearance was different, and they maintained [4] technological skills that were different from that of the surrounding region.

Characteristics of the Andaste

Therefore, of all the examples that I provide herein, perhaps one of the most interesting was that of the characteristics of Andaste Indians.  I found them fascinating due to their physical appearance, plus the fact that I once visited a museum that displayed some of their skulls, which made an impression on me in my youth. I was 13 at the time, and travelling with my father.  He was doing engineering sales and was driving though the Pennsylvania countryside visiting factories and companies all over the territory.  I went along for the ride.  Sometimes he would pull over and we would visit an obscure museum or park, way off the “beaten track” in the hinterlands.

"Of many points of historic interest in our valley, perhaps none has attracted more attention or roused more speculation, from the earliest times to the present, than the mound called Spanish Hill.  This prominence is due not only to its unusual position (isolated from the hill ranges and regions), but also to its odd outline, the remains of fortifications on the top, and its present name."

- Louise Welles Murray -"History of Old Tioga Point and Early Athens -"1908.

Today, if you look up this subject on the Internet you will find very little information.  It is, alas the case with most studies of American Indian archeology.  For most Americans, the study of Americans is one of arrowheads, animal-hide teepees, and a hand-full of dirt mounds and stories of the Wild West.

This is unfortunate, because prior to the invasion of the Europeans in the 1500’s, North America was a thriving and heavily populated region divided into many nations, all of which were engaged in trade, wars and the various aspects of civilization.  Few actually lived in tents.  Most lived in large log houses, with wood floors, doors, furniture and stone fences.  They traveled the world on worn paths and by river travel using well-made boats.  They maintained a large and complex intercontinental trading arrangement and had mastered regional herbal medicines and localized agriculture.

In the Americas were numerous Indian nations, and within these nations were federations of tribes and sub-cultures.  Many had similarities but often they were peppered with unique cultural and societal customs and behaviors.  Yet, there were more than a few surprisingly isolated and biologically unique “Indians” who were part of these nations, but remained aloof from them.

These are the kinds of potential extraterrestrial colonies that I would like to investigate.

History is being Forgotten

At one time there was quite a bit of information about this “Indian Tribe” known as the Andaste.  But time, the lack of interest, and the lack of funding have resulted in the dissemination of many of the relics of this colony.  What remains is but a precious few items.  When one searches for tangible information on this race, one is confronted with an amazing slew of disbelief and incredulity.  It is typically discounted off hand by the ignorant. It’s a photoshop hoax they pontificate. It’s all nonsense, they argue. It just possible cannot be true.

For the record, this is neither a hoax, a fabrication based on a single specimen (Over 80+ skeletons have been found of this race.  They all confirm the size, facial structure and (yes) horns as described herein.), or a wild outlandish story.  The race did exist.  They had their capital in the Bradford area for a very long time; over fifteen centuries, and (I suggest that) they did originally settle in the area (possibly) from an extraterrestrial location.

“After very careful study of all accessible facts, I unhesitatingly commit myself to the conclusion that Spanish Hill is nothing more or less than this ancient fortified town, the stronghold of the Carantouans" 

 -John S. Clark

Their Nation

The Indians had nations. These were identical to the nations of Europe. They possessed armies, borders, society and a form of taxation on the various communities within the nation.

When the Europeans arrived in North America they found a well developed society composed of various indian nations and social-lingustic groups.
The Indian tribes, community, and social traditions of the Eastern early United States. Early Indian nations. (Image Source.)

The first historic records by Europeans indicate that the Susquehannocks were a nation made up of several villages. These communities ruled a large area that included parts of present day New York, and Eastern Pennsylvania. Researchers claim that the Susquehannocks were made up of 5 to 6 principal tribes. These tribes were spread out and divided amongst approximately 20 villages along the Susquehanna river.

As an amateur, I personally find it hard to understand what a “tribe” is relative to an “Indian nation”. I am sure, than an expert in these historical matters could explain much better than I ever could. As far as I have been able to make out, a “tribe” is a collection of similar people that occupies a regional area. To best understand this arrangement, the reader should consider a “tribe” as a state. Just like the original colonies were comprised of thirteen colonies that eventually became states, these tribes can be considered as individual states within the nation of Carantouan. Thus, the nation was divided into five or six states, or sub-regions.

The extent of this nation was unknown until a surveyor from the European colony at Auburn NY, by the name of General John S. Clark mapped out their communities. He determined that their most Northerly village was Carantouan (Spanish Hill). He determined that they were the people of the nation of Carantouan . The first European explorer to visit this site was Etienne Brule in 1615.

Physical Dimensions

“In 1822, while digging a cellar on the farm of General McKean, excavations came  to what was supposed to be "an impenetrable rock, but striking it with a crow  bar it gave forth a hollow sound."

They re-doubled their efforts, and at last  the stone broke and fell into a vault. And now, with visions of long-buried  treasure flitting through their minds, they carefully removed the earth from the arch, speculating the wile as to the probable extent of the "treasure-trove," and the amount of salvage the General would be likely to claim.

On removing the cap they found "not what they sought," but a sepulchre.

A careful examination of the sarcophagus reveled it flagged at the bottom, the sides artistically built up, and a flat stone laid on the top. The sarcophagus measured nine feet in length, two and a half feet in width, and ten feet deep.

In it was found a skeleton measuring as it lay, eight feet and two inches in length.

The teeth were sound, but the bones were soft and easily broken. There were ten of these sepulchres within the space of the cellar, one of which had a pine growing over it three feet in diameter.”

-Source: BRADFORD REPORTER, Towanda, Pennsylvania Aug 14, 1884 - article on Burlington Township.

The first thing that sets this tribe apart from the other tribes in the area was the physical appearance of the members in the community.  They did not act, look or behave like any of the Indians associated in that region.  Not only was their [1] physical appearance different, but [2] they dressed uniquely and acted differently, as [3] well as spoke a completely different language.

Tall Beings with Horns

These individuals were very tall humanoids with males uniformly standing over seven feet tall.  In fact, many males often reached heights of 8 to even 9 feet tall.  This is amazing when one considers that most local Indians and European explorers stood around 5 feet tall.  To put this into perspective, the reader must realize that these individuals were almost twice the size of the people surrounding them.

Not only that, but all the males had horns.  That is right; they had horns!  The horns were proportionally and genetically disposed to grow out of the upper forehead region in a set of two distinct and prominent horns.  These were not one-inch long stubs, but rather 5 to 9 inch long protuberances!  They were shaped like very long and thick goat horns!

Furthermore, these were not coincidentally abnormally tall and thin men either.  They were husky, fully proportioned men of significant girth and strength.  Records from that period described them as “impressive”, “awesome” and “breathtaking” in appearance.

As if that wasn’t enough, however, the fact that their skin color was a decidedly reddish color (Their skin was not a dark reddish-brown like the Iroquois, but a decidedly different color.) would make most anyone go into shock.  Imagine the sight of bright red giants with horns that were twice your size.  They were indeed a most noteworthy race.

Age

There are reports that suggest that the race was not a long-lived one.  Adolescence came early, and so did death.  By all accounts very few of the race lived past 40 years.  This is odd, as all humans have the potential to live up to their early 100’s.  This race was considered to be lucky if it lived to 50 years.

The susquehannock indians were very large and very tall. They were larger than any of the Europeans who came to North America.
Size comparison between a susquehannock male and a European man. Height comparison with the Andaste Indians.

At the time of the apparent height of the Andaste culture, the local Indians stood a mere 4.5 to 5 feet tall, and the Andaste Indians stood between seven and eight foot all.  This has been confirmed by the excavation of their remains and substantiated the local Indian legends.

Think about that for a minute.

That would be around at least two feet taller than any “normal” man at the time. And it would still be considered to be HUGE by our contemporaneous standards today. After all, the supremely tall Shaquille O’Neal is only 7 feet 1 inch, and weighs 315 lbs. These people were taller, and much heavier. Oh, and did I mention that the men all had horns?

Women and Children

It is curious that none of the females, or the children had horns.  While all were of gigantic size and proportions, the females were of smaller stature than the males.  And, of course the children began as a normal infant and grew into manhood through a normal growth development curve.  As such, we can imply that the adolescent males grew horns in their teens and the horns were in some way associated with the attainment of manhood.

Everyone, including the females had a distinctly strong reddish pigmentation to the skin.  Depictions of them show a hairless body with long flowing head hair, but we do not know if this was genetic or cultural.  None of the descriptions includes beards or other kinds of facial hair.

". . . 60 of those Susquehannocks came to us . . . such great and well-proportioned men are seldom seen, for they seemed like giants to the English . . .these are the strangest people of all those countries both in language and attire; for their language it may well beseeme their proportions, sounding from them as a voice in a vault.

Their attire is the skins of bears and wolves, some have cassocks made of bears heads and skins . . . The half sleeves coming to the elbows were the heads of bears and the arms through the open mouth . . . one had the head of a wolf hanging from a chain for a jewel . . . with a club suitable to his greatness sufficient to beat out ones brains.

Five of their chief wereowances came aboard us . . . (of) the greatest of them his hair, the one side was long and the other shorn close with a ridge over his crown like a cocks combed . . . The calf of whose leg was half a yard around and all the rest of his limbs so answerable to that proportion that he seemed the goodliest man we ever beheld!"

-Voyages of CAPTAIN JOHN SMITH (of Jamestown, Va.) during the Years 1607-9.

There is no doubt in my mind that after reading numerous accounts of these gigantic skeletons being found throughout this area, that this is not a mere “legend,” it is a fact. These Susquehannocks (Andaste) were GIANTS especially to the men of average height (4- 5.3 feet) of that time period, but also seemed “huge” to the people who dug them up over the past 100 years.  The Andaste’s AVERAGE height seems to be between 6 and 7 feet, with some exceptional human specimens being recorded to be about 8+ feet in height.

Susquehannock women were very large.
Susquehannock women were smaller than the men, but still significantly larger than the male European colonists. Susquehannock women were quite large but were normally proportioned.

Trade and Commerce

They were terribly warline, but they DID maintain trade relations with their neighbors. They were clever and known to be shrewd traders and businessmen.  Their single and lone colony occupied a fortified bluff or small (natural) hill (This hill was very unique as it had nearly vertical harsh cliff sides and a very flat “tabletop” apex.) with steep sides that overlooked the convergence of two rivers.  Both rivers, by the way, were major trade arteries for the local Indians in that region. (Rivers, prior to the expansion of the American colonies, were the major trade, communication and travel routes.  They were the highways of that time period.)

We do not know much about the trade agreements that they had with other races in the region because that information has been lost through the passage of time.  However, the local legends of the nearby Indian tribes suggest that this nation consisted of individuals who were extremely shrewd businessmen and would engage in commerce in a very strict and formal way.  They would always warn that those engaging in business dealings must first make sure that they knew exactly what kind of agreement that they were getting into.  As there would be “most terrible” consequences if the agreement was not followed exactly “to the letter”.

care is warented with dealign with the susquehannock indians.
You must be careful when dealing with the Andaste and susquehannock Indians. Be careful when dealing with the Andaste. (Image Source.)

The Only Known Colony

Instead of thinking of the Susquehannock “Indian Nation”, for our purposes let’s consider them an extraterrestrial colony. As such, their only known existent colony was in the United States.

The capital complex was located in what is now Bradford County located in north-central Pennsylvania near the New York state line.  This colony was located near the town of Sayre, which is at the intersection of two rivers; Chemung river and the Susquehanna river.  Because of that, they are sometimes referred to as the “Sayre Giants”.  This colony was located on a lone hill with steep sides and a very flat top that overlooked the river.

Today, Sayre is a pretty small town located in the Pennsylvania countryside.

Over time, 15,000 years to be frank, they set up colonies “down river”. These colonies were similar to the main Bradford site. These people were all giants. However the  presence of horns on top of the heads apparently are limited to the Bradford area. Culturally they all shared a common culture.

The susquehannock males all had horns on the top of their heads.
A skull of a male Andaste susquehannock unearthed in Bradford, Pennsylvania.

Andaste skull unearthed in Bradford Pennsylvania. (Image source.)

The Andaste Indian males all had horns, while the children and the women did not.  The horns started to develop during adolescence in young boys when they began to reach maturity. The horns were all uniform and grew out of the upper forehead approximately at the hairline.

Proportionally the horn length varied from individual to individual but was typically at least 6 inches long. Horn diameter also varied considerably with diameters at the base of the horns varying from one to two and a half inches in diameter.  Excavated remains suggest that the horns would sometimes be damaged and would break off, suggestive of combat of some type. (Maybe. Maybe…)

A Fortified Community

This “Indian Tribe” occupied a fortified hill strategically placed nearby, which was once, a major intersection of Indian trade routes.  They had no other villages or settlements.  There were no other similarly sized or culturally similar races nearby.  They were unique and occupied a lone fortified hill.

The fortification; “Onnontioga” (Tioga Point) is located where the Susquehanna River and the Chemung river join. The hill was renamed “Spanish Hill” by the European settlers to the region.  The name referred to the shape and style of the fortifications and ramparts at the hill.  They were decidedly different than any of the other local Indian ramparts.  These were more reminiscent in appearance to those associated with known Spanish fortifications. Early explorers to that region remarked how impressive and advanced the fortifications were.

This is a significant point. The  Onnontioga fortifications were substantially more advanced, technologically engineered, and superior to locally manufactured Indian fortifications; some could argue that it was equal to the superiority of Spanish fortifications of the time.

Other Colonies

Were there other colonies of these people elsewhere in Pennsylvania?  No.  Apparently they were a unique and isolated group.  That stands apart as significant, and is worthy of discussion.

There are legends of these creatures all over the globe.  Much of the folklore about the red devil with horns, and the signing of contracts (could possibly) indirectly originate from these people.  When one comes across the legend of a huge people with horned skulls, red skin and who were very shrewd in business, one must consider the possibility of interaction with this race.

If true, then it has become obvious that they have tried to set up other colonies on the earth over the last 10,000 years, with the colony at Sayre being the longest lasting one.  But none of their other colonies ever seemed to stabilize.  Eventually they all died out, or were assimilated with the indigenous peoples.  Apparently, if true, they had established colonies in other places as well to include Western Russia, and of course the Americas.

There are historical records that the investigator needs to research in order to know the true story of the susquehannock people.
Vintage newspaper article describing the discovery of Indian bones of the susquehannocks who used to live in the area. Vintage Newspaper article.

Weapons

There is indisputable evidence that the Sayre race that lived here were not simply tall, horned, red skinned humanoids.  They had access to firearms as well!  One must keep in mind that these reports come from the year 1500.  At that time the export of gunpowder from China had just then reached Europe.  Its use was just beginning to displace that of the crossbow and long sword.  The Europeans were just getting their first exposure to the precursors of modern firearms, so one must truly imagine their surprise when they encountered enormous red horned giants with rifles!

"There is, however, undisputed evidence from the earliest settlers (Shepards, Hannas, and others) that when they came the Indians remaining in this locality… …stood in awe of the hill, and avoided ascending it"

"Early in the last century, Alpheus Harris settled at the foot of the hill. An old Indian was a frequent visitor, but when asked to ascend the hill he always refused, saying a Great Spirit lived there who would kill Indians.  That he spoke with a thunderous voice and made holes through Indians bodies. This suggests muskets or cannons"

- Louise Welles Murray 1908:62, 64

We also have reports that some of their weapons were quite large. These larger weapons were considered to be cannons (!) by the European settlers to the region.

"Lalemant now describes the warfare which had continued between Canadian and other tribes and the Iroquois.

The latter attack the Andastes, far down the Susquehanna, but find that the villages of this tribe are defended with European cannon; and, moreover, the Andastes are a match for them in cunning — seizing twenty-five Iroquois spies, and burning them to death in the sight of their own army.

Not only do the invaders meet disaster, but their own villages are ravaged by smallpox, and their fields remain half tilled. Thus menaced, the Iroquois plan to form an alliance with the French, hoping that the latter may help them against their enemies; but they abandon this scheme, upon hearing that the king of France is about to send many soldiers to Canada, to crush the enemies of the colonists. Meanwhile, some souls among them are saved; for certain captive Frenchmen baptize over three hundred children, and some adults who are dangerously ill."

-The Jesuit Relations and Allied Documents Volume 48

The Colony Layout

"The fortifications of all this family of tribes were, like their dwellings, in essential points alike.

[1] A situation was chosen favorable to defence, the bank of a lake, the crown of a difficult hill, or a high point of land in the fork of confluent rivers.

[2] A ditch, several feet deep, was dug around the village, and the earth thrown up on the inside.

[3] Trees were then felled by an alternate process of burning and hacking the burnt part with stone hatchets, and by similar means were cut into lengths to form palisades. These were planted on the embankment, in one, two, three, or four concentric rows, those of each row inclining towards those of the other rows until they intersected.

[4] The whole was lined within, to the height of a man, with heavy sheets of bark; and at the top, where the palisades crossed, was a gallery of timber for the defenders, together with wooden gutters, by which streams of water could be poured down on fires kindled by the enemy.

[5] Magazines of stones, and rude ladders for mounting the rampart, completed the provision for defence.

The forts of the Iroquois were stronger and more elaborate than those of the Hurons; and to this day large districts in New York are marked with frequent remains of their ditches and embankments."

-Francis Parkman, "The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century". Edited for readability with the addition of numbered points.

The tribe lived within a Fortified Village or Citadel.

Inside the walled complex was a geometric array of housings and facilities.  It was surrounded by reinforced ramparts of wood and dirt ditches.  The various houses were strategically spaced apart and away from the ramparts.  All the houses were of bound live wood. (Tolkien elf style.) The interiors were of log construction with multi-tiered wooden floors.  Though the building system was different than contemporaneous European methods, it was not inferior. They used bark over live saplings instead of cut and processed logs. Which is much like how traditional homes are constructed in Japan and throughout Europe. It was a superior system for as the settlement aged, the houses became older and stronger. As the early saplings grew into large mature trees.

The houses were aligned in an orderly geometric arrangement suggestive of a military garrison. A comparison of ancient Viking settlements and their longhouses show a distinct similarity. (I wonder if this was a characteristic of warlike peoples…)

Because of its size, shape, and location, Spanish Hill has been believed to be an excellent location for a defensive stand for an attack. Thus, in defense of my proposed narrative, would naturally have been used by early civilizations for mere survival.  It also has a view of many miles in each direction around it because it stands alone on the flat land surrounding it. For this reason, many believe that Spanish Hill was either a Susquehannock village site or site of refuge during attacks during at least the 1500’s and 1600’s. Evidences of campfires, and village remains have been located on the hill to include “hardened fortifications” which also support this school of thought.

There is no question that there were stockades built around the top of this hill (fortifications) around the 1600’s, and a moat or ditch was built around the bottom.  It is known that some Indian villages had two or three levels of stockades built around them, and this hill may have had more than one as well.  I have also been told by several historians that were involved in “excavation digs” on the hill that there was a covered stockade area going vertically down the hill on the west side to a natural spring that was about 1/2 down the side from the top.  This meant that the entire fort had access to clear and fresh spring water, and did not depend on the nearby rivers for drinking water at all.

Living Arrangements

What we know of how they lived is through documented records and journals.

"They covered a space of from one to ten acres, the dwellings clustering together with little or no pretension to order. In general, these singular structures were about thirty or thirty-five feet in length, breadth, and height; but many were much larger, and a few were of prodigious length.

In some of the villages there were dwellings two hundred and forty feet long, though in breadth and height they did not much exceed the others.

- Brebeuf, Relation des Hurons, 1635, 31.

In comparison, their homes were quite large. They were far larger than any homes made by the European settlers to the region. They were larger than the impressive public and religious structures in Europe at the time.

“Champlain says that he saw them, in 1615, more than thirty fathoms long; while Vanderdonck reports the length, from actual measurement, of an Iroquois house, at a hundred and eighty yards, or five hundred and forty feet!”

To put this in perspective, an American football field is 360 feet long (120 yards long). Thus, an actual measurement of an existing Andaste house was much longer than a football field. This is an enormous size, and was most especially impressive in that it was constructed by using live trees interlaced with each other and covered in an array of bark.

“In shape they were much like an arbor overarching a garden-walk. Their frame was of tall and strong saplings, planted in a double row to form the two sides of the house, bent till they met, and lashed together at the top. To these other poles were bound transversely, and the whole was covered with large sheets of the bark of the oak, elm, spruce, or white cedar, overlapping like the shingles of a roof, upon which, for their better security, split poles were made fast with cords of linden bark. At the crown of the arch, along the entire length of the house, an opening a foot wide was left for the admission of light and the escape of smoke.

At each end was a close porch of similar construction; and here were stowed casks of bark, filled with smoked fish, Indian corn, and other stores not liable to injury from frost.

Within, on both sides, were wide scaffolds, four feet from the floor, and extending the entire length of the house, like the seats of a colossal omnibus.”

- Francis Parkman, "The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century"

This differs from other native American Indians. Often, especially among the Iroquois, the internal arrangement was quite different. The scaffolds or platforms were raised only a foot from the earthen floor, and were only twelve or thirteen feet long, with intervening spaces, where the occupants stored their family provisions and other articles. Typically, five or six feet above were yet another platform, often occupied by children.

One pair of platforms sufficed for each family, and here during summer they slept pell-mell, in the clothes they wore by day, and without pillows. But the Susquehannocks were different.

(The platforms) “These were formed of thick sheets of bark, supported by posts and transverse poles, and covered with mats and skins. Here, in summer, was the sleeping place of the inmates, and the space beneath served for  storage of their firewood.

The fires were on the ground, in a line down the middle of the house.

Each fire sufficed for two families, who, in winter, slept closely packed around them.

Above, just under the vaulted roof, were a great number of poles, like the perches of a hen-roost, and here were suspended weapons, clothing, skins, and ornaments.

Here, too, in harvest time, the squaws hung the ears of unshelled corn, till the rude abode, through all its length, seemed decked with a golden tapestry. In general, however, its only lining was a thick coating of soot from the smoke of fires with neither draught, chimney, nor window.

So pungent was the smoke, that it produced inflammation of the eyes, attended in old age with frequent blindness. Another annoyance was the fleas; and a third, the unbridled and unruly children. Privacy there was none. The house was one chamber, sometimes lodging more than twenty families."

-Francis Parkman, "The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century"

Social Structure

The Susquehannocks seemed to follow, a more or less conventional Native American Indian social structure, as far as I can tell. Yet, the reader must be made aware, the reports on this are few and far between. They naturally reflect the biases of the reporter of that time.

"In the organization of the savage communities of the continent, one feature, more or less conspicuous, continually appears.

Each nation or tribe to adopt the names by which these communities are usually known is subdivided into several clans. These clans are not locally separate, but are mingled throughout the nation. All the members of each clan are, or are assumed to be, intimately joined in consanguinity.

Hence it is held an abomination for two persons of the same clan to intermarry; and hence, again, it follows that every family must contain members of at least two clans.

Each clan has its name, as the clan of the Hawk, of the Wolf, or of the Tortoise; and each has for its emblem  the figure of the beast, bird, reptile, plant, or other object, from which its name is derived.

This emblem, called totem by the Algonquins, is often tattooed on the clansman's body, or rudely painted over the entrance of his lodge.

The child belongs, in most cases, to the clan, not of the father, but of the mother. In other words, descent, not of the totem alone, but of all rank, titles, and possessions, is through the female.

The son of a chief can never be a chief by hereditary title, though he may become so by force of personal influence or achievement. Neither can he inherit from his father so much as a tobacco-pipe. All possessions alike pass of right to the brothers of the chief, or to the sons of his sisters, since these are all sprung from a common mother.

This rule of descent was noticed by Champlain among the Hurons in 1615. That excellent observer refers it to an origin which is doubtless its true one. The child may not be the son of his reputed father, but must be the son of his mother, a consideration of more than ordinary force in an Indian community."

-Francis Parkman, "The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century"

Opinions of the European Settlers to the area

The earliest “locals” referred to the remains of fortifications as “Spanish Ramparts” and it is said that the Indians in this area would not go up on to the hill because there was something that made a thunderous noise and made holes in those that dared to climb the hill.

The earliest description known is that of Duke Rochefoucault de Liancourt, a French Traveler in 1795, who, while enroute to the tow of Niagara, saw the hill and thus wrote of it:

"Near the confines of Pennsylvania a mountain rises from the bank of the river Tioga (Chemung) in the shape of a sugar loaf upon which are seen the remains of some entrenchments. These the inhabitants call the Spanish Ramparts, but I rather judge them to have been thrown up against the Indians in the time of M. de Nonville. One perpendicular breastwork is yet remaining which, though covered with grass and bushes, plainly indicates that a parapet and a ditch have been constructed here."

-La Rochefoucald-Liancourt 1795:76-7

The End of the Colony

The colony eventually died out in sometime in the mid 1750’s.  (Mr.La Rochefoucald-Liancourt reported that ruins, devoid of inhabitants, were still visible standing on top of the hill in 1795.) It exactly coincided with the encroachment of European settlers to the region.  Obviously, many of the inhabitants were killed by the European settlers, either directly or through transmitted diseases.  As are all records from that time, secretive combative activities were never recorded.  So no one knows their true fate.  What we do know is that the colony completely died at exactly the same time as the European settlers moved into the region.  One must logically assume that the community died out as a direct consequence of the European advancement into that area.

Why consider them Extraterrestrial?

The point of this discourse is to consider them to be an expert example of what a true and real extraterrestrial colony would look like.

Whether they actually are, however, is speculative.  I, myself, consider it to be speculative, and the reader should as well.  We must not underestimate the creativity and uniqueness of diverse peoples and humans of various backgrounds.  Just because they are different does not automatically imply that they are extraterrestrially derived.  But, at the same token, they indeed could be.

Why even bother with this kind of consideration?

For this work, I wish to introduce the possibility that they were but an extraterrestrial colony of expats.  Of which their home world is unknown.  Indeed, if true; it is not known where they came from.  Their genetic makeup was odd and unusual.  Thus, they could have entirely been members of an extraterrestrial colony that was established on the Earth in numerous locations globally.

Or not.

After all, simply because they look different than “normal” humans do not make them extraterrestrial.  There are many regional variations of humans.  Look at the comparative differences from that of an inhabitant of Zambia to one of Norway.  But nowhere is the genetic variances so pronounced, and so isolated.  That in itself should signify that there is something significantly odd about them.  This oddness should be considered and investigated.

The Reasoning

Consider this reasoning.  Any extraterrestrial colony to a planet that hosts “native” humanoid bipedal entities would stand out as different.  There would be a number of obvious tell-tale signs and indicators of this.

For instance, they would be [1] physically different from the local races.  Their size might be different, their skin color or hair color might be different.  [2] They might speak a different language or have a different set of sounds that they would make.  [3] They might possess technologies or do things using different techniques than those in the surrounding regions.  [4] They might create fortifications and structures designed to protect them from others because they would be so different.  [5] Finally, they might interact with the surrounding local natives in ways suggestive of trade, or collaborative ventures.

All of these points are obvious regarding the Andaste Indian race.  So, while they are classified as the Susquehannocks (Andaste) Indian tribe associated with the Indian nation of Carantouan, I suggest that they could simply be an extraterrestrial colony allied with them.

It is a certainly interesting proposition.

I do not have any proof of this belief.  But everything that I have read seems to be indicative of this.  Therefore, I suggest that the reader consider the possibility that these people might actually be the remains of an extraterrestrial colony.  I suggest the reader do this because this is exactly what a true and real extraterrestrial colony would look like.

Where are the Spaceships, then?

There are quite a few misconceptions regarding an extraterrestrial colony.  One must consider the realistic expectations of any colonist whom comes to earth.  Any colony on the earth would NOT have futuristic spaceships and equipment.  It would not.  They would equip themselves with renewable and replaceable resources in every case.  They would not rely on irreplaceable manufactured devices that would become useless when faulty.  Instead it would depend on the local materials and flora and fauna to sustain itself.  After all, getting spare parts for your contrivances would be impossibility.  Space travel, except for the most advanced extraterrestrial races is not something that is taken lightly.  It requires assets, investments in time and labor, and a steady commitment over decades.

The residents would maintain their culture and a small select collection of mechanical contrivances, but they would not decidedly cart with them high-tech gadgetry.  This is because those very items would be useless when damaged.  In fact, this is one of those truisms that many have forgotten.  When a race creates an expat colony in another planet, they effectively isolate themselves from all sorts of support structures.  They must rely on local vegetation, and wildlife to exist.  (Obviously, if the equipment to travel large distances is difficult, the more likely the colony is to rely on native resources.)  They would adopt native modes and forms of transport, and appear in many ways to live just like the American Indians did; in complete harmony with the surrounding land.

Their End

The last thing that we know about them is how they met their demise. In the middle 1700’s (around 1750) the last remaining 20 Susquehannocks were living in peace in Conestoga, PA. They had relocated to a smaller settlement after being devastated by European sickness, and wars with the Iroquois Indians and Europeans. There they lived peacefully and apart. In 1763, the entire community was slaughtered by the Paxton Boys in revenge for Indian raids that these specific people had nothing to do with.

Today

With the spread of disinformation on the Internet, it is a wonder that anyone can find anything of value today.  The investigator might end up finding sites that promote incredulity, and those that might end up in investigative “dead ends”.  But to truly search and research these mysteries one need simply visit the local sites in question.  Just go there and see for yourself.

Today, one can see the skulls, relics and history of this race at the Tioga Point Museum in Athens, PA.  They are open from 10 – 1pm on Saturdays, and 1-8 on Tuesdays and Thursdays (570-888-7225.)  There are some amazing things there and it is indeed worth a visit.

The museum was founded in 1895, by historian Louise Welles Murray 1854 – 1931. To celebrate the formal opening, she helped open the sepulcher that was about 3 feet by 5 feet in diameter – covered with 2 Devonian fossils that made up the tomb for a man who was most likely an Andaste chief, and “six feet or more in height.”

In 1908, historian Louise Welles Murray wrote a book called “Old Tioga Point”.  It was published with an extensive amount of information about the Andaste Indians and Spanish Hill. Copies of this book are for sale still at the Tioga Point Museum.  Spanish Hill is also a state recognized Indian site in Bradford County with the ID number – 36BR27.

Other Links and Articles

There are other links and articles regarding this most interesting of subjects. I would suggest that the interested reader visit spanishhill.com which is where most of the following links originated from. The author of this site Deb Twigg is an expert in all matters regarding this group of Indians. (Although she might be aghast that I would consider them as possible extraterrestrial immigrants.) This site is the first stop and the most important source of information on this subject.

Take Aways

  • If an extraterrestrial species were to set up a colony on earth they would appear unique.
  • The Andaste Indians at Tioga Point were a community of “Indians” that were unique.
  • These people were giants, had red skin, long substantive horns and possessed firearms.
  • The women were also large.
  • They disappeared at the same time that European settlers arrived.
  • All that is left of their culture is a museum in Bradford County, Pennsylvania.

FAQ

Q: Where are the extraterrestrials?
A: They lie hidden from most humans. As far as most humans are concerned, they do not exist.

Q: How many extraterrestrials are there?
A: We do not know. Conventional understanding is that there are no extraterrestrials at all. Those who have reported that they have met extraterrestrials tend to claim that there are many extraterrestrials all over the universe.

Q: Why would extraterrestrials want to come to Pennsylvania?
A: They would settle in an area or colony that would be comfortable for them and that would meet the needs of their society. Besides, Pennsylvania has great apples. The corn in Pennsylvania is fantastic. The people are wonderful, and the women are very attractive. What is not to love?

Q: What did the Andaste Indians look like?
A: They looked like huge giants with bright red skin, had long horns on the top of their heads and carried firearms.

MAJestic Related Posts – Training

These are posts and articles that revolve around how I was recruited for MAJestic and my training. Also discussed is the nature of secret programs. I really do not know why the organization was kept so secret. It really wasn’t because of any kind of military concern, and the technologies were way too involved for any kind of information transfer. The only conclusion that I can come to is that we were obligated to maintain secrecy at the behalf of our extraterrestrial benefactors.

How to tell...

How to tell -2

Top Secrets

Sales Pitch

Feducial Training

Implantation

Probe Calibration - 1

Probe Calibration - 2

Leaving the USA

MAJestic Related Posts – Our Universe

These particular posts are concerned about the universe that we are all part of. Being entangled as I was, and involved in the crazy things that I was, I was given some insight. This insight wasn’t anything super special. Rather it offered me perception along with advantage. Here, I try to impart some of that knowledge through discussion.

Enjoy.

Secrets of the universe
Alpha Centauri
Our Galaxy the Milky Way
Sirius solar system
Alpha Centauri
The fuselage embedded within the rocks of Victoria Falls.
The Hammer inside the rock.
The Hollow Moon
The Mystery of the Lapulapu Ridge.
The Mystery of the Baltic UFO.
Mystery of the bronze bell.
Mystery of the oil lamp found inside a block of coal.
Did extraterrestrials set up a colony in Pennsylvania?
The Oxia Palus Facility
Brown Dwarfs
Apollo Space Exploration
CARET
The Nature of the Universe
Type-1 Grey Extraterrestrial
The mysterious flying contraptions.

MAJestic Related Posts – World-Line Travel

These posts are related to “reality slides”. Other more common terms are “world-line travel”, or the MWI. What people fail to grasp is that when a person has the ability to slide into a different reality (pass into a different world-line), they are able to “touch” Heaven to some extent. Here are posts that  cover this topic.

Cat Heaven
MWI
Things I miss
How MWI allows world-line travel.
An Observed World-Line switch.
Vehicular world-line travel
Soul is not consciousness.

John Titor Related Posts

Another person, collectively known by the identity of “John Titor” claimed to utilize world-line (MWI egress) travel to collect artifacts from the past. He is an interesting subject to discuss. Here we have multiple posts in this regard.

They are;

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

A Comparison between American and Chinese Playgrounds

Chinese playgrounds are different from American playgrounds. They are fundamentally different. In China the playgrounds are designed to instruct while children engage in play. In America playgrounds are designed to be safe at all costs. Here we take a look at the two differences in intent.

  • USA = Safe at all costs.
  • China = Designed to teach, instruct while having fun.

When you live in another country, you cannot help but make comparisons from your “home” country and your new home. Some of the comparisons are sad, while others are hilariously funny. While some just cause you to simply shake your head. I personally think that when you step out of your home country and experience another reality, you can more clearly see the benefits and the faults of where you have come from.

These comparisons can be stark and astounding.

There are many things that we can compare. In this article, I would like to compare playgrounds. Because, after all, all children learn through play. Play is the “work” of children. A “playground” is an environment, set up by the community to help the children play. It is designed, or at least was initially set up, for “free range” unaccompanied play.

Let’s take a look at playgrounds…

Children Need to Play

The great Fred Rogers once made a statement that play is the work of children. He was absolutely correct. Children learn things rapidly when they are interested. The key to holding that interest is to involve play. Often that is some kind of role-play.

Boys enjoy construction, fabrication, organization, animals, military, hunting, searching, hiding, running, jumping, catching, hitting, practical jokes, and individual play. Girls might also enjoy these things, but they do seemingly have interests in home organization, cooking, fashion, childcare, animals, and group play.

This observation is true no matter what country where you live. You will find young girls playing with dolls in the Sudan, China, Argentina, and the United States. You will find boys playing sports, and military games all over the world. You know, they all also seem to have a fascination with heavy earth-movers and building things.

“This may seem old-fashioned, but there are skills to be learned when kids aren’t told what to do,” said Dr. Michael Yogman, a Harvard Medical School pediatrician who led the drafting of the call to arms. Whether it’s rough-and-tumble physical play, outdoor play or social or pretend play, kids derive important lessons from the chance to make things up as they go, he said.

The advice, issued Monday by the American Academy of Pediatrics, may come as a shock to some parents. After spending years fretting over which toys to buy, which apps to download and which skill-building programs to send their kids to after school, letting them simply play — or better yet, playing with them — could seem like a step backward.

The pediatricians insist that it’s not. The academy’s guidance does not include specific recommendations for the dosing of play. Instead, it asks doctors to advise parents before their babies turn 2 that play is essential to healthy development. It also advocates for the restoration of play in schools.

“Play is not frivolous,” the academy’s report declares. It nurtures children’s ingenuity, cooperation and problem-solving skills — all of which are critical for a 21st-century workforce. It lays the neural groundwork that helps us “pursue goals and ignore distractions.”

When parents engage in play with their children, it deepens relationships and builds a bulwark against the toxic effects of all kinds of stress, including poverty, the academy says.

-Doctors Orders

Play is based on Interest

Without interest, the child will soon be distracted and go off elsewhere. The key to early learning is interest. It is important.

If left alone, a child will find things to play with. They always do. Their interests will generally depend on their gender. (Uh oh! Sound the alarm! politically incorrect statement here!)

That means one of two genders for all of you confused millennial’s out there. Here’s a quick review for those who are confused. It should have been taught to you in elementary school, that is if you were too stupid to figure it out for yourself.

  • Boys have a penis.
  • Girls have a vagina.
  • Humans with a mixture of both are known as a Hermaphrodite.
  • Boys with a penis that identify themselves with female interests are known as Homosexuals.
  • Girls with a vagina that identify themselves with male interests are known as Lesbians.
  • Anything outside of these five conditions is very, very rare. They are what is known as an “Ambiguous Gender”, and are typically treated as someone with a medical disorder.

Now, as far as children goes, there are many exceptions to gender roles.

Some boys like to play house. Some girls like to fight and play war. Many like to do both. The point is that children like to play. If left alone, they will start playing with things in regards to their interests.

Just like you. In fact, exactly like you.

If a boy wants a book on space, don’t force him to rent a book out of the library on butterflies. (Here’s a shout out to the poor kid in Melbourne, Florida who’s mother wouldn’t let him read about rocket ships, and gave him a book on butterflies instead. True story, this.) If a girl wants to read about the latest fashion, don’t make her read about hunting deer.

This should be obvious stuff. A measure of how low our culture has sunk is evident in that I need to explain this most basic premise out.

I remember a post written by a young millennial (on Tumblr) who was upset at her sister. Apparently, her older sister was raising her girls in a more or less traditional manner. She gave them dolls, let them play house and have “tea parties” and dressed them up cute. This upset her younger sister; the young millennial.

When she was asked to “babysit” the girls, while her sister was out, she sprang into action. This was her opportunity. Or, so she thought. So in order to “reverse the damage of gender indoctrination” she bought some toy trucks for the girls. Then she took away the dolls that the girls were playing with. Then after giving the toys to the girls, she let the girls play alone in their room.

An hour later, she went up to check on the girls. She found them there in their room having the time of their lives. They had put the toy trucks to bed (in doll beds) and were reading bedtime stories to them…

The Purpose of an American Playground

Remember when playgrounds were fun? Sure, there was a pretty good chance you’d be scalded by a hot metal slide, or walk away with tetanus, but that’s what memories are made of.

The ground wasn’t coated with soft recycled rubber or sand as most are today – they were asphalt. Remember being hurled from a spinning merry-go-round, then skidding across the gravel at full speed? Good times.

I remember my school playground had a metal ladder “wall” that I swear went up three stories – it didn’t connect to a slide or anything. It was literally a ladder to the sky. I remember fully believing the oxygen was thinner at the top. One false move and I’d have been a flesh colored stain on the asphalt.

We are making playgrounds so safe that they actually stunt our kids’ development. So, while blood was spilt and concussions were dealt on the playgrounds of the 1970s, we were at least in a developmentally rich environment – and we had the bruises and scabs to prove it.

-8 Reasons Children of the 1970s Should All Be Dead

A playground is an area set aside for “free range” unsupervised play. At least that was the initial intention. Today, there are all kinds of playgrounds. Some are supervised, and some are not. Many have benches for adults to sit on and watch the children (at least in the United States they do). China always has places to sit down, as it is usually the grandparents who end up watching the children.

Playgrounds in the past had many elements no longer present. (Well, as far as American playgrounds, that is.) They had “monkey bars” (a construction of bars that children can climb on), “seesaw’s” (a device to move up and down with a partner), “merry-go-rounds” (a large spinning disk that children can push and experience centrifugal forces with), and “slides” (a large structure that a child can slide down on).

The children of the 1960s loved to climb and scramble upon playground monkey bars. This not aonly permitted them to indulge in pla, but excerised their muscles and enabled them to experience life with their peers.
Children playing on Monkey bars during the 1960s. They really loved climbing and scrambling on the bars. It was a source of play and amusement.

Playing on Monkeybars (Image Source.)

The elements each provided an element of play. In making the playgrounds safer, these “dangerous” elements were removed, and no adequate replacements were substituted. In America today we have playgrounds without these critical elements. They are boring and bland.

They are sterile.

History of American Playgrounds

In the old days (about 100 years ago around the time of the Great Depression), every community seemingly had a playground. These playgrounds consisted of “monkey bars”, swing sets, seesaws, and other simple outdoor childhood entertainments. Typically, they had sand at the bottom of the metal (and often concrete) structures to mitigate any cuts, scrapes or broken bones. There was sand at the bottom of the monkey bars, sand at the bottom and end of the slides, and sand below the swing sets.

1900 style American playground
Old American playground around 1900. Only the strong survived recess, obviously.

Photo from Colorbot. Original photo from大昔の子供の遊び場がやばい.

You can read about the history of playgrounds elsewhere. There are some great articles about how playgrounds got started in the city of Boston. As well as how they got started in Chicago , San Francisco and New York City.

Playgrounds become quite popular as a means to keep children off the roads and out of trouble. The advantages of play were obvious, but I am certain, given secondary importance. Back in the day, children were allowed to go out and explore and play. The idea was to create places to keep the children off the streets. Which ended up benefiting everyone. As such, the development of playgrounds continued apace. This continued into my parents’ generation and mine as well. However, over time, the playground equipment became more standardized and mass-produced.

My mother routinely left me alone in the car at a young age while she ran errands. Today, this will literally get you arrested. You see, once upon a time it was okay to leave your kids for long periods without supervision (remember the so-called “latch-key kids” of the 70s?), or let them free roam without constant surveillance. Today, parents won’t let their kids go out to get the mail alone, and any fun with friends has to be scheduled, closely monitored “play dates”.

On summer break or weekends in the 1970s, parents kicked their kids out the front door and didn’t let them back in until the sun went down. “Go play,” were their only words, and you were left to your own devices for hours upon hours. Neighborhoods looked like Lord of the Flies.

-8 Reasons Children of the 1970s Should All Be Dead

American playground around 1960. Note the happy children, swingsets and slides.

This is an American playground in the middle 1960’s. Note the colorful slides, swing sets, and happy children.American playground in the 1960s with slides and swing-sets. (Image Source.)

Though there were efforts that were still made to make them interesting. In Ridgecrest, California, the playground was designed to look like spaceships and a place of adventure. That was the theme in the nearby China Lake military research center. In Hattiesburg, Mississippi, there was a playground that looked like a pirate’s ship. The children could climb up high to the “crow’s nest”. These were not isolated instances. Many communities “dressed up” their playgrounds around themes.

This lasted up until the mid-1980’s.

By the time the 1980’s rolled around, there were numerous small community organizations formed to make playgrounds “safer”, and “better”. These “improvements” resulted in making the playgrounds nice, safe, and very boring. The idea was safety at all costs. Sometimes there was a secondary attention given to exercise, but in all cases there was zero attention to the idea of imaginative play.

For instance, slides became lower. Instead of two stories high (16 feet) during my parents’ generation, and one story high (8 feet) in my generation, they now became four feet high (4 feet) or eliminated altogether. The images on a Google Image Search now apparently show an average of two foot high slides. (16 feet to 2 feet!) “Monkey Bars” became smaller and lower to the ground, if not eliminated completely. Even seesaws and swings became smaller. These “improvements” were welcomed by all the (over) protective parents in their respective communities.

There was only one problem.

The structures were boring and did not challenge the children. They were instead suitable for mentally retarded and handicapped children, infants, and overweight mothers.

My gosh! Children should be challenged while in a safe environment, not coddled until they become an adult.

“…today’s default playground (is the) “the McDonald’s model”: an unchallenging, standardized unit of tunnels, slides, and decks.

“Things like taking risks, learning to fail, learning to master something, to plan ahead, to develop deep friendships, none of those could take place on most playgrounds today.”

- Susan Solomon in “The Science of Play: How to Build Playgrounds that Enhance Children’s Development” as quoted by Ruth Graham, 28MAR14, in the Boston Globe.

Many people in the United States resent what has happened to playgrounds. They yearn for a “simpler time” when children could just go out, run, sweat, climb, play games, and just be a kid. All without breaking some law, or rule.

Most Americans think that just because this trend of playground safety has manifested in the United States that it has manifested everywhere else. (Afterall, the United States is the cultural “leader” of the world…don’t you know.) At least that is the impression that Ruth Graham has. She made the statement that playgrounds in the United States are the same as those in Thailand. But she is quite wrong.

Playgrounds in other nations are NOT sterile and designed for retarded toddlers. They are robust and designed for active children to play in.

All animals like to play, like dogs and cats do.
All animals like to play. Dogs and cats like to play just like children do.

All children, kittens and puppies like to play. (GIF Image source.) Here’s a dog for you cat-haters out there…

Play is important to all creatures, big and small.
Dogs and cats like to play. In fact, everyone likes to play. When we are young we enjoyed ourselves and pretended what it would be like when we grew up. Play is an important part of learning and our personal development.

I strongly believe that children, like cats and puppies, should be encouraged to climb, fight, sing, dance, and do other tasks that involve a moderate level of risk. Playgrounds, like everything else, should be permitted to have some moderate level of risk. It is better to climb in a park near your house than on a mountainside hours from a nearby hospital. If you catch my drift.

“When the first public playground guidelines from the Consumer Product Safety Commission arrived in the early 1980s, the classic playground’s fate was sealed.

By the 1990s, the height and size of new equipment shrank, climbing opportunities disappeared, and guardrails were installed everywhere imaginable. “There’s not as much that’s challenging,” said Colorado photographer Brenda Biondo, whose photographs of classic American playgrounds form the basis of a nostalgic forthcoming book titled “Once Upon a Playground.”

“They’re taking out swings in a lot of places, which is really sad.” Biondo’s book documents now-vanished implements like “stationary jingle-rings” and “giant waves,” plus tall slides and seesaws, prone to cracking kids on the head. Sand itself, the foundational element of those first playgrounds in Boston, fell victim to disability-access regulations and paranoia over junkies’ needles and general dirtiness.

American playgrounds had become dull and homogenous, geared to toddlers more than athletic older kids and dominated by uniform models from catalogs.”

- Ruth Graham, 28MAR14, in the Boston Globe.

Today, there are playgrounds in America. However, they are sterile affairs. They are not stationary toys that children can play upon. They are but arrangements of metal that are called a “playground”, but are anything but that. They are not places where children can play. Compared to playgrounds in the 1960’s, which was full of screaming and running happy children, the playgrounds of today are mostly empty and unused.

Playgrounds in The United States today – Safe

American playgrounds are perfect for handicapped children and imbeciles. American playgrounds are safe at the expense of play.
Safe American playground is suitable for the most incompetent children and retarded idiots that America can produce.

A safe modern American playground. Image Source.

In America today you can find many playgrounds. They have been made “safe” for children. There are no hard surfaces. Nothing is high or tall. There are no moving parts. Though they are typically painted in delightful colorful colors.

Indeed, many of the things that used to be a part of playgrounds in the past are now absent. There are no “monkey bars”. There aren’t any slides, merry-go-rounds, or seesaws. If you are lucky, you might be able to walk up some wheelchair adaptable steps to a two foot height. There are no moving parts. There isn’t much there to inspire creativity. In fact, there really isn’t much of anything there to do at all.

Keeping the picture above in mind, let’s have a look at playgrounds in China…

Playgrounds in China Today – Play

In China, play is considered an important part of childhood development. They use the techniques of play to teach, for education is the most important aspect of a Chinese child’s life.

Unlike the United States, Chinese schools don’t have playgrounds. Instead, they have open areas for group sports and exercise. Most Chinese live in urban areas. In the urban centers, playgrounds tend be located in the most frequented areas; inside the malls and town centers.

While in America, malls have vaporized along with the American middle-class, in China they are quite popular. China has a very robust middle-class. Many malls have playgrounds inside for children to play upon.

Chinese playgrounds are designed for fun. They teach and inspire in equal measure.
Chinese playgrounds are designed for fun. They teach and inspire in equal measure. Yes, this is a Chinese playground. There is a lower age limit. Toddlers can only play if accompanied with a parent.

A modern Chinese Playground (Image Source.)

I was reminded of this by an event in a local park here in China. There were some children (five and six year old) being taught repelling and climbing skills by a small group of instructors. It turns out that many malls and store complexes in China have these huge climbing complexes of ropes, and netting that children are permitted to go “nuts” over. They are very popular here and are well maintained and monitored. They also offer excursions in local mountainous parks.

If you are ever in China, I would strongly advise all parents to utilize this resource. Don’t limit your child’s development to what the neighborhood busybodies think is appropriate. (They really believe that they have the power over your children. Go to the busybody central; Kid Safety Network.)

While these complexes do not have the kind of seesaw’s that we grew up with as children, they have similar devices with similar purposes. Only this time it is more like a big top that a child or group of children can get inside and toss and spin about in. Monkey bars have been replaced with a network of ladders, ropes, steps on ropes, tires on ropes, and woven tunnels hanging five stories high for the children to play about in.

Children are permitted to be safe while playing in Chinese playgrounds.
All Chinese playgrounds are supervised to allow the children to play in safety.

All Chinese playgrounds are supervised. Image Source.

All Chinese playgrounds have supervision. There are always workers who are paid to make sure that safety is maintained. This does come at a cost, though the cost is small and quite reasonable. The children must wear protective gear and harnesses so they will not fall to their death from six stories up.

The Chinese provide their children with a fine place to climb and explore. Sure there is an element of risk, but there are trained instructors and safety harnesses and helmets provided. Compare that to a modern American playground. There simply isn’t any risk. There isn’t any opportunity to explore and have adventure. It is typically in one or two colors, it consists of a few fences and railings, and some stairs to climb up. It is also very safe. It is the opposite of what is available in China.

The differences between the two playgrounds.

The differences are stark. But, don’t just take my word for it. Just compare the product offerings from playground manufacturers in China to those in the United States. You can see what they make and who they market to. The reader should note that American companies tend to market domestically almost exclusively. While Chinese manufacturers market their products internationally.

Just follow the links and be amazed.

China Playground Manufacturers

Henan Jianpei Industrial Development Company Ltd. (A personal favorite.)
Hunan ZhongYi Amusement Equipment Co., Ltd. (For pre-school children.)
Guangzhou Kira Amusement Equipment Co., Ltd.
Vasia Huaxia Amusement Co. Ltd.
Changzhou Warrior Outward Bound Appliance Co. Ltd.

Indeed, this is pretty amazing stuff. Climb ropes and and networks of cages suspended from above, then slide down multi-story rides! Can you imagine? Slide down five story tall slides! Get lost in huge wire baskets, and swing from monkey bar complexes that tower up into the stratosphere! Wow!

Fun for kids of all ages…

The companies in China make their products and ship all over the world. That is, almost everywhere EXCEPT the United States. Other nations, not only China, let their children climb, have fun, and play. However, in most instances, the Chinese companies just doesn’t bother to ship to America. I wonder why?

United States Playground Manufacturers

American Playground Company
American Parks Company
Playworld

Here you can find the makers of the playgrounds that are made for American cities. You will find nice soft surfaces, small and safe slides, a couple of grab bars, lots and lots of hand railings, and some nice safe steps to walk on. Many of them have a platform that is over two feet high that children can stand on. Whoo Hoo!

Let’s face it. Today American playgrounds are pathetic.

Why American Playgrounds became so pathetic

It all began in 1978. Jimmy Carter was president. (But, it really wasn’t his fault.)

An 8-year-old boy by the name of Frank Nelson was playing on a slide in Chicago. He fell and hit his head and the fall resulted in some very serious injuries. The damage resulted in brain damage. It paralyzed his left side and cause speech and vision problems. He also needed to wear a helmet. The attorneys for his mother settled out of court. As such, he was awarded a minimum of $9.5 million (and possibly as much as $29.8 million if he eventually lives to be 75.)

It’s a pretty sad situation. Accidents do occur, and children can get hurt or die. When I was in fifth grade a classmate died when he fell into the ice covered river. My first wife’s uncle died when he was seven. He too fell into the ice covered river. It was something our community knew well, as every five years or so, a child would die under the ice in Winter.

Anyways, back to the child in Chicago…

As a result of this, the city of Chicago decided to tear down all the (so named “tornado”) slides in the city. (This was the mechanism which contributed to the accident with the small boy. They also decided to generally make the playgrounds safer, as they could not afford too many expensive lawsuits.

This settlement, of course, caused a chain reaction.

A tidal wave of lawsuits began the plague the nation. After all, attorneys made BIG money on these kinds of lawsuits. My attorney (when I lived in California) got 90% of any “out of court settlement”, and 60% of the settlement if we took it all the way to court. It was a great racket in the 1980’s, and it still is today.

The lure of big, fast and easy money was seductive.

Attorneys started to look for ways to sue various cities, and there were all kinds of people who wanted to make quick easy cash. Accidents that normally wouldn’t be reported now became national news. For instance, there was the 5-year-old Michigan girl who was strangled on a slide in January when the drawstring from her coat became tangled in one of its bars. In 1988, a 10-year-old Washington, D.C., boy suffered brain damage after falling from an 8-foot climber onto the asphalt below. He was awarded $15 million, which is believed to be the largest settlement of its kind.

To prevent this, many cities started to take preemptive action. They began to make the playgrounds so safe that no one could ever get hurt. They started to ban everything from tires on a rope to slides. They didn’t go six sigma. They went infinity sigma! It’s “zero tolerance” run amok. It was safety at all costs. Who cares about fun. Who cares about child growth. Playgrounds must be SAFE!

Busybodies to Erase Play

Enter an army of busybodies who have one goal in mind; change the purpose of a playground from creative play into a “safe space”. Consider the American organization NPPS, which stands for the National Program for Playground Safety. Their objectives are many, but primarily are directed to reengineer playgrounds so that they are safe for children.

The only problem with this is that there are no thoughts given to the purpose of a playground.

Safe at the expense of play pretty well defeats the purpose of a playground.

You can make claims that the modern American playground designs improve motor skills, and help exercise various muscles. That is all fine and good. However, no one will be exercised if the playground is not utilized. The number one ingredient missing from American playgrounds is something that fires up the imagination of children. Without creative imagination, play is not possible. Without play, there can be no benefit of any playground no matter how carefully it is designed to provide physical exertion.

Here’s how it works…

• Children learn through play.
• Play requires creative imagination, not direction.
• Spaces or places that inspire creative imagination are magnets for playful activities.
• They used to be called “playgrounds”.

This reminds me of a similar progressive initiative by former presidential wife Michelle Obama and her “School Lunch Program”.

Here she mandated healthy food choice for all American children as dictated out of Washington, D.C… Yah, it was healthy, and good for you. However, there was one real problem. No one ate it. The students would get the food and then throw it away without even eating it.

You would think that the damage would be obvious by now.

Who really wants to play on one of these monstrosities?

Ah, but the busybodies are not stopping. There is an entire army of busybodies that wants to bleach out play from playgrounds. They want short, safe and boring locations where children can be parked and not worry about them getting hurt.

In a way, I kind of feel sorry for these people. They mean well, but they can’t understand the basic ingredients necessary to utilize a playground cannot be removed. You need things that inspire and assist in PLAY.

What happens to a cake if you try to make it without flour?

You make it exactly to the ingredients in the recipe, but instead of flour you substitute ground up dog food. You follow the directions on the recipe. You take the “cake” out of the oven. Is it a “cake”, or is it something else? What if you omitted the eggs all together? What if you used orange juice instead of milk? All cakes, regardless of the type, require eggs, milk, flour and sugar.

Playgrounds, regardless of where it is located, should inspire the imagination of children. It should allow them to run, climb and exercise at will. It should also be safe so that MOST children (not ALL children) won’t get hurt. It is after all, a PLAY-ground.

Failure to provide for these needs have created the situation that the United States has found itself in today. We now have playgrounds where “free ranging” play cannot be inspired.

Organizations Against Playgrounds as places for Play

There are numerous (American) organizations involved and concerned about playgrounds. Some, to my disdain, want safety at all costs. Others see the folly in this absolute. They are trying to come up with means and balance. Others are searching for alternative playground options, and how to regulate them out of existence. While still others are trying to introduce some foreign playground ideas on to the American scene. Here are some other related organizations that are trying to figure out what to do about American playgrounds.

They include;

American Alliance of Health
Recreation and Dance (AAHPERD)
Association for Childhood Education International (ACEI)
National Association for Education of Young Children (NAEYC)
National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA)
National Safety Council (NSC)
Safe Kids Worldwide (SKW)

I am sure that everyone in these organizations has good intentions. That is not the point. The point is that you should NEVER make changes to any plan, program or structure that detracts from its overall purpose. What is the point of safety if children can’t PLAY in a playground?

The point is you can design a car that is so safe that no one is ever killed. You know how? You remove the wheels and let it sit in the driveway. How often do you think that people will use that car?

A safe car.

Employment Opportunities

Today in America, you can become a certified playground inspector. That is correct. Your job is to make playgrounds sterile and bland of fun. It is all done in the interests of saving the city from frivolous lawsuits. I think the prune face, long crooked nose, and pointed black hats are optional.

Other Places & Other Ideas

One of the problem with us, and I mean all of us (myself included), is that we tend to only look at what is right in front of us. We fail to think of alternatives. You, the reader, know this is true. Honestly, have you ever thought about making a playground out of ropes and woven baskets before? Nah. I didn’t think so. Instead, we have a tendency to think of playgrounds in the traditional way. We fail to look at it in other ways.

We need to look at playgrounds as a [1] safe place for children, to [2] play using their imagination.

If we open our eyes just a little bit we can see how other nations, and other peoples, provide opportunities for their children to play. While some of the ideas might seem too dangerous for our American sensibilities, I tend to believe that we have become far too fearful of a nation. We need to let children play on their own a little bit. We need to let them go out and PLAY.

Here are some ideas of things done right elsewhere in the world…

Junk Playgrounds

When I was growing up, I played where I was. If I was in a playground, I played on the things that I found there. This included “monkey bars”, and “swings”. If I was climbing though an old abandoned building, I ended up playing with the junk that I found there. If I was in the woods, I would play in the trees and bushes that grew there. Children will pay with anything. They key is that you need to provide them a safe place to play in.

Enter the concept of “Junk Playgrounds”. Here, an area is set aside full of junk and discards so that children can play in and about it. It’s a great concept, and the children absolutely love it. Here are some great links to get your ideas flowing…

“Junk playgrounds” show the value of free play for kids (Video)
• The Junk Playground of New York City
• Is this the perfect playground, full of junk?
• Junkyard or playground paradise? Kids making their own adventures
Emdrup Junk Playground
Mobile Junk and Nature Playground
• ‘Junk’ playground The Land, Wrexham inspires US guests
• Where The Wild Things Play

Nature Playgrounds

Why play with junk when there are beautiful trees to climb, brooks to splash in, and meadows to run upon? There is a movement that believes that nature can prove elements of creative play just as well as any formal or structured playground could. Of course, this idea did not originate in the USA. To follow this train of thought and explore these opportunities for childhood adventure, one must look outside the USA prism.

I am specifically NOT referring to sanitized ultra-safe American style playgrounds that are dressed up to look like trees.

I am specifically referring to real parks and areas that are designed for children to play in. Some are nothing more than rustic versions of the ultra-safe American playgrounds. I suggest a little bit of risk, a lot of nature and a safe central area for access.

Here are some great links;

Nature playgrounds designed around plants and wood.
• The All-Natural Playground
Westminster welcomes hub of tree houses in new nature playground
Earthplay – Provides resources to build your own nature playground

What can you Do?

Many of us, well we sit back and just accept things as they are. We argue, “Hey that is the way things are and there is nothing that I can do.” But this is very wrong. This is “wrong-headed” thinking. There are many things that you can do. There are many levels of engagement.

1. Look at what kinds of playgrounds are near you. Are any of them actually being used? If so, then how? We need to look at playgrounds from the prism of both safety AND fun.

2. Find out who is responsible for the playground. This might be something as simple as talking to the town board in your community, or the people who actually own the property that the playground is on.

3. Talk to them. Do not be some kind of radical who demands everyone change everything immediately. Suggest minor (and I do mean minor) changes to improve it. If it is not safe, improve that aspect of it. If it is not fun, then concentrate in that aspect. Remember the goal is to make playgrounds BOTH safe and fun for children to play in.

4. Concentrate on a balance. The tomato at grocery stores today taste like a cardboard box because it was bred to ship like a cardboard box. No one paid attention to the taste of the tomato. In a like way, by concentrating on safety at all costs, you lose the primary purpose of a playground; individual imaginative play. Strike a balance on having both elements at the playground at the same time.

5. Ask for help. Sometimes you cannot do things alone. Yet there are many others who might want to work with you. Let them.

6. If you hit a blank wall, go your own way. Create your own park / playground. Do it your way. There are many “experimental” types of playgrounds that are designed for interaction with nature, or pile of junk or anything in between. Do your own thing; your way. Then tell us about it. Do not be shy!

7. Remember what it was when you were a kid. I well remember spending hours playing in the nearby stream. I remember what it was like to climb trees. Maybe that is all you need is a place with lots of trees to climb and a sign that says “kids can play here and climb all they want”.

8. Beware of the busybodies. They will try to threaten you, and try to get your involved in the fear of legal action. Put up disclaimers and protect yourself. If you have the financial resources, organize neighborhood monitors to keep things safe.

9. Do it your way.  Finally, and above all else; don’t follow what other people do. DO IT YOUR WAY!

Take Aways

Here are some important points that need to be underlined;

  • Playgrounds should be places to inspire children to play.
  • An accident in Chicago, and the judicial failure to put limits on the monetary awards, resulted in a sterilization of all American playgrounds.
  • America has altered playgrounds to be safe at the expense of play.
  • Other nations do not follow the United States model.
  • In China, playgrounds are set up quite differently.
  • America needs to redesign playgrounds to fit the purpose for them.
  • It is profitable to make playgrounds sterile and boring.
  • Anyone can make their own playground.

RFH

How about a Request For Help? I tire of busybodies and statists who poke fun at the ideas and experiences of others. They offer no constructive dialog. Rather they just make fun, ridicule, and then scurry under a rock.

I use this forum as a way to disseminate some of the things that I learned though my own personal experiences. I am not the best person in the world, indeed, I am quite faulted. The best that I can do is share my opinions about things that interest me, and flavor it indirectly with my unusual understandings.

So, if you, the reader, were so interested, I would welcome your stories about how playgrounds are beneficial. I would welcome any stories about playgrounds in other nations. I would welcome a discussion on the positives and the negatives of playground design. I would welcome ideas on new ideas, construction techniques and ways to stimulate a child to be involved in creative play. I would welcome stories about creative and useful playgrounds that you have encountered. I would welcome thoughts on things that children would like to play with.

This is my callout to you, the reader. I am sure that you have some stories or ideas that can help pull us out of the big “tar pit” that playgrounds have become. Please feel free to comment.

FAQ

Q: Are American playgrounds safe?
A: Yes they are.

Q: Can people get hurt in playgrounds?
A: Yes, they can. However, most serious accidents at a playground are extremely rare.

Q: Does China have playgrounds for children?
A: Yes they do. They have different types depending on the age range.

Q: Is it ok to allow children to play in playgrounds unsupervised.
A: Yes it is.

Q: What are the differences between Chinese and Americans in playground use?
A: The Chinese train their children to take risks. They make sure that the children are trained and instructed properly. They then provide opportunities for the child to use the skills learned. Once they have demonstrated competency, the child is left to fend for themselves. In America, the child is continually supervised. They are not trained, nor instructed. They are also not expected to make decisions on their own.

Q: Does childhood playgrounds influence Chinese culture in America today?
A: It is an influence, among other factors. In general, the Chinese parent expects their child to learn, and then apply what they learn. Playgrounds are used as a controlled location for the child to explore and utilize their learned skills.

Q: Is the Chinese American lifestyle similar to the Chinese lifestyle?
A: It is similar, but there are notable differences. The Chinese child is permitted much more freedom than their Chinese American counterpart. Both are expected to learn and work hard to achieve very high goals and parental expectations.

Q: Do the Chinese in America today prefer American or Chinese playgrounds?
A: I really do not know. However, I would be very surprised if any Chinese American parent would forbid their child to play in a Chinese playground. It is viewed as a learning resource. It is not considered a place of play

Other Great Articles on Playgrounds

The best one that I have found so far is HERE. It is titled “Playground Fun” on the RetroJunk website. It’s a fun read, with ample pictures. The author is a little bit like myself. Lots of pictures, and stories. Read it.

Links about China

China

Articles & Links

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Mad Scientist Explorations

Now what do you suppose this Mad Scientist is up to? Image source.

As a young boy, I dreamed of being a “Mad Scientist”. At that time my imagination was fueled by Vincent Price movies, the gadgets of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.”, and of course the reading of “The Mad Scientist Club”.  Later, as I grew older, I actually had opportunities to work in laboratories, work in top-secret facilities, and design and cobble together all kinds of curious and interesting gadgets. I think that it is a yearning of most boys to build, create and utilize inventions. Let’s take a look at this underappreciated need…

Vincent Price and His Movies

To people today, the name Vincent Price is meaningless. However, to children of the 60’s and the 70’s the name had meaning. For these were the movies that played during lazy Saturday afternoons, and during late night scare-fests. Vincent Price was more than just an actor, he was a legend. He, in some ways, defined a generation of children. He introduced us to monsters. He introduced us to the evils of man. He introduced us to ideas and concepts that were not taught to us in school. He introduced us to B-grade movies and the “Mad Scientists” the inhabited them.

“The Professor is working on something, and won’t tell anyone what it is. He’s got a secretary with the kind of attitude that makes it seem she was weaned on a pickle, and who looks a bit like a gene-spliced offspring of an elderly Betty Davis and Vivian Vance. To make this comparison more apt, her character is called “Ethel.” To make things even more spooky, the actress’ real name is “Viv!” “

-SATURDAY AFTERNOON B-MOVIE CRAPFEST: “The Phantom From 10,000 Leagues” (1955)

This actor was quite a significant player in my boyhood. His movies, aside from “The Abominable Dr. Phibes” and “Dr. Phibes Rises Again” were just typical horror / Science Fiction flicks. (Maybe it’s because I had crush(es) on his amazing assistants.) The movies were easy on the eyes, and fun for a ten-year-old boy to watch.

Vincent Price made many movies during the 1960's and 1970's, and his Dr. Phibes series were amoung his best.
One of my favorite Vincent Price movies was the Dr. Phibes series. Here he is with one of his pretty assistants.

It wasn’t only Vincent Price who participated in those movies. There were many other actors, yet they all shared a basic similarity. The laboratories were all seemingly set in basements, often with hidden or heavily bolted doors. Behind those doors were often evil experiments. One movie might have evil Hitler Nazi’s being woke up from cryogenic sleep, while another might have brain transplants. Some were involved in the reanimation of the dead, while others involved the creation of strange huge machines that would revolutionize or destroy the world.

Indeed, the role of Nazi’s in these movies was quite significant. For instance, you have King of the Zombies where zombies are used to conduct Nazi operations against the United States. There is The Frozen Dead where a scientist reanimates frozen heads of Nazi war criminals to revive Third Reich. There is They Saved Hitler’s Brain where Nazis in South America kidnap scientist to maintain living head of Adolf Hitler in order to revive the Third Reich. In Shock Waves we have an Island-shipwrecked party who encounters former SS commander leading zombie storm troopers. Yikes!

This theme continued with The Boys from Brazil where a Nazi hunter discovers doctor’s plot to revive Third Reich by cloning Hitler in Paraguayan jungle. Death Ship where a Nazi prison ship sails the seas since end of war luring unsuspecting victims aboard. Not willing to give up on this theme, we also have such movies as The Keep. Where the German Army and “Einsatzkommandos” occupy Romanian citadel with demonic forces.

Dr. Phibes movies were very popular Vincent Price movies during the 1970's.
There were two Dr. Phibes movies. Each one used a different assistant. I was in love with both. Yikes! Image credit to Metro Goldwyn Mayer for their promotional photo.

The underground lairs always involved some kind of nefarious laboratory. Inside there were always these big clunky switches that took your entire hand to pull down or push up to engage. In the dark corners of the lab were always these arc generators with bolts of electricity shooting through the air. (I believe it was there to keep the air nicely ionized for personal health and longevity.) There were always counters full of glass vials, beakers, and glassware filled with colorful liquids percolating away over lit Bunsen burners.

These movies were inspirational in that they led a boy, such as myself, to believe that a single lone individual with a dream can make it happen. Oh sure they were portrayed as villains. However, I am quite sure that the reason was because they just weren’t very well understood. You know, each and every one had a reason, which in their mind was just and good. All that you need to do is learn science. Study hard. Focus on your dream and apply yourself.

All you need is a dream, and to study and apply yourself to make that dream happen.

The Mad Scientist Club

The Mad Scientist Club is a series of stories (and books) written in the 1960’s which fueled the imagination and adventures of us children in the 1970’s. (The son of the author has a website. You can visit the website HERE.) These stories inspired me. They inspired my dreams and led me down the path towards technical excellence.

The book cover to the Mad Scientists Club.
The cover from the first book of “The Mad Scientists Club”. This is a classic book for all young children entering their early teens.

The boys in the stories used science to create all sorts of pandemonium and mayhem in their little town. They applied themselves to using science to make devices and gadgets. They played pranks. The books showed how a boy could engineer a device from techniques that they learned in school. They made balloons, talked on ham radios, devised electronics, and they did it all on their very own.

The beauty about all this was that they never asked for help or permission. They took the initiative and did it on their own. They applied themselves.

Indeed, these stories are special. But, don’t take it from me. Read what others have to say.

“This is the best kids book ever.

… In a way it saddens me when I re-read it. I don't think our kids today have as much freedom as these did (or my generation). I remember staying out until dark, riding my bike EVERYWHERE, clubhouses on vacant lots...Or maybe it's responsibility. Kids today have freedom but little responsibility. I'm getting off my soapbox now. but this is a cool book and it will make your kids fall in love with science. I imagine the Mythbusters grew up like this- or maybe their dads did!! ”

-Holly commentary on the book. Found at Goodreads.

I am afraid that Holly is correct. American children (and adults) don’t have as much freedom as we all used to. (It’s our fault, you know.) These books are for kids and inspires them to accomplish things through study and action. These books are not about getting a group together and finding a group consensus. It’s not about how to cautiously speak so as not to offend anyone. Nope. It is about getting things done and raising hell in the process.

It’s books like these that inspired many of us to study science and engineering. It certainly affected me. It also affected others. I am not the only one who studied about rockets and space…

“This was simply a great childhood book for any inquisitive kid who likes science, haunted houses, dinosaurs, flying machines, etc. I read this book in about seventh or eighth grade and actually a couple of times since. I believe this book helped me on my career to being a rocket scientist but it also gave me many ideas as I was growing up.

Brinley managed to capture the perfect mid-west US town and the guys in the book were great caricatures of fun loving, science minded boys with a bit of good natured mischief up their sleeves. Then Brinley took this setting and boys and produced a series of wonderful stories capturing so many things that so many boys growing up find so intriguing.

I bought a copy recently for a nephew and he was enraptured by it. The follow-ups while good never really reached the level of this first book but were fun in their own right. It will always hold a special memory of growing up back in the '60s.”

-Robert commentary on the book. Found at Goodreads.

He’s right you know. The stories certainly inspired me.

I like to think that there is inspiration in stories where you find adventure, freedom and independence. These are things that are absolutely missing in the modern realm of politically correct stories. Which, by the way, is a very important point. By following a “Politically Correct” narrative, you retard the growth of young boys. To paraphrase Clint Eastwood, you turn men into pussies.

“We live in more of a pussy generation now, where everybody's become used to saying, "Well, how do we handle it psychologically?" In those days, you just punched the bully back and duked it out. Even if the guy was older and could push you around, at least you were respected for fighting back, and you'd be left alone from then on.”

-Clint Eastwood

A parent has a responsibly to PREPARE their children to venture out and grow. They need to go forth and carve a life out of the wilderness. But that is not what is happening today. Instead we have children that never leave the nest. Young men, in the United States, live at home until they are in their 30’s. Instead of investing their time in building, workings, making, and creating, they are too busy looking at cat videos on the Internet while they post their latest latté on Facebook. Boys must be taught to aspire to be Men, not to be a woman’s version of a sensitive man.

Pussies.

No amount of tattoos, unique hair or beard, or cool urban clothing style is going to make you into a Man. It comes from within. Education alone won’t do it. Money and wealth won’t do it. Polite conversation won’t do it. It comes from inside. It comes from deep down inside. It comes from a place that says “you can, and must do what you need to do”. You don’t ask for permission, or consensus. You go out and carve your life out.  Alone.

By clutching on to your children like over protective mothers, the children don’t grow up. Physically they might age, but the brain and the emotions are still that of a young child. How else can you explain the SWJ mentality that demands a protective overseer? Which is what they want, you know. They demand to be coddled and taken care of by a big parental government Bernie Sanders style. Because, that is all that they know. They don’t know how to be independent. We don’t teach that anymore.

These books break us out of that mold…

“A gem. Almost unknown; but one of the most hilarious and memorable laugh-out-loud books you could ask for. It's never mentioned by anyone; it's never recommended, placed on book lists or chosen by reading-groups. This just might be because it's a series of books, which represents a 'philosophy-of-parenting’, which has fallen out of favor. That's my suspicion, anyway.

I mean, just think about it. These stories are about kids who are unmonitored; who are allowed to just go off on summer afternoons and hang out on their own; and do whatever they want.... because they are trusted by their folks. Today, this is the last thing parents want to hear. No one in today's control-freak, micro-managing America wants to imagine that children can be trusted like this.

Books for very young children ('Little Prince' or 'Giving Tree') are in abundance on Goodreads. They're sweet and harmless. There's also a new genre called 'YA' ('young adult'). But guess what? They're all very sanitary, careful, cautious, and timid. Antiseptic. Content-supervised and Content-controlled. They always instruct youngsters on the 'correct' thing to do, the 'sensitive' thing to do, the 'courteous' thing to do...blah blah blah.

'Mad Scientists' is different. Instead of caution, the author praises problem-solving, solidarity, daring, and initiative. It's a book written for kids illustrating how NOT to follow the rules. It’s a book, which shows that rules are made to be flouted.

These stories are from a time when today's endless complexities and anxieties just weren't around. It’s a book that deals with kids just... having fun. I say, there need to be a LOT MORE books like this.

The gang of boys in Brinley's tales are pre-teens; somewhere between 11 and 14. This is a strange interval in a boy's matriculation, when they need to figure out a lot of things about life (and it’s also a time when adults have the least relevant advice to offer). This is the space Brinley plays in: the theme of personal responsibility.

Teens NEED to create a few genuine catastrophes in order to learn the weight of 'cause' vs 'effect'. 'Intention' vs 'outcome'. 'Actions' vs 'harm'. They need to learn the ins-and-outs of friendship and loyalty and paying-one's-dues.

The 'Mad Scientists Club' (this is the name carved on their clubhouse door) demonstrate these themes grandly. These young scamps are precisely in that age where you learn how to make a mess and how you clean it up afterwards. By yourself!

The crazy scenarios which afflict these affable 'troublemakers' reminds us--should remind everyone-- that this process can be fun. Making mistakes and learning from them. The best way --nay, the ONLY way--to shape character.

Far cry from today, huh? Yeah. Today, we don't let kids have 'secret clubs', 'hideouts', codewords, or 'mysterious friends'. We don't let them play with equipment or tools. They must not 'wreck' anything of ours. They're certainly not allowed to 'gallivant all over creation' (love that phrase).

Modern parents are rule-mongers and control freaks. When our kids want to play, we take them to 'Sesame Place' and we monitor their nutrition and we deck them in flashing sneakers and put them in helmets and on leashes. We place them in soccer, swim class, softball, karate, dance, gymnastics.

The result? Modern kids have no idea what real 'freedom' means. We never give it to them. They turn out to be vegetables.

But Brinley's kids show the other way it can be done. This boy's club makes their own fun. They don't 'ask for permission' to do stuff--they just do it! They embrace wildness, zaniness, and unpredictability. The outcome? Well, they aren't brought up on charges from the Department of Homeland Security, for the trouble they cause. That's for sure. This is a part of small town-Americana we've let slip away.

Just one example: in one of the adventures undertaken by the Mad Scientists, they build their own hot-air balloon (using scraps from a local junkyard) and they enter it in the town's annual homemade hot-air balloon race. With no adult supervision at all. Once aloft, (!!) they engaged in an air-battle with their arch-foes and fire potato-cannons and slingshots back'n'forth in mid-air. Finally, they manage to send the enemy gang's balloon into the lake! Can you stand it? I can't friggin' stand it, can you?

This book reminds us that children used to be perfectly capable of taking care of themselves if we let them...if we weren't all scared out of our wits by molesters and semi-automatic weapons and drugs and porn and stalkers and computers, we'd still remember the kind of America found in this hilarious read. It's to our shame that we can't.”

-Feliks commentary on the book. Found at Goodreads.

Let me simply posit this; to all those men (not to intentionally exclude women, but I am a man addressing myself to other men) who have made something of their life. Maybe you are a barber, a motorcycle mechanic, a car salesman, or a cook, isn’t it true? To make it in this world, you need to stretch your neck out. You need to take risks, bend the rules a little. You need to apply yourself.

Book cover from the New Adventures of the Mad Scientist club.
The cover to the book “The New Adventures of the Mad Scientist Club”. This is the sequel to the first book. It is also good, though personally, I really prefer the first book overall.

Those times when life got tough, did you go and get permission? Did you go and ask for consensus? Did you politely ask for others opinions, or did you just go out and do whatever it took to achieve your goals? Was it easy? Nope, I’ll wager that it was hard, or at least uncomfortable. You might have to make sacrifices. Right? Right???

Part of the need to accomplish these tasks were goals. These goals were like this golden orb that lay there, just out of reach that you needed to obtain. You would work towards those goals. You would keep those goals in mind while you fought and persevered. A goal might be a car. A goal might be the love of your life.

A man is nothing without a goal.

A goal might be something more honorable and important, like saving the world. As everyone can’t be an evil villain like George Soros. Or, a wealthy trillionaire like Bill Gates. Someone needs to wear the mask of a hero…

Speaking of heroes…

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

In the 1960’s, most Americans were worried about the “Red menace”; Communism. Yikes!

Here, in pockets around the globe, progressive socialists had gotten control of various governments and were implementing progressive social “utopias”. This included the Soviet Union, “Red” China, Northern Vietnam, Cambodia, North Korea, and other socialist paradises.

In these utopias, everyone lived in a progressive liberal society.

In these nations, in these societies, everyone was equal. There wasn’t any racism. Everyone knows what they can speak about and what they dare not say. Everyone wore approved clothing so not to offend anyone. Everyone conformed to society for the good of all. All they had to do was give all their possessions, body and soul to the all-powerful central government…

…and the citizens were quite miserable as a result.

Ah, but that didn’t stop them from expansion. They were out to take your (American) freedom away, don’t ya know. They sent out spies, and agents of destruction. As a result, we had to set up spy networks to counter their spy networks. We had to be ever vigilant against the evil of liberal progressive socialism. This meant a network of trained and motivated experts.

Enter “The Man from Uncle” where a special force of well-trained agents went to fight the roots of the evils that manipulated governments. Because, while we were all busy fighting the “Red Menace”, the true evils laid hidden, for they were the REAL levers of control behind the scenes.

Here, the secret agency (named U.N.C.L.E.) went to fight a very sinister agency that was set on destroying the global world order (named T.H.R.U.S.H.). In many ways it is sort of a cross between the Clinton’s financial network and the George Soros organizations.

The Man from Uncle television series.
The Man from Uncle was a television show that united the cold war foes into an organization that would fight the “Deep State”. For it was recognized then, as well as now, that the “Deep State” was the source of all the ills that befell Mankind.

Against this backdrop were groups of evil villains. For, after all, there are more powerful people than well-established individual nations.

These villains would form their own networks of confederates and together they would implement all kinds of mischievous and dangerous activities. Movies and shows about this emerging phenomenon were everywhere in the 60’s. We have secret agent James Bond fighting all kinds of evil doers like Doctor No.

Evil has no borders, and calls no nation home.

We had agent Flint  saving the world from militant feminists who were hell bent on depose the ruling American patriarchy with a feminist matriarchy.  Ah, Mr. Flint. There were others, of course. We had Alec LeamasJoe Turner and Harry Palmer.

We also had television shows like “Get Smart”, “I Spy”, “Mission Impossible” and “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” as they battled T.H.R.U.S.H..

As a boy I would watch The Man from U.N.C.L.E. with my father. He would sit there with his wine and cheese wedges, and I would eat my potato chips while we watched television together. For me the shows were all black and white, but that was because at the time our television was a black and white TV set.

My father liked the main character, Napoleon Solo while I preferred his Russian counterpart Illya Kuryakin which reminded me of the singing group “The Beatles” who were quite popular at the time. We would watch them operate in secret, while fighting the equally secret evil organization T.H.R.U.S.H.. Of course, they had all these secret codes, interesting devices, gadgets and inventions. As a boy, I was quite enraptured by them. I would imagine what it would be like if I too were a secret agent, using these contrivances and fighting evil to save the world.

What better thing for a young boy to aspire towards?

Prank Central

However, as exciting as it all looked, my attention was elsewhere. For I was young, and boys like being mischievous and playing tricks. It’s a boy thing I suppose. (I just don’t remember any girls doing these types of things. Though, I am quite sure that they were involved in more cerebral activities playing “head games” with other girls.) Boys like to see the physical results of their torment. They want to see girls react in horror to a toad. They want to light firecrackers outside people’s bedrooms, and set bags of dog poo on fire on people’s porches.

Advertisement for toys and gadgets inside a vintage comic book.
When I was growing up, we would find these types and kinds of advertisements inside of our comic books and magazines. They would be full of all kinds of fun things to amuse a young child.

I remember as a boy how we had somehow come across a gadget catalog that was advertised in the back of one of the comic books that we would often read. You know the kind. Pages and pages of things like magic tricks, pranks, books on Black Magic, fake (pellet shooting) fingers, trick buzzers, masks and ”pea shooters”. As a kid, we loved it and wanted everything. We must have circled over a hundred items in that catalog.

I think that it is an interest of growing children to expand and explore these tricks and devices of prankster humor. Too bad that the days of yodeling pickles are long gone. Indeed, you need to leave the ultra-sanitized United States to find some politically incorrect playthings for your child to enjoy.

…Or, do you?

Let me introduce the reader to the Archie McPhee store.

This is the kind of place that is a young boy’s wet dream. Inside the store (physical as well as the Internet version) are absolutely enormous assortments of useless pursuits. They’ve got boxing nuns and bacon scarves. They’ve got yodeling pickles and finger hands. Don’t know what a finger hand is, well then go HERE to find out. They have stuff that only a madman could think of.

“Less talk. More monkey.”

How about rotisserie chicken flavored candy canes, emergency inflatable toast (why?), rubber chickens (big and small), and propeller beanies. Ah we all wanted one of these as a kid. They have trick gum, Holy toast, and bags of busted businessmen. They carry x-ray glasses (yes, you wanted these didn’t you?) and hypno-glasses, wind-up lederhosen, and strange action figures to include horrified movie victims. They’ve got everything from plastic arks, to singing fish. It’s a childhood delight. This store brings out the little kid in all of us. It’s many things, but above all, it’s the go-to place for plastic poop.

I just can’t stop! It’s such an amazing place.

“If there’s a heaven for the deranged, Archie McPhee is probably it.”

-Josh B in Seattle

How about vinderhosen, an emergency Santa kit, crime scene sandwich bags,  and classic disguises. What about underwear for your pet squirrel, inflatable turkey (again, why?), and contemporaneous prayer cards. Here is probably the only place where you can find cool World War II occupation money. How about medical posters from India, they’ve got religious themes, cat themes, food themes, mad scientist themes, and themes that defy description. I am not at all kidding!

The Archie McPhee store in Seattle.
There is a store in Seattle. The rest of us are limited to visiting their (most comprehensive) website.

Do yourself a favor. Let your child buy something from this store. Give them ten dollars to spend, and wait while they go back and forth, back and forth deciding what to buy. It’s all in good fun.

Build your Own Gadgets

When the children are old enough, or for you adults that just never grew up (like me, heh heh) there are outlets for obtaining the tools and supplies to build your very own mad scientist lair. Over the years I have bought from these various outlets and cobbled up some pretty interesting gadgets. In the past I have made such things as television bicycles, remote control automobile deactivators, electronic snooping equipment detector, remote control devices for insects, and all kinds of household appliances.

Here are some of my favorites;

McMaster-Carr

If there was ever a catalog for inventors it is this. It has everything from hardware to materials (that can be bought in small quantities). To use these parts, you will need to have an idea of what you want to build. Then you go through the catalog to find parts or components that you can use. It is wonderfully, and functionally illustrated. Additionally, most of the parts have PDF drawings, and CAD drawings that you can export to your CAD system and made up on the computer. I, of course, highly recommend it.

“The best way to describe McMaster is to say that they carry everything you need to build anything. Items that you could normally only order through factory distributors, or materials that could only be ordered in large quantities, are easily available in any size and quantity, no matter how small. (No minimum order, either!) Their prices are excellent and they tend to only carry good merchandise. Amazingly, when I order stuff at 5:30 p.m., it arrives the next morning with their normal shipping. Their catalog has long been difficult to get because you had to be a reasonably sized business with a Dun and Bradstreet number and established credit to have them mail it to you. But now that they have added an online service, everyone can easily order from them with a credit card.”

Alexander Rose

As a point of curious interest, they used to have a large thick catalog in a bright yellow cover. I used to keep an old catalog, I think it was #93, in my bathroom and would spend my time looking through all the cool stuff while I was on the throne attending to my needs. As I stated previously, this is the go-to-first catalog for emerging Mad Scientists.

Mc Master Carr Catalog
If you have an idea, a concept, a gizmo that you want to build; well Mc Master is your first stop. It is where I go to get the parts I need to cobble together designs and make specialized parts.

Science Hobbyist

When I was a boy, I used to read the Scientific American magazine. In the 1960’s the magazine was appropriate for most people, including myself, interested in science. (Then during the 70’s and 80’s they just became another mouthpiece for the professional elite in the ivory towers in universities. The articles became too specialized and dry for casual reading.)

Anyways, back in the 1960’s the magazine had a section titled “The Amateur Scientist” which was a wonderfully illustrated section describing how a hobbyist can make their own gizmos and gadgets to explore scientific principles with. This website is sort of the modern day equivalent.

A page from the Scientific American section titled The Amateur Scientist.
Here is a sample page from the section in Scientific American titled “The Amateur Scientist”. Just by reading the articles I believed that I too could make my own scientific experiments and inventions.

This site “Science Hobbyist”, should be your first stop if you want to begin cobbling up devices, and making interesting stuff. For starters, I would suggest this section on projects to start a project or two that you might be interested in. You can go HERE to find out some projects for practical jokes. You can go HERE for some really strange projects (after all that’s what Mad Scientists do). This should be a starting point for Tesla coils and other interests such as lasers and infrared goggles.

Radio Shack

When I was growing up, Radio Shack was THE place to get parts and supplies for all sorts of cool stuff. In fact, when I was in High School around 1974 through 1977, it was almost the ONLY place where you could get computer parts and accessories. Indeed, around 1977 they cornered the PC market with nearly 100% market share.

Of course, poor management caused that market share to fall like a rock, and the CEO was sacked a few decades alter when the market share was under 1%. I wonder why that won’t happen to those in charge of the Federal Reserve. Oh, but I digress…

Anyways, Radio Shack has these cool little books and booklets called “The Engineers Notebook”, which is sort of a “cookbook” for playing with electronics. You can cobble all kinds of cool things together using the easy to read instructions and diagrams. Want to make a countdown times for a self-destruct button? Want to make a bug to listen on to what others are saying? Want to make a gadget to shock your friends? All here.  Go for it…

The Engineer's Notebook.
The Engineer’s Notebook is a great source of information for students, kids, mad scientists, and loony troublemakers. It is well worth the few dollars it costs.

The Art of Electronics

Speaking of electronics, if you are really interested on playing around with electronics, then don’t go for a boring text book. Go for a text book that was written by an enthusiast. Read “The Art of Electronics“, and get the LAB book as it is amazing!

"Far and away the finest book on the subject of electronics ... in the last decade. I cannot recommend this book highly enough to anyone whose research or experiments require some electronics." 
Optical Engineering

"A delightful book...The circuits actually work, the schematics are all readable." 
Review of Scientific Instruments

"This book is filled with a tremendous diversity of valuable information. More importantly, this book is a joy to read...It's not at all like studying--it's too much fun." 
EDN (News Edition)

"This book provides a painless way to learn about electronic design. It is also a good read for those already experienced in electronics." 
EDN (Magazine Edition)

"..it comes as close as any book we've seen to fulfilling the promise inherent in its title...written as though to educate the novice, but practicing engineers will encounter many useful tidbits they didn't know, hadn't thought about, or had long forgotten." 
Analog Dialogue

This book was written as a joy by someone who took a real pleasure in cobbling things together. It is super easy to read, and very interesting to boot. If you have the slightest interest in electronics, you will totally relish this tome.

The Art of Electronics.
The Art of Electronics. Here is a stack of the various editions by a fan. Trust me, if you love cobbling things together, then you WILL become a fan.

Websites to DIY Gizmos

In the internet today, it can become pretty daunting if you do not know the correct “buzz words” or Google-approved code words to use in your searches. If you are not careful, you will be sent to websites that are nothing more than product stores offering cool geeky products, but nothing that would interest a true Mad Scientist.

Well, never fear. Here are some FUN links;

Normally, I really do not like many of the websites on the internet. Basically, you have some millennial who constructed a website for profit. They googled similar terms and packaged it in some kind of “hipster” presentation of the day. It’s all packaged nonsense for a profit.

What is missing is HEART. That is to say; websites written by people who LOVE… LOOVVVVEEEEE the subjects that they are writing about. They can go on and on and on about them. Sort of like me and what I like to write about. For instance, HERE is a website that has some heart. That is different from these other websites…

The people who made up these websites don’t eat and drink and love gadgets and gizmos. It’s just a job to them. They are setting up a business model and their plan is to create an income stream off of it. Never the less, they DO have some benefit, if they can help point you in the right direction.

Go visit these two sites, and you will see what I mean…

Supply Catalogs

There are many places where you can get parts for your inventions. The best place is at companies that specialize in the purchase of excess inventories at factories. You can pick up radar dishes used on military ships, the inner workings of laptops, and all kinds of stuff for a mere fraction of what it costs to make. There are stories galore about these places. One man in Canada used military surplus to open up dimensional doors. Another used the equipment to build a personal submarine. While still another blew up his garage by pressing the wrong button. You got to be careful, don’t ya know.

Electronic Goldmine

This should be your first stop when looking for cheap parts, and orphaned mechanisms to use in your creations. You can find things from cameras used in cell phones to robotic parts here. The only problem is that most of the parts do not come with instructions or schematics. However, a little bit of experimentation and simple observation can help determine what goes where and how. I especial like the “grab bag” of who-know-what that you buy really cheap…

Surprise box of parts from the Electronics Goldmine.
Surprise box of parts from the Electronic Goldmine.

I once took a sensor board used for checking microwave leakage from appliances, it cost me a dollar, and turned it into a bugging sensor. You know, all electronics emit radiation. So, this little device was able to go over a wall or automobile and find out where electronics are. Heh heh. Another time, I took a speaker and turned it into a low frequency generator that I used to attract fleas with. (It was more sanitary than a bug bomb.)

Surplus Shed

Here is another website that offers surplus stuff. It has a different set of products and some are quite interesting indeed. You can make a pretty impressive telescope from the parts here. They mostly seem to carry things related to optics. This site is very good if you want to fry an ant’s nest.

American Science and Surplus

There are other places on the Internet from which you can order amazing things. May I also suggest another very interesting store, the American Science and Surplus store.  It’s most especially good for young boys and girls who have a mad scientist interest. Here are a mixture of chemistry sets, military surplus, industrial surplus, jokes and gizmos, and just plain strange stuff. You can make your own chewing gum. You can grow crystals.  You can make all kinds of liquids and potions that glow. You can start on rock collecting, or get started making mechanical gizmos. Explore and have fun.

This would be where you can get toys and gear for your growing children. There are all kinds of scientific goodness here.

Fair Radio

This website, Fair Radio, is a great source for used military electronics and equipment. It’s really not the place to purchase parts to cobble up designs. It is the go-to place to obtain things related to really big projects. I once knew someone who bought the laser rangefinder out of a tank from them. Their stuff can be quite eclectic. With all kinds of things ranging from mine detectors to weather balloons. Never the less, it is worth a look.

Aircraft communication and radio station.
There are all kinds of interesting things that you can buy, as long as you know where to go.

I once lived in an apartment in Milford, Massachusetts. It was an old Victorian mansion renovated into six apartments. I really liked the place, the location and the convenience. That was, unfortunately, until a section eight family moved in and had the entire neighborhood over for all night teenage parties to six in the morning. You know, it’s one thing wanting to help out low income people, but it’s another thing entirely when your rent is very large (because you work) and your neighbor gets a much larger apartment and pays nearly nothing for it (because they don’t).

Ah… Welcome to Massachusetts.

via GIPHY

For some reason, our new neighbors decided to host teenage parties in the apartment. (I remember knocking on her door at 4:30 am asking them to turn the music down. The woman looked at me in a daze and asked “Oh, you need to work tomorrow?” It was only Monday night, for Pete’s sake!)  Anyways, teenagers could come over starting at 9pm and play basketball inside the living room. (On the wooden floor, in the firggin’ living room.) They would crank up the music to level that made it impossible to think, talk on the phone and sleep. They would do drugs; typically smoke “crack” that would fill up the entire house with smoke. When the parties would get large, over thirty teenagers, the noise would be excessive, and police would come. They would break up the parties. Book the juveniles, and arrest the tenants. The peace and quiet would last one or two days, and then it would repeat. It was a nightmare.

It was really a problem, and the laws in Massachusetts could not do anything about it. My landlord couldn’t do anything either. Once they moved in they refused to pay rent, and the State protected them for six months until they could be forcefully evicted. (What a scam, huh? You get someone to take you in. No financial deposit. No first, lasts rent and security deposit. Just a paper from the welfare office. You don’t pay rent, and you can’t get evicted. It’s legislated squatting.) The youth and their instigators were protected. They were starting to break the windows in our vehicles parked outside, and were engaged in all sorts of hyperactive activities that were too rowdy for a quiet neighborhood. I could not sleep. When I would arrive at work, I would be sleep deprived, and terribly irritable. After about two months of sleepless night, I took matters in my own hands. I devised a contraption to put an end to their rock concerts.

I took a furnace igniter from Fair Radio, and placed two long wires in it. Then put the device on a five-minute timer starting at 10:30 at night. (After 10:30 it would turn on and off in five minute intervals.) The result being that I had a device that was an unshielded electric arc generator. I made a Jacob’s Ladder. (How to make one can be found HERE.) Being unshielded meant that all their loud electrics would get fried by noise. Thus when they blared their music, after five minutes a horrible howl full of static would assault their ears and blow out their speakers.

The first time it was used was amazing. It was wonderful. W-O-N-D-E-R-F-U-L. There must have been sixty teenagers (60) next door. There couldn’t have been anywhere to stand inside. Kids were crapping and urinating outside our bedroom windows, and sitting on all of our cars and vehicles. The music was thumping. It was mostly black urban rap at jet engine noise levels…. It was still early. At 10:30pm, I plugged in the Jacob’s Ladder. Turned on the timer and let it rip.

The screeching howl must have permanently damaged the eardrums of each and every teenager. This continued for about thirty seconds. Then it stopped. They turned off the stereo. They mulled about. Talked some. Brought another keg of beer over. Then, they turned on the music again. For five minutes it played on. Then, I hit the “on” button to the gizmo. The howling screeching was horrible.

This continued for about an hour. They would wait. Turn on the stereo. Five minutes later, I would turn on the device. They would shut everything down…. Heh heh. This continued for about two hours and then they broke up and went elsewhere.

Needless to say, they eventually had to find other places to hold their youthful teenage celebrations. Sometimes, when the system fails you, and you need to do something, a creative (and unexpected) solution is always preferred.

Mad Scientist with his assistant.
You don’t mess around with a Mad Scientist. Who knows what creative solutions he may come up with to counter your nefarious activities.

Herbach & Rademan

This is a great source of supply for motors and generators and all sorts of gears and stuff. I once worked with an electrical engineer in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. He used the electrical motors from here and put them in an old car without the engine. He added some batteries and made a fully electric car. It was pretty darn cool. H&R is a pretty good place for motor controllers, decent low-priced motors and the like.

If I wanted to make a two story tall robot (Japanese style), or a mechanical metal spider the size of a truck (Russian Style), I would get the parts from this store.

AllElectronics

AllElectronics is not a surplus store. Rather it is a regular store that sells electronic parts and individual assemblies. It is quite useful for throwing together some prototypes and making things work from scratch. For instance I used the voice module in a prototype for a room air purifier I was working on. When the filter became too dirty, a voice would come on saying “Please change the filter.”

You know, we first experimented with a man’s voice (one of the techs) but it sounded too ominous. It sounded like Boris the Great was coming to eat you. Then we asked the group secretary to do it, and it sounded hilarious.  This was because she had a strong Brooklyn accent.

You can find things like strobe modules, and power strip modules. All would contain instructions and hook up diagrams to help in the installation into your projects. There are also all kinds of project boxes and other kinds of hardware that are quite useful in your mad scientist creations.

Inspiration

As a boy, I was inspired by Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein. If you have teenagers, I would suggest you buy them one of both of these two Ray Bradbury books, and let them devour them. They are filled with awe, mystery and excitement. They are works of art that inspires and directs.

DREAMERS! BE ENCOURAGED. YOU ARE UNDERSTOOD.

Ray Bradbury’s R is for Rocket is a book about and for dreamers… and those who truly desire to understand them. A common character type in his work is the wide-eyed, yearning dreamer who reaches too high, often for a dream beyond his capacity, and who inevitably teeters on the brink of success and failure.

It’s no surprise that Bradbury produced so many pieces that gave voice to themes of blue skies since he himself was a dreamer, a voracious reader and enthusiastic writer from an early age, a man who thrilled himself (and his fortunate readers) on the wild imaginings of his literary soul.

In R is for Rocket, the story “The Rocket” is an excellent example of the author’s heartfelt kindness and sympathy for — and identification with — the hopes and heartaches of a dreamer, in this case one Fiorello Bodoni, a middle-aged, married-with-many-children man obsessed with dreams of rocket travel and space exploration in the face of those who are quick to discourage him.

Excerpts from the story:

“I will ride up in one someday,” said Bodoni.

“Fool!” cried Bramante. “You’ll never go. This is a rich man’s world.” … “No! We live in shacks like our ancestors before us.”

“Perhaps my sons—” said Bodoni.

“No, nor their sons!” the old man shouted. “It’s the rich who have dreams and rockets!” … “No, Bodoni, buy a new wrecking machine, which you need, and pull your dreams apart with it, and smash them to pieces.”

The old man subsided, gazing at the river in which, drowned, images of rockets burned down the sky.

“Good night,” said Bodoni.

“Sleep well,” said the other.

I have read and loved Ray Bradbury’s stories for over forty years because his prose is beautifully delivered and because, as a dreamer myself — who often reaches too high for his own good — I identify deeply with his wonderfully tragic heroes. There were many times that his captivating tales allowed me to escape from grim childhood days and nights, and for that I say to him, now in the Great Beyond for Great Writers: “Thank you!”

This review was written by Kevin Polman, author of THE EXTRA KEY and STORIES.

What you can do…

If you have children, I would strongly advise you let them play.

This does not mean sit them down in a structured environment and teach them how to do some kind of organized activity. I mean set them down with a broken radio, give them a pair of wire cutters and let them go to town. Let them go explore an old abandoned building. Take them to a state park and walk and explore there. Let them know about the Indians who used to live there. Walk them to a junk yard, and let them spend all day at it. Go to a local stream under a bridge, while you take a nap, let the kids play.

Spend time with them. Let them know that it is just fine to go about and throw things together. Give them the resources and then stand back. Give them some room. Let them figure it out on their own. Let them be children without supervision.

Take Aways

  • Boys like to build things.
  • Boys like to watch the reactions of others when they do something.
  • Funneling these interests into fun and innocent activities can be rewarding.
  • In the past, boys were free to build and experiment.
  • There are avenues to keep this interest alive if you know where to look.
  • A thinking person can use their scientific skills to provide answers to pesky problems.

RFH

How about a Request For Help? I tire of busybodies and statists who poke fun at the ideas and theories of others. They offer no constructive dialog. Rather they just make fun, ridicule, and then scurry under a rock.

I use this forum as a way to disseminate some of the things that I learned though my life.

So, if you, the reader, were so interested, I would welcome your stories about the shows and movies that you watched growing up and how they influenced you. I would welcome tales about how you did “experiments” with your chemistry kit, or made electrical devices to pull practical jokes with. I would love to hear about your various adventures.

This is my callout, to you the reader, to assist all of us in solving these mysteries. After all, this is a far better use of the internet than for looking at Justin Bieber videos.

FAQ

Q: Who was Vincent Price?
A: He was an iconic actor who made many famous horror movies in the 1960’s and 70’s. He greatly influenced culture at the time as his movies were typically B-grade horror flicks, and thus were provided free for children to watch at home.

Q: What is the Mad Scientist Club?
A: It is a series of stories written for children in their pre-teen years. It describes a normal life of a boy in the 1960’s. Today the behavior of the boys would be considered criminal, and the DHS might come and arrest the parents.

Q: What is the Man from Uncle?
A: This was a spy vs. spy television show that was popular during the 1960’s. It was full of spys and technology and top secrets of the day.

Q: Is it fun to be a mad scientist?
A: It is worth a try. Everyone has a little bit of crazy inside of them. Tools, and a little bit of creativity can create wondrous things, and great pranks.

Q: What does this have to do with MAJestic?
A: This has nothing to do with MAJestic. I am permitted to chat about anything that I am interested in. I like science, gadgets and playing around. So here you are. Perhaps reading this might enable you to get a little into my head. So that you can see that I am just a normal guy (or asshole, if you prefer).

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. First draft on 8MAR18.
  2. Revised by request 24MAR18.
  3. Revised by request 27MAR18.
  4. Revised by request 4APR18.
  5. Revised by request 20APR18.
  6. Ready for internet posting 23APR18.
  7. Added section for inspiration. 9JUL18.
  8. Added GIF 11JUL18.

Democrat Busybodies and the Destruction of Freedom

Hey! Just for fun, I went on Google and typed the words “Democrat ban”. Why are democrat busybodies so active in banning things? It came back with millions upon millions of entries. I did it on Bing, Duckduckgo, and a few others. In every instance, the results were astounding. Heck! Why are busybodies permitted to go on like they do? What do these busybodies expect to accomplish by to taking people’s money away and banning things? What is their malfunction?

Busybodies. It’s all pretty messed up…

Freedom

Now, to be fair, the Republicans are also out to ban things. It is just not so frantic, crazed, and so active at it as the Democrats are. If the internet is to be believed, Democrats are over one hundred times more likely to ban things than a Republican is. Nevertheless, that means nothing. Not really. Both political parties are run by crazed busybodies. Ah, that is why I like Libertarians and Libertines. They just want to be left alone and don’t give a darn what anyone else wants to do about their own life.

The beliefs of other people really shouldn’t matter to anyone, if we are in the kind of society that America was initially set up as. However, that is promised really not our present reality. The United States does not operate at all as if it was intended; as a guaranteer of freedom and liberty.

Rather it has been run as an empire run by the wealthiest people in the world (many who are not Americans) who have set up serfdom where they successfully milk the American citizenry for financial gain.

American are Controlled

In order to keep the “rank and file” Americans in line, they have setup a system of fears, rules and laws. Each and every single one is an encroachment of individual liberties and freedom.

To put this in perspective, you (the reader) must understand what “freedom” is. It’s not taught in school. It’s hardly ever discussed in a political speech (except by a handful of notable exceptions). What is freedom? Freedom is the ability to do what you want without impediment.

You want to eat sunny-side-up eggs? If you can eat them, then that is freedom. If you cannot, such as in certain places in New Jersey, that is not freedom. It doesn’t matter what the reasoning is for banning something. (A person can come up will all kinds of reasons to justify any action.) Fundamentally, when you take an ability away, you limit freedom.

When you cannot do something, you do not have that freedom. It is gone. It is obliterated.

The Impossible Dream

Ah, the incredulous internet millennial responds; “So you are telling me that I can kill someone else and that is freedom?” My response is very simple. If you can do SOMETHING, without any barriers by society and government, then you have freedom.

Now, let’s not get silly.

No one should have the ability to infringe on other people’s freedom. Killing a person would do that. Therefore, you do not have the freedom to remove other people’s freedom.

Which is, if you think about it, the primary purpose of society and governments instituted by men (“people” for you progressives out there, as well as Microsoft word affectionados). It’s all in the fundamentals.

What about the Constitution?

What has become of the freedom and liberty that was promised to us in the Constitution?  This is both the State Constitution as well as the Federal Constitution. The government should be the guaranteer of liberty and freedom, not the arbitrators of it.

The government is not your parent, or some autocratic leader who hands out gifts to favored individuals (a nod to former President Barrack Obama).

As intended, the United States should let people be people. Then, while people are doing what people do, stand back and let them live life unencumbered.

That is not the way it is.

Busybodies Run our World

The fact is that America is filled with “busybodies”.  They are everywhere. From the five year old bossing their classmates around to the coworker from Hell. All they way up the scale to organized (and funded) Democrat busybodies and beyond. They occupy almost every single position in society, and tend to pester and aggravate everyone else.

Unfortunately, in the United States, they have become organized into huge busybody collectives. Which go by such names a BLM, Antifa, and “deep state“.

As such, they are a royal “pain in the neck”. They demand to tell us how to live our lives. They want to do so many many miles away from us. Those that are already established with a rich support network, such as billionaire George Soros, live in wealthy enclaves. They use surrogates to perform their street-level activities.

George soros uses snopes as a propiganda arm to support many of his nefarious activities within the united states. snopes is not impartial. They have a political agenda. It is an agenda that they are paid to promote.
George Soros was an early contributor to Snopes, and has provided financial backing to the organization for years.

Indeed, it can be summed up quite simply. They want to take your money to fund their lavish lifestyles while they pronounce edicts to limit what you can do.

They call themselves many names. They justify their actions in many ways. However, the sad and factual truth is that they are nothing less than busybodies. Oh, excuse me, busybodies with great PR (if you have been paying even a smidgeon of attention to American media today).

Today, I want to discuss one of the biggest organized groups of busybodies in the United States today; the Democrat party. (We will also spend some time discussing some aligned offshoots such as the BLM, SJW, and Antifa movements.)

In particular, I would like to take the opportunity to concentrate on their love for bossing people around, meddling into other people’s business, and generally destroying freedoms every single chance they get. They are amok. They are like a spoiled child that is throwing food all over a room. They are like a rabid dog, all out of control.

Let’s take a look at their busybody activities…

America is Complicated

There are many articles about Democrats in the United States today. You simply cannot watch any news without some democrat, or a democrat aligned organization, trying to redefine things, stripping freedoms away, or generally trying to take your money.

I’ve got to tell you all, it’s out of control.

They have become more than just a simple nuisance. They have become the enemy of freedom. Oh, they have their excuses! Moreover, what excuses they have become! My gosh, you’ve got to have an IQ of a snail to actually believe some of the excuses.

  • It’s for the children.” That’s a famous line from former President Bill Clinton. He used it quite often.
  • It’s to stop racism.” Poof out of thin air, sometime around 2009 EVERYTHING in the United States became racist. It’s a manufactured narrative. I have other writings on this curious sequence of events. Stay tuned.
  • It’s for your own good.” Ah, the “take your medicine and shut up defense”. This is used by dictators all over the world. Ah, the list can go on and on…

America is Out of Control

Ok, now let’s take a “reality check” here.

There are so many things that are going on in the United States today, that it is just impossible to enumerate every single one of them. I am not going to bother. If you are offended by this, then go away. America today is what it has evolved into. This is neither right or wrong. It just is the way things are.

Some people say that American has gone to “Hell in a hand basket”, while other says it’s just fine as it is. They say America is an exceptional place; a worthy place. It is a place of greatness. Both narratives have their followers. I can actually see both points of view. As such, I would argue that it is both and neither of those two extremes. What America is today is complicated.

America is complicated because we have permitted that crazy busybody down the street to tell us what we can and cannot do.

America was never structured that way. Our founders assumed that their children would recognize a “spoiled brat”, a thief, a crazy person, a misfit, a megalomaniac, a radical, and a busybody. They believed that our children (us) would have the “Brass Balls” to deal with the insolent before they got out of hand and created some “real” damage.

“There is such a large difference in the experience of generations growing up in the post WWII era and those growing up today that it is almost impossible for most youngsters of today to understand and accept as truth a grandfather’s tales of “the way it was”.

That 1950’s style childhood freedom might still exist to some extent in small towns and for kids raised on farms but it isn’t even a believable tale for most kids of today.

Kids today who aren’t permitted to walk to the corner store or a few blocks to school cannot comprehend what it was like for children their age to walk back and forth to schools a mile or more away or walk a paper route of several miles every day.

It wasn’t unusual to see a couple of young boys walking down the street carrying their rifles to go shoot some squirrels in the woods or plink at rats at the local open dump.

Today they send kids home from school for making the letter “L” with their thumb and forefinger.”

-14 posted on 2/3/2018, 6:55:18 PM by Vlad The Inhaler (The only trannie I want to see is a Muncie 4 Speed M-22 Rock Crusher) 

You might not like what I am saying because it is so blunt. However it is very true.

Look at the people in who are demanding changes to the society. They want multiple genders. They demand equality by punishing non-conformance. These people would have been locked up behind bars just a few years ago. They would be considered a danger to themselves, as well as a general danger to the public good. All of them have obvious mental disorders and you would need a DSM handbook to classify many of them.

Listen to what they are saying. Listen to what they are demanding. These are Busybodies of the lowest order. I do not care about their reasons, their excuses, or their justifications. Do not give me any excuses. They are busybodies. Period.

American Rent-a-Busybody

Just who are these “busy bodies” that want to control your and my life? Who are they really? What makes them get up out of bed and come all the way over to your town? What makes them want to interrupt YOUR coffee and donut? Why do they block the road while you are off trying to make it to work? Why?

Often times they don’t live locally.

They do not live “down the street”. Instead they are often in another state often geographically far removed from where we live. They are typically bused in to the protest location, taught how to protest, fed, provided with signs and “battle gear” and instructed in strategies to utilize. They are “rent a radical”, they are “paid protesters”. They are pawns in a huge game of chess. They are the cat’s paw used by the people who really control all of us.

Today, people want to ban certain kinds of advertisements like this. Craigslist advertisement for people to become a paid protester.
The Internet has made it easy to recruit protesters for hire. You just put an ad in the paper or blog ,and people flock to you. Now of course, the Soros-backed Snopes will disagree saying that this is all just a hoax or a misunderstanding. In fact, almost all the media is now parroting the “grass-roots” organic creation of these protests, but it’s all a lie. People have come out admitting that they were paid, showing bank statements and agreements that they signed, and legal action has even started against protest organizers who failed to pay the protesters that they had actually hired.

Busybodies are bused in to where you live. They are paid to influence YOUR life. They are paid to disrupt your life and are permitted to break laws without consequence. Their media support arm protects them every step of the way. They work hand in hand to achieve combined objectives.

Meanwhile, they and those who support them, promptly surround their property with fences and guards, if it wasn’t already in a gated community, that is. Then, safe and secure, they dictate their poison and spew their hate. Why are they so fixated in what we do? What is their problem? What is their malfunction? What compels them to think that they know better than I do?

Why it is Out of Control

They ARE out of control, and the society of Americans inside America isn’t doing anything to stop them. There just aren’t any controls. There aren’t any brakes on their behaviors. There are no punishments when they commit crimes, and there aren’t any consequences when they hurt or damage others, property or lives.

The argument is that, “…well, it’s their freedom of speech”.

Wow, how so very selective. They can block emergency vehicles and cause people to die. They can destroy public monuments, interrupt public discourse, and attack people with mace, acid and nails, and no one is permitted to stop them.  It’s their freedom, is the argument.

Well that argument is specious.

The truth is that Americans are enduring a constructed reality. It is a reality and a situation that was put in place by powerful and rich oligarchs with a set defined objective. That these individuals pay off people and police to look the other way, that they pay off the media to report on things selectively, that they pay off the protesters.  All this money and all these funds come directly for you; the tax payer. It is recycled out of your pocket to manipulate you.

It is designed to change the society that you and I live in.

26th of 48 laws of power
Keep your hands clean
You must seem a paragon of civility and efficiency, your hands are never soiled by mistakes and nasty deeds. Maintain such a spotless appearance by using others as scapegoats and cat’s-paws to disguise your involvement.

This has happened before. It has happened in other nations. It always is successful in it’s short-term goals. However, the long-term changes are often a surprise to the oligarchs which manufacture this construct.

The results of all this will be a surprise.

Let’s look at another time, and learn from it. Let’s look at the consequences of the aftermath of the American Civil War. For that was one horrific and bloody war. It split the United States into pieces and brother fought brother, and there were many a crippled and emotionally damaged person afterwards.

Let’s look what happens when a mentally deranged busybody rises to a position of power, and what happens when the checks and balances of society fail to stop their madness.

Let’s look at a typical busybody and what motivates them.  As there are many, in different sizes and shapes.  Some are just loners who hide behind the curtains in their homes and make “anonymous” complaints against others.  Some are more brazen, and show up in public surrounded by a mini-mob or supporters. Others, take a even more active role they go into politics.

For now, let’s take a look at what happens when a busybody gets power. Let’s look at prohibitionist Carry A. Nation. After all, she, nearly singlehandedly, “improved” America by banning alcohol.

Prohibitionist Carry A. Nation

Here, a “busy body”, with obvious emotional issues managed to galvanize a nation against drinking alcohol. There are many articles about her and the chain of events that she set in motion. I will assume that the reader understands that for about a decade (1920 to 1933 in the United States) it was against the law to make, drink or sell alcohol.

This is the woman who started this event.

Let’s look at who she was and what her motivations were.  For obviously, in her mind, she knew what was best for everyone else.  She was better.  She was superior.  She was smarter.  She was more spiritual. She was above everyone else.

Sounds like some people in government today, eh? Any other public person comes to mind? How does someone embrace such a mental illness and get away with it?

The answer is very simple. We let them.

Fat, ugly, ignorant, Carry Nation was a woman who used her group of enraged radical followers to turn a nation on it's head and abolish drinking and other vices.
Progressive busybody Prohibitionist (and crazy woman) Carry Nation was permitted to convince Americans of the importance of absence from having fun. Prohibitionist Carry A. Nation.(Image Source.)

She had a Failed Marriage

Why? My goodness, why did she go about trying to change America? Why did she believe that banning social gatherings and taking away drinking would benefit America. How did she think it would improve America? Why did she insist in fundamentally changing America?

Well, for starters, she had a mental illness.

Yup, she really most certainly did. Now, historians have blamed her failed marriage for the sickness. However, I have other ideas. You have to realize that mental illness is never caused by one lone single event. It is caused by a collect of events that contribute to a fixed mental state over time. Yes. She had a failed marriage, but her sickness ran much deeper than that.

She was the Scarlet O’Hara in real life.

She lost her slaves, and her family plantation. She lost her family, and her loved ones. She lost her status in society. She lost her social network, and everything that mattered to her. Then, at an early age married a heavy drinker. I am sure that there were other contributors, things that were never written about at that time in history…

When you have everything, and then lose it you can lose your mind as well. Carry Nation was the real-life Scarlett O'Hara.
Carry Nation went quite mad after her family lost everything during the American civil war. It must have been a great shock to her system. Her world turned upside down. One minute she is a sweet Southern Belle who is part of a wealthy slave-owning family on an enormous plantation, and then after losing everything she is a single commoner living far, far away in another area with strangers.

She had a sad life. She has my sympathy. It’s tough sometimes, especially when you are alone and no one knows your hurt.

However, rather than focusing on her contribution to the failure, she went outward.  She blamed others, and other situations. It is sort of like Hillary Clinton trying to blame everyone else for her 2016 Presidential failure. It doesn’t work. It never works. (Oh, her followers might disagree. You know, Hitler, Stalin, and Vlad the Impaler had followers too.)

When things go wrong you need to see what happened, you identify what you could have changed and what was beyond your control. Then you make adjustments and better your life. At least that is what “normal” people do.

We need to Confront our Demons

You cannot grow as a person unless you confront your failures. That is how humans learn. That is how we grow.

This is a woman who came from the hills of Kentucky. She was a spoiled, pampered girl who grew up in a large slave-holding family. We know that her family was quite “well to do” and that they owned a large farm with a lot of slaves, according to the State Historical Society of Missouri. She was probably attended to by her own house slave as was common at the time.

Yup, she was used to giving orders and lording over other people.

When she was 21, after the Civil War, her family lost their farm. They lost the main house, all the outbuildings, and all of their farm equipment. They lost their house slaves. They lost their field hands and all of their field slaves. They lost everything except their lives.

So they bundled everything into their lone remaining carriage and abandoned the ruins of their home. They left everything they knew and all that they loved.

They then chose to relocate to Missouri, where she married Charles Gloyd. He was a young doctor who had served in the Union Army. However, he had his own demons, as he was an alcoholic who couldn’t hold down a job or support her.

Shortly after her marriage, she became pregnant. (As was quite common at the time. First time sex and nine months later she pops out a baby.) She left her husband and went back to her parents. Her daughter Charlien, named after Gloyd, was born in September, and her husband Gloyd died just a few months later.

The real causes of madness are often hidden behind unspoken truths.
Carry Nation became a busybody as a means of adapting to her madness. She could not handle just how radically her life changed, and so she lashed out. Being used to wealth and attention, the change to being a poor “nobody” was a real shock to her.

So here is a pampered Southern Belle whose life was turned upside down by the American Civil War. Her parents fled the ravages of their plantation and started life anew. She was a young woman then, and fell in love with a doctor. He was young, full of “piss and vinegar”, and had his own issues. She gave birth to a child and her husband died.

All in all, it sounds like she had an awful life.

Although she rebuilt her life, becoming a teacher and eventually remarrying to a lawyer named David Nation, the memory of her first dysfunctional marriage influenced Nation. Though, I would bet that it was just a focus for many issues that haunted her life. Nothing in this world is the result of one singular issue. That is a “black and white” narrative. Everything is a combination of many factors. It is often complex.

You know the world can be a tough and a difficult place. Sometimes those who have to endure it are scarred for life; they are scarred in ways that others cannot see. They hurt deeply and tragically. They carry this hurt around with them deep down inside.

If she were alive today, my guess is that she would be overweight, shaved away one side of her hair, and dyed the remaining hair a bright color. She would also have many tattoos and piercings. The costumes change, the looks change, but the people stay the same.

It is the socially acceptable look of an angry woman bound down by the chains of her past.

She was a Religious Zealot

“The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and jails into storehouses.”

- Billy Sunday

As she got older, Nation began having “visions” and became increasingly religious. (For those of you who are unaware, there is a series of mental illnesses that describe this condition.) Yah, she was a sick person for certain.

Having “visions”, eh?

Her husband also became a preacher, the historical society writes. They moved to Kansas, she found other women who also had demons to slay. She found an audience who would listen to her. She found listeners. She found followers. In them, she found strength. With these followers, she organized a local chapter of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

The American civil war devastated many peoples lives. Friends, siblings, and family lost their lvies. Empires, homes and fortunes were destroyed. Many lost their slaves, and now found themselves destitute.
Carry Nation wasn’t the only person who had suffered. Others had lost husbands, siblings, and family during the American civil war. Many had lost their homes, and with that all of their slaves. She was able to unite many angry and frustrated people who were dealing with the aftermath of a horrible war. They became busybodies and their answer to control was through the banning and control of the actions of others.

The union, founded in 1874, had the singular goal of banning alcohol. Of course they had a reason. They said that it was because of the suffering it caused to families.  They specifically organized to protect the women and children whose male relations drank to excess. Oh yes, you read that right…

They did it for the children.

It was a Different Time

27th of 48 laws of power
Play on people’s need to believe to create a cult-like following
People have an overwhelming desire to believe in something. Become the focal point of such desire by offering them a cause, a new faith to follow. Keep your words vague but full of promise; emphasize enthusiasm over rationality and clear thinking. Give your new disciples rituals to perform, ask them to make sacrifices on your behalf. In the absence of organized religion and grand causes, your new belief system will bring you untold power.

Now that was a different time. At that time, women lacked many legal rights that we take for granted today. They had to depend on male breadwinners for some or all of the family income. If the primary breadwinner was an alcoholic (and perhaps violent) it was a really big deal.

Unfortunately, the anti-alcohol crusade quickly came to also encompass other perceived sources of social “impurity”. They expanded to ban such things as smoking and sexual promiscuity. (Lord knows that no male in his right mind would want to date an angry woman who would not let him drink. My guess is that she and her followers probably didn’t get enough loving. This does not necessarily mean sexual activity, but compassion and understanding.  Without this physical need fulfilled, they lashed out in anger over it.)

They took to politics.

Their union proposed to cure these vices through empowering women to vote. Then with the power to vote they could leverage a huge voting bloc. With this power they could revise the laws so that they would benefit women and woman’s causes. They could move the nation away from being a nation ruled by men to a nation ruled by women! (Though they most certainly promoted it as a nation ruled by both men and women.)

Ah yes. The world domination theme.

Sound familiar, or maybe you saw this in a Hollywood movie. Or maybe you have been watching Washington, D.C. politics. You become a political power and ENFORCE your desires on your fellow citizens through the blunt force of law.

World Domination was a theme reserved for evil dictators, despots or evil villains.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s everyone considered evil people to be very rich, powerful, in control of many things, and obsessed with world domination. Does this sound like anyone in modern politics today? Hum?

The Bolder the Better!

28th of 48 laws of power
Enter action with boldness
If you are unsure of a course of action, do not attempt it. Your doubts and hesitations will infect your execution. Timidity is dangerous, better to enter with boldness. Any mistakes you commit through audacity are easily corrected with more audacity. Everyone admires the bold; no one honors the timid.

As a leader, Carry Nation, took a more direct-action approach to the prohibition crusade than many of her followers who surrounded her. Noting all her supporters, she became emboldened.  She felt that she was above the law.

She believed that through her divine understanding that she could do what she wanted.

So, in 1900, she grabbed a hatchet and barged right into a bar and started to swing it about wildly. She started to smash things, including tables, chairs, bottles, and the men who were quietly minding their own business alone in the bar. This particular episode in the bar at the Carey Hotel in Wichita, Kansas made her famous. She was arrested, but…

“Nation, who was released shortly after the incident, became famous for carrying a hatchet and wrecking saloons,” 

-History.com.

She discovered something important. The news media will promote you for free. All you need to do is be outlandish, and do outrageous things. You need to be a train wreck. Like Charlie Sheen, she was the train wreck of her day.

She made Money by Promoting Prohibition.

Carry Nation knew that she had to have rituals and brands that she could take and popularize.  For starters, she had her unusual name (which is also spelled “Carrie” in some accounts) trademarked in Kansas.

This was a very unusual thing to do. It simultaneously illustrates both her genius and her madness. Nation, who was almost six feet tall, used her commanding presence (at that time, most people were typically short in stature) to promote her movement and her desires. She also moved outside of Kansas, where the sale of alcohol was already technically illegal, and brought her vision (along with her trademark hatchet) to other places.

“Her behavior provoked a tremendous uproar and sent her to jail repeatedly for disorderly conduct and disturbing the peace. Later, fines were paid by the sale of pewter hatchet pins, Nation wielded her voice as effectively as her hatchet, eloquently speaking her mind and inspiring others on numerous occasions. Even sworn enemies acknowledged her success with compelling enforcement of prohibition laws and spreading her message.”

Nation and her husband divorced in 1901. I am sure that it was for good reason. Divorce was very rare at that time. So to grant a divorce there had to be a really good reason. After the divorce she went on a number of speaking tours throughout the rest of her life. It’s an easy way of making money.

Barrack Obama, and  both the Clinton’s do this today. It’s an excellent way to collect huge sums of money for little physical exertion. (The truth be told that there wasn’t really anything new that she could say. People went to the rallies to give her money . That was the mechanism, and they might get the opportunity to meet her in person as a result of it.)

I am not judging, just saying.

Her efforts enabled her to buy a small farm in Arkansas. We know that she intended to turn it into a prohibition school to teach her followers how to be an obnoxious busybody and fight for the “good cause”.  Luckily, she died in January 1911. Her train wreck of a life was finally over. However, her followers persisted. She started a trend that soon grew into a tidal wave of support.

Around a decade later, the Eighteenth Amendment was passed.

Consequences of her Insanity

In the United States, everyone associated with alcohol became a criminal.  That represented a huge swath of the nation.  In fact, I dare say, that all Americans at that time in one way or the other were breaking the (various) laws set up to create an American utopia.

This was, of course, a utopia driven by and manufactured by people with serious personality flaws. These were flaws so egregious that they were strongly suggestive of mental illness. Here are some of just a few of the other problems that resulted when we permitted her insanity to influence us;

  • Racism became common under prohibition. Yeah. You “cure” one societal ill, and you make others much, much worse.
  • Organized Crime Flourished. Only organized crime represented the needs of the American people. The police became the “bad guys”. The government became the “club” of the ultra-rich and they became more and more dissimilar to the “rank and file” Americans each and every day.
  • Decline in amusement and entertainment industries. Prohibition’s supporters were initially surprised by what did not come to pass during the implementation of their utopia. When the law went into effect, they expected sales of clothing and household goods to skyrocket. They figured that with men no longer going to bars and spending money on booze, that they would spend it on clothing and furniture for the children. That did not happen. Other people hopping on to the prohibition’s “band wagon” were surprised as well.  Real estate developers and property owners expected rents to rise as saloons closed and neighborhoods improved. Chewing gum, grape juice, and soft drink companies all expected growth. Theater producers expected new crowds as Americans looked for new ways to entertain themselves without alcohol. None of it came to pass. Instead, the unintended consequences proved to be a decline in amusement and entertainment industries across the board. Restaurants failed, as they could no longer make a profit without legal liquor sales. Theater revenues declined rather than increase, and few of the other economic benefits that had been predicted came to pass.
  • Prohibition Criminalized Everyday People. Until that time, most people thought of the police as always “on their side”. The police were people who helped you out when you need it. By making everyone a potential criminal, the entire dynamic of the United States changed. Now, as it still is in many places, it’s “us” versus “them”.
  • It forced the expansion of the Income Tax. On the whole, the initial economic effects of Prohibition were largely negative. Apparently, the only people who prospered during this time were those “running the show”;  the followers of Carry nation and their ilk. The closing of breweries, distilleries and saloons led to the elimination of thousands of jobs, and in turn thousands more jobs were eliminated for barrel makers, truckers, waiters, and other related trades. It completely wrecked an entire industry, and all the other industries that supported it. The unintended economic consequences of Prohibition didn’t stop there. One of the most profound effects of Prohibition was on government tax revenues. Before Prohibition, many states relied heavily on excise taxes in liquor sales to fund their budgets. In New York, almost 75% of the state’s revenue was derived from liquor taxes. With Prohibition in effect, that revenue was immediately lost. At the national level, Prohibition cost the federal government a total of $11 billion in lost tax revenue, while costing over $300 million to enforce. Prohibition lasted from 1920 until 1933. The most lasting consequence was that many states and the federal government would come to rely on income tax revenue to fund their budgets going forward. The federal income tax, and well as many State taxes expanded during this time. If you are unhappy doing your taxes come April, you should start screaming that the crazy bitch who forced them into your life, not the taxman.
  • Corruption of public officials. Prohibition led to the growth of widespread corruption of public officials by organized crime. This enabled gangsters to conduct their illegal operations. The extent of the corruption was a national scandal. There were other effects as well. Prior to Prohibition, most people didn’t give firearms a second thought. However, during Prohibition, organized crime started to arm themselves with military grade weapons. They began to be equipped with Tommy guns, and BARs.
  • Extension of US Naval territorial waters. The U.S. government began to push for an extension of the area of the ocean over which governments have jurisdiction, from 3 miles to 12, which would make it much more difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous to run liquor in from the larger ships. The U.S. eventually succeeded in pushing its national borders outward, expanding national sovereignty over oceans, another unexpected consequence of our anti-alcohol policies.
  • The Rise Of Cocaine And Heroin. Cocaine was taken by people in the United States long before Prohibition came into effect, but it experienced a spike in popularity in the 1920s, particularly among the jazz scene of the time. Whether or not this was due to Prohibition or pure coincidence is unclear. However Prohibition was probably a major contributor.
  • Court System breakdown. One of the main reasons that Prohibition ultimately failed was the pressure it placed on law enforcement, the courts, and prisons. By the time it became apparent that people would not simply abstain from alcohol as largely expected, US law enforcement was at its breaking point, the court systems were backing up, and the prisons were getting full.  You can thank this full-on crazy bitch for making the Prison a household word in America.
  • A distrust in elected officials. Um, they should be distrusted.

Summary

Well, let’s look at the checklist for this famous busybody.

  • She had a failed life.
  • Unable to reconcile it, she turned outward.
  • She became a religious fanatic, and set up a profitable business around her religious message.
  • Using the money she made and her huge following, she was able to pressure the government to do her bidding.
  • They prohibited alcohol.

In the process they hurt America and it, to this day, has not recovered. Indeed, the rest is history.

Destruction of liberty can only last so long until freedom eventually breaks through. That was the case with the banning of beer and ale in the United States.
About fuckin’ time. (Image Source.) Prohibition finally ended after ten long, long years of living under the rules set up by busybody Carry nation. Today, it has been over one hundred years since the 16th amendment (Income Tax) was passed. You would think that Americans would do something about it by now. You would think.  Her efforts to ban things, like all busybodies, are just like the Democrats today.

How they get away with all this

It does not matter what their “cause” is. It does not matter who they are, where they are, who they influence or what manner that they go about wreaking havoc. They get away with it when good men stand aside and do nothing.

  • When laws are not enforced.
  • When repeat offenders are not monitored.
  • When the mentally ill are permitted to organize.
  • When an issue / cause get’s promoted in the media.
  • When they are funded, and those funding their behaviors face no consequences.

Such is the case today in the United States. While crazy lunatic Carry Nation disrupted the lives of Americans for a couple of decades, it is the SWJ movement that is really out of control.

Social Justice Warriors (SJW)

Here is a real “pain in the ass” group of “busy bodies”. They are called “Social Justice Warriors”. Or, SWJ for short. They are busybodies on steroids. Not only that but they are funded by powerful financial interests, and allowed to fester in incubators such as university campuses.

Need I remind everyone that this was the exact same breeding ground for the 1989 pro-democracy movement in China. What happened to those SWJ’s? Anyone?

Anyone remember what happened to them? Anyone?

Tanks were called in to a very large public rally and they were all machine gunned down. Those not at the rally were hunted down, rounded up and put into hard-labor camps. Many are still there. Working in the mines, eating lard and fish heads, and having their organs harvested.

American SWJ; following in the footsteps of their China SWJ brethren…

They are pretty active now at the time that this article was being written. It might be due to the water, or maybe global warming. Whatever the reason, they are really a problem. Here, it is not one person, but an organized onslaught created with a sole purpose and objective in mind; a Social Utopia run and managed by “Busy Bodies”.

They want a utopia where they can sit up on a throne and tell everyone else HOW to live their life. They want to control other peoples speech, actions, activities, interests, dress, thoughts and religion. They want to control their thoughts. They want to control their actions. They want to control their appearance. They want to control everything.

Obviously they do not believe in America, freedom nor liberty. Obviously.

I have looked up and down the internet for a half decent description of what an SJW is. Everyone that I could find seemed to concentrate on one or two characteristics of the group. However, nothing really came close to defining exactly what a SWJ was. For most people, apparently, SJW fit whatever you wanted it to be. This wasn’t helpful.

That is like saying a busybody is a person who is busy with their body.

However, I have eventually found a very good description. A very good, detailed, description of what a SJW is can be found reprinted from “What Is A Social Justice Warrior (SJW)?” written by Roosh on 6OCT14. It’s pretty good;

Social justice warriors believe in an extreme left-wing ideology that combines feminism, progressivism, and political correctness into a totalitarian system that attempts to censor speech and promote fringe lifestyles while actively discriminating against men, particularly white men.

They are the internet activist arm of Western progressivism that acts as a vigilante group to ensure compliance and homogeny of far left thought.

The true definition of SJW is up for debate, but most generally it has become a catch-all term that describes feminists and liberals who actively try to solve the perceived social injustices of modern society by organizing in online communities to disseminate propaganda, censor speech, and punish individuals by getting them terminated from their employment.

They have also been successful at positioning themselves in the upper echelons of universities, media organizations, and tech companies.

I do have to agree with this.

There are people who have come up with different definitions for what a Social Justice Warrior is. Their explanations vary from the point of the view of the author.

To some, they are heroes and heroines. They will make the world right, and everyone will be happy with rainbows, and unicorns prancing about in fields of bright green clover. Men will turn into hermaphrodites.  Everyone would be the same, and all would think and act exactly like the leadership; ah, the leadership of a mentally unstable person.

32nd of 48 laws of power
Play to people’s fantasies
The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert, everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.

Personally,I think those people need to read a little more history. Especially the Cultural Revolution in China in 1966, and Pol Pot in Cambodia.  If you play with fire, you can and will get burned. Thank God, Americans still have their firearms!

Then there are those, like myself, who find them a potentially dangerous nuisance.

SWJ in China

Luckily for me, I live in China. There aren’t any SJWs out here. Not any longer.

Now you know, they began to make a little noise a few years back. Do you remember the “Tiananmen democracy protests“? (Yeah, let’s force China to become a democracy! Woo Woo!) Well, that didn’t go down very well. The government tried to negotiate with them, but they wouldn’t have anything to do with it. They wanted all or nothing.

The time was around 1987 to 1989.  (It had been fomenting underground for a year or two.) Now the Chinese government well-learned the lessons of the Cultural Revolution. (Yet, another SWJ effort, only this time being lead out of Beijing itself.) Now that event happened around two decades earlier. It was still FRESH in the minds of everyone. They remembered it as an AWFUL time.

That is because it actually WAS an awful time.

It was a terrible mistake that almost threw China into the dark ages. It resulted in the deaths of millions of people and just about destroyed the Chinese heritage. During that event, the SWJ’s were permitted to run amok. As a result they devastated the nation. They destroyed so many good things about China and almost ruined the nation to a point where it could NEVER recover.

They would NEVER permit that ever to happen again. Never, ever, they won’t ever allow that mistake to reoccur. No matter what.

The Chinese government quickly summed up the situation.

These SWJ’s had no intention on working together for change. They wanted things their way on their terms. They wanted to repeat the Cultural Revolution, only this time it was THEIR turn. And they would do it right. They wouldn’t make the same mistakes. (Oh, where have we heard that before?)

The SWJ’s felt that they had global public opinion on their side. They believed that if they could control the media, that they could control the Chinese government. As a result they started to work hand-in-hand with CNN and other western media outlets. CNN told them, instructed them, what to do and how to act. They started to attend specially constructed and staged photo-opportunities.

Well, CNN and their sister organizations weren’t doing the SWJ’s any favors. Over a short period of time, it became clear that powerful forces OUTSIDE of China wanted the SWJ movement to succeed.

Thus the Chinese government knew that they had to take action  and move quickly. Like it or not, they moved internal military forces in and took control of the situation promptly. The radical SWJ’s were all rounded up and collected. Public punishments were necessary for stability and to maintain social harmony. They were all thrown in prison back in the early-1990’s during the Tiananmen event.

Do not fall for the pro-democracy propaganda from the fake-news media in America. America is not, and never was, a democracy. These people were NOT peaceful protesters who wanted liberty and freedom. They were something else. They were radical SWJ who wanted and demanded a “seat at the table” so that they could set up a “new” government with THEM in charge.

Yeah. Do not fall for the Western propaganda.

Their behavior is not tolerated here, nor is the behavior of ANY busybody. You try to act as a SJW here, and you will be put away and organ harvested while you do hard labor. The same goes for BLM, AntiFa, and the myriad of similar organizations. China and the Chinese people have zero tolerance for this nonsense.

It is necessary to organ harvest in order to recoup some of the moneys used when dealing with the messes and issues that busybodies create.
In China, organ harvesting is a way to recoup the costs necessary to deal with busybodies. It costs money and takes time to deal with SWJ disruptions. There are lost wages, inefficiencies in labor, and all kinds of economic problems as a result. They only proper way to deal with these individuals is to have them pay for the costs that they incur. As most are unskilled, or at best under-skilled, the only way to recoup the costs they incur is through organ harvesting. That is the most efficient and humane way of recouping losses that they generated.

Yes. You read that correct. Do NOT fall for the media propaganda, and it is propaganda. Those involved with the Tiananman event were anti-society busybodies who wanted to turn the nation on it’s head, and take over and make China into a Utopia with them in charge of it. CNN and the leadership only made it appear that they wanted a democracy. They wanted full tyrannical control using democracy as the means to obtain it.

Anyways, today China has ZERO tolerance for busybodies.

It doesn’t matter what their intentions are. It doesn’t matter how wonderful their idea of Utopia is. It doesn’t matter how many think-tanks, blue-ribbon panels, or studies that they arm themselves with. It doesn’t matter if you have contracts with CNN, Facebook, Google or any other large global software organization. It doesn’t matter if you have talked to the King of Social Upheaval, Barrack Obama the First. The Chinese don’t give a rat’s ass. If you are a busybody in China you will be segregated from society, punished, and if necessary, killed.

If you see an SWJ on the street, or they call you at work, or try to harass you in any way it’s easy to take care of. Just dial 119. Bye bye SJW, say hello to a country that DOESN’T MESS AROUND.

China harvests the organs of convicted inmates.
China does not mess around. If you try to be a busybody, and you try to start messing with society, the government will arrest you. They will convict you. They will punish you. And, they will harvest your organs. Which is why you will not see any SWJ, BLM, Antifa or George Soros minions in China. (Or in Japan, or in Korea, or in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia or even Thailand or Burma.) They are never allowed to fester and rot the fabric of society. Do you think that this chick will go protest on the street, harass a government official, burn a police car, topple a statue, or act as an on-line troll after she leaves confinement? What do you think? It’s gonna be hard to do without her liver.

Not only that, but they will seek you out if you live in another nation. If you even try to fuck around with the Chinese social structure, you will be sought out. One person, or one hundred businesses, it doesn’t matter. They will come FOR YOU. You will be hunted down. You will be carted back to China, and you WILL suffer the consequences.

The Chinese do not take kindly to SWJ individuals.
There is no where to hide if you mess around with the Chinese. They will find you. They will get you (legal or not), and they will bring you to China for swift justice. These folk thought that they were safe in the EU. It doesn’t matter, you cannot hide from the Chinese.

Ah, you’ve got to love China. This is a nation that knows what it’s priorities are and does not mess around.

Humans are not equal

Hey! Here’s a newsflash: no one is equal. We are all different. We look different. We act different. We have different strengths, and desires. The only time when we should be treated equal is in regards to proportion exercises. Other than that, fuhgeddaboudit.

And, while I am at it, don’t lecture me on my “white privilege”.

I sure as heck didn’t have any. My life was HARD. When I was fourteen I was hauling coal under the friggin’ ground and then loading them into railroad hoppers at the crack of dawn. We rode busted hoppers down inclines with faulty brakes. We rode the underground train to blast sites and stood by while we blew out coal shutes. What were you doing?

When I got older, I stood under hot molten steel while it was being poured into molds that I had to hold upright with metal poles. We inhaled toxic gasses, and were allowed a ten minute break to grab some fresh air and a smoke before we had to go back and stand under that blazing cauldron. What were you doing?

After work I had to go to school, and all the time I was being picked on because my family were Polock Catholics. Yeah, I was called names. So fucking what? Yeah, I was crappy playing basketball, and I was the last one picked on school teams. So fucking what? What the fuck have you been doing with your worthless life? How have you been contributing to your family? To your friends? To your society?

Life is hard. Get over it.

I most especially don’t want to be lectured by a fat, obese chick that hasn’t taken a bath in a week, thinks tattoos on the face are beautiful, has nose plugs the size of quarters, and is unemployed.  I do not appreciate being yelled at while you try to shove your fat obese body up to me. Do not think that I will not punch you back in the face when you do so.

Just leave me alone.

Do Not mess around with the tiger. It might look good and nice, but it does not like busybodies. If you tug on it's tail it will lash back and do more than simply bite you.
There are those of us who have ABILITIES, far in excess of what people expect. We are nice. We are kind. We look nice enough to pet. However, we can be very dangerous. Do not mess with the tiger.

Back to Roosh and his discussion of SWJ

Roosh goes on and breaks down some significant characteristics of SJW “warriors”. He has done quite a good job on this. (Warning, if you are under the age of ten, you might get “triggered”. I suggest you either leave, or take a Valium.)

Remember, boys and girls, the quotes are from Roosh and are HIS own opinions. They are not my quotes or statements. So if you are triggered or angry then you will need to take a stress pill and relax.

We need to relax and not take things too seriously.
This all might be too stressful for you. I would advise you to take a stress pill and relax. What is written herein are my opinions. They do not have to be part of your reality.

Roosh goes on, in his very opinionated way, about SJW’s and the value that they place on the view of other people. Ok. It’s his opinions. But all busybodies, no matter where you live, hold this same belief…

Being a SJW is a badge that says “I am a busybody, and I am in your face about it! I am better than you. Bow to me. Because I am the silver clad knight protecting and righting the wrongs of the past!”

Using a “privilege” hierarchy, SJW’s calculate the worth of a human being based on perceived injustices or wrongs that group has suffered since the time of ancestral man, using selective and narrow interpretations of history.

SJW’s elevate groups that they believe have received the least amount of “privilege” in the past, and then use internet activism in the form of mobs and community purges to target those who are determined to have greater amounts of privilege. The idea of privilege is so essential to SJW ideology that a common debate tactic they use is to say “check your privilege,” which roughly translates to, “you must immediately halt or change your speech because your ancestors may or may not have done bad things to women or minority races.”

For example, if a notable white American male makes a joke about a lesbian black woman who practices Islam, SJW’s will coordinate using a combination of blogs, Youtube, and social networking to dox him (publish his personal information, including where he works). They will then pressure the man’s company by flooding it with calls and messages with the goal to remove his source of income while engaging in a mass reporting campaign to get his online accounts suspended.

Their ultimate goal is to silence all speech that they don’t like and which they find offensive while also punishing the speech offender by removing his source of income. As they grow in power, the acceptable range of speech that would trigger an SJW witch hunt is becoming more narrow, and those who are high up on the privilege hierarchy (white men) have to speak through a careful filter if they don’t want to be subject to an SJW attack.

Roosh has a point. It is very difficult to argue against this. Numerous examples of this are everywhere. And yes, by selectively targeting people based on their exercise of American free speech, they actually are being selective in how they treat, attack and judge people.

They can make up the criteria on the spot out of thin air. They do not need to follow any guidelines except how the accuser SWJ feels.

Of course, none of this would actually be an issue, if the governments enforced the law, monitored radicals, and imprisoned people trying to upset social harmony. Luckily there are still nations that have concern for their citizens.

China does not mess around. If you think that you can can hide in Taiwan and try to disrupt the harmony of some one who lives in China, you are sorely mistaken. The Chinese will come for you. They will get you. They will give you a trial and a fair sentencing. You will then learn what real justice is. You don’t mess around with a country that takes SWJ activity seriously.

Any SWJ that hurts Chinese citizens or residents is fair game when it comes to capture and imprisonment.
If you are a SWJ in Taiwan, you are not safe. The Chinese will come and get you. As they have many, many times previously.

Consensus is Better than Objectivity

It is the end of the individual. It is the end of private and personal opinion. It is the end of free speech. Everything that a person must do or say must be approved by the group collective. These busybodies use popular opinion while they have strength in numbers to push their agenda, whatever it is at the moment. In earlier times this was called “rule by mob”, or simply shortened to “mob rule”.

SWJ use groups of people to form mobs to influence others. They browbeat others. They attack, attack, attack and make life pretty miserable if you do not bow before them.  They are the kings. They are the Gods that YOU must OBEY.

Indeed, Roosh breaks this down quite well.

SJW’s do not believe in objectivity. Instead, speech and ideas must be viewed relatively depending on the source and its intended audience. The feeling of the statement must also be taken into account, which can be affected by current news, cultural moods, and pop trends.

For example let’s consider the statement “Asian people are nerds.” If a famous white man uttered this phrase on Twitter after a major Japanese earthquake, a punitive SJW witch hunt may be triggered, but if a popular gay black female Youtuber said the exact same statement, no action would be taken.

The reason is because the black woman is low in the SJW privilege hierarchy and therefore has a greater range of free speech that she could give before triggering a witch hunt.

The white man, who is at the top of the privilege hierarchy, has no leeway to make a joke about any race since he is not in a protected SJW class. He would be decried as racist and a bigot, in spite of the fact that a statement like “Asian people are nerds” has low ambiguity regardless of the race or status of the person who said it.

The lack of such objectivity in SJWism is by design. It’s borrowed from Cultural Marxist thought, which argues that objectivity and the idea of right or wrong is less important than consensus. The reason is that consensus can be easily accomplished by controlling the narrative—cultural facts, ideas, and memes that are possessed by a specific population.

There are serious roots that are tied closely with Marxist thoughts and beliefs.  It is the method that enabled the decline of many societies to the enrichment of a mere handful of people.

SWJ in China is the same as SWJ in The United States.
SWJ is not about what they talk about. They are following the same formula. It is the overthrow of the status quo by powerful interested people who wish to remain hidden.

Obviously, the leadership in the SJW movement believe that they too, one day, will profit and benefit from the direction that the movement takes on. Indeed…

If one can manufacture consensus by controlling this narrative through domination of the media or by swiftly eliminating speech which goes against what “should” be believed, specific beliefs can be held even if they go against proven scientific thought or basic rationale. SJW tactics evolved by necessity to keep their ideology alive in a modern climate where science—even 100-year-old science—contradicts the bulk of their ideas.

For example, a basic tenet of SJW thought is that there is no difference between men and women besides their physical bodies, that evolution stopped at the neck for human beings and gave both sexes an identical brain. Human biology can not sustain this notion, so when a person tries to state that men and women are different to a large audience, the SJW does one of three things:

(1) Attempts to censor the speech through mob action

(2) Calls the person a misogynist who hates women to inoculate the general population from considering the accurate information presented

(3) Destroys the livelihood of the person by contacting his employer so that he is less able to exercise his free speech

Now, none of this should be a surprise to anyone. These are well known and well documented techniques. They are using techniques that have been proven to work in the past. They are using them with modern communication techniques, support and funding from very wealthy individuals and with a support network that includes selected government officials and a compliant media operation.

Roosh continues…

You’ll often encounter SJW debate tactics trying to use consensus to persuade you: “How can you think X when so many people think Y?” 

As you may already know, consensus is a poor judge of facts or morality. Consensus used to believe that the earth was flat and that the sun revolved around the Earth. Sadly, many great men were imprisoned or executed for going against consensus on beliefs that we know are true today. 

Consensus in America also supported the institution of slavery, which of course didn’t make it right. And not long ago consensus believed in segregation between whites and blacks, even in the north where slavery was not practiced. Consensus has been shown to be a dangerous method to validate ideas or behavior.

Observers will note that information control is a huge component of SJW ideology. They have no other choice—their ideas do not hold water to basic science and logic so SJW’s evolved mechanisms where they must control and censor speech which goes against their beliefs. 

By controlling what arguments or ideas people are exposed to, they have a greater chance of convincing others through manipulation and outright bullying of their world view to create the consensus they need to affect societal change. Some individuals buy into their cause because opposing viewpoints were hidden from them, often labeled as “hate speech.”

I have to tell the reader, I wouldn’t be able to devote such a large amount of time dissecting the way or techniques busybodies employ. For me, it is just enough to know that busybodies exist and how to avoid them.

All this talk about group think and group consensus is something right out of a George Orwell novel. All of it. It is like America has become some kind of crazy dystopian novel. However, the craziness is confined to the United States and similar nations.

Here in China, the SWJ’s are kept at bay. They know better than to try to disrupt the harmony of the Chinese society. In fact, if I were so bold, they are particularly sensitive to SWJ activity. The moment that there is any evidence of an SWJ trying to mess around in China, the entire weight of the Chinese legal system (and military) is mobilized. They go after SWJ’s no matter where they are. Even if they are hiding in South America or Mexico.

No use trying to be anonymous in the Americas. China will find you and come and get you. In the past, neither the United States, Canada, Mexico stopped the Chinese efforts to capture SWJ fugitives.

You cannot hide if you are an SWJ.
There is no where to hide. Even the vaulted United States will stand aside while the Chinese come and get a listed Chinese enemy. In fact, in the United States, federal agencies will even assist in the effort. See that guy on the left wearing the sunglasses. The Chinese never act alone. They always get assistance.

The messenger is Most Important

SWJ believe that they are important. They are the messengers of truth; the guardians of what is good and right.

There are many elements of this that are indicative of mental illness. Indeed anyone who runs entirely on emotion, with little in the way of mental reasoning are traditionally thrown into a mental hospital as they are unable to exist in any semblance of normalcy.  Intellect alone can be dangerous. Emotion alone can be dangerous. Wisdom is a careful blending of both.

Unfortunately, an inability to proportion out intellect and emotion is a mental illness. Roosh continues…

A big chunk of their activism depends on subjective feeling and perceived value of the parties involved. Before an SJW can make a decision on what is right or wrong, she must first know the race, gender, and sexuality of the involved participants so that she can decide whether or not to be outraged. A statement or idea in isolation is not enough for them to come to a conclusion on the acceptability of a statement. For example, consider the following statement:

“Abortion should not be used as a method of birth control.”

An SJW could not definitively respond to this statement unless they knew who uttered it. If I—a Caucasian man—published this statement on a popular site like CNN, the outrage would be immense. Most comments would accuse me of hating women and wanting to control their bodies. A petition would be started to prevent me from ever writing on CNN again. On the other hand, if a popular feminist like Jessica Valenti said this statement in the same publication, the response would be more balanced. She would receive some criticism but even support from individuals who would try to destroy my life had I said the exact same thing.

A person who believes in the scientific method would not be swayed by the messenger. They would analyze the statement and attempt to either verify it or not based on logic. SJW’s avoid such objective behavior.

Emotion fuels the actions of SWJ. Emotion. This is the same energy-cell that fuels crazy people. It is the exact same source of power that got all of Hitler’s followers killed. It was the source that resulted in the deaths of millions in Russia, in China, and in Cuba.

SWJ in China compared to the United States.
SWJ is not about what they talk about. They are following the same formula. It is the overthrow of the status quo by powerful interested people who wish to remain hidden.

Only China and Russia recognizes the dangers of SWJ’s. Americans are fat, lazy and stupid. They do not stand up for their nation, their culture, and their history. As a result, they are at the risk of losing it all to some wacked SWJ nut-cases embolden, financed and powered by the enemies of the United States.

I am reminded of a science fiction story by Ray Bradbury, where an alien race wants to invade the Earth. They don’t know how to do it because humans are so strong and powerful. So they find out a method. They decide to use the children, and in using them, they take over the world.

SWJ’s attack america by using our laws and our fears against us.

Groups are More Equal than Others

In many ways, SJWs are modern day “Brown Shirts”.  For those who don’t know, the Brown Shirts were an organization called The Sturmabteilung. They were a paramilitary organization of the Nazi Party. In fact, it was the Brown Shirts that helped Hitler rise to power in Germany. (Then he had the leadership all killed during the “night of the long knives”. Ah, yes. Know your history.)

Know your history.

The Sturmabteilung or SA men were often called Brown shirts because of the color of their uniforms which were similar to Benito Mussolini’s Blackshirts. Oh, they had their glory days. I think it lasted for under two decades. Then they were all killed. That’s life. Know your history, especially if you are trying to duplicate it.

Roosh continues…

SJW’s make a big show of wanting “equality,” but as the Animal Farm quote goes: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

They absolutely do not believe that a man deserves the same treatment that should be given to a woman of his same race.

When they say “equality,” what they really mean is to apply special benefits to protected groups in order to create equality based on their subjective perception and feeling. They even go so far as to claim that women and non-whites can not possibly be racist against white men.

If a black woman calls a white man a cracker, honky, redneck, hick, or peckerwood, she’s correcting historical wrongs and injustices, not being a racist individual.

Since they have no objective measure or guide of equality, it is only achieved when they feel it has been achieved, but then that would destroy the very reason for their existence, meaning that their war on inequality is similar to the war on drugs or terrorism.

It’s a perpetual war that will never be won in their minds because there will always be the creation of a new group needing privilege and equality. If you substitute the word “power” whenever they use “equality,” you’ll come to a more accurate descriptor of what motivates their activism.

If you want to do a simple test that hurts an SJW’s argument that she is about equality, ask her the following: “Do you believe a black woman is equal to a white woman?”

They will squirm mightily and may look to the left and right at their SJW friends to know what they think first before giving you a muddled answer that is inconsistent with their other stated beliefs.

You know, it’s going to get really interesting to see what happens to all these SJW individuals in the next ten years of so. If they become more powerful, then there will be a very nasty surprise for the SJW leadership. If they fade into the black, then the cultural impact will adversely affect the industries that support this behavior. It will be most certainly curious.

Roosh is correct.

Of course, the Chinese here will not care if you are hiding out in a suburb of liberal San Francisco or off on one of the islands of the Philippines. They will go and come after you. There is zero tolerance for disruption of social order.

The Chinese go after criminals and take them back to China.
The Chinese will go anywhere to get criminals. SWJ and their ilk are considered to be criminals. If you try to hide behind the internet, a telephone, a black mask, or a darkened car, they will consider you a threat. They will come for you and it will not matter where you live.

People must be Labeled

The tools of all tyrants.; depersonalize, demonize, and attack. However, you know what? We are all sick and tired of being labeled.

Every. Single. One. Of. Us.

Now, we wear it as a badge of honor. President Donald Trump’s former adviser, Steve Bannon, told French far-right nationalists accused of racism to “wear it as a badge of honor.” Name calling, like swearing loses its’ effectiveness through overuse. Don’t ya know…

If censorship is not an option, SJW’s attempt to destroy the reputation of the speech offender by labeling him a racist, misogynist, creep, bigot, xenophobe, homophobe, or transphobe.

This is one of their most reliable tactics to prime the general public against listening to individuals they don’t like because of the negative weight that such terms still carry. I personally have been called every label under the sun and a site I operate, Return Of Kings, was denounced in mainstream blogs sympathetic to SJW’s and then put on blacklists.

While labels are still effective today, SJW’s are diluting the power of them through overuse.

If the majority of men are decided to be “misogynist,” the general public will become desensitized to hearing it. We are already seeing signs of this whereby SJW’s have to escalate the labels to outright crimes. A tactic I have been seeing lately is accusing men of “sexual harassment,” which is often when a man did nothing more than factually criticize a woman or flirt with her.

Art being used to promote change by busybodies.
Progressive art to make radicalism and change trendy. Listen to me, there is nothing sexy about getting blown up by a grenade.
Even worse, SJW’s have started labeling men as rapists based on anonymous internet allegations, even when the supposed victims never reported the crime to police.

It doesn’t matter that a conviction is not present via due process of law, and “rapist” labels persist against men even when authorities refuse to file charges.

This eradicates the presumption of innocence whereby an individual is innocent until proven guilty, a basic right used since Roman times and included in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

It’s possible that we may reach a point where all men are presumed to have raped a woman, and when a men says something improper, this label will be used against him to limit his speech.

It’s already happened.

A Busybody is Always Right

There is no doubt about this. Read campusreform if you want a hundred or so examples.

There is no open debate with SJW types. It’s the same with other busybodies of the past like Carry Nation. She was right and there was no argument with her. You’d better watch out, or she’d pull a hatchet out on you.

One of the foremost characteristics of a busybody is that there do not like to debate, discuss or talk about things. They just end up yelling and screaming rehearsed and memorized mantras at the top of their lungs. Really, it is like a five year old child who can’t have a lollypop.

Busybodies are so silly.

Roosh continues…

Another feature of the SJW is their total unwillingness to engage in a civilized one-on-one debate instead of mob action through what they call “campaigns” or “pressure groups.”

Unable to take criticism or consider factual evidence, a lone SJW will respond to having her arguments defeated by playing the victim card (“Stop attacking me!”, “Stop triggering me!”, “Stop shaming me!”) or engaging in one of numerous argumentative fallacies.

These tactics are used to buy time before fading back into the power and safety of her large mob group.

SJW’s avoid engaging in debate because they do not have the logical tools that an objective discussion requires.

If your beliefs are held together by subjectivity, feelings, and the perceived worth of an individual based on an imaginary scale of privilege, it would be impossible for you to debate someone else who uses facts.

The lack of educational rigor in SJW communities means they are more comfortable re-blogging content on Tumblr or sharing funny images than sifting through scientific data to find proof of what they claim.

On university campuses, it’s common for SJW’s to obstruct speakers they can not defeat with facts.

To some observers, this behavior may resemble a child putting his fingers in his ears and yelling as loud as he can. They have no choice but to silence someone else’s speech because their own speech can not properly counter arguments that go against their world view. They simply don’t have the intellectual rigor to do so.

All the reader need do is watch videos of SJW in public.  There are many examples of this.

SWJ in China compared to those in America.
SWJ is not about what they talk about. They are following the same formula. It is the overthrow of the status quo by powerful interested people who wish to remain hidden.

No Morality

A life without morals is a life living as a wild animal.

Which is one of the benefits that I had living in a Catholic “God fearing” household. We were taught morals, and rules of behavior. We learned what right and wrong was. Not today. Now the SJW can say that anything they don’t like is wrong. Likewise, anything that they actually like is right.  It is all arbitrary.

Here is what Roosh thinks;

Thanks to the subjectiveness of their ideology, SJW’s lack morality or virtue. The reason this is a feature and not a bug to the SJW is because accumulated knowledge, morals, and wisdom of the past was developed and promoted by white men, who are seen as the harbingers or pain and doom to the classes that they want to protect.

Even if Aristotle, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Thomas Aquinas, or Henry David Thoreau had valuable wisdom that continues to help how millions of people live today, the information derived from their work must be completely discarded since they were white men.

Since white men were at the forefront of advancing humanity for the past several centuries, especially after the decline of the Egyptian, Persian, Mongol, and Ottoman empires, this precludes the bulk of moral guidance that we can use to determine right and wrong.

SJW’s invent their own moral code but it is often based on what they are upset about in the present moment. It does not serve as a guide for more than a month or two, suggesting that their book of code would have to be written in pencil.

The biggest exception I’ve found to their discrimination against white men is Steve Jobs, inventor of the iPhone, a gadget that SJW’s prefer to use. The irony of this is that SJW’s are against “greedy” capitalism in favor of socialism or communism, but iPhones are made with low-cost labor in Asia where some workers have committed suicide in the very factories the phones are produced because of horrid working conditions. SJW’s are capable of applying blind spots to their most cherished ideals so that their consumer lifestyle is not inconvenienced.

SJW’s don’t believe in god, have no belief in the heterosexual nuclear family as the principal unit of human organization, and have no sense of local community as opposed to ones that exist solely on the internet.

Instead of reading historical texts for guidance, they read Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, and Reddit.

A significant amount of them gets their information from image-based memes that they share enthusiastically on Imgur and Facebook.

They are pagans who worship women, minorities, homosexuals, and other non-capitalistic or non-Catholic features of humanity. Since their belief system is based on trends and feelings, an SJW will display rapidly shifting thought from one month to the next depending on what is “hot” or not in SJW discussion forums.

As of late, homosexuality—an alternative lifestyle at best and the disseminator of HIV at worst—seems to be the centerpiece of their activism, especially as the homosexual marriage issue has become suddenly more urgent in America in the past five years.

Some predict that the bulk of their activism will now move onto transsexuality, and one must wonder how the movement will handle so many fringe groups that are angling for least privileged status.

They don’t read. They don’t know history. They are enraptured in the present and enraptured with the artificial world as spoon-fed to them by the propagandized media.

Busybodies are Mentally ill

Evidence does seem to point to the idea that busybodies are mentally ill to one degree or another.  We know that Carry Nation was traumatized when she lost her personal slaves, and then had to move to a small house many miles away. We know that she married a man who did not treat her like she expected to be treated…

Which leads me to ask, what does a pampered Southern Belle who lost all of her personal slaves expect to be treated in the post-Civil War reconstruction period?

Ah, life was not as she expected it to be. And this caused some very interesting actions by her. Of which some were combative and argumentative. These are sure fire signs of mental illness. Roosh says it quite clearly…

Many SJW’s readily admit to serious mental illness and being bullied or mocked as a kid.

They have gone on to be bullies themselves on the internet, a platform where physical strength, courage, or defined identity is not needed to be an effective activist.

Even though they are confused about how to live their own lives thanks to the lack of values they possess, and many deal with suicide, cutting, or other mental issues that prevent them from reading certain articles without a “trigger warning” to act as a disclaimer to reality, they have no problem telling society how to live.


It’s unclear why they respond to their life problems in such a manner instead of seeking professional help or reading self-help, but we can speculate that they seek to control others to compensate for the lack of control they have in their own lives.

SJWism is a form of treatment to their problems because they can focus on the perceived problems of other people instead of their own.

A common problem SJW’s have is confusion about their own sexual identity or outright biological sex.
Most of them find out about SJWism when they are in their teen years and not yet absolutely certain of their sexual preference. Once exposed to SJW writing that presents the theory that two sexes don’t exist, proven biology is wrong, and that you are free to place yourself on a kaleidoscope of gender including multiple kinds of homosexuality and transsexuality, the newly SJW activist mixes and matches her sexual identity to seek approval within her new group.

Mental illness struck SWJ’s early in their life. They never had the opportunity to grow up properly. They are like a stunted plant that will never bear good fruit.

SJW’s have invented new sexes and sexual preferences, the most popular of which being pansexual, the definition of which can vary depending on which SJW you ask but which comes close to bisexuality.

Other inventions include polysexuality, genderqueer, pangender, skoliosexual, and the most curious one of all which assumes a new mammalian life form that science has yet to describe—trigender.

While many of their members are plain vanilla heterosexual, they despise any sexuality or behavior that comes from the straight male.

A male is someone exhibiting offensive privilege when he rates a girl on her attractiveness, exhibits a preference for thin women, or flirts with a woman he wants to have sex with, but when a woman does the same things, she is making an empowered display of her sexuality and must therefore be encouraged.

The male sex drive is considered dangerous and oppressive to women but the female sex drive is wonderful, natural, and deserving of firm praise.

It’s worth noting that some in the SJW community believe that all penis-in-vagina sex is rape, even when the sex is consensual.

Masculinity exhibited by men is dangerous and criminal, but masculine behaviors in women (cutting their hair short, becoming burly in body size, cursing, sexually pursuing other women) are promoted. Again, this highlights the subjectivity and inequality of SJW thought.

Oh Roosh is quite blunt. However, can you really argue with his points? Have you been paying attention to the cultural collapse in the United States? Busybodies don’t get that way by living in a nice and healthy environment. They get that way after being hurt and emotionally damaged while their self-image is still under formation.

SWJ in America compared to China.
SWJ is not about what they talk about. They are following the same formula. It is the overthrow of the status quo by powerful interested people who wish to remain hidden.

How did they become a powerful force?

Today they are a powerful force. Their rise came about during the Obama administration, and the organization and implementation of their belief structures is most certainly curious. I suppose that there are many others who have documented this rise.  It is certainly interesting. Indeed, how does any busybody become a powerful force?

Obvious it is NEVER a “grass roots” organization. It needs direction from a skilled community organizer, and funding from a group of large wealthy donors. It needs objectives and a long term strategy. These truths are obvious.

In America today, someone and something is instigating the overthrow of the core American values to replace it with a dictatorship  disguised as a social utopia.

We can only speculate why an ideology that is so removed from science and Western values has established roots in America. One theory is that their ideology is soma for confused people who have been disappointed in life or have failed in achieving their goals.

It’s easy for these sub-performers to flock to an ideology that says, “You failed because you were held down by the white patriarchy, who still maintains invincible privilege and is robbing you of your daily bread and happiness.”

Sounds like “The Wave” experiment, doesn’t it? Yeah, I wouldn’t be too surprised.

Obviously, it’s a much easier job to blame others or play the victim card than to solve the individual problems of your life.

Hard work is not as valued in today’s society as in the past, so when you give someone a choice between expending effort on one hand to complaining and mob bullying on the other, it’s not hard to see how many (as in millions of people) pick the latter option. It’s also more satisfying to their egos from a power standpoint.

That leads to the question of why straight white males become a part of the SJW movement, since it would be similar to a Jewish person joining the Nazis. Most of these men are shy with low confidence and low muscle mass. They have social anxiety issues and simply want to be part of a co-ed group that increases their access to women. It turns out that white men are carrying the water of SJW’s who would denounce them in a second all for the hopes of getting sex.

The male sex drive is so strong that a man is willing to throw his entire race and sex under the bus in order to possibly fornicate with a woman.

Even though men are usually the targets of SJW’s, it is not uncommon for them to turn on their own. For example, if a white woman, a protected group in SJW ideology, offends a transsexual, who is more protected on the privilege scale, SJW’s may attack the white woman, even if they may have defended her previously (this happened with Laci Green, a protected feminist who once used the word “tranny” and was threatened with death by transsexual SJW’s). Since SJW’ism is so subjective, at whim to constantly shifting winds, an SJW who is on the right side of SJW thought today may find themselves on the wrong side tomorrow.

Now Roosh has a tendency to be rather blunt. I think that there is an element of this in all males, and indeed we all go a little nuts when we fall in love with a lovely lady. However, this point and belief of his might be a little more extreme than I wish to sign on to.

My point is that a nation must protect it’s own people. America is not doing so. It permits these crazy people to go disrupt the social fabric of the nation. Many Americans bash China, most especially Conservatives do. They shouldn’t. China is doing things right. When someone tries to attack the nation, they go after them.

You cannot hide in another nation and attack Chinese people
Suspects involved in telecom fraud walk off a plane after being repatriated from overseas, at an airport in Beijing, China, November 10, 2015. China Daily/File Photo via REUTERS

What do SJW’s want to achieve?

For most of them, they don’t know.

They are lashing out at everything and everyone. The more evil amongst them have conspired and have put forth plans and goals. (With a significant profit motive, of course.)  I don’t know what their goals are. Roosh has some ideas, however…

Their goal is power and domination over the Western cultural narrative to manufacture a consensus that is aligned with their extreme far-left ideology.

Since their ideas are so far removed from science, logic, and rationale, this requires a complete control of information to disseminate their immoral world view along with the complete silencing of those who contradict them.

It is not clear what their end game is when it comes to the white men who they believe are a bane to planet Earth, but it’s not a stretch to predict violence in the future assuming their mobs grow in size, anger, and power, which would put them close to being classified as terrorists according to the FBI.

Currently their main strategies are bullying, spreading propaganda, and censoring opponents.

A growing way they have been accomplishing this goals is by installing SJW activists in prominent institution and communities.

Many are now active moderators on popular forums, leaders in campus groups, tenured professors, or popular bloggers and entertainers who have huge audiences they spread SJW propaganda to.

Some SJW’s, like Zoe Quinn, simply achieved prominent status by having heterosexual sex with men who have access to information that they want to modulate.

Since most feminists, progressives, and liberals are sympathetic to the SJW cause, it’s easy to see how they have reached a stunning amount of influence in America to spread their message.

SJWs are a threat to Western values

They, like their historical counterparts, are a danger to society. In their angry march toward radical change, they will destroy things that have endured for centuries.

SJW’s utilize censorship, discriminate against white men, and disagree with basic human rights concerning due process that has existed in the Western legal canon for centuries.

They are against free speech as granted by the US Constitution and don’t believe that all men are created equal.

They disregard science and wrongly apply labels, accusations, and criminal allegations to those who dare cross their path.

They have determined that some groups should be elevated to receive more benefits and speech rights than others, and have been successful in silencing the speech of those whom they disagree with through their internet witch mobs.

They continue to infect every group, platform, and community that they come into contact with.

Their goal is not to add value or to create, but to control the flow of ideas and thereby thought. Their values are opposed to Western values.

SJW ideas have reached a critical mass in America. University students are indoctrinated with progressive thought that is becoming aligned with SJWism, and even students in grade school are becoming exposed to SJW ideas through feminist-friendly teachers who read the same sites as SJW’s.

SWJ's inhabit our college campuses. They don't have to work and they are being raised within a structured nest that permits them to be cultivated as activists.
Infowars covers this subject extensively. The SWJ’s are all out of control, spouting nonsense, and are being indoctrinated into clone-robots to spout nonsense in equal measure while being groomed to become debt-slaves for life. Pretty soon those pretty gals will be putting out for half a bowl of pea soup unless they are careful. (Image source.)

My fear is that their efforts at censorship and cultural domination will become more onerous as they cement positions in prominent media companies, Silicon Valley, universities, and even in politics. If your belief system is against that of SJW’s, it would be prudent to take measures to protect yourself from their witch hunts, because there is no sign that they will be weakening in power anytime soon.

Ben garrison Comic on the SJW
The comic artist Ben Garrison has summarized how “the powers that be” and other aligned agents use the periodic SJW movements for their own purposes. Nicely done, Ben. Nicely done.

They are a nasty group of individuals who have found a way to exert power over others. Here’s some examples;

“Amid a brave new world of sexual consent forms and rage over the "patriarchy," Formula 1 and its FAI ruling body has decided to ban the use of promotional models, known as "grid girls," from its events because they don't "resonate with [the] brand values [of F1] and clearly is at odds with modern day societal norms."

Whose societal norms? Has anyone checked out a college campus lately?”

“LAFAYETTE, Colo. - A Boulder Valley School District teacher now faces child abuse and assault charges for allegedly forcing a child to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance earlier this month, CBS Denver reports. Lafayette police say Karen Smith, a physical education teacher at Angevine Middle School, grabbed a boy by his jacket, lifted him to his feet and took him out of class on February 1. Police were called.”

…and shuts down anything where a Caucasian person would get a lead role. It’s a war on gender, tradition, and white people. It’s Mr. Mao ‘s cultural revolution all over again. Just like the armies during the Chinese “Cultural Revolution”, political SJW agents are all out busy rewriting the English language. It is getting pretty darn ridiculous.

It’s hard to pin a leader for the SJW movement.  It is pretty obvious that it serves only the ruling elite. Though I suppose it could be a number of activist feminists. I suppose that you could lay partial claim that Hillary Clinton is one such leader. She’s something else. Did you know that Hillary Clinton says that Climate Change is sexist?

“It's unclear what responsibilities men will shoulder after the climate catastrophe has arrived in the future envisioned by Clinton.

“I would say that particularly for women, you’re absolutely right, they will bear the brunt of looking for the  food, looking for the firewood, looking for the place to migrate to when all of the grass is finally gone as the desertification moves south and you have to keep moving your livestock for your crops are no longer growing, they’re burning up in the intense heat that we’re now seeing reported across North Africa, into the Middle East, and into India.”

“So yes, women once again, will be the primary…primarily burdened with the problems of climate change."

-Hillary Clinton

Clinton made these remarks during a speech at Georgetown University. Oh, she didn’t stop there, she also griped about how endemic misogyny was responsible for her embarrassing loss to President Donald Trump. Which is (to anyone with a brain bigger than a toads) a continuing practice of never accepting responsibly for her failures. You know, I can see her frustration. She believed that she had successfully rigged the election. Of course she was going to win. She held all the cards.

The pandering is pretty bad. Uh huh.

“The Ruling Elites loves political correctness, for it serves the Elite so well. What is political correctness? Political correctness is the public pressure to conform to "progressive" speech acts by uttering the expected code words and phrases in public.

Note that no actual action is required. This is why the Ruling Elite loves political correctness: conformity is so cheap. All a functionary of the Ruling Elite need do is utter the code words ("hope and change," "we honor diversity," "thank you for your service," etc.) and they get a free pass to continue their pillaging.”

- Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog

A Modern Busybody

With this in mind, let me present a SJW (Social Justice Warrior) who is hell-bent on enforcing his version of perfection on an unsuspecting public.  Let him be an illustration of the kind of people who possess the destructive behaviors that hurt society.  In their minds they want to “improve” the world, but in all reality, they are just worthless and useless. Do not be like this jackass.

Ah, not all SWJ’s are college students protesting with signs, and putting black masks on their faces. Many hold respectable and responsible positions of power. They campaigned for those positions. They were elected or appointed for those positions, and once in place, they try to make the world a better place based on THEIR ideas of perfection.

Did you know that there is a terrible battle within the state of Wisconsin? It is over how laws are enforced over the quiet people of the Amish religion.

Up to now, they’ve successfully dodged Uncle Sam (the United States government) as they are exempted on religious grounds from a great many “manditory” state and federal laws. These laws include such things as the presence and use of seat belts and child safety seats in all motor vehicles.

Their horse-drawn buggies lack motors, of course, as well as seatbelts and child seats. They don’t have air bags or back-up cameras or tire pressure monitors, either. The Amish don’t believe such things are necessary and therefore do without. They also believe it’s their decision, their business and as such, they just want to go about their business, leave others alone and be left alone in turn. After all, they’re not harming anyone else. And if they harm themselves, the Amish take care of themselves.

It seems reasonable enough.

But not by everyone.  Indeed, there are those who can’t stand FREEDOM and independence.

Let me introduce a SWJ by the name of Bill Winch. (He should win the “Asshole of the Year” award.) He is a member of the Wisconsin Rapids Board of Supervisors. He is a perfectionist. He is a busybody. He uses whatever power he can wield to implement his vision of perfection. In regards to the Amish, who live NEAR (not IN) his community, he believe that he can tell them how to live their lives. He does not think the Amish ought to be exempted from anything . Anything, including other laws requiring driver’s licenses and mandatory insurance.

He has proposed a new law precisely to that effect.

SWJ's want to change the life of everyone, including people who live far away form them. These are people that they never meet nor interact with.
Amish buggy and horses riding peacefully in the rural back roads of America. They will not be able to much longer, if the SWJ busybody assholes have any say in the matter. (Image source.)

Winch goes further. The buggies of the Amish should also be fitted with automotive safety glass, windshield and side glass. It does not matter what it costs the Amish and how impractical it is to install such things in a horse-drawn buggy. In his mind, there should be rear view mirrors that must be electrically heated (so they don’t fog up). Speaking of fog, of course the buggies must have fog lamps, and a backup alarm.

After all, no one wants to get crushed by a horse drawn buggy backing up! The list goes on and on. Why not include anti-lock brakes, GPS tracking, and mandatory safety seats for young children?

For their safety. Of course.

Their horse-drawn buggies should also be required to have headlights and turn signals. The argument goes; just like everyone else’s car. If this requires expense, so be it. And new buggies manufactured after a certain date surely ought to be required to have at least driver and front seat passenger air bags and comply with some sort of government crash test regime.

I can see it now; a test in a government testing facility where a horse races towards a brickwall. Slams into it, and the flight of the “crash test dummies” is recorded in slow motion.

Think of it. It’s necessary! Lord only knows the danger that might befall the passenger of a horse-drawn buggy were he to go speeding and run his team of horses into a cinderblock wall! Safety glass, airbags, seatbelts, child-restraining devices, electronic auto-locking buggy doors, all needs to be included in all horse-drawn buggies. Of course, they will have to be tested, and inspected yearly… at a cost. You know the drill…

…to pay various fees to the government. For the children… don’t you know?

Additionally, Amish teenagers must not be allowed to “operate” a buggy until they have attained a certain government prescribed age, and then only when accompanied by an adult, and never accompanied by other teens, unsupervised. There will need to be a special type of license. One that you get after you can prove that you can operate a standard automobile.

Logically according to this SJW busybody, as a matter of principle, either all of us and not just the Amish should be left in peace to go about our business or no one should be left in peace. It’s all or nothing.

Why should the claim of the Amish that seatbelts and insurance and all the rest are against their Rights, be any different than what other claim? Why should it be different than a Libertarian who sees no need for the government to tell him how to sit in his car? Or the Christian who refuses to bake a cake, simply because they don’t want to?

Why should the government dictate anything… anything at all unless it is specifically specified within the Constitution?

So, here we are.  Either, [1] Winch is absolutely correct. Or [2] he is a consistent authoritarian control freak. You know, like those elected to Washington. (After all, how could you explain 30, 40, and 50 year’s terms of office for multi-millionaires in the Senate? You can’t, unless you classify them as control freaks that love power.)

BTW. As an aside. The argument is that you have to have an amendment to limit the terms for someone to serve in the Senate or in Congress. I propose something simpler. Any public official who has diminished faculties due to age, or in possession of a age-related illness (such as dementia) shall be removed from office. Simple, huh?

The Amish, no matter how pious, are not immune to the forces of nature.

If an Amish buggy driver wrecks his buggy, he might be injured just like anyone else. And if he is not buckled up , if his buggy lacks shatterproof automotive safety glass , his injuries could be more severe than would otherwise have been the case. Undeniable facts of physics.

There are those that believe that it is role of government to tell people how to live their lives. They believe that the government’s role is as a parent that oversees lesser people.

Amish people have accidents just like everyone else does.
Amish road accident. Would any kind of modern safety equipment have prevented this accident? How would the lives of the Amish and those around them be improved? What is the benefits and cost benefits?

So why should the Amish, but not the rest of us, get a break?

Why should they get to live a simple, unencumbered, exempted life? What makes them so very special? Why are they free? Why are they free of not just government busybodyism but also the financial pressure of having to constantly earn money in order to pay for all that busybodyism?

The Amish man can farm his land. He can raise his crops. He doesn’t have to worry about coming up with thousands of dollars every year to pay for mandatory this and tax that. He deoesn’t have to worry about Social Security and Obamacare taxes. Or air bags and seat belts and back-up cameras and shatterproof safety glass. He has no dealings with the DMV.

This makes him a very free man.

Which is very unfair to the rest of us. It is an outrage! No one should be free in the United States.  We all must follow the rules set forth by our leadership. The Amish are, indeed, throwbacks

If the rest of us can’t be free, well neither should the Amish..

It’s not just because of their buggies and beards. They are living fossils of a species almost extinct: The Free Man. They’re not interested in your goods and don’t want to control your life. If you’re interested in their lifestyle, you’re free to emulate it and even to become Amish, if that is your desire. In return, the Amish only ask that you leave them free to be Amish. Let them live their lives their way.

But that is too much to ask for busybodies like Bill Winch.

Democrat Busybodies

Well, I do hope that [1] I have managed to express my belief that there are busybodies in this world. I hope that [2] my explanation as to how they became busybodies, and [3] why they are still busily being busybodies makes some degree of sense. I also provided [4] contemporaneous examples of busybodies who are all trying to enforce their version of “who knows what” on an asleep public.  I have [5] quoted from Roosh, who tends to be much more radical than myself. Yet, he has made some good points, even if it makes some people uncomfortable. (That’s how you grow don’t you know.)

Now, I want to take a moment to get to the heart of this matter and address why this post was written in the first place.

Being a busybody can be enormously profitable.

Which of course is why American Democrats are all, without ANY exception, involved in being a busybody. They can make money! In fact, by latching on the right cause, they can become enormously wealthy! All they need to do is find someone willing to pay them cash in exchange for them for implementing unpopular laws.

You can boss people around AND get paid for it at the same time! Imagine that!

Democrats want to Ban (or Control) Everything

You know, how can I possibly write anything without offending someone? I really do not know if it is possible?  Yet the truth is the truth.

What is their friggin’ problem?

Well, there is [1] a part of me that wants to believe that they are well intentioned, but think that everyone else is stupid. That belief is one where they believe that they are better, smarter, and greater than everyone else. (Sound like an SJW? Hum?)

Then, [2] there is a part of me that believes the truth; that there is a money angle involved. Some business, or foreign nation, comes to the representative and pitches a new law or two. In exchange for the promotion of that law, the represent can get a huge sum of money. This sum of money might be public (like a campaign slush fund) or private (as in a brown bag full of cash). As time move on, I am more and more convinced that the reasoning is the latter.

Hey, I grew up in Pennsylvania, and the potholes in the roads are STILL not fixed. You think that it is a minor oversight? Why do you suppose that is the case? Do you think that graft doesn’t exist?

"I believe a self-righteous liberal with a cause is more dangerous than a Hell's Angel with an attitude. "

-Ted Nugent

Anyways here just some of the things that Democrats want to ban. This list includes individuals who are registered as Democrats, as opposed to official policy positions of the DNC. I know it’s an incomplete list, but I don’t have all day, and the point is pretty much being made anyways. Each attempt by Democrats to ban something has a link for verification efforts. I am not making any of this stuff up.

So here it goes;

Hey, is it just me, but has anyone else noticed a trend here?

Busybodies always have a problem.
Busybodies do not realize who and what they are. They justify their behaviors by being righteous and just. They think that they are making the world a better place, and threat they are contributing to society. When the fact is that that are doing none of these things. Instead their ego has taken over and deluded themselves to cover up the fact that they are just horrible, horrible people.

Busybodies always have a reason, a justification or a need to fulfill. When they are children, it is to show just who is better, stronger or more powerful. If they are smart, they become a “know-it-all”. If they aren’t, they become a bully. It is almost always associated with some emotional issue.

Today, as adults the motivations are not so clear and obvious. I personally think that it is more related to them coveting a new mansion or two, myself. Their excuses are pretty much predictable. “It’s for the children.”, or “It’s to put an end to racism.”, or it’s to “make the country safer”, or “it’s to end the divide between one group of the other”. Ugh! Nah. It’s all just bullshit excuses.

I am not the only one who noticed this.

“In fact, you probably did five illegal things before breakfast without having a clue about it, which you'll find out about the moment some liberal decides you have to be put in your place and looks for a way to do it. Liberals control what you eat, what clothes you wear, what TV you watch, what kind of car you drive, what size soda you can drink, and even what toilet or light bulb you can use in your house. Complain about it and you're accused of wanting to end restaurant inspections and safety standards that prevent cars from exploding.”

-John Hawkins

Even my father, who was a life-long staunch Democrat, questioned the actions of these radical progressives. Now that he is dead and buried, I am sure that he will still be voting Democrat, even though, his heart is no longer in it.

LOL!

The truth is plain as the nose on your face. They have no interests for anyone else except themselves. Someone gives them some money, and they use their power and influence to do their donor a favor (or two or three… for a price.) They come up with all kinds of reasons and excuses, but come on… please. It is obvious that they are just busybodies that have found a way to get rich being a stingy busybody. What a racket!

Both Republicans and Democrats are Busybodies

For the sake of fairness, here are some links to things that Republicans want to ban. After all, we should look at the entire picture. Both are busybodies. There is something about about politics that attract busybodies. It is just that Democrats are more active at it. Republicans just act like fat cats in their mansions and collect the money from “donors”. Heh heh…

Republicans want to…

As such, the reader can see that individuals on both “side of the isle” are busybodies. While all the news coverage might give one the idea that Republicans are out to ban everything, and Democrats are opposed to the efforts that is just an illusion. The media has flooded the networks and internet with huge quantities of articles on the same tired subject.

For instance, there might be one hundred thousand articles on Republicans wanting to ban abortions, but only two articles on Democrats trying to ban pickles. It’s all just an illusion.

The truth is that both people are busybodies.

The political party that one ascribes to is just a formality. They just choose the one that has the greatest chance of them getting power. If they think it will be under the “Democrat Flag” then they become Democrats. (Like most politicians in New York City, for example.) If they think that they will have a better chance as a Republican, they become one, yet they will still vote like a Democrat. Good examples of this are John McCain, and Arlen Specter.

As far as being a busybody is concerned, those with a “D” after their name are much more aggressive at it. Those with an “R” after their name have to deal with an enormous media that will make an issue of everything that they do. Combined, this gives everyone a slanted coverage of who these people are and what they are doing.

Obviously, the media is not doing their Constitutional responsibility. But, that is an article for another time…

Obviously, those elected to office isn’t taking their responsibilities seriously either…

Taxing what you can’t ban

When I was compiling this list of things that Democrats want to ban, I can across a smaller, but significant list of things they want to tax. It is almost like “if you cannot ban it, then tax it.” then, if they cannot tax it outright… “rename the tax as a use fee” or some thing similar.  It’s almost like Bizzaro World…

Taxing tap water

 - Never short on ideas for things to tax, lawmakers in New Jersey are considering a tax on tap water.

The proposal is being floated by State Sen. Bob Smith D-Middlesex, who is trying to say it's not actually a tax but a 'user fee'.

"It is a user fee based on volume," Smith told Fox 5's Chasing New Jersey.

What you can do?

Hey, I am always open for new links to things that people are trying to ban. Please collect them and post them here. I will add them to the list.

Many of the things that we deal with now, are the result of an effort by a busybody to ban things. If you the reader have a link to an article regarding this, please post them here. I am really interested in collecting them.

Busybodies and SWJ's have no idea what kind of trouble that they are getting into.
You know, you do not want to mess about with critters who are not afraid to fight. They do not yell, and enjoin in non-combative arguments, they just go lethal from stage one. So while everyone just seems to be tolerating this nonsense, please kindly be advised that the fuse is almost run out and the explosion will get ugly.

For instance, which government official got Jarts banned? Or how about the genius that put those stupid “child protective caps” on pill bottles?  Which official insisted in making analog broadcasting of video television illegal, and forcing digital on us? Who’s great idea was it to make sure that shirts and shoes needed to be worn inside a restaurant?

Heck, you go to another country, and they have none of these bans. Yet, life goes on and people are happy, productive and living life. What is Americas’ malfunction?

Busybodies. Always trying to improve our world. Taking one freedom away at a time.

Conclusions

What is the point of all this?

  1. Busybodies are everywhere.
  2. Crazy / evil people use other people (often young) as tools to further their agendas.
  3. They organize them, finance them, and provide support in terms of media propaganda, and use of aligned confederates.
  4. The agenda is usually towards major changes in society or governance.
  5. The general population is typically slow to react to this type of attack.
  6. When there is eventually a response, the result is typically contentious and disturbing.

We know all of this because it has happened in the past. In fact it has happened over and over in the past. The playbook has not changed, even though certain elements of conflict has advanced technologically.

As such, in China…

  1. China experienced a SWJ event around 1966. This was known as the “Cultural Revolution”. The communist leadership used the movement to control unrest and strengthen it’s power base.
  2. The movement was a disaster, and almost destroyed the nation.
  3. A second movement began in 1997. It was also led by SWJ leadership. It was known as “The Pro-Democracy Movement”.
  4. It was supported and partially financed for powerful non-Chinese forces. They wanted to change the government and leadership of China.
  5. The Chinese government suppressed this activity, and hunted down all the leadership and their followers.
  6. Surviving remnants of the “Pro-Democracy moment”, set up cells within traditional Chinese organizations. Thus the SWJ take over of the “Falun Gong” began.
  7. China suppressed this movement and all elements of it.
  8. Today, China has zero tolerance for any SWJ activity.

Meanwhile in the United States…

  1. Active “Progressive Democratic” / “Socialist” elements have taken over the American political party known as Democrats.
  2. They have infiltrated all levels of society and have virtually full control of most American media outlets, court systems, congress and many support organizations. They operate as a “Deep State”.
  3. They have organized into “movements”. These movements are all SWJ but each has their own objective. They include (unorganized) SWJ, BLM (Black Lives Matter), AntiFa (a socialist organization that advertises itself as anti-Nazi), as well as smaller splinter groups.
  4. There is apparently no action being taken to suppress the activities of thes organizations.

Will we ever get rid of busybodies? Nope. I find it unlikely. However, I do like the Chinese method of controlling busybodies. They put them down humanely. (Three years of organ harvesting, then death. The family is then billed for the cost.) The Chinese society is too large, and too complex to have such interruptions and disruptions. They have well learned from their last mistake when they permitted Chinese SJW’s to run reckless and rampant. It was ugly. As such, it will never be permitted to reoccur.

One can only hope that soon the United States will recognize the kind of threat that busybodies represent before it gets out of hand.

Take Aways

  • Busybodies are everywhere (except in China).
  • Historically, busybodies cause great damage to the societies that they influence.
  • Busybodies are either mentally ill, or are using the venue for selfish purposes.
  • Busybodies hate being called that name. They prefer to be called something like “Hero of the people”.
  • In the United States today, busybodies have organized into two major and aligned groups; the Democrats and the SJW. Other groups include the BLM, Antifa and any organization with the word “democratic” in it.
  • Being a busybody can be profitable, as long as the people are unaware of your intentions.
  • In general, busybodies can become very wealthy at the expense of the destruction of society.
  • Busybodies are not tolerated in China.

FAQ

Q: What freedoms do busybodies restrict?
A: All of them. There are no limits to the restrictions that a busybody can try to limit.

Q: Is America free?
A: America was initially designed to be a place where everyone was free. Over the years, that freedom permitted busybodies to behave badly. In so doing, they started to infringe on the freedoms of others. As a result, over the years, many freedoms have been taken away or severely limited. Today, America is a place where freedom barely limps along.

Q: How does banning something limit freedom?
A: It works like this;

• Freedom is an ability to do what you want.
• A restriction is an inability to do something that you want.
• A ban takes a freedom and turns it into a restriction.

Q: Why do Democrats, and SJW people want to restrict freedoms?
A: They justify their actions in many ways. However, if you tear away all their excuses it boils down to either [1] ignorance though propagandized education, [2] mental illness, or [3] greed.

The person who banned sand on playgrounds did not have a loved one get hurt on sand. The person who banned candles did not have their home damaged by a candle fire. The person who wants to ban motorcycles, doesn’t ride one. The person wanting to  force the Amish to put anti-lock brakes on their horse drawn carriages is neither Amish, nor interacts with any of them.

They often have OTHER REASONS for their actions.

Q: What does SWJ’s have to do with MAJestic?
A: Nothing. It has nothing to do with MAJestic. Our extraterrestrial benefactors couldn’t care less about how we run our lives. Their primary concern is the battle over sentience dominance. The ultimate result of this nursery is to have one primary sentience for humans so that we can evolve into an approved archetype. Until that happens, we will remain segregated in this nursery.

Q:Why all this talk about China and Busybodies?
A: In the United States, the media and the Internet is all “lit up” over the SWJ phenomenon. Yet, it is all either cheering on the SWJ’s or reporting with prejudice. No one is discussing what to do about these people, the forces behind all the terror, and what laws or rules would be best served to control those trying to turn society on its’ head. No one seemingly know what to.

Yet, China had this experience in the past. The first time was 1966, and the people and the government stood by and let it run it’s course and the nation almost collapsed as a result. Then, in 1989 it reoccurred again. This time, China knew what to do and took steps to suppress all the chaos.

America, and the American citizens are different from the Chinese. Yet in many ways we are very similar. Rather that sitting alone in our own propaganda-filled “fake news” echo chamber, Americans should look at China and copy their very effective techniques. As I stated previously, China does not mess around.

Felons in China.
Prisoners in China. No easy life for those whom violate the laws in China. Perhaps there are things that the United States can learn from China. China is many things, but you cannot say that it is not trying to take care of it’s own people. The Chinese monitor and police society to make life better for it’s citizens.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
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Notes

  1. First draft 12MAR18.
  2. Double-checking the people who were banning the items required some effort. It turns out that most articles did not state the political alignments of the people who were involved with the ban. Therefore, I would need to go find out the actual individuals involved, if the articles did not specify them, and then research what their political policy alignments were. Obviously, this took a long time. This particular article was first drafted in 2013 and resided in an “active” folder for years until I repurposed the information towards a blog post.
  3. Updated 11APR18.
  4. Internet ready 21APR18.
  5. Edited per request 22APR18.
  6. SEO check 6MAY18
  7. Edited by request 8MAY18.
  8. Added additional bans, all from Democrats unfortunately. 7JUL18.
  9. Added link on Chinese AI to recognize anyone in the world. 10JUL18.

The Tale of the End of the Day Potato

Can a potato be a justifiable corporate reward?

We all need to be appreciated. That is where rewards come into play. The method of communicating appreciation is through reward.

As such, there are different rewards for different stages in life.

As many of us work, we find that a corporate reward is important. Indeed, as a worker, we often discover that a corporate reward is the only way that we get positive feedback from the boss, and as such, it is important to us. Life is more than just money, we need appreciation as well. How we are rewarded varies from company to company and nation to nation.

It depends on how we live our life.

When we work, we enter into a daily cycle that our biology conforms to. We get up. We brush our teeth. We shower and shave. We eat breakfast. We rush to work. Then, at work, we have a morning coffee and go through our email. This is a routine that is followed by millions of office workers all over the world. But what about the end of the day…

Routines

This is true of all people. Depending where I lived, I had different routines.  For life is actually like a bunch of individual rooms strung along like a train. You exit one room and enter a new room. Each room is different. Each time you move, change friends, get married, obtain a new job, or live in a different city, you enter a new reality. It is a new “room”. Within that new reality, you have new friends, new places, new activities, and new interests.

The realities change depending on your age, and where you live and what you do. There are no corporate rewards in school, instead your grades act as your reward mechanism. Later, after you graduate you start working either for yourself, or for someone else. If you work for someone else, chances are, they will provide you with some kind of incentive to keep on coming to work. Whether that is as simple as a friendly smile, or monthly dinner, it is and acts as a corporate reward. It is a way of providing you incentives to continue to show up to work.

Each reality, and each situation; each company that we work at can be considered a “room”. It is a “room” within a long chain of “rooms”. Each with it’s own set of rewards, benefits, and trials.

Consider the differences of the “rooms” as you grew up. For me, they varied considerably.

High School Student

In my early years, as a growing boy, I would wake up, get cleaned. Put on clothes and head off to school. I would stay at school all day. I did what everyone else did. We all did this. The school defined my educational routines. At that time, my routines were further subdivided into structured periods known as “periods”. There I would study, go to the gym to weight lift, or sit bored in “study hall”.

There were no rewards. It was what I did. The concept of rewards or even corporate rewards did not come much later; until after I graduated from school.

My first “real” job was as a temp worker in a coal mine. My first part-time job was as a stock-boy at a grocery store at 14 years of age. Then in the summer, I worked full-time in a steel mill.

At the end of the school day, I would leave the school and go to work. For I, unlike most of my classmates, worked after school. Depending on the year, I either worked in the coalmines, packed groceries in the local supermarket, or fought forest fires. (These were the only options to me at that time.)

After school and my work, I would then go home. My arrival would be around 9 or 10 at night. A plate of Saran wrapped table scraps was made by my sister and awaited me in the refrigerator. (She had to be repeatedly scolded, as the portions were perpetually meager.) When I arrived, the first thing that I would do is get the food. Typically the portions were unusually small. (It was a nasty sibling rivalry thing.) For instance, if the family had pork chops, my serving would be something like this; it was one tea spoon of corn, one tea spoon of potatoes, one pork chop and one tea spoon of applesauce.

Typically I would arrive late at night to a dark house. The rest of the family were either out or in their rooms. As such, I would turn on some lights. Get the food. I would pull it out and heat it in the microwave. I would eat it alone in front of the television set. At that time, I might catch a glimpse of ‘The Love Boat”, “Mork and Mindy”, “Three’s Company” , “Magnum PI”, “Hart to Hart” or “Remington Steele”. Then it was my toilet routine (clean, brush the teeth) followed by sleep.

There were variations to this routine. However, it was for the most part, pretty darn consistent.

College Student

College years were different. They changed as a function of which semester I was attending. However, the vast bulk of time the routine went something like this.

First, I would wake up. Then roll out of bed and then on to the floor. Two hundred pushups followed by two hundred sit-ups. (That was my routine. I was pretty darn muscular back then. You know, I needed to be ready to fight the “Red Menace”.) I would then change into my running clothes and run three miles. (I was very big on personal fitness back then.) Then back to a cold shower (The house where I lived was run by some “old school” German immigrants. They didn’t believe in hot water. It was too wasteful of energy.) The woman of the house would then have a nice breakfast made and waiting for me.

As a traditional German, the breakfast (das Frühstück) would consist of buttered toast with peanut butter, liverwurst and braunschweiger. She would have cut up onions, tomatoes and spices in oil that I would always put on top. I then would add some fine German mustard. Alongside this was typically a hotdog and soft-boiled egg. I would also be given a cup of strong coffee to drink. We would sit down together and chat a little.

German style breakfasts can be made anywhere as long as you have the ingredients. The potato is apparently not one of them.
German breakfast spread. Photo by Erin Porter. (Image source.) You’ll notice that the Germans don’t tend to offer the potato as a breakfast food.

It was my little morning pleasure.

Afterwards, I would hop on my motorcycle and go to the university. I rode a small used 250 cc Yamaha that I bought from my best friend for $200. I studied Aerospace / Mechanical Engineering which was more or less concerned with the propulsive and environmental systems on rockets and spacecraft.  Yeah, I was studying to be a “Rocket Scientist”. When I arrived at school, I would then attend class. Have lunch and then study until dinner.

I am educated as a “Rocket Scientist”.

Dinner gave me a chance to spend time with my friends. We would relax and talk. Then we would head out to the library to study.  Typically we would study past 11pm. Often, but not always, we would go to the law library to study as it was open after 11. We would call it quits at 2am. We would then go our separate ways, and I would head home to sleep. Typically, that meant munching on some “Cheez-It” crackers while I did my homework, then watching some late night shows until I went to bed.

At that time, a case of 24 cans of Genesee Cream Ale (beer) cost $1.

Married and Working at a Corporate Job

Of course it all changes when you get married and have a corporate job. You enter a new reality. Different jobs, different wives, different bosses, different roles all represent different “rooms” that you inhabit.

For me, I can confirm that there was a degree of similarity between different companies and different locations. You get up out of bed, shower and dress. Then hop in the car and off to work. I would typically grab a cup of coffee and a morning snack on the way through a drive-through. It was Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and a bagel when I lived in Boston. Whataburger coffee and taquito when I lived in the South. And, Carl’s Jr coffee and breakfast sandwich when I lived out West.

I think coffee is a great drink to have for breakfast.

That was then. Today, I can well imagine that it must be a (smushed) avocado on whole-wheat germ toast and a Starbucks latte in Seattle.

Work was work. For the most part, it was a life in a cubicle farm. It was a corporate hell. Oh, sure they tried to justify the mandatory blood collection drives, and the paltry 1% salary yearly raises (when the rate of inflation was 6%), and the absolutely humiliating HR policies. However, it was the life that I trained for.

In other words, “the big lie”.

Here’s a quick summary; Go to work and make it to my cubicle. Drink coffee while I scan my emails. If there is a “Green Sheet” newspaper by the door, grab a paper and review it over coffee. Answer emails. Get ready for a meeting. Fast food lunch. Back to the cubicle, then late afternoon meetings that began at 5:00 pm and lasted way past “quitting time”.

If you were important enough, you might qualify for a corporate reward. This corporate reward could be anything. Typically, it is a cheap pen with some “inspirational” logo and saying on it. Other things might include a little “trophy” that would have the company mission statement on it, or if the corporate reward was for a group, it could include a nice framed motivational poster.

Corporate Rewards during the 1980’s consisted of a cheap pen with an inspirational saying if you saved the company a million dollars.

Drive home.

Dinner with the wife. Do some chores or take part in a hobby. Usually this meant fixing the house, mowing the yard, or a household project. Then, watch some television. Play games on the computer, then off to bed.

It did not matter who I was married to, where I lived, what company I worked for, or what my job title was, this was pretty much my routine. I think that all of us have routines. There is nothing good or bad about them, they are just what we do out of convenience and situation. It sure does not sound all that exciting and adventurous, but that was my life.

I am sure that there are readers who have had a similar life. Maybe you would go fishing after work. Maybe you would go out and play some baseball with your kids. Maybe you would go take the dogs out to the park to run around. Maybe you would have a night out with your friends. There are many variations of this.

The reality that you inhabit is what you experience within your “room”. So, if you change your job, your city, or family, you will change your life. If you want big changes to your reality, you will need to make big changes to parts of your life. This might mean moving to a different country.

There is too much to discuss here about corporate life and the corporate reward scam that was oh so popular when I lived in the states. Here are some links to better expand on this subject;

Struggling Teacher in China

When I first arrived in China I tried to find work in my field (Engineering management). I was unsuccessful. So while I was “pounding the pavement” looking for work, I took on side work to put “food on the table”. Those coming to America might find work driving a taxi, babysitting or working as a nanny. The same is true in China, except that expats need to find other venues to work. For me, I worked at what I was able to do, and provided a service. I taught ESL English to Chinese adults at a training center.

My routine during this phase of my life went something like this;

Up out of bed by 7am. Shower. Breakfast of noodles, baozi, mantou, or Congee. Coffee. Then off to work. I would arrive before nine as I was one of the most popular teachers at the training center, and was fully booked up.

I would teach ESL English one-on-one face-to-face with students and help them with their English. Depending on the student and the need, I would teach various things to them. Each class required a detailed study plan. In China, where I worked, if you wanted a student you needed to go out and compete against other teachers, other schools, and other (often cheaper) costs. Each student had to be obtained by my own personal sales charm.

Typically I would work a 12-hour day. That is 9am to 9pm. No break for lunch.

The classes were 50 minutes on the hour. That gave me ten minutes free time. That was enough time to go to the bathroom, or scarf down some delivered food. When I was free, I would either be involved in a sales conference (to obtain additional students) or making lesson plans. The entire time that I was doing this, I also was active in a job search for expat engineering positions. That involved quite a lot of work.

I would close up shop a little after 9pm.

We, well everyone in China, would also get a “corporate reward” for good work. Instead of a pen, or a coupon for a coffee in the company canteen, it would be a “red envelope” full of cash. The Chinese believe that rewards, especially a “corporate reward” would be best served in the form of cash. This was true for all the working staff, as well as for the students themselves. They would often provide me with gifts such as bottles of red and white wine, choclates, tea, fine china, or red envelopes full of money.

Anyways, once I was finished working, I would leave a little after 9 pm, and lock up the offices. For some twist of fate, I was often the first one in the office, and almost always the last one to leave.

Dinners, of course, varied. Being in a city (Shenzhen), we were able to eat BBQ outside. This would be a nice table on the sidewalk were we would eat anything from seafood, to chicken, to mutton. BBQ (shaoKou) is always best washed down with cheap cold Chinese beer. Otherwise, we might go to a “family restaurant” (A restaurant run by a family where they lived in the back.) There we would eat our fill of seafood or other dishes. Then off to the house for some wine and fun. Typically, I would go to sleep around 3am.

As the reader can see, life in China was quite different from my life in the States. Was it better? Was it worse? Like everything else, it was give and take; bitter sweet. Some things I missed. Other things I did not, and some things were simply outstanding compared to my life in the United States. The one thing that remained constant was that things were different.

Project Engineer in Pago Pago

For a time, I worked as a construction supervisor building a hospital in American Samoa. For those who are unaware, American Samoa is a small island in the South Pacific ocean. There, I entered a new “room” and began a new life with new friends, new routines, new habits, and new behaviors.

Typically, in the morning I was up before the sun rose. I would quickly shower and change into my work vest and hardhat, then hop into the truck to go to the company “tailgate” meeting. There all the employees would meet at 5am with the boss. It was held outside under a roofed pile structure with open sides. There were around one hundred of us there and you could tell when the meeting was held by all the pickup trucks and jeeps that were gathering about.

There, at the meeting, we would talk about the day and the various issues. Breakfast sandwiches would be served which varied from tuna fish, to hotdogs to hardboiled eggs. We’d go get a coffee and eat while the sun started to rise. Everyone would talk in Samoan, so I just sat there and pretended to know what was going on. Chickens, roosters and dogs would pace in and around all of us while we attended this meeting. There was always a daily prayer to start the day off right.

Then we would break and go off to the job site.

There, I would supervise the activity and make sure that everything would meet code and client expectations. They were a great group of guys. Let me tell the reader this; the nicest people and the hardest workers are the Samoans. If you ever have an opportunity to hire one, do it. It will be the best decision that you could ever make in your life.

Work would end around 3:00pm with a general cleanup and site lockup. I would then take some of the crew back to their houses. I would then go home.

At the house, I would pick up the wife and we would take a ride to one of the smaller towns and hang out on the coast. We would talk and watch the waves. Then back home for dinner and watch movies via the Internet. Then eventually we would be in bed to sleep before 11pm.

Even in the remote Pacific location, there was a corporate reward structure. Every few weeks or so, the boss would call us over to join him for a meal. He would have this big feast that we would get to participate in. In that case, the corporate reward was in the form of food and sharing a meal with the Boss.

As the reader can see, life in Pago Pago was quite different from my life in China. Again, some things were good and some things were bad. No, I cannot say that everything is good or that everything is bad. The only thing that I can say is that things were different.

Fast forward to today…

Life as a Boss

It doesn’t matter what you do, what you know, where you are, who you are with or what your dreams are. Eventually you will enter these “rooms” and your life will be different.

My life today is quite different from any of the previous roles.

I work at my own pace, on my own terms, to accomplish my own goals. I bike ride to work. It’s an easy ride, and very healthy unless it is raining. (Then you have a problem.) I arrive to work, say a nice cheery hello to everyone and take care of the issues of the day. Ah, the “issues” of the day.  Let it be known that most “emergencies” are artificial. That is to say that most things deemed critical by one person, aren’t really critical at all.

A client wants some things made before a certain deadline. Fine. However, they wait until the last minute to place the order. They take their time. Then, they use a timeline with no room for mistakes or problems and complain when problems arise. These problems generate a string of activities that quickly devolve into “issues” in need of attention.

Sound familiar? I am sure that others have heard of these things.

The funny thing about this is that the arrogance of certain customers all disappear when they meet me face to face. Business relationships are based on personality and friendships. If you have a corporate environment, staffed with drone workers, it bleaches out the relationships. People forget who they are and what they are doing and why. In order to compensate they are often under stress and make poor decisions which tends to bind up all the projects under their purview.

Work is a task that needs to be accomplished to help generate income for all participants.

With this in mind, my end of the day routine is rather typical. I make sure that everything is being accomplished and responsible authorities are put in place. I have to admit that our staff is quite good. They are generally hard working and attention minded. All are Chinese and consist of various groups of people from Marketing, Engineering, Customer Service, Quality, Testing, and other Logistics related roles.

Due to the nature of the work and our various situations, I have the cleaning lady come in and clean the office at 5pm.

She’s a typical Aiyi; meaning she is older and is under-educated. She knows how to clean and owns a small business where she cleans various offices. You could call her an “old school” entrepreneur. She’s a traditional Chinese gal, and as such she shows me due deference and respect. For, after all, I am the LAOBAN. (The interesting history of this term can be found HERE.) In China, the boss gets a far greater degree of respect than elsewhere in the West. The boss is treated like a king. It is a show of respect and honor.

When she comes in to clean, she comes to my office. Knocks on the door. Then enters when I say it is fine, and give me my end of the day potato. This is one of her most peculiar habits, and I am not sure of the origin of this tradition. My staff tells me that she does this out of respect for me. I don’t know quite what to think about it. My wife would be furious if I ate the potato, as I would be too full to enjoy a meal with her.

Yes, my corporate reward was a hot potato.

The potato itself is a standard potato. Truly there is nothing special about it. Often it is the size of a large hand that she carefully washes and cooks at home. Then she warms it up in the work microwave. She presents it to me on a tissue right in front of my work keyboard. It is presented plain. No salt, no pepper, no butter. It is just a plain baked potato.

Apparently, according to the (very interesting) history of the potato in China, it was at one time considered a very valuable and tasty uncommon dish. Now, of course, it is quite common. Every KFC serves French fries and mashed potatoes. (Here’s a fascinating article on the Chinese KFC marketing strategy.) But when it’s all said and done, let’s face the facts. A potato is a potato is a potato.

Or, maybe it can be much more than that, if you are a kitten…

Kitten playing with a potato.
Kitten playing with a potato. Cats and kittens like to play with their food. Though, I have never actually seen a cat eat a potato…

An Overview

My entire life I have been educating myself, obtaining experiences and knowledge. I have been working to improve and better my life. Today, now as I brush against my retirement years, I have reached the pinnacle of all that I have worked for. Yes, it is true. I have reached that point in my life where others show honor, respect and reverence to me.

I now receive my end of the day potato.

So, with this in mind, are you the reader working towards that special moment in your life? Will all that you have made, experienced and built upon culminate in the kind of honor and respect that you deserve? Will you finally achieve that wonderful moment when you will be shown respect by others? Will you too, at the end of the day, receive your golden potato?

We can only hope.

How are you Rewarded?

All throughout the world people are rewarded for their efforts. If you are in a corporate job, say at a place like Google, that you are rewarded handsomely. I hear that they even let you have free soda. I also hear that at places like IBM you can actually wear casual clothes on Fridays. I am not at all kidding! I’ll tell you, it’s a new world out there.

Corporate life can be fully if it wasn't taken so seriously.
Corporate life can suck you dry unless you look at it in a humorous way. Here is a great parody on corporate life. (Image source.)

A corporate reward varies from company to company.

When I worked at Delco Electronics, (at that time, it was part of the General Motors automobile empire), we were permitted to wear yellow ties once we entered the management ranks. Now, not everyone could wear the yellow tie, mind you. Only those with an office. That was a corporate reward (though some might call it a corporate perk).

In fact, there was an entire hierarchy of rewards and perks as you would climb up the corporate ladder. If you were able to “go yellow” (wear a yellow tie), the next step up was a potted plant. Not only could you have one, but also it would be taken cared for by the company at no expense to you! The next step up after that was a door for your office. The step above that was a window in your office, and the step above that was a corner office.

If, somehow you managed to advance beyond that level, you entered “mahogany row”. This was a cluster of offices in its’ own section. It was so named by the wood paneling in all the offices and hallways. It has its own secretary, and secretary pool. Its own car pool, and breakroom / snack bar, and other amenities that were only whispered about…

Yeah, different companies offered different perks or a corporate reward.

In California, at Comarco WSD, we were permitted to use the microwave in the lobby to heat up our lunch. It doesn’t seem like much of a corporate reward, but there you have it.

In Louisiana, Poulan-Weedeater allowed us to purchase shirts that had the company logo on it (at full price). Which was a nice corporate reward, it just didn’t seem like a reward if you had to pay for it.

In Indiana, Magnavox gave us a pencil (or a pen) that had the Magnavox logo and a motivational saying on it. But, of course, you needed to prove that you had saved the company one million dollars first, to qualify for it. This was a conditional corporate reward. Apparently it was a big thing in the day. Some jackass wrote a paper (purported to be an in-depth study) that showed that employees were motivated by small gifts provided often as opposed to large monetary rewards.

Meanwhile, in Boston at Pollak, the managers would get a real cake during their birthdays, and not the plastic one that we rank and file engineers ended up with. In that reality, the corporate reward was stratified. However, that is not the way at every company. Only at some companies. For instance, Holmes Products gave their managers a nice spiffy leather bomber jacket, and the rank and file got a pretty cool baseball style cap.

It depends on where you live and the culture at your company.

I am curious about the benefits and perks at other companies. What you they give their management, and their rank and file workers. I have read some things on the internet, but I find it really hard to imagine. For instance, I have read about some software companies allowing the workers to play ping-pong at work, while other ones let them park their bicycles from the ceiling. Still others give their workers free passes to movies and games. The corporate reward program varies from company to company and from place to place.

What does your company do? I would really love to hear about it.

Take Aways

  • Life can be considered to be a series of “rooms” that we enter and occupy.
  • How we live within those “rooms” determine what the next “room” will be like.
  • The rewards given by life vary from person to person.
  • If you work hard and strive, you too will be given your end of the day potato.

FAQ

Q: What is so special about a potato?
A: There is nothing special about a potato. It is a basic food that is full of starch and nutrition. I do happen to like French-fried potatoes, potato chips (the traditional type), and mashed potatoes. A good baked potato is often quite nice with sour cream, salt, pepper, and some nice melted cheddar cheese.

Q: What makes a great Corporate Reward?
A: I think that the best corporate reward is a monetary amount. After all that is why we work for antoher person within a corporate setting.

Q: Why were you gifted a potato at the end of a day?
A: I do not know. I think that the maid either honors me out of respect, or maybe has a crush (love interest) on me and that is her way of signaling interest. Aside from that, she was just your normal house cleaner. I just cannot imagine anything would be particularly favorable or special about a potato.

Q: Do you ever get any other gifts?
A: Oh yes. I have gotten lechee, peanuts, and sliced white bread as well.

Q: What do you do with your potato?
A: I carry it home and throw it out when I reach my house. Typically, there is a trashcan before you enter the lobby, so I just toss it there. The problem with this is that I need to carry it all the way home first. If I threw it away in the office building, one of the cleaning ladies would notice, and there would be quite a scandal. You know, they all talk amongst themselves.

Q: Why is your life so different?
A: Everyone’s life is different; I just choose to expose the various aspects of my life to illustrate a point. In this instance the point is that through hard work, and effort anyone can rise up, make a life for themselves, and get the rewards that they so justly earned.

Q: What does this have to do with MAJestic?
A: Iife is like a series of rooms. Each time you enter one, the previous room becomes a memory. You take on a new life. Thus each “room” in your life is a stand-alone learning exercise. You eat new foods, you have new friends, you have new problems, and you have new pleasures. You have different experiences.

The same can be said for reincarnation.

Each life that you have creates a series of new experiences for you to experience. These new experiences affect your thoughts and thoughts are what create our reality. Thoughts are what organizes and builds upon our soul. You are what you think. You become your reality.

  • Links about China

    Business KTV

    Dance Craze

    End of the Day Potato

    Dog Shit

    Dancing Grandmothers

    When the SJW movement took control of China

    Family Meal

    Freedom & Liberty in China

    Ben Ming Nian

    Beware the Expat

    Fake Wine

    Fat China

    Chinese apartment houses

    China and America Comparisons

    SJW
    Playground Comparisons
    The Last Straw
    Diversity Initatives
    Democracy
    Travel outside
    10 Misconceptions about China
    Top Ten Misconceptions

    Learning About China

    Pretty Girls 1
    Pretty Girls 2
    Pretty Girls 3
    Pretty Girls 4
    Pretty Girls 5

    Articles & Links

    • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
    • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
    • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
    • You can find out more about the author HERE.
    • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
    • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. First drafted 8MAR18.
  2. Readied for the internet 24APR18.
  3. SEO review and Internet readiness. 4MAY18.

Links about China

Popular Music of China
End of the Day Potato
Dog Shit
Dancing Grandmothers
Dance Craze
When the SJW movement took control of China
Family Meal
Freedom & Liberty in China
Ben Ming Nian
Beware the Expat
Fake Wine
Fat China
Business KTV
Chinese apartment houses
Chinese Culture Snapshots
Rural China
Chinese New Year

China and America Comparisons

SJW
Playground Comparisons
The Last Straw
Leaving the USA
Diversity Initatives
Democracy
Travel outside
10 Misconceptions about China
Top Ten Misconceptions

The Chinese Business KTV Experience

This is the real deal. Forget about all that nonsense that you find in the British tabloids and an occasional write up in the American liberal press. This is the reality. Read or not.

KTV1
KTV2
KTV3
KTV4
KTV5
KTV6
KTV7
KTV8
KTV9
KTV10
KTV11
KTV12
KTV13
KTV14
KTV15
KTV16
KTV17
KTV18
KTV19
KTV20

Learning About China

Pretty Girls 1
Pretty Girls 2
Pretty Girls 3
Pretty Girls 4
Pretty Girls 5

Contemporaneous Chinese Music

This is a series of posts that discuss contemporaneous popular music in China. It is a wide ranging and broad spectrum of travel, and at that, all that I am able to provide is the flimsiest of overviews. However, this series of posts should serve as a great starting place for investigation and enjoyment.

Part 1 - Popular Music of China
Part 3 -Popular music of China.
Part 3 - The contemporaneous music of China.
part 3B - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 4 - The contemporaneous popular music of China.
Part 5 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5B - The popular music of China.
Part 5C - The music of contemporary China.
Part D - The popular music of China.
Part 5E - A happy Joe.
Part 5F - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 5F - The popular music of China.
Post 6 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 7 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Post 8 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 9 - The contemporaneous music of China.
Part 10 - Music of China.
Post 11 - The contemporaneous music of China.

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

The Importance of a Family Meal Together

One of the things that I have come to appreciate the most was the family meal  that we had when I was growing up as a child. During my early childhood we would hold formal “sit down” meals in the Dining Room. Us children each had our own roles / chores in regards to this. On Sunday we would have the largest and most elaborate meals. Mealtime was the opportunity when we could all talk about our day, our hopes and dreams, and things that interested us.

At the time, I didn’t realize how important it was.

Then, during the 1970’s everything changed. Both of my parents had to work. (You can thank the American Federal Reserve for the decline in the value of the dollar that necessitated the breakup of our families.) A formal family meal was replaced with “help yourself” fix your own meals, out of a pot on the stove, or “make yourself a snack” out of the refrigerator. We would then scrounge something up, and eat it alone watching television.

Communication was via notes on the refrigerator.

Now that I am much older, I can see clearly the value of a family meal as well as a community meal. As such, I now dictorially enforce an observance of this tradition within my own home. This post is about what I think about this matter. Of course, like anything else, it is all opinion driven.

My own, obviously…

Formal Family Meal

“Family meals. There’s nothing magical about gathering the family for regular meals; it’s what you do with them that matters. Use mealtimes (it doesn’t have to be dinner) as a chance for your family to slow down, get together face-to-face, talk without distractions, cement your values, create a feeling of support, and build loving bonds.”

 - The 3 Families Every Young Man Needs to Grow Up Well

One of the most important events in my family is the hosting of “formal sit-down meals”. Every day we have a “sit down” meal. I like to refer to this is a “Family Meal”. We try to do this at dinner time. The most important meal is the Sunday meal, which may or may not be outside in a restaurant.

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That Sunday meal is the most elaborate.

Living in Seattle we are surrounded by Liberals. And the public schools of course. It was (and is) a drag. The kids would come home and learn something and we would talk about it at dinner. 

(Yes- we always had dinner together around the table.) Lots of learning goes on there, and LOTS and LOTS of opportunities to teach.

“So - you gave up the pennies you found hidden to others that didn’t find as many. And what did that teach you?”

Having twins in different classes it was interesting. In one the teacher hid pennies around the room and the kids went looking. Of course some found a whole bunch, and others not so many. So then the teacher asked the kids what they should do to make it fair. Second grade or so.

My one daughter said “So we voted, and we all decided that those that had a lot would give some to those that didn’t have many, and we made it all fair!!”

The other daughter said “Yeah - that’s what we did too. But I didn’t think it was fair. Some boys were just goofing off and didn’t find any. I argued why should they get any? But of course I got out-voted.”

My other daughter looked at her and said “Hey - you’re RIGHT!” We had a long talk about just because things are equal doesn’t make it fair.

As lousy as it is in Seattle, all three of our kids are staunch Conservatives now, and prepared them for when they are on their own. The one goes a more conservative state for college. Lots of friends from small western towns have complained how liberal the college is. My daughter laughs. “I think it’s great - I bet 30% of the kids here are conservative! Back in High School it was me, my sister and about 4 other kids out of 700!”

-Free Republic

The truth is that we did not plan things out this way. For the longest time we ate out all the time. In order to save some money, we started to cook our own meals. In a short period of time, we discovered that we actually preferred it. Over time, we started to mix up restaurant meals with formal home meals. The restaurant meals are now, not an afterthought. They are planned, and treated special.

We pretty much never had  sit-down family meals, and if we did it was from a restaurant, we ate in  silence, and then we’d just wander off from the table one by one to  watch TV or go on the computer or something. It’s not that we hate each  other or anything, it’s just pretty much the way it’s always been.

PolkaDotsOnThursday 

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I consider a family meal together as an essential component of our family unity. We try to do it every day, but that is not always possible.

Early morning breakfasts in the 1960's with the housewife, the orange juice and the coffee. A breakfast is just as important as a dinner is for a family meal.
A typical breakfast in the early 1960’s. The housewife enjoys a cup of coffee and a smoke. The table is laid out with orange juice, and possibly bacon and eggs. Let’s not forget the fully salted butter. A Family Meal is very important.

Breakfast in the 1960s. Orange juice, coffee, cigarettes, toast, bacon and eggs. (Image Source.)

As a father, it is my role to pace and lead the family. It becomes an easy thing to do when you have rituals, routines, and roles. As such, I always lead the Family Meal.

Mealtime Rules

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In our house, we have rules. These rules are there for a reason. My rules might not work for everyone. As such, they are the rules that fit us. Rules are there to make sure that we all can concentrate on the food and fellowship together as a family. The outside media, and other distractions have no place at our dining table. Other people and other families might have their own rules. Here are my rules.

For us, in my family, we follow these rules…

  • We eat dinner in our Dining Room. The table is cleared and setup for dinner. The Family Meal is ritualized and treated special.
  • All cell phones are power-off, and are nowhere near the dining table. I know that many readers might not understand this rule, but it is very important. In my house all electronics are powered off. That includes the TV, games, monitors, all cellphones, or tablets if they are present.

The reason for this is that there is a purpose to a family meal that is defeated by electronic interruption. The family meal is to spend time together communicating to each other.

The fact is that you just can’t do that when you’re all silently staring at the TV or (more commonly) while everyone has their eyes glued to their phone. For us, it is a rule that is carved in stone. In fact it is the most important rule.

We started this rule when the children were really young. They grew up with this rule; without having any distractions at the table. However, their friends and others haven’t, and as a result, often some explanations are necessary.

(Sometimes we actually collect the phones, powered off, and put them in a basket in the kitchen. We explain that this is the way things are done in Top Secret military operations. That both amuses and silences the critics.)

  • All telephones (if not cell phone) are not answered. If they ring, we hang up and leave the receiver off the hook. (We no longer have a wired phone, but the rule stays intact never the less.)

Dinner time is OUR time. We form a “protective bubble” or “zone” that we exist in and NO ONE is permitted to interrupt it. Over the years, I have bent this rule from time to time, and it always gets misused. Today, every piece of electronics is powered off. No one cares about our family time. It’s up to me to enforce it. Otherwise, we are just sheets in the wind, and subject to the wants and desires of others outside of our household.

No one is permitted to interrupt our family meal.

  • Soft background music is preferred, usually jazz or soft Chinese love songs (but that is just us). We typically select a “station” on YouKou and let it play in the background (you’ve got to download the player first). Alternatively, we also use KouGuo for our streaming music needs. Both downloaded players will hang up during loading. You will need to disable your anti-virus programs if you use American anti-viral programs. You cannot use non-American government approved media sources, don’t you know…
  • The table is adorned with a table cloth. (Typically it is a linen table cloth, with an under-cloth to protect the table wood surface.) Typically it is a white or off-white color. We NEVER use a disposable plastic table cloth. Perish the thought! Additionally, we use special coverings for unique holidays. Such as a woven throw for Christmas, or for Halloween. It’s REALLY nice. If you make something special and you utilize ritual, it does eventually become very special.
  • Everyone follows ritual. This means that Western manners are followed. No one sits down until the father and mother sit down. Everyone says “please pass the…”, and when someone needs to get up and leave the table they ask “May I be excused?” and “Excuse me…”. This is not “guard the food during prison chow call”, but rather how to behave in polite company. I expect our children to know how to behave when they take on leadership roles. If you want your children to be everyday mill-workers, you can permit them to be crude and uncouth. It’s up to you. This is a formal Family Meal, after all.

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  • “Formal” place settings are established for all participants. Each setting has the proper utensils. If we are eating Chinese food, then chop sticks (kuai zi) are provided on a cloth napkin (we purchased cloth napkins and tablecloths just for this reason). If we are eating American, then we lay out formal knife, fork and spoon. Everyone gets a glass for their beverage. Out of tradition, each place setting has a glass of water. People seldom drink from it, but it is provided never the less. On special occasions, we even lay out extra tableware (such as individual salad forks and soup spoons) so that the children can get accustomed for a higher class of life, and so that they are comfortable with it. A Formal Family Meal is an important learning and teaching opportunity.
  • Wine glasses, or VSOP (I am equally prone to drink “jin Jiu” (Chinese herbal alcohol) as I am to drink VSOP. It is healthier, don’t you know.) in a glass tumbler (with ice) for me (the head of the family). Hot tea for the wife, as it is her preference. Children get ice filled glasses and the beverage of their choice. (Nothing is more noteworthy than a frosty ice-cold coke.)

Dinner is the ONLY time when the children can drink soda or soft-drinks at home. Other than that, they must drink pre-approved beverages. This typically consists of milk or various teas. Dinnertime is a special treat for them. It is when they can drink soda, and have ice cream. We adults prefer dry red wine. Typically we drink mid-range red wines from China such as “Great Wall”, or from Australia such as “Yellow Tail”.

Family Meals is not only a time for togetherness, but it is also a time to relax and speak openly, freely with others. When my children start to work they will also earn the privilege to drink alcoholic beverages, just like I was granted that privilege when I turned 14 and began to labor.

I like to drink wine because it tastes great, makes me feel good, and it is good for me (at my age). Heck, when you the reader reach your sunset years, don’t allow anyone to tell you what you can do with your own body. It’s none of their friggin’ business.

  • Family Only, or occasional guests. If we have the housemaid make the dinner, she NEVER participates in it. She is forbidden from interrupting us during the meal, and does not interrupt for any reason. She is useful to answer any phone calls during the meal and tell them to call back later. (She is not part of our family, so she never participates in our family meals.) A family meal is for the family, and not shared with the domestic help no matter how friendly we treat them.
  • Prayer. All western meals have a Catholic blessing of grace. We all hold hands, and someone recites grace. (We take turns.) My in-laws just can’t get their arms around this ritual. My wife has explained to them that it is a American way of honoring Buddha. That seems to be enough to suit their inquiries. LOL!

Bless us,
O Lord,
and these your gifts,
which we are about to receive
from your bounty.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.

  • End of Meal Walk. If the Aiyi (housemaid) makes the dinner, and the weather permits, we have a short walk outside. The family meal can extend to an after-dinner “cool down” period. We take the dog, and everyone gathers for an evening stroll along the ocean while she cleans up. We would go along the boardwalk and talk while the lights of Macao twinkle in the distance.
  • Dogs and cats are NOT fed from the table. (If you start doing so, they get all excited and make a real distraction during the meal. Cats will jump up on to the table, and dogs will try to eat off your plate. Dogs will pace around frantically, around and around the table, whimper and cry. It’s really terribly irritating.) For a while we put the dog outside. Now he knows that he must wait on the porch, or sleep in his bed quietly.

Everyone knows this rule, except guests, and we never give them the opportunity to spoil the critters. The rule is this: animals DO NOT eat with human family at dinner time. (They can eat at other times, depending on the individual. But that is a special human-dog or human-cat thing, and has no bearing on this particular discussion.) The family meal is for the human members of the family.

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  • Fridays we eat fish or seafood.
  • We have family discussions. Always they are of a light subject matter. Nothing emotional or serious is addressed while we all are eating. Here, everyone takes turns sharing something positive and negative that has happened to them during the day. I enforce this, and take the subject “off line” if it is important. It is impossible to digest food when someone is emotional. For the most part we talk about school, work and friends. We also talk about movies, hope and dreams, plans for the future and things we like or hate. The family meal is a time for sharing.
  • No fast-food. Meals that resemble fast-food are discouraged unless it is part of the meal “theme”. (Themes that are exceptions include the Baseball theme, or a birthday theme.) Typically, we spend time in making each meal a “theme”. This is true even if the “theme” is “just an everyday after work and school meal”. Everything must have a theme.
  • Warm food is preferred. We NEVER eat cold food as the main family meal. Everything must be hot or warm. We can have a salad, or a dessert that is cold. Drinks can be cold as required, but the meal itself is hot or warm.
  • Friends are fine. Children’s best friends are sometimes invited, as are their parents. (Dinner is a family event, but in China it is also a social event.) However, Man’s best friend has to stay outside on the porch.
  • Cigarettes. If we are eating Western style, an after dinner coffee and cigarettes (typically 555 brand) are served. The ash tray is clean. At the bottom of the glass ash tray is a folded disposable kitchen-paper-towel, moistened with water. Typically, this is when guests arrive. I myself prefer to smoke a pipe, and I only do it when I am relaxing after dinner.
  • Formal ritual in presentation. During the family meal, presentation of the coffee and cigarettes is very formalized. Coffee is presented in cups with saucers and its own (tiny) spoon. (I wish that I could say that we make it fresh, but this is China, we often settle for instant. Shutter…) Sugar is brown cane sugar in individual packets, and we use individual packets of creamer. These reside inside a crystal glass bowl, and we simply move it to the table when the moment approaches.
  • Chinese guests. If we are eating Chinese food, and we have guests, we offer them white wine (Bai jiu). Not the cheap stuff, either. We don’t want to lose “face”.
  • Themes. All meals have a theme.
  • Bread. If the meal is Western, it is served with bread. We buy a loaf or two of “French bread” from the local supermarket (D, RenRen Le, Carrefour, Taste or Park n’ Shop). There they make “real” crusty bread, not the super soft sweet bread that is so common in Chinese bakeries. Typically we purchase it before hand when it is made fresh and then we freeze it. We take it out and heat it up in the oven or microwave as necessary.
  • Salted Butter. We eat bread with REAL SALTED butter. This is one of the little pleasures that I missed over the years. In the rush to make everything “healthy” in the United States, everyone switched to unsalted butter and margarine. Bullshit. You lose the taste, and you still die early. It’s all nonsense. In my house, we cut the bread, heat it up in the oven, and place it in a bowl covered under a cloth. It is served with the formal family meal.
"I don't want to eat or drink anything with the words light, lite or fat-free on the package."

- Ted Nugent 

The selection (and presentation) of butter is very important. The butter is in a large glass butter container (twice the size of the one we had as I grew up in the 1960’s) and is left out for a few hours to soften up. Butter is ALWAYS “salted” butter (which we buy on the internet), in a pinch we will use “lightly salted”. We absolutely never use “unsalted” butter.

We also never use margarine. I tell the reader this; try it. Get a loaf of French bread, cut it up, and heat it up. Then, butter it using real fully salted butter. Taste it. Go ahead, take a nice bite of that crunchy goodness. (Pat your lips with a tablecloth or napkin.) Then try a loaf of white sandwich bread with unsalted margarine. There is no comparison.

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Now, the truth is that things have changed somewhat. My wife wants to control her salt intake. She read an article on the Internet that advises against too much salt. So she gets her own unsalted butter. The rest of us eat the real thing.

  • Time. The most important aspect of the dinner is TIME. People, please pay attention to what you are doing. If you want to have a special meal for the people that you love (your family), then give them the best and do not skimp on anything. The pennies you save is not worth it. Family meal dinners should be about the best you can do for your family. It’s also about the little things.
  • We always have dessert. Usually it is some chocolates, cake, ice cream, pie, or pastry. We NEVER use cheap chocolates. These are for young children. Instead, we provide expensive high quality chocolate in small amounts. It becomes a most special treat. Let the riff-raff eat the cheap stuff. When it is family meal time, my family gets the best we can afford. The rest of the world can go to hell. BTW, my children absolutely LOVE dinner time with the family. It is the time when they are a part; an equal part of the family, and they get the best and are treated special.
  • Leftovers are seldom used for dinner meals. They are reserved for lunches, and special breakfast concoctions. There are exceptions. For instance, a formal turkey dinner can be recycled into a “diner style meal”. A leftover chili dinner can be made into breakfast omelets, chilidogs, or chili-pockets.
  • Toothpicks. Everyone uses toothpicks at the end of the family meal, and uses a formal (polite) hand-over-mouth action to clean their teeth.
  • Alternatives. If we are too busy for a formal sit-down meal for dinner, we will go outside to a local “family” restaurant. In China, the “family restaurant” is a local family-owned restaurant that has really decent prices and great local prices. We never skimp on family meal time.

Meals like this take a minimum of one hour, with a two-hour meal being normal. Long meals with friends and family is (of course) much longer.

Themes for the Meals

I thought everyone who  celebrated Christmas had a whole three-day celebration starting on  December 23rd. You see, we have Ham Day (23rd), Turkey Day (24th),  Christmas Breakfast (25th). We also get together New Year’s Day to eat  pork chops and sauerkraut. That idea isn’t so weird, but the part that  gets me some looks of disgust is when I mention how we pour maple syrup  on the sauerkraut.

eclantantfille 

The idea of having themes for a major family meal sounds very strange, but I believe it is a necessity. Food is a glorious and wondrous thing, and (at least in the United States) has evolved into a second-class status with the prevalence of fast-food restaurants. Indeed, during much of the latter half of the 1970’s, family meals were missing, and replaced with notes on the refrigerator. That DOES NOT happen in my household. Not if I can help it.

Formal meals always have a theme. Here are some of the themes that we have had in the past;

  • Thanksgiving meal (traditional turkey, dressing, and mashed potatoes). Try getting a turkey in China. It’s darn near impossible. We need to order ours online.

The first time my wife saw it, she darn near had a heart attack. She thought that we were tying to feed the entire block. “How in the heck are we supposed to eat that?” Then she went on to complain about the huge size of the wings, the impossibly huge size of the drumsticks, and what to do with the neck and gizzards. Ugh! When I explained to her that the entire drumstick would go to a person who liked that part of the bird (dark meat), she was incredulous. “Who in their right mind would eat such an enormous piece of meat?”

  • Birthday celebration. (A favorite food, followed by cake.)
  • Chinese New Year Eve dumpling feast. (Along with after dinner fireworks.) Most Chinese families make homemade dumplings. We don’t bother. Ours are frozen. However, in China the tradition is to make dumplings the “old fashioned way”, which is from scratch. That will happen, I am sure, when we are older. However, for now, we use frozen pre-made dumplings.
  • Beowulf (Dim the lights, candles, and eat with greasy fingers.) This can be anything from chicken to mutton or pork. No silverware. No chopsticks. (We play some Richie Blackmore medieval and Renaissance music in the background.)

Kids get super chilled Root beer or extra-strong Ginger beer. Ginger beer is the key. It originated in the 1800’s in England and, at that time, it actually did contain a small percentage of alcohol. Around 100 years later, the ginger ale we’ve come to know and love was developed and came to be known as Canada Dry. The difference? Ginger beer is actually brewed and fermented while ginger ale is essentially a carbonated beverage made from water and ginger.

Ginger beer often has much more of a “gingery” flavor and because it’s fermented, is less carbonated. When someone drinks it, the look on their face is precious! Listen to me; Kids LOVE the experience! (They actually announce that they are eating “Beowulf” at home, and then they show up with five or six friends! LOL!)

  • Hunan spicy Chinese. We typically eat out for this. We have numerous traditional restaurants where we go. We get our own room typically and have a feast. In China, most restaurants have private rooms to eat in. We pick or reserve one. Then we enjoy the experience. To repeat; when in a resturant, family meals are held in a private room with it’s own bathroom. The television is kept off, even when the waitress turns it on.
  • Halloween. The misses bought some white porcelain skull bowls one year. They look like a skull, and we ate spaghetti out of them. It looked like we were eating brains. (I don’t know where the bowls are today. I think we only used them once.) There’s also bloody fingers in a bun (hot dogs) that are a big hit with the kids.
  • Christmas Eve baked ham, fresh baked bread and snack food spread (cheese, cold cuts and vegetables) with homemade Egg Nog. (Impossible to find in China.) This is a carry-over from my mother. We would have cold cuts and fresh cut bead that we would snack on with fresh baked ham. I continue this history.

Other families might be different. I have Spanish friends that describe a different meal and religious routine that I would love to participate in. I have Mexican friends who describe a similar type meal that is outstanding and my Lithuanian friends describe some food traditions that make my mouth water. Ugh! Trust me, that there is nothing wrong with family meal rituals and traditions.

In Zambia they eat this amazing fish with a kind of rice / potato that they eat with their fingers. My God, it is excellent! It helps make the family stronger.

  • Wenzhou steamed shellfish and snails. All Wenzhou dishes provide us an opportunity to explain our Chinese history and the nature of Wenzhou business practices.

For our children to “make something with their lives” they must think as business people. They need to believe that is normal and achievable.

For us, all the kids must be able to say, in wenzhou hua (the local Wenzhou language), “I would like to collaborate with you in a business venture or two. Here is my business card”. And yes, they do have their very own business cards made up. They got to design them themselves.

  • Polish Open-Faced Sandwich (Zapiekanka). We even play some polka music, though I am not a big fan. All Polish dishes serve as an opportunity for me to explain our Polish-American heritage.

Hey, I am Polish-American. Though I don’t hide behind it and ask for handouts like my liberal and progressive friends. I do try to keep some of the heritage alive.

Polish open-faced sandwiches (also known as French-bread pizzas) are popular street food in the bigger cities of Poland, not to mention my old family stomping ground in Pittsburgh (Polish Hill). They’re known as zapiekanki (plural) or zapiekanka (zah-peeyeh-KAHN-kah), which is singular. Most zapiekanki sandwiches start with French bread, sautéed mushrooms, cheese, and ketchup, but there are Greek-style with olives and feta cheese, Italian style and many more.

What makes the open-faced sandwich authentic is a thick drizzle of Polish ketchup across the top, no matter what cuisine the zapiekanka is trying to emulate. That’s the secret.

  • Mexican theme with tacos, burritos, and quesadillas. We can get the real deal in Shekou (a Spanish expat region of Shenzhen), but the hassle to get there makes this a low priority theme.
"At least once a week, I'll put out all the parts of the dinner separately and have my husband and son make their own version of whatever it is we're having.

With taco night, for example, I'll put out corn tortillas, refried beans, Spanish rice, shredded lettuce, chopped tomatoes, cheese, salsa, meat, and cheese. My husband and son love it because they can make their own taco combos and I love it because I don't have to be the one to do all the work.

Build-a-dinner works great with pasta, burritos, pizza and even dessert with company such as a make-your-own sundae bar."

--Jill Houk, Chicago
  • 1930’s style “diner meals”. (Hot Turkey Sandwich with homemade fries with gravy, etc.) We typically buy pre-made beef or pork gravy off the Internet. The misses has yet been able to master American style gravy. Her idea is to add soy sauce or vinegar to “make it taste better”. Ugh! (But she is still learning… Sigh.)
  • Fondue. Fondue is idea for a special family meal occasion. For those of you who don’t have a clue, Fondue is a Swiss condiment of melted cheese served in a communal pot. The pot is usually placed in the center of the table and heated with a burner or open flame. Usually, for cheese fondue, there is a mixture of melted cheese, wine and crème simmering away in the pot.

It is eaten by dipping bread into the cheese using long-stemmed forks. It was popularized in North America in the 1960s. It seemed like every family had one. However, it became disused during the 1970’s. When you dust one off and use it, it becomes a very special occasion.

Fondue was a major part of growing up in the 1960's and the 1970's. Everyone had a fondue set.
During the 1960’s fondue became very popular. It seems that for a while, every Christmas tree had a fondue set sitting under it. Families would host “fondue” parties. This seemed to trail off into disuse during the 1970’s. However, today it makes a perfect special treat during a family meal.

Fondue Family Meal (Image Source.)

  • Fresh baked bread, cheese and homemade soup (Typically, but not always, a heavy cream soup.) The wife goes along with this, but she’s afraid the children will get fat, but I insist. Typically, we use Campbell’s soup (of the crème kind) and add milk instead of water. We thicken it with cheese and crackers. Of course, I insist in “real” fresh bread and real salted butter.
  • Pork Chops (American style) with Country & Western Music playing and applesauce. Forget the political progressive narrative. This is a typical 1970’s meal. We duplicate it to a “T’. If you don’t like it you can go to hell.
  • Crock-pot sweet sausage and peppers, with real rolls. The crockpot will cook for two to five hours, and the result is amazing. If you don’t know how to make this amazing dish, don’t worry. You get peppers, sweet Italian sausage, onions, tomatoes, and spaghetti sauce. You add everything together in a crockpot and let it cook. It is that simple. Yum!
  • Hotdogs, fries, pork & beans with a baseball game playing in the background (via the Internet). Wine or VSOP is replaced with beer, super chilled and served in a cold glass. (The kids get a genuine glass bottle of Coke-cola super chilled (about 20 minutes in the freezer), and they drink from a straw.)

Sometimes it is the simple attention to details that make all the difference. Let your children have the frosty ice-cold coke in a glass bottle experience while smunching on a freshly cooked hotdog. Yum!

  • Homemade pot of chili. We eat it as a thick soup or with rice. In it we use Chinese spices, which has the exact flavor as the imported expensive American spices. Typically we eat it with saltines or cheddar cheese. It makes for a great semi-formal family meal.

Chili meals are always on the informal side. To make it more formal, we will provide homemade bread and soft salted butter. (I have heard of it being served with Doritos or Frito chips, but they are too expensive in China to use.) Next time we are in Louisiana we will get a bowl using Doritos and add some New Iberia hot sauce too. That’s um good, you betcha! yah.

  • Deli sandwich with kosher pickles (This also tends to be a little expensive.)

All in all, I have read and I do believe that parents who have a strong marriage, better relationships with their kids, and set more guidelines for them, were more likely to have family dinners. As a result, they are more likely to have well-adjusted children.

What you can do

All this being said, I look back in my life.

I well remember the 1970’s. That was a time of many changes. I wore bell bottoms, had my hair below my ears and bangs that fell over my eyes. My parents hated it, but I was very fashionable. Oh, baby!

Fresh milk was delivered to our porch daily. It sat inside a small galvanized metal box cooler specifically designed for that purpose. We didn’t lock our house doors. We left the car keys in the ignition. We would say “Hi” to our neighbors and play with their kids. We would make “forts” out of the cardboard boxes that home appliances were shipped in.

I carried a pocket knife with me, and used it to cut small branches and to chew on twigs from a birch tree (it tastes like root beer). I was very shy with girls, and not so great at sports. However, I was a fantastic swimmer, an average golfer, and an active tennis player. I was a member of the cub scouts, and rode a gold Schwinn “banana seat” bike with “high bars” and a “drag strip” (non-tread) rear tire.

We ate “soft serve” ice cream from the local Dairy Queen stand, or had banana malt milk shakes. The news that played on the radio concerned our exploration of space and the Vietnam War. We watched Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”, and “The FBI” (Starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr) after the Walt Disney hour on Sundays. If I wasn’t watching television, I was building plastic scale models, or experimenting on my Gilbert chemistry (and electrical) sets.

I wore a “mood ring” that I found in an old “mason jar” filled with old pennies, marbles, and campaign pins (I picked it up at a yard sale for twenty five cents.). I also wore a catholic ring of Saint Christopher that I picked up at a church sale on “Polish Hill” in Pittsburgh. I wore “Beatles style” hair with bangs that were always covering my forehead and falling in front of my eyes, and often would go into the local “woods” to dig for “old bottles” (in long disused trash dumps, often 100 years old) that I would then clean and collect.

Then, when I would arrive home, I would sit down and eat a family meal.

At that time, I really didn’t appreciate the importance of it. I did not understand the importance of a family meal. However, later… Yes, when both of my parents were working, I did miss the meals. I didn’t know it at the time, but I needed a formal sit-down family meal.

My life had changed, and it wasn’t for the better. Instead of eating with my mother and talking with my father. Instead, I sat alone in the TV room with a bowl of cheerios in my hand, heavily laden with sugar. I watched all kinds of television shows, but around dinner time, I watched The Flintstones. It was mindlessly entertaining for me.

Looking back, I truly see what a waste of time it was.

So, I ask the reader, does this sound like your family? Instead of sitting together during a family meal, is everyone off in their little worlds on the smartphone? Are they checking their likes on Facebook? Are they reading the news on Drudge or Zero Hedge? Are they looking at the goings on with the rich and famous on CNN and the Huffington Post? When you do go out to eat together, is there any discipline? Do you all sit down, look at each other and just talk?

Hey… Listen up! Family meal dinners is the time for everyone to talk, communicate and share with each other. What’s wrong with that? Most of the complaints that I get from people who are having marriage difficulties stem from either financial problems, or communication problems.

You are a family. Take the time to TALK. Take the time to look at each other face to face. Take the time to relax with your family. That is what a family meal is all about.

Indeed, I say this two times, one of the complaints that I hear from many young married millennials is that they don’t communicate enough. They don’t talk. When they do, it seems light, trivial and meaningless. The complaint is that people no longer seem connected. Why is this?

I am not a doctor, nor am I an expert on these matters.

However, I would suggest that some effort be taken to bring everyone closer together. This effort need not be the dining table. This need not be at a family meal. This can be something else. However, whatever it is, it must be free of distraction. No television, or media on. No cell phones. No crying babies that need your constant attention. You need to set aside time (on a regular basis, if possible) for close and real communication.

So, I have to ask? What do you do to maintain your family?

Dinner as “Quality Time”

I spend “quality time” at dinner. We maintain it with rituals and rules. The rules and rituals are for one purpose only; building our relationships through communication. I consider it important. I know that others don’t, but I do. We use the family meal as the vehicle for this.

Here are some ideas what you and your loved ones can do to build, sustain or create relationships together…

  • Involve food. Everyone loves to eat. I only met one person who did not. He was in a mental hospital in Boston, MA. (Stoughton, Massachusetts actually.) He was a truly miserable person. Who in their right mind doesn’t like food? Well, he was an example of one. That is perhaps why he is in a mental hospital. When in doubt, cook “breakfast food”. Everyone loves breakfast food. A family meal can most certainly be made out of breakfast food. Ever hear of pancakes, eggs, bacon, baked beans, toast? Make it special. Put out all kinds of things to put on the toast. Provide cut up tomatoes, peanut butter, chopped lettuce. Make it special. make it noteworthy. The family meal can be anything at all, just include food.
  • Talk without distraction. Do not permit things to interrupt your train of thought, or to drown out the words of people who are trying to talk with you. Music should be of low volume and not jarring. Music sets the pace of eating. Let it be relaxed, slow, casual and friendly.
  • Set up a routine. It cannot be done once or twice and then forgotten. Make it a regular event. If not daily, at least weekly.
  • Give it your best. This period of time during the family meal need not be long, but it MUST be the best time. Give your attention 100%. Do not skimp on anything. Make it special. It’s for you and the ones you love. You can always make more money, but you can never make more time.
  • Have fun. The family meal is the time when your children get to see you laugh. My memories of my mother always include the times when she was singing alone in the kitchen on Christmas day. This should be a special time. This is the time when everyone can feel free to talk without being told to “hush”, or “you can’t say that”.
"Come In. This is Liberty Hall; you can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard!"

 -Commander John Grimes

I sincerely hope that people start to appreciate what they have, instead of looking outwards for more or better. The things that matter to us are right there. We just need to reach out and treasure them. I would urge everyone to start now, today and do it in small ways.

Some Paternal Notes

It wasn’t until I was much older that I fully began to appreciate the total value of a family dinner. Over time I saw examples of it being done right, and other examples that were not to my liking. I have witnessed families getting together at 7:00 am before school and work eating breakfast at McDonald’s together. The dad is there in a business suit, and the kids are there with their school bags and uniforms. It’s pretty cute.

There are some rules that apply to the parents, and especially to the “Man” of the house; the Father. I have followed these rules for the last five years or so, and they work for me. I suggest you, the reader, give them some consideration.

  • The father always smiles. I do. I fake it sometimes, but I always smile.
  • No yelling and no arguments. That is enforced. I simply say “we will take that off line after dinner. Then you can explain to me what is going on.”
  • No one can break off from dinner early. It is formal. They have to ask to be “excused”, and more often than not, the answer is “no”.
  • Nothing is placed on the table. Books, pens, games, electronic devices, a race car.
  • Dinner is a happy time with good, warm food, no worries, no problems, and no troubles.

I maintain these rules, even when there are indeed, some serious things to talk about.

Some Fun Links

Those that study this issue concluded that while family meal dinners alone won’t prevent your kids from turning into cigarette-smoking urban turbaned transgender youth, the ritual can serve as a valuable part of family and the bonds of a family. It is the set of habits, routines, and practices that can contribute to a well-rounded person. While I have always felt this way, others with better communication skills than myself have written articles on this subject in great length.

I would suggest that the reader read their articles and come to your own conclusions.

Conclusions

There are other articles on the importance of a family dinner. There is nothing new about this, what is different here is the importance of a family meal to stabilize a cultural island within a wholly different cultural environment. Our children are American & Chinese. If we do not maintain the importance of their American heritage, they will lose it and become totally absorbed within the Chinese hive (To reference the Star Trek Borg Collective narrative.). Our family meals is our way and means for cultural stability.

We need to do this. Not every family does.

Do you, the reader, see the neighborhood children doing activities that you don’t want your children to get involved in? Are they doing things that you do not like? Are their habits, dress, actions, and behaviors disturbing to you? Well, communicate to them, get involved.

Don’t let the community dictate behavior. You do it.

Have family rituals. Do not expect the neighborhood community to raise your children better than you can. They can’t, no matter what the media tries to ram down our collective throats.

Hillary Clinton tells us (in her book “It takes a Village”) that parents are not really that important. It is the collective society that is important. I can see how well this has worked out in Baltimore, Detroit and similar enclaves such as Ferguson.

I choose a different route. I chose the radical direction; I chose the traditional method of raising children.

I note that while Hillary Clinton made some money on this ghost written tome, she did not follow the advice she so professes. Her child ate formal family meal dinners at home just like my children do. Do as she does, not as she professes.

“Kids are the same now as they were a hundred years ago – petulant, brave, arrogant, earnest, frightened, and cocksure. It’s the parents who have changed. It’s the parents who have put their own happiness above the best interests of their kids. It’s the parents who actually believe “the village” will raise their kids, when the village is profoundly incapable of doing anything of the sort.”

-Mike Rowe

Now for some VERY harsh words. If you, the reader wishes to raise your child progressively – go for it. I am not going to stop you. Your children will serve the food that my children will eat.

It is true, and you know it.

Read your history. Now, you might be offended by the truth, but you’ve got to face the facts. The leaders of today became that way through the teachings of their parents. So give your old man some credit, and take a special moment to thank your mother. You turned out alright, didn’t you? Maybe they did something right. Copy them.

Now it’s your turn.

Take Aways

  • A family meal is a very important part of a family.
  • Children who are raised with formal (family meal) dinner meals perform better than their classmates do.
  • Dinnertime should always be treated as a special event.
  • The best dinners always follow a set of fixed rules.
  • Rituals are important, and your children will remember the rituals more than the events.
  • The most important gift you can give your children is your time.
  • Everything here is my opinion.

Free Republic Posting

This article was posted on Free Republic for comments on 20JUL18. You can read the comments HERE.

RFH

How about a Request For Help? I tire of busybodies and statists who poke fun at the ideas and theories of others. They offer no constructive dialog. Rather they just make fun, ridicule, and then scurry under a rock.

I use this forum as a way to disseminate some of the things that I learned though my life.

I don’t suppose that others might agree with me. However, I am sure that there are people who have ideas, experiences, and thoughts to share. I, for one, am willing to listen to them. Please let this be an opportunity for you to contribute to the community dialog. Don’t be silent. If you have something to say, then please share it. Thank you.

FAQ

Q: What are the benefits of family meals together?
A: Spending time together brings us closer. That is the most important part of a family meal. We are able to communicate and everyone knows how each other is doing, both the good and the bad. Additionally, it is a refuge of support and a feeling of belonging. One of the problems with today’s electronic society is that people have lost that feeling of membership. Instead, they post “likes” and snapshots of desserts instead of talking to people and bonding face to face.

Q: What is the importance of a family meal together?
A: There are few things more important than a family. It is your support group, your strength, security and financial fallback plan when life becomes too difficult to endure. You children will learn that no matter how difficult the world is “outside”, home is a place of acceptance and a good hot meal.

Q: Meals are fine, but what is the importance of family DINNER together?
A: The dinner is the most important meal for social and family interaction. Breakfast is a good way to start the day and wake up. Lunch is a time for the mid-day recharge, but dinner is a time for relaxation and social interaction. Dinner is the end of the day “rewind and relax”. A family meal can be held at any time of the day and with any kind of food.

Q: What is the overall importance of families eating together?
A: People need to do things together, as it creates bonds. Everyone needs to eat. By combining food with togetherness, a family can build bonds and strengthen existing ones.

Q: Do other families in China eat meals together?
A: Yes they do. The Chinese culture is very supportive of communal meals and spending time together. It is the most common way to bond with people. The second most common way is to share a cigarette. The third most common method is to share a drink (beer or something stronger).

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

You’ll not find any big banners or popups here talking about cookies and privacy notices. There are no ads on this site (aside from the hosting ads – a necessary evil). Functionally and fundamentally, I just don’t make money off of this blog. It is NOT monetized. Finally, I don’t track you because I just don’t care to.

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. First draft 8MAR18.
  2. Reviewed 11APR18.
  3. SEO review 3MAY18
  4. SEO review 4MAY18.
  5. Added quote 9JUL18.
  6. Updated 20JUL18.

Learning during my 1970s High School years

Do you remember what it was like going to High School in the 1970s? I do. I most certainly do. In fact, the older I get the more removed that I am from it. As time passes, it starts to look like some kind of a scene from “The Twilight Zone”. The truth is that the kind of life that I had growing up is really alien to the way kids grow up today. That is worrisome, and it really concerns me.

When an American intern comes in to work for me, I am stunned just how absolutely helpless they are. They do not realize that they must go to work before the start of the working hours, and cannot leave until the workday is over. They don’t realize some of the most fundamentals regarding self-initiative is totally missing from them. American kids today are robots, or maybe zombies. They need and expect constant supervision. They are afraid to do anything.

Now this only pertains to my American interns.

The interns that I get from Germany, France, Singapore, and England are just fine. What is wrong with America? What are they teaching in schools there? Ugh. I think that I will devote another post to cover that subject. As it is truly alarming.

Whenever I berate an intern about something that they did wrong, I often use examples from my childhood. I use them to illustrate key points. Such as, [1] you need to eat breakfast at home before you come to work. [2] Showers are not optional. [3] Don’t check your Facebook when you are in a meeting with the boss. [4] Lunchtime is for one hour, and long lunches are not an option. As well, as a pet peeve of mine, [5] you must do the work assigned to you whether you want to do it or not.

Where in the Hell do they get this idea that they can argue or debate with the boss? A task is a task. You are assigned it and you must do it to the best of your ability. Unfortunately, many American interns think that they don’t have to do an assigned task, if they don’t want to. WTF?

When I was growing up, man we HAD to work. It wasn’t an option. Moreover, when I turned 18, I was on my own, or in college. And if I failed, I would be on the streets. This is literally. My family would be too ashamed to have me hide in their basement. A man needed to work.

Granted, I realize that not everyone had the same experiences that I had. My experiences were of a different time. I had the experience of fighting forest fires, working in coalmines, and laboring in steel. Today, they work as barristers in Starbucks, code games on laptops in “open work” environments, and drive uber taxis. Never the less, there is something very important about being able to earn your own money. There is something important about putting in a good, hard day’s labor. There is something very important about carving out your life by your own effort, alone.

To this end, let me talk a little bit what it was like for me growing up. I am sure that everyone has other experiences, and perhaps other ideas of what it was like. This is what it was like for me…

Growing up in Pittsburgh

I am a normal guy.

While I was born in the Connecticut Valley in Bridgeport, CT, I spent the bulk of my youth and High School years in the Pittsburgh area.  Pittsburgh was, at that time, the center of steel manufacturing.  Surrounding it were miles and miles of coalmines, and timber. America is a very big nation, and as such, it is culturally subdivided into regions. I was part of the Pittsburgh (or “Western Pennsylvania”) region. I was an “Iron Steel Baby” (So named because of the local “Iron City” beer and the steel mills up and down the major rivers in the region.).

America is comprised a different regions with different cultural norms and history.
America’s cultural enclaves. America is not a homogeneous society. It is a collection of social-economic regions.  America’s cultural enclaves. (Image Source)

Over the years I have lived in many other areas. Each area was very different. I have lived in the Central Florida, the Rio Grande, the Los Angles, the Fresno, the Memphis-Little Rock, the Louisville, the Cincinnati, the Indianapolis, the Upstate NY and the Boston New England regional areas. I wonder what cultural enclave that you, the reader, is from?

When I was little

When I was little, my father worked in a steel mill. To improve our life, he would go to night school. Eventually, he was able to get his diploma and degree. With that, he was able to get a better job, and we moved into a house that he was finally able to buy. My mother was a housewife, and she watched us kids.

I played “cops and robbers” and “cowboys and Indians” when I was little.  I played with fireworks, climbed cliffs and jumped off them into muddy water in the long hot summers. We would often put a penny on railroad tracks to watch the coal cars flatten it into a long oval copper plate. You can’t really do that with pennies today. That is because pennies are made out of plastic. Instead you can use a dime or a nickel. Both of these coins have a high percentage of copper in it.

Busybodies think that flattening a penny is not safe, and is dangerous to children. (Not everyone shares my point of view.  HERE is an article where it is considered the height of danger and folly to walk on train tracks. HERE is an article that says that it is terribly DANGEROUS and maybe evil to even suggest children participate in such a thing.) But you know what? I don’t care what they think. I personally like the Chinese solution when it comes to these busybodies.

Life in the Trees

I had a “tree house” that I would hang out in with my cat Sedgwick, and played “tug of war” under the willow tree with my pet husky and a big “bull rope” that hung down from one of the limbs. (This is an awesome tree that had flowing branches that fell to the ground.  You could go inside the tree and it was like you were inside a tent. Though in the spring, it was filled with bees and other insects attracted to the flowers.)

I had a “fifth finger toy gun”. It looked like a pointing finger, and it shot this little plastic pellet.  I also had this “joy buzzer” that you could “shock” your friends with (by giving them a handshake). Other toys included “Chinese handcuffs”, which was this woven contraption that you would stick on the ends of your fingers.

“let’s see, I slept outside in a tent almost every night during summer vacation, played lawn darts, shot arrows into the air and we would scatter like doves for the cover of a roof, sled riding down steep tree lined hills. 

Jumped ramps with our bikes (damn near lost one of my man marbles doing that though) climbed trees, built tree houses, floated down the swollen stream on a telephone pole after a 100 year rain storm. drove the flat bottom boat behind river barges to ride the wakes. 

Jumped off roofs with a homemade parachute (didn't work) played with matches, played with matches and gas, played with matches gas and fireworks, had a wrist rocket, bb gun, bow and arrow, went to a catholic grade school with hard ass nuns. I should be in kiddy Gitmo still.”

- booboo Feb 2, 2018 9:55 PM Permalink

Quicksand

We played “quicksand”, usually holding on to tree limbs and trying to avoid touching the sidewalk. (It, like many other things, turned out not to be as serious a threat that we thought it was when we “grew up”.) Talk about a disappointment!

Yeah. When we grew up we were in for some surprises…

The world that we envisioned was nothing like what we saw on television.  We never got to fight secret agents. The rocket ships to the stars never materialized. None of us ever got to tour the nation in a multicolored school bus and play musical numbers in different high schools . Our friends were never as organized as Spanky and his gang , and we never were able to harness a donkey with a carrot. That truly would have been awesome! The truth is, to this day, I have never come across a spot of quicksand.  What a shame.  What a true shame.

However, the reader need not give up hope on their childhood. There still is a Archie McPhee . Thank God for that!

Hats

I, like others of my generation, (in my pre-teens) usually wore a hat when we went outside. (The same was true for the ladies and the girls of that time.) There was even an entire set of rules and behaviors associated with these hats.  The church pews even had these little spring-loaded contraptions to hold the hats in place when in church. (This pretty much fell into disuse in the early 1970’s, along with eating fish on Fridays.) Coat racks in offices, dental offices, and insurance offices all had a shelf along the top of the rack to place your hats on.  For standing racks, there were also “pins” for holding one’s hat.

Take off your hat (civilian, that is) whenever you are indoors, except in a synagogue and except in places which are akin to public streets: lobbies, corridors, street conveyances, crowded elevators of non-residential public buildings (department stores, office buildings). Apartment house elevators and halls are classed as indoors, and so are eating places!

Take it off whenever you pray or witness a religious ceremony, as at a burial, outdoor wedding, dedication. Take it off whenever the flag goes by. And fergodsakes take it off when you have your photograph taken for the place of honor on her dressing table – and take it off before you kiss her!

Lift it momentarily as accompaniment to courtesies when hello, goodbye, how do you do, thank you, excuse me or you’re welcome are expressed or understood. The gesture is to grasp the front crown of a soft hat or the brim of a stiff one, thus to lift the hat slightly off and forward, and simultaneously to nod or bow your head as you say (or smile) your say.

Whenever you perform a service for a strange woman, or ask one—when, for example, you pick up something she has dropped on the sidewalk, or ask her (indirectly) to get her bundles the hell off that vacant bus-seat—you tip your hat to acknowledge her thanks or to give yours. Whenever you greet in passing or fall into step with a woman you know (your wife included), you tip your hat. In fact, the tip of the hat is a must for all brief exchanges with women, known or unknown.

A man rates your hat-lift, too, when he has performed some service for the woman you’re with—when he’s given his bus seat to your wife, for instance (in which case you should give him a card to your psychiatrist, as well). And also when he has been greeted by your woman companion, you tip your hat whether or not you know him. If she stops and if she introduces you, your hat comes off—but this is because you are standing and talking with a woman.

- From Esquire Etiquette: A Guide to Business, Sports, and Social Conduct, 1954

Boys and Girls liked to Play

When I was young, we all played together.  Boys and girls played together. Boys would tend to want to play “army” or “sports”.  Girls would tend to want to play “Barbie” or “house”. I really don’t think it was due to the way that we were raised. It was our interests at the time.

Anyways, we grew up normally. At that time, it was considered normal for boys to like girls, and girls to be interested in boys.  But, apparently today, that view is not shared.  Today there is a “zero tolerance” for anything deemed sexual harassment in young children. Which means that boys just cannot tell a girl he likes her. Today it is deemed “sexual harassment”. Sigh.

Please, why can’t you just let children be children?

We Played

If a boy wants to play with a toy gun, well then let him. If he wants to play with a Barbie doll instead, well then let him do that instead. If a girl wants to play football, I say go for it! If she wants to play house and dress up, good for her! Just let children be children. One of the things that has surprised me is the ever growing list of prohibitions that American children cannot do. Let’s see…

  • Can’t play with toy guns.
  • Can’t play with fireworks.
  • Can’t play knives.
  • Can’t play with slingshots.
  • Can’t play with tree-houses.
  • Can’t play with fire.
  • Can’t ride their bike alone through town.
  • Can’t stay out late after dark.
  • Can’t walk by themselves to school.
  • Can’t be in a playground without supervision.
  • Can’t go into a store without a parent.

This lack of play has had an absolutely devastating effect on the young millennials just now in college. Since they have never been on their own, and used their own self-guided imagination, they are retarded in certain significant cognitive abilities. It is truly worrisome.

Boys and girls would both play in the 1970s. Girls would play with dolls.
Girls of the 1970s would play dolls with their friends. Girls liked to play with their barbie dolls, and hang out with their girl friends. (Image Source.)

My Kid Sister

Consider my kid sister.

I have a niece who is a girly-girl. She loves clothes. One Easter Sunday my mother bought her this really nice Easter dress. My sister, totally hated it, and did not want the girls (I have numerous nieces) to have anything to do with it. However, my nieces, being strong willed, went out and got the dresses out from the closet anyways. The oldest niece, well she was a “Tomboy”, and refused to wear the dress that was bought for her. However, the girly-girl niece grabbed her dress and ran through the house with it.

As she ran, her socks went off. Her shoes went off. Her pants came off, then her top. She shinnied on the dress and went running outside in the yard in bare feet. The dress flying in bright white, and pink with ribbons floating. She ran, jumped, and leaped. She was the happiest girl in the entire world at that moment. She was totally absorbed in living that moment.

You just had to see it. The sky was blue and clear. The air was cool but sunny. The grass was a fresh lush green and the girl with her rosy happy smile on her fantastic sunny face was a picture of the Sun itself. Ah, such a very wonderful time, and a wonderful day…

As I said. Let the children play.

Elementary School

Things were different then compared to today.

I first went to parochial school, and then later, attended public school. In parochial school we were taught how to write in cursive, memorized poetry, studied basic Latin, learned how to perform mathematics using only a paper and pencil, and studied our collective history.  Indeed, when I attended school we learned history, and we were expected to understand it well enough to write a paper on it.  In fact, one of the seemingly yearly events all through middle school into my high school years was writing a paper on history. Sadly, that is no longer the case. Ah, history can tell us so much, and can be a real joy to read about if taught properly.

History has continued to be one of my favorite interests. I personally think that many people don’t know anything about history because it is really not being taught properly.

Coffee

My childhood is a tale of coffee. Coffee was the cheapest thing that you could buy in America. As such, everyone had a coffee pot, and we all drank it 24-7. We would cook it in percolators, and the smell of coffee and the sound of percolating coffee was the way most American woke up to in the mornings. There was even a television commercial that had a jingle that sounded like a percolating coffee pot.

As a child, I didn’t really drink coffee. It wasn’t until I was around 12 or so when I started to share a cup with my parents. That was two full years before I started to work.  It started to “put hair on my chest”.

The coffee was so cheap. In the movie, “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre” the main character is down on his luck in Mexico. To underline just how poor he was, he asks a passing stranger “Hey can you spare a dime for a cup of coffee”. That’s pretty down. Coffee was offered freely throughout the USA and Mexico. I’ll bet that the significance on that statement was pretty much lost on the reader when you watched the movie, eh?

via GIPHY

I well remember the time when the coffee suppliers began to jack up their prices. It was insane. I was working as a stock clerk in a grocery store at the time, and the prices just getting higher and higher. It kept going up…up… and up. First, it was 20%. Then another 20%. Then another 50%. Then 200%. Then 1000%. There was no stopping it.

The customers were angry. Then frustrated. Then crying. Nevertheless, still they bought the coffee. By then, the entire United States was addicted to it. The coffee plantations in Columbia, and Venezuela, and Mexico saw profits, and just took advantage of it. Wow!  With all the billions and billions of earnings that the companies (and owners) raked in, you would think that the nations would now be rich paradises. You would think…

I wonder why not…

Maybe it’s because they are all progressive socialist democracies, and only the rich get the money. Yup. We all know how that all works out. Look at all the wealthy and successful people in Cuba. Look at all the successful and wealthy people in Kenya. Look at all the wealthy and successful people in North Korea. Yuppur! Those progressive socialist paradises really know how to do things, now don’t they?

Potato chips were very popular as a child growing up in the 1970s.
Not every potato chip came in a bag. In Pennsylvania they came in a tin can. The potato chips we ate while we were in 1970s middle school. (Image Source.)

Grandparents

Every weekend we would visit our grandparents. There, we would often sit on the metal porch glider and have bottled soda and cold-cut sandwiches. Both of my grandparents would buy a case of soda in large glass bottles, and I would spend my entire visit drinking it. It would normally be placed in the cellar. That was a cool spot in the house, and it kept the soda cool, but not cold. As is typical for the Pittsburgh area, the basement had a commode located smack dab in the middle of the basement. It’s a Pittsburgh thing that I could never quite figure out. (Same with the idea of putting chairs in front of the house to reserve a parking space.)

A commode in the basement of Pittsburgh.
Many Pittsburgh homes have a commode in the basement. This seems to be native to Pittsburgh. While the story goes that the commodes were used by the workers to clean up and wash, when they came home from the steel mills, I do not buy into that. The reason is that a shower head is more important than a commode for cleaning up. The truth is that in Pittsburgh, typically the men had their own bathrooms. The women folk had their own bathrooms that they shared with the children. Thus, the basement was the domain of the men-folk. That is the real reason for the commodes in the basements of Pittsburgh.

Adults could drink their fill of beer. We always had beer in various old refrigerators, or boxes full of ice. When I started to work, at 14, my father figured that I was going to work like a man, then I could be treated as one as well. From that moment on, I was able to drink beer at all the family gatherings. Which was pretty cool. I was able to get tipsy, and then go to my room to sleep it off without making a scene.

My childhood was all about learning how to be a MAN.

The television was often on with a sports program or two in the background. They, of course, had a large picture of the “Last Supper” on the kitchen wall overlooking the table there. In fact, just about all of my friends had a similar picture. Today, I rarely see it, and absolutely NO television shows have this symbol of Americana displayed. We also had a painting of the “black Madonna” on the wall near the fireplace, and a statue of the Mother Mary in prayer inside a half buried cast iron bathtub in the back yard.

We ate well, and my mother insisted that we have fresh milk every day.

Fresh milk was delivered to our porch daily. It sat inside a small-galvanized metal box cooler specifically designed for that purpose.  It was delivered early in the morning and one of the routines was for my mother to fetch the milk and put it in the refrigerator promptly. The bill (for the milk) was left in an envelope inside the metal cooler box, and my parents would put money in the envelope inside the box to pay for the milk. It was a system that worked well then. I wonder how it would work today.

During the 1970s and 1960s milk was hand delivered to the houses by the local milkman.
In the 1970s, milk would be delivered to our house in a metal box that sat outside on our kitchen porch. Milk Box (Image Source)

Crime

We lived in a very safe neighborhood. I grew up in a small town. The town was big enough to have an elementary and a high school. Though, it was too small to have a middle school. It was a great place to grow up in.

Oh, we heard about the crime in the urban areas of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, but that was a world that was way beyond our experience. We didn’t lock our house doors.  No one did. In fact, the front door lock was often stubborn from disuse. That went for the cars as well. We left the car keys in the ignition. Everyone knew everyone else. All the mothers knew each other.

Dinners in the 1960s.
In the 1960 and 1970s, most people had a traditional family. In a traditional family, the husband works, and gives all of his earnings to the wife. The wife in turn, budgets the money, provides fresh and healthy meals, makes sure that the house is clean, and that everyone is happy. She is in charge of the education of the children, and supervises it and runs off to the school if anything does not pass her muster.

All of the men knew each other. Maybe they did not work together, but they were all members of the various social clubs like the Rotary, the Elks, and the Moose. (As well as the Polish Falcons.) There would be a meeting or two at the lodge each month and my father would attend. Because everyone knew everyone else, no one was trying to take from each other.

For us kids growing up, the entire town was like one big playground. It was most certainly like a scene out of Mayberry RFD. If you want to know what it was really like then read “The Mad Scientist’s Club”.  It was exactly like that.

We would say “Hi” to our neighbors and play with their kids.  “Hi, Mr. Baley.”, or “Hi, Miss Cambell.”. We all played baseball in the neighborhood ballpark, and rode our bikes all over the town. If someone bought a new appliance, then we would make “forts” out of the cardboard boxes it came in, and play with that.

Boyhood Essentials

I always carried a pocket knife with me, and used it to cut small branches and to chew on twigs from a birch tree (it tastes like root beer). It was a blue Cub Scout knife with three blades. I carried it everywhere. My father bought it for me when I was six years old. Ah, it was a male rite of passage.

One of the things that has surprised me is that NONE of the male interns that have worked for me (from the United States) ever owned their own pocketknife. Most have heard about it, and knew what it was, but none had ever owned one. It really stuns me. My male interns from France, England, and Germany all have owned pocketknives. I just cannot get over the fact how retarded that American boys have become. It is almost like they have turned into girls.

Anyways…

Bicycles

I was very shy with girls, and not so great at sports.  However, I was a fantastic swimmer, an average golfer, and an active tennis player. I was a member of the cub scouts, and rode a gold Schwinn “banana seat” bike with “high bars” and a “drag strip” (non-tread) rear tire. Every one of my friends owned a bicycle. My sister had one with a white plastic basket in the front. My bike had these long streamers of plastic that plugged into the handles. I eventually tore those things off. But I would put a card (from a deck of cards) and attach it to the bicycle with a wooden clothes pin. That way my bicycle would make some “cool” sounds when I rode fast. It had a huge red circular red reflector on the back, right under the white “banana seat”. Like the GTO I would later drive when I was in High School, the bicycle was an orange color.

During the 1970s and 1960s all children rode bicycles. I had a banana seat bike that I rode.
We would all ride bicycles when we grew up. Which is different than kids today. Instead, today their parents drive them from event to event, instead of expecting them to get there on their own. A 1970s childhood. (Image Source)

My bike was a personal selection. When my father took me to a store to pick it out, I chose a really simple and rugged model. There were no front or rear brakes on the handlebars. To brake, you would just use the pedals. There also weren’t any gears. There was one gear only. It came with a rear view mirror, that soon broke off, and that was about it. My friends all had more complicated bicycles, and over the years, they were perpetually repairing their bikes and trying to fix them. For me, I never had that problem.

Chores

Every Spring I would help my father take down the “storm doors” and put up the “summer doors”. These doors had mosquito mesh instead of glass. It allowed fresh air to get inside the house, but kept the bugs out. To swap the doors was an easy chore. All you needed was a large screwdriver. Once I proved my mastery of that task, my father made sure that I did it every spring and fall. (Whoops! Roped in to another chore again!)

Life as a child in the 1960s.
In a traditionally run family, everyone had roles that they had to take on. For the boys, like myself, this meant chores. I was almost entirely responsible for all the outside chores, such as care and feeding of the animals, tending of the lawn and garden, and trash, and snow removal duties. My sisters were responsible for domestic matters, and learned how to cook and care from the clothing and the house from my mother.
The two family types and how they work.

Ice Cream

We ate “soft serve” ice cream from the local Dairy Queen stand, or had banana malt milk shakes.  My father would always take us out for a ride on Sundays after dinner. (Sunday dinner was the most important dinner of the week, and the most elaborate.) We all would hop into the car and ride over to the local Dairy Queen stand. There I would get a large vanilla (soft serve) ice-cream cone. Everyone got one. Even our dog Belle who was a husky. She would get hers’ in a little plastic dish.

Everyone had BBQ's in the 1960s and 1970s. We took the time to spend time with our friends and families.
During the 1960s and 1970s we attended BBQ cookouts exactly like this. We would eat pork and beans, or bacon wrapped hot dogs. Corn and watermelon would be served as well. I attended family barbeques exactly like this.(Image Source.)

We ate plump, real ground beef hamburgers and bacon-wrapped hotdogs.  We would eat a fine can of pork and beans, and let’s not forget the buttered corn on the cob, potato salad, and the macaroni salad as sides. Us kids would have an iced cooler full of all the soda we could drink and the parents drank all the beer they could muster. (Typically, Iron City, Bud, PBR, and Michelob.)

News

I would watch the news reluctantly. For me it was pretty boring.

However, I did follow the news about space. You couldn’t miss it. Everyone was talking about space, and the moon. That is all you heard aboout as a child of the 1960’s. The television shows also helped to maintain this theme.

As the news that played on the radio concerned our exploration of space and the Vietnam War.  Of course I didn’t know what was going on. It was a takeover of the United States government by dark forces embedded deep inside the United States government. When JFK was shot, my father insisted that I watch the television. He kept telling me that this was the most important thing to happen to the United States since the Civil War. He was a lifelong Democrat and he had real concerns that there was more to the story than what the government was saying. Later, after he died and President Trump released the transcripts, it turned out that my father was right after all.

The “Deep State” murdered our President.

“This fucker, johnson should be dug up and pissed on, and torn apart. Every modern ill can be traced to him.” 

-sowhat1929

On Sunday we watched Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom”, and “The FBI” (Starring Efrem Zimbalist Jr) after the Walt Disney hour. If I wasn’t watching television, I was building plastic scale models, or experimenting on my Gilbert chemistry (and electrical) sets.

The A. C. Gilbert Company was an American toy company, once one of the largest toy companies in the world. It is best known for introducing the Erector Set to the marketplace. A chemistry set is an educational toy allowing the user (typically a teenager) to perform simple chemistry experiments.

During the Bill Clinton presidency (D) all sales of chemistry, electronics, and mechanical kits were put under investigation as possible routes for “home grown” terroristic activities, and were subsequently suppressed, if not outright banned. Over the Bush years (R), they resurfaced and eked out a small living.  However, by 2017 most hobby kit suppliers went out of business. Ramsey electronics, Heithkit electronics RIP.

Little Treasures

I, like my contemporaries, had my little treasures. Some of my friends collected baseball cards. Others, collected Indian arrowheads, and still others collected comic books. I had one friend with quite an impressive collection of comic books, and Doc Savage paperback books. I ended up buying his entire collection for $10 when he moved out of state.

I owned (but rarely wore) a “mood ring” that I found in an old “mason jar” filled with old “Indian head” pennies, marbles, and campaign pins (I picked it up at a yard sale for twenty five cents.).  I also wore a catholic ring of Saint Christopher that I picked up at a church sale on “Polish Hill” in Pittsburgh.

I was pretty stylish. I wore “Beatles style” hair with bangs that were always covering my forehead and falling in front of my eyes. My parents absolutely hated it.

Bottle Collecting

My favorite thing to do when I was around eight or nine would be to go “bottle collecting”. Here I would go into the local “woods” to dig for “old bottles” (in long disused trash dumps, often 100 years old) that I would then clean and collect. We had a couple of “dumps” that we frequented. One of the best, with the most impressive bottles, was near the river next to an old railroad spur. It was the home of many a “whittle marked” bottle, old time bitters, and about a hundred thousand Lydia Pinkham bottles. (I guess that the local woman folk must have had a lot of “womanly” problems.)

Our parents let us kids go out and play.

“I used to puzzle over a particular statistic that routinely comes up in articles about time use: even though women work vastly more hours now than they did in the 1970s, mothers—and fathers—of all income levels spend much more time with their children than they used to. This seemed impossible to me until recently, when I began to think about my own life. 

My mother didn’t work all that much when I was younger, but she didn’t spend vast amounts of time with me, either. 

She didn’t arrange my playdates or drive me to swimming lessons or introduce me to cool music she liked. On weekdays after school she just expected me to show up for dinner; on weekends I barely saw her at all. 

I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with one if not all three of my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house, or just hanging out with them at home. When my daughter was about 10, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably not spent more than 10 minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not 10 minutes in 10 years.”

-The Overprotected Kid

Ah. My bedroom was a collection of old colorful bottles, scale models of tanks on shelves (and planes hanging from strings from the ceiling), as well as a quite a large collection of paperback books and comics. I had stacks and stacks of magazines. Magazines included “Lost Treasure magazine”, “Men’s Adventure”, “The Good Old Days”, “Mechanics Illustrated”,  “Popular Science”, “Popular Mechanics”, “Mad Magazine” and “Analog”. In fact, the upstairs bathroom had a closet, and the bottom two shelves were devoted to all sorts of magazines and comic books.

Money and Costs

Things were cheaper then.

In fact, most things could be paid for using coins.  If you ate at a restaurant, you would rarely need to use any bills.  Just a handful of coins (from a coin purse) was all you would need. Indeed, my father carried a coin purse and a money clip.  Wallets didn’t really become popular until the 1970’s. (When inflation had jacked up food prices to obscene levels.)

I would fill up the air in my bicycle tires with air from the local gas station.  (For free. Paying for air didn’t become vogue until the 1980’s.) It was a white building with two (gas) pumps outside, and an open garage bay where the owner would typically be fixing the cars of the local townspeople. Inside were dusty pin-up photos of sexy girls taken from magazines (like playboy, the “open spread” foldout format was well suited to wall-poster applications.) and industry calendars which always had a picture of a topless chick (or nearly topless) holding a wrench or hammer.

Advertising to men.
In a male dominated workplace, the most effective means of advertising tools is to utilize imagery that appeals to men. During the Bill Clinton (D) administration, there was a move to make everyone “equal”. In so doing, all efforts to appeal to a anything other than female or neutral gender was discouraged. Know your history.

I drank from a lawn hose in the summer when I was thirsty. It tasted like warm plastic.

If I was off away on a farm, or near a dirt road we would stop at a well and get a drink of spring water. At sometime in the 1960s all wells in Pennsylvania had to be covered up (so that no one would fall into them). Instead the placed these large iron hand-pumps (often painted red of green) that you could pump the water up and drink. The water was free to whomever needed it. Which is so unlike today where even common tap water is bottled by Walmart for a profit.

I was typical, and not a “bad boy” at all. When my friends started to smoke cigarettes, I refused. When I started to work, and was offered beer by the older boys, I drank and soon discovered that I was a “light weight” and numerous embarrassing events ensued. My friends chewed tobacco and often had a can of “chew” in the back pocket of their jeans (often creating a round circle of wear). I didn’t do this.  For the most part, my serious engagement of vices occurred much later… after my retirement.

Television

Television was rather primitive.

While we did have a color television, we still needed to walk across the room to change the channel. Imagine that! Remote controls were not available until the mid-1970’s. On top of it were “rabbit ears” until we were able to subscribe to cable in the late 1970’s. My grandmother had her “rabbit ears” with aluminum foil wrapped around it. She said that it improved her reception. Maybe it did. I don’t know, her reception really sucked, so it must have been really, really terrible.

My favorite after-school show was “The Flintstones”. All of my classmates watched it. There were many shows that I watched when I was growing up. It went from the black and white “Diver Dan” series, to the Fireball XL-5, Supercar, and included such staples as Gilligans Island, and the Man from U.N.C.L.E..

Toy Guns

I had full toy replica M-14 with “action sound” back in the day. We would go around the neighborhood playing war with the other kids with their (own) toy guns. Let’s see, I had a toy M1, a tommy gun, a grease gun, a Beretta that shot projectiles with a suction cup at the end, and a large collection of cap guns and water pistols. Not one parent had an issue.  Not one snowflake triggered.  Not one police call.  Even the girls loved it.

“I remember when toy trucks (Tonka) was made of metal. When automobiles were made of steel. When a carton of cigarettes cost $5, when there where phone booths, a gallon of gas was 45 cents, a postage stamp was 5 cents, a bottle of Coca-Cola was a dime, a nickel-bag of weed was $5, the Sun was yellow. 

I remember a time when you could find starfish and beautiful shells on the beaches of the Atlantic ocean. I remember when our skies where blue, not hazy white. I remember when slot machines paid out silver dollars. I remember a time when children could play safely outside.

I remember when kids could sell lemonade without being arrested. I remember when you could crack your child's ass in public for being a brat and not being arrested. A lot has indeed changed.”

-Hugh Mann Oct 21, 2017 1:34 PM

Lemonade Stands

Talking about selling lemonade, it was a method that introduced business techniques to children. The schools didn’t have any courses on how to start and run your own business. The boy scouts taught self-initiative and independence. If you wanted to know how to start your own business, and the basics on how it worked, your parents would teach you by allowing you to sell lemonade. It was a method by which a child could learn the basics of business management, and production.

Of course, during the Obama administration, this was forbidden.  Moreover, a war on young children, their lemonade stands, and the parents who would teach children about work began. The result was a decimation of the understanding of the basics of industry to an entire generation of children. Read about some of the thousands of instances here;

Today, americans can be arrested for the slightest cause. America is no longer free. Policemen and cops will arrest anyone, even children. In the 1960s and 1970s this would never happen.
Here is an American police officer frisking a child on the television show “Cops” showing how important it is for Americans to obey the law. American cop frisks child for breaking the law. (Image source.) You would never see this in the 1960s and 1970s.

Meals

We ate formal meals.

That is to say, that we ate in the “dining room” with a fully laid-out table with tablecloth (and undercloth), china dishes and silverware. My father sat at the “head” of the table, and my mother sat at the other end.  Us kids, sat in the middle. Household meals always had a meat or a fish with sides of mashed potatoes, a salad, cooked vegetables and bread. Meats would include pot roasts, pork chops, Salisbury steaks, roast chicken, and ham. We ate fish on Fridays. We only ate pizza or hamburgers when we ate outside or at a restaurant. (We rarely ever ate pizza, or “junk food” at home.  We ate “real” “sit down” formal meals.) With an intact family-centered life, we ate far better than Americans do today.

Link

Late Night Horror Movies

We acted like kids, and participated in the activities normal for that time. Most of our time was divided between school and play.  Of that, we enjoyed playing the most.  With our days filled with outdoor activities (such as hiking and bike riding) followed by evening television viewing. Whether it was “the Rat Patrol”, or “Chilly Billy Car dilly” on “Channel 11” showing low-grade “B” horror flicks, we watched them all.

In fact, I must say that I was a big “Ultraman” fan “in the day”.  But, overall, I was  Vincent Price fan.

Vincent Price made many movies during the 1960s and 1970s, and his Dr. Phibes series were amoung his best.
During the 1970s one of my favorite Vincent Price movies was the Dr. Phibes series. Here he is with one of his pretty assistants. Valli Kemp with Dr. Phibes. (Image Source.)

I really liked all of the Vincent Price movies.  These were often B-grade flicks made in the 1970’s which you would watch on a cold and snowy winter weekend afternoon. In fact, I would say that my all-time favorite movies are the Doctor Phibes series.  I don’t know why that is.  Maybe it’s because of the mechanical gadgets.  Maybe it’s because of the tales of creative revenge.  Or, maybe it’s because I always had a crush on his beautiful assistant(s).  LOL!

Dr. Phibes movies were very popular Vincent Price movies during the 1970's.
There were two Dr. Phibes movies. Each one used a different assistant. I was in love with both. Yikes! Image credit to Metro Goldwyn Mayer for their promotional photo. Virginia North with Dr. Phibes. (Image Source.) We all loved these movies int he 1960s and 1970s.

I was a good kid, though a bit “nerdy” compared to my classmates.

Nerd

I had other interests, which tended to be on the nerdy side. For instance…

In the 1970s, board games were very popular before the advent of computer games.
During the 1970s I used to play Avalon Hill’s board games such as Panzer Blitz and Squad Leader. Here are the counters from the Advanced Squad Leader game set. Advanced Squad Leader Counters (assorted). (Image Source.)

I played Panzer Blitz and Squad Leader board games.  (But only with the handful of friends who actually knew how to play the complex games and enjoyed strategy.) Board games were popular, and it took the entire computer industry to demolish the stranglehold that strategy games held. Games would last hours, even an entire day.

“I was just over at ebay scanning the wargames (because of threads in this forum such as the demise of boardgames) and seeing AH Panzer Leader there brought back fond memories. I am sure I had one box at one time, have to find it. I remember in high school, my friends and I had three Panzer Leader and two Panzer Blitz games plus some made up boardmaps, put them all together for a massive tactical wargame that lasted throughout the summer. Our german opponent, stuck in the middle in a replay of 1945, was able to keep the Sov and US units from meeting. Amazing.”

-AnimalAl

I also was very interested in the “computer revolution” that was just getting started. I had taken some basic programming classes, and excelled in them. However, my father thought that there would not be any kind of future in computers. So he STRONGLY recommended that I take something practical. He suggested that I go to university to study something that had potential. Engineering most certainly, but not anything related to computers. He felt that it was a passing fad that would soon go away.

We had a nice long “sit down” chat about my future, and he believed that I would be best served if I went to a military academy to reach my dream of being a spaceman. I believed in it. While it might sound crazy today, it was a reality during the 1960s. and 1970s. I tended to agree with him, and with that in mind I took High School classes that would be beneficial for me to attend the Air Force academy.

Telephones

There were no cell phones; indeed most phones hung on the wall, and fully 50% of them had dials instead of push buttons.  Our home had two phones. One was an old Bakelite black phone from the 1920’s hidden away in the basement. I loved the feeling of it. There was a weight to it that you just couldn’t get during the 1970’s. We also had a “main” phone in the kitchen. It had an extra-long cord. My sister was always “hogging it up”. So one year they bought her a phone for her room. She still spent most of her time on the phone, it’s just that she wasn’t talking in the kitchen all day.

Sunday mornings as a kid in the 1960s and 1970s was very much a time of newspapers, coffee and hot fresh buttered rolls.
Sunday mornings were very much the same during the 1960s and 1970s. This included the children in PJ’s, the coffee, and the pets. Sunday mornings were stereotypical.(Image Source.)

In the house we wore “house clothes” also known as PJ’s, with a robe. Mother would make sure that there was always a pot of coffee brewing, and us kids would always fight over who would get to read the comics section of the paper first.  Of course, our dogs and cats merrily participated in the morning ritual. Picture above is not the ideal, it was the actual.

Pleasures

Chores

From the time I was five years old I needed to pull my weight at the house. I had chores.

I would use a push lawn mower on the weekends to mow our grass (with no breaks until I was finished), and rake the leaves in the fall (with a break drinking apple cider).  No respite during the seasons, as I even had to shovel the snow in winter (with a break drinking egg nog on Christmas Day). (Such was the life of a typical boy in the 1970’s.) Us boys all had chores that we had to finish before we could go out and “play”. When we became old enough, typically 16 years old, we went and got our first job working for someone else.  It was what you did if you were a male boy. (Eh. I started at 14, as my father insisted that work would make me into a man.) So, I went to school until it ended, and then off to work from 4 to 9 every evening. Most of my life consisted of 12 to 14 hour shifts at work.

So, of course, I am going to take offense at the idea that I had “white male privilege”. And, I really get more than just a little hot under the collar when some female SWJ tries to make that point. There was no “white male privilege” in scrubbing out the filthy toilets in a coal mine, getting covered with dirty grease while you climb up a dragline, or being dressed down just because you are young and don’t know anything yet.

I was a typical boy. While many of my friends got to play football and other sports, I worked. I was bred to be a great work horse. That was the experience of boys of my generation. The experience of girls was quite different.

Girls were treated differently. My sisters all got weekly allowances.  This enabled them to go out with their other friends and buy the latest fashions. They were all members of the various cheerleader organizations, and participated in all the local events sponsored by the school.

Poetry

In my early school years (grades 1 through 3), I attended private parochial (Catholic) schools.  They offered and provided a superior education compared to the public schools that I attended afterwards.  I learned the Latin language as well as my English grammar. In fact, one of my most significant “loves” was introduced to me in first grade.

Here we were told (forced) to memorize poetry. (Oh, and boy did I hate it at the time. I would cry and cry. My father would record my complaints and play them back to me. Oh, I hated it. I HATED it.) Now, today, I really appreciate that memorization. I memorized Robert Frost, and Taylor Coleridge.

These are poems that I have NEVER forgotten.

The Road Not Taken - Poem by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;


Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,


And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.


I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

There is a certain timelessness about this poem. I always loved the sound of it, but it wasn’t until I was much older did I appreciate the meaning. You know, when you are in elementary school, you haven’t lived long enough to experience decisions and consequences. However, when you are older, that is something else altogether. Today, the poem speaks to me like no book or movie can. And that is what poetry is all about.

The poem speaks to me personally. I can well guess that it might speak to you (the reader) as well. We have chosen paths that other people didn’t. They took us to interesting places. They have altered our lives in ways… special and significant ways.

Here is another timeless poem by Robert Frost;

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost


Whose woods these are I think I know
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Poems are wonderful. Now that I am older I really appreciate all the effort that the nuns made to force me to learn these poems.

Girls never seemed to care that I could recite poems. So it really wasn’t an issue about getting chicks. The girls of High School seemed only to care about the football players, and hot cars. The poems made a difference in my life when I got older. Then, the complexities of live began to take its toll, and it was poetry that became my refuge when the world spiraled out of control.

Whenever I am stressed at work, and there is some just outlandish and power crazed manager spouting nonsense (remember I worked in a corporate environment during the 1980’s and 1990’s), I would stand off to the side and recite a poem or two. It calmed me down. Because, no matter what role my boss would have, and no matter if he controlled my income, I could recite poetry, and he simply could not.

That fact always put a smile on my face and comforted me.

It also ended up being a great way to “break the ice” in China. I would offer a toast. Then, I would recite a poem. The Chinese, especially the English speaking ones, are always absolutely amazed. As are the beautiful Chinese ladies. Chinese poetry is different, but just as beautiful.

Kubla Khan - Poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.


So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round :
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree ;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.


But oh ! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover !
A savage place ! as holy and enchanted
As e'er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover !


And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced :
Amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail :
And 'mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.


Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean :
And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war !


The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves ;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice !


A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw :
It was an Abyssinian maid,
And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight 'twould win me,
That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome ! those caves of ice !


And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware ! Beware !
His flashing eyes, his floating hair !
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,


For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.

Not one American intern, boys or girls, could recite a poem. Any poem. What in the heck do they teach at schools today? Many times, but not all, they do not even know a poem or could name one. What a sad, sad, state of affairs. It is almost like a part of their life is missing…

How far American Education has Degraded

Just for fun, let’s see if you (the reader) can take a simple 8th grade level test from 1912. Now this is from 1912. This is the kind of test that our grandparents, or in some cases, our great-grandparents took. My parents were constantly harping on how the educational system was dumbing down. Moreover, that was in 1960! One can only imagine what they would think of schools today.

Now, I have passed this test on to my (senior-year university) interns, and they constantly fail it. They justify their failure. Which is something that I teach them NOT to do, and thus the reason for having the interns take the test. Their excuses range from “the computer spell checks for me”, “I don’t need to know trivia”, to “that’s why Wikipedia exists.” Sigh.

Let’s see how you, the reader, can do…

The test begins with a spelling exam. The teacher would recite each of the following words. They would recite it three times. The student taking the test would then need to spell the words correctly. There are forty words in total.

Exam for eight grade students in 1912. This was the kind and type of exam that I used to take in the 1970s and 1960s.
Exam for eight grade students in 1912, but even I could pass it in the 1970s.
Math and Reading questions from the 1912 eighth grade test. I could have passed this test when I was in eighth grade int he 1970s.
Here is the reading and math sections of the 1912 eighth grade exam. Heck, even I could pass this in the 1970s.

Math and Reading questions from the 1912 eighth grade test.

This is a section of a test or exam for eight grade students in 1912. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took in the 1970s.
Grammar portion of the 1912 test for eight grade students. While I could pass it in the 1970s, it is highly unlikely that anyone could pass it today.
Here are some geography questions asked of students in eighth grade in 1912. We were also expected to answer similiar questions during the 1970s. It is unlikely that anyone would be able to answer these questions today.
Geography questions expected of eighth grade students in 1912. This was quite similiar to the kinds of tests that we were expected to pass in the 1970s.
This is a section of Physiology questions given to eighth grade students in 1912. This is similiar to testst that I took in the 1970s.
Physiology test section of a 1912 test given to eighth grade students. I was able to pass similiar tests in the 1970s.
Students today routinely fail test questions that we considered normal just a few decades ago. It is very similiar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.The dumbing down of the American population has been unabated.
Civil Government test questions given to eighth graders in 1912. It is very similiar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.
Questions on Civil Governance given in 1912 to eighth grade students. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.
Civil Government questions given to eighth graders in 1912. Note the questions given to 11 year olds. Today, numerous liberal and progressive sections of the United States wish to make voting possible for 16 year old’s, yet not one could be able to answer any of these questions. Heck, not even our Senators could answer these questions. Can you imagine Senator Maxine Walters (D) answering them? Hah! In fact, I wonder if she slept through class or skipped school. Indeed, this exam is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.
Students in America used to study and know history. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s. Today, not one college educated person can answer the questions in this test given to eighth graders in 1912.
History section of the 1912 exam for eighth grade students. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.
This test was given to eighth grade students in 1912 to test their knowledge. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s. I am sorry to say that it is unlikely that any American college graduate would be able to answer these questions.
Conclusion of the 1912 exam given to eighth grade students. It is very similar to the kinds of tests that I took during the 1960s and 1970s.

You can find the answers to this test on this page HERE. Now, compare that with eighth grade students today.

Penmanship

We wrote in script, and printing out answers was discouraged (and frowned upon). A measure of one’s ability to communicate was penmanship. (Indeed, there is a scientific correlation between writing in script, poetry and improved thinking processes.  This was something, I believe, that gave me advantage over my public-school educated peers.)

We all wrote in script. We were taught script and penmanship early on in elementary school in the 1960s and 1970s.
In the 1960s elementary school we were taught to write in script. This continued through into the 1970s. All of our written tests were timed, and thus the ability to write in script clearly and quickly gave us advantage over those who could not. We wrote in script. (Image Source.)

When the New Year was upon us, we would go out and buy a “Farmer’s Almanac”. It was filled with all sorts of interesting things.  However, I believe that my mother would use it as a guide as to when we should till the earth, and plant our garden. It is still being printed. Thank God!

We wore bell-bottoms and nylon shirts with big-puffy sleeves, and wide collars.  I  also wore a tight collar around my neck made out of white beads. It was called a “choke collar”.

Hamper Migration

I was pretty much a typical boy, and got dirty a lot. When the clothes were dirty, we threw them into fashionable “hampers”, not the large super cheap polypropylene baskets that are sold in Wal-Mart today. In fact, we have seem many things go the same way as the “hamper migration” of the last few decades.

As the federal reserve decimated the United States dollar, Americans began to cope in numerous ways. One such way was to purchase cheaper and inexpensive furnishings. This started in the 1960s and 1970s and continued into the new century.
American hamper migration from high quality, long life articles to cheap and disposable furnishings. American Hamper Migration. Migration began in the 1960s and 1970s and persisted into the new century.

In regards to the function and design of the hampers.  I suggest that the reader pay attention that there was a migration in overall quality, utility, and appearance over time. Indeed, this also translated into longevity as well.  The older products were better made, lasted longer, and were designed for function AND appearance.  Somehow, and we all know why, American products became obsessed with cost savings at the expense of everything else.  Why? It was NEVER this way before.

The answer is simple.

It all is because of the passage of the Income tax and the Federal Reserve. Before the Federal Reserve was established, Americans ate quality food, bought quality clothes, furniture and housing. After the Federal Reserve was established there was a sudden drop in the value of the US dollar. This affected everything. Most notably the purchase power of American citizens.

With non-Americans controlling the American money supply, they could use it as they deemed fit.  They ran the value of the US dollar into the ground. As a consequence, both parents needed to work.  Families became dysfunctional.  People could only afford the cheapest food.  Butter became expensive, and so people bought margarine. As a result, people got fatter.  Greed ruined the core of what made America great.

Inflation ensued.

As the US dollar lost its worth, people could no longer afford what they once could.  Thus, stores that provided the cheapest products and solutions to home management dominated the industry.  (Such as Wal-Mart, and the Dollar Store.) The devastation of the value of the dollar can be traced back to one and only one sole cause. That is one of the many consequences of the imposition of the income tax and establishment of the Federal Reserve…

Ah, but I digress (yet again.)

Partylines

The interns that I employ act as if everyone has a smartphone and it is a requirement to own one. Heck, it wasn’t until the 1990’s that companies started requiring their employees to have a phone. When I was growing up in rural Pennsylvania, many people shared a phone line. This was known as a “party line”. When you picked up the phone, if someone was using it, you would have to wait until they got off before you could use the phone. Seriously, that is the way it was.

Things are so different now.

The problem, as I see it, is that Americans only know what they know. Since many have never experienced furniture made out of real hardwoods, and real solid metals, they don’t think anything of it. They think that just because Walmart is popular today, that it has always been popular. They think that because they need to buy water at a supermarket today they you always needed to buy water at a supermarket. And, finally, they think that just because coffee at Starbucks is expensive that it always was expensive.

No it wasn’t. In fact, until coffee was monetized, coffee was THE cheapest thing that you could buy in America.

This trend towards higher prices and cheaper products is not a random occurrence. It is systematic and has been going on for a long time now. It’s just that you don’t really see it unless you have lived for a while. Then you can see the differences. You can see things changing and then you can compare your experiences with the changes and come up with conclusions.

I blame the Federal Reserve.

The Federal Reserve and the Decline of the USD

As the value of the dollar decreased, both parents needed to work to support the family. Children no longer had parental guidance, and problems came about as a result. The dollar’s value continued to plummet. So people could only afford the cheapest products. Still, that was not enough. The dollar still continued to plummet. Soon, people had to purchase things in credit to just get their basic needs met.

But don’t believe me. Look at the graph yourself. It is obvious whoever is running the American monetary supply is doing a FUCKING PISS POOR JOB at it. This is an obvious fact. It means that the entire system must be scrapped and replaced with one that maintains it’s value over time. If our elected officials were actually doing their job, they would have noticed a problem at the very start of this fiasco.

Decimation of the USD over time since the creation of the Federal Reserve. The 1960s and the 1970s showed the most evident collapse.
The decline of the USD since the Federal Reserve was established. Today the value of a dollar (2018) is less than one cent compared to what it used to be.

The Value of the US Dollar since the establishment of the Federal Reserve. The performance of the first ten years should have told everyone what a huge fucking mistake that they made. The truth is for the last 90 years, the value of the USD has had an unstoppable downward vector.

Door to Door

It was a time when door to door salesmen would sell young couples a huge multi-volume encyclopedia that would take months to pay off. (One can come across the huge collections in yard sales and estate sales.  Maybe on eBay.  Perhaps one of the greatest influences of my childhood was an illustrated encyclopedia for children that I would spend hours perusing.) My father saw what an interest the illustrated encyclopedia had on me that he considered it to be a great idea to get a full “adult” set. This was a great set, however it wasn’t for elementary children to read. As such, I really didn’t touch it or have any interest in it until I hit my teens.

Today is so different.

Back then we could play in parks.  We could climb trees there.  We could play games on the “monkey bars”, and slide down the slide.  We could ride on the “see-saw”, and splash in the pond. That was what their purpose was.  It was for fun. Yet, today it is something else entirely. Today “playgrounds” are no longer about play, they are about being safe. They should be called “safegrounds”, or even better “safe spaces”.

No freedom for Americans. Liberty is not for you. Celebrate the fourth of July without freedom. In the 1960s and 1970s we could celebrate freedom.
This is how Americans have come to celebrate freedom and liberty on the one day that represents freedom and liberty. It is so sad. America today.  Enjoy your holiday! (Image Source.) All of the things banned today were permitted in the 1960s and 1970s.

Porch Lights

It was a time of innocence. I wore a tee-shirt that had a big yellow smily icon, and the words “have a Nice Day” under it. My sister had a baton that she would practice twilling all day. (She also had a “Hula Hoop”. I could never get the hang of that thing. I guess that I just didn’t have the hips for it.

In the rural sections of the nation, porch lights were used to show “openness” to visitors. If you were lonely or just wanted to meet up with someone and talk, it would be pretty hard to do in the country. There just wasn’t any restaurants open, or places to gather around others. The roads were desolate and empty of cars at night. You could walk down them in total silence. It could be a little depressing.

So what people would do, if they wanted to be with someone else, is to turn on their porch light.

The porch light being on signified on of two things. Either [1] you were waiting for someone to arrive, or [2] you were open for visitors.  It was a way to keep everyone in a closed-knit community together with face-to-face communication rather than relying on telephones. Of course, the first thing you would do, when a person knocked on your door, was to lead them into the kitchen and put a fresh pot of coffee on. It was the neighborly thing to do.

Independence in the 1960s and 1970s meant that you had the ability to ride your own bicycle all over town. You had the freedom of time and play.
In the 1960s and the 1970s we rode our bicycles all over the town regardless of the rain or snow. Our parents did not cart us from event to event. Instead we were on our own. We all rode banana-seat bicycles even when it showed out. (Image Source.)

In a small community, everyone knew each other. It was a great way to meet up, make friends, and renew friendships and just chat. Other ways to do so included church, the various fraternities and clubs, and of course, the Scouts.

Cub Scouts

I was a cub scout up until I entered my teenage years.  Every week we would attend meetings in the homes of one of the scout mothers (called “Den Mothers”), and they would help us work on our “badges”, and get ready for the various events.  These events included picnics, hikes, plays and social get togethers.  We would proudly wear our uniform during parades, or on holidays like the Fourth of July, Memorial Day, or Labor Day.  We would salute the flag in school and lead the Pledge of Allegiance at school in the mornings. (Big change from today, when you have multi-millionaire NFL stars refusing to stand for the US Flag. I find it completely reprehensible and disgusting. But, then I am from the “old school”.)

One of the first things that I got when I joined the Cub Scouts was a blue uniform.  I well remember my mother teaching me how to put on my yellow scarf.  In addition, I got to have my very own hand axe.  It was a Rite of Passage for me.  Here at seven years old, I could carry a hand axe.  I was taught how to use it to cut trees, and how to throw it (just in case I might come across some desperate Indians…).

Boys all had hand axes when they were growing up. It was a part of being a boy in the 1960s and 1970s..
My first axe was given to me when I was a cub scout. I used it throughtout the 1960s and 1970s. I learned how to throw it, and how to use it. It was a rite of passage of all young boys. A boy’s first axe. (Image Source.)

While I went to elementary school in the 1960’s, it was my experiences during the 1970’s, which influenced my personality. Indeed, it is my feelings and experiences that reflect that period in time.

High School

Through most of my high school years, I wore “bell bottom” pants, and wide-collared polyester shirts. Our biggest source of entertainment was our television. We listened to the radio, and for me I would read or build plastic models in my bedroom while listening to FM radio on my “mult-band” radio receiver. At that time,  listened to WYDD, which was the “alternative radio” of the day. I also had a “Lava lamp” that was given to my father by a drunk friend who stole it out of a bar and didn’t know what to do with it.

We drank Orange Crush soda, along with Tab, Sprite and 7up. Our parents would drive to the “State Store” or “Beer Distributor” to buy the booze for the week.  In Pennsylvania, the government had a monopoly on the distribution of alcohol.  I guess that they reasoned that it would better” protect” the people of the commonwealth, or maybe they justified it by promising to fix the roads (snort!). Still promising (from what I gather from friends and family).  Yep.  One day the “potholes” all over the Pennsylvania roads will get fixed.  Yessur.

Until the democrats and progressive liberals took over state legislatures, boys and girls (of the 1960s and 1970s) were free to drink and smoke (with parential permission).
In the 1960s and 1970s, boys and girls were free to drink and smoke as they were growing up. This all changed when the Democrats took control of various state legislatures and enforced vice laws. Until Democrats took over the state legislatures,, children were able to drink and smoke with parenteral permission. (Image Source.)

Ashtrays and Chairs

Cars had cigarette lighters and ashtrays.  In fact, even airplanes had ashtrays built into the armrests of the seats.  (This all began to disappear during the Bill Clinton Presidency.) My grandparents both had standalone ashtrays that were their own piece of furniture.  They consisted of a large glass ashtray on a metal pedestal that sat next to the “Man’s chair” in the living room. In my family, as well as the families of all my friends, the father always had “his” chair that he sat in. While us kids might manage to use it, we would always get off of it and defer to our father once we walked into the room.

By the way, if you are dating a girl who says that she does not see the need for a man to have his own chair, run like the wind. I once dated a girl like this. Man, did she have father issues. She eventually dyed her hair a bright sickly pink-orange, shaved the left side of her head, put a nose ring that belonged in an ox’s nose, and went full-on militant feminazi.

Everyone in a household should have their own “space”.

It might be a bathroom that is “hers”. It might be a chair that is “his”. It might a dog that might have his own “special” toy. When you meet someone who believes that everything is equal, and that there are no differences, and no privacy, then you know that the person is mentally ill. Everyone needs and deserves some privacy. Everyone. If you are with someone who does not understand this most basic human needs, then you must avoid them. Avoid them.

The Partridge Family was a television show that was very popular int he 1960s and 1970s.
How can one talk about the 1960s and 1970s without mentioning the televisions show The Partridge Family? Everyone wanted to be a part of the Partridge Family.(Image Source.) Hey! Doesn’t the mother look a little like a younger version of Hillary Clinton? Maybe that’s part of her appeal? I will tell the reader that I did have quite a crush on Susan Dey. My Lord!

Work and Play

My sisters were cheerleaders in school.  All my friends played High School football.  I didn’t. I had to work. My parents were pretty unique in that regard. Most of my classmates got to have fun playing football, basketball, or baseball.  However, my father strongly felt that I needed to be a man, and that meant that instead of playing after school, I should learn how to work and to provide for a family.  Well, in a way he was right. But, in a way he was wrong too.

“The older I get, the more I realize how fortunate I was to grow up in the 70's (graduated HS in '78). It was just one simple, easy time. The stress of the 60's and all the racial/revolutionary crap that came with it was over. The greed of the 80's hadn't hit yet.

There wasn't crap on TV, and no computers or video games, so we spent our time just hanging out with friends, listening to 8-tracks and drinking beer (was actually legal to drink and drive in Texas in the 70's). If we were underage and were caught by the cops with beer, they just made us pour it out and go home.

Like an earlier post mentioned, "Dazed and Confused" really does capture those times well. I look at kids growing up today, with a federal government that's a a joke, police forces that nobody wants to trust, trillions of dollars wasted in "wars" we had no business fighting, college costs through the roof, and... well.. damn.. look at me.. I guess i turned into an old fart after all.”

-Reddit quote

Anyways, to my father, sports were just a game. You couldn’t really make any money off of it. Though, a decade later, my classmate Jim Kelly sure as heck was raking in some real money being a football quarterback. Ah, but that’s a story for another time…

Sports were more about social interaction than play. And, work, well… my history strongly indicates a disconnect from the traditional working models in favor of a debt-slave relationship to a powerful person or group.  But… more about that later…

Square Dancing and Weight Lifting

My favorite time during high school was during “study hall”. There, if we had finished our homework, we could participate in other activities. There wasn’t much at our school, but my two favorite activities were weight lifting (at the high school “Universal Gym”), and “square dancing”. There, believe it or not, the girls would come over and ask and invite me to join them dancing. It was great because there were only a precious few boys who would go dancing with the girls. LOL.

The Idols

I had a poster of Farah Faucett on my wall. She was smiling with this amazing smile, and her huge hair. We all had a crush on her. That, Loni Anderson and Rachael Welch as well.

Farah Faucett was an attractive actress that was very popular in the 1970s.
Farah Faucett was every 1970s boy’s dream. Just about everyone had a poster of her on our wall or doors in our bedrooms. Farah Faucett was every boys’ dream. (Image Source.)

I had numerous posters on my wall. One was the mandatory “black light” poster on velvet. (It glowed under UV light.) One was a picture of Richie Blackmore (Deep Purple) performing a guitar solo. (I had super imposed a F-14 on it for combined imagery. After all, space and high-performance aircraft and rock n’ roll was my dream.) One was a Roger Dean poster (anyone remember the group “Yes”?).

Raquel Welch was a very popular 1960s and 1970s actress that made a big difference in the ideas of beauty and society during the 1960's and 1970's.
Raquel Welch was another popular actress that graced the bedrooms of many a boy during the 1960s and 1970s. (Image Source.)

Overall, I had a great childhood.  I grew up in the 1960s and attended high school in the 1970s. It was a great time, and not at all what is portrayed in conventional American media today  (as a time of “racism and bigotry”). It was a time of family values, productivity, and freedom. Black, white, yellow and red.  We were all Americans.

All of us lived, more or less, the same lifestyle. (Don’t believe me? Go to your grandmother’s house and go through her family albums of photographs.)  Our fathers worked.  Our mothers stayed home and tended to the house, the budget, and us kids.

What? Do I feel a bitching sesson coming on…

Bell bottom jeans were very popular during the 1970s.
During high school, bell bottom jeans were very popular in the 1970s. Elephant Bell-bottom style jeans. (Image Source.)

We were all Suffering through the Incompetence of Washington, D.C.

That was at a point in time before the Federal Reserve still hadn’t completely decimated the US Dollar. It was still worth around twenty cents. As the dollar kept on losing value, both parents needed to go to work. This fact, forced the breakup of the American family. The family had to break up, as the mother had to work as well as the father.

“I am a most unhappy man. I have unwittingly ruined my country.

A great industrial nation is controlled by its system of credit. Our system of credit is concentrated. The growth of the nation, therefore, and all our activities are in the hands of a few men.

We have come to be one of the worst ruled, one of the most completely controlled and dominated Governments in the civilized world no longer a Government by free opinion, no longer a Government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a Government by the opinion and duress of a small group of dominant men."

- Woodrow Wilson. Quoted in “National Economy and the Banking System," Senate Documents Co. 3, No. 23, 76th Congress, 1st session, 1939. The origional quote was published in "The New Freedom" in 1913.

There is a lot of debate on this particular quote. You can look at watch the sparks fly as the debate a rages on. Oh, my goodness! It is all so silly! One side says “here is the quote”, and the other side goes “Oh, No no no. He never said it! It’s all revisionist history. The Income Tax was wonderful!” It really is silly.

Here is my take.

The value of the USD (United States Dollar) was pretty stable. It had it’s ups and downs, but for the most part it was pretty consistent. It was stable. Then, after the passage of the 16th Amendment, the value of the USD dropped like a stone. It plummeted to 50% of its value within a ten-year span of time. It dropped 50% in a decade. That is horrifying!

Only a fucking idiot wouldn’t regret the decision to establish the Federal Reserve.

You have a fairly stable dollar. Some “friends” and “associates” convince you to change the system that is working just fine, and replace it with a different system. So, low and behold, you put a new banking system in place. Then suddenly, right before your eyes, the value of the dollar collapses. It goes completely to shit. Every year it gets worse and worse!

So…

[1] So, ok, maybe the former President didn’t say that quote. If so, then he was a fucking idiot. He was evil and selfish and couldn’t read a simple chart. That is the only conclusion that you can come to, if this quote did not belong to him. Because that is, what the statists are arguing. They are saying that the President was just fine and dandy and happy with what happened with the imposition of the Income tax and the Federal Reserve. He saw the result of the change, he saw the value of the dollar collapse, and agreed that it was all good and well.

[2] If the quote is indeed accurate, then he is a normal person who is able to read charts, and ended up with regrets. This is what a normal and sane person would be. They would see that what they put in place went to complete shit. This would be what a normal person would do. Personally, I can live both concepts. And you, the reader, should as well.

Anyways, with the collapse of the USD, now everything became more and more expensive. Both parents now had to go to work.

The Breakup of the Family

Both parents now had to go to work. As such, there were periods of no parental supervision after school.  That is how American society began to fracture. The parents were absent and replaced by the reality as portrayed by television, and narrated by the people in power.

As such, we LOST many of the important things that really mattered to families. We lost such things as “jobs for everyone”, the ability to save, and formal family meals.

At the end of the day we had formal “sit-down” meals where we would all gather around a multi-dish meal and discuss the events of the day. We kids would talk about the events in school, and our parents would talk about their day. My father would sit at the head of the table. Then, once the meal was complete, we would retire with some coffee and ice cream, and us kids would clean the table and do the dishes. Dinners were great. It was one of the things that I miss most from my childhood.

At that time, in both the 1960s and 1970s,  it was important to participate in your family. It was important to participate in your school.  It was important to participate in local events, and to become a meaningful participant in society.  My, how quaint and outdated that seems today.

"Elephant-leg, hip-hugger pants, halters and platform shoes were the biggest fads.”

-- Lori West, graduated in 1976 from West Forsyth High School in Winston Salem, NC

Fashions come and go. But I always had a fondness for tube-tops, bell bottoms, and those two zipper front jeans that the girls used to wear. The tube-tops showed off the soft curves , and the “painted on” jeans showed off why guys like to look at girls. For a while, platform shoes were very popular, and I ended up having a pair that made me feel like Richie Blackmore on the stage.

Guns

All my classmates owned guns, and many hunted. My father was a very liberal Democrat, and he forbade me from learning how to shoot. (Of course, today he would be considered a Right-Wing Conservative.) The attempts at disarming the American people dates way back, but it wasn’t until the very successful efforts in the 1990’s did Americans start to FEEL the repression of the Federal Government.

The second amendment gives Americans the ability to purchase just about any kind of firearm.
Back in the 1960s and into the 1970s, Americans used to be able to buy any kind of gun or rifle. The limits on weapons didn’t really start to take hold until the Democrats took control of the State Legislatures.  Americans used to be able to buy all kinds of weapons. (Image Source.)

The second amendment was considered important. Mass shootings using firearms DID NOT occur until government started campaigns to take away guns.  There are those who think that this is not really a coincidence. I, for one, KNOW that there is no such thing as coincidence.  “Coincidences” are simply pre-positioned “signs” by others who have constructed elements of our fated existence. But then again, that is just MAJestic speaking.

Anyways… Know your history. Americans are being dumbed down to become cattle. (And you do DO know what happens to cattle, don’t you?)

In the 1960s and 1970s gun safety was taught in school.
In the 1960s and 1970s, gun safety was an important part of growing up to become an adult. In the High Schools we all learned gun safety. My first class on gun safety was in elementary school in the 1960s. Then, just about every year afterwards we would have courses on safety and hunting safety. The first classes on how to use a gun occurred in Middle School.

Ah, television then was geared towards “most” Americans.  (When I refer to “most” Americans, I am actually referring to the MAJORITY of people.  It was not focused on capturing a minority.) That is to say that this was prior to the reorientation of television programing in the 1970’s. The reorientation changed what was presented on television, and marketed directly to the black urban communities. Before that, television shows were about straight white males and reflected the world at that time. (As America was, and still is, a Caucasian majority nation.)

Television Shows

Shows about black people were limited to “Stanford and Son”, and “The Jefferson’s”.

“The "rural purge" of American television networks (in particular CBS) was a series of cancellations in the early 1970s of still-popular rural-themed shows with demographically skewed audiences, the majority of which occurred at the end of the 1970–71 television season. In addition to rural themed shows, the purge also eliminated several high rating variety shows that had been on CBS since their beginning of television broadcasting. One of the earliest efforts at channel drift, CBS in particular saw a dramatic change in direction with the shift, moving away from shows with rural themes and toward ones with supposedly more appeal to urban audiences.”

-Wikipedia

The shows we watched were funnier than what you see on television today.  And, maybe, just maybe a little more innocent. “The Bob Newhart Show” was typical. The humor involved day to day situations and NEVER mentioned race (compare that to today), and had a real twisted surrealistic sense of humor. Consider “Mary Hartman. Mary Hartman”, or “Green Acres”. You can find out more here.

Hi my name is larry and this is my brother daryl and my other brother daryl.
Iconic characters from the Bob Newhart show that was popular in the 1970s and 1980s. Hi! I am Larry, and this is my brother Darryl and my other brother Darryl. (Image Source.)

Ah, you’ve got to hear about the three yokel brothers in the (very surrealistic) 80’s “The Bob Newhart show”. I loved these guys. They might have been the highlight of the show. Heck, they could have had their own show (hint. Hint.)

“…discovering that a witch is buried in the basement of their Vermont inn. They want to find out who she was, but they also want her 300-year-old grave dug up and removed. 

The silly-from-next-door tells him he knows some guys who`ll do anything for a buck.

Next thing, three goofy-looking, backwoods brothers from the genetically weak side of Vermont show up. “Oh, Lord!” says Bob, getting a whiff. Larry--the only brother who ever talks--hands Bob their card.

“We`ll do anything for a buck,” it says.”

- Larry, Darryl And Darryl Are `Newhart` Hits

Larry was the spokesman. Darryl and Darryl never spoke except in the classic final episode. No matter how many times Larry met you, he always started off by saying “Hello. I’m Larry. This is my brother Darryl and this is my other brother Darryl.

They were quite good hearted, and obviously lived a strange, strange life. Afterall, clubbed weasel was their idea of good eatin’. Larry’s totally deadpan delivery of some very bizarre lines was always a highlight of any Newhart episode. “We went to the bakery ’cause they were advertising ‘bear claws’, but it turned out to just be a come-on.

Ah. Good times. Good times.

Movies and television portrayed westerns (with “white men” taming the wilderness), war adventures (mostly involving world war II fighting the evil Nazi army), space exploration (such as Lost in Space, Star Trek, Fireball XL-5, Thunderbirds are Go and Land of the Giants), and Spy Adventures (against the Soviet Union or against fictional organizations such as T.H.R.U.S.H.).

Ah the 1970s

Kitchens had olive colored (baked porcelain steel sheet) appliances (at least in my family), not the brushed silver (aluminum) that is so fashionable today. Men wore polyester and nylon shirts with wide striped ties; carried briefcases not backpacks, drank soda instead of bottled water, and listened to the Air Supply and Firefall on the AM radio.  We wanted Peter Frampton to “show us the way” because we (most certainly) “felt like he did”.

Today, bottled water is everywhere.  You can go into a local 7-11 or similar store like circle-K and get a water.  It is cheap. However it is STILL more expensive than the water that I had when I was growing up. Water was free, and we drank from water fountains. Today you can easily buy a bottled water it is often less than a dollar. That wasn’t the case when I was growing up.

Water was free.

Quickie Marts and other fast stores…

In fact, we didn’t even have convenience stores.  When they first started to appear, everyone was making fun of them.  Why anyone would want to pay so much money for the snacks and sodas that they offered there, we asked. We soon found out that they would offer low prices for gasoline, and we could get our pictures developed by filling out special packages that were right there on the counter. It was most certainly a different life and a different time.

The local hardware store actually possessed a “cigar store Indian” statue. Which was pretty darn cool. I wonder where the Indian from “Cambells Hardware Store” is today. High schools taught firearms handling and safety. You could purchase these huge plump-tire motorcycle tricycles and everyone was driving them about (Until a Democrat had them banned.). We saved “Green Stamps”.  Schools taught FORTRAN. Calculators were just becoming available and our sliderules were starting to gather dust in our desk drawers. High school bands carried (fake) guns (painted white) when they marched.

Slide rules replaced hand held calculators in the late 1970s.
The slide rule was a device that was used before hand held calculators became available. It was used extensively in the 1960s and 1970s. The first calculators started to be available when I was in tenth grade. Slide rule. (Image Source)

Drugs in the late 1970s

Drugs hit mainstream America in the middle to late 1960s and was all the rage in the 1970s. Ecstasy (MDMA) and other so-called “designer drugs” did not make their appearance until the 1980’s.  During the 1970s the most popular drugs were weed (marijuana), LSD (blotter, and microdot), mescaline (or dried mushrooms), hash (processed marijuana), speed (tiny “white cross” pills) and Valium. (Cocaine did not hit the American culture until the 1980s.) All of this drug use (abuse) affected our culture.  All one would need do is view the television shows at that time to appreciate this fact.

Why is marijuana against the law?  It grows natural upon this planet.  Doesn't the idea of making nature against the law seem to you a bit...unnatural?  

- Bill Hicks

Now there are all kinds of theories as to WHY a common enough weed was made illegal in the United States. I have my own theories. Here are my opinions.

Ah. What began in the 1920s and 1930s as a technique to imprison non-Americans and lower-society tier African-Americans (as most “typical” Americans did not enjoy these substances at that time) fully blew up into a nightmare. Moreover, thus began the downward slide of our culture, way of life, and everything that we believed in.

You take away the idea that the police are “on your side”, you will forever become an outlaw. Which was, if you think about it, the theme of the 1960’s and 1970s.

When I was growing up marijuana was highly illegal. It seemed crazy to me then. It was a “harmless” drug, surrounded by more dangerous, but legal drugs.  I, like the rest of my generation, chalked it up to a stodgy previous generation. At that time, we all smoked it.

High School in 1977 was just like as portrayed in the movie Dazed and Confused.
The movie “Dazed and Confused” very accurately portrayed what High School was like in 1976 and 1977. The vast majority of my 1970s generation used drugs. (Image Source.)

I would say that a full 80% of my High School class smoked the stuff.  Some were habitual.  Others were one-time users.  Indeed, the television show “That seventies show” routinely depicted the lifestyle of our generation.  There, they are shown sitting around a table and smoking marijuana. It was in every episode. However, for PC reasons, it was never shown where the smoke came from. I guess that there are some things that you cannot show on television…

This depiction is quite clear in the movie “Dazed and confused” as well.  Both video presentations accurately depicted what it was like growing up for my generation.

It took 40 years, but it seems that that ban on one of the most common plants in North America is beginning to crack.  I am not going to say whether or not the decision to do so is actually good or bad.  What people do in California or Colorado is none of my concern, as I live on the other side of the world.

What I will say is that people deserve FREEDOM.  That includes the freedom to stupefy yourself with drugs. My take is the decision to ban marijuana was a control method, put in place in the 1920s to make it easy to arrest and incarcerate blacks and Mexicans when other laws were not available.  Truth this.

Many people used drugs in the 1970s.
1970s childhood icon Pippy Longstockings smoking weed.  (Image Source)

The “War on Drugs” was in full swing in the 1960’s and the 1970’s, but you couldn’t tell it by participating in youth culture. A sizable percentage of teenagers participated in the culture. The older generations were oblivious to that fact.  In their minds, it was only a small minority of people who were smoking marijuana. They lived within their own bubble of reality. Much like many people do today about other things.

  • Our Grandparents believed that only Negros and (illegal) Mexican “wet-backs” (What “illegal aliens” were called before they became an important part of the Democrat strategy to win elections.) smoked the deadly demon “weed”. They believed that eventually the users would end up in the “crazy house”; locked up for life as the deadly poison worked its way through their brains. First in the mouth, and then in the brain. Before you knew it you became a crazed sex fiend always doing whatever it took to get your “fix” from the local “pusher”.
  • Our parents believed that only the rebels and the dregs of society smoked the illegal cigarettes. They felt that it was a given that the users would find themselves behind bars in jail. As this was characteristic of the behaviors of the misfits of society.

Well, what they failed to realize is that [1] you do NOT ban anything in a “free” society, and [2] times and people change.

What was just fine and dandy for the policing of Arizona in the 1920’s fell flat on its face during the 1960’s and 1970’s.  What only made things worse was that very powerful people, including those in government started to use the “drug issue” for everything. They capitalized on it, and used it as a resource.

“So some people want to smoke some pot once in a while in the land of the free.”

-knukles Karl Marxist Jan 5, 2018 5:21 PM 

Then, as now, older generations have problems understanding the youth that is slowing taking over their society. They just did not understand. (And, I must add, I can see why. Now that I am older, I too am having trouble with the youth of today. In short I find many terribly ignorant of history, devoid of basic work skills, interested in the most trivial of things, and basically very shallow.) Not everyone mind you. Just many of whom that I have come in contact with.

“The war on drugs to me is a war on liberty I concentrate on the issue of freedom of choice when doing things that are high risk. We permit high risk all the time. Generally we allow people to eat what they want. We do overly concentrate on what people put in their bodies,”

-Ron Paul

Indeed, how can we actually say the USA is “free” if we are told what we can and can’t do with our very own bodies?

Being told what you can and cannot do is NOT freedom. I don’t care what the excuse is.

This was a fundamental disconnect that our parent’s generation, and (most especially) our grandparent’s generation (Those idiots that thought up the 16th amendment.) had with those people who founded America.

The belief structures of both our parents and our grandparents were not the same as those of Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison.  They were something else entirely.  They, instead, possess a more “modern” and “progressive” point of view.  One where “the smartest men” in the nations had the power to tell YOU how to live your life.

"People should have the right or responsibility of dealing with what is dangerous. Once you get into this thing about government is going to protect us against ourselves, there's no protection of liberty."

-Ron Paul

You tell them, Ron.

Black People were a Minority

When I show these images of my life to young millennials today, I usually get a harsh response. They claim that it is nonsense, and that I am being racist for not having images of non-white people. Yeah. Really. WTF?

"Most foreigners are amazed there are not more blacks in the U.S. They assume there are black and brown people everywhere from watching our TV and commercials and that they are systematically kept down."

-Zero Hedge

At which I must remind everyone, that up until the 1980s, black African-Americans were a small MINORITY.  That means, that they represented a very, very small segment of the population. When I grew up, the first time I saw a African-American was when I attended college. I did not meet a SA (Spanish-American) until after I left the US Navy and was in California. My first class with an Asian-American was in college.

There were no black people in my High School. This was in the 1970s, now it seems like they are everywhere. Thicker than flies in a barn.
In my 1970s High School we had no non-whites. We had one part Eskimo, and (of course) I was something like 1/10th Iroquois Indian. The vast majority of students were of white European lineage. My High School was all white, and there might have been less than 20 colored kids in the entire county. (Image Source)

While they weren’t common anywhere near where we all lived, we certainly were familiar with them. When I was growing up, I did see people from other races on television. In fact, one of my favorite shows was “Soul Train”, and I would really enjoy watching the American Negros dance and jive. They sure had “the moves”.  I would try to get up and dance as well (as long as no one else was watching).  It must have looked so silly.  This gangly ten-year-old boy trying his moves to soul and disco music!

I have to admit the hair looked cool too.

Everyone was wearing “afros” which looked like a big ball on the top of their heads. Man, people had style back then. Some of the best dressed people were negro and they handled themselves with a way and manner that is rarely seen today.

In fact, one of my heroes of the Rat Pack; Sammy Davis Jr. was an absolutely AMAZING man. Let it be known that he would never allow his pants to fall down and show his butt-crack like some of the ethnic youth do today. He was cool, panache, and had real style.

When everyone else wants to be like Justin Bieber, be a Johnny Cash.
Men of real class; “The Rat Pack”. Men who made no excuses for their behaviors. The Rat Pack (Image Source.) These were “the men” of the 1960s and 1970s.

When Disco started to become popular all of my friends hated it. But I actually loved it. I would try to do some of the fantastic dance moves that I learned from Soul Train, but I don’t think I was good enough. In any event, the girls liked the fact that I was brave enough to shake some body, and that was a good thing.

via GIPHY

Oh, and about all this nonsense about race…

I lived in the rural hills outside of Pittsburgh. We never, and I do mean NEVER, talked about “niggers”, and race.  We just did not. The closest I ever came to it was being called a “Pollack”. (A lot.) The “issue” about race is (today) a politically motivated narrative. And, as such, it was constructed over the last eight years or so with defined objectives. It’s a pile of manure that we are all expected to believe.

Frankly, I am pretty tired about hearing about it all. It’s NEVER been part of my life. To me, it just sounds like a bunch of wining babies complaining. Wahhh! Wahhhh!  It really does. It’s irritating.

Here I am in China. I am always and forever an outsider. I am ALWAYS called by racist names (weiguren or laowei) and I don’t complain and use it as excuses, and you shouldn’t either. It’s below us. It’s stuff that little children do when they don’t want to eat their spinach.

“Our rulers don’t seem to understand just how tired their white subjects are with this experiment. They don’t understand that white people aren’t out to get black people; they are just exhausted with them. They are exhausted by the social pathologies, the violence, the endless complaints, the blind racial solidarity, the bottomless pit of grievances, the excuses, the reflexive animosity. The elites explain everything with “racism,” and refuse to believe that white frustration could soon reach the boiling point.”

-FR comment

Listen up. Real men do not complain about their hardships. They keep quiet about it, and they fucking TAKE IT. If there is one thing that is attractive to women it is that men are strong and quiet. Remember the Johnny Fontane scene from the movie ‘The Godfather” when the singer was begging for the part in the movie and crying about it. Do you remember what the Godfather had to say about it?

via GIPHY

Crying and whimpering about stuff that happened to others long before you are born, and using that as an excuse is…

…pathetic.

Just because the urban areas are NOW dominated by non-whites does not mean that it was ALWAYS that way. What you see today is a result of the decimation of the African-American household structure  in the 1960s and the population explosion that resulted. Read.  Learn.  Understand. For goodness sake, read your history books.

And that’s all that I need to say about that.

Cruising in our “Rides”

We loved our cars.

Cars and girls were a big part of growing up in the 1970s.
Cars were a big part of life when you were a teenager in the 1970s. For us, our cars were everything. (Image Source.)

My buddies cruised around in (decked out) “shag carpeted interior” Camaro’s, old Ford and Chevy pickup trucks (Usually with a cooler full of beer in the back and empty beer cans rolling about on the deck.), and a (periodically) roofless International Harvester Scout. We drove around in my decked out GTO known affectionately as “the goat” that we might race on “the flats”.

Cars were an important part of our lives growing up in the 1970s.
My first car was a 1970s Pontiac GTO. It was passed down from my parents to me. I fixed it up and customized it for parties with my friends. Of course, it had a “kick ass” stereo and shag carpeting. My first car. Pontiac GTO. (Image Source.)

If the reader wants to know what it was like going to High School in that beast, watch the opening credits to the movie “Dazed and Confused”. Same. You’ll see my old car cruising into the High School parking lot. Otherwise listen to Kid Rock’s “First Kiss”.

Yeah, this was me…

Growing up in High School in the 1970s was a time of custom cars, drugs, booze, working and fun.
Cruising in the “ride”, listening to music from Peter Frampton, Boston, Led Zeppelin, and Robin Trower. Smoking, drinking, and meeting up with friends. I owned a GTO that I would cruse in. Ah, life in the 1970s. (Image Source.)

My brother drove a Vega (the aluminum engine block nightmare) named the “solar boat” from a song of the same name by Ray Manzarek. He had the old engine removed and replaced it with a “sooped up” 360. I had friends who drove a Pinto (a plain but long lasting vehicle).  And when my GTO died of a car crash (an icy Pennsylvania bridge in March), I replaced it with a AMC Pacer (it was like riding around in a big epic glass greenhouse).  <smile>

It was a step sideways. Financially, I could only afford what I could buy with the insurance money. So, for a while I rode a Yamaha 250cc motorcycle (also orange!) and then got the pacer. (I needed money for college. It was a matter of priorities.)

The vega was a unique car that was semi-popular in the late 1970s.
My brother’s ride; “The Solar Boat”. He bought it off of my sister’s husband. He put a new engine in it, and customized it. My brother’s ride; a Vega with a retrofitted small block 360 engine. (Image Source.) He drove this car after I graduated in the 1970s.

Automobiles were a big part of our life back then.  In fact, unless you had your own car, it would be pretty difficult to get a date.  (It could happen, but it was much harder.)

We would typically work and use the money to buy a car and “fix it up”. Then, once the car was able to be driven, we would go “cruising”.  At that time, We would travel the back roads and highways of Western Pennsylvania and the mountains of West Virginia.

via GIPHY

Often we would do so with the music “cranked up” loud.

Perhaps the premium “cruising” music of the day was “Boston” (“More than a feeling”), Pink Floyd (“Another Brick in the Wall”, “Money“, and “Time”), Led Zeppelin (“Stairway to Heaven”) and Peter Frampton (“Do you feel like we do?”). The trunk was a mobile ice cooler. We would fill it with bags of ice, and put two or three cases of beer there. We drank anything that we could get our hands on. Most of my friends drank Miller (in eight-pack pony bottles), Budweiser, and Iron City Beer.

Cars had a large trunk that we could fill with ice and beer. Ah, the 1970s were a time of freedom and liberty.
We used to fill the trunk of the car with ice and beer. Then we would go out drinking, smoking, partying with our friends. (Image source.) Oh, this scene was so typical during the 1970s. Today you could get arrested for it, and spend time in prison.

At the time I was in my Senior Year in High School, vans were just getting really popular. Here, we would fully deck out the interiors into these mobile party machines. They would have shag carpeting inside, red mood lighting, comfortable seats, a kick-ass stereo and a big cooler of beer. Dodge and Chevy vans were the most popular.

While movies might give the impression that, the youth of my generation went to discos all the time, and acted like John Travolta, that was not really the case.  (That was the case for many urban youth, but it was not at all representative of the whole.) We pretty much worked part time jobs to support our on-going obsession with our cars.  Each paycheck was devoted to a new “cherry bomb” muffler, or a custom carburetor, or some nice rims for our cars.  Then, all fixed up, we would cruse the roads.  We lived the life of the movie “Dazed and Confused”, as that was a very accurate portrayal of my generation.

This love of cars was not limited to white kids in the country. Everyone loved their cars.  In the cities, such as Syracuse and Pittsburgh, urban blacks would spend all their hard earnings to buy the best and biggest Lincoln or Cadillac available.  Then they would deck them out (or “pimp” them out) into the most elaborate super-cool riding coaches. They sure had style back then. Those were the days for certain.

Not to mention REAL music.

It was a time of funk. Let me tell you all, modern music just doesn’t have that kind of free wheeling happiness, and muscle moving music as the funk of the 1970s did. Indeed, it was a really sad day when people started to talk about the death of funk. Though there are those who somehow think that modern music is just an advanced style of funk. I happen to disagree.

And that is my opinion on this matter.

Guys and Gals

Role models for men included John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Charlton Heston, Burt Reynolds and Sean Connery. Men who were MEN! Men were manly; they worked, fought when necessary, and provided for their families. (Yeah, we would ride around in these “sooped up beasts” and talk about our heroes on television. If we weren’t cruising around listening to “tunes”, we were in the weight room “pushing iron”.)

In the 1960s and 1970s everyone lived in houses like this.
In the 1960s and 1970s, many Americans lived in suburbia houses much like this. We pretty much thrived in that environment and it was safe and a pleasant lifestyle. With solid families all run in traditional households with the wives all keeping an eye out for all the neighborhood kids.

For me, I would lift weights in the High School gym.  There was a “Universal Gym” that I could use.  I wasn’t a member of the school football team as I had to work after school. Some of my friends owned real sets of “free weights”.  They would have a weight bench outside in the back yard, and I might go out and lift with them. My parents had bought me a cheap set of “free weights”. These consisted of weights, not out of cast iron or steel, but rather of plastic disks filled with cement.  They did not last as long as their more expensive steel counterparts, but they did do their purpose.

I kept them in our basement.  They sat alongside the furnace.  Next to it was my father’s old childhood shoebox (he used to go out and shine shoes for a buck or two when he was a boy). It still had his shoe polish, brushes, cloth and other tools of the trade. It was painted light green, for some reason now lost in the mists of time. On the top of it was a platform, tilted at a 45 degree angle, where the customer could place their shoe so that he can shine it.

Both my weights, and my father’s shoebox, sat in front of my great grandfather’s toolbox. He was a carpenter who would make furniture.  Back in the “old days”, he would haul the toolbox out to the countryside.  His potential customers would judge his skill at furniture making by looking at his toolbox.  They would note the condition and craftsmanship of his tools.  As such, if the tools were well maintained and clean, and the workmanship was of high quality, he would obtain work to make commissioned furniture.  Back in his generation, at that time, most of his work was custom furniture to fit the needs of the local townspeople in Germany and Poland in and around the Bug river area.

There in the basement were three generations of male tools and brick-a-brack. Our female companions never cared too much for the emotional value and labor that these items represented to us men.  They only appreciated the money that was derived from efforts using them. (And, for me, NOPE I just never became a famous body builder.)

“Beginning in the 1980s, American childhood changed. For a variety of reasons—including shifts in parenting norms, new academic expectations, increased regulation, technological advances, and especially a heightened fear of abduction (missing kids on milk cartons made it feel as if this exceedingly rare crime was rampant)—children largely lost the experience of having large swaths of unsupervised time to play, explore, and resolve conflicts on their own. 

This has left them more fragile, more easily offended, and more reliant on others. They have been taught to seek authority figures to solve their problems and shield them from discomfort, a condition sociologists call “moral dependency.”

-The Fragile Generation

Roles for us men were different than roles for women. Because, after all, we are quite different.

(Quick recap for those of you who didn’t learn this in first grade. There are two genders. They are boys and girls. If there is a mixture of genitalia on a person, they have a rare condition known as a hermaphrodite. The construction of other genders beside these precious few is not biologically sound, and is used as a political construct for greedy people to get power. If you follow their narrative, you will eventually get hurt.)

Men and Women

Men and women are different. That is a good thing. Different is wonderful.

Hollywood portrayal of men during the 1960s and 1970s were of strong men of means.
1960s and 1970s male roles models were men who acted like men. They carried guns, spoke what they felt, and worked hard. Male role models. (Image Source.)

Television role models for women were different.

Women had a different series of standards and interests.  At that time, women were regarded and cherished as “different” from men.  Men and women were not, never were, and never will be, equal. 

Life in the 1970s as a woman.
In a traditional household, the woman of the house runs the financing, budgeting, and all aspects of the family life. She is totally and completely responsible for the family. She tells the man what to wear, and how to act. She will then budget out the money for him to carry in his wallet, and he will dutifully earn money for the family. She will be responsible for the health and education of the children. It is HER and her responsibly alone.

Heroines for women included Elly Mae, June Cleaver, Mary Anne, Anne Marie, Samantha, Lisa Douglas, and Jeannie. They were all women who acted like women and lived their lives on their own terms. From my discussions with women (Attribution below.), they all seem to agree that television promoted woman as strong leaders.

Consider Elly Mae from the television show The Beverly Hillbillies. She’s pretty but doesn’t know it and doesn’t care, can talk to animals and beat the living crap out of boys if she wants to.

Or, June Cleaver from Leave it to Beaver. From what I hear, June Cleaver was the perfect woman. “How fabulous were her clothes? Her little suburban life? Her shiny appliances? Her squeaky clean kids? Her “hunkahunka” husband? Her cocktail hour and her perfect little dinners?”

Mary Anne, from Gilligan’s Island was wholesome, nice, pretty, athletic, fab body, smart, and loyal.

Samantha from Bewitched was beautiful, magical, so in love with Derwood that she’d give up everything that makes her special, could get anything she wanted by wiggling her nose.

Fun and Games

One hobby that we loved to do was go “dirt biking” which involved a specialized motorcycle that was specifically designed for “off road” use. It would not have a head light or turn signals, and would be lighter.  We would ride these “beasts” up and down all through the woods and the “boney dumps” (strip mined regions devoid of trees). Good times. We just “kicked it up in the sticks”. Why is everything so kid-safe today?

I had many friends who had pickup trucks.  Typically they were older vehicles with many dents, dings and rusty panels. At that time, CB Radios were very popular.  It would be on and we would listen for “Smokey Alerts” (Police Traps). Another fun activity was to go “mud slingin’”.  Here, we would often take a “beater” truck and run through the local bogs and swamps with it.  As one could expect, the truck would “sling mud” everywhere. We would often keep a cooler of beer in the back (Typically in cans.  Our parents drank from bottles.), and drink and party to loud rock music, or (yes) country music.

Here’s a plug for Donald Ray Williams who died on September 8, 2017.

Gas was cheap. Food was cheaper. A dollar could buy you five McDonalds hamburgers, while a music album would cost you $20 (though, it might only have eight songs on it).

Music and Television

Television was a big part of our life.

It is difficult for someone in this day and age to appreciate the grand influence of television had on society during the 1960’s and the 1970’s.  Today we realize that everything is tied, one way or the other, to the Internet.  Well, at that time period, everything (while not “tied”) was most certainly revolving around the television set.  Oh, it was a much simpler time because the government controlled the media, there were only a handful of media companies, and no one knew about the ties between the two. It was an open secret.

Music and televisions were big.

During the 1970s and 1980s we had trucks with big tires, and mud was a perfect saturday afternoon. We would go out shooting our rifles, drinking beer, and chilling out.
In the 1970s and 1980s we used to go “Mud Slingin'” in the woods. Mud Slingin’. (Image Source.)

We watched Walter Cronkite on the evening news, enjoyed “Mary Hartman Mary Hartman”, “Three’s Company”, reruns of “It’s about time”, and weekly installments of “The Love Boat” and “Fantasy Island” on television.  Also included such classics as “The Gong Show”, Reruns of “Adam-12”, and “The Brady Bunch” / “The Partridge Family”, and other retro-1960’s shows like ‘The Mod Squad”, “Julia”, and “Maude” were still getting air time.  So we watched them along with other 1960’s and 1970’s era shows. Of course, we all loved The Three Stooges.

Honorable mention to television shows that influenced me personally at this time included “The Time Tunnel”, “Star Trek” (Of course), “Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea”, “Supercar”, and “Fireball XL-5”.  Finally, “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits” defined our generation at that time.  The cold war influences were all blended together with the emerging post nuclear sciences that indeed really shaped our opinions and thoughts on life.

“I had a .22 Bolt Action Rifle and single shot .410 Shotgun when I was eight years old. I also rode my Schwinn Stingray without Wearing a Bike Helmet. I’m not even going to get into the many years my Parents drove me and my Brother around in a four wheeled death machine with no Seat Belts and a Dashboard made of steel. How I’ve lived to tell the tale is obviously a miracle.

Did I mention the Chemistry Set I got for Christmas when I was ten years old? Isn’t Mercury fun to play with?’

- 2/3/2018, 2:56:02 PM by Kickass Conservative

Television was a staple for my generation, but that was not the case for my parents’ generation. We absolutely lived off it.  They used it to augment their personal activities.  Whether it was knitting (my mother), or smoking a pipe and drinking a glass of red wine or cocktail (my father) my parents considered television to be a supplement to their lives.

Music was always playing and the televisions set was always on. My father would come home from work at the Steel Mill, and my mother would prepare him a cocktail while dinner was being made.  We would have the “late edition” of the Pittsburgh Press (newspaper) delivered, and he would read it in “his” chair (all men need to have “their” chair) as he drank his preferred beverage. We kids would watch the television.  When it was time to eat, we all would put what we were doing aside and go to the dining room. There we would have our daily meal together.

Yes, we collected albums, and listened to them on record players, or very expensive audio components known as “turntables”, “receivers”, “amplifiers”, and “tape decks”.  (We would even buy an album containing 10 lousy songs because we liked one track.)  Music, then as now, was a big part of our life.

Television was our primary source of entertainment. Everyone had one, and we all watched it.  Many households had the television  on most of the day. Though, for the most part, we only had access to from four to five channels of various quality. (This was before cable services.)

Before cassettes, and eight track players, we listened to albums on turntables, and FM music on recievers. Ah, the 1970s and the 1980s had their own way of doing things.
A well stocked 1970s album collection. In the time before CD’s we listened to albums on turntables. A well-stocked album collection. (Image Source.)

Is that a Chicago album I see? How many albums can you, the reader, identify? I see Alice Cooper’s Muscle of Love, Neil Young’s Harvest, and a Three Dog Night, a Boston with a BTO nearby.

Briefly, we had an “8 track” player installed in our family car.  Here we could switch between four (4) locations in the “album” so we could rapidly listen to a different song if we did not like the one that was playing.  We had a collection of these in the car.  As I recall, we had a “Jesus Christ Superstar”, and an “America”, and an “Elton John – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”.  The problem was that the inside of the car got hot, and the “8 track” tapes were made out of ABS plastic, so sometimes they would melt in the heat of the car If you left them on the dashboard.

Belief

At that time, we believed the media.  We believed what we saw.  We believed in the government, and we believed in the promises that were made to us.

Furniture during the 1960s was made out of real hardwood. The use of softwood, plywood, and particle board for furniture did not yet become popular.
This was the style of the dining room furnishings that my parents had. They bought them sometime around 1965. During my entire childhood and 1970s teenage years we would have family meals at this table. My household furnishings. (Image Source.)

We believed the Democrats when they told us that our social security money (taxes) went into a “lock box” (actual term as they used) and would never be “touched” (used for other purposes).  Then, right after they made those promises, they went around and started handing the money away to non-contributors like candy. Anyone could get it. Just like pensions. All gone. Bye bye.

WTF?

We believed that when we paid state taxes that they would go into fixing the terrible “pot holes” that littered Pennsylvania roads.

We believed that they would not go into the big unions of Philadelphia that operated like mob bosses of yore. But we were wrong.  We were really, really, wrong.

Instead, the fat mob bosses just got fatter.  The rich guys “on the Hill” (The Mayor and his toadies.) got richer, and our money seemed to get smaller and smaller. Every year the costs for things increased. Every year we were told that this was “normal” and we needed to accept things, but they “had a plan”.  Always, the plan turned out to take more money from our wallets, and put it into theirs.

My father, a staunch life-long Democrat strongly believed that once the entire state was controlled by Democrats that the world would be pure, easy and everything would be perfect. He really believed in what they promised. Even when it was found that they had stolen his pension. Even when it was found out that his 401(K) was looted. Even when he found out that they “lost” the monies that they promised to fix the roads with. He still believed.

Pennsylvania “pot holes” still never got fixed.

A Simpler Time

We might have been “simple”, but at least we possessed some “common sense”.  We at least knew what a boy was and what a girl was. That is unlike the confused children of today. (And, wow are they confused!)  We knew that if you possessed a penis you were a boy.  If you had a vagina, you were a girl.  If you couldn’t tell the difference you were confused.  Though at that time we would of simply called you a fucking idiot, and laughed at you until you ran home crying to your mother.

If you wore a mask to cover your face, you were a bad guy and doing something reprehensible.  (Something, I might add, that you are ashamed to associate with your face.)  This included Bank Robbers, Train Robbers, Stagecoach Robbers, the KKK, and the Black Panthers. They were not looked upon as righteous heroes such as what is being portrayed in the media today with the BLM, SWJ, and Antifa movements. They were considered criminals.

My First Job

I well remember the first time that I got a job.  I had just turned 14. It was in the local grocery store, and I was hired at minimum wage to stock shelves and bag groceries.  I used to wear a white short sleeved shirt and a red bow tie.  Over this, I wore an apron. My hair must be over my ears and not touch my collar. No face hair was permitted.

I was ready for my first job. However, before I could work, I needed to get a “social security” number.  Here is my experience about that event…

I asked my father, why do I need a social security number?  His response was, you need it because you need to save some money away for when you get old.  This will help you accomplish that.

We were riding in the car, and as we crossed over the East Brady bridge I looked at him, and asked him; “OK, I understand.  But, why does the United States government have to do this?  Can’t I just save the money on my own?”

He just shook his head.  “This is the way it is son.  You have to give part of your money away to the government.  They know better than you do, and they will take care of you when you get older…”

My trustworthy father told me the way things work in the United States. He said the United States government will take care of ME when I get older…

I AM older.  My government ain’t doin’ JACK SHIT.

It was my father’s generation, and his father’s generation that got us in the financial position that the United States is in today.  Reread his answer.  At the time… he really…REALLY believed what he told me. He was a life-long Democrat, and to the day he died he could not understand why, with all the taxes being collected, that the government could not (or would not) help the common citizen.

Back then, taxes were much lower than they are today. Yet, I well remember my surprise when I received my first paycheck.  I expected to be paid in full, and was surprised at the size of the amount deduced from my paycheck…

Americans have the most amount of money deducted from their paycheck for the most reasons, under the widest selection of names compared to the rest of the world.
Getting the first paycheck and seeing the deductions of taxes, fees, contributions, and services from the paycheck.  An American tradition: watching the expression on the face of someone getting their first paycheck and seeing all the taxes taken out. (Image Source.) I experienced this during the 1970s. I can only imagine what a shock it must be today.

It didn’t matter what job I was doing, the taxes always had to be set aside. No matter what the media said, I just never was able to get any of the “freebies” (reference law#40 on the 48 Laws of Power)  and deductions that was promised to me.

I was 11 when I had my first job. Summer job working at a restaurant. I’d be out by 12:30pm and would head to the beach with my friends.

My first pay check was $236 for 40 hours. I’d figured around $280 and was expecting it. I took my paycheck to the manager. I explained to him there were several deductions on it which I felt deprived me of my due compensation for the work I’d done. He explained how it was normal and everyone had it on their paychecks. He even showed my his pay stub with much larger deductions. I was shocked. It was theft. How could all these people put up with this?

I concluded -who steals from an 11 year old?

This is the point at which I became a conservative.


-Justa on Free Republic

Later, when I worked in the coal mines, there was talk about credits for solar panels. Even President Jimmy Carter put solar panels in the White House. But, that credit was not for me.

Then, when I was working in the steel mills, our union steward told us that if we voted Democrat that we could pretty much guarantee a lifetime pension and a great future for ourselves and our families. That never materialized either. My father was particularly upset with this change of events. Sigh.

When we were on the Forest Fire Crew, we would discuss the “rebates” that were promised to us by (then President) Jimmy Carter.  Nah. They NEVER materialized. Maybe some privileged group or major Democrat voting block got some, but we never saw anything. I guess that we weren’t important enough, or maybe it was because we just didn’t complain loud enough.

When I watch the news today, I can well see why those in power don’t want the youth of today to read and know their history. They want to keep them fat, dumb and stupid.

As I get older, I can plainly see the same old “bag of tricks” being recycled for use on an ignorant public. Yeah… yeah…. Vote Democrat and we will fix everything this time. You can trust us! Yah… yeah…

If you speak out of line, or don’t follow the official script, you are “off the reservation“, and will be attacked. Look at what is going on with Kayne when he does not follow the script.

Oh, and the Republicans are just as bad. Don’t think that they are going to get a free pass from me. In my mind they are every bit as bad as the Democrats. But at least they are pretending to try. The fact is that both Republicans and Democrats are working from the exact same playbook; Rule # 31 & 32 of the 48 laws of power.

Families & Vices

In those days, parents were responsible for their children, and if a child misbehaves the entire family would lose face. Parents made sure that children behaved. This was before the coddling movements of the 1980’s where everyone gets a participation prize at school, and those that excel are punished.

In the past, before government legislation, children could smoke and drink with parential permission.
In the 1960s and 1970s, children smoked with parental permission. This all ended when progressive democrats took over the state legislatures and began to re-engineer society to make it “better”. Childhood before social re-engineering efforts. (Image Source.)

The popular television shows reinforced this narrative. If you misbehave, your family would suffer.  Consider the television shows “The Brady Bunch”, “The Partridge Family”,  and Happy Days”.

Television commercials promoted both cigarettes and booze.  The hard liquor ban has been in effect since 1936 for radio and 1948 for television.  The ban on selling “soft liquor” (beer) has been a “darling child” of the progressive left since the days of Bill Clinton.  At the time of this writing the fight is still active.  Perhaps, by the time this gets read the liberal progressive Democrats will succeed in banning it.

The “vices” of the past were once considered unsavory habits. Today, they are considered to be serious crimes.  Indeed, it was just simply “fine” to smoke, drink and have a cocktail at lunch. Though there were limitations; for instance only Management and Sales could go for a “three martini lunch”, the rest of us had to limit it to one or two beers.

The phrases “I’d walk a mile for a Camel.” Or, “I’d rather fight than quit” were famous catch phrases for cigarette advertisements on television at that time.

Cartoon characters smoke, drank, fought and were very politically incorrect. Being homosexual was frowned upon, and there were absolutely NO portrayals of them in the media. No one knew what a LGBT person was, nor cared about it either. I ask the reader this; have you seen a gay person on “The Jetsons”, “The Flintstones”, “Deputy Dog”, “Captain Kangeroo”, “Lost in Space”, “Petticoat Junction”, “Hee Haw”, “F Troop”, or “Ba Ba Black Sheep”?

Now, today, you cannot find a single one without one. Even the science fiction staples such as “Star Trek” and “The Orville” all have multiple characters presented.

If you got pregnant before getting married, it was frowned upon, and while abortion was available, its use was discouraged. The social norms were reinforced by the media. They were not trying to redefine them.

The Three Martini Lunch

I suppose that some explanations are in order.

For there are many things that I grew up that were normal, that is considered outrageous today. One of them is the three martini lunch. The three-martini lunch is a term used in the United States to describe a “leisurely, indulgent lunch enjoyed by businesspeople”. Back in the day, this was a common enough practice. If you were in management, part of a sales team, or even a supervisor, these kinds of lunches were quite common. Indeed, many times, the boss would come back after 3:30pm from a long lunch and be quite “sauced”.

Now, according to Wikipedia, it is ONLY a perception.

“It refers to a common belief that many people in such professions have enough leisure time and wherewithal to consume more than one martini during the work day.”

Ah. Nope, my dear clueless millennial. It was not a perception. It was a reality. Drinking at work was commonplace. At least in the steel, coal, and appliance industries it was. I don’t know about the other industries.

Now, since business matters are usually discussed at them, three-martini lunches can be considered a business expense. Of course  (which includes travel, meals, etc.) and thus can qualify for a tax deduction. The people involved would remember to collect their receipts and turn them in at the end of the month for reimbursement. They would get money back, and the receipts were kept in a ledger to account for all the costs related to business expenses.

In those days, all managers, and of course sales staff, had an entertainment budget. The manager would have free latitude in determination of how to spend the money, and it was often considered a perk. The manager could spend it with employees to offer them incentives and to build up the working relationships, or use it for work related tasks with other companies and people.

Wikipedia does have it right in that the three-martini lunch is no longer common in the United States. However, it is, thankfully, quite common outside of it. Yeah! Baby!

“The three-martini lunch is no longer common practice for several reasons, including the implementation of "fitness for duty" programs by numerous companies, the decreased tolerance of alcohol use (Hum… speak for yourself), a general decrease in available leisure time for business executives, an increase in the size of the martini, and a decrease in the size of the tax deduction.”

America for the modern businessman certainly blows!

President John F. Kennedy (D) called for a crackdown on such tax breaks in 1961, but nothing was done at the time.

Then another democrat, Jimmy Carter (D)  condemned the practice during the 1976 presidential campaign. Carter portrayed it as part of the unfairness in the nation’s tax laws, claiming that the working class was subsidizing the “$50 martini lunch”. (Of course, use the “class struggle” to divide Americans. It’s a time-honored Democrat tactic. The theory is because a “rich businessman” could write off this type of lunch as a business expense.)

By the time Bill Clinton (D) came to office, there wasn’t much that still needed to be done.  So he concentrated in the elimination of all vices from the work environment (except for elected officials, of course) and the banning of cigarettes, and drinking proceeded apace.

Not to be outdone, Obama (D) started to tie health plans to tax breaks.

The only people who still had three-martini lunches were the “fat cats” in Washington, D.C.. They were “different” don’t ya know, and laws don’t apply to them. Most especially if they are Democrats.

Cigarettes

When I was a kid one of the most popular marketing brands was for Camel cigarettes. I can remember wanting to “walk a mile for a Camel” although I was too young to appreciate it’s meaning. This was a “dated” slogan, as it dated back to 1921.  Everyone smoked, except me. LOL!

There were cigarette vending machines everywhere including the high school. It sat right next to the Coke machine in the school cafeteria. The vending machine had a long lever that you pulled outwards to discharge a pack of cigarettes. Matches were common everywhere, and many stores and restaurants gave away free matches with their address on it.

1960s and 1970s cartoon figures smoked and drank on television.
1960s and 1970s childhood icon Fred Flintstone smoking. Of course, smoking and drinking was commonplace until the social re-engineering efforts by democrats. Our cartoon heroes all smoked. (Image Source.)

In the 1990’s during the Bill Clinton presidency, it changed to the “Joe Camel” advertising promotion that became wildly popular.  (Since the Democrat party had no way to skim off some of the huge profits that the advertising promotion generated, they went ”full on” to ban it.  After all, if they couldn’t get their cut in the profits, no one could get anything.  Oh, they promoted the ban to help “the children”.  But of course, what we now know about the Clinton pay-for-play schemes, we know this to be painfully true. But, like everything else, this is just my opinion.)

I guess that I am full of “nonsense” opinions.  Right?  Well, look at this from my point of view then…

  • In March 1992, the “Coalition on Smoking or Health” (a Democrat Progressive social-engineering platform) petitioned the Federal Trade Commission to ban Joe Camel.
  • However in June 1994, the commission decided not to take action against R.J. Reynolds, because the record did not show that Joe was attracting kids to cigarettes. After all, if you want to ban something you have to show a reason behind it.
  • This need; to find reasons to ban things, all ended during the presidency of Bill Clinton. (And look at the nonsense it hath wrought.) Bill Clinton implemented law #33 of the 48 Laws of Power.
  • In May 1997, after a change in personnel (the Bill Clinton administration changed the staff at the FTC precisely because they did not do as he wished) but no change in the relevant evidence, the FTC reversed itself, voting to seek an order that would keep Joe out of children’s sight.

Yup, you throw out the people who are “not on the same team”, and put your guys in. This is true for all politicians, not just Democrats.

Link

Though, President Trump is kind of slow in learning this political lesson…

Why did it get banned?  The evidence did not show a connection. The change in makeup of the FTC was changed by Bill Clinton, that is a fact.  Why?  To “save the children”, from what?  Where is the proof?  I am not, will not and cannot buy those excuses.  Especially related to a mega-rich uber-billionaire and his family who has no obvious sources of income except a presidential salary and well known for their famous “pay-me-money” for access and favors schemes.

Joe’s critics did not need evidence. Wasn’t it obvious that R.J. Reynolds was targeting children? Joe Camel was a cartoon, after all. To which R.J. Reynolds replied that Snoopy sells life insurance and the Pink Panther pitches fiberglass insulation, but no one assumes these products are aimed at kids. The company insisted that hip, irreverent Joe was designed to attract young adults who considered Camel an old man’s cigarette.

Find out on your own.  Take the time to find out why.

The demise of advertising for cigarettes on television, as well as banning cute advertisements aimed at youth (Joe Camel), was part of an anti-smoking initative initiated by the Democrat Party and specifically Bill Clinton (D) in the early 1990’s.  I suppose they wouldn’t have gone so aggressively against the “big” tobacco companies if they contributed more money to the Democrat party election coffers.  But that is a different subject for a different time.

The way this works is obvious to everyone. Especially today. If you want to keep the SJW, Antifa, BLM, and busybodies off your back, you pay them off.

In America you PAYOFF the busybodies.

Furniture

We had furniture that was made out of real hardwood.  The cheap softwood furniture started to replace the long-lasting and durable (and very beautiful) hardwoods in the 1970’s.  This lasted for a decade, and then the 1980’s hit. Everyone was trying to “make a buck”. As a result even cheaper furniture started to make it’s appearance.  This consisted of plywood furniture.  The plywood would have a laminated layer of nice attractive hardwood.

This lasted for about a decade, up until the decade of Bill Clinton. At that time, the uncontrolled spending by Congress reached new levels, and the resulting hit on the value of the worker’s dollar was substantial. Wal-Mart became very popular and powerful.  As it offered the cheapest products for families trying to maintain their standard of living while the value of the dollar collapsed.  This resulted in the cheap “sawdust and glue” furniture (Particleboard) that is so common today.

As inflation decimated the value of the USD dollar, Americans were forced to rely on cheaper and cheaper items of furniture. Today most Americans use paper and sawdust furnishings. This trend became quite noticable during the 1960s and 1970s.
Changes in the use of materials in American furniture since the advent of the Federal Reserve. As the USD depreciated in value, Americans were forced to buy progressively cheaper and cheaper furnishings. THis trend accelerated during the 1960s and 1970s.

Lawyers didn’t yet advertise for class action law suits. Not until the Clinton presidency.  That presidency implemented so many social revisions that are too numerous to mention.  Some may argue that it was certainly for the best.  But, I argue the oppose.  All you need to do is look at what constitutes a playground in America today to see the fallout from this folly.  All you need to do is take a bite out of a tomato that tastes like a cardboard box filled with bland water. All you need to do is try to speak your mind today and see the vitriol and hatred directed back at you.

Indeed, restrictions on one’s ability to do what they please is a restriction on FREEDOM, and is tyrannical in nature and substance. No matter what the (stated) intention was..

Anyways, while there were many things changing over the years, one of the most notable was the phone sex hot lines that were all the rage during late-night commercials. These things were just a passing fad that made some people enormously wealthy in a very… very short period of time.

The networks were dominated by the big three; NBC, CBS, and ABC and they controlled everything that we saw and many things that we read. There was no Internet, if we wanted to watch something out of the ordinary we would watch Public Broadcasting, or one of the small local startups that tended to appear and disappear after a few months. (Thanks to them, instead of the dominant American networks, I was introduced to Bennie Hill, Monty Python, and belly-dancing.)

“If you’re over 40, chances are good that you had scads of free time as a child—after school, on weekends, over the summer. And chances are also good that, if you were asked about it now, you’d go on and on about playing in the woods and riding your bike until the streetlights came on.

Today many kids are raised like veal. Only 13 percent of them even walk to school. Many who take the bus wait at the stop with parents beside them like bodyguards. For a while, Rhode Island was considering a bill that would prohibit children from getting off the bus in the afternoon if there wasn’t an adult waiting to walk them home. This would have applied until seventh grade.”

-The Fragile Generation

Everything was different.

Politics

Politics have made America what it is today. Ugh!

All of the interns that I get from the United States are walking progressive robots. Which is fine, as long as they do their work. Just do you job, eh? The problem is that they have no idea what work is. They think it is talking about their feelings over coffee. What the fuck has happened to America?

Here is what work is;

  • I tell you what to do, and you do it.
  • You do it to the best of your ability.
  • You ask questions if you are not sure.
  • Once your assignment is completed, you have someone review your work.
  • Then you ask for more work.
  • Then you are paid or rewarded for your efforts.

Somehow, the young folk out of the United States never learned this. Their ideas about what work is looks more a scene from the television show “Friends”, or the inside of a coffee shop. Maybe they feel at ease parroting Ellen Degeneres. Many are totally useless at work. It’s their education.

You know, the entire reason for this post was due to a young intern. She had the gall to suggest that I (her supervisors boss’s boss) was in my role because I was “privileged” growing up. She had the fucking gall to tell me that I didn’t know about their “struggles”. Her “struggles”…. Give me a fucking break will you!

Well, I didn’t hold back in my response. I’ll tell you what. She probably has nightmares about me now. (Sigh). Look, life is full of good things and bad things. But life is what YOU experience. It is not what you hear about, read about, or watch in a movie. It is what you personally experience. Unless you have gone through what I had to endure to be where I am today, then SHUT THE FUCK UP.

Politics are both silly and dangerous. I wouldn’t be so fearful except that politics is used to change governments. Here is the basic recipe;

  • They take a stable government and turn it into a “democracy”.
  • Then, they obtain power by manipulation of the people. (This has many facets.)
  • Finally, they devolve into tyrannical governments.
  • Once in power, these governments then turn on their own people. They turn against them.
  • The most important step towards tyranny; you disarm the people.
  • Then you separate the people into groups; favored and unfavored.
  • Then finally, you kill them in batches. Know your history.

Which is why, those of us who actually READ, support the second amendment.

Those that want to change the government are often well-meaning, but easily manipulated by tricksters. Those “tricksters” often manipulate their followers to obtain their ultimate goals of power, control, wealth and fame. Then, once they have obtained power, they kill their top leadership and their top followers. This happens each and every time. It happened in Germany, in China, in North Korea, and in Cuba. The techniques are well known and well documented. If the reader is interested in this, maybe you too want to control your own nation someday, you can read about it in the book the 28 laws of Power.

Politics never reflect reality.

American politics is just a way for those in power to control the people who live within America.
American politics is a very complex subject. Here is a simplified explanation. American politics explained. (Image Source.)

Politics were black and white. Democrats supported the governments of Communist Russia, and Communist China.  (That is one of the reasons why all of the old symbols of the Democrats were red.)  Even the Democrat / Confederate “battle flag” was red with the crossed bars. The KKK was, and for the most part still is, a Democrat organization. Let’s not forget that the Grand Kleagle (LOL!) was Senator Robert Byrd Democrat from West Virginia! I’ll wager a bet that you all didn’t know that.

It’s one of top secrets of the DNC.

Secrets

There are many such secrets. Secrets abound, and it’s not just politically motivated secrets only. Consider the Clinton body count (terribly underestimated in size and scope). The secret about when President Trump exploded all of North Korea’s nuclear weapons under the mountains. Oh, and the Obama funding for the anti-White race war in South Africa. Oh, you haven’t heard about that one yet… well, you will…

You will…

My father, a life-long Democrat, constantly talked about how “one day” the Democrats will get in power and change things.  Yessur!  The people will rise up and the “little guy” (himself and all his white middle-class friends) would get a chance to “sit at the table”. Hah! Was he ever so disappointed in President Obama. I think it broke his heart. 

Now, even though he is long dead and buried, he still, to this day continues to vote Democrat

Democrats were for free speech EVERYWHERE by EVERYONE.  (Speech was more than just talk, but included behavior.  Indeed, Democrats wanted to “let it all hang out”.) Yikes…! At that time, it helped further their agenda.

Which was, and still is, a phased plan to rewrite the Constitution.

  • First step…claim that the Constitution is a “living document” subject to change. Make it so that the rules are constantly and easily bent.
  • Second step… make changes to “improve” things. Put your own judicial interpeters in power. Have them implement rules to fit your narrative only.
  • Third step… repeat the narrative over and over and over. So that everyone calls it a Democracy. You know that you are “over the hump” when elected officials start to parrot this.
  • Then, fourth step… change a Democracy into a Social Democracy. Like the Nazi’s, or Communist China, or the Soviet Union.
  • Fifth Step. Make it nice and “Progressive”. Say you are doing it for just causes. Limit speech. Have a nice long list of things that you cannot say or talk about. Reference law #32 of the 48 laws of Power.
  • Sixth Step. Then the most important step… disarm the population. They can’t have their “pitchforks” and “torches” .  That’s right, get rid of all those guns (then see what happens).  Take every opportunity, get the children to march for it. Punish them if they don’t go along with the plan.
  • Seventh Step. Finally,… setup a rulership of the 1% presiding over a disarmed ignorant mass. Make sure the police have the latest in military technology. Call them something different, like “protectors”, “guardians”, or “peace officers”. Make the names fierce like the SS, or IRS. Use the military against your own people. Even if you are not permitted to, do it anyways.
  • Eighth and Final Step. Once you have control, you must RULE! Show everyone just who is Boss. Go full-on Negan!
Negan is a character ont he television show The Walking Dead.
Once, you obtain power, and you know that there is a large segment of the population that does not support you, you need to RULE. You need to show who is boss. You go full NEGAN. (Image source.)

Politics

Now politics is such a large part of American culture, that I just can’t leave it out.

Here’s the truth. It doesn’t matter if it is 1970 or 2010. Republicans were just sick and tired of all the political nonsense and wanted everyone to leave them alone and stop paying so much in taxes.  However, since the Democrats controlled the media they controlled popular culture.  No matter how one felt, the barrage of progressive indoctrination was incessant. Even the music that we enjoyed and listened to (at that time) was interspersed with progressive propaganda.

Democrats in the 1970’s followed time proved socialist techniques. They supported peaceful protests and “sit downs” for such things as labor unions (automotive, steel, government and education), and free access to the soft drink “Tab”. Republicans wanted to stop the apparently never-ending cycle of “walkouts”, “strikes” and “labor organization” (for substantial pay increases).

It was always attack, and Republicans defend.

Attack… defend.  Attack… defend.

Attack… defend.

By the mid-1980’s, a union steel worker (high school graduate, with no subsequent post-education) with ten years in the union, would be able to make almost two times the salary of a degreed engineer with ten years’ experience. It was really outrageous. (Yeah, but for my generation, it wasn’t so great. After they worked ten years or so and were laid off, they were fucked.)

Fucked over…big time.

Hey! You “I always vote Democrat because they will protect me and give me a pension”, how’s that working out for you? Now that non-Americans can get your jobs? It feel really good? It feels like your have been vindicated? Eh?

Anyways, all of this was pretty hard for industry at that time, where the production line could shut down at a moment’s notice on the most trivial of reasons, and the factory couldn’t do anything about it (that was until globalism…) The Democrats used the unions because they represented a huge voting block. They always manipulated huge blocks of people. Now, here today we know exactly just how far that utility lasts. So, the lesson here is that the Democrats turned their backs on the unions so that they could take more, in bigger bundles from foreign governments. It was all in the name of “Globalism”.

My father could NEVER get over that harsh reality.

Democrats wanted to burn bras (which was something even my mother did) and I never had a problem with it either, and have free love with everyone (and everything).  That also sounded good to me too. Who doesn’t like to look at pretty girls? Who doesn’t like sex? Sex is fun.

Things were so different then. It was a different time indeed.

For today, if you are not from an urban ghetto, or a member of one of the (approved) “oppressed minorities” you are maligned. And, for the record, we all think it’s terrible inaccurate and very, very unfair. So when you are trying to label and box Trump supporters into such things as “uneducated, white males”, or “deplorables”, we all take particular offense at that.

We are not. So shut the fuck up.

 “The schools you send your kids to have been trying to inculcate your kids with all kinds of rotgut, perverted junk under the guise of enlightenment. And you’ve had to sit there and take it. 

You’ve had to sit there and listen to the never-ending, increasing profane rants and having all of this stuff pushed right in your face and down your throat. 

You’ve been forced to shut up. You’ve been forced to say nothing in reaction for fear of losing your job or being chastised, humiliated, or what have you, in social media.

You’ve been forced to accept the cultural rot that the American left has imposed on you and your kids. 

You have to sit around and listen to your religion be mocked. Your religion is laughed at, your religion is made fun of and criticized, openly and with malice, and it is done with impunity. People who mock and applaud and insult you and your religion are praised as brilliant artists. 

You are called hicks. You’re called white racists.

You’re called bigots. Sometimes they call you prudes. Sometimes they call you Bible thumpers. 

You’re an idiot. You’re small-minded. You’re a moral twit. 

And these are the people having a fit over Trump saying something? These people who have put themselves in charge of infiltrating crap throughout our culture and our society? These people who have been responsible for injecting drivel and bilge throughout our society claim to be upset and outraged and offended over the use of a word — slang for a toilet — by the president of the United States, in a private meeting?”

-Rush Limbaugh

Anyways, all the seeds of political unrest was planted during the 1970’s. The seeds are sprouting up today, and they aren’t pretty. It is sad.

It’s sad, but you know what, I no longer live in the USA so it’s not my problem.

You’ve got Democrats and you’ve got Republicans. They are both identical creatures with similar objectives. They pretend to be ideological, but they really aren’t. They just act that way. When it benefits them, they simply switch political parties. That way their objectives are maintained.

Yeah. It’s not my problem.

College

Then, college was where an intelligent and scholarly person would migrate to after high school. At that time, only a few people could afford to go to college, and they were very picky as to whom they would select.  At that time, the wealthiest, and the smartest went to college.  Then, after the implementation of the G.I. bill, room was made for those who earned their “place at the table” through merit (risking their lives in war). Thus, obtaining a college degree was significant and factored large in the overall standard of living that one could hope for.

That is totally the opposite of what college is today, where EVERYONE can get a college degree.  It is  where the content of the degree is so watered down as to become meaningless.  It is where those people whom graduate have to fight a flood of entry-level applicants for a scarce few positions. It hardly seems worth the time, and doesn’t seem to be worth the money, or the investment.

That is because, today, it just isn’t worth it. Looking at the big picture, it is almost like colleges and universities have become large institutions that turn young people into debt slaves – serfs. Unless they quickly obtain a high paying position, they might never leave that role.

Maybe that is the reason why President Obama made college so accessible… I wonder… Using it [1] as a propaganda machine, and [2] to turn the majority of the educated American masses into debt slaves.

For more links on this subject;

I went to college, as that was what young upwardly mobile families did in the 1960’s and 1970’s. For me, I had always wanted to be an astronaut. My only way to become one was through hard discipline, a strong technical background, and a clear vision.

Leaving the Mines to Better Myself

I applied and came in second place for the Air Force Academy. My grades were outstanding, and our scores were tied. Exactly tied. However, my family apparently didn’t have enough political pull, I guess. So my friend Brian got the open slot. (You know, if you two take the same battery of tests every weekend for six months, you do eventually get to become friends.)

It was a disappointment. But, I picked myself up off the floor. Dusted myself off and went to plan “B”.

Getting the best grade will not make you rich. Ability has no bearing on luck.
You can still do everything right, and still lose. It does not mean that you failed. It is just the way life is. It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose.
The reader should never take on the unrealistic belief that if they work hard, and be careful, and do everything right, and have everything go in their favor that things WILL work out to their advantage.  There are no guarantees. Truth is that there are always things and aspects of any particular given situation that is beyond one’s control. These aspects may or may not be in your favor.  Indeed it is quite possible to work hard, and make no mistakes and still lose.  That is life.

I had been saving all the money that I earned in the coalmines and at the steel mills so that I could be able to afford to go to college. I knew that I didn’t have enough for a full four years, but I did have enough for the first two. I had hoped that maybe I could supplement it by working part time while I attended university. My plan was to sell my car, buy a motorcycle and work part time to fund my education.

I applied to MIT and was accepted. I was going to enter their aeronautical engineering program, but at the last minute changed my mind and went to Syracuse University instead. They had an innovative aerospace engineering program that really appealed to me. They also offered to employ me part time as well (which was something that was not available to me at MIT). The program that I would eventually enter was a joint mechanical / aerospace engineering degree, which would specialize in the thermodynamic properties of rocket engines, and spacecraft design. So, I went to Syracuse. I went orange.

My dream was not dead. Just dormant.

My plan was to attend college, become a Rocket Scientist, and then enter another branch of service to obtain a flight slot. That way I could then eventually become an astronaut. It was a simple plan. All I needed to do was study hard classes, with a degree of persistence, all would work out. I would need to keep my focus clear and then with the skills, training and discipline, I would then enter one of the rare flight slots.

Conclusion

Well, I did attend university, and I actually did become a “Rocket Scientist”. I graduated on a sunny May day in 1981. My class was the first graduating class within the “big Syracuse marshmallow” (as opposed to the”big glowing green caterpillar”.)

The reader should know, that I also was accepted by, and joined the US Navy and trained as a Naval Aviator. (I passed the testing for a NFO, but my scores were so exceptional that they opened up a pilot slot for me. Woo Woo!) Indeed, shortly after I graduated, I found myself in the middle of training for a Naval Aviator down in NAS Pensacola, Florida.

All of my goals after years of hard work and labor started to finally pay off.

These are stories for another time. However, let it be known that opportunities to go into space DID present themselves to me. And I, well, I TOOK the opportunities presented to me. It was my dream, and I would never let anyone steal my dream away from me. So, yeah, I did get to explore the outer reaches, it’s just not at all what I expected…

And, as I have stated earlier, that will be a story for another day.

Take Aways

What can we learn from my experiences growing up?

  • I have strong opinions based on my experiences.
  • Growing up in the 1960s and the 1970s does not match the current narrative as promoted by the American media. Cherish the thought!
  • People had more freedom than they do today.
  • People ate better than they do today.
  • People played better than they do today.
  • Furniture was made out of higher quality materials than they are today.
  • Water used to be free.
  • Democrats and Republicans are identical. Don’t let their verbal “policy positions” distract you.
  • I had a knife when I was six years old.
  • I had long hair, had a white “choker collar”, wore bell-bottom jeans and drove a orange GTO in my Senior Year.
  • I like pizza.

All this should indicate that my experiences are totally different from what young people experience today.

Which means that when I talk to an intern, I need to explain to them some basics that they should have learned while they were growing up. The fact that they did not learn them, and that the families and the schools have both failed them is a troublesome worry. For they are not equipped to compete globally for any work at all. Let alone basic janitorial work.

Outrageous Then. Outrageous Now.
Being Gay, or LGBT. Drinking cocktails at lunch.
Not working until you are thirty. Working at 14 years old.
Getting ANY assistance from government. Having a free glass of water with your meal.
Free condoms to students. Cigarette vending machines in school.
Paid cable service. Free Torrents.
Not having a Christmas Tree during Christmas. Halloween costumes depicting black people.
Not punishing a child for screaming in a restaurant. Punishing a child in public.
Paying more than $0.10 for a cup of coffee. Paying less than $2.00 for a cup of coffee.
Not being a member of the local lodge. Having your wife make you a cocktail after work.
Going to school on the first day of hunting season. Smoking in a restaurant.
Having your parents watch you play. Unsupervised play.
Pumping your own gas. Full-service gas stations.
Manditory blood collections at work. Refusing to carry a cell-phone on you.

Comments on Free Republic

In July 2018, this article was presented on Free Republic for comments. You can read the comments HERE.

FAQ

Q: Why is Senior Year important in High School?
A: Senior Year is the last year that you can be a child. You are nearly an adult. You might have a girlfriend or boyfriend. You might have a car, a job, and some money. You have well established friends, and a future of some sort mapped out for you. You are in peak health, and are just ready to begin a new stage in your life.

Q: What was High School like in the 1970s?
A: It was a blast. I would imagine that it was like school in other generations and at other times. The 1970’s, were boring we thought. However, looking back, we can see just how absolutely great they were. Someday, you too will write about your experiences in school like I have here.

Q: What are the differences between High School in the 1970s and today?
A: Freedom. We could smoke outside the classrooms. We could drive our cars to and from the school. We could carry knives. Lunches were ok. We had a main dish, with two sides, a dessert and a drink. I see what constitutes a Michelle Obama school meal and I end up shitting my pants. What the hell was she thinking? Oh, and the music was awesome.

We often complained, back then, that the High School students in France got to drink wine during lunch time. Paid for, of course, by the school. We, us poor Americans, had to wait until we got home before we could drink. Looking back, the differences between then and now are astounding.

Q: What was segregation like in the 1970s?
A: I just don’t know. No one was segregated in the counties where I lived. I heard that there was still some “unofficial” or underground segregation going on in the deep south. But, in my neck of the woods, it was unheard of.

Q: Did everyone in high school drive cool cars?
A: Yes. I drove an orange 1970 Pontiac GTO. Many of my friends rode cool cars. My friend Clyde drove a Chevelle SS. Like the movie “Dazed and Confused”, where Wooderson drives a big-block Chevelle nicknamed “Melba Toast.” He had an Edelbrock intake on his 1970 Chevy Chevelle SS 454. Ohhh the 454, now that was an engine. Other cars included a Ford Mustang convertible, a Ford MACH 1, and a Plymouth Duster driven by the “Brackey Boys”. Heh heh.

Q: What was elementary school like in the 1960s and 1970s?
A: We would play outside before school started. We would play hopscotch on the sidewalk. We would mark out the numbered blocks with a stone and scratch it into the cement. Then we would file in. First thing after roll call was the Pledge of Allegiance. Then we would have a pretty much typical class.

Though there was often some education about the upcoming Global Cooling that would change the earth into a solid ice cube.

We would then go out on organized field trips to collect donations for the cause, and help clean up the local streams and countryside. I don’t know who got to pocket all the money we collected. All I remember is that we used to raise buckets of money for the cause. Literally, they were buckets and boxes of money. Afterwards, the teacher would sing on the guitar with some songs typical of that era, like “If I Had a Hammer”, and “Kumbaya”.

Posts Regarding Life and Contentment

Here are some other similar posts on this venue. If you enjoyed this post, you might like these posts as well. These posts tend to discuss growing up in America. Often, I like to compare my life in America with the society within communist China. As there are some really stark differences between the two.

Link
Link
Link
Tomatos
Link
Mad scientist
Gorilla Cage in the basement
Link
Pleasures
Work in the 1960's
School in the 1970s
Cat Heaven
Corporate life
Corporate life - part 2
Build up your life
Grow and play - 1
Grow and play - 2
Asshole
Baby's got back
Link
A womanly vanity
The Warning Signs
SJW
Army and Navy Store
Playground Comparisons
Excuses that we use that keep us enslaved.

More Posts about Life

I have broken apart some other posts. They can best be classified about ones actions as they contribute to happiness and life. They are a little different, in subtle ways.

Being older
Link
Civil War
Travel
PT-141
Bronco Billy
r/K selection theory
How they get away with it
Line in the sand
A second passport
Paper Airplanes
Snopes
Taxiation without representation.
Link
Link
Link
Make America Great Again.
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
1960's and 1970's link
Democracy Lessons

Stories that Inspired Me

Here are reprints in full text of stories that inspired me, but that are nearly impossible to find in China. I place them here as sort of a personal library that I can use for inspiration. The reader is welcome to come and enjoy a read or two as well.

Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link
Link

Articles & Links

  • You can start reading the articles by going HERE.
  • You can visit the Index Page HERE to explore by article subject.
  • You can also ask the author some questions. You can go HERE to find out how to go about this.
  • You can find out more about the author HERE.
  • If you have concerns or complaints, you can go HERE.
  • If you want to make a donation, you can go HERE.

Notes

  1. Drafted 21MAR18.
  2. Edited by request 24MAR18.
  3. Edited by request 25MAR18.
  4. Edited by request 4APR18.
  5. Edited by request 6APR18.
  6. Edited by request 12APR18.
  7. Edited by request 15APR18.
  8. Ready for internet 21APR18.
  9. SEO prep 2MAY18.
  10. Pre-launch checklist completed 3MAY18.